The man who destroyed the world

It’s somehow fitting that the Destroyer should take the form of a nice Midwestern son of immigrants from Scandinavia. Gail Heriot hasn’t quite figured out that Norman Borlaug is perhaps the quintessential example of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions.

HAPPY 104TH BIRTHDAY, NORMAN BORLAUG: If you don’t know who Norman Borlaug was, it’s high time you learned. His claim to fame: Saving over a billion people from starvation. Yes, that’s a “b” for “billion,” but even if it were an “m” for “million,” it would be a staggering achievement. When others are teaching their children and grandchildren to act like a ruthless killer (“Be like Che”), teach yours to “Be like Norman.”   Make his memory eternal.

Oh, I think his legacy will be remembered, all right. Not even Mao and Pol Pot managed to lay the foundation for a bloodbath of the sort that will one day be known as having taken place on a Borlaugian scale. Let’s just say I very much doubt the world will ever see 3 billion sub-Saharan Africans, let alone 4 billion.

Tell me more about how you don’t see color

Because these fine, upstanding young American men obviously do. Watch this video. Watch it from beginning to end. And then try to tell me, with a straight face, that you still believe that white people and vibrants can live together peacefully and productively in the same society.

Think about how many of these incidents were filmed. And then think about what a very small fraction of the total that they represent. Notice too how the majority of victims were female, the very white women who are always desperate to assert their non-racism, as if that does them any good.

And here is a challenge to all the cucks and conservatives who love to pontificate about the fine Negroes whose race they totally don’t notice despite the fact that they inexplicably manage to point out these wonderful individuals who just happen to be of African descent: what would your reaction be if that was your daughter being beaten half-to-death by someone whose race you can’t even see, for no reason that you can discern?

Be honest. Do you still believe diversity is our strength? Do you still believe in racial equality?

UPDATE: What’s that? 50 comments and not a single “I don’t see color” pose? Not a single Churchian babbling about how there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Gentile, neither black nor white, in the fallen world? Not a single “it’s just the legacy of slavery” rationalization?

Come now, equalitarians and blank slatists and conservatives who would just love to vote for a fine black candidate like Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, or Ben Carson, won’t you defend these unjustly maligned individuals who are merely misunderstood and not at all representative of their people?

Or were you always just lying all along?

St. Possenti is Leibowitz

Ugo Bardi observes that when a great civilization is failing, both the great and the small inhabitants are aware that something significant has changed, but they are almost completely unable to grasp the full extent to which societal change is taking place or conceive of the possibility of the complete collapse of their way of life.

Let’s start from the beginning…with the people who were contemporary to the collapse, the Romans themselves. Did they understand what was happening to them? This is a very important point: if a society, intended as its government, can understand that collapse is coming, can they do something to avoid it? It is relevant to our own situation, today.

Of course, the ancient Romans are long gone and they didn’t leave us newspapers. Today we have huge amounts of documents but, from Roman times, we have very little. All that has survived from those times had to be slowly hand copied by a Medieval monk, and a lot has been lost. We have a lot of texts by Roman historians – none of them seemed to understand exactly what was going on. Historians of that time were more like chroniclers; they reported the facts they knew. Not that they didn’t have their ideas on what they were describing, but they were not trying to make models, as we would say today. So, I think it may be interesting to give a look to documents written by people who were not historians; but who were living the collapse of the Roman Empire. What did they think of what was going on?

Let me start with Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who lived from 120 to 180 A.D. He was probably the last Emperor who ruled a strong empire. Yet, he spent most of his life fighting to keep the Empire together; fighting barbarians. Maybe you have seen the movie “The Gladiator”: Marcus Aurelius appears in the first scenes. The movie is not historically accurate, of course, but it is true that Aurelius died in the field, while he was fighting invaders. He wasn’t fighting for glory, he wasn’t fighting to conquer new territories. He was just fighting to keep the Empire together, and he had a terribly hard time doing just that. Times had changed a lot from the times of Caesar and of Trajan.

Marcus Aurelius did what he could to keep the barbarians away but, a few decades after his death, the Empire had basically collapsed. That was what historians call “the third century crisis”. It was really bad; a disaster. The empire managed to survive for a couple of centuries longer as a political entity, but it wasn’t the same thing. It was not any longer the Empire of Marcus Aurelius; it was something that just tried to survive as best as it could, fighting barbarians, plagues, famines, warlords and all kinds of disasters falling on them one after the other. Eventually, the Empire disappeared also as a political entity. It did that with a whimper – at least in its Western part, in the 5th century a.d. The Eastern Empire lasted much longer, but that is another story.

Here is a piece of statuary from Roman times. We know what Marcus Aurelius looked like.

Now, if it is rare that we have the portrait of a man who lived so long ago, it is even rarer that we can also read his inner thoughts. But that we can do that with Marcus Aurelius. He was a “philosopher-emperor” who left us his “Meditations”; a book of philosophical thoughts. For instance, you can read such things as:

Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

That is the typical tune of the book – you may find it fascinating or perhaps boring; it depends on you. Personally, I find it fascinating. The “Meditations” is a statement from a man who was seeing his world crumbling down around him and who strove nevertheless to maintain a personal balance; to keep a moral stance. Aurelius surely understood that something was wrong with the Empire: during all their history, the Romans had been almost always on the offensive. Now, they were always defending themselves. That wasn’t right; of course.

But you never find in the Meditations a single line that lets you suspect that the Emperor thought that there was something to be done other than simply fighting to keep the barbarians out. You never read that the Emperor was considering, say, things like social reform, or maybe something to redress the disastrous situation of the economy. He had no concern, apparently, that the Empire could actually fall one day or another.

Now, I’d like to show you an excerpt from another document; written perhaps by late 4th century. Probably after the battle of Adrianopolis; that was one of last important battles fought (and lost) by the Roman Empire. This is a curious document. It is called, normally, “Of matters of war” because the title and the name of the author have been lost. But we have the bulk of the text and we can say that the author was probably somebody high up in the imperial bureaucracy. Someone very creative – clearly – you can see that from the illustrations of the book. Of course what we see now are not the original illustrations, but copies made during the Middle Ages. But the fact that the book had these illustration was probably what made it survive: people liked these colorful illustrations and had the book copied. So it wasn’t lost. The author described all sorts of curious weaponry. One that you can see here is a warship powered by oxen.

Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen-based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that. The point is that our 4th century author does understand that the Roman Empire is in trouble. Actually, he seems to be scared to death because of what’s happening. Read this sentence, I am showing it to you in the original Latin to give you a sense of the flavor of this text.

“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries.”

Of course you may not be able to translate from Latin on the spot. For that, being Italian gives you a definite advantage. But let me just point out a word to you: “circumlatrantium” which refers to barbarians who are, literally, “barking around” the empire’s borders. They are like dogs barking and running around; and not just barking – they are trying hard to get in. It is almost a scene from a horror movie. A nightmare. So the author of “Of matters of war” is thinking of how to get rid of these monsters. But his solutions were not so good. Actually it was just wishful thinking. None of these strange weapons were ever built. Even our 4th century author, therefore, fails completely in understanding what were the real problems of the Empire.

Now, I would like to show you just another document from the time of the Roman Empire. It is “De Reditu suo”, by Rutilius Namatianus. The title means “of his return”. Namatianus was a patrician who lived in the early 5th century; he was a contemporary of St. Patrick, the Irish saint. He had some kind of job with the imperial administration in Rome. It was some decades before the “official” disappearance of the Western Roman Empire; that was in 476, when the last emperor, Romolus Augustulus, was deposed. You may have seen Romulus Augustulus as protagonist of the movie “The Last Legion”. Of course that is not a movie that pretends to be historically accurate, but it is fun to think that after so many years we are still interested in the last years of the Roman Empire – it is a subject of endless fascination. Even the book by Namatianus has been transformed into a movie, as you can see in the figure. It is a work of fantasy, but they have tried to be faithful to the spirit of Namatianus’ report. It must be an interesting movie, but it has been shown only in theaters in Italy, and even there for a very short time; so I missed it. But let’s move on.

Namatianus lived at a time that was very close to the last gasp of the Empire. He found that, at some point, it wasn’t possible to live in Rome any longer. Everything was collapsing around him and he decided to take a boat and leave. He was born in Gallia, that we call “France” today, and apparently he had some properties there. So, that is where he headed for. That is the reason for the title “of his return”. He must have arrived there and survived for some time, because the document that he wrote about his travel has survived and we can still read it, even though the end is missing. So, Namatianus gives us this chilling report. Just read this excerpt:

“I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward.”

Can you believe that? If there was a thing that the Romans had always been proud of were their roads. These roads had a military purpose, of course, but everybody could use them. A Roman Empire without roads is not the Roman Empire, it is something else altogether. Think of Los Angeles without highways. “Sic transit gloria mundi” , as the Romans would say; there goes the glory of the world. Namatianus tells us also of silted harbors, deserted cities, a landscape of ruins that he sees as he moves north along the Italian coast.

But what does Namatianus think of all this? Well, he sees the collapse all around him, but he can’t understand it. For him, the reasons of the fall of Rome are totally incomprehensible. He can only interpret what is going on as a temporary setback. Rome had hard times before but the Romans always rebounded and eventually triumphed over their enemies. It has always been like this, Rome will become powerful and rich again.

There would be much more to say on this matter, but I think it is enough to say that the Romans did not really understand what was happening to their Empire, except in terms of military setbacks that they always saw as temporary. They always seemed to think that these setbacks could be redressed by increasing the size of the army and building more fortifications. Also, it gives us an idea of what it is like living a collapse “from the inside”. Most people just don’t see it happening – it is like being a fish: you don’t see the water.

The tragedy of the cassandra is that he has the ability to see the collapse coming, but no ability to do anything to stop it. I have been able to see the collapse of the USA coming since 1995, once the implications of the 1986 immigration amnesty became clear to me, but even I had no idea until fairly recently that this inevitable collapse was likely to be part of a larger civilization-wide event. It’s not merely the USA that is in bad shape, but the secondary powers of China, Russia, and Europe as well.

And the tragedy of the neo-liberal world order was that in thinking to bring progress to the world, they have brought destruction to the West. At this point, the imperial USA is beyond salvaging because the Not-Americans outnumber the Americans. This is why I have been urging people to stop thinking in terms of fixing the USA or restoring it to its former power and glory. MAGA is not an eight-year program, it is probably more of an 80-year program, and if we are unlucky, an 800-year program. If you think I am exaggerating, recall how long it took for Spain to become great again after it first experienced Islamic immigration.

Westerners either need an unlikely champion who is the optimal combination of Charles Martel and Pol Pot or we need to think in terms of preserving knowledge for the future instead of preventing that which our fellow Westerners will never be able to accept or understand until it is too late. They will preach about the evils of the nameless, faceless Left and preen about the importance of this as they posture about the importance of that, and all of it is entirely irrelevant.

Iam canes intra moenia latrantes.

The barking dogs are already inside the walls.

Our Druids may be better than those of the times of the Roman Empire, at least they have digital computers. But our leaders are no better apt at understanding complex system than the military commanders who ruled the Roman Empire. Even our leaders were better, they would face the same problems: there are no structures that can gently lead society to where it is going. We have only structures that are there to keep society where it is – no matter how difficult and uncomfortable it is to be there. It is exactly what Tainter says: we react to problems by building structure that are more and more complex and that, in the end, produce a negative return. That’s why societies collapse.

This also explains why the globalists feel fully justified in their Neo-Babelism. They believe that they are constructing a new civilization that will rise from the ashes of the old one, a secular Byzantium to Christendom’s Rome. That is why the phoenix is one of their favorite symbols. What most of them do not realize is that what they are building is not a new world order, but a very old one.

What really happened

Or so we are told. But it sounds credible enough. Notice who rushed to convince Trump not to veto it: Pence, Short, Mattis, Ryan, and McConnell. Remember that when things start getting interesting.

Immigration seemed to frustrate Trump the most. He secured $1.6 billion for some fencing and levees on the border; it comes with strings attached and the amount fell far short of the $25 billion requested for a wall. He was also eager to blame Democrats for the failure to reach a deal to protect dreamers by coming up with an alternative to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that he ended last year.

Even Friday morning, Trump asked aides how he could still get more money for the border wall and whether some of the items that Democrats celebrated were in the bill — such as money for what are known as sanctuary cities and Planned Parenthood — were really included in the package, according to people familiar with the discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

He was told that it was unlikely he could get more wall funding and that Democrats did secure the items they were touting. He grew angry. So, shortly before 9 a.m., Trump took to Twitter.

“I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,” Trump tweeted.

Inside the White House, senior officials such as Vice President Pence, legislative director Marc Short and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis were summoned to persuade the president to sign the bill and avoid a shutdown.

Mattis stressed that the Pentagon desperately needed the funding boost — a $66 billion increase over last year’s levels — that the bill would provide. Aides told Trump it would be “historic” funding, a word that he likes to hear.

Short argued that the funding package would give the president money for immigration and infrastructure programs and that the White House had already committed to signing the bill. Trump was given a list of all the planes, submarines and other military equipment the bill would fund, a list the president would rattle off later in his hastily organized appearance in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room.

 House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) made his own pitch, calling the president about 30 minutes after the veto threat. Trump continued to say the bill was terrible, but Ryan again touted benefits for the military. McConnell (R-Ky.) called Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, two White House aides said, to keep tabs on the situation.

Woe is us

For future reference. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are not. Only time will tell. But at least we will have a public record of whose analysis was correct and whose was not.

The Audacious Epigone:

The day the Trump presidency died

So bye, bye MAGA dream in the sky:

This is probably the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency. The midterms are shaping up to be a bloodbath. The markets now put the odds of Democrats re-taking the House at 68{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}. The odds of Democrats gaining control of the Senate is 40{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}, an astoundingly high figure given Democrats are defending 25 of their seats–more than half–while Republicans are defending just eight of their own.

The last two years of Trump’s term will be one of perpetual Russia, Russia!, RUSSIA!! and impeachment proceedings initiated by a Democrat congress riding its “blue wave”, while pusillanimous Republicans meekly position themselves in various ways in opposition to the isolated president.

John Derbyshire

This budget bill is, in short, a middle finger to President Trump. Its larger message: populism is no match for the Deep State. The contest is an unequal one. It’s almost cruel the way the congresscritters—Chuck Ryan and Paul Schumer, Nancy McConnell and Mitch Pelosi—it’s almost cruel the way they are grinning and chuckling and high-fiving among themselves over how easy it’s been to kick sand in the President’s face.

I’m afraid we can now see that the populist victories of two years ago that filled us with so much hope were in fact a false dawn, a mirage. For all its spirit and vigor and successes, the populist movement is amateurish and uncoordinated. It’s no match for the seasoned, hardened operatives of the Deep State, with their decades of experience at gaming Western democratic systems.

Who else merits quoting? There is no need to quote Never Trumpers like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro. And the Z-man already publicly abandoned the Trump Train and disowned the God-Emperor, so quoting him would be redundant.

Catch rule revision

The NFL’s new catch rule guidelines look promising:

The NFL’s competition committee has recommended changing the language of the league’s catch rule in an effort to avoid future controversial calls.

The proposal seeks to define a catch as:

1. Control of the ball.

2. Two feet down or another body part.

3. A football move such as:

• A third step;

• Reaching/extending for the line-to-gain

• Or the ability to perform such an act.

The recommendation, revealed Wednesday by NFL senior vice president of officiating Al Riveron, will be voted on by owners next week, perhaps as early as Tuesday. The new rule will get rid of provisions pertaining to the slight movement of the football once it hits the receiver’s hands and the going-to-the-ground requirement.

It’s interesting to see that despite the SJW-convergence of the league office and all the promises to fund this or that SJW-inspired initiative, no team has signed either of the two architects of the anthem protests. It appears the NFL’s general managers are less committed to the self-destruction of their sport than the league or its owners.

The God-Emperor’s 300

I’m half-amused and half-appalled by all the people declaring themselves off the Trump Train over the signing of the omnibus bill and the bump stock ban. What part of “two steps forward, one step back” do you not understand? What part of “lose the battle but win the war” escapes you? Are you Spartan or potter?

No one has claimed the God-Emperor is perfect. Indeed, as I have repeatedly pointed out, one of his best traits is his ability to admit his mistakes and learn from them. No one is claiming that these moves were intentional 12D underwater chess tactics, as he is clearly dealing with a frontal attack from the Democrat-Republicans in both the House and Senate as well as a number of hidden attacks to his flanks and rear from the Deep State.

Do you really think it is a coincidence that the Playboy and porn star stories are front and center on every media outlet while his daughter-in-law is divorcing his son, Theresa May is trying to start a war with Russia, and the stock market is undergoing daily 400-point swings? Do you seriously believe these things are not related to the God-Emperor taking the scalps of the #1 and #2 at the FBI, firing his Secretary of State, and the recent revelations about Facebook?

And do you not understand what these things represent on the Deep State’s part? They represent desperation. They represent fear. They represent real change and they are the early signs of something important. I thought James Woods put it well in response to ex-CIA director John Brennan’s open threats to the President.

You couldn’t get a toothpick up this guy’s ass with a pound of Vaseline right now. You’re next, swamp rat.

Ask yourself this: why are they behaving in this fashion? It isn’t because they control the God-Emperor. It isn’t because they have broken him. It is because they are afraid of him and what he is in the process of doing.

If you’re off the Trump Train, so be it. Supporting the man is psychologically arduous, because it requires constantly resisting the social pressure to submit to the media narrative. I had my own moment of doubt, not about the God-Emperor, but his Grand Inquisitor, back in July because I could not see what Jeff Sessions was doing or understand why he seemed to be focused entirely on something that I thought was irrelevant. It subsequently turned out that he was not. Of course, the human mind being the self-deceiving instrument that it is, I actually had to look up whatever it was that had me so frustrated with the guy who has methodically taken out one after another of the Deep State’s most strategically situated tools.

In my opinion, the God-Emperor has more than earned our continued confidence, even if he makes mistakes and missteps that are much bigger than simply signing an inevitable bill or allowing an enemy Congress its head. If you don’t have that confidence in the man any longer, then you don’t. So be it; these things are what they are. I’m certainly not going to criticize anyone for it, just as I refused to criticize Scott Adams when he lost his confidence in October 2016. You are free to disembark the train at any time and quietly despair. The rest of us, the God-Emperor’s 300, will fight in the shade.

Democrats to the left. Republicans to the other left.
No friends, no allies, and the Deep State rising.
The God-Emperor stands alone but for his 300.

We may win. We may not.
We will not despair and we will not stop.
Trumpslide 2020!

Spartans, what is your profession?

Mailvox: trade and capital flows

Peter Thiel raised some questions about trade, capital flows, and tariffs at a recent talk at the Economic Club of New York. Specifically, why does capital flow in the opposite direction now than it did in 1900, when slow growing economies like the UK invested in fast growing economies like Russia and Argentina? 

There is something really odd going on in the trade relations… The way you’d expect things to be working in a healthily globalizing world is that capital would flow from the slow growing to the fast growing economies, from the developed to the developing world.  This was the way trade patterns looked in 1900, which was a relatively open, free trade world, where the UK had a current account surplus of 4{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} of GDP and the capital got exported to invest in Russian railroads or Argentina, or all sorts of other countries that had higher growth rates and promised a higher return on capital.  That’s the way globalization is supposed to look.

Today, it’s quite the opposite, where capital is flowing uphill from China to the US and is the other side of these enormous current account and trade deficits that the United States has. And so, we are exporting $100 billion a year to China, importing $450 billion a year from China. And China, an economy that’s growing at, say, 6.5{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year is investing in an economy that is maybe growing at 3{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} a year, when the flows should be the other way around.

And so I think that tells you that something is incredibly off. It pushes you to have to ask questions, why it is off?  Why does nobody in China want to buy anything from the US? Why are our goods so undesirable? Or, are there policies that skew things too much towards consumption in the US and more to investment in other places, and should we be rethinking that? Or, are there intellectual property things that are not being enforced? There are a lot of very granular questions that we need to be asking.

Even if free trade is good in theory, and that’s what you want to get to, I think the way you get there is, perhaps, by not being too dogmatic and too doctrinaire.  And if you have people negotiate trade treaties who are doctrinaire about free trade, I always get the sense they won’t do that much work because if you negotiate a good trade treaty, that’s a good thing, and if you negotiate a bad trade treaty that still a good thing because we know that all trade is always good for everybody, in all times, in all places. And so we have to always be careful that free trade orthodoxy not become just a euphemism for the sloppiness or the laziness of the people negotiating these treaties.

Capital chases profit. There is more profit to be made in the US financial sector, which eats up about one-third of all profit in the USA, than there is in the non-financial sectors of other, faster-growing economies. That’s my initial thought, anyhow.