Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[tim]

https://www.collapselife.com/p/euthanas ... ion-murder

Across the continent, including our neighbors to the North, demoralization hasn’t come from a specific war or its aftermath, but from an endless cost-of-living crisis, a widespread drug abuse and mental health epidemic, the collapse of institutional trust, and a society fractured by corrupt politics, technology, and isolation. Culturally, many have given up hope that life will ever get better. The middle class is eroding quickly, and younger generations know they will struggle to afford what their parents took for granted. Worst of all, a majority no longer believes in a divine power and therefore no longer recognizes the spark of divinity within their fellow citizen.

It doesn’t take a global war for a country to lose hope. Debt, despair, disconnection and and a culture that has given up on anything beyond material comfort, hedonistic pleasure, and psychological ease all work just as well.

Such hopelessness allows a familiar idea to creep back into the public consciousness: If life becomes unbearable, isn’t death a form of dignity? Is it not merciful to help someone end their suffering?

In Canada, the legalization of euthanasia — Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), as proponents prefer to frame it — began as a way to provide a dignified end for the terminally ill. It has since expanded to include the chronically ill, the disabled, and the mentally ill. Proposals are already on the table to extend MAiD to “mature” minors and to allow individuals to file advance requests for euthanasia before any diagnosable physical or mental disease even exists. There’s even debate in Quebec about legalizing MAiD for babies with “severe deformities.”

Some see this as a slippery slope. Others believe each step is justified. Advocates frame every expansion as empathy, but empathy has a way of morphing into efficiency when the state becomes overwhelmed and citizens become too tired to recognize the moral quagmire facing them. How did we get here?

In a word, incrementalism.

As the word suggests, incrementalism is the act of small steps towards a broader goal. One where you push just so far, step back and wait for normalization, then push further.

When a society believes the system cannot or will not take care of them, and that life itself is becoming economically impossible, something like Canada’s MAiD functions like a pressure valve for a failing state. And when people lose touch with the idea that life is sacrosanct and God-given, it becomes easier to accept the notion that we can end it at any time. Without the divine, euthanasia becomes a rational and efficient way to deal with a resource that has outlived its utility.

A clarification: Nazi Germany’s euthanasia program was involuntary and explicitly rooted in eugenic theory. Canada’s MAiD, or even Holland’s euthanasia program, is not. At least not yet.

But these societies all normalized state-provided death systemically… step-by-step. None of these populations woke up one morning and chose death as social policy. They slid toward it. Ultimately, that is the cautionary tale.

Collectively, we tell ourselves we will never repeat history’s darkest chapters. But it’s easier to recognize the return of monsters in swastikas and jackboots than it is to see the danger of policy proposals and academic papers that mistake killing for kindness. That is not progress — it’s a rebrand. Worse, it’s not just killing people, but the very essence that made us different from the monsters of history.

[Higgenbotham]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/202 ... er-taiwan/

China would destroy US military in fight over Taiwan, top secret document warns

Beijing’s hypersonic missiles ‘could sink US aircraft carriers within minutes’

China would defeat the US military in a war over Taiwan, according to a top-secret US government assessment.

US reliance on costly, sophisticated weapons leaves it exposed to China’s ability to mass-produce cheaper systems in overwhelming numbers, the highly classified “Overmatch Brief” warns.

A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.

Losing Taiwan, the US’s key bulwark against Chinese power in the western Pacific, would deliver a severe strategic and symbolic blow to Washington.

The country’s most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford – recently sent to the Caribbean for Donald Trump’s crackdown on drug traffickers – is often destroyed in the wargames outlined in the brief.

It was inevitable that the US would end up in some similar position to this. One reason is that mediocrity or downright incompetence has been rewarded in the US for 5 decades plus, while excellence has been punished.

My kid's dentist asked me why I decided to go to her. I told her it was for two reasons. The first is that she didn't ask for a credit card number for me to be able to come in. The first dentist I wanted to take my kid to required a credit card number in advance to be able to enter her office. The second, more important reason, is that some of the academic credentials she listed on her web site would have put her in about the top 1 percent of dentists. As I told her this and looked at her face, 3 things seemed kind of obvious. The first was that not many people have mentioned this to her, the second was that she was a bit embarrassed, and the third was that she is obviously Jewish. I told her that just meant that she did her job and I want to take my kid to somebody who will do her job. If you read reviews of dentists, what you will find is nearly all parents want to take their kid to a dentist who will make it really fun and gimmicky, like they get great toys and prizes.

viewtopic.php?p=90758#p90758

[aedens]

Its not better.

Sat Feb 12, 2022 9:22 am
Yea we have time for Humor.
We have talked to Grade school, High School, and College level members in education.
Teachers assaulted. Ankle biter.

We discussed last week that very topic.
They come in Marxist feral and sadly we are talking the staff also.

Indeed pity the parents who cannot Home School them for they are leaving the Public Educated in the dust.

[Higgenbotham]

Let's hope for our sake that he remains "absolutely not ready". I do think he's right about where the greatest risks lie.

The 10 biggest threats facing humanity, according to Bill Gates

The world’s unpreparedness for the next pandemic

Gates is giving us some scary odds for the next great biological catastrophe. He estimates the chance of a natural pandemic hitting is “somewhere between 10 and 15 percent” in the next four years.

Despite the horrors of COVID-19—which killed an estimated 7 million people, though WHO estimates put the actual toll at 20 million or more—Gates says, “We’re absolutely not ready.” The pandemic also wiped out over $10 trillion from the global economy, according to Health Policy Watch, underscoring the high stakes of unpreparedness.

Gates points out that political division, rather than a lack of tools, is the core problem preventing the consensus needed for better monitoring and rapid vaccine research. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoes this, calling the next health crisis an “epidemiological certainty” that requires urgent attention.

The terrifying reality of manufactured bio-terrorism

While pandemics are natural, Gates considers bioterrorism to be the “most frightening” acute, man-made threat facing us. He once chillingly warned that an engineered attack could kill 30 million people in a single year.

This risk is amplified because the technology needed to create biological weapons is becoming increasingly accessible and affordable, making detection incredibly difficult. The danger centers on “dual-use” technologies, where the same innovations used to cure diseases can also be repurposed for weapons.

The sheer scale of the potential loss is why Gates focuses on this. He stated during an interview with the Wall Street Journal on November 27, 2010, that bioterrorism and pandemics are the only threats he foresees that “can kill over a billion people.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medica ... =9#image=4

From later in the same link:

The dangerous AI investment bubble

Gates maintains an optimistic long-term view of AI, calling it the “biggest technical thing ever in my lifetime.” He even believes AI could streamline society enough to lead to a two-day workweek.

However, he cautions that the immediate market is experiencing a financial frenzy, comparing it to the risky dot-com bubble. He predicts “a ton of these investments that will be dead ends” because companies are rushing to commit to expensive data centers without clear returns.

The immediate threat is profound economic waste: an MIT study found that 95% of organizations are getting zero return on their Generative AI investments, despite pouring billions into the sector. This misallocated capital represents funds that could have been invested in immediate poverty or health initiatives.

Gates isn't too far from coming around to admitting indirectly that a new dark age is possible.

[Higgenbotham]

Why Are There So Many Somalians in Minnesota?
Thomas English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Viha_7K9vC0

Do you want to know
8:18
what today in 2025 the workforce
8:20
participation of people of Somali uh
8:23
diaspora in the United States is? It's
8:26
something like 35%
8:28
which means that somewhere in the
8:29
neighborhood of 60s something % of them
8:32
are unemployed. They're literally they
8:35
are being subsidized for no practical
8:38
reason, for no discernable reason by the
8:41
American taxpayer. And the worst part is
8:43
that a fairly decent chunk of that money
8:45
that they're receiving from the taxpayer
8:47
isn't even going to the beneficiary
8:50
himself. It's going back to the global
8:52
south. It'sing ridiculous. This was in
8:56
the '90s. Most of them had jobs. They
8:58
were making something like $10 an hour.
9:01
Most of them don't have jobs now. they
9:03
they just sort of subsist on on welfare
9:06
and this kind of thing. So the meat
9:07
packing industry is like they don't
9:09
really even do that anymore. Uh meat
9:12
packing centers certainly are not in
9:14
major major metros and most Somali have
9:16
moved out of these tiny little towns at
9:19
this point to the point where now
9:20
there's about 200,000 of them centered
9:23
in the Twin Cities metro. They're
9:25
they're they're urban people. They're
9:27
not really in these in these small towns
9:29
anymore.
9:30
Uh most of them are unemployed and yeah
9:33
they'reing bums primarily. They're
9:34
they're unemployed.

When the welfare state collapses...

Stephen Miller Says Somali Fraud Scandal Could Create Unprecedented Milestone In US History

Harold Hutchison
Media Reporter

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller told Fox News host Laura Ingraham Friday that the welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota centered around Somali immigrants could make for the “greatest financial fraud” in the history of the United States.

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is surging into the Minneapolis area to target illegal immigrants from Somalia after revelations into at least $1 billion in fraud, prompting a probe by the Treasury Department into allegations that some of the stolen funds went to the radical Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Miller observed during an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle” that almost all of the Somalis who immigrated to Minnesota were on welfare programs. (RELATED: Stephen Miller Says CNN Refusing To Book Him On Their Airwaves)

“The Somali community have been engaged in systematic defrauding of the government for years,” Miller told Ingraham. “We’re going to discover, ultimately, we are in the throes right now of a full-throated, all-hands-on-deck federal investigation, is that the scope, scale, size and sheer magnitude of the fraud eclipses anybody’s worst nightmare.”

“According to official government records, 90% of Somali households with children are on federal welfare. The real number is probably 100% because federal records always undercount,” Miller said. “You’re talking about a population that has been imported into Minnesota in which virtually every single member of the population is receiving welfare from the federal government. This could very well end up, Laura, being the greatest financial fraud scandal in American history.”

State employees accused Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota of engaging in “systemic” retaliation against whistleblowers who warned of the fraud schemes as the Justice Department prosecutes multiple federal cases. Walz admitted during a Nov. 30 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the state “attracts criminals,” but he also demanded that Somali residents not be demonized.

Walz also attacked Trump Friday for highlighting the fraud, claiming the president was “indiscriminately targeting immigrants.” Trump announced he would end “Temporary Protected Status” for Somalis in Minneapolis in response to the allegations and also said that the influx of refugees had “destroyed our country.”

https://dailycaller.com/2025/12/12/step ... s-history/

[Higgenbotham]

...failed name brand equipment that is less than 3 years old that a few decades ago would have been trouble free for 10 or 20 years...

This isn't the only example, but we have a Carrier furnace that is just over 2 years old that failed to blow warm air when it started this Fall. Because the HVAC company had been near the furnace when the aluminum AC coil ruptured and was replaced under warranty this Summer (also just over 2 years old) I decided to fix the furnace myself.

The furnace was very clean inside. I didn't see any clogging of hoses, etc., and when I bypassed the pressure switch, the furnace started as normal. The pressure switch was Made in Costa Rica. The new OEM pressure switch was $66 and over 100 had been sold on Amazon in the past month. When I ordered it the estimated delivery was next day but it took 4 days to receive it. Probably had a run on them. I think these pressure switches used to be Made in USA by companies like Honeywell and hardly ever failed, so I wasn't sure that was really the problem but for $66 decided to take a chance. When I owned rental property, I don't recall either a furnace failing at the beginning of a season or a pressure switch ever failing (spark igniter, yes).



It turned out that the pressure switch was the problem. But it's possible that knowing these fail the HVAC company could have taken the tube off and blown hard on it to break the diaphragm on the switch knowing they could come out and "fix" the furnace on warranty, charging the manufacturer for the "repair". So I wanted to keep them out of here if I could, just in case.

But seeing all the subsequent evidence, I'm more inclined to think the part actually failed.

[aedens]

But a spare capacitator for your AC unit also.
Pay $500 for a service call or $15 to do it yourself when it fails.
Just swap them out every 2 years H.

You are here....

Sat May 10, 2025 9:13 am From a guy like us.....

My heat pump failed last summer on a Saturday in the midst of the heat wave.
It was impossible to get an HVAC tech out anytime within the next several days.
Most of the companies in my city are giving preference to customers that have signed up for their maintenance programs.

Truth.

[Higgenbotham]

The United States of Fraud
From shoplifting to gamifying returns, America's consumers are turning into cheaters.

By Emily Stewart
Dec 14, 2025, 3:27 AM CT

I always get a kick out of people's reactions when I bring up what I've come to think of as "mini crimes" against big businesses — small acts of deviance that average shoppers commit without really even thinking about it. At first, there's usually denial: "No, I would never engage in the slightest level of fraud." But pretty quickly, the confessions start to roll in. "OK, I sometimes ring up my organic apples as regular at the grocery store, and sure, I've returned an item after wearing it a time or two. Honestly, I'd forgotten sneaking snacks into the movie theater was a no-no."

Ask whether people feel guilty about it, and the answer is generally, not really. It's tough to lose sleep over a bit of rule-bending amid the state of corporate power and inequality in America.

Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Having a friendly local grocer and corner store guy who's known you since you were a baby is increasingly rare. They've been replaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy — AI — promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us.

Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords. They're engaging in spurts of shoplifting, taking part in return shenanigans, and using their credit cards for "friendly fraud" that's anything but. They see — or at least excuse — these acts not as stealing but as small moments of deserved vengeance in a system that violates their sense of basic fairness at every turn.

A 2024 PwC survey on trust in US business found that while 90% of business executives believe customers highly trust their companies, just 30% actually do.

This breakdown in the social contract leads many Americans to feel that everyone is trying to pull one over on them, so why not return the favor? When everything seems like a scam, it's easier to justify becoming a scammer.

https://www.businessinsider.com/shoplif ... il-2025-12

[Higgenbotham]

Unemployment rate among college grads is really 16%

1 in 7 College Grads Earn Less Than the Poverty Threshold
Last Updated: April 4, 2022

Majority of College Grads Do Not Work in Their Field of Study

In addition to dealing with financial insecurity, only 46% of college grads surveyed say they currently work in their field of study. 29% report working in a different field, while 16% of those under age 54 (and therefore not likely retired) say they are currently unemployed.

48% of College Grads Live Paycheck to Paycheck

Although one of the assumed benefits of going to college is at least some degree of financial stability, 21% of respondents say they live paycheck to paycheck most of the time, while an additional 27% say they live paycheck to paycheck all of the time.

14% of College Grads Currently Make Below the Federal Poverty Threshold

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one person under the age of 65 with no children meets the poverty threshold when making less than $14,097 per year. Of the total 1,000 respondents we surveyed, approximately one in seven reports making under $15,000 per year in personal income.

https://www.intelligent.com/1-in-7-coll ... threshold/

I suppose someone might ask how the unemployment rate for college grads can be 16% but only 14% live below the poverty level. It might be because more than 16% of college grads experience some unemployment each year while also finding work for a few months each year to scrape by.

[tim]

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p ... revolution

Hobson's Choice: Depression or Revolution

Both of these bubble characteristics set up our illusion of choice.

Hobson’s Choice is the illusion of choice, when the only real choice is “that or none”--”something or nothing.” We now face a Hobson’s Choice between a Bubble Economy that leads to Revolution, or we pop the Bubble Economy and get a Depression.

Put another way, there is no alternative in the status quo to a Bubble Economy which leads to Depression or Revolution.

We can choose “something”--a bubble-dependent economy--or nothing, as there is no alternative in what analyst Tim Morgan (Surplus Energy Economics) calls the Post-Capitalist Expediency (PCE) economy because it’s based not on capitalism but on monetary and policy expediencies.

If we choose the Bubble Economy, it ends in Depression or Revolution. If we choose “none”--pop the Bubble Economy--we still get Depression or Revolution, and those come as a inextricably bound pair: the only choice is which come first. So the choice between Depression or Revolution is also illusory.

The temptation here is to distract ourselves with debates that lead to quicksand: rather than illuminate the issue, they bog us down.

The temptation arises because the facts are inconvenient to the conventional narrative of Permanent Progress and Plenty for all--the three Ps.

Over the past 50 years, the share of the economy being distributed to wages has shrunk while the share distributed to capital has increased. Over these five decades, the cumulative difference now exceeds $150 trillion.

The net result is those who own capital have gained fortunes while those who depend on earnings from their labor have lost ground. The “Plenty” has been asymmetrically distributed to the benefit of capital.

At the same time, costs have risen inexorably for the essentials required to participate in the economy. These essentials have become increasingly complex and burdensome. In 1975, at the peak of labor’s share of the economy, one could function as a full participant in the economy with 1) a landline telephone, 2) a mailing address, 3) a bank checking account and 4) one credit or debit card.

The fees to maintain these essentials were modest.

To function as a full participant in the economy now requires constant expenditures on technologies and an immense amount of shadow work to manage the complexity. At the same time, the costs of essential services such as childcare, higher education and healthcare have exploded when measured in the number of hours of labor required to pay for them.

As I have repeatedly explained, this is the only valid metric of costs: the number of hours of labor required to pay rent, insurance, tuition, etc., i.e. the purchasing power of labor. Every other measure is artifice that is easily gamed to create an illusion of “Plenty.” Generating this artifice is the primary task of conventional economists.

The sources of this inexorable rise in the cost of living are many--bureaucratic bloat, the expansion of unproductive complexity, and so on--but the primary driver is the suppression of competition and transparency by monopolies and cartels: once these structures dominate a sector, they are free to increase profits by raising prices and degrading the quality and quantity of their products/services.

The rising costs of essentials is self-reinforcing: soaring healthcare costs increase the overhead costs for employers to have employees, increasing the pressure to replace workers with technology or game the system to avoid having to insure their workers, a trend that increases the precarity of the uninsured workforce.

The economy is now dominated by these self-reinforcing feedback loops of cartels and monopolies--both private-sector and state, as state agencies continually increase mandatory fees.

As I explain in Investing In Revolution, totalitarian governments and corporate monopolies are structurally identical.

Since the status quo is dominated by those who own capital, this widening asymmetry between labor and capital serves their interests remarkably well. They have no incentive to reverse it and every incentive to increase it.

If this widening asymmetry were to become painfully visible, this would threaten the stability of the status quo. And so Job #1 for the Powers That Be is to cloak this reality with 1) artificially contrived statistics, 2) credit and 3) asset bubbles.

To fill the widening gap between the purchasing power of wages and systemically rising costs of essentials, the status quo has expanded credit much like a star going supernova: credit has consumed the entire economy.

Since earnings don’t cover expenses, the “solution” is to borrow money. This is an ideal “solution” for those who own capital, as the debt is an asset that generates income.

That debt slowly impoverishes the debtors is glossed over by the artifice of “investment”: borrowing $100,000 to pay for a university degree of diminishing (or near-zero) value is an “investment,” exorbitant childcare is an “investment,” and gambling in the stock market / real estate casinos is of course an “investment.”

But there are limits are using credit to fill the widening gap between wages and essential expenses, and so the third “solution” is to inflate an asset bubble with central bank monetary stimulus and regulatory hocus-pocus.

There are two key characteristics of credit-asset bubbles:
1. They inherently favor those who already own assets and those with access to lower-cost credit, i.e. the high earning already-wealthy, and
2) They don’t actually address the fundamental problems with our asymmetric economy, they simply paper them over with a floodtide of phantom wealth.

The wealth generated by asset bubbles is phantom because the utility-value of the assets doesn’t increase; the only thing that soars is the market value within an artificially controlled monetary system: think Monetary Mouse Utopia. (Musings Report #48: Red Friday, Mouse Utopia and Model Collapse).

Simply put, the entire structure of asset bubbles--monetary manipulation / stimulus, expanding credit, the funneling of credit into expanding bubbles--is a hallucination that like AI hallucinations, is constantly reinforced by the financial system “training” its analysis on its previous hallucinations of artificial wealth.

Both of these bubble characteristics--the phantom wealth flows to the already wealthy, pushing wealth / income inequality to extremes, and the synthetic illusion that “money” can painlessly solve all structural problems--set up our illusion of choice:

1. If the bubble continues expanding, the extremes of wealth / income inequality will trigger revolution
2. If the bubble continues expanding, the extremes generate instabilities that inevitably implode the bubble.

To take but one example of many, due to the asymmetries built into bubble-dependent economies, the top 10% now account for half of all consumer spending and collect 40% of all income. the top 0.1% who own a preponderance of income-producing assets collect the majority of unearned income / income from assets.

This dependence on soaring asset valuations to generate “the wealth effect” while pushing inequality to extremes is self-liquidating: it generates its own collapse.

Should the bubble pop due to its own extremes and instability, the resulting collapse in consumption and the reversal of ‘the wealth effect” will crush the economy as jobs will be shed in a self-reinforcing feedback loop: as consumption plummets, job losses mount, reducing household income which then further reduces consumption.

Since the state (dominated by those who own assets) has papered over these asymmetries by borrowing tens of trillions of dollars, the state’s ability to “print our way to prosperity” is limited.

Those claiming that the “solution” is to eliminate paying interest on state debt and just print as much money as we need to keep things glued together--Modern Monetary Theory--have fallen into the “money solves every problem” trap: the fundamental sources of the self-liquidating asymmetries are not resolved by distributing freshly printed money.

“Money” doesn’t solve structural, systemic asymmetries, it simply enables their further expansion. “Money” in whatever form we choose doesn’t reverse moral decay, either, as those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid will quickly gain control of the new “money” and use it to their own advantage.

If the bubble continues expanding, this will eventually trigger a social revolution that disrupts the hallucination of monetary stimulus / credit / asset bubbles, crashing the economy into Depression.

So take your pick, but the results will be the same: Depression or Revolution. the only “choice” is which comes first.