https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240228-leap-year-the-imperfect-solution-to-fix-the-calendar
The Sandcastle
By Jeff Thomas
International Man
February 28, 2022
That’s not a pleasant thought to have to consider, but it’s a fact, nonetheless. In every case, a democracy will deteriorate as the result of the electorate accepting the loss of freedom in trade for largesse from their government. This process may be fascism, socialism, communism, or a basket of “isms,” but tyranny is the inevitable endgame of democracy. Like the destruction of a sandcastle by the incoming tide, it requires time to transpire, but in time, the democracy, like the sandcastle, will be washed away in its entirety.
Why should this be so? Well, as I commented some years ago,
The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.
Unfortunately, there will always be those who wish to rule, and there will always be a majority of voters who are complacent enough and naïve enough to allow their freedoms to be slowly removed. This adverb “slowly” is the key by which the removal of freedoms is achieved.
The old adage of “boiling a frog” is that the frog will jump out of the pot if it’s filled with hot water, but if the water is lukewarm and the temperature is slowly raised, he’ll grow accustomed to the temperature change and will inadvertently allow himself to be boiled.
Let’s have a look at Thomas Jefferson’s assessment of this technique:
Even under the best forms of Government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Mister Jefferson was a true visionary. He knew, even as he was penning the Declaration of Independence and portions of the Constitution, that his proclamations, even if they were accepted by his fellow founding fathers, would not last. He recommended repeated revolutions to counter the inevitable tendency by political leaders to continually vie for the removal of the freedoms from their constituents.
Around the same time that Mister Jefferson made the above comment, Alexander Tytler, a Scottish economist and historian, commented on the new American experiment in democracy. He’s credited as saying,
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
So, was each of the above gentlemen throwing a dart at a board, or did they each have some kind of crystal ball? Well, actually, neither. Each was a keen student of history. Each knew that the pattern, by the end of the 18th century, had already repeated itself time and time again. In fact, as early as the fourth century BC, Plato had quoted Socrates as having stated to Adeimantus,
Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery comes out of the most extreme form of liberty.
Today, much of what was called the “free world” only half a century ago has deteriorated into a combination of residual capitalism, which has been largely and increasingly buried by socialism and fascism. (It should be mentioned that the oft-misinterpreted definition of “fascism” is the joint rule by corporate and state—a condition that’s now manifestly in place in much of the former “free” world.)
Today, many people perceive fascism as a tyrannical condition that’s suddenly imposed by a dictator, but this is rarely the case. Fascism is in fact a logical step. Just as voters succumb over time to the promises of socialism, so a parallel decline occurs as fascism slowly replaces capitalism. Fascism may appear to be capitalism, but it’s the antithesis of a free market. As Vladimir Lenin rightly stated,
Fascism is capitalism in decline.
Comrade Lenin understood the value of fascism for political leaders. Whilst he retained a close relationship with New York and London bankers, and a healthy capitalist market was tapped into for Soviet-era imports, he was aware that his power base depended largely on denying capitalism to his minions.
So, from the above quotations, we may see that there’s been a fairly erudite group of folks out there who have commented on this topic over the last 2,500 years. They agree that democracies, like sandcastles, never last. They generally begin promisingly, but, given enough time, any government will erode democracy as quickly as the political leaders can get away with it, and the progression always ends in tyranny.
We’re presently at a major historical juncture—a time in which much of the former free world is in the final stages of decay and approaching the tyranny stage.
At this point, the process tends to speed up. We can observe this as we see an increase in the laws being passed to control the population—increased taxation, increased regulation, and increased promises of largesse from the government that they don’t have the funding to deliver.
When any government reaches this stage, it knows only too well that it will not deliver and that, when the lie is exposed, the populace will be hopping mad. Therefore, just before the endgame, any government can be expected to ramp up its police state. The demonstrations by governments that they’re doing so are now seen regularly—raids by SWAT teams in situations where just a small number of authorities could handle the situation just as well. Displays of armed forces in the street, including armoured vehicles, in instances of disruption.
In London, Ferguson, Paris, Boston, etc., the authoritarian displays have become ever-more frequent. All that’s now necessary is a series of events (whether staged or real) to suggest domestic terrorism in several locations at roughly the same time. A state of national emergency may then be declared “for the safety of the people.”
It’s this justification that will assure the success of tyranny. Historically, the majority of people in any county, in any era, choose the illusion of safety over freedom. As John Adams was fond of saying,
Those who would trade freedom for safety will have neither.
From this point on, it would be wise for anyone who lives in the EU, US, UK, etc. to watch events closely. If a rash of “domestic terrorism” appears suddenly, it could well be the harbinger that the government has reached the tipping point—when tyranny under the guise of “protecting the safety of the people” is inaugurated.
The most essential takeaway here is that, although some may object (even violently), the majority of the people will trade their freedom for the promise of safety.
Reprinted with permission from International Man.
alloping Ghost
Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, the home of the Kennedy Space Center, wasn't, when NASA acquired it, much of an island at all. An 88,000-acre swamp capillaried with gray-green water that was called home by alligators, manatees, dolphins, storks, wild pigs, tortoises and plagues of salt-marsh mosquitoes, it was as liquid as it was solid. The job of making it ready for service as a spaceport was handed to the Army Corps of Engineers. Fifteen thousand individual tracts of privately owned land were bought up, then dredged, drained, squeezed and packed with and before construction work began on launchpads, firing rooms and processing facilities. At the end of September, 1965, the workforce moved into their new buildings: a tableau of tan, beige and gray concrete modernism that, in a land devoid of trees, seemed to sit on top of a landscape rather than truly being a part of it.
At the heart of the complex was the Vehicle Assembly Building - the VAB. Founded on a hive of thousands of piles driven 160 feet down through the soft ground until they found the bedrock below, the VAB was, at the time of its completion in the midsixties, the world's largest building. A third bigger than the Great Pyramid and enclosing a greater volume that either the pentagon or nearly four Empire State Buildings, the giant iron-lattice cathedral seemed utterly alien on Merritt Island; a vast, pale corrugated box standing over fifty storis high that dominated the view from any direction. The scale of the VAB was to accommodate the towering Saturn V moon rockets, assembled vertically within a building that was large enough, on hot, humid days, to generate rain showers from beneath its ceiling, then stacked on top of a 2,700-ton caterpillar-tracked flatbed transporter that carried it to the launch pad three miles away, where the Cape met the Atlantic.
Low cloud and chill air hung over the Cape, when, at dawn on December 29, the huge doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building rolled open - a process that took forty-five minutes to complete. Around 8:00 a.m., the Shuttle stack emerged from the sanctuary of the high bay,, rolling slowly on the top of the crawler toward the pad along a track laid deep with crushed rock and river gravel - a three-mile journey on the back of a 5,500 horsepower machine as big as a baseball diamond that took ten hours to complete. By 6:30 that evening, as the sun went down behind the VAB, Columbia took her place on pad 39A, casting shadows that reached out toward the Atlantic.
Into The Black, The Extraordinary Untold story of the First Flight Of The Space Shuttle Columbia And The Astronauts Who Flew Her
Touchstone, c 2016
pp 237-238
Rowland White
At the end of World War Two Germany had twice tried to conquer the world, or at least significant chunks of it. And twice, Germany failed. The project of militarily imposing German will on the entire planet was an absurd one, a fantasy based on late unification and a very late arrival to the era of European imperialism. Germany came to the imperial party just as the lights were going out and everyone was trudging home, then somehow imagined that it could achieve in a few short years what took the Spanish, the French and the British centuries to build.
There was always something deeply insecure in the German race to catch up and overtake its European rivals, a frantic psychological component which existed both before and after the full schizophrenic episode of Nazism. If we look at the two European nations from which the worst excesses of 20th century tyranny were formed, Germany and Russia, (Nazism and Communism), we see two nations with vast resources which had nonetheless long been peripheral in many ways to European greatness, overshadowed by the earlier successes of Spain and Portugal, and by the wider successes of France and Britain.
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Just as with individuals, embittered and insecure nations in a rush to assert their significance, are more dangerous than long established or long successful ones secure in their identity.
But what the failure of German militarism proved is just how impossible the old routes to power had become. The age of conquerors was dying. Even the enormously powerful new colossus of the United States, after World War Two, would find its record of successful war after that conflict rather sparse. Despite the 800 or more military bases, despite the perpetual war policies, despite the trillions of dollars of investment in military budgets, the US could be embarrassed by Communist rice farming peasants in Vietnam or by Iron Age religious savages in Afghanistan.
What hope, then, for militarism in Germany, which started World War Two with the most prepared, bloodied, experienced and dedicated troops in Europe, led by some of the most innovative and brilliant generals, and ended it in shattered ruins and utter humiliating defeat?
A Germany which had deeply resented military limits and imperial limits imposed at the end of World War One, enthusiastically embraced self-limitation after World War Two. Clearly, Germany was not going to try to impose itself militarily on its neighbours. It certainly wasn’t going to be suffused with a semi-mystical sense of Aryan destiny and German greatness. If anything, it entered into a long orgy of self-hatred, its new insecurities the exact opposite of the ones which had fuelled its military ambitions. Germans became Europe’s most enthusiastic self-deniers, deeply suspicious of nationalism, and determined to expunge their War Guilt by plunging into internationalism and every bureaucratic and modish replacement cause imaginable.
But again it was a curious mix driven by insecurities. Germany was home of a postwar industrial miracle soon making it an industrial powerhouse again. It reclaimed the German reputation for efficiency and hard work. But it also developed paternalistic working attitudes that made Germans almost as unsackable as French or Italian workers. It was content with its reduced Army and with ex Allied WWII opponents being camped on its soil. But it was soon once again bullying its neighbours and imposing its will, this time through its funding of and dominance within the EU, sometimes to the extent of sparking resentments harking back to its Nazi period-as we saw for instance with Greeks furious at German and EU interference during their economic troubles.
The German might now be a curious pedant insisting on a standard measurement for all bananas, or a Green fanatic in an unfashionable jumper, or a diligent pen pusher in some corporate or bureaucratic environment where no military uniform would ever intrude, but he was still a bit of a control freak. And of course if he was in Eastern Germany until the fall of that regime, he was still learning the lessons that come with actual tyranny.
The awkwardness of the synthesis and the curiousness of 20th century German experience and psychology was perhaps best manifested in the person of long term Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel was raised under East German Communism and retained a lifelong rather Communist fashion sense. She was dour, humourless, plain, a dumpy hausfrau without a scintilla of human warmth. She achieved a similar sternness to Margaret Thatcher, and a similar political dominance within her home nation, but with none of the sparkle and surprising femininity that those who interacted with Thatcher often reported. She was as blunt and unlovable as a brick, but Germans saw strength and solidity there.
Everything that worries a Brit or a Yank about bureaucracy, offers a warm blanket of comfort for Germans. If it comes with a form in triplicate, it must be sensible, respectable, and safe. Germans were likely to demand more rules regarding the acceptable length and shape of a banana, rather than regard the whole thing as absurd. Merkel was a skilled politician, but at heart happiest as a bureaucrat.
And few people have manifested the contradictions of modern anarcho-tyranny globalism so well as Merkel did, being always ready to suffocate Germans beneath ever greater legal restrictions whilst simultaneously inviting the wild savages of the world to descend on Germany in (literally) rapacious hordes.
The insecure instinct for dominance and tyranny militarism makes obvious and faces outwards, towards the conquest of foreign nations, did not leave Germany and German psychology at all. Not even Nazism’s gotterdammerung could expunge it. Instead it turned into the inwards meddling of restrictive bureaucracy and the on the surface of things peaceful and consensual march of transnational bodies into every public and private sphere. Germans were as bluntly unsympathetic to those resisting EU demands as they were towards those who once resisted panzer divisions, both at home and abroad.
All of this is by way of providing context for developments today and a truly chilling and important article by the popular Substacker Eugyppius. https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=268621&post_id=141755263&utm_source=cross-post&utm_campaign=1032096&isFreemail=true&r=1dh1hq&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4MzA5NjI3MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQxNzU1MjYzLCJpYXQiOjE3MDgyMDE1MTcsImV4cCI6MTcxMDc5MzUxNywiaXNzIjoicHViLTI2ODYyMSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.Zs9lvwaIZRANK3vPNvoEz1gwORZBH-HrOe_ya-9TtZg
I don’t often provide links or direct recommendations, but in this instance the article is so important I felt that I should. I urge everyone to read it because what Eugyppius describes in it is the template of modern tyranny, even moreso then the COVID measures we saw in 2020-22 and the lawfare we see in the US against Trump. It’s the European model of the Chinese Communist State, and it is truly terrifying and foul.
Eugyppius doesn’t have to uncover secret documents, expose hidden facts, or provide hitherto obscure information. He shows us in the direct words of current German officials where they stand, and where we stand. Almost everything he describes is official German policy and thought, expressed by current German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, of the respectable, mainstream SPD party.
And it’s pure tyranny.
Ostensibly the press conference that Eugyppius references was about ‘fighting far right extremism’. Actually it was about justifying the complete removal of all basic rights to free speech, free thought and free political association from the German people.
Faeser argues that ‘far right networks’ should be treated like terrorist organisations or Mafia style criminal conspiracies. But she and people like her are going to define what these ‘far right’ groups are. And they are, by the definitions she gives, anyone who wants to vote for parties she doesn’t approve (especially the AfD which is the second most popular party in Germany). Far right networks are anyone who attends a conference or a lecture or shares an internet clip she doesn’t like. Far right networks are millions of ordinary voters with views she doesn’t share. Far right networks are people who think the wrong thoughts. This is not my interpretation. She announces this in her own words.
The definition of far right is broad and flexible enough to simply designate anyone they want it to designate. Anyone who argues against the policies of the German State. Anyone who mocks the State or its policies. Anyone who opposes anything!
And how will these people be treated? Imprisonment. Seizure of assets and bank accounts. Removal from the public sphere. The definition of the allowable response is again broad and vague enough to include pretty much anything and reverse any and all existing civil liberties.
All based on crimes of wrongthink and all by the curious reversal of describing enforcing total control as protecting Democracy.
What Germany today openly declares, is the model the western world is embarked on as a whole. Once again, Germany wants tyranny. And this is a far more real threat than Vladimir Putin.
Today's selection -- from Iconic by Miles S. Nadal and Ken Gross. The fate of the iconic Bugatti brand:
“Bugatti was founded in 1909 in the town of Molsheim, in the Alsace region of France, along the Swiss and German borders. Specializing in building fast cars, Italian-born founder Ettore Bugatti built some of the most legendary racecars of the 1920s and 1930s. His finest creation, the 57SC Atlantic, was created in conjunction with his talented son, Jean. Only four were ever made, one of which belongs to iconic fashion designer Ralph Lauren.
“Unfortunately, financial problems forced the Bugatti family out of the auto industry shortly after the end of World War II. But that wasn’t the end of the Bugatti story. After several failed attempts to revive the brand, it was purchased by the Volkswagen Group, who were looking for an elegant brand with serious competition history. VW chairman Ferdinand Piech immediately announced a bold plan to build a 1,000-bhp, 250-mph supercar. The seeds for the Veyron were sown.
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| Bugatti Veyron Fbg par Hermès |
“Named after Pierre Veyron, a top driver for the Bugatti factory team in the 1930s, the Veyron was an audacious mechanical marvel that easily lived up to its promotional hype. The technical specifications are remarkable, even today. Equipped with four turbochargers, its alloy mid-mounted eight-liter V16 produces 1,001 bhp and 992 foot-pounds of torque. The transmission is a seven-speed, dual-clutch DSG with launch control that can be operated manually or automatically. Zero to 60 mph is achieved in 2.5 seconds and top speed clocks in at 253 mph.
“‘What Bugatti has done with the Veyron has altered the accepted parameters of car manufacture,’ said noted author Martin Roach. Bugatti planned to build three hundred examples—and they sold them all. This car was purchased from Bugatti Beverly Hills by American Idol star Simon Cowell, who drove it only 1,300 miles before trading it in, whereupon it became the first certified pre-owned Bugatti in a special new program.”
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| author: Miles S. Nadal, Ken Gross | |||
| title: Iconic: Art, Design, Advertising, and the Automobile | |||
| publisher: Assouline | |||
| date: | |||
| page(s): 60 |
