Tag: decline and fall

The price of speaking out

SJWs will always try to force you to pay for standing up to the Narrative and speaking out against it, lest others do likewise.

Never go full racist. A Tennessee congressional candidate learned that lesson this week after his campaign took out a billboard ad exhorting voters to “Make America white again.” From local ABC affiliate WTVC:

Rick Tyler told WTVC he owns Whitewater Grill in Ocoee, but in the coming months will transition to campaigning to represent Tennessee’s 3rd District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Tyler says his “Make America White Again” sign, which plays off of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, was taken down on Tuesday evening.

The decision to take the billboard down came after Tyler’s business became the target of a boycott.

As if his submission will be sufficient to permit him to be forgiven for the sin of speaking out against the New “America”. Is it not remarkable that those who claim to love America are so determined to wipe out literally every last vestige of it?

Whatever this multiracial empire is, it is not the same nation that for its first 130 years required all new citizens to be “of good character” and “white”. And it is remarkable how many people who lament the fall away from the U.S. Constitution, designed to benefit the Founders and their posterity, don’t make the connection between the abandonment of all three things.

The reality is that the only way to Make America Great Again is to Make America White Again. The two slogans are synonymous. The SJWs know it, which is why both slogans terrify them.

Be prepared this summer

The attacking antifas ended up getting their asses handed to them despite having a 6-1 advantage when they attacked a small nationalist rally in Sacramento, but next time they might be better prepared. This is still pretty tame, as civic violence goes, but outside of the occasional inner city rioting, it is nearly unprecedented in the last 45 years.

Note how the attack quickly breaks down into skirmish mode; even a modicum of discipline would be sufficient to rout either side. If you’re going to a rally this summer, go in groups and have attack, defense, and retreat plans in mind. And if your friends don’t have your flanks or back, keep your head on a swivel!

Notice that the antifas attacked the media too.

Apparently everyone is a Nazi now; “voxday” is listed as #8208 in the TrumpenReich.

A lost faith

Even some of the EU’s most instinctive supporters are turning from it in disgust:

 I actually used to be a big proponent of the EU. I was aware of the obvious problems, but I thought the achievements (long-term peace in Europe, war between Germany and France having become unthinkable, EU aid helping make the likes of Spain and Ireland more prosperous, and EU-required reforms making Eastern European countries modernize) more than made up for the organization itself being notoriously undemocratic. Europe was for a long time peaceful and prosperous, and the EU seemed to be a contributing factor to that.

However, during the last 10 years it has become very clear that the EU is simply not working. Take the Euro for example. While it’s very convenient to able to use the same type of money in many different EU countries, forcing vastly different countries (ranging from Cyprus and Ireland to Slovakia and Germany) to share the same currency basically imposed a rigid one-size-fits-all model on economies that had very little in common. As a result of losing monetary sovereignty, Eurozone countries could (and did) struggle mightily economically while lacking many of the monetary options for stimulating their economies that countries with their own currencies have at their disposal – like cutting interest rates. Member states are instead at the mercy of the European Central Bank, and good luck exerting influence over that behemoth if you’re a small country!

But losing monetary sovereignty is peanuts compared to what has happened to EU member Greece – a country in crippling debt and with a broken economy that instead of getting vital debt relief, or being allowed to go bankrupt in a controlled fashion, has been forced through a torturous journey of repeatedly cutting spending and raising taxes in return for short-term loans that hardly even benefit the Greek people. Forget about the fact that Greece is NEVER going to be able to repay its debt, and that forcing it to continue to try doing so only prevents the Greek economy from growing and adds to economic uncertainty in the EU as a whole. Germany, under the leadership of Angela Merkel (who is also the de facto leader of the EU), demands that Greece keep destroying its economy and society, while impoverishing its people, in order to set a good example to the rest of Europe/be made an example out of. It’s a Sisyphean task if I ever saw one.

Germany’s dominance over the EU under Merkel has generally been a complete disaster – whether it comes to her insistence of perpetually prolonging the Greek Crisis, imposing excessive Austerity across the EU in the name of reigning in budget deficits, stifling job growth and economic growth in the process (never mind that Germany itself ran significant budget deficits to boost employment and get its economy growing again little more than a decade ago) or her borderline treasonous refugee policy, Merkel’s stubbornness and stupidity has done incalculable damage to Europe as a whole. And the EU has only served to enable and amplify her madness.

For example, instead of trying to prevent Merkel from flooding Europe with Muslim migrants, the EU is looking for ways to fine and otherwise punish poor Eastern European countries (the kind of member states the EU of old would be trying to support and develop) for not letting themselves be “culturally enriched” by 3rd world Muslims. Instead of letting the people have their say about how the Establishment’s policies are hurting all of Europe, the EU is leading the charge to Censor the internet, one of the last remaining bastions of free speech. And instead of trying gradually fix their multicultural mistakes, the EU Elites are pledging to prevent the “far right” (the only force in Europe actually willing to prevent Suicide by Muslim Immigration) from ever taking power.

As socionomics would have it, the EU is an artifact of the psychological mood that accompanies economic good times, the result of collective intoxication on the heady stimulant of a massive credit bubble. It should come as no surprise to anyone who is socionomically aware that the financial crisis of 2008 has, after eight years of increasing turmoil, led to the political crisis of 2016.

Since these events tend to follow a certain pattern, and they tend to pick up speed rather than slow down, we can reasonably anticipate that the political crisis of 2016 will lead to the political collapse of 2020, followed by the first war to take place in formerly EU territory in 2022.

So, I don’t think “reform” is an option for the EU anymore. It can be dismantled in an orderly fashion or in a violent and disorderly one, and considering the haughty, delusional self-importance of its unelected leaders, I anticipate their desperate attempts to hang onto power will bring about the latter.

After all, you can take the East German girl out of East Germany, but you can’t take the DDR out of her.

Angela Merkel says EU must act to stop countries “fleeing” EU.”

Perhaps she could build… a wall? (raises pinky to corner of mouth)

The decline of entrepreneurship in America

The media is beginning to notice that there are fewer and fewer startups in the USA every year:

If you look at what’s happened in big cities around the U.S. in recent years, it’s easy to think we’re living in Startup Nation. Thanks to the plummeting cost and increased availability of digital tools, as well as greater access to early-stage funding, we’ve seen what the Economist has called a “Cambrian moment,” with digital startups “bubbling up in an astonishing variety of services and products.” The number of companies in Silicon Valley that got seed funding from investors, for instance, more than doubled between 2007 and 2012. Venture capital funding in the U.S. over the last five years has totaled a remarkable $238 billion, and 200 companies today are so-called unicorns, privately valued at more than a billion dollars each.

Meanwhile, though, a host of economic researchers have been telling a much bleaker story: American entrepreneurship is actually on the decline, and has been for decades. As the economists Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan documented in a 2014 Brookings Institution paper, the percentage of U.S. firms that were less than a year old fell by almost half between 1978 and 2011, declining precipitously during the recession of 2007-’09 with only a slow recovery after. According to the Commerce Department, the number of new businesses started by Americans has fallen sharply since 2000, and so too has the percentage of American workers working for companies that are less than a year old. Indeed, in 2013 Americans started fewer businesses than they did in 1980, when the country’s population was much smaller. This decline isn’t just due to the aging of the U.S. population—Americans of all ages just seem less likely to open new businesses than they once were. And, as Hathaway and Litan put it, the decline “has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech.”

Speaking as a successful entrepreneur who left the country, who is the son of a very successful entrepreneur who is presently in prison, it’s not exactly difficult to understand why Americans are considerably less inclined and less able to start businesses than they were 36 years ago.

  1. The rapacious and criminal tax agencies. You would probably not believe the shenanigans and outright lies these agents habitually engage in if you did not see it in black-and-white documents right in front of you. Even those who think my father merited an amount of jail time for his actions are aghast when they find out what actually happened, and how absurdly egregious the behavior of the various agencies was.
  2. The increasing regulatory and reporting burden. Why go to the effort of building up a company when doing so is the equivalent of painting a big red target on your chest? As one of my entrepreneurial friends said after shutting down his company and taking a job for a big tech firm, “it’s so nice not having to deal with all that shit anymore.” In the USA, self-employment often feels more like working for the government as a paper-pusher. Just trying to get your head around why part-time external contractors who are clearly not your employees must be treated as employees for various compliance purposes is enough to give anyone a headache.
  3. The criminalization of commerce. These days, it’s more work to file the paperwork required to get paid by a big corporation than it is to do the work itself.
  4. The dumbing-down of the populace. Thanks to post-1965 immigration, Americans are 4-6 IQ points less intelligent than they were back in 1980. Less intelligent people are less inclined to start jobs.
  5. Emigration. Many of the American expats I meet around the world are highly intelligent and entrepreneurial. Few of them have any desire or intention to return to the USA. This is a fairly small group of people, but they are a statistically significant percentage of the entrepreneurial class.
  6. International competition. The Internet and semi-free trade means that one no longer needs to live in the USA to have access to its markets. So, would-be American entrepreneurs are much more likely to be beaten to the punch by foreign entrepreneurs exploiting American markets than was the case in 1980.
  7. The politicization of culture. Why start, say, a bakery, if you know you’re going to be forced to choose between being sued into oblivion and violating your conscience as well as your right to free association?
That being said, the situation isn’t much better elsewhere. The worse the global economy gets, the more desperate the various governments are for tax revenue, and the more intensely they go tax-hunting among the successful entrepreneurial class. The first country to offer legal protection and operational assistance to the international entrepreneurs being preyed on in this manner is going to do very well indeed, and do so at the expense of the other countries.

Just wait, Germany

I don’t think the German leadership has yet understood the lesson of #Brexit:

German Leadership Aghast at a Brexit It Helped Cause

Germans – especially German politicians – are waking up this morning to the Brexit reality, and their initial reactions are predictable.  Shock appears to be the overwhelming emotion, followed closely by sadness, anger, and then subdued panic.

The Social Democratic Party, a partner in the governing black-red coalition, has called for an emergency session of the Bundestag today.  (One wonders what this would accomplish except perhaps to issue a statement aimed at shoring up EU solidarity in other wavering member states, or maybe just express petulance.)  Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke of a “sad day for Europe and Great Britain,” while the leader of the Left faction, Sahra Wagenknecht, used the occasion to lambaste the influence of corporations and lobbyists in Brussels (a non-factor in the British vote, as far as I know).

One of the more thoughtful commentaries today is from Torsten Krauel in the right-of-center Die Welt.  Krauel asks whether German Chancellor Merkel is partially to blame for the Brexit and concludes her asylum policy almost certainly played a major role.  And indeed, the spectacle of Germany unilaterally deciding to change the face and future of the European Union by announcing Berlin had opened the doors to all comers – regardless of the wishes of or the impact this would have on other EU states – has been a powerful symbol of elite disconnect with the concerns of average Europeans and an uncomfortable reminder that Germany has come to dominate the union.  Krauel also points out Dover, the British end of the Channel Tunnel to the continent, voted 60 percent to leave.  Maybe this has something to do with the thousands of North African migrants seeking to storm the tunnel and cross to England?

While loathe to admit it, Germans at some level suspect their country’s role in the discontent in Britain.  Speaking to German friends over the past several years, it’s been difficult not to come away with the sense many view the EU as an extension of Germany policy and as a respectable outlet for German nationalism that has been suppressed since the end of World War II.  A new path to German greatness, if you will, camouflaged by warm and fuzzy words about “Europeaness” and immune to complaints of skeptics, all of whom immediately are labeled as right-wing extremists – the kiss of death in German politics.

For me, one of the takeaways from the referendum is the reminder that people care deeply about things other than pure economic interest.

Imagine how surprised the German elites will be when their own nationalists throw them out of power, and if justice is served, put them on trial for their crimes against the nation.

The distrustful youth

The Pew Center fails to note the significant conclusions in its own poll on trust in government:

Historically, there have been only modest generational differences in trust in government. Over time, the trajectory of these attitudes has been similar across generations.

As noted, young people are slightly more trusting in the federal government than older people. Currently, 25% of Millennials (ages 18-34) say they can trust the federal government just about always or most of the time. That compares with 19% of Gen Xers (35-50), 14% of Boomers (51-69) and 16% of Silents (70-87).

In 2009 and 2010, the differences across generations were somewhat larger: In August 2009, the three-point moving average of trust in the federal government among Millennials was 36%, compared with about 20% across older generations.

In the early 1990s, Gen Xers – whose oldest members were then in their early 20s – expressed somewhat greater trust in government than did Boomers and Silents, but these differences have diminished over time. Similarly, there were, at most, small differences in trust between Boomers and Silents in the 1970s and 1980s. Most important, the steep downward slide in trust in government that occurred in the 1970s was seen among both Boomers and Silents.

Look at the chart to the right. Notice the very steep slide that began in 1965 for the Silents and 1970 for the Baby Boomers. What is relevant is not how a very old Silent or an old Boomer’s opinion compares to a young Millennial’s trust in government, but rather how those opinions compare at similar ages.

The Silents’ trust in government peaked at 82 percent, the Boomers’ at 73 percent. The famously cynical GenXers trust peaked at 58 percent, and the supposedly naive Millennials peaked at 62 percent right in the patriotic aftermath of 9/11. The oldest Baby Boomers were 48 years old before they reached the level of cynicism about government that the Millennials have already reached.

This is particularly significant considering that the Millennials are much more racially mixed, so white Millennials are, developmentally speaking, far more suspicious of government than were white Baby Boomers.

Up to 37,500 views!

I expect you will understand why this announcement by McRapey made me laugh:

My piece earlier this week on Clinton and Sanders blew up a bit, with roughly 75,000 views over two days.

Ah, how the most popular blog in science fiction has fallen. Sad! As one might expect, McRapey concludes that his declining site traffic must mean that blogs, while not quite dead yet, are less important than Facebook and Twitter.

What’s amusing is how McRapey considers roughly 37,500 daily views to be blowing up, whereas the traffic here averaged 67,955 daily views in May and is currently running at a rate of 76,166 views per day in June. Whatever’s traffic is now between one-fourth and one-fifth that of VP, and the ratio is steadily falling. I will not surprised if by this time next year, it is one-tenth.

While he’s correct to echo Mike Cernovich’s observations in stating that Facebook and Twitter tend to be more reliable drivers of short-term link traffic these days, what McRapey fails to understand is that blogs have become online community centers that are capable of supporting a broad range of activities.

Such as, for example, this Jobs Wanted notification, before I forget and it disappears too far down the email list.

  • Hiring: Intermediate/Senior Ruby on Rails developer in the Southeast USA. If you have experience working with clients, APIs and know your way around the rails framework and TDD, contact Vox who will forward me your emails. I’ll respond at which point we can talk specifics. Relocation necessary.

Also, if you are a New Release subscriber, you’ll want to check your email tomorrow. Castalia has two new ebooks launching this month, which does not count the new print and audio editions being released. And as both the Production Editor and I have concluded, one of them is right up there with Awake in the Night Land; it’s definitely one of the best books we have published, and possibly even the best to date.

Something has to give

And somebody has to win. Fred Reed sees interracial war on the way amidst “the Shards of America”:

If Latinos become another hostile racial group, Katie bar the door. We face as part of the larger conflict a tricorn race war of, now, low intensity. This makes no sense as most of all races just want to live in peace, but the civilized inevitably get sucked into hostility started by extremists. White nationalists are spoiling for a fight, as are Black Livists and an indeterminate number of Latino hot-heads.

Latinos are key in what is coming. There are at least 55 million in the US–I suspect the numbers are deliberately understated by the government–and most, being legal, are not going away.

Cracking down appears to be beyond the powers of governments whose politicians will temporize, back away, make polite noises, and hope it doesn’t blow on their watch. If we have Hillary, she will do nothing. It is not clear that Trump could change much, though he would try.

There is a large racial element in the social battleground no matter how much we pretend otherwise.

Race is only a part of the onrushing disaster. America is no longer a country, but a riot of hostile races, sexes, and political extremes, of self-serving politicians and extractive corporations of the extremely rich who have no attachment to the US. The mild competition between Republicans and Democrats of the Fifties has given way to hard Right and weird Left who bitterly hate each other. They are irreconcilable.

Somebody has to win.

If the internal stability of the USA depends upon the dedication of the Hispanic population to altruism, tranquility, and sweet reason, we can safely conclude that it is doomed. Those who value civilization and traditional America are going to have to come to terms with supporting the hard Right; better sooner than later. Remember: it takes two to tango, but it only takes one side to start a war.

With whom are you going to side when it comes? More importantly, with whom are you going to be permitted to side?

And on a not-necessarily-unrelated note, I should mention that Cuckservative is not only newly released in paperback, but is already #1 in Nationalism.

Review: This is a sledgehammer book — rigorous empirical analysis, ruthless, relentless logic, historical depth, fearless, muscular rhetorical challenge — better than anything else I have read in capturing the pathetic cultural surrender that has been underway now for the last fifty years in the USA. “Racism” in the US is now what “imperialism” and “capitalism” were in the decaying Soviet Union, empty incantations designed to confuse a demoralized people and distract them from the treachery and incompetence of their masters. This book puts Vox Day and John Red Eagle in the Alexander Solzhenitzyn’s class of courageous writers documenting the dishonesty and cowardice of our entrenched and corrupted ruling class.

Whom the gods would destroy

They first make mad. John Wright observes that the USA has fully embraced insanity:

The Massachusetts House of Representatives voted 116-36 Wednesday to legally demolish the notion of biological sex in favor of “gender identity.” A similar bill passed the Massachusetts Senate last month. Gov. Charlie Baker has already said he’ll sign the bill.

    “The Gender Identity Public Accommodations Bill” (H.4343) provides a three-front advance of transgender “anti-discrimination” laws, reports Conservative Review:

  • It replaces the word “sex” with “gender identity” in multiple areas of Massachusetts law.
  • The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination must amend rules and policies to comply with this shift from biological sex to “gender identity.”
  • It allows people to use the restroom or locker room that matches their gender identity.

Victory brought eye-popping hyperbole from the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. Byron Rushing. “We are doing the work the founders of our nation intended for us to do,” said Rushing, “This is a great day for us and we should be very proud.”

My comment: Go to confession, get shrived, set your worldly affairs in order, buy firearms, stock the basement with foodstuffs and fuel.

It is that bad. The keel beam of the ship just broke, we are taking water fore and aft, and the crew are busily pumping water aboard as quickly as can be, the pilot steers toward the reef, the engines are roaring full speed ahead.

Personally, I think the crazier things get, the more egregiously awful they become, the better.  All of this will be necessary to steel the civilizationists for the hard work to come. It is getting more and more difficult for the moderates and apologists and churchians to manufacture specious arguments claiming everything is really just fine and things are getting better all the time.

Even tender-hearted women are rapidly beginning to reach the conclusion that “kill it with fire” is the only solution to the sick society we presently endure.

What can have changed?

The US infrastructure is decaying and local, state, and federal governments all lack the wherewithal to effectively replace it. I wonder what could possibly explain this loss of capability?

Guess what blatant reactionary wrote the following words: “It seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges, or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently.”

Stumped? The answer is Lawrence Summers, secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, presidential senior economic adviser in the Obama administration and, in between, president of Harvard, writing in the Washington Post. For more on the fiasco of the rebuilding of the Larz Anderson Bridge, between Cambridge and Boston’s Allston neighborhood, see another opinion article by Summers in the Boston Globe.

As it happens, I wrote a column myself back in 2010 on how long it was taking to fix the Humpback Bridge, a portion of George Washington Parkway which rises about 30 feet above an inlet of the Potomac. From the top of that bridge you can see the Pentagon, still the world’s largest office building, which was built in 18 months. I’ve had occasion also to write columns on how excellent books by Philip K. Howard, Peter Schuck and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge which illustrate that, as I put it, “gummit don’t work good.” And I’ve written more recently on the tragic deterioration of the Metro, Washington’s “Great Society Subway.”

So even as we hear from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton how government is going to painlessly provide us with free healthcare, free college and free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (uh, just kidding about the last one), we see all around us how government is unable to do things it could easily do 50, 100 and (think Flint water) 150 years ago. What makes anyone think it can take on additional tasks and perform them satisfactorily? Apparently Summers, lifelong Democrat and frequent advocate of more government spending on infrastructure, is having his doubts.

Interesting. “We see all around us how government is unable to do things it could easily do 50, 100 and 150 years ago.” I wonder what changed 50 years ago? When would that have been, 1966, right?

Now, what happened in 1965?

This is the result of losing a mere 4-5 IQ points on average. Imagine what the USA is going to look like when the idiocratic average declines another 5 points.