Home » Posts tagged 'history'

Tag Archives: history

All fiat currencies are no more than floating abstractions of value. Society has put its faith in fiat currency issued by governments. These government-issued currencies are not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver, but rather by the promises from the government that issued it. A difficult question investors today face is determining which assets will appreciate most thus rising in value and which form to hold their wealth.The value of fiat money is derived from supply and demand and the stability of the government that issues it. Over the years many promises have been made that simply cannot or will not be honored. History and many real-life examples exist that indicate that promises are easier to make than keep.

It is very possible in the near future we may see a strong bifurcation of the financial system. The Hard Asset Inflation / Paper Asset Deflation Theory laid out below is based on the idea that as wealthy individuals begin to realize the fragility of the current financial system they will shift their investment preferences to items of substance.

This repositioning of wealth in assets could occur rather rapidly during a period of inflation. If such a revamping of how the wealthy invest takes place it could drastically add to any inflationary trends. In short, some investments would fall like a stone while others soar. Imagine real estate doubling in value while pensions are cut and stocks falter. This dovetails with my theory t he Fed should be ecstatic so many people have been willing to invest in intangible assets because it has helped to minimize inflation.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Our Predicament Re-stated

July 24, 2023

Our Predicament Re-stated

There is a meme doing the rounds on social media… a picture of a vegetable patch, captioned “the time is coming when only those who know how to grow food will survive.” The idea being that, as our complex civilisation breaks down, we will be forced to return to a far simpler economy, where most people revert to roles within agriculture and food production. As with most memes, it functions as a thought-stopper… one which hides the obvious reality – backed by millennia of experience – that, in fact, “it will be the people who know how to force others to grow food,” who will be the real winners in the post-industrial economy.

At a deeper level though, the meme is an example of the way we delude ourselves into believing that a positive version of collapse – usually in the form of managed de-growth – is possible, and that those promoting such a view will be the ones who inherit whatever benefits it offers. History says otherwise, of course. Life in pre-industrial civilisations was mostly short, brutal, and often marred with chronic pain. The best most people could hope for was life in an institutional version of slavery, where at least serfdom laid some nominal responsibilities on the clergy and the nobility who ruled over them. And again, it was those with the wherewithal to protect and/or steal food by force who got to rule and to enjoy the few luxuries on offer.

Not that most of those promoting some version of the “green” techno-psychotic vision of a future of wind turbines and electric cars are likely to fare any better. Sure, the WEF neofascists and their politician acolytes are currently making a play to cling on to power as industrial civilisation collapses…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Who Will Save Us From Ourselves?

January 9, 2023

Who Will Save Us From Ourselves?

We have the capacity to learn from previous civilization’s errors–rising inequality, hubris, over-reach, decay of production and trade, parasitic elites, and so on–yet we go right ahead and repeat those same errors.

After listening to my explanation of the many cycles human civilizations track first to glory and then to decay, podcast host Tommy Carrigan asked a key question: why don’t we stop ourselves from self-destructing? Tommy and I had a free-range conversation on this and related topics (plus a lot of laughs) that you can listen to here: UFOs & Cycles of Humanity (1:36 hrs)

What explains our inability to learn from history and take corrective actions by maintaining the dynamics of adaptive advances? (Transparent governance, the sharing of knowledge, incentivizing trade and enterprise, competition, stable money, rule of law / fairness, social mobility and limits on elites’ plundering / exploitation.)

Why do we allow the decay, over-reach, greed, hubris, institutional sclerosis and parasitic elites that lead to collapse gain the upper hand time and again? Why do we not act on what can be learned from history?

For those of us steeped in science fiction and the study of AI, this question inevitably leads to discussions of the potential immutability of historic cycles (Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which posited that cycles could not be annulled but the decay/collapse phase could be reduced in duration), the deus ex machina of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations and the potential of super-intelligent AI to save us from ourselves.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

By wis.dom project: Regress in Progress: Who is responsible?

July 22, 2022

By wis.dom project: Regress in Progress: Who is responsible?

This is an essay from reader wis.dom project who describes his painful personal journey of connecting dots to achieve awareness of our overshoot predicament.

I was born in 1969, at a time when everything still seemed possible. On July 20, two people walked on the moon, which is probably the greatest technological achievement of man to this day. In my youth, I devoured novels by Asimov, Clarke, Lem, Dick and Herbert. The galaxy’s colonization seemed within reach.

45 years later, I realized that I was a victim of mass hypnosis, what I refer to today as techno-utopia – a belief in the limitless human development, genius and almost divine uniqueness of Homo Sapiens. I realized that industrial civilization, like any other dissipative structure, is doomed to inevitable collapse.

In 1972 – 3 years after my birth, a book titled The Limits to Growth was released by the Club of Rome. It was the first scientifically compiled report analyzing future scenarios for humanity. It indicated that unlimited development is not possible on a finite planet. The book was published in 30 million copies and was one of the most popular at the time. Surprisingly, despite the wide range of my readings, the book did not appear on my horizon for a long time. As if it was covered by another intellectual “Säuberung”. In fact, it was the subject of an intellectual blitzkrieg and relatively quickly evaporated from the media circulation. I experienced this myself by talking to several university professors. Every one of them dismissed the LtG concept with a shrug and an unequivocal, non-debatable conclusion that the theory had long been discredited.

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

The Age of Discord

June 27, 2022

The Age of Discord

It’s very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.

Today’s topic echoes Peter Turchin’s 2016 book, Ages of Discord, which I have often referenced in blog posts.

I’ll also discuss two other books I’ve often referenced, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker and The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fischer.

Turchin proposes repeating cycles of history of social integration (people finding reasons to cooperate) and disintegration (people finding reasons to not cooperate).

Clearly, we’re in a disintegrative stage.

Fischer proposed a repeating cycle of history in which humans expand their numbers and economy to consume all available resources.

Once all the low-hanging fruit has been consumed, scarcities arise, pushing prices above what commoners can afford, and the result is economic stagnation and social/political revolution.

Either humans exploit a new energy source at scale to provide for the larger population and higher consumption per person, or the population and consumption decline to fit available resources.

Parker covers the mutually reinforcing climate, political, social and economic crises of the 17th century. A long cycle of cold, wet summers reduced crop yields, leading to hunger and strife.

Parker also identifies another cause of the tumultuous, war-plagued 1600s: political leaders had consolidated too much power, enabling them to pursue disastrous wars without any restraint from competing domestic social-political interests.

Clearly, we’re in Fischer’s stage of overshoot and resource scarcity and Parker’s extremes of centralized power free to pursue catastrophic wars of choice.

In the 1600s, those launching wars reckoned a clean, decisive victory was within easy reach. In every case, the wars dragged on inconclusively or generated even wider conflicts.

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

Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

June 11, 2022

Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

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

Dawn of Everything Conclusion

May 5, 2022

Dawn of Everything Conclusion

Preface. Clearly for their conclusion to make sense you’ll need to read the book and see the evidence for yourself. Since they challenge just about all of the ideas currently in fashion, you can find some pretty damning reviews of their book, but do not believe them, the several I’ve read entirely misstate what was actually written, the old straw man fallacy of inventing something that they didn’t say and shooting it down. And their attitude is not at all “we’re right, you’re wrong”, no, quite the opposite. They’re hoping to stir up fruitful avenues of inquiry, different and more meaningful ways of looking at the past, and my hope is that rather than try to invent a steady state / degrowth economy, that ecologists will team up with experts in anthropology and archeology to discuss the best sustainable ways of life from the past, how to avoid authoritarian kings, brutal agricultural societies, and more.

Here is part of their summary, and at greater length below (though they are constantly summarizing arguments throughout the book, another reason you need to actually read it).

“In trying to synthesize what we’ve learned over the last 30 years, we asked question such as “what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 years in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others?

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

The Great Economic Destruction & COMPLEXITY

March 11, 2022

The Great Economic Destruction & COMPLEXITY

COMMENT #1: OK Marty, it is now becoming obvious that not only Trump reads your stuff but so does Obama. Trump bought a $19 million remote island and Obama bought one for $15 million. This is not a coincidence. Your war cycle goes nuts next year and we have the worst crop of world leaders pushing us into oblivion. I think it’s to fess up to all the elites who are your clients.

COMMENT #2: I remember you said you don’t know how Socrates does it. Are you any closer to finding out how it is actually predicting events? Do you think it is connecting to a different dimension/realm? everything is possible!
All the best
M

ANSWER: Neither Trump nor Obama subscribe to our services, at least under their own name. Just about every government is tapping into our forecasts because the computer has called just about everything in my life to my own amazement. They held me in contempt and desperately tried to have me build it for them. I said we would run whatever study they wanted, but the CIA simply reply that they had to own it. It took many years for me to stand up against that, for it would have deprived my main objective to show that there may be a better way to manage society — living with the cycle instead of trying to suppress it. Fed Chairman Arthur Burns concluded that all the battles trying to defeat the business cycle always failed because of COMPLEXITY.

I believe that the success of Socrates is based upon COMPLEXITY that we as humans cannot fully comprehend, no less see. I believe the world economy is much like a rainforest where there are countless species of insects, animals, plant life, and different components of soil…

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

Watching the End of the World

February 3, 2022

Watching the End of the World

How to keep gasoline prices low by bombing your gas station

January 10, 2022

How to keep gasoline prices low by bombing your gas station

An Italian fighter plane (note the “fasci” symbols on the wings) shot down in England in November 1940 during the bombing campaign mounted by the Italian Air Force during WW2 (source). Sending obsolete biplanes with open cockpits against the modern British Spitfires is one of the most glaring examples of military incompetence in history. Among other things, this old tragedy may give us hints about the current situation in the world and, in particular, why the consumers of fossil fuels tend to bomb their suppliers.

Not everyone in Europe has understood exactly what is happening with gas prices, yet, but the consequences could be heavy. For a brief moment, prices rose of a factor ten over what was considered as “normal.” Then, prices subsided, but still remain way higher than before. That is directly reflected on electricity prices and that is not only traumatic for consumers, but also on the competitivity of the European industry.So, what’s happening? As usual, interpretations are flying free in the memesphere: those evil Russians, the conspiracy of the Americans, it is all a fault of those ugly Greens who don’t want nuclear energy, the financial lobby conspiring against the people, etcetera.

Let me try an approach a little different. Let me compare the current situation with that of the 1930s in Europe. Back then, fossil fuels were already fundamental for the functioning of the economy, but coal was the truly critical resource: not for nothing it was called “King Coal.”

The coal revolution had started to appear in Europe in the 19th century. Those countries that had large coal reserves England, Germany, and France, could start their industrial revolution…

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

Young People Turn To Collectivism Because Of These Psychological Disparities

December 10, 2021

Young People Turn To Collectivism Because Of These Psychological Disparities

Are Americans changing with the times, are the times changing with Americans, or, has nothing really changed at all in the past century?

Before we dive into this discussion it’s important to understand one thing above all else – There is nothing new under the sun. Every “new” political movement or cultural upheaval has happened a thousand times or more in the past. Every “new” form of governance is just a rehashed version of a system that came before it. Every “new” economic structure is one of a handful of preexisting and ever repeating trade methodologies. Every “new” revolution and rebellion is a fight for the same basic goals against the same persistent foes that have always existed since the dawn of civilization. All of human history can be condensed down to a few fundamental and irreconcilable differences, desires, values and ambitions.

This cycle of events is a kind of historical furnace where people and nations are forged. Most go through life without any inkling of the whirlwind; they think the things happening to them are unique and unprecedented. Maybe if human beings lived longer lives they would realize how common such conflicts are and view the repetition with less panic.

The so called “disenfranchised” feel overwhelmed by the tides and completely devoid of any influence over the future. Then there are those that have the ability to see the story unfold. There are those that try to control it and use it to their advantage. There are those that are trying desperately to escape it, even at the cost of reason and sanity. And, there are those that take truly individual action and make history rather than simply being caught up in it.

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

The Next European War

November 3, 2021

The Next European War

The notion that history has nothing to teach us is one of the most pervasive beliefs in modern industrial society. It’s also one of the most misguided. Sure, we’ve got all these shiny new technological trinkets, and we love to insist to ourselves that this means we’re constantly breaking new ground and going where no previous society has ever gone before. Clinging to that fond delusion, we keep on making mistakes that were already old when bronze swords were high tech, and flailing helplessly when the usual consequences yet again land on top of us.

The shambolic end of the US occupation of Afghanistan earlier this autumn is a case in point. The self-satisfied gooberocracy that runs the United States these days talked itself into believing that the hard-earned lessons of the Vietnam war didn’t matter any more, and sent American soldiers blundering into a country that earned the name “the graveyard of empires” long before the United States was a twinkle in Ben Franklin’s eye. It wasn’t just Vietnam that the slackjawed warlords of Washington ignored, of course. The Russians had their own messy experiences in Aghanistan, so did the British, so did half a dozen great Asian empires, and so did Alexander the Great. None of that made any difference, because the political class in the US had convinced itself that the past didn’t matter.

Back when the invasion first happened, wags suggested that “Kabul” is how you pronounce “Saigon” in Pashto, and of course they were quite right. Having refused to learn from their history, four US administrations duly repeated it, right down to the humiliating final scenes of helicopters on rooftops and victorious insurgents parading with captured US military hardware…

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

Here’s Why Modern Unbacked Money Derives Value from Gold

October 14, 2021

Here’s Why Modern Unbacked Money Derives Value from Gold

Here Is Why Modern Unbacked Money Derives Value from Gold

Photo by Giorgio Trovato

This week, Your News to Know rounds up the latest top stories involving gold and the overall economy. Stories include: The value behind money, why gold’s price has grudgingly responded to recent market turmoil and what higher energy prices mean for gold and silver.

Money has value, but not because the government says so

In an analysis on Eurasia Review, Frank Shostak goes in-depth in an attempt to answer the question: why does money have value? Opposing the views that the value of money is there because of government reassurances or social conventions, Shostak instead takes a look at history in order to avoid circular pitfalls.

Doing so tells us that money is a byproduct of a bid for convenience, a result of people wanting greater prosperity and better market exchange. In their quest to obtain both, they would put every commodity through a form of trial, and the one that ended up being the most commonly and widely accepted became money.

We now know that that commodity is gold. Even silver or bronze coins served primarily as a form of IOU for gold, although this IOU was far more grounded and sensible than any fiat today. Shostak likewise asserts that central banks were established to prevent market manipulation and monopolization by private banks, which wouldn’t hesitate to print out more gold IOUs than they could cover. (As we’ve seen all too often.)

Yet now, long after these early makings of modern finance, we find that little has changed. Private banks are making monopolies all the same, and despite a gold standard being nowhere in sight, much of their profits come from trading gold IOUs that can’t and won’t be covered by physical gold. That is why the Basel agreement was passed, and why most agree it will only be partially implemented so as to not collapse the global economy.

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

A Hinge Moment of History

September 20, 2021

A Hinge Moment of History

I have lived in countries that have real domestic terrorism movements…. No country blessed enough not to have a domestic terrorism movement should be inventing one.
We are living in a blizzard of lies.
[W]e are more dependent on a handful of woke billionaires to tell us what reality is. They are far more open than ever that they get to determine what are the agreed facts. Google made an explicit announcement about this recently. They said that sometimes they would put warnings on things that are factually accurate because, even though they are true, they do not think it is in society’s interest for people to be seeing it.
[N]ow you will be banned or deleted or blocked or silenced simply for disagreeing with the official version of events. For example, the Great Barrington declaration, which was written by three of the most prominent epidemiologists in the world from Harvard, Oxford, and I think it was Stanford. That was basically deleted from YouTube, banned from Facebook, simply because it contradicted the WHO, CDC official version of events.
It is just groupthink enforced by a cabal of woke billionaires, who have more power than anyone else on the planet.
The other thing that emerged during this year very quickly is that we are at a hinge moment of history. We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.
American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China.

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

History Warns – All Governments are the Same!

August 30, 2021

History Warns – All Governments are the Same!

A man pawns himself off as a baby Kangaroo’s mother. Politicians have LEARNED that they too can pretend that they are your parent and are solely interested in taking care of you when their objective is really raw power.

Government presents itself as if it truly cares about “We the People” when behind closed doors it has nothing but contempt for the people, who they view as easily manipulated and too stupid to know what is best for them.

Everything they do is couched as pretending to protect society when they have no respect for the people or our liberty.

Fauci even said he does not concern himself with the loss of our liberty. Yet, these same people will send us off to war pretending it is to preserve our way of life.

Not only has Snowden exposed that they have collected a dossier on every single person just in case they need to look at your life, but they spy on everything we do, say, or even think. Our government is following the very same path as the most notorious Communist Secret Police in Germany — the Stazi. They are collecting data on everyone. As Amnesty International reported, the Stasi’s massive archive held files on millions.

Once more, we have the government telling us to report family members to the government.

History Repeats Because the Passions of Man Never Change – All governments act the same.

Tag Archives: history

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts