Free Republic

Last week, we gathered with other scholars at Ground Zero for a summit on terrorism and political violence. The mood was somber, not only because of reflections on 9/11 but also because of pained predictions of violence to come. It would have surprised nobody in attendance had they been told another assassination attempt against the former president would occur days later. This was, of course, not merely the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump. There have been many more plots over the past several years — aimed at politicians of all stripes — that never reached the point of gunfire...

On Friday, we faced yet another black swan event. We’ve had an attempted Trump assassination, the surprise coup against President Biden, and now Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, defection and joining up with Donald Trump. Before getting into this and a discussion of the DNC convention in Chicago, I want to expose the partisan perfidy of NPR’s Judy Woodruff and the ease with which she and the press are manipulated by the deep state. Press PatsiesDuring the convention, Judy Woodruff reported (using the most authoritative voice and concerned visage she could muster) that Donald Trump had a telephone conversation with Israeli...

Governments owe an unprecedented $91 trillion, an amount almost equal to the size of the global economy and one that will ultimately exact a heavy toll on their populations. Debt burdens have grown so large — in part because of the cost of the pandemic — that they now pose a growing threat to living standards even in rich economies, including the United States. Yet, in a year of elections around the world, politicians are largely ignoring the problem, unwilling to level with voters about the tax increases and spending cuts needed to tackle the deluge of borrowing. In some...

President Biden has signaled to the world that America is weak. With feckless leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris and cabinet Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas joining him, it is no wonder that Biden’s resolve is being tested by our adversaries. Catherine Herridge, a former senior investigative reporter for CBS News, lit up the interwebs in December with an ominous prediction. Herridge stated, “I just feel a lot of concern that 2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that’s very hard to predict.” She is not alone in her thinking....

by CAPT. SETH KESHELAs Election 2024 bears down upon us, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term Black Swan flung around. An unfortunate reality of living in the post-2020 world is that we have come to expect government-inflicted bullshit that has no place in a free society, like ours was founded to be. You remember this drill – while many of your friends who still won’t fess up today were diving under their beds to hide from a virus that only infects you while you are walking into a restaurant or boarding an aircraft, you were watching local small business die on...

By nearly 2-to-1, voters believe Joe Biden is using the Justice Department to hobble former President Donald Trump and jail him so that he can’t win the fall election. In the latest McLaughlin and Associates survey shared with Secrets on Wednesday, 56% said they believe that “Joe Biden wants to stop President Trump from winning the election by putting him in jail.” Some 30% disagreed. Republicans, 86% to 8%, agreed, as did independent voters, 50% to 33%. But so did many Democrats — 32% agreed to 48% who didn’t. ... What’s more, voters said they believe Biden is playing a...

The Black Swan event is likely to occur before the 2024 election, especially if it becomes obvious that Trump will win despite the Left's every effort to cheat him a second time. SO let's have some fun with it! Might as well laugh at the Grim Reaper! I have a prediction: Taiwan is invaded or blockaded by China. China activates 100's of sleeper cells, who interfere with or destroy much of America's infrastructure. Electrical power is shut down nationwide. Then, Biden's helicopter is shot down by a lucky shot. It will be done with a Ghost Gun AR-15 with a...

Former Texas Representative Ron Paul recently told Tucker Carlson that the public must prepare for an unprecedented “Black Swan” event this year. While discussing current political events on the Tucker Carlson Show, Paul reminded the former Fox News host how he predicted the conflict in Ukraine in 2014. However, Paul said something much bigger is coming, a significant event that would catch the world off guard and plunge society in chaos. “I think we’re reaching this point where some sudden thing is going to happen,” Paul began.

Some of us older folks grew up in a time of normality when chaos was not the rule and weird, life-changing things didn’t happen. The stakes were not that high when we were growing up, except for the whole imminent nuclear war thing, but now we are regularly beset by flocks of black swan events, events so significant and life-changing that they send our society and our politics off in strange new tangents. And they now happen all the time. 9/11, the Wall Street meltdown, Trump’s election, COVID, Ben Shapiro getting a No. 1 rap hit … the black swans...

Google has established itself as the arbiter of "truth" in the digital age. The company controls the flow of information and can amplify or bury stories on a whim. Its leaders have given themselves god-like powers over shaping human opinion. So when they change their rules over what information they can censor in a "Sensitive Event" scenario, it's worth examining closely. If you’ve ever advertised with Google, you might have received this email yesterday: Dear Advertiser, In February 2024, Google will update the Inappropriate content policy to clarify the definition of Sensitive Events. A "Sensitive Event" is an unforeseen event...

Politico had an unusual homework assignment for a number of futurists, political analysts, and prognosticators. It was to put on their Nostradamus caps to predict what, if any, Black Swan events could affect the 2024 presidential election. The results ranged from the somewhat reasonable to the downright bizarre as you can see in Friday's "The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil."One of the assignees was the melodramatic Marquette University political science professor, Julia Azari, who rather than write a simple prediction interpreted her job as writing a novel starting with the very Hemingwayisque title of...

Black Swan. It is the favorite New World Order term. The NWO would have us believe that a Black Swan event is an unfortunate event created by the Russians, MAGA terrorists, or anonymous hackers. Not a looming premeditated war gamed genocidal treasonous act by an establishment fueled by the insanity of a totalitarian Eugenicist movement careening off the tracks. Like Event 201, the Globalists have already clearly telegraphed that they are behind an inevitable Black Swan event. And the rabbit hole is deep. Following the death of NWO Godfather Henry Kissinger, Kissinger’s loyal Nazi student Klaus Schwab fumbles with...

A “perfect storm” is raging all around us, and our world is so close to plunging into a complete and utter state of chaos that even the mainstream media is talking about it. The past several years have been a time when multiple major wars have begun, pestilences have paralyzed the entire planet, the worst global food crisis in modern history has erupted, and we have been hit by a seemingly endless series of natural disasters.

CBS News' "Face the Nation" held a roundtable on Christmas Eve, affording various talking heads an opportunity to make predictions for 2024. While most of the predictions were relatively banal, one among them stood out, prompting critics to puzzle over its possible significance. Network correspondent Catherine Herridge, the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, suggested that "2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that's very hard to predict." Statistician and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term "black swan event" in his...

Musclebound federal agencies and their institutional biases are rendering these same agencies incapable of countering the many risks we now face. A Pink Flamingo describes a predictable event, or series of events, ignored through the bias of leadership, trapped in their institutional thinking. It differs from Black Swan events, which generally come out of nowhere and are statistically implausible. Pink Flamingos exist in a gray area where particular institutions, i.e., political, military, or economic entities, ignore intelligence, conflicting data, and ideas that directly confront established beliefs, tenets, and capabilities of their respective organization(s). Why is this important? Pink Flamingos happen...

A fertilizer supply shock is imminent for US farmers as CF Industries Holdings, Inc. warned Thursday that rail shipments of crop nutrients would be reduced to top agricultural states, which couldn’t come at the worst time as the Northern Hemisphere spring planting season is underway. The world’s largest fertilizer company said Union Pacific had hit it with railroad-mandated shipping reductions that would impact nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate shipments to Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, and California. Union Pacific told CF Industries without advance notice to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad immediately....

The move comes a day after leader Kim Jong Un warned North Koreans that they must expect to eat less food until the country re-opens its borders with China in 2025. 'Black swan meat is delicious and has medicinal value,' while the bird's industrial breeding will 'improve the people's living standard', the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported. A researcher from the country's agriculture ministry told KCNA in 2020 that the black swan meat has more protein than other meats and is easier to digest, adding that it also has 'anticancer' properties. Despite the current hardships the North Korean people...

< snip >In "The Black Swan"--a kind of cri de coeur--Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law. The attractiveness of the bell curve resides in its democratic distribution and its mathematical accessibility. Collect enough data and the pattern reveals itself, allowing both robust predictions of future data points (such as the height of the next five people to enter the room) and accurate estimations of the size and frequency of extreme values (anticipating the occasional giant or dwarf. The power-law distribution, by contrast,...

VIDEOOn September 5, 2021 a black swan appeared in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and attracted a lot of attention as you can see. Does this very rare appearance of a black swan in the very center of China portend a Black Swan event? By strange coincidence, on the very same day the black swan appeared in Tiananmen Square, a fascinating documentary about Black Swan Events, "The Worst Kind of Surprise: Black Swan Theory," was uploaded to YouTube. You can see a few excerpts of it in this video but I highly recommend you watch the entire documentary in the link below.The...

The U.S. has had a slew of black swan events of late. The next one could be the worst. The U.S. has had a slew of black swan events of late. For the purposes here, I'll define a black swan as having the following characteristics. First, it disrupts the equilibrium of society. Second, it is not commonly foreseen, and, if discussed at all prior to happening, it is discounted as highly improbable. Thirdly, in retrospect, the black swan seems to have been inevitable. I'm sure Nasim Nicholas Taleb would not object to such a description. In chronological order, the black...