The contracting empire

Jim’s Blog notes that the USA isn’t merely losing its technological advantages vis-a-vis its now-smarter rivals, it is actually losing military capabilities it previously possessed:

As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance.

In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving.

Our art is crap, we no longer build Cathedrals, but until recently, weapons were good and improving.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review has recently appeared, revealing that we have lost all nuclear military technology:

U.S. production of tritium, a critical strategic material for nuclear weapons, is now insufficient to meet the forthcoming U.S. nuclear force sustainment demands, or to hedge against unforeseen developments. Programs are planned, but not yet fully funded, to ease these critical production shortfalls.

This is euphemistic.  Recent attempts to produce tritium were fully funded, but failed, which failure resulted in new plans for new attempts to produce tritium, which have not yet been fully funded.

I have regularly remarked on America’s inability to produce tritium.  All existing nuclear weapons require tritium to juice their detonation, and without tritium, would produce a low yield explosion.  Tritium decays over time, and so fresh tritium continually needs to be added.  The US is out of tritium, has repeatedly attempted to produce more, and repeatedly failed.

The combination of a 10-point loss in the average US IQ with the systematic diversion of its best minds to irrelevant financial scams and other trivial activities means that the USA is now both less-populous and less capable than China and less capable than Russia. That does not mean the USA is devoid of military advantages, after all, it still possesses a legacy military that is larger and better-funded and more technologically advanced than any military in history, but the rot has now gone from being institutional and societal to infrastructural.

I mentioned previously that the US military is almost certainly going to lose its next war. It has neither the officers nor the civilian leadership that is capable of compensating for its infrastructural debilitation. What we are witnessing in Afghanistan and Syria and Venezuela is almost certainly the feeble last gasp of an empire in contraction.

“The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.”
– Robert E. Lee

The convergence of Canadian law

A Canadian reader writes to let us know about the way Canadian law is converging:

I’m sure you’re not surprised. I shouldn’t be either; I read SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down. What amazes me is how brazen this infestation is, so maybe you’ll find it interesting.

The Law Society of Ontario has been manipulated, through the threat of imaginary racism, to compel lawyers in that Canadian province to declare their virtue. Under the Law Society’s new rules the sanctions are nebulous for any lawyer who fails to adequately demonstrate right-think.

One of the listed recommendations was that the Law Society should “require every licensee to adopt and to abide by a statement of principles acknowledging their obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in their behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.”

It sounds like any lawyers who don’t follow this prescription will be suspended and not permitted to practice law, at a minimum. Of course, as you have pointed out many times, the goal posts will be in constant motion and the SJWs will never be satisfied with the ‘purity’ of the province’s lawyers.

If Ontario’s legal profession is compromised the rest of Canada’s law societies won’t be far behind.

Unless and until the core concepts of “civil rights” and “equality” and “civic nationalism” are entirely rejected, the convergence towards the complete submission of every institution and individual to the social justice narrative will continue almost entirely unresisted. Which means that the society that rises from the ashes of equalitarianism is almost certainly going to be shockingly “ist” by every current standard.

Immigration and immorality

This moral and material descent is what happens when a nation turns away from Christianity and embraces foreigners, empire, and foreign philosophies.

Almost everyone that goes out to visit one of our major cities on the west coast has a similar reaction.  Those that must live among the escalating decay are often numb to it, but most of those that are just in town for a visit are absolutely shocked by all of the trash, human defecation, crime and public drug use that they encounter.  Once upon a time, our beautiful western cities were the envy of the rest of the world, but now they serve as shining examples of America’s accelerating decline.  The worst parts of our major western cities literally look like post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the hordes of zombified homeless people that live in those areas are too drugged-out to care.  The ironic thing is that these cities are not poor.  In fact, San Francisco and Seattle are among the wealthiest cities in the entire nation.  So if things are falling apart this dramatically now, how bad will things get when economic conditions really start to deteriorate?

Let’s start our discussion by looking at the rat epidemic in Los Angeles.  Thanks to extremely poor public sanitation, rats are breeding like mad, and at this point they have even conquered Los Angeles City Hall…

Officials at Los Angeles’ City Hall are considering ripping all of the building’s carpets up, as rats and fleas are said to be running riot in its halls.

A motion was filed by Council President Herb Wesson on Wednesday to enact the much needed makeover amid a typhus outbreak in the downtown area.

Wesson said a city employee had contracted the deadly bacterial disease at work, and now he’s urging officials to investigate the ‘scope’ of the long-running pest problem at the council building.

People from all over the world are drawn to Los Angeles because of what they have seen on television, but it is truly a filthy, filthy place.  The number of homeless has been rising about 20 percent a year, public drug use is seemingly everywhere, and there are mountains of trash all over the place.  Needless to say, rats thrive in such an environment, and the epic battle that one L.A. journalist is having with rats was recently featured in the L.A. Times…

Eastside, Westside, north and south, they’re everywhere. If you’re a rat, the California housing crisis has not hit you yet and it never will. But let’s not be too hard on Los Angeles, because the same things that are going on there are happening in major cities all over the western portion of the country. For example, a massive rat infestation recently forced authorities to close a shockingly filthy homeless encampment under a bridge in Salem, Oregon…

It’s just a matter of time before the next Black Plague sweeps the cities of the West. And a good thing it will be too. Civilization is little more than the art of being able to live in large cities without dying like short-lived, fast-breeding vermin; rural Roman life expectancies were not that much shorter than modern life expectancies. And the art of civilization has observably been lost, because the people who live in large cities have abandoned every aspect of Western civilization.

Mailvox: Brexit will not be delayed

A British expert who knows CONSIDERABLY more than I do about British law and the unwritten British constitution shares his opinion on the likelihood of Brexit being delayed past 29 March:

Something which doesn’t seem to be considered by those proposing an extension is that the EU parliament is prorogued for election on 18 April. The EU parliament would resume, with its newly elected members on 2 July.

Therefore if Her Majesty’s Government did ask for an extension to the Article 50 period, something to which all 27 EU governments would need to agree, a 3-month extension really only buys 14 working days in which to come up with a deal and have it ratified by the EU parliament. Since Theresa May has repeatedly postponed votes, and has only notionally cancelled the half-term break for Westminster, she has already wasted more time since December than a 3-month extension could buy her.

If the extension was longer, say 9 months as proposed by Boles-Cooper and voted down by a majority of 23 votes, it would mean that the new Faragiste Brexit Party would contend the EU elections, with predictable results. Despite threats of resignation from Remainer ministers for the purposes of voting for a new Boles-Cooper, there is no indication that the arithmetic in the House of Commons would return a majority for a 9-month delay, or the 21-month version suggested by Civil Service negotiator Olly Robbins in a bar in Brussels last night. One of the senior Conservative Brexiteer MPs suggested that Mr Robbins should be delivered to the Tower of London by river (implicitly through the “Traitor’s Gate”).

The British version of Maxine Waters, capable of causing Guam to capsize by her mere presence, has publically stated that she knows that the Brexiteers would win a second referendum. The Conservative Party local government leaders have told the party chairman that they are facing a wipe-out in May’s municipal and county elections because of the Prime Minister’s handling of Brexit.

Soros and others are already lamenting the possibility of 33{13f7cd41d75ad26df9f677947736378fee6e9e6bdea39ae580d95ac2edeca384} populist and eurosceptic EU parliament, which could gum up the works in EU parliamentary committee. This would be a higher percentage if Britain returns MEPs to Strasbourg due to a long Article 50 extension. It doesn’t seem likely that any Withdrawal Agreement that would be approved by the EU parliament in such circumstances would bear much resemblance to that currently on the table. Most of the British MEP’s would vote against any agreement to preserve Britain’s independence via “No Deal”.

It is also worth noting that Republic of Ireland opinion polls show 80{13f7cd41d75ad26df9f677947736378fee6e9e6bdea39ae580d95ac2edeca384} for Prime Minister Varadkar taking a hard line against Westminster. The Belgian Prime Minister has also voiced a preference for the certainty of “No Deal” today rather than reopening the Withdrawal Agreement.

On the other hand, Italy has a £10bn trade surplus with Britain, mostly in agriculture, which it is desperate to avoid losing. They lost the Russian market to the Turks and Russian domestic product substitution and know that they aren’t going to get it back. British Mozzarella has been rated by Italian chefs as being on a par with their own product, but currently can’t compete because of EU localisation rules, so losing the British market would likely also be permanent. Therefore the Italians are proposing a bilateral deal, bypassing the EU. Whether such a thing would actually happen remains to be seen, but it does indicate considerable concern.

Many countries have voiced pro-British views, but it is notable that all have unanimously approved the EU’s negotiating guidelines of 28 March 2017, which we could never accept. That was the moment when I first said there would be no deal. All subsequent decisions by the EU Council of ministers (heads of member state governments) have also been unanimous. So, frankly, we’re not placing any store by favourable remarks from EU member governments or politicians.

So to summarise, I can’t see a delay of 3, 9 or 21 months producing a deal, and therefore any delay seems unlikely to be granted. The arithmetic at Westminster hasn’t significantly changed. So we’re going to be out on 29 March with the “No Deal” necessary to recover our independence.

I certainly hope that he is right. There is no question that No Deal is much better than any deal that will win the approval of the Eurocrats.

Italy may be out first

The EU is rapidly splintering even before Brexit has taken place:

Italian PM Giuseppe Conte has hit back at claims made by a chief EU lawmaker that he is a “puppet” of his country’s coalition party leaders, after declaring the bloc had “lost contact” with its people. The EU Parliament witnessed ill-tempered exchanges between Conte, who was making his debut speech, and leading MEPs. Guy Verhofstadt addressed the PM, saying that he regrets Italy has gone from being a big defender of Europe “to the back of the line.”

Bemoaning what he sees as the “political degeneration of Italy,” Verhofstadt accused Conte of being a “puppet” of the Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio and the Northern League’s Matteo Salvini. He also claimed that Italy, at times, “behaves in an anti-European way, openly spiteful against other member states.”

Matteo Salvini
Che alcuni burocrati europei, complici del disastro di questi anni, si permettano di insultare presidente del consiglio, governo e Popolo italiano è davvero VERGOGNOSO. Preparate gli scatoloni, il 26 maggio i cittadini vi manderanno a casa.

It comes after a diplomatic row between France and Italy. Last week, France recalled its ambassador from Rome after a meeting was held between Italy’s deputy prime minister and leaders of the French Yellow Vest protester movement, who have been calling for French President Emmanuel Macron’s resignation.

Translation: That some EU bureaucrats, who are complicit in the disaster of recent years, are permitted to insult the President of the parliament, the government, and the people of Italy is truly SHAMEFUL. Pack your bags, because on the 26th of May (the EU parliamentary elections) the citizens will send you home. 

Meanwhile, Treasonous May is trying to arrange to prevent a No-Deal Brexit, even though that is the best possible outcome for the British people.

The pill and cognitive impairment

For me, the most remarkable thing is discovering that for fifty years, no one ever bothered to test for negative cognitive effects on women taking the contraceptive pill:

More than 100 million women around the world use oral contraceptives. Over the years, research has been able to explore and identify much of their physical effects, but what about their psychological effects?

Dr. Alexander Lischke of the University of Greifswald, Germany, notes how “remarkably little” is known about the effects of birth control pills on emotion, cognition, and behavior.

As part of a new study, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Lischke and his research team recruited 95 healthy women — 42 of whom were on the pill and 53 who were not — for an emotion recognition task. The aim was to find out if using the pill could have any sort of impairment on their ability to recognize emotions.

“We assumed that these impairments would be very subtle, indicating that we had to test women’s emotion recognition with a task that was sensitive enough to detect such impairments,” he explained. “We, thus, used a very challenging emotion recognition task that required the recognition of complex emotional expressions from the eye region of faces.”

Both groups of women had no problem in recognizing basic expressions like those of happiness or fear. But when it came to more complex emotional expressions like pride or contempt, women on the pill were 10 percent less accurate compared to their counterparts.

Keep this sort of thing in mind when you assume that just because a drug or a medical regimen is in wide use, its range of adverse effects have been scientifically studied.

A THRONE OF BONES in audio

It would be hard to describe how pleased I am to be able to announce a project that has been more than five years in the making. And so I am delighted to be able to declare that the first book in my Arts of Dark and Light epic fantasy series, A THRONE OF BONES, is now available in audiobook+ from Castalia House.

Manfully narrated by the indefatigable Jeremy Daw, A THRONE OF BONES is more than 30 hours of high-quality DRM-free MP4 format and retails for $29.99. The audiobook+ also includes the 934-page ebook in EPUB and Kindle formats.

We waited literally years to find the right narrator for Selenoth, which was considerably more important than is the case with most audiobooks due to the sheer volume of content involved. In my opinion, Jeremy’s elegant English accent is ideal for both high fantasy and epic fantasy, and I prefer his voice to those belonging to both of the narrators who have voiced George Martin’s bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire series.

And yes, Jeremy will be narrating A SEA OF SKULLS once he is finished narrating SUMMA ELVETICA and the stories that did not make it into THE LAST WITCHKING & OTHER STORIES. This is the third Selenoth audiobook, and means that there is now 40 hours and 20 minutes of Selenoth-related audio content.

The sickness of Spielberg

Owen Benjamin calls out Hollywood’s biggest monster. Arthur C. Clarke… so what are the odds. One 26-minute silent film and he’s handed a 7-year multi-million-dollar movie contract. Why? Because he demonstrated his ability to be subversive about his sickness in a subtle manner that did not alert the audience.

Krispin Glover, who refused to keep working for Spielberg, tried to warn everyone:

Does Steven Spielberg focus much of his fantasy life on young people? Did he portray children wallowing in sewers filled with fecal matter in Schindler’s List? Did he use children to finger paint an adult in Hook? Does he collect the illustrations of Norman Rockwell, such as the one showing a young boy in his underwear examined by a doctor? Are the inclinations of Steven Spielberg above suspicion by the media-fed culture? Was Steven Spielberg very friendly with Michael Jackson? Wasn’t Michael Jackson supposed to play Peter Pan in Steven Spielberg’s version of the story? Now that Michael Jackson is no longer held in favor by the mass media, does Spielberg associate with him? Do Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg share similar opinions about the sexuality of young boys?