'The Real Fear Is that Somebody Will Come and Take What You've Got.'

If the following CNN report is anything to go by, it looks like a growing number of Americans have a far more negative view about where things are headed than the "experts" in Washington and on Wall Street.

"Texans Grab Their Guns as Economy Stalls"

An Austin, Texas, gun shop is seeing a spike in sales as gun buyers aim to defend themselves in times of economic uncertainty.

Comments

[NaluGirl]

Too many people seem like they are eager for a collapse, like the gentleman in the video. There is a lot of free-floating rage out there, and unfortunately the people who are actually behind the meltdown of the economy are forted up with their private armies, and the brunt of the chaos will fall on those whose only fault was that they believed the lies. The innocent will suffer and the guilty will prosper.

[Steve]

People are so horrified at the dishonesty and blatant racism of Obama.

[Ray Butlers]

that "free-floating rage" is the rage of ignorant, hate-filled white people reeeeeeeeeal pissed off that there is a black guy in the white house.

[Racket]

The Real Fear...2 tiered justice.!

Why Didn’t Prosecutors Go After Wall Street?
In a word: Geithner.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/07/why-didnt-prosecutors-go-after-wall-street/

[Mort]

I lived in Detroit, during the "67 riots. Stores were looted, entire blocks were burned to the ground. The Detroit Institute of Arts was surrounded by military TANKS, to protect the artwork.
If the 5th largest city in the U.S. (at that time)have riots and pillaging, it can happen anywhere."Civilization" is a thin veneer,and can easliy break down.
How would your neighboring residents react, if the supermarkets had no food deliveries for a week?

[Rollover]

California Runs Out Of Money Again, Comes Begging To Wall Street As Moody's Threatens To Go Nuclear On Muni Market

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/california-runs-out-money-again-comes-begging-wall-street-moodys-threatens-go-nuclear-muni-m?

Borrowing $ to pay salaries like these?..

Search for State Worker Salaries

http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/?name=&agency=&salarylevel=400000

no wonder jobs are scarce!

[Will guns protect you against cyber crime?]

Is Anyone Going To Stop The Abuse by HFTs?

Our so-called "central banker" is at this moment "testifying" in The Senate while the SEC does nothing, yet he takes "credit" for the stock market's rally. You, as an individual investor, cannot analyze stocks and then place trades with that information with any sort of protection against ruinous loss not because you were wrong, but because someone has decided to attack the stock with an algorithm designed to distort the market and trip your stop-loss orders.

As I sit here listening to Bernanke talk about "improvement in financial conditions" I am struck by his words - sure, it's "improvement" if you wish to look at criminogenic environmental factors.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=189999

[Happy Bastille Day.]

The 40-Year Cycle of Cultural Change (July 14, 2011)

Their only goal is to not be the one blamed when the whole corrupt contraption finally collapses under its own weight. If there was ever a more pathetic, corrupt, cowardly and incompetent set of "leaders" in the nation's history, they must have done their skimming during periods of relative prosperity. Now we need real leaders, not TV-ready simulacra spouting bloated slogans that contain the magic word "change."

Gen X and Gen Y, this is your "lights, camera, action!" call, if not for political power, then for a cultural revolution. I for one am ready for a Fifth Awakening, a Cultural Revolution, and a restoration of self-rule and the real, non-financialized economy.

Happy Bastille Day. It's time we tore down the Bank Bastille that's imprisoning us all.

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly11/40-yr-cycle-6-11.html

[Tom]

Nah - they'll have us fightin' over crumbs and killin' each other over parkin' spaces before we do anything to the powers that be. There's no Bastille here to attack; all the real "playas" are so far removed that we don't even know their names!

[Blurtman]

An interview with one pot-bellied man in a gun shop and the gun shop owner. Yep, that is pretty dang good journalism. Yesiree, Woodward and Bernstein got nothing on this 1:49 minute fluff piece.

C'mon, Financial Armageddon. This story is terrible, and below your usual standard of quality.

[Susan Nasus]

They will run out of their stored food supplies, and start using their guns to steal food from those who thought ahead and have gardens/farms. Then they will turn their guns on each other.

Americans are too lazy, obese, spoiled, violent and heavily armed to elegantly weather this change. If people can't drive their SUV's, watch TV eight hours a day and eat cheetos? Then it must be the "second coming" anyways and they might as well kill and take what they need!

[kevinearick]

Summary: Technology, Agency, & Extortion

If we cannot go bankrupt, why don’t we just send everyone a million bucks?

Here I am watching a lynchpin MSA collapse from the other side of its lynchpin suburb collapse, in a bedroom farming community full of Hummers, Christian schools, and sparkling government buildings, across the border from an similar echo collapse, with massive stimulus entering the black hole, from empire cannibalism, which has now reached Spain and Italy, while GE is taxing the country, paying its make-workers to collect and carry it back at a massive loss.

So, I ask the kid what the gas station is hiring for. He tells me they are accepting applications, but not giving interviews, waiting for one of the employees to screw up (assuming excess labor in a self-fulfilling crash). What most do not want to see is their government borrowing 40 cents this year to deliver 60 cents in revenue next year, as the basis for borrowing 45 cents, because this country doesn’t make anything the global private economy is willing to buy short of intra-agency extortion, in which they largely participate, expecting a flush pension.

Extend and pretend is rapidly burning the wealth hidden in the nucleus to keep the herd from stampeding, to keep the mortgage subsidies that feed the bad bank, and to keep the Texas governor, who is spending more than Obama on $10/hr jobs in case Obamanomics crashes (ever study wage migration in Texas?), while the planet is creating droughts to feed floods. Regardless of ignition origin, the collapse will be instantaneous relative to the causal behaviors bred over a few thousand years.

Why do you suppose the GSE executives made so much money? I suggest it’s a function of extortion. The cost of maintaining the machine is baked in once it’s installed. TBTF is designed to blow up. The only question is timing/direction. The squeaky wheel is the citizen lobbyist, replicating the something-for-nothing behavior. The NPV window closes, and the future becomes the present, at max tax base, casting the wave to follow.

Analogy: feed an ant farm regularly, increase feeding volatility, and then cut off the food all together. What happens to the society? Technology is the food of economics. The direction of currency is much more important than velocity, and the outcome is an aggregate of local direction X scalar velocity, in a feedback loop. There is no lack of credit or work to be done. There is a lack of willing borrowers capable of turning an economic profit in a system with no profit potential. When it explodes, there will be substantial potential for those that can maintain the gap.

If resistors are the weakness, why would you bother “hacking” the software when you can simply execute a propagation order with a mismatch algorithm?

If you buy a cheap elevator package, to run on arbitrary/proprietary dc technology, you are paying to be extorted on the repairs and modifications, which is enforced by the certification system. Replacing the technology would be more effective all the way around. They are not called low-cost market leaders by accident.

Why would you bother to look at an automation problem if you couldn’t isolate the device error at the controller, pull up a history of the wave form, and rewire to make the job easier, the equipment more reliable, and the outcome more effective each time? The last thing you want to do is wait for the problem to occur repeatedly and then crawl all over the equipment like a dumb monkey with a dumb light, telling the dumber monkeys how smart the dumb meter is, and rely on an extortion certificate to maintain the illusion of intelligence that only a monkey would value.

The objective of technology is to extend the reach of humanity, not to replace the human brain. Yesterday’s second graders could whip today’s high school graduates every time. An education system relies upon the quality of its students, their investigative ability, not the popularity of its teachers, and the economy depends upon the education system. Handing kids over to the American system is criminal social negligence, as the prison system attests (healthcare,etc).

The nation/state system is inbred with technology. It cannot decouple itself. After this decision, it will get exponentially behind the curve every day the GSE problem is ignored. Corruption isn’t evil; it’s just stupid. The addiction is a positive social feedback loop that is too stupid to recognize sunk cost, until it’s too late.

Corruption follows agency, no matter how well intentioned, because it is a least common denominator enterprise. Only the sales person ignores the future cost of revenue, which makes it a traveling salesman problem. The prescription is effective education and the technology is readily available to the community, to develop the necessary technology. Fighting over scarce space in a cave is not the answer.

There should be a different focus on each side of the looking glass to set the overall gear ratio, and gears within the multiplexer to leverage intelligent participation, allowing the electron to appear in many places simultaneously. The chicken and the egg appear on different sides of the glass due to the induced relativity.

The middle class is about to get wiped out because it began locking intelligence out of the classroom 40 years ago, in return for the promise of pensions that cannot materialize under the system. Children maintain the NPV window, not government.

[ruralcounsel]

Eager for collapse? No. But if it's coming, I'd rather it be now than later. I'm not getting any younger, and right now I can be a bigger asset to my children and less of a burden. And Happy Bastille Day has it absolutely right; the guys in charge now are fully culpable, why wait until they've retired and disappeared? Would the French Revolutionists have been more just to wait 20 years to guillotine the aristocracy?

We've had at least 40 years of political ineptness, dishonesty, and hostility to our own country and the bill is coming due. Why let them order another round of drinks and dessert, before they slip off to the restroom (i.e. duck out of the restaurant, leaving us with the whole bill)? Why let them order their affairs any better than the rest of us? Why let them pack their golden parchutes? Why let them have another round of taxpayer bailouts for their excessive risk taking?

We're playing musical chairs, and they are trying to bribe the person in control of the music for a few more minutes so they can line up a seat and con the rest of us into thinking we've averted the end of the game.

Enough analogies?

And as for Ray Butlers assertion about racism? I'm hoping it's an attempt at irony. The race card reflex is so absurd. But it may be the only argument his supporters have left, because there aren't any rational ones left given his lack of comprehension.