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Humanity is spared

Both Drudge and Fox News remained unimpressed, so it appears humanity will be spared my adventures in biology as a consequence of the recent media experiment. However, even accounting for the obvious comments made by the members of the Dread Ilk, the ratio was worse than the 7:1 ratio I anticipated when I conceived the experiment. The actual results were:

Staking the Undead Economist: 10 comments, 11 Likes
Obama is Bad: 87 comments, 61 Likes

Ye cats.

But even as I mourn the incipient intellectual heat death of humanity, I am consoled by the fact that this beautifully sets up my next column on Captain Underoos.

Road Warrior, California-style

VDH continues to chronicle the decline and fall of the Golden State:

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

I find it amazing that even still, those who are generally cognizant of the dangers of immigration still cling to the notion that there is any meaningful difference between legal and illegal immigration. I note that a simple amnesty would render all that illegal immigration legal at a single stroke; would VDH or any other legal immigration supporter genuinely imagine that legalization would make all the problems he observes go away?

To be clear, I am not intrinsically opposed to all immigration in all circumstances. But history indicates that once a single immigrant population exceeds around 1-2 percent of the total population, they begin to present a long-term societal problem.

WND column

Obama is Bad

Obama is bad. Not in the reverse meaning of the term, by which one indicates that an individual is actually cool or intimidating or otherwise superlative in some manner, but in the simple and straightforward negative sense. He is a bad president. He is a bad black man. He is a bad socialist. He is a bad peacemaker. He is a bad American. And most of all, he is bad for America and the world.

Mailvox: an alternative theory

As my prediction of Obama’s decision to refuse the Democratic nomination and retire to the global equivalent of the rubber chicken circuit looks less and less likely, a deep government insider emails me his outline of future events:

Sometime in the next four to six weeks (no less than four but no more than eight at the absolute outside):

1. VP Joe Biden announces that for health reasons, he is leaving the ticket — not leaving office immediately, but to leave office at the end of his term.

2. After a huge, agonizing, public display of, “Oh God no! What ever will we do?” milked for at least a week of prime time and front-page media coverage and a whole lot of talking head blathering about the looming “Constitutional Crisis,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reluctantly agrees to take the VP slot on the ticket.

3. Mitt Romney — ah, who gives a shit what he does? Whatever it is, it will be pathetically ineffective, irrelevant, and a day late and a dollar short.

4. On November 6, 2012, propelled by the overwhelming power of the stupid black, white bitch, dumb college kid, and pussified liberal male vote, the Obama-Clinton ticket absolutely fucking steamrolls the Republicans, and brings along with it filibuster proof Democratic majorities in the Senate, House, and most state government assemblies.

5. Sometime between November 6, 2012, and January 20, 2013, some horrible truth about Obama is revealed — pick one, it doesn’t matter — and all the built-up scandals finally come to a head and erupt in a massive public denunciation of the man. Eric Holder ends up being indicted and arrested by his own people. Team Obama goes to the mattresses in the White House but in the end, in mid-January, as Meet the Press is seriously discussing whether the Secret Service has the authority to arrest the President, the outcry becomes so massive that he must step down — and turn the office over to VP Joe Biden.

6. Biden immediately does a “Night of the Long Knives” thing, purging all those corrupt Obamunists who were the cause of everything that’s wrong with the country.

7. On January 20, 2013, with his place in history as America’s 45th President assured, Biden is downright honored to turn the office over to the new President, Hillary Clinton, and the media rejoice at this triumph of the American electoral system, that our long national nightmare is behind us, and that freedom and justice have been restored.

8. Only much later do honest historians, if any still exist, realize that this was in fact a brilliantly executed Stalinist coup of the first order.

Color me dubious. Among other things, I don’t see Democrats doing well in the state-wide elections. But if it is Biden who steps down, rather than Obama, we’ll know the theory is in play. Also, the total ineptitude of Team Clinton during the 2008 campaign makes me doubt that they can pull off anything that is even more complicated than simply knowing what the rules of the nomination are. They might have the ruthlessness, but they don’t have the necessary eye for detail.

A crisis wasted

The Obama administration needn’t have gone to all that trouble to shoot up that Denver theater:

The weeks-long conference at the United Nations to produce an Arms Trade Treaty is ending without the creation of a treaty. None of the draft treaties which have circulated in the past several days came remotely close to finding consensus support. The impossibility of achieving consensus involved a wide variety of issues and nations, far beyond the Second Amendment concerns that have been raised by many American citizens.

What an embarrassment! To go to all that trouble and get nothing out of it but a few million more concealed carry permit holders. Don’t those troublesome member states and NGOs realize that the White House can’t override the Second Amendment without a solid international treaty to use as an excuse?

Epitaph for the GOP

Pat Buchanan does the demographic and electoral math:

Republicans lose the Hispanic vote 3-to-2. In bad years, like 2008, they lose it 2-to-1. Whites are already a minority in California, and Hispanics will eventually become the majority.

Say goodbye to the Golden Land.

Asian-Americans voted 3-to-2 for Obama, black Americans 24-to-1. The Asian population in California and the nation is growing rapidly. The black population, 13 percent of the nation, is growing steadily.

Whites, already a minority in our two most populous states, will be less than half the U.S. population by 2041 and a minority in 10 states by 2020.

Consider now the Electoral College picture.

Of the seven mega-states, California, New York and Illinois appear lost to the GOP. Pennsylvania has not gone Republican since 1988. Ohio and Florida, both crucial, are now swing states. Whites have become a minority in Texas. When Texas goes, America goes.

This year could be the last hurrah.

Fortunately, Karl Rove has proved Buchanan wrong, as he has assured us that Hispanics are “natural conservatives”, as evidenced by the way they usually choose between a socialist party and a neo-communist party in their native lands. Or something.

The remarkable thing is that if you ask the average Republican, he will still insist that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a good thing and immigration is good for America. Thus proving that while Democrats are evil, Republicans are reliably stupid. If Romney 2012 is the last hurrah, then the party well merits its demise.

Building Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

The London Olympics site describes tonight’s opening ceremony thusly: “London 2012 gives athletes a magical welcome”. The laudable habit of the enlightened courteously telling everyone exactly what they’re doing is always educational. No doubt the generation will be inspired… by what, exactly, we shall learn tonight.

One year later: the scorecard

Well, I didn’t hit my target. One year ago today, I set myself the goal of writing a better epic than the very disappointing A Dance with Dragons – best to be reasonable, after all – and to do the first 295,000-word draft in a single year. This was inspired by Spacebunny’s cousin’s bitter complaints about the time it took George Martin to write his most recent novel, especially in light of the final product.

I didn’t quite make it, but I did get a bit more than 90 percent of the way there, as I’m presently at 267,000 and counting, which is around 650 pages in trade paperback. I expect to finish before the end of August and you can expect to be able to put it on your Christmas lists if you’re interested; I’ll provide specific information about that in October.

What I’ve learned from this is that setting realistic goals tends to be less useful than setting unrealistic and ambitious ones. Even if you don’t hit them, you’ll get considerably farther than with the more conservative ones. I tend to doubt I will keep up this pace for my next book, but I doubt it will take me four years to do a comparatively minor 100k one either.

Africans kill each other, white disarmament the answer

Obama comes out of the closet on gun control:

Faced with a clamor in his party for stricter gun control in the wake of the Colorado movie-theater massacre, President Obama said Wednesday night he would “leave no stone unturned” in seeking new measures to reduce violence nationwide, including more restrictive background checks on gun purchases.

“A lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals,” Mr. Obama said at the annual National Urban League convention in New Orleans. “They belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.”

The president blamed “politics and lobbying” for defeating gun-control measures when outcries arise after mass shootings in the U.S. And he said the nation’s attention should not just be focused on mass shootings, such as the one on Friday in Aurora, Colo., but on the daily shooting deaths of youths from gun violence in major cities.

“Every day, the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater,” Mr. Obama said. “For every Columbine or Virginia Tech, there are dozens gunned down on the streets of Chicago or Atlanta, here in New Orleans.

Let me see here. If young Africans are regularly gunning down other young Africans in large cities where there are already stringent gun control laws, how is disarmingattempting to disarm white suburbanites and exurbanites going to reduce the level of violence in any way?

It seems to me that disarming suburban white America is much more likely to lead to this sort of thing. One of the reason the urban Africans tend to restrict their violence to their own turf is because they know they’re both outnumbered and outgunned outside it.

And as far as I’m concerned, every adult male citizen should be required by law to own an AK-47, a handgun, a shotgun, and a rifle with a scope. If the Republicans had any real balls, they would pass such a law and dare the Democrats to oppose it.

Complexity and the fall of empires II

In which we delve deeper into Ugo Bardi’s explanation of complexity, collapse, and the way in which the collapse of the Roman Empire offers a means of understanding the ongoing collapse of the American empire and the global financial system:

Tainter goes well beyond the simplistic interpretation of many earlier authors and identifies a key point in the question of collapse. Societies are complex entities; he understands that. And, hence, their collapse must be related to complexity. Here is an excerpt of Tainter’s way of thinking. It is a transcription of a interview that Tainter gave in the film “Blind Spot” (2008)

“In ancient societies that I studied, for example the Roman Empire, the great problem that they faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo. Invest very high amounts in solving problems that don’t yield a net positive return, but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.”

So, you see that Tainter has one thing very clear: complexity gives a benefit, but it is also a cost. This cost is related to energy, as he makes clear in his book. And in emphasizing complexity, Tainter gives us a good definition of what we intend for collapse. Very often people have been discussing the collapse of ancient societies without specifying what they meant for “collapse”. For a while, there has been a school of thought that maintained that the Roman Empire had never really “collapsed”. It had simply transformed itself into something else. But if you take collapse defined as “a rapid reduction of complexity” then you have a good definition and that’s surely what happened to the Roman Empire.

The Romans kept increasing the size of their army even after the economic returns that they got from military activities went down, actually may have become negative. It is exactly the same behavior of whalers in 19th century who kept increasing the size of the whaling fleet even it was clear that there weren’t enough whales to catch to justify that….

So, I think we have enough data, here, to prove the validity of the model – at least in qualitative terms. Maybe somebody should collect good data, archaeological and historical, and made a complete dynamic model of the Roman Empire. That would be very interesting, but it is beyond my possibilities for now. Anyway, even from these qualitative data we should be able to understand why the Empire was in trouble. One of the main causes of the trouble was that it had this big military apparatus, the legions, that needed to be paid and didn’t bring in any profit. It was the start of an hemorrhage of gold that couldn’t be reversed. In addition, the Empire bled itself even more by building an extensive system of fortifications – the limes that had to be maintained and manned, besides being expensive in themselves.

The story of the fortifications is a good example of what we had said; the attempt of a complex system to maintain homeostasis. The Romans must have understood that legions were too expensive if you had to keep so many of them to keep the borders safe. So, they built these walls. I imagine that the walls were built by slaves; and a slave surely cost less than a legionnaire. Slaves, however, were not good as fighters – I suppose that if you gave a sword to a slave he might think to run away or to use it against you. You know the story of Spartacus, the leader of a slave revolt in Roman times. I am sure that the Romans didn’t want to risk that again. But with walls the Romans had found a way to replace legionnaires with slaves. You needed less legionnaires to defend a fortification than to defend an open field. That was a way to save money, to keep homeostasis. But it wasn’t enough – obviously. The Romans still needed to pay for the legions and – as a disadvantage – the walls were a rigid system of defense that couldn’t be changed. The Romans were forced to man the walls all along their extension and that must have been awfully expensive. The Empire had locked itself in a cage from which it would never be able to escape. Negative feedback kills.

Military expenses were not the only cause of the fall. With erosion gnawing at agricultural yields and mine productivity going down, we should not be surprised if the empire collapsed. It simply couldn’t do otherwise. So, you see that the collapse of the Roman Empire was a complex phenomenon where different negative factors reinforced each other. It was a cascade of negative feedbacks, not a single one, that brought down the empire.

The key phrase, and the one that is particularly relevant to the current situation, is this: “the great problem… was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo”. So, what are the primary aspects of the current status quo that require increasingly expensive maintenance?

I see two areas that fit the description of a response to a problem that creates a destructive series of feedback loops. The first is debt and the second is immigration. The debt issue is obvious, since new debt keeps being created to pay off the old debts; this strategy will work right up until new debt can’t be created, in which case default which destroys a significant percentage of the powerful financial institutions or increased inflation which further hammers the economy and the populace is inevitable.

Immigration was posited as the solution for the declining native birthrates that threatened the intergenerational Ponzi scheme of entitlements, but it is proving to be far more expensive in a broad variety of ways than its advocates expected. It was intriguing to see Ann Coulter finally, after all these years, turn openly against legal immigration, although she unsurprisingly, and erroneously, attempted to blame it on Democrats despite the Republican elite’s unstinting support of it. I note that one seldom hears the Bush-era claim that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” any longer, which I and others pointed out was totally ludicrous at the time.

There are, of course, other elements that have contributed heavily to American decline and fall, indeed, Bardi and Trainer both specifically deny the idea that there is any one causal factor in societal collapses. But for all that free trade, domestic spending, and foreign wars have added pressure to the structure, they have not created negative feedback cycles of the sort that debt and population demographics have.