Tag: decline and fall

USA contemplates WWIII

It may not sound that way. At least, not yet. But keep in mind the Pentagon’s doctrine concerning cyberwarfare announced in 2011.

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.

In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” said a military official.

Now consider yesterday’s announcement concerning the Obama administration’s desire to launch a cyberattack on Russia:

The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging “clandestine” cyber operation designed to harass and “embarrass” the Kremlin leadership.

The sources did not elaborate on the exact measures the CIA was considering, but said the agency had already begun opening cyber doors, selecting targets and making other preparations for an operation.

So, by the USA’s own logic:

  1. Cyberwarfare is an act of war.
  2. Acts of war can legitimately be responded to by traditional military force.
  3. The Obama administration is considering cyberattacks on Russia.
  4. If Russia responds to those cyberattacks with traditional military force, its response will be legitimate.
Translation: the neocons are trying to launch a war with Russia in revenge for Putin bringing the oligarchs to heel and threatening the increasing instability of the US Imperium. They won a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine, they’re losing badly in Syria, and now they’re desperate to reverse a trend that has the potential to build into an avalanche.

Fortunately, as the article reveals, more sober and experienced CIA hands are dubious about the idea. Personally, I doubt the Obama administration will do anything at all before January, because Obama doesn’t want to do anything but play out the string before hitting the links and the lucrative speech circuit.

And in his position, isn’t that exactly what you would do?

The Post-Republic DSA

Angelo Codevilla considers the likely state of the Dysunion after the end of the Republic in a pensive Claremont article entitled “After the Republic”:

Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” this has resulted in citizens morphing into either this class’s “stakeholders” or its subjects. And, as Publius Decius Mus argues, “America and the West” now are so firmly “on a trajectory toward something very bad” that it is no longer reasonable to hope that “all human outcomes are still possible,” by which he means restoration of the public and private practices that made the American republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s transition from that republic to some kind of empire.

Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives….

Rather than talk about how to restrain or shrink government, Republican candidates talked about how to do more with government. The Wall Street Journal called that “having a positive agenda.” Hence, Republicans by and large joined the Democrats in relegating the U.S. Constitution to history’s dustbin.

Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: “fake constitutionalism.” Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power.

The ruling class having chosen raw power over law and persuasion, the American people reasonably concluded that raw power is the only way to counter it, and looked for candidates who would do that.

While it is a polite lament for the death of the US republic and an intellectual explanation for the rise of Donald Trump, what it really amounts to is the powerful case for the #Alt-Right. Constitutionalism is stone-dead. The proposition nation never existed in the first place. Conservatism failed. The Rule of Law has been trampled by the establishment. There is no more Union; the immigrants upon whom Abraham Lincoln relied to save it with their arms ended up destroying it with their votes only five-score-and-two years after the Gettysburg Address.

The former Republic of the United States of America is now the Post-Republican Empire of the Dysunited States of Many Nations.

What comes next? If history is any guide, ethnic strife, war, and the birth of multiple new homogeneous nations. It won’t happen overnight, but then, it took fifty years for the Republic to die from its mortal wound.

Ethnic cleansing in America

It’s already happening, as La Raza gradually reconquers the American Southwest.

Ethnic cleansing used to be a bad thing.  But in America, when it happens to white people, it’s called progress and the “new face of California.”

The town of Santa Ana has been almost 100% purged of white people.  They were pushed out not by tanks and machine guns, but by a massive influx of people speaking a different language and bearing a different culture who expected everyone to adapt to their norms.

Today Santa Ana is nearly 80% Hispanic and less than 10% white.

There is no longer even the appearance of a coherent nation. This is the state to which the proposition nation lunatics have reduced the USA. Nations are people. They are not ideas, borders or political boundaries. Change the people, change the nation. Change the people, and all of the ideas, borders, and political boundaries will inevitably change with them. Demographics is destiny.

The foolishness of the whites who welcomed these changes is such that they still don’t understand or accept what is happening, nor will many of them until they are driven, hated and impoverished, from their homes. And some, virtue-signaling to the end, will die as martyrs, holding firm to their secular faith and declaring “not all Blacks/Hispanics/Asians/whatever are like that!”

Assimilation is not assent to an idea. It is not mimicking behavior or learning the language or parroting words. Assimilation means interbreeding for multiple generations until your genes are no longer detectable amidst the host population. And assimilation is impossible for large quantities of immigrants.

This cake was baked in 1965. And it’s finally coming out of the oven.

As Martin van Creveld has written, immigration is war. And this is the last war America will ever lose.

Always trust your lying eyes

Modern art, including Abstract Expressionism, was never anything more than government-funded bullshit.

There’s little more divisive than modern art—most take a staunch “brilliance” or “bullshit” stance. So it should come as a surprise that the straight-laced feds at the CIA leaned toward the former camp—or at least saw it as brilliantly exploitable in the psychological war against the Soviets. Reports from former agents acknowledge what was always a tall tale in the art world—that CIA spooks floated pioneering artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, to drop an aesthetic nuke on Communism. What seemed like natural popularity of certain artists was, in part, actually a deliberate attempt at psychological warfare, backed by the US government.

But why modern art? At the time period in question—the 1950s and 60s—the artistic style of the moment was Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism (or AbEx, if you want to impress people at your next snooty cocktail party) stood for, above all else, self expression. Radically so….

The CIA wanted this art to be global. So it dumped millions upon millions of dollars to be secret patrons of art world darlings like Pollock. Fake foundations, used as CIA slush funds, sponsored international exhibitions.

It’s not art. It’s propaganda, the so-called artists were government whores, and the high art cognoscenti were complete suckers.

You’re not a philistine for preferring Truth and Beauty to CIA propaganda and creative prostitution.

Interview with an economic hit man

John Perkins is interviewed by Sarah van Gelder:

Sarah van Gelder: What’s changed in our world since you wrote the first Confessions of an Economic Hit Man?

John Perkins: Things have just gotten so much worse in the last 12 years since the first Confessions was written. Economic hit men and jackals have expanded tremendously, including the United States and Europe.

Back in my day we were pretty much limited to what we called the third world, or economically developing countries, but now it’s everywhere.

And in fact, the cancer of the corporate empire has metastasized into what I would call a failed global death economy. This is an economy that’s based on destroying the very resources upon which it depends, and upon the military. It’s become totally global, and it’s a failure.

van Gelder: So how has this switched from us being the beneficiaries of this hit-man economy, perhaps in the past, to us now being more of the victims of it?

Perkins: It’s been interesting because, in the past, the economic hit man economy was being propagated in order to make America wealthier and presumably to make people here better off, but as this whole process has expanded in the U.S. and Europe, what we’ve seen is a tremendous growth in the very wealthy at the expense of everybody else.

On a global basis we now know that 62 individuals have as many assets as half the world’s population.

We of course in the U.S. have seen how our government is frozen, it’s just not working. It’s controlled by the big corporations and they’ve really taken over. They’ve understood that the new market, the new resource, is the U.S. and Europe, and the incredibly awful things that have happened to Greece and Ireland and Iceland, are now happening here in the U.S.

We’re seeing this situation where we can have what statistically shows economic growth, and at the same time increased foreclosures on homes and unemployment.

van Gelder: Is this the same kind of dynamic about debt that leads to emergency managers who then turn over the reins of the economy to private enterprises? The same thing that you are seeing in third-world countries?

Perkins: Yes, when I was an economic hit man, one of the things that we did, we raised these huge loans for these countries, but the money never actually went to the countries, it went to our own corporations to build infrastructure in those countries. And when the countries could not pay off their debt, we insisted that they privatize their water systems, their sewage systems, their electric systems.

Now we’re seeing that same thing happen in the United States. Flint, Michigan, is a very good example of that. This is not a U.S. empire, it’s a corporate empire protected and supported by the U.S. military and the CIA. But it is not an American empire, it’s not helping Americans. It’s exploiting us in the same way that we used to exploit all these other countries around the world.

It’s all about the debt. And debt that can’t be repaid has to be written off, somehow.

Obamacare in action

Minnesota may not have any insurance companies soon:

Minnesota’s top health insurance regulator says the state’s individual market is in “an emergency situation” amid big rate increases for next year.

Department of Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said Friday that the five companies offering plans through the state’s exchange or directly to consumers were prepared to leave the market for 2017. He said big rate increases were the tradeoff to convince all but one company to remain for now.

Rate increases finalized this week range from a 50 percent average hike for HealthPartners plans to a 67 percent jump on average on UCare.

But Rothman called it a temporary fix and called on lawmakers to make reforms before the market collapses.

It’s rather fascinating to see how one institution after another is collapsing like dominoes while everyone wanders aimlessly around wringing their hands and wondering how this could have happened.

It tends to remind me a little of when a girl in my class and a boy the class below me died in separate, but similarly stupid, easily avoidable accidents. I kept my mouth shut out of respect for everyone else’s feelings, of course, but it was occasionally difficult when a plaintive “why?” would be uttered in conversation.

Now, there are certainly times when one genuinely wonders why something bad came to pass, believe me, it’s a question I have found myself asking from time to time. But there are also times when the answer is completely obvious and totally undeniable. I mean, if you absolutely must point an apparently gun at yourself and pull the trigger to impress your friends, maybe, just maybe, you might want to check the chamber as well as eject the magazine.

The USA is collapsing because it is not the United States of America anymore. Its human and military capital have been considerably drawn down. The people who are the posterity of the Founders have been invaded and overrun, the various propositions and creeds that made their culture exceptional have been rejected by nationals, citizens, and invaders alike, and the remnants of their religion is a watered-down, treasonous, pharisaical Judeo-Churchianity that is a pale shadow of the unadulterated Christianity that once fearlessly proclaimed “No King but Jesus” to the English Crown.

Now they are afraid to call abomination and adultery sin. Instead, they preach against masculinity and nationalism.

So, what else would you expect? I mean, seriously, what other outcome could there possibly be?

Do you not see that the pace of the financial rapine has increased as well? That’s the elite, desperately attempting to make hay while the setting sun still shines.

Train crash in Hoboken

A train didn’t stop and crashed into the station in Hoboken, New Jersey:

At least one person is dead and more than 100 people hurt when a NJ TRANSIT train crashed into the station in Hoboken, causing serious damage and snarling train service during the Thursday morning rush.

Earlier reports indicated that three people had been killed in the crash. But Assemblyman Raj Mukherji, who represents Hoboken, said transit officials told him only one person had died and two were critically injured.

“We’re just praying at this point that the death toll doesn’t rise,” Mukherji told CBS2.

The exact extent of the other victims’ injuries is unclear. A number of area hospitals have been treating the victims, including at least 40 people who were taken to Jersey City Medical Center.

It’s still unclear what exactly caused the train to crash. Images from the scene posted to social media showed mangled metal, wires, concrete and other debris scattered all over the floor. It appears part of the ceiling also collapsed.

“It simply did not stop,” WFAN anchor John Minko, who witnessed the crash, told 1010 WINS. “It went right through the barriers and into the reception area.”

We’ll see whether human error or instrument failure or something else was the reason for the crash, but I can’t help but think of the fact that failing infrastructure is a predictable consequence of lower average IQ.

Is Syria the USA’s Syracuse?

Why the USA is now actively aiding ISIS in Syria:

To grasp what’s really going on behind the endless recriminations, we need to understand that the Obama administration has abandoned its original plan to oust Syrian President Bashar al Assad, and moved on to Plan B; partitioning the country in a way that establishes a separate Sunni state where US troops will be based and where vital pipelines will be built to transfer natural gas from Qatar to the EU.

This ambitious plan is more than a redrawing of the Middle East and a pivot to Asia. It is a critical lifeline to a country whose economic prospects are progressively dimming, whose credit card is maxed out, and who is counting on a Hail Mary pass in Syria to save itself from cataclysmic economic collapse and ruination. Washington must succeed in Syria because, well, because it must, because the red ink has finally penetrated the pinewood hull and is fast filling the galley. A defeat in the Middle East could be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the tipping point in the agonizingly-protracted unipolar-new-world-order experiment. In other words, it’s Syria or bust.

There is a long tradition of democratic empires failing as a result of unnecessary military adventures, dating back to the Athenian disaster in Syracuse. It’s much too soon to tell, but the continuing US failure in Syria does tend to smack of a potential turning point with regards to the imperial USA.

Note for the historical ignorati: before you start arguing that the USA cannot be an empire  despite its military occupation of more than 70 countries around the world because democracy, I suggest you read about the Athenian empire.

Mailvox: Charlotte unrest is not “riots”

From one of the Ilk in North Carolina:

I, like some of the Ilk, live in North Carolina and riots have recently occurred in Charlotte.

For more information – the area they rioted at is by the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and has such dangerous neighborhood dwellings as Ikea and World Market. Home Depot is the shabbiest part of the area where they rioted. They lit bonfires on the highway so trucks would have to stop, and they were subsequently looted.

Insight into CMPD is that they are kind of like the Detroit PD, as they take care of business when necessary, but are often pretty diligent in avoiding “Ferguson” type scenarios.

Looking at all this, this was not a “burst of spontaneous vibrant anger,” but something planned. Often there is discussion of this kind of thing on your site in the comments, but I this is a pretty clear example of what we talk about and are wary of with regards to civil unrest in the US.

It’s reasonably apparent that the Soros money is now being utilized to stir up racial conflict, although it’s hard to imagine precisely what the man’s desired end game is. Sufficient unrest to justify military intervention? What would that change?

Mailvox: infrastructure fragility

From a reader this morning

A pipeline that carried 40%+ of the gasoline for the southeast and east ruptured last week.  No quick fix due to the quarter million gallons of gasoline that spilled and is held in a retention pond.  I’ve thought for years that this pipe would be a good terrorist target and, though this isn’t terrorism, it’s going to wreck havoc in the southeast and east.  Nashville is already out of gas and it’s going to cascade.  This could end up being a huge election issue given Obama’s stopping new pipeline construction during his entire term.

If you Google the story the American media is almost silent, covered by British and RT.  That won’t last for long.  [Redacted] lives in Nashville.  I gave her a heads up yesterday so they could get topped off and this morning 80 percent of the stations are closed in her area.

If you’re in the southeast, fill up your gas tanks now and lay in some supplies.

UPDATE: The story is now public: Alabama, Tennessee, & Georgia Declare States Of Emergency As Gas Shortages Loom After Pipeline Leak

UPDATE: North Carolina has declared a state of emergency too.