My Center Is Giving Way, My Right Is Retreating. Situation Excellent, I Am Reading The ONT!

Hello my children! Welcome to your favorite Thursday night online hangout!

Lots of content tonight, to start, would you like to play a game?

Thursday Night Game

The meme says it all. What's something that you've done that you'll never do again? I decline to answer on the grounds that I might discriminate against myself.

SVB

I know this guy is a venture capitalist, so he's probably not unbiased, but what he's saying here jibes with a lot of things I've read from other sources.

A Thread On Silicon Valley Bank

Here's a thing he mentions: many banks are invested heavily in mortgage bonds, which have long been considered a solid investment. He details how Bidenomics and inflation have lead to a rise in interest rates and the effect that has, but there's another piece to the puzzle. The response to the pandemic absolutely killed center city real estate values. Workers were sent home to work, and many of them found they didn't need to be in the highrise offices of Flim And Flam, Inc. to do their jobs. More discovered that they didn't want to go back to work away from home. So why should corporations maintain large downtown office suites? How many of those mortgage bonds are backed by real estate that is only generating a fraction of the revenue that it did in 2019? I have a hunch things could get much worse before we're through.

What's That You Say? Things Could Get Much Worse?

Are We the Byzantines?

So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?
Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.
In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.
In fact, 250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied Christian City of Constantinople. 
Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.
The 14 th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city. 
But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.
The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they themselves no longer earned.
They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.
They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.
Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, they inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.
The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naïve. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.

Read the whole thing.

How Bad Could It Get?

Well, there's probably not anyone in a position to militarily invade the US like the Turks invaded Constantinople. But suppose we lose completely to the far left? Suppose we become subjected to the tyranny of the woke? It's happened before.

How we forgot about Pol Pot*

Well, as AlextheChick said, “Who's this we? You got a mouse in your pocket?” I haven't forgotten about Pol Pot, but the scope of the atrocities are mind-numbing.

The tree is in a quiet, sunstruck park, lost in a grimy exurb of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The tree is decorated with hundreds of bracelets and trinkets, with the occasional teddy bear and kiddies’ drink – poignantly Blyton-esque touches, perhaps.

But if you look close at the bark of this tree, you can see tell-tale abrasions: chops, scars, bruises. These blemishes mark the places where peasant soldiers would swing screaming children against the tree, smashing their skulls to pulp. This was done, quite deliberately, in front of their naked, wailing and soon-to-be-murdered mothers. Because this is the infamous Baby Bashing Tree, in the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields of Choeung Ek.

How? Why?

At the same time, a groupuscule of Paris-educated Cambodian ultra-Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, was rising to power. They started by radicalising and arming the peasantry, firing them with violent passion. Eventually they seized the capital (that terrible day witnessed by Roland Neveu). They then set about enforcing their crazed belief in an agrarian paradise, with everyone labouring like oxen in the rice-fields. A Maoist autarky. A place without money (they literally blew up the national bank, scattering now-worthless banknotes into the jacaranda trees). A place without religion, hierarchy, social class, intellectuals.

To do this, they killed all the middle classes. Everyone. If you had an education, you were killed. If you spoke a foreign language, you were killed. If you were a monk, a teacher, a lawyer, you were killed. People wearing spectacles were killed. Anyone who could dance was killed; ancient and exquisite Cambodian dance was a tradition handed on orally and practically – this meant that the nation of Cambodia forgot how to dance.

When the KR ran out of obvious bourgeoisie to kill, they killed each other. For any reason. People caught with snails in their pockets were killed. People were killed for having sex, or being happy, or laughing. In the end it is estimated the Khmer Rouge slaughtered about 2-3 million people in a population of 8 million. Cambodia is the nation that crucified itself.

Why? Why was this regime so mad? This is the question many have asked. After this latest visit, finally going to Choeung Ek, I think I perhaps have an answer. In his fine, troubling book – The Elimination – about his interviews with Duch, Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh quotes Duch saying that in his world ‘there is no place for the individual’, and ‘beauty is an obstacle’.

The Khmer Rouge did it by weaponizing the young. Teenagers were the vanguard of the revolution, the exact same cohort that Antifa is radicalizing in America. Unlike Cambodia, where peasants were targeted, here they are targeting the affluent in universities. It won't get that bad here. We are far more culturally and materially prepared to resist. But if you want to know what the end game is for the left, it's only been 50 years since they played it out, and created hell on Earth.

Speaking Of Hell

The Lords of the Underworld

This is a substack that's posted some interesting stuff lately. I'll get to another one in a minute, but this is a fascinating look at the hierarchies that have developed in the mega prisons in the US, using Dante's Inferno and the succession of Scottish Kings as an analogy. All of the power in the gangs flows down to individuals locked in supermax jails, absolutely untouchable.

And of course at the center of the ninth circle Lucifer himself resides submerged, The greatest betrayers in history, Judas Iscariot and Marcus Junius Brutus (Dante was a Caesar fanboy) being knawed in his twin mouths, and in this blackest pit, this coldest hell, in company almost as bad, the great traitor dwells.

Trapped, and yet not.

For he is also the Prince of Hell, the ruler all the devils and damned obey and fear. His voice whispers that which only drunkards hear, appearing in moonlight rays at midnight crossroads, and in shadows cast cross scholars studies.

He has fallen farther than any ever could, yet not so far he can’t snare others to tumble as well, and exact terror and tribute under that threat.

Aristocracy is the rule of the best. And naturally it is quite desirable to be such a ruler.

Cocytarchy is the rule of the worst. The rule of the damned. The rule of the Ninth Circle. And as such only the most defective, desperate and damned have the misfortune to rule in such a system. The rare relative innocent who completes such a descent and “rises” to high power in such a system being a Faustian tragedy of the darkest telling.

Dante’s geographical metaphor of the descent through its layers exactly following its structure of rule. Whereas heaven and the godly secular monarchs are always visualized as a pyramid hell is always visualized as a pit.

And then he closes the circle with a look at the US civil service. It's a...um...wild ride.

Here's the other thing he wrote that I read this week.

The Dream of the Motorcycle Warlords

A pretty in-depth look at how absolutely invaluable motorcycles are to insurgents in asymmetrical warfare, and a compelling case why organizations like the US Army will never field them in force. Not going to excerpt it, but worth reading if motorcycles or insurgency are your thing.

Damn, I'm gloomy tonight, aren't I?

I didn't mean to be. It just arose naturally from the material I bookmarked. What else have I got?

Jimmy Carter was an asshole

First of all, no shit. Second of all, not raising the atmosphere in here. Hmm. How about this?

A Smart Military Blog

Quite a story.

Oooh, This Is Neat

The "Moon-Eyed People" the Cherokee encountered when they first moved into Appalachia

Seems the Cherokee had to take the land from a native tribe already occupying the area. The...Welsh?

I have no trouble believing it. None. We know about Columbus, and Erikson and dozens of other explorers recorded by history. Mankind has been going down to the sea again since we discovered logs float. I have absolutely no doubt, none, that there were dozens or even hundreds of explorers who sailed to all seven continents and everywhere in between that were never recorded in our histories. In fact, it's probably more naive to believe that there weren't.

Naval News

The 5 Main Options For Australia’s AUKUS Nuclear Submarine Deal
Australia wants to join the nuclear sub club. Here's a look at their options. I saw someone tweet that they might enter into a joint venture with China. I find that highly unlikely, because China is the main threat Australia is trying to counter. Don't we have a bunch of decommissioned Los Angeles class subs sitting around awaiting final disposal? We should sell Australia a half dozen of those as a stop-gap measure.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by exercise:

*The only quibble with the entire article is at the end, when he tries to pretend that Pol Pot's atrocities were on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Hitler's. They weren't. Both were just slightly different flavors of Marxism.

posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM

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