Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[aeden]

Tents - survival gear needed - southern indiana - three camp- locals
reports elite flying out and yes we know what all swamps demons truly are
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/mpoehls <----- on my life a better man than those who fly away

the gray cats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDX5q30V_-E&t=116s You still do not what they are and will apply do you.

“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so that they cannot see with their eyes,
and understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them.” John 12:40

[Higgenbotham]

Any recommendations on which countries Americans can escape to?

This Forum concluded long ago that staying domestically is best. Choose your location. There's many good places. Navigator's book explains clearly and the Dark Age Hovel Higg has also made very compelling choices.

This conversation just discusses Texas, but there is much to learn from it.

What is the Best place in Texas for growing Fruit and Vegetables?
The Jungle Explorer
6 years ago

Okay. So I have lived in Jones County, Texas for the last 11 years on 20 acres. In those years I have fought an endless battle to try and produce my own food. I have had little success. It seems like all of nature is fighting me with everything it has got. I could write a large book on all the things I have tried and how they have failed miserably, because of one element of nature or the other. I have spent tens of thousands and worked myself into the ground and I have nothing to show for it. I have had it! I am selling out starting over somewhere else while I still have the chance and strength to do so. My question is, WHERE?

I did not choose to come to my current location; the land was given to me. Now I know why!

https://www.houzz.com/discussions/52026 ... vegetables

I bookmarked this thread and followed it for years. I don't think someone has to be in the "best place" but they need to be in "a place" where they have the skills to handle the conditions. A place as inhospitable as Jones County, Texas might work out well for the very few who have the unique skills to make a go of it.

The above is an abbreviated version of something that was posted awhile back.

Recently, I discussed problems with mice, rats and rabbits in the garden. This is something I want to know how to deal with before spending a lot of money or needing the produce.

The person in the Houzz link also discussed this:

It's like I live with the plagues of Egypt in the Bible all year long. I once tried to plant an acre of corn. The grasshoppers literally ate it to the ground. I planted 4 acres of Blackeyed peas. Did not harvest one pea, because the deer devoured it with a gusto right up to the edge of my house. Out side planting is impossible. Planted this outdoor, drip irrigated garden one year. The rats eat every seed the sprouted before it was an inch tall.

Based on aeden's advice, I decided to get a cat first. I picked up this one up from a nearby farm.



What I didn't say previously was I had gone to the county shelter and looked at about 50 cats. Didn't see one that I thought could do the job. This one has proven to be able to. She leaves evidence of her kills scattered about the property. Watching her go into hunting mode the first time was a sight to behold. At this time, we are giving her a handful of dry food a couple times a week.







But the cat hasn't been able to take care of everything. There were some rats getting into areas the cat didn't seem to be able to sniff out. So I bought 12 of the Victor old style traps for a buck each and got rid of them that way, for now. One youtuber suggested gluing a dog kibble to the metal bait area so that the rodent would be sure to spring it. That worked well. As the garden expands, it should be possible to control the pests here in this part of Texas. In Jones County where the Houzz poster was, I probably would not have the skill level to do so.

[Higgenbotham]

But the cat hasn't been able to take care of everything. There were some rats getting into areas the cat didn't seem to be able to sniff out. So I bought 12 of the Victor old style traps for a buck each and got rid of them that way, for now. One youtuber suggested gluing a dog kibble to the metal bait area so that the rodent would be sure to spring it. That worked well.

One almost got away.

There is a lot of discussion on Reddit, etc., about killing rodents in a humane manner or even catching and releasing them. Probably no such discussion was taking place during the 14th Century mini dark age as the Black Plague swept across Europe multiple times. It seems we have come full circle. But little by little, that view will change...

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

[Higgenbotham]

David Kaiser on the election. Which he says is the most important post he has ever done in his 20 years of the blog.

Thursday, November 07, 2024

Thirty years later, the answer emerges

In 2001 and again in 2009, two presidents--George W. Bush and Barack Obama--had the opportunity to step into the role of the "Gray Champion," the generic term Bill and Neil used for history's Lincolns and FDRs.

And so it was that just eighteen months into the Obama presidency, on July 5, 2011, I wrote what was until now the most important post that I have ever done here. I could see that Obama was not going to undertake another New Deal, and that the era of corporate supremacy would continue into the High that would follow the crisis. It was clear by then that he was about to lose the House of Representatives because he, unlike FDR, and failed to provide real relief to the American people in the first year and a half of the crisis. And so he did, and he never regained it.

David Kaiser's post brings up a lot of good topics for discussion. Since my views do not align with those of either Trump supporters or Harris supporters, or, generally, those who think one party or another can either "Make America Great Again" or "Keep America Great" I will make several comments about David's post here in the Dark Age Hovel. But first I have another compost pit to finish digging.

[Higgenbotham]

But first I have another compost pit to finish digging.

I was about to move the gloves, but then thought they added a nice touch.



First of all, why read a far left Democrat, as John characterized David Kaiser? I mean, I haven't read anything from David Kaiser in quite some time, so why the sudden change? It's because every presidency since 2000 has been an utter disaster and if I want to get a handle on how the next disaster will unfold, the best way to do that is to read what the other side is saying.

As an example, I've very rarely read Stephan Schwartz for the past 4 years, but will be reading him regularly now because he is going to tell people how and why the coming disasters under Trump are going to unfold. As will Bob Butler.

Bob Butler,

If you are looking for a news agglomeration site to hang out at that would suit your fancy and give you the daily and even hourly shot of rabid anti-conservative bias that you so crave, I would highly recommend schwartzreport.net

Just today, Stephan posted the following hate-filled political diatribe and delusional nonsense as the lead-in for his news articles:

Stephan: The American obsessive gun psychosis plus the frenzied, hysterical racism and hate in the White MAGAt community has made the U.S. an unsafe nation. And, as a society, we are not dealing with this properly. Here is a brief article that lays out some of the issues. It will be interesting to see whether once the Republicans take the majority in the House they do anything about this. My prediction is they will not, since the cohort that make America a dangerous country in which to live also constitutes the base of the Republican Party.

Stephan: We saw some excellent good news with the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act. For the first time in American history, driven by the change in the culture this article describes, we are making wellbeing and love the principal definer of marriage. We have crossed a threshold. That said, I find it very interesting that 36 Republican members of the Senate voted against the act. They did that because that is what their base of voters wanted. And their vote memorializes that their position is as a minority.

Stephan is a brilliant man and I think the defining issues he emphasizes such as putting well-being ahead of profit are extremely important, but his rabid political biases are irrelevant in the big picture and diminish him considerably.

He even allows comments on his articles! Few comment! I'm sure Stephan would appreciate your long-winded leftist biased comments and you and Stephan could bask in the glory of the mirages you can both create and reflect back and forth to each other in his far left echo chamber.

https://www.schwartzreport.net/

Meanwhile, with the Trump victory, MAGA, etc. will bask in the glory of the mirages they create and reflect back and forth to each other in their right wing echo chambers.

[Higgenbotham]

Much has been written about Donald Trump, but not enough of it, it seems to me, from a generational perspective--largely because the nation's editors don't want to recognize a fellow Boomer. He (like George W. Bush before him, as I pointed out in one of my very first posts on this blog) is in key ways an archetypal Boomer, very reminiscent of the violent student radicals who first brought Boomers to the nation's attention in the late 1960s. Like most of us, he owed his comfortable childhood to the successes of our parents' generation and specifically to his own father. Like the protesters, he showed from the beginning of his career a complete contempt for established principles and ways of behaving. Confronted by any opposition, he simply shouted it down, and he would never, under any circumstances, admit that he was wrong. He turned himself and his name--not his buildings--into his product. And he made a career of saying outrageous things--a key tactic of the student protesters who violated every language taboo as a means of disrupting society. He started his presidential campaign in 2015 in exactly that way, and within less than a year he had wiped out the entire Republican establishment. Using the same tactics in the general election, he won a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton, who like Kamala Harris embodied one of the principles of the new Democratic party: that gender and race were in themselves critical qualifications for high office, because women and minorities had earned high office to make up for centuries of oppression.

It will have occurred to many readers that one question remains. How has Trump, who has a very tenuous grip on reality, cannot absorb real information, and relies on intimidation to get himself through every situation he faces, won the allegiance of the American people? Why has he not paid a penalty for his complete absence of self-restraint, both personal and political? I have two answers.

More importantly, the loosening of those restraints--personally, culturally, intellectually, and politically--has been perhaps the biggest mission of the whole Boom generation since it reached young adulthood in the late 1960s. Its first great political victory was the elimination of the military draft, that compelled young men to surrender two years of freedom--and perhaps their lives--for the common good. They liberated the arts from restrictions on subject matter and language, and tore down successive strictures against various forms of sexual behavior. They cut taxes and continued ending economic regulations. They have legalized various forms of gambling. They destroyed the respect for facts and traditions in my own profession of academia, with fateful consequences. And under Bush II, they arrogated to the United States to undertake any war anywhere in the world that served its idea of a greater good. Too many Boomers in too many fields have not allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted. Seventy years ago, a giant of an earlier generation whom I had the great good fortune to meet, Edward R. Murrow, concluded his broadcast on the evils of another demagogue, Joe McCarthy, with a chilling quote from Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, was not in our stars, but in ourselves." So it is again. What my generation has done was only human. The self-restraint which, as the Founders realized, was essential to make the American experiment work, had weighed upon too many generations for too long. It could not, human nature being what it is, endure indefinitely, and it didn't. It had indeed gone too far in some ways, and humanity has benefited from loosening some of those restraints. Now it will fall to future generations to re-establish some of those restraints and enable us to live together and solve new problems in the large, cooperative communities which their vast numbers now need to survive.

http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/20 ... tical.html

Here, David Kaiser hits the nail right on the head. I've talked about this before in various ways, many years ago.

(But let me first digress here and talk about one thing the Boomers did back in the 1970's when they thought they were in charge of the streets. It was the most insane thing you ever saw, but the Boomers invented something called streaking, where a lone Boomer or a group of Boomers would run naked through the streets or through public events. Now that the Boomers are in charge of other things, their behavior tends to be similar to streaking in the sense that they announce their authority in very provocative ways. OK, now that the proper tone has been set, I'll continue.)

As an Xer, I see Ben Bernanke "streaking" through the financial world with $7.7 trillion in bailouts which he then denied, or Bill Clinton "streaking" through the White House with the Monica Lewinsky affair and blowing a lot of cigar smoke to try to deny it, and a million other behaviors that, while not as overt as streaking itself, do have similarities. Let's face it, the word streaking didn't even exist until the Boomers came along. Millions of Xer youths watched this taking place repeatedly on national TV.

I posted something years ago: "I can't remember the exact quote, but in the 1930's the US Central Bank was quoted as saying to the effect that, "We did all we could to stop the deflation." Now I need to add to that, "We did all we could to stop the deflation within the moral precepts that confined activity at that time."" To me, what Reid did and what the Fed has done now versus the 1930s are both meaningful in that in both cases lines like those are being crossed that should not be crossed if our civilization is to be preserved intact. And the fact that Reid, the Fed, and many others, particularly others who have the power to change that, don't agree with me is, I believe, problematic.

Now back to Strauss and Howe:

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.

[Higgenbotham]

The self-restraint which, as the Founders realized, was essential to make the American experiment work, had weighed upon too many generations for too long. It could not, human nature being what it is, endure indefinitely, and it didn't. It had indeed gone too far in some ways, and humanity has benefited from loosening some of those restraints.

This is the right idea. In my opinion, though, it has gone way, way too far. Humanity may have benefited if you want to say massive borrowing from the future produces real long term benefits, which it does not. It only produces transient short term benefits. An example would be the recent post in the Abortion thread that discusses large company CEO preferences for employees having abortions instead of absorbing the cost of carrying their pregnancies to full term. It has short term benefits to bottom lines and that's about it.

[Higgenbotham]

So my prediction is that Donald Trump and those he surrounds himself with now have maximal ability to cross lines that should not be crossed and they will do it in grand style. In fact, they are already talking with great gusto about which lines they will cross and to what great extent. Then we can watch the disasters unfold. It should probably be added, though previously implied, that the disasters that would have unfolded under a Harris presidency would have likely been more serious. However, the Trump disasters will be more serious than the disasters of any presidency from Bush 2 through Biden.

This is still my all time favorite quote from this forum.

In any case, his philosophy [Ben Bernanke's] is that if something is bankrupt, you might as well see how bankrupt you can get it before it collapses.

Trump too.

[Higgenbotham]

David Kaiser on the election. Which he says is the most important post he has ever done in his 20 years of the blog.

Thursday, November 07, 2024

Thirty years later, the answer emerges

In 2001 and again in 2009, two presidents--George W. Bush and Barack Obama--had the opportunity to step into the role of the "Gray Champion," the generic term Bill and Neil used for history's Lincolns and FDRs.

And so it was that just eighteen months into the Obama presidency, on July 5, 2011, I wrote what was until now the most important post that I have ever done here. I could see that Obama was not going to undertake another New Deal, and that the era of corporate supremacy would continue into the High that would follow the crisis. It was clear by then that he was about to lose the House of Representatives because he, unlike FDR, and failed to provide real relief to the American people in the first year and a half of the crisis. And so he did, and he never regained it.

One thing I don't understand is why David thinks Obama could have ever been a Gray Champion. My understanding from reading Strauss and Howe is that the Gray Champion has to be of the Prophet archetype and also early in the Prophet archetype. Obama was born in 1961. Strauss and Howe say Generation X fell between 1961 and 1981. Kamala, due to her age, can't be a Gray Champion either. If the Gray Champion is to be the President as Lincoln and FDR were, then it had to be Trump in this election or there wasn't going to be one. Probably whether Obama could have been a Gray Champion was debated someplace or another and it was decided he could because people wanted to believe he could.

[aeden]

The West stagnates and failing.
China and India are increasing...because energy prices are cheap plentiful coal.

Hadrian had a corrupted province. Legatus found the error and the Officials head was send to Rome in Vase of Oil to preserve the
finding and proper solution.