[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'K')unstler is right. The long swim trunks and baggy long shorts look like clown clothes. And the oversized untied shoes look like clown shoes. And the baggy droopy hats look like clown hats.

[PrestonSturges]

GF said she liked one of my very old cotton casual shirts, and with my fingertips I tore it to pieces like it was a wet paper towel. I said "See? My clothes are rotting off my back! Bring me back some shirts from Goodwill!" and she brought an arm load of nice casual shirts. The next week we were at the mall and the intentionally faded fabric of the $50 casual shirts looked older than the ones she'd brought from Goodwill.

[PrestonSturges]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', '
')Getting on and off flights the other week it kind of struck me as well just how slovenly the bulk of the passengers looked. Not, neat casual, but more like Walmart shoppers. The kind so many web sites make fun of.

[Strummer]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'A')nd by the way, the baggy urban styles come out of prison culture. Like sagging pants, that's from oversized prison uniforms that never fit right and sag down.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PrestonSturges', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', '
')Getting on and off flights the other week it kind of struck me as well just how slovenly the bulk of the passengers looked. Not, neat casual, but more like Walmart shoppers. The kind so many web sites make fun of.

[Outsailing]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Strummer', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'A')nd by the way, the baggy urban styles come out of prison culture. Like sagging pants, that's from oversized prison uniforms that never fit right and sag down.

[dinopello]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Strummer', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'A')nd by the way, the baggy urban styles come out of prison culture. Like sagging pants, that's from oversized prison uniforms that never fit right and sag down.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Strummer', 'T')he "land of the free" USA has the biggest part of its population in prisons, more than any other country on the planet, so it shouldn't be surprising. You're a nation of criminals and your fashion simply reflects that.

[Sixstrings]

What Russia REALLY needs is a WOMENS rights movement. Our conservatives used to joke about "feminazis," but you know what?

A man could grab his wife by the arm and slap her around back in the 1950s and before, and his kids too, and people would look the other way.

There were no "domestic violence" calls, decades ago. That was considered a family matter, how a husband treats his wife and kids.

When Russia gets a womens' equality and rights movement going, then that will temper all this macho stuff in Russian culture.

Remember that pussy riot video? That cossack just pulled out a horsewhip and whipped that girl right in the street, under the Sochi sign.

Female equality isn't so bad, by the way. I'm a man. But I'm objective -- more women in government and corporate management has been a good thing. It's we men that start wars, not women. So I'm okay this has happened over here, full equality for women, and handing the reigns over to them more and more.

And I do get why conservatives prefer a patriarchal culture, where we men are just in charge 100% in the home and everywhere, but Strumm, America used to be that way and there was untold abuse that went on. Women just stifled. And more common abuse, with no police or gov to do anything about it. There are pluses to conservative patriarchal culture, but overall in the aggregate, I think a world with womens' eqaulity is for the best -- and it's the right thing anyway, nobody has a right to step on others' rights just because he's a white male and the other is a woman or a minority or whatever.

We are all equal, that's the best way, now we just need to get Russia and the US onto a track of living wages for the working and middle class and we both need to cut down on the oligarch stuff.

[Sixstrings]

And another thing, about fashion, by and large Russians and Americans both dress like slobs. (from what I see in pics from Russia anyhow)

It's ok. Who wants to be so snooty like the French anyway.

I went way off topic in my response to Strumm, but an interesting note about American "ghetto" street style: American culture is so influential, that people in the rest of the world actually adopt the ghetto look too, even when they aren't poor.

Personally I don't care about fashion. It's hot where I live. I wear tshirts and shorts and tennis shoes. I do like suits, but it's been many years that my employment required wearing one.

If I got on a plane though, or doing business, I wouldn't be dressing walmart style. I'd have some dockers and a polo shirt on.

I don't know, do we really care about this topic? Fashion? Style just changes. Times change. Even billionaire tech entrepreneurs hate suits. Our culture is less formal now than in decades past. Does it really matter? Our brains can only handle so much. We're all linked into online now, forums and facebook and online personas and that's expression enough for our narcissism so who needs spiffy clothes.

Actually I think that's part of it there, who is it Zuckerberg that just has a closet with the same shirts and hoodies? And Steve jobs wore the same jeans and turtleneck. Elon Musk is like that, though he knows how to wear a suit but he just prefers not to. People have too much going on these days, your brain can only do so much.

[AgentR11]

For 6.. even a post on saggy pants and floppy shoes has to be turned into a commentary on Russia....
Really. Obsession much?

[Strummer]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'O')TOH.. keeping 3 strikes violent offenders locked up has helped.. it dramatically reduced street crime over these last 20+ years.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Strummer', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'O')TOH.. keeping 3 strikes violent offenders locked up has helped.. it dramatically reduced street crime over these last 20+ years.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', 'F')or 6.. even a post on saggy pants and floppy shoes has to be turned into a commentary on Russia....
Really. Obsession much?

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', 'T')hat was interesting. Thanks for posting that. Not only because the body of evidence is persuasive but also because this is one of those examples of an explanation that comes from outside the narratives that have been hammered over and over again as fact.

[Sixstrings]

Okay Agent you're right, I'll take it as an intervention.

I should have stopped that post at the point of talking about the revolving door with the prison and parole system over here, and not gone into Russia.

It gets annoying for me in general though that everyone always has a comment about the US, but you won't hear an Australian ever talking about China, and Russia's got itself lined up with all the anti-American people -- and actively spreading that with state funded RT and an intentional propaganda campaign that always makes the US look bad but says nothing about Russia, and you've got that massive "putin army of bloggers" campaign on the web that sounds like a conspiracy theory yet there's one mainstream article about it after another. (I think it's organic and not state-controlled)

But anyhow I guess it's Voice of America's job to counter RT and not mine.

And this forum is not the place for it.

So you are right Agent, I'll drop it about Russia.

I would just ask that those of you that are so kneejerk anti-American, try to have a more nuanced view.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '�')��Don’t look back — something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.

I don’t know how anyone can trust the statistical bullshit emanating from our government reporting agencies, or the legacy news organizations that report them. Yet the meme has remained firmly fixed in the popular imagination: the US economy has recovered! GDP grows 5 percent in Q3! Manufacturing renaissance! Energy independence! Cleanest shirt in the laundry basket! Best-looking house in a bad neighborhood…!

¡No hay problema!

This is simply the power of wishful thinking on display. No one — with the exception of a few “doomer” cranks — wants to believe that industrial civilization is in trouble deep. The staggering credulity this represents would be a fascinating case study in itself if there were not so many other things that demand our attention right now. Let’s just write this phenomenon off as the diminishing returns of career log-rolling in politics, finance, media, and academia. All the professional “thought-leaders” pitch in to support the “hologram” of eternal progress that issues their paychecks and bonuses. This culture of pervasive racketeering that we’ve engineered has made us obtuse. The particular brand of stupidity on display also points to another signal vanity of our time: the conviction that if you measure things enough, you can control them.

I’m of the view that the measurers only pretend to measure and can only pretend to control things, especially in the most fragile of the systems that we depend on for running all the other systems of techno-industrial economic life: finance. The pretense has endured a lot longer than many of us had expected. The legerdemain employed by banking officials and their handmaidens was greatly augmented by the sheer wish that fragility (i.e. risk) had been successfully and permanently banished from the universe. That “magic” at least sustained a universal faith in currencies until the middle of last year when so many monies went south — except the dollar, levitating on blowback of the deflationary wind flattening everything else.

All this unreality in money and markets should be expected in the conditions just preceding systemic collapse of an entire trans-national industrial civilization, just as one should expect societies to construct their most grandiose monuments to themselves shortly before collapse. The Mayans R us. One year, they were cavorting bloodthirstily atop their garish painted pyramids and a generation later the jungle was stealing back over the temple steps and the population was a tenth of its former size. The same thing is going to happen to us, except there will be a hell of a lot more worthless, toxic debris left on the landscape.

Of course, even that is a more long-term projection than the exercise at hand calls for, viz., the forecast for measly little 2015. So without further throat-clearing, permit me to break it down for you:

http://kunstler.com/forecast/forecast-2015/

[Loki]

I love me some Kunstler rants, and this was a good one. But he's not very good with his forecasts. He wants the Great Decline to be on a much faster timetable than it is. Needs more patience.

His predictions about the short-term future of global politics were less than persuasive. Citing Dmitri Orlov's blog on Ukraine and Russia? LOL. Might as well quote Pravda, it'd be more fair and balanced. Orlov is an idiot.

Also don't think there will be some grand conspiracy to chop the American economy down by China et al. Russia may try (and fail, as usual), but China has no reason whatsoever to go out of its way to undermine the US, which is their largest trading partner and the only major mature economy that isn't spiraling down the deflationary black hole (yet).

Russia is not as likely to shake off the sanctions and low oil prices as he thinks. He's obviously reading too much Orlov.

He also vastly overestimates the power of ISIS. I'd venture to guess we're at Peak ISIS and it'll be downhill from here.

"Open ethnic warfare breaks out in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden." LOL. Highly unlikely. I do agree with him that the Eurozone economy will continue to float tits up.

Surprised he didn't say more about Ebola. The Archdruid alluded to it being one of the catalysts that leads us into the New Dark Age. Of course it didn't even amount to a mild case of the sniffles at a global scale.

And India occupying Pakistan? LOL. No.

This hits a little closer to home:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')or one who has been a close observer of the US socio-political-economic scene since the Kennedy era, the nation has gotten itself into a pretty sorry state. The pervasive racketeering that poisons American life from the money-in-politics farce, to the shameless, chiseling medical-pharma cabal, to the SNAP-card and disability rights empire of grift, to the college loan swindle, to the disgusting security state apparatus, to the corporate tyranny of local life and economies, to the delusional techno-narcissism of the media, to the despotic and puerile gender preoccupations of academia — all of it adds up to a society that cares as little for the present as it does for the future. And that’s aside from the pathetic digital device addiction of the generation coming up, and the sheer sordid behavior of the tattooed, drug-saturated, pornified masses of adults now forever foreclosed from a purposeful existence or a decent standard of living.

[GHung]

Loki: "He also vastly overestimates the power of ISIS. I'd venture to guess we're at Peak ISIS and it'll be downhill from here."

ISIS/IS/ISIL.... whatever,, isn't an army; it's not just a group of militants or terrorists, clearly not what you seem to reduce it to. ISIS is an idea whose time may have come. It is millions of unemployed, underserved, marginalised youth with no loyalty to one country; dispersed throughout many. Weather or not this idea has legs has yet to be seen, but if you study the history of this kind of movement, it has the potential to redraw the map of the most oil-important region on the planet.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair- ... 48744.html

Arab spring, on steroids.