Trump is the sum total of this era: corrupt, illiterate, and void of humanity. Anyone who trusts him deserves their designated fate.
What happened?
In a nutshell, the competitive consumption lifestyle consumed itself.
Adjusted for inflation, the U.S. space program peaked in the mid-1960s:
It's not hard to understand why today's Lost Boys don't believe in the moon landing. Nothing in their lifetime would indicate such a thing was ever possible. Sure we have the internet and dumbphones. But the internet itself was invented in the 1960s. Two thirds of today's internet servers still run on the UNIX operating system which was invented 50 years ago.
Ironically, far from bringing widespread enlightenment, the internet has delivered the exact opposite - widespread mass confusion and technology-driven illiteracy. Never before has humankind had so much information available at our fingertips. And yet, we are constantly bombarded with excess information. The human mind can't process all of the information and disinformation. Which is what makes the weaponization of disinformation so successful. Mind control has never been easier. As exhibited daily by the Con-Man-In-Chief.
In addition to the space program and other investments in the future, over the past 50 years, corporate-driven profit extraction has strip mined every aspect of the economy: Factories, full time jobs, pensions, healthcare, job security, wages. Quarterly profit growth is destroying the planet at an unprecedented rate, leaving in its wake a corporate Borg of unquestioning zombies hell bent on consuming themselves to death. The consumer is now the consumed.
At this late stage, capital is funding its own insolvency via profitless "growth", at an ever-accelerating rate. Using excess poverty capital to subsidize consumption in order to buy growth. Blitzscaling full speed towards Blitzcrash. Those who believe in this profitless era were either not around in Y2K or have subsequently been stricken with dementia. The same delusion that "profits don't matter" drove that mega bubble into a brick wall as well.
The Y2K bubble was lubed by easy Fed policy, and likewise this year's 180 degree "Fed pivot" has ramped this latest Tech bubble.
"Earnings for the tech sector are expected to drop by 9.9 percentage points on an equal-weighted basis in the next 12 months"
"Profits don't matter"
Case in point, this massive bubble in streaming content. A tsunami of capital rushing into an industry that has yet to prove its long-term profitability. Yesterday, Netflix imploded, hitting the brick wall of Ponzi-sponsored growth.
Indeed
Human life is never easy, but it has always been simple. Nothing changes under the sun in the daily lifecycle - eat, sleep, work, play, learn. What we do never changes, how we do it is what changes. Humans are constantly re-inventing the wheel. Sometimes for the better, too often for the worse.
What passes for economic "progress" today is really just a strip mined version of what used to exist.
Quantity over quality.
Since 1969, the human population has doubled. The wildlife population has been cut in half during that time, much of what remains is endangered. That asymmetric 4:1 ratio indicates an unsustainable trajectory for this planet.
The solution to the unsustainability problem is at hand: mass denial, mass delusion, mass ignorance, and a latent delusion that if we only go back in time to the 1950s everything will be A-OK.
When the central bank "free money" bubble bursts in a way that captures zombie attention, the perpetual growth cycle will end. The Ponzi self-funding of unsustainability will collapse. As will the birthrate, the primary driver of carbon on this planet.
The bullshit bubble has never been bigger than it is today. The greatest source of global warming is hot air and the zombies who can't live without it.
