Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Second, I know you don’t watch TV but I am a very visual person. Even though the idea of watching congressional hearings on CSPAN for 3 1/2 hours seemed dauntingly mind-numbing, I went ahead and started to watch the infamous hearings of 5 December about the abrupt and disturbing increase in Antisemitism particularly on campuses since the butchery of 7 October and the subsequent war began. This hearing has spurred a dozen lengthy commentaries in the paper and memes online. It was like a car wreck. I just couldn’t look away. 5-minute segments of the representatives of the best and brightest of the Clerisy fumbling their way through sharp questioning which, to my mind, highlighted the inevitable splintering of victimhood culture. The softball questions from the Democrats tried to focus how they would “solve the problem” that has arisen but, of course, there is no plan because that would mean smacking down one of the sacred “marginalized” groups for their misbehaviour, as they effectively call for genocide of the Jewish people. Whereas the Republicans had their sharpened knives out and gleefully sliced away at the overt hypocrisy that, as I said many years ago, results from the fundamental incompatibility of most of the agendas contained within the social justice movement, but without having any real plan of their own to sort anything out. It became clear that these Presidents of these gold-standard universities were not chosen primarily for their abilities, but because they can tick off boxes on the social justice criteria for “fairness”.
What was also clear is the degree to which the U.S. education system has become a pale and useless shadow of it’s former glory, as they have gradually embraced an increasingly extreme ideology that has been tearing away at Western culture and values since the 1970s based on the unconstrained vision (see “Conflict of Visions” by Thomas Sowell) that claims that all problems are solvable and all people can live in love and harmony… And here we have absolute empirical evidence that just ain’t so, Joe.
Finally, I reflected on just how exactly this demonstrates the ongoing crumbling of the American Empire and the twilight of Western Culture. This is what it looks like when an empire is so powerful that it cannot come under direct assault from external forces, but decays intellectually and morally from within. In your books and writings, you have, along with quite a few others, observed that the Clerisy who run things become corrupt, devoid of new ideas, and psychologically live in a vibrant fantasy of times past, in this case, the vital time during the 19th Century when we – the West – effectively abolished slavery and they are now desperately attempt to portray themselves as bold, as valiant, and as heroic fighters akin to Hancock’s II Corps at Gettysburg in their “struggle” against “racism”. I use quotes here, because in order to maintain this self-image, they must continually redefine the term out of all meaning.
I think that future historians of Meriga may well reference the events of this past quarter as major turning points in the collapse of the world we currently enjoy.

https://www.ecosophia.net/december-2023 ... ent-106223

[aeden]

https://citizenwatchreport.com/markets- ... into-1q24/

[Guest]

https://citizenwatchreport.com/markets- ... into-1q24/

Double top and kablaam in mid Jan

Optimism Abounds on Wall Street This New Year
A strong economy upended gloomy forecasts for 2023

https://www.wsj.com/finance/optimism-ab ... r-a0ec5cc0

Or maybe not...

[Higgenbotham]

How a viral siege is making some people sick for weeks, even months

It’s like ‘a big bomb of viruses went off,’ says a pediatrician treating kids with flu, RSV, strep and covid

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Updated December 15, 2022 at 1:39 p.m. EST|Published December 15, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST


It started in mid-September with Vance, 5, who came down with RSV and wheezed so badly that his skin was pulling in and out of his ribs with every breath. His little brother Banks, then 11 months old, caught it too. Things were just starting to get better in October, when the boys caught a nasty cold that resulted in more sleepless nights. In November, the flu hit, bringing fevers of 102 degrees.

“It feels like a never-ending cycle,” said their mom, Michelle Huber of Louisville. “We are beyond exhausted.”

The 2022 winter season has been one of prolonged misery for many American families, full of sniffles, sore throats, coughs and trips to the emergency room as bugs kept at bay during the pandemic have been unleashed by the resumption of our old lives.

It’s like “a big bomb of viruses went off,” said Christina Lane, who runs a pediatric practice in New Albany, Ind., and has seen a crush of several hundred children with respiratory symptoms in the past three months.

Parainfluenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), rhinovirus, adenovirus, influenza A, influenza B, respiratory enterovirus and human metapneumovirus. And then, there’s the rebounding coronavirus: The seven-day average of new daily cases is above 66,000, with hospitalizations above 40,000, the highest those numbers have been since mid-September and late August, respectively.

As Year 4 of the coronavirus pandemic approaches, Lane and other doctors agree the overlapping viral surges and how they are playing out are unusual and concerning: Patients with back-to-back respiratory illnesses. Simultaneous infection with three or more viruses, or with bacterial infections, such as Strep A. Otherwise healthy people suffering for weeks, rather than days, with simple colds.

Some U.S. hospitals and European health authorities also report out-of-season increases in scarlet fever and Group A streptococcus infections. As of Thursday, two children in the Denver area and 16 in the United Kingdom were confirmed to have died after infection with a rare, invasive form of the typically mild and common bacterial, rather than viral, infection.

But there is no consensus about whether what’s happening is a once-in-many-years phenomenon — perhaps some of it due to the hypervigilance of Americans who have become accustomed to scrutinizing every ache and pain for signs of infection with a potentially deadly virus — a change in how viruses behave that may be with us for a while, or something else entirely.

The U.S. is experiencing an unusually high uptick in both flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections, while covid cases continue to linger. Combined, the spread of these three viruses has prompted the CDC to issue advisories.

As of last week, nearly all 50 states were seeing a high or very high level of respiratory illness, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that rates are likely to continue to increase. U.S. officials estimate that so far this season, there have been at least 13 million cases of flu, 120,000 hospitalizations and 7,300 deaths, including of 21 children.

Doctors say the chaos has resulted in frazzled parents begging for antibiotics (even when they are told it won’t help their children recover from viruses), shortages of basic essential medications such as fever reducers and albuterol to open airways, and a barrage of questions about the interaction of different viruses in our bodies.

How many bouts of illness in a short period is “normal?” Is there something about having covid-19 that hampers people’s ability to resist other viruses? Or is it normal for things to be so abnormal given our unusual situation, as we head into another covid winter?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... flu-surge/

"Is there something about having covid-19 that hampers people’s ability to resist other viruses?"

I've wondered the same thing.

This article has been making the rounds lately:

Every COVID Infection Increases Your Risk of Long COVID, Study Warns

27 December 2023
By TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS

However we also know the virus changes our immune systems. It preys on our memory T cells which are critical in forming long term immunity. SARS-Cov-2 forces its way into these cells and causes them to activate the cell's self-destruction programming and essentially implode.

Whether we experience a mild or severe COVID infection, COVID depletes our T cells. This is only one of the long term consequences of COVID, and may contribute to more severe and frequent outbreaks of other diseases like pneumonia and RSV.

https://www.sciencealert.com/every-covi ... tudy-warns

For us, this was the case initially. About 18 months ago, after having mild covid once or twice, we were hit with multiple back to back illnesses over the next 4 months. However, since October 2022, we haven't been sick at all.

It may be possible that every covid infection raises risk for a subset of the population, but doesn't necessarily raise risk for everyone.

[Higgenbotham]

Second, I know you don’t watch TV but I am a very visual person. Even though the idea of watching congressional hearings on CSPAN for 3 1/2 hours seemed dauntingly mind-numbing, I went ahead and started to watch the infamous hearings of 5 December about the abrupt and disturbing increase in Antisemitism particularly on campuses since the butchery of 7 October and the subsequent war began. This hearing has spurred a dozen lengthy commentaries in the paper and memes online. It was like a car wreck. I just couldn’t look away. 5-minute segments of the representatives of the best and brightest of the Clerisy fumbling their way through sharp questioning which, to my mind, highlighted the inevitable splintering of victimhood culture. The softball questions from the Democrats tried to focus how they would “solve the problem” that has arisen but, of course, there is no plan because that would mean smacking down one of the sacred “marginalized” groups for their misbehaviour, as they effectively call for genocide of the Jewish people. Whereas the Republicans had their sharpened knives out and gleefully sliced away at the overt hypocrisy that, as I said many years ago, results from the fundamental incompatibility of most of the agendas contained within the social justice movement, but without having any real plan of their own to sort anything out. It became clear that these Presidents of these gold-standard universities were not chosen primarily for their abilities, but because they can tick off boxes on the social justice criteria for “fairness”.
What was also clear is the degree to which the U.S. education system has become a pale and useless shadow of it’s former glory, as they have gradually embraced an increasingly extreme ideology that has been tearing away at Western culture and values since the 1970s based on the unconstrained vision (see “Conflict of Visions” by Thomas Sowell) that claims that all problems are solvable and all people can live in love and harmony… And here we have absolute empirical evidence that just ain’t so, Joe.
Finally, I reflected on just how exactly this demonstrates the ongoing crumbling of the American Empire and the twilight of Western Culture. This is what it looks like when an empire is so powerful that it cannot come under direct assault from external forces, but decays intellectually and morally from within. In your books and writings, you have, along with quite a few others, observed that the Clerisy who run things become corrupt, devoid of new ideas, and psychologically live in a vibrant fantasy of times past, in this case, the vital time during the 19th Century when we – the West – effectively abolished slavery and they are now desperately attempt to portray themselves as bold, as valiant, and as heroic fighters akin to Hancock’s II Corps at Gettysburg in their “struggle” against “racism”. I use quotes here, because in order to maintain this self-image, they must continually redefine the term out of all meaning.
I think that future historians of Meriga may well reference the events of this past quarter as major turning points in the collapse of the world we currently enjoy.

https://www.ecosophia.net/december-2023 ... ent-106223

The "struggle" against "racism" seems similar to the efforts to prevent economic downturns. Economic downturns are necessary economic cleansing processes. They're not something that there should or can be a goal of eliminating. A few pages back, I discussed the idea of overreach and how it extends beyond the commonly cited "imperial overreach", at least in my opinion. It's also my opinion that trying to prevent economic downturns (as currently being practiced) through economic management is a form of overreach.

I can't remember the exact quote, but in the 1930's the US Central Bank was quoted as saying to the effect that, "We did all we could to stop the deflation." Now I need to add to that, "We did all we could to stop the deflation within the moral precepts that confined activity at that time."

There are things that may make sense to ameliorate and things that attempts to ameliorate will only worsen. I recall that Greenspan admitted that either he would be able to stop a depression or it would turn out to be the worst depression ever. I think that realization made him tend to not want to cross certain lines. Greenspan's successors, on the other hand, appeared to believe that they had the absolute power to stop a depression, and that there should be essentially no limits on their attempts to do so. I recall somebody saying that Powell bought half the mortgage market during the covid pandemic.

I think at the apex of a civilization the evidence of overreach extends far and wide, beyond just the commonly used term "imperial overreach".
Demarest doesn't make it totally clear what he means by "You know what's going to bring our civilization down?...the byproducts of our incredible technology" but it seems pretty clear in this quote and others that he is referring more to overreach than some other byproduct such as a technological accident.

I previously summarized another of Demarest's apparent references to overreach:

Updated link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/20 ... o-collapse

Status rivalry drives leaders to try to establish something great, which appears to compensate for the decline. We get these periods that look amazing but they're actually a phenomenon of decline. Things look better and better but actually are getting more and more fragile.

The evidence of overreach I've most frequently referred to is Bernanke's (and now his successors) wild money printing and backstopping, which has exceeded anything done since the events leading up to the fall of the Bardi or maybe even anything in all of history.

[Higgenbotham]

The "struggle" against "racism" seems similar to the efforts to prevent economic downturns.

How about regular white people in America and Europe trying to survive after a collapse? Wouldn't ethno-states be a necessity?

I'm not sure whether they would be a necessity but they might be. I would answer that this way. An extreme example of an ethno-state would be the Sentinilese, which is a tribe that has lived on an island off the coast of India virtually unchanged for 60,000 years. The Indian government has said these people have a right to exist and should be left completely alone by the outside world. I don't know what race they are but they are very dark skinned. If you were to ask the typical US liberal whether this is good policy they would probably say, "Of course, this promotes diversity!" On the other hand, if you were to ask these same liberals whether Iceland, which is also an island, and is very nearly all white and the only comparable white enclave in the world that I can think of, whether Iceland should ban immigration they would probably say, "Of course not, this is racist!" How is that any different? What I am describing here is what diversity is. Diversity means encouraging the widest possible variety of subgroups so as to increase the chances of survival. What the Indian government is doing with the Sentinilese is good policy because in the event of a catastrophic change in the environment, it increases the chances that the human race will survive in some form.

Likewise, encouraging the diversity of subgroups in the US would be a good thing. It would increase resilience. It would provide test cases for what works and what doesn't. I recently read about some African Americans from Atlanta who decided to buy some land and form their own community which, I'm assuming, would exclude whites. This is not racism; it is what diversity is. Diversity is not cramming a bunch of different people into one space. It is a group of people making a determination of what would be in their best interests and exercising the freedom to do that. It may be a good idea or a bad idea. If it's a bad idea, it will fail or be less successful than some other idea. It may fail due to bad governance. I say let the market prove it out and for The 97th Percentile to stop telling people what's good or bad. The technology exists to do this and it should be encouraged. Of course, that would also include diverse groups that don't pertain to race.

This was one of my basic comments on it. John has covered other aspects very well, so no need to repeat those.

What should be added to my comment, however, is that the Sentinilese attempt to kill each and every outsider who comes on or near their island, and they have killed in the past, including a white missionary who came onto their island. Should we "struggle" against their "racism"? Absolutely not, in my opinion.

[Higgenbotham]

Holding back the tide

During the period leading up to the crash of
1929, the US stock market repeatedly bounced
back from precipitous falls. In mid-1928, the
newspapers reported that ‘yesterday the bull market
finally ended’ but it went on to pick up again.
Another bad break occurred in December of that
year, again followed by a recovery. In the crash
itself, there were sudden falls and recoveries over
the course of a fortnight. The market did not
give up without a fight. This is a microcosm of the
advent of the coming dark age. It will not come
down smoothly and unequivocally. Crisis will often
seem to have been averted, and gloomy predictions
will regularly be denied.
Humans and their societies are extraordinarily
resilient. When it seems that it is all over with
them, they have a tremendous capacity to pull back
from the brink and side-step what looked like
inevitable disaster. Forecasts of doom often fail
because they underestimate human ingenuity and
overlook people’s ability to recognise and
overcome their problems. Today many attempts are
being made to reform the follies and incentive traps
that are responsible for the world’s disintegrative,
disorganising and discohesive trends. Some of
these attempts will surely succeed and societies
will generate solutions that cannot yet be conceived
of. History is a ferment, and progress towards the
dark age will not be a monotonic decline of steadily
worsening conditions. The descent will be
characterised by frequent reversals, with rallies
within slides and slides within rallies. There will be
times, even extended periods, when things seem to
be getting better rather than worse.
However, one should not be fooled by these
optimistic outbreaks. Tackling and solving specific
problems is not the same as turning back the tide of
history. It is within nobody’s power to remove, just
like that, the deep contradictions that thread
through today’s national and international
institutions. No one can permanently defy the
abstract and fundamental logic of the phoenix
principle, whereby destruction is an inseparable
element of creativity and progress. Large
retrenchments are inherent to complex systems, of
which societies are just one example.
Many solutions to civilisation’s problems may
simply involve buying time, making the situation
worse in one obscure area in order to patch things
up somewhere else. The world has recently seen
widely hailed rapprochements, in places like
Northern Ireland and the West Bank, that soon
enough degenerated into further bloodshed. Such a
course of events has been quite predictable, for no
memories were erased and no tensions relieved.
In the early days of the Kosovo conflict, an
Albanian refugee made a videotape of his friends
and neighbours lying murdered in the field near
their village. He said that he intended to show to
his children and his grandchildren ‘what the Serbs
have done to our people’. Clearly, the Kosovo
conflict is by no means over, whatever temporary
peace deals may be negotiated. This man’s
grandchildren are already involved. There is no
peaceful, rational, gradualist solution to the
problems of Kosovo. Only the coming dark age can
finally resolve such fundamental contradictions.
Most videotapes will then be destroyed, there will
be no electricity to work the video recorders
anyway, and the VHS format will be forgotten like
the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Future archaeologists
may painstakingly reconstruct a fragmentary
understanding of events, but by then the ethnic
hatreds involved will be dead and their bitterness
dried up. They will be suitable only for the
museum, well beyond doing anybody any harm.

Turning to the duration of the darkness that
will follow collapse, past dark ages can serve as a
guide. Typically, the period of utter obscurity and
turmoil lasts between fifty and two hundred years,
which may therefore be posited as the likely
duration of the coming dark age. A duration nearer
the upper limit of this range is probably more
likely, since the most severe dark ages tend to
follow from the first time that humans achieve a
particular level of social complexity. The present
era is the first time that humanity has achieved so
thoroughly connected a global civilisation, and
some extreme contradictions have been
accumulated. It seems that it will take not one but
several human lifetimes to erase from memory the
hatreds and conceits that ultimately pitch the
present world order into the abyss.

The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson, 2001
pp. 278-9

[Higgenbotham]

While achieving universal tolerance and love
might be another solution, in five thousand years of
history there has been little evidence of that.
A compensating feature of the dark age will be
that ethnic conflict proves largely uncoordinated
and unsystematic. It will be just one more
poisonous element in the war of all against all. If
disintegration is very rapid, ethnic cleansing may
never have a chance to get off the ground. People
may be reduced to self defence at the household
level before their tribal allegiances can produce
much of an effect. Rather than a clear demarcation
between ethnically similar and ethnically divergent
people, there will more likely be degrees of enmity.
White family may butcher black family and vice
versa, but whites or blacks will not come together
in large numbers explicitly to destroy the other.
During more ordered times, the victims of
ethnic outrages preserve the account of where they
have come from and of the wrongs that have been
done to them. Feuds smoulder and the desire for
revenge is handed down through the generations,
until eventually conflict flares up again. The dark
age, by contrast, has the capacity to obliterate
social memory and therefore to dull the aching for
revenge. What happens in the dark age will happen,
in effect, under the cover of night, to a world that is
sleeping. When the dawn comes, and people wake
to some new identity, they will accept their
situation as the simple reality. In the absence of a
sense of history, there will be no status quo ante to
which they long to return. It is the literate and
educated who usually do most to foster ethnic
resentment, and the dark agers will be illiterate,
ignorant people, concerned with practical matters
of everyday survival rather than abstract issues of
ancient injustice. If the people of the dawn
remember anything of their origins, it will be as
legends that do not rouse them to murderous fury.
In this respect, the dark age may resolve ethnic
hostility by actually erasing the awareness of interethnic
difference. A dark age is a melting pot, and
today’s divergent cultures will be thrown into it,
allowing a new, homogeneous culture to be forged
from their various elements. In effect, fighting
might become so general and so desperate that no
coherent sense of ethnic identity is able to survive.
Afterwards, the exhausted population might come
together to build a new identity because every
former identity will have been drowned in blood.
Having said this, the physiological differences
between human populations could hinder the
obliteration of ethnic consciousness and may
continue to be taken as a marker for cultural
difference, which then becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. However, in many cases, such as the
republican-unionist conflict in Northern Ireland, the
physical differences are actually slight or nonexistent.
One may reasonably hope that those
hatreds will be eradicated during the dark age
(though the intervening process will be far from
benign). On an optimistic view, even where
obvious differences do exist, these could be
rendered immaterial by people’s returning desire to
escape from universal savagery. After all a Swede
does not look like an Italian, yet the two are
relatively unaware of their physiological
differences as they participate in a shared western
Christian civilisation. In a similar way, the dark age
may allow new cultural realities to emerge and to
transcend much grosser differences of appearance.

The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson, 2001
pp. 324-5

[Higgenbotham]

This comment from 2012 is sort of interesting given what has transpired since. Though I can dig up many, many more comments of mine that have turned out to be totally bogus.

The reverberations of past crises and hatreds are now sown so deep as to prevent regeneration and a new Dark Age resolution is nearly guaranteed complete in my opinion.

Very interesting commentary, Higgie. While I personally tend to not think that we're headed towards a new Dark Ages unless something really goes "nuclearly wrong," I have to admit that I'm amazed at the Hurculean efforts that the world has cobbled up so far (and will continue to cobble up for awhile) to prevent financial Armageddon. In fact, to be a bit "potentially contrarian" again, I actually somewhat wonder if we could see a Fifth Turning (following this Fourth Turning) in the USA and some other countries. Again, with all those weapons of mass destruction out there such that maybe even the Chinese Generation-X'ers may be a bit hesitant to use them (with their X'ers also being mindful of Sun Tzu's "wait-patiently" tactics), I do wonder if there could be a significant possibility of not having a crisis war in the next 10–15 years, followed by seeing something really blow in the not-too-distant future after that. Heck, if Bernanke can keep it up, maybe we can get China's Communist government to self-implode in about the year 2030 or so, although that might be wishful thinking. —Best regards, Marc

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I would expect the beginning phases of a descent into a Dark Age to be milder than if an actual cleansing and regenerative process were to occur instead. In a descent into a Dark Age, one way to look at it is we continue to borrow more from the future instead of stopping at some point and replenishing the future. That is what clearly continues to happen, as we can see. There are many symptoms of that, but an obvious one is the failure to have enough children to replenish the population and we see that across all of the Western societies with Japan taking the lead. As Peter Drucker has commented, this is unprecedented. Tying that into what you said, many of those parents who have that one precious child instead of three or four as in the past are not going to want to send that one child off to war to die. So in terms of an organized nation state versus nation state version of warfare as has been seen in the past, I don't see it under a Dark Age descent scenario. Instead, I can imagine something like rogue or surreptitious releases of killer viruses, limited release of nuclear material, limited power grid failures and so on tailored to hit certain genetic groups or limited geographical areas where the source of the attack is difficult to trace. This type of warfare would probably not be terribly effective and would be more of a wearing down process that is not regenerative like a typical fourth turning "total war" would be; in other words, Dresden would not be rebuilt to a higher standard than previously, as an example. Chernobyl, the Twin Towers, Katrina, and Fukushima come to mind as harbingers of things that have not yet been reconstructed to a higher standard and perhaps can't or won't be (though the replacement of the Twin Towers is due to be complete by 2013).

If China is going to move on Taiwan, it has seemed to me that it needs to happen in 2024 for it to be most effective. That's based on the idea that the US can get their semiconductor manufacturing plants in Arizona (Taiwan Semiconductor), New York (Micron) and Texas (Samsung) up and running by 2025.

When Russia was massing on the border of Ukraine there were some who thought the Russian army would be in Paris in 30 days.

[Higgenbotham]

This morning I was walking through the grocery store and noticed ABBA was playing. I thought that kind of strange. Is that what should be playing as the new year kicks off?

ABBA burst on the scene in April 1974 during the 1970s bear market and faded away in 1982 as the market took off from the 1982 low. I've been aware of this for many years and have studied the ABBA phenomenon from the standpoint of how it correlated with the malaise of those 8 years and the markets.

I'll be watching.