Global Warming And Other Things

 

Yesterday was freezing, as in doomed retreats from Moscow. Today was hot, T shirt hot. Such is our fickle enemy, the WEATHER. Global Warming aside, or is it Climate Change?, we pulled into an ersatz burger franchise after Mass #2. The Specialist was hungry, "Dad, I'm really hungry, I have to eat!" 

I didn't say "bill it to the Army" and dutifully drove in to a drive through, where the attendants were indecipherable because they were wearing NKVD 95 masks. It was like one of my kid's dystopian computer games, mumble... mumble. "Say again," and so they did, "$5.67, four cheeseburgers."

Fortified by fake hamburgers and wondering why $4.67 has miraculously turned into $5.67, have these facsimile burgers somehow gained in value?, we drove back to the Compound where everything was well.

Shotgun by the door, check (older 870 Wingmaster). Aged Blue Heeler asleep on a Moslem rug, check. Sun shining, yes please and thank you God, decent red wine? Obvs. All good and time for a nap I thought, after all, a workman deserves his wages.

No sooner done than a knock on the door, "Can I come in, are you decent?" Resisting the urge to bellow damn your insolence! I replied "sure." The boy wanted me to look at his laptop, which I did. What the Devil is this?

A pass grade on his CS degree practice semester test. Well done, young man. Now take the real deal and ace it.

Point being, gentlemen and gentlewomen, life is made up of small victories. As in, "Crush the Marxist snake underheel."

Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam,

LSP

The New Feudalism?

Hilaire Belloc wrote this, in Europe and the Faith (1920) about the fall of the Roman Empire. 

All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old, failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local government subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five hundred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry soldiers benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the local "palaces" as they were called, of Roman administration, secured such revenues as the remains of Roman taxation could give them, and, conversely, had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as the decline of civilization could still maintain. That is what happened, and that is all that happened.

All that happened? Belloc was known for hyperbole and he was busy refuting a false view of history in the wake of World War I. Still, his insight into the murky transition of the Western Roman Empire into the Dark Ages and medievalism is well worth the read, to my mind at least. 

Check it out if you have the time. But what's always grabbed my attention is this, The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence.

His point being that power began to coalesce into the hands of increasingly wealthy landowners at the expense of central government. Landowners who were effectively exempt from taxation and at the command, he argues, of military force. A small step from that to feudalism, and so to today.

According to Zerohedge and Forbes, Bill Gates in his wisdom has acquired over 200,000 acres of farmland in the US. Likewise, media mogul John Malone owns 2.2 million acres and CNN founder Ted Turner 2 million.

That's a lot of land, which by the way isn't being made anymore, and it doesn't take a vast amount of insight to draw the Roman parallel. Where will it end? Most obviously, to people being villains, serfs and tenant farmers on their billionaire socialist rulers' land. Also to devolution and Balkanization. History evidently rhymes.

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam,

LSP