Tag: decline and fall

Oh, No! Anyway…

I’m trying to figure out what sort of retard in the US State Department thinks that anyone in a position of leadership in Russia or North Korea, or anywhere else for that matter, gives a fragment of a flying rodent’s posterior about the USA’s diplomatic concerns about North Korea.

The recent rapprochement between Russia and North Korea could embolden Pyongyang to take a more risky approach in the global arena, a senior US diplomat has warned. Deputy Assistant Secretary Jung Pak, who serves as the State Department’s senior official for North Korea, told Bloomberg on Monday that Moscow’s “complete embrace” of North Korea could mean that the country would be more inclined to threaten its southern neighbor, export weapons abroad, and defy Washington’s calls to return to denuclearization talks.

Just as the Swiss government doesn’t seem to grasp that it can’t play neutral anymore now that it has taken sides against Russia, the USA no longer has any influence whatsoever with Russia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, China, or any of the countries that it has either a) sanctioned or b) bombed.

The world is no longer monopolar. And anyone you have treated as an enemy not only has no reason to pay attention to your opinion, he has a powerful incentive to actively pursue those things that threaten you.

Andrei Martyanov is correct. The USA and its European satrapies are not only agreement-incapable, they are so delusional that they can’t even do basic diplomacy anymore.

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Diversity is Mediocrity

Item 1: a selection from Cuckservative, published in 2015:

Without question the worst effect caused by 50 years of failure, and the one most likely to have the most severe long-term consequences, is the negative effect immigration has had on the collective national intelligence. Researchers around the world have observed that the nations of the West have been gradually becoming less intelligent; the Danish military measured a 1.5 point decline in the average IQ of its soldiers between 1998 and 2014, while the average British 14-year-old lost two IQ points from 1980 to 2008. The same is true for the USA, where a three-point average IQ gain that took place after the Melting Pot migration ended has been entirely reversed as a result of immigration from lower-IQ nations.

By multiplying the average measured IQs for the four major ethnic groups in the United States with their changing demographic ratios, we can calculate how the demographic changes have affected the national intelligence over time. In 1960, we calculate the national IQ average to have been 100.3. By 2010, the average national IQ had fallen four points, to 96. By 2030, if the current population estimates are correct, it will fall another point, to 95. Lest you think that average national intelligence is irrelevant, note that just that four-point difference is essentially equal to the difference between countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and countries such as Uruguay and Portugal. There is a strong correlation between societal wealth and average national intelligence as measured in IQ.

Even the left-wing British paper, the Guardian, was recently forced to take note of this phenomenon, as it reported that scientists have determined genes influence academic ability across all subjects, and that as much as 60 percent of the observed differences between various population groups can be explained by genetic factors. So, the mass migration of the last 50 years has been materially dysgenic and has literally made Americans stupider on average. It’s not just you, mass entertainment really has been dumbed down in recent decades in order to appeal to what is an even lower common denominator than before.

Item 2: an article in the Daily Mail, 23 April 2024:

America’s fight to save handwriting from extinction as IQs begin to fall for first time ever and teachers warn some 20-year-olds can’t sign checks anymore. Previous studies have revealed that IQ scores have dropped for the first time in a century and indicated that technology could be to blame. Last year, researchers at the University of Oregon and Northwestern reported that IQ scores had dropped because technology shortens attention spans and decreases the need to think deeply.

The dirt is not magic. Being around magic white people doesn’t make Africans or Papua New Guineans any smarter, the so-called Flynn Effect notwithstanding. The USA is no longer British, it is no longer even European, it is now rapidly approaching the human genetic average. So, exceptional results should no longer be expected, and it can be reasonably assumed that as an increasingly diverse and mediocre empire, it will rapidly be surpassed in every way by higher-performance, more genetically-homogenous nations.

One cannot adopt dysgenic and dyscivic policies without experiencing the inevitable consequences.

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Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy

The European Union and its member states are already well into the throes of a crisis of legitimacy:

Lenin famously defined communism as Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. In other words, the ideological project of building communism was supplemented by the technocratic project of electrification, the latter being an important source of legitimacy for the new regime.

The present-day European Union is engaged in its own expansive electrification project – the energy transition – that similarly inhabits ground where ideology meets technocracy and underpins legitimacy.

Yet in the past year or so, something has gone badly wrong, and a backlash against the climate agenda and its technocratic enforcers has been spreading across Europe. The energy crisis – far from catapulting the continent further along the path toward a carbon-neutral future as it should have – has exposed just how elusive the goal is, as Europe has scrambled to sign expensive LNG deals and even restart coal-fired plants. Farmers dissatisfied with EU policies that they regard as devastating to their livelihoods have been grumbling for years, but recently their protests have reached a crescendo, and built up political weight. Right-leaning and far-right parties, meanwhile, are gaining ground by the day. Standards of living are dropping and industry is shutting down or moving elsewhere.

Discontent with suffocating bureaucracy and regulation is widespread. A recent survey among German small and medium-sized companies – has registered a massive shift in sentiment against the EU. This is particularly concerning because the so-called German Mittelstand used to be among the strongest pillars of support for European integration.

What is embroiling Europe is deeper than a political crisis – it is approaching what can be called a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling elite.

The EU is illegitimate by every measure: politically, economically, militarily, and spiritually. It has already failed, completely, and betrayed every single promise that was ever made to the European nations in order to convince them to place their trust in the single European superstate that vowed up and down it never had any intentions of becoming what it was always designed to be.

But the USA is facing an even more serious crisis of legitimacy, as at least the EU’s illegitimate elite is, for the most part, actually made up of Europeans. The illegitimate elite presently in power in the United States is neither American nor culturally Christian; it isn’t even civilized. Which is why it rules so poorly and so recklessly; what works in the interests of a small and subversive tribal group is entirely unsuited for successfully guiding a large nation, let alone an entire civilization.

The disaster that has been David Tepper’s ownership of the Carolina Panthers is more than a little illustrative in this regard. What works beautifully when the deck is stacked in your favor simply will not work when you’re forced to compete on an equal playing field, and the experience and habits you developed in the easier situation actually tend to work against you once you no longer possess any structural advantages.

The great Israeli general Moshe Dayan once said that the secret of the IDF’s stunning historic military success was that it fought Arabs. If there is one lesson of the post-WWII period, it is that the secret of the stunning Jewish political and economic success in the USA is that they were competing with Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And that is quite clearly not adequate preparation for competing with the Chinese, the Russians, and the Persians on the global stage.

The political entities of the USA and the EU are both going to collapse, almost certainly within the next ten years, because no political structure, and no society, can survive an incompetent and illegitimate elite.

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“It’s Theirs Now”

This is part of the journey toward the estimated 2033 breakup of the political entity known as “the United States”:

A video posted by reliable Fox News reporter Matt Finn shows illegal immigrants ravaging a mountain in Sunland Park, New Mexico, while Border Patrol agents apparently won’t defend it, calling the mountain the Cartel’s. Finn wrote in the video post, “Unbelievable. A Border Patrol agent in Sunland Park, NM just told us a mountain in the United States is ‘not ours’ anymore. ‘It’s theirs.’ Referring to cartels.”

It’s always impossible for the people being replaced to understand what is happening until it is too late to do anything about it. This isn’t a new or unprecedented development. It happened when Europeans invaded North America and displaced the American Indians; due to the divided and dispersed number of the American Indian tribes, it took literal centuries before the tribes even started trying to band together to resist their replacement.

Lombardia, a province in Italy, isn’t named after any of the Italians who lived there, but rather, the Lombard tribe that invaded in the 6th Century AD.

In the spring of 568, the Lombards, led by King Alboin, invaded Italy, breaking the political unity of the Italian Peninsula for the first time since the Roman conquest. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths, and their invasion of Italy was almost unopposed. By late 569, they had conquered all of northern Italy and the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572. They established a Lombard Kingdom in north and central Italy, which reached its zenith under the eighth-century ruler Liutprand. The invasion was opposed by the Byzantine Empire, which retained control of much of the peninsula until the mid-8th century.

And no doubt the Arabs living in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th Century had no idea that by the end of it, they would be almost entirely pushed out of their lands by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Not that the land hadn’t exchanged hands many times, beginning with the great replacement of the Canaanite people by the Hebrew tribes.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Americans are going to end up on reservations of white people in a manner similar to the fate of the American Indian; there are far too many Americans and they are not anywhere nearly so badly outnumbered as the Indians were by the mid-1800s. But it does mean that Americans will lose control of large swaths of territory, both in practical and political terms, on the North American continent. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since homogenous nations always rise from the collapse of heterogenous empires.

But no matter what happens, this is evidence that the Imperial USA is already dead, even if the imperialists in Washington DC and Manhattan haven’t accepted the fact yet.

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Spengler and the Clowns in the Bunker

David Goldman, the Asia Times columnist formerly known as Spengler, was invited to an elite conclave of Clown Worlders to discuss the current state of their war with Russia. And if he is to be believed, there is no Plan B for Clown World:

Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation. I can say that I haven’t been so scared since the fall of 1983, when I was a junior contract researcher doing odd jobs for then Special Assistant to the President Norman A Bailey at the National Security Council…

Russia’s economic resilience in the face of supposedly devastating sanctions is only one reflection of a great transformation of world trade. China’s exports to the Global South doubled during the past three years and China now exports more to the South than to developed markets. China’s unprecedented exporting success, in turn, stems from the rapid automation of Chinese industry, which now installs more industrial robots per year than the rest of the world combined.

This is evident, I added, in China’s newfound dominance in the world automotive market but it also has critical military implications. China claims that it has automated plants that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day—not impossible given that it can manufacture 1,000 EVs a day, or thousands of 5G base stations.

The implication is that China can produce the equivalent of America’s inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles in a week while American defense contractors take years to assemble them by hand.

No one disputed the data I presented. And no one believed that Russia is taking 25,000 casualties a month. Facts weren’t the issue: The assembled dignitaries, a representative sampling of the foreign policy establishment’s intellectual and executive leadership, simply couldn’t imagine a world in which America no longer gave the orders.

They are accustomed to running things and they will gamble the world away to keep their position.

Success always plants the seeds of failure. The current set of Clown Worlders are the third generation in the West, and like every third-generation heir, they are well along the generational pattern of build-crusie-lose that so often produces the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story so witnessed in once-successful families over time. The current elite no longer understands the differences between the situation they face and the historical challenges surmounted by their predecessors, and they are trying to use the same tactics and techniques that worked for their predecessors in a different time and on a very different set of people.

What we’re witnessing on a grand scale across the West is no different than watching the founder’s grandson resolutely steering the family company onto the rocks even as his siblings, wives, and children blithely spend away the family’s resources in imitation of the second-generation’s unproductive champagne lifestyles. Not only do they have no idea how to go about succeeding, but they can’t imagine failure, not even when it is simultaneously staring them in the face and biting them in the behind.

No wonder Spengler is terrified. The comeuppance for the corrupt clowns who destroyed the wealthiest and most successful societies in human history is almost certainly going to be one for the history books.

UPDATE: The Europeans are finally beginning to figure out that the clowns have abandoned them and they are on their own. But they obviously aren’t smart enough to accept defeat, give up their pretensions, and negotiate a settlement with Russia while they can still get very reasonable terms.

Washington has sent a clear message to European NATO members that they can no longer rely on its military protection, the head of German defense giant Rheinmetall has claimed. For decades, the EU has taken it for granted that the US would come to its rescue in case of war, but “that will no longer happen,” CEO Armin Papperger told The Financial Times. He cited the failure of the US Congress to approve continued military assistance to Ukraine as a signal to Europe that the Americans are not willing to pay for its security.

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Total Tory Implosion

Dominick Cummings predicts the collapse of the British Conservative Party:

The only future for the Tories was to let Vote Leave transform them into a new party 2020-24. The Party would now be unrecognisable: CCHQ closed and the party re-opened in the midlands with the rancid old guard ‘retired’, the economy would be extremely different and millions of swing voters would have vanished from the 40% tax rate (pushed up to 100k), MP pay and nurses pay would be linked to the growth/fall of average wages (‘if the voters get a pay cut the MPs get a pay cut’), term limits for MPs, the government would be years into a national project to rebuild the NHS, it would be far more ‘on the right’ on violent crime/borders etc than the median Tory MP, we’d have left the ECHR amid widespread applause that shattered Labour and stopped the ludicrous farce of a major country paralysed in handling a few dinghies, the trans madness and other manifestations of the Left’s Gadarene-psychosis would have been crushed, the broken Northcote-Trevelyan model of a closed-caste civil service recruiting only from within (and optimising for preserve bureaucratic power/budgets over productive adaptation) would have been pried open to recruit the best people in the world, we’d be very popular with ex-Labour voters, we’d be about to crush Starmer and the SW1 debate would be about a startup party replacing Labour.

Instead they broke their deal with us and tried to operate as if it’s ~1999 and 2016 never happened. The collapse in quality of MPs, their delusions about politics and communication, their total obsession with the deranged ‘news’ and punditry of the disintegrating old media instead of how power works — all this guaranteed their own disintegration.

Sunak thought about reviving the deal but decided to double-down on trusting the Establishment and the ‘strategy’ of the most Insider-pundit in SW1 to focus on week-to-week party management — a ‘strategy’ that doomed him to fail with the public then an inevitable collapse of authority with the MPs/Whitehall. 2025-9 the old Tory Party will probably be replaced.

The Conservative Party failed to preserve Great Britain. It has also failed to preserve itself, as it is presently led by a foreign individual one Chinese diplomat has described as a “street defiler”. There is no question that it deserves to die, the only question that remains is what will replace it.

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If You Thought it was Bad Now

Don’t worry. Those fine minds in government already know it’s going to get worse, even if they’re not prepared to admit it openly yet.

“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada. “For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.

The report, labelled secret, is intended as a piece of “special operational information” to be distributed only within the RCMP and among “decision-makers” in the federal government.

A heavily redacted version was made public as a result of an access to information request filed by Matt Malone, an assistant professor of law at British Columbia’s Thompson Rivers University, and an expert in government secrecy.

Describing itself in an introduction as a “scanning exercise,” the report is intended to highlight trends in both Canada and abroad “that could have a significant effect on the Canadian government and the RCMP.”

Right from the get-go, the report authors warn that whatever Canada’s current situation, it “will probably deteriorate further in the next five years.”

We always knew that the age of prosperity had to end sometime. And apparently, that time was 2008. Everything since then has merely been positioning and bracing for impact while running up the tab before the bar burns down.

This isn’t necessarily going to be a bad thing for some people, for in chaos there is always opportunity. But the degree of difficulty is increasing, and the old reliable rules for success no longer necessarily apply.

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Reality Always Intrudes

New York City insists that the crime statistics prove that crime is down in Manhattan. But, as Samuel Clemens once said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. And the problem with relying upon a false narrative based on cooked statistics is that sooner or later, reality intrudes and it becomes obvious to everyone that the map no longer resembles the territory:

The MTA is suing mall giant Westfield after the company notified them it intends to end its lease and cease all operations at the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan. Westfield signed a 20-year lease on May of 2014 – meaning they still have 10 years left in their lease. Westfield is blaming crime and quality of life concerns as their reason for terminating the lease. In response, the MTA is suing the retail management company for breaking the lease.

But Westfield says the MTA is not properly maintaining public safety at the transit hub and the mall giant has told the MTA that multiple tenants have left — citing break-ins, theft, vandalism, harassment and assault. “The rate of subtenant vacancies is at an all-time high,” Westfield wrote in a legal filing. “Few businesses want to open and operate a store where their employees and customers regularly would experience theft, property damage, bodily harm, or threats.”

Workers and subway riders told Eyewitness News that the biggest concern is the homeless population that congregates at the Fulton Center.

But New York City isn’t going to let a little thing like vanishing tenants and a failure to maintain civil order get in the way of its revenue needs:

The MTA is pushing back against Westfield’s plans and filed a lawsuit in federal court to keep the company in place. “NYCTA will face irreparable injury if Westfield abandons the Fulton Center in derogation of its Lease obligations by advancing its own self-serving business interests over the interests of NYCTA, retail establishments in the Fulton Center, and members of the public,” the lawsuit said.

And this is what a no-trust society looks like. Everyone lies, and everyone pretends to believe the lies. This is the future for the post-Christian, post-American USA… while it lasts.

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No Honor in the US Military

One can’t complain they haven’t made it very clear that the US Army officer corps is no long concerned with duty, honor, or least of all, country.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has made the decision to remove the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from its mission statement.

As we have done nine times in the past century, we have updated our mission statement to now include the Army values [of] loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, integrity and personal courage,” Army Col. Terence Kelley, a West Point spokesman, told Fox News. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Randy George both approved the change, according to Gilland.

“Our updated mission statement focuses on the mission essential tasks of Build, Educate, Train, and Inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character, with the explicit purpose of being committed to the Army Values and Ready for a lifetime of service,” Gilland explained.

Evil always tells you what it’s going to do, then tries to convince you that it doesn’t really mean what it just told you. Believe them when they tell you what they are, and what they stand for.

And it’s the third word that is the real target…

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Economics, Reconsidered

In which the Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton and 2015 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences begins to wonder if perhaps everything about the mainstream Neo-Samuelsonian economics he has been utilizing as his basic conceptual model is wrong:

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought…

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century…

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

Economists could benefit by greater engagement with the ideas of philosophers, historians, and sociologists, just as Adam Smith once did. The philosophers, historians, and sociologists would likely benefit too.

I can’t cast too many stones in the eminent Prof. Deaton’s direction. I, too, once believed that free trade was economically beneficial to both nations involved in the trade. I, too, once believed that the free movement of peoples was a net benefit to the economy and the well-being of the peoples involved. And while I was always deeply skeptical of, and completely opposed to, globalization, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I recognized the satanic thread that runs through and inevitably connects liberty, democracy, the liberal Enlightenment values, and economic liberalism to obvious evils like globalism, imperialism, techno-authoritarianism, and Clown World.

But the lies, some of them centuries-old, are shattering. They are being broken apart by finally being tested against real-world consequences. And in the aftermath of their discrediting, an entirely new economics, one that is not based on a false model of a perfectly rational economic man, will be constructed.

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