This is the second to last chapter and we are heading to the big bang. Last chapter we had Galt’s refusal to cooperate, so where does that leave us? Well in true government fashion, we need to double down on failed efforts. Because more of the same will eventually work, right?

I keep saying that things are not going well but truly they are failing at this point. I think that our own experiences have proven that failing is often hard to recognize when you are in the middle of the collapse. You need a point of reference in order to establish how much change has actually occurred.

I am going to skip the chapter synopsis but to say that Dr Stadler and Cuffy Meigs blow themselves up at Project X trying to take over a portion of the country. Numerous high level government officials quit because of hopelessness and others just go straight strongman.

I want to go back to the idea of collapse. I have heard it describe as slow collapse because it doesn’t happen overnight. I suppose that there are those immediate changes like in the case of a coup. But, I actually think that this is normal. If we think about near history collapses like the Soviet Union it was fairly quick as over the course of a couple months. It probably seems fast because we condense history but I am pretty sure that three months of hell doesn’t seem fast at the time, especially if you are in it.

The course of Atlas Shrugged seems to run over multiple years. If there were concrete date references, I missed them. But I do distinctly recall descriptions of different seasons and we went through multiple winters and falls in the book. My point with this is that this would be termed a slow collapse.

There are so many things that we are born into that we never knew any different. Recently, I have heard many comparisons to the speculation of 2023 and 2008. For those that don’t study or remember history, 2008 was when the US government had a policy of “Too Big to Fail”. Different pundits are predicting that 2023 is going to be worse than 2008. Let’s take a look.

Yesterday, I was reading a headline “223,000 non-farming jobs added in December 2022”. The subtext of the headline was that this number blew expectations out of the water. And the implications from that is that things are so much better than expected and you should feel good about this too. I say this in context that also released in the Twitter files the FBI paid Twitter $3.5million for the ability to influence who and what was allowed to be posted on twitter.

Now I ask you, even if the numbers are truly accurate can we even trust any source at this point? Even if we believe that to be true, how many jobs were lost. I saw a lot of sizable numbers between Meta, ABC, Twitter and Amazon. You see, when you add 200 but lose 500 there is a lot to be desired. The headlines I was reading to support this writing was saying the ‘hot economy is starting to cool’. I am thinking to myself ‘what hot economy’? It’s hard to say that seven interest rate increases and 50% inflation equals a hot economy,

Anyway, I am probably going to get out of my lane if I keep going because I am not going to provide proper source citing for this. My point here is that we are in collapse and we have people telling us how lucky we are going to get. At the risk of mixing politics and economics, I ask are we more free today than we were in 1980 or less? Since there is no evidence that anyone can provide that we are more free, we have failed liberty. And that is a collapse in my book.

End Your Programming Routine: This topic could warrant an entire series. I also think that there is very little that be done about all of this, especially as an individual. I suppose the good news is that it is not a violent collapse. Smart money recognizes the situation and takes advantage of it. Don’t be afraid to study the rules and find the loopholes, there is still profits to be made in my lifetime. And that is all we need to be successful and by proxy happy.