As part of the ongoing celebrations of Prophecy Month at Outside in, we present a (short) three part series by Lars Seier Christensen of Saxo Bank on the historical prescience of Ayn Rand (one, two, three). While some distance from high theory, even the most Rand-averse should be able to take something interesting away from this series, whether by considering it as a significant ethnographic — and even religious — phenomenon, or by appraising it as a structured forecast. The foundations (laid in part one) certainly seem realistic enough: “… free capitalism has not really been experienced by many people alive today. […] The strange hybrid of western societies … allows only limited capitalism to create enough wealth to support a wider range of political and social ambitions, largely controlled by anti-capitalists.”

Christensen asks: does the world look increasingly like the politically saturated, anti-capitalist stagnatopia she envisaged? If the evaluation of Rand is restricted to these terms, her claim to attention seems assured.  The conclusion:

If we don’t succeed in changing the values and direction of at least the next generation, I fear the full prediction of Atlas Shrugged will become reality and while that may hold some promise for the distant future, it is not something that I think people of my age feel like going through if we can avoid it.

Given the Cathedral — which is to say, pedagogical (and propagandistic) anti-capitalism in power — Christensen’s hope for a generational shift in “values and direction” sounds like a prayer to a dead God. That leaves only Cassandra, and tragic truths.

(Via.)

Two centuries of US monetary stewardship charted @ ZH:

Click image to enlarge.

Red line is the CPI.
Blue line is the USD / Swiss Franc exchange rate.

What does Dark Enlightenment see when it scrutinizes our world?

This. (Exactly this.)

Two posts in succession at Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution acknowledge that libertarianism’s suicide-by-population-replacement is proceeding according to spontaneous disorder. Completely un-shockingly, mass low-IQ immigration from dysfunctional cultures that despise economic liberty has pushed libertarian ideas from marginality into complete irrelevance. So it goes.

Firstly, there‘s “Bad Demographic News for Libertarians” from Arnold Kling. It should probably be noted that this isn’t a story being told from an immigration-catastrophe angle, so anybody with advanced skills at mental segmentation can dismiss it as irrelevant. You need to check the final table of the source post, by Timothy Taylor, to connect the dots. Kling’s sober conclusion: “I am afraid that the number of households married to the state has soared.”

Secondly, Cowen cites this paper by Hal Pashler (a psychologist at UCSD), whose research “results showed a marked pattern of lower support for pro-liberty views among immigrants as compared to US-born residents. These differences were generally statistically significant and sizable, with a few scattered exceptions. With increasing proportions of the US population being foreign-born, low support for libertarian values by foreign-born residents means that the political prospects of libertarian values in the US are likely to diminish over time.”

I just wish there had been some sort of short-cut to self-abolition for these maniacs that hadn’t been routed through the destruction of America.

[Previous installments of Suicidal Libertarianism here, and here]

Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy writes:

Despite allowing the confirmation of judges for other courts, and one D.C. Circuit nominee, Republicans have continued to block Obama’s latest D.C. Circuit nominees. Now that Senate Republicans have … successfully filibustered five Obama nominees — the same number as Senate Democrats blocked with a filibuster (but half those for which cloture was initially defeated) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to change the rules. According to several news reports, Senator Reid is prepared to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” and force through President Obama’s nominees on a party-line vote, perhaps as early as today. What this involves is making a parliamentary ruling that only a majority vote is required to end debate on a judicial nomination and then sustaining that decision with a majority vote. Some Senate Republicans threatened to take such a step during the Bush Administration, but backed off when a group of Senators from both parties forged a temporary deal to end the stand-off and avert the rule change.

The ‘nuclear option’ represents the clear admission that the division of powers is not only dead but spectacularly cremated, with judicial appointees formally reduced to partisan functionaries. It would thus signal the explicit demolition of the US Constitution. Since a wheezing travesty is worse than a corpse, even strong supporters of the constitutional principle should have few problems with this specific instance of incendiary termination.

America’s crisis of governance is hurtling to a conclusion far sooner than most sober commentators had imagined. As with so many other institutional questions posed in the hysterical phase of Left Singularity, there’s only one realistic response: Let it burn.

ADDED: It’s about jobs.

ADDED: “Democrats nuked the ratchet” (roughly my argument, but on MDMA).

Neoreaction, at its core, is a critical analysis of the Cathedral. It should surprise nobody, therefore, to see it hurtled into public consciousness, as the sole cultural agency able to name the self-evident configuration of contemporary sovereignty.

As the Cathedral becomes a self-confident public performance, its only remotely-articulate analyst is drawn into prominence, in its wake. In this regard, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Even had the Obama administration consciously decided to select the Cathedral as a branding device, it could not have been epitomized any more perfectly. Sacralized progressivism, ivory tower ‘brahminism’, academic-media fusion as the exclusive source of recognizable authority, and the absolute identification of governance with public relations have reached a zenith that tilts into self-parody. Soft fascist self-transcending hyper-Calvinism has been lucidly distilled into blitz-promoted political iconography. Everyone with a television set now knows that the Cathedral is in power, and merely await the terminological confirmation of their perceptions. Enthusiasts and dissidents are seeing more-or-less the same thing, characterized in approximately the same words. The only serious matter of controversy is the quantity of spiritual devotion such a regime, faith, and symbolic order reasonably commands.

Politics-as-religious-experience has been seen in America before. Arguably, it is even typical. What has not been seen since William Jennings Bryan at the dawn of the progressive movement, and never at all before then, is democracy pitched to such rapturous extremities of soteriological expectation — and Bryan was stopped. By identifying himself deliberately with a promise of comprehensive socio-spiritual redemption, Obama has more fully exemplified hubris than any leader in the history of the United States. The appropriate frame of political explanation, therefore, is tragic.

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Salon has been bat-shit crazy for a long time, but right now it’s really going over the edge. It’s almost as if the people there are getting worried about something.

[Thanks to VXXC for pointers into the bin]

My personal pick for comedy gold goes to the article on right-wing brain washing (5th link), which includes this priceless classic: “He believed it when Rush Limbaugh told him that climate change is a hoax. He called Al Gore an ‘asshole’ even after watching the entire An Inconvenient Truth …” (Especially funny for me because I knew someone like that once — he thought Hitler was a dangerous demagogue, even after watching Triumph of the Will.)

Panic! They’re so brain-washed they don’t even believe our propaganda any more.

ADDED: Da Tech Guy EBT follow-up.

Peter Schiff (@ ZH):

Unlike her predecessors, Janet Yellen has never had a youthful dalliance with hawkish monetary ideas. Before taking charge of the Fed both Alan Greenspan, and to a lesser extent Ben Bernanke, had advocated for the benefits of a strong currency and low inflation and had warned of the dangers of overly accommodative policy and unnecessary stimulus. (Both largely abandoned these ideals once they took the reins of power, but their urge to stimulate may have been restrained by a vestigial bias against the excesses of Keynesianism). Janet Yellen, who has been on the liberal/dovish end of the monetary spectrum for her entire professional career, has no such baggage. As a result, we can expect her to never waver in her belief that stimulus is the answer to every economic question.

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David Stockman rests his analysis of recent economic history upon one basic presupposition, whose modesty is expressed by an intrinsic inclination to a negative form: Radical dishonesty cannot provide a foundation for enduring financial value. This assumption suffices to expose the otherwise scarcely comprehensible rottenness of American public affairs, to organize an integral understanding of the gathering calamity, and to marginalize his work as the over-excited howl of a lonely crank.

In any society where minimal standards of civil decency were still even tenuously remembered, his ideas would be simple common sense. In the bedlamite orgy we in fact inhabit, Stockman’s thoughts appear wildly counter-intuitive, rigidly structured by uninterpretable imperatives, and suffused by an improbable aura of doom. In fact Stockman is quite clear — implicitly — that under American political conditions sanity was strictly unobtainable. The coming calamity fulfills a (bi-partisan) democratic destiny — but that is to anticipate.

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Each encounter with the phrase “government shutdown” sparks a detonation of euphoria. It could get quite distracting.

More here (with useful chart, and some acute comments).

Rick Moran, trying to stir up some gloom, makes the whole situation even more delicious: “And the hell of it is, the hard right wing in the House that has been pushing this futile strategy are not going to be blamed for the cave-in. It will be those who are deemed insufficiently supportive of a cause that never had a chance to succeed who will probably suffer the consequences.”
— Federal cardiac arrest and the accelerated disintegration of the GOP? Bliss was it in that twilight …