The sulferous skies of New York City, June 2023. Activision must have had quite the marketing budget for Diablo IV.
Hell on Earth 2023
Tag: decline and fall
Ghost Town San Francisco
The City by the Bay continues to die:
The owner of two of San Francisco’s largest hotels has stopped making mortgage payments on the properties and will let them go into foreclosure as historic crime rates continue to deter tourists.
Park Hotels and Resorts announced on Monday that it stopped making payments on its $725 million loan due in November for the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 — the largest and fourth-largest hotels in the city, respectively.
‘After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market,’ CEO Thomas Baltimore Jr said in a statement.
‘Now, more than ever we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges — both old and new’ as the city becomes a ghost town with empty storefronts.
Out of 203 retailers open in 2019 in the city’s Union Square area, just 107 are still operating, a drop of 47 percent in just a few pandemic-ravaged years.
Among the heavy hitters, Brooks Brothers, Ray Ban, Christian Louboutin, Lululemon and Marmot have all packed it in.
Another 12 new retailers have opened in the area since the pandemic began in 2020 but already two have them have either closed or plan to shut down.
Williams-Sonoma also announced it will shut down in 2024.
San Francisco is a harbinger of the urban US future. Few US cities combine extremes of ideology, diversity, and immigration in as perfect a mixture as San Francisco. Just as Detroit is the poster city for pure vibrancy, San Francisco is the poster city for left-wing ideals. And it is demonstrating, in real-time, the inevitable consequences of those ideals.
Omitting the Obvious
Peter Turchin is doing some valuable work analyzing the whys and wherefores of societal breakdowns:
All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.
These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.
The U.S. has gone through this twice before. The first time ended in civil war. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it.
However, being an immigrant, he naturally averts his eyes from one obvious contributing factor. It’s not an accident that the periods in which the crises were created were periods of high immigration, and it’s also not an accident that the way in which the second crisis was averted was during a time of very strict limits on immigration.
And since there is no appetite whatsoever for reversing the mass foreign invasion of the USA, there will be no fixing the current dysfunction.
Four Generations of Demoralization
The demonic degradation and demoralization of the USA appears to have reached a nadir with the Zoomers.
Gen X is a bit harder to figure out, they mainly seem to just try to “go away” and live their lives as if no one else exists. The most generational expression I get out of them seems to revolve around boomer tier “our childhood was rough and tumble” yet they remember it fondly.
They’ll always remind you that they were “latchkey kids” and that their childhoods were filled with rampant divorce etc, yet they say it with pride. They reflect on their childhoods as hard (like boomers) but with reverence (like millennials)
But I think the singular thing that comes from all of this, is that the last 4 generations are very preoccupied with bracing themselves in various ways, like sailors on a ship in a storm. Protecting themselves from the “hurt” of addressing our present circumstances.
There isn’t a fundamental aspect of the zeitgeist of any of them that is focused on actually fixing any of it though. All of us are preserving what we have or battening down the hatches to weather the storm we’re in, which looks to get worse. But at the macro level generational zeitgeist, no one is planning a mutiny in order to steer the ship around the storm, or to turn around and head back to less choppy waters. As a civilization none of our generations have any widespread will to power.
Gen X isn’t that hard to figure out when seen in the proper perspective. We enjoyed our childhoods, for the most part, but because we’d never known anything different, it wasn’t until we became parents ourselves that we realized how insane they were and how little our parents were interested in us and our children compared to a) our grandparents interest in us and b) our own interest in our children.
Furthermore, unlike the two following generations, we know all too well what has been lost. We had the very good fortune to grow up in a mostly homogenous European civilization of the sort that no longer exists even in Europe anymore. That’s what we miss much more than our youth.
My expectation is that a Gen X leader with Zoomer followers is most likely Western civilization’s best hope for a pathway out of this nightmare. And as the madness of Clown World rises and becomes more and more obvious to the average individual of every generation, the likelihood of various potential candidates rising to the historical occasion increases.
The World They Knew is Gone
Kurt Schlichter explains why conservatives are intellectually and emotionally unequipped to deal with the realities of the world today:
Conservatives, being conservative, like to think they live in an ordered world with norms and rules and that if they rely upon the norms and rules, they will be protected. They won’t be. The genius of cultural Marxism is how it attacks those foundational premises that conservatives believe in, perverts them, and then uses them as a suppository on the befuddled cons…
And now we have the sham system of today. But dumb cons cannot comprehend that systems only function if all the cogs are working correctly. If one component is flawed – like a leftist DA pursuing a specific agenda – you stop having a system. But dumb cons do not want to accept that the justice system has been corrupted so that there is no justice system anymore. They seek the false comfort of illusory normalcy so they do not have to face the ugly reality.
Get it through your thick squish heads – there is no justice system to preserve or protect anymore.
The past is history. The fallen world is what it is. They say that you can’t go home again, and that is particularly true in a societal sense. The USA of 2023 is not the USA of 1950, or even 1980. What was once normal is no more. Those who are civilizationists, those who are Christians, those who are committed to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, need to recognize that the USA is now the center of The Empire That Never Ended.
We are no longer the culture. We are no longer the society. We are now the counter-culture and the minority. Adjust your expectations and analyses accordingly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.