Tag: decline and fall

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.

Islamophobia at the UN

I take personal offense at this reprehensibly Islamophobic comment by a UN official, who implies that devoted members of the religion of peace would allow anyone to come to harm after taking control of a Syrian city:

Thousands of people “will most likely be massacred” if Kobani falls to Islamic State fighters, a U.N. envoy said on Friday, as militants fought deeper into the besieged Syrian Kurdish town in full view of Turkish tanks that have done nothing to intervene.

I’m sure the Turks are amused by the passive-aggressive criticism of their failure to defend the very Kurds who have been violently rebelling against their rule for decades, if not centuries. It’s one thing to wipe out your enemies. But one can hardly criticize a people who, upon seeing someone else doing it for them, shrug, look on, and say, “you know, defending those people is really neither our problem nor our interest.”

Anti-gun liberals would do well to keep this in mind come the day of the zombies. When they’re screaming “somebody, please do something!” I suspect there will be more than a few well-armed conservatives and libertarians who will look on with a faint smile and say, “now, weren’t you the very sort of idiot who a) brought the zombies to town, and b) tried to take my guns away?”

After all, did not the Bible say that the hearts of men would grow cold?

Dutch slaughter

So much for the concept of “never again”. Between abortion and the end of life and euthanasia at the end of it, modern secularists are beginning to make the National Socialist approach to mass killing look downright moderate:

The number of mentally-ill patients killed by euthanasia in Holland has trebled in the space of a year, new figures have revealed. In 2013, a total of 42 people with ‘severe psychiatric problems’ were killed by lethal injection compared to 14 in 2012 and 13 in 2011. The latest official figures also revealed a 15 per cent surge in the number of euthanasia deaths from 4,188 cases in 2012 to 4,829 cases last year. The incremental rise is consistent with a 13 per cent increase in 2012, an 18 per cent rise in 2011, 19 per cent in 2010 and 13 per cent in 2009.

The rise is also likely to confirm the fears of Dutch regulator Theo Boer who told the Daily Mail that he expected to see euthanasia cases smash the 6,000 barrier in 2014. Overall, deaths by euthanasia, which officially account for three per cent of all deaths in the Netherlands, have increased by 151 per cent in just seven years.

Most cases – some 3,600 people – involved cancer sufferers but there were also 97 people who died at the hands of their doctors because they were suffering from dementia, the figures show. The figures, however, do not include cases of so-called terminal sedation, where patients are given a cocktail of sedatives and narcotics before food and fluids are withdrawn. Studies suggest that if such deaths were added to the figure then euthanasia would account for one in eight – about 12.3 per cent – of all deaths in the Netherlands.

So, Dutch doctors are murdering people with “severe psychiatric problems” as well as dementia. At this point, it won’t be long into it is decided that everyone with an IQ under 99 is removed from the gene pool.

The idea that modern post-Christian society is any less barbaric than the Middle Ages is becoming increasingly risible. 

“Those who hate you will rule over you”

I fail to see how encouraging African aliens to rule over white Americans is going to reduce racial strife. Or work any better than it has in Zimbabwe.

Kulane, a 32-year-old graduate of St. John’s University, is one of two Somali council candidates this year, marking the first time that Somali-American citizens have filed for city election here. A third is running for school board. By all accounts, it’s a significant step in this central Minnesota town of about 65,000, which has had a history of cultural tension with the immigrant group.

“It’s a sign of the times,” said Stephen Philion, professor of sociology at St. Cloud State University and chair of the nonprofit Greater Minnesota Worker Center. “They’ve organized the way that other [immigrant] groups previously have organized. Now they’re looking for a seat at the table … They’re a group that should no longer be taken as outsiders. They are St. Cloud.”

Philion said the racial hostility they faced may have had unintended consequences of giving the Somali community “a greater sense of commitment to fighting for political power.”

Kulane, who has lived in the city’s Ward 1 since 2006, is careful not to campaign on issues of diversity…. The racial strife dates to as early as 2002, a few years after Somalis began moving to the area in greater numbers.

A significant step to be sure. But not for the better. I wonder how it is that people from a notoriously failed state are suddenly deemed worthy of political leadership in the United States due to nothing more than the miracle of geographic translocation. And keep in mind that for the most part, alien refugees are the losers of the wars in their homelands; the USA is actually the recipient of the least capable parties. They were outsmarted by barbarian warlords running a Third World failed state, they’ve done nothing but live off welfare ever since, and now they’re going to run things in the West?

Then again, if the people of Saint Cloud are dumb enough to a) permit themselves to be invaded by Somalis and b) actually elect them to positions of leadership, they will deserve to dwell in the New Mogadishu that will result.

It’s increasingly looking like we may not make it until 2033 before the violence starts. If one can’t escape the alien invasion in St. Cloud, Minnesota, then it can no longer be escaped and five decades of retreat from the inner cities has ceased to be an option. Considering that Americans were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to keep French children from growing up in German-occupied France, I cannot imagine what they will be willing to do in order to prevent their children and grandchildren from growing up in African-occupied America.

The Baby Boomers won’t do anything, of course, because they collectively don’t give a damn about succeeding generations. But GenX does and will.

The sixth-most evil author

John C. Wright was not only voted the sixth-greatest living SF author, he was also named #6 on a list of evil authors, led by the evilly evil Orson Scott Card:

Though not as well known as Orson Scott Card, sci-fi author John C. Wright has been even more vocal about his distaste for homosexuality. After the SyFy Channel promised to be diverse in its portrayal of gay people, Wright took to LiveJournal with a shockingly homophobic post: “Why are you willing to tolerate sexual perversion but not racism? In a world with no standards, what makes a malfunction of love higher on your standard than a malfunction of hate? Is an irrational lust and longing to mimic the mating act with a sex with which one cannot mate, at its root, any more or less disconnected to reality than an irrational fear and hatred of a Negro?” He also compared being gay to bestiality, necrophilia, and the sexual abuse of children.

As the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil League of Evil, I can only approve, of course. I am also amused by all the great writers of the past that were omitted; if “distaste for homosexuality” is sufficient to land one on the list of evil bigots, then the greater part of the contributors to the Western literary canon will necessarily need to be included as well.

Of course, the Bible speaks on this in the Book of Isaiah: Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

To put it bluntly, if you are not being labeled evil by the world these days, you should probably reflect upon what it is you are doing wrong. And with regards to homosexuality, it’s hardly new. To assert that its increasing public acceptance is an indication of human progress is to demonstrate one’s historical ignorance. As with an overabundance of credit, open and culturally permissible homosexuality is an indicator of late stage societal decadance. It’s not a cause of rapid civilizational decline, but it is a warning sign that such a decline is in the works.