Welcome To The Collapse

Simon Black of the Sovereign Man website believes that "We’re done with 'gradually'. We’ve now reached the 'suddenly' part." Black is paraphrasing a passage from Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, where a character describes how to go bankrupt: "'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"

    What Hemingway's character is discussing, as Black explains, is called logarithmic decay: a line showing a gradual downward trend that suddenly makes a sharp and very steep decline. He continues:

    In fact logarithmic decay is great way to describe social and financial decline. Even the rise and fall of superpowers are often logarithmic in scale. The Kingdom of France in the 1700s infamously fell gradually… then suddenly.

    We can see the same logarithmic decay in the West today, and specifically the United States.

    The deterioration of government finances has been gradual, then sudden. Social conflict, censorship, and the decline in basic civility has been gradual, then sudden. Even the loss of confidence in the US dollar has been gradual… and is poised to be sudden.

    Back in 2009 when I started Sovereign Man, I spoke a lot about ideas that were highly controversial at the time.

    I suggested that Social Security’s trust funds would run out of money. That the US government would eventually be buried by its gargantuan national debt. That the US dollar would eventually lose its international reserve dominance. That inflation and social conflict would rise.

    The main thesis, quite simply, was that the US was in decline. And whenever I spoke at events, I used to talk about logarithmic decay, saying:

    “As a civilization in decline, you never really know quite where you are on the curve. You could be way over here on the horizontal line, at the very beginning of the decline… or you could be standing on the precipice about to hit the vertical slide down.”

    Well, now we have a much better idea of where we are on that logarithmic decay curve. Because these ideas about the national debt, inflation, social security, social conflict, etc. are no longer theories. Nor are they even remotely controversial.

    Just last week, US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said in a speech that “America’s debt is a ticking time bomb”. Social Security’s looming insolvency is now openly discussed in Washington and regularly reported in the Wall Street Journal.

    We’ve all seen with our own eyes (and even experienced) inflation, social divisions, and censorship.

    And as for the dollar, we continue to see a multitude of cracks in its dominance. Most notably, Saudi Arabia is considering a plan to sell oil not just in US dollars, but also in Chinese yuan.

    Plus the international development bank of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) announced earlier this month that they will start moving away from the dollar.

    Is it any surprise? The US government is weeks away from defaulting on its national debt over the latest debt ceiling debacle. And yet the guy who shakes hands with thin air refuses to negotiate a single penny in spending cuts to help reduce trillions of dollars in future deficit spending.

    The whole world is watching in utter disbelief at the astonishing level of incompetence that has infected the highest levels of America’s once hallowed institutions, including news media, big business, and the government itself.

    America– and the West by extension– really are on the precipice of that logarithmic decay curve… the part where the horizontal line becomes a vertical line down.

    It has taken years… even decades to reach this point, gradually. We’re now at the “suddenly” part.

He goes on to discuss some methods to slow or protect against the decay at both national and personal levels. And while he notes that some empires have, at least temporarily, pulled themselves out of this death spiral, it would require some sacrifices and changes that both the elites and the public would not like. 

• "Why plunging tax receipts are raising fears about the debt ceiling"--The Hill.

    The article cited above from The Hill mentions one great problem facing the country: declining tax receipts. It reports:

    The federal government is pulling in less tax revenue than expected, prompting concerns the early numbers could leave far less time for Congress to strike a deal to avoid a default on the national debt.

    Before tax figures started rolling in after last week’s filing deadline, Congress appeared to have until sometime in late July or August to pass legislation to raise or suspend the debt limit. But some experts have warned that a major shortfall in tax revenue means the U.S. government could run out of cash as early as June.

More specifically, according to the article:

    The U.S. government has collected 35 percent less in tax revenue this year than at the same time in 2022, according to a recent analysis released by Moody’s Analytics economists Mark Zandi and Bernard Yaros. 

    Zandi noted in an interview that it’s “not a surprise” the receipts are coming in at lower levels than last year — when the government saw a budget surplus of more than $300 billion in April 2022, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). But he added receipts are “coming even weaker than” anticipated. 

    “They’re going to come to a point in early June when they don’t have enough cash to pay everyone on time,” Zandi said. ...

The article suggest that the primary drivers of the decline are decreased realization of taxable capital gains (i.e., weakening stock, bonds, and real estate markets), and a decline in corporate tax receipts (although corporate taxes are only a small share--10%--of tax receipts). On top of this, investors are shying away from short term Treasury Notes, so even short term debt financing is becoming more difficult. 

    Per the article, House Republicans have introduced a bill that would raise the debt ceiling in return for spending cuts, but the bill is expected to be dead on arrival to the Democrat controlled Senate.

• "An Obvious Solution"--Vox Day.

    Vox day notes a new report on New York City's efforts to curb its carbon footprint by requiring people to eat less. That news report relates:

    New York City will track the carbon footprint of residents’ food consumption as part of a sweeping initiative to decrease the city’s carbon emissions from food by a third this year, Mayor Eric Adams revealed on Monday at an event for the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. 

    About a fifth of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions come from household food consumption, Adams told reporters, blaming much of that total on meat and dairy. Household food consumption is supposedly the third largest contributor to city emissions totals, trailing only buildings and transportation. 

    The Mayor’s Office of Food Policy has ordered city agencies to reduce their food consumption by 33% by 2030, and Adams has asked private corporations to cut their own emissions by 25% by 2030, insisting New Yorkers’ wasteful eating habits cannot continue without imperiling the planet.

Vox Day reminds us that "Sooner or later, the Satanists always resort to starvation. It’s less confrontational, and therefore, less risky than war. This is why it’s important to start taking steps to secure your family’s food supply now." So, yet another reason to lay up substantial food storage and, where possible, to learn to garden.

• "Did the Neocons Save the World from the Thucydides Trap?" by Ron Unz, The Unz Review.

The Democrats and the Neocons did not save us from war with China, but they sure did their best to make sure we lost. As the two World Wars taught us, the manufacturing capabilities of the combatants is as or more important than what happens on the front line. So, this brings me to the first point: destruction of the U.S.'s ability to manufacture:

Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago, America had emerged as the sole, unchallenged global superpower. But over the last generation, the tremendous growth rate of the Chinese economy had propelled it past America’s in real size, the first such transition since our own country had overtaken Britain near the end of the 19th century. China’s technological progress had been equally rapid, and in our modern world these constitute the raw elements of global power, while China had also begun bolstering its military, not previously a high priority.

    The second point is that the Neocons and Democrats have squandered and foiled any attempt to build an effective coalition with Russia against China. Although Unz does not delve into this, the U.S. missed an opportunity after the collapse of the Soviet Union to develop deeper ties with Russia. But things have obviously soured over the last couple of decades:

    When Mearsheimer had written his long final chapter in 2014, he had naturally envisioned Russia as a central element of the balancing coalition that America would construct against the Chinese, together with India and Japan as well as smaller powers such as South Korea and Vietnam. Any rational American geopolitical strategist seeking to contain a rising China would have taken that approach.

    But the Neocons running the foreign policy of the Obama Administration were remarkably arrogant rather than rational, and that same year they orchestrated an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, followed by the loss of Crimea and ongoing fighting in the Donbas, all of which permanently poisoned Russian relations. Not long afterward, Mearsheimer gave his prophetic talk on the looming future risks of a NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine, a presentation that over the last year has been viewed some 29 million times on Youtube, perhaps more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet.

    Thus, by the time Allison published his 2017 book, any possibility of an American-Russian alliance against China had evaporated and Russia scarcely featured in his discussion. These trends continued and a year ago Rudd’s book already characterized China and Russia as strategic partners, mentioning that Xi had described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “his best friend” and that the two countries regularly collaborated on a variety of different political, military, and economic issues. But Russia still remained a minor factor in Rudd’s analysis, with its role discussed in just a couple of pages together with scattered references elsewhere in his text.

    The outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war completely changed everything, as did the unprecedented wave of resulting Western sanctions targeting Russia and the massive amount of financial and military aid provided to Ukraine, already totaling $120 billion, a sum far larger than the entire annual Russian defense budget. Over the last year, American-led NATO has been fighting a proxy-war against Russia on Russia’s own border, a war that many American political leaders have declared can only end with Russia’s defeat and the death or overthrow of Putin. The Hague in Europe has already issued an arrest-warrant against the Russian president for alleged war-crimes.

    Just prior to the beginning of the Ukraine war, Xi had held this 39th personal meeting with Putin, and had declared that China’s partnership with Russia “had no limits.” The subsequent all-out Western assault on Russia has inevitably produced a tight alliance between the two huge countries.

    China’s industrial strength is enormous, with its real productive economy already larger than the combined total for America, the European Union, and Japan. But add to that the enormous energy supplies and other natural resources of its remarkably complementary Russian neighbor, and the two together probably outweigh the power of America and its allies. ...

Moreover, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India and others are strengthening economic ties with this growing Sino-Russian alliance while reducing the dependence on the dollars. Other erstwhile allies, including France and Japan, are abandoning the U.S. coalition against Russia because of the harm caused by sanctions. As Unz points out, "Given our country’s horrendous budget and trade deficits, America’s continued standard of living is heavily dependent upon the international use of the dollar, especially for oil sales, so these are extremely threatening developments." The only way out of this is to get back to U.S. oil dominance as we briefly saw under the Trump Administration, but we all know the odds of that are practically nill.

• "Human tidal wave is waiting for border to open May 11 — Biden has no plan to stop it"--New York Post. 
• "Mayor Eric Adams says Biden's migrant crisis has 'destroyed' NYC"--New York Post.
• "'The Purpose of Communist Propaganda Is to Humiliate'—Why the Biden Regime Lies About the Border" by John Derbyshire, The Unz Review.

Derbyshire points out: "They lie. We know they’re lying, and they know we know. They don’t care that we know. The object is not persuasion, it’s humiliation—to break our wills and make us obedient subjects of the all-knowing, all-powerful state." As I stood in line with thousands of other passengers at the Las Vegas airport earlier this week to go past a drug sniffing dog just to reach a TSA checkpoint (where they had graciously decided to not require passengers to remove shoes and belts to make up for the delay by the dog sniffing) and thought of how useless all this was, I also thought how all of this is not intended to protect us from terrorist or win the war on drugs, but to humiliate the public.

• "US special forces evacuate nearly 100 diplomatic personnel from Sudan as African nation collapses into civil war that Biden calls 'unconscionable'"--Daily Mail. 
• "Massachusetts teacher and her toddler daughter are among thousands trapped in Sudan as conflict rages, as White House says it has NO plans to evacuate Americans"--Daily Mail.

The teacher was a teacher at the American School in Sudan--i.e., she taught the children of the diplomats that were evacuated. This is just another example that citizenship--at least U.S. citizenship--is bringing fewer and fewer benefits.