Mass Psychosis is now the new threat. Plan in advance

[Yodean]

But, but US focus on climate change and wokeism will counter and outmaneuver anything Putin can do. It says so in our "Taking over the world 101, strategery for idiots" by Pinky and the Brain.

The CEO of El Salvador appears to agree with you:

https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/ ... in-wallets

[SOL]

People from the Donbas areas are shaking their heads at how stupid the outside world can be. Someone I know that is less than 40Km from where this supposedly occurred sent these pictures to me.



The second image is a closer look at the damage. Now imagine this miraculously 27 kids escaped unharmed. They trying a false flag attack here and it will backfire badly as it did in Georgia. Putin won't attack unless Ukraine makes the mistake of pushing them too hard. if that occurs all military targets will be taken out aerially as Ukraine has no Airforce and to let the lesson sink in, he might bomb Kyiv.

However, an easier option is to arm more rebels in Odesa and other parts of Ukraine. Unleash his hackers to create chaos in the country.


This book explains why the US is getting desperate
The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinsk

Here's an excerpt from the book

"In that context, how America "manages" Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent.

Putin is now in almost in control of the Eurasia zone, China controls Africa, and Putin is moving in on Latin America. He is already viewed as the top honcho in the middle east. Whoever controls Eurasia and then by default controls most of the world's resources.


Other interesting tidbits
Yet aside from losing the war in Afghanistan, of which "there can be little doubt", there are far more strategic consequences of the impending pull-out for the US, its allies and the world other than a bruised ego and two generations of veterans asking what it was all for. These lie in the discipline of geopolitics, once shelved into obscurity after the Cold War and presumed triumph of liberal capitalist democracy the world over, at least by the West. In the aftermath of Russia annexing Ukraine's Crimea in 2014, Walter Russell Meads explained in an article for Foreign Affairs, about the return of geopolitics and how it was always relevant for regional powers like Russia, Iran and China, whom he referred to as "revisionist powers" who did not agree with the settlement and status quo of the post-1990 international order.

The British pioneer in the study of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder theorised back in 1904 about what he called "the Heartland", which is most of today's Central Asian pivot. Mackinder argued that whoever controlled this land-mass, would dominate the "world-island" or eastern hemisphere. However, during the Second World War, Dutch-American Professor Nicholas Sykman would go a step further, expanding on the idea with his Rimland Theory, alluding to the surrounding regions of Eurasia (Western Europe, Pacific Rim and the Middle East). He would famously contend that "Who controls the Rimland, rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world."

Yet what we are witnessing currently is the literal withdrawal of the US from this strategically-located country, Afghanistan, which effectively straddles the rimland and heartland. It already unceremoniously abandoned Bagram Air Base last month and will eventually leave Kabul airport. There are no US bases in Central Asia, although it once maintained a base in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan following

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210 ... 0following

[scott]

People from the Donbas areas are shaking their heads at how stupid the outside world can be. Someone I know that is less than 40Km from where this supposedly occurred sent these pictures to me.
The second image is a closer look at the damage. Now imagine this miraculously 27 kids escaped unharmed. They trying a false flag attack here and it will backfire badly as it did in Georgia. Putin won't attack unless Ukraine makes the mistake of pushing them too hard. if that occurs all military targets will be taken out aerially as Ukraine has no Airforce and to let the lesson sink in, he might bomb Kyiv.

Looks like a jackhammer job. Windows not blown out? Very suspect.

[SOL]

Hopefully, cool minds prevail but these two videos illustrate that Russia won't back down. From an observers perspective, it is clear that when you push any nation far enough especially if they have Nuclear weapons you are asking for trouble. At this point wrong or right, Russia has decided to take a stance and China is silently for now supporting Russia. Since the West is targeting these two nations it is not a smart move as these videos will illustrate and also the article posted below where the US is thinking about attempting to block Russia's access to essential chips. Most of the advanced Chips are made outside the US and these chips are now essential for AI dominance and no nation wants to be left behind, certainly not Russia or China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeNwyVG8Egs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDn7d33GsDY

These routes are so complex that in 2021, the Biden administration had to press semiconductor companies to provide greater transparency regarding their supply chains, but responses were voluntary. The bottleneck in chip supplies could make companies even cagier about revealing supply chain details. Taking Russian demand off the market could add further uncertainty, which industry planners would not like. Not only is it hard for the Biden administration to enforce a blockade of a supply chain it cannot quite trace, but the companies involved generally have other priorities than geopolitics.

Second, the U.S. government’s punishment for companies that do not comply with the blockade may lack teeth. The administration could blacklist them by placing them on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List, preventing them from selling to the U.S. government. This may be an empty threat when there’s already a semiconductor shortage.

U.S.-made components found in Russian military drones have already traveled through hard-to-trace supply pathways.

Third, the world should expect Putin to turn to Russia’s new ally, China, for chips and end products. Already, China accounts for 70 percent of Russian computer and smartphone imports. Sino-Russian relations have improved recently, a notable development given that China did not support Russia’s past incursions into Georgia and Ukraine nor the annexation of Crimea. In the meantime, China has been keen to build up its position in semiconductors. Its companies are not among the top global semiconductor companies, and their production is disproportionately concentrated in lower value-added components and less sophisticated chips. Gaining access to Russian technological resources, political support, and engineers could be tempting for Beijing. This could deepen the U.S.-China rift, and monitoring Chinese sales to Russia would be extremely difficult.

Fourth, Russian military semiconductor needs can also be met by other intermediaries, small trading companies, and surreptitious networks eager for the business. U.S.-made components found in Russian military drones have already traveled through such hard-to-trace supply pathways.

Fifth, even if one takes the attitude of “let’s try the strategy and see what sticks,” there are wider risks to keep in mind. If the standoff with Russia, combined with ongoing tensions with China, reach a tipping point, China could be motivated by the semiconductor blockade to make a move on Taiwan—home to TSMC and thus, for Beijing, the ticket to semiconductor glory. An escalation of the cold war between the United States and China could throw the bottlenecked semiconductor supply chain into further chaos and hurt U.S. interests. The crisis caused by the ongoing chip shortage already shaved an estimated 1 percent off U.S. GDP in 2021. Adding more disruption to the chips industry without clear benefits may not be worth i

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/14/ru ... ors-chips/

Chips are so important that sanctions against Russia could push China to attack Taiwan to make sure they have these chips. A chip war could lead to a hot war. AI dominance is essential now for every nation (that is what all the military leaders in China, Russia, etc have determined). So if these supplies are hindered it could lead to a hot war.

what are you thoughts on this topic.

[Yodean]

The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinsk

Grand Chessboard is a fantastic book. Somewhat disturbing, in places. Also some superficial but useful insights may be gleaned from playing the boardgame Risk, over and over again, against different opponents.

China can "take over" Formosa without resorting to military force - more and more "Mainlanders" have entered Taiwan the past decade or so (live and work there, have families, etc.), and this continues. Military invasion of Formosa gives Western Powers an excuse to do naughty stuff - a distraction from domestic social and financial problems. CCP want the infrastructure of Taiwan intact.

[scott]

This morning five Ukrainian "saboteurs" crossed into Russia and were killed. Ukraine says its fake news. Russian stock market down 8%, USD-RUR and EUR-RUR jump up.
I'm going to buy some Rubles today.

Articles in Russian, but you can use a translate app.
https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-60466407
https://www.1rnd.ru/news/3334363/v-rost ... iversantov
https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-60465860

[Yodean]

This book explains why the US is getting desperate
The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinsk

For those who don't have the time nor inclination to read this great book, the following is a good 14 minutes summarizing some of its main points, with some insightful and funny comments from the speaker:

https://youtu.be/dnBMB3fUOGo

[nicolas]

NBC News: In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nation ... -rcna23014

Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high.

We're feeding you and the world fake news. We're not hiding this. And we're not apologizing for this.

At times, the Biden administration has released information in which it has less confidence or about things that are possible rather than truly likely.

Our job is to write a narrative, not to inform you. We're open about this.

“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it,” a U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them — Putin specifically — before they do something. It’s preventative. We don’t always want to wait until the intelligence is 100 percent certainty that they are going to do something. We want to get out ahead to stop them.”

Again, what we say doesn't need to be true because we're the ones writing the story.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you cognitive dissonance in action. Make people believe in something that benefits you. And really capture their mind by eliciting strong emotions, preferably negative ones. Then, tell them it's just a story you made up. But people have too much of their ego and their sense of identity invested in the story, so they'll cling to it anyway. Now you've broken their mind and their will to question the narrative. Those that could intellectually do it won't even try to reason about what you feed them. They're too deep into the story. Thinking would create too much discomfort.

These are truly interesting times for a student of psychology, manipulation, and mass psychosis.

[scott]

These are truly interesting times for a student of psychology, manipulation, and mass psychosis.

Welcome to CWofCD (Charlie's World of Cognitive Dissonance).

[SOL]

These are truly interesting times for a student of psychology, manipulation, and mass psychosis.

Welcome to CWofCD (Charlie's World of Cognitive Dissonance).

Now is a great time to read the fall and decline of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Read the abridged version for the full version well, not only is too long, but it gets a tad bit monotonous. You will marvel at how the top players have learnt absolutely nothing from history. You will also be shocked at how similar the narrative is to what is currently happening. change the dates and you might be tempted to think the Author is talking about America

Cognitive dissonance usually represents a multi-decade or multi-generational peak for the current top power.

I will post free download link if i can find it and some data on this book under this section
viewtopic.php?p=8843#p8843

[SOL]

These are truly interesting times for a student of psychology, manipulation, and mass psychosis.

Welcome to CWofCD (Charlie's World of Cognitive Dissonance).

Now is a great time to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Read the abridged version for the full version well, not only is too long, but it gets a tad bit monotonous. You will marvel at how the top players have learned nothing from history. You will also be shocked at how similar the narrative is to what is currently happening. change the dates, and you might be tempted to think the Author is talking about America

Cognitive dissonance usually represents a multi-decade or multi-generational peak for the current top power.

I will post free download link if i can find it and some data on this book under this section
viewtopic.php?p=8843#p8843

[George1010]

DOUG Casey offers a good overview of what Gibbon was trying to say. Casey is good when it comes to history so so when it comes to investing. Its a long read but well worth it, and a lot has changed since it was written in 2019. The main change being that things in America are now probably 3X as bad



POLITICAL
It’s somewhat misleading, however, to talk about a simple fall of Rome, and much more accurate to talk about its gradual transformation, with episodes of what paleontologists describe as “punctuated disequilibrium.” There were many falls.

Republican Rome fell in 31 BCE with the accession of Augustus and the start of what’s called the Principate. It almost disintegrated in the 50 years of the mid-3rd century, a time of constant civil war, the start of serious barbarian incursions, and the destruction of Rome’s silver currency, the denarius.

Rome as anything resembling a free society fell in the 290s and then changed radically again, with Diocletian and the Dominate period (more on this shortly). Maybe the end came in 378, when the Goths destroyed a Roman army at Adrianople and wholesale invasions began. Maybe we should call 410 the end, when Alaric—a Goth who was actually a Roman general—conducted the first sacking of Rome.

It might be said the civilization didn’t really collapse until the late 600s, when Islam conquered the Middle East and North Africa and cut off Mediterranean commerce. Maybe we should use 1453, when Constantinople and the Eastern Empire fell. Maybe the Empire is still alive today in the form of the Catholic Church—the Pope is the Pontifex Maximus wearing red slippers, as did Julius Caesar when he held that position.

One certain reflection in the distant mirror is that beginning with the Principate period, Rome underwent an accelerating trend toward absolutism, centralization, totalitarianism, and bureaucracy. I think we can argue America entered its Principate with the accession of Roosevelt in 1933; since then, the president has reigned supreme over the Congress, as Augustus did over the Senate. Pretenses fell off increasingly over time in Rome, just as they have in the U.S.

After the third century, with constant civil war and the destruction of the currency, the Principate (when the emperor, at least in theory, was just the first among equals) gave way to the Dominate period (from the word “dominus,” or lord, referring to a master of slaves), when the emperor became an absolute monarch. This happened with the ascension of Diocletian in 284 and then, after another civil war, Constantine in 306. From that point forward, the emperor no longer even pretended to be the first among equals and was treated as an oriental potentate. The same trend is in motion in the U.S, but we’re still a ways from reaching its endpoint—although it has to be noted that the president is now protected by hundreds, even thousands, of bodyguards. Harry Truman was the last president who actually dared to go out and informally stroll about DC, like a common citizen, while in office.

In any event, just as the Senate, the consuls, and the tribunes with their vetoes became impotent anachronisms, so have U.S. institutions. Early on, starting with the fourth emperor, Claudius, in 41 AD, the Praetorians (who had been set up by Augustus) showed they could designate the emperor. And today in the U.S., that’s probably true of its praetorians—the NSA, CIA, and FBI, among others—and of course the military. We’ll see how the next hanging-chad presidential election dispute gets settled.

My guess is that the booboisie (the Romans called them the capite censi, or head count) will demand a strong leader as the Greater Depression evolves, the dollar is destroyed, and a serious war gets underway. You have to remember that war has always been the health of the state. The Roman emperors were expected, not least by their soldiers, to always be engaged in war. And it’s no accident that the so-called greatest U.S. presidents were war presidents—Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. We can humorously add the self-proclaimed war president Baby Bush. Military heroes—like Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower—are always easy to elect. My guess is that a general will run for office in the next election, when we’ll be in a genuine crisis. The public will want a general partly because the military is now by far the most trusted institution of U.S. society. His likely election will be a mistake for numerous reasons, not least that the military is really just a heavily armed variant of the postal service.

It’s wise to keep Gibbon’s words about the military in mind: “Any order of men accustomed to violence and slavery make for very poor guardians of a civil constitution.”

One additional political parallel with the U.S.: up to Trajan in 100 AD, all the emperors were culturally Roman from old, noble families. After that, few were.

__________

LEGAL
Like the Romans, we’re supposedly ruled by laws, not by men. In Rome, the law started with the 12 Tablets in 451 BCE, with few dictates and simple enough to be inscribed on bronze for all to see. A separate body of common law developed from trials, held sometimes in the Forum, sometimes in the Senate.

When the law was short and simple, the saying “Ignorantia juris non excusat” (ignorance of the law is no excuse) made sense. But as the government and its legislation became more ponderous, the saying became increasingly ridiculous. Eventually, under Diocletian, law became completely arbitrary, with everything done by the emperor’s decrees—we call them Executive Orders today.

I’ve mentioned Diocletian several times already. It’s true that his draconian measures held the Empire together, but it was a matter of destroying Rome in order to save it. As in the U.S., in Rome statute and common law gradually devolved into a maze of bureaucratic rules.

The trend accelerated under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, because Christianity is a top-down religion, reflecting a hierarchy where rulers were seen as licensed by God. The old Roman religion never tried to capture men’s minds this way. Before Christianity, violating the emperor’s laws wasn’t seen as also violating God’s laws.

The devolution is similar in the U.S. You’ll recall that only three crimes are mentioned in the U.S. Constitution—treason, counterfeiting, and piracy. Now you can read Harvey Silverglate’s book, Three Felonies a Day, which argues that the average modern-day American, mostly unwittingly, is running his own personal crime wave—because federal law has criminalized over 5,000 different acts.

Rome became more and more corrupt as time went on, as has the U.S. Tacitus (56-117 AD) understood why: “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the nation.”

SOCIAL
Along with political and legal problems come social problems. The Roman government began offering useless mouths free bread, and later circuses, in the late Republic, after the three Punic Wars (264-146 BCE). Bread and circuses were mostly limited to the capital itself. They were extremely destructive, of course, but were provided strictly for a practical reason: to keep the mob under control.

And it was a big mob. At its peak, Rome had about a million inhabitants, and at least 30% were on the dole. It’s worth noting that the dole lasted over 500 years and became part of the fabric of Roman life—ending only when wheat shipments from Egypt and North Africa were cut off by the Vandals at the beginning of the 5th century.

In the U.S., there now are more recipients of state benefits than there are workers. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and numerous other welfare programs absorb over 50% of the U.S. budget, and they’re going to grow rapidly for a while longer, although I predict they’ll come to an end or be radically reformed within the next 20 years. I recognize that’s a daring prediction, given the longevity of the dole in Rome.

DEMOGRAPHICS
The Empire appears to have suffered a demographic collapse late in the 2nd century, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, at least in part because of a plague that killed on the order of 10% of the population. Ancient plagues are poorly documented, perhaps because they were viewed as normal happenings. But there may be other, subtler reasons for the drop in population. Perhaps people weren’t just dying, they also weren’t reproducing, which is much more serious. The rising Christian religion was puritanical and encouraged celibacy. Especially among the Gnostic strains of early Christianity, celibacy was part of the formula for perfection and knowledge of God. But of course, if Christianity had been effective in encouraging celibacy, it would have died out.

The same thing is now happening throughout the developed world—especially in Europe and Japan, but also in the U.S. and China. After WW II, American women averaged 3.7 children. Now it’s 1.8; in parts of Europe, it’s 1.3. Part of that is due to urbanization and part to an understanding of birth control, but a growing part is that they just can’t afford it; it’s very expensive to have a kid today. And I believe another major element is a new religious movement, Greenism, which is analogous to early Christianity in many ways. It’s now considered antisocial to reproduce, since having kids raises your carbon footprint.

INTELLECTUAL
The essential anti-rationality of early Christianity poisoned the intellectual atmosphere of the classical world. This is true of not just religions in general, but the desert religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular—each more extreme than its predecessor.

In late antiquity, there was a battle between the faith of the Fathers of the Church and the reason of the philosophers. Christianity halted the progress of reason, which had been growing in the Greco-Roman world since the days of the Ionian rationalists Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and others, right up to Aristotle, Archimedes, and Pliny. Knowledge of how the world worked was compounding, albeit slowly—then came to a stop with the triumph of superstition in the 4th century. And went into reverse during the Dark Ages, starting in the 6th century.

Christianity used to hold that anything that seems at odds with revealed truth or even with the extrapolations of revealed truth is anathema, the way much of Islam does today. The church drew generations of men away from intellectual and scientific pursuits and toward otherworldly pursuits—which didn’t help the Roman cause. It can be argued that, if not for Christianity, the ancient world might have made a leap to an industrial revolution. It’s impossible to make scientific progress if the reigning meme holds that if it’s not the word of a god, it’s not worth knowing.

For nearly 1,000 years, revealed beliefs displaced science and reason. This started to change only in the 13th century with Thomas Aquinas, an anomaly in that he cleverly integrated the rational thinking of the ancient philosophers—Aristotle in particular—into Catholicism. Aquinas was lucky he wasn’t condemned as a heretic instead of being turned into a saint. His thought had some unintended consequences, however, which led to the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and today’s world. At least until Aquinas, Christianity slowed the ascent of man and the rise of rationalism and science by centuries, in addition to its complicity in the fall of Rome.

As the importance of science has grown, however, religion—or superstition, as Gibbon referred to it—has taken a back seat. Over the last 100, even the last 50 years, Christianity has fallen to the status of a back story for Santa Claus and quaint, albeit poetic, folk wisdom tales.

__________

MILITARY
Wars made Rome. Wars expanded the country’s borders and brought it wealth, but they also sowed the seeds of its destruction, especially the three big wars against Carthage, 264-146 BCE.

Rome began as a republic of yeoman farmers, each with his own plot of land. You had to be a landowner to join the Roman army; it was a great honor, and it wouldn’t take the riffraff. When the Republic was threatened—and wars were constant and uninterrupted from the beginning—a legionary might be gone for five, ten, or more years. His wife and children back on the farm might have to borrow money to keep things going and then perhaps default, so soldiers’ farms would go back to bush or get taken over by creditors. And, if he survived the wars, an ex-legionary might be hard to keep down on the farm after years of looting, plundering, and enslaving the enemy. On top of that, tidal waves of slaves became available to work freshly confiscated properties. So, like America, Rome became more urban and less agrarian. Like America, there were fewer family farmers but more industrial-scale latifundia.

War turned the whole Mediterranean into a Roman lake. With the Punic wars, Spain and North Africa became provinces. Pompey the Great (106-48 BCE) conquered the Near East. Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) conquered Gaul 20 years later. Then Augustus took Egypt.

The interesting thing is that in the early days, war was actually quite profitable. You conquered a place and stole all the gold, cattle, and other movable property and enslaved the people. That was a lot of wealth you could bring home—and then you could milk the area for many years with taxes. But the wars helped destroy Rome’s social fabric by wiping out the country’s agrarian, republican roots and by corrupting everyone with a constant influx of cheap slave labor and free imported food. War created longer, faraway borders that then needed to be defended. And in the end, hostile contact with “barbarians” actually wound up drawing them in as invaders.

Rome’s wars radically changed society, just as America’s have. It’s estimated that at times 80-90% of the population of the city of Rome was foreign born. It sometimes seems that way in many U.S. cities. I always look at the bright side, however: after every foreign misadventure, the U.S. gets an influx of new restaurants with exotic cuisines.

The stream of new wealth to steal ended with the conquest of Dacia in 107. The advance in the east stopped with the Persians, a comparable military power. Across the Rhine and Danube, the Germans—living in swamps and forests with only tiny villages—were not worth conquering. To the south there was only the Sahara. At this point, there was nothing new to steal, but there were continuing costs of administration and border defense. It was inconvenient—and not perhaps just coincidental—that the barbarians started becoming really problematic just about when Christianity started becoming popular, in the 3rd century. Unlike today, in its early days Christianity encouraged pacifism… not the best thing when you’re faced with barbarian invasions.

Remember, the army started out as a militia of citizen soldiers who provided their own arms. It eventually would accept anyone and morphed into a completely mercenary force staffed and led largely by foreigners. This is pretty much how the U.S. armed forces have evolved. For all the “Support Our Troops” propaganda, the U.S. armed forces are now more representative of the barrios, ghettos, and trailer parks than of the country as a whole. And they’re isolated from it, a class unto themselves, like the late Roman army.

Even though the Roman army was at its greatest size and cost in the Dominate period, it was increasingly a paper tiger. After its rout at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the Western empire went into a death spiral. The U.S. armed forces may now be in an analogous posture, comparable to Soviet forces in the 1980s.

Although the U.S. has won many engagements and some sport wars, it hasn’t won a real war since 1945. The cost of its wars, however, has escalated hugely. My guess is that if it gets into another major war, it won’t win, even if the enemy’s body count is massive.

Recall Osama bin Laden’s plan to win by bankrupting the U.S. He was very astute. Most U.S. equipment is good only for fighting a replay of WW II—things like the $2 billion B-2 bomber, the $350 million F-22, and the $110 million V-22 Osprey are high-priced dinosaurs. The Army lost 5,000 helicopters in Vietnam. How many Blackhawks can the U.S. afford to lose in the next war at $25 million each? World War II cost the U.S. $288 billion, in 1940 dollars. The pointless adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are guesstimated at $4 trillion, a roughly comparable amount in real terms.

In the future—unless it completely changes its foreign and military policies—the U.S. will likely be confronting scores of independent, nonstate actors, rather than other nation-states. We won’t really know who they are, but they’ll be very effective at attacking hugely expensive infrastructure at near-zero cost, by hacking computers. They won’t need a B-2 when a stolen Pakistani nuke can be delivered by freighter. They can take out a $5 million M-1 tank with an essentially zero-cost improvised incendiary device. While the U.S. bankrupts itself with defense contractors whose weapons have 20-year development times, enemies will use open-source warfare, entrepreneurially developing low-cost, unconventional weapons with off-the-shelf components.

This is actually analogous to what Rome confronted with invading nomads. Let me relate an anecdote offered by Priscus, a Roman ambassador to the court of Atilla in about 450 AD. While there he met a Greek who had joined the barbarians. This will give you a flavor of the story he tells Priscus. I’ve put some words in bold because they’re especially relevant to other aspects of our story.

After war the Scythians live in inactivity, enjoying what they have gained, harassed very little or not at all. The Romans, on the other hand, are very liable to perish in war, as they have to rest their hopes of safety on others, and are not allowed, on account of their tyrants, to use arms. And those who use them are injured by the cowardice of their generals, who cannot support the conduct of war. But the condition of the subjects in time of peace is far more grievous than the evils of war, for the exaction of the taxes is very severe, and unprincipled men inflict injuries on others, because the laws are practically not valid against all classes.

Wars destroyed Rome, just as they’ll destroy the U.S.

But what about the barbarian invasions that Gibbon perhaps correctly pointed out were the direct cause of Rome’s downfall? Do we have a present-day analogue? The answer is at least a qualified “yes.” It’s true that the U.S. will bankrupt itself by fighting the ridiculous and chimerical “War on Terror,” maintaining hundreds of military bases and operations around the world and perhaps getting into a major war. But from a cultural point of view, it’s possible that the southern border will present an equally serious problem.

The U.S.-Mexican border is a classic borderland situation, no more stable and just as permeable as the Rhine-Danube dividing line was for the Romans. The problem now isn’t invading hordes, but a population that has no cultural allegiance to the idea of America. A surprising number of the Mexicans who cross over to the U.S. talk seriously about a Reconquista, in reference to the fact the Americans stole the land in question from people they presume to be their ancestors.

In many parts of the Southwest, the Mexicans form a majority and choose not to learn English—and they don’t need to, which is a new thing for immigrants to the U.S. Most are “illegal,” as you might say the Goths, the Vandals, and the Huns were in Rome’s final days. My guess is that in the near future, there will be a lot of young Hispanic males who actively resent paying half of what they make in income, Social Security, and Obamacare taxes in order to subsidize old white women in the Northeast. I wouldn’t be surprised to see parts of the Southwest turn into “no go” zones for many government agencies over the next several decades.

Could the U.S. break up the way the Roman Empire did? Absolutely; the colors of the map on the wall aren’t part of the cosmic firmament. And it needn’t have anything to do with military conquest. Despite the presence of Walmarts, McDonald’s, and Chevrolet dealerships across a country whose roads are as impressive as the nearly 50,000 miles of highway laid down by the Romans, there’s evidence the country is disintegrating culturally. Although what is occurring in the Mexican borderland area is the most significant thing, there are growing cultural and political differences between the so-called “red” and “blue” states. Semi-serious secession movements are at work in northern Colorado, western Maryland, and western Kansas. This is a new phenomenon, at least since the War Between the States of 1861-65.

__________

ECOLOGY
Now to gratify the Druids among you.

Soil exhaustion, deforestation, and pollution—which abetted plagues—were problems for Rome. As was lead poisoning, in that the metal was widely used for eating and drinking utensils and for cookware. None of these things could bring down the house, but neither did they improve the situation. They might be equated today with fast food, antibiotics in the food chain, and industrial pollutants. Is the U.S. agricultural base unstable because it relies on gigantic monocultures of bioengineered grains that in turn rely on heavy inputs of chemicals, pesticides, and mined fertilizers? It’s true that production per acre has gone up steeply because of these things, but that’s despite the general decrease in depth of topsoil, destruction of native worms and bacteria, and growing pesticide resistance of weeds.

Perhaps even more important, the aquifers needed for irrigation are being depleted. But these things have all been necessary to maintain the U.S. balance of trade, keep food prices down, and feed the expanding world population. It may turn out, however, to have been a bad trade-off.

I’m a technophile, but there are some reasons to believe we may have serious problems ahead. Global warming, incidentally, isn’t one of them. One of the reasons for the rise of Rome—and the contemporaneous Han in China—may be that the climate cyclically warmed considerably up to the 3rd century, then got much cooler. Which also correlates with the invasions by northern barbarians.

ECONOMY
Economic issues were a major factor in the collapse of Rome, one that Gibbon hardly considered. It’s certainly a factor greatly underrated by historians generally, who usually have no understanding of economics at all. Inflation, taxation, and regulation made production increasingly difficult as the empire grew, just as in the U.S. Romans wanted to leave the country, much as many Americans do today.

I earlier gave you a quote from Priscus. Next is Salvian, circa 440:

But what else can these wretched people wish for, they who suffer the incessant and continuous destruction of public tax levies. To them there is always imminent a heavy and relentless proscription. They desert their homes, lest they be tortured in their very homes. They seek exile, lest they suffer torture. The enemy is more lenient to them than the tax collectors. This is proved by this very fact, that they flee to the enemy in order to avoid the full force of the heavy tax levy.

Therefore, in the districts taken over by the barbarians, there is one desire among all the Romans, that they should never again find it necessary to pass under Roman jurisdiction. In those regions, it is the one and general prayer of the Roman people that they be allowed to carry on the life they lead with the barbarians.

One of the most disturbing things about this statement is that it shows the tax collectors were most rapacious at a time when the Empire had almost ceased to exist. My belief is that economic factors were paramount in the decline of Rome, just as they are with the U.S. The state made production harder and more expensive, it limited economic mobility, and the state-engineered inflation made saving pointless.

This brings us to another obvious parallel: the currency. The similarities between the inflation in Rome versus the U.S. are striking and well known. In the U.S., the currency was basically quite stable from the country’s founding until 1913, with the creation of the Federal Reserve. Since then, the currency has lost over 95% of its value, and the trend is accelerating. In the case of Rome, the denarius was stable until the Principate. Thereafter it lost value at an accelerating rate until reaching essentially zero by the middle of the 3rd century, coincidental with the Empire’s near collapse.

What’s actually more interesting is to compare the images on the coinage of Rome and the U.S. Until the victory of Julius Caesar in 46 BCE (a turning point in Rome’s history), the likeness of a politician never appeared on the coinage. All earlier coins were graced with a representation of an honored concept, a god, an athletic image, or the like. After Caesar, a coin’s obverse always showed the head of the emperor.

It’s been the same in the U.S. The first coin with the image of a president was the Lincoln penny in 1909, which replaced the Indian Head penny; the Jefferson nickel replaced the Buffalo nickel in 1938; the Roosevelt dime replaced the Mercury dime in 1946; the Washington quarter replaced the Liberty quarter in 1932; and the Franklin half-dollar replaced the Liberty half in 1948, which was in turn replaced by the Kennedy half in 1964. The deification of political figures is a disturbing trend the Romans would have recognized.

RELIGION
When Constantine installed Christianity as the state religion, conditions worsened for the economy, and not just because a class of priests now had to be supported from taxes. With its attitude of waiting for heaven and belief that this world is just a test, it encouraged Romans to hold material things in low regard and essentially despise money.

Today’s Christianity no longer does that, of course. But it’s being replaced by new secular religions that do.

PSYCHOLOGY
Despite all our similarities with Rome, and even equipped with our understanding of why Rome collapsed, we can’t avoid Rome’s fate just by trying to avoid Rome’s mistakes. Yes, we have an analogue of early Christianity chewing away at our civilization’s foundations. And yes, we have a virtual barbarian invasion to contend with. But there’s another factor, I think, that worked against the Romans and is working against us… one Gibbon didn’t consider.

We can’t evade the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that entropy conquers everything and that over time all systems degrade and wind down. And that the more complex a system becomes, the more energy it takes to maintain it. The larger and more complex, interconnected, and interdependent it becomes, the more prone it is to breakdown and catastrophic failure. That includes countries and civilizations.

The Romans reached their physical limits within the confines of their scientific, engineering, economic, and other areas of knowledge. And the moral values of their civilization, their founding philosophies, were washed away by a new religion. We may reach our technological limits. And our founding values are certainly being washed away.

Our scientific knowledge is still compounding rapidly—because more scientists and engineers are alive today than have lived in the previous history of mankind put together. That statement has been true for at least the last 200 years—and it’s been a gigantic advantage we’ve had over the Romans. But it may stop being true in the next few generations as the population levels off and then declines, as is happening in Japan, Europe, China, and most of the developed world. It’s compounded by the fact that U.S. universities aren’t graduating Ph.D.s in engineering, mathematics, and physics so much as in gender studies, sociology, English, and J.D.s in law. As it degrades, the U.S. will not only draw in fewer enterprising foreigners, it will export its more competent natives.

My solution to America’s decline and fall? The solution for declining civilizations is less command and control, less centralization, and less legal and regulatory complexity. And more entrepreneurship, free minds, and radically free markets. Unfortunately, although a few might agree with that, it’s not going to happen. Not even if most people agree.

Why? Because there are immense governmental institutions that exist, with many millions of employees—at least 20 million in the U.S. And many tens of millions more in their families and throughout the private sector that depend on them. And many tens of millions more that rely directly on the state for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other direct payments. And millions more associated with quasi-state institutions like NGOs, think tanks, law firms, lobbying groups, and the like. The parasitic mechanism of the state has become key to their survival. Even if many in their ranks see the dysfunction now planted in America, they’re hardly going to break their own well-filled rice bowls.

Every institution, like every living thing from an amoeba on up, has one thing in common: they all obey a prime directive—survive! They will try to do so at any cost to society at large. They intuitively know that, as a corollary, you either grow or you die. So you’re not going to see any dysfunctional organization dissolve itself. It’ll keep trying to grow until it self-destructs or an outside force destroys it. Beyond a certain stage, any serious reform is impossible. In the case of the U.S., it’s now host to a completely inoperable cancer, as the government and its satellites grow faster than ever, while the productive economy contracts.

The second law of thermodynamics is a concept of physics, but it has applications in most areas of human action, including what’s been called “imperial overstretch”—the point where the resources gained from growing is less than the energy expended in the process. Rome ran up against imperial overstretch. So did Alexander, Napoleon, and Hitler. The Spanish, French, British, and Soviet empires all did as well. It’s a natural thing with all living organisms, to try to grow until they can’t grow any further, until their energy expenditures exceed their inputs, and/or they’re too large and complex to be controllable, at which point they either rot from within or fall to external predators. It’s as though the Peter Principle applies to all of nature: everything rises to its level of incompetence, at which point it becomes vulnerable.

But does it really matter if the U.S. declines? It’s already morphed from America—which we all loved—into something else. And it’s morphing even more in the wrong direction, at an accelerating rate, as did Rome. The U.S. is declining in all the areas I’ve touched on. But it’s not unique; it’s following the course of all states and all things.

Rome was arrogant and thought it was unique, the center of the world, and eternal. Just like the U.S. Or China, for that matter.

Rome was corrupt; it departed from the values that made it great and so deserved to collapse. The U.S. is increasingly corrupt. That’s completely predictable, for exactly the reason Tacitus cited—a profusion of laws. In market-based systems, corruption is rare and occasional. But in large, complex, politically based systems, it’s not only commonplace, it’s salubrious, because it allows workarounds. Corruption becomes like an oxygen tank to an emphysema victim—awkward but needed. Rulers, however, never attempt to cure the underlying disease by simplifying the complex systems they’ve built. Instead they pass more laws, making the system ever more like a Rube Goldberg machine, with even more complexities and inefficiencies. That’s always counterproductive, since compounded complexity makes the eventual collapse even worse. And harder to recover from. And more nearly inevitable.

STUPIDITY, EVIL AND THE DECLINE OF THE US
It used to be that America was a country of free thinkers.

“Say what you think, and think what you say.” That’s an expression you don’t hear much anymore.

It’s much more like the world of 1984 where everything is “double think.” You need to think twice before you say something in public. You think three times before you say something when you’re standing in an airport line.

http://www.theinternationalchronicles.c ... -and-rome/

[Tobeornot]

These are truly interesting times for a student of psychology, manipulation, and mass psychosis.

Welcome to CWofCD (Charlie's World of Cognitive Dissonance).

Now is a great time to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Read the abridged version for the full version well, not only is too long, but it gets a tad bit monotonous. You will marvel at how the top players have learned nothing from history. You will also be shocked at how similar the narrative is to what is currently happening. change the dates, and you might be tempted to think the Author is talking about America

Cognitive dissonance usually represents a multi-decade or multi-generational peak for the current top power.

[Yodean]

I prefer coconut oil - got lots, multiple functions.

Given the upcoming and increasing food and perishable item shortages, have stocked up a lot on virgin coconut oil, since I live in the Neo-marxist paradise a.k.a. Canada. Looks like I will need a lot of coconut oil.

https://www.amazon.ca/SprinZ-Silicone-M ... 88&sr=8-43

*****

Along with copious amounts of vaseline/coconut oil/baby oil/saliva, the above devices may be helpful, for those who are planning on staying in a Western democracy in the years to come.

Start small, go slow ... don't "go big or go home" in this instance, as you may end up in the hospital if you do the latter.

[SOL]

I prefer coconut oil - got lots, multiple functions.

Given the upcoming and increasing food and perishable item shortages, have stocked up a lot on virgin coconut oil, since I live in the Neo-marxist paradise a.k.a. Canada. Looks like I will need a lot of coconut oil.

https://www.amazon.ca/SprinZ-Silicone-M ... 88&sr=8-43

*****

Along with copious amounts of vaseline/coconut oil/baby oil/saliva, the above devices may be helpful, for those who are planning on staying in a Western democracy in the years to come.

Start small, go slow ... don't "go big or go home" in this instance, as you may end up in the hospital if you do the latter.

Those tools look dangerously close to a prostate massager, have heard that they can help but never tried them. So have you tried them Yodean lol. Gives a new meaning to the title of sitting on a solid throne