252 thoughts on “Our Alaric Moment”

1. Great post Z–one nit to pick. “A pint’s a pound, the whole world ’round”, is the saying.

   Of course it refers to the approximate weight of a pint of water, which “the experts” have not yet figured out how to undermine.

2. I gave it maximum 2 years. One more year of absolute craziness, especially in the markets. Then a year of society waking up as the lunacy ends.

   Keep in the mind that lunacy comes from the latin word luna, which stands for “moon”. As in lunacy can be defined as being under the influence of the moon. We are experiencing a Saturnalia type of event, except instead of a festival of a few days, it’s a lunacy festival of a few decades.

   Saturnalia occured around Winter Solstice during Roman times – just when the moon was at it highest power.

   The darkness eventually recedes and the sun and its light come forth to beckon the day time (awakening).

   We’re close. We’re close to Light bursting through hard. Two years is what I give it and then bang!

   One more year of lunacy, until it feels like there will never be light again. And then a very rapid unwinding of it all.

   Read James Frazer’s The Golden Bough to understand where we’re at.

3. It for sure won’t be Alaric.
   But it might well be Alarico.

4. If you were living in the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century, then you probably weren’t Roman. Virtually all the remaining Romans had left, either to the East or to estates in the provinces. When the Barbarians crashed the gates and sacked the city, the remaining inhabitants of Rome were mostly immigrants, include other Barbarians.

   Of course, there weren’t that many Romans left, period. Centuries of hedonistic living and the accompanying decline in birth rates had decimated the Roman population. The future belongs to those who show up for it, and the Romans didn’t bother to make the show.

   • Native Roman birthrates cratered in large part due to Roman women never really getting over the experience of acting independently from the men during the Punic Wars (which saw a World War-type shortage of manpower on the homefront due to the need for soldiers).

5. “. “A pint is a pint the world around” was true from peak of the British empire until just a few years ago.”

   Only in America. A Pint in England was and is 20 fluid ozs.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint

   • The saying is actually “A pint’s a pound the world around.”

     A pint is 1/8th of gallon, and a gallon of water weighs 8.34 lbs, so one pint of anything with a density close to that of water will weigh very nearly one pound, which is close enough for cooking and baking at home.

   • “A pint is a pound the world around” meaning that a pint is an 1/8th of a gallon of liquid by weight.

6. Z, you are a far better interviewee than El Nino is an interviewer. After a while the verbal tic “it’s like” “it’s like” It’s like” got on my last nerve to the point that I was just waiting for the next fingernail on the blackboard rather than considering his arguments. I know this sounds uncharitable, but it’s what would prevent me from subbing to him,

7. I’m curious what your opinion of this is. Do you think affirmative action at universities wouldn’t be as big of a deal if the universities actually had a race conscious policy (which has been prohibited since 1978) but with a floor. Like what if Harvard had a policy that we will automatically admit any black student with a 30 ACT or a 1300 SAT or higher. For those below, you’re not getting in unless you have a wealthy donor parent.

   In that kind of situation, the average black would probably still score below the average white – but they would still be very capable.

   • My Big10 school has/had admittance for applicants based on class rank and Act/Sat scores and the program applied for (Liberal Arts vs. Education vs. Engineering).

     The problem was, once admitted, the top 5/10% of the students from the 100% black/ brown urban schools kept flunking out/ scoring at the bottom in the difficult majors (accounting/ engineering).

     What would have been a “capable” black/ brown at Omnidirectional State was a washout at the Big U.

     Mismatch.

     • the university of Texas system decided to do a program where the top ten percent of a graduating class got in automatically. They wanted the smartest and most capable blacks in there system.

       The problem was is that the most capable black students often were getting rejected based on it. An intelligent black from Sugarland (nice suburban area near Houston) who was in the top 20% of there class but not the top 10% would often have higher ACT scores than a black in the top 10% in an all black high school.

       • Correct – there was no adjustment based upon the school from which the student came. So a student from a school where a 2.0 GPA makes you valedictorian* gets in whereas a student from a school where 4.9 GPA puts you in the top 20% means you are out (or at least not automatically in). A caveat: with the UT system you were “admitted” to a general studies program, but not necessarily to a specific school (e.g., school of business, school of engineering). That was a separate admissions process and where the school likely corrects the ill-conceived “Top 10%” rule.

         * See “High School High” (1996, would not have been made today).

         • Haven’t seen “High School High.” But I have seen “Dangerous Minds,” a depressing look at dysfunctional urban school, claimed to be based on true stories.

         • HSH is a comedy poking fun at inner city high school culture, so not depressing on the surface.

     • Have you ever noticed that when it’s mentioned, usually in passing that (for argument’s sake) Harvard had 24 Negro graudates in the Class of 1960 or whatever, that rarely if ever does the speaker/author stop for a moment to consider the implications. Yes, beyond all doubt, there was widespread racial and other types of discrimination in the US at that time. The popular mythoogy of the civil rights movement would have one believe that Blacks were not wanted in elite universities. The “proof” of this was (and often still is) that they are vastly under-represented in the student body relative to their share of the population. Why don’t they ever pause and ask: “If University X was discriminating against Blacks, then why were there 24 Black graduates that year?”

       On a related topic, one of my favorite footnotes of desegregation history is the Wikipedia entry about Dunbar High School. It was an elite Negro high school that, perversely, was ruined by Brown vs. Board. Only slightly less ironic is the very end of the article. Until 1954, Nearby Fairax County, VA saw fit to send their talented Negroes to this school. Doesn’t that sort of go against the popular civil rights stereotype that Virginia was racist, Jim Crow (which were true, beyond all doubt) and did nothing but keep the black man down (which doesn’t seem well supported, at least in the present case)?

   • There are no hoops to jump through to make it work. Reality and biology are far too strong as adversaries. Blacks are not as smart as whites who are not as smart as Asians. Nothing will change this. Blacks who are pushed through entrance will either fail or the academic standards will be removed or reduced to remedial levels to allow them to “succeed”. This is already happening in nearly every institution. This is why you are completely out of your mind if you have a major surgery in ten years.

     • Tired Citizen: “whites… are not as smart as Asians”

       This is an utterly asinine assertion.

       ===============

       PS: Note the lower case “w” on White and the upper case “A” on asian.

       There was even an upper case “B” for Blacks.

       JIDF/Antifa.

       QED.

       SMDHing.

       • Give me a break… The capitalization for blacks was only because it was the first word in the sentence. The lack of capitalization on White was just an accident. I don’t know why I capitalized asians, I didn’t pay that much attention. You’re reading into things here.

         • Interesting distinction. I’m right in the middle of a new book: “Race and Evolution” by Sanderson. He uses lower case for whites and blacks, but not Asians.

     • The jury’s still out on the Asian thing.
       The cultural combo of cramming by rote and cheating/gaming the system may produce better test scores but that’s not the same as IQ.

       • It has often been remarked that Asians are great at memorization, but not as good at creativity. It may explain in part why they excel in areas such as STEM where such things are highly valued, but not quite so much as art, law, philosophy or literature where they do not tend to outperform Whites (they can still do well, but don’t really outperform that I have seen).

         • …and the ethnic group that smokes Whites in the Liberal Arts dare not be mentioned 😀

         • That ethnicity performs well in certain liberal arts. And I will concede they are great comedians.

   • An SAT score of 1300 equates to an IQ of ~117. An SAT score of 1500 (what the top schools are averaging) is ~129.

     Twelve IQ points is a lot. That black kid is going to be – by far – one of the dumbest kids on every class that he takes. He won’t be stupid, but he will be stupid compared to his classmates.

     • ok but the gaps would probably not be as big as they are now. Keep in mind that the 1300 would be the minimum so the median SAT score would be somewhat higher.

       • First, no, the 1300 isn’t some bottom. The vast, vast majority of blacks scoring 1300 or better, in fact, score right around 1300.

         Only 1% of black score around 1400 and you could fit in a minivan the number scoring 1500 or better.

         There just aren’t enough smart blacks to go around. The top 20 schools will eat up basically every black with a score of 1300 or better if they want 10% of the class to be black.

         So, sure, whatever, say that they have to have a 1300. Works for a whooping 20 schools. What about the rest?

         Look, I don’t give a crap. Let liberal worship at the feet of blacks all they want, but the number of smart blacks in astonishingly small. Once you get to the level of good state universities – Washington, Minnesota, Texas, Va Tech, etc. – the blacks are stunningly unqualified.

         • Except for the sportsball teams….

     • Do those numbers corollate over time or has it become the case that a higher SAT score now represents a lower IQ than in the past?

       • SAT has been dumbed down. There have been a bunch of studies showing this most of which have been vanished. Were I less Idle I’d dig one out.

         • All standardized tests have been dumbed down because negroes. When I took the GRE back in ’94, there were three sections–verbal, quantitative, analaytical. The analytical section, which was dashedly difficult, was basically a series of word puzzle problems. It was eliminated, and I don’t think we have to guess as to why.

         • I don’t doubt that it’s been dumbed down, which leads me to wonder if a 1300 was equivalent to a 117, or a 1500 to a 129, in the past or now?

     • Although I wasn’t black as a teen, I was very close to that SAT. I just looked at my records. In 1979 I tested verbal 610 math 670 (combined = 1280). This put me in the 97/98 percentile of “National H.S. Sample” but only 92/93% for “college bound seniors.” OK, so I was slightly > 100 for IQ. Ah, but there was a downside. You see, I was (and still am) lazy. I did not apply myself to my studies. Being a stoner and a drunk since sophomore year didn’t help. In fairness to the drugs and drink, in retrospect I can see that I’d begun slacking off well before I got into the partying culture. I partied my way through a small scholarship and several thousand dollars worth of parents’ money, obtaining a GPA in the 1’s. I’m not afraid to share this (I have before.) Is there a moral? Sure: Just because someone has talent and is even given opportunity, if he can’t or won’t put forth the effort required to succeed, all the rest is of no avail.

       • So what?

         It’s like athletic ability. You have to have the talent and the drive. But when it comes to IQ, blacks just don’t have the talent.

         Btw, I don’t care. If we have separate communities, blacks could be as smart or as dumb as they want – just in their own community.

         I’d don’t love my people because they’re the smartest on the planet (though we’re very close); I love my people because they are my people.

   • “In that kind of situation, the average black would probably still score below the average white – but they would still be very capable.”

     In essence you are asking for a reduction in meritocracy as assuming that a second rate student is/will be as competent as a first rate student. Very capable is not “the most capable”. Aside from this, the “talented” Black you admit will enter into a department of studies and as noted, have to compete will more competent White students.

     There will be, as is now, strong criticism of the department wrt Blacks passed through or failed. If the department holds firm on standards it will fail more Blacks than Whites and there will be hell to pay. This will/has resulted in a reduction of department standards for graduation. All departments seek the very best students they can get because of this problem—even without racial considerations. Been that way since I was a grad student.

     The only way to avoid the above is a blind entry examination given to all candidates. Let the chips fall where they may. Anything else violate selection of the best and brightest. As mentioned, let the talented Blacks seek admission to less prestigious schools, rather than drag prestigious schools down to the level of the student.

   • what is the point of speculating on this? a change to university admissions policy is as likely as winning 5 poerball lottories in a row. will never happen.

     • Au contraire, mon frere. If the change is likely to reduce the percentage of white enrollees, it is not only possible but probable.

8. Great interview on El Nino Speaks.

   Regarding the discussion had during the interview on bussing migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, here is a comical NYT article following up on the aftermath of the initial 49. It starts out with flowery language about the few migrants who are still on the island and how they have adjusted to a new life in the community. However, as with most NYT articles, the real meat of the story is found between paragraph 10-15. This one is no different as by that point the harsh reality of the influx begins to come out.

   ‘How Migrants Flown to Martha’s Vineyard Came to Call It Home’
   Florida flew 49 migrants from Texas to the liberal enclave last year. Since then, a few of them have found work, friends and a new life on the wealthy island.
   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/us/migrants-desantis-marthas-vineyard.html

   “Ms. Cauro is one of at least four migrants who have quietly stayed behind on the island, forming bonds with a community that opened what doors it could. Ms. Cauro, 25, is working as a landscaper. Her brother, Daniel, 29, and her cousin, Eliud Aguilar, 28, found jobs in painting and roofing.

   They first stayed in the homes of Martha’s Vineyard residents who invited them in, and then began earning enough money for a house of their own, with the four of them currently chipping in $1,000 a month each for a two-bedroom house. They got bicycles to ride around town.”

   ‘Not everyone welcomed the new arrivals with open arms.’

   “One longtime resident, Angela Cywinski, said the situation put the community in a tough position, trying to accommodate people who could not legally be hired at restaurants or hotels. Most of the immigrant workers on the island, she said, have put in the necessary time and money to obtain legal status. Ms. Cywinski said she knows migrants from Brazil who have spent up to $60,000 and waited years to obtain visas to live legally on the island. “It is not fair when people jump the line,” she said.”

   So, 4 stayed on island and work low-skill, low-wage jobs and spend $4,000 a month to live in a box on the island while the rest are scattered throughout New England. Quite the American Dream, and what will propel this country into a bright future in the 21st century. Now multiply this by the millions and we see where this is headed.

   • I’ve got a nice mexican fam bought the house next door. 1 car in the garage, 4 in the driveway and 2 on the street. Not sure how many live there.

     • Oh and there is still room on the driveway for a refrigerator.

9. Meanwhile, as the Empire crumbles at home with failing infrastructure, civil strife and political kabuki theater on daily display, USNATO decides to begin opening Pandora’s (Panda?) box with a lurching pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.

   ‘Why NATO’s Growing Interest in Asia Is a Mistake
   https://time.com/6294499/nato-summit-vilnius-asia/

   “NATO, it seems, is making a concerted decision to add Asia to its docket at a time when the alliance has its hands full managing Europe’s largest war since 1945. If this is the plan, NATO policymakers should step on the brakes before it goes too far.

   NATO’s new Asia-Pacific mission is remarkable for several reasons. When the alliance was formed in 1949 amid the looming post-war threat posed by the Soviet Union, it had a clear-cut purpose: protect Western Europe from the threat of Soviet expansionism. Once the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, NATO lost its raison d’être. Expanding to Central and Eastern Europe was no longer an obstacle, and the alliance has nearly doubled in size from its Cold War peak. With its geopolitical adversary dead and buried, NATO increasingly looked outside of Europe, in places like Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to maintain relevance.”

   • Japan part of NATO just makes sense. NATO even sounds like a Japanese word. Just add a “goma” or “shiro” to the end and I am sure some Japanese carries that name. As good a reason as any to include them.

     • Japan has natto, which is pretty close in spelling.

       It’s a traditional dish of fermented soybeans. It’s kind of slimy and funky, definitely an acquired taste, but I happen to love it.

       I predict that one day, some new starlet will go on the Oprah show and mention how she eats natto for the protein and probiotics, and then all 10 million of the Oprioid women will rush out to buy some, turning it into an overnight phenomenon just like they did with that acai berry back in the day.

       It’ll happen. Just you wait.

       • Supposedly it also has blood thinning and clot busting properties.

         Not very tasty, though.

10. Among Warren Buffett’s many Buffett-isms there is one about how investors should have faith in the “American tailwind,” which will (allegedly) carry along the patient investor. During his investing career it was a real thing, part of what made someone like him possible, but I’m of the opinion that we are at or near its end and American markets cannot be expected to be exceptional in the future as they were in the past. Kind of like the investing gospel that states “markets always go up over time,” which is true until it isn’t. How much time are we talking about anyway? A multi decade recession/bear market is a real thing too, it just hasn’t been seen in a long time in AINO.

    Markets are ultimately downstream from culture, is what I’m getting at. And today they are propped up by fake money like everything else about the GAE, the big question being, how long can that continue?

    Talking about butterfat prices gets me thinking about my grandfather again, who churned his own butter from his own cows. A prepper before his time, he was. His farm is still in the family, and I could get it if I wanted it. Far enough out in the sticks that there is no cell phone coverage still to this day. 17 miles to the nearest Wal Mart/hospital. I have mixed feelings about it. It’s a lonely place for an old bachelor.

    The first person I saw use the phrase “as popular as rectal cancer” was Ann Coulter. Did it originate with her?

    • “… markets always go up over time,”

      I can buy that. What I’m worried about is a doubling or so of the market whereas at that time my dollars buy a third of what they do today. 😉

    • Ah, man, I could live out my days there. Bring my books and my coffee and I’d be set to think and write.

11. To those interested in imperial decline, there’s a new 700+ page book that has just come out, titled “The End of Empires”, edited by Gehler, Rollinger, and Strobl, and published by Springer. The final chapter is titled “The Decline of the American Empire”, is written by Hans-Jurgen Schroder, and is about 40 pages long.

    The book examines any number of empires both from antiquity and the modern era — Roman, Parthian, Persian, Hittite, Assyrian, Mongol, Ottoman, Mughal, Inca, Aztec, Napoleonic, Habsburg, Third Reich, Britain, USSR, and the aforementioned USA.

    • That;s a $90 paperback.

12. I am aware of the fact that all comments now go into moderation. I am not sure why this is happening, but I am approving things as fast as I can.

    • If your comments are also going into moderation, it may be the Alaric Moment for the ol’ ZMan.

    • As a Jew Thing poster I didn’t notice the difference.

      • Six million upvotes… that seems a little high!

      • But how could the Wehrmacht click the like button that many times in the midst of a fuel shortage!?!

    • Thanks for the update. I thought I had somehow offended either yourself or WordPress.

13. It’s happening now. Was just in a small town in New England that five years looked like a postcard from 1880. There are dozens of hispanic kids now running around, motorcycles blaring up and down the main street at night, and private security has been hired to sit in the parking lot of the Shaw’s supermarket. They’re everywhere. In ten years they’ll start having kids, right when the Boomers are disappearing, and we will be faced with a sea of brown in any city over 20,000, and even in small towns, dozens of “families” with hundreds of people queuing up abroad to join them.

    • Springfield, MA?

      • Springfield hasn’t looked like a postcard since the 19th century, if it ever did.

      • Ah, would rather not say. But not Springfield.

    • I took a trip to a river far away from the Mexican border. Far far far far away – also in the NE. All set for a peaceful float to watch bald eagles. Then blaring music from Cartajegna on a bank. Up a bit and El Salvador throwing bottles and trash in the bushes and the bank. Up a bit more another bank full of Honduras. Went to my lady’s childhood lake hangout. Taken over by Orthodox. Went to a boat ramp where she could see out onto the lake and where she went as a kid. A gaggle of Guatamalan children playing and splashing on the boat ramp unattended.

      Mayorka’s dream is coming to fruition. May his house be forever marked by all of ours.

    • I live in a state with very few mestizos but just here recently it seems like I am seeing more of them when I go out and about

    • Toronto is completely flooded with Hispanics. They literally appeared out of nowhere this summer.

      I had only met one Hispanic in my life (Mexican father white mother) before this year.

      Short, fat, light, dark, old, young. This old light skinned couple was speaking Spanish at the checkout line at Walmart. Beach day – over half the people are in their 20s speaking Spanish.

      Where did they come from? I have to admit that they are much less alien to me than Indians and Chinese, but it is another instance of random foreigners popping up for no reason. They are not my people.

      • Possible relatives of Auston Matthews there to take in a Leafs game?

14. Light bulbs. My gosh, light bulbs. All one finds these days are those horrid LED things that make everybody look like the Phantom of the Opera, and they cost enough to put a dent in your checking account. Well pay the helluva lot more for a far worse product.

    A good synecdoche for AINO, the LED bulb–a ridiculously expensive mechanism for shedding light slowly fading to dark.

    • Ostei: Granted, but they use minimal electricity and last a long time.

      • And … wiat for it … they come with “temperature” ratings ie warm, cold, etc. for the kind of light they shed.

        Pro Tip: Shop slower; stop and read the packaging.

        • Uh huh. And what “temperature” is quasi-incandescent?

          • I hoarded back when they still made them. Whenever one of my chicken-keeping friends needs a 100W I am able to oblige.

          • “ And what “temperature” is quasi-incandescent?”

            I hear ya, but you’re too harsh. Incandescent is typically termed warm white, or 2700 Kelvin. The rating system is sound, but the (Chinese) manufacturers often cheat. So one brand is different than another. I have a large box of rejected bulbs in my garage.

            LED was foisted upon us when the Fed’s said we need to save electricity/energy and phased out most incandescent bulbs. However, now that bulbs are so cheap to use, I’ve covered my entire home—inside and out—with LED lighting. It’s cheap to run and quite decorative.

            My outside lighting used to be an incandescent 100 watt light bulb on the front entry and another on the porch. Now I have perhaps 40 lights illuminating trees and driveway and the house 360. I estimated the total wattage is less than 300. These lights are just a few lumens rather than the 1200-1400 for a 100 watt incandescent.

            The above illustrates another typical Fed flaw—unanticipated effects of regulation. You forced upon the market an alternative method of illumination. One so cheap and flexible, that I added so many new fixtures as to be using even *more* electricity than before! And I’m loving it.

      • 25 years my ass, I’ve been replacing these f***ers almost as fast as the incandescent bulbs.

        • I’ve noticed that too. Don’t get me wrong, they’re a massive improvement on the CFL bulbs, but they do seem to give up the ghost far more often than is claimed on the package.

          • It seems to depend on the use. I have a lit chandelier that I put LEDs in six years ago and they still work. But in the garage I’ve had to replace a bunch. I think power surges are killing them

          • Cheap Chinese stuff. But it’s the electronics that go, not usually the LED. I suspect testing is not done by switching bulb on and off, but rather a constant on test and an estimate of time to failure.

        • Agreed, Poppy. AINO is now so fake and ghey you can’t even trust its corporate advertising.

      • Their longevity is much overrated.

        • LEDs do last longer than incandescent bulbs. However, they don’t last decades with normal use like their supporters claim. I’ve had a couple of LEDs burn out after just three years or so.

        • One needs to separate failure of LED vs supporting electronics (voltage conversion). I’ve never had, for example, an LED on any electronics (TV, computer, stove, frig, etc) that has ever burned out. Most of these stay on as the device is always plugged in. No frequent on/off with the corresponding surges and heating.

          • You are likely looking at millions of LEDs right now. Many flat screens use them for each pixel. Yes, they fail but rarely.

    • 2700K. Pretty close to incandescent.

15. Like most here, I’m a fan of Glubb’s The Fate of Empires. I’ll just list out the attributes of the final Age of Decadence:

    Defensiveness
    Pessimism
    Materialism
    Frivolity
    An influx of foreigners
    The Welfare State
    A weakening of religion

    We pretty much check ever box. Naturally, the US is under zero threat from other countries. We will need to destroy ourselves. There will be no Alaric from another tribe sacking DC. This will allow the American Empire to stagger on longer than most, and it also means that our decline and break-up will be internal.

    It’ll be interesting to see how the various tribes in America react if (when, I suppose) the world stop funding our debt. The dollar and treasuries are the most powerful weapon of the American Empire. If we have to fund our own debt, serious changes would need to be made.

    Perhaps our downfall isn’t caused by an Alaric sacking DC, but by other nations walking away from treasuries.

    • Of course, Alaric need not be from across yon border. He could be some grizzled paladin from West Virginia leading battalions of DR who’ve finally had enough.

      • I made a comment on social media lamenting the decline of Chicago and was promptly “corrected” by a guy who “assured” me that our city was, is, and always will be great. I looked him up and, sure enough, he’s a black guy–a guy who would probably chafed at things not too long ago. I guess that with the election of the bearded nonentity to the hallowed Fifth Floor, things are going swimmingly well. Z’s mentioning of Alaric and the Visigoths came along fortuitously, since I responded to my interlocutor by mentioning that the Visigoths thought that Rome was a great city while they were pillaging the place. I neglected to mention to him what a Visigoth was, and to my discredit, I may have been off by 66 years in my dating of that ancient rave. At any rate, our latter-day pillagers are homegrown, and have little in the way of a chain of command to direct their energy.

        • Their chain of command might be more real than you recognize. The community organizer in chief has done a tremendous amount of organizing.

          • Perhaps so. I needn’t add any more than the first two words, but perfunctory comments are perceived as “too short.”

      • In the age of drones such a thing is impossible

        • I doubt it. Impossible is a big word.

    • You make a great point. We had a continental sized island surrounded by to massive oceans. A seafaring people with an abundance of salt water ports on two coasts and a massive inland river system. When Rome fell, its drek was replaced by invading Germanic tribes: Lombards; Huns; Goths; Gauls. Its genetic stock was replaced. In America, there will be no such genetic stock replacement for European peoples. We are going to have to do it ourselves through determination.

      The crime of the leaders abandoning their own people and sponsoring their replacement is beyond comprehension. The crime of forfeiting such an incredible continental treasure after the multiple centuries of risk and exploration and settlement is beyond comprehension. The crime of having a population fight an existential Cold War to preserve itself and to propagandize them with movies like Red Dawn, only to win that war and then ethnically cleanse the people who paid for that war is a crime beyond comprehension.

      We can survive and thrive here, but whoever looks themselves in the mirror and decides that their folk and their heritage is worth perpetuating into the future is going to have to work very hard and sacrifice a lot to carve out a land.

    • Maybe Quigley was right, maybe that character in Network, was right— maybe corporations are the new nations, corporate power the new god. Maybe we’ve already been conquered.

      Or maybe I’m just the descendant of colonists rationalizing a nearly-lifelong feeling of disenfranchisement and alienation lol. This America sounds like a terrible place, those Americans— that nation of immigrants— sound like terrible people.

    • Debt funding is our DC; and walking away from it is its sacking.

16. Thanks to Z-Man or whoever that recommended Stanley Payne’s book on European Civil War 1909-1949. Very informative book, had not previously read on the Finnish Civil War for example.

    I think the parallels with the Spanish Civil War are strong. There, it was if I understand Payne correctly, the Socialist crazies who provoked it, the Communists wanting a National Front against Fascism. The Socialists were crazy because they were faction driven, each faction wanting more provocations against the Right/Center than the next to gain the upper hand in the war of the factions.

    Here we have a weak Regency, with factions galore. Marjorie Taylor-Greene mocked Son of Big Guy’s degeneracy with prostitutes, and asked the IRS agent if Son of Big Guy’s paying for said hos to cross state lines was a violation of the Mann Act (it is). And about said Son expensing his sex club fees and hooker payments as golf club memberships and thus deductible for business. A Democrat elicited testimony that Biden did briefly discuss business with the Chinese big shot Son of Big Guy was meeting with. Mocking ala “whose bag of blow was that in the White House” is often fatal.

    Thus the Regime being factionalized, and at the top driven by First Crackhead (now living in the White House as Joe has deteriorated that badly) and Dr. Jill, they will have do stuff that is stupid, vindictive, and cruel in a way that a strong regime would not. Trump not just arrested but perp walked, then Epsteined in jail. No man, no problem. Jeb Desantis getting the same treatment, as Gen Brown takes over from Milley and begins his purge of White non-coms and officers to reach his stated 40% top ceiling of White dudes in the military. And all that flows down into the general population. Nigel Farage can’t have a bank anymore than Fuentes, and that will be AI driven to you. You should know this. It is not going to stop with just a few big shots. The regime is that stupid, weak, and vindictive.

    And then I think its on, various extra judicial murders with no consequences, mass de-banking, and a looming military defeat in Ukraine/Russia with US forces fighting Russians (and losing) might just well do it. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f- things up.”

    • The regime has to know that mass debanking is the end. Those subjects so treated will have little to nothing left to lose. But then I probably would have thought something similar about forced experimental injections, before it happened. Can’t say I ever really contemplated it, before it happened.

      But in the case of debanking, that’s cutting off access to the one thing (money) that still props up the failing empire. The thing that allows people to overlook or tolerate all the other things.

      • The two most dangerous men in the world:

        those with everything to lose and
        those with nothing to lose.

    • Pretty sure AI could identify us all and debank us in an instant. Just by crunching the data and looking at certain behaviours and traits.

    • They first tested “debanking” on innocent little guys, to see how the big names would react.

      The first victim I remember was Martina Markota, who got it for being a Trump fan with a Russian-sounding pseudonym. She was a little-known burlesque girl and podcast guest, interviewed by a few of our guys for being a demographically unusual righty and getting locally (NYC) blacklisted for it. Her own internet show about art history peaked at about fifty viewers.

      One day, either right before or right after Ttump was elected (I forget), they shut down everything. She made some public pleas, “amplified” by a few of us, and nothing else happened. Operation Choke Point was blamed because her job was sort of pornography-related, and reciting that bit of political trivia satisfied the “dissident” nerds, who never thought of her again.

      And so the op was GO. Nigel- and Fuentes-level *potential* targets didn’t stand up for Martina-level *actual* targets, so even those of us who care most don’t care what happens to them. I’d push the button myself.

17. Historiography is a tricky subject that invites many ad hoc speculations and facile analogies. Obviously, America’s descent into the dung heap of history will not fail to bring to mind echoes of the fall of the Rome, but it is important for the sake of truth to understand whether these two entities really belong to the same order or not.

    What’s passing now is not an entire civilization but rather America’s unipolar moment, which was always an aberration that was bound to revert. But to confound matters, the civilization to which America belongs, the West, is also far into its declining years and will continue to fall apart independently of America’s fate.

    The two declines, though they coincide in time, are categorically different. Unipolar moments are accidents (in the Aristotelian sense) and their rise and decline are explained by material and efficient causes. But civilizations are ideas, i.e. more akin to substances, and their rise and fall can only be explained by formal and final causes.

    The situation for the West as a whole will become much clearer once it is free of the American tumor, but since this is not the actual case before us at the moment, we can only attain to that clarity by way of abstraction, separating in our minds what is specifically the American problem from what is generically the Western problem.

    The American problem is one of advanced economic indebtedness and foolishness leading to unsustainable living arrangements, and decades of papering over this reality with layers and layers of moralistic cant that nobody really believes. If you want a good summary of what American politics has been throughout the living memory of all here present, it would be precisely that: Moralistic cant camouflaging bankruptcy. We have had nothing else for domestic policy, and no foreign policy at all. We will collapse like the degenerate heir who inherits a fortune he is unfit to manage, and the world will breath a sigh of relief.

    The Western problem is one of advanced metaphysical shallowness and slapdashery resulting from having tapped out the vein of creative potential. Westerness always had something effete, solipsistic, and rebellious about it, but in the ascending phase of its culture period it could cast that wankerish energy into forms both pleasant and practical, like a violin sonata or a steam engine. Today, what’s left over is simply the wanker-will without the relish of accomplishment, the form without the content. The syncopated cranking of a steam engine, without the constraint of hauling heavy loads, is “deconstructing the patriarchy.” Protestantism, without the ridgebone of orthodoxy, is Woke.

    The final collapse of America will occur well before the date when a new Alaric comes to close the history of the West for good. It should provide us with the necessary time to take stock of ourselves and preserve some of the incidental gains of the past few centuries while purging the spirit thereof. For this reason, I hold that the American unipolar moment cannot pass soon enough, and I will do nothing to prevent it.

    • Nah, what happened is a hostile tribe who hates us monopolized our media and programmed most of our people to accept open borders and to worship backs and sexual deviants. Affluence and compassion enabled this programming. It’s really that simple.

18. “Yet, we stagger on, but somewhere out there is an Alaric moment just waiting to happen.”

    Or instead of that the U.S. will slowly decay into 3rd world status which it is already in the process of doing and it’s military will slink quietly off the world stage without much comment.

    • I think this is the most likely scenario. And as the GAE decays, the hinterlands, populated overwhelmingly by whites, calve and become de facto independent states.

      • That is happening now. It is hard to see things when you are in the midst of them. The open border will not work to abolish these all-white hinterlands unless they put shock collars on the illegals.

      • It has happened in small steps: sanctuary cities/states (some re: immigrants, others re: firearm ownership); some regarding their own version of Fort Knox). What will be interesting to see is if any state decides to issue its own currency. If Texas, for example, were to accept “Texollars” for payment of property taxes.

    • J6 shouldn’t have been the Alaric moment, but in their hyping and exaggeration of it, perhaps the regime turned it into one?

19. Amen! Come, Lord Alaric!

20. Inflation department: here’s a “back of envelope” exercise. First it’s worth noting that among the many official gauges of inflation, they deliberately exclude food and fuel because they are “volatile.” Well, maybe. In today’s simple example, I’m considering housing and the cost of a gallon of gas. I use the Case-Shiller Housing index and a googled nationwide cost per gallon. Gas chart began in 1994 so:

    In 1994, Housing = 78.5, increase to early 2023 approx. 380%.
    In 1994, Gas = $1.00/gal.; increase to date approx. 370%.

    Ladies and gentlemen, nearly 400% rise in prices in thirty years is some serious inflation. Not quite Weimar Germany levels yet, but still, not indicative of a healthy economy.

    • I think the least obscurantist measures of inflation are items found at random, old pictures of grocery store sale signs, hobbyist catalogs, etc.

      My grandma gave me an unused ticket to a Sinatra concert at the Sands in 1961. It was five dollars, a luxury price at the time. You were expected to wear a suit.

      Two years ago I went to see an obscure turn-of-the-century avant-garde rock band’s reunion show at a local dive bar. It was $35. And “real” concerts cost hundreds.

      • It was around the mid 1990s when concert tickets made a very sudden and very large jump, and never looked back. Like from $20 to $100, seemingly overnight. Somebody up there figured out people would pay it. Ticket inflation was slow before that, and slow since, but for a moment there it was hyper.

    • The other issue, and the one that really counts, is the comparison to wage/salary increases. Yikes!

21. Strictly speaking, price/earnings ratio will be just a ratio, “dimensionless” (in this case, no $).

    • Scanning the comments, I see two votes for no symbol, so I removed it. When the symbol police arrive, Ill reinstate it.

      • I was taught by brokers as a young buck that blue chip stocks PE range was 7 – 12. That was in ’94.

        When 7, back up the trucks or accumulate. When getting above 12, check your objective and either sell all, some or stop accumulating.

        As for the dollar sign, it is a ratio, so no dollar sign. Formally, it would be expressed as a ratio. e.g. 7:1 to 12:1 (7 dollars per share for every dollar of earnings)

        Not to be pompous as I am sure you know this, but to be complete. The GAE may be grinding away the Historic American Nation, but we can at least speak properly in the presence of the barbarians.

        • My view on grammar is I go with that which creates the least amount of comments about grammar. That said, some people argue that 12:1 is fine, but if you only use the numerator and it relates to money, as in twelve dollars, then you should include the currency symbol.

          Since the day job requires me to work in multiple currencies, I favor the latter out of habit.

          • No semi-colons in the ethnostate. No Richard Spencer, either.

22. Beautiful post. By the way, just delete the dollar signs ($) in front of the price-earnings ratios and you can delete this comment as well. if you wish.

    • I am not falling for that again. When I would regularly write about economics the comments would be full of people debating whether currency symbols should always be used when referencing money.

      • Dollar sign? I thought you were supposed to use an umlaut (“übermäßig”) or one of those funky “°” thingies Felix and his Danish buddies put over their vowels.

23. The fall of the “Roman Empire” is always a bad comparison. From about 300 AD on, the capital of the Roman Empire and the seat of the Emperor was Constantinople, which was the economic and population center of the Empire. While the western part of the Empire fell in the 5th Century BC, the eastern part endured until the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. AD. The government/state of Rome actually lasted from about 750 BC to 1453 AD, a period of 2,200 years.

    We will end up envying the Romans their unprecedented and never since equalled success.

    The Global American Empire, the Globohomo Empire, is clearly in decline, and its coming defeat in Ukraine will end it. But continental USA will not suffer invasion. Instead the violence the American Ruling Caste has inflicted on the external world since 1945, will be visited on Americans in their homes. Antifas/BLM/wokeisn/transgenerism/pedo-home domination is only the first act of what will be an extremely violent coming decade or two.

    • The Byzantine Empire probably came to an end in 1204. All that the Turks captured was the city-state of Constantinople, which everyone knew had been living on borrowed time for quite a while. But your main point — that the Roman empire endured for a long time — remains unaffected by this minor quibble of mine.

    • Yes, technically correct, but who writes or cites Eastern Byzantine Empire stuff? What the West knows of Rome and the lessons learned come from the era of the Western Empire. Even in my university years, the Western canon taught, pretty much ended with the fall of “Rome” as in the city of Rome, albeit a one sentence explanation was added that the Eastern Empire lived on till 1453.

    • There’s a Ship of Theseus issue here though where when does the empire stop being that empire in it’s recognizable form? A “Roman Empire” with no “Rome” seems like a stretch. It reminds me of the late Ottoman “empire” whose borders didn’t stretch beyond the current Turkish borders.

      We’ll know it’s over when GAE has to concede some portion of it’s empire-proper, Guam to China, Okinawa to Japan, or something like that. It will be framed as a “victory for democracy” or some such, much like the U.K. carving itself up.

      • When can we give Puerto Rico back to Spain? Please?

        • I want to get rid of Hawaii too, give them their independence. We stole it and should give it back.

          • Actually, if I’ve read correctly Hawaii was bought. Mostly sold by the royals there. There was shenanigans via statehood, but not a colonial takeover and annexation. But I’m not certain in my historical knowledge. Bears more study.

      • the uk didn’t carve itself up

    • Power did shift somewhat to Constantinople, but you can’t disregard the immense symbolic weight of Rome itself. Functionally, the former became the seat of imperial power before 476, but historically, psychologically, and culturally, it never bulked as large as Rome. When Rome fell, the world changed.

24. I’d argue that 9/11/2001 was our Alaric moment. Everything since has been a total shitshow that revealed the GAE’s glass jaw and the fecklessness of its ruling class. What did we do in response? Increased Third World immigration and elected a mulatto Muslim more loyal to the barbarians than to us, and sent the mercenary legions out to lose a 20-year war against actual barbarians who had nothing to do with 9/11 while KBR and Halliburton made a fortune and the generals all got promoted.

    Caligula wanted to appoint his horse to the Senate; we have a half-Subcontinental/half-mulatto horse’s ass who was raised in Canada as President of the Senate. Biden may not be a modern Caligula, but it’s clear that his son is no less a degenerate.

    We may be “picking fights” with the Russians and the Chinese, but nobody is under any illusion that our fat, female, minority and transsexual mercenary legions are going to win them.

    We’re basically like Romans circa 430. This is the “new normal” but we’ll have to wait another 30-40 years or so for the full collapse.

    • Yes, when 911 happened I was a blue-pilled pathetic conservative ignaramus kid. I thought, “oh man, we’re gonna settle the shit with the muslims, take back the western-made oil fields, and finally close the border. It’s Reaganin’ time!” Even all the great patriots of the country put cheap made in china flags on their car for a month or two!

      Instead. . .troops are killed and maimed while they go door-to-door or build schools for muslim girls or whatever bullshit they were doing, filling up with gas becomes super expensive and stays that way, border is flung wider open than ever with more muslims than ever, and we elected Obama bin Biden. It took me longer to realize that it was all by-design and on-purpose and not merely incompetence and a tragic series of mistakes.

      Yes, 911 was the end of dominance and the end of 20th century lies we all believed in.

      • And let’s not forget the Sand Hutus built a massive mosque just a couple of blocks away from Ground Zero. Any country that allows that sort of shit richly deserves a precipitous demise. And that is just what has happened.

        • And you still believe the 9/11 bullshit the Media told you.

    • To put it more simply, the US government has already been conquered and occupied by foreign neocons who hate the actual population and mostly give their allegiance to a tiny country in the Middle East..none of whom have ever been elected to anything…They and the other foreign invaders are starting to fight it out for the spoils of a dying civilization…

    • Brilliant post. Somebody in Philly ought to print it out and slap it on the Liberty Bell.

25. Here is an interesting perspective on France: https://counter-currents.com/2023/07/its-not-a-revolt-sire-its-a-secession/

    Scott Greer had a great article called American Chavism a few months back. The premise is that eventually the Democrats coalition of the fringes will figure out that reparations solely for blacks will never work, but that giving every ethnos a grievance and a claim will happen. Then an American Hugo Chavez will arise, and unite the aggrieved ethnic groups and expropriate and dispossess Americans – the European people who created the country from a stone age nothing.

    I saw a blurb from Trump from an interview yesterday, where he said, “If we don’t win in 2024 this country is finished.” It is a great unknown, the odds of whether his election will prevent that. I do think he is right that the odds are certain that is true if he isn’t. I know that because that is the globalist’s goal and their puppet said so. “I want to finish the job.” – Paymasters of Joe Biden

    • Well, they’ve been working on that for generations. Immigrants that come here are often the hardworking, keep-your-head-down, be-thankful-for-the-opportunities-you-have group. These people, I don’t think they belong here, I don’t think they help the nation or its citizens, but they mostly fit the model for what you’d want someone coming here to be. Then they have kids. Conservacucks say these kids would get further integrated into the American fabric. They don’t. They go to American schools, which are all run by leftists, where they get taught to be spiteful mutants and revolutionaries. They come out with a chip on their shoulder and then go and wreak havoc on society. This is, I would argue, the current base of Dem support outside of blacks – spiteful mutant millenial sons and daughters of immigrants. You pile on the oppression narrative and at some point, the kulakization of White Americans is a given.

      Now with the current mass migration situation, it’s a little bit different, you’re getting people coming here with just an eye towards looting the place, who have desire to be good citizens of the country and good neighbors to those who are here. Of course, Dems are quite fine with that.

    • “Trump….said, “If we don’t win in 2024 this country is finished.”

      These statements from conservatives fill me with white hot burning rage. Not because the country isn’t finished, but because Trump and his retarded supporters never do anything when they are in power.

      Trump didn’t do anything to fix immigration, voter fraud, or lawlessness and his supporters didn’t care. If you tried to point out his lack of action during his presidency, they accused you of having “Trump derangement syndrome”.

      Now, after completely wasting 4 years, Trump and his idiot supporters are going around with their doomsaying that we are finished and all hope is lost.

      Thanks for nothing with all your stupid cheerleading for the duration of his whole worthless presidency.

      • Sigh, another TDS person.

        When were the lowest number of illegals caught/counted crossing the Southern border? Trump presidency. When were *any* funds provided to build or repair “the wall” on the Southern border? $1B+ from Trump after he declared a national emergency and redirected those funds.

        That’s not nothing, that’s more than *any* previous Dem or Rep President did or attempted to do.

    • Chavez had the advantage of being able to “boil off” well-to-do malcontents off to neighboring countries, and then kinda-well-to-do, and so forth, something GAE won’t be able to do. Not that it won’t be tried, it almost certainly will.

    • “The premise is that eventually the Democrats coalition of the fringes will figure out that reparations solely for blacks will never work, but that giving every ethnos a grievance and a claim will happen. Then an American Hugo Chavez will arise, and unite the aggrieved ethnic groups and expropriate and dispossess Americans – the European people who created the country from a stone age nothing.”

      This is the plan. It will fail.

      Literally everyone hates the joggers and will not enter into a coalition with them EXCEPT for stupid whites and “whites” and even that is fading away. The other tribes literally hate one another. If, say, the joggers got dey check-kk, Juan and Ignacio would be taking it from Shitavious before he gets back to the mailbox. This is a hellscape, of course, but not one that can continue very long.

      The coalition of the fringes screwing one another over is a white pill. White people sorting and fragmenting is a white pill. These may be the only two white pills in a bowl of black pills, but they are really, really big pills.

26. So what to do?

    Accept the fact and join in on the looting?

    Stoically enjoy your life as best you can until the Neovisigoth invasion makes it impossible?

    Get a MAGA hat, keep voting, cursing, go to school board meetings, buy Yuengling instead of Budweiser.

    Be a prepper and go into hiding?

    • A combination of the first two options? I’m going to enjoy the time I have left, and part of that enjoyment will be derived from fleecing and frustrating the Spiteful Mutant class.

      And when the Goths begin the sack, I hope my people are the tip of the spear.

    • “So what to do?”

      I point to the early settlers out West. At any moment, hostiles could come over the hill, rape your wife and daughters in front of you, before scalping you and taking off with your women folk in tow.

      Fail to split enough wood for the winter, entire family perishes.

      Federals are too busy reneging on contracts with the natives to give a rat’s ass about you.

      Coupled with — learn SKILLS. Unlike, say, storing up foodstuffs (not that I have anything against that), be as ready as you can be to be self sufficient, avoid the snares of debt with your hands. Be around others that are not clueless Eloi.

      No skills? Then not a man. I don’t care how much $$ you ‘make’ or have. You are an Eloi, and to be avoided — and since as such a non male creature, a friendly wave while I drive by will be construed by you as ‘friendship…’ So you won’t even know I am avoiding your clueless self.

      • “Federals are too busy reneging on contracts with the natives to give a rat’s ass about you.” Two virtue signals in one sentence.

        What the hell is a “native” ? Did Indians wear bones through their noses? And reneging on a contract with a defeated foe is not immoral

    • This may sound lame, but I suspect the thing to do is leave it all in God’s hands. None of us are very long for this Earth anyway. Perhaps it’s best to limit one’s investment in what was never more than a temporal existence to begin with.

      • It isn’t in God’s expectations for you to sit idle. The examples are laid out. Your hands should labor to create as worship to your Creator. You resist because Christ resisted and rebelled against evil. You fight in your own way for future generations because He suffered for them. We were never meant to resign or contemplate our toes.

        Complimentary to this, you need to find peace in acceptance of what you cannot change. Fight the battles you can fight. Worry about what is in your sphere of influence over your sphere of concern.

        I sometimes suffer from fatigue and hopelessness too. I am a flawed and weak creature. Your statement about this being a limited time in a temporary state strikes me in a different way though. It’s a short time to strive and to suffer. It’s just a little thing. Really… insignificant.

        Having said that, a warrior of God should be rested and ready. You sharpen your sword and oil your armor. By that I mean you need to take care of yourself, Brother. Find time to enjoy the beauty of the world and your fellow man. It’s okay to take breaks from all the onslaught of the world’s evils. Sit under trees and listen to birds instead of checking the news.

        My apologies for sounding preachy. I speak from experience wherein I was driven to detachment as well. Detaching brought me some quiet but not fulfillment. Once I learned to take care of myself, to balance, I was able to stand up again and do so with a contented heart.

    • WCiv911: It doesn’t need to be either/or. While we accept that AINO could stagger on for decades, my husband and I see the decline and believe it will noticeably impact these last decades of our lives. We have thus adjusted our lives accordingly. We have made changes that most people are too afraid or comfortable or secure to make. They want to prepare their children for today’s world two or three decades into the future, world without end, so they stay the course, send them to college or the military, and convince themselves the new city council will really clean house.

      We don’t believe these things. We do not and cannot predict how bad or how fast things will change, but we notice sufficient changes today, that we’ve changed our responses and choices in advance. We don’t expect our White sons to have a place in AINO’s future economy. We do believe there will be a CBDC, an eventual ban on ICE cars, an enforcement of various global edicts that will further immiserate our lives. We do not consent, and have thus acted to separate ourselves from what passes for culture and success in diverse and prideful AINO.

      If you think everything will continue the same as it is now, just perhaps gradually decaying, then stay in your not-quite-as-White suburb and tell yourself your yellow, brown, and global neighbors are all Americans and will have your back when rioters or the FBI show up. Take your daughter to see the anti-male Barbie movie and tell her she can be anything she wants. Send your son to college to be taught he’s the cause and personification of all evil in the world and expect his business or tech degree will be sufficient for him to pass muster with LaShonda at H R and he can then work with Ashok as his team leader. Your wife can either work in her ‘vital’ job or protest the excesses of the local school board. After all, it’s your duty as a citizen to engage in your society, rather than simply ‘abandoning’ the field to the few bad actors. Besides, the system is fundamentally sound and you just have to get a few good men in office. Hey, have you heard how pro-White that new candidate is? Way to go, Vivek!

      You can continue to believe tomorrow will be much like today, only gradually decaying, or you can look at the pace of change the past 10-15 years and project that into the future. Plan your life accordingly. Those who choose to continue to live what became the standard White middle-class American lifestyle after WWII could be right. Everything could work out fine and their kids’ lives could mirror their own. I wish you/them best of luck. We have bet differently and made different choices. Somehow our choices offend those who have bet on a different future and thus accuse us of ‘running away’ or ‘going into hiding.’

      My husband will go to the requisite trade show for work, but he will drive and not fly. We sold our brick mcmansion in suburbia for a cottage with a wood stove and many acres in the forest. But we still maintain awareness of what’s going on, we’re still online. We watch no tv and have made new friends, go to the store and try to budget for future purchases and plans. We have put our money where our beliefs are.

      Do the same, and I genuinely wish you and others the best of luck. But if you find our choices foolish or offensive, that’s not my problem or concern. My family comes first.

      • Great post 3g –

        My wife and I plan to either leave the “country” all together or do much of the same as you have. The number one requirement is to get away from the American negro.

        Our nice suburban hood has become increasingly “diverse” in just five short years. With it there is litter, theft, bullying kids, etc. they can’t help themselves as they are a subhuman species. To say I hate them does not come close to the true magnitude of my fatigue from them.

        My wife has made the leap too, without any prodding from me. She is able to see it for herself as she works on the civilian side of law enforcement.

        We are doing our best to enjoy our lives, but we are also setting ourselves up as best we can to separate ourselves from this hellscape, leftist shithole when we’re able to retire.

        • Well, good luck Tired. In the Southwest where I reside, Blacks are about 3% of the population. Hispanics are 20+%. Will you be better off “simply” by the lack of Blacks with a corresponding increase of other minorities? I can’t see myself in such a situation.

          That leaves the few other English speaking Anglo nations, which seem to me on the same path as us—only a few decade behind.

      • Buy Lead ofc….

      • 3g4me, you speak with wisdom. Solid post.

      • you can look at the pace of change the past 10-15 years and project that into the future
        —
        Ugh, well, I’ll see y’all under the overpass!

        Reminds me though of a local leader in the rural community that we live in relating the tale of going around to meet new residents and saying that most of them are “sitting around waiting for the world to end” (note: *not* saying 3g is like that). Those people upset me almost as much as the pot-soaked bugmen in the area. If those same people brought their determination to the limited local politics there could be radical change for the better, but instead the place carries on like it’s Mayberry forever.

        • Evil: Funnily enough, my husband tells people we now live in Mayberry since we’ve moved rural. Most locals are only vaguely aware of how bad the national demographic decay is, because they don’t see much of it here (although we notice and abhor each and every non-White face). Others (some native and some from other states) are very aware and have made different plans for the future.

          It’s hard to say what will happen if/when things truly crash one way or the other. We are in our 60s with no prior rural experience. I don’t want to cuddle or gut a chicken. We have chosen a ‘middle way’ and can only hope it proves sufficient to whatever circumstances may arise.

      • This is one of the most cogent and concise descriptions I have ever read explaining the motive for choosing survival over delusion. Thank you 3g4me.

        And I would add that there is nothing more rewarding in my life in the mountains than making stew in a large cast iron pot during the depths of winter and baking bread on the hearth. I feel a tangible connection with my ancestors and both their ways and wisdom. It is, in my humble opinion, a better way to live regardless of the fate of the GAE.

        • TomA: Thank you for the compliment. Cogent perhaps; concise I think not. Too verbose because I don’t go back and read/edit before posting. I have the large cast iron pot but have not baked bread since my teens. I am in total agreement that this is a better way to live – we have space to think and breathe and just live as we were meant to (i.e. not as bugmen in highrises or cookie-cutter suburbs).

      • Don’t be a drama queen. He didnt say your choice is foolish or offensive.

        However, don’t think your retreat into rural America will make you safe. Isolated rural homes are very vulnerable. I also live fairly deep in the country and it’s a matter of perpetual vigilance since law enforcement is a long way off.

      • Spot on, 3g4me. Anyone thinking Trump will sort this out in 2024, or that voting in federal elections matters is crazy.

    • Not every problem has a solution.

      You can’t stop the tides.

      • It’s not the one thing. It’s the dismal tide.

      • Where there is no solution, there is no problem.

27. The most recent example of a large scale collapse is the Soviet Union in 1991. And it was both sudden and unexpected. The 1990s under Yeltsin were a time of great hardship for the Russian people accompanied by general looting via domestic and foreign oligarchs. It wasn’t until Putin came along that the recovery started, and even then, it has taken two more decades for Russia to get back on its feet. What can we learn from that example?

    I would argue that the collapse was the cure. It brought on the hardship needed to cull the deadweight and reinvigorate ancestral fitness drivers. The dormant Eastern Orthodox Church rebounded as people once again found strength in faith and tradition. Today, the Russian people are far far more grounded and reality-oriented than their Western counterparts. And all of this was made possible by a fundamental change in the environment.

    The USA political oligarchs made a bet on being able to conquer and rape both Ukrainian and Russian resources as a means of keeping the plates spinning here. They are about to fail spectacularly. That will be the trigger for collapse unless Brandon starts WW3 first.

    Now ask yourself. If it comes to that and Brandon initiates nuclear Armageddon, would it have been better to intervene before letting that happen? If its a choice between suicide by maniac or hard men doing hard things, which should you choose?

    • The collapse of the SU is fascinating. It doesn’t seem possible, even now. One day the empire collapses, but everything was still there. The human capital was there. The machinery was still there. Whatever they could do the day before collapse should have been possible the day after.

      The American empire is a bit different in that we’ve been selling off the productive assets and have loaded the world with the Dollars to buy everything else that hasn’t been auctioned off. The Soviets still had all the machinery to make the stuff they needed.

      The one thing we have going for us is we still make a lot of machinery. From construction equipment to agricultural equipment to production equipment. We just send a great deal of it overseas.

      • The Soviet Union in a few aspects, was at a distinct advantage over the “proposed” collapse of the GAE:

        The Soviets, for all practical purposes, had no foreign creditors. There were few Western losses when the hammer and sickle were finally lowered from the pole. I realize that there were a few client states that suffered in the transition. Cuba is a good example. In stark contrast, if and when the GAE crumbles, the economic damage, both domestic and foreign, would be catastrophic.

        I agree that the Soviets, at least near term, did keep their factories and workers. However, unless I’m badly mistaken, broadly speaking, their industrial output never found much of a market overseas, probably due to some combination of poor quality and limited production. I suppose exceptions can be made for armaments, but that’s hardly a consumer good. Even thirty years on, I’m not aware that Russia exports much of anything the world wants beyond raw materials. (In Wikipedia’s 2019 ranking of her top 20 exports, only gas turbines could be called a high-tech finished product.)

        Unlike America and Western Europe, they had not effectively exported much of their industry in the decades prior to collapse.

        Neither had they “enjoyed” the alleged benefits of an influx of tens of millions of third world migrants. Indeed for most of their existence they’d tried to prohibit emigration (“escape” might be a better term) of their citizens.

        • I suppose it was more like a prisonbreak than an empire collapse, not that GAE isn’t heading the same way.

    • That’s a good post, and I upvoted it. However, the USSR was based upon a lunatic experiment in Marxism that was always doomed to fail. Now I fully agree the USSR’s collapse was unexpected when it happened. But I always fully believed the US would win the Cold War and that I would live to see the USSR shuffled off into its grave. In the case of AINO, I’m far less confident in a speedy dissolution. AINO will fall, of that there is no doubt. But instead of something spectacular, it will, I believe, slowly fade into dysfunctional obsolesence.

      • ” I believe, slowly fade into dysfunctional obsolesence”

        I go back and forth. The excerpted path is the more probable, but the people running the (shit)show are perfectly capable of incredibly stupid and suicidal actions that could end the GAE in a nuclear flash or a rapid economic meltdown.

    • The difference is that the Russians were a much tougher people than we are, used to hardships and sacrifice. Also, they were a homogenous people (once they get rid of all the “stans” and other Soviet republics). They also had a leader of genius who only turns up once a century: Putin. There are still a lot of great people in the US (maybe even the majority) but I doubt that it will be able to remain a single, unified nation after any collapse.

28. It’s not just ice cream packages are getting smaller, but the quality of the ingredients are going downhill. In order to get anything whose ingredients include something as simple as “cream, sugar, vanilla”, you’re talking about top tier stuff, and about a 50% markup.

    Think of how expensive things would be if all the seed oils, HFCS, etc. were removed and we had sensible ingredients again. The deterioration is even worse than simply shrinkflation.

    • Few Americans are aware of how many things that are in our food that are banned in much of the world. The thing is, these chemicals do not always make for a lower price. They are often just a way to raise the barrier of entry so the big players can make big profits from common items like dairy.

      • ” Few Americans are aware of how many things that are in our food that are banned in much of the world. ”

        The whole purpose of putting questionable ingredients in American food is really where an especially evil subset of the Cloud People are thinking about the long term: The longer you eat the garbage, you will get sick earlier and make even more money for Big Pharma.

        • “…no one is starving in America due to a lack of affordable food, but it is that thing they see every day that gives people a sense of things.”

          Along the line of this thread, and today’s posting above, it should be noted that people may not starve, but their nutritional needs suffer as they are forced to choose lower quality—yet still affordable—foods.

          Filling ones belly with processed crap is better than starvation, but has its problems as well in the long run.

          • Of course, eating cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean buying processed crap. Fresh fruit and vegetables are still–relatively–inexpensive. So are chicken and turkey. People who gorge on corporate garbage do so largely from ignorance, apathy and poor taste, not because they’re too poor to eat reasonably well.

          • Ostel, that’s true up to a point. I’m able to keep my food expenditure reasonable even these days, and I don’t eat seed oils, HFCS, much sugar, or stuff with a lot of ingredients. But it’s very difficult, getting near impossible, to get produce without glyphosate in it, or meat that hasn’t been fed on the same. And that’s before we get into the endocrine disruptors in the packaging.

      • Read the ingredients for an American market product.
        Then find the product with the identical name that is sold in a European market, say, England.
        You may be surprised, but shouldn’t be, to find that the English version has a shorter list of ingredients. That list also has more recognizable ingredients and fewer chemicals.

        Caveat emptor. Maybe Alaric was onto something?

      • There was a science fiction short story by Gene Wolfe called “Seven American Nights,” published in 1978. The story is set in a post-collapse United States of the twenty second century. America collapsed in large part due to overuse of chemicals in foodstuffs. As a result, nearly every American has suffered genetic damage of one degree or another and the United States has been reduced to a Third World nation.

        • Gene wrote that story as a form of penance for Pringles.

    • You beat me to it. I was going to say exactly the same thing. Only the more expensive ice cream is made with sugar. One level down it’s a combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. And one level further down, it’s only corn syrup. I don’t even know whether people read the ingredients.

      • Some of the lower priced brands don’t even taste like ice cream any more, which is somewhat surprising as I thought some of the main ingredients were regulated There’s only so much you can do to produce a cheaper product and still name it as “wholesome” ice cream.

      • Your observation is likely true. However, it’s worth mentioning that, for all practical purposes, [cane] sugar and high fructose corn syrup are identical, within 5% tolerance. (So say some of my diet books.) Corn syrup came into wider use, at least in part, because it was a cheaper alternative to sugar, which like many agricultural commodities, is subject to tariffs domestically to “protect” “farmers” which is political euphemism for massive subsidy to agri-business. Been going on for nigh on a century, now.

        I don’t have any solution to the above issues. However, unlike many problems, diet is usually well within a person’s power to change. Since about age 61, I’ve made a conscious effort to go “low carb” which of course means drastically reducing the garbage in my diet, which means I eat far less refined sugar, flour, etc. than is average.

        The average American eats about 100 pounds of added sugar yearly (I assume that is sugars of all types.) That doesn’t even count the other simple carbohydrates, all told that make up half or more of his diet. In my opinion, diet is probably the single biggest controllable factor affecting one’s health.

        • “Corn syrup came into wider use, at least in part, because it was a cheaper alternative to sugar, which like many agricultural commodities, is subject to tariffs domestically to “protect” “farmers” which is political euphemism for massive subsidy to agri-business.”

          My memory’s not too great these days but was it the early ’80s when the domestic sugar lobby got tariffs imposed on imported sugar? That’s when sugar became expensive relative to high-fructose corn syrup and when the soft drinks manufacturers (Coke, Pepsi) switched to HFCS. You can still get soda made with real sugar (or imported as “Mexican coke”) but you pay a premium price.

          • I think you have the transition correct.
            Personal anecdote: I’ve been an inveterate soda drinker most of my life. In the mid-1980s (my 20s) I switched from regular to diet. Not to save money, but over concern for the amount of sugar that I was consuming in several cans per day. I cannot be sure, but I recall the change was based on cutting out the sugar, not that the taste of regular had changed. I’ve tried regular sodas and the cane sugar products. To be honest, I cannot easily tell a difference. Perhaps because I’ve drunk diet for so long?

        • Ben: I use a ton of cane sugar these days . . . feeding the hummingbirds. Those little buggers empty a 3 cup feeder (with corresponding 3/4 cup sugar mixed in) in less than a day.

        • Carbs are the staff of life the whole world over. Who among us can really do without bread, rice, potatoes and pasta? I know it’s possible, but I have no desire to. I love those things just about as much as steak and fried chicken.

          • You’re largely correct — that grains, beans, starchy foods are staples for much of the world. Low carb often means more animal products which is rather a luxury by historical and even present world standards.

            But highly refined foods? A double edged sword. Pros: low cost, convenience, storage life, uniformity of product, etc. Cons: often nutritional value is slashed (vitamins, minerals lost.)

            People vary greatly in their biochemistry; some do well on a certain diet that would be sub-optimal or perhaps even harmful for another guy. I still eat carbs but they tend to be “higher quality” e.g. fresh or at least canned fruits and vegetables, whole grain breads, etc. If you used less- or un-refined products, you still might be on a “high-carb” diet, but nutitionally it’s quite a different story than if you get most carbs from highly processed foods (sugars, refined flour products.)

    • Just checked my heavy whipping cream pint – it’s still 16 oz (assuming they are not lying). I guess since it is still used for cooking, they can’t get away with it like they do with ice cream.

29. Are we speed-running the collapse of the Roman Empire, or did Rome just die in the most brutally lingering collapse in history? It seems European countries in the middle ages or the 19th/20th century rose and fell *far* faster than Rome.

    • Collapse is rarely a straight line down. It’s decline, then half-recovery, then decline, then half-recovery, and so on. It’s like an old man who gets sick, then sort of recovers, then gets sick again, then kind of recovers again. But after each recovery, he’s not the same as he was before — he’s more fragile, and more prone to further illnesses. The real culprit is age. And so it was with the lingering death of the Western Roman Empire.

      • The question is how many more periods of decline and recovery does the American Empire have left to it?

        • Now that’s an interesting question. Let’s take a tentative stab at it. Maybe the first was in 1973, with the quadrupling of oil prices? The next in the early 1980s, when interest rates rose to about 17% and decimated much of the industry in the mid-West (the original Rust Belt)? The next in 2001, with the dot-com collapse? The next in 2008, with the subprime collapse? And the last is the one we’re living through right now. Each time the patient has become a little more anemic and fragile.

        • At what point did it become an empire? Certainly some time after WWII, which means there have been precious few cycles.

          • Spanish American War at the latest. You can make a case it’s been an empire from day one, with its east to west continental expansion.

            Perhaps it didn’t clothe itself in its current iteration until WW2, but it was definitely an empire prior to that.

        • I guess there is a lot of ways to look at things. This is how I’m seeing it.

          Say we became an empire in 1945. Our first crisis was in the 1960s-1970s with the untidy war it Vietnam and ll the leftist lunacy tearing apart the fabric of the country. We recovered but were certainly weaker.

          Our second crisis occurred from around 2012-20?? with us losing in Afghanistan, all the identity politics and associated problems, COVID, basic Clown World craziness…

          Unlike some here, I think we will make it through this crisis but we will be even weaker and more fragile. This isn’t the end, it is just another step down the staircase. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that staircase is a lot longer than we expect.

          • I guess we shouldn’t be too worried about China, then. XD

    • There’s much more ruin in a mighty empire than in two-bit feudatories. A lesson for those expecting the GAE to commence pushing up daisies any minute now, alas.

30. Apologize for the long copypasta, but James Delingpole’s report from the Fall is too good to pass up here.

    It is the 4th Century AD and the Barbarians are at the Gates of Rome. Around the Imperial capitol, the citizens of the greatest civilization the world has ever known are tearing at their togas, quite unable to agree as to what—if anything—should be done.

    Some, peering over the ramparts towards the hairy hordes encamped across the Tiber decide they rather like what they see. There’s something wonderfully echt and earthy about these splendidly unkempt men with their rich, musky smell and their delightfully untutored table manners. Also, having dwelt so long away from the corrupting influence of the City and having imbibed the purifying spirit of the deep forests, these so-called Barbarians are very likely nice, caring, nurturing types. Probably all they want to do is say “Hello” and share some of their woodcraft skills.

    Other Romans, more fatalistic, take the view that the reason the hordes are carrying spears and swords and are now busy spit-roasting a captured legionary is that they are here with hostile intent. But perhaps this is no more than Rome deserves. Yes, it may well be that the Barbarians have come to impose on the Romans one or two significant lifestyle changes, possibly including violent death. But the truth is that Rome has had it far too good for too long. It has expanded its empire way farther than is natural for any reasonable society. It has developed far too many wholly unnecessary technologies, such as underfloor heating, straight roads, aqueducts and municipal bathing facilities, which will almost certainly deplete the world of the scarce resources that future citizens of the planet will need to survive. Sure, the coming Dark Ages may result in the odd century or so of extreme misery and hardship, but a planned recession like this may regrettably be necessary to secure the long-term future of the planet.

    Others, more rapacious and cynical, watch with a barely concealed delight. That fake beard and those Barbarian-style furs and trews they bought from the costume shop the other week are increasingly looking like a canny investment. Sure it will be a nuisance when the Pax Romana is finally over, the economy’s in chaos and it’s every man for himself. But think of all the business opportunities that are bound to arise as Western Civilization crumbles: private security contracts for all those newly unsafe roads, monopolies to be bought and exploited, alliances to be forged with the new regime, etc. As a wise man from Judaea once said: “With crisis comes opportunity.”

    Still others—and perhaps these represent the majority—glance towards the gathering hordes with a brief tremor of concern before turning to look away to look what’s showing this afternoon at the Coliseum. “Nah,” they’ve decided about the alleged Barbarian threat. “Never going to happen. After all, we’re not inhabiting some poxy little provincial capital in the arse end of beyond. This is Rome, mightiest and most enduring civilization the world has known. It has lasted over a thousand years and is destined to last just another thousand, wait and see.”

    Finally, there are the Realists– and unfortunately they’re very much the minority—who can see what’s coming. They don’t like it one bit and believe something should be done before it’s too late. Of course, they are not at all popular with most of their fellow Romans, who variously consider them to be hysterical, naïve, or tiresome reactionaries unhealthily wedded to the old ways and too selfish to make the radical lifestyle changes that will be necessary if Rome is to progress with the times.

    “But what was so wrong with the old Rome?” plead the Realists. “Didn’t we have a good thing going, what with all the trade and abundance and order and peace and prosperity and comfort and sanitation and cleanliness and under-floor heating and learning and technology?”

    No one else, though, is much interested in what the Realists have to say. In the unlikely event the Barbarians do prevail, well, all good things must come to an end and there are bound to be at least as many benefits as there are downsides. Why, already, there are rumors in the agora that the new Barbarian economy will result in a whole slew of new Barbarian jobs. Once the pampered Romans get used to the more austere Barbarian lifestyle, fuel costs and living expenses will fall dramatically. Their diet will be a lot healthier because now food will be grown locally rather than transported laboriously and decadently from the far reaches of the Empire.

    And if Western Civilization does come to an end, well, what the hell. Western Civilization was always so terribly overrated, anyway.

    • Thank you, Felix. There is no need for an apology, as that was a very trenchant cut and paste. Your contributions, as with so many other participants in this forum, are greatly to be valued, whether profound or snarky.

    • Felix: I had not seen that before. Brilliant and trenchant take on how I see the world today. Thank you for cutting and pasting that.

      • Thanks, both of you.

        It’s from the highly recommendable “Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future.”

        https://www.amazon.com/Watermelons-Environmentalists-Destroying-Stealing-Childrens/dp/1849544050

31. “One reason is no one in their right mind takes anything the government says at face value”

    This is not true! I encountered one yesterday. I don’t even know why I bothered but he started talking about covid and I just snapped and said “I can’t stand the lies anymore it’s just constant lies for years” and then it just spiraled out of control for an intense like 90 seconds that ran the whole gamut of Biden the dementia patient and him claiming it was just a stutter and then at one point he became a living meme and said “what are your sources?” finally I said, let’s just stop but he couldn’t and said “what about Ukraine”? and I just looked at him and said “look, basically everything you believe I believe the opposite”. This is actually one of my clients, not one I’m real interested in keeping. He finally said okay well we can disagree we’re Americans. But the only reason he’s adopting that attitude is because he needs me tomorrow. I already knew he was a liberal I’ve known him for years though I’ve never outed myself before. But it was really extraordinary he literally believes everything the media tell him to believe.

    • Yep. Trump/Covid/Ukraine really opened my eyes to the sad reality that the vast majority of our “fellow man” really just believe and do what they are told. And it’s not just the leftists, or the stupid, or the lazy.

    • I once spent a vacation week with folks in the summer. The TV was on all morning to the seemingly endless “ Today” and other such shows with its array of women, tamed blacks , and the domesticated Bush twin. It dawned on me that this was their steady diet. Any expression of disagreement brought out thst pursed lip look of disapproval and pity.
      It was another world.
      I never went back.

    • If you get into it with him again, go back to the, “We can disagree because we are Americans”, bit. Ask him, if one person thinks our legal system is evil and policing should be ended and the other doesn’t can you really be countrymen? If one person thinks we should have no border and taxes can be used to house, feed and educate any illegal border crosser, and the other person thinks there must be a strongly enforced border and that tax benefits are for the tax paying citizens of the nation only, can you be countrymen?

      A country with no consensus on the nature of the legal system and without borders is not a country. It might be a good time to bring up politely the idea of peaceful separation.

    • There are tons of these idiots. I hate them more than the politicians. I have zero interest in saving them. When the time comes, they will go into the “chipper” first.

      • Tired Citizen: They’d be the first to rat you out when the next plandemic occurs or when someone puts pro-White flyers on doorknobs, so return the favor. My anger at their stubborn blindness was negatively impacting my blood pressure. If you can handle dealing with them in daily life, more power to you.

    • What if the people who will need anything from you don’t get it? I’ve formulated a new response when asked for help of any kind from these people, it’s “you’re in a pickle aren’t you”, and then turn away.

      • I like the redneck meme from a few years back: When someone makes a request or a complaint to you, you say “Wait just a sec….nope. I’m sorry, but my give-a-damn is busted.”

    • One can never win an argument with a client. I know most of mine are libs, and sometimes they probe me for my ‘views.’

      They never get an inch – and proving their meme-worthiness, simply just assume I agree with them and blurt out whatever they have to blurt out.

      • Getreal: My husband is a master at what he terms “calling someone an SOB without calling him an SOB.” He is polite and professional to all customers – even those he despises – and joking/friendly with those he values. He provides excellent customer service regardless, but there are some decent, like-minded people who have made it clear their opinions and concerns align with ours. They have invited him/us to visit their homes, go on a hunt, or join them in various unusual endeavors beyond our budget – wish we could accept more of such invitations.

      • I know. I’m assuming this will end our relationship. A lot of my clients are on the right. I’ve saying no to leftist for a while now.
        I have clients, a married couple, she’s a doctor, both on the right but they both got vaxxed they both kind of bought into be home covid thing but they have moved so far that she refers to the covid vaccine as a culling now. I will take a little credit for helping move them down the line

      • Agreed to Getreal.

        Dealing with Karen, I realized, no, this one’s full Covid Stasi Manager-

        Añd remembered my spycraft.

        I am Jeeves, the English butler; always proper, properly aloof-

        And ready to go full Mau Mau as a proper servant should.

        If they can smile while holding a shiv behind their back, well so can I.

        (Remember all the people who had to keep files on their goshdam management during the Mandate?)

        Sand in the gears, baby.

    • Please don’t dig at the scab.
      This one is ready to put a foot on the bridge. His faith is wavering, that’s why he was talking.

      It takes time. He won’t convert, but he’s at the questioning phase. It takes a lot of time.

      Let it rest a bit; he’ll answer his own questions. He knows where you stand, and that you are steady.

    • Yes, agree. When the narrative stops making sense, people don’t stop believing, they stop thinking.

32. Rome has been collapsing a long, long time if you lived in a Rust Belt city circa 1980. The difference is that every city more or less is part of the Rust Belt today.

    • Agreed. What I see is the number of “dead zones” in the USA increasing in number and size.

      • In my travels through rural AINO, far off the interstate, it smacks you right in the face

      • There’s a post on Nextdoor today by a well meaning and prolific Boomercon who clearly still cares and thinks the stuff he posts will “wake people up”. To be fair, he uses good tactics. He doesn’t get ideological right away but leads with a fact-based story that can’t be disputed. Today he posted a list of buildings around Portland that has been burned recently, mostly in arson or accidental fires set by the only group that matters to the local elite – the homeless. Excuse me, the houseless, people-experiencing-houslessness, unhoused, um… outdoor…underground…humanz…, CHUDs…

        I considered posting something nasty on the thread like “please now burn down the rest of this shit town”. It’s really so dismal. I’m so sad lately thinking about this kind of stuff because you can’t really work up any empathy for people like the local shitlibs. They did this to themselves and while Portland is an especially bad place, it seems like a microcosm of the country at large. Americans have been inviting in looters and arsonists for decades and then making apologies for them. It’s hard to feel like it matters anymore. This is another dead zone being born. In a few years it won’t matter what the excuses were that allowed it to turn into another Detroit.

        • I had a brain scan a couple of months ago ( Still awaiting word if they found one) I’ve been telling Shit-lib in-laws
          “it was interesting, the tech said if you couldn’t tell the difference between a male and female brain you should be in a different line of work”.

          No need to mention that I asked.

          But I do mention, of course.

33. Obama in his first term really had a bad time dealing with the post-meltdown economic malaise, the consistently bad job numbers, the failure of his signature policies (“shovel-ready”) to jump-start the economy, etc. I also remember lefty orgs consistently reporting on this – the first Friday of every month, NPR would sullenly run a story about the bad job numbers and gloomily opine on how Obama and his whiz-kids were struggling to deal with it. The point here, though, is that they reported on it and people trusted the numbers were accurate. This was less than 15 years ago.

    Clearly, the Brandon entity remembers this, because they’re just making the job numbers up at this point. Somehow all their “adjustments” only go in one direction no matter what is going on and no matter how much of a disconnect is made from other numbers that have correlated with the job numbers for decades. So now the lefty writers are whining that people don’t believe how great Brandon has been for the economy, and obviously the next step is to run the disinformation op for this.

    • A good argument can be made that the divorce was finalized between economic realities and re-election chances with Obama. He went on to win a second term with numbers that previously would have prohibited such a thing.

      • This is assuming, of course, that Obama’s reelection wasn’t Fortified for Democracy ™. We all had a good laugh at Mittens Romney’s bow-tied androids saying “we hit all our numbers!”, but the truth is, they probably DID hit all their numbers. I bet the robot historians digging through the radioactive rubble will find lots of 3am ballots for the Lightworker, and/or lots of Romney votes tossed in a ditch by the Postal Service.

        I’d be willing to bet that a) “clean” elections are the exception, not the rule, going back to at least Andrew Jackson, and b) the last “clean” election in AINO was 1996, because — like all “clean” elections — the Democrats didn’t feel the need to cheat in that particular case.

        (Arguably 2016 was “clean,” or clean-ish, for that reason. They tried a lot of last-second shenanigans — there’s a reason they didn’t finally call it for Trump until the wee hours of the morning — but it was too little, too late. They ain’t gonna be making that mistake again!).

        • Sure, that’s possible, even more so because Romney and his co-cucks never ever would have dared to call out cheating to put a mulatto into office. They might have been called “racist”! We don’t know that 2012 was marred by cheating with any degree of certainty as we do with 2020, though. I’ll even go a step further–with the Russia madness, Romney very well could have proved worse than The Light Bringer.

          • This is true. Looking back on it, I realize that Bill Clinton was by far the most “conservative” president in my lifetime (and I am not young). I also realize that as bad as the Democrat was in every election in my lifetime, with the lone exception of Reagan the Republican was arguably to definitely worse (and Reagan gets an unearned bump by having faced truly ridiculous opponents).

            Damn, History looks a LOT different once you take the red pill.

        • The thought made here is correct, but conflated with technology and election changes. I’d argue that *no* election was “clean” in our history, just that the ability to affect the election results has grown with technology, cultural, and election process changes.

          Heck, even today, no reasonable person denies “irregularities”—just that these could not have changed the final results of the election. So now the rallying cry for Rep’s to get their voters to turn out for 2024 is “beat the cheat”.

          Oh, the irony… 🙁

      • The only shovel-ready project from the Obama regime was the steady supply of bullshit.

        History will be cruel to Obama and to the Democrats that supported and even demanded the prevarications, dissembling and outright lying, aided and abetted by their Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists.

        If there were to be an Estates General called to day, echoing the famous one prior to the French Revolution, those self-appointed to the Fourth might find themselves outcasts.

        • History should be cruel to Obama, however it’s doubtful. Obama is enshrined as our first Black President and that’s all the couple of paragraphs in the standard history books will explain.

    • “Clearly, the Brandon entity remembers this, because they’re just making the job numbers up at this point.”

      They were making the numbers up during the Obama administration as well. The problem at that time was they could only massage the truth to a certain extent. And even before Obama, the GWB and Clinton administrations were doing the same. Thus, for example, Clinton never allowed serious analysis of his claim that he created 22m jobs. Because any such scrutiny would have revealed that the jobs were seasonal or part-time or poorly paid service-sector jobs flipping burgers. The US government has been massaging the figures for decades. But as long as your life is comfortable you can swallow this garbage and half-fool yourself that the numbers are plausible.

      • I remember an author, probably Harry Browne, making the case in one of his books (probably in 1980s) that government economic figures are sometimes revised years, even decades, after the fact. He also noted that economists and historians (economic historians, even) STILL argued over the cases of, say, the Great Depression. I surmise one could conclude that government figures are not to be taken as written in stone, as many seem(ed) to do.

    • People forget how the malignant dwarf, Robert Reich, Clinton’s Labor Secretary fudged the employment numbers by reducing the weighting of inner city respondents (read blacks) in the survey.
      They changed it back again just before the Shrub Regime took office.

34. They were electing senators in the 7th century. Barbarians were asking the Byzantine emperor for the title of patriarch well into the same time period.

    It doesnt explode, it just all falls apart.

    • Yes. “President of the United States” will be around looooong after the United States, as we know it, will cease to exist. The seals and music and pomp will remain, but people won’t know why it exists or what exactly it all came from.

      Consider the national anthem: it’s based on a tavern drinking song. The tempo, the cadence, everything. Our national anthem is borrowed from a drinking song. Every time I hear it before a sportsball game or something, and everyone is being serious while it’s being played, it amuses me.

      Consider the Chinese national anthem: it sounds like a late 19th century Sousa band because the Chinese think it sounds like a national anthem, because the height of statesmanship was the late 19th century and all the Westerners were using their brass bands to perform national anthems. But nobody in China makes this connection: it sounds like a national anthem, and that’s all they care about.

      We will soon enter a period where everything will look like the United States, but it will be hollow and completely out of context.

      • “Ceaser” = “Kaiser” = “Czar”

        “Mr. President” = “Senior Presidente” = “Presi-dizzel”

        • “Presi-dizzel” will eventually become “Prez” or “The Big-P.”

      • “We will soon enter a period where everything will look like the United States, but it will be hollow and completely out of context.”

        We’re pretty much already there.

        • Maniac: Agree. Those who think it’s in the far off future feel a bit bad for their grandchildren, but meanwhile there are deals to be made and cruises to take. Those who think it’s already de facto here make very different choices.

      • The GAE has the worst anthem I’ve heard of the Western countries. God Save the Queen/King isn’t great but they have Jeruselem and The Land of Hope and Glory. Le Marseillaise is the best. It’s just a shame the real French don’t take the words to heart and kick out their invaders. I like the Russian anthem too. It’s sounds like a national anthem should.

        • There was a movement way back when to change the American anthem to “America the Beautiful” from SSB. SSB was only officially declared our Anthem by Congress in the 30’s I believe. Some folk thought it too war like others (correctly) too hard to sing (Rossana Barr comes to mind).

          Of course time changes things and America isn’t all the “beautiful” these days, so perhaps the SSB is a better representation of our national ethos.

        • Mike: Glenn Beck is a nut, but I still remember fondly his variant of the Russian anthem with lyrics deifying Obama. Back then I still thought warning people that de light bringa was a Stalinist at his roots was the way to go.

        • The Russian anthem is so magnificent. There is a video of Putin singing it (or trying to, noone bats a 1000) with the Russian Olympic athletes at Sochi that is beyond moving. I also love Shaman’s version.

          • Yep. Probably the only good thing to come out of the Soviet Union. It was ripped off by the Pet Shop Boys for one of their “hits”

      • “Comrades shot by the red front and reactionaries.”

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ9DMRKv8-k

        • Ah, uniforms and marching songs. Germany in those days in a nutshell. Hell, even my father had an album of these and he was occupied by the Germans in WWII. Horst Wessel was an early casualty in the riots that occurred between the Bolsheviks and the NAZIs in their struggle for political control.

          Here’s another clip, “Warriors Song”. I urge all of you to watch it if you’ve not seen/heard it.

          https://youtu.be/OkDYrCCmUIA

          The NAZI’s had nothing on us for psychological motivation in the pursuit of military adventurism. Read the lyrics. The Germans sang of comradery and dying for ones country in war (see: Panzerlied).

          The Warriors Song speaks loudly and clearly of killing others for your country. My favorite refrain is “Lord let me die before You make me old.” (Old being interpreted as too old to fight. Very Vikingish). Enjoy.

          • Compsci: Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. That was awful. Blind allegiance to AINO and the GAE diverse perpetual war machine.

          • Yes 3g4me, but you’ve got to agree it’s a work worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, the famous NAZI propagandist film maker.

            Hell, it’s better. Think of all those young White boys out there looking for status and alpha male recognition. Join the GAE police force and see the world, or rather subdue it. 😉

          • People have long suggested Americans are the most successfully propagandized people on the planet. I only came to realize that as truth in the last ten years. There is in fact more breaking free of the Matrix, but it remains firmly in place.

      • The same thing happened with the Roman Catholic Church with Vatican II. A revolution within the form.

      • We’re 20 years away from the return of the Bellamy Salute.

    • Yep. Was kinda shocked to find that Clovis(!) was very pleased when the Emperor in Constantinople appointed him Consul. St. Bede writes the Church history of the Anglo-Saxons in the 7th century and cites the year in which something happened as the x year of Emperor Y – again, talking about the guy sitting on the chair in Constantinople.

      Amazing.

    • “They were electing senators in the 7th century.”

      Yes, the barbarians who sacked Rome weren’t out to destroy the empire. They had nothing to replace it with — this was wasn’t a case of one empire subjugating another. This was a case of rot on the inside and barbarians at the gates. The barbarians simply exploited the inner rot. The imperial institutions remained after the sacking but just gradually became a shadow of themselves, merely formal structures, until they evaporated away.

35. Readers here seem interested in the end of the Roman Empire. Here’s an historical novel about the end of Roman Britain. There are a number of parallels with what we see today.

    https://www.amazon.com/QUIRINIUS-BRITANNIAS-ROMAN-Erik-Hildinger-ebook/dp/B09LM5NLQ9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Z7NCXLGJX8M4&keywords=quirinius+hildinger&qid=1689858566&s=books&sprefix=quirinius+hildinger%2Cstripbooks%2C219&sr=1-1

    • There are good books about this. One I recommend is “The Final Pagan Generation” by Edward Watts which discusses life in the empire in the late 4th century AD. It does it from the lens of a generational shift in the Roman citizenry that coincided with the movement of paganism to Christianity. Yet in covering the day-to-day life, it describes how for the people living in the, the empire was functioning the way they expected it to and they built out their lives based on that. The other one is “Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization”, which is a pushback into the new academic idea that, well, Rome didn’t really “fall” it just transitioned and people just kind of accepted it and no biggie (gee I wonder why modern academics would say this). He discusses, using qualitative data, that the decay of Pax Romana really led to a breakdown in living standards, in quality of food and goods, in trade, in travel, etc. Of course, in the moment, your average farmer, trader, merchant, etc., couldn’t really do anything about it.

      The key point here is as Z says, things did break down and people mostly did the best they could in the situations they were in. It wasn’t some fast sudden collapse that led to total chaos. It was punctuated by events like the Sack of Rome in 410 but how could even the sacking of that great city compare to the COVID looting operation?

      • I bought that book on the recommendation of someone on this site, maybe you. Thanks.

        The book’s focus is on the Roman equivalent of our current time. The old beliefs are being supplanted by the new, but most people couldn’t imagine the old ways failing.

        This makes me think of optimistic, civic nationalist, Reagan Republicans. Pence, Scott, Haley.

36. It’s already happening but slowly, across our open borders.

    • The tentacles of foreign powers are already fully embedded in our capital.

    • My first thought, too. Alaric was let into the gates and fought for the Empire. Sound familiar?

37. “ Getting whipped by a collection of bronze age goatherds in the graveyard of empires should have been a wakeup call..’

    It indeed should have been but with a compliant corporate media in the tank for the regime & incessantly spinning things their way, think the hope is to keep the Karens fired up – see the hopelessly ignorant, unattractive dullards on “The View” – & normie doped up on the endless stream of fentanyl & distracted & obsessing over frivolity like professional sports that he doesn’t notice.

    • A lot of well-connected American contractors made a ton of money offa dem goatherds. 20-year grift made folks rich.

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