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Living in a Potemkin World

LIVING IN A POTEMKIN WORLD

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” ― George Orwell, 1984

I never thought I would experience the dystopian “fictional” nightmare Orwell laid out in his 1949 novel. Seventy-two years later and his warning about a totalitarian society, where mass surveillance, repressive measures against dissenters, mind control through government indoctrination and propaganda designed to convince the masses lies are truth, fake is real and the narrative can be manipulated to achieve the desired outcome of those in power, have come to fruition.

Everything is fake. I don’t believe anything I’m told by the government, the media, medical “experts”, politicians, military leadership, bankers, corporate executives, religious leaders, financial professionals, and anyone selling themselves as an authority on any subject matter. We are truly living in times of mass deception, mass delusion, and mass willful ignorance.

The term Potemkin Village comes from stories of a phony movable village built by Grigory Potemkin in the late 1700’s to impress his former lover, Catherine II, during her journey to Crimea in 1787. He supposedly erected fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, as her vessel sailed by, to impress her with the progress he was making on her behalf. After she passed, he would have the village disassembled and then reassembled further along downstream.

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Are We Really Going to Build Back Better After a Dark Winter? Part Two

ARE WE REALLY GOING TO BUILD BACK BETTER AFTER A DARK WINTER? (PART TWO)

In Part One of this article I laid out the case the “dark winter”  narrative and how an experimental vaccine marketed like a tech product by Big Pharma and their cronies are part of a globalist scheme to reset the world and force us into subservience.

Now we get to Biden’s campaign slogan, which began to be adopted in August 2020, and was beaten like a dead horse just before and after the rigged election. “Build back better” must have played well among the useless eater, mouth breather demographic, when tested by Biden’s handlers. Biden would pop his head out of the basement periodically to stumble through a teleprompter speech where he was instructed to utter “build back better” three or four times.

Sustainable Development Goals: How can they be a handrail for recovery?

Then the contemptibly compliant corporate media expounded on the narrative as a brilliant plan by the wise statesman Joe Biden to save America from the murderous machinations of the evil orange man. Again, Google Trends reveals the coordinated effort to use this phrase in their efforts to steal the presidential election. If you think this was just a brilliant strategy by Biden’s handlers, you haven’t been paying attention. This is the globalist slogan to change the world.

“Build back better” has been a globalist slogan for over a decade. The definition per our friends at the UN is “a holistic concept using post-disaster reconstruction and recovery as an opportunity to improve a community’s physical, social, environmental and economic conditions to create a more resilient community in an effective and efficient way.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are We Really Going to Build Back Better After a Dark Winter?

ARE WE REALLY GOING TO BUILD BACK BETTER AFTER A DARK WINTER?

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

With all the talk about dark winters from Biden, Harris, Fauci, tyrannical Democrat governors, pandemic hysteria medical “experts”, and the corporate media paid to propagate the vital narrative, my mind was naturally drawn to the words of J.R.R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is a story of good versus evil, with a foreboding mood of darkness and doom.

To those of us of a conspiratorial nature, according to those who conspired to overthrow a duly elected president for four years and are currently conspiring to steal the presidency through blatant election rigging and mail-in ballot fraud, we believe the darkness engulfing our nation has been initiated by the billionaire globalist evildoers marshaling dark forces in their Mordor on the Potomac.

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The Evolution Of Fiat Money, Endless War, & The End Of Citizenship (Part 2)

Read Part 1 here…

The Victory of Fiat Money, Endless War, and the Rise of the “Citizen Soldier”

The stage was now set for the victory of fiat money after the series of bloody religious wars that plagued Europe over the 16th and 17th centuries.  For the first time some combatants would, at least initially, fight for religious “ideals” rather than pay or feudal obligation and this marks the beginning of the end of the Classical phase of European warfare.  This phase of endless war was funded by ever increasing amounts of silver borrowed on credit which, together with an endless series of tax decrees, initiated severe price inflation, economic depressions, and peasant revolts that became larger and more expensive to quell (on credit).  With both political and economic chaos spreading across Europe, it was at this time its intelligentsia began to espouse the “Universal Rights of Man” which, for its time, was nothing short of extreme radicalism as it demanded an end to the centuries old divine rights of the sovereign over his increasingly taxed subjects.

These tenets of the “Universal Rights of Man” were quickly adopted and championed by the Bourgeoisie / Burghers / Borghese, skilled craftsmen, and lesser nobility as a means to not only elevate their social status, but also to break free from their centuries old and ever increasing taxation and military funding obligations to the sovereign.  The Reformation and subsequent religious wars proved that rebellion could, albeit at an extreme loss of (peasant) life, extricate a people from its taxation obligation to the Papal Empire.

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It’s the preppers who are laughing now

It’s the preppers who are laughing now

Since the crash of 2008 much has been made of the fact that the world did not end or the sky fall in on us – unless of course you are one of the people who have been touched by bankruptcy, homelessness, addiction or even suicide as a result of the crash. The truth is that, since the financial collapse, life has not improved, improved very little or even got worse for a huge number of individuals around the world.

Many political and financial pundits have highlighted the fact that the problems that caused the sub-prime crisis and subsequent bank collapses around the world are  in fact a systemic problem. However, it appears that very little has been done to remedy  the situation.  The basic problem is not complex at all – it is very simple in fact:

  1. All closed systems have limits and the economic and ecological world system is  nearing the limits of tolerance.
  2. The main beneficiaries of the current system are a tiny minority (often refered to as the 1%), which is in fact growing smaller, further exacerbating inbalance.
  3. No attempt has been made to address a flawed system that is ultimately unsustainable – papering of the crack is all that has occurred.

If you accept the 3 points above then it is easy to see that we are not in fact headed anywhere better in the short or medium term. If no attempts are made to deal with the distribution of capital, the availability of financially meaningful employment, the facilitation of resources and investment in genuinely productive and beneficial enterprises then circumstances will continue to deteriorate.

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Demoralized, Depressed, Detached & Defiant

Image result for occupy wall street hot girl

Demoralized, Depressed, Detached & Defiant

I’ve now been running The Burning Platform blog for over ten years. It’s been over eleven years since I wrote my first article – Why We Need Ron Paul – in May 2008 during the Republican primaries. I really thought I could change enough minds through my writing to influence voters and help wake up people to the truth about our deteriorating financial situation. I would send op-eds to my local paper, and they would publish them. My articles on Seeking Alpha in 2008/2009 were the most read and commented on their site.

My assessment of the Wall Street banks, coming financial crisis and recession were accurate enough that I was being sought out by Glenn Beck on CNN, Neal Cavuto on Fox, and Maria Bartiromo on CNBC to be interviewed on their shows. I didn’t want that kind of attention, since it would likely have negatively impacted my day job – which actually supported my family.

I had already experienced negative blowback when I predicted the bankruptcy of General Growth Properties in one of my articles. It seems the CFO was a Wharton grad and large donor to the real estate department. He called the Dept. head, who called the Deputy Dean, who called my boss, the CFO. It was at this point where any mention of Wharton was forbidden on my part, or I risked being terminated.

The interesting part of the story was the General Growth CFO said none of my facts were incorrect and six months later General Growth Properties filed for bankruptcy. I sent a link of the announcement to my boss, who throughout his tenure defended my right to free speech whenever the Dean’s office received complaints about my articles. We had a good laugh about their bankruptcy.

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Conspiracy or Chaos?

CONSPIRACY OR CHAOS?

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening – Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.” – Alan Moore

Alan Moore, the renowned graphic novel writer, and author of the dystopian classic V for Vendetta, politically identifies as an anarchist. His view that all political states are an outgrowth of anarchy, with the biggest gang taking control and dictating how things will be run, is manifested in V for Vendetta. As an anarchist, you can understand why he is doubtful of conspiracy theories and an all-powerful entity controlling the world. He believes in a chaotic world competing gangs position themselves to gain power and control.

“We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation – that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice.”- Alan Moore

The Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta has been adopted by anarchist groups around the world, including: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, and the Occupy protestors. Moore’s positive view of the Occupy movement was based on his belief ordinary people had the right to reclaim what had been taken from them by criminal bankers. The initial impetus for the Occupy protests was the destruction of Main Street USA by Wall Street sociopaths, who not only escaped prosecution for their crimes, but were bailed out by the taxpayers they had pillaged and further enriched as captured politicians enabled them to get even bigger.

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Navigating Through the Storms

NAVIGATING THROUGH THE STORMS

Several weeks ago I had to drive west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to pick up my son after his sophomore year at Penn State. I’ve made this trip a dozen times over the last few years, since this is my second son attending Penn State, with a third starting in the Fall. It’s a tedious, boring, protracted, four hour trek through the rural countryside of the Keystone State. During these trips my mind wanders, making connections between the landscape and the pressing issues facing the world. I can’t help but get lost in my thoughts as the miles accumulate like dollars on the national debt clock.

More often than not I end up making the trip in the midst of bad weather. And this time was no different. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is a meandering, decades old, dangerous, mostly two lane highway for most of its 360 mile span. Large swaths of the decaying interstate are under construction, as the narrative about lack of infrastructure spending is proven false by visual proof along the highways and byways of America.

The real infrastructure crisis is below ground in urban shitholes where 100 year old water and sewer pipes fail on a regular basis, but bankrupt Democrat politicians divert their steadily declining tax revenues to bloated pensions of government lackeys. Infrastructure spending is only interesting to politicians if they can name it after themselves and have a ribbon cutting ceremony. Replacing water and sewer pipes before they explode isn’t sexy, so it won’t be done.

A winding two lane highway, with a speed limits of 70 mph, and jam-packed with 18 wheelers driven by sometimes sleepy and often aggressive truckers already leads to a pressure packed few hours. Add rain to the mixture and you ratchet up the blood pressure.

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Stupid is as Stupid Does

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

If you prefer fake news, fake data, and a fake narrative about an improving economy and stock market headed to 30,000, don’t read this fact based, reality check article. The level of stupidity engulfing the country has reached epic proportions, as the mainstream fake news networks flog bullshit Russian conspiracy stories, knowing at least 50% of the non-thinking iGadget distracted public believes anything they hear on the boob tube.

This stupendous degree of utter stupidity goes to a new level of idiocy when it comes to the stock market. The rigged fleecing machine known as Wall Street has gone into hyper-drive since futures dropped by 700 points on the night of Trump’s election. An already extremely overvalued market, as measured by every historically accurate valuation metric, soared by 4,000 points from that futures low – over 20% – to an all-time high. Despite dozens of warning signs and the experience of two 40% to 50% crashes in the last fifteen years, lemming like investors are confident the future is so bright they gotta wear shades.

The current bull market is the 2nd longest in history at 8 years. In March of 2009, the S&P 500 bottomed at a fitting level for Wall Street of 666. In a shocking coincidence, it bottomed on the same day Bernanke & Geithner forced the FASB to rollover like mangy dogs and stop enforcing mark to market accounting. Amazingly, when Wall Street banks, along with Fannie and Freddie, could value their toxic assets at whatever they chose, profits surged. The market is now 240% higher.

You have the second longest bull market in history, while stock market valuations, as measured by the Shiller PE ratio and every other historically accurate valuation method, are higher than 1929 and 2007, but the Wall Street hype machine and the business network shills adamantly declare this bull has years to go and thousands of points of upside.

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What Is the Deep State?

What Is the Deep State?

“… there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.

My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an ‘establishment.’

All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.”

Mike Lofgren, Anatomy of the Deep State

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Søren Kierkegaard

I do not think our time is all that different from those that have gone before it, insofar as the substance and types of our actions are concerned. Every age has its thieves and hypocrites, in high and low places.

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Civil War II–Fourth Turning Intensifying (Part 1)

CIVIL WAR II – FOURTH TURNING INTENSIFYING (PART I)

“History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe -1997

As we enter the final stretch of this vitriolic, deplorable, venomous, propaganda saturated, deceitful, rigged presidential election spectacle, it becomes painfully obvious this Fourth Turning is careening toward bloodshed, bedlam, confrontation, and civil war. The linear fixated establishment, who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the irredemables, are too blinded by their sociopathic, increasingly audacious subversion of the Constitution, to grasp the level of rage and disillusionment of a white working class that has been screwed over for decades.

As the Wall Street shysters frantically accelerate their embezzlement of what remains of middle class wealth, with the Fed and the corporate media propagandists as their wing-men, the country devolves into a corporate fascist state. The disposition of the nation grows dark like the sky before an approaching deadly blizzard. As passions boil over and violence portends, this Fourth Turning hastens towards a bloody decade ahead with an uncertain climax.

If you think this is just hyperbole, you either haven’t studied history or your cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias prevent you from seeing the unavoidable societal altering clashes, which occur like clockwork on an eighty year cycle, when the portents are right in front of your eyes. Historian Arnold Toynbee’s great war cycle that arise every 80 years or so, aligns perfectly with the Fourth Turninggenerational theory. Great wars occur when the generation that doesn’t remember the last catastrophic war ascends to leadership of the country.

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Why is the MSM Covering Up Recessionary Data?

WHY IS THE MSM COVERING UP RECESSIONARY DATA?

The Census Bureau put out their monthly retail sales report this morning. During good times, the MSM would be hailing the tremendous increases as proof the consumer was flush with cash and all was well with the economy. Considering 70% of our GDP is dependent upon consumer spending, you would think this data point would be pretty important in judging how well Americans are really doing.

It’s not perfect, because the issuance of debt to consumers to purchase autos, furniture, appliances and electronics can juice the retail sales numbers and create the false impression of strength. That’s what has been going on with auto sales for the last two years.

The retail sales figures have been propped up by the issuance of subprime auto loans to deadbeats, 7 year 0% interest loans to good credit customers, and an all-time high in leases (aka 3 year rentals). Despite this Fed induced auto loan scheme, retail sales have still been pitiful, as the average American has been left with stagnant wages, 0% interest on their minuscule savings, surging rent and home prices, and drastic increases in their healthcare costs due to Obamacare.

The retail sales for March, reported this morning, were disastrous and further confirmed a myriad of other economic indicators that the country is in recession. GDP for the first quarter will be negative. And this time they can’t blame it on snow in the winter. They have already doubly seasonally adjusted the figures, and they will still be negative. Retail sales in the first quarter were atrocious. It might make a critical thinking person question the establishment storyline of solid job growth being peddled by politicians and their MSM mouthpieces. If people had good paying jobs, they would be spending money.

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The Boomer Retirement Meme Is A Big Lie

THE BOOMER RETIREMENT MEME IS A BIG LIE

As the labor participation rate and employment to population ratio linger near three decade lows, the mouthpieces for the establishment continue to perpetuate the Big Lie this is solely due to the retirement of Boomers. It’s their storyline and they’ll stick to it, no matter what the facts show to be the truth. Even CNBC lackeys, government apparatchiks, and Ivy League educated Keynesian economists should be able to admit that people between the ages of 25 and 54 should be working, unless they are home raising children.

In the year 2000, at the height of the first Federal Reserve induced bubble, there were 120 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 54, with 78 million of them employed full-time. That equated to a 65% full-time employment rate. By the height of the second Federal Reserve induced bubble, there were 80 million full-time employed 25 to 54 year olds out of 126 million, a 63.5% employment rate. The full-time employment rate bottomed at 57% in 2010, and still lingers below 62% as we are at the height of a third Federal Reserve induced bubble.

Over the last 16 years the percentage of 25 to 54 full-time employed Americans has fallen from 65% to 62%. I guess people are retiring much younger, if you believe the MSM storyline. Over this same time period the total full-time employment to population ratio has fallen from 53% to 48.8%. The overall labor participation rate peaked in 2000 at 67.1% and stayed steady between 66% and 67% for the next eight years. But this disguised the ongoing decline in the participation rate of men.

In 1970, the labor participation rate of all men was 80%, while the participation rate of women was just below 43%.

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Feudalism Then & Now

FEUDALISM THEN & NOW

Pictorial Essay: Message to the Voting Cattle

Pictorial Essay: Message to the Voting Cattle

Our own awesome ‘wip’ posted this video in another thread, and asked me to listen to it. I did, and it’s freaking fabulous. I agree with about 95% of it. It explains as well as I’ve ever heard, why I say we should all vote for Candidate Nobody.

Here is the video:

Of course, not 1 in 20 will listen to a twenty-minute video, even here. So, I transcribed it. And, added some pictures for your viewing pleasure. You should be able to read it in under ten minutes. I did this for you curs and Trump-eteers. And, to send out to my brain dead friends and family, which are Legion.

============================================

You cannot begin to imagine in how many ways the world is the opposite of what you have been taught to believe.

You see the guy who sells drugs to willing customers so he can feed his family as the scum of the earth, while you see the hypocrite who gives away stolen money in the name of government, as a saint.

TAXATION THEFT

You see the guy who tries to avoid been robbed by the federal thugs as a crook and a tax cheat, but see as virtuous the politician who gives away the same stolen loot to people whom it does not belong.

every-51-seconds-there-is-a-marijuana-arrest

You see the cop as a good guy when he drags a man away from his friends and family and throws him in prison for ten years for smoking a leaf  [every 51 seconds in Amerika]. And you see anyone who defends himself from such barbaric fascism as the lowest form of life … a cop-killer. In reality, most drug dealers are more virtuous than any government social worker, and prostitutes have far less to be ashamed of than political whores, because they trade only with what’s rightfully theirs, and only with those who want to trade with them.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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