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It’s a Fourth Turning: What Did You Expect?

IT’S A FOURTH TURNING: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

What You Should Know About Getting Snowed In - CLC Lodging

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction…

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

Empire of Lies: Are ‘We the People’ Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?

“Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That’s you and me, folks, and it’s how the masters of the digital universe see us. And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc., but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.”—John Naughton, The Guardian

“Who needs direct repression,” asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?”

In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, “we the people” have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.

Call it doublespeak, call it hypocrisy, call it delusion, call it whatever you like, but the fact remains that while we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

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

Survey Find Americans’ Views on Free Speech is a Whole Bunch of Crazy


Survey Find Americans’ Views on Free Speech is a Whole Bunch of Crazy

The biggest thing this survey proves is that Orwellian double-speak is working.

If you are unfamiliar, doublespeak is a term from the novel 1984It is speech intentionally meant to confuse, or obscure reality.

What does free speech mean? What is hate speech? And what laws currently or should exist in regards to speaking freely?

The answers from Americans prove just how successful the media and politicians have been in making Americans less grounded than a satellite.

The powers that be have successfully confused and obscured any hint of rationality in beliefs. There seems to be little method and all madness. People simply make up their minds emotionally, instead of thinking critically. And that is how those in power like it.

When people behave emotionally, they are more easy to control. A rational belief would be something along the lines of Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

An irrational belief would be that anything that offends you should not be called free speech.

Those who believe the latter fail to understand that practically anything can be considered offensive to someone. Under those circumstances, politicians could limit any kind of critical speech, claiming it promotes violence, offends, or is hate speech.

Holding Two Contradictory beliefs

The survey found:

An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that “it would be hard to ban hate speech because people can’t agree what speech is hateful,” …

Yet a majority of Americans and a supermajority of African Americans believe that “society can prohibit hate speech and still protect free speech.” (To complicate matters, a quarter of Americans, 38 percent of African Americans, and 45 percent of Latinos erroneously believe it is already illegal to make a racist statement in public.)

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

Central Banks Are Out of Tricks

Central Banks Are Out of Tricks

Once the power to manage expectations has been lost, the central bank bag of tricks is empty.

No one knows precisely how and when the global unraveling will impact their corner of the planet, but we do know one thing with absolute certainty: central banks are out of tricks. 

Like all good conjurers, the major central banks will claim that their magical powers to inflate asset valuations and inspire the animal spirits of risk, borrowing and spending are unimpaired, but this time the audience knows the truth: their magic is threadbare and their trick-bag is empty.

Obfuscation and doublespeak are primary components of central bank magic.The magic is largely semantic: if the Federal Reserve claims it can restore the economy and the stock market with reverse repos and other financial legerdemain, the corporate media is always ready to repeat this dubious claim until it is accepted as self-evident.

The central bank magic is fundamentally a mind-trick of managing expectations. If the Fed (or other central bank) announces a quantitative easing or market-goosing program, punters buy assets anticipating the success of the bank’s program, effectively creating the very push higher the bank intended.

This rise draws in other traders, and the program is declared a success as the market generates a self-reinforcing logic: the market’s response is evidence the central bank’s program is a success, which then inspires more risk-on buying and further market gains.

Once a central bank program fails to generate a self-reinforcing rally, the mind-trick’s power is broken. Once expectations of a sustained rally are crushed by the failure of the rally to achieve virtuous-cycle lift-off, the magic no longer works: once traders take a wait and see stance rather than rush to place panic-buy orders, the initial rally soon fizzles, and the expectations of effortless gain are replaced by gnawing fear of more losses.

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

ClubOrlov: Defeat is Victory

ClubOrlov: Defeat is Victory.

On the wall of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth from his novel1984 there were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It occurred to me that these apply just a little bit too well to the way the Washington, DC establishment operates.

War certainly is peace: just look at how peaceful Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine have become thanks to their peacemaking efforts. The only departures from absolute peacefulness which might be taking place there have to do with the fact that there are some people still alive there. This should resolve itself on its own, especially in the Ukraine, where the people now face the prospect of surviving a cold winter without heat or electricity.

Freedom is indeed slavery: to enjoy their “freedom,” Americans spend most of their lives working off debt, be it a mortgage, medical debt incurred due to an illness, or student loans. Alternatively, they can also enjoy it by rotting in jail. They also work longer hours with less time off and worse benefits than in any other developed country, and their wages haven’t increased in two generations.

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

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