Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

tim, your post above reminds me of how Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet system of control:

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the
pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though
scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psycho-
logical sense, fused into a continent — an almost invisible, almost
imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other
country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork,
cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were
many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many
others who had heard something vague. And only those who had
been there knew the whole truth.

[Higgenbotham]

December 6, 2025

All of these cycle studies have produced noteworthy results across multiple time periods, otherwise they would have been lost to the dust bin. But, none of these cycle studies is perfect on its own. What is of interest, is that many if not all of these cycle studies are pointing to a point in time between now and early 2026 whereby the current cycle (a bull market cycle) is slated to end, and a new cycle (a bear market cycle) is slated to begin.

Howe’s work concludes that we are past the midpoint of a fourth turning and poised to enter the crisis period. The Kondratiev wave appears to be peaking and getting ready to rollover into its Winter season. Armstrong’s Economic Confidence Model is scheduled to peak at its downcycle midpoint in June 2026 and begin a yearlong plunge into mid-2027. The Benner cycle is also poised to top in 2026 before beginning a six year decline into 2032. According to Prechter, the DJIA may have already topped at supercycle degree of trend. If so, the correction that follows will also occur at supercycle degree of trend — a corrective force last witness during the great depression era. Gann’s Financial Time Table calls for a major panic and crash by 2026 followed by an extreme low in 2028. The Full Cold Supermoon on December 4th coincided with the end of a 18.6-year lunar declination cycle. Since the S&P more than quadrupled over the past 18.6-years, we think its fair to say that this cycle most likely marks the end of a long advance. The Bradly Model points down into year-end, while the 40-week cycle appears to have topped slightly ahead of schedule.

Indeed, the weight of the evidence from these cycle studies collectively suggest that there’s a storm coming, the magnitude of which has the potential to reach epic proportions.

https://hugeinsights.substack.com/p/hug ... -issue-b44

These cycles sort of worked prior to 2005-10 or so when Central Bankers and others drew reasonable lines. Since then, the overriding goal seems to be to maximize manipulation and fraud, kick the can down the road, do "whatever it takes" (Draghi), however you prefer to think about it. There have been many instances where, instead of expected crashes, there were just dips before the market resumed its upward trajectory. When the Central Bankers finally lose control during a time of vulnerability, the crash should be massive, bigger than 1929, 1857, etc. The volatility should be massive too.

[tim]

https://nataliegwinters.substack.com/p/ ... nformation

EXC: The Architect of ‘Misinformation’ Censorship Is Now Targeting ‘Anti-Immigrant’ Posts

For nearly a decade, Kate Starbird has been one of the most influential academic voices shaping how “misinformation” is defined, studied, and ultimately moderated online.

Her research helped supply the intellectual framework used by major platforms, government agencies, and NGOs to justify sweeping censorship of election-related speech after 2016 and 2020. Claims about voting systems, ballot integrity, and election administration were no longer treated as political arguments. They were reframed as harmful narratives subject to intervention, throttling, or removal.

Now, Starbird is applying that same framework to a new domain: immigration.

[tim]

https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/h ... w-approves

HORROR: New Brunswick Law Approves Organ Harvesting Before Death

“You don't need to be dead to have your organs harvested.”

Read this slowly. Then read it again.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is black-letter law in New Brunswick, quietly passed, officially published, and largely ignored.

A provincial statute explicitly allows organ harvesting to be approved before death.

If that doesn’t make your stomach drop, nothing will.

“You don't need to be dead to have your organs harvested.”

[Higgenbotham]

https://maninamerica.substack.com/p/3-m ... s-released

3 MILLION Epstein Pages Released — I Can't Unsee What I Found

Exposing the Machine Behind the Monster

tim, your post above reminds me of how Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet system of control:

America Is Turning Into The Soviet Union. You Can Blame Epstein’s Cabal
A gross perversion
John Loftus
Feb 11, 2026

The latest batch of Epstein files exposes debauchery and corruption among American elites, the very same high-minded people who claim to be virtuous and democratic but acted quite differently when dashing off emails to Jeffrey Epstein.

But it also exposed perhaps the biggest piece of evidence we have seen yet that the United States of America is slowly turning into a regime much like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

This is a bitter pill to swallow, to say the least. To Americans, it seems like a gross perversion of the spirit of the country and the Constitution. To those who lived through the Soviet Union’s collapse, it’s all too familiar.

Before we get to Epstein and his pals, though, let’s first consider the similarities between Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and former President Barack Obama. They have more in common than you think.

https://stateoftheday.us/p/america-is-t ... dium=email

[aedens]

The trained Marxists treated there own like a bug zapper then another Marxist who added zero value over his actual career
comments on a economy He never contributed value added in. The narrative cults like Him also would not even bury there own frozen dead.
We donated actual time and money. Americans are just still very slow between the ears.
Propaganda worked until the lights do not come back on. The Hügelkultur Garden eliminates more work than the Ag propaganda complex.
We welcome the Italians to the market economy unshackled from Brussels smothering stupidity.
Go ahead call us the Mound People.
The first mound building ag centers was an early marker of political and social complexity among the cultures
in the eastern part of the United States. We also understand they imported ideas designed to fail.

[Higgenbotham]

These are my top 3 general characteristics of a civilization that is on the cusp of entering a dark age/has just entered a dark age (in other words, where I think we are right now):

1. Decline in societal standards
2. Functional failure of government
3. Lack of accountability

"But civic erosion rarely begins with some catastrophic moment. It’s the slow, quiet degradation of basic standards. Inconvenience becomes normalized, frustration replaces obligation, and accountability for anything is rare."

NATIONAL DECAY OF STANDARDS
The Delta doesn’t have to be America’s destiny.
Amber Duke and Jonathan Duke
Feb 12, 2026

Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print.

I mentioned that I was in southeastern Missouri for a hunting trip this past weekend.

My husband and I co-wrote the following reflection on our drive from Hayti to the Memphis airport on the last day of our trip.

NATIONAL DECAY OF STANDARDS

There are stretches of America where the road feels less like infrastructure and more like evidence.

Driving I-55 from Missouri through Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee, is one of them.

Nothing dramatic. Just the slow accumulation of things that don’t work. Gas pumps that won’t start. Bathrooms locked or filthy. Lights half on. Card readers broken. Signs faded. Roads patched, then patched again.

Sometimes you stop at several stations before you can fill up and buy a bottle of water.

Even the places that appear “fine,” according to Google reviews, come with their own warnings: double charges, pumps that run while the tank stays empty, prices that jump for “outsiders.” It isn’t collapse. It’s malfunction as the baseline. After enough miles, you stop being surprised.

That may be the most unsettling part — not the disrepair itself, but the sense that no one expects things to function properly. The Mississippi Delta feels caught in a loop where decline isn’t a problem to be solved but an assumption everyone just accepts.

The region has absorbed economic shocks for decades — mechanization, out-migration, shrinking tax bases, capital flight. What remains is just barely teetering on the edge of serviceable.

From the outside, it looks like nobody cares. But it’s more likely just straight-up exhaustion. When institutions fail long enough, people lower their expectations. “Good enough” becomes the new normal.

That’s an understandable response to sanctioned atrophy. It’s also dangerous.

Because once an attitude of defeat hardens, recovery becomes harder than repair.

Infrastructure can be rebuilt. Capital can come back. But a culture that no longer expects things to work is far more difficult to reverse.

A small moment back in Northern Virginia clarified this. A pedestrian stepped into traffic while jaywalking toward the Metro. Jonathan braked hard. Yet the pedestrian responded with anger, as if Jonathan were the problem. It lasted seconds, but the feeling that something was off lingered.

It was a breach in something we used to understand implicitly — the quiet agreement that we share responsibility for societal order.

It’s a small breach. So are broken gas pumps, dim interiors with flickering lights, missing signage. But civic erosion rarely begins with some catastrophic moment. It’s the slow, quiet degradation of basic standards. Inconvenience becomes normalized, frustration replaces obligation, and accountability for anything is rare.

The point isn’t to moralize or assign blame. The Delta’s contraction is decades in the making. But what’s striking along I-55 isn’t only poverty or underinvestment. It’s the resignation. The sense that nothing works and nothing ever will.

And it isn’t confined to poor areas. The D.C. Beltway is home to some of the wealthiest counties in America. Yet when we were recently hit with a combination snow and ice storm, there was a blanket understanding that travel would be difficult, if not impossible, for at least a week.

People traded complaints about turn lanes covered in “snowcrete,” sidewalks leading to daycares and doctor’s offices that hadn’t seen the hint of a shovel, and snowplows and tractors sitting idle on the side of the road. No one, though, really expected anyone to do anything about it.

Nothing gets better until people stop settling for the status quo. Basic shared standards aren’t just for show — they’re what keep a place functional.

Roads work because drivers expect compliance. Markets work because contracts are honored. Communities work because enough people insist that how we behave matters.

The Delta doesn’t have to be America’s destiny. It should be read as a warning about what happens when expectations decay alongside infrastructure.

The smallest civic norms, like fixing the pump, honoring the crosswalk, and maintaining the sign, are not trivial. They are signals that somebody, somewhere, gives a damn.

Change begins not with grand speeches but with a simple insistence: this should work. And we will not accept less.

https://stateoftheday.us/p/national-dec ... dium=email

They only get one thing wrong. They say the Delta doesn't have to be America's destiny. It will be.

[aedens]

https://ourfiniteworld.com/
Review on some past views seen here and contracts mentioned for inputs.

[Higgenbotham]

https://ourfiniteworld.com/
Review on some past views seen here and contracts mentioned for inputs.

The days of avocados and blueberries arriving to the US from Chile are numbered. Starvation is objective truth. Like the decay of standards, it will arrive slowly and relentlessly, year by year. The early signs are there, but mostly ignored in a world of phony optics.

[Higgenbotham]

My number 1 indicator that the world has entered into a new dark age is the decline in life expectancy. Whether you need to look at every country is debatable. My belief is that looking at the hegemon is enough and probably the best indicator.

Sep 1, 2022

New government data has found that Americans’ life spans are getting shorter. Where life expectancy at birth was calculated at 79 in 2019, this dropped to 76.1 in 2021. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Covid was the main cause for about 50 percent of the decline between 2020 and 2021, and as much as 74 percent of the decline between 2019 and 2020.

The new figure marks the lowest life expectancy estimates since 1996 and is the biggest two-year fall in nearly a century. As our chart shows, the estimate today is significantly lower than the overall peak in 2014, when life expectancy at birth was 78.9 years.

https://www.statista.com/chart/20673/us ... cy-higher/

It was announced a couple weeks ago that life expectancy has recovered to 79 years.