There was a story I read when I was younger, a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. The story is about a working class native of Hawaii, Keawe, who buys a strange bottle from a sad, elderly gentleman who credits the bottle with his wealth and fortune, and promises the imp in the bottle will also grant Keawe his every wish and desire.
Of course, there is a catch — the bottle must be sold at a loss, i.e. for less than its owner originally paid, or else it will simply return to him. The currency used in the transaction must also be in coin (not paper currency or check). The bottle may not be thrown or given away. If an owner of the bottle dies without having sold it in the prescribed manner, that person’s soul will burn for eternity in Hell.
The bottle was said to have been brought to Earth by the Devil and first purchased by Prester John for millions of dollars; it was owned by Napoleon and Captain James Cook but each sold it. At the time of the story the price has diminished to eighty dollars, and declines rapidly to a matter of pennies.
The problem here is that as the price approaches a penny, it will become harder and harder to sell the bottle, as the buyer will be in fear of being left holding the bag.
This tale reminds me of our current national debt. As our debt increases, the interest payments will balloon. They can only get so large before default is inevitable. At that point, anyone in possession of a US bond will be stuck with worthless paper. Because of this, the returns for these bonds will have to increase, so as to entice people in taking the risk of buying them, which will make the interest payments higher, thus making the end that much closer.
For those of you who believe that all we have to do is vote, let me point out that the changes being put in place by the Biden administration aren’t anything that can be simply changed. Even if voting works, we are screwed for a generation or more.
Biden isn’t just putting some policies in place that can be changed with an executive order. No, he is dismantling our gasoline producing infrastructure. He is planning on closing the ammunition plant that makes 5.56. He is going to allow the chip manufacturer in Taiwan be overrun by the Chinese.
In the meantime, he stymies investigations into Chinese fair trade violations. In this particular case, it actually makes it less likely that the US will move to green energy because it prevents American solar manufacturers from competing against Chinese products that are being labeled as coming from other countries while at the same time not providing DPA protections to US firms. This is crippling US solar manufacturing.
The damage that he is doing to the west is not easily repaired. It will take years, perhaps a decade or more, to repair the infrastructure that is being destroyed right now. In the meantime, China will become the world’s largest and most powerful nation. The US is about to become a second world nation.
It’s almost like Biden is an employee of the Chinese government.
The Fed is expected to raise the benchmark funds rate by three quarters of a percent today. Goldman Sachs is now predicting consecutive 75 basis point rate hikes in June and July, followed by a 50 basis point move in September and 25 basis point moves in November and December, taking the fed funds rate to a range of 3.25%-3.5% by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, gas prices near me are at $4.95 a gallon. If I drive 10 miles away, I can hit Sam’s club and get $4.53 a gallon, meaning that a single fill up of my pickup’s 40 gallon gas tank pays for nearly my entire annual membership fee.
Things are about to get a whole lot worse. We are so incredibly screwed.
I asked a couple of days ago why they were making such a big deal about the police not doing their jobs. I was wondering what the end game was, and I think I have it. They are following the Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” and the CIA insurgency manual. If you are unfamiliar with them, I did a three part series on them back in 2020. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three is here.
When an attempted overthrow of a government is in the works, one of the things that needs to happen is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to run things and provide needed services to its citizens. They do this by using violence and mayhem to both make the citizens feel unsafe, and to sabotage infrastructure so that people are crying out for basic services.
Once the people don’t trust the government to do that job any more, they turn to the revolutionaries to do it for them, and the revolutionaries step in and “fix” the problem that they themselves created. I think we are seeing a variation of that. The left already hates the local and state police. Now all they have to do is get the right on board.
American Greatness thinks that this is exactly what is happening to the police, and I can’t say that I disagree with them. That is no way means that I am going to support cops who stand around and arrest parents while children are being murdered, but I see what is happening.
A leftie made an appearance in the comments section here at Sector Ocho. He made some claims that I want to address. This post is an attempt to educate, not engage in personal attacks. Perhaps this poor, misguided leftist has good motives, but simply isn’t aware that he is mistaken. This will either set him straight, or prove that he is a partisan hack. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for now, and simply assume that his is uninformed, rather than being willfully deceptive. His claims will be in red. So here they are, along with my response:
Or the riots that occurred in New York, Seattle, DC, and Portland during Trump’s 2017 inauguration. In DC alone, over 200 people were arrested for taking part in the violence. According to CNN, “Bursts of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets as black-clad “antifascist” protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police lined up in an eastbound crosswalk.”
In February, leftist protesters started a violent clash while opposing Milo Yiannopoulos making an appearance at US Berkeley, doing more than $100,000 in damage. Two Young Republicans were severely beaten and had to be hospitalized. The attackers, who were not affiliated with the university, were taken into custody by UC Berkeley police.
Black-clad protesters wearing masks threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police. Some even hurled Molotov cocktails that ignited fires. They also smashed windows of the student union center on the Berkeley campus where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.
At least six people were injured. Some were attacked by the agitators – who are a part of an anarchist group known as the “Black Bloc” that has been causing problems in Oakland for years, said Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley spokesman.
March saw more leftist initiated violence. Again in Berkeley, the Black Bloc again attacked people attending a Trump rally. A group of self described Antifascists were responsible.
The #Trump rally in Berkeley has broken out in violence four minutes before the march is supposed to start. pic.twitter.com/NJ4HWjh06P
It happened in April, again in Berkeley. Antifa again attacked Trump supporters.
A May Day rally in Portland, Oregon, descended into chaos when the “anti-fascists” showed up, attacking police officers and setting fires. The same day, police in Olympia, Wash., say they were confronted with a “mob” of masked and violent protesters who threw rocks and used slingshots to target officers.
And their response was to ‘take a peaceful tour of the Capitol’, right?
No less peaceful than the “peaceful protests” of the summer of 2020.
Most (not all) of the violence has been performed by your side.
I think that the selected violence from 2017 that I have illustrated in this post shows that you are mistaken. In addition, don’t forget the 400 or so armed leftists that occupied a city block in Portland, using force and refusing to obey court order to vacate a house when the tenants refused to leave the property.
There is also CHAZ (CHOP), AFAC, and numerous other armed groups that have openly declared war on the right.
If the Left begins the next ‘Civil War’, as you call it, I would dare say it was instigated by the Right.
I would argue that the Civil War has already begun, and it was started by violent acts perpetrated by those on the left. It could be argued that the first shots in the second American Civil War have been fired, but that will be a question better left for the historians in some future decade.
It’s just that the right hasn’t gotten sufficiently pissed off to fight back yet. Remember that the right owns 400 million or so firearms, along with several billion rounds of ammunition. We go out on the weekends and shoot at stuff because we think it is fun to see how accurate we can be, how far away we can still punch holes in things. There are those on the right who can hit man sized targets at over a mile. I don’t consider myself to be an exceptionally good shot, and I can reliably hit man sized targets at several hundred yards. We just aren’t pissed off enough yet.
California average gas prices just broke $6 a gallon. The national average is currently 25% less than that at $4.59 a gallon, but many experts are calling for gas prices to reach $6 a gallon within the next 60 days. So they are calling for a 25% increase in 2 months, meaning that fuel prices are now doubling every 8 months. Since everything you buy has to be transported from one place to the other, this will continue to contribute to inflation.
The prices of homes were skyrocketing in 2008. Everyone was in a panic to buy a house, flip it, and get rich. This isn’t that. I think that, unlike 2008, prices of everything are rising, and that is because the value of the US dollar is falling. That is, the US government has printed its way into this mess.
We are not on the verge of a housing bubble popping. We are on the verge of a collapse of the US dollar. In 2008, your home lost half of its value. In 2022, you are at risk of having your bank accounts lose half of their value.
The Democrats have obviously abandoned the Biden regime.
So who is going to replace him? I don’t think it will be Harris, Pelosi, or Constitutionally, it COULD be Obama, but I don’t really see that either. Have we finally reached the point where Americans will support the strongman who promises to fix everything and will hand him supreme but “temporary” power in order to do it? Who will it be?