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In the hyper-real casino, everyone has access to the terrors of losing, but only a few know the joys of the rigged games that guarantee a few big winners by design.

And so we face the ultimate irony: ‘bailing-out-everything’ destroys the entire rotten system.

We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck.

Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people.

The status quo is about to discover that it can’t stop the hard rain or protect its fragile sandcastles.

You’ll recognize A Hard Rain Is Going to Fall as a cleaned-up rendition of Bob Dylan’s classic “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”. Since the world had just avoided a nuclear conflict in the Cuban Missile Crisis, commentators reckoned Dylan was referencing a nuclear rain. But he denied this connection in a radio interview, stating: “…it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen….”

Quite a lot of things can go wrong, especially if the mainstream’s rose-tinted sunglasses induce a delusional confidence in fantasy.

The conventional assumptions are remarkably rosy: the “recovery” is V-shaped in all the ways that count (i.e. the top 10% are once again doing well), the Federal Reserve will never let stocks go down or interest rates rise ever again (never never ever!), and the Federal government will borrow and blow endless trillions in stimulus ($2 trillion every six months seems about right, but since there’s no limit, we’ll double it if that’s needed to bail out every zombie corporation, bloated bureaucracy, skim and scam in the land).

Systemic corruption and the implosion of the social contract have consequences: It’s called collapse.

Social and economic decay is so glacial that only those few who remember an earlier set-pointare equipped to even notice the decline. That’s the position we find ourselves in today.

“Doing more of what’s hollowed out our economy and society” is a slippery path to ruin.

Things change, supposedly immutable systems crumble and delusions die. That’s the lay of the land in the The Empire of Uncertainty I described yesterday.

Anyone claiming they can project the trajectory of the U.S. and global economy is deluding themselves.

Normalcy depends entirely on everyday life being predictable. To be predictable, life must be stable, which means that there is a high level of certainty in every aspect of life.

The best-case scenario is those who love their “great city” will accept the daunting reality that even greatness can go bankrupt.

Two recent essays pin each end of the “urban exodus” spectrum. James Altucher’s sensationalized NYC Is Dead Forever, Here’s Why focuses on the technological improvements in bandwidth that enable digital-economy types to work from anywhere, and the destabilizing threat of rising crime.

The heretical truth is that many of the “consumption rituals” that signified “prosperity” for decades are either meaningless, unaffordable or require way more effort than the meager payoff is worth.

Of all the economic heresies imaginable, perhaps the most heretical is to recognize what we label “prosperity” as increasingly meaningless rituals more akin with Soviet-era staged parades than actual well-being.

Just as time is a one-way arrow, “the politicization of everything” is a one-way road to dissolution and collapse.

The essence of any Totalitarian society is the politicization of everything, as everything must be either supporting the status quo or it’s a threat to the status quo.

The “take this job and shove it” exodus is silently gathering momentum.

The exodus out of cities is getting a lot of attention, but the exodus that will unravel our economic and social orders is getting zero attention: the exodus from work.