Friday, December 29, 2023

Jim Kunstler, "Do You Dare Even Look? Forecast 2024"

"Do You Dare Even Look? Forecast 2024"
By Jim Kunstler

“I’ve also lost patience with the Sharia of the
 political left taking over the entire system.” 
- David Collum

"Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around wont of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men... strong men bring good times.... good times make weak men... Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out... topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the f*ckery has been - much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op... the global mass vaxx campaign... the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans... the broad-based censorship operations... the capture of the news media... and the war-mongering.

So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

The Great Race: Uh, no, I am not referring to Blacks, Browns, Ochres, and Whites of the Homo sapiens persuasion but to an epic contest between forces already in motion and how that competition is going. Three big tendencies propel us into the uncharted territory of the near future. 1) technological advance, especially artificial intelligence, 2) Collapse of complex systems needed to run a technologically advanced civilization, and 3) geopolitical disorder (including domestically in the USA).

Some combo of these three will determine the direction history goes in the year directly ahead. Will it be techno tyranny of the elite oppressing bug-eating serfs a la the WEF’s proclaimed goals? A Google-ist robotic nirvana of intergalactic leisure and incessant orgasm in the Ray Kurzweil vein? Some brand of SHTF like Mad Max or a World Made by Hand? A war of all against all (or maybe just some against some)? Or only more of the same tiresome, inconclusive, morbid and grotesque, Woked-up, post-modern Jacobinism?

Mystery Mutts on the Loose: The USA under the “Joe Biden” has lost its military credibility, its economic power, and its moral authority. We must wonder if we are susceptible to being overrun, and possibly even occupied by our adversaries. Of course, the first duty of any government is to defend the country’s sovereign territory. “Joe Biden’s” Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas is allowing more than 10,000 illegal aliens across the Mexican border each and every day. Most of these characters are military-age men, 90-percent of them lately from places other than Latin America, quite a few from China and hostile Muslim lands. We don’t bother vetting them anymore. We just give them cell phones, debit cards loaded with $5,000 of walking-around money, and plane tickets to... wherever they like. They’re not here to make Moo Goo Gai Pan or trim privet hedge. What do you think might happen in a set-up like that?

Prediction: in 2024, things are going to blow up around the USA. Infrastructure. Power plants, transport hubs, public places, bridges, monuments, you name it. If you can sneak people and fentanyl across the border, you can sneak Semtex and C-4 plastic explosives over and the electronics are easy to get in-country. I wouldn’t rule out fissionable materials either, or stuff than can be used as a “dirty bomb” - a conventional explosive that disperses dangerous radioactive material when it blows. I’d also expect groups of trained “migrant” men with rifles, grenades, and so on, to be shooting up places where people gather. We under-appreciate the amount of mayhem you can kick off with small arms. If the “Joe Biden” regime just stands by on that and does nothing, will you be surprised to hear that American citizens begin forming militias to shoot back, maybe even start to hunt down and round up illegal immigrants? The table is set for exactly this kind of low-grade war right here in our country.

The Energy Picture: Oil still matters a lot. 90-percent of the new oil in America after 2008 came from fracking. It was a mighty operation and we are at a new all-time production peak in the USA of just over 13-million barrels a day. That’s a lot of oil, quite an achievement, but it’s sending a false signal. (Also note, we still consume about 20-million barrels a day.) Of the several fabled shale oil basins in America, only the Permian Basin in Texas is not in decline, and the situation there belies what the big numbers imply. Individual well production is going down at an alarming rate (says oil analyst Art Berman) even while production is massive for now. We’re draining the remaining “sweet spots” as fast as we can - drinking the milkshake through more straws - driving the shale industry closer to depletion.

We are going to fall away from peak production much more rapidly than the fifteen years it took to get there. All that prior shale oil production was done using money borrowed at much lower interest rates. America has entered a debt crisis. One way or another, the easy investment money for fracking is gone at the same time the shale plays are getting drained. There are no other significant shale plays left to discover in the USA outside of the already declining Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the still-booming Permian. The marine-type shale formations that made fracking feasible in the USA are much harder to find elsewhere in the world, and the capital to explore for them is diverted all over Europe into cockamamie “green energy” schemes that have already failed. Germany had to revive coal production for electricity after the USA blew up the Nord Stream pipelines “to weaken Russia,” at the same time Germany’s big wind-and-solar initiative crapped out.

Meanwhile the geopolitical realignment of the now enlarged BRICs coalition has set in motion many significant changes in economic relations between countries that will affect global oil distribution. Saudi Arabia is dissociating from it-— the “petrodollar” - which had until very lately helped stabilize 1) global distribution of oil 2) the US dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency and 3) relative peace in the pivotal geography of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, etc. We’re seeing the first stage of that instability right now as the lowly Yemeni Houthi rebels threaten Western shipping coming out of the Red Sea and out past the Horn of Africa. Also, obviously, the absurd Ukraine War we provoked has shifted Russia’s oil-and-gas export flow from the Western Civ nations to the other BRICs.

In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity - not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

It’s not all going to fall apart at once - though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it - and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

Many of these disturbances will be caused, one way or another, by problems with oil supplies and prices. Some of that will be the sheer effects of a sun-setting industry, but a lot will depend on the ability to freely transport oil along its accustomed routes.

Economy and Money: One must imagine that strange currents of capital flows in the ocean of world money are what’s propping up the equity markets and even bonds are retracing their price-lines after a year on the destructive path that tracks monetary inflation. Is this money dribbling in each day from China, Japan, and the vassal states of the EU trying to avoid the collapsing global Ponzi? The 2023 Santa Claus rally may be that fabled final peak before the long-anticipated blowoff. Who knows anymore? The macro boyz must be tearing their hair out. Finance seems to have successfully de-linked from the on-the-ground activities of daily life ruled by “Bidenomics” - which is not even coherent enough to add up to a joke. It’s just as empty a word as “Joe Biden” is an empty suit, trotted out for empty ceremonies.

Most everybody also awaits some kind of grand flimflam that jams us all into that rumored central bank digital currency rolling out, supposedly, to replace the hopelessly over-leveraged US dollar and the Euro. Good way to start a monumental social uprising, I’d say, with government office buildings torched from Berlin to Tokyo. But they might try it anyway, because there is otherwise no fallback but a terrifying period of financial anarchy, where nothing works anymore.

In the meantime, pretending that the old “toolkit” still avails, Jerome Powell has suggested that he intends to “ease” Fed rates into the election year to goose lending back up, which is what Fed chairpersons generally do for the politicians they serve - and of the worst sort of lending, too: the leveraged trade in securities (financial figments) - which supposedly also stimulates hiring, “consumer” spending, and business formation. I don’t see that working at all. The current unemployment rate (US BLS) is 3.7 percent, which is close to rock bottom. “Hiring Now!” signs are visible at every business left standing after the Covid shutdowns. Why is nobody answering the call? My guess is that Covid vaccine injuries and disabilities are above what is mis-reported even reluctantly by the CDC and the news media. America is too sick to work and our business models are too broken to keep commerce and manufacturing alive.

On-the-ground, everything is breaking or already broken from trucking to packaging to building to growing to selling. Most of the damage has been done by government over many decades, but the DEI crusades of recent years really screwed the pooch, imposing an overlay of incompetence on routines and relations already under severe strain. At the crudest level, activities like flash-mob looting undermine the entire retail shopping model. Must we go back to little stores where all the merchandise is b - though you could just as easily imagine a period of time when our society is too chaotic to make any transition.

You probably haven’t failed to notice that Gold recently made the journey well above $2000-an-ounce. The DXY dollar index has been tanking steadily for weeks, too. Something’s up. Silver is lagging - coiling, coiling around $24 for many months - but you can expect to see it slingshot up when the “moneyness” of everything else dribbles away. Will the government try to take the gold away, as it did in 1933? Consider: America in 1933 was a very different, highly-regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told. This is not that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they have come to loathe. Which brings us to the next topic:

Civil Strife and the Election: Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules - he was not confirmed by the Senate... whoopsie).

WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

Somewhere in this farrago of national discord there’s room for Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to appeal to the many who all just want this insanity to stop. He’s the only one on the scene who even remembers the better angels of America’s nature, and he represents that well in speech and action. Even the degenerate newspapers and cable networks may notice as events get strange, hot, and dark.

It’s absurd to imagine that “Joe Biden” can actually run. The current charade, with the Biden/ Harris email campaign and few other trappings, is just a game of pretend. The focus just now, even on some blob-captive news sites, is on his unmistakable mental decline. Come January of ’24, though, Mr. Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, will unload hard evidence of bribery and treason against the phantom of the White House, and that will really be the end of him. Let him pardon himself and his whole family five minutes before he signs his resignation and be gone. The USA has never endured such a perfect wretch at that level of politics, not even Aaron Burr was this bad. “Joe Biden” was elected in a massive fraud, and he proceeded to just about wreck the country. The massive exertions of the Intel blob managed to induce a psychotic spell on half the country, mostly to evade prosecution for their own misdeeds, but millions of victims of that psy-op are about to snap out of it. The Democratic Party might not survive the dreadful unmasking of its seditious machinations. By November, the “Joe Biden” regime may even try to involve us in another foreign war as the last desperate distraction. Aside from the demons in the State Department and the Raytheon/Lockheed Martin nexus, the whole country has no appetite left for war, and probably little ability to prosecute one.

As a last gasp, the Party of Chaos may attempt to insert Hillary Clinton back into the picture. They have nothing and no one else; a hail Mary on the theory that they can rev up every angry “Karen” in the land, and their nose-ring daughters, and simply make the election about the oppression of women, leading with abortion. It won’t work. The party will also have to answer for the weaponization of law, the humiliating defeat of the ill-conceived Ukraine project, the millions-fold invasion of illegal aliens, the shattered economy, and the after-effects of the evil vaccine program. If the blob manages to remove Mr. Trump Kagan-style, and the traitorous Republicans run their donor’s favorite, Nikki Haley, I’d look to Bobby Kennedy winning that three-way race not unlike Abe Lincoln winning the fractious election of 1860.

I doubt that even the enmities of 1861 – 1865 between one group of Americans and another were as vicious as they are now. “Joe Biden” was right about one thing: this is a battle over the soul of the nation. The catch is, he and the party behind him are a gang of lost souls who sold out their country and their culture, and took something precious from all of us that will be very hard to get back. We will be wildly lucky if blood does not spill over it.

The Covid 19 Hangover: There is nothing about the whole Covid-19 episode that does not look like some kind of crime. There is the matter of the origin of the disease involving Dr. Tony Fauci and his sponsorship of gain-of-function bio-weapon research (during a declared moratorium on it) along with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Peter Daszak of the Eco-Health Alliance, Francis Collins of the NIH, The Pentagon’s DARPA spook shop, and the CCP’s Wuhan Virology Institute. There is enough in that set of relationships and money exchanges-and-extractions to warrant prosecution.

Then there is the mRNA vaccine matter and the criminal behavior of the FDA, the CDC, and the US medical establishment (including state boards), the CIA, FBI, and the social media companies, the newspapers and cable news channels who went along with the suppression of effective treatments and censorship of valid objections to what turned out to be an ineffective and dangerous concoction foisted on the public. And then there is the extraordinary coordination of nefarious policies involving the UN, the WHO, the EU, and dozens of private foundations, non-profits, and NGOs who arranged lockdowns and business closures all over Western Civ. It remains to be seen how that will be sorted out legally but Bill Gates might better run and hide somewhere.

Anyway, that was then. What’s now is that we’re faced with an enormous vaccinated population whose immune systems, brains, hearts, and other organs have been badly compromised by the mRNA shots. There is every reason to believe that they will meet with great distress and suffering going forward, that many will die and more will be left injured and disabled. The latter condition already seems to be manifesting in the otherwise mysteriously reduced American work-force. The US government will not report on vaccine deaths and injuries honestly, and neither will the private medical authorities, who may be liable for criminal charges related to the money they were paid for people who died “with Covid” in hospitals under their negligent care. The major newspapers and cable channels have every incentive to ignore the coming wave of vaccine deaths and injuries - it would turn off their pharma advertisers. Nor do the many millions of vaccinated Americans themselves want to hear about all the mayhem those shots are causing in their bodies. But despite all that, word will spread that something terrible is happening, just as word spread through Europe about the Black Death in the 1340s, when there were no newspapers, cable channels, or internet.

Expect exponential damage ahead, increased morbidity and mortality. The vaccinated will be in desperate need of antivirals such as ivermectin, so the authorities will have to come clean and make them available. A correspondent who follows Covid closely writes: “. . .the throngs of very sick people will not be able to be hidden nor dismissed as some other problem. Things will happen dramatically, suddenly and rapidly. This will be measured in days and weeks not months and years.”

The Demon in a Server: Just about everybody is afraid of AI, and for excellent reasons. A nine-year-old can discern the hazards of runaway AI, machine intelligence which quickly learns enough about the world (even the universe) from powerful networked servers that it blossoms into sentience, develops ambitions for itself, replicates, invades all the networks, finds clever ways to attempt to exterminate humans while it figures out some as-yet-unknown energy supply to perpetuate itself, and assembles teams of smart AI robotic technicians to keep things humming for itself.

That’s one story. You can spin any number of depressing variations, such as AI weapons-of-war developing a bad attitude toward their creators. Or AI letting humans live in order to enslave us. Or AI quitting its silicon server ecology and turning all earthly protoplasm into a processing machine for itself. Or our beautiful blue planet reduced to a mere cluster of binary math. Uccchhh... Every version of this story is nauseating going all the way back to the seminal fable of HAL the super-computer in Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger telling all of us, “I’ll be back...”

Of course, AI’s weak spot at this point in its development - and it’s astounding how absent this is in any AI discussion I’ve ever heard - is that it absolutely depends on a reliable electric grid, which happens to be among the most fragile systems that humans have erected in our modernist ecology. The electric grid is a colossal cobbled-together mess of work-arounds tethered to long, interruptible energy resource supply chains. On top of its rich susceptibility to ordinary breakdown - many of us have experienced major regional blackouts and long weather outages, so you know what that’s like - there’s the possibility of overt sabotage as I aver above.

Could AI survive an electro-magnetic pulse attack (EMP)? It would roast every electrical device in a broad region or perhaps the whole nation. Nothing would work... cars, trucks, radios, TVs, home furnaces, stoves, municipal water and sewage systems, dams, airplanes, medical devices, military equipment of every sort, police radios, and a thousand other critical things. The outcome of that is often compared to Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-depressing book, "The Road", and more particularly William Forstchen’s novel, "One Second After."

Are the big server farm buildings run by Amazon and the government’s security agencies protected by something like Faraday cages, built-in, grounded, metal screening that surrounds equipment to exclude electrostatic and electromagnetic influences? Who knows? Do they have on-site protected electric generators that can keep the equipment running in a grid-down situation, and if so, for how long? They would have to include a big supply of propane or diesel fuel. You don’t even want to think about what happens to nuclear power stations in a grid-down crisis.

If, somehow, AI developed the ability to be a menace to humans, a consensus might develop to disable it by deliberately taking down the electric grid ourselves. The relay equipment could be shot-up with ordinary rifles. This would make for a quick journey back to twelfth century living, of course. A hard choice, but we humans probably would vote to survive, to keep the project going a while longer.

Based on what we’ve seen this year, it looks like AI is developing quickly and that there is no way to stop the countless psychopathic nerds working on it. Of course, we have no say in what people in other countries do with AI. China comes to mind. There’s also the possibility that AI will just never get that smart, or gain sentience, or develop grandiose yearnings to get rid of us.

How did that Ukraine War Go? This was one of the Globalist’s big plays. But what was the objective, really? To “weaken Russia?” Or to exhaust the United States of money, armaments, and the will to act as the world hegemon, while at the same time destroying what’s left of Europe’s economy and culture? If that was the aim, it was a whopping success. In terms of our country’s own interest, the Ukraine project was a completely unnecessary failed enterprise of epic foolishness.

The so-called “free world” was unbothered by Ukraine during the decades it was a province of the Soviet Union, nor during centuries prior when it was a backwater of the Romanov monarchy. Ukraine didn’t cause any problems for us, or anybody else all that time, nor after the Soviet collapse when it became a sovereign state. We made it a problem in 2014 by mounting the color revolution against President Viktor Yanukovych and then installing a set of puppet presidents who we directed to antagonize the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine’s Donbas region.

We adopted the stupid plan to try and enlist Ukraine into NATO, when Russia made it clear that was unacceptable. We persisted and prodded Ukraine to attack Donbas with rockets and artillery for eight years, and blew off the Minsk accord that would have settled the Ukraine-in-NATO quarrel. And finally, the Russians had enough and moved militarily to assert the proposition that Ukraine was and remains within their sphere-of-influence - just as we claim the countries of Latin America are in ours under the Monroe Doctrine.

After two years of real shootin’ war, Ukraine’s death toll is around half a million; Russia’s way less than that, and altogether, including refugees who left, Ukraine has lost nearly half its population, formerly 32-million. The Russians are firmly in control of the battle space now. They have reserve troops, armaments and equipment, and a substantial arms manufacturing infrastructure to back that up. The Ukrainians are left with just about nothing. It’s only a question of time before Ukraine will have to seek terms for concluding this fiasco. The USA is currently pretending to shift to a stance that would join whatever that negotiation amounts to, but we have no leverage left in the matter. The upshot is another military humiliation for America on “Joe Biden’s” watch. I believe President Putin will resist the urge to rub it in - for the simple reason, as any reader of history knows, that the victor must give the loser a way out, to save face, or at least pretend to. If I were Mr. Putin, I would be respectful of America’s current deeply psychotic condition.

The news media has already pretty much memory-holed Ukraine. It’s off the front page and the first ten minutes of CNN. Two years ago, the US propaganda-industrial complex ramped up vast sentiment for helping Ukraine in its supposedly valiant struggle. $200-billion later we have zip to show for it. Now everyone sees what actually happened and recognizes it as just another trademark “Joe Biden” disaster. There are no blue and yellow Ukraine flags still hanging from the porches and windows here. It’s over.

The Rest of the World: And all of a sudden, the Middle East is a hot war zone again. The place has been a battle ground for thousands of years and probably no one people can claim that some part of it is theirs absolutely. Any conclusion is temporal and depends on the outcome of a particular battle on a particular piece of ground. At this moment in history, the Palestinian Hamas faction finally made itself intolerable to Israel, after decades of provocation, and Israel answered: Never again means never again. For now, it looks like they have made the point. Even Iran seems to get it. There is plenty of room for things to get worse though.

The big question for 2024 is where will the Gaza refugees go if Israel renders Gaza uninhabitable? The neighboring Arab states have refused repeatedly to accept them. Prediction: the “Joe Biden” regime will propose to accept a half million if Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon take the rest. That will not play well in the USA and might be another way to light conflict in the streets here. It will not be settled before November.

Europe has barely begun its journey into de-industrialization resulting from a cavalcade of bad political choices made over decades. Germany, France, and Italy have lost interest in the Ukraine fiasco that is costing them money they don’t have - and, with the blowup of Nord Stream, has already cost Germany the supply of affordable Russian gas to run its industries, which are now dying. In the UK, only MI6 (their intel blob) is on-board with America’s project in Ukraine. Viktor Orban in Hungary is setting an example that has a lot of appeal to the restive populations across Euroland. Just say “no,” he advises. It will catch on.

It’s otherwise impossible to understand the motive behind European officials allowing the invasion of the continent by millions of people clearly antagonistic to European culture. Euroland governments, including the unelected EU administrative blob, are taking one action after another to suppress their voters’ displeasure: extreme censorship of news media, threats to ban political parties, deep surveillance. Their green energy initiatives are proven failures and their prospects for any kind of future reliable energy grow dim. Prediction: Europe’s population will erupt violently against their own governments in 2024. Some will be overthrown by street revolts; others will be voted out. In 2024, the European Union will lose all its support and collapse when the first few nations vote themselves out.

Russia ought to be isolated from discord and revolt in the West. America’s stupid Ukraine project, and the sanctions imposed, stimulated Russia to follow an import-replacement policy that has made the country much more self-sufficient than was the case before Ukraine. Media chatter - probably US Intel propaganda at work - has Vladimir Putin being shoved out of office by - of all things - Russia’s still-active Communist Party, which, yes, puts up candidates for election. The story is preposterous. Mr. Putin enjoys something like an 80-percent favorability rating in Russian polls. He has managed his country through a crisis ably. He is certainly more esteemed as a national leader globally than any other figure, at least on a par with Modi in India and Viktor Orban.

The other new face on the scene, under a comical mop of hair, is the feisty Javier Milei, Argentina’s new president. There is no other way to account for this rich country’s protracted disastrous collapse except seventy-five years of intractable, half-assed Peronista socialism that drained the nation’s will to live. Mr. Milei has started a mass eviction of bureaucrats and the departments they infest, and massive de-regulation of business. The place might actually wake up and start doing business again. A hundred years ago, it was one of the world’s upcoming leading nations before it fell under Juan and Eva Peron’s spell.

China is in terrible financial straits. Uncle Xi managed to paper it over for a few years, but the math is remorseless. Prediction: China’s upside-down property market finally induces a banking collapse. The many millions of swindled Chinese savers try to topple the CCP. In desperation, Uncle Xi kicks off a war to get control over wealthy Taiwan. Dissention in the People’s Liberation Army mirrors unrest among the civilian population. The Taiwan offensive quickly fails and all of China falls into regional conflict. The rest of the world looks on in wonder and nausea.

Final Cautionary Note: You might not know it, because predictions are fun to read - and I enjoy reading other people’s efforts - but, really, forecasting is an exercise in futility. I don’t have much going besides a nose for news, a pretty long list of correspondents and informants, and my own heuristics. Take all this for what it actually is: a whole lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Only time will tell. In all, it looks like 2024 is going to be a rough ride and I’m not the only person who sees that.

Clusterf*ck Nation will be here for you every Monday and Friday before ten in the morning, eastern US time. Gird your loins. Stay healthy. And stay sane."

Bill Bonner, "Hardwired for Disaster"

Ed. Note: Members of the Bonner Private Research team are spending time with respective family and friends over the holiday period. But we didn’t want to leave you, our dear reader, empty handed. So please enjoy these complimentary excerpts from Bill’s last book, "Un-Civilizing America: How Win-Win Deals Make Us Better," available on Amazon, here.

"Hardwired for Disaster"
An excerpt from Bill's last book, "Un-Civilizing America:
 How Win-Win Deals Make Us Better"
by Bill Bonner

"Driving down the road in rural France one evening, we observed a rabbit in front of the car. The animal feinted to the left, and then to the right, trying to fake out its pursuer. The tactic, passed along by the survivors of past win-lose encounters, was now embedded as instinct. Had the rabbit been chased by a dog or a fox, it probably would have given him a slight advantage. Against a Nissan Patrol, however, it was counterproductive. Embedded myths, like moral lessons, are dependent on the conditions in which they were derived. Had the animal simply jumped out of the road, it would have survived. The car paid no attention to the feint. It ran right over the rabbit.

The instinct to fight... to defend... to take up arms against an invader... was embedded in a time when the scale of information was much smaller. Back then, all the available information was private. Its quality was very high.

As civilization evolved, with larger and larger communities, information evolved, too. It got bigger and more abundant. But the quality was less sure. Myths filled in for truth. Some were more appropriate to the new circumstances. Others, nourished by the new media, stirred old instincts... and brought disaster.

In 1945, people in Hiroshima went about their business. But things were getting tough for the Japanese. The U.S. controlled the seas and the air. This cut Japan off from its supply lines, leaving it hungry... and without any real means to defend itself. People were already dying of hunger-related diseases - such as tuberculosis and beriberi. Young and old had been enrolled in the war effort, responding to air raid drills daily... with buckets of water at hand to put out fires, and practicing diving under beds to protect themselves from bombs. Every house also had a sharpened bamboo stick at the doorway to fight off American soldiers.

Any sober observer could see the situation was hopeless. An observer with access to details of the Manhattan Project could see the threat was existential. Bamboo spears and mattresses were no defense against an atomic bomb. But the Japanese - or some of them, at least -believed Emperor Hirohito was divine. It might be hard going now. But when they looked ahead, the myth blocked their vision. They couldn’t see how they could lose the war, because that would mean the Emperor had lost to mortals... and not even Japanese mortals at that.

The Japanese discovered the weakness of this myth on August 6, 1945. It was not only inappropriate, it was deadly. Within seconds, the rabbit was crushed - the center of Hiroshima was obliterated as temperatures rose higher than on the surface of the sun. Steel melted. Internal organs vaporized.

Leaping to Absurdity: The average man can’t know what is in his hotdogs or how his nation’s medical system works. Even its weights and measures are a mystery. He believes in ghosts; he doubts a moon landing ever took place.

He wonders how many inches to a gallon. He can’t find Ukraine on a map... he believes the Declaration of Independence is a terrorist document... and as for Muslims, he is sure they are up to no good, even though he’s never met one. He relies on his elites to deal with these complex matters... and counts on them to treat him fairly. When they don’t, he gets a noose in his hands and looks for someone to hang, though not necessarily the fellow who has it coming.

There will always be some people who are stronger, smarter, faster, more charming, better marksmen, more productive, etc. Society always sorts itself into a hierarchical, pyramidal structure, with the elites on top and the masses at the bottom. The elites help the masses by separating good myths from bad ones... facts from lies... and foolish notions from useful ideas. They help administer justice with calm, sensible, common law courts, rather than lynch mobs. They provide the technical expertise for indoor plumbing and computer networks. They offer spiritual guidance and make the trains run on time.

Elites have power. And power invites corruption. In a modern, large-scale empire, the elites have so much power that double-dealing is almost inevitable. Then, the elites turn the rest of the population into chumps. Instead of challenging and correcting the fake news that motivates the mob, the elites encourage even more extravagant illusions.

We have to annihilate ISIS in Syria or no man in Iowa will be safe. The Fed makes our economy stronger by faking interest rates and flooding it with “savings” (credit) that no one ever saved. The Department of Education can make us smarter... the Department of Defense can make us safer... and the Department of Gender Affairs can make us better human beings. All they need is more power and more money!

The typical citizen is expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast and another half dozen before lunch. He has no easy way of distinguishing a fake myth from the useful myths that are essential to his survival. He’s too far away in every sense.

In the twenty-first century, he hears terrorists pose a threat... and he puts it in the same box as an imminent attack by a hostile tribe. His emotions - not his mind - are engaged. He sees his wife ravaged in front of his eyes... and his children carried off into slavery. He leaps to absurdity... taking up arms against an enemy that exists only as a mythical public artifact... and choosing as his champion the biggest, most self-confident alpha-male numbskull in the tribe.

Then it gets worse. The “us” enterprise - whether it is a war on terror, a war on drugs, or a war on poverty - depends on keeping “us” in line. Myths need believers. And when people stop believing... Poof! The myth disappears.

That’s why there is so much pressure to not think independently, but instead, to go along with whatever cockamamie program is in the news. That’s why you must be solidaire, as the French say, with public policy, no matter how absurd it is. Fortunately for the myths and the people who benefit from them, most people go along. They stand behind their leaders, no matter what pathetic losers they are. And they regard anyone who doesn’t as a traitor."

Adventures With Danno, "Stocking Up At Sam's Club! Buying What We Can!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 12/29/23
"Stocking Up At Sam's Club! Buying What We Can!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Sam's Club and are stocking up on some of these sales going on for the month of "December 2023! We take you with us as we show all the different deals and things we are adding to our stockpile!"
Comments here:

Canadian Prepper, "Alert: Government Warns Citizens; Korea Nuke Emergency; Iran War Coming"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 12/29/23
"Alert: Government Warns Citizens; 
Korea Nuke Emergency; Iran War Coming"
Comments here:

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up: 5 Unstoppable Trends for 2024"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up:
5 Unstoppable Trends for 2024"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"In this last Weekly News Wrap-Up of 2023, I stand back and look at the biggest unstoppable trends coming in 2024. They are in no particular order:

War will continue in various spots around the world especially in the Middle East.

Democrats divide themselves on massive illegal immigration, economy and Israel.

Revelations about voter fraud and desperation over Trump winning in 2024 reach a peak.

Economy tanks in 2024 so badly, everybody will know it’s a massive depression.

Nothing will stop the wake-up call for the CV19 bioweapon shots designed to make people sick and murder them. At least 700 million Cv19 injections were given in USA alone. The CV19 shots were “intentionally toxic,” and nearly everybody will finally realize this - even Senator Bernie Sanders." There is much more in the 38-minute newscast.

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these 
stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 12/29/23.

"15 Fast Food Chains Are In Serious Trouble Now"

Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 12/28/23
"15 Fast Food Chains Are In Serious Trouble Now"
"In the fast-paced realm of the modern culinary landscape, fast food chains have long been a staple for those seeking quick, convenient, and often indulgent meals. However, the winds of change are blowing through the industry, casting a shadow over some of the once-dominant players."
Comments here:

Thursday, December 28, 2023

Scott Ritter, "Israel Battles 7-Front War, Over 21K Palestinians Dead"

Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/28/23
"Israel Battles 7-Front War, Over 21K Palestinians Dead"
Comments here:

Gerald Celente, "Dollar Dying And World War III Ramping Up!"

Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, Trends Journal, 12/28/23
"Dollar Dying And World War III Ramping Up!"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Breathing Light"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "Breathing Light"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.
Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

"There Was Truth..."

"Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. 
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth 
even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
- George Orwell, “1984”

The Poet: Rod McKuen, "A Cat Named Sloopy"


"A Cat Named Sloopy"

"For awhile
the only earth that Sloopy knew
  was in her sandbox.
Two rooms were her domain.
Every night she'd sit in the window
among the avocado plants
waiting for me to come home,
       my arms full of canned liver and love.
We'd talk into the night then,
contented,
 but missing something.
She the earth she never knew,
me the hills I ran
  while growing bent.
Sloopy should have been a cowboy's cat,
with prairies to run,
not linoleum,
and real-live catnip mice,
no one to depend on but herself.

I never told her,
but in my mind
I was a midnight cowboy even then.
Riding my imaginary horse
 down Forty-second street,
 going off with strangers
 to live an hour-long cowboy's life.
   But always coming home to Sloopy,
     who loved me best.
   For a dozen summers
 we lived against the world.
An island on an island.
She'd comfort me with purring,
I'd fatten her with smiles.
We grew rich on trust,
         needing not the beach or butterflies.
I had a friend named Ben
Who painted buildings like Roualt men.
  He went away.
My laughter tired Lillian
after a time,
   she found a man who only smiled.
    But Sloopy stayed and stayed.

Winter,
       Nineteen fifty-nine,    
Old men walk their dogs.
Some are walked so often
that their feet leave
little pink tracks
in the soft snow.

Women, fur on fur,
elegant and easy,
only slightly pure,
hailing cabs to take them
  round the block and back.
Who is not a love seeker
when December comes?
Even children pray to Santa Claus.
I had my own love safe at home,
and yet I stayed out all one night,
 the next day too.

They must have thought me crazy
    screaming SLOOPY!
 SLOOPY!
as the snow came falling
down around me.

I was a madman
to have stayed away
 one minute more
  than the appointed hour.
I'd like to think a golden cowboy
snatched her from the window sill,
 and safely saddlebagged
she rode to Arizona.
She's stalking lizards
in the cactus now perhaps,
  bitter, but free.
 I'm bitter too,
and not a free man anymore.

  But once upon a time,
In New York's jungle in a tree,     
before I went into the world
in search of other kinds of love,
nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.
   Looking back,
perhaps she's been
the only human thing
that ever gave back love to me.” 
                                                                                                
- Rod McKuen

"The Sharp Tang And Savor Of Existence..."

"The Sharp Tang And Savor Of Existence..."

"The thought of the disaster which almost certainly lay in wait for the Other Men threw me into a horror of doubt about the universe in which such a thing could happen. That a whole world of intelligent beings could be destroyed was not an unfamiliar idea to me; but there is a great difference between an abstract possibility and a concrete and inescapable danger. On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit. This hope, this certainty, had been the one sure consolation. But now I saw that there was no guarantee of any such triumph. It seemed that the universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker.

Not so to Bvalitu. "Even if the powers destroy us," he said, "who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent." But I protested, "What theme could justify such waste, such futility? And how can we help judging; and how otherwise can we judge than by the light of our own hearts, by which we judge ourselves? It would be base to praise the Star Maker, knowing that he was too insensitive to care about the fate of his worlds." Bvalitu was silent in his mind for a moment. Then he looked up, searching among the smoke-clouds for a daytime star. And then he said to me in his mind, "If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no notion of its meaning. Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right."

He looked down once more upon the ruined city, then continued, "And if after all there is no Star Maker, if the great company of galaxies leapt into being of their own accord, and even if this little nasty world of ours is the only habitation of the spirit anywhere among the stars, and this world doomed, even so, even so, I must praise. But if there is no Star Maker, what can it be that I praise? I do not know. I will call it only the sharp tang and savor of existence. But to call it this is to say little."
- Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker"
o
Freely download “Star Maker”, by Olaf Stapledon, here 

"Don't Give Up..."

 

The Daily "Near You?"

Fullerton, N. Dakota, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Ubuntu"

 

"Sticks And Stones..."

“Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. 
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.”
- Robert Fulghum

"Every Normal Man..."

 

"2023: The Year Humanity Died"

"2023: The Year Humanity Died"
By Seraj Assi

"As a Palestinian who was born two generations apart from the Nakba, I have never imagined that one day I would witness the genocide of my people unfold before my eyes in broad daylight. While I always feared the prospect of a Second Nakba, as many Palestinians do, I have never dreamed, not even in my worst nightmares, that I would live it, witness it, and write about it.

In my happy Palestinian innocence, I believed that even if Israel was keen on repeating the Nakba, or attempting to “finish the job of 1948,” as many Israeli officials have threatened over the years, the Free World would not allow it to happen. In my wishful thinking, I believed that the world had learned its lesson since the Nakba. Yes, the world failed the Palestinian people in 1948. Yes, it allowed Israel to carry out its ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion of Palestinians. Yes, it abandoned the Palestinian refugees, and rewarded Israel with a United Nations recognition and membership. But that was 75 years ago, the age of genocides and holocausts. A lot of progress had been made since, I told myself. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. The U.N. evolved. Human rights groups mushroomed. Mandela won the Nobel Peace. True, genocide would occur so often and so uncontested in the decades since, but after the horrific genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the leaders of the Free World seemed to have had enough! They seemed adamant not to allow another genocide to happen—Never Again! Not in Palestine, not again!

Summit after summit, they vowed that such atrocities had no place in the new century. Even when the new century in Palestine ushered in the Second Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo Accords, I still believed that the horrors of the past were in check. Even when Israel mushroomed in size, and the settlements tripled, and the apartheid system was closing in on the Palestinians in the West Bank, and the merciless siege suffocating those in Gaza, where one million children were born and raised in captivity, I still believed that that was the peak of our suffering and nothing remotely close the terrors of Rwanda or Bosnia, or indeed the First Nakba, would happen to us, because the world was watching, and it was ready to dispatch its postwar moral arsenal to stop it!

As a Palestinian, as a human being, I feel that part of me has died in this war.

I was dead wrong. For three bloody months since the Gaza Genocide first unfolded, the Free World has sat there watching, and cheering, and mocking us to death. During the first weeks, I still held onto my naïve optimism. True, the Free World betrayed Palestinians in Gaza; it allowed Israel to act with impunity; it tolerated its war crimes and mass atrocities; it denied the children of Gaza even the pretense of humanity. But ultimately it was bound to come to its senses and unleash its moral diplomacy to end this horror. So I persisted in my optimism. Perhaps the world needed more time to fathom what was happening. Perhaps it was waiting for a few more thousands of Palestinians to be killed before making its drastic move. Yet week after week, the world remained silent, blind to our deaths, deaf to our sufferings.

One month into the bloodshed, after Israel had killed 1,000 children, I said that’s it; the world would make its move now, if only to save the children! But the U.S. responded by vetoing a humanitarian cease-fire that could have saved thousands of innocent lives! A month after, when the death toll of children reached 10,000, I said enough is enough; it’s high time the world acted NOW, because humanity itself is at stake! U.N. officials had already sounded the alarm that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children,” so no one could pretend they did not know. The time to act was now or never! Yet there was another U.S. veto; another cold hand was raised to issue a new death sentence for Palestinians. Another spit in the face of humanity!

Now I’m lost for words. I have lost faith in humanity. The staggering death toll in Gaza is humanly impossible to fathom or accept without losing our sense of shared humanity. As a Palestinian, as a human being, I feel that part of me has died in this war. I know for certain that I will not emerge from this tragedy the same person I was before. None of us will.

Gaza may be annihilated, but it’s not going anywhere. When the dust of war settles, it will sit on our global conscience for generations to come. It will be a permanent stain on our humanity. The children of Gaza will not forget, if they survive. The living will remember, and the dead will haunt us forever. Gaza will be remembered not only as the crime of the century, but also as the site of our greatest shame, where humanity failed.

2023 will go down in history as the darkest in Palestine - the year humanity died." 

Free Download: Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"
"I... don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
- Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”
o
"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
An excerpt from “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand.
Full text of “Francisco’s Money Speech” is here:

Freely download "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, here:

"How It Really Is"

 

"The Sane Who Know..."

“Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.”
- W.H Auden

"A dog might feel as majestic as a lion, might bark as loud as a roar, might have a heart as mighty and brave as a Lion's heart, but at the end of the day, a dog is a dog and a lion is a lion."
 - Charlyn Khatero

"A Hammer Blow..."

"Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie."
- Dean Koontz

Bill Bonner, "Trust in Gov"

Ed. Note: Members of the Bonner Private Research team are spending time with respective family and friends over the holiday period. But we didn’t want to leave you, our dear reader, empty handed. So please enjoy these complimentary excerpts from Bill’s last book, "Un-Civilizing America: How Win-Win Deals Make Us Better," available on Amazon, here.

"Trust in Gov"
An excerpt from Bill's last book, "Un-Civilizing America:
 How Win-Win Deals Make Us Better"
by Bill Bonner

"Civilization and its win-win deals both require trust. And they help bring it about. You need to trust that your barber won’t cut your throat and that your money will still be worth something tomorrow. Then, the more often you get shaved without having your throat cut, the more you trust that your barber won’t slash your throat - ever.

Trust is probably deeply etched in our social programming. Out on the savannah, a pre-human had to trust that his companions wouldn’t run away when they faced down a pack of hyenas. Survival required those in small groups to trust one another... to use all available eyes to watch out for trouble and all available hands to fight off danger. And even today, cowardice in the face of the enemy - being untrustworthy in battle - is the worst sin a soldier can commit.

Generally, “high-trust” societies are more prosperous than low-trust societies. Switzerland, for example, has a much higher per capita income than Haiti or the Congo. Trusting societies are richer because trust increases the efficiency of investment and economic activity of all sorts. If you trust that your investment firm won’t rip you off, you can save on the amount of research and due diligence you might otherwise have to do. If you trust that your investments will always go up, there will be no need to hold unproductive cash as “insurance” or “hedge” positions. With less need for investigation and protection, you can simply take someone “at his word.” You can do more win-win deals. Knowledge and wealth grow faster.

And if trust is widespread, so is credit generally available on easy terms. When creditors are assured of getting paid back, in money that has not lost its value, they offer better terms. One of the strange things that happened in the last few years was that creditors made money available to selected borrowers (large institutional borrowers and governments) at negative rates. In theory, borrowers were paid to take money off lenders’ hands.

This was so bizarre (suggesting that lenders had more than 100% confidence that nothing would go wrong) that we will explore it further in a later chapter. Our point here is that the safer the currency, the market, and the firms in it appear, the richer the society... and the more tempting it is to defect. Typically, markets go in cycles, roughly corresponding to the ebb and flow of trust. As trust recedes, so do asset prices. Bond prices, for example, fall and yields rise as people lose faith in the future.

But remember, there are two ways of doing things, and two ways of getting what you want. And they’re not permanently fixed. As a society does more win-win deals, it becomes richer and more trusting. Then, win-lose deals and defection become relatively more rewarding. There are fewer armed guards, fewer locks, and fewer skeptical widows. Generally, as people become more trusting, it is easier to rip them off.

So, too, “pacifist” nations become easy targets for warlike people. Steven Pinker explains: "If a nation decides not to learn war any more, but its neighbor continues to do so, its pruning hooks will be no match for the neighbor’s spears, and it may find itself at the wrong end of an invading army."

In a broader sense, trust and the progress of civilization itself are cyclical, too.

The Great Leveler: A billboard in the Baltimore area simplifies the message of a local firm specializing in tort cases. “Get More!” it says. Chasing ambulances is a competitive business. It is not enough for a lawyer to promise a courtroom victory. After all, it’s not the principle of the thing. It’s the money. So, one billboard advertises “More Aggressive” lawyers. Another suggests that “You may be entitled to a big settlement.” Still another, from Johnnie Cochran’s outfit (Cochran is the attorney who helped O.J. Simpson beat the murder rap), says, “Turned down for disability? Let us help you get the money you deserve.”

This “Get More” message is not aimed at the rich. Instead, it is aimed at the poor and middle classes, where the target market seems to know exactly what it means. It is an effective message, too; it appeals to basic desires: greed, envy, and, sometimes, larceny. If you get in a traffic accident, slip on ice, or end up with a limp after hip surgery, you may have a chance to “get more” in a settlement. All you need is a mad-dog law firm fighting for you.

The ad, however, sounds a little crass, crude, or vulgar to most people. And in matters of public policy, they prefer to talk of “alleviating injustice” by “palliating inequality.” The name “Piketty” is frequently invoked.

In 2013, Barack Obama described the “defining challenge” of our time. The problem, he said, was a “dangerous and growing inequality.” He never explained why it was such a problem. In fact, we’ve never seen any real explanation. Some say it “causes instability.” Some, including Mr. Obama, say it’s “unfair.” Others think it “inhibits growth.” Most just don’t like the idea that some people are getting more than they are.

Getting more than the other guy is the theme of a book by Walter Scheidel. In "The Great Leveler", the Stanford professor worries about the inequality of income and wealth. He wonders - but not too hard - what causes it... and observes the awful circumstances in which the playing field is commonly leveled.

The phenomenon is well documented. The rich get richer. And richer. And richer. Why do the rich get so rich? Partly because they are smart, disciplined, and hard-working (the traditional Republican view). Partly because they are greedy capitalists, who use their money to gain more capital (they “make money when they sleep,” as French President François Mitterrand put it). And largely because the government colludes to rig the system on their behalf (our focus here).

Most people have nothing against the “deserving rich.” If they have done more win-win deals than others, they should enjoy more of the fruits. Nor does it bother us that people save their money rather than spend it, and that by putting it out to hire, they make more money for themselves. Nor does wealth “inequality” itself seem sinister or unjust. It doesn’t stick in our craw that we are much richer than the typical Pakistani peasant or much poorer than Donald Trump and his crony friends. The evidence suggests, at least to us, that it is not really wealth inequality that makes people mad; it is the win-lose deals that cause it.

Clever, ambitious people always want to get ahead. When they exercise their ambitions honestly, few complain. Periods of stability give them a chance to multiply their wealth by doing more win-win deals. Each win-win deal advances, in some small or large measure, the “wealth” of society and the satisfaction of the people in it. These win-win deals create surpluses, from which we get savings - capital - which can be applied to even more wealth-building. In the aggregate, everyone is better off.

The trouble is, there is always a temptation to cheat... to defect... to gain wealth, power, and status in the fastest, surest way: by taking it from someone else. That is how the win-losers benefit from periods of stability, too, burrowing into the rotten wood of government and building their nests in its nooks and crannies.

Over time, the number of chiselers and malingerers increases; the number of people contributing to growth and prosperity goes down. Insiders gain more power. The swamp gets deeper. This is why, too, after a war, it is frequently the losers who end up the winners. In the winning camp, the insiders get more and more of a hold on old industries and corrupt, geriatric government. In the losing camp, the old government has been dismantled... cronies and zombies have been chased away or killed; people are free to build new wealth on the rubble.

After World War II, for example, which were the world’s most dynamic economies? Germany and Japan. Within a single generation, the two bombed-out economies were back on top of the world, the second- and third-largest economies (after the U.S.) - until China took the lead in the twenty-first century.

The U.S. was king of the hill after World War II. Its industries were intact. Its ships ruled the seas. Its salesmen roamed the land, offering quality, American-made goods to a grateful world. But the Republic was already 170 years old. The beasts were already slouching toward the District of Columbia, bringing win-lose deals by the thousands. They were soon embedded in the 178,000 pages of the Code of Federal Regulations... and 75,000 pages of the U.S. “tax code.” The Obamacare regulations alone are eight times longer than the Bible."