Tag: decline and fall

The Lethality of Low-IQ Demographics

Karl Denninger is not at all sanguine about the future of a United States that has lost an average 10 IQ points or more since 1965:

You need about a 115 IQ to build and maintain modern civilization.

Examples? Too many to count. How about Flint’s water system? It poisoned a bunch of kids, remember?

Why didn’t it poison kids for the previous 80 years? It had been there that long, with the same lead service lines, but didn’t poison anyone.

Is lead a great material for water feed pipes? Depends on when. Today, no. HDPE is better in all respects; it can tolerate freezing, modest movement and it is nearly impermeable to both the water and outside contaminants, including the chlorine used for disinfection. You probably know this stuff today as “PEX” in a house but in larger diameters — usually black in color and heat-welded at junctions — it is commonly used for water mains as well.

But 80 years ago it didn’t exist.

Lead did. And it too can tolerate a modest amount of movement and is nearly impermeable to contaminates inside and out. Oh, and it self-protects almost-immediately if the water balance is held at the correct level and thus the oxide and mineral layer that immediately forms on it, while the lines are being flushed during installation and the tests on the house, render it safe.

Now put an acidic water supply down it and that layer is destroyed with the lead leaching into the water.

The 115+ IQ people who built and ran the water plant at Flint all those years knew this, and knew how to keep it safe. They drank out of the same lines and so not only did they know how they had plenty of incentive to not screw up — and as professionals who were smart, they didn’t screw up.

Then Shaqueena, or her analog with a <115 IQ took over. And changed the water source. And, at the same time, didn’t check and make sure the chemical and pH balance remained correct because the intellectual firepower to do so was simply no longer there. The result was a bunch of poisoned kids.

Would you use a lead service line today for a new installation? Of course not. But is it unsafe? Not as long as the people running the plant are of sufficient intelligence to operate modern industrial and environmental machinery and not fuck it up.

John Red Eagle and I warned about this back in 2015 in CUCKSERVATIVE. The same problem that is presently afflicting the USA is about to hit the UK and Europe as well. It’s not noticeable at first, because it doesn’t matter if your kebab sellers, taxi drivers, and other common immigrant occupations are filled by newcomers with lower IQs than the natives.

But once the second and third generations start competing with the natives, and outcompeting them thanks to DEI initiatives and shameless ethnic nepotism, the lower-IQ effect hits with a vengeance, particularly as they begin claiming policy-making positions for which they are absolutely and unequivocally unsuited.

Translation: US infrastructure is going to rapidly decline to the Mexican level. Northern European infrastructure is going to rapidly decline to the US level. Southern European infrastructure won’t change. And the relative power of China and Russia vis-a-vis the West will continue to increase.

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For Once He’s Not Wrong

Fake Pope Francis upsets his satanic allies with some uncharacteristically straight talk about the descent of the Post-Catholic Church into antichristianity:

Pope Francis has allegedly shocked bishops in Italy by using an offensive slur when saying that homosexual men should not be admitted to church seminaries because there is already ‘too much’ gay sexual activity. The pontiff told a closed-door meeting at an episcopal conference at the Vatican that homosexual men should not be allowed into colleges to train for the priesthood, Italian media reports.

Bishops at the meeting were reportedly taken aback by the language the 87-year-old used to make the statement – the derogatory word ‘frociaggine‘, which roughly translates to “faggotry”.

Italian news agency Adnkronos, citing sources, reported that the Pope said in the speech: ‘Look: there is already an air of faggotry around that is not good. There is today’s culture of homosexuality with respect to those who have a homosexual orientation [who] are better off not being accepted [into the seminary].’

When the amount of inversion is too much even for the Devil’s servants, you know the pendulum is well-overdue to start swinging back hard.

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Sometimes Tropes are True

SHOT: “Any suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false, and the insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print… saying Jews ‘wielded their money & power in an effort to shape American views’ is offensive on so many levels.”

CHASER: Two Republican congressmen have introduced legislation that would provide the same employment and economic protections to Americans serving in the Israeli military as US citizens who get deployed to serve in the US military. Around 23,380 American citizens are currently serving in the Israeli army, according to a February report by The Washington Post.

To the contrary, any U.S. citizen who serves in the armed forces of any foreign nation, including Israel, should have his U.S. citizenship automatically revoked, be permanently expelled from the United States, and face criminal charges of treason if he enters U.S. territory in the future.

This is precisely why dual-citizenship needs to be made illegal again, as it was for most of U.S. history. No wonder the Clown World edition of the USA is a powder keg just waiting for a series of events to set it off. No nation that has been invaded and occupied to such a comprehensive extent has ever survived intact.

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It’s worse than you think

Don’t blame the younger generations. They weren’t pumping up the money supply with all their home loans, second mortgages, and third car loans. Which, by the way, is the way to pin down those Boomers who try to blame everyone but themselves for their actions.

Because they are responsible for the post-1980 inflation. They borrowed and spent the money. Inflation isn’t printing money, it’s borrowing money. That’s how the money is created. And the private economy is still, to this day, considerably larger than the public one.

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The End of French Colonialism

It makes sense that France’s former colonies no longer seek protection from a nation that has fallen to Clown World and cannot even protect its own borders from mass invasion:

Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko has suggested closing French military bases in the country, claiming their long-term presence is incompatible with the West African nation’s desire for complete control over its affairs.

The minister made the remarks at a joint conference with the French left-wing politician Jean-Luc Melenchon in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, on Thursday.

“More than 60 years after our independence… we must question the reasons why the French army for example still benefits from several military bases in our country and the impact of this presence on our national sovereignty and our strategic autonomy,” Sonko said.

France currently has about 350 troops in Senegal after it began downsizing the contingent of 1,200 based there in 2010. Critics have condemned the troops’ presence as a continuation of French dominance over the former colony, despite independence in 1960.

On Thursday, Sonko, a popular former opposition leader who became prime minister after his hand-picked presidential candidate, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, won a landslide in elections in March, said several countries have promised Senegal defense agreements.

“But this does not justify the fact that a third of the Dakar region is now occupied by foreign garrisons,” he said.

It’s really rather remarkable to see the last vestiges of 18th and 19th Century colonialism being dismantled in real time. How anyone can view the collapse of Christendom in Europe having been an advance of any kind, by any definition beyond a clownish inversion, is really beyond me.

How Civilization Ends

Tucker Goodrich is not optimistic, based on his experience with working on engines and machine shops.

Due to the dwindling supply of quality machine shops and very poor quality aftermarket parts as well as a lack of people interested in learning the engine building and machine shop trades, I regret to inform our many followers and current as well as past customers that we will no longer be taking on any new engine build orders unless it is for a car we are restoring. Since Covid, we have had to do rework on multiple engine builds due to poorly manufactured parts that failed during break in or machine work that was below our standards due to all the old farts like me dying off with no younger workers interested in taking their place. For example, rod bearings are now made too thin resulting in 390 and 401 crank grinds needing to be ground .0085, .0185 or .0285 under standard rod journal size yet all but one machine shop in the entire Phoenix area refused to do anything other than the standard .010, .020 or .030 grinds. Even worse, when the one shop that will grind the cranks the way we tell them we need them loses their crank grinder to retirement in another year or two, they do not plan to replace him. Machine work that used to have a turnaround of 2-3 weeks now takes a minimum of 2-4 months due to an acute lack of people interested in learning machine work and doing manual physical labor. In fact, one engine block was at a machine shop for a year and when we got it back hey did such a poor sleeve job in one cylinder that it was not even useable so it is now a 250 lb paper weight…

What used to take a couple of weeks to get back from a machine shop can easily now take 2-4 months or more resulting in our overall engine backlog now being 15-18 months. The bottom line is that custom engine building is on its way to becoming extinct and it won’t be too many more years before all of us old farts that currently do this work either retire and/or die off resulting in engine building within the collector car hobby becoming nearly impossible to find. And when you do find someone, don’t be surprised if they are backed out 2+ years or more and that they only want to do Chevy builds and know zero about our beloved AMC engines. “The times they are a changin’.”

I can attest to this problem of civilizational and technological decline. We’re installing a new machine in the bindery today. It’s a machine from 1961, and we bought it because it should work much better for our purposes than the new machine we bought in 2022.

If you’re looking for work, or to launch a business, you should probably look very hard at the opportunities in the machine shop area. Because it’s not just the car collectors who need metal parts machined.

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The Decline of the Literary West

Reader’s Digest is shutting down in the UK:

Reader’s Digest’s UK edition has closed down after 86 years due to ‘financial pressures, as the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief shares a touching tribute. In an honest and heartfelt tribute, the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief Eva Mackevic said ‘the company just couldn’t withstand the financial pressures of today’s unforgiving magazine publishing landscape’.

The closure comes 14 years after it fell into administration because of a £125m pension fund deficit.

Founded in the the US in 1922, Reader’s Digest – whose motto was ‘Articles of enduring interest’ – was first published in the UK in 1938. Back in 2000 Reader’s Digest UK was selling more than one million copies a month.

I loved Reader’s Digest. My grandparents were subscribers, and whenever I visited them I would read several of those thick little magazines a day. Laughter the Best Medicine was all right, but I preferred the more subtle humor to be found in Life in These United States. And the abridged novels it contained often provided exposure to interesting authors to be explored more fully in the the future.

But diversity doesn’t read. And increasingly, neither does the three-second attention span crowd. Books are in the process of returning to the elite status they once held prior to the release of the dime novel and the mass market paperback, which is not a bad thing for deluxe leather book binders, but isn’t a healthy sign for society.

With more than 3 million subscribers in the USA, the original magazine should be around for a while. But the failure of the once-powerful UK edition is a good reminder of the vagaries of time. Yesterday’s success not only doesn’t guarantee success today, it often plants the seeds for tomorrow’s failure.

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Oh, No! Anyway…

I’m trying to figure out what sort of retard in the US State Department thinks that anyone in a position of leadership in Russia or North Korea, or anywhere else for that matter, gives a fragment of a flying rodent’s posterior about the USA’s diplomatic concerns about North Korea.

The recent rapprochement between Russia and North Korea could embolden Pyongyang to take a more risky approach in the global arena, a senior US diplomat has warned. Deputy Assistant Secretary Jung Pak, who serves as the State Department’s senior official for North Korea, told Bloomberg on Monday that Moscow’s “complete embrace” of North Korea could mean that the country would be more inclined to threaten its southern neighbor, export weapons abroad, and defy Washington’s calls to return to denuclearization talks.

Just as the Swiss government doesn’t seem to grasp that it can’t play neutral anymore now that it has taken sides against Russia, the USA no longer has any influence whatsoever with Russia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, China, or any of the countries that it has either a) sanctioned or b) bombed.

The world is no longer monopolar. And anyone you have treated as an enemy not only has no reason to pay attention to your opinion, he has a powerful incentive to actively pursue those things that threaten you.

Andrei Martyanov is correct. The USA and its European satrapies are not only agreement-incapable, they are so delusional that they can’t even do basic diplomacy anymore.

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Diversity is Mediocrity

Item 1: a selection from Cuckservative, published in 2015:

Without question the worst effect caused by 50 years of failure, and the one most likely to have the most severe long-term consequences, is the negative effect immigration has had on the collective national intelligence. Researchers around the world have observed that the nations of the West have been gradually becoming less intelligent; the Danish military measured a 1.5 point decline in the average IQ of its soldiers between 1998 and 2014, while the average British 14-year-old lost two IQ points from 1980 to 2008. The same is true for the USA, where a three-point average IQ gain that took place after the Melting Pot migration ended has been entirely reversed as a result of immigration from lower-IQ nations.

By multiplying the average measured IQs for the four major ethnic groups in the United States with their changing demographic ratios, we can calculate how the demographic changes have affected the national intelligence over time. In 1960, we calculate the national IQ average to have been 100.3. By 2010, the average national IQ had fallen four points, to 96. By 2030, if the current population estimates are correct, it will fall another point, to 95. Lest you think that average national intelligence is irrelevant, note that just that four-point difference is essentially equal to the difference between countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and countries such as Uruguay and Portugal. There is a strong correlation between societal wealth and average national intelligence as measured in IQ.

Even the left-wing British paper, the Guardian, was recently forced to take note of this phenomenon, as it reported that scientists have determined genes influence academic ability across all subjects, and that as much as 60 percent of the observed differences between various population groups can be explained by genetic factors. So, the mass migration of the last 50 years has been materially dysgenic and has literally made Americans stupider on average. It’s not just you, mass entertainment really has been dumbed down in recent decades in order to appeal to what is an even lower common denominator than before.

Item 2: an article in the Daily Mail, 23 April 2024:

America’s fight to save handwriting from extinction as IQs begin to fall for first time ever and teachers warn some 20-year-olds can’t sign checks anymore. Previous studies have revealed that IQ scores have dropped for the first time in a century and indicated that technology could be to blame. Last year, researchers at the University of Oregon and Northwestern reported that IQ scores had dropped because technology shortens attention spans and decreases the need to think deeply.

The dirt is not magic. Being around magic white people doesn’t make Africans or Papua New Guineans any smarter, the so-called Flynn Effect notwithstanding. The USA is no longer British, it is no longer even European, it is now rapidly approaching the human genetic average. So, exceptional results should no longer be expected, and it can be reasonably assumed that as an increasingly diverse and mediocre empire, it will rapidly be surpassed in every way by higher-performance, more genetically-homogenous nations.

One cannot adopt dysgenic and dyscivic policies without experiencing the inevitable consequences.

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Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy

The European Union and its member states are already well into the throes of a crisis of legitimacy:

Lenin famously defined communism as Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. In other words, the ideological project of building communism was supplemented by the technocratic project of electrification, the latter being an important source of legitimacy for the new regime.

The present-day European Union is engaged in its own expansive electrification project – the energy transition – that similarly inhabits ground where ideology meets technocracy and underpins legitimacy.

Yet in the past year or so, something has gone badly wrong, and a backlash against the climate agenda and its technocratic enforcers has been spreading across Europe. The energy crisis – far from catapulting the continent further along the path toward a carbon-neutral future as it should have – has exposed just how elusive the goal is, as Europe has scrambled to sign expensive LNG deals and even restart coal-fired plants. Farmers dissatisfied with EU policies that they regard as devastating to their livelihoods have been grumbling for years, but recently their protests have reached a crescendo, and built up political weight. Right-leaning and far-right parties, meanwhile, are gaining ground by the day. Standards of living are dropping and industry is shutting down or moving elsewhere.

Discontent with suffocating bureaucracy and regulation is widespread. A recent survey among German small and medium-sized companies – has registered a massive shift in sentiment against the EU. This is particularly concerning because the so-called German Mittelstand used to be among the strongest pillars of support for European integration.

What is embroiling Europe is deeper than a political crisis – it is approaching what can be called a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling elite.

The EU is illegitimate by every measure: politically, economically, militarily, and spiritually. It has already failed, completely, and betrayed every single promise that was ever made to the European nations in order to convince them to place their trust in the single European superstate that vowed up and down it never had any intentions of becoming what it was always designed to be.

But the USA is facing an even more serious crisis of legitimacy, as at least the EU’s illegitimate elite is, for the most part, actually made up of Europeans. The illegitimate elite presently in power in the United States is neither American nor culturally Christian; it isn’t even civilized. Which is why it rules so poorly and so recklessly; what works in the interests of a small and subversive tribal group is entirely unsuited for successfully guiding a large nation, let alone an entire civilization.

The disaster that has been David Tepper’s ownership of the Carolina Panthers is more than a little illustrative in this regard. What works beautifully when the deck is stacked in your favor simply will not work when you’re forced to compete on an equal playing field, and the experience and habits you developed in the easier situation actually tend to work against you once you no longer possess any structural advantages.

The great Israeli general Moshe Dayan once said that the secret of the IDF’s stunning historic military success was that it fought Arabs. If there is one lesson of the post-WWII period, it is that the secret of the stunning Jewish political and economic success in the USA is that they were competing with Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And that is quite clearly not adequate preparation for competing with the Chinese, the Russians, and the Persians on the global stage.

The political entities of the USA and the EU are both going to collapse, almost certainly within the next ten years, because no political structure, and no society, can survive an incompetent and illegitimate elite.

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