Biologists have been puzzling over extinction events since the dawn of science. Trying to figure out why some species went away is a natural curiosity for those who enjoy solving puzzles. It’s why old western towns remain tourist attractions or why people visit ancient ruins. Stand in the Valley of the Kings and you can’t help but wonder how it all happened. Why were these people here? Why did they do what they did? Why did it all fall apart?

The social sciences gloss over this by asserting that the people in the age of decline did not really think they were in decline. I’ve never accepted that argument. I think they knew, just as we know now. We can look at this story and see it for what it is – cultural suicide.

One of Swedens financial newspapers recently uncovered a secret group of bureaucrats who go under the name “Mottagande” (Reception). They are preparing Sweden for 400,000 asylum seekers of which 130,000 children over the next 5 years. The new Swedes will stem mainly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. The government hopes they will bolster the economy.

There are at least 4 non-elected bureaucrats who are running the group and preparing Sweden for its new population.

1. Max Elger, works for Minister of Finance, Magdalena Andersson

2. Lars Westbratt, works for Minister of Justice, Morgan “only 1%” Johansson

3. Erik Nilsson, works for former communist and current Minister of Employment, Ylva Johansson

4. Annelie Roswall Ljungren, works for former illegal immigrant and current Minister of Public Administration, Ardalan Shekarabi

Reactions to the news were primarily negative and notorious anti-establishment tweeter @SinglaSlant was quick to act and criticized the individuals for choosing to live far away from the multicultural Sweden they are working full time to create.

Sweden is a country with roughly 9.5 million people. According to their government, 1.5 million are foreign born. Adding another half million breeding age foreigners not only raises the foreign population to 20% of the whole, it puts the nation on track to be majority non-Swedish in a couple of generations. The people in charge of Sweden are trying to wipe out the Swedes.

Why would anyone do that? What possible reason could they have? Self-loathing is the only thing that is plausible. How can a people collectively decide to eradicate their kind?

One day in the future people will stand on Swedish ruins and wonder what happened to the people who build those things. They will wonder why they went away. The answer is they simply gave up.

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

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

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

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

I took some grief for my position on death taxes. I am not surprised. The tax debate in America has been so cluttered with group-think there’s simply no way to stake out a position on taxes that does not get someone fired up. Liberals are supposed to be for high rates, progressivity, social engineering and fairness, whatever the hell that means. Conservatives are supposed to be for lower taxes, business incentives and different types of social engineering. Libertarians are supposed to be for no taxes and free weed.

The trouble here is none of those positions make any sense. The point of taxation is to fund government. The point of government is to address “common burdens”. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, that meant military service, fortress work, and bridge repair. As human societies have become more complex and interdependent, the number of things considered “common burdens” has increased. Roads, schools, hospitals, parks and other things have all be put in that basket, requiring greater government and greater taxation.

The point here is there can be but one position on this aspect of taxation. That is, the tax rates must be sufficient to pay for the cost of government. Once you uncouple taxes from government services, taxes become theft. They may be lawful and commonly accepted theft, but they are theft nonetheless. That means the amount of tax is irrelevant. All that matters is what to tax in order to fund government.

How I come at it this is to ask which taxes have the least impact on the natural functioning of society? Road taxes, for example, are an attempt to peg taxes to usage. The more you use, the more you pay. That links the value of the road to the cost of the road. Ideally, taxes will have zero impact on the economic decisions of the people. That’s not always possible, but it should be the goal of tax policy. Otherwise, the impact of the tax could very well exceed the value of the tax.

An example of the latter is George Bush’s luxury tax on expensive toys. Rich people are not infinitely rich. The guy that could swing a yacht before the tax was priced out of it after the tax so he bought something else that was not subject to the tax, like stocks or real estate. Thus the tax was never paid, all the yacht workers lost their jobs and stopped paying income taxes.

That brings me back to the death tax. No matter how high the tax, there will never be a change in the mortality rate. It has been stubbornly fixed at 100% for years now. Experts predict it will remain 100% long into the future. That means confiscating all of the goods from the dead will not do much to change human behavior, at least in regard to dying.

Now, Joseph K makes what I think is the best argument against death taxes:

The estate tax is the single biggest cause of the rise and dominance of Progressivism in the 20th century. The formation by business magnates of massive charitable foundations in order to save their fortunes from government depredation created a massive slush fund for the financial support and promulgation of every lunatic Progressive idea in existence. Without the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur and other foundations, Progressive lunacy as we know it would not exist. Heck, PBS and Sesame Street, which poisoned the minds of innocent children with liberal dreck for generations, would not exist.

Taxation, particularly the estate tax, wrecked the landed aristocracy that ruled England for centuries, and which ruled half the earth for the better at its height, leaving a battered welfare state carcass currently being picked clean by the feral children of former colonial lands. One cannot call this progress.

There are a few things here. The first being that the rich will do crazy things with their money in order to avoid the tax. I’ll concede that point, even though I doubt that’s really what’s going on with these foundations. These are monuments to their own lives, in the same vein as monuments or great public buildings in antiquity. The royalty returning with booty from France in The 100 Years War built castles in honor of themselves, not to avoid taxes.

That said, the death tax could cause all sorts of behavior in an attempt to keep the fortune alive after the death of the plutocrat. That’s why I specifically avoided any discussion of exemptions. If you’re going to have a death tax, it must be 100% and universal – no exceptions. The use of insurance to mitigate the tax for businesses and family farms is not an exemption; it is private mitigation. Setting up foundations and trusts would not be exempt either. The money would have to be given away in life.

The other piece of his argument is that destroying the wealth of the rich has unintended downstream consequences. Toppling over the landed aristocracy, for example, opened the door for socialist lunatics to seize power. I’m not entirely sure about that timeline, but I’ll concede the greater point. Wiping out the rich through taxes is not consequence free and those consequences are not always known.

That’s why I specifically said the rich can give away their wealth before death. To quote myself,

“There’s nothing to prevent Bill Gates from giving his fortune away. He would just have to do it while he is alive. If he wants to set his kid up with a billion dollar gift, that’s his choice. That option exists now. Whatever is left upon his death will go to the government.”

The trouble with everything I’m saying here is summed up by juice.qr.

“what gets me is you make several points about how ‘if it such and such was implemented’ , ‘if it was done this way’ … problem is none of your brilliant fixes have been implemented, or are likely to be.”

That, I think, bookends Joseph K’s argument very well. Even if the defects of the death tax can be addressed, the people doing the addressing have insurmountable defects, primarily the fact that they are crooks, liars and lunatics. The death tax gives them the tools to inflict much wickedness on the people.

To sum up, I’m convinced that the death tax can never be done well and I’m open to the argument that a not done well death tax is way worse than other taxes not done well.

In modern times, famous people get a free pass on their crimes by pretending it was a “mistake” or possible an “error in judgement.” A mistake is when you put the wrong gas in your car because you were not paying attention. An error in judgement is when you hire the woman because she is hot over the more qualified fat guy. Telling people you had a near death experience in Iraq, when nothing of the sort happened, is none of those things.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.

“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

What the bleep does that mean? Are we to believe he was forced to lie about what happened? Is there some new medical malady that compels people to spin tales of daring that never happened?

Williams told his Nightly News audience that the erroneous claim was part of a “bungled attempt” to thank soldiers who helped protect him in Iraq in 2003. “I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” Williams said. “I want to apologize.”

Williams made the claim about the incident while presenting NBC coverage of the tribute to the retired command sergeant major at the Rangers game Friday. Fans gave the soldier a standing ovation.

“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on the broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”

Williams and his camera crew were actually aboard a Chinook in a formation that was about an hour behind the three helicopters that came under fire, according to crew member interviews.

This is not about getting a fact wrong or misremembering a name or place. He made up this whopper so he could get adulation he did not earn for deeds he did not do. In other words, like every other coward, he wants glories for courage he has never been able to muster. That’s a sin in itself, but to then profit from it by dragging others into the lie (his support crew, co-workers, etc) is disqualifying.

A lot of what’s gone wrong traces back to the near total lack of shame by our elites. They simply refuse to uphold their end of the bargain. Williams should have admitted the lie, apologized to all concerned and then resigned. In a better age, his superiors would have left him alone in his office with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver. Instead, he offers a fake apology and carries on as if nothing happened.

This was linked on the great Maggie’s Farm blog this morning.

Used to describe something that’s been around much longer than the word itself, the phenomenon of homonormativity is considered by many to be destructive to the queer rights movement and to the larger queer community.

Homonormativity is a word that addresses the problems of privilege we see in the queer community today as they intersect with White privilege, capitalism, sexism, transmisogyny, and cissexism, all of which end up leaving many people out of the movement toward greater sexual freedom and equality.

I’ll note that feminism is unabashedly anti-capitalism now. By capitalism, she means free markets, not the concentrations of wealth derided by traditional conservatives. The writer, for example, is in the MacCult. The preferred economic model of these folks is closer to Mussolini than Marx. She’s OK with enormous companies that turn their owners into super-rich billionaires, as long as the companies and billionaires are of the one true faith. Walmart is bad capitalism and Apple is socially responsible entrepreneurship.

The other crimes (sins?) are just new names for the same old insanity second wave feminism offered up. The “cisgender” thing should be categorized as a mental illness. If someone declared Newton’s laws of motion “oppressive” we would lock them up, for fear they would jump in front of a car or jump off a building. If instead of saying they were a third sex, these people insisted we pretend they are invisible, they would be wearing a jacket with no sleeves.

First, let’s examine it’s counterpart, heteronormativity. This is a word that similarly describes the evaluation of “normal” sexuality that we see in our culture, from the policy and institutional level down to the interpersonal.

Muchisbeingwritten about heteronormativity, which describes the assumption and promotion that heterosexuality is the only “normal” and “natural” orientation out there, privileging those who fit the norm and positing anyone outside of this as abnormal and wrong.

Our culture is deeply heteronormative, but as queer experiences and rights become more accepted, a policing of sexual and gender expressions within LGBQ spaces is also growing. This is homonormativity.

Homonormativity explains how certain aspects of the queer community can perpetuate assumptions, values, and behaviors that hurt and marginalize many folks within this community, as well as those with whom the community should be working in solidarity.

It addresses assimilation, as well as intersection of corporate interests and consumerism within LGBQ spaces.

It also describes the assumption that queer people want to be a part of the dominant, mainstream, heterosexual culture, and the way in which our society rewards those who do so, identifying them as most worthy and deserving of visibility and rights.  

Bold in the original. My base assumption in life is that the invention of new worlds or jargon follows the invention of new lies. Words have meaning and when a people use an agreed upon lexicon, lying is difficult. Thus the need for new words and new grammatical constructions. Whenever I’m confronted with jargon I get suspicious.

In this case, these people are trying to cloak their true intentions. It never has been about rights or even acceptance with regards to homosexuality. It is certainly not what is at play with the more deranged members of these sexual identity cults. It’s about offending normal people. The guys in sundresses want to parade around your kid’s school because it offends you. The worst thing that could happen to them is for people to accept it. South Park did an episode on it.

As we’ve seen the issue of marriage equality gain success, swooping the nation in election after election, we have to question its position as The Gay Rights Issue™.

Fighting for sexual liberation and equality is, of course, so much more than fighting for the right to marry, but how is the positioning of marriage equality as the major issue also promoting homonormativity?

Marriage as an issue sets up the requirement that all relationships should mimic this heteronormative standard of sexuality and family structure. It promotes the idea that all people want to emulate straight monogamous couples.

When we focus only on this issue, we exclude polyamorous and other non-normative relationship structures as acceptable, as well as, of course, those who don’t want to get married.

Even as marriage becomes inclusive of a particular kind of queer relationship, it perpetuates a policing of other kinds of relationships, maintaining the borderline of what is an “acceptable queer relationship.”

The focus on marriage challenges very little, prioritizing the legal sanctioning of one’s relationships over real relational and societal transformation.

By showing that people outside of the heterosexual norm want the same things that “traditional, straight America” wants, themarriage equality movement fights to gain access to this social institution by reproducing, rather than challenging, heterosexual dominance and normativity andusing this as a basis for who deserves rights.

I’ve often remarked that inside of a mass movement, people find clarity. That’s what keeps them in the movement. Every failure and every setback is explained in someway that signals to the adherents that they must redouble their efforts. Every success is met with sound reasons why they must keep fighting for whatever it is the movement uses as a lure for the adherents. In some case, plain old delusion works fine as in the belief gay marriage is popular at the ballot box.

Putting that aside, the incoherence of these crotch-cults is what will ultimately pull them apart. Gay marriage is the obvious example. Homosexuals have a near total lack of monogamy. The social science is quite stunning, but social science is not science so it can always be disputed. Real science tells us that homosexual males account for 1.6% of the population and 65% of syphilis cases. Syphilis rates are a good proxy for promiscuity rates. People with astronomically high promiscuity rates are never going to adopt marriage, which has proven to be the case.

Therein lies the problem. In addition to having the dog chasing the car problem that is a feature of all mass movements, the sexual identity cults have the additional problem of success invalidating the cause. Social adoption of gay marriage will just prove it was ridiculous from the start. Similarly, normalizing all of these other fetishes will only make those causes appear more absurd.

When the dog catches the car, we all see there was never a car. He was just running around and barking.

The article is a crazy quilt of jargon and locution aimed at people in the third wave feminism cult so it is easy for a normal like myself to misinterpret it. Still, the vibe is undeniable. The gals at the womyn’s studies department are getting uncomfortable with the queers. It’s not just that they are jealous of the success of gay males in the culture. It’s that the queer rights stuff is making it impossible to turn weird for the sake of being weird into a political cause. The womyn are about declare war on the queers.

This Peter Frost column on the Parsis is getting some attention on the fringe. Fertility rates are a bit of a hobby-horse issue on the fringe, but for good reason. In every branch of natural science, reproduction rates are a key measure of health. A species with a declining fertility rate is assumed to be under stress or its environment is under stress. In fact, it is usually the key metric waved around by the greens when demanding some new rule on humans.

The exception is humanity. No one ever applies the same metric to the human species. The great irony of the environmental movement is that they insist humans are not part of the environment. For them, we are everywhere an invasive species.

Mangan has a take on it:

It seems more and more clear that the demands of the market economy come at a price. The enthusiasts for capitalism like to point out how much wealthier it has made us. Before capitalism, or before the Industrial Revolution, incomes were barely above subsistence level, whereas now everyone can afford iPads. But they elide over, or don’t even recognize, the trade-offs that are made to become wealthier. Until relatively recently, even under capitalism and as recently as the 50s and 60s in this country, families still had more than enough children to further their patrimony. But as we become ever wealthier, and opportunities for doing do become more widespread, capitalism steadily erodes what’s left of the old ways, including family ways, of doing things. That would be my interpretation anyway.

It is a testament to the power of the Progressive faith that this assertion is still with us. The Left insists that prosperity eliminates the need for lots of kids. The logical end point is a replacement rate or even a click lower for extended periods. Children become a luxury item once they no longer contribute to the prosperity of the family.

That reduces all human relations to their material content.

It’s also mostly nonsense.

Children have always been a cost in Eurasia. Even in sub-Saharan Africa where low parental investment is the norm, children are a net drain on their families in most cases. Humans, like all living things, have an impulse to reproduce. Without it, we would not be here. The one thing every extinct species has in common is the failure to reproduce. Even those wiped out by predators simply failed to reproduce before it was too late. It’s why it is hard to eradicate rabbits.

Plummeting fertility rates remain a puzzle to the people who care about the topic. Fertility does track closely with religiosity in the West. When church attendance declines, marriage rates decline and then fertility rates decline. This is true within the US as well as across Europe. Poland is one of the better examples because of the accident of history. They were a Catholic society trapped in time during the Soviet era.

Then they were exposed to Western culture in a massive wave following the fall of the Iron Curtain. Church attendance rates collapsed and fertility rates collapsed. A similar phenomenon happened in Quebec, but without the communism. There is was most likely the language barrier that insulated the culture for so longer. Regardless, when church attendance collapsed, fertility followed.

Now, that does not mean one causes the other. But, the correlation is unmistakable.

There’s a line in the movie The Matrix where Agent Smith explains how the first Matrix was a disaster because it was perfect. Humans could not accept it. The machines figured out that their human batteries needed an imperfect world. The implication being that we evolved for a specific environment. While all species adapt over time, there are limits and the time line must be imperceptible. Put humans in a radically different environment and they quickly die off, just like any other critter.

That very well may be what we are experiencing in the West and what the Arabs are desperately fighting. Modern Western culture is almost entirely transactional. There’s no continuity with the past and therefore no understanding of the future. Ours is a material, sterile world, one for which we are poorly designed. Why would humans bring children into a world with an unknowable future? What’s the point?

There’s an old Greek proverb. In good times, old men plant olive trees whose fruit they will never taste.

Upon my arrival, I was told by a friend that one of the women at the Superbowl Party now had a lesbian daughter. The only reason to tell me this was to give me a heads up so I could avoid having to talk about it with the mother or daughter. This is one of those habits in modern times that I don’t think existed in a prior age. Some friend of family member gets caught up in a ridiculous fad and everyone has to pretend not to notice or pretend to support it. The easy path is to pretend not to notice. Otherwise you have to tiptoe through a minefield of nonsense.

In this case, the lesbian daughter was not actually a lesbian. The fashion these days is for girls to declare themselves lesbian on transgendered and then dress up to play the role. The mother went bonkers in college and joined the cult of feminism so it makes perfect sense for the daughter to go in for the latest female fad. The result is a teenager with blue hair, weird makeup and wearing boys jeans.

I’m indifferent to these things simply because there’s nothing to be said about it. Teens often look for ways to drive their parents crazy. There’s not a lot left for kids to do so it is not surprising they are picking up on the sexual confusion stuff. Even that is not terribly original. In the 1970’s, hipster men would put on makeup and wear sexually ambiguous clothes to the disco. David Bowie looked like an aging lesbian for much of the 70’s.

I was telling this to someone today while waiting for an elevator. A nice African fellow overheard and chimed in with his opinion. Africans – the real ones not the ones from Detroit – have a very low opinion of homosexuality. This fellow was polite, but it was clear he was not down with the new trend. He mentioned that it was very popular with girls in the local high schools. He found it troubling. His question, a fair one for sure, is where will the babies come from if the girls are lesbians?

That’s a reasonable question. Vermont, which appears to have based its future on middle-aged homosexual men with a thing for antiquing, has seen its school enrollments decline, along with its general population. The grammar school population has seen the biggest drop, which means things will get worse, not better. I don’t think their problems are due to everyone turning gay in Vermont. I’m just making the point that you have to have babies in order to keep things going and there’s only one way to do that. Homosexuality, therefore, is irrational, biologically speaking.

It is assumed, by liberal lunatics, that those who oppose them are universally against government. That’s complete nonsense, of course, but that’s what happens when you live in a country run by a religious cult. The truth is the Old Right and now the Dissident Right always thought government was essential to civilization. What must be guarded against is the excess of government.

Men are not angels. That is where the discussion must begin and end when it comes to investing power. Give government too much power and the men in charge will inevitably abuse it. Give corporations too much power and they will eventually abuse it. It is at the heart of Distributism.

Anyway, here’s a good example of what government can do and should do.

Numerous store brand supplements aren’t what their labels claim to be, an ongoing investigation of popular herbal supplements subjected to DNA testing has found, New York state’s top law enforcement official said Tuesday.

GNC, Target, Walmart and Walgreen Co. sold supplements that either couldn’t be verified to contain the labeled substance or that contained ingredients not listed on the label, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office said.

The supplements, including echinacea, ginseng, St. John’s wort, garlic, ginkgo biloba and saw palmetto, were contaminated with substances including rice, beans, pine, citrus, asparagus, primrose, wheat, houseplant and wild carrot. In many cases, unlisted contaminants were the only plant material found in the product samples.

Overall, 21 percent of the test results from store brand herbal supplements contained DNA from the plants listed on the labels. The retailer with the poorest showing was Walmart, where 4 percent of the products tested showed DNA from the plants listed on the labels.

Supplement makers sell products to the public claiming they are safe and possess magical powers. The government should be randomly testing these things to make sure they are safe and that the claims on the bottles are honest. The public needs to know if they are eating sawdust or houseplants.

Now, I know where you’re going to go. The state does not stop at testing. They will inevitably reach out the greedy hand demanding a bribe. The same inspectors who are checking the safety of these pills will be unleashed on some politically incorrect company doing all sorts of damage in the name of the one true faith.

Well, that’s true. There’s nothing magical about any of this. Give people too much power and you get abuse. That’s not an argument against government. it is an argument against big government.

Travel challenges your assumptions about many things. People who have traveled a lot tend not to hold provincial ideas, for example. It’s hard to think your town is unique once you see that every other town is pretty much the same. It also gives you time to think and maybe look at things with a fresh set of eyes.

For instance, I was in the airports on Friday and I now think the greatest American alive is the guy who invented yoga pants. My goodness. I looked him up. His name is Ryan McLatchy and he is credited with the spread of this wonderful trend. May his descendants multiply and become many nations! It makes being a dirty old man so much better…

Anyway, the thing I was puzzling over was why terrorists target airlines and airplanes. In America, the place with the maximum amount of government and the least amount of freedom is the airport. Everyone is watched and filmed everywhere except the bathrooms. Even there, they film you on the way in and out.

Security people are constantly watching for anything out of the ordinary. They now have K-9 units sniffing passengers in the terminal. They also have security people randomly stopping people and asking them questions. I was stopped at Logan by a nice young fellow who politely asked me a series of questions about my life. This is a tactic used by El Al Airlines and others.

It seems to me that there are much better targets than airports, but for some reason the Muslims keep attacking them.

I think part of it could simply be habit. Back when the Muslims started making trouble in the 60’s and 70’s, airports were great targets. You had lots of people in small areas and the chance to make it on the world news. There were loads of strangers at the airport, so being out of place was not a big deal. A  Muslim wandering around with bad intentions was just another guy at the airport.

Obviously, security was not what it is today. If you wanted to do something big, an airport job was a great choice. That’s no longer true. In fact, it is the exact opposite. I’m a smart guy and I can do the security math. Getting passed the initial security check is not that hard, but all the random checks is where you leave things to chance and those odds are not great.

The other motivation, I suspect, is stupidity. A thousand generations of cousin marriage have not done the Mohammedan any favors. The regions where we see the bulk of the Muslim terrorists have mean IQ’s in the mid-80’s, which is at the bottom of the human family. Throw in the cultural and religious issues and you have some uncommonly stupid terrorists….

Airports are why libertarians and central planners should never be trusted. Five minutes at an airport shows you that people do not naturally self-organize. Left to our own devices, the mob gets out of control until someone imposes some discipline. People like order and expect it, which is why no one ever complains about signs telling you where to stand or where to go.

That’s obvious. What’s not always obvious is the general awfulness of central planners. Our airports should look nothing like they do and they should not be giant money pits, but they are and there’s nothing to be done about it. In the 1950’s the people who knew best designed the American airport system and we have to live with it.

That said, it is a miracle that we can live with it and do so quite easily. The reason air travel works so well in Europe and America, despite the volume and inefficiency, is the smart fraction. A dozen times I saw some low level types struggle to make something work, only to have a smart person come over and help them through it. Our world may be a house of cards, but we have a lot of people good at keeping it going…

That’s the difference. In places like sub-Saharan Africa, the smart fraction is tiny. There’s not enough of them to supervise the rest so the result is the wacky keystone cops quality to their public services. Socialism works only where you have enough smart people around to make it work, despite the infinite number of internal contradictions.

Reading about Greece while I was waiting around for planes, I kept hoping to see someone note that Greece is the way it is because it is full of Greeks. German-style socialism is simply never going to work in Greece, even at gunpoint. Western-style democracy will never work in Arab lands. Central planning results in horror when applied to big man cultures in Africa.

In the future, something historians and possibly archeologists will puzzle over is the strange mania for homogeneity that has swept western elites.  The demand that everything and everyone be the same in all places, in the name of diversity no less, is as close to mass insanity as you get and still remain functioning as societies.

Greece has no place in the Euro. For that matter, the Spanish and Italians have no place in the Frankish economic system either. Liberal trade, open borders with the rest of Europe and economic help when necessary should be enough to keep everyone happy. Instead, the European keep making war on their own history by demanding everyone be European….

If you are an American and you wonder what it would be like to live in a world run entirely by aging hippies, a good place to go is the Whole Foods in Cambridge Mass. On the way visiting friends, I stopped into the one in Central Square, which is the heart of MIT. Cambridge Mass is basically a city owned and managed by two elite universities, Harvard and MIT. I’ve spent a lot of time in the ghetto so getting off a plane and driving to Cambridge Mass was like a guy from Detroit getting dropped into Reykjavik.

That’s the thing about New England, in general, and cities like Cambridge in particular. It’s the stunning whiteness. Not wholesome Midwestern white or Scots-Irish white like West Virginia. It is a creepy Potemkin white. Central Square is now populated with fashionable young people sporting well cultivated beards and bohemian outfits. The older people all have the aging hippie vibe. The near total lack of diversity is what’s unsettling. Cambridge would make the Klan blush.

According to the census, Cambridge is a city of 105,000 people, with 12,000 of them black. Where they stash those black people is a mystery to me. Even in the old days before MIT and Harvard bought the city, it was hard to find a black guy in the city. Central Square was the exception. Drug dealers, pimps and hustlers would hang around the banks of pay phones at night. All of that is gone now and the black people with it, but to where I cannot say. According to the census data, the percentage of blacks dropped by a third in the last twenty years so that may be it.

Today, Central Square looks like every other hipster-ville. There are loads of little retail stores servicing the college community. Housing is stuffed in where space allows. MIT has built infrastructure on just about every block. It’s impossible to know the lines between the city and the school. For all practical purposes, that part of Cambridge is owned and operated by the school. The same is true of Harvard down Mass Ave from MIT. The school has gobbled up every bit of land not gobbled up by school employees.

Whole Foods is another example of why libertarian economics is utter nonsense. If humans were transactional, value seeking machines, they would not be squandering money on sustainably grown fair trade instant coffee, processed by one-legged transgendered midgets. I picked up a jar about the size of a grenade for $10. I also got some organic antibiotic free milk and a tray of cinnamon buns (preservative free). As I picked up my products I listened to two middle-aged homosexual males bicker over what I think was quinoa.

Like Apple, Whole Foods is about signalling. An iPhone is just a more expensive version of every other phone, but you have one to let people know you are the sort of person who has an iPhone. You’re not like everybody else. Something similar is going on with Whole Foods. Everything they sell can be found at a normal grocery store at a fraction of the price. But, regular stores are utilitarian and transactional. The stores are just selling stuff for a profit. Whole Foods is conformational and affirming.

That’s the thing that jumps out to me when I visit college towns like Cambridge, Boulder, New Haven etc. They are cultivated little utopias based on the ideological inclinations of the modern college faculty. Unlike normal-ville, they are very white and very Asian. There’s little in the way of crime or social pathology. There are no poor people. There’s also scads of money flowing in to support these little utopias, most from the taxes of normal people. MIT and Harvard, for example, get billions in research money. The students are all on some sort of federal aid program. Pull away the government crutch and these little hot houses collapse.

That’s why the politics of these places gets so crazy. Most of the people wandering around Cambridge are not worried about their company laying them off if the new product does not sell. The money spigot is never shut off so most of the people attached to these schools can indulge whatever strikes their fancy. These elite academies operate like a cultural and political black hole sucking the rest of the areas politics and culture into the void. Massachusetts is a different sort of Utah and Cambridge is Salt Lake with better bars and looser women.