Sorry, but it won't be so slow. The financial shock will be cataclysmic when it comes.
Hemingway had it right - "How do you go bankrupt - gradually then suddenly". Some day we will wake up and realise that global debt levels are unsustainable and fiat currency is not worth the paper the bank notes are printed on.
But when? - that's the million/billion/trillion/quadrillion dollar question. [I have a quadrillion pengo note from Hungary 1946, and more recently a 10 trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe 2008 - neither would buy you a coffee at the time.]
The threat of violence seems to be something most countries are now not impressed with. Even Saudi Arabia or more accurately, the house of Saud, has started accepting non-USD payments for their oil. That was unthinkable just a decade ago.
Others are likewise emboldened. The big question of any fiat currency is when do the people stop using it? When inflation hits 10% a month barter takes over as nobody accepts paper except at a huge premium. That becomes a self reinforced feedback loop.
We are near a transition point from Republic to Empire. Either a pagan evil slavish empire importing endless third worlders for globocorps with strict censorship, apathetic unhealthy people and managerial female-tyrant rule. That could last a century or two but would be utterly third world. Or an populist Empire that reasserts the sanctity of the American nation, most likely with a Christian character, with a Caesar who forcibly dismantles the managerial bureaucracy and institutions like the Fed and redistributes the farmland and houses owned by hedge funds to the people.The Republic will become an Empire, the former would be the frog boiling in a pot and the latter would be some cataclysmic reactionary period.
BTL, all our leaders from both parties have participated in this massive charade pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, giving us a bigger subsidies, redistributing wealth, wasting billions of government spending on useless studies, building bridges that go no where, building train lines that stop after 5 miles and $500 military grade hammers. An average housewife could have stopped this. Its all status quo gravy train.
The US is no Hemingway and no Zimbabwe. Thosie two had to deal with bankruptcies, debt collectors, etc. Who exactly the debt collector for the US, I wonder? Space aliens, Bill Gates? BlacRock's or the Fed's security detail? The chimaera of US Government "debt" is just an idiotic red herring in order to justify more robbery of the population through more "taxes", nothing else. Just like "saving the planet" from the scary "carbon".
I can't listen to politicians, they are exactly that - hollow men with hollow words. They don't mean what they say, their scripts are written then thrown away and forgotten. The rhetoric of democracy is already meaningless.
Hang on now--why are we "led?" Aren't we free people? Don't we elect public servants obliged to serve our needs and interests? If they don't, why do we keep them?
If we gave up our freedom, and started to think of our public servants as leaders, we ought to smack ourselves upside our own heads for our credulity and laziness. Those people are us, too.
Yes indeed. But it has been we the people who let them do this. We're not Eloi. They're not Morlocks. It's our fellow Americans, fellow Canadians, fellow Brits, fellow Germans.
I think the biggest lie perpetrated on us (except the Germans) was that the WWII vets were the Greatest Generation. They were the Most Destroyed Generation. Many of their parents fled revolution and slaughter to get to North America and Britain only to experience the Great Depression. Many of their older siblings/uncles/cousins died in or were permanently destroyed by WWI.
Then just as they were of age to maybe manage to get the education their parents were unable to access, they were drafted to fight in WWII. The ones who made it home were permanently damaged too, visibly or invisibly or both. The ones unfit for drafting were the second or third choices of women whose first choices went off to war.
All these people wanted, after peace finally came, was to raise their children in a new miraculous prosperity no one had ever seen before. But all sorts of ghosts and missed chances haunted the nice little homes they were able to provide for their families, and their kids didn't grow up in such healthy families but meanwhile they had too much leisure and comfort to turn them into capable adults.
And still those heroic WWI and WWII epic movies are pumped out by Hollywood etc. so we don't ever look at the reality of what endless suffering and insecurity do to people and unto the however many generations after.
Agree. Completely. My grandfather spent three and a half years in "the mud of Flanders", and Dad "wasted almost five years of his life jumping out of perfectly good airplanes" as a combat medic in Europe. Neither would talk about their experiences. At all.
My dad was on Okinawa. The experience didn't do much good for the effects of his wretched childhood experiences. He was a terrible husband and father and then reinvented himself being the wonderful grandfather to the children of other people's children.
House of cards falling. UK Tory party coming undone, plenty of hollow people there. Some truths finally coming out from the dysfunctional US gov’t federal “health” departments. WHO treaty stuck in limbo, UK ONS lied about vaxxed people dying within 20 days of receiving their covid vaxx. The ONS stated all those who died in 2021 were unvaxxed and now everyone knows the ONS LIED!!!! Trump showed up in the Bronx and people of all colour came out to greet him. Many said we are all Americans, we all want the same thing. I see more hope right now than I have in a long time. Probably because I only read alternative media. I have hope because I know people are pretty much the same. The majority just want to live their lives freely, not under some tyrannical rule and that is why Biden will lose, the tories will lose and anyone else who locked down their citizens for a “plandemic” will lose.
I suspect "it" has already ended. The Pax Americana, following WWII, wobbles on it's last, very shaky, legs. The world is watching the US kleptoctacy self destruct as they approach, or surpass, sub-Saharan or eastern European levels of corruption.
The movement, around the world, to trade in other than the US dollar, and the recent bromance twixt Xi and Putin are simply business-as-normal. A new system replacing an old, no longer functioning one.
And 'The Hollow men' might have been described as "one of the most influential poems of the 20th century", but I think his greatest, by far, contribution to the world was to inspire Webber to put 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats' to music.
A friend of mine who is now a retired English professor said to me recently that Elliot is a poet he has never paid attention to! I was honestly shocked. We had been talking about the Third Man Syndrome. I can also attest to the fact that Elliot’s work is hardly ever assigned to undergraduate students and hasn’t been for a few decades now. Given that most English departments are Woke now, I doubt anyone bothers with Elliot even at the graduate level. When I left college teaching 4 years ago after 34 years, one of my colleagues in the English Department was a newly minted Ph.D. who told me had never read Elliot and couldn’t name a single poem of his. So.
May 24·edited May 25Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com
One of my favorite poems by TSE! I was going to do my dissertation on THE WASTE LAND, but far too many dissertations had been written on that poem already. In retrospect, at that time in my life, these two Eliot works made me an existentialist or tipped the scale in that direction, along with philosophy classes highlighting the works of existentialists Sartre and Heidegger. After I studied these, I no longer believed in God … or life after death. I could no longer see any meaning in it. Ironically, the past four years have changed me. I am now 100% certain there is life after death … and meaning, although we have trouble figuring out what it is with our 3-D brains. And, yes, there is a higher power, call this entity what you will. I also believe every person has a personal guardian some call an angel, others a guardian spirit. To avoid making this response more protracted than it already is, I’ll refrain from explaining events that convinced me. … Just before I read this Substack article, I was talking to a friend about the current state of the human condition. In the process, I was hit with an epiphany—Over many centuries, we’ve been made to believe we are only mind and body, a struggling, miserable dichotomy. In reality, I proposed, we are actually a triad—body, mind and soul. My atheist friend commented, “Isn’t that like the Trinity?” I think he might be right. I can’t think of a better analogy.
That's ironic, because Eliot was a spiritual seeker himself, who eventually converted to Anglo-Catholicism (that branch of Anglicanism which seeks reunion with Rome).
Yes, it is surprising someone who wrote those early poems in his late 20s and early 30s would eventually convert to a traditional religion. Sometimes circumstances open one’s eyes to possibilities beyond negation.
Love the poem! This is off topic, relating to the madness in LA and at UCLA, in which it turns out medical students can't name arteries. If you get sick in Southern California, take an Uber across the desert or the Sierra Nevada to sane medical treatment!
There are 194 Countries, in WHO and in each case, it is the Politicians who drove the WHO false Covid Pandemic from February 2020, by putting in place "Disinformation Laws" from May 2020 to June 2023 to force as many to get vaccinated as possible. Those same people who we the majority, voted into Politics to look after us and our interests and they live amongst us - what seems to be the case is that Big Pharma pays them large lump sums when they quit Politics - but how can that be, the Politicians are paid huge incomes from the public purse, with lurks and perks, to keep them honest - surely any Big Pharma paid Politician is corrupt, as were the decisions they made to get everyone vaccinated, without knowledgable consent the purpose of the vaccines, or their Military end game, being what?
Don't you think it interesting that nobody has challenged Moderna about their patented Covid-19 virus CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG in 2013 - they stick with the Wuhan variety, even when evidence shows otherwise, or say they don't know where it came from - why is that?
All those nasty fascist English pedant professors used to make students feel there was only one correct reading and that you had to get all the allusions or you were a plebian philistine. If you just let it wash over you and see what jumps out at you, what means something to you, you will get enough of it.. A clue is in the epigraph, what the black cabin boy says in Conrad's Heart of Darkness about Colonel Kurtz' death. Many many rewritings of Heart of Darkness, maybe hundreds, including the movie Apocalypse Now. I love Eliot, but I am doddering now, and didn't when I was forced to read him. Here's a little Auden as an antidote to despair:
Late in life, Auden insisted that "we must love one another or die," should've been "love one another and die" My favorite thing he said late in life is "my face is a geological catastrophe"
I don't think it ends as quietly and cleanly as that, at least not in America. Too many people that can live self sufficiently that have hundreds of millions of guns and trillions of rounds of ammo. Maybe most in or near the city, but 10% will never go along and will fight within whatever laws are enforced fairly. If not fairly, they will fight fire with fire to live free.
Many of us are not indoctrinated to do as we're told when it's clearly stupid or evil.
And it only takes 5% of the population to decide they cannot live within the rules set by illegitimate rulers to spark the flame of independence.
They might drone most of us to death, but not all.
Thanks for your reference and posting part of The Wasteland. A prophet is necessarily a poet -- the goodness of Eliot's poetry frequently rises to prophecy.
I memorized East Coker IV from the Four Quartets for sanity during my years in nursing school. You might look up David Lynch's homage to that section of Eliot's work in a six minute clip from his 80's movie Dune: Baron Harkonnen -- "He who controls the spice controls the universe".
Sorry, but it won't be so slow. The financial shock will be cataclysmic when it comes.
Hemingway had it right - "How do you go bankrupt - gradually then suddenly". Some day we will wake up and realise that global debt levels are unsustainable and fiat currency is not worth the paper the bank notes are printed on.
But when? - that's the million/billion/trillion/quadrillion dollar question. [I have a quadrillion pengo note from Hungary 1946, and more recently a 10 trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe 2008 - neither would buy you a coffee at the time.]
The USD was and still is backed by faith which in turn is backed by fear of gross kinetic and/or nuclear annihilation.
Hungary, Weimar, Rome etc didn't have such a corner on violence.
It will end as all empires do, but probably much slower and not like anyone of us can guess.
The threat of violence seems to be something most countries are now not impressed with. Even Saudi Arabia or more accurately, the house of Saud, has started accepting non-USD payments for their oil. That was unthinkable just a decade ago.
Others are likewise emboldened. The big question of any fiat currency is when do the people stop using it? When inflation hits 10% a month barter takes over as nobody accepts paper except at a huge premium. That becomes a self reinforced feedback loop.
We are near a transition point from Republic to Empire. Either a pagan evil slavish empire importing endless third worlders for globocorps with strict censorship, apathetic unhealthy people and managerial female-tyrant rule. That could last a century or two but would be utterly third world. Or an populist Empire that reasserts the sanctity of the American nation, most likely with a Christian character, with a Caesar who forcibly dismantles the managerial bureaucracy and institutions like the Fed and redistributes the farmland and houses owned by hedge funds to the people.The Republic will become an Empire, the former would be the frog boiling in a pot and the latter would be some cataclysmic reactionary period.
BTL, all our leaders from both parties have participated in this massive charade pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, giving us a bigger subsidies, redistributing wealth, wasting billions of government spending on useless studies, building bridges that go no where, building train lines that stop after 5 miles and $500 military grade hammers. An average housewife could have stopped this. Its all status quo gravy train.
Haha. Thank you; well, yes: The Winchester Mystery State.
The US is no Hemingway and no Zimbabwe. Thosie two had to deal with bankruptcies, debt collectors, etc. Who exactly the debt collector for the US, I wonder? Space aliens, Bill Gates? BlacRock's or the Fed's security detail? The chimaera of US Government "debt" is just an idiotic red herring in order to justify more robbery of the population through more "taxes", nothing else. Just like "saving the planet" from the scary "carbon".
This is why WEF retired fuhrer says you will own nothing and be happy--he was right--nothing will be affordable to own once TSHTF.
Enjoy life, have fun, love big.
And stand up for what you believe....
I can't listen to politicians, they are exactly that - hollow men with hollow words. They don't mean what they say, their scripts are written then thrown away and forgotten. The rhetoric of democracy is already meaningless.
Hang on now--why are we "led?" Aren't we free people? Don't we elect public servants obliged to serve our needs and interests? If they don't, why do we keep them?
If we gave up our freedom, and started to think of our public servants as leaders, we ought to smack ourselves upside our own heads for our credulity and laziness. Those people are us, too.
One might postulate that it has been a long, long time since we were a "free people".
Or since "public servants" were *obliged* to do ANYTHING, much less "serve our needs and interests".
But we have, sadly, given up our freedom.
And handed control over our lives to the narcissistic sociopathic kleptocrats among us.
This does not end well.
Yes indeed. But it has been we the people who let them do this. We're not Eloi. They're not Morlocks. It's our fellow Americans, fellow Canadians, fellow Brits, fellow Germans.
I think the biggest lie perpetrated on us (except the Germans) was that the WWII vets were the Greatest Generation. They were the Most Destroyed Generation. Many of their parents fled revolution and slaughter to get to North America and Britain only to experience the Great Depression. Many of their older siblings/uncles/cousins died in or were permanently destroyed by WWI.
Then just as they were of age to maybe manage to get the education their parents were unable to access, they were drafted to fight in WWII. The ones who made it home were permanently damaged too, visibly or invisibly or both. The ones unfit for drafting were the second or third choices of women whose first choices went off to war.
All these people wanted, after peace finally came, was to raise their children in a new miraculous prosperity no one had ever seen before. But all sorts of ghosts and missed chances haunted the nice little homes they were able to provide for their families, and their kids didn't grow up in such healthy families but meanwhile they had too much leisure and comfort to turn them into capable adults.
And still those heroic WWI and WWII epic movies are pumped out by Hollywood etc. so we don't ever look at the reality of what endless suffering and insecurity do to people and unto the however many generations after.
Agree. Completely. My grandfather spent three and a half years in "the mud of Flanders", and Dad "wasted almost five years of his life jumping out of perfectly good airplanes" as a combat medic in Europe. Neither would talk about their experiences. At all.
My dad was on Okinawa. The experience didn't do much good for the effects of his wretched childhood experiences. He was a terrible husband and father and then reinvented himself being the wonderful grandfather to the children of other people's children.
House of cards falling. UK Tory party coming undone, plenty of hollow people there. Some truths finally coming out from the dysfunctional US gov’t federal “health” departments. WHO treaty stuck in limbo, UK ONS lied about vaxxed people dying within 20 days of receiving their covid vaxx. The ONS stated all those who died in 2021 were unvaxxed and now everyone knows the ONS LIED!!!! Trump showed up in the Bronx and people of all colour came out to greet him. Many said we are all Americans, we all want the same thing. I see more hope right now than I have in a long time. Probably because I only read alternative media. I have hope because I know people are pretty much the same. The majority just want to live their lives freely, not under some tyrannical rule and that is why Biden will lose, the tories will lose and anyone else who locked down their citizens for a “plandemic” will lose.
We can only hope!
I suspect "it" has already ended. The Pax Americana, following WWII, wobbles on it's last, very shaky, legs. The world is watching the US kleptoctacy self destruct as they approach, or surpass, sub-Saharan or eastern European levels of corruption.
The movement, around the world, to trade in other than the US dollar, and the recent bromance twixt Xi and Putin are simply business-as-normal. A new system replacing an old, no longer functioning one.
It ain't "gonna happen". It is happening.
Now.
My favorite poet. Thank you. I thought he had been all but forgotten. ❤️
Disagree that Elliot has been "forgotten".
And 'The Hollow men' might have been described as "one of the most influential poems of the 20th century", but I think his greatest, by far, contribution to the world was to inspire Webber to put 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats' to music.
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/eliotts-practicalcats/eliotts-practicalcats-01-h.html
A friend of mine who is now a retired English professor said to me recently that Elliot is a poet he has never paid attention to! I was honestly shocked. We had been talking about the Third Man Syndrome. I can also attest to the fact that Elliot’s work is hardly ever assigned to undergraduate students and hasn’t been for a few decades now. Given that most English departments are Woke now, I doubt anyone bothers with Elliot even at the graduate level. When I left college teaching 4 years ago after 34 years, one of my colleagues in the English Department was a newly minted Ph.D. who told me had never read Elliot and couldn’t name a single poem of his. So.
One of my favorite poems by TSE! I was going to do my dissertation on THE WASTE LAND, but far too many dissertations had been written on that poem already. In retrospect, at that time in my life, these two Eliot works made me an existentialist or tipped the scale in that direction, along with philosophy classes highlighting the works of existentialists Sartre and Heidegger. After I studied these, I no longer believed in God … or life after death. I could no longer see any meaning in it. Ironically, the past four years have changed me. I am now 100% certain there is life after death … and meaning, although we have trouble figuring out what it is with our 3-D brains. And, yes, there is a higher power, call this entity what you will. I also believe every person has a personal guardian some call an angel, others a guardian spirit. To avoid making this response more protracted than it already is, I’ll refrain from explaining events that convinced me. … Just before I read this Substack article, I was talking to a friend about the current state of the human condition. In the process, I was hit with an epiphany—Over many centuries, we’ve been made to believe we are only mind and body, a struggling, miserable dichotomy. In reality, I proposed, we are actually a triad—body, mind and soul. My atheist friend commented, “Isn’t that like the Trinity?” I think he might be right. I can’t think of a better analogy.
That's ironic, because Eliot was a spiritual seeker himself, who eventually converted to Anglo-Catholicism (that branch of Anglicanism which seeks reunion with Rome).
Yes, it is surprising someone who wrote those early poems in his late 20s and early 30s would eventually convert to a traditional religion. Sometimes circumstances open one’s eyes to possibilities beyond negation.
Love the poem! This is off topic, relating to the madness in LA and at UCLA, in which it turns out medical students can't name arteries. If you get sick in Southern California, take an Uber across the desert or the Sierra Nevada to sane medical treatment!
https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
There are 194 Countries, in WHO and in each case, it is the Politicians who drove the WHO false Covid Pandemic from February 2020, by putting in place "Disinformation Laws" from May 2020 to June 2023 to force as many to get vaccinated as possible. Those same people who we the majority, voted into Politics to look after us and our interests and they live amongst us - what seems to be the case is that Big Pharma pays them large lump sums when they quit Politics - but how can that be, the Politicians are paid huge incomes from the public purse, with lurks and perks, to keep them honest - surely any Big Pharma paid Politician is corrupt, as were the decisions they made to get everyone vaccinated, without knowledgable consent the purpose of the vaccines, or their Military end game, being what?
Don't you think it interesting that nobody has challenged Moderna about their patented Covid-19 virus CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG in 2013 - they stick with the Wuhan variety, even when evidence shows otherwise, or say they don't know where it came from - why is that?
This is my go to clip whenever things feel really dark - or in this case hollow.
https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=350902236433441&vanity=Michael.B.Beckwith
This reminded me of the Dead Hand or Sistema Perimetr. Likely a factor in the Ukraine debacle.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/dead-hand.htm
I don't get it?
TS Eliot was saying we are all sad losers. It's the intellectual way.
All those nasty fascist English pedant professors used to make students feel there was only one correct reading and that you had to get all the allusions or you were a plebian philistine. If you just let it wash over you and see what jumps out at you, what means something to you, you will get enough of it.. A clue is in the epigraph, what the black cabin boy says in Conrad's Heart of Darkness about Colonel Kurtz' death. Many many rewritings of Heart of Darkness, maybe hundreds, including the movie Apocalypse Now. I love Eliot, but I am doddering now, and didn't when I was forced to read him. Here's a little Auden as an antidote to despair:
....From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame. https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
Late in life, Auden insisted that "we must love one another or die," should've been "love one another and die" My favorite thing he said late in life is "my face is a geological catastrophe"
I understand.
- Luc
I don't think it ends as quietly and cleanly as that, at least not in America. Too many people that can live self sufficiently that have hundreds of millions of guns and trillions of rounds of ammo. Maybe most in or near the city, but 10% will never go along and will fight within whatever laws are enforced fairly. If not fairly, they will fight fire with fire to live free.
Many of us are not indoctrinated to do as we're told when it's clearly stupid or evil.
And it only takes 5% of the population to decide they cannot live within the rules set by illegitimate rulers to spark the flame of independence.
They might drone most of us to death, but not all.
Thanks for your reference and posting part of The Wasteland. A prophet is necessarily a poet -- the goodness of Eliot's poetry frequently rises to prophecy.
I memorized East Coker IV from the Four Quartets for sanity during my years in nursing school. You might look up David Lynch's homage to that section of Eliot's work in a six minute clip from his 80's movie Dune: Baron Harkonnen -- "He who controls the spice controls the universe".
Orwell quote…
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears [and genitalia]. It was their final, most essential command.