Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

This is the how the managerial class that currently controls the United States is thinking about maintaining population growth for as long as possible - through a "medium immigration" scenario that results in the highest percentage of foreigners in the nation's history.

I think the pandemic and rapid decline in health of the native population took them by surprise and now they are wildly dialing the controls - like panicked monkeys trying to keep a crashing Boeing jetliner in the air.

With most countries that have any immigrants anybody else would want being below replacement, every country will have to earn their immigrants. That means being competitive and having an immigration system that is something besides a wide open border. A wide open border is a sure way not to be competitive. We saw how Japan is doing it awhile back.

The Census Bureau sees an older, more diverse America in 2100 in three immigration scenarios

Here’s a look at how the U.S. population is expected to change through 2100, using the medium immigration scenario.

2020s
By 2029, older adults will outnumber children, with 71 million U.S. residents aged 65 and older and 69 million residents under age 18.

The numeric superiority of seniors will mean fewer workers. Combined with children, they’ll represent 40% of the population. Only around 60% of the population that is of working age — between 18 and 64 — will be paying the bulk of taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

2030s
“Natural increase” in the U.S. will go negative in 2038, meaning deaths outpacing births due to an aging population and declines in fertility. The Census projects 13,000 more deaths than births in the U.S., and that shortfall grows to 1.2 million more deaths than births by 2100.

2050s
By 2050, the share of the U.S. population that is white and not Hispanic will be under 50% for the first time.

Currently, 58.9% of U.S. residents are white and not Hispanic. By 2050, Hispanic residents will account for a quarter of the U.S. population, up from 19.1% today. African Americans will make up 14.4% of the population, up from 13.6% currently. Asians will account for 8.6% of the population, up from 6.2% today.

Also in the 2050s, Asians will surpass Hispanics as the largest group of immigrants by race or ethnicity.

2060s
The increasing diversity of the nation will be most noticeable in children. By the 2060s, non-Hispanic white children will be a third of the population under age 18, compared to under half currently.

2080s
Under that medium immigration scenario, the U.S. population peaks at more than 369 million residents in 2081. After that, the Census Bureau predicts a slight population decline, with deaths outpacing births and immigration.

2090s
By the end of the 2090s, the foreign population will make up almost 19.5% of U.S. residents, the highest share since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1850. The highest rate previously was 14.8% in 1890. It currently is 13.9%.

https://apnews.com/article/growth-popul ... ba5d7cdade

[Higgenbotham]

"The population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover."

This hasn't happened yet, but if 14th Century timelines continue to hold, permanent population depletion will happen (in the US) within 5 years and maybe 10 at the outside. It's already happened in the former Soviet Union.

In 2015, for the first time, there were more white deaths in the U.S. than white births.

https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/blog/2019/ ... r-forever/

Even the official government numbers showed my prediction to be correct and right on schedule. Unless you want to count all the illegals and their offspring.

[Higgenbotham]

This was posted in the news thread in May 2021.

The Coming Dark Age

Blog/Understanding Cycles

Posted Sep 20, 2016 by Martin Armstrong

These are the key points I've taken from Armstrong's blog entry.

The cause is always political corruption.

Coinage is debased because of the corruption in government. The system as we know it is always doomed to failure simply because we are satisfied as a whole with bread and circuses and let politicians run wild in their greed.

We can understand what is coming and WHY, and perhaps take that first step out of darkness and move into the light of a realistic political system that ends the bribing of citizens and this eternal battle of political corruption.

These are some of the general thoughts I've had on the topic posted here over the years.

I'm going to make a novice attempt to define the difference between the beginning of a Dark Age and a typical fourth turning crisis era.

First attempt: A Dark Age is defined as the social and political breakdown of a regional or world hegemonic power which creates a power vacuum for which there is no clear and immediate successor.

Now I'll use Tuchman's words to further attempt to define a Dark Age.

"Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse."

This is a clear distinction in my view and we are seeing Dark Age behaviors today, behaviors that have not been seen to this extent in seven centuries. As the financial crimes go unprosecuted, the consciousness of that knowledge has apparently increased the willingness to commit even bigger financial crimes.

"Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God."

Another clear distinction. Today's dominant institution, the nation-state, which displaced the decrepit 14th century institutions, is failing in its functions, is not protecting, and is morally bankrupt.

"The towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war."

This hasn't happened yet, but the flash mobs, Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street movements are probably the beginning of the mutual hostilities and class war.

"The population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover."

This hasn't happened yet, but if 14th Century timelines continue to hold, permanent population depletion will happen (in the US) within 5 years and maybe 10 at the outside. It's already happened in the former Soviet Union.

"The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness."

Already discussed somewhat above, and there does seem to be a deep and pervasive uneasiness.

"The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task."

Already discussed somewhat above, and the Occupy Wall Street crowd, for example, clearly does seem inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task of governance. If we are entering a Dark Age, it will be found that nobody can govern and part of the reason, I believe, is simply that the US as it exists is ungovernable. As mentioned before, I don't think any dictator in his right mind will want to take over the US and try to restore order because it can't be done. Also, see my definition above.

"They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came."

I believe this in a nutshell is the future for the next several decades at least.

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.

The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
By Spengler

The essay below appears as a preface to my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too).

Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. [1] If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.

Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Eco ... 3Dj05.html

A permanent reduction in population over some time scale longer than, say, a saeculum seems to be characteristic of a Dark Age as opposed to a normal crisis period. Naturally, this is a case of arbitrarily defining something as opposed to something else and giving it a name.

So how could a scale of population reduction that is 10 times that of the prior saeculum occur? My thesis is that a Dark Age scale population reduction can only come about through large scale individual moral and institutional failure. This is harder to quantify, but my previous post describes what that looks like as opposed to typical crisis period failure.

"Spengler's" article linked above elaborates on the meaning of the above 2 paragraphs posted a few months back.

Within the past 45 years, rationalizations for furthering the death of culture and civilization have been encoded into the belief system of the Western nation-state. As "Spengler" points out, it is beyond fixing. It's no longer understood exactly what it is that perpetuates a culture and a civilization and what does not. Technological progress does not and "Spengler" adequately points out the disadvantages of emphasizing technological progress on the birthrate and the linkage of that to a descent into a Dark Age (he doesn't use that exact term but alludes to it) but, at the same time, civilizations that encroach on indigenous or technologically inferior cultures cannibalize the cultures that they come into contact with. There doesn't seem to be any way out of that trap.

The tipping point will be reached when there is nothing left to borrow from the future and nothing left on the periphery to cannibalize.

I think your dark ages theme points out some stark realities on ethics...

Back in late 2011 I posted:

My thesis is that a Dark Age scale population reduction can only come about through large scale individual moral and institutional failure.

I think it has to be, at its root, an ethics problem. There are a lot of commonalities to, let's say, the pervasive belief that it is acceptable for an institution not to be Triple A, not to have pristine credit. It's become acceptable, even considered preferable, not to be or exhibit pristine anything on both an individual and institutional level.

[Higgenbotham]

One issue with population projections based on massive immigration is that you have to get the people from somewhere in a world with massively declining birthrates and most countries below replacement, with more joining them as the years roll by, as "Spengler" discussed in one section of the above post. Which takes us back to the first graphic I posted - the areas of the world that are above and below replacement (except I found one that is updated).

Therefore, every country can make upward population projections based on massive immigration or plan to double the number of guest workers they bring in, etc., if they so desire, but it's not realistically achievable.



]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ountry.svg

[Higgenbotham]

Last weekend, I had a wide ranging 2 hour conversation with a young woman (age 18) who is the daughter of immigrants to the US. I've noticed many immigrants don't think this is the land of milk and honey once they've been here for awhile, but some of the things this young woman said were quite surprising to me.

I don't use the words "dark age" when talking to people in real life, but several topics that have been discussed in this virtual dark age hovel came up. She asked me what I thought of AI. I said the first thing that comes to mind with regard to any new technology is whether you believe the civilization is on the ascent or the decline. If you believe the civilization is on the ascent, and you are right about that, then AI will probably on net be a positive and force for good. However, if you believe that the civilization is on the decline...at which point she interjected, "Oh, definitely!"...and then I finished my thought.

She is a bright girl and has been accepted to The University of Texas at Austin to study Chemical Engineering. However, her plan is to attend community college for 2 years to save money, then transfer. She also told me she plans to leave the United States.

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: ... 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

https://www.semafor.com/article/05/28/2 ... s-politics

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but looking in someone's eyes and seeing their conviction might be a little different than reading about a poll.

According to a Gallup poll from January 2019, 16% of Americans, including 40% of women under the age of 30, would like to leave the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigratio ... ted_States

[Higgenbotham]

Finally, leaving the United States was a hot topic in the Archdruid's Open Post this month. The Archdruid himself is planning to leave for reasons he has stated. Probably best to read it directly from him, but my impression is that he believes a domestic insurgency (this is the word he is using, not insurrection) is coming soon and the country will become very dangerous. I don't have time now, but may excerpt those discussions later.

https://www.ecosophia.net/august-2024-open-post/

https://www.ecosophia.net/august-2024-o ... ent-121789
https://www.ecosophia.net/august-2024-o ... ent-121804 (scroll)

There were several more posts discussing the topic of leaving the US if I recall correctly.

[Higgenbotham]

I went direct to the source to find the JD Vance "childless cat ladies" comment.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6265796735001

This is not going to go away, in my opinion, and unless there is a serious recession taking hold between now and election day that Trump can pin on the Democrats, it could cost him the election.

I said, "This is not going to go away..." and it looks like I was wrong. Kamala has easily trumped Vance and she makes Vance look like a genius in comparison. Amazing.

https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/18 ... 8468950444
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/18 ... 1021762757 <--------- the winds of change
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/18 ... 4079774838

[FullMoon]

Kamala has easily trumped Vance and she makes Vance look like a genius in comparison. Amazing.

Substance in politics doesn't get attention. Sound bites do. Appearing to have substance whilst only using sound bites is their only strategy. They'll say anything and away with the wind. It used to be considered a sign of a bad politician. We're devolved greatly in that short of time. In what is only a show of democracy. Bread and circuses for the masses.

[Higgenbotham]

The weapon is based on technology where the adversary has a large technical advantage. The US is the leader in biotechnology.

The weapon is based on technology where the adversary has a large technical advantage.

The genetic sequence for the SARS-COV2 virus was uploaded by Chinese scientists. Moderna used Chinese information to create their injection.

I didn't answer this post, but the way I would have answered it at the time would have been to say that sequencing a virus is easy due to its small size and the first party who had the virus would be able to sequence it, whether it was the US or China. I would have also said that, generally speaking, sequencing is a US technology, which the US leads in.

However, a recent news article says:

“The wheat genome is full of ­little retro elements and that has made it more difficult and, crucially, more expensive to sequence,” said Griffiths. “However, thanks to our Chinese colleagues who carried out the detailed sequencing work, we have overcome that problem.”

Griffiths and his colleagues sent samples from the Watkins collection to Cheng and were rewarded three months later with the arrival of a suitcase crammed with hard drives. These contained a petabyte – one million gigabytes – of data that had been decoded by the Chinese group using the Watkins collection.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/art ... ntists-say

Also, it came to light this year that the Chinese had sequenced the covid virus before December 28, 2019, which was the day it was uploaded into a US database for the first time (not in January 2020, as originally thought).

[aeden]

We touched on that topic who funded and who built as the dragonfly notes.
Essentially correct timeline as the welds and structural operations from the infra red observations.
Truman was also correct what they forward today also.
One was spared to tell His People.