Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unemployment. Show all posts

Friday, June 2, 2023

How Artificial Intelligence Will Eliminate Most of Humanity

There is currently much talk about how artificial intelligence will develop a will of its own, destroy humanity, and take command of the Earth. This is rubbish based on no plausible scenario. However, the danger of artificial intelligence to the continued existence of the mass of mankind is both real and imminent. It will happen as the result of developments, each appearing to be harmless and actually rather cool. 

Thus for example, if you call your doctor's office for an appointment, you will be answered by a synthetic  voice that will negotiate an appointment date and time. In addition, it will ask for information on the reason for your visit with the doctor, and will then provide the doctor with a report not only stating your problem, but advising on the current best practise in treating it. In fact, This talented receptionist might very well provide all the medical assistance you need over the phone, in which case, it will not only eliminate the need for human medical receptionists, but for most if not all human doctors too. 

Likewise, when you need a retail store assistant, your only option will be to address an intelligent machine that speaks Swedish or Swahili, or any other language you care to use as well or better than you do -- and with exactly the accent you happen to use, Ottawa Valley, New York, or that hideous, fake upper-class, cut-glass English accent spoken by the likes of Ghislaine Maxwell and Christiane Amanpour. What's more, this machine will be able to tell you pretty much anything you want to know about the product you seek as well as whether it is available in the color and size you require, and if not, whether and when it will be available. 

The same substitution of machine intelligence for human service will occur throughout the economy reducing the majority of the population to unemployment. If you are not an AI techie, among the safest jobs will be those involving manual labor, lawn mowing, for example, window cleaning, or prostitution. Birthrates will plummet, the incidence of medically assisted death will grow exponentially as dispair and despondency give rise to a pandemic of chronic depression. Thus, within just a few short years, the plutocratic elite will have what they want:  a world largely free of useless eaters cluttering the best beaches, poisoning the planet with their carbon emissions and spreading ugly suburbs across the landscape. 


Related: 

Goldman Sachs Predicts 300 Million Jobs Will Be Lost Or Degraded By Artificial Intelligence

Saturday, June 4, 2022

A Man's a Man for a' That

Since Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom in 1784, mechanisation and automation have destroyed jobs at an ever increasing pace. That these processes would have a huge impact on working people and the distribution of wealth was already evident two hundred years ago. Thus, in the Edinburgh Review of 1829, Thomas Carlyle wrote:
... Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; ... There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse invoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep.  ...
Yet despite the ongoing destruction of jobs, prosperity as Carlyle noted, had never been greater or more widely spread:
What wonderful accessions have thus been made, and are still making, to the physical power of mankind; how much better fed, clothed, lodged and, in all outward respects, accommodated men now are, or might be, by a given quantity of labour, is a grateful reflection which forces itself on every one. 
Yet, Carlyle asked:
What changes, too, this addition of power is introducing into the Social System ...increasing the distance between the rich and the poor, will be a question for Political Economists...
And today, the answer to Carlyle's question for the Political Economists is at last becoming evident. Not only is machinery replacing human labor, but automation, robotization, and control by artificial intelligence is altogether eliminating the economic value of human intelligence except for that of a tiny elite of highly trained specialists. Increasingly, the objective of the business corporation is not to increase the productivity of human labor but to eliminate it from the productive process.

Thus the telephone company has no human to answer the phone, but seeks to meet their customer's need with a synthetic voice driven by artificial intelligence. Though, currently, the response such systems provide to any inquiry is generally inane, confidence must exist that with incremental improvement, the system will become a fully effective replacement for human intelligence at a great saving in expense. 

The auto industry, likewise, seeks to eliminate the need for for human intelligence as well as muscle, not only in the production of motor vehicles, as evident with the introduction of lights-out robot factories, but in the operation of both cars and freight vehicles. The result: not increased labor productivity, but labor elimination, indicating that we are fast approaching a period of massive and irreducible unemployment. What then for the mass of mankind? 

As we noted several days ago, Yuval Harari, a futurist much admired by Klaus Schwab, founder and Chair of the World Economic Forum, considers that other than the class of high IQ and highly trained techies, the plutocrats who seek control of the globe will have no desire to perpetuate the existence of what Harari calls the "useless people," which is to say most of humanity. 

The implication is clear: the human surplus should off themselves, in the way that the Government of Schwabb-acolyte, Justin Trudeau intends with its Medical Assistance In Death legislation for the old, the depressed, and the terminally ill, to which list will surely be added the permanently unemployable. 

Though shocking to those not familiar with it, this is a solution long endorsed, not only in Nazi Germany but by many in the enlightened West, as these comments by the famous Anglo-Irish playwright,George Bernard Shaw make clear:



In the face of this prospect, I am grateful to Yusef for his response to a question I raised in an earlier post. Namely:
"what are the alternative futures, if any, for the mass of humanity when a pair of hands is no longer worth its keep."

 Yusef provides two quotes:

(1)
Mark 2: 23: And it came to pass, that he went through the corn fields on the sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears of corn.

24 And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful?

25 And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him?

26 How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him?

27 And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath:

28 Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath."

King James Bible
(2)
Immanuel Kant: "An end-in-itself"
An explanation of Kant's concept of "an end-in-itself", often put more informally as the idea that we should not "use" other people.

The word "end" in this phrase has the same meaning as in the phrase "means to an end".

The philosopher Immanuel Kant said that rational human beings should be treated as an end in themselves and not as a means to something else. The fact that we are human has value in itself.

If a person is an end-in-themself it means their inherent value doesn't depend on anything else - it doesn't depend on whether the person is enjoying their life, or making other people's lives better. We exist, so we have value.

Most of us agree with that - though we don't put it so formally. We say that we don't think that we should use other people, which is a plain English way of saying that we shouldn't treat other people as a means to our own ends.

This idea applies to us too. We shouldn't treat ourselves as a means to our own ends; instead we should respect our inherent worth. This can be used as an argument against euthanasia, suicide and other behaviours that damage ourselves.

The idea also shows up in discussions of animal rights, with the idea that if they have rights, animals must be treated as ends in themselves."  (Source)

To which I would add Robbie Burns' fine poem: A Man’s a Man for a’ That

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Covid-19: Why the Panic?

Referring to the panic reaction to Covid 19, a commenter at the Unz Review remarked:

This is looking more and more like an epidemic of mental illness.
But although what is being done to the mass of ordinary folk may cause an epidemic of insanity, the politicians and their media enablers, mainstream or "alt", who are using the Covid pandemic as  a pretext for destroying the livelihood of tens of millions, are surely not insane.

The question, then, is what's the objective? And the answer to that question must be something that can be inferred from the consequences.

So what are the consequences?

(1) The sharpest rate of job losses every recorded, leading to Great Depression levels of unemployment.

(2) Consequent upon (1), massive loss of income for the salaried workforce, business owners, and beneficiaries of pension funds etc., (the last having sustained large and soon to be larger investment losses).

(3) Consequent upon (2), massive reductions in consumption spending.

(4) Consequent upon (3), big cuts in imports to the West of products of cheap Third World labor.

(1) Means real wages will fall, thereby raising potential economic competitiveness of manufacturing in the US and other Western nations, i.e., reindustrialization of the West as will be essential in an emerging East-West cold war.

(2) Means many small businesses will fold, opening the way for expansion by the big boys: Starbucks,  Dominoes Pizza, Amazon, etc.

(3) Means fewer goddam plebs cluttering the best beaches, ski resorts, tourist meccas.

(4) Means a slowing of China's economic growth and reduced Chinese access to dollars with which to buy American and European technology and businesses, from GE Appliances to Motorola Mobility, and from the Chicago Stock Exchange to the Waldorf Astoria.

As for those few the virus kills, they're just old geezers, useless eaters, wasn't that what Adolf called them?

So, nothing crazy about this fake plague: what's not to like about it?

And to put things into context, the situation is much like that during the Great War that led to the still ongoing destruction of Europe. Then, British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George remarked:

If the people knew what is happening, this war would end tomorrow. But of course the people cannot know what is happening
Likewise, they cannot know now, thanks to the MSM and its "alt" auxiliaries.

Related:
Nic Lewis: Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought

Monday, April 20, 2020

the Corona Virus Response: A Media Induced Panic For What Reason?

Here's a comment from an actual expert on viral respiratory diseases:

Dr. John Oxford, virologist, Professor at Queen Mary College, University of London, and a leading expert on influenza, including bird flu and the 1918 Spanish Influenza, and HIV/AIDS.

What he says:
Personally, I would say the best advice is to spend less time watching TV news which is sensational and not very good. Personally, I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic. In this case we have had 8000 deaths this last year in the ‘at risk’ groups viz over 65% people with heart disease etc. I do not feel this current Covid will exceed this number. We are suffering from a media epidemic! Source
So why the continued lock-down?

Many unofficial reports are now emerging that reveal Covid19 infection rates in the general population that are huge multiples of officially reported rates.

 That means that infection rates in many communities are pretty certainly past the point necessary to achieve herd immunity, which is to say the point at which the disease spreads with ever increasing difficulty before dying out entirely.

Yet no government has reported a survey of the general public to determine whether herd immunity has been achieved.

Why not?

Presumably, because governments do not want the public to know.

And that presumably, is because governments want the lock-downs to continue for reasons quite other than those stated.

What are those ulterior and unstated motives?

Interesting question that:

To drive up unemployment while destroying small businesses that are the chief employers of low-wage labor?

Why would governments want this?

Many reasons come to mind. Here are a couple:

1. By creating a much larger pool of the unemployed, a desperate and docile pool of cheap labor is made available to the corporate giants that own the government.

2. While thousands upon thousands of small business that have been forcibly closed -- shops, restaurants, a multiplicity of service enterprises -- the big boys, Amazon, Star Bucks, Tim Hortons, Crispy Kreme will have been planning how to take over the space newly created for their own expansion.

3. Or is the objective simply to create widespread poverty on a permanent basis?

Is it the idea that living standards for the majority having been crushed, they are to remain crushed?

What, after all, is the point of so many people stuffing their faces with junk food, pissing away energy and other resources on  hedonistic cruise vacations, trips to Vegas and stuffing themselves with toxic, obesity- and diabetes-inducing  grease- and sugar- loaded junk food.

Welcome to the new peonage.

Other possibilities? Suggestions welcome!

And here's one obvious alternative: a Deep State plot to get rid of Trump.

Related:
LA Times: Hundreds of thousands in L.A. County may have been infected with coronavirus
Perspective on the Pandemic: Interview with Prof. John Ioannides

Thierry Meyssan: Covid-19: Neil Ferguson, the Liberal Lyssenko
Ron Paul: What If The Lockdown Was A Giant Mistake?
Jim Fedako: Exactly How Many Deaths To Justify Giving Government's Control Of Everything?
ZH: Why The Shutdown Must End

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Jordan Peterson's hysterical rant about people of low IQ

Jordan Peterson is the University of Toronto psychology professor rightly applauded for his opposition to Canada's recently enacted law "to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code" (Bill C16) in such ways as to compel, among other things, the use of self-selected pronouns demanded by transgender and other minorities from the mundane Zie and Zim to such loony extremes as His Majesty and It's Serene Highness.

 Less well known are Peterson's ideas about intelligence. In the short video below, Peterson reveals his thinking on this topic as he describes what he calls a "horrifying thing", namely what he says is the finding of US Army psychologists who were "motivated to find an accurate predictor [of the competence of recruits], so they used IQ."

One of the most terrifying statistics I ever came across [related to] the rationale of the US armed forces for not inducting anyone with an IQ of less than 83.

Lets just take that apart, because it's a horrifying thing.

After 100 years, essentially, of careful statistical anaylsis, the armed forces concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't anything you could be trained to do in the military at any level of the organization that wasn't positively counterproductive.

OK, so what, 83, OK, yeah, one in ten, one in ten, that's one in ten people, and what that really means, as far as I can tell, if you imagine that the military is approximately as complex as the broader society, then there is no place in our cognitively complex society for one in ten people.

So what are we going to do about that? The answer is, no one knows. It's a vicious problem.
At that point, the interviewer interjects:
It's hard to train people to become creative, adaptive, problem solvers.
To which Peterson responds:
It's impossible. You can't do it. It doesn't work. Sorry, it doesn't work.

So here is expressed a basic mistake underlying the IQ-ist creed: it is to assume what has to be demonstrated. Specifically, that IQ test scores are an accurate predictor of competence in the military or, as Peterson clearly implies, every other sphere of human activity.

But cursory examination reveals that everything Peterson is saying is obvious bunk. If, for example, ten percent of the US population is totally incompetent, then one should expect a floor to the unemployment rate of no less than 10%, whereas in fact, US unemployment is currently under four percent, while the unemployment rate for African Americans with an average IQ of 85, or barely above Peterson's threshold for total uselessness, is under 6%.

As for the claim that there is no place in "our cognitively complex society for one in ten people," what exactly is he suggesting? The thinking of those prewar Hitler admirers in the Anglo-American eugenics movement come to mind. That Peterson concludes that the existence of so many incompetent people is a "vicious problem," certainly suggests a willingness to consider extreme solutions.

But in any case, what did he mean by "our cognitively complex society"? Can a society even have cognitive features? Perhaps what he meant was our cognitively demanding society. But is it really? Is it harder to stay alive in a world of 24/7 shopping, homeless shelters, and food stamps than in prehistoric times? And even for those productively employed, how many have cognitively challenging jobs — store clerks? coffee-shop employees? gas station attendants? hospital orderlies? Or the lower ranks of academia, say 90% of college professors?

And what about the Africans? With a mean IQ 84, half the Nigerian population is close to, or below Peterson's competence threshold, yet Nigeria's population is booming. So who's gonna win the evolutionary race: IQ 98 Americans with their below replacement fertility, or Nigerians doubling their population every 30 years? Then there's the Mozambiquans, with a mean IQ of 64 despite a significant Euro-African population component and, like Nigerians, a fertility two and half times the replacement rate.

And, conclusively refuting Peterson's claim that men with an IQ of less than 83 are useless to the US military for anything whatever is the fact that a large proportion of the troops, 354,000 of them, that were sent by the US to fight in Vietnam had IQ's of around 70. To learn more search the Web for Project 100, and MacNamara's Morons.


Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Globalist Economics No. 37: Raising the Minimum Wage, or How to Make Water Flow Uphill

Western liberals hate it when it's pointed out that their globalist policies create poverty in the developed nations by putting the Western workforce in direct competition with the billions of poverty-stricken workers of the Third World: from Bangladeshi garment-industry workers employed in collapsible factories for pennies and hour, to Chinese electronics assemblers employed in factories with anti-suicide nets, and Indian IT technicians earning in a year what a similarly qualified American or European might earn in a month.

So what to do?

Raise Western wages by fiat. Legislate a higher minimum wage.* Easy, hey! And sure to win the hearts and minds of every economically illiterate voter, which is to say most people.

What, after all, could go wrong in ordering greedy, fat-cat employers like Donald Trump to pay their workers more?

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Nationalists Versus Globalists

Nationalists believe that the occupants of a territory have all the rights of ownership to that territory including the right to govern themselves as they see fit, such governing rights including:

(1) the right to limit or entirely prohibit the settlement on its territory of people from elsewhere, such limitation being either general or specific as to the origins, religious beliefs, political affiliations, age, sex, health, financial resources, education, linguistic or professional qualifications or other characteristics of prospective immigrants;

(2) the right to regulate trade, financial transactions, and information exchange with foreign entities for the purpose of promoting national prosperity and security;

(3) the right to defend national interests by force of arms.

Globalists deny the legitimacy of the territorial rights of nations, recognizing only the claims of private property as legitimate. Globalists thus assert the moral right of private individuals, including corporations, to buy and sell property, and to move goods, capital, technology and people wherever it is most profitable, without regard for the rights claimed on behalf of citizens by sovereign nations.

Friday, January 22, 2016

Trump, Not Keynes, Holds the Key to Economic Recovery in the West

Tony Blair: laughing all the way to the bank 
since leaving office.*
This article, by Mike Whitney in the Unz Review, explains how US (and by extension European) monetary and fiscal policies* saved criminally reckless Western financial institutions from bankruptcy. The method was to provide the bankers with virtually limitless amounts of cash at negative real interest rates, which enabled them to blow a huge stock market bubble that financed their return to solvency. At the same time, Whitney argues, governments were careful to limit the magnitude of monetary stimulus so as to insure no substantial growth in aggregate demand or, therefore, in employment or wages.

On the latter point, Whitney offers the correct Keynesian analysis. But Keynes addressed the problems of a different age, when the US economy was largely self-contained, with external trade amounting to less than 5% of GDP.

Globalization with input factor mobility, i.e., free movement of labor from the Third World to the First World, free movement of capital and technology from the First World to the Third World, and free movement of the products of sweatshop labor from the Third World to the First World means lower wages and higher unemployment in the First World, which in turn shrink aggregate demand resulting in even lower wages and higher unemployment.

The Keynesian solution to shrinking demand and rising unemployment was deficit spending to raise aggregate demand and hence employment and wages. But today, in an era of globalization to the max, the effect of deficit spending is primarily to suck in more cheap Chinese shoes and shirts, computers and car parts, all of which Americans and others in the First World used to make for one another. Add in the effects of computerization, automation, robotization and insane student debt and the outlook for employment and wages for ordinary folks becomes, as is now apparent, bleak indeed.

There are two measures to improve the welfare of the proletariat. One is massive infrastructure spending, since this generates work that cannot be off-shored and is still largely beyond the scope of automation and robotization. The other is a return to free trade without input factor mobility, which as David Ricardo explained in his 1817 classic, “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” yields the benefit of “Comparative Cost”, or “Comparative Advantage” as it is now known, i.e., the benefit of increased total output and lower costs than if each nation tried to produce in isolation.

These,  as I explained here, in a post that was rejected for publication in the Unz Review, are the economic policies espoused by Donald Trump, i.e., restoration of the border to limit influx of labor from the Third World, and the imposition of tariffs to restrict influx of products of foreign sweatshops financed with First World capital and technology, thereby achieving the benefits of comparative advantage through international trade, and last but not least a massive infrastructure renewal project.

———
* Said policies are administered by governments largely owned by said criminally reckless financial institutions, for example, the great American banking firm of J.P. Morgan, which took former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair on as an "adviser" for a fee of two million pounds per year. This is in accordance with the Western tradition of political bribery, which as explained by Thomas Macaulay (The History of England (1848)), involves payments made after the bribed individual leaves office, an arrangement that is entirely legal, and one that no politician would ever think of changing.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Why Western Elites Are Destroying Their Own People By Mass Immigration and Multiculturalism

The Saker has an article over at the Unz Review in which he argues that the ongoing racial and cultural genocide of the European peoples by mass immigration and multiculturalism is unstoppable, first, because of the decadence of the European people, and second, because of the malign manipulation of the Anglo-Zionist money power. 

This is a plausible but entirely mistaken analysis of what is happening to the European people both in Europe and in North America.

The elite are destroying their own people because the have no respect for them, or sense of kinship with them, and because it pays. This goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, when an urban proletariat, with no family connection to the landowning and capitalist class that dominated Parliament,* rapidly expanded and became a perpetual threat to the security of the state. Hence Disraeli’s recognition of the existence of “Two Nations” between whom, as a character in his novel "Sybil" (1945) remarked:
there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London in 1848
by William Edward Kilburn. Chartism was a movement for workers rights
and political representation.
In Disraeli’s time, free trade with input factor mobility, i.e., the import of cheap labor, or the export of capital and technology to cheap-labor areas whence products could be imported to the home market, was rarely if ever an option for the owners of capital, which meant that the industrial proletariat, though considered by the elite to be both dangerous and disgusting, had to be tolerated.

But input factor mobility is not only possible today, but the underlying reason for globalization. Thus there is a massive flow of cheap Third-World labor to the high-wage West, a flow of products of sweat-shop labor in the same direction, and a flow of capital and technology in the opposite direction, all of which negatively impacts wages in the West. Multiculturalism is the inevitable, and from the elite point of view, desirable consequence of the Third-World migrant flow. Desirable, that is, because a culturally divided proletariat is much less of a threat to the elite than a united nation.

But the Saker is right about two things. First that mass migration means the complete cultural and racial extinction of the European peoples. Second, that mass immigration will continue inexorable for the foreseeable future, the reason being that, for every worker in, say, England (pop. 53 million), there will certainly be many better qualified people (higher IQ, more energy, more ambition, little if any commitment to workers’ rights, etc.) in the Third World (pop. 5 billion plus), who are paid a fraction of what an English worker is paid. And among these potential migrants,  rickshaw drivers earning a dollar or two a day, for example, there will always be some ready, if they are permitted, to migrate to London to earn twenty or thirty dollars an hour driving a bus? And naturally, the elite welcomes such people. If the newcomers hassle the local girls, squeeze the natives out of decent housing, build mosques, etc., so what? What can the natives do about it? Nothing, as it now is clear. And if it means ever rising taxes to pay for new maternity hospitals, roads, schools, etc., that's very satisfactory: it keeps the construction industry prosperous and it allows a growing bureaucracy to soak up the educated middle class who might otherwise begin to think seriously about what is going on. And if the net result is that the native working class becomes an underclass — i.e., white trash despised by all and sundry, again, so what? There’s not a damn thing they can do about it: the supposedly left-wing workers parties being funded by the same plutocratic donors as the so-called conservative parties.

As for the Saker's assertion that the genocide of the Western nations is an Anglo-Zionist Money Power plot, that is just thoughtless conspiracy theory. One might as absurdly impute the Rothschild's or the Illuminati. Many members of the elite are Jews, for sure, but many are Anglos, and many more are Asians, Middle-Easterners or Africans. The issue is that genocide by immigration and multiculturalism pays. The ethnicity of the genocidal elite is irrelevant.

———
* An understanding of the change in relationship between the landowning classes in Britain, i.e., the elite, and the common folk that occurred with the industrial revolution was provided by Adam Smith in his treatise on economics. There he explained that, before the industrial revolution, there was close kinship between the upper and lower classes due to differential mortality between the rich and the poor. Overall, the population remained relatively constant, but because of high child mortality, the poor failed to fully reproduce themselves and the resulting population deficit was made up by the excess fertility of the rich. Thus, the rich were permanently downward mobile with two results. First, most of the rich had poor relatives for whom they had a personal sympathy, second the poor, many not so long descended from the rich, tended to adhere to the conservative values of their better off relatives. These factors made for a united nation. This unity fractured with the rise of the urban working class, which though living in seeming squalor and bestial ignorance, achieved well above replacement reproductive rates and which, as it swelled in number, adopted socialistic ideas. Thus, in purely hereditary terms, the industrial proletariat became much more distant from the elites than had been the rural poor of the pre-industrial era. In addition the political ambitions of the proletariat came to threaten the security of the elite, as they do to this day.

Related: 

CanSpeccy: The Ongoing Destruction of the European Nations Is No Mistake

Monday, January 11, 2016

Is the West on the Brink of Revolution?

"Revolutions," wrote Stephen Kotkin (author of Stalin, a biography) "are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come."

So, OK, we're not predicting a collapse of the US Empire, and if it comes, we will be as astonished as was V.I. Lenin, when, a month after complaining in a speech to Swiss socialists that "We the old people, won't survive to see the decisive battles of the forthcoming revolution," exclaimed at news of the February 1917 abdication of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II: "It's staggering. It's so incredibly unexpected."* 

All we're saying is: revolution? Yes, "sometimes they come."

But, the complacent will say, how can the West have a revolution? It's democratic, for goodness sake! 

Yeah, right: democracy shamocracy. 

Democracy requires a free press and a literate and informed populace. The West has a press, including in that term the news, information and entertainment media, virtually all of which are controlled by a handful of corporations, which naturally put a corporate spin on whatever they publish. And within those corporate-owned media properties exists a cadre of intelligence service agents to keep the message on track, should the owners fail to understand their own interest. "The CIA," as former CIA Director Colby remarked, "owns everyone of any significance in the major media." And the objective is, as former CIA Director William Casey made clear, to disinform: "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

And that's not all. Throughout the West there are now 12 years of state mandated indoctrination, known as "education," to be followed in most cased by many years of wasted time in a so-called institution of higher learning where the finer points of political correctness are instilled.

But if the system of mind control is so firmly in place, how could there be a revolt? Well, here's the thing: all this bullshit and indoctrination is not for the Hell of it. The purpose was, and remains, to reduce the populace to helpless slavery, in which condition it can be used, abused, or if deemed best, eliminated, at will. But if the abuse is severe, even if the plebs are unable to figure out why what is happening to them is happening, there will always be highly intelligent and highly motivated individuals, such as V.I. Lenin, who will take advantage of the circumstances to enlighten the people and rouse them to insurrection. 

And when the people are severely humiliated, as in Cologne in recent days by an organized mass of feral Muslim rapists, gropers and Islamic supremacists, pauperized and demoralized by a massive rise in unemployment (albeit hidden by lying Government statistics) driven both by off-shoring of jobs and mass immigration of cheap labor, it's not that difficult to open people's eyes. 

Add a few leaks on Bill and Hillary's corruption, mendacity and basic personal vileness, of Obama perhaps taking a pay-off for services rendered while still in office, of the murderous duplicity and destructiveness of Imperial policy in the Middle-East and Ukraine, and it's insane economic and proxy military aggression against Russia — the only power on earth capable of reducing the West to smoldering radioactive rubble, and you have a seriously aroused populace, including members of the armed forces who might just land a dozen black helicopters on the White House lawn, and announce game over. 

———
*Stephen Kotkin, 2014: Stalin. Penguin.

Related: 

Breitbart: WATCH: Muslim Men Shoot Up Nightclub, Govt And Media Refuse To Use The ‘M’ Word