Tag: declineandfall

Ugo Bardi observes that when a great civilization is failing, both the great and the small inhabitants are aware that something significant has changed, but they are almost completely unable to grasp the full extent to which societal change is taking place or conceive of the possibility of the complete collapse of their way of life.

Let’s start from the beginning…with the people who were contemporary to the collapse, the Romans themselves. Did they understand what was happening to them? This is a very important point: if a society, intended as its government, can understand that collapse is coming, can they do something to avoid it? It is relevant to our own situation, today.

Of course, the ancient Romans are long gone and they didn’t leave us newspapers. Today we have huge amounts of documents but, from Roman times, we have very little. All that has survived from those times had to be slowly hand copied by a Medieval monk, and a lot has been lost. We have a lot of texts by Roman historians – none of them seemed to understand exactly what was going on. Historians of that time were more like chroniclers; they reported the facts they knew. Not that they didn’t have their ideas on what they were describing, but they were not trying to make models, as we would say today. So, I think it may be interesting to give a look to documents written by people who were not historians; but who were living the collapse of the Roman Empire. What did they think of what was going on?

Let me start with Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who lived from 120 to 180 A.D. He was probably the last Emperor who ruled a strong empire. Yet, he spent most of his life fighting to keep the Empire together; fighting barbarians. Maybe you have seen the movie “The Gladiator”: Marcus Aurelius appears in the first scenes. The movie is not historically accurate, of course, but it is true that Aurelius died in the field, while he was fighting invaders. He wasn’t fighting for glory, he wasn’t fighting to conquer new territories. He was just fighting to keep the Empire together, and he had a terribly hard time doing just that. Times had changed a lot from the times of Caesar and of Trajan.

Marcus Aurelius did what he could to keep the barbarians away but, a few decades after his death, the Empire had basically collapsed. That was what historians call “the third century crisis”. It was really bad; a disaster. The empire managed to survive for a couple of centuries longer as a political entity, but it wasn’t the same thing. It was not any longer the Empire of Marcus Aurelius; it was something that just tried to survive as best as it could, fighting barbarians, plagues, famines, warlords and all kinds of disasters falling on them one after the other. Eventually, the Empire disappeared also as a political entity. It did that with a whimper – at least in its Western part, in the 5th century a.d. The Eastern Empire lasted much longer, but that is another story.

Here is a piece of statuary from Roman times. We know what Marcus Aurelius looked like.

Now, if it is rare that we have the portrait of a man who lived so long ago, it is even rarer that we can also read his inner thoughts. But that we can do that with Marcus Aurelius. He was a “philosopher-emperor” who left us his “Meditations”; a book of philosophical thoughts. For instance, you can read such things as:

Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

That is the typical tune of the book – you may find it fascinating or perhaps boring; it depends on you. Personally, I find it fascinating. The “Meditations” is a statement from a man who was seeing his world crumbling down around him and who strove nevertheless to maintain a personal balance; to keep a moral stance. Aurelius surely understood that something was wrong with the Empire: during all their history, the Romans had been almost always on the offensive. Now, they were always defending themselves. That wasn’t right; of course.

But you never find in the Meditations a single line that lets you suspect that the Emperor thought that there was something to be done other than simply fighting to keep the barbarians out. You never read that the Emperor was considering, say, things like social reform, or maybe something to redress the disastrous situation of the economy. He had no concern, apparently, that the Empire could actually fall one day or another.

Now, I’d like to show you an excerpt from another document; written perhaps by late 4th century. Probably after the battle of Adrianopolis; that was one of last important battles fought (and lost) by the Roman Empire. This is a curious document. It is called, normally, “Of matters of war” because the title and the name of the author have been lost. But we have the bulk of the text and we can say that the author was probably somebody high up in the imperial bureaucracy. Someone very creative – clearly – you can see that from the illustrations of the book. Of course what we see now are not the original illustrations, but copies made during the Middle Ages. But the fact that the book had these illustration was probably what made it survive: people liked these colorful illustrations and had the book copied. So it wasn’t lost. The author described all sorts of curious weaponry. One that you can see here is a warship powered by oxen.

Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen-based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that. The point is that our 4th century author does understand that the Roman Empire is in trouble. Actually, he seems to be scared to death because of what’s happening. Read this sentence, I am showing it to you in the original Latin to give you a sense of the flavor of this text.

“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries.”

Of course you may not be able to translate from Latin on the spot. For that, being Italian gives you a definite advantage. But let me just point out a word to you: “circumlatrantium” which refers to barbarians who are, literally, “barking around” the empire’s borders. They are like dogs barking and running around; and not just barking – they are trying hard to get in. It is almost a scene from a horror movie. A nightmare. So the author of “Of matters of war” is thinking of how to get rid of these monsters. But his solutions were not so good. Actually it was just wishful thinking. None of these strange weapons were ever built. Even our 4th century author, therefore, fails completely in understanding what were the real problems of the Empire.

Now, I would like to show you just another document from the time of the Roman Empire. It is “De Reditu suo”, by Rutilius Namatianus. The title means “of his return”. Namatianus was a patrician who lived in the early 5th century; he was a contemporary of St. Patrick, the Irish saint. He had some kind of job with the imperial administration in Rome. It was some decades before the “official” disappearance of the Western Roman Empire; that was in 476, when the last emperor, Romolus Augustulus, was deposed. You may have seen Romulus Augustulus as protagonist of the movie “The Last Legion”. Of course that is not a movie that pretends to be historically accurate, but it is fun to think that after so many years we are still interested in the last years of the Roman Empire – it is a subject of endless fascination. Even the book by Namatianus has been transformed into a movie, as you can see in the figure. It is a work of fantasy, but they have tried to be faithful to the spirit of Namatianus’ report. It must be an interesting movie, but it has been shown only in theaters in Italy, and even there for a very short time; so I missed it. But let’s move on.

Namatianus lived at a time that was very close to the last gasp of the Empire. He found that, at some point, it wasn’t possible to live in Rome any longer. Everything was collapsing around him and he decided to take a boat and leave. He was born in Gallia, that we call “France” today, and apparently he had some properties there. So, that is where he headed for. That is the reason for the title “of his return”. He must have arrived there and survived for some time, because the document that he wrote about his travel has survived and we can still read it, even though the end is missing. So, Namatianus gives us this chilling report. Just read this excerpt:

“I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward.”

Can you believe that? If there was a thing that the Romans had always been proud of were their roads. These roads had a military purpose, of course, but everybody could use them. A Roman Empire without roads is not the Roman Empire, it is something else altogether. Think of Los Angeles without highways. “Sic transit gloria mundi” , as the Romans would say; there goes the glory of the world. Namatianus tells us also of silted harbors, deserted cities, a landscape of ruins that he sees as he moves north along the Italian coast.

But what does Namatianus think of all this? Well, he sees the collapse all around him, but he can’t understand it. For him, the reasons of the fall of Rome are totally incomprehensible. He can only interpret what is going on as a temporary setback. Rome had hard times before but the Romans always rebounded and eventually triumphed over their enemies. It has always been like this, Rome will become powerful and rich again.

There would be much more to say on this matter, but I think it is enough to say that the Romans did not really understand what was happening to their Empire, except in terms of military setbacks that they always saw as temporary. They always seemed to think that these setbacks could be redressed by increasing the size of the army and building more fortifications. Also, it gives us an idea of what it is like living a collapse “from the inside”. Most people just don’t see it happening – it is like being a fish: you don’t see the water.

The tragedy of the cassandra is that he has the ability to see the collapse coming, but no ability to do anything to stop it. I have been able to see the collapse of the USA coming since 1995, once the implications of the 1986 immigration amnesty became clear to me, but even I had no idea until fairly recently that this inevitable collapse was likely to be part of a larger civilization-wide event. It’s not merely the USA that is in bad shape, but the secondary powers of China, Russia, and Europe as well.

And the tragedy of the neo-liberal world order was that in thinking to bring progress to the world, they have brought destruction to the West. At this point, the imperial USA is beyond salvaging because the Not-Americans outnumber the Americans. This is why I have been urging people to stop thinking in terms of fixing the USA or restoring it to its former power and glory. MAGA is not an eight-year program, it is probably more of an 80-year program, and if we are unlucky, an 800-year program. If you think I am exaggerating, recall how long it took for Spain to become great again after it first experienced Islamic immigration.

Westerners either need an unlikely champion who is the optimal combination of Charles Martel and Pol Pot or we need to think in terms of preserving knowledge for the future instead of preventing that which our fellow Westerners will never be able to accept or understand until it is too late. They will preach about the evils of the nameless, faceless Left and preen about the importance of this as they posture about the importance of that, and all of it is entirely irrelevant.

Iam canes intra moenia latrantes.

The barking dogs are already inside the walls.

Our Druids may be better than those of the times of the Roman Empire, at least they have digital computers. But our leaders are no better apt at understanding complex system than the military commanders who ruled the Roman Empire. Even our leaders were better, they would face the same problems: there are no structures that can gently lead society to where it is going. We have only structures that are there to keep society where it is – no matter how difficult and uncomfortable it is to be there. It is exactly what Tainter says: we react to problems by building structure that are more and more complex and that, in the end, produce a negative return. That’s why societies collapse.

This also explains why the globalists feel fully justified in their Neo-Babelism. They believe that they are constructing a new civilization that will rise from the ashes of the old one, a secular Byzantium to Christendom’s Rome. That is why the phoenix is one of their favorite symbols. What most of them do not realize is that what they are building is not a new world order, but a very old one.

The media is affecting shock-horror that the American people are beginning to figure out that even their limited form of democracy is a sham and that the Deep State controls both of their political alternatives. And they should, since it was the media’s job to conceal that fact from everyone.

On Monday, the Monmouth University Polling Institute released the results of a survey that found that “a large bipartisan majority… feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a ‘Deep State’ of unelected government officials….

According to the survey:”…6-in-10 Americans (60{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) feel that unelected or appointed government officials have too much influence in determining federal policy. Just 26{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} say the right balance of power exists between elected and unelected officials in determining policy. Democrats (59{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}), Republicans (59{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) and independents (62{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) agree that appointed officials hold too much sway in the federal government. (“Public Troubled by ‘Deep State”, Monmouth.edu)

The survey appears to confirm that democracy in the United States is largely a sham. Our elected representatives are not the agents of political change, but cogs in a vast bureaucratic machine that operates mainly in the interests of the behemoth corporations and banks. Surprisingly, most Americans have not been taken in by the media’s promotional hoopla about elections and democracy. They have a fairly-decent grasp of how the system works and who ultimately benefits from it. Check it out:

“Few Americans (13{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) are very familiar with the term “Deep State;” another 24{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} are somewhat familiar, while 63{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53} say they are not familiar with this term. However, when the term is described as a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, nearly 3-in-4 (74{e1e765f6645cfe4995202f72094ad9c88a5cb669127c8020c4b88ace2386bb53}) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington.…Only 1-in-5 say it does not exist.” Belief in the probable existence of a Deep State comes from more than 7-in-10 Americans in each partisan group…”

So while the cable news channels dismiss anyone who believes in the “Deep State” as a conspiracy theorist, it’s clear that the majority of people think that’s how the system really works, that is, “a group of unelected government and military officials…secretly manipulate or direct national policy.”

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the survey. The data suggest that representative democracy is a largely a fraud, that congressmen and senators are mostly sock-puppets who do the bidding of wealthy powerbrokers, and that the entire system is impervious to the will of the people. These are pretty damning results and a clear indication of how corrupt the system really is.

I’ve known about the Deep State for about 30 years. It used to be that no one believed me, or at least would not admit to believing me, which was one factor in my decision to get out of Dodge. I decided that I would rather live where the corruption was out in the open and well known to everyone than where it was secret, systemic, and operating with complete impunity in the dark. The gap between reality and superficiality was simply more than I could stand to be around, and I suspected that things were eventually going to get pretty damn ugly once hundreds of millions of people discovered that not only their government, but their very way of life, was a sham.

Of course, people have turned out to be both more resilient and more complacent than I ever would have imagined. But it is certainly interesting to have observed one “conspiracy theory” after another go from being mocked to tacitly admitted to common knowledge. I can still remember when believe in the surveillance state and its infrastructure was enough to cause people to label you paranoid.

What the American people will do with this knowledge is still unknown. But whether they choose to stand up for their violated rights or choose technoslavery, at least they will be making an informed decision now.

The Z-Man has a good post on the inertia of the more traditional elite and their inability to recognize or do anything about the problems that their neo-liberal world order cannot address:

The first time I did any serious reading of the Roman Empire, the thought that was always with me was why they never thought to downsize. The cost of conquering Gaul was relatively low, so it made sense to do it, but the cost of hanging onto it never seemed to make sense. The same was even more obvious with Britania. By the third century, it should have been obvious, at least from our perspective, that the Empire needed to be downsized and re-organized. Yet, that was never a part of the logic of the Empire.

I had a similar thought when reading about the Thirty Years War the first time. The Habsburgs were exhausting themselves trying to preserve something that was probably not worth the effort. Of course, we look at these things in hindsight and from a modern perspective. It seems silly to care about the local religious practices, but important people did care about these things and still do. Still, when I read about the rise and fall of empires, I end up thinking through the alternatives, wondering why they were never considered.

The answer is probably the simplest one. People, even the shrewdest rulers, live and plan within their allotted time on earth. Even the Chinese, who take the very long view of things, act in the moment most of the time. People can think about how their actions will impact their descendants a century from now, but it will never have the same emotional tug as how their contemporaries think of them in the moment. That’s just human nature. Most men will trade the applause of today for being remembered long after he is dead.

That’s probably what we are seeing with the current struggles of Western elites to keep this house of cards together. The “liberal international order” is the perfection of a solution to problems of the long gone past. From the French Revolution through the Cold War, the great challenge in the West was over borders, economics and conflict resolution. After a long bloody series of experiments, the West finally figured out something that worked to keep the peace, maximize material wealth and settle disputes in an orderly fashion.

The trouble is, the current arrangements are not answering the questions of this age. In fact, they appear to be exacerbating the problems that face the West.

This isn’t the whole problem, of course. But it does explain some of the mysterious ineptitude and ineffectual handwaving of the governing elites to even begin to do anything about the problems that are so readily apparent to so many people throughout the West.

Unlike the Romans, however, the West is also burdened by hostile interests, some of them foreign, some of them not, which actively want to destroy all three of the pillars of the West, Christianity, the Graeco-Roman legacy, and the European races.

There is observably no free speech in the West anymore, not even for dogs. So, let’s bring back the blasphemy laws and start enforcing those that are still on the books, and jail everyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord or is insufficiently respectful of Christianity and thereby Make Western Civilization Great Again.

A dog owner who filmed his girlfriend’s pug giving Nazi salutes and put it on YouTube revealed on Tuesday he was found guilty of being ‘grossly offensive’ online.

Mark Meechan from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, recorded the dog, Buddha, responding to statements such as ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘Sieg Heil’ by raising its paw.

The 30-year-old was arrested for allegedly committing a hate crime after he uploaded the footage to YouTube in April of 2016.

Now, how is Ricky Gervais not in jail? Spare us all the high-minded farblegarble about “free speech” and “an open society”. Everyone is now aware that it was always just an anti-Christian con.

A self-proclaimed atheist, The Office creator and 2012 Golden Globes host ruffled feathers for portraying himself as Jesus Christ in his “12 Days of Rickmas” PETA campaign.

That is far more grossly offensive than a pug raising its paw. And here is a question. Why wasn’t the girlfriend arrested for naming her dog “Buddha”?

Read the notice in full. Note the grammatical deficiencies. Then read John Derbyshire’s thoughts on the matter:

Young Ahmed sneaked into Britain hidden in a truck that brought him through the Channel Tunnel from France. British immigration officers intercepted him. Ahmed told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

Let me just repeat that: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

But Ahmed was not refused entry. Instead, he was given free accommodation, first in a charity shelter, then in a pleasant middle-class foster home. [Betrayed by the ‘shy and polite’ boy they took into their home: Iraqi asylum seeker, 18, is found guilty of trying to blow up 93 Parsons Green commuters with bomb built with his foster parents’ Tupperware while pair were on holiday, Daily Mail, March 16, 2018] He was sent to school, at British taxpayer expense of course. His teachers reported him telling them it was his duty as a Muslim to hate Britain.

Today, Friday, March 16, 2018, Ahmed was convicted of making a bomb and trying to detonate it in a London subway train last Fall. Fortunately, the thing didn’t explode properly; but it still left 51 subway passengers with serious burns.

Let me just repeat one more time: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

Enoch Powell got it right: “Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”

Fred Reed laments the destruction of the national culture of the United States.

Countries are happiest when they have one national culture, or at least one dominant culture to which all must perforce conform. We see this in countries like Japan and Korea, homogeneous societies which, because homogeneous, have no race riots or religious wars. It was largely true in, for example, Sweden and France until they began admitting immigrants from incompatible cultures. Today, most of the news from such countries deals with the consequences.

Diversity, never a good idea. is in fact the cause of most of the world’s conflicts: Shia and Sunni, Jew and Arab, Hutu and Tutsi, Tamil and Sinhalese, Hindu and Muslim and, in America, black, white, and brown. Diversityis the cause of the dissolution of American society.

Until roughly the Sixties, America was homogeneous enough, overwhelmingly white, European, Anglophone, and Christian. This provided sufficient commonalty that people all regarded themselves as Americans. At the same time, there were many geographically separated subcultures which had little in common and didn’t like each other, or wouldn’t have if they had come into contact. Massachusetts, Montana, Alabama, West Virginia, and New York were different civilizations….

Then everything changed. Diversity began, not at first of people so much as of ideas. Reasons were several. Communications improved. Interstates appeared. The federal government gained in power and reach. The Supreme Court began making sweeping decisions on manners, morals and faith–that is, on culture and values–which it had not done before. Now Washington–New York, really–could enforce these decisions.

The result was unwanted cultural diversity. The Court decided in decision after decision that increasingly explicit pornography enjoyed protection as free speech, imposing an alien ideology on small towns in Kansas. This culminated in internet porn accessible to children of ten, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Obscene music poured out of New York as local stations were bought by Manhattan, from which rap came–unfit, in most regions, for a toilet wall. Towns could not defend themselves because of the doctrine of free speech and the massively increased power of the northeast. Television became national with similar trampling of local values of faith, propriety, and race.

Particularly invasive was the newly invented doctrine of separation of church and state. For at least a hundred and fifty years no one, neither court nor individual, had noticed that the Constitution forbade manger scenes on the town square at Christmas, or the singing of carols on public streets, or mention of the Bible in schools. It was yet more compelled cultural diversity.

One hardly needs William of Ockham to discern the central problem. The United States of America worked when it was American and Christian. It no longer works because it is now saddled with a government that is not-American and not-Christian as well as a substantial minority population that is not-American and not-Christian. These days, the US government is essentially an Athenian-style empire, albeit one with an emperor who is heavily influenced by a foreign grand vizier who is hostile to Christianity and far more concerned with those foreign interests than with American interests.

And the fact that both the emperor and the grand vizier are collectives rather than individuals does not change either the relevance of the observations or the probable outcome. Lament this reality if you will. Hurl accusations and labels if you want. None of that is going to alter, in the slightest, the way the inevitable patterns of history are going to play out.

Only the most foolish of fools can be stupid enough to claim temporal exceptionalism will somehow inure themselves to the great waves of history. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, read Tolstoy, specifically, War and Peace. There are very sound reasons that we see the same events play out again and again and again across the centuries.

“I still think we need a word for cultural self-genocide.”
– Stephen Green, Instapundit

We have it. That word is “immigration”.

“Having spent some time perusing the genetic imprints of invaded populations, it is clear that if the warriors coming from the Eastern steppes left a cultural imprint, they certainly left their genes at home. Gene transfer between areas happens by group migrations, inclement climate, and unaccommodating soil rather than war.”
– NN Taleb, Skin in the Game

Immigration is not “good for the economy”. Immigration is the precise opposite of “who we are”. And as genetic science has conclusively proven, it is quite literally worse than war.

It would have been preferable to see it end sooner, but the main thing is that America’s worst political dynasty is coming to an end:

George P Bush is the young, half-Hispanic, grandson of the 41st president, nephew of the 43rd and son of a former Florida governor. When he was elected Texas land commissioner four years ago, that background gave him a significant advantage as a fledgling Republican candidate seemingly on a fast track to stardom. Now, with conservative politics turned on its head by Trumpism, Bush is facing a tough primary election that threatens to doom his political career – and with it, bring to a close his family’s 70-year political dynasty.

The land commissioner job – which manages state-owned land – was perceived to be a stepping stone to higher office, but the evisceration of his father, Jeb, in the 2016 Republican presidential primary showed that as it lurched to the right and was seduced by sound and fury, the GOP was no longer in the market for a quiet moderate named Bush.

Though he has far more campaign cash than his rivals and has reportedly spent $2m in the past month, Bush has run an anaemic – one might say low-energy – campaign, with scant media availability and no events listed on his website. He is still the favourite, but if he fails to get above 50{659c2545de464f2fcd65f128ea682d8067e3e2248213357d1602012fc3b5a78c} of the vote on 6 March – when Texas holds the country’s first primaries ahead of the 2018 midterms – he will face a potentially dangerous runoff.

“It’s quite possible that the Bush political dynasty, at least for this generation, could end in the spring of 2018 because if George P Bush fails to win the GOP nomination for land commissioner it’s tough to see him coming back from that any time soon,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. The dynasty began with Prescott Bush – George P’s great-grandfather – becoming senator for Connecticut in 1952.

The Bushes have done more than enough harm to the nation. About the last thing that America – what is left of it – needs is a watered-down fourth-generation edition to deal with the damage meted out by his ancestors.

At least, not to be good. Or so most of them think.

Americans took God out of public schools. And universities, mostly. And, over the years, government. And social issues. And holiday references. And there even have been attempts to banish God, or belief in Him, from business, including in the fight over abortion funding in Obamacare.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a new Pew Research poll found 56 percent of Americans say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values.

That’s up from the 49 percent who expressed that view in 2011.

“This increase reflects the continued growth in the share of the population that has no religious affiliation, but it also is the result of changing attitudes among those who do identify with a religion, including white evangelical Protestants,” Pew said.

After answering the poll question and confirming “her” opinion that “she” did not need God to be moral, the transgender “woman” posted lies on Facebook about a political opponent being a neo-Nazi homophobe, before prostituting “herself” to a gay man, and donating a small portion of the proceeds to Planned Parenthood in order to help murder unborn children.

Then “she” went to the Episcopalian “church” to worship “God the Mother”.

It must be all those “Judeo-Christian” values of which we hear so much about these days. Who needs God when you’ve got Judeo Christ? This should end well. In any event, as Christopher Hallpike amply demonstrates, those Americans are wrong.

Glenn Reynolds points this out in USA Today:

The chief problem facing America today is the decline of its institutions, coupled with the denial of that decline by the people in charge of its institutions. The latest example of this problem is the Parkland school shooting in Florida. From the FBI, to local law enforcement, to the schools, everyone failed. There was failure early, there was failure in the middle, and there was failure late. And no one has taken responsibility.

I would put 130 million alien settlers first, but to be sure, the decline of American institutions is certainly high up there on the list of problems.

Government must always be regarded suspiciously, even when it is doing nothing more nefarious than declaring that the sky is blue or the temperature is warm. Distrust and verify must always be our watchwords.