Tag: decline and fall

Post-Democracy in Pakistan

As in the USA, the Pakistani government has forgotten that the primary benefit of representative democracy is avoiding violent partisan battles led by political leaders driven to hold on to power for fear of being punished after the fact:

All hell is breaking loose in Pakistan, amid fears there could be a slide into widescale civil unrest or even full-blown civil war, after on Tuesday the former Prime Minister Imran Khan was arrested and taken into police custody while he was entering the Islamabad High Court for a hearing in a case.

The 70-year-old cricketer-turned-politician has been pursued in court filings by Pakistan’s anti-corruption agency, but the dramatic move to actually detain Khan is a huge and unprecedented escalation, threatening to unleash mayhem in the streets of the nuclear-armed country.

His party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), immediately called for mass protests, which quickly exploded across multiple cities and in front police and military locations, including in the capital Islamabad, but also in Lahore, Karachi, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan, Peshawar, and Mardan – according to international reports.

Viral images and video of Khan being escorted by security forces in riot control gear and whisked away in an armored van are fueling anger in the streets. A government statement has said the arrest was “for the crime of corruption”.

According to Al Jazeera, “Khan has been slapped with more than 100 cases – including corruption, ‘terrorism’ and even blasphemy – since he was removed from power last April through a parliamentary vote of no confidence.”

The fact that most of the people around the world are very ill-suited for even modestly democratic forms of government when not forced to abide by them by an external power is rapidly becoming inescapable to even the most casual observer.

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The Clowns Know Collapse is Nigh

Whether you read Clown World’s intellectuals, pay attention to the statements by its military leaders, or read the statements by its economic directors, the one thing that is very clear is that all of the leading clowns are highly aware of the probability that Clown World is going to collapse, most likely in a sudden and catastrophic manner. What’s fascinating is the way in which they have literally nothing to offer in response to the situation except bromides about “cooperation” and pathetic appeals to “working together” at a time when the rest of the world has all but openly declared war on the new liberal rules-based democratic world order, or whatever it is calling itself today.

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the world is on the edge of geo-economic fragmentation, which she believes could add more “cold water” to already anemic global growth. Speaking by video-link at the Brussels Economic Forum on Wednesday, Kristalina Georgieva called for cooperation at a time when growth across the globe is extremely weak by historical standards.

“After decades of increasing global integration, there is a growing risk that the world may split into rival economic blocs,” the IMF chief said. “And that’s a scenario that would be bad for everyone, including for people in Europe.”

She warned that growth prospects were increasingly bleak at a time when the global outlook is weak both in the near and medium term. The IMF projects growth to remain around 3% over the next five years, the lowest medium-term forecast in more than three decades.

“And yet, central bankers cannot take their eyes off the ball until stubborn inflation is firmly under control,” Georgieva pointed out. “The required monetary tightening is weighing on growth and exposing some financial vulnerabilities.”

Reviving multilateral cooperation is vital for long-term growth everywhere, according to the official, who warned that trade fragmentation could cost up to 7% to the global economy in the long term. That’s “roughly equivalent to the combined annual output of Germany and Japan,” she said, adding that some nations could see GDP losses of up to 12% if technological decoupling is added.

I expect that the economies of the occupied West are going to shrink considerably more than 12 percent. Remember, in the Great Depression, “industrial production in the United States declined 47 percent and real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 30 percent.” And this is a bigger, more permanent contraction that has been underway since 2008, so a peak-to-trough decline of around 50 percent would not be out of line.

The reality is that we will probably never know the true extent of the economic contraction in the USA, because a) the statistics are as fake and gay as everything else in Clown World and b) the USA is not going to survive as a unitary political entity so no one will be calculating the relevant statistics required for the comparison.

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The Death of Cities

And dancing around the obvious. Sarah Hoyt has an interesting piece on the decline of the major US cities that somehow manages to avoid a single reference to the causal factor:

Despite the fact that in the late 20th century we were all taught — or imbibed through entertainment — that the future was the megalopolis, and that in the future everyone lived in cities, the future has taken a sharp u-turn, and what we’re looking at is quite different.

We are standing, staring in awed horror, as cities take themselves apart. It seems Detroit was the foretelling of destiny for the American cities, the inescapable future. But in the end it’s not even Detroit. It’s the way of those enigmatic ruins found in the middle of nowhere, where you look at them and say “Who were they? Why did they build this? And why did they leave it?”

Why did they leave it in the first half of the 21st century is readily answerable: crime, malfeasance, bureaucrat hatred of those they govern, making the cities unlivable. Who will stay to be abused when they could live anywhere?

And that’s the second part, the sting in the tail of what’s happening: the seekers of knowledge, the setters of culture, those who make and break things do not need to live in the city anymore.

While Hoyt has finally come to terms, more or less, with the fact that she is not an American despite her acceptance of many American ideals, apparently it is still too emotionally painful to point out that the reason for the death of the cities is that white people, particularly white Americans, do not wish to live around black people or under immigrant rule.

And these days, living in a major city requires both.

She correctly notes that the major cities are now unliveable, but the reasons that she provides are merely consequences of the real reasons. Detroit was 91 percent white in 1940, with a population of 1,623,452. In 2020, the city was 11 percent white, with a population of 639,111. This demographic change is not the result of “crime, malfeasance, and bureaucratic hatred”, but rather the cause of it.

That same process is already taking place in the suburbs and smaller cities. The problem is that in the USA, Europe, and Australia, there is nowhere else to go. And once there is nowhere further for whites to retreat, the empire will collapse in violence, if it has not already for other reasons.

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Et tu, Argentina?

Argentina abandons the dollar in favor of the yuan for trade with China:

Argentina will aim to pay for the bulk of its monthly imports from China in yuan rather than US dollars, Economy Minister Sergio Massa announced on Wednesday. Buenos Aires and Beijing signed a currency swap agreement last year, aimed at stemming the outflow of foreign currency from Argentina’s central bank.

China is currently Argentina’s second largest trade partner after Brazil, and the second biggest destination for Argentinian exports. Argentina’s total imports from China was around $13.5bn in 2021, according to the United Nations database on international trade.

Massa said that Buenos Aires will pay the equivalent of $1 billion in yuan for Chinese goods and services this month, with $790 million of monthly imports paid for in yuan each month thereafter. The currency swap agreement, expanded and finalized earlier this year, also allows Argentinian exporters to make settlements in yuan or dollars, to help balance the flows of foreign currencies in the central bank.

Even the neoclown Robert Kagan warned of the potential consequences for the neoliberal world order if the USA were to abuse its privileged position, which it generally avoided doing between 1945 and 2020.

The success of the order, however, also depended on the United States abiding by some basic rules. Chief among these was that it not exploit the system it dominated to gain lasting economic advantages at the expense of the other powers in the order. Put simply, it could not use its military dominance to win the economic competition against fellow members of the order, nor could it treat the economic competition as a zero-sum game and insist on always winning.

The Jungle Grows Back, Robert Kagan, 2019

The decision to weaponize the dollar in lieu of challenging Russia directly in a military context may prove to be one of the more catastrophic errors in the history of empires. Astute historians such as Victor Davis Hanson have for some time been wondering exactly when, and where, the Imperial USA’s Syracuse moment of imperial overstretch would take place; in The Father of Us All, published in 2010, VDH argued that the Iraq War was not likely to be a serious candidate for the Moment.

Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).

However, it increasingly appears that the attempt to control Russia using the leash of the dollar reserve system may have marked that long-anticipated Moment, as dropping its economic neutrality and putting pressure on the rest of the participants in the global economy in order to pressure Russia into withdrawing from Crimea and the Donbass, then doubling down on that mistake by financing the Kiev regime’s war appears to have been even more devastating to the neoliberal world order than an invasion of India.

UPDATE: The Global Times expresses China’s belief that de-dollarization is not merely desirable, but inevitable.

One of the most direct reasons behind the global de-dollarization trend is that the US has been increasingly weaponizing US dollar hegemony to impose economic sanctions as well as political repression. For instance, key Russia banks have been excluded from the SWIFT system, a service that facilitates global transactions among thousands of financial institutions.

What’s perhaps more surprising – and potentially worrying for Washington – is how expensive and scarce offshore US dollars are becoming. As the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes hit global financial systems, an increasing amount of foreign capital flowed back to the US, leading to a global US dollar shortage. The US’ interest rate hikes and the resulting shortage of US dollars serve as another important factor driving more countries to push for a quicker pace of de-dollarization.

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US Life Expectancy Declines

So much for the myth of inevitable progress. Even the most-retarded conservatives are beginning to consider the possibility that the dirt may not be not magic.

Years of widening economic inequality, compounded by the pandemic and political storm and stress, have given Americans the impression that the country is on the wrong track. Now there’s empirical data to show just how far the country has run off the rails: Life expectancies have been falling.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that life expectancy at birth fell in 2021 to its lowest level since 1996, a decline of nearly a year on average from 2020. That was after a decline by 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, producing the worst two-year decline since 1921-23….

The factors contributing to America’s decline in life expectancies could point to a decline in its international stature.

Although wealthy countries as a group suffered a fall in longevity during the pandemic, the discrepancy between life expectancies in the U.S. and its closest cohorts has been widening for decades. In 1995, U.S. life expectancy was about six months less than those of high-income countries; by 2020 it was about three years, according to the World Bank.

In 1995, the U.S. had a commanding lead over China, which was about 5 1/2 years behind the U.S.; China then roared ahead, outstripping the U.S. in 2020, when its average life expectancy clocked in at 78.08 years, compared with America’s 77.28.

The mass vaxx campaign is going to contribute to declining life expectancies around the world, but that’s merely one of the significant factors. The fact that the USA is now a minority-European country means that its average quality of life is also going to more closely approximate the global norm.

A society is necessarily either eugenic or dysgenic. And adopting policies that are anti-eugenic is similar to adopting anti-racist policies, since societal degradation is the inevitable, mathematically-guaranteed result in either case for any society that is above average.

The wages of sin are death. And the wages of intellectual inversion are decline.

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The Inevitable Math

The astonishing thing isn’t that this was allowed to happen. We all know why it happened. The astonishing thing is that there are still Boomers who sincerely believe that the USA of 2023 is essentially the same thing as the USA of 1973. But it isn’t.

This doesn’t merely have significant implications for one’s quality of life or the political demographics or the societal infrastructure, it has massive implications for the military capabilities of the US armed forces. As the US no longer has a European military or a powerful manufacturing industry, it no longer possesses the comparative advantages it previously had.

Exactly how much its performance has been degraded is not possible to say, but the demographic changes indicate that the 2020s US military will probably not perform as well as the 1970s US military did. And the early evidence out of Afghanistan and Ukraine tends to support that hypothesis.

With regards to the fate of the country and its population, there are three possible outcomes. And none of them can be reasonably described as either positive or pleasant.

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He’s Not Wrong

Joe Biden is correct. Transgender Americans are absolutely shaping what passes for the “nation’s” diseased and adulterated soul today. And there is worse to come. It appears that God has abandoned Americans to the fate that was chosen when we permitted the overtly anti-Christian servants of Satan to enter the USA en masse and rule over us.

There is a reason the Bible refers repeatedly to deception and warns Christians against permitting themselves to be deceived. Sadly, 20th Century Americans were more concerned about being praised for welcoming those all those poor refugees and huddled masses who never done nothing to nobody.

Welcome to the Melting Pot. It’s not so nice when they turn up the heat, is it?

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If the Dollar is Their Superpower

Then their global hegemony is rapidly coming to an end:

The dollar is America’s superpower. It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.

Sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine combined with Washington’s increasingly confrontational approach to China have created a perfect storm in which both Russia and China are accelerating efforts to diversify away from the dollar. Their central banks are keeping less of their reserves in dollars, and most trade between them is being settled in the yuan. They are also, as Putin noted, making efforts to get other countries to follow suit…

America’s politicians have gotten used to spending seemingly without any concerns about deficits — public debt has risen almost fivefold from roughly $6.5 trillion 20 years ago to $31.5 trillion today. The Fed has solved a series of financial crashes by massively expanding its balance sheet twelvefold, from around $730 billion 20 years ago to about $8.7 trillion today. All of this only works because of the dollar’s unique status. If that wanes, America will face a reckoning like none before.

The decline of the US financial superweapon will be exacerbated by the emergence of China as a financial safe harbor, at least for those who have not spent the last decade attacking it or attempting to subvert it.

The unfolding banking crisis in the US and Europe could highlight China as a “relative safe haven,” economists at Citi said in a note seen by CNBC. The Chinese economy could see accelerated expansion this year, giving the country a “hedge” for growth while economies in the US and Europe face heightened risk of financial disruption, according to the note.

It’s going to be interesting. That’s the only thing we can know for certain. And both one’s investment and consumption should be directed toward hard assets that will hold their value regardless of price levels.

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America is not Byzantium

VDH contemplates the similarities between two dying empires:

The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they themselves no longer earned. They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.

They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered, Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.

Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, the Byzantines inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.

The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naive. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.

The difference is that America was conquered from within by foreigners who have ruled over the natives, and ruled disastrously, in their own short-sighted and self-perceived interests. But America was always doomed due to its foolish, though understandable in the circumstances, adoption of civic nationalism in the place of the real thing.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the decline and fall of the United States, it is that a nation cannot be artificially manufactured from diverse elements. There was never any need to “divide and conquer” the USA because division was built into the USA from the very start. “Show up and conquer” was sufficient.

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