[subscribe2]One of my hobby horse items is the gap between official dogma and observable reality. It exists in every society. The degree is what I find interesting. My instinct is to think that the bigger the gap the closer to collapse, but that may not be true. The Romans held all sorts or weird ideas about the natural world, but that did not inhibit them from conquering the Mediterranean. The Incas had some really weird ideas and they did pretty well until reality came crashing in on them in the form of the Conquistadors.

Maybe there’s a tipping point somewhere. Once the gap between fantasy and reality exceeds a certain size, everything falls to shit. Within the tolerance, the society can stagger along at worst and prosper when the gaps are small. I’m not going to claim I have thought it through that carefully. It is more of a hunch than anything else. As we see with the Russians, practical magic is always the thing holding it all together. Since Marxist-Leninism has fallen in disrepute, they have picked up on Eurasianism again as an organizing mythology.

That brings me to some stories in the science sections lately. This one on genetics and the “gay gene” is interesting.

The Left loves to tell the Right that it’s anti-science, pointing (not without reason) to the correlation between conservative beliefs and a failure to come to terms with the scientific facts of evolution and human-caused climate change. But there’s a subtler tendency on the Left; a fear of research into human nature, in case the findings are in some way politically uncomfortable.

Let’s put aside the oogily-boogily of climate change and just look at evolution. According to this story, half of Americans think God created man as is and 32% think God guided evolution, in the Intelligent Design sort of way. Just 15% accept the official version as stated by evolutionary biology. The rest of the article is a sloppy use of statistics. (Why is it people cannot understand the difference between correlation and causation?) What’s certainly true is religious people are both more conservative (as defined by the CML) and less inclined to accept evolution.

That leaves plenty of room for members of the CML to reject science and evolution. The Telegraph article does a good job showing how the Left reacts like a vampire to garlic when the topic of the gay gene is raised.

Steven Pinker wrote at length about this in The Blank Slate – about a politically correct fear that, if we found genetic differences in abilities between sexes or races, it would undermine efforts to establish political equality between those sexes and races. Two pieces in the last few days have expressed similar fears about research into a possible genetic basis for human sexuality.

“I cannot think of a single positive application for such research, other than the generic claim that it will help us understand better,” says The Guardian’s Alex Andreou, adding that in the context of  our failure so far to cure cancer and dementia “that a single cent of medical research should be devoted to explaining whom I choose to share my bed with is utterly obscene”.

Nick Cohen, in The Observer, claims that any such finding would be a gift to homophobes: “If you ‘biologise’ all aspects of human life, you have no right to be shocked if your opponents propose ‘cures’.”

The “what good will this research do?” trope is well-worn, and can be discounted easily enough. The history of science is littered with examples of unexpected, serendipitous findings that the researchers didn’t expect; the story of how the Big Bang was mistaken for pigeon poo is my favourite, but there are thousands, and scientists have to trot them out most years in defence of funding for pure research.

Nick’s suggestion, though – that a discovery that there’s a genetic component to human sexuality would be a gift to homophobic bigots – is on the surface more plausible, and needs to be addressed. He says (and Andreou agrees) that if there’s a “gay gene”, then people could try to find a “gay cure”, or even abort foetuses with that gene. He thinks that any “reductionist” approach to human sexuality would be “pseudoscience”.

If the choice is between science and their religion, they choose the religion and they will have no trouble burning down the offending lab. As long as science supports the tenets of the CML, the CML loves science. That’s not much different than the religious trying to use archeology to prove the Bible. ID’er do this regularly.

The gap between reality and official mythology in this case is pretty broad. The myth says the progressive faith is based in science while the non-believers are worshiping their sky god and attacking science. Reality tells a different tale. Science quickly becomes the enemy when it contradicts the one true faith. You can see it here in this story about the climate change nuts demanding the banishment of Charles Krauthammer.

Heating up: Climate change advocates try to silence Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer says it right up front in his Washington Post column: “I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.”

He does, however, challenge the notion that the science on climate change is settled and says those who insist otherwise are engaged in “a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate.”

How ironic, then, that some environmental activists launched a petition urging the Post not to publish Krauthammer’s column on Friday.

Their response to opinions they disagree with is to suppress the speech.

Brad Johnson (@ClimateBrad), the editor of HillHeat.com and a former Think Progress staffer, boasted on Twitter that 110,000 people had urged the newspaper “to stop publishing climate lies” like the Krauthammer piece.

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[subscribe2]Nothing lasts forever. When it comes to human societies, they have peaks, valleys and eventually go away. The West has had a pretty good run, starting in the 15th century and dominating the world until now. The US has had a great run the last fifty years or so. Even Rome did not have the global influence we see with the USA. Like Rome, American culture is altering the cultures of the world. How much of a lasting influence it has is up for debate. What is not up for debate is that America and American influence is in decline. Cheerleaders for global fascism argue the West is in decline and the future belongs to China, India, Brazil, Russia et al.

I’m skeptical of that last assertion, but decline does seem to be the right bet for America. Here’s an interesting bit of math on the state of the country.

In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3.

In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.

By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.

There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.

Today in a nation of 317 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers so that it will be a long time, if ever, before they pay back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out.

It seems to me the math is not terribly hard. According to people who measure these things, the United States generates $50,000 of income per person. If we stopped all the nonsense with the tax code and had all earnings of all types per year on W2’s, the sum of those divided by the population is roughly $50K per year. That ties out to GDP close enough for economics. Experience says the American economy can tolerate about 25% of tax at the federal level before bad things start happening. That’s $3.7 Trillion in spending that the tax base can support. Once you exceed that you have to borrow and that creates trouble in future years.

Liberals and libertarians both act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the “wealthy elderly” or give them less. The crisis is born of demographics. It can’t be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven’t been the problem in some time.

It’s the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.

The United States however takes in a million immigrants a year. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and never learned to speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. Twenty-five percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Desiline Victor, don’t even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.

15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.

Decades ago, Milton Friedman noted that you can have a welfare state or immigration, but not both. Cities and states tested this in the last fifty years by offering generous welfare benefits. What they found is they became welfare magnates. America is now the premiere welfare magnate in the world. If you are a poor person in Guatemala, getting to America is your only goal. Globalization has now made it so the smart fraction can get rich in their home country so we get the left side of the bell curve, despite what that traitorous dirt bag Mark Zuckerberg says.

The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract “full value” from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.

The “modern” system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.

And yet we have all three.

In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately “modern” field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn’t actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.

John and Julia began marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.

In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.

Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.

Children raised on welfare are far more likely to end up on welfare than the children of working families.

Fertility rates fall sharply above the $50,000 income line and with a graduate degree; that has ominous implications in a country whose socio-economic mobility rates continue to fall.

Progressive activists still talk as if we can afford any level of social service expenditures if we raise taxes on the rich, but workers can’t be created by raising taxes. Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own social welfare spending completely unsustainable.

By 2031, nearly a century after the Social Security Act, an estimated 75 million baby boomers will have retired. Aside from the demographic disparity in worker ages is a subtler disparity in worker productivity and independence as senior citizens are left chasing social spending dollars that are increasingly going to a younger population. ObamaCare with its Medicare Advantage cuts was a bellwether of the shift in health care spending from seniors to the welfare population.

Increasing welfare is only a form of Death Panel economic triage that doesn’t compensate for the lack of productive workers. It’s easy to model Obamerica as Detroit, a country with a huge indigent welfare population and a small wealthy tax base. The model doesn’t work in Detroit and it’s flailing in New York, California and every city and state where it’s been tried.

After a century of misery, the left still hasn’t learned that there is no substitute for the middle class. It’s not just running out of money, it’s running out of people.

The welfare state has no future. It is only a question of what terms it will implode on and what will happen to the social welfare political infrastructure when it does. The violence in Venezuela and the slow death of Detroit give us insights into the coming collapse of the welfare state.

One of the flaws in the math I posted above is that income is not distributed equally. Half of the population is made up of children. We have 150 million adults, give or take. Some portion is too old to work, 10-15 percent, and some are broken in some physical or mental way. We know that half the work force is not working. We also know that most people are not making much more than $50K. That means the bulk of earnings are in the hands of a tiny minority. The super rich don’t pay taxes. This has been true since the kingdom of Ur. It is why the Reason Magazine guys noted that there seems to be a hard cap of about 19% on tax receipts.

Economists, who have been wrong about every prediction they have made since Keynes first published, argue that the gaps can be bridged with credit creation from central banks and unlimited borrowing. This is being tested now. Obama has been borrowing and spending like you would expect from his kind. Debt is piling up at record rates to record levels. The fact that we have not had an Argentine collapse is proof it will never happen, according to the profession that is never right.

I’m sure everything will work out just fine.

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This morning I heard on the wireless that Arizona is about to start murdering homosexuals. I was a little skeptical so I went to the Interwebs to see what was really happening. It turns out they are about to pass an anti-slavery statute. The law would allow people to associate freely with whoever they choose, including the freedom to work for who they like. Slavery is not, after all, uncompensated work. Slaves in the South were well paid by the standards of the day. They were given free housing, free clothes, ample food and the best medicine available at the time. The hired hands got a meager salary. Slaves were more valuable to the plantation owner than hired hands so he invested more in them.

No, the evil of slavery is that one is compelled to work for another. That’s slavery. Chaining your lawyer to his desk, forcing him to do legal work, would be fun, but it would also be immoral. Freedom has a few prerequisites. One is freedom of association, including commerce. Once the state has the right to force one person to do business with another, the relationship is no longer citizen-government. It is ruler and subject. When the CML bought the vote of John Roberts, he had to find a way around this and thus called the mandate a tax.

What we see here is the truth about the CML. It is a totalitarian faith. The sons of Rue Saint-Jacques have always fashioned their reading of Rousseau as the only permissible one. Therefore, any deviation or contradiction is met with violence.  Now that the CML has deified homosexuals, failure to leave the appropriate sacrifice at the shrine of Pothos is met with ululating hordes from the CML. They will take the property from the heretic and if he does not repent, throw him in prison. In other words, you have no freedom of association that is not granted by the state.

Here’s hoping the people of Arizona are successful in passing their anti-slavery act and perhaps we can start rolling back this odious custom.

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I wonder sometimes if I’m more read than I realize. I have posted on a fair number of sites over the years, so who knows? One of my hobbyhorse issues is the Church of Whole Foods. The hallmark of Baby Boomer marketing in the late empire is turning products into religions. Steve Jobs, the quintessential boomer in many ways, made owning an Apple product s sign of the elect. His revival shows were nothing more than his conformation that the assembled were chosen from eternity to be with the oneness of Apple. There’s a reason why their mobile products sold well, while their back office stuff was a dud. The whole point of being a Mac-Snob was to show the world you were chosen.

That’s what makes this article surprising to me. The Daily Beast reader is the poseur you see at Whole Foods buying sustainably grown organic bananas for fifty bucks a pound. (ironically, sustainably means a billion deaths from starvation if enforced everywhere) Maybe that’s why the author largely misses the religious angle and instead stumbles around the science-y stuff.

If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.

But you don’t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.

I’m talking, of course, about Whole Foods Market. From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a religious, conservative phenomenon—and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don’t.

My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University. Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it’s visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.

Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracle and Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.

You can buy chocolate with “a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,” and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” There’s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are “made in a kitchen—not in a lab,” and tea designed to heal the human heart.

Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics—live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. “This is bullshit,” she said, and went off to buy some vegetables. Later, while purchasing a bag of chickpeas, I browsed among the magazine racks. There was Paleo Living, and, not far away, the latest issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Pseudoscience bubbles over into anti-science. A sample headline: “Stay sharp till the end: the secret cause of Alzheimer’s.” A sample opening sentence: “We like to think that medicine works.”

I’ll cut to the chase. Organic food is a boondoggle. I’ve worked with a few food companies in my life. They let people think they are not using fertilizers and chemicals, but they are using all that stuff. It is just different stuff than is used on the other crops, often grown right next to the organic stuff. Once it hits the system, no one really knows what is and what is not organic. It gets mixed up all the time. The reason is their are no standards and there is no real difference between an organic banana and regular banana. Retailers tend to put the best looking stuff in the organic rack anyway because it fools the customers into paying extra.

But, the customers are not there to get good food. They are there for salvation. The food is just a part of the sacrament. Whole Foods is not selling produce, they are selling grace. Everything about the operation is pure, hard hearted capitalism, but it is aimed at rich people who need to feel like they have purpose beyond making money. In the 60’s, New Age gurus made money off of guilty rich people peddling grace though made up eastern religions. Today, corporations like Apple and Whole Foods are doing the same thing on an industrial scale.

The food cults are one thing, but the fake medicine side of this is where you really see the old fashioned religion. If you refuse medical treatment because you believe in God or you believe in dandelion tea or you believe in leprechauns, what’s the difference? In both cases you’re relying on magic. Dierdre Imus shrieking about  vaccinations is well past anything the Catholic Church conjured, as far as the crazy scale. That’s the thing with all of these sub-cults of the CML, they like to dress up their magic with scientific jargon, or at least jargon that sounds like science, so they can believe it is science and not religion. Who says you can’t lie to yourself?

I got a good dose of the food cults some time back at a party. no matter what came out of the kitchen, the guests asked a dozen questions about the contents. Some were afraid of chemicals. Others were afraid of gluten. Some were afraid of meat. An anthropologist seeing this in the jungle would get rich publishing the work. The fact that I have regularly lied to gluten freaks about the contents proves it is all in their head.

But, the religion business has always been big business.

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I can’t say I’ve spent more than a few minutes watching Piers Morgan. Whenever I’ve seen his show it was on-line after someone sent me a link to a clip of the ridiculous wanker making an ass of himself. The last time I’ve seen CNN was at the airport and that’s the only time I see it. The Interwebs brings news that they have finally pulled the plug on the Piers Morgan.

There have been times when the CNN host Piers Morgan didn’t seem to like America very much — and American audiences have been more than willing to return the favor. Three years after taking over for Larry King, Mr. Morgan has seen the ratings for “Piers Morgan Live” hit some new lows, drawing a fraction of viewers compared with competitors at Fox News and MSNBC.

It’s been an unhappy collision between a British television personality who refuses to assimilate — the only football he cares about is round and his lectures on guns were rife with contempt — and a CNN audience that is intrinsically provincial. After all, the people who tune into a cable news network are, by their nature, deeply interested in America.

CNN’s president, Jeffrey Zucker, has other problems, but none bigger than Mr. Morgan and his plum 9 p.m. time slot. Mr. Morgan said last week that he and Mr. Zucker had been talking about the show’s failure to connect and had decided to pull the plug, probably in March.

Crossing an ocean for a replacement for Larry King, who had ratings problems of his own near the end, was probably not a great idea to begin with. For a cable news station like CNN, major stories are like oxygen. When something important or scary happens in America, many of us have an immediate reflex to turn on CNN. When I find Mr. Morgan telling me what it all means, I have a similar reflex to dismiss what he is saying. It is difficult for him to speak credibly on significant American events because, after all, he just got here.

I received a return call from Mr. Morgan and was prepared for an endless argument over my assumptions. Not so. His show, he conceded, was not performing as he had hoped and was nearing its end.

“It’s been a painful period and lately we have taken a bath in the ratings,” he said, adding that although there had been times when the show connected in terms of audience, slow news days were problematic.

The implication and apparent sadness on the Left is that Americans are just too provincial for an urban sophisticate like Piers. Never mind that he was no such thing. It was all an act. He is a proletarian striver with a middling education and even less of an IQ.  In the UK he worked for tabloids. Here he acted like a boorish twit, sneering at people and making outrageous claims. For some reason, it is news to the people at CNN that viewers don’t like to be talked down to by a nitwit. Like everything else about these people, they can never tell the difference between form and function.

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There’s nothing more ridiculous than the unguarded mutterings of Hollywood stars. We like to think these people get loopy after years of fame, fortune, drugs and alcohol. That’s not the case. Almost all of them were nuts long before they got famous or even got into the business. Maybe it takes a willingness to be a complete nut in public to be a good actor or performer. I don’t know. I just know that when they get an open mic and no handlers to stop them, they say outlandishly nutty things. The best in recent years has been Alec Baldwin. The guy is what the Brits used to call mad.

I flew to Hawaii recently to shoot a film, fresh on the heels of being labeled a homophobic bigot by Andrew Sullivan, Anderson Cooper, and others in the Gay Department of Justice. I wanted to speak with a gay-rights group that I had researched and admired, so I called its local Honolulu branch.

The office number turned out to be some guy’s cell phone. I left him a message—I said, “I’m from out of town, I’m visiting Hawaii on business, I’d like to  get some information on your group.” After two or three more calls, he answered the phone. I said, “Yeah, I’m the guy that called about your organization.” And he said, somewhat impatiently, “Okay, well, what did you want?” I said, “Well, let me put it to you this way, Nick. Your name is Nick? Nick, let me begin by asking you a question. Who would you say, by your estimation, is the most homophobic member of the entertainment industry currently in the media?” And he paused for a long count of four and said, “Um … Alec Baldwin?”

And I said, “Ding, ding, ding, ding! Bingo, Nick, bingo! That’s who you’re talking to.”

He said, “C’mon!”

I said, “Nick, I want to come in and talk.”

I met with Nick and others from two LGBT organizations. We talked for a while about the torment of the LGBT life many of them have lived while growing up in traditional Hawaiian families. Macho fathers. Religious mothers. We talked a lot about words and their power, especially in the lives of young people.

One young man, an F-to-M tranny, said, “Are you here to get dry-cleaned, like Brett Ratner?” Meaning I could do some mea culpa, write them a six-figure check, go to a dinner, sob at the table, give a heartfelt speech, beg for forgiveness. I thought to myself: Beg for forgiveness for something I didn’t do?

I said, “No. I don’t want to get dry-cleaned. I don’t want to be decontaminated by you, Karen Silkwood–wise, scrubbed down. I want to learn about what is hurtful speech in your community. I want to participate in some programs about that. Or underwrite one. And then, like you, I just want to be left alone.”

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This article on the Ukraine has an interesting close.

I have argued that, in our time, 1989 supplanted 1789 as the default model of revolution. Rather than progressive radicalization, violence and the guillotine, we look for peaceful mass protest followed by negotiated transition. That model has taken a battering of late, not only in Ukraine but also in the violent fall that followed the Arab Spring. If this fragile deal holds, however, and the fury on the streets can be contained, Europe might again show that we can occasionally learn from history.

Revolution is not merely a change in who holds the keys to the prison. Revolution is a sudden collapse of the old system and the evolution of a new system. The French Revolution was not a failure when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. He may have looked a lot like Louis XVI, but it was not a restoration of the Ancien Régime. It was just another step in France evolving into a post-monarchical state. What’s going on in Ukraine or any of the places references by Ash is just a change in who sits atop the existing order.

Maybe I’m just splitting hairs, but how in the world can you call this new type of revolution anything but a failure when the final product is no different than the previous product? The Velvet Revolution is an exception, but I’m not sure it is a useful analog. What had existed prior to the revolution was imposed from outside. The Czech communist party could not exist with the threat of Russian tanks. No external force propped up the Ancien Régime. No external force was propping up the Egyptian military or even the Ukrainian government. Something lost in all this is the “opposition leader” in jail was more friendly with the Russians than the guy they just ousted.

I think the record of gentle revolutions is rather shabby and the few success stories are poor examples.

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Open borders fanatics have long pointed to Indian (dot not feather) as the ideal immigrant. They come over, attend college, take up jobs in cool companies and start businesses. Russians have become the object of derision by the American media largely because they are intolerant of homosexual propagandizing. Now, India has criminalized homosexuality. The CML can trim around this by playing the brown card, which could trump the pink card, but I’m not sure that flied these days. If the Hindus stick with this and if it results in violence, you can be sure World War G, as Steve Sailer calls it, will open a new front in the east. That means no more importation of these bigots.

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[subscribe2]This column from Jonah Goldberg reminds me of something I’ve been harping about for years.

National Bolshevism must strike some on the left as quite perplexing. After all, Bolshevism and Nazism — like fascism and socialism — are opposites, right?

If you read my book, you’d know I consider this the greatest myth and/or lie of the 20th century (coming in a distant second: the idea that there is a difference between good flan and bad flan).

Funny enough, the Eurasianists are counting on this myth for their propaganda campaign. They insist that the protesters in Kiev are trying to stage a “brown revolution” or fascist coup. In other words the de facto fascists are calling the anti-fascists “fascists.” And apparently lots of folks are falling for it.

Going back to the 1920’s, the use of “fascism” as an epithet was popular with communists. On the continent, the two big branches that grew out of Jacobinism were Marxism and Fascism. All of the other forms of socialism fell away as those two great religions came to dominate Europe in the 20th century. Principally, the difference between the two is cultural, not economic. Both cults agreed on the big economic questions. One would permit private property, but embrace corporatism. The other would abolish private property, but both embraced state directed economics. The difference was cultural. Fascism is national. Marxism is international.

That difference made exporting the faith difficult for fascism and necessary for Marxism. Consequently, the communist movements in America got plenty of ideological and economic support from Mother Russia. Fascist movements enjoyed no such support. They eventually morphed into the Progressive Movement and dropped any association with continental fascism, including the term. Marxist made fascism an epithet and World War II made it a synonym for evil in America. Naturally, the American Left applied it to to their political opponents, claiming they were on the right, just like Hitler.

First, let’s clear some underbrush. The idea that Communism and Nazism are opposites is more of a utilitarian idea than a core conviction for the Left. It is a rationalization that allows the Left to cut around the historical tumor of Nazism and fascism and say, That has nothing to do with us.

But the simple fact is that the hard Left has always endorsed or at least sympathized with national-socialist countries. What do you think Cuba is? It’s nationalistic and it’s socialistic. Venezuela under Chávez and now Maduro is nationalist and socialist. Nicaragua in the 1980s, etc., etc. Read a speech by any socialist dictator and swap out the word “socialize” for “nationalize”: The meaning of the sentences doesn’t change one iota. Nationalized health care is socialized medicine. Even Obama’s weak-tea socialistic rhetoric is usually dolled up in the rhetoric of nationalism, even militaristic nationalism. Let’s all be like SEAL Team Six! Let’s make this a “Sputnik Moment.”

Most of the Left in the U.S. didn’t really hate the German national-socialists until Stalin told them to. That the useful idiots thought Stalin’s command to turn on his one-time Nazi ally was rooted in deep ideological conviction just proves the depths of their idiocy.

After all, it’s not like the Left suddenly turned on Stalin when he embraced nationalism wholeheartedly and talked of fighting the Nazis as part of the “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.” But, hey, maybe I’m missing the deep Marxist themes in the phrase “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.”

It seems to me the better model for Western politics is to place the sons and daughters of the French Revolution in the center. Imagine a closed world full of lunatics at war with one another, surrounded by a wall. Inside we have the dog’s breakfast of socialist movements. Marxism, Maosim, Bolshevism, Progressivism, Fabian Socialism and so forth. These secular religions occupy the same space Christianity occupied for 1,000 years.  Despite being a small number of believers, they exert an out-sized influence over human affairs because they occupy that central place in the culture.

On the other side of the wall lives the undifferentiated other. The eyes in the darkness that haunt the dreams of Leftists worldwide. Putting Steve Sailer and Paul Gottfried in the same bucket is a category error. The only thing they agree on is they are not on the other side of the wall. Putting the Reason Magazine crowd in the same category as the American Spectator crowd misses what’s important about each group. It papers over enormous differences between the two. I may agree with a lot of what libertarians have to say about public policy, but I am not a libertarian.

A map like this one is a good starting point for a model of western political thought. Instead of HBD at the center, the CML is in the center. Everything else is position based on its reaction to and distance from the center. Maybe that’s a good project for this week.

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For as long as I’ve been alive, women have been haranguing us with complaints about not being treated the same as men. As is always the case with the sub-cults of the CML, feminism moved to the money making racket stage a long time ago. Wretched nags of the Title IX type still make money pestering universities about discrimination against women, despite the fact universities actively discriminate against males. Feminism has always been irrational oogily-boogily, but it is also a big lie. Women do not want equality. They like the unequal relationship just the way it is. Why not? They get the benefits, but avoid many of the costs. Here’s a good example of what I mean.

Four days after Ray Rice was charged with simple assault-domestic violence against his fiancee, a security video from Revel Casino in Atlantic City, N.J. emerged showing Rice dragging his unconscious fiancee from an elevator.

Apparently that’s not the only video police have though. According to MMQB.com’s Robert Klemko, authorities also have a video that shows Rice knocking out Janay Palmer, his fiancee. However, that video hasn’t been released to the public yet.

Palmer has also been charged with simple assault-domestic violence, but it’s not clear if video exists of her transgression. In the court summons released on Wednesday, Palmer is accused of attempting to ’cause bodily injury’ to Rice by ‘striking him with her hand.’

In Rice’s court summons, he’s accused of ‘striking [Palmer] with his hand’ and ‘rendering her unconscious.’

Despite the possible existence of a second video, Ravens coach John Harbaugh said at the NFL combine on Friday that cutting Rice was unlikely. Specifically, Harbaugh was asked if there was a scenario where he could see Baltimore cutting ties with Rice.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Harbaugh said. “I haven’t seen anything that would remotely make me think that. Ray and I are real close. We have been for a long time, so it’s an easy conversation to have.”

If a video of Rice knocking Palmer out does exist, it’s not clear if Harbaugh has seen it or even knows about it. However, after talking to Rice, Harbaugh does think Rice and Palmer can work things out.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s pretend there was video showing the woman decking the football player, knocking him out in the elevator. If you connect at the right spot on the chin, even a girl can knockout a man. The reaction would not be the mock outrage we see all over the press. Guys on TV would not be forced to look down as angry broads lectured them about “domestic violence” and the plight of women. Instead, they would be laughing it up with the women. The feminists would be shouting “you go girl!” and the men would be snickering at the big bad football player. The coach would not be fielding questions about cutting the player. Instead he too would be yucking it up with reporters about how his player was beat up by a girl.

If feminists mean what they say, they should be out defending this poor football player who was forced to defend himself against an aggressive proud feminist woman.

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