Here is one of the best commentaries so far this year.

[Koch Ebola]

I couldn't have said it better myself
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/03/13/dance-death

[PsychoBabble]

1. an opening excerpt ...

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus.

[roscoeroscoe]

2. Yipes

That hurt

[SummerSnow]

3. Wow, this is a great article. Thanks for posting.

[KT2000]

4. as in the British Empire -

they could not find men who were healthy enough to fight the wars for the elites. The destruction of society, at the expense of expansion and military incursions left them with a populous too physically compromised to fight.

The end of capitalism is cannibalism because they will not stop.

[Binkie The Clown]

5. Take heed.

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus.

[Squinch]

6. Great article, but it only applies to one segment of our society: white men. White men are, indeed,

facing a collapse of their ascendency. But women and people of color are doing better than they have done in the past. We are not in the death throes of our culture. We are only beginning to emerge. And as we emerge, we have a lot more resilience as independent forces than the white men who always owned the fruits of our labor in the past.

They are going down and they are striking out, and Trump is the manifestation of that, but this is not a culture-wide condition.