Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has died Saturday, the Vatican has confirmed in a statement, at the age of 95 following weeks of deteriorating health. The past week saw Vatican officials issue calls for prayer for the former Pope as he had become very sick. “With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican. Further information will be provided as soon as possible,” the Vatican announced of his Dec.31 passing.

He had been elected head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, which claims over a billion adherents, in 2005 and served as pontiff until 2013, when he stunned the world by voluntarily resigning. It had been the first time in nearly 600 years that a pope had stepped down, given throughout history they typically occupy the position until death.

“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry,” he explained in a resignation letter at the time.

In an unusual arrangement he lived in the Vatican near the current Pope Francis, in a section of the tiny city-state called the Vatican Gardens. His sudden resignation had set off speculation over whether it was driven by various scandals dominating the attention of Catholic leadership, given at the time Benedict and Vatican officials had been grappling with the magnitude of the clergy sexual abuse crisis and how to respond.

Benedict himself had come under fire for his handling of the crisis even as recently as this year, after a damning report published January 2022 reviewed his tenure as archbishop of Munich in the late 1970’s to early 80’s. The internal watchdog investigation said he knew about priests abusing children in his diocese but failed to act, similar to other bishops and cardinals around the world.

Also driving speculation was the fact that in 2013 irregularities and scandal over the secretive operations of the Vatican Bank came under more intense scrutiny, leading to several arrests.

Benedict vowed to clean up the mess of the Vatican’s finances and bring greater transparency, which included in 2014 him firing the entire Vatican Bank board, but some observers speculated the task proved too immense – or else he crossed paths with other powerful individuals who could have made the public side of the financial scandal worse.

Another common theory was that liberals in the Vatican and among the powerful College of Cardinals pressured him out over his traditionalist stances on everything from how the mass is celebrated (he gave greater freedoms for bishops and priests to resurrect the Latin mass, or “Old Roman Rite” liturgy), to his unbending defense of Catholic teaching regarding homosexuality, abortion, and other right to life issues such as euthanasia. 

“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican.

Further information will be provided as soon as possible.” pic.twitter.com/O5dxoPaVkT

— Vatican News (@VaticanNews) December 31, 2022

As CNN and other mainstream media networks and pundits have long recognized, Benedict was seen as a polarizing figure when compared to the popes either immediately before or after him: 

Bookended by globally popular and charismatic popes — St. John Paul II and Pope Francis – Benedict cut a different figure. Friends and biographers described him as quiet and scholarly, more at home among theological tomes than adoring crowds.   

The German-born Benedict saw himself, and the church, as a bulwark against secular trends in Western society, particularly what he called the “dictatorship of relativism.” He often insisted that Catholics maintain a fortress mentality, saying perhaps a smaller, “purer” church would best maintain Catholicism’s traditions and teachings.   

Conservative and more traditionalist Catholics, who feared their church might eventually go the way of the Church of England – known for its progressive sexual ethics and looser attitudes on a number of moral issues – had been angered and stunned when Benedict had stepped down.

It paved the way for the more Liberal-leaning Francis to become Pope, putting the conservatives once again on the defensive in their own church. Among Francis’ more recent controversial acts over the past two years was his again restricting the Latin Mass, as well as making ambiguous statements appearing to indicate he could be in favor of some kind of church-sanctioned gay civil unions arrangement.

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

Welcome to 2023!

The New Year’s edition of the Economic Prism is a place of wild conjecture and rough suppositions.  A place where abstract thinking is celebrated.  Imaginative cycle theories, deep metaphysics, fractal wave patterns, happy accidents, and amateur fortune tellers of all stripes are invited too.

Today, with perfect 20/20 vision, we set our sights on the year ahead.  After all, the New Year’s here.  What better time than now to peer out 12 months through our proprietary prism and report back what we see?

On the periphery, we find new dreams, new directions, and new delusions, swirling about like storm clouds interspersed with warm radiant light.  We see opportunities and contretemps.  We see doom and despair.  And we also see hope and redemption.

But what else?  What are the essential insights you should take along as you set out to make another pass around the sun?

What does the New Year have slated for stocks, the 10-Year Treasury note, gold, oil, bitcoin, and everything else?  Will junk bonds be roiled by massive corporate defaults?

Will Joe Biden’s recession turn into a depression?  Will Federal Reserve issued digital dollars – a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that’s traceable and programmable – replace the privacy of cash?

Will there be a painful inflation flareup?  Will Sam Bankman-Fried mysteriously perish?  What about Maxine Waters…will she croak too?

Will there be riots in your city?  Will the power grid meltdown?  Will California finally dry up and blow away?  Will your social credit score be tarnished for not recycling your food waste?

Are we fated for complete societal breakdown?  Will 2023 culminate in the second coming of Jesus?

The questions are limitless.  The answers are exponentially limitless.

Where to begin…

Believe In Yourself

To clarify, our predictive methodology is rudimentary.  We eschew popular forecasting techniques – including trend lines, relative strength and/or stochastic oscillators, and other data driven models – for a conjectural approach.

We look to our sixth sense and developed intuition for guidance and pragmatic guesses.

But before we begin, we pause to ask: “What say you, dear reader?”

You likely have opinions on these matters.  Most people do, even your dense uncle can reckon a thing or two.  Without a doubt, the answers to these questions will be revealed in due course.  Some before you die.  Some after.

In the meantime, our advice is to keep it simple and trust your gut.  Many gurus don’t know what they’re talking about.  So, believe in yourself.  For your guesses are better than most.

Besides, after a demoralizing 2022, and with Karine Jean-Pierre as White House Press Secretary, anything and everything can happen in 2023 – including World War III!

Thus, we’re abstaining from a broad range of predictions for the 12 months before us.  But not to worry, we won’t leave you empty handed.

Rather, with humility and modesty our intensive research has brought us to one critical – yet overlooked – event that will come to pass in 2023.  Our claim is bold and of ultimate importance.  Because it will drive the outcome of just about everything else.

By way of full disclosure, our primary conjecture is not unique or unknown.  In fact, many can sense what’s coming.  But like when confronted with the presence of a war veteran with missing limbs, nearly all look the other way.  The horrors are too grave to contemplate.

Not today, however.  Free of charge, and with the sole intent of separating you from the common herd, we’re considering something nasty and unpleasant.  Yet it’s something that will come to pass in 2023, nonetheless.

We’ll tell you all about it in just a moment.  But first, some context is needed…

Who Done It?

To be perfectly frank, if you haven’t already come to this conclusion on your own, WWIII started on February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.  Many Americans remain incapable of comprehending this.

Right or wrong, for 20 years NATO goaded Russia through progressive eastward expansion towards Russia’s border.  An aggressive reaction was bound to happen.

If you recall, the U.S. and its NATO allies quickly responded with a ‘sanctions war’ against Russia, and an actual shooting war using the Ukrainians as proxies.  The initial centerpieces of the massive sanctions included cutting Russian financial institutions off from SWIFT and preventing the Bank of Russia from using its foreign currency reserves.  Orders to ‘freeze and seize’ the assets of Russian oligarchs soon followed.

But Putin had his own countermeasures ready.  To stabilize the ruble, the Bank of Russia offered to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5,000 rubles per gram, thus linking the ruble to gold.  This quickly limited the ruble’s devaluation in terms of U.S. dollars because gold trades in dollars.

Then, in retaliation for the sanctions, Putin required foreign buyers of Russian natural gas pay for their imports using rubles.  By linking the ruble to gold and the price of natural gas to rubles, Putin, in effect, linked the price of natural gas to the price of gold.

By linking the ruble to gold and then linking energy payments to the ruble, the Bank of Russia and Putin fundamentally altered the entire rulebook of the global trade system.  They also accelerated change in the global monetary system.

Since 1971, the global reserve status of the U.S. dollar has been underpinned by oil.  The petrodollar era has remained in place because of the world’s continued use of U.S. dollars to trade oil and the U.S. government’s – and the U.S. military’s – ability to prevent any competitor to the dollar.  Might makes right.

On September 26, 2022, a series of secret bombings disrupted the flow of gas through the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea.  Who done it?

We may never know.

At this point, sanctions have been much less effective at deterring Putin than Javelins and Stingers.  Still, do you follow the wisdom of sending an additional $45 billion to Ukraine along with Patriot missile defense systems?

Are these strokes of genius or strokes of madness?  Moreover, when does a proxy war stop being a proxy war?

Alas, if you must ask the question, the fine line has already been crossed.

With this context behind us, let’s turn to the year ahead.  What is the big – yet overlooked – event that will come to pass in 2023?

One Great Big Nasty Prediction for 2023

In October, Chinese President Xi Jinping successfully completed a report to the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th National Congress. 

He emerged from the party congress with a historic third five-year term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

This outcome lifted Xi into the exalted air of Mao Zedong.  He’s ‘emperor for life.’  The event also underscored the CCP’s position that Taiwan unification is “a natural requirement for realizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”  Xi and the CCP view Taiwan as Mao’s unfinished business.

On Christmas day, not long after Santa Claus traversed the globe, China sent 71 fighter jets and seven ships near Taiwan.  Many of these fighter jets crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait.  The Taiwanese military counted 47 jets breaching the de facto boundary line.

The casus belli, in this instance, was President Biden signing the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which includes $10 billion in military assistance to Taiwan.  A similar reaction was triggered over the summer following a visit to Taiwan from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

About the same time as Pelosi’s visit, simulated war games of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan were conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  The results were grim for both China and the U.S.

Certainly, an invasion of Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) seems improbable.  But so did Russian tanks rolling across the border into Ukraine, until just moments before it happened.

According to JPMorgan, “while the world is short on commodities, China is not given they have started stockpiling commodities since 2019 and currently hold 80 percent of global copper inventories, 70 percent of corn, 51 percent of wheat, 46 percent of soybeans, 70 percent of crude oil, and over 20 percent of global aluminum inventories.

Why, just why, is China stockpiling such massive amounts of commodities?

At the same time, U.S. sanctions on Russia had the unintended consequence of compelling China and Russia into strategic cooperation.  All year Russia has been selling oil to China in exchange for yuan.

In addition, Xi recently met in Saudi Arabia with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other Gulf Arab leaders.  In a direct challenge to the petrodollar, Xi remarked that China would work to buy oil and gas from Arab nations in yuan.

What to make of all this?

Economic warfare is being waged.  The geopolitical stage is being set for the next stage of WWIII in the Pacific Theatre.

With all modesty, and full acknowledgement of the limitations of abstract thinking, that’s our one great big nasty prediction for the New Year.  Expect the unexpected.  China will invade Taiwan.

This will put a torch to all other predictions for 2023.

*  *  *

As detailed above, one should expect the unexpected to come in 2023.  We don’t like it.  But we intend to exploit it.  What’s more, paid up Wealth Prism Letter subscribers will discover exactly how in the January issue, due to be published in the early hours of January 2.  If you’d like to exploit this opportunity too, take action and subscribe today!  Have a blessed 2023!

Forecasters warn a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) event could collapse a Polar vortex by mid-January across Britain and unleash ice, snow, and freezing temperatures. 

British news channel GB News quoted James Madden, forecaster for Exacta Weather, who said: 

“An SSW event is now looking even more likely to occur this winter, and this could happen as soon as in the next ten days.

“This will mean that the cold air over the Arctic will be given a route to cross our shores, and in addition to above-average snowfall, it could pave the way for another big freeze, leaving the cold snap earlier in December a distant memory.”

If an SSW event does set in, colder weather could hit Britons around the middle of January, he warned.

British Weather Services’ Jim Dale said an SSW event “isn’t something that I will rule out, but at the moment, I am favoring a more mobile weather pattern from the Atlantic, and instead of a big snow event, we may be more likely to see a named storm during the start of 2023.”

“However, that does not mean it is not going to happen, and if it does, it will be more likely to affect northern parts of the country,” Dale added. 

British daily newspaper Cambridge News said the Met Office (United Kingdom’s national weather service) forecasted the possibility of snow into mid-January, while other forecasters reported there’ll be “frequent spells of cold wintry weather” next week.

A two-week outlook forecast via Bloomberg shows temperatures across the UK will begin to slide by next Wednesday and average around 35 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-Janurary. 

Meanwhile, European natural gas recorded the largest monthly declines due to the recent warm spell. Dutch futures are down 45%, the most since records began in 2005. 

Benchmark Dutch Natgas was 12% lower at €75 a megawatt-hour. 

And the good news is that the EU NatGas storage percentage slightly increased in late December as heating demand decreased. 

However, if forecasters are correct about another cold blast, EU NatGas prices could soon see a bottom. 

Here’s what people on the Twittersphere are saying about the possibility of an SSW event:

We currently have a very strong stratospheric polar vortex which has now began descending into the troposphere. Growing signals for a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) moving into January which will disrupt the vortex potentially increasing chance of significantly cold weather. pic.twitter.com/4Phns8GRoo

— British Isles Weather (@nvangelder03) December 30, 2022

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Regime change in Russia is all the rage right now. It’s another episode of MI-6’s longest running show, “Russia – Putin’s Fragile Playground,” playing daily in our intelligence co-opted media.

And, hey, thanks to Elon Musk that’s no longer a conspiracy theory, despite the protestations of the bad guys.

The current picture is one punctuated with regular stories of Ukrainian drone attacks on a Russian air base or power station. There’s even now a major article making the rounds about how Russia is facing organized sleeper cells of saboteurs operating without restraint to take out critical infrastructure.

Not that I doubt that it’s true, of course the US and its “key NATO ally” (*cough* the UK *cough*) are fully committed to taking down Russia, but it’s the fact that it’s happening now as Russia makes big moves to reorganize its military to fight this war for the long haul is what’s interesting.

This implies that all of a sudden now there is significant pushback to the scale of that commitment within the EU. I have serious doubts about that.

The recent admission by Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the Minsk Accords were just a time-buying exercise to arm Ukraine for the war can be interpreted in a number of ways.

But for me, knowing that the dominant narrative has been to frame this as a US-led proxy war versus Russia, Merkel’s admission plays into that perfectly. Remember, I’ve always made the distinction between The Davos Crowd and the Neoconservatives.

I’ve always viewed the Neocons as the Useful Idiots of the more Leninist Davosians. Merkel is a committed Davosian lieutenant if there ever was one.

Merkel is adding to that hyper-aggressive US narrative by trying to frame her part in Minsk as something demanded by the US that she went along with.

This is a US-led train that the EU has been held hostage on like its the freaking Snowpiercer.

Yeah, ok.

It makes much more sense if we’re getting all revisionist about things to argue that Merkel used her good relations with Putin and his blind spot for Germany to negotiate Nordstream 2, knowing full well it would be a geopolitical minefield.

Seriously, when you stop to think through the entire NS2 saga, if Merkel was sincere in buying time to go to war with Ukraine then if follows the pipeline was just another Minsk strategically; waste not only Russia’s time but also billions of dollars on a project that was never going to pay them back?

In that view, the money spent on NS2 was one of the first casualties of this war which has been going on since the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in 2014.

When viewed through that lens it makes the current situation even more dangerous and more tenuous than ever. Because that leaves you realizing the depth to how angry the Russians are, and how committed they are to the war.

This means their best strategic play is trapping the West in a Ukrainian meat grinder economically, politically, and militarily of its own devising.

And that brings me to a recent post by Martin Armstrong. Martin is looking at the cycles and forecasting a cluster of them coinciding around the March/April 2023 time frame in relation to war and Putin.

As always, salting to taste Martin’s computer modeling of the future is quite necessary, but I’m happy to engage it if it yields insight.

I understand that Martin Armstrong is very worried about how these next few years play out, and rightly so. The psychopaths in charge across the West don’t have a reverse gear. They only attack.

If you are confused about what it is these people really believe about where the future of Russia is headed, this recent article at the Hudson Institute – about as normie Neocon an institution as you can get — should clear things up.

This article isn’t an opinion piece about potential goals or to be read as a wish-list of crazy people. It is a fervently held set of beliefs that stem from their view of demographic analysis of Russia and their mission to stamp out the remains of the Soviet Union.

This is an ideological fight for the neocons. Ending Russia is their religion.

It is why they are so easy to manipulate. It makes them the perfect useful idiots in Davos’ larger game.

To the neocon mind (sic), it is a foregone conclusion that Russia is going to collapse. I refer you to my article from the other day about models, ‘laziness,’ and the gulf between knowledge and the pretense thereof.

It is this attention to the order of operations that is important in trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world today.

One of my most common complaints with my ‘libertarian brethren’ is that they are always jumping to ‘end-game’ while not thinking through the moves that get us there.

In monetary theory we can do the math and realize the system is doomed. By taking that variable and adding it into the political mix we can solve the geopolitical equation and then make grand pronouncements about the where everything winds up.

And when that happens people arrogantly settle into their conclusions and then their confirmation bias takes over. Each data point then confirms what they want to see and they ignore the Black Swans on the horizon.

The neocons and Davos have already mapped the future end-game and have, frankly, checked out on the day-to-day moves. They are like the libertarians I described above, just waiting for the collapse that may never come.

And I have to thank Martin Armstrong for helping me get past that arrogance personally. His relentless attention to the ‘order of operations’ is his greatest contribution to the commentariat.

This is where I think Martin’s anxiety about Putin and Russia comes from, and again, fair enough. Personnel is policy, after all. But that’s on both sides of the political divide.

I believe he is misreading the situation in Russia when it comes to Putin.

In fact, despite having ‘deep sources’ in Russia, Martin’s analysis of Putin has been fairly weak.  Just because the neocons believe they can just foment enough chaos internally, they can overthrow Putin doesn’t mean that it will finally occur.

Did this work in 2015, when Putin disappeared from the public sphere for two weeks in February and Armstrong himself told us that he was dealing with an internal coup attempt within the Kremlin, which Putin put down with his characteristic understatement?

They faced lesser sanctions then but had a bigger monetary problem than they did in 2022 because in 2014 Russia wasn’t prepared for all-out economic warfare.  Putin warned his SEO giants like Gazprom and Rosneft to pay down their dollar-denominated debt and diversify their payment structure. 

They didn’t and it nearly cost Russia everything.

Putin, with Xi’s help, bailed them out.  But, as always, it’s pretty obvious he got something in return, more loyalty from them.

Martin’s fears stem from not believing Putin always understood his position vs. the West.  It’s naïve on his part to think that Putin who called the west “Not Agreement Capable” in 2015 believed that Minsk was ever going to be implemented or that the UK wouldn’t cross every red line.

While Minsk bought Ukraine time to arm itself, it bought Putin time to build the weapons and systems needed to stop it, while proving to the world that the West was preparing for war on them as well as Russia.

The strategy he employed in dealing with Gazprom and Rosneft in 2015 to secure the domestic allies he’d need today was also used to curate the friends he’d need internationally.

c.f. 2022 as proof of this.

Putin’s strategy has always been allow their strategy of aggressive military and economic strangulation to develop and use diplomacy and honest brokering to accumulate allies around the world for that moment when the West decided to strike in Ukraine.

Then he struck before they were ready.

Martin is, in my view, projecting his fears onto Putin with this analysis.

And I don’t think he does himself any favors by publishing his “Putin Cycle” chart because it doesn’t line up with any of Putin’s big moves. 

This cycle missed Putin accepting Crimea into Russia (March 2014), his 2015 UN Speech and move into Syria, which his grand Economic Confidence Model picked up (Sept 28-30th 2015). It missed his speech where he outlined his strategy to beat the West at the Munich Security Confernece of 2007.  It missed his State of the Union address in March 2018 where he unveiled the weapons which set us on this path where the Neocons realized their window for taking down Russia would close permanently if those weapons ever went into mass production.

I don’t want to be too harsh here because it’s obvious Martin is simultaneously sincere, well informed, and rightfully concerned about Putin’s predicament.  It’s obvious that Putin’s being targeted for termination.  He is the captain steering the Russian ship and the crazies in Moscow are being given every excuse to get rid of him.

But I remind you that Russia like Iran and more so than China, is a civilization first and a system second. Because of that, external pressure and internal infiltration won’t have the same effect as it has here in the West.  

Yes, both Iran and Russia are corrupt, but they are corrupt in different ways than in the West. Iranians and Russians understand this corruption far better than egghead analysts at Langley feeding think tanks on K-Street.

And that, I think, is the difference here.  Putin may have to fend off another round of treasonous activity in the Kremlin in 2023, but I don’t think for a moment that he’s not aware of it.  In fact, what I would say is that his strategy with domestic traitors is no different than how he deals with his Western adversaries; allowing them to think they have him on the ropes and then crush them after they’ve exposed themselves.

That’s Colonel Doug MacGregor’s assessment of Putin’s strategy on the ground in Ukraine.  It’s hard to argue that he wouldn’t pursue the same strategy inside Russia herself, if MacGregor is correct.

Personnel, again, is policy.

None of this is to say that it won’t be a treacherous path for Putin in 2023.  It will be.  

The West believes the humiliations that they have inflicted on Putin will force him from office.

But today’s Russia seems to be, as Alex Mercouris put it in a recent video, “Embarrassment-proof.”

This is what Martin is worried about, that the embarrassments of drone attacks and lack of military success will create unrest for Putin at home.

I would be more worried that Putin makes a big move in the coming weeks in Ukraine.  That he again, “Goes First,” and pre-empts what the West has planned by attacking.

The drone strikes inside Russia are part of these humiliations. But, I think Armstrong, like the neocons, is assessing the political damage to Putin as if he were an American politician.

We are the ones with this air of invincibility.  Russians, thanks to Putin’s successful framing of the conflict, propaganda if you like, are under no illusions about the situation.

They understand their government is dysfunctional.  They understand the West is inconsolable about their refusal to be colonized or wiped off the earth.  And lastly, they understand that Putin isn’t perfect but he’s no globalist traitor.

An airstrike here or a failed offensive there isn’t evidence of anything more than what they’ve always known.  They aren’t starting from the position of imperial arrogance.

We are the ones whose psyches are fragile.  They are the ones who have gone through the fire (the 1990s) and survived.  

This is why we’re more likely to collapse if our vaunted military might falters, or worse, is defeated. Now go back to my arguments about Merkel, Minsk and NS2 and tell me you can’t see the trap that Davos has set for the Neocons and the US political establishment living in the bubble of their foregone conclusions.

The goal of these provocations is, again, to get Russia to go off halfcocked and give the West the moral high ground to mobilize for total war.  

Russia is a country trying to rise, or at least not be swallowed up by attrition. It is not a colonial power trying to stave off the inevitable dissolution.  Time is its ally here.  

Putin will have to respond to these attacks.  He will need a big political win in the next few months.  If you are handicapping his political situation right now, one big negative is his canceling his annual marathon Q&A, but that can be read two ways.

It’s a lot of work to put that event on. Spending weeks preparing for a show he shouldn’t waste his time on it while running a war is the right message to send to his people, not pledging state resources to fix a broken toilet in Irkutsk.

The West wants you to believe he doesn’t want to face an angry populace for his unpopular war.

Honestly?  My answer to that is, “Ok, Boomer.”

Now ask yourself who’s allocating $4 million per member of Congress for “personal security” in a bill that they ram-rodded through post-election?

What should unnerve you about this whole situation is that the one person who is supposedly months away from being destroyed is the one who is calm, understanding his fate.

“Do you know what they say among the Russian people? Those who are destined to hang, do not drown.”

– VLADIMIR PUTIN

You know, now that I think about this quote, I’m not so sure Putin was only just describing himself.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon if you don’t want to drown

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

The danger signs were everywhere in 2022.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.

Totalitarian paranoia spiked. What we have been saddled with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it has conspired to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. In a Machiavellian attempt to expand its powers, the government unleashed all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace in order to justify its demands for additional powers to protect “we the people” from emerging threats, whether legitimate, manufactured or overblown.

The state of our nation suffered. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. The combined blowback from a contentious presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Americans being subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, and the criminalization of lawful activities.

Thought crimes became a target for punishment. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In 2022, those who criticized the government—whether that criticism manifested itself in word, deed or thought—were flagged as dangerous alongside consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information.”

Speech was muzzled. Those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech continued to push for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

Kill switches aimed to turn off more than just your car. Vehicle “kill switches” were sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, but they were a perfect metaphor for the government’s efforts to not only take control of our cars but also our freedoms and our lives. For too long, we have been captive passengers in a driverless car controlled by the government, losing more and more of our privacy and autonomy the further down the road we go.

Currency went digital. No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough, so the government came up with a new plan to make it even easier for its agents to seize Americans’ bank account. In an Executive Order issued in March 2022, President Biden called for the federal government to consider establishing a form of digital money. Digital currency will provide the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

The government spoke in a language of violence. Police violence killed three people a day. Warrior cops—trained in the worst-case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—did not make us or themselves any safer. Despite this, President Biden’s pledged to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention through a $30 billion “Fund the Police” program.

Cancel culture became more intolerant. Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs. Everything has now become fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

Homes were invaded. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.

Political theater kept the public distracted. Having devolved into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population, the political scene provided ample diversions with its televised Jan. 6 committee hearings, the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings, and more.

Bodily integrity was undermined. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Although the Supreme Court overturned its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, it did nothing to resolve the larger problem that plagues us today: namely, that all along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the aged—the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry.

The government’s fiscal insanity reached new heights. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) hit $30 trillion. That translates to roughly $242,000 per taxpayer. It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051.

Surveillance got creepier. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. With every new AI surveillance technology that was adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry were marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Precrime became more fact than fiction. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies were used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating was done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. Where this becomes particularly dangerous is when the government takes preemptive steps to combat crime or abuse, or whatever the government has chosen to outlaw at any given time.

The government waged psychological warfare on the nation. The government made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded. Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government weaponized violence; surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns; digital currencies, social media scores and censorship; desensitization campaigns; fear; genetics; and entertainment.

Gun confiscation laws put a target on the back of every American. Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) gained traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

The burden of proof was reversed. Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head. Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

The Supreme Court turned America into a Constitution-free zone. Although the Court’s rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating. The bottom line: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

The FBI went rogue. The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people ran the gamut from surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, and intimidation tactics to harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.

The government waged war on political freedom. In more and more cases, the government declared war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

The military industrial complex waged more wars. America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

The Deep State went global. We’ve been inching closer to a new world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. This new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations owes its existence in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations. This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

Authoritarian madness escalated. You didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to recognize the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate. When any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and an utter disregard for the rights of the individual, there should be reason for concern.

The takeaway: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with “we the people.”

Unless we work together to push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse, 2023 will be yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Biden administration has dialed up its crackdown on so-called “ghost guns” by issuing guidance that basically expands the definition of what “readily converted” means in a new federal rule and making more do-it-yourself pistol parts subject to restrictions.

In an open letter to firearms dealers (pdf) dated Dec. 27, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) told firearm vendors that nearly-complete handgun frames or receivers—basically the pistol grip and firing mechanism—will be treated the same as fully completed firearms.

Ghost Gun Rule

Firearm vendors who sell near-complete pistol frames and receivers—often as kits that can be relatively easily turned into untraceable homemade guns—were hit with the new rule in August, which required that frames and receivers that could be “readily converted” into fully operational guns are subject to the same regulations as traditional firearms.

The August regulation, dubbed the Ghost Gun Rule, meant that kits containing partially complete frames or receivers plus assembly tools and instructions were subject to licensing, background check, and serialization requirements.

But ambiguity around the definition of the word “readily” in the regulation meant that some vendors continued to sell nearly-complete unserialized frames and receivers as standalone products while additional components needed to finalize their at-home manufacture were offered separately, or by third parties.

Such was the argument made in an October letter (pdf) by a dozen or so Democrat lawmakers to the ATF and Justice Department, which claimed that a number of ghost gun companies were continuing to sell unserialized frames and receivers by interpreting “readily” in a way that amounted to a loophole.

“The final rule, however, is clear and unambiguous: a nearly-complete frame or receiver is a firearm,” the lawmakers wrote.

“The rule does not cover only frames and receivers sold as part of a kit, but also frames and receivers that can be readily completed,” they continued, urging the ATF to issue enforcement guidance that basically expands the definition of what it means for pistol components to be considered as “readily converted” into a functional firearm.

They asked the ATF and the Justice Department to consider a nearly-completed frame or receiver as “readily convertible” not only when it’s sold as part of a kit containing things like jigs, molds, templates, and tools for assembly but also when such auxiliary equipment is available to the general public.

“In particular, we urge the Department and ATF to confirm that how ATF reviews the ‘readily convertible’ nature of a nearly-complete frame or receiver will not be limited to what tools, equipment, and instructions are included in the same sale or distribution of the part sold, but rather premised on the tools, equipment, and instructions that are readily available to the general public, including those easily obtainable online through third parties,” the lawmakers wrote.

ATF agreed and by issuing the new guidance, the agency is making clear that it will now be requiring relevant firearm frames to have serial numbers and to be sold by licensed dealers who carry out background checks just like with fully completed guns.

“Today’s open letter is another important step in implementing the crucial public safety rule regarding privately made firearms, or Ghost Guns,” ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said in a press release. “Ghost Guns can kill like other firearms if they are in the wrong hands, so they are treated as firearms under the law.” 

According to explanatory remarks to the Ghost Gun Rule published in the Federal Register, from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2021, there were around 45,000 homemade ghost guns recovered by law enforcement from potential crime scenes, including 692 homicides or attempted homicides.

Before Regulating ‘Ghost Guns,’ Enforce Existing Laws

Several current and former law enforcement members told The Epoch Times that the proliferation of ghost guns at crime scenes is a problem, but that being insufficiently tough on repeat offenders under current laws is a much bigger problem.

“If we are going to invest energy to fight crime, we should invest energy to get repeat offenders off the street,” Al Maresca, a deputy U.S. marshal in the District of Maryland, told The Epoch Times in an earlier interview.

“Felon in possession of a gun is already illegal, a straw purchase is already illegal—there are all these other laws on the books that we can be focusing our efforts on,” he added.

Roberto Alaniz, a recently retired sergeant from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), told The Epoch Times that focusing on ghost guns is unlikely to make a dent in violent crime.

Read more here…

A Seattle tech worker was charged this week in a criminal theft scheme which netted around $300,000 from his employer.

28-year-old Ermenildo Castro of Tacoma allegedly told detectives he was inspired by the 90’s movie “Office Space” when he allegedly wrote software code to manipulate shipping fees paid to his employer, Zulily.com, to go into his own bank accounts.

According to KOMO news, citing court documents, Castro netted around $260,000 in shipping fees.

What’s more, he used his position as a software engineer to alter the price of around $41,000 in merchandise for ‘pennies on the dollar.’

According to police, the company’s cybersecurity staff found a document on Castro’s laptop titled ‘OfficeSpace project’, which outlined Castro’s scheme to ‘cleanup evidence’ by manipulating audit logs and disabling alarm logging. The theft began in February and by March the company had identified discrepancies in the shipping fees being charged to customers, an SPD report states.

Castro was part of the team assigned to investigate the discrepancies in shipping fees, according to the report. –KOMO

Investigators for the company eventually caught on to Castro’s scheme and visited his house, where they found several boxes of merchandise piled up in the driveway and around the front door. 

He claimed the orders, which included more than 1,000 items, were sent to his house in error.

“When asked why he never returned the items to Zulily, he said that once they fired him his opinion was, ‘f— ‘em’,” reads the police report.

Seattle police wrote a narrative on how Castro’s alleged scheme was like “Office Space.”

“In the Initech office, the insecure Peter Gibbons hates his job. His best friends are two software engineers Michael Bolton and Samir Nagheenanajar, that also hate Initech. When he discovers that Michael and Samir will be downsized, they decide to plant a virus in the banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation into Peter’s account. However[,] Michael commits a mistake in the software on the decimal place and they siphon off over $300,000. The desperate trio tries to fix the problem, return the money and avoid going to prison.”

Apparently Castro thought he could avoid ‘pound me in the ass prison.’

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

If we are not free to think what we want, we do not have a free society.  It really is that simple.  Unfortunately, there is now an overwhelming consensus among elitists in the western world that radical measures must be instituted to control what people think.  If you insist on being a rebel, there is a very good chance that you will be punished for holding unorthodox views.  You won’t necessarily be put in prison, but our system has countless other ways that it can punish you.  For example, those that insist on embracing unacceptable thoughts will find that their career choices are quite limited, and there are certain positions that they will be prohibited from ever holding under any circumstances.  Not only that, but if your thoughts are offensive enough you may have a financial account suddenly shut down or credit denied for seemingly no reason.  This sort of thing was unheard of a decade ago, but now it is happening all the time.  Of course you can forget about having any sort of a substantial social media presence if your thoughts do not conform to current “societal norms”.  Even the “free speech platforms” are banning and shadowbanning countless accounts every single day.

If any of the things that I have just described have happened to you, that is probably because you are a “thought criminal”.

You are not supposed to contradict the conditioning that you have received from our education system, from the news media, from our politicians and from the corporate entertainment that you are being fed for hours each day.

When you deviate from socially acceptable viewpoints, you are guilty of “thoughtcrime”.  This is how “thoughtcrime” is defined by Wikipedia…

Thoughtcrime is a word coined by George Orwell in his 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It describes a person’s politically unorthodox thoughts, such as beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc (English Socialism), the dominant ideology of Oceania. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of the Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania.

Sadly, we truly have become an “Orwellian society” at this point.

In fact, a woman in the UK was just arrested for thoughts that she was thinking within her own mind…

The U.K. March for Life director was recently arrested after police found her praying silently outside of an abortion clinic, according to a press release by Alliance Defending Freedom U.K.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a charity volunteer and Christian, was approached by police officers outside of BPAS Robert Clinic in Birmingham, England, and asked if she was praying, according to ADF’s press release. Vaughan-Spruce told the officers she “might be praying silently” and was later arrested.

“It’s abhorrently wrong that I was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind,” Vaughan-Spruce stated in the release. “Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the UK.”

Once she was taken in to the station, you would think that those in charge would realize that a huge mistake has just been made.

But instead of releasing her, she was ruthlessly interrogated.

Apparently they were absolutely determined to discover whatever evil thoughts that this vicious thought criminal had been thinking.

And apparently they found something, because now she has been charged on four counts…

Remember the British woman who was arrested for praying silently? She’s been charged.

pic.twitter.com/VrHx93kQEd

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) December 28, 2022

She insists that she is not a criminal.

But she doesn’t understand that the world has changed.

Anyone that thinks unauthorized thoughts in now a criminal in this system.

And at this moment there are countless intelligence agents all over the western world that are scouring social media sites for more thought criminals.

Thanks to the release of the Twitter Files, we now know that the FBI has spent an enormous amount of time, effort and energy looking for unauthorized thoughts on our largest social media platforms.

When the FBI found unauthorized thoughts on Twitter, requests were made to ban specific accounts.  This represented a gross violation of our First Amendment rights, and apparently it kept happening over and over again.

The FBI was confronted about this, and this is how they responded…

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our tradition, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.

As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.

The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public.

It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

And it has also come out that the FBI has been paying Twitter and other social media companies millions of dollars for some reason…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is declining to specify what other social media companies the federal agency gave money to after Fox News confirmed that it paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million.

FBI officials told Fox News that the nearly $3.5 million payment to Twitter was a “reimbursement” for the “reasonable costs and expenses associated with their response to a legal process… For complying with legal requests, and a standard procedure.”

The FBI officials also said that Twitter isn’t the only social media company that is being paid by the federal agency, telling Fox News “We don’t just reimburse Twitter.”

What exactly was that money for?

We deserve to know.

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently stated that “almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.”

Reading that should chill you to the core.

Of course many other big tech companies have also been colluding with the government to suppress free speech, and one recent survey found that the vast majority of Americans want answers…

A recent poll shows that 63 percent of Americans want Congress to investigate “whether the FBI was involved in censoring information on social media sites.”

The Twitter Files disclosures show that not only did Twitter collude with the FBI, it also worked with other government agencies like the CIA and the Pentagon to suppress information.

Musk said in a post on Dec. 27 that “*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government.”

As time rolls along, those that choose not to conform to “societal norms” will be increasingly pushed to the utter fringes of society.

If you continue to choose to be an “independent thinker”, getting a “good job” will be exceedingly difficult.

Just think about it.  Right now, how many of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are “independent thinkers” that have unacceptable belief systems?

If you want to rise in the pyramidal structure of our society, you have got to believe what the system tells you to believe.

Of course if all independent thought is eliminated, our society will become the sort of dystopian nightmare that authors such as George Orwell and myself have been warning about for a very long time.

Even though I do not like much of what my fellow Americans have to say, I vigorously defend the right to say those things.

Freedom of thought and freedom of speech are non-negotiable, and our system of government simply will not work without them.

*  *  *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Starting a week ago reports began emerging in Middle East regional media, including in both Iranian and Israeli news sources, that Russia will soon provide Islamic Republic with dozens of Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets. Israeli reports are even citing “Western intelligence officials” in making the claim.

Iranian state Tasnim wrote days ago that “Iran will soon receive 24 of the fourth-generation twin-engine, super-maneuverable fighter jets that are primarily used for air superiority missions,” in what seems to be some level of confirmation.

The state-run outlet noted that Iran hasn’t been able to acquire any new aircraft from outside countries in years, and the last time jets were transferred from Russia was in the 1990’s.

The Times of Israel also recently reported the following, citing the country’s Channel 12 network: 

The report by Channel 12 said the deal could include as many as 24 jets that were originally intended for Egypt, in a deal that the United States thwarted.

This left Moscow looking for a new potential buyer, which it has reportedly found in Tehran. The report comes after Iranian media said in September that Tehran was weighing such a purchase.

Intelligence indicated that Iranian pilots were already using the jets for training, the report said, without elaborating.

In all of these reports, the sourcing is anonymous and thus somewhat dubious, given also even Iranian state media is citing “reports say…”. However, the fact that state media is running headlines about acquiring the Sukhoi Su-35s is hugely significant nonetheless. 

It could mean that Tehran and Moscow are at least in the early phases of negotiating such a transfer. This would indicate that their deepened military ties which has been on display throughout the Ukraine war, based largely on Iran controversially supplying its ‘Kamikaze’ drones which have been in use by the Russian army in Ukraine, is going the other way too as far as the defense supply chain.

🇮🇷✈️🇷🇺Iran to receive dozens of Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets from Russia pic.twitter.com/bGKRQUKnzt

— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) December 30, 2022

On Thursday, Forbes asked the qestion: who will operate these sophisticated and advanced jets if they are acquired? Likely there would be a significant Russian-overseen training program…

The IRGC-AF has never operated more advanced aircraft than those vintage Soviet-era Su-22 Fitter or Su-25 Frogfoot attack planes — ex-Iraqi warplanes that fled from Operation Desert Storm to Iran in 1991, which Tehran promptly confiscated. The IRGC-AF returned the Su-25s to Iraq in mid-2014 to help Baghdad fend off the threat posed by the rampaging Islamic State (ISIS) group.

Forbes further reviews of Iran’s ageing air force planes: “Aside from procuring Chengdu F-7 fighters from China during the 1980s, post-1979 Iran only made one significant fighter procurement, in 1990 when it bought MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jets and Su-24 Fencer bombers for the IRIAF from the Soviet Union.”

Thus any advanced fighter transfer could see the rare instance of Russian advisers training IRGC pilots. Meanwhile, the US and UK have continued to ratchet up sanctions on Iran’s defense manufacturing sector, especially in light of the drone supplies which appear to be ongoing in relation to the war in Ukraine.