… even just the solar system. ‘Awesome’ is a word destroyed by casual over-use, but I’m groping for an alternative right now, and not finding it. This has to be one of the best uses of a website out there — meaning: really out there.
(Via.)
When socialism puts a ratchet into your churn, this is what happens.
(Via.)
The first XS ‘Progress’ post was also a chart — and it dove-tails with this one uncannily.
Pete Dushenski on the reactionary case for Bitcoin, the lead up:
Gold balanced the forces of the world. As such, no matter where you went, gold was transferable to the local currency. Whether you were in France or Florence, your gold was good. In fact, if you weren’t in your own backyard, using your own community’s debt instruments, gold was basically the only thing that was accepted. So whether you wanted to buy a copy of the Bible, fight a foreign war, or build a palace, you needed gold.
Then came The Revolution: replacing the Monarch, the Church, and generally anything good by instituting “reforms” and encouraging “progress” in the name of “the people.” At first, the sheer number of supporters of constitutional democracy was sufficient to establish this social experiment. Eventually, however, sheer numbers would prove insufficient. Why? Because this “new” system failed on every account to educate its supporters on the essential matters of politics and economics, leaving them intellectually high and dry and prone to the exact golden calves that the Church and Monarch were protecting them from. As a result, after experiencing a bit of lifestyle creep, an newfound and ever-growing sense of entitlement began to take root. And oh did those roots grow deep.
The roots grew so deep that the electorate began knocking on democracy’s door, demanding more and more. Where once they were thankful for their new liberties and freedoms, they soon found themselves adrift at sea, lost and without cause. To unyoke this infinite expansion of wants from the finite, gold-bound resources of the state, the Revolutionaries had no choice but to take hold of the money supply of their nations, wresting it from the grasp of sound money and all the goodness and balance it had fostered. This was the only way to keep up the ruse and placate the electorate. So they instituted Central Banking at a scale never before seen. …
(The whole thing is glorious, including — in the original — footnotes.)
If this analysis is right, Romney would be sure to lose a 2016 presidential bid. “Voters will compromise on a lot of issues on Election Day but they won’t ever vote for you if they don’t like you or worse yet, think you don’t like them.” That makes him the perfect GOP candidate — delegitimating the opposition, without seizing the poisoned chalice of democratic leadership (i.e. increasingly vacuous symbolic authority). If the electorate grudgingly concede, after renewing his humiliation, he was right, but we voted against him anyway because he didn’t kiss my baby, it’s NRx gravy.
This has to be in some way related:
Romney 2016: Reform conservative. Romney 2020: Buchananite. Romney 2024: Rothbardian. Romney 2028: Neo-reactionary.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 13, 2015
Half a sentence this time, from Charles Hugh-Smith. It’s rare for me to agree with anything quite this much:
… deflation is the natural result of a competitive economy experiencing productivity gains.
(He continues: “isn’t this the ideal environment for innovation, enterprise and consumers? Yes, it is.”)
According to the Outside in definition, deflation is the basic signature of capitalism. It’s the politically-undirected (i.e. spontaneous) distribution of positive externalities from sound economic order. Inflation — or mere deflation-suppression — is the unambiguous signal that something very different is going on.
ADDED: Related.
The inherent destiny of democracy is fascism. That’s the principal reason to despise it, rather than any cause for celebration.
Does anyone seriously doubt the West is going to die ugly?
Nothing to see here (move right along):
What happened to this? http://t.co/QAmOyvo4tJ … I was still reading it yesterday and now it can't be found. Not on internet archive.
— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) January 11, 2015
(Open thread + linkiness.) Still in catch-up mode here at XS, so raggedness still reigns.
NRx under thoughtful investigation at the Catalyst Club. Re-visiting the Trichotomy. Christianity and degeneration. Notes on religion. Gnonological meditations (1, 2). Bryce’s new blog. The original mitrailleuse. “Yes, they are offering pig blood to a statue of Mao.” A new NRx aggregrator (and blog).
Jihad in Paris dominates the news-cycle. Some NRx-ish commentary from the Legionnaire, NIO, Laurel, Milton, Yuray, and Steves. In any case, this isn’t working. Liberal anguish (with an unexpectedly hard edge). Additional diverse commentary from Peter Frost, Gregory Hood, Sean Gabb, Ed West, Juan Cole, Slavoj Žižek. The Houellebecq connection. John Robb on the 4GW urban combat space (from 2007), with a Dampier update. Meanwhile, in Nigeria. Religious rifting in the CAR and Pakistan.
Consciousness sweeps. The Deep City. Golden ages. Blogs as the new letters (but why not pamphlets?). Richard Fernandez ponders the Great Filter. Templex thoughts from Charlton. Geno-politics.
SpaceX on the crunchy frontier.
Reforming Austrian economics.
An HBD research prospectus.
Sailer on The Imitation Game:
Amusingly, the movie portrays estrogen as suddenly making the tech genius unable to program a computer. As two defenders of the conventional wisdom that Turing was hounded to kill himself put it, “And if you take the testosterone away, then the brain will become muddled.” But this bit of unintentional crimethink has evaded most reviewers.