Way back when Jonah Goldberg was a regular at NRO, he would often promote the blogger Ezra Klein. He would respond to Klein’s posts and I think he did some podcasts with him. Jonah Goldberg is a bright guy and fairly sensible. I know, for example, that he regularly reads Steve Sailer and Peter Brimelow, but he cautions against mentioning them in public. Goldberg understands the media world and you don’t want to be associated with the fringe if you want to keep your career. At the same time, you better read these fringe guys if you want to know what’s going on in the world. Even though I don’t agree with Goldberg on a lot of things, I respect him as a chattering skull.

But, I never got his affinity for Klein. My read on Klein is he is a narrow-minded fanatic with a mediocre IQ. Like most bourgeois millennials, he is good at dressing himself up as an intellectual, but like most bourgeois millennials he lacks self-awareness and lacks any curiosity about the limits of his knowledge. Instead he does what all these guys did in college and that’s suck up to the teacher by repeating the lecture with more enthusiasm than the professors was ever able to muster.

Anyway, this latest letter from Ezra to whoever still reads him is getting lots of run. Most of it is mocking, and it deserves to be mocked.

We’ve finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson.

Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And, even as the grand jury announced its decision not to indict him, he remained silent. He had his attorneys release a statement on his behalf.

But on Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson’s full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “difficult or impossible to believe.” But I want to be clear here. I’m not saying Wilson is lying. I’m not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.

The unintentional comedy here is hilarious. The always earnest Ezra Klein is saying he was so committed to the narrative peddled by his cult that he is now sitting in stunned amazement to learn it was all nonsense.

What happens next is the most unbelievable moment in the narrative. And so it’s probably best that I just quote Wilson’s account at length on it.

I was doing the, just scrambling, trying to get his arms out of my face and him from grabbing me and everything else. He turned to his…if he’s at my vehicle, he turned to his left and handed the first subject. He said, “here, take these.” He was holding a pack of — several packs of cigarillos which was just, what was stolen from the Market Store was several packs of cigarillos. He said, “here, hold these” and when he did that I grabbed his right arm trying just to control something at that point. Um, as I was holding it, and he came around, he came around with his arm extended, fist made, and went like that straight at my face with his…a full swing from his left hand.

So Brown is punching inside the car. Wilson is scrambling to deflect the blows, to protect his face, to regain control of the situation. And then Brown stops, turns to his left, says to his friend, “Here, hold these,” and hands him the cigarillos stolen from Ferguson Market. Then he turns back to Wilson and, with his left hand now freed from holding the contraband goods, throws a haymaker at Wilson.

Every bullshit detector in me went off when I read that passage. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen exactly the way Wilson describes. But it is, again, hard to imagine. Brown, an 18-year-old kid holding stolen goods, decides to attack a cop and, while attacking him, stops, hands his stolen goods to his friend, and then returns to the beatdown. It reads less like something a human would do and more like a moment meant to connect Brown to the robbery.

Ezra Klein went to one of the safest public high schools on the planet. It may have the lowest NAM population outside of Reykjavik High. He grew up in the sort of neighborhood that has such a public school. He went onto college and life in super white American media. In other words, Ezra is a sissy without the slightest clue how violent men go about their business. Anyone who has spent time in the ghetto watched that video of the Gentle Giant shaking the life out of the Asian clerk and saw the familiar. It’s how ghetto boys roll.

Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?

None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. Brown wasn’t a hardened felon. He didn’t have a death wish. And while he might have been stoned, this isn’t how stoned people act. The toxicology report did not indicate he was on PCP or something that would’ve led to suicidal aggression.

Who do you mean by “we” Eloi?

I read Karl Denninger daily. He’s crazy as an outhouse rat, but he makes a good point once in a while. His bizarre fascination with Blackberry is hilarious to me. His threats to ban posters who disagree with him are great theater. Some poor sap thinks he is dealing with a sane blogger and then Karl goes crazy on him for posting something Karl does not like. Most of all he is a great example of how conspiracy nuts think.

The decision was “no bill” which isn’t all that surprising — but I maintain that this case had to go to a petit jury and be heard in public — not in the “privacy” of a Grand Jury room.  The reason is this:

Wilson then fired another round of shots as Brown approached Wilson as if he was going to tackle the officer.

“Just coming straight at me like he was going to run right through me,” Wilson said. “And when he gets about … 8 to 10 feet away … all I see is his head and that’s what I shot.”

I cannot square that with the forensics — specifically, if Brown was coming straight at Wilson at a full charge, and he was shot in the process of that charge, being killed instantly as we know occurred from the forensics where is the damage to his knees, legs, arms and/or other body parts from falling forward onto pavement while at said full charge?

This is the problem that I cannot resolve between the testimony and the physical evidence and it deserves to be heard in public and resolved.

I believed and still do believe that only an indictment would lead to the exposition and determination of these facts, and thus whether Brown was lawfully stopped in the middle of his assault or was killed in an act of manslaughter or worse.

However, like it or not you have to respect the process.  If it’s broken (and I believe it is in circumstances such as this) we need to change that rather than looting and burning the town.

His bizarre use of bold and italics leads me to imagine someone banging away on their keyboard in a manic fit. His whole site reminds me of the early days of the Interwebs when people were first learning how to use HTML. If you could do it, you did it and the results were seedy and garish.

To the point. The conspiracy nut  is never satisfied. Karl spent a lot of time noodling over how the Gentle Giant was shot in the top of the head. Now we know. It was never that great of a mystery, but the conspiracy minded latch onto little inconsistencies like this and then build their grand theories from them. Originally, Karl was sure the autopsy contradicted the cops version of events. It  turns out that the evidence and witnesses back the cop’s version.

But, that’s not how the mind of a nutter works. They keep moving the goal posts whenever new evidence throws their theory for a loop. Now he says the grand jury should have charged someone they did not think committed a crime. That way the nutters can spend a year analyzing the evidence for signs the Illuminati are behind the whole thing. They just can’t except things for what they are. In this case, a cop shot a guy who was attacking him.

The wicked part of this line of argument we’re getting from the libertarian cult is that they reject the notion that their fellow citizens can figure out this stuff on their own. Good or ill, civil societies base their criminal justice system on the notion that common citizens can look at the evidence and judge the guilt or innocence of another citizen. It’s not perfect, but it is the best we can do. Rejecting the grand jury system is a rejection of the liberal model of criminal justice.

Therein lies the fundamental difference between the Old Right an everyone else. The Old Right was willing to accept bad outcomes, as long as the law is followed. All of these other guys will trample the law in order to get their desired result. As soon as you say the ends justifies the means, you’re on your way to the death chamber.

When Glenn Beck was on Fox I loved his show, despite never watching it. What I loved about it is how he sent the moonbats into a frenzy. If you were a room full of strangers and wanted to ID the lunatics, just mention Glenn Beck. The lunatics would suddenly begin convulsing and screeching. Otherwise, I found Beck to be a bit of  a weirdo. He was a man on a grail-quest. Having seen his ugliness in the bottom of a glass, he was racing around looking for the antidote. Religion, followed by slaying the Progressive dragon was his thing on Fox.

Then he left Fox and started his own network. I give him a ton of credit for figuring out before everyone else where the future of media lies. From what I gather The Blaze has made Beck a millionaire many times over. Still, when I see him I get the sense he is still a man on a mission that he is still trying to unravel. This latest seems to fit the pattern.

Glenn Beck on Monday revealed the true extent of his health issues, saying he can no longer keep what has happened a secret from his friends, his staff or audience, whom he considers to be his family.

If you have sensed a change in Beck — maybe you even thought he was losing interest in his program — Beck said it is because he was told he may only have several functional years left, and his health conditions were causing such excruciating pain that it was difficult to do live programming.

“Tonight’s show is not for the casual fan or, really, anyone in the press,” Beck said. “This is a one-on-one between friends. No one in the media ever does a show like this, because it is crazy. … But I believe that by not talking with you openly, it destroys everything of real meaning and value — namely, our trust.”

“I have never lied to you, but I have omitted a few really important facts because — they scared me,” Beck admitted, beginning to swallow back tears. “I didn’t have any answers, and the answers I was being given at the time meant … the end of our time together.”

Not only is there a religious vibe to this, there’s a Jimmy Swaggart vibe to it. That’s an old school preacher move. The personal testimony has been a staple of the southern religious experience since forever. The preacher reminds his flock that he is their shepherd. Then he tells them he is not long for this world. Then the ushers pass the plate.

Beck said that five years ago, around the time of his Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C., God began to tell him that he was standing in the wrong place. At around the same time, his health issues began, starting with vocal cord paralysis, eyesight problems and what doctors at first believed was a painful form of neuropathy.

“While I was at Fox, the pain would get so bad that my camera crew, our executive producer Tiffany and I, had worked out hand signals so they would know when to take the camera off of me,” Beck revealed. “We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands and feet, or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, set them on fire or pushed broken glass into them.”

Beck said that while he was in intense pain, something unusual was happening that he actually thought was an advantage in his business: he only ever needed two to four hours of sleep a night.

“Doctors tell me that up until recently, I hadn’t had a real REM sleep in maybe as long as a decade,” Beck said. “I didn’t have a dream that I remember, except one in a decade. And quite honestly, this isn’t a symptom you look to fix if you have a ton to do. But the first sign of trouble I noticed was what I call a ‘time collapse.’ If we had met before, I couldn’t tell you if it was a month ago, a year ago or when we were in high school. I then began to lose names to faces and over time, entire conversations would go away.”

Beck said doctors told him it was normal for someone processing as much information as he was, and the phenomenon has been discussed by figures like Winston Churchill.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that Beck is a sort of stigmatic and a medium of some sort, with massive amounts of data flowing through him, to you, his followers. His suffering for you is, well, Christ-like, isn’t it? Well, the modern version, least ways. It is sort of a crucifixion-lite, where the savior nails himself to the cross metaphorically.

Maybe I’m being mean-spirited, but I’m skeptical. Adrenal fatigue, for example, is nonsense. It is not a real medical condition. It was cooked up by snake oil salesman to trick middle-aged women into buying crystals and colonics. My bet is the real doctors told him he was either faking or suffering from some sort of psycho-somatic condition.

I know this makes me a stone-hearted villain, but I think he is faking.

I’ve long thought that the tactics of pressure groups have exceeded the bounds of legality. The law is clear about interfering with the business dealings of others for the purpose of causing one of more parties harm. It is one thing for me to claim my soap will make your clothes cleaner than the other soap. It is quite another to disrupt the relationship between the other soap and its vendors in order to harm the business of the competitor. That’s what liberal pressure groups are doing when they start harassing advertisers in order to get them to stop doing business with a TV or radio show.

I made this point in a post about Limbaugh a while back. I was immediately visited by a bunch of spam from lunatics claiming to be concerned about my opinion on Limbaugh. These people are crazy and they go beyond stating their opinions into the realm of tortious interference, in my opinion. Anyway, it looks like Limbaugh is planning to sue the Democrats for defamation.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh has threatened to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) for defamation, The Daily Caller has learned.

Limbaugh retained the services of lawyer Patty Glaser and demanded that the DCCC “preserve all records in anticipation of a lawsuit for defamation and interference” after the Democratic Party group led a campaign against Limbaugh based on out-of-context statements the host made about sexual assault. Limbaugh’s legal team delivered a letter to DCCC representatives Monday informing them of the legal threat. Limbaugh has also demanded a public retraction and apology.

The Limbaugh team is currently proceeding from the standpoint of litigating and has not yet made a decision as to whether the DCCC could make any concessions at this point to prevent the lawsuit.

The DCCC “has intentionally disseminated demonstrably false statements concerning Rush Limbaugh in a concerted effort to harm Mr. Limbaugh, and with reckless disregard for the resulting impact to small businesses across America that choose to advertise on his radio program” according to the GlaserWeil law firm’s letter to the DCCC, which was obtained by TheDC. “Mr. Limbaugh clearly, unambiguously, and emphatically condemned the notion that ‘no’ means ‘yes.’”

“Let’s be clear: Rush Limbaugh is advocating for the tolerance of rape” the DCCC stated in a September fundraising email after Limbaugh mocked Ohio State’s new mandatory sexual consent guidelines.

Limbaugh’s team said that the DCCC’s campaign against Limbaugh provides grounds for a defamation case, based on legal precedent.

“The DCCC may believe it to be immune from liability by quoting words, taken out of context. This is untrue,” Glaser said. “There is significant on point precedent in the 9th Circuit for holding an organization responsible for falsifying meaning through selective quoting. In Price v. Stossel, the court held that, if a party accurately quotes ‘a statement actually made by a public figure, but presents the statement in a misleading context, thereby changing the viewer’s understanding of the speaker’s words,’ that constitutes defamation.”

I think you have to judge any religion by its outcomes, intentional or accidental. Islam has some wise and beautiful elements to it. Much of the practical application of Islam is sensible, particular when applied to a tribal culture. That’s only part of the story. The other part is the butchery and forced ignorance that is the natural result of the full flowering of Islam. There’s a reason no Islamic society has produced anything of any value, other than things like suicide bombers and terrorism.

Marxism is another dreadful loser of a religion. The Soviet empire was good at keeping its people backward and ignorant, but not much else. Germans, despite there obvious faults, were able to reach the very pinnacle of human civilization, except when they were under Marxism. For fifty years Germans in the East produced nothing other than steroids to rev up their female athletes. Amazingly, East Germans even made bad cars while under the rule of Marxism. Then you have the enormous body count, which fills an entire book.

The weird religion of our current rulers has similarly strange outcomes. Steve Sailer points to a story in the old thyme lefty journal The New Republic extolling the glories of Qatar. People forget that the New Republic was founded by Malcolm Crowley, a fascist sympathizer who thought Mussolini was a leader FDR should emulate. But that was a long time ago and who can remember that stuff. I did not know the magazine was bought up by a Silicon Valley robber baron. Anyway, Steve’s point is the ruling class has no problem persecuting someone for not worshiping transvestites, but they are OK with slavery.

The Cult of Modern Liberalism is shot through with these bizarre contradictions. Liberals, for example, are crowing about recently passed marijuana laws, decriminalizing possession of weed. They forget that the Old Right was never in favor of drug laws and it was the Left that was behind Prohibition and the early war on drugs. But, weed is now a liberal fad so it’s OK. Contrast that with their never ending war on tobacco. A town in Massachusetts is now planning to ban tobacco entirely.

The cartons of Marlboros, cans of Skoal and packs of Swisher Sweets are hard to miss stacked near the entrance of Vincent’s Country Store, but maybe not for much longer: All tobacco products could become contraband if local health officials get their way.

This sleepy central Massachusetts town of 7,700 has become an improbable battleground in America’s tobacco wars. On Wednesday, the Board of Health will hear public comment on a proposed regulation that could make Westminster the first municipality in the United States to ban sales of all tobacco products within town lines.

“To my knowledge, it would be the first in the nation to enact a total ban,” said Thomas Carr, director of national policy at the American Lung Association. “We commend the town for doing it.”

Town health agent Elizabeth Swedberg said a ban seemed like a sensible solution to a vexing problem.

The vexing problem of people making informed decisions that the busy-bodies and pests don’t like.

“The tobacco companies are really promoting products to hook young people,” she said, pointing to 69-cent bubblegum-flavored cigars, electronic cigarettes and a new form of dissolvable smokeless tobacco that resembles Tic Tac candies. “The board was getting frustrated trying to keep up with this.”

Citing a report from the U.S. surgeon general, Swedberg said that if tobacco use continues unabated, 5.6 million American children who are younger than 18 today will die prematurely because of smoking. Change, she said, “has to start somewhere.”

The fact that they wish to ban things that are not smoking in order to keep people from smoking is lost on these people. Tobacco and anything related to it is bad because the Cult associates it with the type of white people who shop at Walmart and make fun of men who wear dresses. Weed is cool because it what young people like and you can now buy it at those quaint boutiques near that ski resort you went to in Colorado. Tobacco is what the guy fixing the lifts uses.

A sane person would ask whether it is better for the guy fixing the chair lift to be smoking a Marlboro or a jumbo? I’m OK with the repairman sucking on a cancer stick while he repairs the lift. Nicotine helps concentration. The same repairman doing bong hits before working on the lift is probably about to kill a bunch of people. Of course, he probably called out of work so he can play video games and eat chips all day, but that’s another story.

Greg Cochran first proposed that homosexuality is the result of an unknown pathogen. Here’s JayMan’s write up on it from earlier this year. The idea that pathogens could be the root cause of things like heart disease and insanity has been kicking around for a while, but I know of no serious science on it. Like a lot of speculative science, there’s no money in it until someone finds something concrete. There’s a lot of politics to science because scientists need money to do their work. There’s funding available for genetic research. There’s no money for locating the gay germ.

This may change things.

A virus that infects human brains and makes us more stupid has been discovered, according to scientists in the US.

The algae virus, never before observed in healthy people, was found to affect cognitive functions including visual processing and spatial awareness.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska stumbled upon the discovery when they were undertaking an unrelated study into throat microbes.

Surprisingly, the researchers found DNA in the throats of healthy individuals that matched the DNA of a virus known to infect green algae.

Dr Robert Yolken, a virologist who led the original study, said: “This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behaviour and cognition.

“Many physiological differences between person A and person B are encoded in the set of genes each inherits from parents, yet some of these differences are fuelled by the various microorganisms we harbour and the way they interact with our genes.”

Of the 90 participants in the study, 40 tested positive for the algae virus. Those who tested positive performed worse on tests designed to measure the speed and accuracy of visual processing. They also achieved lower scores in tasks designed to measure attention.

Humans’ bodies contain trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Most are harmless, but the findings of this research show that there some microbes can have a detrimental impact on cognitive functions, while leaving individuals healthy.

The study’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When I was a young man, I used to hear old people say something along the lines that young people would listen to each other, but never to those older than them. The sign a young man was maturing was when he sought out the advice of older people. This always seemed strange to me. I knew young people were idiots, including myself. Taking advice from any of them seemed like idiocy to me. I was young and dumb, but not that dumb. If I needed help, I went and found an old guy.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that I was way dumber than I realized in my youth. While I was right to seek out information from older people, I was not very good at figuring out which old people were worth consulting. That comes with age and experience. As you get older, you acquire your own knowledge, but you also get better at figuring out who is worth listening to or reading. Number one on the list of people you ignore is young people. God bless ‘em, but they don’t know anything and they don’t know anyone who knows anything.

That all came to mind while reading this post by Charles Alphabet Cooke on National Review. He is out with a book called the Conservatarian Manifesto. From the post:

The book is in part a look at the growing number of self-identified “conservatarians” — those people whose worldview is broadly right-leaning, but who are dissatisfied with the Republican party and with much of libertarianism. I also make some suggestions as to how conservatives can update their offering, propose a framework within which their various constituents can once again co-exist, and take on the notion that there is such a thing as a “social issue” per se. At the book’s heart is a sustained defense of federalism and of a thriving and diverse civil society.

My first thought, was that Mr. Cooke is a little young to be offering up a new political philosophy. Last week he was riding his Big Wheel around the driveway. His writing has the feel of the college sophomore coming home for Winter Solstice, lecturing the family about the real world. Even when you agree with him you cringe a little.

Putting my mean spirited bigotry towards the young to the side, I was reminded of when Rod Dreher went bonkers a decade ago and tried to build a cult around breakfast cereal. His shtick was “granola conservatism” otherwise known as “crunchy cons.” He defined these individuals as traditionalist conservatives who believed in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values. They also express skepticism about aspects of free market capitalism and they are usually religious (typically traditionalist Roman Catholics or conservative Protestants).

Of course, those of us who remembered when guys like Joe Sobran and Sam Francis were writing for respectable publications knew that conservatives were never capitalists nor prone to worship at the altar of free markets. Dreher’s “new” flavor of conservatism was just the original product with some of his own eccentric foibles sprinkled on top. It’s why no one remembers “granola conservatism” or Rod Dreher. It was the rantings of a young man in the sophomore stage of his life.

Cooke’s new brand of conservatism sounds just like libertarianism circa 1984. Thirty years ago libertarians were the guys who did not want to fight the Left over issues like abortion and they thought guys like Jerry Falwell were icky and gross. Libertarians famously broke with Reagan over, wait for it, the war on drugs. I know, it sounds crazy, but that was one of the main reasons Ron Paul gave for bolting the Republican Party in the Reagan years.

Cooke’s proposed new cult is basically 1980’s libertarianism with less of an emphasis on free weed. The obvious irrationality is the same we see with libertarianism. If people are to be free to organize themselves as they see fit, that means people will want their government to do a lot of things libertarians find unpleasant. The only sort of human that could live in a libertarian paradise is a person who detests his fellow humans so much he refuses to have anything to do with them. Otherwise, social creatures put rules on one another in order to facilitate mutually beneficial relations. That scales up to what we know as culture.

But, culture is tough intellectual ground to cover and most libertarians are simply not bright enough to master the material. Young people like Mr. Cooke have been marinated in Cultural Marxism since birth and that means they have a Pavlovian response to anything that bumps into culture. That response is to run and hide under the bed or, if they are a true believer, scream at the heretic until he runs and hides under the bed.

The only debates worth having in a civil society are cultural debates. What kind of people we choose to be is the only thing we can leave to the next generation. It is what they will stand upon as they decide how they will order themselves and how they will choose to be remembered. The reason these debates get so ugly and nasty is because they are so important. No one gives a crap about tax policy enough to lose a friend over it. People care about the culture and they are willing to fight over it, unless they are a conservatarian, I guess.

I read Jim Geraghty every day mostly for laughs. He is a middle-brow Republican toady and C-List talking head. National Review gives him a space to talk campaign gossip. Predictably, he had a post yesterday denying the obvious in Virginia. That is the presence of a Libertarian straw probably cost The Stupid Party a seat.

The “Libertarians, without a candidate of their own, would otherwise vote for Republicans” theory is not so sound, and it’s not a factor Republicans should base a strategy on.

Those willing to vote Libertarian — as opposed to those who describe themselves as libertarian or having some libertarian views — are usually deeply attached to policy positions that are still pretty unpopular to Republicans as a whole — oftentimes (though not always) a quasi-isolationist or outright isolationist foreign policy, drug legalization (often well beyond marijuana), and gay marriage. Many (but not all) Libertarians oppose restrictions on abortion, habitually offer long diatribes about the Federal Reserve and the Gold Standard, and in some quarters, an inability to discuss U.S. foreign policy regarding Israel without lapsing into conspiracy theories and uglier sentiments.

Ah yes. Those people voting for third parties are “ugly” and we don’t want anything to do with them anyway. While it is true that most Libertarians are bat-shit crazy, most who vote for these guys just find the main party options too odious to support. The GOP had a chance to win in Virginia, but demanded that the candidate be a long time bagman with a long history of helping Democrats win policy debates. Asking conservative-leaning voters to support that flaming bag of poop is asking a lot.

What’s more, a lot of self-identified Libertarians see their policy differences with Republicans as key to their political identity; otherwise, they would be Republicans. To many Libertarians, the difference with Republicans is the point.

Nor is there much evidence that Libertarians fear that their vote will elect a Democrat. For all of of the alleged or potential flaws of voters who choose Libertarian-party candidates, they’re usually not stupid. They know their guy is in the single digits in the polls. They’re not voting in order to vote for a winner, and hearing Republicans complain that the Libertarian cost them the victory doesn’t make them feel guilty or a sense of regret. They may feel a bit of vindication in that result.

Why would anyone think Gillespie is different from Warner? Hod carriers like Geraghty imagine a world where placement of the 75th comma on page 1,822 of the 3,500 omnibus spending measure that grows the state by 10% a year in perpetuity is a battle worth waging. To people who would like to see one year in their lifetime where government actually shrinks in real dollars tend to think those fights are just a giant circle-jerk for the benefit of the hack-a-rama.

I take a back seat to no man in my condemnation of Libertarians. I think they are as nutty as Progressives. But, they vote their interests and that’s not something most conservatives can say these days. If you vote and you’re not a Liberal, you are either voting for a guy who honestly wants to murder you or the guy who wants to help him, but would like to be on good terms with you until the right moment.

It appears that no amount of facts or experience will kill some fantasies. The myth of the Latino voter is one example.

With President Barack Obama vowing to press ahead on immigration, prominent Hispanic Republicans are worried about the reaction of staunch conservatives. They fear it will harm the party’s ability to win over Latinos in the next presidential election and beyond.

This chart makes clear that Hispanics are not that important and no amount of pandering will change the party split.

But, when objective reality is infinity negotiable. why bother with facts?

While immigration was generally a muted issue in elections dominated by the Republicans, Obama promised the next day to move ahead on his own to remove the threat of deportation or grant work permits to an unspecified number of immigrants living here illegally.

“The initial reaction from Republicans is going to be very ugly and not well- thought-out, unfortunately,” said Alfonso Aguilar, former chief of the U.S. Office of Citizenship in the George W. Bush administration and executive director of Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.

Immigration was a central feature of many races, but pretending otherwise is so much more fun.

Aguilar said congressional Republicans must offer a plausible alternative to the president’s plan, especially since the Republican- controlled House has shelved bipartisan immigration legislation. His call echoes those of some of the party’s potential 2016 candidates to reach out to Hispanic voters in some way.

This is what I call the Lunatic’s Gambit. It works like this. The Left decides some issue has to be addressed. It is so urgent that “doing nothing is no longer an option.” Then they offer up their crackpot plan to address the crisis. When normal people object to the crackpot plan, the Left begins demanding the other side propose an alternative they will accept, or else we just have to go along with their crackpot idea. In this case, merely stopping a Caesarian power grab by the executive is not enough. The GOP has to come up with some way to satisfy the fanatics or else they must stand aside and allow Obama to declare himself emperor.

But House Republican aides note that Speaker John Boehner and others have no effective way to tone down comments of members who stridently oppose looser immigration rules. Indeed, many of those members are proud to defy party leaders.

Boehner himself likened Obama’s remarks to playing with matches. “He’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path,” Boehner said Thursday, a day after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell warned the president not to act without congressional approval. Such a move, McConnell said, “poisons the well” for potential bipartisan efforts.

A Congress controlled by the Republicans come January “will defend itself and our citizens from these lawless actions,” said Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions.

Aguilar and others are concerned that conservative firebrands will go further in their rhetoric, perhaps by calling for Obama’s impeachment or for mass deportations — creating a political sweet spot for Democrats not long after the Republican triumph at the polls and exposing a rift inside the party just as it assumes control of both chambers.

Well, I’m concerned that my neighborhood will be flooded with disease riddled peasants form the third world. That’s a concern Alfonso Aguilar does not have as he lives in a bunker community that is whiter than Reykjavik. If Alfonso Aguilar gets his feelings hurt because patriots say mean things about the open borders fanatics I can live with that. I can’t live in Tijuana Norte.

The trouble with the trip to Utopia is when you get there, not everyone agrees it is, in fact, the paradise everyone imagined. Since perfect social harmony is the hallmark of Utopia, those still grousing about the lack of perfection begin to look suspiciously at those saying they have reached Eden. Similarly, the people ready to settle into the garden look at the complainers as the final burr under the saddle of humanity. Both sides conclude that the only way forward is to get rid of the other side. Regardless of outcome, this cycle continues with all utopian groups until there’s no one left. Utopia, it turns out, is standing alone on the hilltop drenched in the blood of your former comrades.

The Cult of Modern Liberalism is suffering from the same trouble. What has kept the whole thing together is a hatred of the Trads, tradition Americans. They began with blacks and plutocrats. Then they started adding all sorts of weirdos and misfits into the coalition. The trouble with that is blacks are not all that fond of Jews and Homos. The Homos are not fond of one another. The feminists hate the Asians and the Homos. The weird thing about the Liberal coalition is they have only one thing in common, spiritually, emotionally and practically. That’s a distrust of Trads, particularly the pale penis people of the middle-class.

Obama reaching the White House was supposed to be the promised land. The trouble is few of his followers agreed it was the promised land. Six years later they are starting to take aim at one another.

Rose McGowan has declared an “indictment” of the gay community, claiming that homosexual men are “more misogynistic” than their straight counterparts and dismissing those who boycotted the Brunei-owned Dorchester Hotel collection as “delusional idiots”.

The American actress, who claims to have lived a life “heavily entrenched” in LGBT, was discussing the protest against the hotel chain with gay author Brett Easton Ellis in his weekly podcast when she made the comments.

The Dorchester Collection, which is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, has been the subject of boycotts since the controversial change to the penal code was scheduled to come into effect on 22 April 2014 that made homosexuality punishable by stoning to death.

Stephen Fry was among the first celebrities to attach themselves to the campaign.

The American Psycho author opened the conversation by calling the Dorchester Collection boycott a “form of narcissistic, self-victimisation, gay insanity” based on “illusionary and tenuous” reports about the Sharia law that ultimately led to the harming of “the people who simply work at the hotel”.

The actress, who herself held a defiant anti-boycott party at the Beverly Hills Hotel over the summer, agreed, then condemned the campaigners for failing to fight against the human rights abuses on behalf of women in Arab states, too.

“Gay men are as misogynistic as straight men, if not more so,” she said. “I have an indictment of the gay community right now, I’m actually really upset with them.”

What we are seeing now is the various groups packed into the positive rights pyramid looking around wondering if this is all there is and concluding that the real problem is the other misfits in the coalition. Ms. McGowan has decided she would rather spend her time with the pale penis people than her fellow benighted. Blacks and Asians seem to be coming to the same conclusion. Lunatic on lunatic violence is sure to follow.