Subsidized – John Malcolm

The Big Picture: Our Curiously Failing Civilization

By Jack Curtis | May 7, 2012 | American Thinker

Governments around the world are in various stages of financial failure, all seemingly trying to be Argentina. Curious, no? Look at debt and deficits; you see government spending issues; most of the few exceptions have other problems. Look then at global migration patterns showing people leaving poor places for places going broke, an unhappy trend line. Look anywhere; we can’t seem to govern ourselves worldwide, while people protesting are multiplying everywhere.

The U.S. and the EU can’t stop borrowing and spending, though no one can expect their stultified economies to bear the debt they’ve run up. Arab riots and civil wars reflect those countries’ corrupt dictators’ inability to sufficiently subsidize the citizens. Armed insurrections and massive demonstrations plague Russia, India, China, and Latin America; Africa has more than its share of failed and failing states. The Global Incident Map shows worldwide terrorism and both underlines instability and helps explain the migrations. Predictable civil order seems lost.

For “rich” Europe and North America, it’s the famous doom of all democracies: the citizens have learned to vote others’ wealth to themselves via a devil’s compact with demagogues. Once in place, such deals can’t be controlled (Who’s re-elected for shutting off the goodies?) until they outrun available resources and impoverish the economy. “Kick the can down the road” (meaning past the next election) is the U.S. mantra for postponing the end-game; in the EU, it’s quasi-austerity. It’s the same game in both places: Save the Banks. The people? Let them eat cake…

For everybody outside the rich world, it’s the same thing at one remove. That rich world has been such an engine of the world economy that most of the rest are, in varying degrees, dependents. When the rich customer cuts back, the dependent suffers. For those living hand-to-mouth in the first place, the suffering is worse; that puts those governments at more immediate risk. If we really look, much post-WWII stability has been a wire-walking façade.

Civilization: a state of social culture characterized by relative progress in the arts, science, and statecraft. Start with the Babylonians; the picture is later expanded by the multicultural Romans (equal opportunity conquerors) and expanded again by the widely differing but integrated Europeans, Indians, and Chinese. Perhaps it’s time we recognized an additional element in the mix that now defines civilization: technology.

Modern transport, communication, and information technology have linked the whole planet into a functional unity irrespective of language, culture, religion, or other differences. Whether very poor or wealthy, educated or illiterate, nearly everybody on earth is in reach of a network of information and services via a common, worldwide technology. The only obvious threats to that lie with paranoid governments insistent on controlling it and various Luddites intent on its destruction to preserve interests under threat.

Such miracles, like free lunches, carry costs. One cost of the world’s economic integration: a cold in the rich world quickly produces sneezes everywhere else, an unsung partner of things like just-in-time inventory control. Another cost is the greater awareness of events and conditions everywhere. The whole world knows at once of riots anywhere; if cell phones organize the rioters, the world knows that, too. And how a local dictator reacts will appear quickly on YouTube, with any blood in full color. Poorly informed people are becoming much more knowledgeable and sophisticated, seeing how others live, and developing greater expectations that their governments aren’t prepared to accommodate. As citizens’ expectations rise, governments facing them before a world audience find their control of events affected, more so when such strategic interests as oil are involved. An event anywhere can light a fire under a planetary pot; the technology that spreads civilization also expands risk.

When considering political collapse, we look for the signature social meltdown; a strong civilization may work through bad finances. Before they’re swept from history’s stage, civilizations rot from inside. What do we see?

Western civilization was the Judeo-Christian replacement for failed Classical Europe. Its centrality was the general acceptance of Christian morality, built on widespread religious belief and embedded in governments and law. In what’s being called a post-Christian era, that’s dissolving; Western citizens are struggling with each other over such basics as human rights, obligations, behavior, and the value of human life.

Read the full article here.

Europe’s Right in Disarray (spectator.org)
‘We Are Preparing For Massive Civil War’ Says DHS Informant (johnmalcolm.me)
Catholic Bishops Ask For Civil Disobedience (minx.cc)
DHS Preparing for massive Civil War/Civil Disruption. (diogenesfreeholder.wordpress.com)
Cameron’s ‘Big Society failing’ (itv.com)
UK Society ‘Post-Christian’? (frstephensmuts.wordpress.com)
An eye for an eye? (wnd.com)
In a Rich Man’s World: Reducing Government Spending (theconservativeidealist.com)
A Hidden Truth ? (audymm.wordpress.com)
Geert Wilders:NYC address 4/30/12 (iranaware.com)
New must-read book: Lessons From Fallen Civilizations (theblaze.com)
A Different Philosophy of Civil Disobedience (truth11.com)

Dems’ Perks, Privilege and Patrimony

By Patrick J. Buchanan | April 23, 2012 | WND

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Buchanan served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of nine books. His latest book is “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

Pat Buchanan cites latest skullduggery involving ‘the Party of Government’

With the number of Secret Service members and agents caught up in the partying-with-prostitutes scandal in Cartagena now at a dozen, and six already gone, how much wider and deeper does this go?

No one can take pleasure in seeing Secret Service agents – whose deserved reputation is that they will “take a bullet” for the president, his family and all whom they protect – shamed and disgraced.

Yet one would have to be naive to believe this was some isolated incident. No sooner was the first day’s work done in Cartagena than 20 hookers were trooping into the hotel rooms of SS agents, supervisors and members of the military advance team.

And Sen. Charles Grassley asks a relevant question.

As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?

Hostile intelligence services often use “honey traps” to ensnare U.S. diplomats and journalists. Thus this hookers-and-agents scandal is no laughing matter.

And it hit just as we learned that the General Services Administration, purchasing agent for the U.S. government, shelled out $823,000 on a party for 300 employees at a casino-spa in Las Vegas, where the hired entertainment included a mind reader, a clown and a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise.

Jeff Neeley, the GSA western regional commissioner, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify to Congress about what is now being investigated as criminal misconduct.

President Obama’s appointee to head GSA, Martha Johnson, has resigned.

Infinitely larger in terms of the tax dollars looted or lost is the Solyndra scandal, where a green technology company favored by the White House went belly up after receiving an endorsement visit from Obama and an astonishing half-billion dollars in federal loan guarantees.

These events all point to a culture of entitlement born of a belief that now that the Democratic Party, the Party of Government, is again running the government, we can “let the good times roll” once more.

And so we see President Obama for six months literally campaigning on the public dime. Not a day seems to pass that he is not helicoptering off the White House lawn on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One to fly to some swing state, while his staff finds an official cover event so the White House can charge most of the trip to taxpayers.

Has any other president spent so many days campaigning, half a year and a year before the traditional Labor Day start of the election season, or used tax dollars so flagrantly to buy re-election?

The sense of entitlement appears to extend to the Obama family.

Read the full article here.