Tag: decline and fall

The idiot whistle

Whether the subject is equality in the distribution of wealth, sex, or marriage, you can always be certain of one thing.  The appeal to equality is simply the idiot-whistle being blown to summon the support of the unthinking, it has absolutely nothing to do with the objectives of those appealing to that mythic state.

A homogamy aspect is confident enough to admit what was always obvious from the start:

It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. …(F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.  The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.

Vladimir Ilyich had a term that accurately describes those non-activists who support “marriage equality” for reasons of fairness.  Useful idiots.  What the sexually abnormal mean by “marriage” is not what it means to most people, and by expanding the definition they are actively and admittedly seeking to destroy both the institution and the sacrament.

Speaking out vs shooting

Sarah Hoyt is rightly concerned about what she sees as the growing prospects for Round II:

I’m hearing more and more “It’s going to come to shooting.”  I have a sinking feeling in my water that it might very well come to that.  I’d prefer not, though.  Look, I have sons.  Also, we do not live in a nice world.  If our world were really the black-and-white world the liberals believe in, where the USA is the big bad wolf and everyone else is a sweet little lamb who wouldn’t hurt anyone but for fear of the wolf, a civil war might not be a bad idea.

Of course if the world really were like that, we’d be dealing with a species other than human and perhaps communism would work.  Who knows?  May be worth an SF story.

But the world is not like that, and the US even if it is rapidly flushing generational wealth down the toilet is still much wealthier than most of the world, and is way wealthier than most of the Americas.  (This btw is taken by the communists as proof of malfeasance.  It’s a religious dogma.)

While we are involved in a civil war – and let’s assume it’s only half as bloody and half as long as our last one – do you think the other nations of the world will sit still?  Forget a Chinese invasion (though G-d knows you shouldn’t) or Russia getting involved on one side or another with a  view to ruling portions of our country when all is done (and if you dismiss that, you should study the roles of France and England on the past civil war) and just think about the people who hate us and who think (and our media has HELPED this perception) all their woes are our fault, and who  think they’re accumulating virgins in heaven – and prestige on Earth – by hitting us with acts of terrorism writ large.

How many cities do you think we’d lose to random acts of revenge?

What I mean is that it might very well come to that.  But do you want it?  Talk about setting us back generations.  Yes, I know you’re furious and I’ve heard the “we have all the guns” boast.  It’s not true, okay?  Yeah, we have most of them.  And sure, we probably could win in days.  Except that you forget how many third world armies would gladly fight on the other side, once it got started.  And would be promised everything they want if they do.

Oh, sure, they’d probably still lose – but I’m predicting we’d all be wading in blood to our ankles before it’s said and done, and parts of the country would be radioactive for a century.

Again, it might still come to that.  And I think the other side wants that – probably more than even the nuts on the “right” – because part of their religion (don’t fool yourself it’s not one) is the belief that history has favorites and that they’re it.  They think in the end they win.  (They might perhaps want to consult the Norse legends, to figure out which said was believed to win in the end.  Never mind.)

But before the shooting starts – in this moment in the heart of the storm – perhaps those of us to the right of Lenin should try something we haven’t tried before.  Perhaps we should try speaking out.

Look, I’m as cowardly as the rest of you.  I spent more than twenty years, between breaking in and finally losing my mind, listening to digs about “the rich” from people who could buy me and sell me outright; I spend years at parties and meetings listening to Marxist pap and not pointing out how stupid it was; listening to public figures on the right being denigrated as “stupid” when it was obvious they weren’t, etc.  And I shut up.  Because I wanted to make a living in my chosen profession.

I’m still not half as brave as I’d like to be, though I try to speak out if I’m present.  And yes, I know I’ll pay a monetary price.  But I don’t go out of my way to look for fights, because I’ll pay a monetary price.  And also because, frankly, I know many good people on their side.  I don’t want to upset them.

But consider….

Every time our silence gives consent, what we’re giving consent to is the inevitability of eventual shooting.

You know those massacres that have happened in every communist paradise?  Here the would-be victims are armed.  To quote the title of some Baen anthologies There WILL be War.

Unless we stop it now.  Unless we’re as brave with our words as we eventually will have to be with our guns, if we stay silent.

I understand her concerns. The problem is that words aren’t going to stop anything now. For every Sarah Hoyt who immigrated and successfully managed the transition to American traditions and values, there are ten or more who did not and five native Americans who have abandoned the ideals and traditions of their forefathers in favor of one flavor or another of secular progressivism.

There is a powerful correlation between economic contraction and war, although the causality is complicated. Even so, it is readily apparent that the relative peace of the last sixty years, and the civil peace inside America for the last 148, is largely a byproduct of the explosion of the economic growth that took place, first in the USA, then later in the world, followed by the post-WWII Pax Americana that ensued from the American industrial infrastructure being the only advanced one left standing.  But success invariably plants the seeds of its own destruction. Since the long moratorium on immigration ended in 1965, the post-1962 mass apostasy that followed Vatican II,  and the great Hispanic invasion began in the 1980s, the inevitable national fracturing is rapidly approaching and will likely become more evidence with the next phase of the current economic crisis.

There no longer is one American nation, there are at least 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.  These colors should be understood to be symbolic in the sense of the Russian Reds and Whites, not literal, as there are blacks whose allegiance is to White America and Hispanic immigrants who are far more Red than Brown.

Hoyt is primarily concerned about an eventual war between Red America and the giant government is both its inspiration and its weapon, and liberty-loving White America. But Brown America is the X factor; its political support for the Reds has been leased for the short term by state and federal largesse, but the Browns have little interest in either the progressive secular ideals of the Reds or the political and cultural traditions of the Whites.  And Brown America is perfectly capable of starting the fireworks by virtue of its own innate irredentism, which will only become stronger as Red America’s ability to transfer resources to it wanes.

Anyone who has followed the history of warfare knows that wars seldom begin directly between the two primary powers. There is usually the Archduke’s assassination, the invasion of Manchuria, or something similar on the margins before the war begins in earnest. This is why Sarah’s plea for speaking out in preference to shooting, however sensible, decent, and heartfelt, is, unfortunately,  largely irrelevant. I’m not saying it is not worth doing, quite to the contrary, I would similarly encourage others to speak out. I merely caution against putting any faith in its success.

There will be war, whether anyone truly desires it or not. There has always been war and there always will be war, the arrogant pretenses of the totalitarians and their self-serving promises of peace on Earth notwithstanding. As Vegetius wrote: Si vis pacem, para bellum.  The Union cannot be saved because it no longer exists in the hearts of men.

“Twenty-nine percent of registered voters think that an armed revolution
might be necessary in the next few years in order to protect liberties,
according to a Public Mind poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University.”

Fly the flag on Loyalty Day

“I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of
America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2013, as Loyalty Day. This Loyalty
Day, I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support
of this national observance, whether by displaying the flag of the
United States or pledging allegiance to the Republic for which it
stands.”

At this point, it is those who want to burn the U.S. flag, which is now the symbol of those who are destroying the Constitution, who are the genuine patriots. There are only two flags that merit flying in America these days, the Gadsden Flag below is one of them. And the other one is not the Stars and Stripes.

The importance of stories

Sarah Hoyt explains why it is so important to resist the media mainstream and the stories it is telling:

That wish for normality, that desire to belong to a group is what causes the whole concept of “normal.”  I don’t know anymore who I was reading the other day, when a character says “What if nobody really is normal?  What if everyone is just pretending?”

I’d say it makes no difference, really.  Partly because the concept of normal and people acting externally normal makes it easier for rulers to control you and particularly to hold over you the threat of exclusion form the group; and partly because eventually you internalize what you pretend to be….

In the same way the slow, trickle, trickle, trickle distorts our impression of normal too.  It’s become impolite to say in public you’re a Tea Partier, for instance.  The slur of sexual innuendo, followed by never substantiated rumors of violence, have stained the name, though there is no truth at all in it.  At the same time, unless you are with friends and know them well enough, it is against politeness to refer to Occupiers as “Louse infested would be communists” – though it is true of the vast majority of them.

Because that’s not how the stories present those groups.  And people want to belong to the majority – to the “normal.”

Even outliers, people who step out, can break and fall back into the norm.  A great example is that blog that shall never be mentioned, but which has turned completely around in the last 5 years or so.  I was talking to a friend about that and wondered if it was always a false flag operation, designed to turn before 08 and confuse the issue.  He said maybe but – and he’s a right outlier, by virtue of what he is, the same I am – he thought what it actually was just pressure.  Because the owner of that blog is an artist in a leftist community.  The pressure to “return to normal” just broke him at last.

In my case, of course, the more pressure to return to normal the more I explode in weird directions, but growing up when and where I did with non-pierced ears and wearing pants (for the UK visitors that means trousers) I was sort of like the boy named Sue and learned to fight before I could walk.  The shock is not that I won’t return to “normal”; the shock is that I managed to semi-pretend for ten years.

Of course, the most effective strategy would be to pretend to be of them and change it from the inside, but I’m not sure it’s possible.  Religions take time to subvert and cultures take time to change, and we’re nearing the end of that time.  (No?  Look at our economy.  Or our feral children.)

Christianity, while it was replacing the old culture, at least was aware of how the world works.  The culture the Marxists seek to impose doesn’t fit ANY real world with real people, not even the places where they won.  To be “normal” people are going around pretending to believe things that simply aren’t so, like that anyone wanting to look after himself and his is “greedy” and must have stolen what he has; that women are physically stronger than men, and more independent in spirit; that children are wiser than their parents; that everyone must have sex all the time, or they’ll go mad; that every culture in the world is superior to ours.

No one sane can believe any of these even for a minute, if they examine it.  But people don’t.  They just try to “act normal” – which is bringing down Western civilization.  That part might be a feature not a bug, except that communist regimes in the end are like all the old empires: they must feed off healthy societies near them.  If they destroy the healthy societies, the world will go down to a long darkness, until the culture changes.

When both a European immigrant to America and an American immigrant to Europe, two writers who have never met, who have never read each other’s books, and who have considerably different opinions on a number of policies and issues provide almost identical warnings concerning the cancerous societal effect of what is presently being pushed as “normal”, even the most enthusiastic supporter of the proposed new normal should be inspired to, at the very least, consider rethinking his enthusiasm.

Because moral degradation is the new normal. Is the nihilism of Martin, Bakker, and Abercrombie truly to be preferred to the humble heroism of Tolkien? Has the progressive and privileged white preachiness of Rapey McRaperson genuinely produced better science fiction than the libertarian idealism of Robert Heinlein? Are the pornographic necro-bestial fantasies of Laurell Hamilton better plotted or more psychologically relevant than the modest Christian piety of Ellis Peters and Agatha Christie?  Is the YA work of Stephanie Meyer as thought-provoking or as edifying as the children’s novels of CS Lewis?

And if the stories of this new and progressive normal are so uniformly pallid and cancerous when viewed in comparison with the stories of the old and traditional normal, how can anyone credibly suppose that its reality will not prove equally diseased and devolutionary?

There is power in the old stories. That is why the gatekeepers of progress are so intent on preventing them from being told.  This is why it is important to continue telling them, and why I encourage those who hold to the traditions of the civilized, Christian West to give the works of those authors listed on the sidebar as Standout SF Authors and Friends of Narnia a shot.

So much to learn

Jared Diamond, the great prophet of geographical destiny, tells the West that it has much to learn from the tribal people of Papua New Guinea

“”I believe the few remaining tribes and nomad groups left on the
planet have a great deal to teach us,” he says and it is this belief
that inspired The World Until Yesterday.  Some tribal
customs, such as widow-strangling, will not be missed, of course. “We
should not romanticise traditional societies,” he says. “There are
horrible things that we want to avoid, but there wonderful things that
we should emulate.”

Take the example of child rearing. Far from
being harsh towards children, many tribes and groups adopt highly
permissive attitudes. “I mean permissive in that it is an absolute no-no
to punish a child. If a mother or father among African pygmies hits a
child, that would be grounds for divorce. There is no physical
punishment allowed at all in these societies. If a child plays with a
sharp knife and waves it around, so be it. They will cut themselves on
some occasions, but society figures it is better for the child to learn
the hard way early in life. They are allowed to make their own choices
and follow their own interests.””

I consider his theses to be absolutely absurd, but then again, there may be something to be said for the wise people of Papua New Guinea’s vigorous response to U.S. academics.

“A U.S. academic has been gang raped in Papua New Guinea by nine armed men who hacked off her blonde hair and left her husband tied naked to a tree. The 32-year-old woman, who was conducting research into exotic birds in a remote forest on Karkar Island, was walking along a bush track with her husband and a guide on Friday when they were set upon by the gang armed with knives and rifles. Her husband and the guide were stripped and bound by the men, who then used a bush knife to hack off the woman’s hair before raping her in a terrifying ordeal lasting 20 minutes.”

It would certainly make the average East Coast cocktail party more lively if the sort of overeducated midwits who take Diamond at face value were to follow the example of the noble people of Papua New Guinea in this regard.

Now, I realize that many doubt my thesis that most of the desirable tenets of Christian civilization will not survive in post-Christian society, but note that in Diamond, we already have a well-regarded, much-honored academic overtly advocating a return to many pagan, pre-civilized customs. But it never seems to occur to those who eagerly anticipate Western post-Christianity that those raised in a pagan society without Christian customs and strictures will not necessarily retain the civilized customs that are inculcated in the secularist or pagan raised in a Christian society.

It is easy to say, well, we’ll keep the Western strictures against widow-strangling, witch-burning, and academic-raping, we’ll just toss the ones against homosexual-marrying, public fornication, polygamy, and letting children play with loaded guns… wait a minute! The brutal reality is that a society in which most children are “allowed to make their own choices and follow their own interests” is a society where the values, and the resulting societal strictures, will eventually be decided by those semi-feral children and not their overly permissive parents.

What has long been decried by the civilized Christian West as “the cowardly act of animals” – how very raciss and judgmental – may well become the next “new normal”. No one should be so foolish as to believe that behavioral change on a societal level is either predestined or readily controlled by government bureaucracy. It is easier to destroy than create; it is easier to degrade than strengthen. The progressives who proudly proclaim that the youth of today are much more open to “gay marriage” should keep in mind that in the not-too-distant future, those formerly open-minded youths may well find themselves position of the disregarded, close-minded elderly, listening in horror as the progressives of tomorrow proudly proclaim that the youth are much more open to “sexual services on demand”.

I suspect a connection

Ed Trimnell observes that not only are atheists far more inclined to attack Christianity than Islam, but some are even willing to publicly declare that Islam should be off-limits to atheist criticism:

“It seems that a writer at Salon.com is upset because the so-called “New Atheists” have been rather unkind to Islam of late. In a piece entitled “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia” Nathan Lean suggests that these New Atheists should simply shut up about terrorism, sharia courts ordering death sentences for apostates, and honor killings in the Muslim world. Then they can go back to doing what atheists in the post-modern West are supposed to do: talk about the threat that evangelical Christianity poses to humanity. (After all, some of those hillbilly reactionary Christians still haven’t fully embraced same-sex marriage!)”

I suspect that this sort of thing might have something to do with the atheist hypocrisy:

“Hundreds of thousands of people have held protests in Bangladesh to
demand that the government introduce an anti-blasphemy law that would
include the death penalty for bloggers who insult Islam…. Supporters of Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamist group which draws support
from tens of thousands of religious seminaries [and that has the backing
of country’s largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami], converged on Dhaka’s main
commercial hub to protest against what they said were blasphemous
writings by atheist bloggers, shouting “God is great — hang the atheist
bloggers”.”

Apparently the old chestnut about there being no atheists in foxholes isn’t all that far from the truth. Christians are holding to their faith even as they are murdered for it by Muslims in Nigeria and Egypt and by atheists in China and North Korea. Atheists, meanwhile, are showing that they don’t have the courage of their lack of conviction, thus proving my point that post-Christianity in the West is unlikely to look any different than post-Christianity in the Middle East.

A post-Christian West will be pagan, not secular. It will be in the form of dark gods like Santa Muerte and Damballah Wedo, and it will be rooted in death and cruelty. It should be recalled that whereas there never was any medieval “Dark Ages”, there is a very good reason why Jesus Christ was considered “the Light of the World” by civilized and scholarly men who were familiar with the darkness of pagan cultures that preceded Christian society. Merely having to compete with that Christian society considerably improved paganism, as even Julian the Apostate implicitly admitted in his futile attempt to build a paganism capable of rivaling it.

“Julian’s heart was set on a civil and religious reformation. He longed for amendment in law and administration, above all for a remodelling of the old cult and the winning of converts to the cause of the gods. He himself was to be the head of the new state church of Paganism; the hierarchy of the Christians was to be adopted — the country priests subordinated to the high priest of the province, the high priest to be responsible to the Emperor, the pontifex maximus. A new spirit was to inspire the Pagan clergy; the priest himself was to be no longer a mere performer of public rites, let him take up the work of preacher, expound the deeper sense which underlay the old mythology and be at once shepherd of souls and an ensample to his flock in holy living. What Maximin Daza had attempted to achieve in ruder fashion by forged acts of Pilate, Julian’s writings against the Galilaeans should effect: as Maximin had bidden cities ask what they would of his royal bounty, did they but petition that the Christians might be removed from their midst, so Julian was ready to assist and favour towns which were loyal to the old faith. Maximin had created a new priesthood recruited from men who had won distinction in public careers. his dream had been to fashion an organisation which might successfully withstand the Christian clergy; here too Julian was his disciple. 

“When pest and famine had desolated the Roman East in Maximia’s days, the helpfulness and liberality of Christians towards the starving and the plague-stricken had forced men to confess that true piety and religion had made their home with the persecuted heretics: it was Julian’s will that Paganism should boast its public charity and that an all-embracing service of humanity should be reasserted as a vital part of the ancient creed. If only the worshippers of the gods of Hellas were once quickened with a spiritual enthusiasm, the lost ground would be recovered. It was indeed to this call that Paganism could not respond. There were men who clung to the old belief, but theirs was no longer a victorious faith, for the fire had died upon the altar. Resignation to Christian intolerance was bitter, but the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found. Julian made converts — the Christian writers mournfully testify to their numbers —but he made them by imperial gold, by promises of advancement or fear of dismissal. They were not the stuff of which missionaries could be fashonied. The citizens were disappointed of their pageants, while the royal enthusiast found his hopes to be illusions. Mutual embitterment was the natural result.”
– The Cambridge Medieval History Vol. I, pp 362-363

That was 1,650 years ago. There is truly nothing new under the sun. Even today, we see “the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found.” The reason Richard Dawkins’s attempt to set up an atheist charity will ultimately be no more successful than the Emperor Julian’s efforts is because the Christian customs they seek to imitate are not inspired and encouraged for their own sake, but by the particular religious impulse. Both history and observation clearly indicate that it is no more possible to maintain the tenets and various aspects of Christian civilization considered desirable by non-Christians without the Christian faith to support them than it is to maintain intellectual function without a beating heart.

Such efforts can be maintained, for a short time, by extraordinary artificial measures. But they will fail soon enough. And then the true nature of pagan darkness will reveal itself again.

Feminists are sub-civilizational

I’ve said it before.  I’ll say it again.  And each time, more people recognize the truth in the statement.  Calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the National Socialist German Workers Party:

Florida legislators considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion were shocked during a committee hearing this week when a Planned Parenthood official endorsed a right to post-birth abortion. Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor….

“If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,
what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is
struggling for life?”

“We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the
woman, her family, and the physician,” said Planned Parenthood lobbyist
Snow.

This is what the feminist’s vaunted concept of equality means.  This is what it has always meant: the legal protection of a woman from all and any consequences of her actions.  This includes a woman’s ability to break any contract at will, to steal from anyone as she pleases, and murder even the most innocent without having to even hear a whisper of protest to make her uncomfortable.  Feminists are objectively worse than Nazis.  They are demonstrably worse than Fascists. They are provably worse than Communists.  Their insane ideology has a higher body count than any of those three evil ideologies and comes with more costly, less sustainable societal consequences.

Civilization has always depended upon the collaborative effort of men and women to restrain the darker and more chaotic aspects of women’s nature. Women are more important to the sustainability of a society, which is why a society that can survive the bad behavior of its young males cannot survive similarly bad behavior on the part of its young females.

Islamic society is one example of the result of the civilizational burden falling upon men alone.  It isn’t ideal, but it is observably preferable, and observably more sustainable, than the catastrophic state in which Western society presently finds itself.  Victorian expat society appears to be about as close to leaving the civilizational burden in women’s hands as I’ve been able to determine.  Even that is a vastly more functional system.  But now, both men and women alike have washed their hands of the burden and we are seeing the results of hypergamy and solipsism run amok.

There are no limits.  That is the key.  Or rather, there are no INTERNAL limits to them, and so in the absence of external ones being imposed, there are no limits.  “Women’s rights” requires nothing less than sacrificing every other right that Western civilization has achieved, including the right to life itself.  Only the sub-civilizational, the nihilistic, and the stupidly short-sighted can support them.

This isn’t a theoretical observation.  This isn’t mindless mysogyny.  This is simply called “paying attention” to the ongoing societal collapse and its sources.  The Doctor Panglosses of the various statistics departments are already openly willing to admit to a “triple-dip recession.” Deposit heists of up to 80 percent are being openly discussed. College enrollments, even those funded entirely by debt, have peaked.  The nation is on the verge of becoming a genetically Third World one.  We are rapidly approaching a fifth year of debt deflation/disinflation.  The government is arming and asserting its right to assassinate anyone.

And you think everything is fine?  You think this is going to last?  You think this even has the possibility of continuing in the intermediate term?

Persecution in America

It’s fascinating, is it not, how those who deny Jesus Christ, from Roman emperors to petty academic professors, are observably obsessed with forcing others to symbolically reject the name of Man’s Lord and Savior:

A professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Davie campus named
Deandre Poole teaches an “Intercultural Communication” class from a
textbook by the same name.  The textbook calls for an exercise where
students write the name of Jesus in large letters on a piece of paper
and then stomp on it.

Enter Ryan Rotela, a student in the class who happens to be a devout
Mormon. Rotela refused to stomp and complained to Professor Poole,
telling him, “Never do the assignment again because it’s offensive.” 
Rotela also told the professor that he was going to complain to the
university.  Then, according to Rotela, FAU responded by suspending him
from Poole’s class.

It gets worse; the university is now going after the student, not the professor.  That’s obviously questionable.  But as the PJ Tatler rightly puts it, the more important question is this: “Why was there only one student in the class who found stomping on Jesus objectionable?”

Never forget, this is the sort of “tolerance” that the atheists and pagans grant to the Christians after successfully demanding respect and tolerance from Western Christian culture.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the genuine tolerance that was given to them may have been a serious mistake of cataclysmic proportions for everyone, including the atheists and pagans who have been granted free reign and are foolishly using their freedom to bring down a civilization more than a millennium in the making.

Descent into barbarism

It may not be only the economic statistics that are fictional:

Flying in the face of the traditional image of a country seen as the land of good living, ‘France, A Clockwork Orange’ claims that mainstream politicians and the media have long masked a far more disturbing reality: it is rapidly descending into mindless violence and incivility. “Nobody should ignore the reality,” the book claims, namely that “every 24 hours 13,000 thefts, 2,000 attacks and 200 rapes” take place in France – figures far higher than official national statistics.

Now, I don’t spend much time in France, so I have no way of verifying who is telling the truth and who is hiding or exaggerating it here.  But the fact that the book has become a national bestseller tends to indicate that there is something amiss with regards to the reported French criminal statistics, especially since we know that the FBI’s criminal statistics are less than entirely consistent where racial matters are concerned.

But it is worth noting that just as cultural integration tends to split the difference between the criminal tendencies of different cultures, economic integration tends to split the difference between living standards.  The intellectuals on the Left are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they have made an epic mistake of historical proportions, in devaluing and ruining their own cultures under the mistaken impression that this would somehow be of benefit to the rest of the world.

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

It’s not a question of fault.  It’s a question of actions and consequences. The best thing the West can do for the rest of the world is to preserve itself and serve as a positive example towards which it can aspire, not ruin itself in a futile attempt to transform other cultures through the magic of mass geographic relocation.

“enormous possibilities for the Administration”

Granted, he is often a little excitable with regards to the imminence of the sky falling, but in this case, Karl provides mathematical support for his prediction concerning when something similar to the Cypriot action will take place in the USA:

In two years federal medical spending along with Social Security and interest will, on current paths, reach the total of all tax receipts. At the outside the market will realize that Congress will never address the underlying issue with medical care because they have steadfastly refused to do so.  At that point we will have become Greece and Cyprus.

For those who say that our banking system is “strong” and “not corrupt unlike Cyprus” may I ask what the record is on money laundering and intentional obfuscation of the truth with regard to firms such as HSBC and Wachovia (both of which were caught laundering enormous amounts of money) and JP Morgan (which was just grilled, along with the regulators, regarding the “London Whale”) and not one person or institution has been indicted and prosecuted?

There is about $20 trillion in US Retirement “assets.”  A “small” 10% “one time” tax levy on those assets would fund the US Deficit a couple of years from now, and I will go out on a limb now and predict that exactly that will be done.

It first crossed my mind that this could eventually happen back in 1998, although I can’t remember why, but we were discussing it for one reason or another.  I never thought it was necessary, not even in 2008, because I simply didn’t imagine that the financial rulers of the US were crazy enough to continue with their credit expansion even after that clear and present wake-up call.

Two years seems rather on the abrupt side to me, but as I have often observed, these things always take longer to develop than one imagines, and then, when they finally arrive, unfold faster than one can believe.