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.

The Olympic spirit doesn’t include free speech

That totalitarian vibe you were picking up isn’t a product of your imagination:

Triple jumper Voula Papachristou was expelled from Greece’s Olympic team Wednesday for her comments on Twitter mocking African immigrants and expressing support for a far-right party. The Hellenic Olympic Committee said Wednesday that Papachristou is “placed outside the Olympic team for statements contrary to the values and ideas of the Olympic movement.”

I absolutely loathe the Olympics. It’s a corrupt, fraudulent and grotesque celebration of globalism. The idea that Hitler and the Chinese Communists were perfectly acceptable to “the values and ideas of the Olympic movement” but free speech and democracy are not should tell you all that you need to know about the true spirit of the Olympics. Banning an athlete for the “crime” of being a nationalist who doesn’t favor the flooding of her country with foreign criminals is far more troublesome than any race-related comments she may have made. The irony here, given the original rules of the games, is that being a paid professional no longer bars an athlete, but being an open nationalist does.

This is exactly the same totalitarian progressivism that has led to the denial of building permits to companies that do not exhibit “Chicago values”. Strange, isn’t it, how “Chicago values” and “the values and ideas of the Olympic movement” just happen to be exactly the same.

It is in part because of this grotesque political correctness, which is now creeping into European football, that I have no plans to watch the Olympics, except of course in the event that the rumored false flag operation takes place. That might actually be entertaining, certainly more so than the ghastly North Koreanesque opening and closing ceremonies.

UK in depression

Even by the official statistics, the UK is in a recession again:

UK economy contracts by a shock 0.7pc. The figures from the Office for National Statistics are much worse than forecasts for a 0.2pc contraction. It marks the third successive quarter of contraction, leaving Britain in its longest double-dip recession in more than 50 years. The economy shrank by 0.3pc in the first quarter of the year, following a 0.4pc contraction in the final quarter of 2011.

Have a look at the large chart. UK GDP hasn’t been above 0.5% “growth” since the third quarter of 2007, and if one takes into account the margin of error in the various statistical revisions as well as the increasing G portion of GDP, it should be readily apparent that there has been no actual economic growth since then even if we follow the Keynesian lead in ignoring debt.

However, this isn’t a “double-dip recession” as is presently being reported, it is an ongoing economic depression that began in 2007 at the latest, and quite possibly as far back as 2001.

Complexity and the fall of empires I

Ugo Bardi has a fascinating post on the way in which Rome hit its limits and how even those Romans who perceived its decline failed to understand why it was happening:

The Meditations [of Marcus Aurelius] 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”. 1Of 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…. 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.

What Bardi’s illustration of complex system dynamics and decline make very clear is that Robert Prechter is almost surely correct and collapse is not only unavoidable, but we are already firmly into the decline. One need merely look at the decaying state of American infrastructure to see an echo of the decline of Roman roads; travel is still safe but that may not be the case in another century.

The most important thing to draw from Bardi’s article is the realization that most people, including those at the very top, will find the process incomprehensible and whatever policies are taken will prove to be irrelevant and pointless. As with companies, it is the success of the great societies that sows the seeds of their eventual failure, with Rome it was the limits of legionary utility, with the USA it is more likely to be the limits of trade and immigration utility. It is the continued reliance upon that which made a society strong that tends to prove ultimately fatal because nothing proceeds on linear paths.

One thing the discussion with the free traders has taught me is that most Americans can no more grasp the idea that too much trade is possible any more than most Romans could understand that too much farming or too many legions were possible. After all, those two pillars of the Roman economy were the historical basis of Rome’s original enrichment, so how could a source of enrichment ever prove to be a source of impoverishment, let alone societal decline?

I’ll have more thoughts on this in another post tomorrow.

Backfire

We may have to rethink who was behind the possible false flag in Denver given the local response:

Colorado gun stores are seeing a big jump in demand for firearms since last Friday’s massacre at a midnight movie showing in Aurora.

Background checks for people wanting to buy guns in Colorado reportedly increased more than 41 percent after last week’s Aurora movie massacre. The Denver Post reports that firearm instructors have also seen increased interest in training needed for a concealed-carry permit.

“It’s been insane,” Jake Meyers, an employee at Rocky Mountain Guns and Ammo in Parker told the newspaper Monday.

Between Friday and Sunday, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation approved background checks for 2,887 people who wanted to purchase a firearm — a 43 percent increase over the previous Friday through Sunday and a 39 percent jump over those same days on the first weekend of July.

So, it wasn’t the Tea Party after all… it was the NRA! The rabbit hole, it runs deep indeed. But here is a serious point. Since Holmes isn’t talking and appears to be in a massively drug-addled state, how can anyone be certain that he was the shooter? No one saw him in the mask except perhaps the policeman who captured him, and it seems to me that drugging up a patsy dressed in SWAT gear, then sticking a smoking gun in his hands as soon as your colleague comes out the door and hops in the squad car would be trivially easy in all the darkness and confusion.

I’m not saying this scenario is likely, merely pointing out that it would be plausible in the absence of a coherent confession or blood matching the DNA of the victims all over Holmes’s clothing. After seeing that video of Holmes at the arraignment, hearing of his unintelligible rambling on his voice message makes me wonder how functional this highly intelligent individual was last weekend. And speaking as one who read the Unabomber’s manifesto because no one at the Pioneer Press could make heads or tales of it as well as a volume of Stalin’s works, I can attest that most intelligent individuals who turn murderous are not only willing to talk, they won’t shut up about their endless justifications for their actions.

Mailvox: in which corrections are requested

CS asks if there are any holes to be identified in his Contra Calvinus:

Calvinism states that a man can only be saved by God if God has previously elected him for salvation and then draws him, through irresistible grace to his salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Calvinism also states man is totally depraved; man therefore is incapable of making the choice to believe in Jesus Christ unless God first draws him. Therefore, man cannot nor will ever come to God in faith unless God first draws him and if God draws him then man is incapable of resisting. Therefore also, no one is saved whom God did not previously determine would be saved and no one is damned whom God did not previously determine would be damned.

Calvinism also states that God is completely sovereign, so that everything that happens is His specific will and nothing can happen that God does not specifically will.

We may further deduce from scripture that Calvinism would support the statement that it is God’s will that man should be free from sin. We may also deduce from the belief that in man’s total depravity he is so given to his sin that he is unable to come to God in faith, that the strength or quantity of a man’s faith is indirectly proportional to the amount of sin in his life, so that if a man could be perfectly faithful, as was Jesus Christ, he would also be perfectly free from sin, as was Jesus Christ.

Therefore, in God’s sovereignty and according to His perfect will, when man is drawn to Him in faith he must be drawn perfectly so and irresistible grace will necessarily result in the complete renewal of a man at the moment of his justification, to the point where man is no longer a slave to sin and can never be again for all eternity.

Because it is clear from Romans chapter 7 that man, even after he has been saved by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ is still a slave to his sin we can logically conclude that Calvinism and scripture are logically incompatible. And because a central tenant of Calvinism is that scripture is the inspired work of God and perfectly correct it is, in itself, a contradiction, and therefore cannot be true.

Universal suffrage vs democracy

This post by Roissy should help explain why the Founding Fathers limited the vote to about one-fifth of the male population:

If you are apt to align your lifestyle with whatever is the latest fashion, (and ostracize those who don’t), you are probably also apt to blindly obey high status authority figures telling you what is good for you. If true, then we might speculate that women make better cultural foot soldiers for whichever elite authority is most tangible in their lives, owing to women’s greater propensity to accept authority dictums without question.

We may add to this speculation not only personal observation and confirmatory heaps of anecdotes, but in addition scientific evidence that women are, indeed, more obedient to authority than are men. Courtesy of reader uh pointing us to this Milgram experiment replication:

Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram’s subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a “cute, fluffy puppy” who was given real, albeit harmless, electric shocks. They found similar findings to Milgram: half of the male subjects and all of the females obeyed to the end. Many subjects showed high levels of distress during the experiment and some openly wept. In addition, Sheridan and King found that the duration for which the shock button was pressed decreased as the shocks got higher, meaning that for higher shock levels, subjects showed more hesitance towards delivering the shocks.

Always remember: All female participants in the Milgram obedience to authority experiment continued shocking the puppy despite their tears.

Contemplate this: if all women are willing to shock cute little puppies simply because an authority figure told them to do so, what won’t they be willing to do? No doubt the women who participated in the experiment had no desire to harm puppies and would explain their behavior by saying “he made me do it”, but that malleability is the entire point.

Resistance to evil requires the ability to stand up to it and refuse to submit. Jesus was not merely obedient to His Father, he also refused to bow down before the Prince of the World. And note that it’s not only women who lack the ability to resist perceived authority, but half of all men as well. It’s not merely women’s suffrage, but universal suffrage that caused democracies to become dictatorial.

It also underlines the importance of watching women’s actions, not listening to their words. If asked “would you ever subject a puppy to a painful electric shock of no possible benefit to it?”, most of those women would quite vehemently deny the very idea. However, the evidence indicates that if instructed to do so, they would, in fact, do it, even though the action caused them significant personal stress.

Anyhow, I’d be interested to know how many people here, male or female, believe they would shock the puppy at the behest of the men in white coats. I don’t think I would object to giving it a mild shock or three in the interest of science, but if this experiment truly mimicked the Milgram one and I was told that the voltage was high enough to seriously harm or even kill the puppy, there is a non-zero chance I’d punch out the scientist before hooking him up to his device and giving him a shock or two. At the very least, I believe I would deliver a solid “WTF is wrong with you people” rant before kidnapping the puppy.

But then, it is well known that I regard scientists with nearly as much suspicion as male elementary teachers who just love children. So I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a test of authority in my case.