Puerto Rico At The Precipice

An interesting article filled with r/K undertones:

America’s biggest unincorporated territory, Puerto Rico, effectively ran out of cash this summer and has stopped paying its debts. Now, Congress is putting together an oversight board to call the shots until the island gets back on its feet.

The similarities with Greece are uncanny: a sunny vacation paradise that suddenly goes bust, a huge debt taken out in a currency — the euro, the dollar — that’s too strong for the local economy…

… Puerto Rico’s debt is, in fact, much bigger than Detroit’s. Frightened people are leaving for the mainland…

r-strategists are programmed to flee to areas of higher resource availability as K-selection nips at their heels.

Paychecks here are small, and the tenants’ rents are never enough to cover the system’s costs. So Washington subsidizes the rest, currently to the tune of $254 million a year…

Public housing experts say “negative rent” is theoretically possible; Ms. Ramos says she sees it all around her. She pays to live in the projects, but other people have found ways to be paid…

In 2001, Puerto Rico… identified 742 “Special Communities” — places left behind when the rest of the economy grew. It sent organizers to find local leaders who could name the most pressing needs. And it set aside $1 billion for projects…

Mr. García said he began to have qualms when he saw one contractor charge $15,000 for putting a simple tin roof on a house. He knew it was way too much. And it kept happening.

“They charged $100,000 per home, and it should have been $30,000, tops,” he said…

Free resources flow, people think nothing of taking whatever they can, and observers lack the amygdala to complain too loudly. Everything is resource consumption and conflict/badfeel avoidance.

From the heights, they can look down into La Perla’s rabbit warren of houses…

It is just such an incredibly coincidental choice of words.

Among locals in Puerto Rico, it’s customary to bond with a padrino — a godfather — who has the connections and clout to help you move ahead in life and solve problems. La Perla is a tough place, and for many years, it had a suitably tough godfather: Jorge Gómez González, a man known to all as Cara de Truck, or Truckface.

“He did everything for people,” says his wife, Irma Narváez, sitting in her kitchen on a quiet Sunday morning, “from buying groceries to helping repair their roofs if they collapsed…”

In 2014, Truckface was convicted of conspiracy to possess and distribute illegal drugs and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. He has appealed…

Truckface found a source of free resources, and then all the other rabbits were programmed to congregate at his feet, so long as he could lift all their badfeels, and keep their amygdalae relaxed through the liberal application of free resource provisioning. This innately falling into a master/serf relationship is probably a conditioned behavioral drive in rabbits, conditioned within the context of their childhood.

“We’ve been taught to depend on the United States. They taught us in school that Puerto Rico was too small, and it had to depend on a bigger country…”

The way she says this implies to me an almost instinctual comfort with the underlying idea of being the serf to a powerful master who shields them from everything and provides them with resources. They even see the relationship as ideal for their nation, with respect to other nations.

Liberals may not be importing savages solely to kill their nation’s K-strategists. They may be importing a conquering force that they feel will establish this type of master/serf relationship with them – killing others and taking their stuff, while provisioning the liberal pets at their feet. It is interesting how they seem to crave that niche.

It makes you wonder, from a purely intellectual standpoint, if American K-strategists suddenly killed every out-group brutally, would that quiet the liberal’s amygdalae, as they quietly assumed their serf relationship beneath us?

We know liberals see race more than we do, and have a neurotic response to things we don’t even notice. Do white liberals look at blacks/Muslims/criminals/other-out-groups, feel a deeply unnerving fear, and feel rage at America’s K’s because they don’t immediately kill and eradicate all blacks/Muslims/criminals/other-out-groups for them? Could they simply hate us because they subconsciously recognize we won’t be their Truckface? We do know how r-strategist liberals love savages who go on mass murder sprees.

I almost wish we could open up a parallel universe, and execute that brutal plan, just to show liberals how programmed they are, and how little logic plays into their decisions. I’ll bet they would quiet right down, and become our biggest advocates.

Now ask yourself about the evolutionary origins of The Stockholm Syndrome.

Puerto Rico’s financial troubles are driven, to a remarkable degree, by health care. In 1993, Puerto Rico set up an islandwide health plan for people lacking coverage at work — but it didn’t establish a way to pay for it.

Today the program, known as Mi Salud, or My Health, provides generous coverage to 45 percent of the population. For now, federal money covers much of the cost, but much of that money is scheduled to run out in a year or two. Meanwhile, Mi Salud has been scrimping by delaying payments to doctors. It is about $200 million behind…

All of this is the story of r-selection. Provide free resources, do it in a beautiful land whose every vista is permeated with dopamine, and then watch as the r-strategy takes hold, and the nation ends up unable to continue to manage its own affairs.

I would love to point at PR and laugh, but then again, every penny that corrupted them was borrowed in our name. As we careen toward a total currency and banking collapse, that debt is hanging over our heads, meaning where Puerto Rico goes, we will soon follow.

And truth be told, if I want to remove that log from my own eye, I have to admit, I don’t see the willingness to take up arms and kill anyone – to stop the destruction of my nation – having been at all present in my own nature over these past years, even as I have seen what is coming. Free resources corrupts, and reduces the desire to care and the will to act.