Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Higgenbotham
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Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by Higgenbotham »

Dmitry Orlov wrote:
Empires are held together through violence or the threat of violence. Both the U.S. and Russia were, and are, serviced by a legion of servants whose expertise is in using violence: soldiers, policemen, prison wardens, and private security consultants. Both countries have a surplus of battle-hardened men who have killed, who are psychologically damaged by the experience, and have no qualms about taking human life. In both countries, there are many, many people whose stock in trade is their use of violence, in offense or defense. No matter what else happens, they will be employed, or self-employed; preferably the former.

In a post-collapse situation, all of these violent men automatically fall into the general category of private security consultants. They have a way of creating enough work to keep their entire tribe busy: if you don’t hire them, they will still do the work, but against you rather than for you. Rackets of various sizes and shapes proliferate, and, if you have some property to protect, or wish to get something done, a great deal of your time and energy becomes absorbed by keeping your private security organization happy and effective. To round out the violent part of the population, there are also plenty of criminals. As their sentences expire, or as jail overcrowding and lack of resources force the authorities to grant amnesties, they are released into the wild, and return to a life of violent crime. But now there is nobody to lock them up again because the machinery of law enforcement has broken down due to lack of funds. This further exacerbates the need for private security, and puts those who cannot afford it at additional risk.

There is a continuum of sorts between those who can provide security and mere thugs. Those who can provide security also tend to know how to either employ or otherwise dispose of mere thugs. Thus, from the point of view of an uneducated security consumer, it is very important to work with an organization rather than with individuals. The need for security is huge: with a large number of desperate people about, anything that is not watched will be stolen. The scope of security-related activities is also huge: from sleepless grannies who sit in watch over the cucumber patch to bicycle parking lot attendants to house-sitters, and all the way to armed convoys and snipers on rooftops.

As the government, with its policing and law enforcement functions, atrophies, private, improvised security measures cover the security gap it leaves behind. In Russia, there was a period of years during which the police was basically not functioning: they had no equipment, no budget, and their salaries were not sufficient for survival. Murders went unsolved, muggings and burglaries were not even investigated. The police could only survive through graft. There was a substantial amount of melding between the police and organized crime. As the economy came back, it all got sorted out, to some extent. Where there is no reason to expect the economy to ever come back, one must learn how to make strange new friends, and keep them, for life.
Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century
by Dmitry Orlov
2005

https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/1 ... n-century/
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

Higgenbotham
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Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:28 pm

Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by Higgenbotham »

Higgenbotham wrote:
Mon Dec 04, 2023 1:32 pm
Dmitry Orlov wrote: In Russia, there was a period of years during which the police was basically not functioning: they had no equipment, no budget, and their salaries were not sufficient for survival. Murders went unsolved, muggings and burglaries were not even investigated.
As mentioned previously, things are heading in this direction. The below are just averages. In some locales, the police are likely functioning at a high level, but in others things are worse than the graphs depict.

I'm in the process of moving from a location where the police have been defunded to a location 20 miles away where there is still a strong police presence. People vote with their feet too.
Higgenbotham wrote:
Sun Apr 30, 2023 12:18 pm
Guest wrote:
Sun Apr 30, 2023 11:08 am


https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/11727754 ... ecord-high
This is from a link the NPR article referenced.

Image

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022 ... lf-in-2020
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

aeden
Posts: 13918
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 12:34 pm

Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by aeden »

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inli ... k=bNzb2_1B
thread: Molek
Discussion of the question began properly in 1935 with a monograph by Otto Eissfeldt.
Since at least 1921, scholars have claimed to have found tophetim.
The Cult of Molek, 189–92. Lawrence Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, Child Sacrifice at Carthage.
Lev. 18:21 covered this long ago. Evil is real and they will indeed receive the wage.
This alleged culture will indeed cease just as it was written.
Last edited by aeden on Mon Dec 04, 2023 10:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Higgenbotham
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Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by Higgenbotham »

Higgenbotham wrote:
Thu Nov 02, 2023 7:13 am
We're in the process of moving from about 15 miles outside the city to about 30 miles out so I won't have as much time to post for awhile. We can see cows from our back window - this is still primarily a farming area. There haven't been any problems in the current place we're living in, but I'm anticipating there will be. This is my first move in 18 plus years.
Higgenbotham wrote:
Mon Dec 04, 2023 1:51 pm
I'm in the process of moving from a location where the police have been defunded to a location 20 miles away where there is still a strong police presence. People vote with their feet too.
As long as our agriculture remains tied to a hypercentralized market economy in which crops are shipped worldwide and nobody lives off the agricultural produce of their own region, organic farming methods that permit long-term sustainability are going to be economically viable only in niche markets, and most farming in the industrial world will remain stuck in a self-terminating rut.

Of course that’s only one aspect of a much broader problem. Here in the United States, our farms are also hopelessly dependent on chemical fertilizers; we also burn up far more fossil fuel per capita than China’s ever dreamed of having, and far more of the products of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. None of that is sustainable. What that means, of course, is that sooner or later it will stop. That won’t be a sudden process, if only because oil and gas wells don’t suddenly turn off—they lose pressure gradually, descending to a trickle, and gimmicks such as hydrofracturing which boost production again for a little while have less and less effect the more often they’re repeated.

This time, in other words, China’s in for it, and so are we. There’s certainly a point to putting sustainable organic methods of agriculture, gardening, livestock rasing, and the rest of it into place in as much acreage as possible, if only because that’s what will be left once fossil fuel production drops far enough that chemical fertilizers price themselves out of the market, and people who know how to grow food using renewable inputs will be in a good position to teach others and save whatever can still be saved. The question is purely how much capital will be transformed into ruins, wreckage, and raw materials for salvage crews before the long ragged decline bottoms out a few hundred years from now and our descendants can begin laying the foundations for the successor civilizations of the far future.
https://www.ecosophia.net/surviving-cat ... ase-study/

After voting with your feet comes running for your life. Probably not too many years off. Armstrong's 2032 comes to mind.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

FullMoon
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Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by FullMoon »

I'm in the process of voting with my feet but have this nagging daily fear that it could turn to needing to run for it. Housing market makes moving difficult at present and it's not scary enough yet to just throw the stuff in a trailer and drive into the countryside. I'm hoping next year affords an opportunity for affordable real estate and with continued relative stability. It's a frightening position to be in and I might have to compromise on property quality if it gets too crazy. Do you think we'll get a chance to afford a ranch before all heck breaks loose?

Higgenbotham
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Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by Higgenbotham »

FullMoon wrote:
Mon Dec 04, 2023 4:22 pm
I'm in the process of voting with my feet but have this nagging daily fear that it could turn to needing to run for it. Housing market makes moving difficult at present and it's not scary enough yet to just throw the stuff in a trailer and drive into the countryside. I'm hoping next year affords an opportunity for affordable real estate and with continued relative stability. It's a frightening position to be in and I might have to compromise on property quality if it gets too crazy. Do you think we'll get a chance to afford a ranch before all heck breaks loose?
First I'm looking at what we said last time we discussed something like this.
Higgenbotham wrote:
Thu Jul 20, 2023 6:29 pm
FullMoon wrote:
Thu Jul 20, 2023 1:52 pm
Higg, what do you think about the housing market? What's the odds a bank closure and possible currency/debt crisis could make it a difficult time to buy property even with cash?
What you seem to be asking is not whether housing is a good value, but whether, if housing becomes cheaper in the future, transactions can actually take place. As you imply, housing could crash as a result of bank closures or possible currency/debt crisis but those conditions make it impossible to consummate most transactions at the low of the market as a practical matter. I think you are right to be considering that possibility. Offhand, I'd guess the odds of that happening are 50-75%. Someone might say that after the 2008 crisis property values stayed down for 3 or 4 years and went even lower than they did in 2008 so, not to worry, there will be plenty of chances to buy at lower prices after any banking crisis. I don't think there's any way to know whether that will be the case again. Also, assuming there is a crisis, I think there will be too many moving parts this time to know what will happen to the housing market. The moving parts that I can think of are (the first two are already in the news lately to some extent): parts of the country become unlivable or uninsurable, materials and labor required to build and maintain property become scarce and expensive, large number of deaths, debt crisis, Fed responds to debt crisis, as well as the usual things that have affected housing in the past like the job market and interest rates, which make it complicated enough, especially with the most rapid increases in interest rates maybe ever.
That had to do with housing. With land, I posted that blurb from Greer above because I think that's the thing that will be the main determining factor (fossil fuel). aeden has also mentioned the ratio of population to farmers and has said it will go lower. As long as adequate diesel gets to the farms not much changes.

In the meantime, another big interest rate spike should help get prices down if it is big enough and fast enough, like the previous one. It's been touted that real estate prices are flat over the past year. That's not what I'm seeing here and the actual housing price drops here are a lot bigger than what has been advertised in the mainstream. Some as much as 1/3 whereas the mainstream has advertised 10 percent.

I haven't been looking at land prices or thinking about them much. The route I will be going, most likely anyway, is there are lots of farmers in the upper midwest running operations that are thousands of acres. When the diesel runs low, they will no longer be able to handle all of it. That's probably the next main event but whether it happens quickly or slowly and when is the wild card, as well as how dangerous it will be to get there. Right now my assumption is that it will be dangerous and some advance planning for that move will be necessary. That was what I had in mind with the run for your life comment but of course there would be other reasons too. Whether a farmer wants to sell a piece off or enter into a feudal arrangement probably won't make much difference to me. The land where standard chemical based monoculture is done on thousands of acres is going to be pretty dead. It won't be a good option for most people. But it's what I know or think I know.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

FullMoon
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Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by FullMoon »

There's farm houses with small plots divided off the the main farmland already for sale. But the prices were driven sky high during the pandemic and out of reach of most. They've been coming down and that's what I'm hoping to find. This year had a significant spring price bump and it's softening but we'll see about next spring.. My worry is that it's a crazy year already shaping up like 20' with pandemic potential and election chaos except now we have the war cycle ramping up. Even if it takes years to really get bad, it might be better to be well situated and settled in for the long haul. It takes time to relearn the ways of simple living and self sufficiency whereas unlike times past.

Higgenbotham
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Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by Higgenbotham »

Rizer summarizes the problem by telling me about one new officer’s experience in Baltimore.

“This was a great young man,” Rizer says. “He joined the Baltimore Police Department because he wanted to make a difference.”

Six months after this man graduated from the academy, Rizer checked in on him to see how he was doing. It wasn’t good.

“They’re animals. All of them,” Rizer recalls the young officer telling him. “The cops, the people I patrol, everybody. They’re just fucking animals.”

This man was, in Rizer’s mind, “the embodiment of what a good police officer should have been.” Some time after their conversation, he quit the force — pushed out by a system that takes people in and breaks them, on both sides of the law.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... orge-floyd

After using the phrase "siege mentality" earlier today, I checked to see if that phrase has been applied to policing. It has.

The only thing I knew about it is that various professions have contact with inner city neighborhoods and they all share that same experience of being under siege. I was a landlord. Had a good friend who was a glass installer. Another who worked for Ameritech in the hood of Milwaukee, as he was a new employee assigned to the worst part of town and worked with a guy who was later shot and killed in his truck. We all had that experience and discussed it. I referred to some of it earlier:
Higgenbotham wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 12:09 pm
Speaking of what people refuse to talk about or don't want to believe, as mentioned recently, I was a landlord in a low income area during the 1980s and 1990s (Beloit, Wisconsin). When I moved 70 miles northeast from there to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it was like an entirely different world. Right away, in my neighborhood, I met a guy from Green Bay who had just started working for the phone company and, because he was new, was assigned to the worst area of Milwaukee. When we would get home from work, he would tell me about things he had seen that day and I, in turn, would tell him about things I had seen that were similar. One evening, he confided in me that I was the only person he could talk to about this because nobody else, not even his girlfriend or his family, wanted to hear about it. He didn't say they didn't believe it, just that they didn't want to hear it.

Having those discussions prompted me to repeat some of them to a friend at work who, like most white people in America, came from a sheltered background. His response was that he didn't believe any of it. I thought he was joking. He wanted to hear more, but he would always conclude that he didn't believe it. Finally, I came to the conclusion that he really didn't believe what I was telling him and stopped talking about it. With the advent of the Internet, however, some of it could finally be verified. The story that could be verified most conclusively was about a girl I had met in one of the neighborhoods where I had owned a house. She was homeless and bounced from house to house. One of the places she stayed at was owned by a retired teacher across the street from one of my rentals. Her parents had named her Marijuana Pepsi Jackson during the hazy lazy 1960s protests and, contrary to what her name might suggest, she had made high honor roll every time I looked through the list in the paper. The reason I looked at things like that in the paper was so that when prospective tenants came to one of my rentals, I would know what to ask. For example, if someone with the last name of Jackson came by, I might ask if they have a daughter named Marijuana Pepsi, or, if applicable, whether they were the person who had gotten caught shoplifting from K-Mart. When I showed him what was on the Internet he said, well, yeah, that might be true but I still don't believe all that other stuff.
This is actually a pretty good article. It gets better toward the end. I quoted the end of it.

There were a few flaws in the article. One was the article said the death rate of police on the job is relatively low. In some zones, it will be quite high. Also, the article doesn't emphasize along with that statistic the tremendous effort and precautions required to keep the death rate down. As well as the violence that is required to do so.

The bottom line, though, is that there is no solution. The article makes that clear and that's why it's good. It makes the correct conclusion. It is just a part of the constellation of things pointing to the inevitability of a new dark age. Be wary of both former police and the criminals when they are no longer being corralled by the system. Don't show fear.
Higgenbotham wrote:
Fri Jun 12, 2020 7:53 pm
John wrote:
Fri Jun 12, 2020 3:00 pm
** 12-Jun-2020 World View: Derek Chauvin - the Hmong connection

But under the circumstances, I still think that Chauvin's
behavior was motivated by some connection to the KKK.
As mentioned, I owned some rental properties in the 80s and 90s in a low income area. In 1994, I met a guy who was a new employee with the phone company. Being a new employee, his assigned area was the worst slum in Milwaukee. In the evening, he and I discussed things we had seen in common in the respective slums. One night, he mentioned that he appreciated being able to describe what he'd seen and express it to somebody who understood because there wasn't anybody else he could talk to about it. I said you can't talk about it with others unless they have seen and experienced what we have. Not too long after that, a coworker of his was murdered:
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Members of this community expressed shock that a 13-year-old girl is being accused by police of killing a telephone repairman whom she and other suspects thought was an uncover police officer.

"It's frightening and it's chilling," said Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Stanley Miller. "My concern is that we're manufacturing as a culture and as a society young people who are ready to kill."

Ameritech employee Albert Thompson, 39, was found by a coworker in a service van in a Milwaukee alley with a gunshot wound to the head January 18, police said. He died at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital Jan. 23.

"Every law-abiding person in the city was shocked by Thompson's murder," said Milwaukee Mayor John O. Norquist. "And we are shocked by the age of the shooting suspect."

A 20-year-old male and a 19-year-old female also were taken into custody, but police believe the 13-year-old is the one who shot the Ameritech employee, police said in a news release Saturday.

The 20-year-old man supplied the handgun to the 13-year-old girl, police said. The trio was operating a drug house and had seen the Ameritech van on many occasions in the alley where Thompson was found, police said.
https://journaltimes.com/news/national/ ... 13f1a.html

One day, I took a female tenant over to the liquor store so she could cash her welfare check. We parked in the back. While she was in the liquor store, some thugs who were parked next to me began to taunt me saying, "If that honkey turns his head to the side, we'll blow it off." I didn't turn it to the side. Then they taunted me further, saying he knows better than to turn his head, etc. This is standard fare in those neighborhoods. Not to say that it happens every day or it's most of the people, but you can expect it to happen on any given day. If you get to be known in the area as I was, it helps, and most people will support you.

In my opinion, when years and years of operating in that kind of environment are combined with a psychopathic or extremely vindictive and aggressive personality, you get a Chauvin. Based on my experience, I doubt there was any white supremacy movement type of involvement. People like that should be screened out of the police force and removed at the first sign of being abusive. They have plenty of company on the other side. I doubt we'll ever know the full story.
I think you can prevent an extreme example like Chauvin but the overall culture of violence cannot be fixed.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

Higgenbotham
Posts: 7972
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:28 pm

Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by Higgenbotham »

FullMoon wrote:
Mon Dec 04, 2023 8:55 pm
There's farm houses with small plots divided off the main farmland already for sale. But the prices were driven sky high during the pandemic and out of reach of most. They've been coming down and that's what I'm hoping to find. This year had a significant spring price bump and it's softening but we'll see about next spring. My worry is that it's a crazy year already shaping up like '20 with pandemic potential and election chaos except now we have the war cycle ramping up. Even if it takes years to really get bad, it might be better to be well situated and settled in for the long haul. It takes time to relearn the ways of simple living and self sufficiency whereas unlike times past.
This is the type of situation where there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to trying to figure out what prices will do. Typically there will be a time when the market caves but I can't be confident that will happen this time.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

Higgenbotham
Posts: 7972
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:28 pm

Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

Post by Higgenbotham »

Higgenbotham wrote:
Mon Dec 04, 2023 9:30 pm
I think you can prevent an extreme example like Chauvin but the overall culture of violence cannot be fixed.
Case in point:

Image

30 days is not a long time.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

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