Tag: decline and fall

Mailvox: clinging to the myth

MS clings to the myth of equality between different human population groups:

I don’t need to base anything on race; the problem with many blacks in America is their culture. A lazy, irresponsible, INFERIOR culture compared to eurocentric “white” culture. If they adopted our culture tomorrow, most of their problems would disappear (IMO).

He’s completely wrong. Africans don’t adopt European culture for three reasons. First, because they can’t. Second, because they prefer their own culture. Third, because Europeans have increasingly abandoned it themselves. Europeans have been trying to force Africans to adopt European culture for more than 200 years. It’s not possible, and more to the point, it’s not their choice.

Think about it. What could be more racist, what could be more culturally imperialistic, than to insist that Africans must adopt European culture? This is even worse than Muslims imposing Sharia on everyone; Sharia at least permits the dhimmi to retain their religion and customs. Why should Asians not insist that Europeans adopt their culture? If we put it to a global vote, I’m quite confident the Han Chinese would win.

Africans have a perfect right to live the way they want to live. So do Europeans. This is why desegregation is not only doomed to failure, but is intrinsically immoral. It is also likely to destroy whichever culture has the longer time preferences.

Remember, there are no shortage of whites, especially overweight, unattractive white women, who genuinely prefer the African culture of living fast, consuming conspicuously, and dying young in a promiscuous, matriarchal society to the European culture of living conservatively and saving to build for the future in a sexually restricted patriarchal society. As with all things economic, these are questions of preferences and time-orientation, not morality or science.

History has conclusively demonstrated that there is only one way to successfully turn a short-term orientation people into a long-term one: kill off a sufficient percentage of those members of the population group with a short-term orientation before they bear or raise children. This process takes somewhere between 750 and 1,000 years and I suspect that Jared Diamond may have been onto something even though he didn’t understand the full significance of the European geography in this regard. My thought is that the near-continuous warfare between small and competing groups, in combination with their ongoing contact with advanced civilization, allowed the European nations to kill off enough of their short-term oriented troublemakers to collectively develop long-term time orientations.

Remember, the Roman legions didn’t permit their soldiers to marry until AFTER their 20-year term of service was complete.

Not only have Africans not had enough time to go through his process, given when they first encountered European civilization, but they have actually been collectively reverting thanks to the federal and international aid policies of the last 50 years. Neither geography nor law nor even religion are sufficient to convert short time preferences into long ones. Such ideas are mutu, magical thinking akin to the idea that murdering an albino will lead to success in business.

Permitting the barbarians to destroy civilization is not going to benefit either the savage or the civilized in the long-run. The fact that the majority of people in our society cannot grasp this simple fact is, in itself, an indication of the way in which our society has already been barbarized.

La Paglia on societal suicide

Camille Paglia is interviewed in The Wall Street Journal:

‘What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says
Camille Paglia.
This self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” isn’t telling
anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. No, her
indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is
out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male
students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and
women, and sexiness is dead….

I ask if she really sees a connection between society’s attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization. She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,” she says. “These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.”

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians “lack practical skills of analysis and construction”) to what women wear. “So many women don’t realize how vulnerable they are by what they’re doing on the street,” she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes “women are at fault for their own victimization.” Nonsense, she says. “I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.” She calls it “street-smart feminism.”

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten.

It’s easy to dismiss the likes of Karl Denninger and me. But when intelligent, successful, mainstream people as diverse as Camille Paglia, Marc Faber, and X are all observing almost exactly the same thing, and when arrogant world-healers such as Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Paul Krugman are beginning to openly admit that their models don’t work and they don’t know what the hell is happening anymore, it may be time to start listening to the canaries who have been screaming their pretty little yellow heads off.

As for the triumph of feminism, let me be the first to point out that there are now a whole host of men who are “who would admit that he believes women are less capable”. We will not only admit it, we will openly proclaim it. And that host is growing literally every day as awareness of Game continues to spread throughout the male population.

Equality is dead. Multiculturalism is dead. Feminism is dying. And if we’re very, very lucky, civilization won’t be completely devastated in their catastrophic death throes over the next two decades.

The world you live in

This is not The Onion, this is the government pitching its free services. Isn’t it wonderful that idiot sluts can now sign up for federally funded birth control so that men can sexually penetrate them at will without having to worry about getting them pregnant?

It should be amusing when the fine print changes and all the federally funded sluts discover that the price of their free birth control is the requirement to provide sexual services to bankers.

This is the sort of thing that makes one start that the global jihad might be the better alternative. It’s very difficult to look crazier and less sustainable than religious fanatics with a 7th century ideology who shoot women in the head for learning how to read, but Otherly Insane America has somehow managed it. Thanks Obamacare!

Surrender

Invade the world, invite the world, elect the world:

Abdi Warsame made history Tuesday by becoming the highest elected Somali in the country, winning a seat on the City Council in a landslide. Two decades after a wave of East Africans arrived in Minneapolis to escape civil war, they emerged as a political force to elect one of their own for the first time to City Hall, jumping out of their seats at a Cedar-Riverside theater to cheer, clap and embrace one another as War­same took the stage.

It was part of a sweeping turnover on the City Council, where seven new members will be sworn in next year. Two other challengers knocked out incumbents by a 2-1 margin in wards spanning Uptown, the North Loop and Northeast, and the council seemed likely to have its first Hmong and Hispanic members when all votes are counted….

Warsame secured 64 percent of first-place votes for the Sixth Ward seat. He defeated 12-year Council Member Robert Lilligren, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe who strove to show that he could connect with East African voters even if he didn’t share the same cultural background.

Voter turnout in the ward exploded since the last council race in 2009, and Warsame won with three times as many votes as Lilligren garnered in his last election.

Warsame, 35, left Somalia as a child and spent much of his life in England. He moved to Minneapolis in 2006 and heads the tenant association for the Riverside Plaza, the high-rises that house 4,000 East Africans.

Mogadishu on the Mississippi’s newly elected leader is not an American. Not in any sense of the word except the legal one. He’s lived in America less than half the time that I’ve lived in Europe. Does anyone seriously believe that this man has any understanding of the 18th century English political principles that define what America is, let alone any genuine allegiance to them?

Marines were sent to Somalia to prevent Somalis ruling over Somalis. Now Somalis are ruling over Americans. In what used to be America.

Americans did not defend their liberty and now they are getting the non-American government they deserve.

Savages and the post-civilized

Daniel Greenfield observes that for the current administration, technology appears to be nothing more than magic:

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress….

This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it’s why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work….

The difference between savages and civilized men isn’t that savages are dumb and civilized people are smart. Savages can individually be quite clever within their parameters and civilized folk can be quite stupid. It’s the ability to extend that intelligence in groups that makes for a civilization.

Savages cannot work together. They can fantasize, but they can’t build anything bigger than a small group can manage. Savages are warriors, but not soldiers, they are tinkerers, not engineers, they are inventors, not scientists, they cannot work together on a large scale and thereby push past their own limitations as a culture and grow. They may have individual geniuses, but they cannot pass on what they learn.

This is almost exactly what I pointed out that so upset the inept futurists in the SFWA. This is exactly what I meant when I observed that a society of NK Jemisins have never been known to successfully establish or maintain an advanced civilization. And no amount of banning the badthoughts or badthinkers – talk about magical thinking – is going to prevent Western civilization from declining and falling now that post-civilized have seized control and the savages and half-savages are permanently ensconced inside the gates.

It doesn’t matter if you call me raciss, Detroit is still bankrupt and decaying. It doesn’t matter if you call me sexiss, the US birth rate is still plummeting and the population demographics are still dysgenic, in terms of intellectual, educational, and time-preferential genetics.

I don’t create or control any of this. It’s not a figment of my imagination. I do nothing more than observe the historical facts and draw connections between them and what is readily apparent today. What disturbs people is less the nature of my observations and more the fear that my observations are correct. It’s not as if my contentions are unfalsifiable, or that people are not going to notice when the course of events eventually goes more or less the way I have predicted.

I’m entirely accustomed to people thinking I’m crazy and being offended by my perspective. Remember, I left the USA 15 years ago. I was pointing out NSA spying back in 2001, and observing the precarious state of the global financial system in 2002. And even if you are absolutely certain that I am an unmitigated white supremacist, what are your substantive grounds for thinking that I am incorrect now?

Relying on a known logical fallacy, the Genetic Fallacy, and hoping for the best is little more than the very magical thinking that is part of the problem here.

Remember this in 2014 and 2016

Republicans give House leader John Boehner a standing ovation for kicking the can one more time:

At the last GOP conference meeting of the two-week government shutdown, no lawmakers went to the microphones to give their take.

Instead, after Speaker John Boehner told Republicans they had “fought the good fight,” they all rose up to offer a standing ovation. “It was one of the easiest meetings we’ve ever had,” says Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.

“I think he has strengthened his position in leadership,” Representative John Fleming says about Boehner. “He hung in there with us. He’s been reluctant to go to these fights and now that we have stood up and fought for our values and he’s been there with us, leading, I think his stock has risen tremendously. He has great security as our leader and our speaker.”

The message from Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor was unity, with warnings not to point fingers of blame.

“Everyone in this room ran on the Republican ticket,” Cantor told colleagues.

“We all agree Obamacare is an abomination. We all agree taxes are too high. We all agree spending is too high. We all agree Washington is getting in the way of job growth. We all agree we have a real debt crisis that will cripple future generations. We all agree on these fundamental conservative principles. . . . We must not confuse tactics with principles. The differences between us are dwarfed by the differences we have with the Democratic party, and we can do more for the American people united,” he told them.

Walking out of the meeting to the throng of reporters, the conservatives kept to that script, but the moderates drew their knives out for the Right.

Representative Peter King of New York urged more Republican officials to speak up about Senator Ted Cruz and “condemn him for what he did.”

Representative Aaron Schock of Illinois said the lesson of the episode was that Boehner should cut out the far-right flank and work with centrist Democrats.

The Republican Party is neither a conservative nor a small government party. It is not a pro-Constitutional party either.  And I think dh and Ross Douthat are both wrong with regards to the failed attempt by the “far-right flank” to stop the credit madness. It did accomplish one very important thing: it forced the bi-factional ruling party to reveal itself in public.

The USA is one of the very few Western nations that doesn’t have a viable third party. They have grown up faster in Europe thanks to a) the parliamentary system, and b) the European Union forcing the bi-factional “left-right” parties to expose themselves to their euroskeptical populaces. And the USA desperately needs an alternative to the Demopublican-Republicrats.

“Free the Land”

Black separatism in America:

Lumumba smiled and raised his right hand halfway, just a little above the podium, briefly showing the clenched fist of a Black Power salute.

“And I want to say, free the land!”

Applause rang out, bells chimed, wooden staffs rose up and people shouted back, “Free the land!” That’s the motto of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), the movement formed in 1968 that sought to turn the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina into an independent black nation.

Jackson’s new mayor is a former vice president of the RNA and a co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a national group born in 1993 that seeks self-determination for African-Americans — whom it calls New Afrikans — “by any means necessary.” Like many shaped by the Black Power era, Lumumba long shunned formal politics, until a successful run for City Council in 2009. Now, as mayor, he is seeking to apply the tenets of the black radical tradition to the duties of running a city.

“Nowadays you’ve got to call yourself a ‘change agent’ or something, or else you’ll make people scared,” Lumumba told me when I visited Jackson in August. “But I am a revolutionary.”

While I’m skeptical about Jackson’s prospects, I’m all in favor of African-American self-determination and separatism. Regardless of how far along the civilizational scale they happen to be, black Americans have the same essential human right to self-government as everyone else. The natural desire for ethnic, cultural, and ideological segregation on the part of blacks, whites, yellows, and everyone else isn’t racist, it is human. To pretend otherwise requires literally years of brainwashing from an early age as well as rigid intellectual self-supervision to refuse to see and admit the obvious.

This is why, when white Americans seek exactly the same thing as Lumumba and as the Aztlan activists, they are criticized in a vicious way that the black separatists, the Hispanic separatists, and the Pacific Islander separatists are not.

History informs us that political separation and ethno-racial segregation will eventually take place, the only question is when. Both the USA and the EU have already reached the state of the many multi-ethnic empires that preceded it; no doubt many in the British and Soviet and Austro-Hungarian Empires couldn’t conceive that one day there would be many sovereign nations where one central government once reigned.

But the USA is not a single central state, it is a violence-imposed empire that consists of the several States. And, in time, it will go the way of all such empires, riven by the simple human desire to be among one’s own kind rather than those of alien ideologies and different levels of civilization.

The slow birth of American secession

Pat Buchanan observes the growing incidence of secession movements, both in the USA and around the world:

What are the forces pulling nations apart? Ethnicity, culture, history and language – but now also economics. And separatist and secessionist movements are cropping up here in the United States.

While many red state Americans are moving away from blue state America, seeking kindred souls among whom to live, those who love where they live but not those who rule them are seeking to secede.

The five counties of western Maryland – Garrett, Allegheny, Washington, Frederick and Carroll, which have more in common with West Virginia and wish to be rid of Baltimore and free of Annapolis, are talking secession.

The issues driving secession in Maryland are gun control, high taxes, energy policy, homosexual marriage and immigration.

Scott Strzelczyk, who lives in the town of Windsor in Carroll County and leads the Western Maryland Initiative, argues: “If you have a long list of grievances, and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately [secession] is what you have to do.”

And there is precedent. Four of our 50 states – Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, West Virginia – were born out of other states.

In both Catalonia and Lombardia, I have seen that the common people increasingly feel no loyalty to a central government of foreigners who treat them like milch cows while ruling them in an incompetent and self-serving manner. This growth of secessionism should not be surprising to anyone. Bob Prechter and others have long observed that political unions take place in economic booms, while disunions, both violent and non-violent, tend to take place in times of economic contraction.

And we are not even halfway through the Mother of all Contractions.

The job no one wants

Zerohedge ponders why Larry Summers and Tim Geithner have both indicated that they don’t want to replace Helicopter Ben:

The next chairman’s main job is going to be deciding how soon and how aggressively to pull back on Fed programs; and as none other than Fed whisperer John Hilsenrath notes, Larry Summers’ withdrawal increases the likelihood of continuity in central-bank policy for the next few years – meaning any Fed wind-down of its easy-money programs will be slow and gradual. Of course he posits Yellen and Kohn as potential front-runners but throws Tim Geithner and Roger Ferguson back into the mix. Business-as-usual is back and the doves are in control – all the Fed needs now is bigger deficits to enable it to keep the pumps primed…

We can’t help but wonder why Summers really stepped away – is it perhaps that he knows (deep in his cold bloodless heart) just what a disaster this is all going to be and prefers to keep his ‘perceived’ legacy in place?  Now we have Geithner clearly not wanting to be touched with the Fed
s—– stick… seems like we will end up with the lowest common
denominator Fed head – great stuff.

I assume it’s going to be Janet Yellen, given Barack Obama’s fascination with his own historical significance. Also, women are less likely to feel they should be held responsible for anything they do, much less for anything that happens on their watch, and they also tend to place undue importance on being a Hultgreen-Curie candidate. So, unlike Summers and Geithner, Yellen is likely to discount the risk of catastrophic failure to her reputation. If that is true of her, and we’ll know it does if she doesn’t take herself out of the running fairly soon, then we can be fairly confident that she’ll take the system down on a conventional, consensual, and by-the-book basis.

This promises to be the ultimate Hultgreen-Curie scenario: the first female Fed Chairwoman is at the helm when the global financial system goes down.  And it would be a spectacular example if it took place while Christine Lagarde, the first female head of the International Monetary Fund, was still running the IMF.

Keeping in mind that I repeatedly issued warnings about the 2008 financial crisis beginning in 2002, here is what the current Fed frontrunner had to say about it after the fact.

“For my own part I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”
– Janet Yellen, 2010

This should end well.

Strength vs speed

Yesterday I was feeling pretty good. My elbow is back in order, so I was able to do heavy arms for the first time in nine months, topping out with 8 reps at 47 kg on the straight bar curls. My shoulder has recovered too, and while I’m not anywhere near my peak strength, that’s mostly the consequence of having to bench light for the last four months.

Today is another story. I didn’t like running into a few midfielders two weeks ago who could outrun me, and watching the national Under-15 team play recently was a reminder of how much of an advantage speed can be on the field.  So, I decided that running a few speed workouts might help me regain a bit of the speed I’ve lost over the two decades since I last ran track.

Back in college, our weekly speed workouts usually consisted of running 200 meters, walking 100 meters, jogging 100 meters, then doing it again. We ran them between 28 and 30 seconds; anything over 30 didn’t count and meant a do-over. An “easy” day was six, the worst was a punitive day in which we ended up running a hellish 15. That was ugly.

After jogging two warmup laps on the 400m track, I ran the first one.  It seemed okay, although I felt a bit heavy and was huffing and puffing a bit towards the end. Even so, I was a little shocked when I was informed that the time was 34 seconds.  So, after walking and jogging around to the far side, I decided to pick up the pace on the curve a little. 35 seconds. That one burned, both physically and psychologically. I tried to cruise the curve and kick on the flat for the third… and found I couldn’t finish without slowing down. I didn’t even bother asking for the time.

Now, it’s not like I’m utterly out of shape. I played 60 minutes in the midfield in last week’s game and was just starting to feel like I’m in game condition in our last practice. But I’m not sure that even if I had blocks, spikes, and the wind at my back that I could crack 30 now… and I used to do it in 22 seconds. Now it appears I can’t run three under 36 and it took about ten minutes for my glutes to stop burning.  About the only good sign was that my wind was fine; soccer appears to have helped in that regard.

We went home and told Spacebunny that I wouldn’t blame her if she wanted to trade me in on a newer model. Heck, I want to trade me in on a newer model.

Quote of the day: “It’s okay, Daddy. We can come back tomorrow and you can try again.”

I will try again. And again. I’m determined to get down to 30 seconds in the 200m (theoretically doable) and I’d like to get down to 12 in the 100m, (which may not be possible). But not tomorrow.  Most definitely not tomorrow.