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Yes, it is a steep, crash-and-burn decline. But I have not forgotten Jeremiah 18:7,8 : "The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it."
Arnaud Bertrand provides a precis of the Washington Post story on the explosive Rand Think Tank report:
"This is explosive stuff. It says, "The United States might be stumbling toward a decline from which few great powers have ever recovered."
"The study describes this decline as “accelerating” and doesn't seem optimistic about recovery: “Recovery from significant long-term national decline is rare and difficult to detect in the historical record. [...] When great powers have slid from a position of preeminence or leadership because of domestic factors, they seldom reversed this trend.”
"What causes the decline? Pretty much everything you'd expect: “military overstretch,” “self-interested and warring elites,” “Addiction to luxury and decadence,” “failure to keep pace with … technological demands,” “ossified” bureaucracy, “loss of civic virtue,” “unsustainable environmental practices”, etc.
Is the sun slowly setting on U.S. power? That depends on us, @IgnatiusPost writes. https://wapo.st/49WjZGV
12:07 PM · Apr 27, 2024
Serious numbers of migrants arrived in Massachusetts from 1630 - 1640. Roughly 21,000. By 1700 they had become 91,000. Their immediate priorities: having families, building farms, forming towns, and building institutions Old England never developed on local levels. But the new Americans didn’t just reproduce the country they left. They built institutions England didn’t yet have.
Year 1 — a seagoing vessel launched at Medford, 4 July 1631. The shipwrights had been sent out in 1629, ahead of the fleet.
Year 4 — representative government. Elected deputies sitting in the General Court.
Year 6 — Harvard. £400 voted for “a schoale or colledge.”
Year 8 — a printing press, the only one in British North America. Glover died on the voyage out; his widow Elizabeth moved the operation to Cambridge and got it running.
Year 10 — the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in America.
Year 11 — the Body of Liberties, read aloud at every General Court.
Year 12 — the 1642 law: every ...
