192 Replies to “Don’t Touch Me There”

  5. “Don’t touch me there.” Is that, like, a 2nd amendment reference?

    Side note. That tune has the “Wall of Sound” (ala Phil Spectre) to it. According the Wikipedia, an Ike and Tina tune is considered by Phil himself to the “the summit of his Wall of Sound productions”. The close-ups of Tina had me flashing forward to her Mad Max foray.

  6. “Yanis [Varoufakis] is a complicated and clever Marxist. He deeply agrees with Piketty’s radical egalitarianism, or activist opposition to the perceived inequality between the haves and the have-nots as delineated by Marx, but he doesn’t like the idea of an authoritarian state taking care of the redistribution of wealth, which is why he sometimes identifies himself as a libertarian Marxist. He also thinks that the standard leftist or “social democrats'” approach to the problem of “capitalism”, which he sees typified in Piketty’s book, is at best flawed and weak and at worst dangerous.”

    http://fofoa.blogspot.de/2015/02/confessions-of-erratic-marxist.html

  11. if you stand on your head while looking outside at the snow falling it looks like its rising up like alka seltzer bubbles. Try it.

  12. gb, are you sure it’s not the blood rushing to your head?

    anyway, i’ll have to pass on snow experiences until my next winter visit to the continents.

  17. Doom, I think I saw that FZ interview in real time way back when. I owned that vinyl record FZ was promoting at one time, but have no recollection of what may have happened to it.

    I saw FZ in many a live show in the 70’s as Phoenix was good to him as far as ticket sales go. Had a great venue called the Celebrity Theater. It was round and the stage literally rotated 360 degrees. Sound-wise, it it was sufficient, but it filled the gap between an arena and a bar and the slowly rotating stage allowed a view of the band that few seldom see. Any sufficiently large band on tour is a complex undertaking, but FZ’s penchant for perfection and constant recording made it more so I think.There is a choreography to a live performance that is designed to be unobtrusive and the rotating stage enabled a rare peek into that.

  18. My man Clyde stays cool. Odd choice for a slam dunk contest judge. Never dunked in his whole NBA career.

  20. somebody’s lyin’ ’bout somethin’, all the time. that’s the way the world works, and, it only counts when you get called out on it. i guess.

  21. dave, I have bought local grass-fed beef on the hoof and gotten it processed at a (relatively) local butcher. Guy who used to raise the cow (or part of the cow) I owned is retiring, or so he says, so I am not sure how I will fill my freezer with beef next season. It’s a niche market for those of us not in the cattle business (or know jack about it really) but want to have access to relatively unadulterated beef without the boutique pricing. I need to email the old boy and see if he has any suggestions.

  23. yeah, i can slam dunk, when they set the rim at about 6 feet.

    here’s 6 and a half hours on everybody’s favorite austrian:

  24. Hmmm, his left iris seems to be larger than his right iris in that photo.

    “Fery interestink.”

  28. i never rely on anybody or anything to tell me the “truth”. i only rely on anything to tell me what they want to tell me. it may or may not contain some “truthiness”. i guess. the possible exceptions are my cats. say meow when they’re hungry or want to go outside.

  37. one of the reasons i’m partially deaf is attending one of frank zappa’s concerts in honolulu back in the early 1970s. we sat all the way in the back and stuffed several cotton balls in our ears. still, my ears were ringing for about two days afterwards. great music, however, and the weed being passing around was excellent, better than what we brought. ah, the old days…

  41. Yeah, it was the Jewish media that made my old man hate Hitler, not getting the family home burned down.

  42. i see a lot of parallels with what went on in germany in the 1930s and in the usa since 911. government playing the people with big lies and feeding their fears with staged events. MSM propaganda is so thick these days you can cut it with a butter knife. mostly we just try to ignore it, hoping the stupid perps will go away, just like i’m sure the folks did in germany. this will not turn out well.

  43. -5 f here this am. that’s just about as cold as it ever gets around here. the last 3 or 4 winters have been pretty cold and snowy. i never set myself up with ice fishing gear cause the winters in my area have generally been so mild. often times the lakes and ponds wouldn’t freeze, or maybe just freeze for a couple of days. may have to invest in some ice fishing equipment if this keeps up.

    i can’t figure out what that lady is saying to save my life.

  44. i think the usa today and germany 1930’s are kinda polar opposites. german society was on some kinda upswing in the 1930’s. hitler captured that energy and rode that wave. american society has no where to go but into the gutter. we’re all caught in that trough with a big wave breaking over our heads. i think.

  47. dave, in this comparison the 1930’s Germany, I think you are wrong. Fascism is alive and well in the US just as it was in Germany from 1933 on. The wealthy are getting or are staying that way through fraudulent banking and MIC contracts. Lebensraum is about energy, oil particularly. Germany, just as today and with the US and the rest of Western Europe, needs to import it’s energy.

    We are attempting to provoke a war in Europe. We are likely to succeed. I say “we” because we have done nothing to stop the government from its ongoing heinous attacks worldwide in our name.

    Our Brownshirts are labeled Homeland Security. They will mutate.

    What you speak of is relative to the Weimar Hyperinflation. We may get a like scenario here.

    There are more similarities than not, some of which I won’t get into here, to 1930’s Germany.

    Tick tock.

  51. yeah, i still think that the resemblances are kinda superficial. germany in the 1920’s was a basket case, for a lot of reasons. by the 1930’s it was fairly robust society that was steadily gaining wealth, confidence and world influence. the usa is in exactly, pretty much, the opposite position today. it (the usa) is and has been steadily losing wealth, confidence (arrogance and confidence being 2 different things) and influence for more than a decade.

    both societies are are similar in that, like germany of the 1930’s, the usa of the 2010’s has set itself up in a no win situation. this is unavoidable for a lot of reasons.

    germany thought it could ride out an energy wave, and was crushed by an even bigger one. the usa, today, thinks it still controls the relative energy it did 50 years ago, and it doesn’t.

    eh…

  53. dave – it was WPA-like public works and rearmament that was the recovery in Germany. Whatever robustness they had it was faux. Berlin is not Germany.

  54. “human stress responses are limited and kinda etched in stone…so there’s that.”

    For everything else, there’s muscle memory.

  55. it was WPA-like public works and rearmament that was the recovery in Germany. Whatever robustness they had it was faux. Berlin is not Germany.

    well, if this is true, where did all the panzers, uboats, battleships and messerschmidts come from? how about 3 million well equipped troops? at least until about about 1944. why were the nazis welcomed with open arms in austria? from what i know, etc.?

  56. this is like the usa (2015 version, not the 1941 version) intervening between…whatever…i guess.

  59. ok, so my whole point is that germany was on an upswing in the 1930’s, hitler was able to build a cohesive and influential society. the usa is currently on a downward trajectory. it’s society is degrading with no way of reversing that trend. any similarities are, in my mind, superficial.

  60. well, germany was doomed, and didn’t fully appreciate the state of their predicament. first, hitler played the appeasement card for as long as he could. their war machine was very efficient. i recall a typical german solider had an enemy kill ratio of over 100:1, whereas the russians (who really wupped them, with american and british assistance) has a solider enemy kill ratio of 10:1 or less. only one tiny problem: not enough german soliders.

    they were overwhelmed by the sheer number and material resources of the allies. like dave says, the allied energy wave was bigger than the german one, no matter how efficient or inventive (blitz tactics, tiger tanks, 88-mm howitzers, lugars, V-1, V-2, almost the intercontinental V-3 rockets, first jet airplanes, superb attack subs, fast warships (again, too few), A-bomb program (too late), coal-to-oil process, etc., etc.).

    the only ally the germans had with any firepower was japan, way too far away to help. the italians were disappointing, to put it mildly. austrians? vichy french? too few and too whimpy.

  64. geoengineering does have a ring of desperation to it. however, there is some precident in volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and then followed by colder climate conditions for up to several years. also, the reverse experiment, conducted thanks to 911, was a brief warming of the Earth’s climate in the days following the “no fly” lockdown, when airplane exhaust was suddenly eliminated from the lower stratosphere.

    so, we know that one works. spraying fine aluminum dust would be experimental, though. i don’t know how it would eventually react in ocean water and on land. moron research needed!

  65. so, anyhoo, i spent the 6.5 or so hours watching that a. hitler bit over last few days. not much else to do when it’s 0 f out. anyhoo, as i expected it’s hagiography piece. however, it certainly wasn’t any worse than britsh/american apologies such as “the world at war”. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071075/

    being born right in the middle of the baby boom (1956), thus being raised ensconced in the american ww2 myth (if anyone wants to examine lies and omissions, that might be a good place to start.), it was novel to see figures like hitler and mussolini being treated sympathetically.

    anyhoo, onwards and upwards…not really.

    i always thought it was the particulate haze that acted as the cooling agent…

  66. “i always thought it was the particulate haze that acted as the cooling agent…”

    you were correct. the volcanic SO2 quickly reacts with H2O in the atmosphere to make tiny droplets of sulfuric acid, which has the appearance of a haze. the liquid droplets act as particles that, along with some very fine grained volcanic ash particles, reflect incoming sunlight and cool the planet, increasing the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity. AFAIK, the exhaust from airplanes is both unburnt fuel particles (soot) and gases like H2O, N2O and CO2 that combine to make droplets, probably of dilute carbonic, nitric acid.

  67. dave, I guess we are just going to disagree on the superficiality. Of course, the real question is how was Hitler paying for all that “prosperity”?

    never could get your “allah ackbar” to play. It seemed a non-sequitur anyway. But, this is ZK.

    Fucking engineers. There’s a dangerous lot. They are #2 on my list of professions I refuse to provide services to. Lawyers are #1. Lawyers will fuck you out of your fee and engineers will fuck up your work after you’re done and expect you to make it right for free. And badger you with “suggestions” the whole time.

  69. then again, maybe it was all staged by dick cheney, with fake blood oozing everywhere. for sure old dick slipped in the fake solid glass bottle of champaign.

  70. speaking of geoengineering:

    “Second on the list is something called geoengineering. If you don’t know what it is, don’t worry; it’s largely a synonym for mental masturbation. The idea is that you fix things you don’t understand by using technologies that don’t exist. But given many humans’ irrational belief that every problem must have a technological solution, there is always some fool willing to throw money at it. Previous efforts along these lines involved the idea of seeding the oceans with iron to promote plankton growth, or putting bits of tin foil in orbit to reflect some of the sunlight, or painting the Sahara white. These are all fun projects to think about. How about using nuclear weapons to put dust into the atmosphere, to block out some of the sunlight? Or how about nuking a few big volcanos, for the same effect? If that’s politically difficult, how about something politically easy: a limited nuclear exchange? That will darken the skies, bringing on a mini nuclar winter, and also reduce the population, which will cut down on industrial activity. There are enough nuclear weapons to keep the planet cool for as long as it takes us all to die of radiation poisoning. This geoengineering solution, along with all the others, is in line with the popular dictum “If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.””

    from: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/02/extinctextincterextinctest.html

  71. re Shitty situation
    Old Scottish teacher at Trade school told us a funny story about his son who was doing Elec engineering at Uni.
    Apparently in the guys shitter written above the toilet roll was “Bachelor of Arts – please take one”

  80. they really do have a fetish for the perfect pancake. one is very expensive, and you get only one served to you at a time. if you want a stack of them, say three or moron, you’d better have your credit card with you.

    i want to go there and show each of those girls that kinky sex is good, even, perhaps especially, with an older gaijin man.

  83. silly joke:

    It was the first day of school, and the elementary school teacher was establishing the fact that she’d take no nonsense from the kiddies this year. While taking the roll, she was told by one boy, “My name is Bob Fuckhauer.”

    Upset, the teacher said very loudly, “THERE’LL BE NONE OF THAT KIND OF BEHAVIOR IN MY CLASS THIS YEAR, now Bob; tell me your real name!”

    The kid said, “No, really teacher, it is Bob Fuckhauer. You can go across the hall to fourth grade and ask my brother if you don’t believe me!”

    Not wanting to be subjected to that kind of thing, the teacher went across the hall and knocked on the fourth grade classroom door.

    The fourth grade teacher had stepped down the hall to the front office for a moment, so she entered the room and directly asked the class, “Do you have Fuckhauer in here?”

    “Hell no!” replied a little kid from the front row, “We don’t even get a damn cookie break!”

  86. “sucking beer out of the carpet” time:

    nicole’s 10-minute talk starts at about the 33 minute mark.

    the rest sound like silly wankers to me.

  87. eh, none of us have any control over anything…just do what’s in front of you, that’s all anybody can do anyways. i guess.

  91. here’s an interesting followup to the moon shots, send volunteers to Mars on kamakasi missions, mars one. they’ve already selected 100 finalists for the 24 volunteer slots, in six groups of four. their mission, go to Mars in about 7 months. assuming you survive the trip and landing, spend the last 68 days or so of your life there.

    sounds ridiculous? well, we live in ridicuous times.

    http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/17/tech/mars-one-final-100/index.html

  97. That was an interesting read dave, except I suspect the author is laboring under impression the US wanted anything other than a compliant hollow state. I do think there are more “Yemens” to come.

    I think we have bigger worries than Yemen.

  99. well, in that the usa is a much bigger nation state, has a lot more people, a lot more various built infrastructure to fall apart, etc., than yemen, then yes our problems are much bigger. but on a person by person level?…eh, everybody suffers and dies, one way or another. i’d say.

  100. yeah, who gives a flying fuck about yemen or abba? neither one even picks up my trash, and we could give a FF about him, too. (maybe a case of beer at christmas time.)

    —monkeybrains

  101. “eh, none of us have any control over anything…just do what’s in front of you, that’s all anybody can do anyways. i guess.”

    logically, then one should seek to place in front of you something worth doing, whatever her name, race or religion may be.

  103. FYI, nudge left massachusetts a few months ago and is now living in the greater Chicago area. she claims the opportunities are better there. she’s good buds with laura louaser of CFN daz, a Chicago resident.

  104. “logically, then one should seek to place in front of you something worth doing…”

    logical or not, this is generally how i try to spend my time.

    “Boston. never set a foot there. psyops, lockdowns, snowed in. sounds difficult. maybe try live elsewhere?”

    haven’t been to boston? you haven’t missed anything.

    “FYI, nudge left massachusetts a few months ago and is now living in the greater Chicago area.”

    huh, like moving from the outhouse to the shithouse, or something like that.

  105. yeah, who gives a flying fuck about yemen or abba?

    yeah, if i had the choice between all the chinese out there and one of my cats, there wouldn’t be a single fucking chink left out there. not that i have anything in particular against the chinks, they just seem to come first to my mind. that’s all.

  106. on 8/24/15, 6 months from now, when it’s 95f out, i’m gonna think to myself: wow, 6 months ago it was -6f.

  108. you can get everything you want
    and your bird can sing
    but you don’t get me
    no you don’t get me

    these are some great lyrics…

  110. Gail Tverberg says:
    February 23, 2015 at 11:47 am

    EROEI, as far as I can see, needs to rise. The idea it can fall, to say, as low as 10, is nonsense. This is part of what underlies the collapse we are facing. All that happens is that production switches to countries with higher EROEI fuels (and lower wages). This is why we are facing near-term collapse.

  112. i recall sitting in my GFs living room, listening to her new Beatles Revolver album on the family stereo. that would have been about 1967 or 68. she was a complete waste of time, but i didn’t figure that out for a few moron years. stupidity? perhaps, but i was leading a sheltered life with M&D at home at the time. things picked up for me most ways, including “romance” (or was it just causal sex?) when i left home for the islands.

    like tina sez, “what’s love got to do it?”

  115. i burn ng. there’s a fair number of people around here who burn wood, mostly as a supplement. i don’t like the associated indoor air pollution. setting up and stoking an outside burner of some sort is too much work. so. for the moment anyways, i burn ng.

    within a 25 mile radius of me there are 3 coal fired generating stations, 1 ng fired generating station and a trash-to-energy plant. they all keep to lights on around here, for the time being anyways. yale university, which is not too far away, has its’ own ng fired plant. those are just the closest plants. generating stations, all either coal or ng, pretty much dot the ct shoreline. they get their coal on barges and gas from pipelines that are all over the place around here.

    it’s kinda funny, i guess, but somebody set up a good sized wind turbine in new haven harbor a couple of years back.

    http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/wind_turbine_erected/

    indian point (2 reactors?), one of the oldest nuke stations in the country, i think, is about 40 miles due west. the ct yankee nuke stations (2 reactors, i think) are about 40 miles east.

    eh…

  116. there’s an old polish/russian saying: “too soon old, too late smart”, something like that. it applies universally. actually, in my case anyway, the older i get, the stupider i get…something like that.

  117. Almost sounds like Nudge took the blue pill.

    Doom, I have a neighbor that worked umpteen years in the hospitality industry in HI (big island I’d guess) and retired to fly0ver. Has family near by. I dare say his retirement buck is going much farther here than there. Of course, we do get a bit of nasty weather here. Nothing like what dave is putting up with tho. Or GB either I’d guess.

  119. Ecology, politics… don’t you guys ever get tired of talking about this stuff when the problem probably starts with the human condition?

    Does anyone know of any good social engineering or trans-humanist sites?

  120. ’67 or ’68 – there wasn’t shit in Phoenix then, well, Alice Cooper. I drove a school bus one year for his old high school while I was in college. I hated getting up early. Now I’m lucky to sleep past 4AM.

  124. what do you mean by “human condition”? humans do nothing but socially engineer themselves, not unlike ants and bees and mole rats and such, i guess. the implication of the term “trans-human” (transcend? transform?), is something other than human, i guess.

  125. no nomouth. must be chilly up in niagra these days. hopefully, you didn’t relocate to chicago area.

    the beatles. i think they were a welcome baum for the open brain wound in the american psych left by JFK’s assassination and the growing vietnam war horrorshow in the 60s. oh look, it’s the same warmonger neocons at it again in ukraine. what fun!

  126. human condition = human nature = human behaviour = anything along those lines. Socially engineering ourselves, as you put it, is not the same thing as groups of people deliberately testing theories out on experimental subjects. ie people other than themselves.

    doom, I like how you like to pretend you don’t know where I live.

  127. “Socially engineering ourselves, as you put it, is not the same thing as groups of people deliberately testing theories out on experimental subjects. ie people other than themselves.”

    give me an example.

    like nazis rounding up jews?
    like madison avenue coming up with a new advertizing gimmick?
    like elites rule the proles?
    like priests duping the faithful?
    like the msn cooperating with the ruling class (so to speak)?
    like the cia giving acid to unsuspecting experimental subjects?

    what are you getting at?

  129. dumb or not, you need to be more explicit.

    from what i can tell, people arrange themselves into various hierarchical systems, based on an undecipherable hard determinism and the 2’nd law of thermodynamics. people being people will exploit any system to their own advantage.

    so what experiment(s) are you talking about? i mean shit, if you want to talk about something, tell me what you’re talking about. no?

  130. Niagara Falls. Doom I recall a despondent youth from the Canadian side named Brandon that used to come on CFN.

    I don’t know where nomouth is from but she has always been opaque, then disappears.

    Burning some serious firewood this winter boys. GB how thick is the lake ice over your way?

  131. ironically, i love burning firewood in just about any situation, indoors, outdoors, anytime, anyplace.

    heck, when i wuz a small kid, i nearly burned down yosemite valley all by myself. you see, there were a lot of pine cones lying around, and i wanted to stoke the campfire a bit, and i did, and then the flames started reaching up to the bottom limbs of the pines, furs and redwoods there in the campground. somebody stopped me, fortunately.

    it was a little like the socceror’s apprentice, except with pine cones in place of water buckets.

  132. yeah, Brandon could write. i recall JR was very impressed with his writing. i thought nomouth was up there, as well, on the canadian side of the falls.

    no nomouth = yo nomouth. gd typos.

    nomouth, where you stay?

  133. damn, i read in the wiki that some asshole(s) stole the famous “albretch mach freie” sign over the entrance gate at dachau last year. almost makes me want to change my tourist plans. i wuz gonna sleep over, too. lotsa bunks.

  134. Lake ice thickness? I have no idea. Last time I went ice fishing was MLK birthday and I was already getting a workout with my hand ice auger. There have been 2 days in Feb. where the temp has gone a degree above freezing level here. The ice is very thick.

  138. nice social experiment. here’s a physical experiment with flour: take a few grams of white, bleached flour and place it in a bag. i recommend a small paper bag. plastic might work also, but it could start a fire. anyway, shake the bag vigorously. then put it down and place a lit match at the entrance or inside the bag. the contents should explode, so wear safety goggles.

    bigger explosion: place pure oxygen in the bag.
    no explosion, use any gas without oxygen. even pure methane should not explode, unless you get air inside.

    then again, maybe don’t try this experiment at home.

  140. rule no. one: avoid being arrested.
    rule no. two: if arrested, avoid being incarcerated, if at all possible.

    notice there is a lot of leeway in approach, legal and extra-legal.

  142. dave, this is what i was referencing… everyone looks nervous and inarticulate trying to explain what is happening to them… no one knows where to really start, no one really knows how to reference much that can’t be ‘plausibly denied’. The helpful part is seeing Amy Gutman’s face through all of this. I imagine it’s how a psychopath would react – stone faced and probably more concerned with dinner.

  143. Doom, there’s a reason the NEC classifies grain elevators and suchlike as a Class II Hazardous location requiring explosion proof electrical installations.

  147. nomouth

    yeah, i sat through maybe 3 minutes, then i couldn’t take it anymore…the only thing i can really (or want to) say about any of that, is something like: there is no need for elaborate, hidden, undetectable (if something is undetectable by any means how can it be said to exist?), etc., means of control, when most people in this (any industrial) society are sent to a compulsory mind control camp by the time they’re 4 or 5 years old, ie, school. but, even with that being said, every society needs, and has, some method of inculcating its’ members with its’ norms.

    i guess.

  149. i’m gonna invent an owl shack that changes its colors over time. really F-up those owl’s camo routines, heh heh.

    i’ll practice with the wild chameleons we have here first. red fence, green fence, etc. this video kinda gives away my technical approach. oh well,

  150. “yeah, prison and school, pretty much the same thing. i’d say”

    well, the threat of being raped in both places is actually quite high. around here, they installed a bunch of “anti-rape stations” (no called that) which are telephones with auto-dial to the cops and blue lights. they have them all over the campus now as a deterant. seems to me the ubiqutous cell phones that no co-ed would be caught dead without being stuck in their face, have largely eliminated the need for these stations.

  151. Trying to attract a breeding pair of screech owls to my back yard. I currently have 2 (unoccupied?) nestboxes up that I made. I encourage those of us in the northeast especially to give this a try. Apparently the eastern screech owl is on the decline in the northeast, but the best reason: they are great at controlling garden pests.

  154. yeah, greer’s ideas that humans can somehow decide to keep some technologies while discarding others are pretty silly. somethings, in some places, may be around for a while; but nobody gets to decide.

  155. kinda okay joke:

    There was a guy walking down the street in San Francisco, and he tripped over an old looking oil lamp. He picked it up and hid it under his jacket, because he thought it was priceless. While he was running to the antique shop to cash this puppy in, it rubbed against his shirt. *POOF* A genie popped out of his pocket!

    The very angry looking Genie said, “Alright, I have had enough with this three wish stuff, and ‘cuz you stole me away from my HBO Special, I will only give you one wish!”

    The suprised man said, ” OK, I want to live in Hawaii in a huge condo on the beach with three million dollars in the master bedroom, but I am afraid of boats and planes so I want you to build a bridge from here to Hawaii.”

    The genie replied with a smirk, ” Are you crazy? Do you know how long that will take, with the pillars going down to the bottom of the ocean, all the cement it would take for the highway? No I’m sorry, it just can’t happen.”

    The man said with a smile, “Fine then, I want to understand women.”

    The genie said, ” Would you like two lanes or four?”

  157. the most dangerous kind of officer: “both stupid and intensely energetic…”. the world is full of such idiots.

  161. Lotta trouble travelling in Namibia. Think about it – all these people are clearly fluent in English (I assume the lingua franca). So how the fuck will you get a cab if everyone speaks English well?

  165. kinda sucks, in a sweet sucky kind of way. of course when you’re 13, you don’t know that yet. dave clarke 5 meets the partridge family. somethang l’dat.

  166. so my sister calls. she’s visiting and staying at a west coast resort. very tired. flys for six hours to get here, then gets stuck in rush-hour traffic and sits in a cab for another four hours as she creeps out west in bumper-to-bumper traffic. collapse should help this problem.

  167. so i attend this seminar on “seachange: the future of oceanographic research”. the speaker shows a slide of federal research funding from about 2000 to present, then with a projection to about 2025. the trend looks exactly like the trend for conventional crude oil production during this period, with a rise and peak in 2005, then a steady decline, with the projection to decline further to 2025. no one in the room, including the speaker, raises this point. they know there’ll be less funding available, but not the cause. the cause is obvious to those willing to see it.

  171. gary brecher has been my favorite commentator on world affairs for a long time. but i think that zizek is taking his place. will the usa give up dollar hegemony without making some sort of real big mess? that’s my question of the day.

    “And in both cases, the same superstitious mechanism is at work, as if talking about it will prevent it from happening. We know about the danger, but we don’t believe it can really happen—and that’s why it can happen.”

    http://inthesetimes.com/article/17437/how_the_united_states_rolls

  172. seems to me we are in a race between global economic collapse and WWIII. hopefully, the former wins before the latter, and prevents it from happening. i’m convinced the planners behind WWIII are the us industrial-military-government complex (the us fascists) and wall street tycoons who hope that by starting a big war, it will ultimately save what’s left of their power and capital/wealth.

    otherwise, they see their power and wealth slowly slipping away with oil depletion (of the good stuff, not the ponzi fracked oil and deep-water disappointments) and fear the looming big economic collapse they’re so deperately trying to both avoid and hide. most folks and the planet would be better off without these assholes and i hope they lose the race.

  174. have you ever noticed that really dumb people always think they’re very smart? i’ve seen this too many times for it to just be random noise. so beware of the self-declared smarties, they’ll get you into trouble.

  180. Not once did Zizek mention Israel. He is merely reinforcing the narrative dave.

  181. Enjoyed that rendition of WMGJW. It is unfortunate that the sound mix was less than optimal. As a long time fan of live string quartet performances in small venues, a lot is missing.

  183. Robb minces words here to get his post up, but I think he has the gist of it. It’s the lack of interconnectedness, whether it be financial, communication, energy or influence that gives TPTB nightmares.

    http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2015/02/leaving-the-global-grid-and-being-arrested-for-it.html

    “In contrast, Larry [Fink, the CEO of BlackRock,] does see one threat as real and tangible: ISIS. Why?

    ISIS isn’t connected or dependent on the “grid.” Worse, it’s growing like a geographical cancer that can severely damage the [tightly interconnected “financial”] grid.

    This idea. The fear that a growing part of the world is being taken off the grid gives guys like Larry nightmares.

    I don’t think he is alone. It apparently gives more people than just Larry nightmares.”

  184. “seems to me we are in a race between global economic collapse and WWIII”.

    Pretty much yeah. Of course, there’s always the alien contact/extinction event from space wild card.

    Thank the gods for precious bodily fluids.

  185. isreal is a piece of the geopolitical puzzle, like a lot of other pieces. i think. you could just as well say that zizek leaves sa out of the picture. it’s a 1000 word article, if that much…zizek’s point is that the usa acts the world police. does isreal pull what strings it can? sure why shouldn’t it?

    larry fink is turning a blind eye to the fact that other countries (bric, for example) are trying to eliminate his grid of interdependencies (us $ hegemony). i think.

    isis is something else…it is the wave of the not too distant future. i think. i think we’ll see isis like groups here in north america within the next 20 years. they’ll last until the military hardware is gone. then we’ll be back to tire irons and rocks and sticks and such. i guess.

  186. Israel is a bigger player than that. Much bigger.

    Agreed about Larry Fink. Lots of blind eyes in the smokey rooms he frequents.

    The makings of an ISIS-like entity in the US of Americans (not muslim extremists) is already in place.

  187. “Israel is a bigger player than that. Much bigger”

    yeah, could mean anything, not sure.

    anyways my take on israel is something like: there are influential jews all over the world. jews, by and large, owe their allegiance to israel, not necessarily to the nation state that they happen to be living in. but that’s all kinda bullshit and only goes so far. in the end, there’s plenty of people who would gladly kick joe lieberman and richard blumenthal, the rothchilds, etc., et.al., in the ass. jus’ sayin’.

    also, does israel carry more wieght than maybe greece or yugoslavia? sure for a lot of obvious strategic reasons. it’s held the oil patch together for the last 50 years for one. let’s not forget about that.

  188. “The makings of an ISIS-like entity in the US of Americans (not muslim extremists) is already in place.”

    again, you’re not explicit. not sure why so many people want me to guess what it is they’re getting at.

    anyhoo, sure. all kinds of podunk police forces have been equipped to the gills. that’s what i see.

  191. did a set of isreali atomic sachel bombs take down the WTC buildings? wouldn’t tell-tale radioactivity in the debris give this possibility away?

    inquiring minds want to know. stay tuned to this channel.

  192. did a set of isreali atomic sachel bombs take down the WTC buildings? wouldn’t tell-tale radioactivity in the debris give this possibility away?

    inquiring minds want to know. stay tuned to this channel.

    yeah, you should get together with nomouth. she can help you get to the “truth” with some magic radiation brain waves, and such.

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