decay of civilization

Deep States and the Modern American Citizen

The issue of `deep states’ had drawn the attention of at least some mainstream journalists for an instant or so around February of 2014 because of a very interesting article by Mike Lofgren, a former Senate staffer; I’ll get to that article in a short while. The attention seems to have been a flash in … [Read more…]

National Security Intelligence Analysis as Mind-shaping

Col Pat Lang (ret), a Green Beret and military intelligence officer, has written another of many short and authoritative commentaries on the current messes which are the US civilian government and US military. Of the two, the military seems to be the far lesser mess, even to the point of being reformable so long as … [Read more…]

Unreliable Memories, Minds Like Silly Putty

My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins … [Read more…]

We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation

Judith Curry is Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Curry’s blog is well worth reading for reliable commentary on climate science and more general matters of science practice and of public policy in its relationship to science. One of her recent articles, More scientific … [Read more…]

Political Philosophies Are Bound to Be Bad When Creation is Poorly Understood

In a short essay recently published under the byline of the staff of The American Conservative, Higher Culture, Better Politics, an argument is made which is in the right direction but steps into the water as the boat is pulling away from the dock: When a movement neglects culture and philosophy, one can be sure … [Read more…]

Simple Is Digested Complexity

It’s natural for most human beings to seek simple understandings. They correspond at least roughly to the simple (or elegant) understandings which are a goal of many theorists in the sciences which have a large mathematical component. Einstein pointed out that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler. Closer to ordinary … [Read more…]

We Need to Act in the Spirit of St Benedict, Not Just to Mindlessly Repeat His Acts

Folks who would be conservative, who would preserve what is good and even holy in the heritage of Western Civilization, still don’t get it. At least not fully, but some are trying hard to figure out what to do in a decaying and possibly collapsing West and some of those are risking their futures in … [Read more…]

Maybe the Resulting Culture(s) is the True Measure of a Country’s Educational Systems?

In a typically intelligent way, Steve Sailor discusses the latest results from PISA, the educational tests which basically cover the `rich’ (OECD) countries. The article is here, PISA, Piece by Piece, and is worth reading. They say the proof is in the pudding and I’d claim the pudding for education is the resulting culture. As … [Read more…]

Multiculturalism: Throwing Ourselves and Our Children into the Trash-bin of History

Srdja Trifkovic wrote of Jean Raspail’s New Warning on the website of Chronicles Magazine. Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1973; that novel was a controversial take on immigration and multiculturalism; it depicted France decaying into a state of violent incoherence in a multicultural age. Forty years after publishing his prophetic dystopia Jean … [Read more…]