Future Headline: Fed Says New Pandemic is the Only Way to Bring Down Inflation

July 28, 2023 In a world full of unimaginable absurdity, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future… and to where all of this insanity leads.“Future Headline Friday” is our satirical take of where the world is going if it remains on its current path. While our satire may be humorous and exaggerated, rest assured that everything we write is based on actual events, news stories, personalities, and pending legislation. July 28, 2025: Fed Says New Pandemic is the Only Way to Bring Down Inflation With inflation remaining stubbornly high at 5%, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, for the fourth year in a row, the Fed seems ready to throw in the towel with its current set of policy tools.“ We’ve exhausted all of our normal tactics,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said at today’s press conference following the Fed’s normal July meeting. “At first, back in 2022, we denied that inflation existed. But very few people believed us; it turns out too many Americans were visiting grocery stores and filling up their cars with gasoline.” “Next we figured if we said enough times that it was transitory, we could manifest it with the Law of Attraction. But that didn’t work either.”“Then we thought, ‘hey why not pass a law to bring inflation down’ and we were hoping Congress would just enact new legislation banning inflation outright. Unfortunately they didn’t do the trick, but we got the next best thing with the Inflation Reduction Act.” “You know the deal with legislation, it’s all about the name— and believe me, I was more surprised than anyone that inflation didn’t respect the Inflation Reduction Act.” Inflation did fall to 3% in 2023. However, inflation quickly rose back to a range of 5-8% after energy prices soared in late 2023. Many economists blame the Biden Administration’s anti-fossil fuel energy policies, and the passage of the Green New Deal in 2024, which triggered enormous increases in food and fuel prices. Powell addressed stubbornly high inflation in his remarks, when he said, “We tried raising interest rates for four years now, but it hasn’t gotten the job done, and in many respects, things are much worse now since so many banks have failed due to higher interest rates, and now even the Treasury is nearing default, so we really have to try something new.” “So today, I am introducing a new tool— the only proven way that inflation was eradicated for a short time during my tenure— a new pandemic.” Powell explained that the Federal Reserve is in talks with the Chinese government to go through the catalog of indexed viruses, to see if any might be just what the economy needs. The Fed calls the new tool COVID, which stands for Currency Optimization Via Infectious Disease. The plan is to release a new virus into the population, and let public health officials do their work. “If you think back to how great the economy was during the last pandemic, it’s pretty obvious we need to create those conditions again. So let’s bring out another virus, slash interest rates to zero, and print tons of money again. What could possibly go wrong? ”One disruptive reporter asked whether the Fed’s new COVID policy would create new supply chain dysfunction and future economic havoc. “We don’t anticipate that printing trillions more dollars will have any negative impact on the economy. The important thing is just making sure people cower in fear inside their homes.” To your freedom,

Simon Black, Founder Sovereign Man

Do you really need a second passport?

July 24, 2023 Some time in the year 136 AD, in the ancient town of Lanuvium located just south of Rome, a private club known as the ‘Society of Diana and Antinous’ hired a local scribe to chisel the group’s bylaws onto a large marble slab.You can just imagine the club’s Board of Directors hovering over the scribe to check his work as they dictated the inscription line by line. The slab still exists today, and it lists the club’s regulations, major donors, and even birthdays of founding members. It also shows the initiation fee for new members: 100 sestertii, roughly $440 in today’s money based on modern gold and silver prices. The annual dues were an additional 24 sestertii per year. So what exactly did the members of this ancient club receive in exchange for their dues? Peace of mind. That’s because the Society of Diana and Antinous was what was known as a ‘burial society’ or collegia tenuiorum. We would think of it today as a rudimentary insurance policy. Life in ancient Rome, even during the empire’s Golden Age, was fraught with risk. War, fire, famine, and plague were constant threats. Many jobs (like mining) were exceptionally hazardous. And occasionally a natural disaster like an earthquake or volcano eruption would strike. Romans knew these risks were a normal part of life. But death was very expensive—as it still is today. So, given the very real risk of an untimely and expensive death, ancient Romans created private groups like the Society of Diana and Antinous to help offset burial costs in a sensible way. In the event of a member’s untimely demise, the club would pay for the burial, easing the financial strain on the deceased’s family. Insurance has obviously evolved substantially over the past 19 centuries… but the basic concept remains the same: mitigate obvious and critical risks in a sensible way. Most people today have fire or flood insurance for their homes, collision insurance for their vehicles, and even life insurance to protect their families. These are all sensible precautions that any rational person might take. But there are a number of far greater risks lurking that don’t come with a traditional insurance policy. While I am an optimist at heart and believe that nearly all major challenges are entirely fixable, it’s not controversial anymore to say that much of the West is a complete mess. Most of Europe has been importing rape and violence under the banner of multiculturalism at an astonishing pace; France can’t seem to destroy itself fast enough. And, according to recent data published by the European parliament, nearly half of Europeans say their standard of living is falling thanks to multiple, never-ending crises. Then there’s the US, which, while comparatively better off than Europe, has its own unique dumpster fire of chaos. The national debt stands at over 120% of GDP as the government continues to borrow more; in fact the US national debt has increased by $1 trillion in just the last two months. The US dollar is in serious danger of losing dominant market share as the global reserve currency. And the Federal Reserve– the US central bank– is insolvent. Social Security’s key trust funds are also within a decade of running out of money. Every major city has seen crime surge. Socialist politicians are rising in popularity. And Americans have lost faith in every major institution, from education and the justice department to news media and Big Tech. These are clear risks which barely scratch the surface of America’s list of problems. Like traditional, “insurable” risks (like a collision policy for your vehicle), some of the above risks are quite simple to quantify, visualize, and mitigate. Social Security’s trustees state in their annual report, for example, that the program will have to slash benefits once it runs out of money in a decade. This isn’t even a risk… it’s a near-certainty. And that makes it easy to visualize: any Social Security beneficiary can easily quantify the cost of their benefits being slashed. (It’s also easy to mitigate this risk— like setting up a solo 401(k) structure and putting more money away for retirement.) But some risks are really nebulous. For example, it should be obvious that the US is a deeply divided society that is deteriorating quickly. Just think about how much has changed in the past decade alone. But where will American society be ten years from now? It’s hard to say. It’s much harder to predict the future of social trends than it is to map out the trajectory of the national debt or Social Security, which are really just arithmetic problems. And this is ultimately what makes a second passport so useful: a second passport is like an insurance policy for all of the ‘hard to define’ non-financial risks that we cannot predict or quantify. Of course, a second passport isn’t some magical document that will solve all your problems. It’s not going to make inflation go away, convince politicians to do what’s in the best interest of the nation, or save the dollar. But it does mean that, no matter what, you and your family will always have a place to go if you ever need it. A sensible insurance policy is also usually low cost; a good home insurance policy should cost a small percentage of the home’s value. Likewise, a second passport is not something you need to spend a fortune on. Sure, you can spend close to $1 million if you want to gain citizenship through investment in Malta. You could also spend closer to $100,000 for one of the Caribbean programs.Or, it could cost next to nothing. Many people qualify for citizenship by descent that allows you to reclaim your ancestors’ citizenship. Or you could find a foreign country that you enjoy spending time in and naturalize after as little as two years of residency. The whole concept of a Plan B is that it’s an insurance policy that allows you to come at all the future unknowns from a position of strength. And a second passport might be a useful part of that. A lot of people probably think they will never need it. And hopefully you don’t. Hopefully you don’t need your home insurance policy either. But if the day comes and you do need it, it will be too late to start working on it. To your freedom,

Simon Black, Founder Sovereign Man

Why 100+ million deranged Americans are dumb enough to trust Mark Zuckerberg

On the 26th of February in the year 1401, an English priest named William Sawtrey was hauled before his Archbishop to learn whether he would live or die.Sawtrey wasn’t a witch or satanist, or even a criminal. He was, however, an early leader in a breakaway religion known as Lollardism, which both the Church and the English government viewed as a major threat. The Lollards followed the basic plotline of Christianity. But they criticized the heavy taxes that people paid to the Church, and they questioned the ways in which the Church spent its riches. More importantly, the Lollards believed in the separation of church and state. They also strongly opposed war and preached that all Christians should live in peace. Those last points were enough for the English government to treat the Lollards as subversive enemies of the state. And in 1401, parliament passed a law authorizing heretics to be burned at the stake. Sawtrey was the first victim of this law. He was charged with heresy, convicted on February 26, and burned at the stake days later. The government hoped that Sawtrey’s death would silence the Lollards and scare everyone into submission. But it actually had the opposite effect; support for Lollardism grew, and many people spoke out against Sawtrey’s unjust punishment. In fact, little by little, people started having the courage to speak out against the harsh treatment of heretics. Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the most famous intellectuals of the Middle Ages, and he wrote later that heretics should be treated with “gentleness, courteous language, softness,” and that Catholics should “not be feared with cruelness”. Martin Luther similarly wrote that heretics should be engaged with logic and reason rather than violence. If you have to burn someone at the stake just because he disagrees with you, your argument doesn’t have much merit. The last heretic to be burned at the stake was executed on July 26, 1826. It’s been nearly two centuries since then. And while heretics are not longer burned alive, the practice of persecuting certain individuals for their ideological convictions still runs deep today. We’ve all seen the ridiculous cancel culture over the past few years. Heretics who participated in Canada’s Freedom Convoy were practically erased by the financial system, and by state, with the Prime Minister musing, “do we tolerate these people?” During America’s Summer of Love in 2020, blasphemers who said “all lives matter” lost their jobs, lost their friends, and had their lives turned upside down by ravenous mobs. And of course, anyone who disagreed with Tony “the Science” Fauci was canceled right off the Internet, (even though many of his critics were ultimately proven right). There’s never any due process with cancel culture. There’s no public debate, no discussion. Offenders are marched straight to the proverbial stake. One of the most prominent prosecutors of this new faux-justice over the past few years has been Facebook– now known as Meta– and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg jumped into bed with Tony Fauci early in the pandemic and tasked his organization to stamp out all ‘misinformation’ as defined by Fauci in his sole discretion. This is no conspiracy theory; there are reams of emails showing the cozy relationship between Facebook (along with other tech companies) and the US government, leading a federal judge to write last week that “the government has used its power to silence the opposition” and engaged in the “targeted suppression of conservative ideas”. Zuckerberg has been a willing champion of that suppression, whether it was the Hunter Biden laptop story, Wuhan lab leak theory, random “hate speech”, or any number of blasphemous ideas. Bear in mind, Zuckerberg is also a guy whose organization has a history of destruction: election interference, devaluing the self-esteem of highly impressionable young people, etc. Not to mention he’s hijacked everyone’s data, much of which without our consent. You might be surprised to know that, even if you don’t use any Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), they’re still tracking you. Their tools and infrastructure are embedded deep in the Internet, so they still know what sites you visit, what you’re buying, who you connect with, etc. And their profile on you goes on for literally thousands of pages. It’s bizarre that this isn’t a crime. Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg were following children around in the real world with the same voyeuristic intensity as he watches them online. At a minimum he’d be slapped with a restraining order and criminal trespassing. In more conservative jurisdictions he would probably have a hole in his head. This is what makes the popularity of Zuckerberg’s new ‘Threads’ app so bizarre. You’ve probably heard that Threads is Zuckerberg’s attempt to rival Twitter; and at the moment of this writing, it has surpassed 100 million signups only a few days after its launch. Twitter, of course, is now owned by Elon Musk, who up until recently was one of the most popular people on the planet for his brash, unfiltered, antihero personality. Even many people on the left adored him for making electric vehicles sexy. But after referring to himself as a “free speech absolutist,” Twitter users revolted. Apparently they can’t simply unfollow someone with whom they disagree, or attempt to engage ideological opponents as Erasmus suggested– with kindness, civility, and reason. Nope. The Twitter mob isn’t happy unless the heretics are canceled and all non-woke blasphemy is expelled from the platform. And Zuckerberg has now swooped in to scoop all the whining, hysterical Twitter users into Threads where he has already started censoring the wrongthinkers. So… 100 million people hate Free Speech so much that they just jumped into the arms of Mark Zuckerberg, i.e. the guy who stalks our children across the Internet. That’s like asking Jeffrey Epstein to come over and watch the kids because you had an argument with your regular sitter. It’s also the perfect example of why America can’t manage to solve its problems: millions of Americans are so wimpy now that they refuse to engage with the opposing side. Instead they whine and cry for their opponents be censored and shut down. They don’t even want to see an opposing argument because it might be ‘offensive’. This concern about not being offended is so great that there can no longer be any rational discussion of problems… let alone talk of solutions. 247 years into its history, America is plagued by enormous, gargantuan problems. For the most part these problems are still solvable, and there is still a narrow window to fix them. Nothing will happen, however, without a frank and open discussion of priorities, resources, and realities. In joining Threads, millions of people just made a statement that they’re not interested in open discussion. They’re interested in censorship… because not being offended is more important than freedom, more important than solving enormous problems. It’s nice to hope for the best. And perhaps a day may come when rational people are once again able to discuss problems civilly and reach responsible compromises. But until that happens, it’s critical to have a Plan B. To your freedom,

Simon Black, Founder Sovereign Man