America call liberalism is really just a secular religion. For many of the adherents, it is a cult  that defines them as people. The difference between it and other cults is the Führerprinzip is not always obvious. What we typically think of as a cult has some charismatic leader around whom the cult is organized. Liberalism is more like the Catholic Church in this regard. The cult leader is temporary.

This cult-like quality is most obvious in the sub-groups like the environmental movement or the climate change stuff. There’s a primitive aspect to it that hearkens back to nature cults in the pre-Christian age. They are not sacrificing animals to the gods, hoping for a good harvest or good fortune, but they worship nature nonetheless.  This story about the search for a green cow is a great example.

A White House climate initiative has boosted a quixotic search for the “cow of the future”, a next-generation creature whose greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by anti-methane pills, burp scanners and gas backpacks.

Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the primary man-made gas warming the planet, but methane is far more potent and the US’s biggest source of it is its 88m cattle, which produce more than landfill sites, natural gas leaks or hydraulic fracturing.

The Obama administration’s launch last month of a plan to curb methane emissions has given fresh relevance to climate-friendly technologies for cattle that range from dietary supplements and DNA gut tests to strap-on gas tanks.

Now, imagine driving through the countryside and coming upon a dairy farm. You look out at the pasture and you see cows with tanks on their backs and a hose in their ass to collect their farts. The words, “You gotta be kidding me?” come to mind.

Juan Tricarico, director of the Cow of the Future project at the Innovation Center for US Dairy, an Illinois research institute, said the initiative had boosted his quest to create the “star athlete” of the bovine world.

“For us it is very encouraging because it basically demonstrates that important players out there are thinking in similar ways to us,” he told the Financial Times.

But he said there were common misconceptions about where cattle methane comes from. “Ninety-seven per cent of all the methane gas is released by the front end through burps, not from the back end,” he said.

They will also be wearing gas masks in addition to the, eh, ass masks.

Based on his research priorities, the dairy cow of the future will be the unstressed inhabitant of spacious accommodation, munching on anti-methane gourmet grains that are processed by an efficient, best-in-species digestive system.

And a billion or so humans will starve to death if he and his coreligionists ever get their way on any of this stuff. We hope there will always be a enough people with good sense to step in and throttle these idiots before they starve a billion people, but you never really can be sure.

“We want it to be more productive, we want it to be healthier, we want it to be a problem-free cow,” said Mr Tricarico.

Methane accounts for 9 per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions and does not linger in the air as long as CO2, but it has a global warming effect more than 20 times greater than CO2, the White House says.

However, financial barriers are hampering the adoption of tools to limit methane from cattle, as was the case with early technology to curb pollution from power stations and motor vehicles.

The costs are prohibitive for dairy and beef farmers and the kind of research that could make the tools more cost-effective would require public funding.

Ah, there we are. If we ever cut off the flow of public funds to these people, they are gone in a week. But, state sponsored religion is like that.

C-Lock, a South Dakota company, sells a feeding station that gives animals dietary supplements such as basil to cut methane production and measures the content of their breath by pulling it towards trace gas sensors with a vacuum.

Patrick Zimmerman, C-Lock’s founder, says prices start at $45,000 but stresses the economic benefits of improved efficiency. “Of the energy the animals eat, 3 to 15 per cent is lost as methane and that’s a waste,” he says.

At Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology, scientists have created backpacks that collect gas via tubes plugged into cows’ stomachs. A typical animal emits 250-300 litres of methane a day and researchers say this could be used to power a car or a refrigerator for a day, but Jorge Antonio Hilbert of the institute says the tanks’ use on a large scale is “totally improbable”.

Jonathan Gelbard of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, says: “Anyone who can come up with a cost-effective way to harness that methane is going to make a lot of money.”

Ilmi Granoff of the Overseas Development Institute said an alternative to controlling cattle emissions would be to cut the number of cows.

“Forget coal, Forget cars. The fastest way to address climate change would be to dramatically reduce the amount of meat people eat,” he said. “But that involves cultural preferences and they are difficult to touch.”

And it would also kill a billion people or more. That’s the dirty little secret of the environmental movement. It is anti-human. They would gladly gas a billion people to “address climate change” or whatever nonsense they are into this week. People join mass movements out of self-loathing. They hate themselves so they seek to trade their individual identity for that of the group. The resulting dynamic is a loathing of all things outside the cult and a willingness to die for the ideas of the cult. It’s why the body count for liberalism world-wide is staggering.

There used to be a time when I thought America would get beyond its race obsession for no other reason than exhaustion. We would get tired of talking about it. The Baby Boom generation would die off and the following generations, exhausted from hearing the Boomer preen over race, would drop the subject entirely. As I crest the hill of my life, I no longer believe we will outgrow or move past our racial problems. Stories like this one are the reason.

Hank Aaron was a sports hero of mine when I was a boy. He was not the first black athlete to cross over, but he was one of the first to do it in a major way. In the 1970’s, Aaron was a superstar. There’s no doubt he suffered from racism and was treated poorly at times. He has also lived a fairy tale life that few people on earth have ever experienced. America, for all its faults, was really good to Hank Aaron. Yet, all that matters to him is the bitterness.

Hank Aaron has the letters tucked away in his attic, preserved these last 40 years. He’s not ready to let them go.

He almost has them memorized by now, but still he carefully opens them up and reads every word, as if he wants to feel the pain.

“You are (not) going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it,” one of them reads. “Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. My gun is watching your every black move.”

Yes, Aaron even saved the death threats, the ones that vowed to end his life if he dared break Ruth’s cherished all-time home run record.

“I wouldn’t have saved those damn things,” says Hall of Famer Willie McCovey, who grew up in Aaron’s hometown of Mobile, Ala. “I would have burned them. I had a few of them myself over the years. I don’t save stuff like that.

“Why would you?”

The answer to McCovey’s question is this. What defines Hank Aaron, as far as Aaron is concerned, is race. It is not his place in American culture, the fact that he overcame so much or the fact he has lived a wonderful life. None of that matters. He is man consumed with race, because he is defined by it. To be authentically black in America is to define oneself in relation to white America, real or imagined. For Aaron or most blacks to “move past that” is to abandon who they are.

Aaron’s march to history ended 40 years ago today, when his 715th home run vaulted him past Ruth as baseball’s all-time home run leader. Yet it was an often joyless and lonely pursuit, and Aaron says he has good reason to hang onto the cruel correspondence.

“To remind myself,” Aaron tells USA TODAY Sports, “that we are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record. If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There’s not a whole lot that has changed.

“We can talk about baseball. Talk about politics. Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated.

“We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country.

“The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”

Aaron is 80 and I suppose some allowance should be given him for that fact. Men grow bitter as they grow old. Often, men who were great athletes will get very bitter. I doubt Aaron passed on a career in physics to play baseball. All he had was his physical ability as a ball player. Once that faded, he was just another guy. That seems to be a very tough adjustment for many athletes and many get quite bitter.

On the other hand, Aaron is 80 and has seen a lot. When he was 15 and showing promise as a ballplayer, his future was bleak compared to white players. The best he could hope for was scratching out a living in the Negro Leagues for a few years and then heading off to the farm or the factory. Today he sees young black guys with promise getting doted on by coaches, agents and promoters. If you are a 15 year old black kid with anything on the ball, the world is your oyster.

How can Hank Aaron be so blind to that truth?

That’s the sad state of things. Fifty years of trying to fix race and the people see little progress? That’s what the polling shows. When more than half of blacks and close to half of whites think things are the same or worse as in the past, you have to wonder if it is worth all the effort. I’m as skeptical as any man, but I thought Obama would remove a lot of racial tensions. Obviously, that has not happened. That presents the obvious question. If all of these efforts have failed, what can be done?

The sodomy lobby taking out the Mozilla guy has the right-wing cranks out wringing their hands about the Left’s alleged turn toward authoritarianism. It is a tiresome performance that never amounts to anything. The game played since anyone reading this has been alive is that the Left advances and the Right complains. There’s never substantive push-back from the Right, just complaining about the unfairness. There are two interesting things to consider about this incident.

One is the Left has done such a great job selling their alternative history of themselves, that hardly anyone knows it is nonsense. Conservative Inc. accepts that the Left is the home of free speech and tolerance. Of course, the one big idea that sprung from the Left was Marxism and that has a body count of 100 million. If your thing has spent the last century murdering anyone suspected of independent thought, you’re not the religion of free speech and tolerance. But, here we are anyway.

The other thing worth considering is if this is a change in past practice. The tattered remains of conservatism thinks this is some ghastly new development. The Left has been attacking people for unclean thoughts since anyone can remember. According to David Horowitz, the New Left was running off heretics every week back in the 1960’s. Going even further back, the Left tried to ruin Whitaker Chambers because he had the gall to point out that Alger Hiss was a commie. It is rather pobvious that intolerance is a feature of radical thinking, not some new bug in the code.

Anyway, a surprisingly thoughtful look at this last point comes from the very liberal Corey Robin.

In a sharp take on the Left, Freddie deBoer asks, “Is the social justice left really abandoning free speech?” Drawing on this report about an incident at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Freddie answers his own question thus:

It’s a question I’ve played around with before. Generally, the response [from the Left] is something like “of course not, stop slandering us,” or whatever. But more and more often, I find that the answer from lefties I know in academia or online writing are answering “yes.” And that is, frankly, terrifying and a total betrayal of the fundamental principles we associate with human progress.

Freddie goes on to offer a rousing defense of free speech. I don’t want to enter that debate. I have a different question: Is Freddie’s sense of a change on the Left — “more and more often” — accurate?

To be clear, I know exactly the phenomenon Freddie is talking about, so he’s not wrong to point it out. But from my admittedly impressionistic vantage as a middle-aged American academic, it seems far less common than it used to be.

Historically, the Left has had an ambivalent relationship to what used to be derisively called “bourgeois freedoms.” From Marx’s On the Jewish Question to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of repressive tolerance, some of the most interesting thinking on the Left has been devoted to examining the limits of what for lack of a better word I’ll call the liberal defense of freedom and rights. And of course this tradition of thought has often — and disastrously — been operationalized, whether in the form of Soviet tyranny or the internal authoritarianism of the CPUSA.

But if we think about this issue from the vantage of the 1960s, my sense is that today’s left — whether on campus or in the streets — is far less willing to go down the road of a critique of pure tolerance, as a fascinating text by Marcuse, Barrington Moore, and Robert Paul Woolf once  called it, than it used to be. (As Jeremy Kessler suggests, that absolutist position, which is usually associated with content neutrality, historically went hand in hand with the politics of anti-communism.)

Once upon a time, those radical critiques of free speech were where the action was at. So much so that even liberal theorists like Owen Fiss, who ordinarily might have been more inclined to a Millian position on these matters, were pushed by radical theorists like Catharine MacKinnon to take a more critical stance toward freedom of speech. But now that tradition seems to be all but dead.

Something happened on the way to the censor. Whether it was the pitched battle among feminists over the MacKinnon/Dworkin critique of pornography — and their advocacy of anti-porn statutes in Indianapolis and elsewhere — or the collapse of the Berlin Wall, most leftists since the 1990s have been leery of deviations from the absolutist position on free speech. Not just in theory but in practice: just consider the almost fastidious aversion to shutting down any kind of discussion within the Occupy movement.

That’s not to say that leftists don’t go there; it’s just that the bar of justification is higher today. The burden is on the radical critic of free speech, not the other way around.

Yes, one can still read of incidents like the one that provoked Freddie’s post (though compared to the past, they seem fewer and farther between). And critical issues like the relationship between money and speech are still argued overon the Left. But, again, compared to the kinds of arguments we used to see, this seems like small beer.

My take, as I said, is impressionistic. Am curious to hear whether others have a different impression. And to be clear, I’m talking here about the Left, not liberals, who may or may not be, depending on a variety of factors and circumstances, more inclined to defend restrictions on freedom of speech.

The professor cannot be blamed for defending his side by claiming it has been anything but in favor of free speech. That’s just human nature. He seems to have a genuine interest in truth, even if he is a Progressive. His willingness to confront his fellow ideologues is unusual and will ultimately get him banished.  He is right to point out that this is not a sudden up-tick in witch hunting. It has been worse in the past. They are not killing anyone this time.

An alternative view is that as the last waves of this liberal flood recede, the hard thumping fanatics are rampaging through the culture looking for a few trophies. After the New Left had run out of steam in the late 1960’s, groups like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army went berserk and started killing people. Maybe we are in a soy-vegan-latte version of that phase. On the other hand, maybe things will get much worse over the next decade. Worse is always an option.

The US Supreme Court refused to step into a slavery case in New Mexico. The New Mexico Human Rights Commission had ruled that two lesbians had the right to hold photographers as a slaves, forcing them to perform photographic work for them against their will. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not too far off. Forcing people to work for others against their will is a form a slavery, just one that has some pay. That’s what is happening with these cases where businessmen have to work for gays.

The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from Christian photographers who were fined and admonished by the New Mexico Supreme Court for declining to work a same-sex ceremony, in what could be a blow to religious business owners.

The high court decision not to take up the appeal means the New Mexico ruling against them stands. That ruling is only binding in New Mexico, but could set a precedent that can be cited in subsequent cases.

In this case, Elane Photography, owned by Jon and Elaine Huguenin of New Mexico, was brought to court for refusing to photograph a same-sex couple’s commitment ceremony in 2006.

An attorney for the couple argued that the business openly advertises its wedding photography services, and as a public business is required to follow the same anti-discrimination laws as any other company.

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in August that the business’s refusal to photograph the ceremony involving two women did violate the state’s Human Rights Act.

Lawyers for the business, though, argued the ruling violates the business owners’ free speech rights by compelling them to “express messages that conflict with their religious beliefs.”

Elaine Huguenin said she also has a right of artistic expression under the First Amendment that allows her to choose what pictures to take, or refrain from taking.

The reason the SCOTUS is avoiding these cases is obvious. As soon as they grant a religious exceptions to private discrimination, freedom of association will be out of the box again. How can one permit Christians to avoid perverts, but not permit blacks to avoid Koreans? The current principle is that your tastes, your preferences are not important in the area of commerce, hiring and housing. if there is an exception made, then the whole regime gets called into question.