Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

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.

The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.

Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th Century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years, until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
1978

[Higgenbotham]

My number 1 indicator that the world has entered into a new dark age is the decline in life expectancy.

US life expectancy rose in 2022 as deaths due to COVID dropped: CDC



https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-life-e ... =108305740

[Guest]

Higgenbotham wrote:

So the question is why turn the military into a woke military between 2016 and 2024? I can't possibly know what is being discussed at high levels inside the military. But if the possibility of a domestic insurgency is being discussed along with the possibility that the rank and file of the military might join an insurgency coming out of the mountain West and the South, then you don't want to draw your military recruits from these areas, you want a woke military. Then you can go ahead and jail Donald Trump and use the woke military to put down any insurgency.

Okay, so your BLM, Antifa, illegal immigrant army can massacre disarmed people, but can it fight China and Russia?

[Higgenbotham]

Higgenbotham wrote:

So the question is why turn the military into a woke military between 2016 and 2024? I can't possibly know what is being discussed at high levels inside the military. But if the possibility of a domestic insurgency is being discussed along with the possibility that the rank and file of the military might join an insurgency coming out of the mountain West and the South, then you don't want to draw your military recruits from these areas, you want a woke military. Then you can go ahead and jail Donald Trump and use the woke military to put down any insurgency.

Okay, so your BLM, Antifa, illegal immigrant army can massacre disarmed people, but can it fight China and Russia?

Insurgency is tough business. Your supposition that I believe the US population is incapable of pulling off a serious insurgency is correct, but to say they would be disarmed is a very large leap. I seriously doubt the government can disarm the population.

But why I think it's too tough for them deserves more explanation.

[Guest]

Higgenbotham wrote:

So the question is why turn the military into a woke military between 2016 and 2024? I can't possibly know what is being discussed at high levels inside the military. But if the possibility of a domestic insurgency is being discussed along with the possibility that the rank and file of the military might join an insurgency coming out of the mountain West and the South, then you don't want to draw your military recruits from these areas, you want a woke military. Then you can go ahead and jail Donald Trump and use the woke military to put down any insurgency.

Okay, so your BLM, Antifa, illegal immigrant army can massacre disarmed people, but can it fight China and Russia?

Insurgency is tough business. Your supposition that I believe the US population is incapable of pulling off a serious insurgency is correct, but to say they would be disarmed is a very large leap. I seriously doubt the government can disarm the population.

But why I think it's too tough for them deserves more explanation.

Okay, so, as Biden says, the US government has F-16s versus the dissedent's AR-15s.

And the compentency crisis is destroying our military, and yet, we are still on track to win WW3?

That does not compute.

[Higgenbotham]

Okay, so, as Biden says, the US government has F-16s versus the dissedent's AR-15s.

And the compentency crisis is destroying our military, and yet, we are still on track to win WW3?

That does not compute.

I don't believe I've ever said anything about whether the US is on track to win World War III or not win World War III. But I'll go through the archives and see if that's the case. Feel free to search the archives for that.

[Guest]

Okay, so, as Biden says, the US government has F-16s versus the dissedent's AR-15s.

And the compentency crisis is destroying our military, and yet, we are still on track to win WW3?

That does not compute.

I don't believe I've ever said anything about whether the US is on track to win World War III or not win World War III. But I'll go through the archives and see if that's the case. Feel free to search the archives for that.

You have never said that. I was referring to what many other on the boards and the talking heads on TV have said.

[Higgenbotham]

These are the main comments I have made about World War III that I can either find or recall. One of the problems is that search won't bring up certain terms if they've been used a lot. Also, google has blocked most of what is on this site, so I can't get it that way either.

I would also mention that if bioweapons with pandemic effects can be perfected soon enough, then I strongly believe those will become the weapons of choice and they will be delivered in much the same manner, with infected terrorists spreading the pandemic via public transportation systems and so on.

The technology is now advanced to the point where pathogens can be engineered so they're relatively specific for different ethnic groups based on their genetics. Pathogens can be engineered. I can tell you my friends, or what used to be my buddies at DTRA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency Chem Bio Division, are extremely acutely aware that agents can be engineered to target ethnic groups. That's the battlefield. That's the real environment we're in. We have to have some technology to enable rapid response.

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/mrna- ... d-national

I'm not qualified to have an opinion. But my opinion is ethnically targeted bioweapons would not take out the intended ethnic groups in a clean manner. Some percentage of advantage might be achieved but not enough to make a decisive difference. I think the reality of this is they are going to try it come hell or high water, which is basically what I said last year.

The main takeaway for me is they are going to do it; this is where things are headed and that's part of the reason for my long term predictions I keep quoting, but only part of it.

My more specific predictions would be:

• There will be a major global financial panic and crisis. Supply chains will break, resulting in unavailability of critical raw materials and components. Global trade will begin to shut down. As it begins to become apparent that the supply chain linkages are permanently broken, the global interlinked financial markets will shut down and cease to exist. This will all happen very quickly. It will not take years from the initial panic.
• The focus of governments will turn to controlling their panicked and hungry populations. Due to lack of availability of imported goods and adequate storage "sufficient to reconstitute" a system consistent with nation state government, this will prove to be too little too late and most government will devolve to the local level as populations lose faith in their national governments and the national governments lose the resources and ability to control their populations.
• There will be no large scale nuclear war. Instead, the population will be culled through starvation, local strife (including settling of long-standing scores) and disease. Wave after wave of pandemics will sweep the world.
• Similar to national economies and governments, centralized utilities will fail or become so decrepit as to be unsafe and unusable. All centralized utilities including the power grid will shut down permanently.
• The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.
• Life during the coming dark age will be similar to the last dark age but worse due to environmental damage and pollution.

[Guest]

Also, google has blocked most of what is on this site, so I can't get it that way either.

Which means you are probably right.

[Higgenbotham]

Also, google has blocked most of what is on this site, so I can't get it that way either.

Which means you are probably right.

That's a reasonable assumption.

Recently, I searched on google for "maintenance phase of a declining civilization" - you know I've used that phrase numerous times.

I've mentioned in these pages that somewhere around 1971, give or take a few years, and it would vary from sector to sector with probably the more complex sectors coming first, that the US entered the maintenance phase of a declining civilization. There was a slow recognition and response to that turning point. Boeing would be more complex from an engineering standpoint than the average sector. Like the Boeing engineers said, they're not making washing machines, toasters or clock radios.