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All Will Be Fine!

September 27, 2022

You all know this feeling running under the title ‘this cannot happen to me’. During normal times it does have a certain usefulness to it, protecting one from falling into panic and overreacting all sorts of possible problems. It also makes life look smooth and easy by making one believe that someone somewhere will take care of things, so one can continue with Business As Usual forever. ‘The sky is not falling — it didn’t fall last time either — so all you Chicken Littles just shut up and get back to work.’

Needless to say, this feeling has devastating effects in face of a real disaster — be it a car accident, a natural disaster, or a stock market crash for that matter. Thomas E Drabek, author of the book Human system responses to disaster: an inventory of sociological findings (1986) coined the term for this phenomenon and called it normalcy bias. It is one of many cognitive biases, which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. According to its definition (with my emphasis added):

Normalcy bias is a psychological state of denial people enter in the event of a disaster, as a result of which they underestimate the possibility of the disaster actually happening, and its effects on their life and property. Their denial is based on the assumption that if the disaster has not occurred until now, it will never occur.

Sounds familiar? If not, Wikipedia cites a number of examples:

As for events in world history, the normalcy bias can explain why, when the volcano Vesuvius erupted, the residents of Pompeii watched for hours without evacuating. It can explain why thousands of people refused to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached and why at least 70% of 9/11 survivors spoke with others before leaving…

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

The Preparedness Community’s Dangerous Failure of Imagination

August 18, 2020

The Preparedness Community’s Dangerous Failure of Imagination

In Northern regions of an unstable country, a battle broke out yesterday in the streets of a small city. Meanwhile, in the Southeastern corridor, protesters continue to clash over control of a monument, and in the North West, rebels have been battling local authorities for control of the Capitol for 80 days. One city in the central part of the nation has isolated itself by raising drawbridges in an effort to quell the violence and destruction of ongoing riots. After a massive crime spreehe largest city in the nation looks like the setting of a dystopian movie.

The formerly prosperous nation has been rocked by disease, authoritarian measures, police corruption, and economic catastrophe throughout the summer. A hotly contested presidential race is spurring further division, and the level of violence is expected to increase as election day approaches.

It sounds like coverage of some distant, war-torn country. I remember when I was in college hearing daily coverage of the situation in Sarajevo and it sounded so far away that at some point, I stopped paying attention.

But now the war-torn country is ours.

The report above is about events currently taking place in Kalamazoo, Stone Mountain, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City.

And still, I see people saying, “It can’t happen here.” They say, “Our area is different.”

Have you checked your normalcy bias lately?

One of the things that Selco writes about often is recognizing that a new set of rules is in place, and acting on that immediately. The earlier you can accept that the rules of the game have changed, the better off you’re going to be.

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

Abnormalize The Status Quo

August 17, 2020

Abnormalize The Status Quo

If we’d been living in a healthy society and then suddenly had this society’s sick, insane status quo thrust upon us by powerful people, we’d have all been out in the streets making life very hard for those powerful people in an instant.

We are in the same situation now. We are having a wildly insane status quo thrust upon us by the powerful and for the benefit of the powerful. Only difference is we’re not all out in the streets, and instead of thrusting this horrible situation upon us suddenly, they’ve been doing it this entire time.

Which is precisely why we’re not out in the streets. We were born into this mess, so we assume it’s normal and that things are supposed to be this way. But it isn’t, and they aren’t.

What is normal is health. Health is the normal default condition. If you wake up with a fever and stabbing pain in your abdomen you don’t say “Ah well I guess that’s normal now, you can’t expect to just not have a fever and stabbing abdominal pain,” you recognize that there’s an urgent problem and you take action to fix it.

Even if you’d been sick your entire life, you would understand that your situation is not normal. You would understand that the basic default condition is health, but some dysfunction in your specific system has deprived you of that normal state of being.

In order for us to begin pushing back on the dysfunction of our current system, we need to begin looking at it in the same way. We need to clearly come to see how spectacularly divergent it is from the basic default condition of health. How sick it is. How abnormal it is.

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

28 Signs Of Economic Doom As The Pivotal Month Of September Begins

September 3, 2019

28 Signs Of Economic Doom As The Pivotal Month Of September Begins

Since the end of the last recession, the outlook for the U.S. economy has never been as dire as it is right now.  Everywhere you look, economic red flags are popping up, and the mainstream media is suddenly full of stories about “the coming recession”.  After several years of relative economic stability, things appear to be changing dramatically for the U.S. economy and the global economy as a whole.  Over and over again, we are seeing things happen that we have not witnessed since the last recession, and many analysts expect our troubles to accelerate as we head into the final months of 2019.

We should certainly hope that things will soon turn around, but at this point that does not appear likely.  The following are 28 signs of economic doom as the pivotal month of September begins…

#1 The U.S. and China just slapped painful new tariffs on one another, thus escalating the trade war to an entirely new level.

#2 JPMorgan Chase is projecting that the trade war will cost “the average U.S. household” $1,000 per year.

#3 Yield curve inversions have preceded every single U.S. recession since the 1950s, and the fact that it has happened again is one of the big reasons why Wall Street is freaking out so much lately.

#4 We just witnessed the largest decline in U.S. consumer sentiment in 7 years.

#5 Mortgage defaults are rising at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last financial crisis.

#6 Sales of luxury homes valued at $1.5 million or higher were down five percentduring the second quarter of 2019.

#7 The U.S. manufacturing sector has contracted for the very first time since September 2009.

#8 The Cass Freight Index has been falling for a number of months.  According to CNBC, it fell “5.9% in July, following a 5.3% decline in June and a 6% drop in May.”

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

Mad World

November 20, 2018

MAD WORLD

And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very very
Mad world, mad world

Image result for the primal scream

The haunting Gary Jules version of the Tears for Fears’ Mad World speaks to me in these tumultuous mad times. It must speak to many others, as the music video has been viewed over 132 million times. The melancholy video is shot from the top of an urban school building in a decaying decrepit bleak neighborhood with school children creating various figures on the concrete pavement below. The camera pans slowly to Gary Jules singing on the rooftop and captures the concrete jungle of non-descript architecture, identical office towers, gray cookie cutter apartment complexes, and a world devoid of joy and vibrancy.

The song was influenced by Arthur Janov’s theories in his book The Primal Scream. The chorus above about his “dreams of dying were the best he ever had” is representative of letting go of this mad world and being free of the monotony and release from the insanity of this world. Our ego fools us into thinking the madness of this world is actually normal. Day after day we live lives of quiet desperation. Despite all evidence our world is spinning out of control and the madness of the crowds is visible in financial markets, housing markets, politics, social justice, and social media, the level of normalcy bias among the populace has reached astounding levels, as we desperately try to convince ourselves everything will be alright. But it won’t.

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

Markets Ignore Fundamentals And Chase Headlines Because They Are Dying

February 17, 2016

Markets Ignore Fundamentals And Chase Headlines Because They Are Dying

Normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing. It is so frightening because it is so final; much like death, there is simply no coming back. Rather than a physical death, normalcy bias represents the death of reason and simple observation. It is the death of the mind and cognitive thought instead of the death of the body.

Ever since the derivatives collapse of 2008 the public has been regaled with wondrous stories of recovery in the mainstream to the point that such fantasies have become the “new normal”. These are grand tales of the daring heroics of central bankers who “saved us all” from impending collapse through gutsy monetary policy and no-holds-barred stimulus measures.

Alternative economists have not been so easy to dazzle. Most of us found that the recovery narrative lacked a certain something; namely hard data that took the wider picture into account. It seemed as though the mainstream media (MSM) as well as the establishment was attempting to cherry-pick certain numbers out of context while demanding we ignore all other factors as “unimportant.”

We just haven’t been buying into the magic show of the so called “professional economists” and the academics, and now that the real and very unstable fiscal reality of the world is bubbling to the surface, the general public will begin to see why we have been right all these years and the MSM has been utterly wrong.

Mainstream economists have done absolutely nothing in the way of investigative journalism and have instead joined a chorus cheerleading for the false narrative, singing a siren’s song of misinterpreted statistics and outright lies drawing the masses ever nearer to the deadly shoals of financial crisis.

Why do they do this? Are they part of some vast conspiracy to mislead the public?

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

Fourth Turning: Crisis of Trust

September 11, 2015

Fourth Turning: Crisis of Trust

“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

  • Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
  • Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
  • Cultural distress, with the media plunging into a dizzying decay, and a decency backlash in favor of state censorship
  • Technological distress, with cryptoanarchy, high-tech oligarchy, and biogenetic chaos
  • Ecological distress, with atmospheric damage, energy or water shortages, and new diseases
  • Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
  • Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction” 

 The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

September 2015 marks the seventh anniversary of this Fourth Turning Crisis. The economic, social, cultural, ecological, political, and military distress propagates by the minute as the globe is besieged by economic turmoil, increased human suffering, and endemic corruption of the political and ruling classes. The Federal Reserve/Wall Street created global economic implosion was the spark which catalyzed this fourth Crisis period in U.S. history in September 2008. Neil Howe in a 2012 essay assessed the beginning of this Fourth Turning and why 9/11 was not the catalyst:

“Pending stunning new developments, I believe the catalyst occurred in 2008.  It’s a date that is looking better and better as time goes by.  The year 2008 marked the onset of the most serious U.S. economic crisis since the Great Depression.  

 

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

Food Supply Interruptions: The Biggest Gamble

May 6, 2015

FOOD SUPPLY INTERRUPTIONS: THE BIGGEST GAMBLE

Nowhere have I witnessed a normalcy bias so strong as when it pertains to food. It has always been available at the grocery stores and in restaurants; at least that is the view of most people alive today. And if one falls on hard times, then the government in this country (the US) will probably supply you with an Electronic Benefit Transfer allowance (food stamps) and perhaps direct you to local food banks and/or co-ops to supplement your cupboards.

We take for granted that these operations are a given, for this is the way it has always worked…..or so we believe. But this is far from accurate, as many hungry Americans already know. While I welcome more and more of my fellow Westerners becoming aware of food reality, I cringe to think it will hit them where it hurts the hardest. It is not in the wallet, but in their bellies.

Currently, the global food chains are taking enormous hits. Many of these revelations are under reported in the mainstream media, who seem to rarely dig far into themes which require out of the box thinking. These events, which are decimating parts of the world’s food supply, will in my opinion continue to escalate for the foreseeable future.

There are steps we can each take to hedge against the worst, and I discuss some of them below. But first let’s look at some of the growing threats. While any one situation taken alone might be easily compensated for, when looked at in the aggregate, a stark picture begins to form.

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

 

 

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