Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Pull back in time into mid next week and bubble up to 7000 spx suspected later next year as the scripted debauches continues
as unto the Eurodollar Eco History into Keynes and Dexter White period discussed.

I covered 1 percent of SDS near yesterday's low. Am 100 percent SDS again as of a couple minutes ago with SPX up 42. The contango on futures gains about 200 points per year for holding the position. I'm not moving much due to that and the extreme overvaluation.

[Higgenbotham]

When a friend mentioned over 20 years ago that he was going to start growing his own food, I said I planned to keep buying food for the foreseeable future. That plan has now changed.

I can imagine a couple distinct phases in the transition to the new dark age. The first phase will be economic trouble, which we are well into and I think getting close to the major global financial panic and crisis after which I think a second phase will follow. Sometime during the second phase money will disappear and people will need to either provide their own necessities or barter for them.

In my new Dark Age Hovel, I will be digging a few dozen compost pits starting today and through the Summer and into the Fall to prepare the ground for an intensive garden. This pit took 2.5 hours to dig and measures 32 inches by 40 inches by 2 feet deep. That implies I will be preparing 500 to 1000 square feet of ground by Fall for intensive production plus more ground beyond that.

Anyway, the main point being that I think it's time to earnestly prepare for the second phase, which will be the much more difficult phase.

Diggenbotham

Higgie,

That's a beautiful plan, but what do you plan to do when others come by (worst case scenario, I think Greer calls them 'warbands") and help themselves to the fruits of your labor?

My first customer came by a couple nights ago and took a few bites out of several tomatoes. This is how he is looking this morning after getting whacked with a shovel last night as he tried to help himself once again. If there are others in his little warband, they decided to move on.



That made me think more about the first human customer who will be showing up. Probably the very first will be a child who has been told by his parents to steal out of the garden. This happened during the Great Depression. For that, we will have Granny stationed at the garden all night, which is what the Russians did to protect their kitchen gardens when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Then what we do with the more virulent human pests who come after that will depend on whether the police force is still operating and any intelligence we can pick up on recent attacks.

[Higgenbotham]

Got another one with the shovel last night.

Nobody told me and I didn't read anywhere that mice and rats are a big problem for gardeners in Texas. However, a couple days ago, I found a video from a gardener in Houston who said upwards of 95% of pest problems in that area are due to mice and rats. I had been told about rabbits. And they are a big problem here also. Having been told about the rabbits, I considered using chicken wire to keep the rabbits out. And almost ordered some but decided to wait. The gardener in Houston was using chicken wire but the mice were still getting in so he was setting traps. It was stated online that some gardeners in Texas build clay walls around their gardens. Since I'm digging clay out anyway, some of that will be used to build clay walls.

A couple comments.

Most Americans, when starting a project, are programmed to buy buy buy as the first step. They automatically make a list and buy before doing any work. I'm trying to operate as if the dark age has already begun. So my go to is to ask what I already have here that can be used rather than defaulting to buy. However, I will buy traps if, after careful research, it appears they will be a necessity and will pay back before the clay wall is built.

Back when, I spent 2 years in the house remodeling and rental business before quitting my job. The real work only began when I quit but I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to do versus going in cold turkey. I don't have any idea when the shit is going to hit the fan for real (it hasn't yet) but I want to have a pretty good idea of what I am going to do when several hours per day of preparations (when I'm not dealing with the unavoidable bullshit of pre-collapse civilization) turns into 14 to 16 hours per day of real work day in and day out. I learned in the rental business that there is a huge difference between the two modes. I'm clearly not ready for the second mode yet, but it's moving along.

[aeden]

Possums, Coons, Rodents are always issue, and we do not shoot stray cats unless they are in really bad shape. Coyotes get them first anyways.
We feed them once a week to keep them motivated. If they like you, actually they leave a few mice on the porch to share.
PETA means perfectly edible tasty animals. We have more regard and respect for the animals except wood chucks and starlings
the dumb asses imported. We use the marlin with scope which is 80 yards dead on. Forty yards hollow point is feather puff ball as we remove them.
The only thing dumber than PETA are NGO Human smugglers.
We are for Legal immigration and that is to sophisticated for swamp Uniparty thieves to grasp. They are worse than wood chucks and more sadistic
than starlings in a song birds nests.

[Higgenbotham]

We feed them once a week to keep them motivated.

Thanks for the advice.

[guest]

Possums, Coons, Rodents are always issue, and we do not shoot stray cats unless they are in really bad shape. Coyotes get them first anyways.
We feed them once a week to keep them motivated. If they like you, actually they leave a few mice on the porch to share.
PETA means perfectly edible tasty animals. We have more regard and respect for the animals except wood chucks and starlings
the dumb asses imported. We use the marlin with scope which is 80 yards dead on. Forty yards hollow point is feather puff ball as we remove them.
The only thing dumber than PETA are NGO Human smugglers.
We are for Legal immigration and that is to sophisticated for swamp Uniparty thieves to grasp. They are worse than wood chucks and more sadistic
than starlings in a song birds nests.

Beautiful post, Aeden!

[Higgenbotham]

"At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist—together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum."

The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe

While Strauss and Howe say total war doesn't necessarily have to happen, this is what they say must happen.

When ancestral generations passed through these great gates of history, they saw in the Gray Champion a type of elder very different from the bustling senior citizens of America's recent past and from the old “Uncle Sams,” the Revolutionary War survivors of the 1830s, when Hawthorne wrote his tale. Who were these old priest-warriors? They were elder expressions of the Prophet archetype. And their arrival into old age heralded a new constellation of generations.

Where were the other archetypes at the same moments in history? Who was entering midlife in 1689? The cunning likes of ex-pirate Benjamin Church, or the reckless Jacob Leisler, leaders among a Cavalier Generation that bore more adversity (and cruelty) than any other cohort group of New World settlers. In 1775? The Liberty Generation peers of George Washington, skilled at the harsher tasks of history. 1865? Chivalrous Gilded colonels, ruined farmers, cynical industrialists, and one lone assassin. And 1944? The ex-Doughboy Lost Generation whose gutsy generals and unpretentious politicians made the tough choices while younger war heroes won the applause. These were Nomad archetypes.

Who was coming of adult age? The team-playing, upbeat Glorious Generation of Cotton Mather; Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton of the Republican Generation, the greatest civic achievers in U.S. history; and the G.I.s who scaled the cliffs of Point du Hoc and harnessed the secret of the atom. These were Hero archetypes.

Who were the children? The Enlightenment Generation children who later became the first students at Yale and at William and Mary College and still later the polite professionals who waited patiently to inherit the new colonial institutions founded by their elders; the Compromise Generation's John Quincy Adams, weeping as he watched from a distance as friends of his father fought and died at Bunker Hill; the Progressive Generation's Theodore Roosevelt, hoisted on a parent's shoulders as he watched Lincoln's funeral train roll by; and Michael Dukakis, age eight on Pearl Harbor Sunday and age ten on D-Day, hearing his parents talk about forging a new political and global order that he would later try to improve. These were Artist archetypes.

At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist—together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum.

In nature, the season that is about to come is always the season farthest removed from memory. So too in American history, past and present. Less than 10 percent of today's Americans were of soldier (or riveter) age on D-Day, the climax of the last Fourth Turning. Less than 2 percent have adult memories of 1929's Black Tuesday, when America last entered a saecular winter. Among their juniors, few can conjure how an Unraveling-era mood can so swiftly transform into something that feels and is so fundamentally different. Americans have always been blind to the next turning until after it fully arrives.

We may prefer to see ourselves as masters of nature, controllers of all change and progress, exempt from the seasons of history. Yet the more we balk at seasonality and the more we try to eradicate it, the more menacing we render our view of time—and of the future. Most of today's adult Americans grew up in a society whose citizens dreamed of perpetually improving outcomes: better jobs, fatter wallets, stronger government, finer culture, nicer families, smarter kids, all the usual fruits of progress. Today, deep into a Third Turning, these goals often feel like they are slipping away. Many of us wish we could rewind time, but we know we can't—and we fear for our children and grandchildren.

In a sense, Americans resemble a primitive people who, feeling the dry chill of a deepening autumn, grow nostalgic for spring while wondering how (or even if) the moist warmth will ever arrive again. Many Americans wish that, somehow, they could bring back a saecular spring now. But seasons don't work that way. As in nature, a saecular autumn can be warm or cool, long or short, but the leaves will surely fall. The saecular winter can hurry or wait, but history warns that it will surely be upon us.

We may not wish the Gray Champion to come again—but come he must, and come he will.

Thus will the Gray Champion ride once more.

Eight or nine decades after his last appearance, America will be visited by the “figure of an ancient man ... combining the leader and the saint (to) show the spirit of their sires.” Again will appear the heir to the righteous Puritan who stood his ground against Governor Andros, the old colonial governors of the American Revolution who broke from England, the aging radicals of the Civil War who pitted brother against brother with a “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel,” and “the New Deal Isaiahs” who achieved their rendezvous with destiny.

Whence will come the Gray Champion? Picture the Boomer Overclass of the Unraveling, aged another twenty years. Picture William Bennett's “Consequence and Confrontation” missives; Al Gore predicting an environmental cataclysm; James Webb's summoning a “ruthless and overpowering” retaliation against foreign enemies; James Fallows rooting for a “7.0 magnitude diplo-economic shock”; “Apocalypse Darman” and “Default Newt” with their budget train wrecks; Earth First saboteurs, willing to sacrifice other people's lives to save trees; and Army of God antiabortionists summoning the terminally ill to “use your final months to torch clinics.” Picture Boomers like these, older and harsher, uncalmed by anyone more senior, feeling their last full measure of strength, sensing their pending mortality, mounting their final crusade—all at a time of maximum public peril.

The full dimension of the Boomer persona will only emerge when today's better-known 1940s birth cohorts (whose youth was marked by relatively few social pathologies) are joined in public life by the tougher-willed, more evangelical 1950s cohorts (whose youth was marked by many more pathologies). That is the mix that will beget this generation's elder priest-warrior persona, vindicating the early Unraveling-era warning of Peter Collier and David Horowitz that Boomers are “a destructive generation whose work is not over yet.”

As the Crisis deepens, Boomers will confront the end result of their lifelong absorption with values. They will have laid a long trail of Unraveling-era rhetoric, much of it symbol and gesture, but now the words will matter. When James Redfield (or his elder equivalent) describes his peers as “a generation whose intuitions would help lead humanity toward a ... great transformation,” the summons will no longer be for pensive spiritual reflection but for decisive civic action. Boomers will comply with Cornel West's suggestion that “the mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage—come what may.” Their habitual tendency to enunciate unyielding principles will now carry the duty of enforcement.

The final Boomer leaders—authoritarian, severe, unyielding—will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth. In domestic matters, old Boomers will recast the old arguments of the Culture Wars into a new context of community needs. They will redefine and reauthenticate a civic expansion—crafted from some mix of Unraveling-era cultural conservatism and public-sector liberalism. In foreign matters, they will narrowly define the acceptable behavior of other nations and broadly define the appropriate use of American arms.

The same Boomers who in youth chanted “Hell no, we won't go!” will emerge as America's most martial elder generation in living memory. Whatever the elements of Crisis, old Boomer leaders will up the moral ante beyond the point of possible retreat or compromise. The same Boomers who once chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” will demand not just an enemy's defeat, but its utter destruction. They will risk enormous pain and consequence to command youth to fight and die in ways they themselves never would have tolerated in their own youth. They will believe, as did Cicero, that this moment in history assigns “young men for action, old men for counsel.”

Old Boomers will find transcendence in the Crisis climax. As they battle time and nature to win their release from history, they will feel themselves in position to steward the nation, and perhaps the world, across several painful thresholds. It is easy to envision old Aquarians as pillars of fire leading to the Promised Land—but just as easy to see them as Charonlike monsters abducting doomed souls across the Styx to Hades. Either is possible.

As the Crisis resolves, elder Boomers will have not the last word, but the deep word. If they triumph, they will collectively deserve the eulogy Winston Churchill offered to Franklin Roosevelt: to die “an enviable death.” If they fail, their misdeeds will cast a dark shadow over the entire twenty-first century, perhaps beyond. Whatever the outcome, posterity will remember the Boomers' Gray Champion persona long after the hippie and yuppie images have been forgotten to all but the historian.

And if the Crisis ends in triumph, what will come of the splendid new Victory Generation born just after it ends? As children, they will be
indulged. As youths, they will revolt against the Millennial-built world. In midlife, they will protect their children from civic decay. As elders, sometime around the year 2100, the Gray Champion will appear yet again among them.

As the next Gray Champion, the Boom Generation will lead at a time of maximum danger—and opportunity. From here on, Boomers will face the unfamiliar challenge of self-restraint. Having grown up feeling that G.I.s could always step in and fix everything if trouble arose, Boomers have thus far pursued their crusades with a careless intensity. In the Fourth Turning, G.I.s will no longer be around as a backstop, and the young Millennials will follow the Gray Champion off a cliff. If Boomers make a wrong choice, history will be unforgiving.

The continued maturation of Boomers is vital for the Crisis to end in triumph. These one-time worshipers of youth must relinquish it entirely before they can demand from Millennials the civic virtue they themselves did not display during the Awakening. This will require a rectitude that will strike some as hypocritical, yet it will be no more than a natural progression of the Prophet's life-cycle persona. When the Crisis hits, Boomers will need to defuse the Culture Wars at once. Their pro-choice secularists and pro-life evangelicals will need to move beyond their Unraveling-era skirmishes and unite around an agenda of national survival, much as Missionary elders did during depression and war.

Boomers must also display a forbearance others have never associated with them. By nature, they will always tend toward self-indulgence in their personal lives—but if they allow this to overflow into public life and demand generous public benefits, they will bankrupt their children financially, themselves morally. Unlike the Silent, sneaking through unnoticed will not be an option. Worse, if Boomers become pointlessly argumentative and let their values back them into a corner, their current talk-show hyperbole about annihilating enemies could translate into orders to use real doomsday machines.

Come the Crisis, Boomers will face the utterly unyuppielike task of presiding over an era of public authority and personal sacrifice. This generation must squarely face the threat its unyielding moralism could pose to its own children, to the nation, indeed to the entire world. “When people repeat the slogan ‘Make love not war,’ “historian David McClelland has warned, “they should realize that love for others often sets the process in motion that ends in war.” But if aging Boomers can control the dark side of their collective persona, they can look back on their role in the Fourth Turning the way old Ben Franklin looked back on his. When asked what image belonged on the national seal of the United States, the old man replied: the inspiring image of Moses, hands extended to heaven, parting the waters for his people.

Modern societies too often reject circles for straight lines between starts and finishes. Believers in linear progress, we feel the need to keep moving forward. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we land at the mercy of its deeper rhythms. Unlike the Navajo, we cannot withstand the temptation to try closing the circle ourselves and in the manner of our own liking. Yet we cannot avoid history's last quadrant. We cannot avoid the Fourth Turning, nor its ekpyrosis. Whether we welcome him or not, the Gray Champion will command our duty and sacrifice at a moment of Crisis. Whether we prepare wisely or not, we will complete the Millennial Saeculum. The epoch that began with V-J Day will reach a natural climax—and come to an end.

[Higgenbotham]

As the next Gray Champion, the Boom Generation will lead at a time of maximum danger—and opportunity. From here on, Boomers will face the unfamiliar challenge of self-restraint. Having grown up feeling that G.I.s could always step in and fix everything if trouble arose, Boomers have thus far pursued their crusades with a careless intensity. In the Fourth Turning, G.I.s will no longer be around as a backstop, and the young Millennials will follow the Gray Champion off a cliff. If Boomers make a wrong choice, history will be unforgiving.

The final Boomer leaders—authoritarian, severe, unyielding—will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth.

A few weeks ago, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that a majority of Latino men between the ages of 18 to 34 supported Trump.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/wo ... 42530.html

[Higgenbotham]

The Fall rain and cooler weather finally came in early in the week and the next morning I planted a crimson clover cover crop in the open areas of the garden. It's already sprouting. The mice are temporarily gone, but on Saturday I'll be picking up an outdoor farm cat that is a proven hunter who, according to the owner, drops her prey at the back door as aeden described (thanks again aeden). I had forgotten what my mother taught indirectly some 50 years ago. She had a Siamese cat who sometimes announced her arrival by flinging birds against the back door. There was never a rodent doing any damage in the garden. Like the Boomers who had the Silents and GIs doing everything for them as they grew up, I took it for granted.

[Higgenbotham]

I don't have any idea when the shit is going to hit the fan for real (it hasn't yet) but I want to have a pretty good idea of what I am going to do when several hours per day of preparations (when I'm not dealing with the unavoidable bullshit of pre-collapse civilization) turns into 14 to 16 hours per day of real work day in and day out.

Everybody has the unavoidable bullshit of pre-collapse civilization they are dealing with.

The school asked all the parents to make "a form of transportation" out of a cardboard box so the kids can participate in a "transportation parade". The kids are supposed to stand inside the contraption that the parents help them build and walk around with it. That's a lot to ask of someone who is busy prepping and has way more important things to do...



...as the new dark age tightens its grip.

PS The folks who are giving me the cat are leaving the country. I didn't ask why.