Perhaps if we could stop being treated as parasites, we could address the external parasites. Humans may be animals, mammals, and it is true that we have parasites within us. Food for thought. Follow the logic. Follow Dirt Road Discissions on the telegram for the truth. Time to defeat the Matrix, Commander.
If things get as bad as the 1970's (I actually think it will be worse), there's going to be some rude awakenings for our spoiled, decadent society. There's millions of people now that have never known a missed meal and many that have never rode in a car older than 2 or 3 years old. Don't know where their food comes from and make fun of farmers and ranchers. Never had to walk to school. Have never gone without any "goodies". Many have never had to cook a meal or even know how to cook if they had to. Don't know how to grow any of their own food. Don't know how to take their foot off of the accelerator to save fuel. I could go on and on. And then add to that that (in my opinion) people in our society are not as kind as they used to be and... man. Let's hope that we return to sanity soon. The destruction that has been laid out for America by some very real monsters is real and horrifying to think about. Financial collapse will/would make so-called "covid" look like a walk in the park. Masks and shots will be the last thing that people will be worried about. (And that would be a good thing to me).
1970s UK (Socialist Policies post-war): inflation 22%; mortgage rate 16%; average wage settlement 14%; basic income tax 35% moving up through narrow tax bands in 5% increments; tax the rich 83% income tax, 15% supertax on investments income, thus top marginal rate 98%; corporation tax 60%; oil supply shortage, coal strike = daily power cuts & shops businesses operating 3 day week; massive budget deficit and National debt. But apart from that…
Tax rates and revenue are most remarkable things. The US economy over a long time delivers ~ 20% OF GDP as revenue to the feds. The Congress spends, pre-Obama ~ 22% of GDP. So that got covered by ` 2% inflation, remember that is some magic number now for our Fed. So in 2008 we saw a collapse of the real estate market when, surprise, prices don't always go up and limits arrive. That required a bailout lest the economy collapse along with the banks and investor class. A net loss on paper of some $14-17T in a $19T economy. At the very same time, perchance, but obvious, the FDR time bomb of boomers exploded. We have simply moved that $17T to a future debt because we refused to take the medicine then. Despite inventing MMT to suggest we can print to oblivion, we are discovering that may prove hard to do. Particularly since nobody in history has done it. We are just so smart.
With over half the budget already spent on transfer payments and rising interest service to do something about rapid price rises - well what must give? China would like to know because they are eyeing some prime property. I do hope we can afford to control their greed. OTOH, sell your old car for a weeks worth of food? Barter? New dollar? I do hope our leaders might see we need to get back to work on stuff that matters. All of us.
Barter: this requires you have something with which to barter that others want. In European Countries nearly 50% of the able population get wages for doing jobs that create no wealth. Government, bureaucracies, NGOs, charities, welfare, busy-work jobs - forms a large parasitical class. They are the paid via the State out of tax plundered from the other productive half or from begging in a ‘good’ cause. Not sure what proportion applies in the USA, I would guess at least a third. Going back to barter would be interesting - a lot of hungry people and a rush to get real jobs. But the real point is we cannot sustain societies where so many produce no wealth on.y consume what others create.
Wow - had to check my files to make sure I did not write this one! I too remember a different world, when Dad went too work every day, and Mom was always at home. When every kid in school had two parents, (except for the three families where Dad did not make it home from the war). I remember splitting wood, and 'keeping the water barrel full', at 6 years old. I remember when my sisters were learning to cook - on a wood stove. I remember chores - as a fact of life. As they were for every other kid. We all learned to split and stack firewood, milk the cows, hoe the garden, darn our socks, gather eggs, prepare and cook meals and sew buttons on. And thousands of other useful skills. Now - no so much.
Gee at 82, I thought I was old! I can recall shoveling coal from a huge pile onto a chute contraption every evening once I was 10. Before I could help, my momma had to do it and other things suffered. I recall I was tolerably proud of my chore because I got a better meal. My pops was always "on the road" all week. I got a break on weekends, but he didn't. At least the Ammonia refrigerator did away with ice deliveries.
Some of the clues seem really inconsequential and yet they tell the whole story. And it started with diet meal plans and now it's fully-prepped meals you pop in a custom countertop thingy and lo, dinner is served!
When you're so incapable of buying and preparing raw ingredients to make a decent meal to your liking, you are an utterly fucked human being. When I married for the first time, at 18, I was as unprepared for adult life as any person anywhere has ever been, and I bought myself a little "meals for two" paperback and began that long, slow, strange journey towards adult life.
When you need everything apportioned out for you, including snacks, because learning common sense and balance is too hard for you...
The best class my now-adult kid ever took, anywhere, was middle-school health where the assignment was to live like a grownup. The teacher gave them a monthly budget figure, and they had to do everything within it. Rent an apt., furnish it, buy groceries, pay utilities commute to a job, etc. etc. That was the biggest eye-opener my kid ever had. We'd go real grocery shopping and my kid was just shocked to realize what it cost to feed even one person for one week, based on my kid's prospective menu plan and the prices on the shelves.
Half the class was, as the British say, skint before the month was out. My kid learned fast to avoid that.
My wife used to hand out assignments like that one, back before she tried academia (and subsequently quit in disgust after butting heads with the gender studies cultists).
But she did it differently:
Write up where and how you want to live, including furnishing your abode, what car(s) and so on. That was the first part and the kids loved it. Second part was to find out how much must you earn each month (remember, in Sweden you pay more tax on your wages than you get to keep, simplified, and 25% VAT on anything you buy, basically).
That was a real eye-opener, realising that buying a 70" plasma screen and decorating the bathroom with olive oil polished, salt water preserved oak cost a pretty penny.
She did one version with the problem class too, even funnier because these kids didn't start bitching: inner city kids from migrant no-go zone. When she had asked the class "what are you doing to do for a living?" one arab kid had piped up "Imma gonna sell dope an get rich!". Kid was only half-joking too.
So she had him tell how he was going to live, then total the cost. Then she asked the going price for a joint, for ½ gram of coke, and for one pop of amphetamine. The kid stood at the whiteboard (hate whiteboards, give me chalk and blackboards back!) and did the sums realising that it was going to be a 50 hour a week job selling dope at all hours.
And then she brought the hammer down: no unemeployment benefits, no insurance and the risk of getting shot because of a friends of yours owes someone else money.
Kids loved the exercise, parents too. Her white middle class colleagues living in owner apartments and houses an hours drive from the zone, not so much.
It's easier starting poor (relatively speaking, I am in no way comparing myself to the likes of kids growing up in favelas or the like!), like I did. When you can compare an underpass to a room with a matress, a bare bulb and a big bag for your stuff to a furnished apartment/hostel to your own lease and subsequently your own house, you know how to roll with the blows. Starting out being spoiled rotten (guess helicopter parenting and curling sounds nicer, don't ask what I think about adults who can't even handle "troublesome" expressions and terms) and then starting to lose, stating to lag behind in the rat race and being overtaken by the Joneses, that must be harder?
PS: My friend recently reminded me that when she got her first apt. lo these 45 years ago, I showed her around the supermarket and explained what was worth paying brand-name price for and what could be bought from the cheap unbranded line--especially since almost all that stuff is mfg. by the same corporations. (You could find the telltale codes on the pkgs. if you knew where to look...) And she was far better educated than I. We'd met in 5th grade but she got 2 master's and I dropped out of college.
This brings memories of two online fora from which I was driven. The first was dominated by far left intolerants, and four years later it continues shrinking. My departure was greatly celebrated.
The second was a discussion about an online story. It relied on donations to keep it going. A vocabulary-challenged member took me to task for a post following introduction of a transgender character. The post began, "The transgender phenomenon, as old as mankind, . . ." How dare I call it a phenomenon!!! I was gang-raped by the membership.
They were unaware that I was half of the financial support for the discussion forum.
Ignorance isn't a cognate for evil, or even stupidity. And stupid, or even nasty and narrowminded people don't deserve to lose everything, or to barely survive, because of the maliciousness of the ruling class.
I ain't no "with love for everyone in my heart" type by a billion lightyears. But I'll save the schadenfreude for people like Hillary-Who-Shall-Never-Be-President and her sycophants, and Trump, whose almost every claim has been proven more true than not, and who destroyed himself because he couldn't get a grip on his worst tendencies. Some moron whose middle-class life is rapidly becoming close to penury ain't my target.
Agreed. No one deserves what’s coming. Even those of us who are (possibly?) prepared will be facing rough times. NO ONE deserves what the ‘elites’ are doing to the world.
The screaming sirens should have gone off when we first saw them mocking themselves. The elite eyebrows rising in amusement as they called themselves WASPs. Maybe they really didn't know what they were doing, implying that people of British Protestant descent could have possibly sprung full-fledged as elite people without any actual ethnicity. I could never understand those drugstore haircare aisles marked "ethnic." Who the fuck are the rest of us?
But it was the beginning of those miserable people pretending that the only people in this country with a rich cultural heritage are black, and everyone else is "whiteness." Seriously, I better stop now because I can feel a lot of using the keyboard to spell out naughty words is a-comin'.
Hard to restrain oneself from angry thoughts regarding this stuff. I guess that’s what they want though; devision, anger, despair, despondence…They can’t defeat people who resonate with higher frequencies. Stay strong, stay positive 🥰
Anyway I try to remind myself that most of these people are profoundly unhappy; profoundly empty inside because they are not creating but destroying. The thing is, they're destroying a generation of children. One should not hate the rabid animal but must stop its predations.
Great article, wish that’s the kind of thing you’d find on mainstream media. Luckily Substack is gaining more and more momentum, hopefully to become THE mainstream media (one can hope…)
Well! Sock it to me.
Ah the days of 14% mortgages. But at least the CDs paid something.
Yesterday’s satire and absurdity; today’s reality.
Once upon a time, the mainstream was uncaptured.
I have been hearing increasing comparisons to Mr. Carter's 1970s lately, so here's mine:
I never thought we would see another POTUS more inept, but why do I ever say never?
Perhaps if we could stop being treated as parasites, we could address the external parasites. Humans may be animals, mammals, and it is true that we have parasites within us. Food for thought. Follow the logic. Follow Dirt Road Discissions on the telegram for the truth. Time to defeat the Matrix, Commander.
I'm laughing, but I think it's hysteria.
And there was a time SNL would call out a Democrat?
Don’t worry about it! Soon, the NYTimes will publish a list of greatest presidents since 1965.
Jimmy Carter will be number 2, just behind Biden.
What about OBummer?
In their world he transcended the meager presidency, to messiah.
This guy gets it.
If things get as bad as the 1970's (I actually think it will be worse), there's going to be some rude awakenings for our spoiled, decadent society. There's millions of people now that have never known a missed meal and many that have never rode in a car older than 2 or 3 years old. Don't know where their food comes from and make fun of farmers and ranchers. Never had to walk to school. Have never gone without any "goodies". Many have never had to cook a meal or even know how to cook if they had to. Don't know how to grow any of their own food. Don't know how to take their foot off of the accelerator to save fuel. I could go on and on. And then add to that that (in my opinion) people in our society are not as kind as they used to be and... man. Let's hope that we return to sanity soon. The destruction that has been laid out for America by some very real monsters is real and horrifying to think about. Financial collapse will/would make so-called "covid" look like a walk in the park. Masks and shots will be the last thing that people will be worried about. (And that would be a good thing to me).
1970s UK (Socialist Policies post-war): inflation 22%; mortgage rate 16%; average wage settlement 14%; basic income tax 35% moving up through narrow tax bands in 5% increments; tax the rich 83% income tax, 15% supertax on investments income, thus top marginal rate 98%; corporation tax 60%; oil supply shortage, coal strike = daily power cuts & shops businesses operating 3 day week; massive budget deficit and National debt. But apart from that…
Tax rates and revenue are most remarkable things. The US economy over a long time delivers ~ 20% OF GDP as revenue to the feds. The Congress spends, pre-Obama ~ 22% of GDP. So that got covered by ` 2% inflation, remember that is some magic number now for our Fed. So in 2008 we saw a collapse of the real estate market when, surprise, prices don't always go up and limits arrive. That required a bailout lest the economy collapse along with the banks and investor class. A net loss on paper of some $14-17T in a $19T economy. At the very same time, perchance, but obvious, the FDR time bomb of boomers exploded. We have simply moved that $17T to a future debt because we refused to take the medicine then. Despite inventing MMT to suggest we can print to oblivion, we are discovering that may prove hard to do. Particularly since nobody in history has done it. We are just so smart.
With over half the budget already spent on transfer payments and rising interest service to do something about rapid price rises - well what must give? China would like to know because they are eyeing some prime property. I do hope we can afford to control their greed. OTOH, sell your old car for a weeks worth of food? Barter? New dollar? I do hope our leaders might see we need to get back to work on stuff that matters. All of us.
Barter: this requires you have something with which to barter that others want. In European Countries nearly 50% of the able population get wages for doing jobs that create no wealth. Government, bureaucracies, NGOs, charities, welfare, busy-work jobs - forms a large parasitical class. They are the paid via the State out of tax plundered from the other productive half or from begging in a ‘good’ cause. Not sure what proportion applies in the USA, I would guess at least a third. Going back to barter would be interesting - a lot of hungry people and a rush to get real jobs. But the real point is we cannot sustain societies where so many produce no wealth on.y consume what others create.
Wow - had to check my files to make sure I did not write this one! I too remember a different world, when Dad went too work every day, and Mom was always at home. When every kid in school had two parents, (except for the three families where Dad did not make it home from the war). I remember splitting wood, and 'keeping the water barrel full', at 6 years old. I remember when my sisters were learning to cook - on a wood stove. I remember chores - as a fact of life. As they were for every other kid. We all learned to split and stack firewood, milk the cows, hoe the garden, darn our socks, gather eggs, prepare and cook meals and sew buttons on. And thousands of other useful skills. Now - no so much.
Gee at 82, I thought I was old! I can recall shoveling coal from a huge pile onto a chute contraption every evening once I was 10. Before I could help, my momma had to do it and other things suffered. I recall I was tolerably proud of my chore because I got a better meal. My pops was always "on the road" all week. I got a break on weekends, but he didn't. At least the Ammonia refrigerator did away with ice deliveries.
And leaving school age 16 and not working and going on welfare NOT an option. Don’t like the only jobs available? Too bad - get to work.
Some of the clues seem really inconsequential and yet they tell the whole story. And it started with diet meal plans and now it's fully-prepped meals you pop in a custom countertop thingy and lo, dinner is served!
When you're so incapable of buying and preparing raw ingredients to make a decent meal to your liking, you are an utterly fucked human being. When I married for the first time, at 18, I was as unprepared for adult life as any person anywhere has ever been, and I bought myself a little "meals for two" paperback and began that long, slow, strange journey towards adult life.
When you need everything apportioned out for you, including snacks, because learning common sense and balance is too hard for you...
The best class my now-adult kid ever took, anywhere, was middle-school health where the assignment was to live like a grownup. The teacher gave them a monthly budget figure, and they had to do everything within it. Rent an apt., furnish it, buy groceries, pay utilities commute to a job, etc. etc. That was the biggest eye-opener my kid ever had. We'd go real grocery shopping and my kid was just shocked to realize what it cost to feed even one person for one week, based on my kid's prospective menu plan and the prices on the shelves.
Half the class was, as the British say, skint before the month was out. My kid learned fast to avoid that.
My wife used to hand out assignments like that one, back before she tried academia (and subsequently quit in disgust after butting heads with the gender studies cultists).
But she did it differently:
Write up where and how you want to live, including furnishing your abode, what car(s) and so on. That was the first part and the kids loved it. Second part was to find out how much must you earn each month (remember, in Sweden you pay more tax on your wages than you get to keep, simplified, and 25% VAT on anything you buy, basically).
That was a real eye-opener, realising that buying a 70" plasma screen and decorating the bathroom with olive oil polished, salt water preserved oak cost a pretty penny.
She did one version with the problem class too, even funnier because these kids didn't start bitching: inner city kids from migrant no-go zone. When she had asked the class "what are you doing to do for a living?" one arab kid had piped up "Imma gonna sell dope an get rich!". Kid was only half-joking too.
So she had him tell how he was going to live, then total the cost. Then she asked the going price for a joint, for ½ gram of coke, and for one pop of amphetamine. The kid stood at the whiteboard (hate whiteboards, give me chalk and blackboards back!) and did the sums realising that it was going to be a 50 hour a week job selling dope at all hours.
And then she brought the hammer down: no unemeployment benefits, no insurance and the risk of getting shot because of a friends of yours owes someone else money.
Kids loved the exercise, parents too. Her white middle class colleagues living in owner apartments and houses an hours drive from the zone, not so much.
It's easier starting poor (relatively speaking, I am in no way comparing myself to the likes of kids growing up in favelas or the like!), like I did. When you can compare an underpass to a room with a matress, a bare bulb and a big bag for your stuff to a furnished apartment/hostel to your own lease and subsequently your own house, you know how to roll with the blows. Starting out being spoiled rotten (guess helicopter parenting and curling sounds nicer, don't ask what I think about adults who can't even handle "troublesome" expressions and terms) and then starting to lose, stating to lag behind in the rat race and being overtaken by the Joneses, that must be harder?
PS: My friend recently reminded me that when she got her first apt. lo these 45 years ago, I showed her around the supermarket and explained what was worth paying brand-name price for and what could be bought from the cheap unbranded line--especially since almost all that stuff is mfg. by the same corporations. (You could find the telltale codes on the pkgs. if you knew where to look...) And she was far better educated than I. We'd met in 5th grade but she got 2 master's and I dropped out of college.
I wonder how many people can spell schadenfreude.
I intend to revel in it.
New flavour from Ben & Jerrys?
This brings memories of two online fora from which I was driven. The first was dominated by far left intolerants, and four years later it continues shrinking. My departure was greatly celebrated.
The second was a discussion about an online story. It relied on donations to keep it going. A vocabulary-challenged member took me to task for a post following introduction of a transgender character. The post began, "The transgender phenomenon, as old as mankind, . . ." How dare I call it a phenomenon!!! I was gang-raped by the membership.
They were unaware that I was half of the financial support for the discussion forum.
Justice, ain't it grand.
Or define it!
Except there are many many innocent people being crushed even as we converse here.
The people in Rob’s post don’t sound innocent. They sound ignorant, at best.
What’s the German word for taking joy in another’s... education?
Ignorance isn't a cognate for evil, or even stupidity. And stupid, or even nasty and narrowminded people don't deserve to lose everything, or to barely survive, because of the maliciousness of the ruling class.
I ain't no "with love for everyone in my heart" type by a billion lightyears. But I'll save the schadenfreude for people like Hillary-Who-Shall-Never-Be-President and her sycophants, and Trump, whose almost every claim has been proven more true than not, and who destroyed himself because he couldn't get a grip on his worst tendencies. Some moron whose middle-class life is rapidly becoming close to penury ain't my target.
Maybe that moron should be in the hopes they’ll wake up.
Agreed. No one deserves what’s coming. Even those of us who are (possibly?) prepared will be facing rough times. NO ONE deserves what the ‘elites’ are doing to the world.
The screaming sirens should have gone off when we first saw them mocking themselves. The elite eyebrows rising in amusement as they called themselves WASPs. Maybe they really didn't know what they were doing, implying that people of British Protestant descent could have possibly sprung full-fledged as elite people without any actual ethnicity. I could never understand those drugstore haircare aisles marked "ethnic." Who the fuck are the rest of us?
But it was the beginning of those miserable people pretending that the only people in this country with a rich cultural heritage are black, and everyone else is "whiteness." Seriously, I better stop now because I can feel a lot of using the keyboard to spell out naughty words is a-comin'.
Hard to restrain oneself from angry thoughts regarding this stuff. I guess that’s what they want though; devision, anger, despair, despondence…They can’t defeat people who resonate with higher frequencies. Stay strong, stay positive 🥰
Thanks!
Anyway I try to remind myself that most of these people are profoundly unhappy; profoundly empty inside because they are not creating but destroying. The thing is, they're destroying a generation of children. One should not hate the rabid animal but must stop its predations.
Wise words
Great article, wish that’s the kind of thing you’d find on mainstream media. Luckily Substack is gaining more and more momentum, hopefully to become THE mainstream media (one can hope…)