One of these elementary principles of law is the commercial doctrine of “consideration”. The premise and legal principle is a simple one. In order for any commercial transaction to be recognized as being legitimate (and thus legal), both parties to any transaction/contract have to derive some material benefit. In law; this material benefit is known by the name “consideration”. There must be consideration, on both sides of any/every commercial transaction.

At this point; many readers will already grasp that so-called “negative interest rates” violate the legal doctrine of consideration, and thus fail the test as a basis for any legal/legitimate commercial transactions. However, this merely scratches the surface when it comes to the degree to which our criminalized interest rates violate the Rule of Law. These corrupt, spineless governments and the Institutions of Financial Crime which rule above them (and us) are doing more than merely betraying us, as they serve their real Masters. They are malevolently conspiring to destroy us financially, completely and utterly.

The “War on Cash” and all of these other systemic financial crimes are a war against all decent people, waged by the psychopathic oligarchs who lurk in the shadows. We did not declare this war. We do not want this war. But if we don’t start to fight this war, it will soon be over – and we all will have lost.

Of course no discussion of megaquakes in the middle part of the country can leave out the New Madrid fault zone, which is approximately six times larger than the San Andreas fault zone in California. Scientists assure us that the New Madrid fault is around 30 years overdue for a major seismic event, and when it does happen it is going to be the biggest disaster in modern American history up to this point.

Back in 1811 and 1812, a series of earthquakes along the New Madrid fault were so powerful that they actually cracked sidewalks in Washington DC and rang church bells in Boston. Testimony from eyewitnesses to those earthquakes sounds like something from a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel…

The Midwest was sparsely populated, and deaths were few. But 8-year-old Godfrey Lesieur saw the ground “rolling in waves.” Michael Braunm observed the river suddenly rise up “like a great loaf of bread to the height of many feet.” Sections of riverbed below the Mississippi rose so high that part of the river ran backward. Thousands of fissures ripped open fields, and geysers burst from the earth, spewing sand, water, mud and coal high into the air.

In those days not many people lived in the middle of the country. What in the world would such an earthquake look like today? I also want to point out that there are 15 nuclear reactors sitting inside the New Madrid fault zone, so if a megaquake did hit the region we could be looking at Fukushima times 15.

And the prophetic economist Andrew Smithers warns, “US stocks are now about 80% overvalued.” Smithers backs up his prediction using a ratio which proves that the only time in history stocks were this risky was 1929 and 1999. And we all know what happened next. Stocks fell by 89% and 50%, respectively.

Even the Royal Bank of Scotland says the markets are flashing stress alerts akin to the 2008 crisis. They told their clients to “Sell Everything” because “in a crowded hall, the exit doors are small.” Blue chip stocks like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM will plunge. But there is one distinct warning that should send chills down your spine … that of James Dale Davidson. Davidson is the famed economist who correctly predicted the collapses of 1999 and 2007.

Davidson now warns, “There are three key economic indicators screaming SELL. They don’t imply that a 50% collapse is looming – it’s already at our doorstep.” And if Davidson calls for a 50% market correction, one should pay heed.

Indeed, his predictions have been so accurate, he’s been invited to shake hands and counsel the likes of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — and he’s had the good fortune to befriend and convene with George Bush Senior, Steve Forbes, Donald Trump, Margaret Thatcher, Sir Roger Douglas and even Boris Yeltsin.

There are six banks in America that basically dwarf all of the other banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. If a single one of those banks were to fail, it would be a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions for our financial system. So we need these banks to be healthy and running well. That is why what we just learned about Wells Fargo is so concerning…

Back in 2007 and early 2008, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, President Bush and a whole host of “experts” assured us that everything was going to be just fine and that a recession was not coming. Today, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, Barack Obama and a whole host of “experts” are assuring us that everything is going to be just fine and that a recession is not coming.

I hope that they are right.

I really do.

But there is a reason why so many firms are filing for bankruptcy, and there is a reason why so many Americans are getting behind on their auto loans. Our giant debt bubble is beginning to burst, and this is going to cause a tremendous amount of financial chaos. Let us just hope that the “too big to fail” banks can handle the stress this time around.

The FTSE 100 index of leading shares has surged 15 percent and the more UK-focused FTSE 250 is 4 percent above its pre-referendum peak. There’s no sign of George Osborne’s “punitive tax-raising emergency Budget” – or even of George Osborne – and the state pension remains intact. While Brexit and QE are the subject of endless press commentary, the really big issues affecting all our economic futures can be summarised under the heading of “geopolitics”. Such matters barely get the attention they deserve – even in the aftermath of last weekend’s G20 summit, which was to geopolitics what Woodstock was to rock.

It’s widely recognised many Western voters are angry about “rising inequality” and “being left behind by globalisation”. Such concerns explain, in the minds of some, not just the UK’s Brexit vote but the rise of “anti-establishment” politicians worldwide, including Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Far less commented upon are the increasingly fraught relations between Eastern and Western nations, and the potential for future protectionism and (heaven forbid) more serious forms of conflict. Such trends, if they continue, will undermine global trade – and broader economic growth – to a very serious degree.

A major flashpoint, of course, is the maritime dispute between Washington and Beijing, relating to the battle for influence in the South China Sea. Seemingly remote, some $5.3 trillion (£4 trillion) of goods cross this vital body of water each year – no less than 70 percent of all seaborne freight globally. No economy in the region will do well unless the ongoing battle for control between America and China remains relatively calm. There are increasing signs that it won’t.

You’ve heard of Robocop, the fictional man-machine on a mission to lock human criminals away. But experts fear the opposite will soon come true and it will be machines that end up becoming the criminals, leaving us humans powerless to stop them. Artificial intelligence experts have claimed that computers and robots will commit more crimes than humans by 2040. They warned that murder machines will end up carrying out the “lone wolf” terror attacks more associated with radicalised terrorists than psycho computers.

Tracey Follows, chief strategy and innovation officer at The Future Laboratory, told Raconteur: “As the workforce moves towards more automation, we could find 35 per cent of jobs now done by humans have been replaced by robots. Futurists have been forecasting a sharp rise in lone-wolf terror attacks for years. But once robots can be hacked to become suicide-bombing machines, lone-robot attacks could become rife too.”

The robotic crime wave will be driven by the rise of artificial intelligence, which is expected to give machines a cognitive ability which could even surpass that of humans. If the robotic crimewave seems like a distant prospect, you should consider a statistic from the National Crime Agency, which found that cyber crime made up 54 percent of total offences in 2015.

When I was growing up, my father often told me that Andy Warhol once said that he wanted to be a machine, and that it would be a lot easier to be a machine — if something broke, you could just replace it. Even though small wounds and injuries heal, this has not been the case for humans. If something were inherently broken, it would stay broken the rest of our lives. Which relates to another common saying: The only two things in this world that are certain are death and taxes.

For the transhumanist movement, this is not the case. Transhumanists believe that humankind can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations to become “superhuman” and, eventually, immortal. One of the most prominent members of the movement is Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist Party and 2016 third-party presidential candidate.

For Istvan, aging and death are the biggest plague of our time. The party is proposing a transhumanist bill of rights that states that it should be illegal to stop research on longevity and eternal rights based on religious and ethical reasons.

But they oppose each other on a swathe of issues across the globe, creating a delicate political balance that could collapse and engulf nuclear states and alliances such as NATO. A range of experts have identified several flashpoints across the globe which are today the most likely triggers for such a war.

The proximity of NATO and Russian bombers flying over Syria, Vladimir Putin’s aggression in eastern Europe, and China’s movements in the South China Sea are among them. Experts have also raised concerns about the instability of nuclear-power Pakistan as extremist factions and terrorist groups within the country grow in power.

Adding to this is these groups’ sworn opposition to neighbouring India – which holds its own much-coveted nuclear arsenal. Britain’s Admiral Lord West told The Sun Online: “Basically none of us know what is going to happen but we are in a more dangerous, chaotic and unpredictable time than any other in my 50 years in the force.

“I believe that because of Brexit, I think Europe is very flaky, I think it is unfortunate that we didn’t stay in, because they actually need our military expertise. I can see bits of Europe breaking up and when Europe gets into a mess, twice in the past we’ve had to go in there and clear it up with immense loss of blood and lives.”

We have millions upon millions of strong young men just sitting around doing nothing. They aren’t employed and they aren’t considered to be looking for employment either, and so they don’t show up in the official unemployment numbers. But they don’t have jobs, and nothing the Obama administration does can eliminate that fact.

According to NPR, “nearly 100 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked” in the 1960s. In those days, just about any dependable, hard working American man could get hired almost immediately. The economy was growing and the demand for labor was seemingly insatiable. But today, one out of every six men in their prime working years does not have a job…

We do have the largest prison population in the entire world by far, and without a doubt that does play a role in these numbers. However, a far bigger factor is the millions of men that have become content being dependents of the federal government. More than 100 million Americans receive money from the government each month, and a lot of people (both men and women) have found that it is just easier to sit back and collect government checks than it is to go out and try to work hard for a living.

But of course the number one factor is the lack of jobs available. I personally know people that have been looking for work in their fields for years and have not been able to get hired. We have a major employment crisis in this nation, and it is only going to get worse in the years ahead as we continue to lose jobs to technology and millions more good jobs get shipped overseas.

More than three years into this bizarre pontificate, one thing has become clear to the informed objective observer: “Father Bergoglio,” as he is wont to call himself when undermining Catholic doctrine by telephone, is abusing the papal office like no other Pope before him in an attempt to pass off his own ideas as binding on the Church.

On and on he goes, telling us whatever he thinks as if he actually expects any believing Catholic to accept his notions as authentic Church teaching, including these:

• the admission to Holy Communion of people living in adultery in “certain cases”;

• the embrace of environmentalism, “global warming” hysteria and the United Nations “sustained development goals”;

• the absurd whitewash of Islam, the demand for unrestricted Muslim immigration and the outrageous claim of a moral equivalence between Islamic terrorists and Catholic “fundamentalists”;

and so on and so forth — endlessly, day in and day out.

Evidently, Francis considers failure to adopt “green” practices a mortal sin requiring absolution and an amendment of life. This is in stark contrast to his view of people who, as even the new Catechism teaches, are living “in a situation of permanent and public adultery” in purported “second marriages” following divorce. Francis has been laboring incessantly to admit these wayward Catholics to Confession and Holy Communion without any firm purpose of amendment. Catholics who fail to care adequately for “our common home,” however, apparently cannot receive absolution, according to Francis, unless they amend their lives by “going green.”

In the same vein, Jeff Mirus, citing Lawler’s piece, has posted one of his own, mordantly entitled “Why care for the environment shouldn’t make the ‘works of mercy’ list.” A work of mercy, he notes, is always directed to the good of a particular soul whose neediness is before us. Francis’s novelty, however, “inescapably shifts our attention from the person to the environment itself [his emphasis].”

The final caption of Mirus’s piece could not be more telling: “That way madness lies.” We need not confine ourselves here to that veiled suggestion. We can say openly what any honest observer with a sensus catholicus is now thinking: this pontificate is insane. Only God knows how it will all turn out. Meanwhile, we can only hope and pray for our deliverance from this growing madness.

The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, which enforces the state’s anti-discrimination laws, recently published a “Gender identity guidance” that lays out what will be legally required of employers and “agents of places of public accommodation.” The guidance was published September 1 but has gone unreported by the media until now. The commission confirmed that the version of the guidance online is the “final edition.”

Beginning October 1, the guidance notes, “All persons, regardless of gender identity, shall have the right to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation.” The guidance notes that Massachusetts law defines “public accommodation” as “any place, whether licensed or unlicensed, which is open to and accepts or solicits the patronage of the general public.” (Restaurants and hotels, for example, are generally considered public accommodations.) Violators of the law face up to one year in jail.