This is a much longer read than it needs to be. Its length and erudition reflect the publication itself and the academic audience who are thrilled by the roots and historical repetition of moods and movements. Millenarianism is nothing new. It comes and goes and life goes on.

Ecologism, the sole truly original force of the past half-century, has challenged the goals of progress and raised the question of its limits. It has awakened our sensitivity to nature, emphasized the effects of climate change, pointed out the exhaustion of fossil fuels. Onto this collective credo has been grafted a whole apocalyptic scenography that has already been tried out with communism, and that borrows from Gnosticism as much as from medieval forms of messianism. Cataclysm is part of the basic tool-kit of Green critical analysis, and prophets of decay and decomposition abound. They beat the drums of panic and call upon us to expiate our sins before it is too late.

This fear of the future, of science, and of technology reflects a time when humanity, and especially Western humanity, has taken a sudden dislike to itself. We are exasperated by our own proliferation and can no longer stand ourselves. Whether we want to be or not, we are tangled up with seven billion other members of our species. Rejecting both capitalism and socialism, ecologism has come to power almost nowhere. But it has won the battle of ideas. The environment is the new secular religion that is rising, in Europe especially, from the ruins of a disbelieving world. We have to subject it to critical evaluation in turn and unmask the infantile disease that is eroding and discrediting it: catastrophism.

There are at least two ecologies: one rational, the other nonsensical; one that broadens our outlook while the other narrows it; one democratic, the other totalitarian. The first wants to tell us about the damage done by industrial civilization; the second infers from this the human species’ guilt. For the latter, nature is only a stick to be used to beat human beings. Just as third-worldism was the shame of colonial history, and repentance was contrition with regard to the present, catastrophism constitutes the anticipated remorse of the future: The meaning of history having evaporated, every change is a potential collapse that augurs nothing good.

What Might the Scandal Endgame Look Like?

Simberg builds a case for impeachment that depends rather much on Republican cojones. It also depends upon whether the IRS is seen as a manipulator of last Fall’s election and if there is a John Dean out there, or more than one, who will testify that Obama played a direct role in any od the scandals. We think he did, and in a more direct way than creating the atmosphere that made them possible. In any case, it’s going to get worse.

North Dakota has the Ugliest Residents?

Technology and Collective Action: The Effect of Cell Phone Coverage and Political Violence in Africa

[snip] The benefits of mobile technology in other regions are widely hailed. The availability of cell phones and use of social media is often credited with playing a key role in the Arab Spring, which toppled dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, and sparked protest movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa. [snip]

Key findings include:

• Even when confounding variables such as income, inequality, ethnic fractionalization, geography are accounted for, increases in cell phone coverage are associated with higher levels of violence throughout Africa.
• When evaluated on an individual country level, the impact of cell phone coverage on conflict is also significant within each country.
• Greater cell phone coverage leads to more conflict in “areas with structural conditions that favor violence” than those where the conditions do not favor violence; it “enables groups to overcome their collective action and coordination problems more easily, which translates to more organized conflict events.”
• The authors conclude that “cell phones lead to a boost in the capacity of rebels to communicate and monitor in-group behavior, thus increasing in-group cooperation. Furthermore, cell phones allow for coordination of insurgent activity across geographically distant locations.”

[snip]

They forgot to include Climate Change.

Yes, Barack O’Bama and his lovely wife, Shillelagh (Celtic for “Michelle”), are living it up in Ireland for a couple of days and a few million dollars. He’s attending the G8 summit for the critical purpose of being away from reporters asking about his legion of scandals, and Michelle and the girls are along for the critical purpose of burning through millions of taxpayer dollars to have lunch with Bono (really), look at harps in museums (really), and to tell anyone in Ireland who’ll listen that “it’s good to be home” (really).

The president also took time off from his busy schedule to give a speech to an audience of Irish teens, telling them to “stay peaceful” and lay off any Catholic versus Protestant violence – perhaps by converting to Islam. Okay, he didn’t say that last part, but it’s more or less implied at this point.  [snip]

Early this month a Gallup Poll found that Congress ranks last among 16 “societal groups” in the measure of popular confidence.  It was the fourth year in a row that Congress achieved this stellar rating.  Among polls for general confidence in government, the hive ranks around 40% in confidence; about 60% of us believe the tyrannical Liberal Leviathan that Obama and his nazi posse have built will use its snoop data for bad purposes.

We don’t know exactly where Obama’s popularity is, but our guess is that his personal favorability remains where it always is; those who approve of him are too stupid or ignorant to have an intelligent opinion on the other poll questions.  He’s a separate category, and we have to consider the  fanatics on the left who will support Obama precisely because he’s created a Super State.

We don’t think any of these numbers mean anything.  Polling is a kind of sorcery which for all its sophistication in quantifying opinions, is still unable to combine them to predict outcomes that are complex interactions of moods, attitudes, impulses and especially the subterranean leanings that are concealed from those who have them and the pollsters who think they’re knowable.

For us, Obama has exposed what was already apparent to anyone with a liberty-loving temperament, and it’s the blistering hypocrisy of The Left.  It’s probably incorrect to even call it hypocrisy, because Leftism is the liquid  dishonesty distilled from Liberalism and that isn’t hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy is a deviation from or weakness in the adherence to a principle.

Leftism is not a set of principles, and we only give it an ideological classification when it organizes and asserts itself.  The guy who holds you up at gunpoint is scarcely different than the guy who thinks you should be taxed heavily because you don’t deserve what you have.

A long time ago 60 Minutes presented a  segment on the criminal mindset of men in the New York prison system.  All of them had been through the rehabilitation mills and most of them admitted that they had learned to “work” the system, but a few of them profited from it.  One of the more self-aware inmates explained that the criminal robs from you because you simply have what belongs to him anyway.  He assaults your wife because she belongs to him and you only have her at the moment.  There is no moral barrier that divides the criminal’s interests from yours.

Once you understand the you and them dynamic of Leftism as a not-so-extreme variation of the criminal perspective, its social consciousness alongside its abuses and lies and hollow promises clarify a lot.  If Obama shows the unconvinced that no liberal ethic is actually present in his Hobbesian world, his legacy will have some moral weight.