Are We Entering a Golden Age?

By Rich Kozlovich

 

I subscribed to Joe Lonsdale's substack blog because I was told what a genius he is, and it's probably true, but mostly he bored me. However, I remained a subscriber because you never know when someone smart will say something really smart. This was the second piece I found worthy, the first was the interview with former Senator Phil Gramm, and I liked it so much I linked to an article of my own.

There's one thing I really found interesting, and that was his view we are on the verge of a "Golden Age", providing we can escape the swamp.  Well, it appears that's going to happen, and much faster than anyone ever hoped for or expected.  Crushing the deep state and the leftist fever swamps will make a huge difference admittedly, but I seriously doubt that will lead to a “golden age”.

I've always believed in historical cycles, and read three books on the subject, and if there ever was a historical endeavor that was in serious need of an organized academic discipline, that's it, because the writers all have their own terminology and odd ways of creating coherence through connectives.  However, if you can plow your way through you find they've all come to the same conclusion. We’re in an end cycle, and all end cycles involve massive economic downturns, and violence.

The world’s governments are in debt to the tune of almost 310 trillion dollars, and many of these nations are in capable of repaying that debt.   The debt holders are incapable of collecting it, and that includes China.  China won't be able to collect on defaulted loans, their Road and Belt is a failure, and they're broke.  

There are six things a nation needs to be self-sufficient. The ability to feed itself, fuel itself, arm itself, defend itself, create its own internal market, and pay off their national debt. There’s only one nation on Earth that can do all six, and that’s the United States. The international debt will destroy the world’s economy, except for America.  Canada, Mexico, and the Northern tier South American states will become economic supplicants just to stay alive.  They need us, we don't need them, and that's true for the entire international economic story.  This isn't 1930 and the Smoot Hawley tariff story is meaningless to America's economy.  We don't need them, they need us.

While international trade is an important economic factor, it’s not life saving for the United States. But there will be no golden age, just national survival!  While the rest of the world breaks up into semi to totally autonomous states, which is Europe’s foundational social paradigm, that's also true as well for China.  

The foundational social paradigm for both the Middle East and Africa are tribal based societies, and if the world's economy collapses, so too will they break up into tribal states, violent tribal states, preceded by massively violent civil wars, such as has been going on in Libya.  The idea of Islamic and/or Arab unity is a myth.   South America will mostly remain as it is because the geography is so difficult, which is why there have been few wars between South American nations, but they will all be broke. 

The world is not going to be entering a new golden age.  Get over it. 

Life is All About the Patterns

By Rich Kozlovich

I've been a history buff for all of my life, and I think that's why when I'm reading books or articles, even watching movies or television shows, I see patterns.  I see them easily, and more often than not, more quickly than just about everyone else, and I see the world a little differently than everyone else, and I draw conclusions more quickly than everyone else.  So, when I write I base my views on those patterns hoping readers will come to my conclusions.

One of my conclusions is there four things that are with us always for good or ill. 

1. People will always be people.
   
2. Life is about patterns, and the patterns of life keep repeating over and over again. 
3. Culture is king. 
4. Everything is the basics. 

People aren't as unique, or as special as they think they are, but they will all act in their own best interests. What I find intriguing is why leaders make decisions that are clearly not in the interests of their culture, whether they're leaders in politics, religion, or even commerce, and they ignore the basics.   What's happening in Europe right now is one example, especially in England charging the government has been party to covering up Muslim rape gangs, which the Prime Minister claims is all lies. 

In some demented way they believe they're going to benefit even if their culture fails.  We're seeing that here in America with Democrats and RINO's, the Canadian and European leaders, much of South America, Mexico, Asia, entertainment, sports, the Pravda media, the Disney studios, and even the Pope.  It seems clear there's something wrong with their minds, and there will be consequences.  So where's this going to end up?

As I've said I'm a firm believer in patterns, or cycles if you will.  I've read three books on historical cycles, all complicated because they all seem to use their own terminology, historical periods, and definitions.  If there ever was a need for an organized academic disciple, historical cycles is it.  But all of them agree on, and conclude, we're now at the end of a historical cycle, and all end cycles are violent and include massive economic downturns.  

 

 

Chevron Attacked the Very Idea of America

Representative Government vs. the Priesthood of Experts

Rod D. Martin Jul 04, 2024

 

Editor's Note:  This appeared in full at John Mauldin's weekly economic update, Thoughts from the Frontline.   I've not asked for, nor have I received permission to publish this in full.  However, I think this is such an excellent commentary on how the Chevron Doctrine allowed and promoted tyranny by the bureaucracy; undermined of the rule of law; undermined of the foundational principles outlined in the Constitution; destroyed the very idea the Constitution is the law that governs government, not the whims of bureaucrats with uncontrolled agency mandates.   As a result I feel this deserves the widest distribution possible.    If the author objects I will break it down to a link. RK

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron was an early Independence Day gift. Chevron stood for an imperial bureaucracy, neither responsible to the people nor accountable to anyone, a priesthood of experts pursuing what Thomas Sowell called “the vision of the anointed”, interpreting, adjudicating, and above all, making the laws we must live by, however they saw fit.

Last week, in their Loper Bright and Jarkesy rulings, the Court overturned that half-century travesty, partly upending the statist technocratic order and, at least to a degree, replacing it with the Constitutional vision of the Founders.

James Madison would be proud.

The Administrative State: Subject-Matter Dictatorships

To understand the principles at stake, we first must grasp the radical shift in governance represented by the advent of the administrative state a century ago.

The Founding Fathers established responsible government: elected leadership that must regularly stand accountable for its actions and their effects. Their Revolution explicitly repudiated the idea of lawmaking and enforcement by far-away elites, in favor of that government which was closest to the people. They recognized the benefit of continent-wide (though not unelected or transoceanic) policy on a handful of key issues; but to achieve that, they created multiple competing elected bodies to check each other’s hubris, and they wrote a Constitution that restricted their new government to only a short list of subjects.

Why did they do this? Because they had experienced the tyranny born of unrestricted arrogance. And while they knew they couldn’t change the nature of man, they could use competition among men to restrain their more venal and predatory impulses.

They thus also created a very small bureaucracy, every part of it directly accountable to one or more elected officials. With no Civil Service Act, and a Senate elected by the state legislatures, if your mailman kicked your dog you could go find your state representative at the coffee shop and complain. Enough complaints and change was certain: elected officials have a lot of incentive to listen.

Over time, usually for practical reasons but increasingly motivated by a very real shift in philosophy, not only did government grow exponentially, but elected officials became both more remote and less able to help. We decided we wanted to “protect” bureaucrats from the “spoils system”, so we made it nearly impossible for Presidents to fire them. We decided to delegate vast authority to those bureaucrats, people whose only constituents, aside from their current bosses, were the companies and interest groups who might hire them later. We did this in the name of “nonpartisanship” and “expertise”.

By the end of the New Deal, we’d curbed representative government at every point, in favor of a permanent unelected elite. And while we did not create a true unitary state as other countries did in the 1930s, we did establish a sea of subject-matter dictatorships: unaccountable entities with nearly unlimited power in their assigned areas.

Take the Environmental Protection Agency as one example. Created by a hodgepodge of executive orders and bits of bills, there is no single enabling act to which one can refer for a clear grant of or limit on its power. Yet the EPA, like countless other agencies, concentrates the powers of all three branches of government in its agency administrator, the de facto dictator. 

The agency makes law, and its lawmakers work for the administrator. The agency enforces the laws that it makes, and those enforcers also work for the administrator. Worse still, the agency employs a small army of Administrative Law Judges, or ALJs, none of them confirmed by the Senate, whom it may haul you in front of whenever it chooses. They work for the administrator too.

All of this is a grossly unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. It eliminates virtually all checks and balances. And the Chevron Court acknowledged that, to a degree: it said that by 1984, things had been done this way so long that it would just be too disruptive to change things.

In short, Chevron established constitutionality by longevity. You can apply that logic to Plessy v. Ferguson and tell me whether you think it’s a good idea.

Jarkesy and Juries, the Bulwark of Your Liberty  

But Chevron did more and worse still. Chevron largely eliminated your Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial, by almost completely curtailing your right to appeal an ALJ’s ruling to an actual, Constitutionally-authorized Article III court.

Let’s say that again: under Chevron an agency could sue you in front of its own judges, over its own made-up rules, enforced by its own bureaucrats, and you had no right to an appeal. You didn’t even get a jury of your peers.

That last bit is the keystone, the philosophical crux, of the entire matter. It is the core of the disagreement between King George and George Washington, between Madison and Marx.

The bureaucrats argue, as do the Democrats shrieking over Chevron’s overthrow, that the subject matter addressed by the various agencies is so complex, so intricate, so specialized that not only can a jury not understand, neither can an Article III federal court. They tell us in more-and-more blatant terms that, though they constantly pursue rule by unelected judges, even those experts are insufficiently elite. For true “democracy”, we must have rule by a class of super-experts, not subject to any oversight at all.

At every step of the process, Chevron replaced “government by the people” with that priesthood of experts, those who must simply be trusted to be benevolent, all-knowing and true. This is the technocrat’s and socialist’s (but I repeat myself) dream: to eliminate the great unwashed from the process of scientific government.

And if federal judges are too unwashed for our would-be betters, how much more so juries?

But juries matter, and not just because they are constitutionally guaranteed. Judges apply the law, but juries establish the facts: what happened, what didn’t, who’s believable, who’s not. There’s a reason for “of your peers”. The most basic fact which must be established is whether or not the accused had any intent to commit the act for which he’s being prosecuted. The priesthood, far removed from your life experience, is poorly positioned to determine that; your peers can stand in your shoes and imagine themselves in the same situation.

Your jury can also nullify a law they believe to be unjust.

Agency employees, regardless of their title, aren’t going to do that. Most of the time, you’re just going to lose, either outright or through a settlement. And if no appeal is possible, there’s no incentive for the priesthood to be reasonable, not in making law and not in its adjudication. After all, who the heck are you?

It’s worse. Increasingly, agency regulations are “strict liability”, which means that your intent doesn’t matter. By this standard, an accidental killing becomes murder. And speaking of murder, agencies issue not just civil but their own criminal laws, by some estimates as many as 300,000 separate agency-made offenses, all adjudicated solely by their own ALJs with no juries and no possibility of appeal.

Last week, in SEC v. Jarkesy, the Supreme Court upended that, re-establishing your Sixth and Seventh Amendment rights. And the Democrats’ howling began.

Loper Bright and the Abomination of “Chevron Deference”

But the crying was about to get louder. The very next day the Supremes handed down Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and wiped out much of the rest of the philosophy back of Chevron.

Loper Bright is about so-called “Chevron deference”, the doctrine that if you somehow do get to an Article III court, that body must defer to an agency’s interpretation of any ambiguity in a law the agency enforces. Chevron deference didn’t just upend centuries of principles of statutory construction. It also neutered the Article III courts.

Again, this was a feature, not a bug. The three dissenting Democrat justices made that clear, by not focusing on the constitutionality (or lack thereof) of Chevron but rather lamenting the priesthood’s loss of power. Their philosophy is simple: the anointed “experts” should rule you. Peasant.

Freedom is impossible if those who wield force are not accountable to the people. But in David Harsanyi’s words, “bureaucrats do not function under a notion of ‘accountability’ that most normal people would recognize. When was the last time an agency cleaned house because its policies had failed? When was the time the administrative state was reined back in any genuine way? How many regulators or appointees are ever fired? If you were as bad at your job as Alejandro Mayorkas, you’d be out of work forever.”

Put more simply: what power do you have to make any of those things happen?

The Founders’ Vision vs. “Our Democracy”

When power is vested in the elected branches, as our Constitution requires, you have exactly that power every election. The Chevron philosophy is the opposite: technocratic at best, socialistic at worst, without accountability always.

But technocracy is failing, and losing legitimacy, everywhere. There’s a reason for the increasingly global populist revolt: the self-anointed elites have lost all touch with those they rule (and rule they do, not serve). George Friedman writes about this, and what he believes will come next, in his excellent The Storm Before the Calm. From a somewhat different direction so does Neil Howe, in his brilliant The Fourth Turning is Here.

The Founders answer was and surely would be smaller government; but even if they could not make government smaller, at the very least they would shift its power back to the elected branches and thus the election process. Give the President the power to replace bad personnel. Give individual House members and Senators enough staff to actually oversee the government we have. Force agencies to defend their “brilliance” before real, constitutional courts. Force Congress to actually legislate, rather than (unconstitutionally) delegating its powers to the bureaucracy.

It is this last bit where the Court failed, at least in part. In Jarkesy, the Fifth Circuit re-established the long-dead nondelegation doctrine 10-6: Congress must not delegate its law-making powers. This would have been the death of the Administrative State, not of the agencies or their enforcement duties but of their subject-matter dictatorships. The Supreme Court did not address that portion of the case, neither affirming it nor overruling it.

This is a shame. Hopefully it will be rectified next term, after the Beltway has had time to adjust to all of the foregoing.

The Founders’ vision gave us the America we know, the tiny colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast that in barely more than a century grew into the colossus of the world, by attracting millions to its opportunity and liberty, and by harnessing their talents “like an invisible hand” to create a near-universal prosperity unknown in all the history of man. Liberty is chaotic, and brilliant, and wildly innovative; and that innovation is called forth by a system that does not direct, but rather allows everyone to imagine the better future that would come from solving other people’s problems, and then doing so not through top-down coercion but through the marketplace.

For millennia, the aristocratic, elitist vision produced a stultified world, in which as late as 1800 fully 94% of humanity lived in extreme poverty, and in which the richest lived far worse than you do. Freedom has doubled life expectancy, put a supercomputer in the hands of billions, and upended tyrannies as old as the world.

But this century-old debate is far from over. Increasingly hostile to the Constitutional order our Founders gave us, Democrats believe technocracy is essential to what they call “Our Democracy”. They are increasingly clear that "Our Democracy" means a priesthood of experts, shielded from accountability or responsibility, making decisions "for the good of the people" without their involvement or consent.

In short, "Democratic Centralism".

Let the reader understand.

The Beast is Here

By Rich Kozlovich

Recently I read this piece, What rough beast, its hour come round at last, by someone who styles himself as Charles Martel, with a picture of him wearing a crown.  Whether of not that's his real name I will leave up to you.  But, for the uninitiated, Charles Martel, AKA, the Hammer of France, was the de facto ruler of France, and prevented the Muslim Moors from overwhelming Europe by defeating them at the Battle of Tours in 732 C.E.    

Well, I didn't know what the "rough beast" phrase meant, so I did a quick search and found out that's a much quoted line taken from a poem, by William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Okay, that's the reason I never read poems.  So what's all that mean?  This was right after WWI, and we really do need to try and understand the impact of all the destruction, death, and suffering that war made on people's minds and hearts. 

 

Western civilization before 1914 considered itself beyond that kind of insanity.  Germany and France were considered Europe's cultural centers for education, science, and philosophy.  The common people saw a world of wondrous advancement, with hopes and visions of a bright future for their children.  That was not to be. 

 

WWI was the most significant event in modern history, and was merely a prelude to WWII, irreversibly destroying 2000 years of progress leaving a dark and frighten world without pity, plagued by a "tidal wave darkened by blood", with "pure destruction and lawlessness spread across the world."

What they saw then is what we're seeing now.  I've read three books on historical cycles, and while I recommend reading those kinds of books, understand, they're difficult at best, if for no other reason they don't share a common lexicon.  But they all agree on one thing.  We're now at the end of a historical cycle. 

 

"The center cannot hold, merely anarchy is loosed upon the world, the ceremony of innocence is drowned, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity"

 

All end cycle scenarios depict a plague of economic collapse and violence.  The beast is here. 

• Victor Davis Hanson: American Civilization Is in Freefall, It’s All Mounting - “You can see it’s all mounting,” Victor Davis Hanson says in the clip below. “It’s a civilization in freefall.” When you know the problem and can’t fix it, society collapses. These people causing this are very, very wealthy, all from political families, they all know each other, and they are all hard left. They never pay the consequences of their actions...........The US abandons the melting pot and encourages people to behave as they would in their countries. There is no unity and assimilation so it becomes lawless. There is no law in Biden’s America...........
• The Rich Are Getting Second Passports, Citing Risk of Instability - The Rich Are Getting Second Passports, Citing Risk of Instability - Wealthy U.S. families are increasingly applying for second citizenships and national residences as a way to hedge their financial risk. The wealthy are building “passport portfolios” — collections of second, and even third or fourth, citizenships — in case they need to flee their home country. Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who added a citizenship in New Zealand, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who applied for citizenship in Cyprus. The top destinations for supplemental passports among Americans are Portugal, Malta, Greece and Italy, according to Henley Partners............
• America Is Hurtling Toward a Full Blown Hot Civil War - It never ceases to amaze me at how little so many people in this country have done to train their minds to critically analyze information. They have eyes to see and ears to see, and yet, somehow the truth of any major issue still seems to evade them, or they simply refuse to recognize the truth with it standing right in front of them, slapping them in the face.  So many things are currently plumb damned fouled up by this Biden regime and going awry on their own through the dynamics set in motion by this anti-American, lawless regime, that it’s nearly impossible to properly address them all in a single commentary. But I’ve tried to give the Reader as comprehensive an assessment as I possibly can with this piece.......

 

Leftism Has Always Been Wrong, Destructive, and Evil

You know that little voice inside your head that keeps you from saying things you shouldn't say. Yeah, I don't have that.

By Rich Kozlovich

Most of us have real families, real children, real home mortgages or rent, real car payments, real taxes to be paid, etc, and as a result we have real jobs we go to regularly.   You know, all the things real people do who are the real producers in this world.   

As a result of being responsible, real people are usually out of touch with the misfits of this world who are driving all these weird changes in society.  Much of which is driven by the Temples of the Church of Wokeness, such as Twitter (even now that it's called X), Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and others, not to mention the Main Stream Media.  They were the Chapels for the Church of Political Correctness, but they've now become sects in the Church of Wokeness.  Same thing....just more of it, and even weirder. 

Some years ago Tim Young posted an article I thought was insightful, humorous and shows a clarity of vision about the misfits attempting to tell the nation, and the world, on how to live.  Arrogantly instructing the world on what's right, what's wrong and how the world should function, entitled Don’t Tolerate People Who Hate You, asking who are these people?

The people who are forcing the huge cultural shifts on our society are people you would disregard in person...........When is the last time you went to an independent coffee shop.....I mean, a grungy, hipster coffee shop run by Gen Z-ers who dress like they rolled out of a bed in the late ’70s and who believe their knowledge of roasting beans has greater value than rocket science........they remind me of who we’re up against in the ongoing culture war......and if you don’t agree with these new radical ideologies, you’re considered the problem.  

Now these are the "real" original coffee shops right out of the beatnik coffee shop era of the 1950's.  Since most of you are too young to remember who the beatniks were, let me explain:

 

"a social movement of the 1950s and early 1960s which stressed artistic self-expression and the rejection of the mores of conventional society broadly : a usually young and artistic person who rejects the mores of conventional society."

 

The "beatniks" were the force that introduced illegal drug use in white America, just as jazz was the moving force in black America, and latter became the hippies who functioned with the moral foundation of, "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out".  We normals thought they were all weird and destructive.  Well, we were right, they were! However, by comparison to these misfits we're forced to deal with now, they were almost normal.    So who are these people?  Well, for reasons I don't understand, it appears Tim likes going to those grunge coffee shops, and here are his observation of the clientele.

.......poor hair colorings of the entire rainbow, lots of that nose piercing of a sort only cattle should have, an “I’m-rebelling-against-my-parents” wardrobe provided by Hot Topic, and dozens of what could be best described as prison tattoos entered the building—and of course they were all there midday which implied that they had nowhere like a job to be...........In a simple glance, you’d identify that they don’t deserve even a second of your respect. These are the people who are pushing the extreme cultural shifts onto society.

The purple-haired woman who wants her pronouns to be ze/zir and who believes in only using natural deodorant—the one who also pierced her nose to look like a bull, who has what looks like a poor attempt at drawing a 3-D box on her arm she did while high and who wears small ripped up shirts, but should be in 2XL—is among the vanguard of people who want you to change your life to make “zir” feel more comfortable. 

He goes on to say:

These are the people who wanted you banned from society for not getting the same medical treatment they believe in; the same people who want toddlers to be taught sex in schools; the same people who want to ostracize you for your faith in God; and the same people who scream that you’re a hateful-phobe or an -ist for having opinions that differ from their own.  You’d laugh at them in person........ They don’t deserve your respect or your tolerance—they never did.  

And if you ever lose that perspective or feel intimidated by what you’re seeing from the Left, just take a trip to your local independent coffee shop and reclaim your confidence in knowing that you are on the correct side of history.

Dan Mitchell is a Libertarian who publishes International Liberty and allows me to publish his work, and most of the time it's worth publishing, but Dan's a Libertarian, and when it comes to the legalization of drugs he's in favor of it....sort of.  He published this yesterday, Oregon and Drug Legalization, which I didn't publish.  

 

Libertarians take the view people should not be prevented from doing what they want to do as long as they don't harm anyone else, and that's a really nice meme, except for one all important fact.  When it comes to drugs, that's not reality, and I commented on his article saying:

 

Historically, at least as far as I have been able to ascertain, there is not one historical example of legalization and distribution of mind altering and/or addictive compounds that wasn’t disastrous for humanity. 

Furthermore, these compounds alter the natural function of the mind, especially when used regularly, and at some point, there’s no return to normal functioning, and they become unemployable.

Then the bleeding hearts start whining how it’s now the responsibility of the stable elements of society to house, cloth, feed, and take care of their medical needs, and the virtue signalling gutless politicians go along with that and we’re left with a massive non-productive bunch of leeches eventually costing billions

Is left good at anything?  Yes:

• The ability to redefine language from clear and definable meaning into irrational and confusing leftist babble.  
• The ability to twist history to fit their narrative of the moment.
  
• The ability to project their failings onto others.  
• The ability to spew out logical fallacies without even thinking about them.  
• The ability to place massive burdens on the shoulders of others while screaming outrage if they have to carry a toothpick.  
• The ability to demand perfection from others while failing to perform at even basic standards of competence.  
• The ability to make their hypocrisy someone else's fault.  
• The ability to lie without one iota of guilt or conscience.  
  

One of the things I keep trying to point out is nothing the left ever does, or supports, ever ends up being successful, and nothing they claim is ever the truth.  It's either outright lies, lies of omission, obfuscation, cognitive dissonance, projection, logical fallacies, or speculation.  But most importantly, they're always wrong.  They just about have a monopoly on "wrong".  

 

Ray Di Lorenzo in his article, Think the Unthinkable lists 29 "Bogus Predictions from the Elite", which they use to justify their destruction of America and the Constitution in order to impose a tyrannous socialist form of rulership on the world.  Not just America, the world.  If there is no America there is no free world.

1. 1966: Oil will be gone in 10 years.  
2. 1967: Famine by 1975. 
3. 1969 We will all disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989 (Paul Ehrlich).
4. 1969: World-wide plague, ecological catastrophe by end of 20th century.
5. 1970: Oceans dead in a decade, food rationing by 1980.
6. 1970: Natural resource depletion
7. 1971: An ice age will hit us by 2000.
8. 1972: Oil depletion by 1992. 
9. 1972: Urban citizens will require gas masks by 1985. 
10. 1974: We will have ozone depletion.
11. 1975: A cooling world and drastic decline in food production.
12. 1976: ‘Scientific consensus’ that famine is imminent.
13. 1977: Oil will peak by 1990s (Department of Energy)
14. 1980: Oh my God, acid rain!
15. 1988: Rising sea levels will obliterate nations by 2000.
16. 1988: Maldive Islands will be underwater by 2018 (they are still there).
17. 1989: Nations wiped off the planet by 2000 from global warming (UN).
18. 1996: Oil will be gone in 2020.
19. 2002: Famine if we don’t give up meat, fish, and dairy.
20. 2004: Britain will be Siberia by 2024.
21. 2005: Manhattan will be underwater by 2015.
22. 2008: The Arctic will be ice free by 2018.
23. 2009: Prince Charles says we have 96 months to save the planet.
24. 2009: The UK Prime Minister disagrees, says we have 50 days.
25. 2009: Al Gore moves his prediction of an ice-free Arctic from 2013 to 2019.
26. 2014: We have 500 days to avoid climate chaos (John Kerry, Jay Carney, French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius).
27. 2019 We have eight or nine years to address climate change (Bernie Sanders) 2021.
28. present:Dr. Anthony Fauci: “The vaccine is safe and effective and will prevent you from getting COVID”.  (These false "vaccines" are neither safe nor do they work, and time is showing they represent very real health hazards to those who've taken them. RK.)
    
29. And finally Joe Biden:“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
    

He then asks this question:  

Do you see a pattern emerging?  Answer?  Yes, I see the pattern.  These are all predictions that turned out to be wrong.  These represent nothing but pattern of corruption, lies, myths and hyperbole.  All in order to fool humanity into accepting serfdom with their falsehoods.   All done with a massive amount of help from a corrupt media, especially the big tech social media, all temples of the Church of Wokeness.

The commonality they all share is this:  Leftism is a disaster waiting to happen on every front and every issue we face.   Whether it involves, immigration, science, big tech, energy, spending, taxes, regulations, health care, national security, crime prevention, rule of law, or for that matter, anything they promote or support, it turns into a disaster.  And we absolutely have all the historical evidence we need to recognize that statement is factually incontestable. 

 

Take a look at the crime ridden economic sewers they've managed to turn every one of America's major cities into: Chicago,  Detroit, New York City, Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco, and even Washington D.C.  As for the states in which these cities exist, they're also a mess.

 

As an avid history buff I realized the patterns of life keep repeating over and over again.  I've been a believer in historical cycles, because they occur, and these are patterns of human behavior are recorded and traceable.  I've read three books on historical cycles, and while I think they're complicated, they've all come to this conclusion.    We're coming to an end of a historical cycle that's going to impact the entire world, and all historical end cycles end in massive levels of violence and a massive economic downturn, before a new cycle can begin.  

Clashing Crises

 John Mauldin January 19, 2024 Thoughts from the Frontline

 “Two is better than one” is a nice saying, but it really depends on what you’re describing. Two hurricanes or earthquakes aren’t better than one. Just one disaster at a time will suffice, thank you very much. The same holds true for man-made crises like the debt fiasco we’ve been discussing. Last week in No Way Out I said we’ve missed our chance to avoid it. We are simply not going to do what it would take to get the federal debt under control—like it was as recently as 2001—until we have no other choice. I have said it before, and I truly believe it, it will take a crisis to force us to act on the deficit and debt.  When you know a problem is coming, the normal ideal is to address it immediately. Procrastination just lets the problem grow and raises the odds you will face multiple problems at the same time.

And that, unfortunately, is what I fear will happen. The government debt crisis will be bad enough, but it’s also likely to crescendo just as we face social, geopolitical, and demographic crises, too. Last fall I spent 10 letters describing the historical cycles that all look set to peak in the next decade. That’s also when I expect the debt to reach its limits. This is something where two is definitely not better than one. And in this case, we’re talking about more than two. A bunch of bad things are going to happen in a fairly short time.

Now is the time to begin preparing for what will come. But to do that, you need to have at least some idea of what to expect. This is where the cycle theories of Neil Howe, George Friedman, Peter Turchin, and Ray Dalio can help. It’s a lot to juggle in your head, so today I want to quickly review these ideas. They will help stimulate your thinking as you develop your own strategy for the next decade.

Their views differ but don’t contradict each other. Rather, they are just different ways to look at history for patterns and causes. And as you might expect, there is often significant overlap in their findings..........To Read More...