Tag: decline and fall

Mexicans in Minnesota?

Operation Wetback II is long past overdue:

Many middle class people are leaving the state for Texas, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, where taxes and the cost of living are lower. In the past decade, 1.5 million more people left California for other states than came to California from another part of the United States, according to analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.

New births and international immigration make up the difference, but even immigration has slowed from sky-high rates in the 1990s, according to demographers, as people such as Maribel Mota, a recent arrival from Mexico, find themselves unemployed and behind on rent in the Golden State.

Mota, a 38-year-old who spoke to CNN through a translator, said she wants to go to Minnesota, where she hears there are more job opportunities and rent is lower. She’ll trade sun for snow, she said, if it means she can make ends meet.

No doubt those Californians won’t take long before setting about californicating their places of refuge. The problem is that if the legal immigrants are not sent back along with the illegal ones, it won’t be more than 20 years before the Aztlan independence movement becomes an issue. It’s pretty simple. Either the idiotic “melting pot” ideal is not only abandoned but aggressively rejected or the nation collapses amid civil war.

The socialisthistorical end game

VDH notes the historical pattern of corrosive parasitism:

History is not kind to such collective states of mind. Pay an Athenian in the fifth century BC a subsidy to go to the theater; and in the fourth century BC he is demanding such pay to vote in the assembly as well — and there is not to be a third century free democratic polis. Extend to a Roman in the first century BC a small grain dole, and by the late first century AD he cannot live without a big dole, free entertainment in a huge new Coliseum, and disbursements of free coined money. Let the emperor Justinian try cutting back the bloated bureaucracy in sixth century AD Constantinople and he wins the Nika riots that almost destroy a civilization from within even as it is beset by hosts of foreign enemies.

Social Security started out as a few dollars a month to the elderly, in their last two or three years of life, to ensure that they could feed themselves without the indignity of borrowing from their children. It has morphed into someone living well for twenty years on far more money taken than was put in — or a young family with a dyslexic child on “disability” for life. To cut any for the latter would cause far more riot and mayhem than not to have given the former anything in the first place — despite the fact that the 21st century recipient was far less needy and got far more than the early 20th century recipient who needed more and got less.

VDH points out that there isn’t actually anything properly socialist about the nominal socialists who build their careers on transferring wealth from one party to another. And as we’ve seen demonstrated very clearly since 2008, the banks and large corporations are every bit as willing to play the “socialist” game as any labor union. It’s all about utilizing government power to forcibly redistribute tax income, and this is an old, old game that long precedes Marxism or any other form of socialism.

In the end, it is merely a rancid form of political corruption, and one that Aristotle would recognize as readily as Julius Caesar. In fact, Caesar may well have been the original Too Big To Fail, as one technique he used to guarantee continued support from the moneyed class was the gargantuan debts he incurred as he worked his way up the cursus honorum. His creditors knew that if he did not succeed to the Praetorship or the Consulship, they would never see their loans repaid, and so they were forced to remain solidly behind him.

Societies have a life cycle that is as obvious to the educated observer as the difference between a young Sports Illustrated model and a decrepit Social Security recipient. What we’re seeing in the USA and other Western countries isn’t progress, it is straightforward and unmistakable decline.

Call it what you want

It still isn’t marriage:

New York made history last night by becoming the sixth and largest state to legalize gay marriage. The state Senate passed the bill by a 33-29 margin and Gov. Cuomo quickly signed it five minutes before midnight.

To paraphrase F.A. von Hayek, the adjective modifies the noun. The mere fact that homogamy is described as “gay marriage” is sufficient proof that it is not actually marriage. And the ironic thing is that as has been seen in other states and nations, virtually no gay men are going to pretend to get married anyway, since monogamy is generally considered about as desirable as ebola to the male portion of the same sex community. I look forward to seeing feminists go ballistic when the next step begins and everyone who claimed that homogamy would not inevitably lead to polygamy begins to pretend that they never said anything of the sort.

Homogamy is an interesting test of the level to which an individual worships the State. My question to those who assert that a marriage is valid simply because the state said so is this: if the state in which you are resident passed a law declaring that the sum of two and two was five, would you still believe that the answer to 2+2 was 4 or would you insist that it was, in fact, 5?

The historical fact is that homogamy is not new, it is not progress, and it is not a human right. If Barack Obama were to come out of the closet and marry Reggie Love tomorrow, this would permit the United States to finally catch up with that epitome of modern social progress, the Roman Empire of Nero and Elagabalus.

Better hope for a breakup

Because the USA as a whole is rapidly going the way of DC and Detroit:

For the first time, minorities make up a majority of babies in the U.S., part of a sweeping race change and growing age divide between mostly white, older Americans and predominantly minority youths that could reshape government policies.

Preliminary census estimates also show the share of African-American households headed by women – made up of mostly single mothers – now exceeds African-American households with married couples, a sign of declining U.S. marriages overall but also continuing challenges for black youths without involved fathers.

The findings, based on the latest government data, offer a preview of final 2010 census results being released this summer that provide detailed breakdowns by age, race and householder relationships such as same-sex couples.

Demographers say the numbers provide the clearest confirmation yet of a changing social order, one in which racial and ethnic minorities will become the U.S. majority by midcentury.

I understand that a lot of people believe that this increasing vibrancy is a good thing for the nation because “diversity is strength”. The fact that this charming equalitarian belief happens to fly in the face of every relevant historical example as well as the recent societal patterns doesn’t appear to bother them in the slightest. One need only look at the governance of any non-white majority city to see what is in the cards for the USA as a whole; when Los Angeles or Mexico City are your rosy scenarios, well, you’re pretty much out of luck.

The thing that the multicultural and racial fantasists can’t seem to understand is that culture is malleable. The non-European immigrants, forced and voluntary, are not going to be magically transmogrified by the laws and social mores they find, they are instead going to transform them to their liking. Victor Davis Hanson describes, in ominous detail, precisely how that process has taken place in his California valley:

Last week was another somewhat depressing chapter in a now long saga of living where I was born. I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following — mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.):

1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment. The saw was new; I liked it — an off-the-shelf $400 Echo that ran well. I assume it will be sold off at a rural intersection in these parts, or the nearby swap meet for about $60. I doubt the thief was a professional woodsman who needed a tool of the trade to survive.

2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized — all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50. I was told by neighbors that reports and descriptions of the law-breakers focused on youthful thieves casing the countryside — in official parlance a “gang,” and in the neighborhood politically-incorrect patois “cholos” — like the fellow who recently drove in, in his new lowered shiny red pickup (hydraulic lifters are not cheap), inquiring about buying “scrap” and “just looking” before I ran him out….

I conclude that most Americans would agree that chain-sawing a peach tree or pumping irrigation water enriches the nation, while cruising around looking to destroy such activity does not. The latter represents the sort of social parasitism that I read about each Saturday night in our environs (and, in terms of illegal immigration, once wrote about in Mexifornia — a book I seem doomed to relive in Ground Hog fashion each day — nearly a decade ago): gangbanger A shoots up gangbanger B; B goes to emergency room for publicly funded $250,000 worth of surgery and post-op treatment by C, an MD, who otherwise would have been insulted and intimidated by A or B should he have met either earlier in the day. Indeed, C is more likely to be ridiculed or sued by B than thanked. And yet C does not need either A or B; both need the former in extremis.

Where does this all end — these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?

We are left with a paradox. The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.

Where VDH and other nominal social conservatives go wrong is to imagine that this has anything to do with illegal immigration. It has to do with the ethnic and racial makeup of the country. As we have seen everywhere from Atlanta and Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, a society can not only survive, but thrive, with a small dash of vibrancy. A country that is 90 European, 5 percent African, and 5 percent Hispanic might well benefit from the additional heterodoxy provided by the minorities, while a country that is 40 percent European, 20 percent African, and 40 percent Hispanic is going to be riven by a constant battle for government spoils of the sort that distracts the elites of most of the nations in the third world.

But it is obviously too late now to save the nation as a whole. There is no coherent nation anymore. Those who hope to save a vestige of what was once America would do well to ally themselves with the likes of La Raza, who will probably be one of the more important forces in ultimately ending the ill-starred Union.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.””
— Robert A. Heinlein

Are the neocons losing Red Faction?

Ross Douthat defects in the New York Times:

Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy. In the Senate, he’s constantly pressed for a more hawkish line against the Mideast’s bad actors. His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the “watchman on the wall of world freedom.”

Paul, on the other hand, has smoothed the crankish edges off his famous father’s antiwar conservatism, reframing it in the language of constitutionalism, the national interest and the budget deficit. (As Matt Continetti noted in The Weekly Standard, “Whereas Ron Paul criticizes U.S. interventionism in tropes familiar to the left — anti-imperial blowback, manipulation by neocons, moral equivalence — Rand Paul merely says America doesn’t have the money.”)….

The country is weary of war, but the story Rubio tells, with eloquence and passion, is still tremendously appealing — the story of a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world.

This is a story that many conservatives — and many Americans — want to believe. Once, I believed it myself.

But that was many years and many wars ago, and now I think Rand Paul is right.

One unmentioned factor here is that Rand Paul is an native American. Marco Rubio is not. He may have grown up in the United States, but he is a Cuban raised in a community that has been agitating for the USA to overthrow the Castro regime for decades. So, it should come as little surprise that Rubio is so content to ignore the American national interest in favor of the latest neocon cause du jour. Because neocons, regardless of their background, have limited allegiance to the national interest, they see the nation primarily as a means rather than an end.

As I have pointed out in the past, it was always mistaken to conflate neoconservatism with Jews and the Israel First lobby. They are merely the most obvious example of what would be more accurately be described as Neoconnery, (there is nothing conservative about it), and is a concept that is as old as the Roman Republic. Back then, when Rome ruled over the Mediterranean just as America rules over the Atlantic and Pacific, foreign nobles would come to Rome and offer promises of allegiance, troops, and gold in return for a Rome-supported crown. These Friends of Rome were the neocons of their day.

On the one hand, it is encouraging that even the moderate conservatives are beginning to respond to the geostrategic and financial realism of the Red Faction’s libertarians. On the other, it is depressing that even bankruptcy isn’t enough to slow down those like Rubio, who talks a good game but appears to see America as little more than a tool to serve foreign interests.

Those who deny that transnational freedom of movement will tend to ultimately work against the interests of human liberty would do well to pay attention to the way in which the foreign policy positions of second- and third-generation immigrants tend to diverge from those leaders whose families are more rooted in the nation. Consider: would any other British leader have intrigued so shamelessly to manipulate the USA into World War II as the half-American Winston Churchill? All great powers are tempted by the neocons of their day. And history indicates that most eventually succumb to the temptation, and as a result, follow the predictable trajectory of decline and fall. It is far from the only factor in national decline, of course, but it is an easily recognized one.

On a stylistic note, full credit to Douthat for referencing John Quincy Adam’s 1821 Independence Day address. Read it and mourn for an America that post-Americans like Marco Rubio have never known and would trample upon in their Wilsonian pursuit of “national greatness”.

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity…. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.

Republicans to cave on the debt ceiling

Rep. Ron Paul expects the usual kabuki:

Al Hunt: Do you think Congress will pass an Extension.

Ron Paul: I do. This will go up until the last minute, then they will raise the debt ceiling.

Al Hunt: Your speaker John Boehner says he will absolutely insist on a dollar of spending reduction for every dollar the debt ceiling goes up. Do you take that seriously?

Ron Paul: I don’t take that seriously. President Reagan wanted two dollars of cuts. The deficit exploded. Do you think the American people will believe that we are going to cut in the future? The only budget that counts is this year. 10-year programs are pie-in-the-sky talking. This year our obligations are five trillion dollars.

Al Hunt: The idea of a spending cap that takes place in ten years does not appeal to you?

Ron Paul: A 10-year spending cap is too little, too late. No one is going to believe it. All governments when they get this far into debt, default. They don’t default by not paying the bills. We will always pay the bills. The default comes from the devaluation of the currency.

The outcome is predictable enough. Republicans will talk a brave game, come up with some ludicrous “mechanism” that will allow them to pretend that they actually accomplished something, then business will proceed as usual. There is simply no way that the political class in the USA is going to directly address, let alone actually attempt fixing, the severe financial and economic problems facing the nation.

Voting for Republicans or Tea Partiers isn’t going to accomplish anything. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it if it makes you feel better, just don’t expect anything substantive to come of it. At least the Romans got some music out of it. What do Americans get as their nation burns? Weiner tweets.

Corrupt like a senator

Public Enemy had it right. Congress is shamelessly crooked. This also explains why they behaved in such a shamelessly slavish manner towards Wall Street when their supposed masters, the American public, were vehemently against TARP and the bank bailouts:

An extensive study released Wednesday in the journal Business and Politics found that the investments of members of the House of Representatives outperformed those of the average investor by 55 basis points per month, or 6 percent annually, suggesting that lawmakers are taking advantage of inside information to fatten their stock portfolios.

“We find strong evidence that members of the House have some type of non-public information which they use for personal gain,” according to four academics who authored the study, “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

To the frustration of open-government advocates, lawmakers and their staff members largely have immunity from laws barring trading on insider knowledge that have sent many a private corporate chieftain to prison.

It’s that last sentence that shows America is not only dead, but well into a state of rigor mortis. Congressman are not only breaking the law, they have openly declared themselves to be above the law as well. And they are getting away with it.

Send Congress home

Why, exactly, are we bothering to elect Senators and Representatives in the first place now that they have handed hand over control of the money supply to a private bank and war powers to an unholy combination of the executive branch, NATO, and the United Nations? Not only is this not democracy, it’s not even representative democracy, much less in accordance with the Constitution.

In an effort to satisfy those arguing he needs to seek congressional authorization to continue US military activity in accordance with the War Powers Resolution, President Obama wrote a letter to congressional leaders this afternoon suggesting that the role is now so “limited” he does not need to seek congressional approval.

“Since April 4,” the president wrote, “U.S. participation has consisted of: (1) non-kinetic support to the NATO-led operation, including intelligence, logistical support, and search and rescue assistance; (2) aircraft that have assisted in the suppression and destruction of air defenses in support of the no-fly zone; and (3) since April 23, precision strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles against a limited set of clearly defined targets in support of the NATO-led coalition’s efforts.”

A senior administration official told ABC News that the letter is intended to describe “a narrow US effort that is intermittent and principally an effort to support to support the ongoing NATO-led and UN-authorized civilian support mission and no fly zone.”

“The US role is one of support,” the official said, “and the kinetic pieces of that are intermittent.”

From the beginning of the U.S. military intervention in Libya, the Obama administration has cited the 1973 War Powers Act as the legal basis of its ability to conduct military activities for 60 days without first seeking a declaration of war from Congress. The military intervention started on March 19; Congress was notified on March 21. Those 60 days expire today.

One merely wonders how a military target being clearly defined or in support of a coalition effort makes bombing it any less an act of war.

The downfall accelerates

It’s really impossible to pretend that Americans don’t deserve to have their country overrun with barbarians. France has banned the burqah, Switzerland has banned minarets… and 11 U.S. states are providing affirmative action to illegal immigrants:

This week, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley signed a bill to require the state’s public universities to give undocumented aliens — generally illegal — in-state tuition privileges. The bill, known as the Dream Act, is already the law in ten other states, including California, New York, Texas and Illinois. But critics argue that the bill will give illegal aliens better treatment than Americans and legal immigrants — thanks to existing diversity policies at universities.

When one reads history, one often finds oneself astonished at the apparent inability of various political and military leaders to foresee the obvious consequences of their actions. When I was reading Mahan’s reasonably detailed summary of the long struggle for naval supremacy between Britain and France, it was remarkable to read about France’s stubborn unwillingness to change its naval doctrine despite its consistent ineffectiveness in wars spanning hundreds of years and at least three different forms of government. So, I have no doubt that the historians of the future will marvel in disbelief at the epic, self-destructive short-sightedness of the American political class and the bovine placidity of an American public that meekly accepts their inept governance.

What is worse than federal “help”?

“Help” from the United Nations:

Five thousand dead, 300,000 ill, and a medical emergency that has already lasted six months; now the people of Haiti have someone to blame for the cholera outbreak which has swept through their earthquake-ravaged country: the blue-helmeted peacekeepers of the United Nations.

An official report into the ongoing epidemic, which began last October, has concluded that it was almost certainly caused by a poorly constructed sanitation system installed at a rural camp used by several hundred UN troops from Nepal.

The virulent strain of cholera bacteria began infecting locals after faecal matter from their base seeped from badly designed septic pits into the Meye River, a tributary of the Artibonite River in the country’s central region.

The United Nations is far worse than the joke many people believe it to be. If it ever obtains the genuine global power it seeks, the 5,000 Haitians it killed in the last six months will look like the smallest of rounding errors.