I’m not sure where I am with Ted Cruz. I like some things he has said, but I have my doubts about his sincerity on issues important to me like immigration, guns and the size of government. But, I’m still open minded about him. Stories like this make me wonder if he is an idiot or extremely clever.

Sen. Ted Cruz was booed offstage at a conference for Middle Eastern Christians Wednesday night after saying that “Christians have no greater ally than Israel.”

Cruz, the keynote speaker at the sold-out D.C. dinner gala for the recently-founded non-profit In Defense of Christians, began by saying that “tonight, we are all united in defense of Christians. Tonight, we are all united in defense of Jews. Tonight, we are all united in defense of people of good faith, who are standing together against those who would persecute and murder those who dare disagree with their religious teachings.”

Cruz was not reading from a teleprompter, nor did he appear to be reading from notes.

“Religious bigotry is a cancer with many manifestations,” he continued. “ISIS, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, state sponsors like Syria and Iran, are all engaged in a vicious genocidal campaign to destroy religious minorities in the Middle East. Sometimes we are told not to loop these groups together, that we have to understand their so called nuances and differences. But we shouldn’t try to parse different manifestations of evil that are on a murderous rampage through the region. Hate is hate, and murder is murder. Our purpose here tonight is to highlight a terrible injustice, a humanitarian crisis.”

“Christians have no greater ally than Israel,” he said, at which point members of the crowd began to yell “stop it” and booed him.

EWTN News Nightly’s Jason Calvi caught the moment on video.

“Those who hate Israel hate America,” he continued, as the boos and calls for him to leave the stage got louder. “Those who hate Jews hate Christians. If those in this room will not recognize that, then my heart weeps. If you hate the Jewish people you are not reflecting the teachings of Christ. And the very same people who persecute and murder Christians right now, who crucify Christians, who behead children, are the very same people who target Jews for their faith, for the same reason.”

The cries of “stop it, stop it, enough,” and booing continued. “Out, out, leave the stage!” At this point IDC’s president, Toufic Baaklini, came out to the stage to ask for the crowd to listen to Cruz, but Cruz had already had enough.

I probably know more about Arab Christians than most people, but guys in his league have sharp people around them who do their homework before sending their man out to speak. Arab Christians hate Arab Muslims and they hate Israel. They have good reason to hate both camps. They are typically used as canon fodder by both sides. The Israelis and Arabs have run most of the Christians out of Lebanon, for example.

Now, maybe Cruz is just a blockhead, who assumed all Christians are like American Evangelicals. He went in thinking he had a great pitch only to find they thought he was flinging poo at them. On the other hand, it may have been a setup. The three “I’s” still apply to some degree in American politics. That’s Iowa, Ireland and Israel. Get the support of all three and you win the presidency. Ireland has fallen by the wayside now, but Israel still counts for a lot. Taking one for the Tribe looks pretty good on the resume if you’re planning to run for president.

Until recently I had zero interest in TedTalks, assuming they were the sort of nonsense that bourgeois bohemians were into, not the stuff for guys like me. Then I became a hyper-critical jerk with a blog and I can’t get enough of the TedTalks. It is like a candy store for malevolent meanies who enjoy making sport of our betters. At some point the beautiful people will find out that the rest of us think these things are hilariously stupid and they will stop doing it, but for now I have guys like Lawrence Lessig to entertain me.

[ted id=1960]

Lawrence Lessig is fairly typical of the grasping, self-important barnacle we see these days. His biography says he was “conservative” in his teenage years, joining the Teenage Republicans. He was a law clerk for some conservative judges and then joined the Cult while he was in Europe working on a philosophy degree. Ever since, his “change of heart” has been his pass into elite circles of the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

At the dawn of the Internet age, these faculty lounge philosophers were just about out of options. Sitting around smoking clove cigarettes and talking about Che was seen as ridiculously out of step with the times. Making money, living the good life and jumping on the speeding train of technology was where the cool kids were at, not bookstores and coffee shops. This ever-present caravan of crazies that poses as the avant guard needed to figure out how to get in on the act.

Guys like Lessig figured out how to attach themselves to the productive class by philosophizing about technology. Early nerds, like myself. were attracted to computers, the Internet and programming because you did not have to put up with all the bullshit that clown shoes like Lessig imposed on other creative fields. In fact, you could avoid these guys entirely as they were afraid of what you were doing. Debates on early bulletin board systems were wild and ferocious, but loads of fun because you did not have to worry about scolds like Lessig.

As to his talk, you see the same thing here as with all of them. Watching the video, it is all conversational, self-referential and emotive. It’s the Feelies from Brave New World. The guy on stage talks about an emotion and the crowd feels it. These talks are intended to be religious, not instructive. You see that when you read the text. It’s the sort of thing you write when on acid, thinking you have reached a higher consciousness.

He mentions this, his promotional vehicle he pretends is a political movement. Lessig has decided to attach himself to the Cult’s latest cause, getting money out of politics. The Cult hates the idea of unapproved people influencing politics. Citizen’s United has become a rallying cry and a weird sort of epithet for the Cult. Like health care, the Left is rallying to overturn rules and regulation they passed long ago. That Supreme Court ruling would be meaningless if the Left had not passed a mountain of other laws intended to curb money in politics.

Anyway, Lessig’s organization is just a way for Lessig to promote himself using other people’s money. Like “universal health care” campaign finance reform has become a subcult within the Cult of Modern Liberalism. That means there’s money to be had getting on this issue and that means barnacles like Lessig will attach themselves to it. It beats working, I guess.

One of the more bizarre rituals in Rousseau-ist cults is the self-criticism session. The Chinese called them Struggle Sessions. The difference is probably cultural. Oriental societies have always maintained a dense wall between the public life and the interior life of a member. Western culture has always sought a strong link between the public man and his private thoughts. In the West, “what you see is what you get” makes some sense. In China, such a concept is hilariously alien. Still, the idea of confession as a cleanser is a universal.

The NBA is going through that now. I’m going to assume that Donald Sterling’s threat to dish dirt on the league has frightened them into a careful re-examination of their private musings. Given how modern management works, the league office probably instructed each team to scour their networks for any communications that could be upsetting to very tall black people. We have one owner committing seppuku and now we have a GM subjected to a struggle session. His crime was the same one tripping up everyone these days. That would be noticing.

I think it was Charles Murray who documented that regulations tend to come along after the threat had dissipated. In other words, once people became aware of some danger they adjusted their behavior. It was only after that government came along with rules intended to mitigate the danger. I wonder if something similar is afoot here. It seems that most people are looking at the public hysteria over these thought crimes and wondering if the rulers have lost their minds. Even the more liberal types are rolling their eyes at these shenanigans.

Maybe these latent struggle sessions are a response to the public’s dwindling interest in race. Unless you have brain damage, you can’t help but notice that life for black Americans is pretty good now. If you avoid crime, drugs and mayhem, you will have a good life. You may not get rich, but you can have a decent middle-class life. Most of the nation’s celebrities are black. All of the athletes are black. They live like royalty. Evidence of real discrimination is impossible to find without a lot of digging and imagination.

Or, perhaps our rulers are simply spinning out of control.

Way back in the olden thymes, bankers went crazy and we ended up with the S&L Crisis. Bank fraud, bubbles, busts and system collapse are regular features of banking. The reason is simple. Banks attract bank robbers. The role of government is to police the banks, arrest the robbers when they find them and then make examples of those bank robbers by putting them in cages for long periods. It is not perfect, but it keeps the banking system of a nation working in an orderly fashion.

In the Clinton years, that all changed. We stopped putting bankers in jail. In fact, we stopped arresting them entirely. Instead, it is a free-for-all in finance. Here’s yet another story of systematic bank fraud that will result in no action by the government.

Derivatives regulators told the U.S. Justice Department they’ve found evidence of criminal behavior following an investigation into banks’ alleged manipulation of ISDAfix, a benchmark used to set rates for trillions of dollars of financial products.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which first sent subpoenas to the world’s largest banks in November 2012 to determine whether ISDAfix was rigged, has flagged its findings to prosecutors, according to a person familiar with the matter. The CFTC’s enforcement powers are confined to bringing civil, not criminal, cases. It isn’t clear who the CFTC suspects broke the law.

Benchmarks like ISDAfix, which is used to track prices on interest-rate swaps, serve as the foundation of global finance, helping pension funds determine their future obligations and lenders decide how much to charge borrowers. Regulators around the world are probing allegations that measures used to set prices in gold, oil, interest rates and currencies were rigged by banks and brokers wanting to pad their profits while cheating their clients and other investors.

Last week, the Alaska Electrical Pension Fund accused 13 banks including Barclays Plc (BARC), Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. (C) as well as broker ICAP Plc (IAP) of conspiring to manipulate ISDAfix. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority is also looking into allegations of wrongdoing involving the benchmark.

Representatives of the Justice Department, CFTC, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup and ICAP declined to comment.

This is not just a few guys stealing. This is systematic theft of public monies by the world’s largest banks. This does not happen without the top level managers knowing and directing it.

Bloomberg News, citing a person with knowledge of the matter, was the first to report last year that the CFTC found evidence traders at Wall Street banks instructed ICAP brokers to buy or sell as many interest-rate swaps as necessary to rig ISDAfix by moving it to a predetermined level. Doing so helped banks reap millions of dollars in trading profits, costing companies and pension funds, the person said at the time.

Brokers on the ICAP desk, nicknamed “Treasure Island” because of the large salaries and bonuses they were paid, negotiate swaps trades on behalf of banks. Until this year, the dollar-denominated version of the ISDAfix rate was set daily by ICAP based on data submissions from banks. Amid the CFTC investigation, ICAP lost that central role. The International Swaps & Derivatives Association Inc., or ISDA, picked Thomson Reuters Corp. to take over that job this year.

Deferred prosecution settlements between regulators and banks including UBS AG and Barclays related to London interbank offered rate rigging have compelled firms to hand over information in the ISDAfix and currency probes to avoid criminal prosecution in the Libor case.

The term “deferred prosecution” is a neologism that means no prosecution. If you are a young gun working your way up in finance, you see no risk to this behavior. If you get caught, your bosses cover it up, you keep the money and maybe you have to change firms as a “punishment.”

Start putting these guys on The Farm and we suddenly get a new respect not only for the law, but the spirit of the law.

Years ago, I used to enjoy watching John Derbyshire go around and around with ID’ers about evolution. What I found enjoyable was how frustrated he would get with them. It was not that I enjoyed seeing him frustrated. It was that in his exasperation he would write some very funny things. John is an empirically minded guy and he could never wrap his head around the the circular reasoning of the intelligent design crowd. He try to walk them through the basics and they would break free and start yapping about entropy and the Big Bang.

The thing I find interesting about the creationists and ID’ers is they are not very Christian. In fact, they are almost pagan in their beliefs. This story that has been kicking around the neo-Christian sites is an example. The first sentence is a good starting point.

LANDMARK Adelaide research showing that sperm and eggs appear to carry genetic memories of events well before conception, may force a rethink of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, scientists say.

Creationists and ID’ers look at evolution as a cult. They naturally assume Darwin holds the same place in the hearts of “evolutionists” as Jesus or the Bible holds for them. If Darwin is proven to be wrong in some way, then everything he said is false and the whole religion of evolution comes crashing down. After all, if the prophet is proved false his religion is proved false. The result of this thinking is an obsession on the part of ID’ers with Darwin and trying to discredit him.

The trouble is science does not work like religion. Darwin was wrong about a lot of things and he guessed about a lot of other things. He was also not the only guy working on these ideas. Genetics and the cracking open of the human genome have added more to evolutionary biology than Darwin. Newton was wrong about plenty of things, but that does not mean math is a false god. Science is the process of trial and error, with error leading to new discoveries.

But, the ID’ers can’t think that way. Their interest in the subject is not to gain a better understanding of the natural world. Their interest is to defend their faith. That’s where the paganism creeps into the story. Traditional Christianity contains two key elements. One is that God is rational and the other is God is unknowable. The former is about consistency. God created the laws of nature and enforces them. They don’t change. That’s what permits science and scientific inquiry. God could change those laws, but he doesn’t because he keeps his word, literally and figuratively.

The latter, the unknowable part is where the new breed of Christian wanders off the reservation. They think they are having a personal relationship with Jesus. Traditional Christianity does not view Jesus as divine in the same way Greeks viewed Zeus as divine. Jesus was the word, God’s word, made flesh. If God were so inclined, he could have used a stick or a rock as his covenant with man. Jesus is the symbol through which God communicated his new covenant with mankind.

The neo-Christians into the Intelligent Design cause hold a different view. They see Jesus as their personal God in the same way a Roman would have a personal relationship with Apollo. Like the pagan gods, Jesus can and does intercede on man’s behalf when asked. This is why the wide receiver looks up and thanks Jesus after he scores a touchdown. The result is an occasionalist view of nature. If Jesus were so inclined, he could make the sky green and the grass purple.

In this regard, creationists are more honest that ID’ers. The creationist simply says the world is as described in their version of Genesis. They are not interested in knowing anything about their version of Genesis or the science of evolution. ID’ers on the other hand are only interested in evolution in order to come up with the right ritual to persuade their god to smite the evolutionist. They dream of a time when Jesus will defeat Darwin at the end times. That’s not science and it it barely qualifies as Christianity.

Something that I find interesting is the professional liar. Everyone lies and some lie a lot. That’s not a big deal. Getting paid to lie is a rarity. Lawyers are the most obvious example of people who are paid to lie. Not all lawyers are paid liars. In fact, most are just pushing buttons on the great machine of justice, filling out forms and submitting them when asked. The liars are the criminal defense attorneys. In almost every case their client is guilty and they stand up in court and claim otherwise. I suppose prosecutors are also paid liars, but they have the luxury of knowing the defendant is probably guilty as charged.

Politicians are another class of professional liars. Maybe it is because I’ve met more pols than defense attorneys, but I think most pols believe their own bullshit, while lawyers know they are lying. There are always exceptions and people can kid themselves about all sorts of nonsense. Politicians are a different breed of cat from normal people. Most are stunningly shallow and self-absorbed. It’s not that they know they are lying it’s that they simply don’t care. Words are just noises they hope are pleasing to you. Joe Biden, for example, has no idea what’s coming out of his mouth.

I bring this up because most of us are troubled by our lies. Even little lies like “You look great in that honey” hurt a little bit. Deliberately fooling someone is not something normal people relish. I asked a defense attorney I once knew how he feels about lying on behalf of dirtbags. He said he really did not think he was lying, but that too was just another lie, I suspect. If you stand up in court and say your client is not guilty when you know he is guilty, you’re lying for money. I did not make that argument at the time, thinking it rude, but I’ve heard others dance around this with sermons about how even the guilty needing good representation.

Anyway, deliberately lying for money is a strange thing. I’m not talking about one time things, but the regular lying. Steve Sailer has a post up about a column by Charles Blow. The disgust in Steve’s commentary is obvious. Charles Blow is fairly emblematic of his class, which means he sings the old time religion whenever called upon. He also has to know his words are, at best, nonsense. In reality they are intended to deceive his readers or at least allow them to remain deluded. Judging from the comments, the readers want to believe what amounts to a global conspiracy and Mr. Blow is happy to feed them heaping piles of baloney for a fee.

Of course, Charles M. Blow could believe what he writes, but that seems implausible. The general tone and structure of the column suggest he knows he’s full it. His final paragraph gives the game away.

There is no way in this country to discuss crime statistics without including in that discussion the myriad ways in which those statistics are informed and influenced by the systemic effects of racial distortion.

Individual behavior is not the only component of the numbers; bias is the other.

The previous 735 words, a bunch of assertions and dubious statistics, are intended to dispute the obvious picture one must draw from the FBI crime reports. Yet at the very end, when his intended audience is nodding so enthusiastically they cannot keep up, he admits that those statistics in the crime reports are true. He would just prefer it if his coreligionists remain convinced otherwise.

Again, maybe he is just as deluded as his readers. Maybe that’s just how people cope with disconformation. When the facts of the world are unacceptable, people find ways to wrap them in magical thinking and lots of hooting and hollering. It’s the lawyer who defines his work in moral terms, when he is just a guy who lies on behalf of criminals. It’s the politician who thinks he is doing the Lord’s work as he lines his pockets with the people’s money.

It’s is hard to know. Magical thinking is a part of the human condition, probably a necessary part. Wishing for things to be a certain way is the seed of inventiveness. It is also the genesis of all sorts of crackpot ideas intended to avoid facing reality. Maybe that’s all that it takes for a guy like Charles Blow to write these columns every week for his employer. Like an aging minister delivering yet another version of the same old sermon, it’s not that he believes what he is saying, it’s that he has nothing else and the flock seems to like it. Why bother with reflection or circumspection when life is good?

I’m not a big consumer of television so I admit to being a terrible judge when it comes to the latest fads. Game of Thrones, for example, looks like a daytime soap mixed with Lord of the Rings. But, it is wildly popular. When I heard about this new Fox show I expected it to do well. Stick a bunch of people out in the woods and see how long it takes for human nature, good and bad, to take its course. I tuned in for a few minutes, but it looked a little too contrived for my tastes, but again, I’m not their target audience.

Al Gore’s Contrivance brings word that the show may be  flop. Maybe I’m more in tune with modern TV viewers than I thought. Having a bunch of 20-something piss and moan on an island somewhere is not very interesting. Throwing in some 30-somethings and a few middle-aged people is not going to help. Frankly, people in a survival situation are not going to get naked and frolic. From my few minutes of viewing, that seems like what most of the cast did right out of the chute.

Again, I watched for maybe ten minutes. Five at the beginning and then I got bored and watched the football game. I came back at some point to see everyone naked, rolled my eyes and went back to the game. I can see all the naked people I want on-line. There will also be doing more interesting things than complain about the other naked people. I was reminded of something similar they did years ago called Survivor. I thought that was pretty stupid for the same reason.

Anyway, it got me thinking about what would work. Maybe sticking people on an island is just too limited. I know nothing about how TV is done, but insurance, budgets, rules, etc., may constrain what they do with these things. Maybe leaving them to fend for themselves is too risky. Maybe TV people just can’t let things play out on their own or maybe people are just too boring without a script. I have no idea and I don’t know anyone who does.

That said, instead of building utopia, maybe have them survive a hunting party. Take 20 people, put them in the woods and then put a group of hunters in there to try and kill them. Not really kill them. Use paint ball guns. The hunters will not know where the campers are setup so they have to find them. The prey has to work together to avoid or defeat the hunters. That would be fun. The winners split a million bucks or something.

I recall a few years back when Hoopi Goldberg was telling whoppers about lynchings in Chicago. She kept saying she “remembered” reading about them in the news as a kid. Five minutes of research revealed that it was an impossibility. Not only were lynchings rare in American history, none occurred in her childhood – anywhere. Presumably someone got to her and told her to stop it because she has not talked about it since.

Bill Clinton suffered the same memory problem with church burnings. Confusing Hollywood’s version of reality with his own, he claimed to remember black church burnings in his youth. In one of life’s ironies, no churches of any color were torched in his youth. If I recall correctly, there had been a bunch of church arsons at the time he made the claim. The press tried to make it into a race thing, but it turned out that many, even most, of the churches were white, not black. I forget the outcome, but it was not race related.

Anyway, Denzel Washington is recalling memories that never occurred. I was in Boston at that time. The locals would have fainted if anyone used such language. Unless he and his old lady were dressed as pimps for a role, no one was mistaking him for anyone other than the star of the most popular show in town at the time. St. Elsewhere was a huge hit and based in Boston. The stars of that show could have robbed banks in the city and no one would have thought ill of them.

I get so tired of our famous clowns and jugglers pissing and moaning about how tough they had it. In this age, no one has it that tough, unless they do something really stupid. Denzel was raised by prosperous, middle-class parents. He went to private schools as a kid. I’m sure he encountered a bad word here and there, but the guy has otherwise lived a charmed life. Instead of pissing and moaning like an ungrateful bitch, he should be boasting about how great his country has been to him in his life.

Instead, the racist prick is making up reasons to dump on his countrymen. What a punk.

I’ve gone on at length about the problems with the cops in the country. Suburban white people tend to think these arguments are either suicidal liberalism or libertarian idealism. The reason is suburban white people tend to have a vastly different experience with the cops than downscale whites and minorities. That’s a changing reality as more and more suburbanites have their dogs shot by storm troopers raiding the wrong house, but there’s always a lag in these things.

This video is a good example of how the lower classes experience the cops.

http://youtu.be/CZh9xumD1cQ

I’ve run into some version of that fat cop a million times. In bad neighborhoods they pair cops together and that usually means a hot head partnered with a more sober minded officer. The fat one should be fired for being a fat slob, but the dirty little secret is there’s not an excess of cops willing to work tough areas. The degenerates and sociopaths are willing to work the ghetto and that let’s a slob like the fat cop keep his job. It also destroys the relationship between the citizens and the police in these neighborhoods.

The Conventional Right tends to side with the cops, but the libertarian insurgency may be changing that a little. The Ferguson shooting was remarkable not in how the Left cynically tried to exploit it, but in how many on the Right jumped on the warrior cop angle. The thing is, the Right really should not be so quick to side with the cops. They are, after all, just another bit of the growing custodial state. Cops and their unions are constantly agitating for more money, less work, more benefits, more protections, etc.

The worst aspect of it is the cops work hard to avoid accountability. People like me, who cherish law and order, but have a distrust of the police would have a different view if we actually held the cops to the same standards as private security guards. This story in 538 is a good example of how the cops undermine their credibility.

Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.

In a data driven society like our, no counting how often cops shoot people is inexcusable. Forty years ago every round fired from a state issued firearm was logged. It was standard operating procedure for police departments to have cops check their firearms in at the station when their shift was over each day. A cop discharging his firearm could expect to fill out a lot of reports and answer a lot of questions. Today, when we have much better tools for documenting this stuff, we do less of it. The ATF, of all people, routinely lose their own service weapons.

Like so much of what haunts our age, the cop problem is not staying in the ghetto. The news has a stories every day about cops doing something nuts in the suburbs. Whether or not that will change the politics of the issue is a mystery to me. My sense is it will not as the suburbs are now littered with traffic cameras and soon will have drones buzzing around. Having a fat mental defect pushing around soccer moms in the burbs is probably going to face little resistance.

I’ve been a little skeptical about the Scottish independence stuff for two reasons. One is the polling showed the “No” vote winning handily. The funny thing about polls is the first ones tend to be right or at least close to right. The other reason is that it is hard to leave and there’s no obvious benefit. People are lazy and naturally conservative. If sticking with the UK keeps the welfare checks coming, that vote’s not changing. If sticking with the UK secures the business interests, then nationalism is not changing those minds either.

But, here we are a little over a week out and they say the “Yes” vote is now in the lead.

THE YES CAMPAIGN is ahead in the Scottish referendum battle for the first time, according to a poll, amid signs of infighting among senior figures backing the union.

The YouGov research for the Sunday Times found 51% supported independence, compared to 49% who wanted to remain in the UK.

The results are the latest evidence of a dramatic surge for the Yes Scotland campaign, which has seen the gap between the sides – once regularly in double digits – vanish in a matter of months.

The YouGov poll showed the Yes vote increasing by four points, while No dropped by the same number.

The headline figures exclude those who would not vote or are undecided. With those groups included independence was backed by 47% and staying in the UK 45%.

The two point gap is within the margin of error for such polls, meaning the contest, which climaxes on September 18, is effectively too close to call.

That’s not a big lead or even a lead, given the nature of polling, but it has the elites worried all of a sudden. This Bloomberg story says the Brits are now offering bribes to swing the vote their way.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said a program to hand more powers to the Scottish Parliament if Scots vote No, offering Edinburgh more control over taxes, public spending and social policy, will be announced in the “next few days” as the London government responds to the shift in the polls. Talks are still ongoing on the detail of the proposal, his office said.

“It’s clear that Scotland wants more control over the decisions that affect Scotland,” Osborne said in a televised BBC interview. “The timetable for delivering that will be put into effect the moment there is a ‘no’ vote in the referendum. Then Scotland will have the best of both worlds. They will both avoid the risks of separation but have more control over their own destiny, which is where I think many Scots want to be.”

Just in case that’s not enough, the increasingly ridiculous Prime Minister says the Scots will be killed by Muslims if they vote for independence.

Scotland will be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks in a “very dangerous and insecure world” if it votes for independence on Sept. 18, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said.

Being part of a union gives Scots the protective benefits of being part of a larger country, Cameron told reporters at the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s summit in Newport, Wales, yesterday.

“With terrorist threats and other threats, isn’t it better to be part of a United Kingdom that has a top-five defense budget, some of the best intelligence and security services anywhere in the world, that is part of every single alliance that really matters in the world in terms of NATO, the G-8, the G-20, the European Union, a member of the security council of the UN?” Cameron said. “All those networks and abilities to work with allies to keep us safe. Isn’t it better to have those things than separate yourself from them?”

It’s good to know that it is not just America with the idiotic scare mongering about Jihadi. I’m not privy to the inner workings of ISIS, but my guess is they don’t give a damn about Scotland. They have bigger fish to fry. Further, I doubt the civilized world is going to tell the Scots to pound sand if they ask for help with rooting terrorists out of their golf courses.

I’m not sure which side I’m on. I’m not sure it matters as much as both sides claim. For the average Scot, life probably changes little if they go it alone. I do think it could lead places like Catalonia to follow the same path. In the main, I think the more small countries the better. As an ardent localist, I think lots of small countries makes it tough to sustain the weird corporatist internationalism we see today.

The best argument for hoping the Scots vote for independence is all the worst people are against it. The cult of economics swears the gods will reign terror upon us if the Scots vote for independence. All of the major parties in Britain are against it. The fascists in Brussels are against it. When just about every loathsome creature on earth is against something, I’m inclined to be for it. Admittedly, that’s not a great reason to be in favor of something, but I’m not a Scot and I don’t get a vote.