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Why Is The Weather So Crazy All Of A Sudden?

Crazy Weather - Public DomainAll over the planet, global weather patterns have gone completely nuts.  Just over the past few days we have seen “life threatening” heatwaves, extremely dangerous wildfires, vicious tornadoes and unprecedented flooding – and that is just in the United States.  And of course this is just the continuation of a trend that stretches back to last year, when extremely weird weather created “apocalyptic-like conditions” in many areas around the world.  So why is this happening?  For decades, we could count on weather patterns falling within fairly predictable parameters, but now that is completely changing all of a sudden.  All over the globe we are seeing things happen that we have never seen happen before, and the weather just seems to get even more crazy with each passing month.

Just consider what has been going on the past few days.  Let’s start with the “life threatening” heatwave that is currently hammering the west coast…

The West Coast is in the grip of a ‘life threatening’ triple-digit heatwave that is set to continue well into next week, raising the risk of wildfires.

The National Weather Service has issued excessive heat warnings for southeastern California, southern Nevada, western and southern Arizona, western Oregon and far southwest Washington.

From Oregon to Nevada temperatures are set to top 100F tomorrow and into Monday, with Phoenix, Arizona, predicted to top out at 116F.

These are temperatures that you might expect to see in July or August, but right now summer has not even officially begun yet.

And as the article quoted above noted, these extremely high temperatures bring with them a much higher risk of wildfires.  In fact, firefighters in southern California are currently fighting a horrible fire that is raging wildly out of control and that has already forced thousands of people (including Kim Kardashian and Kanye West) out of their homes…

A massive brush fire Saturday in the Calabasas area forced mandatory evacuations as rapid flames consumed 516 acres and threatened 3,000 homes, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said.

“This is a fast-moving, dangerous fire,” Los Angeles County Fire Chief Dennis Cross said. “It’s hard for people to see where this fire is because of the dense canopy and the canyons.”

If you follow my work closely, you already know that 2015 was the worst year for wildfires in all of U.S. history.

More acres burned in the U.S. last year than we had ever seen before.

And so far this year, we are more than a million acres ahead of the pace set last year.

Meanwhile, CNN is reporting that this “is the second year in a row that Texas has been hit by 500-year floods“…

“It could just be really bad luck,” said CNN Senior Meteorologist Brandon Miller. “A 500-year flood doesn’t mean you will go 500 years between them. It just means it is such an extreme event that the odds of it happening are very low, therefore it only happens on average every 500 years.

“It just so happens that parts of Texas have seen them now in back-to-back years, and maybe even twice this year. The odds of that happening are infinitesimally small.”

In a recent article, I noted that the United States has now been hit by 10 major flooding events since the end of last September.

Never before in U.S. history have we ever seen so many major floods in such a compressed period of time.

And the hits just keep on coming.  On Sunday, the east coast was bracing for a series of storms which appeared poised to produce very high winds, severe thunderstorms and even possibly some tornadoes.  The following comes from the Daily Mail…

The East Coast is braced for an incoming storm that could see up to seventeen million people hit with tropical rain, thunderstorms and even tornadoes.

People from New York through North Carolina could be affected, as thunderstorms were expected to blast winds up to 55 miles per hour later on Sunday.

The Governors Ball in New York City was cancelled for safety reasons after organizers saw the forecast for lightning.

And on top of everything else, Florida is about to be hit by tropical storm Colin.

But don’t worry, because all of this is perfectly “normal”, right?

Across the Atlantic, Europe is also dealing with some extremely crazy weather.  Major flooding is being reported all over the continent, and the French just experienced their wettest month since 1886…

Segments of France’s border with Belgium received six-week’s worth of rain in under 24 hours earlier this week, causing widespread flooding across the country. May has been the country’s rainiest month since 1886, Radio France Internationale says.

As a result of that rain, French meteorologists expect the already-swollen Seine in Paris to peak at 6.5 meters (21 feet) above its usual level on Friday. The Louvre is closed due to flooding concerns, and workers have been busy moving priceless works of art as a precautionary measure.

On the other side of the planet, many areas of India have been dealing with an unprecedented heatwave.  On Thursday, May 19th, the all-time record for the highest temperature ever recorded in India was broken.  And this was part of a crippling heatwave that pushed temperatures in northern India “above 104 degrees for weeks”…

A severe heat wave warning is in place for much of India through Saturday. Temperatures in northern India have risen above 104 degrees for weeks, the BBC reported. The weather has killed hundreds of people and destroyed crops in more than 13 states, the Associated Press reported.

If this happened where you live, you could just go inside and turn on the air conditioning.

But most of those people do not have air conditioning, and that is why hundreds of them have been dying.

At the exact same time when the crust of our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, our weather is starting to become really crazy too.

Some people are going to dismiss all of this as just a bizarre series of coincidences, others will want to blame “global warming”, and yet others will see all of this as a sign that Jesus is coming back soon.

But what is truly frightening to consider is this…

What if our weather just keeps getting crazier and crazier?

If our weather continues to spiral out of control, it is inevitable that there will be major famines, widespread riots and tremendous political unrest all over the planet.

Is our world equipped to be able to handle seven billion people going absolutely nuts all at once?

Let us hope and pray for weather patterns to begin to return to normal, because I don’t think that we are.

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

Barack Obama Warns Americans ‘To Be Prepared For A Disaster’

Barack Obama At FEMA - Public DomainWhen Barack Obama speaks to the public, it is very rare that he does so without a specific purpose in mind.  So why is he urging Americans “to be prepared for a disaster” all of a sudden?  On May 31, Obama took time out of his extremely busy schedule to deliver an address at the FEMA National Response Coordination Center in Washington.  During his speech, he stressed that every American is responsible for preparing for disasters, and that includes “having an evacuation plan” and “having a fully stocked disaster supply kit”.  These are basic steps that I have been encouraging people to do for years, but if they won’t listen to me, perhaps they will listen to the man currently residing in the White House.  The following excerpt from Obama’s speech comes directly from the official White House website…

One of the things that we have learned over the course of the last seven and a half years is that government plays a vital role, but it is every citizen’s responsibility to be prepared for a disaster.  And that means taking proactive steps, like having an evacuation plan, having a fully stocked disaster supply kit.  If your local authorities ask you to evacuate, you have to do it. Don’t wait.

This speech was timed to coincide with the beginning of the hurricane season, although hurricanes have not posed much of a threat lately.

In fact, a major hurricane has not made landfall in the United States for 127 straight months.

But without a doubt, we all need to be preparing for disaster.  Hurricanes can create a short-term emergency that can last for a few days, but there are other threats that could create a major emergency that could potentially last for an extended period of time.  That list of potential threats includes a major volcanic eruption, a natural or engineered pandemic, a west coast earthquake, a New Madrid earthquake, a tsunami on either the east or west coasts, a meteor impact, Islamic terror, war, an EMP burst that takes down the power grid, cyberwarfare, economic collapse, and civil unrest resulting in the imposition of martial law.

Of course the items that I just mentioned are not mutually exclusive.  In fact, in different scenarios we could actually see multiple events happen in rapid succession.

It is interesting to note that during his speech Barack Obama also noted that the American people seem to have become very complacent about getting prepared…

And what we’ve been seeing is some public complacency slipping in; a large portion of people not having preparedness kits, not having evacuation plans.

This is exactly what I have been noticing as well.  There appears to be a tremendous amount of apathy out there, and relatively few people really seem to feel much urgency to get prepared these days.

My contacts in the emergency preparedness industry have been telling me that sales are way down right now.  There was a big peak last fall, but since then it is like interest in prepping has just fallen off the map.

Ultimately, those companies are going to be okay because interest will pick back up shortly as global events begin to spiral completely out of control.  However, of much greater concern is the fact that people have not been using this period of relative calm constructively.

Just like we have seen in Venezuela, time to prepare eventually runs out.  And someday there will be millions of parents that are absolutely horrified when their children come to them crying out for food and they don’t have anything to give to them because they didn’t heed the warnings and they didn’t get prepared.

When that day arrives, many of those families may be forced to turn to whatever help the government is offering at the time.

One more thing that I found particularly noteworthy about Obama’s speech was that he said that there is now “a FEMA app” that can direct you to the nearest “FEMA shelter” in the event of a major emergency.

If you need information about how to put together an evacuation plan, how to put together a disaster preparedness kit, as Craig said, we’ve got an app for everything now.  We have a FEMA app in English and in Spanish to help you prepare your family for a disaster.  You can update the National Weather Service alerts.  You can get safety tips for more than 20 kinds of hazards.  It provides you directions to nearby shelters.

Could you envision yourself and your family having to take refuge in a “FEMA shelter” someday?

If not, you should do what you can to get prepared now.  Over the next couple of days, my wife and I will be releasing a couple of new videos about preparation on our YouTube channel.  In fact, I just checked and the first one is already up…

Unlike Venezuela, it looks like we may still have a little bit more time to prepare for what is ahead.  Some people will relax and use this time to party, but those that are wise will work diligently and will do what they can to get ready for the exceedingly challenging times that are rapidly approaching.

Hopefully you are listening to the warnings and are heeding what the watchmen are saying.

If not, the consequences for what will happen to you and your family will ultimately be on your own hands.

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

8 Reasons Why It Is So Hard To Find Someone Decent To Marry

Love And Marriage - Public DomainIt is not easy to be single in America today. If you are a man, it can be exceedingly difficult to find a good woman to marry. If you are a woman, it is literally a miracle if you can find a good man to marry. So is it just our imaginations, or has the process of finding a mate become much more challenging in recent years? Well, it is a fact that fewer people are getting married these days. For the first time in our history, there are more single adults in our country than married adults, and Time Magazine says that 25 percent of Millennials will never get married even once in their entire lifetimes. And of course those that do get married are taking far longer to do so than previous generations. Just recently, I wrote about how the average American woman is getting married 7.0 years later than she did in 1956, and the average American man is getting married 6.7 years later than he did back at that time.

So why is this happening?

Why has finding love become so challenging?

Below, I would like to share 8 reasons why it has become so hard to find someone decent to marry…

#1 The Me-Centered Society

We live in a “me-centered” society in which tens of millions of us are literally in love with ourselves. When pleasing self becomes the highest priority, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for the kind of self-sacrificial love that marriage requires. An astounding 24 billion “selfies” were uploaded to Google last year, and that says a whole lot about where we are at as a nation. So many of us are inclined to stay with our “partners” for only as long as they make us happy, and the instant that ends many of us wish to dispose of them. And that is a lot easier to do if you are “living together” instead of being legally married.

#2 It Has Become Much More Difficult To Find Someone With Good Values

The moral collapse of America is something that I write about extensively.  As a society, we have rejected the values of previous generations, and today most people generally do whatever they feel like doing. But this can become a major problem when you are looking for someone “that shares your values” to get married to. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of all Americans that belong to the “Silent Generation” attend religious services weekly, but less than 30 percent of all Millennials do.  With each passing generation, we have become less Christian, less “conservative”, and less moral.  Unfortunately for young single adults, these trends do not seem likely to change in a major way any time soon.

#3 A Lot Of Young Adults Are Obsessed With Money And Materialism

A lot of single people these days will not date someone unless that individual has “good prospects” for the future. In fact, one survey found that 75 percent of American women would not date an unemployed man. Of course it is entirely reasonable to want a spouse that will work hard, but many young people are taking their obsession with materialism to ridiculous extremes.

I want to share with you what is going on in China these days, but similar scenes are playing out all across the rest of the world as well…

Parents often provide their male children with a home or car to make them appear more attractive. Women are often encouraged to “marry up” and not to settle for anyone who can’t provide material benefits.

A woman from the southwestern city of Chengdu rejected her boyfriend’s flash mob proposal last December, when she saw the ring and thought the diamond was too small.

She later told a friend that the man had agreed to “buy me a diamond ring as large as one carat,” Soho News reported.

It was reminiscent of a famous line from a 2010 Chinese dating show, when a contestant said, “I would rather cry in the back of a BMW than smile on the back of a bicycle.”

#4 A Lot Of Young Men Of Marriage Age Have Turned Into Bums

Have you noticed that a lot of young men in their twenties and thirties would rather spend all day watching television and playing video games than doing something constructive?

And record numbers of them have moved back home with no apparent intention of moving out. Today, 32 percent of all American Millennials are living at home with Mommy and Daddy. In some cases this is being done out of necessity because there aren’t enough good jobs, but in other cases it is simply pure laziness.

So what are quality young women supposed to do?

Are they supposed to actually consider these unambitious young men that seem perfectly content to indefinitely camp out in the basements of the homes that they were raised in?

#5 Sexual Immorality Is Absolutely Rampant

If you are looking for someone sexually pure to get married to, good luck with that. Everywhere you look in our sexually-hypercharged society, people are behaving like animals.

This is even happening in the wealthiest areas of our nation. The following is an excerpt from a recent Vanity Fair article about what is going on in the Hamptons right now…

Cops put the kibosh on a burlesque party at East Hampton’s Maidstone hotel. A professional orgy-planning outfit is hosting its first bacchanal later in June. Wednesday Martin, the author of Primates of Park Avenue, warns that married, heterosexual women in the Hamptons are conducting steamy affairs with their female fitness instructors. “Female flexuality,” she calls it. A randy rabbi, who blazed through five ex-wives, finally got the ax after running around town with a former flight attendant who was decades his junior. And a Southampton schools superintendent was investigated after one of his X-rated selfies made the rounds on campus.

The CDC says that there are 20 million new STD cases in America each year, and our young people are being corrupted at younger and younger ages. In fact, I just came across a headline earlier today about a “sexy school teacher” that got pregnant by a 13-year-old boy…

The Aldine Independent School District Middle School teacher accused of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student turned herself in to Montgomery County police Wednesday after a warrant was issued for her arrest.

Prosecutors said Alexandria Vera had a sexual relationship with one of her students and also got pregnant by the eighth-grader.

#6 An Increasing Percentage Of Our Young People Don’t Even Want Someone Of The Opposite Sex

According to the Daily Mail, the percentage of men and the percentage of women that have had sexual relations with a member of the same sex has approximately doubled since 1990…

Researchers from San Diego State University, Florida Atlantic University and Widener University in Pennsylvania, analysed data from the General Social Survey – a nationally representative survey of more than 30,000 adults that has asked Americans about their attitudes toward same-sex sexual behaviour since 1973 and about sexual partners since 1989.

They found that between 1990 and 2014, the percentage of men who reported having had sex with at least one man increased from 4.5 percent to 8.2 percent.

In the same time-frame, the number of women reporting having had sex with at least one woman increased from 3.6 percent to 8.7 percent.

#7 Sexual Immorality Is Running Rampant Even In The Church

Did you know that the rate of teen pregnancy is about the same for Christians in America as it is for society as a whole?

Very few of our churches like to talk about sin, commandments, holiness or eternal judgment anymore, and as a result many people in the church are going just as wild as people in the world.

Let me share with you one example that comes from an article authored by Dr. Michael Brown…

Well, during an I Love New York celebration at a recent women’s conference hosted by Hillsong in New York City, a Hillsong youth pastor was onstage, dressed up as the Naked Cowboy, meaning that he too was wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, briefs and a guitar.

But hey, after all, what’s wrong with that? We don’t want to get religious now, do we? What’s wrong with a youth pastor standing onstage in his underwear during a women’s conference? (Sarcasm fully intended.)

#8 A Large Percentage Of Our Young People Are Not Marriage Material Because They Are Addicts

You definitely do not want to marry an addict. In America today, millions of young people are addicted to alcohol, millions are addicted to illegal drugs, and millions are addicted to legal drugs.

But for this piece, I want to talk about pornography addiction in particular. As I have mentioned before, there are more than four million adult websites on the Internet, and collectively they receive more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.

According to a recent Charisma article, 68 percent of all Christian men watch pornography on a regular basis, so even if you go to church “to find a man”, there is still a very good chance that you could be getting an addict.

And of course all of these sick images are resulting in an explosion of very bizarre “alternative lifestyles” in America including “puppy play”, “ecosexuality” and “polyamory”. Everything about sex, marriage and relationships is literally being turned upside down, and the United States will never be the same from this point forward.

Before I finish this article, I want to leave you with one final thought…

In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced that we would put men on the moon.

In May 2016, Barack Obama announced that we would put men in women’s restrooms.

The very foundations of our society are being systematically destroyed, and yet very few people seem upset about this.

If we continue going down this path, is there any hope for the future of our nation?

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

It Is Being Reported That Turkish Military Forces Have Entered Syria

Turkey Syria Border - Google MapsThere are international news reports that claim that Turkish military forces have entered Syrian territory and have established positions near the towns of Azaz and Afrin.  If these international news reports are true, then Turkey has essentially declared war on the Assad regime.  Back in February, I warned that escalating tensions in the region could be the spark that sets off World War III, but things seemed to cool down a bit in March and April.  However, this latest move by Turkey threatens to take the war in Syria to a whole new level, and everyone will be watching to see how the Russians and the Iranians respond to this ground incursion.

So far, it is the Russian media that it taking the lead in reporting about this movement of Syrian forces.  For example, the Sputnik news agency was one of the first to report Turkish military activity around the town of Azaz…

Amid violent clashes between militants of Daesh and troops of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the town of Azaz in northern Aleppo district, reports are surfacing suggesting that the Turkish Army units have been seen located in the district of Azaz.

In addition, Sputnik claims that Turkish military forces entered a small village called Hamam near the town of Afrin on Saturday…

“Two days ago, the Turkish military entered the village of Hamam in Afrin area. We are ready to repel any attack. Meanwhile, FSA units are suffering serious defeat in clashes with Daesh. They have already lost control of 12 villages. If Daesh comes to Azaz, ‘Democratic Syrian Forces’ will repel the jihadists, and not allow them to enter the city,” Arac stressed.

The map that I have posted below comes directly from Google Maps, and it shows how far south of the Turkish border the towns of Azaz and Afrin are…

Turkey Syria Border - Google Maps

In particular, the Azaz corridor is considered to be extremely important because that is the primary route that Turkey has been using to resupply jihadist rebels in Aleppo.  So Turkey wants to keep that road open at all costs.

Meanwhile, an Iranian news source is also reporting on this Turkish incursion into Syria…

Member of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PDS) Ahmet Arac said that the hundreds of the Turkish soldiers crossed the Syrian border at Bab al-Salameh border-crossing and deployed their forces in al-Shahba’a region near Marea and Azaz.

“The Turkish Armed Forces are preparing an offensive in the Azaz and Marea regions that have been the scenes of tough battles between the ISIL terrorists and its rival group of the Free Syrian Army,” Arac added.

“Also yesterday the Turkish Army carried out rocket attacks on the positions of Democratic Forces of Syria,” he went on to say.

So far, there has been no confirmation of this invasion from the mainstream media in the western world.  But of course since Turkey is our ally, the Obama administration would not want the media talking about this.  So instead, our big media outlets are giving us headlines such as “Judge sentences Catholic to attend Baptist church” today.

If you have been following my work for a while, you already know that Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been working very hard to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad for years, and Assad knows exactly what Turkey has been up to…

“..Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, have crossed all possible red lines, possibly from the first weeks of the Syrian war. Today, the war against Erdogan and against Saudi Arabia is a war against terrorists. The Turkish army, which is not even Turkish, is Erdogan’s army that is fighting today in Syria. Everything that Ankara and Riyadh have done from the very beginning can be considered aggression. Aggression in a political sense or in a military sense – providing terrorists with arms – or direct aggression with the use of artillery, and other military violations. Erdogan is directly supporting the terrorists as he allows them to move into Turkish territory, to carry out maneuvers with tanks. This concerns not only individuals, he finances them [terrorists] through Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and through Turkey itself, of course. Turkey trades oil that has been stolen by IS (Islamic State, Daesh), at the same time carrying out artillery attacks against the Syrian army – when it moves close – in order to help the terrorists. They are terrorists and when we attack these terrorists in Syria, this leads to Erdogan’s direct defeat..”

Assad is a very bad man, but everything that he said about Turkey in that quote is true.  Turkey has been giving direct assistance to ISIS, and Barack Obama has known about it the entire time.

Most Americans simply do not understand how insane Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan truly is.  Our “ally” has essentially become a dictator, and he is obsessed with recreating the old Ottoman empire.  These days, political rallies in support of Erdogan are quite reminiscent of what Nazi rallies under Adolf Hitler were like, and there is a nationalistic fervor in Turkey right now that is so intense that it is hard to describe it to someone in the western world.  It is fueled by the rise of radical Islam, but what is going on in Turkey is broader than that.  It is extremely dangerous, and yet nobody in the U.S. criticizes Erdogan because he is our “friend”.

In addition to moving troops into Syria, Turkey already has forces positioned in Iraq, and the Russians are quite upset about this.  Just consider what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday…

“This (keeping troops in Iraq) is an absolutely unacceptable position,” it cited Lavrov as saying. “In principle, I believe that what the Turks are doing deserves far greater public attention on the part of our Western partners.”

But for Erdogan, what we have seen so far is just the beginning.  He dreams of creating an Islamic empire, and he envisions himself at the top of the food chain.

This is one reason why he is so virulently against birth control for Islamic women in his country.  He wants the population of Turkey to multiply greatly so that the Turks can fulfill their appointed destiny…

In a speech broadcast live on TV, he said “no Muslim family” should consider birth control or family planning.

“We will multiply our descendants,” said Mr Erdogan, who became president in August 2014 after serving as prime minister for 12 years.

In fact, Erdogan actually considers it to be “treason” for Islamic women in Turkey to use contraception…

Mr Erdogan himself is a father of four. He has previously spoken out against contraception, describing it as “treason” when speaking at a wedding ceremony in 2014.

He has also urged women to have at least three children, and has said women cannot be treated as equal to men.

Are you starting to see how dangerous this man is?

Our “ally” is an egomaniac dictator that dreams of recreating the Ottoman empire, and he now has troops positioned in both Iraq and Turkey.

And if he isn’t careful, Erdogan may end up starting a major war which would ultimately involve the United States.

Hopefully cooler heads will prevail before events start spinning entirely out of control.

Bill Kristol Announces That ‘There Will Be An Independent Candidate’ To Sabotage Donald Trump

Idea Follow Question - Public DomainIt has long been my contention that the elite are more than willing to do whatever they have to do to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.  There are many forms that this could take, and one potential option just became a little bit clearer.  On Sunday, the founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, announced on Twitter that there “will be an independent candidate–an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”  Kristol has very, very deep ties to the Republican elite, and so this is certainly not an idle threat.  At this point we do not know who the candidate will be, but some of the names that have been mentioned include Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse and billionaire Mark Cuban.  Of course dividing the conservative vote would be suicidal and would virtually ensure a victory for Hillary Clinton in November.  So why would Kristol and other Republican elitists want to do this?

That is a very good question, and it goes to the very core of how the game of politics is played in America today.

The truth is that the elite are accustomed to being in control of both parties, and that is why things never seem to change very much no matter who is elected.

But this time someone that the elite do not control has miraculously captured the Republican nomination, and this scares them to death.

So now the mission is to destroy the Trump candidacy at all costs, even if that means having the Republican elite sabotage the Republican nominee.

I wasn’t sure if they were actually going to pull the trigger on a major third party candidate, but Bill Kristol now says that this is absolutely going to happen…

Of course Donald Trump was horrified when he learned of what Kristol had said.  He responded with a series of very angry tweets…

I would be upset too.  For the Republican elite to purposely sabotage Trump and throw the election to Hillary Clinton is seemingly insane.  This is something that Ben Carson commented on during a recent interview with Fox News…

Former 2016 candidate and Trump backer Ben Carson, speaking Monday on Fox News, echoed Trump’s warnings and invoked the 1992 presidential race as an example.

“A quarter of a century ago, another Clinton was running for the White House, and it was the entrance of a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, that made it possible for him to win,” Carson said. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if the same thing happened this time?”

Of course Kristol and the others that he is working with know precisely what they are doing.

There is no way in the world that Romney, Sasse, Kasich or Cuban could win.  But that wouldn’t be the goal anyway.  The goal would simply be to deny five or ten percent of the vote to Trump so that Hillary would win in a landslide.

At one time it seemed like such sabotage would not be necessary, but now polls have begun to shift and the elite are beginning to panic.  Here is one example of how the numbers have shifted…

That data and recent events suggest that Wall Street, which currently prefers former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to real estate mogul Donald Trump, may not get the president it wants. According to the Iowa Electronic Markets, a prediction online betting platform, the probability that we’ll see a Democrat take the White House in 2016 is shrinking fast.

“The Democratic candidate was all but a certainty to win the presidency less than a month ago—it was at 74 percent and it’s down to 58 percent today,” said Hickey.

In a head to head matchup, there is a very real possibility that Trump could defeat Clinton.  So that is why the elite feel that they have to make a move.

But we probably will not find out the identity of the third party candidate until some time in June at the earliest.  In fact, a source that is involved in this third party effort told CBS News “not to expect an announcement for a couple of weeks.”

So for the moment, we will wait.

But without a doubt, there appears to be a unique opportunity for a third party candidate in this election cycle.  A whole host of recent polls and surveys have shown that the American people are not pleased with either party at this point and that most Americans would like to see an alternative choice to either Clinton or Trump.  The following comes from the New York Times…

The survey also found evidence of overwhelming interest in the presidential contest, although less than a quarter of Americans say they’re excited about it.

Worse, 55 percent of Americans, including 60 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of Democrats, say they feel helpless about the 2016 election. And two-thirds of Americans under 30 report feeling helpless.

“I am despondent,” said Cserbak. “I wouldn’t say I feel totally helpless. I do have a vote.”

Of course no matter who runs as a third party candidate, there is no way in the world that individual will win.  Any third party candidate will simply play the role of spoiler, and will throw the election one way or the other.

I understand that a lot of people out there are very excited about Trump.  And it would be very nice to think that the American people could actually elect a president that is not controlled by the elite.

But that is not how the real world works, and over the next several months we are going to get a very clear lesson in power politics.

If necessary, the elite will move heaven and earth if that is what it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.  Anyone that would suggest otherwise simply doesn’t understand how the game is played.

6 Giant Corporations Control The Media, And Americans Consume 10 Hours Of ‘Programming’ A Day

Faces - Public DomainIf you allow someone to pump hours of “programming” into your mind every single day, it is inevitable that it is eventually going to have a major impact on how you view the world.  In America today, the average person consumes approximately 10 hours of information, news and entertainment a day, and there are 6 giant media corporations that overwhelmingly dominate that market.  In fact, it has been estimated that somewhere around 90 percent of the “programming” that we constantly feed our minds comes from them, and of course they are ultimately controlled by the elite of the world.  So is there any hope for our country as long as the vast majority of the population is continually plugging themselves into this enormous “propaganda matrix”?

Just think about your own behavior.  Even as you are reading this article the television might be playing in the background or you may have some music on.  Many of us have gotten to the point where we are literally addicted to media.  In fact, there are people out there that become physically uncomfortable if everything is turned off and they have to deal with complete silence.

It has been said that if you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out.  It is the things that we do consistently that define who we are, and so if you are feeding your mind with hours of “programming” from the big media corporations each day, that is going to have a dramatic affect on who you eventually become.

These monolithic corporations really do set the agenda for what society focuses on.  For example, when you engage in conversation with your family, friends or co-workers, what do you talk about?  If you are like most people, you might talk about something currently in the news, a television show that you watched last night or some major sporting event that is taking place.

Virtually all of that news and entertainment is controlled by the elite by virtue of their ownership of these giant media corporations.

I want to share some numbers with you that may be hard to believe.  They come directly out of Nielsen’s “Total Audience Report“, and they show how much news and entertainment the average American consumes through various methods each day…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using  a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add all of those numbers together, it comes to a grand total of more than 10 hours.

And keep in mind that going to movie theaters, playing video games and reading books are behaviors that are not even on this list.

What in the world are we doing to ourselves?

The combination of watching live television and watching time-shifted television alone comes to a total of more than five hours.

If you feed five hours of something into your mind day after day, it is going to change you.  There is no way around that.  You may think that you are strong enough to resist the programming, but the truth is that it affects all of us in very subtle ways that we do not even understand.

And as I mentioned above, there are just six giant corporations that account for almost all of the programming that we receive through our televisions.  Below is a list of these six corporations along with a sampling of the various media properties that they own…

Comcast

NBC
Telemundo
Universal Pictures
Focus Features
USA Network
Bravo
CNBC
The Weather Channel
MSNBC
Syfy
NBCSN
Golf Channel
Esquire Network
E!
Cloo
Chiller
Universal HD
Comcast SportsNet
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Studio Home Video

The Walt Disney Company

ABC Television Network
ESPN
The Disney Channel
A&E
Lifetime
Marvel Entertainment
Lucasfilm
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Disney Mobile
Disney Consumer Products
Interactive Media
Disney Theme Parks
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures

News Corporation

Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox News Channel
Fox Business Network
Fox Sports 1
Fox Sports 2
National Geographic
Nat Geo Wild
FX
FXX
FX Movie Channel
Fox Sports Networks
The Wall Street Journal
The New York Post
Barron’s
SmartMoney
HarperCollins
20th Century Fox
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Blue Sky Studios
Beliefnet
Zondervan

Time Warner

CNN
The CW
HBO
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
HLN
NBA TV
TBS
TNT
TruTV
Turner Classic Movies
Warner Bros.
Castle Rock
DC Comics
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
New Line Cinema
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine

Viacom

MTV
Nickelodeon
VH1
BET
Comedy Central
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Country Music Television (CMT)
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land

CBS Corporation

CBS Television Network
The CW (along with Time Warner)
CBS Sports Network
Showtime
TVGN
CBS Radio, Inc.
CBS Television Studios
Simon & Schuster
Infinity Broadcasting
Westwood One Radio Network

Fortunately, those enormous media conglomerates do not have quite the same monopoly over the Internet, but we are starting to see a tremendous amount of consolidation in the online world as well.  Just check out these numbers…

Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found.

The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.

The battle for the future of this nation is a battle for the hearts and minds of individuals.

And it is hard to see how things will be turned in a dramatically different direction as long as most of us are willingly feeding our hearts and minds with hours of “programming” that is controlled by the elite each day.

The good news is that there are signs of an awakening.  More Americans than ever are becoming disenchanted with the mainstream media, and this is showing up in recent survey numbers.  Here is one example…

Trust in the news media is being eroded by perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans’ skepticism about what they read on social media.

Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions.

As Americans (and people all over the world) have lost confidence in the mainstream media, they have been seeking out other sources of news and entertainment.  This has greatly fueled the rise of the alternative media, and the dozens of websites all over the Internet where this article will ultimately be published are examples of this explosion.

You can only enslave people for so long.  Ultimately, they will want to break free of the chains that are holding them back and they will want to find the truth.

In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves.  If you find that you are still addicted to the “programming” that the giant media corporations are feeding you, I would encourage you to start unplugging from the matrix more frequently.

In the end, you will be glad that you did.

A Spirit Of Violence And Civil Unrest Is Rising In America

Riot 2 - Public DomainIt was only a matter of time before our deeply divided nation was going to start coming apart at the seams.  Waves of anger, frustration, violence and civil unrest are starting to sweep across the United States, and political rallies for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have become a focal point for releasing some of that energy.  The angry mob that threw rocks, bottles and burning T-shirts at police and Donald Trump supporters on Tuesday night wanted to get the attention of the national media, and they got it in droves.  Now that the election is less than five months away, this kind of scene is going to be repeated over and over, and this is something that I warned about back in March.  Millions upon millions of our young people have fully embraced the radical left, and they have already made it exceedingly clear that they are not afraid to use violence to advance their cause.

Never before in my lifetime have I seen America so divided.  Our politicians and the mainstream media have been endlessly pitting various groups against one another for years, and wherever you look hearts are growing very cold.

I have said it before, and I will say it again.  I believe that this is going to be the most chaotic election season that we have ever experienced, and the chaos and violence that are going to be unleashed over the next five months are going to shock the entire world.

On Tuesday night, the angry mob that gathered outside of the Albuquerque Convention Center didn’t seem to care who they hurt as they unleashed their anger.  According to Fox News, some of the protesters even tried to set police horses on fire…

The rampaging gang was made up of anti-Trump goons — waving the Mexican flag and burning a Trump banner.

“Viva Mexico,” protesters shouted, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

The rioters even targeted police horses — knocking one down – and throwing burning T-shirts at others. Who tries to burn down a horse?

How sick and twisted do you have to be to try to set a horse on fire?

But this is what happens when a spirit of violence descends on a group of people.  The consequences can quickly spiral out of control in unexpected ways.

Here is how CNS News described the chaotic scene outside of the Albuquerque Convention Center…

In one of the presidential campaign year’s more grisly spectacles, protesters in New Mexico opposing Donald Trump’s candidacy threw burning T-shirts, plastic bottles and other items at police officers, injuring several, and toppled trash cans and barricades.

Police responded by firing pepper spray and smoke grenades into the crowd outside the Albuquerque Convention Center.

According to at least one report, rocks thrown by some of the rioters were actually flying through the convention center windows, and a number of innocent people got hurt.

What would make people act like that?  This isn’t what America is supposed to look like.  But when fundamental institutions such as the family and the church start to crumble, this is how people start to behave.  You can see a clip that includes footage of protesters jumping on police cars last night in Albuquerque right here…

And of course the spirit of violence and civil unrest that is rising in America is not limited to Donald Trump rallies.

In major cities all over the nation, violent crime is rising by double digit percentages.  In Chicago, the number of people that have been shot so far in 2016 is 50 percent higher than during the same period last year…

This past weekend in Chicago saw another five killed and 40 wounded in shootings, slightly down from Mother’s day weekend when eight people were killed and 42 wounded. The two weekends are indicative of what’s taking place in the homicide riddled city, in which the number of people shot so far this year is running an astonishing 50% above this time last year – what’s worse, summer is not even here yet, which is traditionally the city’s most violent period.

Yikes!

Other big cities are seeing similar spikes in violent crime.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the New York Times…

Experts cannot agree on what to call a recent rise in homicides, much less its cause, but new data on Friday that showed a sharp spike in homicide rates in more than 20 cities rekindled debate over whether it was time for alarm.

The data showed particularly significant increases in homicides in six cities in the first three months of the year compared with the same period last year — Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Fla., Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Memphis.

If this is happening now, with the stock market soaring and unemployment a bit lower than it was during the depths of the last recession, what is going to happen when things start getting really bad in this country?

Desperate people do desperate things, and if people are willing to hurl rocks and set horses on fire because they are upset at a political candidate, what are they going to do when there is no food for their families?

Just look at what is happening down in Venezuela.  People are hunting down dogs and cats because they don’t have anything to eat.  There have been at least 107 mass looting events so far in 2016 alone, and crime is completely and utterly out of control.

What is happening down there is eventually coming to America too, and the chaos and violence that we will see during the coming months will be a small preview of that.

The funny thing is that none of these political protests are going to matter anyway.  It remains my contention that the elite will move heaven and earth to do whatever is necessary to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.  They have already spent tens of millions of dollars against him and they have continuously had their media outlets put out “hit pieces” in an attempt to destroy him.

But their bag of tricks goes a lot deeper than that, and this is not a game to them.

I know that a lot of people out there have some very high hopes for Donald Trump, and we should be praying for him and for his family.

However, the time when the people determined the direction of this nation is long past, and the elite guard their monopoly over the political process very zealously.

Why Are Americans Getting Married An Average Of 7 Years Later Than They Did In The 1950s?

Wedding - Public DomainAmericans are getting married later and later in life these days.  So precisely why is this happening?  As you will see below, the average age when men and women first get married in the United States is getting perilously close to 30, but in the middle of the last century is was close to 20.  There has been a dramatic cultural shift, and this has resulted in a whole host of unintended consequences.  Because even though people are getting married later, they are still engaging in behaviors that in previous generations were considered reserved for those that had made a permanent commitment.  The family has always been one of the foundational institutions in society, but now it is breaking down at a very alarming pace.  Our young people have been trained to think that getting married, having children and raising a family are not important priorities, and this is showing up in a myriad of various ways.

In America today, the average woman is getting married 7.0 years later than she did in 1956, and the average man is getting married 6.7 years later than he did back then.  The following comes from CNBC…

The typical U.S. woman now marries at 27.1 years old, the typical man at 29.2, according to census data. That’s up from record lows of 20.1 for women and 22.5 for men in 1956.

“They’re concentrating more on school, careers and work and less focused on forming new families, spouses or partners and children,” said Richard Fry, lead author of the report and a senior economist at the Pew Research Center. Fry said of the millennials.

At one time, a woman was considered to be an “Old Maid” if she had not married by the age of 25, but in this day and age that is about the time that many women are just getting started seriously looking for a mate.

One of the big reasons why men and women are both delaying marriage so much these days is because our young people are constantly being inundated with messages that tell them that it is much more fun to be single.  If you aren’t doing so already, start paying attention to how marriage and parenthood are being portrayed to our young adults on television and in the movies.  In most cases, getting married at a young age is portrayed as being a “mistake”, and having children is often depicted as a good way to ruin your future.

And of course a lifestyle that involves sexual promiscuity is almost always portrayed as more desirable than a lifetime commitment to a single person.  Just watch any television show or movie that is targeted to young males in particular.  Being able to “score” often and with as many women as possible is what they are told they should do, and very rarely are they encouraged to value marriage and fatherhood.

This dramatic cultural shift that we have seen over the past several decades is having some very serious unintended consequences.

For one thing, an increasing number of our young people are choosing to never leave the nest.  In fact, the percentage of our young adults that are living at home now exceeds the percentage of our young adults that are married or are living with a partner…

Nearly a third of millennials live with their parents, slightly more than the share of their age group who live with a spouse or partner. For this age group, the researchers say, this is the first time that living at home has overtaken living with a spouse since the U.S. Census began keeping track in 1880.

As recently as 2000, nearly 43 percent of young adults, ages 18 to 34, were married or living with a partner. By 2014, that proportion was just 31.6 percent.

In 2000, only 23 percent of young adults were living with parents. In 2014, the figure reached 32.1 percent.

Another unintended consequence has been a huge rise in the number of unmarried women giving birth to children.

When the average age of first marriage was at a record low in 1956, about 5 percent of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents.  Today, more than 40 percent of all babies in America are born to unmarried parents.

In addition, just because young adults are not getting married does not mean that they are not looking for outlets for their sexual desires.

Of course lots and lots of people are sleeping around, but others are seeking alternative ways to fill what is missing in their lives.  Right now, there are more than four million adult websites on the Internet, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.  This plague has become so widespread that it has been estimated that even 68 percent of all Christian men watch pornography on a regular basis.

Clearly we have a major problem.

And I haven’t even mentioned the millions of abortions and millions of STD cases that have resulted from the “sexual revolution” that we have witnessed.

As the institution of the family has broken down, we have become lonelier, more isolated, less healthy and more prone to addictive behaviors as a society.

Could it be possible that previous generations of Americans actually knew what they were doing?

Could it be possible that it would be a good thing to teach our young people to value marriage and family?

Could it be possible that we are actually designed to get married and have children at a relatively younger age?

What we are doing right now is definitely not working.  We have one of the highest divorce rates on the entire planet, the CDC says that there are about 20 million new STD cases each calendar year, we have tens of millions of men that are addicted to pornography, and somewhere around a third of all children in the United States are currently being raised in a home without a father.

So is there a solution to this mess?

If so, what would that look like?

Please feel free to tell us what you think by posting a comment below…

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

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