This report was originally published by Chris Martenson at PeakProsperity.com
As the dog days of summer wind down, it’s hard not to notice how the climate is suffering brutally right now across many areas of the globe.
Crop failures have hit hard across Europe. Australia is under an intense drought. Warm water representing ‘archived heat’ has penetrated deep into the arctic. Coral reefs are dying through mass bleachings. The stocks of ocean fisheries are in deep trouble. Insect and bird populations remain in a state of collapse.
It couldn’t be any more clear that our society’s demands for ever-more “growth” are taking an increasingly dangerous toll. “Growth” is now the enemy of life on the planet; yet there are precious few leaders willing to admit as much.
What we need is less pressure on vital ecological systems and precious remaining resources. But good luck finding a politician willing to admit that.
Though a refreshing exception is French environmental minister Nicolas Hulot who dramatically resigned his position last week, on live television, declaring “I don’t want to lie to myself anymore.” His view is that the government is not addressing the major environmental issues properly and he didn’t want his presence to give the false appearance that it was. Kudos to Nicolas, though I’m not sure that losing such a rare principled person in government is a step in the right direction.
Operating On Blind Faith
Most politicians appear to think that there are no big issues out there ecologically-speaking. Of course, very few of them spend any time outside or understand where their food even comes from. Most subsist on the blind faith that our planet will somehow always bounce back from the abuses we inflict on it, despite reams of mounting evidence that it’s hitting a mulitplying number of breaking and tipping points.
Sadly, the mainstream media chooses to toss wedge issue after wedge issue, ususally in the most inflammatory ways it can, at an increasingly irate general populace that has almost zero clue about the true source of the shocks (financial, economic, and ecological) they are experiencing. This prevents society from having an informed discussion about the real risks we should be concerned with.
As heart-tugging a topic as ‘border kids’ might be, the monster asset price bubbles blown by the central banks get almost no attention in the media — despite their ability to destroy the futures and dreams of pretty much everyone reading this article.
Our media is failing us, badly, by focusing on symptomatic issues that enrage and divide us, while remaining silent on the causal matters of vital importance to all of us.
In other words, you’d do well to ignore the pre-packaged opinions being spoon fed into your mind by the media professionals. Instead, look at the data yourself and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.
Notice the near complete lack of insect diversity and numbers? What about the collapsing populations of frogs and reptiles? How about the missing seabirds? Did you know that humans have worked their harvesting down to the lowest part of the food chain and are now netting krill — removing the base of the pedestal for the oceanic food chain?
Why is it so hard for our culture to recognize that an economic model founded on the idea of perpetual exponential expansion, while living on a planet with finite resources, is a thoroughly unworkable idea? How can we all so blithely ignore the obvious indicators screaming that we’ve already hit the limits of that model?
The lengths to which humans are now going for new deposits of oil, copper, water, arable land and other essential economic inputs are staggeringly desperate. Each should be a warning sign unto themselves.
But taken together?
Ignoring them requires the same degree of self-deception that addicts employ in their belief that they still have things under control, and can stop anytime.
Yeah, right. Somehow ‘that day’ never arrives. It’s always just one more fix, one more day.
Except in this case it’s just one more election, one more quarter of growth, one more injection of central bank money.
Frustrating? You bet.
Trying to elevate the critical observation that pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet is not only impossible, but a really terrible idea, has been a frustrating endeavor.
We here at PeakProsperity.com have been at this for over a decade, and we can tell you first-hand, Folks, this ain’t easy.
While the logic support it is extremely straightforward, it runs afoul of the majority’s entrenched belief systems. So even the most basic and compelling of data is ignored. Instead, tortured anecdotes are held up as “proof” that their treasured belief systems are correct.
Here’s an example.
Anecdote: “Electric car sales are up 40% in Europe!”
Somehow this is proof that we’re on the right track. Electric cars are going to rapidly replace internal combustion cars, and thereby solve all the issues related to the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.
Basic data: “There’s not enough cobalt or lithium to even replace 25% of all cars on the road, let alone 100%. EV cars still consume extraordinary resources, and release a huge amount of carbon in their manufacture. Massive subsidies are required to make them economically attractive, even to wealthy citizens of wealthy nations, so they aren’t well suited to the bulk of the world’s population. And if these cars were somehow all powered by electrcity from solar and wind, those energy sources are still themselves massively dependent on fossil fuels for their mining, manufacture, transportation, installation and replacement.”
The basic data says that instead of salivating over expensive and advanced personal transportation methods designed to preserve the status quo of our current failing infrastructure, we should instead be dedicating a large part of our efforts towards mass transit, relocating our work/play/farm spaces so that they are closer together, and use vastly fewer resources to deliver the same services we rely on.
Recently I’ve been frustrated by the efforts to convince Americans that our democracy is under attack by outside agents when there’s ample evidence — concrete, hard, firm evidence which I’ve repeatedly covered — that US elections have been spitting out improbable and even sometimes impossible election results for the past 14 years, ever since insecure, low-integrity eVoting platforms and central tabulators were introduced.
Yes, nefarious agents may well indeed be undermining our democracy. But the real villains appear much more domestic than foreign.
There’s nothing more poisonous to the notion of democracy than fraudulent election outcomes. Nothing. And yet the number of people rising up in protest on this issue may as well be zero, as long as we’re rounding to the nearest whole percentage. Meanwhile millions are up in arms about the still-unproven allegations that Russia tipped the recent presidential elections with a laughably tiny amount of social media ads.
For those interested in more detail on just how badly manipulated recent voting results have become, read my recent account on the topic here. And then, just for fun, take a look below at the voting “architecture” put in place in Ohio under its disgraced Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and which delivered a very surprising win for G. W. Bush over John Kerry. The pre and exit polls both showed an overwhelming win for Kerry. Oops! The new Diebold electric voting machines (which Blackwell owned a stake in) instead reported a surprising win for GWB:
You don’t have to be an IT expert to detect that there are numerous places for bad actors to insert themselves into this system and romp about with the vote totals. It’s a ridiculous joke of an architecture that, honestly, seems to have been specifically-designed to allow fraud.
In fact, this schematic reveals that the shady company “entrusted” to add up the vote totals had inserted a key piece of machinery as a “man in the middle” and not as a mirror server. That meant that the vote totals could be easily manipulated in a way that could not be undone or later refuted.
Even the most unschooled of individuals must be aware that vote counting cannot ever be a matter of “trust us”. With so much on the line, it must always be assumed that cheating is going to happen, not that it might happen. Checks and balances need to be in place to counter such abuse.
Several important questions emerge. Why did Kerry, knowing all of this, concede defeat so graciously within 24 hours? Why was such an obviously corrupt architecture put in place and not challenged? Why does it still persist to this day? Why have no major news outlets run a major investigative inquiry and publicized a huge expose on the utter lack of integrity within the US voting system? Why do we have a perfectly secure system in place for using a credit/debt card to buy a $2 slushy at 7-11, but somehow secure and trustworthy voting remains a mysteriously-unachievable outcome for a nation as advanced as the US?
The simple that explains all this: Voting is rigged, and the entire power structure wants it that way.
The wonder of it all is that there are a lot of people in Ohio desperately up in arms about Russian meddling right now, blissfully unaware that their entire state is shot through with election fraud courtesy of both major parties.
Yes, their democracy is under attack, and it has been for a long time. But it certainly isn’t the Russians designing, installing, and defending the Ohio voting systems.
The Outlook Is Deteriorating Fast
There are lots of things that we should be very concerned about and practically none of them are to be found on the news. In the rare cases they are, they’re presented without meaningful context and very rapidly replaced by trivial distractions.
We should be asking ourselves why that’s the case.
More to the point, you need to understand that very serious risks to your future prospects, well-being and liberty are building. The mounting warning signs are all around you if you look for them, though they’ll be carefully filtered out from the nightly news or your social media feeds.
Getting access to good information is difficult these days. And it’s getting harder, not easier. Only a few massive corporations own nearly all of our media outlets. They have a narrative they want sold, often developed with the goverment, and they invest billions to refine their craft of delivering it. Better algorithms, in-product placements, and mentally-addictive formats for delivering you distracting, emotionally manipulative context that has practically zero positive bearing on your life.
In short: it’s a rigged game. Perhaps it always has been, but in today’s digital age, the tools of state are becoming ever more crafty, sophisticated and complete.
Gone are the days when our financial markets served as important signals about the health of the economy. Today, they’ve been replaced by ““markets”” that central bankers and other bureaucratic planners utterly own and control. The only signals they send are what those running the show want us to hear.
Our precious ecosphere is disintegrating. The fossil fuels bonanza we are hopelessly addicted to is ending. But there is no Plan B to deal with these existential challenges (beyond the elites’ private plans to bunker down and ride out the trouble when it begins).
The message to take from this is: You are on your own. There’s no benevolent government preparing to step in and sort things out for you if/when collapse arrives. Your pensions are already gone — the math is cruelly certain on that. Self-interested corporations set the rules. Power will never be fairly redistributed due to elections.
Were a future of unlimited growth possible, these worries wouldn’t really matter. But it isn’t. So none of this is fine. Now that the pie is no longer growing, the obvious truth is that the rigged system is handing over a larger and larger portion of that stagnant pie to fewer and fewer people.
That’s an incontrovertible fact. But it’s reported by the media as if it were a wayward comet nobody expected that just showed up in the night sky. Rich people getting richer, what are you gonna do?
Never mentioned is that the system is rigged to create that outcome. And that the central banks have engineered it on purpose.
It’s time to wake up and see what’s really going on.
This is especially true right now for anyone with assets in the US equity ““markets””. With indices back at all-time highs, record complacency reigns. But scratch lightly on the “everything is awesome!” veneer, and an ugly picture of accelerating rot and instability immediately appears.
In Part 2: The Outlook For The Markets Is Deteriorating Fast we expose the truly frightening contagion currently decimating a long list of emerging market countries and explain how it threatens to bring down the world economy with it. Collapse happens from the outside in, and the periphery is falling fast…
Yes, the entire system is rigged. But when a breaking point is reached, and things get so bad they spiral out of the control of the manipulators, Look out below!
Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)
While images of sand rails, assless chaps and Mad Max futures are dramatic, that’s not likely how the collapse initially materializes. It is a continuous saga of families and individuals falling off the edge of self-sufficiency, one by one…silently…no fanfare…disappearing into relative’s basements, tent cities, cardboard boxes, or suicides.
Those not yet at the edge think it won’t happen to them. They have “good jobs”. They “work hard” to provide for themselves. But they, too, will also fall off the edge eventually.
Make ready now. Billions will be liquidated in the coming years. Try not to be one of them.
Keep the oil changed in the sand buggy and keep them assless chaps conditioned so they don’t, well, chap your ass.
If you want to know the future and how it unfolds before you, read the prophecies.
Nothing not mentioned in them and supporting their development, especially nothing preventing them, is going to happen.
And they won’t be happening overnight, they will develop over time and affect many generations along the way, as Islam fulfilling the second seal releasing the Red horse rider has shown.
We are, IMO, in the time of the opening of the seals, what other seals can you see as having been opened in developing world events? Remember, they come small and develop like birth pains that are increasingly closer together and stronger each time they come.
Operating On Blind Faith = Religion. Been duping sheep for thousands of years and keeps on duping sheeple today.
Speaking about Rigged. The Paper shorting manipulators crushing Silver again today Down to $13.96 This AM now back up to $14.12… And the Silver to Gold Ratio is a whopping 84.5:1 Way out of the normal trading range of 45 to 80. Silver is so way undervalued even according to Gold. Back up the truck and get your PHYSICAL Silver holdings jacked up .. Stack and pack more if you can.
Silver reflects the same pricing at physical dealers, paper not the item you are buying there.
So if you are buying thinking it will turn around and a reckoning will come, hope for more of that “driving down” of the price as you buy.
Some of these a-holes that sell eagles want 5 or 6 bucks over spot. Crooks.
Buy online for less if you want the hidden hand knowing your business.
Eagles are not even pure silver, 90-95% silver.. its just worthless intrinsic junk. Sheep get fleeced.
The last batch of 400 Ounces of pure .999 silver 1 Oz physical rounds I bought, I was only charged .15 cents over spot, per OZ from a popular Dealer. Shop around folks.
And if I sell it back to the same dealer at any time, I am only charged .25 Cents under spot pricing for a transaction fee.
Hint: Buy Low, Sell High
Why do my Eagles say they contain 1oz Fine Silver.
FWIW, in case you are unfamiliar with the term, “Fine Silver” is what 99.9% silver is called which is why it is also sometimes called three nines silver.
Eagles, Maple Leafs, Kangaroos, Philharmonics all .999 silver.
The old Morgan and Peace dollars are 90% silver.
Most dealers will give spot price on Eagles and 25 cents under for other sovereign coins.
Silver Buffalos usually $1 under spot. Thats my experience, anyways.
Nope. The main issue is urbanization and carrying capacity. This should be common sense to preppers who know anything at all about agriculture.
Human beings are not designed to live in densely populated regions. Take any animal and grotesquely increase the population and they turn on each other and distribution to acquire resources is entirely contigent upon building up a surplus through logistics and transportation.
We were never intended to all live in concentrated urban enironments. Yet 76-81% of Americans do so. Imagine living in small towns. 90 % of issues fade and distribution is relatively easy as the carrying capacity becomes realistic using common sense.
And then crop failures and adverse weather has a much smaller effect on say fresh water availability, law enforcement, fodder yield, etc.
Disease is reduced and the general state of health improved and infection potential is vastly lowered.
It’s almost always a factor of trying to make unrealistic population density to work. And why would you do so?
The only gainis potentially industrial output and that has been all but ruined due to globalism and free trade and automation through robotics.
Ahh, another loon that wants to turn the entire planet into a third world poverty hole.
You may disregard at will.
‘(Hulot’s) view is that the government is not addressing the major environmental issues properly and he didn’t want his presence to give the false appearance that it was.’
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson
“Like an exceedingly ramified tree, whose lush branches and twigs must be lopped off for it to remain fertile, peasants must be occasionally pruned so that they renounce their arrogance, lethal hatred and invidiousness and be brought back to the discipline of humility, servility and self-recognition. They should be stripped of their feathers, so that they cannot fly too high.”
― Gadi Algazi
The only purpose of a tyrant ― if it can be called a purpose ― is vapid iconoclasm. I don’t think they have strong feelings about it.
They are not simply enraging you. They are giving just-enough steam to the change agent, and chilling the reactionaries just-enough. When there is a new normal, rinse and repeat.
https://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/thermal-equilibrium.jpg
Their greatest currency and source of taxation is hope.
And, Hulot’s not even taking the effort to bait you, at this point. He said, “I don’t want to lie to myself anymore.” Then, he is spent, emotionally, and in need of a new prime minister, who can lie to himself. He has worked himself out of a job, if there is no noble lie, or fake makework social cause to invoke emergency powers.
This article is true, throughout. The whole system is rigged.
The question is how can we remove the corruption?
One way
1. Change the voting system to a Lottery Selection system. Have good job definition in terms of formal education and experience that is required. If a person wants the selected job, they can opt for it, pay a nominal vetting fee, they get vetted, and if all is ok, their name gets put in the hat. This option will eliminate the need for term limits, chances of getting selected twice are very, very low. We are all on the same side, no more partisan ship. No more caucuses, as not enough time to build them. No more bought and paid politicians, as the fee is nominal and it does not take a million dollars to get in the Selection system, as it does the election system, campaign costs are always in the millions. Those individuals who opt to get in the selection system, we will know that they meet the job requirements. No more bigotry, as anyone with the criteria can get in. Yes, after people have been selected, the corrupt people in the system will try to bribe and sway whom they can.
But, to prevent that the next option
#2. Government staffers have a maximum of 6 years This is the amount of the longest term, the senate. No government staffer can work for the government job for more than 6 years. You ask about postal employees, military, irs, etc, yes, no more than 6 years. If the government people in charge want to contract out a company, that is fine, the contracted company will not have the year limit. However, contracts are renewed annually and they may lose the contract.
This is one option for trying to get control of governmental corruption, which seems to be an ongoing problem.
Fran, Boy oh boy… do I wish I could agree with you. But, voting is not going to solve a thing. Nor are some set of rules and changes to the current system of government. A major reset is needed. This whole article – regardless of what one believes is true or not – has a point. The entire world is approaching a crux point. Lies are more rampant and more common than truths. And most people when shown the latter choose to deny it or find an excuse why it won’t be them that pays the prices that must be paid. Simply put, it is death. Millions, if not more, deaths that will be the settling of this ‘bill’. It is the way mankind has always gone on, how we’ve separated ourselves one era or empire from another. A new Dark Age is going to be upon us all.
TPTB, the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Oppenheimers, etc. are the power that dictates in which direction environmentalism goes. Last year we had articles about the Colorado River being contaminated deliberately by the EPA who ironically is responsible for preventing such things.
Why? The only logical conclusion, I come to is that TPTB need to use environmental pollution as an enforcer justifier.
They will be justified in every evil because it is good environmental policy. Forced sterilization of healthy people, ghetto living in concentration cities, and hunger games like those in Eukrane in the 1930’s.
_
Thank you for having the courage to tell the truth on a website where most people prefer to pretend Climate and Environmental problems are not happening— THEY ARE HAPPENING!!
The time is soon approaching where you will be taking “a nature walk through the Book of Revelations”.
Al Gore quote.
When given a choice of two warmonger pretend opposing parties to vote for why even bother when the result is always a continuation of the overall decline existing before any election. Because to collectively oppose both fake sides would require too much respect for every other common human and that’s not going to happen. Played like money grubbing idiots from the top down too easy.
Of course the system is rigged. Let’s define what the system is. Everything has been gradually merged into the “system”. It is a political – financial – economic – social – legal construct for control, fashioned by TPTB. At the top is TPTB, they are the real masters. Gov’t, corporations and big business, “civil” rights organizations, MSM, NGO’s, public education, etc. are the components they cloak themselves in to give them an appearance of legitimacy, falsely conveying their actions as beneficial to the citizens. In reality, these components are just parts of a mask, helping them to achieve their goals while hiding their true intent. The “elite” despise the citizens, they see us as nothing more than managed disposable resources for the state.
All official national policy and corporate goals are ultimately not for the people. For example, look how much medical insurance companies and big Pharma industry colluded with gov’t for the implementation of Obamacare. Gov’t got more control over our lives, and big corporate business benefited by the public being legally forced to buy their products at non-competitive prices. Another is all these g*dd*m wars we’ve fomented over the last 17 years. The people don’t want any more fruitless wars, The gov’t, as per TPTB, keeps spending literally trillions of borrowed dollars and wasting thousands of lives against those who have absolutely no existential threat to us, but is good for the Mil. Ind. Comp., and the Intel. Ind. Comp. Why does the US send more than 10 million dollars a day to Israel, but much of the public infrastructure in our country is on the verge of collapse. Why are we giving public education (which is controlled by fed. gov’t policy) billions and billions of dollars, but education gets worse and worse. There is a small but powerful group of insiders encouraging open borders for the US, for allowing unimpeded illegal immigration, and fighting against the construction of The Wall, yet say nothing against other countries walls like Israel (to whom we send tons of money) has built, impenetrable walls and fences on their borders.
The number one, highest priority policy of TPTB is to change the demography and culture of our country. Once accomplished, they can move on to number 2, to render the Constitution to no effect, and change our gov’t to a far more authoritarian type, severely inhibiting civil and economic rights, and greatly disempowering the citizens. Thus leaving a small “elite” and their minions exercising full control over the masses. Every country, every society, every culture, group, or tribe, or ethnicity, no matter what time in history or what place in the world they existed, had to endure heavy authority and loss of personal liberties, the “system” existing only for the benefit of a few. This is the real nature of gov’t.
They opened a new casino near me last Saturday I wanna say. Anyway people were running over there to give the state and Indians their $. They didn’t get the memo that the casino wasn’t built to pay them. Suckers. If pm dealers are charging you more than spot price then cash is more valuable. They are then paying less than spot to buy it from you. They want cash not your silver really. Everyone takes cash very few take silver. Cash is king. Hoard cash.
OF COURSE IT’S RIGGED; HAS BEED SINCE THE INCEPTION OF VOTING OCCURRED WITHOUT DIRECT-SIGHTING OF ‘BALLOTS’
EVEN THE OLD PULL-HANDLE MECHANICAL VOTING BOOTHS HAD THEIR COGS / GEARS CHANGED TO EITHER INCREASE VOTES OR DECREASE VOTES!
Vote with your Second Amendment; that’s the only was as proven in Tennessee in the 1947 election where a corrupt Sheriff committed Vote Fraud, and the townspeople raided the Sheriff’s office armed with their weapons!
Geeezzz eeewww.
Why get up in the morning??
Most people agree….. “piles of poop”…..are demoncraps.
“scoops of poop”….. are republicraps.
One has no moral compass……the other uses “tools.”
Take the money out of the equation and it hobbles the
MSM who live for campaign money. It removes the
puppet strings of big globalist money. It cuts the ties
to Foreign blackmail, freeloading globalists.
TV debates only…. paid equally by the number of contestants.
a Rodeo of sorts…..points for accomplishments in their platforms.
Boxing match……number of majority of issues successfully knocked out.
a virtual Wrestling match….. no holds barred, verbage held to the mat…..
5 min. limit to make a point then you’re ..done.
Interrupting or usurping someone else’s time…. your done… get out !!
Every politician worth his salt seems convinced that we are all going to drown under rising oceans, which will then boil away from global warming. Likewise, mainstream media preaches the same sermon almost daily. So much for not being concerned about ecological disasters.
Perhaps the media and politicians should focus on the one thing that unites us: At least 98 to 99 percent of the population do agree on one thing — be they liberal or conservative, progressive or libertarian, left-wing or right-wing, communist or laissez-faire capitalist, Republican or Democrat, pro-Trump or anti-Trump, pro-Clinton/Obama or anti-Clinton/Obama, globalist or nationalist, Christian or atheist, Jew or Muslim, religious or nonreligious, White or Black, or Yellow or Brown. They all agree that one form of genocide is perfectly acceptable. This form of genocide can eliminate a group without bloodshed.