Tag: decline and fall

The Folly of Ukraine

Karl Denninger explains how the imperial USA’s interventionist foreign policy is leading up to a Syracuse moment for the US empire:

It was only a matter of time before our so-called foreign policy turned into a serious problem with someone who can punch back.

For decades the United States has arrogated to itself the capacity to tell other nations who they should have as leaders. Who must run said nation, and who may not. The alliances that are to be coddled, and those that are forbidden. This is preposterous, of course, in that national sovereignty is precisely that, yet we have for decades believed we have the “righteous authority” to issue such diktat.

The CIA has toppled some 50 governments over time. Some more-or-less openly, some on the down low. Iran is an infamous one that ultimately blew up in our face. Deciding that the Iranian government was unacceptable because it expropriated the property of a British company, not even a US concern, we interfered, toppled the government and installed the Shah. This ultimately led to the Iranian revolution and the seizure of hostages at our Embassy, never mind a whole bunch of other terrorism.

We are very anti-narcotic and anti-serious drug — except, of course, when the use of the money generated suits us. Then its “oh well” or “oh, that’s sad”, even if the people that die from said drugs are in the United States, and they often are. Oliver North and the cocaine trade that was at the center of Iran-Contra anyone?

The United States was the initiator of events that led to the war in Ukraine. We were fully behind the overthrow of the government there back at the time of Maidan less than a decade ago. Said government was incorrigible, but that’s none of our business, right up until it apparently is and someone gets a wild hair in their backside about where someone’s using the money — or really, really likes the idea of being able to launder some as a US interest. Anything that gets in the way of that is, of course, unacceptable.

But for Maidan there would be no war in Ukraine. But for our continued attempts to do what we did with Turkey and missiles right near Russia there would have been no Cuban missile incident either. Yes, that was a crisis, but it was our making — not the USSR’s. Would you sit back and let some foreign nation put nuclear missiles in Mexico within a few minutes flight time of LA?

Didn’t think so.

Fundamentally the Ukraine problem lies there.

His analysis is correct, although I consider it to be partial and historically incomplete. Here is my not-unrelated perspective: the US empire, like most late-stage empires, is currently run by foreigners who have obtained power and influence through words, money, and the naivete of the native people. Those foreign rulers are now in the process of discovering the massive difference of being a parasite on another people and actually being responsible for all the various challenges of governing a major world power.

Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

It should be no surprise that the endeavor is going about as well as it did for the adopted gamma child who is suddenly given responsibility to provide for and protect the entire neighborhood. The challenge is not just beyond his abilities, it is beyond his imagination. And now the people who have never successfully managed a single state the size of Delaware are intentionally seeking direct conflict with the oldest and most successful civilization on Earth as well as with the second-greatest military power in human history.

The odds are not good.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Cupboard is Bare

Germany’s Defense Minister publicly admits that Germany is totally incapable of defending itself against military attack.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius claimed on Monday that the country’s army isn’t prepared to protect the nation against military aggression. The minister made the remarks during a meeting with fellow members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

“We have no armed forces that are capable of defending [the country], that is, capable of defending [it] against an offensive, brutally waged aggressive war,” Pistorius said.

The minister said the Bundeswehr is understaffed and under-equipped after decades of neglect from the federal government. Pistorius added that Germany would have to invest much more in its military in order to be up to NATO standards.

Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, the commander and highest ranking officer of the German army, told the DPA press agency on Sunday that the €100 billion previously promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz would not be enough to make the country’s armed forces battle ready. He further added that “the army that I have the duty to lead is more or less bare.”

It appears NATO has succeeded in at least two parts of its mandate, which was keeping the Germans down and the USA in. But while it prevented the Soviets from invading, it clearly failed to keep the Arabs and Africans from doing so.

Clown World is going to crash so hard that it’s hard to even try to formulate an opinion about what is going to come next. There is absolutely no point in history that decadent and unarmed nations have ever fared well against the barbarians who decide to take their land, their women, and their gold.

If, by this point, you haven’t figured out that all of the ideologies of Clown World, both left and right, are intrinsically destructive, you simply aren’t paying attention. The cult of freedom and capitalism is every bit as satanic and self-contradictory as the coven of feminism and centralized control.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Premier Fake Science Journal

The “science” published in this journal doesn’t even rise to the coin-flip level of professional peer-reviewed scientific publications:

Research scientists and doctors are always looking for grants. Not only so they have a job for themselves, but often can get funding for a place to live and transportation and if you string enough of them together from some very high end donors, you can live really well. The thing is those big donors all have pet causes, so you have to be able to match yourself with one of their causes and then make sure the big donor sees it. The donor wants to see that you have done the work. You also need to make sure your research fits what the donor wants to see to write the big check. Many times, the donor can be a big business who would like another business to be put out of business. If it can be done with some splashy research, that is scientifically backed and looks plausible, all the better. Then, the one big business can send out press releases talking about why some product is awful and then come in a week later with another press release about where consumers should go to spend their money.

The scientists and doctors need a publication that is willing to publish some really shaky science so the doctors can go to the donors and say look at this. We are published in this magazine that even you know. So, give us a bunch of money. The magazine has been around forever. It started as a magazine that just talked about general easy to digest science stuff for the general public and was sold on newsstands. Over the years, it has become more tailored to the scientific crowd. Most of you know the name of the magazine, especially if you were around when it came out and was sold everywhere. Now, it just takes huge amounts of money from businesses and scientists to publish poorly done research papers that most of the time are inherently flawed, but they make ten times what they ever did when it was just for sale as a regular magazine.

The magazine appears to be Scientific American, which rather like the old chestnut about the Holy Roman Empire, is neither scientific nor American these days. But it could just as easily be describing Popular Science, which is now equally devoid of genuine science. UPDATE: Or Nature, which also appears to be a candidate.

The New Atheists always failed to understand the relationship between religion and science. Not only is there no inherent conflict between religion and science, but increasingly, Christianity is proving to be an absolute requirement for science that can be successfully replicated.

DISCUSS ON SG

Rare and Expensive

The US federal government is spending more than $250,000 apiece to create fake white supremacists:

They eventually offered me three options. One, I get to stay in the Marines, but I have to work for them wherever I get stationed as a confidential informant. They were prepared to offer me a quarter of a million dollars as a sign-on bonus. To be a rat,” he explained. “They said that if I chose to stay in the Marines, they would want me looking for and joining ‘terror cells’ within the corps.”

“The second option was I get kicked out of the Marines, but I get on their payroll to work for them wherever I go in the civilian world. They said they wanted me to join groups. As many as I could. They mentioned Patriot Front, active clubs, and even something called Atomwaffen by name. They wanted me to look for evidence of violence and extremism. The third option was nothing. I get kicked out and that was it.”

When the Justice Report asked Kaltenbach what his response was to an offer of $250,000 dollars, the Marine private replied, “I told them to get f—ed. I felt like I was trapped in the room and couldn’t leave, so I just started to shut down.” But despite his refusal, the FBI, according to Kaltenbach, kept trying to coerce him.

“Be on team America, be on our side, and help us. Right now, you’re probably 50% team America, but we need you to come over the edge and be 100% team America,” said Kaltenbach, explaining the way federal agents attempted to use Kaltenbach’s innate sense of patriotism to adopt a new life as a domestic spy.

What they now call “Team America” clearly has absolutely nothing to do with the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution anymore. The inversion is now complete.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Paper Americans

By their own tongues they condemn themselves:

At my wife’s citizenship ceremony and all of our new Americans can’t stop talking about their homelands.

They may be US citizens, but they will never be sons or daughters of the American Revolution and they will never be the Posterity whose rights the Constitution was written to acknowledge, anymore than they will be Apache, Cherokee, or Navaho.

Nation literally derives from one’s birth. Not where one was born, but to whom.

The United States is in the process of collapsing because its people bought into the lie of civic nationalism. But a civic nation is no more a nation than social justice is justice.

DISCUSS ON SG

Strategically Incapable

The USA is not only “agreement-incapable”, it is now also strategically incapable, as Reminiscence of the Future correctly observes:

You cannot explain to 99.99% of people within the Beltway what real war is, how military strategy is subordinated to the strategy of the state (meaning geopolitics in a larger sense). Lastly, you cannot explain it to the average US MSM journo or “analysts” (or “expert”) which is a euphemism for the general lack of culture and ignorance.

The war in Ukraine is reaching a new phase, and US strategy is undergoing an important shift. Fears of Russian nuclear escalation are receding as fears of a long war featuring unrelenting attrition are increasing. So President Joe Biden’s administration is ramping up support for Ukraine now in hopes of producing an eventual diplomatic resolution — an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy that may prove very difficult to execute. Nearly a year into the war, uncertainty about its course is greater than ever. For the first six months, Russia had the initiative: The major questions were when, where and with what success it would attack. Over the following five months, Ukraine had the initiative, and analysts tried to divine the location and prospects of its counteroffensives.

The United States can not do “strategy”, it never could after WW II. It took SMO to expose utter incompetence of the US “elites” with all their military, diplomatic and academic institutions. It is a parade of the ambitious amateurs who are no good for any serious task of statesmanship, despite all their hefty fraudulent degrees. US “diplomacy” is a butt of jokes among the rest of the world, US military cannot fight a serious combined arms conflict with peer, without sustaining catastrophic losses.

The reason the USA is not capable of constructing a grand strategy is that it is not a nation. It is an empire which is ruled by a foreign elite, rather like the Roman Empire once the emperors ceased to be Roman.

In China’s Grand Strategy: Trends, Trajectories, and Long-Term Competition, the seven RAND scholars define the concept of grand strategy: Grant strategy is the process by which a state relates long-term ends to means within the rubric of an overarching and enduring vision to advance the national interest.

But when the state is controlled by an elite that has interests which are separate, distinct, and in some cases contradictory to the national interest, it is not possible to create any overarching and enduring vision, because the overarching and enduring objective of the elite is to remain in power.

This built-in contradiction between the national interest and the foreign elite’s interest will necessarily and inevitably lead to growing incoherencies that are even more readily apparent to enemies outside the state than nationals within it. Which, no doubt, is why Wang Hunin was able to observe the incoherencies and write America Against America 20 years before I made some of the same observations, which was nearly 20 years before it became obvious to most Americans that “defending democracy” looked a lot like “installing a puppet regime” in Ukraine.

What is the USA’s grand strategy? No one can say. Even the US strategists readily admit that they have no idea what it is. Defending the petrodollar is not a grand strategy. Preventing the rise of Russia and China is not a grand strategy. Maintaining the largest GDP or the highest GDP per capita is not a grand strategy. Eliminating the European population within a state is a grand strategy of sorts, but it is an evil, insane, and observably inimical to the national interest, ergo it is not a viable one for the United States.

And the incoherency produced by having a state with separate interests from the nation is why the USA is absolutely destined to defeat at the hands of nation-states with genuine grand strategies. There are other valid reasons, of course, beginning with industrial capacity, but on the most basic level, it should be easy to understand that it is much more difficult to successfully reach a destination when one doesn’t even have a particular one in mind.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Sacrifice of the Slavs

The NATO-Russian war has been anticipated for nearly 30 years, and various aspects of it, from the use of Ukrainian proxy soldiers to expanding NATO to Japan, were being pushed by George Soros as long ago as 1993 in a piece entitled Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO, in which he envisioned the transition from the post-WWII world order to the present Clown World Order, albeit one that would literally rule over the entire planet.

The countries of Europe must bear a larger share of the cost and have a correspondingly larger say in NATO. Economic aid to Eastern Europe would provide a much needed stimulus to the depressed European economies. The fact that the present command structure of NATO is too lopsided in favor of the United States is well recognized by all parties; making NATO the pillar of the Partnership for Peace would hasten the process of adjustment. Specifically, it should induce France to reenter as a full member. That would serve as the test of the success of its internal reorganization.

There is only one deficiency in this design: it leaves Japan out of account. Japan should be asked to join NATO. Then we would have the beginnings of an architecture for a new world order. It is based on the United States as the remaining superpower and on open society as the organizing principle. It consists of a series of alliances, the most important of which is NATO and, through NATO, the Partnership for Peace which girds the Northern Hemisphere. The United States would not be called upon to act as the policeman of the world. When it acts, it would act in conjunction with others. Incidentally, the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act. This is a viable alternative to the looming world disorder.

However, what I find fascinating is the way in which, earlier in the article, his theory of history and consequent boom-bust model, the details of which remain undisclosed, tend to apply much more closely to the present Clown World Order and the so-called “open societies” than anything else. This may explain some of the panic and desperation that one senses from Soros and other influential clowns.

My theory of history is based on the recognition that our understanding of the world in which we live is inherently imperfect. We have to act without full knowledge of the facts because the facts are created by our decisions. There can be no correspondence between our view of the world and the actual state of affairs, because the actual state of affairs is not independently given and our view of the world has nothing definite to correspond to. Therefore, there must always be a discrepancy between the participants’ thinking and the actual state of affairs and that discrepancy provides the key to understanding the course of history.

There are times when the discrepancy is relatively minor, and there is a tendency towards convergence between people’s views and the actual state of affairs. That is the case when prevailing institutions are flexible enough, so that they can be adjusted to meet people’s desires, and there are critical processes at work which bring people’s thinking in line with practical possibilities. In these near-equilibrium conditions, the discrepancy does not influence the course of events to any great extent and it can be safely neglected. It is in these conditions that the timelessly valid generalizations of economic theory, perfect competition, efficient markets, the discounting of future expectations, are relevant.

But there are times when the discrepancy between perception and reality is very wide and shows no tendency towards convergence. On these occasions, the course of events follows a totally different pattern and the normal rules do not apply. These far-from-equilibrium conditions arise at the two extremes of changelessness or rigidity on the one hand, and changeability or instability on the other…

I have made a special study of these conditions of dynamic disequilibrium, both in the financial markets and in other settings. I find the boom/bust pattern that is common in financial markets also very helpful in understanding the rise and fall of the Soviet system. But, of course, one must not apply the pattern uncritically.

I shall not go into the details of my theory. The most important point I want to make about the boom/bust pattern is that it is a time-bound, one-directional process but it is open-ended and also characterized by discontinuities. That is to say, a prevailing trend can be reversed at any time; indeed, an eventual trend reversal is an integral part of the boom/bust pattern and the point at which the trend is reversed is not determined in advance. Indeed, in the financial markets, for every boom/bust pattern that becomes fully developed, a great many are aborted in the early stages.

Another important feature of the boom/bust pattern is that it is asymmetrical. The boom is drawn out, the bust is condensed. It is the lack of time that makes the bust so violent. Events happen so fast that it is very difficult to adjust one’s thinking and behavior to changing circumstances. Policies which would have been appropriate in the early stages are ineffective or counterproductive at another. This can be very disorienting, especially when people do not recognize a distinction between near-equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium conditions .

There is no group on Earth with a greater discrepancy between perception and reality right now than the foreign elite presently ruling the United States and presiding over Clown World. They don’t recognize how weak the US military forces are vis-a-vis the Chinese, the Russians, or even Iran, they don’t recognize the way the society over which they preside is rapidly crumbling, they don’t recognize that it is the economic order they dominate that is more fragile than those of their enemies, and they vastly overestimate their ability to control the thoughts of those over whom they have influence.

The seeds of their incipient failure were sown by their past success.

In short, Soros and his fellow clowns are making Littlefinger’s Error, which is confusing influence for power. And while Clown World’s boom has lasted since 1965 – although one could argue for 1945 – the bust is coming rapidly, and as Soros writes, it will be condensed and violent, although we cannot yet know the precise timing, the starting location, or even the fundamental nature of the bust.

DISCUSS ON SG

Troisième Guerre Mondiale

A French analyst is one of the few quasi-mainstream thinkers who appears to understand the true scope of the current conflict.

Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview. So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.

  • A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.
  • The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.
  • Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”
  • Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.
  • Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.
  • “The fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing a qualified Chinese work force.”
  • And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.

Of course he wasn’t at Davos. Davos isn’t listening to anyone who is capable of seeing the situation with clear eyes. Todd is not even remotely wrong. But if he’s selling 100,000 books in Japan based on those entirely obvious conclusions, I should really consider finding myself a Japanese publisher.

Anyhow, if you’re wondering why some of the more historically perspicacious intellectuals appear to be so wildly off-base with regards to their observations of the current situation, a recent conversation I had with one individual proved very illuminating. My impression is that it mostly comes down to the elder generation not being able yet to comprehend any sort of conflict between a) a regional war of the US and its allies against a single regional power, and, b) mutually assured nuclear destruction.

As a general rule, they believe that the USA of 2022 is still, more or less, the USA of 1950, only with momentarily ascendant leftists and better ethnic food. They see the qualitative problems very well, but don’t recognize the scale of the quantitative and issues, which is why their analyses, and their solutions, tend to rely upon some sort of 1980s Reagan-style renaissance that isn’t even a possibility anymore.

From centenarian clowns like Kissinger to twenty-something Republicans who read Victor Davis Hanson, all of the proposed “solutions” to the global war between Clown World and the other 80 percent of the planet led by the Sino-Russian alliance are comically irrelevant. Failing to understand either the nature or the scope of the conflict, it is their reliance upon their familiar axioms and the continuation of the current global infrastructure that is leading them astray.

But very important structural things, have fundamentally changed, as I pointed out on Monday’s Darkstream following a highly unusual statement by the Saudi Finance Minister.

Andy told me back in September 2022: “The dollar hegemony is right about ready to break when you realize that Saudi Arabia is about to join the BRIC nations. Do you think Biden is going to fly there to ask for more oil? He went there to beg them not to join BRIC.”

“The dollar was made reserve currency only because of our protection of the Saudi kingdom,” Andy continued. He then noted astutely that Saudi Arabia had signed new protection agreements with Russia. “All of the Eastern European countries that have repatriated their gold. They’re all part of the EU but they all trade their own currency. They’re all going to break away from the Western system,” he added.

And now it looks like Andy was right: it appears Saudi Arabia has just issued a death knell to the exclusivity of the petrodollar as we once knew it – the first of several dominoes that needs to fall before the U.S. is exposed financially as an emperor with no clothes.

Saudi Arabia Just Killed The Petrodollar, 18 January 2023

It may be worth noting here that my original prediction of 2033 for the end of the political entity known as the USA was predicated on the expected lifespan of the post-Bretton Woods dollar. I don’t recall anyone taking that timeframe very seriously at the time, but if it was an option, it would probably be considered in the money now.

DISCUSS ON SG

Human Sacrifice on the Horizon

Sacrificing animals at home is now legal in Detroit:

Residents of a Detroit-area community with a large Muslim population can sacrifice animals at home for religious reasons. The Hamtramck City Council explicitly approved the practice, 3-2, Tuesday, another step in recognizing a cultural shift in a city whose 20th century history was shaped by Polish immigrants. Muslims often slaughter animals, typically goats or sheep, or pay someone to do it for them during the holy holiday of Eid al-Adha. Meat is shared with family, friends and the poor. The Hamtramck council in December had voted to continue a ban on animal slaughter but reversed course, at least for religious reasons, after legal advice and objections from people who follow the Islamic faith, the Detroit Free Press reported.

In fact, human sacrifice for religious purposes is arguably more indigenous to North America than animal sacrifice. Don’t forget that the name of the tribe that ruled the Aztec Empire, which not only utilized human sacrifice for religious purposes, but engaged in it on an industrial scale, is the Mexica. And as the nation named after that tribe has increasingly abandoned its Spanish-imposed Catholicism for a syncretic death cult, the historical trend is clear.

It is coming. Don’t think it isn’t. And the only thing that will stop it is a) the collapse of Clown World and b) Christian revival.

There is no such thing as a secular society. Secularism is just a meaningless line on the gradient between Christianity and devil worship.

DISCUSS ON SG