Year: 2023

Omitting the Obvious

Peter Turchin is doing some valuable work analyzing the whys and wherefores of societal breakdowns:

All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.

The U.S. has gone through this twice before. The first time ended in civil war. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it.

However, being an immigrant, he naturally averts his eyes from one obvious contributing factor. It’s not an accident that the periods in which the crises were created were periods of high immigration, and it’s also not an accident that the way in which the second crisis was averted was during a time of very strict limits on immigration.

And since there is no appetite whatsoever for reversing the mass foreign invasion of the USA, there will be no fixing the current dysfunction.

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The Rape Factories

If, at this point, you are still putting your children in public schools, you are committing child abuse by proxy:

US public school employees who sexually abuse children are typically moved to different schools three times before they are finally arrested, preying on as many as 73 victims before they are eventually punished, according to a new report by a conservative think tank.

Published last week by the Defense of Freedom Institute, the report details hundreds of cases in which teachers in public school districts were accused of abuse, but had their records scrubbed before being moved to new positions, where the abuse continued.

Citing earlier research by the Government Accountability Office, the report noted that firing teachers can be a costly process for school districts. As such, the districts often negotiate confidentiality agreements with unions whereby a teacher can resign or be demoted to avoid disciplinary action, before being transferred to another school with a clean slate.

The average employee accused of abuse is passed to three different school districts before facing legal consequences, and can abuse up to 73 children in this time.

This system has allowed sexual assault to proliferate, the report claimed. According to the most recent Department of Education data, 13,799 cases of sexual violence and 685 cases of rape or attempted rape were recorded in schools during the 2017-2018 school year, up from 9,649 and 394 in 2015-2016.

Homeschooling your children should be your #1 first priority. It doesn’t matter if you have to move, add a side-hustle on top of your primary job, or lower your standard of living. Just do it! Neither your nor your children will ever regret it.

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Showtime

The Russians report the long-awaited Ukrainian offensive has finally begun.

Ukrainian forces have attacked the Russian troops along five sections of the frontline in Donbass during their “large-scale offensive,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in the early hours of Monday. According to the MOD, the assault began on Sunday morning. “The enemy’s goal was to breach our defenses in what they assumed was the most vulnerable section of the frontline,” the ministry said in a statement carried by the Russian media.

It will be interesting to see the shape of the Russian response. As I was discussing with William S. Lind the other day, the historical Russian response has been to launch a counteroffensive with far more forces than had been anticipated. That may not be possible anymore in the day of satellite flyovers, but it’s worth noting for the record.

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It’s Afraid

Even the Left is beginning to see that Christian Nationalism is inevitable as Clown World continues to crumble.

Once Trump became “normal”, events that seemed even more extreme did too. A 2022 survey found that two in five Americans thought civil war was “at least somewhat likely” in the next decade. One political scientist speaks of the possibility of rightwing dictatorship in the US by 2030.

The same creep of normalisation is happening in European politics. At the turn of the millennium, when Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) – led by Jörg Haider, who had made comments suggesting he was sympathetic to the Nazi regime – entered a coalition with the conservative People’s party, mass protests not only erupted in Vienna but across Europe and in the US. The EU even imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria. It was understood that an important red line had been crossed; that given Europe’s blood-soaked history, the far right had to be kept firmly outside the tent.

No longer. When the FPÖ formed a new coalition in 2017, the protests were relatively small. Today, the party picks up victories in local elections and leads Austria’s opinion polls. Now the country’s main political force, it has every chance of leading the next government. Meanwhile, under pressure from its right flank, the People’s party has adopted ever harsher anti-migrant policies.

Then there’s Spain. For years after the financial crash, the country appeared to buck the trend of many European nations because of its lack of a rising far-right party. Leading lights in the leftwing Podemos party had an explanation: the mass indignados protests against austerity, which erupted in 2011, seemed to ensure that discontent was directed at powerful interests, rather than vulnerable groups such as migrants. But in the 2019 general election, the far-right Vox party – defined by its hostility to migrants and opposition to regional autonomy in Spain – came third, and in last weekend’s local elections exceeded expectations. A snap general election has been called for July, and Vox could soon be in government, the first time the Spanish far right would be in corridors of power since the fall of Franco.

The pattern is strikingly clear. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is surging: one recent poll forecast it would come second in a general election, ahead of the ruling Social Democrats. While other parties claim they will refuse to work with the AfD at the national level, such relationships already exist at the local level, leading Foreign Policy magazine to recently declare that “Germany’s far-right ‘firewall’ is starting to crack”.

This is, after all, what happened in Sweden, where other parties refused to work with the Sweden Democrats party, which has neo-Nazi roots. In 2016, Anna Kinberg Batra, the leader of the conservative Moderate party, denounced it as racist. But in the last election, it came second, and negotiated a deal to prop up a rightwing government.

It’s not exactly a mystery. All the alluring promises of Clown World have turned out to be false, evil, and astonishingly destructive. The centrist ruling parties of the USA and Europe promised a shiny, sexy, secular, science-fiction technotopia according to the principles of Equality and Enlightenment, and instead delivered stinking societies of decaying infrastructure, inflation, unemployment, crime, and mass invasion by literally unwashed barbarians with a taste for rape and sex trafficking, all being run by satanic foreign clowns who criminalize any criticism of their rule while financially pillaging the natives.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the eucivic traditions of Christendom are looking more and more appealing to those now dwelling in the squalid shadows of its post-Christian ruins. At this point, the Left shouldn’t be worrying about future elections, it should be worrying about the coming crusades and eventual inquisitions.

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Same As it Ever Was

Voting for Republicans will not fix anything at all. It makes no difference what they say before they’re elected, they’ll do whatever they’re told once in office.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has changed her position on the public release of the tapes documenting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, warning Friday that their release could “put the security of the Capitol at risk.” Greene said in an interview on the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice that releasing the video footage publicly would jeopardize the Capitol’s security and endanger those who were present at the Capitol grounds but did not enter the Capitol nor commit crimes.

It’s all just so tedious. The inevitable appeal to “national security” is ridiculous in any country with borders as wide-open and undefended as the USA’s. Put not your faith in politicians, for they will break their promises and betray you.

Every single time.

Nobody cares what the excuses are this time. There are always excuses for not doing the right thing, for not doing what you were literally elected to do. But we are rapidly approaching the point that most actual Americans would rather take their chances with the whole thing burning down and fighting it out with the invaders among the glowing ashes of Clown World.

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Four Generations of Demoralization

The demonic degradation and demoralization of the USA appears to have reached a nadir with the Zoomers.

Gen X is a bit harder to figure out, they mainly seem to just try to “go away” and live their lives as if no one else exists. The most generational expression I get out of them seems to revolve around boomer tier “our childhood was rough and tumble” yet they remember it fondly.

They’ll always remind you that they were “latchkey kids” and that their childhoods were filled with rampant divorce etc, yet they say it with pride. They reflect on their childhoods as hard (like boomers) but with reverence (like millennials)

But I think the singular thing that comes from all of this, is that the last 4 generations are very preoccupied with bracing themselves in various ways, like sailors on a ship in a storm. Protecting themselves from the “hurt” of addressing our present circumstances.

There isn’t a fundamental aspect of the zeitgeist of any of them that is focused on actually fixing any of it though. All of us are preserving what we have or battening down the hatches to weather the storm we’re in, which looks to get worse. But at the macro level generational zeitgeist, no one is planning a mutiny in order to steer the ship around the storm, or to turn around and head back to less choppy waters. As a civilization none of our generations have any widespread will to power.

Gen X isn’t that hard to figure out when seen in the proper perspective. We enjoyed our childhoods, for the most part, but because we’d never known anything different, it wasn’t until we became parents ourselves that we realized how insane they were and how little our parents were interested in us and our children compared to a) our grandparents interest in us and b) our own interest in our children.

Furthermore, unlike the two following generations, we know all too well what has been lost. We had the very good fortune to grow up in a mostly homogenous European civilization of the sort that no longer exists even in Europe anymore. That’s what we miss much more than our youth.

My expectation is that a Gen X leader with Zoomer followers is most likely Western civilization’s best hope for a pathway out of this nightmare. And as the madness of Clown World rises and becomes more and more obvious to the average individual of every generation, the likelihood of various potential candidates rising to the historical occasion increases.

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Adjusted Metrics

If you don’t like a product for what are deemed to be the wrong reasons, your vote no longer counts:

A leading film rating site has adjusted its review metrics after it found “unusual voting activity” for a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid that has been criticised for casting a black actress as Ariel.

The film, which was released in May, had a 7/10 rating on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) website, despite 15,000 of its 39,000 user-submitted reviews having given it one star.

In a notice posted on the film’s page, IMDB said: “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”

The lesson, as always, is this: convergence eliminates an organization’s ability to perform its primary function.

What is the point of a review site that does not permit reviews? The fact that it is permissible to dislike a movie for one reason, but impermissible for another reason renders the entire service of the review site irrelevant. After all, if one person doesn’t wish to see a movie with a black protagonist, this point is presumably of interest to anyone who happens to share their opinion.

Such as, for example, the entire population of China and most of the population of Asia.

The self-immolation of the Clown World corpocracy is serving to create one global business opportunity after another.

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Diversity is Why Nothing Works Anymore

A former Boeing engineer explains why Boeing can’t build quality aerospace projects anymore.

Once upon a time Boeing had an excellent reputation for quality and performance on contracts. Then the big aerospace layoffs hit – they absorbed MacDonald Douglas and adopted their crappy penny pinching management. That’s when the big layoffs hit as well – but there was one other thing that happened then. I was working at Boeing and one day we were called into a “all hands” meeting of the engineers by management. We were told to look around the room – virtually everyone there was white males. Then we were told that very soon only 15 percent of the engineering staff was going to be white males in the near future. This was around the mid 90s and shows DEI was already being adopted by some corporations. Because I had specialist knowledge, after I was laid off I was soon recalled and “What do you know?”(tm) I was the only white male in the team – which worked out to 15 percent. I retired a few years later but I can’t help but wonder if the reason Boeing now sucks is they went down the DEI rabbit hole.

Equalitarianism is antithetical to quality. And diversity means convergence, which indicates the eventual inability to perform the organization’s primary tasks.

The USA is no longer the USA of 1980 or 1950, much less 1920. Adjust your expectations accordingly. Because both Russia and China lack diversity relative to the USA, they now possess all the advantages of having a smarter and more capable work force that the USA did prior to 1965.

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