New Year, Same Me
Damar's Silver Lining, Cloward-Piven & Plans for 2023
Here’s hoping everyone had a terrific New Year and holiday after last week’s Bye Week. As a semi-reluctant entrant into the my 50s, I’ve long outgrown the Las Vegas New Year’s Eve and other similar festivities that were the blurry hallmark of my 20s. These days, a warm fire at home with some friends, good food and family is infinitely more attractive than battling the Drunk Driving 500 or paying triple retail at a restaurant for the same menu the night before. To each his own, and if I were single it might be a different story. But fortunately I’m not.
Good to be a Democrat.
There are at least 3 stories circulating that remind us it’s better to be a Democrat in today’s political circus. After all, a card carrying membership comes with marionette strings and the MSM in your back pocket.
When all is said and done, productive citizens pay approximately half of their income to the government. For that extortionate price tag, consider how little the the federal government does competently. From endemic incompetence to nightmarish mismanagement, The State has unraveled three colossal failures that have barely registered on the mainstream media's radar - a deafening silence which would be reversed if an opposing President were in office. If Trump (or any Republican) was President, we’d be seeing 24 hour, wall to wall pearl-clutching coverage over the following 3 fiascos:
Airline Travel Calamity: The incredible degradation in airline travel experience, capped by the recent Southwest fiasco is a major black eye for statists. Believe it or not, there’s actually a cabinet level position that is supposed to deal with these types of collapses. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttieg aka ‘Mayor Pete’ made headlines when he took two full months off on parental leave when he and his partner adopted twins. While the idea of taking off 8 weeks while you’re supposedly in charge of the transportation complex of the most powerful nation on earth while its suffering through a supply chain and travel crisis is mind boggling enough (don’t accept the position if you can’t fulfill the responsibility - this isn’t an MTA conductor job), the ability to avoid any criticism or attention whatsoever when the nation’s airways are one big SigAlert these days is a perfect example of how Democrats face no consequences for their colossal public failures.
Mayor Pete’s invisibility confirms the Confucian maxim - Those who hire based on identity politics and not merit end up with incompetent scrubs like Mayor Pete.
The Baby Food and Child Medicine Shortages: We have an epidemic of childhood respiratory illnesses and a horrific shortage of baby formula, children’s medicine and antibiotics.
It’s insane this isn’t leading every MSM news channel morning, noon and night. It’s doubly insane the White House gets a pass on this. If you can’t do the bare minimum and protect children from your own market induced failures, what’s the point of even pretending legacy governments matter?
The Border Crisis: Biden and Harris have sought to downplay the onslaught of migrants at our Southern border, yet it remains an undeniable fact that we are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. With never-ending flow cases flooding in every single day, this escalating dilemma has become sheer mayhem personified.
Any rational person observing humanitarian crisis can see that this is either the most venal vote fraud scheme in American history or the keystone of a deliberate Cloward-Piven strategy I spoke about in March 2021 while condemning the MSM:
“This destabilization of the American mind and moral compass now has begotten, as it must, societal destabilization. Whether it is the War on Christianity and people of faith, the elevation of racial distrust or the flooding a purposely porous border with an overwhelming amount of unassimilable foreigners, this serves the Cloward-Piven goal of overloading the system to cause a total breakdown of society, necessitating replacement of it with a socialist or totalitarian one.
The more people awaken and realize that nearly everything they read in the corrupted, corporate media is either manipulated, shrouded or outright false, the better off we'll be as a society.
The death of honest journalism is one of those metastatic cancers that doesn't always make itself visible immediately, but in the long run is always fatal to a society.
Consider for a moment what the lack of a free press would have meant at other times in history.
Watergate, WMD in Iraq, the Pentagon Papers, MK Ultra, Nazi eugenics experiments, Tuskegee, the failure to identify the origins of SARS-Cov2 and hold the perpetrators responsible....the list goes on and on.
It means those in power can literally do anything they want when corruption and falsehoods go unchecked. There's zero chance for a productive or just society under that framework.
So what can we do about it? Treat journalists like tobacco executives (they're worse). Publicly shame them and starve them of your hard earned money. Cancel subscriptions to the New York Times, Washington Post and any other of the establishment mouthpieces that have made a career on spreading fake news, or acting as the think tank and chief propaganda arm of woke totalitarianism. Your dollars and attention are your shield and armor.
Seek out minority reports that have proven themselves reliable and incorruptible over the years. Reporters like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and others.
People spend money on art for it's representation of truth and beauty, do the same for honest information brokers and creators.
Instead of being a patron of the Arts, Be a Patron of the Truth. Spend your money on Truth Seekers and Truthsayers you align with ideologically. Support dissidents and information insurgents. If we let the principle of objective truth be murdered on a cross of Wokeness, then the future will continue down a path of despair. Between DeepFakes, AR and an all-seeing all-powerful technocracy, they will literally be able to present untrue 'information' directly in front of our 'lying eyes' (or downloaded direct onto our brains in a chipped transhumanist future).
Truth still matters. Don't let them tell you different.
The available information molds the narrative, and the narrative controls the policy and public's response.
By altering and manipulating that information, the establishment and it's water-carrying hand maidens in the press have been able to convince the majority of people to adopt principles and politicians that are diametrically opposed to their well being.
Sow fear, distrust, worry, and the delegation of personal autonomy to a force they deem capable of saving or fixing things (the government) who can only make things worse. Wash rinse repeat.”
For those unfamiliar with Cloward Piven, it’s a hallmark strategy of leftists to destabilize the country. Create the problem, provide their own solution. It’s similar to the Covid fiasco where US funded gain-of-function research led to a lab ‘leak’ of a novel and deadly virus. Suddenly thereafter, Big Pharma and government bodies show up with a magical 95% protection’ vaccine after less than a year despite failing to come up with a vaccine for HIV, the common cold, cancer or any other coronavirus after more than half a century of testing.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy is the tactical brainchild of an ambitious couple - professors Richard and Frances Piven from Columbia University. They sought to revolutionize American society by intentionally overloading bureaucracy with impossible demands, thereby triggering a cascade effect that would eventually lead to social unrest and economic collapse; as well ultimately bringing about dreams of socialism inspired by Hillary Clinton mentor Saul Alinsky.
“Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.
Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth. By chaos, they mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.
In the '60s, Cloward and Piven saw welfare reform as a way to exploit racial unrest - so they brought George Wiley on board with his National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). This organization employed militant activists who stormed local government offices demanding their entitlements. Thanks in part to this strategy, nationwide welfare rolls skyrocketed from 4.3 million all the way up to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s. The greatest success was seen right here at home; New York City boasted one recipient of assistance for every two people working full time in its private economy.
The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven’s thrill that “…the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.”
Despite their revolutionary, nearly 50-year-old mission to overthrow capitalism in the United States, most Americans remain unfamiliar with Cloward and Piven's grand scheme for economic upheaval. But here’s a crash course: by encouraging even a small number of people already eligible for government benefits to claim them all at once - thus overloading bureaucracy - they hoped it would trigger an avalanche towards total systemic collapse. In other words, they believed that if you can't beat 'em, overwhelm 'em!
As a result, they predicted a profound financial and political crisis would unleash "powerful forces for major economic reform at the national level." With a carefully orchestrated media campaign, friendly liberal journalists would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline and apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act as we saw in 2020 and are continuing to see now.
The border is literally the base case for the existence of a federal government. If you can’t secure and defend our borders, what exactly is the rationale for government’s existence? And please explain it to me like I’m a 5th grader why I should pay federal taxes…
Flashbacks and Forward
One of the best market calls I’ve had was my Controlled Demolition of the Bull Market post from October 2021. I suggest you re-read it as those who followed were able to sell the highs and save themselves from the across the board capital destruction of the last 12 months. The letter was a clarion call to move to cash with a sprinkling of commodities and bitcoin. While the bitcoin call hasn’t panned out (yet), you should know that it is not a day or a swing trade - it’s System Insurance against the accelerating monetary and political madness we’ve seen over the last 2 decades.
At some point the system will need a reset or reboot. Much of the brazen political and financial corruption we’re seeing bears the hallmarks of late-stage Empire collapse where those in the know are openly looting and extracting what they can before the Reset Button gets punched. The debt and spending is unsustainable and for the first time in my lifetime, the dollar perch as the reserve currency is being threatened by the BRICS and the Biden Administration’s unprecedented incompetence.
I was one of the first in late 2020 and early 2021 to call out the impending tidal wave of inflation and mock the Fed’s embarrassing ‘transitory’ take on inflation.
Moving to cash in late 2021 would have saved you from the rollercoaster of 2022 that ended with the largest down S&P performance since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
These days, several sectors appear interesting despite the weakening economy like industrials and commodities due to decades of capital underinvestment. For example, United Airlines just made "the largest widebody order by a U.S. carrier in commercial aviation history" by purchasing 100 of Boeing's top-of-the-line 787 Dreamliners with options to purchase 100 more.
Precious metals should hold their value and potentially increase as foreign central banks have been big buyers of late and gold remains one of the most likely candidates to compete with the dollar as the basis for an alternate reserve currency if the BRICS movement keeps growing.
I’ll have more next month, but suffice to say there is no rush to do anything. The Fed isn’t done yet, inflation and high rates are taking a tough toll on the economy and housing, and the coming decade long de-globalization trend is just getting started.
Additionally, I think there is a significant likelihood that Russia will launch a Winter Offensive that will hurt energy, food and investment market stability. Bear markets are grinding, and return of capital is the goal - not return on capital. Don’t chase breakouts or sell hard dips. Heed the age-old adage: have a plan and stick to it. Don't be deterred by the winds of change unless compelling reasons arise that demand adaptation. The most likely scenario, is a frustrating, capital churning range bound market from 3200-4400 on the S&P. But we’ll dive deeper in the coming newsletters.
Advice from an Unlikely Source
It’s rare that I’ll consult the New York Times as anything other than a barometer on The Current Thing-ism, but it does help to read opposition research to get a feel for where things stand in the eyes of your enemies. Whether socially, politically or especially financially, markets are governed more by emotion and psychology than most economists and analysts give them credit.
What’s interesting is if you can peel back and shed the programming, people are a lot more similar than we expect. Yes, politicians and the media do everything in their power to divide and conquer. But at the base level, people are intrinsically analagous. We’re all subject to thousands of years of evolutionary programming and psychology, and we all want relatively the same thing - life’s basic life necessities like food, shelter, safety and health taken care of and then the metaphysical grails like purpose, connection, happiness and meaningfulness.
Here are a few bits of advice from the New York Times Year End Magazine Issue which I found helpful and agree with:
In your closet and your life, subtract whenever you add. — Mary Shanklin, Winter Garden, Fla.
Stop and recognize happy moments when you’re in the middle of them. Literally stop and say out loud, “This is a happy time.” It’s a way to ground yourself in the joyful parts of your life. We do this with moments of trauma and crisis all the time. Maybe we should flip that script. — Mary Guzzetta, Pittsburgh
Parent the child you have. As a parent of a child with special needs, this is my mantra. But this is also true of any child. Stop trying to make your child quieter, louder, more outgoing, more interested in things their sibling likes and appreciate the unique and individual small person you’ve been given. — Sue Lanigan, East Aurora, N.Y.
Everyone is going through something. — Rose Fischietto, Macedonia, Ohio
If there is an issue bothering me, I think to myself, “Will this still be an issue in one week or in one month?” If the answer is no, it’s a small problem so I let the stress go and move on. — LaNae Williams, East Lansing, Mich.
After my son and his fiancée were involved in an automobile accident in Spain, a friend told me I would need to learn how to practice “powerless mothering.” Following several spinal cord surgeries and six months of challenging rehabilitation, my son’s sweetheart has slowly regained strength and mobility in her upper body, but she remains paralyzed from the waist down, and my grown son has become a loving caregiver. My friend’s advice has helped me see that I can still be a supportive mother without any power to change their new world. — Candice Dale, South Portland, Maine
When the wrench is on the nut, tighten it. In other words, if you’re already touching a piece of mail, deal with it. If you see a thing you’ll need soon, buy it now. If an uncomfortable conversation comes up, have it rather than deflecting it. — Kasia Maroney, Trumansburg, N.Y.
I like to remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days is 100 percent, and that’s pretty good. — Hudson, San Diego
Put 10 pennies in your left pocket. Find something for which you are grateful. Move one penny to your right pocket. You should find all pennies have moved to the right pocket at the end of the day. Celebrate. — Mike Wilson, Sedona, Ariz.
Stop reaching for people who aren’t reaching back. — Katya Davidson, Portland, Ore.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you have to do it, or that it’s good for you. — Divya Rao Heffley, Pittsburgh
Be where your feet are. — Submitted by both Pattie Saunders, Portland, Ore., and Kelly Kammerer, New York City
Damar Hamlin
Most of you are likely familiar with the frightening story of Bills safety Damar Hamlin who collapsed suddenly on the field during the Monday Night Football game. As the event has been covered exhaustively in other places, there are only a few quick points I want to make about the tragic event.
First and most important, it appears Damar will survive and even avoid the worst predictions of significant brain or other permanent damage.
He’s possibly the luckiest man on the face of the earth. If he collapses anywhere else but on the middle of a field during a pro football game with some of the best doctors and paramedics right by his side with AED equipment, he’s almost certainly dead.
Nobody knows yet whether it was due to the vaccination or some other condition, and the “I know the answer” speculation has been suspect.
The big lesson here is not the obvious one, namely that no one except those over the age of 75 or with significant comorbidity should have even considered taking the vax. Especially not young athletes in the prime of their career. The vaccine has injured and killed far more healthy people under the age of 30 than Covid ever could or did, by a large factor. That’s a perpetual lesson we still need to learn and hold people accountable for, but that’s not THIS lesson.
The lesson to learn from the Damar event is much more subtle and should raise a lot of eyebrows if you’re paying attention. Think about the reaction of the Regime and its henpecked maidens in the media the instant Damar went down. In a matter of seconds, establishment approved doctors were on Twitter saying it was clearly ‘Commoto Cortis’ and had nothing to do with the experimental vaccines.
Other questions about the extraordinary event include:
Why did several carloads of government agents pull up to the hospital? Was there a security risk? Or was it to ‘manage’ the story and optics.
Without an update on Damar’s condition or communication from his doctors, why were the NYT and other ‘journalist’ agents of the intelligence community pushing stories that night and the following morning that Commoto Cortis (CC) was really quite common and that’s almost certainly what was responsible for Damar’s fate.
Anyone who watched the game or the highlights, can see with their own two eyes that this was a routine, nothing hit. Does that mean CC is impossible? Of course not. But which is more likely? Damar collapsed and temporarily died on the field from CC - an event that has happened a handful of times over a 30 year period and usually from 90+ mph slapshots or baseballs smashing into players with no padding andpredisposing conditions which would have been picked up prior, or that a professional football player in the prime of his life suffered the same affliction that thousands of athletes have suffered over the last 2 years since the introduction of the experimental ‘vaccines’ that are known to cause myocraditis and other heart damage?
The massive and immediate all hands on deck propaganda effort from the regime tells us they’re deathly worried about the narrative as more and more people wake up. If I’m the NFLPA or a player, I’m demanding answers right now and terrified of what could happen.
Final point - there’s no definitive answer yet. Hopefully we hear some honest truths but the way the regime reacted and the devastating effect it would have on the entire Covid vaccine narrative doesn’t make me optimistic.
Addendum: Steve Kirsch added a couple of fascinating points yesterday in his newsletter which is worth repeating in full:
“If the Buffalo Bills want to know if any of their players are vaccine injured, it's easy to do so
There is a company, HeartCare Corp, that makes a machine that looks like an EKG, but can detect a wide variety of heart damage, including myocarditis. They can assess their team in a day.
Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz could always return to Kansas at any time, the same is true of the Buffalo Bills… if they want to assess whether their players have a heart injury or not, all they have to do is give Heart Care Corp. a call and arrange for a visit to their team.
The HeartCare screening is safe, non-invasive, and takes around 15 minutes.
Then they would know for sure if the COVID vaccine has injured their players. This will save lives.
Sound good?
Does the technology work?
Yes.
They’ve screened vaccinated patients and the rates of clinical and subclinical myocarditis observed is so high you’d never believe I was telling the truth (hint: it’s well over 5% in the general public).
There are just two minor problems with my idea…
The players won’t want to know because it could sideline them permanently
The management won’t want to know because it would mean that they were responsible. It could also disqualify them from playing in further contests.
However, they could do a screening and just notify the individual players of their results, but make the aggregate statistics known to the public as a public service.
Summary
Airlines, professional sports teams, etc. could screen all their pilots, players, etc. This is especially important for airlines.
Will they?
I doubt it. The stakes are too high. They’d rather deal with a crashed plane than have to replace a lot of pilots.
I just wrote this article to point out that we have the solution.
What we lack is the courage to do the right thing.
The FAA won’t require screening since their job is to protect the public from terrorists, not from pilots suddenly dying in the cockpit.
President Biden is never going to call for safety screening since it would reveal he has crippled the American public.
But maybe a large employer which required the vaccine will offer a free heart screening to all employees. Will they then take responsibility for their actions? I doubt it.
Employees should be demanding this from any employer that required the vaccine. A mass screening of a single large company would generate statistics that would immediately halt the COVID vaccination program and reveal the depth of corruption at the FDA and CDC.
Maybe The New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN would do it for their employees? Wouldn’t that be interesting?
Or the military could do it for all their soldiers? Or just the pilots who fly expensive jets? Seems like cheap insurance to me. But of course, they’ll want to keep the results private so nobody finds out. After all, we wouldn’t want to upset the narrative now, would we?
Summary
Heart screening is available and inexpensive.
I sure hope SOMEONE does this and proves me wrong on all of this.
But I know what the post-vax myocarditis rates are, so I’m pretty sure nobody in the world is going to want to do this.
This is very sad.”
Big Silver Lining: Damar’s scare catalyzed a nation and the bright spot is many people were witness to the power of faith. Even the secular skeptics like the NYT were forced to acknowledge the large and powerful bond between football and faith.
2023 Goals and Reflections
Whether you did it in 2022, or still haven’t gotten to it yet, it’s worth the exercise to find a quiet place to sit in stillness with a pen and a journal and exhale onto the page your assessment of 2022 and desires for 2023.
Here’s a good, simple infographic from Matt Gray giving some prompts followed by the inestimable Jon Gordon’s 21 Tips to make 2023 the best year it can be.
Things I’m Reading…
Podcasts and Videos I’m Listening To….
Dr. Joe Dispenza - Transform Your Mind. 90 minutes of Dr. Joe at his best.
All-In 2023 Predictions with Jason Calacanis, Chamath, David Sachs & David Friedberg
David McCollum’s Year in Review on Pomp’s Podcast
Best of Twitter
Memetic Warfare
Parting Quote:
Think hard about this.
What a life. It certainly puts mine in perspective.
As always, please share this week’s Sovereign Sunday with anyone you think might enjoy it. Love you guys. 🙏 -MK
Thanks for sharing as always Michael. Your writing spurred a thought on the sudden excitement about open prayer on the field from the MSM crowd: No atheists in foxholes and there is a lot of people in the “ Hope I don’t have heart problems “ foxhole. Hope they’re prayers are answered regardless.
Excellent article- particularly the lesson on Cloward-Piven. I’ve always blamed Johnson’s Great Society for the breakdown of the family/ starting the cycle of poverty and crime in so many of our cities. Never learned about this angle so found it very interesting. “It’s good to be a democrat-“ thought for sure I was about to read a commentary on the McCarthy clown show we just witnessed 🤦🏻♀️…. Betsy BC