For new followers & old, you may see that I've kinda gone full "cold civil war going hot" doomer recently. I do want to nuance all this a bit with a quick thread. Here's a random list of my assumptions:

1. The nature of these moments is that nobody, including me, really knows if or when they'll truly blow up into some real rupture. It's like a dam where the pressure's building in a storm -- you can analyze & measure, but you can't know if or when the thing will actually crack.

2. I have no idea what it looks like when your country is about to blow apart at the seams, b/c I've never lived through that. I have studied such breakdowns abstractly, but I don't even know as much about that as I know about random other stuff I geek out on.

3. The traumas hitting us are lumpy, unevenly distributed, & cluster w/ respect to time & geography. If you're in a pocket of it, the world looks one way, vs. if you aren't the world looks way different. So my POV is skewed, so is yours.

4. Following on #3 above, don't confuse any confidence you may detect in my feed for certainty. Those are two different things. I am a dude who kinda holds forth, & is often confident (or at least confident-sounding), but I am only very rarely certain about anything at all.

5. I have been worried about violent domestic conflict, & writing about it, for quite a few years now. So when I see the kinds of events & contagion I'm seeing, I'm naturally going to take that as confirmation b/c of my well-documented priors. Caveat lector.

6. When complex systems are under stress, things don't escalate in a linear fashion. We can have a build-up, then a calming down, then a further build-up, and it can cycle upwards in a "random walk" kind of way. Nonlinearity & stochasticity are weird. Expect reversals.

7. The ruptures & random, weird breaks we're seeing now are from cracks that were there before the pandemic, but the pandemic has applied intense external pressure to the system. It's blowing out existing cracks AND creating brand new ones that are hairline now but will later.

8. I actually hold out some small hope that the cold weather will give us a meaningful break from a lot of the social unrest and escalation of nightly violence, as we shift our attention back to whatever pandemic-related crises.

9. I try to model scenarios, and not make predictions. "Space of possibilities" is a phrase I probably overuse. Because in my view there's a space, & it has various gradients, & it has local maxima & minima. So modeling is about spotting those gradients, maxima, & minima.

10. One main way I use this platform for forecasting & zeigeisting, is I put stuff out there that I think will resonate just to see how many people will smash the & RT buttons. It looks like I'm planting a flag, but really I'm running one up the pole to see how many salute.

The above is a way of saying, this is my feed, & above all it needs to work for me and help me gather intel & insight, so often what you see on here is not the output of some intel-gathering but the input. Whatever I write long-form ( http://theprepared.com ) is always output tho.