Tuesday, December 14, 2021

"Unprecedented" by Michael Anton

Link:

If forced to bet, I would have to place my chips somewhere between imminent collapse and drawn-out decline. I occasionally read theories of triple bank-shots and four-dimensional chess—they really know what they’re doing!—only to marvel. Our regime cannot, at present, unload a cargo ship, stock a store shelf, run a clean election, handle parental complaints at a school board meeting, pass a budget bill, treat a cold variant, keep order in the streets, defeat a third world country, or even evacuate said country cleanly. And that’s to say nothing of all the things it should be doing, that all non-joke countries do, that it refuses to do. If our ruling class has a plan, it would seem to be to destroy the society and institutions from which they, at present, are the largest—one is tempted to say only—beneficiaries. Do they think they can benefit more from the wreckage? Or are they driven by hatreds that blind them to self-interest? Perhaps they’re simply insane?

Whatever the case, couple all this unprecedentedness with all this incompetence, and going long on Wokemerica seems a sucker bet. But, to end where we began, the very unprecedentedness of our situation means that all bets are off.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

I waffled for a long time between 'our elites are incompetent' and 'our elites are evil' but in the end I think I came up with a reasonably good explanation. I'd be curious to read your review of ploink.org/tragedy

Anonymous said...

Abundance minded people were horrified that Kyle showed up to an event across state lines with a rifle at all, while Scarcity minded people were thrilled that one cannot shoot into a crowd of antifa without killing pedophiles. Usually civilization follows a cycle of four generations back and forth between these poles, popularized as the 'four turnings' or somewhat unfairly as the 'hard times / strong men' cycle, but the invention of birth control negated the normal population pressure that should have begun pushing us back into Scarcity around 1995, two full generations after the baby boom. This has allowed us to swing to more a extreme Abundance mentality than usual.

In addition, an organization in the late stages of decay will actively promote the Abundance lifestyle: its increasingly incompetent leaders require followers that are either even more incompetent themselves or too busy partying to care. This explains the strong official support for LGBTQ, the ultimate frontier of the Abundance mentality. Even though only 3.5% of Americans are not-straight, and only 0.3% are transsexual, LGBTQ issues are consistently front and center, e.g. the United States Embassy in Kabul tweeting about gay rights rather worrying about the Taliban retaking their country. Since we have now moved so far towards the Abundance pole (Hazard High School made the news recently for an assembly where male students in bikinis gave teachers lap dances), the inevitable mean reversion to Scarcity will likely overshoot spectacularly.

Anonymous said...

When we encounter the unknown, our natural impulse is to try to figure out how it works. But this strategy does not work with Evil, Inc. because it is simply too big, too complicated, and too deliberately deceptive. You can spend your entire life reading 8-chan and watching conspiracy videos on Youtube and emerge no wiser. The only way to cut out of the jungle is with the machete of ruthless logic: the laws of organizational selfishness and incompetence must apply to Evil, Inc. as well. In fact, since these are the most selfish people on the planet, these laws operate even more powerfully and rapidly than usual. If Evil, Inc. actually had a top-down military structure, where low level gangstalkers logged into Evil.net to receive their instructions from Dr Evil, it would have completed its organizational life cycle long ago and broken up. To survive, Evil, Inc. must be small enough to monitor and remove incompetence from its midst via bargaining. And since the best position for siphoning free resources is the special interest group within the larger group, Evil, Inc. must look like an onion. Within Evil, Inc. is the smaller More Evil, Inc. which then contains Extremely Evil, Inc, and so on. Each layer must keep its subordinate layers disorganized and ignorant in order to keep siphoning free resources from them.

Anonymous said...

What is going on now is 100% on purpose.

They (start with our hi tech overlords and billionaires) want to destroy the US and handover the rebuilding to the authoritarians, they think they will be spared, but will actually be the first ones up against the way.

But do not worry, read up o Devolution.

League of Women Voters said...

"A medical tyranny theoretically solves all of Mr Global's problems: inflation from printing can be mitigated by deflationary lockdowns and eventually enable a digital currency which would allow them to eject people from society at will, lockdowns and masks encourage everyone to conduct all social interaction through Big Tech where 'misinformation' that conflicts with their project can be censored, and above all the population can be controlled by lethal or sterilizing injection. If you find this last item difficult to believe, ask yourself what you would do in their shoes. If you could save the planet, wouldn't you feel you had to do it? Sure, a lot of people will have to die, but the future of the human race is at stake! A war on viruses works perfectly: deaths by injection can be blamed on viruses, which then require more injections. The cycle can be continued until the population is some 500 million. And best of all, the virus can dominate the news cycles and distract everyone from holding Mr Global accountable for its various past mistakes."

!

CP said...

Ploink - have you read much of our collapse bibliography?

https://www.creditbubblestocks.com/2021/06/overshoot-bibliography.html

Tom said...

@ CP, ploinks' essays are great. I thought I was the only one into permaculture, WAPF, Buteyko and religion as the technology needed to get us through the hard times ahead.

I think it is time for you to host a CBS convention - I can't imagine how eclectic and awesome the attendees would be.

Long live the Teutons.

Anonymous said...

@CP

Thanks, I just checked it out and I can't say that I have read practically any of them, except that I have some experience with Weston Price. But from skimming the descriptions, it seems I am coming at the problem from a more political/psychological angle. I will probably read some of them, but at the same time I don't really need to be convinced that we are running out of oil. Perhaps I should be more skeptical there, but it just seems obvious to me. Thanks for the link!

@Tom

Thanks very much! I knew these essays would not be popular with the masses, but it's nice to see that they are making a small impact. Hopefully you have a few friends that would appreciate them as well! Especially Frictioneer, a word we desperately need in the English language.

@League of Women Voters

%

@Anonymous

I feel like you might benefit from reading the essay again.

CP said...

What convinced you about peak oil?

There are many oil cornucopians thanks to the (unprofitable) fracking glut.

https://www.creditbubblestocks.com/2019/10/what-happens-to-oil-prices-when.html

Anonymous said...

So as stated I come at the problem for a different angle. I think the biggest problem is actually psychological, i.e. 'If human ecological overshoot is real, why isn't it news? Why isn't anyone doing anything about it? It must not be a big problem.' And Olson's work on collective action shows why the incentives make it impossible for us to do anything for the environment even though any individual who engages their brain is going to conclude that exponential growth of a population that uses more and more resources individually as well is going to fail in the end.

Beyond that I had a little experience losing money in some of the natural gas frackers and came to the conclusion that most of the shale oil industry was basically a ponzi designed to soak up Fed cash. Your linked article does not surprise me at all. But I don't pretend to have any deep insight there.

League of Women Voters said...

Maybe our elites (rulers) look at us this way:

"The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life — another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them."

PresentWitness_ said...

If you look into just one of these issues with a sufficient level of depth, the players reveal themselves, and there’s not as many as you might think. I was a geopolitical analyst for years, and at first, I was like you; skeptical of effective collusion.

I tried to blame corporations, algorithms, and bad ideas too, but you eventually realize that there’s just a much more simple explanation. Could it be that the democratic structure you think you exist within, isn’t quite as democratic as you thought? I was naive.

What exactly do you think NGO’s are? What do you think media outlets are? Industrialists of the past such as Carnegie and Rockefeller conceived of NGO’s as vehicles to evade taxes, fuel other profitable ventures, and reshape the society in the image they saw fit.

What makes you think our modern industrialists are any different? Maybe a few are dumb enough to believe the modern framing, but honestly I doubt it. I don’t really see any evidence to suggest it’s not purely cynical and self-interest driven.

What if they really want chaos? What if they really want disorder? What if they actually want a caste system? What if they actually want to track and trace you like herd animals? What if they just want less people in their cities?

Maybe it is time to finally start asking the question, “are they doing this on purpose?” The sophistication of the collusion only looks like incompetence to the casual observer.

The fact that we end up with a Fauci instead of a McCullough really tells you all you need to know about The System. Now understand these same filtering mechanisms apply across ALL domains now. Our institutions and hierarchies no longer select for competency.

PresentWitness_ said...

'Simulations' are events sponsored by elites to mine our best ideas and subvert/integrate them into their larger agenda. Isn't it weird that every 'simulation' is predicated on some attack against us, and ends with a carbon credit system?

Pretty clear that they have 'assets' all across the mainstream spectrum. A Cooper, SB Cohen, J Cramer, etc. I think what happens is that they're approached by official agencies, and coerced into believing that they're 'saving the free world' or something naive like this.

They're just trying to get as many people as possible on their carbon credit, track and trace system. They don't care at all about your health, side effects, or deaths. They aren't intentionally trying to kill anyone, but they don't really care about the collateral damage.

The 'green pass' is the first real step towards side-stepping the nation-state model. It is the basis for a borderless track/trace and access granted/denied system spearheaded by a handful of unelected bureaucrats, elite-funded NGO's, and corporations.

They’re ok with some collateral damage as long as they can get to their ultimate goal of a digital track/trace system and normalization of mandatory mRNA gene therapies.

The plan is to eventually phase out the dollar (just like has already been done with gold) and replace it with a carbon based social credit system that will be used to discourage ownership and manage rental access.

PresentWitness_ said...

They are phasing out the dollar by printing fiat. Printing fiat serves a dual-purpose: 1. Devalue the dollar. 2. To give corporations near-unlimited investment capital to build the technical infrastructure for the new new carbon-based system that will be used to mediate society.

They’re not quite ready yet though, so that’s why they’re pushing the medical tyranny. The vaccine is an on-ramp to the track and trace digital passport system which is basically a beta version of the carbon-credit system. That’s why they called it the ‘Green Pass’ in Europe.

The final act is to eventually crash all markets to make as many of us as possible dependent on their new system. Without savings or the ability to earn a living outside of the corporate structure, most will be forced to capitulate. Timeline is unknown, but moving very fast.

Anonymous said...

ploink.