big business – The Burning Platform

The Metaphysics Underlying The Sunset of the West

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

-Proverbs 16:25

The heart is deceitful above all things…

-Jeremiah 17:9

When small men cast big shadows, it means the sun is setting.

– Lin Yutang, Chinese philosopher

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Upon the recommendation of a blog commenter, I recently read “The Crisis of Modernity” by Italian professor and philosopher, Augusto Del Noce (1910 – 1989). The book was published in 2014 and is a brilliant compilation of twentieth-century essays and speeches by Del Noce. His philosophical insights are profound and his conclusions and societal predictions, especially regarding Scientism and the Technocracy, are eerily similar to those of English author and theologian C.S. Lewis – see my previous posts entitled “The Abolition of Man Amid the Consequences of Reality”, and “Gnostic Parasitism in the Post-Modern Simulacrum”, and “A Postmortem on Postmodernism”.

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FOURTH TURNING ELECTION YEAR CRISIS

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“There is no darkness but ignorance. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” William Shakespeare

I read The Fourth Turning in 2006, after seeing it described in John Mauldin and Doug Casey’s newsletters as an uncannily accurate assessment of American history based upon generational configurations which recur on eighty-year cycles, a long human life. Strauss and Howe wrote the book in 1997 and used their generational theory to predict the Crisis that would begin in the mid-2000’s and come to an indeterminate climax in the mid-2020’s.

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The Monopolization of America

Guest Post by David Leonhardt

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In one industry after another, big companies have become more dominant over the past 15 years, new data show.

The popular telling of the Boston Tea Party gets something wrong. The colonists were not responding to a tax increase. They were responding to the Tea Act of 1773, which granted a tea monopoly in the colonies to the well-connected East India Company. Merchants based in the Americas would be shut out of the market.

Many colonists, already upset about taxation without representation and other indignities, were enraged. In response, dozens of them stormed three ships in Boston Harbor on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, and tossed chests of East India tea — “that worst of plagues, the detested tea,” as one pamphlet put it — into the water.

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Chart of the Day – America’s Prison Population Over the Past 100 Years

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

There are 2.3 million Americans in prison or jail. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. One in three black men can expect to spend time in prison. There are 2.7 million minors with an incarcerated parent. The imprisonment rate has grown by more than 400 percent since 1970.

Recent research suggests that incarceration has lost its potency. A report released this week from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law finds that increased incarceration has had a very limited effect on crime over the past two and a half decades.

– From today’s Five-Thrity-Eight article: The Imprisoner’s Dilemma

The sickening and absurd rate of incarceration in these United States has been a frequent topic of conversation here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the years (links at the end). In our national insanity, the U.S. has only 5% of the worlds population, yet 25% of its prisoners. Many of these people have no business being locked in a cage to begin with, and are wasting their lives away for committing “victimless crimes,” i.e. for no good reason.

While the immorality of locking up so many of our fellow citizens for non-crimes should be readily apparent, today’s article from Five-Thirty-Eight offers evidence that America’s incarceration rate has become so saturated that it has absolutely no meaningful impact in lowering crimes rates anyway. The time for prison reform and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences is long overdue.

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