some of this is quite interesting and can be used to explain some of the various behaviors we are seeing.
https://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/are-parasites-shaping-geopolitics
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236666753_Pathogens_and_Politics_Further_Evidence_That_Parasite_Prevalence_Predicts_Authoritarianism
I have not read the 4th turning book and don’t really plan to. I have been someone who has been into preparedness for 20+ years. I also enjoy reading on topics such as personality and human and organizational behavior. People tend to vote their temperaments unless pushed in one way or another by an outside influence.
https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/evidence-base/the-association-between-personality-traits-and-voting-intentions-in-the-2016-presidential-election/
I am not sure that “generations” have a specific temperament. Much more likely that due to circumstances in a specific society specific temperaments tend to become more vocal. However, once that happens too much other groups in society start pushing back. I am not sure how much of that has to do with the financial clusterf-ery that is going on right now except to say that people will behave how their personality forces them to behave unless controlled inside some type of system of laws.
"I’m getting food parcels to several hundred hungry conflict refugee families for $8-10 each. " — please speak more about this … love to see what you are doing — Great work – we can stop “rubbernecking news” and all make a difference locally , nationally or in your case internationally
I noticed that I’ve let my emergency pantry slide a bit this week. I hadn’t been going out like I had been each week and topping things off. Might need to get back up to my red line again.
Truckers Threaten To Run Over Protesters and Refuse To Deliver Needed Supplies To Cities
Given the number of Likes, it makes me sit up and notice.
Les, with respect to your comments #69 and 73, I find a contradiction with another comment you made - #1 on the Garbage Science thread (bold my emphasis):
I have sympathy for one individual who was mistreated by authorities, but handling of HCQ science and the entire virus response should have everyone up in arms."You got 15 thumbs up for that comment. So what I am trying to understand is why it is okay for people to take up arms over the virus, but it is not okay for marginalized groups who consistently, constantly experience exclusion and discriminatory behaviours in their day-to-day lives to do the same? Especially those who are dis-proportionally affected by the same virus you want us all to take up arms against? I would appreciate knowing what the difference is, Les. Can you elaborate on that for me please? My perspective is that the protests and riots are mere symptoms of the larger root cause of systemic discrimination. Unless a person has lived experience with that, they cannot truly understand the long term effect, of exclusion and oppression, whether implicit or explicit, inadvertent or intentional. People can only take so much before they push back. As a person with a disability I do have that lived experience. I can well relate to the rage felt by those who are oppressed. I have felt it myself, and still do, especially when I see any marginalized group being wronged. I am also aware of my privilege from being born a white woman in a middle class, Canadian home. I am aware that that privilege provided me with access to resources and legal avenues to help me, when things were not going well for me, to fight for my rights in the workplace (even if not always successfully). I am aware that many marginalized people do not have easy access to what I have/had access to because they were not born into a privileged societal class, and face ongoing systemic discrimination as a result. I recall a time when I was in my early 20's, struggling to get established in the working world without any of the supports, technological and otherwise, that we have today. My late, dear dad said something to me that, while I found it to be insensitive and racist, also had a lot of truth to it. He said "you are far better off being white and deaf than you would be to have hearing but be black." As much as I disliked and for a time disagreed with what he said, I do not think he was wrong. In your comment # 69 above, Les, you said this:
Everything I’m seeing says the rioters are dominating the poor behavior narrative and the tragedy is that, to a large extent, they are attacking people and businesses that are not responsible for any of the grievances they are supposedly rioting about.My feeling is there is culpability in all of us as a society that has allowed the discrimination, exclusion and oppression to flourish. While there may not be direct responsibility for many, there is the indirect responsibility that comes from being bystanders. How many of us can say we regularly intervene when we see people's rights being violated? How many of us can consider ourselves allies to marginalized peoples - not just reactively, but proactively? Many people may be, but far, far more are not. We all love to trot out our respective constitutions, wave them about and proclaim loudly how important 'rights' are, and how we will fight for our rights. But at times, I think that only means some rights. Clearly, in society as it stands now, not all rights are deemed to have the same level of priority, or be worth fighting for... It is the lack of ally-ship, as well as a wilful failure to really and truly buy into the belief that we are all one that enables the kind of societal breakdowns we are seeing. It is the unwillingness to examine unconscious bias and how that affects decision making in all aspects of life. It was/is the allowing of the moral and ethical rot to invade and grow throughout society. Especially with regard to tolerance for the unfathomably corrupt banking and financial system, which has by far and order of magnitude been the biggest oppressor of all. Yes, I believe we are all culpable on some level. If we want to survive this Fourth Turning and come out on the other side with a better and more equitable society, then we must be better allies to and for everyone. That is my perspective on what it will take to truly create a world worth inheriting. Jan
DaveDD,
Thanks for chiming in, and no, you’re not as you described yourself, IMO. After months of thoughts to post here, I finally was provoked enough to grab a headline phrase without really worrying about the definition. So until I know better, you’re entitled to your interpretation. We may be more in harmony that you suspect.
As an 8-year follower of NTHE, I’ve had to ask myself, What is the alternate scenario, in which humanity pulls back from the brink of irretrievable environmental terminus. Other than the improbables of an angelic host or aliens riding to our rescue, I’d only come up with an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange, and a pandemic with at least the lethality of 1918 or the bubonic plagues. Or the Thwaites glacier breaking off some fine morning.
We got off easy this time, on that scale. And we’re seeing CO2 down, what, 17%? I await the next cycle of the Keeling Curve results. More out of scientific curiosity than futile hopes of a lasting effect.
I consider this pandemic to be a warning shot, and an invitation to take a different course, given us at a relatively cheap expense. 1918 was at least 60 million (young, “productive”) people dead. (Don’t you other elders feel like they’re getting ready to jettison us? Best to have your society’s ill intentions revealed to you in advance.)
Do I think we’ll take the message of warning seriously enough? Not bloody likely. But at least we’re on notice. My own escape plans have been blowing up of late, which is humbling on its own, but at least I’ve made them. Something involving shearing llamas, maybe, but I can see from the videos that they’re kind of ornery when you try to hold them down. 
Long pent-up rant follows:
This pandemic experience has been an inflexion point, in at least several ways, in all of our lives. A worldwide sharing, from elites servantless in their mansions, to locked down hungry poor in favelas worldwide.
I went out rarely, but wore a mask all through March. The rest of my semi-rural county, OK maybe 30%, only caught on in April. Before that, I had the sense that wearing the mask marked you as HAVING a disease, in most people’s minds.
In my mind, blind Conformity IS a disease.
All through March, regional officials had been parroting the party line about NOT using masks, (1) because they’re needed to meet the PPE shortages (as if I could drop off my 2009 SARS pandemic masks at the local hospital without them being trashed immediately), and (2) because you’ll wear them ineffectively, plus, they’ll give you false confidence. Sheesh! What sanctimonious condescension!
A month later, these leading lights were parroting the opposite position, decreeing when and where to wear masks. Without a blink of remorse for their stupidity just weeks before. Down the memory hole.
And let’s not get started on the current HCQ topic, which illuminates the complete, and completely corrupt, boobery on “both” sides of officialdom when it comes to groupthink.
Oh, and now the Party Line is, repetitively, “You’re not wearing the mask to protect yourself. You’re wearing it to protect other people from YOU.” Again, SHEESH! Sick of hearing them sanctimoniously droning on.
I’m fcking 70-something, supposedly in the vulnerable cohort. I’m wearing it to lower my inoculum in the air from the a-holes around me. (OK, that one unknown super-spreader.) Fck you – exactly when do you get to have some valued status deserving of survival in an industrial consumer society? Apparently never.
“Herd immunity”? I don’t want to be part of your f*cking herd. I’ve done enough throughout my lifetime to separate myself from your herd mentality, and I’ll continue to try to maintain that separation.
I’ve lived at least 50 years of my life (since the Vietnam War) realizing again and again that we are in the hands of complete and dangerous idiots, and just trying to stay out of their way, picking my occasional battles, most of which have resulted only in me having a clear conscience, and little else.
So, yes, “preppers” are anti-societal lunatics (probably dangerous, diseased, or otherwise demented hoarders), until the crises they’ve anticipated come upon us, and then, … crickets. “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”
Thank you for listening. The STI, Search for Terrestrial Intelligence, continues. Yes, there is intelligent life on Earth, just not enough of it.
The center of all problems is “over-population” from which the imbalance between poor and rich manifest.
The Earth has a maximum service capacity for 529 million humans after which this support capability starts to fail and all manner of problems manifest.
The Goblet of the Truth page LXIX explicitly states:
And you human beings of Earth, both young and old, are the ones who can no longer set down any roots in your life, you wander, demoralized and hopeless, bereft of work and home, with the result that you fight yourselves in all things and you hate your present existence, to the extent of finally bringing it to an end yourselves as has already been the case to an increasing extent since the twentieth century and will become ever more widespread in future. Therefore, with the third millennium, this time has already dawned in which these things have quickly found their beginning and will develop ever more rapidly the longer they persist. As a result, the number of diseases and plagues is increasing, as is the number of illnesses that severely impair drinking water and bodies of water because of poisons of various kinds, as well as the air, soil and foodstuffs which grow on trees and bushes as well as in fields, woods, gardens and greenhouses. And still your efforts to counteract all the disasters are in vain, as are your attempts to put a brake on this development, because it is becoming greater and greater and more catastrophic with every day, indeed with every hour and every minute, standing in relation to the rapid increase in overpopulation. Therefore, you human beings of Earth want to resurrect all that has been destroyed so far because of your guilt and irrational- ity as well as irresponsibility, just as you want to keep what has remained whole, whereby however all your efforts in this direction are in vain because you do not come to the right conclusion in rationality. And the right decision is solely and alone this, that the overpopulation be stopped through a worldwide regulation of births and in this wise your earthly humanity be reduced to an extent that is appropriate for the planet and for nature, in which case this extent has been defined in accordance with nature and the planet for the whole Earth at 529 million human beings.All these upheavals and the novel virus are a response to correcting the over-population imbalance. Contact Report 738 has stated that the 44% of the world's population that see the virus as a hoax will contract and spread the virus and will die as a result. Contact Report 730 and CR737 describes how the virus presents itself mildly at first leading to a seeming recovery with no trace of the virus only to have the virus re-appear impulse-based to afflict vital organs leading to death. It is vital that that the people of the Earth finally recognize the over-population problem as central and initiate a multi-year birth-stop followed by a year where births are allowed in a repeating cycle over a few hundred years until world population stabilizes below 529 million.
Belmonti –
I am new here, so I will guess that the photo I dropped in below will not post, CAPTCHA is being rather cruel to me, probably a wise choice by the PP site to not allow such. They do tell a thousand words, real people, real faces, receiving bags of food after being locked away from any earning for at least a month. If I learn how to do it correctly, I may offer more. They really were an experience for me, from a distance of 10,000 km.
In this week which is very “1968” for many of us (Mayor Daley must be lurking behind some tweets somewhere), I am relieved by having a non-Americentric view from daily contact with people who are in a different country, culture, and language. I am still a “visitor” peeking in, with very little confidence in my own understanding of their outlook on the world.
Thanks for your comment. Colombia has at least 5 million “desplazados”, on a par with Iraq and Syria, people forced to flee the decades of “civil war”, mostly attacks by paramilitary groups in the employ of rich elites. Tens of thousands killed. Sponsored by, guess who, our favorite Uncle.
The 2010 film, The Colors of the Mountain (Colores de la Montana), if you can find it, depicts the individual and family tragedies that are still occurring in rural villages in various regions.
I recently mentioned it to the family I’ve been involved with for several years and was told that that was their story, and why they were now in a city ghetto. Ten years ago, the house of their aunt in the countryside was bombed, several people killed, and the children were beaten while their mother was away working in the city. I suspect that is not the whole story, but I will not pry.
It is humbling, even intimidating, for me to be so close to the actual people chronicled so faithfully by Eduardo Galeano and others, the continuation of the massacres throughout Latin America encouraged by such as Reagan and tolerated by the American public in its stupidity.
Colombia’s pandemic mitigation has gone better than Peru’s and Ecuador’s, and certainly much better than Brazil’s faint effort. But confined to a small apartment, under police supervision, there is no way for day-to-day workers to feed a family.
My family heard children crying from hunger in neighboring apartments in their Bogota slum. I sent money and within two days, they were delivering food to 40 families. But dozens more requests came from surrounding calles and lists were made.
I sent $2000, they made bulk purchases of eggs, milk, rice, flour and more, and they fed 200 more families. The police provided vehicle help with deliveries, and space at their station to pack all the bags.
The following week, I sent another 2k and this time, the purchases bulked up even better, and 250 families received their food. I was overwhelmed by the efficiency and competence of these angels I thought I had known, as they transcended their own lifetime of deprivation in a time of crisis for others.
The police then drove them across the city to Soacha, which is an even more impoverished location of refugees, many living in tents, including Venezuelans unable to work or return home, and conditions hardly imaginable to us. There are videos you may search out. I can take a little bit at a time.
When I listen to Americans worrying whether their restaurants or colleges will reopen and “distance correctly”, well, you can imagine how I wonder at the disproportionalities we tolerate. I can pop a beer and go sit in my backyard.
I think that is enough for now. Just to finish saying, after a lifetime of considering theoretically the paths to economic justice, being put face to face with an emergency for the poorest of the poor has me still in a state of shock. It still has me re-evaluating myself and what I ought to live for. What it means to be a “good person” in comparison with people who may be far my moral superiors.
the protests aren’t just about Mr Floyd. its about wealth inequality. sometimes people are struggling to articulate their anxiety and need a vehicle to which they attach that anxiety. Mr Floyd is it
All roads lead back to the fiat money system:
Broken countries. Broken trade. Broken bond markets. Broken manufacturing. Broken businesses. Broken housing markets. Broken Labour markets. Broken people. Mal-investments. Wealth inequality. Big Government. Mass immigration. Overpopulation. Nature fighting back. Wars. Even climate change.
End the FED. End the ECB. End the BOJ. End the PBOC. End the BOE. End the SNB. End the RBA
Bring back The Classical Gold Standard.
This is the most wound up I have seen Hedges. He goes so far to say he didn’t weep for the precinct being burned down. For those who have a hard time understanding the riots you may want to consider you have never walked in their shoes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjSxXpoWoTI
According to the Medical Examiner for Hennepin County, there is no evidence that George Floyd was asphyxiated. Folks we have now entered into the Twilight Zone. These riots are nothing compared to what is coming.
For a black person in Amerika dying of natural causes means you died because you are black and nobody gives a shit.
I would not want to be a cop right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp8ISideoDE
Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself…and building 7 was brought down buy fire…amd Kennedy’s brains flew onto the trunk of the car because he was shot from behind.
The result is a lose-lose-lose situation, getting worse by the hour.
Tanker truck drives into Minneapolis protesters
https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idPiTm?now=true
Yes, any coordinated response by truckers may add another twist to the already twisted supply chain story. So I agree we should assess our personal food supplies and other preps and replenish to fill in any gaps to the extent possible.
No one said he was suffocated. So, that is what the coroner was looking for only and didnt find… My guess there are about 10 others ways the actions could kill you. Obviously, he died from this event, he begged for them to stop and he couldnt breathe… His whole body was in pain… - my guess is the subluxated his spinal nerves which would cause all the pain and also likely caused some form of respiratory paralysis. But one thing is for sure, he was murdered. He did not die of disease or natural causes
Its about the super police state we have. Its about total control and lack of welfare for the smaller ( poor ) citizens anymore. Police are animals. They are not even taught with the humanity of a military infantry . Police are public servants,. they have to put their lives on the line to protect us. Not the other way. Its enough of people being killed while dining with their kids - because they were a “reasonable threat” how is someone eating dinner with their kids while you invade the wrong house etc… a reasonable threat? The truth is unless the bullets are already flying at you , you should not be allowed to pull your gun… if you need to pull your gun and start firing because someone scratched their nose… reached for their wallet ( after being instructed to present id ) , or moved an inch of their arm, you shouldnt be a police officer if you are this freighted of everyday action with the public with no real knowledge they are deadly… Just assume all people want to kill you. The truth is cops are not killed often… to make them act like this … this is modern training and modern brainwashing that the public is little sheeple that must be controlled by the BIG bad STATE.
Yeah its pretty ironic that we cant print off money but the feds can.? But even though this does not give the right to execute someone in the street, how do you know the guy passing the funny money, is not a victim himself?
Things are going to get ugly. I am wondering if anyone here wants to start writing policy for the new contingent US govt when the current one is put out to pasture… If my health were better, I would have done this about 10 years ago. I am not sure Chris hasn’t thought about policy// I really dont want to govern, but I have a few great ideas where to start. Maybe its time to start writing all brand new policy. and create a new political party, and be ready to go.
WARNING: Additional “flashpoints” lie smoldering, ready to inflame further social, political and economic unrest and upheaval.
Note that the George Floyd funeral will be held in MN on Thursday, and his body flown back to Houston, TX for burial on Tuesday, June 9. (Source) Boxer Floyd Mayweather will be paying for all funeral expenses. (Source) There are multiple memorial services and marches planned for the weeks and months ahead.
These events are rich sources for media sound bytes, photos and raw video clips, talking-head commentaries, and hard-hitting opinion pieces and reactive tweets. Even with the best of intentions and planning, more peaceful events will most certainly be exploited or hijacked by those with other, possibly malicious agendas.
Expect more flashpoints thereafter, with charges to be levied (or not) and inquiries and trials to be conducted (or not).
Meanwhile, there’s a pandemic going on, waxing and waning throughout protests, elections, changing seasons and extreme weather, and grotesquely distorted ““markets””.
Emotions and tensions are getting hotter while consumers, small businesses, NGOs and governments at all levels have already burned through whatever sparse financial “reserves” they had over the past few months. No one trusts that the “managers” can manage (or lead, print, lie, or force) a “fix” to this situation.
The rate of deterioration and intensity of push-back from all sides is really stunning. Things are spiraling wildly out of control with potentially catastrophic, long-lasting consequences. It is hard to comprehend, and almost impossible to really prepare for such life-altering, rapid change.
Hope and pray for the best, but plan for the worst.
Additional self-defense commentary by Mike Adams: As the world burns… the real forces behind the uprising, and how to protect yourself NOW – NaturalNews.com
"I was about to write an article explaining how the Federal Reserve’s mass money printing is flooding the rich with wealth while the working poor are being looted and oppressed, and why that’s the real root cause behind the riots that are now spreading across the USA. It turns out that Chris Martenson beat me to it, and he already covered the topic brilliantly. So I’m presenting here the full article from Christ Martenson at PeakProsperity.com, who has also been one of the most insightful analysts on the covid-19 situation from the very start. And by the way, I’ve never seen Chris recommend what he’s now recommending in this article… this is a first. Read this article if you want to understand what’s happening right now in America, and follow the advice here if you want to survive. I’ll add some additional thoughts below his article."
Lines of cars around ATMs at the banks in Maryland. What is going on?