by Tyler Durden, 02June2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/suffering-charts
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Things have taken a turn for the worse. In recent months, economic activity has been dropping all over the nation, and that decline appears to be accelerating. We just learned that gross domestic income has now fallen for two quarters in a row, and the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now been plummeting for 13 consecutive months. Unfortunately, when economic conditions deteriorate it is the people at the low end of the economic pyramid that get hit the hardest.
Thanks to our rapidly rising cost of living, we are seeing a dramatic explosion in the number of “working homeless” that are living out of their vehicles on a daily basis even though they are currently employed.
In particular, the RV “communities” that are springing up from coast to coast are starting to get quite a bit of attention…
The owner of a party bus company, Rikers Island prison guards and an Amazon worker are just some of the eclectic bunch who have formed a community of ‘working homeless’ people living out of RVs in the Astoria section of Queens, New York.
Similar communities have formed across the US from New England to California where people have chosen a nomadic lifestyle amid a national cost of living crisis.
Most of these people get up and go to work in the morning.
In fact, the Daily Mail spoke to one man that actually “works for a New York City hospital”…
Resident Paul Reevers described himself as ‘working homeless.’ He said that he has a job but the rent went up too high and he could not longer to afford a an apartment.
Reevers, who works for a New York City hospital, said that he took out a loan and bought his RV.
If you work at a hospital, you should be able to afford a place to live.
But this is our country now.
We are absolutely destroying the middle class, and as a result we now have a massive homelessness crisis on our hands…
Insider Monkey, a finance website, revealed a list of the top 30 cities worldwide with the highest homeless population. Notably, a handful of the US cities on the list are governed by progressive leadership, which may not surprise readers. While it is evident that some unfortunate individuals are facing homelessness, a trend exacerbated by recent inflationary pressures and a drug addiction crisis, some liberal policies have enabled others to sustain their nomadic lifestyles with taxpayer funds.
Insider Monkey found New York City is number 5 on the list, with a homeless population of about 69,000. Next is Chicago, at number 7 with 65,611. Washington, DC, is number 8 with 57,416, Los Angeles number 13 with 41,980, and San Fransisco number 14 with 38,000.
No matter what you or I are facing right now, at least we aren’t sleeping in the streets.
So we should count our blessings.
Hunger is also rapidly growing all over America. Right now, record numbers of people are coming for help at one food bank in the Seattle area…
Since March, the food bank has broken its record three times for the highest number of people served in a day since 2019, when the organization started allowing three visits a month. More and more, people like Jones who haven’t been to the food bank in years, are showing up, Christian said.
“That’s hard on them; they felt they had moved above the poverty line, got some stability but, ‘Here it is 2023 and here I am back in the food line asking strangers for help,’” Christian said.
And in Boston, the line for food on one recent weekend morning “stretched the length of two football fields”…
The line outside Boston’s American Red Cross Food Pantry on a recent Saturday morning stretched the length of two football fields.
The number of people filing into the red-brick industrial-zone warehouse on some days now exceeds the worst periods of the pandemic economic crisis and in April it had the second highest monthly traffic since it opened in 1982, according to David Andre, the director.
We are witnessing so much suffering all over the country right now.
And there are so many more people that are living right on the edge of disaster.
According to one recent survey, approximately 38.5 percent of U.S. adults experienced “some form of difficulty in covering expenses between April 26 and May 8”…
A large swath of American consumers are facing financial hardship as they grapple with elevated living costs, record-high credit card use, and two years of negative real wage growth. This perfect storm could decimate financially fragile households in the next downturn.
As many as 89.1 million American adults (or about 38.5%) were found to experience some form of difficulty in covering expenses between April 26 and May 8, according to Bloomberg, citing new data from the Household Pulse Survey. This is up from 34.4% in 2022 and 26.7% during the same period in 2021.
Of course this is just the beginning.
As I keep warning my readers, things will eventually get much worse.
And finally, whatever happens in Washington is not going to fundamentally alter our long-term trajectory, and that means that much more suffering is coming in the days ahead.
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 Silhouette of depressed man sitting on walkway of residence building (Aonprom Photo/Shutterstock) By Katabella Roberts
11August2023 Updated: 22August2023 https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/us-suicide-rates-hit-record-high-of-nearly-50000-in-2022-provisional-cdc-data-show-5458976
Suicide rates soared to the highest number on record in 2022 as nearly 50,000 Americans took their own lives, according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Aug. 10.
The latest report suggests a notable increase in suicides since 2021 following two consecutive years of modest declines in 2019 and 2020.
According to the CDC’s provisional data, an estimated 49,449 Americans committed suicide in 2022, or nearly 15 deaths for every 100,000 people, up 2.6 percent from 48,183 deaths by suicide in 2021, and surpassing the peak of 48,344 in 2018.
Previously in 2019 and 2020, the suicide rate fell to 47,511 and 45,979 respectively, according to the CDC, although it is unclear exactly what prompted the decline.
Suicide is now the eleventh-leading cause of death in the United States, compared to 2020 when it was the twelfth-leading cause, the latest data suggest.
The latest figures—which are based on death certificates received by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and may change—show that America is facing a growing mental health crisis, according to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra.
“Nine in ten Americans believe America is facing a mental health crisis. The new suicide death data reported by CDC illustrates why. One life lost to suicide is one too many. Yet, too many people still believe asking for help is a sign of weakness,” Mr. Becerra said. “The Biden-Harris Administration is making unprecedented investments to transform how mental health is understood, accessed, and treated as part of President Biden’s Unity Agenda. We must continue to eliminate the stigmatization of mental health and make care available to all Americans.”
According to the latest CDC report, men accounted for approximately 79 percent of the total number of suicides in 2022, although rates increased among both males and females at 3.8 percent among American women, and 2.3 percent among American men.
The largest increase in suicides was seen among older adults, according to the CDC.
Youth Mental Health Crisis Deepening Due to Pandemic Policies: Study
Rates Increased Among Older Adults
Among Americans ages 45 to 64 there was a 6.6 percent increase in suicides, the data show. In those older than 65, the CDC reported an 8.1 percent increase year-on-year.
Many middle-aged and elderly people experience problems like losing a job or losing a spouse. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, said it was important to reduce stigma and other obstacles to them getting assistance.
Meanwhile, among the racial and ethnic groups the CDC tracks, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders had the largest increase in suicide in 2022, with a 15.9 percent rise, the CDC data show.
Multiracial individuals saw suicide rates increase by 7.9 percent while rates rose 5.7 percent among Asians and 3.6 percent among black or African Americans.
However, the CDC noted a decline in suicide rates among American Indians/Alaska Natives, where suicide rates declined 6.1 percent year on year.
The health agency also noted a decline in suicide rates among individuals aged 10–24, approximately 8.4 percent.
While it is unclear what prompted the rise in the number of suicides among Americans, experts have said the increase could be driven by a multitude of factors such as increasing rates of depression and the limited availability of mental health services.
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, which for many led to job losses, financial instability, isolation, and loneliness, may have also played a role.
Pandemic Prompts Anxiety, Depression
A March 2023 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that by early 2021, 4 in 10 adults reported symptoms consistent with anxiety and depression over the course of the pandemic, although that figure dropped to approximately 3 in 10 adults as the pandemic continued.
Deb Stone, a behavioral scientist at the CDC Injury Center, told The Washington Times earlier this year that suicide rates might be stable or even decline during a disaster, and rise afterward, “as the longer-term sequela of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among populations struggling with preexisting inequities.”
Meanwhile, a poll conducted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and published last month found that the majority of Americans (82 percent) are still not familiar with or have not heard of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, a resource aimed at helping people in mental health, substance use, and suicide crises get connected to the support they may need.
Final data from the CDC on suicide rates will be available later this year.
“Today’s report underscores the depths of the devastating mental health crisis in America. Mental health has become the defining public health and societal challenge of our time. Far too many people and their families are suffering and feeling alone,” said U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
“These numbers are a sobering reminder of how urgent it is that we further expand access to mental health care, address the root causes of mental health struggles, and recognize the importance of checking on and supporting one another,” he added.
As part of its effort to combat the rising suicide rate among Americans and address the nation’s mental health crisis, the Biden administration has announced a string of initiatives aimed at lowering and preventing such deaths, including its National Suicide Prevention Lifeline that launched last year allowing anyone in the United States to dial 988 to reach mental health specialists.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis or is considering suicide, has mental health issues, or is engaging in substance abuse, dial or text the U.S. Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 to speak with a counselor. If you’re in the UK, call the Samaritans at 116123.
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30August2023 // Arsenio Toledo // https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-08-30-declining-health-standards-crisis-early-death.html
A recent study has found that the United States is experiencing what leading researchers call “a crisis of early death.”
The study, done by researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), found that more than one million deaths in the U.S. – including many young and working-age adults – could be avoided each year if the country had similar mortality rates to other developed nations.
The researchers noted that, in 2021, the U.S. had 1.1 million excess deaths which could have been averted, with the excess deaths referred to as the country’s “Missing Americans” because these deaths reflect people who would still be alive if the U.S. death rate was equal to its peers. (Related: Government to blame sudden death epidemic on long COVID and climate change, says Ed Dowd.)
“The number of Missing Americans in recent years is unprecedented in modern times,” said study lead and corresponding author Jacob Bor, a BUSPH associate professor of global health and epidemiology, in a media release accompanying the publishing of the study.
The researchers analyzed mortality trends in America from 1933 to 2021 and then compared the results with age-specific mortality rates from “peer nations, including Australia, Canada, Japan and 18 nations in Europe.
The findings showed that America had lower mortality rates than peer nations during World War II. By the 1960s and 1970s, America’s mortality rates were similar to peer nations. But by the 1980s, the U.S. began a four-decade-long trend of accelerating excess deaths, reaching 622,534 excess deaths in 2019, nearly 1.01 million excess deaths in 2021 and over 1.09 excess deaths in 2021.
According to the study, nearly 50 percent of all Missing Americans in 2020 and 2021 were under the age of 65 – this means that nearly half of the excess deaths in the U.S. were from working-age Americans and even youths.
“Think of people you know who have passed away before reaching age 65. Statistically, half of them would still be alive if the U.S. had the mortality rates of our peers,” said Bor. “The U.S. is experiencing a crisis of early death that is unique among wealthy nations.”
Declining healthcare system mainly responsible for excess deaths
While Bor and the other researchers acknowledge that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic likely contributed to a sharp spike in mortality in the U.S., the research does not acknowledge the role vaccines may have played. Instead, Bor and his associates point to the general decline in health standards in the U.S. as the main culprit.
“The U.S. was already experiencing more than 600,000 Missing Americans annually before the pandemic began, and that number was increasing each year,” said Bor. “There have been no significant policy changes since then to change this trajectory.”
“We waste hundreds of billions each year on health insurers’ profits and paperwork, while tens of millions can’t afford medical care, healthy food or a decent place to live,” said study senior author Steffie Woolhandler, a distinguished professor at the School of Urban Public Health at Hunter College, City University of New York. “Americans die younger than their counterparts elsewhere because when corporate profits conflict with health, our politicians side with the corporations.”
Study co-author Andrew Stokes, a BUSPH assistant professor of global health, said that the findings raise a number of urgent questions that need to be addressed in future research. “Which geographic areas are disproportionately responsible for the Missing Americans, and what were their causes of deaths? Answers to these questions may help to clarify policy solutions,” he noted.
Learn more about the American healthcare system and how it continues to disappoint many in the country at Medicine.news.
Watch this clip from “The HighWire” as host Del Bigtree and investigative journalist Jefferey Jaxen discuss how excess deaths are also surging in other countries like the United Kingdom.
EXCESS DEATHS HIT RECORD LEVELS
This video is from the channel The HighWire with Del Bigtree on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
Scott Schara: Medical system didn’t value people’s lives during COVID-19 pandemic – Brighteon.TV.
Most major medical bills are grossly INFLATED by Big Pharma just to see who is gullible enough to pay them without question.
Dr. Jane Ruby STAT: Government protects killer doctors by granting them blanket immunity – Brighteon.TV.
America’s top 20 nonprofit hospitals received over $23 billion in COVID-19 payments (while killing or injuring millions of people).
Americans continue to suffer as hospitals refuse to be transparent about their prices.
Sources include:
StudyFinds.org
BU.edu
WorldHealth.net
Brighteon.com
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by Tyler Durden, 02August2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/fitch-cuts-usas-aaa-rating-cites-fiscal-deterioration-erosion-governance
Update (1750ET): Treasury Secretary Yellen is pissed, calling the downgrade “arbitrary” and “outdated.”!
“I strongly disagree with Fitch Ratings’ decision. The change by Fitch Ratings announced today is arbitrary and based on outdated data. Fitch’s quantitative ratings model declined markedly between 2018 and 2020 – and yet Fitch is announcing its change now, despite the progress that we see in many of the indicators that Fitch relies on for its decision. Many of these measures, including those related to governance, have shown improvement over the course of this Administration, with the passage of bipartisan legislation to address the debt limit, invest in infrastructure, and make other investments in America’s competitiveness.
Fitch’s decision does not change what Americans, investors, and people all around the world already know: that Treasury securities remain the world’s preeminent safe and liquid asset, and that the American economy is fundamentally strong.
Over the past few years, the United States has undergone a historically fast economic recovery from a deep recession. Today, the unemployment rate is near historic lows, inflation has come down significantly since last summer, and last week’s GDP report shows that the U.S. economy continues to grow. The American economy remains the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, with the deepest and most liquid financial markets in the world. To build on this, President Biden and I have been focused on making critical investments in our country’s core economic strength and productive capacity.
President Biden and I are committed to fiscal sustainability. The most recent debt limit legislation included over $1 trillion in deficit reduction and improved our fiscal trajectory. Looking forward, President Biden has put forward a budget that would reduce the deficit by $2.6 trillion over the next decade through a balanced approach that would support investments for the long-term.”
Perhaps she should read this…
 Federal Debt Held by the Public 1900 – 2053
Bidenomics for the win…
 zerohedge-tweet-1August2023-Yellen Says Fitch Downgrade Based on Outdated Data We wonder how the Vice President feels about this…
 zerohedge-tweet-1August2023-Kamala: First of all, it’s two letters * * *
In the middle of the debt-ceiling ‘crisis’ in May, with Fitch, Moodys and DBRS all threatening to do what S&P boldly did in 2011 and downgrade the US should the debt ceiling crisis lead to a technical default, China’s leading rating agency, China Chengxin International Credit Rating decided not to wait, downgrading the USA’s rating by one notch, to AA+ from AAA, citing high inflation and the widely watched debt-ceiling stand-off.
Today, Fitch decided to get off the pot and join S&P and Chengxin, downgrading USA’s Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’.
 US Dollar Downgraded
Key Rating Drivers
Ratings Downgrade: The rating downgrade of the United States reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to ‘AA’ and ‘AAA’ rated peers over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.
Erosion of Governance: In Fitch’s view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters, notwithstanding the June bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt limit until January 2025. The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management. In addition, the government lacks a medium-term fiscal framework, unlike most peers, and has a complex budgeting process. These factors, along with several economic shocks as well as tax cuts and new spending initiatives, have contributed to successive debt increases over the last decade. Additionally, there has been only limited progress in tackling medium-term challenges related to rising social security and Medicare costs due to an aging population.
Rising General Government Deficits: We expect the general government (GG) deficit to rise to 6.3% of GDP in 2023, from 3.7% in 2022, reflecting cyclically weaker federal revenues, new spending initiatives and a higher interest burden. Additionally, state and local governments are expected to run an overall deficit of 0.6% of GDP this year after running a small surplus of 0.2% of GDP in 2022. Cuts to non-defense discretionary spending (15% of total federal spending) as agreed in the Fiscal Responsibility Act offer only a modest improvement to the medium-term fiscal outlook, with cumulative savings of USD1.5 trillion (3.9% of GDP) by 2033 according to the Congressional Budget Office. The near-term impact of the Act is estimated at USD70 billion (0.3% of GDP) in 2024 and USD112 billion (0.4% of GDP) in 2025. Fitch does not expect any further substantive fiscal consolidation measures ahead of the November 2024 elections.
Fitch forecasts a GG deficit of 6.6% of GDP in 2024 and a further widening to 6.9% of GDP in 2025. The larger deficits will be driven by weak 2024 GDP growth, a higher interest burden and wider state and local government deficits of 1.2% of GDP in 2024-2025 (in line with the historical 20-year average). The interest-to-revenue ratio is expected to reach 10% by 2025 (compared to 2.8% for the ‘AA’ median and 1% for the ‘AAA’ median) due to the higher debt level as well as sustained higher interest rates compared with pre-pandemic levels.
General Government Debt to Rise: Lower deficits and high nominal GDP growth reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio over the last two years from the pandemic high of 122.3% in 2020; however, at 112.9% this year it is still well above the pre-pandemic 2019 level of 100.1%. The GG debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to rise over the forecast period, reaching 118.4% by 2025. The debt ratio is over two-and-a-half times higher than the ‘AAA’ median of 39.3% of GDP and ‘AA’ median of 44.7% of GDP. Fitch’s longer-term projections forecast additional debt/GDP rises, increasing the vulnerability of the U.S. fiscal position to future economic shocks.
Medium-term Fiscal Challenges Unaddressed: Over the next decade, higher interest rates and the rising debt stock will increase the interest service burden, while an aging population and rising healthcare costs will raise spending on the elderly absent fiscal policy reforms. The CBO projects that interest costs will double by 2033 to 3.6% of GDP. The CBO also estimates a rise in mandatory spending on Medicare and social security by 1.5% of GDP over the same period. The CBO projects that the Social Security fund will be depleted by 2033 and the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund (used to pay for benefits under Medicare Part A) will be depleted by 2035 under current laws, posing additional challenges for the fiscal trajectory unless timely corrective measures are implemented. Additionally, the 2017 tax cuts are set to expire in 2025, but there is likely to be political pressure to make these permanent as has been the case in the past, resulting in higher deficit projections.
Exceptional Strengths Support Ratings: Several structural strengths underpin the United States’ ratings. These include its large, advanced, well-diversified and high-income economy, supported by a dynamic business environment. Critically, the U.S. dollar is the world’s preeminent reserve currency, which gives the government extraordinary financing flexibility.
Economy to Slip into Recession: Tighter credit conditions, weakening business investment, and a slowdown in consumption will push the U.S. economy into a mild recession in 4Q23 and 1Q24, according to Fitch projections. The agency sees U.S. annual real GDP growth slowing to 1.2% this year from 2.1% in 2022 and overall growth of just 0.5% in 2024. Job vacancies remain higher and the labor participation rate is still lower (by 1 pp) than pre-pandemic levels, which could negatively affect medium-term potential growth.
Fed Tightening: The Fed raised interest rates by 25bp in March, May and July 2023. Fitch expects one further hike to 5.5% to 5.75% by September. The resilience of the economy and the labor market are complicating the Fed’s goal of bringing inflation towards its 2% target. While headline inflation fell to 3% in June, core PCE inflation, the Fed’s key price index, remained stubbornly high at 4.1% yoy. This will likely preclude cuts in the Federal Funds Rate until March 2024. Additionally, the Fed is continuing to reduce its holdings of mortgage backed-securities and U.S. Treasuries, which is further tightening financial conditions. Since January, these assets on the Fed balance sheet have fallen by over USD500 billion as of end-July 2023.
ESG – Governance: The U.S. has an ESG Relevance Score (RS) of ‘5’ for Political Stability and Rights and ‘5[+]’ for the Rule of Law, Institutional and Regulatory Quality and Control of Corruption. Theses scores reflect the high weight that the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI) have in Fitch’s proprietary Sovereign Rating Model. The U.S. has a high WBGI ranking at 79, reflecting its well-established rights for participation in the political process, strong institutional capacity, effective rule of law and a low level of corruption.
Additionally, they warn that the following could lead to more negative ratings actions…
- Public Finances: A marked increase in general government debt, for example due to a failure to address medium-term public spending and revenue challenges;
- Macroeconomic policy, performance and prospects: A decline in the coherence and credibility of policymaking that undermines the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar, thus diminishing the government’s financing flexibility.
All hail Bidenomics.
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by Tyler Durden, 22July2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/its-mourning-america
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Now that America has been transformed from a high-trust social order into a low-trust social order, there’s no going back.
 The Wizard of Oz – Behind the Curtain The birth of financialization in the early 1980s was morning in America because finance– the collateralization of previously low-risk assets and the resulting explosion of credit and leverage–gooses demand and asset valuations.
Now that we’ve at long last reached the demise of financialization, it’s mourning in America as the hyper-stimulation has reached its zenith and is beginning its inevitable end-game of uncontrolled implosion. The hyper-financialization of American life has fatally distorted the nation’s production, politics, values and social order.
Regardless of our political persuasion, we’re all mourning for what’s been lost to either decay or erosion, both of which are so gradual that we cannot discern the full extent of the damage. We sense it, though, and this fuels the nation’s distemper.
The decay, erosion and distemper remind me of a quote from French author Michel Houellebecq:
“I have the impression of being caught up in a network of complicated, minute, stupid rules, and I have the impression of being herded towards a uniform kind of happiness, toward a kind of happiness that doesn’t really make me happy.”
Substitute con for happiness and we have an insight into the source of mourning in America: we’re being conned 24/7, on every level and in every nook and cranny of the economy and society.
The key to any good con is to persuade the mark (victim) that it’s not a con. The most direct approach is to claim the con is true, factual, etc. Once this claim starts unraveling, then the con switches to an alternative reality that has enough shreds of credibility to be plausible.
This is why so many confuse the con and propaganda. Both are self-serving, of course, as the goal of propaganda is to generate compliance and conformity in the populace by constructing an emotionally compelling context that is both appealing and plausible. Those spewing the propaganda do so to secure their power and further their own self-serving agenda.
For example, that we’re all enjoying unprecedented prosperity in the best of all possible worlds. Look at all the low-quality rusting junk we can buy from manufacturers in totalitarian nations at low, low prices–wow! It doesn’t get any better than this. Stainless Steal (February 26, 2023).
The difference is that those spewing propaganda can be true believers in whatever cause is being pushed. In most cases, propaganda is issued by cynical, manipulative sociopaths who are merely hired guns for whomever seeks all the advantages of persuading people that enriching and empowering the few at the expense of the many is not only allowable, it’s the right thing, the only option, etc. But propaganda works best when it converts the previously uncommitted or apathetic into true believers, much like a religious conversion.
A con, on the other hand, is a swindle, a fraud, a bezzle, that takes advantage of the mark’s naive trust. This trust might be in a blood relative, a friend, an enterprise, an organization or an institution. The con exploits this trust to defraud or break the mark into an unknowing patsy.
The fundamentals of the con are:
1. The gains are guaranteed, i.e. low risk.
2. The benefits are exaggerated while the costs and consequences are left unsaid.
Here’s the metaphor the con presents: I’m leading you to a glorious fruit tree loaded with ripe fruit. All you have to do is harvest as much as you want.
Since we’re all still hunter-gatherers in Wetware 1.0, this greatly appeals to us. We’re inherently risk-averse and greedy to exploit windfalls, and the con promises us near-zero risk and one windfall to stripmine after another. It’s irresistible.
The con always has an end date, when the mark discovers they’ve been fleeced. Trust is destroyed, and the mark, bitterly enlightened to their own credulity, laziness and greed, vows to never fall for such a con again.
The higher-order con never lets trust be completely destroyed. Instead, the con-man either rushes to console the mark and apologize for the unexpected loss, (Jeez, this never happened before–it must have been a glitch in the Matrix), or the con-man brazenly blames the victim for misjudging the situation and failing to take advantage of the unbeatable deal.
You blew it, pal, I can’t help you with that. But hey, since I’m such a nice guy, and you’re deserving of a second chance, I’m gonna let you in on another deal, not quite as good as the one you blew, but still a gem.
This is America in a nutshell: a continuous cacophony of cons. This is why trust in institutions such as the media, corporations, political interest groups, government and education are in free-fall, along with social trust in our fellow Americans. Every node of power is dominated by people out to maximize their personal gains at the expense of the public, customers, voters, members, students, etc.
Listen, kid, you’re gonna be on Easy Street if you go borrow $120,000 and give it to us for a college diploma. You’ll be set for life, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel once you pony up the dough and we give you the paper. Don’t be a chump, kid, you gotta look out for yourself, and we’re trying to help you here.
This medication is safe and non-addictive, you’re gonna feel a lot better as soon as you start taking it. Here’s ten pages of side-effects, but don’t worry about all that, it’s just boiler-plate. We’re here to help you, pal, and the $27,000 a month cost is mostly on the government, so it’s a slam-dunk win for you.
Gee, I’d like to answer your questions about the district budget, employee salaries and overtime, it must be in this 293-page annual statement somewhere. You can buy a copy for only $25.
And so on, in an endless profusion of self-serving cons. Ernest academics ponder this decay and propose all sorts of scholarly possibilities, while never mentioning the obvious source: every node of power in America is hopelessly corrupt, covering its cons with tsunamis of propaganda aimed at “trust-building” among “stakeholders,” whipping up the conned faithful, cherry-picking evidence to string along the marks just a little longer, and pointing to the long history of the institution as trustworthy–a reputation that is being pillaged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
 it wasn’t influence-peddling
The most successful cons divert attention from the con-men to some other group of marks / victims. You got fleeced because of them. The fact that everyone outside the nodes of power has been fleeced is left unsaid, as this realization might generate a common cause of the marks against those benefiting so richly from the cons.
It was fun while it lasted, exploiting the supercharged-cons of hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization, but those cons have been tapped out and there are no replacements.
It’s tough recognizing that we’ve been credulous, naively trusting, and greedy for low-risk riches. Every one of the countless skims, scams and cons has exploited our willingness to trust and our self-interest in easy wealth.
Now that America has been transformed from a high-trust social order into a low-trust social order, there’s no going back.
 US Social Trust
This is why it’s mourning in America. Trust can only be rebuilt slowly, first by opting out of all the self-serving cons and then re-establishing trust at the local level.
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By Steve McCann
30May2023 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/the_decline_and_fall_of_the_american_empire.html
A cursory examination of history reveals that the United States is mired in the same process that precipitated the collapse of the great empires of the past. The foibles and failures of human nature and their impact on the rise and fall of empires is amazingly consistent and the end result always inevitable. Can this nation avoid a similar fate?
Empires are defined as great military and economic powers encompassing large occupied or controlled land areas. Although they vary greatly, they average around 250 years in duration. The United States will be celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2026.
In 1976, Sir John Glubb, a distinguished British diplomat and general, wrote an essay on the fate of empires throughout history. He enumerated, based on 3,000 years of historical data, the six various stages in the rise and fall of empires.
These stages and how they apply to the United States are as follows:
- The Age of Pioneers (The Revolutionary War and the founding of the Nation)
- The Age of Conquests (The Western Expansion to the Pacific Ocean)
- The Age of Commerce (Industrialization and evolution of a dominant middle class)
- The Age of Affluence (The meteoric rise of the standard of living in the 20th Century)
- The Age of Intellect (Global domination in the arts, medicine and technology)
- The Age of Decadence (For 30+ years America has been increasingly mired in this age )
The Age of Decadence is marked by debauchery, defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, a significant weakening of religion, frivolity, a welfare state, and a massive influx of unassimilated foreigners. These symptoms of national decadence are the end product of long periods of prosperity and power, love of wealth and status, and self-obsession by the ruling elites leading to fateful government corruption and instability.
Sir John Glubb is definitive in stating that in all ancient and modern fallen empires, “there does not appear to be any doubt that money is the agent which causes the decline of strong, brave and self-confident people.”
An examination of various empires from the Persian Empire to the Roman Empire to the British Empire confirms Glubb’s hypothesis that pursuit and accumulation of money or wealth is the portal through which power over the masses is achieved. The amassing of wealth and thus power evolves into a quasi-religion that over time triggers the descent into the age of decadence and corruption that inevitably leads to the collapse and conquering of empires by their external enemies.
In the early stage of the age of decadence, materialism becomes a driving force in society, inducing many in the upper classes to indulge in excessive, often conspicuous consumption as an absurdly wealthy elite emerges. Far too many societal elites and non-elites become convinced that increased consumption and social status is the key to happiness, but in its pursuit they become demonstrably more pessimistic and less happy and fulfilled.
The search for happiness and fulfillment leads to imprudence and voyeurism becoming central to the culture. Unhappy people searching for diversion became fixated on celebrities and captive to evolving voyeurism. And voyeurism takes on a more sinister aspect as people in both ancient and modern empires become increasingly desensitized to graphic images and willing spectators or participants in violence and debauchery.
Debauchery is an oft-recurring theme in the demise of empires. Societies develop an abnormally immature obsession with sex. An obsession that requires increasing deviancy to satiate coupled with concurrent abuse of children and the marginalization and exploitation of women. Meanwhile, the use of drugs and alcohol expands exponentially. Debauchery is a symptom of the absence of meaning in people’s lives leading to the self-destruction of society and concomitantly a loss of a sense of duty and patriotism.
Other symptoms common among many empires in the last stages of decline include:
- Massive and growing disparities between rich and poor and an undisciplined and over-extended military.
- An intensification of internal political hatreds and a corresponding inability to reconcile in order to save the empire.
- An ever increasing level of self-serving corruption and patronage among the ruling class.
- A massive influx of unassimilated foreigners whose allegiance and cultural ties are with their native lands and not the host nation and who do not feel obligated to defend the empire.
- Severe financial and economic crises linked to the unending debasement of the currency.
- An ongoing and irreversible decline in monotheistic religions that emphasize self-sacrifice, temperance, a sense of duty as well as honor and integrity.
Additionally, while the decline of empires is precipitated by internal factors, the final collapse is marked by defeat at the hands of powerful external enemies. The United States is presently facing an implacable and powerful external enemy, Communist China. A foe this nation’s elites, in their self-indulgent pursuit of wealth, essentially created by willfully intertwining the American economy with a ruthless and dictatorial communist regime.
Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the American citizenry is not aware of the historically precarious situation this nation finds itself. Nor are they aware that the policies and actions of the Marxist controlled Democrat party over the past 20 years is a window into what will happen to this nation if they continue in power. Another four to eight years of Democrat Party rule will permanently embed:
- Unchecked corruption in government and America’s corporations and institutions.
- The ongoing debasement of the currency, uncontrolled spending and economic instability,
- The continued massive influx of unassimilated foreigners,
- The intensification of political animosity and the persecution of any political opposition,
- An undisciplined, ideologically driven and feckless military incapable of confronting China,
- Drug-addled and crime-ridden dystopias in America’s major urban and suburban areas,
- Continued and accelerated mainstreaming of decadence and sexual debauchery
As the last three years have amply proven, decadence and sexual debauchery will continue apace. All forms of deviancy, including but not limited to pedophilia, will be forcefully mainstreamed. Religious liberties will be denigrated and curtailed. Infanticide and state-sponsored euthanasia will be legalized. Materialism and voyeurism will become the new state religion. And virtually all drugs will be legalized and easily available.
As the United States descends into insolvency, societal chaos and upheaval, Communist China, with which the Democrat party is intertwined, will actively abet and promote the dissolution of this country as it will be waiting vulture-like to feast on the carcass.
The inevitable can perhaps be mitigated if a significant majority of the populace acknowledges the current plight of the nation and initiates a return to the nation’s founding Judeo-Christian principles. Additionally, it is imperative that either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis wins in November of 2024 and for a populist Republican Party to control both the presidency and Congress for a minimum of two presidential terms.
Republican primary voters must also acknowledge reality and not be captive to cultlike sycophancy for either Trump or DeSantis. They need to ask themselves: who can win against a corrupt and devious Democrat party reliant on voter fraud and manipulation in the battleground states of Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania? Who has the coattails to assure the capture of both Houses of Congress? And can that person can either serve a second term or make certain another Republican will win in 2028?
It is not hyperbole to say the upcoming election cycle is the most determinative in American history. If the Republicans fail to win the presidency and Congress in 2024, this nation will have passed the point of no return and a new chapter in the annals of the decline and fall of great nations will be written.
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Calls from Congress and state houses to the private sector for out-of-the-box thinking, such as repegging the currency to gold or declaring precious metals to be legal tender, are growing.
 An illustration of the U.S. dollar linked to gold. (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock) By Alex Newman | 22August2023 Updated: 23August2023 https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/efforts-to-protect-us-intensify-amid-global-shift-from-dollar-5451294
With inflation plaguing the economy as the U.S. dollar is increasingly being sidelined in international trade, potentially even at risk of losing its status as the global reserve currency, lawmakers in Washington and state capitals are touting gold and precious metals as the solution.
From congressional efforts that would once again back the U.S. dollar with gold to state-level initiatives to facilitate commerce in precious metals, proposals are proliferating. Some have already advanced.
Private-sector players are getting in on the action, too, arguing that gold can be a defense against economic calamity as foreign governments and central banks stockpile record amounts of precious metals.
In a series of interviews with The Epoch Times, state and federal lawmakers working to restore gold as money argued that this was the best way to defend the dollar, stabilize the economy, rein in government spending, and protect U.S. interests.
A bill introduced in Congress this year by U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), dubbed the Gold Standard Restoration Act (H.R. 2435), would redefine the dollar in terms of a fixed weight in gold. The legislation would also require authorities to exchange paper currency for gold.
 U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) introduced the Gold Standard Restoration Act (H.R. 2435) this year. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) “How can you look at a country that’s 32 trillion in debt with out-of-control spending and think it’s the right standard to go by?” Mr. Mooney asked in a phone interview with The Epoch Times, warning of peril ahead for the dollar if its gold backing was not restored.
“Returning to the gold standard would bolster domestic and international confidence in the U.S. dollar because its value would be tied to something of actual worth, not just the ‘full faith and credit’ of the U.S. government,” added Mr. Mooney, who has been sounding the alarm throughout his political career. “This would preserve the U.S. dollar’s global reserve status.”
Meanwhile, in Texas, lawmakers concerned about the stability of the dollar and the U.S. economy are working to facilitate commerce in gold through the Texas Gold Depository.
“You have to look at history,” said Texas Rep. Mark Dorazio, a Republican who introduced the bill to facilitate intrastate trade in gold. “Over the last 6,000 years of history, gold and silver have kept their value and served as the standard.”
“It is the go-to in economic crisis and instability—everyone knows you go to gold,” the lawmaker told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.
“Everybody I talk to likes the idea of using our depository to conduct business,” he added. “Plus it would make money for the state. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
 A worker polishes gold bullion bars at the ABC Refinery in Sydney on Aug. 5, 2020. Gold prices hit $2,000 an ounce on markets for the first time on Aug. 4, 2020. (David Gray/AFP via Getty Images) Ron Paul, a longtime champion of the gold standard and sound money who spent decades in Congress attempting to draw attention to the issue and wrote a best-selling book called “End The Fed,” told The Epoch Times that gold is likely to play a major role in the future.
As what he called the “Mickey Mouse” dollar continues to lose dominance, “something will have to replace it, [and] now we are seeing that,” he said, warning that “the Chinese are buying a lot of gold.”
Dr. Paul ridiculed the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights and emerging central bank “digital” currencies without inherent value as potential alternatives, saying something tangible such as gold is what’s needed.
“If there’s a digital currency that is truly backed with gold, that might be helpful,” he said.
Ultimately, Dr. Paul said he would repeal legal tender laws, abolish the Federal Reserve, and allow the market to decide what should be used as money.
“Gold and silver became money spontaneously thousands of years ago, and metals have worked well,” he said, praising state and federal efforts on precious metals. “We need sound money.”
Despite his pessimism about the economy, Paul, who gained national prominence during his runs for president, celebrated the growing number of states declaring gold and silver to be legal tender.
“The Constitution is very much on their side,” he said.
 Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is a longtime champion of the gold standard. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images) Among other benefits, this can facilitate trade in precious metals by removing sales taxes and eliminating other obstacles, he said.
“This is a silent revolution going on at the grassroots level, passing legislation on this,” Paul said, adding that gold could protect countries, states, and even individuals. “That is a help in changing attitudes.”
As government debt and inflation continue to grow amid moves by U.S. adversaries to displace the dollar, interest in precious metals will continue to expand, multiple experts told The Epoch Times.
What Happened to Gold?
Until about 50 years ago, the U.S. dollar was still officially backed by gold. Because other currencies were mostly exchangeable for dollars on demand, the global monetary system was in effect underpinned by gold—at least in theory.
 Infographic: One Dollar Graph
An illustration of the decline in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar over the past century. (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock) In fact, for thousands of years, precious metals have served as money. Economists say this is because they are durable, portable, scarce, and inherently valuable.
But with a series of major policy changes, beginning with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 followed by a 1933 executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt limiting gold holdings, that began to change.
Under the leadership of President Richard Nixon, the U.S. government formally severed the dollar’s final link to gold in 1971, ending the ability of even foreign powers to exchange their dollars for gold.
That was a turning point. Conventional wisdom holds that the move by Nixon resulted in the end of the gold standard forever as most of the world was suddenly plunged into what is known as a “fiat” monetary system. Fiat means the currency has value by government edict, rather than any inherent value.
Economist John Maynard Keynes famously referred to the metal as a “barbarous relic,” a view that has proliferated in academia and in central banking circles.
But the world is now facing escalating economic and monetary turmoil. Just last week, Fitch downgraded U.S. debt in a historic blow as debt levels surge and the purchasing power of currencies worldwide plummets.
The problems with the dollar are growing. As reported in May, U.S. adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party are actively working to reshape the global monetary system and replace the dollar.
Even traditional U.S. allies such as France and Brazil are now doing international deals in other currencies.
Multiple experts explained that Biden administration and Federal Reserve policies were contributing to the trend through high spending and loose monetary policy blamed for inflation.
Calls for major monetary reform at the international level have been steadily growing for decades, and have ramped up further in light of current events.
Numerous world leaders and central bankers, including the People’s Bank of China, have proposed an international reserve currency to displace the dollar, and senior U.S. policymakers have even flirted with the idea publicly.
 People walk past a currency exchange shop in Istanbul, Turkey, on June 23, 2023. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images) But in the United States, more traditional options for drastic reforms involving metals are being explored, too. Indeed, developments are causing many experts and lawmakers to take a fresh look at the “barbarous relic.”
At the same time, reports that authorities in the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) will consider a gold-backed currency are fueling interest in monetary metals worldwide.
Non-Western central banks are buying gold in record quantities, according to the World Gold Council, and analysts expect that demand to remain strong.
“We think this trend of central bank buying is likely to continue amid heightened geopolitical risks and elevated inflation,” Swiss bank UBS said in a note to clients in late May.
Gold Standard to the Rescue?
Several congressional Republicans who spoke with The Epoch Times pointed to current events to highlight what they say is the urgency of legislation to protect the dollar by once again tying it to gold.
Mr. Mooney of West Virginia, the chief sponsor behind the “Gold Standard Restoration Act,” explained that severing the link between the dollar and gold has produced extreme spending, inflation, and other problems.
“We need to learn from history,” he told The Epoch Times. “When President Nixon unfortunately took us off the gold standard, it made everything worse. He claimed at the time it was going to control inflation, but the opposite occurred.”
“It was a huge mistake,” continued Mr. Mooney, who introduced the bill in the last Congress as well. “Inflation is still out of control to this day.”
Because the dollar is no longer tied to gold, and because the federal government is rapidly losing the trust of Americans and people worldwide, the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency is at risk, he said.
“They keep playing monetary games at the Fed, with borrowing and printing money, and that makes the dollar less stable and more susceptible to international competition,” the congressman warned, adding that the Chinese Communist Party is taking full advantage.
 In 1913, The Federal Reserve Act established the Federal Reserve System as the central bank of the United States. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) But eventually, change may be forced upon the United States.
“If we get to the point where we literally can’t pay our debts anymore—where we default on our loans—it would force some fiscal restraint in our country, but it would also jeopardize the dollar and give a great opportunity for communist China and other countries to not use the dollar anymore as the standard,” he said.
Mr. Mooney also pointed to increasingly erratic U.S. foreign policy such as the Afghanistan withdrawal “debacle,” saying other governments were now reconsidering whether the United States is truly as stable as previously believed.
Aside from restoring the gold standard, Mr. Mooney said it was imperative for the U.S. government to come up with a plan to control spending. “Democrats have absolutely no plan to do that,” he said.
He also warned that if current trends continue, economic disaster is a certainty.
“I can’t tell you what the exact limit is, but I never thought we’d be able to get this far,” he said, blasting the $5 trillion in new debt added under the current administration as “totally irresponsible.”
The only answer is to get back to a real standard where the dollar is backed by gold, he said. “If we got back to the gold standard, at least we would have a restriction there in terms of government spending,” Mr. Mooney added.
 The National Debt Clock in New York City on July 7, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Another co-sponsor of the bill, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), also warned about the consequences of allowing the dollar to be debased.
“If our currency continues to suffer from rampant inflation, and our wealth and retirement become less and less valuable, Americans can thank [President] Joe Biden for printing more money out of thin air,” he told The Epoch Times.
“H.R. 2435 would protect families and businesses against Biden’s spending sprees by repegging the dollar to a fixed weight of gold at market price,” Mr. Gosar concluded.
Numerous other lawmakers have supported the general proposition as well. Commenting on the Federal Reserve’s efforts to bring in a Central Bank Digital Currency, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also touted gold.
“We should go back to the gold standard, not digital currency payment systems. Hard pass,” she wrote on Twitter in April.
State-Level Gold Initiatives
Lawmakers and analysts told The Epoch Times that currently there is little chance of President Biden signing such measures into federal law. That could change under the next president as the economic situation deteriorates, however.
But at the state level, initiatives to expand the use of gold are proliferating nationwide. In recent years, multiple states have even passed laws declaring gold and silver to be “legal tender,” in line with Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution.
In Texas, lawmakers are making some of the biggest moves yet.
In 2015, the state approved the creation of the Texas Bullion Depository, which, among other functions, stores precious metals for clients.
Now, a growing coalition of lawmakers and experts are working to use the institution to facilitate trade within Texas using precious metals.
 Texas Rep. Mark Dorazio. (house.texas.gov) The idea was first hatched about 3 years ago, Texas Republican Rep. Mark Dorazio told The Epoch Times, as lawmakers gathered to discuss solutions to “out-of-control overspending by the federal government” and “the people of Texas being taken advantage of through inflation.”
“The question really was, ‘How can we protect Texans from the federal government?’” the lawmaker said. “That’s where this idea came from.”
“I’ve always been interested in silver and gold because of the stability they provide,” he added, noting that gold has remained stable and preserved its value for over 5,000 years, going back to the Bible’s Book of Genesis.
Recent inflation as well as banking collapses and bailouts have only added urgency to the issue as Texans grow increasingly concerned about their retirements and pensions, explained Mr. Dorazio.
China’s and Russia’s ongoing purchases of gold also suggest Texas must take the issue seriously, he said.
The goal is for Texans to be able to use a debit card-style system allowing them to transact and make payments using their gold deposits at the state depository at merchants around the state.
Mr. Dorazio credited economic warfare expert Kevin Freeman with the idea, but other experts as well as multiple lawmakers also played a role.
“This bullion bill would give everyday folks on the street the opportunity to own gold or silver and, when they need to liquidate or transact business, they can do it, just like they would with a credit card, with any vendor,” Mr. Dorazio said. “The depository would just deduct that amount in gold from the holder’s account. The merchant never even knows, they just get paid.”
 A man shops at a grocery store in Houston on Dec. 18, 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images) Eventually, Mr. Dorazio and others behind the effort hope that Texas’s new system can be expanded and potentially even serve as a model for other states and countries.
“When this came to me, I said, ‘We’ve got to push this thing,’” he continued. “We pushed it hard.”
The bill did not pass in this year’s session. However, Mr. Dorazio and other lawmakers intend to file what they say is an improved bill in several different committees next year, “and I think we’re going to get it passed.”
Mr. Freeman, the economic warfare expert Dorazio credited with the concept, told The Epoch Times that the move by Texas would have benefits for all Americans.
“If passed into law, this becomes a safe haven for those who want to buy, hold, and even spend precious metals,” he said, pointing those who would like to learn more to TransactionalGold.com.
“This effort would strengthen our financial system and as a result actually help the dollar by adding gold and silver to America,” he said.
Numerous state legislators who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed an urgent desire to pursue similar solutions for their states.
Another prominent lawmaker embracing gold is Republican Rep. Ken Ivory of Utah. Even as he sees a “fiscal and monetary earthquake on the horizon,” his state is especially vulnerable as a significant portion of its budget comes from the federal government.
“The big concern we have is the most vulnerable people in Utah are dependent on federal funds that the [Government Accountability Office] and the [Congressional Budget Office] both tell us are unsustainable,” he said. “We need to figure out as states how to end that dependence and really find a stable system for caring for people in Utah.”
 The Utah State Capitol building in Salt Lake City. (Scott Catron/CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons) While Utah is consistently regarded as one of the best-managed states, Mr. Ivory said, “it doesn’t matter how diligent we may be, because it’s like we’re on a treadmill going the wrong direction as they continue to inflate the money—they just keep printing money—and so even as one of the best-managed states, we are still losing ground.”
 Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory. (Utah House of Representatives) Mr. Ivory is one of a growing number of lawmakers across America who see major economic turmoil ahead that is “going to devastate the most poor and vulnerable,” the lawmaker told The Epoch Times in a phone interview, referencing debt, deficit, and the accelerating de-dollarization trend.
“It will be terrible for everyone,” he continued, “but the most vulnerable will pay the most.”
Citing military leaders, Mr. Ivory also called the looming economic trouble one of the most significant threats to national security.
As such, it is time to begin “contingency planning,” he said.
The Utah legislature is not currently in session, but Mr. Ivory and other state officials are already working on legislation for 2024 that will give the state treasurer the authority to hold gold and silver.
“We also want to do more of what Texas has done, starting with the [gold] bill that did not pass as a template for Utah,” he said.
Private Sector and Individuals
Even without action from authorities, individuals and the private sector can also play a role in protecting themselves from trouble with the dollar, experts in economics and the metals industry told The Epoch Times.
Charles Nenner, a prominent trends forecaster and economic analyst, recommended diversifying investments as a way for individuals to protect their own wealth and savings.
People should “move as many assets as they can out of the dollar since the U.S. dollar is very vulnerable,” he said, suggesting that the loss of confidence in the dollar was part of a broader “super cycle” involving the end of U.S. global dominance.
University of Bayreuth Honorary Economics Professor Thorsten Polleit, who serves as chief economist at Degussa, Europe’s largest precious metals trading house, also recommended diversification out of fiat currencies for investors and companies.
“I think that the official fiat currencies—U.S. dollar, euro, Chinese Renminbi & Co—will see their purchasing power erode over time,” he told The Epoch Times. “So people and businesses should not rely on the ‘stability’ of fiat currencies, but to minimize their money holdings.”
“In addition, people should diversify their assets: hold physical gold and silver, invest in a globally diversified stock portfolio; and don’t put your money in money market funds and bonds,” he added, suggesting investment for the long-term.
 A one-kilo Swiss gold bar and gold U.S. dollars coins in Paris on Feb. 20, 2020. (JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images) Ultimately, Mr. Polleit said many of the political and economic problems facing not just the United States but the world could be traced back to “state monopolized money, or fiat money.”
“The solution is a return to a ‘free market in money’: Ending the state’s money production monopoly by giving people the freedom to choose the kind of money that suits their needs best,” he said, adding that people would likely choose gold as it has “always been the finest money available in human history.”
One Utah-based company, Goldback Inc., is working to circulate gold in the market already by turning the metal into notes with 1/1,000 of one ounce of gold in them to be spent at willing businesses.
“We are really focused on helping people use gold as money,” Goldback CEO Jeremy Cordon told The Epoch Times, adding that over 1,000 businesses already accept Goldbacks and the number of participating merchants is growing fast.
The biggest barrier to more widespread use of gold in commerce at the moment is sales taxes charged on precious metals in various states, including even some conservative states, he continued.
“I think it’s great that state legislators are paying more attention to these precious metals laws,” Mr. Cordon continued, adding that the firm is tracking legislation nationwide. “We are seeing a huge uptick in action on the congressional side, too.”
“A lot of these lawmakers know people are starting to use gold as money as part of the de-dollarization environment we’re in, and that is going to continue,” he said, calling it “encouraging” that more and more states were acting on the issue.
Neither the Federal Reserve Board nor the U.S. Treasury responded to requests for comment.
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Niall McCarthy Former Contributor
Data journalist covering technological, societal and media topics
2February2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-countries-with-the-most-stem-graduates-infographic/?sh=5ad012e5268a
Since the turn of the century, China has experienced a revolution in third level education. It has outstripped both the United States and Europe in graduate numbers and as of 2016, it was building the equivalent of nearly one university per week. That progress has caused a massive shift in the world’s population of graduates, a population the U.S. used to dominate. Last year, India had the most graduates of any country worldwide with 78.0 million while China followed close behind with 77.7 million. The U.S. is now in third place with 67.4 million graduates, and the gap behind the top two countries is widening.
Some estimates see the number of Chinese graduates aged between 25 and 34 rising 300 percent up to 2030 compared to just 30 percent in the U.S. and Europe. According to the World Economic Forum, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) has become a pretty big deal in China’s flourishing universities. In 2013, 40 percent of Chinese graduates finished a degree in STEM, over twice the share in American third level institutions.
STEM graduates have become a vital cog in the wheel of global prosperity and unsurprisingly, China is leading the way. The World Economic Forum reported that China had 4.7 million recent STEM graduates in 2016. India, another academic powerhouse, had 2.6 million new STEM graduates last year while the U.S. had 568,000.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
 The Countries With The Most STEM Graduates TOP |
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Administrator Posted on May 31, 2023 https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/05/31/fall-of-american-empire-and-descent-into-a-new-dark-ages/
“The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigor of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.” — Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 38 “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West”
 Cole Thomas – The Course of Empire Destruction 1836
“After a diligent inquiry, I can discern four principal causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years. I. The injuries of time and nature. II. The hostile attacks of the Barbarians and Christians. III. The use and abuse of the materials. And, IV. The domestic quarrels of the Romans.” — Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 71 “Four Causes of Decay and Destruction.”
The moniker of my website originated from a quote by David Walker, then Comptroller General of the U.S., in 2007. I wholeheartedly endorsed Walker’s viewpoint and become politically active in trying to get Ron Paul elected as president in 2008 and 2012. It was a fruitless effort, as the uni-party in Washington DC, controlled by the dark forces of the Deep State, do not allow men and women who truly want to reduce the size and scope of government to ever get elected. His warning sixteen years ago is a perfect example of being right but being early. When talking about the decline of empires, you are really deliberating about a process, not an event. The Roman Empire did not fall on a specific day due to a specific cause. It collapsed in stages over hundreds of years due to numerous reasons, each triggering events which compounded upon each other and ultimately led to the final collapse.
Walker said, “The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon.” He believed we were resting on the laurels of being the sole superpower, as our empire built on debt was slowly and methodically crumbling. He cited three reasons for the fall of the Roman Republic that resonated in 2007 regarding the American Empire (formerly a republic):
- There has been a decline in moral values and political civility at home. Examples include the devaluation of life, greater self-centerdness by individuals and increased partisanship and ideological divides in Congress.
- We now have an overextended military around the world. While the US military is unmatched as to its capabilities, it is under stress and stretched very thin.
- There is fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. Our debt ratios are set to increase dramatically when the baby boomers retire.
It’s almost humorous Walker was issuing these dire warnings when the 2007 annual deficit was $160 billion. At our current rate of debt accumulation, it takes only one month to reach $160 billion. In 2020 and 2021 it only took 20 days to accumulate $160 billion. The national debt in 2007 was $9 trillion, up from $5.6 trillion in 2000. Today it stands at $31.8 trillion. Interest on the national debt will approach $900 billion this year, exceeding defense spending.
Walker warned about our debt ratios skyrocketing when the baby boomers retired. Well, the debt to GDP ratio has doubled from 62% in 2007 to 124% today, and most boomers can’t even afford to retire. U.S. unfunded liabilities total $188 trillion. Personal debts total $25 trillion, with $1.8 trillion of student loan debt and $1.3 trillion of credit card debt. The fiscal irresponsibility of our government and its citizens is breathtaking, unsustainable, and ultimately fatal to our empire. Walker may have been early, but he certainly was not wrong.
 Federal deficits trends Over Time-FY 2001-2022
The current Kabuki theater farce regarding the raising of the debt limit is a perfect example of how spineless politicians blatantly deceive the public, with the full support of the regime media, in proclaiming spending cuts and fiscal responsibility, when the CBO projections show the national debt growing to more than $50 trillion in the next ten years, as most of the spending is on automatic pilot. And this is before the coming recession/depression provokes the usual political response of fiscal stimulus, which will drive the debt higher.
Threats of government default, hysterical articles in the regime media, and last-minute deals are nothing but a show for the ignorant masses, while the true globalist agenda of one world order, where the peasants will own nothing and be happy, is rolled out at an accelerated pace. They know the fiscal sustainability of the western world is dire, therefore they are acting in a reckless manner, which imperils the world with a potential global war.
 World Economic Forum-twet-19November2016-You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy. This is how our world could change by 2023
Walker’s first point about the decline in moral values and political incivility has reached civil war instigating levels of degradation, deviancy, and treasonous political activity. Not in Walker’s wildest dreams did he envision the grooming and trafficking of children, drag queen story hour for toddlers, pushing children to be mutilated and propagandized into believing they are the opposite sex, promoting deviancy, and having this degenerate behavior jammed down our throats by the government, corporations, and the media.
Destroying our culture, promoting abnormality and sloth, tearing the fabric of our society to shreds, encouraging lawlessness, looting and murder, and persecuting normal white Americans who dissent, is actively promoted, and funded by Soros, Gates, and the rest of the Davos – WEF globalist psychopaths. The devaluation of our lives was never more evident than during the covid plandemic, where the annual flu was weaponized to lockdown the world, create havoc and chaos, institute totalitarian measures to abscond with our liberties and freedoms, destroy the lives of vaxx dissenters, and ultimately destroy the lives of millions who obeyed and were injected with the untested, gene altering, spike producing, Big Pharma enriching concoction.
 Covid-19 Protests-Free_Ohio_Now_Columbus
To put a Roman Empire slant on it, what has been wrought by Clinton, Obama, Comey, Wray, Brennan, Clapper, Pelosi, and their gaggle of treasonous co-conspirators since 2016 has marked our current day crossing of the Rubicon. Politics has always been a dirty game, but the machinations to bring down a duly elected sitting president, which continue to this day under the direction of Biden’s handlers, is reminiscent of the plots, coups, and murders as the Roman empire descended into corruption, madness, and deviant behavior.
The Durham report documented the unequivocal facts regarding the relentless coup attempt against Trump, but the complete coverup by the regime media and the toothless non-existent prosecution of the criminal Deep State characters involved in this treasonous act proves there no longer is a representative government looking out for the citizens of this country. We are a corporate fascist oligarchy, ruled by the few, for the few. We are nothing more than serfs, peasants, and useless eaters to the ruling class, as they continue to pillage and plunder what remains of the Treasury.
Walker thought our military was stretched thin in 2007, as the neo-cons had us fighting a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan to enrich the military industrial complex, based on false WMD claims and a fruitless effort to find our CIA created global terrorist mastermind – Osama bin Laden. Little did he know that twenty years after invading Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban, we would conduct a disastrous retreat and hand the country back to the Taliban, with a gift of about $10 billion in military hardware.
 Taliban’s new arsenal
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984
The defense budget in 2007, while fighting two wars, was $700 billion. Today the budget approaches $900 billion when we are supposedly not at war with anyone. With the Deep State firmly in control of both political parties, the arms dealers will always be swimming is your tax dollars, whether they are shipping their murderous wares to Zelensky, Israel, Taiwan, or any other country fighting our current mortal enemies – Russia, China, Syria, and Iran.
Mr. Walker was naïve in his assessment about the U.S. military’s strength. Winning wars to protect America has never been the goal. War is big business and keeps the politicians on both sides of the aisle satiated with political donations (aka bribes). The ruling class had no issue using a few hundred thousand poor patriotic useless eaters as cannon fodder in Iraq and Afghanistan to further enrich themselves. But it is much easier to create chaos and war in other countries and let their poor suckers die for a forlorn false cause, while providing weapons to both sides. I wonder if Walker was blindsided by Obama’s creation of wars in both Libya and Syria in 2011.
We killed Ghaddafi and left Libya a smoking chaotic ruin, with Islamic terrorists running rampant. Obama created ISIS so we had a reason to destroy Syria and Assad. Russia obliterated ISIS and has successfully kept Assad in power, infuriating the neocons and provoking the next move on the global chessboard. All the NPC Ukrainian Flag waving dolts who believe everything the regime media regurgitates, as instructed by their masters, are clueless as to why Biden and his neocon handlers are pushing us towards a direct conflict with Russia. Obama, Clinton, Victoria Nuland, John Brennan, McCain, Graham, and a slew of other Deep State lackeys overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine in 2014, because he was friendly towards Russia, initiating a domino effect in the Ukraine which has left us at the doorstep of World War III.
 State flag of Ukraine carried by a protester to the heart of developing clashes in Kyiv, Ukraine. Events of February 18, 2014.
The Roman economy was basically a rapine economy. Like all slave-owning societies, Rome had no middle class, a debased currency, and no export production – it lived by conquests, slave trade, and plundering the conquered provinces. Such economies can exist only as long as they expand; when the expansion ends, downfall is inevitable. See any resemblance to the American economy? When the Fed stops printing, it all comes crashing down. By the third century their currency was worthless, and a barter economy sprung to life.
By 451 AD the empire was bankrupt, taxes were 40% to 60%, and there was nothing left in the coffers to pay the military or keep the infrastructure from crumbling. The barbarians applied the final blow with the sacking of Rome, and the Dark Ages were born. Slavery and serfdom were the fate of Roman peasants. The collapse of Mediterranean trade meant the collapse of papyrus imports, and the means of writing disappeared. Literacy dissipated. The Roman civilization was kept alive only in churches and monasteries, which could afford parchment and vellum. What will the bankruptcy of the American empire entail and how will the city dwelling welfare recipients’ fare? My guess is not very well.
 Heinrich Leutemann,-Rome’s plundering by the vandals (c.1860–1880)
Just as the Romans became fat and happy, enjoying the fruits of efforts, innovation and sacrifices put forth by prior generations, Americans have grown to believe they are the richest, freest, and most powerful nation on earth. They believe it is their privilege to rule the world. Just as the Romans hired mercenary armies to fight their wars because it was beneath their citizens to defend their vast empire, the U.S. used paid mercenaries (Blackwater) in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight their wars. Now we just outsource the dying to Ukrainians, Libyans, Syrians, and Somalis, while providing them the weapons, technology, and logistics to wage endless war on our behalf.
 IRAQ-LIBYA-YEMEN-SYRIA-before-after US intervention
Next up will be the Taiwanese, as we provoke China into our next war. As documented earlier, the fiscal trajectory of our empire is on a course towards Armageddon, and the tens of billions in weapons being handed to the most corrupt nation on earth – Ukraine – is simply insane. Biden acts like a Roman emperor dictator (with dementia) during the final stages of Rome’s collapse, while the feckless politicians in the House & Senate sit idly by, cheering on our descent into national bankruptcy.
The final collapse of the Western Roman Empire was mainly triggered by the weakness of its late-stage emperors, failure of its civil administrators, disease, epidemics, and the unceasing invasion of its lands by the barbarian Visigoths and Vandals. Military failure and monetary weakness were the final nails in the coffin. The parallels with the American empire’s late stages are uncanny.
 Joe Biden-child sniffing fool
Can anyone conceive of a weaker emperor than Dementia Joe Biden? He is a low IQ, lying, corrupt to his core, bumbling, child sniffing fool, acting on behest of the Deep State and their globalist cabal. His administration is crawling with deviants, dopes, and those seeking the destruction of our country. The barbarian hordes are streaming across our southern border and being ushered into communities across the country by government sanctioned flights and bus rides. These mostly male Hispanics, Haitians, Somalis, Muslim terrorists, and Chinese nationals are not going to strengthen our country, but contribute greatly to its fall. But at least the ruling class will have maids and gardeners, while Big-Agra will have cheap labor to pick their crops.
 The Longest Welfare line in the World
Edward Gibbon’s discernment that the number one cause for the ruin of Rome was “The injuries of time and nature”, is more profound than it might seem. Its ability to be sustained for almost one thousand years is remarkable, but as with all large entities it succumbed to entropy, currency debasement, deviancy, corruptibility of its ruling class, and apathy of its citizenry. Everything trends towards disorder, chaos, and ultimately collapse. Pleasure without pain, glory without sacrifice, indolence without work, degeneracy disguised as creativity, and treason portrayed as politics, led to a slow spiraling disintegration of their society and culture over the course of centuries.
These exact same characteristics are rearing their ugly head in the late stages of the American Empire decline. It is fascinating that Roman historian Tacitus was documenting traits of a declining nation state during the first century, while it took until the fifth century for the Western Roman Empire to finally collapse. The timing of the downfall is always in doubt, as grains of sand are added to the pile until entropy wins and all comes crashing down.
 Invasions of the Roman Empire
“You have not tasted servitude. There is no land beyond us and even the sea is no safe refuge when we are threatened by the Roman fleet. We are the last people on earth, and the last to be free: our very remoteness in a land known only to rumor has protected us up till this day. Today the furthest bounds of Britain lie open—and everything unknown is given an inflated worth. But now there is no people beyond us, nothing but tides and rocks and, more deadly than these, the Romans. It is no use trying to escape their arrogance by submission or good behavior. They have pillaged the world: when the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy, if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of ’empire’. They make a desolation and call it ‘peace” ― Tacitus
 American Flag in Tatters
It’s as if Tacitus lived among us today. His description fits perfectly in describing the psychopaths controlling the U.S. Empire, along with most of the western world, as they rape, pillage, plunder, and desolate foreign lands in the name of freedom and call it peace keeping. The U.S. Empire is willing to fight Putin until the last Ukrainian is dead on the battlefield. How noble. Slaughter and seizing natural resources under false pretenses (WMD) are hailed as spreading democracy to third world countries.
It took the Roman Empire about 1,000 years to fall. The British Empire fell in approximately 300 years. The United States has been around for 234 as a nation, but only an empire since 1946, a mere 77 years. Has the advancement of technology, speed of communications, monetary manipulations, and level of military firepower coalesced into accelerating the demise of empires? It certainly appears so, as the American Empire is on course to fall by the end of this Fourth Turning, within the next ten years.
It is commonly believed the Dark Ages began with the fall of the Roman Empire. Of course, the definition of the Dark Ages has been debated for centuries, with the time frame sometimes set from 500 AD to 1000 AD, and sometimes until 1500 AD. They overlapped with the Middle Ages and some scholars contend they weren’t even that dark. I find it interesting as we enter a new Dark Ages, the regime media is busy writing articles contending the previous Dark Ages weren’t so bad after all.
The level of gaslighting produced on a daily basis by the propaganda peddlers doing their assigned task of keeping the masses ignorant and confused, is beyond the comprehension of average Americans trying to make a living and trusting their government. In reality, the Dark Ages coincided with the cultural decay and decadence of Rome in its late stages, as the vices of gluttony, lust and greed became the root of their civilization and functioned as chains enslaving and weighing down their culture.
 The Dark Ages by JonasDeRo https://www.deviantart.com/jonasdero/art/The-Dark-Ages-312263111
During the glory days of the Roman Empire, they achieved tremendous advancements in the areas of science, literature, philosophy, government, and architecture. The fall of the empire left a vacuum in these areas for centuries. The death of a culture is not an easy event to recover from. Record keeping during the Dark Ages was minimal, leaving historians in the dark as to what happened. After the fall, feudalism emerged, and the Catholic Church gained increasing power.
The intermingling of the church and state contributed to the lack of cultural advancement. The uneducated peasants were fearful and superstitious, living lives of subsistence and want. The Renaissance Age of enlightenment, which followed the Dark Ages, provided the inverse paradigm to the Dark Ages. Italian scholar Petrarch, who lived in the 14th century referred to the time period as ”those men of intellectual prowess as living cloaked in darkness”.
I would contend we have already entered a new Dark Ages, based upon the collapse of our culture, ignorance of the masses, failure of our educational system, celebration of deviancy, lack of civility, and lawlessness in our cities. Most Americans would scoff at the notion we have already entered a new dark age. Everyone (including the desperately “poor” illegal aliens swarming across our border) has a super-computer phone in their hands 24/7. Every piece of knowledge ever conceived is available at our fingertips through the internet.
We spend tens of thousands of dollars per student per year in our public schools to educate our children. Our universities are world renowned. We are the wealthiest nation in history. We have tens of thousands of laws, regulations, and rules, to keep us safe. And supposedly, the American dream is attainable by everyone born in this country. Sounds like we should be living in a new age of enlightenment. But nothing could be further from the truth. Mistaking technological advancement and passage of laws with cultural and societal advancement is a complete fallacy, as described by Albert Einstein and Aldous Huxley almost a century ago:
 “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” Albert Einstein
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
In case you haven’t noticed, our culture has descended into the gutter, societal norms which kept the country relatively cohesive since its inception are being attacked and obliterated by deviants and degenerates, and any semblance of a unified vision of what America stands for is actively being destroyed by the globalist Davos crowd seeking to implement their Great Reset agenda of technocratic control over the lowly peasants, while they feast, plunder and pillage the planet – the true psychopath barbarian billionaire horde.
The perversion of normalcy into glorifying pedophiles, drag queens, transgender freaks, drug addict felons, race hustlers, and organizations promoting lawlessness, looting, and killing, while persecuting and prosecuting normal, hard-working, civilized white people has left the country on the brink of chaos. Technology has done nothing but make us dumber, distracted and easily manipulated by the Bernaysian masters of manipulation.
Multiple generations have now been socially indoctrinated by government schools to obey, emote, believe, and fear whatever (Covid) and whoever (Putin) they are commanded to fear. What they are not taught is how to think critically, question everything, and make their own decisions based upon actual facts. Test scores in reading, writing and math are at all-time lows. The solution is to continually lower the standards and never hold anyone accountable for results.
We are a nation of morons led by a cadre of psychopaths. Children are encouraged by their parents and doctors to cut off their breasts and penises due to peer pressure and deviants controlling the schools and media. Groomers make toddlers watch transgender freaks perform sex acts on stage. Library books for 8-year-olds describe anal sex, masturbation, and other perverted acts.
 Matt Walsh-tweet-4October2022-I believe that gender ideology Statues portraying our history are torn down by mobs, while what passes for art and architecture today is perverted, frivolous and inconsequential. There are no masterpieces of literature created in our rotting society. The only thing that matters is monetizing content and number of eyeballs. Quality is non-existent, overridden by quantity and replaceability. Movies and television programs are created by untalented hacks, responding to focus groups, and required to insert the required racial and homosexually woke storylines into every program.
There are no Godfathers or Casablancas being produced. There are no novelists writing masterpieces on par with Steinbeck or Hemingway. But we do have Cardi B belting out her best-selling song WAP (acronym for Wet-Ass Pussy) and Sports Illustrated with transgender and obese swimsuit models. Based on TV commercials, 90% of Americans are either black, in an interracial relationship, gay, or transgender. We are an epically unserious society. Anyone observing America and most of the western world in an impartial manner would have to conclude we are already living in a new Dark Age of ignorance, superstition, and degradation, even before the final collapse of empire.
 Hank Willis Thomas Sculpture Honoring Martin Luther King Jr on Boston Common
While doing research on the Dark Ages I was surprised to stumble across some climate related information which puts the current hysterical climate change narrative in perspective. The current war on CO2, cow farts, petroleum powered vehicles, farmers, and human beings living in peace, is nothing more than an agenda to depopulate the planet, make our lives miserable, and further enrich those controlling the narrative, flying on private jets, vacationing on enormous yachts, and living in 50 room mansions in the Hamptons.
The green agenda is built on taxing you more, with zero impact on climate, while virtue signaling success. Meanwhile, the sun and power within our earth’s core will dictate our climate, despite all fruitless manmade efforts to have an impact. George Carlin’s The Planet is Fine diatribe captures the hypocrisy of humans thinking they matter at all when it comes to the planet.
“The planet is fine; the people are fucked! The planet isn’t going anywhere; we are! We’re going away! Pack your shit, folks! We’re going away and we won’t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that.” – George Carlin
 Solar Cycles-Brey and Eddy Solar Cycles
As you can discern, Rome flourished during a warming period and the Dark Ages coincided with a cooling period. Neither was due to human activity, petroleum products, not recycling enough, or cow farts. It was due to solar and volcanic activity, which may have gone hand in hand in creating the dynamics that made the Dark Ages dark. The Little Ice Age coincided with the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 when sunspots were at a minimum. Major volcanic eruptions in the 13th century, dimming sunlight across the planet also contributed to the cooling of the planet.
It seems recent studies of ice cores by real scientists confirm the period around 536 AD may have been the worst time to live on our planet in history. A cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland in 536 AD spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere, producing a mysterious fog plunging Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. Snow fell during the summer in China. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by Bubonic plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640.
 Natural disasters on European society
Humans will always be at the mercy of Mother Nature, the sun, and the volcanic activity within the bowels of our planet. Taxes, recycling, and electric cars won’t have one iota of impact on the future of the planet. The impact of little or no sun over the course of years led to crop failures, famine and plague, bathing sixth-century Europe in darkness and despair. Crops cannot grow without sun. Hunger and lack of vitamin D left the populations susceptible to disease. The bubonic plague killed half the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire during these dark days, hastening its collapse.
With no wheat, there was no bread, a staple of the diet in those days. The people of Europe were occupied with survival, living a brutish existence, leaving little time for cultural advancement. The trials and tribulations documented throughout history are determined by a combination of controllable human actions and uncontrollable natural causes.
 Under dark skies, St Augustine brings a message of Christian hope to 6th-century King Ethelbert of Kent. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
Under dark skies, St Augustine brings a message of Christian hope to 6th-century King Ethelbert of Kent. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
Our helplessness at the hands of nature happens every day across the globe, with the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami deadly reminders of our vulnerability and powerlessness. We already know Schwab, Soros, Gates, Tedros, and the rest of the Great Reset New World Order cabal are actively attempting to bring down the American Empire and replace it with a global oligarchy, where we own nothing, and they own it all. Using climate change as their cudgel, they are already conducting a war on farmers, purposely restricting the output of food for the masses.
Combined with rampant raging central bank created inflation across the world, wars being conducted in breadbasket regions of the globe, and extreme drought conditions in key agricultural regions, the landscape is already in the danger zone. With Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano showing signs of a major eruption, and hundreds of other dormant volcanoes around the world capable of eruptions on par with the 536 AD eruption, it’s only a matter of when, not if. Many scientists postulate the Sun has entered into the modern Grand Solar Minimum (2022–2053) that will lead to a significant reduction of solar magnetic field and activity like during Maunder minimum, leading to noticeable reduction of terrestrial temperature. We have zero control or influence over these events.
 AMECAMECA, MEXICO – MAY 23: Popocatepetl volcano spews incandescent material as seen from Paso de Cortés on May 23, 2023 in Amecameca, Mexico. The second highest volcano in the country increased its activity while Mexican authorities raised the alert to yellow phase 3. Popocatepetl volcano caused the fall of ashes in different municipalities in Puebla, Estado de Mexico and Mexico City. Mexican army has spread forces as a preventive measure while the 3 levels of government are in coordination to observe the activity of the volcano and the situation in the surroundings. (Photo by Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images)
Quotes from Tacitus nearly 2,000 years ago are proof human nature never changes and the cycles of history repeat themselves across empires. Biden’s illegal executive orders, disregard of the Constitution, and blatant corruption, along with the regime media suppressing legitimate dissent about Fauci’s lies, Pfizer’s falsification of trial data, and the FDA colluding with Twitter to censor doctors, fit perfectly into Tacitus’ view of the world.
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” ― Tacitus
“If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticize.” ― Tacitus
 CORONAVIRUS-BIDEN-FAUCI
The traitorous acts of Obama, Biden, Clinton, Comey, Brennan and the entire FBI and CIA complex in conducting a coup against a duly elected president and then covering up their treason with the full cooperation of the regime media was and still is an audacious crime. These crimes are fully detailed in the Durham Report and on Hunter Biden’s laptop, but no one will go to jail, because half the country supports the crime the other half is apathetic and uninterested, and our elected leaders are in on it. Two thousand years and nothing changes.
“Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.” ― Tacitus
“The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.” ― Tacitus
 spies who lie
The American Empire is displaying all the worst attributes of Rome in its death throes, as the oligarchy grows more audacious, knowing they are illegitimate, but unconcerned with being brought to justice because they control the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government. They fear no one and dare the peasants to try and stop them. The oligarchs provoke crisis, chaos, fear, and strife. They hide in the shadows, functioning as an invisible governing power, manipulating the minds of the masses, in their psychotic belief they can control and rule the world because they are superior in intellect, integrity, and ability to envision the future.
This relatively small circle of psychopaths, who have gotten the empire into this mess, grow ever more powerful as they lead us on a path to disaster. Their hubris and an arrogant disregard for the wishes of the people, belief in their own invincibility, and not fearing any retribution for their crimes of treason, leave them at the top of a crumbling empire – so they will have the farthest to fall.
Everything about our empire is unsustainable. Ultimately it will collapse financially under the weight of its unpayable debts. With psychopaths running the show who believe they can win a two front war against Russia and China, we will be lucky if our empire isn’t just a pile of smoldering ruins when they are done with it. There is absolutely no way to vote ourselves out of this because the Deep State counts the votes.
The dissenters are not united enough to shoot our way out of this. You can run, but you can’t hide from the impact of the coming collapse. The unknown ingredient to this toxic mixture of death is nature’s influence. If a volcanic eruption, or several volcanic eruptions on par with the 536 AD occurrence, were to happen concurrently with economic collapse, the earth’s population of 8 billion would be drastically reduced in short order.
 Amish Community: The Caretakers Of The Earth
At this point, the best we could hope for is a relatively non-violent collapse where the critical thinking self-reliant people would migrate to rural regions and learn to live off the land again. The simple life of thriving day to day based on your own efforts, along with the efforts of your small homogeneous community, is the likely destiny for millions. No one is coming to save us. We’ll have to save ourselves. We happened to be born at a juncture of history where a Fourth Turning crisis ended an empire. We didn’t choose our fate, but we need to prepare and make the best of our situation.
I find nothing more appropriate to visually represent our clownworld empire falling than a picture of a dwarf clown, smoking a cigarette while holding a bouquet of wilted flowers in the pouring rain in front of a defunct circus tent. If the clown shoe fits, wear it. The season is turning.
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
To everything turn, turn, turn
There is a season turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under Heaven
– Turn! Turn! Turn! The Byrds
 Sad Clown
“The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
TOP |
by Tyler Durden, 21September2016 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-20/martin-armstrong-coming-dark-age
Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,
Question:
Over the years you have made several comments about directional changes and have alluded to the idea that a crossroads is coming in that we will either enter another Dark Age or we will see the light towards greater liberty and freedom. More recently, you mentioned the year 2032 as a critical year in this regard.
In addition, you have mentioned that Trump winning the election would postpone the inevitable chaos, but that HRC winning would speed it along.
In terms of the distal effects of the November election on 2032, does either Trump or Clinton winning increase the likelihood of entering a Dark Age over something more hopeful? Should we be attempting to kick the can down the road or should we get it over with?
 Wild Tree – Dark Age
Answer:
Hillary is just corrupt and rotten to the core. She represents everything that is wrong with our political economy. Politicians no longer care about the people. Every election promises “change” in some variation.
 Obama – Change we can believe in
That is admitting something is broken, but it always comes down to the same thing – it’s just about them.
 Mark Twain – If voting made any difference they would not let us do it Indeed, it was Mark Twain who put it best during the last century: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” We must understand that this has been an age old battle between the rulers and the people. In Athens where Democracy was born, they constantly fought to seize power back and even made Pericles stand trial. Government has always sought to bribe the people creating a welfare state. The Romans knew that the way to power was to promise everything but give them bread and circuses (sport games) and they could maintain power. It was Decimus I?nius Iuven?lis, commonly known as Juvenal, who was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD that wrote that phrase:
… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses
[…] iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. […]
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81)
Nothing has changed. Many people can name every person on some sports team but cannot name their political minister, congressman, or whatever lofty title they call themselves. The judge in a courtroom demands to be called “honorable” as do all public servants. They make a mockery of the very word.
 Athens – AR Tetradrachm 510-505BC (17-35 grams)
We are approaching the grave danger of a Dark Age beginning from the aftermath of 2032. Hopefully, I will be gone by then and will not have to face this horrible event. Yet Dark Ages are reoccurring events throughout history and in all cultures. The Greeks endured their between the Homeric Age that marked the end of the Mycenaean civilization around 1100 BC, to the first signs of the Greek cities (poleis) rising again in the 6th century BC (508–322 BC). It was during the 9th century BC (900-801BC) that we begin to see the rise of great cities outside of Greece including Carthage, which was founded by the Phoenicians.
Japan went through its Dark Age, which also lasted about 600 years and the same impact was endured in Europe with the collapse of Rome in 476AD. Dark Ages seem to come in units of 3 so they are 300 or 600 years. The cause is always political corruption.
 Japanese Debasement 760-958AD
In the case of Japan, each new emperor devalued the money in circulation with a decree that it was worth 10% of his new coins. There was no intrinsic value since they were bronze or iron. This process led people NOT to hoard money. Chinese coins were sought after since they would not be devalued. Eventually, nobody would accept Japanese coins and they ceased to be issued for 600 years. People used Chinese coins or bags of rice.
 Roman Follis 295-348AD
The Roman Monetary Crisis that saw silver vanish by 268AD, was naturally followed by an attempt to restore the monetary system. A new bronze coin was introduced in 295AD known as the Follis. Again, one 52 year cycle saw its collapse from over 16 grams to under just 2 grams.
 Zenonis By the time you come toward the very end of the Roman Empire, you rarely find any bronze and when you do, it is less than an American penny. Coinage is debased because of the corruption in government. Those who think restoring the gold standard would do anything are wrong. Such monetary reforms appear repeatedly throughout history with little lasting impact. The system as we know it is always doomed to failure simply because we are satisfied as a whole with bread and circuses and let politicians run wild in their greed. Hillary is the example for everyone to see.
I will gather all the accounts and this is on my bucket-list of books to complete. We do have a choice. We can understand what is coming and WHY, and perhaps take that first step out of darkness and move into the light of a realistic political system that ends the bribing of citizens and this eternal battle of political corruption. We need a REAL democracy without career politicians. Only then can we hope to advance as a society. |
by Tyler Durden, 21September2016 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-21/three-stages-empire
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
I consider it self-evident that we are in the third and final stage of self-serving Imperial decay.
Though Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third is not specifically on the rise and fall of empires, it does sketch out the three stages of Empire.
Here is the current context of the discussion of Imperial lifecycles: the U.S. defense budget is roughly the same size as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined:
 US Defense budget
Luttwak describes the first stage of expansion thusly:
“With brutal simplicity, it might be said that with the first system the Romans of the republic conquered much to serve the interests of the few, those living in the city–and in fact still fewer, those best placed to control policy.”
The second stage spread the benefits of Empire much more broadly:
“During the first century A.D., Roman ideas evolved toward a much broader and altogether more benevolent conception of empire… men born in lands far from Rome could call themselves Roman and have their claim fully allowed, and the frontiers were efficiently defended to defend the growing prosperity of all, and not merely the privileged.”
The third stage is one of rising inequality:
“In the wake of the great crisis of the third century, the provision of security became an increasingly heavy charge on society, a charge unevenly distributed, which could enrich the wealthy and ruin the poor. The machinery of empire now became increasingly self-serving, with its tax collectors, administrators and soldiers of much greater use to one another than to society at large.“
That line describes the American state and central bank perfectly. The burdens of an increasingly self-serving hierarchy are falling most heavily on the middle and upper-middle class, while bread and circuses (i.e. Medicaid-paid opiates) are freely distributed to the restless masses to distract them from the immense concentration of wealth and power at the top of the pyramid:
 The Global Wealth Pyramid
At some point, Collapse Is Cheaper and More Effective Than Reform (November 5, 2015). The third stage Luttwak describes can be broken down into a chart of the Lifecycle of Bureaucracy, for every Imperial Project is ultimately the combination of a vast concentration of wealth/power and the sclerosis of self-serving bueaucracies that serve themselves rather than society at large:
 Lifecycle of Bureaucracy
I consider it self-evident that we are in the third and final stage of self-serving Imperial decay. That said, we don’t have to follow that trajectory; we can fashion a much better future outside the status quo, as I outline in A Radically Beneficial World.
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If you find value here, please consider becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. My new book is #5 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book’s website.
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Administrator Posted on 27August2023 https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/08/27/end-game-for-the-american-empire/
 Thomas Paine Quote: The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance Living through the late stages of an empire in decline, coming unhinged, flailing about in a death throes of debt, depravity and denial, is not a pleasant experience. But, it is just the cycle of history playing out once again, with the name of the empire changed, different villains and fools, civil and international strife, and a debt default to end all debt defaults. As the chart below portrays, the existing social order, controlled and dominated by America since the beginning of the 20th Century, is rapidly hurtling towards its demise, to be swept away by a tsunami of debt default, social chaos, and global war. That’s how Fourth Turnings roll.
 The Archetypical Big Cycle-Dalio-Cycle I know the ignorant masses choose the ostrich method of keeping their heads buried in the sand, but that will not save them from the consequences of actions taken and not taken over the last fifty years by the political and business leaders installed by wealthy globalist psychopaths bent on controlling the world and reaping the riches from their despicable efforts.
 Stick your head in the sand I believe Ray Dalio‘s chart of the changing world order is accurate as to where we stand in the cycle, even though he is one of those global elitists. The beginning of the decline can be pegged to the start of the 21st Century, with the dot.com crash and 9/11 ushering in an astronomical increase in debt, money printing, and despotism, as each crisis created by debt and money printing was met with the “solution” of more debt and money printing. With interest on the national debt about to surpass $1 trillion per year and unfunded future debt obligations exceeding $200 trillion, there is no way out. The American economic system will implode in a matter of a few years.
The internal conflict since the election of Trump in 2016 and the subsequent coup, election fraud, scamdemic, and now unwarranted un-Constitutional persecution of Trump, leaves the country on the brink of civil war. I know the regime media and distracted masses scoff at the possibility of civil war, but the same was true in 1859. There are a lot of rightfully angry people in this country with a seething rage for those who have destroyed this country for their own gain. The 2024 election sure seems like a spark that could ignite this powder keg, and the 300 million weapons owned by the angry people are waiting to be put to proper use.
 Tree Of Liberty by StephenBarlow https://www.deviantart.com/stephenbarlow/art/Tree-Of-Liberty-476474101
I believe we are already in the midst of stages 16 – Loss of Reserve Currency and 17 – Weak Leadership. The American empire initiated war in the Ukraine has set in motion the demise of the USD as the reserve currency of the world, ending its seventy seven year reign as the one and only settlement currency for global trade. Biden, the weakest, dumbest, most corrupt, illegitimate president in the history of our country, has succeeded in pushing Russia, China, India, Brazil, and now the Middle East and South American oil producers towards an economic alliance which will accelerate the demise of the USD.
Biden, as the puppet of evil globalist forces, has encouraged an invasion of our southern border by barbarian hordes, has destroyed our economy, flaunted the Constitution, and has set us on a path towards global conflict. He makes James Buchanan and Jimmy Carter look like Mount Rushmore candidates compared to his “accomplishments”. They were just ineffective and weak. He is corrupt, evil and destructive. 2024 would be the sixteenth year of this Fourth Turning, right in the wheelhouse of civil war, revolution, and global conflict. We have entered the endgame and now it’s just a matter of how much destruction, death, and retribution will be required to achieve a new world order better than what we have today. Not winning is not an option.
 “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately”-Benjamin Franklin
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by Tyler Durden 19October2016 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-19/hidden-fragility-what-happens-when-electricity-three-days
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
What happens when an electricity dependent society and economy has an extended loss of electrical grid and communications?
One of the hidden realities of modern life is its fragility. For example, few people are aware of the precariousness of the supply chain that refills gasoline/petrol stations around the world every few days.
A new book, When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation explores the fragilities of our truck-dependent supply chains.
Longtime correspondent Bart D. (Australia) recently experienced a multi-day regional loss of electricity. His first-person observations help us understand what breakdowns in energy are like on the ground.
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Observations of life in an extended power failure by Bart D. (Australia)
South Oz is continuing with its streak of extreme weather. The latest being our encounter with what’s being described as a category 2 ‘hurricane’ with the added bonus of a severe front preceding it that produced many low-grade tornados. A score of major power transmission towers were twisted off their footings, 80 000 lightning strikes fried out a lot of ‘secondary’ electricity infrastructure … 40% of power that is usually being generated from wind had to be shut down due to extreme winds and base load backup generators failed in many locations (including my region).
Power ‘gradually’ returning after blackout plunged state into darkness
End result … entire state without electricity for a day and a half. Some regions, including my home region, (about the size of the state of Tasmania) were without electricity for 3 nights and 2.5 days.
It was a fascinating opportunity to observe firsthand what happens when an electricity dependent society and economy has an extended and complete loss of electrical grid and communications.
Key observations for my local area are:
1. Many people have small petrol generators thanks to our lovely coastal wilderness and a preoccupation with Glamping (Glam Camping)
2. Very few people had a store of petrol at home more than 5 to 10 litres. (usually kept for use in lawn mowers, brush cutters, chainsaws). Some owners of small boats had up to 20 litres on hand.
3. When the electricity goes out … the pumps at fuel stations don’t work. To my great surprise, only 1 fuel station in my nearest city of about 14 000 population had (or quickly acquired) a back-up generator to work their fuel pumps. There was a 3 hour wait for customers to get from back of queue to the pumps … and a ridiculous show of ‘bulk buying’ where people didn’t just take fuel that they personally needed; they showed up with between 3 and 8 X 20 litre (5 gallon) fuel cans as well as filling their cars. Hopefully the canned fuel was distributed among family and friends. (My assertion is that the owners of the station should have rationed fuel to 40 litres per customer to keep the que moving faster and to make sure everyone had some, rather than creating an ‘all or nothing’ situation)
4. Due to the difficulty with getting hold of petrol after the blackout started … almost everyone with generators at home could only run them for a few hours over the course of the entire blackout. Even then, the small camping gensets usually lacked the capacity to run large modern refrigerator/freezers. So … most people lost the contents of their fridges by the end. Due to cold weather, at least freezers stayed cold for the most part.
5. Big shops had their own gensets … but they can’t power the banks of chillers for meat and dairy … so these items became unavailable by the evening of the blackout starting.
6. The full loss of grid, grid back-up and other smaller backups caused telecommunications and data transmission to practically cease. This meant limitations of EFTPOS in stores. Banks were shut, ATM’s didn’t work and some shops that were open could only take cash. Generally though, everyone muddled through the sketchy electronic payment systems one way or another. Internet access failed for the most part. Social media pretty much collapsed … my two daughters though their social lives were over. I didn’t miss it. My wife found more time to do other things too.
7. The items that disappeared from the shelves fast, and were tricky to find after 24 hours without power were : Bread, D cell batteries, 6 volt square batteries, matches, heat beads, butane gas cans, fresh meat, sandwich meats, cheeses. (not sure about bottled water – most here have rain tanks anyway). Everything else seemed fine, although fresh fruit and veg got limited after 48 hours.
8. In hardware/camping stores that managed to open: bottled LPG quickly sold out as did BBQ’s, camp stoves, camp lights and batteries to run them. Most here have a gas BBQ at home, but if you didn’t already have a full bottle of gas … it was very hard to get a replacement after 48 hours.
9. No one here knows how to use a road intersection properly when the traffic lights are out! I think this helped create major gridlock in the states capital but was even noticeable here at my much smaller regional city with just one such intersection containing lights. (public education urgently required on this)
10. The number of back-up gensets at critical locations (including hospitals and communications systems) that failed was disturbing. There needs to be a major inquiry into why the back-ups on critical services failed. This nearly caused a shutdown of mains water supply as our water is pumped out of aquifers and has to be lifted to storage tanks high up in the hills. More of a problem for sanitation than drinking, as rain tanks are common here.
11. Then there were a few people like me … I ran my big ‘workshop’ genset 7 hours a day (hour in the morning, hour at lunch time, 4-5 hours in the evening) and was burning about 7 litres of fuel a day in doing so. My home fuel reserve meant I could run at that extravagant level for a month if need be, or supply others who fell short. We ran refrigerators, lights and TV almost ‘as usual’ and offered to charge anyone’s batteries who needed it and supplied a small camping gas burner, full cylinder of gas and a good battery powered camping light to my parents-in-law who were seriously underprepared. The rest of my small home town (located 20km from a regional city) was rather dark and quiet for the three nights (in part due to the lack of pre-stored fuel to run camping gensets).
12. We have a gas stove in our kitchen, with bottled LNG that lasts 3 -5 months in normal use, so cooking was as normal for us. Since we didn’t try to use the gas to also heat washing/bathing water it would have lasted for the usual amount of time.
13. When most were having cold showers, no showers, wasting their BBQ gas to heat pots of water or crowding into friends and relations who had LNG hot water systems in their houses … our family had hot baths by candle light in huge volumes of wood heated water. (Picture of my old wood heater below.) It is very efficient, made in the 1940’s I think, but possibly much older. The inner bowl is copper and absorbs heat from a small fire lit behind the square opening in front. It can boil 70 litres in 20 minutes from a cold start, or 15 minutes for a refill of water once it’s already been going a while.
 Wood fired water boiler
14. Apart from the fuel distribution fiasco everything remained orderly, people remained calm and helpful and life went on. Strangers were a lot chattier with other strangers than usual … which is good to see. I saw examples of shops extending ‘unsecured credit’ for small amounts of basic food items to people who had no cash on them and whose cards didn’t work. No looting, no “Law Enforcement” out making trouble and plenty of sharing and cooperation.
15. Although about a quarter of houses have solar panels or solar thermal hot water where I live … none of it worked as it’s all grid connect AND doesn’t work under the heavy cloud/rain/cold of a 3 day storm.
I’ve been thinking about getting ‘stand-alone’ solar power (ie connected to my own batteries) since they closed the big coal fired station in the north of my region, (and the price of these systems has become quite affordable). Our region is at ‘the end of the line’ of our state grid now and I expect regular outages this summer when hot, calm conditions prevail that reduce our wind generation output at the same time as spiking power use for air conditioners. Our electricity now has to travel up to 1600km (1000 miles) from the state of Victoria to reach us when the windmills aren’t working here!
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Thank you, Bart, for sharing your observations. The resilience (or lack thereof) of complex systems is difficult to assess until there are atypical strains placed on the system.
What seems effortlessly resilient on average days can break down dramatically if redundancies, proper maintenance and crisis response have been stripped from the system by incompetence, budget cuts and/or the self-serving priorities of managers and employees.
As a result, we only discover systems have become fragile and brittle in crisis, when it’s too late to restore resilience.
 Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock TOP |
by Tyler Durden, 07August2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dear-america-rest-whats-coming-when-normies-awake
Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
Normies Awake!
“The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal.”
– Gaius Baltar
So-called Normies might be musing, this month of approved mental languor, whether the mighty efforts to suppress news of all kinds, about everything, have concealed the true tendings of our wayward country – leading them to wonder whether it is even possible to be a Normie in such an abnormal time and place.
So-called Normies might be musing, this month of approved mental languor, whether the mighty efforts to suppress news of all kinds, about everything, have concealed the true tendings of our wayward country – leading them to wonder whether it is even possible to be a Normie in such an abnormal time and place.
 Peasants Will Be Out With Pitchforks What news is suppressed?
That the USA is worse than dead broke.
That the people were poisoned, apparently on-purpose.
That the spectral “Joe Biden” sold out our country.
That the war we started in Ukraine, on purpose, for no good reason, is about to be lost, and with it our standing around world.
That there actually is such a criminal organism as the Blob at large in our government, responsible for the astounding abnormality immersing us.
But never mind all that… for now, just go see Barbie. Have a clam roll, a dip in the ocean, another margarita…. September will be here soon enough.
Eventually, the official perversion of money – especially of borrowing an awesome lot of it with no intention of ever repaying – leads to the unhappy circumstance of money disappearing until nobody has any money. And by such, the broke-ness of the government transmogrifies to a whole land full of broke people. Many banks go broke as well. Even the high-fliers who hoarded things that purport to represent money go broke. Then, nobody has the means to buy anything. Businesses that can’t sell anything stop being businesses. After a while, no activity is meaningful except grubbing in the soil to grow some food, or stealing it from those who grubbed and grew it. By then, you can barely even call it a society.
By September, we’ll have some idea where all that is heading. The bond market is wobbling because the government can’t stop increasing its spending. America issues more and more bonds to borrow ever more money, but to the world’s bond-buyers (a.k.a. lenders), what used to be considered virtually risk-free now looks like a bad bet. So, the enticement to buy, which is called the interest rate, has to go up. But as it goes up, the cash value of existing bonds goes down (who wants the older bonds when the newer ones pay more?)
The holders of bonds are mainly big institutions: banks, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds (other countries). They put their large holdings into bonds because in normal times they are safe and dependable investments. But these are abnormal times. When the value of their bonds goes down a lot, the value of their reserves goes down. And when those reserves get reduced too much in relation to the institutions’ liabilities (what they owe), the institutions go bankrupt. When that happens, the people who are vested in those institutions lose their money, too, and end up having to sell stocks and other property to meet their obligations. This ends up looking like what we call “a crash.” It will get Normies’ attention.
How’s it going with the poisoning of America? Since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now “X”), the app has developed a beefed-up immune system against censorship aimed at it by the FBI, CIA, DHS, and the White House. Twitter is once again a popular medium of information exchange, where news flows pretty freely these days. Even news of previous censorship and cancellation is getting out – and with interesting possibilities for consequences.
 Mary Talley Bowden MD-tweet-6August2023-On 11/17/21, I posted 25 Tweets saying “Vaccine mandates are wrong” w/screenshots of patient testimonials. Days later, Houston Methodist, 1st in the country to mandate the vaccine, notified the Houston Chronicle that my privileges were suspended for spreading “dangerous misinformation.” The many brave doctors who questioned the “vaccine” story, are being heard now. Other entrepreneurial analysts on Twitter — e.g., Edward Dowd, The Unity Project, “The Ethical Skeptic,” “Chief Nerd”— regularly publish data and charts showing America and the rest of the world just how much damage the mRNA shots did to millions of people, how many have been disabled and killed by them. By September, the awareness of what has been done, and the psychopathic degree of official lying about it, could pass that threshold beyond which everybody knows and the great crime is revealed. Expect a major American political attitude adjustment.
There is surely enough publicly-seen evidence to make an impeachment case against “Joe Biden.” The process seems to move slowly, given the traditional lassitude of Congress, but momentum is building as all these other national fiascos careen toward criticality due to abysmal executive leadership. That evidence shows the Biden Family engaged in an international racketeering scheme to peddle “JB’s” influence when he was vice-president. That’s bribery and the very word is in the short passage of our Constitution describing the grounds for sacking a high official.
Rep. Comer’s House Oversight Committee has already dug up voluminous suspicious activity reports in Biden family bank accounts and has promised more, including information of offshore hidden accounts. Jim Jordan’s preliminary impeachment inquiry has drawn up its first witness list which includes the shadowy “JB” aide Michael Carpenter, and the slippery Trump impeachment “whistleblower,” CIA agent Eric Ciaramella — who essentially accused Mr. Trump of attempting to look into the very bribery crimes of the Biden family lately exposed, a pungent irony. When the impeachment process gets underway in earnest this fall, I expect “Joe Biden” will resign, leaving Ms. Harris to be managed by the shadow-president Barack Obama. That in itself will become a crisis of its own.
Our country has vested its prestige and treasure — but not our blood, at least yet — in the preposterous Ukraine proxy war, completely misjudging every element of it. The Russiaphobia of so many Blob officials was amplified by their own dishonest efforts to blame Russia for all the self-created ills of our own national life. The dirty secret of the Ukraine war is that we are no longer in control of events. The Russians are going to settle things there and that poor palooka of a country will be wrested back into their traditional sphere-of-influence, no more to be a troublemaker. I doubt that our puppet, Mr. Zelensky will be in power by Halloween. NATO will cease to exist and each nation of Europe will then struggle to settle its own sovereign hash without much of an industrial economy left. Expect governments to fall.
In the meantime, enjoy the clam rolls, the surf, the corn-dogs at the fair, and all the other blessings of languorous August. Rest up for what’s coming when Normies awake!
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Administrator
Posted on September 20, 2023 https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/09/20/fake-climate-narrative-is-easily-debunked
ZeroHedge emphasis added https://www.zerohedge.com/political/quinn-fake-climate-narrative-easily-debunked
Anyone capable of critical thought knows this entire globull warming/ climate crisis/ health emergency narrative is false, contrived by the ruling elite/globalist cabal billionaire class as a further means to gain control, increase their already ungodly wealth, tax us into oblivion, lock us down in their 15 minute cities, and dole out our daily allotment of bug protein.
Their narrative is filled with lies, misinformation, and holes so big you can drive a Tesla through them. They have faked the temperature data for decades. CO2 is not a pollutant. Eating meat is not destroying the planet. Cows farting is not ruining our environment. Of course, Chris Christie farting may be harming the planet. This fake narrative is dutifully spewed by the corporate regime media 24/7, as they are funded by Gates, Soros, and the WEF to do so. Lies, lies and more lies.
 ANCIENT WISDOM Only a fool believes that electricity used for air conditioning harms the planet, but electricity used to charge a Tesla does not.
The foolishness of the drivel they expect us to swallow is beyond the pale. They want to put oil companies and coal companies out of business because fossil fuels are evil. They are purposely attempting to drastically reduce our energy output, which means less electric power. But they also want to force everyone to drive an electric vehicle. And they won’t allow nuclear power plants to be built. These insane beliefs are ridiculous. Only low IQ willfully ignorant NPCs could believe them. More than half the population [of the Global North/NATO] apparently fall into this category.
Wind and solar are polluting, environmentally damaging and inefficient. They push solar, while at the same time push geo-engineering to block the sun, to cool the planet. This idiocy speaks volumes to what these people running the show think about the intellectual capacity of the masses. They believe we are sufficiently dumbed down, distracted, and apathetic to implement their agenda through constant propaganda, fear mongering, and threats. They want to own everything, while you own nothing. It’s nothing but a show and they will keep it going until we do something about it.
 Greta Thunberg Poses for the Cameras Amid Arrest TOP |
by Tyler Durden, 08May2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/once-trust-has-been-lost-theres-no-going-back
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Now that the overlapping crises are upon us and the banquet of consequences is being served, we’ll see just who our elites and leadership really are.
The erosion of trust doesn’t require intent, it only requires the blind pursuit of self-interest above all else. Trust is fundamentally reciprocity and honesty: to build trust, we must each perform our agreed-upon responsibilities and be truthful about our performance and actions.
 US Social Trust Lies, obfuscation, misdirection and the sins of omission are all Kryptonite to trust. Those who put the pursuit of self-interest above all else like to think they can finesse their greed by omitting the truth rather than presenting a fabrication / lie. But being social animals whose survival ultimately rests on trust, humans are keenly sensitive to the difference between the truth / honesty and self-serving prevarications such as the sins of omission.
America’s elites and those living large in protected fiefdoms have persuaded themselves that their relentless pursuit of self-interest has no cost or consequence. Conveniently ignoring Adam Smith’s volume on the moral foundations needed to support capitalism, they think “the invisible hand” of the market is nothing more than a feeding frenzy of self-serving greed, and so their relentless pursuit of self-interest will somehow magically transform their looting and free-riding into a stable economy and society.
 Share of Total Net Worth of the Middle Class
This is why trust has been lost in America. Everyone with any hold on power uses that power solely to benefit themselves and their cronies, under the tissue-thin guise of “serving the public” (or even more egregiously, “doing God’s work”–please hand me a barf-bag…).
When everyone is issuing an endless spew of BS to cover their own self-enrichment, trust is eroded and then lost. When everyone with any shred of power is scrambling to free-ride the system to serve their private interests above all else, the system itself can no longer be trusted.
This is why institutions have lost public trust. Those happily ensconced in a politically powerful fiefdom can increase their private gains at the expense of the public interest without any worries that the public can ever make it through the complexity thickets they’ve erected to ring-fence their fiefdom.
The elites rig the system behind flimsy legal screens and declare the system one of “endless opportunity” without mentioning some are more equal than others. Markets are rigged, politics is theater and those in the know gloat as their personal fortunes expand like clockwork.
 Share of Total Net Worth of the Top 1 Percent
All of this is betrayal of the public trust and the public interest, and betrayal has a cost and consequence: trust is lost. Betrayal hurts because we believed the pretenses and promises of the lying, cheating prevaricator. Once the truth seeps out, we’re done with the liar / free-rider / self-serving BSer.
This is where we are: trust has been lost and there’s no going back. As the first chart above illustrates, social trust–our willingness to trust strangers–has declined for decades. There are many threads in this decline, but one is that everyone has transmogrified into a scammer or grifter, trying to extract something from us while giving us nothing in return except empty promises, phony gratitude or the pretense of reciprocity.
What exactly is the difference between the beggar with a phony story, a politician “explaining” a new junk fee or a private-sector elite rigging the system to benefit their enterprise? There is no difference. All are masking their pursuit of self-interest behind a phony story. The beggar’s story of needing $10 for gas is obviously threadbare; so too are the stories of pickpocketing “leaders” and SillyCon Valley monopolists.
As the chart below shows, the middle class that once trusted markets, institutions and civic leaders has seen its share of the national wealth decline as the top 1%’s share increased. Wealth wasn’t “grown,” it was transferred. Eventually “investors” finally accept they’re nothing but marks for the financial elite to skim and scam and so they exit the fake 3-card-monte “market.” The skimmers and scammers, bereft of marks, whine and beg for a return to the good old days when they could exploit all the trusting marks.
 Percentage household financial assets in stocks 1950 -1985
Those who have looted the public trust for their own private gain now decry the loss of trust. Their tears are as fake as all their other stories. What they mourn is the marks awakening to their endless skims and scams, and the opting out of those who’ve finally had enough.
Everything’s gone so well that those with wealth and power have been able to pretend to be fantastic. But now that the overlapping crises are upon us and the banquet of consequences is being served, we’ll see just who our elites and leadership really are.
 Overlapping Crises: “Solutions” Are Now Mutually Reinforcing Problems
Pretending will no longer work, and all the self-serving prevarications in the world will no longer shield us from the consequences of a society stripped of public trust.
 When things go wrong in life, that is when it shows who you are. When things go well, everyone can pretend to be fantastic.
Once trust has been destroyed, there’s no going back.
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by Tyler Durden, 12May2023 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/extinction-event-hitting-corporate-media
Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
MSM went “all-in” on a discredited COVID narrative.
Since the pandemic I’ve been saying that confidence in the mainstream, corporate press has been irreparably damaged. After four years of non-stop Trump Derangement Syndrome so intense that even some liberals were wondering if the press had gone overboard on editorializing – Covid hit, and a lot of normies now see the MSM for what it really is: agitprop and brainwashing.
Cancel culture and censorship reached such absurd levels that we started to see an exodus of high profile reporters (Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, et al) exiting corporate news outlets and setting up on their own, after they committed the sin of colouring outside the lines of establishment precepts.
The MSM went all-in in Covid, but every core tenet of the Covid narrative has since fallen apart:
- This thing came out of a lab
- Ecohealth and Fauci are up to their asses in it
- The lockdowns did more damage than anything else, and
- Everybody was forced to take a vaccine that not only doesn’t work but also seems to be the common denominator in an excess fatality rate that exceeds the pandemic itself.
Not good.
 Russian TV test Pattern
With the tempo being set by numerous media collapses, especially by overtly “woke” ones: Buzzfeed’s bankruptcy, Vice circling the drain – and television viewership plummeting, the stage was set for a few key moments that will be remembered as defining the extinction level event rolling through corporate media:
#1) The Rise of Dark Carlson
After Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, the number 1 pundit on television with the highest viewership today, he didn’t go to a rival network (Newsmax offered him $25 million), he decided to take his own show out on Twitter.
 Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist-tweet-9May2023-This is a defining moment in the extinction event Apparently, on his own, not part of any deal with Elon Musk, Carlson is just letting it all hang out. In one of his first installments, he called into question the 9/11 narrative (Why did Building 7 just fall into its own footprint for no reason?). It prompted one observer to coin the term “Dark Carlson” for what is transpiring via this channel.
#2) The Schism of RFK Jr. coverage
RFK Jr, having thrown his hat into the ring to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, immediately drew fire from the MSM, having unilaterally decided that anything RFK says is automatically “misinformation” (see the closing remarks on “rhetorical circularity”, below).
RFK Jr, for his part, created an account on Nostr.
 Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist-tweet-11May2023-Nothing epitomizes the Industrial Age vs Network Era Nostr is a fast growing decentralized social media network, contrast with Twitter – which is governed by the vagaries and whims of whomever owns it – Nostr is decentralized at the server level to relays (which anybody can run) at the the account level to individual users. This protocol is spreading like wildfire and it’s beyond censorship.
The juxtoposition between a sclerotic, industrial era, mediocre network clutching their pearls over RFK’s “misinformation” and RFK showing up on Nostr tells us a lot.
While this is not seen as much of a big deal yet, this is a signal worth paying attention to.
#3) CNN’s disastrous town-hall with Trump
I didn’t watch it, and when you look at the reporting on it, both left and right traditional outlets are declaring victory – but the reality is that CNN pulled the plug on it 20 minutes earlier than scheduled (ten key moments here).
Love him or hate him, Trump draws attention and viewers unlike any other personality – and the fact that CNN drew the curtain early signals one thing: it was a disaster for the network and probably didn’t hurt Trump. After deftly manipulating a hostile media and leveraging social media cunning to win the presidency in 2016, it doesn’t look like the MSM has learned much.
When the media falls, so does the system it supports
When the Soviet Empire fell in 1989 – 1990, anybody predicting it even months earlier would have been ridiculed. When it happened it took everybody by surprise (even the CIA) and unfolded at astonishing speed (Victor Sebestyen’s Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire covers it brilliantly).
Things move even quicker today – where we are in the early innings of what will possibly be the final financial crisis of the fiat money system.
In another great book about Late Stage Communism, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More“, Alexey Yurchak chronicles the hyper-normality that saturated the zeitgeist during “the last Soviet Generation”. The “Dead Irony” chapter outlines the ingenious forms of unauthorized humour.
A contemporary parallel is when you come across a Twitter account that exhibits such over-the-top support for All The Latest Things™ that you can’t tell if its satire or not. That is a type of performative dissidence called “Stiob” (unless it’s real).
(It’s parody)
Yurchak’s examination of “the hegemony over meta-discourse” and it’s disintegration ring eerily familiar to those keeping score today. One example is what he called “rhetorical circularity”: in our case it means that anything the MSM refuses to cover is “misinformation”, because there are no MSM citations to support it.
As I frequently comment, we’re in Late Stage Globalism. While many view Covid as the gateway to a “Great Reset” technocracy – it looks to me like it was instead, the a-c-c-e-l-e-r-a-t-i-o-n event of the millennia.
I’m not an accelerationist and the elites are certainly still pushing hard for that WEF-style authoritarianism.
But I’m just an observer and I’m here to tell you, that is what’s happening. Given the nature of technological compounding (“Future Shock”, as Alvin Toffler called way back in 1970), accelerationism is somewhat baked in and we just have to watch the implosion of corporate media (not to mention the self-destruction of Woke capitalism) to know it is happening.
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While Israel is secure and forever, who will have a ‘Sweet Year’?
18September2023 https://rivkalevy.com/the-sweetening-begins/
I just got off the phone with my husband, waiting in some airport in Poland to get back to the Holy Land.
He told me the border crossings today have been brutal. [Both the Poles and the Ukrainians are rabid Antisemites]
People standing in the sun for hours and hours, on a fast day, and lots of people fainting.
There are still some massive, ongoing tests of emuna and middot going on, and every single person who went to Uman this year, with maximum mesirut nefesh, has sweetened the harsh decrees for all of us.
Of course, the same people who are still going on about ‘safe and effective’ are EXACTLY the same people still dissing the kibbutz in Uman on Rosh Hashana, and calling the people who went ‘idol worshippers’ and ‘retarded’, amongst many other choice words.
Do the experiment for yourself.
Take a look at who the most vehement ‘anti-Uman’ people are, the worst ‘anti-Rav’ people, and then go and see what they were saying about ‘safe and effective’ [Covid-19 vaccine is not ‘safe and effective’]
It’s probably not a total 100% match up – but I guarantee, it’s approaching it.
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In the meantime, here’s some good news I got sent, still unverified, but from a trustworthy source:
The Rav said that there is no din.
The pain endured by not getting to Uman will be instead of much pain that the Jewish people were meant to endure this year.
And the war in which all the nations will go against Israel will either not happen, or if it will happen and no Jewish family will get hurt, and there will be an earthquake in Israel like there was in Morocco (which will destroy the enemies of Israel).
The Rav was felt on Rosh Hashanah in Uman and Uman was felt by the Rav in Yerushalayim.
The Rav’s minyan was packed in the kloiz in Uman and the Rav’s minyan was packed in the Olam in Yerushalayim.
We were all together and felt tremendous tikkunim and cancellation of judgements.
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This is the ‘vibe’ I’ve been getting so far about Rosh Hashana, too, even though it seems a little incredible, if I’m honest.
That somehow, stuff got ‘sweetened’ again, and all the evils’ plans are going to some how fall through again, BH – as we’ve seen happen so very many times already, over the last few years.
At least, for the people who are making even in a tiny bit of sincere teshuva, and making some small effort to stay within the circle of the True Tzaddikim – as we saw recently in Essaouia, in Morocco.
For everyone else…. I really don’t know still, how all this is meant to play out.
Mass teshuva at the last minute, once the penny finally drops?
Let’s hope so.
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I will keep you updated as and when I hear more.
But in the meantime, it’s nice to have some ‘good news’ to share here.
Because we are still heading into choppy waters, at least in the short term.
And we still need to make every effort to keep doing our hitbodedut, making our teshuva, saying our Tikkun HaKlalis and paying our tzedaka, to get the evil decrees to carry on evaporating.
At least, in our own little corner of the world.
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While Israel is secure and forever, peril faces American Jewry
While Israel is secure and forever, peril faces American Jewry. Not only are non-Orthodox rapidly self-destructing and disappearing, but these fault lines extend into “Modern Orthodoxy”. Op-ed.:
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
15August2023, 1:00 PM (GMT+3) https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/375594
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is Senior Contributing Editor at The American Spectator, Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly twenty years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California.
News Item: “Australia to Resume Use of Term ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’”
Australia? They occupy land belonging to aborigines.
OK, who’s next? Biden living on occupied Delaware Indian territories?
What “The World” says about Israel does not matter. Through 75 years of Israel, and 50 before, G-d’s miracles have predominated despite enemies afar and snakes within. Like the Babylonian, Mede, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine empires, those enemies have met their fate, and Israel grows only stronger.
Israel exists by different rules of nature. By all odds, it never should have emerged. Hebrew was going the way of Latin and Celtic. The name “Israel” was supplanted by “Palestine.” Two thousand years of Exile persuaded the world we were consigned to be “Wandering Jews.” They even mockingly named a plant for our disgrace.
Then the worst anti-Semites helped midwife Israel. Stalin voted for it. The world center of Jew hatred, the United Nations, legitimized it. It was too small to survive, so G-d hardened the Arabs’ hearts, and their wars expanded Israel into the Negev, Galilee, and Judea-Samaria. Even before 1948, virulently anti-Semitic Poland miraculously helped build the Jewish armed resistance, arming and training all three underground groups — the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Lechi — until Hitler arrived. Communist Czechoslovakia emerged to arm Israel when America demurred. The Italian Mafia, controlling Manhattan and Jersey docks, helped run arms to Israel when Truman embargoed. Miracles.
-In 1956 during the Suez crisis, France was Israel’s champion while Eisenhower was hostile. In 1967, France reneged, so Israel found post-Eisenhower America ready. And Israel sailed away two years later with the five French gunboats she had paid for but that DeGaulle would not release. C’est la vie. When he was needed in 1973, Nixon — of all people — stepped in, even as his Vice President Agnew was pleading nolo contendre on the exact day the arms shipments to Israel were authorized.
-Israel survived the Ford-Kissinger “Reassessment,” the anti-Semitic Jimmy Carter, Reagan’s condemnations of Israel’s conduct of the 1982 war and of Begin’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, George Bush and James Baker, Clinton hosting Arafat more than any other White House visitor and inducing Ehud Barak to offer Arafat parts of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; Obama, Biden, Hillary, and Kerry, and aspects of Trump’s “Deal of the Century” that would have compromised Jewish sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria.
-The Obama-Biden-Kerry refusal to veto UN Security Council resolution 2334 in December 2016 ultimately proved meaningless as, only months later, Trump — of all people — arrived to recognize Jerusalem as capital, move the embassy, recognize Golan sovereignty, and recognize the legality of Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria.
-Israel has prospered by G-d’s miracles. Peres preached a vision of “Palestine” as a Maui or Tahiti. The “Palestinians” helped clarify reality by bus-bombing Bibi to a miracle election victory. Bibi then broke faith at the Wye Conference, so G-d replaced him with Ehud Barak. Barak unilaterally handed over South Lebanon to become a Hezbollah stronghold and tried giving away parts of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount so G-d gave him an Intifada that exposed his military incompetence, and replaced him with Sharon.
-After Sharon broke his pledges to voters and perfidiously imposed a national catastrophe on 8,500 Jews in Gush Katif, he turned next to ceding Judea and Samaria. Instead, he sustained a debilitating stroke. He recovered, got a second chance perhaps by merit of his 1950’s Unit 101 and his Yom Kippur War heroism, but he had learned nothing. He sustained another stroke so massive that his plans and he ended for good.
-Ehud Olmert — now revealed as a crook, prisoner, and villain who urges countries to withhold support from Israel — followed and tried actualizing the give-away. He was stopped by a Hezbollah kidnaping that launched a war he proved incapable of waging, alongside his hapless “Defense Minister,” a Labor Party union hack. When Netanyahu returned, he had learned never to cede Judea and Samaria.
So, although Zionists must advocate passionately for Israel, it kind-of does not matter except for fulfilling one’s duty to G-d and His Torah, land, and people. With some 350,000 Jews now living in eastern communities of Jerusalem that were liberated from Arab occupation in 1967 and more than 500,000 in the rest of Judea and Samaria — totaling 850,000 Jews — and recognizing the logistical mess the Israeli government encountered in relocating, resettling, and reemploying 8,500 Jews from Gush Katif (one percent of 850,000) in 2005, it is clear the “Two-State Solution” never will happen, no matter what anyone says or does. One million Jews cannot be forcibly uprooted and relocated. Indeed, Israel now is reversing the 2005 Gush Katif surrender by restoring Chomesh and other communities in Northern Shomron.
Chief Rabbi Yitzchak HaLevi Herzog said in the 1940’s, when he refused to relocate temporarily from Eretz Yisrael as Hitler’s Gen. Erwin Rommel approached the Holy Land during his North Africa campaign, that the Tanakh (Bible) and all of Judaic theology speak of only two destructions. There will not be a third Churban (catastrophe).
One should not be nonchalant about threats of America reducing aid to Israel. But one should not lose sleep over it either. When a parent threatens to cut off a college-age son or daughter financially, that worries the child. But once the child becomes a successful entrepreneur, professional, TikTok Influencer, or $350,000-a-year Israeli Supreme Court justice, that threat evaporates.
Israel is that matured entity. Yoram Ettinger has shown that Israel is a better financial and military value to America than vice-versa. Several recent influential think pieces have made the argument that Israel even can benefit from living without American aid — if it comes to that. In time, Israel would actualize Moshe Arens’s dream and create its own jet fighters, and Americans would lose restrictive influences. India will buy. Finland will buy. Arabs will buy. The whole world will buy. They do now.
Miracles. All fears that Arab birthrates would imperil Israel’s Jewish demographic majority have been vanquished. A million Jews from the former Soviet Union arrived. Jews from France, Argentina, Ethiopia came — always some anti-Semitic eruption to augment Israel’s population. Even the miracle of 850,000 Jews arriving in the 1940’s and 1950’s as Arab countries secured Israel’s Jewish demographic majority forever and laid the groundwork for Edot HaMizrach (Sephardic Jews) to save Israel from the godless Marx-inspired Ashkenazic elite who had laid the foundation for a secular socialist society whose last entrails are found at Tel Aviv restaurants on Tisha B’Av. The Opposition’s perpetual protests reflect they have lost; otherwise, they would be celebrating.
Australia? Kangaroos, the Koala, the Wallaby. They don’t matter. Neither do Canada, England, France, Russia, America, anyone.
While Israel is secure and forever, peril faces American Jewry. Not only are non-Orthodox rapidly self-destructing and disappearing, but these fault lines extend into “Modern Orthodoxy”:
1. At least 33-40 percent or more of American “Jews” are not Jews. American Orthodox rabbinic and lay institutions are terrified to reveal they know this and its ramifications. All practicing American rabbonim (Orthodox rabbis) know they secretly undertake lineage investigations before conducting weddings for anyone not engaged in their communities because odds are that one or both prospective spouses is not Jewish. For that same reason — encountering “Jews” who are not Jews — they turn away even relatives of paid synagogue members from being buried in their shul cemeteries and from having their kids “bar- or bat-mitzva’d.”
American rabbonim regularly encounter people who tell them they or their spouse is “Jewish,” or their child is marrying someone “Jewish,” even though the rav knows the person is a “Marilyn Monroe convert.” Because the Orthodox Union and Rabbinical Council of America, terrified to offend members and donors, deliberately evade the issue and stopped educating the public years ago, many Jewish parents affiliated with O.U. shuls and RCA rabbonim have evolved to accept when their boys marry non-Jewish and tell them “Mom, she’s doing a conversion with a reform/conservative rabbi, so it’s OK and you will have Jewish grandchildren, and don’t write me out of your will.” Jewish parents no longer feel stigma: “Well, Rabbi, at least she is undergoing some kind of conversion. Right?”
Wrong.
The local syngogue raibbi is afraid to speak the Truth because he may get fired. He rationalizes: “If I tell them the hard truth, they will fire me, and then what will become of the shul?” (Answer: They will hire someone else with the exact same skills-set but more docile.) Tragically, the RCA and OU, who cannot be fired by local congregants but fear donors, also resist speaking the Truth. That is the meaning of Exile. The lesson for Israel: Jews vigilantly must guard against similar erosion in Israel’s Law of Return and Grandparent Clause. The toxicity poisoning American “Judaism” must not attain a foothold in Israel. This is Judaic life-or-death.
2. Secondly, mainstream American Modern Orthodox institutions proceed with contempt-of-court toward their own Poskim (Torah Authorities) and fear speaking with clarity on issues regarding the pernicious pretense of “Open Orthodoxy.” The “Maharat” Academy (“Yeshivat Maharat”), which contravenes Judaism and ordains “Orthodox women rabbis” (“Maharats”), now proudly and publicly endorses lesbian marriage, even among their own Maharat “Yeshiva” students. Yes, “Orthodox women rabbis” in lesbian marriages.Other “Maharats” advocate for transgender legislation, claiming they speak for Orthodox Judaism. Such “Maharats” amplify the disgrace; one is “Rabbi in Residence” at Missouri’s Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion. Another is a professor of Feminism at the seminary for “Reform Rabbis,” where she is proud to be called “Rabbi.”
The Orthodox Union asked their Poskim to pasken (Judaically rule) on whether “women rabbis” may serve O.U. congregations, and their revered Torah Authorities unanimouslypaskened in an extended learned Teshuvah (Responsum) in February 2017 — more than six years ago — that women rabbis are absolutely forbidden. Yet, to this very day, there are O.U. congregations in public contempt of their own rabbinic judges, and Orthodox Union knows it — because allknow it, because it is so public — and yet O.U. has not implemented the very rabbinic ruling it sought. That is contempt of court.
Even so, the same O.U. “boldly” lectures Israelis on how to deal with their courts. Nor does Rabbinical Council of America conscientiously enforce its own explicit requirement: “. . . [W]e cannot accept either the ordination of women or the recognition of women as members of the Orthodox rabbinate, regardless of the title.” Indeed, RCA even has bumbled into becoming a back-door vehicle for “Open Orthodox” female and male rabbis to gain legitimacy.
And the third “pillar” of American Modern Orthodoxy, Yeshiva University, now has a “Vice Provost for Values and Leadership” who leverages her YU status to legitimize “Maharat women rabbis” in a number of venues. The university’s Cardozo Law School awarded Jimmy Carter their “International Advocate for Peace” award, and 21 of their faculty signed a letter opposing Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination for the Supreme Court. Cardozo even has mandated that all students must take a course in critical race theory to graduate.
How far YU has descended from Presidents Rav Bernard Revel, Rav Samuel Belkin, and Rav Norman Lamm of blessed memory and the overriding spiritual leadership of HaRav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik!
Greater Israel is safe and secure forever. American Modern Orthodoxy?
To receive Rav Fischer’s Weekly Extensive Torah Commentaries or to attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to: shulstuff@yioc.org
Rav Fischer’s recent hour-long interview on a range of pressing contemporary Jewish issues, ranging from the “Palestine” Myth to apostate Jewish leftists and their like-minded reform rabbis to the weakness of pro-Israel campus Jews who root their advocacy in Victimology instead of Jewish strength, can be found here.
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The Jewish establishment left us practically defenseless in the face of this new mutant strain, and that is why – I know it’s a serious charge – we are in this awful situation.
By CHARLES JACOBS Published: 2JUNE2023 https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-744853
 OPEN LETTER published January 13, 1898, in ‘L’Aurore’ by Emile Zola in response to the Dreyfus Affair, in which Zola addressed French president Félix Faure and accused his government of antisemitism. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
It might not have been the kindest thing during my trip to the Holy Land to tell Israelis, who were just bombarded by 1,500 Islamic Jihad rockets and are stuck in the excruciatingly painful fracas over judicial reform, that American Jewry’s house is on fire and that the Jewish establishment there is failing to subdue the flames.
But that was the theme of my talk at Jerusalem’s Begin Center last Monday. It was a book launch for the just-published collection of essays Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, which I co-edited with Avi Goldwasser.
Indeed, antisemitism in the US is careening out of control. According to the FBI, Jews are more likely the targets of hate crimes than Blacks, Latinos, transgenders, and Muslims combined. Nearly every Jewish institution has security, many with armed guards. This is not the country we grew up in.
Antisemitism in the US: Where is the assault against American Jews coming from?
The assault – ideological and increasingly physical – comes simultaneously from four major ideological camps.
Who are our adversaries? First, the white nationalists who attack us based on that older Jew-hatred we’re familiar with. Today, they update their classic picture of the Jew as conniving, greedy, powerful behind the scenes, with the charges that we are the ones who invented multiculturalism and are the ones behind the rising tide of Third World immigration that they believe will remake America.
 Religious leader Louis Farrakhan gives the keynote speech at the Nation of Islam Saviours’ Day convention in Detroit, Michigan, U.S. February 19, 2017. (credit: REUTERS/REBECCA COOK)
Second: Black racists – including Black academics, politicians and followers of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Many believe Farrakhan’s lie that the Jews were the masters of the Black slave trade. More recently, Blacks are taught that the Palestinians are just like them: oppressed “people of color.”
Third: radical Muslims, many from antisemitic cultures, who carry an ancient religious hatred and are further inflamed by their tribal support of Palestinians. In American mosques, imams preach hatred of Jews. Muslims have attacked Jews on America’s streets.
The fourth camp consists of anti-Israel radical progressives who now include the most energized segments of the Democratic Party – the Squad. Israel, they preach, is a racist/apartheid state where Jews oppress indigenous, innocent, indigent and, importantly, darker-skinned peoples. This narrative has grown over four decades into support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Recently, progressives supported Nakba Day rallies in more than 35 American cities.
All of this did not happen overnight. It built up over about four decades, slowly.
The book, which has received praise from Dennis Prager, Daniel Pipes, Leil Leibovitz, Ken Levin and Gil Troy, is a collection of 22 essays (an expansion of an original set published in White Rose Magazine, published by Karen Lohman Bloch).
Some pieces are by prominent thinkers and writers – Alan Dershowitz, Jonathan Tobin, Morton Klein, Thane Rosenbaum, Caroline Glick and Richard Landes – who analyze our situation and explain how and why Jewish leaders are failing us. Other essays are by unsung Jewish activists who document the incompetence, the ignorance, even, yes, the perfidy of their local Jewish leaders who refuse to stand up and fight back, or worse, who misguide us about our actual situation.
By “the failing Jewish establishment,” we mean the legacy organizations: the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Councils, the Federations, along with most of the Rabbinate. The lone exception among legacy groups is the Zionist Organization of America, led by the courageous and indefatigable Morton Klein. The other groups that are bravely fighting our adversaries – CAMERA, StandWithUs, Club Z, Endowment for Middle East Truth, Aish HaTorah, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Students Supporting Israel, and more – were launched as grassroots groups, precisely because the Jewish establishment was failing.
As our writers describe, the Jewish establishment first failed to intervene against the media defamation of Israel. It then failed to stop harassment and intimidation of Jews on campus. It now is failing to stop anti-Israel education in America’s public high schools, exploding across the nation via ethnic studies curricula and critical race theory. Finally, it failed to recognize the long-term threat of the growing radicalization of the historically moderate American Muslim community.
My talk described how this happened. I used examples from my experience as a Boston Jewish activist who helped lead grassroots Jews to resist. As the essayists describe, the Boston experience is mirrored across the country – and in Canada.
WHAT HAPPENED to the West’s Jews? As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, antisemitism is a virus that morphs predictably: Whatever is any society’s worst sin, that is what the Jews are charged with. In the religious epoch, Jews were the killers of the Christian God. When race “science” – eugenics – was all the rage, Jews were racial vermin. In capitalist societies, the Jews were hated as communists; in communist societies, we were despised as capitalist exploiters. When having a nation-state was the way normal people expressed their values, Jews were cursed as rootless cosmopolites. And so today, when globalism and internationalism are the reigning virtues, Jews are cursed for their state.
Once we were tainted, stripped of having the moral high ground – which, for a while, the guilt and shame from the Holocaust provided – all hell could be loosed against us. Well, the virus mutated into anti-Israelism, or Palestinianism, and Jews worldwide are tainted as oppressors. The “new antisemitism” pierced our post-Holocaust shield.
The Jewish establishment left us practically defenseless in the face of this new mutant strain, and that is why – I know it’s a serious charge – we are in this awful situation.
To make matters worse, a new “woke-progressive” ideology that is undeniably and inevitably anti-Jewish has defeated classical liberalism in many key institutions and has become an accelerant to the mounting antisemitism.
Classic liberalism believes in equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, religion and/or sexual orientation. It welcomed and supported Jewish life in America. The new ideology – which goes by many names: woke, progressivism, political correctness, intersectionality, etc. – insists instead on equal results. If there are fewer Black or Latino lawyers proportional to their numbers in society than there are white or Jewish lawyers, that proves that society is unjust and racist. Those who achieved success did so by exploiting the underachieving minorities. Success in life is proof that you have oppressed or have benefited by the oppression of Blacks, Latinos, women, homosexuals, etc. As Jews are among the most successful, we are by implication the biggest oppressors.
And all of this ideology is being taught in American public schools. Its principles are required in law schools, medical schools, corporate boards. Fewer and fewer Jews are getting into Ivy League schools, fewer are being hired by corporations, and fewer are sitting on boards of philanthropies.
The Jewish establishment is now fully trapped. It put all our eggs into the imploding liberal basket. It made alliances with all the minority groups, and now these very groups have turned on us and have become Palestinianists and antisemitic. Our leaders are flummoxed and confused. They need to be pressured, convinced, humiliated and shamed to do a massive rethink.
To help organize grassroots activists to challenge and change our leadership, we created The Jewish Leadership Project (www.jewishleadershipproject.org). Our book prescribes steps that our leaders must take to stem the tide of animus.
We are in danger at a watershed moment. But we are an accomplished community, with very talented individuals. We can and must find proud, brave and competent leadership to secure a better Jewish future.
The writer is a longtime Jewish and human rights activist, speaker and writer, who today is president of The Jewish Leadership Project. charlesjacobs123@gmail.com
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Jerusalem Cats Comments: How can you raise Jewish Children without a good Jewish Education?
“One factor which the majority of research and, hence, policy planning in the field of Jewish education has not paid sufficient attention to is social networks. Our research shows that American Jews may say they feel disconnected from other Jews; yet, they are actually influenced by their Jewish social circles. Similarly, educators have tended to emphasize the role of parents in making educational decisions for their child and overlooked the importance of Jewish social networks in motivating children to continue their Jewish education. Our research shows that Jewish friends and social networks, especially during the teen years, influence decisions to attend Jewish schools and Jewish educational programs. This new understanding of the power of social networks suggests that the direction of influence in the teen years is from friendships to education to family involvements. A strong Jewish social network in the teen years is a predictor of college friends and choice of Jewish marriage partners.”
Jerusalem Cats Comments: How can you raise Jewish Children without Jewish peers? If you want Jewish teenagers then you need to raise then with Jewish Peers in a Jewish Schools and in a Jewish State with Jewish Holidays and a Jewish Week.
 Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream US & CAN 1-866-4-ALIYAH | UK 020-8150-6690 or 0800-085-2105 | Israel 02-659-5800 https://www.nbn.org.il/ info@nbn.org.il Even the most secular teenager in Israel has a better Jewish education then anyone outside of Israel.
“When Jews lived in societies in which they had a lot of contact with each other (and very little with non-Jews) they and others usually thought of themselves as “born into” Jewishness. Jews amassed ethnic social capital through daily experience, in the form of ethnic languages, food, music, stories, texts, arts and culture, religion and rituals. These individuals who shared ethnic social capital also tended to value similar things, and to feel an affinity for each other.”
You can only do this in Israel.
“In terms of predicting adult Jewish connections, statistical studies show that every year past the bar mitzvah year “counts” more than the year before. Receiving formal Jewish education from age 16 to 17 more accurately predicts adult Jewish connectedness than receiving formal Jewish education from age 15 to 16. Quantitative and qualitative research suggest that having mostly Jewish friends in high school is a motivator for continuing formal and informal Jewish education and a predictor for marrying or partnering with a Jew and forging strong Jewish connections. Conversely, when teenagers stopped attending Jewish schools after bar and bat mitzvahs, both they and their parents (in separate interviews) reported that their family Jewish observances and activities such as Shabbat service attendance gradually declined.”
“This is a growing group. Successive studies have underscored the fact that in 1960, 77 percent of American women and 65 percent of men below the age of 30, had accomplished the five sociological milestones of adulthood–”completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child.” Today, fewer than half of women and one-third of men fit that fully adult profile The proportion of Americans aged 25 to 34 who have never been married exceeds those married. The Jewish identity gains that result from a Jewish education during the teenage years are significantly undermined when young American Jews remain single for a decade or longer after college. These young American Jews between the ages of 22 to 35 require programs tailored to their distinctive form of Jewish attachment.”
“When Jewish education succeeds, it is most often a story of the more, the more.
Jewish education is part of the ongoing building of Jewish social capital. No one educational strategy provides a permanent Jewish inoculation for all Jews, but all educational strategies work best when they include the reinforcement of a social network.”
“But for some Jewish populations who miss these serendipities, the story is more like, the less the less. Some Jews are geographically isolated in childhood, and have few Jewish friendship circles, and do not get sent to Jewish camps that might enrich their Jewishness on many levels [What about a Jewish Day School or Full Time Yeshiva Program of stead of Public School?]. Some are the children of weakly identified Jewish parents; some of these Jewishly “impoverished” families, in terms of Jewish social capital, are intermarried families, especially where the mother does not identify as a Jew. Weak Jewish identification often gets worse with each generation that is remote from Jewish social networks and Jewish education, creating a cycle of poor Jewish social capital.”
According The Pew Research Religion and Public life project : Orthodox Jews are more likely than American Jews of any other denomination to have traveled to Israel; 77% have done so, followed by 56% of Conservative Jews, 40% of Reform Jews and 26% of those who have no denominational affiliation. |
Are American Jews facing an existential threat?
by Rabbi Antony Gordon and Richard M. Horowitz Published: June 10, 2017 http://www.aish.com/jw/s/INFOGRAPHIC-Will-Your-Grandchildren-Be-Jewish.html
 Click to Download the PDF version Will Your Grandchildren be Jewish-aish
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From aish.com INFOGRAPHIC: Will Your Grandchildren Be Jewish?TOP |
 Infographic: Survey of Jewish Americans TOP |
By Gregory A. Smith and Alan Cooperman
November 12, 2013 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/11/12/what-happens-when-jews-intermarry/
American Jews have been debating the impact of intermarriage for decades. Does intermarriage lead to assimilation and weaken the Jewish community? Or is it a way for a religion that traditionally does not seek converts to bring new people into the fold and, thereby, strengthen as well as diversify the Jewish community? The new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews did not start this debate and certainly will not end it. However, the survey’s findings on intermarriage, child rearing and Jewish identity provide some support for both sides.
For example, the survey shows that the offspring of intermarriages – Jewish adults who have only one Jewish parent – are much more likely than the offspring of two Jewish parents to describe themselves, religiously, as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular. In that sense, intermarriage may be seen as weakening the religious identity of Jews in America.
Yet the survey also suggests that a rising percentage of the children of intermarriages are Jewish in adulthood. Among Americans age 65 and older who say they had one Jewish parent, 25% are Jewish today. By contrast, among adults under 30 with one Jewish parent, 59% are Jewish today. In this sense, intermarriage may be transmitting Jewish identity to a growing number of Americans.
Surveys are snapshots in time. They typically show associations, or linkages, rather than clear causal connections, and they don’t predict the future. We do not know, for example, whether the large cohort of young adult children of intermarriage who are Jewish today will remain Jewish as they age, marry (and in some cases, intermarry), start families and move through the life cycle. With those cautions in mind, here’s a walk through some of our data on intermarriage, including some new analysis that goes beyond the chapter on intermarriage in our original report. (We would like to thank several academic researchers, including Theodore Sasson of Brandeis University, Steven M. Cohen of Hebrew Union College and NYU Wagner, and Bruce Phillips of Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California, for suggesting fruitful avenues of additional analysis.)
First, intermarriage is practically nonexistent among Orthodox Jews; 98% of the married Orthodox Jews in the survey have a Jewish spouse. But among all other married Jews, only half say they have a Jewish spouse.
In addition, intermarriage rates appear to have risen substantially in recent decades, though they have been relatively stable since the mid-1990s. Looking just at non-Orthodox Jews who have gotten married since 2000, 28% have a Jewish spouse and fully 72% are intermarried.
Also, intermarriage is more common among Jewish respondents who are themselves the children of intermarriage. Among married Jews who report that only one of their parents was Jewish, just 17% are married to a Jewish spouse. By contrast, among married Jews who say both of their parents were Jewish, 63% have a Jewish spouse.
 Pew 2013 jewish identity by generation
Among Jews, the adult offspring of intermarriages are also much more likely than people with two Jewish parents to describe themselves religiously as atheist, agnostic or just “nothing in particular.” This is the case among all recent generations of U.S. Jews.
For example, among Jewish Baby Boomers who had two Jewish parents, 88% say their religion is Jewish; hence, we categorize them as “Jews by religion.” But among Baby Boomers who had one Jewish parent, 53% describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or having no particular religion, even though they also say they consider themselves Jewish or partially Jewish aside from religion; they are categorized as “Jews of no religion” in the table. Far fewer Jewish Baby Boomers who had two Jewish parents (12%) are Jews of no religion today.
A similar pattern is seen among Jewish Millennials: 51% of Millennials who have one Jewish parent are Jews of no religion, compared with just 15% of Millennials who had two Jewish parents.
Summing this up, it appears that the share of Jews of no religion is similar – and relatively low – among recent generations of Jews with two Jewish parents. It is much higher (and also fairly similar across generations) among self-identified Jews with only one Jewish parent.
 Pew 2013 Jewish Intermarriage one parent But it is also important to bear in mind that the percentage of Jewish adults who are the offspring of intermarriages appears to be rising. Just 6% of Jews from the Silent Generation say they had one Jewish parent, compared with 18% of Jewish Baby Boomers, 24% of Generation X and nearly half (48%) of Jewish Millennials. The result is that there are far more Jews of no religion among younger generations of Jews than among previous generations, as shown in the survey report.
When we look at all adults who have just one Jewish parent – including both those who identify as Jewish and those who do not – we see that the Jewish retention rate of people raised in intermarried families appears to be rising. That is, among all adults (both Jewish and non-Jewish) who say they had one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent, younger generations are more likely than older generations to be Jewish today.
For example, among U.S. adults ages 65 and older who had one Jewish parent, 25% are Jewish today (including 7% who are Jews by religion and 18% who are Jews of no religion), while 75% are not Jewish (meaning that they currently identify with a religion other than Judaism or that they do not consider themselves Jewish in any way, either by religion or otherwise). Among adults younger than 30 who have one Jewish parent, by contrast, 59% are Jewish today, including 29% who are Jews by religion and 30% who are Jews of no religion.
 Pew-2013-Jewish Intermarriage younger generation Finally, it has often been assumed that Jewish women are less inclined to intermarry than are Jewish men. As Bruce Phillips, a sociologist at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, has written: “In American popular culture, intermarriage has been the [domain] of Jewish males. Starting with ‘Abbie’s Irish Rose’ and ‘The Jazz Singer’ following the turn of the century through ‘Bridget Loves Bernie’ and the ‘Heartbreak Kid’ in the early 1970s to ‘Mad About You’ in the 1990s, the plot is about a Jewish married man in love with a stereotypical [non-Jewish woman].”
But our survey finds that Jewish women are slightly more likely to be intermarried than Jewish men. Among the married Jewish women surveyed, 47% say they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among the married Jewish men, 41% say they have a non-Jewish spouse.
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JerusalemCats Comments:
The real test is will they make Aliyah?
According to Pew “A Portrait of Jewish Americans”(2013) ”The Jewish Population went down from 5.2 Million in 2000 to 4.2 Million +/- 3% today” http://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/comparisons-between-jews-in-israel-and-the-u-s/ The US has an 85% intermarriage rate for secular Jews vs. 2% for Israel.
Relatively few Israeli Jews identify with either Conservative (2%) or Reform (3%) Judaism.
 Pew-2016-03-08-Israel Reform Essay static identify
Reform leader Rick Jacobs travels the USA proudly proclaiming that “interfaith families are now the majority of the movement.” Op-ed.
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer 8June2023, 1:12 PM (GMT+3) http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/372504
The recent Israel-bashing, Jew-hating graduation speech by a “Palestinian Arab” at CUNY Law School made national news. The Zionist Organization of America took the lead, as it almost always does among the Presidents’ Conference “major” Jewish organizations, in fighting back. ZOA demanded that the CUNY Law den of corruption be defunded by New York State, that the administrators who approved and facilitated the Nazi-like speech be fired, and that the Jew-hater graduate be denied a New York State Bar license to practice.
Amazingly, that lowest-tier (ranked #154, among the lowest 20% in the country) school’s so-called “Jewish Law Student Association” praised the speaker’s vicious anti-Zionist venom and lies. Their pathetic self-hate appears here in its entirety. That self-flagellating screed is so warped that one initially would suppose it a forgery, impossible to be authored by Jews even in a world of self-hating Jewish apostates like George Soros, Bernie Sanders, and Ben & Jerry.
That document helpfully demonstrates that almost half the people in America who call themselves “Jews” are in fact not Jews.
The numbers:
Much of current American “Jewish” demographic data emanate from a landmark Pew report. Pew asked interviewees to self-identify. If someone told Pew’s pollster he or his parents are or were “Jewish,” Pew took it as gospel.
But who really is a Jew? Through 3,300 years of Judaism until 1983, the only definition of a “Jew” was to be born to a Jewish mother or to convert to Judaism by accepting and undertaking the laws (halakhah) and traditions (mesorah) of Judaism completely and unequivocally, and affirming total belief that every word in the Torah is true and the word of G-d spoken to Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses our Teacher).
On March 15, 1983, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the “Reform” movement’s body of rabbis, passed an unprecedented resolution that declared hundreds of thousands, perhaps one million or more, of non-Jews to be ”Jews.” Prepared by a committee on patrilineal descent entitled “The Status of Children of Mixed Marriages,” the CCAR resolution stated that “we face, today, an unprecedented situation due to the changed conditions in which decisions concerning the status of the child of a mixed marriage are to be made.”
Contrary to thousands of years of unbroken Jewish practice and tradition — which even “Reform” acknowledged as binding through its first 150 years — the resolution overnight accepted the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers as “Jewish” if the parents nominally would claim they would rear the child that way. Obviously, such a claim by a Jewish spouse who marries a non-Jew has no meaning.
The “Reform” movement’s body of congregational temples is the URJ (Union for Reform Judaism), and their president, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, now travels the country proudly proclaiming that “interfaith families are now the majority of the movement.” (See embedded link at page 9, lower left column.)
Rabbi Jacobs’s assertion that the majority of “Reform”-affiliated families today are headed by a Jewish and non-Jewish intermarried spouse substantiates the underlying math. Let’s say there are 200 married congregants at the “Reform” Temple, comprising 100 marriages, and 60 of the marriages (the majority, which Jacobs asserts) are intermarriages. That means, outright, that at least 60 of those 200 in the temple are non-Jewish under any definition. They alone comprise 30 percent. Beyond that, among their 60 “Jewish” spouses, a certain number of them also are non-Jewish. Many of those “Jewish” spouses are children of outright non-Jewish mothers who intermarried with Jews, and who after 1983 (40 years ago) reared them “patrilineally” as though Jews — although they are not and never were. Others among those 60 are the children of “Jewish” mothers who “converted to Judaism” like Marilyn Monroe via a heterodox rabbi, which means those mothers also were non-Jewish. Some 10-20 (could be more, could be fewer) of the 60 “Jewish” intermarried spouses in our sample thus actually are not Jewish either. So we have 70-80 non-Jews among every 200 “Reform Jews.” That is 35-40 percent.
Even non-Orthodox “Conservative” rabbis regard large swaths of “Reform” “converts” to be non-Jewish because many such “converts” never immersed in a mikveh ritual body of water. Thus, the numbers of outright non-Jews in our 200-person hypothetical sample of Year 2023 “Reform” households stand at 70-80 non-Jews or 35-40 percent “of the movement.” These non-Jewish families, in turn, then have their own children for the next generation.
Inasmuch as “Reform’s” patrilineal policy now is 40 years extant — two generations — the numbers of outright non-Jewish “Reform” “Jews” today, among “Reform” Jews born since the 1980s, well exceeds 40-50 percent. (By contrast, older Reform Jews who were born and grew up well before the 1983 “patrilineal” tsunami and before Jews started marrying non-Jews at record highs — say, people over age 60 — would number a markedly higher percentage of actual Jews.)
Pew reports that “Reform” Jews comprise 37 percent of American Jewry, with “Conservative” Jews at 17 percent, and Orthodox at 9 percent. Pew’s Orthodox numbers manifestly are incompatible with reality in terms of proportion of actual Jews, but the numbers could be |
![The 3-ruble commemorative silver coins that read "A Meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of State in Ufa" and "A Meeting of the BRICS Heads of State in Ufa", June 26, 2015. On June 22, 2015, the Central Bank of Russia issued the coins for the July SCO and BRICS summits in Ufa. [Photo/CFP]](http://www.jerusalemcats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/BRICS-coin.png)
