Tag: decline and fall

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.

A blast from the past

This was the column I wrote the day after 9/11 that launched my recently concluded op/ed career as well as this blog.  It has its flaws, but in light of the references to the NSA and even Syria, it is a fairly prescient warning of the events of the subsequent twelve years, as well as of the freedoms we have lost during that time.

Yield no more freedom
September 14, 2001

In response to a number of questions inspired by last week’s column, we were working on a piece related to PC security, specifically the sort offered to one’s e-mail communications by various encryption technologies, when we were interrupted by the horrifying events of Tuesday. The fatal hijackings and subsequent media response has been difficult to dismiss from our mind, so we have tabled the usual technology review for a week in favor of some reflections on these recent events.

One of the many troubling aspects of the hijackings is the brutal demonstration that we, as a people, have received very little of the security we were promised in return for the many violations of personal freedom and civil liberties that have been enacted over the past decade. We would go so far as to raise the question if this had not been a fool’s bargain, wherein we have given up something of precious value in return for … arguably, nothing. It is bad enough that we allow the FBI to filter our e-mails and record our keystrokes, that we permit the National Security Agency to intercept every electronic communication floating through the aether, but it is even worse that we have done so without realizing that which we hoped to gain.

Just as the drug war has not reduced the amount of illegal drugs used in this country, the sacrifice of our civil liberties on the altar of national security has not brought us security. Keep this in mind, as the inevitable drumbeat begins for more sacrifices, as the calls begin for Americans to give up even more of their hard-won freedoms. National security cannot seriously be cited any longer in the attempts to ban personal encryption technology, not when, as WorldNetDaily reported yesterday, far better forms of communications encryption have already been delivered to terrorist-sponsoring states like Syria with the full approval of the previous administration.

It is said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but that vigilance must be applied within as well as without. A thousand suicide bombers could not destroy America, but America is quite capable of destroying itself in the pursuit of any number of false idols, among them wrongheaded and illusory notions of security at any price. Individual privacy, like private property, is one of the foundations of our freedom, and it must not be thrown away out of fear. Anonymous cell phones or encrypted e-mail missives could be used by a terrorist, true, but the same is also true of a razor blade or a flight simulator.

What our leaders must realize is that personal technology is not a foe, but a powerful ally. The enemy we face can be subdued and contained by soldiers, bombs and a strong national will, but it cannot be ultimately defeated through conventional war. But satellite transmissions and the Internet know no borders, nor does the concept of freedom. Our enemies recognize this, which is why they fearfully denounce every sign of American influence as decadence, because they well know that they cannot raise another generation of suicide warriors if that generation is allowed to partake of the dangerous and forbidden fruit of freedom.

Some have protested that America must not strike back, that doing so will only perpetuate the “cycle of violence,” that others will only rise up to replace those we strike down. But this is demonstrably untrue, as no German ever rose up to replace Hitler, nor does a Japanese war party trouble us today. It is appropriate for a nation to fight a war in its own defense, especially when war has been openly declared upon it. But in doing so, we must resolutely resist the call to sacrifice that which makes the United States of America a country worth defending – our inalienable rights and our individual freedom.

The decivilization of America

Fred Reed reminds us of the civilized society we have lost and explains why we lost it:

This is why as cultures break down, or mix with less civilized
cultures, more and more police become necessary. So do locks, bars,
alarms, cameras and, for the remaining virile, carry permits. Hello.

Here is one reason why multiculturalism seldom works.
Suppose that one culture has a strong work ethic, fairly strict sexual
morality, low illegitimacy, low crime, respect for study and proper use
of the national language. Suppose that another culture is precisely
opposite, or approximately opposite, as for example the Moslems in
France. If the first group is truly dominant, and imposes its
standards—you will do your homework, kid—the second group may
successfully assimilate.

But suppose that the dominant group isn´t really that
dominant and can´t, or won´t, impose its values. How—in a school,
say—do you mix the toilet-mouthed with the well-spoken, girls who
expect to marry before giving birth with fifteen year old single
mothers pushing strollers into class? Or if the courts have decided
that “motherfucker· is an entire language to itself, and that
eradication of the word would constitute imperial culture-abuse? The
effect will always be to lower the civilized group to the uncivilized.

This multi-generational societal devastation is the cost of giving in to the multiculturalist dogma of half-savages like Jemisin and fatherless, clueless hypocrites like Scalzi. McRacist and McRapey don’t understand that what they call racism and bigotry was the basic foundation of advanced civilization.  Civilization depends, it has always depended, upon keeping down the half-civilized, keeping out the barbarians, and preventing both the half-savages and full savages from infesting, infecting, and ultimately destroying the civilized aspects of a society.

Instead of gradually welcoming into society those exceptional Africans who followed the lead of blue-bottomed Brits and naked Germans in graduating from cannibalistic savagery and expecting from them the same rights and responsibilities of a civilized citizen, the Civil Rights movement insanely declared all humanity to be the same, thereby eliminating the all-important distinction between civilized human population groups and savage ones. Once that happened, it was only a matter of time before the enwiggification of America took place.

The Civil Rights movement didn’t merely destroy Constitutional rights, but literally gave naked, albino-eating, baby-raping cannibals the same intrinsic legal rights as highly civilized, highly moral Christian Europeans and told the romantic equalitarian fools to expect even better results than before. The Greeks knew better than that. The Romans knew better than that. The Imperial British knew better than that. And America’s Founding Fathers knew better than that.

Was it an accident? Of course not. There have always been those with the will to power, those who wish to rule unopposed by the will of the people. The Ciceronian cycle predicts the rise of aristocracy across the democratic world, and that is precisely what we are seeing in the elevation of the international corporate executive class and their relative immunity to the laws to which the rest of the population are subject.

Seen from this perspective, multiculturalism and the subsequent decline into vibrant semi-barbarism is merely a demographic application of the ancient strategic principle: divide and conquer.

Three landmark moments in pop

Several people have asked me to share my thoughts on the recent performances at the MTV music awards.  I have seven of them.

  1. Neither liked nor cared about Billy Ray Cyrus.
  2. Neither like nor care about his daughter.
  3. Michael Jackson’s televised moonwalk marked the beginning of the overt negrification of American pop culture.
  4. Madonna’s rolling around on stage in a wedding dress marked the beginning of the overt sexualization of American pop culture.
  5. Whatever it was that Miss Cyrus was doing the other night marks the moment at which those two forces, negrification and sexualization, combined to complete the enwiggification of American pop culture.
  6. Umberto Eco was correct in Apocalypse Postponed when he pointed out that “pop culture” is an oxymoron.  There is nothing cultural or civilized about pop; it is intrinsically anti-culture.
  7. Demographics is destiny. Don’t expect the plumbing to long outlive the melodies.

“When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.”
– Plato, Republic