Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Cell phones vastly reduced crime on stranded females but everything has its price. Women are still going to want their pound of flesh so to speak and they will figure out how to get it. Bezos et al should understand this but I'm pretty sure they do not.

The men will too. When the men at Cornell said "free pussy" they meant it. It was free in such situations 40 years ago. Cell phones haven't changed that except to leave a record. The lesson learned will be to continue getting it but don't leave a record.

As the new dark age tightens its grip, the general trend will be for leadership to appear to worsen and for more frequent changeover of leaders. Whoever gets the Senate seat in Texas will likely be worse than the one who vacated it. Whoever replaces Trump will likely be worse than Trump, as difficult as that is for the left to believe.

[Higgenbotham]

As the new dark age tightens its grip, the general trend be for leadership to appear to worsen and for more frequent changeover of leaders.

AI does another fabulous job here.

In the new dark age, will the general trend will be for leadership to appear to worsen and for more frequent changeover of leaders?

AI Overview

Based on historical patterns of societal contraction—often metaphorically called "Dark Ages"—the general trend does indeed lean toward volatile leadership changeovers and a perceived decline in leadership quality, driven by systemic collapse rather than just bad actors.

When complex civilizations fracture, the institutional guardrails that ensure peaceful, competent transitions disappear. This creates two distinct dynamics:

1. Accelerated Leadership Changeover (The Velocity of Chaos)

During periods of structural decline, leadership becomes highly unstable.

Loss of Legitimacy: When a government can no longer provide security, basic infrastructure, or economic stability, it loses its "mandate."
The Survival Loop: Leaders are frequently overthrown, assassinated, or replaced because they cannot solve systemic crises (like resource scarcity or climate shifts).

Historical Example: During the Crisis of the Third Century in the Roman Empire, a 50-year period of near-collapse, there were over 26 claimaints to the imperial throne. Most were military generals who ruled for only a few months before being assassinated.

2. The Appearance of Worsening Leadership (Perception vs. Reality)

Leadership often looks significantly worse during a dark age, though this is a mix of actual skill degradation and impossible circumstances.

The Impossible Job: A leader in a golden age looks brilliant because they are managing abundance. A leader in a dark age looks incompetent because they are managing unavoidable triage. Even a political genius cannot fix a collapsed supply chain or an depleted agricultural base.

Shrinking Talent Pools: As centralized education, bureaucracy, and institutional knowledge break down, the pool of trained, strategic leaders shrinks.

Shift to Warlordism: Survival replaces governance. Complex, forward-thinking diplomacy is replaced by short-term, transactional, and often brutal rule (warlordism). To the citizens, this looks like a massive regression in quality and morality.

The Cyclical Exception

While fragmentation causes high turnover early on, it eventually bottoms out into a different kind of stability: highly localized, stagnant feudalism. Once power shrinks down to small, manageable territories (like a local warlord or a fortified manor), a brutal but durable form of local leadership often emerges, ending the rapid cycle of changeovers until a new integration phase begins.

So as the next round of Socialism or Socialistic leadership emerges, expect things to worsen further and for some other brand of incompetent leadership to quickly take its place.

[aedens]

Yes it already started. My view was from February 2023 in to 2024.
The delay is just traction in the current design wasting.
Move from EU to Thailand and the US. was leading indicator of the broader flow.
It matters for currency, credit, and commodity markets which is the last leg of the chair they will
try to remove to implode limited value added zones that are already clear enough.
Complete reset into complete digital currency in the already polished model entirely new tyrannical police state already well advanced
so yes, the old system will be wiped. Taxpayers here are to be emptied blood bags in the Vampire Economy as they think they do just that with the incoming Brain Virus labeled Democrats. The next three years will drain what was able and only allowed to survive the next few years as already is known as the Carbon Cults hardens the rot around them as warned.

[tim]

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p ... rich-leads

The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted
This is Essay #3 in the series Truth Be Told.
CHARLES HUGH SMITH
19 HOURS AGO

31

2

10

That The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who’ve Been Looted is so obvious that it is strictly taboo in the polite circles of those tasked with protecting The Hidden Looting by the Rich behind the cliches of “market forces” and the many carefully obscured mechanisms of state subsidies, tax giveaways, insider trading, market manipulation, and so on.

An astute reader summarized the dynamic succinctly: “Looting by the rich is hidden, silent, not criminalized while the physical looting by the poor is overt, thunderous and criminal.”

Note that “the market” doesn’t dictate what is legal and what is criminalized; the state dictates what is legal and what is criminal. This establishes the second truth which is taboo in the status quo:

“The Market” and the State are one system. Every claim that these are separate is self-serving misdirection / artifice. Consider the difference between what happens when Average Citizen contacts their state representative or a regulatory agency, and what happens when Tech Bro Billionaire contacts their state representative or a regulatory agency with an offer to fund $10 million of campaign contributions if various regulations and tax codes are amended.

The truth is “the state” is a “market” for corruption and self-service in which the “market” is hidden from view: The auction that dictates what’s legal and what’s criminal is won by the highest bidders, who are of course the wealthiest and most powerful few, who then dictate state policies that expand and protect their wealth and power by looting the powerless many.

French economist Frederic Bastiat famously described this dynamic of “market” and “state” generating legal plunder, i.e. legal looting. Once the purchase of state power for the purposes of self-enrichment becomes normalized--what I term moral decay leading to moral collapse--it becomes more profitable to pursue legalized looting than actually create authentic value.

This is why we see extreme wealth-power inequality increasing while the quality of goods and services plummets. There are no “rewards” for the richest few to risk capital by increasing the quality of goods and services when political influence is both cheap and risk-free: just “buy” a tax break or subsidy or regulations that protects your lavish state contracts from competition and expands the power of your monopoly / cartel.

The reason why this dynamic of legalized looting by the rich expands until it breaks the status quo is that it is self-reinforcing. Those who aren’t delighted to further enrich the moneylenders in the temple with their labor quit in disgust, while those with zero scruples and limitless greed devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot.

Politicians who don’t kiss the ring of Tech Bro Billionaires to raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions lose elections, as once again those with any shred of integrity self-select out of the political / “market” cesspool.

As Bastiat put it, the status quo boils down to “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen”. What’s seen is an endless spew of paeans to the glories of “the market,” scrappy innovators creating new products in garages that generate billions in wealth, blah-blah-blah, or paeans to the glories of the state protecting us from the evils of exploitation, blah-blah-blah, all of which is the necessary cover story to cloak the market-state system of legalized looting by the rich and the criminalization of any blowback by those being looted.

We’re being looted in so many ways that are not seen until the scales fall from our eyes. Billionaires manage to exploit tax shelters intended for the middle class to protect millions of dollars in gains from any taxes. Inflation in goods and services that is gutting the bottom 90% doesn’t affect the wealthy, as they spend an inconsequential share of their wealth and income on essential goods and services.

As in any conflict staged for show, “the market” is glorified as the saint and “the state” is demonized--or on other stages, the roles are reversed. Neither staging reflects the truth: there is only one system, and the only possible output of this morality-free system of self-enrichment is the terminal expansion of looting until the system breaks down.


This--


leads to this:

Legal looting by the rich--who have eliminated both the moral foundations of society and avenues of Redress as impediments to the ceaseless expansion of their wealth and power--leads to uncontrollable looting by those who have been looted--Retribution. I address all these dynamics in my book Investing In Revolution. If you can find another book that explains everything I explain, by all means buy that book. But there is no other such book to my knowledge.

[Higgenbotham]

tim, thank you for the well done summary you posted above by Charles Hugh Smith.

At the end of the summary he says, "Legal looting by the rich--who have eliminated both the moral foundations of society and avenues of Redress as impediments to the ceaseless expansion of their wealth and power--leads to uncontrollable looting by those who have been looted--Retribution. I address all these dynamics in my book Investing In Revolution. If you can find another book that explains everything I explain, by all means buy that book. But there is no other such book to my knowledge."

We touch on some of the nuances of that here, and the things I post by and large I have not seen anywhere else except in this summary by Charles Hugh Smith. It seems to me we are now heading into the "uncontrollable looting by those who have been looted--Retribution" and I don't really think the tech bros and their (primarily) Republican accomplices see the handwriting on the wall.

I am going to try to find the time to make 5 or 10 posts on things that come to mind from reading this summary.

[Higgenbotham]

First, let's go back to the specific example of the Amazon worker who died in the warehouse in Oregon.

This raises several issues with respect to what Charles Hugh Smith is discussing generally.

Amazon's response and the coverage of their accomplices in the legacy media boils down to two strategies:

Obfuscate and lie about the death of the worker.
Continue to tell fake stories about things like hamburger and lemonade stands in a attempt to illustrate how great capitalism is.

Neither strategy suffices.

The problem with the strategy is twofold.

One, for those who want to know the truth about what happened, they are going to be led exclusively to socialist and left-leaning sources. These sources, in addition to telling the truth about what really happened in sufficient detail using good investigative reporting, make cogent and valid points.

Two, the fake stories about hamburger and lemonade stands insult the listeners' or readers' intelligence. Then, the fact that the oligarchs have planted shills with fake names like "Andy Christian" on sites like Quora to tell these same bullshit stories doesn't help their case because it's obvious where this is coming from.

Not everybody is smart enough to figure all this out, but the suburban women in Houston, Dallas, and Austin are smart enough and have enough time on their hands, and that is probably all it is going to take to turn the Senate blue and maybe all of Texas eventually.

Major Ken Paxton Donor Endorses James Talarico in Texas
Published Oct 22, 2026 at 04:04 AM EDT

Thomas J. Henry, a prominent attorney and the founder of the personal injury law firm Thomas J. Henry Law, which has offices in five cities in Texas, announced his endorsement of Talarico in a video posted on X on Wednesday night.

https://www.newsweek.com/major-ken-paxt ... s-12603268

What this grifter personal injury attorney is doing is sticking his finger in the breeze and coming to the conclusion that Talarico is going to win, then trying to explain away the fact that he had supported Talarico's Republican opponent...as the new dark age tightens its grip.

Signs of the times in the new dark age. Maybe the owner of the local tattoo parlor or McDonald's franchise can weigh in on who to vote for...

Also, during the early stages of this breakdown, there were economic losers and beneficiaries. The beneficiaries were the corporations who could cookie cutter their outlets across a previously interesting and varied landscape, producing the forlorn, bland, and ugly architectural landscape that now exists across America. McDonalds perhaps being one of the first and best examples.

To capture this concept correctly, I would have needed to get the McDonald's, a tattoo parlor, a hole in the wall church, a dollar store and a billboard for a personal injury lawyer all in one photo. It wouldn't have been too difficult except that traffic was moving (slowly).

[Higgenbotham]

The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted

CHARLES HUGH SMITH

Those who aren’t delighted to further enrich the moneylenders in the temple with their labor quit in disgust, while those with zero scruples and limitless greed devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot.

I sit at one point on the wheel which gives one perspective on this.

My cohort turns 65 this year. I've talked pretty extensively here about what I call The 97th Percentile. In a high school class of 300, The 97th Percentile could ideally be characterized as those who ranked from roughly Position 4 through Position 15. They are those who do the work without question and strive to do the best job they can. You could spend somewhere between 4 and 12 years around these people and get a pretty good feel for who fits in at that level. If a teacher is an entitled goldbrick who teaches two classes while wasting oodles of taxpayer money, The 97th Percentile will fear, aid and abet him without question.

I'll get back to that in a minute.

So Tuesday I went to my daughter's school to pick her up. School started about the first of September. Tuesday, for the first time this year, I saw one of the grandparents of a girl who is in my daughter's class. He's a Business professor here and I would put him right around my age. We were both happy to catch up. He told me he's been spending a lot of time working on AI. Been very busy helping businesses integrate AI into the operations. Lots of work. Then he turned the topic to retirement. Doesn't know what he would do if he retired.

Now I will switch back to those previously mentioned who were in Positions 4 through 15 and discuss an observation. Once they graduated college, nobody ever heard from them. The reason is, I think, that those at The 97th Percentile in a professional capacity in this day and age barely have the time to keep up with the work and other demands that are being placed on them. From my observation, these people sort of disappear into this black hole of "professional employment" for decades. As they near retirement, they will pop their heads up and proclaim that fact. Then, one at a time, again, in my observation, once retired, they will post photos of themselves on Facebook, LinkedIn, or what have you of the golf clubs on their back or whatever. They look like hell and are not even recognizable vis a vis their younger selves but apparently in their minds they have made it and can now proclaim it to the world, warts and all. And, as I posted not too long ago, something like 93% of then will have at least one chronic condition.

That bring us to the point of the quote above from Charles Hugh Smith, "devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot."

This might sound a little harsh to some. It does to me. I mean, I know some of them are good people. At best, they probably didn't intend for their actions to produce that result. But that is what has happened, and at best they were too myopic to see the result. But that is in fact, in the big picture, the result that was produced.

Now back to the good professor. I described to him some of what I've observed with others, as stated above, then questioned for just how long these newly retired will last on the golf course or what have you. The idea being that decades of relentless pursuit of enriching "the man" changes a person. It reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's characterization of the gulag system as the sewage disposal system. They go into our sewage disposal system intact, eager and fresh and leave ragged, worn out and unrecognizable. They may have a temporary pile of loot or an income stream supposedly coming but remain blissfully unaware that that will probably be taken away in the Fourth Turning and they won't have the energy to regroup.