Inseption
Nine years ago, Jeremy Rifkin, an American economist wrote The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Rifkin confidently predicted that Europe would dominate the world.
He observed that Americans emphasised the work ethic whereas Europeans placed more of a premium on balancing work and leisure. According to Rifkin, America had always seen itself as a great melting pot. Europeans, instead, preferred to preserve their rich multicultural diversity. Americans believed in maintaining a strong military presence in the world. Europeans, by contrast, emphasised economic cooperation and consensus over traditional geo-political approaches to foreign policy. Particularly, he argued that the European Union had the potential to become a world super power and that the European model was better-prepared to face the challenges of a globalizing world in the 21st century than the American equivalent.
Europe would rule because the future belonged to an aristocracy. With the rise of automation most people would become functionally useless. A small cohort of superproductive persons — a kind of aristocracy of enlightened Stakhanovites — would create everything of real value. The rest of society would be functionally on the dole. In his book, the End of Work:
Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that would create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a “social wage” in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.
America, with its emphasis on individual freedom and productivity, was doomed. The world was destined to become an ant-heap. The sooner people got used to the idea, the better it would be.
It would not be at all unpleasant for people would become enlightened ants. In a later book Rifkin further prophesied that in that future everyone on the planet earth would buy the world a Coke. In a 2009 book titled the Emphatic Civilization he predicted that “humanity … finds itself on the cusp of its greatest experiment to date: refashioning human consciousness so that human beings can mutually live and flourish in the new globalizing society. In essence, this shift in consciousness is based upon reaching out to others”. Learning to be an good little ant was the key skill.
The danger lay in those who resisted change — the bitter clingers. “The older faith-based and rational forms of consciousness are likely to become stressed, and even dangerous, as they attempt to navigate a world increasingly beyond their reach and control.” Like so many others before him Rifkin was confident that the Age of Aquarius was right around the corner, held back only by people who read books and constitutions more than a 100 years old.
The question now is where did the Dream go? Europe now seems less the land of aristocratic ants than of paupers. Greeks are eating out of garbage cans. Young Spanish workers are moving to Latin America in search of a job. Americans find it tough but “the combined gross domestic product of the 17 countries that use the euro currency shrank 0.6 per in the four quarters from the previous three months, and now has declined for five consecutive quarters.” It’s tougher in Europe.
The Guardian summarizes the unemployment figures for the continent. “The eurozone unemployment rate rose to 11.8% in November 2012 – the highest rate on record according to official figures out today.”
Eurostat figures also show youth unemployment and the latest figures suggest the situation has got worse. The youth unemployment rate for November 2012 was 23.7% in the EU, up from 22.2% in November 2011.
The eurozone recorded a youth unemployment rate of 24.4%, up from 24.2% the previous month. Greece and Spain reported the highest rates at 57.6% (September 2012) and 56.5% respectively.
For the Greek and the Spanish youth, Rifkin’s prophecy has proved tragically accurate. Europe seems to have indeed seen the End of Work. And it looks like Unemployment.
What may follow next is described by Victor Davis Hanson in his article Why Do Societies Give Up? On the heels of the Dream comes Depression. Not just of the economic kind, but also of the emotional sort. “Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?” Hanson asks. His brief answer is because they got lost in the Dream. They left reality. For societies which find themselves in a state of despair first began their downward path by imagining they had conquered reality and running off the cliff like Wile E. Coyote.
Hanson explains with lessons plucked from history. Time and again societies have given themselves over to the dreamers who thereafter produced a Nightmare.
One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie…. For Gibbon and later French scholars, “Byzantine” became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats …
Britain missed out on the postwar German economic miracles, in part because after the deprivations of the war, the war-weary British turned to class warfare and nationalized their main industries, which soon became uncompetitive.
The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites, rather than a physical inability to produce past levels of food and fuel, or to maintain adequate defense. Americans have never had safer workplaces or more sophisticated medical care — and never have so many been on disability.
Like other mental aberrations, depression often alternates with mania. The nightmare follows the dream followed by more nightmares. First the hors d’oeuvres. Then the ordure. And if we’re smart we fool ourselves so we can’t tell the difference.
Probably nothing demonstrates a manic obsession better than New York Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to ban styrofoam. This follows his wars on smoking in bars, trans-fats in restaurant foods and big gulp sodas. “The Styrofoam ban is likely to meet opposition from small businesses since containers made from ‘greener’ materials cost more.” But who cares? It’s onward. Ever onward.
Other environmentally friendly proposals laid out in the address include the installation of curbside vehicle chargers for electric cars and the construction of a new recycling plant that will be able to process plastics that were not accepted before.
The city is also planning to launch a pilot program on State Island that will take food waste from homes and turn it into compost for city parks.
As Hanson puts it, “we don’t talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth”. Hell no. We don’t talk about the parade of foreign policy disasters, the debt or the loss of jobs either. No, we talk about styrofoam and “high powered magazines” or whether Marco Rubio drank water in the proper way. Those are the important things.
Since VDH missed the opportunity to articulate it, I will formulate the thought: in the nightmare state the more serious things become the more obsessed with trivia our cultural elite becomes. Actually it was Dickens who put it most memorably, as he traced out the workings of Fagin’s mind while waiting for the sentence of death to be pronounced.
He looked up into the gallery again. Some of the people were eating, and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs; for the crowded place was very hot. There was one young man sketching his face in a little note-book. He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the artist broke his pencil-point, and made another with his knife, as any idle spectator might have done.
In the same way, when he turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress, and what it cost, and how he put it on. There was an old fat gentleman on the bench, too, who had gone out, some half an hour before, and now come back. He wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner, what he had had, and where he had had it; and pursued this train of careless thought until some new object caught his eye and roused another.
Not that, all this time, his mind was, for an instant, free from one oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could not fix his thoughts upon it. Thus, even while he trembled, and turned burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken off, and whether they would mend it, or leave it as it was. Then, he thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold—and stopped to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it—and then went on to think again.
Of course Fagin was hanged anyway. But at least focusing on trivia helps you forget about it. The styrofoam, Mayor Bloomberg, that’s it! Then the compost for the city parks.
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Yeah, I guess a decade ago, Rifkin’s prediction might’ve looked solid – the Euro was going strong and even the Greeks were living the good life. But as someone observed recently, people have a tendency to take whatever happened recently and extrapolate it into infinity. Market down 100 points today? Hey, it’s going to zero! Home prices up 20% last year? Wow, let’s jump on the bandwagon, they’re gonna triple before we know it!
It’s easy to overlook the fact that the world does things a certain way not because people are stupid and/or imprisoned by tradition and/or afraid of new ideas, but because THOSE WAYS WORK. It is impossible for “genius” central planners to see all the pitfalls and inconsistencies of their brave new worlds and that is why they always fail. We discard what has worked for centuries in favor of what sounded good over lunch at the faculty lounge at our great peril; unfortunately, that’s a lesson that every few generations or so has to re-learn.
A stray thought related to Rifkin’s utopian wet dreams:
Remember “The Life of Julia” during the campaign last year? Did anyone else remember that “Julia” was Winston Smith’s love interest in 1984?
Progressives have no sense of irony, which is compounded by their historical and literary ignorance.
Or was the choice of “Julia” a deliberate act of malice? Or a cynical joke?
???????
NAAAAAHHHHHH. no way.
On the heels of the Dream comes Depression. Not just of the economic kind, but also of the emotional sort.
I have compared Western Europe to someone with clinical depression for some time now. The state-assisted suicides, euthanasia, ridiculously long development timelines for technological projects, the lassitude and reluctance to defend oneself, either as a nation or an individual. The descent into decadence and degeneracy, etc.
This thread the Short Course: Idiot gets pwnd, you pay the tab.
The problem with being even a happy ant is that it is against human nature to be an ant. T.H. White wrote eloquently on that dystopia. The problem for both the ants and the would be Ant Masters is that there are Ant Eaters. Science has codified four species of verminlingua but we may hypothecate the existence of related sub species either Islamist or Marxist. Any solution that starts out “First we get everyone, including the people who want to kill us, to agree on what a great idea this is” deserves not just rejection but the public dismemberment of whoever advocates it. Men are not Angels. If we were we would need no earthly government. As we are not any government that neglects earthly concerns, such as the existence of Ant Eaters, is at best a waste of resources and possibly a pangolinus totalitarianus marxi in disguise.
Rifkin wrote:
“refashioning human consciousness”
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome French Revolution?
Don Rodrigo wrote:
“Progressives have no sense of irony”
In order to have a sense of irony, one must have a sense of humor.
So, there you go.
This is why competition and true diversity are useful. The kind of “diversity” Rifkin talked about was a special kind of monoculturalism. That deserved to be attempted like anything else, but the centralizing influence of visionaries who want to gather All of Heaven Under One Roof to implement their schemes really creates a kind of fragility.
They may talk about “multiculturalism” all they want. But that can never disguise the fact that ultimately, they want their vision to prevail.
The need for competition has been discussed here before, notably by Leo.
The problem with many empires is they retain enough coercive power to enforce internal homogeneity long after they lose the ability to resist external threats. They are able to hold reform and internal critics at bay even when they can no longer keep external enemies out.
“We won” refers to a victory over American political opponents. It does not apply to al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or North Korea.
So the key structural innovation in a survivable polity is to design it to “break internally” before it is invaded externally. The Constitution is really that kind of circuit breaker. Adaptation from internal political change is supposed to require less energy than having to change at the point of an external sword.
Of course the two forces interact. What often drives internal reform in a society is the perception of external threat. This happened to Meiji Japan as well as to the Ottoman Empire. It happened, arguably, to the Soviet Union. It did not happen to Nazi Germany because was overwhelmed by the Allies before Valkyrie or movements like it could effect a change.
Taleb hit the nail on the head by noticing that the “more stability” is forced on a system the less stable and the more fragile it becomes.
Rifkin is a bad economist and a worse forecaster.
The Boom Bust Cycle is Caused by Cultural Evolutionary Rot
There have been many cycles of boom and bust. I have a new explanation for the bust. It is cultural evolutionary rot. Prosperity blocks the natural cleansing of evolution and reproductive channels become clogged with inferior information transmission. As the culture becomes contaminated with erroneous ideas, instability sets in and prosperity is destroyed.
The cycle begins with poverty. The requirements for survival are scarce and people perish from starvation, disease or exposure to the elements. This could happen, for example, after an ice age or an economic contraction. It is an ideal evolutionary scenario. Only the most fit survive and reproduce. This is true also of culture. Wrong-headed ideas have led to people dying, and those ideas have consequently been abandoned by those surviving.
People are very much in touch with reality.
The next step is economic growth, almost certainly according to the Adam Smith model. People learn to cooperate, trade and complement each other’s skills. Work becomes more productive, and prosperity is generated. Culture thrives and begins to insulate people from objective reality. Governments are formed and people become ‘altruistic,’ meaning that they are happy to give other people’s wealth to support those who would otherwise be unable to survive. This egalitarianism extends to culture where all ideas are deemed equally worthy. Since the non-fit are not allowed to perish, the reproductive channels of both genes and cultural information become filled with reproductive trash. This is not an ideal evolutionary scenario.
People have lost touch with reality.
As altruism and egalitarianism take hold, work becomes less productive, and prosperity is reduced. Because of the fragility of the productive system, the decline is usually catastrophic. Bubbles burst; markets crash; revolutions arise; terrorism abounds. After a while there are fewer people and less culture and more contact with reality. The cycle begins anew.
In order to break the cycle, the emerging culture must recognize the nature of the cycle. The true principles of evolution and economics have to have been recognized and preserved.
Wretchard says: In the nightmare state the more serious things become the more obsessed with trivia our cultural elite becomes.
Reminds me of a Witz attributed to Karl Kraus, an Austrian journalist and satirist, regarding the summer of 1914: “In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”
Have our elites all become pre-WWI Viennese?
The housing bust hit central Florida hard. The profligate ways of the past are catching up with us. Despite tax increases as well as failed attempts at getting even more taxes, multiple public schools are being closed. Parents are very upset.
And last year I heard over an over again on the radio a government-funded campaign designed to get smoking in public parks banned. Smoking banned. And that’s outside. I don’t smoke, don’t like smoking, and wish cigarettes would all disappear, but it is unimaginable for me to be outside in a park and be bothered by someone smoking. Noisy vehicles and the exhaust from them, yes, but somebody with a cigarette? Even a whole lot of somebodies with cigarettes? NFW!
That’s an example of our priorities. We don’t have enough money to run schools but we do have enough for such idiotic campaigns.
As for Europe, I recall that in the late 80′s there was a little piece on TV, interviews with “typical” Europeans dining in sidewalk cafes. Asked about the future of the USA they all replied, “Uh, it’s over for the Americans. They have this huge national debt. The future is here in Europe.”
A couple of years later we had Desert Storm followed by the collapse of the USSR. Europeans were calling the USA a Hyperpower and worrying what they could do to stop us if we decided to blow them all away.
Is America the only free market economy having a codified set of rights for the individual?
It certainly looks to me that we are the lone fish swimming upstream, Ever other economy is tightly controlled by rigorious rules inhabited by people who have few if any rights.
Are we destined to be dragged down to a dark and deadly sea? Seems to be.
I recently watched a couple of Wallanders. He is a Swedish detective. I don’t know if his consciousness has been refashioned. The theme seems to be: Life is horrible but as long as you are breathing you might as well solve the crime. It makes me nostalgic for Marlowe and Sam Spade. They mixed a lot more living with the dying.
I agree that most multi-culturalist are dishonest.
So is much of the push for “Critical Thinking in education. In effect what the people talking about critical thinking want is for everyone to think like they do.
What Rifkin was promoting is simply communism using a different vocabulary.
Inseption, I suspect, is mispelled. Worse, most search engines will gather results for the word ‘inception’, rendering the chance of discovering an arcane useage of ‘inseption’ almost impossible. I never relalized how difficult it is to search for a mis-spelled word.
It is intentionally misspelled, as when “inception” is cross-bred with “sepsis”. It may be an unfortunate choice. But I happen to like the move Inception and would not dream of tainting that film with this idea.
But the philosophical question raised by the movie is quite interesting. The characters are looking for a lost reality. They want to come back from the dream — a place they thought they would like — and have no way of knowing when they’ve reascended from the layers of illusion back to bedrock.
You can actually think of the scientific quest as a kind of search for reality. Religion, too, is a kind of search for it. It is a mistake to think that religion is about finding the Next Life. It is that, but above all it is an attempt to regain This Life.
The modern view, perhaps the view of the Wallanders, is that our current life is meaningless. Nothing in it is true, except perhaps the statement that “nothing is true”. And in consequence there are no consequences. There is no “reason” why one should study, strive, discover. It’s the life of an ant who so remains until he grows weary of anthood.
Only if we regain our grasp on reality — only if we believe that we ourselves are real and therefore consequential — will anything matter again. In that instant you regain your life. For suddenly your study, endeavor, search and striving become meaningful again. You can live.
But absent that … well I can sympathize with an obsession with styrofoam. “Others ask why … I say why not styrofoam”?
Wretchard at #13: But absent that … well I can sympathize with an obsession with styrofoam. “Others ask why … I say why not styrofoam”?
How gauche of Bloomie to ban the raw material of Obama’s faux Greek columns at his 2008 coronation in Denver. Has Hizzoner no sense of tradition? (No /sarc tag needed.)
4. no mo uro
wrong, this has nothing to do with the “french revolution” but with Fabianism
this all reminds me of the french revolution, re: elites and their plans for the proles.
wretchard, i am going to recommend a book for you: “City In the Sahara” by Jules Verne.
Borrowed from a Mr. Paul M. Day’s July 2005 Amazon review of Rifkin’s book:
“Rifkin’s obvious vegetarian bias is evident throughout the text, and he makes sweeping generalizations based on that bias. Not that I have a problem with vegetarians. I used to be a vegetarian. But when he attributes meat consumption to perpetuating poverty, the result is distortion.”
Poor Rifkin! He would be so upset at the current European horror of horse meat being passed off as beef. Surely all those superior Europeans ought to be vegetarians by now?
Rifkin seems to be a classic example of someone who sees what he wants to see, and ignores the rest. He does not see the circle of cars burning round Paris, or English rioters looting London clothing shops. He does not see young Welsh women putting on their slut clothes to wander the streets of Cardiff on a Saturday evening, or the parade of northern European holidaymakers vomiting on the streets of Spanish resorts.
Yet Rifkin’s fantasies can find a publisher. Maybe that’s the real problem.
W: “’Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?’ Hanson asks. His brief answer is because they got lost in the Dream. They left reality.”
Leaving reality is the same as leaving the truth, or accepting the lie and the truth simultaneously with the lie always one leap ahaead of the truth. This all seems so Orwellian because it is Orwellian. Social insanity is the very heart of the Orwellian idea; group insanity on an immense scale, controlled by government, mass media, education and entertainment venues.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously [the lie and the truth], and accepting both of them [Insanity]… with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality… If human equality is to be forever averted; if the “high,” as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently; then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.” George Orwell – 1984
refashioning human consciousness
Yeah right, all them commies think nature is a matter of social norms, Lysenkoism, etc. And that even if it were, it’s easy to design a new one that works.
But the idea that everyone should spend more quality time on cultural activities and leisure is right out of Marx, isn’t it? Speaking of obsolete 100 year old books.
Do we really need 100,000,000 Rifkins writing absurd analysis?
… and yet, I was brought up in much of this tradition, and I’ve said as much here time and again, the march of technology allows that maybe we can have all the food and widgets we can stand, with only 10% of the population working. We can AFFORD to let 90% sit idle, if they wish. About the only thing in short supply is meaningful work! This might be possible, but some distribution and allocation methods are still needed, so one chowderhead doesn’t just burn all the wheat and leave everyone else to starve. We don’t HAVE those methods, and there are going to be some serious, serious problems setting up anything like that to work (read: corruption, not to mention stupidity).
I think you are all wrong about Europe disasters. Look at Greece – everything looks normal, despite economic news. Even in Amsterdam – we see filthy degenerates driving by, but the Puma shop is still open for business.
The news channels are lying again. They always do.
It’s not just young Spaniards going to Latin America, it’s young Portuguese going to _Angola_, for Pete’s sake! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/16/portuguese-exodus-angola-el-dorado
Nr. 10, Wallender is a drag, though the stories are sometimes good.
Marie-Claude, it certainly goes back in some form to Rousseau, but I’ll grant that the links between Rousseau and the Révolution are a complicated topic.
BFTP 3: “The problem with being even a happy ant is that it is against human nature to be an ant.”
You forget that a true Socialist (whether Marxist, Euro-Fascist or Islamo-Fascist) believes that he, like a god, can create a new human nature, where individuals possess little or no value, and thus, like ants, are expendable.
“The individual is only a cell… power is collective. The individual only has power in so far that he ceases to be an individual… If he can make complete utter submission; if he can escape from his identity [and become an ant in our new utopian ant-heap]; if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful and immortal… Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal… You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do, and will turn against us; but we create human nature.” George Orwell – 1984
“only if we believe that we ourselves are real and therefore consequential — will anything matter again. In that instant you regain your life. For suddenly your study, endeavor, search and striving become meaningful again. You can live.”
God love you, god knows I do.
Storm_Rider +1
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for horse meat. Beats dog or cat over a burning tire though I’d never beat any one of them… but maybe a jackass. That is what the communists are bring us.
I can’t say within a factor of ten how many times I heard in Europe some variation of the chestnut “Europeans work to live, Americans live to work”.
I really feel that was a divide that is still not overcome. They don’t see the point of producing for the sake of being productive, and Americans generally can’t come up with a good reason for working as many hours as we do other than consuming. When asked, in the US most people seem to be able, when pressed, to identify the consumption as a byproduct of their production. There was no equivalent in most Beneluxers when I lived there. But there used to be, our famed protestant work ethic came from the same place. What happened?
The Euros I know best generally seem to be fighting Nietzsche, they have seen his fruits and lived with the devastation. Rifkin believes that the answer is a gnostic humanistic cult of anti-Nietzsche, which leads appropriately to rights-make-might international structures and all the other trappings. The innovation declines from lack of competition, the art becomes intolerable and interpretable only by the savants(tm), and the wealth of the culture morally, demographically and financially declines asymptotically. Which leads us back to conflict and Nietzsche.
The only thing that separates the US from this status is the 12 steps on a national level. We have a collective notion that a periodic acknowledgment of the human condition will keep us survivable.
Yeah, Rifkin got a few things wrong in his predictions. Ok, more than a few things. Didn’t Yogi Berra have some comment about predictions being difficult because they dealt with the future?
10. hdgreene Try reading a couple of Wallender books. Absolutely, cringe inducing, epitome of pathetic. The books are twice as bad as the TV programs.
In today’s National Post Terence Corcoran has this to say about how the view from Obamatopia clashes with the normal viewpoint of the middle class in N. America.
“The Obama vision of a thriving middle class is of a people propped up by job-creation schemes, raised into prosperity by minimum-wage laws, made comfortable by more home-ownership subsidies, educated by more grants and loans, employed through tax breaks for industry, sent to kindergarten on federal funds, pensioned off by the state and kept in health care via government programs.
The whole Obama project distorts and misrepresents the core economic and social premises behind the idea of a dynamic middle class. You don’t have to be Ayn Rand to grasp the middle-class dream, which is that in a country like America — called “the greatest nation on earth” by Mr. Obama — the main idea is the freedom to get on with the business of life, not to stand around waiting for the government to arrive.
Perhaps Mr. Obama truly misunderstands the idea behind a self-created middle class that builds its own future and creates the rich of tomorrow. Or maybe he truly believes that the middle class is the creation of activist government. Either way, the result will be the same. In Obama’s America, the objective is to allow the government to get on with the business of governing, expanding the role of bureaucrats and wealth transfers.”
N. America is not Europe and I don’t believe it will become Europe, in spite of the loony left and the ideologically incestuous lusts that titillate its mentally constipated elite.
“Rifkin seems to be a classic example of someone who sees what he wants to see, and ignores the rest. He does not see the circle of cars burning round Paris, or English rioters looting London clothing shops. He does not see young Welsh women putting on their slut clothes to wander the streets of Cardiff on a Saturday evening, or the parade of northern European holidaymakers vomiting on the streets of Spanish resorts.”
“Yet Rifkin’s fantasies can find a publisher. Maybe that’s the real problem.”
Funny, I didn’t see all the Muscovites with pitchforks outside the Kremlin walls the last few times I was there. Maybe they were somewhere else? I’m sure they exist though b/c some commenters here insist that they do with their own fantasies.
I do recall wondering where all the pretty Parisian women were when I visited the City of Light. I must’ve not gotten the cool people memo, as I didn’t notice too many beauties until I got to Prague. The German ladies upon crossing the old border were simply bigger and taller but not necessarily fairer.
As one fellow sarcastically said upon being confronted in a certain Russophobe fanatic’s blog, the UK is a place where bad libertarians go after they die. But that doesn’t stop it’s media from proclaiming Oceania eternally freer and superior to Muscovy, capitol of Eurasia, or Eastasia.
Per the comment above, Angola has plenty of sunshine and crude oil, as well as mines to clear out from the USA-USSR proxy wars of the late 1970s-early 80s.
I can think of two great dangers in this, Wretchard;
First, and I think more likely, is that our external enemies are going to test their luck someday soon. Perhaps North Korea, or Iran, or Pakistan, or all three will look at out feckless society led by an even more feckless elite and decide now is the time to strike a blow against the Great Satan. Perhaps Mayor Blomberg will have his styrofoam musings interrupted by a nuclear bomb laden freighter detonating in New York Harbor.
Second, and I admit less likely for the time being: At some point, the decay and decline will overcome the design margin left by our Constitution. At some point, perhaps when the dollar collapses and Americans are eating out of garbage cans like Greeks, there will come a cry for a man on horseback. I do not say that any American general will imitate Ceasar or Bonaparte. I do say that at some point Congress might declare a state of emergency – which will beoome permanent.
These idiots are all over the place, often implementing public policy. You can tell when things end up working as designed.
There is a small inuit community in northern canada that has been in the news for years. The original location was unsuitable for some reason, and the government paid to move everyone to another place a few miles away, building houses and shops. The place became characterized by terrible levels of substance abuse, either alcohol or huffing gasoline. Each generation would end up in the same situation as their parents, hopeless and inebriated.
There was a spate of suicides and deaths from substance abuse, a large number that became a cause celebre, and the government responded by pouring money into the place. Ice rinks, housing, social workers and addictions specialists, a centre that showed the traditional inuit life, cost no limit. A few years later the death rate and addiction rates were unchanged.
it was in the news because of some unusual tragedy, and I remember an interview with a social worker, obviously frustrated. She said that we have them every thing, allowed them to live very well doing the traditional things the inuit did, they could even teach us. But it made no difference.
Reminded me of something from soviet times, we pretend to go to work and they pretend to pay us. The workers paradise produced male longevity rates in the mid 50′s and sky high abortion rates.
You would think that these intelligent well educated folks would learn.
on topic and off at the very same time, as we face cultural death and we see our elites focused on fluff and trivia, igive you fluff and comedy.
this is from an actual Australian tourism site.
Q: Does it ever get windy in Australia ? I have never seen it rain on TV, how do the plants grow? (UK).
A: We import all plants fully grown, and then just sit around watching them die.
Q: Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? (USA)
A: Depends how much you’ve been drinking.
Q: I want to walk from Perth to Sydney – can I follow the railroad tracks? (Sweden)
A: Sure, it’s only three thousand miles. Take lots of water.
Q: Are there any ATMs (cash machines) in Australia ? Can you send me a list of them in Brisbane , Cairns , Townsville and Hervey Bay ? ( UK )
A: What did your last slave die of?
Q: Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Australia ? (USA)
A: Af-RI-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of Europe .
Aust-Ra-lia is that big island in the middle of the Pacific which does not …
Oh, forget it. Sure, the hippo racing is every Tuesday night in Kings Cross. Come naked.
Q: Which direction is North in Australia ? (USA)
A: Face south, and then turn 180 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we’ll send the rest of the directions.
Q: Can I bring cutlery into Australia ? (UK)
A: Why? Just use your fingers like we do.
Q: Can you send me the Vienna Boys’ Choir schedule? (USA)
A: Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is …
Oh, forget it. Sure, the Vienna Boys Choir plays every Tuesday night in Kings Cross, straight after the hippo races. Come naked.
Q: Can I wear high heels in Australia ? (UK)
A: You are a British politician, right?
Q: Are there supermarkets in Sydney and is milk available all year round? (Germany)
A: No, we are a peaceful civilization of vegan hunter/gatherers. Milk is illegal.
Q: Please send a list of all doctors in Australia who can Dispense rattlesnake serum. (USA)
A: Rattlesnakes live in A-mer-ica, which is where YOU come from. All Australian snakes are perfectly harmless, can be safely handled, and make good pets.
Q: I have a question about a famous animal in Australia, but I forget its name. It’s a kind of bear and lives in trees. (USA)
A: It’s called a Drop Bear. They are so called because they drop out of gum trees and eat the brains of anyone walking underneath them. You can scare them off by spraying yourself with human urine before you go out walking.
Q: I have developed a new product that is the fountain of youth. Can you tell me where I can sell it in Australia ?
A: Anywhere significant numbers of Americans gather.
Q: Do you celebrate Christmas in Australia ? (France)
A: Only at Christmas.
Q: Will I be able to speak English most places I go? (USA)
A: Yes, but you’ll have to learn it first.
When obama came out with the julia stuff, no one did the obvious. Take a camera into communities who are recipients of high levels of government care. I don’t think the pictures would be very glamorous. The republicans would never do that for risk of being called racist.
A decade ago an Italian friend told us that the European Union would eclipse the USA because its political system was superior. To which I replied it was the worst possible political system.
A system by and for elite, nameless bureaucrats combined with remote responsibility and lack of voter accountability. It’s a system designed to avoid responsibility, and at the same time concentrate power. The perfect environment for public service drones to run a Ponzi scheme.
At least with a dictatorship you know who to blame for things.
All angry mobs can do now is burn cars and the occasional bank. These aren’t the Ceaușescus they’re looking for of course. And the ponzi scheme limps on.
31- Zombie does that, sort of. Also cables shows like Hardcore Pawn, which are a part of trutv’s domestic propaganda.
5. wretchard
The ability to control the internal population after having lost the power (or desire) to keep invaders is seen through history. A great example was the Germans using the french control system to police their conquered territory during WWII.
As has been said here long ago by another – our current leader would love to surrender to the enemy and be made Calif of America.
Our greatest enemy is always our own government.
Listen friends, and mark my words in this moment and this hour–
God is jealous for his name for his name is jealous.
Nor is this a charming flower to set before a man
nor one of his commands.
Yet, without Jesus, this is more than we can love as we desire peace,
and less than we can know as we desire joy.
For the sacred fire
that makes us liars–
I mean, that separates speech from dreams,
and separates our flesh from the future–
is God’s power manifested.
So, in the year and the hour– for his sake, invest your desire in Jesus.
Follow his holy fire for right now. Right now he intercedes for us in heaven!
Some will say we are people of the way.
We are people of the way.
We praise his holy name
Yahweh.
I am who I am.
I cause things to be.
I am the first cause of creation.
We praise his holy name
Elohym.
And say “Thank you Jesus for your precious blood–
better, so much better than the blood of Abel.
How then should we pray?
I pray bless me a lot oh God.
Show me your kingdom and righteousness
in such a way that my thoughts words and deeds
reflect your wisdom and power–
and that– for the sake of your honor and glory.
So that I will live in your presence
in this life and the next.
For your name sake
Let me hear my children praise your name
And their children too.
Let them woo 10 generations
coiled up in their dimensions
to the praise of your name.
Let my enemies,neighbors,family, friends,
strangers praise Jesus.
the risen Lord
I pray all this in Jesus name.
6. winslow
Cultural Rot – That is one way to understand it.
My father said “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”
Kondratiev had a similar 60 year time span of economic growth and decline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
The tribes of Israel apparently figured out a way to short circuit this process in the last decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28biblical%29
“Sean where are you off to?” “Going to Dingles for a meat pie.” “Are you daft they have been using donkey meat in those pies.” “When I go to the pub this evening I’ll be able to swear on a stack of Bibles that I got some ass.” “Point, that’s about the only way a man can get some ass in this parish.”
16. cjm
“the city of Sahara” or the “Barsac mission”
is it because that already related a Mali Campain, wheras drones were involved?
in that case one can say that hte fiction was prophetic !
34. Langley
oh then they must have used prostitutes and pimps as their intelligence, hey in Javert tradition, the best intelligence before the agencies were the bordels
My small town has already tried the picking up food waste/composting thing. Everyone in town was issued a little green bucket to put outside. Unfortunately, the project soon had to be abandoned, because the cute little green buckets with food waste attracted flies and other pests. Do these bureaucrats not know about cause and effect? Do they think the people who live on Staten Island are peasants who won’t notice the flies?
One way to view the differences between the European and traditional American experiences is to differentiate between teaching and learning.
Europeans are big on teaching and the PhD (Piled High and Deep), an exhaltation of the teacher. Traditional Americans focus on learning, which empowers the student.
Europeans are like Darwin’s Natural Selection, a reductive choice among pre-existing alternatives.
Americans are creative, like Darwin’s Origin of Species is, except Americans believe in God as the Creator, in other words, Intelligent Design. [This is distinctly different from Creationism, a static philosophy.]
Only creative societies have a long term future. Lacking creativity, Europe is dying. In America, creative destruction rejuvenates the society.
Not Uncle Joe @ 27 – Perhaps the reason you don’t see too many people with pitchforks and torches on the streets of Moscow is because all those pretty single Russian women have emigrated in search of husbands with jobs! My email is full of offers by such women, mostly in their twenties. Without young women, Russia is doomed. They are “voting with their feet” and jilting Pootie-Poo. It seems they dislike BABYKILLERS!
Maybe what those few who remain ought to do is march through the streets banging on pots and pans and carrying signs, (in English) reading “Putin supports babykilling in Syria!”
How could even MSNBC broadcast the Winter Games from a nation whose women protest their own government officials as BABYKILLERS!
And young women are THE key demographic of all those TV advertisers!
SAVE THE CHILDREN, BOYCOTT RUSSIA!!
“My email is full of offers by such women, mostly in their twenties.”
funny not mine, but I used to get plenty for “enlarging one penis”
is it because you registred to a “meeting” site?
h
MC#15:
“this has nothing to do with the “french revolution” but with Fabianism”
MC, there’s a pretty strong connection between Rousseau, the French Revolution, and Fabianism. And Bolshevism. And NPR leftists. And postmodern academics. And Rifkin’s maunderings.
That link is the notion that human nature can be permanently altered by government fiat in order to impose the will of a self-styled elite claiming to be more intelligent and more in tune with what is “fair” than regular folks.
My post wasn’t an attack on French people but on a particular time in their history. No need to be so defensive.
@MachiasPrivateer,
I suggest that you quit the bath salts and sober up.
Baby-killers? Projection much?
Notice the progression from Rousseau to Marx in regards to who owns property. Karl Marx stood on the shoulders of French Socialists, and so the Communist Revolution stands on the shoulders of the French Revolution.
“THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” Jean Jacques Rousseau
http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq_04.htm
“But as the essence of the republic or of democracy is equality, it follows that the love of country necessarily includes the love of equality…. This great purity of the French revolution’s basis, the very sublimity of its objective, is precisely what causes both our strength and our weakness. Our strength, because it gives to us truth’s ascendancy over imposture, and the rights of the public interest over private interests…. We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror…. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue…. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic.” Maximilien Robespierre
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Communism/ROBESPIERRE'S%20SPEECH.htm
“We claim to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want this real equality or death; that’s what we need. And we’ll have this real equality, at whatever price. Unhappy will be those who stand between it and us!…We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses… The French Revolution was nothing but a precursor of another revolution, one that will be bigger, more solemn, and which will be the last.” Gracchus Babeuf
http://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/conspiracy-equals/1796/manifesto.htm
“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property… In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend… In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” Karl Marx
“The proletariat [labor-challenged, non-disabled, tax-consuming government-dependents] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [self-serving Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois [middle class] individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
The future will tell. The EUrocrats, their toadies and admirers have one vision of human nature and of reality: it is a complete utter rejection of the West from the Greeks to the Enlightenment; and I have mine. I believe Pascal, Aristotle, Augustine were correct. I hope to live just long enough to see who is right and no longer.
“How will this end?” asked the Emperor.
“In fire.”
Progressives are really big on selling the term Social Darwinism as a justification for Big Government “multiculturalism”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term used for various late nineteenth century ideologies predicated on the idea of survival of the fittest.[1] It especially refers to notions of struggle for existence being used to justify social policies which make no distinction between those able to support themselves and those unable to support themselves….
…
The term social Darwinism gained widespread currency when used in 1944 to oppose these earlier concepts.
Multiculturalism has a long history with unsavory European types like Anarchists.
And all because they cannot differentiate among more than two options.
What ever happened to the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair “Third Way”??
How did the capitalist US of A elect a BLACK PRESIDENT?
****************
That will set them off!!!!
Ask an anarchist, “What did God do on the Eighth Day, go back to the work of creation or Die?”
He can’t be dead because he acts later, by evicting Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, for example.
He modified and improved his own work! The best proof of that is Jesus.
Rumcrook #30:
My favorite question of that sort sent to the Aussies was:
Q: “Is it possible to walk around in the wilderness naked?”
A: “And accomplish what?”
By the way, Eggplant, if you are out there, the new weapon came close to taking out the big nuke plant at Chelybinsk last night. Aim lower and fire for effect. Pour it on!
Today’s Song of the Day is
Harry Belafonte – I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
…God is not dead, nor doth He sleep..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvXHMimt_n0
He has offered the Holy Spirit to all who would have it.
I’ve got to go to work, but here is a bonus song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI0x0KYChq4
Throughout his entire career, every single one of Rifkin’s predictions has been proven wrong. Every single one. He is reliably wrong about everything. He is one of the stupidest and most ignorant men on the planet.
“We can AFFORD to let 90% sit idle, if they wish. About the only thing in short supply is meaningful work!”
This isn’t the first time this has happened, Imperial Rome faced much the same situation in the 1st century. We have mechanical devices to do our labor and vast agricultural improvements to supply our food; they had massive amounts of essentially free slave labor brought in from foreign conquests and huge new food supplies brought in from newly conquered Egypt and North Africa. (both of them almost as productive 2000 years ago as America’s great plains are today – imagine that)
Like us, Rome had a huge civilian population which could be fed but which had nothing useful to do, other than cause trouble for the rulers. Their solution to the problem is well known, as is it’s final outcome. Looks like we’re on the same glidepath.
Baobao wrote: “Look at Greece – everything looks normal, despite economic news.”
Everything looked incredibly normal at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 5, 1941. Everything looked normal in Paris in 1939. Everything looked normal in Atlanta right up until the week before the retreating confederate troops burned it to the ground.
Everything always looks completely normal right up to the point that the end comes. But that has nothing to do with the fact that the end is, indeed, coming.
Baobao wrote: “Look at Greece – everything looks normal, despite economic news.”
There’s still a lot of cultural and community capital in Europe, and it seems to keep the continent going. Europeans may not have lots of kids, but the extended family links seem viable, where they still exist. Spain is only 30 years removed from a kind of pre-modern society. Socially, Spaniards keep up appearances, but you can see more and more idle men drinking in public because they don’t have any work. And the professional classes are treading water. Fortunately, there’s plenty of great wine, and it’s cheap.
Iceland went rogue and seems to be doing better. Now it wants to ban porn. No bankster easy bucks? No porn? The marxists said that religion was the opiate of the masses. True to some extent. But the new opiates work really well, too.
The question is who will be master, that’s all.
anon @40 – I can show you an example of a composting program that’s working. I started one myself in my kids’ highschool. My 2 sons are autistic, and when the oldest graduated at 21, he had nothing to do all day. So a teacher and I convinced the principal to let us start a composting program. Twice a week I bring my son and 2 other autistic grads to the school, and we go through the halls collecting the little plastic baskets full of vegetable waste. The wood shop built us some composting bins, we dump the stuff, wash the baskets and return them to the classrooms. It works, but it works because it’s a small-scale project done with people who are willing and interested. The classes that don’t want or need to participate aren’t included, only those who know how composting works and want to do it. It’s planned and monitored and works on schedule – because we know what we’re doing, nobody is bothered by fruit flies because we collect the waste quickly and get it outside where it can rot in peace. I check that nobody’s throwing chicken nuggets or hamburger buns in, so it doesn’t attract flies and rats. It can work – but not if it’s a top-down, one-size-fits-all, “everyone has to participate” government-run project. We’re producing nice useful compost, and most importantly, the autistic kids are doing something that keeps them busy, active and useful. I think in the past, this sort of grassroots-level activity would not have been unusual; nowadays, everyone thinks if it’s important, the government should be doing it, and it ends up being a failure.
P.S. – Marie-Claude, have you ever heard of a performer named Pierre Desproges? I’m translating his 1-minute comedy sketches into English, and I have to know – is it possible that he invented French words? Because I’m having great difficulty finding them even in a French dictionary, let alone a French-English one. “Décrispons la Berrigoulaine” – what the hell is that? If he’s just making up stuff I can do the same, but if this is some bizarre French dialect…
Rifkin reminds me of Edward Bellamy, who in 1887 imagined the year 2000 as a time when utopian schemes had been realized; all people worked just a few hours a day and were all very wealthy without being greedy; everyone played the piano like a maestro and otherwise improved themselves in the time freed up from working; strife, war and poverty had been eradicated; relations between the genders were tuned to perfection, and pneumatic tubes were tons more efficient than they had been in 1887.
In fact, Rifkin’s book bears a troubling resemblance to Bellamy’s, which was the #1 bestseller of the late 19th century.
Dr Mabuse @ 53 – One of my customers just placed another order to improve and scale up a functional pilot plant project to turn biowaste into gasoline. He made a successful 100 gallon pilot run. Now we’re going bigger!
So we might be able to turn your autistic boys into bio-gasoline moguls (they will need bio-gasoline to run their lawn mowers to provide the grass clippings used as a feed stock to make more bio-gasoline). That is a virtuous circle. We help the boys and they get a nice little lawn service business that makes good money in the process.
And it is sustainable GREEN ENERGY!
Ain’t technology wonderful??
ONLY IN AMERICA!!!!
“…with aim of providing a new rendering of human history and the meaning of human existence.” The Empathetic Civilization
When you read the first several pages of Rifkin’s book about the “recent discovery” of empathy, and why concern for the well-being of your fellow man is the key to human flourishing, you have to ask what kind of cocoon this guy was educated in and lives in. Amazon Look Inside
Acknowledgement of the dignity of each human person is Christianity, and has been since day one some 2,000 years ago. I suppose it’s a good thing that at least some folks in the chattering class are finally figuring out what the ordinary peasant or tradesman knew for centuries. Now that would be Progress.
“You can actually think of the scientific quest as a kind of search for reality. Religion, too, is a kind of search for it.”
Which explains why liberal progressives always get the science wrong and do not understand religion. For the Rivkins of the world there is no “reality” or “truth”. He can use use these words but would not understand them because he lacks a basic ability to transcend his own physical experience. He cannot experience a true “I-Thou” (Ich-Du)relationship as in the philosophy of Martin Buber. To do that the Other must be accepted without imparting value or content to the relationship.
Rivkin and those like him can only relate in the sense if “I-It” (Ich-Es) To him the Other is only understood as an object. There can be no real communication because everything only exists as I understand it or wish it to be.
They get the science wrong because they address scientific issues like climate change or the potential charge of a Lithium Ion car battery from an internal frame of reference. They are not listening to what the universe has to say, they are telling it what it should be like and expect that is how it will turn out eventually given enough effort.
People are means to an end for these folks. They are not understood as independant beings in a mutual relationship. They are simply objects occupying different strata within a power structure. Rivkin wants them to be comfortable and happy but he has no interest in listening to what people want or just letting them live as they see fit. He wants to design a Disneyland and keep them there as pets.
What I find increasingly depressing is that our institutions somehow, for whatever reason, can no longer deal with what reason can affirm is real. The people who occupy key positions do not appear to be able to handle today’s problems, with the result that they and the institutions they represent are becoming irrelevant. With that, people no longer take them seriously–and we move into a dark age.
55. MachiasPrivateer
Only in America eh? Or maybe you are copying the family farm compound that I visited in rural Southern India in 1985. This family used cow dung in an enclosed tank to generate methane gas which they ran through a network of gas pipes to the houses and other buildings in the compound. They used the methane for light and for cooking. The used dung was cleared out of the tank and spread on their adjacent banana plantation.
With apologies to India and Wales maybe the slogan should be – Bharat am byth!
stevesmith @ 59 – You missed the fact that we are makng LIQUID fuels. Fuels with a huge energy density, that can be dropped right into existing vehicles through the existing petroleum gasoline infrastructure.
Making methane out of dung is called FARTING! Anybody, even a nitwit Ivy League Liberal Arts Major, can do that!
One way we’re getting like EU is the balkanization caused by unassimilated immigrants. Witness the rumble between the local African-American homies and Somalis at a Minneapolis high school yesterday and concerns in the Black community about getting pushed out of the economy by Obama’s horde of legalized Mexican peasants. In the high school incident, the white kids sat on the sideline yukking it up at the fight. It might not be so funny in a while.
55 Machias Privateer – Yes, it is wonderful! (Even though it’s happening in Canada, not the U.S – but it’s the same attitude that exists on both sides of the border.) And I couldn’t care less about the “greenness” of it all, though I know that for the school administrators, that’s the big selling point. For me, the priorities are:
1) Do something for my son
2) Do something for the other autistic kids like him in the same situation
3) Do something for the school, because my kids have gone there for years
4) Do something enjoyable (gardening)
Way, way down the list comes “help the planet”; that was never part of my motivation at all.
But the reason this works at the micro level is because when you’re actually down at that level, you can see the terrain up close, and spot the possibilities. A government department can’t see my son and other autistic kids, or where to put them. I can see that there’s enough vegetable waste generated daily in a highschool to make composting worthwhile on the scale we’re doing it: me plus 3 handicapped kids. I can see the work it entails and know that it’ll fit the capabilities of the boys. No bureaucrat would ever have been able to concoct a little plan like this because it’s too small.
Peter (56),
Well, since before day one, actually. Ever read, e.g., the book of Jonah?
Another great post! One small niggle: Rifkin’s newer book is “The Empathic Civilization” rather than “the Emphatic Civilization”. You are no doubt a victim of computer spell check!
I suspect President Obama read the book and loved it. If you want to make a liberal think you’re a genius, tell him something that reinforces his prejudices.
#57
They are not listening to what the universe has to say…
I think that’s what C.S. Lewis was saying in the Abolition of Man in 1944 and Benedict XVI at Regensurg in 2006, and more than a handful of others in between.
I haven’t read enough Rifkin to get a firm handle on where he’s coming from. Bringing empathy into the mix is a bit encouraging but even that may be too little to raise any enthusiasm as he attributes it only to electro-chemical activity that can be measured by laboratory instruments.
The real tragedy of the age is that “they” are killing humanity by reducing its nature to blips on an oscilloscope. This cultural suicide has been difficult to resist because people in general seem unwilling, or unable, to separate the science behind genuine technological achievements from the pseudo-sciences of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and the like.
#63
Orthodox Christianity encompasses the entirety of the Old Testament. Did not intend to imply otherwise.
I understand what Our Host is getting at, but this part is not correct. Religion is per se the worship and service of God. From this it follows many facts that the modern world has well-nigh forgotten, which also prove the Catholic doctrine and oblige men to submit to Holy Mother Church.
1. If religion is the worship and service of God, it stands to reason that only that worship and service is fully pleasing to God which he himself did establish.
2. God, being himself supremely good and perfect in every sense, can only be pleased by worship and service which is itself perfect.
3. In attempting to render such perfect worship, man finds that he is thwarted at the very outset by inconstancy, the love of evil, self-seeking, and his own divided heart (Original Sin).
4. So unless it can be asserted that God has himself established a Church to bring fallen man into the fullness of Grace, then God has cast off man and confined him to perdition.
5. It is asserted that Jesus Christ is the founder and indeed the substance of this Church, which was promised in God’s revelation to the people Israel; which assertion being accepted, so much about Jesus Christ must also be believed:
6. That he was without sin and fully pleasing to the father in every way, from whence it follows that he was true God.
7. That he is capable of communicating this grace to man in a way that man’s nature can receive; and man himself being a microcosm and the measure of all things, can only receive from another man those things which pertain to his essential humanity; hence Jesus is also true man. (6 and 7 comprise the Hypostatic Union.)
8. That the form of the Church which Jesus did establish is in itself perfect and fully pleasing to the father, and that the sacrament(s) of this Church is/are the means by which saving grace is conferred. (Sacraments are efficacious signs of grace.)
9. Henceforth all that is taught and believed by Holy Mother Church, while not indeed following from pure synthetic reason and remaining mysterious, will be found to be fully compatible with reason—the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Atoning death on the Cross, the Resurrection, Transubstantiation, the Holy Trinity, the Ascension into Heaven, etc.—and furthermore, that which is not conformable to reason or not taught and believed by the Church, such will be found to destroy the salvific efficacy of the Gospel; so that salvation, if real, must of necessity flow from the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and no other.
10. So that while God in justice is entitled to this form of worship from all his creatures without quid pro quo, he also mysteriously promises his love and fellowship to us in the spousal embrace of the Church, and to raise us to everlasting life and beatitude, to share in his own divine nature; which rewards are conferred upon those who persevere in the faith that Christ established, the same being the Holy Catholic Church, and who keep all his commandments.
Postscript: Happiness in the quotidian sense is not always possible, nor is it possible to regain this life once it is lost. But a share in the divine life of the Trinity, which is called “eternal” due to being the abode and presence of the everlasting Almight God, is possible to him who believes. Jesus, being the source of this life and giver of eternal life, through his body and blood in the great sacrament of the altar, shall raise the believer to life on the last day.
Dr Mabuse @ 62 – And the best part is “at the end of the day” you can truly say…
WE BUILT THAT!
and then SMILE
Now imagine taking a field of wheat, separating the wheat (to eat) from the chaff (for bio-gasoline) and getting residual liquid nutrients (phosphous etc) to fertilize the next crop?
How about that???
Ask your son if he likes that idea!
Oh, I could ask him, but he’d just look at me gravely with those big blue eyes and wonder when I’d stop pestering him with questions and let him get back to his cartoons on YouTube!
60. MachiasPrivateer
Trust me, I got the liquid part
” For whom the gods would destroy,they first make mad”. Go ask Alice…
Dr Mabuse
http://mp4.ha.ina.fr/divertissement/humour/video/CPC84050590/decrispons-la-berrigoulaine.fr.html
Berrigoulaine effectively is one of Desbroges’s words invention, incarnating all the provincial women, Berrigoulaine probably comes from Berrichonne which is the official word for a woman originating from Berry, a french province. It probably was easier for him to opt for Berry, for if he had to make it from Bretonne, which at least would have illustrated better his purpose, as we know fishermen’s women are waiting for their hubb to come home (like Penelope), anyways, with Bretonne, it would have been difficult to make a harmonic word, imagine Bretongoulaine !
Decrispons, means let’s deride, or let’s untertain,
Desbroges didn’t use dialectical words, but original words and normal french words, he just changed the meaning of them, or rather the usual metaphores that were deriving usual from them. He is a master of what we call “black humor”, and his irony is a art work, one of our masters in that matter.
Probably it’s difficult to grasp his sense for a foreigner, there a french tradition of such a humor, with the “Pilot magazine”, “fluide glacial”… caricaturists that don’t make in the political correctness, Gotlib is another famous one
-http://tinyurl.com/c7acph8
it’s always about “ethics”
43. no mo uro
boff, it rather is funny how you would like to see Rousseau and the french revolution at the origin of your “evil” fears !
Didn’t you know that we also producted Bastiat, Tocqueville…
And that Revolution was rather a movement to change the regime, whereas the French weren’t citizens but subjects !
The EU is no where referring to the french revolution, but rather to the fabian elitism, they don’t want us to get another social statut, just that a Elite chooses our fate
45. Storm_Rider
blah blah blah
your own politburo also made a good job on you !
72. Marie-Claude
Ah, mais vous êtes un ange! Thank you very much! I will have to think about what to do about the Berrigoulaine. And the English do have a strong tradition of “black humour”; not so much the Americans, though you can find some there too. I find these sketches very funny, but especially very daring. Not at all politically correct; some of them are really too strong for English TV at any time, but now they’d be impossible. ‘South Park’ goes somewhat in this direction, but they use a lot of swearing and vulgarity as well. Oddly enough, that makes their humour MORE acceptable. People would be much more shocked by Desproges, with his very dry wit – much more cutting and…severe, somehow. That may not translate well, but a lot of this is just funny: The Little Prince Meets the Venus de Milo and it’s a fiasco. You have to have some education to get a lot of this stuff, but it’s still hilarious.
http://www.ina.fr/divertissement/humour/video/CPC84051110/remettons-le-petit-prince-a-sa-place.fr.html
even sometimes for us we have to think twice before getting the sheme !
Desbroges minuts demolish the reverred symbols of our culture
@71 Thomas Wells,
Seems as though that job is being done, not by the gods, but by the chattering classes.
#55 & #60 MachiasPrivateer
Obviously if it is being expanded from a pilot plant, there is the judgment that it is economically feasible. A few questions, if I may. If it gets into proprietary information, of course I understand if you tell me to bugger off.
Is the fuel’s price point comparable with refined gasoline? With or without subsidy? You are talking about scaling, so some thought has obviously gone in that direction. Is it estimated that it can be scalable to say the size of a small refinery? Are there other distillates besides gasoline? Is there a specific kind of biowaste involved, or is it a more omniverous process? There was a retort process using animal waste from slaughterhouses/packing houses that showed some promise a few years ago, but it was put out of business by regulatory warfare. Or is this solely plant based?
I wish you luck, but realize that you are going to have the various government rent-seekers out after your scalp if it looks promising.
In re: #60: I think you overestimate the abilities of the average Ivy League Liberal Arts Major. They would either pay someone else to do it for them, or try to get it done with a government grant.
#61 trangbang68
While the white kids’ response was not ideal [I'm sure somebody in the school administration is going to blame the Muslim Somali -v- African American hostility on white racism ™] to be honest that is about all they can do. If they intervene in any way on either side, or try to break it up, both sides and the government will turn on them. The smart thing would be to depart the area so that they cannot be as easily made the scapegoat.
But I have to admit, watching two separate government-favored protected classes go at each other does pose an interesting conundrum. Both will try to play the victim card with the authorities. The fight will simmer until a decision is made, and when it is made; whoever is found to be less an official victim class than the other will be less than thrilled that the victim card did not work for them. I’m guessing that the Somali’s will be favored being immigrant, non-white, and Muslim. African Americans, being mostly native born and either Christian or agnostic, don’t have the same clout with the Democrats.
Subotai Bahadur
Rodrigo @2 If you are going to catalog liberal ignorance, please don’t overlook the seminal field of arithmetic.
How about InGSoc? Which I assume is done as humor.
Really fantastic info can be found on site.
@13 Wretchard
It is intentionally misspelled, as when “inception” is cross-bred with “sepsis”.
That’s what I thought the moment I saw it. Don’t let anyone mislead you to think that maybe you should dumb things down.
Subatoi #78,
Regarding Somalis, while we’re at ground zero for the border invasion here in southern Arizona, we have a huge contingent of Somalis and Sudanese . How they get here who knows. They have absolutely no desire to assimilate . It’s hard to go to a supermarket in the working class areas of Tucson and not see a hijab or two. At least the Mexicans are Christian and work hard. The Somalis strain the welfare system and live in enclaves. We also have a growing number of refugees from Bhutan who have third world skills and adaptability levels.
Maybe its a strategy of Butch Napolitano to turn a reliable red state blue by flooding it with third world flotsam and jetsom.
Ever build something, like a stone dam or a treehouse, that collapsed under use? I have. But, since I built the structure I was solely to blame for its failure.
But, have you ever hired someone else to build a house, a small bridge, or an abstract structure like a Trust, only to see it fail when put to use? Most of us have, but here we were able to seek recompense from accountable third agents.
Which puts America’s Progressives in a terrible bind. See, the Left has spent billions of Euro’s in American media markets laying track and paving webs of narrated “transits” for its political trams and trolleys to ride on. These through-ways are well known to the observant citizen: global warming (ie. climate change), Joe Biden’s “silent Racism,” Arabs have “root causes” for why they “hate” us, “Fracking Kills!,” to name just a few.
Well, the Left must be made aware that these suspended thorough-fares are crumbling just as they are rolling the full weight of their ideology’s freight-trains and lorries onto them.
Start with Carbon taxes. They cannot win popular approval without their foundational “Global Climate Change” underlaying them, and yet noone disputes that, after the last Copenhagen climate summit, the climate catastrophism of the nineties is a spent force.
Take another. “Racism,” as a slur slung to discredit political challengers, commands less and less credulity with every day that America’s “First Black President” serves. And, too, as we interbreed, the slur’s anachronistic under-tow will make its slingers appear aged and out of touch. Racism, in 2013, is a poor floor to erect the Progs’ next house on.
And a last: as the Arab world resolves its food supply and government problems with its various “Springs,” Americans will get a clearer and clearer view of just who these people who (others never fail to remind us) bear “root causes” against the “White Satan” are. We will learn soon enough whether Islam is a religion “of Peace,” or a simulacra of Stalinist communism’s Red Guards. Whichever it is, neither answer provides solid ground to the lefts’ cause celebre of enticing Americans to elect centralized welfarism and pacifism.
I won’t debunk them all because I believe they are refuting themselves for me as we speak. And those that aren’t will be rebuffed by the others’ fall.
The point of this missive is to point out to America’s Democrats the futility of paying media to generate short-lived, abstract – and often falsified, memetic rail-networks out of the mushy steel and rivets of “talking points,” these forged in a dumb rush to fit their agents’ dumbed-down, day-to-day, sound-bite media-mold.
The Left needs to know that the structures their paid media erect are slap-dash and frail, and that they have exhibit a shelf-life on par with that of a chicken in Thailand. And that, just like the frail concubine crumbles under the portly King’s affections, the Left’s shabby tresses and overpasses must collapse as Obama lowers the weight of his agenda down onto them.
It’d be better for the national Democratic Party to focus on empirical, grass-roots campaigning on real pocket-book issues. And they’ll save a lot of money if they’ll stop letting national and foreign media pick their contributors’ pockets!
#6 Winslow:
This may be the best explanation for the collapse of the American educational system I have ever read. Between public teacher unions and guaranteed fat student loans, the market process of weeding out inferior teachers, ideas and institutions has been completely short-circuited. Free market economics? Marxism? Classics? Grievance studies? Who cares what gets taught. Everyone in the system makes more and more money year after year and no one ever loses their job.
Re. #67 Matt:
May I attempt an abridged version of your post?
Anyone who does not support the assertion of the Pope that he is the infallible heir of St. Peter, and does not support any and all of his pronouncements in all respects, and does not support the hugely expensive and ostentatious rituals and costumes of the Roman Catholic Church, and does not excuse the brutality, prejudice, cruelty and criminality of its hierarchy, is eternally damned.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The Roman Catholic Church is evil beyond redemption. Jesus, if he came back, would give short shrift to the Vatican. Having an unrepentant Nazi as Pope (for the next couple of weeks, at least) is evidence enough.
86. Flethcer Christian
You do not know very much about the Catholic church or its teachings. If I was not polite I would say your notions about infallibity are as wrong as your mind is small. “Evil beyond redemption?”, you can start your mind expansion by counting the hospitals and orphanages.
Fletcher Christian,
You call Benedict an “unrepentant Nazi.” Exactly how do you propose to document that accusation?
Part of Benedict’s legacy is surely his three encyclicals. There is nothing evil, let alone irredeemably evil, about them. They are luminously Christocentric. Besides that, to call anything or anyone living unredeemable is to impugn the salvific power of Christ, which I really don’t think you intend to do.
No doubt there is much in the Catholic Church that needs redemption. This is also true of every human person and institution in history. But as a practicing Catholic who attends many churches and watches many Catholics of every rank on a regular basis, I can say with authority that there is a great deal of good done by the Catholic Church every day to which its enemies close their eyes.
Best,
Richard