Tag: decline and fall

A refusal to learn

We have learned nothing from history and so we are bound to repeat it:

We’ve known for 5,000 years that mass spying on one’s own people is always aimed at grabbing power and crushing dissent, not protecting us from bad guys.

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.

We’ve known for 2,000 years that wars are based on lies.

We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.

We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

We’ve known for millennia that torture is a form of terrorism.

We’ve known for thousands of years that – when criminals are not punished – crime spreads.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system.

We’ve known for centuries that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands are dangerous for free markets.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that companies will try to pawn their debts off on governments, and that it is a huge mistake for governments to allow corporate debt to be backstopped by government.

We’ve known for centuries that powerful people – unless held to account – will get together and steal from everyone else.

It’s not different this time. There will be ethnic cleansing and probably several incidents of mass slaughter, although whether it will be the immigrants or the native people on the short end is yet to be determined.

There will be series of economic crashes and the ongoing depression will deepen and widen, because the incipient credit busts in 1987 and 2001 and 2008 were all papered over with more central bank “money” created ex nihilo.

There will be wars, both due to the great clash of civilizations and pro-globalist elites clinging to government power in the face of furiously nationalistic people denied their will through the limitations and legalistic perversions of representative democracy.

These things are all inevitable. Not likely, inevitable. There is no force on Earth that can stop them, because in our arrogance and foolishness, we have again decided this time it’s different. But it’s not. It never is. And if you’re still a Republican defending income inequality because communism or a Democrat defending big government because poor people or a Libertarian defending open borders and free trade because individual, your entire political perspective is outdated and irrelevant. That world doesn’t exist anymore.

Aristocratic tiger-riders

In the introduction to the third edition of FA von Hayek’s A Tiger by the Tail, Austrian economist Joseph Salerno observes:

Inflating aggregate money expenditure leads to a short-run increase in employment that causes an inappropriate distribution of resources whose inevitable correction ensures another depression. Such a correction can be postponed, but never obviated, only by repeatedly neutralizing relative price changes through accelerating inflation.

Those who deny Hayek’s analysis—as all contemporary mainstream macroeconomists and policymakers do—and promote ever-increasing spending as the panacea for our present crisis live in the simplistic Keynesian fantasy land from which scarcity of real resources has been banished and in which the scarcity of money and credit is the only constraint on economic activity. As Hayek pointed out, such people do not merit the name “economist”:

“I cannot help regarding the increasing concentration on short-run effects—which in this context amounts to the same thing as a concentration on purely monetary factors—not only as a serious and dangerous intellectual error, but as a betrayal of the main duty of the economist and a grave menace to our civilization.”

Of course, as we were reminded in 2008, and again in 2014, not only does the postponed correction always eventually arrive, but the nominally palliative measures become increasingly ineffective. The Left is not entirely wrong to focus on the evils of income and financial inequality, because today they are not the result of capitalism and free enterprise, but the neo-feudal largesse distributed by the federal government to the financial aristocracy through the central bank.

I had always wonder why the Ciceronian cycle predicted the rise of aristocracy rather than the conventional expectations of post-democratic dictatorship. But in light of the post-2008 crisis events, it makes a good deal more sense.

The Great Partition has begun

As it is said, the value of any predictive model can only be found in its ability to correctly anticipate the future. So, you may recall that my expectations of the U.S. electorate are that it would increasingly consist of a white ethnic vote against a multi-colored alliance of non-white ethnics combined with an increasingly small number of left-wing white quislings. With the most recent election, we are now beginning to see that happen with the coalescing of the white vote.

Exit polling shows racial polarization of the electorate has begun to cross party lines, with whites less likely to back Democratic candidates than they have been in the past. Across 21 states where Senate races were exit polled, whites broke for the Republican by a significant margin in all but four – Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Oregon. None of those four states has backed a GOP candidate for president in the post-Reagan era except when New Hampshire went for George W. Bush by 1 point in 2000.

The Senate seats on the ballot this year were last up for re-election in 2008, a presidential year. Democrats typically rely on greater turnout among their core voters when the presidential race tops the ticket. But still, Democratic Senate candidates lost ground among white voters by an average of 10 points compared with 2008. White voters abandoned Democrats in droves in places with heated contests as well as those without much action. The exceptions were Minnesota and Oregon – where Democratic incumbents improved their overall support across the board – and Mississippi – where Travis Childers managed to grow the Democratic share of the white vote from 8 percent to 16 percent.

The shift is particularly acute in the South, where some of the last white Democrats in the House of Representatives lost their seats on Tuesday.

  • In North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan carried just 33 percent of the white vote, down from 39 percent in 2008. White voters under age 30 backed Hagan decisively in 2008, 60 percent for her to 36 percent for her opponent, as they helped to sweep Barack Obama into office. But this year, younger white voters who cast ballots in North Carolina broke just as decisively for Thom Tillis, with 56 percent to 32 percent for Hagan. Twelve percent backed Sean Haugh, the Libertarian.
  •  In Louisiana, Mary Landrieu captured just 18 percent of the white vote, a sharp decline from the 33 percent she garnered in 2008. Younger whites there broke for her Republican opponent in 2008, 68 percent to 30 percent, and they were even more likely to back one of her GOP opponents this time around – 22 percent voted for Landrieu while 74 percent went for Bill Cassidy or Rob Maness.
  • In one surprisingly competitive Senate race Tuesday, whites in Virginia voted 37 percent for Mark Warner, 60 percent for Ed Gillespie. In 2008, Warner won the votes of 56 percent of whites. Younger whites broke heavily this year for Ed Gillespie in Virginia, 57 percent to 31 percent for Warner. In 2008, Warner carried 59 percent among this group.
  • Even winning Democrats aren’t immune to the drop-off in white support: Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin captured 43 percent of the white vote in his successful bid for re-election, that’s down 18 points from his support among whites in 2008.

FEW REPUBLICANS HAVE REACHED BEYOND WHITE VOTERS

But Republicans haven’t minimized racial polarization in the other direction either. The coalition behind Republican Senate candidates was predominantly white, 90 percent across all 21 states with Senate races that were exit polled, ranging from 79 percent white Alaska to 98 percent white in West Virginia. Dan Sullivan in Alaska managed to pool the most diverse electorate with a strong showing among Alaska natives, and more than 10 percent of those backing both John Cornyn in Texas and Cory Gardner in Colorado were Hispanic.

Those three – Sullivan, Cornyn and Gardner – were the only Republicans to assemble a coalition that was less white than Mitt Romney’s in the 2012 presidential election.

Notice this phrase in particular: “the last white Democrats in the House of Representatives”. Notice also the four outlying states where whites did not overwhelmingly favor Republicans: Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Oregon. Notice anything they have in common? 78.9, 85.3, 93.2.83.6. In other words, all of them are a) traditionally left-leaning, and b) considerably whiter than the national average of 72.4 percent. Call it the Scalzi effect, in which a white left-liberal, through ideology, hypocrisy or sheer ignorance, supports diversity and other left-wing policies that work to the detriment of his own race because he is geographically removed from experiencing the consequences of those policies… for the moment. Both traditionally right-leaning states and less white states are moving rapidly towards White Identity politics, as has been inevitable since the successful 1965 assault on the traditional U.S. ethnic identity.

This means the Great Partition has officially begun. Most people don’t realize it yet, even as they are beginning to take unconscious part in it. Republican and Democrat are no longer pure political identities, but are increasingly markers of ethno-cultural loyalties. It will, of course, end in bloodshed. Considerable bloodshed. When will the violent phase begin? You’ll know it when the Scalzi effectors belatedly attempt to join the side that doesn’t hate them for their genetic privilege. Which is to say, when John Scalzi and his wretched kind first stop openly supporting the Democratic Party, which will soon be followed by their open endorsement of the Republican Party.

You may or may not be pleased by this development, but how you feel about it is absolutely and utterly irrelevant. America is not special. This time is not different. And history is absolutely eloquent concerning the eventual fate of multi-ethnic states. If you’re having trouble understanding this, here is a useful question to ask yourself: how do all of these ethnically homogenous states throughout history keep magically coming into being?

Republican House, Republican Senate

It would be nice if the Republicans would attempt to do more with their newly won Congressional power than they did the last time they held both House and Senate, but given their objectives, I have no expectation whatsoever that they’ll even do something as trivial as overturn Obamacare. Indeed, I rather expect them to dig the hole deeper. Consider the words of the new Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell:

“This experiment in big government has lasted long enough. It’s time to go in a new direction,” McConnell boomed to supporters in his victory speech. But he sounded a conciliatory note as well, adding that while he and the president rarely see eye to eye, “we do have an obligation to work together on issues where we can agree.”

“It’s time for government to start getting results and implementing
solutions to the challenges facing our country, starting with our
still-struggling economy,” [House Majority Leader] Boehner added.

Translation: immigration amnesty and free trade. From the same article:

While Republicans are likely to cooperate on issues like tax reform, the
party will seek to breathe life into their stalled jobs bills, to gain
approval of the delayed Keystone XL pipeline, roll back some carbon
emission regulations and tweak Obamacare.

Well, that’s certainly an ambitious program that is all but guaranteed to completely turn things around, isn’t it? It’s fascinating how they’ve managed to completely evade addressing every single aspect of American decline.

And on a blog note, I can only observe that we need some saner trolls. It appears Ann Morgan is even less connected to objective reality than one would have assumed: “Hahahaha. Total democrat victory tonight proves my point is correct.”

Yeah, so, about that…. The constant laughter of the SJW isn’t, as they think it to be, the confident amusement of the superior being at the antics of his lessers. It’s the cackling of unhinged madness.

Election Day

I trust by now that anyone reading this blog has been sufficiently disabused of the notion that freedom has any causal relationship with voting. As the New York Times made clear today to even the slowest midwits, voting is not, and has never been, a Constitutional or human right. Women, like men, can be denied the privilege, it merely cannot be denied by “by the United States or by any State” on the sole basis of sex.

The 19th Amendment states “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Which raises the question, what right of the citizens of the United States to vote? It is not numbered amongst the unalienable rights listed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It does not appear in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution “left the boundaries of suffrage undefined” and the only directly elected body specified was the House of Representatives, for which “voter qualifications were explicitly delegated to the individual states.”

In any event, as millions of voters exercise their privilege across the USA today, it is very, very unlikely that the replacement of a Democratic majority in the Senate with a Republican one, and the strengthening of the Republican majority in the House is going to signify much in the grand scheme of things. The federal government will continue its deficit spending, the banks will continue to loan out credit money they create ex nihilo, Wall Street will continue to dictate policy to Washington, the U.S. military will continue to intervene in the affairs of sovereign nations around the world, and the flow of diverse and semicivilized immigrants will continue unabated.

So enjoy the show, but understand it is merely rote and ritual, a piece of kabuki theater to which we all know the steps and the lines.

Vietnam vs America: round 2

Vietnam appears to be coming out ahead again:

According to the Pew Global Poll, 95% of people in Vietnam agree that most people are better off under capitalism, even if there is inequality. By contrast, only 70% of Americans believe the same thing…. But the Vietnamese advantage may boil down to this: Free markets are new there, whereas America has had them for a long time. Scientist Thomas Ray once said that every successful system accumulates parasites, and the free market in America has been successful for a very long time. Established businesses get tied down with regulations that keep out new innovations — like Michigan’s GM-backed anti-Tesla law that bars carmakers from selling directly to the public — while politicians line up to line their pockets with taxes and fees and campaign contributions.

This phenomenon probably explains why most of the growth and innovation in the U.S. economy has been in the Internet or Internet-enabled sectors where regulation has been light, though even there the politicians are cracking down. Ultimately, the political system doesn’t like anything to go on unless it has control — and a chance for politicians to wet their beaks and look after their own.

I expect Glen’s explanation is correct. All things are corrupted in time, all empires, even the mightiest, fall. Glen quite rightly doesn’t want a war or revolution, but that is what the USA is likely to eventually see at least one of those things as it inevitably fragments, as all force-imposed empires do in time. The UK very nearly broke apart earlier this year, and the Catalan-Spain union will likely do so within ten years.

Both of those unions were voluntary, so how can anyone possibly assume that the USA, which is a union imposed by military force and the will of a conqueror rather than the people, will not do so as well? It’s simply not a credible position, and demonstrates both the lack of the imagination and historical ignorance of anyone who holds it.

NB: I’m sorry about the comment captchas, but I’ve already got word verification turned off and I can’t seem to do anything about it. The way to avoid it is to be logged into Google; you can still use Name/URL and you won’t be forced to deal with the captchas. I suspect it is because I use an old template, but I don’t actually know why Blogger is suddenly ignoring the Word Verification setting.

A state of war

Dmitry Orlov considers the current state of US-Russia relations on Zerohedge:

So far, this all seems like typical economic warfare: the Americans want to get everything they want by printing money while bombing into submission or sanctioning anyone who disobeys them, while the rest of the world attempts to resist them. But early in 2014 the situation changed. There was a US-instigated coup in Kiev, and instead of rolling over and playing dead like they were supposed to, the Russians mounted a fast and brilliantly successful campaign to regain Crimea, then successfully checkmated the junta in Kiev, preventing it from consolidating control over the remaining former Ukrainian territory by letting volunteers, weapons, equipment and humanitarian aid enter—and hundreds of thousands of refugees exit—through the strictly notional Russian-Ukrainian border, all the while avoiding direct military confrontation with NATO. Seeing all of this happening on the nightly news has awakened the Russian population from its political slumber, making it sit up and pay attention, and sending Putin’s approval rating through the roof.

The “optics” of all this, as they like to say at the White House, are rather ominous. We are coming up on the 70th anniversary of victory in World War II—a momentous occasion for Russians, who pride themselves on defeating Hitler almost single-handedly. At the same time, the US (Russia’s self-appointed arch-enemy) has taken this opportunity to reawaken and feed the monster of Nazism right on Russia’s border (inside Russia’s borders, some Russians/Ukrainians would say). This, in turn, makes the Russians remember Russia’s unique historical mission is among the nations of the world: it is to thwart all other nations’ attempts at world domination, be it Napoleonic France or Hitleresque Germany or Obamaniac America. Every century or so some nation forgets its history lessons and attacks Russia. The result is always the same: lots of corpse-studded snowdrifts, and then Russian cavalry galloping into Paris, or Russian tanks rolling into Berlin….

[W]hy has war been declared now, and why was it declared by this social worker turned national misleader? Some keen observers mentioned his slogan “the audacity of hope,” and ventured to guess that this sort of “audaciousness” (which in Russian sounds a lot like “folly”) might be a key part of his character which makes him want to be the leader of the universe, like Napoleon or Hitler. Others looked up the campaign gibberish from his first presidential election (which got silly young Americans so fired up) and discovered that he had nice things to say about various cold warriors. Do you think Obama might perhaps be a scholar of history and a shrewd geopolitician in his own right? (That question usually gets a laugh, because most people know that he is just a chucklehead and repeats whatever his advisers tell him to say.) Hugo Chavez once called him “a hostage in the White House,” and he wasn’t too far off. So, why are his advisers so eager to go to war with Russia, right now, this year?

Is it because the US is collapsing more rapidly than most people can imagine? This line of reasoning goes like this: the American scheme of world domination through military aggression and unlimited money-printing is failing before our eyes. The public has no interest in any more “boots on the ground,” bombing campaigns do nothing to reign in militants that Americans themselves helped organize and equip, dollar hegemony is slipping away with each passing day, and the Federal Reserve is fresh out of magic bullets and faces a choice between crashing the stock market and crashing the bond market. In order to stop, or at least forestall this downward slide into financial/economic/political oblivion, the US must move quickly to undermine every competing economy in the world through whatever means it has left at its disposal, be it a bombing campaign, a revolution or a pandemic (although this last one can be a bit hard to keep under control). Russia is an obvious target, because it is the only country in the world that has had the gumption to actually show international leadership in confronting the US and wrestling it down; therefore, Russia must be punished first, to keep the others in line.

Empires always fall. The most powerful military is always eventually surpassed by its rivals. These are lessons of history that the average individual, especially the average American, never takes into account. And very, very few individuals in a society in decline ever recognize that it is in decline at the time. However, the USA is presently showing many signs of decline that have previously been observed in imperial societies of the past, including both democratic Athens and republican Rome.

Obama’s plan to open the immigration floodgates and give out 34 million green cards on top of the 60 million immigrants already in the country may mark the final nail in the coffin, but such things are merely consequences of the country abandoning its original identity as a white Christian Anglo-Saxon nation. There is no mechanical fix for that, and it should surprise absolutely no one that an empire that is no longer predominantly a white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation does not abide by either the traditions or the values of white, Christian, Anglo-Saxons.

An unmoored state

John C. Wright drops a daisycutter of law and logic on the celebrants of the ur-legalization of sodogamy:

The proponents of what is called (with unintentional hilarity) gay marriage express the gaiety for which they are named by crowing and gamboling with delight that the Supreme Court has declined to do its core Constitutional mission of interpreting the law, and chastise and check the abuses of activist judges overruling the sovereign votes of the decent and sober majority.

They should perhaps rein in their gay celebrations: gay marriage cannot be justified either in law or logic. This means the law has just departed from the environs of law and logic.

The gay partisans should instead recoil with dread, for the thing, by being given into their hands, is effectively destroyed. Whatever meaning or sanction the pairs of homosexuals are seeking out of the pretense of marriage is destroyed by the very fact that it is a pretense, not a marriage.

I am not speaking about an abstraction, but as a matter of law. The way law works, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the basic principle, is that once a precedent is established, until and unless it is definitively overruled, it has controlling authority over every case standing on similar facts, and the degree of similarity is the core of what all legal arguments are about.

This ruling, now left to stand, will and must create more havoc with family law, with testaments and estates, divorce laws, property laws, far more than if the government simply decreed marriage to be a private contract. No matter what the desires and tastes of the reformers, and no matter their promises, once set in motion, the law operates by a logic and by an inertia of its own.

I have been pointing out the increasing U.S. abandonment of law (and, for that matter Law) for nearly a decade now. I first noticed it back in the 1990s, when a petty legal case to which I was the only witness was settled, in the courtroom, by the judge literally flipping a coin. At the time, this was shocking to me. These days, I think the average man would consider himself lucky if he managed to get fifty-fifty odds of genuine justice being done.

What we are witnessing here in the Supreme Court’s cowardly decision to permit the widespread implementation of sodogamy through inaction is precisely what Wright describes, the abandonment of law and logic. I’m not even remotely surprised by the Court’s decision to punt; the reason they did so was expressly because they did NOT wish to set a precedent, any precedent, in either direction. On the one hand, they did not wish to “turn the clock back” in favor of traditional, actual marriage because they wish to curry favor with the global elite that are actively seeking to destroy marriage. On the other, they did not wish to set an actual legal precedent because there are no solid legal or logical grounds that would permit them to demolish the concept of marriage consisting of the union of one man with one woman that would be limited to only changing the “man/woman” element; every argument that can be made for sodogamy can also be made every bit as effectively for polygamy and for unions with non-human entities. Regardless of whether you are anti-sodogamy or pro-marriage equality, this abandonment of jurisprudence should not be celebrated.

The continued abandonment of law and morality is inevitable at this point, to the extent it hasn’t already happened. It is part and parcel of a civilization in the latter stages of decline, and our responsibility is not to try to prevent its fall, but rather, to continue to uphold each petty traditional schwerkpunkt represented by the families and institutions that have not succumbed to the cultural rot. Human societies are cyclical entities, and one can no more fight the cycle than gravity. This is not, however, a counsel of despair, but rather, one of hope. “Progress” is neither linear nor inevitable. What we are seeing has happened before, and will happen again. Our fathers and grandfathers may have failed to sustain the civilization they inherited, but we cannot be held responsible for that. What we can, and will be responsible, is if we fail to keep the seeds of that civilization alive to pass on to future generations.

We are the bases of tomorrow’s civilization. We are the foundation of tomorrow’s societies that will rise from the swirling barbarism. Don’t forget that.

As wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah

Thus spake the Rev. Billy Graham:

Reverend Billy Graham, arguably the most well-known and respected evangelical preacher of the last 50 years, said in a recently published commentary that America was “founded by men who believed in prayer” and that prayer can turn “the tide of history,” adding that while “America is just as wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah” and deserves “the judgment of God,” this judgment can be lessened through prayer.

“Even though America is just as wicked as Sodom and Gomorrah ever were, and as deserving of the judgment of God, God would spare us if we were earnestly praying, with hearts that had been cleansed and washed by the blood of Christ,” said Rev. Graham.

It’s hard to argue otherwise without throwing out the entire metric. Post-Christianity is a bitch, and a pretty nasty one at that, as the West is gradually beginning to discover.