I’m torn on Richard Spencer and his white consciousness movement. I think white identity is nutty and silly, for the most part. It runs contrary to what we know of biology. That said, Spencer is very smart and makes some wonderful critiques of Cultural Marxism.

I’m not really sure he is a white supremacist or even thinks much about it, but that’s the charge laid at his feet. The people making the charge, however, are mostly crazy people so it is tough for me to form an an opinion of the man. Still, he is worth considering and this long interview is a pretty good place to start.

Baltimore has always been full of tension, by nature of the historical arrangements that evolved following the Civil Rights Movement. The uneasy coexistence after Reconstruction between blacks and whites south of the Mason-Dixon Line was held together via legal and private discrimination. Whites stayed in their areas and blacks stayed int heir areas. Both sides policed their side of the line, figuratively if not always literally.

The Civil Rights Movement swung a wrecking ball through that arrangement. After all, the northern whites were sure their way of handling blacks was superior. In the north they herded blacks into urban ghettos. That way they could pretend to treat blacks as their equals because they were never within eyesight of them.

So, the northern whites swung the wrecking ball through the Southern way of dealing with blacks, by banning public and private discrimination. In Baltimore, this resulted in a thing called “block busting.” Jewish neighborhoods would suddenly sellout to blacks or their intended landlords. The surrounding blocks would be quick to sell at a discount and whole areas of the city went from white to black.

Since the old covenants against selling to blacks or renting to blacks were no longer enforceable, there was no way for these old neighborhoods to hang tough against the onslaught so they fled to the county. To this day state regulators in Maryland try to trap real estate agents into making discriminatory statements. They now say these things in code.

That’s how things evolved in the Baltimore area. The phrase “good schools” means few blacks. The word “diversity” means lots of blacks. Those with anything on the ball have fled the city and moved to the county. There are sections of Baltimore county that are very black, but very safe and middle class. There are areas that are very white, as well.

The city has become an urban reservation, for the most part. There are parts that managed to remain white, but they are upper middle class areas where home prices prevented block busting. There are very wealthy areas as well, and the small gentrified areas near the tourist traps. Otherwise, the city is a holding pen for people no one wants in their neighborhood.

This has worked fairly well for the area. The cops keep the tourist areas running which brings money into the city. That also keeps the state involved, hoping to avoid the fate of Detroit. Having massive Federal spending in the state due to proximity to the Imperial Capital has financed these arrangements. West Baltimore operates as a giant reservation system, holding the pre- and post-convict population of the city.

Now, the Soros Army is at the city walls demanding the whole system be dismantled. They have no replacement for the current arrangements. They are here for the mayhem. These incidents are just billionaires playing human chess with the hoi polloi. Imagine Soros betting the Koch Bothers a dollar over whether he can burn Baltimore to the ground.

Unlike Ferguson, Baltimore is not a small town with small town police and small town criminals. Baltimore is a big city with big time criminals. The city is called Bodymore Murderville for a reason. The locals are proud of that label for a reason too. More important, there are rich people with assets in the city they want protected – by the police.

The cops are already reporting that things are getting hot on the streets, following the announcement that the six cops will be hanged in accordance with the demands of the Soros Army. The rational thing here is for the cops to simply withdraw, letting the animals kill as many libertarians and anarchists as they can find. That would do us all a favor, but that will not happen.

“I have been to five calls today and three of those five calls for service; I have been challenged to a fight. Some of them I blew off but one of them almost got ugly. I don’t want anybody to say that I did not tell them what is going on. This is no intel this is really what’s going on the street. This is my formal notification. It is about to get ugly.”

Here’s something the news will not report. That’s a cop patrolling a mostly white area and he is a white cop. The whites in the city are frightened out of their minds right now and the white cops are now paralyzed. White cops will be banging out sick, taking vacation and   applying for jobs outside the city.

Things are going to get very ugly.

If you are a Christian, you believe the ethics and morality of your faith are transcendent. Muslims believe that the gobbledygook in their holy book is revealed truth and applicable at all times and all places. The Spartans believed the gods Ares and Apollo favored the Spartans and their ethics. Being a strong warrior was the ultimate good so leaving defective infants in the woods or tossing them off a cliff was considered perfectly logical and ethical.

Even murder has been, to some degree, within the bounds of acceptable in Western society. The weregeld in the Salic Code was literally the price of a man. Kill a man and you paid his family or clan a fee. There was no distinction between murder and manslaughter so it did not matter if you accidentally killed the man or hunted him down, the fee was the same.

The point here is that ethics and morality are not universal in humankind. There are common threads, but the prevailing religion of the society codifies the attitudes of the people. If the people’s culture permits sex with children then sex with children will be ethical according to their religion. If the culture of the people prohibits adultery, then you get a all sorts of religious and ethical prohibitions against adultery like forcing women to wear blankets over their heads in public.

In modern America, it is more difficult to stake out the ethical turf because our religion is invisible to us. The people in charge are all adherents to Cultural Marxism, but they not only deny it, they don’t think of it as a religion. Instead, they think “science” and “maths” lead them to their ethics. The results are these weird debates like the one over gene editing.

A bioethical firestorm erupted last week when Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University published research in the journal Protein & Cell detailing how they had tried to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to change the genomes of 86 human embryos. The team, led by the gene-function researcher Junjiu Huang, used embryos from IVF clinics that had been double-fertilized, giving them three sets of genes instead of the usual two. Such triploid embryos cannot grow into babies.

The researchers sought to make changes in a gene that causes the sometimes fatal blood disorder beta-thalassemia. The aim is to find out just how effectively and efficiently CRISPR can make changes to genes in human embryos, with the ultimate goal of altering embryos such that any subsequently born babies will be disease-free. This is known as germ-line modification, since the corrected gene will be passed down to subsequent progeny.

The Chinese scientists essentially ignored recent calls for a moratorium on editing human reproductive cells and embryos. The month before their paper appeared, Science recommended that such research be “strongly discourage[d]” while the “societal, environmental, and ethical implications of such activity are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.” Meanwhile, Nature had editorialized that “genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable….At this early stage, scientists should agree not to modify the DNA of human reproductive cells.” Some 40 countries have preemptively banned germline genetic engineering. (The United States is not among them.)

Not too surprisingly, both Science and Nature reportedly declined to publish Junjiu Huang’s study on “ethical” grounds.

The research naturally provoked some bioethical handwringing. “No researcher has the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against altering the human germline,” declared Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “The medical risks and social dangers of human germline modification cannot be overstated.” She further urged, “We need to act immediately to strengthen the global policy agreements that put human germline modification off limits.” In The Christian Science Monitor, University of Wisconsin at Madison bioethicist Alta Charo asked, “Do we really want to have the power not just to select among the choices given to us by nature, but to create entirely new choices of our own specification?”

Catholics have little problem with these problems, having had 2,000 years to work out the details of the nature of man. Most Christians, getting their ethics from the Catholics, have an easy answer, too. Having a supernatural source for your ethics naturally makes these things easier to sort. You look in the holy book or ask the holy man and you have your answer.

In the materialist world of today, the utopians always fall on the side of trying to perfect life on earth. That means anything that can be done should be done. Eugenics, after all, was about “fixing” the mistakes of nature by eliminating from the breeding stock those people deemed unfit. This lack of a limiting principle means anything goes. The only check is the long hangover from the Christian era.

That’s what makes the very idea of bioethics laughable to me. From what authority do these people derive their authority? They can’t point to science as their authority for obvious reasons. God is dead so he has nothing to say on these matters. Ultimately, bioethics is just the opinion of men and the loudest voices will prevail.

When it comes to altering the human genome, all the megaphones are on the utopians side so that’s what will become “ethical” in the coming years. How that will unfold is a mystery, but my hunch is no one reading this will live long enough to see a race of super intelligent chimps enslaving humanity.

I predicted after Ferguson that the rational response of small cities being attacked by Soros Inc. will be human sacrifice and tribute. The city leaders will hang a few cops, preferably white ones, so everyone knows they will do what it takes to pacify the rent-a-mob Soros has gathered at the city gates. Once those ceremonies are over, the city will quietly pay money to the “community organizers” so they will shut up and go away.

The Soros Army rampaging through America right now is not all that different from pirates in the age of sail or swords-for-hire in the medieval period. Eventually, civilized men will have to crush them, but for now cities and towns will have to make due. Baltimore has decided to hang six cops today.

The state’s attorney of Baltimore, in an unexpected announcement, said Friday that she had probable cause to file homicide, manslaughter and misconduct charges against the police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, who died after sustaining a spinal cord injury while in police custody.

In a news conference Friday, the state’s attorney, Marilyn J. Mosby, said that the death of Mr. Gray had been ruled a homicide and that the police had been negligent in his death.

“We have probable cause to file criminal charges,” Ms. Mosby said. As she spoke outside the War Memorial here, dozens of police officers dressed in riot gear stood nearby.

Ms. Mosby described repeated mistreatment of Mr. Gray. She said that time and again police officers had mistreated him . She said they had arrested him with no grounds, violating police procedure by putting him in cuffs and leg cuffs in the van without seat belting him and then repeatedly failing to get him medical attention.

She said that when he was removed from the wagon, “Mr. Gray was no longer breathing at all.”

The death, Ms. Mosby said, is believed to be the result of a fatal injury to Mr. Gray while he was riding in the van without a seatbelt.

The announcement came a day after the Police Department completed its initial investigation into Mr. Gray’s death and also handed its findings to Ms Mosby’s office.

The Police Department completed its initial investigation into Mr. Gray’s death and also handed its findings to Ms Mosby’s office, on Thursday. Prosecutors added the police work to their own investigation, and Commissioner Anthony W. Batts said his department will now take direction from them about what leads to pursue.

The people in charge of the city clearly think this will get the Soros Army off their back. If the cops are white then it give the megaphone holders something to rant about for while thus shifting the focus from the chaos on the streets. With the tourist trade at grave risk, the city has to try something so they are going with a human sacrifice.

The trouble, of course, is that the cops are probably innocent. When they are not convicted, then the whole things starts over and they will be right back to having the National Guard on the streets. That’s been the lesson of Ferguson. You can only buy off the besieging hordes for so long. At some point you have to destroy them.

At some point, someone is going to realize that only when the head of George Soros is on a stake will this madness come to end.

I mentioned the other day that religions only work if they saturate the life of the believer. Without universalism they lose their utility and their rationale. If you flip it around, the way to identify a religion or a theodicy is to see if it is all consuming. If the people espousing a particular point of view judge everything within the context of that point of view, then you’re dealing with a religion of some sort.

This strange article on Bitcoin is a good example.

Nathaniel Popper’s new book, Digital Gold, is as close as you can get to being the definitive account of the history of Bitcoin. As its subtitle proclaims, the book tells the story of the “misfits” (the first generation of hacker-libertarians) and “millionaires” (the second generation of Silicon Valley venture capitalists) who were responsible for building Bitcoin, mining it, hyping it, and, in at least some cases, getting rich off it.

The tale is selective, of course: not everybody involved with Bitcoin talked to Popper, and the identity of Bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains a mystery. But Popper did talk to most of the important people in the cryptocurrency crowd, and he tells me that he put real effort into trying “to find a woman who was involved in some substantive way”.

The result of that search? Zero. Nothing. Zilch. Popper’s book features no female principals at all: the sole role of women in the book is as wives and girlfriends.

To a non-moonbat, this is nutty as squirrel poop. What sort of diseased mind cares about the sexual demographics of Bitcoin’s founders? The answer is the Modern American Moonbat. The MAM’s are obsessed with their crotch the crotch of everyone else. It’s all they can think about all the time.

There are nasty consequences of this. If you are a woman involved with Bitcoin, you are invariably going to get treated like an outsider. As Victoria Turk says, “it seems that the only Bitcoin community that particularly welcomes female participation is the NSFW subreddit r/GirlsGoneBitcoin”, which is basically a site where women get paid in cryptocurrency to pose nude.

I’ll just note that Bitcoin went from weird technological hobby to social statement to mass movement rather quickly. Bitcoin meetups? Bitcoin clubs? Replace Bitcoin with “small denomination bills” and you see why this is weird.

Men make up an estimated 96% of the Bitcoin community, which means that if Bitcoin does end up succeeding, as its adherents think it will, and if the people who own Bitcoin see their holdings soar in value, then all of the profits will end up going to what Brett Scott calls the “crypto-patriarchy”. Not many men, to be sure: as Charlie Stross says, the degree of inequality in the Bitcoin economy “is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia”. But it’s not many men, and effectively zero women.

That’s why the MAM’s are calling in the SJW’s to attack the cult of Bitcoin. They suspect it is a deviationist sect orchestrated by the Pale Penis People to undermine the progress of the One True Faith.

I’ve been posting about Africa this week mostly because I find it interesting. My guess is most of my readers find the topic a bit dull. Never let it be said you are not getting your money’s worth here at The Z Blog. My interest is mostly anthropological. Africa has been populated by humans longer than anywhere on earth. More important, Africa has not changed a whole lot since modern man debuted on this planet.

Of course, there’s the fact that a billion Africans are sitting around their hut dreaming of life in your neighborhood. My guess is ten percent of them will make their way to Europe and the US over the next 25 years. I’m probably being conservative. The US political class would gladly take 100 million Africans tomorrow. Either way, it’s probably a good idea to get learn a bit about our soon to be fellow “citizens.’

In prior posts, I’ve highlighted the fact that Africa is poor, disease ridden and full of stupid, violent people. That’s not a great recipe for building a competent modern society. One of the great measures of a society is the corruption index. It’s a measure of social trust. Low trust societies cannot engage in complex social investment. High trust societies can create large-scale social institutions.

Here are the numbers for Africa. The lower the number the higher the corruption. As a touchstone, the Anglosphere is in the high 70’s.

If you take a simple average, the typical African country is about as corrupt as Mexico. The difference is that Mexico is right next door to a giant economic power with a very high level of social trust. The typical African country is surrounded by countries that are bordering on anarchy. Place like Sudan and Somalia are in the state of nature.

If you are living in one of these countries, you cannot trust anyone from the state. Call the police and they will want a bribe or they will rob you. Go to court and the judge will demand a bribe from you and your opponent. Even if you pay, he may still rob you. The only thing you can really count on are your blood relations and even there the wise man is cautious.

Now, you talk to your cousin Tongo who is back visiting from France and you are going to think that maybe he has it great. The cops don’t ask for bribes. The government gives him free stuff. If someone steals his free stuff he can go to the authorities and they will try to get his stuff back. Even better, there are all sorts of “public” things that are magically maintained and they even work!

The problem is your new neighbors will most likely bring those old habits with them. Africa is a low-trust world because it is full of Africans. Transplant them to Sweden and they are not going to take up curling and start investing themselves in traditional Swedish social life. Europe and probably America is going to become much more African over the next 25 years.

Anarcho-Tyranny is when the managerial state either loses the will or the capacity to control real criminals so they harass the citizenry. The best example I can conjure is your car. In most American communities, the cops don’t even bother to look for stolen cars. They take a report and put the car in the system. The car could be on fire in front of the station and they don’t bother to notice. Car theft is simply not their concern. That’s the anarchy.

On the other hand, every street corner and intersection now has a camera for spotting violations. In my two mile commute to the office, I pass through a dozen cameras. Then there are the cops looking for broken taillights, drivers not wearing seat belts and any of an endless list of potential violations that have nothing to do with safety. That’s the tyranny.

In Britain, the process is far more advanced than in the US. There, the authorities truly are game keepers, policing every little thing about the public. If I were located in Britain, this blog would have me rotting in prison because I’m obviously a threat to the progress of mankind.

If that sounds farfetched, consider this from yesterday.

A former Monty Python cameraman has been arrested for harassment over a series of homemade satirical posters mocking local councillors.

John Wellard, 71, said the episode was “completely pythonesque” and told the six police officers who arrived at his home on Friday night: “I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.”

The pensioner was questioned by police for two hours after the police received complaints that a series of light-hearted posters appearing in Faversham, Kent, amounted to harassment of members of the town council.

Residents have been locked in an on-going dispute with councillors over fears the town’s historic creek area will be developed into expensive flats.

In the last few months, posters have been handed around local pubs and posted through doors, along with brown envelopes stuffed with copies of old Venezuelan banknotes bearing the note: “If you find this message please return it to your councillor.”

One poster depicts a Tory councillor on a donkey riding through the town, while another describes the town’s mayor and other local figures as “a growing problem in the heart of Kent”.

Mr Wellard, who refuses to confirm or deny any involvement in the posters, believes his name had been given to Kent Police because one of the posters involved a joke from the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian.

He told The Mail: “It was completely Pythonesque. Lampoonery and satire have been part of British public life for centuries.

“Why have six policemen threatened to go through my belongings just because a few feathers have been ruffled? Freedom of speech is being whittled away.”

Mr Wellard, who was interviewed under caution at the local police station, chose to give a ‘no comment’ answer to every question.

“It’s irrelevant who’s done what because I do not believe any offence has been committed,” he said.

“I refused to make any comment, not as a measure of my guilt but I don’t believe that I, or anyone else concerned, have done anything wrong.

“In politics people make criticisms and say all kinds of insulting things – if they can’t take the joke they shouldn’t join.

“When the six police were about to search the house I joked that “I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition”, but it fell a bit flat.

The riots in Baltimore the other day were pretty mild by the standards of these things. The riots in the late sixties burned out big chunks of major cities, including Baltimore. This riot broke a few windows, mostly in neighborhoods that can’t get much worse. A few broken windows is not going to change much. The big damage was to the tourist trade as the news made it appear that the city was just sacked by the Goths. As a result conventions have been cancelled and who knows how many holiday plans have been altered in order to avoid the city.

The funny thing about these things is we have three narratives. There’s the one from the Cult of Modern Liberalism we get from just about everywhere in the media. That’s the one where the poor, dispossessed blacks have been brutalized by the Pale Penis People to the point where they revolt. Their peaceful protest against the PPP is turned into a riot by overzealous cops, the same cops who killed the poor innocent black body, this time named Freddy Gray.

The trouble with this narrative is it is never supported by the facts. In most of these cases, the truth makes the liberal narrative appear insultingly stupid. Michael Brown was a giant thug. The guy in New York was a career criminal. Freddy Gray appears to have died by accident. Of course, Baltimore is a black city run by blacks and it has a black police force. Whatever problems they have are not the fault of the blue-eyed devil.

Conservative Inc. swings into action with its own spin on things. This piece by Kevin Williamson is fairly typical of their role in the public drama. They point out that the people in charge are all members of the CML and have been following all of the favored policies of the Cult for generations. Their argument is that the riots and the squalor are the logical result of liberal policy making. Kevin’s article makes that case in the specific as well as the general, referencing other dilapidated cities.

The problem here is other cities have extremely liberal governments yet they manage to avoid the mayhem we see in Baltimore or Detroit. Kevin briefly mentions San Francisco, but prefers to focus on the black arrests rates, as if they are somehow unwarranted or out of line with black arrest rates nationwide. He’s ham-handedly trying to argue that the pasty-faced lefties running these cities are bigots. The fact that the Hispanics and Asians seem to be doing just fine in these places is conveniently avoided.

Then there’s the other narrative, the one no one dares say for fear of being labeled a monster. On the television you see young black males mugging for the cameras as they commit pointless acts of mayhem. You see blacks running from burning stores with arms full of goods. Of course, the liquor store is robbed and you see blacks carrying away the liquor and beer. These scenes are narrated by the same old voices saying the same old things. To spice it up, they interview a local, who mumbles through the interview, confirming everything you see on TV.

This, of course, is the simple reality of places like Baltimore, Detroit, East St. Louis and so on. When the government banned private discrimination in in the 1960’s, whites fled the cities to avoid having to send their kids to school with blacks. Responsible and intelligent blacks tried to keep it together, but they threw in the towel in the 80’s and 90’s when crack turned American cities into war zones. They headed for the suburbs to live with the whites. What’s left in these urban reservations are low-IQ violent nitwits.

Of course, no one is allowed to say any of this in public. Racial solidarity requires blacks, who know better, to defend their dimwitted brothers rioting in the streets. Liberal whites think there’s profit in the riots so they cast about for a black hat on whom to pin the blame. Crime thinkers like John Derbyshire believe that the truth of things will eventually will out. I think John is right that reality will always win eventually, but I know I’ll never live to see it. Everyone alive today is too deeply invested in the myth that if we just turn the right knobs and push the right buttons, biology will be overcome. Fantasy is powerful stuff.

The fantasists may be onto something though. Baltimore has about 200,000 people that are useless. The males just want to commit crimes, get high and screw. The females just want to get high and screw. The city would love to ship them off somewhere, but somewhere does not want them either. John Derbyshire’s dream of race realism is not going to change the fact we have a lot of useless people and nowhere to send them.

Maybe we’re better off leaving reality as the hate that dare not speaks its name. The fantasy keeps everyone committed to papering over reality and doubling down after each failure. Ferguson will fade away and those people will go back to doing what they were doing before they got famous. Baltimore will go back to being Baltimore. The dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

This has been Africa week at the blog. The Dark Continent is an endlessly fascinating place for some of us in the Occident, primarily because it is such a baffling place. That and the greatest degree of human genetic diversity exists in sub-Saharan Africa. As much as it pains many white people, the cradle of humanity is Africa.

I see Steve Sailer has gotten in on the act this week. His angle of entry is, as always, immigration. There are a billion Africans in their huts right now thinking about how life would be much better in a country not run by Africans so it is a good place to start. African migration is driven by sky high fertility rates and that’s a unique feature of Africa. Everywhere else has figured out how to stabilize fertility.

That brings me to another metric to consider and that’s national IQ. I used the list here from Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen and Jelte Wicherts. I spot checked some figures against other sources and that list seems to square with others so I’m using it here. Raw numbers are not important. Relative IQ is what we’re after.

Here’s the consolidated version for Africa:

What jumps out here is you have scads of people in many of these countries with the cognitive skills of the retarded bag boy at your local grocery market. Africa has a very small smart fraction and a very large not so smart fraction. In order to conduct any large scale public projects, you need people smart enough to think of them, but also a large cohort that is bright enough to implement them.

Africa is, in many respects, the exact opposite of what is required for a modern complex society. Steve Sailer seems to think Africans can be trained to used condoms and birth control to reduce fertility rates, but that may not be possible. There’s a reason that white trash girls from the trailer parks get knocked up as teenagers. They are simply not smart enough to think beyond the moment.

Putting that aside, the issue for Europe is how many of these low-IQ people can they reasonably absorb into their societies? Modern, automated societies require far fewer people who can only provide labor. Europe, on its own, can supply all of the low end labor it needs. Bringing in 75-IQ Africans may help bolster the local soccer team, but at what cost?

Of course, part of why these numbers are what they are is that every African with something on the ball left a long time ago. Africa has been boiling off its high-IQ population for generations. If you are someone in Ghana, for example, who speaks English and has a 105 IQ, you are getting out of Ghana at the first opportunity. Those left behind breeding like rabbits are the low-IQ nitwits.

In this regard, the best thing Europeans countries could do is send the high-IQ Africans they have now back home. Skimming off the smart fraction is part of why Africa is such a mess. The world has plenty of funky sounding guys at the UN and World Bank. What the world lacks are native Africans with the wherewithal to run a sane country in Africa.

This post the other day on NRO is a good reminder about how religions work, how they have to work. That is, every choice and every action is set against the tenets of the faith to be judged. Born Again Christians used to wear WWJD bracelets as a reminder that their faith commands them to live as Jesus would live. Muslims pray five times a day in order to remain in communication with god and, presumably, obedient to god.

That’s the way it has to be with religions. They are either all consuming or nothing. After all, if you can be a part-time Catholic, for example, what’s the point of Catholicism? Similarly, if you can pick and choose what parts of the faith to follow and which to reject, you cannot plausibly be of the faith. You can’t be on the team unless you follow the rules, all of the rules, exactly as described.

It’s why faithful Christians worry about watching Game of Thrones (apparently). The Bible makes no mention of the show so it is not clear if God condemns it or supports it. That leaves the faithful to puzzle through it looking for the correct answer. It strikes the secular ear as weird and silly, but when everything is experienced through the lens of a religion, religion is everything.

It is why I argue liberalism is a religion. It demands the adherents immerse themselves in the faith and judge everything through the lens of the faith. When you talk with a moonbat, it does not take long before they are hectoring you about some outrage or another. Even discussions of the weather will eventually turn into a debate about global warming. They may not sport crucifixes, but they are going to signal their commitment to the one true faith and proselytize if the chance arises.

A good example is this innocuous story about McDonald’s. The burger chain is the quintessential symbol of core America. it is the place where suburban moms have been taking their kids for fifty years. People around the world know the golden arches better than any other symbol of America. But, tastes change  and, like America, McDonald’s is on the decline. The article contains some “solutions” to their decline.

People are increasingly seeking out vegetarian options, even if they’re not converting into strict vegetarians, said Paul Shapiro, a spokesman for The Humane Society of the United States. He said that means it’s time McDonald’s offers a vegetarian option.

Shapiro noted that many other chains already court people who feel like skipping meat. Chipotle introduced a vegan topping called Sofritas. Denny’s and Johnny Rockets have veggie burgers, and White Castle recently said it would make veggie sliders a permanent part of its menu after their popularity as a limited time offer.

“So many of McDonald’s competitors are serving plant-based entrees, and McDonald’s is lagging behind,” Shapiro said.

Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, faithful Progressives still believe vegetables please the gods in some magical way.

In a column in The Chicago Tribune, Easterbrook said he wants to transform McDonald’s into “modern, progressive burger company on many fronts,” focusing on perceptions about its food and workers.

It came right after McDonald’s said it would raise the starting wage for workers to $1 above the local minimum wage. But labor organizers — who are calling for $15 an hour and union — said the move falls far short especially since it only applies to company-owned stores, which account for a tenth of U.S. locations.

Robert Reich, former labor secretary and a supporter of the Fight for $15 campaign, said raising wages across the chain would not only mend the chain’s image as an employer, but lower its worker turnover and help business.

Here’s you see the lunacy of the progressive faith. Fast food is for working class people, for the most part. Jacking up wages means jacking up food prices. But, that’s a big part of the liberal faith. Deep down, they hate poor people. Therefore, their preferred solution for McDonald’s is to transform it into something not McDonald’s.

Ronald McDonald has been a source of tension among some who say the chain uses its mascot to market unhealthy food to children. By retiring the red-headed clown, McDonald’s could start rebuilding its trust with many moms, said Jesse Bragg, spokesman for Corporate Accountability International, which has criticized the company’s marketing practices.

“It’s clear this brand has lost the trust of people,” he said.

Those who make a career of impersonating Ronald shouldn’t worry, though. Although he had faded to the background for a couple years, McDonald’s has defended its spokesclown as a “force of good.” Last year, it even gave him a new outfit and said he would be appearing on its social media sites more.

One of the more bizarre aspects of modern liberalism is the duality. On the one hand they give lip service to the old commie themes of anti-capitalism like marketing and sales. On the other, they really love money, as we see with liberal lions like Elizabeth Warren and the Clintons. The disdain for overt money chasing works best when the adherent has money. That way they can pretend their riches are due to their goodness, not their greed. McDonald’s using a clown to sell burgers is gauche.