Polybius

Statue of Polybius, Alois Düll, 1899 (Vienna, outside the Parliament of Austria).

David Warren's post today prompted me to comment:

When society collapses, the collapse will likely take the internet with it and all that old printed matter, printed on paper, will become valuable again. It will become so valuable you might think that all the old booksellers and hoarders are working together to ensure the collapse of civilization, as they are the only ones who will profit from it. But that would be unfair, because everyone is working very hard on the collapse. I say that because everyone is sure the collapse is coming (probably not for ten years, and maybe not even for 100), everyone can see we are headed for the cliff, but it's not a sharp drop off, at least not right away. We've gone over the peak and now we are just past level and starting on a downhill slope, but there is no danger, at least in the immediate view, and we are cruising, going 60, top down, sun shining, things couldn't be better. But the collapse is coming, but nobody knows what to do to stop it. Wait, that's not right, everybody knows what to do, but nobody can get enough people together to actually do anything about it. A detailed view of the economic situation might be the place to start.

Courage

Courage

Another great post about the political / psychological war being fought in America.

The Courage To Be by Sarah A. Hoyt

Hard Reset

A Dream of Italy - Robert S. Duncanson

Not a cheerful outlook, but perhaps a realistic one:

Hard Reset by Brett Stevens

Kind of a similar theme to my last post. 

Circumstantial Evidence

Stolen entire from JMSmith:

Circumstantial Evidence

“Society has always the Scylla and Charybdis of Socialism and Individualism on its right hand and its left, and it is never without danger from the one or the other. It is sometimes, of course, in much more danger from the one than from the other” Robert Flint, Socialism (1906)

Robert Flint (1838-1910) was a Scottish theologian and philosopher who was neither a socialist nor an individualist.  As he very helpfully explains, a healthy society balances society’s need for cooperation and the individual’s need for elbow room. A sane and sensible man therefore inclines to socialism or individualism when he believes his society or local circumstances have drifted too far in the opposite direction.  

I incline to socialism if my neighbor has taken to keeping twelve howling wolfhounds chained in his back yard; I incline to individualism if he demands that every house on the street fly four American flags on the Fourth of July.

There are, of course, absolute socialists who would like to see everyone perfectly equal and entirely the same.  There are absolute individualists with imperial egos that will be curbed by nothing short of guns and fists.  But between these lunatics the mass of humanity aims to sail between Scylla and Charybdis in a society that blends sociability and freedom to maximize the good.

Flint’s explanation helps us to think sanely about all sorts of ideological positions.  A sane man inclined to “authoritarianism” when his circumstances give every sign that canibal orgies are about to break out in the streets, but that same man will incline to “libertarianism” if a meddlesome harpy phones the police because a whiff of cigar smoke has drifted over her backyard fence.  A sane man inclines to “ritualism” when gibbering energumen are rolling in the aisles of his church, but that same man will incline to “charismatic enthusiasm” if a dull and precisian priest allows cobwebs to be spun between the sagging shoulders of parishioners and the pews.

Our ideological positions are, in other words, circumstantial and not absolute.  In whatever direction we may be inclined at the moment, a shift in circumstances can (and should) cause us to change.

The Future is Grim

What Happened to Horses Is Happening to Us
CGP Grey

So what are we gonna do? Put everyone on the dole? Some people will be happy, but idle hands are the devil's workshop. Maybe this is why we have so many wars going on all over the world. Maybe we need to bring back the sun god and start building massive stone monuments, by hand.

National Unity

 China is making it a law. From Jamestown:

New Law Engineers Unity

Executive Summary:

• The new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress gives legal form to Xi Jinping’s campaign to “forge a collective national consciousness,” transforming Xi Jinping’s ethnic policy agenda into a binding mandate across the entire Party-state.
• The law further hollows out the older framework of regional ethnic autonomy by subordinating minority languages, cultures, histories, and identities to a singular, Han-dominated vision of the “Zhonghua minzu.”
• Its most revealing feature is the scale of the machinery it mobilizes: schools, textbooks, museums, media platforms, families, cadres, budgets, security organs, and diaspora-facing institutions are all made responsible for producing the desired national consciousness. Unity is no longer treated as a social condition to be preserved, but as an administrative outcome to be engineered, monitored, and enforced.

I wonder if maybe we need a little of this. Meanwhile, I understand why good old Joe Biden allowed massive immigration, he wanted to secure a permanent Democratic majority, or at least that's the prevailing right wing theory. What I don't understand is why the Europeans have allowed massive immigration from Africa and the Arabia. Are they also hoping for a permanent Democratic majority?

Farming

Revenge isn't Policy
Farming While Beige

This guy makes a lot of sense. I don't think I've ever heard of the land for farming explained quite like this.

Here's a statement from his website, blackbirdcoop.com:

Half of America's farmers are set to retire by 2035. There's no plan to replace them.

Most of the next generation set to inherit those farms simply wants to cash out. Unless something is done, corporations, billionaires, and foreign interests will continue acquiring the land of retirees, eroding the number and health of our farms, food, farmworkers, and the natural environment.

We need a large influx of new, first-generation farmers to stem the tide. For decades, we've pinned our hopes on the small-farming movement to provide that influx of new farmers to care for the land and feed our people.

Unfortunately that movement has failed to do so. Intense labor requirements and a poor business model prevent nearly all of these new farmers from lasting a single decade, much less a single or multiple generations.

Blackbird is dedicated to solving this "First Generation Farmer Problem." Our work centers on the idea that the production, processing and distribution of food should be under the integrated control of our communities. It should not be under the control of an adversarial relationship between family farmers and shareholder agribusiness that leaves corporations rich, farmers starved for cash and incentivized to abuse their own land, their heirs looking for a way out, and 2,300,000,000+ people living with food insecurity.

For the time being, we're tiny. Just four optimistic guys who've thrown every dime we have into our faith that we can solve this problem and make farming work for a generation that no one made a plan for. We will win, or ruin ourselves trying.

Please bear with us and our high-ish prices while we're still small. We plan to get (responsibly) big in a way that gets the price of good food in range of most peoples' budgets over the next few years. But our business model that puts profits at the service of people, instead of the other way around, doesn't attract a lot of speculative investment.

Our customers and our communities are our biggest investors, and where we place our hopes. We hope you'll join us one way or another.

Crazy

Multnomah Athletic Club on Monday evening. (Aaron Mesh)

Willamette Week has a fine example of the difficulty in balancing civil liberties with public safety.

Multnomah Athletic Club Attack Inflames Civil Commitment Debate by Andrew Schwartz

The man who smashed a car full of explosives into the upscale Portland athletic club early Saturday morning has several earlier encounters with law enforcement.

Culture

Midwest Chick has a fine post up:

Contemplations on the importance of culture

Word of the Day

Orwell's crimestop - In George Orwell’s 1984, crimestop is a Newspeak term defined as the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It is a form of protective stupidity or self-censorship, allowing citizens to avoid thoughtcrime (thoughtcontrol) by automatically halting independent, critical, or rebellious thoughts before they fully form.

Ran into this word, crimestop, in an excellent post on Yard Sale of the Mind about Darwin, survival, tribe membership and politics.

Not Funny

Not Funny

Did this really happen? This is what Google says:

In June 2016, reports emerged that ISIS militants burned 19 captive Yazidi girls to death in Mosul, Iraq, by placing them in iron cages. Witnesses alleged the execution was punishment for refusing to serve as sex slaves for the fighters. The victims were among thousands of Yazidi women and girls abducted following the 2014 Sinjar attack. 

Key details of the reported atrocity include:

• The Incident: Reports stated the women were burned in public, witnessed by hundreds, as a "lesson" to the community.
• Context: ISIS militants considered the Yazidi religious community as "devil-worshippers" and used sexual slavery as part of a campaign of genocide.
• Verification Challenges:
   While widely reported, some human rights investigators at the time indicated difficulty in verifying the specific incident through local sources in Mosul, leading to debate over the details, [says a 2016 report from SBS News.
   

Despite debates over specific incidents, the United Nations and other international bodies have confirmed that ISIS engaged in widespread sexual slavery, forced conversions, and public executions against the Yazidi population starting in 2014. 

Make Work

One of my pet theories on how to improve society is to start up a big stonework project. Something that would involve digging many big blocks of rock out the ground, cutting them into useful shapes, hauling them to a building site then stacking them up make something enduring, like the pyramids. Or an aqueduct, like the Romans did:

Massive Roman aqueduct built in Segovia, Spain by emperor Trajan (r. 98-117 AD).

Egyptian civilization under the pharaohs lasted for thousands or years. Let me just emphasize that: Thousands of Years. Our country is looking at a measly 250 years. Think maybe we could learn something from the Egyptians or the Romans? Nah, that ain't gonna happen, we are better and smarter and know more than those guys ever thought of knowing.

Anyway, I'm thinking if the apparent problem in America today is the lack of jobs, maybe the real problem is we don't have enough people starting businesses that need people. If they need people for their business, they are going to hire people and that would be great.

Meanwhile, rumor has it that George Soros is hiring protesters to show up the No Kings protests.

I just realized that maybe George is following my advice and putting people to work. Okay, they are temporary jobs, but it is something. I'm not quite sure what the point of these protests is. Is this just an old man making himself feel better by doling out nickels to the starving? Or is he just amusing himself by staging these protests to see how irate people get? Or is he building a religion? If it's the later, I'm wondering what he is going to ask of his army of believers.

Freakout

Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about the Minneapolis shooting. You should go read it. It's pretty great.

Doom & Gloom

1968 Experiment Predicted 2026: The "Behavioral Sink" Has Begun
World Economy Reborn

This video is a little long winded, but the speaker's voice and tone are agreeable. He might be AI generated. Whatever, the message kind of explains what's going on in societies all over the world. Just to check that this isn't just some nutball's fantasy, I ran a search on Google and it returns beaucoup de results.

The business about the economy booming is just bullshit. The prices of things like houses, cars and stocks aren't going up because they are becoming more valuable, they are going up because the dollar is worth less every freaking day. I want to make a graph of the S&P 500 divided by the price of gold. Lots of S&P numbers popping up, but not the ones I want. In any case I suspect the graph will show that the real value of the S&P 500 has been flat for the last 50 years.

Via Bustednuckles

American versus European Politics

From a story from The Telegraph via Bayou Renaissance Man

American voters ... are unabashed in their belief that the American way of life is based on an abiding principle: that individuals have an inalienable right to improve their circumstances in life by their own efforts. If they find that their aspiration and determination are frustrated by things that are beyond their control like inflation or competition for jobs from illegal migrants, they expect the government to act effectively on those problems. Traditionally in the United States, it has been believed that this was what government was for: to remove obstacles to individual achievement and progress.

Much more recently the European model of state intervention and the creation of a welfare state which is designed to protect the disadvantaged and to care for those who, it is believed, cannot succeed on their own, has been brought into the US electoral arena. It is espoused by Left liberals like Bernie Sanders and the new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, who have gained a hearing but whose ideas are still considered exotic and profoundly at odds with mainstream discourse. It is important to appreciate this because, paradoxically, it could help to illuminate the identity crisis that European democracies are undergoing.

 

Mothers & Babies

thirties are the new twenties: US births by maternal age group

I was captivated by an image that only showed the lower portion of this graph - i.e. the portion that shows that the number of births to women under 20 is now lower than the number of births to women over 40. That seemed a little alarming, so I went and dug up the full graph. Those two groups (under 20 and over 40) contribute only a small portion of all U. S. births. 25 seems to be most popular age so I am reassured.

Murder

Homicide rate by state. FBI. 2022 data.

I was glad to hear that Trump sent the National Guard into Washington D. C. might be sending them into Chicago. From the news, it seems like crime is out of control there. Then I mentioned that there had been 238 murders in Chicago this year, and my friend replied that Chicago is a big city. That wasn't the response I was expecting.

So let's see if we can make sense of this. Population of the Chicago metropolitan area is 9.4 million. Call it 10 million. The number of murders last year was almost 600, so the murder rate is 6 per 100,000 (seems to be the number that Wikipedia uses). The rate overall for the USA is like between 3 and 10.

Looking at the map (above), Illinois had a murder rate of 7.8, which is not much different than 6, at least compared to some places, like some Caribbean islands and Mexico.

Countries with the most homicides

I suspect that there are problem areas in Chicago where the murder rate is very high, but that doesn't bother most of the people in Chicago because they don't live in those areas. Which is kind of like me not caring about the murder rate in the Caribbean.

Why Africa is a Disaster

K T Cat has a post up:

His assertion, which he lays out thoroughly if you watch the whole video, which I recommend, is that the Africans had never seen a functioning country. Prior to colonial rule, they'd never experienced anything other than primitive, tribal society. Here's an excerpt. I have edited this transcript for clarity. Her dialog is in italics.

wherein he quotes from a Franck Zanu video:

We had tribal wars. And you must understand, even though the only thing African tribes have in common is skin color. Once we go to this tribe is a different language, different religion, different everything. Food, everything. It's like you've been to China, in France, except the way in the same region. Let people get this picture clear. It was a continent with only tribes.

(When the Europeans arrived in Africa) there was no republics. There were no countries. No modern day concept of what country means. There were no formal boundaries and borders. So let's talk about Benin itself. How many tribes were in Benin at that time? About 50. 50 different tribes or more... But you can't say Benin because there was no Benin. You can say the region. You see what I mean? It was a region that stretched all the way from the Nile River in Nigeria, all the way to Ghana, just a region. That's no name for anybody. There was nothing like Benin, Nigeria, Ghana. 

No. But there was a concept of Dahomey.

That's correct. That's a tribe ... That's one tribe of very brutal guys. Guys with potbelly married 200 wives, and they call them chiefs. And the foreigners named them kingdoms, because that is the only way they know from where they were coming from Europe. But there was no kingdom. We are not kingdoms.

It's any pot belly guy married to many women with his family making war on the other small tribes, and they were describing them based only on the word they know. The Europeans say, oh, this people's kingdom. It was only chiefs. We never had kings in Africa.

Explains a lot.

Doom & Gloom

Dollar Value

Inflation is our enemy. Inflation crushes us all. The stock market goes up by leaps and bounds, but all this apparent gain is an illusion. The value of a pound of steel or wheat or oil has the same value it had yesterday, it's just that the dollars you are using to try and buy that stuff are worth less. The increase in the number of people not working is because companies are trying to survive in trying times. They are doing everything they can to cut costs, and workers are often the biggest expense. If they can't find a way to do more with fewer people, they are going to find themselves going down in flames because other businesses will find a way to cut costs.

Inflation is entirely due to our goddamn government, especially congress. They vote to spend more money than they raise through taxes, so we have more money flowing into the economy, but that just makes every dollar worth a little bit less.

Okay, none of this is new, this has been going on for decades. I don't know when it started, maybe when FDR became President, maybe WW2, maybe when Nixon let gold float. I dunno. Is it going to change? I don't see any signs of improvement, though maybe we are not sliding toward the abyss quite as fast as we were last year.

The part that bugs me the most about inflation is that it is impossible to tell what a good price is. Inflation has become so ingrained that nobody is surprised when things cost more, or at least you shouldn't be. It's still annoying though.

We have numerous propaganda campaigns currently running in this country, shaping the opinions of the great mass of people. Maybe what we need is a propaganda campaign aimed at Congress telling them to quit spending so much money. Since you are only talking about an audience of 500 or so people, it shouldn't be that expensive. Any right thinking billionaire should be able to finance it. 

Most Congress critters are more concerned about getting re-elected than stopping inflation, so a targeted anti-inflation campaign is going to have a tough row to hoe. We also need a campaign to target the voters. That one is going to be considerably more expensive, and is going to be even harder to sell because no one wants their favorite government program cut. In a country of morons, we are all doomed.