Stop the Madness!

No, this is not a weight loss infomercial: it is a last-gasp attempt to arouse a comatose consumer society to save themselves from soon-to-be-inevitable indentured servitude to a banking cartel that is quickly seizing not only the reins of power but the food supply of the blindered brutes who plod along the corridors of power. If the madness is not stopped by concerted citizen action, the only remaining alternative to 1984-style social control mechanisms will be reminiscent of the opening sentence of Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, the most widely printed book originally published in English: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Here is a quote attributed to Robert Hemphill, the Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Georgia: "If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation.This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the
commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation,cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not,we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can
investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon [emphasis added]."

It is almost certainly too late to do any further investigation and reflection: the bankers have for all practical purposes taken nearly complete control of the governments of the Western nations, and there is precious little you will be able to do about it, save take to the streets (or perhaps the hills) when the screws are tightened further. There is an old saying that goes: "Discretion is the better part of valor," and it likely applies here. Head for the hills. Make your way To the Catacombs, if not here in the Southern Cone, then wherever you can create your own.

Understand this: creating a viable Catacombs is a group effort that requires a minimum of four adults and preferably more, living and working in a less structured property and wealth distribution arrangement than that of the prevailing paradigm in the West.

The madness to be stopped is no longer societal; that is now outside the control of even large and organized groups. No, the madness to be stopped is one's own participation in a system doomed to failure. Stop! Stop supporting the system by playing a part in it. Convert intrinsically worthless paper assets into tangible goods and land. Cash out the retirement plan while you still can, even with the tax penalty. If you can, form or join a network of like-minded families who are actively doing something other than talking!

The bankers have taken over the management of the United States and nearly all the West: period. That is a fact, and denying that fact is dangerous to your future. Unless and until a mass movement to destroy the Fed and the extant financial system is initiated by way of a general strike to STOP THE MADNESS, the controls over the citizenry will increase apace, and the window of opportunity for escape will have closed. All productive assets will have been bought up for pennies on the dollar by the financial oligarchy; distribution of essentials will be controlled by the financial oligarchy; any form of protest against the financial oligarchy, their puppet governments and their social engineering agenda will be met with increasingly severe repression and daily life will assume a degree of regimentation designed to induce maximum passivity.

Fight or flight: there are no other options, save for submission and servitude.

How far are you willing to go now to avoid a more difficult situation later? How much discomfort are you willing to endure now to avoid servitude later?

Western societies are collapsing: even a Fed office is admitting it! For a number of years now, various commentators have compared societal collapse stages with the five stages of coming to terms with grief. One of these, Dimitri Orlov, summed this up well in an essay entitled "The Five Stages of Collapse."

"Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism."

It seems safe to say that the West is internalizing Stage One and the prudent can see Stage Two looming up upon the horizon like a dreadnought taking aim with the twenty inchers.

Paradigm Change, anyone?

MANE, THECEL, PHARES

"All right, young people, settle down! Now, who can tell me what those words represent and in what book we can find them?"

Looking at the picture might help, but this once-common reference is not familiar to many in today's dumbed-down, culturally illiterate West.

We will find the words (as spelled above) in the Book of Daniel, Chapter 5, in the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible: look them up to learn how the prophet interpreted them. They are better known in their contemporary connotative form as "the handwriting on the wall."

The handwriting on the wall in the United States and elsewhere in the West is now in stroboscopic neon, and it reads something like "Danger, Will Robinson!"

Don't believe it? Here's a headline that lights up the wall: Pentagon Rebrands Protest as "Low-Level Terrorism". Or this one: HR 2749: Totalitarian Control of the Food Supply, which is nicely counterpointed by "And Now: Sh%$ in the Cookie Dough," a story about how food giant Nestle USA has had to recall its Toll House refrigerated cookie dough products owing to the presence of e-coli bacteria. Nevertheless, Big O and the Obots, doing their masters' bidding, plan to fast track and ram through The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, which "would impose a one-size-fits-all regulatory scheme on small farms and local artisanal producers; and it would disproportionately impact their operations for the worse," stated the June 16th post on the Food Freedom blog.

Ordered those open-pollinated seeds yet? Growing something this season? Have anything critical to say about the government, the Fed (same thing, really) that you haven't stated openly? Doing your bit to derail the Hellbound Train that is picking up speed?

When the time comes to stand up and be counted, will you be weighed in the balance and found wanting?

Pinhead Dancing

Readers may be familiar with the old shibboleth (posed as a question) designed to discredit Scholasticism: "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"



An absurd question, really, when applied to everyday life, and the phrase has come to represent the idea of a useless or impractical debate.

There is much of this going on at present: discussions that are intellectually interesting but of next to no practical value. We find them in the endless blah about the "banksters" and Obama, about "terrorists," about how best to prepare for a crisis, about this or that wonderful idea. This morning I encountered a debate over the Augustinian and Thomist viewpoints on predestination and free will, and this in a publication dedicated to spreading the Distributist ideal. The economies of the once-Christian West are being seized by secular materialist bankers and their political cronies while the capons of the mass media don't raise a squawk, and those who have a genuinely worthy alternative economic system are splitting hairs and flapping their gums? This is the way to go about Paradigm Change?

No, it is not. Distributism can be learned about by visiting IHS Press, where a number of excellent resources can be found, but reading alone--never mind gum-flapping--isn't going to do the job.

Rather than ask about angels on pinheads, one might better ensure a good supply of pins should sewing make a comeback once there is an interruption or cessation of the supply of cheap, shoddy clothing imported from China, Indonesia and wherever else people are easily exploited.

It is time for production to take pride of place back from trade, and you can change that paradigm on a personal level beginning at once. Imagine making something instead of buying it already made! Now don't imagine it: do it! Better yet, make more than one of whatever it is and see if you can find someone willing to trade with you for it. Local economy!

If distributism, mutualism, social credit or any "alternative" economic ideas interest you, put some part of them into practice. That's part of what goes on here at The Catacombs.

Perhaps you should begin by starting a Catacombs of your own. And while you do so, let the tongues wag, the gums flap and the angels dance where they may.

The Hellbound Bullet-Train

I first heard the poem "The Hellbound Train" half a century ago, recited by Jean Shepherd, a radio monologist of a more innocent time. No one knows who wrote it. Read it aloud to yourself.



The daily reading of news and commentary cannot but lead one to believe that the West has bought itself a one-way, first class express ticket on the Hellbound Bullet-Train. It beggars imagination that anyone could be so terminally naive as to believe that socio-economic conditions will soon improve. There is no longer hope that the train can be stopped or even slowed down; one's only chance is to get off as quickly as possible, however possible. The government can build all the bullet trains it wants, but the reality is that they'll all be going nowhere fast.



There is much talk--endless talk--on the blogosphere about creating a New Paradigm, but the only New Paradigm that will be of any importance in the near term is one's personal New Paradigm. And that New Paradigm requires action.

This site is intended primarily for those who are able, willing and ready to emigrate from the English-speaking north, but it is hoped that it will offer a useful Paradigm Change perspective for those who for one reason or another either prefer to remain in the English speaking countries in the hope that positive change will occur, or are trapped in the north by circumstances which make it well-nigh impossible to leave or to acquire legal residence in another country. The emphasis remains the same whether you plan to emigrate or stay put: Paradigm Change is a personal plan of action that is to be put into effect starting now!

The late Curtis Mayfield (lead singer of the Impressions) encouraged "People get ready, There's a train a-comin'," but he wasn't talking about some high-speed boondoggle: Curtis was singing about the spirit and soul-saving, not about getting from L.A. to San Francisco in a hermetically sealed tin can that shows off the surrounding countryside as a blur worthy of a very bad acid trip.

The larger societal paradigm change may or may not include improved rail transport, but high speed bullet trains... That people are busily debating such matters is evidence that you have no more time to waste. Prepare for disruption and prepare a staged withdrawal from areas that could suffer chaotic disruption if essential services--particularly food supply--are interrupted for any but the shortest of periods, say five days or so at the most.

Get on board the Paradigm Change train, brothers and sisters, because "if you miss it, I feel sorry for you," as the Ojays harmonized with respect to the Love Train, one more that never left the station.

Howdaya Handle a Billion Hungry Men?

"With kid gloves," comes to mind, but it is not the likely answer.

A billion--or a thousand million, depending on your counting system--people are hungry, as defined by the U.N. World Food Program: those who have a diet of less than 1000 calories a day, one infers after searching the web for the minimum daily requirement.

OmyGod! Overpopulation!

Well, no: "According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the world already produces enough food to feed every child, woman and man and could feed 12 billion people, or double the current world population,” states the Wikipedia entry on malnutrition.

Nevertheless, a June 12th Reuters article was headlined "U.N. warns of catastrophe as hungry people top one billion."

Interestingly, on the same Blacklistednews "breaking headlines" page we find this: "Peak Soil Investment: This Quiet Land Grab is Just Beginning," an article originally published in Wall Street Pit. The article strongly promotes agricultural land--not commodities themselves--as an excellent investment opportunity, using the old "they aren't making any more of it" rationale for land investment.

Both these articles are drawn directly from Old Paradigm thinking. The former advocates bringing food to people at great distance and for great cost, rather than recognizing the reality that people should be permitted to go where the food is or can be produced on a scale adequate to feed families. The latter article views farmland itself as a commodity, something to be exploited as a capital good for industry, rather than recognize that arable land widely distributed is the basis of any healthy society. Today's societies are sick--perhaps terminally ill--, but the obvious remedy is not on any governmental drawing board.

Here's a remedy that will work for those families who still have the good fortune to acquire a bit of arable land and have capital sufficient to create a viable homestead: The Have-More Plan. I have seen many, many books on homestead self-sufficiency, and this one is my favorite. It can be viewed at this Scribd location.

It doesn't require vast acreage to produce good, healthy food, and if families were larger and learned to work together with other families in their area, hunger could be greatly reduced. Those in the West would once more be able to develop societies that were people-centered rather than profit-centered, paced in sync with the natural world rather than at war with it.

Hunger is a result of mismanagement as well as of natural disaster. Those who decide that they wish to manage their own lives rather than be at the mercy of the globalist overlords will recognize that food self-sufficiency is paramount to their game plan and will then move to secure it buy taking the appropriate steps.

Don't wait to get "handled." Don't wait for speculators and transnational corporate giants to buy up all the land worth having.