- "GDP: more lies, damned lies, and statistics"--Bayou Renaissance Man. Peter Grant's post is about an article reporting that the U.S. has gone a record 10 consecutive years without 3% or more growth in GDP. And this is using the altered (Grant uses the term "fraudulent") statistics publicly released by the Federal government and Federal Reserve. Grant explains that the problem is worse than that:
The impact of the real inflation rate (as opposed to the rate claimed by the government) is significant. Mr. Williams estimates real inflation, measured in an unbiased fashion and not changed to reflect 'political correctness', to be close to 10% - effectively, more than five times higher than the 'official' rate.
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As can readily be seen, if the real rate of inflation is taken into account, we've been without 3% growth in GDP for much longer than government statistics would reveal. In fact, real GDP's been negative (that is to say, the economy's been contracting) for most years during the past two decades.
Do you want to know why almost 100 million people in this country are considered 'not in the labor force'? ... The economy's too crippled to provide jobs for them. Furthermore, when mainstream media commentators pontificate about how the economy's doing just fine, look at those charts again and realize that they're spouting the politically correct line. The economy's not doing just fine, and sooner or later the economic fairy-tales that are being told to us are going to be revealed as just that. Reality's going to bite . . . and it's going to be painful.
(Emphasis in original).
The inmates of the castle are beginning to understand that the strange lighted dots in the distance represent men with torches and pitchforks on the move. The old deference to authority has weakened suddenly and catastrophically. ...
... The Washington Post, which is as reliable bellwether of established opinion as can be found anywhere, writes "Trump is the GOP's Frankenstein Monster"; which he is, cobbled together from all the unfulfilled promises of the 2010 and 2014 elections. But the same might be said of Sanders and the revolt over borders now shaking the EU to its core. Trump is just one of the monsters. They're all over the place. The trouble with Frankenstein's monsters -- and most historical revolutions -- is the revenge they visit on the aristocracy is almost always attended by excess. When they hit a lot of plates are broken.
... The global hubbub is the revival of things assumed lost forever: borders, nations, creeds. In their wake will march the crowds, expectant, cheering, menacing. But the same crowds which can create can also destroy. ...
- Fernandez takes up this theme again in his piece, "How Tyrannies Implode." He writes about how tyrannies and empires can seem strong one moment, then suddenly collapse, seemingly without warning. Fernandez explains:
In his book Private Truth, Public Lies, social scientist Timur Kuran argued that people, under pressure to conform by culture leaders, often told public lies to get the pollsters and thought police off their backs, even as they nurtured largely undetected private resentments inside them. Over time, two divergent perceptions would emerge: the public lie would determine how the regime thought about itself while the private truth contained the real, but hidden data.
These two contradictory perceptions can coexist for as long as they don't meet, living in a kind of superposition much like Schrodinger's Cat. But eventually some event occurs which makes the public aware of the private truth which is really what everybody is thinking. That observation collapses the political wave function and causes all hell to break loose. ...
As Fernandez explains, the implosion catches the political leadership off guard because all they see is the public lie (which they accept as truth), while the private truth was hidden to them. Fernandez illustrates his point by reference to the fall of several of the communist regimes, but turns his attention on the current situation in the West:
It's becoming evident that the European elites failed to understand how explosive the migrant issue was until it detonated full in their face. Now it is in the midst of a crisis which could literally bring down the European Union. Why didn't they see it coming? Because they believed their own Narrative, even when they should have suspected it was a lie of their own making. If the PC Western elites are overtaken by a cascade similar to that which collapsed the Soviet Union, the ultimate irony will be that the very migrants which they had counted on to create the Curley Effect will turn out to be the engine of their own destruction.
They will have been hoisted on their own petard, or perhaps, more accurately, sentenced by their own Narrative. The most dangerous lie is the one which you tell others, then wind up believing yourself. For many years the Western political elites not only espoused the "public lie", but made certain that anyone who refused to repeat it was pilloried by the thought police. Like the Soviets, they thought this solved the problem. But it only ensured that the spring would be wound -- and wound past the breaking point -- precisely where they could not see it strain.
Empires may be expansionist, but they're also tolerant and multicultural. They have to be, since out of their initial phase they have to enlist the cooperation and services of subjects from a variety of cultures and religions. An empire may initially be fueled by the talents and skills of a core nation, but as it reaches its next phase, it begins sacrificing their interests to the larger structure of empire.
The argument between the establishments of the right and the left is over two different kinds of empires. The Republican establishment in America and its various center-right counterparts abroad have attached themselves to the liberal vision of a transnational empire of international law so much that they have forgotten that this vision came from the left, rather than from the right.
This Empire of International Law proved to have some uses for global trade and security, particularly during the Cold War. These practical arrangements however are overshadowed by the fact that it, like every empire, sacrifices the interests of its peoples to its own structure. This is true of the structure at every level, from the EU to the Federal structure of the United States. The system has displaced the people. And the system runs on principles that require cheap labor leading to policies like amnesty.
The Empire of International Law needs Muslim immigrants even if its people don't, because it envisions integrating them and their countries into this arrangement and rejects national interests as narrow-minded and nativist.
This formerly liberal vision now embraced largely by centrists is the left's vision, which includes today's liberals, is of a completely transnational ideological empire in which there are no borders, but there are countless activists, in which everything and everyone are controlled by the state.
Like the more conventional imperial vision, the left's red Empire of Ideology depends on enlisting Muslims and Muslim countries into its ranks. This is the basis of the Red-Green alliance.
These two types of imperialists are incapable of representing native workers or communities because they are transnationalists. Their vision is cosmopolitan, rather than representative. They are entranced with a byzantine international arrangement and uninterested in the lives of the people they are ruining.
SKYNET works like a typical modern Big Data business application. The program collects metadata and stores it on NSA cloud servers, extracts relevant information, and then applies machine learning to identify leads for a targeted campaign. Except instead of trying to sell the targets something, this campaign, given the overall business focus of the US government in Pakistan, likely involves another branch of the US government—the CIA or military—that executes their "Find-Fix-Finish" strategy using Predator drones and on-the-ground death squads.
In addition to processing logged cellular phone call data (so-called "DNR" or Dialled Number Recognition data, such as time, duration, who called whom, etc.), SKYNET also collects user location, allowing for the creation of detailed travel profiles. Turning off a mobile phone gets flagged as an attempt to evade mass surveillance. Users who swap SIM cards, naively believing this will prevent tracking, also get flagged (the ESN/MEID/IMEI burned into the handset makes the phone trackable across multiple SIM cards).
Even handset swapping gets detected and flagged, the slides boast. Such detection, we can only speculate (since the slides do not go into detail on this point), is probably based on the fact that other metadata, such as user location in the real world and social network, remain unchanged.
Given the complete set of metadata, SKYNET pieces together people's typical daily routines—who travels together, have shared contacts, stay overnight with friends, visit other countries, or move permanently. Overall, the slides indicate, the NSA machine learning algorithm uses more than 80 different properties to rate people on their terroristiness.
The program, the slides tell us, is based on the assumption that the behaviour of terrorists differs significantly from that of ordinary citizens with respect to some of these properties. However, as The Intercept's exposé last year made clear, the highest rated target according to this machine learning program was Ahmad Zaidan, Al-Jazeera's long-time bureau chief in Islamabad. [I.e., a reporter].
- "Equality in Marriages Grows, and So Does Class Divide"--The New York Times. In short, the article indicates that rather than successful businessmen or professionals marrying their secretary (or, if a doctor, their nurse), they are more likely to marry someone with an education and career similar to themselves--what is called assortative mating. "Researchers say the rise in assortative mating is closely linked to income inequality. The two have increased in tandem, Dr. Schwartz, the sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, said: 'People who are married tend to be more advantaged, and on top of that, more advantaged people are marrying people like themselves, so those people tend to be doubly advantaged.'" The article focuses on assortative mating being a natural result of more women going to college and into professions. However, I suspect that there is another important element here, which is the anti-discrimination laws in the workplace: attempting to court a female subordinate (e.g., the secretary or nurse) could land you in the middle of a hostile work environment law suit. A risk of which men are well aware.
- "Donald Trump Is The Next Barack Obama"--Angelo Codevilla at The Federalist. In his article, Codevilla posits:
The Obama years have brought America to the brink of transformation from constitutional republic into an empire ruled by secret deals promulgated by edicts. Civics classes used to teach: “Congress makes the laws, the president carries them out, judges decide controversies, and we citizens may be penalized only by a jury of our peers.”
Nobody believes that anymore, because no part of it has been true for a long time. Barack Obama stopped pretending that it is. During the twentieth century’s second half, both parties and all branches of government made a mockery of the Constitution of 1789. Today’s effective constitution is: “The president can do whatever he wants so long as one-third of the Senate will sustain his vetoes and prevent his conviction upon impeachment.”
Obama has been our first emperor. A Donald Trump presidency, far from reversing the ruling class’s unaccountable hold over American life, would seal it. Because Trump would act as our second emperor, he would render well-nigh impossible our return to republicanism.
Today, nearly all the rules under which we live are made, executed, and adjudicated by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and countless boards and commissions. Congress no longer passes real laws. Instead, it passes broad grants of authority, the substance of the president’s bureaucracy decides in cooperation with interest groups.
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Nancy Pelosi’s remark that we would know Obamacare’s contents only after it passed was true, and applicable to nearly all modern legislation. The courts allow this, pretending that bureaucrats sitting with their chosen friends merely fill in details. Some details! Americans have learned that, as they say in DC, if you are not sitting at one of these tables of power, “you’re on the menu.”
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In recent years, Obama and the Democratic Party (with the Republican leadership’s constant collusion) have prevented Congress from voting to appropriate funds for individual programs and agencies. They have lumped all government functions into “continuing resolutions” or “omnibus bills.” This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, shielding elected officials from popular scrutiny, relieving them of the responsibility for supporting or opposing what the government does. This has enabled Obama to make whatever deals have pleased him and his Republican cronies.
Codevilla's argument against Trump is:
Trump’s career and fortune have been as beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others.
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Trump’s claim to be an enemy of rule-by-inside-deal is counterintuitive. His career and fortune have been as participant and beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others. Crony capitalism is the air he breathes, the only sea in which he swims, his second nature. His recipe for “fixing” America, he tells us, is to appoint “the best people”—he names some of his fellow crony capitalists—to exercise even more unaccountable power and to do so with “unbelievable speed.” He assures us that, this time, it will be to “make America great again.” Peanuts’ Lucy might reply: “This time, for sure!”
Oswald Spengler's historical analysis showed that every complex civilization, as it enters the twilight of its existence, transitions into an age of what he termed "Caesarism"--rule by emperors (or, in our case, elected monarchs). It appears that Codevilla is touching upon this theme. However, Codevilla is mistaken by assuming Obama was our first such emperor. The transition from Constitutional Republic to elected monarchy occurred between the Civil War and the Great Depression. The federal system of government set up in the Constitution was our Rubicon. Abraham Lincoln was our Julies Caesar who dared cross that Rubicon and establish that the states were inferior to the federal government. Franklin D. Roosevelt was our Augustus. But even as Augustus paid lip service to the Republican institutions of Rome, so too have Roosevelt and subsequent presidents paid lip service to federalism and co-equal branches of government. The difference between Obama and the earlier presidents, however, is that Obama didn't care to keep up the public fiction of appearing to merely be the president of a Constitutional Republic.
So let me disabuse you of the belief that this election has anything to do with the type of government we have: at this point, the choice we have is not the selection of a type of government--that was determined over 100 years ago--but who will be our elected monarch for the next four years. As I've noted, and as a few of the articles above point out, the real question facing us is whether to reject globalism. Perhaps later, in another election, we can address the issue of our form of government; but right now, that is not the issue.
Update: Some additional articles:
- "No, America Is Not Collapsing Like The Roman Empire Did"--The Federalist. The author's basic point is that the United States is not Rome, and, therefore, one should be careful in drawing parallels between the Roman Republic heading into Empire and where the United States is today. He writes:
We’re not heading for an imperial system because we’ve already worked out an alternative to our dead republic. As I said in my original article, we now have an elected monarchy. Sure, we don’t call it that, but that doesn’t change that that’s what we have. Guerra even hints at this in his article: “While the system has been strained, it is still a vibrant and functioning liberal democracy where power peaceably transitions every four to eight years.” Notice that he identifies the government with the office of the president. That was not the vision of the founders.
We didn’t end up with an imperial system (and we won’t) because history isn’t cyclical, and Americans stopped trying to emulate Rome. We found a way to navigate the end of republican government without 60 years of violence. Our elected monarchy is actually far superior to Rome’s imperial system. We have a tradition of peaceful transition and a constitutional method for succession, two things that Rome never mastered.
One thing we do have in common with the ancient Roman Empire, however, is that we still pretend that we have a republic. Both America and Rome managed to inaugurate new forms of government without actually changing the constitution. Hundreds of years after Augustus, some Romans still paid lip service to the Republic, even though they recognized that political power rested in the person of the emperor. We do something very similar.
On paper, our American form of government has changed very little over the last 200 years. In reality, our government operates in a manner that would be unrecognizable to the drafters of the Constitution. Every branch of government has gone through a radical change in its relative power, and we didn’t have to rewrite much of anything. One might argue that I’m cutting my distinctions within America’s political history too fine. Historians, however, look for the distinctions.
I take this as a backhanded swipe at Spengler and Gibbons. Spengler, however, never argued a cyclical theory of history, but an organic theory of history: civilizations differ much as trees, bushes, or flowers may differ, but they all pass through similar stages of growth and decline. Rome is a convenient subject because its history is well documented.
The author is also playing fast and loose with the definition of an Empire. An Empire is a political entity where a central state or authority exercises power over a group of countries or regions. There is no requirement that the central power or authority be any particular form of government. Certainly the British Empire was no less an empire because authority was vested in a nation controlled by a constitutional monarchy.
- "Arguing for Marriage"--Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. While I don't agree with Dreher's apparent love for modern divorce laws (which themselves are disincentives to marriage), he has some valid observations about the result of the failure of disintegration of the family:
Over two decades ago, Robert Kaplan, in The Atlantic, wrote about “the coming anarchy” in what we still called then the Third World. As part of the article, he contrasted the chaotic poverty of the slums of West Africa with the slums of Ankara, in Turkey. All the Turkish poor lacked was opportunity; despite the poverty of their neighborhoods, Kaplan felt perfectly safe there, because those Turkish Muslims knew how to live:
My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.
There’s a lesson in that for us too. The “extensive slum life” among poor American blacks and, increasingly, among the white American poor and working class, has caused and is causing those cultures to decompose. I don’t say that judgmentally, but I do say we have to see this for what it is. Back when my folks were growing up, in rural poverty, the culture among the white poor (I don’t know about the black poor back then) was generally that of the Turkish slums. That is fast going, and has in many places gone.
What does this have to do with Jones’s point? We have reached a point in the broader culture in the United States in which many people do not instinctively feel the need for traditional religious values, or marriage. They do not understand what most cultures in human history have understood: that sexuality needs to be bound within authoritative structures in order to be controlled, for the good of the tribe and the individuals within it.
As I watched, I used my trusty Google to endlessly study one of my obsessions: why our nonwhite young men relatively are so violent and undisciplined and commit so many crimes and do so badly in school when the ones I meet and work with are smart and pleasant and hard working.
The answer I came up with was this:
Our country needs a great many things. More stealth bombers. More Marines. More medical care for Veterans and their families. More good teachers. But our most urgent need is for more fathers.
In every study, by every metric we have, we see that young people of color who grow up without a father present in the household do far worse in school than kids with a father present, have FAR more trouble with the law, are incarcerated at a far higher rate than young people who grow up with a father present.
The fatherless kids have wildly more mental illness, commit more violent crimes, have more suicides, more rapes, have incredibly higher rates of illiteracy, higher rates of dropping out of school than kids with fathers present.
Fatherlessness predicts trouble for kids of any race. But roughly 30 percent of white kids grow up fatherless. Roughly 3/4 of black kids do. This is a national catastrophe. One out of every three black youths will spend time behind bars, a rate astronomically higher than that of whites. A large majority in some urban areas are illiterate. Fatherlessness is behind much of this.
Something terrible is going on with these Americans. The terrible thing is that they don’t have fathers to impose structure and order and self-discipline and a sense of right and wrong or even a sense of the difference between love and sex. (What was the last rap song you heard that talked about love?) They do not have a flesh and blood super ego at home to give them an idea of how to behave.
What happened? Blacks used to live lives not that different from whites in terms of law and order and family and then it all fell apart starting in the early sixties.
Was it drugs? Maybe. Drugs are poison to morals. Maybe it was the welfare system that paid women to be pregnant and unmarried. In many states in America, a single mother with three children and no husband gets paid as much in welfare as a starting computer programmer or teacher. You usually get what you pay for.
There’s a horrible echo here: Slave women were valued for how many children they could breed. Now, under the welfare plantation system, women can create value by having as many children as possible without a husband.
This is serious stuff. The emotional pain that these kids feel is cruel. Their rate of death at an early age is horrifying. They are a rapidly growing fraction of the population. The majority of first graders in America are now nonwhite. Close to half of all first graders have no father at home. We are creating a new generation of largely illiterate, violent, fatherless Americans. If this continues, America’s days as a first world nation are numbered.
Historian Peter Turchin defined a key factor in the resilience of the social order as "the degree of solidarity felt between the commons and aristocracy," that is, the sense of purpose and identity shared by the aristocracy and commoners alike.
As Turchin explains in War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires:
"Unlike the selfish elites of the later periods, the aristocracy of the early Republic did not spare its blood or treasure in the service of the common interest. When 50,000 Romans, a staggering one fifth of Rome’s total manpower, perished in the battle of Cannae, the senate lost almost one third of its membership. This suggests that the senatorial aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen...
The wealthy classes were also the first to volunteer extra taxes when they were needed… A graduated scale was used in which the senators paid the most, followed by the knights, and then other citizens. In addition, officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay, saving the state 20 percent of the legion’s payroll...
The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times as wealthy as an average Roman citizen.
Roman historians of the later age stressed the modest way of life, even poverty of the leading citizens. For example, when Cincinnatus was summoned to be dictator, while working at the plow, he reportedly exclaimed, 'My land will not be sown this year and so we shall run the risk of not having enough to eat!'"
Once the aristocracy’s ethic of public unity and service was replaced by personal greed and pursuit of self-interest, the empire lost its social resilience.
Turchin also identified rising wealth inequality as a factor in weakening social solidarity. By the end-days of the Western Roman Empire, elites held not 10 times as much wealth [as] commoners but 10,000 times as much as average citizens.
Wealth inequality is both a cause and a symptom: it is a cause of weakening social resilience, but it also symptomatic of a system that enables the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
Read the whole thing.
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