Category Archives: Culture

Welcome to the Madhouse

Posted on by

The worst despotism is an arbitrary one. If you find yourself living under a set of rules with which you disagree, you can adapt. Jews living in countries that banned Jews from public office, for instance, adapted and carved out happy. Blacks in the American South did not like Jim Crow, but they could live with it. The fact that literacy rates, crime rates and illegitimacy rates were much better for blacks under Jim Crow speaks to the toughness of humans. As long as the rules are fixed and known, people can and will adapt to those rules, not matter how much they hate them.

Where things get ugly is when the rules are unknown and variable. Imagine driving on a highway where the speed limit is never posted and the cops get to set the limit according to their whim. Word would quickly get out and no one would drive that road for fear of being victims of the police.  It is this arbitrariness that makes for madhouse societies. Anyway, this comes to mind reading stories like this one.

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that young adult illegal immigrants whom President Obama has given tentative permission to be in the country — so-called “dreamers” — are also entitled to driver’s licenses and ordered Arizona to issue them.

The ruling comes while the government is debating policy about a new wave of illegal immigrant children who are surging across the border in Texas, overwhelming federal authorities’ ability to handle them.

We now live in a land where the President can wave his hand and the people’s laws are invalidated or altered in ways that are contrary to their intent. We live in a land where a Federal court can force a state to issue driver’s licenses to people who are not citizens and not even in the nation legally. In theory, it means the government would have to issue licenses to an invading army.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer blasted the court’s ruling, saying it could end up meaning her state would have to grant driver’s licenses to some of those in the latest wave of illegal immigrants if Mr. Obama finds ways to avoid deporting them too.

But immigrant-rights advocates hailed the decision, saying it is a major step in helping the Dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. as minors by their parents, move toward some sort of normal life in the U.S.

“This is a huge victory for the young immigrants who want nothing more than to make meaningful contributions to communities in their home state of Arizona,” said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

A three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Dreamers — so-named because of pending federal legislation known as the Dream Act — are in the same situation as other illegal immigrants who have applied for legal status and to whom Arizona law grants driver’s licenses while they await a final ruling in their cases.

The judges said to treat the Dreamers differently violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Think about the madness baked into that last sentence. The US Constitution provides the structure of American political institutions. The people of France do not consider it binding on them. They have their own rules and structures. The people of Kenya have their rules. In other words, the US Constitution applies to Americans in America. These lunatic judges have just declared that all humans on earth are now covered by the US Constitution, thus making them Americans.

The 9th Circuit is a well known holding pen for liberal fruitcakes. Sadly, they are no longer outliers. They are the norm. The super structure of the nation is falling apart around us and we are left with the whimsical, arbitrary decisions of these petty despots dressed like goth druids. These people hate us and enjoy rubbing our noses in the fact we no longer are a nation of laws. The contempt for Americans in the words and deeds of these immigration fanatics is stunning.

In a madhouse society, the rulers are perpetually at war with the ruled. That’s where we are today. Elected officials furiously work to discredit the offices they hold in the eyes of the people. The keepers of the law undermine the people’s faith in the law. The law abiding today are criminals tomorrow. There are no fixed points and there are no rules. Nothing is on the level and there’s no grift that is too small. Welcome to the madhouse.

Casual Corruption

Posted on by

One of the interesting things about 18th century America is the way government sold favors to private interests. Ben Franklin got government printing contracts through bribery. It was not considered bribery at the time, but it would be today. Buttering up local officials to grease the skids was just the way things were done. In a land with a tiny amount of government and a tiny number of laws, you’re getting a tiny amount of public corruption. Corruption, like government, does not scale up well.

Today we have vast and complex state apparatus. So vast and complex no one knows the limits. In fact, you break the law every day. It is this vast and complex web of laws that provides cover for the colonizing pod people to rob us blind. The old expression about the devil being in the details means that the more details, the more opportunity for the devil to do his work. Big government is, if nothing else, a vast thicket of details and minutiae. This post at ZeroHedge is a good example.

It was back in April 2013, when the WSJ reported of a peculiar surge in various health insurance stocks that came moments after a report from Height Securities, a Washington-based investment-research firm that ferrets out policy news and analysis for investors, correctly predicted the Obama administration would reverse course on big spending cuts that would have hit health insurers. The note was released about 15 minutes before markets closed on Monday, April 1, leading to the following surge in the biggest Obamacare beneficiaries.

Needless to say, it is quite clear that non-public info was leaked by US legislators to a “expert network” consulting company, which in turn further propagated the information to its own clients, making them profits of up to 8.6% in milliseconds. As the WSJ summarized at the time, “The resulting stock surge is one of the most dramatic examples in recent years of how tips and insights from Washington’s burgeoning political-intelligence business can drive trading on Wall Street, potentially leading to big profits for those in the know.”

It took the SEC 14 months to finally figure out there may have been something illegal with this setup and as the WSJ followed up three weeks ago, “prosecutors are gathering evidence for a grand-jury probe into whether congressional staff helped tip Wall Street traders to a change in health-care policy, an indication the long-running investigation has entered a more serious phase.”

Trading on inside information has become so common in Washington, no one bothers to hide it. It was not always this way. In the olden thymes, officials relied on foreign junkets to cash in on their position. A Congressman would decorate their homes with goods “gifted to him” by foreign potentates. His big fancy house was probably paid for by donors or a special deal made possible by his donors. It was all legal and mostly small potatoes. Compensation in lieu of salary.

Today, public criminals like Harry Reid become millionaires making shady land deals with organized crime. John Kerry went to DC penniless. He is now worth north of $100 million. A lot of it came from marrying two rich widows, but that was levered into a fortune using inside information. With the parasitic financial system, politicians can now grab millions for themselves trading their knowledge of new rules, new investigations and new taxes.

As we see with this story, they think it is their right and privilege. Where have we heard that before?

What is unknown – and perhaps unknowable – is how much of the legislative tsunami is strictly for privateering purposes. Those million word bills are not only packed full of favors; they are packed full of gimmicks the pols can use to grow their portfolios. Since no one reads these things in their entirety, no one knows where to look for the deals tied to specific pols. In fact, the laws are now written by law firms lobbyists working on behalf of wealthy interests like corporations.

The outrageous part of this is not the corruption. Men are not angels. Washington controls trillions of dollars and that will attract the worst sort, determined to skim some for themselves. The outrage is the lack of outrage. In the 18th century you could shrug at Franklin buying off a local official for a printing contract. It was small money and the printing needed to be done. Today’s pols are like highway bandits, robbing for the sake of robbing. Yet, no one seems to care.

Hold the AIDS

Posted on by

This was on American Digest. This is when you see that the people running this country are not of this country. Homosexuals make up about 2% of the population. If BK monopolizes the gay demographic, it is a rounding error on their financials. It’s a rounding error on the store level financial. Pretending that homosexuals are a super-valuable market segment was never meant to be taken seriously. It was always agit-prop intended to justify normalization.

Now, throw in the lunatic population, which makes up a consistent 20% of the population. Lunatics like waving the rainbow flag because they think it offends Christians. Note that Evangelical Christians are 26% of the population. Lunatics are not all enthusiastic for gays. Male lunatics, for the most part, keep their head down and avoid saying anything. The reason is men, even lunatic men, find homosexuality mildly repulsive. Even extreme fanaticism cannot overcome biology.

The point being is that a  few minutes considering the numbers shows that Burger King  is not gaining anything from this. They will most likely piss off a portion of the customer base with this nonsense. Throw in the fact that homosexuals don’t eat fast food and Burger King is known as the McDonalds for black America and you have a recipe for marketing disaster. Blacks and downscale whites loath this rainbow stuff.

The people running Burger King, on the other hand, live in their ruling class echo chamber. In that weird world of pod people, everyone loves homosexuals and thinks their cause is on par with the Civil Rights Movement. You can be sure that the marketing geniuses that came up with this “don’t know anyone who opposes gay marriage.” The reason for that is they are an alien class of people wholly unfamiliar with the people over whom they rule.

As I’m fond of saying, American has been colonized by aliens.

Ramblings on the Unhinged

Posted on by

Bored yesterday I was trolling around looking for something interesting. I saw this posted on NRO by Jonah Goldberg. He was taking the lunatic writer to task for her foaming at the mouth rantings. It is a favorite of both Left and Right to pick out a ranting from the other side and then rant about its alleged shortcomings. Lunatics pretend that deviations from orthodox liberalism are violations of the laws of physics. That allows them to be excessively smug, in addition to condescending.

The sheer volume of really terrible and inaccurate responses to the Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. has been kind of astonishing. Every few hours, a new piece of conservative flotsam washes up and demands to be taken seriously. They all go something like, “This is a victory for religious freedom. You can’t make your boss foot the bill for your choices. Contraception is ‘recreational,’ not medical. Cave man mad grumble sexual intercourse grumble procreation grumble.” It seems that nothing gets the right riled up quite like a victory for corporate personhood and the tantalizing prospect of punishing and humiliating women.

Katie McDonough is listed as “Salon’s politics writer, focusing on gender, sexuality and reproductive justice.” According to her resume, Katie is a 30-something woman from an upper middle-class family. Rather than finding a husband, she has been living off her parents while pretending to be a writer in NYC. She also appears to have developed an unhealthy obsession with her lady parts.

I have nothing to say about her column. It is full of the abracadabra words hive minded lunatics like Ms. McDonough find appealing. Hers is a life full of signaling. Like all herd animals, she is obsessed with the borders between her group and those outside her group, the folks we call normal people. Scanning her writing, I see repetitive chanting, defining the line between her gang and an array of bogeymen she imagines are threatening to seal up her barren uterus.

Anyway, reading along for a bit, I noticed down at the bottom right a little block suggesting other stories on the site I may like. There was this one, written by another womyn, about how she has closed the doors and windows of her life to avoid anything that contradicts the tenets of her politics. Looking into her bio, I discovered she is just another type of spoiled crazy person rich countries have elected to indulge. Her ailments may be real, but her melodramatics are pure theater.

Then I see this story pop up. It is now featured on Drudge, who enjoys showcasing the hard thumping crazies of the Left when it is a slow news cycle. The writer is one of those old pseudo-radicals that grows increasingly deranged as they hit their dotage. He sat out the fun stuff in college like storming Dean Wormer’s office or banging the radical hippy girls. He tried to make up for it by carrying the radical flag from the comfort of his university office, but now is just a nuisance.

Having missed the last revolution, he is forever predicting the next one is around the corner. I recall reading similar rants to this one in the 1980’s, during the Reagan years. Here we were in the midst of a great economic boom and a period of cultural peace and these aging hippies were talking about the brewing revolt. Given the current times, it is just as funny to hear a lefty talk about the coming revolt, given that the Left is full control of the nation. The lack of self-awareness with these people is stunning.

Anyway, I realized I was reading Salon and recalled how it was one of the first webzines. Slate was another, backed by Bill Gates. Salon was emblematic of the late 90’s in that it was a business with no revenues, but a sky high stock price. They were convinced that hits would translate into dollars, which never happened. In the 90’s, it was typical of the Left during the Clinton era. They published boutique liberalism aimed at the sort of people who wrote max checks to the local Democrat.

Gluten Intolerance May Be Completely Fake

Posted on by

I’ve been sent this story a few times by friends who know my thoughts on gluten intolerance.  I never thought it was real. Food allergies are real, but rare. When all of sudden half the population becomes allergic to bread, you should know it is hysterical bullshit. I know exactly one person with celiac disease. I know dozens of people claiming to be gluten intolerant. The fact that all of these people were eating bread with no problem until this fad came along is what the empirically minded call a clue.

That’s according to an academic study that effectively overturned the results of a previous one in 2011, which had served as evidence that non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) is a real condition, Real Clear Science reports.

Peter Gibson, a gastroenterology professor at Monash University in Australia, conducted the original study, but was not satisfied with its results.

So he and a group of researchers carried out a new one, giving 37 people with a declared gluten sensitivity and irritable bowel syndrome four separate diets. Participants were first fed a baseline diet that was low in FODMAPs (fermentable, poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates) for two weeks.

The subjects then were blindly assigned one of three diets for a week: a high-gluten diet, which had 16 grams per day of added gluten; a low-gluten diet, which had two grams of gluten and 14 grams of whey protein per day; and a control diet, which had 16 grams of whey protein isolate per day, according to the study.

Subjects reported worsening gastrointestinal symptoms no matter which diet they consumed. Data from the study suggested a “nocebo” effect, similar to when people feel symptoms from Wi-Fi and wind turbines, Real Clear Science reported.

It should also be noted subjects reported feeling fewer gastrointestinal symptoms after eating the baseline diet, low-FODMAP diet, which includes many foods from which people abstain when taking on a gluten-free diet, such as breads, beer and pasta.

This reminds me of the peanut allergy hoax popular last decade. All of a sudden, 20% of the nation’s youth was allergic to nuts. Basic science said this could not be true, but parents convinced themselves their little snowflake was allergic. Then the kids got to the age where they could pick their own food and magically they were no longer allergic. I knew a woman who swore her kid was allergic until one day he came home munching a peanut candy of some sort.

Of course, all of this is an off-shoot of the victim culture. Everyone is looking for a clever way to prove they are up against it. The greatest displays of public piety are those that involve the suffering of the pious. Instead of nailing themselves to the cross, bourgeois bohemian mothers pretend their otherwise mediocre offspring have an exotic disorder.  That’s run its course, so now, in middle age, those same moms claim cupcakes give them the runs.

 

Now We Have “Ethical Conservatism”

Posted on by

Conservative Inc. and the Republican Party are struggling to come to terms with what the neocons did to the movement and the party, particularly the Bush years. The “new” conservatism was supposed to do all the things Reagan failed to do by appealing to a broad audience on liberal terms. Instead, it turned the GOP into the Democratic Party circa 1975, with endless wars of choice in the Middle East. The latter is a debacle from which the country may never emerge.

Anyway, The American Conservative is featuring a long essay from somepne named Brain Patrick Mitchell. He is some sort of political thinker slash theologian, pushing a new political theory. His “new” contribution to the hyphen party is ethical-conservatism,. which is different from other conservatism because it is ethical. That sounds a lot like the Bush compassionate-conservatism of a decade ago. It actually starts out on an interesting footing

The modern age is an age of anarchy, an era of habitual rebellion against old ways and existing order in the name of liberty, equality, enlightenment, and progress. It began as a rebellion against religious hierarchy, burgeoned into a rebellion against political monarchy, and finally boiled over in a rebellion against social patriarchy, leaving in its wake a new civilization endlessly at war with civilization itself.

Raised to rebel, the modern, anarchistic, progressive personality is always impatient with the world as it is and ever insistent that it change to suit him. Believing himself innocent, he blames others for the suffering he sees, indicting Society, Civilization, the Church, the State, the Establishment, the System, the Corporations, or the Man for crimes against the People and the Planet. Consistent with the age’s Luciferian culture of grievance justifying rebellion, the progressive lives passionately and impulsively as the hero of his own personal revolution, in which anything that stands in his way—that limits his autonomy, inhibits his self-expression, frustrates his ambitions, convicts his conscience, offends his sensibilities, or denies him satisfaction—can be condemned as unfair, unjust, intolerant, and therefore intolerable.

That’s some fine writing and a rare attempt to take an honest look at the people cult running America since the end of World War II. I don’t agree with his analysis, but I don’t think he is too far from the truth. It is rare to see an attempt to understand the Left on its own terms so that’s encouraging, even if it misses the mark.

This is the spirit riling the two competing passions of our age, libertine individualism and envious egalitarianism. Both deny the moral relevance of the objective other to the subjective self. Both insist on the self as the point of origin and reference for all definitions of goodness, truth, and justice, in effect replacing the First Person of the Holy Trinity with the selfish first person—the singular “I” in the case of individualism, the plural “we” in the case of egalitarianism.

This is where this type of analysis falls down the stairs. The writer sets up a false dichotomy and then uses it as a launching pad for his own opinions that he thinks are unique and different from whatever else is kicking around today. It has always struck me as a get out of jail free card. If you can dismiss current reality, you’re free to indulge in whatever you like. Libertarians tend to do this by pretending Left and Right are two sides of the same coin, when they are right there with them.

That said, I’m all in favor of rejecting the left-right model of describing political thought in the modern age. That is nothing more than a tarted up version of the Left’s us-versus-them world view. It is how you end up with Hitler on the Right, alongside Burke and Reagan. Somehow we are to believe that the polar opposites are Hitler on one end and Marx on the other. The truth is that all of these sects are the sons and daughters of the marriage of Rousseau and Hobbes.

The one thing I think he needs to explore more deeply is the Left’s impulse to destroy for the sake of destruction. He gets into it a little, but can’t seem to bring himself to accept that it is destruction for its own sake. The old 1960’s rallying cry of “burn, baby burn!” is instructive. There are no rallying cries from the Left that bring images of anything other than destruction. Whatever Utopian fantasies are at the start of the movement, the end is always about pulling the roof down.

It’s what makes all of these attempt to slap a new coat of paint on the Baby Boomer Conservatism pointless. White Americans are throwing in the towel on their race and culture. People who stop having children are saying it is better to have never been born than to carry on the traditions of their age. You’re not turning the tide with ten point plans and clever tax reform proposals. At least this brand of hyphen philosophy gets a little closer to the truth.

Hobby Lobby & Cults

Posted on by

Way back in the olden thymes I lived near a Hari Kirsihna center. Despite their reputation for extreme weirdness, they were excellent neighbors. You only saw members when they were headed out to annoy people in a public place. That is one of their primary methods of spreading their faith. They make a big fuss in a public area, hoping someone will find it interesting. They really do seek out people who have run out of options, as far as participating in a social group.

Otherwise, they kept to themselves and avoided all contact with neighbors. A key characteristic of cults is the adherent’s “us” versus “them” view of the world. Everyone and everything is either inside or outside the group. In the case of groups like the Krishnas, that results in complete isolation from outsiders. As far as they were concerned, the neighbors did not exist and that was the way they wanted it.

We tend to think of cults as having a charismatic. That leader has some grand vision of the future. Maybe it involves space aliens or God. Maybe he thinks he is God. Of course, the cult of popular imagination always follows the same arc. The leader acquires some followers and it all seems innocent and wonderful. The thing grows as the leader becomes increasingly deranged. At some point he either leads them into mass suicide or into some crazy act that brings the whole thing down.

As we see with the Krishnas and Scientology, obliteration is not the outcome in all cases or even most cases. The guy who started the Hari Krishnas has been dead for years and his movement keeps going. Scientology thrived after the death of L. Ron Hubbard. As far as I know, neither is plotting mass suicide or trying to launch a revolution.

The famous UFO cult, The Seekers, fell apart, reformed a few times until Dorothy Martin died. The point being that cults and religious movements don’t always end in obliteration. In fact, most either stabilize into a viable ongoing concern or they fall apart and the followers find a new movement. Those that survive their founders tend to get good at drawing bright lines between themselves and everyone else.

I was reminded of all that when I saw this posted on MR the other day. On a regular basis, a gaggle of social scientists release a study telling us why liberals are good and conservatives are bad. Sometimes it is just a focus on why conservatives are bad and other times it is a study on some essential goodness of liberals. The point is always the same, as the people doing it are always the same.

The gold standard for this, oddly enough, led to the Goldwater Rule. In 1964 a bunch of liberal psychiatrists, during the 1964 presidential campaign, declared that Barry Goldwater was clinically insane. After all, only a crazy person would deny the essential goodness of the Progressive movement. Some version of this pops up every few years, masked as social science.

An obsession with the moral differences between “us” and “them” is a hallmark of mass movements. It is fair to say they are fanatical about it. Oddly and maybe even counter intuitively, members of mass movements are not very good at understanding the differences between the array of groups not in their group. The others are just an undifferentiated mass of people not inside the cult.

A good example is the Amish. As far as they’re concerned, everyone else is English, by which they mean outsiders. They could no more tell a Catholic from a Jew and they don’t care. Muslims see nothing but infidels outside the world of Islam. Scientology, from what I understand, has similar labels for people outside their faith. Jews call non-Jews gentiles and, oddly, Mormons call non-Mormons gentiles too.

Progressives are by any reasonable definition, a political cult. Like Islam, it is aggressive and intolerant, particularly of Christianity. Not unreasonably, it sees Christianity as its chief threat. Not that Christians are automatically a bunch of freedom loving Burkeans. The Pope, after all, is a Marxist. That does not matter to the Left. They have a long hatred for Christians and Christianity.

The mandates in ObamaCare were not put in for health or cost reasons. Their intent was to make life miserable for Christians because they oppose contraception and abortion. That’s why Progressives have gone berserk over the Hobby Lobby case. If you imagine yourself in a life and death struggle with your chief rival, even tiny set backs seem like the end of the world.

I’ll wrap this rambling post up with a short story about an Iranian I once knew. This was back in the Iran – Iraq War days. He had been drafted into the Ayatollah’s army and sent to fight the Iraqis. A commander called for volunteers to clear a minefield. Immediately a bunch of young fanatics volunteered. They were sent out into the minefield, finding the mines the old fashioned way. Behind them the infantry, followed the now clear path through the field.

Shortly thereafter my Iranian friend went AWOL, got a fake student Visa and found his way to Belgium. He hooked up with other Iranian ex-pats, mostly Christians and Jews. They helped him get his paperwork in order. Because of the chaos in Iran at the time, his parents were able to claim he was missing in action so they could avoid trouble from the fanatics.

That’s life in a land where a cult takes over.

Civilizational Suicide

Posted on by

Today is the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. At least it is considered the anniversary. This is the day Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie in the city of Sarajevo. The Austrians blamed the Serbs and in July delivered an ultimatum they surely knew would be rejected. The point was to provoke war with the Serbs, which it did. In a month the great powers of Europe were aligned against one another in what would be a massively brutal war.  Close to 40 million men were killed, wounded or went missing in 51 months of war.

To put that in some perspective, the population of the United States at the start of the war was roughly 99 million. Every hour of every day of the war over 1,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing. Put another way, one day’s fighting in The Great War had more military casualties than the entire Iraq War. It is why, as John Derbyshire points out in his latest transmission, that Europeans called it a suicide attempt.

The Great War has got slighted in the history books, but that may be changing. Outside the Left, more people are taking a fresh look at this war. Watching the American ruling class feverishly try to flood the country with third world peasants in an attempt to break the back of the middle-class, one cannot help but think things are headed to a dramatic denouement. One hundred years ago the ruling elites of the civilized world tried to commit suicide. They seem to be at it again.

The question that naturally arises when looking at the prelude to the Great War is how did these people not see what was coming? As John points out, all of the principles were highly civilized and highly cultivated. These were not savage people led by glory seeking leaders. The rulers of Europe were often related and certainly familiar with one another through social connections. They were highly educated men leading a class of men with much to lose and little to gain from war. Yet, the actions of a lone madman set the civilized world on fire.

Similarly, no one outside the Left can figure out why our current rulers want to destroy their countries. Pat Buchanan famously noted that we may be the first civilization in history in which the ruling elite despises that which holds them up as elites. The drive to bring in exotic peasants to destroy the America is an act of suicide. The sorts of leaders these peasants favor tend to murder the types of leaders we have in place.

Today as 100 years ago, the causes and explanation are complicated. You really can’t point to one thing to place the blame. Part of our trouble today is due to the strange ideology that dominates American politics. It is a toxic blend of Utopian lunacy and rage against the limits of nature. The collapse of Christianity as an active part of people’s lives means there is no transcendent alternative to the Utopian scheming. What fills the void is the sterile conservatism we see in the pages of National Review.

The years leading to the Great War had a similar feel. Europe had abandoned Christianity following the 30 Years War. What came to fill the void was a strange nationalism that was loosely based on blood and soil. Contemporaneous accounts give one the sense that imperialism had run its course. The Great War was the way to find out what came next.

Perhaps it is just a natural process. Marx described capitalism as the organized destruction of productive forces. What he saw was a natural process where competition commoditized labor and capital. Perhaps at the civilization level, material success destroys the will to thrive. When there are no more hills to conquer, the leaders lose focus and this devolves into petty, selfish behavior leading to no good end. I don’t know, but today sure has the vibe of Europe’s last summer. Maybe one day Jean-Claude Juncker will be remembered like Gavrilo Princip.

The Religious Divide

Posted on by

Way back in the olden thymes, “spiritual” people eschewed traditional religion, in favor of pseudo-paganism and Eastern mysticism. Along with it came sub-cults like saving the whales or saving the environment. Concern for people and things over the horizon is the hallmark of new age religion. Most of these people were miserable to their families and friends, but they had nothing but love for mother earth, nature and oppressed people living far away.

All of that nonsense from the 60’s and 70’s was just religion for people who liked the benefits of public piety, but were not into any of the sacrifices. They had special outfits to wear in public, signaling their goodness. They ate strange foods and got into meditation and yoga. Bumper stickers were a big thing. it was a way for them to impose their values on you without taking an risk. That’s the thing with the self-righteous and publicly pious. It grace without sacrifice for them.

Still, they were a minor nuisance, for the most part. Cleaning up rivers and protecting wildlife is the sort of stuff rich societies can do without causing too much trouble. It is what economist call public goods. Despite the fact the people behind these efforts were mostly monomaniacal weirdos, like Ralph Nader, the goals appealed to people’s Christian sense of duty.  It’s the same way the social-welfare laws tag along on the people’s sense of Christian charity.

This arrangement started to change in the 1990’s. Bill Clinton felt it necessary to be open about his Christian faith. It was, in part, to make inroads into the South, but also appealed to northern Catholics. By 2000 Al Gore was dismissive of religion entirely while Bush was the Evangelical. That’s the source of the great divide that has roiled the nation ever since. People who worship the old gods versus those who worship the new gods and have zero tolerance for the old gods.

Obama comes along in 2008 and is clearly non-Christian. Maybe he is a Muslim or maybe he is simply not religious. His membership in the crazy black church hardly qualifies as religious. The clear message was that unlike the people who put Bush in office, Obama was not a Christian. The last election featured a man who never attends services and a man who belongs to a weird cult that is alien to the Judeo-Christian traditions of America.

The point of all of this is to underscore just how far Christianity has fallen in public estimation. In 1980, Reagan seeded his talks with references to the Bible, on the assumption everyone would know what he meant. His opponent was a deeply religious man who felt comfortable discussing his relationship to God on television. Today, it would seem strange to see a presidential candidate discussing his relationship with God or his duties to his church as a Christian man.

One thing you learn when reading about population genetics is religion is near universal. We have evidence of religious practice going back as far as we have evidence of modern human activity. Science thinks religion evolved as one of the first human traits. If you take a step back and look at religion as a subgroup of mass movements, then it is even more obvious that faith and belief are necessary human traits that are integral to our understanding of the world.

Religion was most likely the first solution to the free rider problem. Not only does guilt and moral suasion push the free loader to pull his weight, it justifies taking harsh action against those who take more than they give. Belief in the common gods and common morality would have obvious reproductive advantages. A natural bias toward religiosity would, over many generations, bake belief into the human animal. Like all traits, it would manifest itself more prominently in some and less so in others.

That brings me back to the collapse of Christianity in America. Take a look at church attendance by state. Where are you more likely to find, for example, global warming fanatics? Vermont or Mississippi? If you look at the bottom ten states, there you find the most deeply committed liberals and the most deeply committed warmists. Gaia worship, manifested as climate concern, is the religion filling the void left my Christianity for the people least connected to Christian faith and heritage.

Whether you want to call AGW the master cult, encompassing the lesser cults of environmentalism, or you lump all of it into the same bucket with the other progressive fads, there’s no escaping the religious overtones to all of it. Here’s an interesting bit from a hard core believer site called Think Progress. These are the sort of folks who invest a lot of time counting heretics. Their map is revealing. It is not just party preference dividing the nation. It is religion.

The question is whether it was the vacuum left by the collapse of Christianity in these areas that allowed this pagan faith to spread or do the causal arrows point in the other direction? The American Left has been hostile to Christianity since the end of World War II, mostly in order to include Jews in their cause. Perhaps as the people of these areas became more liberal, church attendance dropped and these weird fads spread or maybe as Christianity died, the people went crazier.

Iraqafornia

Posted on by

There seems to be two great currents in human history that are now colliding with one another. On the one hand, there is a definite long term trend toward larger organizational units. The first human settlements were tiny camps that become villages and then grew into towns. These towns were the administrative centers for the surrounding farm and pasture lands. Those towns grew into cities and eventually city-states. The Bronze Age was peak city-state.

The city state gave way to the regional power that was a collection of city-states speaking the same language and having a shared history. Eventually, after a lot of war and conquest, we got nations, mostly composed of people with a shared genealogy and culture. There are exceptions, but the nations of Europe mostly track the ethnic grouping of the continent. The 20th century gave us world government, in bits and pieces. The European Union is all about creating a super-state.

Now, the other great current is disaggregation. This is where large complex social organizational units break up into smaller units. The Czechs split from the Slovaks. The Walloons and Flemings are close the breaking up Belgium. Scotland may be ready to bolt the UK. Quebec is once again making noises about leaving Canada. The Catalans want to leave Spain and the Venetians want to leave Italy. Of course, Iraq is about to break into pieces.

In the US, we have states making noises about breaking into smaller states. This is not exactly new, but it is usually confined to cranks. On the other hand, people fond of federalism really are advocating the reintroduction of autonomous zones based in the natural divisions int he country. It’s not a big leap from there to having a big state lead a walkout of the union.  California is moving closer than many realize to having it on the ballot in two years.

Advocates for Six Californias, a plan to split the Golden State into a half dozen separate states, are holding a petition drive this weekend to get their plan on the ballot in 2016.

Tom Knorr, holds a State of Jefferson flag in Corning, Calif. The idea of forming their own state has been a topic among local secession dreamers for more than a century in the state. (Terry Chea / Associated Press)

The idea is the brainchild of Timothy Draper, a venture capitalist from Menlo Park – or as he hopes to some day call it, the state of Silicon Valley. Draper has sunk $2 million into signature gathering for the proposal. He maintains it will break bureaucratic deadlock in Sacramento (proposed state of North California) and attract more business.

“California has become the worst managed state in the country,” he told The Times this spring. “It just is too big and too ungovernable.”

Anna Morris, spokeswoman for Six Californias, said in an e-mail that  the group has collected “a significant amount of signatures and are hoping to get the remaining signatures we need this weekend.”“For people who put our chances at zero, we say that we are dedicated to challenging the status quo and are hopeful that Six Californias will be the much needed refresh for state government,” she said.

Joe Rodota, the co-chair of OneCalifornia, an opposition group, downplayed the significance of getting signatures on a petition.

“This is just a process that pretty much any well-funded interest can pursue,” said Rodota, former cabinet secretary for Gov. Pete Wilson. The real challenge, he said, is ballot approval and “it’s just very difficult to get a yes vote historically.”

Times political columnist George Skelton called Six Californias “crazy” and “really crackpot,” but he noted that attempts to break up the state have been around since its inception and can be highly diverting if never successful.

“Go ahead and put this thing on the ballot,” he wrote in April. “We could use some fun.”

There’s a strong argument for breaking up California. It’s too big to operate as a state, but not competent enough to be a country. A better argument is for state government to get much smaller and let local government take on more responsibility. You could keep the state intact if county and city government were left to their own devises for providing services. The great mistake of centralization is the belief that spreading the misery makes it go away. The opposite actually happens.

There’s no record of the centralizers ceding control back to the locals, at least not without a bloodbath, so it is unlikely to happen. That’s the problem we see everywhere in America. Things like education policy, food charity, housing charity and health care arrangements have been handed to the Federal government and there’s little chance they hand them back to the states. Even staggering, outlandish incompetence is not enough to get the pols thinking about devolution.

The same thing is happening in states like California. State government took over the schools, the police and the collection of taxes. Cities, counties and towns are just administrative arms of the state, often working at cross purposes with state agencies that allegedly run things. The result is anarcho-tyranny.  The locals have no real power, so they harass local business and citizens, who just try to play by the rules. The state government is to big to do the job, so we get anarchy.

The two trends I described at the start of the post are in conflict. Logic says one force must prevail, but look at Iraq. Logic says it should be broken up or it should have one sect dominate the rest. Yet, it staggers on as a weirdly inefficient and incomprehensible version of Switzerland. It is a federation of people who have no business being in the same country, but have no will or interest in being their own country. That seems to be the problem with California and America as a whole.