After 9/11, I expected the government and all Western governments to quietly shut down immigration from Muslim countries. I assumed they would have be subtle about it as they would not want to piss off the various barbarian governments with which the West does business. At the same time, no president would want to be on the hook for letting another attack happen by letting them walk right on through the front door.

I was, of course, completely wrong about that. Instead of locking down the flow of Muslims into the country, the US government ramped up its recruitment. According to this report, there have been over 1.6 million green cards issued to people from Muslim countries. Amazingly, number one on the hit parade is Pakistan, having sent 200,000 migrants our way. Iran, of all places, is number two, having contributed 160,000 “new Americans.”

Unsurprisingly, the Feds say they need to monitor all of us to make sure we are not terrorists. They are also running some sort of secret domestic spying program that no one can explain. When they’re using shell companies to hide their actions, it is safe to assume the FBI is up to no good. It may be nothing, but in the custodial state, we’ll never know even if it is malice so we’re better off not looking up. Keep your head down folks. Nothing to see here.

The more suspicious sorts like libertarians think it is part of the government’s attempts to control us. That ship sailed a long time ago. Just look how fast the people in charge have turned the culture on things like homosexual marriage. It has moved so quickly that even the most committed fanatics are struggling to keep up with the faith. Even the folks who are supposed to defend traditional America have throw in the towel, posting 7,000 word odes to buggery and sexual deviance.

I think the paranoids have it wrong. The governments bizarre response to Muslim terrorism is not about control or an authoritarian takeover. Frankly, the people allegedly at the tip of the spear of this takeover are blithering idiots incapable of doing basic things. If the TSA is part of the government’s plan to make us slaves, we’re at no risk of a coup. The performance of the CIA and NSA has not been much better as they are routinely outfoxed by retards like the Tsarnaev brothers.

What’s going on here, in part, is a big jobs program for the security sector. The 9/11 attacks triggered what has become the New Deal for the security and defense industry. Around DC, every company offering security services, surveillance equipment and so forth has experienced a boom like nothing seen in living memory. I know a firm that offers security guards that has quadrupled its business in ten years, all on the tit of terrorism.

It’s also a great program for the political classes. One side gets to sell their egalitarian and multicultural ideas about how to pacify the jihadis. The other side gets to tub-thump about being butch with the jihadis. At the same time, both sides are importing as many Muslims as possible to make sure there’s a steady supply of state-side baddies to follow around with drones and wiretaps.

Again, I don’t think a secret cabal in Washington or Tel Aviv is deliberately putting Muslims in the West in order to frighten the public. In fact, I don’t think anyone puts much thought into it at all. The two sides of the political elite are too focused on their feud with the other side to notice the absurdity of their actions. Red Team deeply believes Islam is an existential threat like communism or Nazism. Blue Team thinks Islamic terrorism is blow-back for centuries of racism and colonialism.

That’s why both sides freak out when a guy like Rand Paul protests the War of Terror. One side sees him as an apostate and the other side sees him as a racist. The real issue is that he doubts the premise. The Muslims are way over there with no ability to project power beyond their village. If we stay here and leave them over there, then we don’t need to spend a trillion a year on security.

Of course, that money spent on security, no matter how foolishly spent, buys a lot of support so the politicians will never question the paradigm now. Like every other aspect of the welfare state, this one turns even the most independent minded citizen into a fan of the Leviathan. It’s not an accident that most people in the military-industrial complex are big fans of the GOP.

This is hilarious:

Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced he is running for president on Wednesday, becoming the third Democrat to challenge Hillary Clinton.

“Today I am formally entering the race for the Democratic nomination for president,” Chafee said in a university auditorium just outside Washington, D.C.

His announcement speech focused on finding “a way to wage peace.” The former Republican highlighted his opposition to the Iraq war, called for an end to drone strikes, and said he would reinvigorate the United Nations and further engage Russia.

He also said Edward Snowden should be allowed to come home and the U.S. should rethink the war on drugs. And, in one of the more unique policy positions outlined in a campaign speech this year, Chafee proposed the U.S. switch to the metric system.

“Here’s a bold embrace of internationalism: let’s join the rest of the world and go metric,” he said. During a question and answer session the former senator said it would be “symbolic integration” and a good-faith gesture to the rest of the world.

I remember when the lunatics tried converting us to the metric system. It was right around the same time they started making kids play soccer. It’s another example of how the Cult’s self-loathing is not a symptom, but a core aspect of the faith. It’s been there all along.

The thing is, this guy deeply believes all this stuff. It’s not an act. The mistake the Professional Right has made for as long as I’ve been alive is in assuming that Progressives really don’t belief this stuff. If they do belief it, then it is just bad information. They just can’t wrap their mind’s around the idea that someone can be nice, funny, smart and batshit crazy.

One of my gags is to point out that if the people flooding over the Rio Grande had law degrees, the American Bar Association would make Pat Buchanan look like an open borders fanatic. The penalties for hiring illegal lawyers would be draconian, involving torture and slow death. The border would make the DMZ look like Golden Gate Park.

In America following WW2, it was a great time to be working and middle class. If you had anything on the ball and a modest amount of self-control, you could create a fine life for yourself and your family. The twenty year period following the war was the heyday of middle-class America.

Just as the 1950’s were not a great time for the talented ten percent of blacks, it was not a great time for the cognitive elite of white America. No great fortunes were amassed in the 50’s and 60’s, like we saw in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th. Men got rich, but not over-class rich. There was simply no way to transfer large chunks of middle-class wealth to the ruling class.

Things changed in the 70’s and by the 1980’s, the technological revolution was setting the stage for a new robber baron class to emerge. First we allowed the financial class to auction off the manufacturing base to the third world. Then all sorts of new value transference schemes were created allowing Silicon Valley to boom. Of course, government metastasized.

This great concentration of wealth over the last three decades has been spurred on by the reckless enthusiasm of the managerial class. Educated people who should have known better cheered on the financialization of the economy by Wall Street and the assault on the culture through mass immigration. After all, the “new money” was bankrolling the universities and think tanks.

This is nowhere more obvious than in our university system. Even the most pedestrian of colleges are staffed with tenured radicals and overgrown hippies preaching nonsense. Middle class children are saddled with tens of thousands in debt for an education that used to be free in pubic school. The basic training for a work life is loaded down with agit-prop of no value in a human society.

The crushing reality of mathematics, however, may finally be reaching these tenured radicals on the college campus.

Lawmakers in Wisconsin advanced a daring proposal made by Gov. Scott Walker that would eliminate state laws guaranteeing faculty tenure at state universities, a dramatic potential shift that has faculty and administrators up in arms.

The Wisconsin legislature’s Joint Finance Committee voted 12-4 Friday to approve a proposal that would eliminate tenure from state law and allow tenured faculty to be laid off even if a school isn’t in a declared financial emergency. The proposal would also weaken faculty influence in setting policy and would cut the University of Wisconsin (UW)’s budget by $250 million over the next two years, down from a $300 million cut that was proposed by Walker.

The elimination of tenure protections was first suggested by Walker back in February, but was considered a longshot proposal. The Joint Finance Committee, however, is tremendously influential, and its decision to send the rollback to the floor of the legislature is seen as making passage much more likely.

By itself, the measure wouldn’t end tenure, but it would remove the current protections it has under state law and allow universities to set their own policies on the matter. In response, current UW system president Ray Cross said the school’s board of regents will act to enshrine tenure as university policy in a meeting later this week. No statement of the university’s intent can match the power of state law, though.

All movements become a business and then a racket. Tenure was seen as a way to increase discourse on campus in an era when the dominant religion was Christianity. It allowed the educated to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. As Christianity died off, the New Religion turned tenure into a jobs racket for members of the faith. If you are not an adherent, you will never get tenure at an American university.

The result is our centers of training and learning have been transformed into monasteries of lunacy, divorced from financial reality and the market economy. If you want to have a nice life, you must pay these gatekeepers for the credential and join, to some degree, their cult. What was intended to be an asset to a thriving people has become another anchor on a sinking culture.

The math of the managerial state means the top must consume the middle in the name of the bottom. The trouble is the middle is finite, meaning the erosion of the lower middle, becomes an erosion of the middle. Then it is onto the upper middle-classes. The rot is now reaching those with advanced degrees. Maybe those alarm bells going off in the universities will wake some of these people up. Maybe it is too late.

Steve Sailer has a post up highlighting the general lunacy of the Bruce Jenner story. The thing no one says in all of this is we are required to pretend, along with Jenner, that he is a woman and it is perfectly normal for him to have done what he has done to himself. No amount of pretending, however, can change the fact we all know it is not real. Jenner is not a woman.

In fact, Jenner is a person with a serious mental illness. If he were convinced, let’s say, that he could fly, society would take custody of him in order to prevent him from jumping off a building. He would be deemed a danger to himself and others. Similarly, if he started slashing his wrists or stabbing himself, he would be remanded to a psychiatric facility and appropriately restrained so he could not mutilate himself.

Biology tells us that humans come in one of two sexes. Not genders. Sexes. We know that some small portion of men and women are sexually abnormal, being attracted to the same sex. Similarly, some humans appear to have no sex drive, while others have an all-consuming sex drive. Like any other abnormality, these are exceptions to the standard.

Where there is no exception is in the presence of a Y-chromosome. If you have that, you are biologically male. About 1-in-1000 have two or more X-chromosomes and a Y-chromosome. These people are not a third sex as there are no documented cases in which both types of gonadal tissue function. In other words, they express as male or female, not both or some third option.

This is basic biology. If someone claimed that their head was on backwards or that they had eight legs, this conflict with observable biological reality would be proof of mental defect. The question, therefore, is why this other type of mental illness is being treated as a triumph, rather than insanity. The Sailer post argues, in its own way, that this has some utility to the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

Most normal people seem to think it is a part of the war on white men or the general attack on traditional western sensibilities. I think that’s the Sailer line. His subsequent post from Theodore Dalrymple adds in the need to crush and humiliate the people. I think that was certainly true in the authoritarian societies Dalrymple was observing. Corrupt the man and you break the man.

There’s more here though, in this denial of biology. Blank slate types used to claim that maleness and femaleness were 100% cultural. That’s largely been forgotten, but I’m old enough to recall when it was an article of faith amongst Progressives. It’s what was behind the push to put girls into sports in the 1970’s. That way, girls could learn to be competitive, just like the boys!

That turned out to be a bust. Women’s professional sports are mostly for lesbians. A typical crowd at a WNBA game is wearing flannel and comfortable shoes. Normal females will play sports until they discover boys and then their interests change. They may keep playing, but it is a part of their competition for eligible males. In other words, girl’s sports remained girl’s sports.

I wonder if what we’re seeing here is a renewed effort to claim that sex is a cultural artifact. After all, if Bruce Jenner can change sexes, then there’s no such thing as sex. That is the unsaid truth of egalitarianism. If everyone is the same, then no one really exists as a unique individual. Egalitarianism is a nullification of humanity and what better way to prove that than to change someone’s sex?

Of course, it could simply be wholesale what has long been observed retail. The person who is willing to break one social convention is likely to break others. Serial killers are often spurred on by the exhilaration from the previous act. Potheads are more likely to try coke and then meth than is the teetotaler. Similarly, a society that has broken from its traditional constraints is always on the prowl for some new high, some new adventure in cultural nullification.

Maybe that’s all there is to this. For as long as I have been alive, the worst thing you could say about someone is that they are average or normal. Everyone invests a maximum amount of time proving they are a special little snowflake, God’s special angel. That usually means being a nuisance or social irritant. Having run out of ways to be weird, we’re now onto mutilating the mentally ill.

This comment from ErisGuy raises an interesting question.

It’s more than strong- vs weak-horse. The character of the people has changed. They are overly deferential to their rulers, eager to learn how to behave and what to think from movie stars and to be guided by politicians. They no longer wish to make their own decisions, and desire only that others supply peace of mind.

Islam means submission. In their hearts they have submitted. Christianity means salvation. They know longer know “from what.”

Has the character of Western people changed in the last fifty years? Science tells us that large scale shifts in culture are going to take multiple generations. Those changes in culture will change the people in some way, but the sluggishness of the biological process puts a natural brake on things. The national character of Britain in 1959, for example, was not all that different from that of 1859.

But, it is hard to get around the fact that 80% of people in the Anglosphere went to Mass on Sunday just a few generations ago. Today, 80% would be hard pressed to name the nearest church. America is more Christian than Britain, but that’s changing quickly, it seems. Along with that change is a whole basket of social customs that were considered deranged a generation ago.

Of course, fifty years ago it was hard to broadcast propaganda to the whole nation. Not impossible, but not easy. Television was too new and even the power of radio was not fully understood. Governments were still using the old mass rally approach to propaganda, but adapting it to the new technology. It is only within the last thirty years or so that the ruling class has become skilled at the use of mass media.

It is said that Kennedy was the first politician to take advantage of TV, but his edge was accidental. He was good looking and his opponents were mugs. Nixon looked old even when he was young. Those who followed Kennedy did not build on his narrow use of TV. It was not until Reagan that we saw a politician employ the lessons of Hollywood and Madison Avenue to sell a candidate.

Team Clinton explicitly used Hollywood producers for the first time in a campaign. The highly polished campaign video is standard stuff now, but it was new in 1992. They also developed the idea of spin, whereby operatives would flood onto current affairs shows and monopolize the time chanting the campaign slogans. The idea of spin is common today, but it was Team Clinton that perfected it.

Has there been a more Riefenstahl-esque campaign than the selling of Obama? From beginning to end his was a use of mass media that the world had never seen. TV, radio, Internet, print, news shows, everything was saturated with the Obama message. They even had campaign videos automatically downloading to people’s DVR’s. I recall being in a party store and seeing Obama themed party supplies. Goebbels would have been gobsmacked by the efficient use of mass media by Team Obama.

What’s changed is not the character of the people, but the character of their rulers and their use of the institutions of social control. 200 years ago the state simply lacked the technological ability to monitor the daily lives of citizens. Instead, it had to be delegated. That put leadership down at the street level in every village and every block.

Compare Soviet Russia with modern China. In the Soviet Union, the party needed police on every corner to keep the population under control. That requires an enormous investment in bureaucracy, which ultimately bankrupted the system. China, in contrast, controls mass media and the currency. Both of which are possible in the modern technological age.

The Western managerial state is made possible through mass media. A single message can be broadcast to the whole public from a single source. More important is the ability to coordinate across platforms. Fifty years ago government had to politely ask Hollywood to support a war or social cause.

Today they seamlessly coordinate their efforts. The selling of ObamaCare is an obvious example as it was explicit. The White House had public ceremonies where they brought in Hollywood big shots and charged them with selling the program. At a more clandestine level, modern telecommunications makes coordination easy and seamless.

Of course, the fact that the great bulk of the public is plugged into the matrix most of their day makes it even easier to control public opinion. The people in charge wage multifaceted propaganda campaigns using TV, radio, social media, the interwebs and mobile devices. In a strange turn, all of us pay hundreds each month so the people in charge can give us instructions through our TV, the phone or the computer.

The question, of course, is whether the managerial state can survive mass media. The communications revolution may have let it flourish, but that does not mean it can arrest the mathematics. The crashing fertility rates in the West are what biologists would focus in on as a symptom of ecosystem decay. But, that’s over the horizon and I’ll be long gone by the time that question is answered.

I’m fond of pointing out that jerks and a-holes will ruin the best of plans. No matter how carefully you work out the details, some jerk will come a long and throw  a wrench in your plans. It’s just the nature of things in the modern world. Everyone is walking around with a sense of entitlement and no one wants to be the heavy so the jerks run wild.

It’s a variation of the tragedy of the commons. In the standard model, individuals will figure out that it is to their individual advantage to take more than they contribute. This sets off a cascading effect leading to everyone taking and no one contributing.The most common examples are grazing lands or fisheries. Without regulation and policing, you get over grazing and over fishing.

The jerk variation is when jerks decide they have a right to do some activity simply because there is no explicit prohibition against it. Everyone will understand, for example, you should not let your dog poop on the bike path, at least without policing it. The jerk walks their dog on the bike path and let’s the chips fall where they may, as it were. When confronted, they respond by saying there’s no rule against it.

Another example of jerks make life hard for the rest of is right here on this site. Blogs and news stories invite comments. Jerks come along and fill the comments with work at home scams and penis pill ads. That means we have to have spam filters and police the comments sections. A good chunk of the code in a WordPress site is to fend off jerks trying to mess up a blog for no other reason than they are an asshole.

Anyway, the jerks are ruining the interwebs in a different way and that’s with ads. There are some sites I don’t bother to visit because they are so bogged down with popups, scripts and the worst thing of all, auto-playing videos. The guy who came up with that idea should be burned at the stake. There’s nothing worse than having some nonsense come blaring through your PC speakers as you feverishly look for the source.

Like most everyone, I have ad-blockers, script blockers, flash blockers, pop-up blockers, you name it, on my daily browser. I use Chrome as my video browser so if I wished to see something on youtube I open it in Chrome. My Mozilla-based browser has a flash blocker. It’s a bit ridiculous, but it is necessary to have a decent internet experience.

That is not without its consequences.

In coming weeks, a large analytic firm will release disturbing figures on the state of the ad blocking scene. According to someone who has advanced knowledge of the data, on desktop computers and on critical segments of the digital audience, the use of ad blocking keeps rising exponentially.

Along with The Netherlands, the German market is by far the most affected one by the ad blocking phenomenon. There, ad block use approaches 40% of the internet population. The reasons for the epidemic are unclear, but two elements are likely to play a role. First, AdBlock Plus (ABP), the most popular ad blocking software, has its roots in Cologne. Second, a cultural factor: German opposition to online advertising that manifests itself in the government’s obsessive anti-Google stance pushed by large media conglomerates such as Axel Springer SE.

In France too, ad blocking use is on the rise: about 30% of Gallic internet users are said to have installed extensions that remove banners and other modules; and the Millennials segment (born in 1980-2000) is twice more likely to use an ad blocker. The worst hit are Gaming sites with 80% to 90% of their views deprived of ads. More broadly, the more technophile an audience is, the more likely it is to resort to an ad blocking product.

The US market seems the less affected with 15%-17% of the internet population, again on average, using an ad blocking extension. Among the Millennials, the share is said to be twice the average. The UK is said to experience the same pattern.

Altogether, 300m people in the world have downloaded an ad blocking extension and about half have actually installed it.

This may not seem like a big deal, but ads are based on site views and site views assume the embedded ads are being seen.

For publishers, ad blockers are the elephant in the room: Everybody sees them, no one talks about it. The common understanding is that the first to speak up will be dead as it will acknowledge that the volume of ads actually delivered can in fact be 30% to 50% smaller than claimed — and invoiced. Publishers fear retaliation from media buying agencies — even though the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats.

One of the comments gets it right:

There are sites that I don’t block ads at. They usually ask me not to block ads. They also treat me with respect. No pop-ups. Not autoplaying video or sound. Good privacy policies.

Sites that respect me, earn my respect in return. All other sites earn blocks instead.

If this drives them out of business, I’m good with that. What would be better is if they learned to treat their readers with respect.

And that would be a win win too. Not only would they not be blocked, but since blockers like adblock often slow the browser down, I would see ads and have a faster browsing experience.

I don’t solicit Breitbart because it is infested with ads created by the nation’s dickhead community. Loads of viruses are spread through embedded ads as well. If a site has no choice but to go the jerk route with their ads, then they should go out of business. The world has plenty of jerks. We’re full.

According to a new study, the Church of England is heading for the dustbin of history, while British Islam is on the upswing.

The Church of England has suffered a dramatic slump in its followers, shocking new figures show.

Between 2012 and 2014, the proportion of Britons identifying themselves as C of E or Anglican dropped from 21 per cent to 17 per cent – a fall of about 1.7 million people.

Over the same period, the number of Muslims in Britain grew by nearly one million, according to a survey by the respected NatCen Social Research Institute.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey warned last night that unless urgent action was taken, the Church was just ‘one generation away from extinction’.

The number of Anglicans in Britain has dropped from about 10.3 million to 8.6 million, and will raise fresh fears over the future of the Church of England, which has been in decline since the 1960s.

Of course, those numbers of Anglicans is boosted by imports from the old empire. Africans and Arabs are surely boosting those figures. How many natives attend services even occasionally is unknown to me. The overall weekly attendance rate of Christians in England is 12%. My bet it the number of self-identified Christians who bother attending services is less than 20%.

Alarmingly for Church leaders, the worst losses have come over the past decade, with about 4.5 million fewer people affiliating themselves to the C of E or Anglicanism between 2004 and 2014. In contrast, those who describe themselves as Muslim have jumped from 3.2 per cent of the population – equivalent to 1.5 million – in 2012 to 4.7 per cent or 2.4 million in 2014. The only Christian denomination that has remained relatively stable between the 1980s and today is Catholicism – numbers have dipped slightly from ten per cent to eight per cent.

Mr Brierley said the Roman Catholic Church had benefited from the influx of immigrants in recent years, particularly those from Eastern Europe. He added: ‘It is not just Poles. Many others are joining the Church when they come here, from Filipinos to Portuguese. There are seven different Catholic churches just for Croatians in London.’

A category called ‘Other Christian’ has also remained steady, boosted by the rise of largely black congregations attending Pentecostal ‘mega-churches’.

Naomi Jones, of NatCen, said one explanation for the Anglican decline is that fewer people see Christianity as being an important part of their British identity.

I have an old friend who is an Episcopal minister. The Episcopal Church is suffering from the same problems as the Anglican Church. Women, homosexuals and Progressives have worked hard to turn the church into an anti-Christian and anti-Western romper room. They had a Bishop a few years back who was a proud sodomite and all-around public nuisance.

Christianity only works when it calls the faithful to live in opposition to the fallen world. In Europe, nationalism was mixed into the faith so that each people could make their own claims to be God’s chosen. Even so, the faithful, including secular leaders, were required to live according to the tenets of the faith, which demanded the foregoing of earthly pleasures in order to spend eternity in heaven.

Mainstream Protestant faiths, like the C of E, have thrown in the towel on all that sacrifice and self-denial stuff. As a result, people stopped going to services, What would be the point? The Church was supposed to offer guidance and support in navigating around temptation. If the guy saying mass cannot control himself and preaches that you follow his lead, why not stay home and watch TV instead?

That’s all water under the bridge now as Christianity is dead on the Continent and nearly dead in the Anglosphere. The big news is that Islam is maybe a decade away from being the biggest religion in England. With about ten percent of the population being Muslim now, ongoing conversion and immigration suggest Muslims will be pushing 25% of the population in a generation.

It’s tempting to think that the rest of the country will rise up in opposition, but everyone thought something similar when Æthelberht converted to Christianity in the 6th century. As Osama bin Laden put it, people see a strong horse and a weak horse. They will choose the strong horse. Just as Christianity was the strong horse 1500 years ago, Islam is now the strong horse in Britain.

As-salamu alaykum Chaps!

It is my contention that the Cult is fine with throwing the 2016 election if only to be done with Hillary Clinton. If a true believer were to step into the race, like say Elizabeth Warren, then we would see the Cult and its hoffaktors make a full court press to keep the White House in the hands of the Cult. After all, there could be several Supreme Court openings.

But, that’s not happening so for now the liberal media will subtly point to the failings of Clinton and her campaign.

Over the last few months, Harold M. Ickes, a longtime ally of Hillary Rodham Clinton, has helped organize private meetings around the country with union leaders, Clinton backers and Democratic strategists. The pressing topic: Who will step up to be the Democrats’ megadonors in the 2016 presidential race?

Republican contenders have already secured hundreds of millions of dollars in commitments from a stable of billionaires, including a Wall Street hedge fund executive, a Las Vegas casino magnate, a Florida auto dealer, a Wyoming investor and, of course, the Kansas-born billionaires David H. and Charles G. Koch. But none of the biggest Democratic donors from past elections — for example, the Chicago investor Fred Eychaner, the climate-change activist Tom Steyer and the entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg — have committed to supporting Mrs. Clinton on nearly the same scale.

“No one has stepped forward as the savior,” said Matt Bennett, a longtime Democratic consultant in Washington.

A big part of the Progressive mythology is to believe that a secret cabal of billionaires is working to thwart Progressives. When you look at the figures, you see that about 60% of the rich guy money is going to Democrats. Most of the rich guy money going to the GOP is for globalist, open borders stuff that no sane person would call “conservative.”

But, the take away here is that the big donors of the Cult are keeping their powder dry for now. The excuse is hilarious:

In planning sessions and one-on-one meetings with donors, Mr. Ickes, who is a Priorities USA board member, and other Clinton supporters are discussing how to raise as much as $300 million for Democratic outside groups. That is almost twice as much as Democratic super PACs and other outside groups spent to help re-elect President Obama in 2012, when conservative super PACs far outspent liberal ones.

This ambitious goal will require the emergence of a new class of at least 20 Democratic donors who can give $5 million or even $10 million each. Mr. Ickes said recruiting them would not be easy.

“Our side isn’t used to being asked for that kind of money,” Mr. Ickes said. “If you asked them to put up $100 million for a hospital wing, they’d be the first in line.”

It’s things like this that should remind normal people that the Cult is not stocked with reasonable people with bad information. These people are nuts. They truly believe the lunacy they spout and no amount of reasoning is going to change their beliefs.

The hurdles begin with the candidate. While Mrs. Clinton has committed to meeting personally with potential super PAC donors, people close to her say she has not yet grappled with the kind of big-donor courting that has framed the early months of the Republican race.

She is also navigating the intricate rules on what a candidate may do to help super PACs, which, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, can raise unlimited funds from individuals and corporations but may not “coordinate” with candidates. Fearful of violating the rules, Mrs. Clinton plans to limit her direct appeals to donors.

Yeah, the people who have spent the last twenty years breaking every Federal law regarding campaign financing are now suddenly scrupulous about the minor details of fundraising. The only way someone can write that paragraph is as satire or severe mental illness. My goodness. Just the other day it was revealed that Clinton sold off 20% of the nation’s uranium supply for cash to her “foundation” which is a giant slush fund for Clinton Inc.

This is the way theocracies operate. Objective reality is hammered and shaped to fit dogma, to the point of absurdity. If a normal person were in the room when this article was discussed and they made mention of the scandals, everyone would leave the room. Before long someone from HR would call the normal in and poof! They’re a non-person at the NYTimes.

That’s not to say the agit-prop organs of the Cult of Modern Liberalism will fully support Clinton. Theirs is a more subtle game. They will avoid outright denunciation because Clinton is not a heretic. She’s just a crook and a loser. Instead, they will talk about how the true believers, for some reason, are just not that enthused about Hillary. That way they can let events take their course, while still waving the flag of Team Moonbat.

This post on Quora reminds me of something I’ve noticed in myself and I suspect is common with humans. That is, we decide whether we like someone within a few minutes of meeting them. In many cases, we strongly like or dislike the person for no obvious reason. On the other hand, there are times when we know exactly why we have the strong reaction to the stranger.

An example that comes to mind of the irrational reaction is Newt Gingrich. The first time I laid eyes on him I detested him with the intensity of a thousand suns. When he opened his fat mouth and started talking in that nasally whine, the urge to punch him in the face was almost overwhelming. Even though he was saying things that I should find agreeable, the only thought in my mind was of him being hit by a bus.

Later, I was proven right, but I also figured out why I had such a strong reaction to him. That is, my bitter weirdo theory of human organization. The first order of business when organizing your society is to make sure the bitter weirdos have no power or authority. Newt grew up as an annoying fat kid picked on by normal kids. He turned out to be a bitter weirdo with a chip on his shoulder. His life is consumed with settling petty personal scores.

An example of someone who I never liked, but instantly knew why, is Ann Coulter. In fairness, I have softened on Coulter as she has matured. When she first got on the scene, her act was just an act. It was plainly obvious. She was the precocious daddy’s girl getting the attention of adult males by saying impolite things. It just seemed like a made for TV act.

That Quora piece got me thinking that maybe there’s something else at work. The human mind, to my observation, is a pattern matching mechanism. It’s what makes artificial intelligence so daunting. It’s not the speed of our synapses; its the nature of them. Our brains have a massive catalog of concepts through which we instantly sort to find the one that closely matches anything new.

Imagine a four dimensional database in which one dimension is time. The new thing is compared to the closest thing in the database, then the next closest and so on at the speed of light. Once we land on a match, that’s where we start to place this new thing in our database of knowledge.

It’s why deception is so effective and so disdained. It violates the innate rules of the human mind. This new thing that looks like this known thing suddenly turns out to be different is alarming. Alternatively, that thing we had put into its proper category that suddenly turns out to be something wildly different is scary. Deception causes us to doubt the very thing that makes us tick.

It’s tempting to assume that we react to strangers strongly because at some level they remind of us someone we know. That strikes me as simplistic and not a very useful adaptation. There’s enough variation in people where we will meet people who are not much like anyone we have known. Children are innately fearful of strangers because their catalog is small and most everything is foreign to them.

My hunch is that in the case of Gingrich, I was picking up on the minor deceptions in his demeanor. His carefully cultivated presentation lacked authenticity and that’s what triggered my dislike. This was a smart guy really good at lying to people. That makes him very dangerous. Ann Coulter, in contrast, was just a TV phony, not dangerous or threatening, just annoying.

As I said, I’ve softened on Coulter. She can still dine out on her looks, but that’s not the sale these days. She can say what she wants as she has her own money so she is more relaxed and honest. Her fake laugh still bugs me, but that’s more than balanced by her ability and willingness to punch a hippie.

Of course, there’s something else that may be specific to me. I detest phonies. I can get along well with people who are what they are, even if what they are revolts me. Here in the ghetto, there’s a lot of social pathology, but it does not bother me as these people are what they are. In SWPL-ville, most work hard to conceal their intentions, which I find intolerable.

The news brings word that ISIS has sacked Palmyra and Ramadi. To what degree they control these cities and their populations is disputed. There are reports that Ramadi is mostly in the hands of the Iraq government with some terrorism from ISIS fighters. I’m not sure it matters a whole lot as the main story is the collapse of Iraq into anarchy and sectarian war.

If you look at a map, it is not hard to see why Iraq is nearly ungovernable as a single state. Arabs are highly clannish, with primary loyalty to their lineage-based tribe and a natural hostility to those outside the tribe. Layer on this map and you see that Mesopotamia is additionally riven by deep religious differences. Those Sunni – Shia difference may seem small to us, but they are everything to them.

Just to make things interesting, according to this post from HBDChick, Iraq has very high levels of cousin marriage. They have cousin marriage rates as high as 50%, including double cousin marriage, which is when the children of one man marry the children of his brother. That may explain why Iraq has a national IQ of 87.

The assumption of most Americans, including the people in charge, was that Saddam was a ruthless dictator because he was a sadist or evil. Saddam simply liked doing horrible things to his people, like using poison gas on them. Reality, of course, was more complex. To run Iraq requires overcoming the tribal and sectarian hatreds, along with the limited smart fraction. That means murderous force.

In fairness to all of the neo-cons who championed the Freedom Agenda in the Bush years, getting rid of Saddam sounded good and was well intentioned. They truly believed that they could arrange things in such a way that the Arabs of Mesopotamia could join the modern world with modern governance and modern economics. Their analysis was not all wrong, in this respect. It was simply naive.

But, they were wrong and removing Saddam was a terrible mistake that resulted in the current mess. Maybe we should have kept troops in country longer. Maybe we should have blown up more stuff and killed more of their males. No amount of who struck John arguments will change the fact that the region is a disaster and mostly because of American policy the last 25 years, particularly the last 15 years.

Note that the timelines here are becoming generational. Assuming a generation is 20 years, we are now into the second generation of mucking about in this region. The typical Iraqi is 27 years of age, which means he has known nothing by the US dropping bombs on him. That’s a long time to engage in any public policy. At some point, people expect to see some positive results and that’s not the case with the Near East.

That’s what I found a bit strange about the reaction to Rand Paul’s latest riffs on ISIS. This bit from Roger Simon jumped out at me because he has always struck me as a level headed guy. In this case, he appears to have thrown his dress over his head and ran screaming into the night.

Alas Rand (I had higher hopes for him), like father Ron, has a mega-chauvanistic view of the world.  The USA is so big and strong it causes everything, including, at one point, 9-11, and now ISIS, if you can believe that. Never mind that the Islamic State is just another avatar of Islamic imperialism’s desire for a world caliphate that has been going on for centuries, long before our country was in existence — the Battle of Tours (732), the Siege of Vienna (1683) and on and on. The violence has been there forever, too.  As any literate person knows, it’s in the Koran and the Hadith.  Beheadings were part of Mohammed’s game plan. It’s what he did and what he called for. This was not invented by a cabal of neocons in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 2003.

I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for libertarianism and I’m no fan of Rand Paul. His comments on ISIS are not measured, but they are not outlandish or even wildly incorrect. They are simply incomplete. A long series of mistakes and general stupidity by US policy makers gave us the current mess. No one intended for it tot happen. No one intends to hit a tree with their car, but we accept blame for it when it happens.

That’s what makes Paul’s comments incomplete and careless. He leaves the impression that it was intentional. We did create a Muslim force in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and it did become Al Qaeda. That’s indisputable. It was not, however, the intent of guys like Clarence Long and Charlie Wilson who pushed for arming the Afghans. They simply could not see over the horizon and know where their schemes would lead.

Similarly, breaking up and disbanding the Iraqi military sounded like a good idea. No one thought about what would happen when all of those paranoid and unemployed Sunnis who used to work for Saddam decided on what to do next. No one thought about how the new Shia government would react to those Sunnis. No one imagined ISIS or anything like it.

Lack of foresight, however, is not a blameless act. If I don’t know what is behind door number two, I am obligated to consider the possibilities. If I just blunder through it, I have no one to blame but myself for the results. We expect our rulers to look down the road and consider the possibilities. Very serious men cautioned that removing Saddam would lead to chaos.

Team Bush and the mainstream conservatives rejected those warnings and ran off the old paleocons from the Reagan years. The great schism that plagues the American Right to this day was caused by the rift over Iraq. It is what causes Roger Simon and The Weekly Standard crowd to fly into hysterics whenever one points out that this mess in Mesopotamia and the Near East is due to the mistakes of American policy makers, primarily the hawks in the GOP.

Now, none of this should be taken to mean I don’t think ISIS is a problem. It is a problem and a significant one. How much of this problem we need to address and how to address it starts with understanding why this problem exists in the first place. That means owning up to our own mistakes and avoiding a repeat of them going forward. That also means putting the light on the hawks who were so terribly wrong and knocking that smug look off their face.

That’s really what the hysteria over Rand Paul is about, I suspect. Any discussion of the past means revisiting the predictions and polices of those who turned out to be all wrong about Iraq after Saddam. It’s hard to remain in the debate if you are, to some degree, responsible for creating the mess. Roger Simon, I suspect, would like to everyone to forget he was all wrong about this.

The result is a strange moral panic on the Right anytime the issue is raised. If you are not fully on-board with forever war, then you get labeled a Neville Chamberlain who is insufficiently tough on terrorism. In other words, it is all about shifting the focus away from the errors of the past and onto the lack of faith of the person trying to discuss the past. Simon even resorts to the old Progressive trick of projecting their racism onto others.

Rand, again like father Ron, is essentially racist in blaming this on America and not recognizing other cultures have belief systems to which they truly adhere and that those belief systems may be dangerous, even evil.  America did not evolve Islamist ideology anymore than it did Nazism, but the Islamists have the potential to wreak just as much havoc if they are not stopped.

The undeniable fact is the forever war types like Simon cheered on the Iraq invasion arguing that Arabs were just like us, loving what we love and hating what we hate. Implicit in their claims was a denial that there is even such a thing as being Arab or Muslim. The whole point of the invasion and occupation was to erase the Arab identity and replace it with a Western one.

For that reason I hope Rand Paul continues his critique, but polishes it up a bit by dropping the conspiratorial tone so common amongst libertarians. It was not a conspiracy by the Deep State, the military-industrial complex and the Israel lobby that caused this mess. It was a combination of ideological irrationality, triumphalism and misplaced American optimism. I’d throw in a failure to appreciate the diversity of the human animal.

The only way to arrive as a solution is to cast the spotlight on guys like Simon and their wrongness with regards to the region going back two generations now. Otherwise, they will keep hooting down everyone that wishes to try something different in an effort to put the lid back on the cauldron that is Mesopotamia.