Tag: decline and fall

Corruption in New York

The other New York assemblymen were shocked, shocked, to learn that the Speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, was arrested on corruption charges:

The speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, was arrested on federal corruption charges on Thursday and accused of using the power of his office for more than a decade to secure millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks and then covering up his schemes, according to court documents.

Mr. Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who has served as speaker for more than two decades, is accused of a range of corrupt dealings that capitalized on his official position. They include using his position to obtain corrupt payments misrepresented as referral fees from a law firm; funneling state research funds and other benefits to a doctor who in return referred asbestos claims to the law firm where the speaker worked; and secretly helping real estate developers win tax breaks.

In recent years, a steady parade of lawmakers in Albany has been charged with corruption, and the complaint against Mr. Silver outlines a capital culture rife with back-room dealing, where money and influence shape public policy for the benefit of private agendas.

I’m sure the Senators and Congressmen in Washington D.C. are much, much cleaner.

How civilizations fall

John C. Wright explains the process of civilization decline, and in doing so demonstrates how far along the West has traveled down that dark path:

The first thing that can start the dissolution of civilization, and place our foot on the long, blood-soaked, sad path toward that aboriginal tribe that has forgotten how to make needles or sew, is the treason of the clerks.

One the king is convinced (or in these more degenerate and democratic times, the parliaments and congresscreatures who have kingly duties but no sense of a higher power to whom they are obligated) that he has authority to overrule the laws of civilization, perhaps to make the pathway clear to the alleged utopia that the priests said surely will arise once anarchy is unleashed, then the legitimacy of his state is gone, and he is merely a raving beast like a mad man-eating lion.

The first thing the lion eats is the sense of honor that keeps his fighting men in check. His fighting men includes what in the modern day is both the military and the police. The police are made more and more militaristic; they are cast as the enemy of the people; and the military is degenerated from its ancient precepts of honor and courage, and instead becomes sensitive and friendly to womenfolk or sodomites.

Now, to be clear, in a modern bureaucratic state, any one who has the power to enforce the law and harass the people is, for all practical purposes, a policeman, a soldier, a fighting man of the king. We would call these bureaucrats, everyone from the tax man to the clerk on a planning and zoning board enforcing an irrational eco-nutbag regulation.

The sense of honor needed to keep soldiers and civil servants in check evaporates as the lawlessness of the anarchic King spreads down the wall to the next row, and the soldiers, police, and civil servants become young lions, red in tooth and claw.

Once the fighting men are corrupted, next oldest support of civilization vanishes: the burghers, the townsmen, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the shopkeeper and tradesman, and middle class. Their corruption is far easier and far quicker, because trade and possession depends on a faith in objective law and evenhanded enforcement of contracts, not to mention the soundness of coin or currency. The middle class can be taxed out of existence, as they were in ancient Rome, which collapsed the Western Empire in one generation, and kept the Eastern Empire in a state of servitude and poverty for the remainder of its millennium.

The merchants who turn to the King to make a sweetheart deal create crony capitalism, which is also, more correctly, called fascism. The industries, such as are left, become organs of the state and are protected by increasingly one-sided and nakedly unfair taxations and regulations.

The important point to note is that the treason of the merchants undermines the unspoken social contract which allows trade and manufacture, or even guilds and small shops, to exist: that is, namely, the unspoken social contract provides that spoken contracts shall be upheld, and trade be fair and free. This idea is laughed into nonexistence, and the merchants are no longer merchants, but become jackals slinking and slouching in the shadows of the lions consuming the people, greedy for scraps.

But no civilization of this is possible without the brotherhood of family and clan. And that is not possible without marriage and an institution of paternity.

So the final course of stones to go is the social contract, the bargain, between fathers and mothers, between male and female. The deal is that, in return for the bearing the burden of bearing children, the womanfolk will be protected and cherished. When the barbarians attack, the women and children go first to the stronghold, and the men man the walls; the iceberg strikes, the women and children go into the lifeboats, and the men go to death in the icy water. In return, the women preserve and reproduce the race.

To defend civilization, it is necessary for men and women to take the risks that modern society places upon us. Yes, there is risk of divorce. Yes, there is risk of missing out on something, whatever that something might be. But in the end, if even those who are civilizationists give in to the temptations and whispered promises of safety offered by modern society, civilization will fall.

It will most likely fall anyhow. But the important thing is to provide, like the monks of an earlier civilizational decline, a means of preserving that which will permit civilization to rise again.

The risk is worth it, because there is more to life than maximizing your number of sexual encounters and your bank account. So take the risk. Marry. Have children. Teach them right from wrong. And raise up a new generation that is not only civilized, but capable of defending the remnants of civilization.

Female intelligence

 It appears the Female Imperative now takes precedence over national security:

For the past eight months, there has
been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House,
the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a
means of identifying characters in the devastating report
it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and
detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now
we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story
revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of
high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does
not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible
judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs
through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was
given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks;
she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she
misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an
absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely
told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for
the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional
studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church
Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a
painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in
order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable.
Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to
NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former
intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on
background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many
intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail
for what she has done.”

Instead, however, she has
been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently
working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch,
she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was
also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

This is an example of another reason not to permit women in the military. Women are not considered to be fully accountable in modern American society, and soldiers who are unaccountable to civilian leadership are not desirable in anything that still pretends to be a free society.

They’re not the good guys

The Senate report on the useless brutality and deception involved in the CIA’s interrogation program tends to support what those of us who opposed torture from the start have been saying all along:

In January 2003, 10 months into the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prison program, the agency’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He said he had told his bosses he had “serious reservations” about the program and no longer wanted to be associated with it “in any way.”

The bitter infighting in the C.I.A. interrogation program was only one symptom of the dysfunction, disorganization, incompetence, greed and deception described in a summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. In more than 500 pages, the summary, released on Tuesday, paints a devastating picture of an agency that was ill equipped to take on the task of questioning Al Qaeda suspects, bungled the job and then misrepresented the results….

The report said the agency had evidently forgotten its own conclusion, sent to Congress in 1989, that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” The Democratic Senate staff members who studied the post-Sept. 11 program came up with an identical assessment: that waterboarding, wall-slamming, nudity, cold and other ill treatment produced little information of value in preventing terrorism.

The report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no.

I’m not exactly surprised. You may recall I wrote the following on WND back in 2006:

Consider the words of Winston Churchill, a man not well-known for shirking confrontation or combat, written after World War I while he was secretary of state for war:

All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived – not without reason – that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them to win. Germany, having let hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. … When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.

It is those last words that most completely damn the Bush administration as barbarians unfit for leadership of the free world. Few would find appeals to national security very compelling if the president insisted that victory in the War That Dare Not Speak Its Name required feeding the armed forces on the flesh of fallen Iraqis, and yet there is very little evidence, historic or current, that indicates torture will be of any use in turning back the forces of expansionist Islam.

Enthusiastic use of the most brutal torture did not help the French hold Algeria against Islamic rebels, nor did it bring victory to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Debates about whether “water boarding” is more acceptable than the rack or thumbscrews are meaningless; the point is that civilized societies do not indulge in such activities since they are evil and effectively useless.

The banality of US evil

ESR rightly identifies a problem much worse than racism:

Eric Garner was black. The policeman who choked him to death was white.

Some people want to make this horror about race. I find myself wishing they were right – that just once, the racial grievance peddlers weren’t basically making up inflammatory crap that canonizes thug trash like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Because as bad as violent racism is, I’m afraid that what actually killed Eric Garner was something far worse.

The truly terrifying thing about Eric Garner’s death is that I don’t think the cops in that video hated anybody. They were just doing their job. And their job included strangling a man to death for having sold “loosies” – untaxed cigarettes. Something he wasn’t doing when he was killed; he had just broken up a fight that the police came to investigate.

Garner had just broken up a fight. The police hassled him, based on his record as a (gasp!) vendor of untaxed cigarettes, and when he protested the force of law came down on him and snuffed him.

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a book called Democracy In America that has been justly celebrated for its perception about the young American republic ever since. In it, he warned of the dangers of what he called “soft despotism” – that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules”, all justified in soothing ways to achieve worthy objectives. Such as discouraging people from smoking by heavily taxing cigarettes.

Eric Garner died in a New York minute because “soft despotism” turned hard enough to kill him in cold blood. There was no anger there, no hate; the police simply failed to grasp the moral disproportion between the “crimes” he wasn’t even committing at the time and their use of force. And an investigating grand jury did no better.

Violent racists, as evil as they are, generally understand on some level that they’re doing wrong. That understanding is written all over the excuses they make. These cops didn’t need an excuse. They were doing their job. They were enforcing the law. The casual, dispassionate, machinelike brutality with which Garner was strangled reveals a moral vacuum more frightening than mere racism could ever be.

Americans find themselves living in a country where people can be freely killed, without hesitation or consequences, by the police for the “crime” of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. To call it “the Land of the Free” is darkly morbid sarcasm indeed.

The anger expressed in the Ferguson riots was misplaced, but not entirely illegitimate. There is a serious cancer in the United States and it has fully metastasized in the police forces across the country. It is yet another sign that all is not right on Main Street USA these days.

The birthrates fall

The US birthrate falls further below replacement level. But it’s okay, because immigration!

The number of women in the United States who gave birth dropped last year, according to federal statistics released Thursday, extending the decline for a sixth year. The National Center for Health Statistics reported Thursday that there were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, down slightly from 3.95 million in 2012, but 9 percent below the high in 2007.

According to the report, the general fertility rate in the United States — the average number of babies women from 15 to 44 bear over their lifetime — dropped to a record low last year, to 1.86 babies, well below the 2.1 needed for a stable population. For every 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, there were 62.5 births in 2013, compared with 63 the previous year.

The decline is especially notable because the number of women in their prime childbearing years, 20 to 39, has been growing since 2007. Some demographers said the numbers were not cause for concern.

“Americans haven’t worried much about birthrates in the past, because we
have the faucet of immigration to turn on and off,” said Andrew J.
Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns Hopkins University.

Absolutely. After all, swapping an -1SD IQ Guatamalan immigrant who doesn’t speak English for the native child of +2 SD white parents isn’t dysgenic or dyscivic at all, right? Such an exchange is not going to have any problematic long-term consequences in a world that we’re told is going to be getting more competitive and require more cognitive capacity to be economically productive in the future, n’est-ce pas?

It looks rather like a vicious cycle has been established. The economy drives down birth rates, which results in less educable lower-IQ immigrants being substituted for higher educated, higher-IQ natives, which hurts the economy….

The mainstream discovers MGTOW

A very good article by Milo on the increasing male distrust for and disinterest in the opposite sex:

Never before in history have relations between the sexes been so fraught with anxiety, animosity and misunderstanding. To radical feminists, who have been the driving force behind many tectonic societal shifts in recent decades, that’s a sign of success: they want to tear down the institutions and power structures that underpin society, never mind the fall-out. Nihilistic destruction is part of their road map.

But, for the rest of us, the sight of society breaking down, and ordinary men and women being driven into separate but equal misery, thanks to a small but highly organised group of agitators, is distressing. Particularly because, as increasing numbers of social observers are noticing, an entire generation of young people—mostly men—are being left behind in the wreckage of this social engineering project.

Social commentators, journalists, academics, scientists and young men themselves have all spotted the trend: among men of about 15 to 30 years old, ever-increasing numbers are checking out of society altogether, giving up on women, sex and relationships and retreating into pornography, sexual fetishes, chemical addictions, video games and, in some cases, boorish lad culture, all of which insulate them from a hostile, debilitating social environment created, some argue, by the modern feminist movement.

You can hardly blame them. Cruelly derided as man-children and crybabies for objecting to absurdly unfair conditions in college, bars, clubs and beyond, men are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: ridiculed as basement-dwellers for avoiding aggressive, demanding women with unrealistic expectations, or called rapists and misogynists merely for expressing sexual interest. 

The readily observable fact is that the majority of women do not give a damn about men. They are so locked into their vision of intrinsic female inferiority that they assume their actions will have absolutely no effect on how men think and behave. This is profoundly dyscivilizational, which means that men are going to need to install an overt patriarchy, as the Romans eventually saw the need to do, if civilized society is to survive.

There is nothing fair or equal about feminists. Words are, for the most part, meaningless weapons to them; they would just as soon appeal to “purple” or “Kardashian” if they thought it would be useful. Men need to stop buying into those false appeals for the same reason everyone needs to stop giving ground to the SJWs.

A society of Gamma males will not survive for long. We need to get the Deltas to stop white knighting for women or the cruelest, coldest Alphas will soon rule over all. The reality is that a female-dominated society is not one that any self-respecting man is willing to maintain or live in.

No wonder young men are checking out. Consider this ridiculous, anti-male article:

They started in 2007 by forming a girls-only team. The girls started working with a robot that the boys had initially built. Almost immediately, they solved problems that the boys couldn’t. They developed competition strategies without loud-mouthed boys and repaired the robot on the fly without having to defer to the strongly held opinions of the male members of the team.

Lesson: don’t lift a finger to help women in science, tech, or games. They ask, you ignore. If they’re so damned superior, they can certainly figure it out for themselves. There is no need to discourage them, just leave them to their own devices and go your own way.

Something is wrong with these people

VERY wrong. PZ celebrates the decision of a publisher to stop marketing books to boys, as are his few remaining readers:

  • Holy crap. Somebody did the right thing for a change. I am blown away.
  • What do I think Lego should do? I think they should make half of all
    their future minifigs women. Construction set? Half the construction
    workers are women. Airplane set? Make one of the pilots a woman and one
    of the flight attendants a man. Police set? Not just a token woman, half
    women. Half the crooks, half the cops, half the bystanders. How hard is
    that?
  • Best news I’ve read all week.
  • This was enough to draw tears from me today.
  • My hubby the engineer bought electronics kits for our kids, and it was the oldest daughter who loved them. She happily joined him on any science project while her siblings ran off to do other things. She’s 37 now, and holds degrees in engineering, computational neuroscience and neurobiology. She’s been working for the NSF on a project to interest more women and minorities in STEM.

That last comment is my favorite. She has three degrees, but instead of actually doing any science, engineering, or biology, she’s using them to work in marketing. And what do you bet she hasn’t given her parents any grandchildren?

SJWs are much worse than useless. They are active participants in the ongoing implosion of civilization.

The Cultural Collapse Progression

Roosh has written a truly insightful article concerning the way in which a cultural collapse proceeds:

The Cultural Collapse Progression

1. Removal of religious narrative from people’s lives, replaced by a treadmill of scientific and technological “progress.”

2. Elimination of traditional sex roles through feminism, gender equality, political correctness, cultural Marxism, and socialism.

3. Delay or abstainment of family formation by women to pursue careerist lifestyles while men wait in confused limbo.

4. Decreasing birth rate among native population.

5. Government enactment of open immigration policies to prevent economic collapse.

6. Immigrant refusal to fully acclimate, forcing host culture to adopt external rituals and beliefs while being out-reproduced.

7. Natives becoming marginalized in their own country.

It’s particularly interesting how he traces it back to the removal of the religious narrative, given that he is not, to the best of my knowledge, a religious man.

He writes: “Cultural collapse is the decline, decay, or disappearance of a native
population’s rituals, habits, interpersonal communication,
relationships, art, and language. It coincides with a relative decline
of population compared to outside groups. National identity and group
identification will be lost while revisionist history will be applied to
demonize or find fault with the native population. Cultural collapse is
not to be confused with economic or state collapse. A nation that
suffers from a cultural collapse can still be economically productive
and have a working government.”

However, I would note that conomic and state collapse are very likely to follow as a consequence of the cultural collapse, particularly if the marginalized natives were historically more economically productive than their replacements.

4GW in Middle America

This looks rather like a prelude of one of the signs I predicted would be among the harbingers of the civil war that will bring about the end of the USA:

Police families in Ferguson fear for their safety and many have gone into hiding or left town after receiving assault and death threats.

Spouses and children of cops in Ferguson, Missouri, have received assault and death threats after the shooting of Michael Brown. Tensions continue to rise in Ferguson as a grand jury nears its decision on whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s shooting

‘It’s very frightening,’ said the police wife, who asked to not be identified. ‘Most people who have a family member who’s a police officer are very proud of what they do.This is real and people actually do know how to find us and they do want to harm us.’

I doubt it is anything more than threats at this point, though. If people were planning to act, they wouldn’t be warning police families ahead of time. We will know that 4GW has come to America in earnest when police and federal agents are leaving their jobs for fear of harm coming to their families.

Which, you may recall, is one reason I theorized that the notorious FEMA camps are not actually intended for enemies of the state, but rather, for the families of its servants.