Tag: decline and fall

Federal spies in the sky

Congratulations, you now live in Orwell’s America:

Today EFF posted several thousand pages of new drone license records and a new map that tracks the location of drone flights across the United States.  These records, received as a result of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law enforcement agencies, universities and—for the first time—three branches of the U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Perhaps the scariest is the technology carried by a Reaper drone the Air Force is flying near Lincoln, Nevada and in areas of California and Utah. This drone uses “Gorgon Stare” technology, which Wikipedia defines as “a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone . . . capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city.” This imagery “can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind’s Eye project” being developed by DARPA.

It’s hard to imagine how this technology is going to be misused, isn’t it?  The idea that Americans are in any way still a free people is becoming increasingly ludicrous.  And, of course, the spies aren’t all in the sky either.

The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members
of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an
interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this
information against anyone.

WND column

An American Independence Party

In Spain, the two pro-Catalan independence parties now control a
majority of the regional parliament. While the Esquerra Republicana de
Catalunya is on the political left and the Convergència i Unió is on the
center-right, the one thing they can agree on is that Catalonia should
be independent.

In Great Britain, the Scottish National Party has all but eliminated
the Conservative Party north of the border and seats nearly twice as
many members as the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament. As for the
United Kingdom herself, the United Kingdom Independence Party, derided
by British Prime Minister David Cameron as a collection of “loonies,
fruitcakes and closet racists,” just handed the Tories their
Eton-educated heads in three by-elections that serve as a likely
harbinger of political upheaval to come; UKIP has already effectively
replaced the Liberal Democrats as the United Kingdom’s fourth most
influential political party after the Conservatives, Labour, and the
Scottish National Party.

47 years late and 55 trillion short

Larry Auster points out that conservatives never manage to conserve anything, not even the nation they supposedly love so dearly:

As long as there was a chance to stop the immigration and the resulting dispossession of Anglo-European America, the topic was forbidden.
But now that it’s happened, and there’s a sense that nothing can be
done about it, and therefore the identification of the fact that mass
nonwhite immigration is leading to the radical cultural and political
transformation of America does not logically require a call for restricting
that immigration, it’s become safe for Mark Steyn and all the other
despicable conservative cowards to come out from the shadows and say
bold-sounding things like, “Demographics is Destiny.” In the minds of
Steyn and the others, they are not issuing a warning against that transformation, as such a warning would make them racists; they are announcing the victory
of that transformation, combined with impotent little grumblings about
some of its negative effects. After all, what—other than impotent
grumbling—is conservatism about? 

Of course, just because it’s too late to do anything about it easily or peacefully doesn’t mean it’s actually too late for anything to be done about it.  And that is the real tragedy.

The half-life of the secular utopia

Post-Christianity is all secular fun and games until the vacuum is filled.  And we all know how nature fills about vacuums:

Muslim immigrants in a town near Copenhagen have forced the
cancellation of traditional Christmas displays this year even while
spending lavishly on the Islamic Eid celebration marking the end of
Ramadan.

The controversy has escalated into an angry nationwide debate over
the role of Islam in post-Christian Denmark, where a burgeoning Muslim
population is becoming increasingly assertive in imposing its will on a
wide range of social and civic issues.

A spokesman for the Danish Conservative Party, Tom Behnke, says he fears there are people who want to convert Denmark into a Muslim country. In an interview with DR News, Behnke said: “I think it is deeply alarming that our integration efforts are so ineffective that the moment there is a Muslim majority, we do away with good-old Danish traditions and introduce Muslim traditions instead. We are living in Denmark, and people have to adapt to the situation that applies here.”

When asked whether housing associations with a Muslim minority should sponsor an Eid party, Behnke replied: “We have to remember that in the past, an Eid festival was the Muslims’ victory celebration after they had slaughtered the Christians, so I don’t know how much there is to celebrate in Denmark. Still, people should be allowed to celebrate whatever festivals they want to, but they also must respect the festivals in the country they have come to.”

Behnke added: “There is no point in wanting to convert Denmark into a Muslim country because you yourself have a Muslim background. That must never happen. On the contrary, we must have mutual respect for one another. This is a lack of respect for Danish traditions and culture. We must not have a Denmark where Danish traditions disappear as soon as there is a Muslim majority.”

Of course, the only way for Denmark to avoid losing its Danish traditions is to not have a Muslim majority.  As I have repeatedly attempted to spell out for the atheists and agnostics in our midst, there is not and there will never be a secular science-based utopia.  It is a fundamental category error to pretend it is even remotely possible.  What passes for secularism is merely the transitional state between one dominant religious form and its successor. Post-Christian culture is neither secular nor scientific, it is pagan and pre-Western civilization.

There are two choices on offer.  The secular enlightenment isn’t one of them.  What passes for progress is actually a large-scale societal reversion of significant proportions, and neither technology nor ever-increasing quantities of debt, (which presently pass for wealth), are going to prevent that.

Based on what we’re observing, the half-life of a secular society is about twenty years.

Secession enters the mainstream

The New York Times publishes a remarkably balanced article on the topic of Texas secession:

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the
center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state
Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on
a variety of issues, including health care and environmental
regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves
simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat. 
But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas
nationalism — a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups
that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the
1830s and 1840s — it is a far more serious matter. 
The official in East Texas, Peter Morrison, the treasurer of the Hardin
County Republican Party, said in a statement that he had received
overwhelming support from conservative Texans and overwhelming
opposition from liberals outside the state in response to his comments
in his newsletter. He said that it may take time for “people to
appreciate that the fundamental cultural differences between Texas and
other parts of the United States may be best addressed by an amicable
divorce, a peaceful separation.” 
For the record, I am in favor of self-determination.  That is the key, I think, for secession supporters to win liberal/progressive support.  American liberals, for all their ability to double-think, simply cannot permit themselves to oppose self-determination, since it is one of the foundations of their perspective on foreign policy.  While some of them will be able to concoct a convoluted conceptual structure that allows them to vehemently support foreign self-determination while denying it to Americans, most of them will not.  It is too integral to their view of the world.
And for the record, I am entirely in favor of self-determination for Texans as well as the other American states.  Liberals like to point out that the “Democratic” states subsidize the “Republican” states; a fact which omits one extremely relevant point which I shall point out and walk through the math in a future post.  Secession advocates should use this fact and the self-determination argument relentlessly, as encouraging the left to declare “good riddance” will be key to winning their support for the eventual, and inevitable, secession of several American States.

Feminism ends in the brothel

Back in 2006, I think it was, I wrote about how the combination of feminism,  immigration, and post-Christianity would lead inevitably towards reducing women’s choices to the brothel or the burqah.  That point is rapidly arriving in both Holland and the UK:

Anything-goes Amsterdam has long been hailed as a sex mecca. The red-light district attracts thousands of customers, many of them tourists, who walk through alleys where half-naked prostitutes prance in the windows of some 300 brothels illuminated with scarlet bulbs.

A century ago, the brothels were banned to stop the exploitation of women by criminal gangs of Dutch men. But gradually the sex establishments crept back, with the authorities turning a blind eye.

In 2000, after pressure from prostitutes (demanding recognition as sex workers with employment rights) and Holland’s liberal intelligentsia (championing the choice of women to do what they wished with their bodies), the brothels were legalised. The working girls got permits, medical care, and now there are 5,000 in the red-light district.

But things went badly wrong. Holland’s newly legal sex industry was quickly infiltrated by street-grooming gangs with one target: the under-age girl virgin who can be sold for sex.

The men in the gangs are dubbed — incongruously — ‘lover boys’, because of their distinct modus operandi of making girls fall in love with them before forcing them into prostitution at private flats or houses all over Holland, and in the window brothels. The lover boy phenomenon has appalled Dutch society, not least because of the sheer numbers of girls involved.

Holland hopes the rot will be halted. Last year, 242 lover boy crimes were investigated by police, half of them involving the forced prostitution of girls under 18. Campaigner Anita de Wit says this is a fraction — ‘one per cent’ — of the true number. ‘There are thousands of girls being preyed on by male gangs in Holland,’ she says.  Anita visits schools to warn girls exactly what a lover boy looks like, and makes no bones of the fact that most of the gangs are operated by Dutch-born Moroccan and Turkish men.

‘I am not politically correct. I am not afraid of being called a racist, which would be untrue. I tell the girls that lover boys are young, dark-skinned and very good looking. They will have lots of money and bling as well as a big car. They will give out cigarettes and vodka. They will tell a girl that she is beautiful.

‘The gangs know who to pick out: the girl with the confidence problems, with the glasses, or who looks overweight. They flatter her and seem like the “knight in shining armour”. She is drawn to her new boyfriend like a magnet.’

There has never been a society that survived the loss of its religion and its children.  The end game for secularism, equalitarianism, and multiculturalism is not the shiny, sexy, It’s A Small World scientopia of post-religious dreams, it is what is already being witnessed in present-day Amsterdam.  This is not progress, this is a return to the pagan world that was defeated with the passing of Julian the Apostate and Diocletian.

The problem isn’t that the feminist revolution “backfired’, the problem is that it was a revolution of 180 degrees that marked a return to ancient societal patterns.

The menace of hope

The NYT smells Republican blood in the water and goes for the kill:

 Funny how quickly some principles collapse when given the right kind of shove. One day, the Republican Party is rock-ribbed restrictionist, dedicated to the proposition that unauthorized immigrants are an invading army of job stealers, welfare moochers and criminals whose only acceptable destiny is to be caught and deported — the border fence forever, “amnesty” never. The next day: never mind. The party suddenly discovers the merits of a working immigration system. Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who once bravely supported bipartisan reform but slunk away late in the last Bush administration, are scratching at the door again, as if the last five years never happened.

All it took was an election in which millions of Latino voters — many of them the wives and husbands, sons, daughters, grandchildren, cousins, co-workers and friends of those despised “illegals” — overwhelmingly chose President Obama over the man who promised to be deporter in chief. They rejected Mitt Romney by 3 to 1, according to exit polls. Asian-Americans did, too. Republicans looked at a changing America, saw a future of decline and irrelevance for the party, and concluded that immigrants weren’t so bad after all.

One more amnesty and we’ll establish the permanent left-liberal majority!  You can almost feel them desperately trying to conceal their glee.  What is remarkable is that they can’t seem to understand that the current travails of Illinois and California are what happens when left-liberals get what they want.  It’s like letting a five year old kid child drive.  There’s going to be a crash, it’s going to be bloody, and everyone is going to blame those who weren’t behind the wheel.

This is much more A Phantom Menace than A New Hope.

Church of England delays suicide

I’m a little surprised at the result of the Synod vote as I was confident that the Anglicans were literally Hell-bent on following the Episcopalians in their death spiral into the historical dustbin of post-Christianity:

In a knife-edge decision at a special sitting of the Synod in London, bishops
and clergy voted through the change by large majorities.  But the measure failed to secure the required two thirds support among
representatives of the laity by just 6 votes.  Although 324 members of the Synod voted in favour of the change, 124 voted
against and 11 abstained.

It’s amazing that so many churches are determined to follow the world rather than the Word.  But then, it was written that they would do precisely that.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a nominally Christian denomination that ordains women isn’t Christian, merely that it won’t be Christian for long.

Krugmanocracy

Tim Geithner is going to end this depression now!

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Friday that Congress should
stop placing legal limits on the amount of money the government can
borrow and effectively lift the debt limit to infinity.  On Bloomberg TV, “Political Capital” host Al Hunt asked Geithner if he believes “we ought to just eliminate the debt ceiling.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Geithner said.

Not satisfied with this intellectual victory, Paul Krugman celebrated by calling for a 91 percent tax rate.  The amazing thing is that wasn’t even the craziest thing in his column.  He also asserted: “We are, morally, a much better nation than we were.”

His claim puts me in mind of the Book of Isaiah. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for
light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for
bitter.”

No, don’t move

Karl Denninger inadvertantly recommends spreading the Blue virus:

[T]he people of California passed a ballot measure to tax themselves
and give the money not to a state program but rather to a bunch of
banksters.  There’s no solution to stupidity that is lawful; your only lawful option if you live in that craphole called California
where people vote to steal your money using the guns of the government
as a means to compel you to to turn it over and then give it to a bunch
of thieves on Wall Street — not even spending it on a program to
benefit you and your children — is to move.

While it is moderately amusing to think of the devout goodthinkers of California patting themselves on the bank as they  piously vote to raise taxes that use the California schools as a funnel to the banksters, it is a mistake to permit Californians to go anywhere but another proud blue state.  Because it’s only a matter of time before the ex-Californians start looking around and wondering if life wouldn’t be better for everyone if things were done the wonderful way they were back in California.

And aside from New Yorkers, I’ve never known any group of people more dedicated to informing you of their origins than Californians.  It was bad enough at my university that the one girl from Minnesota used to roll her eyes and sarcastically mutter “hey, Minnesota buddy!” in my direction if we both happened to be in the vicinity of two Californians congratulating each other on their mutual state of residence.  Granted, they’re not quite as obnoxious as Parisians, but it’s still ridiculous.