I’ve always been fairly open to immigration. I have a lot of immigrant friends and acquaintances. They are hardworking, mostly honest and good additions to America. Not all immigrants are the same and we should be cautious about who we let in to the country. Muslims, as much as possible, should be barred from entry. That seems obvious. Koreans, Chinese and Japanese are very successful immigrants with very strong support networks so we can be liberal with them. A country our size can easily absorb and assimilate half a million new citizens each year, maybe a little more in good times.

Now, if we shut off all immigration, as we have in the past, that’s fine too. We have roughly 40 million foreign born in the US. That’s a big number and the people would be justified in wanting a halt, in order to let the current immigrants get settled. It is only fair. Inviting these people in and then screwing them by gutting the labor market with more immigrants is pretty close to evil. If we are going to have immigration, we should make sure the immigrants succeed, as much as possible.

The problem is that immigration stopped being a public policy issue and became a rentier racket for the ruling class. Big companies like cheap labor from indentured servants. Small business likes cash labor so they can avoid paying taxes and insurance. Then we have an army of human traffickers that make money getting migrants into America. These brokers operate on both sides of the border. Of course, foreign governments have figured out to make money off this racket as well.

This story on VDare explain how the way the Mexican government, for example, profits from illegal immigration. Billions flow from America to Mexico through illegal immigration. Of course, the drug trade is intimately tangled up in the immigration rackets and with the Mexican government. All of this is facilitated by a banking system that operates beyond the reach of any government’s laws. If you go to a convenience store near where migrants live, you’ll find a wire transfer machine/check cashing machine located in the back. Western Union seems to own most of them.

The human brokers are probably the most offensive to the morality of a sane people. This story I stumbled upon from a long ago is a great example. The areas where these poultry plants operate are not suffering from labor shortages. In fact, light manufacturing locates to these areas because of the abundance of cheap land and cheap local labor. It is a hassle dealing with rural rednecks and rural blacks. They demand things like sick time and holiday pay. Slaves from Korea tend not to cause much trouble. They are much less likely to fall into a machine or blow the place up by accident.

The economics of immigration policy are easy to understand once you look into it. As the above shows, there are a lot of people making big money by flouting the laws. Getting easier laws to flout, presumably, opens up greater avenues for these parasites to profit. That’s the thing to remember. The cheap labor may mean cheap landscaping, but the American put out of work by the illegal migrant is on welfare, which drives up your taxes and social costs. In effect, these immigration privateers are taxing all of us by shifting costs to the tax payer.

On every other issue, we find politicians on both sides. Raising or lowering business taxes, for example, will get friends of business out in support of the proposals, but it also gets pols out who are emotionally opposed to profit making business. In other words, you can’t bribe Nancy Pelosi into supporting tax cuts. Immigration is the exception. Only a handful of pols dare speak out against the moneyed interests. Even pols who have nothing to gain and represent strong anti-immigrant constituencies are silent. It’s as if a madness has taken hold of the ruling elite, where any criticism of immigration is heresy.

The increasingly clownish Marco Rubio is back with a new scheme to flood the STEM fields with indentured servants. Keep in mind that his political prospects took a nosedive after he backed the last immigration scheme. Unless he is retarded, the guy has to know that the public is overwhelmingly against this. Yet, here he is throwing his career away for this cause. Even assuming he is getting bribed, why take the risk? Rubio is a young man who could be president one day. Why risk it all just for a few bucks and the pat on the head from the ruling elites?

That’s the key question. Simple bribery is never enough on other issues so why would immigration be the exception?

The answer is the secular religion we call liberalism, progressivism, multiculturalism, etc. A core tenet of this belief set is that all humans are the same. Economics and circumstance are what makes for different results. Ireland is the way it is not because it is full of Irish, but because of the accident of history. Put a bunch of Bantus on the island and before long you get black Irish who are remarkably good at track and field. It’s not just that race is a myth; ethnicity is a myth, a leftover from a bygone era.

When applied to immigration, the only morally consistent policy is open borders. After all, letting in one group over another means one group is better, innately better, than the other group. That blows apart the whole thing. It’s why Steve Sailer has it all wrong about how France can walk back from their immigration policies. Even saying that “we have reached our goal” on immigration admits that not all people are the same and therefore it is good and proper to make judgments about them based on culture. Admitting that culture is real and permanent is inconceivable.

I was listening to a Boston sports radio station over the Interwebs today and I heard an ad for the New England Cannabis Convention. It’s possible that this is an interwebs-only ad, but lots of people listen on-line these days so I’m not sure that matters. That means these ads are hitting a broad audience, even if it is not over the public airwaves. Apparently, the station thought it was OK to run ads for this thing, since it is legal in the state. Why not?

Imagine a parent on the way home with their pre-teen kids, listening to the radio. This ad comes on and there’s not much the parent can do about it. Turn off the radio and the kids will take note. Leave it on and the kids have to hear about the exciting new world of weed dealing. Parents have been talking about drugs and alcohol with their kids for a couple of generations now, I would assume. By the early 70’s parents knew their kids would be exposed to street drugs, in addition to booze. Their natural ally was the fact drugs were illegal. Now, they are cautioning against something that is celebrated.

That’s always been the issue with drug legalization that gets ignored. Prohibition does not reduce use only by raising prices and reducing supply. When you ban something, a stigma is associated with it. After all, why ban something that is morally good?  When you legalize something, the stigma is lifted. Anti-smoking campaigns took decades to stigmatize smoking. Even so, they needed the law to step in and ban the practice from most public places. In some jurisdictions, smoking is allowed only in your own home.

The legalization of cannabis will come with all sorts of surprises like that advertizement I heard on the radio. Half a century of prohibition means all sorts of customs and institutions have grown up expecting drugs to be illegal. Pull the pin of legalization and all sorts of unexpected things get damaged in the explosion. The pro-legalization people only see the potential upside of legalization. The big important stuff, however, is always the stuff you don’t see.

What that ad for the convention makes quite clear is that the goal of the weed community to to attract more weed users. If you tried to have a tobacco convention, using Joe Camel to pitch your show, the cops would throw you in jail. The weed crowd is, so far, immune from these laws, so they are doing what any business does. They are advertizing and trying to increase their customer base. That means we will have a lot more pot smoking and that means more of the problems that come from pot smoking.

Sensible people, who have argued for legalization, have also acknowledged that it would bring an increase in drug use. Forty years ago when Milton Friedman was making that case, we had three TV channels, analog phones tethered to the wall and AM/FM radios. Advertizing, marketing and “socializing” a product was greatly limited relative to today. Imagine your kids getting text message from the local pot dispensary with the daily specials aimed at a more youthful audience.

I think the data from Colorado is pretty clear that legalizing cannabis will result in an explosion of cannabis use. The power of science and modern business techniques means many more people are going to be high in the workplace, school, at the mall, etc. Doing bong hits requires privacy while munching on a THC-laced candy can be done at your kid’s soccer game – by the coaches. I’m not imagining reefer madness, but I’m thinking we better get used to dealing with stoners in our every day life.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” is a popular line from Emerson that is mostly used to dismiss critics. I’ve used it myself, almost always to dismiss criticism of my opinions on some matter. I also like saying the word “hobgoblin. I’m also fond of this line from Huxley, ” Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” Again, it is used to brush away nitpickers.

That’s the thing. Trivial inconsistencies and contradictions, otherwise known as exceptions, are to be expected in just about all things outside of science. In philosophical or political matters, where you are often dealing with gross generalizations and flowery rhetoric, everyone is a hypocrite to some degree. Events simply don’t fall so neatly into their categories, which leaves room for all sides to claim they support their side.

The most obvious example for myself is the forever war stuff with the Muslims. I was in favor of blowing up Afghanistan to make a point after 9/11. I was fine with sending in troops to hunt down the jihadis. By the time Obama came to town, I was all for leaving the dung heap to molder. That makes me a hypocrite, but events changed, I had more data and I simply changed my mind on some things. My liberal friends are still scandalized when I call Obama a worse war monger than Bush. They simply cannot fathom my apparent hypocrisy.

That’s what bugged me about the hysterical reaction from Conservative Inc. over the Pope’s words regarding the limits of speech. The left hates other religions in proportion to their proximity. Catholics are close so they are hated with great intensity, just behind Evangelicals. They also are always chanting about free speech as they implement speech codes. It made perfect sense for the Left to have a ritualized freak out over the Pope. It’s what they do.

Professional conservatives, on the other hand, are predisposed to respect religion, particularly Christianity. Even The Weekly Standard crowd is pro-Pope in most cases. The caterwauling from Conservative Inc. struck me as contrived, as if they were trying to inoculate themselves in some way. We see that with race all the time. That, or they were hoping to deploy their libertarian chariots to out flank the Left on the matter of free speech absolutism.

Thinking about it, I suspect what really bugs me about it is that it concedes a more important principle to the Left. That’s the right of association. You simply cannot have freedom of speech without freedom of association, which includes the right to private discrimination. If the Christian baker must work for the homosexual couples trying to make a point that the baker finds objectionable, you have effectively given the state the right to regulate speech.

If I’m free to say what I like, but you are free to use the courts and the law to bankrupt me for saying things you don’t like, you have effectively stripped me of that right. Put more simply, if the state requires you and I to be in the same room, even though we say objectionable things to one another, we are going to want the state to set the rules for what we can and cannot say to one another. Otherwise, it ends in a knife fight.

That’s why the professional conservatives wet themselves when these issues arise. Freedom of association means the diner gets to hang out a sign that reads “Whites Only.” If Jonah Goldberg or Rich Lowry were to argue that a business owner should have the right to refuse service to blacks, he is fired in hours. They know that a wide range of opinions are forbidden in public so they avoid getting anywhere near them. Not everyone can afford to be John Derbyshire.

Therein lies the rub for me. Hooting about free speech when we encourage and tolerate enormous amounts of regulation of speech is not just hypocritical. It is illogical. It is compounded by the demands for state regulated association, embraced by all of the ruling class. The French prefer the government to play referee. Americans hand that job to corporations and academia. Complaints about the Pope’s formulation is haggling over trivialities.

The Ik people are a tribe living in the mountains of northeastern Uganda near the border with Kenya. The only thing interesting about the Ik people is their near total lack of social structures. They have no government, not hierarchy, no religious customs or anything one would associate with human society. The members of Ik tribe spend all of their time foraging for food as their environment is extremely harsh.

Each member is able to get enough food and water to survive so there is no sharing of resources. Men will let their wife starve while they eat. Brothers will steal food from one another, even if it means death for the one. Children are usually expelled from the home at 3-5 years of age and left to forage on their own. Husbands and wives spend little time together as they are always hunting for food, which they never share with one another. In fact, marriage does not exist. They are just mating pairs and their time together is accidental.

The only reason to care about the Ik is from an anthropological perspective. It is largely assumed that early humans had social structures similar to chimps and bonobos. These social structures evolved as man evolved and therefore “society” has been a part of humanity since before there were modern humans. The Ik show that maybe it was not necessarily so. But, they could simply be a rare exception due to their unusual environment. Still, there are conditions in which humans will lose all traces of society.

I was thinking about the Ik on my run this evening. The temperature was in the low 40’s so the black males were out loitering. It is still too cold for the Hispanics to hang outside and the whites will remain indoors until it is wife beater weather. The ghetto is an unnatural environment that humans are distinctly unfit occupy, but we insist on jamming our poor into ghettos anyway. Like the Ik, people in a hostile environment will develop some strange habits.

The inside/outside life is what I was thinking about tonight. Black men look to get out of the house as soon as possible. They live off the women who dominate the house so the men have to go outside to be free to be themselves. There’s simply no place for them inside. Like male lions, they live on the edge of female life, quarreling with one another on the streets.

Hispanics seem to have evolved a different set of habits. I see underclass Hispanics outside using the cell phone and my hunch is that’s for privacy. The custom around here is for twenty people to pack into an apartment so there’s no privacy, but there is family life. As a result, they tend to remain indoors. Hispanic males will walk miles to get beer or food so you see guys walking home carrying beer on payday, but they do their drinking indoors.

Poor whites are an inside animal. Here’s where things are most obviously different. The males run the house and women are secondary. The males will do their drinking and drug taking in their own place with their friends and family. They will get high right in front of their kids. In the summer, I’ll ride through a white trash section of town and smell reefer coming from adults on their front steps, watching their kids play.

The age old argument is whether it is the environment that makes the people or is it the people who make the environment. It’s both, of course, which is why the black ghetto is different than the white ghetto, which is different from the Hispanic ghettos. At the same time, the organization of these ghettos shapes the people. Places like West Baltimore or Detroit eventually become distilled versions of the worst the people and environment can muster.

The Ik people did not end up in the mountains of Uganda by accident. Odds are they were driven their by hostile tribes. Relegated to the worst possible environment, the worst aspects of these people concentrated as the other qualities boiled off. Just as Amish have become more Amish over time, the Ik got more Ik-y the longer they were stuck in that terrible place. It seems to me that our ghetto system has the same results, concentrating qualities that should be diluted and boiling off qualities that should be cultivated.

Increasingly I find myself reading about how systems decay and collapse. It is a subject that appeals to me because I like finding patterns in things. As a kid, I enjoyed taking IQ and personality tests because it was fun to deconstruct the exam and figure out how the test maker was filtering the answers. Figuring out how a puzzle works or how a system is designed tells you something about the person who created the test or system. At least I think so. I could be completely nuts on that score.

There’s not a lot of literature on the subject of collapse. This is probably the best known book on the subject. This may be a better known book or at least as well known. I don’t know of a way to compare them in that regard. I run across more references to Tainter on this subject than Diamond, but maybe that’s just due to hanging with a bad crowd. You never know about these things. Sometimes it is not the world; it is you.

Anyway, the common element in social collapse is that the leaders cannot break free of their traditional mode of thinking in order to address a new challenge. The Late Bronze Age featured a series of cities collapsing, but being rebuilt as they were before the revolt, earthquake, invasion or famine. It is as if they learned nothing from the calamity. Eventually, the destruction was so thorough the city was abandoned or the society was swept away.

That’s what comes to mind reading this in the Spectator.

 The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.

In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’ and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. And, of course, it is what President François Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris last week.

All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we — the general public — are a lynch mob in waiting. ‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves. Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.

This may be comforting to some, but where is the evidence to suggest the ruling elites think anything of the sort? If they really think Islam is a violent antagonist to western society, the easiest step to address it, without admitting error, is to cut off immigration to Muslim countries. If after 9/11, American elites concluded Islam is the problem, why did they increase the number of immigrants form Muslim counties?

This bit from Tony Blair posted on NRO today seems to confirm that it is not just a pretty lie. Blair is the Prime Minister who ramped up immigration into Britain in order to increase diversity. He and his coevals remain convinced that diversity is the answer to every problem, even the problems that arise from diversity, like Muslim terrorism. The madness is so through that many have declared themselves experts on Islam, claiming the terrorists are simply bad Muslims.

The evidence is all pointing in one direction. The people in charge have no answer for the current threats. To take on the Islam problem means a) admitting prior error and b) abandoning the keystone of their ideology. To do either undermines their legitimacy as a ruling class. Even if they could plausibly claim we have reached peak diversity and therefore are shutting off immigration, the implications are obvious.

In the palace system of the Bronze Age, the rulers existed to control the palace economy. All goods flowed through the palace, which was pretty much a distribution center with ceremonial buildings. Even though a centralized system could not work beyond a certain scale, what else was there? A distributed system would not need a king so it was unthinkable. Instead they kept trying to make the palace system work until they failed utterly.

That’s what we seem to be seeing in the West. Cultural Marxism may be a dead end street, but what else is there? If the alternatives cannot prop up the pseudo-meritocracy and the attendant exam system, what’s in it for the people in charge? The answer is nothing so alternatives are unthinkable. Instead they keep racing around, trying to keep an increasing number of plates spinning.

At some point, it simply stops working.

This picture from France posted on Drudge is both sad and funny.

The Diversity Coalition marching in unity against the logical results of the diversity

The obvious humor comes from the fact that Netanyahu looks like he would rather be anywhere but in that procession with those idiots. Israel has no illusions about diversity and multiculturalism. What happened in Paris last week is what Israelis call a typical day.

Merkel looks like she is at a funeral. Hollande is hugging onto her like he is the oldest son in the family, supporting mom through it. The black guy is an ornament placed there to reinforce the multiculturalism, which was the point of the parade. The incessant yapping about unity and conformity in the face of barbarity is of course just another reminder that dissent will not be tolerated. The irony would be hilarious if not so tragic.

When I was a boy, events like this meant the churches would be busy. The regulars would be joined by the irregulars and even the skeptics. The priest or minister would remind the flock of their obligations and say a special prayer for those who suffered. That was the extent of public ceremonies in the face of tragedies and terrible events.

A quarter century ago or so the candlelight vigil got going. When something bad happened, church was taken outdoors to some public place. That way a whole bunch of strangers could “share” their feelings about the event. At first the ministers and priests presided, but they gave way to the minor public figures. I guess priests and ministers were too divisive.

Now these things have a formalized ritual where the leaders of the cult make their public acts of piety for the rest of us, like priests sacrificing an animal to the gods. All public events these days have been hijacked by this deranged religion, the post-modern version of the Totenehrung.

Go to a ball game and they take time out for various ceremonies to reinforce the one true faith. “Please direct your attention to the end of the field as we honor the first one legged lesbian Elvis impersonator of color…” Inevitably she was a victim of something and “overcame it” with “courage” to be a pest. Everyone is supposed to cheer, which they do, because that’s how this stuff works.

The insanity of the official European response is to double down on that which caused this event. Multiculturalism is the ideology that asserts biology and culture are social constructs. Therefore they can be altered and arranged by human agents to conform to the societal goals of the rulers. Since the people keep self-selecting along biological, cultural and linguistic lines, the remedy is to forcibly integrate disparate people.

The fact that the Muslims imported into Europe hate European culture and they hate Europeans is assiduously ignored. The fact that the native populations don’t much care for Muslims is ruthlessly punished. The attacks in Paris are a natural result of these policies. Yet, the public ceremony in response to it is turned into a warning to those who dissent from multiculturalism.

The other day, I read a book on the Late Bronze Collapse in the Aegean and Near East. The issue has been a topic of debate for a century or more. Every new excavation or new technological discovery clouds the issue. It was originally thought that swarms of people form the north overwhelmed these societies. New evidence of natural disasters, famine, revolts and inter-dependency suggest it was more complicated.

What seems clear to me is that the sociopolitical arrangements of the palace economy could not hold up to the march of technology. It was not that new technology disrupted the old arrangements. It was that the volume of trade and commerce overwhelmed the capacity of the palace system to manage it. Since the palace system was the pole holding up the tent, when it fell the whole system broke down quickly.

The West is facing a similar crisis. The system erected after the wars of nationalism of the early 20th century was always flawed. The efforts to address those flaws (low fertility, automation, labor shortages) have imported new problems that the original system was not designed to address. The phenomenon of “homegrown terrorism” is the result of these internal conflicts. Muslims imported to address the need for labor reject assimilation into the host country. Because confrontation on cultural grounds is officially forbidden, leaders are left with various forms of appeasement and compromise.

The only way compromise can work is if the compromise satisfies the wants of both parties. If either side feels they got short changed, they will come back for more, eventually. That’s the dilemma faced by the West. No matter how satisfied they are by the compromise, the other side is never satisfied. The only thing the West can offer the other side that will be satisfactory is their neck.

The other side is just as irrational. A Europe dominated by Islam will be just as backward and materially impoverish as every other Muslim society. The Arabs flooding European cities go there for the material benefits. A Muslim version of Dresden will simply be a much colder version of Ankara. The great conflict within Islam is the fact their religion is a cultural dead end. You can be Muslim and have an Iron Age society or you can have a modern society without Islam or a radically different version of Islam.

Just as the palace system proved to be inadequate for managing global trade and growing populations, multiculturalism is proving inadequate to address the clash of peoples brought on my globalism. No one has an alternative that the ruling class can stomach so they stick with multiculturalism, growing ever more fanatical trying to make it work. The people so fond of saying they are on the side of history may very be about to be swept away by the tide of history.

I went over to the Spectator to see what they had to say about the Muslims shooting up Paris. The last I checked it was a respectably conservative opinion site. It used to be that “respectable” meant non-fringe, but these days it means not threatening to the status quo. Sure enough, this is their first instinct.

The Muslim Council of France, and of Britain, have denounced today’s attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. As they know, one of the aims of the jihadis is to try to speak for Islam – but they have been joined in their condemnation by hundreds of Muslims on Twitter. Here are some of them.

It then goes on to list a dozen or so tweets from Muslims saying they are unhappy with the attack in Paris. As is always the case these days, the truth lies in the comment sections of respectable sites. The one at the very top nails it. When Muslims get their feelings hurt, they manage to have mass rallies and mass killings. After something like this, they can only muster some mild rebukes on twitter.

The fact that the first instinct of the Spectator is to insulate Muslims against the great mythical backlash that never comes is telling. A normal person can be forgiven for wondering whose side they are on here. It’s tempting to think that maybe it is just a subtle way to get readers to post comments, a form of click bait. The readers get to say what the writers and publishers are afraid to post.

That’s a fantasy. Even if true it just shows that the people allegedly leading the charge against the Left are simply to afraid to fight. What’s the point of supporting these folks if when it comes time to choose a side, they will join the opposition?

The problem we have in the Anglo-sphere is that the Anglos have no tribune. There’s no one willing to represent the stale, pale males who created civilization. There’s no one willing to defend civilization. If Charles Martel were alive today, the Frogs would have packed him off to sensitivity training or worse.

For the longest time, the smart people looked at the situation in Greece, fainted and then, having been resuscitated, declared it impossible for Greece to leave Europe. Something had to be worked out to address their financial problems. Greece was, in a way, a test for the idea of Europe, but also an excuse to move from an economic cooperative to a political union. In Greece and Italy, leaders were replaced with ones more pleasing to Brussels and willing to sign off on austerity measures.

After a short interlude, the Greeks are back in the news. This time they are threatening to throw off their Euro-approved leaders in favor of a neo-fascist outfit called Syriza. I know, I know, the Left can never be called fascist, even if they look just Mussolini’s old party. Whatever you want to call them, Syriza is not interested in sticking with the austerity program or even with Europe. What they want is unclear, but all of the beautiful people are now convinced that their elevation will lead to a crisis.

The tone this time seems different. At least that’s my read on stories like this one. No longer are the money-men convinced that a Greek exit will collapse the Euro. I suspect the reason for that is the realization that it was always nonsense. Greece is a small country with little impact on Europe. Even the worst case scenario said they would not drag the continent into depression. They are simply too small. Now, everyone has insulated themselves to their problems so the risk is simply not there.

As the article indicates, there’s also a strange belief that Syriza is not what is claims. Once they gain power, they will like being in power. That means cutting a deal with Germany and remaining in Europe. The alternative would mean a depression and with that political turmoil. The conventional wisdom is that turmoil is bad for those in charge, even though Syriza is a different breed of cat. The thought of a party of the hard left using a crisis to seize total power seems to have been forgotten by everyone.

The Germans are now talking tough, in that post-modern German way. Merkel has no choice, given what’s happening to her coalition. On the one hand she has to acknowledge the growing frustration of many Germans over the bailing out of profligate Greeks. On the other hand, she has to remind the trouble makers that their heresy will not be tolerated. In other words, she can notice their noticing, but she can’t let it slide. It sounds like madness, but that’s all she and the globalists have at this point.

France is taking a somewhat different tack. The French elite are nowhere near as unified as the German elite over Europe. Frustration with the loss of “Frenchness” is not just a phenomenon of the lower classes. Gaullism still resonates with the French elite. The stunning success of Eric Zenmour’s book Le suicide français as well as the slow legitimization of Marie Le Pen suggests the French elite are not prepared to go all in with their German partners. That Weekly Standard piece is well worth reading, by the way.

People can convince themselves of anything. The globalization project, of which Europe is a major force, is predicated on the belief that the people will never notice what’s happening to them. The average German will not notice that his town is being over run by Muslim migrants living on the welfare system. The typical Frenchman will not notice his standard of living collapsing.

It’s also dependent on religion. Much like how religion was used by the Foundation in the Asimov novels, the religion of cultural Marxism is a narcotic that turns the addict into a defender of the faith. If you dissent from the bulldozing of traditional culture, you are branded a racist, which is just the new term for heretic. If you dissent from globalism and free trade uber alles, then you are an isolationist trying to turn back the clock. Again, this is just another way to brand you as a heretic.

In America, this brand of religion works exceptionally well. Calling someone a racist is about the worst thing imaginable. No one, of course, thinks isolationism is good so that means you have to be for free trade, open borders and globalism. Then there’s the job of being the world’s cop, which is America’s God given responsibility! Anti-racism, global capitalism and policing the world are wrapped in the flag of patriotism to keep the American public fully supportive of the ruling class.

In Europe, anti-racism is not the magic fairy dust it is in America. No one seriously thinks the Europeans can keep the peace. In fact, their inability to keep the peace is one of the justifications for Europe. Instead of racism, nationalism is the bogeyman used to scare the faithful and bully the heretics. That’s what makes the Eurozone crisis so thorny. You can’t help but notice that the problems all stem from the places where everyone has black hair, brown eyes and olive skin. It’s a big reason the European elites have been desperate to keep Greece from leaving the fold. Anti-nationalism is supposed to solve these problems, not exacerbate them.

The Greeks remaining in the Euro is untenable. The Greek people will not tolerate the conditions placed on them and the Germans cannot make exceptions for the Greeks. They have to go. The details of that will slowly be worked out as both sides come to accept reality. The Germans, however, need Greece to suffer. Their exit from Europe has to be so terrible that Italy, Spain and Portugal are scared straight. That means the coming Greek crisis will be at a time and place of Merkel’s choosing.

The Germans and French may try to bolster their own standing by tightening immigration ever so slightly and dumping the Greeks from Europe. That would take some wind out of the sails of the anti-Euro parties. Daily images of Greeks rioting or waiting in line for money will drive home the point, at least for a little while. In the long run, Greece is not going to dissolve. If they find a rich uncle to help them through it, they could end up being what Euro elites have feared – a bad example for the trouble makers.

I said in my predictions post that Mike Huckabee will run as the snake handler candidate in the 2016 GOP primary. My reasoning was pretty simple. This cohort needs a champion and they are a large cohort. Someone will always step forward. Second, and most important, Huck needs the work. He parlayed his last run into a TV job, but that has now run its course.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee announced Saturday night that he would be ending his Fox News talk show to gauge support for a possible presidential campaign.

“There has been a great deal of speculation as to whether I would run for President,” Huckabee told his followers on Facebook. “I won’t make a decision about running until late in the spring of 2015, but the continued chatter has put Fox News into a position that is not fair to them.”

Roger Ailes is no dummy. He knows Huck is running so he put him on the clock. Whatever juice Huckabee has as a TV personality has waned as the Evangelical movement dissolved in the last decade. Those people are still there and they are still going to church, they just don’t hold much interest to TV these days. The Libertarians are the cool new toy for the cable outlets.

“I feel compelled to ascertain if the support exists strongly enough for another Presidential run. So as we say in television, stay tuned!” he added.

Huckabee, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 and hosted his show for more than six and a half years, had drawn renewed attention by criticizing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton last month after she said “smart power” also means empathizing and showing respect for enemies.

“How can we empathize with terrorists who think nothing of beheading innocent men, women and children?” Huckabee asked in a blog post on his website last month.

The 2016 race is already well underway online.

Even before Huckabee had made his announcement, Rand Paul’s PAC was firing away on the digital front. Just as the Kentucky Republican’s political arm had done when Jeb Bush signaled last month he was weighing a White House campaign, Paul’s team bought prime real estate for any Google searches using the terms “Huckabee record,” “Huckabee announcement,” “Huckabee taxes” and “Huckabee common core.”

Steve Sailer likes to point out people who borrow his material, without crediting him for it, as members of the steve-o-sphere. Maybe it is the steve-o-verse. I can’t recall, but the point is he has a lot of influence on the public debate, despite being banned from the public debate. As a purveyor of crime-think, I suspect Sailer has some influence on anyone trying to write sensible things about the events of the day.

I’ve started to notice my shadow growing as this blog gets more traffic. I don’t spend much time looking at the numbers or who is on line. I do notice when people link to me. The software lets you know when someone links to you. I get an e-mail and a link to the referring site. If I click on it, the site doing the linking will know that’s how I came to their site.

That’s relevant because I get to see who is linking to me, but also if anyone notices if I linked to them. The other day I linked to the British History Podcast in this post about the Eloi. Jamie Jeffers, the narrator of the podcast, uses WordPress for his site and must have got a notice that I linked to him. I saw soon after that someone referred from his site was reading my blog. A few days later he posted this episode, a rant about how girls are just as butch as boys, even in the middle ages.

In subsequent episodes, he has banged the drum about how biology, sex and ethnicity are just illusions. I’ve listened to every episode and this is the first time he has lurched into cultural Marxism. I may be guilty of hubris, but I suspect the revelation that a crime thinker like me is a fan of his podcast must have been traumatizing. His reaction was to triple down on the right-think.

I still enjoy the podcast. The episode on “gender” was a bit silly so I skipped through much of it. Otherwise, it is an excellent podcast and a fun way to survey the history of Britain. The point I’m making is that influence is not always predictable. Those deeply invested in right-think are emotionally bound to it. When they bump into crime-thinkers like me, their natural reaction is to huddle closer to their coreligionists, spiritually if not physically.