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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For most of human history, leaders had to focus on staying alive. First, they had to fend of family members who wanted the job. Then they had to make sure the people were not revolting. That was not always enough as there were always external threats so they needed the people willing to contribute to the common burdens like supplying men for war. It was not always easy to keep the people happy. Being the boss was fraught with danger, which is why it often ended poorly.

A great example of what I mean can be found in Rome. The Julio-Claudian line had five emperors. Augustus lived a long life and died of old age. Tiberius spent most of his life too paranoid to do much of anything and was smothered in his sleep. Caligula was murdered. Claudius lived a long life and died of old age, but Nero ended poorly, committing suicide rather than face being killed. That’s two good ends, two horrible ends and one debatable end, Tiberius.

Keep in mind that this was the most civilized society to have existed up until the late Middle Ages. Outside of Rome, the life of a ruler almost always ended violently. I think you can argue that European civilization turned the corner once they got a handle on how to both constrain the ruling class and address those who were trouble, without resorting to riots, uprisings and conspiracies. The orderly maintenance and transfer of civil authority is the great leap forward in human affairs.

I’m fond of saying that post-modernism is when a people forgets all of the lessons of the past with regards to human relations and sets about painfully relearning them. The care and feeding of the ruling class is one such example. America has lost control of its billionaires. Untethered from any sense of obligation to their host country, the billionaire class is now functioning as a colonial class. Along with their managerial class attendants, they are ruling over us like the Brits in India.

A survey of the news on any given day paints a gloomy picture of where it is all headed. But, a flicker of hope from the Far East should pick up your spirits. China just executed one of its billionaires.

A Chinese billionaire famed for his love of casinos, cigars and luxury cars was executed on Monday in one of the most dramatic episodes yet in president Xi Jinping’s war on corruption.

Liu Han, a 49-year-old mining tycoon once worth at least £4.2 billion, was one of five alleged mafia kingpins to receive the death penalty after being convicted of offences including gun-running and murder.

The part-time God Father “tyrannised local people and seriously harmed the local economic and social order,” Xinhua, China’s official news agency, said in a brief dispatch announcing the execution.

Prior to his death Liu was allowed a final “meeting” with his family, Xinhua added.

Liu Han made his money in construction and went on to become the chairman of the Hanlong Group, a Chengdu-based mining firm with interests in Australia, Africa and the United States.

Worth an estimated 40 billion yuan (£4.2 billion) at his peak, the tycoon was a vocal and extravagant regular in the business pages, boasting of his diamond watches and fleet of Bentleys, Ferraris and Rolls-Royces.

In a 2010 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Liu bragged of plans to buy a billion tons of uranium. “Liu Han always wins. Liu Han never loses,” said the billionaire, who was reportedly wearing a knee-length mink jacket.

Yet for all his business acumen, Liu’s parallel life as an “evil gangster” proved his undoing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every president has his issues and by that I mean the things he likes to work on as a matter of policy. Johnson was a natural at domestic policy wrangling. Nixon had a great mind for foreign affairs. Clinton loved interns. Bush the Younger became a war president and surrounded himself with people good at prosecuting wars. The defect in the American system is that we are stuck with our president until he dies, leaves office or is voted out in the next election, which rarely happens. So, if our guy is not very interested in foreign affairs, like is the case with Obama, you have to hope nothing big happens in the world while he is in office. Otherwise, it can get ugly.

The Europeans seem to have figured this out finally. I’m surprised it has taken so long, but old habits die hard. Most of our post-WW2 presidents have had experienced people to rely on for this stuff and all of them have been willing to work with the Europeans. Some of them too much, but that’s hardly a vice. You can disagree with the policy, but even our week presidents have not followed weird policy goals. Obama is the exception. He has a weak team and he seems to hold the Europeans in contempt.

I think Europe has finally thrown in the towel and is ready to walk away from the US, at least when it comes to Ukraine.

MUNICH (Reuters) – The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France agreed to meet in Belarus on Wednesday to try to broker a peace deal for Ukraine amid escalating violence there and signs of cracks in the transatlantic consensus on confronting Vladimir Putin.

The four leaders held a call on Sunday, two days after Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande traveled to Moscow for talks with Putin that produced no breakthrough in the nearly year-long conflict that has claimed over 5,000 lives.

After the call, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said progress had been made and that he was hopeful the meeting in Minsk would lead to a “swift and unconditional ceasefire” in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists have stepped up a military offensive in recent weeks, seizing new territory.

But Putin warned in a newspaper interview that Kiev must stop its military operation in east Ukraine and stop exerting economic pressure on rebel-held regions.

“Kiev’s attempts to exert economic pressure on Donbas (region of east Ukraine) and disrupt its daily life only aggravates the situation. This is a dead-end track, fraught with a big catastrophe,” Putin told Egyptian state newspaper Al-Ahram, according to an English transcript provided by the Kremlin.

A Ukraine military spokesman said on Sunday that intense fighting was continuing around the rail junction town of Debaltseve, with rebel fighters making repeated attempts to storm lines defended by government troops.

At a high-level security conference in Munich over the weekend, Merkel said it was uncertain whether further negotiations would lead to a deal with Putin but argued that all opportunities for a diplomatic solution should be pursued.

She came under sharp criticism from U.S. Senators Lyndsey Graham and John McCain, both Republican hawks, for opposing the sending of defensive weapons to the Ukraine army to help it fight the separatists.

“The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we’re sending them blankets and meals,” McCain said in Munich. “Blankets don’t do well against Russian tanks.”

If you’re Merkel, Hollande and Putin, you have to be thinking you’re on your own at this point.Obama let the State Department run wild in Ukraine, helping create this mess. Victoria Nuland should have been publicly sacked so as to show the World Obama is not going to tolerate that sort of bungling. Instead this woman stays on, like a big”FU” to the Europeans. Further, Obama keeps sending John Kerry to Europe, despite the fact everyone thinks he is a ridiculous person.

The bellicose ramblings of the warmongers in the GOP must be very concerning. A weak president surrounded by boobs can be bulldozed by a John McCain channeling Cato the Elder. Americans are largely clueless about the politics in the provinces, the rest of the world watches American politics closely. They have to worry that weak, lame duck president could be bullied into doing something stupid. Eliminating that possibility means even a bad deal is a good deal.

The trouble with the Europeans turning their back on Obama is it means turning their back on America, if they can make a deal with Putin. Putin surely knows this so now he has a reason to make a deal over Ukraine. There’s the looming Greek problem that could also complicate things. When Cyprus is talking with Russia about military bases, it’s reasonable to assume the Greeks would jump at such a deal. The rest of Europe has to think they would be better off letting the Russian have Ukraine back so they can focus on their other issues to the south.

I don’t think Putin is the evil genius many on the Right think. It’s just that he is matched against a nitwit. In comparison to Obama, Putin looks like Goldfinger.

I read National Review On-Line every day for the same reason I read the NYTimes or the WaPo. It’s not that I share the outlook, it’s that I like to know what they are planning to do to me. Plus, there’s some entertainment value. This is a good example. The piece itself is the same swill they slop the warmongering hogs with on every other foreign policy issue. The war party has worn out their welcome with me. That’s not the important bit. What I find hilarious is the author of the piece.

National Review works closely with Fox News and Sky News. You see the same people turning up on all three places. The Weekly Standard also shares resources with these three, but not as much as National Review. Tom Rogan is the new toy on Fox and NRO prattling on about foreign policy issues. Fox loves using guys with British accents to play the role of foreign policy expert. Roger Ailes must be a James Bond fan. Unfamiliar with Rogan, I looked him up and found his LinkedIn profile:

Contributor
The American Spectator
January 2014 – Present (1 year 2 months)

Contributor
Guardian News & Media
January 2012 – Present (3 years 2 months)http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/tom-roganhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/tom-rogan

Media Contributor
Various
January 2012 – Present (3 years 2 months)London, United KingdomProviding commentary to various media outlets – including Al Jazeera America, BBC News, BBC World News, Sky News, Radio. http://www.tomroganthinks.com/2013/11/selected-writings-on-middle-east-and.html

Contributor
The Week
December 2012 – December 2013 (1 year 1 month)http://theweek.com/editor/articles/tom-roganhttp://theweek.com/editor/articles/tom-rogan

Player Escort Deputy Manager – Wimbledon Championships
G4S Security Services
June 2005 – July 2012 (7 years 2 months)Part time-

In 2005, 2006 and 2007 I worked as a Player Escort attached to the primary escort team. In 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012 I was the Deputy Manager of the Player Escort Division and Lead Escort Officer for Centre Court and Court 1.

Student Ambassador
Aspire South East London
October 2006 – December 2008 (2 years 3 months)Working part-time as a college student mentor to inner city students from years 11 – 13. Guidance on University, Career prospects, Assisting on Projects.

Intern/Advisor
Humfrey Malins MP CBE
February 2005 – May 2005 (4 months)UNPAID – Producing speech writing, campaign material, research, constituent demands, scheduling, press in the Office of Humfrey Malins MP*.

Intern
2004 US Presidential Campaign
July 2004 – October 2004 (4 months)UNPAID – Intern – US Presidential Campaign (July – October 2004)

The red part is what caught my attention. I was expecting, given his age, to see a bunch of college stuff. For paid work, I expected a stint at some ministry or possibly the UN. In other words I figured he was a hack in some foreign policy shop who decided to try his hand at TV. Maybe he married someone in the TV business or something, but he had something on his resume to qualify him to call foreign policy his specialty. Instead, he was essentially a mall cop.

This is why a guy like Brian Williams goes so long telling whoppers. In world where everyone is pretending to be something they are not, a world where low IQ blockheads with the right look are paraded on TV as experts, why not tell whoppers? It’s just a big show anyway. As long as a guy like Rogan does not start talking about how Blofeld is behind the Ukraine crisis, why not let the mall cop be the foreign policy guy?

The Swedes are not the only occidentals trying to erase themselves from the map. The Brits are doing a good job of it too.

At least 1,000 Muslim protesters gathered outside the gates of Downing Street to protest against the depictions of the Prophet Mohammed in Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine.

The protestors, many of whom were divided into groups of men and women, gathered just yards from the Cenotaph which remembers Britain’s war dead, and blocked half of Whitehall as they demonstated.

It comes weeks after two terrorists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the Paris-based satirical magazine which had published images of the Prophet Muhammad, killing 12 staff and wounding 11 others.

The protest was organised by the Muslim Action Forum, which said that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had helped “sow the seeds of hatred” and had damaged community relations.

One young child, who appeared to be under the age of 10, stood next to a placard displaying the message: “Charlie and the abuse factory”.

A series of Muslim leaders addressed the crowd from a platform outside the Ministry of Defence, with the message “Be careful with Muhammad”

The meeting was organised by the Muslim Action Forum, which was handing out leaflets about the demonstration on Whitehall.

The leaflet said: “The recent re-publishing of the cartoons, caricatures and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) by Charlie Hebdo magazine and other publishers is a stark reminder that freedom of speech if regularly utilised to insult personalities that others consider sacred.

“Such actions are deliberating insulting and provoking to Muslims worldwide as British citizens, we believe that these publications will continue to ‘sow the seeds of hatred’ and damage community relations.

“In an already fragile world we need to move from actions of incitement, hatred and provocation to civility, consideration and respect.”

I’m fond of pointing out that a lot of people make money off poor people in the ghetto. You know you’re in the ghetto as soon as you see a check cashing joint or liquor stores with malt liquor signs. In every city, there’s a grocery chain doing business in the hood. They have big signs about the various forms of food programs they accept. The lottery, of course, is about ripping off the poor, but its for the children so it’s OK.

Whenever I mention this the libertarians tell me that the poor need stuff too and besides, they don’t have to buy cheap beer and snacks with their EBT cards. They have choices. Maybe so, but it takes a soulless person to think this is a proper way to make money.

Middle-class white people simply cannot fathom the impact prison has in the black ghetto. For the typical white person, prison is something you see on TV. It’s where bad men are sent to be raped. In the ghetto, prison is like college. The boy hits a certain age and he goes off to prison. Everyone has a relative in the can. In some parts of the ghetto, 80% of males are either ex-cons or in the system. That means waiting for trial or on probation.

I don’t want you to think I’ve gone soft. The people in prison are there because they belong there. The nonsense about our jails being full of potheads is exactly that, nonsense. Almost all of the drug offenders are there because they pleaded down a more serious charge. There are a lot of very bad men in the ghetto,  but nothing like our prisons.

Still, the warping of civil society in this way is troubling. In California, the prison guard unions lobby for more and more laws and longer sentences. The reason is it is good for business. More laws means more criminals. That means more prisons and more prison jobs. You can be sure the people behind this new scheme will be all in favor of more jails and more people in them. Prison is their business now.

I am an empirically minded guy who thinks math is the only important and necessary field of study. In my free time I like to work math puzzles and learn machine languages. That’s not to say all the other stuff is unimportant or useless, but I put it into the leisure activity category. Western society took off with Calculus, not the Canterbury Tales.

That said, a healthy skepticism with science is warranted. Science, in the abstract is pure, but we don’t live in the abstract; we live in the real. In the real world science is financed by men and practiced by men. That means all the stupidity, vice and bias that is a part of the human animal will find its way into the lab. There’s no greater example of that phenomenon than the global warming hoax.

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Politics is about choosing between available options. In stable social democracies like America, the choices are not all that important most of time. The parties haggle over trivial issues in order pretend there are real differences, but it is all theater. When the choices have real consequences, there’s always one option that offers the least risk to the ruling class. Politicians always seek the path of least resistance so the choice is easy. That’s why I don’t write about politics often. It’s boring. Not Canadian boring, but pretty close.

There are times when it is not boring and that’s when the choices are hard and the consequences are not clear. The Greek showdown with the EU is one of those times. The options available to both sides are all unpleasant and the consequences are mostly unknown. The new Greek government has three choices. One is they follow through on their campaign promises and refuse to accept the terms of the bailout. That could lead to a breech with the rest of Europe and a disorganized exit from the EU. How that plays out is unknown.

Basically, they have to comply with EU demands in order to keep getting loans at artificially low interest rates, along with a certain amount of debt forgiveness. Additionally, their banks get support from the ECB as long as Greece is in compliance. Take that away and Greece faces the open market for borrowing and those conditions are much tougher than the ones from the EU. Most important, Greek banks run out of cash and close down. Greece, at least for a while, becomes a barter society. How long is unknown.

The other option is they buckle and accept the terms offered by Europe. That would eliminate their credibility as a party and probably lead to wide-scale riots in Athens, maybe even a revolution. The people, after all, voted them in on the promise they would end austerity. If they don’t deliver something, their support will evaporate and who knows how that unfolds. The same mobs celebrating a month ago could very well be rioting a month from now. Golden Dawn, whose polices are almost identical to Syriza, by the way, is standing their ready for their shot. That’s an important bit here.

Then there’s some sort of compromise that let’s the Greek government save face, but also let’s the EU pretend they held the line. The on-going negotiations are aimed at finding that magical solution, but so far no one has found one that works for all concerned. They have about two weeks to find one before events begin to get away from the politicians. Debt has to be rolled over, banks have to be re-capitalized and the bank run has to be stemmed.

For the Greeks, those are all bad options with unknowable consequences. The Europeans have similar problems. The ECB holds about 85% of Greek debt. The one option available to all debtors is default. Having that much debt suddenly go bad would not sink the ECB, but it would create serious problems for the bank. It would trigger all sorts of political problems as the EU taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for that bad debt. Private banks hold the rest of the debt so that offers up the possibility of further  impairment to the EU financial system.

That means there’s a limit to how far the EU can push the Greeks. Assuming they choose not to go that route, the other option is to accept some amount of debt forgiveness. This would be fairly easy, but they have to maintain the austerity rules and the Greeks refuse to accept those conditions. For the EU to back off opens the flood gates for the rest of the periphery to make the same demands. You can be sure that the Clown Party in Italy is watching this closely, for example.

Of course, there’s the unknown unknowns. I pointed out on NRO the other day that the belligerents in the Civil War could not imagine the consequences of war. The First World War is another example. In both case, the belligerents could not accept the available options so they kept moving forward, waiting for the other side to blink. Brussels is not going to send tanks into Athens, but that does not mean there’s not something similarly awful lurking around the corner.

Andrew Stuttaford points out another wrinkle that could lead all of them over the cliff. The Greek voters getting froggy could very well lead the rest of Europe to follow the same route. The German and French voters my look at the Greeks and wonder why they should not be making similar demands. The whole point of the European project was to obliterate nationalism. If all of a sudden Germans start thinking about Germany, instead of Europe, keeping the project going loses its rationale. A union of countries that puts their own interests first is not much of a union.

My sense here is that the way to bet is on Syriza. The reason is the way radicals view crisis. It is the one thing they are good at, going back to the French Revolution. In a crisis, they look to pair their preferred option with one that is monstrous for the other side. They want the other side to think they have  choice between going along with the radicals or facing a bloody mess. It’s how Hitler rose to power and it is how Syriza is trying to bully the Germans.

They keep bringing up the Nazis, not to shame or embarrass the Germans. That’s not the point. They are letting the Germans know that the choice here before them is to deal with Syriza or eventually deal with Golden Dawn. Tsipras is betting that the German elites are tormented by the idea of a photo-op with Golden Dawn leaders sporting black outfits. Given the political culture of modern Germany, Tsipras is probably right. Merkel would rather face her angry voters than be seen on the cover of Der Spiegel next to a Greek Nazi.