Tag: decline and fall

The Geostrategic Initiative is Gone

The unholy alliance of the Biden administration with the Republican neocons is in a sudden state of alarm and is inexplicably attempting to stir up the US citizenry for war with Russia.

You’ll recall in the last report I emphasized how the tone was now shifting to: “Russia will invade Europe next!” But even I didn’t expect them to run with that new narrative in such a provocative and alarmist way.

Now a new raft of reports and statements from the usual suspects gives us insight into how desperate the establishment warhawks representing MIC interests have really become.

First, these two videos. Biden openly says that American troops will have to fight Russian troops if Ukraine is not shored up immediately.

Kirby and Blinken stepped up the fearmongering as well, evoking spilled “American blood”:

They’re dialing up the fearporn to a hysteric level like never before:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Congress on Tuesday during a private briefing that if they do not pass more aid to Ukraine, it would “very likely” lead to U.S. troops fighting a war in Europe.

“If [Vladimir] Putin takes over Ukraine, he’ll get Moldova, Georgia, then maybe the Baltics,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) told The Messenger, after Austin and other senior Biden administration officials briefed House lawmakers on their request for more aid for Ukraine.

“And then the idea that we’ll have to put troops on the ground in Secretary Austin’s word was very likely,” McCaul added. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Recall in the last report I cited Moldova as precisely the next vector, given the sensitivity of the PMR pressure point for Russia. Most notable is his express use of the qualifier “very likely” to describe U.S. troops fighting on the ground. In fact, the U.S. has been preparing for this grand European war for a while now.

Establishment Alarmism in Overdrive, 8 December 2023

The political situation of the Kiev regime must be crumbling rapidly in Ukraine, and the hysteric tone of the rhetoric suggests that Russia has rebuffed the various settlement overtures that have been made to it. Recall that it wasn’t long ago that Kagan and the other leading neocons were calling for an end to hostilities on the Russian front in order to make a turn to the Chinese front possible. Then, Hamas and Israel opened up the Middle Eastern front.

So, how is it possible that fighting a three-front war is suddenly deemed better than fighting one on two fronts?

The logical answer is that the US no longer has the luxury of deciding upon how many fronts it is going to fight. It has entirely lost the geostrategic initiative due to the failure of its proxy in Ukraine, the weakness of its Greatest Ally in the Middle East, and the observable reluctance of its satrapies in Europe and Asia. On every front, it is the nationalist rebels against Clown World’s global empire who now are in control of what happens next.

And that is not a state to which the self-styled masters of the world have been accustomed for a very long time.

UPDATE: It should not be surprising that the strategists and politicians of Clown World do not recognize the limitations of the US military, given that the US military itself does not yet recognize them.

“You look at what is required to support Ukraine, look at what might be required to support our partner in Israel, and then, of course, you put Taiwan on top of that—we have the construct that we do with combatant commanders and the rest that should allow us to command and control those three things all at one time.”
—Admiral Christopher Grady, Vice Chairman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff

However, notice that the admiral used the term “command and control”. That means they do not have the men, the ships, the planes, or the missiles. They think they’re going to be able to fight two more proxy wars of the kind they have already lost in Ukraine.

I also think it’s a mistake to assume that the Sino-Russian alliance is incapable of opening more than the three obvious fronts. See: Niger, Venezuela.

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The Death Spiral of Journalism

Peter King, an excellent and very liberal sportswriter, pointedly refuses an invitation to defend his former publication, Sports Illustrated:

On Sports Illustrated and AI. From Nick Colletti, of Grapevine, Texas: “Given your expressed disgust with the recent Charissa Thompson episode, I’d like to get your thoughts on your former employer, Sports Illustrated, being accused of publishing AI-generated stories by non-existent writers. If true, this confirms the death spiral of journalism.”

It’s a sham. It’s a shame. It’s also not surprising that a company that bought a grand brand in the sports media space (but heading downhill fast) would do what so many companies that are money-first, -second and -third would do—try to make money off the great name of Sports Illustrated instead of trying to revive it and make it great again. In the business of journalism, we face a major challenge from companies that cut costs further than down to the bone—but actually into the bone marrow. That resulted in a story by the site Futurism that reported that SI.com posted stories or reviews that were generated by Artificial Intelligence writers, with bylines of invented writers. When Futurism contacted the company for comment on using fake people to write fake stories passed off as content from venerable Sports Illustrated, the stories and the bios of the “writers” disappeared from the site. What the owners of the company are doing now is using the Sports Illustrated name to make money on other things that have nothing to do with journalism.

It’s fascinating to see how even those who are completely blind to the intrinsic degradation of Clown World are capable of seeing the fundamental evil of the corpocracy when it touches their own area of expertise. But there is no reason to mourn the loss of something that was always dyscivilizational, to the contrary, it’s a reminder of how it is wise and proper to focus on building our own platforms and institutions instead of attempting to take the easy path to what supposedly passes for success.

Michael Crichton was right, he was just three decades too early.

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—”artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page”—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

“[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality,” he lectured. “Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk.”

It’s pretty obvious that he will have been proven right by 2033… and there’s that number again.

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The Worst Form of Government

I’m not certain that democracy is definitely the worst form of government. Certainly, representative democracy is making a powerful claim to the title, and it’s true that the more the franchise expands, the worse the elected governments get. But it is certainly a lot easier to understand why the American Founding Fathers were so skeptical of the concept and determined to limit it.

This review of Dr. Fadi Lama’s book, WHY THE WEST CAN’T WIN, certainly makes it look worth reading:

Westerners have almost uniformly come to live under democracies. Drawing on both Republican Roman experience and the traditions of Greece, Cicero believed that democracy was one of the worst forms of governance possible, along with tyranny and oligarchy. Thomas Jefferson, in his own interesting way, expressed a similar sentiment. Listen to any Clown World heathen, like fake US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and within two or three minutes some platitude about democracy will be incanted with sacred solemnity. Lama masterfully walks his readers through the history of the Money Powers-driven West and the Powers’ absolute obsession with democracy. He exposes the clear pattern of the ruin of nations by eliminating religious and nationalistic controls and replacing them with democratic perversions, degeneracy, and usury. The end result, in France, America, or India, is a form of slavery and societal pillaging. That is why all attempts to democratize government, such as the US’s 17th Amendment, allowing for the supposedly “free” popular election of Senators, act to subvert freedom, prosperity, and true representation of and for the people. Lama mathematically demonstrates, on page 88, that “from a socioeconomic standpoint, democracy is the worse form of governance throughout history. That is natural, as it was made by the Money Powers for the Money Powers.”

As much as the book is a warning to those who need it and might hear it, it is equally an optimistic appraisal of where the majority of humanity stands moving forward in this century. In between and all around, a history is woven—from the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, through the horrors of the Enlightenment, across the financial capitalistic terror of Bretton Woods, ending with the emergence of multipolarity. Lama nicely sums up the where-we-are-now as follows, from page 20: “The current global geopolitical clash is in essence a struggle between the colonial powers wishing to preserve the Bretton Woods system that facilitates siphoning the wealth of nations and sovereign nations striving for independence and an end to a millennium of their oppression.”

The irony is that true democracy, in which citizen referendums are neither limited by elected representatives nor judiciaries, appear to be considerably better than the representative systems designed to fix the problems of mob rule. Indeed, as the Western “democracies” increasingly crumble under the mass invasions of the global south and east, history’s verdict may well be that democracy, at least in its limited and representative mode, is not a sustainable form of government.

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Stumbling Toward 2033

Simplicius explains his perspective on the decline and fall of Clown World:

The general gist though of what’s happening now is that the world is hurtling toward a nexus point, a sort of singularity moment, because the entire 20th century’s worth of hyper-financialized “capitalism” has reached a near-breaking point.

The type of system in the West relies on parasitism and labor theft to keep its own luxurious standards afloat, as well as mediate the endless debt expansion and ever-ballooning inflation. They needed globalism to do this, as globalism allowed a new form of parasitizing the rest of the world by smudging out economic borders between countries and creating a predatory pipeline enabling the “too big to fail” corporations and banks in the West to keep themselves afloat by increasingly robbing the rest of the world via offshoring and other globalist techniques.

The problem is, that too has come to its end, as most developing nations like China have reached a level where it’s no longer profitable to use them for slave labor, and infact they’re in turn becoming so powerful that they threaten to form new economic blocs that could entirely usurp the Western money cabal’s rule of the globe.

One of the ways the West has been kept afloat is via the anchor of the U.S. dollar, which was made possible by secret coercive deals with all vassals to prop it up by way of purchasing U.S. government treasuries and bonds—in short, financing all U.S. debt.

But now that too has reached its limit as China and other traditional purchasers are no longer buying, and are in fact dumping, the treasuries. This is leading to a point of no return, where the entire Western financial system has no way out, no further quick “saves” like before.

In the past, they used several emergency stopgap measures to buy themselves a few more years of time. The financial crash of 2008 was the first crack heralding the end of the system. They pumped trillions upon trillions to keep the system afloat, but by the 2020s it was obvious time was running out and final collapse was again close. So they panicked and rolled out the Covid hoax to save the system one final time. Under cover of the Covid falseflag, they managed to sneak another few massive trillions into the system to get a last few precious years.

But now they’ve run out of options. Only the final tried and true method could save them: instigate some type of global war/conflict, which is mostly why they provoked the Ukrainian conflict at the time they did, after years of it being frozen.

As you said, things are now moving at breakneck speeds and the power elite are hanging by a thread, as they’re being assailed and losing on almost every front: from social media, where they’ve failed to stop the onslaught of ‘truth’ destroying most of their fake “Fact-Checking” fronts and Ministry of Truth attempts (Nina Jankowicz, etc.); to the global geopolitical flashpoints where they’re besieged, from Ukraine to the MidEast; to the Covid and “Climate Change” hoaxes, which are taking a beating in the public forum; the ‘paradigms’ are crashing all around.

Now I believe hyperinflation has truly begun in the U.S. Forget Biden’s cooked numbers, everyone who’s paying attention can see the prices for everything are skyrocketing YoY.

So where is it all leading? I believe the turmoil is only just beginning. Sure, there’s potential for a major culmination to happen by election time, or 2025, but I personally think it will drag out a bit longer both in U.S. and Europe as well.

Large new movements are growing in Europe, we’ve seen the wave of conservative and ‘right wing’ candidates sweeping many countries. The citizens are up in arms and angrier than ever, with major protests getting steadily more violent in France, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and everywhere in between. Insanely totalitarian new laws are being rolled out everywhere, from the new proposed clampdowns in Ireland, to the crazy anti-free-speech laws in Germany and the EU at large with their DSA.

There’s still far more “room for growth” in terms of the degradation and disaffectation in society. I believe this trajectory will continue for another few years, with A.I. developments adding the final ‘unpredictable’ black swan momentum which could veer everything into untold and unforeseen directions.

That’s why I don’t see a final collapse or major historic ‘events’ happening until closer toward 2030, but it’s very possible it can happen sooner.

What I find fascinating is the way in which what was deemed impossible and borderline insane when I first pointed out the observable trajectory back in 2004 gradually became conceivable in the late 2010s and is now increasingly becoming seen to be inevitable in the early 2020s. That doesn’t mean I was correct, of course, as even the seemingly inevitable is only a probability, but it is rather fascinating to see the way public opinion has shifted so massively over the last two decades.

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An Army of Gammas

The US Army’s strange recruiting tactics make a lot more sense once you realize it probably isn’t mobilizing for a war with a near-peer military like China or Russia, but rather, in preparation for the large-scale violent suppression of civilians:

Do you remember when the testosterone-driven “Top Gun” was the ultimate recruitment tool for the US Navy? It’s easy to see why—the movie was packed with adrenaline, rugged men, beautiful women, and plenty of what’s now termed “toxic masculinity.” Contrast that with today’s military, which has totally shifted focus. Instead of seeking out traditionally masculine men, their recruitment now heavily includes the LGBTQ community and men who wear pantyhose. This change might be why their recruitment numbers are in the toilet.

The United States military’s newest recruitment tactic is taking a really bizarre turn. Gone are the days of scouting for robust young men at gyms or high school football practices. Now, they’re adopting a different strategy: dressing up as anime characters and visiting “conventions” across the nation.

The Bolsheviks didn’t unleash an elite and well-disciplined military against the kulaks of the Ukraine. To the contrary, they unleashed a horde of coked-up gammas to steal, slaughter, and suppress the population, if the accounts of the Holodomor are even remotely accurate.

So, either the US Army has no idea what sort of young men it is going to attract by shifting its focus toward recruiting sexual deviants and “socially-awkward weirdos” or it is preparing for a very different sort of war than most people anticipate it fighting.

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The Inflation is Real

Karl Denninger observes that the government’s CPI numbers simply do not reflect the reality at the grocery store:

When I go to the grocery store the register tape — and my Quicken — says I’m spending a lot more money there. Not a couple of percent over the last 12 months, an obscene increase. Shelf prices are one thing, but actual paid prices are truth — and those involve discounts, coupons, BOGOs and similar. I, like most people, buy pretty much the same things to eat. Spending over the last 12 months is in fact up more than 30%, not 2%.

Car insurance is claimed to be up about 20% — and it is. That’s real, and everyone with a car has had to pay it. But the government also claims that health insurance has been down in price by roughly 30%. That’s nonsense, and we all know it, but there it is.

There are some who think the answer is “higher wages!” But its not; you can’t keep up any more than you can with a “roaring” stock market.

The simple reality is that you cannot have Congress emit eight percent, more or less, of the economy in newly emitted credit and not have prices go up by about 8% unless there is somewhere that absorbs it which you do not have to cover. For roughly two decades there was — the increase in global trade, most of which is settled in dollars, buffers that by temporarily capturing the money while goods are in transit.

Note however that a permanent change in trade doesn’t result in this remaining captured; it is the change in level of global trade that does that, and only while the change is taking place. We’ve offshored basically everything we can offshore at this point and thus the available increase has dwindled to essentially zero.

The problem is that during that 20 year period of time we “trained” Congress (and both political parties) that they can run 30% deficits and not have it show up as 8% inflation on a permanent basis. That’s flat-out false.

This in turn means that either we’re going to absorb about 8% inflation (no matter what the government claims), spending must come down by about 30% at the federal level and that is only to stabilize prices, not return them lower, or taxes must go up by about 40% which of course is another expense in the household and reduces disposable income. The latter is politically impossible.

How does this resolve?

Revolution and civil war cometh, if Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics are to be believed. A perfect storm is approaching for the United States, as all four structural drivers of societal instability are not only present, but appear to be at, or at least near, record historical levels.

Focus on what is important, focus on what is going to last. It’s not an accident that Castalia has shifted from ephemeral ebooks to leather books that are capable of lasting for centuries and have been assembling machinery for everything from sewing machines to leather bindings.

It’s going to be difficult. But our community is not only going to survive, it is going to thrive. Because unlike most, we have been repeatedly tested by adversity, and we are hard enough for the hard times.

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The Defunding and Decline of the Media

We’ve already reached the point that mainstream media organs require sugar daddies like Jeff Bezos, Carlos Slim Helú, and the US federal government just to operate on a reduced scale. And now that the era of free money is over, the decline is going to accelerate as more mainstream and mainstream-supported organizations fail.

​​Nearly 20,000 jobs have been eliminated across the media industry this year as premium outlets struggle to combat declining rates in ad revenue, according to Axios estimates. The report found that media companies can no longer rely on short-term capital to insulate them from ad declines because of “high interest rates and investor skepticism.” Thus, the cuts were industry-wide in 2023.

The Washington Post announced plans to offer voluntary buyouts in an attempt to cut 240 jobs. The Post has roughly 2.5 million subscribers, down from 3 million at the end of 2020. The Post is set to lose $100 million this year.

CNBC Digital cut around 20 editorial staffers last week. Vice Media Group laid off about 100 staffers this year and consolidated its businesses from five to two. G/O Media suspended Jezebel and laid off some 23 staffers.

Elsewhere, ad revenue for BuzzFeed declined 35% year-over-year. Ad revenue for Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, decreased 3%. Linear ads for television networks like CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery declined “12% on average,” per the report.

And this doesn’t even begin to account for media organizations using AI to replace hack journalists and editors. The situation presents a massive opportunity for alternative media companies that operate on a subscription model, but the challenge is to figure out what subscribers actually want/need and for which products they are willing to pay. The advertising model was always fake, it simply allowed the favored organizations to subsidize all the free viewers and thereby massively expand their influence.

It was also malinformative, as it permitted those running the propped-up organizations to believe that their businesses were sound and their products were hugely popular. But, as is so often the case with Clown World, most of that “succcess” was a manufactured and debt-inflated illusion.

So, the playing field is being levelled, to some degree, but that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily wise for any alternative organization to attempt to play on it. We’re not going to do anything right now, as we have our hands sufficiently occupied with delivering on our current projects. But it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out for future ones.

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The Scorpion’s Lament

In which a US-resident Jew on /pol/ contemplates the self-defeating consequences of his elders’ long-term plans to “destroy the white race”, turn America into “an idea nation” and “a melting pot”, and “transform Europe into a multicultural mode”, and concludes that perhaps the results were not, in the end, desirable.

Have you ever played a video game where the Al just sat there and did nothing while you took it apart methodically?

We “won” in a game that nobody else was playing because they did not think anyone would be stupid enough to do so. Our” victory”? We killed our host, the survivors will hate us, they will eat us because we look white, the muslims will exterminate us the moment our goy slaves become too weak to protect us. not to mention we are giving the muslims nuclear weapons by giving them France and England.

Our daughters misceginate or are whores, my favorite niece married a “jewish” black who was 20 years older than her. She lived in a mixed-race neighborhood, her house was the only one that did not look like trash because she tried, ended up divorced with a half-black kid. Breaks my heart.

Brother is incel, can’t find a wife because all women are whores, almost all the men in the extended family are ruined, either marrying roasties or failing to marry at all. And why? Because the weapons we set on the goy cattle also affected us.

So yay, we “won” by default because nobody else was dumb enough to try for a game of lets destroy civilization, our victory is such that our host species is going extinct due to our actions, and the only two paths forwards are:

  1. whites finally wake up and kill us all
  2. whites finally die out and the blacks eat us for being white

Great victory.

Some on /pol/ have suggested that this lament is too self-aware to be genuine, but in the light of current events in the Middle East, I see no reason to assume that the average individual of modest intelligence, of any race or ethnicity, who would prefer to live in some reasonable approximation of civilized European culture, cannot observe that the consequences of the Kalergi Plan, or the Lerner-Spectre Plan, or the Celler Plan, all of which amount to exactly the same thing, have been utterly disastrous for everyone, including the descendants of those who originally conceived those evil plans and enacted them.

From a historical point of view, this shouldn’t be a surprise. In six thousand years of recorded history, there have only been a limited number of great civilizations, which collectively make up a very small percentage of the total number of peoples and societies across world history. And the preferences, customs, traditions, and laws of most societies are observably not capable of creating or sustaining any form of civilization, let alone one that approaches the heights of Western European civilization circa 1800 – 1950.

Everyone likes the idea of being in charge, in theory. Everyone likes the idea of his tribe being on top, and in possession of the reins of power. The problem is that not everyone is capable of successfully being in charge. This is why it is so important to be careful what you wish for. Because you just might get it.

In addition to the time to civilization requirement that has been previously pointed out here on this blog, there is also a dyscivilizational values problem. No civilization that comes to be dominated by individuals from a society with dyscivilizational values can sustain itself in a functional manner over time. The more that Western Civilization is influenced by non-Christian, non-European people from societies that never successfully established their own civilizations and with values that contradict the historical values of Western civilization, the more likely it is that the resulting societal structure will not transition into a post-Western civilization with post-Western values as expected, but rather, collapse entirely into a post-civilized state.

Atheists such as Richard Dawkins have already discovered that post-Christian society is worse for atheists than Christian society ever was. Both internal and external foes of the West will almost certainly come to the same conclusion in time.

There is an older version of the Russian tale of the scorpion and the frog. In the Persian tale, which dates back to 1487, the scorpion is riding the back of a turtle. Unlike the frog, the turtle survives the scorpion’s sting due to its hard shell, tells the scorpion that it is wicked, and drowns it in order to prevent the scorpion from harming anyone else.

So, this naturally tends to raise the question, which civilized societies are frogs and which are turtles?

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Norman Rockwell Paints Clown World

The demonic nature of Clown World can perhaps best be seen when shown in stark contrast to the ideal 1950s America that was portrayed by the great American painter. The weaponized autists of /pol/ have harnessed the power of AI image creation to illustrate the extent of the sin-drenched abomination that is today’s post-American Clown World. Below is just one of many vivid examples.

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