It Got Serious In A Hurry, by Robert Gore

Posted on April 1, 2021 | 38 comments

He’s a joke, but nobody’s laughing.

Trump’s five years were fun. He said things that provoked outrage among all the right people, often because they were true. You could laugh at their hypocritical idiocies, hysterical posturing, and sputtering anger. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, anyone who can watch Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow without laughing has a heart of stone. Frothing anger fueled effort after effort to depose Trump until success was realized with overblown pandemic panic, riots, and a clearly rigged election. If nothing else, Trump exposed the mendacity, arrogance, incompetence, venality, and criminality of the Corruptocracy.

Reality doesn’t invert. A corollary is that the severity of consequences from an inversion is the square of the distance between the inversion and reality. Consider the US military. It has disregarded the realities of the wars it has fought—the relative difficulty of invasion versus defense, the deadly effectiveness of guerrilla warfare and insurgency, the corruption, tyranny, and lack of domestic support for our puppets, and so on—losing every conflict since WWII, often after lengthy and in some cases ongoing engagements.

The current crop of corruptocrats have introduced yet another inversion in the military, the woke inversion. The military will now be graded on its commitment to combat-irrelevant factors: the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual preferences and political creeds of its forces, and their professed fealty to regnant political dogma. In other words, “diversity” in everything but thought.

This inversion is huge and given the distance squared corollary, it will soon render the armed forces incapable of fighting even a war for the protection of the United States proper. Given its ineptitude fighting offensive wars, the military will be completely useless. The defense budget, however, will grow ever more bloated.

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Joe Biden aspired to mediocrity in his prime and it’s been downhill ever since. As for Kamala Harris: some are born hacks, some achieve hackness, and some have hackness thrust upon them. She’s all three. They and their string-pullers have taken things from fun to serious—deadly serious—in a little over two months.

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Peter Schiff: The Federal Reserve Is Basically Just A Big PR Firm, by SchiffGold

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

How about that, the government’s central bank spouts the government’s line. From Peter Schiff at schiffgold.com:

Most people view the Federal Reserve as an important policying-making body driving the economy. But in this clip from an interview with Jay Matin at Cambridge House, Peter Schiff says the Fed’s primary role is that of a marketing firm selling the populace on bad economics and trying to convince everybody that everything is great.

Peter said he thinks a large part of the Fed’s job today is public relations and spin.

To try to create a false sense of confidence in the US economy and the US dollar.”

Peter referenced an interview he saw with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The interviewer played clips of Bernanke back in 2005 and 2006 as he claimed everything was great and there was nothing to worry about. Bernanke said there was no housing bubble and any problems in the subprime mortgage market were contained. The interviewer asked Bernanke how it felt to be so wrong.

Look, you couldn’t have been more wrong. And here you were chairman of the Federal Reserve. You had all this information. More than anyone else. Now, he didn’t say, ‘Peter Schiff was out there saying it’s a housing bubble. We’re going to have a financial crisis.’ He didn’t bring me up. But he’s basically saying, ‘You had more information than everybody, yet you were so completely wrong.’ Instead of saying, ‘Yeah, I really feel kind of dumb now that I look back. God, what was I thinking? I was so clueless,’ what Ben Bernanke said, to basically save face, his answer was, ‘Well, you know, I couldn’t exactly speak forthrightly or honestly.’ I can’t remember if he said honestly. But, ‘I couldn’t actually say what I actually thought because I was part of the administration.’ And I’m thinking, what? This is what he just said? Because the Fed is supposed to be independent.”

The former Fed chair just put a spike through the myth of central bank independence. He admitted he was toeing the line for the administration. And as Peter points out, Bernanke was basically saying he got it wrong because he wasn’t even trying to get it right.

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10 Signs That “Things Are Getting Better In America”, by Michael Snyder

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s some sarcasm in the title. From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Everything is great, and America is about to enter a golden new era that will be overflowing with peace, prosperity and happiness.  If you believe that, there is a very large bridge that I would like to sell to you.  There is certainly nothing wrong with being optimistic about the future, and personally I am very excited about the next chapters in my life.  But if you think that the United States is heading in the right direction you are not thinking straight.  Evidence of our advanced state of decline is all around us, and yet we continue to embrace our self-destructive ways.

Over the years, I have literally shared thousands of examples that show that our society is coming apart at the seams, and today I would like to share 10 more…

#1 New York City was once one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world, but now giant mountains of trash are piled up everywhere and approximately 2 million rats are rampaging all over the place.  In an attempt to turn the tide, city officials plan to create a “City Cleanup Corps”…

New York City is being forced to deploy an army of 10,000 cleanup workers in response to worsening problems with trash and rats.

A newly created ‘City Cleanup Corps’ will be tasked with fighting the piles of garbage on the streets of the Big Apple, with complaints surging by 150% between March and August last year.

After a $100 million cut to the city’s sanitation budget, filth and rodent infestations have become a common sight, with data revealing that waste tonnage rose 15% by the end of March compared to the early months of the pandemic.

#2 In 2020, homicide rates increased by an average of more than 30 percent in major U.S. cities, and now homicide rates in many of those cities are even higher in 2021…

A Baltimore sanitation worker was fatally shot yesterday evening on his trash truck. The city has 94 homicides in less than four months.

To the south, DC had two more homicides yesterday, bringing its tally to 62, up 41 pct over 2020.

To the north, Philly has 156, up 31 pct.

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Nothing Can Get Us Out Of This High Debt, High Intervention, Low Default, Low Productivity Loop, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

This pithy little article hits the nail on the head. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

On Tuesday morning, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid published his 23rd annual default study, a document he first put out in the 1990s which as he says, “makes me feel very old” and adds that the story of this report over the past decade or so has been the increasing divergence between economic growth and defaults. And while defaults have trended down alongside growth, the last 12 months have been a supersized version of this as defaults have peaked at a lower level than during the previous three big default cycles even as growth across many countries was at the lowest levels for several decades or centuries.

According to Reid, the reason for this is simple: it is because debt has become so large over this period, and of such extreme systemic importance, that when each cycle turns there is an ever larger policy move to ensure that many of the most heavily indebted entities don’t default and risk a severe contagion event for the global economy.

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Deflation Threat Looms As China Suffers First Population Decline Since 1949, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 28, 2021 | 1 comment

China will not grow at anywhere the rate it has been if its population is shrinking. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

China is battling not one but three vicious demons. The interconnected issues of insurmountable debts, deflation, and demographics threaten to sap the world’s future growth potential. 

Fending off the 3 D’s: debts, deflation, and demographics requires the People’s Bank of China to slash borrowing costs and unleash an enormous amount of credit into the local economy to cover up the faltering demand that usually persists with demographic challenges.

The question we should be asking is China really on the “rise,” as President Xi Jinping believes: “the East is rising and the West is declining” or if the coming demographic crisis derails Xi’s global takeover plans.

Beijing desperately attempts to recover from its decades of disastrous ‘one-child policy,’ which officially ended in 2015 and was replaced by the current two-child policy.

According to FT’s sources, the latest Chinese census data, which was completed in December and has yet to be publicly released (the issue is reportedly so sensitive that it won’t be released until many government agencies reach a consensus on the data and its consequences), is expected to show the country’s first population decline since records began in 1949.

China’s total population is expected to print less than 1.4 billion, according to people familiar with the census report, and if it is reported, the peak in China’s population came five years earlier than the United Nations predicted.

But, as Bloomberg notes, the trend is hardly surprising. China’s birth rate has been in decline for years and the introduction of the two-child policy in 2016 failed to make a dent. The number of newborns in 2019 fell to 14.65 million, a decrease of 580,000 from the year before. To cope with the shrinking population, a PBOC study last month urged a drastic overhaul of the policy to encourage “three or more” children per household. It called for a total lifting of any restrictions to “fully liberalize and encourage childbirth” to reverse the current four-year straight decline in births nationwide.

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Flexport: Trans-Pacific deteriorating, brace for shipping ‘tsunami’, by Greg Miller

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Between Covid-19 restrictions and massive fiat debt issuance, supply lines are frayed and the effects are ratcheting throughout the economy. From Greg Miller at freightwaves.com:

US importers face even more extreme delays ahead as container capacity maxes out

containers
Berths full of container ships in Oakland (Photo: Shutterstock/Sheila Fitzgerald)

The number of container ships stuck at anchor off Los Angeles and Long Beach is down to around 20 per day, from 30 a few months ago. Does this mean the capacity crunch in the trans-Pacific market is finally easing? Absolutely not, warned Nerijus Poskus, vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse,” he told American Shipper in an interview on Monday.

“What I’m seeing is unprecedented. We are seeing a tsunami of freight,” he reported.

“For the month of May, everything on the trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one client who needed something loaded in May that was extremely urgent and who was ready to pay $15,000 per container. I couldn’t get it loaded — and we are a growing company that ships a lot of TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units]. Price doesn’t always even matter anymore.”

Restocking driving volumes higher

Poskus said that trans-Pacific import volumes are still rising. He noted that January trans-Pacific imports were up 10% versus 2019 (comparisons to 2020 numbers are skewed by COVID) and 13.5% in February, then jumped 51% in March. “So, we’re now at 1.5 times pre-pandemic levels.”

With imports far outpacing retail sales growth, he attributed volumes to inventory restocking. “The restocking is actually affecting the trade even more than growth in demand. That tells me that this will last even longer. Let’s say U.S. consumer demand slows down in Q3 and Q4. That’s not expected, but even if it does, [capacity availability and rates] shouldn’t improve quickly, simply because of the huge restocking demand.”

Poskus also believes there is a growing export backlog piling up each day in Asia, awaiting available ship slots. If that backlog grows too big, he said, “I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.”

As a result of the backlog and restocking demand, he thinks “prices will remain high and shipping will probably remain difficult for the rest of this year. And then after that, you have the peak for Chinese New Year in 2022.”

About to get even worse

He said that the situation today is the worst he’s witnessed — and he believes it’s about to get even more severe.

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The Global Deep State: A New World Order Brought to You by COVID-19, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Covid-19 has been a totalitarianism amplifier. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power.”― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world.

It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.

Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it has become increasingly obvious that we have entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations.

This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which has seen governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, has shifted this transformation into high gear.

Fascism has become a global menace.

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, the pharmaceutical industry and, most recently, by the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

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Don’t Look Now, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

If Arizona can actually pull off a legitimate vote audit and irregularities are revealed, that may be enough to get the ball rolling on investigations into other states. Which may in turn upend the 2020 election results, both locally and nationally. SLL puts the probability at low, but James Howard Kunstler is an optimist. From an optimistic Kunstler at kunstler.com:

There was Joe Biden, all masked-up at the Virtual Climate Summit Meeting, the only world leader with his face covered, like he was fixing to rob the joint. In reality — if such a place in space-time still exists — Joe was sitting all by himself in an otherwise empty room in front of a video camera, all vaxed-up, too, as is everybody else who comes and goes in the White House. So, what was the mask all about? Surely not the virus. Does Ol’ White Joe bethink himself some kind of international Lone Ranger?

This was only one of countless mysteries orbiting around the dimming star that is Joe Biden. The biggest one, the planet Jupiter of all puzzlements, is how the guy managed to get elected occupant of the oval office. Or, more to the point, how did others manage to get him elected? I mean, considering those few embarrassing campaign forays from the basement to a bunch of empty parking lots back in the fall of 2020, not to mention the supernatural victory on Super Tuesday that rescued his pitiful old ass from the glue factory of broken-down political war-horses.

We may be about to find out as Arizona’s State Senate finally got around to approving a full audit of the November 3rd vote in Maricopa County, comprising Phoenix and its asteroid belt of suburbs, which amounts to more than two-thirds of the state’s population. The Democratic Party tried pretty hard to stop the durned thing, sending its gnarliest Lawfare warrior, one Marc Elias from the Clinton-indentured DC firm of Perkins Coie, and a posse of 70 other attorneys, to bury the proceedings in court orders. But all they got was a weekend pause from an Arizona judge who imposed a $1-million-dollar bond payment on the Democrats to cover expenses for the interruption — which would then be forfeited if the audit went forward. The Dems declined to pay up, so the pause was lifted and the audit goes forward today.

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Hunter Biden’s Laptop, by Peter Schweizer

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

This may be the story the mainstream goons would like to squelch the most. From Peter Schweizer at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • The book’s [Secret Empires] conclusions were based on reconstructions of timelines, records obtained through hard work done on location in foreign countries. Yet, some in the media still accused us of engaging in a “witch hunt” designed simply to embarrass the family of now-President Joe Biden.
  • Law enforcement sources have since confirmed a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes, but that actually means they are looking not just at his taxes, but at the money he made that he may or may not have declared on his taxes. That investigation continues.
  • What emerges from all of this clearly shows what I call the “Biden business model,” in which the Biden family seems to trade off the Biden name, Biden connections, and the Biden access.
  • Recently, Hunter Biden has sat for several interviews to discuss his new memoir about his struggles with drug addiction. The investigative reporter in me cannot resist pointing out these interviews were done by CBS News, owned by ViacomCBS, which also owns Simon & Schuster, the publisher of his new book. He mostly dodged questions about the laptop.
  • [T]he deeper question that should concern us more… is whether he is covering for his father. Emails reviewed by Sen. Ron Johnson’s committee during its investigation referenced a consultant writing to Hunter Biden about a proposed partnership with Chinese businessmen. The email says Hunter will receive a 20% equity in the partnership, plus a 10% stake “held by H for the big guy?”
  • The identity of “the big guy” has not been established. But… [t]he modern model of corruption in politics is rarely done in a straight line, but along the branches of a family tree. As foreign governments and other interested parties have learned, the way to a politician’s heart is through his family. There is circumstantial evidence in the collection of materials now possessed by the FBI and journalists that Hunter Biden was acting as a cover for business dealings that would benefit his father or at a minimum the Biden family estate, which includes his father.
Pictured: “The Mac Shop” in Wilmington, Delaware. In April 2019, Hunter Biden reportedly left a liquid-damaged laptop at the shop for repair, and nobody returned to retrieve it. According to the New York Post, the shop owner handed the laptop over to the FBI and also made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. (Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

Investigative journalism mostly reconstructs events and exchanges from hidden scraps, obscure records, and third-party documents. Often the best we can do is to show that something bad must have happened based on the coincidences we find in these records. Because reporters are not prosecutors, they cannot issue subpoenas or compel testimony. It is exceedingly rare for a reporter to obtain that “smoking gun.”

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Playskool Releases ‘My First Knife Fight’ Playset

Posted on April 27, 2021 | 1 comment

From The Babylon Bee:

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Escaping Serfdom, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on April 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Most of us would swap tax rates with the serfs in a heartbeat. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.

When I was a schoolboy, I was taught that the feudal system of the Middle Ages consisted of serfs tilling small plots of land that belonged to a king or lord. The serfs lived a meagre life of bare subsistence and were subject to the tyranny of the king or lord whose men would ride into their village periodically and take most of the few coins the serfs had earned by their toil.

The lesson I was meant to learn from this was that I should be grateful that, in the modern world, I live in a state of freedom from tyranny, and as an adult, I would pay only that level of tax that could be described as “fair”.

Later in life, I was to learn that, in the actual feudal system, some land was owned by noblemen, some by common men. The commoners typically farmed their own land, whilst the noblemen parcelled out their land to farmers, in trade for a portion of the product of their labours.

As a part of that bargain, the nobleman would pay for an army of professional soldiers to protect both the farms and the farmers. Significantly, unlike today, no farmer was required to defend the land himself, as it was not his.

There was no exact standard as to what the noblemen would charge a farmer under this agreement, but the general standard was “one day’s labour in ten”

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