Baruch and Lynn and I will be doing a podcast soon, probably airing in February. The subject suggested by Baruch below is endlessly fascinating to me as a science-fiction writer.
I liked your last podcast.
I agree that the only rational hope is a cataclysm.
But it feels like something is coming.
A guy whose work I like, Martin Armstrong, is a finance analyst. He did the most time of anyone I am aware of for contempt of court, something like seven years until the Supreme Court got ahold of the case. He claims to have built a computer program which ingested all kinds of historical data, going back thousands of years, exchange rates etc., which identifies cycles and forecasts the future. Financial cycles, solar cycles, cycles of war, cycles of turmoil, etc. Says we're heading into an interesting couple of decades. And I feel like that's right.
This institutionalized mediocrity can't go on. The middle has been eaten out of the tree, and it's been loaded down with too much junk nailed to the bark. A storm will put things back in their rightful place.
Sincerely,
Baruch
I read Martin Armstrong's book issued to his clients, one of whom is a friend. You know, that while the Feds were torturing him in prison, he was housed with the guys that tried to take down the tower with the van bomb—who were the only decent dudes in there, as far as being courteous—and that he said that they were drawing pictures on the walls of planes crashing into the towers...on the prison walls. And the Feds didn't know it was coming? Reminds me of the link you just sent on how known terrorists are given free range in Europe.
I have two views of how the institutionalized mediocrity, which seems to be endemic to all civilizations, fails. One is the slow, rocky road of decline, with government agents and agencies, immigrant warlords and corporations taking to farming human live stock directly, outside of the massive mechanisms of state control, similar to the way in which the Church, invading Germanic chieftains and the lingering elite scrambled for the pieces of crumbling Rome over a couple centuries and cobbled together feudal Christendom. I can well see our larger population and pace of technological change, speeding our version of decline up.
The other version I'll frame below.
-J
Nov 30, 2019, 1:22 PM (19 hours ago)
to Lynn, me
Also this: look at these numbers.
7:35 AM (1 hour ago)
to Lynn, me
And look at this:
So-100 million people at least to keep technological civilization going, assuming no war in the core areas to destroy efficiency. That's people with an IQ of 100 or more, which, assuming widespread genetic engineering does not kick off soon, means another 100 million below that, if they're North European-descended. If they're Northeast Asians, less below that, but still a sizeable number. Keep in mind that those people are going to need others to change their oil and paint their house.
And keep in mind the core areas are about to be disrupted (migrants, etc.) even without a big catastrophe like Yellowstone blowing or a Carrington event. If that happens, instead of 100 million, the lower bound will be higher.
So, the elites can't drop population down to a million people, or even a hundred million. Probably a billion is a lower bound. But you can't just get down to a billion and hold there, because to get there without mass epidemics, starvation and civil wars, you have to get people to stop having kids voluntarily. But to do this, you have to destroy their connection to the source of life, and once you've done that, they're not going to have 2.1 kids, they're going to have 0 or 1 kids, and in the latter case, that kid will grow up hating them.
You can say, ok, but with robots and artificial intelligence, we won't need people to keep civilization going. I've played with a fair amount of robots, everything from industrial stuff to desktop toys, and has a decent grasp on AI (a little bit of hands on, plus worked integrating AI into products, and have some friends who are working in the field at a high level.) The best stuff today is much dumber than a dumb three year old child. For instance, if you show a three year old child a cat, he will be able to accurately identify cats of all colors, in all positions, from all angles, in all kinds of lighting conditions, male, female, etc. To train an AI to recognize a cat, you need to train it with millions of pictures of cats in all variations, and then it can show a reasonable rate of success. Picking up a dropped tool is a trivial problem for a child, and a very difficult one for a robot. And so on. In other words, robots work great in very limited and artificial envelopes, and can't replace people, and aren't getting closer to it.
So you need a lot of decently intelligent and hardworking people to keep this whole thing going. And the thing itself is causing less of them to be born, plus alienating many of the ones that are. What happens when things go south?
Sincerely,
Baruch
I can attest to the toxicity of single-child households. I have two sons, who I have never yelled at, never struck, always supported and advised and financially carried until they were men. I physically protected the elder and the younger from thugs. They were 13-years apart, essentially raised as single children. I let them make all their own life choices and did not get in the way of their embracing government indoctrination and induction into the current world religion.
The result is, that they dislike and disapproval me.
My grandchildren harbor a deep and palpable fear of me.
I do not see this dynamic in families with multiple children, even families where the father was much less engaged than I was, or was even abusive.
If there is an agenda among the ultra-elite it is not keeping this hole thing running on its current massive and progressive scale. The addled minds of the standard elite are no more in tune to the ramifications of their social order than middle class pale Americans are to the ramifications of the hip-hop music they crave so perversely.
I think, that if the ultra-elite are consciously riding civilization into the ground like a trooper flogging a flagging horse, that the technology suite that the ultra-elite shall hang their crown on will be bio-tech, which will include them accessing specimens from among the thrall population for breeding, engineering racially specific diseases to take out less desirable races, and gestational indoctrination. This has been the subject of most of my science-fiction. I came to the conclusion that such an agenda would likely result in enough unforeseen and unintended consequences to crash the human population to the point of extinction. The minds of our unseen rulers are corrupted by power and their perverse desires are most-likely unattainable. I suspect this to be one of the abortion mechanisms intrinsic to the Civilized construct and which accounts for many abrupt declines. I would never accuse our puppet-masters of pure logic or of higher morality.
On the one hand, I see the hollowing of the tree of life, as you so elegantly put it, as applied mediocrity resulting in a slow collapse from which something ugly and fascinating might emerge, and on the other, a diabolical desire for the ultimate aristocracy, for an Atlantis-like ideal by which the tiny elite who now control over 90% of wealth and ideas will control the same portion of ecology and biology as directly managed assets—not a squalorous African nation forwarding its pittance to the bank, but a primeval nature preserve, complete with small numbers of primitive tribesmen as ignorant as those who Burton and Speke encountered, to be enjoyed by their living gods.
Just as landfills have been covered by parks and golf-courses, human landfills such as New York and London, abominations that they are, will likewise give way to ice, water, earth, wind, pavement-cracking trees, mud and sand. It sounds horrible to the kid who thought that space colonization would be the natural progression and population pressure release for his kind. But imagine being that gardener, the mind that directs 100 million savage Africans to depopulate a continent of its slothful and dull unworthies and then smite them with a plague and begin with your own Garden of Eden, as God himself, or as a member of an Olympian elite of gods. I do not think that such a thing would ever work as intended. But when I see info-tech fiends seeking to drive thought to extinction, I can easily understand that the will among the most powerful and therefore worst men will not stop short of attempted godhood.
They are yet emotive and will regard their hand-picked million to be equal to your feral billion, even if their thirst for unbounded power permits them to consider the course of things as you have. A man like you might work for them—but would he risk being cast out for blaspheming?
I suspect this has happened before, and that the stories of the Flood from around the world might represent the cataclysmic overturning of such an elite order.
This ancient tradition is discussed in my book:
Our current predicament in:
The Bio-tech path to depopulation in:
A post-cataclysmic future in:
King David had a similar problem with his sons, for similar reasons. Perhaps the Native Americans didn't need to discipline their sons because Nature did it for them, far more harshly. David was whetted on the bear and the lion before he was anointed king, but his sons were raised in luxury.
As a Millennial from a three child family, I can say that much of my disaffection stems from alienation via atomization through childhood mobility that terminated in the land of Midwestern pseudo-Yankees, whom I would rather genocide than live among. It is difficult to grow up in a father's house with no path towards honor and brotherhood. These are intangible goods a father should provide, that matter more than daily bread. Lot lost much family for raising them in Sodom, in abundance of corn and oil.
Elite whites will not prevail, not because they are bad, but because they are bad at Evolution. Evolution doesn't care; she just whistles while her scythe swings. Snicker snack; now the pendulum swingeth back.
Lovely rhyme!
This is where we are headed. Shackled to a chair, being interrogated by
a Zuckbot:
twitter.com/AmendmentAll/status/1201302196748521473
I can imagine the conversation:
Zuckbot: You badmouth your overlords?
JL: I drunk too much and posted again about Robert Howard
Zuckbot: And what was your intention?
JL: To awaken the dying soul of a dead nation.
Zuckbot: You make joke?
JL: Do I look like a stand-up comic to you?
Zuckbot: Apologize!
JL: (smirks, spits) "What forbids us to tell the truth, laughingly?"
I love the Zuckbot dialog—thanks.