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These guys are just crazy enough to try it

In a January 12 post titled What Will The Aristocracy Try Next? I listed some manufactured crises that might further enrich the 1% at the expense of the rest of us. But our elites are a crafty bunch, and instead of a food shortage or cyber-attack, they’re apparently trying something more exotic: alien invasion.

Real or fake? If it’s real, and we’re in a shooting war with hyper-advanced visitors from a distant star, then there’s a decent chance that we’re done as a species (which we deserve if we’re really this stupid).

But regular people can’t do much about interstellar war, so let’s move that scenario to the back burner and focus on the much higher probability that the global deep state needs an excuse to cut interest rates back to zero and introduce central bank digital currencies, and thinks hostile aliens might be useful for quelling the unrest that spiking inflation would otherwise cause.

This is a scenario we can work with because it’s pretty much the question we were already trying to answer, i.e., how to protect our money and freedoms from a rapacious billionaire/political/corporate/military class that wants to take everything.

So … accelerate the prepping. Increase stacks of cash, gold, and silver, pay off more debt, expand the garden, and fill in the gaps in your arsenal (I’m shopping for a concealed carry pistol as this is written). An article about bug-out strategies is in the works here for next week.

As for stock market timing, one would think that the government saying “yep, we’re shooting extraterrestrials on sight” would ignite a tsunami of selling…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

While the Nation Fragments Socially, the Financial Aristocracy Rules Unimpeded

March 19, 2019

While the Nation Fragments Socially, the Financial Aristocracy Rules Unimpeded

America’s aristocracy is not formalized, and that’s the secret of its success.

If there is one central irony in American history, it is this: the citizenry that broke free of the chains of British Monarchy, the citizenry that reckoned everyone was equal before the law, the citizenry that vowed never to be ruled by an aristocracy that controlled the government and finance as a means of self-enrichment, is now so distracted by social fragmentation that the citizenry is blind to their servitude to a new and formidably informal financial aristocracy.

From this juncture, ironies abound: the so-called Socialist demands for Medicare for All, “free” college for all and Universal Basic Income (UBI) are encouraged (or perhaps orchestrated) by the financial aristocracy, which rakes in tens of billions of dollars in profits from its banking, healthcare, national defense and higher education cartels: throwing more trillions down the ratholes of Medicare and higher education will only further enrich and empower the financial elites.

As for Universal Basic Income (UBI), the financial aristocracy is cheering loudly for UBI, which would enable debt-serfs to keep servicing their debts. (Is anyone so naive to think that UBI won’t have a clause which enables the deduction of debt payments from the monthly “free money”? Does anyone think the financial aristocracy is going to give $1,000 a month to debt-serfs and then let them default on their debt? Get real!)

The demands for social justice, i.e. that everyone be allowed to be treated the same before the law and enjoy the same rights as other citizens, is a core tenet of American culture. Long before the Constitution was even ratified, the calls to end slavery were becoming louder.

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

The Experiment

March 9, 2019

The Experiment

How much longer will the middle class politely tolerate its own destruction?

A middle class that outnumbers the combined poor and aristocracy is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back to around 1900. The rise of the middle class was the result of Industrial Revolution capitalism. It has been one of the most significant and epochal developments in history, yet the intellectual reaction for the most part has been to either ignore it or treat it with disdain. Now the project to destroy the middle class is well under way, with unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences that promise to be just as epochal as its creation.

Intellectual condescension towards the middle class is so common it’s a cliché. What’s rare are attempts to go back in history and see things through the perspectives of that despised group and its progenitors, the poor.

In 1800, virtually everyone was poor, living under conditions of deprivation and grinding poverty. Even being wealthy was no picnic; present-day poverty-line Americans live better. Life expectancy was an estimated twenty-nine years. Farming, the occupation of most, was dangerous, backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk. Most of those so engaged eked out a tenuous subsistence. There was no electricity, no running water, primitive sanitation and health care, and none of the machinery, gadgets, and appliances we take for granted. Only a few wealthy poets who didn’t have to wrest a living from nature waxed euphoric about its “joys.”

As the nineteenth century progressed, primitive factories, mostly in cities, began producing goods of better quality, in more quantity, and at lower cost than had been possible by artisans handcrafting their wares. No doubt conditions in those factories were abysmal—long hours, pittance pay, child labor, dangerous and filthy conditions, and horrible accidents and injuries. All that has been well-chronicled and dramatized, but an important point gets overlooked.

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

The Biggest Threat to US National Security Is the US Government

October 8, 2018

The Biggest Threat to US National Security Is the US Government

A dictatorship does not represent the public but only the aristocracy that, behind the scenes, controls the government.

Jonathan H. Adler, Professor at Case Western University School of Law, noted, regarding George W. Bush’s secret policy for the NSA to access everyone’s phone-records, that “The metadata collection program is constitutional (at least according to Judge Kavanaugh),” and he presented Judge Kavanaugh’s entire published opinion on that. Kavanaugh’s opinion stated that the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution could be shoved aside because he thinks that the ‘national security’ of the United States is more important than the Constitution. Kavanaugh wrote:

The Government’s program for bulk collection of 2 telephony metadata serves a critically important special need – preventing terrorist attacks on the United States… In my view, that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program…

The Fourth Amendment allows governmental searches and seizures without individualized suspicion when the Government demonstrates a sufficient “special need” – that is, a need beyond the normal need for law enforcement – that outweighs the intrusion on individual liberty…

In sum, the Fourth Amendment does not bar the Government’s bulk collection of telephony metadata under this program.

Kavanaugh said that since the 4^th Amendment excludes only “unreasonable” searches and seizures (such as seizures of all of this private information from everyone), it doesn’t exclude the “bulk collection of 2 telephony metadata” (collection of both phone numbers in each phone conversation from and/or to anyone in the United States), because a “critical national security need [“preventing terrorist attacks on the United States”] outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”

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

U.S. — A ‘Democracy Where ‘Both’ Sides Represent ONLY the Aristocracy

September 20, 2018

U.S. — A ‘Democracy Where ‘Both’ Sides Represent ONLY the Aristocracy

The most comprehensive scientific study ever done of the subject has shown that America is ruled only by its few richest, not by the public. How can this be the case if its Government is run by two Parties — Democrats and Republicans? Those are merely competing factions within the aristocracy. America is a two-Party dictatorship. A dictatorship can have any number of parties. An aristocracy can have any number of factions.

The aristocracy are the country’s richest people, and they sometimes influence their government directly by their political donations, but usually they do it indirectly via their corporations — both the profit and the non-profit ones — which they control (and which lobby the government heavily, and which also advertise in the media and so control whatever media that the government and non-profits don’t control). During the prior, agrarian, era, when most property was land or “real property” instead of corporations, the richest people were formally titled as ‘nobles’, but the U.S. Constitution outlawed that, and so by now almost all aristocrats have only corporate titles (CEO, Chairman, Director, etc.), no official titles from the state (other than elected governmental positions, and the appointees of same).

Aristocrats are taught, from childhood, to compete fiercely against others of their class, but not with people ‘below’ them (who are always required simply to obey them). Duels between them, thus, were common — sometimes to the death. The aristocratic way is constant war, against everyone who resists them, even against their own peers, their competitors — sometimes to the death.

A typical example of such aristocratic control of a nation is occurring right now between America’s Republican Party aristocrats versus its Democratic Party aristocrats, and this contest concerns whether or not to impeach and replace the current Republican President of the United States, Donald Trump, by his Republican Vice President Mike Pence.

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

Why America Is a Dictatorship

September 13, 2018

Why America Is a Dictatorship

America is a country in which dollars count far more than voters do, and that’s what all of the data shows. And that’s a dictatorship by the richest.

This kind of country, this kind of country, and this kind of country, get this kind of President. And the rulers blame it on the public, instead of on the billionaires, the actual rulers themselves (the behind-the-scenes rulers). These rulers selected the politicians and offered those to the public to select from in ‘elections’ — and they then blame the public for the choices that the public make, from amongst these bad final options that the aristocracy has provided to them.

Billionaires despise the public, and have no intention of allowing the public to have better leaders than this — but they allow the public to have only leaders who serve their bosses, namely, those billionaires themselves.

Any teacher who says otherwise is simply contradicting the data. The data are clear on this: America is a dictatorship by the few richest under 1%, over the many more than 99%, who are commonly called “the public.” It’s an aristocracy, and it’s run like one. The public’s loyalty to this dictatorship — to this aristocracy or rule-by-the-richest — is retained by the deceit of calling the public “citizens,” instead of “subjects” (like in the bad ‘good old days’), but the reality now is that they’re subjects, not citizens.

Citizens exist only in an authentic democracy. Subjects are merely the people against whom the aristocracy’s laws are imposed. Subjects are not citizens. The aristocracy’s media spin them as being “citizens” in a “democracy.” Almost all of the public are fooled by that lie.

Like former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has said of today’s America (with such honesty so that none of the major ‘news’ media reported it):

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

How Democracy Ended

May 20, 2018

How Democracy Ended

What killed democracy was constant lying to the public, by politicians whose only way to win national public office is to represent the interests of the super-rich at the same time as the given politician publicly promises to represent the interests of the public — “and may the better liar win!” — it’s a lying-contest. When democracy degenerates into that, it becomes dictatorship by the richest, the people who can fund the most lying. Such a government is an aristocracy, no democracy at all, because the aristocracy rule, the public don’t. It’s the type of government that the French Revolution was against and overthrew; and it’s the type of government that the American Revolution was against and overthrew; but it has been restored in both countries.

First here will be discussed France:

On 7 May 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected President of France with 66.1% of the vote, compared to Marine Le Pen’s 33.9%. That was the second round of voting; the first round had been: Macron 24.0%, Le Pen 21.3% Fillon 20.0%, Melenchon 19.6%, and others 15%; so, the only clear dominator in that 11-candidate contest was Macron, who, in the second round, turned out to have been the second choice of most of the voters for the other candidates. Thus, whereas Le Pen rose from 21.3% to 33.9% in the second round (a 59% increase in her percentage of the vote), Macron rose from 24.0% to 66.1% in the second round (a 275% increase in his percentage of the vote). In other words: Macron didn’t just barely win the Presidency, but he clearly dominated both rounds; it was never at all close. But once in office he very quickly disappointed the French public:

On 11 August 2017, Le Figaro bannered (as autotranslated by Google Chrome) “A hundred days later, Macron confronted with the skepticism of the French”, and reported that 36% were “satisfied” and 64% were “dissatisfied” with the new President.

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

The Aristocratic Illusion

January 18, 2018

The Aristocratic Illusion

They’re not as smart as they think they are.

If you draw your sustenance from the government—as an employee, contractor, or beneficiary of redistributed funds—the money you receive comes from someone who had no choice whether or not you got paid. Except for those jobs the government mandates, private sector workers’ compensation comes from employers who have freely chosen to pay it. The jobs they perform are worth more to their employers than what they’re paid, or the jobs wouldn’t exist.

Here’s a new definition of aristocrat: a person legally entitled to take money from other people without their consent. This definition focuses on what aristocrats do and have done throughout the centuries, regardless of their labels.

If you’re an aristocrat, the thought that you’re living on somebody else’s dime may cause psychological stress. All sorts of rationales have been concocted to justify this privileged position. The most straightforward is the protection racket. In exchange for their subjects’ money, aristocrats protect them from external invasion and preserve domestic order. It’s not a voluntary trade—the subjects can’t say no—but at least both sides get something from it.

However, “protection racket” doesn’t have quite the moral gloss aristocrats crave. Deities may not have been an aristocratic invention, but they jumped on the concept of divine favor to justify their position. It makes it harder to oppose the rulers if authority is bestowed by the gods or the government is a theocracy. Ultimately, regardless of rationale, the ideology always come down to: The aristocracy is superior to those they rule. The aristocrats have no trouble believing it; they have to psychologically justify their positions to themselves. The trick is to get the subjects to buy in.

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

The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

November 24, 2017

The Public Are All Alone: Understanding How the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

In political matters, the public are taught to believe that some political Party is ‘good’, and that the others are “bad”; but the reality in recent times, at least in the United States, has instead been that both Parties are rotten to the core (as will be clear from the linked documentation provided here).

Belief in this myth (that the opposition between Parties is between ‘good’ ‘friend’ versus ‘bad’ ‘enemy’) is based upon the common adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” One side is believed, and ones that contradict it are disbelieved — considered to be lying, distorting: bad. But, maybe, both (or all) Parties are deceiving; maybe all of them are enemies of the public, but just in different ways; maybe each of them is trying to control the country in the interests of (and so to obtain the most financial support from) the aristocracy, while all of them are actually against the public.

Can it really be false that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Not only can be, but often is. And no one is able to vote intelligently without recognizing this fundamental political fact.

It’s true between entire nations, too — not only within nations.

For example: Hitler and Stalin were enemies of each other, but neither of them was a friend of America (except that Stalin did more than anyone else to defeat Hitler, and thereby saved the world, though the U.S. — far less a factor than the U.S.S.R. was in defeating Hitler — still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Stalin did more than anyone else did to prevent the entire world’s becoming dictatorships; so, whatever democracy exists today, is a result of that dictator, Stalin, even more than it’s a result of either FDR or Churchill).

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

How the US Aristocracy Deceive the US Public

October 31, 2017

How the US Aristocracy Deceive the US Public

The progressive former Democratic US Senator Ted Kaufman wrote at Forbes, on 22 July 2014:

Another year has passed with no one from a Wall Street bank going to jail for the criminal behavior everyone knows helped cause the financial crisis. Fines against Wall Street banks are reaching $100 billion, but all will be paid by stockholders. Bank CEOs and managers pay no fines and face no prison.

There has been no reform — zilch, nada — of the credit-rating agencies. They are right back rating securities from issuers who pay them for their ratings.

If you still can’t trust the credit-rating on a bond, and if Wall Street’s bigs still stand immune from the law even after the 2008 crash they had played a huge role to cause, then in what way can the US Government itself be called a ‘democracy’?

Kaufman tries to get the American public interested in overcoming the US Government’s profound top-level corruption, but few US politicians join with him on that, because only few American voters understand that a corrupt government (especially one that’s corrupt at the very top) cannot even possibly be a democratic government.

However, America’s aristocracy are even more corrupt than Wall Street itself is, and they control Wall Street, behind the scenes. And their ‘news’media are under strict control to portray America as being still a democratic country that somehow lives up to its anti-aristocratic and anti-imperialistic Founders’ intentions and Constitution. Maybe all that remains of those Founders’ intentions today is that Britain’s aristocracy no longer rules America — but America’s aristocracy now does, instead. And, this isn’t much, if any, of an improvement.

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

Upon The Next Crisis, The Rules Will Suddenly Change

September 29, 2017

Upon The Next Crisis, The Rules Will Suddenly Change

For the benefit of the elites; not the rest of us

We can add a third certainty to the two standard ones (death and taxes): The rules will suddenly change when a financial crisis strikes.

Why is this a certainty? The answer is complex, as it draws on human nature, politics and the structure of societies/economies ruled by centralized states (governments).

The Core Imperative of the State: Expand Control

As I explain in my book, Resistance, Revolution, Liberation, the core (i.e. ontological) imperative of every central state is to expand its reach and control. This isn’t just the result of individuals within the state seeking more power; every centralized state views whatever is outside its control as a threat. The way to reduce or neutralize a threat is to take control of the mechanisms that generated it.

Once the state has gained control of these mechanisms, it is loath to relinquish them; to relinquish control is to invite chaos.

There is of course an intensely self-serving dynamic to extending state control: those being paid to enforce this state control have an immense vested interest in the state retaining (or even extending) this control, as their livelihoods now depend on the state doing so.

The higher-ups in the state also have a vested interest in retaining these new controls, as more control means more wealth and power accrue to those at the top of the centralized power pyramid: this extension of state control means private enterprise must now lobby the state for favors, and it gives the higher-ups more perquisites and favors to dispense—for a price, of course.

This vested interest arises throughout the power pyramid, from the bottom functionary with newfound power over common citizens to the managers of the departmental bureaucracy tasked with enforcing the new control to the apex of state authority.

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

What America’s Aristocracy Want

September 10, 2017

What America’s Aristocracy Want

The American aristocracy want inequality of rights, with two basic polar-opposite classes: the ‘elite’, with themselves at the top of everything, and everybody else below them, as subjects to be ruled by them, in such ways as they (themselves, and their fellow ‘elite’) can agree to do. They are convinced that they have earned their high status, in one way or another, and they compete ferociously amongst themselves, to rise even higher within the aristocracy.

Many of the aristocrats think that they are ‘elite’ because they are the richest; many think instead that the ‘elite’ are the smartest or the most cunning; and, a third group think that the ‘elite’ are the «well-born» who descended from ’superior’ people — they believe in an inherited elitist version of Hitler’s generic racist vision, of the ‘Aryans’ versus the ‘non-Aryans’. Instead of being such racists, however, this third category are simply classists, who define their aristocratic rights as being inherited from their ancestors — so, they’re similar to racists, insofar as they are obsessed with genealogy (like racists are), but their obsession is focused instead upon their own family, not upon any «race» at all. They ‘come from the right family’, not from ‘the right race’. This third type of aristocrat believe in inherited rights and obligations. They believe that they possess an inherited right to control the public — the non-aristocrats (the ‘lower class’).

In whichever of the three ways that a member of the ‘elite’ might happen to see ‘the elite’ as being constituted, they all agree together, that an ‘elite’, which includes themselves, should rule (and should have more rights than) the ruled, and that everyone else (the public) should obey, or else be punished for not doing ‘their duty’ to obey, their ‘superiors’.

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

Aristocracy Deceives Public about the Deep State

March 5, 2017

Aristocracy Deceives Public about the Deep State

The «deep state» is the aristocracy and its agents. Wikispooks defines it as follows:

The deep state (loosely synonymous with the shadow government or permanent government) is in contrast to the public structures which appear to be directing individual nation states. The deep state is an intensely secretive, informal, fluid network of deep politicians who conspire to amplify their influence over national governments through a variety of deep state milieux. The term «deep state» derives from the Turkish »derin devlet», which emerged after the 1996 Susurluk incident so dramatically unmasked the Turkish deep state.

Their article is so honest that it continues from there, directly to:

Official Narrative

The official narrative of deep states used to be that they simply do not exist. This position was modified in the last few years to the claim that they don’t exist here. In 2013 the New York Times defined the deep state as «a hard-to-perceive level of government or super-control that exists regardless of elections and that may thwart popular movements or radical change. Some have said that Egypt is being manipulated by its deep state». [1] Since the Times (like the rest of the commercially-controlled media) is more or less a under the control of the deep state, such a mention is very interesting.

However, one of the deep state’s many agents, Marc Ambinder, came out with a book in 2013, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, much praised by others of the deep state’s agents, such as Martha Raddatz, Jeremy Scahill, and Peter Bergen; and it pretends that the ‘deep state’ is only within the official government, not above it and controlling it — not what has been called by some «the money power,» and by others «the aristocracy» (or the «oligarchy» as it was termed — though even that, only indirectly — by the only people who have scientifically established that it exists in America and controls this country: to acknowledge publicly that the U.S. is controlled by an «aristocracy» is prohibited in scholarly publications; it’s too ‘radical’ a truth to allow in print; it is samizdat).

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

America’s Vampire Aristocracy

January 3, 2016

America’s Vampire Aristocracy

On January 2nd, America’s NBC News bannered “Arab Spring Cleric Nimr al-Nimr Among 47 Executed by Saudi Arabia,” and, one-third of the way into their report, showed this tweet:

“Saudi execution of Nimr al-Nimr along w/ al Qaeda members is straight from Assad’s playbook – lumping nonviolent activists with terrorists.

— DavidKenner (@DavidKenner) January 2, 2016”

Even when Sunni-Islamic extremists, the Sauds, perpetrate mass-murder, in Saudi Arabia and not only in Yemen and in Syria, the U.S. ‘news’ media find some way to smear their audience’s minds with the demon, “Bashar al-Assad,” as if Assad actually had anything to do with it, and the King of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, had nothing to do with it. Salman, who owns Saudi Arabia and everyone in it (and who even allows outright slavery there), wasn’t so much as mentioned by the NBC ‘News’ ‘reporter’ or propagandist. (Assad was mentioned in that ‘news’ report only because Assad allies with the U.S. aristocracy’s super-demon, Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia, who refuses to do the U.S. aristocracy’s bidding, such as his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, much praised by the U.S. aristocracy, had done.)

America’s main ally, and the largest customer for American-made weapons, the royal family that owns and runs Saudi Arabia, had just started out a new year of mass-executions, after their near-record year of 2015: the AP headlined only the day before, on New Year’s Day, “Saudi Beheadings Soar in 2015,” and reported that, “Saudi Arabia carried out at least 157 executions in 2015, with beheadings reaching their highest level in the kingdom in two decades, according to several advocacy groups that monitor the death penalty worldwide.” (King Salman wasn’t mentioned in that one, either.)

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

The Real Trouble Begins When Rising Inequality Splinters the Elites

October 22, 2015

The Real Trouble Begins When Rising Inequality Splinters the Elites

If others in our class are still rising while we’re stagnating, we sense a great disturbance in the financial and political Force.

Rising economic inequality tends to generate political instability for all the obvious reasons: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the rich say let them eat brioche and next thing you know, the ungrateful wretches are tearing down the Bastille and a youthful army officer has to restore order with a whiff of grapeshot. After which he launches a war of conquest that kills hundreds of thousands and bankrupts nations.

So yes, economic inequality can generate quite a spot of bother.

Historian Peter Turchin identified “the degree of solidarity felt between the commons and aristocracy,” the sense of purpose and identity shared by the top, middle and bottom of the wealth/power pyramid, as a key ingredient of social unity and political stability.

One measure of this unity of purpose and identity is the degree of inequality between commoners (the lower 90% of American households by wealth/income), the top 10% professional/technocrat class that owns 74% of the wealth and pays almost 80% of the federal income taxes, and the Power Elite aristocracy (the top .1%).

Turchin discusses instability and wealth inequality in his well-researched book War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires.

History supports two narratives of rising inequality leading to social disintegration and political instability: one is inequality between the top classes and everyone else, and the the other is rising inequality within the top classes.

When the pie starts shrinking and there aren’t enough slices to satisfy the rising expectations of the top class, the elites splinter in profound political disunity. In other words, when the offspring of the top 10% earn MBAs from respected universities and can only find internships, their parents become extremely dissatisfied with the status quo.

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

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