TimoMalum.com

The World Can Move On Without The United States.

"The world can move on without the United States.

100 years ago the British Empire dominated global commerce, commanding more than 20% of the world's wealth. Many believed its sun would never set.

200 years ago, France bestrode Europe's stage, its armies feared, its culture envied. Napoleon declared himself immortal.

400 years ago, the Spanish crown reigned from Manila to Mexico, its treasure fleets groaning with silver and silk. The kings thought their glory would last eternal.

Each empire proclaimed itself indispensable. Each was ultimately eclipsed.

Power wanes, influence migrates, and legitimacy dies the moment it's assumed rather than earned. Should America forfeit the world's respect, it will discover what every fallen empire learned too late:

The world moves on. Always."

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I recently found this on social media. It's a tweet on X attributed to China's President Xi Jinping, but even though it has a blue check to verify its authenticity, my research indicates neither the president nor his top staff actually have accounts on X. I have no way to know for sure, but regardless, what the tweet says is all that matters. It gives examples of how past empires are just that: past. And no one misses them. 

As the United States stumbles and stalls, horribly divided from within and threatened from both within and without, it might be wise to compare our situation today with the situations previous empires faced before they fell. There are frightening similarities, the top one possibly being that we think we're too big and powerful to fail.

History teaches us that as the wheel of time turns round, eventually one nation drops and a new one rises to the top.

And the world moves on. Always.

We Tried To Warn You.

But it's not too late to start.

The Moral Rot At The Heart Of Civilization.

by Nate Bear

This civilization is letting a genocide happen.

Israel and the west are to blame for the genocide but not one country, bar Yemen, has come to the material aid of the Palestinians.

Not one government in the entire world has done anything.

Shout-out to Hezbollah and a few militant groups in Iraq. Well done South Africa for bringing the ICC case against Netanyahu and his fellow Zionazis.

But no government on Earth used its state capacity, used its navy or its air force or its army to do anything to help the Palestinians.

A military mission to stop Israel would have been nice. No-fly zones and the like, with the threat of force. But in the absence of that, many of us would have settled for a humanitarian mission, a country or countries sending a fleet of ships and planes to deliver aid, come what may.

These vehicles could have been unarmed. The country or countries could have made it very clear to Israel this was solely a humanitarian mission, it would have called their bluff and created a stark binary choice: bomb unarmed aid ships of a nation state, effectively a declaration of war, or let them through.

But no, nothing. Looking at a list of the roughly two hundred countries in the world, well over half would have the capacity to send aid via air force or navy assets.

On the ladder of complicity in genocide, the western states supplying Israel with the military equipment and political cover for genocide sit on the top rung, but the countries with the greatest capacity to have done something, to have carried out a humanitarian mission, must sit on the next rung down.

In the end it has just been empty words of condemnation and a few symbolic gestures on trade.

In the end it has come down to a handful of activists on a crowdfunded sailing boat to be the moral conscience of the world and do something not one single country in the world did.

It’s hard to get your head around.

This inaction and apathy in the face of an actual genocide, in response to twenty months of 4k videos of children being shredded, blown up, ripped apart, beheaded, burnt alive and starved, signals a deeper moral rot at the heart of our societies.

A moral rot that cannot be separated from neo-liberalism and how money and profit have come to dominate our brains, dominate our political systems and dominate our world.

When it comes to a unifying vision for society, the only thing most of us ever hear from our governments is one word: growth.

Growth is the spiritual center around which the entirety of our politics is orientated. And it doesn’t mean anything at all! We can’t be richer. We have all the food and technology and money we could possibly need. We have never lived in more abundant times. The richest people are richer than countries. Footballers and tennis players are billionaires. The idea that if we just had another one, five, ten percent of economic growth we could create that extra bit more we need and solve all the problems is actually a comical insult to our intelligence.

Yet this is the myth and the legend that underpins all of modern politics. This is the story that so many people fall for and buy in to. Growth is the secular religion for an areligious age. And as such, it must be worshiped. Anything that creates growth is to be lauded and encouraged, and anything that hampers it is to be rejected. To speak out against growth is a crime against the religion.

Even a genocide must be no obstacle to growth.

Which is why, just a few days after the UK’s defense secretary David Lammy said the country had suspended trade talks with Israel (because even the genocide enablers in the British government couldn’t justify starving children), the UK’s trade envoy to Israel was live tweeting from Tel Aviv about his trade mission to the country.

The moral cesspit of neo-liberalism looks at a genocide on the one hand, and a percentage point of growth on the other, and chooses growth every time.

A few weeks ago I revealed that the son of the attorney general for the Conservative Party in the UK, (Lord) David Wolfson, who was a minister in Boris Johnson’s government, is a soldier in the IDF. Sam Wolfson went to Israel to join the IDF in 2022, participated in the genocide, and only returned to London earlier this year. He’s now working at the right-wing neo-liberal think tank Policy Exchange, because killing civilians and doing a new holocaust, rather than being an obstacle to a career path, is a valued skill. The more death you create, the more doors you open and the richer and more powerful you can be.

Neo-liberalism enthusiastically rewards death-eating immorality.

Just look around!

From Donald Trump to Elon Musk to Tony Blair to Joe Biden to Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel to Jeff Bezos to the bank bosses to the arms company bosses to the fossil fuel CEOs. Boringly the list goes on and on and on and on. Some of quite literally the worst people in the history of the world with the most blood on their hands are the richest people with the most power.

Neo-liberal economics has created a moral cesspit of a civilization in which there’s no financial upside in stopping a genocide.

On the contrary, the financial upside is in genocide.

From the American mercenaries running the sham aid distributions centers in Gaza, to the software being provided by Google, Microsoft and Meta to smooth the genocide, to the AI being provided by Palantir to track the Palestinians, to the missiles being provided by Lockheed Martin to liquify them.

The money is in the killing, not the saving.

The money is in the enabling, not the stopping.

The money is in the trade deals and the good relations.

Morality is all downside.

This is why I cannot stand to look at the faux moral posturing over Ukraine by the west. The truth? The money is in keeping that war going, funding Ukraine, rearming Europe. Latest estimates are that the war has caused 1.4 million casualties. These are absolutely horrifying numbers. Wanting more dead young men isn’t moral. Supporting Ukraine has nothing to do with good or bad, right or wrong. It’s only about blood money, resources and strategic interests.

And this moral cesspit of a civilization is one in which we all swim, whether we like it or not.

How many times have you said to someone “X should happen because it would be good” or “Y shouldn’t happen because it’s bad” and their sincere response, hollowed of all morality, has been along the lines of: but who would pay for it/there’s no money in it.

Our brains and value systems have been rewired to think about the world only in terms of money and profit.

This is why the foundations of our existence as biological beings - the air, the soil, the water - are being demolished. The money is in death, not in life. Good or bad and right or wrong don’t enter the calculation.

It’s hard to look at this civilization, a civilization tearing down the pillars of our own existence, a civilization that allowed a genocide to happen in such a visible way, and see any redeeming features.

People are worth saving. Beauty is worth saving. The animals and the rivers and the seas and the ecology are worth saving. But from the political to the economic to the legal, institutionally there’s nothing worth saving.

The liberals and the centrists have had their shot at reforming this mess. But the contradictions at the heart of their ideology (capitalists, but good ones!) couldn’t be resolved, and they’ve only ended up perpetuating the horrors of the system.

I’ve said it before but I’ve never felt it more keenly than after watching the west collaborate on genocide and the rest of the world do nothing to stop it: the future will be radically pro-social and anti-capitalist or there won’t be a future at all.

[republished by permission of Nate Bear / 'Do Not Panic' on Substack]

Our World No Longer Hears God.

"Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. 

Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. 

Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. 

Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. 

Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? 

How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. 

The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.”

—Cardinal Robert Sarah

Question Everything.

The deep state exists. Conspiracies exist. The government lies. The media lies. There is an agenda, and it involves YOU.

Question everything.

Government Is A Disease.

"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure." - Robert LeFevre

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." - Ayn Rand

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - Theodore Roosevelt

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” - Thomas Paine

“The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in.” - Harper Lee

"Government begins by protecting some against others and ends up protecting itself against everyone." - Robert LeFevre

“Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure” -- Alexis de Tocqueville