Category Archive 'Gloom and Doom'

05 Jul 2009

Not the Best July 4th

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Roger Simon has gloomy comments on experiencing what used to be Independence Day in the new banana republic of Obamistan. The good news is that the paint on the left’s shoddy idol is already developing visible cracks.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my country so divided and depressed on the Fourth of July in my lifetime and – no matter what Bob Dylan dreamed up – I’m not young, forever or otherwise. That includes the Vietnam War period when both sides at least had some conviction and excitement for the future, even if wrong. Not so now. The current situation is grim.

Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan – if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all – has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama.

30 Dec 2008

Russian Professor Predicts Breakup of USA… in 2010!

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The Wall Street Journal reports on the theories of Igor Panarin, whose pessimistic view of the US economic crisis makes Russians very very happy. Dream on, Ivan.

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument — that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. — very seriously. Now he’s found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he’s been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. “It’s a record,” says Prof. Panarin. “But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.”

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it’s his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin’s views also fit neatly with the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories. ..

“There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. “One could rejoice in that process,” he adds, poker-faced. “But if we’re talking reasonably, it’s not the best scenario — for Russia.” Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control. …

He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls “The Californian Republic,” and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of “The Texas Republic,” a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an “Atlantic America” that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls “The Central North American Republic.” Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

“It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time.”

The poor chap is completely confused.

Obviously the Texas Republic, aka the Confederacy, would go right up to Virginia, and, if independent, would not be absorbed by Mexico, but would instead wind up annexing Mexico (and much of the Carribean).

The California Republic would merely be a narrow strip along the coast, buying water from the Republic of Montana which would own everything east of the Diablos, and would undoubtedly ultimately become a part of France, not China or Japan.

03 Oct 2008

How Did Things Get So Bad?

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Little by little, suggests one of Richard Fernandez‘s correspondents.

Something is clearly wrong. Some time ago I argued that it has long been a false article of faith that there exists an essentially unlimited margin of resources from which to indulge the Green Mania, say “sorry” to the world, provide military advantages to America’s enemies, admit untold numbers of illegal immigrants and to pay off scaremongers who require unreasonable levels of accountability. A reader sent me an email saying:

    A while back you had a post which said that while decreased economic activity was one way to deal with man-caused global warming, such a reduction in wealth also decreased our ability to respond to crises, including those associated with global warming.

    In engineering there is a concept called “design margin” in which extra strength, power, capacity, capability is built into things to account for wear and tear as well as unknowns about the environment.

    I think that the reason so many things seem to be “breaking” today is that over the last 20 years we have used up our “margin.” Not pumping oil from our own known reserves ate into that margin. Cutting the military back by almost 50% – and then deploying it more than before – cut into that margin. Insisting on environmental, legal, racial, considerations in everything ate into that margin. Political correctness ate into that margin.

    No one thought that a number of bad loans made to people who could not repay them would sink the economy – indeed it is not clear that it will even now – but eventually that “margin” in the financial system got eaten away. A single massive award in a lawsuit by a woman who spilled coffee in her lap ate into that margin in its own way, as did innumerable other lawsuits, silly or not.


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