I was listening to the great Howie Carr the other day and this was a topic for a segment or two. For those who hate watching news videos on-line, the very short version is retailers are shrinking their products while keeping the price the same. This, allegedly, inadvertently games the inflation numbers. A candy bar may remain $1.25, but it is 80% of its original size. The bag of sugar at the market went from five pounds to two kilos, which is roughly 4.5 pounds.

That last trick is common with beverages. A fifth of liquor is now sold as 500ML. A fifth is roughly 25 ounces, while 500ML is 17 ounces. They will mess with the shape of the bottle so it tricks the eye. This may sound like a small thing, but consider this. The tax on alcohol is roughly $23 per gallon. That means the booze maker saves $1.30 on taxes, plus the cost of tax collection and the cost of manufacturing his product. (Cheap liquor is not distilled. It is mixed at plants using water, flavorings and commercial alcohol.) Multiply that over a million bottles and you have real money.

I’ve noticed this all over the grocery market. I’m not insane so I have a sensible diet composing mostly meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. This has been true for most of my life so I tend to buy the same supplies every week. I’m an eat to live, not live to eat person. That means I can have the same thing for breakfast everyday for a year if it is convenient. It also means I notice when my grocery bill changes or when my food shrinks. Since the crash, my food bill has gone up close to 30%. I could get out for about $70 a week and now it is rarely under $100. Like the price of gasoline, food is much more expensive now than a decade ago, even though we are told there has been no inflation.

That’s the fundamental dishonesty at work. We live in a time when lying about everything is so common, no one notices. Ours is a dishonestly culture. The dick heads who came up with the idea to shrink the food are not the first to think of it. Long ago in a country far far away I was told about the pickle maker who hired a new plant manager. Soon, the plant was much more profitable so the owner went to see how it was done. The manager told him how he increased profits by removing one pickle from each jar. That means every ten jars netted him one free jar of pickles he could sell!

The owner fired his manager. The reason was the manager was not just cheating the customers, he was cheating the owner. The “savings” were eventually going to cost the owner business. In other words, they were not savings, they were accrued costs. Somewhere down the line that accrual would reverse out and someone would have to pay, most likely the owner. This is the most basic form of intergenerational theft. That’s spending tomorrow’s profits today. It creates a liability that has to be paid tomorrow.

The fact that the food makers are lying to us is not a stunning development. The standard has been set by public officials who lie so much it is impossible to know the truth. They lie on spec, as the gangsters say. Politicians have always lied, but it became the centerpiece of their morality in the Clinton years. This is when steaming piles of human filth like James Carville took over public discourse. They gave us the word “spin room” which is a cute phrase for the place where they orchestrate a campaign of lies to deceive the public. If you have been living in America for the past 25 years, you have become so use to the casual dishonestly from the ruling class, it now seems immoral to be honest.

That last bit is not always obvious either. In a world where there is no truth, you can easily miss what’s happening. In the last election, Herman Cain was driven from the field because he liked getting freaky with co-workers. The people shrieking in outrage, however, spent the 1990′s defending a man who was a serial rapist and was impeached for shoving cigars into fat interns. The same people who lionized Hillary Clinton for sticking by her man, mocked Cain’s old lady or doing the same. If you need proof we live in an insane asylum, it is right there. (Cain’s defects as a candidate is not the point here)

All of this is predictable. When one religion so throughly dominates, it is impossible to tell the secular institutions from the religious ones, society descends into madness. The Founders understood this and worked to shape public institutions that were weak. They also worked to make it tough for one religion to dominate the rest. The theory being that if no one could hope to have control of the public institutions, they would work to prevent others from it and the result would be a preservation of republican government. They never anticipated what was going to come from the French Revolution.

It is comforting to think that there is a limit to this. You can only shrink the food so far. You can only hide the money creating and debt spiral for so long. Mathematics says there are limits and once those limits are reached, the game is up. I’m not so optimistic. It may be comforting to think there are still enough citizens willing to fight to keep the country, but that’s probably a fantasy. The overwhelming majority want the custodial state and will fight anyone who tries to stop them. No matter how much and how often the Cult lies to them, they will trust the Cult before they trust themselves.

When you live in a diverse neighborhood, you learn a lot of about race.  Not just the stuff the Cult preaches about either. That’s something you learn too. The Cult knows nothing about race. No, you find out quickly that race is not just a social construct and it is not just a white-black, master and servant thing. This is a big world with a lot of tribes living in isolation for very long periods of time. As a result, certain group characteristics have been baked into the cake. Most of what we are is the result of a relatively small number of people cross-breeding for thousands of years. The result is what we see. The fact that this was obvious to people for thousands of years, but is now a taboo is one of the great mysteries of human history.

In my little slice of heaven, we have a lot of blacks, a growing number of pre-Columbians, Koreans and a growing number of sub-Continentals. The folks from the sub-Continent are mostly Hindus, but we have some Pakistanis and Nepalese. Whites remain a majority overall, but it s a very slim majority and it is shrinking. They own the nice homes in the less congested areas of town. Where I live there is a Darwinian struggle between the remaining whites and the other groups. An odd sort of alliance has developed where the remaining whites and Koreans are sort of aligning with the pre-Columbians and sub-Continentals to keep the blacks at bay. It’s a losing battle and the reason is in this story from Detroit.

In my travels, I’ve found that whites have largely abandoned crime as a cultural ornament. White gangsters are a thing of the past, outside of the Aryan Brotherhood and outlaw biker gangs. They operate on the fringes, well away from the bulk of white Americans.This is why the typical 20-something white boy is trying to look a like a homosexual. Bad men and tough guys are as alien to him as buggy whips and farming. Even the movies they watch are devoid of white guys being tough. Instead, the women do the fighting and the men get in touch with their feelings or act like morons. They will stand no chance against the gathering storm.

People from Confucian societies have plenty of organized crime, but it is inward looking and often tangled up in the legitimate governing institutions. Leland Yee is a good example. His accomplice has been tangled up in Chinatown politics for decades. The Koreans who have come to America are following the Tiger Mom route by sending their kids to college, financed by cash businesses they can run with a minimum of English. Koreans are fearless when it comes to business. In Baltimore and Washington, Koreans took over the cash businesses in the black ghettos. They sell liquor, cigarettes and Skittles from behind bullet proof glass.

The pre-Columbians, who often speak Spanish, but not necessarily. Many speak Mayan tongues like Mam and Nahuatl. We call them Latinos as if they are all descendants of the Goths on the Iberian peninsula. Mexico, like all of Central and South America is populated with people who prefer authoritarian government. They bring those habits here and the result is complex criminal gangs that function like a government in their communities. MS-13 is a good example of how this works. The Mexican Mafia is another example. These are complex gangs that impose order on the Latino community. They also are well equipped to deal with the blacks with whom they battle for drug turf in American cities. The Mexicans seem to be winning.

The best I can tell is the natural flow of things is for the whites to vote with their feet. I see for sale signs all around the cheaper areas. It seems that these small ranchers are being bought by blacks fleeing the city, which only encourages more white flight. The late comers from the sub-Continent are tough to read. They have no criminal history and most are here because of professional reasons. They have advanced degrees in STEM fields and work at the big engineering firms and hospitals. The younger ones live in apartments like barracks. I’m guessing they are H1B1 and will be fleeing once it gets too rough. Maybe they will follow the whites out of town, I don’t know. The guy who runs the wine store near me lives in a nice bedroom community twenty miles away. I suspect he plans to sell out to a Korean who will install bullet proof glass and lay in a stock of cheap beer.

This report from Michigan State comports with my observations. People from different tribes don’t get along very well. Even if it is not open warfare, it is a simmering sort of hostility that prevents anything resembling a community. I’ve lived here for ten years and I can name maybe five people within walking distance of me. I bet 70% of the whites around here were enthusiastic Obama supporters, judging from the yard signs and bumper sticker. Going by the for sale signs on their lawns now, I’m betting 70% prefer their diversity at a great distance. As I’m fond of saying, these people talk like MLK but live like the KKK.

My little slice of heaven is a microcosm of what is going on in the nation at-large. Both political parties are berserk about replacing Americans with foreign imports, mostly from Central and South America. The new robber barons like Mark Zuckerberg want as many Hindus as possible. Legitimate gangsters like Sheldon Adleson want to flood the country with third world peasants and they are willing to buy all the politicians they need to do it. Some people think the public is turning against open borders, but that’s not the way to bet. Countries are run by rich people and America’s rich people would like to be free of Americans.

That’s why that Detroit story is important. CBS is just a hod carrier for the Cult. Their rather surprising candor about what is obviously a tribal assault is a bit stunning. It is our future. You cannot throw a bunch of people from different tribes together and not get violence. People will inevitably self-segregate.  They will inevitably arm themselves and start jostling with one another for supremacy. Charles Murray was right and everyone knows he was right. Maybe the Cult figures everyone is now ready to accept our Bosnian future.

Way back in the olden thymes, I got a close up look at the Cult of Modern Liberalism. This was back in the early Reagan years when I was a part time employee for the Congressman Clarence Long. I was just a kid and a nobody, but Susanna, his wife, took a liking to me and that gave me the run of the place, so to speak. I used to have lunch with the Congressman two or three days a week. He was a nice man, but about as interesting as vanilla ice cream. That’s true of every elected official I met in Washington. privately, they were very dull.

The interesting people were the aides and activists. The ones on the Right were full of excitement about finally turning back the liberal tide. Even as a kid, I thought they were delusional, but they were fun. On the other hand, the old liberals defending the status quo were scary. They were deadly serious and ideology was everything. These were not people interested in free and open debate. They were not all that interested in the free market of ideas. They wanted to win and they were not interested in deviationists in their midsts.

The lesson I have carried with me ever since is this. Unless and until the Right comes to terms with what they are facing, America is doomed. These are not people with whom you can reason or compromise. They are fanatics. To quote myself, “The Liberal is out there! They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

The Bush years cured me of any hope for the American Right. Nice people in many cases. The problem is they are all like Jonah Goldberg. They make wonderful arguments in defense of civilization. They are often very good at warding off the zombie attacks from the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Their defect is they think the Left is just a bunch of people mistaken on matters of fact or reason. That’s not the case. The Left is a cult of lunatics no different from Islam. Even Obama thinks the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.

Until civilized people take the same view of the cult that sprung up on Rue Saint-Jacques, civilization is doomed.

Maybe that’s starting to happen. This column by Kevin Williamson on NRO, of all places, takes an unvarnished view of the death cult running the culture.

The convocation of clowns on the left screeched with one semi-literate and inchoate voice when my colleague Jonah Goldberg, borrowing the precise words of one of their own, titled a book Liberal Fascism. Most of them didn’t read it, but the ones who did apparently took what was intended as criticism and read it as a blueprint for political action.

Welcome to the Liberal Gulag.

That term may be perverse, but it is not an exaggeration. Mr. Weinstein specifically called for political activists, ranging from commentators to think-tank researchers, to be locked in cages as punishment for their political beliefs. “Those denialists should face jail,” he wrote. “You still can’t” — banality alert! — “yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year.” “Balderdash” — a felony. At the risk of being repetitious, let’s dwell on that for a minute: The Left is calling on people to be prosecuted for speaking their minds regarding their beliefs on an important public-policy question that is, as a political matter, the subject of hot dispute. That is the stuff of Soviet repression.

But then Soviet-style repression has long been a dream of the American Left. Consider the abuses of psychiatry that were the great hallmark of the Soviet way, and then consider that there is a cottage industry today among left-wing psychiatrists arguing that conservative political views represent a form of mental disorder. That psychiatric approach to suppressing dissent has spread quickly through the intellectual sewers of the Left, with writers everywhere from Daily Kos to Salon diagnosing instances of “RWA” — right-wing authoritarian — disorder among their political rivals. Robert Altemeyer, the father of this asinine school of so-called thought,  denies that there exists such a thing as a left-wing authoritarian.

If Mr. Weinstein’s preferred method of enforcing intellectual conformity — coercion through state violence — seems extreme, consider that the jihad against Brendan Eich of Mozilla was no simple exercise in the operations of civil society. (Even if it were, it still would have been wrong; it is not as though social pressure cannot be put to illiberal and contemptible ends, something that gay-rights activists, of all people, should appreciate.) Mr. Weinstein’s victims of state repression are only hypothetical; Mr. Eich is a victim of state suppression in fact. His donation of $1,000 to a Proposition 8 group was made public through the commission of a crime by political powers — namely, the leaking of confidential IRS data to left-wing groups by their sympathizers within the agency. The leak was not intended to destroy Mr. Eich but rather to destroy Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign; Mr. Eich is nonetheless entitled to expect justice from the Department of Justice. Congress believes that it knows who the leaker is; but he has not been, and almost certainly will not be, prosecuted for his crimes. The reason for that is that the current management of the Department of Justice sympathizes with his political positions and does not wish to intervene to prevent the abuse — at the hands of government officials — of those it regards as its political enemies.

I’ve mentioned a few times that the Obama administration has been doing, with reckless abandon, what Nixon was merely accused of doing, in the articles of impeachment drawn up by Congress. If you want to measure how far down the pit of fascism we have fallen, ponder that for a second. Nixon was forced out because he contemplated doing that which we associated with authoritarianism. Today, the mass media celebrates a President using the IRS as a political weapon, conducting political prosecutions, spying on the citizens and refusing to enforce the people’s laws.

Williamson is one guy so I’m not getting my hopes up about the Right. The only way to dig out the fanatics from the culture is through the rough methods of revolution. I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. Instead, we will stagger on toward a soft, feminine fascism. Heretics will be exiled to the fringes of life, but not thrown into camps. A sort or weird and semi-violent Shakerism amongst whites will eventually give way to a Latin authoritarianism as the white population is over run my Hispanic peasants from the south.

The last time I had any reason to “care” about Naomi Wolf, she was trying to explain bukaki to teenagers during the Clinton years. I put “care” in quotes because I was really just laughing at her and the rest of the feminist trolls for becoming living, breathing contradictions to everything feminism had asserted for fifty years.

Here you had Bill Clinton carrying on like the male chauvinist pig of feminist lore and everyone of these broads was not just excusing him, they wanted to be in his bukaki pit. There’s hypocrisy and then there is American feminism. They talk like Susan B. Anthony, but fantasize about being a naughty June Cleaver.

Anyway, this crossed my path the other day. I’ve noted that the Left seems to be entering the paranoid stage as this wave ebbs. Given that fascism and American liberalism have so much in common and their origins are so tightly intertwined, it seems odd that the Cult would be so fearful of their brother. There’s two theories for the American Left’s obsession with fascism. One ties back to the old schism in socialism that happened in the early 20th century in Europe. The other ties back to the FDR years when every good Progressive in the English speaking world thought Mussolini was the future. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

First, this from the biographical blurb deserves attention:

Naomi Wolf played a leading role in so-called “third-wave” feminism and as an advocate of “power feminism,” which holds that women must assert themselves politically in order to achieve their goals. She advised the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Western feminism has made some memorable theoretical mistakes; a major one is the frequent assumption that, if women held the decision-making power in society, they would be “kinder and gentler” (a phrase devised for George H.W. Bush in 1988 to appeal to the female vote). Indeed, so-called “second-wave” feminist theory abounds in assertions that war, racism, love of hierarchy, and general repressiveness belong to “patriarchy”; women’s leadership, by contrast, would naturally create a more inclusive, collaborative world.

The problem is that it has never worked out that way, as the rise of women to leadership positions in Western Europe’s far-right parties should remind us. Leaders such as Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, Pia Kjaersgaard of Denmark’s People’s Party, and Siv Jensen of Norway’s Progress Party reflect the enduring appeal of neofascist movements to many modern women in egalitarian, inclusive liberal democracies.

The past is prologue: Wendy Lower’s recent book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields adds more data to the long record of women embracing violent right-wing movements. And the rise of far-right movements in Europe – often with women in charge – confronts us with the fact that the heirs to the fascism of the 1930’s have their own gender-based appeal.

One obvious reason for the success of women like Le Pen, Kjaersgaard, and Jensen is their value for packaging and marketing their parties. Just as Bush sought to revamp the Republican Party’s “brand’ of cold-hearted elitism and hostility to women, so Europe’s far-right parties today must appeal to citizens by not seeming dangerously extreme and marginal. How dangerous can the movement be, after all, if women are speaking for it? Such parties come to be seen as more mainstream, and their appeal to traditionally harder-to-win women supporters receives a boost.

This piece in National Journal reminds me of the moment when I decided we were done for as a country. I was still in my salad days when a man is supposed to be full of optimism. Instead, I was oosing doom and gloom. Well, maybe it was not that bad. Still, watching Newt Gingrich waddle on stage as the next Speaker of the House and, presumably, the leader of the loyal opposition, I knew we were done for as a country. If that’s the best we could muster, it was time to reconsider the whole experiment. Two decades of rot have confirmed what I suspected.

It’s not that Gingrich is a festering carbuncle of man or that he is a moral nullity. Politics, going back to the Alcibiades, has been populated with loathsome parasites. If the country could weather the Kennedy family it could handle another degenerate in a powerful office. The thing that was the clincher for me was how Gingrich was talked about as some sort of deep thinker. That absurdity is right here in the piece.

Within a year, nine out of 10 Americans could be dead. And whatever causes the national apocalypse—be it North Korean malice or the whims of the sun—the downfall will ultimately be our own fault.

That’s the fear of Newt Gingrich and other members of a high-profile coalition who are convinced that our fragile electrical grid could be wiped out at any moment.

Their concern? Electromagnetic pulses, the short bursts of energy—caused by anything from a nuclear blast to a solar flare—that can wreak havoc on electrical systems on a massive scale. And the coalition believes it’s coming soon.

“I think we’re running out of time,” said Peter Pry, a former CIA officer and head of a congressional advisory board on national security. And if the worst happens? “This gets translated into mass fatalities, because our modern civilization can’t feed, transport, or provide law and order without electricity,” he said.

While some see the coalition as alarmist—and others dismiss them as out-and-out quacks—the coalition boasts some prominent and influential names. Pry and Gingrich are joined by former CIA Director James Woolsey.

“It wasn’t difficult persuading them” to join the coalition, Pry said. Gingrich “has known about EMP and cared about it for many years.”

Last year, Gingrich told members of Congress that an EMP attack “could be the kind of catastrophe that ends civilization—and that’s not an exaggeration.”

What does Gingrich know about physics? The answer is nothing. He was a history instructor at strip mall college and he liked dinosaurs. I love history, but it is not science and everyone knows it. Many not-so-bright people skate though college as history majors, English majors and so forth. Even if you dispute my opinion here, you cannot dispute that history is not science. Gingrich is no more qualified to discuss the electric grid and EMP attacks than my cat.

The fact that the nation takes seriously a guy like Gingrich on anything, much less issues he is uniquely unqualified to discuss is far more worrisome than solar flares or an EMP attack. Gingrich is a crank and not the funny entertaining type either. He is the weird guy who lives at the end of the lane type of crank. The guy parents warned their kids to avoid. His ideas are mostly nonsense, but he believes them with the intensity of a fanatic. This is a guy who thought we could put sunglasses on the globe to “address global warming.”

I tend to like fringe guys, even when they hold very weird opinions. The reason is they make watching this stuff fun. Jerry Brown is entertaining as all get out, until he gets power. Then he becomes a dangerous lunatic. Gingrich has always been at the center of the “conservative movement.” His weird social engineering ideas should never get a purchase in a movement that makes claims to liberty and small government. His central role in conservative politics over the last two decades says “conservatism” has been nothing but a fraud. That’s why we are doomed. Without an alternative to the Cult of Modern Liberalism, they are free to do as they please for as long as they please.

Reading Destructive Generation, I kept noticing that Jews were way over represented in the New Left. I’m just talking about the guys and gals with obviously Jewish names. If your name is Tov Schlomo I’m probably on safe ground assuming you are a member of The Tribe. Just looking at the Weathermen, it appears close to half the founding members were Jews. Huey Newton and the Black Panthers were largely brought to life and sustained by Jews in California. Even accounting for the fact Horowitz may have highlighted the Jews he knew in the movement, it is impossible not to conclude that Jews were way over represented in radical politics.  When one percent of the population is 30% of anything, that’s a clue.

I was reminded of it the other day, so I put “why are Jews liberal” into the nearest Google-machine and out popped this list of links. When you get 12 million links, it must be an oft-pondered query. But, it is not as popular as that figure would suggest. Change “liberal’ to “midget” and you get 47 million hits. Make of that what you will, but the first link of my original query is something I remembered from way back. Norman Podhoretz wrote about this in 2009. Podhoretz repeats the old line, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Obama captured 78% of the Jewish vote, despite being mildly anti-Semitic and hanging out with raging anti-Semites.

Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of “Jewish values.” But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.

Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of. Even more telling is that on every single cultural issue, the Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law. To cite just a few examples: Jewish law permits abortion only to protect the life of the mother; it forbids sex between men; and it prohibits suicide (except when the only alternatives are forced conversion or incest).

The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

The response to his query and the book that followed was predictable. The NYTimes dragged out an old warhorse to defend the faith, so to speak. First you discredit the man:

Norman Podhoretz loves his people and loves his country, and I salute him for it, since I love the same people and the same country. But this is a dreary book. Its author has a completely axiomatic mind that is quite content to maintain itself in a permanent condition of apocalyptic excitation. His perspective is so settled, so confirmed, that it is a wonder he is not too bored to write.

Then dismiss the argument:

The veracity of everything he believes is so overwhelmingly obvious to him that he no longer troubles to argue for it. Instead there is only bewilderment that others do not see it, too. “Why Are Jews Liberals?” is a document of his bewilderment; and there is a Henry Higgins-­like poignancy to his discovery that his brethren are not more like himself. But the refusal of others to assent to his beliefs is portrayed by Podhoretz not as a principled disagreement that is worthy of respect, but as a human failing. Jews are liberals, he concludes, as a consequence of “willful blindness and denial.” He has a philosophy. They have a psychology.

The long and short of it is we have one person, as far as I can tell, asking the obvious question. Why are Jews liberal? His answer is that liberalism has become the religion of The Tribe. That’s a bit of a tautology, but at least it moves the ball down the field. The alternative theory as seen here, here and in the NYTimes book review is the typical boilerplate we see from the cult of modern liberalism every day. “The reason for X is the Cult is the shining city on the hill and down in the valley, where the bad people dwell, is Y.”

I like the Podhoretz’s explanation for a number of reasons. One is it fits with something we know about liberalism. It is clearly a religion for the hard thumping Liberals. This political ideology provides the inner measures traditionally considered to be a religious territory, such as ethics, values, symbols, myths and rituals. At the same time, its attachment to the Standard Social Science Model appeals to those raised in the Talmudic tradition. Instead of divining God’s will from the Torah, liberals divine the will of science through textual analysis of social science. There’s a natural fusion between the Hebrew intellectual tradition and the ideological justifications of the political religion.

Steve Sailer thinks that successful minority groups the world over have one thing in common. That is they attach themselves to the strongest element of the ruling class. An example he uses is Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire. Carols is not Mexican or even Spanish. He is Lebanese. He is also tight with the ruling class. He has to be as he controls 90% of the telephone market. If he does not make sure the guys with guns are well compensated, they may decide Carlos needs some competition or cement swimming clothes. Presumably, a successful minority will follow the same formula. In American, the organizing faith is Progressivism so it makes sense to throw in with the Progressives.

The trouble with this theory is Jews have been out front in American culture and politics for generations now. The days of Jewish entertainers, for example, passing themselves off as Italians are long gone. Joe Lieberman was a Vice Presidential candidate 15 years ago and probably kept Gore in the race. Lieberman was a very respected political figure and very publicly Jewish. I just don’t see how modern Jews would feel they have to cozy up to the elite for protection. Throw in the fact that Evangelicals love Israel and go out of their way to reach out to Jews and the logic of Steve’s theory falls apart. Maybe fifty years ago it worked, but it does not bear up today.

That brings me back Podhoretz. I like his reasoning, but I have a couple of problems with it. Catholics, Episcopalians and Baptists have not followed the same path. Catholics used to be a core Democratic constituency, but that was more class and economics than religion. Plus, when they left their old church, they did not join the new faith. Instead they started voting Republican. Protestants certainly swapped the old religion for the new in many cases. Episcopalians, for example, are mostly moonats these days. Baptists, on the other hand, have gone the other way and probably are the chief enemy of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. The only way Podhoretz is right is if there is another element, something unique to Jews.

Genetics may hold the key. Jews, as known in the West, are not the same Jews as in the Middle East. Most Jews in the West are Ashkenazim, not Sephardim. Recent studies suggest Ashkenazim descend from the earliest Europeans.

The majority of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from prehistoric European women, according to study published today (October 8) in Nature Communications. While the Jewish religion began in the Near East, and the Ashkenazi Jews were believed to have origins in the early indigenous tribes of this region, new evidence from mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on exclusively from mother to child, suggests that female ancestors of most modern Ashkenazi Jews converted to Judaism in the north Mediterranean around 2,000 years ago and later in west and central Europe.

The new findings contradict previous assertions that Ashkenazi mitochondrial lineages originated in the Near East, or from mass conversions to Judaism in the Khazar kingdom, an empire in the north Caucasus region between Europe and Asia lasting from the 7th century to the 11th century whose leaders adopted Judaism. “We found that most of the maternal lineages don’t trace to the north Caucasus, which would be a proxy for the Khazarians, or to the Near East, but most of them emanate from Europe,” said coauthor Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in the U.K.

Given the state of religion in Europe 2,000 years ago, it is rather amazing that a group of people would elect to become monotheists, much less Jewish. At the very minimum, Ashkenazim were a highly unusual tribe before they found Judaism. A religion requiring a relatively high degree of literacy and one that comes with a rational legal code is going to make them even more unusual. I don’t think it is too much of a reach to think that Ashkenazim are hard wired to believe and to believe a certain way. That uniqueness most likely put them on a genetic island where these traits were reinforced through the normal process of natural selection.

Keep in mind that I’m just trying to reason thorough this inductively. There’s too much missing from my discussion to be more than ruminations. There’s some evidence from genetics that belief is heritable, but not enough to draw too many conclusions. How much of culture is genetic is an area where disagreement is near universal. The fact that Jews and Gypsies have remained culturally unique, despite it all, suggests genetics is a bigger role there than the SSSM crowd would like to believe. The Welsh, Scots and Irish are three examples from a single island where culture and genetics appear intertwined. Still, there are a lot of loose ends here.

This irritated me for some reason.

A lefty friend once asked me whether I thought I held any subconsciously racist opinions. One should always be on the lookout for one’s own intellectual and moral defects, so I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a possible candidate: As I suggest in my NRO piece today, “Asian-American” seems to me to be an obviously nonsensical category, because it includes people of origins ranging from Pakistani to Japanese. But “African-American” has never seemed immediately nonsensical to me in the same way. This may be because I know a little bit more about Asia than I do about Africa, or it may be because Indians and Koreans strike my white American eye as obviously and visibly different in a way that is not true of members of many African groups. It should go without saying that I detest racism, and it is also the case that racial and ethnic feeling, even of the benign, St. Patrick’s Day variety, seems to me atavistic and primitive. My self-analysis here is not meant to be taken as normative, but rather an examination of the semi-subconscious impressions of what I believe to be a fairly typical middle-class white guy from Texas.

The new religion has made race awareness into the worst moral sin. By “race awareness” I mean noticing that not all people hail from the same tribes. It has become such a fetish that otherwise sensible people are petrified they may be one of those wretched noticers. The ridiculous bit of squid ink in the first paragraph that I highlight is a good example. I don’t think for a second that Kevin Williamson is losing any sleep over his “subconscious racism.”

While I don’t buy the race-as-a-social-construct position entirely, there is a great deal of cultural specificity to racial perception. Surely I am not the only white American guy in the history of the world to meet a Somali or an Ethiopian and have his brain simultaneously register “black” and “not black.” And I believe that that is the real psychological fault line for white Americans: not white vs. not-white but black vs. not-black. Ethiopia, Wikipedia informs me, recognizes more than 80 different ethnic groups on its census and, for whatever reason, members of some of those groups only push some of the buttons of perception associated in my particular brain with “black.” I think it probably says something about the culture that at some level my mind really wants to make that distinction in absolute terms. We all know that Barack Obama has one black parent and one white parent, but my impression is that people generally look at him and see black, rather than biracial.

This is akin to saying “I don’t buy this gravity-as-a-social-construct position entirely.” The science is in and race is exactly what we thought it was for 5,000 years. Like a lot of received wisdom that is easily confirmed through simple observation, there is a scientific explanation. Race is one of those. The Chinese guy’s genetic differences are not just limited to skin tone, hair texture and the shape of the eyes.

The fundamental fact, I think, is that when a white American sees a black American, he sees history, and that history looms far more significantly over black Americans than it does over Hispanics or Asian immigrants or other minority groups. Conservatives see that history and generally don’t want to think about it; progressives see that history and want to use it for their own political ends. And I don’t have the imaginative capacity to guess what the view looks like from the black perspective. In that sense, it’s hard for me to believe that black-white relations in the United States will ever be normalized, as much as I wish it were otherwise. The fact that “black” exists in my internal taxonomy as a unitary and exclusive category — even though at some rational level I know better — suggests to me that while “Asian” maybe be only a geographic term in the American political mind, “African” is a very different kind of term, one that has more to do with realities on this continent than realities in Africa.

This is the least ridiculous portion of the post. I think he is right that people with a long history with one another tend to remember that long history with one another. This is true in the same way that people who have evolved here on earth tend to look like us. Armenians and Turks will forever have opinions about one another that outsiders will never fully appreciate. Jews and Germans will always be tied to one another in ways that the Dutch and Jews are not, even though the Dutch gladly handed over their Jews to the Nazis.

The post strikes me as a way for Kevin to build up some credits so that when he reviews or writes about the forthcoming book by Nicholas Wade he has inoculated himself against the hooting and bellowing from the race hustlers. Kevin is the one bright penny at the moribund National Review, but the feckless twerp running the place cannot be counted on to stand by even his best writer. Maybe it is a wise career move on Williamson’s part. As science unravels the Standard Social Science Model, the empirically minded will come under assault for not vigorously praying at the right shrines. Indifference will no longer be acceptable.

Alternatively, it could be the start of what I have observed for years. Pat Buchanan called it “going native.” A sensible person moves to a moonbat land and before long they start sounding like a moonbat. It is hard to stand out from the crowd. Almost all of us feel pressure to conform and fit in with the group. When your friends insist the sky is pink and the grass is yellow, you will eventually give in and agree with them. It is why your red state congressman ends up on TV hugging the wackiest nutter on the Democratic side while extolling the virtues of surrender bipartisanship.

Perhaps Kevin Williamson is just going native.

You go out for a long weekend and come home to a house full of plumpers.

A comedian under the impression he had rented out his posh Chelsea pad to a man with family in town for a wedding returned home to a wild orgy, he said.

Ari Teman, 31, claimed he left his apartment keys with David Carter, 32, on Friday night and stepped out for dinner before leaving town.

When he returned to the building to grab his luggage, a rowdy sex party featuring “Big Beautiful Women” was in the process of being shut down by building management.

“This was just so bizarre,” said Teman, who had rented his apartment via the Web site Airbnb.
“The worst part of the Internet right there was in my apartment.”

“There were all sorts of people walking out of my apartment and people coming in from the back yard. It was a huge mess.”

Teman said his apartment was trashed by a group of nearly nude, overweight people. After the shindig was broken up, Carter was a nervous wreck in the lobby, Teman says.

“This guy had a look of horror on his face,” Teman said. “He didn’t expect to see me for a few days. He said, ‘They shut us down, man, they’re shutting it down.’ ”

Carter, however, claims he just had a small, quiet get-together and that Teman was overreacting.

“I had six people, friends and family,” Carter told The Post. “He is making a big to-do because he is being evicted.”

Carter posted on Airbnb that he wanted a place for his in-laws to stay while they were in town for a wedding, Teman claims.

“He had a verified account and he seemed legit,” Teman said. “He had three positive reviews and so I approved the deal.”

When Teman later searched Carter’s phone number on the Internet, he found the raunchy soiree involving plus-sized women advertised online as “Turn Up Part 2: The Pantie Raid.”

One person even blasted out Teman’s Seventh Avenue address in a tweet for an “XXX FREAK FEST.”

Carter denied he had anything to do with the ad.

A web ad that was displaying information on the alleged orgy.

“There was no address on the advertisement and I had nothing to with it,” he said.

The professional comedian called police, but no charges were filed. He now claims he wants to move.

“I just don’t want to touch anything in there,” he said. “I threw sheets all over everything.”

Carter claimed that a little partying never hurt anyone.

One of the reasons I’m an economics-as-religion denier is right here in the story. People are liars. Economics has as an axiom that in the aggregate, people are honest. Simple observation and 5,000 years of history says otherwise. It is similar to my complaint about crowd-sourcing. You see it in the story. One person is dumb and foolish, but we’re supposed to believe that a million morons are smart and wise. Similarly, a million liars is not making for an honest market.

This column reminded me of a few things. Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics. He was commissioned by the New York Times to ruminate on foreign policy. I have no doubt that other economists and pseudo-intellectuals laying claim to mathematics have been prepping “game theory” type analysis of Eurasian affairs. Tyler is a very smart guy who has many interesting things to say. Still, I’m old enough to remember when no one would ask an economist to discuss anything outside of economics, narrowly understood. Even there, they were one voice, the one wearing the green eye-shade and holding a calculator. Today, the local economist feels free to poke his nose into everything.

The reason for this is economists are the new priestly class. In another era, religious leaders routinely commented on the morality of public policy, including foreign policy. Today that role is filled by members of the local economics faculty. The reason is the morality of Christianity has been replaced by a new materialist morality amongst the ruling classes of the West. Every act is judged based on its impact on the cost/benefit to society. If the costs outweigh the benefits, the act is deemed immoral. On the other hand, anything that can be shown to have a positive integer on the bottom line is morally good. It is why passing a Byzantine health care bill was treated as a moral triumph. An economist somewhere said it would add wealth to the nation.

The flaw in this calculus is that the benefits of public policy often lie well over the horizon. The costs are often right now. Raise taxes on short-term stock flipping and there’s a real cost today. The long term benefit – fewer pump and dump schemes – lie down stream and are difficult to quantify. The result is a form of short term thinking about public policy that veers into the myopic. In America, living in the moment morality has produced a nation of amnesiacs incapable of remembering yesterday. This summer Democrat politicians will be out campaigning against ObamaCare and few will notice they were vociferous supporters just last year.

In foreign policy, this new morality is at the heart of our troubles with Russia. Putin and his coevals running Russia reject the materialism of the West, despite living like medieval royalty. They look at the Crimea as a part of their cultural history and a part of their patrimony. It is a part of what they hope will be their shadow, in which future generations will stand. That changes their cost benefit analysis. Russia is willing to lose a lot to get what to Western minds has limited value. The West wants Ukraine in the Euro so their bankers can loot what little remains in Ukraine. Russia wants it in their orbit because it defines who they are as Russians.

The other thing that comes to mind is just how deeply our elites are marinated in cultural nihilism. Top to bottom they think culture is witchcraft from a bygone era. People everywhere, according to our rulers, are the same. Everyone wants what we want, loves what we love and hates what we hate. You see this in domestic policy all the time. Education starts with the assumption that everyone can be above average, as Bush hilariously claimed. IQ, ethnicity and sex are declared off-limits as remnants from the barbaric era the rest of us call our past.

It is what drove policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush people truly believed that if they setup institutions the right way, Iraq would become Texas. The neo-con crowd is still stunned that the Iraqis preferred their tribal customs over what the American were offering. The CML is worse than the neo-cons in this regard. The bungling in the Maghreb during the recent revolts was like watching someone hit themselves with a hammer over and over, despite being told to put down the hammer.

In the competition with Putin, the West’s inability to see his motives through his eyes is leading to one error after another. John Kerry throws a temper tantrum thinking it will have the same effect it has when he does not get seated on time at the club. Instead Putin sees a weak, feckless man who is no threat to him. In Obama, he probably sees a guileless provincial surrounded by equally inept courtiers. The fact that Obama and his people cannot imagine that being the case means we have informational disequilibrium.

Consider this from Tyler:

A more reassuring kind of deterrence has to do with the response of Russian markets to the crisis. Russia is a far more globalized economy than it was during the Soviet era. On the first market day after the Crimean takeover, the reaction was a plunging ruble, and a decline in the Russian stock market of more than 10 percent. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates to 7 percent from 5.5 percent to protect the ruble’s value. Such market reactions penalize Russian decision makers, who also know that a broader conflict would endanger Russia’s oil and gas revenue, which makes up about 70 percent of its export income.

In this case, market forces provide a relatively safe form of deterrence. Unlike governmental sanctions, market-led penalties limit the risk of direct political retaliation, making it harder for the Russian government to turn falling market prices into a story of victimization by outside powers.

The underlying assumption is that Putin wants what we want. He and his coevals love what we love, hate what we hate and see themselves as citizens of the world, just like Tyler! Maybe the folks running Russia put a high price on having swank Miami condos and houses in Switzerland. It is just as likely they love their country, their forebears and their own place in the Russian time-line more than those trinkets. We don’t know, but Putin knows. He also knows those trinkets count for everything in the West.

No, this is not a post about marriage. This story in the Daily Mail says we could sentence people to jail for 1,000 years or at least make it feel that way.

Sentencing a criminal to 1,000 years in an artificial hell may one day become a reality.

At least, that is the claim of scientists at Oxford University who have been exploring controversial technologies that could extend human life.

They say billions are being invested in techniques that could mean the cruellest criminals will be kept alive indefinitely in condition befitting their crime.

According to their research, prison firms could also develop drugs that make time pass slowly, making an inmate’s sentence feel like an eternity.

Last year, a team of scientists led by Rebecca Roache began exploring technologies that could keep prisoners in an artificial hell.

‘Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying,’ Dr Roache told Ross Andersen in Aeonmagazine.

Dr Roache highlights what she describes as the ‘laughably inadequate’ sentence of 30 years in prison for Magdelena Luczak and Mariusz Krezolek.