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Guest Post: This Too Shall Pass. So Will This, This, This, This, And This Too
From Simon Black of Sovereign Man
This too shall pass. So will this, this, this, this, and this too
Take a moment and conduct a mini thought experiment. Imagine that you're from the future many hundreds of years from now, researching what life was like in the early 21st century. You pull up an archive of newspaper headlines from the year 2011 and read the following:
"US Congress To Vote On Declaration Of World War 3 -- An Endless War With No Borders, No Clear Enemies"
"Blackwater hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together a secret force of foreign troops"
"10 killed in US drone attacks in northern Pakistan"
"US Officials Warn Terrorism Threat Remains Post-bin Laden"
"TSA Pat Down of Suspicious Baby Is No Big Deal"
"Treasury taps federal pensions as Uncle Sam hits debt ceiling"
"Fed chief Ben Bernanke says he's not worried about inflation"
"Global Food Prices Hit New All Time High After 8 Consecutive Months Of Gains"
"Over-50s suffer a lifestyle crash: Millions less comfortable than a year ago"
"UK And US Data Shows Stagflation Threat Deepening"
"Greek riot police, protesters clash over austerity "
"IMF: Greece needs more austerity measures"
"IMF Chief no stranger to sexual assault allegations"
"Portugal on brink of bankruptcy"
"Contagion fears high as Italy drawn into crisis"
"Italian PM Berlusconi Faces Prostitution Trial in Italy"
To an observer who is not part of our time, it must all look like a really bad joke, like it just couldn't possibly be true. In the same way, we look back upon history and wonder with skepticism and incredulity how our long-lost ancestors have possibly allowed the Inquisition, the Dark Ages, genocide and slavery to occur.
We fancy ourselves so advanced and enlightened... but my guess is that history will view us in the same way that we see those unfortunate brutes of medieval times: misguided, misled, and totally self-deluded.
We might not be burning each other at the stake anymore, or waging war for king and conquest, but the metaphoric comparisons run truly deep. Moreover, our story today is a similar one: there is a very small group of people in power whose decisions affect the lives of billions of people. Those of us not in the elite ruling class allow it to happen.
Their choices drive up food prices, increase war and destruction, bankrupt entire economies, reduce standards of living, degrade social stability, and force everyday people into conditions that look more and more like a police state.
Simultaneously, this elite group uses its position to shower itself with privileges and benefits at everyone else's expense: hard-core sex parties, handing out free money to their friends, not paying their taxes, hiring private armies to protect them from their own people, etc.
It's positively disgusting... and I have to imagine that historians of the future will scratch their heads and wonder how we allowed ourselves to be duped into such a system.
Our leaders tell us that these troubles will pass... to sit down, shut up, be patient, and put our faith and confidence in their abilities to right the ship once again. Sounds great... but there's just one problem. Nobody's buying it anymore.
We're in the beginning of a period where people are finally starting to wake up and smell the fraud... and even though the establishment is furiously rearranging the deck chairs and trying desperately to maintain the status quo, the great market singularity is beginning to take hold: that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.
Glance at those headlines one more time. This system is corrupt, perverse, and wholly unsustainable. It will reset. Reasonable, sentient human beings cannot live under such a yoke in the long run.
It's difficult to say how it will happen, when it will finish, or what it will look like at the end, but rest assured, it's already happening, and it's going to be a bumpy ride.
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Not to sound like an optimist, but couldn't you put together a similiarly bleak list of headlines from pretty much any year? How about a list for 1932 or 1943 or 1974. I could put together an optimist list from 2011 too. Not to say we don't face serious issues, but this seems to be an exercise in wasting time.
The list seems to leave out several major known bills we will have to pay. No country using nuclear power has figured out where to store the empties yet, and no one is paying them to recycle. Perhaps the pitiful state of our electric grid and telephone pole connect to the world and a solar event NASA has warned us can destroy our networks. If there is no talk or action to fix the infrastucture, they are not ignoring the issue, they are guaranteeing it.
You lost me on the "hard core sex parties". How does this harm the tax payer? How is it bad? Just curious to see what ideas you're cross-fertilizing here.
For some reason, Italians are upset that their Premier engages underage girls for his Sex Orgy parties. Maybe they're just a bit square like that in Italy.
There are such things as parties involving sex and not hookers, probably more than the ones with hookers actually. I'm just trying to separate puritanical self hatred from more objectively accepted indecent behaviour like stealing or killing.
I don't think the point is about the sex itself it is about the culture of elites playing god and likening it to Roman orgies pretending that their office entitles them to any and all whims in a self-induced fog while there is actually real people hoping that their "leaders" will lead and solve problems instead of fuck their brains out.
"I'm just trying to separate puritanical self hatred from more objectively accepted indecent behaviour like stealing or killing."
That's awesome.
While you're at it, attempt to separate puritanical self-hatred from the revolting thought of sex acts performed on a 12 year old "hooker" by our Masters of the Universe.
I know there's a human being in there somewhere.
Could you please quote where I endorsed sex with minors or hookers?
Puritanical self hatred? Where did that phrase come from? Are you a real psychologist or do you just play one on TV?
From my perspective is has to do with respect for oneself, others and the boudaries in between.
History tells us that society goes through cycles where so called morals and ethics change. Like a pendulum it swings back and forth between extremes... or maybe society only swings between varying degrees of hypocrisy while individuals remain constant.
Hey, I have no problem with what consenting mature and capable human beings do between themselves as long as it is not physically, financially or emotionally forced... and therein lies the problem. How does one draw the line between what appears to be free will and what people do because they have been compelled to do because of the emotional or financial pressure unfairly put upon them by abusers and looters?
Totally agree on free will, and I like what you say about hypocrisy.
However, if you have some new definition of free will you want to introduce with what you seem to imply when you say some people are too victimized to know they're victims, I don't believe in that kind of condescending form of judgment, given its risk of being hugely subjective. You have to give adults the right to decide when they like something or not, and what choices they make. Otherwise you're on an extremely slippery slope to having some "expert" tell you whether you are smart enough to know when you like or dislike something. Not cool in my books and completely undermines the concept of free will.
If the problems are that some people threaten other people to do things they wouldn't do, there are plenty of laws to cover that. Why do we keep outlawing symptoms of problems and at the same time allow our freedom to be eroded?
I blame St. Augustine and the Catholic Church.
does the cost of the high priced hookers paid with taxpayer money bother anyone.
I don't know the Monica Lewinsky investigation cost taxpayers $6-7 million and she wasn't even a pro; well a pro at making bank I guess after the fact.
I wonder if this is what it was like just before Hitler really turned up the heat?
the historical similarities are excruciatingly similar.
Of course Ben Bernanke is not worried about inflation. The guy rides around in a limo. He is fervent about maintaining the steady transfer of wealth from us to them.
I can hardly wait to see the headlines over the next couple of years. Can they reflect a greater sense of statism and indecency than those in the article?
NPR had a great broadcast this weekend detailing the competition between different US intelligence agencies to get a domestic spying program in place pre-911, they made the point several times that 911 made it much easier to implement.
the entire conversation focused not on the issue of domestic spying, but instead on the intrigue between the different agencies..
seriously.
so yes, i'm sure the headlines will get better, as the complacency is deafening in its silence.
When Debt Hope: Down and Dirty Survival Strategies becomes a bestseller you can all start to worry.
The Pollyanna Party is back ON too! The Fed has invited us all to come. You can even crash the party if you like!
Time is nature's way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once.
Here's what won't end soon, silver market manipulation:
http://thesilvergoldhedge.blogspot.com/2011/05/market-manipulation-not-t...
The reason it has happened through history and will probably continue to happen into the future is that most humans are corruptible. The moment they get the privileges and taste the power, they become just like the people they overthrew.
Which is exactly why there are checks and balances written into the Constitution.
But there is no check or balance for the Fed. The president
is presented with a shortlist, and Congress affirms one. Then
whoever gets put in does what he or she wants to do with the
purse strings.
forgot the anti-christ Arnold's mini spawn has been revealed.
"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
Mark Twain
Glance at those headlines one more time. This system is corrupt, perverse, and wholly unsustainable. It will reset. Reasonable, sentient human beings cannot live under such a yoke in the long run.
Actually the default political/social/economic mode of existance for the overwhelming majority of humanity throughout history is pretty oppressive and bleak. Reversion to the mean from here would involve a much lower standard of living.
Hamster hit the magic number "poof"
I have a Post Hole Digger, does this count for a P.H.D?
Many will simply withdraw from what they perceive as a pointless endeavor and they will wither. That would include about all of the blogees who visit this site and some fraction of its bloggors.
The remaining resonable will continue trying to feed their children.
The other 98.6% of humanity will be perfectly content with their cashless, price and wage fixed, every transaction data-mined economy and its utopian monetary authority clearing the path to prosperity.
Let us not confuse economy-building stimulus with free-for-all kleptocratic giveaways. Bernanke will be remembered for what he is already known for--massive dilution of currency value to prop up the failed businesses of thieves. And yes, there are still good psychologists out there who can offer help to victims of brainwashing.
Well.
I find it amusing that anyone today thinks that anyone tomorrow will be looking back, at anything. In any fashion. Or having any thoughts about us at all.
We've never been 7 billions, locked in a global struggle for resources on a world grown small and cramped and smeared all over with our unending excrement. A world changing from it's very foundations right out from under us. And we possessed with weapons of mass destruction that would have been the tools of the gods in an earlier era. Humanity has never stood before on this threshold, ever. Perhaps no sentient race in the history of the entire universe has so stood.
It has become a singularity, folks. A great hole in history poised to swallow us. What goes into it now may not survive the compressive forces of contraction into oblivion. If the universe is unkind, there will be no looking back. Not by us -- not by anyone -- not ever.
But yes, they'll think we were mad all the same, but they would be wrong. We were not mad, we were greedy.
Nice!
Though I would argue that greed at this level of intensity is just another form of madness.
He will think the same thing that I think when I read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I especially love the story where the city is under siege and the Senate is negotiating to have the siege lifted ... the barbarians demand all the gold, silver and anything of carryable value in the city, and the indignant Senate replies, "But what will that leave us?" The answer was, "Your lives!"
Vae Victis, bitchez!
Imagine that you're from the future many hundreds of years from now...
Don't be stupid. Cockroaches can't read headlines.
I wrote a short story about that in the 70's. So sorry to have been correct. :-(
+ egg sac?
Well said, Dr. Head
Heeyy as long as i've got what it takes to make my pizza.
You left out Indiana nullifys the Magna Carta...
Will eating my lawn sustain me?
A person far far in the future will read these headlines and will say to his friend," Hey B239H!, look Jews used the same tricks to make money in those days too."
"... the great market singularity is beginning to take hold: that which is unsustainable will not be sustained." - TD
Anchor stones like this one litter the plains that lead to the final resting place of Noah's Ark.
We're gonna need a bigger boat.
"Reasonable, sentient human beings cannot live under such a yoke in the long run."
we are killing all life and this planet faster than she can recover. Imagine that. what great force we are to snuff out the life force on this rock, on such great basis, at least until we are gone.
"[in] the most comprehensive evaluation ever made of the status of the world's biodiversity" a recent report conludes that earth's biodiversity "is declining at an unprecedented rate"
"we cannot assume that any conservation activities will automatically prevent extinctions"
Among the report's conclusions:
The findings were unveiled at the 3rd World Conservation Congress.
there are at least 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre.
qualitatively, there could be more plastic per square meter of ocean water than there is plankton.
"Quantity and type of plastic debris flowing from two urban rivers to coastal waters
and beaches of Southern California"
http://www.algalita.org/uploads/Urban_River_Debris.pdf
For the past several billion years evolution on Earth has been driven by small-scale incremental forces such as sexual selection, punctuated by cosmic-scale disruptions—plate tectonics, planetary geochemistry, global climate shifts, and even extraterrestrial asteroids.
Sometime in the last century that changed.
Today the guiding hand of evolution is unmistakably human, with earth-shattering consequences.
The fossil record and statistical studies suggest that the average rate of extinction over the past hundred million years has hovered at several species per year.
Today the extinction rate surpasses 3,000 species per year and is accelerating rapidly it may soon reach the tens of thousands annually.
In contrast, new species are evolving at a rate of less than one per year.
Over the next 100 years or so as many as half of the Earth's species, representing a quarter of the planet's genetic stock, will either completely or functionally disappear.
The land and the oceans will continue to teem with life, but it will be a peculiarly homogenized assemblage of organisms naturally and unnaturally selected for their compatibility with one fundamental force: us.
Nothing, not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, nor even "wildlands" fantasies can change the current course.
This is not the wide-eyed prophecy of radical Earth First! activists or the doom-and-gloom tale of corporate environmentalists trying to boost fundraising.
It is the story that is emerging from the growing mountain of scientific papers that have been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences over the past decade.
http://www.zcommunications.org/end-of-the-wild-by-stephen-m-meyer
(it's a great read if you havent read it. it is short. he goes on to say that there will be 3 main types of species which will survive with us and due to us. Weed species, such as rats and pigeons, relic repecies like tigers and lions in zoos or alpine plants which only survive due to benign neglect, which is also a form of human and not natural selection, and ghost species such as the yellow fin tuna or east Asian giant soft-shell turtle which make increasingly rare appearances in the wild.)
so that's just it, the long run is something we as a species absolutely suck at. by will mind you. it's the flaw.
Reasonable and sentient sounds nice, but it takes effort and in that regard, we are a lazy and endlessly selfish species.
Mostly, we'd rather be willfully unreasonable, blind and ignorant.
there wont be any future, sapiens is an oxymoronic evolutionary mistake, a dead end.
Whatever survives, could care less about sapiens' history.
can i have all your stuff?
yours, I have had everything, take it. didnt do anything for me, maybe for you.
Stephen m. Meyer was/is my hero.
hey if anyone in here likes to read, this is a fucking fantastic site:
library.nu
youll need a gmail account, which i got just for this fucking site, i hate google. i use scroogle. use scroogle and donate you rich zh reading fuckers. thats something you can do to fite back.
also checkout caroll quigly dot net especially the pdf "weapons systems and political stability" by caroll prof quigly its a 1000 pages i wouldnt mind some help in bloggin it ou tthere.
ori regional dude in india where are you ?
Belarus currency crisis and crackdown. Is this what awaits us? Read here: http://thesilvergoldhedge.blogspot.com/2011/05/belarus-currency-crisis-a...
the berlin fraction of idiocracy..
Can anyone even make a high quality guillotine anymore ... ya know one that won't fall apart after just a couple of heads?
Working on it, however a bullet is fast and furious. I would like to support the gun industry for a change.
For sure the Amish or Pennsylvania Dutch still have access to the technology.
You might have pay a bit of a premium, though.
I see sales sky rocketting. Just have to get the DHS to approve it and regulaorty bodies and who know how many years before I can set up shop.
Bummer.
I was looking for that Hamy post for a laugh and apparently the post censoring has become more active again.
Soros Spends Over $48 Million Funding Media Organizations
http://www.mrc.org/bmi/commentary/2011/Soros_Spends_Over__Million_Fundin...
This article is very relevant to the Pyramid of Capitalism
http://lonerangersilver.wordpress.com/?s=pyramid+of+the+capitalist+system
Looks a lot more like how government works, rather than capitalism.
In capitalism, the people at the bottom can save money (REAL money), and work their way up the pyramid, if they care too. Not only that, but the capital collected by those further up the pyramid raise the living standard of EVERYONE involved in the system.
Or did you actually want to talk about how capitalism works?
I have to imagine that historians of the future will scratch their heads and wonder how we allowed ourselves to be duped into such a system... This system is corrupt, perverse, and wholly unsustainable. It will reset... It's difficult to say how it will happen, when it will finish, or what it will look like at the end, but rest assured, it's already happening, and it's going to be a bumpy ride. – Simon Black
Yes and the reset will come as revelations and courageous charges such as this stack up against the gates of our tyrant rulers. Thank you ZH and Simon Black.
I was so depressed by all this big world shit that I took a break from it and put up crown molding in my kitchen ceiling today. You know what, it actually looks good.
Congrads. I on the other hand just drink Wild Turkey to breakaway from this crap. I think I will reinvent the Guillotine
Wodka.
Lasers.
Gin and Tonic- Long Live Al Capone
I can understand the rebirth of spirit from individual accomplishment. That’s why I like Ayn Rand. The basic theme of Rand’s We the Living about Soviet Russia appeals to me; it is the sanctity of human life – in the sense of “supreme value.”
Said Rand, “The essence of my theme is contained in the words of Irina, a minor character of the story, a young girl who is sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia and knows that she will never return:
Said Rand: “I could not understand how a man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life. Today, the contempt has remained; the incredulity is gone, since I know the answer … of the men who value their own lives and of the men who don’t … the first are the Prime Movers of mankind and the second are the metaphysical killers, working for an opportunity to become physical ones. … men motivated either by a life premise or a death premise.”
Rand was the age of twelve at the time of the Russian revolution when she first heard the Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State.
Imagine that you're from the future many hundreds of years from now, researching what life was like in the early 21st century.
"We appreciate you volunteering. You're a very good observer Coal."
Cole: "I didn't volunteer..."
JBT: "Are you making trouble again?"
Cole: "No...no trouble..."
Calender you can have and be proud off
http://nativenotes.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/2006krispykremelingeri...
Screw it, I am fine with being a citizen of the second most powerful country in the world!
Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra...FWN
Fried(e)
Well since i'm noob here i was forced to outGoogle the shit out of the sum of the namedropping in here so i can have my fair share on ZH's inside jokes.
His name was Harry Wanger.
His name was Harry Wanger.
long eur/chf.
His name was Harry Wanger.
...aaah yeeah, more Fight Club members to kill the zombie bankers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEAjawYMWLg&feature=related
this is pretty funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptEPEAK OIL BABY!
article from marketskeptics on this very topic:
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2011/05/america-becoming-a-third-world-cou...
*One elementary school teacher in the town of Monroe, Georgia was arrested recently for something very unusual. One day he made the decision to walk around the halls of his schoolcompletely naked. So why was he naked? Well, it turns out that he learned that he was going to be fired and so he snapped.
I've been watching some old movies with my kids; the Disney stuff, but also funny old movies from the 1950's on up.
It really, really makes me sad because so many of the frightening predictions in sci-fi movies and dramas about the future are coming true.
It would be myopic and xenophobic to think that it was caused from the outside - we have internal rot.
If you had told me thirty years ago that we would be where we are I would not have kids.
I came across this fascinating article in Wired magazine. A strange, virtually unheard of monument built in 1979 by a mysterious man known as R.C. Christian who said he represented a group dedicated to an Age of Reason. Apparently these are their 'commandments' for the New World ...
Let these be the Guidestones to an Age of Reason:
MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000 IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE.
GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY—IMPROVING FITNESS AND DIVERSITY.
RULE PASSION—FAITH—TRADITION—AND ALL THINGS WITH TEMPERED REASON
PROTECT PEOPLE AND NATIONS WITH FAIR LAWS AND JUST COURTS.
LET ALL NATIONS RULE INTERNALLY RESOLVING EXTERNAL DISPUTES IN A WORLD COURT.
AVOID PETTY LAWS AND USELESS OFFICIALS.
BALANCE PERSONAL RIGHTS WITH SOCIAL DUTIES
UNITE HUMANITY WITH A LIVING NEW LANGUAGE.
BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH—LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE—LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_guidestones
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrzGpVOPcTI
...and weather, quakes, crop loss, space/solar events etc... 2011 has set records and it's only May. We have yet to enter the ''Dark Rift'' coming in October. If prophecy is true, (it is) ...this year will end with much more, and from here on out, to about 2016, we will see much more weather, quakes, crop loss, space/solar events, wars/Big badda boom(2011-12ish) that leads to>prophetic false peace around 2012-13ish and a very prophetic global market system of evil. {Based on intelligence analysis related to ''occult claims/anceint cultures and Bible prophecy which describe the same time(s) event(s) structure and occurrence(s)} Good news though, when we do witness the fulfillment of these things, many people will be confirmed by them and they will stand fast in agreement, outside of the goats in the Citi of Babylon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysACqhMXElM&feature=related
...or not, we will keep on trucking and become Borg. Ah haa haaa. Resistance is ...futile. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a61fPIgJfgs&feature=related
Sorry, doubt if there will be newspaper archives several hundred years from now. It is more than the system that is unsustainable. Ever wonder why we have at least half a million years of human fossil evidence and 6-10k years of history. Thats because most of the time there is an ice age and humans can't afford historians, or librarys and those from previous times seldom survive. Governments redevelop when it gets warm again and there is surplus production to tax. Unless something strange happens to break the cycle, the ice will be back within "many hundreds of years".
The NY Times recently ran a story about some researchers who used a system to compare the lyrics of pop music today to the lyrics of pop music 25 years ago. The lyrics 25 years ago were inclusive, spoke of love, about the "other person," "so happy together, " etc. The lyrics of today were self-focused -- even to the point of hatred of the other. This will not be sustained.