07:35 – Stock markets around the world are crashing as they open this morning. European markets had lost a quarter of a trillion dollars in nominal value by lunchtime. Wall Street isn’t likely to be an exception. This looks to be more than just profit-taking.
The morning paper has an article about a new group in Charlotte that’s protesting police shootings. It’s called True Healing Under God and goes by T.H.U.G. I am not making this up.
Barbara goes back to work this morning. Her last day at the firm is in five weeks. I’ll be glad to have her working at home with me.
12:32 – Someone emailed me to ask if I would be willing to send him part of the book that covers getting started. That sounds like a good idea to me, so I’ll throw that open to my other readers. If you’d like a PDF copy of Chapter 1, email me at thompson (at) ttgnet (dot) com with the subject line “book sample”. I’ll send you the PDF that I just sent him.
“Stock markets around the world are crashing as they open this morning.”
The Chicom market lost 9% so fah; and our bozos are panicking, of course. Could be an interesting week; two questions: what will the potentates and nabobs do about it, if anything? And…will any of the candidate clowns say anything about it, seeing as how this affects, or could affect, peoples’ lives worldwide??
Or are we just gonna hear about the Cankles emails again and how swell Trump is doing?
With all this in mind….
http://guerrillamerica.com/2015/08/markets-bloody-heres-your-community-security-checklist/
Yo, finance guys, what does this mean?
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230562
It means people are trying to get out, prices are crashing as there are no buyers, and some of the mechanisms that were put in place to prevent or slow crashes have activated.
It’s supposed to give people time to stop panicking, break the automatic computer driven trades, and also give time for people to arrange financing and loans to cover losses they are on the hook for.
nick
At this point, things look serious but not too serious. If things are still bad and getting worse by the end of this week, I’ll be a lot more concerned.
I guess we’ll know a bit more this afternoon:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-24/nyse-will-suspend-stock-trading-if-s-p-500-index-plunges-7-
I’ve always said it’s simple arithmetic, that even a STEM imbecile like me can understand, given that I was required to memorize the multiplication tables, do long division, etc. in ELEMENTARY SKOOL.
http://www.barnhardt.biz/2015/08/24/how-much-lead-warning-would-have-been-right/
Well, I’ve heard this music before. In 2000 I lost half my retirement savings when the tech crunch happened. I was supposed to be in funds that were “no tech” but the fund manager shifted to 90% tech just before the crash. He looked bad with his underperforming non-tech portfolio, compared to the tech funds. Of course, if he’d held out, he’d have looked like a genius, and provided the diversification I needed and which was promised initially by the fund. I didn’t have much, but losing it hurt.
Then again in 2008, and the following years, I saw my savings greatly reduced. This time I had more, and it HURT. The passage of time was not working in my favor.
So 2 years ago, I put half my retirement in an insured, capitol protected annuity, backed with a stock fund. Every year I can lock in any gains. So I did. Assuming the insurance stays valid, that money is protected.
Last year, I moved the rest into cash. I engaged in “profit taking” which simply means getting out of whatever asset rose on paper, and converting that paper gain into money. I went early, so I ‘left some money on the table.’ I’m fine with that. It is VERY difficult to time the market, and I slept a lot better knowing I would not lose my retirement money again, short of confiscation, the complete destruction of the current financial system, and return to a barter economy.
This year, I convinced my wife to ‘take her profit’ and get out of stocks, mainly funds, but also some individual stocks. She didn’t commit fully but still converted 70% to cash. The market has been falling ever since and I look like a genius.
Is this the beginning of something like 2008 or even worse? I don’t know. But I sleep better at night, knowing what steps we’ve already taken.
Is the remainder safe? Not really. There are a number of things TPTB could do to get my money or reduce it’s value. I’m paying attention, and if some things continue, I’ll bite the bullet, pay the fines and taxes, and move that cash into tangibles, either PMs, land, or gear that I control directly. This is what the greeks tried to do just before capitol controls hit. If applied to goods, it causes rapid price inflation and shortages, so you have to act before the masses. Kind of like bugging out. You need to know what would make you leave, where you are going, and then ACT decisively.
I have no plans to bug out of my home, but I’m watching carefully to see if I need to bug out financially.
nick
looks like some recovery, but if it were me, I wouldn’t want to be holding anything over night, so look for additional selling at the end of the day.
This is a time you can make a fortune in the stock market. Apple will still release the iPhone 6S in a month. Their stock has dropped significantly. When the new phone comes out, their stock will go up. Even if it is a couple of dollars, you could make significant money. But, as always, you gotta have money to make money. Buffet and Soros are drooling right now.
This is not a paid ad. It is an observation from a educated WHITE! nabob.
I remember some kinda caper back in ’88 or ’89, I think, when I was working at the old Digital Equipment Corporation in Marlborough, MA. Some of the longtime employees were a tad snarky about their vested retirement accounts and how swell they’d been doing over the years with DEC, and then the chit hit the fan and they all lost most of what they’d been holding, exclusively, I might add, in DEC stock and zero diversification. Surprise!
Mrs. OFD and I have blown through four or five, i.e., ALL of our retirement funds over the past fifteen years, due to bills and taxes and my long periods of unemployment in a very rocky IT field while aging at the same time. We MIGHT get our Social Security when the time comes, but I sure ain’t counting on it.
Off to bring daughter’s cah to the dealership for some stuff; I wonder if they’ll have the tee-vee on in the waiting room, usually CNN or Faux Nooz.
“It is an observation from a educated WHITE! nabob.”
Rayciss.
Micro-aggressions.
This will be reported to the Management.
What surprises me is that oil is still selling for as much as it is. Given the world situation, $40/bbl seems ridiculously high. I think Lynn said he expects it to bottom out at $25. I’m thinking single digits, followed by a years-long climb back into the low double digits.
I just hope we don’t end up being stuck in Winston-Salem. The relocation search for a home up in the mountains is going much more slowly than I’d like. I was just rethinking plans last weekend for what we’ll do if the SHTF while we’re still in Winston. That would be sub-optimal to say the least, but we’ll deal with it if we have to. At least I’ve thought it through in detail, so I have some idea of what the biggest problems would be and what we might do about them.
I know that a lot of you guys are in similarly less than ideal locations.
I put everything into real estate (apartments) and a couple of business ventures. Nice steady income and I can sit on the sidelines and watch the fireworks in the markets. If things really drop, 30% not 5%, then I may make some investments.
“know that a lot of you guys are in similarly less than ideal locations.”
True, that; we like our house and village and location but it’s not ideal by any means; too close to interstate, rail line, pipelines, military bases and only 75 miles from Montreal. We would be bugging-in here and we’re setting up to do just that over a long, cold, snowy winter with no Grid if necessary. If worst came to worst, we could try humping overland twelve hours by car to the cottage in northern New Brunswick, in a fishing community where the old guys are still fishing but the young ones all go out to the tar sands in Alberta to work. I figure we’ll stand or die here, though.
“I know that a lot of you guys are in similarly less than ideal locations.”
Fifteen minute drive from a named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial. Thirty minute drive from a major metropolitan area. I guess that’s less than ideal.
Well it’s correction for earnings. Prices get pushed up by the get rich quick crowd then reality finally pushes back. Then the anxiety starts and the news starts the panic.
Well, at least we’re on the far northwestern edge of Winston-Salem and the Triad. Of course, the Triad is a million people.
I moved most of my assets to Greek bonds a few years ago, so I should be alright… 🙂
zerohedge has been talking about various aspects of this for a while:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-24/blackrock-said-to-start-financing-rental-home-investors
Note the list of players. The “housing recovery” was primarily driven by these guys and the people they enabled.
Note the built in assumptions about why it’s a good deal, ie., bad credit, more renters, lots of people who lost homes, poor economy, poor job market. AND they expect those things to last, and possibly get worse.
nick
Renting to people because they’re not going to be there long (corporate rentals, military families, etc.) usually works out well. Renting to people because their financial situation is so bad (credit score, debt, etc.) they they cannot buy can be risky. There are a lot of laws in place to protect tenants and not landlords. I remember hearing from the time they miss a payment until you can have them forcibly removed from the property is like 90-120 days. That’s three or four months they’re occupying your property and not paying you a dime (and potentially damaging the property from neglect or malice). If they do up and leave and leave their stuff behind you can be required to securely store their belongings for up to a year (cost of storage can be added to what they owe you in rent – but, let’s face it, that’s never getting paid). My father was a realtor and a property manager for several years after he retired from the USAF. He was frequently disgusted that tenants always had money for cable TV and cigarettes, but not for rent. I suppose if those tenants could make decisions worth a shit they’d be in a position to buy and not rent anyway. When you evict them they sometimes get pissed (afterall, it’s your fault, not theirs, that they can’t pay their rent) and do shit like flush concrete down all of the toilets, or kick in much of the drywall, or plug the sinks and turn all of the faucets on.
Or pour chicken blood into the floor vents, or hide bags of chicken guts in places where they will blow up and burst. Or just steal every piece of copper, every wall switch and outlet, every appliance and fixture, and flood the place out.
We rented for the first 7 years to a former co-worker. The couple we have in now are not super clean people, and are emotionally younger than their age, but not really bad.
One thing that helps here is to do a lease vs. a rental. The 1 year lease (or 2 years that we got them to sign) is better for the landlord. Texas also has fewer “tenant rights” and better protections for landlords than other states.
It is still a bit of a crap shoot and people can always change as their circumstances change.
I wouldn’t want to rent apartments, that is for sure.
I have a friend who bought an apartment building and turned it into vacation rentals. He gets a month’s rent for every week, he doesn’t deal with traditional tenants, and he gets a bunch of water and beach toys as writeoffs because he allows the renters to use them. If I lived in a vacation destination, I would look at doing something like that. Corporate rentals are good too, but harder to break into.
nick
BTW, it’s definitely work. I’ve mentioned some of it here before. It’s not for everyone, but it has a lot to recommend it long term, especially as a ‘cottage industry’ so to speak.
What a bunch of sour pusses:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3207790/Obama-sheds-summer-curse-just-time-daunting-fall.html
and the article can’t decide if they should suck up or be pissed off.
nick
The appartment next to my brother was rented. Tenants left, not paying rent, and did a lot of damage – not sure if it was malicious or just because the renters were underclass. The owners spent months fixing the place up again.
I’d run for my life rather than rent.
(I live in a nice, quiet part of Adelaide that isn’t on the road to anywhere. The underclass parts of Adelaide are, in the main, 35 km north and 15+ km SW of here. I’m more worried about bushfires…)
Looks like all the major US markets have recovered to 1% or less down. Yawn.
Maybe it was a “test” run to gauge financial, political and public reactions….
…it may be a yawner so fah, but funny chit can happen when the peeps who rule the country are thieves, parasites, criminal scum and lying sons of bitches. If they’re playing games, they’re playing with fire; 330-million of us out here, with at least that number, if not two to three times that, of firearms.
Here’s another exercise they can try: shut down EBT cards and ATM withdrawals for a week. Just to see what happens…
They can’t let the economy crash on Obama’s watch. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize holder, and general hero, after all. More to the point, that would be the final nail in the coffin of Hillary’s whitehouse hopes.
Seriously: even if things have recovered, this ought to be a warning shot across the bow of the “let’s print more money” policies. Of course, they don’t have any other arrows in their quiver, so the warning will be ignored.
I don’t believe that the government or any significant part of it has evil intentions. It’s more a matter of, as Heinlein wrote, “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” in combination with their complete lack of understanding of the downsides of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
I think that the government is trying desperately to keep things together, not from any love for the country or its citizens, but because they’re big losers if they can’t keep it together. If all of us end up the broken eggs needed to make that omelet, they don’t care. But it’s not like they’re actively trying to harm us. Indifference, in their case, just imitates hostility.
“Indifference, in their case, just imitates hostility.”
Ordinarily, and in the past, I’d be inclined to agree with you. Not anymore; I believe that there are active factions in and out of government who have long planned to bring this country down. It’s been going on since the 1930s, primarily fostered and run by the Soviet KGB, but they’ve since lost most of the control they once had and their rotten progeny continue the project here and in Europe. They’ve been eminently successful in infiltrating and corrupting our main cultural institutions, such as education, the media, and government itself, and that has accelerated since the 1960s.
How successful are they? Look around you; hardly anyone even questions what have become the standard political and social beliefs; several generations are lost already. They’re ahistorical, illiterate and innumerate, and readily absorb stuff like homosexual “marriages,” affirmative action, the worship of Diversity, and the feeling of absolute entitlement and the idea that something can always be had for nothing. Meanwhile half the country is outraged by this, and the other half is outraged at our outrage.
I think it’s reached the stage now when stupidity, ignorance and incompetence are running neck-and-neck with malice and villainy. I also think there’s already a de facto civil war going on within the government and the good guys are losing; this may be reflected in due time by conditions out here in public society; hell, we’re well on the way.
Another bit of gloom.
I think people have always been getting fed a load of shit and happily swallowing it. It’s certainly not a 20th/21st century problem. There’s lots of reasons for it ranging from laziness to malice to conspiracy. Nobody wants to independently confirm anything. Hell, most people don’t even want to hear differing views. They get their information from 1 or 2 sources that they trust completely (with no known foundation for that trust). They don’t check any of the facts themselves. They don’t visit other sources to see how those with differing politics or geography may see it to form a more objective view. They just get spoon-fed from their favorite MSM outlet and take it all as gospel. People are as ignorant as they want to be and, apparently, people want to be very ignorant. “Ignorance is bliss.”
“In the labor market, a shortage of skilled workers threatens America every day. Job openings are growing, quit rates are rising as people seek to improve their situation, and unemployment is declining. Growing companies are not able to hire the workers they need fast enough.”
Yah, we keep hearing this, but the official unemployment stat keeps dropping, nationally and here in VT, yet I can’t get the time of day, other than from recruiters and headhunters, usually from the Indian subcontinent with not great English, and who I never hear from again after I jump through all the HR hoops and send in paperwork. A brother down in MA was a UNIX guy for thirty years and can’t get the time of day, either, in a state with ten times the number of peeps and jobs, presumably; coincidentally, I’m over sixty and he’s 59. In IT they want you to be under 40, have a complete alphabet soup of IT acronyms, and be willing to slave 60 hours a week for shit pay and minimal bennies, if any. They want senior this and senior that, and you look at the reqs for the job and wonder where in hell they’ll ever find anybody with all those skillz. I’ve pretty much given up on that job market, just doing due diligence for family purposes and working on other stuff now.
“People are as ignorant as they want to be and, apparently, people want to be very ignorant. “Ignorance is bliss.””
True, that; and if you try to help them with verifiable info and intel, they don’t wanna hear it and get very annoyed. Like with prepping for SHTF: “You don’t really believe all that stuff, do ya?” “Nothing that bad is gonna happen.”
I think the trick to maintaining shelf life in IT is to move over to the business side of it as Business Analyst or Project Manager or something akin to that. Also, huge non-IT companies (big banks, etc.) tend to have a much higher median age in their IT departments. I worked at a big bank and I think our average Sys Admin was probably over 50. I joked that it must be where all of the IT dinosaurs came to wait on retirement. 🙂
Tech companies and small/medium businesses seem to have an average age of about 22 (especially amongst their programmers). That’s an exaggeration, but you catch my drift.
“Stock up on canned food for stock market crash, warns former Gordon Brown adviser”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/stock-up-on-canned-food-for-stock-market-crash-warns-former-gordon-brown-advisor-10469509.html
Wow, what an alarmist. A stock market crash will not cause the food and water networks to die also.
” I joked that it must be where all of the IT dinosaurs came to wait on retirement.”
Sign me up! Several banks up here have advertised for IT people in the past couple of years but they want that alphabet soup of acronyms and evidently think people that are expert gurus in operating systems, various apps, and programming all at once, grow on trees. The IT security positions look for people that already have the top-level cert, which you can only get after actually working in that field for YEARS and taking multiple exams.
” A stock market crash will not cause the food and water networks to die also.”
No, it won’t. However it could have a ripple effect on those networks eventually. And mass panic is contagious; what happens when peeps start thinking their local bank is gonna run outta cash to hand out? Especially when various pundits advise taking out all their money right now in cash, as well as stocking up on canned goods, etc.
More boffo laffs from our wacky country’s cut-ups and clowns:
http://takimag.com/article/the_week_that_perished_takimag_august_23_2015/print#axzz3jlS20TzO
“Immigration isn’t just the biggest issue in America. It’s the biggest issue across the world, or at least where immigrants are being foisted upon unwilling hosts.”
http://takimag.com/article/wheres_the_safe_space_for_christians_jim_goad1/print#axzz3jlS20TzO
What surprises me is that oil is still selling for as much as it is. Given the world situation, $40/bbl seems ridiculously high. I think Lynn said he expects it to bottom out at $25. I’m thinking single digits, followed by a years-long climb back into the low double digits.
Because $25/bbl of crude oil is right at most companies production cost here in the USA. At some point these companies will spin the wheel to close the valves lay off significant amounts of their employees. The amount of crude oil reaching the market will significantly drop at that point. Natural gas also. You cannot produce something below the cost of production for very long. You will start to miss paychecks, payments to third parties, etc. The wolves start baying at the doors fairly early nowadays, especially the IRS.
We hit a mark last here in Houston that I did not like to see. Chevron laid off 1,000 employees in the Houston area, 1,500 nationwide. That means that they already laid off all the contractors for now. Now Chevron is cutting off muscle (direct employees).
Exxon too, although I don’t have numbers from my buddies. I’m almost afraid to ask.
nick
Haven’t heard much about BP tho
“We hit a mark last here in Houston that I did not like to see.”
We hit that mark a couple of years ago with IBM, arguably the largest private business in the state, with several thousand layoffs, first the contractors, and then the regulars. They even made sure they included all ethnic, racial and seniority categories so as not to get caught out for any accusations of discrimination. So my boss was dumped after eighteen years there while a guy who I worked with but had only been there eleven years, stayed on. And several guys I worked with had been required to train their foreign replacements before being tossed overboard.
Meanwhile they still post jobs for manufacturing drones on the night shifts and occasionally for IT gigs, but I have yet to score one of those, even in the EXACT same buildings and data centers that I slaved in for two years on the EXACT same machines.
And I still have no idea who’s been doing the hands-on inside those data centers for the past couple of years, either. That was 80% of my day.
Re: stock market crash and no food.
One scenario is that with a crash, and banks and brokerages in trouble, the commercial credit dries up.
W/out credit, the trucks won’t roll from the producers to the wholesalers. Shelves could be bare pretty quickly.
The other is a deflationary spiral, no on will stock anything because it gets cheaper the longer it sits.
The other is an inflationary spiral, no one will sell now, because it will cost more later.
If there are wild currency fluctuations, then imports and exports will be dramatically affected, and Chilean bananas, asparagus, melons, etc will stay in Chile.
Besides, NO ONE reading here should have to run out to stock up. You already have food stored right?
nick
One scenario is that with a crash, and banks and brokerages in trouble, the commercial credit dries up.
W/out credit, the trucks won’t roll from the producers to the wholesalers. Shelves could be bare pretty quickly.
The Fed is not going to allow that to happen. Again (2008 was the last time). If the system gets anywhere close to the credit market drying up then the Fed can stop it. Two or three times more. The Fed still has credit itself that it can loan out.
Besides, NO ONE reading here should have to run out to stock up. You already have food stored right?
In violation of OPSEC,
1. four person months of pantry food
2. twenty person months of dried food
3. six person months of water (plus swimming pool plus two water heaters)
4. ten person months of cooking fuel (swag)
I just hope we don’t end up being stuck in Winston-Salem. The relocation search for a home up in the mountains is going much more slowly than I’d like. I was just rethinking plans last weekend for what we’ll do if the SHTF while we’re still in Winston. That would be sub-optimal to say the least, but we’ll deal with it if we have to. At least I’ve thought it through in detail, so I have some idea of what the biggest problems would be and what we might do about them.
I thought that you had a place that you liked and offered them 25% under the asking price?
BTW, have you bought a truck yet for moving your stuff? In your area, I would lean 4WD. Of course, the perfect truck for me has a factory camper top like my Ford Expedition. Wait, the perfect truck is a Ford Expedition! Good luck in finding a 4WD, they are rare beasties. At least around here.
From whom? Your wife?
Twenty-four person months of food is a pretty good start. You’re feeding, what?, three people?
Mr. Lynn’s all set now; I’d drive down and hang out with him when TSHTF but it’s too damn hot. And because venomous reptiles. And gee whiz, a few states over some locals caught a 950-pound gator. Screw all that. I’ll stick with ice storms, bears and moose.
And my good buddy, Mr. Champ.
4. ten person months of cooking fuel (swag)
From whom? Your wife?
That is my cooking fuel swag if that is what you are talking about. And it is a total swag. The real variability comes if you have to boil water in order to use it. I would guesstimate that requires you to use 2X ? 3X ? 4X ? of fuel than just fuel to cook soups, eggs, etc from the Augerson Farms #10 cans.
http://www.augasonfarms.com/
I am figuring on feeding four people. In reality, if things go totally bad then we are totally screwed due to roving gangs of people looking for food. I estimate that unless you are in the wilds of Alaska, you will be shooting people to defend you and yours within a month. As the roving gangs become larger, you will need to merge with your neighbors for common defense. Who, will eat your stored food also after they clean out their pantries.
One scenario is that with a crash, and banks and brokerages in trouble, the commercial credit dries up.
That’s what was about to happen in 2008. We were 24 hours from the commercial paper market stopping when the Fed and the US Government stepped in with the bailout. It’s why I don’t hold voting for the bailout against anyone that was in Congress then. They averted a financial meltdown as big as the Great Depression.
I meant OPSEC from your wife.
“Who, will eat your stored food also after they clean out their pantries.”
And then they’ll eat YOU, after they’ve cleaned out your stored food. Be a good host and grease up a nice truck axle for them and stock up on charcoal.
Our guessing game is over:
http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/251824-howard-stern-predicts-trump-will-win-gop-nod-people-dig-him
Walmart is out of stock on a lot of Augason Farms #10 cans. I wonder if a lot of people are stocking up right now?
http://www.walmart.com/c/brand/augason-farms
That is a lot of food for six person months. I may need to revise my estimate down by a factor of two.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-6-Month-1-Person-Emergency-Food-Storage-Kit-53-count/22001493
[snip] some locals caught a 950-pound gator [snip]
Here in Florida, that wouldn’t even be news unless the critter had chewed on a person first. A few years back the state came in & took most of the good sized ones from my golf club after some homeowner’s pet got eaten. I’d rather have gators on the course than yappy dogs.
Actually, that doesn’t look like anything close to a 6-month supply of food for one person. More like a 3-month supply, maybe, and of course without stuff like meat that makes food worth eating. I’ve just eyeballed it, because Augason doesn’t include that particular kit on their site, but I’m guessing that’s a six-month supply figured on maybe 1,400 calories per day, or about half a realistic number.
Augason Farms is actually better about this than most long-term storage food companies. I have seen x-person/y-day kits from some companies that on closer examination turned out to be figuring on as little as 400 calories/day!
Read this article:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/food-storage-calories/
“Servings” are utterly meaningless, because they’re whatever the vendor decides they are. What counts is actual nutrition. Calories is a reasonable proxy for the real nutrients–carbohydrates, protein, and lipids. I generally figure on 3,000 cal/day per person. Some will need less and some may need more. Possibly much more, depending on the situation. A large 20-something guy doing heavy manual labor all day long may break even at 4,000, 5,000, or more cal/day.
I’ve always kept track of nutrition, period.
Incidentally, the choice of foods in that AF collection is better than some, but still pretty poor. I like AF stuff, but I’d never buy a collection. I pick and choose specific items. It’s pointless to pay AF two or three times as much as the LDS HSC charges for rice or wheat or beans. I buy stuff like egg powder, butter powder, etc. that AF offers and LDS HSC doesn’t.
“Servings” have never meant diddly to me and our son at any time anyway. What a laugh. We’ve each eaten meals that claimed to be four, or six or eight servings at a sitting, regularly.
“A large 20-something guy doing heavy manual labor all day long may break even at 4,000, 5,000, or more cal/day.”
I’m a large 60-something guy doing heavy manual labor for half a day a few times a week plus basic PT chit now and I bet I do close to 4,000 on those days, at least. Plus gallons of wotta.
Dunno how long that’s gonna last, though, probably not too long, although we see farmers up here out in the sticks well into their 70s and 80s still packing their mud every day, both genders, too. (Yes, there really ARE only TWO genders, Virginia…don’t listen to Bruce or Barbara Walters…)
Sadly, I didn’t know what a waifu was until just now. I’d heard about the cartoon pony stuff and thought THAT was fucking weird. Now comes this:
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-economics-of-waifu.html
A whole nation of psychotics. This is just one of the symptoms. Have you watched anime? Seen the way they fetishize weapons? Or the other sexual fetishes? Used panties in vending machines in train stations. Love hotels. The whole schoolgirl thing. TENTACLE SEX. Panchira. Ecchi. Loli.
nick
You’re talking about Japan, amirite? Yeah, it’s weird stuff. The cartoon pony thing seems to be a North Murkan fetish, though.
“A whole nation of psychotics.”
We have our share here, but most of them seem to be thriving in the upper levels of government/bureaucracy. And among our latest generation of police:
http://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_raping_of_america_mile_markers_on_the_road_to_fascism
That would be the “bro-nies”.
My daughters love My Little Pony, and generally the show is pretty good. It has decent life lessons and rarely has the sort of thing that makes me see red. Catchy songs in every episode, and if you listen closely, and know something about music, you can hear who they are stealing from.
I love the parody of MLP as the “Luna-corns” in the Penguins of Madagascar cartoons. Kind of a play within a play, and the Penguins are clever and funny.
Just got an email from the financial team that advises my advisors. It basically suggests ‘stay the course’, but keep an eye open. I’m not buying it. Whenever someone suggests an action based on our supposed economic recovery, and quotes the official statistics on jobs, etc, I automatically discount what they are saying. Since it’s pretty conclusively shown that those numbers are bull.
nick
(why use them if I don’t trust their advice? Well, someone has to manage and hold the retirement stuff, and they are free to me for some historical reasons.)
“…Senior Economist outlined that economic fundamentals remain supportive here in the U.S., consumers are generally in good shape, with credit scores at their highest levels in a decade, while the employment picture remains solid…”
Or the convoluted language (although by no means the worst):
“…With more than a quarter of emerging market exposure dedicated to stocks in countries facing serious economic and market challenges—we believe the asset category has an upward hill to climb. Commodity pressures, weakening growth trajectories, and currency headwinds may plague the asset class over the intermediate-term. ”
If you just skimmed that you’d get “asset category climb upward, growth trajectory”
I automatically turn off convoluted torturing and jargonizing of my beloved English language and I’d stand the perps against a wall and happily machine-gun the fuckers. I hated it from lawyers, politicians, financial geniuses and wizards, ad copy writers, media rumpswabs, and most of all from English professors and fellow grad students back in the day. It’s also a daily, if not hourly, feature of most corporate environments nowadays. Bastard scum.
If you want to feel your head exploding, visit pretty much any college English or Comp Lit department and read the stuff they write and post about, or get into a conversation with one or more of them. I served multiple sentences in places like that in MA and NJ and now, if I want to look at literary criticism, I go back to Ernst Curtius, Erich Auerbach, and Dr. Johnson.
Immigration – actually, asylum seekers – is certainly a huge issue in Europe just now. Millions of people leaving Syria, plus the usual pile from various African countries. A huge hoard has made it across Turkey (um, just how is kind of unclear, that’s not a short journey). Greece let them through, because what’s Greece gonna do with them. Macedonia sold them bus tickets to get them across the country as fast as possible, and now Serbia is trying to close the border. But it won’t work, they’ll flood through Serbia to Hungary, which is nearly finished with a fence along the entire border. But do they have the people to patrol that fence?
It’s a horrible situation, actually. I mean, the people coming are genuinely desperate. But they don’t understand that Europe is not a land of milk and honey. They don’t speak the language(s), most have little education and no useful skills. What the devil do they expect us to do with them?
You can take in a million people out of charity, but not a hundred million. Somewhere, you have to draw the line and say “no more, go back and fix your own countries”. Australia definitely has the right approach: turn them away always. Without a consistent message, the flood will continue.
With minor exceptions, there are only two SEXES, male and female. (I ignore the tiny percentages of phenotypic/genotypic variations such as true hermaphrodites and various aneuploidies such as XYY, XXY, and so on.)
Gender, on the other hand, is a grammatical construct. Many languages have three or more GENDERS, most commonly masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Don’t let the progs redefine perfectly good words like sex and gender.
@RBT
So you’re saying words have gender and people have sex?
Good way to put it.
Back when I was in college, I don’t remember even once thinking that I’d like to have gender with a girl.
OK, OK, I shoulda known better. SEXES! Two SEXES!
Now gender THIS!
You just verbed a noun, you heathen!
So did you, you pagan!
Point of order: I’m an atheist, not a pagan.
Verbing nouns and adjectives and even conjunctions doesn’t bother me at all. For one thing, I don’t categorize words into “verb-things” and “descriptive-things” and so on. I’m perfectly happy with words being fluid in this regard. The other reason, just as important, is that attempting to enforce the purity of any aspect of the English language is even more hopeless a task than attempting to ready a 40-year-old crack whore to be a white-clad virgin bride.
… Dammit! Was that a microaggression or something that would tend to deter women from reading or commenting here? And I was trying so hard. I even held in my fart jokes even though one of the comments I read a few minutes ago was just begging for a fart joke in reply.
Point of another order: I’m a traditionalist Latin Rite Roman Catholic convert from High Church Anglicanism, not a bloody heathen.
“…attempting to enforce the purity of any aspect of the English language is even more hopeless a task…”
Indeed. English is like unto the Borg. Unstoppable. The Master Language of the Universe. God speaks English. And the Devil knows Latin.
Here we go again!
“”The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
–James D. Nicoll”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll
Exactly.
I’ve seen that quote before.
And our writers even make up words out of whole cloth when they feel like it. Since the earliest days, too.