AND ON THIS HAPPY NOTE…SOME THINGS TO REALLY WORRY ABOUT
In imitation of the recent trend toward Top 10 lists (or Top 5, or Top 7, etc.) that enumerate arguments in slightly glorified bullet-point format, I offer the following. Consistent with tweeting, texting, e-mailing and PowerPointing, listing enables us to convey a lot (quantitatively) without worrying too much about niceties like paragraphs, thought flow, story-arcs, or literacy. So here come The Top Several Real Threats to America (the term America is used here as synonymous with the United States as a political entity, created by the Constitution of 1787. Not as a term for the stretch of geography between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with a pretend southern border and a big Blue State to the north. The threats that America faces would include asteroids, supervolcanoes, and the coming ice age.
1.Browning. Read an article regarding the modern Balkan nation of Macedonia and you will likely encounter soon within it an admonition along the lines of: “This is not to be confused with the ancient kingdom of the same name, in the same location, that was home to Alexander the Great”. In other words, an entirely different and unconnected people and culture occupied the same lot a long time ago and the current residents have inherited their name. No other similarity exists.
So what will "America" mean in 20 years? What does it mean now? The term “browning” has been used, by no means always pejoratively, to describe the changing demographics of America. While the specifics of “browning” have changed some since its original coinage, it still refers to the fact that White People of European ancestry are not, or soon will-be not, the majority ethnic group here.
Specifically, “Latinos”, a term for people who are, oddly enough, not European, like the Latins were, are now the largest minority— having surpassed “African-Americans” (another puzzling misnomer) in numbers a few years ago. And, of course, they keep coming by legions (as Latins would, one supposes) to mow, prune, pick, and commit crime. To be sure they are not the only immigrants. The Middle East, Asia, and West Africa— both the part actually in Africa and the part in the Caribbean-- are great sources of urban population replacement, too.
What browning really means, though, is not simply an expression of aesthetic racism. When considering the threat level, substitute the term Non-White People with People Not Products of Western Civilization. There is a chasm of a difference. The former just means your forfathers didn’t come from Europe. That latter means you are not plugged into the American Idea. America, after all, is founded upon a cultural ideal, the product of an idea. Those principles are not identical to, but also not separable from what used to be called Western Civilization, particularly (to really ruffle some feathers) the Protestant take on that civilization. Unless the immigrants coming here now assimilate, and do it quickly, America the idea is dead. The walls of Rome will just move north, temporarily. Latin America will not develop or be improved a bit, and Latin Americans in America will not benefit for long. The US will become, de facto, a Latin American country, replete with all the corruption, poverty, and other dysfunctionalism that culture has so amply demonstrated in the last half millennium. Writing everything in espanol, as well as English, does not help solve the assimilation problem, obviously It is dangerously simpleminded to say this is a non-issue and compare it to waves of Eastern and Mediterranean Europeans that flooded through Ellis Island. They came to adopt, adapt, and acculturate. Current immigrants, many of whom are illegally here to begin with, don’t. The plan is to milk the US’s first-world economy, while maintaining a Third World culture. It just doesn’t work that way. This has happened before. As rounded dates, AD 476 and AD 2008 may have a lot in common. When the barbarians overran Rome, the result wasn’t a bunch more new Romans, who just happened to have red hair and freckles, and pushed Latin As A Second Language programs and bilingual schools. It was the Dark Ages. They weren’t called Vandals for nothing.
2. China. It’s really hard to make sense of why we continue to do everything in our power to hasten the end of our reign as the Sole Superpower and elevate one of the world’s least democratic, least humane, and most –non-Western countries—let alone the world’s biggest country-- to be our effective and unbeatable archnemisis. It’s like Frodo and Company can’t deliver the Ring to Sauron fast enough. Heaven forfend that we do anything to even slow the rise of Mordor. We really just hope they’ll keep lending us money.
This also why Iran going nuclear is a secondary problem, and doesn’t make the Top Several catastrophes list. We already won’t do much about Iran because we don’t have the will and we’re kind of afraid of China. If it wasn’t for China, we’d only have Russia to worry about. And, while we don’t seem anxious to clip their wings either, the Russians have a lot of their own problems to occupy them (like a hell of lot of non-Russians in their country, see above.) In a few years, we won’t be able to do anything about the next Iran because we can’t and China could actually, militarily, stop us. Unless that alien technology we’re reverse engineering at Area 51 is practically magical we are going to have our position in WorldCo severely downgraded. It will be the most dramatic demotion of a country since Great Britain became Britain. And we die intestate, unlike the Brits who had us, to pick up the mantle of civilization and all that that means. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the Communist Chinese character that makes them appealing as a major force in the world. The whole planet will become bad neighborhoods or prisons. And we seem to be fine with that.
3. The Debt. As cliché as it is to say it, it is true. The national debt is so out of control that it arguably makes everything else irrelevant. And it is not just theoretical or ethereal anymore. It is really, concretely affecting our everyday lives, dragging the economy farther and farther into an abyss, destroying the value of money and leaving more and more people with no jobs and all the other nothing that comes with that. No institutions are going to be able to continue as they are, all infrastructure— not just physical bridges and damns, but everything-- is deteriorating and there is simply is no money to do anything about it. The current “leading” generation has already seen its standard of living decline significantly relative to the previous one. Education is no longer any guarantee of success, or even employment. And this is all without inflation. When that hits, and it inevitably will, then all bets are off. For a variety of reasons, we may be looking at something far worse than 1932, and without the ability to even give an illusion of recovery. At least this might solve the illegal immigration problem. This is certainly hastening the Dark Ages' arrival, with or without a change in complexion.
4. Fuel. Yes, the enviro-nazis are right that we must end our dependence on oil. The fact that we’ve become accustomed to $3 a gallon gasoline as simply a fact of commerce that we must accept demonstrates steep decline in our national pride and spirit of self-preservation. They are wrong, however, to think this can be done in the foreseeable future. There simply is nothing else except coal, which they also don’t like, and nuclear, which they double don’t like. No amount of windmills, solar panels, or people on bicycles is going to change that. So the best we can do is to end our dependence on foreign oil. That would solve all kinds of problem, including having to give a rat’s arse what happens in the Middle East, and transferring what little wealth we really have to places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. This means we must drill, drill, and drill some more. Including off-shore and in Alaska where caribous might have to eat around the oil rigs. And it means coal. Lots of it. And nuclear. And, importantly and obviously, we cannot cripple ourselves with some suicidal carbon-credits scheme that will not benefit the “planet” at all, and will help move problem Number 2 much farther into the alarm zone. The fact that that even needs to be said is a horrifying comment on where exactly we are in the country’s timeline of decent.
5.The Government. Ronald Reagan was being even more profound than smart people realized at the time when he noted that government is the problem, not the solution, to our must fundamental troubles. There is permeating every elite, especially the political and the media, a denial that rises to the level of psychopathology as to the degree to which government policies have created the dystopic state of affairs we are in. Crisis after crisis, be it health care, the debt, immigration, what have you; has been created and/or worsened by the very regulatory meddling that the political Left, at least, consistently turns to for salvation. At some point you'd think that “anyone” would realize that more water in the gas tank is not the remedy for knocking in the engine. But so far, it is not happening. If anything, the election of the Obi One and the Congress from Cambridge has been a huge leap backward. To an era where Big Government is arisen and even more irrational, irresponsible, megalomaniacal and kleptomaniacal than ever. Unless we revamp our entire notion of what politics is supposed to be, we can’t address any of the other issues and WE ARE DONE. Do I hear the bells of secessionism ringing again? Dang, that keeps happening.
In imitation of the recent trend toward Top 10 lists (or Top 5, or Top 7, etc.) that enumerate arguments in slightly glorified bullet-point format, I offer the following. Consistent with tweeting, texting, e-mailing and PowerPointing, listing enables us to convey a lot (quantitatively) without worrying too much about niceties like paragraphs, thought flow, story-arcs, or literacy. So here come The Top Several Real Threats to America (the term America is used here as synonymous with the United States as a political entity, created by the Constitution of 1787. Not as a term for the stretch of geography between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with a pretend southern border and a big Blue State to the north. The threats that America faces would include asteroids, supervolcanoes, and the coming ice age.
1.Browning. Read an article regarding the modern Balkan nation of Macedonia and you will likely encounter soon within it an admonition along the lines of: “This is not to be confused with the ancient kingdom of the same name, in the same location, that was home to Alexander the Great”. In other words, an entirely different and unconnected people and culture occupied the same lot a long time ago and the current residents have inherited their name. No other similarity exists.
So what will "America" mean in 20 years? What does it mean now? The term “browning” has been used, by no means always pejoratively, to describe the changing demographics of America. While the specifics of “browning” have changed some since its original coinage, it still refers to the fact that White People of European ancestry are not, or soon will-be not, the majority ethnic group here.
Specifically, “Latinos”, a term for people who are, oddly enough, not European, like the Latins were, are now the largest minority— having surpassed “African-Americans” (another puzzling misnomer) in numbers a few years ago. And, of course, they keep coming by legions (as Latins would, one supposes) to mow, prune, pick, and commit crime. To be sure they are not the only immigrants. The Middle East, Asia, and West Africa— both the part actually in Africa and the part in the Caribbean-- are great sources of urban population replacement, too.
What browning really means, though, is not simply an expression of aesthetic racism. When considering the threat level, substitute the term Non-White People with People Not Products of Western Civilization. There is a chasm of a difference. The former just means your forfathers didn’t come from Europe. That latter means you are not plugged into the American Idea. America, after all, is founded upon a cultural ideal, the product of an idea. Those principles are not identical to, but also not separable from what used to be called Western Civilization, particularly (to really ruffle some feathers) the Protestant take on that civilization. Unless the immigrants coming here now assimilate, and do it quickly, America the idea is dead. The walls of Rome will just move north, temporarily. Latin America will not develop or be improved a bit, and Latin Americans in America will not benefit for long. The US will become, de facto, a Latin American country, replete with all the corruption, poverty, and other dysfunctionalism that culture has so amply demonstrated in the last half millennium. Writing everything in espanol, as well as English, does not help solve the assimilation problem, obviously It is dangerously simpleminded to say this is a non-issue and compare it to waves of Eastern and Mediterranean Europeans that flooded through Ellis Island. They came to adopt, adapt, and acculturate. Current immigrants, many of whom are illegally here to begin with, don’t. The plan is to milk the US’s first-world economy, while maintaining a Third World culture. It just doesn’t work that way. This has happened before. As rounded dates, AD 476 and AD 2008 may have a lot in common. When the barbarians overran Rome, the result wasn’t a bunch more new Romans, who just happened to have red hair and freckles, and pushed Latin As A Second Language programs and bilingual schools. It was the Dark Ages. They weren’t called Vandals for nothing.
2. China. It’s really hard to make sense of why we continue to do everything in our power to hasten the end of our reign as the Sole Superpower and elevate one of the world’s least democratic, least humane, and most –non-Western countries—let alone the world’s biggest country-- to be our effective and unbeatable archnemisis. It’s like Frodo and Company can’t deliver the Ring to Sauron fast enough. Heaven forfend that we do anything to even slow the rise of Mordor. We really just hope they’ll keep lending us money.
This also why Iran going nuclear is a secondary problem, and doesn’t make the Top Several catastrophes list. We already won’t do much about Iran because we don’t have the will and we’re kind of afraid of China. If it wasn’t for China, we’d only have Russia to worry about. And, while we don’t seem anxious to clip their wings either, the Russians have a lot of their own problems to occupy them (like a hell of lot of non-Russians in their country, see above.) In a few years, we won’t be able to do anything about the next Iran because we can’t and China could actually, militarily, stop us. Unless that alien technology we’re reverse engineering at Area 51 is practically magical we are going to have our position in WorldCo severely downgraded. It will be the most dramatic demotion of a country since Great Britain became Britain. And we die intestate, unlike the Brits who had us, to pick up the mantle of civilization and all that that means. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the Communist Chinese character that makes them appealing as a major force in the world. The whole planet will become bad neighborhoods or prisons. And we seem to be fine with that.
3. The Debt. As cliché as it is to say it, it is true. The national debt is so out of control that it arguably makes everything else irrelevant. And it is not just theoretical or ethereal anymore. It is really, concretely affecting our everyday lives, dragging the economy farther and farther into an abyss, destroying the value of money and leaving more and more people with no jobs and all the other nothing that comes with that. No institutions are going to be able to continue as they are, all infrastructure— not just physical bridges and damns, but everything-- is deteriorating and there is simply is no money to do anything about it. The current “leading” generation has already seen its standard of living decline significantly relative to the previous one. Education is no longer any guarantee of success, or even employment. And this is all without inflation. When that hits, and it inevitably will, then all bets are off. For a variety of reasons, we may be looking at something far worse than 1932, and without the ability to even give an illusion of recovery. At least this might solve the illegal immigration problem. This is certainly hastening the Dark Ages' arrival, with or without a change in complexion.
4. Fuel. Yes, the enviro-nazis are right that we must end our dependence on oil. The fact that we’ve become accustomed to $3 a gallon gasoline as simply a fact of commerce that we must accept demonstrates steep decline in our national pride and spirit of self-preservation. They are wrong, however, to think this can be done in the foreseeable future. There simply is nothing else except coal, which they also don’t like, and nuclear, which they double don’t like. No amount of windmills, solar panels, or people on bicycles is going to change that. So the best we can do is to end our dependence on foreign oil. That would solve all kinds of problem, including having to give a rat’s arse what happens in the Middle East, and transferring what little wealth we really have to places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. This means we must drill, drill, and drill some more. Including off-shore and in Alaska where caribous might have to eat around the oil rigs. And it means coal. Lots of it. And nuclear. And, importantly and obviously, we cannot cripple ourselves with some suicidal carbon-credits scheme that will not benefit the “planet” at all, and will help move problem Number 2 much farther into the alarm zone. The fact that that even needs to be said is a horrifying comment on where exactly we are in the country’s timeline of decent.
5.The Government. Ronald Reagan was being even more profound than smart people realized at the time when he noted that government is the problem, not the solution, to our must fundamental troubles. There is permeating every elite, especially the political and the media, a denial that rises to the level of psychopathology as to the degree to which government policies have created the dystopic state of affairs we are in. Crisis after crisis, be it health care, the debt, immigration, what have you; has been created and/or worsened by the very regulatory meddling that the political Left, at least, consistently turns to for salvation. At some point you'd think that “anyone” would realize that more water in the gas tank is not the remedy for knocking in the engine. But so far, it is not happening. If anything, the election of the Obi One and the Congress from Cambridge has been a huge leap backward. To an era where Big Government is arisen and even more irrational, irresponsible, megalomaniacal and kleptomaniacal than ever. Unless we revamp our entire notion of what politics is supposed to be, we can’t address any of the other issues and WE ARE DONE. Do I hear the bells of secessionism ringing again? Dang, that keeps happening.
posted by the wrightist at 2:12 PM
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