How quickly the “First World” can become the Third. How fast people can pivot from sanctimonious, virtue-signaling hypocrites into realists trying to survive. How ironic it is that this occurs concurrently with the assault on free-market capitalism and the abundance of wealth, food, comfort, and infrastructure that only it can provide. And the simultaneous abandonment of standards and abasement of history, tradition, and culture that has led to chaos and destruction in too many of our cities.
Now that the commies have made no secret of their plan to cause worldwide food shortages in the name of environmentalism, I thought I’d throw out some ideas on how to not starve to death.
Three major elections on the same Sunday in June — in France, Colombia and Spain — tell the fundamental story of democracy in our era: the continuous disaffection with government, the collapse of traditionally dominant parties and figures, and the constant search for alternatives — which is quickly followed by yet more disaffection and the search for yet other alternatives. This is no longer a narrative of dysfunction distinctive to one country, if it ever was. The Conservative Party in Britain is now scrambling to find a new prime minister; the government in Italy is near collapse. The nature of political authority has fundamentally changed. Political power has become fragmented, as voters abandon traditional parties and turn to upstart, insurgent parties or independent, free agent politicians from across the political spectrum.
We are living through a dictatorship of ineptitude
A century has passed since William Butler Yeats sensed the stirrings of a “rough beast” with a gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun”. That beast’s apocalyptic hour has come around again, its rebirth announced by the galloping horsemen of war and pestilence, with what looks to be famine trailing in the dusty distance. It calls itself Legion, but is today better known as Ideology.
The reason Biden needs war is very simple. The world monetary system is collapsing. The negative interest rates in Europe since 2014 have wiped out all the pension funds that needed 8% to break even. This is what is being the Guaranteed Basic Income because the politicians have destroyed the future of pensions. Even in the USA, 100% of social security is invested in US government bonds that pay well below 8% and this has undermined the fund going forward. Biden is following the FDR playbook and since COVID failed to produce the Great Depression they were counting on, they are shifting to PHASE 2 which is war.
America has become a nation of pernicious lies, and it is increasingly mandatory that the citizens not only embrace the lies, but also espouse and defend them. Those who dare refuse to comply are ostracized and publicly castigated by the led-by-the-nose politically correct, who are as legitimately ignorant as they are illegitimate to all that made America a nation of godly values.
In a desperate bid to console a nation reeling from crises he created, President Joe Biden delivered his first official State of the Union Address on Tuesday.
The Democrat attempted to downplay his plummeting approval by promising to do better in his second year in office but instead offered a speech riddled with falsehoods and contradictions.
While Biden’s address was supposed to breathe new life into his presidency, Americans are meanwhile plagued with rising prices, a southern border crisis, and now an overseas conflict that leaves them feeling like “the State of our union is in crisis because of Joe Biden.” Here are 17 absurd lies Biden told during his State of Confusion speech.
Thomas Hobbes is a founder of the modern political philosophy. We can deny his conclusions, like laws of mathematics and physics are denied in some American schools, but this is unlikely to help comprehend the ongoing processes.
The human society, Hobbes argued, in its primitive, natural form is no more than a Brownian movement, where “everyone is at war with everyone.” Such is the nature of man (no matter how disgusting it may be for progressives), striving to satisfy the basic animal aspirations – power, sexual possession, gain. To avoid extermination of all by all, people are forced to agree to a ‘Social contract’: they give up unbridled individual freedom in favor of rigid laws that ensure safety for all. People can choose different forms of state power: monarchy, elite republics, democracy. However, in any case, the state must provide for the basic norms of human society: security and order.
I CAN neither sleep at night nor concentrate on my work by day for the sound of right-thinking people stamping their feet and shouting their protests: ‘This has to stop!’ or ‘Something must be done about that!’
But it won’t be.
It’s not as if we live in fear of a revolution. The revolution has happened, and the old order is vanquished; all our institutions are permeated by the neo-Marxist ideology. The new dogmas are set in stone.
This year, at the height of what used to be called the Christmas season, a Pew Research Center poll on religion revealed that only slightly more Americans described themselves as Roman Catholics (21 percent) than as believers in “nothing in particular” (20 percent). The millennial generation, which includes most adult Americans under 40, is the first one in which Christians are a minority.
Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? The interplay among institutions, behaviors and beliefs is notoriously hard to chart. Even if we could determine that religious sentiment was in flux, it would be hard to say whether we were talking about this year’s fad or this century’s trend.
Or perhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization — a civilization that began (roughly) with the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the late fourth century and ended (roughly) with Pope John XXIII’s embrace of religious pluralism and the West’s legalization of abortion.
… Is it a coincidence, by the way, that four officers of the Federal Reserve have been outed for trading stocks and bonds in a pattern that looks an awful lot like front-running the Fed’s own “guidance?” Robert S. Kaplan, head of the Dallas Fed, and Eric Rosengren, head of the Boston Fed announced their “early retirements” last week over stock-trading ethics issues. Fed Vice-chair Richard Clarida’s financial disclosure statement indicated that he dumped millions of dollars in a Pimco bond fund and jammed them into a Pimco stock fund the day before Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced emergency interventions to battle the Covid-19 epidemic in early 2020. Mr. Clarida was involved in deliberations leading to the change in fed policy. And Richmond Fed president Thomas Barkin is under scrutiny for voting to bail out the corporate bond market while sitting on a portfolio of corporate bonds. In his past role as CFO of McKinsey & Co, a global consulting firm, Barkin advised Purdue Pharma L.P. on maximizing sales of its painkiller OxyContin, the infamous scourge of the US opioid epidemic.
h/t Mauser
The less moored our identities become, the louder we shout about them
There has never been a perfect human culture, and any attempt to create one has reliably led to tyranny: to the gulag or the gas chamber, the guillotine or the mass grave. Humans are fallen, or just flawed, and the world is nailed together from our crooked timber. From revolutionary France to 21st century Afghanistan, those who thought they could draw up a rational paradise once the slate was wiped clean have always been violently disabused.
The United States has been dominant in the mathematical sciences since the mass exodus of European scientists in the 1930s. Because mathematics is the basis of science—as well as virtually all major technological advances, including scientific computing, climate modelling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics—US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage. But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position.
The nation’s attention these past two weeks has focused nearly exclusively on Kabul, and rightly so given that the city has become the scene of the largest hostage situation in American history and a vivid image of the decline of Pax Americana abroad.
But Americans don’t need to travel 7,500 miles to get a first-hand glimpse of the end of American order. In many of our own country’s major cities, gangs of masked thugs and criminals do what they please — and our far-better-armed police aren’t allowed to stop them and protect the rest of us.
