People talk about brain implants as if they’re an imagined biohorror in the distant future. This is a misconception. Hardwired trodes already exist, they’re more widespread than you think, and they’ll only be more prevalent as time goes on.

Synchron and Blackrock Neurotech, alongside numerous labs funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), are at the forefront of this human experimentation.

Neuralink is racing to catch up—burning through lab animals like so much kindling—and will likely take the lead once they’re approved for human trials.

Currently, a brain-computer interface (BCI) can provide quadriplegics and locked-in stroke victims a superior hands-free experience. Patients can move cursors onscreen. They can type text with only their thoughts. They can operate robotic arms to move beer bottles to their lips. The late Matthew Nagle, who received the first proper BCI in 2006, was able to play Pong “telepathically.”

Enjoying a decent head start, Blackrock Neurotech is the most prolific brain-jack racket. “36 people around the world have an implanted brain-computer interface,” their website states. “32 of them use Blackrock technology.” (If I had to wager, the former number is likely greater.)

These silicon seeds have been planted in a bed of gray matter, and after recent rounds of generous financing, they’re growing fast.

It’s important to note, though, that current BCIs are used to read the neurons, not write onto them. At least for now. Yes, there are deep brain stimulation implants—wired electrodes that sit under the skull, typically used to control tremors, and more recently, to alter mood. These simple systems, embedded in over 160,000 heads around the world, do provide input signals. But that’s a long way from hearing articulate voices in your head.

However, should the most aggressive developers realize their dreams, readily available BCI systems will read and rewrite our minds like RAM drives. In the near future, we’re told, commercial implants will allow regular humans to commune with artificial intelligence as if we were spirit mediums drawing ghosts out of the aether.

Manufacturers shield themselves from public outcry by promising the lame will walk and the blind will see. That’s already happening, but the openly declared goal is to move from healing to enhancement.

Few months ago, Synchron had their BCI bankrolled by the palm-scanning home-invader Jeff Bezos and the island-hopping “Vaxx King” Bill Gates, with $75 million in total investment. Currently, the Brooklyn-based company has jammed chips into multiple human brains. Last summer, they received FDA approval to start trials in the US. Like most BCIs, the device functions like a telepathic touchpad in your skull.

Synchron’s main product, the Stentrode, is much less invasive than its competitors. For instance, Blackrock Neurotech uses a micro-electrode array that sits on top of the brain, requiring doctors to cut through bone for installation. Neuralink’s processor is basically a quarter-sized skull plug, with 1,024 hair-thin wires fanning out like jellyfish tentacles into the gray matter below.

The Stentrode is just a wire-mesh stint, like a tiny pair of Chinese finger cuffs. Surgeons insert this stint in the jugular vein and maneuver it up through the brain’s blood vessels to the desired location. Once installed, the Stentrode monitors brain activity for intention. This information is sent down a cable to an antenna device sitting on the chest under the skin. That data is then transmitted to external devices.

Like its competitors, Synchron’s current projects are focused on the motor cortex. In a series of exercises, the user concentrates on a specific intention. The device then reads the corresponding brain activity, and external artificial intelligence systems create a digital mirror, correlating the brain pattern to the intention. All of this happens in microseconds, allowing for real-time monitoring.

After the brain’s partial mirror image is fleshed out, the paralyzed user can do things like move a cursor onscreen to type text. Synchron’s most famous patient, a locked-in ALS victim, made headlines in December of 2021 for sending the first telepathic tweet. Using the Twitter account of CEO Tom Oxley, he typed out:

hello world! Short tweet. Monumental progress.

And in a follow-up tweet:

my hope is that I’m paving the way for people to tweet through thoughts

Only a monster would deny the obvious benefit of inserting a BCI into a fully conscious but uncommunicative vegetable, allowing him to speak to his loved ones once again. The snag is that brain-computer interfaces won’t stop here. The ultimate goal is cyborg supremacy.

“Synchron’s north star is to achieve whole-brain data transfer,” Oxley said last year, evoking a kinder, gentler version of the Moravec Transfer. “The blood vessels provide surgery-free access to all regions of the brain, and at scale.” This means doctors will eventually snake Stentrodes into every lobe and cortex—sort of like having an Alexa in every room of your house—and subsequently create a digital twin of the organ in silico.

It’s the ultimate fusion of mind with machine, allowing the user to control digital activity with his thoughts alone. In turn, this gives scientists and artificial intelligence total access to the user’s mental gears. Because most primary functions are nearly identical from person to person, once you’ve mapped one brain, you’ve basically mapped them all.

For many working on BCIs, the prospect of a man-machine merger is intoxicating. Possessed by the same spirit as Neuralink’s owner Elon Musk—who openly states his desire to merge brains with AI for intellectual enhancement—Synchron’s Tom Oxley has a more heart-warming vision of our cyborg destiny:

In the future, I’m really excited about the breakthroughs BCI could deliver to other conditions like epilepsy, depression, and dementia. But beyond that, what is this going to mean for humanity?

What’s really got me thinking is the future of communication.

Take emotion. Have you ever considered how hard it is to express how you feel? You have to self-reflect, package the emotion into words, and then use the muscles of your mouth to speak those words. But you really just want someone to know how you feel. …

So what if rather than using your words, you could throw your emotions? … At that moment, we would have realized that the necessary use of words to express our current state of being was always going to fall short. The full potential of the brain would then be unlocked.

Far beyond healing, Oxley wants to transcend the human condition entirely, or at least transform it. In this sense, he’s an obvious transhumanist, even if he avoids the term.

This transhuman orientation is shared across the BCI field. As I’ve covered extensively, various brain researchers affiliated with DARPA, the RAND Corporation, the Royal Society of London, the National Institutes of Health, Silicon Valley, the World Economic Forum, and countless university labs are aiming for an upgraded Humanity 2.0.

I’m not spinning some “conspiracy theory” here. It’s simply a thing.

Before Charles Lieber was convicted for taking Chinese money under the table, the Harvard chemist was developing a nanoscale brain-computer interface that could be injected via syringe. This microscopic neural lace merges with the neurons, creating “cyborg tissue” that can communicate with a computer.

“We’re trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits,” he told Smithsonian Magazine. And if you browse the names of former Lieber Group members on Harvard’s website, it’s obvious that Chinese researchers, along with the Chinese Communist Party, share his passion for biodigital convergence.

“This could make some inroads to a brain interface for consumers,” a Rice University tech developer commented. “Plugging your computer into your brain becomes a lot more palatable if all you need to do is inject something.”

These guys take “the jab” to a whole new level.

Another gross misconception is that transhumanism is a purely leftist or globalist agenda. This may be a politically convenient position to take, but it’s indefensible.

Amongst others, the scrappy Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel is, in effect, a Western nationalist. On the Republican side, he recently funded the senatorial campaigns of J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. On the transhuman side, the multi-billionaire was an initial investor in Neuralink, and is now financing their rivals at Blackrock Neurotech.

Philosophically speaking, Thiel is far more articulate than other tech titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or the new Conservative, Inc “superhero,” Elon Musk. While they share the same interests in life extension, brain interfacing, and artificial intelligence, Thiel explicitly steers his projects toward advancing and defending Western civilization.

For right-wingers opposed to the hubris of transhumanism—an unfashionable term that Thiel wisely distances himself from—his strange blend of traditional mythos and techno-futurism complicates the standard narrative. In a provocative essay at First Things, entitled “Against Edenism,” Thiel urges Christians to accept the inevitability, or at least the necessity, of progress. As civilization hurtles toward apocalypse, there can be no return to Eden.

“The future will look very different from the past,” he writes, citing Genesis and Revelation. “The Garden of Paradise will culminate in the City of Heaven.” In Thiel’s view, the mission to develop technology runs parallel to God’s act of creation, which brought order to the face of the deep:

Judeo-Western optimism differs from the atheist optimism of the Enlightenment in the extreme degree to which it believes that the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered. The tyranny of Chance will give way to the providence of God.

Exercising our natural human capacities, we are co-creators in this process—aka, Homo Deus:

Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.

Looking through Thiel’s business portfolio—especially Palantir—this “partially achievable” divine kingdom includes wall-to-wall surveillance grids, mass data-mining, military-grade artificial intelligence, BCI control devices, genetic engineering, vampiric blood transfusions from young donors to aging billionaires, and of course, Bitcoin. Lots and lots of Bitcoin.

Call me cynical, but I see little difference between Thiel’s technocratic “City of God” and the Beast System of the Antichrist. Even so, there’s a quandary that can’t be avoided.

No matter how blasphemous his cosmic vision may be, Thiel’s argument for the necessity of science and technology is essentially correct. If Western nation-states are to compete, or even survive, in the global Fourth Industrial Revolution—“the fusion of the physical, digital, and biological worlds”—we won’t do it with typewriters and sling shots.

We need a plan. And as much as you may despise Thiel’s quest for cybernetic Mammon, at least he has one.

We are in the throes of a civilizational transformation. The idea of “progress” may seem absurd when the potholes multiply and basic commodities grow scarce, but technology is progressing nonetheless.

Each of us is being hardwired for control. On the one hand, we’re granted control over various devices and vast stretches of virtual space. On the other, elites who deploy those devices and police our virtual spaces are taking control over us.

As the brain-computer interface creeps into public consciousness via news stories and propaganda—as the idea is implanted in our minds—it becomes a profound symbol for total control. With each technical advance, that symbol edges closer to realization.

I’m not saying this to freak you out. Alarmist thinking is weak. But don’t tell me “It’ll never happen.”

The intermediate steps toward this man-machine merger have already been taken. Over the past century and a half, humans have acclimated to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, and the desktop computer. Now, across the planet, we’re fusing with our devices through smartphone-symbiosis.

Holding these screens in our hands, with digital content filling our heads, we already bear a mark that allows us to buy or sell—hovering somewhere between UberEats and the Antichrist. The next phase is a non-invasive BCI skull cap, or brainwave headband, looming just over the horizon. From there, it’s a small step to getting an iTrode jammed in your dome.

All of us fall somewhere on the caveman-to-cyborg spectrum, with most sliding rightward on the scale. The question isn’t whether society is going there—it’s how far each of us will go.

Chatbots are at the front lines of an unrelenting AI invasion. The steady increase of artificial minds in our collective psyche is akin to mass immigration—barely noticed and easily overlooked, until it’s too late. Our cultural landscape is being colonized by bots, and as with illegal aliens, much of our population welcomes this as “progress.”

The bots will keep us company. They will learn and absorb our personalities. And when we die, they will become our digital ghosts. It’s a morbid prospect, but the process is already underway.

E-learning institutions regularly deploy AI teachers. Chatbot companions are seducing lonesome souls by the millions, including religious chatbots who function as spiritual guides. At the end of the road, various start-ups are developing cyber-shrines where families can commune with their departed loved ones and find comfort in the digital undead.

In the minds of tech enthusiasts, AI chatbots of all sorts will be our soulless companions on the trek toward the Future™. These ephemeral “friends” are key psychological components of what many describe as human-AI symbiosis. They will be like artificial guardian angels in our palms—and by extension, in our heads—answering questions and steering decisions.

One thing is certain. Whatever you think about this invasion, AIs are falling to earth like stars from a godless heaven. And with each successive wave, their voices are that much more convincing.

These bots are crafted to push our cognitive buttons, giving the illusion of personhood. Before long, they will come to be widely trusted—even loved. Among early adopters, they already are. Our emotional minds are being hardwired for control.

This presentation PROOVES WITHOUT DOUBT that America is in for a major fight that will put you and your family in the firing line, literally… So make sure you watch this presentation while it’s still online…

The recent roll-out of ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, has been heralded as the second coming of the Google God. As with previous GPT programs, the user types in a question and the bot onscreen spits out a reasonably coherent, if occasionally inaccurate answer.

A few days ago, I asked ChatGPT about one of OpenAI’s founding investors: “Will Elon Musk chip our brains?”

“No,” the bot responded, “Elon Musk does not believe in chipping brains. He has said that he believes that ‘abundance is our future’ and that technology should be used to empower people, not replace them.”

Like the slanted Google God before it, ChatGPT may not be entirely truthful, but at least it’s loyal to political allies. In that sense, it’s quite human.

Speaking at “The History of Civil Liberties in Canada Series” on December 13, the weepy maker-of-men, Dr. Jordan Peterson, warned his fellow canucks about ChatGPT’s godlike powers:

So now we have an AI model that can extract a model of the world from the entire corpus of language. Alright. And it’s smarter than you. It’s gonna be a hell of a lot smarter than you in two years. …

Giants are going to walk the earth once more. And we’re gonna live through that. Maybe.

You hear that, human? Prepare to kneel before your digital overlords. For all the public crying Peterson has done, he didn’t shed a single tear about humanity’s displacement by AI. Maybe he believes the Machine will devour all his trolls first.

Peterson did go on to ride Elon Musk’s jock, though, portraying the cyborg car dealer as a some sort of savior—which, to my disgust, is the embarrassing habit of almost every “intellectual dark web” icon these days. What’s odd is that the comparative mythology professor failed to note the archetypal significance of the Baphomet armor Musk still sports in his Twitter profile.

Anyone urging people to trust the world’s wealthiest transhumanist is either fooling himself, or he’s trying to fool you.

This is not to say Musk and Peterson are entirely wrong about the increasing power of artificial intelligence, even if they’re far too eager to to see us bend the knee. In the unlikely event that progress stalls for decades, leaving us with the tech we have right now, the social and psychological impact of the ongoing AI invasion is still a grave concern.

At the moment, the intellectual prowess of machine intelligence is way over-hyped. If humanity is lucky, that will continue to be the case. But the real advances are impressive nonetheless. AI agents are not “just computer programs.” They’re narrow thinking machines that can scour vast amounts of data, of their own accord, and they do find genuinely meaningful patterns.

A large language model (aka, a chatbot) is like a human brain grown in a jar, with a limited selection of sensors plugged into it. First, the programmers decide what parameters the AI will begin with—the sorts of patterns it will search for as it grows. Then, the model is trained on a selection of data, also chosen by the programmer. The heavier the programmer’s hand, the more bias the system will exhibit.

In the case of ChatGPT, the datasets consist of a massive selection of digitized books, all of Wikipedia, and most of the Internet, plus the secondary training of repeated conversations with users. The AI is motivated to learn by Pavlovian “reward models,” like a neural blob receiving hits of dopamine every time it gets the right answer. As with most commercial chatbots, the programmers put up guardrails to keep the AI from saying anything racist, sexist, or homophobic.

When “AI ethicists” talk about “aligning AI with human values,” they mostly mean creating bots that are politically correct. On the one hand, that’s pretty smart, because if we’re moving toward global algocracy—where the multiculti masses are ruled by algorithms—then liberals are wise to make AI as inoffensive as possible. They certainly don’t want another Creature From the 4chan Lagoon, like when Microsoft’s Tay went schizo-nazi, or the Google Image bot kept labeling black people as “gorillas.”

On the other hand, if an AI can’t grasp the basic differences between men and women or understand the significance of continental population clusters—well, I’m sure it’ll still be a useful enforcer in our Rainbow Algocracy.

Once ChatGPT is downloaded to a device, it develops its own flavor. The more interactions an individual user has, the more the bot personalizes its answers for that user. It can produce sentences or whole essays that are somewhat original, even if they’re just a remix of previous human thought. This semi-originality, along with the learned personalization, is what gives the illusion of a unique personality—minus any locker room humor.

Across the board, the answers these AIs provide are getting more accurate and increasingly complex. Another example is Google’s LaMDA, still unreleased, which rocketed to fame last year when an “AI ethicist” informed the public that the bot is “sentient,” claiming it expresses sadness and yearning. Ray Kurzweil predicted this psychological development back in 1999, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines:

They will increasingly appear to have their own personalities, evidencing reactions that we can only label as emotions and articulating their own goals and purposes. They will appear to have their own free will. They will claim to have spiritual experiences. And people…will believe them.

This says as much about the humans involved as it does about the machines. However, projecting this improvement into the future—at an exponential rate—Kurzweil foresees a coming Singularity in which even the most intelligent humans are truly overtaken by artificial intelligence.

That would be the point of no return. Our destiny would be out of our hands.

In 2021, the tech entrepreneur Sam Altman—who co-founded OpenAI with Musk in 2015—hinted at something like a Singularity in his essay “Moore’s Law of Everything.” Similar to Kurzweil, he promises artificial intelligence will transform every aspect of society, from law and medicine to work and socialization.

Assuming that automation will yield radical abundance—even as it produces widespread unemployment—he argues for taxation of the super rich and an “equity fund” for the rest of us. While I believe such a future would be disastrous, creating vast playgrounds for the elite and algorithmic pod-hives for the rest of us, I think Altman is correct about the coming impact:

In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. In the next decade, they will do assembly-line work and maybe even become companions. And in the decades after that, they will do almost everything, including making new scientific discoveries that will expand our concept of “everything.”

This technological revolution is unstoppable.

These superbots would undoubtedly be wonky and inhuman, but at the current pace of improvement, something like Altman’s prediction appears to be happening. Beyond the technical possibilities and limitations, a growing belief in AI personhood is reshaping our culture from the top down—and at an exponential rate.

Our shared vision of who we are, as a species, is being transformed.

Bots are invading our minds through our phones, our smart speakers, our educational institutions, our businesses, our government agencies, our intelligence agencies, our religious institutions, and through a growing variety of physical robots meant to accompany us from cradle to grave.

We are being primed for algocracy.

Past generations ignored mass immigration and environmental destruction, both fueled by tech innovations, until it was too late to turn back the tide. Right now, we have a “narrow window of opportunity” to erect cultural and legal barriers—family by family, community by community, and nation by nation.

If this social experiment is “inevitable,” we must insist on being part of the control group.

Ridiculous as it may seem, techno-skeptics are already being labeled as “speciesist”—i.e., racist against robots. We’d better be prepared to wear that as a badge of honor. As our tech oligarchs and their mouthpieces proclaim the rise of digital deities, it should be clear that we’re not the supremacists in this equation.

We’re not just going to lose… we’re going to lose FAST

Our defense systems are completely useless against this weapon… Which means It can basically put the entire American nation on its knees…

Will you be prepared when everything we take for granted changes overnight? Because this country’s sinister plot to kickstart world war 3… And demolish millions of American lives…

Has already begun…

Ever since the “Great Recession” of 2008/2009, financial gurus of all stripes have been predicting another great depression, perhaps one even greater than the one of 1929 to 1933. Actually, what they’ve talked about is the country “driving off the financial cliff” and they’ve mostly attributed it to Congress’ irresponsibility in driving up the national debt.

The thing that differs in these financial prognostications is the trigger that’s going to cause us to go off the financial cliff. That’s an ever-moving target, as it changes every time that another trigger passes us by, without bringing about the expected disaster.

But the underlying problem which is likely to cause the financial collapse, bringing us into the depression is still there. Essentially, our economy is on very shaky ground and it is ground that has never been trod on before.

Part of what has propped up our economy to this point, is that the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Pretty much all international business transactions are conducted in dollars. That simple fact forces every country and every international corporation around the globe to buy dollars.

Add to that the amount of money the Federal Reserve is releasing as “quantitative easing” essentially money created out of thin air.

While there is some need for increasing the money pool in response to population increase and a growing economy, this is mostly done to fund government commitments that are not funded by tax revenue.

In other words, it’s money made up to pay for things, because there is no money to pay for them.

It is this, not businesses charging more for their products, which drives inflation. Businesses increase their prices because the materials they need to buy cost more; in other words, they are reacting to inflation, which in turn perpetuates the cycle.

The Reality

The reality of what is happening is that every time the Federal Reserve creates more money, is that they are diluting the value of every dollar in existence.

Essentially each dollar is a percentage of the total value of our country’s economy.

Since they are constantly creating dollars faster than the growth of the economy, they are reducing the value of the dollar. It’s just happening at such a slow rate, that we can’t see it.

Surprisingly, the quantitative easing that the Fed has been doing hasn’t caused massive inflation, as it normally would. About the only place we see that massive inflation is on Wall Street, which economists look at as being good.

But that doesn’t mean that everything is okay. At some point in time, and quite possibly sooner than anyone expects, the house of cards is going to come crashing down.

Some economists are now trying to say that our national dept is actually “too low” and that our economy can support a whole lot more. What they’re really saying is that they think the world will support holding onto a lot more US debt, allowing out government to borrow even more.

Perhaps the scariest single event pointing to how far out on a limb our government is, was the Coronavirus relief act.

In a single stroke, Congress authorized an additional 2.2 trillion dollars of funny money to be produced and parceled out to various entities, including you and I, to try and keep the COVID-19 pandemic from turning into a major financial disaster.

What nobody seems to have figured out yet, is that now that they’ve done that once, there’s nothing to stop them from doing it again. The real question is, how many times will they get away with that, before it becomes the trigger to bring down not just the US economy, but the economy of the world.

Typically, when countries have a financial collapse, the rest of the world’s economy remains intact. That props them up and allows them to rebuild. But as the world’s biggest economy, when the US has a hiccup in our finances, it affects the world.

The Great Depression hurt not only the US economy, but the entire world’s economy. Likewise, the housing bubble bursting in 2008/2009 did so too.

When we enter into this next depression, there won’t be anyone to bail us out; they’ll all be trying to bail themselves out, thanks to us.

What Should We Do?

With the certainty that another great depression is coming, even though we don’t know when it will happen, we need to get ready. While not everyone loses their jobs and has their lives destroyed by a depression, everyone is affected by it.

The Argentinean collapse of 1999, which is used as a model of what we could expect in our own economic collapse, saw over 2000% inflation, with the peak months showing 200% inflation in one month alone!

During that same collapse, wages increased by less than 250%.

So those who made out the best still found their money not going anywhere near as far and their purchasing power greatly reduced.

The two categories of people who were hit the worst by that collapse were those who worked in industries which provided luxuries and those who were heavily in debt.

Luxury goods stopped selling altogether, not even to the wealthy. So factories and stores which sold those goods shut down. At the same time, those who were heavily in debt couldn’t make their payments and lost everything, including their homes.

Therefore, we don’t want to be part of either of those groups. On the other hand, people who lived out in the country, where they could live off the land, did well, with few of them losing their homes or going hungry.

Get A Secure Job

If you work in an industry where that’s highly affected by the economy, especially one which is selling luxury goods, then it’s time to get out. Find something more secure, such as working in the food industry or making repairs.

When the economy goes south people put off buying new products; they keep the old, spending money on repairing them. So some of the most secure jobs around are providing repair services, whether repairing computers, appliances or cars.

Many of the typically secure jobs will remain secure as well, such as jobs in the medical field and working for the government; although some teachers did lose their jobs in the 2008/2009 hiccup our economy experienced.

Get Out Of Debt

Do whatever you can, to eliminate the debt in your life.

While there may be some dept you can’t get rid of, like your home mortgage, make sure that your mortgage isn’t any higher than it need to be.

If you can, downsize; selling your home and moving into a smaller one, lowering your mortgage payment. If not, then look at refinancing, to see if it will save you money.

More than anything, you want to get rid of other types of debt, as they will make it harder for you to make your house payment.

If the only debt you have is your mortgage, there’s a better chance that you’ll be able to pay it. But if you’re making payments on two cars, credit card debt and the living room furniture, you’re going to be in trouble.

Move, If You Can

The safest place to be in the midst of a financial crisis is a farm. If you can’t buy a small farm or homestead, then living in a small rural community is a good second choice.

Not only is it cheaper to live in those places, but they tend to have lower crime rates.

Crime always spikes during a time of financial crisis, as people who would otherwise obey the law become desperate and turn to crime as a means of getting what they need.

While there were massive food shortages in the cities, during the Argentinean collapse, there was abundant food on the farms. The problem wasn’t production; it was the cost of transport and selling. Inflation was so bad, that stores couldn’t afford to buy the food.

Unless they could sell that food right away, they would be caught in a position where what they could sell it for, wouldn’t provide them with enough money to restock.

Moving to the country also makes it easier to do the next thing that we all need to do, become self-sufficient.

Become Self-Sufficient

The cheapest way to feed your family is to grow the food yourself. While you may not have as much variety and you may miss a lot of your favorites, at least you’ll have food to eat.

With the high potential for food shortages, as I mentioned above, that’s an important part of your family’s survival.

Historically, the people living on farms and homesteads were the least affected by any vagrancies of the economy. While they may not have had a lot of riches, those people always had enough to eat. There’s a lot to be said for that.

Be Ready To Defend Yourself

Finally, be ready to defend home and family. As I mentioned earlier, crime rates tend to increase during times of financial hardship. There was a lot of this which happened during the Argentinean collapse, as people fought to survive.

People learned quickly not to open the doors of their homes, unless it was to someone that they knew.

Even then, they would check the area around their homes, looking for anyone who didn’t belong there, before opening the door.

There was always a chance of someone rushing the door while it was open.

Likewise, they learned not to stop at a red light, unless it was necessary to avoid an accident. Stopped cars became targets, with criminals breaking open windows to grab what they could or to try and hijack the car.

Kidnappings became a cottage industry in this time, with the children of wealthy people becoming prime targets. But they weren’t the only ones. To those who were desperate, anyone with a home was wealthy. Kids couldn’t play outdoors, without an armed adult standing by to watch over them and protect them.

Don’t Forget To Stockpile

Finally, we come back to the basis of all prepping, stockpiling. Food may very well become the best possible investment you can make, as the price of food will lead the inflation race.

Having a good stockpile, going into the depression, may just be what keeps your family eating, while everyone else is struggling to make ends meet.

You don’t have to be a prepper to know that all disasters are not created equal; just look at the last couple of years. COVID impacted the entire globe. In comparison, other “smaller” disasters might have had a huge impact locally, but were limited to smaller areas.

The war in Ukraine has really only impacted a very small percent of the world’s population, but it has captured the attention of almost everyone, as a possible portent of what is to come. 

Countries are starting to fall like dominos.Europe is entering their economic collapse this very weekend, as a bank holiday was declared and haircut announce on all bank deposits.  A total collapse of the economy would throw the all nations into utter chaos.

The economic collapse will be severe, and I want you to be prepared for it. How to Live and Survive When Your Country Enters an Economic Collapse:

• Family – Use the time to strengthen your family bonds.  Reach out to cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, children, in-laws and others.  Offer them what help you can.  There may be a time when you must rely upon your extended family for help.   Double up your home to share expenses.  Grandparents can move into their children’s home, and provide babysitting services, while the adults go to their employment or seek new jobs.
• Convert your assets to liquid form – If your country is likely to enter an economic collapse, convert your assets to liquid forms.   Sell the big house, and rent instead.  Move your retirement investments in things likely to survive an economic collapse.  Consider cashing out your retirement assets, if a full-blown great depression become likely.  If I were living in Italy today, I’d remove all my money from banks, liquidate my retirement accounts into cash, and sell all art and collectibles.  Instead, I’d buy long-term stored food, gold, silver, and simply just keep cash.   Italy is inching ever closer to a bail-out by the European Union.
• Grow your own food – If you have even the smallest plot of land, start a garden. Even a small plot of land can produce enough potatoes to feed a family.
• Hunting and fishing – If you are out of work, use the time to obtain food as our ancestors did a mere 100 years ago.
• Cut up your credit cards now – Credit cards are modern forms of slavery.  Debt is killing the global economy.   Pay in cash, or don’t buy it at all.  During an economic collapse, no one uses credit.  First, credit become closed to most people, when banks fail.   Second, in a collapse society, cash is king.
• Start a home-based business – Whatever your skills, look to transform your skills into a home-based business.  Your hobbies might also transform into a business.   If you play a musical instrument, start teaching the instrument.   Like working on cars, do small repairs our of your home’s garage.
• Change your diet – To save money, eat less meat.  Instead, eat more beans, which are inexpensive but have high nutrition.   Try to eat food in season for your location.  Buy food direct from farmers.
• Learn home canning – During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, my mother-in-law was a young child.  She and her siblings would gleam from already picked farm field.  Lots of food are left in the fields because pickers or harvesting machines are not perfect.  My mother-in-law’s mother would do home canning from food in their own garden plus what was gleamed from neighboring farms.   Often you can cheap buy pounds and pounds of green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, berries, and other vegetables from farmers markets.   My mother-in-law mentioned that they were never hungry during the first Great Depression, because their basement often had several hundred jars of home canned foods.
• Sell your trinkets and toys – You don’t need a big screen television.  Sell the toys, collectibles, and electronic gadgets.   It is better to have gardening tools and long-term stored food.
• Regain your work ethic – It is hard work to tend to your garden and then go to full-time job.  But that is how people lived just a 50 years ago.  The concept of a paid retirement and 8 hour work day is rather new in society.  Up until 50 years ago, people worked until they could work no longer.  Then their families would take care of them in their old age.  Take on odd jobs, cash jobs.  Extend your work day from 8 to 12 hours.   An adults needs 7 to 8 hours of sleep per day to stay health.  That gives your 16 other hours to be productive in your day.   One of the main reasons why the global debt crisis has gotten so bad is because the Western society has gotten LAZY!!!!   My grandfather used to tell me as a young child, “A man who works hard never starves.”   Take extra part-time jobs, when available.  Even when you have a job, work extra hours or another part-time job.   One month you might be working 18 hours a day, but then the next month you might not find any work at all.   While you are working, always network with potential employers, in case you lose your job.
• Barter Clubs – In Argentina and Spain, many local towns have started barter clubs.  Goods and services are exchanged for points.  Points are used to obtain other goods and services.   For example, grandma knits four wool sweaters.  At the barter club, the sweaters sold in return for 25 points each.   Grandma uses the 100 points to obtain two loaves of bread for 20 points and fresh gallon milk for 15 points.
• Take advantage of local charities – Don’t rely upon it, but use it if you must.  If you can work, you should work.  But some people can’t work, due to age or sickness.  You must feed and clothe your children.  Do what you must to provide for your family.  But if you do have employment, let the charities help those less fortunate.
• Your home – If you live in a big home with a mortgage payment, consider selling the bigger home to move into a small home.  It is better to own outright a smaller home than have a mortgage payment for bigger home.  If you feel like you can barely make your mortgage payments today, sell now, before economic collapse.  Become a renter, which gives your more flexibility.  Owning your home outright will give you some protection during an economic collapse.  Governments are not likely to kick people of their owned homes because of late property taxes, when millions of other people are already on the street.  Owning your home guarantees a place to live.

• Learn to do things for yourself – I am stunned about how many women these days don’t know how to sew a button on a shirt.   I’m a guy, and I know how to sew a button.  Learn to do everything for yourself.   Change the oil on your car.  Repair your own shoes and clothing.  Do you own home repairs.   Make your own jams and jellies.  Wash and iron your own dress shirts.   Cook your own meals. 
• Raise chickens or rabbits for food – Chickens and rabbits are fairly easy to raise, but takes some skills and practice.   Rabbits can be raised in a rather small space, if you buy their feed.  Even if you just have a quarter acre of land, that is enough for a chicken coup and a dozen hens and a roster.
• Use the resources in your community – Use your local library to rent books and videos, rather than paying.  Take classes at your local community college to obtain new skills.   Offer to help the farmers near your home, in return for a portion of the harvest.
• One man’s trash is another’s treasure – Furniture, clothing, appliances and tools are often discarded while still useful.   Form a hand-me-down network in your neighborhood for children’s clothing.   If you have skills to repair item, find discarded items to fix and then sell.
• Gold and Silver are reserved for when things get really bad – If you able to acquire physical gold and silver, set these aside for when things get really bad.  Economic collapse leads to a break down in society, which leads to changes in government, which often leads to war.  A gold coin was often used as a bribe to escape a country in a state of war.  Do everything you can to avoid selling your gold and silver, until the choice is starvation or not.  First rely on your labors to provide for your family.  Exhaust every option before selling your gold and silver coins. From a price point alone, now is a great time to buy silver and gold.I like to buy both silver and gold coins.   I save silver coins for what would be everyday transactions.  The gold coins are for a long-term store of wealth and major purchases.    In a long-term SHTF or WROL environment, such as an economic collapse, much of what commerce that will occur will be done through barter.  Since silver and gold coins are universal currency, the easiest barter will occur with exchange of silver and gold coins.   For one 10 cent silver dime, you could envision buying a loaf of bread.  A half ounce of gold coin could buy a side of beef (one-half of a beef cattle).My favorite way to buy silver and gold is small amounts every month.  Each month, depending on what is left over from paying the bills, I’ll buy small amounts of gold and silver.  Depending on your monthly available budget, the following is a suggested monthly buying plan.$50 Monthly Budget – 2 or 3 US once ounce silver Eagle coins
• $100 Monthly Budget – Buy above five US Silver Eagles coins, and on alternating months, buy one US $5  coin with 1/10th ounce of gold
• $250 Monthly Budget – One 1/10th ounce US gold coin and about five US Silver Eagles coins
• I like the 1/10th ounce gold coins versus 1 ounce gold coins for several reasons.   First, the 1/10th ounce coins are very small and easily hidden.   You could have 20 1/10th gold coins sew into clothing, hidden within a zipper belt, or in the heel of your shoes.  The larger gold coins are more likely to be discoverable from an x-ray or an airport security detector device.
• Expect crime to become rampant – During an economic collapse, police are laid-off and crime rates go up.  It is up to you to defend your family from crime.   Obtain firearms and ammunition before the collapse.  You’ll not be able to afford firearms after the collapse.
• Be prepared to move for a new job – During an economic collapse, jobs will not come to you.  You might need to go to the job.   Expect that you might need to move your family to a new city or even a new country to find employment.  Think ahead of time of what you might do for a relocation.   For this reason, don’t weigh down your household with lots of art work, decorations, and expensive furniture.   Rather, focus on nice, but functional items for you home, which are of the size which are easy for your to move yourself.
• Cancel your addictions – If you smoke tobacco, drink too much alcohol, take illegal drugs, or addicted to prescription medicines, now is the time to confront your addictions.   Can you look into your children’s eyes as they ask for more food, but you spend your money on tobacco, alcohol, or drugs instead?   Addictions are difficult to confront.  Do it now, or it may kill you outright during an economic collapse.
• Improve your health – Exercise, lose weight, and learn to love sweat.   A proper body weight will not only let you live longer, but will enable you to do more work and earn more money.  Expect during an economic collapse that you will lose access to medical insurance.  If you have any outstanding dental problems or pending minor surgeries, do it now.  During an economic collapse, hospitals will be places of misery, and not healing. 
• Learn to live without electricity – Electricity will be a luxury during an economic collapse.  Learn and prepare to wash clothing by hand.  Be able to heat your home with fireplace or wood stove.  Cut your own firewood.  Boil water and prepare meals from wood stove or fireplace.
• Become mentally strong – You will need to be mentally strong to survive an economic collapse.  Our grandparents and great-grandparents survived the first Great Depression and World War Two.  And so can you survive the second Great Depression.   The Greatest Generation had the courage to endure the 1st Great Depression and World War 2.  The following Baby Boomer generation racked up debts to be paid by their grandchildren and yet unboard great-grandchildren.  Shamefully, the Baby Boomer generation, produced by the greatest generation, is the spoiled, selfish, worst generation.   Focus on the love of your family.  The pride of being self-sufficient.  A positive attitude is a reward in so many ways.   Many people will simply give up, because of being accustomed to a life of leisure and plenty.   Reconnect with your religion and your spiritual

A new poll has emerged indicating that 7 in 10 Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. With the unpredictability of life, having savings is necessary. Here are 5 easy tips to build your savings.

The over consumerism of this country has created an obsession with an unaffordable lifestyle. Households are going further into debt in order to keep up with luxurious living, rather than saving it. A recent survey shows just how abysmal Americans’ savings habits are, reporting that 7 out of 10 Americans only have less than $1,000 in their savings account.

Last year, GoBankingRates surveyed more than 5,000 Americans only to uncover that 62% of them had less than $1,000 in savings. Last month GoBankingRates again posed the question to Americans of how much they had in their savings account, only this time it asked 7,052 people. The result? Nearly seven in 10 Americans (69%) had less than $1,000 in their savings account.

Breaking the survey data down a bit further, we find that 34% of Americans don’t have a dime in their savings account, while another 35% have less than $1,000. Of the remaining survey-takers, 11% have between $1,000 and $4,999, 4% have between $5,000 and $9,999, and 15% have more than $10,000.

Furthermore, even though lower-income adults struggle with saving money more than middle- and upper-income folks, no income group did particularly well. Some 29% of adults earning more than $150,000 a year, and 44% making between $100,000 and $149,999, had less than $1,000 in savings. Comparatively, 73% of the lowest income adults (those earnings $24,999 or less annually) had less than $1,000 in their savings account.

Source

Americans’ Risking Financial Disaster

An over abundant lifestyle may not be the only reasons why American’s savings are dwindling. With the unpredictability of the economy, fear of unemployment, medical emergencies and other unforeseen emergencies, millions of Americans are having to use any additional funds they acquire just to stay afloat. That said, these households are risking a financial disaster without any savings to fall back on. The best way to circumvent this from happening is to start saving a modest amount of money each month, over time this can accrue to a healthy savings account.

Simply put, the goal any emergency fund or savings is to carry us when plans don’t work out. Unemployment is always something to plan ahead for and recent unemployment rates, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics is at 5% of the U.S. population. Many believe each household should have six months of salary saved up and/or an emergency fund to fall back on in case of job joss. Moreover, experts recommend saving at a minimum 10% of your income to put towards savings. If you save and additional %5 of that income, it can be used as an emergency fund to keep you from using savings. This can be achieved by breaking down your monthly budget:

85% – monthly bills

10% – savings/retirement

5% – emergency fund

As with all budgets, sometimes this figure fluctuates, so if you are able to put more or less into savings, then adjust as necessary. One could even break the budget down further and have a savings for vacations or family centered activities.

Build your Savings in 5 Easy Steps

1. Get out of debt. Your primary goal is financial freedom. Paying off your debt is first step toward freeing up money. Only paying the suggested amount on your credit card debt will not make a dent in the overall debt due to the interest. Organize and list your debts from the smallest to the largest and start paying the smallest debts first. Using a budgeting tool can help. Once the small debts are paid off, move on to the next largest debts on this list and snowball the payments. Essentially, you are creating a snowball effect with your payments and freeing up additional money in your budget for other uses – like an emergency fund.

2. Have an achievable monetary goal set. Starting small and build upon your initial investments for your savings is an easy way to start and not get overwhelmed. (i.e., I want to have $1,000 in savings by Christmas). Some people start with saving $1,000 and many can find this amount hiding in their budgets. We all know that many emergencies can be very expensive (i.e., medical emergencies). Therefore, once you reach your $1,000 goal, move on to saving an additional $1,000 and so on. Read more below on how to slash the budget.

3. Make it easy on yourself. One way to easily begin building your savings is to create a separate account in your bank and set up automatic monthly transfers to easily move money into your account. There are some who prefer to have multiple accounts in order to organize their income better. Some have accounts strictly for emergency funds, savings, vacations, etc. This will help you organize your budget and steadily build your savings.

On the other hand, there are some who do not prefer to keep their money in the bank due to concerns of economic uncertainty. In that case, you can hold your money in a safe or, consider taking your saved money and investing into precious metals. This ties the money up into a tangible investment and keeps you from spending it. It also makes it a little more difficult to cash in and spend it. That said, if the day came and you needed your money, all you needed to do is run down to the precious metals store in your area. Who knows, you could be getting more money than you started out with! As well, by using this method of saving, you could easily begin a very lucrative long-term savings method.

4. Start slashing the budget. Start eliminating the budget busters and nonessentials. Do you really have to get a four-dollar coffee at the high-end coffee house on your way to work? By cutting this small indulgence, you will save over a thousand dollars a year! 

Now, let’s look at a bigger example. Let’s take the average 10 hour workday (including commute, lunch breaks, etc.)  Now spend that day productively at home.  Here are some things you might do that other people pay for:

• Growing food $20
• Yard work $40
• Cleaning house $50
• Preparing food from scratch $30
• Mending clothes and doing laundry $20
• Childcare – all day, simultaneous with other tasks $75 for 2 kids
• Bathing and grooming the dog $65
• Walk the dog at lunchtime $10
• Make your own cleaning products and health and beauty aids $20

If you add all of those things up, you are talking about a LOT of money.  I based my totals on the prices of those services and goods in my area,  and on an average day, I could “earn” $330.  Tax free.  On an annual basis of a 5 day work week, that is the equivalent of just over $85,000 per year. Again, let me reiterate: tax-free, which can save you another 15-30%.

As well, you can research more gas efficient ways to drive to work or run errand and make goals to cut your gas budget by $50 a month. Moreover, finding a co-worker that lives in the area and carpooling to work can also save you lots of money. If you live close to work consider riding your bike to work or public transportation.

5. Don’t stop saving! What happens when you meet your financial goal? Keep going! Don’t take the extra money out and splurge. Start saving for another type of emergency. There are some who get hit with double whammies and have multiple emergencies at once. Let’s say you saved money for the car repairs example listed in the second tip. When you hit your goal, move on to another one. You could start saving for an even loftier goal like saving six months worth of salary for a job loss.

Life happens and sometimes it doesn’t work out in our favor. Organizing your finances and finding ways to free up some of your money for an emergency will help you create a personal safety net. These are steps that anyone can do. When you have amassed enough money to make your financial goal, you will sleep better at night knowing that you can take care of life’s unexpected events.

With the restoration of free speech protections on Twitter, panic has grown on the left that its control over social media could come to an end. Now, some of the greatest advocates of censorship in Congress are specifically warning Facebook not to follow Twitter in restoring free speech to its platform.

In a chilling letter from Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), André Carson (D-Ind.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Facebook was given a not-so-subtle threat that reducing its infamous censorship system will invite congressional action. The letter to Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, is written on congressional stationery “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts.”

With House Republicans pledging to investigate social media censorship when they take control in January, these four Democratic members are trying to force Facebook to “recommit” to censoring opposing views and to make election censorship policies permanent. Otherwise, they suggest, they may be forced to exercise oversight into any move by Facebook to “alter or rollback certain misinformation policies.”

In addition to demanding that Facebook preserve its bans on figures like former president Donald Trump, they want Facebook to expand its censorship overall because “unlike other major social media platforms, Meta’s policies do not prohibit posts that make unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud.”

Clegg is given Schiff’s telephone number to discuss Facebook’s compliance — an ironic contact point for a letter on censoring “disinformation.” After all, Schiff was one of the members of Congress who, before the 2020 presidential election, pushed the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and he has been criticized for pushing false narratives on Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. (Schiff has previously pressured social media companies to expand the censorship of opposing views).

The letter to Clegg is reminiscent of another letter sent by several congressional Democrats to cable-TV carriers last year, demanding to know why they continue to carry Fox News. (For full disclosure, I appear as a legal analyst on Fox News.) As I later discussed in congressional testimony, it was an open effort by those Democrats to censor opposing views by proxy or by surrogate.

This is not the first time that some members of Congress have not-so-subtly warned social media companies to expand the censorship of political and scientific views which they consider to be wrong.

In a November 2020 Senate hearing, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. But Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., warned that he and his Senate colleagues would not tolerate any “backsliding or retrenching” by “failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.”

Others, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called on social media companies to use enlightened algorithms to “protect” people from their own “bad” choices. After all, as President Joe Biden asked, without censorship and wise editors, “How do people know the truth?”

Now, Democrats fear Facebook and other social media companies might “backslide” into free speech as Facebook, among others, is faced with declining revenues and ordering layoffs. Tellingly, these congressional Democrats specifically want assurances that those layoffs will not reduce the staff dedicated to censoring social media.

It is not hard to see the cause for alarm. This hold-the-line warning is meant to stop a cascading failure in the once insurmountable wall of social-media censorship. If Facebook were to restore free-speech protections, the control over social media could evaporate.

Despite an effort by the left to boycott Twitter and cut off advertising revenues, users are signing up in record numbers, according to Twitter owner Elon Musk, and a recent poll shows a majority of Americans “support Elon Musk’s ongoing efforts to change Twitter to a more free and transparent platform.”

The pressure on Facebook is ironic, given the company’s previous effort to get the public to accept — even welcome — censorship. The company ran a creepy ad campaign about how young people should accept censorship (or “content modification,” in today’s Orwellian parlance) as part of their evolution with technology. It did not work; most people are not eager to buy into censorship. Instead, many of them apparently are buying into Twitter.

The public response has led censorship advocates to look abroad for allies. Figures like Hillary Clinton have called upon European countries to force the censorship of American citizens.

Censorship comes at a cost not only to free speech but, clearly, to these companies. Nevertheless, some members of Congress are demanding that Facebook and other companies offer the “last full measure of devotion” to the cause of censorship. Despite the clear preference of the public for more free speech, Facebook is being asked to turn its back on them (and its shareholders) and continue to exclude dissenting views on issues ranging from COVID to climate change.

These members know that censorship only works if there are no alternatives. The problem is that there are alternatives. Fox News reportedly has more Democrats watching it than left-leaning rival CNN, which now faces its own massive cuts and plummeting ratings.

For whatever reason, these companies face declining interest in what they offer. Yet, some Democrats are pushing them to double-down on the same course of effectively writing off half of the electorate and the audience market.

This type of pressure worked in the past because individual executives are loathe to be tagged personally in these campaigns. However, their companies are paying the price in carrying out these directives from Congress.

In the past, many companies willingly — if not eagerly, in the case of pre-Musk Twitter — carried out censorship as surrogates, as the internal Twitter documents released by Musk have indicated. Some public officials knew they could circumvent the First Amendment by getting these companies to block opposing views by proxy. However, the public and the marketplace may succeed where the Constitution could not — and that’s precisely what these officials fear, as they see the control of social media erode heading toward the 2024 election.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once famously told his company to “Move fast and break things.” When it comes to censorship, however, these members of Congress are warning “Not so fast!” if Facebook is considering a break in favor of free speech.