One of the subtexts to the current war in the Ukraine is the fact that the West has been wrong about every aspect of the conflict. None of the predictions about the actual fighting have been correct. Even the propaganda has been hilariously wrong, often making the West look foolish. The economic response, which was supposed to be a fatal blow to Russia, has gone horribly wrong. Europe now faces an unprecedented energy shortage this fall and winter.
The bulk of the blame lies at the feet of the neoconservatives running foreign policy for the Global American Empire. The same cast of characters who were horrifically wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years have managed to turn a regional issue into a global disaster. London and Brussels, along with the provincials occupying legacy positions in national government share blame as well. They enthusiastically went along with a war plan that had no chance to succeed.
The degree of wrongness is a thing of beauty, when you can look at it from a purely objective point of view. Rolling dice, flipping coins or pulling policy ideas out of a hat would have had a better result. One could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this series of errors is somehow deliberate. Maybe that ridiculous bald guy from the World Economic Forum really is a super villain. The masters of the universe are setting the West ablaze so they can build back better.
The question that should be pondered is why has everything gone so terribly long for the collective West? One reason is competence. The Global American Empire is led by a man who barely knows where he is most of the time. In his prime, Joe Biden was known as an affable moron. In his dotage, he is a confused and incompetent old man unable to perform his duties. His handlers give him stage instructions for basic things like where and when to sit.
Biden is the bit of the iceberg we see. There is a whole apparatus around him that was instrumental in getting him into office. The Washington political community thought a dementia patient was better than Trump. That says nothing about Trump and everything about the people who engineered Biden’s ascension. People forget that the Democratic Party had to rig its own primary to get Biden the nomination. They never stopped to think what this would mean after the election.
Of course, this degree of incompetence is made possible by a political culture that is defensive, isolated and insulated. They picked Biden because he was the safest option to get rid of Trump. Biden’s primary appeal to the political class was that he was a vegetable they could move around however they pleased. Biden and his family were simply happy to fill the role and play their part. He also provided the best chance of liberating the city from the scourge of Trump people.
That decision gets to the insularity of the political class, not just in Washington, but across the collective West. These are people without any understanding of the societies over which they rule. When you look at the resumes of these people, the common feature is no experience in the dreaded private sector. Politics has been their life since they were adults. In fact, we have reached a point where private sector experience raises suspicion in the political class.
These are people who simply have no idea how things work. They just take for granted that things work. Like the heirs of a family business, the political class has spent their life in a system without ever having to think about how it came into being. The system of power they command is a permanent feature of life. The only variable is who will have control of the institutions of power. That is politics, the game of verbal chess which picks the winners and losers in the system.
Therein lies the other cause of this unfolding disaster. The West is a collection of people who deal in words exclusively. They have never done anything, other than talk about making other people do things. Nancy Pelosi has been in Washington for eighty years and there is no single physical thing she can point to, other than her ten-thousand-dollar freezer, as a product of her political career. When she is dead, the next wave will wash away her footprints in the sand and she will be forgotten.
On the other side of this fight is a different system, one that is the result of people doing things and rising in the ranks as a consequence. Putin is a man who had to navigate a world where failure meant prison or death. When that world collapsed, he had to navigate a world of chaos. When he gained power, he then had to impose order, often taking on powerful oligarchs backed by Western interests. Putin and his ruling circle are a collection of men who do things, not just talk about things.
Six months ago, the West was prepared to give the Russians a good tongue lashing, cancel her from the internet and de-platform her from the financial system. On the other side, the Russians prepared to fight a war against a well-armed and prepared enemy in Ukraine and a well-armed and prepared West on the world stage. One side was ready for a battle of words while the other side was ready for a battle of actions. It turns out that words count for a lot less than actions.
All civilizations have periods of incompetence. The Russians suffered through the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods. The difference for the West is that the system has been selecting for bourgeois obsequiousness for a long time. The reason Washington is run by fossils is the next in line is much worse than the geezers. Mitch McConnell knows something about running the party. Kevin McCarthy was selected because no one in power worried that he would be a challenge.
The crisis of the West is that it is now run by a managerial class that was selected for being the teacher’s pet, ticking the right box on a form and making sure to never utter a discouraging word around the boss. It is why presidents have been increasingly ridiculous since the Cold War. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden are all mileposts in the decline of competence. Next up is Kamala Harris, an absurd manifestation of a system that selects against competence.
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There are no sober, practical minded men (let alone females) running the show anywhere – the hive mind rules. Their blatherings on any subject are as predictable as the rising of the sun. I’m not sure what it’s going take to get things back on track, but it needs to happen sooner rather than later – economic implosion and/or WWIII are right around the corner.
25
And civil war-that is also around the corner and IMHO more likely than WW3
1
The ‘decline in competence’ may be most evident in government, but IMO it is being felt in all realms. And whether it is the result of mal-education, mal-parenting, or some Darwinian result of lower IQ persons giving birth, while higher IQ persons get grad degree, fancy credentialed career instead of passing on their genes, the results are coming in and they are stark. And negative.
What, now, is a ‘restaurant’? A magnet for illegal immigrants? A place where one can get bad food, and bad service for high prices? Where I live, going out to eat is an exercise in futility.
Customer service? Really, shouldn’t there be another term created, for current year? I just called to check on an order to be told I was “number 263 in the” while said company’s Chat was down due to “unexpected circumstances..” Even giant companies like Xfinity can’t keep their service up, and regularly have unexpected outages. Good luck reaching them.
It goes on and is beyond the scope of an internet post unless you want to go all autist and present a wall of words.
22
It is turning up all over the place. It takes six months to see the dentist because there is a shortage of hygienists.
17
Not in north-central rural Ohio.
4
2
This. Most of the doom-and-gloom opinions on the internet are shaped by lived experiences in urbanized, “vibrant”, blue hell-holes. Crime. Empty shelves at the supermarkets. Hair care products locked in drug stores. Pantifa. Mask/vaxx mandates. Unaffordable housing.
Most of the USA is still normal.
3
2
While I’m as pessimistic as most of us here are, allow me to offer a snapshot of my local town and how it (hopefully!) presents a worse-than-actual reality view of my local populace:
Monday about 2:00 PM, I went shopping at one of the better groceries here in ex-urban central Florida city. As I tend to notice such things, I saw a disproportionate number of mothers with biracial children (two or three, and this in the local upscale store, not the Save-a-Lot). Too, outside there was a somewhat unusual duo of a homely white-ish female and a black male, each pushing a baby carriage with one or more children in it. I witnessed this last pair while entering the store, as well as after I left. They were clearly not shopping, but wandering aimlessly as is typical of the homeless. Perhaps I’m wrong, but in general, people don’t take the baby for a stroll mid-day on a hot, muggy Southern summer afternoon.
While my city doesn’t have the problem on a scale of LA or some Left Coast city, the poor are not unknown here and there is seen the occasional tent pitched off the highway.
Now, the “statistical” wisdom: I was aware that what I saw was not representative of the overall population. The scene, if you will, self-selected to highlight the non-working members of society (to include the retired, of which there are many, this being “God’s Waiting Room,” as wags term it.)
In sum, perhaps an overly jaundiced slice of my local reality. Even so, it’s depressing that this is probably typical, even of smaller cities, in vast majority White areas 🙁
3
Mr. Generic: DFW is urbanized and all too vibrant, but I wouldn’t yet call all its ‘burbs “blue hell-holes.” And while shelves are not empty, I noticed about 10 years ago when they started locking up or chaining retail products. At the same time, there was a massive increase in the number of non-White drivers of insanely expensive sports cars on the road. And the remaining White public school population appears increasingly unaware that it’s constantly shrinking as it pals around with its Han and pajeet besties.
No, most of the US is not normal. You are fortunate that where you live remains so.
1
it seems like the lack of staff is directly tied to a lack of decent pay. maybe combined with forcing people to work under shitty conditions (to compensate for being understaffed).
7
It is a great puzzle. The great resignation, as it is being called, requires an explanation for how these quitters are paying their bills. Disability claims have been in decline https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/dibStat.html Boomer retirement is one possibility.
5
boomer retirement, people cashing out of their homes during insane R.E. market, and I think extended families are conglomerating back into a single home.
8
There’s a ton of millennials (yes, in their 30’s) moving back home and even more Gen Z who simply haven’t moved out. Why work when you’ve never had to work before, and Boomer parents will stock the fridge for everyone?
3
Once you accept the puzzle is answered by just less people, its no longer a puzzle.
4
A lot of it is interstate migration. The competent people are flocking to places like Texas, the Ozarks, Tennessee, and Florida.
4
It’s still possible to make decent income with little capital trading momentum/volatility on a variety of financial instruments.
No reason not to because they are going to crash everything to zero, rendering any fiat-denominated capital worthless.
1
I have seen no plausible explanation offered. You have to wonder if there is a massive underground economy or secret government bennies because no other explanation suffices. Whate KvH pointed out is true, but there are tons of work-aged people without family support or assets to sell who are humming right along, too.
2
Another potential source of funds could be people taking loans against their 401k to play the extend and pretend game with their credit cards. I imagine that some people were taking home equity loans as well. I’m not sure where to find reliable stats for either of those.
Businesses have been raising pay significantly and can’t get qualified applicants. In the Zman’s example dental hygienists are very well paid. More and more people don’t want to put up with all the nonsense that goes along with showing up to work everyday. Lots of people retired somewhat earlier than they expected after Covid started. A significant number of women decided to stay home with their kids or pursue more flexible work options. An added pressure on all this is that the public schools are turning out a generation of imbeciles incapable of doing skilled worked. I don’t know how all these people are supporting themselves, but raising wages doesn’t solve a worker shortage anymore.
3
1
I remember maybe on the first day of the whole imbroglio in the Ukraine, even before I heard of the escalation, I was confused by something I saw on my homepage. There, on the news section, instead of some ridiculous pop star or an empty suit, was a white man with genuine hardness in his eyes. He looked like he’d been in prison for ten years, yet he was wearing a blue suit and a conservative tie. I hadn’t seen anyone in modern American politics (or modern American anything) who looked like that. I clicked and saw it was Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. We have men who play at being hard in our political class, the Zioclops Nick Fury from the Second Congressional District in Texas, “Working Class Joe” who challenges people who ask him about his crackhead son to pushup contests, flabby Trump who knows how to bloviate and howl (like a creature with a big dewlap and no claws), but we don’t have any men like that Russian guy in public life.
That’s just another way that the Russians stand as a living and constant rebuke to our rulers’ claims of the arc of history bending their way. I watched an American journalist interviewing Peskov, demanding to know why he wouldn’t release some WNBA sasquatch who’d gotten caught with hashish oil in Moscow. “She broke Russian law and she will be punished under Russian law.” It was like watching an adult talking to a child. I think even “Griller Cons” who had “Red Dawn” on a loop in the 80s are rooting for Russia now.
40
Joey, are you besmirching the benighted Brittney Griner? Please, say it ain’t so.
She may be a WNBA sasquatch to you, but she is a Super Non-Binary Beyond Butch hero to BIPOCs and trans-athletes as well as Ben Shapiro.
7
OK, Yeti, then.
9
Brittney Griner with a str@p-on and Ben Shapiro on all fours – now that’s some ghey pr0n I might ackshually watch.
2
If hyperbolic click baiting Zerohedge is to believed, NATO is getting a super boost of equipment and soldiers to the tune of a quarter million men.
This could be the “hard times make hard men” moment. God help us.
Said it during the Russian troop build up on the border, and I’ll say it again here:
Nobody puts a condom on unless they’re ready to f. These ridiculous madmen are really going to do it. They’re going to pull the trigger on a war with Russia.
9
where will these 250k super soldiers come from? US recruiting is cratering at the same time standards are being reduced. the EU doesn’t have one capable military in all its countries combined.
just like everything the retard lords plan, an army of gen-z soyboys is not going to be winning any wars.
birth rates are cratering all over vaxxlandia; not a good time to get into a massive loss of life event.
12
Don’t forget about the old theory that the elites actually want depopulation. It all ties in with their Gaia worship. WW3 is an accelerant to that goal, especially if white boy gets killed off in the process.
4
Yeah, but just think of the pollution all those nuke explosions will create – though it’ll probably take care of global warming. The question they have to axe themselves is: will gaia be happy or mad?
The same has been said of Russia v. Ukraine: they’re old people’s homes with TFRs well below replacement. Demographically, this war makes no sense.
That isn’t the calculus. [insert favorite conspiracy here]
Personally, I think the West is in the throes of a nihilistic death cult. War with anyone won’t touch our elites in any way, other than to pad their bank accounts.
10
“Personally, I think the West is in the throes of a nihilistic death cult. War with anyone won’t touch our elites in any way, other than to pad their bank accounts.”
Agreed. I think it’s a consequence of massive wealth centralization. When the arrogant cannot feasibly have MORE, the only way to fuel that arrogance is for everybody else to have LESS.
I don’t like the idea of making wealth into a crime… but I don’t see billionaires pushing against the Narrative, either. Mike Lindell and Elon Musk come closest in USA and nobody would call them altruists or idealists.
1
Those NATO spokesdroids are just flapping their gums.
In the real world, one cannot simply print up some armored brigades and heavy artillery like a pallet of euros.
It’s bizarre to watch these creatures proclaim otherwise.
2
Joey Junger: Oh gawd, have you seen the comments at the Daily Mail when they report on her woes? “Bet she misses ‘murrrica now.” “Guess she’ll regret kneeling for the anthem.” If they weren’t so utterly civnat clueless they’d be hilarious in their symbolic patriotism to a dead letter.
And the photos of that thing – sasquatch is so very apt – towering brown thing with wild eyes and dreads and tats being led by normal-appearing White Russian men and women. Perfect symbol of primitive strutting AINO versus competent and proud Russia.
2
I truly am rooting for Russia in all this. What was our country has become the enemy we supposedly vanquished when the Cold War ended. I still can’t believe that I have changed that much. Although maybe I haven’t changed and the country has.
1
It’s spelled “competence”
Sorry, but somebody had to say it.
1
Let me tell ya, I cam close to hurling my PC out the window this morning. I run spellcheck on the browser and for some reason it thinks competence is spelled “competance” or “competnece”. I then used Word and it started doing the inclusivity check, which makes my blood boil.
18
Any reason to keep Word? Open source stuff isn’t always great, but I’ve been using LibreOffice for years.
1
I get it for free, so I use Office. I have used the open source stuff in the past. The Word spellcheck is pretty good. The grammar check is often weird, but I am in the free-love camp when it comes to grammar. What I find infuriating is the inclusiveness crap. There is probably a way to shut it off, but I should not have to do that. Think about the mentality of the people who think this is a good feature.
9
It depends on the level of complexity in the document.
LibreOffice and the other free suites maintain good MS Word compatibility with basic business correspondence.
That seems to degrade pretty quickly once you start including graphs and mathematical equations that are required for STEM work.
1
Intentional or not, I think the spelling error was hilarious.
1
Brings into question the competence or “compentance” of the current crop of Microsoft programmers.
3
You might want to fix the headline. Good points, though.
“The Crisis Of Competence”
Army cuts high school diploma requirement to boost recruiting
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4074445/posts
Every branch of the military is struggling to make its 2022 recruiting goals, officials say
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4074488/posts
High Skrewl dropouts wielding multi-billion-dollar weapons systems is an excellent recipe for achieving Peak Clownworld.
9
Also makes one wonder how the technological armamentarium will be kept in good working order when no one can read or do simple math.
4
Mercenaries.
The hewers of wood and drawers of water, as Marechal Foch put it, will still be recruits. The drone operators, high-tech repairmen and EW specialists will be mercenary white guys. You are already seeing this in Ukraine.
4
Tend to concur. However, awareness of how mercenaries are treated under the Geneva Convention might impede recruitment efforts, no matter how good pay may be offered. 🙂
2
The competent woke white merc pool is not all that large.
Uncle Vlad is whittling their numbers down as I write this.
3
Just so. This is a a problem going back perhaps over a century (one of the first wide scale uses of IQ/Competence tests was by the military during WW I). Here’s a link to a slightly older article:
http://observer.com/2018/08/pentagon-most-americans-are-too-fat-stupid-to-enlist-in-the-military/
Roughly 70% of all young adults are too fat (50%), stupid (~20%) and/or criminal (10%) for any branch of the military. And those numbers have doubtlessly deteriorated in the decade(s) since. As I’ve often cynically noted, anyone who has served in the military and/or lower level government jobs knows that hurdle isn’t particularly high for entry, and it’s all the more pity that large fractions of the populace can’t even surmount those obstacles.
On occasions when the military has waived their standards, the results have been disastrous. An example from the 1960s is “McNamara’s Folly.”
If there’s any saving grace here, it’s that to the extent the services get further dumbed down, is it will tend to stymie malevolent government plans.
3
The ones who would join are too stupid to make it, and the ones who could make it are too smart to join.
1
Well. Competence would begin with spelling it correctly…
1
13
Somebody please link to the video of the western Powers, trudeau, johnson, that horrible Ursula woman and others, sitting at a round table laughing and mocking Putin while they are falling into the pits that they dug for their enemies. I don’t want to starve to death, I don’t want the country to fall into anarchy, but if my reward is I get to see these people swinging at the end of a noose I’ll take it
33
I’d only add that the level of infantile discourse in that G7 clip is pretty commonplace among the managers and execs in the MIC.
It’s not any better among the grey/blue collar set either. Conversations are largely endless snark with a sprinkling of references to gross bodily functions.
2
Once again, let’s go deeper. How did we get here?
First, start with the charade of a two party system in which you have approximately equal voting blocks. Every election now has a reliable base of over 40% for each candidate and only a small percentage decides each race. Now add in vote bribing aimed at the stupid and the needy, who will gladly sell their vote for a few shekels or alms (hello black community and illegals). But that alone is not good enough. Social media is the crack cocaine of propaganda-based indoctrination that reliably sways the mush-heads that play video games 60 hrs/wk and can’t take their eyes off of their cell phones. But we’re not done yet. Tech oligarchs pour $millions into voter fraud campaigns that send out thousands of mules to drop boxes after midnight and deposit tens of thousands of phony ballots in key districts where the local DA has been paid off. And none of this works unless you own the police. The Stasi will only get involved if you try to interfere with the mules or Antifa goons. But they will work their ass off entrapping average citizens that object to systemic corruption in DC. Last, honest voters now know that the game is rigged, the fix is in, the election outcome is predetermined; so they stay home and boycott the election as the only form of protest that the Stasi will allow. And the vicious cycle kicks into overdrive until the corruption and incompetence get so bad that the house of cards collapses. Only then can a real remedy and rebirth commence.
22
Your last paragraph is the killer. I’ve seen the next generation of “leaders” at close range. The thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps me up at night, because based on my very long, very broad experience of college kids, she’s what I call the “Basic College Girl.” They’re ALL like that. Indeed, she’s one of the smart, motivated ones. In their world, she’s a competent go-getter with a lot on the ball…
….and that idiot is going to be La Presidenta por Vida in ten years. Her cabinet is going to be worse, and the generation below her is too stupid to breathe without cue cards. If we survive to 2040, we’re going to be longing for the steely-eyed competence of Joe Biden.
40
2
Every time I see Biden, I’m reminded of what Lisa said to Homer when he didn’t want to let Grandpa drive. “Studies have shown that the elderly drive at least as well as sleep-deprived monkeys.” I’m not sure, though, whether Biden or Ocasio-Cortez have quite as much on the ball as sleep-deprived monkeys.
9
These are absolutely the leaders that this cult of child sacrifice and sodomy deserves
12
how many female presidents are there in South America?
3
With camel toe possibly in between, God help us.
2
Wow. AOC in 2040. I can image it quite clearly, Sev.
The country by then reminds me of a old Elmer Fudd cartoon.
He’s tooling around in his old jalopy, sausage patches on the tires, steam coming out of the engine, cracked windshield, bouncing up and down, looking as daffy as the duck he’s after.
2
How did the incompetent conquer the competent?
How did women defeat men?
How did the tribe subdue the whites?
If the competent are so competent, it is a puzzle to explain how they were overthrown.
Affluence that bred complacency and a love of comfort above all else.
The open-hearted gullibility of white men during good times.
14
Its an underpants gnome argument.
They are so incompetent they dominate all politics, media, corporate, military, judiciary, cultural control in the west and have maintained it for decades.
Its an argument in contradiction to evidence all around.
2
Just because you get to see the clowns in giant shoes falling over each other in the ring does not mean the circus is not managed competently.
The issue comes down to knowing what is the goal in order to judge whether its incompetence or intent.
Destruction can be achieved via chaos as well as any other means.
9
There are two ways of advancing the argument about incompetent leaders:
1) The techno-bureaucratic system has an emergent awareness of its own and selects those who furthers its interests — and they are thoroughly incompetent by the indices we humans measure competence, and/or
2) The “leaders” we see are paid actors performing a pantomime, which is meant to distract and obfuscate both from who really calls the shots and unfolding reality.
What I seem to witness is an engineered demolition of the western world.
6
There are also positions in between obviously.
It does not have to be a giant cnspiracy. It can be quite a small conspiracy if you are in the right positions and all directives are trickle down instructions.
Look at the coof. It does not require every doctor to be in on the fake vex, maybe 10 people in each country in the right positions that set policy and the NPCs just follow the syllabus they are given even unto destruction of themselves.
6
“Look at the coof. It does not require every doctor to be in on the fake vex, maybe 10 people in each country in the right positions that set policy and the NPCs just follow the syllabus they are given even unto destruction of themselves.”
It does require a gigantic conspiracy. These “10 people in each country in the right positions that set policy” alone indicates that TPTB know what those 10 positions are and have staffed them with the proper puppets. Then, you have to have the media support their pronouncements while blocking any competing information. Plus, the politicians to support vaxes and pass legislation to continue to shear the sheep. Not to mention the ability to force people to stay home, crash the economy, and pass spending bills to provide a pittance to the sheep that they will recoup by driving small companies out of business, crashing supply chains, burning food processing plants down, and add a few more trillions of debt to an already unsustainable one. All at the right time. No chance to it. It is a giant conspiracy.
8
By giant I suppose I mean everyone.
You are correct. But even then the size is still relatively small if you consider the decision making positions (n a real sense) and the NPC followers of the directives. Even if the numbers can be quite large.
The NPCs can be as incompetent as you want, what does it matter how badly they f things up, as long as they get the general direction.
In fact I suppose the worse the better if your intent is destruction.
1
The old saying about the Bolshevik Revolution was that is was made possible with Latvian bayonets, Jewish brains and Russian stupidity. A similar phenomena has shaken out over the last thirty years. Neocon brains (scheming), Southern patriotism and Northern cupidity.
17
it’s a consequence of the US having conditions conducive to normies. this crisis of competence is driven by the ascendency of normies.
3
Accurate. Very accurate
2
Quite true.
However, the sands are shifting. Identity politics, failed wars, economic limitations, the arrival of other scheming groups, etc. The environment that created the current leadership is gone.
Will be interesting to see how those three groups adapt.
2
Incompetent versus Competent isn’t like hand-to-hand combat between 2 individuals. The spiteful and the stupid built their control by little increments, acquiring allies along the way, until they surrounded the competent. Then the intelligent people had to fight the corrupted institutions in addition to the malicious fools at the top.
There was a case of a Russian plane that crashed in the early 1990s because the pilot in charge foolishly allowed his son to sit in the pilot’s chair and “fly the plane” for a treat. While the adults were happily chatting, the kid accidentally turned off the automatic pilot and gradually the plane turned until it went into a dive. The g-forces made it impossible for the pilot to get back to the controls until it was too late to save the plane. So it wasn’t a case of a grown man “fighting” a little boy, and why couldn’t he prevail? It was a man fighting the plane, fighting physics, and fighting the Earth itself to try to take back control, and he just couldn’t do it. That’s what it’s like now. We don’t have to just fight Karen, we have to fight the entire school board bureaucracy, and the police bureaucracy, and the military bureaucracy, and everything attached to it now.
17
Good response but it kinda restates the problem.
I’ll summarize your words as: the competent are not very competent at social group warfare, especially when compared to other groups.
This is Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. This is also why individualism is so dumb.
5
it was that same kind of dangerous miscalculation that led to chernobyl going off.
2
Chernobyl WAS the same sort of incident, and for the same reason: the people involved didn’t think there was any danger in what they were doing. They knew they were breaking the rules, but they thought there were fail safe devices in place, so disaster *could not* happen. They didn’t fully understand the equipment they were working on, and didn’t realize it.
Our situation is similar. The malignant misfits now running the the machinery were allowed in by people who thought, “Oh, what harm can it do?” Humoring the barren harridan with a safety fetish, the truculent foreigner, the sexual deviant with a chip on his shoulder… let the baby have his bottle, just give them what they want to shut them up!
As someone wrote to Mark Steyn in 2008, “We’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.” A few people like us were ringing an alarm bell, but most people went along with jaunty insouciance, sure that the design margin was big enough to absorb the damage done by these worthless parasites. Decades later, we’ve tied down the emergency siren cord, the alarms are shrieking non-stop, the plane is in a nosedive, and the normies are FINALLY starting to wonder what can be done about all this.
3
Dr. Mabuse: Excellent analogy. And spot on – that is what daily life now feels like – fighting the burkha clad drivers or Karens texting on the interstate, while keeping an eye out for cops looking to ticket a White dupe minimally exceeding the speed limit. Dealing with surly or nonexistent store clerks, trying to find someone who speaks English, and knowing not one of them understands the system they are now helping to crash – who designed it and for whom, and why.
And I’m not even trying to fight anyone or preach to anyone. I’m just trying to attend to what used to be everyday ordinary business, but is now like some extreme challenge reality tv show.
1
Competence is measured against some standard. If you replace your estimation of competence against theirs, then in makes more sense.
If you want to “fundamentally change America”, replace white people and any remnants of Western Civilization, and achieve a new world order ruled over by elites who eat beef while you eat bugs, then an estimation of their level of competence rises.
4
Correct. White America needs to wake up and trim down.
I’ve always been fascinated by how incredibly effective neocons are at weaseling into power and how terrible they are at wielding it.
Their natural knack for extracting wealth from a foreign society simply doesn’t translate into maintaining that society, much less improving it. They utterly lack noblesse oblige for others, even those over whom they rule and rely upon for their position.
They truly are an odd people, so talented in many ways and, yet, completely clueless in others.
21
“Parasite” is a harsh word, but…
15
Yeah, but parasites usually try to stay in the background, quietly sucking enough blood to survive but not so much as to kill the host.
Our friends are anything but quiet and seem determined to either kill their host or force it to expel them. It’s a very odd evolutionary strategy.
12
I cannot for the life of me discern any “talent” possessed by the likes of Max Boot.
14
Every group has their strengths and weaknesses. The group I belong to created Western Civilization. We’re also very high-trust and are prone to suicidal altruism.
17
Back in the day, we were king of the hill, knew it and acted like it. Now, well easy times have created weak men and women and here we are – on the edge of the abyss.
9
One of the strengths of the deep state uniparty whatnot is in holding up the high stations of the supposed opposition while also grounding them into the leftist power plant such that their only “wins” were either inert or bipartisan or 100% theatrical. Bi-partisan of course being just gaytalk for anti-heritage American.
The lefts monopoly on credentials of institutions and the institutions themselves captures oppositional talent and yokes them to the machine such that their gifts are corralled for the opposition from day one. Kinda like how the NBA-Nike adopts basketball American eggs out of the ghetto by age 10.
It’s why I have never thought much of the WEF ‘global leaders’ thing. Having been anointed ‘young leader’ and the like myself back in the day by various institutions by nature of simply being a high performer, the entire system is constructed to harvest talent and then sort for the psychopaths, true believers, or opportunists which are slotted into positions of actual power while the rest are paid to occupy positions of pseudo power or administrative title.
There is position and there is power. We have a system in which careers can be made out of positions. Positions in which the power is vested elsewhere. From what I have seen this is how we get both evil genius and retards running the show with mostly retards or well-kept opportunists in the visible ‘positions’.
13
I believe I know what particular ethnicity you refer to 🙂 While we didn’t specifically cite them, it’s no secret they are found disproportionately in government and other skilled positions. They have a history going back centuries if not millennia, of going from outsider, to necessary evil providing needed skills, to highly successful examples in niches of their host nation; yet often bring disaster upon both themselves and their host. Perhaps these people don’t hold exclusive claim to such an odd tendency. Yet it’s a foible well-attested in world history and even in their own writings.
5
During the Democrat primaries, when Tulsi Gabbard participated in the debates, she was clearly the most impressive and competent among the large group running for president. The contrast was striking. Mayor Buttboy was bland, Williamson was a weirdo, Biden a confused old guy, and Kamala Harris was exremely unlikeable and a dunce.
To be clear, I’m not heaping glowing praise on Gabbard. I would guess that most of us have met and known individuals more impressive than her. She just stood out as the best of the worst.
25
Of course it was retarded and will become more retarded each time because their primary intended audience is blacks and college aged girls. 100% chance of retardation.
6
Yes. And when she qualified for the next round of debates, they changed the rules to exclude her. (The R-team did a similar thing to Ron Paul back in the day, as did the D-team w/ Hilary in ’08.) The inner party chooses the candidates.
1
Given they are 2 private monopoly organizations they can set the rules to whatever they want.
The questions should be why are you voting for employees of a private monopoly organization to run your life?
> Next up is Kamala Harris, an absurd manifestation of a system that selects against competence.
No, no. She’s extremely competent. She literally slept her way to the top. She is the perfect role-model for the Only Fans Generation.
12
I guess you could say that Kamala is someone who actually does things. Unfortunately, those things usually require her being on her knees.
3
Kamala Harris rose to the top in a system where failure meant all her unspeakable acts with Willie Brown were for *nothing*.
3
San Fran is full of beautiful, intelligent women and she is neither. That Kamala was able to rise to the top through slutty adultery surprises me. Even when she was young, I would have put a bag over her head. She must really be uninhibited and adventurous.
1
She was willing to sleep with Willie Brown. How many beautiful, intelligent women could stoop so low??
Might be an idea to re-watch Mike Judge’s 2006 film, “Idiocracy.” This was one of those “semi-banned films.” But it also troubled viewers because it was too close to today’s reality, rather than five centuries from now.
When the struggle for survival (temporarily) subsides, and nature does not choose for competence and ability, then the population and its leaders become weak, flaccid, stupid, and thoroughly incompetent.
8
It was absolutely crazy when that movie came out. I mean, they delayed it for a year, trying to bury it, they did absolutely no press tour for it, still I managed to see it in the theater on opening night, a Friday night, walked into the theater there were eight other people in there. We all just literally looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders like this is so bizarre. The theater was packed of course for everything else
7
An interesting example of a new category–the anticipatory 7documentary.
3
Factoids via another publication:
• Despite efforts to curtail purchases of Russian energy exports, soaring oil and gas prices — themselves, a reaction to the invasion — have poured funds into Russian state coffers.
• Russia’s current account surplus tripled to more than $110 billion so far this year, putting it on track for a record.
• The income boom has propped up the country’s currency and stabilized inflation. That, in turn, allowed the central bank to scale back the emergency interest rate hikes it implemented at the beginning of the war.
The G7 continued escalation is a tacit admission that efforts to isolate Russia economically have been insufficient to cut the flow of cash helping to finance Putin’s war. To continue the…punishment of Putin, G7 members are now preparing for gas shortages, what gas there is – is at all time highs, inflation is rampant, an outburst of labor strikes / unrest, and significant food shortages on the horizon.
Problem: the power of magical thinking in the political class doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect.
Solution: add gas to the fire by creating creating more money we don’t have to pour into Ukraine so we can have more death and destruction.
Stupidity on a tower of Babel scale.
10
Spectacular. Which publication was that, Stranger?
1
Axios Markets (trends Left, but generally informative)
If you look at American leadership from the Founding until, say, the late Twenties, it was characterized by mediocrity. Yes, there were impressive and dashing and highly competent individuals here and there–Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and so on–but most leaders simply were figureheads for their respective parties and movements. The federal government was not complex, was relatively tiny, and secondary to most aspects of life.
FDR changed all that with predictable results. Complex systems require highly competent people with good skillsets in narrow areas. Being a democracy, of course, means mediocrity will be the norm under the best case scenario. As things have evolved over the last almost hundred years, though, a caste system has developed that inserts incompetents into positions in a complex system where at least mediocrity is required.
There is a White Pill here, though. As the central government lurches from failure to failure and becomes a bitter joke, local and state governments will become the actual power centers and the dictates and pronouncements from the Imperial Capitol will become ignored with increased frequency. Yes, this means hysterical idiots like AOC will have control over nukes (this is the case now) so the prospect of annihilation will increase, along with total devaluation of the dollar, but everything from the postal system to the military will pose less of a threat and imposition in an increasingly smaller sphere. The first beneficiaries will be the already reluctant reluctant satrapies of the GAE, and in short order lording it over Northern Virginia will become next to impossible.
To play on something you wrote the other day, what if we had a Civil War and no one noticed? That’s what is happening even now. It is de facto, but that’s a feature and not a bug.
10
Jack – I tried this exact argument last time Zman wrote on this subject and most everyone crapped on me!
But obviously I think you’re correct in that the increasing complexity of centralized systems requires greater skill and makes a constant level of capability among bureaucrats seem inadequate to the task.
Simplification and decentralization is at least a start towards the solution.
6
Would like to agree with you about state and local takeover of federal functions. I tend to think that the best states are a lot better than the average fed. However, the bulk of the money is with the feds, and they have to agree to “give” it back to the states. Doesn’t happen without a lot of strings. And those strings pretty much guarantee a continuation of the current state of governance.
5
The Fed printing press and the remaining trust in the USD are the two pillars of their power.
Remove those and they’ve got nothing.
3
At one point Republicans touted block grants to remove the strings. Of course, the federal GOP lawmakers couldn’t grift as much if there were direct transfers to the individual states.
While every state would take a hit, in some cases a near-fatal one, if federal funds were not available, all of them would survive in some form or another, likely in a coalition. Further, the reality is that the funds WILL dry up. To play on what Geese noted, worthless dollars make everyone poorer and the federal government essentially powerless. So those funds will be essentially meaningless in the near future.
Some think this will give rise to war lords and barter, but something similar to the concept of the failed attempt at crypto currency as a means of exchange, which the feds had to snuff out, will be the more likely outcome. When all the central government can offer is billions of dollars that will be inadequate to pay for a few miles of road, it is game, set, match.
The Black Pill is there will be attempts to strip mine White Heritage America of its assets, but that will prove limited because most of those assets are pegged to dollars. Still, study the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution when thugs ventured outside of the cities to seize food and hard goods. However thuggish, they were men. Compare and contrast.
4
Let me add, as others have previously noted, the proxy war in Ukraine was a failed attempt to expand the debt-based GAE economy into new areas. Without an increased number of people willing to buy its debt, the GAE cannot go on.
4
Jack: I don’t know that having local and state governments becoming “actual power centers” will necessarily be a good thing. The majority of immigrants and women in my DFW ‘burb vote for the holiest person of color they can find. Greg Abbott is always looking for good press but never does anything of any real substance. I have yet to regret having my name removed from the voting rolls.
As the larger institutions people once depended on decay, so too will the smaller ones – i.e. state and local ‘government.’ Because they, too, suffer from a lack of competency. And because most people are utterly unprepared for any sort of self reliance or unplanned event, they will not know what to do when their institutions and rules fail them.
While I like the idea of local and regional power gradually reasserting itself, I think the reality is far more likely to be increasing chaos. Even now, things just barely work. Getting one thing done or one financial conflict resolved can take a week of phone or driving time. The city council can continue to make its rulings, but the real people and real industry that enables real modern life is gradually falling apart. I don’t think regionalism is going to stop that, at least no in the short term.
2
“The city council can continue to make its rulings, but the real people and real industry that enables real modern life is gradually falling apart. I don’t think regionalism is going to stop that, at least no in the short term.”
I disagree in part. While in the short term the larger urban centers will sink further into dystopia, those even of middling size will stabilize into less grand visions of themselves; I expect public school systems to be a thing of the past in about ten years, for example. Long term, the larger urban centers surrounded by saner, Whiter areas will fall into such chaos that adjacent state and regional governments or whatever form they take either will wall them off or do what everyone knows needs to be done.
If you live in an area already in chaos, it will get worse and you should leave it now. Such places likely will be isolated and run by duly elected warlords in the near future, and some even are now. DFW is one such place, to be certain. I could see Texas itself as a multitude of hostile or allied polities.
I’m not given to White Pills but mostly healthy disintegration is our future.
Overall, a good essay. The main criticism that springs into my mind (“oozes up from the bottom muck” might be more accurate 😀 ) are some open-ended questions like:
Given that our present government(s) select for incompetence, what behind-the-scenes entities most likely profit from this state of affairs? Two ancient investigative rules: Follow the money; Who benefits?
Z implies as much (e.g. the odd selection of Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary process): the apparent leaders, the Bidens, maybe even the congress critters, are largely puppets and figureheads. Who is it, actually, that pulls their strings and puts the words into their mouths?
10
On the bright side, the truly capable in this society have been busy getting stinking rich in technology, commerce, biotechnology and finance. There is plenty of talent in the private sector. So far, they’ve taken the path of least resistance and gone along with some of the crazy woke stuff. Perhaps when things start crumbling around their ears, they may insist upon reforms.
I don’t know why I’m so optimistic this morning…..all the leftist butt-hurt around the Roe/Dobbs decision put a spring in my step.
4
3
We’re starting to see the vestiges of a counter elite with the likes of Musk dipping his toes, of course Bezos and Thiel also.
Of course, it’s largely due to the fact they’re nerds whose brains can’t stand the double-speak and just want to go into space and do cool stuff. The technocrats are largely bugs who want to ensure the rest of the world become bugs just like them. Their goal is to crush anyone attempting true greatness to dust.
The pioneer white nerds got their own tools used against them then got cancelled by the ascendent left, which just goes to show these tinkerers need people over them with leadership and power or they’ll just get rolled. The libertarian internet was smashed within less than a generation.
7
Did the libertarian Internet ever really exist?
I mean, there is evidence that government money was behind most of the Big Tech monsters running amok nowadays.
3
Every big tech company, from Youtube to Twitter to Facebook, was very libertarian at the start. Whether this was sincere or just an act is a very good question.
3
Probably about as real as the Libertarian party itself.
1
You’re a nerd with a passion sincerely pursued. Once you’ve got something going, the bigs come to you with a proposal and a promise to take your passion mainstream. Now you’re corrupted.
It’s called capitalism, and it’s how every modern industry began. Shakespeare had a theater, Disney isn’t even a person anymore, just a poz-spewing global brand. I don’t doubt who wins the marathon, though.
1
They still are. Big tech says do what feels good. Nothing is wrong, except telling someone else they are wrong. This is libertarianism in a nutshell. They’ve just been guilting into verbalizing what a libertarian ends are.
Thanks Chet. You made my point better than I did. I would just add that the people here who think successful hedge fund managers aren’t smart haven’t met many successful hedge fund managers. The issue obviously is how they are directing their efforts and whether they benefit society.
Captain Willard: Calling those getting rich in finance and technology “the truly capable” is not how I would describe the hedge fund leaders, day traders, and dot.com bots.
4
The finance guys are capable at extraction for doing very little work. I worked at hedge fund. Of all my jobs, no one put in fewer hours than hedge fund managers and traders and made more money.
Creating financial markets and then skimming off of them is a skill but a socially destructive one. My favorite failed painter outlawed this and he was correct.
3
It goes back to morality. Don’t deal with your demons. There are no demons. That’s the crazy talk of spooky people.
If virtue was enough, CivNatery would have us in good shape.
So we end up with morons following retards who kill foreigners, sell out Americans, and oppress the whole world to get rich.
2
> People forget that the Democratic Party had to rig its own primary to get Biden the nomination. They never stopped to think what this would mean after the election.
Seeing three contenders drop out and support Biden on the same day was more insane than even Trump’s election, with barely a whimper from the radical left. And then Reddit and Twitter went from their guy to Biden on a dime. While it was probably largely bots trying to shift opinion and manufacture consent, the fact that the power players running these things were all in lockstep showed the farce of democracy more than even the most hilariously corrupt elections.
10
There’s no great leader in the wings to take control when things finally turn to chaos. Therefore the chaos soon to be unleashed will choose its own leadership. People of which no one has ever heard. Or should I say men of which no one has ever heard, because we’re heading for an era where the ladies will be shown the door…to the kitchen. They’ll come from doing real things in real industries, many of which will have been government contractors at some point. Maybe even some with a minor stint in government, only to look around and know that they were better than that. Most importantly, they’ll have the skillset that will be the most in-need. They’ll know how to kill and without remorse.
8
2
I’d say government subcontractors, perhaps ones specializing in custom fabrication.
The managers and execs in the big MIC shops are nearly as clueless as the Jonestown, DC crowd.
8
Filed under ‘Competence of the Third Triumverate’:
Rice, Jarrett…and that skilled Chicago community organizer…obozo.
3
The ruling class has fallen into decadence and incompetence. Covid was a big wake up call, or at least should have been. Had they stuck their fingers in their ears and covered their eyes and mouths, they would have handled it much better. Simply doing nothing and wishing it away would have been a better strategy.
They are even worse equipped to deal with the war in Ukraine. Really, they probably did more than any other group to start it. What is standing between us and a nuclear exchange is the sober men in Russia. Russia is already justified to start sinking US war ships. We are playing word games where if we don’t declare war, we aren’t at war and it would not be fair to sink our ships killing thousands of our navy men. How did this work out with the Lusitania? When you hide munitions on a mail steamship, it doesn’t magically protect you from torpedoes.
15
“They are even worse equipped to deal with the war in Ukraine. Really, they probably did more than any other group to start it. What is standing between us and a nuclear exchange is the sober men in Russia.”
The problem is with the hysterical, feminized “leaders” in the United States, and that now includes the Pentagon. They easily may bungle us into a nuclear war.
5
Worse yet, politics necessarily revolves around getting the “woman vote” – hence feminism will never be dropped (until it sinks society). Russia is largely free of this burden. Putin understands all this but it unfortunately doesn’t make having to deal with the hysterical US/West much easier.
2
The woman vote is dictated by the media conditioning. so it seems a closed circle of providing the opinions you then solicit.
You get the “vote” for policies you seeded as if by magic.
4
Our Elites are governed by the principle “I think, therefore it is”
14
Let there be light
2
Rather, “I feel this should be, therefore, no matter the feckless stupidity involved, it must be made to be so. Selah!
1
My image of our government is a woman doing interpretive dance in a burning building.
4
…and some of the women have male appendages and five o’clock shadows.
1
The modern man cunningly manages not to present his theology directly, but through profane notions that imply it. He avoids announcing his divinity to man, but proposes goals that only a god could achieve or proclaims that the human essence has rights that suppose it to be divine.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
(sorry for my translation: it is the best I could do)
2
The selection criteria of the ruling class is simple: They don’t want anyone who comes from the dreaded “private sector” and they don’t want anyone who can outshine them.
For the media, as you said Z, it’s pathological lying in support of whatever narrative they try to pass off to the public as the truth.
In the military, there are also selection pressures for the officer class. Once, there was a hidebound group of “ring knockers” who graduated from each service’s academy who used their friendships and connections to rise up the ranks. Many times, those like me that were a product of ROTC or the officer candidate schools were passed over for important jobs by less qualified but well-connected candidates.
While that still is the case, the diversity dictates are also now an issue. The officer class in the U.S. military now selects for slimy operators who will jump up and down like organ grinder monkeys for whatever tune their political masters play. If that means sending mentally ill “trans” lunatics onto ships or into cockpits, they’ll do it without a second thought to what it does to our actual military capabilities. Wonder why planes crash and ships burn or collide with other ships? It’s because our officer class has been purged of the competent who make waves or those like me that appeared to tow the line but secretly resented it and replaced by the politically reliable, who aren’t as competent or are dangerously incompetent.
The reason why our special forces are used so often is they’re the only really reliable troops we have. The regular Army, now weighed down with women and diversity, is borderline useless and would get obliterated by a halfway decent army in a stand-up fight.
My last job in the Reserve was the squadron’s keeper of the tribal knowledge as the ranking officer in the STAN/EVAL department. I had great power as the chief custodian of the squadron’s flying qualifications, acting as both a teacher and an inquisitor. I tested pilots and crew for their knowledge of all-important procedures (everything we did in flight and during emergencies uses some sort of procedure that should be muscle memory and recited without a second thought when queried) and since those are safety related, I had no slack for those who didn’t meet the standard. Failing a check ride flight with me where I drilled a pilot on procedures was a career-killing death knell if they weren’t able to correct their mistakes.
The problem I ran into at the end was the Air Force’s stated goal to make the cockpit more diverse. I was begged, pleaded and cajoled by higher-ups when I failed a female or diverse pilot to “cut them some slack” and other numbskullery. It once happened only with ring knockers, but it started to become more common when it came to making the service “more diverse.”
I told them that a pilot that doesn’t know the proper procedures is a danger to his fellow crew members, any passengers and people on the ground. I also said there is one standard and it doesn’t care about race, gender or politics. It requires knowledge and execution and if you can’t do that, you have no place in the cockpit.
While it didn’t affect my fitness reports with my command, I got tired of being asked to give folks a break. When I had a chance to retire rather than take a promotion, I gleefully hit the exit hatch and went back to my civilian employment full time. I knew things would only get worse because I retired with Trump in office and the diversity lunatics were still pedal to the metal. I can’t imagine what it’s like now.
24
dr_mantis_toboggan_md: You appear to be one individual to whom I can say, unironically, “Thank you for your service.” Although, to put that in perspective, my husband and I lament that his father’s lifetime military career was ultimately worthless in view of what AINO has become.
7
As I’ve said before Europe faces much worse than a rough winter. Come the fall the EU will be finding all sorts of ways to unwind the sanctions. It is not apparent to me why Putin (let’s play the West’s name game) should increase energy supplies. Putin’s St Petersburg speech is an astonishing contrast to the wall of lies that issues from the orifices of the west.
https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/vladimir-putins-st-petersburg-speech
Electricity costs in Germany are three time higher than in the US – 33 cents kwh v 11 c kwh. and will likely double again. We are going to witness the de-industrialization of Europe over the next couple of years.
There is a desperate need in the West for new Elites- ours are just not up to the job and every time they have another opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot, they miss and put another round into the scrotum. An act of mind-numbing stupidity is the decision to prevent the purchase of Russian Gold. Proudly they proclaim Russia is cut off from the two major centers of Gold trading : London and New York/Chicago. The “Gold” traded in the West is almost entirely paper, the Central banks of several countries have been trying for years to get good delivery on gold from London and estimates of the leverage of trades to oz’s range from about ten to one to six hundred to one. The cardinal virtue of gold is that it is a “financial asset” with no counter-party risk, in the West the vast majority of those who think they own gold own pieces of paper with a pyramid of counter parties often dozens deep before their claim on the physical asset itself can be satisfied. The two biggest Metals ETF’s GLD and SLV changed their prospectus within a couple of years of launch to specify that you could not enforce settlement in Oz’s but only in Dollars.
Meanwhile, the worlds major gold purchasers India and China will continue to buy Russian gold at the real physical market price.
Just as the energy sanctions are going to de-industrialize Europe, the Gold market could well be the thing that brings the financial house of cartels to the ground.
Just how thick are these fuckers?
13
Think of how retarded the average EU politician is, and then realize half of them are more stupid than that.
11
I said that and then I read a piece about the head of NATO committing to zero carbon emissions for NATO by 2050 and the push for electric vehicles on the battlefield and that NATO already takes “account of climate change when planning our operations and missions.”
https://www.rt.com/news/558014-stoltenberg-nato-climate-change/
I should have said imagine how retarded Jens Stoltenberg is, and then realize half the EU class is more stupid than he is.
3
They cannot possibly be that dumb, this is the press running out of things to say and coming up with something by combining current buzzwords. What’s wrong is they are not sufficiently endowed with common sense to realize that reducing co2 is an objective with no priority in the context of war, and that the blunder is hilarious.
This latest G7 Biden bungle is a good sample of what’s lined up in the wings. They came in with 2 goals: to ban Russian gold sales (purely symbolic) and to cap Russian’s price of oil to EU (minus Bulgaria, CR, Austria and whoever else gets oil by pipeline instead of port shipment). Apparently Yellen’s been tasked with Biden’s childish project of capping maritime oil.
As if Putin needs to sell oil to EU at US-dictated prices! Further, this BS doesn’t go into effect until December, and Putin will probably have mopped up Ukraine by then (maybe taking Odessa with him). What’s the plan when Putin says “no thanks”? Blame Germany for US policy?
In other words, Biden is pledging future foreign policy failure, scheduled for fallout this December.
9
Two examples of the crisis of competence:
Moderna and Pfizer are tired of manipulating their shot data so they are lobbying the FDA to dump clinical trials altogether:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/who-fda-gates-future-framework-covid-vaccines/
Macron caught on a hot mic telling Biden that Saudi and UAE have no ability to raise their oil production capacity:
https://mobile.twitter.com/freedomrideblog/status/1541521142707589121
The only competence the people have is driving the collective West into aThelma & Louise style ending.
4
Yes, they are good at breaking things, because breaking things is easy. But they cannot build anything.
5
I like Sergei Lavrov’s observation concerning some of his western counterparts: “They must not have done well in school”.
6
Thanks for an excellent piece.
It is also appalling, and an Xray of what our rulers value (and also what they think of us) that their war plan was to deprive Russians of OnlyFans and McDonalds, which would cause them to overthrow the State.
11
As a guy with a long experience in United Nations organizations (yes, I have worked in Mordor), I can tell you that the most incompetent people work there. They are good at talking, climbing and backstabbing but nothing more. Some parts of the UN run at the level of African governments.
Unfortunately, the words they speak are collected by governments and more efficient organizations so they can do real evil.
7
The difference for the West is that the system has been selecting for bourgeois obsequiousness for a long time. […] The crisis of the West is that it is now run by a managerial class that was selected for being the teacher’s pet, ticking the right box on a form and making sure to never utter a discouraging word around the boss.
So very true, it is infuriating being condescended upon by these middle class macaroni morons. Pol-Pot moment from the Zman. Maybe there’s a chance there was a similar situation in czarist Russia, so that the intelligentsia+bolsheviks were justified in their terror campaigns that led to ultimately crashing the old decrepit system down?
Based on the current economic and politic turmoil, I cut and pasted from the conspiratorial web, and integrated with a bit of my own, this bit of speculation about what may be the most probable future scenarios:
We have high inflation, and also have a recessionary trend.
In this situation, squeezing credit and raising interest rates would almost certainly not only aggravate the recession, and cause unpredictable social disruption. It would also burst a bubble of debt with catastrophic consequences.
The traditional recipe for getting out of a conjuncture of recession combined with inflation prescribes making massive public infrastructural investments to increase productivity, production, employment and income. However, these investments should be made in debt, therefore they are of doubtful feasibility for mostly everywhere in the First World. Moreover it is not certain they will work, and in any case it would take years to identify what interventions are needed, make cost-benefit assessments, complete the tendering procedure and start construction sites.
A similar predicament occurred in the months leading up to 9/11, after all fiscal stimulus to a stagnant US economy – just shaken by the dotcom fiasco – had failed. Given the slowness of the Keynesian remedy mentioned above, the lone major public investment rapid enough to be effective was war. In effect, 9/11 triggered this type of investment, which in turn triggered a new real estate and financial bubble destined to burst in 2008. In exactly the same way, in 1940 it was the war that brought the US out of the collapse of 1929.
From the point of view of the oligarchies of the West, and also of the rest of the globe, a valid solution, which could put them all in agreement, would then be the one described by George Orwell in 1984. That fictitious universe was stabilized into a condition of perennial, multiple wars around the world. This state of things legitimized in the eyes of the populace the everlasting adoption of a war economy, with centralized state management of resources, the possibility of arbitrarily imposed rationing controls, suppression of cash, a strong social regimentation, total control of information, the imposition of a single political thought with criminalization and discrimination of dissenters, such as we already conspicuously have now. This arrangement would leave no alternatives to common people but to ‘understand’ and therefore accept what the elites want, as well as to prevent and suppress protest and the organization of resistance, including trade union resistance.
Our current reality is in fact already very much dominated by the interlocking interests of Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia: their coming, chronic wars without a decisive outcome will allow the power elites to control all resources and all information, and also to curtail all rights. At the same time, it will be possible for them to assuage and galvanize the population with a propaganda representation of reality, and ad-hoc rewriting of the historical past.
Implementing such a system of social and economic control could make possible what the elites most crave for: avoid an economic and financial collapse, hence also avoid a crisis of popular consensus and obedience. That is, avoid reckoning.
On the internal front, the management of the pandemics and vaccination campaigns seems to be aimed at the gradual replacement of the current consumerism-based economy, in need of vast absorption of raw materials and energy, with a system based on the chronic consume of drugs and vaccines. The latter system will be far more sustainable in terms of raw resources, and will be capable to absorb a large part of the disposable income of the great majority of the population. To achieve this, the population should be made drug-dependent and vaccine-dependent through battering media manipulation. People will therefore become immuno-suppressed and as such distracted from socio-economic problems and incapable of rebellion, as they will shift their focus on health issues.
At the same time, a society supervised and regulated by means of social scores or obedience is in development in the West, akin to the one already widely implemented in China. There, access to public services and rights is conditioned on behavior compliant with state rules set by the owners of institutions. What awaits us is a marked reduction in spontaneity, freedom, in short in man’s unpredictability.
Having reached such a point, the elites would be only one step away from solving the Earth overpopulation problem, because the population would now be for all effects under zootechnical management.
This train of speculation would be in line with the interests of the dominant oligarchies, and with current technological surveillance possibilities, hence should not be discounted as conspiracy theory.
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Didn’t read the whole thing, but what I did read was quite good.
Instead of introducing you to the idea of paragraphs, I’ll just slightly refine something you (and many others) have said: IT is not going to war that brings (brought) the economy out of the doldrums; it is putting the economy on a war footing that does it.
Not the same thing.
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I thought each time I would finish a sentence and press ‘Enter’, there would be an empty line.
Evidently I went with muscle memory instead and used ctrl+enter without noticing.
Anybody see the press boomlet for Sue Rice? I guess you can tell I don’t buy it (her covertly running the White House on Obama’s behalf — she is a mulatta preppie like himself so maybe benefits from interpersonal/charismatic favoritism at most). It would not faze me if POLITICO announced she’d paid them to run the puff piece, in the way that publication normally receives news via corporate sponsors.
Rice who to any zoomer may seem antediluvian is actually a new-breed post-Hillary/Schumer figure (and 2 gens after Biden/Kerry fossil formation) and middle-of-the-spectrum for the Taleb “IYI” category– not the worst, not basically benign either; and therefore representative of the problem. Though reputed to be uncouth and foul-mouthed a la some Catholic girls’ school alumna of yore she’s a serviceable example of 2022 D.C. respectability and never won’t have a job there, whether in government or some para-government industry like academia or media. If you wondered what her idea of “patriotism” is, that’d answer itself with an involuntary laugh. Her ilk avidly serve competing neo-religions like feminism, civil rights, education/expertise, of course. These other faiths are popular. Maybe driven by economic insecurity, or maybe narcissism (spoiled-brat softness of “kids today,” etc.) — it totally doesn’t matter. It’s an Orkin paradigm where if you see 1 there must be 10,000 nested in the wall. Thus the “eschew The Cathedral, concentrate on your own community” folks are half-right at best. Until the overall scam collapses, it’ll gobble up smaller critters to the point of some biological ceiling (public-choice economics is true and this is why yuppie Leftist professors hate it). Many feds will post this same glowing analysis on any webzone, not out of ideology but because it fits the Wall-Street self-defense method for a rotten edifice. I think you could connect this to their half-baked military envy, too. They have only cargo-cult plans for Iraq or Syria or Ukraine or whereever yet seriously worry at night about the activities and merit badges that comprise a powerful person’s cursus honorum. This attitude happens when you don’t feel you own something.
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You say that the neo-conservatives were to blame for these wars. However, what about the ‘Intelligent Services’ certainly they must share in the blame.
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I’m afraid I do not understand why my comment will not published?
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