Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Bill Gates was the world's richest man every year from 1995 through 2007. Before that, I had read a biography about Bill Gates where he discussed his early vision for Microsoft. It turns out that he has repeated that vision often and it can be referenced from sources other than that biography.

The revolutionary concept of software as an amazing tool was the whole idea that Paul Allen and I built our company around. When Microsoft got started in 1975, our dream was a computer on every desk and in every home.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/bill-gates-o ... technology

Of course, the idea was that there would be a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software with frequent upgrades whereby Gates would receive ongoing payments from every desk and every home in America. I think that mindset was inherent in Bill Gates and never left him.

Perhaps the biography I read (published in 1992) was the first time that vision was put in front of the public, but it was probably before that. In any case, though, I think that the biography was the first time the vision really became mainstream knowledge. After that, every year that Bill Gates was named the richest person in the world, people were reminded of Bill Gates and how he did it. While it would have escaped the notice of most people, it did not escape the notice of those so inclined to want to make a lot of money. Also, it didn't escape the notice of that subset of people that Microsoft and Gates got to where they got not by primarily focusing on making great software but by focusing on how to be the only game in town when it came to software, which came down to the business practices that Bill Gates used.

I consider this (the underlined part above) to be a small part of the decline in societal standards that coincides with the descent into a dark age.

These are my top 3 general characteristics of a civilization that is on the cusp of entering a dark age/has just entered a dark age (in other words, where I think we are right now):

1. Decline in societal standards
2. Functional failure of government
3. Lack of accountability

Each of these should be prefaced by the word extreme, which also applies to the present situation, in my opinion. Once the society is well into the dark age the top 3 characteristics are different.

In this case, the standard that was tossed aside was making the highest quality product reasonably possible. Prior to the 1970s, making the highest quality product reasonably possible was an agreed upon societal standard. That standard was compromised in many ways by Gates and others in order to comply with maximizing profit and market dominance.

Nowadays, there are many ways to differentiate between what was previously the norm in quality and what the norm has become. For example, the previous norm in food was things that are now called organic, grass-fed, etc., and sold as "premium product" at exorbitant prices. Meanwhile, the CPI does not account for this.

As documented, though, this was already happening in a similar manner before the advent of Microsoft.

Also, during the early stages of this breakdown, there were economic losers and beneficiaries. The beneficiaries were the corporations who could cookie cutter their outlets across a previously interesting and varied landscape, producing the forlorn, bland, and ugly architectural landscape that now exists across America. McDonalds perhaps being one of the first and best examples. During the heyday of the expansion of McDonalds, along came the "great investors" who realized they could make a lot of money investing in this concept, people like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch. Lynch described what he called the "ten-bagger" which was a stock where you could invest a dollar and that investment would multiply quickly to 10 dollars as these corporations cookie-cuttered their outlets across the country. Expanding in this way made a corporation hungry for capital and there was a class of people who got rich providing it, including many corporate nomads who recognized what was happening from observing their own lives. However, many more missed the boat, even though it was somewhat obvious.

As an aside to the above, this was when the definition of quality was, let's say, adjusted. Quality no longer primarily means you get something really good. It primarily means, for example, as you travel across the country and go from McDonald's outlet to McDonald's outlet, it means you know what you are going to get and it will be very close to being the same thing.

quality
1 of 2
noun
qual·​i·​ty ˈkwä-lə-tē
pluralqualities

1
a
: peculiar and essential character : NATURE
her ethereal quality
—Gay Talese
b
: an inherent feature : PROPERTY
had a quality of stridence, dissonance
—Roald Dahl
c
: CAPACITY, ROLE
in the quality of reader and companion
—Joseph Conrad

2
a
: degree of excellence : GRADE
the quality of competing air service
—Current Biography
b
: superiority in kind
merchandise of quality

3
a
: social status : RANK
b
: ARISTOCRACY

4
a
: a distinguishing attribute : CHARACTERISTIC
possesses many fine qualities
b
archaic : an acquired skill : ACCOMPLISHMENT

5
: the character in a logical proposition of being affirmative or negative

6
: vividness of hue

7
a
: TIMBRE
b
: the identifying character of a vowel sound determined chiefly by the resonance of the vocal chambers in uttering it

8
: the attribute of an elementary sensation that makes it fundamentally unlike any other sensation

https://www.merriam-webster.com/diction ... %20generic.

This change in concept was pushed heavily by the cookie-cutter corporations and business schools starting in the 1970s and is well documented.

Let's look at the power tools discussion from another angle with respect to a dark age. The first angle previously discussed was to be aware of the degradation of quality that has occurred.

Another angle, though, is how and why the degradation in quality occurred and to whose benefit. I'm not going to do a research project in that regard but will instead just throw out a few generalities that probably apply because they do in fact apply in similar situations that I have knowledge of. One poster in the woodworking forum previously linked to noted that the big box hardware stores have been stocking their own cheaper name brand versions which include plastic parts instead of metal, etc. It would be probable without really looking that those tools were put out there in that way to mislead consumers into thinking they were getting the same thing as the quality version at a cheaper price because the biggest big box can offer lower prices on volume. It would be probable without really looking that this strategy was implemented by some MBA who has seen similar. It would be probable without really looking that this and similar "business and marketing strategies" or what have you at least somewhat explain how the founders of these companies became billionaires and the managers and stock holders became millionaires. It's not because they came up with something that was actually better than what previously existed; it was in fact worse.

More recently, examples such as the above are considered to be smart business practices.

My thesis is that a Dark Age scale population reduction can only come about through large scale individual moral and institutional failure.

I think it has to be, at its root, an ethics problem. There are a lot of commonalities to, let's say, the pervasive belief that it is acceptable for an institution not to be Triple A, not to have pristine credit. It's become acceptable, even considered preferable, not to be or exhibit pristine anything on both an individual and institutional level.

If Fitch does a downgrade of the US credit as happened recently the majority will now say, well, it doesn't really matter.

[aeden]

Grandpa had built it with reinforced concrete and metal roof.
Everything else burned to the ground. One in a million seen it coming.
As seen in the left coast the plan was to burn them out. Provided was
DNR documents to those facts from risk assessments or wishful thinking lists and from Linemen reports who
found poles cut over half but barely standing waiting for the winds to topple them.
This list also included the lunatics caught with gas cans eco arsonists.
Keynes was correct only one in a million will see it just on that aspect for structural inflation also.
The spoiler alerts as liberals embrace conspire. Priceless.

To the end loyal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwDwZW5jBmY

https://scopesinsights.com/best-thermal ... e-hunting/

“diversity index” Babbling self-divided useful idiots.

[aeden]

SpaceX and other rocket companies have for years asserted that its hiring practices were dictated by the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) law, which regulates the export of regulated technologies, such as rocket parts. An "export" is deemed to have occurred if technology is disclosed to a foreigner, even in the U.S.
Musk responded Thursday night, tweeting "SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense," adding "This is yet another case of weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes."

Republicans? Braindead to be shipped in railcars also.

It exists solely to provide wealth and power to the psychopaths.

Zipper noted correctly - It’s incredible the lunacy exhibiting from this Biden lead Democrat party.
I know one thing, keep your distance from these Democrats. They are the essence of all that is filth as failed in life try hell.

So anyone who crosses the border can get a Top Secret Security clearance from the US Government.

That the plan... only thing left is to default on debt. When Goodfellows cannot get anything more from the restaurant they burn it down
for insurance payments as the shell company's buy offshore exter vaults.

They cannot be convinced by the direct approach. They spend their time in bubbles and the reality on the streets doesn’t affect them.

What did you sleep with.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LBqeWAktNoU/T ... yramid.png

[aeden]

We have a full assortment of open border candidates that have had even three Solar cycles years to fix it also.
When I was your age I read books for fun was said of those over 55. Now we coded a solution your to busy to understand
from even a older code. See how no true Scotsman adds sugar to porridge.

Chose your Cross carefully.
Today we serve the poor with essentials in humility and fear of the Creator.
Assassins, Congress related and even the Office appear to think denying a provider to serve 500 contracts is intent to do harm.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/deaconsbe ... -carrying/

Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema,
while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit.

What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to re-examine the validity,
under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology. ―Sir James Goldsmith, London Times, Feb 1994

As we pointed out this was the target again.
https://media.townhall.com/cdn/hodl/ima ... 7b9b30.jpg

Sun Jan 15, 2012 3:17 am
“The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit…The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.”


https://media.townhall.com/cdn/hodl/ima ... e7ae58.png
thread: psalm27

[Higgenbotham]

The elites are free to discuss what they will try to do ahead of time, but their opposition is not free to do that, so elite discussions get overweighted.

Why the WEF's 2030 will fail. Discussion at 1:07:14. In this example, you have to go to Rumble to find it because it has been banned on youtube.

https://rumble.com/v38loqk-martin-armst ... seize.html

So European intellectuals like Klaus Schwab keep on rehashing the same dreary rhetoric and churning out the same shopworn plans for reordering the planet. Meanwhile European politicians tolerate the metastatic growth of the European Union, which is the sort of ever-expanding bureaucratic sprawl, answerable to nobody, which populates the wet dreams of would-be world-reformers. It’s not surprising that the overprivileged classes here in the United States gaze longingly across the Atlantic, hoping that someday they, too, can establish a bureacratic oligarchy that can ignore democratic institutions and rule by edict the way the EU does—and it’s also not surprising that people who find this prospect less than appealing have turned Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset into a convenient focus for their wrath.

Admittedly Schwab is an easy target. He’s a professor with degrees in economics, engineering management, and public administration, and thus a classic example of the intellectual hopelessly lost in a maze of abstract daydreams. He’s also the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and the inventor and promoter of “Stakeholder Capitalism.” What, you may ask, is “Stakeholder Capitalism”? It’s a system in which business enterprises are forced to make their activities conform to a set of ideological principles imposed from without, which may not be questioned and which take precedence over such minor issues as making enough of a profit to stay in business. (In Germany in the 1930s the same notion was called gleichschaltung, “coordination,” though the ideology in question was a little different.) At this point Schwab’s gimmick has large overlaps with the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) fad, which ranks corporations by their conformity to the same ideology and tries to lure investment money to businesses with a high ESG rating irrespective of whether they can turn a profit.

The consequences of this sort of thinking are not good, and this is where we reach Sri Lanka, where the government is sending soldiers into the streets just now in a frantic attempt to restore public order. That was not supposed to happen. In 2018, in fact, Sri Lankan prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe published an essay on the World Economic Forum website announcing that his country was going to become rich by 2025. His strategy for getting there involved following a bevy of WEF diktats, and he did it with such enthusiasm that Sri Lanka had a near-perfect 98 ESG rating, higher even than Sweden’s.

As it turned out, though, the saying “get woke, go broke” doesn’t just apply to corporations; it also applies to countries. Those highly touted WEF programs proceeded to trash the Sri Lankan economy, wreck its agricultural sector, plunge half a million people into extreme poverty, and send furious mobs crashing through the doors of the presidential mansion. Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, have both resigned and Rajapaksa has fled the country. That ebullient essay by former prime minister Wickremesinghe, by the way, has abruptly vanished from the WEF website in the last few days.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-great-reh ... brightest/

Read Sir Glubb for initial briefing.
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

William Blackwood & Sons Ltd
32 Thistle Street
Edinburgh EH1 1HA
Scotland
© J. B. G. Ltd, 1976, 1977

XVIII The Age of Intellect

We have now, perhaps arbitrarily, divided
the life-story of our great nation into four
ages. The Age of the Pioneers (or the
Outburst), the Age of Conquests, the Age of
Commerce, and the Age of Affluence. The
great wealth of the nation is no longer
needed to supply the mere necessities, or
even the luxuries of life. Ample funds are
available also for the pursuit of knowledge.

The merchant princes of the Age of
Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by
endowing works of art or patronising music
and literature. They also found and endow
colleges and universities. It is remarkable
with what regularity this phase follows on
that of wealth, in empire after empire,
divided by many centuries.

In the eleventh century, the former Arab
Empire, then in complete political decline,
was ruled by the Seljuk sultan, Malik Shah.
The Arabs, no longer soldiers, were still the
intellectual leaders of the world. During the
reign of Malik Shah, the building of
universities and colleges became a passion.
Whereas a small number of universities in
the great cities had sufficed the years of Arab
glory, now a university sprang up in every
town.

In our own lifetime, we have witnessed the
same phenomenon in the U.S.A. and Britain.
When these nations were at the height of
their glory, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and
Cambridge seemed to meet their needs. Now
almost every city has its university.

The ambition of the young, once engaged
in the pursuit of adventure and military
glory, and then in the desire for the
accumulation of wealth, now turns to the
acquisition of academic honours.

It is useful here to take note that almost all
the pursuits followed with such passion
throughout the ages were in themselves
good. The manly cult of hardihood, frank-
ness and truthfulness, which characterised
the Age of Conquests, produced many really
splendid heroes.

The opening up of natural resources, and
the peaceful accumulation of wealth, which
marked the age of commercialism, appeared
to introduce new triumphs in civilisation, in
culture and in the arts. In the same way, the
vast expansion of the field of knowledge
achieved by the Age of Intellect seemed to
mark a new high-water mark of human
progress. We cannot say that any of these
changes were ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

The striking features in the pageant of
empire are:
(a) the extraordinary exactitude with which
these stages have followed one another, in
empire after empire, over centuries or even
millennia; and
(b) the fact that the successive changes
seem to represent mere changes in popular
fashion—new fads and fancies which sweep
away public opinion without logical reason.
At first, popular enthusiasm is devoted to
military glory, then to the accumulation of
wealth and later to the acquisition of
academic fame.

Why could not all these legitimate, and
indeed beneficent, activities be carried on
simultaneously, each of them in due modera-
tion? Yet this never seemed to happen.

XIX The effects of intellectualism

There are so many things in human life
which are not dreamt of in our popular
philosophy. The spread of knowledge seems
to be the most beneficial of human activities,
and yet every period of decline is character-
rised by this expansion of intellectual
activity. ‘All the Athenians and strangers
which were there spent their time in nothing
else, but either to tell or to hear some new
thing’ is the description given in the Acts of
the Apostles of the decline of Greek
intellectualism.

The Age of Intellect is accompanied by
surprising advances in natural science. In the
ninth century, for example, in the age of
Mamun, the Arabs measured the circum-
ference of the earth with remarkable
accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass
before Western Europe discovered that the
world was not flat. Less than fifty years after
the amazing scientific discoveries under
Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Won-
derful and beneficent as was the progress of
science, it did not save the empire from
chaos.

The full flowering of Arab and Persian
intellectualism did not occur until after their
imperial and political collapse. Thereafter
the intellectuals attained fresh triumphs in
the academic field, but politically they
became the abject servants of the often
illiterate rulers. When the Mongols conqu-
ered Persia in the thirteenth century, they
were themselves entirely uneducated and
were obliged to depend wholly on native
Persian officials to administer the country
and to collect the revenue. They retained as
wazeer, or Prime Minister, one Rashid al-
Din, a historian of international repute. Yet
the Prime Minister, when speaking to the
Mongol II Khan, was obliged to remain
throughout the interview on his knees. At
state banquets, the Prime Minister stood
behind the Khan’s seat to wait upon him. If
the Khan were in a good mood, he
occasionally passed his wazeer a piece of
food over his shoulder.

As in the case of the Athenians,
intellectualism leads to discussion, debate
and argument, such as is typical of the
Western nations today. Debates in elected
assemblies or local committees, in articles in
the Press or in interviews on television—
endless and incessant talking.

Men are interminably different, and
intellectual arguments rarely lead to
agreement. Thus public affairs drift from bad
to worse, amid an unceasing cacophony of
argument. But this constant dedication to
discussion seems to destroy the power of
action. Amid a Babel of talk, the ship drifts
on to the rocks.

[Higgenbotham]

Trump will win in 2024 with 61% of the vote. 19:52 in the video with Martin Armstrong.

https://rumble.com/v38loqk-martin-armst ... seize.html

[Higgenbotham]

Also, even within urban communities, mode of living and social connections have been broken across class, so it's more difficult to know what is going on in your own backyard.

I think to understand the impact of the rootless urban PMC you have analyze their impact on the places they “came” from before their arrival in the urban environment.

I’ve lived most of my life fifty miles or so outside of the PMC mecca of New York City and have witnessed their impacts on my outlying area for decades. They come into the communities to raise their kids in a “safe” environment and are basically just there to have their kids educated at “good” schools. They do not interact with or participate in the local community during the raising of their children in the community. They just shuttle them from home to school to preplanned activities that will look good on college applications. The children who “grow up” in these places have no connections to anywhere except their parents home, the schools they attend and maybe a restaurant or store. After 18 years of education to assemble their college applications the children leave the community. Then once all of their children have left for college the parents will usually leave the community as well either to somewhere in the Sun Belt or to “hip” towns.

What does that mean for these communities? The PMC want good schools and those good schools mean higher property taxes which drive out those with lower income or make home ownership impossible. So you get a temporary population in the higher income areas that resets every 20 years while the lower income is herded into exorbitantly expensive apartments where they can go to sleep after a day of servicing the area’s temporary inhabitants. So no one develops a real culture because they are either only in the place temporarily or they're too poor/overworked to have time for much more than mass culture.

https://www.ecosophia.net/december-2022-open-post/

By PMC, the poster is referring to "professional and managerial class".

Broadly, Americans are pretty isolated by class. The researchers find that the wealthiest Americans are far and away more likely to encounter just similarly high-earning peers, meaning that the rich hang out with the rich. And isolation across class is more pronounced in urban and suburban areas.

This socio-economic isolation has grown even more stark since the pandemic. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that far fewer people visited neighborhoods where residents made significantly more or less money than they did in December 2021 than in January 2019. Interactions between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds dropped by up to 30% during that time period — long after COVID lockdowns were lifted, according to tracked cellphone data of more than a million people in Boston, Dallas, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The researchers laid the blame in part on the rise of remote work and online shopping in helping keep Americans in their own neighborhoods.

After all, research from Harvard economist Raj Chetty has found that being friends with higher-earners is key to your economic mobility — but many lower-earning Americans make friends based on proximity.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers ... 5904&ei=39

[Higgenbotham]

Trump will win in 2024 with 61% of the vote. 19:52 in the video with Martin Armstrong.

https://rumble.com/v38loqk-martin-armst ... seize.html

More say violence could be necessary to restore Trump to White House: survey
BY TARA SUTER - 07/25/23 6:48 PM ET

A recent survey shows increasing support for the use of violence to restore former President Trump to the White House.

The report, titled “Dangers to Democracy” and released by the Chicago Project on Security Threats (CPST) earlier this month, found that 7 percent of Americans from April 6 to June 26 agree that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”

That number is an increase from 4.5 percent, or “the equivalent of an estimated shift from 12 million to 18 million American adults,” according to the survey, which was conducted by CPST and NORC.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... se-survey/

[Guest]

https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9002

How racial groups rate each other

Hatred of whites has been completely normalized. Low IQ, low agency POCs (I don't know if it is accurate to call them minorities anymore) have deluded themselves into thinking Mexico and Zimbabwe are the correct templates to create an ideal America.

I have to agree with the realists like Cool Breeze and say none of us will survive this.

[Guest]

Trump will win in 2024 with 61% of the vote. 19:52 in the video with Martin Armstrong.

https://rumble.com/v38loqk-martin-armst ... seize.html

Martin Armstrong: MASSIVE Civil Unrest Coming in 2024 & All Crypto Will Be SEIZED

Looks like Cool Breeze will lose out on BTC.