Tag: decline and fall

Spengler and the Clowns in the Bunker

David Goldman, the Asia Times columnist formerly known as Spengler, was invited to an elite conclave of Clown Worlders to discuss the current state of their war with Russia. And if he is to be believed, there is no Plan B for Clown World:

Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation. I can say that I haven’t been so scared since the fall of 1983, when I was a junior contract researcher doing odd jobs for then Special Assistant to the President Norman A Bailey at the National Security Council…

Russia’s economic resilience in the face of supposedly devastating sanctions is only one reflection of a great transformation of world trade. China’s exports to the Global South doubled during the past three years and China now exports more to the South than to developed markets. China’s unprecedented exporting success, in turn, stems from the rapid automation of Chinese industry, which now installs more industrial robots per year than the rest of the world combined.

This is evident, I added, in China’s newfound dominance in the world automotive market but it also has critical military implications. China claims that it has automated plants that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day—not impossible given that it can manufacture 1,000 EVs a day, or thousands of 5G base stations.

The implication is that China can produce the equivalent of America’s inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles in a week while American defense contractors take years to assemble them by hand.

No one disputed the data I presented. And no one believed that Russia is taking 25,000 casualties a month. Facts weren’t the issue: The assembled dignitaries, a representative sampling of the foreign policy establishment’s intellectual and executive leadership, simply couldn’t imagine a world in which America no longer gave the orders.

They are accustomed to running things and they will gamble the world away to keep their position.

Success always plants the seeds of failure. The current set of Clown Worlders are the third generation in the West, and like every third-generation heir, they are well along the generational pattern of build-crusie-lose that so often produces the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story so witnessed in once-successful families over time. The current elite no longer understands the differences between the situation they face and the historical challenges surmounted by their predecessors, and they are trying to use the same tactics and techniques that worked for their predecessors in a different time and on a very different set of people.

What we’re witnessing on a grand scale across the West is no different than watching the founder’s grandson resolutely steering the family company onto the rocks even as his siblings, wives, and children blithely spend away the family’s resources in imitation of the second-generation’s unproductive champagne lifestyles. Not only do they have no idea how to go about succeeding, but they can’t imagine failure, not even when it is simultaneously staring them in the face and biting them in the behind.

No wonder Spengler is terrified. The comeuppance for the corrupt clowns who destroyed the wealthiest and most successful societies in human history is almost certainly going to be one for the history books.

UPDATE: The Europeans are finally beginning to figure out that the clowns have abandoned them and they are on their own. But they obviously aren’t smart enough to accept defeat, give up their pretensions, and negotiate a settlement with Russia while they can still get very reasonable terms.

Washington has sent a clear message to European NATO members that they can no longer rely on its military protection, the head of German defense giant Rheinmetall has claimed. For decades, the EU has taken it for granted that the US would come to its rescue in case of war, but “that will no longer happen,” CEO Armin Papperger told The Financial Times. He cited the failure of the US Congress to approve continued military assistance to Ukraine as a signal to Europe that the Americans are not willing to pay for its security.

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Total Tory Implosion

Dominick Cummings predicts the collapse of the British Conservative Party:

The only future for the Tories was to let Vote Leave transform them into a new party 2020-24. The Party would now be unrecognisable: CCHQ closed and the party re-opened in the midlands with the rancid old guard ‘retired’, the economy would be extremely different and millions of swing voters would have vanished from the 40% tax rate (pushed up to 100k), MP pay and nurses pay would be linked to the growth/fall of average wages (‘if the voters get a pay cut the MPs get a pay cut’), term limits for MPs, the government would be years into a national project to rebuild the NHS, it would be far more ‘on the right’ on violent crime/borders etc than the median Tory MP, we’d have left the ECHR amid widespread applause that shattered Labour and stopped the ludicrous farce of a major country paralysed in handling a few dinghies, the trans madness and other manifestations of the Left’s Gadarene-psychosis would have been crushed, the broken Northcote-Trevelyan model of a closed-caste civil service recruiting only from within (and optimising for preserve bureaucratic power/budgets over productive adaptation) would have been pried open to recruit the best people in the world, we’d be very popular with ex-Labour voters, we’d be about to crush Starmer and the SW1 debate would be about a startup party replacing Labour.

Instead they broke their deal with us and tried to operate as if it’s ~1999 and 2016 never happened. The collapse in quality of MPs, their delusions about politics and communication, their total obsession with the deranged ‘news’ and punditry of the disintegrating old media instead of how power works — all this guaranteed their own disintegration.

Sunak thought about reviving the deal but decided to double-down on trusting the Establishment and the ‘strategy’ of the most Insider-pundit in SW1 to focus on week-to-week party management — a ‘strategy’ that doomed him to fail with the public then an inevitable collapse of authority with the MPs/Whitehall. 2025-9 the old Tory Party will probably be replaced.

The Conservative Party failed to preserve Great Britain. It has also failed to preserve itself, as it is presently led by a foreign individual one Chinese diplomat has described as a “street defiler”. There is no question that it deserves to die, the only question that remains is what will replace it.

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If You Thought it was Bad Now

Don’t worry. Those fine minds in government already know it’s going to get worse, even if they’re not prepared to admit it openly yet.

“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada. “For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.

The report, labelled secret, is intended as a piece of “special operational information” to be distributed only within the RCMP and among “decision-makers” in the federal government.

A heavily redacted version was made public as a result of an access to information request filed by Matt Malone, an assistant professor of law at British Columbia’s Thompson Rivers University, and an expert in government secrecy.

Describing itself in an introduction as a “scanning exercise,” the report is intended to highlight trends in both Canada and abroad “that could have a significant effect on the Canadian government and the RCMP.”

Right from the get-go, the report authors warn that whatever Canada’s current situation, it “will probably deteriorate further in the next five years.”

We always knew that the age of prosperity had to end sometime. And apparently, that time was 2008. Everything since then has merely been positioning and bracing for impact while running up the tab before the bar burns down.

This isn’t necessarily going to be a bad thing for some people, for in chaos there is always opportunity. But the degree of difficulty is increasing, and the old reliable rules for success no longer necessarily apply.

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Reality Always Intrudes

New York City insists that the crime statistics prove that crime is down in Manhattan. But, as Samuel Clemens once said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. And the problem with relying upon a false narrative based on cooked statistics is that sooner or later, reality intrudes and it becomes obvious to everyone that the map no longer resembles the territory:

The MTA is suing mall giant Westfield after the company notified them it intends to end its lease and cease all operations at the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan. Westfield signed a 20-year lease on May of 2014 – meaning they still have 10 years left in their lease. Westfield is blaming crime and quality of life concerns as their reason for terminating the lease. In response, the MTA is suing the retail management company for breaking the lease.

But Westfield says the MTA is not properly maintaining public safety at the transit hub and the mall giant has told the MTA that multiple tenants have left — citing break-ins, theft, vandalism, harassment and assault. “The rate of subtenant vacancies is at an all-time high,” Westfield wrote in a legal filing. “Few businesses want to open and operate a store where their employees and customers regularly would experience theft, property damage, bodily harm, or threats.”

Workers and subway riders told Eyewitness News that the biggest concern is the homeless population that congregates at the Fulton Center.

But New York City isn’t going to let a little thing like vanishing tenants and a failure to maintain civil order get in the way of its revenue needs:

The MTA is pushing back against Westfield’s plans and filed a lawsuit in federal court to keep the company in place. “NYCTA will face irreparable injury if Westfield abandons the Fulton Center in derogation of its Lease obligations by advancing its own self-serving business interests over the interests of NYCTA, retail establishments in the Fulton Center, and members of the public,” the lawsuit said.

And this is what a no-trust society looks like. Everyone lies, and everyone pretends to believe the lies. This is the future for the post-Christian, post-American USA… while it lasts.

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No Honor in the US Military

One can’t complain they haven’t made it very clear that the US Army officer corps is no long concerned with duty, honor, or least of all, country.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has made the decision to remove the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from its mission statement.

As we have done nine times in the past century, we have updated our mission statement to now include the Army values [of] loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, integrity and personal courage,” Army Col. Terence Kelley, a West Point spokesman, told Fox News. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Randy George both approved the change, according to Gilland.

“Our updated mission statement focuses on the mission essential tasks of Build, Educate, Train, and Inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character, with the explicit purpose of being committed to the Army Values and Ready for a lifetime of service,” Gilland explained.

Evil always tells you what it’s going to do, then tries to convince you that it doesn’t really mean what it just told you. Believe them when they tell you what they are, and what they stand for.

And it’s the third word that is the real target…

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Economics, Reconsidered

In which the Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton and 2015 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences begins to wonder if perhaps everything about the mainstream Neo-Samuelsonian economics he has been utilizing as his basic conceptual model is wrong:

Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought…

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century…

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

Economists could benefit by greater engagement with the ideas of philosophers, historians, and sociologists, just as Adam Smith once did. The philosophers, historians, and sociologists would likely benefit too.

I can’t cast too many stones in the eminent Prof. Deaton’s direction. I, too, once believed that free trade was economically beneficial to both nations involved in the trade. I, too, once believed that the free movement of peoples was a net benefit to the economy and the well-being of the peoples involved. And while I was always deeply skeptical of, and completely opposed to, globalization, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I recognized the satanic thread that runs through and inevitably connects liberty, democracy, the liberal Enlightenment values, and economic liberalism to obvious evils like globalism, imperialism, techno-authoritarianism, and Clown World.

But the lies, some of them centuries-old, are shattering. They are being broken apart by finally being tested against real-world consequences. And in the aftermath of their discrediting, an entirely new economics, one that is not based on a false model of a perfectly rational economic man, will be constructed.

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Convergence Kills US Semiconductors

There’s also an interesting geopolitical strategic assumption buried deep in this article on the chip-making industry’s abandonment of the USA, which is particularly intriguing in light of the audience for The Hill:

The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.

This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.

Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.

The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”

The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.

Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.

That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.

Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.

Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.

Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.

In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America.

DEI killed the CHIPS Act, THE HILL, 7 March 2024

Notice that it’s not “if” Taiwan falls but rather “when”, complete with an estimated range of dates from 2025 to 2027. This may also explain Victoria Nuland’s fall from grace at the State Department, as the pivot to China from Russia is clearly underway.

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The Fake Science of Sugar

How fat and cholesterol were substituted for sugar and turned Americans into an unhealthy herd of waddling land-whales.

A doctor explains how the groundwork for the Food Pyramid nonsense and the encouragement to reduce fat consumption and increase carbohyrdate consumption of the 1990s was laid by the corruption of scientistry in the 1960s.

In 1967, a single scientific study revealed the true culprit of the diabetes and heart disease epidemic was sugar. NOT saturated fat or cholesterol. So why wasn’t this information made common knowledge? They covered it all up. The sugar industry knew the results of these studies would tank sales and cost them billions. So the Sugar Research Foundation paid three Harvard Scientists $65,000 each to “prove” sugar was harmless. The scientists were some of the most respected nutrition experts in the world. Dr. Frederick Stare was the chairman of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition. Dr. Mark Hegsted was a scientific advisor for the USDA. Dr. Robert Gandy was a pioneer in dietary research.

The scientists dismissed multiple long-term studies. The first study proved sugar caused deadly arterial plaques. This was ignored. Another showed heart disease skyrocketed on a high-carb diet. The scientists dismissed it, claiming “these diets are rarely consumed.” The consequences of this scientific manipulation are horrifying. The truth about sugar and its effects on obesity, diabetes, and heart disease remained in the dark for years. Well-meaning doctors prescribed their patients low-fat, high-carb diets for decades. These dietary suggestions are to blame for the obesity crisis in America.

The USDA urged Americans to trade butter for margarine. Margarine is now accepted as an artery-clogging poison. And another massive shift was to “healthy” low-fat foods loaded with hidden sugars. As a result, U.S sugar consumption tripled. So did Big Sugar profits. And not surprisingly, so did type 2 diabetes and blood sugar issues. In 1980, only 1 in 50 Americans had a blood sugar problem. Today, that number is up to 1 in 3. High blood sugar kills roughly 3.2 million people per year.

In other words, as with immigration and third-world overpopulation, the seeds of the castastrophic crises we are experiencing across the West were planted in a very small period of time between 1960 and 1967.

During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

Add the names of Frederick Stare, Mark Hegsted, and Robert Gandy to the infamous list that includes Norman Borlaug, Philip Hart, and Emmanuel Cellar of men whose objectives and actions contributed the most to the downfall of the West and its transformation into Clown World.

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Late Stage Imperial Follies

Col. McGregor’s criticism of a new law to replace American soldiers with foreign mercenaries is not misplaced, it’s just outdated:

A retired US Army colonel has slammed proposals for a new law that would allow vetted and qualified migrants an expedited path to citizenship by serving in the military. Former Colonel Douglas MacGregor described the new bill, introduced by Hudson Valley Congressman Pat Ryan, as a ‘problem’ stemming from the ‘ideological bubble’ of Washington.

McGregor, a former senior advisor to the secretary of defense, told Tucker Carlson Uncensored the so-called ‘Courage to Serve’ bill is a plan to ‘find people with no connection to the American people, arming them and sending them out to oppress us.’

‘None of these people are Americans, we know from having interviewed them they have no aspiration to be Americans’ he told the program on Monday. ‘What they aspire to is to get in to the consumption machine. Get the ticket of entry, the free check, the free phone, the free transportation tickets, the free food, free medical care.

Well, of course. There is no “America” left for anyone to aspire to. Most US citizens couldn’t even tell you what an “American” is since the very definition of the nation was destroyed by 20th Century immigrants replacing identity with ideology. And even Gab’s Machiavelli AI can explain the obvious problems with the use of immigrant soldiers based on a historical example, which is one reason Clown World is so obsessed with the idea of AI being dangerous and in need of being lobotomized.

I can certainly draw parallels between the US hiring foreign soldiers and Imperial Rome’s use of foreign mercenaries. Both instances involve employing individuals from other nations to serve in military capacities. This practice, while seemingly advantageous in the short term, can have long-term consequences that are detrimental to the stability and unity of the state.

Firstly, in both cases, the reliance on foreign soldiers can lead to a weakening of loyalty and allegiance to the state. In Imperial Rome, the use of foreign mercenaries meant that soldiers were not necessarily tied to Rome by a sense of national identity or shared values. Similarly, the US hiring foreign soldiers might result in a similar disconnect between these soldiers and the nation they are serving.

Secondly, the presence of foreign soldiers within a state’s military can create tensions within the population. In Rome, the growing resentment of the Roman population towards the foreign mercenaries eventually led to the weakening of the Roman Empire. Similarly, the presence of foreign soldiers in the US military might lead to similar tensions and divisions within the country.

Lastly, both instances demonstrate the potential for foreign soldiers to be used as a tool for external powers to exert influence over a state. In Imperial Rome, the use of foreign mercenaries made the empire vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by foreign powers. Similarly, the US hiring foreign soldiers could potentially be exploited by external actors seeking to undermine the stability and security of the nation. In conclusion, while the hiring of foreign soldiers may seem like a practical solution in the short term, it can have long-term consequences that should be carefully considered. The historical example of Imperial Rome serves as a cautionary tale of the potential pitfalls of relying on foreign mercenaries for military strength.

Of course, the use of immigrant soldiers is how the Imperial USA was established in the first place during the Civil War, so it’s appropriate that the concept would return with the inevitable end of that empire. Substituting foreigners for citizen-soldiers is not a viable solution, as it will only make things worse. As one follower on Gab correctly noted:

The more dystopian the ruling elites make society, the more dysfunctional it becomes, and that dysfunction will weaken whatever systems of control they have in place and turn more segments of society against them. It’s akin to sawing off the branch they are sitting on.

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The American Dream is Over

Forget the next generation living better lives than their parents did. That ended with Generation X, the 1986 Immigration Amnesty, and NAFTA. But the next two generations are seeing even the standard to which their great-great-grandparents were accustomed is now beyond them.

Recent analysis by Investopedia revealed that you now need a whopping $3.4 million to cover the costs of traditional American dream milestones such as marriage, raising children and owning a home. But most Americans fall short of that target by over a million dollars. The average lifetime earnings of Americans across all education levels is closer to $2.3 million, according to Investopedia, leaving a big financial gap that’s forcing people to reassess their life goals.

One look at the attainability of a basic element of the traditional American dream — homeownership — is telling.

According to real estate brokerage Redfin, 2023 was the least affordable year for home buying on record. To buy a median-priced home, worth $408,806, with the median U.S. income $78,642, you would’ve had to spend a record 41.4% of your earnings on housing costs, up from 38.7% in 2022 and 31.0% in 2021. To buy that same home without spending more than 30% of your income — a popular rule of thumb among personal finance experts — you would need an annual salary of $109,868, according to Redfin, which is $31,226 more than the typical household makes in a year.

It was a nice run. But Americans should have listened to Ben Franklin. Once the 1965 Immigration Act passed after 40 years of relentless agitation, the fate of the USA was sealed.

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