Tag Archives: war

Numb

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Imagine the impact if people alive in the 1950’s had encountered these articles, all from today:

     Sixty dead in suicide blasts in Nigeria

Two explosions at a crowded market in northeastern Nigeria have killed at least 60 people.

The twin bomb blasts, thought to have been carried out by female suicide bombers, hit a market in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.

“After the first explosion happened and people started to gather, a second explosion took place,” Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh, reporting from Abuja, said…

Hospitals have been flooded with injured residents, Al Jazeera sources said.

     Suicide blast kills dozens in Afghanistan

Officials say bomber targeted volleyball tournament match attended by large crowd in province bordering Pakistan.

People living in the 1950’s would have been deeply shocked. Not fake “shocked,” like our politicians pretend to be. Truly, deeply disturbed.

Today? For most people? Just another day in the news. Background noise, if they even hear about these events at all. The mainstream media tends to ignore them in favor of politicians sniping at each other, the demonizing of trumped-up enemies, the antics of movie stars, and lies masquerading as economic statistics to get people to spend and borrow rather than save.

     ‘Scores dead’ in air strikes on Syria’s Raqaa

Government raids on ISIL-held northern city have mainly killed civilians, with hundreds more injured, activists say.

     Pakistan says 20 fighters dead in air strikes

     Iraq’s Anbar grapples with devastation 

As usual, if people are getting blown up, it’s easy to find US involvement:

     Group: Death toll of U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria tops 900

     Hacked US Documents Said To Reveal Extent Of Undisclosed US “Lethal Aid” For Ukraine Army

And here’s a headline from Oct. 17 that says plenty (hat tip to JS):

     Pentagon readying for long war in Iraq, Syria

Every day, people are literally being blown to bits in the many conflicts (these used to be called wars), on the many battlefronts around the globe. Many are killed, many more seriously injured, still more are devastated in their minds and hearts. What has happened to us that such events do not sink in? How can these reports just pass on by like reports on sports or the weather?

Think this killing is just in the Middle East?

2,200 National Guard Troops To Be Deployed In Ferguson Tonight

     Forget Ferguson, 244 Teenagers Have Been Shot In Chicago Since Michael Brown Died

Statistics on the war in Chicago from this site:

     Totals Since Ferguson (Aug 9 – Nov 24)
          Shot & Killed: 130
          Shot & Wounded: 725
          Total Shot: 855
          Total Homicides: 155
     Year To Date Totals
          Shot & Killed: 343
          Shot & Wounded: 2,003
          Total Shot: 2,346
          Total Homicides: 408

So, we’re blowing up and shooting people, we’re killing off lots of species, we’re killing the oceans, we’re poisoning our farmlands, we’re draining the world’s great aquifers so quickly that entire cities are sinking, we’re fracturing the Earth’s crust for oil and gas and pumping the poisons from the process back into our aquifers, 30 million people are held as slaves, 800 million people don’t have enough food or clean water…you know this sentence could go on for a long time.

And yet, and yet…this is the status quo that people want to maintain. This is the system they want to keep. Maybe with a few minor tweaks around the edges, a few reforms.

What has happened to us? How did we get so distracted, so numb? What will it take for people to awaken?

War cycle update

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Those who have been readers here for awhile: Are you now getting the flavor of how these cycles unfold? As a valid cycle comes into play, people fall into line and play their parts. The so-called “great men of history,” who conquered regions and nations: were they simply pawns falling into a role, pushed and prodded by cyclic forces far greater even than their Icaran ambitions?

Since the Wheeler Cycle of War and Political Change was last discussed here, full-blown wars have erupted in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iraq. Fighting has re-emerged in Libya. Tonight, we hear that the US will be bombing in Iraq. These wars join the continuing wars in central and North Africa. And the posturing and saber-rattling by China, Japan, Viet Nam, and especially the US and Russia, continue to build.

The graph of the Wheeler Cycle has been shown before, but some readers have told me they don’t much like graphs. So, in text: The Wheeler Cycle was discovered in the 1930s and was further enhanced by its current keeper, Martin Armstrong. The cycle is based on data from all cultures from 600BC to the present. It says that there is major war or major political change every 25.05 years, which is every 9,149 days. Please analyze the following:

Wheeler Cycle Date Major War or Political Change Event Start Date Commencing Event
7/26/1914 World War 1 6/28/1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated
    7/28/1914 War declared
8/13/1939 World War 2 9/1/1939 Germany invades Poland
8/30/1964 Viet Nam War 8/2/1964 First alleged Gulf of Tonkin attack
    8/4/1964 US bombs North Viet Nam
9/17/1989 Fall of Communism 11/9/1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall
10/5/2014 ???? ????

A careful reading of the above and a recall of the history of these events show that the forces for war and political change build and build as the cycle date approaches and then, within a month in either direction of the cycle date, an event occurs that is understood, either at the time of the event or later, as the start of a major world change.

So, we approach the center of the cycle on October 5, 2014. Regrettably, we see the forces of war building.

The worst part of this is: major wars begin around the cycle date, but the fighting generally builds to its greatest intensity four to six years after the start date. Think of the wars in the table above and this becomes clear.

Perhaps now you can see why I have been focused on the fact that people must now resist war. If this cycle is allowed to express itself without mass resistance from humanity, the default is horrendous. And this is up to people. Our “leaders” are leading us to war.

The current situation is exacerbated by the presence of another cycle pointed out by Armstrong: we are again approaching the focal point of the cycle of internal political unrest and revolution. One can see this playing out in Tunisia, Egypt, Thailand, Myanmar. One can see it in the internal politics of nations, where the dominant political parties are beginning to face formidable upstarts, and where, worldwide, more than 550 separatist groups are seeking freedom from what they consider to be tyranny.

And regarding the “great men of history,” I do look forward to a time when history is not the study of the Caesars, Napoleon, and Hitler, but rather the study of how Patanjali and Plato and da Vinci and Shakespeare and Blavastky and Aung San Suu Kyi and the Buddha and Jesus and many others shined the light of evolution, showing people new ways to comprehend, to express, to relate.

And I look forward to the study of history including the study of cycles, so that we are not their unwitting slaves.

And I look forward to the Wheeler Cycle being simply called the Cycle of Political Change as war is studied only as part of the archaic and primitive phase of human evolution.

Unstable

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Instability is accelerating in many spheres of life on Earth.

Earthquakes have accelerated beyond the record-setting pace described in Rockin’ and Rollin’ with sixteen magnitude 6.0 quakes in the first sixteen days of May. So we’re running at the rate of one major quake per day. Here’s the list:

Date/Time Magnitude Place
2014-05-16T11:01:42 6 113km NE of Grande Anse, Guadeloupe
2014-05-15T10:16:41 6.2 50km WSW of Alim, Philippines
2014-05-15T08:16:34 6.6 96km SSE of Ifalik, Micronesia
2014-05-14T20:56:13 6.1 99km SSE of Ifalik, Micronesia
2014-05-13T06:35:24 6.5 108km SSE of Punta de Burica, Panama
2014-05-12T18:38:37 6.5 Southern East Pacific Rise
2014-05-10T07:36:01 6 11km W of Tecpan de Galeana, Mexico
2014-05-08T17:00:17 6.4 15km N of Tecpan de Galeana, Mexico
2014-05-07T04:20:33 6.1 96km SW of Panguna, Papua New Guinea
2014-05-06T20:52:26 6.1 West Chile Rise
2014-05-05T11:08:43 6 9km S of Mae Lao, Thailand
2014-05-04T20:18:24 6 23km ESE of Ito, Japan
2014-05-04T09:25:14 6.1 South of the Fiji Islands
2014-05-04T09:15:53 6.6 South of the Fiji Islands
2014-05-02T08:43:37 6 70km SSE of Namlea, Indonesia
2014-05-01T06:36:35 6.6 201km WNW of Ile Hunter, New Caledonia

And Oklahoma, famous for tornadoes but hardly for quakes, has seen an incredible increase in earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or greater, from about two per year from 1975-2008, to forty per year in recent years:

     What’s causing the huge spike in earthquakes in Oklahoma?

The US Geological Survey found that from 1975 to 2008, central Oklahoma experienced one to three 3.0-magnitude earthquakes a year, compared with an average of forty per year from 2009 to 2013. And it looks like that number is going to get bigger. It’s only February, and the state has already logged more than twenty-five quakes of 3.0-magnitude or larger this year, and more than 150 total quakes in the past week alone.

This instability isn’t just in the Earth’s crust. Check these real estate statistics that came out of China late last week:

  • 1st-tier cities sales fall 40% y/y (year over year)
  • 2nd-tier cities sales drop 65% y/y
  • 3rd-tier and 4th-tier cities sales decline 32% y/y

In a country where real estate development has played an outsized role in their long economic boom–and on a planet where Chinese economic growth has contributed greatly to the world not sliding off into total Depression–these dropoffs are shocking. The Chinese government has been well aware that they have a real estate bubble, and they’ve been trying to deflate it gradually, but those numbers don’t quite equate with “gradual.” Their solution to bring things back to life? What else? No money down!

     In China Homes Are Offered “Zero Money Down”

Since March, 20 property developers in Guangzhou have been offering “zero down-­payments” to attract buyers, in addition to large discounts and tax refund, the National Business Daily reported Monday.

I’m sure that will work out real well.

How big is the China real estate bubble? It turns out someone at a private business meeting surreptitiously recorded the comments on this very topic by the vice-chairman of China’s biggest property developer. He describes Chinese real estate as an epic bubble:

“In 1990, Tokyo’s total land value accounts for 63.3pc of US GDP, while Hong Kong reached 66.3pc in 1997. Now, the total land value in Beijing is 61.6pc of US GDP, a dangerous level,” said Mr Mao.

“Mr Mao said China’s house production per 1,000 head of population reached 35 in 2011. The figure is below 12 in most developed economies “even when the housing market is hot; no country has a figure of greater than 14”.

The Chinese have been so enamored of real estate that they’ve been buying lots of it in California as well:

Cash buyers reach record level of all home purchases at over 42 percent: 80 percent of all sales over past year in Irvine went to buyers from China?

In California, Chinese nationals and immigrants are “parking their cash in single-family homes,” said Meyers.

In Irvine, Calif., for example, 80% of sales over the past year were to Chinese buyers, he said.”

This is a massive amount of targeted home purchasing in one city. I’ve had a few contacts that sell homes in the Orange County market telling me that 7 out of 10 purchases were going to Chinese buyers, all with cash offers…Irvine is no small city with 230,000+ people living in the city.

These frenzies always work out so well in the long term. Sure. (Do I even need to say it to anyone considering buying residential real estate in California, where bidders now present PowerPoint presentations about their offers to the owners? Be careful out there!!!)

And speaking of China and instability, Japan and China have been rattling the war sabers, but most aren’t aware that they are in a no-holds-barred currency war, with each country struggling to take down the value of its own currency to try to make their exports cheaper in world markets. Currency wars don’t generally end well.

And China has territorial disputes not only with Japan, but with Viet Nam and the Philippines as well. We’ll cover those in a separate post on how the War Cycle is progressing.

And what about instability in the banking system. So far this year there have been sixteen high-profile banker deaths: murders by angry customers, suicides, and mystery deaths. By mystery deaths I mean deaths under very suspicious circumstances where the deceased gave no indication at all of wanting to commit suicide, for example, sending an e-mail to a spouse arranging that night’s dinner plans–just an hour before they jump out of a 30th floor window? Some of these people were involved in government investigations of their activities and so they may have known more than their employers wanted them to divulge. Or perhaps these employers–it turns out that the four largest US banks hold $680 Billion in life insurance on their individual employees–simply want to collect on some insurance policies. And trying to find out about this doesn’t work because the US regulators are calling this a “trade secret” of each of the banks:

     Suspicious Deaths Of Bankers Are Now Classified As “Trade Secrets” By Federal Regulator

Well, if anyone wants to verify any of this–though I don’t recommend it–here is a starting point:

     52 Year-Old French Banker Jumps To Her Death In Paris (After Questioning Her Superiors)

And here is the strange story of a guy who worked for the US Federal Reserve for 26 years threatening his boss, the head of a major US housing agency, with murder, apparently over a bad job review the boss gave him!?!

     Former San Fran Fed Employee Threatened To Murder Ex-FHFA Head Ed DeMarco

Stranger still is that the guy was easily released on bail.

So people seem just a bit testy in the banking and finance world. The question for the rest of us is: how much of our savings do we want in these people’s hands? You know my vote.

Instability has unexpected consequences. Some countries, such as Pakistan, are now so unstable that polio is making a comeback:

In February, the WHO found that polio had also returned to Iraq, where it spread from neighboring Syria. It is also circulating in Afghanistan (where it spread from Pakistan) and Equatorial Guinea (from neighboring Cameroon) as well as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

I guess those countries are on the Who’s Who list of instability.

This post could go on and on, but I’ll end with a high-quality video showing some of the earth changes and extreme weather in April:

     Signs Of Change The Past Month Or So 2014 (4) April/May

 

 

A brief comment on the metals

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This is strictly an opinion piece, I will not try to prove my case with links, charts, and so forth. An attempt to prove the case would be seriously lengthy, a project for which I don’t currently have the time and which I doubt most would want to read.

There is a very bright golden light on the horizon for precious metal prices, but that light is on the horizon (let’s say the first half of August), not right here. In other words, I think prices will drop first before they start rising in a serious way. I see four separate price, time, and trend patterns that include an expectation that price falls first before it takes off to the upside in a big way. And these patterns are supported by the seasonal pattern for gold which shows prices typically falling in the Summer and then turning up sometime in August.

So for anyone who has savings to deploy in the metals, the setup is ideal: you should get lower prices over the next couple of months for your buying, with an expectation that your buying will be followed by the start of a major price rally, that is, the prices available over the next several weeks should be quite a bargain.

For those of you who bought your metals years back–hopefully at prices that are still well below where they are now–and who have no additional buying power, you’ll need to be patient here, but as implied above, a price drop dead ahead will be an elegant completion of major recognizable patterns (based on four entirely different types of calculations) that have an exceedingly high probability of being the end of this general price downmove that started in late 2011. These patterns all clearly indicate that the bull market in metals that started early in this century still has many years to run, and that the best upward price movement is definitely still ahead of us.

Of course this could all be wrong if some huge war breaks out, in which case prices could go up and never look back. But if things are allowed to work out with “only” the normal amount of accelerating instability that is the most important trend of our time, then these reliable price, time, and trend patterns are likely to complete as outlined above. In any case, no matter what, prices should turn up for good later in the Summer.

This post is an attempt to keep emotions out of the precious metals picture so that as many of us as possible own some when we will all truly need them down the road. (I am serious about the word need; my repeated posting about gold and silver has nothing to do with an “investment scheme” to get rich quick or with having the “right asset class in your diversified portfolio,” I am talking about what people will soon need.) As their propaganda on this topic and their dirty tricks clearly show, the Powers That Were want you to get emotional and make the mistake of avoiding or selling physical metals so that they can accumulate more metals for themselves at low prices. I’m hoping that everyone who reads Thundering Heard is well prepared to fend off, or even capitalize on, their tricks.

 

134 Countries

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That’s the number of countries in which US Special Forces (you know, Green Berets, Navy Seals, etc.) took actions in 2013. That’s the number to which a US spokesman admitted, the number may be higher. That’s 70% of the countries in the world. From Nick Turse:

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget. Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally. This presence — now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations — provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace.

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120. Today, that figure has risen higher still.

In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134 countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs. This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of overseas power projection. Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences…

Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command has grown steadily in the post-9/11 era.   SOCOM is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001.

There’s a lot more in the full article.

Pathetic Beating of War Drums

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There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
–1935, Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket

Since the story broke around May 13 that the US Department of Justice collected the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors for months in revenge for their printing a story about the CIA that the Administration did not like, the Administration has faced an avalanche of scandal. What did they expect? Directly attacking the press with a massive wiretapping operation? The press was rightly furious. Many boycotted the off-the-record press conference (how’s that for twisting language and taking oxymoronics to new depths, an “off-the-record press conference”!) held by Attorney General Eric Holder to explain how they really weren’t doing any harm with all those wiretaps. Sure.

They pushed the press too far. It inspired at least a small number of those who claim to be journalists to live up to their name and unleash the avalanche: the IRS targeting political enemies, the admission that the War on Terror is permanent, that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress under oath, that the US collects millions of personal phone records from telecom companies, that they collect everyone’s internet activities shown here and here, that the US is drawing up a list of targets for cyber warfare, that the US “hacks everyone everywhere”, and so forth. What a month!!!

So now what do we get? The distraction supreme: War! They’ve conveniently and officially decided that Syria has used chemical weapons (“weapons of mass destruction”) and so now the public discussion will be: what weapons will be sent, where will warships be placed, how many “advisors” are needed, when will a no-fly zone be implemented, and so forth. Haven’t we seen this script before? Didn’t they actually make movie like that? A war would nicely dominate the news. The assumption is that people are stupid and they’ll forget about the illegalities and theft of freedoms from the previous paragraph, and they’ll allow the country to get sucked into yet another war.

Well, are we that stupid? Are we going to let them sucker us into another war that profits the very few and kills the many? In the name of the many? Paid for by the many?

Let’s review some history here. In 1935, the most decorated US war hero up to that time, Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler, published the amazing pamphlet War Is a Racket, perhaps the best summary ever of what war is really for: Profit! They taught us all that in school, right? Sure.

As Butler predicted in 1935, they were preparing for war, which turned out to be World War 2. After that war, They saw that it would be impossible to keep up that level of intensity forever, so They came up with the Cold War and regional war. That keeps the weapons procurement process going big time for the defense companies, and keeping all those ships and jets and trucks running around the world at somewhere between 700 and 1,000 bases worldwide brings huge profits for the energy cartel.

They succeeded in having a very profitable regional war in Korea. Following that war, US President Eisenhower warned about a takeover by the military-industrial complex. But few listened.

Then They wanted a regional war in Viet Nam. John F. Kennedy resisted. So They assassinated him and soon after there were hundreds of thousands of well-armed troops fighting in Viet Nam. Martin Luther King caught on to their game and started including a lot of anti-war remarks in his speeches in 1968, so They assassinated him. Robert F Kennedy showed all signs of campaigning against war, so They killed him. So then the young people who were being sent to Viet Nam and whose friends were being sent to Viet Nam started protesting that war in earnest. The Woodstock concert in 1969 was the largest peace rally ever held. Since there was no police presence there, that concert proceeded peacefully. So in 1970 They killed some of the heroes of that concert like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. And They killed four war-protesting students at Kent State University. But people still protested until the US government couldn’t take it anymore and ended its involvement in Viet Nam in 1973.

Soon thereafter, They switched most of their attention on the Middle East. The money was flowing in from oil, so They armed everyone to the teeth. Arabs versus Jews, Sunnis versus Shiites, Muslims versus Christians, dictators versus democracies, wow, what an endless platform for weapons sales and continuous regional war, which they have now achieved.

The question for all of us is: if we let them create a larger war in Syria, clearly, won’t Iran be the next stop? And will the Iran war go beyond regional, will that one go nuclear, will that be World War 3?

Will They be satisfied with the steady profits from Their successful creation of continuous regional war, or are They greedy for something much larger?

Folks, our so-called leaders are not going to put a stop to this. They know that the leaders who tried to put a stop to it got killed for their efforts. So our “leaders” will either be the paid salespeople for war or they will stand aside and let others play that role. Either way, the political honchos are not going to stop this. People have to stop it. We have to stop it.

They know we can stop it. That’s why They have to resort to such elaborate hoaxes and false flag attacks to drag people into these wars. So let’s not fall for it. Let’s peacefully put a stop to it.