Tag: decline and fall

Predictable consequences

It’s absolutely hilarious to see the mainstream media and government employees complaining about private citizens putting what they have learned from the IRS and the mortgage banks into action:

“It must be a mistake,” he said, when the loan officer told him that
someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and
on other properties he owned.

But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property
to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war
of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in
2009 — a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology
known as the “sovereign citizen” movement, is being employed more
frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.

Over the next three years, the couple, Thomas and Lisa Eilertson, filed
more than $250 billion in liens, demands for compensatory damages and
other claims against more than a dozen people, including the sheriff,
county attorneys, the Hennepin County registrar of titles and other
court officials.

“It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my
children,” Sheriff Stanek said of the liens. “We spent countless hours
trying to undo it.”

Cases involving sovereign citizens are surfacing increasingly here in
Minnesota and in other states, posing a challenge to law enforcement
officers and court officials, who often become aware of the movement — a
loose network of groups and individuals who do not recognize the
authority of federal, state or municipal government — only when they
become targets. Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or
other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with
them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the
strategy “paper terrorism.” A lien can be filed by anyone under the
Uniform Commercial Code.

These liens, and many of the “frivolous” claims made by various private citizens are not necessarily fraudulent in the legal sense. There can be no question that they are no more fake than the millions of liens and foreclosures filed by mortgage banks that never held title to the properties they seized and no more illegal than the private MERS system that those banks tried to substitute for the historical county land records.

That is precisely why dealing with them can be so nightmarish; because they are as legal and legally enforceable as anything that the courts produce.  This is nothing but a natural consequence of the government declaring itself and its agents above the rule of law and then being surprised when the people follow its lead.

This is how a civilization falls, one step into barbaric chaos at a time. 

Naked authoritarianism

We appear to be rapidly reaching the end of the grand pretense of liberal democracy:

While the much publicized Sunday morning detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda at Heathrow on his way back to Brazil, in a stunning move that as we subsequently learned had been telegraphed apriori to the US, could potentially be explained away as a desperate attempt at personal intimidation by a scared, and truly evil empire in its last death throes, it is what happened a month earlier at the basement of the Guardian newspaper that leaves one truly speechless at how far the “democratic” fascist regimes have fallen and  fondly reminiscing of the times when dictatorial, tyrannical regimes did not pretend to be anything but.

For the fully story, we go to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger who, in a long editorial focusing on the tribulations of Greenwald, his partner, modern journalism and free speech and press in a time of near-ubiquitous tyranny when the status quo is questioned, happened to let his readers know that a month ago, after the newspaper had published several stories based on Snowden’s material, a British official advised him: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.”

It gets better: after further talks with the British government, Rusbirdger says that two “security experts” from Government Communications Headquarters, the British NSA equivalent, visited the Guardian’s London offices and in the building’s basement, government officials watched as computers which contained material provided by Snowden were physically pulverized. One of the officials jokes: “We can call off the black helicopters.”

Reuters adds that according to a source familiar with the event said Guardian employees destroyed the computers as government security experts looked on.

What is shocking is that as Rusbridger explained to the gentlemen from Whitehall, they had no jurisdiction over the forced destruction of Guardian property as it has offices in New York, that Greenwald himself was in Brazil, and that future reporting on the NSA did not even have to take place in London. That did not stop the UK government’s punitive measures, and obviously neither did pleas, before the computers were destroyed, that the Guardian could not do its journalistic duty if it gave in to the government’s requests.

In response, he wrote, a government official told him that the newspaper had already achieved the aim of sparking a debate on government surveillance. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying.

What is most shocking is that the UK government was apparently dumb enough to think that by forcing the Guardian to destroy its own hardware it would actually destroy some of the underlying data. It is this unprecedented idiocy that is most disturbing, because when interacting in a game theoretical fashion with an opponent one assumes rationality. In this case, what one got instead, was brute force and sheer, jawdropping stupidity.

If you still do not understand that government and force can NEVER be trusted to uphold human liberty and basic human rights without being held strictly accountable to the people at all times, with no exceptions, you are part of the problem.  And protesting “what if bad people might do bad things if we don’t let the bad people in government do whatever they want whenever they want without telling us” is not a credible counterargument, it is tantamount to voluntarily placing a dunce cap on your own head and drooling.

A view on black crime and white decline

In which I ask Huggums for his opinion about the observation that blacks have higher crime rates in a wide sampling of societies:

What is your currently preferred theory for higher black crime rates? You
know mine is a combination of genetic and cultural factors leading to
lower average time preferences, I’m just interested in knowing what
yours happens to be.

Pretty much the same, but I don’t think the
genetic influence is quite as strong as many believe it to be. I think
that depending on the cultural environment and the existence of positive
social pressure, just about any human trait can find a positive mode of
expression.

The genetic issue can only really be “solved” with
time. Of course, if white liberals are any indication, even if some
environmental catastrophe or social upheaval pushed the next generations
of black people towards civilization, once that civilization reaches
its apex, it will begin working feverishly to destroy itself. Either
that or just start massacring its own citizens because of whatever
thin-as-wet-tissue-paper reason it happens to come up with.

Huggums raises an important point here, which is the flip side of my controversial observation that the African population, taken in the whole, can only be half-civilized because fully civilizing a people appears to require about 1,000 years of exposure to civilization.  This, I have argued, is the primary reason blacks have repeatedly shown themselves unable to maintain advanced societies everywhere from Detroit to Zimbabwe, and why the more savage portion of the population has demonstrated that it cannot even constructively participate in an advanced society.

However, whites and other distinct human populations should not be too impressed with the accomplishments of their ancestors simply because they happened to get an earlier start on the process, because if the process of civilization is hard, maintaining it is observably even more difficult.  Indeed, one could even argue that it is impossible and eventual failure is only a matter of time.

It would be very hard to argue with Huggums’s observation that there are a considerable quantity of whites who have been working feverishly, and in some cases purposefully, to destroy white Christian European civilization.  Indeed, one could observe that their actions are a logical extension of the white European destruction of traditional Chinese civilization, traditional Japanese civilization, traditional Russian half-civilization, and even traditional Aztec/Inca quarter-civilization.

If I am correct and extended average time preferences is a critical factor in developing and maintaining civilization, then it would appear the white population has taken several significant steps towards savagery, in both intellectual and behavioral terms. The Keynesian concept of economic growth through inflation and debt-spending is literal intellectual savagery, as intrinsically magical and nonsensical as the illiterate Australian aborigines ideas about causation. And it is not hard to determine where “if it feels good, do it” falls on the time preferences spectrum.

And this highlights the intrinsic danger of inviting the barbarians inside the gates and encouraging them to integrate with the civilized citizenry. It is easier to bring down than to build up. It is much easier to infect the civilized youth with the idea of living for today and letting tomorrow take care of itself than it is to convince the savage youth to restrain their impulses and save for tomorrow what could be be consumed today. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once described the pathologies of black America as a warning of the coming pathologies of white America.  He was more prophetic than he knew; the dire effects of the behavioral problems to which he attempted to draw America’s attention turned out to be even worse than he had feared.  Black hip-hop culture may have been the most noticeable symptom of the cancer of anti-civilizational savagery, but it was the wigger adoption of it that signified the metastasis.

We are now well past the point of peak American civilization. The only question now is how far into savagery we are going to fall before the process can be reversed.  If it can be reversed.

Congress exempt from Obamacare

Just in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear that Obamacare is going to wreck American health care, the executive branch has given the congressional branch an exemption from the law:

The White House has approved a deal that will exempt members of Congress and their staff from some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, Politico reported late Thursday. Under the law, popularly referred to as Obamacare, lawmakers and their aides were required to source health insurance “created” by the law or offered through one of its exchanges, and without the subsidies they currently enjoy, the members of Congress would have faced thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year, the report said. However, the Office of Personnel Management now plans to rule that the government can continue to make a contribution to the health-care premiums of the lawmakers and their staff, it said, citing unnamed congressional sources and a White House official.

Their shamelessness simply knows no bounds.  None.  Cicero was right; democracy does lead inevitably to aristocracy. The fact that we presently have an aristocracy of connections and influence rather than an aristocracy of blood only means that it will be another generation or three before the latter is made institutional.

What “independence”?

This is what happened back in January 2011, just to set the stage:

In the wake of the recent shooting in Tuscon, Travis put up a post on his blog about how he didn’t particularly feel like shedding any tears over the shooting of a politician, entitled “1 down, 534 to go!” Provocative? Inflammatory? Even tacky? Sure. But it was just speech. Political speech. The kind that’s protected under the 1st Amendment, even when it’s about politicians further up the food chain than congresscritters.

Comic readers tend to trend younger and lefter than the norm, and some of his customers found out about his post and decided to organize a boycott. I have no problem with boycotts; lord knows I’ve called for the boycotts of businesses that did things that annoyed me, such as using murderers for pitchmen. Some people were so butthurt, however, that they went to the authorities, and Travis received a knock on the door: It was the Arlington, MA po-po, there to relieve Mr. Corcoran of his guns, his ammunition, his firearms license, and his 2nd Amendment rights, all for having the temerity to use his 1st Amendment rights in the former Cradle of Liberty, now its grave.

 And this is what happened yesterday, on July 4th, “Independence Day”, 2013:

Well, TJIC got his Massachusetts FID* reissued, and has reapplied for an MA LTC**. Now the local po-po*** is surrounding his crib, wanting to inspect the premises. Without a warrant. In the suburbs of Boston. On Independence Day….

I repeatedly refused the cops’ requests for a voluntary walk-through of the house.

I repeatedly refused to answer any questions.

The cops repeatedly told me that if I had nothing to hide, I should just allow a walk-through, and if I was a good guy, I’d have a “conversation” with them.

In the end they illegally seized my FID (just plan CAN NOT do it, but they took it and wouldn’t give it back) and they illegally seized Jennifer’s firearms. My lawyer was appalled but not surprised.

Jennifer and I have been talking about moving out of MA in 3-6 years.

We are officially looking for real estate tomorrow; I will not spend one more day than is necessary in this totalitarian hell hole.

I ask again, what “independence” was it that you were celebrating yesterday?

UPDATE: It’s not only the Second Amendment that is under attack. Even the Third Amendment is being openly violated:

Henderson police arrested a family for refusing to let officers use their homes as lookouts for a domestic violence investigation of their neighbors, the family claims in court….  It continues: “At 10:45 a.m. defendant Officer Christopher Worley (HPD) contacted plaintiff Anthony Mitchell via his telephone. Worley told plaintiff that police needed to occupy his home in order to gain a ‘tactical advantage’ against the occupant of the neighboring house. Anthony Mitchell told the officer that he did not want to become involved and that he did not want police to enter his residence. Although Worley continued to insist that plaintiff should leave his residence, plaintiff clearly explained that he did not intend to leave his home or to allow police to occupy his home. Worley then ended the phone call.

Mitchell claims that defendant officers, including Cawthorn and Worley and Sgt. Michael Waller then “conspired among themselves to force Anthony Mitchell out of his residence and to occupy his home for their own use.” (Waller is identified as a defendant in the body of the complaint, but not in the heading of it.)

The complaint continues: “Defendant Officer David Cawthorn outlined the defendants’ plan in his official report: ‘It was determined to move to 367 Evening Side and attempt to contact Mitchell. If Mitchell answered the door he would be asked to leave. If he refused to leave he would be arrested for Obstructing a Police Officer. If Mitchell refused to answer the door, force entry would be made and Mitchell would be arrested.'”

Interesting, is it not, that white suburban Americans appear to be increasingly less inclined to trust or cooperate with the police.

The downside of corporate profits

As PJ O’Rourke points out in Don’t Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, a high rate of profits not always a harbinger of economic good news:

[Adam] Smith spotted the exact cause of the 2008 financial meltdown not just before it happened but 232 years before, probably a record for advice to sell short. In Book II, chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote, “A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant… If it is to be let to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue.” Smith therefore concluded that, although a house can make money for its owner if it’s rented, “the revenue of the whole body of the people can never be in the smallest degree increased by it.” Bingo. Subprime mortgage collapse.

Smith was familiar with rampant speculation, or “overtrading,” as he politely called it. The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble had both collapsed in 1720, three years before his birth. In 1772, while Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, a bank run occurred in Scotland. Only three of Edinburgh’s thirty private banks survived. The reaction of the Scottish overtraders to the ensuing credit freeze sounds familiar. “The banks, they seem to have thought,” Smith said, “were in honor bound to supply the deficiency, and to supply them with all the capital which they wanted to trade with.”

According to Smith, the phenomenon of speculative excess has less to do with free markets than with high profits. “When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary,” he said, “overtrading becomes a general error.” And rate of profit, Smith claimed, “is always highest in the countries that are going fastest to ruin.”

Judging by how America invested in 2007 and voted in 2008 that would be us.

In this vein, it may be pertinent to note that both corporate profits and their stock prices reached record highs in 2013.  Both are actually higher than the previous peak in 2007.

 
Considering the recent political and geopolitical events, with the Supreme Court solidifying the moral breakdown of the country, the Senate doing its best to cement the existing demographic fracturing, and foreign nations as diverse as Ecuador, Russia, and Switzerland all openly demonstrating their contempt for the administration’s imperial overreach, it should not come as a tremendous surprise to see that certain economic indicators are flashing signs of an incipient crisis.

Amend or go home

Remember when all the progressives and moderates were saying that a Defense of Marriage Amendment was unnecessary because Congress passed a law?  Yeah, well, they lied:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal law that defines
marriage as a heterosexual union, saying it violates the rights of
married gay couples by denying them government benefits.

Between legalizing abortion and the government dismantling of marriage, the USA has now officially entered Sodom and Gomorrah territory.   I wouldn’t put too much confidence in that “God bless America” notion.  The best-case scenario is that He’s not paying attention. Following American politics these days feels like watching Gibbon on fast-forward; an imperial decline and fall measured in years rather than centuries.

I find it remarkable that Republicans still bother passing this sort of law when it has been clear since at least 1973 that the Supreme Court will simply overturn anything that is effectively conservative. Amend or don’t bother.

UPDATE: And they effectively overturned Proposition 8 in California by refusing to hear it.  Taken together, these two “rulings” make it official: American democracy is entirely dead.

The court avoided a ruling on the merits in a second gay-marriage case
involving California’s Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage, saying that
both the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court lacked jurisdiction
to hear the case. That means a federal district court’s ruling striking
down Proposition 8 stands, which could clear the way for same-sex
marriage to resume in California.

Notice how the Supreme Court will jump in and wave the Constitution whenever it wants to override something, but turn around and claim it has no jurisdiction whenever it wants to leave a lower court decision intact.  Pass a law, pass a referendum, it doesn’t matter.  The black robes now rule.

B&N totters

It was interesting to notice during the recent SFWA campaign how
completely clueless most of the authors were about the present state of the publishing industry.  They
genuinely believed that the status quo remains viable, which was part of why
Random House was accused of creating Hydra simply because they are obviously wicked and evil.

Nor did they rethink their position when Nightshade Books went under.  As I said at the time, it would probably take the bankruptcy of Barnes & Noble and the concomitant effects on the genre publishers to get them to realize that the traditional publishing game is all but over.  But that could happen sooner than even a skeptic like me had imagined:

Barnes and Noble has not had an easy go of it. The brick-and-mortar stalwart has seen its revenues and profits steeply decline as we’ve entered the age of the e-book. In fact, profits haven’t just shrunk; they’ve disappeared. During the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2013, the company suffered a net loss of $118.6 million, down significantly from the already poor showing it posted in 2012 when it lost $56.9 million in Q4. For the year, that put Barnes and Noble’s losses at $154.8 million — more than double what it lost in 2012.

It’s somewhat of a pity, as some of my favorite memories include spending Friday evenings wandering through the stacks with Spacebunny.  The only book signing I ever did was at Barnes & Noble and I was told it was one of the most successful ones that branch had ever had.  When I first graduated from college, I used to set myself a $50 monthly book budget that I would spend there; I’d usually manage to spend it by the second or third week.

But then, I still recall my last visit there, and walking out without buying anything.  The SF/F section was full of media tie-in novels and fantasy novels with badly Photoshopped covers, the history section had all but disappeared, and most of the remaindered hardcovers were picture books.  So perhaps the structural rot that is now apparent had already set in.

I imagine the executives at Barnes are already trying to figure out what sort of pitches they can make to Amazon and Google.  Anyhow, if you’re an SF/F writer who writes actual SF or epic fantasy, feel free to contact me about publishing through our in-game store.  We’ve already got some excellent original works of fiction, including a few set in Selenoth, but we’re looking for about 20 more.

Snowdon and the secret cyber army

Although, given its functions and capabilities, secret cyber Praetorian Guard would appear to be a more historically relevant description:

With his revelations exposing the extent of potential, and actual, pervasive NSA surveillance over the American population, Edward Snowden has done a great service for the public by finally forcing it to answer the question: is having Big Brother peek at every private communication and electronic information, a fair exchange for the alleged benefit of the state’s security. Alas, without further action form a population that appears largely numb and apathetic to disclosures that until recently would have sparked mass protests and toppled presidents, the best we can hope for within a political regime that has hijacked the democratic process, is some intense introspection as to what the concept of “America” truly means.

However, and more importantly, what Snowden’s revelations have confirmed, is that behind the scenes, America is now actively engaged in a new kind of war: an unprecedented cyber war, where collecting, deciphering, intercepting, and abusing information is the only thing that matters and leads to unprecedented power, and where enemies both foreign and domestic may be targeted without due process based on a lowly analyst’s “whim.”

It has also put spotlight on the man, who until recently deep in the shadows, has been responsible for building America’s secret, absolutely massive cyber army, and which according to a just released Wired profile is “capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it’s ready to unleash hell.”

Meet General Keith Alexander, “a man few even in Washington would likely recognize”, which is troubling because Alexander is now quite possibly the most powerful person in the world, that nobody talks about. 

I have little doubt that General Alexander is, within the constraints imposed upon him by the nature of his job and career path, a decent man who operates within the limits that have been set for him by his superiors, though obviously not the legal ones imposed by the U.S. Constitution.  However, it doesn’t take a superintelligence or a Roman historian to figure out where this arrangement is likely to end up as soon as a sufficiently ambitious or ideologically driven individual manages to take control of the cyberwar apparatus.

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden has safely landed in Moscow and a ship bound for Syria, rumored to be carrying American weapons for the Syrian rebels, has mysteriously cracked in two on the high seas and has been abandoned.

Curiouser and curiouser….

UPDATE: It appears Mr. Snowden is heading for Ecuador:

“The government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J.
Snowden,” Patino said. WikiLeaks said in a statement that Mr Snowden is “bound for the Republic
of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being
escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.”

Prelude

Even the historically illiterate, stunted intellectuals of Red America are beginning to observe the signs of the eventual breakup.

Along with — and because of — dramatic social and demographic changes,
America is quickly dividing itself into two separate nations, regional
enclaves of rigid politics, as the idea of common national priorities
fades further into a distant past….  And the country’s seismic demographic and cultural shifts threaten to make our tribalism permanent.

There has been the rapid rise of minority populations and stagnation in the growth of the non-Hispanic white population in this country. Now, Hispanics represent a majority of all births in America, and last week The New York Times reported on census data that revealed that “deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century.”

In fact, according to an Associated Press report last week, which cited government reports: “For the first time, America’s racial and ethnic minorities now make up about half of the under-5 age group.”

But there were also some worrisome statistics in the report that could help to signal those children’s views on policy…. And, we are becoming less blindly religious and more blindly militaristic. (The former is a good thing; the latter, not so much.)

Blow is wrong about one thing: there is no “nation divided against itself”, because as I’ve previously noted, there are not merely two separate nations, there are four.  There are the Reds of progressive, secular America, there are the Whites
of traditional religious America, there are the Browns of third world
America, and there are the Blacks of feral America. They may broadly follow the racial demographics, but the lines are not hard; for example, Charles Blow is a black man who is clearly Red, rather than Black, just as David Brooks is Red, not White.

Given how people have expressed considerable doubt concerning my  negative outlook on the continued union of these four Americas, it should be interesting to see how they respond to a black, left-wing New York Times columnist who has, despite our very different perspectives, reached similar conclusions. Note, in particular, that damning admission: “because of dramatic… demographic changes”.

The fruits of diversity are bloodshed and war.  They always have been.  Populations of sufficiently differing time preferences simply cannot live together for long. And the only successful way to keep those fruits from ripening has is a powerful militaristic state willing and able to commit atrocities in order to keep the otherwise warring parties in line.  Consider, for example, the difference between segregation as it was practiced in the pre-1960s USA and the way it was practiced in the USSR and China.  Or the way it is presently practiced in Africa with the various tribes vying for power in the national government.

It won’t surprise me if those who oppose deportations now and are horrified by the WWII Japanese internment live long enought to one day find themselves supporting a Red American government that is engaged in internal deportations of Hispanics to its Aztlan Autonomous Oblast.