Civilizational Jenga - Bit by bit, our ruling class is eliminating our societal safety margins

 Politics makes me sad sometimes.

Oh, not just because politicians are doing dumb things.  Not even because politicians are corrupt.  Politicians have always been dumb and corrupt, as any study of history will demonstrate. 

And it doesn’t matter if they hold office by election, inheritance, or swords distributed by strange women lying in ponds.  Stupidity and corruption are human characteristics, and politicians are very, very human.  (Though recent history is strange women lying in ponds distributing swords look better as the basis for a system of government . . . .)

Sometimes their stupidity and corruption make me angry, and sometimes they make me laugh.  But, given my low expectations, it takes a special kind of stupidity and corruption to actually make me sad.

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing.  One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse.  They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.

Never Give In, Never, Never, Never

Thus spoke Winston Churchill in 1941.

And Mark Steyn echoes that in this concluding paragraph in his elegy for Notre Dame.

And yet the next time in Paris I shall visit again those magnificent rose windows and feel something akin to the connection Keats did to the figures on that Greek urn. Civilization is always a paradox: deep roots and yet a thin veneer. To raze Notre Dame to the ground would have been a grand victory for barbarism. If not a "wake-up call", the sight that arises this Tuesday on the Île de la Cité is a kind of pre-Easter resurrection, or at least a reprieve.

We have a reprieve, let us make the best of it.

I Believe the Children Are Our Future, and the Future Must be Stopped

The left is calling for an end to all procreation of human beings, so it must be a day that ends in "Y" and an hour that ends in a digit.

Via Ace of Spades

The "respectable" class attacks the lunacy of Alex Jones' nightmare scenarios about the top 5% of the world population wanting to exterminate the bottom 95%, but when leftists actually endorse a similar plan (actually pushing for Voluntary Human Self-Extinction), the "respectable" class pretends this is a reputable idea worth serious consideration.

After the smash

Richard Fernandez

After several ominous rumbles outside the tower the individual creaks have finally merged into a continuous roar. Brexit, the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the crumbling of the Iran deal, America quitting UNESCO, Trump dismantling Obamacare, consular withdrawal from Cuba, the pullout from the Paris accord -- these have piled on so fast they've acquired the character of a single collective event. Now the fall of Hollywood has followed like the inevitable comedic boulder right on Wile E. Coyote's head at the bottom of the gulch. Are we still in Kansas anymore?

It's becoming increasingly hard to believe the world can return to the status quo ante, even if Trump is impeached. It's too far gone. A whole landscape has vanished seemingly overnight going from the post-Cold War to the post-post Cold War; from a post-Modernist culture to post-everything in the blink of an eye. Even the political scene is unrecognizable. The Republican party is in shambles; the Democrats in disarray....

There will be danger -- perhaps immense perils -- associated with this paradigm shift. Yet the danger may have even been greater had the population not risked adapting. For one thing it might have been trapped in the Tower now fallen to dust. What is manifest is the gods have fallen, leaving many institutions rudderless. The Left spent decades replacing traditional myths and social sanctions with their own structures only to see these fall to ruin.

Political shock and awe.

Wise world written in 1966 by Frank Laurence Lucas

“One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat, that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it.”

I don't think civilization is ever really secure and I greatly fear that it's retreating.

In Defense of White Dudes

Let me crank up the wattage on that spotlight: The peoples of the world want to live where White Christian Dudes (WCD) hold sway. Here in our own increasingly frazzled USA, the anti-WCD, PC elite want us to forget that White Christian Dudes founded our country. Look at the Declaration of Independence; you won't see too, too many Mohammeds or Moishes among the signatories--...The Founding Fathers, all of them British and the epitome of White Christian Dudes, drew their moral and philosophical outlook, their concern for human rights and limited government, not from Asian or African philosophers, but from British, French, and Greek philosophers--all White Dudes, most of them Christian. Were our Founding Dudes perfect? Nope. Did they tolerate slavery, albeit reluctantly, when they should not have? Yes. White Christian Dudes can act out of step with their own principles. They are human. Yes, some White Christian Dudes from Europe ended up collaborating with African and Muslim Dudes to traffic in slaves. White Christian Dudes, however, do their own policing. It was overwhelmingly White Christian Dudes, we should note, who laid down their lives to end slavery. In more recent times, it was overwhelmingly White Christian Dudes who tore down European Nazism, liberated the concentration camps, and, by the way, also defeated racist Japanese Shinto militarism, freeing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, Malays, Koreans, and others from a brutal existence. It also was largely White Dudes, most of them Christian and Republican, who dismantled the Democrats' Jim Crow regime in the American South. White Christian Dudes gave America a new commitment to freedom and equal justice.

Around the world we see that just about everybody wants to live with the White Christian Dudes. We see this drive to live with White Christian Dudes every day along our southern border; Australians see it on their coasts and in the changing make up of their cities; Britons in the unceasing wave of migrants besieging their island. Canada's beautiful Vancouver in even more beautiful British Columbia has become a largely Asian city. Everywhere, it seems, the civilization built by White Christian Dudes is the magnet.

Richard Fernandez: Fighting the Next Fight

Fighting Entropy

Most of us have watched movies where a mysterious threat attacks an unsuspecting community. They may be vampires ravaging an Alaskan town or a blob-like being swallowing a town. Typically the defenders, at first confident, are rapidly dismayed when they find that police firearms have little effect against the creatures. With that realization the characters go from complacent to desperate in a few minutes of movie time until the hunted survivors are forced by desperation to try an outlandish theory from a crackpot who has a peculiar insight into the nature of the monsters.