Karl Denninger is a plain-talking stock market analyst, technology businessman, finance blogger, and political activist, sometimes referred to as a founding member of the Tea Party movement.
Denninger was the founder and CEO of MCSNet (Macro Computer Solutions) in Chicago, which became one of the area’s first commercial internet service providers, leading the Chicago Sun-Times to call him one of “the movers and shakers who brought Chicago into the Internet Age.” In 1998, Denninger sold MCSNet to Winstar Communications for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock, and moved to Florida where he began to devote more time to stock trading and political activism.
Denninger was one of the early members of the Tea Party movement, sometimes referred to as a founder. On January 20, 2009, the day of Obama’s first inauguration, he published a blog post calling on readers to mail tea bags to the White House and Congress on February 1. However, Denninger later expressed concern with the Tea Party movement, stating in an October 20, 2010 blog post that Republicans had hijacked the movement and perverted its original goals to the standard Republican concerns of “guns, gays and God”.
Here’s his sobering message to America on his The Market Ticker site. It’s well worth your read.
~Eowyn
As You Hang Out This Holiday Season
by Karl Denninger
December 26, 2013
Roll this around in your cranium….
We run into a lot of people over our years. We start being born into something called a “family”, and we don’t get to choose ‘em. There’s always two, and one’s male and one’s female. Oh sure, there are pairs of people and even single people who try to claim otherwise, but God (or Darwin) is a bastard and he made it how he made it — there’s always one of each. Sometimes one of them is worthless, sometimes they both are, but you can’t change how it is.
If we’re lucky we have at least one of those two role models between male and female that is worth a **** and competent to run their own life. Oh sure, they’re not going to be perfect — nobody is. Maybe they’re messy, or maybe their life is just a bit ****ed up, but with some luck one of the two has their cranium screwed on straight enough that they can provide a place to ****, shower, sleep and grub — the basics. If we’re really blessed then we have two people in that category, but despite what you see on TV that almost never happens. The number of families out there with at least one adult member who is a few cans short of a six-pack is huge. Maybe that’s why God (or Darwin, if you prefer) made things the way they are — it enhances the odds that there’s at least one guiding light, even if it flickers somewhat.
If we’re not lucky then we have two dysfunctional people. There’s two forms of that as well. One is unintentional and, while this usually results in*****ed-off kids, rebellious or whatever, it’s not really their fault. It’s just their own limitations. You can’t blame people for being unprepared, for listening to screwball “advice” that is utter and complete crap or worse, is malicious and grounded in protecting their own turf instead of those in their charge. After all, lots of folks are seduced by people with fancy letters after their name. You might be one of those who has been — or is today — being seduced in that fashion.
The intentionally-dysfunctional jackass is another matter. Those folks deserve what they get, and if there is a God, they’ll get it eventually. Those are the drunks, the serial philanders, the abusers, the molesters, the abandoners and the thieves, among others. In short, they’re the ones without a conscience, who take on a responsibility that is not just beyond them, but one they won’t even try to fulfill because they’re too narcissistic — or evil — to give a damn about anyone else. Some of them eventually come around, and those who do are entitled to claim redemption, but most simply make excuses throughout their lives, moving from one scheme to the next to try to stay ahead of living under a bridge.
The role of parents is to start with a child that is utterly dependent upon you for their very existence and to transition to a relationship of respect and mutual admiration before adulthood. Sometimes you succeed, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it’s your fault, and sometimes it’s not. There’s another human being involved — the kid — who has his or her own choices to make too. And, at some point, they have to live with the consequences. It would be nice if all the people we grew up around and with were good, decent people, but a huge percentage of them are not. There are the same proportion of jackasses among kids as there are among adults — there are those who are competent and reasonable, those who are incompetent but not by intent, and then there are those who are intentionally malicious.
We then all go into the world and in that wild world out there we discover that heh, it works the same way when we’re on our own. Hopefully we figure it out before we get scammed too many times, or we wind up doing something really, really stupid that destroys us.
Why do I write this — a real “downer” — on the day after Christmas?
It’s simple — we are witness to the end of an extraordinary time in America and, indeed, among much of the developed world.
See, the hedonism and jackass behaviors that used to lead to you being tossed out in the snow a few hundred years ago — where you would surely die unless you were a member of a privileged class such as a baron or duchess — have over the last 30+ years become a means to get ahead. It’s been codified as “ok” to screw your neighbor, so long as you got yours. We have lived in a terrible time, really, that looks all nice and pretty but is anything but.
Witness the poverty pimp Jesse Jackson who is now demanding a meeting with A&E — and Cracker Barrel — over the Duck Dynasty fiasco. This is the man who’s son was just sentenced to prison for bilking people. He didn’t get busted for tooting up cocaine or some other “victimless” crime — he got busted for stealing money – specifically, $750,000 of funds that were given to him to run for office.
It’s even better — Jesse Jr. claims to be Bipolar. What are we doing with mentally-ill people in political office passing laws? I have no quarrel with someone who’s mentally incapacitated — but if you are, you’ve got no business telling anyone else what to do — period.
It would be one thing if it was just Jesse’s offspring — after all, as I noted above, there’s a kid involved in all of these deals and sometimes they suck. That’s just how it is. But no, in this case it’s Jesse too. Remember, this is a Baptist Minister who proclaims the Bible – but can’t keep his dick in his pants where it belongs, and has an illegitimate daughter. I seem to remember something about that in both Leviticus and Romans, among other places in The Book.
Jackson has done more to harm black people than anyone I know in recent history, along with Sharpton and others of his ilk. He doesn’t preach redemption, inclusion, hard work and integrity. To the contrary — his message is one of shakedowns and threats. He epitomizes and exemplifies everything that’s wrong with America today and has been for the last 30 years — he’s an ambulance chaser, a pimp and a thug all rolled into one, using his race as a weapon.
Thinking men and women of all races should have long ago told him to go **** himself with a rusty chainsaw as his acts and message have been behind the very destruction of hope and advancement that those people who share his skin color should be achieving – not through beinggiven something but rather through hard work and personal integrity.
And that brings us to his screaming yesterday, you see, because he claims that there’s something wrong with Phil talking about how Phil never saw racism in the deep south in his youth.
Well, you know what? I grew up around black people in my earlier years and I never saw it either. But I didn’t live in the south. Phil did. What’s wrong with a man’s experience, eh? Do I believe that there was, and is, plenty of racism in the world today — and was then? You bet. I have met plenty of people who are hard-core racists, and they’re *******s — all of them. That includes plenty of black people, by the way. I have no time for that crap in my life. My #1 at MCSNet was a black man, Marcus, who’s job it was to keep **** together when I was out of the office. He was ex-military and the best person I could hire for the job. Did I care what color his skin was? Hell no. My head of sales, Marvin, was also black. He could sell ice cubes to Eskimos in the dead of an Alaskan winter, and I’ll be damned if I knew how he did it – I couldn’t do it. That’s why I hired him. Then there was my customer service manager — Liz — who came up from literal zero in the company answering phones. You know why she got the job, the responsibility and the office? Because she was a hard worker, competent, willing to learn the business and what was required of her and trustworthy.
There were plenty of white people who worked for me too in every color under the sun. There’s a lot of us out here who just don’t give a damn what color someone’s skin is — we look at who people are and whether they look to their own values, principles and acts rather than their skin color to define who they are.
Phil seems to be that sort of guy. His family seems to be that sort of family. And I see utterly nothing to suggest that his experience is not authentic. Indeed, everything I see about Phil, and the Duck Dynasty people, oozes authenticity. You may not like him, but that’s a different matter entirely. You know what you’re getting, A&E knew what they were getting, Cracker Barrel knew what it was getting and both they and their customers want it and like it.
Now is Phil and his family perfect? Hell no – - and he admits it.
I’m not perfect either.
So what?
If you want perfection then you’re claiming to be (or want to be) God, and I charge you’re a narcissist. You’re never going to achieve that and you’re always going to be miserable. It’s never going to be good enough. You will eventually be driven to scam or bully someone because youcan’t get what you want any other way.
And that, my friends, defines you as an *******. Your name might even be Jesse Jackson.
Now here’s the point of this missive, and I go back to what I said before — we’ve lived in an extraordinary time these last 30 years. We’ve lived in a time when we could borrow from tomorrow to have what we won’t work for today. We’ve lived in a time when screaming racist to shake people down and issue “demands” becomes a currency and a way of making a living. We’ve allowed ourselves, and those who we elect to represent us, to make promises that can’t be kept. We knew this at the time, most of us, even if only at a gut level rather than taking the time to figure out the math, but we knew.
We did it anyway.
We robbed our children.
We robbed those not yet born.
We robbed everyone, so we could “get ours.”
And we’re still doing it.
As the robbery expanded it got both deeper and broader, until today we have a medical system that has turned into Brosurance and Hosurance, complete with the campaigns of lies promulgated by effeminate “boys” in pajamas.
Can you smell the desperation in the air? The campaign slogans, the ads with metrosexual boys in onesies that were once reserved for infants holding a cup of hot chocolate?
That’s not John Wayne in those images, and with good reason. John Wayne was a man. He stood for independence, for testosterone, for ability, for raw force of will. He stood for what we did and how we did it when we put a man on the Moon. We had no idea how to accomplish it, we just decided to go and then figured it out. Dozens of men sat on top of bombs, on purpose, figuring it out. Three men died sitting in one of those bombs while practicing procedures due to a ****up because we didn’t really know how to do everything we were trying to do and an entire crew almost died trying to get to the Moon in space when their service module exploded due to an assembly fault.
All that’s faded off from the American scene. What we have in its place in corporate America is a company running a facially-bogus demonstration of “drone delivery” of packages and its stock is selling at 1,000 times earnings — a firm that has announced it has no intention of earning money in the foreseeable future. We have another that thinks that spamming your cellphone and desktop computer with ads when you want to talk about your best friend’s cat is a good way to make money. We have a third that thinks they can turn 140-character short messages into a cash machine. There are dozens more just like those, just like the “companies” in 1999, and just like houses that never go down in price so you can use them to buy that big SUV, that cruise and all that slave-labor produced Chinese crap.
Behind all of it is J. Wellington Wimpy, who is forevermore eating a hamburger today that he’ll pay for Tuesday.
But he never does pay, does he?
Arithmetic says that this time — this extraordinary time — is coming to a close, ladies and gentlemen. Not because we want it to, as the scam, the fraud, the shakedown and the pimping are both faster and easier than honest work, but because the arithmetic of exponents say it can’t continue forever — and thus it won’t.
So here’s what I leave you with today to think about:
- Who do you associate with, and who do you shun? Which of those you associate with are people who you are very sure will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you when things get bad? If they can’t keep their dick in their pants, why do you think they won’t shoot you and eat you if they’re hungry? How sure are you? If you’re wrong, you’re dead. How’s that going to serve those who depend on you and those who you love?
- How do you behave? Leave aside the distant past. If you’re perfect and have never sinned in that regard, you need to go apply to see if you’re really Jesus. You know damn well you have, and that you’re not perfect. The real question is how have you been doing in therecent past, and how are you doing today? Have you learned something in your life? Are you happy with who you are, how you comport yourself, how you live? If you’re not, are you — right now — doing something about it? Be honest — because there’s nobody grading this test but you.
- What are you doing right now to cut the dependence cord? Are you running some sort of scheme? Do you depend on the government, or someone else’s largesse? Are you up to your eyeballs in debt? What happens if the means to service that disappears? Are you one of the people who believes in the poverty pimp game — or even one of the beneficiaries of it? For how long have you been able, but unwilling, to do anything about your dependence? Months? Years? Decades? Guess what — it’s going to go away, and not voluntarily either. When are you going to face the fact that it is precisely what you demand and in fact vote for, in the main as a people, that you get and when you demand an impossibility what you are going to get, inevitably, is pain.
You can choose to be a hermit if you want, and maybe among your associates that’s your best option.
Or maybe you need better associates.
But I’ll tell you this, and I’m pretty sure of it: You better figure all of this out, and soon.