Category Archives: Collapse

On Which Hill? By T.L. Davis

We’ve known it’s coming for many years. Sooner or later we’ll have to take up arms against the scum who presume to rule us. From T.L. Davis at theburningplatform.com:

I don’t usually title a piece before I write it, preferring to let the piece speak for itself, but I wanted to keep myself on track with this one. As the title suggests, on which hill do we die? We all die, it’s just a matter of how much pain and anguish goeth before the end.

The only thing more emotionally difficult than watching the perfection of the United States die such a horribly corrupt and meaningless death was watching my father die of cancer. I don’t usually get into personal issues here, or talk much about my family; it’s just not relevant. But this time, in anticipation of death, both of myself and my nation, I’ll go outside that restriction.

My father was a farm boy, just a rural kid who watched in amazement his father work long, hard, endless years to build something out of the soil. He was plucked from that pastoral existence to shoot Koreans, or, more likely, Chinese, across the frozen plains of Korea. He was a machine gunner and spent a year and a half on the front lines, earning him a quick discharge. I don’t know how he lived through that, most didn’t.

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Why People Move from Blue States: It’s Not Just High Taxes, by Charles Hugh Smith

People move from blue states because a lot of blue state cities have become shitty places to live for everyone but the uppermost economic strata. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Simply put, people are moving not just to escape unaffordable housing and high taxes. They’re moving to escape fiscally irresponsible, ineffective, unaccountable governance.

Defenders of high state taxes like to point out that surveys find few high-net-worth households move primarily to lower their tax bills. This may be so, but it misses the point: high-income, high-net-worth households don’t move away from high tax states if they’re getting fair value for their taxes. But if services and infrastructure are crumbling around them even as their taxes keep ratcheting higher, then the benefits of moving become much more compelling.

In other words, if you’re getting good value for your high taxes, then high taxes are not sufficient motivation to move. The problem is not high taxes per se, any more than a high cost of living is the reason to move from a world-class city with great amenities: world-class cities with great amenities have always cost more than less desirable locales, even in the 1600s.

The reason blue states are losing population isn’t just high taxes; it’s a lack of fiscal discipline and accountability, and insanely unaffordable housing costs. Immense floods of tax revenues sluice into the state coffers but the outcomes of all that spending diminish rather than improve. Problems don’t seem to get solved even as the permanent “solution”–throw more money at it–fail due to the decay of fiscal discipline and accountability, and the rise of a “stakeholders” mentality where dozens of entrenched interest groups each hold a veto in every decision.

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Prepare to Be Bled Dry by a Decade of Stagflation, by Charles Hugh Smith

We can hardly wait. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Our reliance on the endless expansion of credit, leverage and credit-asset bubbles will have its own high cost.

The Great Moderation of low inflation and soaring assets has ended. Welcome to the death by a thousand cuts of stagflation. It was all so easy in the good old days of the past 25 years: just keep pushing interest rates lower to reduce the cost of borrowing and juice credit expansion ((financialization) and offshore industrial production to low-cost nations with few environmental standards and beggar-thy-neighbor currency policies (globalization).

Both financialization and globalization are deflationary forces, as they reduce costs. They are also deflationary to the wages of bottom 90%, as wages are pushed down by cheap global labor and stripmined by financialization, which channels the vast majority of the economy’s gains into the top tier of the workforce and those who own the assets bubbling up in financialization’s inevitable offspring, credit-asset bubbles.

To keep the party going, central banks and governments pushed both forces into global dominance: hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization. Policy extremes were pushed to new extremes: “temporary” zero-rate interest policy (ZIRP) stretched on for 6 years as every effort was made to lower the cost of credit to bring demand forward and inflate yet another credit-asset bubble, as the “wealth effect” of the top 5% gaining trillions of dollars in unearned wealth as asset bubbles inflated pushed consumption higher.

Corporate profits soared as credit became essentially free and super-abundant and globalization lowered costs and institutionalized planned obsolescence, the engineered replacement of goods and software that forces consumers to replace their broken / outdated products every few years.

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How the US gov’t built a shadow structure that enabled COVID vax ‘bioterrorism’, by Patrick Delaney

There isn’t an infectious disease exception in the U.S. Constitution, so the government simply ignored that document. From Patrick Delaney at lifesitenews.com:

‘Congress and U.S. Presidents legalized and funded the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution… through a massive domestic bioterrorism program relabeled as a public health program… on behalf of the World Health Organization and its financial backers,’ writes legal researcher Katherine Watt.

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Editor’s Note: This article is the fourth of a series on the role of the U.S. government in orchestrating a bioterrorism attack upon their own citizens utilizing “biowarfare agents” marketed as “COVID-19 vaccines.” The prior three articles can be accessed here, here, and here.

(LifeSiteNews) — With exceptional detail and comprehensiveness, a paralegal researcher and journalist from Pennsylvania has documented the extensive “pseudo-legal” structures put in place over decades which allowed the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to execute its “COVID-19 vaccine” bioterrorism attack upon its own citizens, killing and maiming many thousands with complete impunity.

Katherine Watt identifies herself as “a Roman Catholic, American, Gen-X writer, paralegal, printmaker, wife and mother.” Prior to becoming a paralegal, Watt earned a philosophy degree from Penn State University, worked as a reporter for small newspapers, and then eventually founded Bailiwick News in 2016.

Former pharmaceutical executive and researcher Sasha Latypova, who has been a source of several important bombshell reports over the last year, has more recently relied on Watt’s documentation and strongly encouraged “everyone to subscribe to her and read her work. It’s an encyclopedia of law references, meticulously researched going back years describing how the [pseudo-legal] structure [for the government’s bioterrorism program] was put in place and what it entails.”

“I’m saying ‘pseudo-legal’ because you cannot legalize a crime,” Latypova explained in a December video lecture. “They made it on paper legal… [but] none of this is lawful because they are committing a crime.”

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Lose-Lose, by James Howard Kunstler

Spend much time reading the mainstream media and your head will surely explode. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” — Hugo Dionisio

The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.

This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.

The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

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Gold And The Shrinking Trust Horizon, by John Rubino

Gold has never told a lie. From John Rubino at rubino.substack.com:

Last week I posted an article on the implosion of the official vaccine narrative. That’s a controversial topic so not surprisingly it generated some heat on both sides. And a few readers expressed the wish that I’d stay in my lane (precious metals investing) and avoid venturing into unrelated and less well understood territory.

But believe it or not, the public health establishment losing its credibility is related to precious metals, via something called the trust horizon. It works like this: When things are good and the people in charge of big systems seem to be running them well, we’re content to trust the experts. We keep most of our money in banks, brokerage houses, and crypto wallets that exist for us only as websites. We buy produce that’s grown in a different hemisphere and shipped via boats, trains, and trucks to corporate chain grocery stores. We vaccinate ourselves and our kids according to the schedules set by the NIH or the CDC. We pop pills on our doctor’s orders without doing any research. We eat processed foods on the assumption that the FDA keeps them free of dangerous additives. And we believe what we see on cable news.

In other words, our trust horizon, defined as the distance from ourselves at which we’ll believe what we’re told, is global. We assume everything everywhere is working for our benefit and we’re thus willing to put our welfare in those distant hands.

But let some big systems fail to take proper care of us and we pull back, finding people and institutions closer to home that we can see and judge first-hand. We move our money out of distant banks and brokers and into local credit unions whose managers live down the street. We start buying groceries from farmers markets or directly from local farmers. Instead of popping whatever pill is standard for our ailments we look into “food as medicine” and other lifestyle remedies like exercise, supplements, and meditation. We homeschool our kids and join gun clubs. We buy homesteads and start raising chickens.

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Trials and Tribulations of the Collective West, by Pepe Escobar

It may well be a race to the bottom in the west. The much more interesting question is which countries will have what it takes to pick themselves up. From Pepe Escobar at strategic-culture.org:

Sit back, relax and enjoy a race to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The only question is who will get there first: the EU, NATO, or both.

One may be excused to imagine all sorts of amusement games unrolling at the HQ of the Russian General Staff as The Empire and NATO go literally bonkers. What crazy stunt will they come up with next – short of WWIII?

Here is a delightful put down of NATO’s dementia praecox. Everything so far has failed, from “crippling sanctions” to all sorts of wunderwaffen, while the whole Global South marvels at the exploits of Wagner PMC – now configured as the planet’s top urban fighting machine.

CIA mouthpiece Washington Post duly released how Washington, once again, had the Liver Sausage Chancellor Scholz for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The idea was floated by Secretary of State Tony Blinken: let’s announce we will deliver M1 Abrams to Ukraine in a hazy, unspecified future, thus providing cover for Scholz to release the Leopards now.

Don’t you just love German sovereignty in action?

Every military analyst with an IQ over room temperature knows all those Leopards will be duly incinerated – or better yet, captured, and dissected by Russian military specialists.

So what happens next is yet another vector of the – very successful so far – U.S.-unleashed German de-industrualization racket: the Americans will invade the German industrial military complex with their “much improved” Abrams – which may perhaps arrive in 2024, when only a rump Ukraine may still exist, or never arrive at all. So no need for the Abrams to prove themselves in actual combat – as in being captured and/or incinerated.

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The War Against Us, by James Howard Kunstler

We know they’re corrupt; they know we know they’re corrupt; we know they know we know they’re corrupt. Is anyone ever going to stand trial? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy ” – Chris Hedges

The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernible motives. For now, it just looks like the greatest collective act of ass-covering in history.

It’s pretty clear, for instance, that all the criminal misconduct in the FBI / DOJ — continuing to this moment — emanates from the years-long effort to cover up the seditious campaign to nullify Donald Trump starting well before Nov. 8, 2016. All the players in the agencies, and their news media accomplices, stand to lose at least their reputations, if the public cared about how dishonestly they acted. Many of those still working would lose their jobs and their livelihoods too, and quite a few would lose their freedom in prison. So, their motive to keep up the skullduggery is simple self-preservation.

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Here’s How “Prosperity” Ends: Global Bubbles Are Popping, by Charles Hugh Smith

Debt bubbles always pop. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

So here we are: the global credit-asset bubbles are popping, and the illusory “prosperity” generated by the bubbles is about to tumble off a cliff.

There are two kinds of prosperity, one fake, one real. Bogus “prosperity” depends on credit-asset bubbles inflating, magically creating “wealth” not from labor, production or improving productivity, but from the value of assets soaring as bubbles inflate.

This bubble-generated “wealth” then fuels a vast expansion of credit and consumption as assets soaring in value increases the collateral available to borrow against, and the occasional sale of soaring assets generate capital gains, stock options, etc. which then fund sharply higher consumption.

When the value of a modest home skyrockets from $200,000 to $1,000,000 in a few years, that $800,000 in gain was not the result of any improvement in utility. The house provides the same shelter it did when it was worth 20% of its current value. The $800,000 is gain is the result of the abundance of low-cost credit and the global search for a yield above zero.

Eventually, this vast expansion of “money” chasing yields and seeking places to park all the excess cash trickles into the real economy and the result is inflationary. Consider how soaring home prices affect rents.

When an investor bought the modest home for $200,000, the costs of ownership were low due to the costs being linked to the value: the property tax, insurance and mortgage were all based on the valuation. (The costs of maintenance were unrelated to valuation, of course, being based on the age and quality of construction.) Let’s say the modest house rents for $1,500 per month.

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Net Zero You, by Joel Bowman

Our would be rulers are trying to outlaw living. From Joe Bowman at bonnerprivateresearch.com:

Are you the carbon they wish to eliminate?

(Source: Getty Images)

Joel Bowman, appraising the situation from Buenos Aires, Argentina…

Welcome back, dear reader, to another Sunday Session, that time of the week when we gather at the virtual saloon to banter with mates and, in the immortal words of the great Aussie band, Cold Chisel, “see which one of us can tell the biggest lie”…

The world’s temperature has been “top of mind” for global elites of late, as last week’s Davos confab brought together a few thousand of the planet’s largest polluters to discuss what you’re doing wrong. Fortunately, the lifeblood appears to be draining from that coven of cackling kooks. (See our cheerful/hopeful obituary here: W.E.F… R.I.P.)

But that doesn’t leave the situation down here at sea level, where the rest of us jilted peasants reside, any clearer. Constantly we are reminded of the “existential crisis” facing mankind. Indeed, barely a day goes by when some righteous politician, ex-royal or hack actor is not on hand to lecture us about our carbon-based transgressions.

Take Jane Fonda, apparently immune to embarrassment, who was wheeled out this week to draw an imaginary line between climate change and… “sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, whatever… the war.

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