American flag in the darkness. Microphone and flag in darkness. Stage after the concert. Show has already ended.
by Bill Bonner
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
– George Orwell, “1984”
“Today, a darkness spreads across the country. From coast to coast, we are benighted…in a total eclipse of good sense. We ended yesterday wondering what future generations will think of us. We take away our monuments in the dead of night, and spit on the graves of our ancestors in the light of day.
Smashing statues: A now-famous photo shows a stout young woman in North Carolina stomping on a statue of a Confederate soldier:
It is not a monument to the Confederacy or to the generals or to slavery. It is merely a statue remembering the sacrifices and suffering of ordinary soldiers. The common man in the South had no truck with slavery. He owned no slaves. Instead, his earnings were reduced because he had to compete with slave labor. But when the call went out to defend his country, he took the patriotic bait, as men always do. More than a quarter of a million soldiers died on the Southern side alone – killed by bullets or disease, hunger or cold.
You’d think that people today – comfortable in their air-conditioned apartments, fed to a fault, and succored by student loans, Obamacare, unemployment comp, and disability – could find it in their plump little hearts to forgive the mistakes of their forebears and honor their suffering.
Nope. Instead, we trash our grandfathers’ heroes, kick their gods, and smash their statues. Yes, dear reader, today we are under assault, too. We suffer neither cold nor hunger. We take up arms not to protect our homeland, but to inflict murder and mayhem on people half a world away who can do us no real harm. But today, we are attacked by one preposterous thing after another, each of them even more absurd than the last.
Doom update: Before we get to that, we promised to revisit our Doom Index. You’ll recall that our research department has put together 11 indicators that – when aggregated – have coincided with the last two major blow-ups. Has doom come closer? We asked our chief researcher, Joe Withrow: ‘U.S. junk bond prices – one of our 11 indicators – have fallen nearly 2% since our last update. The ISM Manufacturing Index and railcar use – two of our other indicators – have fallen as well. None of these moves are extreme enough to warrant the crash flag prior to getting third-quarter data, but they are worth mentioning.’
‘And on a side note relating to your Diary entries this week: I got a call from family in western Virginia. Rumors are the young lefties are planning to march on the historic Robert E Lee Hotel in Lexington. The fruits of an American education, I suppose. It is beginning to look as though there is an inverse correlation between total student loans outstanding and total logic outstanding. If we could only figure out how to make that a Market Insight!’ Yes, Joe is onto something. The more time people spend in schools, the dumber they get. And now, the typical American’s brain has been so dulled by the internet and education that he can’t think straight.
Bigger storm: We were supposed to believe, for example, that the Russians hijacked the US presidential election, putting Donald J Trump in the White House. Congress imposed stiffer sanctions on Russia by an almost universal vote in favor, despite a lack of evidence the hack ever happened. Even if it had happened, it is hard to see how disclosing the internal deliberations of the Democratic National Committee would have made voters less able to make an informed choice!
Then we were supposed to believe that the president of Syria had attacked his own people with chemical weapons. In response, Team Trump committed an act of war against a foreign nation, even though many experts thought it unlikely that the Syrian government was behind the chemical attack.
And now, we are supposed to believe that Mr Trump is a ‘racist’ and a ‘white supremacist’. His Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin – a Jew – was urged by his Yale classmates to resign. No more proof that today’s education system turns its students into morons is needed. These are Yale graduates…hundreds of them: ‘We call upon you, as our friend, our classmate, and as a fellow American, to resign in protest of President Trump’s support of Nazism and white supremacy. We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing.’
What? There is no evidence of any kind showing Trump to be a Nazi supporter. A fool? An imbecile? An opportunist? Maybe. But with all his obvious and egregious faults, why accuse him of being something he isn’t?
But behind the flurries lies a much bigger storm. There, the howling winds of fake finance blow up so much dust that the typical person cannot see clearly. If he is ready to believe that we can all get rich by borrowing money that never existed from people who never earned it…and never pay it back…he is ready to believe anything! Today, the sun hides its face in shame and embarrassment.”
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http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-darkness-is-spreading-across-us.html