Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Dark Age Chronicles

Last week a former coworker contacted me by email. He said he is retiring in a few months and needs to wrap up a project we had last discussed in 2015. I last worked with him in 2002 but we have stayed in contact over the years. He's what I would call a survivor. He said he is near the top seniority in his division of over 100 people. A few years ago, when he was in his early 50s, he told me he was already waking up in the middle of the night to urinate "half a cup!" The stress of the job was pretty bad at the time we worked together and it only would have only gotten worse as people who left were not replaced, but the work load would not have been reduced commensurately, as is pretty much true everywhere but probably moreso there.

Anyway, as I read his emails I was puzzled because they were disjointed and parts of them didn't really make sense, as well as containing a misspelling that was uncharacteristic of him. By all appearances, they could have been written by a covid long hauler who's suffering from brain fog. In addition to the obvious workplace stress that he would have been suffering from for the past 20 years, he also mentioned that he is worried about his kids, one of whom still lives at home. I shouldn't be surprised by any of this but when it's people you know and have a clear memory of the way they were it is still a bumpy road to the acceptance phase.

[John]

Dark Age Chronicles

Last week a former coworker contacted me by email. He said he is retiring in a few months and needs to wrap up a project we had last discussed in 2015. I last worked with him in 2002 but we have stayed in contact over the years. He's what I would call a survivor. He said he is near the top seniority in his division of over 100 people. A few years ago, when he was in his early 50s, he told me he was already waking up in the middle of the night to urinate "half a cup!" The stress of the job was pretty bad at the time we worked together and it only would have only gotten worse as people who left were not replaced, but the work load would not have been reduced commensurately, as is pretty much true everywhere but probably moreso there.

Anyway, as I read his emails I was puzzled because they were disjointed and parts of them didn't really make sense, as well as containing a misspelling that was uncharacteristic of him. By all appearances, they could have been written by a covid long hauler who's suffering from brain fog. In addition to the obvious workplace stress that he would have been suffering from for the past 20 years, he also mentioned that he is worried about his kids, one of whom still lives at home. I shouldn't be surprised by any of this but when it's people you know and have a clear memory of the way they were it is still a bumpy road to the acceptance phase.

Speaking from experience, the above
could be caused by someone who has to
use computer dictation and voice
recognition, and who has difficulty
accessing the hotkeys necessary to
easily edit text.

[Higgenbotham]

Dark Age Chronicles

Last week a former coworker contacted me by email. He said he is retiring in a few months and needs to wrap up a project we had last discussed in 2015. I last worked with him in 2002 but we have stayed in contact over the years. He's what I would call a survivor. He said he is near the top seniority in his division of over 100 people. A few years ago, when he was in his early 50s, he told me he was already waking up in the middle of the night to urinate "half a cup!" The stress of the job was pretty bad at the time we worked together and it only would have only gotten worse as people who left were not replaced, but the work load would not have been reduced commensurately, as is pretty much true everywhere but probably moreso there.

Anyway, as I read his emails I was puzzled because they were disjointed and parts of them didn't really make sense, as well as containing a misspelling that was uncharacteristic of him. By all appearances, they could have been written by a covid long hauler who's suffering from brain fog. In addition to the obvious workplace stress that he would have been suffering from for the past 20 years, he also mentioned that he is worried about his kids, one of whom still lives at home. I shouldn't be surprised by any of this but when it's people you know and have a clear memory of the way they were it is still a bumpy road to the acceptance phase.

Speaking from experience, the above
could be caused by someone who has to
use computer dictation and voice
recognition, and who has difficulty
accessing the hotkeys necessary to
easily edit text.

He also hyperlinked to something that can only be accessed by employees through their intranet, so when I clicked on it, it asked me for my username and password. That really scared me because it indicated he may have had a brief brain fart thinking I still work there, when I haven't for 20 years.

"There was some good news from 2022 : " followed by link from their intranet.

If I call him, I'll ask about that and update this.

Which reminds me...

Dark Age Chronicles

I could probably write one of these every day but today's is kind of interesting. I've been talking lately here and there about retail theft.

So today I was leaving with my kid and one of my neighbors said he has some goods for sale if I'm interested. I said sure, tell me about what you've got. He started telling me about what he has now - beauty supplies, cleaning supplies, etc. I asked him if he might have things like Tide laundry detergent. He said not right now but, yeah, he would have some of that and the price on everything is half what you pay in the store - do I want powder or liquid? I said if it's half just bring me what you can get. He opened the trunk and back seat of his car to show me what he has now.

Then I went to get the mail. Our car insurance for 6 months went from about $700 to about $1000. That's for 2 vehicles. I called my agent and they said it's just experience with one of the vehicles. More accidents, MORE THEFT, etc., nothing to do with us specifically.

I used to call these kinds of posts the Gen X Debacle of the Day, but now Dark Age Chronicles seems more fitting.

I don't think he can come up with any Tide, but if he can, wow, things are a lot worse than I suspect. I just think he wants to keep me in the loop. We'll find out.

He did not come up with any Tide.

[aeden]

Sometimes we could care less about spell check. Covid brain fog oh hell yes that was fun.
The shock jocks are saying 80 percent stock hits end of July.
Even i think thats past half assed retarded as more 90 tbills roll out July. Sector rotation sweeps to the last Direct Cash Flow and Net Working
Capital. Do to think Jpow from FEDzilla told the IMF toads to FOAD on CBDC for the masses of poor asses.
The greens have simply destroyed Fritz.
The human locusts are ignored here also as crime.pol took million and million as the agency issues corpse's rot in plain view.
Difficult times as these lemmings chew the wiring as consumers demographic's grip the zones.
Two of the largest malls is Asia was ghosted on levels even the locals portend implosion failure maps.
Credit has no effect. Yes another delay effect to stimulate the numbers. Get out of debt these thieving swamp lunatics spent in six months
more than the previous year and no they are not democrats. Structural inflation will take out the already knee capped.
I will listen to Doctor Copper then demand destruction already noted. We will not fight the tape or the semantics of the smart to dumb
indicator either. We will sweep out the EGS stakeholder fools one day at a time and simply are.
The only trickledown effect is the amount of odious debt as every map has increased in cost.
We understand the Keynesian structural inflation veil and velvet rope Cantillion effect and your countless looted no tax shell accounts.
Your smartest guy you know is one evil SOB. It took some time, but we found the covenant money and orphan shell money.
Good luck on your body farm since the taxpayers know your headed to a place of a darkness so pitch you should be beyond terrified.

https://www.usasupreme.com/video-gun-to ... -to-carry/
Any candidate that wants your weapons are lying to you retrograde retards.

Behind EVERY blade of grass. Amen.
Unless you think the 51 even pretend to be of any Honor.

[Higgenbotham]

Two pages back, I wrote the fictional story of Bob, a young man who started a real estate business. It was based on experiences I have had. On the previous page, I repeated the story of Micron, who started a semiconductor chip business. It was only after writing the story of Bob that I recalled the similarity to the story of Micron. Bob was turning conventional wisdom on its head locally while Micron turned conventional wisdom on its head on a global scale. Both Bob and Micron:

1. Entered existing, established businesses that were seeing rapid changes.
2. Were relentlessly focused on driving their costs down for the ultimate benefit of customers.
3. Surprised people who were already in the business by doing things they hadn't thought of or didn't think would work.
4. Quickly moved into a leadership position, passing competitors who had vastly more resources.
5. Were or were comprised of individuals who conventional wisdom had no means to identify as being uniquely able to accomplish what they did.

[aeden]

No one was expecting that kind of 'animal spirits' growth?
And Fedzilla rate incoming wave rising from the Sea.
Jpow and CBDC cult like the chorus of the Frogs.
The Volkner early meltdown as they circled the plasma center after the first rate cut mistake.
As we noted before port or starboard side it does not feel right H.
Asian reports of ghosting was chilling to see.

Paul Volcker
1982. When I saw a line snaking around eight city blocks in Columbus, Ohio for people who wanted to sell their blood at the Alpha Plasma Center. Nothing says end of the world like people waiting in line for hours to sell their life's blood for twenty bucks.
I was building days in motels chains when construction was crushed. Over the decades from the Nixon shock to crush the workers with operation 936 one thing stands out. The national ability to remain absolutely clueless.
I can assure them for years the hammer was moving or you did not get $147.40 per unit.
We did 2 a day then rocking in.

https://fbj.springeropen.com/articles/1 ... 21-00100-w dutch disease as noted before
Workings of Dutch Disease. Last time we watched 17 percent over production and yes it was a feature
as it burn down 44 percent from our initial finding of 40 percent unhedged.
The issue is the agency issue of intent.

[Higgenbotham]

Descent

Chapter 33 - The disorganisation process

Boom and bust

At the start of the twenty first century, western
economies are booming. It does not look as though
global civilisation is in terminal decline. People
feel more prosperous than ever, and all the
expectations are that things will get better still. The
catastrophic economic unravelling of a dark age
seems very unlikely and very far away.
Some calculate that the next two or three
decades will see an expansionary phase of the
world economy.2816 George Soros, on the other
hand, believes that east Asia’s crisis may have been
the classic foreshock preceding a much wider
crash.2817 There have been many periods of strong
economic growth in the past, and none has ever
been permanent. Clearly, the present boom will not
last forever or even for more than a few years. By
the same token, the next economic downturn may
be equally transient and not necessarily the
immediate prelude to collapse. The descent has
some way to run, and world economies could go
through several more cycles of boom and bust
before the dark age arrives.

The worse the busts are, the longer the descent
is likely to take. A bust acts like a miniature dark
age, forcing people to take a more realistic view of
things, and to work harder while expecting less.
South Korea built up a series of white elephant
industries in shipbuilding, petrochemicals and
heavy manufacturing in the late twentieth
century,2818 and it has now paid dearly for its
centralisation and inflexibility. However, it will
come out of the experience wiser and in better
shape.2819 As east Asian entrepreneurship is
unleashed again, it will re-invigorate the entire
world economy, with America and Europe being
among the beneficiaries. That may make
predictions of a coming dark age look less
warranted than ever. Nevertheless, the west’s burst
of growth that came after the second world war
faltered within a few decades. Similarly, even the
most spectacular Asian recovery will not touch the
deep historical currents that are carrying the world
towards catastrophe.

The descent will be characterised by economic
false dawns. The United States budget and trade
deficits, for example, may occasionally improve,
but they will soon worsen again. These deficits are
intimately connected with other features of the
current order, such as drugs trafficking, welfare
dependency, and the costly protection of American
interests world wide. No one, however determined,
can rationally sort out these problems, whose
interactions are far from fully understood. The
deficits must remain a chronic problem.
The booms that take place during the descent
will be based on much less substance than were
former periods of great growth in the world
economy. The mobile phone, the internet and
computer games will not create eddies upon eddies
of economic organisation in the way that the steam
engine did, or the aeroplane. Economic growth
may occur on paper but there will be fewer real
differences to people’s material standard of living.
It will not deliver tangible utilities like cars,
televisions and foreign holidays. Instead, one of the
big growth industries today is gambling, and it is
questionable how far that can be said to make
people feel better and live better. Similarly, the
internet is certainly a boon, but its overall
contribution to human welfare is mediocre. Giving
people ready access to vast amounts of
pornography hardly compares with the drama of
the industrial revolution.

In future, therefore, to gauge how the descent
is going, one should not be taken in by statistics.
The crucial measure of economic health will be the
evidence of genuine innovation that people
experience in their everyday lives. If some major
new item appears in one’s home, comparable to the
vacuum cleaner, the video recorder, or the
microwave oven, one can assume that the dark age
is getting further away, perhaps by a quarter of a
century or more. On the other hand, one may find it
difficult to identify what is driving the stock
market. One’s own consumption may be of mostly
transient pleasures, and one may worry whether
one’s work is really making a positive contribution
to the commonweal. In that case, the economic
descent will be proceeding unchecked.

The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson, 2001

I've been working my way back in a roundabout way to the second excerpt from Widdowson's book to be discussed. I agree with Widdowson in almost all respects. The innovation doesn't necessarily have to be a major new item in one's home, and he doesn't say it has to be, but there still needs to be a mindset that innovation, large and small, is how we do things, and nobody is too big to fail. In the stories of Bob and Micron I tried to show what that mindset looks like. That has been less and less the case since the 1980s by my reckoning. The increase in large businesses compared to small businesses is one way to show that. Small business can't be dismissed as "You Didn't Build That." "You Didn't Build That" may have some truth in it, but the conversation and actions taken need to be about how collectively we are going to put projects and policies into place that produce more people that we can theoretically point to and say "You Didn't Build That" without ever really saying it.

The economic descent is proceeding unchecked.

[aeden]

Compression is seen. Sweeps indicated we moved away from most advanced looters to preserve capital.
The Cantillon effect will kneecap even more.

Rus banker meets sudden stop. Only mercy was dead on impact from the - accidents.
https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uplo ... 080&crop=1

Unrelated related relate Wagner was not paid for three months.
The petitioners also noted that they feared being killed by their commanders.
Adds up. Report is legit from the merc combatant's release.

thread: Storm-Z

[Higgenbotham]

California supermarket installs metal exit gates to stop shoplifters from raiding groceries

Story by Alyssa Guzman and Lewis Pennock and Ruth Styles In San Francisco, California, For Dailymail.com • Jun 20

A Safeway in Vallejo, California, recently installed metal emergency exit gates in front of one of the entrances to deter shoplifters
Some Safeway locations installed exit bars months ago, including large metal barriers across closed checkout lanes

A California supermarket desperate to slow the constant shoplifting that has plagued parts of the state has installed giant metal barriers at exits to stop the thefts.

A Safeway in Vallejo recently added metal emergency exit gates in front of one of the entrances that warn an 'alarm will sound' if thieves try to leave the building.

CBS reporter Betty Yu also said the Vallejo store closed a second entrance and other locations are following suit to deter thieves from stealing.

Some Safeway locations installed exit bars months ago, as one shopper took to Twitter to show one store going to the extreme, blocking off closed checkout lanes with large metal gates, as well as lining pathways leading out of the store with obstructions as well.

'Bars everywhere, multiple security guards, you have to scan your receipt for the gate to open in order to exit, and if you don't buy anything an employee has to open the gate to let you out,' a Twitter user remarked in February about an Oakland Safeway store.

"You Didn't Build This"



Yes, I know, Barack, but you and your Democrats did.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/compani ... jl#image=1

[Higgenbotham]

As with the topic of the high tech companies and how they stuff their coffers with cash, John has also written about declining innovation in the generational cycle on his main site - the "Crusty Old Bureaucracy Theory".

The "Crusty Old Bureaucracy" Theory

Let's take a look at one more explanation of why the 2000s decade will be a decade of depression. This is meant to be an intuitive explanation, not a rigorous argument.

As we mentioned above, the 1930s agencies and regulations designed to prevent another depression didn't work because they didn't change human nature. Now we're going to explain why human nature is such that we must always have a financial crisis like the Great Depression every 80 years or so, and that there's nothing we do to prevent it.

I got the idea for this when I heard a television business news story that described some company as having financial troubles because the "crusty old bureaucracy" that was running the company was moving too slowly keep the company competitive with newer upstarts.

The problem with any organization that lasts a long time is that it gets set in its ways; it gets departments and divisions that are slow to change; employees lose their energy and don't want to rock the boat.

Ordinarily, such an organization will go out of business because it's not competitive enough, and its business will be taken over by more up to date and aggressive competitors.

The problem is that a society (or country) can be thought of in exactly the same way. Looking at a country as a whole -- its entire government, all its businesses, labor unions, educational institutions, and non-profit institutions taken together -- a certain, ever-increasing percentage of these organizations viewed as a whole are going to become inefficient. The crusty old bureaucracy will grow with time.

It's the word "ever-increasing" in the preceding paragraph that is the crux of this argument. Some readers may not agree that the amount of inefficiency constantly increases with time; that businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and so forth, constantly renew and improve themselves, so that they're always just as efficient as ever. If you believe that a society as a whole stays just as efficient as ever over time, then you won't agree that we have to have a Great Depression every now and then.

But if you believe, as I do, that the buildup of bureaucracies, politicians and layers of control, and the tendency of people and organizations to do their job without rocking the boat with changes means that society as a whole becomes inefficient as time goes on, then the conclusion that Great Depressions are always necessary is inevitable.

In my many years of experience as a computer industry consultant, I've seen what happens with my own eyes. There are many businesses that have computerized, eliminating layers of management, streamlining accounting, manufacturing, order processing and other departments, eliminating large groups of employees doing work that can just as easily be done by a computer that doesn't require a salary.

But I've also seen many, many other businesses that haven't done that: doctors' offices with racks of patient records in paper folders; business offices which use computers for no more than word processing and an occasional budget; rooms full of pencil-pushing employees that perform repetitive tasks all day long - tasks that could better be done by computers. These are the businesses that will be wiped out by a new Great Depression.

Elsewhere in this book, I discussed the concept that "war is senseless" to many people. It's true that war is senseless to the individual, but from the point of view of survival of the human species, war -- including genocide and mass rape -- is extremely sensible, because it guarantees that the strongest races, civilizations and nations will survive, and the weaker ones will die off.

A Great Depression is, like war, another of "nature's ways" of renewing a society. When poverty is rampant and the unemployment rate is above 25%, as it was in the 1930s, then not rocking the boat is impossible. Thousands of businesses will shut down, eventually to be replaced by new businesses that are more efficient. Governments at all levels will be forced to shut down and cut back on all its agencies, because the level of tax collections will be way down. Similar observations will be true for educational institutions, labor unions, non-profit institutions, and so forth.

Organizations in all sectors will disappear, as they did in the 1930s. The ones that survive are able to do so only by completely reinventing themselves, and accepting inevitable cutbacks in all but the most essential jobs, and letting employees in non-essential jobs go to fend for themselves. That's how society renews itself.

When I talk about things like this, people criticize me for being too negative. Heck, even I get depressed reading the paragraphs that I've just written. But being warm and fuzzy is for another book on another day, or by a different author. This book was not written to make people feel good; it was written to describe what I, as a mathematician and researcher, consider is likely to happen.

What does a "depression" mean for our lives?

Since the word "depression" means different things to different people, it's worthwhile to point out that in this book it refers to one specific thing: A big drop in stock market value, similar to the big stock market fall in the 1930s.

But what does that mean in terms of people's lives? In the 1930s, it meant massive unemployment, bankruptcies and homelessness. Are we facing the same fate today?

The forecasting tools that I've used to forecast the massive drop in stock prices do not tell us what ups and downs stocks will take before reaching bottom, and do not answer the questions about bankruptcies and homelessness, so we can only guess.

In the 1930s, money was very tight. People and businesses that owed money were forced to pay their debts or go bankrupt. Businesses that went bankrupt laid off employees, causing more unemployment and more personal bankruptcies. People who went bankrupt often lost their homes, becoming homeless.

Today, the Fed is acting to prevent these massive results by flooding the economy with money -- by keeping the federal funds interest rate close to 0%, and possibly by repurchasing long-term bonds. Businesses that are close to bankruptcy can often borrow cheap money and keep going. People who are close to bankruptcy can often borrow against credit cards, which pass along the low interest rates to their customers.

So we're seeing a different effect on people's lives of the massive stock price drop than we saw in the 1930s. In the 1930s, people went bankrupt and homeless. Today, people and businesses are going massively into low interest rate debt.

It's not known what effect this will have in the long run. In the optimistic scenario, it will give businesses time to change to produce 21st century products, instead of the old 20th century products. In the pessimistic scenario, it will keep the "crusty old bureaucracy" in place a few years longer, thus causing an even harder fall when the fall finally comes.

http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... ession.htm

Crusty old bureaucracy theory

How is it possible for prices to fall, even during a financial crisis?

The explanation is what I call the "crusty old bureaucracy" theory.

There is a long-term generational cycle in business, where there is a "great depression" every 70-80 years or so. In American history, a British banking failure in 1772 sent most New England businesses into bankruptcy, providing a monetary motivation for the Revolutionary War. The Panic of 1857 bankrupted many American and European businesses, leading to the Civil War. And of course the Great Depression of the 1930s was one of the causes that led to World War II.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, here's what's going on: During the 1930s Great Depression, most old businesses went bankrupt, and every new business was "lean and mean," with every employee required to pull his full weight.

In the intervening 70 years, these businesses have all been getting calcified with bureaucracies, older employees who are waiting around for retirement, middle aged employees whose job skills are obsolete, or whole departments or divisions producing products and services that people no longer want. Therefore, the average American business today is producing too many overpriced products that nobody really wants. The same calcification process has also happened with government agencies, universities, and all other organizations. This is what I call the "crusty old bureaucracy" problem.

So the economy will "correct itself," but will do so by a major adjustment like the crash of 1929. This will force all the existing businesses into bankruptcy, and the cycle will repeat with the creation of new "lean and mean" businesses. Unfortunately, the side effects of massive homelessness and even starvation will also occur.

Another side effect is that products have been getting gradually obsolete, and this has been happening on a national basis. In the extreme, once enough businesses are producing obsolete products, inflation can't increase because no one will want the products at any price. The only way to fix the problem is through massive business bankruptcies and a new set of businesses.

In the current economy, one of the most visible examples is music CDs (compact disks). There's a huge chunk of business associated with manufacturing, distributing and selling CDs. However, CDs are becoming increasingly obsolete, because people want their music on their computer, and don't want CDs around cluttering up their homes. In other words, people don't want CDs at any price. CDs is one example, but you can easily think of many more examples in other domains where computerization are making products obsolete, or at least way overpriced. After the financial crisis, it will turn out that there are many products like that, and so prices will remain low and inflation will remain low.

Life in the next few years

We're at a unique time in history, about 60 years after the end of World War II, when every country is experiencing the same generational change at the same time: The people in the generation that fought in WW II are all disappearing (retiring or dying) all at once, and are being replaced by the people in the generation born after WW II. This new generation has no personal knowledge of the horrors of World War II, and will lead the world into a new world war. As I've described in the discussion of the six most dangerous regions of the world, the time is not too far off when a regional war in one of these regions will trigger a much wider war that will engulf America and the world.

You can see this happening today especially in the Northern Pacific, where the level of conflict is increasing on an almost daily basis, and both China and North Korea are evidently planning preemptive wars of reunification (with Taiwan and South Korea, respectively). These wars might begin next week, next month, next year, or thereafter.

What will life be like for the next few years? It turns out that we have a pretty good idea. Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe have studied what's happened in previous American crisis periods, and have published their findings in two books, Generations and The Fourth Turning. In fact, their generational theory forms the basis of Generational Dynamics.

Based on what happened during the previous crisis periods -- World War II, the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War, they tell us (in The Fourth Turning, p. 258) what's going to happen:

Private life will transform beyond prior recognition. Now less important than the team, individuals are expected to comply with new ... standards of virtue. Family order strengthens, and personal violence and substance abuse decline. Those who persist in free-wheeling self-oriented behavior now face implacable public stigma, even punishment. Winner-take-all arrangements give way to enforceable new mechanisms of social sharing. Questions about who does what are settled on grounds of survival, not fairness. This leads to a renewed social division of labor by age and sex. In the realm of public activity, elders are expected to step aside for the young, women for men. When danger looms, children are expected to be protected before parents, mothers before fathers. All social arrangements are evaluated anew; pre-Crisis promises and expectations count for little. Where the Unraveling had been an era of fast-paced personal lives against a background of public gridlock, in the Crisis the pace of daily life will seem to slow down just as political and social change accelerates.

When society approaches the climax of a crisis, it reaches a point of maximum civic power. Where the new values regime had once justified individual fury, it now justifies public fury. Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality. The risk of revolution is high -- as is the risk of civil war, since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries. Leaders become more inclined to define enemies in moral terms, to enforce virtue militarly, to refuse all compromise, to commit large forces in that effort, to impose heavy sacrifices on the battlefield and home front, to build the most destructive weapons contemporary minds can imagine, and to deploy those weapons if needed to obtain an enduring victory.

One of the political consequences is that programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be discontinued or substantially cut back. In a time when the survival of the nation is at stake, the needs of the elderly will have to give way to the needs of the young. By 2010, it will be very difficult for a non-wealthy older person to survive comfortably.

This is the kind of world we're headed for. It won't be the end of the world, but it will be worse than the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II. America has gone through this kind of thing three times before, and will do so again.

As I've done before, I'm cautioning all my readers to be taking steps to protect yourself, your family and your nation. The world today is much worse than it was a year ago, and things are getting worse every day. The public debt situation and the level of world conflict grow, and more and more commentators are noticing it. We must come together as a nation to protect one another, because we are going to have no choice.

http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... 050324.htm