Let's start with the big one; the one on everybody's mind: Virginia. This is where people most think that our cold civil war is most likely to go hot.
- For the Slow Learners at Aesop's Raconteur Report
- The Virginia Flashpoint: a clear and present danger? at Bayou Renaissance Man
- How Virginia Democrats would destroy the USA by Don Surber
- The 2020 Virginia Showdown by Matt Bracken on American Partisan
It worries me more than words can say that we've got people not merely casually tossing around the idea of civil war, but actively trying to foment it, on both sides of the political aisle.When both sides refuse to back down, that's the definition of conflict. It's hard not to conclude the Republic is irreparably broken, and the next step is dissolution into open warfare. It doesn't have to be but if both sides keep pushing for it, it will happen.
Back on my New Year's eve piece, I like to Borepatch's Thoughts on what's past, and what's ahead. Borepatch doesn't even mention Virginia until nearly the end, but brings up lots of the things on my mind. Here, he's quoting from Free-Man's Perspective in a piece, “Government Against the People: It Gets Worse In the Late Stages.”
All of this, and more, has been regular blog fodder around here. Looking at the first two, I've been saying that I can see an economic collapse coming literally since the first post on this blog - almost 10 years ago. I've advocated for a return to a gold standard - or at least one based on real commodities that can't be created in virtually infinite amounts on a whim.Let me be clear on this: Once ruling hierarchies get beyond a certain point, they cannot be reformed. And I am sure that the modern West is beyond that point.
So where are we? What are these things saying? I sure don't know. Will Virginia turn into the shooting match that appears to be coming? Don't know. Will the US exist in 2030? All I know is that with 100% certainty is that if the country is gone in 2030 the cause will absolutely have nothing to do with climate change. Given the absolute truth that nobody can predict the future with absolute accuracy, I think you could do worse than listen to (read) Raconteur Report's “The 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture”
Wherever you're reading this, you've had unmistakable evidence that things aren't going to go all rosy. Perhaps ever again. Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again. You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it. Howsoever long or briefly.Aesop goes on to talk about the value of trying to prepare for the variety of things that are coming. Switching over to John Wilder, he points out:
Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key. The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.
Optimists say the glass is half full.
ReplyDeletePessimists say the glass is half empty.
Politicians say "This isn't my glass. Where is my glass? My glass was full. And it was bigger."
Re: "It worries me more than words can say that we've got people not merely casually tossing around the idea of civil war, but actively trying to foment it, on both sides of the political aisle."
ReplyDeleteIt may take two to tango, but it only takes one side to start a war. The Left has been actively at war against America for a century. We have just begun to push back.
Every year, the Left gets stronger. They bring in millions of recruits to occupy our territory for them. Silicon valley tightens the electronic noose even as it lengthens its reach into every facet of our lives.
Every year, we get weaker. As we age, our children are being taught in schools (that we pay for) to hate us and despise what little of their own heritage they learn about. The economy worsens for the average family as the government's lies about inflation eat away at the value of our earnings and dissolve our savings.
The Left jumped the shark when the Soviet Union collapsed -- nobody today makes an intellectually honest attempt to defend the modern Left's positions anymore. What the Left remains able to do is dominance challenges, doxing, and Soviet political officer stuff within the Left's institutions. But look how weak this is! No secret police demands I carry a cell phone parole bracelet tracking device, or not purchase with cash, or submit this comment using a Google Account login. Nobody has permanently squelched anyone who takes their continuity of blogging the least bit seriously. The military position of the Virginia rurals is the strongest of such comparables in world history.
Delete#2 ON TRENDING - 2019 Was The Craziest Year Ever (Mr. Beast Video)
ReplyDeletehttps://commoncts.blogspot.com/2020/01/2-on-trending-2019-was-craziest-year.html
ps. could u please add CC to your blogroll? Thanks!
McChuck, I'm not sure that the left gets stronger each year. We're seeing a backlash all over the place, both in America and in Europe - not to mention places like Hong Kong. Certainly the media is much weaker than they've ever been.
ReplyDeleteThe signal to noise ratio is terrible and the left hides behind that, but it's very possible that the terrible S/N ratio is a sign that the left knows that it is weakening.
The Left imports 2 million left-leaning, anti-American foreigners into our country every single year. And they vote, legally or not. And their kids certainly will.
Deletehttps://www.childtrends.org/indicators/racial-and-ethnic-composition-of-the-child-population
any good socialist knows what a great equalizer a bullet is and what a great defensive screen propaganda is.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a rabble rouser or advocating violent overthrow of anyone's government but I do know what an M-67 is for. it's for when telling them 'fuck you' doesn't work anymore.
After tax collection is disrupted and the Useless Eaters^H^H^H Retirees in Florida stop receiving Social Security and Medicare, what are they going to do to earn a living? Will they join the coal miners in learning to code?
ReplyDeleteSiG, you quoted Bayou Renaissance Man. I read that post earlier. The last paragraph is most bothering to me because his observation is correct.
ReplyDelete"But", I hear some readers ask, "what happens if one or the other side won't take a deep breath and back off?" In that case, dear readers, we're neck-deep in the dwang, and sinking fast. There does come a time when there's no other option but to take a stand. I just hope and pray we can avoid that, if at all possible, to allow men and women of goodwill on both sides to work out a mutually acceptable way forward.
The problem is the only side that might take a deep breath and back off is the conservative side. The Left will NEVER allow compromise. Because the Left has gained so much traction in the needed areas such as the MSM, Bureaucratic/Deep State and Internet, we are past the point of compromise. If they ever gain power again, it will be their way or the re-education camps/gulags/death-camps if you don't accept their way. And that is why I unfortunately have lost a lot of hope for our future.
In 11 months and a few days, we will know the immediate future if it is not interrupted by the portended events in Virginia. My belief is that the Democrats will cheat so hard or will enter open revolt that our Nation will be truly sundered in two.
Just to correct a wording error here: After tax collection is disrupted and the innocent Retirees in Florida who obeyed the law and paid into what was supposed to be a secured fund for life instead of going to jail stop receiving Social Security and Medicare, what are they going to do to earn a living?
ReplyDeleteThere. Fixed it for ya.
:)
DeleteI do think that BillB is right - the Left never stops until it either implodes into a Leftist Singularity (Leftist Purity Death Spiral) or someone kills all of the Leftist leaders farther Left than them (think Stalin). For the most part, the Right just wants to be left alone, which is fundamentally impossible for the Left.
ReplyDeleteThere is good news, however! At the local grocery store next week if you buy a dozen eggs, you get the next dozen 50% off.
They're not innocent, they've been voting for a living since 1955, and planned all along to take out several times what they put in. Gary North says he was shown the math in high school back in 1955 how Social Security was projected to fail. If they were innocent, they would have implemented all those changes Denninger wants, so they wouldn't financially cannibalize their own children. They would have fixed it around 1970 when they turned 30 and figured it out. Then they would have 50 years to have made other retirement plans.
ReplyDeleteActually, I think saving for retirement is impossible for the middle class given the baby boom throughout the first world. What retirees want is medical care. You can't store doctors and nurses in a warehouse for fifty years. If you store gold coins, then when your hip breaks you are in possession of a bag of round metal stampings, when what you want is doctors and nurses. Somewhere you need to find doctors and nurses who want whatever you've saved up. But if the young skilled first world population is smaller, there may not be enough doctors and nurses.
You want more doctors (other than the Indians and Pakistanis), then talk to the AMA and tell them to stop their hold on medical teaching schools and hospitals. The AMA hasn't allowed a single new place since the early 1960's. And they've delisted a couple.
DeleteThe AMA operates like a medieval guild - they keep prices high by restricting membership. And they've instituted diversity quotas, quality of education and service be damned.
The AMA is not a government department, agency, commission, or state-owned enterprise. The AMA can not call upon armed policemen to enforce its policy desires. Whatever is causing the doctor shortage, it cannot be the AMA. Maybe it's all those Trump voters who Just Follow Orders when the government, which it elected, tells them the Affordable Care Act bans new doctor-owned hospitals like The Surgery Center of Oklahoma https://surgerycenterok.com
DeleteThey're not innocent, they've been voting for a living since 1955, and planned all along to take out several times what they put in. Gary North says he was shown the math in high school back in 1955 how Social Security was projected to fail. If they were innocent, they would have implemented all those changes Denninger wants, so they wouldn't financially cannibalize their own children. They would have fixed it around 1970 when they turned 30 and figured it out. Then they would have 50 years to have made other retirement plans.
DeleteThat's an incredibly naive approach. You're expecting an entire population to take your view and yours is the only solution. First off, around half the population wants the Fed.gov to be in charge of everything and would vote against ending these programs - then as now. At any given moment in the last 50 years you're complaining about, you could watch every "expert" in those programs parade across the TV saying SS and medicare are fine, they're the "untouchable third rail of politics", they'll always be there and so on, versus one or two others saying they're doomed. Just like today. What do you think people are going to do? Are they going to believe you or the expert on TV? When the average person can't do eighth grade level math?
I've been figuring that these programs have been in trouble since the early '80s and have been voting that way and saving that way ever since. Did it do any good? A lifetime in savings can be quietly wiped out by central banks in a few years. Keeping your retirement in gold coins in your safe can be made illegal at the stroke of a pen.
I've said it over and over, but one more time: what you're saying is that we should have started shooting decades ago. Exactly when and where? There is no alternative. Literally everyone would have had to break the law and go to jail. If you're not self-employed, that money is taken out and you don't have access to it. If you are self-employed you have to pay it quarterly. If you don't, they come for you.
What you're doing is bitching that the world didn't turn out exactly like you wanted so you want to kill everyone that didn't make it the way you want. Real mature.
You're expecting an entire population to take your view
ReplyDeleteNo, anything that involves mass persuasion is a flavor of democratic voting, and as you point out most humans in most times and places don't want freedom. This appears driven by great ape political instincts, and I don't expect that voting outcome to change prior to altering the relevant human genes.
what you're saying is that we should have started shooting decades ago. Exactly when and where? There is no alternative. Literally everyone would have had to break the law and go to jail.
Gun registration has recently been ignored in Connecticut, California, New Jersey, Boulder, and I expect Virginia. None of those events produced shooting or mass imprisonment despite the majority approving of the policy; the law was simply disobeyed by the minority in a manner that didn't poke anyone's head above the herd defense. According to your military-political theory those political results were un-possible, and those historical events could not have occurred.
Here is a military-political theory I believe makes more accurate predictions than yours: Technological growth overall on net empowers small groups more than large groups. Examples include the printing press, the Xerox copier, the Macintosh, the Internet, the blog. Bitcoin, despite its lack of commodity backing, and its future replacements. What small home shop cnc people can do on a hobby budget to blocks of aluminum melted down from cans. What the US Navy Millennium Challenge wargame concluded. What recently happened to half the Saudi refining capacity at trivial cost and risk using drones. Tech growth does not appear to level off to a logistic curve, therefore neither would the shifting of military force multiplication advantage to smaller groups. This continually shrinks the size of group which can force mutually assured destruction onto the largest groups. It will be ever-easier to destroy, and ever-harder to defend. Soon nobody will be able to force Bubba to do anything, much less "pay taxes" supporting the [insult] group of [slur] in [placename] to do [anything].
And given some humans are crazy, that's why humanity needs to physically diversify into space, which is an even better fence than mountains and oceans. But in the meantime, tax collection will end, despite 99% of first world voters wanting big government in charge.