There Is A Storm Coming

If you have ever watched a business blow up, you know that there are signs of impending doom. A slow decline in revenue and morale, gradually accelerating (this is when those in the know suddenly start leaving--the rats fleeing the sinking ship, so to speak), and then a sudden break up or collapse. As I've noted before, the collapse of Western Civilization began a century ago. We are, I believe, on the cusp of the sudden surge toward break up. The past weekend was full of news stories painting an outline of some of what is coming down the pike.

I'll start with the cultural war. Not the "abortion" or "gay marriage" topics, but something even more fundamental--the gender wars. Instapundit posted the following message from feminists to straight-white-men:

"Sit down & let us abolish you."

Breitbart reported that "[a] Liberal Democrat activist who sits on two national party committees has been suspended from her regional party after a string of sexist comments on social media. The activist in question, Sarah Noble, made multiple tweets of a disturbingly hateful nature, including 'kill all men', 'fuck men', and 'die cis[gendered] scum'." Nothing new in all this, other than feminists are becoming more public and brazen about the topic. It is easy enough to write off the foregoing as some radical fringe, except the attitude infects society as a whole. Men are denigrated throughout our society. And the response is declining marriage rates. As this article points out, "men need marriage like a fish needs a bicycle." I think what we are going to see is an sudden, exponential decline in birth rates and social stability as more young men choose their X-Box over sex and marriage.

Iran. It is developing (if it has not already developed) a nuclear weapon. Obama's negotiations were nothing more than stalling tactics while Iran widened its proxy wars, hardened its military program, and upgraded its missile defenses. In fact, according to the Washington Free Beacon, Obama expressed surprise that Iran hadn't purchased air defense missiles from Russia earlier:

President Obama said that he was “not surprised” Russia sold an advanced missile system to Iran in the midst of his negotiations with the Ayatollah to prevent Iran’s nuclear facilities from making a bomb. He went even further to say that he expected the deal to happen a lot sooner than it did. 

“I’m frankly surprised that it held this long given that they were not prohibited by sanctions from selling these defensive weapons,” President Obama said on Friday.

"Defensive weapons," which will be used to shield Iran from any military action should it not abide by the not yet existing treaty to forestall its nuclear weapons program. Oh, but that is not all that has been happening during the kabuki theater of the negotiations. North Korea has been transferring missile components to Iran in violation of international sanctions--a fact that Obama kept secret from the U.N. agency responsible for enforcing the sanctions.  And don't worry about the convoy of ships from Iran to Yemen to openly resupply the Shia Houthi rebels. I mean, maybe you should worry, but Iran evidently does not need to. Even the Arab Gulf nations have begun to publicly question whether Obama secretly supports the Iranian regime specifically, and Shiite Islam in particular.

Last week, Judicial Watch reported on the existence of an ISIS base in northern Mexico, near the border with the United States. The Administration denies that there is any such base. In fact, the information is so baseless, that the FBI is now conducting an investigation into who leaked the information to Judicial Watch. I'm sure that this has nothing to do with the theft of radioactive material last week in Cardenas, Tabasco, Mexico. But some future theft will be for the radioactive material and not scrap metal.

I don't want to forget Ragnarok, which began as an armed uprising in Ukraine and now has the U.S. and Russia stumbling toward war:

COULD A U.S. response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russian war? Such a possibility seems almost inconceivable. But when judging something to be “inconceivable,” we should always remind ourselves that this is a statement not about what is possible in the world, but about what we can imagine. As Iraq, Libya and Syria demonstrate, political leaders often have difficulties envisioning events they find uncomfortable, disturbing or inconvenient.

Prevailing views of the current confrontation with Russia over Ukraine fit this pattern. Since removing Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi from power had limited direct impact on most Americans, it is perhaps not surprising that most Washington policy makers and analysts assume that challenging Russia over Ukraine and seeking to isolate Moscow internationally and cripple it economically will not come at a significant cost, much less pose real dangers to America. After all, the most common refrain in Washington when the topic of Russia comes up is that “Russia doesn’t matter anymore.” No one in the capital enjoys attempting to humiliate Putin more than President Barack Obama, who repeatedly includes Russia in his list of current scourges alongside the Islamic State and Ebola. And there can be no question that as a petrostate, Russia is vulnerable economically and has very few, if any, genuine allies. Moreover, many among its business and intellectual elites are as enthusiastic as the Washington Post editorial page to see Putin leave office. Ukrainians with the same view of former Ukrainian president Viktor F. Yanukovych successfully ousted him with limited Western help, so, it is argued, perhaps Putin is vulnerable, too.

Nevertheless, Russia is very different from the other countries where the United States has supported regime change. First and most important, it has a nuclear arsenal capable of literally erasing the United States from the map. While many Americans have persuaded themselves that nuclear weapons are no longer relevant in international politics, officials and generals in Moscow feel differently. Second, regardless of how Americans view their country, Russians see it as a great power. Great powers are rarely content to serve simply as objects of other states’ policies. Where they have the power to do so, they take their destiny into their own hands, for good or ill.

WHILE MOST policy makers and commentators dismiss the possibility of a U.S.-Russian war, we are more concerned about the drift of events than at any point since the end of the Cold War. We say this having followed Soviet and Russian affairs throughout the Cold War and in the years since the Soviet Union’s implosion in 1991. And we say it after one of us recently spent a week in Moscow talking candidly with individuals in and around the Putin government, including with many influential Russian officials, and the other in China listening to views from Beijing. We base our assessment on these conversations as well as other public and private sources.

There are three key factors in considering how today’s conflict might escalate to war: Russia’s decision making, Russia’s politics and U.S.-Russian dynamics.

(Read the whole thing).

And nature can still deal some blows. ABC Australia reported over the weekend a mysterious deadly outbreak in Nigeria that killed its victims within 24 hours. Probably too deadly to spread very far, but that was what was thought about Ebola a couple years ago. And this article from the Seattle Times is ostensibly about how global warming is increasing the length of the growing season in more northern climes (at the same time as it brings colder winters and more precipitation to the same localities), but that California, the American Southwest, and the Rocky Mountain states are seeing declining rainfall. 

We live in interesting times.

(H/t Instapundit and Weasel Zippers)