… this post by Borepatch is pretty good. It points out the one good thing about Newt.

Well one of two things. Obviously the best thing about Newt Gingrich is the fact that he’s named Newt Fucking Gingrich.

I alluded to Newt Gingrich’s moonbase plans earlier. I am not totally convinced of the shark’s claims to have colonized space – I admit I have my doubts – but even absent a selachimorphic space empire the Newt’s plan is problematic.

First and foremost, in the speech Newt hisownself used the term grandiose to describe the adventure. Not a good sign, really. A second relaunch of the JFK? A monolithic governmental exercise that pursues a politically chosen goal at all costs, consuming and destroying all other options as it progresses; a program that might (only if successful) result in something kind of amazing but which will leave a sterile policy wasteland where even cockroaches and lobbyists have trouble surviving? More, please.

We are just now recovering from the original sin of Apollo. NASA’s finally shed itself of the ridiculous abomination that was the space shuttle, though I imagine most of the tens of thousands of people who worked on that program are still on the payroll. The 21st century re-imagining of the Apollo program – known collectively or in its parts as Orion, Constellation, Ares, EDS (sounds like a disease you’d be embarrassed to have), Altair and for all I know, “Oh shit we better think of something or we’re fucked” – is on the ropes as well. NASA, through massive effort, the dedication of thousands of brilliant engineers and managers, and the application of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars has managed to achieve the impossible: get to the moon six times forty years ago, and make space travel seem as exciting as a local zoning planning board meeting.

There are now several enterprises looking to change that, mostly funded by tech-industry billionaires. Of these, Space-X has the most hardware in actual use. They’ve successfully flown a rocket large enough to put a capsule in orbit. That capsule is about this close to being man-rated, and could carry as many as six people into orbit. They’ve got plans for a heavy lift vehicle that builds off the success of existing rockets and there’s no reason to imagine it wouldn’t work. Elon Musk could be on the moon a decade before Newt, and for far less money. Significantly, far less of our money, since Senor Elon will be spending his own money to do it. And even if Space-X fails because a rocket falls on Musk’s head, there are others – Paul Allen working with Scaled Composites, Bezos with Blue Origin, and more besides.

Please, please, please don’t start another government space program. Because if you do, it will kill a private space industry that is just about off the ground. I want to go into space, and I trust Elon Musk more than I do Newt Gingrich. I said that so I can say this:

I think the most interesting thing about Newt’s speech is that he thought that the moon could become the 51st state. A “Northwest Ordinance for Space” has been ridiculed by some, but I think that making fun of one of the great achievements of the Confederacy is mean-hearted and unwise. The Northwest Ordinance was probably one of the most successful government enterprises ever. By setting things up such that the colonists pushing back the frontier would come into the union on the same terms as the original colonies, now states – that more than anything assured the success of the American experiment.

If we are to avoid a repeat of the whole belters vs. flatlanders wars that we read about in science fiction, we’d need a Northwest Ordinance. Having a framework for communities in space to join on equal terms with their compatriots back home on Earth would be a good thing. And if people heading out knew that they would, in time, be on an equal political footing with those who stayed behind and that the rule of law would extend into space with them, we’d do more for space settlement than spending any amount of actual tax dollar money could ever do.

I don’t know how significant this is, but in my recent travels through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohi0 – and then back – over the Christmas holiday I saw “Ron Paul 2012″ etched, inked or carved next to five urinals in mens’ restrooms. Given the number of stops I made thanks to the infinitesimal bladders of my children, that was a Ron Paul Pisser ratio of about one out of two.

I saw no exhortations for Mitt Romney, Obama, Gingrich or any other announced candidate.

I hear that there’s some debt shenanigans going on.  If I weren’t so appallingly cynical, I’d be shocked at the apparent inability of politicians and professional economists and Wall Street pimps to understand what’s happening.  I mean, it’s pretty simple, as Reddit demonstrated the other day.

I see only a few possibilities:

• mendaciousness – the individuals in question really do know what’s happening, and are lying to us for their own gain.
• cluelessness – they really are that stupid, and don’t see that they’re spending us right off the cliff.
• unjustified arrogance – along the lines of what Oxford Sovietologist Ronald Hingely once said, noting that basic misapprehensions about the nature of the Soviet Union were rare among really serious scholars, and also among ordinary people.  Those who didn’t get it were those of fair intelligence, the “educated elite.”  Hingely commented: “For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character,  sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed.”

It seems to me that each of the three groups most responsible for our current predicament fits one of those descriptions.  I will allow that there is some possibility of overlap…

I’d say that reading the economic news is like watching a train derailing, except that you can’t exactly watch a train derailing from the inside, so its not a perfect analogy.  I have this terrible sense that inexorable doom is coming toward us.  You look at the similarities between the first great depression and our current situation (banking crisis, pause, soveriegn debt crisis…  who will be the Creditanstalt for our times?).  You look at the results of debasing the currency in Imperial Rome, in pre-Industrial England, in dozens of countries from Weimar Germany to Zombabwe in the last century and wonder how we can be different, except in scale. You look at the disingenuousness of the economic statistics – Q1 revised down to .4% growth? G is a component of GDP. Take that out, subtract that from next to zero, and what do you have? And let’s not mention the unemployment numbers.

In this environment, people like Ron Paul are made to look like the crazed radical for pointing out the obvious. Well, maybe the food, gold, ammo approach is less unreasonable and paranoid than it once was.

The Dominion of Canada wonders what will happen if the US economy really tanks.

I haven’t listened to this yet, but I will tonight. Apparently the BBC has unearthed a coup plot in the US from the 1930s.

A new book claims that the Roswell aliens were a Soviet Hoax. It’s discussed in this piece at NPR, down in the “highlights” section. This is the interesting part:

On flying discs and conspiracy theories

“The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2 intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had allegedly created [a] flying disc. … American intelligence agents fanned out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact, they had made this flying disc.

“The idea behind it remains, why? Why were they looking for a flying disc? And conspiracy theorists have had their hands on this declassified file for over a decade now, and they say it proves that this flying disc came from outer space. If you read the documents, the takeaway that I found fascinating was that at the end of it, the Army admits finding the Horten brothers, and that the Horten brothers admitted their contact with the Russians and that’s where the file ends. Everything after that is classified.”

On why Area 51 is actually classified, according to a source

“The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. … There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that’s almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft.

“The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there’s a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, ‘Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.’ And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there’s no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg.”

On the Soviet human experiments her source told her about

“The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman’s bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn’t compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. …

“What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin.”

On why the Soviets would have undertaken such a hoax

“The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack.”

Sweet

Untimely Meditations has a this, on the idea that things will only get worse. A basic rundown of the obvious threats, and a pleasant read.

Fjordman posts at Gates of Vienna on preparing for Ragnarok. Well, if there’s one thing I’m ready for, it’s Ragnarok. Dinner tonight, not so much – but I’ve got Ragnarok covered.

According to the French writer Guillaume Faye, for the first time humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis that is likely to begin in the decade before 2020 — a crisis provoked by degradation of the ecosystems and geopolitical contests for scarce resources like agricultural land, oil, and above all water; by the fragility of an international economic order based on speculation and the massive indebtedness of democratic states; by the return of epidemics; by the rise of terrorism and nuclear proliferation; by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s world offensive; and by the dramatic aging of European populations, whose below replacement-level birth rates are confronted with rapidly growing masses of young people in the dysfunctional countries of the global South, coupled with mass migrations to the North.

This convergence of catastrophes will mark the transition from one era to another. The USA will most likely cease to be the leading world power by mid-century, perhaps cease to exist at all in its present form. The global center of power will then move back to Eurasia, where it has almost always been previously. The strongest power will probably be China or what Faye calls “Euro-Siberia” — a federated alliance between the peoples of Europe plus Russia. He doesn’t think this is literally the end of the world, merely the end of the world as we know it. Something new may arise from these events, since Europe is a civilization of metamorphosis.

Faye predicts two possibilities for European civilization over the coming century: regeneration based on a resurgence of ancestral values, or else disappearance. Europe, especially the western half of the Continent, is currently being invaded. This is coupled with an incredible masochism on the part of Europeans themselves. Only a terrifying crisis can awaken them, and war is the most merciless of selective forces; a people that abandons its will to power inevitably perishes. A “mental AIDS,” a virus of nihilism, has severely weakened their natural defenses. Consequently, Europeans have succumbed to self-extinction. The primary symptom of this is “xenophilia,” a systematic preference for the Other over the Self.

The current advanced state of decadence owes much to the secularization of Christian charity and its modern egalitarian offshoot, human rights. In the widest possible sense it was the same civilizational genius that gave the world the concepts of universal gravitation and universal human rights. After the unprecedented successes of the Scientific Revolution, post-Enlightenment Europeans fell so much in love with the power of their own ideas that they ultimately came to define their very existence as one big idea, hence the concept of an “idea nation” or “proposition nation” was born. The leaders of this were the Americans and the French, whose Revolutions in the late 1700s came to view their countries as universal republics. This ideal was not and could not be implemented at that time, but two centuries later, coupled with the rise of global communications, it won out over ethnic identification.

Faye believes that Europe now faces a danger unparalleled in its history and refuses to see it. It has been colonized by peoples from the South. This non-European invasion began in the 1960s and was largely self-engendered, by politicians contaminated with Marxist ideas, by an employer class greedy for cheap labor, and by Utopian humanitarian ideals or misplaced post-colonial guilt. Illegal immigrants/foreign colonizers are very rarely repatriated, but receive lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by anti-white forces in control of the state:

A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a subterranean war that will be far more destructive than ‘terrorism.’ The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation. The state’s utopian plan for ‘republican integration’ has nevertheless failed because it assumed peaceful coexistence between foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t ethnically homogeneous… European societies today are devolving into an unmanageable ethnic chaos.

I have to try to resist these thoughts, because I know I am fascinated by disaster scenarios. But as I look around, there are indications of all sorts of potential nastiness – economic and otherwise.

More for my own reference, but here’s a link to that post from a while back where a guy commented on Mangan’s about the real US government ideology, following a Moldbuggian sort of line. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth it.

Also, just read everything on Zero Hedge to get your mind in the right place for the coming econopocalypse. Just recently, they’ve had a few good ones: on attacking the Fed, on game over, on spinning out of control. Plus, there’s more! I really should stop reading ZH, it makes me sad.

[wik]: I almost forgot a couple more. From Simon Rierdon – Solar apocalypse, Detroit apocalypse, and Economic apocalypse. Looking at pictures of what Detroit has become is depressing.

In old cartoons, you’d often see a character beset by a moral dilemma have a little angel and demon appear, one over each shoulder to argue the merits of the case. For me, thinking about politics, I have three.

I have a little Aretae, a little Foseti, and a little Bruce Charlton.  To me, at least, these three each represent an aspect of truth – the sort of truth that is not to be found in the mainstream.  But they don’t exactly agree with each other.

• I agree with Aretae almost entirely, with the simple but large caveat that I don’t think his thinking applies as well to people who are not very bright libertarians.  I would like to live in a society composed of people like me, Foseti, Bruce and Aretae.  We could have a minarchist system with free trade and cookies and skittles.  But, sadly, the world is inhabited by people with different levels of abilities, and different time horizons, and different propensities for violence.
• I agree with Foseti almost entirely as well.  The reactionary model of politics we both got from Moldbug is powerful.  It explains much.  But as we’ve seen with Moldbug’s attempts, it is not exactly prescriptive.  Coming up with a new model reactionary system would either fail immediately, or soon fall prey to the same flaws that are dooming our current system.  I mean really, a new reactionary system?  How can that really work?
• I agree with Bruce slightly less, but the fault is mine and not his.  He is a convert to Orthodoxy, as am I, but I feel pretty sure that his conversion was rather more thorough than mine.  But the questions he asks are important ones, and ones for which the perspectives represented by Little Aretae and Little Foseti on my shoulders have no answer – if they even consider them at all.  Faith, tradition – you could call it culture, but that’s not what it really is – it’s what is missing.

I keep thinking that there’s some synthesis of all this.  But maybe it’s nothing more complicated than economics should approach as much as possible what Aretae recommends, politics aim more toward Foseti, and that in the end it won’t really work unless the people believe in something, together.

I was surprised to see this at Breitbart’s Big Government site – in tone it’s more what I would expect from Mangan, Devin or Foseti.

Witness, Andrew Mellon:

Universally, democracy is being exalted.

Everywhere one turns, one hears of its virtues: how democracy ensures human rights, fosters prosperity and shepherds in modernity.

Yet democracy represents nothing more than the tyranny of the majority. In other words, contrary to the ideals of western liberalism, democracy does not ensure that the smallest minority, the individual is protected.
In the vast majority of circumstances, people free to choose their government get the government they desire. In Russia, the people have chosen again and again to elect KGB criminals. In Gaza, the people have chosen to elect either Hamas or Fatah, terrorist parties in perpetual war. Democracy does not a free society ensure. Even in America, citizens have not only allowed but encouraged the growth of a rapacious bureaucratic tyranny.

Wait, that last sentence was me. Mellon continues:

Democracy is merely a system of election – it is not inherently good as its results are entirely predicated on the voters themselves. Freedom-loving peoples will generally establish a political system to protect freedom. Those who prefer strict rule will devise a political order that squelches it.

This has obvious implications. But Mellon is speaking of Egypt.

I would argue that any Islamic society will refuse to establish a system grounded in property rights, individual liberty and free market principles because it is completely anathema to Islamic culture, history and religious tenets.

So why are doing the same despite our clear lack of Sharia? Finally, he wanders close to the point:

In our own nation which shifted from a Republic to a democracy (against the wishes of the Founders mind you), we have seen poor results. Even with a populace composed ostensibly of freedom-loving peoples, we have developed a social welfare state with crony capitalism, plunderous public unions, major slices of the private sector either outright or de facto nationalized and widespread wealth redistribution. When combined with political correctness, a chief component of cultural Marxism, our society in many respects has been rendered impotent.

Now all he needs to do is embrace the dark side and understand that Democracy is the cause of these tragic developments.  It didn’t just allow them to happen, it didn’t create an environment where the malevolent could make them happen – it created our world.

A couple fun what if links:

• Hawaiian Libertarian points to an article about how life might be different if the Fed had never existed. I think the the most important item is that the present-day dollar might not be worth 4.5 cents compared to the 1913 dollar. We could get back there, though, if we adopted the Buckethead currency plan.
• Radley Balko aims us in the direction of a list of Eight Crazy Constitutional Scenarios. My favorites:
  

  5. Two House Members Could Stage a Coup

  We’ve all seen those late-night C-Span telecasts of the near-empty House chamber where one member is in the chair and the other is on the floor speaking to an empty chamber. Suppose word came during this “session” of the House that the president and vice president had been simultaneously killed. What’s to stop the House member on the floor from moving that he (or theh guy in the chair) be elected speaker of the House and the member in the chair saying, “Without objection, it is so ordered.” I’m not saying this would hold up in court, but technically the new “speaker” would then become president by virtue of presidential succession law. It’s a legal House session unless there’s another member present who suggests the absence of a quorum.

  6. Congress Could Allow the President to be Recalled

  There’s no way short of impeachment to remove a sitting president, right? Wrong. The 25th amendment creates a huge loophole. In order to provide for cases of presidential disability, the amendment allows a majority of the cabinet to declare the president disabled, subject to a congressional override if the president insists he’s fine. But the amendment also permits “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to issue a disability finding. The amendment’s sponsors no doubt intended this to mean a panel of physicians. But they didn’t say that. So what’s to stop Congress from declaring the American public as a whole that “other body” and empowering a majority of them to decide, at any time, the president is unable to discharge his duties? Voila, a backdoor recall provision! (Of course, this would just elevate the vice president to acting president, but still.)

  I think we’ll see something along these lines in our lifetime.

My home town

Actually, things aren’t so bad. Except for some soreness in the back from giving the Dad a hand with moving, things are verging on decent.

As Foseti mentioned, we had a little reactionary gabfest on Friday. Along with his observations, I’d add that reactionaries seem to be rather tall. It’s unusual that I meet people taller than me, and Foseti is just fricken’ huge. Wiry, though. Odd that sometimes when you meet for the first time a person you’ve never seen, they are almost exactly the way you pictured them. Except for the extra 6-8 inches, Foseti is just how I thought he’d look.

It is refreshing to talk to someone who not only doesn’t freak out when I say what I think (my friend Christian is very kind, and doesn’t freak out) but actually agrees, or even is more hardcore on the point than I am. The reactionary is decidedly outside the mainstream. And the monkeybrains part of your being just shrieks inside you when you are disagreeing with everyone. Seeing that there is someone who actually exists – not just words on the screen – and agrees with you is very calming.

Devin’s Hackertopia idea has got me thinking.

I think the biggest problem would be critical mass. If you don’t get a sufficiency of smart, interesting people to move there; smart, interesting people won’t move there. How do you bootstrap the process? Rather than planning a large community – start with the village and grow up from there.

If one could purchase a 160 acre plot in the adjacent to the middle of nowhere, it wouldn’t cost that much. For example, this place:

Is located in Monroe County, WV, near I-64 and I-81, near the Virginia border. It costs $350k. Not an unreasonable sum, all things considered. A moderate amount of effort could produce a roughed out town square, a home, and the first building of the Hackiversity. Build a nice stone structure, fully wired, and set it up as a hacker space, and you might be able to get it started. Over time, the founders could sell plots out of the original 160 acres – reserving some for the university and some for the public square – to finance public works and to purchase nearby land for expansion.

New residents could buy into the municipal corporation, or not; buy land, or rent. Those who bought shares would have a hand in the governance as shareholders, and would share in the profits, if any.

If the university made a name for itself, the city could grow pretty rapidly.