Tag: decline and fall

Biden as Valens

Martin Armstrong draws a historical parallel:

My phone has been in meltdown ever since Trump was arrested… EVERY phone call I have had from Asia to Europe, they are all expressing complete shock that the United States is collapsing and they are now all seeing that our forecast that the 2024 Presidential Election would be the most corrupt in history and market the END of democracy in the United States.

These people just do not get it, they crossed the line and now the view of the United States from the outside looking in, they no longer believe that America is the beacon of liberty to the world. It is becoming so obvious that our computer will be right again. I warned it even was showing that the 2024 election might not even take place. That was a small 18% probability, but that NEVER came up EVER in this history of running our political models – NEVER!

This year, 2023, was a MAJOR Directional Change that was showing up in both the LEFT & the RIGHT databases. The year 2025 is when a president would take office in January. This has been the #1 target on our political models for decades. The NEOCONS are in full control of the government. There is no way to stop the collapse of the United States at this point. Nobody will listen and there is nothing I can do. People often ask what if people protested? We will never realize the opportunity to reestablish a new form of government post-2032 without the pain and destruction first.

During the Reign of Valentinian I and his brother, Valens, who came to power in 364AD where Valentinian I died in 375 and Valens ruled into 378, there are serious correlations from both and economic and monetary perspective. They too saw their power weakening so they allowed the Goths to cross the Danube and settle within Roman territory provided they would also then serve in the Roman military. This is what is really behind Biden allowing all these people to flood in through the border. What they do not realize, is that history repeats as Biden grants citizenship in return for military service. The Neocons want to build an army to defeat China and Russia simultaneously.

We all know what happens when you don’t sink the ships. Eventually, the barbarians take over the government. In 2004, when I first predicted the collapse of the USA as a political entity in 2033, the prediction was seen as an utter absurdity. Now, it’s not looking crazy at all.

We’ll know it was dead on when people start denying that I could possibly have seen it coming three decades in advance. But history always rhymes, and the patterns are there for those with the education and the wherewithal to read them.

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Banking in Yuan

Russian banks are openly discussing settlements in the Chinese currency:

The hegemony of the US dollar is seriously challenged by the rise of the Chinese yuan and by Washington’s failed attempt to wreck the Russian economy by weaponizing the greenback, Andrey Kostin, head of Russia’s banking major VTB, told Reuters on Friday.

The major banking figure said that under the current geopolitical circumstances more and more nations are shifting away from trade settlements in dollar and euro, while China is moving towards removal of strict currency policies.

“The long historical era of the dominance of the American dollar is coming to an end,” Kostin said, in an interview with the news agency. “I think that the time has come when China will gradually remove currency restrictions.”

According to Kostin, VTB has been discussing using the Chinese national currency in settlements with third countries.

US Dollar hegemony was always based on US military supremacy which began with the security of the US industrial homeland and was secured by the physical destruction of all of its potential economic rivals from 1939-1941. But now that Clown World is collapsing under the weight of its incoherencies, that global military supremacy has devolved to the mere regional superiority of a traditional Great Power, as evidenced by the recent failures of its proxies in Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

And that is a very, very different game than global monopower.

My expectation is that the political structure of the USA will fail before most Americans recognize the extent to which the global balance of power has changed.

UPDATE: The Chinese are directly targeting the US film industry as well.

China Film Association released professional ethics convention for film practitioners, vowing firm opposition to tax evasion, pornography, gambling and drugs.

The association published the convention on its WeChat account on Thursday, saying that the move is aimed to further strengthen the construction of professional ethics of film workers and the construction of film industry style in order to create a clean environment for the Chinese film industry and contribute to building China into a country with a strong socialist culture.

The convention called on Chinese film practitioners to stick to loving the country and the people and to firmly oppose any remark or behavior attempting to split the country, destroy national unity, damage social harmony and stability or infringe people’s interests.

It requires film practitioners to comply with the laws and regulations on environmental protection, cultural relics protection and production safety at filming sites; resolutely resist tax evasion, pornography, gambling and drugs.

It also expresses opposition against violating behaviors like exorbitant pay, ghostwriting by gunmen, malicious hype, fake box office and illegal reprinting, and calls on the industry to abandon abnormal aesthetics.

Translation from the original Mandarin: No more Disney films in China.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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