Monthly Archives: October 2015

More Texas

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Sitting in the stands of a rodeo in Forth Worth is like going back in time. I’ve been to the rodeo and I’ve watched the event on TV so I understand the basics. In all honesty, I find it a bit dull so while I’m sitting there watching girls ride horses around barrels, I’m thinking of other things. My friends, who had never been to a rodeo, were captivated. To them, it was incredible watching humans ride animals with such skill.

Chit chatting about it after, I think the big attraction to rodeo for many folks is that it reminds them of a better age. The rodeo is wholesome family entertainment. There’s no sex or crude jokes. There’s no hip-hop music blasting from speakers. It’s just wholesome looking young people, corny jokes and a good time. Cheap too. Tickets to a rodeo are nothing compared to a football game.

That’s what makes it feel like a trip back in time. For most of human history, entertainments were relatively cheap. Entertainers lived on the fringes of society and made very modest livings. Maybe the showman who owned the circus or traveling act made a good living, but the performers did not. Running away to join the circus was not a move up, it was giving up. If you could not hack it in normal life you ended up as the bearded lady in the circus.

Contrast that to today where we venerate knuckleheads with the IQ of a goldfish and shower them with millions. In order to do that the cost of entertainment has skyrocketed. I was at the Dallas Cowboy game on Sunday and the prices are staggering. Cheap seats are $500 just to get in the door. The facility, which is incredible, is simply a massive platform from which to sell you stuff.

That’s what’s incredible to me. Everything has a sponsor. “This hot dog concession stand brought to you by AT&T” is the sort of thing that makes me think the Catholics were right about cupidity being a mortal sin. Every square inch of the Cowboy facility has a sponsor attached to it and almost every square inch is for the purpose of moving product of some sort. You keep wondering, “Don’t they have enough?’

That excess allows the Cowboys to pay their star defensive end millions of dollars, even though he spends his free time beating and strangling women. You only do that when you have so much, you feel you are immune from public opinion. Hearing the crowd cheer when that demented knucklehead made  big play, I’m going to assume the paying portion of the public is OK with wife beating.

I’m sure many rodeo entertainers are terrible people. That’s just a part of life. My guess is though, public knowledge of bad behavior ends your rodeo career unless you also get right with Jesus. The customers will look the other way if you are turning your life around after getting drunk and running naked through the streets. Otherwise, there’s probably not a lot of tolerance for it.

In a weird way, people enjoy things like the rodeo now because it lets them escape the wall of sound that is modern mass culture. The whole downtown Forth Worth area feels like it exist as an escape. People dress in their cowboy clothes and have an old fashioned good time. I was at a bar in Fort Worth and it was just cheap drinks and people dancing to country music, like they used to in the old days.

That’s the other thing that popped into my head comparing a night in Fort Worth to the day at Jerry World. In today’s mass media culture, everyone is assumed to be a child. At the football game, it is nonstop noise and video. Between plays they are hitting you with some ad or speech. In breaks for commercials, they hammer the audience with messages. You don’t have a minute to talk to the guy next to you. They assume you must be amused for every second like a toddler.

The infantilization at a modern ballpark extends everywhere. Buy a beer and they open the container and keep the cap. I guess they don’t want you to swallow it. The container is made from something that prevents it from being a projectile, in case you have a tantrum. Of course, they shut off beer sales half way through events so you don’t have too many. The modern sporting even is the nanny state taken to the logical conclusion.

All that said, Texas is a great place to visit. I’ll have more thoughts on it when I return back to the Imperial Capital.

 

Travelogue: Texas

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Travel is one of the best ways to see the world. I’ve been lucky in my life in that I have had the luxury of traveling quite a bit on someone else’s dime. Business travel is not vacation travel, but I think it is often a better way to see the world simply because you have long stretches with nothing to do so you look around, explore, adventure. On vacation, you have “stuff’ that fills every waking moment, usually within the confines of the Potemkin vacation area.

I’ve been to Texas many times. I used to travel here often for work matters. Thirty years ago when I first visited Texas on the way to Mexico, I thought this is a place I should live. For some reason, it just seems to fit my sensibilities. Every time I’ve come here, I have had the same thought: I don’t think I’m going back. But, here I am nearing my jump into the void and I’m still just a guy who visits Texas.

The funny thing about Texas is it is remains the one place in America that is brimming with confidence. Texas is not a terribly sentimental place. They will knock down an old building for a new building without giving it a thought. In the Northeast, an army of weirdos will be there guarding the old building, even though the weirdos will have no clue why the old building was built. It’s just old so they think it has to be saved.

At the same time, those same weirdos will claw one another’s eyes out to cancel the school Christmas play. There’s the lack of confidence. In most of America, our betters conduct themselves like the ne’er do well grandchildren of a successful man. The kids compete with one another as to who is the most reverent toward the old man, but not a one of them tries to emulate him. The best they can do is have a big picture of him in their house, which he bought for them.

Texas does not have the problem yet. Texans love being Texans and they love being in Texas. There’s really nothing special about Texas. Dallas is a massive suburb that looks like every other suburb in the South, but they are proud of it and you see that everywhere you go. Texas plays Oklahoma today in the Cotton Bowl and tickets are selling for $500 on the secondary market, even though UT is terrible. It’s just a great celebration of Texas football history.

I think that confidence is why Texans are soft on immigration. They are cocksure that if you move to Texas, you will become a Texan. They are right about it too. Vietnamese refugees landed in Houston and are now Texans whose ancestors came from Vietnam.  Of course, Texas has always had loads of Mexicans from the northern part of Mexico. A big part of what makes Texas tick is the blend of Southern culture and northern Mexican culture.

In Massachusetts, there’s zero cultural confidence. If America were invaded, the good thinkers of the Bay State would surrender on day one and begin taking classes in the language and culture of the invaders. That’s why the northeast seems to be leading the charge on the immigration fight. They are scared. A friend here in Texas, who is from Mass, is a rock-ribbed Trump man now and it is all over immigration.

In the South, illegal immigration is an issue, but mostly because it offends the people’s law and order instincts. It’s not seen as a threat to their way of life. In many respects, migrant workers are a part of their way of life. The South would be a very different place without the flow of migrants into the agribusinesses. Go into a poultry plant in Virginia or North Carolina and you see nothing but Hispanics. It’s been that way for generations.

The same is true of Texas. Mexican migration in and out of the state is just a part of the state’s character. The Mexicans who live here permanently came here because a part of what made them Mexican also made them Texan. The transition was easy. Of course, there are Texas families who were here before Texas was a place. The result is most Texans feel they have a good handle on how to manage Mexican immigration.

Finally, kicking around here it strikes me that the Cult hates Texas for the same reason they hated Sarah Palin. In the case of Palin, the idea that dirt people could live the feminist ideal while hanging onto dirt people culture enraged the Cult. Palin was the living negation of the One True Faith. There’s a similar thing with Texas. here, diversity is on display all over, but it’s held together with the dominant Texas culture.

The Cult believes this is impossible. For them, diversity means obliterating all culture by running it through the blender of multiculturalism. The result is the exact opposite of vibrant diversity, but the screaming and bellowing makes it impossible to point it out. A state like Texas puts the lie to the Cult’s blathering about diversity. Texas has boatloads of it without adopting any of the Cult-Marx nonsense.

Now, I’m off to eat my weight in fried food.

The House Divided

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I’ve been making the point for a long time that the Republican Party is not really a political party. It’s a dumping ground for people that don’t fit into the Democratic Party for some reason. The groups that find themselves in the GOP don’t have a lot in common with one another. Many would prefer to be in the Democratic party, but circumstances make it impossible.

Romney famously ran on the “three legs of the GOP base.” That was economic conservatives, social conservatives and foreign policy hawks. That’s not a terrible formulation for a political party, but it is not based in reality. The so-called social conservatives, for example, are much more populist and localist than the economic conservatives can tolerate.

Similarly, the foreign policy hawks are not in line with the economic conservatives on a lot of things. The main reason people favor a tough line with the muzzies is so the muzzies will stay over in their countries. Many foreign policy hawks, like me for example, are OK with letting Afghanistan return to the 5th century. They should remain backward. Close down their airports, electric plants and water systems. Problem solved. That’s heresy with the economic conservatives.

Political parties in America have always been coalitions of divergent interests with one or two unifying items. From FDR to Jimmy Carter, the Democrats were Yankee elites running a coalition of ethnic groups, unions, southern populists and intellectuals. That’s given way to a party of Yankee elites running a coalition of fringe weirdos, blacks, immigrants, academic elites and their students. The Democrats are mostly the party of people who went to college and would have preferred to stay there.

The Republicans are not a coalition of anything now. If you are a Southern conservative, you have little in common with the conservative of the northeast. People in Massachusetts, for example, who call themselves conservative and vote Republican, are not religious and they are indifferent on the homos and abortion. Their leaders are often pro-abortion and gay marriage. Contrast that with the Democrats where everyone is violently in favor of abortion.

My formulation of the Republican elected officials is that one third wish they were Democrats, one third just like the easy life of elected office and the rest are genuine conservatives in the traditional meaning of the term. John Boehner, for example, would have been a fine Speaker in 1984, when the Democrats ran the House and tangled with Reagan over policy. Boehner would have been fine at building majorities to compromise on the small issues.

There’s something else. The Democrat Party is now a purely ideological party. This is a first in America. Europe has ideological parties, but American has never had them, at least ones that gain votes. The Democrats are now a party of the New Religion. You can’t win office as a Democrat being pro-life or if you are against homo marriage. You have to embrace anti-racism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism in order to have a place. I’ll note that all Democratic House members are open borders fanatics.

How a coalition party, especially a haphazard one, responds when faced with a an ideological party is debatable. The experience of Europe in the first third of the 20th century is not encouraging. It does appear that the House Republicans are so divided they cannot pick a speaker. No one dares say it, but the issues dividing the party are the old national questions, particularly immigration. The people running the party want open borders. The insurgents want national sovereignty. There is no room to compromise.

My guess is the people in charge will stay in charge. They will employ an age old strategy of backing a novus homo that they think will fail and embarrass the upstarts. Just in case, you can be sure they will work hard to make sure he does fail. They are playing the long game from the comfort of the inner party. Some of these people have been in DC so long, their GPS reads “thar be monsters” for the areas outside the Beltway.

The only whiff of good news in any of this is that I sense that the sovereignty issue is playing much better in the Northeast and Midwest than elsewhere in the country. The South is much more mildly opposed to immigration, simply due to the cultural arrangements and the long history with migrant farm workers. In the Northeast, the old Yankee paranoia and intolerance is showing up in the immigration debate.

If the GOP can evolve as a party to reflect the mild nationalism of lightly managed trade, constitutional liberty and regulated immigration, it can be a majority party that has appeal nationally. That will require something on the ball in the leadership positions, but all the incentives are pointing the wrong way now. A party riven with dissent ends up with the worst leaders of the various factions. The result are guys like Mike McCarthy who is as dumb as a goldfish.

We live in interesting times.

Not Funny

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The other day, some one posted a link to this post by the late Larry Auster. I was not a frequent reader of Larry’s while he was alive, but I have read more of his work since his death. It’s a funny thing. I should have been a big fan of his work, but there’s only so many hours in a day and you can’t follow everyone. That and a dozen years ago I was a little wore down by paleo-con moaning about George Bush.

Anyway, his commentary about Jonah Goldberg reminded me that it has been a long time since I’ve read Goldberg. I was a regular reader up until his first book, which I thought was very good. If you want a good primer on 20th century Progressive history, it is a good option. Up until that point, Jonah was an irreverent slacker smart-ass, but after he wrote a book he tried to turn himself into a very serious person, which was a good decision. The money is better.

A couple of years ago he tried to get back to being an irreverent smart-ass again with his G-File columns, but they were painfully unfunny so I stopped reading them. They just felt hackneyed and corny, like seeing an old comic try to do his act after 20 years away from the stage. Tastes change, people change, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. All humorists have their time and once it is gone, they start to sound, well, hackneyed and corny.

A good example of that is P.J. O’Rourke, who has always struck me as a nasty, self-absorbed d-bag. Maybe there was a time when he was funny, but I’ve never stumbled upon an example of it. I’m told he was hilarious at National Lampoon when he penned stuff like this. There’s no accounting for taste, but there was never a time in my life when that was funny to me, not even as a child when cornball humor goes over well.

The other day the twitter machine was buzzing with this column written by O’Rourke that may be humor or maybe not. I really can’t tell. It just reads like a bitter old man saying nasty things about someone out of jealousy.

Toward Ann Coulter I had always taken a “suffer little children to come unto me” attitude. Not that she ever came on to me or anything. It’s just that she’s a kid. She was born in 1961. I’ve got skinny Brooks Brothers neckties in the back of my closet older than that.

Hilarious. O’Rourke is pointing out that he he very old and has old stuff. That’s a real knee-slapper.

Ann Coulter grew up during the “I-was-conservative-after-conservatism-was-cool” era, helping found the Cornell Review in the early 1980s. She’s noisy and she gives me a headache. But kids are, and kids do. I have several.

Actually, the 1980’s was pretty much when “conservatism” became cool. It’s also when he decided his left-leaning hippy routine was becoming dated so he went with the libertarian shtick.That way, he could make fun of the lefties, but also play the old crowd by mocking the Right. To quote myself, libertarianism is standing on the sidelines and pretending it is on principle.

That last line is a classic insecure old-manism. Coulter is a middle-aged woman so calling her a kid allows the old fart to dismiss her like a servant. It’s a defense mechanism you see with old men who fear they can no longer keep up. O’Rourke is not a dunce so he knows he is a yesterday man and he is bitter about it.

The rest of it is mostly sad. Writing is not a young man’s game, but it is not geriatric man’s game either. Some guys stay fresh well into their dotage or they stick to subjects where being a geezer works well. But, all of us lose our fastball eventually. For a guy that is mostly getting by on shtick, the fastball goes early. If O’Rourke ever had a fastball, it is long gone.

Of course, The Weekly Standard is not trying to send a fastball at Coulter’s head. They just want to let her know to take it easy on the Jew stuff. This brush back was more like throwing behind the batter so you know he won’t get hit, but he’ll get the message. Having the old washed up guy do it is safe because even if he plunks her, nothing is going to come of it.

Mitt Romney in Drag

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In 2008, Mitt Romney ran as the guy to the right of John McCain, which was not too hard given McCain’s record. The trouble for Romney was that he was not much of a conservative, by anyone’s reckoning so the party splintered. Evangelicals could not stomach a Mormon so they lined up behind their coreligionist, Mike Huckabee. McCain had the party bosses behind him, who thought having a black president was too important to wage a serious challenge in the general.

In 2012, Romney re-purposed himself into Robo-Conservative. His programming was combed through for any defects and bugs so that no matter which buttons you pushed, out popped the standard “conservative” response. It was a bit creepy watching a guy from West World run for president, but they say we will be ruled over by robots soon enough so it was good practice. The thing with Romney is that he said the right things, but no one believed him.

That’s the problem with “evolution” in politics. If you start out as a gun enthusiast who tried to bargain with the gun-grabbers, but evolved into a 2A absolutist, people understand your journey and they believe you.  If you start out as a gun-grabber and then suddenly change positions, you better have a damned good story. Otherwise, you’re worse than wrong, you’re a liar.

The Romney career is a great example. For twenty years he kept evolving to meet the situation in which he found himself as a candidate. It was not that he evolved as a candidate that got him in trouble. It was that voters understood he would never stop evolving and that once in office he could turn out to be anything or nothing. To paraphrase Malcolm X, Romney believed in nothing so he would fall for anything.

Fiorina has the same problem, but it is not quite as evident to the voters. I pointed out the other day that she is a stalking horse for the party bosses. They are tarting her up to walk the same streets as Trump, hoping she can lure enough of his vote away to sink his candidacy. Some guy at Bloomberg, who maybe reads this blog or can see the obvious, has a similar take on the Fiorina show.

Carly Fiorina is looking like the insider’s outsider candidate.

On the surface, it’s clear why the national political mood has swept her, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson to the top of Republican presidential polls. A former California technology executive, she has never held elected office, a profile that a plurality of Americans say they prefer to a candidate with gubernatorial or U.S. Senate experience.

Yet, as she recently demonstrated when otherwise-feuding Republican lawmakers showed up to see her on Capitol Hill, she also has Washington credentials that have won her fans inside the Beltway, even as she seeks the nomination with a strategy that makes the GOP establishment a frequent punching bag.

I always thought that the problem with Romney, in the end, was that he was an insult to the voters. The people who championed Romney just assumed that the voters were too stupid to think about it too closely so they would line up behind him as their betters instructed. Most did, but many were disgusted by it all and stayed home. Whether or not it was enough to swing the result is debatable, but it was enough to be debatable.

Now the same folks that were ready to sell us Jeb Bush are now, in response to the revolt on the Right, selling Carly! Fiorina as the antidote to what ails the American Right. She is making many of the same noises that the angry rubes in hooterville find attractive in Trump, but she’s not one of those dirt people the modern GOP finds so disgusting. The trouble is, she is just Mitt Romney in drag.

Abortion is one of those issues that is a litmus test issue. If you think it is a barbaric act, you are never in favor of anything that makes it more attractive or available. There’s no wiggle room there. You can allow for its legality and acknowledge the moral ambiguity in certain circumstances, but you do so through gritted teeth. If you were waving the Planned UnParenthood banner around, your conversion to the pro-life cause better have happened on the road to Damascus. Otherwise, you’re just adding “liar” to your list of defects.

Coincidentally, abortion was the issue that really hamstrung Romney as he could never come up with a plausible answer for why he kept changing his opinion. By plausible, I mean one that did not indicate he was a soulless sociopath who would say anything to get elected. Fiorina is a more gifted liar than Romney, having climbed the greasy pole of corporate politics, which requires great skill at apple polishing. But her polling suggests she is not catching on with voters outside the Acela Corridor.

Placing the Carly! phenomenon in the timeline with Romney, the picture that emerges is of a party that has no idea why it is a party anymore. All they know is they are not Democrats. The Democrats are not much better as they are just a collection of fads designed to piss off the squares in normalville. One party is a revolt against commonsense, the other is a response to that revolt, with neither having anything to offer beyond hysterics.

To the Gas Chambers!

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Most men grow out of libertarianism, if they were ever so foolish, by their mid-20’s. It is at that age when you have enough experience in the world to see the foolishness of it. It takes longer for the young Progressive male to wake up because of the cultural reinforcements all around us. We live in lands controlled by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. To be something other than a Progressive tests the mind on a daily basis.

I’m fond of pointing out that liberalism and libertarianism are two sides of the same coin. People find that assertion bizarre, but both are utopian and both start with a hatred of humanity. That is the heart of materialism, after all. Materialism places efficency at the top of the moral hierarchy and people somewhere further down. The main difference between the faiths is the the liberal hates all men equally, while the libertarian simply detests the unfit.

This is on full display in this column by Kevin Williamson. The style is familiar where the curdled hatred of humanity is couched in an ad hoc critique of the bogeymen that haunt the dreams of reactionaries and libertarians alike. There’s also the standard layer of free market frosting about the glories of free trade and the free movement of people. It’s the part we’re supposed to notice, rather than the sadistic misanthropy at the core of the article.

Phillips, Inc., in the end decided it had no need for Phillips, Texas, and the town was scrubbed right off the map. The local homeowners owned their houses but not the land they sat on, which belonged to the company. (These sorts of arrangements were, and are, more common than you’d think, as in the case of the many Californians in the Coachella Valley who own their houses but lease their land from the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians.) Many of the residents of Phillips were uneager to be evicted from their homes, and they sued the company with the help of the famously theatrical Texas trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes, who informed the good people of Phillips: “They might whup us fair and square, but they better bring lunch.” Lunch was served, and Phillips is just gone.
It was the right thing to do. Some towns are better off dead.

That’s always been the truth at the heart of libertarianism, as well as the various implementations of Rousseau’s monstrous ideas. Libertarians have always imagined themselves as trapped with a bunch of fat lazy takers. Lacking the courage to confront the slackers themselves, they seek a system that will do the dirty work for them. Liberals have this same view. They see themselves as the saints of a fallen world and their system will take care of all those sinners.

Way back in the olden thymes, Whittaker Chambers unriddled this connection in his review of Ayn Rand.

Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In a age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

The liberal and the libertarian look at the messy arrangements of mankind and wish to clean the slate and start anew, because to work through the current arrangements is dirty and time consuming. One does not seek to alter the current arrangements out of a love or respect for the current arrangements. All utopians first aim to destroy and that is done best with a passion, which can only arise from contempt.

That’s what bleeds from Kevin Williamson’s writing. He looks at the “losers” in America with contempt. Some towns are better off dead. My guess is he thought that was a cheeky line, as he tends to the adolescent, but maybe he did think much about it. As Chambers noticed, libertarians are not full of introspection.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left, first surprisingly resemble, then in action tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purposed, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

That last line sounds remarkably like Lenin’s adage, “who, whom?”

A Post Defending Matt Damon

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If you have lived in one of the Left’s strongholds for any amount of time, you learn how to navigate around your local moonbats so as to avoid the harangue about whatever it is they are into at the moment. A decade ago when they started vibrating in ecstasy over homo marriage, the safe course was to say, “Let ’em be as miserable as the rest of us!” Then you could walk away without having to listen to the sermon.

Libertarians have built an entire philosophy around avoiding contact with the enemy. Gay marriage? They are against marriage licenses! Immigration? They are against borders! Whatever the issue, they always have some third implausible option they champion so everyone can ignore them. In the culture wars that have roiled the nation over the last fifty years, libertarians have been hiding under their beds.

Anyway, that may be a fine way to avoid conflict, but it makes public discourse impossible. A good example of it is in this screed about Matt Damon in America’s newspaper of record.

Matt Damon is an insufferable jerk. You know it. I know it. Rupert Everett most certainly does.

The Hollywood liberal (read: smug hypocrite) has interrupted the outer-space high surrounding Friday’s release of his Oscar-bait star turn, “The Martian,” to conduct a parallel “I’m Not a Homophobe” tour. But it’s only driving him deeper into the quicksand with LGBTQ types and those, like me, who couldn’t care less whom a performer loves. It’s 2015, Matt. Get over yourself!

He should grovel. GLAAD should dedicate a lecture series to him.

He should shut the hell up.

I’m betting that Andrea Peyser would care a lot if a celeb was found to be “loving” a sheep or a little boy. This affected indifference when it comes to homosexuals is exactly that, artificial. To have an opinion about homosexuals, other than the enthusiastic embrace, means you are evil, maybe even Hitler. If you can’t stomach being Hitler or you cannot embrace sodomy, then you choose the third option, which is to stand on the sidelines and pretend you do so on principle.

Now, Matt Damon is a lunk head and he says batty things. That just makes him a typical Hollywood performer. He’s in a business dominated by gay men so he is courting trouble by speaking publicly about the queers. He could stand up and say all Christians are Nazi pedophiles and his peers would applaud. Appear less than enthusiastic about buggery and you get to bunk with Mel Gibson. Shutting up is probably the best path for him to take.

If you want to live in some version of Iran, ceding the floor to the fanatics is a good way to do it. That is where we are headed. As the space for honest disagreement grows smaller, the number of people willing to risk getting the Hitler treatment grows smaller. Before long the only people left on stage are the guys with the clubs. Andrea Peyser’s admonition, “He should just shut up” becomes a way a life.

Guns, Blacks and Biology

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Whenever a lunatic goes bonkers and shoots up a public place, the usual suspects march around in public, waving their banners and making a nuisance of themselves. Whether or not we have more lunatics going on shooting rampages is debatable. The figures are always gaffed by the people presenting them so they can claim science! supports their side. What no one can dispute is that we have more people with more guns, but the lowest violent crimes rates since the 80’s. Whatever is causing the nuts to go bonkers, it is not the guns.

William Saletan, a minor moonbat writer at Slate, is a good example of the deranged logic of Progressives in defense of the One True Faith. His piece on the latest mass shooting is the sort of thing that you would expect from a college freshman, but it is pretty standard stuff from the modern Left. There’s the requisite bogeyman (Republicans), the hero (Obama) and a series of cheers that are supposed to be an argument.

He writes that Obama is “raising a question that Republican candidates for president ought to answer: Our country has a strikingly high rate of killings. If it’s not because of our prodigious stockpile of firearms, what’s your explanation?”

Think about the implication of that statement. The mere presence of guns causes some portion of the public to fly into a rage and murder people. That’s the only conclusion one can draw from that argument. Even nuttier, it means that shaping metal in a certain way imbues it with the magical power to make an otherwise passive man become violent and murderous. Of course, you also have the classic logical fallacy of declaring that only one possible cause can explain the observed result.

Now, it is unlikely that Saletan believes in magic, but he is a true believer. As such, the other possible reasons for American’s elevated crime rates are off-limits. It’s not a lot different than how ancient people would assume witchcraft as an explanation for extraordinary events. When you can’t come up with anything rational, the only thing you have left is the supernatural. For Progressives, guns are magic that make people commit crimes.

Another example of this superstitious fear of knowing the true cause of crime in America is this story from 538 back in the summer. You have the typical Nate Silver treatment of the issue with lots of weird charts and tables. Then you get to the end where he slips in a bit of forbidden knowledge, assuming his Progressive readers never bother to read the whole thing. He writes:

The Charleston killings were unusual in that it was a mass shooting — and also in that the suspect is of a different race than the victims (both black and white homicide victims are much more likely to be killed by someone of their own race.) But that doesn’t negate that the threat black Americans face from homicide is radically different from the one whites do.

Get that? Blacks are killed in much higher numbers than other races, but they are killed by other blacks because murder is almost always intra-racial. Whites tend to kill whites, blacks kill blacks and so forth. Since blacks are much more likely to be victims, and blacks kill other blacks, well, you know what follows. That truth is so horrifying to Progressives it can never be said. It can only be implied and only through oblique references.

The truth is America does not have a gun problem or even a murder problem. America has a black guy problem. According to the Federal government, young black males make up 3% of the population and commit 27% of the homicides. Put another way, if black crime rates fell to the same level of whites, America would have an overall crime rate of a typical European country.

I did a series of posts on Africa a long time ago and one of them listed the intentional homicide rates. Sub-Saharan Africa has some outlandish murder rates, but they are consistent with what we see in American in cities like Baltimore and Detroit. America’s blacks are actually less violent than blacks in the mother country so that speaks well of the civilizing effects of civilization, but it still means there is a biological component to violence.

Progressives, of course, cannot accept that as it means a big chunk of the One True Faith is invalid. Reality, however, is making that increasingly difficult.

Palm readers claim to be able to see a person’s future in the patterns on their hands, but it seems it is possible to also learn about their ancestral past too from their fingers. Fingerprints – already used as a way to identify individuals – appear to encode information about a person’s ancestral background. Researchers have found there are distinct differences in how fingerprint ridges split between people of European and African ancestry. The researchers claim their findings could prove useful not just for anthropologists but also for modern law enforcement when trying to profile suspects.

Professor Ann Ross, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University who led the study, said: ‘This is the first study to look at this issue at this level of detail, and the findings are extremely promising. ‘A lot of additional work needs to be done, but this holds promise for helping law enforcement. ‘This finding also tells us that there’s a level of variation in fingerprints that is of interest to anthropologists, particularly in the area of global population structures.’

The researchers, whose work is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, examined the right index fingerprints of 243 individuals. They looked at both the level one details, such as pattern types and ridge counts, and the level two details, which are more specific variations such as bifurcations – where ridges split – ridge endings and other structures. They analysed the prints of 61 African American women, 61 African American men, 61 European American women and 60 European American men. While they could not find any significant differences between men and women, they did find significant differences in the level two details of fingerprints between people of European and African descent.

If fingerprints carry racial markers, it is no longer possible to argue that race is anything but biological reality. How the Cult of Modern Liberalism contends with the growing amount of data contradicting a major chunk of their worldview is not clear, but denial cannot go on forever. Otherwise, they will all sound as nutty as William Saletan and the next stop is marginalization. We can only hope.

The Hive

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The late great Joe Sobran argued that modern American liberalism embraced abnormality as a replacement for the allegiance to international communism. The Soviet Empire was a murderous and nullifying creation, but the American Left simply ignored its reality and instead pretended it was the path to some glorious future. When reality made that impossible. The Hive was left without a queen and found a variety of causes like gay rights around which to organize.

Sobran was mostly right in his description of the post-Soviet Progressives, but I don’t think he truly appreciated the nature of the American Left. As he wrote in one of his columns, for him the Left was an odor, something he could sense, but not fully describe. He was not alone. The Right was just as warped as the Left by the defeat of Nazism and the subsequent Cold War. It was the lens through which everything was viewed for half a century.

The big mistake, I think, is to assume the American Left is just a traveling partner of the European Left. The Right has turned “socialist” into an epithet that has no meaning. Calling Obama a socialist or his health care scheme socialism is just a way to lodge a protest. The Right and the Left have embraced the basics of socialism for close to a century now. The debate is over how far to go with it. The last serious politician to advocate the end of Social Security, for example, was Barry Goldwater.

When Christianity failed as a unifying force for Europe, nationalism filled the void. “If all of us can’t be God’s people, well, maybe some of us can be God’s people” was what bound the people to each other and their rulers. When nationalism failed, various forms of socialism filled the void. Fascism, socialism and communism are European heresies, with communism as the first serious effort to unify Europe under a single religion since the Thirty Years War.

In America, what emerged after the Civil War was Public Protestantism mainly in New England and Private Protestantism in the rest of the country. The old Puritans had always believed that each person’s salvation was predetermined. What mattered was carrying out God’s work on earth. Put another way, you signaled your salvation status through public piety and working toward the perfection of society. That’s why New England has always been the hotbed of utopian lunacy.

Private Protestantism is the mirror opposite, starting with the status of one’s soul. Your garden variety Evangelical thinks the point of your life is to get right with Jesus in order to gain salvation. Since heaven on earth is not just an impossibility, but against the will of God, efforts to perfect society are pointless and possible evil. It’s why populism, individualism and a fetish for individual rights is dominant in the South, Appalachia and the Southwest.

Now, it is certainly true that Jews and European immigrants of the 19th and 20th century brought socialism, fascism and communism with them. These ideas found a home in the Yankee culture of Public Protestantism. The philosophy of Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, for example, turns up in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. Similarly, Reform Judaism of Abraham Geiger folded neatly into the American Progressive Movement, which has always been the technocratic arm of Public Protestantism.

The central defect the Puritans faced, the one they were never able to resolve, was that the human condition is immutable. They could kill as many Indians as they liked, but the nature of man was not going to change. Worse yet, Christianity was often at odds with utopian efforts to fix the world. In the 19th century Christianity, began to take a back seat to saving the world, but that created a new problem. If the purpose of God’s anointed is to save the world, what’s the point if there is no longer a God to do the anointing?

In the 20th century, Progressivism became Public Protestantism with a void at the core where God used to exist. Into that void first rushed an imaginary interpretation of Soviet Bolshevism that needed constant tending to avoid exposing the humanity crushing reality of it. Once that became impossible, what has rushed into the void is a series of vulgarities that serve no purpose other than to offend common sense. The God of the Left is now just the outrage of the decent.

It’s why the Left appears to be racing to the abyss. Today they clamor for what was unimaginable twenty years ago. That means twenty years from now they will be clamoring for what commonsense today says is beyond absurd. In 1995 gay marriage was a joke and today it is required. Today pedophilia is a monstrous taboo, but already the Left is clamoring to normalize it. The debate amongst Progressives is never about limits. It is about how far beyond the limits they can go.

The race to pile on society every imaginable indignity has its limits. Pop music performers, for example, tried to replace talent with outrageous behavior. Finally, there was no one left to outrage. The logic of the Progressive faith will follow the same path, but the end is the obliteration of society. Open borders fanaticism, for example, is just passing out the Kool-Aid at a national scale. One can’t help but wonder if Obama’s urge to give Iran the bomb does not include the hope that they use it.

It will not end well.

Rambling about the Maths of Debt

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The other day, Kevin Williamson posted this about balancing the Federal Budget. It is the typical snarling, snide polemic he is known for recently. Maybe he accidentally drank out of his ink bottle or took a blow to the head, but his work has been of this type for a while. This recent piece is mostly another deranged rant about Donald Trump. The bulk of his column is crap, but this got my attention.

At the moment, our national fiscal situation is considerably less bad than it was during the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era of one-party Democratic rule; the 2010 and 2011 federal deficits were 8.7 and 8.5 percent of GDP, respectively, but the 2014 deficit was only 2.8 percent of GDP. Federal spending went from 24.4 percent of GDP in 2009 to 20.3 percent in 2014, thanks in no small part to budget sequestration, the one national policy in which Washington’s Democrats and Washington’s Republicans are united in loathing. The 2017 deficit is projected to be 2.3 percent of GDP.

That puts us within striking distance of having a balanced budget (albeit one that is balanced at a spending point that is too high for my own taste) or at least the reduction of budget deficits to trivial levels. All that is needed to get there is a little sober reform on the taxing front and a little sober reform on the spending front, with the hardest piece being reform of our entitlement programs, which in the long run will be the major drivers of deficits. I like the idea of radical tax reform, scrapping the tax code, abolishing the IRS, and starting over, and then privatizing Social Security and abolishing Medicare and Medicaid to boot. But you don’t actually have to do that to balance the budget.

That struck me as implausible so I did some mathing. The first thing we need to know is how much debt the Feds are piling on each year. In fact, that’s probably the only thing worth knowing as that is the tax on the future we may or may not be able to sustain. Greece stopped being a country, after all, because it could not service its debt, not because it spent too much or taxed too little. When you can no longer service your debt, you’re done as a country.

According to the Treasury, the amount of total debt held by the public has gone up 23.9% since the heroic budget deal Williamson is fond of touting. That’s better than the previous four years when debt rose by 37%, but there was also the big giant recession where tax receipts dropped. On the other hand, it is still well above the average over the last 35 years, so no one should be celebrating this modest reduction.

The larger point he is making is that with some small tweaks, the federal budget can be balanced. Well, over the last 35 years the annual increase in Federal debt has been 8.3%. In 1980 the debt was $907,701,000,000 and it is now $17,824,071,380,733, as of the end of the 2014 fiscal year. That’s a staggering amount of debt that happened during the two biggest economic booms in the nation’s history. Put another way, in the best of times we have run up debt at record levels.

For another way to look at it, here is the inflation adjusted debt since the 60’s:

fredgraph

There’s no way a sober person can look at the number and come away thinking we are a few tweaks away from solving the debt problem. If that were true, the graph above would not exist. Instead the line would bounce along in that 30% range as it had for so long. Something changed in the 1980’s and as a result debt as been on a steady run upward ever since, regardless of the party in charge and the amount of tweaking.

That raises another interesting question. If debt as a percentage of GDP is spiraling upward and neither party seems to have a way to stop it, what is driving the debt spiral? The most obvious place to look is the spending side as taxes have not changed a whole bunch in my lifetime. They lower rates, but remove deductions. Then they raise rates, but add back in a bunch of deductions. As Reason Magazine noted a few years ago, tax collection remains fairly constant over time.

Here’s one of my favorite charts. It is the per capita inflation adjusted spending. Using 1980 as the starting point, the size of the Federal government has doubled, even adjusting for inflation.

When you look at per capita, inflation adjusted GDP growth, you see something curious. The average growth rate has been 1.86% since 1980, which is interesting for a number of reasons, but what’s relevant here is that it explains the chart above. The cost, per capita, of government may have doubled in 35 years, but so has per capita, inflation adjusted GDP. The cost of the Federal government has simply kept pace with rise of incomes. The relative cost of government has not changed much.

So, what is driving the debt spiral?

The answer is the the debt spiral is self-perpetuating in a zero interest rate world. Imagine you have a personal income of $100,000 per year after taxes and expenses of $105,000 per year. You borrow $5,000 to cover the deficit. Every year your earnings go up 5%, but your expenses go up 5% as well. In 20 years, that annual deficit is $12,500, which sounds pretty good. Your annual deficit percentage has not changed, but your total debt is now $165,000!

Of course, it gets much worse because debt has interest. Even the government pays something in interest today. Using the above example and the historic norm of 7%, the total debt would balloon to over $200,000 in that 20 years and the debt payments would eat up a big chunk of the budget. Long before you got the 100% debt range, your little country would have been forced to cut back and pay down debt.

What’s happened in the free money era since the 1980’s is the cost of borrowing, in the view of politicians, has disappeared. In the age of market based borrowing rates, the bond markets forced the government to choose between competing options. Do you spend more on defense or more on roads? Do you make pension promises for ten years out or does the impact on borrowing make that untenable, because it cuts into current spending on other constituents?

That has not been the case for a generation. Instead of choosing between competing interests, pols just borrow to pacify both interests. The Republicans borrow to cut taxes for their patrons and the Democrats borrow to give goodies to their patrons. Elections, therefore, have no consequences as the parties never threaten each others interest. The voters are simply deciding who gets to spend time at the debt trough.

Of course, there’s a limit to how much debt a government can run up even in a zero interest world. If central banks begin to let rates rise, then the day of reckoning comes much sooner, which is why they can never let rates rise, at least not on purpose. That returns me to the original topic. The only “tweak” that can fix the debt problem is actually a radical change and that comes but one way.