An article for Billy. Where I live isn’t much different. Obama has killed off thousands of good paying coal jobs. 50% of the population in the county are on food stamps. Welfare and disability are a career path. And the upper crust, the 1%’ers around here? Doctors or business owners? Nope, union drone government employees. They’re making $120,000 a year and retiring at 50 with massive pensions. Welcome to socialism/communism in the USSA.
Vast Stretches Of Impoverished Appalachia Look Like They Have Been Through A War
By Michael Snyder, on January 15th, 2014
If you want to get an idea of where the rest of America is heading, just take a trip through the western half of West Virginia and the eastern half of Kentucky some time. Once you leave the main highways, you will rapidly encounter poverty on a level that is absolutely staggering. Overall, about 15 percent of the entire nation is under the poverty line, but in some areas of eastern Kentucky, more than 40 percent of the population is living in poverty.
Most of the people would work if they could. Over the past couple of decades, locals have witnessed businesses and industries leave the region at a steady pace. When another factory or business shuts down, many of the unemployed do not even realize that their jobs have been shipped overseas. Coal mining still produces jobs that pay a decent wage, but Barack Obama is doing his very best to kill off that entire industry. After decades of decline, vast stretches of impoverished Appalachia look like they have been through a war. Those living in the area know that things are not good, but they just try to do the best that they can with what they have.
In previous articles about areas of the country that are economically depressed, I have typically focused on large cities such as Detroit or Camden, New Jersey. But the economic suffering that is taking place in rural communities in the heartland of America is just as tragic. We just don’t hear about it as much.
Most of those that live in the heart of Appalachia are really good “salt of the earth” people that just want to work hard and do what is right for their families. But after decades of increasing poverty, the entire region has been transformed into an economic nightmare that never seems to end. The following is a description of what life is like in Appalachia today that comes from a recent article by Kevin D. Williamson…
Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007.
In these kinds of conditions, people do whatever they have to do just to survive. With so much poverty around, serving those on food stamps has become an important part of the local economy. In fact, cases of soda purchased with food stamps have become a form of “alternative currency” in the region. In his article, Williamson described how this works…
It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices.
I would encourage everyone to read the rest of Williamson’s excellent article. You can find the entire article right here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367903/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson/page/0/1
In Appalachia, the abuse of alcohol, meth and other legal and illegal drugs is significantly higher than in the U.S. population as a whole. In a desperate attempt to deal with the pain of their lives, many people living in the region are looking for anything that will allow them to “escape” for a little while. The following is an excerpt from an excellent article by Chris Hedges which describes what life is like in the little town of Gary, West Virginia at this point…
Joe and I are sitting in the Tug River Health Clinic in Gary with a registered nurse who does not want her name used. The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check” — payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI — a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival.
“They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. “They will insist to us they are crazy. They will tell us, ‘I know I’m not right.’ People here are very resigned. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.”
The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers OxyContin, fentanyl — 80 times stronger than morphine — Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result.
Of course this kind of thing is not just happening in the heart of Appalachia. All over the country there are rural communities that are economically depressed. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, economic activity in about half of the counties in the entire nation is still below pre-recession levels…
About half of the nation’s 3,069 county economies are still short of their prerecession economic output, reflecting the uneven economic recovery, according to a new report from the National Association of Counties.
So what are our “leaders” doing to fix this?
Well, they plan to ship millions more of our good jobs overseas.
Unfortunately, I am not kidding.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are introducing “fast track” trade promotion authority legislation that will pave the way for rapid approval of the secret trade treaty that Barack Obama has been negotiating. The following is how I described this insidious treaty in a previous article…
Did you know that the Obama administration is negotiating a super secret “trade agreement” that is so sensitive that he isn’t even allowing members of Congress to see it? The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the “NAFTA of the Pacific” and “NAFTA on steroids”, but the truth is that it is so much more than just a trade agreement. This treaty has 29 chapters, but only 5 of them have to do with trade. Most Americans don’t realize this, but this treaty will fundamentally change our laws regarding Internet freedom, health care, the trading of derivatives, copyright issues, food safety, environmental standards, civil liberties and so much more. It will also merge the United States far more deeply into the emerging one world economic system.
Once again, our politicians are betraying the American people and millions of jobs will be lost as a result.
Not that the economy needs another reason to go downhill. The truth is that our economic foundations have already been rotting away for quite some time.
But now the ongoing economic collapse seems to be picking up steam again. For example, the Baltic Dry Index (a very important indicator of global economic activity) is collapsing at a rate not seen since the great financial crash of 2008…
Despite ‘blaming’ the drop in the cost of dry bulk shipping on Colombian coal restrictions, it seems increasingly clear that the 40% collapse in the Baltic Dry Index since the start of the year is more than just that. While this is the worst start to a year in over 30 years, the scale of this meltdown is only matched by the total devastation that occurred in Q3 2008. Of course, the mainstream media will continue to ignore this dour index until it decides to rise once again, but for now, 9 days in a row of plunging prices is yet another canary in the global trade coalmine and suggests what inventory stacking that occurred in Q3/4 2013 is anything but sustained.
Soon economic conditions will get even worse for Appalachia and for the rest of the country. The consequences of decades of very foolish decisions are rapidly catching up with us, and millions upon millions of Americans are going to experience immense economic pain during the years to come.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/vast-stretches-of-impoverished-appalachia-look-like-they-have-been-through-a-war
I’m thinking bb used a sock to post as #BURN and then thumbs-upped himself…
Just pathetic, really.
And for the record, I’d rather have my health back. If I could be rid of the leukemia (most likely from depleted uranium), have new disks put back in between my vertebra, take the plate out of my right hip and the screws out of my leg, give me back my thyroid… I’d give back every penny… all of it. I can deal with the memory loss and the nightmares and shit like that.
“On the dole”….
Fuck you, bb.
Personally, I think the Gooberment got the better end of the deal.
Llpoh
“and that is why they are struggling economically. They are incapable of thriving in a modern economy. So they are now reliant on welfare. And they will not overcome this for generations, even if they start now. If they delay, they may be stuck in the free shit army forever. But odds are that is what will happen. They have fucked themselves, their kids, their kid’s kids, etc.”
Dude. Think about what you just said. “A modern economy”. It’s the fucking App mountains. What kind of ‘modern economy’ do you envision?
In a way, I think they’ll be okay.
See, they’re already practicing the skills the rest of the country will have to relearn once TSHTF. Been doing it for over 200 years. Matter of fact, when TSHTF, I doubt they will know or care since it will have very little effect on their lives…
Perhaps being an anachronism ain’t all bad…. like Pacific islanders running around wearing leaves and shit.. while the rest of America is suffering iCrap loss, those folks in the App mountains will still be making soap from rendered fat, beeswax candles and coal oil, making shit by hand… while the rest of America is trying to figure out how to charge their car up when the power is gone… or where their next meal is coming from…
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In zombie future they will be fine. I do not ascribe (entirely) to that future.
Billy , thank you for your service .I didn’t know you had medical problems..
One last thing before I turn in…
Fucking pukes like bb are quick to point the finger and yell “DRONE! FREE SHITTER!” at the guys that got chewed up by the machine and spat out in pieces… the Gooberment throws us a bone and we’re expected to make good on what little we get.
The same fuckers like bb will gladly vote for the same stupid fucks in the House and the Senate if those clowns keep the river of money flowing to the defense contractors… building billion dollar bombers that sit there and soak up resources, having to be constantly maintained by legions of techs and mechanics, all of whom also draw a paycheck to keep a useless piece of hardware airworthy… or a multi-billion dollar submarine that sails around and does… what, exactly? When was the last time one of our subs actually fired a shot in anger?
Yeah, they’ll gladly vote for the clowns who blow multiples of billions of dollars on high maintenance hardware that will be obsolete in a couple years…
But let a guy who got shot up draw a puny stipend?
FREE SHITTER! HYPOCRITE!! LOSER!!
At least I used what little they’re giving me to try and build a life… to start a business and be self-sustaining. I don’t sit around all day eating fucking Ho-Ho’s and watching Dr. Who reruns. Anyone who has ever owned or lived on a farm knows they need constant attention… there is ALWAYS shit that needs to be done. Shit that I do myself because I can’t afford to hire anyone to do it.
So, to the bb’s of the world – Fuck you. Y’all can suck my ass. Just get up in there and suck my white ass. I’ve done more in my life – STILL doing more with my life – than you pukes ever will.
bb
“Billy , thank you for your service .I didn’t know you had medical problems..”
Look. The others call you the village idiot and other disparaging terms… I usually don’t go out of my way to attack you.
But YOU came at ME…. flapping your fucking soup coolers without knowing the whole story. But, that’s okay. I’m a Grunt. Grunts get shit on. I think Einstein proved it.
We get chopped up and spewed out, and assholes point at us and yell “FREE SHITTER!”… we get thrown a fucking bone and are supposed to be happy with it. I tell you truthfully, it would have been better if I had been killed. At least then the payoff from the insurance would have paid off the farm, with a little left over for property taxes and maybe some groceries… I’m worth more dead than alive, according to the Government…
Folks are always willing to point fingers at us… conveniently forgetting the multi-billion dollar Edsel’s that the military has that just sit there… doing nothing, but that YOU paid for…
If it makes you feel any better, you don’t have to suck my ass…
I’m going to bed now..
This is a pointless argument for billy to be making with Llpoh.
It’s well known that rural areas nationwide suffer from a phenomena sociologists call “brain drain”. The best and the brightest born into certain regions quickly see that there is no opportunity, and use their high intelligence to get the fuck out of the community and move to an area with a university. Once educated thusly, they rarely if ever go back. Llpoh and I are both examples of this (I am one of the few who “came back” and now I am planning on leaving again, due to limited social and educational opportunities for my growing children).
The next tier down in intelligence from rural areas are those who join the military. These are the people who are smart enough to know the rural area has nothing for them. They are not quite academically gifted enough to have an immediate escape via college, so they join the military for the travel, adventure, steady pay, and maybe later on the GI Bill. These folks also are sure to leave, sometimes returning but usually not.
The only people who grow up in rural/impoverished areas, and for sure stay, are those unfortunates who aren’t very bright. If they were really, really bright they would have escaped via out of state university; if they were relatively bright with good work ethic they escape via the military. Since they weren’t very bright, they stay and become drug addicts and get busy reproducing the next generation of children in the area. This next generation of children, coming from parents of diminished capacity, are less likely to be bright themselves, and those poor few who are (if not intellectually stunted and traumatized by their circumstances) are even more certain to flee at the first opportunity.
The cities and urban areas are enhanced by the constant influx of intelligence (brain drain) coming out of rural areas – meanwhile rural areas struggle to find doctors, dentists, accountants, attorneys, and professionals of all sorts etc to even make the communities functional. Lack of a professional class makes it even more difficult for the next generation of rural youth to be intelligent, and even more certain that the few children of high intelligence produced by the community will leave and never come back. Lack of a professional class also means fewer decent jobs produced for those middle-tier kids, who then are left with even fewer good options to stay and more reasons to join the Army and get the hell out.
A couple generations of this brain-drain process, stir in a hearty dose of Government Assistance/ FSA mentality and Meth — and the community becomes a rural version of 30 blocks of squalor. The problem is not just in Appalachia. Brain drain hits many regions and states really hard. Furthermore, look at how stupid the states are that benefit from brain drain — such as NY, MA, CA, NJ, IL, etc. These places not only have their own distribution of intelligence amongst their natives, but they attract and retain smart people from other regions — and yet even the brain-blessed states are full of idiots.
I don’t recall Appalachia being part of the new Promise Zones. If I was to check, I suspect they’re mostly inner city. What would Obummer care about white poverty?
I also agree with AWD, I am getting highly intolerant of older, not elderly, obviously retired, gentrified boomer fucks who will live better than anyone currently in the work force not nearing retirement and without a defined benefit plan. Not only do they not know what a recession is, other than their dollar stretches further but they’re retiring in their 50’s with a generous income and benefits package, including health care.
I worked half of my adult life without any benefits, health care, retirement or paid days off. I’m currently working as a government drone, although with my skill set, I can work in any vertical industry, government were the ones hiring, and not contract. My ancestry is Scots-Irish from the Piedmont. A descendant of the patriarch still lives on the land deeded by King George in 1753. It was a wilderness back then. There’s no other way to describe it.
LL says he knows better than most about being pushed off your own land. He has a point. The feds don’t discriminate about who they fuck over. I don’t know why they don’t see themselves as the problem, but they don’t. Reagan is a special case where he talked the talk of smaller government, but did exactly the opposite. He paved the way for where we are today. Carter is the last POTUS who even attempted to reign in the federal bureaucracy.
I’ve literally given up that we will find a workable solution for the currency crisis of the west. Having shipped jobs overseas in the pursuit of profit, without any regard for the welfare of it’s citizens, yes, that is one of the constitutional mandates of the government, to promote the general welfare, not the welfare of the 1% or their owners, and with reckless and unaccountable spending, the federal government has painted the West into a corner. While the size of the pie shrinks along with the value of the dollar, the siphoning off of the nation’s wealth is accelerating, until there will be nothing left, except debt, and the 1% will find that their owners have left town with their dual passports to island safe houses and private security. In the end, those who serve the devil will find he will destroy them as surely as he would destroy the rest of us, were it not for God’s Word, and they don’t have that protection.
While there may be no salvation or saving grace in the world, there is hope for the return of Christ for his people, and my bags are packed.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20, ESV)
Amen and God bless!
What we’re seeing right now across this country is “the natural selction process”
When -90 IQ American dumbfucks try to slap me down for speaking ill if the US
corporation, I simply tell them, “I’m not American, I’m full blooded German,
dont include me in the cesspool of shit the rest of you useless eaters are
gleefully swimming in.
Entropy will decide who makes it through this…expect at least 1/2 to be fertilizer
in 3 years or less…. unfortunatley, panicing swimmwers tend to drown life gaurds,
becarefull who you choose to save,
yadda ,yadda. yadda…more tearing at the remnants of a great cultural fabric whilst the smoldering heap that is American urban multicultural society lies in near total ruins.Federal meddling induced poverty in the Appalachians translates into despair and self abuse while the self-induced poverty of urban America turns outward towards a feral predatory nature never before seen in any civilized culture.
“[Man] has diverged into distinct races, or as they may be more fitly called, sub-species. Some of these, such as the Negro and the European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered as good and true species.” Charles Darwin
(Source: columbia.edu)
http://www.woodpilereport.com/
Wherein ol’ Remus comments on
The White Ghetto art-link-symbol-tiny-grey-arrow-only-rev01.gif, by Kevin
Williamson at National Review
“White bread” people – A few stand-up comics are trying to “reappropriate” this ethnic epithet: Jim Gaffigan, for example, is currently on his “White Bread Tour.” But it remains one of the few ethnic slurs that’s acceptable—indeed, almost unquestioned—in the 21st century.
Steve Sailer at takimag.com
Appalachia is sure-fire material for standup comedians and hatchet-job movies. We know what to expect from the first y’all. What to keep in mind when reading snark like The White Ghetto is the difference between stereotype and caricature. Stereotypes don’t arise from nothing at all, and they’re unfair only to the exceptions, whereas caricature is unfair by intent and admits no exceptions. Mr. Williamson’s essay has no purpose but caricature.
Goopey layers of it pile up in his first sentence, “… the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery.” The requisite tone of cosmopolitan contempt struck, he deploys the ten foot pole:
If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation.
Apparently it annoys Mr. Williamson quite a lot that Appalachia is, um … white. Don’t look for him to describe actual reservations as Cherry Cobbler-hued though, only Appalachia can be insulted without limit or consequence. In fact, extra points for inventiveness, and he racks up the points, to wit:
These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.
Which is his way of saying he doesn’t belong there, so nobody he wants to know does either. The locals, or those with a bugout in their plans, may read his description differently. Come the collapse we’ll keep the infrared light on for him.
He continues with an homage to the idyllic beauty of the place, beautiful but tragically defaced by the native untermenschen’s sorry shtetls, they’re stay-behinds you see, worthies having long fled, ipso facto, self-selected inferiors remain. Unlike Baltimore or Boston assumedly, where ancient row houses collapse after a good rain but otherwise improve what was formerly a patch of unsightly wilderness, as do their wise and ambitious inhabitants who, we are assured, ‘struggle’ toward a decent life, but in the multi-generational meanwhile need seamless, near-total forbearance and a perpetual temporary “hand up.”
He goes on.
There’s a great deal of drug use, welfare fraud, and the like, but the overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two-thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average.
Drug use. Welfare fraud. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my. As if welfare were anything other than fraud. But wait. What’s this? The crime rate isn’t merely less than Detroit or Camden, speaking of reservations. It’s less than the national average. And by a lot. How can this be? We have Bigge Tymme studies by ever so important people proving poverty is the Root Cause Of Crime. Picture a teeter-totter. Income down, crime up. Income up, crime down. As close-coupled as that.
It’s a first rate theory, easily the equal of phrenology or the luminiferous ether, neatly presented with scienced-up charts’n graphs purporting to quantify their anecdotes for our academic reading convenience. Poverty-caused crime—as versus criminal-caused crime we suppose—is the ironworks supporting the whole construct of sociology, namely, if: poverty, then: crime, therefore: entitlement. Said differently, we bribe the feral and make them feel special besides. It worked for Rome did it not?
There are impressive government buildings with attractive lobbies and nice offices where people administer this notion with the unquestioning fervor of medieval monks. They believe it obvious and self evident that the wealthy—investment bankers, say—don’t commit crime. The poor commit crime, as something akin to a legitimate franchise to hear them tell it. And Appalachia is chock full-o’-poor, in fact, poor who actually are poor rather than “living in (over-fed, late model car, air conditioned, big screen tevee, Obamaphone equipped urban) poverty”. Yet there’s less crime per head in Appalachia than in the rest of the country. By far. Hmm. Somethin ain’t zactly addin up here. Despite the essay’s title, we’re trying to not notice what’s going unsaid. But hold on, there’s more. Mr. Williamson continues.
A 2004 study found that the majority of impoverished households in Appalachia were headed by married couples, not single mothers. Kentucky and West Virginia have abortion rates that are one-fourth those of Rhode Island or Connecticut, and one-fifth that of Florida. More marriage, less abortion
Why, that there’s crazy talk. Poor, yes, but mothers don’t off their offspring? And they’re married to their children’s fathers? Poor, but more law abiding? And guns, lots of guns, but far less violence than most anywhere else? No flash mobs, knockout games or drive-by shootups? How odd. Same circumstances as Newark, lower crime than Minneapolis.
This incandescent falsification of the teeter-totter imperative is totally unacceptable to collectivists, worse, it resonates with a huge swath of Americans and naturally so, it has the feel of a long-missing piece of the puzzle. Appalachia is tediously and unrelentingly depicted as “backward”, and by Progressive metrics it is, but it doesn’t follow such backwardness as we find is bad. Appalachia can be seen as backward, certainly, or it can be seen as having the answers while the rest of the country is just now admitting the problems.
Neither is strictly true, as in everything else there are no solutions, only tradeoffs, and tradeoffs are always debatable. Most often the choice is between bad and worse. How Appalachia is seen says more about the witness than about what is seen. There are implacable extremists. Example: Fox News channel’s Bill O’Reilly revealed his inner Einsatzgruppen when he demanded Appalachia be forcibly depopulated and turned into a national park. Said just that way. The people of Appalachia make no such demand of Mr. O’Reilly’s home grounds, although a compelling case could be made. Perhaps a better course is reciprocity, meaning leave each other alone. It was once the American way.
It’s understandable though. Appalachia can shock those who know nothing of it other than the “slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery” version. Appalachia is where reality-deficient social engineering risks a prefrontal lobotomy, which is why practitioners either stay away or do a Google Earth photo car drive-through to see what they set out to see, call it done and get their Mencken on. They certainly won’t find what they’re not looking for. If they did, with Appalachia’s potential to fatally undermine DC’s received truth, we can almost read their panicked minds; “alert the Special Statistics And Tactics team. Call out the Standup Comedy Reserves. Tell the Hollywood Rapid Response Guild to roll. Oh, and get Damage Control over at National Review on the line, ask for Kevin.”
Diversity hustlers swoon over hit pieces like The White Ghetto. And Mr. Williamson delivers all they expect save parking validation. The title alone nearly gets ’em high, the Dorothea Lange redux finishes the job. Then there’s the clincher. Oh the shame, Appalachia is embarrassingly, Wonder Bread–hued, irredeemably white. Mr. Williamson meant it as censure. It isn’t. “If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation,” sez he. No he wouldn’t. If it weren’t white he wouldn’t whisper the word ‘reservation’ to a passed-out drunk on a rainy night in Rittenhouse Square. In fact, if he wrote this stuff about a nonwhite Appalachia he’d be pilloried for using the place as a bootscraper. But it isn’t 98.5 percent nonwhite. So it’s all good. Scrape away.
. . . . .
LIfe for all of us is about to get more like The Walton’s. They were probably high end hillbilly’s by hillbilly standards but they had knowledge that enabled them to live meaningful lives in meager conditions. (yes, I know that was a tv show but the show was based on a real family from Appalachia)
The hillbilly’s lived there before welfare and I have no doubt they will live there when welfare goes away. The cessation of welfare will actually help their communities in the long term.
Personally I admire the people who inhabit those mountains. Of course I’m excluding the low lifes among them. During the time I spent in SC, I got to know quite a few poor black families. They literally lived in dirt floor shacks but what they lacked in money and “stuff” they more than made up for in deep knowledge of their surroundings, real life skills, very strong family ties and honest caring lives. They were genuinely kind despite experiencing extreme racism. Once I got to know a few of them, I was always made to feel welcome. Most of them were old when I knew them 30 years ago and are surely gone by now. I felt the same way about the old rural Spaniards I got to know in Spain as well. Honest, hard working, good people. I’d really appreciate having both of them as neighbors now.
LLPOH and Billy are walking two sides of the same razor blade. I suspect that both LLPOH and I would get along very well in person with Billy despite the pissing contests. How boring would things be without them? I bet we’d raise some hell too!
I_S
This conversation was not sycophantic.
(Thanks to the one who shall not be named, I learned a new word)
LLPOH says: In zombie future they will be fine. I do not ascribe (entirely) to that future.
LLPOH as a businessman look at the debt this country is carrying and make a forecast. Can you see where huge cuts will need to be made to social programs? How do you think the inner city thugs will respond? What impact will their actions have on business as usual?
Here’s how I judge how smart an individual is. Can you live without electricity and gasoline at a moments notice? If the answer to that question is yes than an individual is smart enough to look into the future and prepare for a disruption to our way of life that is surely on its way. The degree of the impending collapse could surely be argued, but not the reality this ship is going down.
Bottom line is those hill folks will do better than many 1%er’s. Like the Alabama song says ” when Wall Street fell we were so poor we could not tell”
I’d rather be surrounded by a poor, ignorant although resourceful homogenous population , than say a multiracial population of devious and cunning sophisticates any day of the week..
Maybe it’s a conspiracy of dope dealers masquerading as medical professions in collusion with a despotic Federal government attempting to exterminate the reaming population of the last of the anti-urbanism( see JHK) hold-outs in order further their Agenda 21/Wildland Project of moving all rural people into urban areas….pack ’em in so the wildlife can again roam free, they said.
MDES!
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=227619
No Kidding? (Acetaminophen Damages Livers)
The Market Ticker ® – Commentary on The Capital Markets
2014-01-15 13:12 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 194 references Ignore this thread
No Kidding? (Acetaminophen Damages Livers)
Gee, you don’t say…..
(CNN) — You’re in pain after surgery, and your doctor prescribes you Vicodin, or maybe Percocet. But when you get home, the pain hasn’t subsided and you decide to pop some Extra Strength Tylenol.
Unknowingly, you may have just taken more of the drug acetaminophen than is safe.
Yeah, and….
Acetaminophen is often used in pain medications with opioids such as oxycodone (Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin) and codeine (Tylenol with Codeine). These are called combination drugs, and the Food and Drug Administration is asking doctors to stop prescribing those that have more than 325 mg of acetaminophen per dose.
You want to know why they blend those? Oh, I know what the drug companies say. They say it’s because the tylenol (acetaminophen), in combination, makes the opiod painkiller work better.
I have long maintained that it’s for an entirely-different reason — they know damn well that acetaminophen is a liver toxin and blending the two means if you try to abuse the Percocet or similar you may kill yourself.
This, I believe they surmise, serves as a “deterrent” to abuse of those drugs.
It looks like rural anywhere America. To be honest, I have to agree with LLPOH on this one. Those same red necks that rail against Obama, Democrats and welfare all greatly benefit from the aforementioned.
Sure, they’ll vote Republican, but a hell of a lot of them pull in some form of assistance.
Reduce the military, and shrink the benefits. The two things we need the most are the two things that will never happen.
In fact, I daresay WW3 (or w/e the next major war is called) will grant the military an even larger piece of the budget, impressive given that our military spending is already enough for us to wage war halfway around the world for over a decade.
With 30+ years of camping in the mountains of SV/NC/WV/VA – the more remote the better – I have seen some significant changes over the years. Where tourism flourishes, where there is enough arable land, where there is still some industry – the people are still relatively responsible – but take away those items and things deteriorate quickly.
I suspect like the rest of rural America the area has been subjected to the “brain drain” mentioned before – a large percentage of the locals with any talent, intellect or initiative saw the hand writing on the wall and left a long time ago – and this left the rest to fend for themselves as best they could.
And now that the low skill manufacturing plants are mostly closed nationwide where are these less talented, less intelligent and less motivated people supposed to go?
There is a real argument that free shit encourages poor choices and the spiral down is swift but I do believe that regarding the pitiful circumstance nationwide for low skill jobs in general the choices are just not there – so we are left to deal with freeshitters who, due to a lack of talent, intellect and motivation, may decide to use their free shit in less than appropriate or sustaining manners making them poor contestants for the low-skill jobs that no longer exist.
Before the freeshit came their way they had the opportunities provided by the local talented, intelligent and motivated members of their communities – perhaps after whatever Armageddon TPTB have scheduled for our once great nation the talent/intellect/motivated folks will migrate back and make use of the ones still around.
My two cents.
Damn…
I turn my back for two minutes and y’all post some seriously good shit… especially SAH, flash and Non… that woodpilereport sort of hit home.
And I did NOT know that O’Rielly said some shit about depopulating our mountains and turning it all into some sort of national park.. that remark really got me simmering and I said some very, very unkind things about Mr. O’Rielly, his anatomy, his family and frankly, what I would like to do to him if I ever met him face to face…
Still, I suspect that the culture of these mountains will resist as long as they can and, in the event of SHTF, they will do better than most…
Of course, they might be shoeless, toothless hayseed hillfolks, but they’re not THAT stupid… they/we know that when a SHTF event happens, all the fucking flatlanders will try to come up into those mountains as some sort of refuge… little do they know, they’re marching into a hornet’s nest. So, good luck with that…
Ancestors of those “hillbillies” have lived in those hills and mountains since before the Revolutionary War. Good luck to any entity trying to root them out by force.
I’d rather be poor and ragged, surrounded by these folks, than live in any multi-culti mishmash city, surrounded by Yoofs and Teens, living under siege all the time…
Here’s a little more ear gravy for y’all…
DAMN that boy can saw a fiddle!
no country for old honkies..
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…just like us, they said.
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Europe, an even worse socialist welfare state than the United Socialist States of America (USSA)
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Billy, one way to begin to solve the problem is more abortions for the mountain people .In fact it should be forced abortion. That’s the liberal cure for unwanted populations and it would work.It has kept the.black population under control for 40+years.Then the federal government should raise property taxes by 70% .This would force many off their land and in the hands of government which would then relocate them to more productive places.You may not like losing your land but neither did the Indians but they have for the most part gotten over it.Hey it’s not perfect but it is a plan to help government help these people out of poverty.You got any better suggestions.
when push come to shove…
The red areas have been rurally pacified .
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It’s harder to be a poor, rural White person than it is to be a poor, urban Brown person. As the pro-trickle-down-economics crowd likes to say, “a rising tide raises all ships.”
Living in the ghetto, there are easier opportunities to crawl out – there is public transportation and proximity to “better neighborhoods” with libraries, schools, jobs, museums, charitable organizations, etc. With a little motivation, there are ways to commute or syphon off of the resources nearby. You may even be able to transition yourself into college or technical school, if you want the opportunity exists to eventually leave the ghetto in relative style. Also in urban areas, those on public assistance have better access to dental and medical, just due to proximity to providers. Medicaid is shit, but urban Medicaid folks get that dental and their kids in Headstart get those fluoride treatments and dental education right after a nutritious government free breakfast and lunch. By the time they are old enough to want to get a job (if they want) they are more likely to have enough teeth to work customer service with a smile. There are a million more opportunities for the urban poor to find escape routes, enough opportunities nearby that even mediocre urban poor could improve themselves and find jobs if they want. Plus, being brown, affirmative action and a Liberal FSA loving urban population stands ready to help. When I went to the big city to be educated, I lived close to the ghetto – I used to wonder what the hell was wrong with the people in the “projects” only a couple miles away from schools and jobs, and with cheap public transportation that could get them there — I moved 3000 miles away from a poor rural town to be there. I felt anyone from the urban ghetto who wanted to could get out pretty easily, truly. If they don’t get out, they are truly stupid or criminal.
The rural poor whites are in relative isolation. The level of motivation, natural intelligence, and commitment it takes to crawl out of poverty are tremendous. Your shitty town and school system might be 150-500 miles away from any decent school, library, job, museum, charitable organization, etc — so good luck with that. Even if you are born bright and curious, you grow up not having access to any tools to develop that. You either have to be truly gifted and committed to getting completely the fuck away and relocating hundreds of miles away, or you don’t have access to anything, period. And who cares if you are on public assistance, your Medicaid is only as worthwhile as the availability of Drs and Dentists. It is shitty enough in the city, good luck accessing providers 300 miles from nowhere. Lack of population density means no Headstart, no dental education free toothbrushes and fluoride treatments and all that shit our gov spends money on in the “war on poverty”. By the time the poor white kid realizes how important teeth are to employment, the teeth are already black and rotting out of their heads. Please understand I live in an area with meth mouth white folks (not in Appalachia) and some of them just grow up with black teeth and fall through the cracks of “the system” in a way that poor black kids in the hood do not. There aren’t social workers, dentists, doctors, Headstart preschool teachers, etc to keep tabs. Good luck getting llpoh to hire you once you appear to have spent the better part of your childhood snorting peanut butter crank and learning to shake and bake meth in your trailer. Plus being White, llpoh will not even get affirmative action credit for hiring you – so he is absolutely not lying when he says he would NEVER hire these people (business owners like llpoh realize in today’s America you have to use your white-hiring quota very selectively and efficiently, since it is so limited). Being poor white rural trash is just about the most jacked-up thing you can be.
If you want to argue that these poor white people are “living off the land”, like homesteaders…. Hahaha. At least in my area they smoke cigarettes, eat Doritos and drink soda, drive vehicles, don’t garden, cook meth out of all manner of chemicals, mostly live in “manufactured homes”, wear polyester (petroleum based) clothing that was made in Guatemala, most don’t have horses or likely ATV… I guess that yes they do hunt and fish. So what. Rich educated folks from the city skeet shoot using $3000 shotguns while wearing finely crafted outdoor clothing made in the USA by Filsons and LL Bean. They fly fish using hand tied lures and tour lovely areas like Wyoming, Montana and Alaska to trophy hunt big game. The big advantage poor white trash has is – they won’t miss civilization, because they haven’t had a taste of it. They will miss their Mt Dew, Crank, Doritos and Marlboros though.
“The big advantage poor white trash has is – they won’t miss civilization, because they haven’t had a taste of it. They will miss their Mt Dew, Crank, Doritos and Marlboros though.”
Great comment SAH, you’ve won my heart once again.
You forgot “oxy” though, hillbilly heroine
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And they don’t buy Marlboros anymore, they “roll their own”, unfiltered, at $10 a carton
SAH, survival of the coming collapse will be about location more than anything else. White trash that live out in the middle of no where will have a much better chance than the wealthy that live in or near large population centers. If and when the dollar collapses wealthy people with stocks, bonds and or cash for that matter will be holding a hand full of shit, with a huge target on their back.
The only thing of value will be what you can lay your hands on, and your location far from the hungry mobs.
Flash what is that map about? I live in a large red area
Billy, it’s “dayum”. I learned that yesterday…
Rural Appalachia’s obsession with drinking Mountain Dew baffles me. God it’s nasty. Diet Mountain Dew is worse. Carbonated skunk piss. I couldn’t even finish the 12-oz can.
There are going to be some mighty bad things to come. The welfare system and financial systems will collapse. That does not necessarily mean a full collapse of society. I do not believe full zombie is on the cards. Just a lot of pain for the unprepared. A lot of pain.
The poor people that live in the woods will survive when millions of others don’t. The hood rats will devour the cities, than move on to the suburbs. They are already flash-mobbing suburban areas. But they won’t go past that, not out into the woods. The whites that do survive in suburban areas by forming their own militias and neighborhood protections squads will hold out for awhile, but will quickly run out of food. They’ll live off their obesity for awhile, then start starving, and won’t be able to travel anywhere because of the hood rats and gangs. Some will flee to the rural areas, but won’t be welcome and will become victims. Like it or not, these people will survive.
Looks like Eastern Kentucky is a safe place. Move there before it’s too late
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SAH, out of curiosity, do you know anything about Mill City Or.? (It’s off Hwy 22 in the foothills of the cascades). My family owned a log cabin not far away on the Little North Fork of the Santiam River and I remember what a nice little town it was in the early 1970’s. It put on a helluva July 4th fireworks display from the park in the middle of town. It was a very typical lumber mill town back then. I wonder if Freres Lumber Co. is even around anymore…
I am just curious what it looks like today.
AWD 7:34 comment
That’s the way I see it going down.
When the EBT cards get reduced significantly or stopped all together large population centers will be very dangerous. Killings are already on the rise and the hood rats are still feeding, wait till their Hongry.
sensetti says:
“wait till their Hongry.”
where’d you learn to spell? it’s ‘wait until there hongry’.
Coyote,
Eastern Kentucky and southeast West Virginia is harsh. I drove through those areas once in October 2006. Harsh, spartan existence to live there. Very few stores, gas stations or motels. Extremely harsh winters. Sides of mountains excavated and leveled to accommodate public schools and modest shopping centers. Graveyards situated on the sides of mountains (the only room available). I had never seen that before. Narrow, winding two-lane highways in the mountains. Drive by an occasional coal mine in production. Stop to fill up and the restrooms are not for use by the public. It was an education. Gangs would not survive there: nothing to steal! No abundance to pillage.
El Coyote Fuck you in ass. Did I spell that correctly you God Damn piece of shit.
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Sensetti – he was being funny. I do not think he was being mean. Just my two cents.
@Zara – oh yes, Mill City. It is in gorgeous land, but today the town has a semi-scary, semi-ghost town feel to it (I had never visited before the 2000s). There are lots of rundown buildings, broken down cars in yards, unkempt landscaping, deferred maintenance, and the look of a community with a lot of Meth use, etc. The last time I was there was in 2009. I imagine some people have nice acreage property with a Mill City zip code, but it is not a place I would live in the town. The nearby towns of Dallas, Independence, Rickreal, Monmouth, Sheridan and McMinnville have fared better economically.
Hands down the scariest, worst place I have ever been in Oregon (besides Indian Reservations and North Portland) is Swisshome, OR which is terrifying, it’s like the movie Deliverance but worse — and would rival any degree of poverty and destitution in Appalachia.
It’s just Coyote’s humor above, Sensetti. He intends no insult. Really. He fucks with me all the time. Thanks for all your comments.
No Jobs For Americans:
In America the unemployment rate is a deception just like everything else. The rate of American unemployment fell, because people can’t find jobs. The fewer the jobs, the lower the unemployment rate.
One of the best threads ever. A Choctaw indian (Llpoh) going toe-to-toe with an Appalachian hillbilly (Billy). If there were ever a penultimate example of the saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” you two are it.
P.S. For all those who disparaged Billy’s service and status as a retired enlisted man in the Army (am I right about that, Billy?) as being just another “government drone drawing a retired paycheck,” let me tell you something about being enlisted in America’s land forces, the Army and Marine Corps. It’s a well kept and little known secret.
On the battlefield, the enemy can kill our corps commander, division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion commanders, company commanders, and platoon leaders. All officers.
Most enemy armed forces would freeze if that were to happen at any of those levels. Their leaders are dead. Who’s in charge? They’re lost.
Not the U.S. It keeps on going. The NCO’s (enlisted) are there all the way down. If needed, they will take charge. As they have so many times in the past.
Billy was a member of that unique group of NCO’s which make America’s armed forces unique. Enjoy the retirement check. You earned it.