Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Another guest]

Higgie, you know why all of this is, it happens in medicine too, it's just that that career takes so long and is so controlled/regulated that eventually you'll get a job, since demand is so high. It's all cycles, as you guys know. The immigrants you showed earlier with the indian/east asian kids had major pressure from their parents to "do well in school" so of course they did well, knowing that as immigrants from a s-hole country, they now couldn't blow the chance they have in front of them. But it also overestimates the value of "education" in the sense that it is more about dedication and rule following than it is actual intelligence. That's why people of european descent, as gifted as anyone, in later generations are fairly indifferent if they aren't genetically/constitutionally competitive. What's more, the job an intelligent Joe could get as HVAC or plumber, etc now is FAR more valuable than a system controlled physician, or rat race lawyer. With the abuse of people through big government and monetary repression, most industries are controlled by the psychopath political class anyway, making advancing in this society and culture fairly meaningless, as your actual efforts or accomplishments mean less and less (and connections mean the most). Or worse, they elevate incompetent identity groups over those who actually know and do things.

I know you all know this, but some of these posts act like you don't. The question is only, will enough people remain and actually have kids (europeans) so that the US doesn't turn into a total 3rd world s-hole? The poster from South Africa shows you that if that is done or allowed, it will happen.

At the rate we are going now, America will be South Africa in 3-4 years. America will Zimbabwe in ten.

[Guest]

Higgie, you know why all of this is, it happens in medicine too, it's just that that career takes so long and is so controlled/regulated that eventually you'll get a job, since demand is so high. It's all cycles, as you guys know. The immigrants you showed earlier with the indian/east asian kids had major pressure from their parents to "do well in school" so of course they did well, knowing that as immigrants from a s-hole country, they now couldn't blow the chance they have in front of them. But it also overestimates the value of "education" in the sense that it is more about dedication and rule following than it is actual intelligence. That's why people of european descent, as gifted as anyone, in later generations are fairly indifferent if they aren't genetically/constitutionally competitive. What's more, the job an intelligent Joe could get as HVAC or plumber, etc now is FAR more valuable than a system controlled physician, or rat race lawyer. With the abuse of people through big government and monetary repression, most industries are controlled by the psychopath political class anyway, making advancing in this society and culture fairly meaningless, as your actual efforts or accomplishments mean less and less (and connections mean the most). Or worse, they elevate incompetent identity groups over those who actually know and do things.

I know you all know this, but some of these posts act like you don't. The question is only, will enough people remain and actually have kids (europeans) so that the US doesn't turn into a total 3rd world s-hole? The poster from South Africa shows you that if that is done or allowed, it will happen.

At the rate we are going now, America will be South Africa in 3-4 years. America will Zimbabwe in ten.

My Dutch parents lived there in the fifties when apartheid just took off. My mom did not like that and they returned to the Netherlands. My father always maintained that if the ANC would be in power, the country would tank within a generation. I always fiercely opposed him. My dad has been dead for over a decade now. Sorry dad, you were right.

[Higgenbotham]

Higgie, you know why all of this is...

It's because we've been in the maintenance phase of a declining civilization since the 1970s. Back in 1982, when I interviewed on campus, one of the recruiters (Kimberly-Clark) asked me if I had any "mechanical ability" which indicated that all they really needed was glorified mechanics, not engineers.

What's more, the job an intelligent Joe could get as HVAC or plumber, etc now is FAR more valuable...

That's a symptom that we're in the maintenance phase.

When was the last refinery built in the United States?

As of January 1, 2022, there were 130 operable petroleum refineries in the United States.

The newest refinery in the United States is the Texas International Terminals 45,000 b/cd refinery in Channelview, Texas, which was operable on January 1, 2022, but actually started operating in February, 2022.

However, the newest refinery with significant downstream unit capacity is Marathon's facility in Garyville, Louisiana. That facility came online in 1977 with an initial atmospheric distillation unit capacity of 200,000 b/cd, and as of January 1, 2022, it had a capacity of 585,000 b/cd.

Capacity has also been added to existing refineries through upgrades or new construction. Some recent examples of large increases include:

In 2012, Motiva upgraded its refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, making it the largest U.S. refinery, with a capacity of 626,000 b/cd as of January 1, 2022.

In 2015, Valero expanded its Corpus Christi, Texas refinery after previous expansions, bringing its capacity as of January 1, 2022, to 290,000 b/cd.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php? ... 0%20b%2Fcd.

A US lawyer told me Belarus had an upside down economy because an auto mechanic made more money than a lawyer in Belarus. That sounds like a right side up economy to me, albeit at a lower level of complexity.

Soon we will be following the FSU into the collapse phase.

[Guest]

A South African myself, having lived here for 57 years, it is actually far-far worse then most know. South Africa is actually in a death spiral. There is absolutely nothing that you can think of that is not broken. ANC continue now to sow racial division with employment race quotas and now race quotas for water. You cannot make this sh%t up.

Any idea the strain load shedding has on mortuaries, hospitals, clinics, water purification plants and many other essential services. Now the ANC want to nationalize the health sector. A good friend of mine had a hernia operation last week and had to recover lying on the hospital floor. All of this so the ANC can control the money, contracts and tenders - that all go to family and cadres. Really, really bad!

Crime is at levels never seen before, like a war zone. For your own safety DO NOT travel here until and only if things turn around for the better.

[Higgenbotham]

I put a little more detail into some of this awhile back. But the big picture reason for these details is that we're in the maintenance phase of a declining civilization.

The tests conducted by Anresco were done on 29 foods commonly found on grocery store shelves. According to the report, glyphosate residues were found in:

General Mills' Cheerios at 1,125.3 parts per billion (ppb)

The food companies did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-glyph ... 30379.html

This goes back to a few comments I've made in the past about the fact that major US corporations do not want smart or ethical employees and deliberately screen them out of hiring processes.

The above illustrates why. General Mills does not want an internal employee raising the alarm on such a topic as covered above. They got decades of lead time and made billions of dollars while this issue festered before a smart external entity figured it out.

Now for the true story related to the above. When I was a senior at the University of Michigan soon to be graduating in Chemical Engineering Summa Cum Laude, I walked into an on-campus interview with General Mills. The recruiter from General Mills looked through my material and told me point blank, "You're too smart to work here."

It has nothing to do with age discrimination in my case. I was 21 years old at the time.

Other large companies were more subtle. For example, during an on-campus interview with Kimberly-Clark, the recruiter asked, "Do you have any mechanical ability?" He gave the example of rebuilding race cars and said ideally they would be looking for someone who has done something like that. Seriously? They needed an engineer who spends time rebuilding race cars on the side, rather than concentrating on their chosen profession?

[Higgenbotham]

A South African myself, having lived here for 57 years, it is actually far-far worse then most know. South Africa is actually in a death spiral. There is absolutely nothing that you can think of that is not broken. ANC continue now to sow racial division with employment race quotas and now race quotas for water. You cannot make this sh%t up.

Any idea the strain load shedding has on mortuaries, hospitals, clinics, water purification plants and many other essential services. Now the ANC want to nationalize the health sector. A good friend of mine had a hernia operation last week and had to recover lying on the hospital floor. All of this so the ANC can control the money, contracts and tenders - that all go to family and cadres. Really, really bad!

Crime is at levels never seen before, like a war zone. For your own safety DO NOT travel here until and only if things turn around for the better.

South Africa appears to be trying to hold onto a maintenance phase but can't even do that.

[Higgenbotham]

Fast forward close to two thousand years and it’s far from difficult to see how the same pattern of elite extinction through the collapse of political complexity will likely work out here in North America. The ruling elites of our society, like those of the late Roman Empire, are superbly skilled at manipulating and parasitizing a fantastically elaborate bureaucratic machine which includes governments, business firms, universities, and many other institutions among its components. That’s what they do, that’s what they know how to do, and that’s what all their training and experience has prepared them to do. Thus their position is exactly equivalent to that of French aristocrats before 1789, but they’re facing the added difficulty that the vast mechanism on which their power depends has maintenance costs that their civilization can no longer meet. As the machine fails, so does their power.

Nor are they particularly well prepared to make the transition to a radically different way of exercising power. Imagine for a moment that one of the current US elite—an executive from a too-big-to-fail investment bank, a top bureaucrat from inside the DC beltway, a trust-fund multimillionaire with a pro forma job at the family corporation, or what have you—were to turn up in some chaotic failed state on the fringes of the industrial world, with no money, no resources, no help from abroad, and no ticket home. What’s the likelihood that, without anything other than whatever courage, charisma, and bare-knuckle fighting skills he might happen to have, some such person could equal Odoacer’s feat, win the loyalty and obedience of thousands of gang members and unemployed mercenaries, and lead them in a successful invasion of a neighboring country?

There are people in North America who could probably carry off a feat of that kind, but you won’t find them in the current ruling elite. That in itself defines part of the path to dark age America: the replacement of a ruling class that specializes in managing abstract power through institutions with a ruling class that specializes in expressing power up close and in person, using the business end of the nearest available weapon. The process by which the new elite emerges and elbows its predecessors out of the way, in turn, is among the most reliable dimensions of decline and fall; we’ll talk about it next week.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... tical.html

Also, I think that once the numbers of births start to decline, that is the point at which the rate of physical expansion of the civilization also starts to slow down and, therefore, traditional male activities like building infrastructure begin to decline and the civilization enters into a maintenance phase before the inevitable decline. The mix of jobs begins to change and women are able to better do many of the jobs that become prominent during the maintenance and decline phase (like health care and education, which really just serve to milk out the surplus of the civilization before it collapses). This shift in the job mix has the effect of accelerating the decline (further reducing births and the effects that result from the further reduction in births).

[Higgenbotham]

Complete post and adjacent posts containing the excerpt from the Archdruid on the previous page can be found here:

https://thearchdruidreport-archive.2006 ... index.html

[Higgenbotham]

Difference Between Asian and White SAT Scores

Average Asian Score Minus Average White Score


2018...75
2019..109
2020..113
2021..127
2022..131

https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sa ... -over-time

This data should be crosschecked with official sources like the College Board.

As far as the poor achievement of young whites relative to Asians in the US, I considered the idea of going further into depth on that yesterday and decided against it because it would take maybe as many as two dozen posts to cover all the subtleties. So that's also just covered with the broad brush of we're well into the maintenance phase before the decline into the dark age and will leave it at that. Though I think the apparent acceleration means we will be leaving the maintenance phase very shortly and entering into a steep decline.

[aeden]

Sun Jul 01, 2012 9:29 pm
A guy wants to increase existing production. Thugs want 120k impact study to what he already does.
Evil and plain economic murder.
Sun Jul 01, 2012 10:11 pm a, also my thanks for posting the link to that William Black testimony. At 6:06, he states that Central Banks for centuries have routinely demanded that boards of directors remove incompetent bank CEOs, until now. I didn't know that, but it's one more piece of evidence indicating we have a brewing crisis of multi-century scope rather than 80 year scope.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=svb+collaspe&ia=web
https://www.theverge.com/23635692/silic ... re-capital