The System in Collapse
Apr. 6th, 2026 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteeleThere is a great deal of misplaced nostalgia for the 1980s. I lived through the 1980s and I don't think they were all that great. Now, materially they were splendid. We had everything we needed, or at least it seemed that way as a person who grew up upper-middle class. We wanted for nothing. Nevertheless, as my own childhood gave way to adolescence, things got measurably worse even though we were doing materially better than ever. I remember when factors of disintegration began to pick away at my childhood bliss, especially as puberty encroached and the pressures of sexuality began to make themselves known, not only in my body but in all the forces trying to get at me, and it was hell. The comfort of a bunch of stuff, adequate food, and shelter often breeds a special kind of boredom and frustration and the 80s made this happen for many of us, myself included.
By the time I was a teenager, I felt thrown away. I felt like I had no place to be, often literally. I was warehoused in a prison-like school. My high school was a clean but awful place where I was babysat for 7 hours a day. I could not wait to get out of it. Graduating from that pit was one of the most liberating, happiest days of my life. (Of course I was an idiot and went to college and made it worse.)
When we look at the 1980s through rose-colored lenses, we are not seeing what built it. The 80s were Peak Israel. Only now in the cold, sober light of internet and social media do we see how much of a construct that lifestyle was. The 80s were about American hegemony on a large scale. America dominated the entire world in the 1980s, and the Empire was at the top of its game, even if we were very much past Peak Oil and in the process of selling out the working class and exporting manufacturing and other forms of gainful employment to the Third World. In my book Sacred Homemaking, I share an anecdote about a jacket that I had to have at age 9. I ended up with two of the stupid, pastel, Michael Jackson-inspired windbreakers. The only reason they were cheap was because they were made in a Chinese sweatshop. My 1980s childhood took place at the same time that textile manufacturing and production was mass-outsourced to the global south, and my ridiculous fashion choices as a 9 year old were part of the same force that made it impossible to have an entirely local clothing production company here in America.
What I also did not see and also had no perspective upon was how world politics had converged to make my jackets possible. The systems that made up the System where what made my whole lifestyle possible, and I could not see the forest for the trees.
To be upper-middle class is to be especially influenced (brainwashed) by media. Movies, especially, contributed to my astral poisoning back in the day. I could quote several popular movies. I knew the stars, but to my credit, so did most people and knowing them was the social currency of the upper middle class just as bawdy jokes have always been the social currency of the lower middle class. The System was happening right under our noses and it is only lately we are finding out how bad it has been this whole time. Consider the cast of the 1986 film Lucas, one of many vehicles in a small spate of years that featured prominent teenage idols Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. Both Haim and Feldman admitted to being sexually abused by men on the set of Lucas. 13 year old Haim was groomed and allegedly anally raped by 19 year old Charlie Sheen, who reportedly used a handful of Crisco and would go on to claim he would beat AIDS with his "tiger blood" later in life. I dimly remember seeing Lucas as well as other Haim and Feldman movies, never having a single clue that its stars were victims of vicious predation and sexual abuse. Not once would I have imagined that the System that tortured these children in its grist mill was run by Sabbatean Frankist, nearly-always-Jewish-identifying overlords. I certainly did not suspect the CIA or elite divisions of the US military of operating a grandiose collection of child-trafficking rings with the assistance of local and federal governments. I certainly did not understand enough to distance myself from military-industrial complex imagery that made up my programming in order to keep the System running and well-fed.
I did not know the name Les Wexner when I worked for The Limited as a late teenager and early 20-something. Les Wexner, for those not aware, is the multi-billionaire scion who invented the Limited and all of its sister companies, many of which survive in shopping malls today. Limited, Limited Too, Express, Victoria's Secret, Torrid, Lingerie Cacique, Bath & Body Works, Yankee Candle, Abercrombie & Fitch, and even Dick's Sporting Goods belong or belonged to Les Wexner, a reportedly bisexual Epstein bestie and primary funder of Epstein's lavish lifestyle. The Limited was at the forefront of fast fashion arbitrage. When I was still a preteen and too young to work there, the Limited was the first store to instigate the trend of wearing layered henley shirts. The shirts were all the rage among tween and teen girls, and they were dramatically overpriced considering they were made in sweatshops for pennies. In order to be cool, you had to wear at least two of them with one unbuttoned or tied at the waist to reveal the other one, which was always a different color or pattern. This look was always paired with sweatshop made Guess? jeans and frizzy, teased, curly hair that was sprayed into a chemical-smelling wall at the crown and sides and greasy with mousse and scrunched in the back.
I had all of one Henley shirt to my name in the time they were a thing, but once I worked at the Limited, I bought their clothes because I was required to do so. One of the insults of working at a Limited-affiliated retail brand is that employees were required to buy and wear the store's merchandise on the sales floor. The expectation was patently ridiculous: associates were expected to buy at least $400 worth of current Limited clothing and accessories every six months (at least) when we made less than $10 an hour. I made more babysitting per hour than I ever did at The Limited. We were also expected to be pushy. There was a Limited credit card and we were expected to get shoppers to sign up for it. I remember one young woman who came in on one of my last days at the Limited, waving her talon-like, stinking set of nail extensions as idiot me ran from dressing room to rack getting her every piece of clothing in the store to try on. After two and a half hours, she plonked over $1000 dollars of merchandise on the counter and her credit card was declined and had to leave the store. She did not seem all that upset. I think she was on every drug available on the street and otherwise and I failed to realize it, despite all the signs being there.
Besides the Limited crap I was required to buy from rich-ass, dybbuk-hosting Les Wexner, I had my fair share of Bath & Body Works, Victoria's Secret, and Express merch and served as a walking advertisement for his brands almost as long as I could remember. I still wear Bath & Body Works products when they are given to me as gifts. I am done personally buying from those brands now that I know the truth of them, but I am not going to be mean to my husband or my brother if they get me soaps and lotions I never disdained before this most recent year of revelation.
I don't blame myself for my early programming and neither should you. The programming went extremely deep. It was our world. Our world ran on supply chains and mysterious agendas. We were informed by elites who used to have more power via secrecy. Social media and the internet has contributed to the visibility of that architecture, which is now beginning to crumble as a result of being exposed to the light of day.
The more things change . . .
I refuse to play into the fears that we soon won't be able to get avocados anymore because of the current set of wars. If it happens, it happens, but I'll be damned before I will actively worry about such an outcome. That said, things are changing at a fairly rapid pace, and I think we all need to be ready for those changes. Make no mistake, what is happening in Iran right now is a holy war, and it is not one the American empire is set to win. The holy war is against an ancient evil that merged with Christianity and Judaism to become Ba'al/Babalon. Iran's latest contributions to the skirmish have been AI propaganda videos of Trump and Netanyahu as Legos, supplicating to Ba'al as the demon demands blood sacrifice. One video has Lego Trump bragging to Ba'al about sacrificing 168 school kids, a possible reference to the bombing of an Iranian school. Ba'al, who has the Star of David on his forehead, answers not with thanks but with: "MORE! I WANT MORE!" before being hit with Iranian missiles and going up in flames.
There is no love lost between me and the Islamic regime or its prophet, Mohammed, however, when you're right, you're right. Islam and monotheism, in my own personal belief, is drawing near to the end of its tenure as we see the rise of animism as the newest (oldest) force in the religions that will dominate the future. I reluctantly admit that the enemy of my enemy has become my friend.
I liked Trump, which is quite obvious from some of my past essays. He was America first. He had me fooled. I never would have voted for yet another System pedophile would enter the US into another world war. At least Hillary Clinton was honest about being a warmonger, even if she could not own up to Frazzledrip. She at least had the integrity to avoid promises of no new wars.
America needs to be concerned about the holy war aspect of the current debacle, even if Iran's Islamic caliphate worships a prophet who married a little girl who was 3-4 years out of diapers at best. We have sided with the wrong Tribe. Right now, Tel Aviv is likely in ruins and looks like the Gaza strip, but you wouldn't know it from what mainstream media reveals. I get most of my news, pathetically, from TikTok, and TikTok reports that Israel is being taken to the woodshed by Iran. At least 400 American soldiers have been killed a month into the war, not 5 or 6 as is claimed. Payback is a bitch and Israel may be wiped off the face of the map, and the darkest side of my heart hopes they are in retaliation for the pedophilia-run System they have enjoyed and enforced worldwide for the last half century or more. Killing the Ayatollah and leaving his son alive was a big mistake, as they have created a Kim Jong Un/Il parallel that begs for Bad to be replaced by Worse. It's giving John Michael Greer's Twilight's Last Gleaming, and I hope we can collectively avoid a collapse similar to Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 where the collapse of the US dollar seriously downgrades the lifestyles of a crew of regular urbanites and suburbanites until they are fighting for their lives in Weimar Germany/Argentina in 2001 conditions.
I hope our transition to a much lower and slower standard of living is more like the oil crises of 1973 than the crises of the novels I mention above. I am not counting on it. Things are changing rapidly, such as inflation -- gas has doubled in price since a few months ago -- and whether we deny it or accept it, we must work with what we are given. I suppose we can expect nothing less than a collapse now that it is clear to all but the voluntarily blind that the whole world has been run on blackmail butt stuff with little kids and babies in lieu of earned wealth.
It is both good and bad that the construct I grew up with in the 1980s is falling. That was that world. I don't want that world to be my world despite it coming with luxurious benefits. I would give up a lot of nice things for that world to slide into the garbage chute of history. Every night in my prayers, I devote some time and energy to praying for all of the kids who are abused or who were abused to have something that rhymes with my own childhood, whether it is in this lifetime or in a future one. I don't specifically wish for them to have the upper middle class aspect of my upbringing, nor the creature comforts or material wealth because those things were not exclusively the essence of what made my childhood healing and full of goodness. No, I wish for them the safety of having parents who are decent and who never were nor ever will be abusers. I wish upon them parents that are decent and hardworking like mine were. I wish for them to be loved and appreciated. I pray for them to have the security that money cannot buy when they are at their most vulnerable. I pray for this every night, every day, and really every hour. If this horrible System of kompromat, kiddy-diddling, and trafficking that runs the world goes away, maybe more kids have a shot at a childhood that resembles the best parts of my own. I will never stop praying for that. The misery of my 80s childhood was nearly all confined to its System-addled materialism, especially considering the wealth and stability we had despite the System. The decency of my parents and the tight-knittedness of my community made my childhood good. The Empire can fall and kids can still have a childhood that rhymes with the best parts of mine, and if it comes, it will come from a deep appreciation and gratitude for the good. It will succeed by the building of the good against all odds and against all of the forces that would seek to get at the children, because even in the backdrop of everything they tried, they still didn't get me.
By the time I was a teenager, I felt thrown away. I felt like I had no place to be, often literally. I was warehoused in a prison-like school. My high school was a clean but awful place where I was babysat for 7 hours a day. I could not wait to get out of it. Graduating from that pit was one of the most liberating, happiest days of my life. (Of course I was an idiot and went to college and made it worse.)
When we look at the 1980s through rose-colored lenses, we are not seeing what built it. The 80s were Peak Israel. Only now in the cold, sober light of internet and social media do we see how much of a construct that lifestyle was. The 80s were about American hegemony on a large scale. America dominated the entire world in the 1980s, and the Empire was at the top of its game, even if we were very much past Peak Oil and in the process of selling out the working class and exporting manufacturing and other forms of gainful employment to the Third World. In my book Sacred Homemaking, I share an anecdote about a jacket that I had to have at age 9. I ended up with two of the stupid, pastel, Michael Jackson-inspired windbreakers. The only reason they were cheap was because they were made in a Chinese sweatshop. My 1980s childhood took place at the same time that textile manufacturing and production was mass-outsourced to the global south, and my ridiculous fashion choices as a 9 year old were part of the same force that made it impossible to have an entirely local clothing production company here in America.
What I also did not see and also had no perspective upon was how world politics had converged to make my jackets possible. The systems that made up the System where what made my whole lifestyle possible, and I could not see the forest for the trees.
To be upper-middle class is to be especially influenced (brainwashed) by media. Movies, especially, contributed to my astral poisoning back in the day. I could quote several popular movies. I knew the stars, but to my credit, so did most people and knowing them was the social currency of the upper middle class just as bawdy jokes have always been the social currency of the lower middle class. The System was happening right under our noses and it is only lately we are finding out how bad it has been this whole time. Consider the cast of the 1986 film Lucas, one of many vehicles in a small spate of years that featured prominent teenage idols Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. Both Haim and Feldman admitted to being sexually abused by men on the set of Lucas. 13 year old Haim was groomed and allegedly anally raped by 19 year old Charlie Sheen, who reportedly used a handful of Crisco and would go on to claim he would beat AIDS with his "tiger blood" later in life. I dimly remember seeing Lucas as well as other Haim and Feldman movies, never having a single clue that its stars were victims of vicious predation and sexual abuse. Not once would I have imagined that the System that tortured these children in its grist mill was run by Sabbatean Frankist, nearly-always-Jewish-identifying overlords. I certainly did not suspect the CIA or elite divisions of the US military of operating a grandiose collection of child-trafficking rings with the assistance of local and federal governments. I certainly did not understand enough to distance myself from military-industrial complex imagery that made up my programming in order to keep the System running and well-fed.
I did not know the name Les Wexner when I worked for The Limited as a late teenager and early 20-something. Les Wexner, for those not aware, is the multi-billionaire scion who invented the Limited and all of its sister companies, many of which survive in shopping malls today. Limited, Limited Too, Express, Victoria's Secret, Torrid, Lingerie Cacique, Bath & Body Works, Yankee Candle, Abercrombie & Fitch, and even Dick's Sporting Goods belong or belonged to Les Wexner, a reportedly bisexual Epstein bestie and primary funder of Epstein's lavish lifestyle. The Limited was at the forefront of fast fashion arbitrage. When I was still a preteen and too young to work there, the Limited was the first store to instigate the trend of wearing layered henley shirts. The shirts were all the rage among tween and teen girls, and they were dramatically overpriced considering they were made in sweatshops for pennies. In order to be cool, you had to wear at least two of them with one unbuttoned or tied at the waist to reveal the other one, which was always a different color or pattern. This look was always paired with sweatshop made Guess? jeans and frizzy, teased, curly hair that was sprayed into a chemical-smelling wall at the crown and sides and greasy with mousse and scrunched in the back.
I had all of one Henley shirt to my name in the time they were a thing, but once I worked at the Limited, I bought their clothes because I was required to do so. One of the insults of working at a Limited-affiliated retail brand is that employees were required to buy and wear the store's merchandise on the sales floor. The expectation was patently ridiculous: associates were expected to buy at least $400 worth of current Limited clothing and accessories every six months (at least) when we made less than $10 an hour. I made more babysitting per hour than I ever did at The Limited. We were also expected to be pushy. There was a Limited credit card and we were expected to get shoppers to sign up for it. I remember one young woman who came in on one of my last days at the Limited, waving her talon-like, stinking set of nail extensions as idiot me ran from dressing room to rack getting her every piece of clothing in the store to try on. After two and a half hours, she plonked over $1000 dollars of merchandise on the counter and her credit card was declined and had to leave the store. She did not seem all that upset. I think she was on every drug available on the street and otherwise and I failed to realize it, despite all the signs being there.
Besides the Limited crap I was required to buy from rich-ass, dybbuk-hosting Les Wexner, I had my fair share of Bath & Body Works, Victoria's Secret, and Express merch and served as a walking advertisement for his brands almost as long as I could remember. I still wear Bath & Body Works products when they are given to me as gifts. I am done personally buying from those brands now that I know the truth of them, but I am not going to be mean to my husband or my brother if they get me soaps and lotions I never disdained before this most recent year of revelation.
I don't blame myself for my early programming and neither should you. The programming went extremely deep. It was our world. Our world ran on supply chains and mysterious agendas. We were informed by elites who used to have more power via secrecy. Social media and the internet has contributed to the visibility of that architecture, which is now beginning to crumble as a result of being exposed to the light of day.
The more things change . . .
I refuse to play into the fears that we soon won't be able to get avocados anymore because of the current set of wars. If it happens, it happens, but I'll be damned before I will actively worry about such an outcome. That said, things are changing at a fairly rapid pace, and I think we all need to be ready for those changes. Make no mistake, what is happening in Iran right now is a holy war, and it is not one the American empire is set to win. The holy war is against an ancient evil that merged with Christianity and Judaism to become Ba'al/Babalon. Iran's latest contributions to the skirmish have been AI propaganda videos of Trump and Netanyahu as Legos, supplicating to Ba'al as the demon demands blood sacrifice. One video has Lego Trump bragging to Ba'al about sacrificing 168 school kids, a possible reference to the bombing of an Iranian school. Ba'al, who has the Star of David on his forehead, answers not with thanks but with: "MORE! I WANT MORE!" before being hit with Iranian missiles and going up in flames.
There is no love lost between me and the Islamic regime or its prophet, Mohammed, however, when you're right, you're right. Islam and monotheism, in my own personal belief, is drawing near to the end of its tenure as we see the rise of animism as the newest (oldest) force in the religions that will dominate the future. I reluctantly admit that the enemy of my enemy has become my friend.
I liked Trump, which is quite obvious from some of my past essays. He was America first. He had me fooled. I never would have voted for yet another System pedophile would enter the US into another world war. At least Hillary Clinton was honest about being a warmonger, even if she could not own up to Frazzledrip. She at least had the integrity to avoid promises of no new wars.
America needs to be concerned about the holy war aspect of the current debacle, even if Iran's Islamic caliphate worships a prophet who married a little girl who was 3-4 years out of diapers at best. We have sided with the wrong Tribe. Right now, Tel Aviv is likely in ruins and looks like the Gaza strip, but you wouldn't know it from what mainstream media reveals. I get most of my news, pathetically, from TikTok, and TikTok reports that Israel is being taken to the woodshed by Iran. At least 400 American soldiers have been killed a month into the war, not 5 or 6 as is claimed. Payback is a bitch and Israel may be wiped off the face of the map, and the darkest side of my heart hopes they are in retaliation for the pedophilia-run System they have enjoyed and enforced worldwide for the last half century or more. Killing the Ayatollah and leaving his son alive was a big mistake, as they have created a Kim Jong Un/Il parallel that begs for Bad to be replaced by Worse. It's giving John Michael Greer's Twilight's Last Gleaming, and I hope we can collectively avoid a collapse similar to Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 where the collapse of the US dollar seriously downgrades the lifestyles of a crew of regular urbanites and suburbanites until they are fighting for their lives in Weimar Germany/Argentina in 2001 conditions.
I hope our transition to a much lower and slower standard of living is more like the oil crises of 1973 than the crises of the novels I mention above. I am not counting on it. Things are changing rapidly, such as inflation -- gas has doubled in price since a few months ago -- and whether we deny it or accept it, we must work with what we are given. I suppose we can expect nothing less than a collapse now that it is clear to all but the voluntarily blind that the whole world has been run on blackmail butt stuff with little kids and babies in lieu of earned wealth.
It is both good and bad that the construct I grew up with in the 1980s is falling. That was that world. I don't want that world to be my world despite it coming with luxurious benefits. I would give up a lot of nice things for that world to slide into the garbage chute of history. Every night in my prayers, I devote some time and energy to praying for all of the kids who are abused or who were abused to have something that rhymes with my own childhood, whether it is in this lifetime or in a future one. I don't specifically wish for them to have the upper middle class aspect of my upbringing, nor the creature comforts or material wealth because those things were not exclusively the essence of what made my childhood healing and full of goodness. No, I wish for them the safety of having parents who are decent and who never were nor ever will be abusers. I wish upon them parents that are decent and hardworking like mine were. I wish for them to be loved and appreciated. I pray for them to have the security that money cannot buy when they are at their most vulnerable. I pray for this every night, every day, and really every hour. If this horrible System of kompromat, kiddy-diddling, and trafficking that runs the world goes away, maybe more kids have a shot at a childhood that resembles the best parts of my own. I will never stop praying for that. The misery of my 80s childhood was nearly all confined to its System-addled materialism, especially considering the wealth and stability we had despite the System. The decency of my parents and the tight-knittedness of my community made my childhood good. The Empire can fall and kids can still have a childhood that rhymes with the best parts of mine, and if it comes, it will come from a deep appreciation and gratitude for the good. It will succeed by the building of the good against all odds and against all of the forces that would seek to get at the children, because even in the backdrop of everything they tried, they still didn't get me.
