Reading Tea Leaves

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

We are in such a complete and accelerating chaos that most of us are suffering from confusion and just wanting to know what comes next, or have SOME sense of normalcy.

I have bad news. It’s not going to happen.

This is because the chaos has at least three different sources. I expect this will be a series of posts, and this one I lay out the types of chaos we’re facing.

1- We are under a governance that loathes the nation it governs. Partly I think, because they are well aware we didn’t vote them in.

As such, it’s seeking to maximize wounding of the nation, which means maximizing chaos — by design or not.

This is primarily accomplished through open borders and giving in to fanatics who want to destroy fossil fuels.

Open borders because in the current state of the economy, we can’t absorb vast hordes of untrained migrants. War on fossil fuels because … well…. the society runs on energy. Control the energy and you might not control society or economy, but you’ll make it very odd.

But that’s not the only two factors of chaos they introduce, of course. For years now I’ve had the feeling they’re running around actively trying to start WWIII (I have ideas on why) and let’s not forget the entire covidiocy ride and their attempt to restart it since.

Then add all their strange ideas of how things work, and the fact they’re not half so smart as they think they are, and most of what they try to do has weirder and weirder effects that reverberate and ricochet around.

2- We are coming to the end of what we’ll call “the blue model” of governance. Or what was called in the cold war the “Mixed system” (One of my teachers was so proud of Portugal having a mixed system. Some sewage in that wine! Chef’s kiss.) This was the “Communism is more efficient and generally better at economy, but look at the human cost. So we’ll do soft communism/socialism with a human face”. People still get to have property, etc, but the state like a benevolent parent stands over them and redistributes property, makes sure everyone is playing nice, etc. etc. etc.

Like hard communism, it never really worked, because it’s broken in the fundamentals.

But for a while, it could pretend to work and even be successful.

Part of what contributed to its success was that though America has been bitten by the virus since FDR, we took in less of the poison. Much less than Europe. This meant we were still relatively free to innovate and create. The Free Market is so amazing that a small percentage allows you to do wonders.

However, socialism always kills, fast or slow. The soft socialist societies failed to reproduce, and the people on top are trying to create a pan-world society and–

It’s coming apart. It’s coming apart everywhere at once, and when it starts (Narrator voice: It had already started) in the actual, fizz bang way, it’s going to propagate all over, because people have had about enough.

BTW this is not just immigration (though that might be the fuse) but is mostly economics. The born again internationalist societies like the EC, not giving a d*mn about any particular country have become playthings of the tiny and blinkered “international elite”.

It will need a full post to go into. But picture Europe and people not being able to live in the places all their ancestors have lived because they can’t afford it. Heck, it’s true here in NYC, in California, in a lot of places.

It’s just here love of specific place — as opposed to love of country — is less common. But in Europe, not being able to live where your ancestors are buried for 10 or more generations?

The burning would already have started if they had more young people. And yet, even so, it might very well be beginning.

3- Technological innovation.

We’re living in a time of catastrophic technological innovation, which both makes the above chaos worse, and feeds into it. Note “Catastrophic.” I’m not saying the tech innovation is BAD but that we are getting it hitting closer and closer with no time to adapt, even when the results are good.

I was talking to friends this morning and I mentioned we don’t realize how fast innovation is. Not even looking back. I just realized we’ve been living for twenty some years off the mailing supplies I had just bought and which usually lasted me a month, when suddenly all magazines went “submit by mail.” It was so fast that the supplies I had on hand to circulate 60 short stories have lasted me this long. I think last year we went through the last roll of stamps.

Think about it: How did that affect envelope makers? The USPS? Etc? We don’t know, because it’s like we’re pretending it didn’t happen.

And this is a very minor corner of a very widespread effect.

Why does it make everything else worse: well, this ain’t the time to be importing people who don’t have very specific, very needed skills, for instance. Our own people are going to have a heck of a time adapting their skills to the new environment. Imagine trying to ride the bucking horse of catastrophic technological change WHILE also adapting to a brand new culture/language/etc. Shudder.

And as for governance: All intrusive governance distorts the market. But the market right now is unreadable, so the distortion has that much more chance of twisting/destroying the beneficial.

On top of that there is an eager chorus of dunces, casting confusion and doubt on real innovation. Whether that’s by thinking AI can do all sorts of things it actually can’t, or by day dreaming that we’re now post fossil fuels, they cast enormous confusion on what is actually happen, and have the potential to make things immeasurably worse.

So, reading the tea leaves?

Keeping an eye open and seeing what is happening might help. Yes, history teaches lessons, but you have to shed the bias of the recorders, and also account for what is different this time around. Few people are able to do it. None can do it perfectly.

I don’t know what’s coming, but it will make very interesting chapters in future history books.

We’re in for a heck of a ride. Prepare, hold on tight and hope for the best.

229 thoughts on “Reading Tea Leaves”

  1. I broke my crystal ball after it predicted that Dewey would beat Truman and Truman won. [Crazy Grin]

    Liked by 2 people

    1. President Dewey did a great job! He went a long way in preventing the Democrats from continuing their implementation of socialist policies in America. Authorizing MacArthur to continue the drive through North Korea, the nuking of Bejing and Moscow, further cemented the Global Pax Americana.

      Oh, sorry, that was a different universe. Which universe did I wake up in this morning?

      Liked by 4 people

  2. The irritating thing is that we could have been past most (not all) “fossil fuels” decades ago if people weren’t stupid about nuclear. We could be using the stuff for plastics and lubricants (for machines you pervs…).

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      1. The resistance to nuclear is emotional, not rational. “Nuclear bombs! China Syndrome! Chernobyl! REEEEEEEEE!” “Saving the planet” is simply the most recent excuse. They’re modern Luddites with smartphones.

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        1. The KGB+GRU+… funded and directed anti nuke “movement” in Europe was their response to the theater intermediate range nukes in Europe, which the Soviets knew was a direct threat to their massed armor doctrine. It had to use the existing greenie anti-everything-including-people groups as seed organizations to get big demonstrations going. The issue, as with many Soviet memetic warfare initiatives, is that it outlasted it’s paymasters, and metastasized with the help of Hollywood (see the BS propaganda “China Syndrome” movie) to impugn the safest western technological industry that has ever existed.

          If annual deaths in the coal industry supply chain, or from that of oil, were ever summed and compared and contrasted to nuclear power…but no, scary nuk-yoo-ler anything is bad magic, turned me into a newt, burn the witch, etc.

          It’s funny how the direct action groups the Soviets funded and directed all faded and folded pretty rapidly, but their memetic influence campaigns just kept going on internal inertia and their penetrations of media and academe. There is probably a lesson there for how our side should effectively memetically infect China in preparation for its fall so the correct memes find fertile ground, but certainly none of the three letter agencies would do anything like that, gentlemen don’t meme, wouldn’t be proper, etc., etc.

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          1. “There is probably a lesson there for how our side should effectively memetically infect China in preparation for its fall”

            Maybe support Christian groups in China? It’s possible that might bring down the commies before anything else. Wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to the Three Gorges Dam to bring them down. The fall of the CP would go a long way toward removing the rot in our government.

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            1. Last I saw Three Gorges was already having issues, with the floodgates already dumping to try and preserve the dam itself. Bad times to be downstream…

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              1. Yeah, wouldn’t be surprised if it failed on it’s own if it’s a wet winter there. Though it would mainly affect peasant types, I’m sure a collapse would put a damper on any military plans Winnie Xi Pooh might have.

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                1. If the Three Gorges goes, it won’t just affect peasants.

                  Basically, under the worst case (like the over-full situation it’s now in), China would lose Wuhan for a start, and would have severe flooding down to Nanjing, and possibly even flooding in Shanghai.

                  Anywhere from 100 million to 400 million people could be directly affected, with a massive death toll.

                  Basically, it would take the heart out of the Chinese economy, destroy much of their agriculture, and set the stage for multiple regime changes…

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                  1. IIRC, the worst death tolls in history have all been from floods in China; the number 300,000 comes to mind for one flood of, I believe the Yangtze (might have been the Yellow; all those Chinese rivers look alike 😉). But if Three Gorges goes, it would almost certainly make that look like chump change.

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                    1. The Reader views the potential effects of a Three Gorges Dam failure as the ultimate protection for Taiwan.

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                    1. How are the air defenses around Three Gorges? I’ll suggest Taiwan is not unaware of the potential.

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                    2. If anyone zaps Three Gorges deliberately, I would expect a nuclear response. Safe to assume at least some working and deliverable weapons exist and are identified for quick demonstration use.

                      Bad idea. Really bad.

                      Mining harbors would produce the needed disruption without the rage inducing abbatoir.

                      Liked by 1 person

                  3. Three gorges catastrophic failure? Famine and economic collapse. Then pestilence from 300+ million corpses in warm wet weather. Then war as the government “restores order. The fourth horseman rides rampant. Communism, et all, racks up it’s first 8 figure casualty event. Maybe 9 for the decade.

                    Nah. They will blame us or Israel for the weather, and open the drain gates. They can “manage” a bad seasonal flood. They can manage the face loss of “can’t refill it for a while”, dang saboteurs. They will choose ruthless crisis over existential every time.

                    The only real question is, will they stall too long and lose control. Oops.

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                    1. My late father was a civil engineer specializing in soils. His master’s thesis was on stabilizing slopes. I picked up a few things over the years.

                      The discharge rates from Three Gorges that I’ve seen videos of make me think about catastrophic hydrodynamic cavitation.

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                  4. Which would also destroy the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wonder if anything else might emerge from that.

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                    1. Ripping open that lab in a natural disaster situation like that would like spread whatever bioweapons they’ve developed, or natural pathogens they’ve stored, throughout the country. That’s a nightmare for the entire world.

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                    3. We could try sterilizing Wuhan with a thermal nuke. The problem is, how many other labs are there scattered across the Chinese countryside? (Or other places in the world for that matter?)

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    2. We had working solar in the early 1900’s. Scientists were working on new forms of energy, more efficient ways of using oil and steam.

      All disappeared. Not even notes still exist. I can’t imagine where we would be if the possibilities hadn’t been throttled.

      Where would our world be if we’d had time to adjust to new forms of energy before computers came along?

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        1. Mostly information from demonstrations done at science fairs, journal entries of people who saw the demonstrations, and news stories. Those inventing were cautious, with reason, and the patent office had a habit of denying patents for things it considered “impossible,” regardless of the actual data.

          I believe it was 1919 when the director of the patent office recommended it be shut down because everything that could be invented already existed.

          Tesla was not the only inventor whose notes disappeared after dying. His notes were returned to his nephew I believe in the 1950’s, but by all accounts only a small portion were returned.

          I looked up some of the patents years ago, and while the solar panels were primitive by our standards, demonstrations showed they could run a small car.

          Tesla did a demonstration in Colorado of another sort of engine, but wouldn’t answer any questions anout it except to say it ran off the “ether.” He threw a snit when a reporter accused him of witchcraft, if I remember correctly, and left.

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      3. are you referring to that “paddle in a bottle” novelty?

        It’s available as a desk toy. Not “lost”.

        Hope your comment was sarcastic, a swipe at leftloon conspirnuttery. Sounded that way.

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        1. Depends on what you refer to as left-wing conspiro-nuttery. I have a strong interest in truly “alternative” power sources, and I’m not stupid enough to think that true innovation and new discoveries in that field stopped with the war between Edison and Tesla.

          We’re still generating power on 1800’s technology, prettied up and painted.

          If your point was that solar never “disappeared,” just imagine where we would be if it had been taken seriously in the early part of the century.

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          1. Where we would be? About where we are. Energy density is the limit. And absent -cheap- high-temperature superconductors (200F+), we wont get much more out of a square yard of solar than we do now. Even then, the output is still too low. How much -useable- energy hits a square yard of surface?

            Its a low-energy-density dead-end technology. And if it diverts us from high-density/high-yield nuclear, its a trap. A civilization crippling trap.

            Which is why our opponents want us to waste time and effort falling down that rabbit hole.

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            1. Considering hot summer days yield enough energy to cook food (the classic is fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk), there must be ways to harvest it, even if it’s impractical for larger purposes.

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              1. That works because the material (concrete) absorbs really well and doesn’t conduct or radiate for crap, so its temperature keeps rising.

                Fry an egg? Sure, that doesn’t take much energy. Run a dishwasher? Not so much.

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                1. IIRC, the available energy at the Earth’s surface is about 1.05kW/m^2 at the subsolar point at noon in clear weather. So with the current-best photovoltaic panel efficiency at ~24% the most you can get is about 250W/m^2. And that’s at noon on a cloudless day; reduce that to about 24W/m^2 per day on average; see…

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance

                  …for info. As Mailclerk said, low energy density. And not exactly reliable, given weather and the fact that half the day it’s zero.

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    3. And for anyone who thinks this wouldn’t have been practical or could not have been done, at the very least for the electricity grid, I give you…

      France.

      With “the cleanest air in Europe” by popular consensus, too.

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    1. For what we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful. It’s been a wild day. We had a dump, then a pump, and now another dump. Bonds, especially the long bond, is doing things it’s not supposed to do.

      To add to the volatility, Google has been found to be in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Anti-Trust act as a monopoly in “general search services and text advertising.” Because of its exclusive distribution agreements. I’ve been reading the full opinion and is very interesting and well argued, The judge didn’t find google liable for destroying their messages, which was disappointing, but again it was well argued.

      I don’t own any Google so I’m delighted. If you do, this is probably only the first blow. Never advice, just sayin.

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      1. The local news station that gets played at work has a talking head that they invite on a few times a week to talk about the economy. But he might as well be an administration shill. He spent the morning talking about how the current mess with the market is really a good thing in the long term, and blaming it all on over-valued tech stocks undergoing a correction.

        Purely minor stuff! Nothing to worry about!

        In a later segment, when talking about low sales in the snack food industry, he made sure to include a quick mention of “price gouging” as one of the reasons why snack food sales have dropped off lately.

        I cringe whenever I see him show up on the TV.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I’ve been watching other people eating and buying less snack food since this past spring. It probably started earlier, but it’s really obvious now. Like the empty tables in cafes, and fewer cars on the road, and at the mall or strip shopping areas. The regional economy has taken it in the shorts this year (ag + fires + energy), and it is really showing.

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          2. Seeing a lot of that around Flyover Falls with a couple of notable exceptions. Dairy Queen gets good business most days, and the small chain taco shop did very strategic store locations (they picked spots where there’s a lot of hungry people but not so many competitors). They serve good food, large portions and have been careful with price increases.

            A couple of diners do well for breakfast/lunch. Not so sure about the fancier sit down places. Applebees was deserted the one (and only) time I tried last month. One other party when I came in, maybe 10 customers total when I was done at lunch.

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            1. Red Lobster doesn’t seem to be very busy, don’t have to wait, but then we go between 4 and 5 PM (which on unlimited shrimp Monday’s s/b swamped, even at $27/meal, used to be, before Biden/Harris came into office).

              Texas Roadhouse is busy, but never as swamped as before (we use call ahead wait, < 10 minute wait for our arrival time, thi is not new, and before Biden/Harris came into office it used to be standing room only plus people outside).

              Where we go for Mexican food isn’t as busy, but they’ve never been so swamped that there is a long wait. (Local non-chain.)

              Haven’t been to Outback Steak in forever so don’t know how they are now.

              Sizzler? Local one in Springfield is now owned by corporate, the franchise did not survive. It is “busy” for terms of busy, but not swamped like they used to be.

              We go out too much, lately because of the *heat, but in general we’ve cut way, way, way, back.

              (* No whole house A/C. Three floor units, two down/one up, and one wall unit upstairs. None back where the bedrooms are. Last thing I need to do is start up the oven or stove tops. We do grill, which helps, but can only have hamburger so many times. Steak meat, unless fantastic sale at Fred Meyers, is as much as going out.)

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              1. The local Sizzler survived the corporate closures in the late ’90s, but died at the start of the lockdowns. (“Temporarily Closed”, says the sign as workers are turning it into a fancy pizza place and some others.) The fast food chains are still going; Burger King did a new store, but at the expense of the one on the busiest corner in F-Falls (and it was a pain to get into–bit of a maze). McD is down a bit at their two locations. I use it as a treat place. Haven’t done a meal there in years.

                Jimmy Johns is new (don’t eat there), and the Denny’s is going strong. I’m not sure if the Applebees will make it. There’s a lot of medical & dental places near the hospital, along with OIT. OTOH, there’s a new brewpub next door with a rooftop setup for good weather days.

                The local sit-down restaurants vary. The popular Chinese place is a bit less crowded than before. Had lunch at one of the diners a month ago and it was close to packed. I got a table in the back room, and the rest of them filled immediately. Not a cheap place to eat, but it’s really good food.

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                1. Panera Bread is noticeably less crowded, despite the new, “Under $10,” menu. And (since they’re my “goto,” when I’m out for lunch) I’ve been in several in about a 100-mile radius lately. (There was one near the hospital, with some of the kindest staff I’ve ever met). Of course, they have legal issues to get past.

                  When we’re at home we tend to hit the local Mexican joint (very good, decent prices) the Chinese takeout joint (so-so food, less expensive than the Mexican) and a deli run by a, “We’re Christians but we do Saturday as the Sabbath and live in communes,” sect. (Excellent sandwiches, homemade soups, lots of teas, no chocolate, reasonably priced and tons of atmosphere).

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                  1. I am noting how may fast food / dine out places have folded in my fairly high-income area. of the survivors, service is occasionally spotty at best, and bad more often than I think sustainable. Some places that were reliable superior are now “meh” at best.

                    Folks are pruning back the convenience spends, and there is a shortage of folks willing to work “service”. Either they have trust funds or tolerant roommates.

                    Not “doom” but definitely a strong sign of approaching recession. There is a building momentum of caution, a large gain in thrift. This usually indicates folks see the oncoming downturn ahead, and are making counter moves now.

                    The business cycle is highly psychological. And the fiasco of FICUS making his houseplant-mind obvious, and the oncoming cackle-weed replacement, is having a totally predictable impact on folks’ confidence.

                    Trump wins, should not be too bad. A year or so of recession to un-f(HONK!) things. Then another boom. If the donkuloids “win” or make an obvious and significant delay of “Trump takes office”, well, we might be arguing about the recession and what needs done in January of 2029.

                    The rest of the planet, however, may be in for some -very- bad times.

                    Must buy popcorn….

                    Liked by 1 person

                  2. Our preferred local Chinese restaurant changed hands changed up the menu combinations and substitution options, we didn’t go back. Guess we weren’t the only ones, they didn’t survive ’20/’21 lock downs (near university without being on UofO row, they did a huge takeout business all along). The smaller family owned restaurant closed down because owner wanted to retire, none of the children/grandchildren wanted to continue. Haven’t found one to replace it. BIL & wife have a favorite on W. 11th, I think it is fine, but hubby & son weren’t impressed so won’t be going there unless meeting BIL. Which given his current medical condition, is probably never.

                    Regarding BIL. Prayers would be appreciated. His knee is still swollen and hot. The staff infection is back (don’t know if back, now because off antibiotics, or back in spite of antibiotics, and the long term antibiotics are a danger to liver and kidneys). They see Slocum this Wednesday to pull off fluid and tests, and next Wednesday meet again with severe infection doctor(s). About the only good news is it isn’t in his blood, but it hasn’t gone away either. He did not tolerate the antibiotics, not the direct intravenous, and especially not the oral versions they had him take after course of intravenous versions. Lost almost 30#s, which (unlike some of us) he didn’t have to lose. He is 77.

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                    1. I stopped going to the Asian buffet before COVID; when I saw a noodle (had to assume it was wheat) in my hot&sour soup, I figured that the slack I’d been giving them for marginal food safety was over. (Some of the steam trays were maybe safe, but a bit cool for my liking.) The COVID shutdowns finished them off. The place was for sale as-is for a while, then somebody got the building and proceeded to do renovations. (Said roofing renovations gave me a strong desire not to enter the building. Protip: 7/16″ OSB should be supported by more than beams on 8′ centers. Especially in a snow zone. Most of the roof has steep pitch, but not all.)

                      No idea when it opens, if it will. It’s the slowest project I’ve seen with professionals (for values of) in play.

                      The local restaurants/diners/taquerias that are doing OK have a) good food, b) decent (occasionally huge, but it’s the center for a farm area), and c) good service. I’m a regular at the three locations for the mini-chain taco shop (one hospital, one near the restaurant supply, one by the mail drop), and even the newbie employees do good service. The Chinese place (not the buffet, more traditional) might have changed hands; much of the pre-lockdown staff is gone, but the food is the same and prices are not out of line considering Kamaflation. (Hey, she wants the debate to follow as if she were virtual-Biden, so she inherits the blame for inflation. Yippie-kay-yea, MoFo!)

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                    2. Prayer’s for your BIL. My regular doc thought I was going to get a knee replacement, and I was thrilled to tell him nope. The meniscus and arthritis cleanup did wonders, and after 3 weeks, I’m close to nominal. Did not need a canet’s pretty good. Took an emergency cane with me for market day, and unlike last week, did not need it at all. Took a naproxen this morning (trying for one a day, since my warfarin-admin Was Not Happy with it) and a single Tylenol midday.

                      Arggh. Now dealing with a wasp(?) sting I got yesterday; think it flew onto my arm, and when I moved it, it got the back of my biceps. Rash hurts and is spreading. I’m passing on the urgent care places; they’d be closed by the time I got there, and lack of a complte medical history might make any treatment a bit too exciting. Unfortunately, the hospital/clinic complex doesn’t have any urgent care, relying on the ER. I’ve seen one co-located at a hospital in Medfore, and it did wonders when I had a bad reaction to a pneumonia vax.

                      And yes, I’m slightly(?) allergic to beesting. It’s been 15-20 years since the last hit, and AFAIK, the only serious allergic reaction probably wasn’t beesting (possibly lobster, so I don’t eat it). That was 35 years ago…

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      2. here comes the pump. Nikkei trading halted limit up as Yen rises 1% — that’s huge. Remember, There’s a good chance the US market closes up on the week, possibly significantly up. This is classic “topping” behavior. The crash isn’t here yet,,probably. At least I don’t think so. But t(en again no one knows nothin, especially me,

        They haven’t really taken the US economy into account yet, this is about the carry trade. essentially, unless Japan allows the Yen to completely collapse, which they might but probably don’t want to, there’s going to be a long bloodbath that will wreck everything in its path, starting with crypto, through US mega tech, and ultimately the high yield (risky) debt markets. the stock market is a tiny mound compared to the debt markets.

        most everything you read is going to be talking book and wishful thinking. Will Japan let the Yen die is the great question

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    2. Market resets are always a thing. We’ve known we’re in a stockmarket bubble for what, a decade now? Yes, in the short term it’s going to suck. But I remember Black Monday and how a year and a half later it was back. Percentage wise we’re nowhere near that territory.

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      1. no one knows, and I certainly don’t, but this seems more like ‘29 or ‘00 than ‘87. Arguably this is worse than ‘29 or ‘00 and matched only by ‘22 which was ended, after a 30% decline, by the massive fiscal pump we’ve been living through. Bidenomics baby. MMT.

        I’m not expecting the Great Depression, but then no one at the time was expecting the Great Depression either; much as no one was expecting WWI or II or the ACW, or any of the other catastrophes to be what they were. We expect life to go on from day to day much as it always has.

        Very little would surprise me at this point, from a huge inflationary pump to a 50% deflationary dump. We might well get both seriatim. it’s why I love options.

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        1. Certain people were expecting WWII, and many other wars.

          None of what we are experiencing is unexpected, much has been instigated and planned. Now the exact results and timing may vary, but the fuel and dead wood has been stacked for decades.

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          1. I was waiting for 2000 and 2008 — 87 too but was surprised that it all happened in one day, no one and I mean no one, expected that and anyone who says they did didn’t publish beforehand. I’ve been waiting for this one since last year, and yes, I have it in writing. it’s been a long year, my first actual negative year in over 30 years of trading. We only find out who the certain ones were after the fact and most often, not always but most often, we find out they’re stopped clocks. Perma-bears we call them on the street. doesn’t work.

            I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a depression, I’m not expecting one, but I’ve allowed for the possibility. Good long term investment is mostly about not worrying about expectations and managing risk instead. Options are your friend, but you really have to know what you’re doing.

            On the other hand, I don’t believe in grand conspiracies. It’s much more likely to be incompetence, fear, and greed. I do have the advantage of knowing several of the “players,” some for decades going back to prep school. A sufficient level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, but it’s still incompetence. Too many conspiracies are just after the fact narrative because we humans don’t seem to be able to grasp chaos.

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            1. It wasn’t incompetence to allow the turd-world to flood into western countries, it was deliberate. Nor was it incompetence to rig elections, increase racial conflict, or destroy the economy with helicopter money after creating a “plan-demic”.

              Nobody “accidently” fumbled the ball. These things were planned and discussed. Some people really want to play god and destroy the existing civilization. The “incompetent” are merely their tools.

              The “incompetent” didn’t erect the Georgia Guidestones.

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              1. yeah they did. The biggest argument against grand conspiracies is the level of competence they require. If they’re that competent then maybe we should let them get on with it. Fortunately, there is no visible supply of competence. I’m sticking with ex-post narrative construction.

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                1. It would be some small comfort to know that there was actually some shadow organization behind it all, and that they had a Plan.

                  Alas, the preponderance of evidence points to a herd of incompetents and fools working at cross-purposes.

                  Sometimes I wonder if this is how the citizens of the Weimar Republic felt.

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                2. If “they” were competent, the folks outing the actors would all be in camps, or otherwise hushed.

                  “They” ain’t rounding up folks, nor doing much to shut them up.

                  So “they” are incompetent, or the noisy folks are way wrong.

                  Or both.

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              2. We know who erected the Georgia Guidestones. It was a liberal Catholic physician with more money than sense.

                If you’re interested, there’s a two-part Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World episode about it.

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        2. There’s a book called The End of the Armistice about the outbreak of WWII. It’s by G.K. Chesterton. Who died in 19436. It was rather clear.

          As of ACW, Jefferson was predicting it.

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        2. Big down day? Bargain sale. Time to go shopping.

          If you are balancing your assets, and playing a long game, market crashes are opportunities, not disasters.

          Oops. Was I not supposed to point that out?

          Some sonnsabitches -want- you to panic. Because they can take “emergency actions”.

          So “covid-19” morphs to “crash-24”

          They are too stupid to run a free country without disaster. They are fucking predictable in their malfesance. But certainly cunning enough to exploit the surprise chaos to gain more power.

          I am confident they will botch it. Especially this bunch of third rate second stringers.

          or are they second rate third stringers… oh well..

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          1. IBM. Don’t remember if late ’90s or ’08. Dropped more than half. Hubby gleefully went rogue and bought more. Ultimately did good. Between the subsequent splits, dividends, covered calls, we made good money, for us, on IBM. Basis for selling at $180/share was around $10. All tax free at the time (IRA’s), some always tax free (ROTH).

            Don’t know what hubby is looking at right now. Sold off a lot of stock under covered calls, and supposedly a lot of cash. Just hasn’t found what he wants to get. (I stay out of this. I know what he does, just not fun for me.)

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  4. “Whether that’s by thinking AI can do all sorts of things it actually can’t…”

    Have been about a guest-post on this. Working title: “All Hot To Trot at the AI-GIGO A-Go-Go.”

    It’s really like people expect statistics-based “idiots savants” to be truly, actually intelligent like Heinlein’s Mike or Clarke’s HAL. Nope!

    Maybe the very term ‘artificial intelligence’ itself is to blame?

    Michael Flynn, in his “Firestar” series, calls them ‘AS’ for Artificial Stupids, because outside of their narrow ‘training’ area, they are.

    [And the Martian calendar(s) now on version 2.0, maybe ready one of these (please, pretty please, O Fates) not-so-strange days…]

    Liked by 2 people

      1. Yes! This exact analogy, silly or shallow as it might sound to some (not always smart or well-informed) people, is just about spot-on.

        Except for the “we implement it on a fancy ‘deep’ neural network machine” part, and a few other details, this IS how most ‘AI’s work.

        “Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain… I am the Great and Powerful OZ!”

        Liked by 2 people

      3. Jim Covello, Head of Researg at Goldman Sachs and no dope, has been pouring water on what they’re calling AI. He notes that it will cost at least $1 Trillion to rollout and asks “What trillion-dollar problem will Al solve?” and notes that “replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed in my thirty years of closely following the tech industry.”

        To justify its extraordinarily high costs, AI “must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do,” he explained in a recent Goldman report on the topic.

        The technology is so expensive that it won’t even cut costs by replacing humans with machine learning. “We’ve found that AI can update historical data in our company models more quickly than doing so manually, but at six times the cost,” he said. Costs would have to come down dramatically to make automating tasks with AI affordable, he added.

        In a similar vein, Daron Acemoglu from MIT another non-dope says, ”I question whether AI technology can achieve superintelligence over even longer horizons because it is very difficult to imagine that an LLM [large language model] will have the same cognitive capabilities as humans to pose questions, develop solutions, then test those solutions and adopt them to new circumstances,”

        It’s certainly not universal at Goldman since they underwrite a lot of this AI stuff but it’s notable that all the people boosting it have never lived through a bubble bursting and all the people questioning it have. Just sayin. For myself, I’m afraid that current AI is just Pets.com all over again.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. The Reader notes that LLMs are this decade’s AI craze. Some previous ones being expert systems, neural nets, chess and Go processors. and deep learning / big data. Each one went though a cycle of boom and bust similar to what we are seeing with LLMs today. The tech from each cycle only found a home when Moore’s Law made the underlying processing so cheap that it would run on your cell phone or laptop. The Reader isn’t sure how many generations of semiconductor nodes it is going to take to reach the point that LLMs also fade into the background of our personal tech or whether Moore’s Law will continue far enough to make that happen. He does agree that there is going to be a large crash in all things LLM related before it happens.

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          1. Funny also how each new “thing” in “AI” uses significantly more electrical power to do a bit more things somewhat slightly half-arsed well.

            The power thing is a real thing.

            Like

            2. The power thing is in part an extrapolation of the power consumption of current LLM hardware (and admittedly it is large). That becomes a barrier to entry until semiconductor nodes reduce it. IBM’s Deep Blue was a power hog when it started beating grandmasters in chess. Today your phone will do it handily. The market adjusts.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. An old comp sci rule of thumb: any performance improvements the hardware guys come up with, the software guys will piss away. Industry might kick the power problem down the road, but, like the national debt or pension obligations, it ain’t going away.

                Nukes are coming, if only to power our New Robot Overlords; I just bought my first nuclear power stock today.

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        2. This actually relates to interesting things from different directions.

          From a machinery occupation perspective, this is maybe a little bit cargo cult/top downism. All along engineers have designed machines, and gotten them built. Engineers screw up machine designs all the time, but are much better at that than they are at marketing, and there are quite a few engineering projects that are technical success, and marketing/economic failures. There’s actually a theoretical tool that would help engineers sort viable technological advancements from all the churn of sexy wonderwaffe projects, but they have to reinvent it, and as far as I know almost no engineering programs actually teach it.

          From a ‘how do we teach people how to think’ perspective, this is maybe one of the diagnostic hints of stuff badly wrong in university land.

          Some room to talk about ESG in finance, but that was probably down stream of recent nonsensical changes in how universities train even engineers.

          GRand societal challenges, and ‘wider’ picture in both engineering and in finance, instead of pure profit calculations. The ‘wider’ picture is narrower, because the proxies are not, and a pure monetary profit analysis would have captured a lot more about what is really important.

          But, the folks who gaslight people into thinking ‘climate technology’ is important are also not going to see the costs from similar sorts of institutionalized lie.

          As best as I can tell, there are useful applications in engineering research of programming methods that we can call AI, of various sorts. Those have some very narrow uses, no matter what is going on in hype world. But, the world managers live in has seemingly lost the ability to deeply understand the real implications of this or that bit of technology.

          I have opinions, but that does not mean I have a good idea of what next. And, where business and finance is concerned, I am only really at the level about repeating verbatim those stock complaints about MBAs.

          AI ‘experts’ include a fair number of willful cultists who self selected into being called experts, because they were already insane cultists. But, if you know how to sort out and ignore those, or were looking at IT people while ignoring senior IT management, you could find a lot of voices warning that the current AI investment thinking was not good.

          Anyway, I thought I had a point, but may have lost it reaching this location.

          Like

        3. In my experience, modern LLM “AI” offers a useful improvement in OCR accuracy, and eases interfacing with image synthesis and procedural content generation tools. Not worth trillions, and probably not worth what was spent developing, training, and productizing it.

          Like

          1. It also offers decent typeahead suggestions. Don’t use it to generate a paragraph, but when you’re typing an email and it suggests a few words that are exactly what you were about to write, you can hit Tab and save yourself half a minute of typing. I’ve seen this at work: a couple of my colleagues (software developers) have the GitHub Copilot tool installed on their computers. As they’re typing, the computer is auto-suggesting the rest of the line they’re about to type, and it’s correct often enough that they can hit Tab and accept the suggestion, increasing productivity by 20-25%.

            I was initially VERY skeptical about code generation by LLMs, but having seen it in action, it works pretty well when the amount of generated code is small. That’s the key. Writing an entire function? The LLM is going to get it wrong in subtle ways. Predicting which parameters you’re about to pass into that function call? The LLM will often be right, and more importantly, you can see the results before you accept them by pressing Tab, and it’s obvious whether it’s wrong or right. Which means the human is still in control of the process, and the LLM is serving as a fancy autocomplete.

            But, yes, not worth trillions. Microsoft is probably going to end up making money off of GitHub Copilot suggestions, because they’ve managed to turn it into a useful product that employers will happily pay for. (Make your 100k employee 10% more productive, at a cost of $100 per month? Yes, please!) But a lot of other companies are going to go bust when the bubble bursts.

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            1. Hmm. Seen that on gmail emails. Didn’t know how to take advantage of the “suggestions”, OTOH made sure I spelled somethings correctly as typed. Have to try the “Tab”. (Don’t send that many, so didn’t bother to figure out how to take advantage.) OTOH2, when underline “improper” syntax, the syntax suggested is too often “No! That will change my meaning!”

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              1. Oh, lordy. And the new version of spellchecker with AI is SO MUCH WORSE.

                When I type “spatial,” I don’t mean “special.” And yet it changes that for me.

                I have to learn how to turn it off, because it’s a menace.

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                1. 100%

                  I have auto-correct/corrupt turned off. Fine to mark a word misspelled, usually it is a misspelled word. Most the time when I try to get suggestions, the word wanted isn’t on the list. Yet if go to a tab for word search that brings up the correct word and I’m not attempting any different spelling from what I typed, which was way off.

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                2. I never let the computer word for me. :-P

                  I only let it put red marks under words it disagrees with. Sometimes I find tpyos that way. Usually I grumble “That is exactly what I meant to say, you Artificial Idiot. Go away.”

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        4. The technology is so expensive that it won’t even cut costs by replacing humans with machine learning. “We’ve found that AI can update historical data in our company models more quickly than doing so manually, but at six times the cost,” he said. Costs would have to come down dramatically to make automating tasks with AI affordable, he added.

          Did this idiot seriously just publicly bet against the cost of computronium decreasing?

          Like

        5. AI

          The whitewalled purple and gold Cadillac Eldorado of the computer field.

          Pimpmobille.

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    2. The true name of AI is Ain’t Intelligent.

      It is the mere creation of the illusion of intelligence. They just get better at creating the illusion. In the same way a woman is not sawed in half by the magician. Just a better illusion. An AI does not know how to put the trolley on the track. It simply displays what you tell it. As we load more pictures, the illusion gets better.

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  6. All I know is this-

    1-It’s going to be a wild ride, no matter what happens.

    2-Trump winning and winning big is our best option. Why? Any ambiguity in a Trump win will embolden our enemies. A Harris win, on the other hand (or a fourth Obama term, as a friend pointed out that the people behind the curtains remain unchanged) would give far too many bad actors in the world a chance to see how bad they are. Combine that with how quickly the current media is willing to jump on any narrative that gets them out of the line of fire (i.e. the mass stabbing in England would have been quickly memory-holed if there weren’t protests by the lower-class English about lack of law enforcement…which has turned this by the BBC’s own people into an Islamophobia issue), it’s not going to be fun.

    A clear Trump win, especially if Trump starts really draining the swamp, is going to be unpleasant but necessary.

    (And for anyone here that wants to go Will No-One Rid Me Of The Bad Orange Man? as a solution to things…having that happen will probably set off the boogaloo.)

    3-After that…I suspect we’re going to see another big tech crash, especially if all the companies out there discover that their “AI” (Large Language Model systems, people!) projects are duds and are making their issues worse. In ten years, we’ll learn that someone offered solutions that were cheap, easy, and straightforward…and not “sexy” or would make double-digit returns for investors (or were pitched that way). I think many of the big social media companies will make it, but very badly beaten up, probably reduced in size.

    Entertainment is going to crash as well, especially the Hollywood and streaming models. The only reason why it hasn’t fallen apart yet is a lot of these companies can draw on a lot of banks for money…for now. When Disney is pricing itself out of the theme park market and Universal Studios is overtaking them, there’s problems.

    It doesn’t help that tech companies have been looking at the studios for their content libraries for…guess what…”AI” (Large Language Model) generation systems.

    How it ends? A lot of dead studios and content rights holders in the wind. Hollywood becomes a hollow shell, as production moves out of the US to Canada and more content is purchased from overseas. Netflix becomes a cable network in all-but-name, similar to HBO, many of the “niche” streaming services, and maybe Hulu and such will survive. “Network” TV (anything that’s basic cable these days) will become mostly reruns and Reality programming.

    4-Real economic numbers will come out after the Trump win, and it’s not going to be good. If our actual unemployment rate (i.e. people looking and people that have given up that should be working) is less than 20%, I’ll be surprised. This will be blamed on Trump, of course.

    5-Overseas…once again, if Trump wins, it’s going to be bad but not terrible. A Harris win on the other hand…assume Israel will do whatever it takes to make sure that Iran is no longer a long-term threat. Considering that most of Iran’s money is in oil shipped by two or three ports…those ports are going to go away, one way or another.

    China might try to move on Taiwan in a whole “nice island, shame what’ll happen if you don’t let us run things” manner-they don’t have the assets to do a forced landing yet and the regional powers would regard the PRC taking Taiwan as a definite threat.

    Russia is going to either find a way to pull out of the Ukraine or push no matter what it takes-and be in deeper hock to the PRC in some form or another.

    And Xi has been reported to have medical issues, so what happens if Xi steps down after trying to recreate the Mao-style cult of personality?

    All I suggest from this end is stockpile, secure, make friends, and keep your weapons and clothes handy in the dark.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. Better than awakening to your own….

        Re: Britain and the protests against the little girls being knifed, I do think it’s great that the Belfast Unionists and Irish Republicans have finally found a reason to join hands in friendly fashion.

        It’s a sad reason… but we all bleed red, after all.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Britain, such as it is, is on the brink of catastrophe. Get busy or get out. I doubt there are two years left before “Caliphate” in all but name.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. I don’t think the caliphate wins. There are still more British and European immigrants, and even Indians who will assimilate given a chance.
              They will however get very very sportive. And ugly.

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          3. It was bad enough when the Saxons had their little “plantation” i gCuige Uladh. Now our own fucking goverment is doing a new plantation. Ath Cliath is no longer an Irish city. Gailimhe is going the same way.

            There is no curse in Irish, English, or any of the tongues of men…

            Liked by 1 person

    2. In regards to entertainment, there are a serious number of mostly young people, teens-twenties, making and filming twenty-thirty minute shows and putting them on the tube of you.

      They range from bad to cheesy, at least the ones my tweens and teens favor, and these young folks are by and large decent actors. One of the kids just watched one using what looked like claymation combined with the actors, and it was pretty well put together.

      The productions are at least as quality as sitcoms and soap operas, and a lot more wholesome than those have been for a long time. The ones my kids find do not include romance plots. Nope. None. Most are done by sibling groups plus friends. (This might have to do with my kids’ preferences rather than what’s available.)

      The plots are generally absurd and the scenery iffy-there was one episode that was clearly “What if we combine Star Trek with Labyrinth?” with most of the set built visibly of drywall panels and craft store fake ivy, but you know, cheap production.

      Liked by 2 people

      2. Do you have links? I’d love to see them. My kids have similarly creative friends. My youngest watches much more indie online stuff than corporate productions.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. If I was a Serious Entertainment Executive, I’d be looking at the creators on YouTube and (cringe) TikTok and seeing who’s doing great with their content and figuring out how to get them under good management and monetization.

        For all intents and purposes, Yahtzee Croshaw is the reason people subscribed to Second Wind and were subscribing to The Escapist.

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    3. Considering that LaWhorish is already blaming Trump for “the pending recession”, it’s a given that the Donks and MSM will try to pin anything less than wonderful on Trump. (And take credit for his successes if he makes it into office.) [Catches eyes before they roll into the under-desk dust bunnies.]

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Yeah, and he’s living rent-free in their heads. I love the question: “Has she accomplished anything?”

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    4. …production moves out of the US to Canada…

      That ship sailed a long time ago. Most TV has been Vancouver-shot for a long time.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. There’s a whole different scale than what I’m talking about. I’m assuming that what will happen is that any production companies in Hollywood proper are empty shells and the executive level, while everyone else is in places where they don’t have to provide the same pay and benefits.

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    5. If Russia doesn’t get the frak out of Ukraine, and soon, there might not be a meaningful Russia in 10 years.

      They are bluffing, bigly, because those crazy Ukies just won’t roll over for the “big bear” act. Their only hope is that we make the Ukies quit. Or same-diff settle for current lines.

      Russia is -fucked-.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. The problem for Ukraine is that it’s getting its best weapons from the US. So it has to give at least some weight to what the US asks.

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    6. “(And for anyone here that wants to go Will No-One Rid Me Of The Bad Orange Man? as a solution to things…having that happen will probably set off the boogaloo.)”

      Heh. Congressman Raskin was complaining about possible civil war and that they need body guards. So apparently, he is well aware that any “civil war” is going to be less war, and more targeted removal of the worst offenders like himself.

      Liked by 2 people

  9. “We’re living in a time of catastrophic technological innovation, which both makes the above chaos worse, and feeds into it… we are getting it hitting closer and closer with no time to adapt, even when the results are good.”

    One of the good things (if a really oddball one, at first blush) is we have seen this before and gotten through it. Not us, specifically; but our root culture, and our country, and even the whole of “Western Civilization” as it used to be known.

    The Industrial Revolution, and far more specifically the Victorian Era.

    No, really. Look at Britain (or America, more so) in say the 1840s. Now look at it in the 1890s. What’s the difference?

    Not everything, surely, but so much of what everyday life is made of did not stay the same. (There’s an interesting book called “How to Be a Victorian”, by someone who tried a lot of that out first-hand. Most of the entries have rather different ‘content’ depending on the decade.)

    Our ancestors did it, so likely we can also keep our footing in an earthquake in the middle of a hurricane. And maybe we can even simply steal some of their best tricks, too…

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Steel, good stuff, was a semi-precious metal in 1800 and a cheap commodity in 1900.

      Aluminum was a precious metal in 1850 and a commodity in 1950.

      Communications. 1820 to 1920.

      Transportation.

      Medicine.

      Energy.

      19th century was -way- more radical progress than the 20th. What we now have is greater speed of smaller changes. Combinations. But not nearly the swarm of major changes of root technologies.

      Like

      1. Computers are a HUGE change. Tasks that would have taken thousands of years can now be run in seconds on a $80 Raspberry Pi. More than a dozen of the ‘standard integrals’ printed and reprinted in generations of calculus textbooks were found to be wrong when run through Mathematica. Somebody made mistakes hundreds of years ago and nobody ever did all the excruciating work to check them — or else they repeated the same mistakes.

        We laugh at Midjourney’s foibles but it does turn out some amazing images. Check out the CGI effects in Babylon 5, way back in 1997 and still impressive today.

        I have laid out circuit boards without CAD. I never want to do that again. Ever.

        Of course, like any other technology computers can be abused.

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        1. It’s also the epsilon-cost communications that computers enable. That 1820-1920 timeframe that 11B mentions marks the change from high to medium cost communications.

          When you have high cost comms, you pretty much can’t do anything. If you manage to build an empire through other methods you can set up something that is on the lower end of expensive, but that’s about it.

          When you get medium cost comms it unlocks *staggering* economic potential, and mass production of communicated goods (radio and TV), but the catch is that it takes a lot of centralized infrastructure to put information into the system, which is to say an easily controlled chokepoint. This is why the 20th century looked the way it did.

          But when you get low and then epsilon cost communications – much of which isn’t just bandwidth but the packet switched network – suddenly that bias towards large and powerful entities being able to control the narrative vanishes.

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            1. Which they have failed to do despite immense effort, vs how things worked in the past where the information would never even get off the ground, little to no effort required.

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          2. Rome did an amazing job delivering a daily news sheet far and wide in the empire using fast horses. Essentially, “pony Express”.

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        2. one technology.

          arguably it’s a combination.

          note that mechanical computational engines and programmable machines existed in the 19th century.

          Internet is telecom is telegraph is heliograph. Bandwidth and saturation/access are the delta.

          Dutch had optical telegraphy -way- before the 19th.

          20th was fewer -root- technologies and more combinations, plus acceleration.

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          1. Gondor had a firewood powered optical alert system. But it required hundreds of men to be stationed, protected, and provisioned, in high elevations to run each relay. Now imagine trying to summon Rohan for aid and instead having a massive storm system roll through making visibility less than 10 feet? That would be the equivalent of a Carrington event today.

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        3. I was thinking about the bootstrapping effects with computer circuits. When I started at $LARGE_DEFUNCT_SEMICONDICTOR_INC in ’74, manual circuit layouts were done with rubylith film (dual layer, cut and peel off the parts you don’t want. Photograph and reduce. Each. Layer.). CAD came into play a year or so later, and as semiconductors started to get cheaper, more smarts got built into equipment. One of the beneficiaries of the smart equipment was that used for building semiconductors.

          By the time I left the industry in ’01, computer control of the processes was the rule, along with more and more powerful CAD tools.

          Steelmaking is much the same way. Really efficient steel production needs a large quantity of (wait for it) high quality steel. I suspect there’s a lot of products and processes that help to improve themselves via bootstrapping. (Looks at program development tools. Nods, then makes sign of cross. Not gonna do that again!)

          Like

          1. I used to work in the semiconductor photomask business when “deep sub micron” (0.1 or less) was the latest buzzword. Lol. Dino-tek now.

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        1. If I recall correctly, there was a block of Aluminium in the British Crown Jewels at one point. It was essentially Unobtanium.

          The Washington Monument is capped at the peak with a block of it, about one pound pyramid. Its the pointy end of the lightning arrester. Would not appreciably corrode, versus iron.

          Now? Beer can metal.

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      3. Steel became relatively inexpensive with the invention of the Bessemer process in the 1850s. According to Wiki (and articles in ACOUP) small quantities of steel could be made (see swords) with great expenditures of labor (and wood for charcoal), but Bessemer brought it to industrial level, and that was followed by the open hearth process a decade or so later.

        Getting cheap aluminum required large quantities of electrical power. Niagara Falls had a large hydropower plant, and ALCOA set up shop there for aluminum production. (Wiki says that Al-rich clays are common in the area, so it was one-stop shopping for producing the metal.)

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  10. C and I lived in California essentially all our lives; we left when I was 70 and she was 58. We still miss it: the climate, the scenery, the daily life, the culture of toleration (though that seems to have developed ugly limitations), the network of friends (it’s hard to make new friends when you’re adults, and more so if you don’t have employers). But the California that’s our spiritual home is gone. When we crossed the Colorado River I felt as if it were the Red Sea, and Pharaoh wouldn’t be able to follow us.

    It’s not just “can’t afford to live there,” though surely that was an issue; it was the increasingly hostile legal and regulatory climate, and since we left, the open sores on the body politic, and the catastrophic neglect of infrastructure. I fear the state may be doomed, and though I hate to think of our friends who will be caught in it, I can only feel that the doom is deserved—and too many of them supported the officials and policies that make it likely.

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    1. I’m heartbroken about California, too – my sister and her family remain there, as do my brother and his … and neither of them would ever consider living anywhere else.

      I loved living there, when I was a kid – it was glorious, and livable, and seemed like the center of the entertainment world, wonderful weather, splendid beaches …. everything.

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      1. I know how you feel about Polis but he, or someone taking his name in vain, tweeted a suggestion for a Harris/Cthulhu ticket, with graphics. That was unexpected.

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        1. That would be deeply foolish of Harris. It would create such an incentive to remove her from office . . .

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    3. I’m living in California, lived here most of my life. I love a lot of it. I love having access to the coast. I love (God help me) San Francisco under certain circumstances. My family is here. It’s where the weather is what I think is perfect.

      But the moment my friend gets his startup running, I’m probably going to take his offer and move to Tennessee. Because California isn’t the state I grew up in anymore. It’s being run into the ground by people that are destroying something beautiful, and I can’t stop them.

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      1. Most of the year, Tennessee is warmer than San Francisco. Although there are some valleys that challenge it for fog.

        I’m sorry, though, hon. It’s not right, what they’ve done to your place.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Communism by its nature always turns the Minas Ithril’s of the world into Minas Morgul. That is what has happened to California.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Most of my friends have either left the area or are changed in ways that disturb me. I joke that I’m the only human among the vampires for years…yet now, I’m worried about the shadows.

          When acts of mass criminality is “resolved” by adding more social services for those that commit the crimes…

          When even the “high rent” areas in cities have a lot of open store fronts…

          When the politics of the area ensures a political supermajority (jungle primary system), nothing is really going to change.

          I’ve been told good things about Tennessee.

          It just isn’t home. I’m not sure if it will ever be.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. “It just isn’t home. I’m not sure if it will ever be.”

            What Oregon is for me. At least when we were in Washington we were just across the river. Did not even blink when hubby was transferred into Oregon, even though ’85, timber town, no way were we able to sell our house immediately ($68k home when $300k homes were selling for $100, in our neighborhood). Eugene, which was double bonus because I grew up here. Even better for reasons, hubby was here full time 4 months before we moved. Why? Because he was determined to not be in the same area as my parents. Ended up renting only 4 miles north of them, ultimately buying 1 mile north. He chose the area (easiest access to either mountain range, and freeway).

            You’d think I’d have a bit of the wanderlust that infused both family trees. One set settled Oregon, the other Montana, with the latter grandparents ending up in Oregon after WW2. Nope. Maybe if the stars open up with rocket equivalent of the covered wagon (not the ships that came to America’s from Europe, want some autonomy). That isn’t happening anytime soon.

            Liked by 1 person

      2. More like “The Old Issue”.

        https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/old_issue.html

        Here is nought at venture, random nor untrue
        Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.

        Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
        Step for step and word for word–so the old Kings did!

        Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read.
        Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed–

        All the right they promise–all the wrong they bring.
        Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King !

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  13. Eh. SNAFU applies at all times, but in varying places. I’m rereading one of Pam Uphoff’s pieces today, and had the thought that she may be on to something with her God of Just Deserts.

    Look at Argentina and El Salvador – two places where he was free styling until recently, but has apparently moved on.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. One of the book series I’ve never read but read alot about is the Left Behind series. It gets a lot of criticism, and one of the oft-repeated in The Villain is supposedly smart and charismatic enough to sieze near total global power but then becomes a drooling moron who decided to follow a prophecy predicting his defeat to the letter because that would subvert said prophecy somehow.

    Well right now I’m watching similar evil people do pretty much the exact same thing in real time. “Let’s have a two- tiered justice system in favor of the third world savages we’re importing! Why are white people rioting and burning down migrant centers? Let’s come down hard on those evil racists!”

    A popular meme right now is a big mural that says “The French Aristocracy Never Really Saw It Coming Either.”

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Today I discovered there is a post-grunge country fusion genre forming up in music. Because an AI algorithm served up a song that was apparently released 3 days ago by a guy I’d never even heard of until about 20 minutes ago:

    I’ve also be pointed to other things I absolutely needed, and didn’t know even existed before an algorithm served it up as a ‘hey this looks cool’. There’s been a lot of other dross, and manipulation and that sort of junk too, but there’s been so much useful as well, and useful specifically to me.

    They’ve created the paperclip maximizer, except it is maximized around matching information to people, and they cannot control it, no matter how much they try to step on the fire hose. I’m not even sure they can stop it, even trying to pull the world out by the roots.

    I think it will be ok. Massive upheaval, yes, and we’ve also got a big bill from the Piper to settle for the follies that got us here, but I can’t help but think what comes next will be better, regardless of how much the dying guard tries to drag it down with them.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. Parrish also collabs with Miracle of Sound, Jonathan Young, and Colm McGuinness – All of whom I would heartly reccommend – Young, McGuinness, and another TikTok/YT bass singer did the “song of Durin” (the song chanted by Gimli mac Gloin in Moria) which is damned amazing.

      Liked by 1 person

  16. Re trying like mad to spark WWIII, there is an underlying concept that central planning was what let the west win the Second World War, and that keeps getting pointed back to when each latest “the moral equivalent of war” thingee gets rolled out as justification for Mo Control To Fight Blank.

    The alternative, that the free market built all the US industrial capacity that won the war and the centrally planned military effort just parasitized upon that for half a decade, imposing all the SNAFU and shipments of arctic gear to the equatorial Pacific style waste and graft such that every WWII vet told stories about for the rest of their lives, so aside from placing orders for rifles and battleships, the central planners rationing and controlling actually impeded the war effort.

    But that never gets told. No, it was central planning and cooperating with Uncle Joe that won the war.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. I was discussing a side piece of this with a friend on Sunday. If you read the writings of German officers they always express shock at how US soldiers fought, noting that the first thing a fighting company does is throw away the SOP manual.

      I argued it this way, we had central planners at the top, who said go take this objective. But on the ground, the fighting me were largely left to their own devices, and the results were amazing nearly every time. While all of the other armies believed in micro management down the lines…

      So in short, we won WWII because of American Individualism, not the touted central planning.

      Like

    3. Well, it was the central planners and buddies who owned the publishing companies for those history books. Of course the non-controlled people aren’t going to get much notice.

      I saw a comment on WWII a while ago. Something to the effect that part of the success for D-Day was giving a bunch of 19 year old paratroopers rifles and grenades and letting them loose to do their thing when and where they landed. (Apologies to those who had to deal with Omaha Beach and the like…)

      Liked by 2 people

  17. According to Vatniks for Harris, Donald Trump was a conspiracy by the CIA all along, and the Russian Army will win the election in November.

    Liked by 2 people

  18. there are reports of “massive” explosions in Isfahan Iran along with “severe”disruptions in mobile service, internet, GPS, and starlink in several cities including Isfahan, Tehran, Shiraz, and Arak.. Some VPNs are not working. Some government-affiliated channels are posting their updates with delays. Word is that this was a preemptive Israeli raid. Iran has a large airbase in Isfahan.

    In other news, IDF spokesmen are saying there were approximately 350 rockets launched at Israel from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and that Iran had launched 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles.

    Iran was going to do “something.” They had to. Let’s hope that this is all they do.

    Liked by 2 people

  19. A lot of young people from the Baltic Countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) headed west in the EU as soon a they could, for the much better wages and higher standard of living. Some are coming back, but the Ukrainian refugees are moving in and taking the entry-level jobs. And working very hard, or so I got the sense. Yes, they have some special allowances, like getting longer than other guest worker get to learn the local languages, but no one criticized their work ethic. The families that I did see often had multiple young children, as in more than two.

    Finns tend to go to Sweden to work if they leave the country, or so I was told. (The US, too, when Sweden got full in the mid to late 1800s). It goes back to the days of Gustavus Adolphus, as best I can tell.

    Liked by 1 person

  20. Harris may be a better candidate than we would expect.

    Partly, our expectations are very low.

    But, university acceptable language tracks PC.

    Donald Trump’s genius was by not speaking like a university type, and not being PC, he tapped into a vast audience that is tired of being condescended to, and at the mercy of, PC university types. He also did not allow himself to be shamed out of using non-PC language.

    Harris might be able to appeal to brain fried stoners, who might likewise appreciate someone who sounds like they fried their brain after passing university.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. I’ve been seeing Kammy described as the “wine mom” candidate, drunk and incomprehensible, convinced their inane circular thoughts are profound, and then there’s the cackling.

      I don’t have any idea if she’s intoxicated, but once you watch any vid of her speaking with that mental filter in place it’s hard not to see those signs.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I sere ObsidianKnife has seen things along this line. Probably not alcohol as there would be staggering and slurring and pratfalls ala The Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, but other intoxicants? Hm.

        Like

            1. Which matches up with the multitudes of ex-staff saying she refuses to read the briefing books, won’t allow long verbal briefings, and does not retain what she’s been told in Cliffs Notes briefings except occasional random points. And she won’t use notes or notecards.

              No way we’ll see transcripts, but if I had to guess it sounds to me like she blew her way through college and law school, somehow managed to cram for and pass the CA bar on her second try, landed the Alameda County assistant DA gig, then Willie Brown moved her into the political realm. So she only ever had to study once, for her second try at the Bar exam, and since that’s a once in a lifetime thing, phew, no more of that icky learning required.

              Liked by 2 people

                1. THAT is actually …. Harris is normal for a lot of post graduate WOMEN and minorities. Because of the ladies who tan A. They’re not necessarily stupid, but they might be illiterate. And they never HAD to think.

                  Liked by 1 person

  22. “…a governance that loathes the nation it governs.”

    That is absolutely the case. In Canada they don’t even pretend anymore, in the USA the pretense wears thin.

    So here’s a random example from a non-government source I saw on Slashdot the other day:

    https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/08/03/2226205/epic-games-ceo-criticized-for-calling-apples-find-my-feature-super-creepy

    CEO of Epic Games is calling the “Find my iPhone” ap “super creepy”.

    Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney commented on Apple’s ‘Find My’ service, referring to it as “super creepy surveillance tech” that “shouldn’t exist.” Sweeney went on to explain that several years ago, “a kid” stole a Mac laptop out of his car. Years later, Sweeney was checking Find My, and as the Mac was still connected to his Apple ID account, it showed him the location where the thief lived.

    “When someone asked Sweeney if he’d at least gotten his laptop back, Sweeney answered “No. I was creeped the hell out by having unexpectedly received the kid’s address, and turned off Find My iPhone on all of my devices.”

    “But when the blog AppleInsider accused Sweeney of “an incredibly bad leap of logic” — Sweeney responded. “You’re idealizing this issue as good guys tracking criminals to their lairs, but when Find My or Google’s similar tech points a device owner to a device possessor’s home, one must anticipate the presence of families and kids and innocent used device buyers, and ask whether it’s really appropriate for a platform to use GPS and shadowy mesh network tech to set up physical confrontations among individuals.”

    Now, not to belabor the obvious, but this set of arguments is idiotic. First, a guy steals your laptop and you immediately assume this is “a kid.” Code for random minor child, probably non-white, not responsible for his actions. (That’s not what I think, that’s what this dude thinks.)

    Second, the assumption that everyone is entitled to absolute personal privacy, even (or possibly especially) criminals. Which is moronic all on its own.

    Third, the danger is that physical confrontations will happen in the presence of families and kids. Yes, if regular Normies use this tool to find out who stole their phone, innocent blood will run in the streets.

    This jackass runs one of the biggest media companies in the world. Epic Games is a huge company worth billions. (In case you were wondering why games suck lately, this is why. This guy and his equally moronic yes-men.)

    He’s a member of the elite. He thinks Americans are scum. They are stupid, and must be controlled. They cannot be trusted with “Find My iPhone.”

    Meanwhile, the DemocRat Party is trying to entice mentally ill young men to kill their rival in a presidential election. They’re still out there doing it 24/7, and these elites are fine with that. Anything that increases their grip, their control, pushes their team forward, its all good.

    Until the Molotov Cockatiel starts nesting in -their- town. Then, suddenly, its no good. Can’t we all just get along?

    I think it will reflect badly on us if we let morons like this guy continue to run the show. History will sneer.

    Like

  24. You can smell the fear stink from this congresscritter Rakin.

    https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/08/05/new-jamie-raskin-says-congress-will-disqualify-trump-after-the-election-threatens-civil-war-n2177785

    I rather doubt that Congress, this one or the next, would do something quite so stupid. Or ballsy. They might posture around such a vote, but actually vote to overturn? No. They balked in 2020. They wont go there this one. That cuts both ways of course.

    But we have the first overt, clear language, non-coded, red-letter, “out loud” declaration that “Democracy” now means “Ruled by Democrat Party.”

    Shark is lining up the jump run.

    Like

    2. I’ve been worried about this scenario for a long time, but kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t give the wrong people any ideas. Now that they have them, though, I may as well spill.

      The Supreme Court, in slapping down the states that tried to bar Donald Trump from the ballot, showed the path by which it could be done legally. State officials cannot declare Trump an insurrectionist, and thus barred by the 14th Amendment from running for national office. Only Congress can do that.

      The conclusion that follows is simple: if the Democrats win 218 seats in the House and 50 in the Senate in November*, they can take all of a victorious Donald Trump’s electoral votes and stuff them up his [censored]. The new Congress comes in on January 3rd. Certification of the electoral votes happens, as you probably recall, on January 6th. The Democrats, if they are in control of both chambers, have three days in which to pass a bill declaring Trump an insurrectionist against the United States. If that measure passes both chambers, there is no chance that it won’t be stuck under the Autopen and signed into law.

      *218 House seats is a majority. 50 in the Senate isn’t, but recall that the sitting Vice-President gets a tie-breaking vote, and the VP’s term does not end until the 20th.

      That doesn’t make Cackles the President, necessarily. In this scenario, she still has a minority of the electoral votes … unless Congress decides that the votes cast for an insurrectionist are not merely blank votes, but null and void. Harris gets a majority of the “valid” votes, and is elected. This would definitely get taken to the Supreme Court, which stands a good chance of rejecting that interpretation.

      Instead, you have nobody with a majority. The House then chooses who will be President from the top three vote-getters. Theoretically there is only one vote-getter, Harris, but there is the possibility of faithless electors who voted for somebody else. If other people get electoral votes that way, the top two of them join Harris for the selection in the House. I will let you imagine the scenarios that spring from that: it’d take too long to elucidate them all.

      You thought we had some serious plot-twists coming before. As usual, we have no idea.

      Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. One leetle problem for them — President Trump has never been charged with ‘insurrection’. The Stalinist show trial in New Yuck had nothing to do with ‘insurrection’, just a bunch of fake charges that could only be raised by contorting the law into a 5-dimensional pretzel.

      What they really hate Trump for is winning elections.

      Liked by 1 person

  26. It appears Harris will take Walz as her VP. Couldn’t take Shapiro because the JOOOOOS, as an old Jewish regular over in the Wall Street Journal comments used to say. (The WSJ actually had a community going in its, “Best of the Web,” column, but they decided they needed to, “moderate,” it and a bunch of folks bailed).

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Vance hinted that GOP speculation was that Sharpio said “Thanks for the offer, but No Thanks” with an undercurrent of “oh, hell no.” That if even remotely considering 2028, that the Harris ticket was a rabbit hole he was not willingly following down. Essentially, smart dude.

      Like

  27. The hardware store where I work seems to be reeling from crisis to management-induced crisis on a daily basis. There was a quarterly bonus – right after that, hours got cut without warning. People get called back in on a moment’s notice for short days when, surprise surprise, someone has to call out sick (a bunch of those are stress, I’m guessing) and there weren’t enough people scheduled to take up the slack. Ads of “we’re hiring!” are up everywhere (they’re not, at least not here), while customers keep complaining there’s not enough people. When they’re not complaining about the temperature inside – old building design, and the way management requires doors open down in Lumber all day means there’s no way the store stays below about 80.

    One person who usually works in blinds is swooping in to take a regular cash register when she can to up her listed sales, because management’s goal for her actual department was 80K last month and they’ve upped it to 120K this month. She has no idea where they got that number and absolutely no idea if there will be any sale that’d bring in customers to clear that kind of sales.

    On top of that the computers have been throwing all kinds of weird program faults, accelerating this week, to the point that we’re having to restart a self-checkout that knocked itself offline about every 20 minutes, and the regular registers have now started a hiccup where someone paying in cash now sets off the message for agreeing to “6 months same as cash” terms; cashiers keep punching it off, but it’s a message that pops up on the PIN pad in front of the customer, and no one knows what’ll happen if some customer actually pays attention and pushes accept. Supposedly IT has been called. Multiple times.

    And, of course, every other customer is complaining about how much things cost.

    I don’t know how much more chaos anyone can take.

    Liked by 1 person

  28. To understand How We Got Here, realize, this state of Chaos has been the goal pretty much all along…

    They have been, and are, utilizing The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis:

    The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

    Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

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