FACT: Governments Are Using Doppler Radar To Control The Weather
Alex Jones breaks down evidence showing governments are using sophisticated technology to manipulate weather patterns, as depicted by a researcher recently on social media.
RELATED: TikTok Bans MUST-SEE Video Predicting Deadly Houston Storm & Exposing Weather Manipulation
Trump Scorches Biden with Spicy ‘Keeps Falling’ Meme
When it comes to mocking Joe Biden, no one does it like Donald Trump.
The former president flexed his meme skills Friday with a hilarious video posted to Truth Social highlighting his 81-year-old “Crooked” Democrat nemesis’ penchant for falling, which he’s done numerous times in public.
OMG! Donald Trump just posted this video on Truth Social. ?????https://t.co/qzEfCDM4p7 pic.twitter.com/jARrh0fCHL
— Steve ?? (@SteveLovesAmmo) May 17, 2024
The meme satirized Tom Petty’s classic hit “Free Fallin,” with a parody by “Joe Biden & The Alzheimers,” titled, “Keeps Falling.”
The music video for the track features unsteady Biden repeatedly falling on camera, illustrating the puppet president is almost incapable of walking four steps – let alone staying in office four years.
This is amazing! https://t.co/dqlJYA4SkE
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) May 17, 2024
Trump previously mocked Biden with a meme depicting him as a geriatric nursing home patient, playing off concerns over Biden’s advanced age and cognitive decline.
Congratulations to @MAGADevilDog!
The boss loves The Dilley Meme Team!pic.twitter.com/ChxgKFScfv— Brenden Dilley (@WarlordDilley) March 16, 2024
President Trump posted this on Instagram LMFAO pic.twitter.com/CL7afGxKS9
— Suhr Majesty ™ (@ULTRA_MAJESTY) January 12, 2024
Trump is set to face off in a debate against Biden on June 27 on CNN, despite a list of demands from the Biden campaign, including that there be no other opponents and no in-person audience.
Educational Explosion: The Damage of Unnecessary Advanced Degrees
The percentage of U.S. adults holding an advanced degree increased by over 3% from 2011-2021.
This increase in education is assumed to have a crucial role in America’s increasing economic strength over that time period. The expertise gained from such degrees is supposed to be valuable enough to outweigh the time and money put into grad degrees, both from the student’s perspective and the perspective of the schools and institutions that so often fund graduate degrees. In developing countries, college graduation rates are positively correlated with economic success. This same effect is thought to translate to America’s current explosion of higher education. This belief is held so strongly that the federal government spent 311,000,000,000 dollars on higher education in 2021. However, a high advanced degree rate is much less strongly linked to national and individual success than universities would like you to think.
The first driving factor for graduate school is supposed to be self-interest. Graduate school is portrayed as a process that directly increases income and happiness. For some degrees, there is certainly a large associated increase in income, but for 40 percent of grad degrees, there is either negative or zero ROI. Most degrees in the arts and humanities fail to even pay themselves off. The time spent working would typically be far more beneficial to students than their choice of grad degree. While some may gain enough from those degrees in personal satisfaction to make up for their choices, taxpayers must feel comfortable knowing they are funding life expeditions that do not even increase the capability to care for oneself. Public education funding is promoted on the premise that the country will be both personally and collectively better off. With many degrees, neither is the case, yet more and more money is always being funneled towards public education.
While the negative ROI of some humanities degrees is expected, the corporate world has also created an inefficient monster through the promotion of MBA degrees. They are entry-level for many positions and they are recommended for workers who have stopped progressing and want promotions. Most MBA programs take 2-3 years to complete, so a significant break from working life is required. MBAs give very few specific skills and are more of a certifying apparatus that an employee is relatively intelligent and has enough resources to put some into an extra project. If they taught extremely useful skills their value would be obvious, but they appear to be more of a status symbol. Their relatively useless nature is evidenced by the fact that overall, MBAs have negative ROI. Most people who undertake MBAs are already high achievers, so the time spent getting an MBA could be used better by continuing the linear progress of their career.
The explosion of advanced degrees reflects a greater rejection of community and trust. Advanced degrees serve as a very expensive safety blanket for whichever line of work they are oriented toward. For people seeking work, they demonstrate their capability in a manner not dependent on any sort of relationship or past professional experience. Employers do not need to investigate as rigorously if they can examine a prospective employee’s course load and institution of choice. Demonstrations of actual capability through doing good work take a backseat to the prestige of the name on a diploma. Real-world experience is not quantifiable, and environments and individuals have a rich interplay that is impossible for any recruiter to fully decode. Graduate degrees remove this ambiguity and rubber stamp someone’s capability in a particular career. Trust and community could help assuage the current overinvestment in graduate school by letting capable workers be recognized for their work by people who know them as more than productivity units. If workers who feel they are ready for the next step must take a break from working to get an advanced degree unless that degree is far more than a certifying stamp, they are harming themselves, their company, and their country. The benefits of transparency created by advanced degrees are far outweighed by the damage done by workers slowing down their careers simply to gather institutional confirmation that they are indeed good workers.
Even if individuals or businesses were paying for their degrees, they would still be suspect, but government education makes it even clearer how detrimental they are. Government education spending is one of the largest contributors to the ever-growing national debt. There are some government expenditures that are generally deemed necessary, but the inefficiency of these degrees is so great that it can be seen across party lines. While they are necessary for some fields, the current ballooned state of advanced degrees is exceedingly harmful.
EMERGENCY FINANCIAL NEWS: Economist Warns The Collapse Has Already Begun – Will Be Worse Than The Great Depression
Six Explanations for Rising Vaccine Hesitancy
The Rise in Vaccine Hesitancy is a Fact
In April last year, UNICEF reported that vaccination coverage had decreased in 112 countries and 67 million children had missed out on at least one vaccination over 2020–23 because of lockdown-caused disruptions and diminished confidence in vaccines. Measles rates had doubled globally in 2022 compared to 2021 and polio was up by 16 percent. Overall, UNICEF recorded “the largest sustained backslide in childhood immunisation in 30 years.”
Out of 55 countries that UNICEF looked at, public perceptions of the importance of childhood vaccines fell in 52 countries, by as much as 44 percent in some countries. China, India, and Mexico were the only countries where faith in vaccines held firm. The report warned that “the confluence of several factors suggest the threat of vaccine hesitancy may be growing,” including: “uncertainty about the response to the pandemic…declining trust in expertise, and political polarisation.”
Measles are on the rise even in industrialised Western countries. On 24 January, the BBC, quoting the WHO, reported that there was a 45-fold rise in measles cases in Europe in 2023 (42,200 cases) compared to 2022 (900 cases). UK outbreaks are at their highest levels since the 1990s. Herd immunity against measles requires around 95 percent immunisation of five-year-olds, but in parts of the UK, the level is down to 75 percent and as low as 56 percent in some London boroughs.
While some of this might be the lingering effect of lockdown-era disruptions of immunisation services, in part it also arises from falling trust in public health edicts and institutions that has spilled over into a more generalised vaccine hesitancy. Polling conducted by the campaigning group UsForThem showed that:
- Only 52 percent of people believe the UK government was honest about the risk-benefits equation of Covid vaccines;
- The share of parents of children under 18 likely to give their child government-recommended vaccines has fallen from 84 percent before the pandemic to 60 percent;
- Almost twice as many people (57-30 percent) believe ministers were dishonest rather than honest about the necessity for Covid restrictions; and
- 72 percent no longer trust public health information and government briefings.
In other words, Molly Kingsley wrote on behalf of the group, “manipulative vaccination policies and deceptive propaganda campaigns, unsurprisingly, have decimated trust in public health, and childhood immunisations in particular.”
The key word in Kingsley’s sentence is “unsurprisingly.” In this article, we identify six Covid-management-related policies as likely explanations for the growth of vaccine hesitancy.
1. Over-Claimed Benefits
On 20 June 2023, Stanford Medical School’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya tweeted newly released emails under freedom of information access from Rochelle Walensky, the now departed head of the CDC, from 30 January 2021 early in her tenure, showing that she, the head of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, and the face of US Covid policies Dr. Anthony Fauci were all aware then, a month after the vaccination campaign began, of the reality of breakthrough infections.
Yet, at a press briefing on 16 July 2021, referencing Walensky’s statement that Covid had become the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: “99.5 percent of people who are in the hospital are people who are unvaccinated.” During a CNN town hall event on 20 July 2021, President Joe Biden said that vaccines would ensure that people did not get Covid; or if infected, they would not need hospitalisation; and they would not die.
Before long, however, the initial belief in the efficacy of vaccines in breaking the links between infections, hospitalisations, and deaths was confounded as data began to accumulate with mass vaccinations. In Israel the Pfizer vaccine showed efficacy rates against symptomatic illness falling to 41 percent, and for AstraZeneca in the UK down to 1.5 percent against infections and 60 percent against serious illness, from the initial rate of over 90 percent for both vaccines.
On 10 October 2022, Pfizer executive Janine Small made the startling admission to the European Union (EU) Parliament that they had never tested their Covid-19 vaccine for transmissibility. Therefore the entire vaccine passport requirement was built on a conspiracy of lies. In an NBC interview on 26 February 2021, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla clearly says “there are a lot of indications right now that are telling us that there is a protection against transmission of the disease” provided by the vaccine. In a CBS interview on 26 May 2021, Fauci said: “when you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community…you become a dead end to the virus.”
Australian data too showed initially strong protective benefits against severe disease and deaths. Before long, however, data accumulated to show that despite 95 percent adult vaccination, the vaccines failed to provide immunity against infection, hospitalisation, ICU admission, or even death. This is why Australia’s Covid-related mortality was substantially higher in 2022 and 2023 than in 2020 and 2021.
In a Brownstone Institute article, Michael Senger looked back at the demonisation of the unvaccinated by various public authorities, enthusiastically amplified by the media, and all predicated on the false belief that vaccines stop transmission. Richard Kelly reviewed the many head-shaking edicts and enforcement actions in Australia – such as fining a delivery man for washing his van at an empty car wash at 1.15 a.m. and a teenage learner driver for going for a lesson with her mum. In an article on news.com.au, Frank Chung compiled a list of statements from Australian ministers and health bureaucrats repeatedly stating their firm conviction that vaccines stop transmission.
The public health officials’ ignorance about the disease was exceeded only by their arrogance and hubris about their ability to control the behaviour of a coronavirus.
2. Denial, Underplaying, and Minimisation of Harms
Governments and health bureaucracies also went to extraordinary lengths to censor, suppress, and deny information about the many serious side effects of Covid-19 vaccines. So much so that some doctors have begun to identify vaccines as “the leading cause of coincidence” in deaths. The Legacy and social media alike colluded with health authorities in this effort to protect the official narrative, even if it meant downplaying factual accounts of what was happening.
Unsurprisingly, this failed to keep the truth of vaccine injuries hidden – word of mouth is a powerful ‘people’s expression’ as, with growing numbers of vaccine-injured, people either suffered an injury or knew someone in the family or among colleagues who did and told others about it. This is why it has in fact created growing distrust of pharmaceutical giants, governments, health authorities, and the media.
Cases of adverse side effects from Covid-19 vaccines include anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction), Guillain-Barré syndrome (muscle weakness and paralysis), and myocarditis and pericarditis (heart muscle inflammation). Most recently, AstraZeneca admitted on 27 April for the first time in court documents in the UK that its Covid vaccine “can, in very rare cases, cause TTS” (Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome) that causes people to have blood clots and a low blood platelet count. On 7 May, the company announced a worldwide withdrawal of its vaccines.
Sean Barcavage is an American nurse practitioner who was a perfectly healthy man but suffered adverse reactions within 15-20 minutes of the first dose of a Covid vaccine in 2020, like a racing heart from standing up, stinging pain in the eyes, mouth, and groin, and tinnitus. Because of the mandate for healthcare workers, he agreed to a second dose three weeks later but then suffered severe adverse reactions with “a myriad of symptoms.”
In an interview with Chris Cuomo, himself vaccine-injured, Barcavage said he had been dismissed, censored, his injuries denied, and attempts to inform others online on Facebook and Instagram blocked, in the effort to counter “vaccine hesitancy.” Yet the censorship, suppression, and denial “is actually fuelling vaccine hesitancy.” Instead, if the government had explained that these were novel vaccines, side effects were inevitable, programs were being instituted to deal with them, do the research, require the manufacturers to provide help and assistance, etc., people would have understood and appreciated all that.
3. Denial of Natural Immunity
The durable protective benefits of natural immunity acquired from viral infection have been known to physicians since the Athenian plague. For some reason, this knowledge was memory-holed for three years (2020–22) with respect to Covid before being rediscovered. The WHO demonstrated an unexpected willingness to manipulate definitions of “herd immunity” in relation to vaccines and natural immunity in order to fit with the experimental pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions that came to dominate Covid policy around the world. Those who issued reminders of the reality and powers of natural immunity were simply ignored.
On 30 June 2021, Prof. Robert Dingwall, a member of UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said letting children catch Covid would be better than vaccinating them. Their intrinsically low risk from Covid means they may be “better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the ‘possible’ risk of a vaccine.” A study of almost 900,000 5-11-year-old children in North Carolina, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, added to concerns that vaccines don’t just lose their effectiveness within a few months; they also destroy natural immunity against reinfection severe enough to put them in hospital.
On 30 July 2021, Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University tweeted: “The pandemic of the unvaccinated is a misnomer. It’s a pandemic of the non-immune.” On 6 August 2021, Martin Kulldorff from Harvard Medical School followed with: “Vaccinated people were 6.72 times more likely to get infected than those with natural immunity from prior” Covid disease.
In an article published on 9 March 2024 in Monash Bioethics Review, Drs. Vinay Prasad and Alyson Haslam note that “having had and survived COVID-19 means the risk of bad outcomes following reinfection are staggeringly low.” Vaccination should therefore have focussed on the uninfected and unvaccinated and natural immunity could and should have been accepted as vaccination-equivalent, they concluded, but few countries did so.
We don’t know if, like many others, they felt compelled to make an obeisance to vaccine effectiveness in order to enhance the prospects of early publication of their article. We do know that the failure had severe repercussions for faith in experts and public health.
4. Mandated Vaccines
As noted above, the top US officials dealing with Covid – Walensky, Collins, and Fauci – were all aware by February 2021 of the reality of breakthrough infections. Yet, they continued to push vaccine mandates anyway. For example, Walensky said on MSNBC TV on 29 March: “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” and “it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real-world data.”
Dr. Hanna Nohynek is the chief physician at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and chair of the WHO Strategic Group of Experts on immunisation. In a Helsinki court case this April, she testified that authorities knew by the summer of 2021 that Covid vaccines did not stop infection or transmission. Consequently vaccine passports no longer made sense and could worsen the situation by giving a false sense of security, yet the WHO continued to recommend and governments to require it.
On 5 June 2023, the WHO and the European Commission announced the launch of a landmark digital health initiative for creating global vaccine passports. It’s not clear how this meets the UNESCO Statement on the Ethics of Covid-19 Certificates and Vaccine Passports (30 June 2021) which requires that (1) “the certificates should not infringe freedom of choice regarding vaccination,” and (2) they must “deal responsibly with the uncertainties regarding the degree of protection provided by specific vaccines and past infections.”
Any mandate decision requires an assessment of two questions:
Is it medically justified? An affirmative answer would require overwhelming health benefits to the individual, which in turn would require evidence of grave risk from the disease absent vaccination, and high efficacy (in laboratory trials before, and in order to gain, regulatory approval and rollout) and effectiveness (in the real world after rollout). Another medical question was the impact of mandates on staffing levels in healthcare institutions at a time when they were already stretched, with accompanying social and economic impacts that extended to the families of those dismissed.
Is it ethically justified? This is even more challenging. There could be some ethical justification if there is compelling data to indicate substantial community benefit that overrides the loss of individual autonomy and bodily integrity.
In the initial months after vaccination, data did back up claims of high effectiveness for individual vaccinees against severe outcomes. But the reductions in transmission were modest even in the early months.
By the northern autumn of 2022, with the widespread emergence of Omicron as an escape variant, both the personal protective benefits and reductions in transmission had become insubstantial. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine in June 2022 by Boucau et al. showed that people with Covid-19 had comparable rates of viral shedding regardless of their vaccination status. Consequently denying entry into public spaces to the unvaccinated was not permissible by public ethics, when vaccination status could not separate those individuals who can spread the disease from those who could not.
Additionally, given the exceptionally steep age segregation of the risk of severe outcomes from contracting Covid, and the relative risks of serious side effects for the different age groups, there never was any medical, let alone ethical, justification for vaccine mandates for healthy schoolchildren and university students. This is especially so because, with the ubiquitous reality of escape variants of the virus, breakthrough infections have become commonplace. In these circumstances, the only relevant endpoints to evaluate the success of repeated vaccine doses were mortality and severe health outcomes requiring hospitalisation.
The full range of collateral harms inflicted on school and university-age pupils made the mandate seriously unethical. In fact, in retrospect (and perhaps even in real time), emergency use authorisation for Covid vaccines should never have been provided for any but the elderly and the comorbid.
5. Censored and Silenced Critics
In January 2021, Toby Young was reprimanded by Ipso, the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation, for a column he wrote for the Daily Telegraph in July 2020, when there was much scientific uncertainty and robust debate over topics like natural immunity and herd immunity. “I may have been over-emphatic in putting the anti-lockdown case,” Young conceded, “but it’s not as if the advocates of a pro-lockdown position are any less emphatic…Why hasn’t Ipso reprimanded them?”
Good question. In a column for the Spectator on 17 June 2023, Young also aired suspicions that the Counter Disinformation Unit, a secret cell inside Whitehall, might have illegally compromised the BBC’s editorial independence in its coronavirus coverage.
In March 2023, Mark Steyn was rebuked by the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom (Office of Communications) for an April 2022 interview with Naomi Wolf about data from the UK Health Security Agency that, they said, showed significantly greater risk of infection, hospitalisation, and death from a Covid booster. Broadcasters were free to air programs that are controversial and challenge statistics, Ofcom accepted, but not to insist that only one conclusion could be drawn from the data. In May 2023, Ofcom found Steyn to be in a second violation of the broadcasters’ code of conduct in an October 2022 program.
But government officials were never held to the same standard for pro-vaccine claims. On 9 September 2022, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf tweeted that the updated Bivalent Wuhan-Omicron BA.4/5 booster “increases your chances of being in attendance at upcoming gatherings with family and friends.” Prasad and Haslam note wryly: “Had the company said this, the FDA could fine them for false statements.”
In Australia, Senator Alex Antic’s probing questions led to official confirmation that in less than three years, the federal government intervened 4,213 times to restrict or censor posts about the pandemic on digital platforms. Moreover, echoing the growing understanding of the lead role played by the national security apparatus in the US pandemic response, these requests to the Australian media came from the Department of Home Affairs.
6. Redefining GMOs as Vaccines
Recently in this asymmetric information battle, populations have begun to learn that the “Safe and Effective” cure-alls for Covid also appear to have always satisfied Australian, South African, UK, and EU legal definitions for being properly deemed Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and also satisfy being correctly called Gene Therapies.
This legal classification has been called into the spotlight of Federal Court of Australia proceedings alleging that Pfizer and Moderna always knew their products to be GMOs, but unlike AstraZeneca which sought and was granted a GMO licence for its Covid product, Pfizer and Moderna sidestepped this legally required process. Dealing with a GMO in Australia without a licence is a serious criminal offence. The ramifications for valid Informed Consent are astounding, let alone the consequences for human DNA from the genetic risks posed by GMOs that were never evaluated nor publicly discussed, as the legislation required them to be.
On 6 May these allegations of the Covid-19 drugs being at law GMOs and gene therapies were placed squarely at the feet of WHO officials, in Notices of Liability served by the World Council for Health, headed by Dr. Tess Lawrie.
Prominent YouTuber Dr. John Campbell interviewed an author here who detailed the manner and lengths to which the UK’s MHRA, the EU’s EMA, Australia’s TGA and OGTR, and the FDA in the US went, for holding back knowledge of the GMO nature of these substances that were coerced on entire populations or mandated across sectors under threat of dismissal. Now that a previously beguiled public has started to pick up on this information, many are beginning to ask whether the earlier public health position of seeking to avert “vaccine hesitancy” by resort to “justifiable” censorship, was in truth undertaken to avoid “GMO hesitancy” via the ultimate censorship – not informing populations about what was really in the vials.
To make matters worse and cause people everywhere to recoil still further from whatever the latest public health vaccine offerings is, is the news now confirmed by findings from labs in five different nations, that the Covid drugs of Pfizer and Moderna also contain synthetic DNA up to 534 times above levels accepted by drugs regulators. To be clear, this is a contaminate known to interfere with human DNA, a manufacturing issue well-known by Pfizer and Moderna.
Yet, despite the WHO declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and the billions in public spending that subsequently followed and flowed, not one national drugs regulator put in place adequate and inexpensive purity protocols for ensuring that citizens were not receiving substances capable of altering their human genome. And the tragic irony is, Moderna had spelt out what those $5 protocols needed to be.
In sum, to reverse vaccine hesitancy and recreate public confidence in the infrastructure of public health institutions, including regulatory agencies, some humility, and public apology might be a more fruitful approach than the continued gaslighting of concerned commentators who question the excesses of Covid-related public policies.
EMERGENCY FINANCIAL NEWS: Economist Warns The Collapse Has Already Begun – Will Be Worse Than The Great Depression
Not Just the US: Global Debt-To-GDP Ratios Are Skyrocketing
The US national debt is so out of control that, ironically enough, even the Federal Reserve chair has expressed concern about the problem. And while America is among the top contributors, it isn’t just the US that’s spending money it doesn’t have: after briefly declining in 2023, the global debt-to-GDP ratio is again at an all-time high.
Even though interest rates are still extremely low by any free market standard, with even modestly elevated interest rates in the US, payments on servicing the debt skyrocket. This blows up the national debt balloon even bigger. With zero chance of Washington reigning in spending anywhere near enough to keep up, the interest can only be paid with even more borrowing.
The largest quarterly increases were unsurprisingly in the US and Japan, and these are a couple of the most indebted national economies overall. But emerging markets are now along for the ride, with some of the largest debt-to-GDP ratio increases this year coming from the likes of China, India, Brazil, and Mexico. Along with Thailand and Korea, China’s ratio of consumer debt to GDP is still above pre-COVID levels.
In any event, 2023’s debt-to-GPT ratio decline was not due to countries spending more responsibly. It was due to inflation, which can have the effect of boosting nominal GDP, because it increases the total on-paper value of the goods that a country produces, and makes tax revenues appear artificially higher.
But while inflation makes prices go up, it doesn’t increase the real, lasting value of an economy. It also steals purchasing power from savers, which can only be spun as an economic positive in a world like ours, ruled by the Keynesian perversion of fiat central banking. The whipsaw effect of monetary policy never truly addresses the root of any problem it attempts to solve. It requires fallible humans with limited information, limited tools, and endless biases to attempt to micromanage a system of near-infinite complexity.
After post-2008 quantitative easing programs flooded the world with cheap credit, it logically resulted in a flood of investment in poorly-rated governments and companies, encouraging risky borrowing. Justified by the need to “stimulate the economy,” expanding the debt with endless central bank money printing promises to fix a problem that was caused by central banking itself. More recently, COVID money-printing “stimulus” shenanigans even more drastically increased the debt-to-GDP ratio to even more epic levels.
Money printing just happens to also enrich those who happen to be closest to the money printer, and financial firms that can scoop up assets for pennies on the dollar during an engineered bust. Meanwhile, Americans are unable to afford basic goods, racking up massive personal debt in addition to what their government owes.
Struggling consumers are starting to realize en masse that something is very wrong. As Peter Schiff said about the Fed in a recent interview with Don Ma on NTD’s Business Matters:
“If it tries to tries to fight inflation, which is worrying the consumer, it’s got to raise interest rates, but that’s already worrying the consumer…on the other hand, if the Fed…cuts them as planned, inflation’s gonna get a whole lot worse, which means consumer confidence can only go down.”
To make matters worse, the current record level of credit card debt being racked up by struggling Americans doesn’t even count the increasingly popular “pay-as-you-go” programs, which aren’t tracked as part of the overall consumer debt calculation. That’s because they’re individual programs offered by retailers, rather than “official” debt that comes from bank loans.
US credit card debt has reached more than $1.1 trillion, an all-time high.
— Global Markets Investor (@GlobalMktObserv) May 9, 2024
Year-over-year growth has fallen from nearly 40% to 7.5%. It is still much above the historical average, though.
Meanwhile, interest rate on credit card debt is at record 21.6%
Chart: Liz Ann Sonders pic.twitter.com/0XTYf1KweQ
In a few other countries (like Canada and Australia), household debt as a percentage of GDP was even higher in 2022 than in the US — over 100% — with no end in sight. A few Western countries, like Germany and Switzerland, have seen their national debt-to-GDP ratios decrease in 2024, but not nearly enough to offset the overall global increase.
The increasing age of the average global citizen is also exacerbating the global debt powder keg. Labor shortages will increase as populations get older and countries don’t have enough young people to employ and replace elderly folks who are aging out of the workforce. Older citizens also require more social services, but without enough revenue to fund them, the entire balance falls apart. Japan has an especially dire issue with an aging population, but even here in the US, the number of Americans expected to hit 65 and up is slated to increase by 47% by 2050.
The recent CPI report indicates that the Fed could be cutting rates in September, but whether they cut or not, America’s debt will continue to expand unsustainably. And the debt bubble is global — when it pops, it’s going to be spectacular.
Economist Peter Schiff Predicts A Financial Crisis That Will Make The Great Depression Look Tame
Public Schools Have No Respect for the Students or Their Parents
Some of us may remember the Helen Lovejoy character in The Simpsons, who would appear any time some catastrophe befell the town and plaintively wail, “Won’t someone please think of the children?!” The joke here, of course, is that as long as you do something in the name of helping children, it must be right, and you must be virtuous.
Such sentiments are easily ridiculed in cartoons, but unfortunately, they take root in reality like Russian knapweed despite copious evidence undermining their veracity. Consider your own government-school experiences, whether as a student, parent, or interested observer:
- How often did you or your children feel that school was something being done for you and not to you?
- How often did you or your children, especially in middle and high school, leave excited for school in the morning? (If you think that question is unfair, consider what that says about the traditional school system.)
- How often did you or your children feel respected by the school system and those who ran it?
It is that latter question I want to address herein because the concept of respect is one that I have violated time and again during my work as a teacher, and it is one that is foundational to what is rotten in the government school system.
We’ll Control Your Time
Perhaps the most obvious yet overlooked way I and others in the school system disrespected students was by controlling their time. The bell system, a relic of concern over the efficient use of buildings and punctuality, ensures that students know when it is time to learn a subject and when it is time to stop learning a subject, thus guaranteeing that learning becomes relegated to specific time frames determined by others.
Working on your math homework in social studies class? Why, that is forbidden and worthy of punishment. That time is for social studies only. Please wait for the dulcet tone of the bell to signal to you when you are permitted to learn something else. Of course, if you do want to continue learning said subject, that is also not permitted because the bell has told you that it is time to move on to a new subject.
Imagine if anything outside of school worked in the same manner: Cutting your grass? You have forty-five minutes. When you hear the bell, stop and then begin vacuuming your living room. Coding a new piece of software? You have forty-five minutes. When you hear the bell, stop and then return to your assigned small group from the day before to continue working on a marketing campaign for a completely different product.
Is it likely that such processes would yield anything but fragmentation, frustration, and subsistence-level productivity? However, those outcomes are exactly what government schools produce time and again.
This control of time also lends itself naturally to the gradual destruction of students’ innate love of learning. We need look no further than young children to see this inborn quality, but over time, the traditional school system erodes this natural love through control. This erosion is evident each day in the desultory walks of middle school and high school students to their bus stops and through their days at public schools.
We’ll Aggress against You
In addition to the control exerted over students, I and others in the system perpetrate or at least permit aggression against those students day in and day out. The most common form that it takes is emotional aggression via the adversarial relationship that school systems and the adults therein create with students. In school, students learn that their self-worth is adjudicated by others in the form of arbitrary letters from A to F that the adults claim have a strong bearing on one’s success or failure in life.
Moreover, today’s push for college for all only intensifies this aggression because it places outsized importance on each test and each assignment, any one of which might make or break a student’s college plans (or so students are told), so students essentially operate in pressure cookers each day that impel them to worry far more about grades than about learning any content or finding joy in that learning.
It is this pressure, added to the normal emotional struggles of growing up and finding one’s place in the world, that contributes to the rising rates of depression and suicides among young adults. To be clear, I am not making a scientific claim that school naturally causes depression or suicide; I simply posit, from my own experiences and observations, that traditional school systems do little to mitigate such issues and likely only aggravate them.
When students often are apathetic at best or adamantly opposed at worst to attending school each day, what impact might that have on their emotional and psychological health?
Consider that more than half of United States adults are glad they no longer have to spend time in school. Further, in a recent study of high school students’ self-reported feelings about school, over 75 percent of those reported feelings were negative. In a more specific study of 472 high school students in Connecticut, they self-reported negative feelings over 60 percent of the time while in school.
Of course, this widespread emotional aggression is complemented by physical aggression or the threat thereof in many schools around the country. As I detailed in a previous article, students are actually more frightened of violence inside rather than outside schools, and there were over 1.6 million nonfatal violent incidents in schools between 2017 and 2019, about twice as many such incidents as outside schools.
Thus, in many schools around the country, students deal with both physical and emotional aggression each day such that school becomes more about surviving than thriving.
We’ll Lie to You
In a final display of disrespect, I and others in the school system trade in lies nearly every day. We lie because, ultimately, our interest is in following orders, keeping our jobs, and preserving the system. Take standardized testing as an example. Although many of my colleagues and I saw little value in the tests or the massive bureaucracy around them, we dutifully completed test-preparation exercises with our students and lied to them about the importance of the tests for them and “their” school system.
At one point, our district leaders decided that state-test results would not appear on our students’ transcripts, thus providing students with little incentive to put their best efforts into the tests or to even show up on testing days, but students were not always aware of this change. During a department meeting, one of my colleagues lamented this lack of incentives for students, so my department chairperson bluntly stated, “We’ll just have to lie to them.”
This type of behavior is common, though, when the majority of the daily goings-on in schools are done for the benefit of teachers, administrators, state bureaucrats, and the system itself—not students, as is claimed.
We also lie directly when we state or indirectly when we intimate that we care about and can help all students to learn, but the government school system can offer only ersatz solutions such as preferential seating, more time after school, graphic organizers, and chunking assignments.
If I and the other school leaders truly cared about your children, though, why would we not examine all possible solutions and subject the system itself to scrutiny as perhaps part of the problem? Has anyone in your local district ever sat down with you and your children to determine which learning options might best suit them, whether in a government school or elsewhere?
Analogously, consider whether you would prefer a doctor for your children who claimed she could treat every patient no matter the problem because she cared so much or one who thoroughly tried to determine what was actually ailing your children and then suggested options—including other doctors—to treat those ailments.
Ready for R-E-S-P-E-C-T?
If much or even some of the above sound familiar to you from your own school experiences or those of your children, know that alternatives do exist—many of which move well beyond private schools with high tuition but nearly identical systems to those in government schools. In previous articles, I discussed several such options, and you can find self-directed education, microschools, and other education options near you.
The beauty of these options is that they are predicated on respect because they have to be: they survive through voluntary contributions of tuition and donations, not coercive funding. They are also generally much more transparent about their curricula, beliefs, and pedagogies than public schools because they must freely compete for your business.
Contrary to schools based on traditional models, such alternative systems based on choice are ones that show students and families just a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.
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