The foreshocks before the financial Big One: what to look for
Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do when they come for you? -Theme From COPS (by Inner Circle)
OK, so we all know that America's debt is unsustainable, and will cause one fuck of a debt collapse eventually. From reading about Argentina in 2001 and Greece in 2015, here are a few things to watch for so that you get out in time.
1) There is a long, years long, recession, one they can't cook the books to hide. When construction stops and businesses start firing people en masse, watch out.
2) This recession leads to big problems on Wall Street. Banks and brokers start failing. When this happens you need to move your money out of danger, although where to in the event that America goes down is a valid question.
3) The government starts in with the happy talk while everything is going to shit. When they start telling you your savings is safe, you may only have a few days to finish stocking up on food and water.
4) Only then do they establish the corralito, nationalizing all money in the banks (generally called a "bail in") leaving the country destitute. In America's case, this probably will apply to the entire PLANET, taking every red cent that's not under your mattress (although they may have been keeping track of withdrawals and gold/silver purchases, in which case it's time to lock and load) and using that money to make good the bad debts. By then it's too late. People in Greece knew that eventually the corralito would arrive, as much as FIVE YEARS AGO! Did they do anything, of course not.
So, that's what to look out for. People in Greece have been keeping Ferfal ( themodernsurvivalist.com ) updated. No cash, no banks, no food in the stores. The economy simply up and died. What will YOU do when it's your turn?
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Back in the saddle again...
Well, I've been allowed back on the survival forum I was thrown off of four months ago. Looking over my blog, it seems that I mainly blog about survivalism anyway. For some weird reason, most of them seemed happy to have me back. So, I guess I can blog about survival topics again.
Well, I've been allowed back on the survival forum I was thrown off of four months ago. Looking over my blog, it seems that I mainly blog about survivalism anyway. For some weird reason, most of them seemed happy to have me back. So, I guess I can blog about survival topics again.
Here we go again...neurodiversity and vaccines-and suicide
I recently asked people on a survival forum (yes, I've been allowed back, more on that in another post) about what really is so bad about being neurologically different, in light of a Washington Post article about the neurodiversity acceptance movement. Immediately people started debating the whole vaccine thing again, I guess because the idea of neurodivergent people who do not want to be "cured" is something they can't bear to face.
Also, I learned a lot about mothers of ASD kids who regularly contemplate suicide, mainly because they have no support and no respite from what apparently are more severe cases of ASD than mine. The kid has autism, so hubby walks out and finds another model to tinker with, and all your "friends" suddenly decide that they never really liked you anyway, and bail. You can't work, so you go on welfare (once AFDC, now TANF, and facing yet another overhaul in Congress right now) and now EVERYBODY hates you. So, you decide to cash out early, and to take your kid with you.
WAIT! You need to know that you and your ASD kid have value, despite what other people think. As a radical conservative, I do hate people who get SSI for "anxiety" so they can sell drugs/women, chop up stolen cars, and run psychic scams (yes, there really was a case ages ago in Redding where a woman glommed onto SSI as a cover for running a cursed money scam) with impunity. And then there's the people who suffer for all that shit. People who really need assistance.
It seems that all the jobs have been exported, leaving Americans to sell cheap hamburgers to each other for money. As long as there are no jobs, the country will have to figure out ways to feed people. The English solution, where welfare is simply ended leaving millions to starve in the streets, is probably not viable in a country where the number of guns equals the number of people. So, the government will have to feed people. FDR's solution, which was moving city workers to the country so at least they could feed themselves, seems to not be on the table, probably because TPTB don't like the idea of people being independent.
So, what are families of ASD people to do? Living in rundown suburbs, unable to grow their own food which would at least give the kid (and mom) a reason to get up in the morning, and everybody around you deals drugs to survive. In that case, victimhood seems really appealing, especially when everybody else does it too. What's the answer? I don't know, except eventually TPTB are gonna try gas chambers again, what with 7 billion people on earth and 100 million added every year.
I recently asked people on a survival forum (yes, I've been allowed back, more on that in another post) about what really is so bad about being neurologically different, in light of a Washington Post article about the neurodiversity acceptance movement. Immediately people started debating the whole vaccine thing again, I guess because the idea of neurodivergent people who do not want to be "cured" is something they can't bear to face.
Also, I learned a lot about mothers of ASD kids who regularly contemplate suicide, mainly because they have no support and no respite from what apparently are more severe cases of ASD than mine. The kid has autism, so hubby walks out and finds another model to tinker with, and all your "friends" suddenly decide that they never really liked you anyway, and bail. You can't work, so you go on welfare (once AFDC, now TANF, and facing yet another overhaul in Congress right now) and now EVERYBODY hates you. So, you decide to cash out early, and to take your kid with you.
WAIT! You need to know that you and your ASD kid have value, despite what other people think. As a radical conservative, I do hate people who get SSI for "anxiety" so they can sell drugs/women, chop up stolen cars, and run psychic scams (yes, there really was a case ages ago in Redding where a woman glommed onto SSI as a cover for running a cursed money scam) with impunity. And then there's the people who suffer for all that shit. People who really need assistance.
It seems that all the jobs have been exported, leaving Americans to sell cheap hamburgers to each other for money. As long as there are no jobs, the country will have to figure out ways to feed people. The English solution, where welfare is simply ended leaving millions to starve in the streets, is probably not viable in a country where the number of guns equals the number of people. So, the government will have to feed people. FDR's solution, which was moving city workers to the country so at least they could feed themselves, seems to not be on the table, probably because TPTB don't like the idea of people being independent.
So, what are families of ASD people to do? Living in rundown suburbs, unable to grow their own food which would at least give the kid (and mom) a reason to get up in the morning, and everybody around you deals drugs to survive. In that case, victimhood seems really appealing, especially when everybody else does it too. What's the answer? I don't know, except eventually TPTB are gonna try gas chambers again, what with 7 billion people on earth and 100 million added every year.
Monday, July 6, 2015
The Dreaded Ass Burger: Encyclopedia Dramatica and DSM Confusion
I suppose everybody in the autism community knows of this addition to the list of Web Pages That Will Live In Infamy:
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Asperger%27s_Syndrome
Yep, it's ED's Ass Burger page. First off, autism and sociopathy are rarely lumped together except by people who either want to satirize (what, if anything, is still unclear) or are truly ignorant of mental illness. I have a cousin who made the mistake of marrying a sociopath, and the first thing that such a victim will say is that a sociopath is VERY charming-until he reels you in, then it's gutting and filleting time, and you're the fish. Aspies, meanwhile, couldn't charm a paper bag, as is evident from perusing Wrong Planet.
Also, the "aspies" listed on ED probably don't have autism at all, but rather some form of weird personality disorder. A common theme is that they live almost exclusively on the internet, posting bad artwork, worse slash, and generally looking to justify a non-existent "creative talent" by putting it on Deviantart or Tumblr so as to gain followers to feed their narcissism. Most REAL aspies avoid Tumblr as if it had deadly cooties (which it does in a sense). While it seems that many aspies had narcissistic parents, they themselves don't seem to be very narcissistic.
The main reason that an aspie will loiter in the net is because going out into public inevitably triggers a huge meltdown due to sensory overload. The main reason that an ED "aspie" stays online is because he/she wants to share their "talent" with planet earth. It helps if they can find people dumber than themselves to kiss their rears and who actually like bad art, or are too dumb to know how bad it is. In fact, ED aspies seem to have art/writing as the main reason they don't kill themselves. This completely ignores tech-oriented aspies, who wouldn't touch deviantart with a 39 1/2 foot pole. But, if one is trying to make a point about "lazy aspies", one will exclude programmers pulling in a couple hundred grand a year.
Sometimes I wonder what narcissistic losers did before the legalization of the public internet in 1993. I'm old enough to remember that world, and I know that books were cheaper relative to income, and there were places called "bookstores" where people browsed books and bought them, walking out with a plastic bag (sporting reinforced handles) full of cool shit to read. There were compact discs, sold in places called record stores, where people browsed music. Music was played on contraptions called radios, and my generation recorded songs off them onto "cassette tapes". I remember the flyers pasted to light poles in downtowns: "Three Abominations Before GOD: 1) Abortion 2) Homosexuality 3) Bill Clinton", "Still Life With Rent Due #6" (this consisted of a stack of papers with an apple on top), "Muni Riders Before Resistance Begins" (cows on a bus, this one was protesting some insignificant issue with Muni, San Francisco's famously incompetent transit system).
Back then, the only way the public could be heard was to write letters to newspapers. It wasn't like today where any weirdo can spew trash endlessly to cyberspace where it will last longer than a plastic bag in the ocean or until the Iranians set off an EMP bomb, whichever comes first. There are no gatekeepers like in the old days. So, what else is there to do in a world where you can earn more being disabled than by asking if the customer wants to supersize that order?
I suppose everybody in the autism community knows of this addition to the list of Web Pages That Will Live In Infamy:
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Asperger%27s_Syndrome
Yep, it's ED's Ass Burger page. First off, autism and sociopathy are rarely lumped together except by people who either want to satirize (what, if anything, is still unclear) or are truly ignorant of mental illness. I have a cousin who made the mistake of marrying a sociopath, and the first thing that such a victim will say is that a sociopath is VERY charming-until he reels you in, then it's gutting and filleting time, and you're the fish. Aspies, meanwhile, couldn't charm a paper bag, as is evident from perusing Wrong Planet.
Also, the "aspies" listed on ED probably don't have autism at all, but rather some form of weird personality disorder. A common theme is that they live almost exclusively on the internet, posting bad artwork, worse slash, and generally looking to justify a non-existent "creative talent" by putting it on Deviantart or Tumblr so as to gain followers to feed their narcissism. Most REAL aspies avoid Tumblr as if it had deadly cooties (which it does in a sense). While it seems that many aspies had narcissistic parents, they themselves don't seem to be very narcissistic.
The main reason that an aspie will loiter in the net is because going out into public inevitably triggers a huge meltdown due to sensory overload. The main reason that an ED "aspie" stays online is because he/she wants to share their "talent" with planet earth. It helps if they can find people dumber than themselves to kiss their rears and who actually like bad art, or are too dumb to know how bad it is. In fact, ED aspies seem to have art/writing as the main reason they don't kill themselves. This completely ignores tech-oriented aspies, who wouldn't touch deviantart with a 39 1/2 foot pole. But, if one is trying to make a point about "lazy aspies", one will exclude programmers pulling in a couple hundred grand a year.
Sometimes I wonder what narcissistic losers did before the legalization of the public internet in 1993. I'm old enough to remember that world, and I know that books were cheaper relative to income, and there were places called "bookstores" where people browsed books and bought them, walking out with a plastic bag (sporting reinforced handles) full of cool shit to read. There were compact discs, sold in places called record stores, where people browsed music. Music was played on contraptions called radios, and my generation recorded songs off them onto "cassette tapes". I remember the flyers pasted to light poles in downtowns: "Three Abominations Before GOD: 1) Abortion 2) Homosexuality 3) Bill Clinton", "Still Life With Rent Due #6" (this consisted of a stack of papers with an apple on top), "Muni Riders Before Resistance Begins" (cows on a bus, this one was protesting some insignificant issue with Muni, San Francisco's famously incompetent transit system).
Back then, the only way the public could be heard was to write letters to newspapers. It wasn't like today where any weirdo can spew trash endlessly to cyberspace where it will last longer than a plastic bag in the ocean or until the Iranians set off an EMP bomb, whichever comes first. There are no gatekeepers like in the old days. So, what else is there to do in a world where you can earn more being disabled than by asking if the customer wants to supersize that order?
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Live tweeting your son's hours-long meltdown
Somebody on another autism blog posted this article:
http://www.ptbocanada.com/journal/2015/3/7/peterborough-couple-live-tweet-a-severe-meltdown-from-their-autistic-child
The blog that linked to this was pretty angry over the parents' actions, and it's easy to see why. Autistic kids nowadays are apt to be controlled with brute force and/or sensory deprivations like "time out rooms". When those fail, the caregivers are at a loss. The only thing left is to lock themselves in a bedroom while the kid demolishes the house. The parents feel vindicated by the support they get online. Then, apparently, comes the GoFundMe accounts to fix the damage to the house. Finally, the parent starts making plans to kill in order to escape a trap that wouldn't exist if only the parents had taught their kid how to cope with meltdowns as a toddler.
Clearly, more research is needed to figure out how to control kids besides sitting on them until they are exhausted or locking them in the hall closet. But the main objection seems to be that parents are making private moments public. How will their kid feel at age 40 with all this stuff about how horrible they are forever online? How will autistics react to being called monsters by everyday people who only know of autism from "warrior mothers" who view autism and autistics as an enemy army to be defeated?
Somebody on another autism blog posted this article:
http://www.ptbocanada.com/journal/2015/3/7/peterborough-couple-live-tweet-a-severe-meltdown-from-their-autistic-child
The blog that linked to this was pretty angry over the parents' actions, and it's easy to see why. Autistic kids nowadays are apt to be controlled with brute force and/or sensory deprivations like "time out rooms". When those fail, the caregivers are at a loss. The only thing left is to lock themselves in a bedroom while the kid demolishes the house. The parents feel vindicated by the support they get online. Then, apparently, comes the GoFundMe accounts to fix the damage to the house. Finally, the parent starts making plans to kill in order to escape a trap that wouldn't exist if only the parents had taught their kid how to cope with meltdowns as a toddler.
Clearly, more research is needed to figure out how to control kids besides sitting on them until they are exhausted or locking them in the hall closet. But the main objection seems to be that parents are making private moments public. How will their kid feel at age 40 with all this stuff about how horrible they are forever online? How will autistics react to being called monsters by everyday people who only know of autism from "warrior mothers" who view autism and autistics as an enemy army to be defeated?
A few issues and a different focus...
I haven't written in six months, maybe more. During that time, I got kicked off the net's biggest survival forum, actually more like harassed until I had to leave, simply because one poster thought I was "whining", and suddenly everybody rallied around him and started bashing me. The guy who started it has followed me from forum to forum since around 2009 or 2010, simply to bash me. He even convinced one forum owner to make him a mod simply so he could ban me. When I started posting on survival forums, I was in a really bad place personally, and did stuff I regret and angered people. But to hold a grudge like that for six years is unreasonable imo.
So, this blog will no longer have a survival component. I am a far inferior blogger on survival topics to top dogs like Fernando Aguirre, whose themodernsurvivalist.com blog should be in everybody's bookmarks, and his books in every bookcase. Instead, I will focus primarily on autism and maybe throw in a little politics.
As you may be aware, parents of autistic kids are getting attention for themselves by doing things like live tweeting meltdowns and posting videos of their kid's meltdowns. Specifically, a couple in Canada live tweeted a meltdown that went for HOURS. Did they try helping their son? Nope, they were locked in their bedroom tweeting how awful their son is. I will address this specific case in another post.
I haven't written in six months, maybe more. During that time, I got kicked off the net's biggest survival forum, actually more like harassed until I had to leave, simply because one poster thought I was "whining", and suddenly everybody rallied around him and started bashing me. The guy who started it has followed me from forum to forum since around 2009 or 2010, simply to bash me. He even convinced one forum owner to make him a mod simply so he could ban me. When I started posting on survival forums, I was in a really bad place personally, and did stuff I regret and angered people. But to hold a grudge like that for six years is unreasonable imo.
So, this blog will no longer have a survival component. I am a far inferior blogger on survival topics to top dogs like Fernando Aguirre, whose themodernsurvivalist.com blog should be in everybody's bookmarks, and his books in every bookcase. Instead, I will focus primarily on autism and maybe throw in a little politics.
As you may be aware, parents of autistic kids are getting attention for themselves by doing things like live tweeting meltdowns and posting videos of their kid's meltdowns. Specifically, a couple in Canada live tweeted a meltdown that went for HOURS. Did they try helping their son? Nope, they were locked in their bedroom tweeting how awful their son is. I will address this specific case in another post.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Survivalism, confirmation bias, and the "Obama Boom"
A common topic on survivalist forums is "normalcy bias". This is where people assume that because something has always been a certain way that it will always be so. Survivalists like to whip this one out as the cause of the poor downtrodden sheeple just not getting the "fact" that TEOTW is surely upon us. Never mind that TEOTW hasn't happened yet, that all their predictions of it have been wrong.
Well, I want to add another bias to the mix. Confirmation bias is where a person goes looking for "proof" of the truth of a preconceived opinion. If one only has a hammer, one will see nothing but protruding nails. Survivalists have a BIG problem with confirmation bias imo. They are so convinced that the world is about to end that they grab onto any strand of "proof" they can find. I guess they don't want all the money they've spent on preps to be a total loss.
I have been thinking about confirmation bias lately as the result of two articles on MSNBC. One was about some prognosticator saying that "we are in year six of a 20 year boom". Well, ok, opinions are like assholes, everybody has them and most of them stink like poo. But today, MSNBC directly referenced the "Obama Boom". This wasn't some dude who has smoked too much wacky tobacky blowing hot air, but a news item that pointed out that the improving economy may change people's opinion of Obama.
Anybody remember "2016: Obama's America"? When Obama was first elected, this video popped up, asserting that America would be in a state of near collapse and chaos if Obama got eight years to ruin it. Well, a weird thing happened on the way to TEOTWAWKI: San Francisco has such a tight housing market that sellers are making the sale of their houses contingent on the seller wrapping up a place to move to. Wall Street is on a tear. The numbers of employed persons in the state of Oregon is at an all time high.
The normal response among the far right to this is something along the lines of "who you gonna believe, me and my fellow doomsters or your lying eyes?" Searches for survivalist topics are down two thirds from a December 2012 peak. (Apparently, many thought that a nonexistent prediction from a calendar that is only 50% legible by archaeologists, never mind laypeople, was far scarier than an inexperienced president.) Doomer Michael Snyder (you know him, The Economic Collapse Blog) and many others are starting to look crazy when every piece of good news is met by them sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming "lalala, it's all fake, the numbers are cooked".
This is confirmation bias at work. Having cut their teeth on the near meltdown of global finance in 2008, they are grabbing onto every string of bad news from Greece in order to keep the doom gravy train from derailing. Other than being careful what horse you hitch your cart to (although admittedly people have been expecting Jesus to return for 2000 years), what this says is that some people simply can't accept that maybe the world WON'T end next week. This doesn't mean to stop prepping (although many people have and will, and after all hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes do happen) but that you don't need to prep for TEOTW. Even an earthquake is far less demanding to prep for. And as I have noted, a tree falling on your power line or a water pipe bursting in your ceiling is far more likely than a zombie apocalypse.
A common topic on survivalist forums is "normalcy bias". This is where people assume that because something has always been a certain way that it will always be so. Survivalists like to whip this one out as the cause of the poor downtrodden sheeple just not getting the "fact" that TEOTW is surely upon us. Never mind that TEOTW hasn't happened yet, that all their predictions of it have been wrong.
Well, I want to add another bias to the mix. Confirmation bias is where a person goes looking for "proof" of the truth of a preconceived opinion. If one only has a hammer, one will see nothing but protruding nails. Survivalists have a BIG problem with confirmation bias imo. They are so convinced that the world is about to end that they grab onto any strand of "proof" they can find. I guess they don't want all the money they've spent on preps to be a total loss.
I have been thinking about confirmation bias lately as the result of two articles on MSNBC. One was about some prognosticator saying that "we are in year six of a 20 year boom". Well, ok, opinions are like assholes, everybody has them and most of them stink like poo. But today, MSNBC directly referenced the "Obama Boom". This wasn't some dude who has smoked too much wacky tobacky blowing hot air, but a news item that pointed out that the improving economy may change people's opinion of Obama.
Anybody remember "2016: Obama's America"? When Obama was first elected, this video popped up, asserting that America would be in a state of near collapse and chaos if Obama got eight years to ruin it. Well, a weird thing happened on the way to TEOTWAWKI: San Francisco has such a tight housing market that sellers are making the sale of their houses contingent on the seller wrapping up a place to move to. Wall Street is on a tear. The numbers of employed persons in the state of Oregon is at an all time high.
The normal response among the far right to this is something along the lines of "who you gonna believe, me and my fellow doomsters or your lying eyes?" Searches for survivalist topics are down two thirds from a December 2012 peak. (Apparently, many thought that a nonexistent prediction from a calendar that is only 50% legible by archaeologists, never mind laypeople, was far scarier than an inexperienced president.) Doomer Michael Snyder (you know him, The Economic Collapse Blog) and many others are starting to look crazy when every piece of good news is met by them sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming "lalala, it's all fake, the numbers are cooked".
This is confirmation bias at work. Having cut their teeth on the near meltdown of global finance in 2008, they are grabbing onto every string of bad news from Greece in order to keep the doom gravy train from derailing. Other than being careful what horse you hitch your cart to (although admittedly people have been expecting Jesus to return for 2000 years), what this says is that some people simply can't accept that maybe the world WON'T end next week. This doesn't mean to stop prepping (although many people have and will, and after all hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes do happen) but that you don't need to prep for TEOTW. Even an earthquake is far less demanding to prep for. And as I have noted, a tree falling on your power line or a water pipe bursting in your ceiling is far more likely than a zombie apocalypse.
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