We Are In Trouble

 I've had this post rolling around in my head for quite some time now. It's more of a feeling than anything else, but I think that we are officially in Trouble with a capital T. And by "we" I mean everyone on the planet. I've never wanted to be wrong about a prediction so bad, but I think something really big and really bad is coming. And it isn't the case that there is just one thing badly out of whack that everyone can point to, like in 2008 with the housing crisis. It's more like every single thing, every institution, the very fabric of society, the way people interact with each other, is rotten to the core, past the point of being fixable. 

First, let's look at some numbers. Did you know that nearly 80% of all US dollars in existence were printed in the last two years? It's easy to read a sentence like that and just kinda keep it moving. But think about it for a minute. Without a degree in economics or any special knowledge, does that seem like a good thing to you? And this isn't some whacky conspiracy theory, this is according to the Federal Reserve itself. Look at some of these graphs:

Does that look sustainable to you? There's this new idea out there that since we're off the gold standard anyway, governments can simply print as much money as they want. This idea, of course coming out of the insipid and awful world of 'academia', is loosely called "Modern Monetary Theory", obviously abbreviated to MMT. [Here's a real good rule of thumb I've learned over the years; whenever you see lots of acronyms, you're in trouble. The more acronyms, the more trouble.] Basically, a bunch of literal pencil pushers and other cretins who live in dark, stuffy rooms on college campuses and dreary government buildings all got together and created lots of fancy graphs and equations and definitions of things with words like "heterodox" and "vertical vs horizontal transactions." The conclusion was, 'hey we're creating money out of thin air anyways, why not create a shitload of it!' The former chair of The Fed, Alan Greenspan, actually said this: "The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default." Zero possibility. Right.

Anyone with a basic understanding of the world can probably grasp the fact that you can't just print as much money as you want. Only someone with a graduate degree could be stupid enough to think something like that is feasible. And the reason is simple. Wealth is how much money you own in relation to how much money is in circulation. Your wealth is the percentage of the total that you own. If you have 10 apples, but only 100 apples exist, you own 10% of all apples. Most people don't own any apples, some have one or maybe two. You would be "apple rich". Now let's say a million apples fall from the sky. Now everyone has at least 10, some even have thousands. Suddenly, you're apple poor. What happened?! The amount of apples you own didn't change! Well obviously, the apples falling from the sky is what happened. The value of every single apple dropped enormously and instantly.  A 10 year old can grasp this concept. 

When I made my first Bitcoin post here, one of my major reasons for investing in BTC was the amount of dollar printing the Fed was doing. I said it way back in 2020 that it would have catastrophic results and that inflation would skyrocket. All while the Fed kept saying that inflation was only "transitory". Now here we are, 2 years later, and of course inflation is WAY up and the Fed has had to admit they were wrong about the "transitory" nature of this inflation. How did a nobody fucking sports betting blogger know more about future inflation than the Chairman of the Federal Fucking Reserve?? It's either one of two possibilities: they were being sincere and really didn't think all this money printing would cause inflation, or they did know and they just lied and did it anyway. They're either lying or incompetent, and honestly, I don't know which one is worse. 

I just saw in the news the other day, a few states are considering MORE STIMULUS money to go out to citizens to pay for the higher gas prices. That is a take your breath away kind of stupid. It's like starting a fire and trying to put it out with gasoline because gas is wet and fires don't like wet things. It's one reason I think we are in capital T Trouble. 

Inflation is such an insidious problem because I don't think many people really understand it. It affects absolutely everything. It's why the cost of every single thing is way up. Besides greatly diminishing your purchasing power, it also diminishes the value of your past labor. Every dollar you earned in the past, every hour of work, is now worth a lot less than it was at the time. Inflation is like a tax that no one votes for and no one gets anything out of. It's a real sneaky way to move wealth from the lower and middle class to the upper class. If you don't have investments that at the very least keep up with the current rate of inflation (which, by the way, is probably around 20%. Not the 8% CPI the government likes to use) then you're going backwards. And even if you somehow can keep up with inflation, all the money you made in the past just became worth a lot less.

If this were our only problem, I'd still think we'd be fucked. Just maybe not "learn to farm, fast" fucked. But our monetary foibles are only a piece of this shit pie. 

Have you noticed that rule of law seems to be eroding? People walk into a CVS, take what they want, and walk out. While being videotaped. No one stops them, and even more damaging, no one seems to be even arresting them. Smash and grabs are a regular thing now. Do you know how detrimental this is to a society? If we can't freely trade with each other anymore, you can pretty much kiss the world as we know it goodbye.

Violent crime is way up in most major cities. Free speech is under attack. The basic law of self defense is suddenly up for grabs. Elementary school kids are having their minds absolutely poisoned. Racial tensions are as high as I can ever remember. Men are breaking womens fucking skulls in legally sanctioned MMA fights, and we can't even agree on what a man or woman IS. The mainstream media is so utterly compromised that it's a joke. "Hate crimes" get exposed for being hoaxes with virtually no repercussions. Actually, they get praised!! Here you have someone talking about Jussie Smollet saying "even if it was a hoax, it's low key noble" (to an eruption of applause from the audience). It's jaw dropping. The very fabric of society seems to be tearing at the seams. 

And I keep thinking, what if Covid was only like 5% worse? It had a survivial rate of roughly 98%. What if it was only 90%? Or 80%? In the middle of the panic, my fiancee had to take a covid test for work. The at home tests were all sold out, so she was waiting in a long line at a public testing place. She got there before they even opened and was still in an hours long line. 9 AM came and went, and they didn't open. There were workers inside but they remained closed. People started getting mad, some were even banging on the glass. Eventually a cop showed up and went inside to see what was going on. Apparently, not enough workers showed up so they couldn't perform the tests and they were afraid to open and tell people. So they announced to everyone that this testing site was now closed and they weren't testing anybody. People were understandably pissed off. My fiancee overheard a woman on the phone say she was going to another test site nearby. Others heard her too and a bunch of them RAN to their cars to get to the other test site before they shut down. 

Does that seem just a little bit concerning to you? It's like the first half of a zombie movie. We've seen how we react to a virus with a 2% death rate (and even that stat is probably way over exaggerated since there seems to be no distinction made between people who died because of covid vs those who died WITH covid. If someone dies in a car accident and happened to have covid, would you consider that a covid death? The CDC does). Imagine if the death rate were 5%? Or 20%?? Imagine if everything we saw during the pandemic was 10 times worse. It's hard to even fathom.

And the sad part is I don't even think the worst is behind us. We have no idea how badly we damaged an entire generation of children with our hysterical, over the top reaction to covid. A weird thing I've been seeing out and about is families walking around outside with ONLY their little kids wearing masks. Lots of schools still have mask mandates!

Oh and by the way, the data is starting to leak out about the affects of social media on children, and boy is it bad. I would bet a good chunk of change that if we're still all here in 30 years, we're going to look back on children using social media the same way we look back on doctors prescribing cigarettes to pregnant women. Maybe even worse. 

There's a phycologist named Jonathan Haidt who I've been following for a while. He's all over the affects of social media on children, and the conclusions he draws are absolutely terrifying. Depression and anxiety are through the roof for little kids, mainly young girls. This guy is no nut job either, far from it. He thinks we're about 10 years away from our democracy failing. I highly recommend you check him out, but here's a quick quote: 

'In 2019, Haidt postulated that American democracy may fail in the next 30 years, but he now says with his understanding of social media, it could be more like five to 10 years if Donald Trump is re-elected in 2024.

"I think the ability of a deliberative democracy to have a deliberation is declining and the ability of people to believe crazy, ridiculous stuff is ever growing. So I think these are all threats to open societies.

"By fail, I don't necessarily mean civil war, but I think becoming a dysfunctional nation like some of the least functional Latin American nations with sporadic violence ... I don't know what's going to happen, and probably I'm wrong in my pessimism but catastrophic outcomes that seemed like one in a hundred 10 years ago, now seem like one in two or one in three."'

Professional, public thinkers like him don't say stuff like that lightly. A 50% chance of the United States becoming Nicaragua, or worse. Awesome

There's plenty more problems, too. The declining birth rate of industrialized nations is a ticking time bomb that no one seems to notice. The explosion of illegal immigration into the U.S. and the catastrophic effects on our demographics. The sudden and bizarre sexualization of children. The FBI is compromised. The ACLU is now literally fighting against free speech. I honestly can't think of a single American institution that hasn't been thoroughly captured by evil, partisan politics and power hungry people with their own agendas. Not even Disney is safe anymore!

It's easy to dismiss all of this as some conspiracy theory, Alex Jones type whacko shit. Three years ago I would have too. And I'm not saying that there's some shadowy group out there, deliberately trying to stoke racial tension and general unrest and upend America as we know it. What I am saying though, is if someone were trying to do that, it'd look a whole lot like what's going on right now.

Personally, I'm officially starting to prepare. I need to learn how to grow and maintain a garden. I need to learn how to collect and process rainwater. I'm going to start buying some seeds. Weapons, ammo, first aid stuff. Lots of other things. I can't believe I'm saying this shit either but I honestly think that's where we're at.

I'm still obviously very much into crytpo and am still actively trading. My next post will be some updates on where I'm at with that and how the future of crypto might look. But I had to get this off my chest. I hope to god I'm wrong, but the time for bravery was about 3 years ago. I think now it's time for preparation.