Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

I was absolutely astonished to discover Abba's song Cassandra,
because it is so dark, because it captures my own continuing feeling
of dread, and because it so closely parallels the disaster that
America is headed for, as China prepares for a massive missile attack
on America, which, like Troy, may not survive.

Most of the Abba lyrics are pretty clear, but some are a bit obscure,
so I'm providing the following interpretations:


[Verse 1]
Down in the street they're all singing and shouting
Staying alive though the city is dead
Hiding their shame behind hollow laughter

(Troy is dead, and they will all be killed or enslaved, which
explains the "hollow laughter." The "shame" is because they could
have prevented Troy's destruction by listening to Cassandra and not
treating her as insane.)

While you are crying alone in your bed
Pity Cassandra that no one believed you
But then again you were lost from the start

(Cassandra's predictions were right, but that only makes her pain
worse, because she knew what was coming for a long time.)

Now we must suffer and sell our secrets
Bargain, playing smart, aching in our hearts

(Now that the Greeks have conquered and destroyed Troy, they're
dividing the spoils of war, which means they will decide who gets
which slaves and slave girls, and who gets Trojan gold and other
assets. Desperate Trojan survivors can only plead for mercy.)

[Chorus]
Sorry Cassandra I misunderstood
Now the last day is dawning

(This is Troy's last day of existence.)

Some of us wanted but none of us could
Listen to words of warning
But on the darkest of nights
Nobody knew how to fight
And we were caught in our sleep

(The Trojan soldiers were killed in their sleep.)

Sorry Cassandra I didn't believe
You really had the power
I only saw it as dreams you would weave
Until the final hour

(The Trojans thought that Cassandra was dreaming or insane.)

[Verse 2]
So in the morning your ship will be sailing
Now that your father and sister are gone

(Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam, who was killed, along
with her family.)

There is no reason for you to linger
You're grieving deeply but still moving on
You know the future is casting a shadow
No one else sees it but you know your fate

(Cassandra knows that she will become the slave and mistress of the
Greek king Agamemnon. She will warn Agamemnon that if they return to
Greece then his wife, Clytemnestra, will kill them both. But she also
knows that Agamemnon will not believe her and that Clytemnestra will
kill them both.)

Packing your bags, being slow and thorough
Knowing, though you're late, that ship is sure to wait

(She knows that the ship to Greece won't leave without her.)

[Chorus]

[Verse 3]
I watched the ship leaving harbor at sunrise
Sails almost slack in the cool morning rain
She stood on deck, just a tiny figure
Rigid and restrained, blue eyes filled with pain

(Cassandra has lost her family and friends, her entire city has
been destroyed, and now she is going to her new fate, and death.)

[Higgenbotham]

Human life can be at least partially defined as a striving based on an irrational feeling of hope. I think that probably correlates with a certain void in rational intelligence which all humans possess to varying degrees. Human suicide is considered by humans to be an irrational act but it can also be considered a temporary lapse in human irrationality when viewed from the perspective beyond human level intelligence where there is nothing to strive for and therefore nothing to hope for.

This reminds me of a quote from A Distant Mirror describing attitudes during the 14th Century Dark Age: "Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came." This captures how "Human life can be at least partially defined as a striving based on an irrational feeling of hope," which is the quality that prevents most humans from killing themselves when things are miserable enough for long enough to make it perfectly rational to do so. The continuation of human life is not an intelligent, rational process. It's an emotional process based on a belief that something better might come, even when there is no reason to think it will. The "longing" and "wanting" is what makes it continue.

This video is pure genius as far as summing that up in my opinion, leaving open all possibilities. Why go through that mind-numbing drudgery day after day? Because something we as humans long for might come, or it might not but can be imagined in our irrational minds. The something could be anything - what is portrayed, the birth of a child, or the death some secretly wish for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HnOFwqpLRQ
ABBA - The Day Before You Came (1982)

I must have left my house at eight, because I always do
My train, I'm certain, left the station just when it was due
I must have read the morning paper going into town
And having gotten through the editorial, no doubt I must have frowned
I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine
With letters to be read, and heaps of papers waiting to be signed
I must have gone to lunch at half past twelve or so
The usual place, the usual bunch
And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained
The day before you came

I must have lit my seventh cigarette at half past two
And at the time I never even noticed I was blue
I must have kept on dragging through the business of the day
Without really knowing anything, I hid a part of me away
At five I must have left, there's no exception to the rule
A matter of routine, I've done it ever since I finished school
The train back home again
Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then
Oh yes, I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame
The day before you came

I must have opened my front door at eight o'clock or so
And stopped along the way to buy some Chinese food to go
I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV
There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see
I must have gone to bed around a quarter after ten
I need a lot of sleep, and so I like to be in bed by then
I must have read a while
The latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style
It's funny, but I had no sense of living without aim
The day before you came

And turning out the light
I must have yawned and cuddled up for yet another night
And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain
The day before you came

[aeden]

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inli ... k=o6ttqaHP
data set for saint nic results

[FullMoon]

If China is going to move on Taiwan, it has seemed to me that it needs to happen in 2024 for it to be most effective. That's based on the idea that the US can get their semiconductor manufacturing plants in Arizona (Taiwan Semiconductor), New York (Micron) and Texas (Samsung) up and running by 2025.

There's a whole list of reasons and they all point to the fact that waiting is not a good choice for them anymore. They can neither act nor wait. They're stuck in a horrible limbo from which chaos will determine their, and the world's, next steps.

[Guest]

What makes a country third world? Poverty, wars and failed states. Why do these things happen? Because of the culture of the people who live in those countries. And they import that with them when they come to the UK.

[Higgenbotham]

Dark Age Chronicles

This post will describe my 2 days after Christmas in the new dark age.

...

Late yesterday evening, my wife told me that one of her friends had texted her saying she needs a favor, a big favor. (Before we started moving, I said there will be people wanting to move in with us. I said the answer needs to be no, and the reason is that your mother is moving in with us next month. I said let's agree to that now before it happens, because it's going to happen. We agreed.) So I said the big favor she needs is that she wants to move into our house. That turned out to be correct. I said I was surprised they were the first, but they won't be the last. We got more details this morning. He lost his IT job, her contract job ends in a few days, and they were scammed out of all their savings. They thought they were investing in a business. More bad news this morning. Their rent is $2,300 per month, December was not paid, and they are facing eviction. My wife gave her the canned response: her mother is moving into the house next month. But she added that we have this apartment vacated and they (and their kids) can live here until the lease runs out. She rejected that offer, saying she needs to keep the kids in the same school. After she got off the phone, my wife and I noted that she hasn't yet come to terms with how much trouble she is in.

...

These types never see it coming...

Please keep us posted on her.

Text received tonight.

"Where is the apartment?"

It took 9 days.

[Guest]

Dark Age Chronicles

This post will describe my 2 days after Christmas in the new dark age.

...

Late yesterday evening, my wife told me that one of her friends had texted her saying she needs a favor, a big favor. (Before we started moving, I said there will be people wanting to move in with us. I said the answer needs to be no, and the reason is that your mother is moving in with us next month. I said let's agree to that now before it happens, because it's going to happen. We agreed.) So I said the big favor she needs is that she wants to move into our house. That turned out to be correct. I said I was surprised they were the first, but they won't be the last. We got more details this morning. He lost his IT job, her contract job ends in a few days, and they were scammed out of all their savings. They thought they were investing in a business. More bad news this morning. Their rent is $2,300 per month, December was not paid, and they are facing eviction. My wife gave her the canned response: her mother is moving into the house next month. But she added that we have this apartment vacated and they (and their kids) can live here until the lease runs out. She rejected that offer, saying she needs to keep the kids in the same school. After she got off the phone, my wife and I noted that she hasn't yet come to terms with how much trouble she is in.

...

These types never see it coming...

Please keep us posted on her.

Text received tonight.

"Where is the apartment?"

It took 9 days.

When does the lease run out?

[Higgenbotham]

When does the lease run out?

End of February.

[Higgenbotham]

The thing I find interesting is your comment that things are generally in decline. I get a feeling that this is a common attitude here. I see a crisis as a difficult but positive time. After a struggle and conflict, a solution is found and old values replaced by new. There is a new birth of freedom. If black lives do matter, if women control their own bodies, if war is seen less as cost effective, if insurrection is seen as a bad thing, if fighting death by disease is seen as wise, is not the world a better place?

As George III, Jefferson Davis and Hitler were not followed up by copycats, I don’t see Trump being followed either. If you fail miserably, you aren’t copied. After you solve the problem of the crisis, the methods used are reinforced in the high. As an S&H fan, I see a repeat of the prior American crises pattern continuing.

But I’ll leave the other issues alone for now.

While I still visit your pages occasionally, I don't see myself instigating more than quick comments.

One of the questions I addressed post 2011 after I concluded that the world had entered a new dark age was how the crisis period would look versus how the crisis period would look if the world hadn't entered a new dark age. In my opinion, this is the first crisis period there has been since the world entered a new dark age and this is how I outlined what that might look like (back in 2012):

I would expect the beginning phases of a descent into a Dark Age to be milder than if an actual cleansing and regenerative process were to occur instead. In a descent into a Dark Age, one way to look at it is we continue to borrow more from the future instead of stopping at some point and replenishing the future. That is what clearly continues to happen, as we can see. There are many symptoms of that, but an obvious one is the failure to have enough children to replenish the population and we see that across all of the Western societies with Japan taking the lead. As Peter Drucker has commented, this is unprecedented. Tying that into what you said, many of those parents who have that one precious child instead of three or four as in the past are not going to want to send that one child off to war to die. So in terms of an organized nation state versus nation state version of warfare as has been seen in the past, I don't see it under a Dark Age descent scenario. Instead, I can imagine something like rogue or surreptitious releases of killer viruses, limited release of nuclear material, limited power grid failures and so on tailored to hit certain genetic groups or limited geographical areas where the source of the attack is difficult to trace. This type of warfare would probably not be terribly effective and would be more of a wearing down process that is not regenerative like a typical fourth turning "total war" would be; in other words, Dresden would not be rebuilt to a higher standard than previously, as an example. Chernobyl, the Twin Towers, Katrina, and Fukushima come to mind as harbingers of things that have not yet been reconstructed to a higher standard and perhaps can't or won't be (though the replacement of the Twin Towers is due to be complete by 2013).

I’m not seeing a new dark age. I am seeing a new age, the Information Age. The innovations triggering it include are nukes, proxy war, computers, and renewable energy. But of the list you quoted, only Chernobyl and Fukushima aren’t being rebuilt, and that due to radiation not economics. The lifestyle is pretty much the same as before. In certain fields such as rockets, electric vehicles and computing significant advancements are being made, and in other industries progress plods along. In certain areas such as Gaza and Ukraine they are learning the hard way that war isn’t cost effective. Yes, disaster, but that is not a global trend. Compared to prior crises, the conflicts are small.

But I would agree this is the first crisis of the new age, even if we perceive the new age differently.

NEW ORLEANS HOMEOWNERS STILL IN FINANCIAL STORM 18 YEARS AFTER KATRINA

August 31, 2023


It was 18 years ago this week that Robert Ricks, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, issued an ominous warning as Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans.

“Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks ... perhaps longer,” the note read. “At least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail ... leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed.”

That bulletin, issued at 10:11 a.m. on Aug. 28, 2005, also predicted that the suffering and effects from the storm’s damage would last weeks. But the native of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, which was among the areas of the city inundated for weeks after levees failed in Katrina’s wake, could not have fathomed the depths of the hurricane’s ravages.

Many residents continue to struggle with the fallout from the catastrophe almost two decades later.

Some areas of the Gulf Coast that rested in Hurricane Katrina’s path can claim to have recovered, even grown, in the years since the tempest. But the 2020 census still shows New Orleans’ population is down 100,000 people from the 484,674 who lived there in April 2000.

After hurricanes Katrina and Rita, more than 130,000 Louisiana residents received more than $9 billion in funds through Louisiana’s Road Home program – a federally supported fund intended to rebuild after the disaster.

But due to systemic inequities, it has been far more difficult for Black and Brown residents to remain. Communities of color are more vulnerable to and less able to recover from natural disasters like hurricanes because of chronic underinvestment in their communities, racial segregation, redlining and racial wealth inequality. These factors push a disproportionate number of Black residents and renters into areas with crumbling infrastructure, poorer-quality homes and greater exposure to environmental hazards and contaminants.

Despite the influx of billions of dollars in aid and efforts to rebuild the city’s aging infrastructure, some residents – particularly in Black and Brown communities – are still struggling to rebuild.

DEBT COLLECTORS

The Road Home program that was intended to help Louisiana recover from the storm damage exacerbated longstanding racial inequities. It shortchanged people in poorer, predominantly Black neighborhoods while giving people in wealthier, predominantly white areas more of what they needed to fully rebuild. People in the poorest areas of New Orleans were forced to cover more of their rebuilding costs under the program than those in wealthier areas, even though they had fewer resources.

To make matters worse, the state sued thousands of homeowners, alleging that they did not follow the rules in spending grants under the Road Home program. Debt collectors hired by the state came calling on the poorest residents, further hampering their efforts to recover.

It was not until February of this year that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it was ending efforts to reclaim funds from homeowners who had received money through the Road Home program.

“Eighteen years removed, the pain and scars of Hurricane Katrina have never left us,” HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge said today. “We take the time to pause and remember those who died and lost their homes during this tragedy. This February, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development stepped up to announce the closure of the Road Home program, which freed 3,300 Louisianans from repayment obligations. With the state of Louisiana's compliance with HUD’s corrective action, the state released unpaid judgments and payment plans against homeowners in April of this year. Under President Biden’s and my leadership, HUD is righting a historic wrong and prioritizing the well-being of Louisiana families.”

Even though the problems with the Road Home program plagued communities for over a decade, it required multiple lawsuits to get federal leadership to recognize the issues hampering the recovery effort.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/08/ ... ril%202000

[Higgenbotham]

Chernobyl, the Twin Towers, Katrina, and Fukushima come to mind as harbingers of things that have not yet been reconstructed to a higher standard and perhaps can't or won't be (though the replacement of the Twin Towers is due to be complete by 2013).

The real question is, after all the finger pointing and arguing by those involved in the cleanup and any rebuilding, whether any of these disasters were rebuilt to a higher standard, if they were rebuilt.

Are there any shiny new fusion reactors in the place of Chernobyl and Fukushima?
Is New Orleans the new shining city on the hill?
Are the Twin Towers now built with shiny high tech space age materials that will withstand impact?

Did anything come in under budget?
Was anything completed timely and more quickly than it was in the past?

How about the Flint water system?