ARMED COP IN EVERY SCHOOL?

I don’t think there are enough donuts in the country to make this solution feasible. This idea is almost as bad as Obama’s. Nothing like more government in our daily lives. Let’s condition our children to living under the protection of armed thugs. Maybe we can roll out the West Philly solution of bars and cages to cover all the windows of all our schools. This again shows that both the right and the left in this country want more control and power.

NRA calls for armed police officer in every school

WASHINGTON — The nation’s largest gun-rights lobby called Friday for armed police officers to be posted in every American school to stop the next killer “waiting in the wings.”

The National Rifle Association broke its silence on last week’s shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school that left 26 children and staff dead.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” the group’s top lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre, said at a Washington news conference.

LaPierre said “the next Adam Lanza,” the man responsible for last week’s mayhem, is planning an attack on another school.

“How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and a sense of identity that they crave, while provoking others to try to make their mark,” LaPierre said. “A dozen more killers, a hundred more? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?”

He blamed video games, movies and music videos for exposing children to a violent culture day in and day out. “In a race to the bottom, many conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate, and offend every standard of civilized society, by bringing an even more toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty right into our homes,” LaPierre said.

He refused to take any questions after speaking. Though security was tight, two protesters were able to interrupt LaPierre’s speech, holding up signs that blamed the NRA for killing children. Both were escorted out, shouting that guns in schools are not the answer.

LaPierre announced that former Rep. Asa Hutchison, R-Ark., will lead an NRA program that will develop a model security plan for schools that relies on armed volunteers.

The 4.3 million-member NRA largely disappeared from public debate after the shootings in Newtown, Conn., choosing atypical silence as a strategy as the nation sought answers after the rampage. The NRA temporarily took down its Facebook page and kept quiet on Twitter.

Since the slayings, President Barack Obama has demanded “real action, right now” against U.S. gun violence and called on the NRA to join the effort. Moving quickly after several congressional gun-rights supporters said they would consider new legislation to control firearms, the president said this week he wants proposals to reduce gun violence that he can take to Congress by January.

Obama has already asked Congress to reinstate an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and pass legislation that would stop people from purchasing firearms from private sellers without a background check. Obama also has indicated he wants Congress to pursue the possibility of limiting high-capacity magazines.

FOURTH TURNING EERIE QUOTES OF THE DAY

WELCOME TO THE FOURTH TURNING

“An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown. The president declares emergency powers. Congress rescinds his authority. Dollar and bond prices plummet. The president threatens to stop Social Security checks. Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Default looms. Wall Street panics.”

The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – Page 273 – Written in 1996

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability –  problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

  • Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
  • Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
  • Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
  • Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction” 

 The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

 

Strauss & Howe provide four possible outcomes to our current Crisis:

  1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.
  2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
  3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
  4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

Robots and Automation Are Taking American Jobs – Think Your Job is Safe?

You’d think the same headline would be the prominent theme of every year since the 1800s. After all, we’ve seen a decline in the need from everything from lamplighters once electricity was invented to farm workers once farming equipment, tractors and trucks came along. However, for various reasons throughout 2012, there’s been a steady debate brewing over modern day robotics and algos overtaking jobs that were once unthinkable.

Where Employing Humans Makes No Sense

There are a lot of parts of the economy where humans continue to perform functions that can and should be performed completely by automated means. By continuing to employ humans, it’s just an unnecessary cost on society and frankly, prevents people from being freed up to do something that adds more to US productivity, output, and possibly, their own career/income. Here are some examples:

  • Toll Takers – I don’t know what they call it where you live but in the Northeast, we have an “EZ-Pass system which allows your car to drive straight through an overpass that detects your car’s pass. Usually, there are a couple EZ-Pass only lanes and then there are a few human operated lanes. It continues to confound me why they still exist. And what is even more perplexing is why Americans still voluntarily sit on each toll line 5 minutes or more instead of flying through an automated lane. I could see an international traveler or very infrequent driver that doesn’t bother, but for 99% of drivers, why would you wait? Aside from that, the people performing these jobs aren’t really using their potential, at all. They stand in a booth all day taking a ticket and handing out change. They are often subject to insults and rude behavior, but more importantly, they are subject to hazardous fumes for a lifetime that must surely result in a higher prevalence of health issues later in life, and they are paid above-market rates for completely non-skilled labor due to their labor arrangement. They don’t really help with anything else outside of toll-taking. For instance, years ago, my car broke down going into the toll booth. What great timing! My car was stuck right at the damn entrance to the booth and I looked at the guy and shrugged, like “what now”? I said, “you wanna help me push this up a bit so people can get through?” He said no since if he hurt himself outside the booth, he wouldn’t be covered under the rules. So, I was on my own. I started pushing the car myself which was ridiculous since it was 2000 pounds and there was nobody to steer it. I wasn’t having much luck, but fortunately, a guy stuck behind me got out of his car to help me push. In essence, it makes no sense that these jobs still exist in the numbers they do. States should do more for force (or entice via incentives like a 10% discount) drivers to switch completely to EZ-pass type systems.
  • Gas Station Attendants – …

Continue Reading Robots and Automation Are Taking American Jobs

SHOWING THEIR TRUE COLORS

 The children slaughtered in Connecticut by a drugged up mental defective haven’t even been put into the ground yet and Obama is convening a gun banning convention in Washington DC today. Hysterically, the Philadelphia Chief of police is headed down to provide his brilliant insight. Meanwhile, we enter the final week of 2012 and Philly will finish the year with around 330 homicides, the highest since 2007.  Philadelphia has the toughest gun laws in the state. I’m sure if we ban guns, the lowlife scumbags in North Philly and West Philly will abide by the new rules. Maybe a few NO GUNS ALLOWED signs will work. Doctor Sowell does his usual fantastic job poking holes in the left wing liberal storyline. I’m sure he hasn’t been invited to Washington DC for his thoughts on the matter. We wouldn’t want any divergent points of view.

If you had any remaining thought that the Mainstream media in this country was impartial and just journalists reporting the facts, you are badly mistaken. This past week was probably an eye opener for anyone with critical thinking skills. The propaganda and misinformation is being screeched over the airwaves, in Op-Eds and by Cartoonists across the land. The dead children were barely cold before Bloomberg, Obama, and the left wing do-gooder control freaks on MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the liberal propaganda machines began spewing their standard storyline. This tragedy will not go to waste. Maddow, Matthews and Shultz were probably high fiving as the news reports came in. There was a tingle up their legs.

I always knew the press had a liberal bias, but this tragedy has revealed the true colors of these faux journalists. It appears that 90% of the mainstream media has a liberal agenda and is nothing but a mouthpiece for the government assuming more and more control over every aspect of our lives. When it became clear that the murderer was a drugged up psychopath, just like the previous mass murderers, the MSM dutifully trotted out the mouthpieces for the drug industry and the psychology industry to deny that his mental illness and their drugs had anything to do with it. Corporate media helping corporate advertisers helping bought off politicians.

There will be new laws. There will be new regulations. There will be new rules. There will be new paperwork and bureaucrats and police. The mindless sheep will be surveyed and they will beg for gun control. Obama will have a grand signing ceremony surrounded by the families of the dead children. Crime rates will go higher. Homicides will go higher as the criminals will know that their victims won’t be armed. The do-gooders and the MSM will call for more laws to save the sheeple.

And so it goes.

 

Invincible Ignorance

by Thomas Sowell

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

 

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries – and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

 

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s – after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions – there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots’ choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem – including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a “study” that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

December 18, 2012

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

 

My Boomer Life and the Greatest Generation Parents Who Raised Me

I won’t be posting a Quinn-like masterpiece with lots of graphs and statistics. First, I don’t have that ability. Second, I am not a statistic. I am a person … so this will be a personal story with anecdotes about my achy-breaky Boomer life. Mostly, I just want to address the following question;

“ARE BOOMERS RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING WRONG IN AMERICA TODAY?”

First, let me whine a little.  A number of folks here (you know who you are, lol) answer that question with an emphatic “YES!!”.  I find it incredulous that otherwise very smart folks can say such things. I don’t know if it’s said just for effect to “piss off” Boomers such as myself, or if you can really attribute this country’s Great Malaise to such a simple theory.   It is also rather dismaying that whenever ANYTHING positive is said about the Boomer generation, then that person is accused of being in “denial” or an “apologist”.  It’s almost as if the quest for knowledge ceases when it comes to Boomers … a really surprising turn of events considering the large number of INTJs here.

Others will say we Boomers shouldn’t take it “personally” — which, really, is like calling a black person “nigger”, and then exclaiming, “Oh! Please don’t take that personally”. Tough to do! Accuse me of whatever you wish. I simply cannot wrap my tiny mind around the Broad Brush Approach — lumping an entire generation of 76 million people  as the cause of Everything Evil is not wise, helpful, applicable, or even possible, imho.  You might as well say, “Humans caused all our evils” … which would also be equally correct, and equally useless since the classification is too enormous.  But if one is looking for an Easy Unified Theory of Everything Wrong With America … “Boomers Did It” … well, have at it.

I cannot identify with the rich Boomers, because I am not rich. I cannot identify with the rich Greatest Generation , because I am not rich. I cannot identify with the rich of any generation, because I am not rich. Without advocating a class-warfare approach, I must maintain that a far greater divide in America is along Class — not, age.  The mega-rich, the mega-powerful, the ultra-elite — yeah, the 1% — as George Carlin says, THEY are your owners! Redirect your anger accordingly.

I am NOT against the younger generation. I love ‘em. I feel I have more in common with my emotionally troubled son than with most Boomers in my life.  Unlike what happens to many old farts, he at least he still questions everything, still wonders what this crazy life is all about, still wonders how he “fits in”.  Just like I did when I was his age, and actually, still do to some extent.  \\end:whining//

STUCKY  CONSIDERS HIS PAST WHILE AT A CHRISTMAS CONCERT

A couple Sundays ago I went to my Dad’s Christmas concert.  He sings for The Plainfield Gesang & Turn Verein, a German-American heritage club that was founded in 1886. There were about 200 people in attendance.  I would say that 90% of demographics were Boomers such as myself and our parents, The Greatest Generation.

I not only listened to the music, but as I watched my dad singing so proudly, and as I glanced at my mom who always gets weepy at this event, my mind also grew nostalgic, as it is prone to do at such holiday occasions.

It is only in the past few years that I have seen my parents as “whole” persons. What I mean by that is that their whole existence on this planet, as far as I was concerned for most of my life, only started around when I was 5 years old … my earliest memories of them. That means about 30 years of their lives — while they did start to tell me bits and pieces once I turned 17 and thereafter — well, for all intents and purposes it simply didn’t exist. What a damn shame, to my own detriment, that I didn’t even care about the great fountain of experience and knowledge I so easily dismissed. The major event that shaped my parent’s lives was WWII. With apologies to all those here who know this story, I shall very briefly summarize it for those who don’t, for context.

My dad was a German living in Romania.  One day, when dad was a teenager, the German Army came sweeping into his village, yanked him from his home, told him he was in the German Army, sent him to the Russian front, where he was captured, spent time in a Russian prison camp, and upon release was not allowed to return to Romania and never saw his family again, but was instead sent to England to work in the coal mines for several years – a form of ‘reparation’, before he made his way to a refugee camp in Austria.

My mother was a German living in Yugoslavia. One day, when she was a teenager, the Russian Army came sweeping into her village. They shot a lot of older German men – the young ones were all off to war — on the spot. Virtually all the women in the village were promptly sent to a Russian gulag, where she was raped, saw her mom raped and then murdered in front of her eyes. After the war ended only she and her brother remained alive, they were not allowed to return to their village, and they walked to a refugee camp in Austria.

I don’t relay these events for pity. Screw that. They are just one of millions of German families who suffered in WWII … just as millions of Americans have suffered in WWII, with only the details changing. I just have a story to tell, and my parent’s story is a huge part of my story. Of course I can’t speak for 76 million of us except in a general sense.  For example, I graduated from a high school of about 2,000 and I feel comfortable in saying we all share the Same Boomer Story, generally speaking.

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING BOOMERISM

The point is these are the people who raised my fat Boomer ass … which they did not do in a vacuum, independent of things that shaped their lives.  The picture in your mind’s eye of a “Boomer” is quite incomplete if you forget, or misunderstand, our Greatest Generation parents.

So, I’m watching my mother as she watches the concert, I put my hand around her shoulder as I see her eyes well up with tears. What is she thinking?  What pains are still so real to her today .. that I can’t help her with?  I start thinking about my own 59 years of living … how crystal clear certain events of my own teenage years still are … as if they happened yesterday. And then a feel a certain shame that it took me so long to see my parents as whole persons.  I suddenly feel despondent that I so despised several aspects of my upbringing that I couldn’t wait to join the military, even in the midst of the Vietnam war, just to get the fuck out from under my parent’s thumb.  Before taking a look at how the Greatest Generation raised us, let’s quickly take a look at another key to understanding Boomers;  the world in which we lived

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY ??

The Gay 20’s really weren’t all that gay, just as  the world Boomers inherited wasn’t only the fun, Hippie, pot-smokin’, LSD trippin’, rock’n-roll groovin’, free love image that is remembered today. Two big events and a ton of smaller ones helped turn our once pure souls to the Dark Side.

First Big Event: Da Bomb. Russia. Nukes. Commie bastards. Ka-BAM! All gone. Nuclear winter. Dead. Why??? Nuke drills!! Little Boomer children hiding under desks for protection. Little Boomer children watching gub’mint movies showing homes blasted to smithereens. Little desk hiding Boomers not stupid, “We gonna die under this desk!!”  Was I forever traumatized – some prepubescent PTSD – by these drills? No. Did it affect my perception of what the world was about and that just maybe it made no sense at all and that the grownups were idiots and that since tomorrow may never come so I might as well live just for today … even though I was just a kid at the time?  You better believe it.

Second Big Event. Vietnam. Dirty, nasty, disgusting, vile war that killed 60,000 of us and maimed hundreds of thousands more. What was it good for? Absolutely nothing.  Did it affect my perception of what the world was about and that just maybe it made no sense at all and that the grownups were idiots and that since tomorrow may never come so I might as well live just for today? You better believe it.

Not to mention in no particular order;  civil rights ….. riots …. . corrupt government openly lying ….. a disgraced president ….. dead soldiers faces broadcast on TV every night ….. Kent State …..  double-digit unemployment ……. Midnight Cowboy ….. 25% interest rate for a home loan ….. gas lines ….. shitty cars that exploded ….. S&L crisis ….. Bay of Pigs ….. nukes in Cuba!! …. Abortion …. JFK ….. and, MLK …. Jimmie Hendrix and Janis Joplin …. Gloria Steinem and  woman’s rights ….. no more prayer in school ….. the Ayatollah ….. Supreme Court turns activist all over the place …… Korea ….. school integration ……………….

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Did we shape the times, or did the times shape us? I think it’s the latter. Simple math. 

The first Boomers were born in 1946.  How old are the people-in-charge, the leaders, the CEOs, the 535 politicians that rule our lives … i.e., the people who actually make things happen?  Let’s be conservative and say that it’s 30 years old.  So, the first Boomers with power to affect the status quo  arrive on the scene only in 1975.  I  would say Boomers  took the helms of power around  daddy Bush’s presidency in 1989 – when the first Boomers were 43 years old.

The “ME Generation” —- A MISNOMER

We are … and you may add the adjective “most” to many  of these descriptions;  selfish, self-indulgent, unwilling to sacrifice, politically correct, drug addicted, material minded, entitled, liberal or commie shits, bad parents, lazy, humans to ever walk the earth. And to top it all off we invented Afro’s and disco (actually, two legitimate reasons to hate us).  Amazingly, we accomplished all this because of the year in which we were born.  And because of our sin of ‘The Year Of Our Birth’, you can go to literally hundreds of blogs other than here and find the admonishment that Boomers should “just die already”.  The implication being, that once this happens, pretty much everything will return to bliss, prosperity, and overall happiness.  I read that we Boomers only cared about only three things;  1) Me, 2) Me, and 3) Me.  Just like the “love of money” is the root of evil,  our preoccupation with “Me” is the root cause underlying our evilness.

BUT — the ME-Generation was raised by the Greatest Generation.

How would YOU like to be born following that moniker?  Imagine you have just one older sibling, and your parents referred to him/her as “The Greatest Kid”.  It just might fuck you up!  Lol   Boomer babies didn’t drop out the shoot and at the moment of birth become The Most Selfish Bastards ever.  We did not raise ourselves. Somewhere along the line, some person(s) and some event(s) helped us along into becoming selfish pricks.  Cause leads to effect, nature abhors a vacuum.

What do you THINK you know about The Greatest Generation?

Unless you’re a Boomer, what you think you know about the Greatest Generation is likely inaccurate.  The people you know as grandparents are NOT the same people who raised us.  Some kind of Weird Assed Transformation took place from the time we were born to the people you know. Maybe it has to do with the aging process – whereby one becomes more introspective, soft hearted, and most importantly – accepting of Things As They Are … not, What They Should Be, a mantra us Boomer kids heard a million times if we heard it once.   Maybe it was the realization that their own Materialism was a big mistake … and trust me on this, in many ways they were much more materialistic than their boomer children.  Maybe they didn’t ‘change’, maybe they just ‘adapted’ – but, the Metamorphosis into A New Life Form –one that is NOW loved and revered —  is and was spectacular.  

Let’s take a look at what Boomer kids heard growing up

“ I’m not buying you a new pair of Converse sneakers. You think money grows on trees?”

“You’re not going out dressed like that, are you? What will the neighbors think?”

“I slave all day to put food on the table, so you damn well better eat all of it!”

 “You don’t know what hardship is all about.  WE had it rough.”

“Kids in China are starving. Learn some gratitude, dammit.”

 “You see all the stuff we have?.  We did all this for you.”

“Turn off the damn lights. You think electricity is free?”

 “You don’t know the meaning of sacrifice.”

“Cut your hair!  At least look respectable.”

 “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“At least you could show some respect.”

 “You don’t know the value of things.”

“Why don’t you appreciate anything?”

 “Quit acting like a bum!”  KaPow!!  (We boomer kids got wacked …. A LOT)

If you don’t see a significant amount of materialism in those statements then, I’m sorry, you’re just not being perceptive enough.  Materialism is largely a state of mind.  Bertrand Russel said,  ——- “It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

HANGING ONTO WHAT YOU GOT LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT

It’s not about how much stuff you own. It’s about the stuff you own that eventually owns you.  A middle aged man attempts to reclaim his youth and buys a vintage Harley, just like the one in Easy Rider. He owns the bike.  Before you know it he’s spending all weekend polishing every nut and bolt.  Then he decides it needs some restoration, and he spends a few grand doing that.  Then he spends more and more time away from his family and with his fellow enthusiasts, riding around town, showing off like a peacock. Then one day his teenage son accidently puts a small scratch on the fender.  He hurls a string of expletives at his son for committing this unforgiveable sin.  The bike now owns HIM.

Although I lacked nothing growing up, my pre-boomer angst was fueled by the ever present possibility that all the blessings bestowed on me could be lost at any time. From scarcity we came, and to scarcity we could return.  This pretty much fulfills Bertrand Russels’s  materialism “preoccupation” criteria. Our stuff, meager as it might be, owned us.  The resultant activity of the scarcity meme, in terms of materialism, is that my Greatest Generation dad worked his ass off to make sure scarcity would never rear its ugly head. This is admirable and not to be condemned.  Don’t you, and I, do the very same thing for our children? 

But, it did have unintended consequences.  Growing up I couldn’t help but feeling that material gain was more important than anything else. Our parents did work their fingers to the bone.  But by the time they dragged their tired asses through the door, they were too tired to hug us.  They were too tired to have any really meaningful conversations, especially about sex.  “Children should be seen, and not heard.” , I swear was God’s eternal truth scripted somewhere in the Gospels. So, we spent a great deal of our time out of our parents’ sight.  That was great for both of us … far less arguments.

We even had our own special place to play in the house.  The basement. We sure as hell never romped around the main level, especially the living room;  “Don’t sit there!  That’s GOOD furniture!!”.  Our little boomer minds duly noted; ‘furniture more important than us’. Watch reruns of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ and Marie’s living room to see the hilarious abortions  our parents resorted in order to “save” the good furniture;  they covered everything in plastic! Lol  All of us immediately identified with the advice Dustin Hoffman received in The Graduate;  “Plastics, my boy. Plastics.”  Eventually we got the last laugh when all that plastic shit turned a putrid shade of yellow, and the cushions smelled like skunk ass when the plastic was removed. Meanwhile, we were banished to the basement where we could destroy nothing of real value.

FROM DEPRIVATION TO EXCESS TO REBELLION

One of the most common reactions to deprivation is excess.  For example, people who have faced starvation will often, once circumstances have changed, become gluttons.  This was our parents’ response.

Then, as time passes, a typical reaction to excess is rebellion. This was our response.  For example, on a grand scale a Colonist eventually  rebels against the excesses of his British masters, and dumps tea in the bay.  On an individual scale, children (of any era) eventually rebel against their parents’ excessive rules by doing the exact opposite. The goal of the Rebel, whether a nation or a child,  is always to starve the master of their power.

This dynamic plays out predictably well in the Greatest Generation / Boomer relationship.  The Greatest Generation faced deprivations in spades; from the Great Depression to Dust Bowls to World War II. The end of the Big War ushers in the greatest economic boom in American history, or something like that.  Remembering their deprivations the Greatest Generation becomes as materialistic as any in recent memory.  Some of you folks err when you compare that materialism back then with what we have today.  You look at countless graphs, data, GDPs, debt, one financial ratio after another … compare the two eras … and somehow conclude that the Greatest Generation were ‘savers’.  The “numbers” don’t look so bad back then only because the whole shebang was just getting started.  Some shit just takes time to get stinky.

What was this great economic post-war boom about? Was it not the beginning of Consumerism? What do you think this is all about;  … getting that little starter house, then upgrading to the bigger house with the nice white picket fence, movin’ on up to a good neighborhood, getting that  fifty cent promotion, replacing a literal ice-BOX with a real refrigerator, getting a nice big Dee-troit car or two,  the explosion of corporate TV shows like the Colgate Comedy Hour … if not consumer fueled materialism? Excess folks, excess.

“Oh Yeah?  Well …. fuck you!!”

The Boomer children, mostly neglected as daddy –and soon, mommy – pursued the Good Life (FOR us, naturally) reacted in a way that shouldn’t be a surprise …. we rebelled against our oppressor for their real or imagined sins.   Only we did with much greater aplomb than ever before ; we didn’t fuck around, we were all in. 

They had short-haired geeky musicians, we had long-haired hip rockers.  They had booze, we had drugs.  They had rules – lots of them —, we had none. Free Love, baby!  If it feels good, do it. Love the one you’re with.  They worked hard, we went to Woodstock. They had a lifeless church, we had the Jesus Movement.  They followed the call of  Madison Avenue,  our hearts  hung out at Haight and Ashbury. They liked Ike, we preferred Dylan.  They wore penny loafers, we had sandals and a bandana (and other ridicules articles of clothing). And so it went at every turn; right or wrong, a repudiation of ALL that came before.  So people  look back on this crazy-assed behavior and label us the “ME” generation.  I’ll grant you that there is some truth to that.  But, it falls far short  of what was really going on. It wasn’t “me, me, me” as much as it was; “fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you”.

BTW, isn’t that EXACTLY what the younger generations are saying about us Boomers; “Fuck You!”?   History rhyming yet again. Solomon correctly wrote; “Vanity of vanities, there is nothing new under the sun.” I don’t know what dumbass mistakes this younger generation will make — I sometimes feel they think they’ll make none, the first Perfect Generation — but trust me on this one thing oh Young Ones, you too will blow it … and your offspring will mock you as well.

BOOMERS NEVER EARNED ANYTHING — EVERYTHING WAS HANDED TO THEM

Nothing quite baffles me like this accusation.  I shake my head wondering exactly what was given to me. I started out getting a fifty-cent allowance, back when fifty cents could still get me into the movies (double feature plus cartoons, a soda, and a popcorn and get a nickel back). It wasn’t “free” either … it came attached to doing chores.  Mow the lawn, take out the garbage, do the dishes when asked, and keep my room clean.  This our parents called “learning responsibility”. All for 2 bits … good thing we weren’t Unionized.

But for real money to get real stuff — like those Converse sneakers — we had to work.  So, I got my first job at around 13 selling subscriptions of the town newspaper door to door on Saturdays.  I got a dollar per new subscription.  Some Saturdays I’d rack up 20 plus bucks and back then that was living large. My first real job was in high school. I worked in a lasagna factory, stirring lasagna in a huge vat of boiling water … for $1.35 an hour. And I never stopped working since.  We worked hard all our lives. My friends all did likewise.  So. Pardon me if I am offended at being called “selfish, greedy, and entitled” as I refuse to accept that label.

Speaking of “entitled”, perhaps this is what people mean; all those juicy gub’mint entitlement programs, especially SS and Medicare.  First of all, social security was NOT created by the Boomer generation. So, solly.  Try the generation before us. Medicare was NOT created by Boomers either. Sure it was enacted in 1965. The oldest of the Boomer generation would have been born in 1943 … making that Boomer just 22 years old in 1965. The voting age was still 21.  Please don’t tell me Medicare was voted into being because of then 22 year old Boomers!

I know people just hate it when us old farts “expect” to collect on SS. Can you walk in my shoes for a moment?  Let’s say you paid $50,000 into some account set up by the gub’ment. It is money you earned by the sweat of your brow.  You didn’t ask the gob’ment to do this for you.  They took it by force and promised to give it back to you later. Much later. That “much later” is now here, and some people want to tell us, “Hey, you can’t have the money. The gub’ment spent it and you can’t have it.” We used to have a word for this: Theft.  Look, I can understand that I may not be able to collect SS forever until I die.  But, can I at least get MY $50,000 dollars back?? You don’t even have to pay any interest, if that makes it better.

I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SINS OF MY BRETHREN

I won’t cover any of the other Entitlements / Social Programs.  All I  can tell you I voted Republican most of my life, and I cannot ever recall voting based on getting free shit.  Foreign policy, wars, and character where my usual hot buttons. I don’t know how other Boomers voted. I don’t care.

I don’t care because I don’t believe in the idea of Collective Guilt. Google that term and the first page will show articles on “German collective guilt over Nazis”, so this is a topic I personally know something about. It is a heinous principle first found in the Old Testament that — “The sin of the fathers He punishes on the children to the third and fourth generation.”  A monstrous mockery of justice!! Collective guilt refuses to acknowledge the INDIVIDUAL. Evil regimes and their dictators (Stalin, Mao, Marx, etc.) love collective guilt as they collectivize individuals as “the populace” or “the masses” or “the workers” and then enslave or execute them as it suits their purposes. That’s why I have often said here that the demonization of Boomers may one day logically lead to Death Chambers for us old farts.

You, dear reader, don’t believe in collective guilt either. Do you find yourself guilty of the crime of slavery? No.  Do you find yourself guilty for the genocide of Native Americans ? No. Do you find yourself guilty for Mai Lai? No.  Do you find me guilty for Buchenwald?  No.  So why do you throw all Boomers in the Collective guilty pot?  It is said ‘people get the government they deserve’.  If that’s true then I should find YOU guilty for the current mess we’re in. But, don’t worry, I won’t because that entire argument is specious.   Here’s one way we should follow in the footsteps of the Greatest Generation; they didn’t blame their own parents for their youthful excesses of the ’20’s which then led to the financial ruin of the Great Depression . They just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made the best of a bad situation. So should we.

“YOU MADE PROMISES TO US ………. AND YOU LIED!!”

Another common theme amongst disgruntled Utes are the broken promises we Boomers made. When I went to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in NYC I saw more than a few Utes displaying  posters about Education  … “$60,000 in Student Loans and No Job”, and several variations thereof, including demands to forgive the debt.  For change of pace I will number my responses.

1)— Guess what kids?  Your generation isn’t the only one that was lied too. We were lied too, also. So, welcome to the real world.

2)— Guess who told us that education was the path to a better life?  That’s right, our Greatest Generation parents.  We just passed what we learned in OUR youth, onto you. By and large that’s how parenting works. Again, welcome to the real world.

3)— Our parents valued education because they were mostly blue-collar workers toiling away in factories (remember those?). They saw first-hand that the “higher-ups”, the folks in the office, the guys in white-collars made significantly more loot than they did.  So, putting two and two together they came up with the brilliant conclusion that education pays.  And that’s why I got my ass kicked whenever I brought home a bad Report Card. The first question at the dinner table was, “Did you wash your hands?”. The second and usually last question was “Did you do your homework?”  Study, study, study was drilled into our mush brains until the cows came home. It is really no more complicated than that.

4)— What’s wrong with furthering your education anyway? Did we commit some Mortal Sin in telling you to study? Don’t you know that we “pushed” this Horrible Thought on you for a reason?  Don’t you know that with knowledge you’ll learn how to think and analyze. Don’t you know the value of  using logic and rational thought, and how that will benefit you throughout your life?  Don’t you know we wanted to give you a foundation that would allow you to filter through all the bullshit the world tries to feed you? Apparently, not.

5)— Regarding not paying back your loan.  Where did you learn that from?  Certainly not from us Boomers when you were young!  Again, we taught you what was taught to us. And here’s one thing I can guaran-damn-tee you our parents showed us; paying one’s bills was a Badge of Honor.  It wasn’t God, country, and apple pie. It was Pay Your Bills, God, country, and apple pie. My parents would sacrifice a meal in order to pay a bill.  We taught you to do the same when you were little.

Here’s what Boomers and the Greatest Generation did wrong.

6) We monetized “value” when talking about “the value of an education”.  Did the Greek philosophers value education to make more money? No.  Did the great men of the Renaissance era value education to make more money? No. Did our Founding Fathers value education to make more money? No.  The “value” of an education is more than exploiting it for financial gain (see #4 above).  But, clearly, modern America is all about the Almighty Dollar.  So, I went to college pretty much in order to make better money. And I told my kids to go to college to make better money. Guilty as charged. Money, it’s a gas. I suppose what pisses off Utes is that Boomers were actually able to get jobs when they graduated, while they can’t. Which leads me to my final point.

7) Tough shit!!  And please don’t tell me us Boomers “guaranteed” you a good job upon getting an education. First of all if you actually believed such a statement you need to recalibrate your Bullshit Detector. They never has been and never will be any guarantees in life, except death, taxes, and obese fat women pictures from our own beloved AWD.  Secondly, it’s a lie from hell.  Our Greatest Generation parents were keenly aware of the possibility of losing it all … again.  

They even coined a unique phrase to drill home the concept of no guarantees; –“you never know”. For example, “Put down that stick! You could poke your sister’s eye out, YOU NEVER KNOW!” (In my childhood there were apparently about 845 ways to poke out my sister’s eye.) Or, “Put on clean underwear before we drive to church.  We might have an accident, YOU NEVER KNOW!”.  Or, “No, we’re not joining the community swimming pool.  We need to save every penny, YOU NEVER KNOW when we’ll need it.”. 

Lastly, Utes also blame Boomers that they can’t get married,  they have to live with their parents, will never be able to start a family, buy a house, etc. etc.  It all boils down to “life isn’t fair”. Well!  1) we Boomers used that phrase on our own parents a million times.  Please come up with something new.  2)  In what fairy-tale are you living where ‘fairness’ is the rule of the land? 3) Stop emulating Gordon Gecko. Try, Tim the Toolman. 4) My parents taught me this and I pass it along to you.  Perhaps the Ten Best Words Of Advice you will ever hear;   “Life isn’t fair. Get over it. DO something about it.”

FINAL THOUGHTS

In closing, let me say that I’m not trying to change the real Boomer Haters. It was downright depressing doing some research for this article. I don’t know exactly how widespread this hatred is, but what is out there is savage, vicious, and said with such ferocity that I wonder when, not if, the loathing for my generation  turns into violence against us.  Every revolution has at least one scapegoat. The “Boomers Suck” meme is paving the way towards acceptance of  our destruction, should it go that far. How does one change such a person’s opinion?? But, there are folks out there who have yet to decide if they shout hate/blame Boomers for everything.  I hope this article reaches those.

I also hope this does not come across as either making excuses or rationalization.   It’s just my story, and I assume it’s similar to millions of others in my age group unfortunate enough to be labeled a Boomer. All I tried to do is tell it as it is … yes, as I see it with my Boomer-tainted goggles … and in the telling I know I barely scratched the surface.  

One thing I know is they we are ALL in this together. When I see a homeless man in NYC, he may be a Boomer … or, very well be a more recent generation. I often drop a few dollar bills, but I don’t first verify his age, because I don’t see a GenX or Boomer … I see only a homeless person, a human being who is worthy of compassion because I realize “there but for the grace of God go I”. 

I think it’s a fact that most of us Boomers have seen our savings, our assets, our net worth dwindle before our eyes and most of us are not well off. I think it’s a fact that most Boomers still work, and probably will need to work —- either until we die or the ravages of age incapacitate us.  And if we are incapacitated … and if the timing is such that all the Free Shit is no longer available … then don’t worry about killing us, as I believe many will commit suicide.

Lastly, I am fully aware I have my own biases, and as we discussed in another thread from last week, “total honesty” in the trillion plus connections  organized by our highly fallible brains may not even be possible . Not only might I “not know” the truth, it is conceivable “I don’t even know that I don’t know”.  In other words, yeah, I could be full of shit. (If so, I’m sure you will inform me thereof. Lol ) But, I doubt it.

Peace

Herr StuchenBoomer

Briggs Myers’ Personality Test

Someone else suggested that it would be interesting to know the personality types of other posters here on TBP. I agree and if you would not mind participating, go here to take the 72 question test. Answers are yes/no. If you are so inclined, post your results below.

 

BERNANKE – TRAPPED IN HIS BLIZZARD OF LIES

John Hussman reveals Bernanke to be a filthy stinking liar by using some basic facts. Bernanke can never unwind his balance sheet without destroying the U.S. economy. He says he is waiting for unemployment to drop under 6.5%. If it ever drops below that level, he will come up with another excuse to unwind his balance sheet. He’s trapped. He is stalling while his masters finalize their exit and extract the remaining wealth of the nation. Bennie has no intention of ever unwinding anything. He will print to infinity and beyond.

Roach Motel Monetary Policy

 
John P. Hussman, Ph.D.
All rights reserved and actively enforced.
Reprint Policy

While we continue to observe some noise and dispersion in various month-to-month economic reports, the growth courses of production, consumption, sales, income and new order activity remain relatively indistinguishable from what we observed at the start of the past two recessions. The chart below presents the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (3 month average), the CFNAI Diffusion Index (the percentage of respondents reporting improvement in conditions, less those reporting deterioration, plus half of those reporting unchanged conditions), and the year-over-year growth rates of new orders for capital goods excluding aircraft, real personal consumption, real retail and food service sales, and real personal income. All values are scaled in order to compare them on a single axis.

Strong leading indicators such as the CFNAI and the Philly Fed Index have been weak for many months, and the deterioration in new orders has moved from a slowing of growth to outright contraction in recent months. In the order of events, a slowing in real sales, personal income, and personal consumption expenditure typically follows – these are called coincident indicators. These growth rates generally only weaken materially once a recession is in progress, and reach their highest correlation with recession about 6-months into the downturn. That’s what we’ve begun to observe over the past few months, adding to our impression that the U.S. joined a global (developed economy) recession during the third quarter of this year. The most lagging set of economic indicators includes employment measures, where I’ve frequently noted that the year-over-year growth rate of payroll employment lags the year-over-year growth rate of real consumption with a lag of about 5 months. As a result, the year-over-year growth rate in payroll employment reaches its highest correlation with recession nearly a year after a recession has started – another way of saying that it is among the last indicators to examine for confirmation of an economic downturn.

All of that said, our concern about recession emphatically is not what drives our concern about the stock market here. In early March, our measures of prospective return/risk moved to the lowest 1% of historical data based on a broad ensemble of indicators and consistent evidence of market weakness following similar conditions in numerous subsets of historical data. Those conditions remain largely in place today.

There’s no question that massive fiscal and monetary interventions have played havoc with the time-lag between unfavorable conditions and unfavorable outcomes in recent years, which prompted us back in April to introduce various restrictions to our hedging criteria (see below). Still, present conditions remain strongly negative on our estimates. Meanwhile, the stock market is not “running away” –  at best, these interventions have allowed the market to churn at elevated levels. Only a month ago, the S&P 500 Index was below its level of March 2012, when our estimates shifted to the most negative 1% of the data, and was within about 11% of its April 2010 levels, which is the last time that our present ensemble approach would have encouraged a significant exposure to market risk. Notably, as of last week, an upward spike in long-term Treasury yields took market conditions to an overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising yields syndrome – which has tended to be anathema to the stock market, even prior to the more limited downward bouts of recent years.  

Beyond that, a natural question is – if recession concerns don’t factor into our present defensiveness in the first place, why should we be concerned about recession at all, and devote so much analysis to this issue in the weekly comments? The first answer is that the foundation of this particular cyclical bull market has rested on the continuation of massive fiscal and monetary interventions, and a new recession would stretch those interventions to untenable limits (and to some extent already have), which should be of concern regardless of one’s stock market views. The second answer is that much of Wall Street’s overbullish sentiment, as well as its “valuation” case for stocks, rests on the continuation of record high profit margins that are largely an artifact of extreme government deficits and depressed personal savings (see Too Little To Lock In). A contraction in sales, coupled with a contraction in profit margins – which is what we presently expect – is likely to devastate the “forward operating earnings” case for stocks, and I continue to expect Wall Street to be blindsided by this fairly predictable outcome (as it was in 2001-2002, as it was in 2008-2009).

The distortions we presently observe in the economy will have significant long-term costs, but it is entirely naïve to believe that these costs should be evident precisely at the point where the wildest distortions are taking place. Federal deficits presently support about 10% of economic activity, and the primary driver of improvement in the unemployment rate has not been job creation but a plunge in labor participation, as millions of workers drop out of the labor force. In a post-credit crisis environment, and particularly with Europe’s sovereign debt in question, it should be no surprise that the world has been willing to accumulate U.S. currency and Treasury debt at near-zero interest rates. That makes debt seem benign and money creation seem without consequence. But it is absurd to point at that happy short-term outcome and dance under the illusion that escalating debt won’t matter in the longer term, or that massive money creation will be easily reversed, or that strong inflation will be avoided if it is not reversed.

We have already accumulated enough government debt to place a broad range of current and future government services under a cloud. Given that most of the publicly held U.S. government debt is of short maturity, there is no way of inflating away its real value over time, because interest rates would adjust at each rollover of that debt. In the event that the sheer size of the U.S. debt results in a loss of confidence (which is a 5-10 year proposition, though not yet a present one), there is no reason that we could not expect the same short-term funding strains that many European countries are facing in fits and starts today.

Meanwhile, last week, Ben Bernanke announced that the current “Twist” program (where the Fed buys long-term Treasuries and sells an equal amount of shorter-dated Treasuries) will be replaced with outright “unsterilized” bond purchases. In doing so, Ben Bernanke has put the economy on course to choke down 27 cents of monetary base for every dollar of nominal GDP by the end of next year – in an economy where even the slightest normalization to interest rates of just 2% would require the monetary base to be cut to just 9 cents per dollar of GDP to avoid inflationary outcomes. The chart below is a reminder of where we are already.

Understand that Fed policy now requires interest rates to remain near zero indefinitely, because competition from non-zero interest rates would reduce the willingness to hold zero-interest currency, provoking inflationary outcomes unless the monetary base was quickly reduced. Given an economy perpetually at the edge of recession, so far, so good. But as interest rates essentially measure the value that an economy places on time, Ben Bernanke’s message to the U.S. economy is clear: time is worthless.  

Monetary policy has become a roach motel – easy enough to get into, but impossible to exit. Bernanke seems pleased to note that inflation presently remains low, but why shouldn’t it? In a structurally weak economy, velocity drops in exact proportion to new monetary base, with zero effect on real output or inflation. The problem is that Bernanke seems incapable of running thought experiments. Suppose the economy eventually strengthens at some point past 2013. At that point, the Fed would have to sell nearly $3 trillion of U.S. debt into public hands in order to reabsorb the money creation he claims “is only a temporary matter.” These sales would add to the stock of U.S. debt already held by the public, very likely while a significant government deficit is still in place. Such a sale would be, by two orders of magnitude, the largest monetary tightening in U.S. history. Is that possible to achieve without disruption? I doubt it.

So instead, the Fed must rely on the economy remaining weak indefinitely, so it will never be forced to materially contract its balance sheet. To normalize the Fed’s balance sheet without contraction and get from 27 cents back to 9 cents of base money per dollar of GDP without rapid inflation, we would require over 22 years of suppressed interest rates below 2%, assuming GDP growth at a 5% nominal rate. Indeed, Japan is on course for precisely that outcome, having tied its fate 13 years ago to Bernanke’s experimental prescription (stumbling along at real GDP growth of less than 1% annually since then). Bernanke now sees fit to inject the same bad medicine into the veins of the U.S. economy. Of course, a tripling in the consumer price index would also do the job of bringing the monetary base back from 27 cents to 9 cents per dollar of nominal GDP. One wonders which of these options Bernanke anticipates. Psychotic.

Big picture – my perspective remains unchanged: the long-term viability of the global economy is being increasingly wrecked by short-sighted policies focused on avoiding short-term economic adjustments, and at bottom, on avoiding the restructuring of unserviceable sovereign, mortgage and financial debt. Yet only that restructuring is capable of unchaining the economy from reckless past misallocations; only that restructuring is capable of unleashing robust new demand that would form the basis for sustainable economic activity and job creation. You either pull the bad tooth, or you provide every kind of pain killer and symptom reliever, and let the problem rot indefinitely.

From an investment perspective, we know that the impact of quantitative easing both in the U.S. and abroad has generally been limited to a rally in stocks toward the highs of the prior 6-month period, in some cases moving as high as the monthly Bollinger band (2 standard deviations above the 20-month average). Given that the S&P 500 is within a few percent of its highs, and that conditions have already established an overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yields conformation, much of the “benefit” of QE on stocks appears already priced in, as it has been since October when Bernanke effectively announced the present policy. The downside risk overwhelms the upside potential, in my view, but we can’t confidently rule out some amount of upside potential – which would still seem dependent on the avoidance of negative economic surprises.

The foregoing comments represent the general investment analysis and economic views of the Advisor, and are provided solely for the purpose of information, instruction and discourse. Only comments in the Fund Notes section relate specifically to the Hussman Funds and the investment positions of the Funds.

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave

If this doesn’t piss you off, nothing will.  Let’s just solve all our problems by making the BIG LIE official policy of the Government (as if it isn’t already!).  Now the FED is going to set it QE4EVA policy based on unemployment – which figures are just as big lies as the “official” CPI rate which understates inflation by a minimum of 7%  (Official CPI year over year: 2%, true year over year is 9%).  So what do we do?  Modify the way the CPI is figured, yet once again, so any adjustments to payments made based on the “official” CPI will be lower – saving the Goobermint money and putting the greased pole to anyone receiving benefits.

Now benefits from Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, Obamaphones, SNAP and Social Security are going to have to be reformed and probably cut.  But WHY IN HELL CAN’T THE GOVERNMENT BE HONEST AND SAY, “Hey guys and girls, we’re going broke and can’t afford these entitlements.” instead of LYING about it, not reducing Gooberment spending, fraud and abuse, cut Federal salaries (especially the automatic pay raises CONgress awarded themselves) and everyone share the pain?  

This “suggestion” sucks and John Rubino calls them on it..

 

Hat tip to  John Rubino

 

By the age of 12 or so, most people have learned through bitter experience that dishonesty is hard to pull off, because one lie tends to require more lies, until the complexity of the situation exceeds the liar’s ability keep everything straight.

This is just as true for governments as for individuals, especially when it comes to money. A currency that holds its value over long periods of time is nice but restrictive, because it limits a government’s ability to fight multiple wars and buy votes with generous social programs. So every government eventually resorts to monetary inflation, which is a combination of theft and deceit – or fraud, as it’s known in legal circles. By creating large amounts of new currency, a country lowers the value of each piece of currency in the hands of citizens, thus secretly taxing them to run the government. Then, to mask the effects of this stealth tax, governments distort their reported economic statistics to portray a world that’s healthier than the one most people experience. The goal is to siphon off as much wealth as possible while keeping the victims docile for as long as possible. The longer the con runs, the richer the people at the top become.

Eventually the gap between government reports and individual experience grows so wide that the lie is revealed and the scam ends, either through some sort of revolution or a financial collapse or both. A sign that we’re approaching that point is the following article, in which Time Magazine advocates making a heretofore-unspoken part of the con explicit government policy:

Fixing Inflation Adjustments Is the Smart Way to Shrink the Deficit

Let’s face it: There’s no way to reduce America’s budget deficit that won’t hurt someone, and that pain can’t be limited only to the rich. A payroll tax, passed in 2010, is scheduled to expire at the end of this year, for example, and that will cost middle-class households anywhere from $600 to $1,200. In addition, more than 20 million taxpayers could become subject to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), adding several hundred dollars to their annual tax bills on average. On the spending side, budget cuts would not only reduce government services but could also eventually cost tens of thousands of Americans their jobs.

But there are other ways to make progress on the deficit over the long term that would be a lot less painful and would also be politically viable. In my last column, I wrote about the estimated $30 billion a year that the Federal government could save by getting really tough on fraud. Even more could be done, though, by changing the inflation adjustments for government spending.

Cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) are used throughout the U.S. economy – for union contracts and income tax brackets, as well as for government entitlements. It may seem only fair to adjust contracts and government programs for inflation – otherwise recipients would see their standard of living steadily erode over time. But there are a lot of ways to adjust for inflation. Moreover, the most commonly used gauge, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), may overstate the adjustment needed. Switching to a more conservative measure could save as much as $200 billion over the coming decade.

The most commonly proposed change is to replace the CPI with another index called the “chained CPI.” Basically, inflation is calculated based on putting together a basket of commonly bought goods and services and then tracking the price increases for them. In reality, though, people don’t consistently buy the same things. If one particular item – steak, for example – gets very expensive, people will typically buy something cheaper instead, such as chicken. The chained CPI takes into account the substitution of cheaper items for things that get too expensive, and is therefore arguably more accurate than the regular CPI. It also rises a little bit more slowly.

The result of replacing the regular CPI with the chained CPI would be slightly slower increases in monthly Social Security payments and some other government benefits. The new measure would also modestly boost tax revenues. The reason: tax brackets are indexed to inflation and would ratchet up more slowly if the chained CPI were used to adjust them. For many taxpayers, that would mean that some of their income would fall in a higher bracket.

Further savings could come from changing the formula used to calculate initial Social Security benefits. Because Social Security was originally designed to mimic a pension plan rather than look like a welfare entitlement, initial benefits are pegged to retirees’ earnings over their working lives. Because the general standard of living improves over time, wages and salaries normally outpace inflation – and so do initial Social Security benefits. (After benefits have begun, further increases are based on a more usual cost-of-living adjustment.) Some economists have long argued for altering the formula for initial benefits. Keeping the current more generous earnings-based calculation for lower-income retirees but switching to an inflation-based calculation for the more-affluent half of the population could eliminate half of the Social Security deficit over the next 75 years.

Such fixes to benefit plans are not uncontroversial. When a recent Republican budget proposal included changes to the way the Federal government calculates inflation, the idea was swiftly rejected by some Democrats. Opponents of the idea objected that retirees face higher inflation than the average American because of health-care costs and that some of the tax increases would fall on the middle class. It’s true, of course, that altering inflation adjustments will limit future benefit increases and cause an upward creep in income taxes. But the idea that the Federal deficit can be brought down to sustainable levels without anyone giving up anything is simply unrealistic. Hiking tax rates on the rich alone will raise enough revenue to cut the deficit only by about 8%. In the end, simple arithmetic ensures that the bulk of deficit reduction will come from the middle class – the challenge is to minimize the pain.

Unfortunately, tinkering with inflation adjustments will be little help with other runaway costs – most significantly health care, which presents even greater long-term budget problems than Social Security does. Advances in medicine often make treatment more expensive. In addition, health care is labor intensive, and in all service sectors it’s hard to offset rising labor costs with the sort of productivity gains that can be achieved in manufacturing. Doctors can only see so many patients an hour, teachers can only correct so many papers, and there’s a limit to how fast a pianist can play the minute waltz.

But where rising costs are chiefly the result of inflation adjustments, fine-tuning those mechanisms may be the least painful way to start bringing down the long-term deficit. The spending cuts that are currently scheduled to go into effect next year in the absence of a budget deal look horrific and could result in 7% to 9% reductions in a broad range of Federal programs. Surely it seems more rational to minimize the need for such sudden, deep, and indiscriminate cuts in the near term by accepting smaller increases in government spending over the coming decades.

Some thoughts:
This is a perfect example of how lying sometimes corrupts both liar and victim. The honest approach to a situation where there’s not enough wealth would be to explain that everything from the military empire to the welfare state will henceforth have to live smaller. But that’s both hard to say and hard to hear, which makes the lie relatively painless for both sides. Just keep telling citizens that they’ll get everything they expect, while actually giving them a little less each year. Government gets the inflation-generated resources it wants, and the recipients of government spending get to pretend for a while longer that they’re taken care of. The problem is pushed into the future for tomorrow’s leaders and the children of today’s recipients to deal with.

Put more clearly, US voters are enabling the liars because – despite the mounting evidence that the lies are coming at our expense – we prefer the comfort of those lies to the harsh reality of no more free money for the lifestyles we thought were our birthright.

The result of dishonest public policy being enabled by voters in denial is a corrupt society, where lying – as in the article reprinted above – becomes acceptable public policy. We’re not far from the old Soviet joke, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

BRICKS & MORTAR RETAILING CRUMBLING

Anyone who thinks J.C. Penney, Sears, Best Buy, or Radio Shack just need to make a few tweaks and everything will return to normal probably believed Bernanke in 2005 when he said the housing market was not a bubble. Retail CEOs and their humungous egos refuse to acknowledge that their business concept is dying. Building new stores in this economy is like putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. All of these bricks and mortar retailers who are now going full speed into on-line retailing are cannibalizing their existing mall based stores. These are not incremental sales.

As gas prices shockingly rise again in 2013 and real wages shockingly decline again and two million more people shockingly leave the work force, and the MSM idiots conclude that the economy shockingly went back into recession, consumers will shockingly spend less money in the dying bricks and mortar retailers. Online sales will probably continue to grow, just as it has for the last two decades.

Retail CEOs will be forced to acknowledge that their thousands of physical stores are growing obsolete and dragging them towards bankruptcy. The announced “restructurings” will result in thousands more vacant hulking shells in more dying malls. It already looks like SPACE AVAILABLE is the hottest retailer in America. Mall developers will be defaulting on their loans, but the Wall Street banks will just “restructure” the loans so they don’t have to write them off. Who needs principal and interest payments when you have accountants and 0% loans from the Fed?  

The next time you see a Wall Street shyster recommending Sears stock and talking about the brilliance of Eddie Lampert (aka the next Warren Buffett), remember this chart. Lampert has run this joke of a retailer into the ground. The Wall Street scum touted Sears as an asset play, with thousands of valuable real estate locations. Hysterical. Who exactly is Lampert going to sell these mall locations to? Best Buy? JC Penney? Target? 

The demise of bricks and mortar retailers will be a slow motion train wreck. It already started in 2008 and will pick up steam in 2013.

V FOR VENDETTA – 2011(Oldie but Not Goodie)

It has been almost two years since I whipped this article out in a one day sleepless frenzy. I was then reminded of it by the BART incident, the London riots and the indictment of the Tea Party as terrorists by the liberal MSM and Democratic politicians in the summer of 2011, so I posted it again . There were calls for civility that week. I knew it wouldn’t happen. Now the horrific mass murder in Connecticut brought it back to my mind again. This Fourth Turning gets worse by the day.

 

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot…

 

After the horrific mass murder in Tucson yesterday I had trouble sleeping last night. When my mind gets overloaded, I can’t sleep. I came downstairs at 3:30 am and for some reason decided now was the time to watch the movie V For Vendetta. Many people had recommended this movie over the years, but I had never gotten around to it. Well, on the day after the attempted assassination of a Congresswoman and murder of six others, including a Federal Judge, this movie provided a vision into what could happen next in this country.

The 2006 movie centers around a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask who refers to himself as V.  He is a bold, charismatic freedom fighter driven to exact revenge on those who disfigured him.  The film is an allegory of oppression and coercion by government. It is a declaration against government intervention into the lives of the citizens. He blows up the Old Bailey on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day. He promises to blow up Parliament one year later on the 5th of November. His speech at the beginning of the movie, broadcast to all of England, explains what happened in a fictional England and what is happening here:

“Good evening, London.

Allow me first to apologize, for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of everyday routine, the security, the familiar, the tranquility, repetition… I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone’s death or the end of some awful, bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is certainly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.

There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. I think that even now orders are been shouted into telephones and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because when the truncheon maybe used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who would listen, the enunciation of the truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there?

Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression, and where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission? How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again, truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid! Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease… There were a myriad problems that conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor, Adam Suttler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient, consent.

Last night, I sought to end that silence. Last night, I destroyed the Old Bailey to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than 400 years ago, a great citizen wished to embed the 5th of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. So if you’ve seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then, I would suggest you allow the 5th of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me, one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a 5th of November that shall never, ever, be forgot.”

 

The movie’s central theme revolves around the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. The plot was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby. The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605, as the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands during which James’s nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was to be installed as the Catholic head of state.

  

 Guy Fawkes, who had 10 years of military experience fighting in the Spanish Netherlands in suppression of the Dutch Revolt, was given charge of the explosives. The plot was revealed to the authorities in an anonymous letter sent to William Parker, 4th Baron Monteagle. During a search of the House of Lords at about midnight on November 4, 1605, Fawkes was discovered guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder – enough to reduce the House of Lords to rubble – and arrested. He was hanged shortly thereafter. November the 5th has been celebrated ever since this event with celebrations and fireworks.

Anarchy Has Arrived

There’s no certainty – only opportunity. V – V For Vendetta

 

As I watched hour after hour of coverage about the ambush and assassination attempt on a Congresswoman from Arizona, I couldn’t help but think this could be the spark for something bigger. There were almost immediate reactions from the MSM that this murder was instigated by the Tea Party. The liberal ideologue Paul Krugman blamed the Republican Party for the murders. Apoplectic left wing faux journalist Keith Olbermann described conservative commentators as those “who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism”. The local sheriff, an Arizona State Senator and the Congresswoman’s father all blamed the Tea Party, either directly or indirectly. Based on my reading of the murderer’s writings and youtubes, he appears to be a mentally deranged psycho. Somehow, every liberal MSM “journalist” has concluded that this was due to the contentious political atmosphere in the country. This is code for “we need less dissent”. Stop disagreeing with the Obama agenda. If you disagree, you are dangerous.

The scene in the movie that made me think of yesterday’s events was toward the end of the movie when Inspector Finch, who is trying to capture V, has a feeling about what is going to happen:

Finch: I had to see it. There wasn’t much left. But when I was there it was strange. I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It’s like I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events that stretched all the way back before Larkhill. I felt like I could see everything that happened, and everything that is going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me. And I realized we’re all part of it, and all trapped by it.
Dominic: So do you know what’s gonna happen?


Finch: No, it was a feeling. But I can guess. With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty. And then Sutler will be forced to do the only thing he knows how to do. At which point, all V needs to do is keep his word. And then…
[Dominoes collapse with TV footages showing conflicts between rioting citizens and the anti-riot police]

The line that hit me like a ton of bricks was, “With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid.” As Inspector Finch was speaking these words a scene of a policeman shooting a 10 year old girl with a Guy Fawkes Mask on is shown and then an angry mob surrounds and kill the policeman.

Yesterday, someone did something stupid. The question is what happens next.

Already, a fringe religious fanatic pastor and his followers, who have previously picketed the military funerals of Americans killed in Iraq, issued this press release:

 “Thank God for the shooter – 6 dead! WBC will picket their funerals!”  It continues on to condemn what it condemns as violence unleashed on WBC by a “hateful nation…hoping to silence our kind warning to obey God and flee the wrath to come.”

There is one thing I’m sure about. This will not result in more civil discourse. Opposing ideologies will become further entrenched in their positions. Those who attempt to be peacemakers will be shouted down. Passions will rise as they did in the 1850s when another member of Congress was badly injured as national passions flamed over slavery.  On May 19, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a prominent voice in the anti-slavery movement, delivered an impassioned speech denouncing the compromises that helped perpetuate slavery and led to confrontations in Kansas. Sumner singled out Senator Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina. Butler, who had recently been incapacitated by a stroke and was recuperating in South Carolina, was held to particular ridicule by Sumner. Sumner said that Butler had taken as his mistress “the harlot, slavery.” Sumner also referred to the South as an immoral place for allowing slavery, and he mocked South Carolina.

Preston Brooks, a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, was particularly incensed. Not only had the fiery Sumner ridiculed his home state, but Brooks was the nephew of Andrew Butler, one of Sumner’s targets. Brooks walked to Sumner’s desk in the Senate chamber, and reportedly said: “You have libeled my state and slandered my relation, who is aged and absent. And I feel it to be my duty to punish you.” With that, Brooks struck the seated Sumner across the head with his heavy cane. Brooks continued raining blows with the cane upon Sumner, who tried to fend them off with his arms. As might be expected, northern newspapers responded to the violent attack on the Senate floor with horror. Southern newspapers published editorials lauding Brooks, claiming that the attack was a justified defense of the south and slavery. Supporters sent Brooks new canes, and Brooks claimed that people wanted pieces of the cane he used to beat Sumner as “holy relics.”

This attack was a foreshadowing of what was to come – the deaths of 600,000 Americans in the space of four years – over 4% of the male population. Yesterday’s tragedy is another step deeper into this Fourth Turning. Every Fourth Turning has proven to be a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

Words Matter, Ideas Can Change the World

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people. V – V For Vendetta

 

The prior Fourth Turnings in U.S. history (American Revolution, Civil War, Great Depression/World War II) all proved to be secular upheavals of immense proportions, tore apart the existing civil order, but had numerous moments of danger and uncertainty about the future turn of events. We are six years into a twenty year Crisis saeculum. Every Crisis intensifies as time progresses to an ultimate crescendo. The initial financial crisis built to a dramatic peak in September 2008 as the government and Federal Reserve have taken extraordinary and immoral actions to protect Wall Street banks. Since September 11, 2001, the government has used fear as its primary means of controlling the American population. Fear of terrorists, fear of flying, fear of WMD, fear of mushroom clouds, fear of the axis of evil, fear of economic collapse, fear of a Great Depression, and now fear of the Tea Party movement. This attack by a crazy man will lead to further losses of liberties and freedoms. That is a certainty.

Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security. V’s speech to the people of England invokes Ben Franklin:

“I know why you did it. I know you were afraid! Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease… There were a myriad problems that conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor, Adam Suttler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient, consent.” – V – V For Vendetta

Those who would give up Essential Liberty
to purchase a little Temporary Safety,
deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

– Ben Franklin

This country has not reached the level of control and fear seen in Orwell’s 1984 and V For Vendetta, yet. We are moving relentlessly in that direction. Surveillance, monitoring, spying, censorship, secret prisons, predator drones, and conforming to state rules and regulations put citizens further under the thumb of an all powerful state. The freedom to dissent, the freedom to be left alone, the freedom to speak out against injustice, the freedom to disagree with your government, and the freedom to present your ideas without fear of retribution or penalty are essential in a democratic society. The next phase of this Fourth Turning will surely include another downward spiral in financial markets as un-payable debts accumulate to a tipping point level. When ATM machines stop spitting out twenties, food shelves are bare and gas stations are shuttered, social chaos will ensue. The government will react with further command and control measures. In V For Vendetta, the government creates a terrorist incident in order to gain unquestioned control over the population. Americans will need to be more vigilant than they have been over the last ten years in keeping an eye on their government.

In the movie, Parliament is the symbol of government power. The thought of destroying this symbol provided the people with a renewed sense of purpose and power. By V’s destruction of the building, the people regained their hope for the future. The symbol of America is the Statue of Liberty. The pedestal at the base of the statue states:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The idea of America is still alive. Whether it is kept alive is up to us. Words matter. Ideas can change the world.

 “I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot… But what of the man? I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But who was he really? What was he like? We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of ideas, I’ve seen people kill in the name of them, and die defending them… but you cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it… ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love… And it is not an idea that I miss, it is a man… A man that made me remember the Fifth of November. A man that I will never forget.” – Evey Hammond – V For Vendetta

THE IDEA OF AMERICA – THE CHOICE IS OURS

 

PEOPLE OF WAL-MART – WE’RE ALL DOOMED

4455

Of course Jesus would park his van at Walmart, because he probably saw our site and realized he could cut down on time and save soooo many souls in one place!

4453

You haven’t lived until you have walked around Walmart with a monkey’s vagina touching you neck. Yeah, it’s gross, but you people need to think about that so people stop doing this crap. They aren’t birds, you’ve got monkey genitals all up on your face!

4454

Some pirates looking for booty are gonna be in for quite the surprise when they find these black spots marked for a pirate’s death! (Shout out to Muppets Treasure Island for that bit of knowledge.)

4452

Are me and Eric Cartman the only ones that get annoyed by modern day hippies? There truly is no point to them whatsoever, unless the point is to look weird and smell all sorts of funny.

4451

I guess this isn’t technically a “Who Wears It Better?” unless I suppose I ask you which cart wears it’s lazy bitch better? Yeah, I guess that could work. Who wears it better?

4450

Ahh yes, #3 in the pervert playbook: The Upskirt! So which under booty bottom biscuit would you put on the books?

4448

This guy couldn’t look anymore like a rat if he was in the middle of narcing on John Gotti.

4447

Hey people, just a quick reminder, patterns don’t typically go together very well. Just because it’s a nice shirt and those are nice pants does not automatically let them combine to make a nice outfit. I mean, nothing in here is working on its own, but even if it did that would apply. That’s all I’m saying. Anywho, I’d like you guys to pick which one of these screwed the pooch the least.

4446

Looks like we got ourselves a couple of bitches here that just love to bitch about other bitches. Also, my dog is a bitch and I can’t really think of any other ways to use the word bitch…bitch.

Alright people, we haven’t given anything away for a while so let’s change that. Funniest pickup line wins either a copy of our new book or calendar, your choice. GOOOOOOOO!

No use actually buying toilet paper when you’re just gonna let it air dry. Either have poor hygiene or poor fiscal responsibility, not both.

Everyone say hello to Brandon from MTV’s True Life: “Addicted to Porn”. *This is where you all say hello in unison like an intervention* Anyway, not sure whether or not Brandon is still addicted to porn or not because I haven’t watched anything on MTV since 1998. Do we have any porn addicts out there who just happen to be browsing our site during a down time?

Remember guys, if you ever find yourself terribly lost in this horrific neck of the woods you can always find your way out by following the North Star.

Plot: Smokey meets a VW bug, accidentally knocks her up, gets behind on child support, gets some gambling debt and then his sciatica starts acting up.

I was gonna yell at this dude for his complete disregard for personal space but then I realized any girl that wears see-through lace pants doesn’t really have “personal space”.

Don’t worry, your ass in white yoga pants definitely does not look like mashed potatoes. Nope. Not at all. I don’t know what to tell you, I’m not sure why that girl has a bowl of gravy.

Your hair looks like something they find buried under a hoarder’s couch.

 

THANK YOU YOJIMBO

Boston here we come. Yojimbo has finalized the design of the Burning Platform electronic sign. It will go live sometime in the next few weeks. I expect DHS to be kicking in my front door shortly thereafter. If our site isn’t already being monitored by the Feds, it certainly will after this sign goes live.

I’d like to thank Yojimbo for all his hard work. I’ll thank him personally and get to meet the rest of you at the TBP FEMA camp in the near future.

 

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IS MONEY THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL???

 

There was an opinion stated on the TBP in the last day or two about “Money being the root of all evil.” and all that crap. Here are a few musings on the matter.

 

Actually, money is a very useful invention and lies at the base of our “barely is” and “slowly shrinking” prosperity. The bad part is the human tendency to foul its’ own nest, which we are doing in so many and varied ways from printing fiat money and spending it first (that’s the 1st Rule of Government – spend it first!) to polluting any and everything we touch with oil, waste heat products, feces, fertilizer and plastic crap to using up antique aquifer water (a few hundred million years old) so fast that within the lifetimes of our great grand children, farmers’ wells in the corn and wheat belts will be dry, dry, dry. Maybe whatever the “money” is then will be sufficient to pipe in water from Canada. Or perhaps things will be warm enough by then to do the farming in Canada, who knows..

The human animal is just a remarkably shrewd, not very smart, upright ape with very selfish tendencies. Of course, there are exceptions to the “not so smart” but, in all, as a race, our IQ’s have been dropping for 4,000 years. This produces an entire world wide population of beings who, in general, only think of today – maybe tonight as well – especially if sex is involved — but absolutely no farther. The short term, instant gratification mode is glaringly present in all aspects of human behavior from shoplifting to politics to excessive extraction of natural resources.

That’s why “kick the can” is universally preferred to really fixing anything when it’s gone wrong.

Paint over it, move it over, rearrange the chairs, weld that broken strut (poorly), just fill it with putty and so on and so on.

But “money” is not the cause of all this present and coming agony. We are the cause of it. Now how is that?

The 2012 elections should have plainly written in the sky in all CAPS for everyone to see that cares to look up from their video game is that some 200 years ago a thrifty Scottish fellow by the name of Alexander Fraser Tytler, had a startling insight into the nature of short term human thinking, so well proved out today. Right now, in fact.. It goes as follows:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”

I’m not so sure about the “monarchy” conclusion reached at the end – but a dictatorship or fascist form of government is obviously the most likely as civil order finally implodes when the Free Shit stops — as it mathematically must at some point when lack of resources, technology and productivity fail to keep us even with the “Take from the productive and give to the non-productive” proclivity that exists in broad reaches of the world today – especially in the USA and the EU.

Another fellow – a bit later in time – Alexis de Tocqueville by name, had a slightly different view of corruption via political pollution of money:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the publics’ money”.

And then we have Will Rodgers who summed it all up, “A fool and his money are soon elected.”

Ending with Margaret Thatcher, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money [to spend].”

Put them all together and you have been provided sufficient foresight into the simple fact that money is not the root of all evil but that man is all root, trunk and branch; through his actions, the functions of money are distorted and once distortion (i.e. fiat inflation of any ilk) has gained a foothold, eventual debasement and collapse of the fiat money are inevitable.

Please remember: unbacked credit and money created out of thin air are exactly the same thing and the collapse of the debt it “finances” which will happen simply depends on the confidence of those people, wherever and whomever they are, who accept the fiat money/credit in exchange for real property, goods and services.

When the people and producers, in their inimitable fashion, lose confidence in the fiat credit/money to purchase real goods and services in an orderly fashion, the immediate response is to try and find something else to use for money – in a black market..

Gresham’s Law (well proven) states, “Bad money drives out good money.” and makes the good money vanish from view into the black market where some great bargains can be had. But you must be careful the Government doesn’t catch you because by then, the Government has installed draconian currency controls, confiscatory taxes and other robber baron methods to fleece businesses, the sheeple and outlaw anything but their own fiat garbage as a medium of exchange!.. You take their worthless money at the point of a gun or be mightily punished for not doing so. Be advised that this is the true path into penury and has happened throughout history time and time again.

History is exceptionally cruel in this respect in that when debasement of money, fiat and unbacked “fantasy credit” is issued that will never be repaid begins to happen, there is no historical incidence or record of it ever ending except in disaster. NEVER.

It always collapses just like any other Ponzi scheme, even when done on a worldwide multinational basis. We are watching the twisting and turning of Central Banks and Governments world wide trying frantically to get out of debt by going deeper into debt, papering over default by selling themselves bonds they printed themselves and all other varieties of kinky fiscal idiocy that will eventually blow away in the wind, leaving all concerned dead and dying at the end of the rope they strung for themselves to hang by.

This fiscal exercise in futility is then followed by a general lowering of living standards, a die off of significant proportions and, in a burst of glory, the fabled Man on The White Horse barges in (with his loyal troops) to the “rescue” and we all find ourselves living under martial law at a much, much lower living standard and with a Military fascist promising to liberate us from our own folly. Same old, same old. This has played out time after time down the tortuous trail of history and our situation will be no different this time either.

The bitch is in the timing. My comment on a thread elsewhere about it being a long and agonizing scream of misery followed by a “Bang” applies.

In the l-o-n-g run, if anyone is interested in it, we are totally screwed as a race – humanity that is, not some subset of it – and money has nothing to do with it. We, however, are smarter than the dinosaurs and other “less intelligent” species that have vanished before us through accident, cosmic indifference or climate change. We are currently engineering our own extinction ourselves which will have the exact same effect as enjoyed by all those species preceding us to extinction. We, in our particularly twisted ways, are hurrying other lesser species to extinction every day as we continue to rape and pillage various environments for greater “economic” glory.

Think about this: 98% of all documented species that ever dwelled on the planet are now extinct.  What makes anyone think we’re “too special” to trot right along after the other 98%, especially since we are destroying our own ecosystem?

There isn’t a chance in Hell that the human race, in all its’ glory, varied self-centered goals, wants and perceived “needs” will be willing as a world wide group to agree on anything, much less coordinated action to prevent or mitigate what is roaring down the pike toward us all. Which is a planet 2-6 degrees Celsius hotter than today with all the misery that will cause from draughts, extreme hurricanes, violent monsoons and a huge rise in ocean levels that will flood a billion people from their homes and cities. But that’s day after tomorrow and of no interest to the teeming masses of sheeple that cannot even understand it, much less bring any pressure on ruling bodies to arrest the trend..

But “money” is not to be blamed for any of it.

Our own distortion, misuse, over use and stupid use of so many things in Nature, both the human sort and that belonging to Mother’s Nature is to blame for every bit of it and as Pogo said, “We have found the enemy and he is us!”.

 

End

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

We don’t go to the movies that often, and at $11.50 a ticket we won’t be going too often in the future. But I wanted to see Silver Linings Playbook because I’d heard good things about it, the great cast (Robert DeNiro, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence), and mostly because the setting of the movie is the Delaware County suburbs where I grew up. The movie was filmed in my stomping grounds and I recognized all of the locations. I’ve eaten at the Llanerch Diner, where one of the scenes took place. The setting is Ridley Park, which is about 5 miles from where I grew up. The inside of the house has all the traditional Catholic statues and pictures of Jesus that were in all of our homes.

One of the key storylines throughout the film is the love of the Philadelphia Eagles. The fanaticism of their fans is captured perfectly. DeNiro is fantastic as the fanatic Eagle fan, OCD father who has been banned for life from Eagles games for fighting other fans. The movie is darkly humorous. It’s a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest love story. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence give great performances. The scene where DeNiro blames Cooper for the Eagles losing a key game against the New York Giants is a classic, with Lawrence stealing the scene.

You’ve gotta love a movie where someone is killed on the Schuykill Expressway.

I’d highly recommend this movie to anyone, and especially to people from Philly. Bradley Cooper is from Philly. Another feather in his cap. Avalon thinks he’s hot. It must be his uncanny resemblance to me.

I also must make some observations about the economy. We went to a restaurant next to the movie theater before the movie for a bite and a drink (actually a pitcher of Sangria). At 7:00 pm on a Saturday night there was no wait for a table. Previously, we’ve waited 40 minutes for a table. There is a Target, Lowes, and BJ’s Wholesale adjacent to the restaurant, so there should have been plenty of traffic. The movie theater appeared vacant. No wait for tickets. Usually there are multiple long lines. Avalon insisted this was due to everyone out Christmas shopping. I’m not buying it. I believe we’ve hit a wall. The signs are everywhere. Life is about cash flow. Declining real wages and the highest gas and food prices in history have sapped the life out of consumers. Taxes are going up, Obamacare has already increased our healthcare costs, and four more years of Obama economics will crush the middle class. It’s not a collapse yet, but spending growth has come to a halt. You heard it here first.

http://youtu.be/2MP7A1k8Jr0