Tag: declineandfall

This moral and material descent is what happens when a nation turns away from Christianity and embraces foreigners, empire, and foreign philosophies.

Almost everyone that goes out to visit one of our major cities on the west coast has a similar reaction.  Those that must live among the escalating decay are often numb to it, but most of those that are just in town for a visit are absolutely shocked by all of the trash, human defecation, crime and public drug use that they encounter.  Once upon a time, our beautiful western cities were the envy of the rest of the world, but now they serve as shining examples of America’s accelerating decline.  The worst parts of our major western cities literally look like post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the hordes of zombified homeless people that live in those areas are too drugged-out to care.  The ironic thing is that these cities are not poor.  In fact, San Francisco and Seattle are among the wealthiest cities in the entire nation.  So if things are falling apart this dramatically now, how bad will things get when economic conditions really start to deteriorate?

Let’s start our discussion by looking at the rat epidemic in Los Angeles.  Thanks to extremely poor public sanitation, rats are breeding like mad, and at this point they have even conquered Los Angeles City Hall…

Officials at Los Angeles’ City Hall are considering ripping all of the building’s carpets up, as rats and fleas are said to be running riot in its halls.

A motion was filed by Council President Herb Wesson on Wednesday to enact the much needed makeover amid a typhus outbreak in the downtown area.

Wesson said a city employee had contracted the deadly bacterial disease at work, and now he’s urging officials to investigate the ‘scope’ of the long-running pest problem at the council building.

People from all over the world are drawn to Los Angeles because of what they have seen on television, but it is truly a filthy, filthy place.  The number of homeless has been rising about 20 percent a year, public drug use is seemingly everywhere, and there are mountains of trash all over the place.  Needless to say, rats thrive in such an environment, and the epic battle that one L.A. journalist is having with rats was recently featured in the L.A. Times…

Eastside, Westside, north and south, they’re everywhere. If you’re a rat, the California housing crisis has not hit you yet and it never will. But let’s not be too hard on Los Angeles, because the same things that are going on there are happening in major cities all over the western portion of the country. For example, a massive rat infestation recently forced authorities to close a shockingly filthy homeless encampment under a bridge in Salem, Oregon…

It’s just a matter of time before the next Black Plague sweeps the cities of the West. And a good thing it will be too. Civilization is little more than the art of being able to live in large cities without dying like short-lived, fast-breeding vermin; rural Roman life expectancies were not that much shorter than modern life expectancies. And the art of civilization has observably been lost, because the people who live in large cities have abandoned every aspect of Western civilization.

What we have here is a case of severe rhetoric fail on the part of George Soros:

Europe is sleepwalking into oblivion, and the people of Europe need to wake up before it is too late.

If they don’t, the European Union will go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991. Neither our leaders nor ordinary citizens seem to understand that we are experiencing a revolutionary moment, that the range of possibilities is very broad, and that the eventual outcome is thus highly uncertain.

Most of us assume that the future will more or less resemble the present, but this is not necessarily so. In a long and eventful life, I have witnessed many periods of what I call radical disequilibrium. We are living in such a period today.

The first step to defending Europe from its enemies, both internal and external, is to recognize the magnitude of the threat they present. The second is to awaken the sleeping pro-European majority and mobilize it to defend the values on which the EU was founded.

The next inflection point will be the elections for the European Parliament in May 2019. Unfortunately, anti-European forces will enjoy a competitive advantage in the balloting. There are several reasons for this, including the outdated party system that prevails in most European countries, the practical impossibility of treaty change, and the lack of legal tools for disciplining member states that violate the principles on which the European Union was founded.

The EU can impose the acquis communautaire (the body of European Union law) on applicant countries, but lacks sufficient capacity to enforce member states’ compliance.

The antiquated party system hampers those who want to preserve the values on which the EU was founded, but helps those who want to replace those values with something radically different. This is true in individual countries and even more so in trans-European alliances.

The Soviet Union was evil. So is the European Union. Neither of them were even remotely democratically legitimate. There is no “sleeping pro-European majority”. The entire structure rests on a web of increasingly unconvincing lies.

The EU is the nightmare, and the nations of Europe are gradually waking up from it.

This report on the Southern Baptist hierarchy and various church leaderships attempting to protect sexual predators doesn’t surprise me. Back when I was in the States, the pastor of our Southern Baptist church told me of two separate attempts to take over churches by people who were of nefarious attempt. Not all that glitters is gold and not everyone who says they are Christian actually serves Jesus Christ. This is the price of ignoring Paul’s warning about wolves in sheep’s clothing as well as the ill-considered belief in forgiving the unrepentant.

In June 2008, she paid her way to Indianapolis, where she and others asked leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and its 47,000 churches to track sexual predators and take action against congregations that harbored or concealed abusers. Vasquez, by then in her 40s, implored them to consider prevention policies like those adopted by faiths that include the Catholic Church.

Days later, Southern Baptist leaders rejected nearly every proposed reform….

Journalists in the two newsrooms spent more than six months reviewing thousands of pages of court, prison and police records and conducting hundreds of interviews. They built a database of former leaders in Southern Baptist churches who have been convicted of sex crimes.

The investigation reveals that:

• At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades. In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.
• Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints within their own churches or seminaries.
• Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit. Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc.
• Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors. Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms. A few were adults — women and men who sought pastoral guidance and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.

It’s not just the schools and churches that are protecting the predators. It’s also the medical community:

The long Journal story, which is well worth reading in its entirety, includes a facsimile of a hand-written letter that Mark wrote about Dr. Weber, blowing the whistle on him as a predator. Across all the years, I immediately recognized the handwriting. The letter included this observation about Weber’s propensity to select boys and young men as reservation clinic patients:

[T]he probability of Dr. Weber seeing so few females–based on random chance–is two out of a trillion. I have first-hand knowledge, based on my years of association with this individual, that he preferentially chooses skinny and normal weight teenage boys and young men in his practice and I observed him on many occasions picking the charts of these patients out of my own box.

You would think this sort of revelation from a colleague would be the end of Dr. Weber’s association with the Indian Health Service. But no:

After a clash with Mr. Weber, Dr. Butterbrodt was pulled into a supervisor’s office and, within weeks, transferred to a remote facility in North Dakota and stripped of bonus pay, which amounted to around one-third of his annual salary, according to personnel records and Dr. Butterbrodt. “I was chased off by a pedophile and the people who chose him over me,” said Dr. Butterbrodt, who retired soon after.

Every organization must be pressured to adopt a no-tolerance policy for sex criminals. No church should ever permit any man who admits or is even credibly accused of sexually preying on minors to have any employment at all within the church. And, as Spacebunny notes, since we have a three-strikes laws concerning drug offenses, which are comparatively minor, shouldn’t we have a two-strikes-and-life-imprisonment laws for sex crimes involving minors?

The Saker interviews Michael Hudson to learn why the USA is suddenly so interested in Venezuela, of all places:

The Saker: Could you outline the various reforms and changes introduced by Hugo Chavez? What did he do right, and what did he do wrong?

Michael Hudson: Chavez sought to restore a mixed economy to Venezuela, using its government revenue – mainly from oil, of course – to develop infrastructure and domestic spending on health care, education, employment to raise living standards and productivity for his electoral constituency.

What he was unable to do was to clean up the embezzlement and built-in rake-off of income from the oil sector. And he was unable to stem the capital flight of the oligarchy, taking its wealth and moving it abroad – while running away themselves.

This was not “wrong”. It merely takes a long time to change an economy’s disruption – while the U.S. is using sanctions and “dirty tricks” to stop that process.

The Saker: What are, in your opinion, the causes of the current economic crisis in Venezuela – is it primarily due to mistakes by Chavez and Maduro or is the main cause US sabotage, subversion and sanctions?

Michael Hudson: There is no way that Chavez and Maduro could have pursued a pro-Venezuelan policy aimed at achieving economic independence without inciting fury, subversion and sanctions from the United States. American foreign policy remains as focused on oil as it was when it invaded Iraq under Dick Cheney’s regime. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy, running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S. banks.

By imposing sanctions that prevent Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits and the assets of its state-owned Citco, the United States is making it impossible for Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This is forcing it into default, which U.S. diplomats hope to use as an excuse to foreclose on Venezuela’s oil resources and seize its foreign assets much as Paul Singer hedge fund sought to do with Argentina’s foreign assets.

Just as U.S. policy under Kissinger was to make Chile’s “economy scream,” so the U.S. is following the same path against Venezuela. It is using that country as a “demonstration effect” to warn other countries not to act in their self-interest in any way that prevents their economic surplus from being siphoned off by U.S. investors.

The Saker: What in your opinion should Maduro do next (assuming he stays in power and the USA does not overthrow him) to rescue the Venezuelan economy?

Michael Hudson: I cannot think of anything that President Maduro can do that he is not doing. At best, he can seek foreign support – and demonstrate to the world the need for an alternative international financial and economic system.

He already has begun to do this by trying to withdraw Venezuela’s gold from the Bank of England and Federal Reserve. This is turning into “asymmetrical warfare,” threatening to de-sanctify the dollar standard in international finance. The refusal of England and the United States to grant an elected government control of its foreign assets demonstrates to the entire world that U.S. diplomats and courts alone can and will control foreign countries as an extension of U.S. nationalism.

The price of the U.S. economic attack on Venezuela is thus to fracture the global monetary system. Maduro’s defensive move is showing other countries the need to protect themselves from becoming “another Venezuela” by finding a new safe haven and paying agent for their gold, foreign exchange reserves and foreign debt financing, away from the dollar, sterling and euro areas.

The only way that Maduro can fight successfully is on the institutional level, upping the ante to move “outside the box.” His plan – and of course it is a longer-term plan – is to help catalyze a new international economic order independent of the U.S. dollar standard. It will work in the short run only if the United States believes that it can emerge from this fight as an honest financial broker, honest banking system and supporter of democratically elected regimes. The Trump administration is destroying illusion more thoroughly than any anti-imperialist critic or economic rival could do!

In short, Venezuela is another crisis point for US financial imperialism. The inability of Venezuela to take possession of its own gold in London is yet another indication that the neo-liberal world order is increasingly unstable. It’s not about the oil, it’s about the debt.

It certainly doesn’t help that US officials are doing incredibly stupid things, like the Secretary of State calling Juan Guaido “duly-elected” when the man has never even run for President of Venezuela! The two candidates who lost the 2018 election to Nicolás Maduro were Henri Falcón and Javier Bertucci, while Henrique Capriles was the losing candidate in the 2013 election that was also won by Maduro.

The sooner the USA collapses, the better it will be for everyone, especially American children:

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D.) commented Wednesday about a controversial 40-week abortion bill and in so doing said the law allows an abortion to take place after the infant’s birth.

“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” Northam said, alluding to the physician and mother discussing whether the born infant should live or die.

A Democratic lawmaker in the Virginia House of Delegates proposed a bill Tuesday that would allow abortions through the end of the third trimester of pregnancy. The video of Delegate Kathy Tran presenting her bill led to an exchange where she admitted that her bill would allow for a mother to abort her child minutes before giving birth.

If post-birth abortion becomes legal in Virginia, I expect events are going to play out a little differently there than the abortion advocates envision.

The most important consequences are not likely to be the outcome of the Mueller investigation or even the re-election of the God-Emperor, but the way in which it has further destroyed faith in the liberal democratic system pushed by the neo-liberal world order everywhere from Moscow to Tokyo. This Russian perspective is very much not limited to the Russian people:

What should interest us is how Russiagate allegations have tarnished America’s democratic reputation in Russia and thereby undermined the pro-American arguments of Russia’s liberal democrats, who were never a very potent political or electoral force and whose fortunes have already declined in recent years. Consider the following:

 – Russian democrats argue that their country’s elections are manipulated and unfair, including, but not only, those that put and kept Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. “Patriotic nationalists” now reply that Russiagate rests on the allegation, widely reported and believed in the United States, that an American presidential election was successfully manipulated on behalf of the desired candidate and that the entire US electoral system may be vulnerable to manipulation.

– Russian democrats protest that oligarchic and other money has corrupted Russian politics. Their opponents argue that special counsel Robert Mueller’s convictions and other indictments – in the cases of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, for example -prove that American political life is no less corrupt financially.

– Going back to Soviet times and continuing today, a major complaint of Russian democrats has been the shadowy, malevolent role played by intelligence agencies, particularly the KGB and its successor organization. Patriotic nationalists point to disclosures that their US institutional counterparts, the CIA and FBI, played a secretive and major role in the origins of Russiagate allegations against Trump as a presidential candidate and since his inauguration.

– Russian democratic dissidents have long protested, and been stifled by, varying degrees of official censorship. Their Russian opponents argue that campaigns now underway in the United States against “Russian disinformation” in the media are a form of American censorship.

– Many Russians distrust their media, particularly “mainstream” state media. Their opponents retort that American mainstream media is no better, having undertaken a kind of “war” against President Trump and along the way having had to retract dozens of widely circulated stories. In this connection, we may wonder what Russian skeptics made of an astonishingly revealing statement by the media critic of The New York Times – an authoritative newspaper in Russia as well – on January 21 that the “ultimate prize” for leading American journalists is having “helped bring down a president.” By now, Americans may not be shocked by such a repudiation by the Times of its own professed mission and standards, but for Russian journalists, who have long looked to the paper as a model, the reaction was likely profound disillusionment.

The Neo-Western model has long been viewed askance by the global East and South. But not until very recently has it actually looked inferior to the alternative post-Communist systems that are now on the rise and competing effectively in Africa and Asia.

Some people are offended by Mike Cernovich’s recent observations:

Christianity has given us a country where 11 year olds dance for adult men who throw dollars on the stage.

Christianity gave us a church that molested children and sold out their flock (Covington) to the left.

A moderated form of Islam is probably the West’s only hope.

Keep in mind this is the master troll who so befuddled Seth Rogan’s wife that she claimed she cheated on Rogan with him. Cernovich isn’t condemning Christianity per se, he is correctly condemning the near-total failure of Christians to defend their churches and their nation.

And we deserve that condemnation. We Christians let this happen, all because we were too afraid that someone would call us “racist” or “judgemental” or “anti-semitic”. We failed to hate the wicked. We failed to reject the sons of the Devil and the people of the Lie. We sought the approval of the world, and in doing so, reaped the inevitable whirlwind.

It’s just as well there will be No State of the Union address forthcoming:

President Donald Trump said he is postponing his State of the Union address until the partial government shutdown ends, yielding after a weeklong showdown with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Following a high-stakes game of dare and double-dare, Trump conceded Wednesday night that “no venue that can compete with the history, tradition and importance of the House Chamber.” He said he was not looking for an alternate option after Pelosi served notice earlier in the day that he wouldn’t be allowed to deliver the address to a joint session of Congress next week.

Pelosi had taken the step after Trump said he planned to show up in spite of Democratic objections to the speech taking place with large swaths of the government shut down.

Denied that grand venue, Trump promised to come up with some sort of alternative event. The White House scrambled to find a site matching the gravitas of the traditional address from the rostrum of the House to lawmakers from both parties, Supreme Court justices, invited guests and a television audience of millions.

“As the Shutdown was going on, Nancy Pelosi asked me to give the State of the Union Address. I agreed,” Trump tweeted shortly after 11 p.m. EST. “She then changed her mind because of the Shutdown, suggesting a later date. This is her prerogative – I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over.”

Forget the partial shutdown and the State of the Union speech. Just shut the whole thing down. The state of the union is “postmortem”. There is no union anymore, there is merely the creaky rattling edifice of an empire on the verge of collapse.

New York celebrates child-killing:

On the 46th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, New York state passed a law to protect women’s access to abortion if the historic case is overturned.

“Today we are taking a giant step forward in the hard-fought battle to ensure a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her own personal health, including the ability to access an abortion. With the signing of this bill, we are sending a clear message that whatever happens in Washington, women in New York will always have the fundamental right to control their own body,” said Gov. Andrew Cuomo after signing New York’s Reproductive Health Act on Tuesday night.

Not only will the law preserve access to abortions, it also removes abortion from the state’s criminal code. This would protect doctors or medical professionals who perform abortions from criminal prosecution. The law also now allows medical professionals who are not doctors to perform abortions in New York.

“The old law had criminal penalties. It was written that the doctor or professional could be held criminally liable,” Cuomo said during an interview on WNYC Wednesday. The law also addresses late-term abortions. Under New York’s Reproductive Health Act, they can be performed after 24 weeks if the fetus is not viable or when necessary to protect the life of the mother.

An unborn child is no longer categorized as a person in the amendment of the penal code. This is an abomination. These are not our people. This is not our nation. This is the true face of so-called “Judeo-Christianity”.

Do you still believe God, the actual Christian God the Father, blesses America the USA?

Don’t ever think that those who talk about worshipping “god” but reject Jesus Christ worship the same god that you do.

UPDATE: A reader points out that there has long been a theory postulating that New York City is the Whore of Babylon.

Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters … and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication … And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.

Because they never had a coherent political philosophy, let alone a consistent one:

Just what is it that conservatives want to conserve? One answer that’s often given is “freedom” – by which is usually meant “individual freedom.”

Well, if individual freedom is really important, those who call themselves conservative should be very pleased with the trajectory of the past century, because Americans today generally have more freedom and “rights” than those of earlier generations.

Consider life in 1930, for example – when nearly all Americans still regarded the US as a “great” country.

For one thing, employment and job opportunities were generally segregated and restricted by sex and race. Employment notices in newspapers appeared in separate sections, one for Men and another for Women. Women were effectively barred from a wide range of jobs.

There were no “gay rights.” Homosexual behavior was punished as a crime. Any suggestion that a woman might have the “right” to marry another woman, or a man another man, would have been regarded as offensive and absurd.

By law and custom, people of European ancestry could not marry persons of other races. In most states marriage between whites and blacks was a felony.

Abortion was not a “right”; it was a crime.

Americans could not buy groceries, tools or clothes on a Sunday. Stores across the country were closed on Sundays as an expression of respect for the Christian heritage and Christian sensibilities.

No one could legally order a glass of beer or enjoy a bottle of wine with a meal in a restaurant. The sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited throughout the country.

How many Americans today who call themselves conservative would prefer life in the “great” America of 1930 to life in the “liberal” USA of our era? Is “freedom” really the most important thing that conservatives want to conserve?

Conservatism was always doomed from the very beginning because it has never been anything more than an attitude and a defensive posture. And you cannot win any contest without ever even seeking to go on the offensive or possessing a reasonable understanding of your ultimate objectives.

“I don’t want things to change faster than makes me feel uncomfortable” is neither a strategy nor an objective. And that is why conservatism has completely failed to conserve anything, from the churches to the Constitution.

This is the key line from a long article very much worth reading: In keeping with their distaste for confrontation and discord, conservatives have long tolerated the promotion of seemingly noble sentiments that have unpleasant long term consequences.