I found this rather odd essay linked somewhere. At first blush it looks like the typical preaching to the choir you see from the broadsheets. Gaia is unhappy and must be appeased with the blood of the deniers! Well, they are not that entertaining, but you get the point. Instead, what we have here is a rare admission that what they are up to has nothing to do with science, but is a religious cause.

ACCORDING to a recent poll, a large majority of Americans, and roughly half of Republicans, say they support governmental action to address global warming. The poll, conducted by The New York Times, Stanford and the research organization Resources for the Future, stands in stark contrast to the vast partisan gulf in political efforts to address climate change. How could it be that so many Republicans view global warming as a problem, but so few on the right are pressuring the government to take action to address it?

A paper that Matthew Feinberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and I published in the journal Psychological Science in 2013 suggests one answer to this puzzle: While the number of Republicans who say global warming is a serious problem has reached high levels, there remains a very large gap in moral engagement with the issue. We found that conservatives were less likely than liberals to describe pro-environmental efforts in moral terms, or to pass moral judgment on someone who behaved in an environmentally unfriendly way, for example by not recycling. Where liberals view environmental issues as matters of right and wrong, conservatives generally do not.

It is rare to see the masked dropped like this. Usually, the Cult is waving around graphs and data that they don’t understand, but are sure proves their case, because you know, science! Here we have someone saying that it’s really a moral issue.

But why does this moral gap matter if most people now believe that global warming is a real threat? Other research has shown that people are generally reluctant to undertake costly political actions, even for a cause they think will be beneficial. After all, there are so many worthy causes competing for our time, effort and resources, and we can’t contribute to every one.

People think quite differently, however, when they are morally engaged with an issue. In such cases people are more likely to eschew a sober cost-benefit analysis, opting instead to take action because it is the right thing to do. Put simply, we’re more likely to contribute to a cause when we feel ethically compelled to.

Still, why do liberals moralize environmental issues, while conservatives do not? The answer is complex, owing in part to the specific history of the American environmental movement. A quick review of that history reveals that, while the environment has been politically polarizing since the 1960s, there is nothing inevitably liberal about environmental concern. After all, it was a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, who founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Here you see the hive mind at work. Utopians operate in a world of “us-versus-them.” After all, there’s only one destination, the promised land. Therefore, you are either heading forward to that promised land or you are an obstacle to the tides of history. Nixon was no one’s idea of a conservative. He proudly embraced liberal economics and social engineering. In many respects, he was a proto-liberal. But, he was a Republican so he is one of the undifferentiated other the Cult sees as the them.

To win over more of the public, environmentalists must look beyond the arguments that they themselves have found convincing. The next wave of moral arguments for environmental reform will need to look very different from the last, if they are to be maximally effective. Such efforts to understand others’ moral perspectives might not only bring both sides in line on this important issue, but also foster the sort of sincerity and respect necessary to sustain a large-scale collective effort.

The fascinating thing about utopians is they never seem to listen to their own words. They are just incantations that make them feel better, but make little sense to a non-believer. The writer claims big majorities are in favor of his preferred acts of piety to appease Gaia. What need is there to convince the holdouts? If a majority want what he wants, surely the elected officials, who all want what the author wants, will go along with it.

That’s because it is not a rational thing. At some level, the author and his coreligionists believe that the presence of even one non-believer keeps them from reaching the promised land. Just as ISIS is focused on purifying their lands by ridding it of every last infidel, the modern liberal obsesses over the dwindling number of non-believers in the West.

The other fascinating thing is that these utopians never take yes for an answer. That’s because they can’t. What animates their faith is the struggle. The promised land is always just over the next hill or around the next bend. Today they must valiantly struggle against the infidel so that tomorrow they can live in paradise. The fact that the Left has been triumphant for close to a century in America has brought them no closer to their goal. The promised land remains just out of reach, no matter how much ground they gain in the fight.

I used to be fond of asking these sorts of people a simple question. What would have to happen for you to feel like you won? They never have an answer. Instead, you get an answer to a question you did not ask. That’s because there are no conditions in which they will be satisfied and quit. It’s the struggle, not the victory. Environmentalism will be with us in some fashion forever simply because it is a religion, not a problem to be solved.

I tend to think of “secessionist movements” as collections of harmless old weirdos with too much time on their hands. The operative word being harmless. As we see in Europe, the West is well past violent insurrection. Instead, the pissed-off confine themselves to angry posts on Facebook, Twitter and the secession club meeting at the local Holiday, as long as there is a breakfast buffet.

We do, however, have a cop problem.

In a deliberate “show of force,” federal and local police forces raided a political meeting in Texas, fingerprinting and photographing all attendees as well as confiscating all cell phones and personal recording devices.

Members of the Republic of Texas, a secession movement dedicated to restoring Texas as an independent constitutional republic, had gathered Feb. 14 in a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall along with public onlookers. They were debating issues of currency, international relations and celebrating the birthday of one of their oldest members. The group, which describes itself as “congenial and unimposing,” maintains a small working government, including official currency, congress and courts.

According to MySanAntonio.com: “Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, agents of the Texas district attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

“In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine’s Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.”

“We had no idea what was going on,” said John Jarnecke, president of the Republic of Texas. “We knew of nothing that would warrant such an action.”Information Liberation noted, “The pretext of the raid was that two individuals from the group had reportedly sent out ‘simulated court documents’ — summonses for a judge and a banker to appear before the Republic of Texas to discuss the matter of a foreclosure. These ‘simulated documents’ were rejected and the authorities decided to react with a ‘show of force’ – 20 officers and an extremely broad search warrant.”

Even allowing for the fact this is reported in World Nut Daily, there’s simply no excuse for this behavior from government officials. They are harassing people to get their jollies. It’s why dressing up mall cops in battle gear is a very bad idea. It takes low-IQ dimwits and sociopaths and tells them they have a free pass to push people around.

In the custodial state, however, the cops function as hyper-violent helicopter parents. If a citizen is doing something the authorities think is unsafe or uncooperative, the state sends in a swat team as a “show of force” or worse. There are over 50,000 SWAT raids a year in America. Most are for things like serving a summons or collecting non-violent parolees. The argument is the cops don’t know what they are getting into so for their safety they send in Seal Team Six.

This is the logic of the managerial class. Police departments have arrived at a bizarre sense of self-awareness where they no longer see themselves as part of the community. They stand apart from those they watch, like game keepers in a preserve. While their job is to keep the animals safe, their first priority is their own safety above all else, fueled by a deep distrust of those they supervise.

It’s not just the town clowns stocked up with surplus army gear paid for by the Feds. NASA has a SWAT team. They can no longer hurl a man into orbit, but they have a SWAT team. The Department of Education has a SWAT team. Again, a lot of this is due to the unlimited access to funding for status items that are popular with the managerial class. The streets of DC are jammed with armored SUV’s toting minor officials for the same reason. No matter the reason, it is no way to run a civilized nation.

The managerial class, which the cops are a part, although at the lowest rung, must always attack and undermine the institutions of traditional social life if its power and interests are to prevail. Freedom of associations, along with its subordinate right, freedom of expression, are always under suspicion. These are the breeding grounds for resistance to the managerial class

It’s why Europe has little sympathy for the Charlie Hebdo victims. The rulers make a show of it while the issue is in the press, but they immediately go back to suppressing speech and association. The European rulers don’t fear Islam or Islamic terror. France is not going to convert to Islam. They do fear their own citizens, deciding for themselves and amongst themselves that they may prefer different arrangements. That’s a real threat. As far as the managerial elite is concerned, the shooters did them a favor.

This will not end well.

It looks like a standard collegiate prelude to a one-night stand. But there will be no kissing, no fondling, and definitely no Saturday morning walk of shame. Sean and Rae do not have the hots for each other—or anyone else, for that matter. In fact, they’re here hanging out at the campus outreach center, a haven for all who question their sexuality and gender identity, because they’re exploring an unconventional idea: life without sex. Or mostly without sex. They’re pioneers of an emerging sexual identity, one with its own nomenclature and subcategories of romance and desire, all revolving around the novel concept that having little to no interest in sex is itself a valid sexual orientation. Rae tells me she’s an aromantic asexual, Sean identifies as a heteroromantic demisexual, and Genevieve sees herself as a panromantic gray-asexual.

Not sure what these terms mean? You’re not alone. The definitions are still in flux, but most people who describe themselves as demisexual say they only rarely feel desire, and only in the context of a close relationship. Gray-­asexuals (or gray-aces) roam the gray area between absolute asexuality and a more typical level of interest. Then there are the host of qualifiers that describe how much romantic attraction you might feel toward other people: Genevieve says she could theoretically develop a nonsexual crush on just about any type of person, so she is “panromantic”; Sean is drawn to women, so he calls himself “heteroromantic.”

At the start of the industrial revolution, lots of people got rich by getting around existing rules that governed other the world. That’s the nature of technology. The guy who invented the first plow found a way to get around the limitations of the hoe. The next guy who added a draft animal to the mix got around the limits of the human body. The Industrial Revolution, at the simplest level, was the application of science to the physical limits of the human being.

That’s the romantic view. The more realistic view is that great technological leaps are accompanied by, and maybe spurred by, a desire to get around laws, customs and moral codes. Web development in the 1990’s, for instance, was driven by the pornography business. The technology to display images and video on-line was primarily due to pornographers. Jeff Bezos became a billionaire avoiding sales taxes by selling on-line and gaming local tax laws. Uber right now is gaming the laws to undermine taxi cartels.

The push for open borders by Silicon Valley, for example, is about getting around labor laws and nothing more. Mark Zuckerburglar loves the idea of paying the rates they pay in Tamil Nadu India for technical work. He just hates the idea of having to go to Tamil Nadu India to get them. Instead, he would like to import those people to live in camps here and work at rates otherwise against the law here. He’s even willing to let them use indoor toilets, thus showing he is a warm and generous man!

The Robber Barons can’t put it that way so they lie about shortages of labor in their industry. Here’s a good example.

President Obama’s legislation on immigration has been one of the most hotly contested political reforms for a generation. The Immigration Order, along with Ron Paul’s subsequent bill attempting to overturn the reform, put immigration firmly at the forefront of the political agenda.

The outcry in the US reflects a similar sentiment sweeping across Europe. The rise of numerous right wing parties of varying extremes across European countries has led to immigration being actively curtailed. Anti-EU sentiment also is fueling a desire for homegrown talent in business in this highly charged atmosphere.

You see what’s happening? Those who oppose mass immigration are Nazis. They are bad people that can be dismissed, or worse, because they are not really human. They are extremists!

However, as arguments on both sides escalate, the technology sector has emerged as one of the few voices of reason. Digital companies are used to operating globally, and innovation is driven by attracting and retaining the best talent from around the world.

In San Francisco, the battle for talent has seen tech companies doing everything they can to win the best recruits. Hairdressers, free food and doctors are all expected as competition continues to soar. The distance between this environment and the national debate around restricting immigration is extraordinary.

The “everything they can” also includes colluding with one another to depress wages and prevent employees from jumping companies. For people allegedly trying everything to attract talent, they seem oddly willing to engage in what should result in lengthy prison terms in order to not attract talent.

The fact is there’s no shortage of technology workers in America or Europe. There’s a shortage of owners willing to abide by the laws and pay market rates. Instead they seek to game the system to enrich themselves at the expense of their countrymen. It’s a form of colonialism, except this time the colonists are exploiting their own ethnic group. I’d call it feudalism, except feudal lords provided a service in exchange for food rents.

The argument from libertarians in these matters is that the market will sort it all out. Tyler Cowen’s flunky always says it is unfair to punish people because of the accident of birth. National borders are immoral. That’s insane, but let’s think it through. No borders means no country. No country means no citizens and that means no government, at least no legitimate government. Order will simply be imposed by those with force to do so.

In such a world, the entire economics department of George Mason would be on a chain gang somewhere as chattel labor in a few weeks after the new system is in place.

The hard cold truth is that much of the tech sector is just another ruling class scam these days. Credentialed grifters get a license from the state to rip-off the public. The costs are socialized so they are not as obvious, while the profits are privatized. Flooding the country with cheap labor from abroad, living here as indentured servants, has a cost. Silicon Valley thinks you should bear that cost so they can enjoy the profits.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the average home had three TV channels and a few radio stations. Some people had more than one newspaper, but in many towns it was one paper with maybe multiple editions through the day. I grew up in a house with two TV channels, which is why I never developed the TV habit. My father would come home with the newspaper, which he read after dinner. He was a working man so he read the evening paper. Salary men read the morning paper.

The point here is that it was not that long ago when mass media was a narrow pipe allowing for few voices. In order to get on TV, you had a long apprenticeship. That meant most of lunatics were weeded out before they got in front of a camera. Newspaper columnists spent years covering local stories, writing obituaries and following cops around town reporting on crime stories. Getting a column was a big deal and reserved for middle-aged men who could be trusted to keep it between the ditches, even if they drank at breakfast.

The communications revolution has made the pipe infinity larger. So much so that anyone with a little initiative can reach a broad audience. The trouble is the number of responsible, sensible people is fixed. That means the pipe is now full of nuts and morons hooting and bellowing at us, drowning out the few intelligent voices. The megaphone is now in the hands of the dumbest members of society. Here’s a good example.

The video is horrific. Madison, Alabama police officer Eric Parker slammed Sureshbhai Patel into the ground hard enough to paralyze him. There was a time when lynchings were carried out by mobs. Now, we have created a much more formal process of carrying out violence against oppressed and marginalized people. Badges and uniforms are handed out so that those we place in authority can intimidate and repress those that we think are less worthy of life. The temptation is to say that Eric Parker is an animal and dismiss the entire situation. The truth is that Eric Parker was simply doing what we paid him to do.

The dirty secret about the attack on Sureshbhai Patel is that a homeowner called in and reported him as, “…a skinny black guy, he’s got a toboggan on, he’s really skinny.” There was also an ominous report that he was getting close to a garage. The police showed up quickly for “a skinny black guy” in a white neighborhood close to a garage. These are racist thoughts perpetuated in white neighborhoods around our nation every day. The police first thought they were going after a black man.

Upon arrival, Officer Parker realized Patel did not speak English. Instead of having patience, Officer Parker grew more aggressive. How many times does this same situation play out over and over again throughout our nation? People who are unable to understand and speak English are treated like shit. What makes us think that our language is superior to every other language on earth? The truth of the matter is that the only language that our whole nation is fluent in is the language of violence and oppression. Officer Parker simply played out the way that we treat immigrants all the time…we push them around, treat them with suspicion and tell them to go home. What began as racism, turned into xenophobia and ended up in a crime of hate.

Ever since I heard about the story, I have not stopped praying for Sureshbhai Patel. When I told a religious friend of mine how concerned I was about this story, I was chastised, “If he is Hindu, then you need to first and foremost pray for his salvation.” Who the hell is going to pray for our salvation? We are an evil, intolerant and oppressive people in desperate need of an antidote. The first step of recovery is admitting you have a problem. For the love of God, can we please stop and admit that we need help?

The Huffington Post is pretty much just a platform for lunatics like the person who wrote the above report. If you actually click through the links to the news reports, you learn that this is a case of a gung-ho cop in a small town, something all of us have encountered at least once. The town quickly suspended the cop and is charging him with assault. It’s a shame this old man got hurt, but these sorts of things are bound to happen in a big country with 300 million people.

To a mentally disturbed person, this is something more sinister. If you run “Reverend Jeff Hood” through the google machine you quickly learn he is a crazy person. He’s probably harmless, but giving him a platform to broadcast his brand of crazy is irresponsible. When you’re trying to fill that huge pipe with content, however, you quickly run out of sane people and have no choice but to dip into the lunatic bucket.

There’s no mechanism in modern societies to deal with this phenomenon. Maybe people just ignore it all, but I doubt it. The downward drift of public discourse in the last three decades suggests the coarsening is proportional to the size of the pipe. The above story was on the front page of Yahoo today, which is why I noticed it. Some number of sensible people will read that nonsense and think it is legitimate.

It’s getting harder and harder for me to remain a sunny optimist.

When reading about the Julio-Claudian dynasty, I’m always struck by the juxtaposition of Nero and Augustus. Nero seems to have hated the very idea of Rome and everything associated with it. Every description of his time as emperor brings to mind someone obsessed with debasing everything around him, including his own position. Shocking the sensibilities of the nobles and offending the people appears to be all that mattered to him.

Augustus, it seems to me, loved the idea of Rome. For instance, he carried on many of the Republican traditions, despite the fact he was the emperor. There was certainly a political motive to pretending the old system was still in place, but he had to have a fair amount of respect for the idea of Rome to see the value in maintaining the customs. Of course, Suetonius claims he said, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” That’s the mind of man in love with his city and what it represents.

I’m surely over simplifying, but this is not a post about Rome. I just find Roman history a great starting place when trying to noodle through events of today. One thousand years of history provides a lot of useful examples and lessons. Add in some of the great historians and chroniclers and you get a great source of material for a blog post by a random idiot.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when reading this the other day.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that her greatest success as a politician was the rise of Tony Blair to lead a party he called New Labour: “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” As yet, Barack Obama can make no similar boast. Just the opposite: He radicalized his Republican opponents, and empowered most those who agreed with him least. With the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, Obama can finally glimpse Thatcher-style success. Here, at last, is an opponent in his own image.

What can the son and brother of a president, grandson of a senator, and great grandson of the founder of the Walker Cup have in common with the son of a failed Kenyan politician? Look beyond the biography to the psychology.

The first part is nonsense on stilts, but this is David Frum and most of what he says is nonsense. He does have solid connections to the neo-conservatives so it is often worth weeding through the nonsense to learn what’s going on with the Cult of Leo Strauss. The last bit is what got my attention. Obama is a bitter weirdo whose presidency looks like a revenge fantasy from someone with a deep antipathy for America. Making this comparison to Jeb Bush is no small thing.

This bit he quotes from Bush is stunning to me:

I’m bicultural—maybe that’s more important than bilingual. For those who have those kinds of marriages, appreciating the culture of your spouse is the most powerful part of the relationship. Being able to share that culture and live in it has been one of the great joys of my life. We chose Miami to live because it is a bicultural city. It’s as American as any, but it has a flair to it that is related to this bicultural feeling. I wanted my children to grow up in a bicultural way.

You cannot be bicultural. To quote my ancestors, a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can be an American with an appreciation of or even a fondness for another culture. You can be a Mexican with an appreciation of America. On the other hand, you can be an American who moves to another land and adopts the culture of that land, just as millions of Mexicans have adopted American culture. You cannot be on both sides of the fence. Claims as such suggest to me that Jeb Bush really does not like America all that much.

As Jeb Bush himself notes, there is a Bush family tradition of moving away from the culture into which one is born, to plunge into another. George H.W. Bush, born to a family of Northeastern grandees, reinvented himself as Sunbelt conservative. George W. Bush, born in New Haven, Connecticut, was the only member of the next generation of Bush brothers not born in Texas, and yet became the most Texan of them all. Jeb Bush moved away first from Texas, and then from his family’s patrician identity as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

By itself, this can be easily seen as a tick of successful families. The sons want to distinguish themselves from the father so they go another way. It’s one thing for one son to embrace the earthy side of the family. It is quite another for the other son to go so far as to embrace another country’s culture entirely.

Bush seems to have something more in mind than just the familiar (if overstated) claim that immigration can counter the aging of the population. He seems to think that there is some quality in the immigrants themselves that is more enterprising—more dynamic to use his favorite term—than native-born Americans. This is not only a positive judgment on the immigrants themselves. It is also a negative judgment on native-born Americans.

I used to wonder how anyone could think it wise to put a guy like Obama in the White House. You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning and hitting the lottery on the same day than meeting a man with Obama’s bio. He is the very definition of un-American. At least his supporters could claim he embraced America and loved his countryman. It’s an implausible claim, but not an impossible one.

Jeb Bush hates his country and his countrymen. That’s clear in all of his utterances. Putting this man in the White House is akin to handing the purple to Nero, after knowing what Nero intended to do as emperor. At least the Romans had the fall back policy of assassinating their intolerable leaders. We have to hope there’s a Sirhan Sirhan out there and he is able to slip past the Praetorian Guard. That’s not much of a fall back plan.

It’s also no way for a sane people to manage their affairs. I’m not prone to doomsday thoughts, but this may be the critical moment in the history of the nation. If this self-loathing lunatic is put in the White House, the country is finished. Even if the people rise up and stymie this guy’s drive to gut the country, the consequences of that will be almost as bad. The senate murdering Julius Caesar may have stopped Julius Caesar, but it also put an end to the Republic.

Nero Bush must be stopped.

Jon Stewart is retiring. No one will notice after the first week, but the usual suspects will make a big deal of it in the run-up. For a long time now, Stewart has been the source of confirmation for the American Left. I’m fond of pointing out that the Left took over the American Protestant movement in the 19th century and has followed their rhythms ever since. The Great Awakenings are now Progressive Awakenings. It’s not an accident that Jon Stewart got famous in the early 1990’s, when this Progressive Awakening began.

Similarly, it is not an accident that he is leaving the stage as this Great Awakening draws to a close. It’s not hard to see that things are fizzling out with the Left. Their party is a mess, run by broken down old people left over from the 1960’s. Their savior is on his last legs, ready to stagger out of office without  bringing about the promised Utopia. At last check the seas are right where he found them six years ago. Stewart is a smart guy and he knows when to leave the stage.

Another reason to leave is he has an army of imitators now. The reason for that is his shtick is easy. Dave Letterman worked out the exaggerated irony-face bit in the 80’s. Comics have always used cues to let the audience know it is OK to laugh. Letterman, a journeyman comic, got very good at this as a guest host for Johnny Carson. He latter combined it with liberal politics to titillate the typical NYC audience.

Stewart’s innovation was to take Letterman’s act and base it on a fake news show. That way he was free to pound away at liberal themes in a way that made the audience feel special and privileged. They got the jokes so they must be smart. His act is flatire, satire intended to flatter the audience. Greg Gutfeld call it the mirror that laughed.

Now there are a bunch of guys doing it and some doing it even better. John Oliver, who is just Jon Stewart with an accent, hits the younger crowd because he can freely curse in his act. Steve Colbert has found he can keep his liberal base, but attract the less crazy too. In a way, exaggerated irony-face is a commodity. The bit has been perfected and it is now a low cost comedy option. The value in Jon Stewart is now heading down and he is wise to leave before he becomes a hack.

The strange thing about Jon Stewart is he was never all that funny. More important, he was never all that hip and groovy. That was just the bullshit middle-aged cosmopolitans and wannabe beautiful people sold themselves. The Weekly Standard has a piece on the real numbers behind Stewart’s show.

As a “millennial” (roughly speaking, someone between the ages of 18 and 29), I’ve grown used to being tarred with fallacious accusations. We millennials are spoiled and mollycoddled! (Nope.) We’re tech-obsessives who would never even think of picking up something as fuddy duddy as a book! (Wrong again.) We’re irredeemable narcissists! (‘Fraid not.)

Today’s meme is that we millennials are utterly devastated by Jon Stewart’s announcement that he will be leaving The Daily Show next year. “What Walter Cronkite was to an earlier generation — an utterly trusted voice — Stewart has been to millennials,” writes Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe.  Stewart has “hordes of millennial fans,” reports CNN. “For people under 30,” says the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, “Jon Stewart leaving the Daily Show is the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up.” (And Tumulty should know – she was born in 1955.)

Now one thing we millennials supposedly love is “data journalism.” So let’s back up and see whether there exists any data to back up Tumulty et al.’s claims that we millennials have just suffered a loss on par with the demise of the Lennon-McCartney partnership.

As of 2013, The Daily Show was bringing in approximately 2 million nightly viewers. And according to an exhaustive Pew Survey from 2012, 39 percent of The Daily Show’s regular viewers are between the ages of 18 and 29. That means that approximately 780,000 millennials are regular Daily Show watchers. In the United States, there are 53 million people between the ages of 18 and 29. That means that a whopping 1.5 percent of millennials watch the Daily Show regularly! Let’s be generous and assume that, say, 5 million people watch The Daily Show even occasionally. That would still mean a paltry 1.95 million out of 53 million millennials are Stewart fans.

That’s not all. According to Bill Carter, then of the New York Times, the average Daily Show viewer is 41 years old. Considering other cable shows alone, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, American Horror Story, and Louie all have significantly younger audiences than does Stewart. And here’s my favorite nugget: 9 percent of the regular viewers of the nightly evening news – long derided as the news source of the geriatric set – are between the ages of 18 and 29. About 22 million people watch the nightly news. Thus, nearly 2 million millennials are regular viewers of the nightly evening news. That’s right: more than twice as many millennials watch Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, et al, than watch The Daily Show.

In other words, the great millennial following of The Daily Show is a total myth.

Reality, of course, is not of much interest to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. This piece in the Moonbat Review is what we’ll be hearing until Stewart finally quits. Again, the tone and choice of language is what you would expect from a religious cult. Calling a TV comic a “prophet” is not the sort of thing rational people tend to do. The Christian overtones are unmistakable, for those who know their history and Bible. Steve Almond sounds like one of the disciples sorting through his options after the Ascension.

This is consistent with end cycle Progressive Awakenings. Unlike UFO cults or apocalyptic cults, American Progressives handle disconfirmation by going dormant for a period. The New Left went dormant in the mid-70’s and remained so until the early-90’s. Look back at those dormant years and the movies, music and television were big on reminiscence of the 60’s. There was a certain sadness to it all in the early years until it became full-blown nostalgia in the late 80’s.

Steve Almond is speaking to that growing ennui on the Left that the party is over, for now.

Libertarians and some conservatives often argue that western political thought is divided into two camps, the heirs of Hobbes and the heirs of Locke. One camp wants to impose their vision of society on the people, while the other camp wants to let the people figure it out on their own. There’s really no third choice there so it is not a terrible way of looking at political philosophy. Democratic political systems would fall into the latter group and everything else would end up in the former group.

That’s fine but not useful beyond labeling the bad guys as authoritarians, which is probably the point. Both Locke and Hobbes started from a premise that we now know is ridiculous. Early man was not in a state of perpetual war or perpetual cooperation. Early man, before settlement, lived in small bands of no more than 150 members. Within the group, there was most likely little violence and communal property. Between groups, violence was common and brutal at times.

Putting that aside, the better way of looking at the great divide is between those who think there is a perfect social arrangement and those who do not. The former imagine there is a perfect way to order human affairs to achieve maximum happiness. That perfect way is both discoverable and achievable. Morality dictates that anything and everything be done in order to reach this state of social perfection. The Rousseau-ists are entirely focused on the end and are willing to use any means necessary to achieve those ends. It’s why the body count for the various Rousseau-ist cults is staggeringly high.

The other mode of thought rejects the notion that there can be a perfect arrangement. The human condition is immutable. The best we can do is incrementally improve the material state of society by adding a few grains of sand, each generation, to the foundations of society. That necessitates preserving the traditional institutions, while adding to them as they are the storehouse of knowledge, built up over countless generations through trial and error. The Burkeans focus entirely on the means knowing the ends are beyond the ability of man to perfect.

Obviously, that’s a very simple way of looking at things, but it is a useful shorthand. Since the French Revolution, the Rousseau-ists and Burkeans have been battling over the shape of western society. One side trying to create the perfect society, whatever it takes, and the other side trying to stop them from pulling the roof down on everyone. It’s a one way fight, of course, as the Rousseau-ists attack and the Burkeans defend, but it takes a long time to pull down 2,000 years of cultural institutions.

This is supposed to be reflected in the American political system. The Democrats are Rousseau-ist fanatics and the Republicans are the Burkean Conservatives, defending America from the rage zombies of the Left. A lot of people believe that is how things work. Sensible people are convinced that if the GOP can get control, they will roll back the welfare state, chase the sodomites from the Temple and bring America back in line with her constitutional past.

At the same time, liberals are sure the other guys are going to roll back the welfare state, chase the sodomites from the Temple and bring America back in line with her constitutional past. They toss and turn at night over the prospect of another Bush siting on the throne. They think Sarah Palin is hiding under their bed, ready to stuff their uterus with Bibles and sew their legs shut. It’s why they never quit, no matter how disastrous their schemes.

Kevin Williamson goes goes down this road in his piece on the authoritarian impulses of the Left.

The Right is finally coming around to the understanding that what mainly distinguishes it from the Left is not its general preference for muscular foreign policy, its not always convincing defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even its relatively faithful reading of the Constitution, as important as those things are. Rather, the fight between Right and Left is about coercion.

One side is willing to use any means necessary to reach the promised land. The other side is restrained by the means they will tolerate and they are willing to accept less than optimal results. If the people prefer high tariffs, for example, that’s fine as long as it is debated and enacted in a constitutional process. The Right can argue for something on rational grounds, but accept less knowing that people are seldom rational. That’s the claim, least ways.

That would be great, if it were true, but it has not been the case for a long time now, at least in American politics. In fact, what we call “conservative” is pretty much just the same stuff we call “liberal” but with slightly different ends. This thread on NRO is a good example of what I mean.

Abby McCloskey supports a universal maternity benefit on conservative grounds. Some women, including many high-wage workers employed by large firms, already have access to paid leave through their employers. The women who’d benefit most from a universal maternity benefit are low-wage workers employed by small firms, for whom paid leave is virtually unheard of. These women tend not to have the savings or the family support they’d need to ride out a long spell without paid work. When they fall out of paid work to care for a newborn, it can be difficult for them to find their way back in. Moreover, lengthy interruptions in work experience can lower one’s wages considerably over time. That’s why McCloskey, writing in Forbes, has suggested that a modest universal maternity benefit is best understood as a way to keep working mothers from falling into hardship without punishing employers. Because the benefit she proposes is fairly small, to help ensure that it doesn’t crowd out more generous paid leave policies currently offered by employers, McCloskey estimates that it would cost only $2.5 billion to provide six weeks of paid leave to workers without other paid leave options, an amount she believes can be raised by eliminating waste from the $93 billion spent on unemployment benefits in 2012 and the $200 billion spent on disability insurance each year.

Those ruling class women have all sorts of privileges that come from their status. They have private trainers and dieticians so they can remain slim and attractive, even into late middle-age. Maybe we should mandate that too. What you see here is a fight between green eye-shade types over which Utopian fantasy is more cost effective. Abby McCloskey, I’m sure, considers herself a conservative firebrand, yet she accepts every key premise of the Rouuseau-ists. Namely, the perfect arrangements are discoverable, achievable and we have an obligation to pursue them – no matter what.

The typical Republican and most so-called conservatives accept this without question. Bush the Minor famously said that “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, Government has got to move.” This is the very definition of the custodial state, the dreamed of end result of every Rousseau-ist cult since 1789. It is simply impossible to believe that and think they can be any limit on state coercion of the citizens. Those are the words of the police state. Yet, he was applauded by his party and most of the professional Right.

Young people can be forgiven for thinking a Ted Cruz is a far right conservative. It’s what they know and what they have been sold. Reality is a different thing. Our political culture now functions within a broom closet of the main room of western political thought. Within that small intellectual space, everyone agrees on the big stuff and most of the small stuff. The big fights over who gets to parade around in purple while the semi-permanent custodial state keeps a lid on things, like game wardens at an animal preserve.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of some readers, the Roman Republic came to an end in no small part because the ruling elite of Rome was unable to think critically about their dominant paradigm. The French Revolution was as much about the calcified ruling elite’s inability to understand the threat, much less respond to it. As the American political culture narrows and the factions close ranks, their ability to reform and respond to new threats diminishes. Correspondingly, the people’s ability to make their demands know through democratic processes also diminishes.

I’m fond of making sport of libertarians, but they are not wrong about everything. In fact, I’d go so far as to say most libertarian arguments are mostly right, when they bother to make them. But, that’s a story for another day. The one thing they have right is that every new law leads to a new abuse, because all state power is abused eventually. Here is a classic example of the phenomenon.

An Iowa widow is charged with a crime and had nearly $19,000 seized from her bank after depositing her late husband’s legally earned money in a way that evaded federal reporting requirements.

Janet Malone, 68, of Dubuque, is facing civil and criminal proceedings under a law intended to help investigators track large sums of cash tied to criminal activity such as drug trafficking and terrorism. But some members of Congress and libertarian groups have complained that the IRS and federal prosecutors are unfairly using it against ordinary people who deposit lawfully obtained money in increments below $10,000.

At issue is a law requiring banks to report deposits of more than $10,000 cash to the federal government. Anyone who breaks deposits into increments below that level to avoid the requirement is committing a crime known as “structuring” — whether their money is legal or not.

The IRS has increasingly used civil forfeiture proceedings to seize money from individuals and small businesses suspected of structuring violations, according to a review by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group. The agency seized $242 million in 2,500 cases from 2005 to 2012 — a third of which arose from nothing more than cash transactions under $10,000. Nearly half was returned after owners challenged the action, often a year later.

Some of the depositors had broken up the deposits to save their bankers from having to submit paperwork or because they mistakenly believed it was a way to avoid unwarranted government scrutiny. The Treasury Department receives millions of reports every year, and deposits above the $10,000 threshold incur no additional fees or taxes.

Facing criticism of the practice, the IRS announced in October that investigators would no longer seize funds in cases involving legal sources of money “unless there are exceptional circumstances” and would focus on illegal sources. A U.S. House subcommittee is expected to hear testimony about the practice Wednesday, at a hearing called, “Protecting Small Businesses from IRS Abuse.”

Larry Salzman, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, criticized the government’s case against Malone given its declared shift in practice.

“This is shocking because it demonstrates that prosecutors are not taking seriously the IRS’ alleged policy change not to prosecute legal source structuring,” he said.

Of course not. The people in these jobs are horrible people. In another era, they would be robbing travelers or accusing the local hag of being a witch. Five minutes with this old couple and the agents involved knew exactly what was happening. They were harmless old coots with some eccentric ideas, but that’s it. But, we’re dealing with government employees, tinpot tyrants with a badge that enjoy harassing an old women.

The reasons for passing these laws are well known. The people in the IRS and the FBI all know the laws are to help keep up with drug dealers and organized criminals. They know that, but it is hard chasing drug dealers, terrorists and gangsters. Instead, they go after old women, small business people and dentists. These people are willfully, knowingly abusing the law. The worse part is the people who wrote the laws do nothing about it. They just laugh.

The great Bob Novak said it best. Love your country, but hate your government.

I’m looking around for a new comment system. I’ve never liked the default WordPress comment system. The box is small and you can’t do much with the formatting. The worst part is you cannot edit mistakes. I thought about integrating a forum system like PHPBB, but that’s a lot of work and I’m old and lazy. A lazy man option is to use Disqus, but people seem to hate it for some reason. I’m not entirely sure why, but it is seems to stem from the lack of anonymity. I don’t get that entirely, but maybe there are other things at play there.

I discovered something called IntenseDebate that is like Disqus, but allows for anonymous commenting. You still provide a fake name and fake e-mail, but you have the option of creating a profile so you can maintain an identity as a commenter. It has an edit button, threading and allows for limited formatting of text and links. I tested it out last night and it is simple, easy to use and not a huge departure from what is considered standard these days. The nice feature is it lets you use your twitter and Facebook to comment. In other words, you can comment and post to social media at the same time. I get a lot of twitter traffic of late so I’m thinking that may be useful.

The other service I found is LiveFyre. I have to say, it looks really good. I have not spent much time on it, but my cursory review tells me it is going to be the hot new plugin for blogs and websites. It’s very slick and very polished. The only thing I see that could be a problem is you have to create an account of some sort. You can use any number of social media accounts or create an account here. Again, that seems to be a hangup for some people. I don’t know why, but maybe someone can fill in the blanks for me.

If anyone has other choices for me to consider, let me know. I’m going to spend some time on it over the weekend.