Even avoiding the common conspiracy stuff, the banks are screwing us, the government is eroding our rights left right and centre, the rich are really cleaning up, it's hard not to believe that global warming is having some sort of effect and we can't avoid running out of oil at some stage.

Really the next 10-50 years could be pretty bloody worrying.

It's better to be paranoid and prepared than not. Stay informed about what is going on around you and be ready to react quickly if something big happens. If you have a plan and make haste as soon as shit hits the fan you'll be two steps ahead of almost everybody else.

I personally think things are going to get really bad in the coming months. First there will be riots, more false flag attacks, then Martial Law will be instated.

What makes you think that we aren't already under martial law?

Because I know what martial law is.

In a few months you really think there will be martial law? Really? Really?

(Serious question, with a hint of sarcasm.)

I'd agree with your sentiment. People have been talking about coming martial law for years. Plus I've never really seen enough evidence of large scale false flag operations.

Just because you haven't seen the evidence, or have seen it and chosen to ignore it (9/11) doesn't mean there aren't false flag operations. But I do agree, martial law could come, but I don't see it any more likely now than any time in the last decade.

Well, I saw the evidence on 9/11 and decided it wasn't remotely compelling enough. I didn't choose to ignore it.

Sorry... but 9-11 evidence is extremely solid and compelling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ojR7vtXeWM

Perhaps you didn't look too far.

No need to apologise because you have a differing opinion, we're all friends here! I think this is one for a different thread, can't have every discussion descending into the 9/11 argument.

this IS /r/conspiracy.

Best point of the day!

The conspiracy community has been prophesying disaster "in the coming months" for years. I see even less reason to believe it now than I have in the past.

What do you call 9-40% unemployment across the nation, 5-10% of homes in some stage of foreclosure, a decade of war in Afphanistan, at war in Iraq from 2003 now (not withstanding the recent draw down). Not to mention Katrina and the horrific response thereto.

How much disaster do you need?

What do you call 9-40% unemployment across the nation

9 to 40, that's quite a range. The actual number is much closer to 9 than 40. Either way, I wouldn't call that a disasrer.

a decade of war in Afphanistan, at war in Iraq from 2003 now

The Vietnam war went on for 2 decades.

Not to mention Katrina and the horrific response thereto.

Katrina was bad, for that area, but they are recovering.

Do you really feel that any of those things you mentioned would be considered "shit hitting the fan"? I wouldn't, in fact, my life hasn't really changed much at all.

9 to 40, that's quite a range. The actual number is much closer to 9 than 40. Either way, I wouldn't call that a disasrer.

That's because you will never get the real numbers. The 9% figure comes from the labor department and they only take into account active, registered unemployed workers. They don't count people who have never registered with the labor department, people who have to work at places like Wal-Mart part-time because they can't find full-time employment, etc. The number is closer to about 30%

The Vietnam war went on for 2 decades.

I am missing the point you are trying to make. The length of these wars mean we have not advanced as a civilization.

Katrina was bad, for that area, but they are recovering.

Come on, are you kidding? When was the last time you've been to New Orleans? What's bad for one of us is bad for all of us. There's a Jewish poem ( I think it's a poem) that speaks to this mentality of not being concerned about your fellow man. It's something like 'Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew' . . . Your logic is dangerously flawed and part of the reason we are in the mess we are in. Make no mistakes about it, we are in a mess.

None of the points you are making are convincing me that America has collapsed. Because that's what this topic is about, "impending, catastrophic, economic meltdown". I'll ask again, do you think a ~15% unemployment rate, a medium sized war, and flood damage to a single US city constitutes "catastrophic, economic meltdown?"

Respectfully . . . I find all your comments crazy. The fact that your life hasn't changed at all has nothing to do with the health of the nation. Everyone else could have small pox and that would matter even if you didn't cause other folks in the world do matter, do have value, and their health and well being DOES effect you sooner or later.

Factually, LA has unemployment at 9% or so, and Detroit is at 40%.

Please, even with unemployment rate at 40%, not much has changed, and I live in Metro-Detroit. But to suggest that the US has gone through some "catastrophe" is just overly dramatic, or insane.

Oh, I KNOW we're living in a period that people 60 years from now will study in history books as the 'second depression' or something like that.

http://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/

I see a very dark storm on the horizon. So we are perparing what we can. But if the dollar goes belly up, then what becomes the legal tender?

or bottle caps ...

AMMO-U-NITION.

the yuan.

Well, start preparing. I'm not saying buy a year of food and more guns than you can carry, but buy a bugout bag and some canned goods you will use anyway and some water.

not even remotely surprised to find you saying that

The potential for disaster is always equal and opposite of the state of man's affairs. There are 6.5 billion (+/-) people on the earth and some of them have nuclear weapons. The potential for calamity is, therefore, 6.5 billion (+/-) irradiated corpses (minus the percentage that gets evaporated, of course). That's the extreme potential, however. Even if all-out nuclear war never happens (and I don't believe it will), we are still facing twin towers of potential from the global economic crisis and peak oil. Watch "Collapse" by Mike Ruppert...if you dare.

Nope.

I listened to Alex Jones a couple years ago and was worried then.

Until everything he said turned out to be total bullshit.

I have a much better memory than most of his listeners, apparently.

Besides, my economic situation can't get much worse.

Well, the North Korean bombing won't help your mindset I'm sure.

So get prepared! You're worrying because you know you should be preparing. So start doing what you know is the right thing to do.

Buy heirloom seeds, grow a garden and learn how to preserve the food from your garden. Buy a gun and plenty of ammo. Stock up on necessities that can be stored for a long period of time.

Make a list of what you use to get by right now, decide what's necessities and what's not then use that list to get prepared.

If you are really wealthy buy gold and/or silver in small denominations, but only do this if you can afford to do it after you buy all the other stuff you need without cutting it too close.

I got the marshmallows, gram crackers, and chocolate. Let's sit and watch the show.

The Powers that Were want you to be exactly where you are right now, spending your days reading speculative fear porn and worrying about the dark days ahead. We are in a war of frequency, and it is important to realize that the only thing coming is that which you create. It is true that there are powerful malevolent forces currently controlling our world. It is also true that we are on the brink of a "new world order," but it's not the prison planet we have been told is coming.

There are huge problems in the world right now. Massive, massive problems. But there are forces more powerful than those who currently dominate our world, and they will not allow it to come to nuclear war or other mass death. One thing is what we know as karma; it is coming around and its effects are unavoidable to those in power right now. Another is highly advanced races who are ready to intervene if massive worldwide calamity comes to pass.

Definitely be prepared. Be ready, but don't be afraid. What is coming around the bend is something more beautiful than you ever imagined.

Specifically, there are many different groups. I'm not an expert because I haven't met any of them personally, but here are some common ones. There are the Pleiadians, I believe these are known as the tall blondes. There are people from the constellation we know as Sirius, some of whom are actually feline-human types :/. There are people from Orion, Arcturians, and many others. Our galaxy is a very big place, and the multiverse is indeed infinite from our perspective. Both are teeming with life.

There are also what are commonly known as "service to self" races, or simply put the "bad guys," although it's never that simple. These guys are kind of rare since, if you think about it, it's hard to develop extremely advanced technology without obliterating yourselves unless the spiritual progress comes along with it. Just look at the situation we are in right now with nuclear weapons.

...and now I google Pleiadians.

Personally, I find this field to be somewhat of a clusterfuck, so while a Google search is a good start be prepared for that..

If I might recommend a couple of interesting sources I would point you to David Wilcock and Project Camelot, but use your own discernment with both.

For ET-specific info I really like James Gilliland. He and what he is doing at his ranch is truly unique in the world, although it's about to become increasingly common in the coming years.

Steven Greer is another interesting source although the man is a bit ego-heavy.

googling both James Gilliland AND David Wilcock and Project Camelot

Let's try the reverse then. What do you imagine will get this economy back on track?

The Fed is out of options. QE1 didn't work, so now we have QE2. Failure followed by failure. Great plan.

The Fed can't lower interest rates below zero. They can't raise interest rates above real inflation, because servicing the debt will balloon payments past infinity. Nobody's buying our crap bonds anymore.

We're already down 12 trillion dollars. 19 if you count the bad debt we bought from the banks. Over 80 trillion if you count all the unfunded mandates for the next 30 years.

Our exports are shit. We don't make anything anyone wants to buy, on the whole. (Yeah yeah, iPods, woo woo.)

I've always argued this "service economy" was crap. Somewhere down the line, you have to actually create something physical that someone wants to buy. You cannot base a rational economy where everyone is essentially pushing fries out the window to everyone else.

Our glorious leaders (may peace be upon them) are obviously not willing to make the hard choices necessary to get our spending back in line with reasonable taxes.

Ben Bernanke is an idiot.

The Players are moving out of the stock market and into commodities. You'll all remember how well that played out a couple of years ago with gas prices. You'll start seeing the price of everything rise accordingly. Don't believe the BS about bad crops in India or whatever.

Nearly 40 million people on food stamps. Thirty million Americans unemployed or underemployed. These are government figures.

Home prices are still falling, foreclosures haven't slowed down a bit. And I don't even know if the wave of business/retail foreclosures has even really started yet.

Face it, our economy is a gasoline saturated bonfire right now. The only reason I can't tell you how its gonna go up in flames is because there's too damn many people holding lighters.

Look at what happened to Argentina 11 years ago. The Banksters are playing out exactly the same scenario here.

Is that enough or shall I continue?

Please, please tell me that our Hallowed Leaders have a plan for getting us out of this, because I haven't seen diddly from them in a LONG time.

"Most things I read on /conspiracy/ generally lead me pessimistic about the state of the world we live in"

You really shouldn't worry about 99% of the shit in /conspiracy

mostly . . . the conspiracy folks have called things like the economic melt down, war stuff, etc correctly.

I think we should let people worry a bit.

My understanding is that there are a wide variety of conspiracy "theories" that exist and have existed for a while. Because a portion of these happen to prophesy events: economic meltdown, war stuff, etc. Doesn't necessarily mean that they predicted them.

Well there's a lot of conspiracy proof as well :) Many conspiracy theories were proved as fact, for example, in the many, many, many books and first person accounts that said the war in Iraq was pre-planned and the WMD case was completely manufactured and meant to be deceptive.

So . . . you are either going to be lied to again and again and again . . . or you are going to start making calculated guesses as to what to believe based on the evidence you can find.

And you are either going to start getting pretty vicious about demanding a government that stops lying to you, and citizens who stop being willfully blind because they are too lazy to run their own government . . . or you are going to find yourself living through some crazy bad times.

Waving around the term "conspiracy theories" and saying "no one knows" solves nothing does it. The fact that you don't know anything is cause you have decided NOT to know anything. The fact that you don't think anything was accurately predicted is cause you have decided it is too much trouble to decide (based on all the evidence YOU can find) what to believe and based on that analysis to decide what you think is going to happen next.

PS: I mention in passing, it was only a conspiracy for a long time that Jews were being burned in Ovens, that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie, that Mortgage Backed Securities were a dangerous and destabalizing risk to the economy, etc.

Sometimes that shit matters . . . sometimes NOT knowing the "conspiracy theories" is pretty damned expensive to people and their families.

What do you call 9-40% unemployment across the nation, 5-10% of homes in some stage of foreclosure, a decade of war in Afphanistan, at war in Iraq from 2003 now (not withstanding the recent draw down). Not to mention Katrina and the horrific response thereto.

How much disaster do you need?

mostly . . . the conspiracy folks have called things like the economic melt down, war stuff, etc correctly.

I think we should let people worry a bit.