Tag: Societal Collapse

Can It Happen Here?

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Do you ever get the sense that human civilization is a juggernaut that basically has no one steering?  Our activities have become this unstoppable force that tramples anything that gets in its way but basically has no idea where it’s headed.  Now there are lots of people and their leaders who try to direct things but most of them seem to be idiots or so completely selfish that they only recognize their own priorities or even if they seem to exhibit some altruism, they’re completely mistaken in their beliefs about what are the important problems or at least what are the right things to do about them.

And now that humanity has increased to more than eight billion souls and with our capabilities to destroy enormous numbers of people with weapons of mass destruction, we seem to be constantly on the brink of blowing the whole furiously spinning human enterprise to smithereens.

I am aware that this is hardly anything new.  Going back to 1945 and Hiroshima we have been living in the shadow of Armageddon now for eighty years.  And going back to 1914 we have for well over a century been living in the seeming collapse of European Renaissance civilization.  But it does seem to have reached a breaking point.  With the current trends we have seen concerning population decline and apparent rampant psychiatric collapse of a sizable percentage of young people we must be reaching the point where either someone or some group rallies a core of people to step back from the brink of collapse or this whole civilization will break down into a dark age; something like what happened during the so-called late bronze age collapse.

In general, it looks like there needs to be a sanity check on what we value.  The current social media environment is so dysfunctional that if someone proposed destroying the internet he might become the next prophet; whether you want to compare him to Mohammed or Martin Luther.  But whatever the solutions that are selected there is no doubt at all that our present trajectory is disastrous.  And I have named religious reformers because it is obvious that the primary problem is not economic or technological.  It is spiritual, or if you prefer, psychological.  We have allowed nihilistic concepts and other harmful ideas to percolate into young minds through teachers who shouldn’t be allowed to interact with children.  And it’s having dire effects.  For this reason, it will require a reset of what we teach children.  I’ve begun to hear that some states and localities are purging the trans-gender subject matter and teachers from their schools.  But it’s going to take a much more systematic approach to get a handle on this poisonous influence on children.  And I fear that places like California it’s already too late to fix.  People will have to flee to save their kids.

The real question in my mind is, “Is it too late?”  At a certain point if a society can no longer provide the basic services and protections for its people, they will flee in search of a refuge.  It happened in the bronze age Eastern Mediterranean.  Can it happen here?  I think so.

Compelling Drama

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I guess I don’t know for sure what most people think nowadays but from my vantage point it seems clear that the world is going insane.  And it seems to be accelerating.  Crazy things happen almost constantly and no one even bats an eye at them anymore.  At the same time, it feels like some people (Trump and his administration) are trying to course correct.  To give an analogy, it’s as if a pilotless airliner at twenty thousand feet was flying straight toward the ground and finally a pilot takes the controls and is trying desperately to pull the plane out of the nose dive while the rest of the crew tries to stop him.  It’s like a madhouse where the lunatics are running the asylum.  So how does all of this end up?

I’ve got to be honest, I’m not very hopeful.  I think we have a chance but so many things have to go right for us to survive this that it seems much more likely that we’ll come up short.  The main problem seems to be that people nowadays just don’t seem very bright.  They believe things that are just obviously not true.  Take this transgender thing.  The whole millennial generation were completely alright with going along with the idea that drugging and mutilating children was the appropriate healthcare for a childhood delusion that they allowed mentally unbalanced teachers to indoctrinate their kids into.  How in the name of all that’s rational can this be possible?  And yet this is just one of a host of crazy ideas that have taken hold across the country.  Defund the Police was another really stupid idea.  Open Borders was also a suicidal policy that was put into effect even though it went against federal laws.  None of these ideas make any sense and all of them were allowed to happen because apparently people are too stupid, scared or evil to stop them.

And so, I have to say if there are that many Americans who are unconnected from reality it doesn’t seem likely that we can avoid a major societal catastrophe.  Near the top of the list is a major war.  I guess that means a nuclear exchange.  I don’t really believe that the “nuclear winter” that has been used to try and scare everyone will finish off over five billion people.  But I do know that a full nuclear exchange will devastate this country horrifically.  We might lose thirty percent of the population in the first few days.  And the disruption to the food supply chain might kill another thirty percent.

And war is not the only disaster to consider.  The geniuses in Washington who had China mutating bat viruses into bioweapons screwed us up pretty well with a cold virus.  The idea that these same psychopaths might try something with Ebola or small pox has to give one pause.  And there are endless other scenarios that could wreck our civilization pretty thoroughly.  So that’s kind of why I’m not very bullish on our future.

But at the same time, I have all my chips bet on us getting through.  And those chips are my kids and grandkids.  I haven’t gathered up the clan and flown off to some tropical island with only dolphins and manta rays for neighbors.  The United States, for better or worse, is the last best hope of humanity.  This is our last stand.  We have to make this work somehow.  I give Trump full marks for trying.  He could buy that island and take his family there and wait out the apocalypse.  But he’s not going down without a fight.  Every day he tries to pull us out of this nose dive and every day the lunatics try to pull him away from the controls.

One thing’s for sure; it’s compelling drama.

Where Will We Be in 2,500 AD

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The last twenty-five hundred years of Western History seem to be divided roughly into five-hundred-year chunks.  500 BC to the beginning of the Christian Era was dominated by the Greeks and their successors the Macedonians and the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great’s conquests (remember I said roughly, the Romans finished off the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms in 30 BC).

Then the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe for the first five centuries of the Christian era.  When Rome fell, we had five hundred years of interregnum.  From 500 AD to about a 1,000 AD the petty kings fought each other over the carcass of the Roman Empire and the Church attempted to keep the peasants alive and give them hope.  By 1000 AD some stability had been restored and the “Dark Ages” were replaced by the High Middle Ages and civilization began to coalesce and Europe was no longer just a maelstrom of savagery.  And just exactly around 1500 AD Europe exploded into the Age of Reason and the Age of Discovery.  Science, technology, commerce and learning were everywhere and the Renaissance Civilization of Europe conquered the world.

And now here we are at 2,000 AD and European civilization is collapsing into some kind of squalid self-hating cult.  All of the remarkable triumphs of science and technology are despised and feared by the technophobic ignoramuses that crowd around the campuses of the universities where pseudo-intellectuals pose as philosophers and preach a false gospel of defeatism and anti-European hatred.

So, are we doomed to repeat the five hundred years of dark ages that swallowed up Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire?  I guess it’s possible.  It certainly looks that way.  But history doesn’t repeat itself.  We live in a very different world.  Even the powerful Islamic caliphate wasn’t able to roll any farther than Iberia and Asia Minor so Europe had a chance to reassert its independence.  But the world is a very different place today.  China and other non-European powers are emerging.  If Europe and the United States were to decay into weak entities their independence and survival would be far from a guaranteed result.  It truly behooves the leaders in the West to address the loss of morale and direction that is currently ubiquitous in Western countries.  It is basically an existential necessity at this point.  And there is very little time left to reverse the situation before it becomes impossible to solve.

What is needed is a cultural revival.  And a revival requires a leader.  Someone has to focus the resources of the state to purge the negative aspects of the present culture and replace them with institutions and goals that will strengthen society.  And the institution that must be restored and strengthened the most is the family.  All the reforms should work to restore the nuclear family to vigorous health.  Laws that encourage women to stay home and care for children while their husbands work are the most important aspects of a revival.  All elements of society that are detrimental to the family should be weakened and discouraged.  No one should be telling children that they can decide what sex they are or any other madness like that.  Traditional sex roles and other stabilizing patterns should be showcased and encouraged in entertainment and educational media.  Society as a whole should be focused on restoring healthy lifestyles and activities for everyone.

If a program of renewal is pursued strenuously, I think it’s not impossible for us to stave off the destruction of Renaissance civilization.  But where do we find the leader to initiate it?

Don’t Cry Baby, Don’t Cry

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Don’t Cry Baby, Don’t Cry

Donald Trump takes office in about two months.  Can we avoid a nuclear confrontation with the Russians until then?

I’m really not sure.

 

Comcast is going to spin off MSNBC.  And Elon Musk has jokingly spoken about buying it and putting Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones on the air.  Is it just a joke?

I’m really not sure.

 

Donald Trump says he’s going to deport thirty million illegal aliens and rip the Deep State out of the federal government by the roots and put RFK Jr. in charge of the HHS and let him dig out the truth about modern medicine and eliminate DEI from the military and the rest of the federal government.  Can he do any of these things?

I’m really not sure.

 

There’s a sense of unreality about a lot of our world.  People claim that misinformation is the reason that so many things that we are told turn out not to be true.  But I don’t think that’s the only reason for this growing uncertainty in our environment.  I think that the system may be coming apart at the seams.  I think the “people in charge” are themselves unsure about which way things are headed and therefore unsure which way they should head.  And without the rich and powerful putting their weight behind a particular outcome, random factors and herd instinct has a greater influence on day-to-day happenings.

Take the first example above.  The United States and England both gave the Ukrainians permission to fire modern medium range missiles into the heartland of Russia.  These are very advanced weapons and in fact, the Russians know that the missiles are being fired by American and British technicians.  And the Russians have responded to these attacks by clarifying that they consider attacks with modern weapons that come from the Ukrainian territory are the same as attacks by nuclear powers and can be answered by striking back at those nuclear nations directly.  And to emphasize their seriousness they launched a new class of medium range multi-warhead ballistic missile into a target in a Ukrainian city.  Now of course this missile was not armed with nuclear warheads.  This was saber-rattling.  But that’s one hell of a saber.  Since that launch the Ukrainians have not used any more American ATACMS or British Storm Shadow missiles.  But the war is not going very well for the Ukrainians and many people say that the State Department and the Pentagon are determined to do everything they can to force the Trump administration into continuing the war.

Well, how far will they go with nuclear brinksmanship?  How well are they calibrating Putin’s willingness to ignore their provocations.  Or are they actually trying to provoke an attack on NATO bases outside of Ukraine?  Are they looking to let things go nuclear?  And who are they?  It’s a cinch that Biden isn’t calling the shots.  He can barely remember his name.  But is it even Blinken and the Joint Chiefs?  With things winding down is it even a lower-level cadre of idiots?  But whoever it is, are we staring down catastrophe because these weirdos lost an election and won’t get to play God in Ukraine anymore?

Once again, I’m really not sure.  And I’m beginning to believe no one else does either.

All the crazy stuff going on seems to be outside of the control of anyone with a lick of sense.  It’s almost as if every attempt to fix the problems elicits an even stronger and more dangerous response from somewhere.  But where?

 

We’re living in strange days.  If you’re the praying sort this might just be the right time to do it.  You could do worse.

 

“These are the days of miracle and wonder.  …   A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires …  and don’t cry baby, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

Post Renaissance European Collapse

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Since at least 1500 AD the most dominant, dynamic culture on Earth has been Europe and its colonies.  Portugal, Spain, Holland and England along with smaller contributions from France, Belgium and Germany colonized the world by sea.  And the Russians conquered northern Asia by land.  European science and technology revolutionized all aspects of life and their cultural endeavors produced superb music and art.  Basically, Europe transformed life and they dragged the rest of the world along with them.

But along the way the Renaissance civilization has seemingly lost the morale and confidence it once had.  It has adopted a global view that holds Europeans guilty for all of the ills of the third world nations and requires them to make amends by allowing endless immigration into their lands until there is no longer a trace of Europe left.  And that goes double for the United States.

I don’t think there is a previous example of something like this in history.  Civilizations have been overrun by migrations before.  The Bronze Age Collapse and 5th Century AD Rome are obvious examples but, in neither case, did the invaded civilization go out of its way to invite the event that overwhelmed them.  The globalists think they can manage this replacement of their people and culture seamlessly.  But even at this early stage of the process, things don’t look very promising.  Crime, ignorance, poverty and disease are problems that were minimized in the highly organized environment of the first world.  The new immigrants are a totally different case.  And no attempt is being made to force them to assimilate to the culture of their hosts.  Pretty soon we will have a very large population with a multitude of backgrounds and cultures that will drown out the older European culture.  And it may be the case that it will drown out the properties that this older population possessed and which were the source of the stability and prosperity that used to be the status quo.

If that’s the case, what will follow?

As I said there really isn’t any close analog for what is going on.  The globalists believe in their “end of history” theory.  They feel that the western countries have already built a framework (financial and military) that precludes the possibility of their arrangements being challenged.  After all, China gets to sell us all our stuff and in return they get to be the new Japan and do what we say.  The same holds for the Middle East and Russia and the rest of the world.  Well, it seems they might be wrong.  Lots of countries that toed the line during the Cold War are beginning to talk amongst themselves and maybe they no longer think that a monopolar world is the only or even the best choice for their future.  Places as different as Saudi Arabia and Brazil are looking around at their options and they aren’t necessarily thrilled with the program that Washington and Brussels are pushing.  Things are changing pretty rapidly.  New alliances are forming and even the military power of the United States isn’t as formidable as it once was.

So where does this leave us in a few years?  My guess is a West swamped with third world poor will be a less powerful, less technologically advanced place.  I guess it will be something like Brazil; a patchwork of poor and rich areas but without the stability formerly provided by the large middle class.  And this will allow some other countries to move ahead as world leaders.  Guessing I’d say maybe China and some other of the Asian countries are the best bet for these up-and-coming places.  Who knows, maybe in the future China might even sponsor enterprise zones in North America where Chinese industry takes advantage of labor resources to set up factories where Americans can earn slave wages to feed their families.  And I’m sure the American oligarchs will figure out a way to get their percentage from the deal.  They’ve always been interested in making a buck off the misfortune of their neighbors.

But we’ll have to wait and see.  We have an election where illegal immigration is one of the hot topics.  Anything is possible, I guess.

Cultural Suicide

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As the glaciers of the last ice age were receding, the Neolithic Age gave way to the beginning of what we call human civilization.  And over the course of the last ten millennia human beings have slowly and painfully mastered various technologies and attempted to live in more and more complex social structures.  But along the road from cave man to knowledge worker there have been several examples of a dominant local culture imploding for no apparent reason.  When this happens the surrounding cultures usually take advantage of the vacuum created by the collapse and absorb the lands, peoples and resources that are up for grabs.  We may be about to experience just such an implosion.

Our society; western civilization, the first world, the global community, whatever you want to call it; has become delusional.  And this has been a top-down process.  The elites who inform the academic world, specifically the Ivy League colleges and fill the ranks of the top corporations and the federal bureaucracy have formulated a moral order that has given us the George Floyd riots, pediatric transgender medical malpractice, unrestricted third world immigration into the first world countries and the rest of the woke ideology that we are presently engulfed in.

But even though this was started by the elites it has now percolated through the entirety of the younger half of the population.  And the poison of this philosophy has done its job.  The culture at large believes in things that make no sense and if acted upon will undo our civilization.  This is what a culture committing suicide looks like.  Adopting the self-hatred that the woke ideology prescribes for Americans guarantees that our society will cease to exist as it formerly was.  We are already seeing the fruits of the DEI approach to corporations.  Boeing’s airliners and space ships are falling apart.  Airline pilots are no longer selected and judged base on their ability to fly planes but on their skin color and sex habits.  The same is happening with surgeons and judges.  And what we will find is that airplanes and heart surgery can no longer exist in a world where pilots and heart surgeons are unqualified.  After four or five airliners crash who is going to fly?  Who is going to get a coronary bypass surgery when the survival rate is 5%?

What I don’t know the answer to yet is how does this play out?  I am starting to see some evidence that in some jurisdictions people are rejecting the DEI model and all of its effects.  Several states have already written laws banning things like transgender surgery and treatments for minors.  Some colleges have pulled back from the abandonment of standards like SAT exams for admission and other means of selecting for qualified individuals.

Maybe we will see a rejection of all the dangerous and dysfunctional ideas that have flooded our world with unqualified individuals running the mechanisms of modern life.  Maybe we will pull back from the abyss and regain some semblance of sanity in how we regulate our world.  We should have some clues to this soon.  One of the signs I would be looking for in a population retreating from the abyss would be rejecting the woke leadership.  And rejecting Joe Biden would be the clearest sign of that.  Biden has embraced all of the woke agenda and this has affected most of the American people catastrophically.  If the electorate embraces Biden, then I’ll assume that societal collapse is what is baked into the cake at this point.  Well, why should we be any luckier than the Hittites and the Romans?  Anyway, if Biden is the winner stock up on canned food, bottled water and bullets.  You’ll probably need them.

Surgical Madness

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I wonder if the death penalty is the appropriate sentence for doctors involved in something like this.  An eighteen year old is dead because doctors were willing to slice and dice him up in an insane attempt to turn part of his intestines into an absurd substitute for the female genital tract.  While they were at it why didn’t they graft on California Condor wings so he could pretend to be an angel too.

When people look back on this someday they’ll identify this as the point at which our society became detached from reality and stepped off a cliff.

If this goes on I think I’ll volunteer for either the North Korean or the Chinese Uighur death camps.  They’re a lot saner and probably more humane.

 

Burn It!  Burn It All!

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Ah, the heady days of our civilizational maelstrom.  As the world we knew is ripped to shreds and flung around us in centripetal chaos I can recognize fragments of familiar things flying by.  Sort of like the images that Dorothy sees in the scene where she is riding in the tornado and sees her friends and relatives float by in a rocking chair or a row boat.

You recognize some normal American ritual or an icon of a former day.  There’s a flash of recognition and it triggers some reflexive emotion or thought.  And then it flies by and is gone and the reality of being spun around in a howling cyclone of fragmented bits of the former reality returns.

But when we’re not fighting for our lives, human beings have to search for the interesting and enjoyable things around them.  Even in hell there must be a coffee break where people gather around the water cooler (or battery acid cooler) and shoot the breeze.  It’s just the nature of the beast.

You know I really enjoyed thinking about the minutia in the giant ant movie yesterday.  Thinking about the characterizations and the movie conventions that they employed back then was the most fun thing that I have thought about in weeks.  And it occurred to me that here is so much substance, so much American-ness in these old silly things from sixty, seventy years ago.  And not because there’s great art on display.  This is a story about giant ants.  Nothing more absurd is imaginable.  Nothing less important exists.  And yet the people who wrote the script and acted the scenes managed to do a good job of creating this ridiculous world that they were employed to create.  The guy who played the booze-soaked hobo in the hospital ward was highly entertaining.  The general working with the cop to operate the bazooka for the phosphorus bombardment of the ant nest was amusing in his portrayal of upper management trying his hand at a front-line task.

Maybe that is what the future looks like.  We’ll be like the medieval monks copying and illuminating fragments of the classical world to preserve something for when the rampaging vandals have run out of places to sack and burn and whoever is left sets about the hard work of rebuilding civilization from what’s left of the wreckage.  So, I’ve found new direction in celebrating whatever fragments and shards of the old order strike my fancy and even any worthwhile new shoots as they present themselves.  Certainly, it’s an uphill battle while the orcs are still busy burning and pillaging all around us.  And from time to time, we’ll have to put down our quills and cap our inkwells and pick up a battle axe and shield to fend off the latest incursion of rampaging savages.

But there is absolutely more sense in celebrating the things that give meaning to life and to enjoy art; high or low, than there is in just bemoaning the destruction and dwelling on how low we have fallen.  After all, no one threw a switch one day and ended the dark ages and began the renaissance.  The knowledge was always there.  It needed people who were willing to apply that knowledge.  It needed human ingenuity and imagination and a little breathing space between them and the nearest barbarians.

So don’t be surprised if I sound a little happier.  Sure, the orcs may win this war.  Our whole civilization may come crashing down in an orgy of death and darkness.  We may be on the cusp of a millennium of ignorance and misery.  But as Hurin said in the Silmarillion, “ Aurë entuluva!”, “Day shall come again.”  It seems inevitable that human intelligence will persevere over entropy and stupidity.  There is in life that which strives against chaos.  I’ll bet on us.

Now, let’s take another look at that giant ant movie.  Have you ever noticed how annoying the girl scientist gets when she’s down in the ant nursery in New Mexico?  She starts yelling at her colleagues, “Burn it!  Burn it all!”

I mean who the hell is she?  Especially since Ben and Bob are going to have to haul her fat butt up several steep inclines by rope to get her out of that cyanide laden death trap.  It’s not like she has the upper body strength to get herself out.  She could at least act a little more polite.  An incipient girl-boss even back then.  Ah well.

Who Murders a Classroom of Second Graders?

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Who destroys innocent human life just to get attention?  A madman.  Whether he uses a gun or an automobile or poison this is a creature devoid of human feeling.  And imagine targeting specifically young children.  Now we have a human monster.  Someone who is intent on horrifying his audience to the greatest degree.

What does it say about our society that we have platoons of these maniacs?  One time it’s a heartless creep who mows down a crowd of children and their families at a Christmas parade.  Then it’s a racist opening up on a train full of commuters.  Last week it’s another racist shooting up a store.  And yesterday an eighteen-year-old psychopath shoots his grandmother and goes on to a grade school and kills everyone in sight.

The fact that one of them was white, two black and one Latino is only important in the case of the white man because that allows him to be guilty of the additional crime of white supremacy.  And the black man in the car must be completely ignored because he didn’t use a gun and is black.  But the three gun-wielders all can be used as fodder for the gun control lobby that relishes these stories like nothing else.  And that is why the man who mowed down a crowd with his car must be ignored.

Because if we think about other weapons like a car or a kitchen knife or a couple of grams of fentanyl, we realize that mass murder is within the reach of any maniac who decides he wants to get famous by murdering innocent people.  After all a nurse has the opportunity to kill thousands of people if she is careful to avoid an obvious pattern to her work.  A worker at a food or pharmaceutical plant can easily adulterate products that people will ingest.

It’s simply that guns are a political target that the Left seeks to take away from free people to render them subject to their supposed public servants.  I’ve seen how this story works with the weak minded.  They immediately cave to the appeal to their soft nature, “Think of the children.”  Well, what about the maniac at the wheel of a car?  Shouldn’t we by the same logic eliminate the automobile?  And how about chain saws?  I’m sure someone has killed his neighbor with one of those.

But it’s the same old argument.  We’ll hear this ad infinitum for the next few weeks.  Hopefully the Supreme Court won’t be swayed when they make their decision on New York City’s restrictive gun law that’s on the docket.

But for me the real question is a different one.  It’s not about the weapon.  My question is about the killers.  Are they getting worse?  And are they getting more common?   Fifty years ago, more or less, an insane man took a rifle into a tower on a college campus and started shooting people at random until he was stopped by a policeman’s bullet.

That killing spree horrified the nation.  But it wasn’t followed by another one a week later and then another one a week after that.  I could be wrong about this but it seems like the mental health of this country is sliding.  The people who commit these mass murders are the worst cases.  They must be the people who have the lowest reserves of sanity to draw on.  But for every one of these there must be a million cases of road rage or some other antisocial outburst.

This is the result of living in the pressure cooker that the Left has ushered in with their George Floyd color revolution.  Deteriorating financial conditions, lawlessness on the streets, alienation by the people in charge; it’s a perfect storm of mental stress that is cracking more and more of the weakest minds.  But think of how disconnected from his human feelings an eighteen-year-old must be to go into a classroom of second graders or fourth graders and start shooting them point blank.  I can’t do it.  I can’t imagine that anyone with a shred of humanity could do such a thing.

So, the world is dehumanizing the weakest people among us.  That is a warning signal.  We’ve gotten rid of God.  We’ve abandoned reality.  We no longer protect our children from harmful people and their warped ideas.  Life in Joe Biden’s America is becoming something like living in an insane asylum.  Maybe people will vote to change that.

ZMan Claims Collapse of Social Trust Will Mean Societal Collapse Soon

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ZMan walks us through the institutions that have burned through their social trust and then finishes by saying that the American Empire will soon have its collapse like the Soviet Union.

I think he makes a lot of good points.  But it’s not clear to me that any systemic collapse is likely to happen anytime soon.  And the reason for that is a collapse doesn’t occur until some external event intrudes.  So, when will that happen?  Well, it could happen tomorrow or it could be a decade.  Now, I don’t think it will be a decade, in fact I could see something happening within three or four years but I wouldn’t even think of saying it’s going to happen on such and such a day.  I think a good trick would be to try to guess what the external triggering event is likely to be.  An easy guess is a financial collapse.  The result of some kind of stagflation or very high unemployment might be enough to destabilize the political situation.  But if we are talking about a societal collapse like the Soviet collapse it would be important to know what the US military would do in the case of essentially an insurrection.  And that will completely depend on who is in the military at the time.

It’s fun to imagine a scenario that will end the Left’s hold on power.  But trying to predict its occurrence against a calendar is maybe too difficult to try at this time.