Our Population Growth Totalitarian Future

As the world explodes in violence, war, riots, and uprisings, it is challenging to step back and examine the bigger picture. With airliners being shot down over the Ukraine, missiles flying between Israel and Gaza, ongoing civil war in Syria, Iraq falling apart as ISIS gains ground, dictatorship crackdown in Egypt, Turkey on the verge of revolution, Iran gaining control of Iraq, Saudi Arabia fomenting violence, Africa dissolving into chaos, South America imploding and sending their children across our purposely porous southern border, Mexico under the control of drug lords, China experiencing a slow motion real estate collapse, Japan experiencing their third decade of Keynesian failure, facing a demographic nightmare scenario while being slowly poisoned by radiation, and Chinese-Japanese relations moving towards World War II levels, it is easy to get lost in the day to day minutia of history in the making.

Why is this happening at this point in history? Why is the average American economically worse off today than they were at the height of the economic crisis in 2009? Why is the Cold War returning with a vengeance? Why is the Federal Reserve still employing emergency monetary policies when we are supposedly five years into a recovery and the stock market has attained record highs? Why do the ECB and European politicians continue to paper over the insolvency of their banks and governments? Why did the U.S. support the ouster of a dictator we supported for decades in Egypt and then support the elevation of a new dictator after we didn’t like the policies of the democratically elected president? Why did the U.S. eliminate the leader of Libya and allow the country to descend into anarchy and civil war? Why did the U.S. fund and provoke a revolutionary overthrow of a democratically elected leader in the Ukraine? Why did the U.S. fund and arm Al Qaeda associated rebels in Syria who are now fighting our supposed allies in Iraq? Why has the U.S. been occupying Afghanistan for the last thirteen years with the result being a Taliban that is stronger than ever? Why are the BRIC countries forming a monetary union to challenge USD domination? Why is the U.S. attempting to provoke Russia into a conflict with NATO?

Why is the U.S. government collecting every electronic communication made by every American? Why is the U.S. government spying on world leader allies? Why is the U.S. government providing military equipment to local police forces? Why is the U.S. military conducting training exercises within U.S. cities? Why is the U.S. government attempting to restrict Second Amendment rights? Why is the U.S. government attempting to control and lockdown the internet? Why has the U.S. government chosen to treat the Fourth Amendment as if it is obsolete? Why is the national debt still rising by $750 billion per year ($2 billion per day) if the economy is back to normal? Why have 12 million working age Americans left the workforce since the economic recovery began? How could the unemployment rate be back at 2008 levels when there are 14 million more working age Americans and the same number employed as in 2008? Why are there 13 million more people on food stamps today than there were at the start of the economic recovery in 2009? Why have home prices risen by 25% since 2012 when mortgage applications have been at fourteen year lows? Why are Wall Street profits and bonuses at record highs while the real median household income stagnates at 1998 levels?

Why do 98% of incumbent politicians get re-elected when congressional approval levels are lower than whale shit? Why are oil prices four times higher than they were in 2003 if the U.S. is supposedly on the verge of energy independence? Why do the corporate controlled mainstream media choose to entertain and regurgitate government propaganda rather than inform, investigate and seek the truth? Why do corporations and shadowy billionaires control the politicians, media, judges, and financial system in their ravenous quest for more riches? Why has the public allowed a privately owned bank to control our currency and inflate away 96% of its value in 100 years? Why have American parents allowed their children to be programmed and dumbed down by government run public schools? Why have Americans allowed themselves to be lured into debt in an effort to appear wealthy and successful? Why have Americans permitted their brains to atrophy through massive doses of social media, reality TV, iGadget addiction, and a cultural environment of techno-narcissism? Why have Americans lost their desire to read, think critically, question authority, act responsibly, defer gratification, and care about future generations? Why have Americans sacrificed their freedoms, liberties and rights for the false expectation of safety and security? Why will we pay dearly for our delusional, materialistic, debt financed idiocy? – Because we never learn the lessons of history.

There are so many questions and no truthful answers forthcoming from those who pass for leaders in this increasingly totalitarian world. Our willful ignorance, apathy, hubris and arrogance will have consequences. Just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. The cyclicality of history guarantees a further deepening of this Crisis. The world has evolved from totalitarian hegemony to republican liberty and regressed back to totalitarianism throughout the centuries. Anyone honestly assessing the current state of the world and our country would unequivocally conclude we have regressed back towards a totalitarian regime where a small cabal of powerful oligarchs believes they can control and manipulate the masses in their gluttonous desire for treasure. Aldous Huxley foretold all the indicators of a world descending into totalitarianism due to overpopulation, propaganda, brainwashing, consumerism, and dumbing down of a distracted populace in his 1958 reassessment of his 1931 novel Brave New World.

Is There a Limit?

“At the rate of increase prevailing between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to double. At the present rate it will double in less than half a century. And this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most desirable and pro­ductive areas are already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay.” –Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited – 1958

Demographics are easy to extrapolate and arrive at an accurate prediction, as long as the existing conditions and trends remain relatively constant. Huxley was accurate in his doubling prediction. The world population was 2.9 billion in 1958. It only took 39 years to double again to 5.8 billion in 1997. It has grown by 24% in the last 17 years to the current level of 7.2 billion. According to United Nations projections, world population is projected to reach 9.6 billion in 2050. The fact that it would take approximately 70 years for the world’s population to double from the 1997 level reveals a slowing growth rate, as the death rate in many developed countries surpasses their birth rate. The population of the U.S. grew from 175 million in 1958 to 320 million today, an 83% increase in 56 years.

The rapid population growth over the last century from approximately 1.8 billion in 1914, despite two horrific world wars, is attributable to cheap, easy to access oil and advances in medical technology made possible by access to cheap oil. The projection of 9.6 billion in 2050 is based upon an assumption the world’s energy, food and water resources can sustain that many people, no world wars kill a few hundred million people, no incurable diseases spread across the globe and there is no catastrophic geologic, climate, or planetary events. I’ll take the under on the 9.6 billion.

Anyone viewing the increasingly violent world situation without bias can already see the strain that overpopulation has created. Today, six countries contain half the world’s population.

A cursory examination of population trends around the world provides a frightening glimpse into a totalitarian future marked by vicious resource wars, violent upheaval and starvation for millions. India, a country one third the size of the United States, has four times the population of the United States. A vast swath of the population lives in poverty and squalor. India contains the largest concentration (25%) of people living below the World Bank’s international poverty line of $1.25 per day. According to the U.N. India is expected to add 400 million people to its cities by 2050. Its capital city Delhi already ranks as the second largest in the world, with 25 million inhabitants. The city has more than doubled in size since 1990. The assumptions in these U.N. projections are flawed. Without rapidly expanding economic growth, capital formation and energy resources, the ability to employ, house, feed, clothe, transport, and sustain 400 million more people will be impossible. Disease, starvation, civil unrest, war and a totalitarian government would be the result. With its mortal enemy Pakistan, already the sixth most populated country in the world, jamming 182 million people into an area one quarter the size of India and one twelfth the size of the U.S. and growing faster than India, war over resources and space will be inevitable. And both countries have nuclear arms.

More than half the globe’s inhabitants now live in urban areas, with China, India and Nigeria forecast to see the most urban growth over the next 30 years. Twenty-four years ago, there were 10 megacities with populations pushing above the 10 million mark. Today, there are 28 megacities with areas of developing nations seeing faster growth: 16 in Asia, 4 in Latin America, 3 in Africa, 3 in Europe and 2 in North America. The world is expected to have 41 sprawling megacities over the next few decades with developing nations representing the majority of that growth. Today, Tokyo, with 38 million people, is the largest in the world, followed by New Delhi, Jakarta, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Manila, and Karachi – all exceeding 20 million people.

To highlight the rapid population growth of the developing world, the New York metropolitan area containing 18 million people was ranked as the third largest urban area in the world in 1990. Today it is ranked ninth and is expected to be ranked fourteenth by 2030. The U.S. had the fewest births since 1998 last year at 3.95 million. We also had the highest recorded deaths in history at 2.54 million.  The fertility rate for 20- to 24-year-olds is now 83.1 births per 1,000 women, a record low. That combination created a gap in births over deaths that is the lowest it has been in 35 years.

This is the plight of the developed world (U.S., Europe, Japan) and even China (due to one child policy). According to the U.N. report, the population of developed regions will remain largely unchanged at around 1.3 billion from now until 2050. In contrast, the 49 least developed countries are projected to double in size from around 900 million people in 2013 to 1.8 billion in 2050. The rapid growth of desperately poor third world countries like Nigeria, Afghanistan, Niger, Congo, Ethiopia, and Uganda will create tremendous strain on their economic, political, social, and infrastructural systems. Nigeria’s population is projected to surpass the U.S. by 2050. Japan, Europe and Russia are in demographic death spirals. China is neutral, and the U.S. is expected to grow by another 89 million people. I wonder how many of them the BLS will classify as not in the labor force.

What are the implications to mankind of the world adding another billion people in the next twelve years, primarily in the poorest countries of Asia, Africa and South America? What does the world think of the U.S., which constitutes 4.4% of the world’s population, but consumes 20% of the world’s oil production and 24% of the world’s food? Will there be consequences to having the 85 richest people on earth accumulating as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion, with 1.2 billion surviving on less than $1.25 per day? Can a planet with finite amount of easily accessible financially viable extractable resources support an ever increasing number of people? Is there a limit to growth? I believe these questions will be answered in the next fifteen years as the dire consequences play out in civil strife, resource wars, totalitarian regimes, and societal collapse.  cycles always sweep away the existing social order and replace it with something new. It could be better or far worse.

Impact of Over-Population

“The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals — this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter. Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems. Worse still, it will create conditions in which individual free­dom and the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become impossible, almost unthinkable. Not all dictatorships arise in the same way. There are many roads to Brave New World; but perhaps the straightest and the broadest of them is the road we are travel­ing today, the road that leads through gigantic num­bers and accelerating increases.” 

The turmoil roiling the world today is a function of Huxley’s supposition that over-population pushes societies towards centralization and ultimately totalitarianism. The relentless growth in the world’s population, not matched by growth in energy resources, water, food, and living space, results in increasing tension, anger, economic decline, government dependency, war and ultimately totalitarianism. Huxley believed politicians and governments would increasingly resort to propaganda and misinformation to mislead citizens as the problems worsened and freedoms were revoked. Could this recent statement by our commander and chief of propaganda have made Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels any prouder?

“The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever been.”

I’m sure the people living in Gaza, the Ukraine, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Thailand, Turkey, Africa and American urban ghettos would concur with Obama’s less violent than ever mantra. Disease (Cholera, Malaria, Hepatitis, Aids, Tuberculosis, Ebola, Plague, SARS) and malnutrition beset third world countries, while the U.S. obesity epidemic caused by consumption of corporate processed food peddled to the masses through diabolical marketing methods enriches the mega-corporate food companies, as well as the corporate sick care complex. Religious wars and culture wars rage across the world as intolerance for others beliefs reaches all-time highs. After three decades of government controlled public education they have succeeded in dumbing down the masses through social engineering, propaganda, and promoting equality over excellence. Obama should stop trying to think and stick to what he does best – golf and fundraising. After reading his drivel, I’m reminded of a far more pertinent quote from Huxley:

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

The chart below details the fact that 12% of the world’s population in countries producing 9% of the world’s oil are currently in a state of war. The violence, war, and civil unrest roiling the Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan are a direct result of U.S. meddling, instigation, and provocation. The U.S. government funds dictators (Hussein, Mubarak, Assad, Gaddafi) until they no longer serve their interests, engineer the overthrow of democratically elected leaders in countries (Iran, Egypt, Ukraine) that don’t toe the line, and dole out billions in military aid and arms to countries around the world in an effort to make them do our dirty work and enrich the military industrial complex. The true motivation behind most of the violence, intrigue and war is the U.S. need to maintain the U.S. petro-dollar hegemony and to control the flow of oil and natural gas throughout the world. The ruling oligarchy’s power, influence, and wealth are dependent upon dictating currency valuations and flow of oil and gas from foreign fiefdoms.

In Huxley’s 1931 Brave New World fable the world’s population is maintained at an optimum level (just under 2 billion) calculated by those in control. This is done through technology and biological manipulation. Procreation through sexual intercourse is prohibited. Creation of the desired number of people in each class is scientifically determined and the classes are conditioned from birth to fulfill their roles in society. When Huxley reassessed his novel in 1958’s Brave New World Revisited he didn’t argue for an optimum level of population. He simply hypothesized a close correlation between too many people, multiplying too rapidly, and the formulation of authoritarian philosophies and rise of totalitarian sys­tems of government.

The introduction of penicillin, DDT, and clean water into even the poorest countries on the planet had the effect of rapidly decreasing death rates around the globe. Meanwhile, birth rates continued to increase due to religious, social and cultural taboos surrounding birth control and the illiteracy and ignorance of those in the poorest regions of the world. The ultimate result has been an explosion in population growth in the developing world, least able to sustain that growth. Huxley just uses common sense in concluding that as an ever growing population presses more heavily upon accessible resources, the economic position of the society undergoing this ordeal becomes ever more precarious.

It essentially comes down to the laws of economics. Most of the developing world is economic basket cases. They cannot produce food, consumer goods, housing, schools, infrastructure, teachers, managers, scientists or educated workers at the same rate as their population growth. Therefore, it is impossible to improve the wretched conditions of the vast majority, as they wallow in squalor. Unless a country can produce more than it consumes, it cannot generate the surplus capital needed to invest in machinery, agricultural production, manufacturing facilities, and education. The rapidly growing population sinks further into poverty and despair. Huxley grasps the nefarious implications for freedom and liberty as over-population wreaks havoc around the globe:

“Whenever the economic life of a nation becomes pre­carious, the central government is forced to assume additional responsibilities for the general welfare. It must work out elaborate plans for dealing with a criti­cal situation; it must impose ever greater restrictions upon the activities of its subjects; and if, as is very likely, worsening economic conditions result in polit­ical unrest, or open rebellion, the central government must intervene to preserve public order and its own authority. More and more power is thus concentrated in the hands of the executives and their bureaucratic managers.”– Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited – 1958

Despots, dictators, and power hungry presidents arise in an atmosphere of fear, scarce resources, hopelessness, and misery. As the power of the central government grows the freedoms, liberties and rights of the people are diminished and ultimately relinquished.

Source: The Millennium Report

Iraq And The Bloody Price of Lies

Western civilization lied and people died.

It lied, that is, to itself.

It’s a lie that imbues Bushes, Clintons and Obamas, both the left and the right and most everyone in-between. It is the enlightened position of the modern man, a tenet of our times.

It’s the idea that all peoples are basically the same.

I wrote about this seven years ago in “The Folly of Deifying Democracy in Iraq,” in which I predicted that our “nation-building” would ultimately be fruitless:

While we often view democracy as the terminus of governmental evolution, the stable end of political pursuits, the truth is that civilizations have tended to transition not from tyranny to democracy, but democracy to tyranny (e.g., the ancient Romans). …Benjamin Franklin understood this gravitation toward tyranny well, for when asked what kind of government had been created when he emerged from the constitutional convention, he said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

This brings us to the crux of the matter: Even if we can successfully install democratic republics in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, what makes us think they can keep them?

…To average westerners, all groups are essentially the same, despite profound religious and cultural differences. If a civilization — be it Moslem or Christian, Occidental or Oriental — suffers under the yoke of tyranny, it is only due to a twist of fate that has bestowed the wrong system of government upon it. Change that system and “voila!” all live happily ever after.  What eludes these Pollyannas is that politics doesn’t emerge in a vacuum but is a reflection of a far deeper realm, the spiritual/moral.  Alluding to this, Ben Franklin observed,

“Only a moral and virtuous people are capable of freedom; the more corrupt and vicious a society becomes, the more it has need of masters.”

…[S]piritual [and moral] health must precede the political variety….

A good way to illustrate this point is with Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s story about a large group of young British schoolboys who are shipwrecked on an island and who, after an initial effort at democratic governance, quickly descend into brutal autocracy. Being children, they are raw pieces of humanity perfectly illustrative of the “wild man.” After all, one thing distinguishing children is that they aren’t yet morally and spiritually developed enough to govern themselves. This is why a young child must be watched and controlled, with his life micromanaged by his (usually benign) nanny state, the parents. As he grows and matures, however, the parents can gradually allow an increasing degree of self-governance until, it is hoped, a day comes when he’s capable of complete autonomy.

But as our bursting prisons prove, this process isn’t always successfully effected; more to the point, as greatly varying levels of criminality among groups evidence, not all of our nation’s sub-cultures effect this process with equal success.

If this is true of some sub-cultures in our nation, however, why would it surprise anyone that it would be true of some cultures outside our nation?

In fact, I’ve long described moral and spiritual growth as movement toward “authentic adulthood,” which, at its pinnacle, yields that ethereal combination of innocence (meaning, absence of sin) and wisdom, and the former is actually a prerequisite for the latter. Yet some cultural norms can produce just the opposite: a loss of innocence and lack of wisdom.

However you describe this growth, the fact is that peoples mature very differently. George W. Bush was famous for saying that everybody wanted freedom, but this is an imprecise statement. No nation has complete freedom (to kill, steal, etc.), so what freedoms do the people in question supposedly want? But even if a given people does want freedom in the sense of democratic self-determination, wanting isn’t enough. Virtually everyone wants money, but not everyone has the discipline and wherewithal to acquire it; everybody wants health, but some people still can’t resist smoking, eating or drinking themselves to death. Ours is a world full of people too wanting to get what they want, which is one reason why unfulfilled desire is man’s constant companion.

Ironically, the very modernists who stress how foreign Muslims are “just like us” can easily comprehend culture/system incompatibility when our own culture war is at issue. No small number of liberals have concluded that the last opposition to their agenda won’t evaporate until we traditionalists — who, ironically, liberals sometimes liken to the Taliban — die off. Oprah Winfrey said that the old “racists” were just going to have to die; Judge Judy Sheindlin said that those who oppose faux marriage were just going to have to die. What they’re really saying is that the culture on the other side of the culture war has to die (and, believe me, I consider their “culture’s” demise no less necessary). And they figure that it won’t be perpetuated because they’re forging a new culture via the media, academia and entertainment.

So why is it so hard to understand that the same principle applies to foreign intransigents?

If certain moderns can resign themselves to this with respect to Western Christian culture, why can’t they realize that it’s no different with Islamic culture? They don’t think for a moment that they can talk us traditionalists out of our deeply held principles, so why do they think they can talk Muslims out of theirs? And they have only succeeded in shaping the younger generations because they have seized control of the aforementioned culture shapers. So why would they think that Muslim civilization could be reshaped without the same Gramscian march through the madrassahs and other Islamic institutions? They act as if their own domestic political opponents are more foreign than foreigners. But I will explain the reason why.

Just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, distance makes dreams grow fanciful.

As with an irritating neighbor who, owing to continual petty annoyances, you despise more than a tyrant an ocean away, liberals are close enough to us for our behavior to have affected them viscerally so that they feel on an emotional level what they’re incapable of apprehending intellectually. But Muslims are far enough away — and I don’t just mean physically, but, more importantly, psychologically — so that it’s easy to ascribe to them whatever qualities one’s fantasies may prescribe. It’s as with the starry-eyed, naïve young lady who is smitten with an exotic but flawed man and who is just sure (as women so often are) that she’ll be able to change him: after 15 years she can be a cynical old jade who will bitterly lament, “He’ll never change!” The man, you see, made that transition from theoretical foreign naughty boy to up-close domestic nightmare.

So do you really want to know what it would truly take to transform the ‘stan du jour? Alright, but most of you either won’t like it or won’t believe it:

1. Go in with massive force and brutality, Roman style.
2. Execute anyone who offers resistance after dousing him in pig’s blood.
3. Forcibly convert the population to Christianity, and thoroughly infuse their institutions with the faith.
4. Garrison troops there for several generations, repeating steps one and two as necessary to complete the transformation.

And, by the way, there is precedent for this: It’s a version of what the Muslims did when they long ago conquered the old Christian lands of the Mideast and North Africa.

Having said this, I’m not currently recommending such a course. I’m just telling you what would be necessary to effect the kind of change in question. You see, everyone talked about Mideast nation-building when we really just engaged in government-building and what was actually needed was something far grander than both: civilization-building. The moderns thought that if they put sheep’s clothing on a wolf it wouldn’t bite, that they could put the leaves of liberty on a tree of tyranny and they wouldn’t wither and die. We thought we were remedying causes when we were just treating symptoms.

So yesterday’s moderns called WWI “the war to end all wars.” Then their grandchildren gave us the political system to end all wars — democracy — with George W. Bush once saying that democracies don’t go to war with one another. And this is true. After all, when democracy’s birthplace, ancient Athens, democratically decided to launch a disastrous imperialistic war that ultimately cost her people their whole empire, the target was autocratic Sparta; there were no other democracies to war against at the time, you see.

So all we can really say is that democracies haven’t yet gone to war with one another. Perhaps even more to the point, democracies don’t always remain democracies; they often, sometimes quickly and violently, descend into tyranny.

Then they may go to war.

So while some commentators are saying that the current crisis in Iraq vindicates the neo-cons, it only proves that they were better than the liberals at herding cats. A wiser policy was the one we pursued during Cold War days. Understanding that the island boys were going to need a firm hand, we both kept them on their island and tried to ensure a firm hand we could handle: a pro-American dictator, such as Augusto Pinochet or Hosni Mubarak. Oh, the viciously vacuous condemned this as the authoring of tyranny, but they forget that, as Thomas Sowell often points out, in life there often aren’t any solutions, only trade-offs. And accepting this can help prevent making the wrongs ones, such as trading off blood and treasure for that fruit of folderol and fantasy — nothing.

Where Is The Rehabilitation For “Racists”?

For decades liberals have lobbied against punishment and for rehabilitation. The argument was that a mugger or murderer was just a victim of his environment, someone caught in the crosshairs of bad nurturing and neighborhood. Accountability is unwarranted because the person bears no responsibility: he knew not what he did. And so successful was this movement that our penal system was largely reorganized based on the rehabilitation model. Why, I’ve even argued with people who insisted that “punishment doesn’t work” (apparently, they’d never heard of Singapore, caning and virtually zero crime).

So, question: where are the calls for rehabilitation, as opposed to punishment, for “racists” such as Clippers owner Donald Sterling?

And the rehabilitation mentality’s absence isn’t just apparent in the social ostracism and career destruction visited on those accused of the One Liberal Deadly Sin of “racism”*.

(*Some exceptions may apply.)

It isn’t even just apparent in the social persecution of supposed “haters” in general, from Brendan Eich to the Boy Scouts to devout Christians.

Just consider leftism-disgorged “hate-crime” law. It proves ever so explicitly that, somehow, liberals have discovered the utility of punishment; after all, they will justify this legislation by saying that since some crimes target whole communities, they’re so destructive that a message must be sent. It appears that when their own ideological ox is being gored, the people who authored the atheist version of “the Devil made him do it” want Devil’s Island.

A good example is Donald Sterling. It’s not enough that he has had his reputation destroyed, been fined $2.5 million and been “banned for life” by the National Bolsheviks Association. There are people who want newspapers to stop accepting his ads. And the bigoted Al Sharpton — proving hypocrisy knows no bounds — had actually said that the Clippers should be disbanded. Yes, and maybe we should adopt the North Korean model of purging Sterling’s family and friends, too. But how much punishment is enough? How many pounds of flesh will sate the rapacious and blood-stained leftist palate? Would only a gulag and a long, slow, painful death suffice for the world’s Sterlings?

None of this is a surprise if you understand that liberals don’t operate based on principles, but feelings; in keeping with this, liberalism isn’t an ideology. It is a process. Even Marxism has a vision for how society should be (unrealistic though it is), but liberals do not. The only consistent definition of liberalism is “a desire to change the status quo,” which means there will always be, without a guiding vision, directionless, unprincipled change and action. Liberals are the children who ever fight the parents simply because that is the nature of the brat, and they do this even when yesterday’s liberals have become the parents.

How does this relate to punishment? A person operating on principle, on a vision, will try to tame his emotion and say: here’s the crime, here’s what justice dictates, so here is the proportionate punishment. But with liberals there is no justice — it’s “just us” as they’re governed by the shifting sands of convenience. Their feelings tell them that they hate the transgressor and that they want revenge, and it’s never enough to satisfy them viscerally. It’s as with the feeling of hunger: no matter how much you eat, there’s always another appetite mere hours away.

This governance by emotion helps explain why “*Some exceptions may apply.” It sheds light on why liberals haven’t made a federal case out of Bellville, NJ, Democrat mayoral candidate Marie Strumolo Burke, who lamented proposed tax-rate changes and was caught on audio exclaiming, “This is gonna be a f*****g n****r town!” It illuminates why they did nothing when then NBA owner Jay-Z threw a 2010 party in which no whites were allowed. It even explains why Sterling, whose views were long known, received not only a special dispensation but also acclaim and awards from the left. As part of their political phalanx, liberals don’t hate Burke; they don’t hate bigoted blacks such as Jay-Z; they don’t even hate rich, old white men who pay their dues and pay off the cause. And disconnected from Truth and thus having “situational values,” it’s easy for libs to live in a world of rationalization. Just give them plausible deniability in their own minds, so, as Mark Cuban once said about Sterling, they can shrug off the sin as the eccentricities of a fellow who “plays by his own rules.” But don’t you dare out yourself if you’re a white guy. Don’t become a liability to the cause. It’s as if the mistake isn’t the act (at least if you’re one of the initiated) — the mistake is getting caught.

But with those who aren’t part of their phalanx, liberals will hate, hate, hate; they will hunger for vengeance and, since vengeance never eliminates hate (only forgiveness does), there is never an end to their retribution.

To be clear, I’m not saying that outrage over “racism” is always mere artifice. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s reminiscent of medieval heresy accusations, which could be leveled against an individual by vindictive people with an axe to grind. But much of the time if not most, the anger is real.

It’s just selectively triggered.

In rare cases, the transgression itself may be enough to induce the emotional response. Most of the time, however, it’s some combination of transgression+transgressor+situation. Transgressor can negate transgression, as when a black person makes a bigoted remark; or transgressor can magnify transgression, as when a white Republican makes a corresponding remark. If a white Democrat or Democrat enabler does, transgressor status plus a situation in which you somehow maintain that plausible deniability gets you by. If it’s a wealthy, powerful black man whose success is necessary for the cause, as with Barack Obama, well, then you’re bulletproof. Then again, if you’re a wealthy, powerful white man whose failure is necessary for the cause, as with George Allen and “macaca,” you’re history.

This isn’t to say that most liberals are fully conscious of what animates them. Self-awareness is often lacking among man, and this is especially true among philosophically dysfunctional men (who we today often call liberals). All most leftists know when spewing venom at a supposedly “racist” conservative is that they hate the person, and they assume it’s only because of his transgression. Living situational lives where everything is compartmentalized, they generally don’t know what truly drives them or consider, at the moment they’re wallowing in hatred, that in the past they’ve reacted very differently to liberals in the same boat.

Of course, another factor is that liberals don’t view these transgressions the way a normal person would. They often “feel” — “think” would be the wrong word because, again, leftists generally operate emotionally — that a black’s or liberal’s uttering of a racial remark is of a very different moral species than when a white conservative does so. A black has a right to such sentiments because of the “legacy of slavery.” As for a white liberal, it was perhaps just a weak moment, a slip of the tongue; after all, the person has proven his credentials with his public face as a good leftist foot soldier. If a white conservative says the same thing, however (which never seems nearly as common), it just reflects the deep-seated bigotry that you have to know resides in his dark soul.

Going even deeper, understand that this accords with liberals’ favored reality-denying modern isms. Nominalism states there is nothing that objectively makes both a tiger and a buff tabby “cats,” categorically speaking — we just happen to view them that way. Likewise, a normal person may see two bigoted statements or two acts of punishment as occupying the same category, but there is, objectively speaking, no such thing as a category called “bigoted statements” or “acts of punishment.” Such classifications only exist in our minds, so we can assign these labels as we see fit. And in deference to relativism, which boils down to the notion that there’s no right or wrong, neither punishment nor rehabilitation can be inherently good or bad, and consistency can be no better than inconsistency.

At bottom, this is how devout leftists view the world. Subscribing to the Protagorean proposition “Man is the measure of all things” and the apocryphal one “Might makes right,” when they win culture wars and take control, they make themselves the measure of all things. Perhaps the best characterization of their philosophy is occultist Aleister Crowley’s formulation, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

And what they wilt do is persecute you. Remember that, nice-guy conservatives, the next time you want to fight them using Queensbury Rules.

The Liberal Media’s Donald Sterling Race-Baiting

Never let a racial crisis go to waste is, I suppose, the credo of the Machiavellian mainstream media. Since the release of the Don Sterling audio, liberals haven’t missed a chance to play the race card for all its worth. One of the worst offenders is a New York Daily News columnist named Harry Siegel, who — in a piece of pablum bearing a picture of NBA owners portrayed as Klansmen — bemoans the lack of Diversity™ in league ownership and management. Unfortunately for Siegy, his points, which start with the Klan hoods, only get worse from there.

A man with a conscience (malformed though it is), Siegel laments that the NBA is “a league where three-quarters of the players are black, but fewer than half the coaches and not even a fifth of the league office staff are black, as of October, 2013, and every majority team owner except Michael Jordan is white.” But there’s an easy remedy.

Institute a quota ensuring that whites, and other races, get proportionate representation among NBA players.

This would make the league approximately 63 percent white, 17 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 6 percent Asian. The remaining one percent can be represented by Clint Eastwood’s empty chair on the sidelines, and we can throw in a primordial dwarf if it makes the Diversity™ didacts feel better.

And why not? Why should proportionality go only one way? The bias here lies in self-righteously bloviating about Diversity™ when whites dominate an area while acting as if you don’t even notice it when blacks do.

Of course, liberals would say that the players have earned their positions. But how do we know the owners haven’t? After all, some individuals definitely seem to have a gift for building financial empires. This isn’t to say that every rich person makes his fortune through respectable means. Heck, some people even make millions dribbling a ball around.

But it seems that liberals, prejudiced to the core, only have a problem with it when the “wrong” groups succeed. With the contraception con spent, Barack Obama (PBUH) has used his Teleprompter recently to rail against the male/female wage gap — and he wasn’t talking about the one where young urban women earn 8 percent more than their male peers (because they’re 50 percent more likely to graduate college; I don’t think ol’ Barry mentions this gap, either). Libs could also cite how NBA owners are inordinately Jewish, but that narrative won’t work yet. And the highest-earning religious group in the nation is Hindus, but, last I heard, colleges weren’t schooling mush-head kids in “Hindu privilege.”

But talking about those things might be “publicly toxic”; you know, in the sense that Siegel said he’s sure that Sterling is “not the only owner whose private thoughts are publicly toxic.” No doubt. And I’m certain this is limited to rich white NBA owners, or at least white people in general. It also occurs to me, however, that people can develop a tolerance for certain toxins, such as when black ex-basketball players suggest all-black leagues or black civil-rights hustlers call a city “Hymietown.” And, in keeping with the toxicological principle “The dose makes the poison,” tolerance for toxins disgorged by whites stands at about .010 parts per million.

Then there are the millions, of dollars, that Siegel laments the NBA players are not getting, writing that theirs is a “league where the 360 or so athletes who, in fact, make the game, split its proceeds about 50-50 with ownership.” Note that he also dismissed the owners, who allegedly believe they make the game, as “[w]ealthy men…[who] think highly of their own contributions.”

Now, some might say that the fans make the game; after all, you earn zilch without a market. But what is Siegel’s point? Wouldn’t the proceeds split be much the same in the virtually all-white NHL? And how is that different from any corporation or successful business? A person doesn’t invest his heart and soul and risk capital in a venture without the carrot of a possibly handsome return; not even liberals such as Little Big Gulp (a.k.a. Michael Bloomberg), Warren Buffet and Donald Sterling do that.

So it sounds as if Siegel is lamenting economic freedom, as if he’d prefer a Marxist model (this certainly would have the upside of not enriching men who dribble balls and pundits who dribble ideas). Of course, nothing is stopping the players from pooling their resources and trying to buy into their team.

But perhaps most telling about Siegel’s article is what could be akin to a Freudian slip. A recurrent theme of his is that “we” can feel good about ourselves for taking the principled stand against Sterling, but there is much work yet to do. He writes, “We can all take a moment and pat ourselves on the back for not being as horrible as this appalling old man,” and later, “Once we’re done feeling good about not being Sterling…,” it’s time to beat the Diversity™ drum. But he also self-righteously states that Sterling’s “obscene behavior…has been well documented” and asks, “how could this have gone on for so long?”

What this gets at is the phoniness of the left. Let’s be clear on something: the “we” here isn’t me. It’s not most of you readers, the Heritage Foundation, Catholic Church or Southern Baptist Convention.

It is the left.

Notoriously liberal Mark Cuban, who now calls Sterling “abhorrent,” said in 2009, “I like Donald. He plays by his own rules.” (Translation: a lib who becomes a liability to the cause is “abhorrent.” A lib who is getting away with it “plays by his own rules.”) Black actor Leon Isaac Kennedy called Sterling “a prince among men.” The NAACP gave him an award and was set to bestow another. And ex-NBA commissioner David Stern, who some libs now criticize for not only tolerating the owner but even rewarding him, is, like Sterling, a Democrat donor.

The “we,” libs, is you.

It’s not conservatives. It’s not white people. It’s you.

You anointed yourselves arbiters and overseers of acceptable racial commentary; “racism” is your hang-up, your defined One Deadly Sin, your great litmus test. Don’t blame “society” — upholding yourprinciples is your responsibility.

So most of the lib outrage over “racism” is, when not downright phony, motivated by selectively triggered emotion. It’s a ploy used to tear down tradition and traditionalists on specious grounds and win the culture war. It’s not for lib-enablers, such as late Senator Robert Byrd, who’d been in the KKK; blacks such a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton; Bill Clinton with his Obama-coffee remark; or fat cats who make big donations — until it’s time to throw them under the bus.

As for Siegel, if he’s so concerned about Diversity™, perhaps he could turn his columnist slot over to a minority. After all, the vast majority of columnists are white, Siegy, and you wouldn’t want some future writer to have to lament, “how could this have gone on for so long?”

Vladimir Putin Caesar And Our Great Geo-Political Turning Point

We are witnessing, I believe, a turning point in geopolitical history, one future historians may analyze as we have the Roman Empire’s fall. Vladimir Putin is making a move — and it’s not just against Ukraine. It may not be just a move against Eastern Europe. It’s not even, perhaps, just a move against US world dominance.

There was a time when the USSR was the “evil empire, a godless Golgotha. But that was then. Now, in 2013-14, Putin has seen fit to say, in his December State of the Nation speech, “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. …Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.”

This roughly coincided with Russia’s enactment of laws prohibiting homosexual propaganda and was a salvo against both the West’s Great Sexual Heresy and what enables it: moral relativism.

In another shot at relativism, Putin averred, “Society is now required…to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning.”

The Russian president then took aim at multiculturalism: “Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures.”

And now we’re seeing the release of Russian Culture War 2.0. In a document called “Foundations of the State Cultural Policy,” the Kremlin is doubling down and writes, “Russia must be viewed as a unique and original civilization that cannot be reduced to ‘East’ or ‘West.’ …A concise way of formulating this stand would be, ‘Russia is not Europe.’” The document goes on to state that Russia rejects “such principles as multiculturalism and tolerance” and “projects imposing alien values on society.”

No, this is not your grandfather’s Russia.

But it very well may be your great-grandfather’s.

There are a few different things, I suspect, going on here. The 20 years after the Cold War’s end had been a period of relative co-operation between Russia and the West, but you can’t define yourself by going along (to get along) with the world’s cultural hegemon; you can’t be band leader by playing second fiddle. So Putin is defining his nation as the un-morally-wild West. In addition, he knows that to rally a people behind you, you need a boogeyman, your Eurasia, the “Nappy” (Napoleon) who will “get you,” British children, if you’re not good.

Yet it isn’t just that Putin is restarting the Cold War. Nor is he just an old-line KGB Bolshevik, as some stuck in commentary amber have suggested. He’s smart enough to realize that Marxism is, as the kids today would say, just so “played.”

He more likely wants to be the next czar.

What’s my theory? Try this on for size: It isn’t just that Putin wants to restore lost Russian glory.

He sees a chance to be a historic figure.

Note here that you don’t have to be good to be historic; Roman statesman Cicero called Julius Caesar an “ambitious villain,” but Caesar’s name is far better known than Cicero’s. And let’s consider what might be Putin’s calculation: the West has long been the world’s cultural trend-setter, spreading an increasingly un-Christian creed to all corners of the Earth. Of course, not everyone is on board. The Islamic abode wants nothing to do with it, but it’s Muslim; sub-Saharan Africa is largely opposed, but it lacks clout. As for South America, in addition to lacking clout it’s confused; and while China is gaining power, it’s largely pagan and non-committal on the culture war.

Enter the second Vladimir the Great.

Putin doesn’t just see a chance to define himself — and to unite the Russian people behind him — via opposition to the West, as his Marxist comrades once did.

He sees a chance to do it as today’s Charlemagne.

There’s an unsatisfied market for Christendom’s standard bearer, and Putin perceives an opportunity to exploit it. China won’t do it, Africa can’t, South America wouldn’t and couldn’t. But just as the original Vladimir the Great Christianized the Kievan Rus’, just as Charlemagne forged and helped Christianize modern Europe, Putin has a chance to lift the cross — and himself — high.

And the West is a gift that keeps on giving insofar as this goes. Our cultural Marxists are on the march, smell blood and will not stop. They will continue spending us into insolvency, perverting us into prone position, relativizing us into risibility and “immigrationizing” us into irrelevance. Even now, not satisfied with placing another great nail in marriage’s coffin, our militant secularists are making moves to legitimize pedophilia and bestiality. It’s onward Luciferian soldiers.

And for Putin, it’s onward Christian soldier. As our degradation advances, Russia’s star can rise commensurately. Putin knows the West is in decline. He sees the demographic trends, that the US is transforming into a Third World/Hispanic nation and Western Europe into a Third World/Muslim continent. He knows that if there is another superpower in the near future, it will be Russia or China. And he knows what card he has to play to win this game.

Of course, while we could argue about whether the Christian-soldier solution is tactic and strategy or just tactic, it is so obviously prudent that it’s inconceivable Putin wouldn’t have pursued it. Just consider the benefits, starting with justification of Russian expansionism. If you’re a typical Russian, might not the idea that “the West is decadent, debauched, exhausted and effete” justify, in your mind, a Russian manifest destiny? Might it not be natural and wholly in accordance with man’s nature to believe that your moral superiority gives you the right to dominate? Note that this is the theory that helped justify the colonial powers’ imperialism: they were bringing civilization to a world of darkness. And it’s what we do to this day, applying secular values as standard. How often have we heard intervention in the Islamic “stan” du jour justified by pointing out that its rulers oppress women and are intolerant? The judgments are different, but the desire to claim the moral high ground is the same.

Then consider foreign relations. The USSR used to jockey for world influence with us; whereas before they had to market Marxism, however, now they can peddle purity. Standing against decadent Western secular-imperialism can win Russia many friends in Africa and even the Middle East, and most of the Far East will go with the dominant power.

Lastly, even if Putin is a functional atheist — even if his road to Heaven is paved with bad intentions — he surely knows that if Russia wants to prosper, Western secular/hedonist isms must be rejected. And why wouldn’t he know? As Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov and others have , it was his erstwhile Marxist buddies who encouraged those movements in the West for the purposes of undermining our civilization.

But we’re doing a very good job of undermining it ourselves, and Putin is more concerned with building his own. Pat Buchanan recently wrote about this and pointed out that Putin may very well view his realm as “The Third Rome:”

The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today’s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was — Moscow.

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

…Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

Note here that the term “czar” is derived from the Latin word Caesar. And while Putin may be just as satisfied to be Julius or Augustus as Constantine, I’m quite sure that Marxism is no longer his bag. That would be playing second fiddle again — and the last thing the Russians want to be is like us.

Razing Arizona: Conservatives Succeed At Failing Again

Perhaps Arizona governor Jan Brewer was sincere when saying that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (SB 1062) she vetoed yesterday could “create more problems than it purports to solve.” After all, observers such as Napp Nazworth at The Christian Post contend that SB 1062 might actually — contrary to all the hysteria — have made it harder for most business owners to refuse service to homosexuals. This analysis may have merit and can be read here, but it’s irrelevant to a larger point:

The GOP’s handling of this matter was a good illustration of conservatism’s fatal flaw.

Whatever the legal realities, about something we can be sure: many conservatives believed in SB 1062. And as with the three GOP lawmakers who voted for the bill but turned against it after the heat was turned up,  many of those conservatives caved under great pressure from greedy businesses, limp-wristed neo-con artists (John McCain) and that great leftist public-relations team (the media).

I’ve long lamented that conservatives are conservative; that is to say, they play defense and just try to protect the status quo, which was, though conservatives generally appear oblivious to the fact, created by yesterday’s liberals.

So they never actually try to rescind those efforts at thought control called hate-crime laws, but just hope to limit the scope of new proposals for them. They never really endeavor to eliminate government programs and bureaucracies; they just aim to slow down their metastasizing. They hardly ever try to reduce spending and shrink government, but just seek to limit the rate at which both balloon. And with the Arizona effort, they weren’t really willing to do what was necessary to reclaim freedom of association. They just proposed a half measure and then folded like cheap cameras.

As for the Three Mouseketeers who ran for cover — senators Bob Worsley, Adam Driggs and Steve Pierce — they wrote in a letter to Brewer that while they wanted “to create a shield for all citizens’ religious liberties, the bill has been mischaracterized by its opponents as a sword for religious intolerance.”

Wow, is that all it takes?

We might as well just bow down and lick the left’s jackboots right now.

How did these three chronologically adult politicians think the left would characterize their effort? Who are these guys, Beaver and Wally Cleaver and Dennis (the Menace) Mitchell? Of course the left is going to call you names! That’s what they do. And now you’ve just confirmed for them, once again, that this is all they have to do to bring you to your knees. Welcome to How to Lose a Culture War 101.

How should conservatives handle such name calling?

Hurl names right back.

Call the leftists what they are: tyrants, socialists and haters of liberty. Explain that they want to destroy freedom of association. Seek to control the language of the debate and to frame the narrative — and use their own Alinsky tactics against them. And we do have one great advantage: we’re right and righteous.

As for strategy, realize that framing this as a matter of freedom of religion makes it seem a special-interest cause, as not everyone considers himself “religious.” What we really need is a Freedom of Association Restoration Act.

For this freedom is increasingly trampled. A photographer in New Mexico being sued and two Oregon bakers forced to close their business — both for refusing to be party to lesbian so-called “weddings” — are just two examples of the phenomenon.

But think about the supposition justifying this kind of government coercion: no one would deny me the right to include in or exclude from my home whomever I please. Why should I lose this right simply because I decide to erect extra tables and sell food?

It’s still my private property, paid for with my own money and created by the sweat of my own brow. It’s tyranny to give me a choice between relinquishing my rights — and starving.

Likewise, no one would force you to bake cakes for or take pictures of people with whom you didn’t want to consort. Why should this change just because you decide to bake cakes or take pictures for money? The principle is simple: your home, your oven, your camera — your choice.

The hypocrisy here is thick, too. We wouldn’t force a Muslim butcher to deal in pork or a Jewish baker to place Nazi symbols on a cake; in fact, there’s a story about a supermarket that refused to place the name of a neo-Nazi’s son — Adolf Hitler Campbell — on a birthday cake. And even more recently we heard about a bar in California denying service to legislators seeking to protect marriage. Of course, the left will claim there’s no comparison, as pork eaters, Nazis and pro-marriage individuals aren’t protected groups. So let’s get this straight:

They trumpet discrimination as an argument for disallowing discrimination.

And what invidious discrimination theirs is. They somehow think that supporting the granting of just some groups “protected status” — and thus leaving other groups, apparently, “unprotected” — gives them moral high ground in trying to discriminate against yet other groups by forcing them, but not others (e.g., those opposing and denying service to traditionalist legislators), to violate their deeply held convictions. Only a twisted mind could consider this justice. Of course, though, with liberals telling us via a high-school textbook (Magruder’s American Government & Civics) that justice “is difficult to define for justice is a concept, an idea, an invention of the human mind [and that] [l]ike other concepts such as truth, liberty, and fairness justice means what people want it to mean,” this is no surprise.

Some will balk at my argument, saying that my position on freedom of association would allow businesses to discriminate even on the basis of race or sex. The answer to this is illustrated with a simple analogy: does freedom of speech mean anything if only extended to popular speech? It then isn’t freedom of speech at all, but merely the establishment of different prohibitions than may exist in Iran, North Korea or Cuba. Likewise, the true test of whether we really believe in freedom of association is if we’ll extend it to even those who would exercise it in a way we abhor.

As for businesses that must operate in today’s tyrannical, rights-squelching environment, I have a solution. If, for instance, people forced me through law to provide bakery services for them, the trauma just might affect my ability to identify and measure ingredients and follow a recipe. And I would then show them that you can have your cake, but you can’t eat it, too.

Divided We Stand: A Traditionalist Manifesto

Conservatives are generally very nice people — who never saw a culture war they couldn’t lose. That is to say, we often hear cracks about how Barack Obama and his ilk may “evolve” on issues, but conservatives exhibit that tendency, too, and their evolution goes something like this:

“Marriage is between one man and one woman, period!”

Five years later…

“I can accept civil unions, but marriage shouldn’t be redefined.”

After five years more:

“The states can do whatever they want, just keep the feds out of it.”

And 10 years further on:

“People can do what they want. How does faux marriage affect me, anyway?” (This is the point British “conservatives” have reached.)

And at an even later juncture it’s, “Why shouldn’t homosexuals have the right to ‘marry’? It’s a matter of equality.” (Just ask some “conservatives” in Sweden.)

Oh, this isn’t limited to marriage or anything else some dismiss as “social issues.” Conservatives were against Social Security (in FDR’s time) before they tolerated it before they were for it before they demanded it. And they are against socialized medicine. But should it endure for 15 years, their children will tolerate it and then accept it and then expect it — as today’s conservatives do in Western Europe.

This gets at the only consistent definition of conservatism: a desire to “conserve,” to preserve the status quo. This is why while 1950s conservatives in the US were staunchly anti-communist, conservatives in the USSRwere communist. As the status quo changes, so does the nature of the prevailing conservatism. And it is liberals, as the agents of change (without the hope), who shape tomorrow’s status quo.

Here’s how it works: the liberals come to the bargaining table demanding a change. The conservatives don’t like it, but being “reasonable” they give the other side some part of what they want. And it doesn’t matter if it amounts to 50 percent, 30, 15 or just 1 percent.

Because the libs will be back, next year, next election cycle, next decade.

Again and again and again.

And each time the cons will get conned, giving the libs a few more slices, until the left has the whole loaf and those ideological loafers, conservatives, are left with crumbs and a crumbled culture.

In a word, today’s conservatives are generally people who have assimilated into yesterday’s liberals’ culture. And every time we compromise — on civil unions, big-government programs or whatever it may be — we assimilate further. And what is the nature of this evolution?

It is nothing less than a superior culture being subsumed by an inferior one.

Now, all this perhaps sounds hopeless. Are we damned to inexorable and irrevocable movement toward the “left,” at least until the complete collapse of civilization is wrought? Well, there is an alternative to assimilation.

Separation.

There has been some talk of secession lately. But note that there is a prerequisite for political separation: cultural separation. Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Slovenia didn’t become their own nations because they suddenly thought the name Yugoslavia was no longer cool, but because of profound cultural differences. And Catalans in Spain some time back empowered parties that have called for an independence referendum this year because of cultural differences. Make the cultural differences great enough, and separation (assuming you can avoid bondage via a governmental iron fist, which is the other possibility) is a natural by-product.

But a key to increasing that cultural divide is avoiding assimilation. Did you ever hear of an Ainu (Japan’s original people) independence movement in Japan? No, because they’ve been largely absorbed by the wider culture, sort of how traditionalists get absorbed by our modernistic culture and end up having, at best, children who’ll reflect today’s liberals and be called tomorrow’s conservatives. So how can further assimilation be avoided?

We only need to look at how it’s done all over the world. And there are two ways. To illustrate the first, consider how ardent Muslims avoid being subsumed. They don’t view fellow citizens in a host nation as national brothers.

But as the “other.”

Oh, the others may occupy the same borders, but they are as alien as anyone outside them. Their culture is to be rejected not just because it’s decadent and despicable — and our liberal-created variety is certainly those things — but because it is of the other. So it is with the others’ laws, social codes, and traditions, too: they are born of an infidel, alien culture and are to be viewed with extreme suspicion if not hostility.

And this is precisely how leftists should be viewed.

For this to work, our instincts must be thus: If liberals say left, we go right. If they say down, we say up. If they scream “Change!” we shout all the louder “Tradition!” and then push for our own change — tradition’s restoration.

Note here that I’m not speaking of a cold intellectual understanding of the issues, which, don’t get me wrong, is important. But just as it is passion that makes a man fight for a woman, it is passion that makes you fight for a cause. Loathe what the liberals stand for, meet their agenda with animosity, cultivate a visceral desire to wipe it from the face of the Earth. Hate, hate, hate it with the fires of a thousand burning suns.

One drawback to this tactic for division, however, is that it constitutes a blind defiance that could conceivably reject virtue along with vice. An example of this is when elements of the black community dismiss education, Christianity and higher culture because they view embracing them as “acting white.” Yet since liberals are right only about 0.4 percent of the time (and I’m perhaps being generous), this isn’t the greatest of dangers at the moment. Nonetheless, this brings us to the ideal method for separation.

G.K. Chesterton once said, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” A good example of love-driven separation is the Amish. They do try to avoid hating anyone (although I suspect they hate certain ideas), yet their love for their culture is so great that they remain a people apart. Of course, where they fall short is that they won’t fight at all, even politically. And this philosophy will not yield separation on a wide scale because the left simply won’t allow millions of people to live “off the grid.” Someone has to fund the nanny state, after all.

But the proper combination is obvious. We need sort of an Amish jihad, a deep love of the good and hatred of the evil that translates into action. But there is a prerequisite for this, and it brings us to something both the Amish and Muslim jihadists have in common.

They believe in Truth.

Sure, the Muslims may call it the will of Allah; the Amish, God’s law. But the point is that they aren’t awash in a relativism that, amounting to the Protagorean notion that “man is the measure of all things,” is unduly influenced by man. They don’t see a large number of people lobbying for some loony social innovation and figure that, with man as arbiter, they have to “get with the times.” Rooted to what they see as eternal, they don’t bend to the ephemeral.

Quite the opposite of G.W. Bush, I’m a divider — not a uniter. If this sounds bad, note that Jesus himself said He had not come to unite the world but as a sword to divide brother against brother. And while I certainly don’t claim to be God or even godly, I do know that tolerance of evil in unity’s name is a vice — and blessed division a virtue.

We can hate what is in front of us, love what is behind us, or both. But if we’re sheep and not soldiers, compromisers and not crusaders, Western civilization’s days will be behind us — and in front, perhaps, a thousand years of darkness.

Homosexual Mafia Gets Duck Dy-Nasty

When I saw the headline yesterday about how “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson had commented on a certain sexuality-defined group, I wondered how long it would be before he got the “treatment.”

I saw the no more than a few hours later.

In case you haven’t heard, the faith-filled Louisianan wound up in hot water after being asked what was sinful by a GQ interviewer and offering the following answer, as presented by the magazine:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God.”

Can you guess which of the above groups caused what subsequently befell Robertson: suspension from his A&E show?

It wasn’t the greedy.

Or the idolaters.

It wasn’t bestialists, though there’s an effort to legitimize their behavior now, too.

The swindlers?

Nope — not the slanderers, either.

Hint: One of the organizations whose complaints got Robertson suspended was GLAAD, and that doesn’t stand for Guiding Light Advocates for Adulterers and Drunkards.

Of course, we all know the answer. GLAAD characterized Robertson’s comments as vile and “extreme,” and now he joins Dr. Laura Schlessinger and others whose careers were hobbled by the Velvet Mafia.

This is probably where I’m expected to ask, “Where’s freedom of speech?” or whine about how the left should respect the other side’s beliefs. But this would ignore reality, which is that every civilization has its “values.” And as someone once pointed out, stigmas are the corollaries of values; if we’re going to value certain things, it follows that what contradicts or condemns them will be de-valued.

People who don’t understand this will utter refrains such as “I don’t care what you do in your private life, just don’t shove it in my face,” as if something can be completely de-stigmatized but then, somehow, remain in the closet. Those who do grasp it, however, might say something such as what homosexual activists Hunter Madsen and Marshall Kirk wrote in their book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s. They said that once homosexuality was normalized, those who would “still feel compelled” to oppose it would be “cow[ed] and silence[d]…as far as possible” and that if homosexual activists can “produce a major realignment solidly in favour of gay rights, the intransigents (like the racists of twenty years ago) will eventually be effectively silenced by both law and polite society.” And what do we see 20 years later? Criticism of homosexuality will get overseas Westerners punished through law and Americans punished through social pressure.

How’s that tolerance workin’ for ya’?

“Tolerance,” as it has been marketed, was always a con. Aristotle said that “[t]olerance is the last virtue of a dying society,” but it’s also the vice that kills it. And it so often is a vice because it’s generally misunderstood. For one thing, tolerance always implies a negative, real or perceived; you wouldn’t have to tolerate a beautiful car or a delectable meal — you relish those things. But you might have to tolerate a cold or bad weather. Thus, tolerance is only noble in two situations: One is when dealing with something objectively negative that cannot be eliminated, such as irremediable pain. The other is when confronted with something you don’t happen to like and could avoid, but that is objectively good or neutral; an example would be tolerating a food you detest in order to avoid offending your hosts.

So while we might admire a person who can bear a cross with a stiff upper lip, what if he abides a negative he needn’t put up with? He then is either a doormat or a masochist.

That’s us.

The doormat, that is.

This brings us back to that modernistic “I don’t care…just don’t shove it in my face” attitude. This is a pipe dream and the first step toward degradation and tyranny; it is a false Americanism. As John Wesley said, “What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace.” And once this happens it is ridiculous to wonder why the thing in question is out of the closet; accepted things by definition always will be. At this point those with an affinity for it will take the next step: marketing.

This is precisely what Madsen and Kirk prescribed with respect to homosexuality, writing that Americans needed to be desensitized to the behavior via a “continuous flood of gay-related advertising,” a “conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.” Madsen, mind you, was a marketing man by trade.

And when this marketing is successful enough and the newly exalted product is considered a good, what will that which condemns it be considered? This is how good becomes bad, bad becomes good, and those conned into being tolerant come to be seen as intolerable (I discuss this in-depth here).

And thus is Christianity being suppressed. Make no mistake, the concept of sin is central to Christianity — and sexual sin is part of that centrality. Lust, correctly defined as disordered sexual desire, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. So saying you cannot talk about sexual sin — in its entirety — is to say you cannot talk about Christianity in its entirety. And this is part of the process of relegating Christianity to the closet.

This tolerance trap is why Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote in 1931:

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

…Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. …Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in their laboratories….

Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.

Our culture war is a fight to the death. The barbarians are inside the gate, and they don’t listen to reason. Show them the same tolerance they show you — and then show them the door. In the case of A&E, what should happen is that they be boycotted till brought to their knees.

To their knees.

Unless we can rediscover virtue and muster total intolerance for the intolerable, our decline will be inexorable.

Rise In Female Breadwinners Means America Is A Loser

When women start doing what men have traditionally done, yours is a civilization of the setting sun.  This is brought to mind when pondering a recent Pew Research Center study showing that women are now the primary or sole breadwinners in 40 percent of American households.  You may have heard the story — it created quite a stir on Fox News, with Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly (who became quite hysterical) taking exception to male colleagues’ warnings about the development’s sociological implications.  But if these two ladies, and the other critics, had reacted rationally and not emotionally, they would realize what is obvious:

The rise in female breadwinners is a sign of a civilization in decline.

Let’s start by first examining the study.  While the term “breadwinner” conjures up images of pleasingly plump paychecks, the real story here is the rise of poor single mothers.  Among the 40 percent of women in the breadwinner group, 63 percent are single mothers.  This isn’t surprising, since the out-of-wedlock birthrate has risen from about 4 percent in the 1940s to 41 percent today (72 percent in the black community).  So what kind of “bread” are we talking about?  Writes Amy Langfield of CNBC, “The median income for a single mother who has never been married was $17,400 as of 2011.”  And, obviously, having large numbers of single mothers, with essentially fatherless children, struggling to make ends meet isn’t good for the women, the children, or the society as a whole.

The picture looks better for the married 37 percent of the breadwinner group, but only by comparison.  Twenty-nine percent of these women’s husbands are unemployed.  Moreover, Pew describes these women as older, college-educated, and white.  Translation: they’re the one-child wonders.  These are often women who postpone childbirth in deference to careerism and then, perhaps after dropping a tidy sum at a fertility clinic, have their sole son or daughter.  Why does this warrant mention?  Because as the documentary Demographic Winter points out, this phenomenon is a significant contributing factor to the plummeting birth rates among Western peoples.  Outside New Zealand, there isn’t one major European-descent group with a replacement-level birth rate.  And for all you secular-feminist chauvinists so proud of your cultural hegemony, what do you think happens to values that cause people to erase themselves?

So why can’t the Megyn Kellys of the world perceive the rise in female breadwinners as the warning sign it is?  Because their feminist dogma teaches that any female “gain” relative to men is positive, and any criticism of it is blind male chauvinism.  These are the people who cheer girls’ “better” performance in schools even though this is largely attributable to boys’ worsening performance (and improved female test scores aren’t relevant, because the exams, like the boys, have been dumbed down).  It’s a mindset that would consider it a good thing if women won every future marathon because men either lost their legs or stopped running.

And that is the point.  If a warring nation must move a few divisions from the southern front to shore up the northern, it isn’t a victory for those divisions; it means the war effort is waning.  And if the divisions’ generals view it as a personal victory because they’ll have the opportunity to distinguish themselves, they’re self-centered and ignorant.

Likewise, it was a sign of crisis when women had to assume men’s roles in the factories during WWII, but the idea was that the crisis would end and normalcy resume.  But today we are in perpetual war — culture war — in a never-ending crisis in which we fight ourselves and confuse losses with gains.  No, the intersex wage gap isn’t a bad thing, and it isn’t good when it starts to close.  The size of that gap correlates with the health of the nuclear family; the larger it is, the greater men’s ability to support their families and women’s opportunity to stay at home with the children.  No, it isn’t good when girls outshine boys in school, as this reflects a society of undisciplined lads and a hostile yet permissive, feminist-oriented academia.

And, no, it isn’t good when you destroy patriarchy.  Why?  G.K. Chesterton put it best when he wrote, “What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.”  If you want matriarchy, just go into the black community.  Women rule the roost there, but they reign in a hell born of degraded morals and family breakdown.  There has never been a successful matriarchy — the notion of a matriarchal prehistory is a myth — and there never will be.

This is why, ultimately, the feminist model is destined for the dustbin of history.  The only system that ensures the perpetuation of civilization (replacement-level birth rates) is patriarchy; the only system that compels women and men to fulfill their responsibilities to hearth and home is patriarchy.  And this is why, barring the end of man or a dystopian future in which children are lab-created assembly-line style to be the collective’s drones, patriarchy is inevitable.

There is no substitute for tradition. The Soviets learned this the hard way, for after undermining the family, sex roles, and religion, mass murderer Joseph Stalin actually outlawed abortion in a vain attempt to combat a bottomed-out birth rate.  But today Russia’s population is still declining by 700,000 per year — the wages of their statist sin.

When a people would be invaded or conquered years ago, the men and boys above a certain age would sometimes be killed.  Emasculate a society, and it’s no longer a force to be reckoned with.  But we have emasculated ourselves, killing off manhood by neutering men emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.  This won’t end well, but for sure it will end.  Because the feminist band can play on, but the rising water will soon drown out their music — for good.