“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek
“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”
Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.
The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.
The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.
In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.
If you step on a rusty Lego™, you might need to get a Tetris© shot.
You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.
The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.
Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.
Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.
Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.
It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”
Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.
Why? This why is important.
It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.
Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.
Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.
I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.
Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).
Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.
How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.
A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.
As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.
What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.
Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?
The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.
If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.
These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.
This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.
- A decadent people
- Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
- Because they live in abundance
- Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure
What, then, do the people want?
Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.
What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.
Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.
And that’s how you get a Dictator
Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.
Any grammatical errors aside, a good piece. The main takeaway from the “Scam-demic”, for me anyway, has been the removal of what little trust I may have had in our government or the news media in general. Liars all.
CNN. Ha!
We work best when we work together, and worst group a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader.
Maybe this needs a little grammatical help
Yes.
Yes. (And thanks! )
Again, thanks. Late night.
As long as we’re copy-editing, in the paragraph just above the Wall Street Journal image, that second
“import” should be “export.” Not even the USSA can import more than it imports, no matter how many “dollars” go into the Fed’s spreadsheet.
Appreciated! (I finished this one later than normal)
Yup – right! Thank you. Hear the ruble is now backed in gold?
You did promise a turn to darker topics. I just wish you had disappointed us all.
Opie Odd
Not quite done yet. And Monday will be the Civil War Weather Report . . . .
“…behave like lemmings…”
John, this whole Ukraine thing goes much deeper. Its the honey pot for Congress, the Deep State, et al, ad nauseam. Want to launder a few mil? Hey, First National of Kiev will do it for ‘ya. Look at Biolab #3 of Lvov – you now get a 5% cut of its profit, it’s a huge producer of Horse!!!
My MBA is so ancient that it actually helped me biz wise, thanks to Lonnie Strickland & Art Thompson. The US economy is screwed, Set & Match to the Rooskiess & Charlie Chan. Let’s pray for a “benevolent” dictator.
Forget benevolent. If a dictator we must have, I want one who will fight for us and crush our enemies.
All my enemies are in Mordor, DC. If Mumbly Joe Biden wanted to fight my enemies, he’d start out by eating a pistol.
Precisely my point.
I used to worry that Iran would nuke DC and NYC and San Francisco. Now I worry that they won’t.
And they have gotten so good at opinion manipulation . . . .
John, the almost overnight switch from The Plague to Ukraine has been stunning. It hard to believe that five weeks ago we were still constantly discussing Omicron – now, only the fact that we have to mask up at airports and the occasional mask wearers in public are reminders of the last two weeks (the difficulty, of course, will be if Ukraine does not end and the spike in China continues as I feel that the continuing booster saga has lost steam and will be difficult to re-engage). Now it is Ukraine all the time (and yes, one of the most ridiculous of things is how suddenly all media pronounces things in Ukrainian. I would be far more impressed if you always did that). And makes wonder and worry what the next “global emergency du jour” will be.
It is genuinely shocking to me how, in a country which is theoretically based on freedom, how few actually seem to want it. They are far more content with increasing hedging and reduction of their freedoms, somehow content in the fact being unfree imparts some sort of moral righteousness.
Every word in your comment is 100% on point.
It’s Kiiiiiiiv now.
We are Weimar, we are Zimbabwe. (as sung to We Are the World)
The CPUSA Long March comrades are butthurt about Russia tossing the workers utopia into the trash bin of history.
It is ironic claiming that Pooty Poot (H/t-Shrub) is trying to remake the USSR as they are building the USSA.
A bastard hybrid of Cuba/Venezuela/South Africa with our own Joe Slovo Biden managing the decline.
Obama’s third term cements the Fundamental Transformation into third world turd and FIRE is already here.
A long gone Russian neighbor said it several years ago…you already are communist.
The NPC hive is total weak soft squishy marshmallow queefs and external enemies are laughing their asses off at how easy it is going to be.
You can still see some maskaloids out and about and they are easily quieted with some dirty looks.
Don’t get demoralized because you are Not Sure the Brawndo Czar.
Long March is tomorrow’s post.
Ha! Brawndo has what plants crave!
John – – You said, “… Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the uni-polar world we had since 1992.”
True. However, we must always remember that the Russian Bear and Chinese Dragon don’t really like or trust each other. It is easy to predict that those two will form a bloc against the “free world” (“free” as in helicopter money….). Economically, they may compliment each other, but will each one be willing to put their future into the balance (word used here is a noun) against the other’s lack of fair play and protection of contractual/property rights ??
The reason that the US Dollar is still the reserve currency is because no other nation is as trustworthy in honoring its contracts and respecting property rights. Unfortunately, under the Third Woebama Administration, that is changing and morphing into lawless diktats from banksters and DemonicRats bent on garnering even more control over the Sheeple. Recent T-bill sales demonstrate the economic distrust purchasers are sensing. We are on the cusp of an economic collapse and most perceive that reality but are lost as to how to respond because we have no history of such economic stupidity.
Godless and not even moral enough to be “amoral”, our elites rip American sense of justice and fair play from any possibility of continued presence in our largely overly trusting national psyche.
You, John, are spot on. Things will get worse and then more so before we reach the nadir of despair. And those who have failed to prepare for The Bad Times will suffer for their chosen ignorance.
Yep. Things will get bad before they get worse.
China and Russia trust each other . . . more than they trust us.
Sure, we can’t make enough steel to matter and don’t produce an ounce of lead. But more importantly, can America still manufacture PEZ?
Well, we have the sugar, so PEZ is safe. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DISPENSERS?????
Very tangential to today’s post, but the notion of leaderless groups put me in mind of the Monty Python troupe. They were six brilliant entertainers who revolutionized modern comedy with such a paucity of clashing egos that I doubt we will ever see the likes again. How was it even possible to collaborate without any single personality dominating? Some members of the troupe are better-known today than others (John Cleese vice Terry Jones, for example). But this has much more to do with their individual pursuits subsequent to the end of the Python empire than any special notoriety during their time together.
Is it just a Brit thing, subsuming individual egos for the sake of the collective? Tell that to Lennon and McCartney. Or those twits from Oasis. I was (briefly) a member of a wedding band in early adulthood whose overblown egos led to vicious on-stage fights over what song it was that we had just finished playing (“It was ‘Hava Nagila’!” “No, you knob, it was ‘There’s a Kind of Hush’!”)
What passes for ‘leadership’ in America 2022 looks more like ‘sinking ship’ on casual inspection. The future record will show clearly that we are ripe for the rise of the next Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot. And right about now, I am not convinced that this will not be an improvement. What’s Idi Amin up to these days?
You have to have trust in the group for something like Python to work. America 2022 is looking rougher than Hunter Biden on a Sunday morning.
I’m fairly certain there isn’t going to be a hot civil war because nobody will show up to fight. Big gov killed the economy to favor a few large corporations, demanded subservience in the form of both masks and forced medical procedures, and watched as people held their own children down to do the same to them. If it was going to happen, it would’ve already.
Start working in the emerging parallel economy. Some states will ignore the feddies more and more until a defacto breakup of the US happens. Move to those, or get involved to encourage that kind of stuff. Quit thinking of the former USA as one country: it’s at least six now, if not more. Most of it is also third-world. It’s all low-trust. If you keep playing by Clown World’s rule-set you’ll be trapped in a Clown World hellscape.
I told my wife several years ago that it was time to starting looking at states the way we typically look at countries, and asking ourselves, “If each state was its own country, which one would you want to be living in, given what is coming?”
The more powerless a regime feels, the more it tries to crack down. But, hey, at least we have local corruption to look forward to!
Most people don’t know anything about WW II other than what they have seen in movies so the “then one day, for no reason at all…” meme is really funny. But it wasn’t “for no reason at all”. For the average German in the 1930s, living in Weimar was hell on earth. There was no sign they would come out of it without something drastic happening. For people facing that bleak of an outlook, their decision to elect Moustache Man Bad makes perfect sense. They weren’t voting for “The Holocaust” or to invade the USSR, but they were looking for someone, anyone, to fix the mess.
That is what the whole strategy boils down to and Biden isn’t even a small cog in the machinery. Even before he went full on Alzheimer’s he was a dim bulb. Now he is just a puppet, an especially creepy one. The goal is to run our entire society into the ground at full speed leaving things so bad that people will accept whatever is offered as a solution. As it happens, they already have one in mind under the charming name The Great Reset.
This is all intentional.
Yup. And keep in mind, a cunning leader will be a puppet that cuts the strings.
As an avid poker player, your “swapping out the chips” analogy is right on target. Moving from COVID to Russia is EXACTLY like what happens in a poker tournament when you “color up” and take the now-less-valuable 100 unit (“COVID”) chips out of play as the stakes of the tournament get higher in its later stages. They just aren’t worth the hassle to use them anymore, so you hand out 1000 unit (“WW3”) chips at a 10:1 ratio. And play on until there is a winner.
The problem is, poker is a Western game. The Russians play chess. You’ve heard the expression “won the battle but lost the war”. Putin is on the verge of losing the Battle For Ukraine and winning the global war by flipping from FIRE poker to oil/grain chess. THe importance of this must-read article cannot be overstated:
https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/28/got-gold-rubles-russia-just-broke-the-back-of-the-west/
And having a gold ruble is huge.
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
By Etienne de La Boetie
You can find a reading of most of it at:https://corporationnationradioarchiv…w370_may15.mp3
Listen and contemplate how we the Peasant Class have learned to love our servitude in America.
And….. This was known in the 1750s!!!!
You can bet that the Nobility Class that is worshiped in America have read it and also read the old old stories and books referenced.
We were taught nothing of value in the Government Schools.
And so much of what we were taught isn’t so.
There will be local civil war. As bad as Weimar was, it was dealt with and shouldered by Germans as a cohesive ethnic group. Any politician or bought-and-paid-for “Pastor” who thinks the Gangsta Rappers and Vato Locos are going to come together, put WIN buttons on their lapels, and sing Kumbaya; is whistling past the graveyard. All of the rich enclaves and upper crust suburbs will be targeted, and the “Thin Blue Line” will be running for lives. Buy or borrow and read: FOREIGN ENEMIES AND TRAITORS by Matt Bracken. It paints a very real and believable future for this corrupt, degenerate, syphilitic-thinking country. Bleib ubrig.
Don’t forget that the Germans had their own civil war early on in the Weimar years. It’s not considered polite to talk about who the instigators were, because their relations and fellow travelers now control almost all the media in the USA.
McChuck: Thanks, my bad. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the rest of the (((Spartacists))). Fortunately, armed German patriots took out the trash. No telling how it will play out in this corrupt, syphilitic-thinking septic tank of a country. Bleib ubrig.
It depends on how crafty the would-be Caesar is. I’ve read Mr. Bracken, and keeping a coalition together of people who don’t like each other will happen only through fear.
My head is spinning. I’m almost 77 years old and I just found more to read than I’ve probably got years left. Plus my eyes are getting bad enough that it looks like I’m going to have to have cataract surgery, shortly. My wife is finished with her first eye and it went swimmingly. I start on mine maybe in another month. Really good stuff, guys.
It’s a good crowd here.