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Western Institutions Becoming Unreliable by Design
Big thought, short article. The center cannot hold, and it’s no accident. From Obama nationalizing medicine and carmakers to banksters capriciously declining to service various transactions (guns, Russians, charities), the malaise of the twenty-first century, so far, is the decline in the reliability of western institutions. Rule of law, contracts, finance, education, marriage, alliances, freedom of God, Guns, and Gutenberg… all circling the bowl.
Numerous outfits such as Visa and MasterCard, as well as Mcdonald’s, have decided that Russians may no longer use their services or purchase their products. These private companies conducting foreign policy should be charged under the Logan Act, uh, I’ve heard it said and makes sense to me. I’m no expert. But they won’t be. They are just the corporate side of our fascist corpo-state flexing on Heaven, as it is on Earth.
There may be short-term effects like reducing Putin’s appetite for destruction, but the next thing that happens, as the Gods of the Copybook Headings inform us, is that there will be a reaction. The risk in dealing with Russia was always there. The risk in dealing with the West is new. Say goodbye to reserve currency status, vestigial hegemony over things like SWIFT, the internet, the UN, and any presumption of goodwill and fair dealing such as underpinned the decaying notion of the US as THE exceptional nation. From crime sprees and secure borders to wars and currency collapse, this stuff has been brewing for a while, and I suspect we are approaching — or are now upon — an inflection point or a phase change.
I am pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine, pro-USA USA USA, and I still think that we are screwing this up with heavy-handed, short-sighted destruction of little more than our own dwindling credibility. Our political class selected a faceless nothing as President to wear as a prophylactic while they did all of this to us. They will be fine. We will not, and “we” are a lot more than just Americans.
There’s a lot of ruin in a country (Smith), but there’s not an infinite amount, and it’s not just the country that is in imminent danger. It’s the whole of Western and Western-styled civilization. This will be a century of dictators to make the 20th century look like a prototype.
Published in General
Has this kind of ‘cancelling’ happened in the past? It feels as if the US is at war without actually declaring war.
Just a sense, but I feel it’s been simmering, and the bubbles turned into a boil. We have allowed ourselves to be talked out of a vigorous defense of small things, and now we lose large ones — because the small ones no longer support.
A people not allowed to defend their culture does not become the glorious new mankind — they become animals.
I’m with you on this
I agree. We got out of the habit of declaring war on 09 Dec 1941 (actually some time in 1942, but close enough).
I’ll dig up a link to what I think has happened on that specific question… stand by.
EDIT: Here it is: The Fault in Our Wars
https://ricochet.com/1076972/failing-to-learn-from-the-century-of-fake-wars/
Complex systems can absorb a lot of little failures, but each fault pushes the system closer to the edge. Once the system passes the inflection point where redundancy and fault tolerance are overwhelmed by progressive failure at successive missions, the system can only be repaired by taking it out of service.
We won’t have that option, so we’ll have to fix-forward. Many things will be lost.
Yup.
Those connected dots are starting to form an ugly picture, aren’t they?
Or it might be irreparable. America is a fluke. It is unnatural to have self-rule.
What really stuns me is that our so-called elites are making the institutions that give them elite status less reliable. They act as though the good times will go on forever. While I think they are evil or normally corrupt, they are often quite stupid.
Shhh … don’t tell anyone, but they were never that elite to begin with.
Yeah.
Like French Aristocrat in that.
Excellent observation . . .
I certainly hope not, yet fear that you may be correct.
Perhaps skilled cultural bullies.
I always feel like this belongs in one of these posts:
With itself.
It wants to be. The left is running the place and they think the world is social media where their whims are reality
Not really. Ask the South Vietnamese. It has taken a long time to accomplish the ruin, yet here we are. Cdr Salamander says:
There’s nothing actually new anywhere (ask the Sioux), but in the context I’m using, yep, it’s new. We will pay risk premiums that had effectively been waived for us across a wide range of things.
So many are so dumb about this.
@LukeGromen @DoombergT and @S_Mikhailovich are the cutting edge sources for supply chain analysis, the political economy, and the financial system.
This includes a transcript, for those that need that.
https://www.grant-williams.com/podcast/0028-luke-gromen/
These are on some podcast platforms.
I don’t pay super close attention to this guy, but I thought this was really good because he left out a lot of jargon, mostly.
The other thing that’s really good is interviews of Jeffrey Gundlach. His Yahoo finance interviews are old but I think the good parts aren’t dated. When you look at interviews of him just skip over the parts that are too technical. He’s really good at explaining debt and social problems.
Just fish through the latest ones. It will take you a whole minute.
https://twitter.com/S_Mikhailovich
YOU ARE A BAD PERSON IF YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT GLOBALIZATION,
for some reason.
Trade is good, but nobody thought this through for the collective interest of the West.
I “liked” this one for “don’t buy bulk.” Ha!
You might think the West would have learned something when Britain ran into a meat shortage last year(?) when the wind turbines stopped turning in the North Sea and the price of energy became so high their fertilizer plants had to shut down (one of several energy intensive industries) and they couldn’t move the animals to market because the truckers couldn’t afford the fuel. But, no. We’ll just keep “going green” until people are starving and there’s no one around to appreciate how “green” the planet is.
How’s that “information economy” working out for us now? Anyone think it might be a good idea for people to know how to make things? Not just send bits and bytes into the ether?
Hey! Some of us are good at that.
Germany was boycotted at various times in the 20th century.
That’s why it’s now called the House of Windsor, instead of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
Perhaps we should look back on the Cold War as merely an episode in the Great Game, wherein the Russian Empire, having expanded all the way to the ocean in the North and East, is now, after minor reverses, once again pushing South and West. And the free world, always disorganized, tries to stop it!
Yeah, me too. Luckily some of my older siblings live near the Amish and have learned how to make/grow things over the years.