Tag: decline and fall

Optimistic

It would appear that Spengler, for one, has been listening to the Learned Elders of Wye. His article makes it appear as if the precious golden geese who have healed America with prosperity are in the early stages of preparing to take flight once more. David Goldman has what strikes me as a remarkably optimistic article on how much the Chinese like and admire the Jews because they have so much in common.

There is no greater compliment to any culture than to be admired by Chinese, who with some justification regard their civilization as the
world’s most ancient and, in the long run, most successful. The high
regard that the Chinese have for Jews should be a source of pride to the
latter. In fact, it is very pleasant indeed for a Jew to spend time in
China. The sad history of Jew-hatred has left scars on every European
nation, but it is entirely absent in the world’s largest country. On the
contrary, to the extent that Chinese people know something of the Jews,
their response to us is instinctively sympathetic.

“I am always surprised by the expressions of affection that the
Chinese show for the Jews. Both cultures, the Chinese emphasize, share
respect for family, learning and, yes, money,” wrote the journalist
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore last year. ‘”Most Chinese will think Jews are
smart, clever or good at making money, and that they have achieved a
great deal,’ Professor Xu Xin, director of the Institute of Jewish
Studies at Nanjing University (one of over half a dozen centers in China
dedicated to studying Judaism) told me last week,” she wrote. “This
logic — that the Jews are admired for their success despite their small
numbers and historical oppression — has also led to a burgeoning
industry of self-help books that use Jewish culture and the Talmud to
preach business tips.”

Family, learning, respect for tradition, business acumen: these are
Jewish traits that the Chinese also consider to be their virtues. All
this is true as far as it goes. One might also mention that China never
has had reason to view the Jews as competitors for legitimacy.

Christianity began as a Jewish sect and has vacillated between the
claim that is has superseded Judaism and the view that it is a daughter
religion that should honor its parent. Islam claims that Jews and
Christians falsified the revelations given to them and that their
scriptures are a perversion of God’s true message, which Mohammed
restored to its original integrity. But by no stretch of the imagination
could China view the Jews as a threat to the legitimacy of its
civilization.

The Chinese, in short, have no reasons to dislike or fear the Jews,
and a number of reasons to admire them simply because Jews display
traits that Chinese admire among themselves.

Now, it’s possible that Goldman is correct. I’m an East Asian Studies major, I’m not Chinese. Perhaps the Chinese will welcome the Jewish people with more or less open arms the way the American people did following the large-scale Jewish retreat from the European continent. On the other hand, there is also the possibility that the Chinese will look at the historical track record of the Jewish people, see what they have done to the United States of America during the post-WWII period, and view them as a parasitical threat.

Perhaps Goldman doesn’t view the financial rape of the USA or the fact that China is sitting on $1.304 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds that could be rendered worthless overnight as a reason for the Chinese to dislike or fear the Jews, but I am a little less sanguine on the prospect. I also think Goldman underestimates the ruthlessness of the Chinese in matters tribal and nepotistic.

The survival strategy that worked so well in the Middle Ages, where the Jews would be expelled from a country, then quietly return until they were banished once more, doesn’t seem likely to work quite as well in an age of global communication. Hitler’s complaints about the Jews sounded entirely mad to Americans. They sound mad, and manufactured, even today. But in the event of the sort of economic catastrophe and political breakdown that so concerns the Elders of Wye, I tend to suspect the Chinese will take the accusations of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert
Camacho a little more seriously.

Especially considering that the Chinese would like nothing better than to see a US political breakdown that would free them to claim the regional supremacy and world leadership they believe to be their civilizational birthright. I agree with Goldman that China does not view the Jews as a threat to the legitimacy of its
civilization; my understanding is that the Chinese already view them as a rival.

Refugee blowback

These new concerns about internal attacks by pro-Syrian “Americans” is an object lesson in the foolishness of foreign intervention and granting residence to foreign allies from the losing side:

Islamic extremist groups in Syria with ties to Al Qaeda are trying to identify, recruit and train Americans and other Westerners who have traveled there to get them to carry out attacks when they return home, according to senior American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

These efforts, which the officials say are in the early stages, are the latest challenge that the conflict in Syria has created, not just for Europe but for the United States, as the civil war has become a magnet for Westerners seeking to fight with the rebels against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. At least 70 Americans have either traveled to Syria, or tried to, since the civil war started three years ago, according to the intelligence and counterterrorism officials — a figure that has not previously been disclosed.

The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said Thursday that tracking Americans who have returned from Syria had become one of the bureau’s highest counterterrorism priorities.

From WWII to the Syrian civil war, refugees have created massive problems for America. It’s one thing to grant humanitarian assistance and to help resettle people who are in danger. But semi-civilized peoples shouldn’t ever be resettled in civilized first world nations.

Diversity encompasses the civilized and the savage alike. And it is always a mistake to allow barbarians to enter the gates.

Fed failure within 10 years

Jim Rogers predicts the failure of the USA’s third central bank:

With Bernanke’s term due to expire in January, Rogers says he will be remembered as “the guy who set the stage for the demise of the Central Bank in America. We’ve had three central banks in America. The first two disappeared. This one’s going to disappear too in the next decade.”

“It’s not a possibility,” he adds, “it’s a probability. People will realise that these guys have led us down a terrible path. The Fed balance sheet has increased by 500 per cent in the last 5 years and a lot of it’s garbage.”

Unlike the wider market, Rogers does not set great store by the Fed’s decision shortly before Christmas to taper its bond buying measures from $85bn per month to $75bn. The announcement put pressure on gold and drove US equities to a new all-time high, in what Rogers views as a relief rally.

“The US went up because people said, ‘Now it’s done, we don’t have to worry anymore.’ But somewhere along the line, markets are going to start suffering. They’ll taper until the markets start hurting and then they’ll panic and loosen up again. They’ve got themselves in a terrible box.”

“It’ll turn into a bubble or a very inflated situation, but eventually the markets will say, we’re not going to take your garbage anymore, whether it’s treasury bonds or currency.”

As you know, I disagree with the inflation call, but I don’t disagree that the Federal Reserve will collapse in bankruptcy sooner or later. As I have repeatedly noted, I expect a political and financial collapse of the US empire by 2033. The pace of problematic events appears to be picking up speed; not even the reported 4 percent economic growth and new Dow highs appears to have dented the average American’s pessimism.

The stage is being set. But when the curtain will fall, I do not know. Every government and every financial regime comes to an end sooner or later, but it usually much easier to see the end date in hindsight than in real time.

Searching everything for any reason

So much for security in one’s papers and effects. At this point, the federal courts aren’t even really trying to pretend the Constitution is still in effect:

A federal court today dismissed a lawsuit arguing that the government should not be able to search and copy people’s laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints without reasonable suspicion…. In June, in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, DHS released its
December 2011 Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment of its
electronics search policy, concluding that suspicionless searches do not
violate the First or Fourth Amendments. The report said that a
reasonable suspicion standard is inadvisable because it could lead to
litigation and the forced divulgence of national security information,
and would prevent border officers from acting on inchoate “hunches,” a
method that it says has sometimes proved fruitful.

The absurd thing is that the reasoning that justifies the open abandonment of the Constitutional limitations on the federal government could be used to justify literally anything. Sure, a hunch could lead to stopping a terrorist attack, of course, it could just as credibly lead to stopping a demonic invasion by transdimensional god-aliens.

And yet, it strikes me that there is no “terrorist attack” or “demonic invasion by transdimensional god-alien” clause anywhere in the Constitution. It must be in one of those emanations or penumbras. This is why you can’t ever allow for “reasonable exceptions” in any organization. It never takes long for the reasonable exceptions to become unreasonable ones.

The rule of the game is now pretty simple. The federal government rules by a combination of force and fraud. They’re unwilling to openly throw out the Constitution, but the fig leaves they are using these days to cover their actions are growing increasingly small.

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.