I grew up in the first of what I’ve recognized as three cycles of collapse. I’ve learned by looking for parallels and differences.
As a kid in the 1970’s, I saw society crapping out. Society didn’t recognize its bad trajectory and improve. Instead they doubled down on the same failed ideas. This seems universal. In every cycle where the elite have fucked up, they doubled down.
The elite double down on their mistakes until an external force stops the cycle. The elite hate the force that stops the cycle with the white hot loathing of a thousand suns.
President Carter was as popular as dogshit on a sandwich. The press tried to cover for him but I was there and I remember everyone and their dog hating Carter. The press reported him and Reagan in a close race. Being naïve I assumed it was true. It wasn’t. Reagan curb stomped Carter like a tornado flattening a butterfly.
In what I see now as a pattern, the elites hated Reagan with every cell of their being. They hated not what he did so much as that he was the “wrong kind of people”. Compared to elites, Reagan acted “low class”. He worked in movies. He played opposite a monkey. His money didn’t come from mysterious sources. Reagan was happy cutting brush on a ranch.
I remember being told Reagan was dumber than dirt. Unlike the usual Yale and Harvard crop of zombies, Reagan attended a Christian college in Illinois. The press declared Reagan was a dipshit cowboy almost certain to start World War 3 and never let up the whole time. Meanwhile, America thrived.
More recently the press said Hillary was 99.9% sure to win. That was unquestionable truth until she lost.
As with cowboy Reagan the elites lost their fuckin’ minds over Orange Man Bad because he’s the wrong kind of person. Trump and Reagan were “low class” and elites hate them with unbridled passion. It’s as if rapport with deplorables gives the media a kryptonite enema. Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania like the son of a garbage man instead of Yale like an elite billionaire. The horror!
Everyone in any media situation will tell you that Trump is dumber than dirt… as if any monkey can run a real estate corporate conglomerate. Trump is dumb just like that dipshit cowboy Reagan was dumb. The press will call Trump too dumb to be taken seriously in the same world where I’ve all watched dementia addled Biden have trouble putting on a jacket
Just because I’m tired about hearing about “low class” and “stupid”: here’s a video of New York Representative and Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler shitting his pants at a podium:
(A note about “smart” versus “dumb”. When sober and healthy all of these cats are smarter than the average bear but some have only limited exposure to non-elite America. Ford, Clinton, and the two Bushes went to Yale… as expected of elites. In case you’re wondering Hillary did too. Obama went to Harvard. Yale (8 presidents), Harvard (5), William and Mary (3), and Princeton (2) have “educated” 40% of our presidents since inception and 5 of 9 since Nixon. Nixon was offered a ride to Harvard, turned it down and went to Duke. (The press hated Nixon and after he won with a huge popular sweep just like Reagan would in the 1980s. Nixon was torn apart until he resigned over Watergate, Reagan was under constant attack culminating in hearings about the Iran/Contra Affair, and Trump’s house was raided by the FBI last month. See another pattern there?).)
Trump was never elite in behavior even though he has money such that my life’s savings is a rounding error. He eats junk food, uses small words, and has a clear source for most of his assets. Just like Reagan, the press declared Trump an incompetent nincompoop almost certain to start World War 3 and never let up the whole time. Meanwhile, just like under Reagan, America thrived.
Keep comparing cycles of suck. Foreign policy under Carter was a clusterfuck just like it is now. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan went so badly I’d substitute the word “flee” for “withdraw” and play it to the tune of Yakety Sax Carter’s foreign policy was to get pantsed by OPEC and the hostage crisis. The hostage crisis was a big fat hairy deal to America! America was weak and so Iran decided to roll the dice. It went like this:
“Dude you took hostages… not cool man.”
“What are you gonna’ do about it you fucking pussy?”
“I’ll call the UN!”
“I’ll call your mom!”
And that was it. What should Carter do? Hard to say. What did he do? Not a fucking thing. He couldn’t have looked more ineffectual if he stood there while Iran hit him with a custard pie.
America hadn’t recovered from a drubbing in Vietnam and it would take four Rambo movies in the 1980’s to even start thinking about it. As a kid, I expected the president to take action. Put some soldiers on planes, go to wherever this shit was happening, and reduce the place to rubble. Any kid in elementary school knows you can’t let bullies get the better of you! If some jackoff can take 52 people hostage and that’s enough to freeze all of America… how the fuck did we even exist?
Carter tried a rescue attempt. Like everything he tired, it was a world class disaster. I watched the report on the news. We tried to fly in under cover of night and the helicopters crapped out in the desert. It looked bad; incompetent. Six stoners trying to get their sober cousin to go get pizza would have looked more organized. Was it worse than Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan? Probably not. Carter’s massive fuck up cost less lives than Biden’s.
Regardless, neither one did well. As a kid watching black and white TV all I could think was; “Sneak in at night? We’re fucking America! Show up at dawn and tear the place apart brick by brick until no stone is left upon another.” Maybe my youthful self lacked elite nuance; I’d have said “the goal is to make taking hostages a very bad idea. Rescue people if you can but lay waste no matter what.” But you know what, my youthful brain’s reasoning had merit. Carter had people tying ribbons to trees. Fat lot of good that did!
When Reagan was elected, nobody wanted American hostages on their soil. The hostage game ended immediately. Foreign policy under Orange Man Bad wasn’t so bad either.
Carter never made anything better. When my house was cold the president told me the solution was to wear a sweater. Gas was scarce so he made laws about driving slow. He applied solutions that even a clueless kid saw as ineffective.
A child starts with the belief that adults are… um… adults. With time, they realize some adults are fucking morons. That was the lesson of growing up when I did. “Welcome to Gen X… the economy sucks and nobody cares about you.” I’m not complaining, it’s simply what it was.
Is that different from now? Has a child in 2022 witnessed intelligent adults managing events intelligently? How many canceled classes or conflicting mask mandates does it take for a kid to realize the people in charge are morons? If there’s a kid in 2022 that still thinks his teacher is pretty smart, that’s because the teacher is his drug dealer.
Eventually I sussed out the end game of the incompetence cycle. It wasn’t just bugs and gasoline and hostages… it was death. The people in charge invited death. They wanted it.
Consider the part about being cold and eating bugs. I lived in a town that had firewood and farms right there. So how the hell was it going to happen there? “Shut up kid, it’s necessary because of overpopulation.” They focused on gloom and doom even while rejecting obvious solutions.
The cycle of bullshit got dark toward the end. The elites drifted from overpopulated people nibbling on crickets to outright starvation. People in Ethiopia were starving. This was presented as if it had nothing to do with anyone in Ethiopia! It was just the beginning. A wave of death was going to sweep the planet. People in lab coats said so! Sad distended children were on our black and white TV every day. Cold, then poverty, then bugs, then death. It always ends in death. They lust for it.
Sometime in the middle of the Reagan era it dawned on the elites that none of us was going to starve as instructed. So inconvenient. Soon there was a new way all the peasants would die. Russkies would nuke us! This was the same thing since the 1950’s but Reagan was “low class”. Therefore, world war 3 was unavoidable. Working class losers voting for the dipshit cowboy Reagan had caused it! We’d voted wrong. We’d all be reduced to glowing radioactive skeletons. We deserved it!
That’s the cycle. You have to live through it and watch with clear eyes to see it. Once you see it you can’t un-see it. I’ve coined the five stage cycle of suck:
- We made this situation that sucks and now it sucks to be you.
- It didn’t suck in the past but now it will suck for your whole future.
- Your fate is to endure the suck. You deserve it.
- It’s never going to get better. You deserve it.
- There are too many peasants… most of them will die. They deserve it.
What I heard half a lifetime ago is what’s being taught to kids right now. Total nuclear annihilation faded. New boogeymen are invented to suit the times. It doesn’t matter so long as it’s clear that the people who vote wrong will cause most of the peasants to die. Whether it’s from AIDS or COVID or failed crops or nuclear bombs it’s all just death. Death because you disobeyed.
Kids don’t know the authority figures, media, politicians are full of shit. How can they? They take it to heart and become twitchy. The multiple disheartening failures are always layered thick; starvation, bugs for food, no more cars, and endless death through pandemics… I could find all that in newspapers in 1975 or I could find it in Reddit threads in 2022. Same shit, new cycle.
When eggheads get too much power. They indulge in their fantasies. Their failure to use reason and grounded notions leads to mismanagement. Invariably it starts to collapse but to chance course would require discarding their false notions. Instead they double down and make it worse.
The final stages are when it’s obvious that everything sucks; they declare it’ll always suck. Nobody in the Carter era told me Reagan was going to show up and play the cold war to a no-shots fired stalemate. Nobody in the Obama era told me an Orange weirdo was going to show up and set the economy on fire until unemployment was the lowest in a lifetime. The people who bring failure want to lock you into failure. “We’re all you get and there is no other option.”
Finally comes death; the ultimate thrill for the mismanaging elite. “The peasants need to suffer and eventually die.” The reason can be anything, usually somehow tied to overpopulation. Gaia / peak oil / viral loads / etc… it’s always something. It leaves the elites in charge and the peasants eating crickets.
It’s a lie. Getting lied to sucks. It’s harder on the soul if you haven’t seen it before.
This is the third cycle of the bullshit pipeline I’ve seen in my short life. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Death and misery are not a done deal. Most of the suffering is caused by people who are incompetent and don’t want to accept their limits. When they stop doubling down, the misery ends.
Even as Carter/Obama/Biden ran/run the economy into the ground it doesn’t have to stay that way. They tell you it can’t get better but that’s because they can’t do better.
That’s the most cruel and horrible part of the bullshit pipeline. Statement #4 on the list; this is never going to get better. That’s the deadly one!
The forces that create a bullshit pipeline need you to be depressed. Happy fulfilled people don’t fall into the gravity well of bullshit. They keep on keepin’ on until another sunny day. They have weddings in the middle of wars, celebrate birthdays during a pandemic, and go fishing during a recession.
Hope comes from resilience. This is why elites that can’t manage success go after kids. They went after kids when I was a kid. They’re going after them now. For a while I truly believed by the time I was old enough to own a Chevy I’d be starving or radioactive. Fortunately, it didn’t get me down… not for long. If I’d put a bullet in my head (or let the teachers drag me down further) I’d never have a chance to blog about my two motorcycles and freezer full of bacon! The future didn’t suck!
Of three bullshit pipelines, two of them turned an economic corner and got better amazingly fast. One election and BOOM… new hope and cheaper gas. The third bullshit pipeline is going on right now. It seems to be following the same trajectory as the first two. First it’s a little funky, then it’s flat out berserk, and then we’re all gonna’ die. And then? Well I’m not sure but I’m optimistic.
The future doesn’t have to suck and I’m not listening to liars that say it must.
Your unemployment rate argument has a problem, the lowest rate for President Trump was 3.5 % which was matched by Biden this summer. I don’t think people are thinking the economy is doing great now. My problem with Trump is that he wasn’t much of a conservative except for social issues. Economically he spent like he was a democrat, foreign policy was more isolationist; even from NATO and our allies. He was a populist who wanted to create a cult of personality. Yes Hillary was an idiot and criminal and should be prosecuted but Trump also is heading down this path as well. Hillary thought she was above the law and Trump’s handling of classified materials post presidency smacks of the same.
Ok, so low unemployment (which is usually absolutely good) is showing up in the post covid economy (and it is possibly good news now too?). One could take the low unemployment rate out of my post and substitute one of several other statistics that were also positive. Cheap gas, low inflation, reduced taxes (at least my taxes went down), etc… The year 2019 is the last year before Covid nuked everything and things get hard to analyze. It’s a good year for comparison to other eras. By several measures 2019 went pretty well compared to the several years leading up to it.
Gas prices are another hard one, covid nuked the oil markets and oil producers idled a lot of production and are leery about bringing it all back online in a recession. Plus we have no refining capacity, currently refineries are running 92-96% capacity which is the best it is going to be due to regular maintenance needs. Prices are going down but by the end of the year we’ll probably be a buck over what we paid in 2019. Biden’s limiting of oil lease sales really don’t impact the here and now on prices. It takes years for that production to come online if ever. Oil companies currently have thousands of leases they are sitting on, some probably aren’t economically viable but many just take time and resources which in a recession isn’t a good time to stick millions into drilling a lease. The pipeline from Canada was heavy tar sand oil that was going to the Gulf Coast and be exported. Most of our refineries can’t handle that type of crude. That oil is still making it to market just a a reduced rate. Biggest impact is the mess in Ukraine and Europe realizing getting most of your energy from a country that isn’t an ally wasn’t too smart.
Prairie
There’s low unemployment, because all the people who want a job, have one. Then there’s low unemployment (and if you really believe those figures I have some nice bottom land for sale, or you should be in jail – all those companies collapsing, businesses shutting, homeless out the yin yang … but don’t you dare believe your lying eyes) where all those people who’ve been looking for a job, have given up (and all those who can’t be bothered are living high on the hog on the freebies). And that’s not even considering all the ‘unfortunates’ no longer in the labour pool because of permanent disability or death due to “unknown, but definitely not the vaxx, causes”.
Both parties when they are in power want low unemployment. It’s odd to say Democrats fudge the numbers but totally believe that Republicans would never do that. Believe the numbers as whole or don’t but don’t cherry pick saying one year’s figures were more honest than another’s. Politics is rarely about honesty anymore. Vaccines are what they are if you believe in them fine, if you don’t fine. There is enough information out there people can make their own decisions. The decreased life expectancy for whatever reason atleast means Social Security will last a bit longer.
Yes yes Trump is a populist. How is wanting to restore America to pre obama , pre bush, pre clinton greatness creating a “cult of personality”?
Was Trump perfect? No, and a long ways from it……but he is hard core pro USA, pro freedom, pro American citizen, pro business. Tell us how you know he mishandled “classified” materials? Quit listening to Vodka Skeletor and the rest of the incompetent lying cheating stealing swamp inhabitants and their media mouthpieces.
Don’t hide behind the”hillary should be prosecuted” argument, shitstain. You may not be pro democrat, but you certainly ain’t pro America, not in any meaningful way. Your criticism of Trump without any substance outs you for the false conservative you are.
Always nice to have a discussion devolve to personal attacks. Never said I was a conservative, I don’t belong in either party. I said Trump wasn’t much of a conservative in the massive amount of spending he did. His foreign policy wasn’t much better. As an ex president you don’t have carte blanche to take whatever you want home with you after the transfer of power. His lawyers could have easily defused this and handed over only the requested documents. A cult of personality doesn’t have anything to do with making America great, it was his focus on personal loyalty to him above all else which has been stated by members of his own cabinet.
You actually believe the unemployment figures? So much for critical discernment.
Measure them the way we did in the 1930’s. Closer to 30% than 3%.
Workforce engagement is now lower than it was under Jimmy Peanut.
That’s the number the Left has trouble fudging.
No shit? Lower than Carter? That’s pretty impressive. Back in the 1970’s a fair number of moms and wives chose to stay out of the workforce; certainly more than now. If workforce participation in 2022 when women are assumed to be seeking employment really dropped below 1970’s when many weren’t… we’re doubly fucked.
How the hell do you expect to have an intelligent discussion about the economy when you use the Governments numbers? If you were alive for the Clinton Regime you surely remember the malignant dwarf Reich shaving 20 basis points by simply reducing the numbers samples in cities:- read blacks.
Start with John Williams Shadow Stats.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
Brilliant AC! Thank you!
Glad you like it.
It sounds like we are fairly close age wise, I’m probably a couple three, four years ahead of you at least. I’m 62 1/2 now.
That means we have lived through the same time frame and put up with the same shit.
Like you, I caught on to the bullshit fairly early.
Even to a kid paying just a smidgeon of attention to current events, shit didn’t add up.
Speaking of such things, one of Nixon’s lasting legacies is that fucking 55 mile an hour speed limit that is still everywhere.
I had mercifully forgotten about the Yellow Ribbon insanity, thanks for reminding me.
It’s the Same Shit Different Day cycle with these morons. They think they are better than us and have to prove they aren’t by fucking up everything they touch.
If the ignorant pig fuckers would just leave shit alone, The Average American will get into a rhythm and shit will just keep percolating right along. But no, You Vill Eat Ze Bugs jackasses are always right there with both left thumbs.
As tore up and fucked up as I am from living life with no fear of death and managing to escape with merely enough injuries to cripple me, I am praying that I will be around long enough to help curb stomp this current batch of assholes and be able to live out the rest of my days in relative peace.
One never knows when one’s time is up so I try and stick my finger in their eye at every opportunity just for the self satisfaction.
Fuck them very much.
Hi AC,
Once again, you have made my day. I’m guessing we are fairly close in age as I have lived through the same cycles you mention, and I think you are absolutely spot on.
I recognise the truth of what you are saying.
I remember being terrified by Leonard Nimoy spouting about the unknown gravitational effects of all the planets in our solar system being aligned linearly for the first time ever, and how we were all going to freeze in a soon to arrive Ice Age. I actually had nightmares as a kid about this stuff because I knew that Mr Spock would NEVER lie to me.
In Australia the propaganda is endlessly ramping up. The website for our Australian Broadcasting Corporation (“Auntie ABC”) is a wonderful source of fear pr0n.
They are telling me we are now buying the last cars we will ever own that run on petrol. Complete with a couple of companion stories featuring a diverse, inner city “new-Australian”, wealthy, retiree, responsibly-green couple allegedly travelling our vast, vast, vast country in a tiny electric car and how wonderful it was – Krishna (a real Aussie name) just had to carefully plan their stops. (See https://archive.ph/l3hWO).
The push for nuclear power is incessant from Auntie ABC too, and how awesomely safe and bountiful it will be.
Yet they featured an article of concern this weekend about vodka-man’s eeeeevil troops shelling a nuclear power station (https://archive.ph/JuiB1) and how everyone should be terrified about a melt-down.
Not from the artillery though. Because of bushfire. Apparently a nuclear power station can shrug off artillery, but bushfires cause a “significant risk” of a nuclear accident because they stop the cooling plants from working. GREAT ! Just what we want in a sunburnt country dominated by cycles of either flooding rains or terrifying bushfires.
At the start of the year, my elderly boomer father was telling me with genuine concern and seriousness how he was sure capitalism has been an experiment that has failed. I stopped – just let his comment hang for about thirty seconds – and said how I’d read those bullshit articles too about a week before on the ABC, and maybe he should turn the TV off. I think he was actually mildly embarrassed and we have not broached the subject since.
But my dad speaks with his 13 & 15 year old granddaughters (my nieces) daily. These poor kids are both terrified of their own shadows and “boosted”. This stuff is insidious.
As complete a description of my own thoughts as I have seen (and annoyingly phrased better – don’t you just hate it when somebody says what you think better than you can? It’s why I sometimes sound like everything I say is either a Pratchett, some old Roman guy, quote, or … a 70’s/80’s song lyric).
I’m constantly telling the young people I know about just this thing, illustrating with similar examples, and … you can see both the relief, and a light-bulb going off as they start to realise, not just to see behind the curtain, but that there ’is’ a curtain.
I was recently ‘forced’ to watch the execrable “Hunger Games” films and … one correct point (even though they, the leftists, did the usual thing of thinking ‘they’ are the ‘rebels/victims’ whilst conveniently ignoring the point that everything, but everything, they do is exactly what the evil dictators in Capital City, did) was the understanding that ‘hope’ was the thing ‘they’ explicitly aimed to destroy.
Everything can be an utter disaster, nothing in your life going right, without hope, sinking into a compliant apathy is the best outcome you’ll see. But … if you still have hope that it ‘can’ be better, you will continue to fight to make it so – and ‘they’ can’t allow that.
It’s not just that they are amoral, nihilist, mercenary POS’s, it’s that they genuinely believe that it would be better (for them, the elite, at least) if the rest of us just ‘accept our place’ and do as we’re told. To hope and dream is an anathema to that Platonic ‘ideal’, with themselves as philosopher kings, and the rest of us as drudge labour to provide them with their just deserts – forever. No, better to ensure the scum never hope for better for themselves, in fact it’s better to ensure they believe it will only get worse.
AC…
Great essay.
Thanks for the positive vibes, man.
Im prolly older, 65 now. I lived the Carter buffoonnery and it was the same shit as today: we’re all gonna DIEEEEE!!!!!
Thanks.