This story is yet another example of why atheists are terrible people. If Christianity folded up shop tomorrow, they would re-invent it, just so they could cause problems for the Christians.

A humanist advocacy group has filed a federal lawsuit to remove a cross-shaped World War I memorial in Prince George’s County, alleging the display violates the First Amendment.

The American Humanist Association says it does not object to the fact that the Bladensburg Cross memorializes soldiers, but rather the placement of the Christian symbol on property owned by a government agency, The Daily Record reported.

“We are certainly recommending coming up with a monument inclusive of all religious groups,” said Monica Miller, a lawyer with the association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center.

In 2012, the group sent a letter to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission demanding that the cross be removed from the war memorial. The group said it would have no objection if the cross was on private land, MyFoxDC.com reported.

John Moss, the town’s administrator, said the Bladensburg Cross is not endorsing any faith.

“The cross memorializes our veterans,” he told The Daily Record. “It was never meant to be a religious icon.”

The 40-foot-tall concrete memorial was erected in 1925 by the American Legion to commemorate the 49 men of Prince George’s County who died during World War I.

Look, I’m not a religious guy. The last time I was in church was a couple of years ago for a friend’s ordination. Before that was probably Christmas mass at the insistence of friends, but when that was I don’t recall. Left to my own, I’m not going to church or thinking much about the existence of God. I’m an empirically minded guy which means I don’t dwell on what I can never possibly know. I’m not much of a joiner either so church is not offering much to a guy like me.

Religion does, however, bring joy and happiness to tens of millions of my fellow citizens, so if they want to put up crosses all over the country, good for them. Their expression of their faith is not harming anyone. In fact, I think America was probably better run when most people attended services. It kept the cultural rot at bay and it kept the lunatics under control. An aggressively Christian population would probably be a good antidote to Progressivism, as long as the women are not permitted to vote.

This monument has been up since 1925. No one complained since 1925. Then this collection of dick heads comes along and forces the public to spend tax money to defend normalcy. Here’s the staff list of the Anti-Humanist Society. If you have a chance to make their life a living hell in some way, please take it. With any luck, all of them will come down with an excruciating disease.

Anyway, you’ll notice they steer clear of Jews and Muslims. The former runs the country and has plenty of resources to crush these people. The latter has no qualms about killing for the faith. You can be sure the “humanists” will not be posting Mohamed cartoons on their web page. Christians have foolishly forgotten their roots and let themselves get pushed around by these people. My advice to Christianity is get back to your roots. Kill a few humanists the old fashioned way and the rest will run for cover.

It is always fun telling liberal white hipsters that gentrification is just a nice word for ethnic cleansing. In reality, it is nothing more than old rich white people throwing out poor brown people, so young white people can live in the city. This is very upsetting to white liberals, as they have no defense against it. It points to the fact that Progressives talk like MLK, but they live like the KKK.

It’s a nice gag and it gets the desired reaction, because it has the advantage of being the truth. This old NYTimes article tried to paint a pretty picture, but the fact is rich white people are flooding into cities like New York, pushing out the brown people. These sincere, wholesome bourgeois bohemians will chew your ear off about how diversity is our strength, except where they live of course.

It is not just NYC, DC is getting whiter. Boston gentrified long ago. Even Oakland is going for a lighter shade of pale. These cities voted for Obama 81% (NYC), 90% (DC), 80% (Boston) and 84% (Oakland). As these cities get whiter, they get more Progressive and they get more aggressive in their proselytizing. At some level, they know the truth, but their coping strategy is to become even more hysterical on race.

That’s why this story in the NYTimes is interesting.

Cities that have worked for years to attract young professionals who might have once moved to the suburbs are now experimenting with ways to protect a group long deemed expendable — working- and lower-middle class homeowners threatened by gentrification.

The initiatives, planned or underway in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh and other cities, are centered on reducing or freezing property taxes for such homeowners in an effort to promote neighborhood stability, preserve character and provide a dividend of sorts to those who have stayed through years of high crime, population loss and declining property values, officials say.

Newcomers, whose vitality is critical to cities, are hardly being turned away. But officials say a balance is needed, given the attention and government funding being spent to draw young professionals — from tax breaks for luxury condominium buildings to new bike lanes, dog parks and athletic fields.

“We feel the people who toughed it out should be rewarded,” said Darrell L. Clarke, president of the Philadelphia City Council, which last year approved legislation to limit property tax increases for longtime residents. “And we feel it is incumbent upon us to protect them.”

I love how they were not terribly concerned about “neighborhood stability” when the neighborhoods were black and brown. Once the white people took over, they suddenly start sounding like Rotary Club Republicans from the suburbs. The even funnier part is the city council president just about says they owe these urban pioneers for driving the bad element out of the city.

In doing so, cities are turning urban redevelopment policy on its head and shunning millions in property tax revenue that could be used to restore municipal services that were trimmed during the recession because of budget cuts, including rehiring police officers.

A decision to reduce property taxes can be risky because such levies account for at least 50 percent of operating budgets in most American cities and sometimes provide as much as 80 percent of a city’s revenue.

But even Detroit, where a declining tax base has been at the core of the bankrupt city’s troubles, recently announced plans to cut property tax rates.

Last month, Mike Duggan, Detroit’s new mayor, said property taxes would be cut by up to 20 percent to levels that more accurately represent the value of homes in the city. The reduction could cost Detroit as much as $15 million annually in revenue.

The tax adjustments are part of a broader strategy by cities to aid homeowners — who continue to struggle financially since the home mortgage crisis. In Richmond, Calif., lawmakers are attempting to use eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages to try to help homeowners keep their houses.

Housing experts say the arrival of newcomers to formerly working-class areas — from the Mission District in San Francisco to the Shaw neighborhood in Washington — is distinct from previous influxes over the past 30 years because new residents are now far more likely to choose to move into new condominiums or lofts instead of into existing housing, making the changes more disruptive.

“This latest wave of gentrification has happened very quickly, and cities are cognizant to keep from turning over entirely,” said Lisa Sturtevant, executive director of the Center for Housing Policy, a nonprofit research group. “And cities where property values are up and budgets are generally more stable have the wherewithal to provide tax breaks.”

Ms. Sturtevant said that given that many of the younger, newer arrivals do not necessarily plan to stay for long, cities are making a sensible economic choice.

“There’s less personal investment and less incentive to stay, so cities are saying, ‘Let’s invest in the stayers,’ ” she said.

It makes perfect sense for cities to try and lure middle-class white people. There are a million arguments about crime and race and poverty and education and drugs and blah, blah, blah. There’s no argument about the crime rate among middle-class white people, as it is the lowest in the world. Fill a city with them and you don’t have a crime problem. The other fact no one disputes is low crime means higher property values, high civic participation, better schools and more stable tax receipts.

This should be something everyone knows and accepts. If you really want to help black people, demand they act white, instead of indulging their bad behavior from behind the walls of your gated community. There’s nothing to be gained from lecturing whites about diversity, while the people doing the lecturing ethnically cleanse their own neighborhoods. All it is doing is creating a lot of angry white people.

There is a specter haunting the neocons. it is the specter of Russia, which has been the same specter haunting their ancestors settled in America. The new term of art to sell this paranoia is “Eurasianism.” Maybe it will be “Duginism,” after the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin. The later is easier for pundits on TV and radio to pronounce so that’s the one that probably sticks, but you never know. Maybe they come up with some new way to personalize the old tribal fear.

Steve Sailer has written about the subject, but only superficially. Most of the paleocons, which make up the bulk of his audience, are not all that interested in how younger dissidents have responded to Dugin’s writing. The paleo-crowd simply does not care beyond demanding the US stay the hell out of the problems of Eurasia. Steve’s information and comments will therefore be received without too much fanfare. I may be reading it wrong, but that’s not a crowd looking for dragons to slay.

National Review is another matter. Given that they are wholly owned by the neocons at this point, they have to obsess over this new thing. Not only are they looking for a reason to restart the Cold War, they need to find a way to justify their embrace of multiculturalism. They had some guy named Robert Zubrin write a piece on Eurasianism. His biography suggests he is a very bright guy, but the tone of the article suggests he lies awake at night, straining to hear the hoof beats.

The roots of Eurasianism go back to czarist émigrés interacting with fascist thinkers in between-the-wars France and Germany. But in recent years, its primary exponent has been the very prominent and prolific political theorist Aleksandr Dugin.

Nazism, it will be recalled, was an abbreviation for National Socialism. National Bolshevism, therefore, put itself forth as an ideology that relates to National Socialism in much the same way as Bolshevism relates to Socialism. This open self-identification with Nazism is also shown clearly in the NBP flag, which looks exactly like a Nazi flag, with a red background surrounding a white circle, except that the black swastika at the center is replaced by a black hammer and sickle.

The open devotion to Nazism is Dugin’s thought is remarkable. In his writings he celebrates the Waffen SS, murderers of millions of Russians during the war, as an ideal organization. He also approves of the most extreme crimes of Communism, going so far as to endorse the horrific 1937 purges that killed, among numerous other talented and loyal Soviet citizens, nearly the entire leadership of the Red Army — something that Stalin himself later had second thoughts about.

What Russia needs, says Dugin, is a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism.” On the other hand, “Liberalism, is an absolute evil. . . . Only a global crusade against the U.S., the West, globalization, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response. . . . The American empire should be destroyed.”

This is the ideology behind the Putin regime’s “Eurasian Union” project. It is to this dark program, which threatens not only the prospects for freedom in Ukraine and Russia, but the peace of the world, that former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych tried to sell “his” country. It is against this program that the courageous protesters in the Maidan took their stand and — with scandalously little help from the West — somehow miraculously prevailed. But now the chips are really down. The Ukrainians are being faced not with riot police, but with Russian divisions, subversion, and economic warfare. The country needs to be stabilized, and defended. The Ukrainians deserve our full support — and not just for reasons of sympathy for those resisting tyranny or respect for the brave. It is in the vital interest of America that freedom triumphs in Ukraine.

Without Ukraine, Dugin’s fascist Eurasian Union project is impossible, and sooner or later Russia itself will have to join the West and become free, leaving only a few despised and doomed islands of tyranny around the globe. But with Ukraine underfoot, the Eurasianists’ program can and will proceed, and a new Iron Curtain will fall into place imprisoning a large fraction of humanity in the grip of a monstrous totalitarian power that will become the arsenal of evil around the world for decades to come. That means another Cold War, trillions of dollars wasted on arms, accelerated growth of the national-security state at home, repeated proxy conflicts costing millions of lives abroad, and civilization itself placed at risk should a single misstep in the endless insane great-power game precipitate the locked and loaded confrontation into a thermonuclear exchange.

The 20th century saw three great-power confrontations. Two of them turned into total war. We lucked out on the third. Do we really want to roll those dice again? We will have to, unless the Eurasianist program is stopped.

The stakes in Ukraine could not be higher.

It is not hard to see where this goes. The usual suspects in Conservative Inc. will be chanting about the shadow of Eurasianism over Europe. or, it could be the specter of Duganism haunting the West. Mix in some Cold War nostalgia and the usual suspects will be wearing American flag lapel pins again. We are ruled by people who are defined by ancient hatreds and nostalgia for a time when being anti-Russian was enough to be on the side of angels. They will never leave Russia alone.

We don’t know a whole lot about the Druids. What we know about them comes from the Roman conquerors, who hated the druids. The Romans invested a great deal of men and material to stamp out the druidism. They associated druidism with a sense of self they thought was antithetical to the Roman way. This was largely true, but what motivated the Romans was the resistance. They hated it because it refused to yield.

The Welsh, for example, clung to druidism into the fourth century, despite regularly being slaughtered by Roman legions. All they had to do was humor the Romans and they could have avoided slaughter, but they could betray themselves. That sense of self, that identity was tough and the Romans were never able to stamp it out. Druidism, however, did die out. Christianity eventually became the religion of the island, overwhelming all of the pagan faiths, but it was not easy.

There’s an important lesson there if you are a Christian in 21st century America. Church attendance has plummeted in the Progressive controlled areas of the country.  This Gallup poll shows that church attendance in the Old North is down near European levels. This is a five year old study so the numbers are probably now below 20% in most of these states. Massachusetts, after the homosexual priest scandal, has seen church attendance plummet.

The Old South, on the other hand, has church attendance well above 50%. The Cold Civil War is and always has been a religious war in addition to a culture war. The new religion of the Old North is post-national Progressivism and it is a very aggressive. It is an intolerant religion. This column by Ross Douthat makes clear that the homosexual marriage fad is more about the war on Christianity than a celebration of homosexuality.

IT now seems certain that before too many years elapse, the Supreme Court will be forced to acknowledge the logic of its own jurisprudence on same-sex marriage and redefine marriage to include gay couples in all 50 states.

Once this happens, the national debate essentially will be finished, but the country will remain divided, with a substantial minority of Americans, most of them religious, still committed to the older view of marriage.

So what then? One possibility is that this division will recede into the cultural background, with marriage joining the long list of topics on which Americans disagree without making a political issue out of it.

In this scenario, religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions, as a kind of dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation, while the wider culture declares that love and commitment are enough to make a marriage. And where conflicts arise — in a case where, say, a Mormon caterer or a Catholic photographer objected to working at a same-sex wedding — gay rights supporters would heed the advice of gay marriage’s intellectual progenitor, Andrew Sullivan, and let the dissenters opt out “in the name of their freedom — and ours.”

But there’s another possibility, in which the oft-invoked analogy between opposition to gay marriage and support for segregation in the 1960s South is pushed to its logical public-policy conclusion. In this scenario, the unwilling photographer or caterer would be treated like the proprietor of a segregated lunch counter, and face fines or lose his business — which is the intent of recent legal actions against a wedding photographer in New Mexico, a florist in Washington State, and a baker in Colorado.

This is why the Left always wins. They don’t play politics by a set of rules that prevent them from winning the fight. They begin with the end in mind. Then they construct the term of engagement in such a way that they have the advantage. They know the Right will assiduously abide by those rules, which the Left will violate as necessary. The Left has one principle, which is winning, while the Right has a long list of principles that are more often than not imposed on them by the Left.

Meanwhile, pressure would be brought to bear wherever the religious subculture brushed up against state power. Religious-affiliated adoption agencies would be closed if they declined to place children with same-sex couples. (This has happened in Massachusetts and Illinois.) Organizations and businesses that promoted the older definition of marriage would face constant procedural harassment, along the lines suggested by the mayors who battled with Chick-fil-A. And, eventually, religious schools and colleges would receive the same treatment as racist holdouts like Bob Jones University, losing access to public funds and seeing their tax-exempt status revoked.

In the past, this constant-pressure scenario has seemed the less-likely one, since Americans are better at agreeing to disagree than the culture war would suggest. But it feels a little bit more likely after last week’s “debate” in Arizona, over a bill that was designed to clarify whether existing religious freedom protections can be invoked by defendants like the florist or the photographer.

If you don’t recognize my description of the bill, then you probably followed the press coverage, which was mendacious and hysterical — evincing no familiarity with the legal issues, and endlessly parroting the line that the bill would institute “Jim Crow” for gays. (Never mind that in Arizona it’s currently legal to discriminate based on sexual orientation — and mass discrimination isn’t exactly breaking out.) Allegedly sensible centrists compared the bill’s supporters to segregationist politicians, liberals invoked the Bob Jones precedent to dismiss religious-liberty concerns, and Republican politicians behaved as though the law had been written by David Duke.

What makes this response particularly instructive is that such bills have been seen, in the past, as a way for religious conservatives to negotiate surrender — to accept same-sex marriage’s inevitability while carving out protections for dissent. But now, apparently, the official line is that you bigots don’t get to negotiate anymore.

This is rather obviously the goal. Progressivism is a covetous faith. It does not play well with other religions. It is why their body count in so high. Catholics, over 1500 years, probably killed a million people for heresy. The radicals of the Enlightenment have murdered 100 million in a century and half. History tells us Genghis Khan was the most murderous invaded to ever enter Europe. In reality, history’s greatest monster was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Which has a certain bracing logic. If your only goal is ensuring that support for traditional marriage diminishes as rapidly as possible, applying constant pressure to religious individuals and institutions will probably do the job. Already, my fellow Christians are divided over these issues, and we’ll be more divided the more pressure we face. The conjugal, male-female view of marriage is too theologically rooted to disappear, but its remaining adherents can be marginalized, set against one other, and encouraged to conform.

I am being descriptive here, rather than self-pitying. Christians had plenty of opportunities — thousands of years’ worth — to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance. (And still do, in many instances and places.) So being marginalized, being sued, losing tax-exempt status — this will be uncomfortable, but we should keep perspective and remember our sins, and nobody should call it persecution.

Finally, we see why the American Right is entirely worthless against the Left. They have never come to terms with what we face. They keep thinking that if only they can purify their souls, the Left will forgive them. Alternatively, they think they can reason with what amounts to religious fanaticism. Neither is tethered to reality or much good when your culture is being looted by well organized fanatics. The Right is built to lose, so it must be destroyed if there is ever to be an opposition to the Left.

I used to be broadly in favor of drug legalization, but I never thought about it too much, so my opinion has always been conditional. Smart people seemed to think legalizing drugs made sense so I went along with it, but smart people often have nutty ideas about the world. My view of government says we should have a very small state controlled by the nation’s wealthy, leaving most things up to citizens to work out for themselves.

At the same time, I knew that legalization was not a panacea. Life is nothing but trade-offs. Fewer drug laws may mean fewer cops chasing drug dealers, but it also means more drug addicts. That has a cost too. That’s an easy one to tease out right from the start, but there are always unexpected or hidden trade-offs. We’re just not very good at thinking through all of the possibilities. It’s why chess is not our national past time.

According to this story, one such unexpected trade-off is the use of EBT cards for buying weed.

The “Preserving Welfare for Needs Not Weed Act,” is expected to be introduced on Monday by Colorado Republican Reps. Dave Reichert, Scott Tipton and Cory Gardner, KDVR.com reported.

The bill would add pot dispensaries to the current list of locations where states must block welfare electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards from being used for purchases or ATM withdrawals, Reichert’s office told the station.

KDVR.com reported last week that at least 19 different dispensaries allowed electronic benefits transfer withdrawals inside their pot shops in January. Public records obtained by the station showed 56 transactions, totaling nearly $4,000.

One of the only things John Edwards said worth remembering is the line about there being two Americas. There’s actually more than two. If you are black, you live in an America very different from that of white people. If you are a member of the ruling class, you live a life nothing like the rest of us. If you are in the underclass, you live a different life than most people. We spend a lot of time talking about blacks, the rich and the middle-class, but  not much about the under-class.

Anyway, this law will do nothing to curtail the use of EBT cards for buying weed. The underclass figured out long ago how to turn welfare benefits into cash. EBT cards are traded like any other commodity. Of course, the easiest trick is to use the card to buy a bunch of easily salable food, like canned goods or soda. Then you sell those to a small restaurant or market at a discount. Magically, the card was converted into cash. It is what funds the Oxycontin Express.

People in the under-class are stupid, but they are clever. They know how to work a scam if there is a quick buck in it. Not all are without morality, but one reason the poor are poor is they lack social competence. Getting over on the government is not a moral question for them. It is a matter of impulse control. They can so they do. These are not people contemplating the vagaries of the universe. They want what they want and will do what they must to get what they want. The poor have always been transactional.

Of course, the under-class is at it full-time while the agents of the state administering these programs are part-timers. Just as prisoners know a lot more about the prison than the guards, the poor know more about the ghetto than the social workers and case officers from the state. The politicians know nothing about the poor, which why we got a welfare state in the first place. That means whatever rules the state creates to control the activity within the under-class is going to fail.