Alex mentioned to me in an email a while back that chores around the house are nearly as good as a gym membership. My father echoed those sentiments when he told me what I was in for this spring. Our house was owned by a couple for over 50 years, so when the remaining member (the husband) moved out at 92 years old, the lawn hadn't been maintained as it had through the 1990s.

The front of the lawn looks great, but the back has moss and areas of spotty growth. Per my father's advice on lawn care, I bought some seed as well as some starter fertilizer and lime to start things off next month.

But before I got ahead of myself, I used a recent flood followed by a sunny, 60 degree day to stay home and poke around the yard. There were lots of random bricks and pieces of wood near the founation, as well as pipes and random gardening equipment for plants that clearly hadn't grown for years. It felt good to finally get a nice, warm day to roam my property, evaluating what work was in store to get it looking the way I wanted, and prepping it for the jobs to come.

I sifted through a lot of junk outside that had been buried by snow, and dumped anything natural like soil out by the treeline. I grouped together all the junk and put it in the trash, and took down the outdoor clothesline. The area underneath will make for another nice piece of flat lawn once I get it cleaned up and put down more seed.

With the house being painted this spring, I also had to get other junk out from around the house. The old gentleman did leave behind some things that will be useful, such as some lengths of hose. But when I saw an old rusted out fertilizer/spreader that must have come from the 1950s, I had to call bulk trash pickup and start cutting my losses with some of the crap he left behind.

Other chores this spring will include killing moss on the brick surrounding the house, and figuring out a good spot for the grill. It might be hard work overall, but taken one task at a time it'll be fun to sweat outside and learn things about my particular property. Once we can use our outdoor space to have company and enjoy fresh air, we'll finally experience the primary reason we moved out of our apartment.

We recently joined the "flooded basement" club, one with many new members with all the rain over the past few days falling in New England.

Roads were closed and utility crews did their job, and well. For as old as the infrastructure is here in New England, I'm amazed that not many areas (that aren't bordering river banks) have roads as dry as a bone less than two days after the last raindrop fell. At least some of that tax money makes its way back to us when we need it most.

On our end, we have a steamheat system and it's pretty close to the ground. Once we had to shut the heat off, it only took a day of 35 degree weather for us to buckle and go stay with my parents for the night. If we didn't have a six month old baby, we would have just lit a fire in the fireplace and dealt with it.

There was some furniture and personal belongings lost, but nothing that can't be replaced. Some lessons learned:

• Even if your basement hasn't seen water in 30-40 years, it's always worth it to store anything in a basement on pallets. If you can't get your hands on pallets, just use some of those hard plastic stackable holders for 6 2-liter bottles of soda.
• Don't melodramatize. If your basement doesn't leak but you get water from ground saturation, other people are in the same boat. It goes down quickly once the rain stops.
• Clorox bleach is your friend - if you clean up your basement right, you'll be fine.
• Keep generators on hand, one or two. If you have a heating system that needs to be plugged in to work, you can count on losing power during a bad storm of any kind - wind, rain, snow - and in cold weather it's useful to have backup power, wherever you live.

We don't live in a flood plain, but in New England, we do see some drastic temperature changes in the spring. So heavy snow can be followed by 50-60 degree weather for days on end, then you get flooding even without rain. It's always best to be prepared, rain or snow. Being new homeowners, we've resolved to have a sump pump installed, knowing it'll be an expensive ornament for perhaps years before it's ever used. But it's a cheap and easy way to keep your home dry, and better than dealing with an insurance company after you lose personal belongings in a flood.

While I realize not everyone can afford my sunny outlook on the storm after only a couple days of sunshine, in a way I'm glad this happened now. Had we not seen any flooding during this storm, we would be in a false comfort zone for the next big storm. Had we finished the basement, we would have lost a lot more than a couple of books and furniture that wasn't in use anyway. And the cleanup is a good opportunity to sift through junk and figure out what you really need and what belongings are really important. Decluttering is always a welcome distraction.

It's common sense that competitive team sports are one of the best ways to become a better person, even if you're not participating yourself. It's even more beneficial to compete, though. I had been thinking about the specific mechanisms of how something playing on an amateur football team makes you a better person, and I think one of the most important ones is that it forces you to boost your social skills. You've got a team who need to work together to achieve a goal and overcome others in a competition. The team needs to be motivated, but there's no money and not much glory to provide that motivation. That makes leadership a challenge. You can't just yell and people, curse and threaten to fire them the way you could on a construction site or at a warehouse job. You gotta be good.

If you just plain don't like sports, you can get the same benefits in other settings. Any situation where long-term teamwork is necessary and money isn't much of a motivator will suffice. Playing in a bar band is another example - there's some money to be had but not much, and you have to keep the team happy and motivated with other incentives. Even if you're not the leader, you will learn a lot just by observing the ways in which people try to give others incentives to do a good job. If you're really lacking in social skills, you might even have to use your brain and consciously try to analyze these transactions the way someone like Roissy analyzes picking up chicks, but you should still benefit trememdously. Here is an example of a non-financial transaction serving as an incentive: if you do your job well you will be more liked and respected by your bandmates, meaning the pianist will invite you to his parties where there are plenty of women you can hit on.

In one way, playing in a band with crap pay or being a lousy amateur footballer is better for you as a person than being a well-paid pro.

Recently, in the context of a tragedy in my extended family, I was called out by my own family members for not baptizing my son "yet". He's just about seven months old and we have no intention of having him baptized. He can do it if he wants to, John The Baptist style, at a time of his choosing. I have written about this topic before here.

The conversation went something like this, and I apologize for the use of internet abbreviations (DS = Dear Sister; DM = Dear Mother):

DS: So when you were in church [for the funeral], didn't it make you feel anything?

Me: Regarding religion or...?

DS: Regarding baptizing your son?

Me: Ah! Um...well, you know we didn't marry in a Catholic Church, so wouldn't it be disingenuous of me to baptize my son? No priest would recognize our marriage so how could they recognize a product of it?

DS & DM simultaneously: You don't have to be married [to get your son baptized]!

Me: Well, I wouldn't feel right about it.

DM: I don't know what they teach you kids when you go off to college.

Baptism as a symbolic gesture can be wonderful. But as an insurance policy because your Catholic guilt won't go away, it's a pretty bad idea. Keeping one foot in the proverbial holy water as a "just in case!" makes no sense, though it appears some would rather I purchase the additional homeowner's insurance even if I don't live in a flood zone, so to speak.

Regardless of merit, religion is a touchy subject with family members. It should be: as members of a family, one would expect that everyone has the same religious beliefs, because you share DNA. When people branch off and begin believing different things, it can drive a wedge between family members. Or it could be a symptom of dysfunction, depending on the family. Some will feel alienated by this person they've known all their lives, suddenly switching gears (even if it wasn't such a sudden change). Some will disown the person who changes beliefs; luckily, no one has taken it that far on our end.

It will be a challenge continuing to justify our beliefs while also remaining a part of the family, but we're up to the challenge. We simply keep the focus on our family, and running it in the way that makes the most sense to us.

I suggest all anti-Western conspiracies constitute a European-liberal conspiracy to undermine our Western superiority. Follow me to understand why.

When I was loading a Wikipedia page about Judaism, my Internet connection froze. Opera had only loaded 9/11 elements of the page. JEWS DID 9/11!!1! Well, of course. If you're convinced about a belief, you tend to see proof of that belief everywhere, because there's a need within most people to constantly re-assert their personal opinions. If you hate America or Israel, or just dissatisfied with life in general, you'll find every opportunity to "reveal" conspiracy proof that they destroy the world.

That's the psychological explanation. But the reason to why we're seeing so much doomsday conspiracy thinking going on today may be of an ideological nature. Let's review the main targets of Western conspiracy beliefs:

• (Pax) America(na)
• Israel/Jews
• Capitalism
• Transnational organizations
• Populist greenism

What these groups, institutions and belief systems all have in common is success and status quo. They are powerful norms in all Western societies. America is still a world super power. Israel is backed by America, and Eastern-European Jews are still highly successful as a group. Capitalism has not only won the West over, it's winning ground where we never thought it would (China has recently even recognized a form of private property right). Transnational organizations like IMF, UN, EU and WHO are as powerful as ever. Greenism is dominant in every branch of industry today.

People who subscribe to Western conspiracy theories revolving around these targets also oppose the norms that currently support the Western power dominance. But instead of simply criticizing the power norms, which is healthy for everyone to do, conspiracists take it one step further: if we're against the West, and group X is too, we ally with X. This explains how young white people living arm chair lifestyles can blog on Facebook about how cool Russia is, why "mixed economies" are better than capitalism, why Israelis are Nazis, and how global warming is a religion that aims at controlling the world. It's an arm chair POV, because it bears little or no relation to reality. It's ideological fiction.

But by calling for revolution instead of internal criticism, we undermine our own position in the world and leave ourselves vulnerable to open fire from enemies abroad. This is how 9/11 happened--not because we were all-mighty and powerful. We all know Anglo-America pretty much is. It happened because while we were all-mighty and powerful, we were displaying signs of weakness. The weakness of not being willing to demonstrate that power. It's kindergarten psychology at a foreign policy level: you may be strong as a horse, but if you're afraid of fighting, someone else will figure you're a loser and hit you.

That weakness is liberalism, mainly European in form, but today transforming into mainstream politics in America through the Obamarama meme. Liberalism has turned against the founding principles of its own civilization by divide & conquer logic. Diversity instead of unity. Government instead of culture. Immigration instead of family. Commerce instead of faith. Chaos instead of authority. Anti-Western conspiracy theories all thrive on the inherent civilizational weakness the West is currently displaying in the face if its much weaker, but ballsy enemies. It's a crowd of people psychologically opposed to the status quo. I criticize, but defend, this status quo.

I'm a part of it and I believe in it. It's my sincerest belief that if You will, too, we can rise above our internal weaknesses and cast the liberal conspiracy behind us. It requires us to be able to appreciate the life we have here and now, for all its faults. We don't want to live under religious laws, we don't want the government to control every aspect of our lives to make us "safer," we don't want to live in poverty and unemployment, we don't want to wake up in chaotic multicultural suburbs without future...we reject the anti-Western sentiment, because it is self-destructive. We thrive because we constitute a superior culture. We don't necessarily believe in forcing other people to be a part of that culture, but by example, and through force if needed, we will assert and uphold it as our way of life.

The first victims of imminent ecocide will be our fish. This will have consequences that rock the human world. However, the solution is both harder than we think -- and much, much easier.

Postmodernists like to blame our use of language for our limited truth capacity. Their reasoning goes that if we use "x=y" sentential, linear logic we are doomed to see false truths.

As someone with experience in the area of communicating complex ideas, I think the postmodern analysis of truth is only partially true. Our sentential logic means we can only express one detail or idea at a time. But what limits our truth capacity is something different.

Despite much media hype over global warming, the population is backing down from supporting it. From their perspective, the issue got hyped to a fever pitch, then got corrupted and used as a justification for other agendas, and finally got debunked when it came out that scientists were faking the data.

In the "out of sight, out of mind" world of modern media, where information overload is so great that a story two weeks ago is 100% forgotten, this means that ecocide has slipped again from the public eye. This is not a repeat from 1974, 1981 or any other time this issue has gained mass momentum.

Yet ecocide, like a slow cancer, keeps coming closer even when we're not watching. As a species, we're like toddlers hiding under a blanket thinking that if we can't see the parent, maybe they can't see us. The truth is that much like mortality is always there, our errors and their ongoing consequences are there even when we're not looking. A tree falling in a forest DOES make a sound, after all.

The first tier of ecocide is going to hit us in an ugly place. There are some food supplies we take for granted, because nature provides them and we just take them. The one we rely on most but think about the least is our fish supply.

Worldwide, we eat 14kg of fish per person per year. Although we use fish farms to produce much of our intake, they are expensive and so limited to the first world, and also environmentally destructive because we must feed farmed fish some source of cheap protein, usually wild-caught fish. We're talking about a large part of our protein intake as a species, especially in the developing world.

But as the data points out, our fish supplies worldwide are declining possibly to as low as 10% of their strength at the beginning of the last century. Even more, the fish that are left may be poisoned with heavy metals, which cause cancers, mutations and sterility.

We're of course freaked out by this because there seem to be no solutions. So, we say a sad platitude and move on. After all, how are we going to stop people from eating fish? Outright commercial fishing regulation as Obama proposes will only stop one country from fishing, and others will continue the mania.

Populations disappear -- ecocided -- when they are unable to successfully breed. This means that below a certain number, the species is unable to breed healthy individuals and some epidemic wipes it out. We won't get a warning call from God (or for you secular humanists, Government) when we're approaching this number. The fish supply will just slow to a trickle, and then we'll notice some species missing.

Slow death is hardest for us to face. We can handle events before they happen, and after they've happened. But what really limits our truth capacity is our perspective as individuals. We are thinking "but what will happen to me?" and if we don't see an immediate threat to us personally, it's out of sight and out of mind. Fixing that is the only first step to a solution.

Our 20th century morality is obsolete. We can talk about compassion for other individuals, or grow up and get real, and talk about compassion for the whole of our world, including nature and our own common sense.

No one lacks a morality. Each of us has a moral interpretation and if we mapped them all out, we'd find there's only a handful of structurally different ones, but many nuanced interpretations that add up to those same few ideas.

As the 20th century wore down on us, more of this kind of stuff started appearing:

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality. - Ian McEwan

Descended from Christianity, and convenient for commerce, this is humanism at its core. We must not be selfish as individuals; we must see it from the other guy's view, and as a result acquiesce to his demands.

Never mind that this becomes a race to the lowest common denominator, because whoever comes up with a new demand now wields the power of making others yield to them.

But as the 21st century warms up, we're seeing a new struggle. Actually, it's the old struggle hybridized with the 20th century struggle. Instead of human against human, we're looking at human against nature, with the human against human struggle being necessary to determine that outcome.

• Environment. Do we keep growing and take up all the space on earth, committing ecocide in the process? Our problems are twofold: third world overpopulation and first world economics, which reward constant growth.
• Economics. Putting the cart before the horse, we approve of things if they earn money. The problem is that this outlook is addictive. Command economies under socialism do not thrive, but under capitalism, they may thrive too much.
• Biology. The quality of the average human being is declining. They have lower IQs, less physical health, less moral alertness and tend to be rather short-sighted as a result. Do we become supermen, or recede into being apes again?
• Unity. Politics, values, religion, and ethnicity divide us, yet they're also what defines us -- and one of the few forces that can resist the "everything goes" mentality of commerce and mob rule. Do we agree to disagree, or agree to separate?

Compassion for other individuals will not solve the problems above. In fact, it's a non-sequitur. We need compassion for the whole. The process of nature, the natural selection we impose upon ourselves, and even compassion for economics and politics so we can understand them and master them.

For too long, intellectuals in the West have declared the world a cinder and backed away from having a practical plan. Instead, they tell us we should have compassion. Unfortunately, that's the most easily-coopted view, and the radical strides of the hippies and progressives are now standard fodder in advertising and big media entertainment.

A new way must be found. Having compassion for individual humans, or humanity itself, is a subset of the actual question, which is how we adapt to life on earth, improve ourselves in morality and abilities, and find a balance with nature so we don't commit ecocide on our way to self-destruction. Compassion that, tweebs.

The ideas of liberals often seem gullible and innocent at face value, but if we have learned anything from life, it is that face value is illusion. We need to look beyond the facade. A liberal friend of mine recently faced the bitter consequences of the facade he'd been trying to keep alive for years. After what he just realized, I don't think he'll want to talk about women or immigrants for a while.

The story is short and simple. This guy was looking for a job at government-owned news television. His dream was to become a famous news reporter, expressing to the world how unequal our society is against minorities. So he took contact with the head of the news department where he lived and asked around. Her answer was rigid: no, our financial situation is not what it used to be, we cannot hire you right now. Sorry.

A few weeks passed. He and I met up with a woman studying journalism. She was happy. We wondered why. She'd gotten a job at news television. How? Oh, she just asked for it. There was a temporary spot she could fill in. Great, I said. My liberal friend was not so happy. He wondered how the hell she'd gotten the job, despite the fact she was just a student and he had real credentials. He had merits. But she had the job. So he contacted the boss at the department again, and this is roughly how that conversation looked like:

Friend: We've been in contact before concerning a job as a reporter. At the time you told me there wasn't any need for me.

Boss: Ah, yes, that's right.

Friend: ...so how come you hired this woman for exactly such a job?

Boss: She was just the kind of person we were looking for, it was a good match. I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.

Friend: But I had greater merits. She is merely a student.

Boss: That's possible, but right now we're working according to an affirmative action system...

Friend: --wait, you hired her because she's a woman?

Boss: ...she had the background we were looking for.

Friend: So I, as a Swedish man, stand no chance of getting a job simply because I am not woman or from an immigrant background?

The conversation ended with a bitter truth: the news department followed the liberal affirmative action policies of the Swedish government, which demand that employers are forced to actively increase the number of women and immigrants within the work force. My friend now stood at the far end of that program: he was Swedish, blond and blue-eyed--blue-eyed enough to really believe that all the inequalities he spoke about every day never could affect him. Now he was barred from work simply because of his gender and ethnic background.

I told him he should at least be happy that he's contributing to a better world where diversity rules. "Right," was his answer, as he went off home. Reality, as always, is law.

For any environmental protection to work, it must be unimpeachably honest, effective, and streamlined into the already-existing activities of human beings. The green industry however is dead-set against this because they thrive by making people feel exceptional.

Politics can kill us through memory. Once an issue is set forth in the press, we start reacting to that issue and we stop thinking about the situation it refers to. In the case of green politics, the politicization of the green idea quickly replaces the concept of protecting our environment.

When we talk about our environment, then, we should cast aside our expectations of left and right and the issues they've raised -- issues that are largely symbolic and don't address the problem itself. Instead, let's just look at the problem: our world has finite capacity and we need to share that with the natural flora, fauna and ecosystems they together create.

It's hard for us to do that in public however because whether socialist or communist, our societies operate by getting lots of people excited about an idea through self-interest. In the case of minority politics, that has conventionally happened by convincing people they are enlightened or should be self-righteous about a certain issue.

And it's hard to argue with that. It brings in the bucks. It gets the issue in the press because there are a lot of people out there who feel better about life if they are the ones to bring it up in conversation, media or at a vote. However, because they are motivated by self-aggrandizement, they ignore any parts of it that will not be popular to a group.

In turn, they also end up creating the curse of the modern time, which is "make-work" activity. These actions occur when you look out there and find a news item or chore to fit a need to be seen doing something, or having something new on your front page. It's the exact opposite of common sense, which is to find an activity that fits the goal.

As a result, we get "green" products that are ineffective but big moneymakers, and even people inventing hype so they can advance their own careers, culminating in blatant corruption as people with something to hide start highly visible public activity to make them seem like "the good guys" instead of the bad. Pretty soon we're all just cheering for our team at the expense of truth, and because our proposals are flawed by dishonesty, are distancing ourselves from any chance of being effective.

But in the short term, that doesn't matter, because most people are involved with these issues for a simple reason: to make themselves look good. Your friends think you're smarter, your consumers think you're safe to buy from, your constituents think you're looking out for them, and your advertisers feel good to be part of a hot new trend. However, the problem of getting things done remains elusive.

Even worse, because the point of the activity is to be seen as addressing the problem, the best "solutions" are those which are highly visible but not effective. Back-breaking labor, throwing out everything you own for paltry substitutes, and creating awkward governmental process to certify some activity as "green" -- these are the modern self-flagellation. Just as you wouldn't argue with a man of God who whips himself twice daily, it's hard to argue with someone buried under paperwork, green products and new expenses.

As we continue our green coverage here on CORRUPT, it's important that we all think about the real bottom line -- not dollars and sense, not whether it's popular, but whether our proposed ideas solve the damn problem. If we want to overcome bipartisan chaos, we need to first and foremost have effective suggestions that fit into modern life as it is, making them easy to adopt and effective once adopted.

I just had a new article published for newly-started Alternative Right, entitled "Let us fail!," where I argue that young men today suffer morally from not taking individual responsibility:

Here is how we morally destroy the character of men. It starts when we're just boys and we demand our parents buy the toys we see on television, serve us the food we want at any moment, and satisfy our every emotional demand as long as we yell loud enough. We learn as children that we can pretty much bully people around and get away with it. And parents, too afraid of what'd happen if they resisted or too lazy to even care, shrug and pay the dues. By doing so they breed a form of self-centered recklessness that damages the self-image and self-discipline of their children.

There's no excuse for being a lazy, incompetent fool, but as "preacher-dude" Mark Driscoll points out, a lot of blame is on girlfriends and mothers, because they'd rather babysit men than to force them into work. Authorities in welfare countries work the same way. By taking over functions that communities regularly would manage on their own, bureaucrats discourage us from being active citizens. Why bother, when someone else will do it for you?

I see this all the time, everywhere, in Swedish society. Curiously I also see it in church. When I spontaneously volunteered for work there, people were baffled. You get the kind of weird reactions like these: "But...you don't get paid?" or "Shouldn't you sleep on Sundays instead?" and even "No one is forcing you man, you better let others do it." It's laziness, but in aggressive form, and the logic is the product of decades of welfare-ism: don't volunteer to work for something you don't need to, only think about yourself. It even goes further: if I am lazy, but you are not, I better make sure you do like the rest of us and stay home all day, because otherwise you'll make us look...well, lazy. And people wonder why European culture is in decline?

Since a lot of women work within the church, you get a lot of babysitting unless you're a bit socially aggressive. If you're passive, they'll take over and pacify you. I had a weird conversation with the woman who was supposed to write contract with me. "You know, you can come here like every second Sunday or something." I insisted. "No, I want to make this a binding contract, I'm not here to fiddle around." She looked surprised. "That's great...you know, you don't have to take part in the ceremonies, it's free." I insisted again. "Part of the reason I come here is because I take interest in the ceremonies." So it went on until I had to talk her into signing me a binding contract. A-mazing.

It's not out of negativity or fear people are reluctant to give you pressing duties. It's the social mentality in an individualist culture where no one takes responsibility for anything - unless they're paid for it. They assume you're just another confused young dude walking in to check things out and then drop out when you pass the bar or something. Women in particular hesitate to give orders or enact their authority (those that do often abuse it, hence most women prefer male bosses). So a word of advice to male readers who are thinking of getting involved in civic work: women may treat you like a baby in the beginning. Press them to trust in you and your work. To female readers: we men love seeing you around when we work. The more of you, the merrier.

Greenism requires we panic for a trend. Conservation requires that we do one thing consistently.

Across the West, people are turning against politics as usual. Over time our politics went from being solution-oriented to being justification-oriented.

Justification politics work backward. Instead of working toward a goal, we set up symbols like freedom, equality and diversity. We then do whatever we want to, and claim that we're working toward those abstract and emotional symbols. The result is corruption, because instead of intending to fix problems, we pick something that looks good and then charge it to the account of freedom, equality and diversity.

Underconfident or corrupt individuals use these symbols as much as government agencies do. If anyone proposes an inconvenient idea, they claim it violates one of those sacred goals. It's like an insane cult religion or the kind of dogma we saw in the Soviet Union. We must uphold the dogma, but it doesn't work, and the only solution we accept is to keep trying these failed solutions.

Unlike truly goal-oriented politics, symbolic goals are never reached. This makes us to deconstruct politics into issues, which we can fight over instead of fixing the problem of which the issue is the symptom. However, issues make work for politicians, bureaucrats, media workers and others who benefit from controversy -- and like corrupt doctors, they get paid to operate, not to make people well.

"Green" politics are part of our justification frenzy. Our environmental ideals become justifications for the usual goals -- freedom, equality and diversity. This means that green politics target the wealthier nations and individuals among us, blame them for our environmental problems, and as a solution suggest we take wealth from the rich and spread it around a bit.

Justification politics always end up at this point -- the ideological wealth redistribution. That is because unlike goal-oriented politics, justification politics work backward. There is no goal. There are only these symbols that conveniently hide our real motivations. As a result, those motivations become selfish. Take from those that did succeed, and give it to the rest of us, so we can be equal.

The end result of green politics is fighting over carbon caps and energy use, which translates into a quest for wealthy nations to destroy their economies while non-industrialized nations will grow. This view of our environmental crisis assumes that the problem is issue-based, and not a consequence of having too many humans. Let's look at the problems we have made for our environment:

• Pollution. Carbon isn't the only thing we're dumping into our environment. Heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, road salt, plastics and airborne toxins are impregnating the parts of the environment that get distributed around the world -- water and air.
• Nutrient imbalance. While most view this as a type of pollution, and it is, it deserves a separate category because it's too much of a good thing in the wrong place. Our fertilizers and even hot water from industry can cause some species to spike in population, resulting in overgrowth and then kill-offs.
• Species extinction. First they come for the butterflies, then they come for the amphibians and finally, mammals including ourselves. We've taken over their habitats and changed their sources of fresh water, air and food species. Even worse are those naturally-occurring animals we depend on for food.
• Habitat loss. As a direct consequence of both excessive human population growth, and our tendency to allow individuals the freedom to settle wherever they want and start businesses of undetermined use and families, we expand like poured cement and take over continents. Whether this is roads that divide habitats and kill animals crossing them, or slash and burn agriculture, or the relentless growth of cities into suburbs as crime consumes their centers, humans take over all available land and this eliminates the space animals need to breed, hunt, and move.

Global warming may be a problem, but like issues politics in general, it's a stand-in for the bigger problem. That problem doesn't boil down to a convenient but corrupt symbol or dubious product you can buy. It's not a trend. It's a reality: we are in command of our environment now. And if we don't limit our population, we will grow like a cancer. Even more, if we don't limit the destructive ideas of individuals -- putting a fast food franchise in a pristine forest for personal profit -- we will consume everything in our path.

The only solution is to reject environmentalism and replace it with conservationism.

Conservation is solution-oriented, not justification-oriented. It is not an issue, but an attribute of everything we do. It's like having roads and putting criminals in jail. It's part of a healthy outlook on life. Unlike issues politics, which sends you running from one panic to the next, conservation is slow and steady. It's always there. We should always do it. We can ramp it up or down, but it never changes.

From a conservative perspective, life is fundamentally good. For this reason, we don't like revolutions and crusades. We like however to conserve -- to save what nature has done that is great from human greed, stupidity, overgrowth and selfishness. Conservative environmentalism is called conservationism, and it is a belief in setting aside land for nature to do its thing.

Ideally, every society would set aside 2/3 of the natural land and not cut it up with fences or roads. Just leave it be. It's like nature's farm, and it produces oxygen, absorbs CO2, and gives plants and animals space not just to exist but to carry out the necessities of life. Among other things, it guarantees animal populations do not fall below safe breeding levels and become horribly inbred.

Environmentalism wants to treat the environment like a budget deficit or war. We get together, come up with some laws to manage it, and hope the problem magically goes away. But since we dominate nature, we need to always be stewards of our environment. This means that we need an unvarying and perpetual solution. Setting aside land for nature and not humans accomplishes this with little displacement of ourselves.

There are bonuses for humans as well. If we cannot recklessly expand, we have to finally fix the problems in our cities like crime and decay. Land gets more valuable so that so-so home you're hanging on to might become your retirement fund. Businesses that cater to thoughtless people will become less valuable, and responsible businesses more valuable. And you'll always have fresh air and water.

Like conservative politics itself, conservationism is just common sense, but cannot exist alone. It is not a revolutionary thought, but an evolutionary one: we constantly do better at what we do without having to micromanage it. If you like me are tired of the manic neurosis of the environmental movement, conservation is an idea you cannot afford to miss.

Justice and freedom are 'blind' according to Western tradition. This means that all citizens are guaranteed certain liberties and right to just trials, regardless of their position in society. This is a noble tradition harnessed for thousands of years through several civilizations in "the West." It's therefore not surprising that the series of revolutions we've undergone have begun to undermine this system.

Because we feel the pillars of our society are no longer taken seriously or defended against alien values, we begin to stare ourselves blind at our own basic values. What follows is that we miss the big picture and fail to comprehend how and why they were invented in the first place. This Dutch debate with Geert Wilders illustrate my point:

Wilders' opponent has become blind before justice and freedom. Of course all citizens have equal rights, but that's not the point. If certain groups among those citizens don't share the belief in those rights, or in other ways cause problems that threaten the platform serving those rights, that is a pattern problem. We call it 'pattern problem' because by looking at patterns and trends emerging demographically, socially and economically, you are able to more effectively secure rights for everyone.

Obviously it's very controversial to discern certain patterns. Religion and race are the two most touchy holy cows in Europe right now, and to a certain degree in America as well. Liberals especially feel this way, so they deny these patterns and instead use the Western tradition as a justification for only looking at uniform citizens. It's a rhetorical trick. Justice is blind to citizens, but people are not. We cannot deny certain citizens their rights, but we can adjust policies so that certain groups among them don't threaten the rights of everyone. Social pragmatism, if you will.

In Europe that means limiting and toughening up immigration policies, decreasing the role of bureaucracies regulating individual rights, and refusing to back down before those same Western values liberals say are so important. The only way to do so is to discern patterns in society and being wary of negative, destructive trends. If minorities riot in suburbs and disrespect the law, it's not a blind issue. It's an eye-opening issue, and leaders like Geert Wilders are concerned about what we do about them. Social reality, we call it, and it's here to stay.

Our son is enjoying solids now, to the point that his formula doesn't interest him nearly as much as it used to.

Even cheap baby food gets expensive, and despite some of the companies telling you it's "all natural", who knows for sure? As a result, we've put to use a food processor we got for our wedding, which stayed in a box until recently.

It's really easy to make your own baby food. Just buy a big bag of veggies - say, butternut squash - out of your grocer's freezer. Mix it up in a food processor, and then put it into ice cube trays. Refreeze and you have cubes of food with the proper consistency ready to go.

You can pop out the cubes and put them in a plastic bag in your freezer once they are frozen solid. In advance of your son or daughter's meal, make sure you put a cube or two in the fridge to defrost. You can use a bottle warmer and put a small baby food bowl on top of it, with the still-cold cubes of food in it to warm to room temperature. For our part, we sometimes mix in an ounce or two of formula just to make sure the consistency is right, and to add something extra.

For lunch/dinner, we also use baby oatmeal and baby rice cereal to mix in with the veggies. For breakfast, our son usually gets 6 ounces of formula and some all-natural apple sauce with mashed up banana.

Using frozen veggies and processing them yourself saves a ton of money. Typically, an entire pound of frozen vegetable can last over a week for a six month old baby and costs a dollar or two. You just bought & processed a week's worth of food for the cost of one packet of baby food containers that would only last for a couple of meals.

You don't even have to freeze it, you can buy a squash at the supermarket and prepare it as you need it.

This phase doesn't last too long, then it's time for them to start using their teeth. I look forward to the fun of being able to share our home cooked meals with our son.

A new revolution is gripping America, and un-doing the revolution of 1968. Instead of radical humanists rebelling against materialists, it's pragmatic people rebelling against a calcified liberal government that has become parasitic and corrupt.

Back in the 1960s, we had a revolution in the West. It was a peaceful one, arising from a groundswell of discontent. Its basic message was that our society had gotten sidetracked by materialism, and forgotten the human.

Now we've got another revolution -- one that says whether we pick humanism or materialism, the dogma replaces the reality, and our society drifts into complacent oblivion. Where in the 1950s a rising corporate culture emphasized a vapid pursuit of material comfort, in the 2000s a rising humanist culture has created a haven for selfishness of another kind.

The modern West has become a willing host to any parasite willing to show up, repeat our official dogma of equality, diversity and freedom, and then take whatever we hand out. In our zeal to escape the stodgy 1950s cash culture, we have created another cash culture -- one that supports people just for being human. In just 42 years we have reversed direction and found ourselves facing the exact same problem.

As a result, our government has become a parasite. In addition to throwing trillions of dollars into welfare programs that do not consider whether the individuals they subsidize are contributing at all to the common good, government itself has grown to an immense size.

Let's look at what government means to the average person:

• More paperwork than ever before. To get a house built, a business established, or even deal with the death of a family member, we must navigate a vast bureaucracy. Inevitably this means paying experts and lawyers.
• Government views us as a cash cow. Fees have gone up, and practices like the creation of de facto speed traps have continued to drain citizens, without any regard for whether these people are contributing members of society who need a break, or repeat lawbreakers.
• In addition to hiring legions of consultants and contractors, most of whom get placed at the front of the line for being minority- or female-owned, government has surged in size and pay for bureaucrats, even as efficiency has declined.
• The rise in bureaucracy and tendency to hand it over to people without considering their competence has created a culture of corruption that "threatens the fabric of the US", according to the FBI. It even reaches the White House.
• Government now operates in "moral" humanistic mode, which means that it supports any idea no matter how impractical which endorses our holy trinity of secular humanity -- equality, diversity and freedom -- while ignoring the consequences. As a result, we now have legions of diversity consultants, counselors, educators, presenters and other nonsense "make-work" bureaucrats.
• Having this many relatively incompetent but highly paid people causes them to seek to justify their position by publicly enforcing laws rabidly, and starting all sorts of new and pointless programs. The origin of the Nanny State is not an Orwellian desire for control by the state, but a desire by incompetent individuals to justify their salaries.

No matter how we cut it, this means government has become a parasite. It takes from the productive, and gives to the unproductive. Even if we object to measuring life through money, we have to recognize that rewarding the good means that they have an incentive to outperform others. It's that incentive that is the foundation of evolution and natural selection as well as any healthy society.

I'll spare you the comparisons to Communism and instead make a comparison to 1776 and 1968. In 1776, bureaucrats from England were taking money from the productive colonies and using it to prop up their failing empire. In 1968, fat dumb guys in suits were in such a mania to profit from the post-war boom that they forgot their souls.

And now in 2010, the same pattern is repeated. We thought humanism was an antidote to soullessness just like we thought revolution was an antidote to bad leadership. Once we slayed the dragon, we thought we could blow off the problem for the interim. But now we see that the dragon regenerates, because wherever we stop paying attention, parasitism grows.

If anything is going to drive the Tea Partiers -- and they now have similar movements in the USA, UK and mainland Europe -- to success, it's going to be that the average functional citizen recognizes that government is sabotaging what he or she is doing. That sabotage then pays for the dysfunctional, who cause more than their share of social problems.

The left has rebelled with their same-old slogans and objections. They are trying to prove that the Tea Party goes against the values of 1968 -- that's the blind equality, diversity and freedom dogma -- so that they can debunk the Tea Party. But the problem is that Tea Partiers are objecting on a pragmatic ground, which is that in the name of fairness and anti-materialism, we have become cancerous and self-consumptive.

When the left was rebelling against a calcified culture of materialism, they at least had some degree of accuracy -- even if their methods were bad. Now that what the left created has become just as calcified, the right has taken over and adopted their methods. In the middle, the citizens who have been ignoring politics in order to have careers and raise families have started to notice, and they're siding with the Tea Partiers.

I learned that the Swiss Government is making extra-small condoms for as boys as young as 12 to combat rising teen pregnancy rates. I relayed the news story to a couple of friends today to gauge if they were as disturbed as I was. I was uniformly met with the same tentative, "Well, I guess it's better than the alternative..."

This is an issue I feel marginally hypocritical about. My first time was centered around some eagerness and anxiety, yes, but also pressure because I felt I was getting outgrowing a comfortable context. The problem is the context. If I had waited, I'm not sure sexual frustration would be as big of an issue as it can be now (when single), and honestly, it's a complicated addition to a young person's life. (Do you know how much better I could have done on tests if I wasn't obsessing over a man or hanging out with said man? Dozens!)

Abnormalizing teen sex is a challenge in a secular society where the institution of marriage is belonging to an older audience. Re-structuring marriage is impossible unless we choose to sacrifice a hyper-educated society (applicable to both men and women), but this doesn't mean we also have to opt for moral degeneracy.

I'm not sure the answer belongs to religion because then the issue would be one where waiting a third of your lifetime to lose your virginity becomes a real challenge and frustration, and on most counts, would be futile. However, it does provide a strong moral foundation where at least the issue is one of waiting.

I also have issues when it comes to religion as it pertains to my intellectual conscience. What are reasonable sacrifices to make when it concerns morality? There is a possibility of constructing a secular, moral framework. Liberalism, by nature, eliminates all categories of objective morality - good or bad - and I think if a moral gauge was substituted we would all be at least a little better off.

Regarding Alex's recent post about Ron Paul, I think Paul's recent actions are more about legacy than about Paul's current political aspirations.

The man will be 76 when the next election comes around and he hasn't come out and said he'll run for president for 2012. Who would elect a 76 year old man when they wouldn't elect the better, 72 year old version in 2008?

And so, instead of continuing to talk about how right he was regarding the economy, he's let others do that and is setting up a legacy of his career in the event he gets elected out of office, or gets too old/weak to run. This involves some tough choices and some odd partnerships; hence, Chuck Baldwin and changing churches. There really aren't many with the common sense of Ron Paul out there in politics, who for years unapologetically shouted at whoever would listen about the virtues of a lean banking system and protecting constitutional freedoms (read: American culture) instead of entitlements. Interestingly, he's done this despite unsubstantiated cries of "racism" from the crowd, who would rather see entitlements protected than basic rights for all - but guarantees for none.

Ron Paul's blog at house.gov/paul is still valuable reading for any American citizen who cares to stay involved in the political process. You get weekly updates from the Congressman himself on relevant issues making their way through Congress.

Who Paul buddies up to today is one thing, but some basic facts about his policies remain:

• He wants an audit of the fed and an overhaul of our banking system with more transparency - not so the average joe gets transparency to our banking system but so that our own leaders can speak intelligently about the state of that banking system.
• He wants to pull back our unnecessary military operations and revamp where we spend our resources abroad.
• He's a medical doctor who knows that gov't intervention in health care would be an absolute disaster.
• He wants the federal government to limit its involvement in our daily lives, and let states run most functions by themselves. He says this not to get people riled up about control conspiracies, but rather because that's what the leaders who built our country envisioned.

It shouldn't matter to most what religion Paul is; in fact, the irrelevance of his religion is part of his political philosophy. I could ask similarly irrelevant questions, such as, do we even know Obama was born in this country, or which God he bows to? Does anyone care? Not really, they just care about the (empty) promises. At least Paul would follow through on his.

Sofia calls Islam a threat for contemporary society. I would clarify this statement by stating that radical forms of diversity is a threat to any established social or cultural order. Liberals disagree and don't think we can get enough diversity before we learn to import and export people like products across continents. Let's pick out some bullshit arguments about Islam and cultural diversity in Europe:

But Islamic shock is not simply a description of differences in flows of people. The claim is that the new wave of immigration has been uniquely disruptive of a European “way of life.” This narrative of pre-Islamic immigration by white Europeans sharing the same values, going to the same churches, and welcoming new immigrants with their good hearts, it turns out, is baloney. Yet even the most knowledgeable of the European-Islamic-threat writers, the journalist Christopher Caldwell in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009), describes an undifferentiated Europe now besieged by Muslims. Conveniently forgotten are centuries of religious wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, attacks on Belgian and Italian immigrants to France, and, of course, the events of the early 1940s, in which good French and Dutch people joined good Germans in denouncing and arresting Jews and transporting them to death camps.

For a starter, this doesn't really justify the current problems Europe faces with integrating Muslims into our Western society. It merely describes the real problem of diversity. Further, there's no conflict between the existence of major differences among European cultures to this day, and the unity of these countries on ideas central to a common civilization.

Secondly, and most importantly, this is not a correct historical comparison. Europe's always been torn by religious, economic and political conflicts. Yet each country and State/region believed in and asserted a constitution and set of values that kept it moving. It would be impossible for instance to assert both a Catholic and Protestant church in Sweden after the religious wars in Europe. Today, however, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Sweden demand Islam to become an equal part of Swedish culture as the Christian churches. That's a different situation, one that the writer conveniently leaves out of the picture.

The pertinence of these objections comes from the Burkean core of Caldwell’s complaints, highlighted by his title. People, he argues, should not have to radically change their ways of life. But the massive arrival of Muslims has forced such changes, wrested quiet Europeans from their peaceful ways, and forced them to look at minarets next to their steeples. Yet when about one-third of French people freely admit to being racist, and some Britons on camera casually compare Muslims to cockroaches, the conservative argument loses some of its bite. Perhaps some Europeans need a good jolt to confront the persistent racism that plagues the continent.

That French people are racist, or some British twats get caught on video for saying NILLA, are separate issues from the Islamic problem in Europe. Racism concerns ethnicity and not religion. Furthermore, the argument suggests the real problem lies with intolerance on behalf of the native Europeans. Everyone who has lived in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community knows this simply isn't true. There are other more complex problems underlying the chaos in Paris, London and Copenhagen. Problems like a conflict between Western constitutional principles and Islamic values, begging for some kind of reconciliation. It's that reconciliation we need to discuss, not racism.

Indeed, current laws and policies in most of Western Europe do not promote immigration, but mainly guarantee residents’ legal rights. In Britain this means the right to wear religiously motivated dress to school and eat religiously required foods in the school canteen. In the Netherlands and France it means the right to have state support for religious schools that open their doors to anyone. These rights were won by earlier generations of Catholics and Protestants; they have nothing to do with naïve multiculturalist Islamophilia. While these legal rights are often challenged—by onerous language requirements in the Netherlands, or severe restrictions on family reunification in Italy—in principle, they are assured.

The immigration policies of the European Union render national policy more and more irrelevant. The social policies described are unproblematic for most Christians, since their religion is in tune with European culture and civilization. Non-Westernized interpretations of Islam are not. This is for example why wearing niqab is so controversial even in liberal cultures like Sweden: yes, you are allowed to express your religious freedom, but if your employer is not allowed to shake your hand and cannot see your face expressions, we have a problem. Whenever we avoid this discussion, we are in fact in the hands of "naive multiculturalist Islamophilia."

These arguments suffer from two defects: shallow historical memory and “block thinking.” As Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn remind us in their When Ways of Life Collide (2007), a generation ago those Dutch people who today vaunt their egalitarianism and their toleration of all lifestyles were authoritarian in family life and homophobic in public and in private. A recent study found a rising number of young Dutch men who espouse attitudes of tolerance, but then attack gay men. Nor have Europeans always been gender-equal. Two generations ago, French women were not able to vote and did not have the same rights to property as men, and Muslim women in much of the world had more avenues to gaining divorce than did most European women. Europeans, Africans, and Asians all have been moving gradually toward greater legal recognition of equal rights for women and men, and everywhere it has been a struggle.

The problem with this argument, that really should be posed as a question, as done by Mark Steyn: Then why aren't the Muslim communities and organizations in Europe actively condemning the terrorist and anti-freedom of speech plots committed in Madrid, Bali, London, Paris and Copenhagen? A moderate Islam exists, but if it's weak and silent compared to its more radical friends, then that fact doesn't really matter.

Shallow historical memory may be a vice, but short historical memory is probably worse. Go back a thousand years in European history and you will know why Europeans are wary of Islam. No, wait, you don't even have to go back that long. How about Yugoslavia? How about Kosovo? If you fail to understand the historical significance of Christian Serbs fighting against Muslim invaders to protect their land, and how it relates to the genocide we saw during the Yugoslavian collapse, you're likely not in the position of teaching history.

Perhaps more insidious is block thinking, whereby the diversity of perspectives within a social group is collapsed into a single caricature. Today, in Europe and elsewhere, there is a widespread assumption that all Muslims think one way and all non-Muslims another. True, polls show that in relatively non-religious Europe, Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be opposed to abortion, homosexuality, and suicide. According to a 2009 Gallup survey, in France 78 percent of the general public finds homosexuality morally acceptable, compared to 35 percent of French Muslims. We could also, however, compare Europeans with Americans on this question. A 2009 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Americans find homosexuality to be “morally wrong,” that regular church-going means a greater likelihood of disapproval, and that American Protestants and American Muslims disapprove of homosexuality in equal measure—60 percent. The gap is not between Islam and the West, but between more religious and less religious people.

The gap between religious and non-religious people, America and Europe, is real. Yet both groups agree to preserve and uphold each respective Constitution. The kind of intolerance we're seeing within Islam in Europe is often not only openly defiant of basic Constitutional ideals like free speech--it wants harsh punishments for certain lifestyles. Many conservative Christians may not wish homosexuals to marry in their church. That's intolerant. But when we look at Islamic intolerance in Europe, we're not just talking about if homosexuals can marry in mosques or not. We're talking about civic rights in an open and free society. This is where Islamic intolerance has proven far more radical than any fringe Christian nut movement.

Putting aside the faulty data—France does not even collect demographic data by religion—these arguments have two deficiencies. First, total fertility rates (TFR) are falling in many of the Muslim-majority countries sending people to Europe. During the period 1985-2003, the TFR fell from 3.3 to 2.2 in Turkey and from 4.5 to 2.5 in Morocco, thus approaching European rates—France has a TFR of 2.1. Second, Muslim women born in European countries are doing precisely what demographers predicted: having fewer children. Fertility rates for Muslim women born in European countries are declining quickly, heading toward rates for natives.

Basic math tells us this is irrelevant; natives continue with low birth rates and will never keep up with immigrant birth rates, hence the gap will persist. Additionally, a country like Sweden has taken in and still take in most of its immigrants from places like Iraq and North Africa, where people have high birth rates. The demographic gap, which this writer fails to explain, is and will persist. In fact, it's growing all the time, regardless of small adjustments among certain Muslim groups.

This writer is however correct on one point: there is no turning back. Europe is pluralist today. We have to deal with the situation realistically, and hence adjust policies accordingly, which is what every New Right movement in Europe right now is fighting for. Diversity, strangely pleasing to liberals and leftists considering the complex problems it brings, is currently one of our greatest weaknesses, not strengths. In the end, historically, we have only seen genocide and tyranny rise out of radical diversity. The aftermath legacy of Yugoslavia, and the absolute ignorance of terror displayed by its rulers, should teach us a lesson:

Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, has told judges presiding over his genocide trial that the Bosnian wars during the 1990s were "just and holy".

He argued that conflicts resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia were a natural consequence of the struggle for land.

"And even then it was Muslim desire for domination in Bosnia, and the nefarious interference of Western powers, perhaps in particular Germany, which took Bosnia into civil war, and not the acts of the Serbs themselves.

Denial becomes a virtue in a culture divided by conflicting interests. Let's not repeat this mistake again, because if we do, a second, more unsettling question needs to be asked: Would the Americans be willing to bomb our capitals to end another series of genocides?

I've explained in an earlier post how and why Ron Paul's career ended with extremism. Unsurprisingly it didn't make me a rock star among the Ron Paul fans at Facebook. But that's also very telling of the current Paulite climate in general. His fans have become dogmatic followers and profess dogmatic beliefs beyond the sound rationalism that's always been a Ron Paul hallmark. World government conspiracies, 9/11 truth movements, and now outright religious extremism:

Ron Paul publicly endorsed the loony far Right John Birch Society. Ron Paul even went so far as changing his church from mainstream Episcopalian to a fundamentalist Baptist variety. Now Ron Paul has come out of the closet and endorsed the extreme Right Constitution Party.

Paul said: “I’m supporting Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party candidate.”

The Constitution Party is specifically Christianist and wants to impose fundamentalist Christianity on the United States. They don’t even pretend to respect the religious values of others. They instead claim that “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” is the “Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the Universe and of these United States.” Please note they specifically claim that Jesus Christ is the “Ruler of the Universe and these United States.” How much more clear can their theocratic tendencies be?

As much as we still like Ron Paul, let us face an obvious fact: Ron Paul's campaign wasn't destroyed by Fox News or Neoconservatives. Ron Paul radicalized over time, began to attract nutcases, took questionable interviews, promoted fundamentalist religious views openly, and gradually lost fire power for his mainstream supporters. It's a conservative dilemma; over time conservatives tend to either radicalize to the extreme or go too liberal to enact their original policies once they are in power. Ron Paul, while intelligent and capable as congressman, spells FAIL as political leader. Time to move on.

Liberalism arises from human self-pity, and causes us to think backward, so that instead of working toward a goal and liking ourselves for the attempt, we consider ourselves superior for reasons unrelated to reality, and this makes us neurotic.

The basic idea behind liberalism is that life is bad. Nature is bad, and life is bad, because they are scary. We the individuals could die at any minute. Even worse, we could screw up.

If you are hanging with your homeys, and you suddenly say "watch this" and try the coolest stunt ever and screw up, you look like an idiot. One of your homeys is going to make fun of you and he'll then look cooler than you. He will gain social power over you.

That's a big loss. How did you screw it up? The vision in your head of how reality works did not match up to the, ah, reality of the situation. You thought you could vault three speeding cop cars with your crotch on fire, but instead of a graceful result, here you are in the body cast. Idiot. Joe told us you'd screw it up and he was right, so he gets your share of the beer.

Liberalism is a counterattack by human beings against the cruel, cold, evil world. Since we have these big brains, and in them we keep track of the world in our holographic mind-maps, we can choose to edit the map instead of acting on reality. Why strive, when we can just say we did and go home?

The oldest form of this attitude is a kind of social non-aggression pact. It says that we all accept each other and ignore our deficiencies so we can keep the peace. It may be essential in really bad situations to have this type of social order; if all of your friends are morons, and you are one too, it's best not to compete for least moron status. You'll all end up in body casts.

Liberalism takes this attitude to a new level. Instead of waiting for results, we assume that results prove we as individuals are good, and then whatever happens becomes officially Not Our Fault. You tried to vault a cop car on a motorbike and ended up in a coma? Probably a faulty bike wheel made by a large corporation with ties to Israel or worse, the Church.

Most of our human activity consists in establishing this Not Our Fault level. We do this by not talking about results, but how nice, moral and friendly we are. This leads us to idolize pacifism over all else, and culturally agree to like nerdy, insecure people who make us feel happy because they're harmless.

This creates a large mob of people committed to denying reality and being useless because they pity themselves. They feel horrible about how evil life is, and how cute little bunnies get ripped apart by fast mean eagles. They start to idolize being useless and nice, instead of possibly mean -- but also smart. Because their thinking is already inverted, they quickly turn this into hating the smart because they could be evil.

When this hits a culture, it invents for itself a further justification -- it's progress, liberal thinking, big-mindedness, open-mindedness, whatever. That's all just advertising and is as sincere as the words of a prostitute or used-car salesperson. People of this mentality like to sabotage any order, authority or consensus as to what reality is, because that way they can hide behind the chaos. Anarchy, libertarianism, atheism, weird sex, postmodernism... these are all justifications, not positive and constructive reasons for living.

Check out the latest self-congratulatory stroking:

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials -- the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium -- have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They're less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more).

But at the moment, fully 37% of 18- to 29-year-olds are unemployed or out of the workforce, the highest share among this age group in more than three decades. Research shows that young people who graduate from college in a bad economy typically suffer long-term consequences -- with effects on their careers and earnings that linger as long as 15 years. - Pew Social Trends

What a positive article! "Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change."

But when read beneath the skin, you see that all of these traits are social traits. These have zero relevance to whether these people are, say, effective or intelligent. They like to think they're intelligent, but they use symbols of intelligence -- liberalism, open to change,diversity -- instead of actual intelligence. Does anyone else think this sounds like a marketing scam?

Buy the new Zipradical 3000 lawn mower! It's open to change, well-educated, under-employed and positive. Who knows if it cuts your grass? Your neighbors will think you're cool. Buy today!

If you were wondering how this backward logic -- using the symbol of being intelligent instead of being intelligent -- comes to play, check out this amusing anecdote from more trend-watchers. First, there's the positive spin:

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. - CNN

These people are forward moving, man. They pitched out God, are good pious liberals and are more intelligent -- so says the sample group anyway -- and even more, they're unique precious snowflakes because, as the article windily elaborates, "sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past." Whoah, dude, they've transcended evolution itself!

But later on you get the skinny:

Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with "unconventional" philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be "ways to communicate to everyone that you're pretty smart," he said.

In other words, if you want to look smart act like smart people you see on television. The article doesn't tell us where these IQ ranges fall, so it may be they're looking at a bunch of 118s who graduated community college, got themselves Volkswagens and now are busy telling the rest of us how dumb we are. No word on what the 130+ folks who can read and understand Schopenhauer are thinking.

As part of this whacked-out backward logic, it's important to always champion the underdog. The underdog after all has suffered, and so knows things those of us in comfy homes with stable lives cannot. We didn't die on the cross -- they did. But all of that is the tail end of the backward thinking, with the real goal being this: if we accept the most screwed up people on earth, and with pity make them equal to us, then no matter how screwed-up we are, we should accept and like ourselves.

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.” - Prospect Magazine

Chant it with me now: who's going to save us? The slums are going to save us! The sharecroppers will save us! The dropouts, the addicts and the insane! Let's accept everyone, so we can accept ourselves.

This is the psychology of liberalism, leftism, progressivism -- whatever you call it, the origin is crowdism, or the will of the mob to have it be Not Our Fault. Instead of simply fixing themselves, they're seeking external scapegoats and self-esteem builders. The scapegoats are the powerful (God, Kings, corporations, Nature) and the self-esteem builders consist of lifting up the underdogs, praising the neurotic, and of course liking themselves. Backward thinking means you start by liking yourself; you don't like yourself because of anything you've done, learned, conquered or achieved. It's the loser table at high school appointing themselves Fuehrer.

It takes a long time for the nerdy self-conscious low-self-esteem dropouts of the world to unite and overthrow their betters, but they've had many centuries to do so, and they finally started to really pick up steam around 1945 or so. Ever since then, being strong and doing what's right has had that nasty sting of "well, you could be the new Hitlerstalin" to it, and so smart people have backed off from changing anything beyond their own matching paint tones at home. The result has been a chaotic society spiraling out of control, and the only real winners are the profiteers who pander to parasites and idiots with moronic products like hip-hop, Snuggies, Big Macs, glow-in-the-dark dildos and movies like Goonies or Save the Last Dance where a band of misfits comes together to take down the successful, attractive and intelligent ruling caste.

And what's the end result of all this liberalism? Well, since people are irresponsible scapegoaters who are obsessed with finding "uplifting" reasons to like themselves, the ship of state has veered out of control and tried to promise everything to everybody, with a net result being that we've squandered our wealth and replaced it with a giant angry mob of incompetents.

The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 "lowest-low" fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can't borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don't have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don't have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian "public service" of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. - Orange Country Register

I don't want to boil it all down to money, but money reflects the degree of organization in our society. A sensible society thinks forward: it looks at reality, tries to understand it, and then sets reasonable goals and charges forward to accomplish them. A sick society thinks backward: it congratulates itself on being brilliant, and finds a reason why it is owed money by government or some other large scapegoat. The healthy society thrives and gets more organized; the sick society lapses into greater degrees of disorganization until its population breeds itself back into gibbons and flings poo at the camera.

At this point, I wonder if what I'm expressing is actually an opinion. It's a prediction and an analysis. I don't even know if I like it. After all, I think I'd like being a liberal more -- but it's hard to turn my mind off to the consequences of my actions. Because, if you can get over the fact that life ain't fair and we all suffer, you can see this world as a mostly blank canvas in which great things can be constructed. But the liberal psychology turns its back on that, and from fear of it, hopes to destroy it.

Alex's latest post touched upon how unifying religion, and concomitantly culture, can be. In Toronto, social culture especially is strange, in that it tends to be very exclusive or dominated by introversion, shyness, and extreme forms of social etiquette. (Intentionally bump into someone in this fair city, and auto-pilot will prompt the other person to apologize profusely.)

As a fun experiment, I decided to sign up for JDate, a fairly large dating site for Jewish singles to connect. (Hint: I'm not Jewish.) The tight-knit mode of networking was truly impressive, and most of the people on the site tended to be marriage-minded. I've flirted with internet dating briefly in the past, and it was a much flakier experience. Also, most of the Jewish singles on the site were attractive professionals, so even provided with the pre-selection and screening the internet affords you, practically everyone was desirable in some way.

There is no stronger tie than religion and culture. Unfortunately, I'm not afforded either so the social initiative and the powers of charisma and personality rests entirely on me. I think more people than not are plagued with loneliness for the sheer effort it takes to constantly try and connect with people.

Politics is the new religion in dating, so I'm concerned about getting back on the market considering that most of my views are not status quo. When I decide to date again, it might do me well to convert.