Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[FullMoon]

That is a lot to ask. Must be a private preschool. Public schools here don't seem to ask for any but rather do a good job of tapping into the gravy train of state/federal funds and paying for everything the kids need at school. Breakfast and lunch are "free"(think cheap hotel continental breakfast food) and basic supplies are provided. You might have gone overboard on the soap box car and I bet you had the best one there. If not, that's an extremely competitive area. They'll be smart enough to get your preps... 2 leggeds are the trickiest.

[FullMoon]

The Fall rain and cooler weather finally came in early in the week and the next morning I planted a crimson clover cover crop in the open areas of the garden. It's already sprouting. The mice are temporarily gone, but on Saturday I'll be picking up an outdoor farm cat that is a proven hunter who, according to the owner, drops her prey at the back door as aeden described (thanks again aeden). I had forgotten what my mother taught indirectly some 50 years ago. She had a Siamese cat who sometimes announced her arrival by flinging birds against the back door. There was never a rodent doing any damage in the garden. Like the Boomers who had the Silents and GIs doing everything for them as they grew up, I took it for granted.

My free range chickens are up every mouse they could find. They're smaller sized mountain mice. But anywhere I dug, they ripped up the garden. It's good to be learning all these lessons in the good times, bad times will make mistakes less forgiving.

[Higgenbotham]

That is a lot to ask. Must be a private preschool. Public schools here don't seem to ask for any but rather do a good job of tapping into the gravy train of state/federal funds and paying for everything the kids need at school. Breakfast and lunch are "free"(think cheap hotel continental breakfast food) and basic supplies are provided. You might have gone overboard on the soap box car and I bet you had the best one there. If not, that's an extremely competitive area. They'll be smart enough to get your preps... 2 leggeds are the trickiest.

You're hitting on some of the things that I wanted to watch for. It is a private school run by a Christian church. I attended the parade. Out of 6 kids in my daughter's class, 2 didn't make "a form of transportation" at all. 2 more threw something together at the last minute that was passable, but not very good. Roughly 22 kids participated. Of the 22, I would say 4 put something together that was equivalent or better than what I did. It surprised me it was that many. Judging from that at least, there still appears to be a lot of excess and proverbial fiddling before Rome burns, more than I would have estimated. I talked to one couple who has a kid in the class in such a way to open the door for them to be able to say the equivalent of, "This is bullshit and we don't have time for this stuff." They didn't. But they were concerned that the elementary school at another location conducted an active shooter drill last week. As I said, it's a Christian school and, you know, we did have an election which had an outcome that some are not too happy about.

Speaking of such things, I didn't follow up with more detail about my grain pickup of a couple weeks ago. The new people who showed up didn't seem to be prepping, as none of them were buying large sacks of grain or other prepping supplies. They seemed to be buying the quantity that would save them some money this month. A lot of them looked like immigrants. They looked worried and poor.

[Higgenbotham]

Today, the Congressional Budget Office published its annual 10-year Budget and Economic Outlook. According to the CBO’s latest estimates, in 2024 the U.S. government will pass a grim and once-unimaginable milestone. The federal debt has gotten so large that spending on interest to service that debt now exceeds federal spending on national defense.

A startling projection

What’s startling about the CBO’s latest projections is that just one year ago, the Congressional budget scorekeepers estimated that interest payments would exceed defense spending in late 2028. By 2029, the CBO then projected, we’d be spending $1,041 billion on defense and $1,071 billion on interest.

Now that threshold will be crossed this year. In 2024, CBO estimates the federal government will spend $850 billion on defense, compared to $870 billion on interest.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothec ... -spending/

https://youtu.be/AheBb-MOxy0?t=3617

Niall
1:00:17
Ferguson was in Australia recently and he made a fascinating comment I heard him observe that down he's an economic
1:00:23
historian of course that down through the ages no great country has remained
1:00:29
great for long when the cost of servicing its debt exceeds what it
1:00:35
spends on defense well America crossed that Rubicon as I understand it last Financial year.

[aeden]

It will be very difficult to break the collective stupidity urban debt constructed death zone years late.
We anticipate more of it for now as not to be proven wrong and dated.
As before they forgot to record the craven wave of fiscal damage and crime as countless groups
imploded to preserve capital value maps as moving. Tiny Bubbles was told bluntly and yes even the Amish had to Ride to avail the carnage
done in detriments by intent. The measure of Cipolla's five fundamental laws is only matched by the regard in the Cantillon effect that eradicated them in the wasting period simply impossible to miss. As to the white paper for the MMT cult revenue streams as they
become labor sticky wage bundles in direct relationship as Marshall indicated to us it is impossible to miss the pretext
to Keynes delight in the euthanasia of the rentier class named you. The decline window did start in the
mid Seventy's and yes, they have the productivity maps to what it is and where you now are.
As it was put a very long time ago the used an Awl tool to piece the ear to the Manor door to prove their debt
was real and servitude to the House.
You still speculate why they send them to the trenches proves the five laws.
As for our condition few can remember why Washington went into Kentucky
and why in the Hell since the Steele documents are the criminal participants not in Leavenworth and
shut out as they derailed the Common law with malice. These ideological craven fools are already poised to erase
you and your posterity as the paraded to mock your existence with story time with the actually brain diseased.
The old language conveyed what they did what did ensue to the educated 𐤀𐤃𐤍 fools.

Capex matrix for node system energy margin nodes appear to be kind functional.

When the Steele criminals are caged then American conservatives will and should be sending reciprocal
"campaign support" for Farage in the next UK election, and ... only then new trade deal will be on the table
after Farage a true Friend to our Peoples becomes PM.

When the Steele criminals are caged, we shall listen.
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1854163550 ... dent-trump
U.K. conservatives know that Trump’s administration will prioritize a strong Anglo-American alliance,
particularly with shared conservative ideals on trade, defense, and foreign policy.

[Higgenbotham]

The mice are temporarily gone, but on Saturday I'll be picking up an outdoor farm cat that is a proven hunter...

So today I went out to Trump country to pick up the cat. As the crow flies, I'm about 25 miles from downtown Austin. Out here, the vote was slightly in favor of Trump. The cat was at a farm, as the crow flies, about 50 miles from downtown Austin. That county went 80 percent for Trump. Starting about 40 miles out, there were a lot of Trump signs. So when I got there, I asked the woman what she felt when she found out Trump won. Her answer was one word: "Relief." According to her, the cat kills and eats mice and rats, and we need to let the cat get acclimated inside for at least 3 days before putting her to work.

[Higgenbotham]

Contrary to models of development which provide a subset of policy prescriptions at the policy makers’ disposal (e.g. Washington Consensus) or a fundamentalist adherence to a particular economic tradition (e.g. neo-liberalism), the philosophical intentionality of the Beijing Consensus is reflected in the infamous words of Deng Xiaoping “I do not care if it is a white cat or a black cat … It is a good cat so long as it catches mice”.

Gray is OK too.

[Higgenbotham]

https://news.yahoo.com/white-men-no-lon ... 57841.html

Let me begin by making this point as clearly as possible. There is absolutely nothing worse for the combat effectiveness of a military, than attempting to use recruiting as a social engineering program.

It was reported in this newspaper recently how the US Army has seen a dramatic fall in the number of white recruits, as the Military.com website found that the army fell 10,000 short of its 65,000 enlistment target.

Underpinning this drop was a dramatic decrease in white recruits from 44,042 in 2018, to just 25,070 in 2023, leading to the proportion of white recruits falling from 56.4 per cent of all recruits in 2018, to just 44 per cent. According to the US Census from 2022, around 59 per cent of all US citizens were from white backgrounds. The US military is 17 per cent women, so the recruiting crisis is primarily one among white men.

Clearly, something inside the US Army’s recruitment system is failing, both in terms of targets being drastically missed, and a failure to recruit effectively among the nation’s largest ethnic group.

The UK Armed Forces are in a similar depressing situation. Recruiting targets are consistently not met, but the main priority is not to get more people to join up – it is to get more non-white people and women to join up.

POLITICS
The Army’s answer to a lack of recruits is a prep course to boost low scores. It’s working
BY LOLITA C. BALDOR
Updated 11:16 AM CST, November 10, 2024

FORT JACKSON, S.C. (AP) — Index cards taped to a large board on the wall at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, reveal the sometimes blunt and gritty reasons that new recruits took a chance at a last-ditch program to get into the Army.

“Eviction notices motivate me,” one said. Others talked about getting free college, a good job and a way to better themselves.

Known as the “Why Wall,” the board is meant as an inspiration for the recruits who could not meet the Army’s physical and academic test standards, so they went into the Future Soldier Prep Course. It provides weeks of instruction to help them bring up their scores.

Started as a trial program two years ago to help boost dismal recruiting numbers, the prep course is fueling the Army’s enlistment comeback. Recruiting has suffered for all the military branches in recent years coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid low unemployment and stiff competition from private companies able to pay more and provide similar or better benefits.

By the end of this budget year on Sept. 30, the Army had made its recruiting goal of 55,000, and service leaders said more than 13,000 of those recruits — or 24% — came into active duty through the prep course.

https://apnews.com/article/army-recruit ... 5ea6650b92

Noting that they dropped the goal from 65,000 to 55,000 then said they met it.

[Higgenbotham]

The other side is saying the election of Trump would be the end of America as we know it.

When Trump ran in 2016, there were people who were very concerned. This was already posted several years ago, but someone asked me what I thought of Trump. I said, "It's all bread and circuses anyway so might as well get some entertainment on the way down." At that time, early 2016, America as we knew it had already ended and the success of Trump was just a manifestation of it. Trump is one small step from what we've had toward a strongman. A strongman would have been beneficial in many areas, even at that time, and moreso now. So the emergence of Trump was just a recognition that a strongman would probably be beneficial. It has nothing to do with Trump. A full blown strongman will not emerge from the type of background Trump is from. Aeden recently posted on the Venezuelan gangs who took over an apartment building in Colorado while the owners and police and whoever else were unable to do anything about it. Venezuela, unfortunately, is the type of background from which a real strongman can emerge. That's the type of thing that we are starting to get, as in the early Spring robins are already out on the lawn. Some Americans have the background from which a real strongman can emerge too, like whichever cops will be on the other side of the apartment building takeover in Colorado and who will ultimately run the Venezuelan gangsters out, etc.

Transcript: Jeff Bezos’ Vile Suck-Up Moment with Trump Is Very Ominous

An interview with Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, who reflects on whether our institutions are surrendering to Trump's authoritarian second term in advance.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

This week, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Jeff Bezos issued an extraordinary tweet. He didn’t just congratulate Trump on his victory, he also went out of his way to hail Trump’s extraordinary political comeback. We think this is a bad sign of what’s coming. People in key institutional positions going out of their way to curry favor with Trump in advance. How bad is that going to get and what will the consequences be? Will Bunch, national columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a very good column about this, arguing that this bended knee to Trump suggests the beginning of America’s strongman era.

https://newrepublic.com/article/188186/ ... mp-ominous

[Higgenbotham]

JD Vance speech: Amazon funded Black Lives Matter so riots would destroy rival retailers

By Cameron Joseph Staff writer
Updated Aug. 15, 2024, 4:25 p.m. ET

In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to a conservative think tank on “woke capital” – and accused Amazon of funding Black Lives Matter in order to burn down the competition.

“Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” Mr. Vance said, referencing the riots that broke out in the summer of 2020, amid a wave of racial justice protests. “The people who are invested in destroying America via our corporate class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand.”

But when asked for comment about his 2021 remarks to the Claremont Institute on abortion and Black Lives Matter, a spokesman for Mr. Vance doubled down.

“Jeff Bezos’s companies promoted and donated to Black Lives Matter as BLM protestors destroyed countless brick and mortar businesses across the country – the very businesses that Amazon counts as direct competitors,” Vance spokesman William Martin says in an emailed statement. “Woke billionaires like Bezos have taken over corporations across the country and turned them against the American people. Senator Vance is absolutely right to call them out and will continue to do so.”

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/ ... n-abortion

I've said the same thing in these pages - without knowing Vance said it previously.

An unsupported allegation about Amazon
Thomas Frank, a left-leaning historian and author who has written extensively on American populism, says that Mr. Vance identified a phenomenon that has been going on for years – but took it to an extreme and unsupported conclusion.

“This combination of liberalism and capitalism, this does exist, and it’s real,” says Mr. Frank. But instead of just accusing companies of virtue signaling, Mr. Vance makes a giant leap in framing their rhetoric and actions as part of a sinister plot. Jeff Bezos wanting Main Street to burn? “That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. I would love to see his evidence for that.”

Vance is 100 percent correct. It's impossible that Bezos did not understand the ramifications of what he was and is doing. And it's impossible that he is not worried about being called out and the results of this election (along with Trump's age).