Tag: American Empire

What If We’re Not Doomed

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How many times have pundits (including my humble self) declared that we are already irrevocably tobogganing down the slope toward the decline and fall of the American Empire?  Probably too many to count.  And it’s not as if there isn’t a lot of dysfunction everywhere you look.  I won’t go through the litany.  It’s almost endless but all we have to mention to provide an undeniable example of societal rot and insanity is the spectacle of the American Medical Association embracing “gender affirming” treatments for minors including hormone therapies, mastectomies, hysterectomies and castration.

But what if things are about to improve?  Suppose the Trump administration is followed by the Vance administration and during this reprieve from leftist lunacy the country gets its financial health back to a greater extent.  Let’s go with that scenario.  People have enough money to buy houses again and raise kids and plan for the future.  What would that look like?  Of course, I have no way of actually knowing but let’s play the game and throw out some ideas and see if it leads us somewhere.

First off, I think it’s important to say what it won’t look like.  It’s not going to look like America in the 1950s or even the 1980s or 1990s.  The adults and children today; the millennials and the zoomers are very different from my parents’ generation and mine.  They’ve been propagandized in school and through social media to despise the world from those olden times.  They’re ashamed of their parents and grandparents and want to conform to the norms they’ve been taught.

Some of this can be seen in the situation playing out in New York City’s mayoral race.  The last two mayors have been liberal Democrats and under their administrations all the improvements in quality of life and safety gained during Republican mayors have been lost and the city is on the verge of collapsing into chaos.  So, what do the people there want in the next mayor?  A communist!  Now this is just an example.  There are others.  A similar radical is running for mayor of Minneapolis.  So, there is no lack of evidence that the millennials believe insane things.  Now it is true that there is precedent for people who believe these things being gob-smacked by reality and changing their minds.  Maybe that’s what we’re going to see.  It happened to the baby boomers in the nineteen seventies and eighties.  Maybe it’ll happen again.

But regardless, things will be very different.  I believe there has been a breach between the older America and what will follow.  It will not be the monolithic culture.  It will be several, or possibly many separate cultures.  Identity groups have been spawned and they will not disappear.  Ethnic and locality identities will develop and they will complicate social cohesion.  Hollywood and other purveyors of cultural content won’t be able to put out one product that resonates with everyone.  We already see that.  The multicultural experiment with superhero movies and other content have fizzled because people recognize they’re being handed a narrative to cheer for someone else’s team.  How many teenage boys want a female superhero beating up on much larger men as the template for the movies they are being handed.  They just stay home and play video games that allow them to control the narrative.

So, America might recover and even thrive.  But it will take generations for it to coalesce into a common identity.  In the meantime, we and our descendants will have to look out for our own interests, forming alliances and voting blocks where advantage exists.  There may even be a shining city on a hill.  But on the next hill may be a hellhole.  And that’s just the way it’ll have to be.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 10APR2024 – End of Empire

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Manipulation by our “betters” is a long standing tradition, ever since the first gathering of hominids there was a Bernie Sanders/Karl Marx to tell people what they were owed for the privilege of being in charge, and the penalty for being productive. When the Roman empire stopped expanding, and became unworthy of defending by Roman citizens, they were forced to hire the barbarians as mercenaries, and began to play games with the currency.
The practice of embedding veterans into captured territory, and wedding them to the natives, producing a new generation of Roman soldiery to take up arms for the empire, and reducing rebellion because no father in law wanted to destroy their grand children’s inheritance.
This stopped with the ceasing of expansion by the empire. We have now reached the point in our history where we are at the limits, defined by our neighbors, and the global community, of our expansion, and now begins the first stage of ossification. We have a citizenry that no longer is learning to love our country, believes JFK got it backwards with ” Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, emotionally crippled, sexually confused, and financially abused. Debasement of our currency was inevitable, it just seems that we get to live through the cashing of the checks our government wrote.
The hiring of barbarian mercenaries has begun as Los Angeles has just graduated a class of LEO cadets , that are here illegally, not legally allowed to own a firearm, but are now sworn police officers, a judge in Illinois just ruled that citizens must have FOID cards, but illegals can not be required to obtain them. I have no problem with “Dreamers” enlisting in the military to earn their citizenship, and actually encourage such programs. They come out of the shadows and are then legal, complete with the Responsibilities and privileges that come with citizenship, but draw the line at creating an armed organization that has less loyalty to the US, the. Constitution, and the people of the US than the agencies we already have in our borders.
I don’t always agree with Michael Weiner/ Savage but his statement that “Any country that doesn’t protect its borders, language, and citizens is not a country anymore” rings true.

I’ll Wait for the Movie Version

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“Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians as they warred against each other, beginning to write as soon as the war was on foot, with expectation it should prove a great one and most worthy the relation of all that had been before it; conjecturing so much both from this, that they flourished on both sides in all manner of provision, and also because he saw the rest of Greece siding with the one or the other faction, some then presently and some intending so to do. For this was certainly the greatest commotion that ever happened among the Grecians, reaching also to part of the barbarians and, as a man may say, to most nations. For the actions that preceded this and those again that are yet more ancient, though the truth of them through length of time cannot by any means clearly be discovered, yet for any argument that, looking into times far past, I have yet light on to persuade me, I do not think they have been very great, either for matter of war or otherwise.”

In 1629 Thomas Hobbes the philosopher (or we should say the social scientist) translated into English, Thucydides “Peloponnesian War.”  Above is Thucydides’ introduction.  He believed that this was the greatest war that had ever been fought among the Greeks.  And in this belief, he was probably right.  And in a sense every major war that was fought afterward in which European peoples fought amongst themselves became the greatest war.  After the Peloponnesian war, Sparta fought with the other Hellenic city states such as Thebes until they wore each other down.  That allowed the related Macedonian nation to conquer the Greeks and that led to Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire.  And the squabbling of the successor kingdoms of Alexander’s generals was the incubator for the Roman empire.

But when the rotted corpse of the Caesars’ world disintegrated sometime during the 5th century A.D. it formed the fertile soil that nurtured our Western civilization.  And now the United States of America is approaching the point where it will need a new name.  Calling it a democratic republic is sort of a bad joke.  The form of the government is some kind of self-perpetuating bureaucracy.  And its extent is no longer defined by the outline of the fifty states.  Much like Rome it has many vassal states that while technically not American territory nevertheless are almost completely controlled by America.

And like Rome the American Empire has an enormous amount of momentum.  Even in the midst of precipitous decline in many aspects of its existence the shear mass of this human organization is staggering to behold.  And because of this scope it will take a long time for the creature to die.  Unfortunately, we will be the witnesses to the early stages of this downfall.  And it is already on display.  Just as the Roman republic died with the destruction of the small Roman farmers so our society will degenerate into a feudal existence with the dominance of the corporate oligarchs over small independent businesses.  And in fact, the last few years has greatly accelerated this process.

And our age’s equivalent to the Roman “bread and circuses” is the vision of welfare and the metaverse where everyone commits slow suicide to make room for the depopulated Gaia model.  It almost makes 5th century Rome sound humanistic.

I was recently skimming through Macchiavelli’s “History of Florence.”  It begins with the Fall of Rome and after the Carolingian period quickly devolves into endless petty wars between a long series of German Holy Roman Emperors named Frederic, French Kings named Louis and Neapolitan Dukes named Rodrigo battling the Popes for control of Tuscany and Lombardy.  And it occurred to me that someday that will be North America.  Idiotic descendants of the Pilgrims will be warring endlessly with some Asiatic warlords and Neo-Aztecs for possession of Lake Winnipesaukee.  And if that’s the case then my ancestors might as well have remained in Southern Italy and at least have had the comfort of snow free March weather.

If I were a Stoic, I’d look at the whole thing as the way of the world and just make the best of it without whining about it.  But my ancestors made a tradition of bitterly complaining about just about everything that was outside of their control and just about everything was outside of their control.  At the same time, it meant trying to make the most of the things we could control; family, food and friends.

But just as Thucydides did with Athens and Tacitus did with Republican Rome, we will get a chance to see up close and personal how a once free people get turned into serfs.  It won’t be pretty but it will be momentous.  I hope the movie version has good CGI effects.

The Real Reset

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The Global American Empire (or whatever you prefer to call it) seems to be unravelling.  In a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Rules-Based International Order Is Quietly Disintegrating” it was noted that Western institutions like the United Nations, the G-20, the World Court, the IMF and the World Trade Organization have fallen into disrepute and are routinely ignored or disparaged.

Evidence can be seen in the recent annual opening of the UN General Assembly in which Joe Biden was the only leader of the five permanent members of the Security Council to show up at all.  Now it’s obvious why Russia’s and even China’s leader isn’t travelling to New York City.  Even ignoring the threat of attack by homeless zombies and gang bangers America’s largest city is no longer neutral territory in this new cold war.

It’s not so much that the West has become suddenly weaker.  That has been a slow, steady process.  What has accelerated is the sense that the American Empire is no longer an honest broker between the various nations and power blocks.  Recent behavior has demonstrated that the West has become capricious and underhanded in its dealings with other nations both large and small.  Its actions in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been heavy-handed, arrogant and clumsy.  In fact, the Africans have recently stated that whereas the Chinese provide assistance on projects, the West provides lectures on LGBTQ awareness.  And that synchs up with the recent spate of coups in West Africa and the calls for the French and the Americans to remove their troops from the region.

The larger question is where does this trend lead?  Much of America’s power is based on its reputation for stability and competency both economically and politically.  None of those things seem true lately.  The COVID lockdowns and the political theater that characterizes the Biden administration and its military actions in Afghanistan and Ukraine all reinforce the impression of a country racked with muddled thinking and dangerous instability.  Because of this the actions of the Western nations no longer seem to have the clout they formerly possessed.

The prime example is the Ukraine debacle.  The West has been using economic sanctions against Russia and military assistance to Ukraine to punish Vladimir Putin for resisting the West’s plan to weaponize Ukraine and bring a hostile military power to the very border of Russia.

Against expectations, the sanctions have failed to crash the Russian economy and instead have badly damaged the economies of several European states including Germany which received a large part of its energy supply as Russian gas until the United States sabotaged the underwater pipeline that supplied the gas.

And the war itself is not going as expected with Ukraine fighting valiantly but finding its manpower exhausted and facing economic and societal ruin through the disruptions it’s suffering through.

And the war has fostered a much closer relationship between Russia and China.  China sees what has happened to Russia with Ukraine and they recognize a similar situation for themselves with respect to America’s attitude about Taiwan.  And this strategic partnership between China and Russia is strengthened by their economic and monetary relationship in the BRICS economic grouping which in addition to those two countries, includes India, Brazil and South Africa and soon will expand to include Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

So, all in all, “the West” is facing serious challenges to its economic and military supremacy for the first time since the end of the Cold War.  And without a doubt the trouble is almost completely self-inflicted.

The article finishes with this summary of the latest woes:

“States are imploding and the rule of law is disappearing across large parts of the world. In Latin America, narco-trafficking crime organizations have infiltrated or supplanted weak states. Something similar is happening in the Sahel, with jihadist groups and bandits openly defying the authority of shambolic governments. Russia, China and Iran are happily fishing in these troubled waters, with few signs of effective Western responses to a growing security threat. The ignominious collapse of French power across Africa has been more dramatic, but the palsied incompetence of American responses to the erosion of civil order among our own neighbors is at least equally disgraceful, and equally grave.”

Up until a few years ago I would have viewed this upending of the supremacy of the Western world order with horror.  Now I think it may be for the best and may clear the way for America to return to its correct mission, serving the needs and goals of the people who live here and let the world muddle through on its own.

Panem Et Circenses

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“I recollect, when I was lamenting to the Doctor the misfortunes of the American war, and exclaimed, “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined; he answered, “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.””

(Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet)

In 1776 England was among the greatest nations on Earth.  And this in multiple measures.  Financially, economically, scientifically, militarily, geographically, even culturally it was a power to be reckoned with.  So, when Adam Smith opined that even defeat in the American War of Independence wouldn’t topple Great Britain, he was correct.  And history has many examples of great powers sustaining a terrible loss and recovering.

But history is also full of great nations abandoning the practices that made them great and falling into ruin.  And although the fall may be gradual, nevertheless, the ruin is assured by the reversal inherent in the loss of so important a characteristic.  There may be a great deal of ruin in a nation but once the well-being of the citizens is no longer the driving force behind its government that ruin is assured and the greater the nation the more dramatic the fall.

And as in so many discussions of the American republic we always seem to come back to Rome as the exemplar of a republic that began as a wildly successful partnership between the common people and the elites and ended up as a tyrannical oligarchy where most citizens were impoverished serfs who were essentially slaves to the rich landowners.

Of course, it took about five hundred years for this change to destroy Rome but it is patently obvious that it was the freedom of the Roman citizens in their heyday that made the Roman legion the most fearsome fighting force of the ancient world.  They were fighting for their small farms and families.  These were things worth fighting and dying for.  But by the fifth century A.D. your average Roman commoner didn’t own anything and wouldn’t care whether he was ruled by a Frank, a Visigoth, a Hun or a Roman emperor.  So why would he fight to maintain the empire?  He wouldn’t.  And so, it fell.

What about us?  How do we end up?  Well, currently the globalists have been announcing that in the future “you won’t own anything and you’ll like it.”  That sounds an awful lot like bread and circuses to me.  We’re creating a state that has no patriotic aspect to it.  Now whether such a state can exist in the current international environment is an open question.  But I would say that the idea that such a country could be a militarily dominant state doesn’t seem likely.  I think that will be on display going forward.  Currently, the American nuclear arsenal acts as a powerful deterrent against the great powers attacking the country.  But the idea of using the threat of nuclear annihilation to coerce Hungary or Afghanistan into celebrating gay pride seems kind of absurd.  So, we can conclude that our influence around the world will diminish along with the diminution of our military and economic power.

So, what will we look like going forward?  Probably like an updated version of England.  We’ll be the former hegemon slowly muscled out of all the territories we used to dominate.  And we already see it.  Asia and Africa are already going their own ways.  Then the Americas and finally Europe.  Who knows?  The day could come when even Canada starts kicking sand in our face.  That would be the bottom.

There is nothing certain about the arc of our historical relevance as a great power.  The elites that currently embrace all of the madness that is leading us to ruin could wake up tomorrow and decide that, “Wait a minute, a closed border and resurgent industrial policy is exactly what the Democratic party has always stood for.  And weren’t Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis magnanimous in defeat and shouldn’t we let bygones be bygones?  And what the hell is going on in the cities with criminals running amok?  Law and order is the Democrat way.”  Hell, they wouldn’t even have to let Donald Trump out of prison.  They’d claim he had been the woke problem all along.  After all we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

They could do this because the underlying motivation is their own self-interest.  If the globalist project suddenly founders then it will be all aboard the new American century with red, white and blue bunting and hip, hip hooray for our boys.  We can even expect another attack on the “homeland” at some point.  But as the Roman elites eventually discovered slaves don’t make very convincing legionnaires.  And I think we may be past the point where American troops will dominate the world stage.  So even if there is a pivot to sanity, we won’t again approach what we were in 1941 or even 2001.  Americans just aren’t going to buy into it again.  We’re just another declining empire with puppet masters pulling the strings and the serfs trying to avoid the consequences of the next reflexive spasm of the great dying beast.

And so, as I said earlier, there may be a great deal of ruin in a nation but once the well-being of the citizens is no longer the driving force behind its government that ruin is assured and the greater the nation the more dramatic the fall.  And depending on the surrounding circumstances the fall isn’t necessarily slow.  Keep your eye on the exits.

What the Hell is Really Going On?

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When I read about the Nord Stream sabotage, I was thinking that the CIA and the State Department were figuring a way to force the Europeans to back their play in the Ukraine.  After all, if there was no way to get gas to Europe except through the Ukraine pipelines then effectively, they would have to go along with beating Russia to get the gas back.  But suddenly it seems like there’s more going on here.

What it is, I’m not sure.  Will it be some kind of October Surprise to sway the Mid-Term election?  Will these maniacs go to the brink with Russia to try and win the mid-term elections.  Is Creepy Uncle Joe going to go on television before the election and tell us that war with Russia is imminent and the only way he can win that war is to have a united Congress to rubber stamp his every action in the war?  It’s hard to believe he would do something that crazy.  But then again what’s crazy nowadays?

But what else could be going on?  Could this really all be about not letting the Germans buy natural gas from Russia?  That seems absurdly trivial when questions of nuclear war are being considered.  Surely war and peace are at a much higher level of US foreign policy than commercial relationships between European nations even if one of them is Russia.  But that is the claim of some people.  That we are trying to prevent Europe from cozying up to Russia because we want to prevent anything interfering with our hegemony over the West.

All of these actions and motives are bizarre to say the least.  It no longer seems that our foreign policy is being run by people who are grounded in reality.  Brinksmanship in the Ukraine is the height of dangerous behavior.  Sabotaging critical infrastructure that our closest allies depend on for the energy supply for their homes and businesses seems insane.  Having Joe Biden repeatedly state that the United States would get into a shooting war with China over Taiwan when the Chinese weren’t making an issue of it is just plain stupid.  But maybe that’s the point.  Maybe very stupid people are running our foreign policy now.  Maybe this is the best they could come up with to stave off the collapse of their “new world order” which seems to be coming apart at the seams everywhere we look.

After all, the EU is seeing defections from their immigration policy in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and now also in Sweden and Italy.  The BRICS and some other countries have rejected Washington’s embargo of Russian petroleum and mineral products.  And more and more Americans are tired of the madness that’s been going on for the last two years over COVID, crime and the destruction of the economy.

So if this is the Elites flailing around to distract us from the shambles they’ve made of everything, then my only fear is that we may not survive to see them rejected at the polls.  After all it’s still about forty days until election day and at this rate they’ll have triggered nuclear Armageddon and a Great Depression simultaneously before they can be fired.

Is this all just Joe playing “tail wagging the dog” or are these people so delusional that they think they can do any crazy damn thing and get away with it?  Maybe it’s too much to hope to know what’s really going on but I assure you I’m not the only one thinking that we’ve descended into a mad house.  The slogan that the Republicans should use for both 2022 and 2024 is, “Had enough yet or do you want the crazy to keep going?”

The World is Changing

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The world is changing.  Of that there is no doubt.  Look at the realignment that is going on in this country and around the world.  The Democrats have abandoned their former allies in the working class and embraced the plutocrats that run corporate America.  The Republican voters have abandoned establishment Republicans and are embracing populism and nationalism wherever they can.  And around the world the post-WWII military, financial and cultural hierarchy is in a shambles and is desperately trying to resist the forces of change that are breaking out in places like Poland, Hungary, Russia, China, India, Brazil and elsewhere.

What remains to be seen is whether this crisis is part of a well thought out plan by those in charge of the globalist order or just something they’ve cobbled together to control the reaction by the victims of the excesses that have ravaged post-industrial America and Europe.  Right now, they’re working to eliminate the descendants of the people they think they no longer need.  Part of that program is to eliminate the parts of the economy that used to support these people.  So, manufacturing jobs have been off-shored to China and now we have the attempt to eliminate fossil fuels and make energy much more expensive.  Also, the personal ownership of farmland and other valuable commodities is being made unattainable for all but the truly wealthy.

So far, the program is moving along at a rapid clip.  The oligarchs have managed to collapse the economic basis of the working class using the COVID “crisis” as an excuse.  The election fraud in 2020 was unchallenged except for the January 6th protest and that has been stifled using gestapo tactics to intimidate and silence all resistance.  Basically, all the levers of power have been captured and even the military has been captured by the Democrat regime.

But what hasn’t been taken into account is that the basis of America’s strength as the global hegemon was its strength, both militarily and economically.  And both those strengths have been degraded as part of the global program.  During Obama’s fundamental transformation of the military, he was instrumental in replacing white men who were the backbone of the officer corps with women and minorities who weren’t selected based on merit but rather for their race or sex.  This has had a corrosive effect on the whole military structure.  Currently there are indications that military preparedness in each of the branches of the military is below the level needed to be able to win a war against a modern army.  This means that the deterrence that formerly prevented second tier militaries like Iran and North Korea from getting involved in military adventurism against their neighbors may no longer hold.

And having transferred our industrial base to China our status as an economic superpower is also unjustified.  Look how the sanctions we levied against Russia over the Ukraine war have boomeranged back against us.  With the US once again dependent on foreign oil and gas we are the ones suffering from the consequences of trying to embargo Russia’s energy products.  The skyrocketing cost of fossil fuels is crippling American and European economies and impoverishing their citizens.

So, it may turn out that the New World Order has become a house of cards that will fall without the people it thought it could dispense with.  If our economy and military have been hollowed out by the elimination of the deplorables then maybe it’s not too late to head off the whole rotten project.

Of course, that’s a pretty big maybe.  And even if it happens there is going to be hell to pay when the American Empire falls off its perch.  So, we’re going to see very interesting things in the next few years.  The regime has lost the support of about half its citizens.  And that will alter this country in a profound way.  You’ll notice it and it will alter the way you feel about America and how you live your life.

The times they are a changing.

If Biden is President is This Still America?

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When Caligula declared his horse Incitatus a Roman Senator did that give pause to some proportion of the Roman citizenry.  Did they think, “Is this still Rome?”

I have to say that is how I currently feel, “Is this still America?”  Just look around at the madness that has enveloped almost every facet of life.  I won’t bother naming them again.  It’s too repetitive and depressing.  You can fill in the blanks.  But concisely, if someone like Joe Biden is the President then ask yourself, “Is this Still America?”

A lifelong political grifter whose drug addled son acts as a bag man to shake down foreign governments for kickbacks.  A man who can no longer make a coherent speech about the simplest things.  A man who has been lying about himself and his motives for decades and someone who can’t keep his hands off of women and even young girls even when the cameras are rolling.  If this man is the President of the United States is this still the same country we knew?

The answer is no, it’s not.  In the same way that the Roman Empire wasn’t the Roman Republic.  It was a gangster state, an oligarchy that used a once free people as conscript troops to rule a continental empire.  And that’s where we are now.  An oligarchy rules over us and you and I have about as much say over it as some plebian would have telling Caligula to leave his daughter alone.  We are a despised and unwelcome people.  The only thing we’re needed for is an army.  Soon foreign conscripts will be installed in the army and then they can disarm and enslave us at their leisure.  We are strangers in our own land and we are being dealt with as quickly as possible.

The only question worth asking at this point is whether it’s already too late to do anything other than leave.  And even leaving is questionable.  For this empire isn’t continental, it’s global.  Sure, Russia and China are on the outside, sort of, and the really backward nations are client states that only supply sweatshops and immigrants.  But the places you can go to escape this mess aren’t certain to last.  How many places can’t be pressured or bribed to bend the knee.  Recently we found out one of those places is Afghanistan.  But imagine living there?  That’s how far you would have to go to escape the Empire.

The hopeful thing is that the Empire seems to have skipped several stages in the familiar evolution.  We seem to be progressing rather quickly from Late Republic to Visigothic sack all in a day.  After all Joe Biden isn’t Augustus.  He’s not even Tiberius.  Dementia Joe is more like a 4th century emperor who has to dodge marauding armies of barbarians while avoiding assassination by his successor.  The only question is whether there is enough left in the treasure chamber to pay off the Huns for a few more years.

After that we’ll be looking at a new world.  And that will be an exciting and frightening thing.  Looking for a stable and safe refuge will be an important and difficult task.  Eastern Europe?  East Asia?  South America?  Maybe even a rump America somewhere in the red states?  It’s impossible to say.

I guess there’s some consolation in knowing that the traitors who destroyed our country have slit their own throats at the same time.  No groundswell of brave volunteers will enlist and save Creepy Uncle Joe when he bungles his way into a war with Iran or North Korea.  All he’ll have at his back will be the praetorian guard, or in his case the FBI.  But when the going really gets rough they’ll sell him out to the highest bidder.  Then Jeff Bezos can be emperor for a few weeks until a real general comes along and makes mincemeat of the Amazon Kid.

So, get ready to enjoy the ride it’s bound to be bumpy but I’m beginning to think it might be more interesting than some assumed.  One thing that might be worth considering, when the marauders overrun the country, it might be worthwhile finding out what their terms of service look like.  It might give you an opportunity for some payback.  Who knows, you could end up as the warlord of Silicon Valley.  They definitely wouldn’t be de-platforming you anymore.

The Z-Man Has an Essay on the The Economics Of Democratic Empire

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http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15929

He compares the economics of monarchical empires to the modern multi-ethnic states like the Soviet Union and present day America.  Z-Man says that the monarchical empires valued their vassals because they produced wealth for the emperor but that the USA openly exploits the “social capital” of its society for short term gain.  His thesis is that this is a new situation and it is not clear whether this exploitation can be made stable or whether it will completely undermine the state and collapse the whole enterprise.

Pretty depressing reading for the holidays but well thought out.