I sent this to my liberal friends mostly because I was bored and I sometimes find pleasure in making them miserable. That does not make me a good person, but on the list of things I have to answer for, it is far down the list. I was also curious to see if they would repeat the same lines they always do when someone points out that their cult is not about to reach the promised land.

Sure enough, the old chestnuts came out right away. “The GOP is in worse shape” was the universal response. “The demographics are on our side so it is just a matter of time” was a close second. Both of those may be true, but it is a strange response when you think about it. A story about the problems with Democrats and the response is to change the subject. Cults are funny like that.

Anyway, Matthew Yglesias, no relation to Julio, is sort of a silly person, but he is worth paying attention to if you follow politics. His analysis is nothing much, but he is a useful indicator of what is being discussed in the fever swamps, away from the public. He and his site are messengers, of sorts, spreading whatever is this the official position at the moment. At least that’s what the Vox boys are hoping.

There’s little doubt that the Democratic Party is shriveling up to be simply the Progressive White People Party with blacks attached to it. The map in the story show just how marginalized the party has become over the last decade. It’s not that the GOP suddenly has a monopoly on commonsense, it’s just that the Democrats have become an ideological party that appeals to about 20% of white people.

What I found hilariously telling is this bit:

In what Democrats should take as a further bleak sign, four of the 11 states where they control both houses of the state legislature — Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois — have a Republican governor. This leaves just seven states under unified Democratic Party control.

 

Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Along with the usual set of tax cuts for high-income individuals and business-friendly regulations, the result has been:

 

• An unprecedented wave of restrictions on abortion rights
• The spread of union-hostile “right to work” laws into the Great Lakes states
• New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction
• Large-scale layoffs of teachers and other public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats

You could be forgiven for wondering what in the hell he is talking about with regards to curbs on voting rights and large scale layoffs of teachers. The real howler is the “richer, whiter older” stuff. Pretty much the only white people voting for Democrats these days are old and well off. Normal people can’t afford to be progressive. That’s a rich man’s hobby.

This is the money graph:

Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.

An essential element of the progressive faith is they believe they are in a war with a superior enemy and only through a total commitment to the One True Faith will they defeat Grendel and achieve grace. When no such enemy exist, they invent one. Their claim that the GOP is a “ideologically coherent coalition” sounds insane to normal people, but Progressives believe it, they have to believe it. Otherwise they are just a bunch of meddling weirdos harassing normal people for no reason.

Even so, we live in an interesting time. The GOP is a party of men with the imagination of mid-level bureaucrats at the department of motor vehicles. The Democrats are a bunch of geriatric hippies and radicals that sound like extras from a documentary on the 60’s. The hard part about watching Sanders and Clinton go at it is not laughing. It’s two old farts arguing over bingo at the retirement home, but instead of bingo, they think they will get the chance to rule over the rest of us.

The funny thing about this Vox piece is that Progressives are correct about the condition of their movement. It’s exhausted. They are running around trying to champion trannies and deviants because they have run out victims to exploit. Similarly, the alt-right is correct about the condition of the Conventional Right. It’s a racket for moving books and merchandise to well intentioned Americans thinking they are doing the right thing.

Something is going to fill the void. Donald Trump did not stroll in and become the front runner by accident. When given the choice between something and nothing, people will always pick something, even if it not all that much. At some point, something better than Trump is going to come along. What that is, I don’t know.

Americans, probably like everyone in the West, just assume that the shape of our countries will remain the same forever. Conquest is something you read about, but that’s all in the past so the map will stay the same forever. Similarly, we tend to think that revolution is no longer a part of civilized life. The savages have revolts maybe, but the civilized countries have elections to sort out problems.

Of course, maps are not written in stone. There’s no reason to think that France will stay the same shape forever. The people of Normandy could decide they have had enough of being French and break off to form their own country. The people of Catalan are trying to do just that by voting for independence and then going to court over it.

But, those Spanish are hot blooded and all that. The English speaking countries don’t have those problems, other than in Scotland, Wales and Quebec. Even so, these are more symbolic than anything else. There are protests, votes, court cases, more votes, but that’s it. No tanks in the streets or men with guns preparing for the revolution, because violent revolts are things of the past.

What if they’re not? What if the Scots and English can’t resolve their differences peacefully? What then?

On the other hand, what if the people in charge keep going down the road they are going and the people finally get fed up enough to do something about it? In the US we have protests at the Mall, but never anything serious, at least not for a long time. But what if we’re just overdue and things are slowly coming to a head and revolution is just around the corner?

There’s a new book that argues the US is long overdue for a revolt and the current consensus is breaking apart, suggesting the revolt is right around the corner. James Piereson is a think tank guy at a fancy think tank called the Manhattan Institute. His book is one of those “theory of the world” sort of things where he has this theory that explains parts of the past. He then uses it to make some predictions about what’s coming next.

I’ve never written a book review and I have no intention of starting now, so you can read this one or you can read this one. There’s also a podcast here with the author. As an aside, I suspect the future of book selling is going to be podcasts. A thirty minute discussion of a book is a great way to sell books.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sold on the thesis. My own view of US history is as an extension of the English Civil War. For instance, Piereson argues that a consensus emerged in 1800, but the New England states were ready to split from the Union up until the outbreak of war with Britain. Similarly, those same states would have signed off on the slave states seceding if not for the foolish assault on Fort Sumter.

Putting that aside, one can’t help but wonder if we are headed for a crackup of some sort. If you look at the map of recent presidential elections something jumps out. That is, very few states are actually in play now. In 2016, the fight will be over Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada. The rest are firmly in the Roundhead or Cavalier camps. For the candidates, the only reason to campaign in most states is to raise money and put on a show for the folks in the toss-up states.

The chaos in the GOP primary is mostly due to the fact that no one really represents the sensibilities of the regions that support the GOP. Bush is from Florida, but he may as well be from Boston. Rubio is from Florida, but the part wholly unlike the rest of Florida. The only two candidates that represent the GOP regions are Kasich and Huckabee and both have too many other problems to be serious candidates. Trump is from New York and it has never been in the Roundhead or Cavalier camp. Otherwise, the people running are foreigners to their voters.

Having the country divided into camps is one thing. Having one camp ramming through stuff just to spite the other is where things get dicey. The crazy ObamaCare bill was mostly spite. Homo marriage was entirely spite. The revolt brewing on the Right is really a revolt among the troops over their leaders refusal to fight. Students of the Crisis of the Third Century are familiar with this phenomenon. At some point, there will be a fight, whether it is with these leaders or new, more rambunctious ones.

The thing few notice because the people in charge tend to keep it quiet is the Roundheads would not mind it if the other part of the country seceded. Progressives hate the South and southerners with the intensity of a thousand suns. For a long time now, Progressives have been thinking, if you will, that it is time for the South to leave the Union. For obvious reasons this does not get promoted by the people in charge, but a lot of them hold this opinion.

The assumption, an incorrect one, is that the Old Confederacy along with Texas and Oklahoma would be cut loose, while the rest of the states would make up the slimmer and trimmer United States. Reality is probably something else. Look at that map and the lands of the Roundhead are mostly Yankeedom. The few other blue states would mostly likely go with the red states for practical reasons.

But, maybe the southern states will insist on marching from Worcester Mass to Boston, burning everything along the way, just for old time sake.

One of the stranger things about living in America is the lack of a news media. With a few exceptions, what we call a news media is mostly just the propaganda arm of the Liberal Democrats. The proselytizing is endless. Even sports is larded up with “messages” that have nothing to do with sports. President Obama has been on ESPN more than the coach of the New England Patriots.

Another consequence of this is that big important stuff gets ignored. For instance, the great re-arrangement of the chess board in the Near and Middle East has gone largely ignored mostly because it would be embarrassing to Obama. The Russians are about to rub out ISIS and setup Iran as the regional hegemon.

Syria’s armed forces advanced south of the second city of Aleppo on Friday in a fresh ground offensive backed by Russian warplanes, a monitoring group said.

Since Moscow began its air war in support of Damascus on September 30, the Syrian army has launched assaults against rebels in at least four provinces with Russian aerial support, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Russian air cover is backing offensives by Syria’s army and allied militias in the central provinces of Homs and Hama, as well as Aleppo in the north and Latakia along the coast.

On Friday, the Syrian army pushed south from the provincial capital Aleppo city, where control is divided between regime and rebels forces, as Russian air strikes pounded the villages of Al-Hader and Khan Tuman and nearby localities.

“The Syrian army started a new front on Friday and advanced to take control of the villages of Abteen and Kaddar” about 15 kilometres (12 miles) south of Aleppo city, said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

He said “dozens” of Russian aerial attacks in the past 24 hours had struck the area, which is controlled by a patchwork of groups including rebels, Islamist fighters and Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, Al-Nusra Front.

For a generation, the US ruled over the Middle East through the Saudis and Israelis. It was hardly perfect, but that was the arrangement. The main point of it was to keep the oil flowing and the crazies bottled up in their own lands. Suddenly, the regional hegemon is going to be Iran, backed by Russia, with some support from Syria’s Alawite tribe.

Once the Syrians regain control of the Western cities, the push east to wipe out ISIS comes next. It’s easy to forget that ISIS is a Saudi creation, for the most part, and the US has had some hand in funding them. Once ISIS is gone, the Saudis are out of cards to play and they will find their authority in the region greatly reduced. In the Arab world, might makes right.

That’s not a small thing. The Russians will now control a vital piece of Europe’s energy supplies. By setting up Iran as a Russian client and the bully on the block, the Russians will effectively control Middle East policy and be wired into the complex relationships that transcend the region. A while back, I pointed out that those millions of Arab men marching into Europe will have a lot of Russian friends too.

Another piece on the board is the fact that the Russians have transformed their military under Putin in response to what they have learned from US military involvement in the Arab world. Those little green men who turned up in Crimea should have been an eye-opener to the West. Now it looks like the Russian military success in Syria is getting the attention of Western strategists.

The strikes have involved aircraft never before tested in combat, including the Sukhoi Su-34 strike fighter, which NATO calls the Fullback, and a ship-based cruise missile fired more than 900 miles from the Caspian Sea, which, according to some analysts, surpasses the American equivalent in technological capability.

Russia’s jets have struck in support of Syrian ground troops advancing from areas under the control of the Syrian government, and might soon back an Iranian-led offensive that appeared to be forming in the northern province of Aleppo on Wednesday. That coordination reflects what American officials described as months of meticulous planning behind Russia’s first military campaign outside former Soviet borders since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

From an American perspective, handing the Middle East over to the Russians is not a terrible thing. Americans are far too moralistic to run a proper empire. The Russians are too incompetent to remain a big player in the region in the long run, but in the short run they will be the whip hand that is needed to keep the peace. The Russians will kill everything that moves in eastern Syria, for example, in order to subdue ISIS.

The bigger issue is that the Russians can effectively coordinate a multi-pronged attack on Europe, without triggering a nuclear war. In the east, they can put economic pressure on the Baltics, Ukraine and Poland. They can also put pressure on the Germans through their near monopoly of natural gas flowing into Europe. Then there is the wave of migrants flowing north that Russia can turn on and off as necessary.

The center of gravity in Eurasia is moving east and Americans hardly notice. How much of this is due to Obama’s incompetence and how much is Putin’s skill is hard to know. There’s also the fact that the American foreign policy establishment is exhausted spiritually and intellectually. Even so, the great under reported story of this decade is the rise of Russia as a world player.

I was reading the comments of this post on National Review and one exchange caught my attention. Someone calling himself JonathanD75 wrote:

Boy I hope you’re right. I’m a Jim Webb Democrat myself, but, at least from my Facebook feed it’s a Bernie Sanders party. I won’t vote Republican, so I’m stuck. The degree to which I wish we were a multiparty system is not small.

To the comment about never voting Republicans someone asks why and the answer was:

Because I’m a liberal. If I were a Mainer, I might, *might*, vote for one of the Maine ladies, but even there, probably not. I don’t want conservatives in charge of the country, and though I know it doesn’t seem so to you, the GOP seems very conservative to me. If you want the specific issues I care about I’m happy to go into them, but I doubt that level of navel gazing is all that interesting.

A common characteristic of all mass movements is that the people in them spend little time talking about their movement to people outside them. Inevitably this results in a bunch of insider jargon and even a redefinition of common words such that they carry special meaning to those inside versus those outside. It’s not deliberate or by design, it just happens and to the people inside it is perfectly logical.

To those on the outside, the people inside the movement seem a bit nutty, maybe even dangerous. If you are not immersed in progressive politics, that guy’s belief that the Republicans are very conservative sounds hysterical. Within my lifetime the ideological center of the country was well to the Right of Ted Cruz, the fringe right wing of the current GOP. Charlie Wilson, the Texas Democrat who got stinger missiles to the Afghans in the 1980’s, was a typical moderate a generation ago.

The fact that the country has moved steadily left over the last 30 years is hardly news. What got my attention about that guy’s comment is that he identifies as a liberal, but he rejects Bernie Sanders. Outside The Hive, people think Sanders is just a concentrated version of a liberal, but inside they see him as an anachronism, a guy whose ideas no longer carry much meaning.

What we’re seeing in the current Democrat primary is how American Progressivism has moved away from economics entirely in favor of the spiritual issues of The New Religion.  The modern Progressive cares more about the feelings of the homosexuals than the cost of living for the working class. In fact, Progressives have embraced the same technocratic corporatism that has infected what we call conservatives.

The singular focus of the modern liberal is scrubbing the sins of western civilization from society. It manifests in different ways, but the overarching impulse is to seek salvation through self-abnegation, with the self being defined narrowly or broadly. President Obama runs around apologizing to the third world for Western colonialism, while TN Coates writes gassy articles about the sins of racism he witnessed at the mall.

When I was in college, Sanders was a common figure on campus. His argument is a math  argument. The math is nutty, but it is still an argument from math. Change the laws in such a way and we get prosperity to such a degree that no one goes without, every need is met. Bernie genuinely believes he can seize the assets of the billionaires and cure poverty.

The New Religion, as I’m fond of calling it, is indifferent to these issues.They see poor people as fat and lazy, stuffing their fat faces with Big Macs while watching daytime TV. That’s what the new Progressive cares about, the soul of that poor slob, not his food budget. The post-scarcity liberal wants to use the state to put the poor on treadmills and Prozac so they can be slim and beautiful, in communion with the brotherhood of man.

The beauty of the spiritual path over the economic path for the Left is that there are no pesky facts in the spiritual fight. Once the poor start getting fat, there’s no real need to rob the rich on their behalf. But there are always souls to be saved, sinners to be harassed, witches to be burned.

I’m fond of pointing out that the main reason Progressives win every fight is that their opponents make the mistake of thinking it is a debate over facts and reasons. The people calling themselves conservative right now are sure that all they have to do is round up the facts and present them to the other side and the Left will throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers.

Reality is completely different. Progressives are religious fanatics and no amount of reality will shake them from their beliefs. Their religion does not have a superior being anymore, but it has lots of supernatural components. Most important, it has a moral component. The adherent is there to receive grace and that comes through social activism. They act locally because they think eternally.

We’re seeing a similar thing with open borders. It’s common to blame the greedy cheap labor lobbies for buying off pols in both parties, but there’s not a ton of evidence for it. The guys doing most of the hiring of illegals are small businesses with no lobbying power. Amnesty actually harms the cheap labor lobbies because it would end the under the table hiring. Yeah, there are cheap labor lobbies, but they are not the bogeymen many imagine.

Steve Sailer has different theories. In this post about Paul Ryan, he blames lazy black people.

In the early 1990s I visited the Milwaukee fairgrounds on the lakefront a couple of times for various festivals. I recall being struck by how African Americans made up a large percentage of the partiers at the festivals, but a small percentage of the workers. Most of the work seemed to be getting done by Mexicans.

A continuing theme here at iSteve is that Milwaukee and Madison have, on average, close to the worst blacks in the country. Most Northern cities’ blacks are the descendants of people who left the South in the 1940s and 1950s for jobs in the North. But Wisconsin’s blacks tend to be the descendants of people who left Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s for welfare in social democratic Wisconsin.

It’s only natural for Wisconsin whites like Paul Ryan to see Mexicans as better than blacks and thus want more of them in order to demographically swamp the African-Americans who have made life miserable for Wisconsin whites. But it’s also natural for Republicans further from the Canadian Border to be less naive about the poorly thought-through social engineering emotions of Wisconsin politicians.

Steve is fond of this sort of reductionist argument. It sounds good at first, but when you think about how it must work, it starts to sound implausible when you scale up from one guy at the state fair. Imagine Ryan meeting with his team and saying, “We have to do something about our bad blacks and I think we should import a bunch of Mexicans!”

I don’t know. Maybe that’s happening at secret meetings of The Deep State™ and I’m terribly naive, but my sense is exactly no one in Wisconsin thinks like this. I get around a lot and what you always hear from amnesty advocates is one of two talking points. One is that Hispanics are wonderful hardworking additions to the country. The other is they are a necessary part of the labor market.

Frankly, I don’t know if anyone that says these things thinks much about it. They just say these things because that’s what you do. If you are a Democrat, you are for amnesty so you pick from one of the Democrat talking points. The same is true for most Republicans. Libertarians, of course, have their fantasies about the free flow of good and people in a world without government.

My hunch is what lies at the core of the Religion of Open Borders is morality. It’s a manifestation of Public Protestantism. In a prior age, the Yankee religious impulse was focused on the salvation of society, not of the individual. You had men in black clothes making sure you were observant of the Sabbath and not having too much fun. Once God faded from the picture and the world got smaller, this impulse folded into what we call social activism. The moonbat woman next door with the Prius really does think she is saving the planet.

The Religion of Open Borders is the next great cause or perhaps the globalization of Yankee Public Protestantism. Take a look at this article by Tyler Cowen’s flunky, Alex Tabarrok.

Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth and income created by these differences are magnified by governments that suppress entrepreneurship and promote religious intolerance, gender discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound these injustices, cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of penury.

The overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade. But lawmakers and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned violence—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while paying lip service to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

That is a purely moral argument. He couches it a little in economic terms, but he is not shying away from the moral claims he is making in favor of mass immigration.

What moral theory justifies using wire, wall, and weapon to prevent people from moving to opportunity? What moral theory justifies using tools of exclusion to prevent people from exercising their right to vote with their feet?

No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.

The language used here is right out of the Abolitionist Movement. It is right from the Civil Rights Movement. It’s right out of John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity. God does not make an appearance, but clearly Alex believes that the path to grace is through creating a world where “every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.”

The big hobbyhorse issue for libertarians is America’s incarceration rate. They love the issue because they get to prattle on about weed, while sucking up to the liberals, who are always looking for an excuse to release felons into middle-class neighborhoods. In other words, they get to sound butch about small government in a way that is entirely safe.

While I think our prison system is a mess, my response to libertarians over the issue is always the same. “How many current inmates would you like released into your neighborhood? On which corner of your block should we put the halfway house?” It’s a fun bit because no has yet provide an answer. Just as it is easy to be generous with other people’s money, it’s easy to be kind to convicts from a great distance.

It’s even easier if you are insane. This story I saw posted on twitter was getting passed around by the usual suspects, suggesting that maybe I’m too soft on libertarians.

What Lind doesn’t talk about is the way that the vast, vastly profitable private prison industry created and lobbied for legislation that criminalized more conduct and set out longer sentences for violations, operating in opaque secrecy, running forced-labor camps, profiteering from prisoners and their families, bribing judges to send black kids to jail, and producing a system where the rich can launder billions for drug cartels without a single criminal prosecution, but poor people caught with minute amounts of weed go to jail for long stretches.

In other words: that hockey-stick growth isn’t an accident.

If you follow the links, you find the Alex Jones type paranoia that has always been a part of the modern Left. Instead of secret government agencies in league with space aliens, you have secret corporate agents in league with aliens. It’s The Deep State™ run out of a corporate boardroom instead of Langley.

Putting all of that aside, it does raise an important question and that is how were we able to have relatively low crime rates, adjusting for race, age and sex, while having a stable prison population. Something changed in the 50’s and 60’s that led to the sudden upward turn in crime.

The obvious candidate for what changed preceding the spike in murder rates is the Civil Rights Movement. The greatly diminished status of blacks would have suppressed crime rates in two ways. First, the fear of white retaliation would have resulted in high levels of self-policing among blacks. Second, white indifference to black life would have artificially reduced the crime stats.

The trouble with this explanation is that white murder rates did tick up in the 60’s, just off a much smaller base so it was less obvious.

The trouble here is getting good data of crime rates by race from before 1980 is surprisingly difficult. I’ve been searching and this is the best I was able to find. Crime rates by race are slowly becoming forbidden knowledge. Even so, it’s hard to honestly tie the spike in black crime to the Civil Rights Movement without better data showing a bigger spike than we saw in white crime rates.

The more politically correct answer is the proliferation of street drugs and the drug trade. Libertarians love this one, but so does the Left because it conveniently avoids talking about race. The trouble with this explanation is that it assumes people suddenly went insane and started taking massive amounts of street drugs. This is one step away from blaming evil spirits.

The Old Right answer is that general assault on traditional culture that started in the late 50’s and accelerated into the 70’s eventually broke down the traditional ways of controlling crime and other social pathologies like drug taking. The result was a rise in social anarchy. Eventually, we evolved a new way to deal with the problem, which was mass incarceration.

The crime issue is a good example of how public policy is always about trade-offs, Swing the wrecking ball through a social institution and something replaces it. It’s also an example showing how American Liberalism will inevitably end in authoritarianism. As traditional institutions are destroyed, the state flows into the void. The existing organic institutions grow weaker relative to the state, making them easier to knock over.

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports. I’ve slept in them, hung out in them and I even worked in one for a while. I was not an airport employee, but my company rented an office at the airport for some reason. As a frequent traveler, I’ve had the pleasure of being in a lot of airports in various places. I don’t really know a lot about them, but I have noticed a lot about them.

What interests me is not the airports themselves as they are mostly the same as far as the bigger concepts. When you think about it, an airport is just a big bus stop. No, what I find interesting in airports and the air travel system is it is a great example of how societies evolve solutions to near term problems. Those solutions often turn out to be long term liabilities and you clearly see that with our air travel system. In some cases, they are crippling malinvestments.

If you were going to design an air travel system for North America, you would not replicate what’s in place. It does not make any sense and it is expensive. Instead you would look to maximize geography and technology. For instance, there’s no great technological hurdles to super sonic passenger planes. The Concorde started flying in the 70’s. The issue has always been that airports can’t handle it. The noise and the runways were the problem, not the plane.

Imagine a few large airports on the East Coast built for massive super sonic passenger planes that could ferry 500 or more people to Europe in three hours. If you are in Kansas, you would take a domestic flight to the nearest international airport. But, when we started designing and building airports and the air traffic system, no one imagined super sonic air travel or the volume of air travel we now have.

That’s the thing you see all over the air travel system. We have layer upon layer of solutions to old problems that often make solving new problems more difficult or even impossible. It’s not that the people of 1950 were morons and designed bad airports. They just saw what they could see and did the best they could to unriddle those problems they knew about and could imagine. Within living memory, the idea of a Muslim from Saudi Arabia boarding a plane in the US was laughable.

Security is where you see the cul-de-sac. American airports were never designed to filter out Muslim lunatics, luggage bombs and other Muslim problems. When I left the Imperial Capital, I had a 5:00 AM flight, but I still needed 40 minutes to pass through security. Leaving America to return back home, security took over an hour, even though there were few people in line.

It’s why I like airports as an example to explain the impossibility of public policy in our current age. We have this massive overhang of evolved solutions that are largely useless for the current age. Food stamp programs are an obvious example. Even poor countries are full of fat people. There’s no need to be handing out food to the poor. But like all those zany rules at the airport, everything has a constituency, even if it has no purpose.

Compared to the labyrinth of rules in the welfare system, airports are simple. Yet, we cannot make small changes at airports to eliminate the cost of old solutions so that we can efficiently add new technology and solutions. Instead, it is just more and more layers. To solve the problem of Muslim fanatics, they bolted on new layers of stuff between you and the point the airport, which is to get on an airplane.

Airports also make good examples for explaining the law of unintended consequences. In the 1950’s, you could walk on a plane with your sidearm. Then we started getting hijackings in the 60’s so the “solution” was to ban firearms from people and carry-on luggage. That meant metal detectors and guards to look for guns on passengers. Before long, anything that could be used as a weapon was prohibited.

The “solution” for the terrorists was to put bombs in the luggage. Then the “solution” was to smuggle knives on the plane, knowing that everyone was unarmed on the plane. Air travel is a big complicated system that few truly understand well. Make some small changes at one end and what pops out the other end is often a surprise. No one in the 70’s imagined the Lockerbie bombing or 9/11.

Finally, if you have libertarian tendencies, a trip to the airport should disabuse you of those ideas. people do not self-organize very well. You have to have someone in charge who can say “no” to the percentage of humans who do not naturally follow the rules. You need someone to tell the self-absorbed d-bag that he has to check his gigantic backpack. It’s “ordered liberty” not just “liberty” and that means someone has to be giving orders. Otherwise, airports would be impossible.

Sitting in the stands of a rodeo in Forth Worth is like going back in time. I’ve been to the rodeo and I’ve watched the event on TV so I understand the basics. In all honesty, I find it a bit dull so while I’m sitting there watching girls ride horses around barrels, I’m thinking of other things. My friends, who had never been to a rodeo, were captivated. To them, it was incredible watching humans ride animals with such skill.

Chit chatting about it after, I think the big attraction to rodeo for many folks is that it reminds them of a better age. The rodeo is wholesome family entertainment. There’s no sex or crude jokes. There’s no hip-hop music blasting from speakers. It’s just wholesome looking young people, corny jokes and a good time. Cheap too. Tickets to a rodeo are nothing compared to a football game.

That’s what makes it feel like a trip back in time. For most of human history, entertainments were relatively cheap. Entertainers lived on the fringes of society and made very modest livings. Maybe the showman who owned the circus or traveling act made a good living, but the performers did not. Running away to join the circus was not a move up, it was giving up. If you could not hack it in normal life you ended up as the bearded lady in the circus.

Contrast that to today where we venerate knuckleheads with the IQ of a goldfish and shower them with millions. In order to do that the cost of entertainment has skyrocketed. I was at the Dallas Cowboy game on Sunday and the prices are staggering. Cheap seats are $500 just to get in the door. The facility, which is incredible, is simply a massive platform from which to sell you stuff.

That’s what’s incredible to me. Everything has a sponsor. “This hot dog concession stand brought to you by AT&T” is the sort of thing that makes me think the Catholics were right about cupidity being a mortal sin. Every square inch of the Cowboy facility has a sponsor attached to it and almost every square inch is for the purpose of moving product of some sort. You keep wondering, “Don’t they have enough?’

That excess allows the Cowboys to pay their star defensive end millions of dollars, even though he spends his free time beating and strangling women. You only do that when you have so much, you feel you are immune from public opinion. Hearing the crowd cheer when that demented knucklehead made  big play, I’m going to assume the paying portion of the public is OK with wife beating.

I’m sure many rodeo entertainers are terrible people. That’s just a part of life. My guess is though, public knowledge of bad behavior ends your rodeo career unless you also get right with Jesus. The customers will look the other way if you are turning your life around after getting drunk and running naked through the streets. Otherwise, there’s probably not a lot of tolerance for it.

In a weird way, people enjoy things like the rodeo now because it lets them escape the wall of sound that is modern mass culture. The whole downtown Forth Worth area feels like it exist as an escape. People dress in their cowboy clothes and have an old fashioned good time. I was at a bar in Fort Worth and it was just cheap drinks and people dancing to country music, like they used to in the old days.

That’s the other thing that popped into my head comparing a night in Fort Worth to the day at Jerry World. In today’s mass media culture, everyone is assumed to be a child. At the football game, it is nonstop noise and video. Between plays they are hitting you with some ad or speech. In breaks for commercials, they hammer the audience with messages. You don’t have a minute to talk to the guy next to you. They assume you must be amused for every second like a toddler.

The infantilization at a modern ballpark extends everywhere. Buy a beer and they open the container and keep the cap. I guess they don’t want you to swallow it. The container is made from something that prevents it from being a projectile, in case you have a tantrum. Of course, they shut off beer sales half way through events so you don’t have too many. The modern sporting even is the nanny state taken to the logical conclusion.

All that said, Texas is a great place to visit. I’ll have more thoughts on it when I return back to the Imperial Capital.

Travel is one of the best ways to see the world. I’ve been lucky in my life in that I have had the luxury of traveling quite a bit on someone else’s dime. Business travel is not vacation travel, but I think it is often a better way to see the world simply because you have long stretches with nothing to do so you look around, explore, adventure. On vacation, you have “stuff’ that fills every waking moment, usually within the confines of the Potemkin vacation area.

I’ve been to Texas many times. I used to travel here often for work matters. Thirty years ago when I first visited Texas on the way to Mexico, I thought this is a place I should live. For some reason, it just seems to fit my sensibilities. Every time I’ve come here, I have had the same thought: I don’t think I’m going back. But, here I am nearing my jump into the void and I’m still just a guy who visits Texas.

The funny thing about Texas is it is remains the one place in America that is brimming with confidence. Texas is not a terribly sentimental place. They will knock down an old building for a new building without giving it a thought. In the Northeast, an army of weirdos will be there guarding the old building, even though the weirdos will have no clue why the old building was built. It’s just old so they think it has to be saved.

At the same time, those same weirdos will claw one another’s eyes out to cancel the school Christmas play. There’s the lack of confidence. In most of America, our betters conduct themselves like the ne’er do well grandchildren of a successful man. The kids compete with one another as to who is the most reverent toward the old man, but not a one of them tries to emulate him. The best they can do is have a big picture of him in their house, which he bought for them.

Texas does not have the problem yet. Texans love being Texans and they love being in Texas. There’s really nothing special about Texas. Dallas is a massive suburb that looks like every other suburb in the South, but they are proud of it and you see that everywhere you go. Texas plays Oklahoma today in the Cotton Bowl and tickets are selling for $500 on the secondary market, even though UT is terrible. It’s just a great celebration of Texas football history.

I think that confidence is why Texans are soft on immigration. They are cocksure that if you move to Texas, you will become a Texan. They are right about it too. Vietnamese refugees landed in Houston and are now Texans whose ancestors came from Vietnam.  Of course, Texas has always had loads of Mexicans from the northern part of Mexico. A big part of what makes Texas tick is the blend of Southern culture and northern Mexican culture.

In Massachusetts, there’s zero cultural confidence. If America were invaded, the good thinkers of the Bay State would surrender on day one and begin taking classes in the language and culture of the invaders. That’s why the northeast seems to be leading the charge on the immigration fight. They are scared. A friend here in Texas, who is from Mass, is a rock-ribbed Trump man now and it is all over immigration.

In the South, illegal immigration is an issue, but mostly because it offends the people’s law and order instincts. It’s not seen as a threat to their way of life. In many respects, migrant workers are a part of their way of life. The South would be a very different place without the flow of migrants into the agribusinesses. Go into a poultry plant in Virginia or North Carolina and you see nothing but Hispanics. It’s been that way for generations.

The same is true of Texas. Mexican migration in and out of the state is just a part of the state’s character. The Mexicans who live here permanently came here because a part of what made them Mexican also made them Texan. The transition was easy. Of course, there are Texas families who were here before Texas was a place. The result is most Texans feel they have a good handle on how to manage Mexican immigration.

Finally, kicking around here it strikes me that the Cult hates Texas for the same reason they hated Sarah Palin. In the case of Palin, the idea that dirt people could live the feminist ideal while hanging onto dirt people culture enraged the Cult. Palin was the living negation of the One True Faith. There’s a similar thing with Texas. here, diversity is on display all over, but it’s held together with the dominant Texas culture.

The Cult believes this is impossible. For them, diversity means obliterating all culture by running it through the blender of multiculturalism. The result is the exact opposite of vibrant diversity, but the screaming and bellowing makes it impossible to point it out. A state like Texas puts the lie to the Cult’s blathering about diversity. Texas has boatloads of it without adopting any of the Cult-Marx nonsense.

Now, I’m off to eat my weight in fried food.

I’ve been making the point for a long time that the Republican Party is not really a political party. It’s a dumping ground for people that don’t fit into the Democratic Party for some reason. The groups that find themselves in the GOP don’t have a lot in common with one another. Many would prefer to be in the Democratic party, but circumstances make it impossible.

Romney famously ran on the “three legs of the GOP base.” That was economic conservatives, social conservatives and foreign policy hawks. That’s not a terrible formulation for a political party, but it is not based in reality. The so-called social conservatives, for example, are much more populist and localist than the economic conservatives can tolerate.

Similarly, the foreign policy hawks are not in line with the economic conservatives on a lot of things. The main reason people favor a tough line with the muzzies is so the muzzies will stay over in their countries. Many foreign policy hawks, like me for example, are OK with letting Afghanistan return to the 5th century. They should remain backward. Close down their airports, electric plants and water systems. Problem solved. That’s heresy with the economic conservatives.

Political parties in America have always been coalitions of divergent interests with one or two unifying items. From FDR to Jimmy Carter, the Democrats were Yankee elites running a coalition of ethnic groups, unions, southern populists and intellectuals. That’s given way to a party of Yankee elites running a coalition of fringe weirdos, blacks, immigrants, academic elites and their students. The Democrats are mostly the party of people who went to college and would have preferred to stay there.

The Republicans are not a coalition of anything now. If you are a Southern conservative, you have little in common with the conservative of the northeast. People in Massachusetts, for example, who call themselves conservative and vote Republican, are not religious and they are indifferent on the homos and abortion. Their leaders are often pro-abortion and gay marriage. Contrast that with the Democrats where everyone is violently in favor of abortion.

My formulation of the Republican elected officials is that one third wish they were Democrats, one third just like the easy life of elected office and the rest are genuine conservatives in the traditional meaning of the term. John Boehner, for example, would have been a fine Speaker in 1984, when the Democrats ran the House and tangled with Reagan over policy. Boehner would have been fine at building majorities to compromise on the small issues.

There’s something else. The Democrat Party is now a purely ideological party. This is a first in America. Europe has ideological parties, but American has never had them, at least ones that gain votes. The Democrats are now a party of the New Religion. You can’t win office as a Democrat being pro-life or if you are against homo marriage. You have to embrace anti-racism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism in order to have a place. I’ll note that all Democratic House members are open borders fanatics.

How a coalition party, especially a haphazard one, responds when faced with a an ideological party is debatable. The experience of Europe in the first third of the 20th century is not encouraging. It does appear that the House Republicans are so divided they cannot pick a speaker. No one dares say it, but the issues dividing the party are the old national questions, particularly immigration. The people running the party want open borders. The insurgents want national sovereignty. There is no room to compromise.

My guess is the people in charge will stay in charge. They will employ an age old strategy of backing a novus homo that they think will fail and embarrass the upstarts. Just in case, you can be sure they will work hard to make sure he does fail. They are playing the long game from the comfort of the inner party. Some of these people have been in DC so long, their GPS reads “thar be monsters” for the areas outside the Beltway.

The only whiff of good news in any of this is that I sense that the sovereignty issue is playing much better in the Northeast and Midwest than elsewhere in the country. The South is much more mildly opposed to immigration, simply due to the cultural arrangements and the long history with migrant farm workers. In the Northeast, the old Yankee paranoia and intolerance is showing up in the immigration debate.

If the GOP can evolve as a party to reflect the mild nationalism of lightly managed trade, constitutional liberty and regulated immigration, it can be a majority party that has appeal nationally. That will require something on the ball in the leadership positions, but all the incentives are pointing the wrong way now. A party riven with dissent ends up with the worst leaders of the various factions. The result are guys like Mike McCarthy who is as dumb as a goldfish.

We live in interesting times.