Northam Declares State Of Emergency In Virginia Because “Armed Militia Groups Plan To Storm The Capitol”

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Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

The drama in Virginia has escalated again as Governor Ralph Northam declares an official State of Emergency before January 20th’s “Lobby Day” protests.

Citing violence that erupted in Charlottesville during a Unite the Right rally in 2017, Northam said that there are credible threats that “armed militia groups plan to storm the Capitol” during Monday’s rally. In an executive order,  he announced he is banning all weapons from Capitol Square for the day.

Credible intelligence gathered by Virginia’s law enforcement agencies indicates that tens of thousands of advocates plan to converge on Capitol Square for events culminating on January 20, 2020. Available information suggests that a substantial number of these demonstrators are expected to come from outside the Commonwealth, may be armed, and have as their purpose not peaceful assembly but violence, rioting, and insurrection. Assuring that Virginia’s Capitol Square and surrounding public areas are sheltered safe places for those who come to participate in the democratic process, as well as those who work on or near Capitol Square, is my greatest priority.

The anticipated effects of the potential convergence of tens of thousands of demonstrators on Capitol Square, some of whom may not come to assemble peacefully, constitutes an emergency as described in § 44-146.16 of the Code of Virginia (Code).

Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution of Virginia, by §§ 2.2-103 and 44-146.13 et seq. of the Code, as Governor and Director of Emergency Management and Commander-in-Chief of the Commonwealth’s armed forces, I proclaim that a state of emergency will exist starting on January 17, 2020 through January 21,
2020. Accordingly, I direct state and local governments to render appropriate assistance to prepare for this event, to alleviate any conditions resulting from the situation, and to implement recovery and mitigation operations and activities so as to return impacted areas to pre-event conditions as much as possible. Emergency services shall be conducted in accordance with § 44-146.13 et seq. of the Code. (source)

The Executive Order doesn’t only ban guns, but also includes helmets, shields, and more.

“No weapons will be allowed on Capitol grounds,” said Northam, a Democrat.

“Everything from sticks and bats to chains and projectiles…. The list also includes firearms. It makes no sense to ban every other weapon but allow firearms when intelligence shows that armed militia groups plan to storm the Capitol.” (source)

The rally had been planned as an open carry event and the turnout is expected to be massive. Monday, the state’s congress is expected to vote on a number of incredibly unpopular anti-gun laws, discussed here and here. While one of the most alarming bills has been pulled due to overwhelming opposition, there are plenty more to take its place.

What are these threats?

When you push a population to the brink, threatening them with gun confiscation at the hands of the National Guard and telling them that their lawful actions of rebellion are meaningless, you have to expect that population to push back. Particularly a rural, gun-loving population that makes up most of the counties in Virginia.

According to a press release from Northam’s office, “credible intelligence gathered by Virginia’s law enforcement agencies indicates that tens of thousands of advocates plan to converge on Capitol Square for events culminating on January 20, 2020. Available information suggests that a substantial number of these demonstrators are expected to come from outside the Commonwealth, may be armed, and have as their purpose not peaceful assembly but violence, rioting, and insurrection.”

Specifically, Northam said they’ve received threats including people detailing plans to storm the Capitol Building, use weaponized drones, and more. A state official cited one posting that included a photo of an AR-15 with a caption that said there are “great sight angles from certain buildings” near Capitol Square. (source)

Who is sponsoring the rally?

It’s interesting to note that throughout nearly every article on the mainstream media about this topic, you’ll find multiple references to “white nationalists,” making it seem as though the event is being hosted by white supremacists instead of law-abiding gun owners who have no intention of kowtowing to unconstitutional mandates. It’s particularly interesting that it’s Governor Northam making most of these references, given his part in a recent “blackface” scandal.

Here are some examples:

• From NBC: “Northam’s declaration will also ban items like helmets and shields, items that some white nationalists carried in Charlottesville. “
• From USA Today: “Northam said the decision was a response to threats, some of them made online in forums hosted by hate groups and white nationalists. The governor called on rally organizers to dissuade out-of-state groups from coming to the rally and encouraged a “peaceful day” for Virginians.”
• From NPR: “Northam is raising concerns about a reprise of the deadly violence surrounding the white supremacist march in Charlottesville in August 2017. He said state intelligence analysts have identified threats and rhetoric online that mirrors the chatter they were picking up around that time.”

But in actuality, the group sponsoring the rally is Virginia Citizen’s Defense League, a group dedicated to “defending your right to defend yourself in Virginia.”

This isn’t the first tyrannical move in Virginia this week.

An extremely popular Facebook post that has been shared thousands of times reads:

So Virginia introduces a bundle of radical laws to destroy 2A rights, militias, sale transfer and registration bills, and the People of Virginia says no, and we’re going to vote you all out next term.

Virginia government responds by introducing a bill to eliminate voter ID.

Virginia says we’re not going to wait, we’ll petition your removal from office and gets almost a 3rd of the 240K signatures to remove the governor and starts petitions to remove deligates.

Virginia govornment responds by introducing a bill to raise the amount of signatures from 10% of the prevailing vote, to 25%.

Folks, this is the a textbook example of tyranny. “We’re the government, and we’ll do anything we want, whether you like it or not. We won’t let you vote us out, we won’t let you remove us from office…. And if you can’t possess the weapons that a militia would need to force us out, of office, then there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it” (source)

I guess we can add this Executive Order to the list of tyrannies above.

What happens now?

On their Facebook page, they said of Northam’s emergency declaration:

VCDL is going to have our attorneys investigate this situation once we hear Northam’s statement on Wednesday and we will let you know what we find out. (source)

Based on the comments on the VCDL Facebook page, a lot of Virginians are not planning to comply and it looks like there could be widespread civil disobedience on Monday. You can find out more information about Lobby Day here and you can get transportation to attend here.

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Yeah... But!

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Yeah... But!

Authored by Michazel Lebowitz and Jack Scott via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Yeah… Barry Bonds, a Major League Baseball (MLB) player, put up some amazing stats in his career. What sets him apart from other players is that he got better in the later years of his career, a time when most players see their production rapidly decline.

Before the age of 30, Bonds hit a home run every 5.9% of the time he was at bat. After his 30th birthday, that rate almost doubled to over 10%. From age 36 to 39, he hit an astounding .351, well above his lifetime .298 batting average. Of all Major League baseball players over the age of 35, Bonds leads in home runs, slugging percentage, runs created, extra-base hits, and home runs per at bat. We would be remiss if we neglected to mention that Barry Bonds hit a record 762 homeruns in his MLB career and he also holds the MLB record for most home runs in a season with 73.

But… as we found out after those records were broken, Bond’s extraordinary statistics were not because of practice, a new batting stance, maturity, or other organic factors. It was his use of steroids. The same steroids that allowed Bonds to get stronger, heal quicker, and produce Hall of Fame statistics will also take a toll on his health in the years ahead.  

Turn on CNBC or Bloomberg News, and you will inevitably hear the hosts and interviewees rave on and on about the booming markets, low unemployment, and the record economic expansion. To that, we say Yeah… As in the Barry Bonds story, there is also a “But…” that tells the whole story.

As we will discuss, the economy is not all roses when one considers the massive amount of monetary steroids stimulating growth. Further, as Bonds too will likely find out at some point in his future, there will be consequences for these performance-enhancing policies.

Wicksell’s Wisdom

Before a discussion of the abnormal fiscal and monetary policies responsible for surging financial asset prices and the record-long economic expansion, it is important to impart the wisdom of Knut Wicksell and a few paragraphs from a prior article we published entitled Wicksell’s Elegant Model.

“According to Wicksell, when the market rate (of interest) is below the natural rate, there is an incentive to borrow and reinvest in an economy at the higher natural rate. This normally leads to an economic boom until demand drives up the market rate and eventually chokes off demand. When the market rate exceeds the natural rate, borrowing slows along with economic activity eventually leading to a recession, and the market rate again falls back below the natural rate. Wicksell viewed the divergences between the natural rate and the market rate as the mechanism by which the economic cycle is determined. If a divergence between the natural rate and the market rate is abnormally sustained, it causes a severe misallocation of capital.

Per Wicksell, optimal policy should aim at keeping the natural rate and the market rate as closely aligned as possible to prevent misallocation. But when short-term market rates are below the natural rate, intelligent investors respond appropriately. They borrow heavily at the low rate and buy existing assets with somewhat predictable returns and shorter time horizons. Financial assets skyrocket in value while long-term, cash-flow driven investments with riskier prospects languish. The bottom line: existing assets rise in value but few new assets are added to the capital stock, which is decidedly bad for productivity and the structural growth of the economy."

Essentially, Wicksell warns that when interest rates are lower than they should be, speculation in financial assets is spurred and investment into the real economy suffers. The result is a boom in financial asset prices at the expense of future economic activity. Sound familiar? 

But… Monetary Policy

The Fed’s primary tool to manage economic growth and inflation is the Fed Funds rate. Fed Funds is the rate of interest that banks charge each other to borrow on an overnight basis. As the graph below shows, the Fed Funds rate has been pinned at least 2% below the rate of economic growth since the financial crisis. Such a low relative rate spanning such a long period is simply unprecedented, and in the words of Wicksell not “optimal policy.” 

Until the financial crisis, managing the Fed Funds rate was the sole tool for setting monetary policy. As such, it was easy to assess how much, if any, stimulus the Fed was providing at any point in time. The advent of Quantitative Easing (QE) made this task less transparent at the same time the Fed was telling us they wanted to be more transparent.  

Between 2008 and 2014, through three installations of QE, the Fed bought nearly $3.2 trillion of government, mortgage-backed, and agency securities in exchange for excess banking reserves. These excess reserves allowed banks to extend more loans than would be otherwise possible. In doing so, not only was economic activity generated, but the money supply rose which had a positive effect on the economy and financial markets.

Trying to quantifying the amount of stimulus offered by QE is not easy. However, in 2011, Fed Chairman Bernanke provided a simple rule in Congressional testimony to allow us to transform a dollar amount of QE into an interest rate equivalent. Bernanke suggested that every additional $6.6 to $10 billion of excess reserves, the byproduct of QE, has the effect of lowering interest rates by 0.01%. Therefore, every trillion dollars’ worth of new excess reserves is equivalent to lowering interest rates by 1.00% to 1.50% in Bernanke’s opinion. In the ensuing discussion, we use Bernanke’s more conservative estimate of $10 billion to produce a .01% decline in interest rates.

The graph below aggregates the two forms of monetary stimulus (Fed Funds and QE) to gauge how much effective interest rates are below the rate of economic growth. The blue area uses the Fed Funds – GDP data from the first graph. The orange area representing QE is based on Bernanke’s formula. 

Since the financial crisis, the Fed has effectively kept interest rates 5.11% below the rate of economic growth on average. Looking back in time, one can see that the current policy prescription is vastly different from the prior three recessions and ensuing expansions. Following the three recessions before the financial crisis, the Fed kept interest rates lower than the GDP rate to help foster recovery. The stimulus was limited in duration and removed entirely during the expansion. Before comparing these periods to the current expansion, it is worth noting that the amount of stimulus increased during each expansion. This is a function of the growth of debt in the economy beyond the economy’s growth rate and the increasing reliance on debt to generate economic growth. 

The current expansion is being promoted by significantly more stimulus and at much more consistent levels. Effectively the Fed is keeping rates 5.11% below normal, which is about five times the stimulus applied to the average of the prior three recessions. 

Simply the Fed has gone from periodic use of stimulus to heal the economy following recessions to a constant intravenous drip of stimulus to support the economy.

Moar

Starting in late 2015, the Fed tried to wean the economy from the stimulus. Between December of 2015 and December of 2018, the Fed increased the Fed Funds rates by 2.50%. They stepped up those efforts in 2018 as they also reduced the size of their balance sheet (via Quantitative Tightening, “QT”) from $4.4 trillion to $3.7 trillion.

The Fed hoped the economic patient was finally healing from the crisis and they could remove the exorbitant amount of stimulus applied to the economy and the markets. What they discovered is their imprudent policies of the post-crisis era made the patient hopelessly addicted to monetary drugs.

Beginning in July 2019, the Fed cut the target for the Fed Funds rate three times by a cumulative 0.75%. A month after the first rate cut they abruptly halted QT and started increasing their balance sheet through a series of repo operations and QE. Since then, the Fed’s balance sheet has reversed much of the QT related decrease and is growing at a pace that rivals what we saw immediately following the crisis. It is now up almost a half a trillion dollars from the lows and only $200 billion from the high watermark. The Fed is scheduled to add $60 billion more per month to its balance sheet through April. Even more may be added if repo operations expand.

The economy was slowing, and markets were turbulent in late 2018. Despite the massive stimulus still in place, the removal of a relatively small amount of stimulus proved too volatility-inducing for the Fed and the markets to bear.

Summary

Wicksell warned that lower than normal rates lead to speculation in financial assets and less investment into the real economy. Is it any wonder that risk assets have zoomed higher over the last five years despite tepid economic growth and flat corporate earnings (NIPA data Bureau of Economic Analysis -BEA)? 

When someone tells you the economy is doing fine, remind them that Barry Bonds was a very good player but the statistics don’t tell the whole story.

To provide further context on the extremity of monetary policy in America and around the world, we present an incredible graph courtesy of Bianco Research. The graph shows the Bank of England’s balance sheet as a percentage of GDP since 1700. If we focus on the past 100 years, notice the only period comparable to today was during World War II. England was in a life or death battle at the time. What is the rationalization today? Central banker inconvenience?

While most major countries cannot produce similar data going back that far, they have all experienced the same unprecedented surge in their central bank’s balance sheet.

Assuming today’s environment is normal without considering the but…. is a big mistake. And like Barry Bonds, who will never know when the consequences of his actions will bring regret, neither do the central bankers or the markets. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 01/15/2020 - 09:36

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Sharyl Attkisson: Feds admit to spying on me

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A former federal government agent has admitted to spying on investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson when she worked for CBS News.

Attkisson said on her website the insider has identified former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as the person responsible for the surveillance.

At the time, Rosenstein was the U.S. attorney in Baltimore.

In response to the admission, Attkisson and her family have filed a lawsuit against Rosenstein and four other men allegedly involved. The lawsuit contends the illegal surveillance was conducted against Attkisson and other U.S. citizens under a government operation based at the Baltimore U.S. Attorney's Office.

Attkisson, who has won five Emmys and the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting, discussed the case in an interview with week with Glenn Beck.

Beck's publication The Blaze said the spying on Attkisson's laptop computers and telephones happened from 2011 to 2014 under the Barack Obama administration.

The video:

At her website, Attkisson explained: "The plaintiffs first acquired the details regarding key individuals involved in the surveillance in August, 2019, from a person involved in the wrongdoing who has come forward to provide information. Prior to that time, the government and its agents and representatives had denied that any such conduct had occurred, including denials in court pleadings and argument."

She said her complaint alleges that in 2011 "defendants Shawn Henry, Shaun Bridges, Robert Clarke and Ryan White, all of whom were government employees connected to a special multi-agency federal government task force based in Baltimore, Maryland, were ordered by defendant Rosenstein to conduct home computer surveillance on Attkisson and other U.S. citizens."

At the time, Attkisson was a CBS News investigative correspondent who was uncovering news about the Department of Justice's "gun walking" operation known as Fast and Furious.

Attkisson's reporting of the case later was recognized with an Edward R. Murrow award and an Emmy.

In the Obama operation, federal officials sold guns to criminals they believed could be traced to the Mexican drug cartels. However, authorities lost track of many of the weapons, and some ended up being used in drug cartel wars.

Rod Rosenstein testifies before House Judiciary Committee in December 2017 (Video screenshot)

Attkisson said the "remote surveillance" continued as she reported on Islamic jihadist attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, another major Obama scandal.

She also said "a former FBI Unit Chief has signed a sworn affidavit confirming that forensics prove U.S. government software was used in illegal surveillance on Attkisson and family."

She reported:

Leslie Szwajkowski, an attorney, headed up the FBI’s Electronic Surveillance Technology Section. He says that a colleague asked him for help in examining Attkisson’s computer in late 2012. Szwajkowski says a forensics exam conducted by a technician with expertise in government surveillance tools confirmed that spyware proprietary to a federal agency was found in Attkisson’s computer. Szwajkowski says he and his colleagues were “shocked” and “outraged” to learn the government was spying on a journalist.

She said Szwajkowksi confirmed the "remote intruders" had full access to her files, photographs, keystrokes and internet activities.

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Hannity, Levin, Jones Push for Mass Murder and War Crimes

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Trump adviser Sean Hannity is calling for the president to use “the full force of the greatest, most advanced, most sophisticated military this world has ever seen” to flatten Iran and engage in the mass murder of Iranian civilians. 

He is not alone. It appears many alt-righters are calling for war crimes, including talk show performance artist Alex Jones. 

I received an email this morning from an Infowars watcher who says Alex Jones declared at the outset of his show today its OK for the USG to assassinate foreign leaders. Once upon a time, Alex Jones pretended to be a defender of the Constitution and the rule of law, but now that his guy is president, Jones is a reformulated neocon. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are coming out of the woodwork in an effort to outdo each other in blaming Iran for past terrorist attacks. 

Amazing to listen to GOP talking points right now on Soleimani:

Rep. Scott Perry blames Soleimani personally for 1983 attack on Marine barracks in Beirut (he was 25 years old at the time) and for Khobar Towers, an Al Qaeda attack falsely blamed in Iran. pic.twitter.com/t5miejxidW

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 9, 2020

Rep. Scott, like his president, is a geopolitical ignoramus. Soleimani had nothing to do with the bombing in Saudi Arabia. Initially, the blame was placed on “Saudi Islamic militants, including many veterans of the Afghan War,” according to The New York Times. 

The FBI eventually blamed Iran, as required by political expediency. What is forgotten here is that the FBI did this to derail Bill Clinton’s thawing of relations with Iran and its then-president, Mohammad Khatami. Ever since, the US has blamed Iran and its “proxy,” Hezbollah for all manner of evil in the Middle East. 

Never mind that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, admitted at the time there wasn’t enough evidence to blame any group or individual. 

In 2001, an indictment was issued in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, Virginia charging members of both the Lebanese and Saudi versions of Hezbollah for the attack. Eight Saudis were also charged. The 9/11 whitewash commission bent over backward to blame Osama bin Laden. Soleimani was not mentioned. 

In fact, at the time, Soleimani was the IRGC commander in Kerman Province. He was busy fighting the Kurds. He didn’t become Quds commander until 1998, two years after the Khobar Towers bombing. 

William Perry, Clinton’s Sec. of Defense, was confused about where the blame should be pinned—on al-Qaeda or Iran. During a June 2007 interview Perry, however, said: “he now believes al-Qaida rather than Iran was behind a 1996 truck bombing at an American military base.”

By 2006, it was official. The high court judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that Iran and Hezbollah were directly responsible for the attack, never mind the absence of evidence (this is now a routine practice). 

None of this is relevant now that Republicans are demanding full-fledged war on Iran, thus potentially soon providing Israel with a belated Hanukkah and Asarah B’Tevet present. 

Iran’s Mullahs Should Brace for Impact #IranAttacks https://t.co/l7BrF6PuEK

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) January 8, 2020

“Iran launched an attack against our brave men and women in the region,” said the talk show host. “For years, since 1979, they’ve been at war with us.” 

In fact, these “brave men and women” are illegally and violently occupying a country that never threatened America or the US government. Hannity the historical and geopolitical retard did not mention the fact widespread hatred of the USG by average Iranians is the result of Eisenhower and the Brits overthrowing the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddeq, and then installing the Shah and his CIA and Mossad trained SAVAK secret police. 

‘Iran is the culprit, not the victim’: GOP former CIA officer blasts Democrats https://t.co/mx1bUdFGX5

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) January 9, 2020

This is precisely why Hannity is cognitively challenged. As history amply demonstrates, the CIA is a far larger threat than Iran or even Russia and China. It is directly responsible for overthrowing Iran’s government. It has a long and extremely bloody track record and is guilty of participating directly and indirectly in the murder of millions of people since its creation as the primary covert terror component of the national security state. 

Next up, the Zionist shill Mark Levin. This “conservative” has turned history upside down with his lies and misinformation. 

Islamonazi Regime

Why does the NY Slimes ignore the atrocities committed by the murderous Iranian Islamonazi regime?

To see more, get LevinTV: https://t.co/ICZsTSMn7z pic.twitter.com/oUAjc90UmG

— LevinTV (@LevinTV) January 7, 2020

Iran didn’t have “democracy” under the Shah. It had a brutal dictatorship that tortured and killed political opponents and rivals. As noted above, this was directly supported by the USG and later Israel. (See The Unwritten History Of Israel’s Alliance With The Shah’s Dictatorship.)

Have the mullahs of Iran murdered opponents? You bet. This is something all states do, and the USG and Israel are at the top of the list. However, Iran is not killing US and Israeli scientists or engaging in concerted economic warfare against America and its people. Iran is not bombing its neighbors and stealing their land. It is not assassinating the Joint Chiefs of Staff or neocons advocating bombing Iran (like big-time Israel and Trump booster Sheldon Adelson called for). 

Finally, the son of Trump has provided us with yet another example of the manufactured  war between Republicans and Democrats. 

Will the Democrat Iran fan club in Congress still do whatever they can to cheer-lead for the regime?
My guess is 100% yes, unfortunately.

BBC News – Iran mistakenly shot down Ukraine jet – US media https://t.co/DYy3niegHs

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 9, 2020

Democrats have a support Iran fan club, according to Junior. This is delusion, hallucination, dishonesty, malfeasance, and the continuation of brazen and stupid lies, the sort of behavior that should be expected from the son of a guy who learned his political chops from his personal lawyer, the miscreant Roy Cohen. 

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New Cambridge Analytica Leaks Reveal Psychological Manipulation Of Global Population

On New Year’s Day 2020, Twitter account @HindsightFiles began posting documents from data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) which expose the extensive infrastructure used to manipulate voters on a global scale.

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On The Idiotic Partisan Debate Over Regime Change In Iran Or Syria

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There is an idiotic partisan debate over whether (US-Zionist) regime change should take place in Iran or Syria – but it’s one and the same agenda.

There is an idiotic partisan debate

occurring right now over whether there should be regime change in Iran or Syria. I love my job. Really, I do. But writing about US military agendas for a living often brings one into contact with such staggering stupidity that all you can do is pause and wonder how our species survived past the invention of the pointy stick. By far the dumbest thing in all of US politics is the fact that Democrats tend to support regime change in Syria, while Republicans tend to support it more in Iran. I am not talking about the elected officials in those parties; I’m talking about the ordinary rank-and-file Joes and Janets who stand absolutely nothing to gain from toppling either Damascus or Tehran, but who have been brainwashed by lifelong media consumption into supporting one or the other anyway.

Whenever I write against the US government’s longstanding agenda to replace the leadership of Tehran with a compliant puppet regime, I know with absolute certainty that I’m going to spend the rest of my time online arguing with Trump supporters and lifelong Republicans. Whenever I write against the US government’s longstanding agenda to do the same in Syria, I know with absolute certainty that I’m going to be arguing predominantly with so-called centrist liberals.

At no time has this ever failed to occur.

I’ve spent the last few days arguing with Trump supporters who are telling me I’m crazy for not celebrating the death of an Iranian general they had no idea existed one week ago, and many of these pro bono State Department propagandists began following my work because they liked what I’ve been saying about Syria.

Conversely, all the fauxgressives and liberal interventionists who spent all last month telling me I’m a monster for writing about leaked OPCW documents showing we were lied to about an alleged 2018 chemical weapons incident have been staying out of my social media notifications completely these past four days.

It is truly bizarre. And it is truly, deeply, profoundly stupid.

It is truly, deeply and profoundly stupid because the agenda to topple Iran’s government and the agenda to topple Syria’s government are not two separate agendas. They are the same. Supporting one while opposing the other is like wanting to shoot someone in the head but being morally opposed to shooting them in the heart.

Syria and Iran are allies. Eliminating one government necessarily hurts the other. Iran has been helping Syria to win the war against foreign-backed extremist proxy fighters who nearly succeeded in toppling Damascus before its allies stepped in, and should Syria succeed in rebuilding itself (something the Trump administration is actively preventing it from doing) we can be sure it would return the favor when called upon.

The US government’s agenda to “take out” all noncompliant governments in the Middle East is completely removed from any consideration for American party politics. It’s one unified agenda, and the more the imperial blob succeeds in weakening any of the remaining unabsorbed nations, the easier it gets to absorb the others.

Supporting regime change in Iran but not Syria, or vice-versa, is for this reason an inherently absurd position to take. If you opposed Obama’s attempt to topple Damascus via Timber Sycamore-armed proxies, it’s absurd for you to support any maneuvers which could lead to the elimination of Syria’s key ally in that fight. If you oppose Trump’s current warmongering toward Iran, it’s absurd for you to support the elimination of one of Iran’s remaining friends in the region.

If Iran falls you may be sure that Syria will fall next, and vice versa. It’s the same box being ticked; you’re just arguing over whether it should be a left-handed or right-handed check mark.

But such is the strength of propaganda. The perception managers of the US war machine have successfully manipulated the voting public into a debate not about whether regime change interventionism should happen, but which regime change intervention should happen first.

In a sense it’s quite brilliant; we may be quite sure that government agency departments responsible for domestic perception management on US foreign policy have discussed this precise dynamic at length. But in another sense it’s quite mundane: the recent Republican presidents have pursued regime change in Iran, while Obama pursued it in Syria, so Republicans support Republican interventions while Democrats support Democratic ones.

This has nothing to do with any substantial difference in these agendas (again, it’s actually one agenda) and everything to do with what each faction can be more easily propagandized toward. Liberal hearts are easier to grab with horror stories about a monster who gasses babies for no reason and less concerned about refugee crises and the persecution of Syrian Christians, while Republicans are much easier to manipulate into despising a theocracy run by Muslims.

And of course there’s overlap; people who prioritize mass murder above all else like John Bolton and Lindsey Graham will cheer enthusiastically for as much military interventionism as they can get in either country (or any country, really). But by and large, especially among the rank-and-file, people tend to support the interventions their respective presidents propagandized them into supporting. Propaganda is pretty much the only thing the presidential “bully pulpit” is used for.

Because Iraq has poisoned the idea, each mainstream faction may deny actually wanting the US to oust the government of Iran or Syria. Trump supporters who still stand by the anti-interventionist platform he falsely campaigned on may say “I don’t want war with Iran, I just want Iranians to get their freedom and I think it’s awesome they killed Solamumi or however you spell it.” Liberals might say “I don’t want interventionism! I just support the Freedom Fighters in Idlib and want Assad to stop murdering civilians for fun and sexual gratification.” But circulating propaganda narratives about governments targeted for regime change is supporting regime change. You’re participating in it as surely as if you’d deployed the Tomahawk missiles yourself.

Now we’re being told that none of the millions of people publicly mourning Soleimani do so voluntarily and they all secretly like the fact that America assassinated their country’s top military commander who defended Iran and just defeated ISIS. The propaganda is getting dumber.

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 6, 2020

Yesterday someone told me that everyone at Qassem Soleimani’s incredibly massive funeral procession was attending because they were forced to. When I asked him if he was claiming that every single one of those millions of people were publicly mourning because they’d been literally forced at gunpoint, he told me no: many were forced in the sense that state propaganda was all they’d ever known, so they were psychologically coerced into grieving Soleimani.

“I don’t accept that your ‘state propaganda their whole lives’ model is any more coercive or fascistic than the kind that causes Americans to turn up to pro- and anti-Trump rallies,” I said. “Americans are no less propagandized than Iranians. If anything it’s worse, since Americans don’t know they’re being propagandized.”

“You’ve got it backwards,” he said. “Iranians don’t know they’re being propagandized because they only have one source of information. The U.S. knows it because we have sides screaming it to other sides all the time and the freedom of information and thought to come to our own conclusions.”

“Nonsense,” I replied. “Nearly all Americans are propagandized to the gills. They’re probably the most aggressively propagandized population on earth, just because so much depends on their swallowing propaganda. It’s just a more scientific sort.”

“And yet here we are, talking about it freely without worrying about swallowing a bullet,” he said.

“Here I am arguing with a man who just so happens to be striving very, very hard to convince me to swallow the exact same narrative that Mike Pompeo is trying to convince me to swallow,” I replied.

The greatest asset of the propagandists is the belief that we haven’t been propagandized.

The post On The Idiotic Partisan Debate Over Regime Change In Iran Or Syria appeared first on The Freedom Articles.

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Michelle Williams: ‘Sometimes You Just Have To Ask Yourself, ‘How Many People Do I Have To Kill To Get An Acting Career?”

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Via The Babylon Bee

HOLLYWOOD, CA—At the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday night, Michelle Williams gave an impassioned speech about her acting career, and how if she hadn’t had the ability to knock off a few people, the audience and the viewers at home would have had to suffer an existence without her being an actress.

“You have to do a little math,” Williams said. “Human life, or fame and fortune? Which one has more intrinsic value?” Williams laughed, as did many in the crowd.

Williams was accepting the award for best actress in a limited series or motion picture made for TV for her turn as Gwen Verdon in Fosse/Verdon. “Imagine if this TV series existed with someone else playing this role,” she implored. “I’m sure you will agree, it was worth a few souls being snuffed out. A lot of people die every day. It’s important to keep our priorities straight in this life. I just can’t imagine the horror I would have had to endure if I’d allowed those lives to be lived. Even to put them up for adoption would have been too much of a hassle. I had acting classes to get to.”

She argued that in the end, she had made the humane choice not just for herself, but for the children who didn’t have the right to exist anyway. “Imagine the suffering my previous kids would have felt every day knowing that their own existence had robbed their mother of something of much higher meaning and worth than their lives could ever amount to. This award right here, this is what life is all about. I could never allow my children to live knowing they robbed of this. If they could thank me, they would.”

Williams was visibly pregnant during the speech and took the opportunity to speak about her decision to let this one live. “I’m just thankful we live in a culture where we can define human life according to our own whims. I’m blessed to have had my cake and I got to eat it too. I offed a kid or two, got rich and famous, and now I can finally allow one to live since there will be no risk of them robbing me of what is rightfully mine. I want this child to grow up knowing that if my career had not taken off…” Williams then ran her finger across her neck and made a whimsical death noise. The audience applauded.

The actress says that her expected newborn will be named “Lucky,” to remind the child every day how lucky they are that their mother got that Golden Globe that they may live.

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Facebook VP: Trump got himself elected, Russia isn't to blame

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The thing about reporting is that it helps to read what material you’ve gathered before you come up with a headline. I know, this may seem like simple stuff when it comes to journalism, but it’s apparently not standard operating procedure over at CNN.

This was the headline on one of the network's stories Tuesday: “Top Facebook exec: Yes, we got Trump elected and it may happen again.” That’s "whoa" material.

Liberals have always operated under the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign worked hand-in-glove with Facebook — along with other social media giants, the Russians, reptilian shape-shifters and Judge Crater — to steal the presidency from the wholly deserving and very electable Hillary Clinton. Now, CNN’s got proof!

The entire body of the story, instead, is about a memo written to colleagues by Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth describing how Donald Trump's campaign efficiently used the platform, while in no way breaking the rules or engaging in unethical behavior. Also, Bosworth -- a Hillary Clinton backer -- warned against changing the rules to tilt against President Trump for the 2020 campaign.

So, uh. Sorry for everyone that clicked expecting to find evidence of that whole conspiracy, guys! That's CNN's bad. Thanks for coming.

The article in question didn't have the only terrible headline or wretched level of spin on the Dec. 30  memo -- first reported by The New York Times -- but it was the worst. (The Washington Post was a solid second, if not quite close a close one: "Facebook executive says company was responsible for Trump’s victory but warns against policy changes.")

Most of these headlines hung their legitimacy on a sentence in Bosworth's memo where one is left with the feeling members of the newsroom got to a certain point and stopped reading.

That point, I'm guessing, was right when Bosworth wrote this: "So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks."

They definitely didn't read the next three sentences: "He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period."

For media channels where functionaries have no doubt spent an inordinate amount of time poring over the sentence fragment "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," one feels this might be intentional.

The memo also stated that Trump and Brad Parscale, the 2016 campaign's digital media head who is the Trump campaign manager for the 2020 race, had done "unbelievable work" while dispelling many of the myths surrounding the campaign.

"They weren’t running misinformation or hoaxes," Bosworth wrote. "They weren’t microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person. The use of custom audiences, video, ecommerce, and fresh creative remains the high water mark of digital ad campaigns in my opinion."

Bosworth posted his memo in toto on Facebook (natch) after The Times reported on it. For the most part, it's a rambling document that touches upon "Lord of the Rings," left-wing political philosopher John Rawls and "quadruple stuffed Oreos" as metaphors for Facebook's business and the company's decision-making regarding political advertising.

The Oreos reference is part of a rather inconsequential passage about how "algorithms are primarily exposing the desires of humanity itself, for better or worse." Rawls, of course, was invoked because of his theory of the "veil of ignorance," which isn't worth explicating here but which draws a bit of a chuckle on multiple levels when used by a Facebook executive.

Bosworth's excursion into J.R.R. Tolkien, however, was yet another part of the memo where the media's eyes tended to glaze over.

"I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial [sic] and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her," Bosworth wrote. "As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear."

A Facebook exec swiping a metaphor from a fantasy novel is profoundly unsurprising, and one talking about how "we must never do that or we will become that which we fear" is about as rich as quadruple-stuffed Oreos, but there you have it.

The unspoken context of that passage -- and indeed, of the entire memo -- is Twitter's decision to halt all political advertising. The unspoken part of that decision, meanwhile, was that the GOP (more broadly) and the Trump campaign (more specifically) had better positioned themselves to use advertising on social media to their advantage. The decision was broadly hailed as a victory for fairness and nonpartisanship. In fact, the decision to halt it suddenly and in the middle of a campaign cycle, particularly to benefit one side, was anything but that.

And make no mistake, social media -- like any other group of tech conglomerates in Silicon Valley -- is very liberal. Here's the least surprising part of the Bosworth memo: "To be clear, I’m no fan of Trump. I donated the max to Hillary. After his election I wrote a post about Trump supporters that I’m told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me (I regret that post and deleted shortly after)."

"[C]olleagues who had supported him." Right. Please show me these colleagues, Mr. Bosworth. I'm demanding habeas corpus on these tech employees. I get the feeling they're every bit as real as Cory Booker's good friend T-Bone.

Another unsurprising passage: "That brings me to the present moment, where we have maintained the same ad policies. It occurs to me that it very well may lead to the same result. As a committed liberal I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand?" This led into the "Lord of the Rings" passage, so apparently Gandalf did.

Bosworth's memo also said that Cambridge Analytica was "a total non-event" from "snake oil salespeople."

"The tools they used didn’t work, and the scale they used them at wasn’t meaningful. Every claim they have made about themselves is garbage," Bosworth wrote. "Data of the kind they had isn’t that valuable to being with and worse it degrades quickly, so much so as to be effectively useless in 12-18 months. In fact the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) seized all the equipment at Cambridge Analytica and found that there was zero data from any UK citizens!"

Bosworth said that "[w]henTrump won, Cambridge Analytica tried to take credit so they were back on our radar but just for making bullshit claims about their own importance. I was glad when the Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale called them out for it."

As for CNN’s headline, one wonders how many levels of gatekeeping it passed through without someone actually pulling the emergency cord and stopping the crazy train.

Given the content of the memo, it’s clear what Bosworth meant was that the platform got Trump elected. His campaign managed to do it on its own. No Russians, no Cambridge Analytica, no Judge Crater -- and no scale-tipping by Facebook, either.

Let’s apply this to other media. If CNN were around in 1864, we would have “Western Union executive: Yes, telegraph got Abraham Lincoln elected, and it could happen in the future, too.” In 1936: “RCA: Our radio technology helped ensure FDR's victory, and 'Fireside Chats' could win him three more terms." In 1961: "Westinghouse top brass: JFK owes his election to our televisions, and it could ensure Democrat dominance going forward."

A medium is -- or should be -- a platform. There shouldn't be people running around behind the scenes pulling levers like Bosworth wants to do. (Thank God we have Frodo, or else things would apparently have taken a turn.) That's exactly what legacy media want social media to do, however, as evinced by headlines like "Top Facebook exec: Yes, we got Trump elected and it may happen again."

Trust me, CNN did plenty to ensure that Donald Trump would not get elected and will do more to prevent it from happening again. If you don't believe me, watch for 10 minutes if you're in an airport sometime soon.

It's a rare day where a Silicon Valley executive comes out looking more even-handed and objective than someone with a major news network. Congratulations are in order to Andrew Bosworth, I guess. He deserves a package of quadruple-stuffed Oreos.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

The post Facebook VP: Trump got himself elected, Russia isn't to blame appeared first on WND.

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Fake Noose? '60 Minutes' Shreds Epstein Suicide Theory

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Fake Noose? '60 Minutes' Shreds Epstein Suicide Theory

'60 Minutes' has revealed several new data points in the death of wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein which raise more questions than they answer, and suggest that the financier did not kill himself - an opinion the New York City Medical Examiner's office stands "firmly" behind.

The New York City Medical Examiner's Office ruled Epstein's death a suicide by hanging, but a forensic pathologist who observed the four-hour autopsy on behalf of  Epstein's brother, Mark, tells 60 Minutes the evidence released so far points more to murder than suicide in his view. Dr. Michael Baden's key reason: the unusual fractures he saw in Epstein's neck. -CBS News

While we've heard all sorts of theories about the improbabilities of the force required by the nearly 6 foot tall Epstein to successfully hang himself while breaking an unusual three bones in his neck usually seen in strangulations, that's nowhere near the most peculiar part of Epstein's demise (notwithstanding the ol' homeless guy switcharoo theory).

For the first time, we get to look at the noose Epstein used to allegedly kill himself. Photos admitted as evidence reveal a clean cloth with no blood, despite Epstein's clearly bloody neck. Moreover, both ends of the noose were hemmed, not cut - while the guard who found Epstein reportedly cut him down.

Also odd is that Epstein's ligature wound, allegedly left by said bloodless noose, is fairly low on his neck.

"It doesn't look like anybody ever took scissors to it," said 60 Minutes' Sharyn Alfonsi. "So there is some question—is that the right noose?"

“I have never seen three fractures like this in a suicidal hanging.”

Dr. Michael Baden lays out the forensic reasons why he’s skeptical of the medical examiner’s ruling that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. **This video contains graphic images.** https://t.co/rZDRtPchod pic.twitter.com/sAkIch7sBF

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 6, 2020

The photos also reveal other potential nooses - none of which are bloodied, as well as orange sheets strewn around the room.

"There were fractures of the left, the right thyroid cartilage and the left hyoid bone," said Baden. "I have never seen three fractures like this in a suicidal hanging."

"Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures," he added.

Other irregularities include Epstein being taken off suicide watch, broken cameras which didn't record the front of his cell during the cruicial period, and of course, the fact that his guards failed to check on perhaps the most high-profile inmate in modern history - and were instead browsing the web and sleeping.

Tyler Durden Sun, 01/05/2020 - 21:00

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How Long Will It Take For The US To Collapse?

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Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

There are a multitude of false assumptions out there on what the collapse of a nation or “empire” looks like. Modern day Americans have never experienced this type of event, only peripheral crises and crashes. Thanks to Hollywood, many in the public are under the delusion that a collapse is an overnight affair. They think that such a thing is impossible in their lifetimes, and if it did happen, it would happen as it does in the movies – They would simply wake up one morning and find the world on fire. Historically speaking, this is not how it works. The collapse of an empire is a process, not an event.

This is not to say that there are not moments of shock and awe; there certainly are. As we witnessed during the Great Depression, or in 2008, the system can only be propped up artificially for so long before the bubble pops. In past instances of central bank intervention, the window for manipulation is around ten years between events, give or take a couple of years. For the average person, a decade might seem like a long time. For the banking elites behind the degradation of our society and economy, a decade is a blink of an eye.

In the meantime, danger signals abound as those analysts aware of the situation try to warn the populace of the underlying decay of the system and where it will inevitably lead. Economists like Ludwig Von Mises foresaw the collapse of the German Mark and predicted the Great Depression; almost no one listened until it was too late. Multiple alternative economists predicted the credit crisis and derivatives crash of 2008; and almost no one listened until it was too late. People refused to listen because their normalcy bias took control of their ability to reason and accept the facts in front of them.

There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.

In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.

Crash events are like stages in the process of collapse; they create moments of clarity for the blind. However, they are also often engineered to benefit the establishment. There’s a reason why the elites put so much energy into hiding the real data on the state of the economy, and it’s not because they are trying to keep the system from faltering by using sheer public ignorance. Rather, a crash event is a tool, a means to an end. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:

“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…”

Central bankers and their cohorts manipulate economic data and promote the false notion of a boom before almost every major crash because they WANT to ambush the populace. They WANT to create panic, and then use it to their advantage as they rebuild and mutate the system into something unrecognizable only decades ago. Each consecutive crash contributes to the collapse of the whole, until eventually the society we once had is barely a distant memory.

This process can take decades, and the US has been subject to it for quite some time now. Once again in 2019 we are seeing the lie of an “economic boom” being perpetuated in the mainstream. The public was growing too aware of the danger and had to be subdued. More specifically, conservatives were growing too aware. The sad thing is that the boom propaganda is most prominent today among conservatives, who are desperately trying to ignore the fundamentals in an attempt to defend the Trump Administration.

The same people who were pointing out the economic bubble under Obama are now denying its existence under Trump. Trump himself argued that the markets were a dangerous economic fraud created by the Federal Reserve during his campaign, yet once he was in office he flip-flopped and started taking full credit for the bubble. What is mind boggling to me is that many people, even in the liberty movement, still choose to dismiss this behavior in favor of worshiping Trump as some kind of hero on a white horse.

This only reinforces my theory that the system is due for another major engineered crash event, and that the ongoing collapse of the US is soon to accelerate. Each case of economic calamity in modern history was preceded by peak delusional optimism and peak greed. When the people traditionally most vigilant against crisis suddenly capitulate and claim victory, this is when reality strikes hardest. This is when the establishment triggers yet another controlled demolition.

In order to determine how long an empire will last, one has to take into account the agenda of the elites that control its institutions. As long as they are in key positions of power within the system and as long as they can inject their own puppet politicians, they will have the ability to influence the collapse timeline of that system.

Can they prolong and stave off crisis? Yes, for a short while. However, once the machine of a crash has been set in motion the best they can do is slow down the Titanic; they cannot change its path towards the iceberg. And frankly, at this point why would they? I hear it argued often that the elites are going to “keep the plates spinning” on the economy and that they don’t want to lose their “golden goose” in the US economy. This reveals an naivety among skeptics of the true agenda.

Firstly, the elites have a highly useful political puppet in the form of Donald Trump; he is useful in that he inspires sharp national division, and, he is a self proclaimed conservative champion and nationalist. If the elites did not trigger a crash under Trump, then this would give the public the impression that conservative ideals and national sovereignty works. This is the opposite of what they want. Why would globalists that want the erasure of nation states and the creation of a centralized socialist “Utopia” seek to make conservatives and nationalists look good? Well, they wouldn’t.

The only concern of the banks is that they do not take the blame as their engineered collapse of the old world order hits the public with increasingly painful consequences. These consequences are already becoming visible.

The next major crash has begun in the form of plunging fundamentals, and far too many conservatives are placing their heads in the sand for the selfish sake of proving the political left wrong. Declines in US manufacturing, US freight, global exports and imports, mass closures in US retail, as well as all time highs in consumer debt, corporate debt and national debt are being shrugged off and rationalized as nothing more than “hiccups” in an otherwise booming economy. The Fed’s repo market purchases, barely keeping up with demand from liquidity starved corporations are also not being taken seriously.

Conservatives and analysts are going to have to forget about supporting Trump, a Rothschild owned proxy, and start acknowledging reality once again. The only question now is, will the elites allow the crash to spread further into mainstreet and strike markets before or after the 2020 election?

As noted above, to predict the timing of a collapse in a nation or empire, one has to examine the agendas of the elites that dominate its institutions. We can gain some sense of timing from the public admissions of globalist organizations like the IMF and the UN. Each has announced the year 2030 as a target date for the finalization of globalization, a cashless society and sustainability goals. This means that the elites have around ten years to create a crisis and then “solve” that crisis with globalism.

Ten years is a narrow window, and if the elites intend for conservatives to take the blame for the next crash, they will have to initiate it soon. They may not have a choice anyway, as the chain of dominoes was already been set in motion by the Fed in 2018 with its liquidity tightening policies.

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We can also gauge timing of a collapse to a point by understanding the common tactics the establishment uses to hide what they are doing.  Generally, when a collapse is about to accelerate the elites use crisis events as cover to distract the public and produce scapegoats.  In my article ‘Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy’, I outlined three potential distractions that could be used in the near term, and if any of these events took place, then people should watch for the collapse to move faster.  Two of these events now appear imminent:  The first being a war with Iran, and the second being a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.

Finally, we can take into account the globalist need for a scapegoat, and it appears that conservatives and nationalists are their target for blame.  This leaves less than one year for a crisis event if Trump is intended to leave the White House in 2020, or less than four years if he is intended to stay in for a second term.  Keep in mind that A LOT can happen in a single year, and a second Trump term is certainly not guaranteed yet.

But why create a collapse in the first place?  Crash events allow the establishment to consolidate control over hard assets as poverty forces the population to sell what they have to survive. This poverty also creates fear, which makes the public malleable and easier to control. Each new crisis opens doors to political and social changes, changes which end in less freedom and more centralization. Collapse is a succession of crashes leading to a complete erasure of the original society. It’s not a Mad Max event, it’s a hidden and insidious cancer that takes over the national body and warps it into a wretched form.  The collapse is complete when the nation either breaks apart, or is so damaged for so long that no one can remember what it used to look like.

What we are witnessing today is the beginning of a new crash, and the final phases of a collapse of our way of life. The economic boom narrative among conservatives is a farce designed to trick us into complacency. The bubble that we warned about under the Obama Administration has been popped under the Trump Administration. Nothing has changed in the ten years since the 2008 crash except that the motivation for keeping the crash hidden is quickly disappearing.

Crashes are inevitable, but collapse is only possible when the public remains unprepared. Our civilization and its values are under attack, but they can only be destroyed if we stay apathetic to the threat and refuse to prepare for their defense.  We must adopt a philosophy of decentralization.  We need localized and self sufficient economies, as well as a return to localized production.  Beyond that, we have to prepare for the eventuality of a fight.  The fate of the US economy has already been sealed, but the people who are destroying it can still be stopped before they use the collapse to force society into subservience.  We have to offer security, we have to offer alternatives to the “new world order” and we have to remove the globalist threat permanently.

Make no mistake, we are living in the midst of an epoch moment; the outcome of collapse depends on us and our reactions. This is not the task of the next generation, it is a task for our generation. We do not have another couple of decades to take the danger seriously. The plates are not spinning, they have already dropped.

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