“The problem with the post-2007 world is that we are not in a cyclical recovery; we are in a structural depression defined as a sustained period of below-trend growth with no end in sight. The U.S. has caught the Japanese disease. Structural depressions are not amenable to monetary solutions, they require structural solutions.” – James Rickards
Can anyone stabilize this bitch? At daybreak, anyway, the Federal Reserve governors were all bagging Z’s in their trundle beds. Maybe after a few pumpkin lattes they’ll jump in and tell their trading shills to BTFD. The soma-like perma-trance among those who follow markets and money matters appears to be ending abruptly with the recognition that sometimes robots and humans alike run shrieking to the exit. A pity when they get to the door and discover it opens onto a cliff-edge. Look out below.
All this trouble with money comes from one meta problem: aggregate industrial growth has ended. It has stopped more in some parts of the world than others, while in the USA it has actually been contracting. The cause is simple: the end of cheap energy, oil in particular. At over $70-a-barrel the price kills economies; under $70-a-barrel the price kills oil production. The bottom line is that, in the broadest sense, the world can no longer count on getting more stuff, except waste, garbage, political unrest, and the other various effects of entropy. From now on, there is only less of everything for a global population that has not stopped growing. The folks on-board are still having sex, of course, which has a certain byproduct.
This dynamic was plain to see a decade ago, but the people who run finance and governments thought it would be a good idea to maintain the appearance of growth via the usufruct mechanisms of central banking: ZIRP, QE, market intervention, and universal accounting fraud. It’s not working so well. Debt was generated in place of the missing growth, and now there is too much of it that can’t be repaid on a coherent schedule. Many nations, parties, and entities are in trouble with debt and the prospective defaults are starting to pile up like SUVs on a fog-bound highway. Greece is just the first one fishtailing into a guard-rail.
The magic moment will come when it becomes obvious that these systemic quandaries have no solution. The system itself is programmed for implosion, in particular and most immediately the banking sector, where most of the untruth and illusion is lodged these days. As it stands exposed, the people are compelled to shake off their faith in what it represents: order, authority, trust. Institutions fail and each failure acts as a black hole, sucking air, light, and even time out of the system.
In the natural course of things, structural reform can occur, but that natural course entails some degree of disorder and loss. If Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs founders a lot of people will be living in their cars — a first stop perhaps to not living at all. Sooner or later, though, the survivors will all have to live differently. Structural reform means, for instance, that you can no longer count on getting food the way you were used to getting it. No more 3000-mile Caesar salads and take-out tubs of Kung Po Chicken. That will be very traumatic in the early going. Eventually in the places where it is possible to grow food on a smaller scale, it will be done. Maybe not so much in the Central Valley of California anymore, but in other places: Ohio, Michigan, even New Jersey (“the garden state”). And once grown, it will be sold by means that differ from the supermarket.
Americans think that WalMart and its brethren are here to stay. They’re mistaken. Structural reform means reorganizing many layers of commerce around town centers — Main Streets — while the disintegrating strip malls await the salvage crews. Are we ready for that? Rebuilding local economies would put a lot of people back to work doing real things. All the blabber about “job creation” for the moment is only about increasing the share price of predatory corporations and the bonuses of their mendacious executives. Will the world miss them? Can we still make some things and move them around and put them up for sale? I think so.
Are you disturbed about the pervasive racketeering in health care (so-called) and higher education. Well, those grifts are eating themselves alive. Structural reform probably means far fewer and smaller colleges and far more and smaller local clinics free of the stupendous insurance chicanery that mystifies the public while it swindles them. There will be a lot of useful work for people who want to take care of other people, and certainly fewer MRIs.
Do you fear the end of mass motoring and the suburban infrastructure that it operates in? Maybe your children and their children will be happier in walkable neighborhoods — outlandish as that sounds. There is a hell of lot of rebuilding to do. It may not involve materials like strand-board and vinyl siding, but the newer and smaller buildings will probably last a whole lot longer and look better. And a lot of hands will be needed to do the work.
Will we ever again know banking on the JP Morgan scale? Not on any horizon I can imagine. But there are other ways to establish mediums of exchange, stores of value, and pricing mechanisms. You can be sure that banking will never again occupy 40 percent of gross economic activity in this land.
Today may not be the true event horizon for our diseased status quo, but it is probably, at least, the coming attraction trailer. Try not get puked on.
The third World Made By Hand novel
!! Is available !!
(The Fourth and final is near completion)
“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist
My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire Books…
or Amazon…
Yanis Reveals EU Denial of any Right of the People to Vote
Posted on June 29, 2015 by Martin Armstrong
Greece’s Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has come out and revealed the quite shocking and anti-Democratic events that took place during the last Eurogroup meeting. First, they do hate Yanis’ guts for he does understand far more about the economy than anyone in Brussels. Any further discussions they demand will be without him. What led to the EU breaking off was exactly what we reported previously – they do not want any member state to EVER allow the people to vote on the Euro. Brussels has become a DICTATORSHIP and is so arrogant without any just cause that they know better than the people.
We are watching the total collapse of Democracy and the birth of a new era – Economic Totalitarianism from Arrogant people who are totally clueless beyond their own greed for power and money.
Here Comes Puerto Rico Monday – Next Greece
Posted on June 29, 2015 by Martin Armstrong
Puerto Rico is set to release a key report on its financial stability Monday, and its Governor, Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla told The New York Times that the island would probably seek significant concessions from as many as all of its creditors because “the debt is not payable.”
Puerto Rico is the next Greece where the “vulture” investors bought their bonds back in 2013 when its roughly $70 billion in outstanding debt suffered a huge plunge in bond prices over the summer.
All government follow the same model and this is BIG BANG, where government debt at every level will begin a death spiral. Governments since World War II have borrowed continuously never managing anything properly. They have just assumed that the great herd of taxpayers had deep pockets that were endless. This attitude is causing the collapse in Socialism whereas all the promises of pensions cannot be maintained. The majority of people assumed that working for government was the safest. They are now starting to see that it is the worst of all for you cannot even prosecute them for mismanagement and fraud as you would if a private employer pulled the same nonsense.
The smart money smells a rat. Capital has rushing out of long bonds since May and pouring into the very short-term federal paper pushing rates back negative to the crisis level of 2009. BIG BANG is being furthered by the worst collapse in liquidity I have ever witnessed in my entire career.
Good article but your “Big Bang” was just the fuse crackle of the trillions of dollars, Euros and Yen TPTB printed and stacked in their safes; now we are going to experience a giant inflationary Big Bang price explosion as TPTB spend that cash buying gold, farmland, etc, but “We The People” will experience a Giant Sucking Implosion Sound.because with over 500% inflation, we won’t be able to buy a cup of warm pee soup.
Well, as usual, Kunt-ler has said something to piss me off.
This –> “The bottom line is that, in the broadest sense, the world can no longer count on getting more stuff, except waste, garbage, political unrest, and the other various effects of entropy. From now on, there is only less of everything for a global population that has not stopped growing. The folks on-board are still having sex, of course, which has a certain byproduct.”
Meaning, overpopulation.
And, to a certain extent, I agree. However, the way he says it is a Lie of Omission.
Tell us, oh Great and Mighty Kunt-ler, which nations are reproducing at barely replacement rate – or under it – and which ones have populations that are exploding?
I’ll save you the trouble. White countries – meaning “The West” – are barely holding their own with replacement rate births. Most aren’t, but a couple are. Which means the white populations are decreasing. Non-white countries – and even continents – have exploding populations. Why? Because we fucking feed them. Their populations are at above Carrying Capacity levels and increasing rapidly because we artificially sustain those populations with shipments of food.
Whites aren’t the ones grunting out as many chilluns as we can. The non-whites are. From an evolutionary standpoint, they’re kicking our ass. Genocidal levels of altruism power this, motivated by do-gooderism.
Whites can see down the road – well, some of us – and realize there will come a day when there ain’t enough food to go around, no matter what level our agri-tech is at. The only reason our Ag production is so high is because of fixed nitrogen fertilizers – invented and capitalized on by whites. But, like always, someone had to take a good thing and fuck it up.
“Oh, lookit those poor starving wretches over there! We must send them food!”
Eh, no. We don’t. 25 years ago when that sickening “We are the World” song came out, there were only a couple million starving Ethiopians. Fast forward, and now there’s multiples of millions of starving Ethiopians, thanks to free shit we gave them. And what did we get for a Return On Investment? Piracy. Rape. Murder. War. Anarchy. Barbarism. And apparently that wasn’t enough, because we’re shipping them by the fuckin’ PLANELOAD over here, complete with new backstories, new histories, new identities… all we’ve done is transplant Ethiopia to here, where it has no business being…
And they’re reproducing, Oh Great and Powerful Kunt-ler… at much higher rates than whites. Because it’s a fuckin’ payday for them… why should they work – or do anything other than eat and fuck – when whitey is paying the bills?
You better unfuck yourself Kunt-ler and get with the program.
How does money increase when wealth decreases?
When debt is money, how does inflation rise when debt values collapse?
I disagree with your conclusion, Robert. Inflation? We’ve had it in SPADES! Monetary inflation the likes of which has never been witnessed has flowed not into goods and services (where excess capacity keeps prices and wages down) but into ethereal things like AAPL.
They have no where to go but down.
Billy…..it is Africa and Middle East that are the reproducing titans.This may be a WAG, but the possibility exists that the whole GloBull Warming Hoax is designed to reduce the breeding populations in Africa.
There has been just 1 item that has allowed humanity to flourish in population, technology, science, medicine, etc., and that is OIL. Oil has allowed propulsion through infrastructure – this is what the Kyoyo Protocol and the Global Warming Agenda denies to Africa. Stop massive infrastructure and you stop clean water, electricity, sewage facilities/treatment.
If one cares about humanity, then infrastructure for Africa is #1.
If you don’t care about hundreds of millions of humans perishing, then go with the GloBull Warming bastards.
“Whites aren’t the ones grunting out as many chilluns as we can. The non-whites are. From an evolutionary standpoint, they’re kicking our ass.”
Only if the assumption that ‘more breeding = greater survival rate’ is true. It was true for thousands of years, and we’ve gotten used to thinking that way, but I don’t think it’s true anymore. I think we’ve turned a corner during the last 40 years or so. When a species becomes overpopulated, increased reproduction DECREASES the survival rate of the species.
In evolutionary terms, I’ve seen it described as breeding like a rabbit or breeding like an elephant. Rabbits crank out offspring like Pez and their offspring don’t live very long. Elephants have one at a time and invest a lot of time and energy raising each one. Humans are far better off if they have fewer offspring – but take very good care of the offspring they do have. Each individual life has more invested in it and therefore tends to turn out better and be valued more highly.
One thing about sending food to Ethiopia by the planeload is that by dumping a bunch of ‘free’ food on them, we pretty much ensure that no one in Ethiopia can farm profitably. How can you expect someone there to grow food and charge money for it when we send them everything for free?
“to maintain the appearance of growth via the USUFRUCT mechanisms of central banking”
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct
It’s tedious when Jim K. uses words that are barely still in use but technically correct. It’s annoying when he uses them incorrectly.
Greetings,
Watching this happen is probably like Christmas, New Years and a birthday for Kunstler. He has been predicting this for years and it IS happening though slower than he thought it would. Next, I’ve noticed that the rhetoric against Russia is at a fever pitch and I can only imagine that everyone is looking towards a “limited” or proxy war to keep a lid on the upcoming deflationary atomic bomb.
These are very interesting times.
At least Kuntsler didn’t mention NASCAR.
Interesting post by Chris Hedges regarding the DECLINE at Race Tracks, as well as other institutions, and how that’s a sign of a country that has capitulated to mindlessness … thanks, Millennials – I hope you enjoy your enslavement.
=======================================================
Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee. A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers, pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower room. A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all middle-aged or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the sport.
“Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would come,” suggested one gray-haired man.
But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations — with images often dominated by violence and pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry, the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.
The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is NASCAR — which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers — is ominous. It is the symbol of a captive society.
“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling with the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult. They only want to look at their computers.”
– Advertisement –
Printup’s parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for it.
“We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,” he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this past weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. “The digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them. We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid Googles ‘Ferrari — racing — sports car’ we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay for that. It is not cheap. That’s how you have got to get these kids. But it’s not working the way it should.”
Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement, or what he called our “social capital,” in his book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” He noted that our severance from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness and alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.
Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a steady stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictator’s speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that were not under the iron control of the party.
The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads, why censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.
The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within the parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and cliches, are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a totalitarian society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety, fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of state propaganda–content, respectful of authority, just, economically secure and free–is mistaken for reality.
Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called “atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification.”
Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded to new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public, to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public “and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action.”
“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses,” Heiden wrote. “The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration.” Heiden, forced to flee Nazi Germany, went on: “When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind.”
Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin called “voluntary associations for study and teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation, resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and self-denial.”
.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_lonely_american_20150628
If one cares about humanity, then infrastructure for Africa is #1.
If you don’t care about hundreds of millions of humans perishing, then go with the GloBull Warming bastards. – koko
Heh… Your point: “You can choose A or B. Choose A, and I’m on your side. Choose B and you’re a fraudulent asshole.”
Bullshit.
Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t give a flying fuck about Africans. I also think the whole climate change hoax is just an excuse to shake down 1st world nations by 3rd world nations. It’s a complicated confidence scheme designed to siphon cash out of the producers and funnel it to those who do not.
Your argument is just “Da White Maing’s Burden” all over again…. according to you, “Africa” is being “denied infrastructure”… as if it were somehow possible for people on one side of the Earth to prevent people on the other side of the Earth from building roads, damns, water treatment plants…
Africans don’t build that shit because they are incapable of building it. They are literally too stupid to think it up and too corrupt and lazy to actually build it even if they could think it up… it’s not my responsibility to go over there and dig wells for the stupid fuckers – they’ll just sell off all the tooling and then piss and shit in the well like it’s an open pit latrine…. then complain when everyone gets cholera and dysentery…
They have proven themselves incapable of even maintaining what we build. Look at South Africa. They were literally given an entire, modern, functioning and solvent country – a working, going concern – and it only took them 20 years to run it into the ground so badly, they not only can’t even feed themselves, but they can’t float a loan through the IMF in order to fix their infrastructure… the whole country is falling apart at the seams, their entire government is corrupt and anyone with enough cash and sense has already jumped the fence and lit out for somewhere else where they won’t get slaughtered with pangas…
So fuck them. What needs to happen is a die-off. A big one. I’m long since past giving two shits about those barbarians…
Stucky, there might be another, more urgent reason, for the lack of civic engagement and participation in local charities and service organizations among the young.
Fact is, only the elders still have the money for it. I myself am usually much more engaged than I have been lately. But it’s belt tightening time in preparation for a retirement that may or may not be voluntary, and I’ve had to excise a lot of things from my budget, including gifts to beloved charities, and membership dues in various local organizations, like the garden club and local historical society.
But at least I have a paid off condo and money in the bank, and that’s a lot more than the youngins’ have. They have college debt in the high five digits, and no time to do much but look for jobs. Young people have never been much into civic affairs, anyway.
Billy….sorry to disappoint you, but I am not among the “Da White Maing’s Burden” believers. Save that for the liberals. You may not care about Africans – well, that is you. I care about humanity – that includes you and the Africans.
In reference to barbarians – if you look at world history for the last 2,500 years, that history is mostly European. Look back and you can see that whites have been the grandest barbarians the world has ever seen.
Humans are generally OK, but it is the heads of state that bring to life the barbarian nature within the male gender.
The Millennials are sucked into the electronic vortex, often to a disturbing degree. I see this everywhere.
However, even if they weren’t, many of those listed institutions are dying anyway. NASCAR – not very interesting, fake, requires a whole day of sitting outside in the heat – for what? I think it appealed to generations that owned real muscle cars and fantasized about driving them fast. Most Millennials have trouble affording cars, and only a few care about speed. Video games are more exciting anyway.
Many of the other listed organizations? They don’t serve a current purpose, and their meetings are slow, tedious and dreadfully boring. I’ve been a member of a couple and no longer serve in a leadership role. Too much time listening to old men talk slowly to pretend-debate something that is a foregone conclusion. If you ever feel really energetic and happy, go attend a Jaycees meeting, it will take it out of you.
I also have to wonder if on some level the Y2K generation realizes just how badly they were HAD by the Obama 2008 campaign, and may be turned off from politics forever as a result. This may, of course, have been the intention.
Billy….sorry to disappoint you, but I am not among the “Da White Maing’s Burden” believers. Save that for the liberals. You may not care about Africans – well, that is you. I care about humanity – that includes you and the Africans. – Crapola
How does your fuckin’ mind work, anyways? Because from here, I can smell the crazy coming off you… your brain is a bag o’ cats.
Your entire argument WAS “The white man’s burden” – literally! Then when called on it, you try and pull some halfassed Jedi Mind Trick by basically saying “Nuh UH!!” Like anyone’s gonna fall for it…
For someone who wants me to “save that for the liberals”, you sure adopted their tactics pretty easily. Paint your argument in terms where if anyone disagrees, they’re automatically discredited… “Oh, this legislation is “common sense” and “reasonable”…. when in fact it is neither one. You did the same shit. “Feel free to disagree, but you’ll be lumped in with the GloBull Warming assholes”… The fuckin’ Fabian Socialists adopted that shit over 100 years ago… old news, crapola… ho hum.
“I care about Humanity!”
Puh-leeze… the world is groaning under the weight of all the breeders in 3rd world shitholes, and you want to go build more shit for them for free so that they can breed even more!
You’re outta your goddamned mind… but then, most folks of your stripe are off their fuckin’ axle in one way or another, so why should you be any different?
In reference to barbarians – if you look at world history for the last 2,500 years, that history is mostly European. Look back and you can see that whites have been the grandest barbarians the world has ever seen.
Translation: “But! B-b-but! White people did it TOOOooOOOoo!”
Fuck you, you self-hating genocidal piece of dogshit. I’m not even going to bother explaining why the above is just equivocating and assigning some mythical “moral superiority” to a bunch of 3rd world fucksticks so backwards they actually hunt down, kill, chop up and sell albinos for good luck charms or chop off body parts for petty theft… If you can’t see it for what it is, then you’re a lost fuckin’ cause…
Humans are generally OK, but it is the heads of state that bring to life the barbarian nature within the male gender.
Oh HELL NO!!
You’re fuckin’ one of them…
Let me guess… you’re going to howl “MUH-SOGINY!” now?
You must have missed my post yesterday that completely destroyed your kind… sorry, sister, I’m no sub-human pussy servant to be keep waiting in the corner until told what to do by your kind…
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You remind me of that dumb white cunt who went down to Hay-shee after the Erf-quake to “help out da bruvvahs!” and ended up being systematically beaten and raped… then said it was okay because they suffered from “Black rage” or some shit… .
The level of your delusion borders on mental illness…
Billy….take a reading comprehension course.
And, always,do not interject your assumed opinions onto others, especially with your reading skills.
Billy….take a reading comprehension course.
And, always,do not interject your assumed opinions onto others, especially with your reading skills.– crapola
Whatever you say, Insane Bitch.
I noticed you didn’t bother to refute anything I said – instead attacking me directly with some bullshit comment about “reading comprehension”…
Which is pretty much all you got. Figures.
Laters, Crazy…
Kokoda I think you make a mistake when you assume that mankind is basically good. Men in general are covetous savages nearly on the level of chimps.
Billy, I wish you would stop holding back and just say it. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Kokodo, billy seems to possess excellent reading skills. Hate to say it, but you are in brainwash territory here. You’ve bought the whole white guilt thing, hook line and sinker. Denial isn’t just a river in egypt. Good luck with that, reality is going to hit you hard.
I love it when folks talk about caring for Africans, etc.
How much money do you send? Do you own a house? Sell it and send the money if you really care.
Go work as a volunteer.
People do not care very much – just enough to carry a bit of guilt, but not enough to truly sacrifice.
I no longer donate to anything to do with helping people. My taxes have supported enormous human welfare expenditures. They take that from me at gunpoint, so why should I bother donating more?
I donate to animal welfare organizations. My family sponsors a shelter where all animals are taken in and cared for, and none are put down unless they are deemed dangerous by 3 independent animal behavior experts.
It is very sad what happens to children, and innocents, world-wide. But I have come to believe that any attempts I make to help only increases the suffering in the long-term.
If I send food to Africa, the population increases and the risk of famine increases again. If I send money to earthquake victims, they build stone houses on fault lines and reset the scenario for another disaster. Etc.
So, I help animals instead. They cannot help themselves. Humans can, but do not. I cannot change human nature. But I can save a great many dogs and cats from being put down.
“If one cares about humanity, then infrastructure for africa is #1.” Kookoda. You are batshit crazy. And manless. And childless. And batshit crazy
+++++++++++++++++++Llpoh
Whenever my inner altruism level rises to the point where it needs to be bled off I find an elderly neighbor who needs firewood, a roof repair or a coat of paint on their house. If I’m in a particularly good mood I’ll pass around a couple of packages of ground beef or a chicken.
And anyone who tells you that they “love all of mankind” you are dealing with a fibber.
I am 95% with Ilpoh. Animals can’t help themselves but are stuck with our viciousness and cruelty, our destruction of their habitats, and our propensity to gobble up the planet and spread across it like a toxic fungus, making life impossible for everything else.
So I’m not much interested in helping people, either, least of all populations that adhere to backward, savage, self-destructive cultures whose mores guarantee that the beneficiaries will place themselves right back in the same predicament you helped them out of.
However, I am interested in helping some people, such as gifted children from disadvantaged backgrounds who are really trying to learn and make something of themselves in spite of coming up in the worst-run households in the U.S. It’s not their fault they were born to cretins. And I can’t help but want to comfort and protect that tiny percentage of the population that is so deeply mentally ill that its cohorts are too scattered to even know where to go to get help, and end up living under bridges, talking to themselves, and trying to kill themselves on the el tracks. I have an old high school buddy who melted down into schizophrenia at age 20 or so, after showing signs of extreme disturbance since childhood, and watching her get beat to nearly death inch by inches over years of sleeping in doorways and fishing food out of garbage cans was heartwrenching to witness.