I saw this on Drudge.

MSNBC president Phil Griffin, whose cable news network is the only one among the big three to lose primetime viewers this season, told staffers he would look to turn things around by continuing a push for younger viewers in 2015.

Griffin, in a memo sent Monday, also promised “to get on the road — and outside of Washington” to broaden the network’s coverage.

“It’s no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for msnbc,” Griffin wrote.

“We have a long history of finding and nurturing great talent — and with an eye toward 2016 — we continued to build our next generation of top-notch journalists,” Griffin wrote.

The memo then singled out such 20-something hosts as Ronan Farrow, Kasie Hunt and Alex Seitz-Wald.

The fact that I had to run Kasie Hunt, Mike’s brother, and Alex Two Names through the google machine tells me they need to keep looking for the next “great talent” to nurture. The only reason I know anything about that squealing sissy, Ronan Farrow, is he was fun to mock at one point. Clips of him having a hissy fit would turn up in my mailbox. If Frank were alive today, Ronan would not be.

It also touted Shift, MSNBC’s just-launched streaming news service, which “is already allowing us to reach new, younger audiences.”

MSNBC’s push to embrace youth makes sense for the only cable news network to see its primetime audience erode in the current season, as measured by Nielsen.

Its 548,000 primetime viewers age 2 and older — down 18 percent from the comparable season a year ago — ranked third to CNN’s 560,000 (up 15 percent) and Fox News Channel’s 1,845,000 (up 1 percent).

Viewers “2 and older”?? You’ve got to be kidding me. The fact there’s a metric for toddlers left in front of the TV while mommy gets another glass of wine says that TV ratings are mostly bullshit. Regardless, in a country with over 100 million cable homes, getting one half of one percent to tune in says you’re about as appealing as ass cancer. There’s no way to spin those numbers.

This is why a la carte pricing of cable should be at the top of the conservative agenda. MSNBC would not exist without cable fees. If people could drop it, everyone would and 99% of the money to this outfit would disappear. The same is true of CNN. Fox would make it because they have a solid audience with money to buy stuff. The ad dollars would probably go up for Fox once the others folded. Just as Fox tries to play both sides of the street, competing news outlets would be forced to follow suit. The news would start to look like America.

This is a microcosm with what’s gone wrong on the professional right. They never understood the long game. Public sector unions were never about public sector workers. It was about taxing those workers to finance liberal causes. Grants to non-profits were never about charity. They are jobs programs for liberals, usually engaged in get out the vote activity. Up and down American society you see a skim. Wherever money changes hands, the Left is getting a cut to finance their operations. In that regard, they operate just like the Mafia.

The Feds finally broke the Mafia by cutting off their money. Tax laws turned out to be the best weapon. The annual audits of unions, pension funds and front companies made it impossible for the mob to make a living. The American Right needs to take the same view. Scott Walker paved the way in Wisconsin, of all places. Now that he has cut the Left off my from union money, the state is suddenly a lot less progressive.

I saw this on Drudge today and I got a chuckle from it.

The first Jews to settle in what is now South Dakota established themselves in Deadwood during the Gold Rush over 150 years ago, finding a niche selling hardware, groceries, dry goods and more.

By 1920, the state was home to some 1,300 Jews. That community has dwindled to an estimated 390 people. No state has fewer.

It’s a small, but tightknit flock that makes do without a permanent rabbi and worries too few children are coming along to sustain it.

Steve Benn is a doctor who serves as lay leader at Rapid City’s Synagogue of the Hills. He says “nobody wants to be the last one to turn the lights out.”

Benn orchestrates bar mitzvah ceremonies, performs ritual circumcisions and conducts funeral services.

South Dakota is also one of the whitest states in the country. It is 6th, in fact. If you’re a member of Stormfront then South Dakota looks like a great place to live. Out of curiosity I looked for a breakdown of Jews by state. It looks like there are a number of contenders for the ideal Stormfront state. I’m not very familiar with their stance on these things, but my guess is they hate blacks slightly more than they hate Jews.

I searched “best state for black people” and I got back a lot of hits on black centered sites with state rankings by flava. I changed black to white and the results are mostly liberal sites ranting about racism. Change white to Jews and we’re back to serious analysis of where Jews have it best. Funny how that works.

Steve Sailer once proposed something called a Cromartie Index. It’s one of those funny things that pops up on those bad think sites. I wonder if anyone has ever created a measure to rank places to live, by the amount of diversity. In ecology, there’s a thing called the Simpson’s Index, which measures the diversity of species within a system.

A HBD Index would take into account race, age, religion and political outlook. I’m throwing religion in there because a place like Utah might look good to some, until they learn about the magic underwear business. The other problem is the fact that a 100% Hispanic town would have the same HBD score as a town in Maine, but mean different things to different people. Maybe including IQ would solve that problem.

Maybe if I have time I’ll try and come up with an HBD Index.

Back in the 1970’s there was a TV drama called The White Shadow. It was a classic white man’s burden story popular in that era. The white man would learn the wonders of diversity, while helping the minorities rise from the ghetto to something better. Back then it was what passed for cutting edge. It was also fairly dull and no one watched it. Finally after three seasons the network threw in the towel.

Today, of course, the white man would be routinely humiliated in each episode in an attempt to atone for his whiteness. The difference is it would not be a TV show but real life. According to America’s newspaper of record, the White Shadow is suing the New York City schools for discrimination.

A Bronx teacher says being a white man at his mostly black and Latino middle school has made him a target for unfair treatment — including being denied a key to the restroom for three years.

Paugh William Shadow of upstate Port Jervis charges he was discriminated against as a white man at MS 391, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit he filed against the city and the Department of Education.

Shadow claims he was falsely accused of corporal punishment, using derogatory language and leaving his post; and that school administrators refused to back him up on disciplinary matters and failed to reimburse him after he bought materials for his science-lab students.

The charges, including an allegation he marched sixth-graders up and down a set of stairs for more than five minutes as a means of discipline, were dismissed, he claims.

Shadow says he “was humiliated in front of his peers” and that school officials “discriminated against [him] due to his gender and race.” He is seeking unspecified damages.

My have times changed.

A year ago I wrote a post critical of BitCoin. At the time, it was trading at $1000 and all the smart people were saying it was the future. A year later and it is trading at $300 and no one talks about BitCoin anymore.

There are a lot of practical problems with digital currency, but the biggest defect is no government will ever let control of their currency slip into the hands of a bunch of anonymous nerds. It’s why we no longer have hard money. Money is the language of economics. Control the language and you control the debate. Control the money and you control the economy. One of the reasons the US runs the world is the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. That and a massive military and a nuclear arsenal.

Putting that aside, the other big problem with BitCoin is it is not really money. You don’t go into the market and buy your groceries with stock certificates or bonds. Those things have value, but they are not money. They lack certain key attributes of money, namely the predictability we expect with money. I know what a dollar or pound or yen will be worth a year from now, with a 99% accuracy. That stock can have a range of values, perhaps a very broad range of values. That’s what we see with BitCoin.

Of course, BitCoin is valued in dollars. That’s because the dollar is money, a universally accepted money. BitCoin is a gaming device. People bought them as an investment, a bet that dumber people would come along and buy them at a higher price. It turns out that peak stupid in the BitCoin realm was a year ago.

I’m not sure how I stumbled onto this blog. I was looking for something on Africa and it was in the search results. Google is a great search engine, but it is not without its weirdness. The post that was linked was this one. I thought it was a joke of some sort so I kept reading. Turns out the blog is by a self-absorbed and possibly unbalanced Brit. At least that’s my take. Maybe it is just very clever satire that I’m too “obtuse” to comprehend. You never know.

But the about me section says it is most likely not an elaborate gag.

I am a computer programmer who has lived mostly in or near New York City. The part of the world that has most shaped my view of it is Uptown Manhattan. Although I tend to think of myself more individually, I am in fact part of the wave of middle-class West Indians who left the city in the 1990s to bring up their children. I have two sons, ages 12 and 14 (as of 2010). After 15 years of marriage I left my wife, Rebecca, on March 1st 2009. I took our two sons. She was growing increasingly violent.

At university I studied computers and ancient Greek. Computers showed me how to make a living, the Greeks showed me how to live. People told me studying ancient Greek was a waste of time, but I learned far more about life and the world from the Greeks than from anything in computers.

In my twenties I was a Marxist, a materialist: If God exists, he does not matter to us. The universe is just matter in motion. In my circles in New York, Christianity was something for old women who did not know much about the world.

Then I got married, had children, settled down. Before I got married I had promised Rebecca that I would read the whole Bible. I did, cover to cover. As a materialist Marxist, no less. I found out it was not the pious fable I had always assumed it was. And so in time I became a Catholic.

West Indian, of course, means black from the Caribbean. They are not typically obsessed with their race, but the better educated are just as solipsistic as American blacks. Looking at the guy’s posts shows me he has a near pathological obsession with his skin. John Derbyshire has written a lot about this phenomenon. He thinks it is an American thing, but it is a worldwide phenomenon. The post-colonial African leaders were educated in the West and brought back with them an obsession with their race.

In a recent radio transmission, Derb said:

For many American blacks, especially elite blacks like the Obamas, nothing exists outside their own blackness. Their blackness is endlessly interesting, endlessly fascinating to them. They can never get enough of thinking about it, talking about it, reading and writing about it.

If they write a book, it’s about their blackness: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, for example. If they write a college paper, it’s about their blackness: Mrs Obama’s Princeton thesis, for example, the seven words of whose title contain the word “black” twice. If they read a book, it’s about blackness. I’ve spent many, many hours riding the New York subway. Sitting next to a black person who’s reading a book, I take a peek: two times out of three it’s some black author writing about blackness.

Black black blackety-blackety-black. It fills their consciousness and absorbs their attention. What on earth must it be like to so trapped like that, such a prisoner of your own skin? I can’t imagine. I guess, just as the T-shirt slogan says: It’s a black thing; I wouldn’t understand.

It really is a strange thing. John is mostly right to isolate it as a feature of elite blacks, but you see some of it at the lower levels as well. My own sense is it is a part of the racial solidarity that is so strong with blacks. If you are living a middle-class life as a black person, the only way to keep it black is to talk non-stop about being black. It is an overcompensation to remain loyal to the blood, without walking around with your pants down, playing with yourself like they do in the hood.

It is not just a superficial affectation. The latest post on that blog referenced above is a good example of the studied obsessiveness with being black. If you scan through a course list of an Africa-American studies program, you see the same thing. There’s some history and culture course, but the meat of it critical race theory and its variants. CRT is the theory that a super-secret cabal of pale penis people rig everything to keep the black man down. That sounds insane, but I’m being kind. Here’s the official definition:

“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”

I’ve written a lot about the need for blacks to drop the racial solidarity as a way to move into the mainstream of American life. That’s why the people in the race rackets are so obsessed with keeping everyone on the reservation. It’s a self-ghettoization that is self-perpetuating, therefore I see no way out of it. Perhaps it becomes so poisonous it just collapses on its own. Maybe when all the old race hustlers from the civil rights era drop dead, the funk will lift. When you have a distinct minority that defines itself by its obsession with being a distinct minority, there’s no reason to think they ever pull out of that spiral.

Now that weed is legal, the next great cause of libertarians is something equally pointless. That is prison reform. Rand Paul has been banging the drum for a year now. He is motivated, in part, by political concerns. He wants to inoculate himself against charges of racism so teaming up with a famous black on prison reform is his avenue. I guess he thinks that because blacks dominate the prison scene, this will appeal to blacks. I’m thinking Rand does not know much about liberals or blacks.

The rest of the libertarian cult has been jumping on board as well. The other day Kevin Williamson had a piece up on it. He was basing his article on the NYTimes article singing the blues about the state of New York prisons. I imagine they just went into the archive and fished out some articles from the 60’s and 70’s. Since the beginning, radical politics has been about letting the criminals wreak havoc on society.

Libertarians are always looking for ways to make nice to the Left. It used to be free weed and complaints about the Christians. That was how you could reject Progressivism, without getting in trouble with the Cult. Now that weed is legal and many Republicans are declaring themselves libertarians, the Randians need a new bed to hide under. They seem to have landed on prison reform. Like drug legalization, it appeals to liberals, who fashion themselves as populist, and it is entirely meaningless in the great debates of our age.

That last bit is vital to libertarians. Taking on topics like homosexual marriage, a proxy for cultural dominion, will put you at odds with the Cult. Pushing for the end of public sector unions could ruin your life. Tackling issues that have no practical impact on Americans is a safe way to stand apart from the Left and the Right.

When it comes to prison reform, you’ll note that libertarians are mostly offering up warmed over ideas from the 60’s. The resulting mayhem brought about the end of the New Left in an orgy of violence. From Rand’s bill:

The REDEEM Act proposal would encourage states to raise the age of criminal responsibly to 18 years of age; expunge or seal the records of juveniles who commit non-violent crimes before they turn 15; place limits on the solitary confinement of most juveniles; and establish a system to allow eligible nonviolent criminals to petition a court to ask that their criminal records be sealed. Sealing the records would keep them out of FBI background checks requested by employers and likely make it easier for those former offenders to secure a job.

A massive amount of crime in the ghetto is committed by teenagers. My guess is Rand simply has no idea what happens in the ghetto so this sounds reasonable to him. Like all libertarians, he probably suffers from the belief that all people, regardless of race, will flourish if left to their own devices. Take away the game keepers from the black ghetto and you get Detroit, but you have to live here to know that, I guess.

That may be what’s at work here. Kevin’s piece is mostly a rehashing of the Times article with some complaints about government bureaucrats. He takes it on faith that the reporting is accurate, despite the long history of fabrication by the New York Times. The state abusing innocent citizens is considered the highest crime imaginable by libertarians, so that’s probably what got his attention. Even so, it is a safe topic on which to be outraged, which is what makes it attractive to libertarians in general.

As I pointed out in the comments, the main reason our prisons are so horrible is they are full of criminals. Fill up our prisons with cub scouts and nuns and they will not be so bad. Fill your state legislature with members of the local street gang and see what happens. Our jails are full of very bad people. Most of them will keep committing crimes until they are dead or too feeble.

The sorts of people attracted to daycare work are not the same type attracted to prison work. There’s a reason Mary Poppins was not the chief executioner of the state. Warehousing evil, violent men is dangerous work. It will attract a fair number of sociopaths and sadists. That means prison abuse will always be a part of prisons. As is true in all human endeavors, there are trade-offs. In this case, we put up with some abuse in order to keep the streets safe.

I also pointed out in the comments that the reforms that would make prisons less chaotic and dangerous are simply not permitted. Prisons should be segregated by race and sentence. Putting blacks and whites in the same cage is insane. Putting violent lifers in the same cage as common thieves and drug dealers on short sentences is equally nuts. But, the Cult will never permit such segregation so we are left with human warehouses.

Similarly, the people working in prisons should be segregated by race and sex. Frankly, it may not make any sense to have black prison staff, given that most of the prisoners are black. Too many guards are from the same neighborhoods as the prisoners. Maybe geographic segregation would solve the problem. Again, there’s no way the Cult would permit this sort of reform as they want the mayhem that comes from guards working as go-betweens for the prison gangs.

Having women guard male convicts is probably the craziest thing a society can do. This story from Baltimore is fairly typical. Women and men are different as a matter of biology, evolution, culture and psychology. Men guarding women or women guarding men will have predictably bad results. There should be no women permitted in male prisons and no men at women’s prisons. But, we know that will never be permitted.

There are other reforms that would make out prisons vastly more humane and peaceful. The Cult running our society simply refuses to do them. The reason is the people running the Cult of Modern Liberalism would prefer to fling open the prison doors and send the criminals out to feast on the hated core of society – the white middle-class. Libertarian interest in prison reform is just another way to avoid taking part in the culture war.

Here is the late great Tony Snow’s legendary column on Kwanzaa.

BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa Web site — as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site — the celebration was designed to foster “conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans” and provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.”

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.”

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “G-d Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you’ll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” that “this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope …”

Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh.”

His book concludes: “I have been here, and I have seen — and frankly, I want no part of it. …. By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today — my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires — derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact.”

Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday — Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices — “cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility” — that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.

Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: “The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity.”

But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas — and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

A Howard University football player celebrated Christmas by getting killed in a  botched home invasion. For those unfamiliar with Howard, it is a black college in Washington DC. TN Coates flunked out of Howard. It’s probably the most politically connected black college on earth. That’s why it has an endowment of half a billion. It’s also why it is counted as one of the Black Ivies.

A former coach and family friend of the Howard Bison running back who was one of two suspects fatally shot during an attempted robbery in Texas says Terrence Neal Tusan was a “good kid” and student.

Tusan, 22, was killed on Sunday at a Denton, Texas, apartment complex. Denton police say five people were involved in some sort of altercation during the home-invasion robbery.

“He was a good kid,” Clarence Nevels, a former coach and mentor to Tusan, told the Denton Record-Chronicle. “He had good grades and was just down at AT&T Stadium for Thanksgiving Day Madness Youth Football speaking to students about believing in themselves.”

Tusan, who was at home on holiday break from the Washington D.C., school, was killed along with 18-year-old Jakobi Dmon Gipson.

Police say three men forced their way into an apartment and gunfire broke out, leaving two suspects dead and two residents wounded. The third suspect fled and reportedly remains at large.

Nevels, who said he knew Tusan for 15 years, told the Denton newspaper that Tusan didn’t have a criminal history and wasn’t known to be associated with drugs.

“You have to wonder, what would be the purpose to throw his life away?” Nevels said, according to the Record-Chronicle’s report.

Tusan, a junior for Howard, had 331 rushing yards with two touchdowns this season as a backup running back, including a 70-yard TD in a 38-25 loss to Rutgers.

Police recovered two guns, one belonging to a victim and another belonging to a suspect. Police haven’t specified who opened fire.

“Terrence was the only child [his mother, Donna Tusan] had left, and now he is gone, too,” said Nevels, who the newspaper reported was speaking on behalf of the Tusan family. “We just want to ask anyone looking into this incident to investigate further.”

It’s not much of a mystery, of course. Terrence and Jakobi decided to rob someone, probably over drugs or a lack of respect. A gun fright erupted and the result was inevitable. Young black males commit an enormous amount of crime and this is fairly typical of what happens in the ghetto. The technique of bursting into a home and shooting up the place is popular for reasons no one bothers to explore. It does seem to be a more popular murder technique with blacks than other races.

What is a mystery as well is why black males commit so much crime. This story is a familiar one. A young man seems to have some promise so adults like coaches and teachers take a special interest in him, hoping he can be an exception. Everything goes well until he suddenly decides to rob a liquor store or murder a drug dealer. It’s not like the kid started to hang with a bad crowd or start taking drugs. It just all goes wrong all of a sudden.

The explanation for this that jumps out to me is the extreme racial solidarity in black America. In white America, keeping the good kids away from the bad kids is the focus of everyone. Even back in the paleolithic when I was coming along adults had no trouble culling the defects from the herd. Somewhere around puberty, the stupid and uncontrollable ended up in “special” classes, away from the rest of us. That is not permitted in black culture.

The result is Terrance gets to hang with Jakobi as an equal, but they are not equals. Jakobi, I’m guessing, is high status in the hood. His ghetto name is what I’m going on here. In the white world, Dakota is not allowed anywhere near Dwayne and that was the case from about the fifth grade. By the time Dakota is at college, Dwayne is long gone. In black America. Terrence is never allowed out of the hood. He has to “keeps it real.” Otherwise, he runs the risk of being a “Tom” or acting white.

Until blacks drop the racial solidarity, this story will be a common one.

I’ve written a lot about the religious aspects 0f modern liberalism. The idea is not my creation. Rousseau wrote about Civil Religion in the Social Contract. His was a compromise between a religion of the state, the Catholic religion, with which he was most familiar, and Christianity in general. Later writers picked up on this theme. HG Wells pitched socialism as a universal religion. American Progressives in the early 20th century argued for a social gospel that was a fusion of Continental socialism and American Protestantism.

This concept was fairly well known and understood amongst leftist writers and thinkers into the 20th century, then it sort of disappeared. Talk to a modern liberal today and they will think you’re nuts if you compare their thing with religion. This is especially true of economists and fake nerds. They have it in their heads that their thing is a model of dispassionate logic, the very opposite of religion. That post the other day where I called Neil deGrasse Tyson a circus clown is a good example. To the people worshiping Tyson, religion is the opposite of science. In their binary world, the former is evil and the latter is good, Satan versus God.

Back in 2000 when Al Gore wandered off to Mt. Sinai to get the good word on climate change, I pointed out to the amazing number of new converts in my peer group that Al Gore was falling back on his religious training. He was playing the role of Old Testament prophet. It was pretty obvious that he was having a breakdown during the campaign. His bizarre behavior in the debates was later explained by his wife as him cracking under the pressure. She went onto to say that losing the election to Bush sent Gore into a tailspin and she thought he was having a breakdown. Instead, he came back as a convert to a new religion that looked a lot like the Old Testament.

Anyway, there’s a long piece in The Weekly Standard from a month back that comes at modern liberalism from the religious angle. I’m behind on my magazine reading so I’m just getting around to it. The fact that no one on the Right in the chattering classes has mentioned it says a lot, I think, about the general dimness of modern conservative movement. It’s well worth reading. The writer comes at it from a slightly different angle than I do, but it is a good take. Bottom, despite being a Catholic, really gets the messianic quality of 19th century American Protestantism.

I would quarrel with him on the apocalyptic section of his piece. I’m not so sure the Zero Hedge crowd is preaching doom because they think the gods are angry. They simply think they are right about the current economic arrangements.  Similarly, the preppers and doomsday types building bunkers in the woods have always been with us. They think the fragile nature of society will inevitably lead to collapse. That and many of them are just nuts. They are not motivated by religiosity. The various end of times fads on the left, however, are a part of their over all religious impulse.

The lack of interest by the professional Right in this way of looking at the American Left has always puzzled me. Reagan, having gone head to head with commies in Hollywood, knew they operated with a religious zeal. He was a big fan of Eric Hoffer, from whom I got my understanding of the Left. Reagan is practically worshiped by the professional Right, yet this part of Reagan’s thinking is never mentioned. That Bottom article should be the sort of thing to get the chattering skulls on the Right going as it is easily quotable. But, they skip past it.

There’s a reason for it, but I don’t know it.