As pandemic-related economic pain and wage losses continue, there are signs 2020’s financial stressors will continue to exact a toll well into 2021. Now in its fifteenth wave, the MNP Consumer Debt Index has dropped to 89 points, the lowest point since it was introduced in June 2017… “We’re almost one year into the coronavirus crisis and financial confidence has reached a new low across the country. Financial anxiety is understandably much higher among those directly impacted by job loss, declining wages and business closures,” says Grant Bazian, president of MNP. “The Index shows financial pressure is mounting for a large proportion of the country.”
The Fed pushed the money supply higher by nearly $3 trillion or 70% throughout 2020. At the same time, GDP is $600 billion less than it was at the beginning of 2020. As a result, velocity has sharply declined. GDP is recovering nicely but remains below levels of a year ago. The Fed expects to push the money supply higher at a 15% rate this year. All else equal, velocity will likely further decline and offset the money supply growth.
... This all before 2020. Facing 2021, there are now 10 million fewer jobs in the United States, as well as almost 2 million new jobs that never happened (a number already insufficient to begin with), still more than 900 thousand weekly jobless claims indicating more destructiveness, and, in many places, an undeterred belief none of this will matter because…”stimulus” of the same untruthful, unstable kind which has been introduced by those who don't want to realize, or anyone else to realize, the situation for what it truly has become.
It is not even the end of January 2021 and yet the great global meme for the year --“The Reflation Trade”-- might be coming into question already. That’s right: the market may have binge-watched the whole thing in just three weeks.
Of course, the “Reflation Trade” was never related to underlying economic fundamentals. These have been lowflationary/deflationary for decades, as we have explained many times before. The disruption of Covid-19 is widely recognised as having accelerated our underlying labour vs. capital and monopoly/monosophy-power MNCs vs. powerless SMEs dynamics.
Yes, we have official recognition that we need more fiscal policy. Hurrah. But most of that spending is in the rear-view mirror already; and it is merely putting the same, and often *less*, back into the economy than is taken out by state-imposed virus restrictions
Market cycles haven’t ceased to exist. It’s just that historically reliable “limits” haven’t been effective in recent years. So we’ve become content to gauge the presence of speculation or risk-aversion, without immediately becoming bearish once speculation has become outrageous. While sufficiently extreme conditions can still hold us to a neutral market outlook, the shift to a bearish outlook requires deterioration or divergence in our measures of market internals, which are our most reliable gauge of whether investor psychology is inclined toward speculation or toward risk-aversion. A week ago, our primary measures of market internals shifted to a negative condition. That shift was a bit surprising, because it was driven by components that capture market behavior across “debt securities of varying creditworthiness.” Interestingly, those debt-sensitive components were also the first to shift negative at the 1987 and 1929 peaks.
…
I continue to expect a loss in the S&P 500 on the order of 65-70% over the completion of the current market cycle. As I noted about my 83% loss projection for tech stocks in March 2000, “if you understand values and market history, you know we’re not joking.” A loss on the order of 65-70% would merely bring the S&P 500 to historical norms that have been followed by historically run-of-the-mill returns.
COVID-19 notes:
Last week’s edition focused on some cautionary reasons for on-going concern; this week’s has a couple of items with reasons for optimism
“So much has been written about the power of exponential growth, yet it never seems to sink into the brain of the body politic. We’ve all heard about lilies on the pond and rice on the checkerboard. Maybe we need to put it in terms of humans on the planet. If our global population of 7.8 billion grew at 1% — a tenth of a percentage point slower than the current rate — we’d have 21 billion people on the planet. Yes, that’s 21 billion at 2121.”
In short, a positive PCR test in the absence of symptoms means nothing at a Ct of higher than 30, according to the experts interviewed by the New York Times and according to Jaafar et al. Yet positive tests is the number CNN loves flashing on the screen. … What I have referred to as the “casedemic” since September will be magically solved just in time for Joe Biden to look like a hero. For doing absolutely nothing.
Official Title: A PHASE 1/2/3, PLACEBO-CONTROLLED, RANDOMIZED, OBSERVER-BLIND, DOSE-FINDING STUDY TO EVALUATE THE SAFETY, TOLERABILITY, IMMUNOGENICITY, AND EFFICACY OF SARS-COV-2 RNA VACCINE CANDIDATES AGAINST COVID-19 IN HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS
What did they think trust-fund Donald was going to do? Fall on his sword for a whistleblower/journalist? Trump is, after all, still just Trump.
This was the plan. Trump needed to finally be defeated. His followers humiliated. There was never going to be an Assange pardon.
There was never going to be a big declassification.
He was never allowed to burn the place down.
If any of that was going to happen it would have happened ages ago.
And this is why I’m happy Trump is gone. Because did you really want to live through another four years of pathetic virtue signaling, bureaucratic inertia, media lies and shameful pandering?
No, today the collapse of the U.S. will be on the watch of the people who orchestrated it. It won’t have the consent of a majority of the people, but if we were really honest with ourselves that’s how it was under Obama, Bush the Lesser and Clinton.
Trump was a guy who made things interesting but he also ensured we would be disabused of any notion of dissidence.
Today is the day Trump supporters can finally grow up. He wasn’t Orange Jesus sent to save America from itself. There was never a plan.
Trump was just a guy in over his head doing something no President did since Calvin Coolidge, giving a shit about what America means for Americans.
That’s why he had to be destroyed and that’s why we ultimately have to put him behind us.
There’s an old adage that you know a politician is lying because you see their lips moving — but this culture of lying, built up over decades, is something different. Three decades after Bill Clinton was quite literally impeached for lying, lying is ubiquitous. We don’t experience momentary storms of fabrications or untruths — deceit is now the entire environment in which politics exists.
Instead of applying a modicum of skepticism to this gigantic show of military force, much of which appears to be “security theater” in its purest form, our vaunted media is doing little other than cheering it on. And of course, inflating the threats being cited as justification for it. They can repeat over and over again that what occurred on January 6 at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” and therefore everything and anything is justified to retaliate, but everyone with a brain by now should be able to recognize that the government was never at a greater than 0% risk of being overthrown that day. Fear-inducing terms like “insurrection,” “domestic terrorism,” “seditious conspiracy,” “armed rebellion,” and others have been marshaled intentionally to inure the public to extreme actions such as the swiftly-executed corporate censorship purge and now, the transformation of the country’s capital into a military fortress.
It’s doubly odd because the deployment of military personnel to various cities last summer, though generally welcomed by locals and intended to quell what had genuinely been a sudden outburst of destructive chaos, was depicted by media members at the time as the rawest incarnation of violent fascism.
Super excited for America to finally get rid of its racist corrupt right-wing asshole of a president, hopefully by sometime in the next four to eight years.
Carmen Reinhart
bluntly said, "don't confuse the rebound with a recovery."
"a rebound
this year still leaves per capita income below where it was before the covid
crisis - calling it a recovery is misleading."
She went onto
say that one year later, the world is still facing "record" infection
rates, adding that "the longer this (virus pandemic) goes on, the more
disruption in terms of jobs, in terms closures of business that can really get
back to anything resembling normality."
Reinhart said
she is "very concerned the longer this goes on the more strain on balance
sheets of individuals, households, firms, and countries - it's a cumulative
toll that I think will create classic balance sheet problems."
She also said,
"there's been a problem that has been delayed but not avoided" - that
is the households' ability to repay their mortgage and service any other debt.
During the virus pandemic, financial institutions worldwide agreed to grace
periods for businesses and households, so they don't have to repay their debts.
Reinhart then asks the trillion-dollar question: What happens when those grace
periods come to an end?
Solving a Debt
Problem:With the debt growing substantially faster than the
ability to pay for it, there are three options to deal with the problem.
Austerity ---- Default
---- Inflation
The Fed shuns
options one and two above. Austerity would squash economic growth, which the
Fed and lawmakers will not tolerate. Defaulting on a moderate share of debt
will devastate the financial markets and hurt the economy. While both options
require severe short-term pain, they promote more robust growth in the future.
That leaves
inflation. Inflation deflates the real value of debt. Higher wages, profits,
and taxes resulting from inflation make debt payments less onerous.
The Fed is
trapped. They want robust economic activity and soaring asset prices. In the
current environment, this can only occur with more debt and leverage. To make
existing and additional debt manageable and appealing, they must reduce
interest rates.
As it turns out,
yields peaked as the taper began and continued to fall for the better part of
two years as the Fed halted purchases. This seems paradoxical. The Fed slowly
stopped buying billions in bonds, and bond prices rose and yields fell. But on
a deeper level it makes sense. QE is a powerful tool, because it boosts
confidence in positive economic outcomes. This boosts “term premium” or the
compensation investors demand for holding bonds over time due to the risk of
higher rates. Positive economic outcomes tend to increase interest rates. Not
to be overlooked, liquidity being added to the system boosts the outlook for
inflation too. When the Fed stopped doing so in 2013, these measures began a
persistent decline. The likelihood of better than expected economic data faded,
and inflation was no longer expected to move higher in a meaningful way. Hence,
longer-term interest rates (most sensitive to economic outcomes) declined.
What “reflationary” markets are betting is that none of this will matter;
that, ye, it’s really, really ugly right now for way, way too many people, but
giving the vaccine(s) enough time and under the cover of Joe Biden’s TGA
funding, today won’t have any impact on what’s expected to be a much brighter
tomorrow. Of, if it does, then there won’t be any material consequences because
Uncle Sam will pay everyone their losses incurred.
Reasonable beliefs, or rationalized conceit?
The problem isn’t those, necessarily, rather it’s the lost economic
capacity and potential that only increases as second and third order effects
multiply given how this [hole] and constant disruption remains as huge as it is
with no sign of its end. Some markets may be able to imagine beyone the horizon
and see only normality, but as regular American workers get jerked around week
after week, month after month, businesses, too, the more negative pressures and
changes – the kind of long-run damage all this stimulus is supposed to avoid –
further sets in.
Two Worlds: So Much Prosperity, So Much Skepticism
A hard thing to wrap your head around in economics is the idea that two
opposite things can be true at once.
Consumers are in the best shape they’ve been in, ever.
A huge portion of consumers think that’s bogus because they’re in the
worst shape they’ve been in, ever.
Economists lack a good understanding of what causes inflation. In
introductory macroeconomics curricula, the mantra of Milton Friedman remains
central: “inflation is always a monetary phenomenon.” By this, Friedman meant
that excessive price growth happens when a state loosens the supply of money,
thus over-expanding the monetary base. But recent research has brought this
popular doctrine into question. While expanding the money supply seems to be a
necessary condition for uncontrolled inflation to occur, it is not sufficient:
increases of the monetary base have occurred without any inflationary episodes,
and inflationary episodes have happened with only very small increases in
monetary base.
…
Hyman Minsky’s writings on the collapse of the so-called golden age of
capitalism offer some insight by forcing us to engage with how distributive
struggles have driven the inflationary and deflationary cycles of the past
fifty years. In doing so, we can construct an account of the political economy
underpinning the “deflationary coalition” that rules the common sense of our
economic policymakers and the policy they write
It could take
Tesla almost 1,600 years to make as much money as the stock market has invested
in it, yet frenzied investors continue to gamble on Elon Musk.
We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have
received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will
be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the
biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it
is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what
political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the
predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation
places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and
accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We
especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous
challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will
perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem
services on which society depends. The science underlying these
issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating
and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions
required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.
BofA: As has often been the case during this crisis, there is a race
going on between the negative impact of the COVID crisis and the fiscal policy
offset. With the holidays behind us, there is tentative evidence that COVID
cases are starting to level off. However, we do not expect much of a slowing in
the next couple months. Indeed, if the new UK strain spreads, cases will
probably start increasing again. Given the usual lags, hospitalizations and
fatalities could trend higher for the next few weeks. As we have noted before,
hospitalizations seem to be the main driver of social distancing rules,
suggesting more tightening to come.
…Now the bad news. New Covid
spreads much more aggressively.
…
It gets worse. There is still uncertainty about the lethality of the new
strain. While it could be the same as or lower than old Covid, it could also be
around 20 percent higher,
… However, we also detected a previously undiscovered novel cluster of
B.1.1.28 genomes from Manaus containing a unique genetic signature (Fig. 1B).
This new cluster, hereby named P.1 lineage …
Now new variant in the US: seems to be even more contagious than both the
South African and UK strain previously discovered, two studies revealed
Researchers at Ohio State found a new Covid strain in the U.S. with
mutations that scientists haven’t seen before. They also revealed that they
found another strain that is identical to the highly transmissible one from the
United Kingdom. The researchers say these mutations “are likely to make the
virus more infectious.”
“If the variant becomes common [in] the US,” Tom Frieden, former director
of the CDC, said on Twitter, “it's close to a worst-case scenario.” He says
political turmoil, overtaxed hospitals, and an unrelenting new form of the
virus could create a “perfect storm.”
I believe there is a non-trivial chance that the
United States will experience a rolling series of “Ireland events” over the
next 30-45 days, where the Covid effective reproductive
number (Re not R0) reaches a value between 2.4 and 3.0 in states and regions
where a) the more infectious UK-variant (or similar) Covid strain has been
introduced, and b) Covid fatigue has led to deterioration in social distancing
behaviors.
…
A single Ireland event is a disaster. A series of Ireland events on the
scale of the United States is catastrophic. If this were to occur, I’d expect
to see a doubling of new Covid cases/day from current levels in the aggregate,
peaking somewhere around 500,000 new daily cases before draconian economic
shutdowns (more severe than anything we’ve seen to date) would occur in every
impacted major metro area. Hospital systems across the country would be placed
under enormous additional strain, leading to meaningfully higher case fatality
ratios (CFRs) as medical care was rationed. Most critically, this new infection
rate would far outpace our current vaccine distribution capacity and policy.
…
yes, I think this model is nuts. I think this was a politically-motivated
Trump Administration exercise to “prove” that the US infection fatality rate
(IFR) is really tiny and you’ve got nothing to worry about. One of many such
politically-motivated efforts across many institutions to minimize the risk and
impact of Covid-19.
But this CDC model is why prominent Covid missionaries like Scott
Gottlieb and Tony Fauci have said that they expect daily case numbers to
decline from here on out, not accelerate, and this is why I think a potential
Ireland event is NOT priced into any mainstream market expectations or
political expectations for 2021.
Unfortunately, once it becomes apparent that an
Ireland event is occurring, it’s too late to stop it.
In our human-scale, linear world, we experience exponential growth like
this: nothing, nothing, nothing … case, case, case … cluster, cluster, cluster
… BOOM! But by the time we start to really pay attention to an exponential
growth process – typically at the cluster stage – the process is already too
entrenched to stop it, absent incredibly harsh social measures like you see
China reinstating today in Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million. No government in
the West is prepared to even talk about these measures, much less implement
them. So we’re always surprised by the BOOM.
According to Phillip Alvelda, a former NASA & DARPA
technologist-turned-entrepreneur, the pandemic is about to get even uglier for
Americans as the fast-spreading U.K. strain makes its way across the country.
He talks to Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking about
what you need to know and how our behavior must change in order to beat the
coronavirus.
Almost a third of recovered Covid patients will end up back in hospital within five months and one in eight will die, alarming new figures have shown. Research by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found there is a devastating long-term toll on survivors of severe coronavirus, with many people developing heart problems, diabetes and chronic liver and kidney conditions.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb: As current epidemic surge
peaks, we may see 3-4 weeks of declines in new cases but then new variant will
take over. It'll double in prevalence about every week. It'll change the game
After ~10 months of relative quiescence
we've started to see some striking evolution of SARS-CoV-2 with a repeated
evolutionary pattern in the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern emerging from the
UK, South Africa and Brazil. 1/19
Someone yesterday tried to convince me that
COVID is completely safe for people under 65. Response: Half of COVID
hospitalizations in America have been people under 65. Half! Over a million
Americans. COVID can be a horrible disease for any age adult.
Silicon Valley’s most
influential companies, alongside healthcare companies, US intelligence
contractors and the Commons Project Foundation, recently launched the
Vaccination Credential Initiative. The initiative’s ambitions reach far beyond
vaccines and will have major implications for civil liberties.
You can think of a test’s sensitivity like this: In a group of 100 people
who absolutely have Relevant Infectious COVID Disease, how many people does the
test actually report as “positive?” For a test that is 95% sensitive, 95 of
these 100 patients with the true disease will be reported by the test as COVID
positive and 5 will be missed.
Specificity: In a group of 100 people who absolutely do not have Relevant
Infectious COVID Disease, how many will be reported by the test as “negative?”
For a test that is 95% specific, 95 of these healthy people will be reported as
COVID-negative and 5 will be incorrectly reported as COVID-positive. Sensitivity
and Specificity are inherent characteristics of a test, not of a patient, not
of a disease, and not of a population.
…
How does this same 95% sensitive/95% specific test work in this screening
setting? The good news is that this test will likely identify the 5 people out
of every 1000 with Relevant Infectious COVID! Yay! The bad news is that, out of
every 1000 people, it will also falsely label 50 people as COVID-positive who
don’t have Relevant Infectious COVID. Out of 55 people with positive tests in
each group of 1000 people, 5 actually have the disease. 50 of the tests are
false positives. With a Positive Predictive Value of only 9%, one could say
that’s a pretty lousy test. It’s far lousier if you test only people with no
symptoms (such as screening a school, jobsite, or college), in whom the
up-front likelihood of having Relevant Infectious COVID Disease is substantially
lower.
The very same test that is pretty good when testing people who are
actually ill or at risk is lousy when screening people who aren’t. In the first
scenario (with symptoms), the test is being used correctly for diagnosis. In
the second scenario (no symptoms), the test is being used wrongly for
screening. A diagnostic test is used to diagnose a patient the doctor thinks
has a reasonable chance of having the disease (having symptoms like fever,
cough, a snotty nose, and shortness of breath during a viral season). A
screening test is used to check for the presence of a disease in a person
without symptoms and no heightened risk of having the disease.
A screening test may be appropriate to use when it has very high
specificity (99% or more), when the prevalence of the disease in the population
is pretty high, and when there is something we can do about the disease if we
identify it. However, if the prevalence of a disease is low (as is the case for
Relevant Infectious COVID) and the test isn’t adequately specific (as is the
case with PCR and rapid antigen tests for the COVID virus), then using such a
test as a screening measure in healthy people is forcing the test to be lousy.
The more it is used wrongly, the more misinformation ensues. Our health
authorities are recommending more testing of asymptomatic people. In other
words, they are encouraging the wrong and lousy application of these tests.
The new issue is the
potential for a really massive spike in Covid cases, where medical systems
break down completely. So much of the economic/political status quo seemed to
depend on the (largely irrational) optimism that followed the initial vaccine
approval. If this gets replaced by a universal “OMG we are so fucked” the
damage could be catastrophic–stock market, many industries that have been
hanging on the edge, rage at media, doctors, politicians–any “voice of
authority”. Even if (rationally) it turns out to be a two-month issue that the
vaccines could have reversed.
Obviously Biden won’t be up
for this challenge but no other current or recent politician would have either.
I don’t think events will fit any current narratives, and MSM attempts to spin
them will fail. The general public won’t specifically blame either Biden or
Trump. But if another 10 million people are suddenly out of work, no one will
understand why it suddenly happened, and no one will trust anyone’s ideas about
what to do next.
They’re not actually worried about “domestic terror”, they’re worried
about any movement which threatens to topple the status quo. They want to make
sure they can adequately spy, infiltrate, agitate and incarcerate into
impotence any movement which provides a threat to America’s rulers and the
system which funnels them wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. The
movements which most threaten this are not rightists, who are generally more or
less aligned with the interests of the oligarchic empire, but the left. This is
who they’ll end up targeting going forward, and whatever Biden and Company wind
up rolling out to fight “domestic terrorism” will help them do so.
“I don’t think it’s particularly difficult… to know what to expect from the Biden administration,” the acclaimed American journalist told Chris Hedges, host of RT’s On Contact, on Sunday. Biden, Greenwald continued, has enjoyed a five-decade career in Washington and made his policy priorities well known over these years. Biden is “somebody who has repeatedly supported militarism and imperialism” and “one of the crucial leading advocates of the invasion of Iraq,” he said. On the domestic front, Biden is “a loyal servant of the credit card and banking industry” and the “architect of the 1994 crime bill,” the latter of which has been blamed for dramatically upping the incarceration rate of black men in the US.
I want to start this analysis by first noting that I fully realize the
political left is not the root of the problem in the US or the world, they are
merely a grotesque symptom of a deeper disease called globalism. That said, the
collectivist/totalitarian mindset of globalism is very appealing to these
people, and even though they claim to despise the ultra-rich elites that
promote globalism, leftists have become unwitting and useful idiots for their
agenda.
If you want to learn about what globalists really desire all you have to
do is study the statements of the World Economic Forum and their “Great Reset”
initiative. They openly admit to plans that would result in the total
centralization of money and power along with the destruction of free and
independent society. But, we cannot talk about the fight against globalist
oligarchy without also acknowledging that the political left is the weapon the
elites are using to maintain and expand that oligarchy.
The Biden/Harris inauguration event is going to be a star-studded
celebration spanning an unprecedented five days, a giddy orgy of excitement at
a murderous oligarchic empire having a new face behind the front desk after
promising wealthy donors that nothing will fundamentally change.
…
The empire needs both faces. Without the murder face, it could not exist
as an empire. Without the grinning face, the public would never consent to the
murder face.
People who inhabit the hub of a murderous empire are historically unaware
of its horrific nature. In the old days that was because information was easy
to restrict access to. Today it’s because information is easy to manipulate and
distort.
9/11 opened the gates to the Global War on Terror (GWOT), later softened
by Team Obama to the status of Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) even as it
was suavely expanded to the bombing, overt or covert, of seven nations.
9/11 opened the gates to the Patriot Act, whose core had already been
written way back in 1994 by one Joe Biden.
1/6 opens the gate to the War on Domestic Terror and the Patriot Act from
Hell, 2.0, on steroids (here is the 2019 draft ), the full 20,000 pages
casually springing up from the sea like Venus, the day after, immediately ready
to roll.
And as the inevitable companion to Patriot Act 2.0, there will be war
overseas, with the return in full force, unencumbered, of what former CIA
analyst Ray McGovern memorably christened the MICIMATT
(Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank)
complex.
And when MICIMATT starts the next war, every single protest will be
branded as domestic terrorism.
The faux coup
Whatever really happened on 1/6 in the militarized Valhalla of a
superpower that spent untold trillions of dollars on security since the start
of the millennium, the elaborate psy op/photo-op circus – complete with a
strategically photogenic MAGA Viking actor – could never had happened if it was
not allowed to happen.
Debate will rage till Kingdom Come on whether the break in was organic –
an initiative by a few hundred among at least 10,000 peaceful protestors
surrounding the Capitol – or rather a playbook color revolution false flag
instigated by an infiltrated, professional Fifth Column of agent provocateurs.
What matters is the end result: the manufactured
product – “Trump insurrection” – for all practical purposes buried the
presentation, already in progress, of evidence of electoral fraud to the
Capitol, and reduced the massive preceding rally of half a million people to
“domestic terrorism”.
That was certainly not a “coup”. Top military strategist Edward Luttwak,
now advising the Pentagon on cyber-war, tweeted, “nobody pulls a coup during
the day”. That was just “a show, people expressing emotions”, an actually faux
coup that did not involve arson or widespread looting, and relatively little
violence (compare it to Maidan 2014): talk about “insurrectionists” walking
inside the Capitol respecting the velvet ropes. …
There’s no reason to rehash what happened over the last several days, but
the gist of it is that significant components of internet infrastructure were
weaponized for ideological and political purposes. If we’re being honest with
ourselves, we all knew this day was coming. We just didn’t want to admit it or
confront it, because it’s not a comforting or easy thing to admit or confront.
But the day has arrived and we’re no longer in a position to ignore it. The
most concerning aspect isn’t that it happened, but that it could happen at all.
…
People who think this is about Trump for me are the most ridiculous
people. I never voted for him, supported him or took him seriously. While I
recognize the role he played in the greater scheme of this massive historical
cycle, the best thing that can happen is for him to disappear as a political
force and be understood as the spectacle and distraction he was. I’m not here
to lecture anyone about who they voted for, but I’m here to connect with people
of all political persuasions ready to become serious and admit that a real strategy is needed to address the unaccountable power of the
national security state oligarchy. Conventional political avenues are a dead
end at this point.
I recognize that tens of millions of frustrated, angry and concerned
minds are trying to make sense of it all and reorient themselves. This presents
a giant opportunity, but also very real danger. All the emotion being felt
currently can be channeled into negative avenues such as violence, aimless
spectacles, Trump martyrdom or a futile search for the next political savior
guaranteed to disappoint, or it can be channeled in productive ways. That’s why
I’m here writing this post at this moment. Enough people are finally motivated
to respond, but what really matters is the nature of this response. The
dominant aggregate reaction is what will determine the future.
Most of us eagerly, or more likely lazily, embraced the current insipid
and dull paradigm in the name of convenience, low prices, and free shipping,
but we never stopped to consider the sacrifices made along the way. We
swallowed it whole, became comfortable fat and happy, and now the facade’s
about to be slowly stripped away unless we bend the knee to an ever-narrowing Overton Window of speech and behavior parameters. It begins with social
media purges, but it won’t end there. All the special things we sacrificed from
the prior era are gone, yet the consequences are here to stay. We can’t run and
hide hoping to be the last one hauled off to the abattoir. It’s time to step up.
In this regard, I have a simple suggestion. Cancel Yourself. Unshackle yourself mentally from our suffocating and bland corporate
culture while you still have a chance to do it voluntarily. Cancel yourself
before they have a chance to cancel you. In this there is power. You’re taking charge and
acting proactively as opposed to reacting. We need to play the game on our own
terms, because the game’s coming for us either way. If you were a Trump
supporter, forget about him. If you held your nose and voted for Biden, don’t
expect anything good. If you’re a Sanders supporter, forget it, he’s done. Most
importantly, don’t waste time and energy thinking about 2024 and who might run.
A lot of really bad stuff can happen between now and then and there may not be
much of a country left at that point. Focus on today and focus on what you’re
willing to do personally in the near-term.
…
Alastair Crooke has brilliantly outlined the Top Three main issues that
shape Red America’s “Epiphany”: stolen elections;
lockdown as a premeditated strategy for the destruction of small and mid-size
businesses; and the dire prospect of ‘cancellation’ by an incoming woke ‘soft
totalitarianism’ orchestrated by Big Tech.
“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in
hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and
half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
