A great article from The Burning Platform.
It always sounds "old" to say that times past were better but in the case of the current state of the US is is profoundly true. As our linear view of history in Western culture is about to give way to a more realistic cyclical vision, it is amazing to see decline in action as rot slowly gnaws away at the foundations of the country erasing in a short few years decades of progress, the democratic process questioned as if there really was an alternative (all types of other arrangements have been tested over time, none are pleasant!) and corruption spreads like wildfire. A sad but good story as told below.
“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” – Edward Gibbon
“Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.” – William Shakespeare, Richard II
We moved to our corner of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
twenty-seven years ago. We raised our three boys here. We spent hundreds
of hours on local baseball fields, in hockey rinks, in school gyms for
basketball games, concerts, plays and donuts-with-dads. It’s still a
nice place to live, with virtually no crime, decent roads, and
reasonable property tax rates. But I would have to say there has been a
degradation in the overall quality of life in my community, which is
consistent with the downward spiral of our society in general. When we
planted our roots in this community it was still more farm-like than
suburban. Family farms and open space were more prevalent than housing
tracts, strip malls, fast food joints and cookie cutter commercial
buildings. A beautiful farmhouse a few miles from our home, freshly
painted white, proudly displayed the iconic yellow smiley face. It
symbolized good times.
We’ve been driving on this road for twenty-seven years on the way to
baseball games, hockey practices, the car dealer for service, and lately
to our gym, as we try to fend off father time. Driving by that barn in
the early days would always brighten your day. A bright yellow smiley
face against a white background represented a positive, happy view of
the world.
We moved to this area in 1995 while Clinton was president,
unemployment was 5.6%, CPI was 2.8%, GDP growth was 2.7%, the annual
deficit was $164 billion, the national debt was $4.9 trillion, the Fed
balance sheet was $500 billion, the U.S. population was 263 million,
total household debt was $4 trillion, you earned 5.5% on your money
market fund, the U.S. bailed out Mexico, the Oklahoma City bombing
happened, and OJ Simpson was found not guilty of killing his ex-wife.
The military industrial complex was being starved by lack of wars and
the stock market soared by 33% as the beginning of irrational exuberance
began under the reign of Greenspan and his Put.
A lot has happened over the last twenty-seven years and the faded,
barely visible smiley face, on a now mold ridden decaying barn, is truly
representative of a society, culture and economic system dying a slow
torturous death, as apathy, technological distraction, myopic indolence,
and the greed of powerful elites combine to ensure the eventual
collapse of the short-lived American Empire. Much of this quarter
century of decline is borne out in the change in economic numbers noted
above.
The unemployment rate is reported as 3.5% today with 158 million out
of 264 million working age adults employed. That leaves 106 million not
employed, or 40% of working age adults not working. Back in 1995, 125
million out of 199 million working age adults were employed, leaving 74
million not working. Over a quarter century we’ve added 65 million
people to our population, but only 33 million to the employment rolls.
Either we’ve devolved into a nation of freeloaders on
welfare/disability, or the BLS is lying about the 3.5% unemployment
rate, or both.
The BLS currently tries to convince the ignorant masses inflation is
only 8.5%, up tremendously from the 2.8% in 1995. Since the Fed/Wall
Street induced financial crash of 2008, the government had been
reporting inflation of between 0% to 3%, when in reality, as measured
the way it was measured in 1980, it had been between 7% to 10%. Today’s
actual inflation rate is 17% in case you were wondering. Revealing the
true cost of living to the peasants might induce a revolting outcome for
our overlords. The government prefers to treat the math challenged
masses like mushrooms, by keeping them in the dark.
The corrupt Fed, feckless politicians, media mouthpieces for the
empire, and Wall Street shysters were shocked I tell you by skyrocketing
inflation after the Fed increased their balance sheet from $3.7
trillion to $8.9 trillion and the D.C. swamp creatures increased the
national debt from $23.2 trillion to $30.7 trillion since the beginning
of 2020. This generated inflation in financial assets for the global
elite and their minions, while destroying the finances of the middle and
lower classes. The rot grows like a cancer in this empire of debt.
The annual deficit of $164 billion in 1995 was racked up in 17 days
in 2021. We have run annual deficits of $3.1 trillion in 2020 and $2.8
trillion in 2021, and the scumbags in Washington just keep passing $700
billion spending bills, writing off student loan debts for gender
fluidity majors and sending billions in weapons to the most corrupt
regime on the planet – Ukraine. The degradation and downward trajectory
of this empire of debt, delusion and despair can be most clearly defined
by comparing our GDP growth since 1995 to the growth of debt by both
our government and the populace. Total U.S. GDP in 1995 totaled $7.6
trillion and today checks in at $24.8 trillion. That is a growth of 326%
over twenty-seven years. The national debt has grown by 626%. Seems
unsustainable, but why question our glorious leaders.
The Fed balance sheet has grown by 1,780%. Household debt has grown
by 400%. Median household income in 1995 was $34,000. Today it is
$73,000. That is a 214% increase over 27 years. With real inflation
averaging over 10% per year during this time frame, average working
Americans have seen their standard of living methodically decline,
replacing the income with debt. The only beneficiaries of debt are the
banking cabal and the mega-corporations selling their cheap Chinese crap
to clueless dupes who believe driving a leased BMW and living in a
cookie cutter McMansion with an $800,000 mortgage makes them wealthy.
The selfie generation is too distracted checking in on Facebook,
posting pictures of their food on Instagram, doing a dance routine on
Tik Tok or counting their likes on Twitter to realize how badly they’ve
been screwed over by those pulling the strings of this society. The
propaganda and psychology of fear utilized by the powerful interests has
reached a level that would make Edward Bernays burst with pride, as
manipulating the masses to believe falsehoods is a key requirement in
implementing their Great Reset agenda.
This entire charade seems to be bursting at the seams, with raging
inflation, a recession in process (despite Biden’s lackeys trying to
redefine recession), a Green New Deal Great Reset agenda purposely
creating energy and food shortages, government agencies running
roughshod over the Constitution, and a tyrannical administration
attempting to crush their political adversaries using any means
necessary. Smiles are fading as we head into either a hyperinflationary
depression or a deflationary depression, with some world war mixed in.
The economic decay is easily provable, but our cultural and societal
degeneration has exceeded our economic deterioration. Just as the Roman
Empire exhibited particular traits of a dying culture, the American
Empire displays similar characteristics, such as: concern with
displaying affluence instead of building wealth; obsession with sex and
perversions of sex; art becoming freakish and sensationalistic instead
of creative and original; widening disparity between very rich and very
poor; increased demand to live off the state.
Of course, our dying culture has also been turbocharged by the
climate cult attempting to destroy our fossil fueled economic system by
purposely sabotaging our energy and food systems as the driving force
for their Great Reset. Weaponizing the annual flu as a means to inject
billions of people with a DNA altering, sometimes lethal, concoction is
part of Bill Gates’ depopulation agenda. They have taken the sex and
gender perversion to new levels of child abuse, grooming and mutilation.
The rampant pedophilia and child trafficking by the global elitists is
the most despicable aspect of our cultural degeneracy. Anyone with a
conscious can no longer be proud of this country and should be
desperately concerned about its future.
“A growing sense of unease presently
pervades the American consciousness. Americans are no longer as
confident in their nation and self-assured as they once were. A sense of
frustration and anger underscores American consciousness. Americans are
looking over our shoulder at other emerging economic juggernauts and
wondering if we can still be world’s social, political, and economic
leader when Congress cannot even manage to balance the national budget.
The thought that we are diminishing in stature in the eyes of the
international community constantly torments Americans. Faded glory
strikes a crippling blow to the American psyche. Analogous to an aging
beauty queen, America might still possess a golden crown, but she lost
her luster. In an eroding empire, Americans feel like second-class
citizens in the union of nations.” ― Kilroy J. Oldster
The terms modern and progress have become warped and used as an
excuse for destroying localization, small businesses, what worked, what
was good, and what benefitted society, replacing it with globalization,
mega-corporations, complex technology, profits at any cost, and benefits
accumulating to the few with suffering borne by the many. Two examples
come to mind within a few miles from my home. Just a couple miles from
the fading smile barn is a property that was once a thriving family
farm. I snapped a picture last week as I was driving past.
The decaying abandoned farmhouse, dilapidated barn, and rusting farm
machinery are being engulfed by weeds, as the memories of a productive
useful family farm fade like that yellow smiley face. I don’t know why
it was abandoned, but I’m sure the corporate farming conglomerates and
the corporate meat processing plants were a major factor. When you can
buy cheap meat at Wal-Mart produced in China or some industrial farm,
why pay a little more for fresh non-GMO meat sold by a local farmer?
Gone are the roadside vegetable stands and buying fresh meat from
your local farmer neighbor. Maybe the patriarch of the homestead got too
old, and his sons had been indoctrinated by the government schools to
get corporate jobs in some of the commercial office campuses that have
replaced open space and farmland. Whatever the reason, it provokes
melancholy about a better simpler time whenever I pass by.
The governmental actions taken in the early 2000s still irk me to
this day. The area around the intersection of Forty Foot Road and
Sumneytown Pike in the late 1990s was still reminiscent of simpler
times, before smart phones, hyper-consumerism, and proliferation of big
box retail. Small businesses were important and viable. There was a
family run diner near the turnpike entrance where all the locals ate
breakfast and talked sports and politics.
Township police were friendly, driving older basic vehicles and
housed in a small unassuming one-story township building. Nicely kept
older homes lined one side of Forty Foot Road and the other side was an
eclectic mixture of old-time baseball fields, with no lights and little
to no ground’s maintenance, and the old Henry Sprecht grade school,
built in 1909 to honor a long-time educator and local historian, which
had been replaced by newer schools and creatively repurposed into a
quaint antiques mall.
We spent many a summer evening watching my oldest son play little
league baseball on those fields while trying to keep our four-year-old
and three-year-old sons from getting into trouble. We loved wandering
through that antiques mall as individual vendors selling all manner of
antiques, hand crafted woodwork, baseball cards, toys, occupied nooks,
and crannies in this ancient school. We bought a handcrafted cabinet by a
local artisan for our kitchen, which we still employ today in our
storage area.
My fondest memory was at Christmas time when it would become a
Christmas wonderland and I would take the boys there to see the
spectacular miniature train show, where local train aficionados would
set up amazing displays. The kids were mesmerized. There was also a
family-owned home center in Hatfield called Snyder’s that sold
everything for your home and also had a great train display at Christmas
for kids to enjoy. All this unpretentious delight ended abruptly in the
early 2000s, as progress, commercialization, and greed took hold of the
country and our little community.
As you may remember, Greenspan coined the term irrational exuberance
in 1996 to describe financial markets, then turbocharged stocks by
cutting rates, causing the dot.com bubble and responded to the stock
market crash by cutting rates and causing the biggest real estate bubble
in history, until now. These ephemeral paper riches caused local
government bureaucrats to use phantom tax revenues to envision delusions
of grandeur by building useless unnecessary projects.
This is exactly what the government drones running Towamencin
Township did. They produced a grand master plan, gave it a fancy name,
spent tens of millions of our tax dollars, and produced an embarrassing
mess. They used eminent domain to acquire homes, forced the dozens of
small business owners out of the antique mall and flattened the
building, closed off the baseball fields to little kids, and closed
Forty Foot Road for over a year to build a glorious $13 million bridge
to nowhere. This bridge stands as a tribute to all those Chinese ghost
cities, as it serves no purpose except as an example of government
incompetence, wastefulness, and misuse of taxpayer funds with no
consequences for the government drones.
Rather than wait for actual retail tenants to sign on to their
glorious project, the government geniuses built the bridge knowing they
would come. They never came. The real estate retail bubble popped. It’s
now fifteen years later and those four baseball fields are still sitting
there, untouched, undeveloped, and unused. They stuck a Walgreens where
the charming antique mall once sat. No pedestrians cross the pedestrian
bridge because there is nothing on either side. A four- story
commercial building was built on spec a block from the bridge and stood
vacant for five years.
Home Depot and Lowes built within a few miles. There are now cookie
cutter townhouses where Snyder’s stood. Another successful retail center
in the 1990s up the road, anchored by a family owned Genuardi
supermarket and a Sears Hardware, along with a pizza place, drugstore,
Blockbuster, and kids play center has been vacant and rotting for over a
decade, as bankruptcies, mergers, and the relentless downward economic
spiral made it untenable.
In addition to wasting taxpayer money on the ghost bridge to nowhere,
these financial government geniuses decided their police station built
in 1975 no longer met the needs of their fast-growing police force in a
township with no crime, because it is 88% white/Asian. They built
themselves a complex three times the size of their old station. Lucky,
because they now have a police force of 23 officers, all decked out with
souped-up brand-new SUVs.
You need that level of manpower and firepower for all those speed
traps, fender benders and writing tickets for illegal basketball nets.
There hasn’t been a major crime in Towamencin in over a decade, but the
taxpayers pay over $1 million per year to be harassed and pay for their
donut budget This level of government waste is happening in every
locality and state in America. And the Feds put them all to shame with
their corrupt, wasteful, traitorous spending, bribing, and war mongering
across the globe, to the tune of trillions.
The decline I’ve personally seen in my local community is not just a
localized cancer but has metastasized across the land and around the
globe. As our economic system accelerates towards inevitable implosion,
either as a planned demolition or due to the hubris of central bankers,
the fraying social fabric of our civilized society is unmistakable, as
the moral state of our country has deteriorated to a level seen only in
debauched empires on the brink of failure.
The global elite and their moral depravity have engulfed the world,
as their ravenous greed, insatiable appetite for dominion over the
masses, immoral deceit, manipulative use of propaganda, and satanic
decadence have created economic, social, political, and military
distress across the globe. As Toynbee and Solzhenitsyn note, the lack of
morality and courage among those who profess to be leaders has
permeated throughout society, leading to a dearth of citizens taking
civic responsibility for the path of the country.
“Of the twenty-two civilizations that
have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached
the moral state the United States is in now.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee
“A decline in courage may be the most
striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
The Western world has lost its civic courage. Such a decline in courage
is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite,
causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
We are a lost society, ruled by emotions, captured by technology,
misinformed, uneducated, indifferent, fearful, passively accepting of
whatever government and media tell them is true, and entranced by
materialism funded by debt. We are a sick dying culture where common
community standards, self-responsibility, hard work, kindness, and
manners have been superseded by the worship of abnormality, celebration
of degeneracy, living off the government, spreading hatred, and waging
undeclared wars across the world.
There is an empty shallowness to our civilization, with the vacuum
filled with gadgets, pathetic displays of fake affluence, trivialities
like social media, and superficial displays of virtue signaling
regarding the latest woke craze shoved down our throats by those
controlling the levers of society. There is an overwhelming feeling of
hopelessness, fear, and foreboding mood of impending doom, as this
Fourth Turning accelerates towards its bloody denouement.
The aura of pessimism about the future and fear that our superpower
status, only in existence since 1946, is rotting from within permeates
the psychology of those actually willing to think critically and see
what is really happening. The existing social order will be extinguished
during the waning years of this Fourth Turning. We are in the interval
between the decay of the old and formation of the new, whatever that may
be.
This transition will be one of uncertainty, turmoil, miscalculation,
fanatical misrepresentations, war (civil & global), false prophets,
bloodshed, and clear winners and losers. Decay and death of empires have
happened for centuries and are necessary to expunge the excesses and
abuses which always occur as empires expand and its leaders exhibit a
hubristic arrogance towards their people and the world.
“Just as floods replenish soil and
fires rejuvenate forests, a Fourth Turning clears out society’s
exhausted elements and creates an opportunity.” – The Fourth Turning
It is hard to believe the prognostications of Strauss & Howe a
quarter century ago, just after I moved to my community, could be so
eerily accurate. But, when you are sure of the catalysts: debt, global
disorder, and civic decay, the volcanic eruption of distress can only
flow along certain channels, preordained by choices made over decades by
our leaders and ourselves.
“Imagine some national (and probably
global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress
that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the
catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts
free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of
an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten
ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:
- Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement
trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade
wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
- Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism,
or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and
mercenaries hired by walled communities
- Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax
revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism,
authoritarianism, and altered national borders
- Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction”
This Fourth Turning has created tremendous distress in all four
categories noted by Strauss & Howe. With over $200 trillion of
unfunded liabilities, the country is already in default, but unwilling
to admit it. The Social Security fund will run out of money in a few
years. State and local pension funds are underfunded by trillions. With
Powell and his minions in control, hyperinflation and deflationary
depression are on the near-term horizon, with financial assets crashing
once again, for the fourth time this century.
The social distress has been initiated and promoted by the global
elite through their complete control of the media propaganda outlets.
They are attempting to spur violent upheaval, as this will give them the
excuse to disarm and electronically imprison dissenters and Great Reset
resisters. Class, race, religion, and gender are all being used to
stoke unrest.
The political distress is the biggest gaping wound in our national
body today. If critical thinking individuals didn’t acknowledge the
existence of a Deep State before, they surely can’t deny its existence
now. It has existed for decades, but has been forced out into the open,
as threats to their power and control multiply due to their arrogance,
ineptitude, wickedness, and avarice.
Anyone who dares to deviate from their directives and threatens their
fiefdom is either killed, neutered, or destroyed (JFK, RFK, George
Wallace, Perot, Assange, Trump). Russiagate, two impeachments, J6 witch
trial, and now the rogue DOJ/FBI raid on Trump’s compound has driven the
political stress to heights not seen since 1860. The desires of the
globalist elites for a Great Reset into a new world order where you own
nothing, and they own everything is the goal of all this engineered
chaos.
The military distress may be the most concerning and potentially most
destructive aspect of this Fourth Turning as we enter the normally
bloody phase. The flailing U.S. empire is provoking and stoking global
conflict to keep feeding the Deep State military industrial complex. The
Ukraine conflict was initiated by the U.S. in 2014 and is being used as
a justification to fight Russia without getting our hands dirty.
Continuing to poke the nuclear armed bear, has the potential to
escalate the conflict to a point of no return. Throwing fuel on the fire
by provoking China over Taiwan’s independence is irrationally reckless
and the mark of a desperate empire seeing the sun setting on its 76-year
reign as the one global superpower, and willing to risk global war in a
fruitless effort to remain king.
The U.S. can let its empire expire with a whimper (e.g. British
Empire) or a bang. Based on their ham-handed, stumbling, absurd
endeavors to maintain their dominance over the world, they have
initiated global food and energy shortages, caused unbearable economic
hardship upon the middle and lower classes, and have pushed the world to
the brink of nuclear war with countries run by serious men. While we
are supposedly led by an ancient fossil lost in a fog of dementia and
unable to string two coherent sentences together, even with a
teleprompter. Obama, the Deep State, and a plethora of diversity hire
apparatchiks are really calling the shots.
The smile has faded on this empire of debt, delusion, denial, and
destruction, just as it has on the barn near my house. The coming trials
will require levels of courage, fortitude, and sacrifice which many
might think they are not capable of summoning, but we have no choice.
You can’t sit out Fourth Turnings. Sides will need to be chosen and life
or death decisions made. The future of this country and the world hang
in the balance.
Choosing your allies and forming local communities of like-minded
people with the skills to survive and thrive in the world created after
the coming conflict is resolved, is all you can do at this point.
Preparation may not be enough, but not preparing guarantees a bad
outcome for you and your family. Whatever you do, put absolutely no
faith in any government solution to our predicament. They are the enemy
and you can’t vote your way out of this.
I hope after this is over to see a fresh coat of white paint applied
to that old barn and a brand-new yellow smiley face resurrected on the
same spot, marking the start of a new High.