Charles Hugh Smith – In response to my recent post What If There Are No Analogs for 2024?, an astute reader nominated the Roman Empire as a fitting analog. Longtime readers know I’ve often discussed the complex history of Western Rome’s decay and collapse, for example, Why Rome Collapsed: Lessons For the Present (August 11, 2023).
Dozens of other posts on the topic stretch back to 2009: Complacency and The Will To Radical Reform (February 12, 2009)
What conclusions can we draw from recent research and the voluminous work done by previous generations of historians? Our first conclusion is simply to state the obvious: it’s complicated. There was no one cause of Western Rome’s decay and collapse. A multitude of factors generated feedback loops and responses over hundreds of years, some more successful than others. Continue reading
J.B. Shurk – It is difficult for any American who loves this country to watch its political, economic, and military “leaders” destroy it. Part of the political theater propping up the illusion of electoral choice in this Kabuki dance that the State-controlled press calls “democracy” is the lie that officeholders from different parties are at each other’s throats.
J.B. Shurk – The House has a new speaker, and now attention returns to whether a government “shutdown” can be averted before November 17. If only the American people could place the federal government in lockdown just as the unaccountable bureaucracy did to them during COVID’s oppressive hysteria. (So much for the people being in charge, eh?)
Joe Hardy – I’m old. And having orbited the sun a nice, even seventy times, I like to think I’ve seen it all: the ups, the downs, the sweet, the sour, the noble and the patently absurd.
David Randall – I share with many ex-liberals a conversion story that is one of increasing rancor against liberalism. Since I hit my adulthood in the 1990s, the occasions are those of the Bush I, Clinton, and early Bush II era — the unresisted fatwa against Salman Rushdie, monolithic Democratic support for Slick Willie during his impeachment trial, and, above all, 9/11, and the Democratic unwillingness even to say that we had Muslim enemies. The last is somewhat ironic, since I am now a considerably more isolationist conservative, but I did begin as a fairly neocon one. The usual ironies of life.