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Grant writes about the The Fall of the Roman Empire, in his book by that title. He focuses on “the decay wrought by clinging to the alluring fantasy that past success guarantees future success, without any nasty sacrifices by the ruling elites.”
"Enmeshed in classical history, all [the Roman] can do is lapse into vague sermonizing, telling other Romans, as many a moralist had told them throughout the centuries, that they must undergo an ethical regeneration and return to the simplicities and self-sacrifices of their ancestors.
There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. His whole attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.
This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.
This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions,
there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all."
“Roman elites in Gaul were still writing letters to one another complaining of the breakdown of everyday life right up until the system collapsed.”
Any investment in bioscience research comes with 100% risk because one never knows if a particular strategy will produce beneficial outcomes.
Publicly traded pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and the only sure way to generate profits is through regulatory capture.
So Big Pharma just lies about its products and buys off the regulators (and the politicians and the media) every time.
The biggest profits come from giving a drug to the entire population in the name of preventive care — vaccines and now statins.
By pathologizing natural human emotions, the makers of psychopharmaceuticals also seek to sell treatments to nearly the entire population.
Causing harm increases profits by 100x or more (a single injury can produce a lifetime of profitable treatments).
Said simply, causing harm and disease massively increases the size of the market for pharmaceutical products so that’s Big Pharma’s business model today.
Dr. Toby Rogers
The “Putin apologist” smear is as omnipresent today as the same kind of smear was in 2002 in the US, deployed against anyone who questioned the wisdom of the coming war on Iraq. It’s designed to shut down thought. As usual, Hungary is the one dissenter from the EU consensus.
Rod Dreher
The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:
First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
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