What is the Transition? Part 7

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Thundering Heard

In the context of the Transition, what are the detectable trends with people?

COMMUNICATION / CONNECTEDNESS: Enabled by the internet and by the radical expansion of telecommunication and video technologies, there is explosive growth in communication. Some communicate almost constantly, staying connected during nearly all waking hours. This is bringing an exponentially growing exchange of information that is making it increasingly difficult for people and organizations to hide information. Beyond the use of technology, some report finding an increasing ability to connect and communicate telepathically.

INNER WORK: People’s interest in inner work is flooding across the planet. Sure, some are searching for an inner secret to magically obtain a Maserati, and yes the world sometimes seems to be nearly-drowning in materialistic striving, but a large and growing number of people are realizing the importance of their inner life and the need to cultivate their insight in this realm.

This can be seen by the remarkable growth of people practicing meditation. Clear examples are organizations such as the Self Realization Fellowship founded by Yogananda, which has 500 centers in 54 countries. Even the Economist magazine stated that Sai Baba–whose organization is said to have centers in 166 countries–could have as many as 100 million followers. And there are thousands of other groups, large and small, teaching meditation, chanting, breathing, and other techniques for the cultivation of inner insight and being. Millions of people have been to therapy. Millions do Qi gong, yoga, or similar disciplines daily. There is explosive growth in this trend.

INSISTENCE ON KNOWLEDGE OVER BELIEF: For many, belief is no longer sufficient, they insist on going by knowledge gained from their own experience. This has resulted in a steady exodus from some of the traditional, belief-oriented religions into the inner work traditions, where experience is typically emphasized over belief. As a side-effect, this is making life more difficult for political parties, the mainstream media, and self-appointed or committee-sanctioned “experts” as people become less likely to simply believe the proclamations of an authority figure in favor of something that corresponds with their own experience.

GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS: Over the last 150 years, we’ve seen the strong emergence of people’s awareness that they belong to groups, communities that have nothing to do with the nation-states delivered to us by local geography and our history of war. Women’s movements and civil rights movements were created to secure equal rights. Labor movements began with the idea that commerce is a field where all participants can win, not just a few on the backs of the many. The environmental movement was begun by those who saw all humans as a group with the right to clean air, clean water, unpolluted land. The peace movement began with the idea that all people are in a group with the right to not be killed or maimed for the political and financial gain of small powerful cliques. Most humans see that groups can accomplish things an individual never could, spelling doom for the idea of “every man for himself.” Some spiritual traditions see all of us as one without separation, that what happens to one happens to all. All of these developments indicate an expansion of consciousness beyond the formerly limiting sense of group defined by family or nationality.

A CHANGING ATTITUDE TOWARD THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES: Most people are rightly respectful of the accomplishments of the physical sciences. But many are increasingly unsatisfied because these same sciences leave so much of life poorly explained. Even within their own fields of study, for example, biologists can’t explain photosynthesis; physicists don’t know the nature of the “dark matter” that they admit comprises at least 85% of the mass of the universe; mapping the human genome has raised at least as many questions as it answered; Western medical sciences are at a loss in the face of many diseases; and so forth. Many are transitioning themselves into intellectual and experiential research into realms which adherents of strictly physical science say do not exist because those realms cannot reliably be detected or measured using physical plane equipment. But Thomas Kuhn eloquently showed in his landmark 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the science of any period operates within a paradigm that excludes “non-standard” thinking despite the fact that new discoveries typically arise from what the keepers of the paradigm consider non-standard thinking. But some of these defenders of the paradigm can become almost religiously dogmatic about their worldview so that non-standard thinkers are often derided and almost invariably deprived of funds by lack of employment and grant money. This exerts a major drag on scientific progress. Thus many people seek direct experience of realms, planes of existence, that lie outside the boundaries to which the physical sciences claim life is limited.

HEALING: Unsatisfied with restricting themselves to the limitations and dangers of Western medical practices, many people are transitioning to receiving and giving energy-based healing techniques delivered physically or telepathically, and thereby enjoying the benefits of healing methods based on the presence of meridians and chakras, of direct treatment of the etheric, astral, and lower mental bodies, and so forth. For some, this path is opened by the inability of Western medicine to cure their problem, for example, rosacea, a difficulty for which conventional medicine has no solution, but which is often completely cured by acupuncture.

Strict defenders of the medical status quo go out of their way, ostensibly in the name of the alleviation of suffering, to put certain alternative practitioners out of business, even in jail, despite testimony from hundreds or even thousands that their suffering has been relieved by such an alternative. What they often say is that there have been no double-blind studies to verify the technique and therefore all reported healing can be written off to the “placebo effect.” But what does it mean that there is a placebo effect, that we even need double-blind studies? It means that people have, within themselves, the ability heal themselves with their own minds. This is not an endorsement by me that people completely forsake Western medicine and rely only on their ability to heal themselves, but simply to point out the obvious fact that the entire apparatus of double-blind studies is a testament to people’s ability to heal themselves, an absolute proof of mind over matter. So in the name of relieving suffering, some people cause more of it, a lot more of it, by hounding, persecuting, and prosecuting methods where there is ample testimony and evidence of the relief of suffering.

ALL IS ENERGY: More people are transitioning themselves to a deeper understanding of what we are told in school—everything is energy—but which many ignore, clinging to a mechanical world view where a bunch of dead billiard balls bouncing off one another somehow create an expanding multitude of galaxies inhabited by multitudes of intelligent beings. Some take this farther, seeing all life as alive, from the tiniest particle to the Sun and beyond.

SENSING ENERGIES AT DIFFERENT LOCATIONS: More people are transitioning themselves to sensing differences in energy at different locations on the planet and concluding that some places are, because of these differences, more conducive to inner work, and to the retrieval of all of their capabilities, than others.

EXPERIENCE OF MULTIPLE PLANES: Some people are transitioning themselves to experience the multiple planes of life that humans can touch, exploring both the perils and vast riches of planes other than the physical.

INTERACTION WITH NATURE INTELLIGENCES: Inspired by work at places like Findhorn and Perelandra, many report startling horticultural results when they elicit direct help from those intelligences that are the true designers and builders in nature, enabling a true working with nature rather than against it.

WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP: Some people are transitioning themselves from a “what can I get” approach to life to an approach that asks “what am I capable of, what can I bring to the table, what can I do to help?” Almost invariably these people seem to get a lot more help than people who are focused solely on “what can I get.”

* * *

There probably is no need to spend much time documenting the fact that acceleration is driving a lot of people insane. Proof can easily be obtained by watching the news or doing a “channel surf” on television. Clearly, events such as mass shootings are accelerating, as can be seen from this and this. And there have been additional shootings since those lists were published.

It’s clear that a lot of people are attempting to deal with acceleration by sedation via legal and illegal drugs and alcohol. Here are some quotes from just one US state agency web site:

“Unintentional poisonings in North Carolina have more than tripled in the last decade, and 7 out of 10 of those poisonings are from narcotics.”

“Prescription drug abuse is the leading cause of accidental death in North Carolina.”

“National research now shows teens using marijuana more than 20 times a month (heavily) has increased 80 percent in the last three years.”

Acceleration as usual.

And in a deeply tragic insanity of our time, for exhibiting non-standard behavior, a lot of schoolchildren are being given drugs like Ritalin and drugs said to be anti-psychotic. Children are having a difficult time coping, so what do we do? We numb their minds and bodies. This sounds like tactics of a severely repressive dictatorial regime, and yet it is being brought to us by the medical industrial complex and educational system in allegedly free societies. If there is any greater evidence that the powers that be want us all to keep our heads down and just keep munching another clump of grass, I don’t know what it is. Stalin would be very intrigued.

If one takes the time to investigate almost any field of endeavor on the planet at this time—food, politics, finance, medicine, business, legal, education, media, military, fossil fuels, transportation, and so forth—it doesn’t take long before one encounters insanity. There is an upcoming post on this topic that will be called “Runaway Trains.”

In Part 8, we will explore what these current conditions and trends can be expected to yield going forward, in terms of both turbulence and benefits. In other words, we can get to predictions.

We interrupt this program…

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Thundering Heard

For two items:

1. The Cyprus Bailout
2. Gold: Last Chance

That title phrase was used when normal television programming was to be interrupted for a special news announcement. And this post is an interruption of sorts—of the What is the Transition series—though actually it is a continuation of a general theme here: Lots of the events that we are all seeing—from earth and weather changes to financial events to the fact that more and more people are taking up meditation by the day—are hints, clues, indicators of things to come. They are not isolated one-off events. They are part of a trend, signs to be read and understood to see what’s coming next. Life has been very kind, bringing things on in evolutionary fashion for anyone who wishes to heed the signs. But things are ramping up. This strongly favors action over a wait-and-see attitude. This first story is a perfect example:

1. The Cyprus Bailout

Europe Does It Again: Cyprus Depositor Haircut “Bailout” Turns Into Saver “Panic”, Frozen Assets, Bank Runs, Broken ATMs

The fifth European national bailout pertains to Cyprus, where receipt of the bailout money is contingent on the confiscation of money directly from people’s bank accounts. The government will take 6.75% of the deposits of anyone with under 100,000 Euros. And they will take 9.9% of anything over 100,000 Euros.

The people will not send in this money, it will be taken directly from their accounts on Tuesday if the Cypriot legislature approves the bailout plan.

Funds to pay the levy were frozen in accounts immediately, ECB Executive Board Member Joerg Asmussen said. The levy will be assessed before Cypriot banks reopen on March 19 after a March 18 national holiday. Sarris said electronic transfers will also be limited until then.

When bankers and politicians want someone’s money…

If a word to the wise is sufficient, one can only hope that more will gain wisdom from this event. One German newspaper is already suggesting today that a 15% “wealth tax” be levied in Italy to help with its debt problem.

2. Gold: Last Chance

Jim Sinclair (there is always a link to his web site JSMineSet.com on the Thundering-Heard BlogRoll) held lots of gold in the precious metals bull market of the 1980’s, riding the price from $40 to $850 per ounce. He sold his holdings on the very day of the top price in 1980 and thus entered the ranks of investment legends.

In 2003, he started a web site and went public with the prediction, which he reiterated many times in the years that followed, that gold would rise from its 2003 price in the mid-$300’s to $1,620 per ounce by January 2011. He was roundly derided for both the predicted rise of the price and for the precision of the predicted timeframe. It turned out he was off by 8 months: gold’s price did not rise to $1,620 until August of 2011, not January.

The gold price in dollars has been in a sideways correction since late 2011. Recently, Jim has been pounding the table that the current sideways movement in the gold price will be complete before the end of this month, March 2013, and begin its next phase of upward price movement to $3,500 per ounce and beyond. When Jim makes predictions about gold, it pays to listen.

If anyone has been hesitant about buying gold because of claims by those who have been wrong all along about gold that the gold bull market was over, that the “gold bubble” has popped, let’s just look at a few charts, first of gold, and then of charts where bubbles did pop. I think you’ll be able to clearly see that the people claiming a “bubble pop” for gold don’t know the first thing about how to read charts, meaning that they know very little indeed about financial markets. Here’s the longer term chart of gold, from the year 2000 through now:

Notice that sideways price drift at the top right of the chart? Chart readers call this a “correction in an ongoing bull market.” It’s a bull market taking a breather before powering higher.

Now, want to see what the chart of a real popped bubble looks like? Here’s a chart of the Nasdaq stock index from Stockcharts.com. This index represented the internet and tech stocks during that time when we were told that there was a new paradigm, that everyone remotely connected with technology was going to be rich rich rich because they had started a web site to sell, well, whatever, it didn’t matter at the time:

Notice the parabolic upmove as price increased 15-fold in less than 10 years and then: SPLAT! A high-speed drop of 78% in just over two years. Thirteen years and trillions of printed dollars later, the Nasdaq is still 36% below that all-time high price.

Here’s the chart of crude oil from 2003 to 2009 with price rising to $140 per barrel and then crashing back to $32 per barrel in less than a year:

Note in both of those cases, no sideways price movement for months and months, as is seen on the gold chart, just a sharp fast very-nasty price crash.

I think Jim Sinclair is correct. I published back in June 2012 (What then can we do?) that people might want to complete their conversion from paper/electronic currency into gold by August 2012. That was a good idea. But cycles research at the time showed that it was possible that we would get one more price downmove, into March of 2013 at the latest, so I did not label that Summer 2012 opportunity as the “last chance” to get gold at a decent price. Now price has come down again into that same area where it was during the Summer of 2012. This time I think that “last chance” phrase is appropriate. Jim Sinclair says, and I agree, that after this month, you won’t ever be able to buy gold anywhere near $1,600 per ounce again.

What is the Transition? Part 6

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Thundering Heard

You know that thing about time accelerating? As of today, nearly one-fifth of 2013 is in the past!

The Age of Truth

If truth does set us free, then far greater freedom is on the way due to the accelerating emergence of truth. The controllers of the major systems on our planet react to both, that is, they react to the emerging truth by repeated attempts to squelch free expression on the internet and on the streets, and by well-funded propaganda and disinformation campaigns; and they combat emerging freedom by surveillance cameras (1.6 million in the UK alone!), repudiation of laws that protect individual freedom, complete tracking of people’s electronic activities, drone surveillance, and so forth. All under the rubrics of national security, public safety, copyright protection, and so forth. In the US, it appears that this is likely to get worse:

CIA Head Sworn In On Draft Constitution WITHOUT Bill of Rights

One problem with a discussion of the emergence of truth: On this planet, at this time, when the light of truth shines, it reveals a lot of lies. Many have come to see lies as standard operating procedure, so lies are accelerating in their frequency and boldness. This is a problem for two reasons: lies generally have consequences, victims, that is, they often do damage; and much that goes on in our world is based on trust, for example, when you buy something, you trust that it will work as advertised, and the vendor who sells it to you trusts that your form of payment has value. What is the general consequence of an increasing breakdown in trust resulting from increased lying?

Some lies are easy—once they are exposed. Horsemeat being sold as beef all over Europe comes to mind. Though this fish thing will be tougher to sort out:

New Study Shows 59% of “Tuna” Sold in the U.S. Isn’t Tuna

Other lies are more tricky because either there is a powerful constituency that supports the lie, or most people want it to be true even if it isn’t, or both. That is the category of lie described in the first major post on this site, The financial system is based on twelve promises that are lies, which described the lies at the foundation of what is called our financial system; and how the recognition of just one of those lies—the lie that real estate prices always goes up—came within hours of dissolving the world’s current financial system.

Governments lie so often now that more and more people assume that anything the government bothers to comment about in public is a lie. It would help their case if they weren’t so obvious, though sometimes one has to do at least the amount of digging that would be required on a standard reading comprehension test to uncover them.

There is a great example of a “policy lie,” and likely the often-associated “lying to keep one’s job,” at this link. It’s of interest here because we used the government’s own database to show the truth of this topic in Part 1. The post reports on a US Geological Survey study that says more people will die from earthquakes during this century than the last. But it is known from repeated examples that it is USGS policy to say that earthquakes are not increasing. So the article dutifully states that it isn’t because earthquakes are increasing that more people will die, but rather because of increasing population density in seismically vulnerable buildings. But the article blows its own policy case. They state that there were seven catastrophic earthquakes in the Twentieth Century, so that’s one every fourteen years. And then they state, and I quote: “Four catastrophic earthquakes have already struck since the beginning of the 21st century.” So that’s one every three years! So the “population density in vulnerable buildings” took a threefold leap right around the year 2000?! Nice try. This is science by policy–and keeping one’s salary or grant money flowing–rather than science by data. Such “science” is unfortunately all too common in our world.

So why does the USGS have a policy that can be easily shown to be a lie using their own database? For one, I’m sure they are correct in thinking that most people are not going to actually go look at the data, so they can say what they want about it and most people will believe it: “It’s from the government. It’s from a scientist. It must be true. What’s on TV?” For another, governments seem to think that keeping people calm is a high priority. Perhaps they correctly believe that they get to stay in power longer when the people are calm. But as each of their lies is uncovered, what they derided as “conspiracy theory” becomes conspiracy fact and they have an accelerating loss of credibility.

The same applies to billionaires. If you see or hear about them saying an investment is bad or good, assume that they are talking their book. In other words, if they say in public that some investment is fabulous, it means that they own a boatload of it and now want to get rid of it, selling it to anyone who will listen. And if they deride an investment, they are trying to knock down its price so they can buy more of it cheaper. George Soros was caught doing this with respect to gold twice in just over a year. Twice he made somewhat nebulous but definitely negative public comments about gold. In both cases, in the quarter following his comment, his hedge fund strongly increased their position in gold as its dollar price fell. These purchases are only revealed well after the fact, so they can’t be uncovered in real time. But if a billionaire bothers to hit the airwaves with investment commentary, assume that they are talking their book. One exception to this idea is Jim Rogers, but he is unusual.

Over the last six weeks, we found out more about the world’s Too Big to Jail treatment of banker crime. In the US, first the Assistant Attorney General said right on TV that he didn’t prosecute the big banks because he worried about the economic fallout:

Assistant Attorney General Admits On TV That In The US Justice Does Not Apply To The Banks

And then the Attorney General himself, Eric “Place” Holder, admitted the same in testimony before the US Congress:

Eric Holder: Some Banks Are So Large That It Is Difficult For Us To Prosecute Them

Holder: But I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

So, big money gets a free pass from what is supposed to be the Department of Justice.

There are entire industries that live by lies:

The tobacco industry is famous for it.

The nuclear power industry, creators of vast quantities of waste that will be deadly toxic for thousands of years, has in recent years been trying to characterize itself as “green”! And there were people who are supposedly environmentalists who fell for it. It took the catastrophe at Fukushima to take at least some of the wind out of their sails.

And the oil industry is a barrel of laughs along these lines. Let’s take the case of alcohol fuel, aka ethanol. Everyone in the US now “knows”–because it was covered this way by both the liberal and the conservative press, so people think it must be true—that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than one can get from the end product. And it drives up the price of food for everyone. And it wrecks engines. So ethanol is bad.

Would it surprise you to find out that all of that “information” is vigorously and continuously disseminated by the American Petroleum Institute in a well-financed campaign to malign ethanol? That it is based on a series of studies by a single person, Cornell Professor David Pimentel (more “science”!) who is the only investigator who claims that ethanol has a negative return on energy invested and whose faulty calculations are strongly at odds with other investigators? That Brazil’s conversion from gasoline to ethanol turned the country from a struggling importer of expensive energy to a net exporter of same? That the oiligarchy regime of Bush and Cheney implemented the ethanol program in a way that was sure to make ethanol look bad? That Henry Ford wanted all cars and trucks to be powered by ethanol, not gasoline, but that a ruthless campaign by John D. Rockefeller made that impossible? Including the fact that Rockefeller funded groups who created Prohibition of alcohol as a drink in the US not because he was against people drinking alcohol but because he wanted to bankrupt the major alcohol distillers in the US (he succeeded) so he could supply oil as the transport fuel of choice? That there are farmers across the globe who distill their own ethanol on their farm and successfully run all of their machinery with it? That alcohol is clean-burning, creating no particulate pollution? So again now, what is it that we “know” about ethanol and how inferior it is to petroleum fuel? Have the engines in all of the cars in Brazil been destroyed because they are burning ethanol? It turns out that, using permaculture, it is possible to become energy independent without driving up the cost of food for anyone. In the late 1970s, PBS funded a nine-part series by David Blume on precisely how to do that. They broadcast the first two episodes. All of their oil company donors said that if they continued airing the series, those oil companies would pull all funding forever. PBS folded under the pressure, even to the point of destroying all copies of the tapes, none of which exist today.

In real estate, it’s always a good time to buy. (I was planning to do a post with that as the title, but I don’t have to, Jim Quinn of the Burning Platform did that, and he did an outstanding job):

IT’S ALWAYS THE BEST TIME TO BUY

If prices are rising, it is claimed that they will always rise forever. If prices are falling, then they said to be a great bargain. Some blogs refuse to report the exaggerations that are alleged to be statistical reports from the US National Association of Realtors. At the end of every year, the NAR quietly revises the data it reported for the past year. For several years running, they have “adjusted” the number of existing home sales down by around 800,000 per year. So they report big, increasing, “better than expected” numbers all year, only to quietly admit the truth after each year is done. (The use of “better than expected” when reporting dismal statistics in news headlines deserves a post of its own, but let’s agree to pass on that.) You’ve probably all seen the monthly headlines generated by the NAR. But have you ever seen a headline about the NAR annual revisions? Certainly not in the mainstream media.

When you see some headline like “Highest New Home Sales in Three Years,” just remember this next chart. Yes, the highest level in three years. But this is a market trying to lift its face out of the mud:

Here is Jim Quinn’s comment on that chart:

The media, NAHB, and certain bloggers look at this chart and declare that new home sales are up 20% from 2011 levels. Sounds awesome. I look at this chart and note that 2011 was the lowest number of new home sales in U.S. history. I look at this chart and note that new home sales are 75% below the peak in 2005. I look at this chart and note that new home sales are lower today than at the bottom of every recession over the last fifty years. I look at this chart and note that new home sales are lower today than they were in 1963, when the population of the United States was a mere 189 million, 40% less than today’s population. Do you see any signs of a strong housing recovery in this chart?

OK, when one includes existing homes sales, the picture is a little better, here’s the chart of mortgage applications for purchase of a home in the US:

So that’s back to 1997 levels. But Jim Quinn correctly notes this:

JP Morgan, Blackrock, Citi, Bank of America, and dozens of other private equity firms have partnered with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, using free money provided by Ben Bernanke, to create investment funds to buy up millions of distressed properties and convert them into rental properties, further reducing the inventory of homes for sale and driving prices higher. Only the connected crony capitalists on Wall Street are getting a piece of this action.

So what just happened? Through a well-orchestrated bubble followed by a continuing foreclosure fest, shown here:

residential real estate ownership in the US is being transferred from Main St to Wall St., facilitated by free money from the US Federal Reserve. Here’s the ownership percentage of regular people in the housing stock in the US:

So that number has dropped from 80% to 43%. How does that trend look to you? Do you think all of this government real estate assistance, said to be for the benefit of regular people, is for regular people or for Wall St? And this is the system that most people hope remains intact.

And speaking of free money from the Federal Reserve, and indeed, all central banks, the next time you see meek and mild Ben Bernanke on TV telling you he’s doing it all for you, remember who gets free money from him and who does not. The big banks get free money. You and I do not. But, if you are a citizen of the US, you might think, well at least he’s giving money to American banks. But that’s less than half true. Much of Ben’s “quantitative easing” (i.e., the fashionable cover term for money printing) has gone directly into the coffers of European banks via their American branches. Why? The US Federal Reserve is a private corporation among whose major shareholders are large European banking families. And the European banks have a lot of bad loans and their depositors are wising up and withdrawing their deposits:

Euro-Land Banks In Trouble

A recent study by Ernst & Young has revealed that euro-land banks in the aggregate now hold € 918 billion (US $1.23 trillion) in non-performing loans…

Of course we’ve all heard from the European politicians that everything has been fixed in Europe, though even a cursory look shows that to be a lie.

So Ben Bernanke is printing up US Dollars to bail out European banks. He testified to Congress in 2011 that he was not and would not bail out European banks. But those who track the Fed’s money printing have demonstrated that what was called QE2 (Quantitative Easing 2) did not show up on the balance sheet of US banks, it showed up on the balance sheets of the American branches of large European banks, and this has continued. The benefit to the European banks is shown here in green, correlated with the amount of money printing the Fed has done shown as the black line:

That chart is from:

Fed Injects Record $100 Billion Cash Into Foreign Banks Operating In The US In Past Week

And speaking of lying, there is a law against what the Federal Reserve is doing. The law says the Fed can’t buy Treasury Bonds directly from the US Treasury. There’s a reason for this: when the Fed prints up new money to buy US Treasury bonds, which is the borrowing of the Government of the US, it’s called “monetizing the debt,” a clear Ponzi scheme where one hand borrows and the other hand prints to enable the borrowing. There’s a law against this because many countries have gone down the tubes once they traveled that road of money printing. Their currency value ultimately went to zero. So what does the Fed do to circumvent the law? They have one of the big NY banks buy the Bonds from the Treasury and then they buy the Bonds from the big NY bank three days later. So the Fed circumvents the law and NY banks get nice commissions and the US Congress gets more free money. And your income and savings are worth less and less.

Fed Buys Back 30 Year Bond Auctioned Off Last Thursday

And the politicians and economists who support money printing claim they are Keynesians, that is, that they follow the principles of economist John Maynard Keynes. But they cherry-pick Keynes work, only using that which supports what they want to do anyway, ignoring the rest. Here is a quote from Keynes:

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. … Those to whom the system brings windfalls… become “profiteers” who are the object of the hatred…. the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Does that sound like someone who thought money printing was a good idea? Clearly, politicians think all this underhanded dealing is justified:

Berlusconi: “Bribes Are Necessary – They Are Not Crimes”

This section could go on for days, but let’s stop, though I would like to mention that I think it is advisable that people give consideration to those things derided by powermongers and their minions in the press as “conspiracy theory.” Many things that the mainstream attempted to relegate to this scrap heap have turned out to be true (here’s a link to an account of 33 of them).

Just one example: Many supposed conspiracies are rejected under the heading that too many people would have to know about it and that this large number of people could never keep it secret. This whole rejection methodology was blown out of the water with the LIBOR scandal where at least dozens of traders at several major banks conspired over decades to manipulate the interest rates on which trillions of dollars of contracts are based. Testimony has been given in the US and the UK that people told the central banks of their respective countries about this manipulation as early as 2008 and the central banks did worse than nothing: The Bank of England is said to have encouraged the practice. Clearly the profit motive was enough to keep this conspiracy operating and quiet for decades. So when you hear that price fixing takes place, with or without government collusion, in fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, stocks markets, precious metals markets, and so forth, it actually appears to be irrational now to think that price fixing is not taking place. When there is big money to be made, there is big price manipulation in play. All this stuff about “free markets” is a thick, giant smokescreen designed by to increase the power of those who already have it but who crave even more.

However, between insider whistleblowers and great investigative researchers (typically outside the mainstream media that is primarily a compliant tool of those in power), using internet communication as a conduit, discovery and dissemination of truth is clearly on a meteoric rise.

This trend is strongly supported, in my view, by the accelerating increase in the number of people who recognize that individual inner work is beneficial and necessary. People who do the work to identify and become independent of lies they once blindly accepted as true, who continue working to understand the ways in which they fall for illusion, become acceleratingly tough to trick! We will take a look at this and other fabulous developments in Part 7.

What is the Transition? Part 5

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Thundering Heard

ACCELERATION

People’s Perception of Time

Everyone whom I have asked, including young people, feels like time is speeding up, like the day, the week, the year starts, and “before you know it,”, it’s gone. People feel like they have little time to carry out their plans. I would guess that this not universal, but perhaps it is.

Technology

And everyone, or certainly close to it, is aware of Moore’s Law, that the number of transistors that can fit on a chip doubles every two years. And Intel’s David House added that processor performance would double every 18 months. This acceleration in performance, and the fact that the price for that performance has steadily dropped, has changed the world in magnificent ways that have been difficult to envision at any point in time. People like Ray Kurzweil are famous for utilizing this increasing performance and for having made some prescient estimates of the impact of this exponential increase in price/performance, though some of his predictions have been wide of the mark, and it seems his general view that processors will outdistance human intelligence is destined to fail as well since a pathway to program a machine to have a higher self, intuition, noble emotions, will, self-awareness, and a sense of humor seems unavailable, to put it mildly.

Exponential, parabolic trends

As we did with the weather and Earth changes, let’s look at some data.

Money

It took the USA until 1990, that is, over 200 years, to create the first trillion US dollars. The rate of money growth had increased so much by 2007 that it took less than a year to create each additional trillion. Now, it’s seemingly all in day’s (OK, maybe a month’s) work. Here’s a chart of the money supply in the US and China combined:

Yep, between the US and China, that’s $25 trillion floating around.

Another way to look at things is this: From 1971 to 2007, the world economy grew fourfold. Over the same period, the amount of money floating around increased forty-fold. And central banks were just leaving the proverbial starting gate in 2007; the continuing financial crisis had just begun, and the response was, and continues to be: Print Money!

And don’t think the Europeans want the euro to be left out of this print-a-thon:

And the Japanese just joined the US and the Eurozone saying they would print “whatever it takes” to get their economy humming again.

And the Swiss!?!? The most pronounced money printing line on this chart (in light blue) represents Switzerland, purported to be so conservative about money. Ah, the good old days! No longer. For the size of their economy, they are the current money-printing front-runner by a wide margin:

Et tu, Canada? (from zerohedge.com)

And this has little to do with political parties, as shown on this chart of federal government debt in the US:

though I would ask that you note the super-acceleration of this trend that started in the year 2000.

And in today’s world, the Chinese are the ones doing the heavy lifting in terms of manufacturing, so they are collecting a lot of this printed paper money, in other words, the West prints paper, sends it to China, and gets real goods in return. But the Chinese aren’t stupid, they are well aware of how much more of this paper is being created. So what’s their solution? To get real:

The Chinese mine more gold than any other country now—none of which leaves the country–and they import even more physical gold from other countries. Insiders at the London Bullion Market Association, the leading venue in the world for trading physical gold, say that the Chinese are vacuuming out the London gold warehouses. And the Chinese are scouring the planet to buy mines, wells, and so forth, especially in Africa

But really, one would think that, with all this money floating around—there must be at least 200 times the money around now versus 1971–everyone must be rich! But we know that’s hardly the case. Sure, there are other parabolic charts, like the one for corporate profits:

The corporations seem to be doing quite well. And US banks had profits of $35 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 alone. (Yes, the same banks that needed those big bailouts. As a group, they had a total of four quarters where they weren’t profitable. It’s been business as usual ever since. And they are hard at work telling legislators, as they bribe them, that any new regulations will seriously hurt their business.)

But other parabolic charts tell a different story. Here’s one for youth unemployment in the Eurozone (from zerohedge.com):

Yes, that’s over 60% youth unemployment in Greece, with Spain right behind.

And gasoline prices are “doing great”—for the oil companies, that is. Here’s the price chart for the US, with gas up 243% since 1998:

That chart is only through 2011, but since US gas prices just registered their highest ever price for a February here in 2013, this trend does not seem to be in jeopardy.

And the Food Price Index of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is up 132% since the year 2000, with the all-important cereals/grains index up 190%. This is putting an extreme and accelerating squeeze on the budgets of the poor around the world.

This article contains the chart below showing that in 2005, it cost the US government one penny to mint a penny and one nickel to mint a nickel. Now, after all that money printing, it costs twice as much:

resulting in a loss of $436 million for the Government of the US (GUS) to mint pennies and nickels since 2006.

So it seems clear that the accelerating money printing is accelerating the cost of real things that people need: gasoline, food, the metals that go into manufactured products, and so forth.

Here’s the accelerating cost of Social Security in the US:

Well, we saw the accelerating youth unemployment in the Eurozone above. And the EU just announced that its overall unemployment rate is 12%. And, as this chart shows, there hasn’t been any growth in the EU economy since late 2011 (chart source):

In the US, GUS says the economy hit stall speed (0% “growth”) in the Fourth Quarter 2012. Here is a chart that shows that, of the 41 largest national economies in the world, only 18% of them expanded in the Fourth Quarter of 2012:

Astute chart readers will notice that such a reading corresponds with the worst recessions (1973-74, 1981-82, and 2008-2009) of the last 50 years, so now you know why the central banks have started printing even more money–yes, accelerating!

How is it going for jobs in the US? As this chart shows, the US is still 3 million jobs short of where things were in 2008:

Even worse, as the next chart shows, the large increase in the number of people working part-time means that a lot of the apparent job gains shown on the previous chart are part-time rather than full-time jobs:

If you think it’s only uneducated people who are suffering from all this, check this:

Number Of PhD Recipients Using Food Stamps Surged During Recession

The number of PhD recipients on food stamps and other forms of welfare more than tripled between 2007 and 2010 to 33,655, according to an Urban Institute analysis cited by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The number of master’s degree holders on food stamps and other forms of welfare nearly tripled during that same time period to 293,029, according to the same analysis.

These job difficulties are reflected in household income in the US. The following chart shows two problems. While the red line shows income growth since 2000, it is still lower than it was at the start of the financial collapse in 2007. And the blue line shows household income adjusted for inflation. When GUS-calculated inflation is taken into account, income for the average household is 8% lower than it was 13 years ago:

Here is a chart of US household net worth (annotated by Of Two Minds) compared to all of the debt that has been created, showing that all of that debt is not making people richer:

All of these economic charts were compiled by governments who, as we’ll show in a future post on the acceleration in lying, have a strong vested interest (it’s literally and even proudly called MOPE by academics—Management of Perception Economics) in making things look better than they are. In that light, I ask that you consider the following two charts compiled by a private bunch of computer geek types at a place called Consumer Metrics Institute. They thought, in this time of highly-networked business, that it was silly to have to wait until governments spent months collecting data before telling us what happened some months back, that the data could be collected and reported in near-real-time. If you wish, you can find out what they do at their FAQ.

But what they essentially do is track, in real time, discretionary purchases for things like automobiles, housing, vacations, durable household goods and investments.

These two charts show the trend in these purchases where a value of 100 would equal the same level of purchasing as was taking place in 2005. The first chart is the last 60 days:

And the second chart is of the last three years:

So, both charts show their index hovering around 85 or lower, which means that this large portion of the US consumer economy is 15% smaller than it was in 2005! Perhaps that aligns better with the income and net worth charts shown above rather than the rosy “we’re in a wonderful economic recovery” MOPE spewed by minions of The Powers That Be.

So what it looks like is that all that money printing is making a select few richer and, by driving up the prices of real goods, squeezing regular people—whose income is falling and who spend a far greater percent of their income on real goods. And the Western central banks say it isn’t their fault that people are rioting in countries where people’s costs for food have gone from 40% to 80% of their income. Nope, they aren’t driving prices up at all with their money printing, it’s those “evil speculators.” Well, perhaps it is evil speculators, but they are aided and abetted by a vast surplus of gambling chips supplied by the central banks.

There’s more to come. Stay tuned for Part 6.

Thundering Heard

Toward Clarity in this Time of Major Transition

Monthly Archives: March 2013