Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, the usual suspects in America have been hooting and bellowing about “free speech.” Sadly, the usual suspects include many on the Right who should know better, but are overcome by the appeal of standing next to the hippies, shouting down the dissidents, in the name of free speech.

An example of that last point is this posted on National Review. It is the inspiration for this blog post. Some at National Review have an obsession with the current Pope. I suspect it due in part to the fact this Pope is a Marxist. But, many are Catholic so it is understandable that they would have a particular interest in the Pontiff. Naturally, when he came out with his position on speech offensive to religion, they jumped all over him. The claim being that the Pope wants to bring back blasphemy laws.

First off, I would hope the Pope and every other religious leader, for that matter, would want to bring back blasphemy laws. It is a weak and dying religion that invites the scorn and mockery of non-believers. Strong religions are tough and they don’t take any guff from heretics and infidels. If given the opportunity, they will stifle dissent and punish the critics. That’s what religions do. It is what they have to do or at least try to do. Otherwise, they stop being religions and instead become a list of suggestions supported by magic.

Of course, the Pope speaks for the Catholic Church. That’s his job as God’s intermediary. It is perfectly reasonable for the Pope to oppose mocking religion and to command his flock to avoid doing it as well. It makes even more sense for the Pope to convince non-Catholics to avoid criticizing his religion and his church. Getting non-Catholics to sign off on that would be very good for his church. That horse left the barn a long time ago, but you can’t blame the guy for trying. Islam is proving the value of that strategy.

As a general principle, it is probably bad form to mock religion. That’s not to say it should be illegal or even strongly discouraged. It just means it is one of the many things we can judge one another on, like our tastes in clothes and foods. A guy with a mullet and wife beater swilling cheap beer is judged differently than a guy in a suit having a salad. Similarly, someone who gratuitously mocks religion is judged differently than someone who is respectful of other faiths. Even in our degraded age, people appreciate politeness.

What’s dangerous about this latest burst of “free speech” fanaticism is it distracts from what is important and cedes ground to the Left by adopting their choice of language. Specifically, the formulation “free speech.” There’s no such thing as free speech. It is an abstract idea that conflates official censorship with social custom at the expense of the latter. The Left sees no limit to the state and no place for the organic culture that flows naturally from ethnicity, created over thousands of years of trial and error.

The fact that the libertarian weirdos are trying to out bellow the liberals on this issue once again proves that the former suffer from the same defects as the latter. I’ll grant that the increasingly deranged Karl Denninger is probably a bad example. He obviously knows nothing about religion or self restraint. Charlie Cooke is the house libertarian hipster at National Review and he is ululating about free speech as well. Again, the defect here is the the very idea of “free speech.”

Rights do not exist in the abstract any more than left handedness exists in the abstract. People have natural rights based solely on the fact they are a living human. One of those rights Americans believe humans posses is the right to speak freely and publicly on public issues, such as politics and policy. It is not an absolute right. Speech that involves incitement, false statements of fact, obscenity, child pornography, threats, and speech owned by others are all completely exempt from First Amendment protections.

In other words, Americans give the government very limited powers to regulate speech. The state must pass a high threshold in order to limit what I can say, where I can say it and to whom I can say it. But, and this is a big one, the state does have that authority. Every society gives the civil authorities this power, some more than others. That’s the place for debate. What can the state regulate and what proof must they muster in order to exercise that authority. The reason the Left hates this line of reasoning, the view of the Founders, is it means a natural limit on state power, something the Left rejects.

The worst part, is that these free speech mavens conflate state censorship with social custom. Every society has taboos. These are things we prohibit by custom. The reasons for prohibition may be sensible or magical, but every human society has them. It’s called culture. If you doubt this, start talking about your sexual interest in children at the next dinner party. It will be your last dinner party because decent people in our culture think sex with children is monstrous. It is one of our more serious taboos.

Sex with minors is illegal, but talking about your desire to have sex with a minor is not. That type of speech is permitted to a point, based on local obscenity laws. Custom, however, is not so permissive. It rarely is as permissive as the law. That’s why every human society has counted heavily on custom, the unwritten rules of society, to regulate most behavior. Being cast out from your own has always been one of the worst things that can happen to a human. The threat of it is a powerful corrective.

Conflating social custom and taboos with state power is the dream of ever liberal. It is why they keep demanding more laws. It is why our legal code has ballooned beyond the comprehension of the citizens. The Left imagine a state that more than dominates life. They imagine the state as the medium in which the citizen is defined. A system where your very humanity is defined by your relationship with the state and there’s no space between the public and private. Accepting this premise by treating the utterances of a religious leader as equal to those of a state actor gives the game away. All that is left is the time and place of surrender.

Making the made up concept of free speech a fetish obscures the real issue that is worthy of debate. The state should have power to regulate speech only at the fringes. The people, through their customs and traditional institutions should be free to sort these issues out as they see fit, without seeking permission from the state. Freedom of speech and freedom of association go hand and hand and always mean freedom from state coercion. When a group of citizens are free to not associate with another group of citizens because of the things being said, the unwritten rules are able to work and the state is not needed to referee.

That last part is important. You’ll note that the phrase being bandied about is “protect free speech.” This is only necessary when the citizens are not free to leave the room when they hear things they find objectionable. Instead of protecting freedom from the state, the state is protecting our rights from one another – at a price. Before long the state is no longer a referee but a game warden.

It looks like Google figured out that this was a stupid idea.

Google will stop selling the current version of its Google Glass and reorganize the business behind it, Dow Jones reported on Thursday.

Google will release a new version of the much-hyped wearable data product at some point this year, the report said.

The tech giant’s shares were largely unaffected following the news.

The newly reorganized Glass business will report to Tony Fadell, CEO of Nest, the home automation company Google acquired last year.

Ivy Ross, the current head of Glass, will retain day-to-day duties and authority, but will start reporting to Fadell, according to another report from The Verge.

“We realize that we’ve outgrown the lab and so we’re officially “graduating” from Google[x] to be our own team here at Google.” the company said in a statement. “As part of this transition, we’re closing the Explorer Program so we can focus on what’s coming next. January 19 will be the last day to get the Glass Explorer Edition.”

Google expects to wind down its Explorer program in the coming months, Fortune reported Thursday.

Nancy Pelosi famously called the Tea party “AstroTurf” alleging it was a synthetic grass roots movement just as AstroTurf is synthetic grass. It was a clever line and whoever wrote it for her deserves credit. Pelosi then went on to repeat a million time like some sort of malfunctioning robot. The rest of her cult followed suit, like chanting monks in a monastery. Within a week it was self-parody.

The person who came up with the line is also a member of the cult and as such assumes the world beyond the walls works just like the world within the wall. Inside the walls, everything is carefully choreographed. Nothing is spontaneous. Unity and conformity are essential to the functioning of a hive so the adherent naturally assume their enemies operate the same way.

Reality, as we often see with the Cult of Modern Liberalism, is 180 degrees out of phase with their perceptions. It is primarily their group that is responsible for synthetic protests and marches. It turns out that the attempts to angry up blacks in Ferguson was a George Soros operation.

There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.

Rather, it’s liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org.

Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.

In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations.

The financial tether from Mr. Soros to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest movement that transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a 24-hour-a-day national cause celebre.

The proof that the opposition to the Cult is non-existent is right here. Soros should have died of lead poisoning long ago. If the opposition had any strength at all, someone would have made the call. Instead, Soros operates with impunity in the US.

“Our DNA includes a belief that having people participate in government is indispensable to living in a more just, inclusive, democratic society,” said Kenneth Zimmerman, director of Mr. Soros‘ Open Society Foundations’ U.S. programs, in an interview with The Washington Times. “Helping groups combine policy, research [and] data collection with community organizing feels very much the way our society becomes more accountable.”

For most of human history, the folks on the left side of the bell curve were ignored, as far as their opinions about community issues. This makes sense, obviously, as we don’t want to take advice from the stupid, the insane or the malicious. Human societies have had a variety of ways to handle it, mostly by keeping these people off the stage. Today, we give these people a megaphone and encourage them to fill the public space with their bellowing and hooting. Turn on any of the news channels and you get a full blast of stupid.

Mass communications has made it easy for all segments of society to “make their voices heard.” Most of these voices are just noise. They offer nothing of value. Twitter and Facebook make it easy for blockheads to reach out and “share” the ideas buzzing around in their heads. It’s why I call social media the “moronverse.”

Here’s a great example posted on NRO today:

Here is an excerpt from an Alternet article by Kali Holloway republished by Salon. See if anything about the GDP figures jumps out at you.

The top five members of Congress are worth more than the GDP of entire countries. At $200.5 million, Republican Dave Trott’s personal wealth is greater than the GDP of both Peru and Iraq ($200,269 and $195,517, respectively). Democrat Jared Polis is worth $213.2 million, more than the GDP of Algeria and ($208,764). Democrat John K. Delaney is worth $222.4, greater than the GDP of the Czech Republic ($208,796). Another Democrat, Mark Warner, is worth $254.2 million, which beats out the GDP of Greece ($241,721). While Republican Darryl Issa, the richest man in Congress, is worth an incredible $448.4 million, which makes him worth more than the GDPs of Bolivia, Croatia, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong put together ($30,601; $57,869; $67,203; and $274,027, respectively). And that’s still $15.6 million less than he was valued at last year.

The larger theme of the story, that members of Congress are shockingly wealthy, is poorly understood as well. The average member of Congress is about 57 years old, and they are mostly married, mostly savers and investors, and mostly college graduates in two-income households. Their net worths are about the same as other similar households.

I stumbled on this today while reading the sports pages. I must have clicked on it by mistake as I have no interest in the Big 12 or their plans for extracting more money from the taxpayers. What caught my eye was the following:

The conference is seeking to deregulate the FBS rule that requires leagues to have at least 12 teams and two separate divisions in order to stage a conference championship game. He said there hasn’t been any noticeable resistance to that effort yet, that he expects the process to play out within the next six months and that the ACC is also seeking to have the rule removed.

“John Swofford and I have socialized it among the 10 FBS commissioners and there have been a few questions and there hasn’t been any significant opposition to it,” Bowlsby said.

The first highlighted portion takes weasel words to another level. What exactly is “deregulate a rule” supposed to mean other than “repeal the rule”?? He obviously prefers to avoid using the word “repeal” so he went with “deregulate” instead. I can only assume that means leave the rule in place, but never enforce it. Why would anyone ever do that unless you thought there would be some objection to repeal?

The second portion is a bizarre use of language. Who talks like this other than a bureaucrat or a confidence man? Again, the obvious word to use is “talked” as in “we talked about it.” Instead, he chooses a more slippery word that could mean anything and nothing in this context. The object here, the proposal to not enforce the rule, needs to be “socialized” like a feral cat?

Later in that piece:

“We could certainly take our two highest-ranked teams and have them play again but one of those teams would have won during the regular season,” Bolwsby said. “You have to question whether or not it’s fair to have to have that same team beat the other team again in order to get past it. I could capably argue either side of that. We think the rule ought to be deregulated but whether or not we would have a [conference championship game] once we get there, I don’t know.”

Again, who talks like this other than sociopaths?

This is something we’ve seen more and more of over the last couple of decades. It started in the Clinton years when the flaks from the White House would contest the underlying definition of common English words. They would dispute the premise of every question, no matter how benign. They reduced public discussion to a word cloud that meant whatever they thought would work in the moment. As a result, our public discourse has become oriental in nature.

This is not entirely without precedent. Human societies are often ruled by people who communicate with one another in an official language that is opaque to the masses. The most obvious example is the use of Latin by the Catholic Church in the middle ages. Other than conquered people, however, I can’t think of an example where the rulers spoke to the people in a pseudo-language unintelligible to the people. Perhaps this is the next turn of the wheel. Esoteric writing in the communications age will result in the use of esoteric speech, a form of English used by elites to speak over us in public. An Ivy League Esperanto.

This post has already been linked to 818 times!

The late great Andrew Breitbart used to have a great way to befuddle moralizing liberals in TV. The liberal would go on a rant about something, which meant repeating the liberal pieties about the subject, then sitting back, full of righteous indignation expecting Andrew to cower. Instead, he would respond with “So?” and a rye smile. He had the perfect look to pull it off and the confidence to deliver it on target. The liberal would be poleaxed, unsure why they did not get the expected reaction. It was a great way to handle the passive-aggressive style so popular with the Left.

I thought of then when looking at this:

THE brutal murder of 12 people at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris today appears to have been carried out by militant Islamists. If so, many will again question the compatability of Islam with secular-minded, liberal European values. Mistrust of religion is not confined to Islam, but Europeans regard it as more threatening to their national cultures than other faiths (or indeed atheism), according to a 2013 poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a non-profit organisation in Germany. The threat of Islamic terrorism is rising, to judge not just by today’s slaughter but also by other attacks and a recent upward trend in arrests for religiously-inspired terrorism reported by Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement arm. Perceptions can easily run ahead of reality, however. There were still more arrests for other types of terrorism (motivated by separatism, for example) in Europe in 2013, the last year for which pan-European data are available. And European publics wildly overestimate the proportion of their populations that is Muslim: an Ipsos-Mori poll in 2014 found that on average French respondents thought 31% of their compatriots were Muslim, against an actual figure closer to 8%.

So what? People are notoriously poor at this sort of thing. They simply pick a number that feels big or small or about right, depending upon the subject. Americans wildly overestimate the number of queers in the population. The reason is we are bombarded with the subject by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It feels like there are many more than there are, which is what should be the point. Europeans are suffering from a similar phenomenon. Culturally, Islam is punching way above its weight in Europe so it feels like Muslims are swarming in big numbers.

This sort of passive-aggressive tactic is popular with the CML. Instead of making an argument and supplying facts to support it, they put things “out there” to shift the focus. You can be sure that the chattering skulls in Europe will prefer focusing on this rather than the lunacy of importing millions of Muslims. That’s what made Brietbart’s retort so much fun. It turned the focus back on the other guy, forcing him to explain himself.

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy buff. My own experience says people have a tough time keeping a secret. Anglo-sphere countries also suffer from the concreteness of language, which makes it tough to pull off a good conspiracy. For a ruse to work, the mark has to believe things that are not true based on his own mistaken interpretation of what has been said by others. English is not a great language for that.

Arabic is a great language for nuance. Russian is a pretty good language for deception as well. In both there is lots of room for interpretation. Whether culture shaped the language or language shaped the culture is unknown, but a hour working with Arabs or Russians and you figure out that it is nearly impossible to pin them down on anything. It’s why contract law is alien to Arabs.

Anyway, this got my attention today. Since it is probably fire-walled, I’ll past it here.

Barely 24 hours after Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s prime minister, joined millions marching in Paris to pay tribute to the 17 people killed by Islamist extremists, the country’s president struck a much more confrontational tone.

“The duplicity of the west is obvious,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a press conference on Monday evening. “As Muslims we have never sided with terror or massacres: racism, hate speech, Islamophobia are behind these massacres.”

“The culprits are clear: French citizens undertook this massacre and Muslims were blamed for it,” he added.

Although political leaders in Turkey have repeatedly condemned the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, a Jewish supermarket and a policewoman, a parallel narrative has emerged in the country, with conspiracy theorists blaming the murders on foreign intelligence agencies rather than radical Islamists.

This is so Turkish. I’m by no means an expert on Anatolia, but I have strong interest. It is, in part, due to their love of conspiracy. The other reason is the first “fast woman” I ever had fun with as a young man was Turkish.

A similar phenomenon has occurred in Russia, which sent Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister, to Sunday’s march.

Some such theories have been endorsed by pro-government figures — highlighting the growing resentment and suspicion of the west in two strategically important countries at a time of rising tensions over Ukraine and the Middle East.

Russians are not the same sort of conspiracy mongers as the Turks. Russians seem to like the deeper, more subtle brand of conspiracy and intrigue. There’s an assumption that things are not as they seem, but also an internal logic is at work. Turks seem to like chaotic conspiracies that make no sense to anyone.

“In Turkey, at least, it looks dangerously like people are playing a double game,” said Aaron Stein of the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think-tank. “Issue condemnations that play internationally, even as you tolerate supporters pushing crazy opinions that appeal to your political base.”

Melih Gokcek, mayor of Ankara for the ruling AK party, said on Monday that “Mossad [the Israeli intelligence service] is definitely behind such incidents . . . it is boosting enmity towards Islam.” Mr Gokcek linked the attacks to French moves towards recognising Palestine.

Ali Sahin, a member of Turkey’s parliament and foreign affairs spokesman for the AK party, last week set out eight reasons why he suspected the killings were staged so that “the attack will be blamed on Muslims and Islam”.

Mehmet Gormez, director of the state-run religious affairs directorate, described the attacks as a “perception operation” that cynically used the symbols of Islam, although he later appeared to tone down his comments.

In his own remarks on Monday, Mr Erdogan added: “Games are being played throughout the Islamic world”. He expressed bewilderment that French intelligence services had not followed the culprits more effectively. However, he has mainly appeared to hint at a conspiracy behind the depiction of the killings rather than the murders themselves.

That’s the other difference between Turks and Russians. Turks personalize their conspiracy theories. Whoever is pulling the strings is not as important as who is the target of the subterfuge. In this case, they start with Muslims being blamed and work backwards. Russians don’t have the self-pity for this sort of stuff.

In Russia, some pro-Kremlin commentators sought to link the killings to geopolitical machinations by the US.

Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of Russia’s leading tabloids, ran the headline: “Did the Americans stage the terror attack in Paris?” and posted a series of interviews on its website that presented various reasons why Washington might have organised the attack.

In one interview, Alexander Zhilin, head of the pro-Kremlin Moscow Centre for the Study of Applied Problems, claimed the terror attack was US retribution against President François Hollande for a January 6 radio interview in which Mr Hollande urged the EU to lift sanctions against Russia.

Washington used the attacks as “a quick fix for consolidating” US and EU geopolitical interests in Ukraine, Mr Zhilin claimed.

Others repeated a popular Russian conspiracy theory blaming the US intelligence services for a swath of terrorist assaults, from the 9/11 attacks on the US to last week’s Paris killings.

“For the last 10 years, so-called Islamist terrorism has been under the control of one of the world’s leading intelligence agencies,” Alexei Martynov, director of the International Institute for New States, a think-tank, told pro-Kremlin internet outlet LifeNews. “I am sure that some American supervisors are responsible for the terror attacks in Paris, or in any case the Islamists who carried them out.”

The Russians, I think, just enjoy giving the Americans the business by feeding Muslims these wacko ideas. Given what is happening in Ukraine and Syria, it is in the interests of the Russians to angry up the Muslims. That does no mean the Russians don’t think skulduggery is at foot. It’s just that the assume it is rational. So, they throws some logs on the fire to suit their interests.

In all seriousness, I keep wondering when the West is going to wake up and figure out that Turkey is a lost cause. Turks with anything on the ball are heading to Europe. The remaining Turks are trying to figure out how to keep from being outnumbered by the Kurds. Their answer is to go all in on Islam. Supplying these guys with modern weapons and technology is a terrible idea.

Something I’ve always found odd is how stories about homosexuals on sites that allow comments are instantly filled up with crazy comments from the Militant Homo Army. National Review has been sleepy for a while now, not generating tons of comments. Ramush Ponnuru is one of the least interesting posters there so his stuff gets cobwebs on it before anyone posts a comment. Today he posted this about some professional homosexual bitching about normals not wanting to be give up their religion to please homosexuals. Immediately it was flooded with deranged commenters making a nuisance of themselves. It was obviously a coordinated effort.

I posted something about how strange it is for these weirdos to organize troll attacks. Who has the time for that? I was informed that there’s actually a blog that organizes the MHA to bomb sites they don’t think are sufficiently deferential to their cause. It’s called JoeMyGod and it is about what you would expect from a site devoted to the crotch. It’s littered with pictures of naked men. It appears to to be the work of rabid lunatics to angry up the gays over their alleged oppression. They have a link to Right Wing Watch, the journal of the aluminum foil hat crowd so I’m assuming the blog owner is a crackpot.

I’m going to assume the thrust of the site, so to speak, is the cause of homosexual marriage. That and the abolition of religion. Homosexual have had a long running feud with Christianity to the point of obsession.That’s why these nuts are running around harassing bakeries and caterers they think are Christians. Homosexual marriage, 0f course, is just a tantrum against tradition, they incorrectly associate with Christianity. The fact that marriage as a social custom integral to human settlement dates back thousands of year prior to Christianity is lost on these people.

I’ve written in the past that I think homosexual marriage to be a most harmless insanity. Basing public policy on rants against biology and serendipity is probably a bad idea with unknown downstream consequences. The most obvious argument against is it weakens normal marriage and thus undermines social cohesion. My argument against it is the grounds of general stupidity. Homosexual marriage is absurd and it is stupid to pretend otherwise. But, I can be convinced it is just harmlessly stupid.

What’s striking about the Pink Mafia is the inherent fascism in their cause. The image of homosexuals and Nazi cavorting together makes me laugh just typing it, but they say Hitler was probably a man who preferred the company of other men. He did have a thing for leather. Anyway, the underlying argument from homosexual activists is that you must get permission to use your private property and you must get permission from the state before deciding with whom to associate. Everything within the state, nothing outside the state.

I doubt the people reading and responding to JoeMyGod have the capacity to think that through. They are just angry and they want to strike out at society. People who join movements do so from self-loathing. The homosexuals harassing Christian bakers are seeking to exchange their hated self for the identity of the group. It’s why Islam seems to have an unlimited supply of suicide bombers. The self-loathing see obliteration as the ultimate goal of their membership in the cause. Mass movements have a lot of those people by definition.

The comments section of the post that started all of this is interest in that the hive mind is on full display. Each comment is another way of shaking the fist at those outside the hive. The naked hatred of Christians is pathological. The neologism “Christianist” must be an epithet in their cult, but maybe it has origins elsewhere. A quick Google search suggests it started with Andrew Sullivan, but I’m not interested enough to research it further. It’s just another reminder that you never put weirdos in charge and you’re best off keeping them out on the fringe where they can’t break anything important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Way back in the mists of time I had an exchange on Marginal Revolution with Steve Sailer regarding the book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. I pointed out the phenomenon of surname drift as an obvious counter to what Clark appeared to be arguing. Surname drift is how last names die out and slowly the number of last names diminish. Given enough time an isolated population would end up with everyone having the same last name. It’s just simple math.

Sailer got cross with me as he is a bit of genetic determinist and Clark’s book fits nicely into that belief. He’s not alone. John Derbyshire is a determinist, as well. In all honesty, I’m far closer to that view of human biology than most, but I think serendipity plays a much larger role than most of these guys would allow. Bill Gates was the son of bright parents. There were millions of coin flips by other, whose outcome shaped his life, between conception and his days stealing code out of dumpsters.

I thought about that when reading this from Derb the other day. I suspect we will hear a lot of sensible people discount the dynasty complains with regards to Jeb Bush. Derb was born and raised into a monarchy so I guess he can be forgiven with thinking such arrangements are sensible. I suspect many Americans will accept these arguments and dutifully vote for Bush in the primary and general election. I give Jeb a better than 50% chance of winning the nomination.

Derb’s argument rests on this:

I write with feeling there, as a person hopeless at practical politics. If there is a PQ analogous to IQ, I’m down in the bottom decile. In my years working at corporate offices, I never had a clue who was up and who down. When X was suddenly fired or Y given a sudden dazzling promotion, I was always flabbergasted: “I had no idea …!” My colleagues would respond with a roll of the eyes: “Oh, Derb. Try to keep up, please …”

It is reasonable to suppose that this skill, or lack of skill, is rooted in the contours of the individual human personality. Now, most of the features that define personality are heritable, often highly so. (The paper at that link gives heritability for the “big five” core personality traits as: Extraversion 0.86, Openness 0.92, Neuroticism 0.59, Agreeableness 0.85, Conscientiousness 0.81.) We should therefore expect political skill to travel in families, like freckles or hairy elbows.

Presumably nature gets some reinforcement from nurture, too. Evelyn Waugh remarked somewhere that most men are best suited to the work their fathers did.

It seems to me that history argues against this line of thought. The line if Ida had a very good run, but many in his line were inept, crazy or deranged. The Julio-Claudian line was a train wreck. These are the two most successful family dynasties in the Occident and we see it I hit and miss, as far as hereditary leaders. Medieval Europe has a lot of hilariously insane rulers who came to power merely by their having won the lucky sperm contest.

The Founders certainly had a dim view of political dynasties. They had that in mind when designing the national government. They wanted the best and brightest to be attracted to state and local government, not the national government. This was, in part, to make political dynasties difficult to establish. A look through the biographies of the Founders say they knew a thing or two about the children of powerful men turning out to be nitwits.

There is an expression that goes, “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.” The first generation builds the family fortune, starting from the working class. The next generation does its best to maintain it, but mostly lives off the fruits of their fathers. The third generation blows through what’s left and ends up back in the same level as the founding generation. The Kennedy family is a good example.

I think the children of the king probably do, on average, possess more of the magic stuff that makes for a good king than most children. I also think they have precisely the wrong environment to cultivate that magic stuff. Poppy Bush served in WW2 and almost died in the Pacific. In other words, as a young man he had to cultivate his leadership assets under duress. His kids cultivated their assets getting drunk and chasing tail at elite preparatory schools. Seeds amongst the stones.

That said, any argument against Jeb Bush will find a friendly reception from me. If I were a religious man, I could be convinced that he is the Anti-Christ, heralding the end times. But that’s just me.