When the election results finally were through just after midnight, the whole country was in uproar. People could not believe it. Over a night, everything had changed. Before the government-run television show closed down, the two hosts ceremonially announced: "When you wake up tomorrow, you will wake up to a new and different Sweden." And they were right.

Sweden is a geographically, politically and culturally isolated country in Western Europe. While its neighbors Norway, Denmark and Finland continuously have cut down heavily on immigration, emphasized national law and culture, and slowly adapted to the economic and political reality of southern Europe and America, Sweden has been doing the exact opposite. When France and Italy have liberalized their economy and driven out groups who don't behave or follow rules, Sweden has continued to celebrate multiculture and mixed economy.

Among the recent progressive hallmarks, the Swedish church has changed the ceremony to adapt to gay values and include homosexuals to marry in church, green "city taxes" have been introduced to any car moving in and out of the capital, father-only months have been forced on families wishing to fully utilize financial family support, gambling within the government-run gambling industry have introduced an 18-year-old age limit, and millions of tax payer's money have been given to the medical industry for a swine flu that never broke out. But all of this is now changing.

Just by reading and understanding these stats, the Swedish election was politically and culturally revolutionary in two ways. One, the Social Democratic (S) one-party state empire is over. Finito. The Social Democrats have reigned Sweden almost uninterrupted for 70 years. 70 years. For an American it's probably not even possible to fathom the enormous effects such a rule has had on a country. Everything from job security, pension, medical care, cultural activity, family life, food, lifestyle and trade has been closely regulated almost unanimously by one welfare party. As of the 19th of September, a conservative bloc has been in political majority two times in a row without social democratic interruption since the early 80's. But the real socialist downfall gleams from the social democratic election numbers: 30,66 %. The Social Democrats are now just as big as the old-school right-wing party, the Moderates (M).

The second and perhaps most important revolution: the right-wing success is not a temporary blip on the historical map. It's not a coincidence. It's a trend. Patriotic and semi-right Sweden Democrats (SD) receive incredibly 5,7 %. Bigger than the Christian Democrats (KD), bigger than the Leftists (V). Our friends in southern and central Europe, where burqas and mosques offend people and lead to bans, may not find this particularly revolutionary. But this is a country where suggesting lower immigration rates is equal to race hate, and where the state minister suggests citizens avoid saying anything that offends other religious groups, freedom of speech or not. In such a culture, almost 6 % clearly demanding accountability and responsibility is a revolutionary force.

Many American Democrats like to point to Sweden as the ultimate soft-socialist experiment America needs to embrace. Obama's politics has been an attempt to steer the American culture towards a more Nordic-centered model. What he and other liberal Democrats have failed to note is that Sweden in recent years has begun to abandon its socialist principles. To understand how, watch:

Today we represent a Nordic country moving in a direction opposite to liberal socialism. Although the major conservative party is social liberal rather than conservative, the political development points to an increasingly conservative basis. The move away from government-run schools, government-run railroad systems, government-run telecom business and government-run health care is drastic, and it makes Sweden's liberalization one of the fastest in Europe. Now that major anti-socialist and anti-immigration parties are declaring election victories, we know that Sweden is seeing a political "Europeanization"--we are no longer an isolated Social Democratic island. We are present in the world and we are quickly adapting the wave of New Right to our own cultural conditions. The 19th of September will be a hallmark in our country. Freedom is here to stay.

Nowadays most economists agree that the crisis in the American economy, starting with the housing market and later spreading to Europe, was either caused or blown up in proportion by irresponsible banking institutions. Now it is time for us to agree on the following: that financial institutions taking big risks is normal in a functional market economy, but that big risk-takers also need to face the full consequences of those risks.

The subprime market scheme, that began during the late Clinton era and boomed dramatically during the Bush Administration, has received a lot of criticism. And rightly so. But few understand the intention behind it. There will always be people who, for various reasons, lower their credit value by making unsound financial decisions. Maybe they start up a company, go broke, and find no way of getting out. Maybe they bet on poker online and cash in all their possessions to pay back.

Whatever's the reason, responsible banks will have a hard time to lend these people money if they want house or car. Contrary to how liberals feel about it, I don't think this is "unfair." But I do think it's reasonable that we allow certain banks on the market to take greater risks and lend these people whatever money they need. Inevitably, the interest rate over time will be high, maybe sometimes too high for these people to pay up. If banks were doing this practice responsibly, e.g. in moderate volumes in relation to their overall lending business, it would not be a big problem--except for the people who do the borrowing and cannot pay back.

The banks who began offering these subprime loans made the unsound decision of offering too many of them, to make more profit. For every bad housing loan, banks took out interest and made more money. Then they repackaged those bad loans and sold them off as new loans. More money was made. At first only the low-credit people were suffering. They were the ones who couldn't pay. But when banks examined their business, they were also going dry. Their capital was useless, because it relied on people who couldn't pay back. A financial dead-end.

Any normal financial outcome of such malpractice would be to let the market do its social darwinistic job: die. Let them fall. But Bush and his financial administers decided to bail out the banks. The argument was, in the light of his political career, perfectly understandable: don't upset middle class voters who'll see their economy shaking, maintain an economic status quo. But from a larger point of view, this decision makes no sense. If you take big risks like these housing firms did, you also have to face the consequences of those risks threatening to take you down. What else would the incentive be to change from unsound to sound financial behavior? More regulation?

Just as low-credit people continue to borrow money to waste it on poker and sluts - and we don't hold this against them as long as they face the consequences - banks will lend out money and make huge profits as long as they know someone else will save them from falling. Their fall would shake the economy, probably very badly, but now we have a situation where old and new firms continue to speculate and hand out bonuses while taking big risks to trash other people's economy, and therefore, lives. It's irresponsible of a government to prevent finance to regulate itself, just like it's silly of parents to prevent children from learning by making mistakes. Sometime big risks pay big, but that's life.

The hysteric world view of climate change may be the best thing that has happened to us conservatives. Thanks to it and the social guilt liberals always project unto each other, they've become society's whiny, dogmatic doomsday prophets. People nowadays laugh at those who say we need to recycle everything in sight, that we can save the world if we donate billions to poor children, that a grey race culture can be achieved. Election results across Western and Eastern Europe speak for themselves: people don't buy the shit anymore.

This gives conservatives a great opportunity to express their forward-thinking philosophy. It's what Corrupt has been trying to do for years. I find increasingly that people are baffled when you think positive and do good things instead of pointing out what's negative. They understand there's a better way of living life, and they want to be on that train rather than becoming another fake-sympathizer with invincible causes. Check this out:

• Engagement: Because progressives have destroyed our morality on sex, it's nowadays almost thrilling to get engaged with someone you love before you turn 25. Most younger people, including girls, would have no idea what it's for. Now you can seek out a lover, love her/him more than ever, and prove it to the world with confidence.
• Home cooking: My message has always been clear on this subject, but let me rephrase that again for all of you. Cooking your own food today is revolutionary. I know people passing 24 who don't know how to cook pasta properly or make their own pasta sauce. When I discovered that it only takes me 30 minutes to make my own bread and much less to make really, really good ice cream, I almost completely abandoned the overpriced junk you find at supermarkets. Promise me, once you show your friends how to piece together a chicken stew, they'll at least want to try it at home, too.
• Church community: You may not be religious, but if you're looking for an intelligent, dutiful partner - or just something meaningful to do after work/studies, a not-so-dogmatic church community is not a bad place to start. If you're American this may sound strange to you, but most of Europe today is secular, especially Northern Europe. You can't imagine the looks on people's face when someone says they regularly attend or work in a church because it's more fun than to watch television. I've played some hilarious trolls on people by denouncing populist atheism as boring. In a society where no one believes in anything, religion suddenly becomes mystical and interesting again.
• Cut adolescence: The increasing reality for younger generations in the West is to remain a teenager until you're about 30. That's about the time people these days finish studies, get a job, and...well, wait five years and they may plan to have a baby. In most societies where modernity hasn't struck high yet, like Russia or Ukraine, people think you're a retard if you're a woman and not pregnant by the age of 25. All you Western youngsters who're in your 20s can really provoke people's lazy attitude to life by aiming early at nailing the following (not necessarily in this order): competitive education -> decent paying job, stable relationship (1+ year), safe home (living home at ma's and pa's doesn't count). I know women past their 30s who still believe that their life is over if they'd become pregnant by accident. In such an environment, a self-confident and soon-to-be father is danger alert for whiny liberals.
• Life is good-philosophy: Have you noticed how basically all politics today is about CHANGING everything. Why do we catch on to that? Are things really all so bad that we need other people to tell us what to do to be safe? I don't think so. But most people do, including many misguided conservatives, because they basically think life sucks. I don't, and if you learn to appreciate what you've got, you won't either. Believe it or not, but this may in our current time be the most radical political message out there: DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING. Society is good. I can fulfill my ideals, I can build a future for my family, I can shoot cans after work, I can make my own beer. Anything is possible, if I just have the will (and, occasionally, money) to do it. Don't become another believer in CHANGE. Most stuff in the West works. Don't mess with it, or us.
• Dare to be indifferent: I'm sure those who are reading this, like me, have got quite a few immigrant friends. I like my immigrant friends, but I've got my own culture, and am not overtly interested in what Iraqis have for dinner or why Iranian women sometimes are pushed out of balconies. I'm just fairly indifferent to diversity and only choose to participate in it when I feel like it. Liberals demand we all share a great interest in everything besides our own culture. If we don't, we're bad, backwards-thinking people. Have you tried sometime to join a multicultural discussion by saying that you just don't care about what goes on in segregated neighborhoods, and that you really just prefer your own lifestyle? Indifference to diversity usually upsets a lot of people. You should allow yourself to smile when saying this.

There's more, but I'm sure that if you ponder the idea, you will discover the rest. It always boils down to this: everyone else is busy trying to conform to a progressive lifestyle, so you have all the time and space in the world to take charge of your own future and shape it according to what you believe is important. It really is a great world, isn't it?

A wise Englishman once remarked that when politicians do as little as possible, they tend to do good. Martin Regnen always says that he fears intelligent leaders, because they tend to want to change everything, even if it only makes things worse. Maybe this explains why a lot of intelligent people are liberals, but would benefit the most from being conservative?

Swedish election is coming up and every party is promising job opportunities, better schools and better health care. Eventually every social democratic state transforms into a version of Sweden: people want to be nannied into narcotic safety, and leaders love to hand out the drugs. Welfare becomes an addiction. If you're used to giving away 30 or so percent of your income and expect "free" hand outs in return, you'll want more of it, all the time. Despite what socialists say about capitalism, we know for sure that social democracy breeds generations of egoists: "We paid our taxes, now we demand you give us everything we want!"

Social democratic elections always push paternalism, regardless of who ends up winning. It's not that we don't need a more flexible labor market, that public schools don't need to raise the standard, that health care isn't running out of funding, or that we don't need to reduce organized crime. It's just that our leaders are incapable of doing it all that well. If they deregulated the labor market, lowered the taxes for employees, pushed more people into private schools and made it harder to pass public education tests, cut down on health care bureaucracy and strengthened laws and civic society, we would improve fast.

Instead we expect the election to be a time when leaders promise us to save us from ourselves. "I will be in charge of your safety," says a conservative party poster close to where I live. It is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the political culture of our society. You're not supposed to be in charge of my safety--that's my business. Your job is to make sure I can run my own life. To expect something else would be financially unwise and morally reprehensible. I don't like morons as leaders, but Martin and other democracy-critics may have a point: if you think you're so smart you can make all decisions for me, you need to be dethroned and put on a real job instead. Paternalism is slow death.

Occasionally I decide to break a few laws. When doing so, it's mostly motivated by personal principles. For instance, I refuse to pay the common license fee for televisions, because I don't watch the public service channels. I sometimes drive against red light to follow traffic rhythm in inner cities. And I don't see a problem with letting friends smoke marijuana at my porch when it's hot outside. Here's why.

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.
- Henry David Thoreau

The rule of law is one of the key things that set the West (including its offspring like Australia and Japan) apart from most of its other neighboring powers. We follow the rule of law because we want each citizen to be treated equally under a common standard. But the laws themselves need to change over time in order to reflect the current culture they preside over. Sometimes politicians don't make that happen. Then people have to act.

Justice in Western societies is based upon Christian morality. According to Western tradition, people are sole responsible for their individual actions. This is why we have individual rights written down in our constitutions. But with these rights also come limitations. Following Christian tradition, we have a choice to either obey a law or break it. When we break it, there are ways of punishing our behavior. Punishment is a cost for behaving without limitations. This is what Plato described when he talked about the invincible ring of Gyges; if we act invincible, we will corrupt ourselves, because we escape consequences of our choices.

A law is a sort of contract. It's a promise that if you step beyond the bounds of society, society will punish you for it. This is why law breaking, in one sense, is unproblematic. You are free to kill your cheating wife or hunt down a rapist with torches, but if someone gets hurt, you'll have to pay for it. So when I decide to be civic obedient and not pay for a service I don't want, I'm rebelling against a law. But with that choice, I am also ready to face any consequences of my behavior. In this case, it'll just cost me a fine, and only in a rare case will I face a shorter prison sentence.

But the point stands: I, together with many other Swedes who feel the public service channels should either change the way they finance their service, or switch to a commercial model, are slowly changing an idiotic law by protesting against it. Civic disobedience is a common feature of Western societies all throughout history, and is actually actively supported by the Swedish parliament. It is believed to strengthen important rights and democracy.

Why is this important? Because most people today walk around in total fear of laws and are ready to commit to irrational behavior in order to obey the government. Sometimes laws, like in the traffic, can be more harmful than helpful. In those situations it's crucial to make an independent evaluation of what's going on. It's important to understand that a system of laws is just a contract, and you're free to pull off from any details, as long as you understand that it may cost you. In most cases, the cost is too high, which is what supposedly stops most of us from killing and stealing whenever we feel like it. The rest, of course, is up to communal and individual morality. That's why a strong civic community is important, both to protect, and occasionally, circumvent laws.

When buying a home, the first thing one should ask oneself is, can I/we afford it? That's an involved question, and one that deserves some thought. Most mortgage bankers, at least in the United States, will give you the "total monthly cost", meaning property taxes, mortgage and interest, and any additional insurance needed depending on your finance package.

While banks should be a trusted source of any additional questions or concerns you have about home ownership and in particular, the associated monthly expenses, recent events have shown they may not be the final word as they have an interest in making a loan happen. Rather than advocating for the government to force them to be trustworthy, which would hinder intelligent people who know their limitations in a house purchase from borrowing in some instances, a more sustainable solution is for the individual or family to take an honest look at their own finances.

It can be difficult to do this when browsing house listings or going house-hunting, so be aware of the following:

• Add a few things to projected monthly expenses. These would be water bills, your current bills of course, and build in a buffer for groceries, plus oil or gas (depending on how your home will be heated). Slice your income by 10% on the top line just in case tax brackets change. You won't have a real picture of what your bottom line will be each month until you get realistic about the actual house expenses.
• Beyond house expenses, build in a nice night out for you and your spouse and/or family each month, plus other discretionary spending. You shouldn't be buying a house if you need to sacrifice 100% of your discretionary spending, for a couple of reasons: you'll be miserable if you can succeed in doing so, living only for your house, and most people are simply unable to eliminate all discretionary spending.



• Build in landscaping expenses and one-time expenses such as a lawn mower, tools, barrels, anything else you know you'll need shortly after the purchase. It can get overwhelming if you have to suddenly spend hundreds of dollars maintaining a home you just bought. The inside is usually okay to leave as is for a while and projects can be tackled inside with little expense, but outside is where equipment and other expensive purchases may need to occur.
• Make sure you have plenty in savings before buying. The bank might want you to have two or three month's worth of mortgage payment in the bank, but be conservative and have at least six or seven. A year's worth would be even better.

Lastly, of course, there are things you can't expect. That's what homeowner's insurance is for. Spend the extra money putting in a sump pump even if you feel you may not need it - your own little insurance policy against basement flooding, which can lead to mold, mildew, and plenty of other damage you'd rather avoid. That's just one of many additional items to consider.

In my case, our family bought a smaller house in a better town, and ensured our budget was such that we still had money left over every month - taking our past spending habits as a history, even though we knew in the backs of our minds we could curb some of the discretionary spending. Seeing the bottom line in black rather than red every month even in "worst case" estimates will increase your confidence during the home buying process, but will also properly direct you toward wiser decision making.

"I want anarchy!" "Save the white race!" "Money is our enemy!" When you've lived long enough you begin to understand why most people, especially those who are sensible in most areas of life, surprisingly are moderate when it comes to politics. They've seen extremists and revolutionaries destroy whole societies like Russia and Cuba. But more cautiously, they've observed how the best of soft intentions often spawn tyranny, as in the case of Holland and Sweden. This is the story of why conservatism really is about conserving moderation.

Revolution attracts young people, because of its inherent idealism. Powerful people are fascinated by it, because it gives them an opportunity to continue to rule under a new fashion system of government. When the lower classes in France demanded a revolution, the nobility recognized the problems their privileges posed to the public, but chose to resist opposition. After the Second World War, in many parts of Europe, they slowly passed votes saying yes to public democracy. Conservatism was therefore born to stabilize society by slowing down revolutions through the implementation of slow changes to society as a whole.

The conservative principle is belief in slow change guided by tradition. This means it's both futuristic and traditionalistic. Radical ideologies like socialism, feminism and anarchism fall outside of this scheme of thought, because they demand a radical transformation of society at fast speed, often with little or no consideration to historical reality. Put simply, radicalism takes no regard to human nature or history, but sees only ideas on paper. When they become reality, they often create dysfunctional cultures like Russia and North Korea.

Radical conservatism is therefore sort of an oxymoron. You're not really conservative if you believe we should immediately overthrow our democratic leaders, replace the entire class system with birth-given meritocracy and send home millions of immigrants from wherever they came from. It would completely disrupt the entire society, even if its goals are based on historic conditions. If we look realistically at the world, we recognize we need a moderate change over a longer period of time to which people can adapt to. Think about some of these issues:

• Feminism: Has caused us a lot of harm, but as it stands today, many women are capable in the work force and some of them are completely unsuitable as mothers. Forcing them all to revert back to pre-2000 gender roles would not work out, and would dig a hole in an already infected economy.

  Democracy: Moderates some problems with direct tyranny, but historically seems to transform into some form of fascism over time, clouded with bureaucracy. What would we do if we killed it next year? We'd have to rewrite our entire constitutions, many of them spanning centuries of political wisdom. And after anarchy? Well...

  Multiculturalism: Has not brought us much diversity, despite high promises. Yet most people today know that some immigrants have managed to integrate nicely and contribute to the host culture and society. It's not been a picnic, but slowly we've found out that culture is much more dynamic than what we think and if it wants to survive, it cannot be isolated, it needs to adapt to worldly conditions in a global civilization.

  Capitalism: Everyone's favorite target these days, and indeed, the West's hyper-effective economies have drained natural resources and made life boring and miserable for a lot of workers. The alternative though, as we can still see in socialist countries around the world, is not that appealing. Great minds have found that it's possible to limit environmental and social problems by better understanding how a free market really works, given the input of sane values guiding it instead of raw money craze.

  Americanism: When a dominant culture rules, all other cultures adapt to certain key conditions of that host culture. We saw it in central Europe during the rule of Rome and we see traces of it in Caucasus today. But what it means is not just that cultural diversity is relative to any master culture sustaining it, but most importantly that maybe, sometimes, we should be thankful there is a backing hand in a world increasingly left in the hands of unpredictable and dangerous dictatorships.

This realization may upset some people, especially young idealists. It means we may be thinking right when we orient ourselves around radical philosophy, but fail miserably when we try to apply these philosophies short-term. Therefore we choose not to directly advocate an uprise against democracy, death of feminism or destruction of globalism on this site. Radical conservatism, understood as a belief that life would be better if we returned to a pre-modern world, is appealing in theory, but is lethal in practice.

Instead we believe in a moderate conservatism where these over-arching goals influence the way we bring about slow change today. In terms of lifestyle, this means we may choose to lift weights instead of training with swords, letting our women repair the car one day instead of locking them up inside the kitchen, joining a local church community instead of declaring pagan gods our masters, or attending local Arab parties when we feel like having fun, instead of deciding that all immigrants are unwelcome guests. Some say this is pragmatism, but what it really is, is a recognition of the depth and value of history, and a willingness to let that history guide us safely but bravely into the future. Think wisely, think conservative--think Right.

Everyone who followed Ron Paul's presidential campaign learned that the "Ron Paul revolution" wasn't really about the presidency. In fact, the chances of Ron Paul ever becoming a President, for a lot of reasons including network bias, were slim. Rather, his campaign was a rally call; a people's movement; a rebirth of traditional conservative values in context of a modern society. Likewise, the rise of the Tea Party movement in America and radical conservative parties in Europe display a similar approach to politics. The Right is no longer ideologically centralized. It has spawned a new political language and a new set of ideas that dare to breach conventional wisdom. This is the New Right.

The Ron Paul revolution will always be remembered by New Rightists, because it marked the beginning of a new era for Right-wing politics. Ron Paul, unlike his competing Republican candidates, dared to emphasize sensitive but important issues:

• Due to a questionable foreign policy and a complex political situation in the Middle East, American hegemony in the world may soon be coming to an end.
• Capitalism works, but only if we believe it works without strong central regulation.
• Race is an explosive topic, and therefore politically pretty much off the table, so let's talk about how individuals can thrive, not collectives.
• Populist environmentalism has become a religion, so it makes sense to focus instead on how we can protect the environment by emphasizing property rights.
• Freedom by constitutional rights is obvious, but keeping government in check is not, so people need to react as soon as leaders try to solve problems with more regulation.

Most of these issues offended the Republicans more than the liberals, because they realized their political methods were slowly becoming outdated. Ron Paul lost, but his momentum transformed into a larger movement. Some might say the Tea Party movement is a constitutional movement, but seeing a similar Right-oriented uprise in Europe, we now know it's a larger political trend in the West. What the Paulites did was to emphasize conservative issues beyond conventional Left-Right politics, but most importantly the New Right movement understands political method in a way traditional conservatives do not.

The old conservative approach to politics is to spell out theory. But "sayin' it like it is" is modern political suicide. Politics, as widely observed, is a rhetorical phenomenon created to motivate and persuade the public. New Rightists are far more radical than ordinary conservatives in a lot of areas, but by carefully beating home a few basic set of ideas, they effectively circumvent radical opposition:

• "You don't want to protect us against terrorists!"
  We do, but we can't afford chasing them all over the world, so instead of both losing the war on terror and going bankrupt, we need to focus on national security.
• "You are racists!"
  We prefer to regard people as individuals. If racial groups want to defend their interests, they should do so on their own, because the government should only be mandated to work with citizen's rights, not X group's rights.
• "You are anti-feminists!"

  No, we just feel women can best improve their situation if they're left alone by the government. Attempting to babysit them is reducing them to children, which we feel is dehumanizing.

• "You are brutal capitalists!"

  Capitalism is brutal when it's regulated in favor of certain groups in society. We find it to be an effective economic tool when it operates according to market principles in a society where citizens have equal rights and duties.

• "Why don't you try to stop the climate change!"

  Because even if it's a problem we need to address, we can't do it through taxation, when we need to make sure that industry develops cleaner technology and better urban design. If we don't look at infrastructure and lifestyle, we're not being seriously green about the environment.

• "You only care about the white middle class!"

  We care about the constitutional rights that give each individual the right to tend to individual interests. If we happen to be white or middle class is irrelevant; we wish all people looked after their families and communities, but we don't believe it's our job to do it for them. Likewise, we hope you respectfully stay out of our lives.

• "Against socialism?"

  We don't have to be. We just emphasize fiscal conservatism everywhere and as often as we can.

• "What are you going to do about the elite that is sucking us dry?"

  We will cut away their entitlements.

The New Right persists on scaling issues down to their very core. It understands that a political fight over class, gender or race can never be won, only prolonged and made worse with group conflicts, hate and misled propaganda. It understands that unless we apply capitalism in a sensible fashion to our economy, it will consume and destroy rather than to nurture and build. It understands culture, but demands it to be culture free of political attachment. It understands people's need to look after their own needs, but it's not about egoism, but independence. It understands the environment and suggests bipartisan solutions that everyone can agree are rational things to do.

Liberals don't understand what's going on, so they call us racists, but fail to convince anyone. Conservatives understand what's going on, and realize they can either continue to champion the old ways of Right-wing politics, or join the new movement. John McCain chose to side with old politics, Sarah Palin chose to join the new politics. Glenn Beck was already outside the mainstream, Ron Paul stepped back while his son Rand Paul took over part of the leadership of the new movement. What makes this movement so special is that it refuses to obey central ideological authority. It is commanded by angry citizens who are tired of Left-Right hegemony. Palin cannot control it, neither can Beck, but they can influence and lead it in new directions. That is what they're doing and we are now hoping they can gain us seats in the coming American elections and spread the momentum to Europe. If that happens, we will have an interesting ten years ahead to look forward to.

Where I live, most people are either Social Democrats or Communists, or both. These people tend to blame every problem in society on capitalism. I once spoke with a bartender who went as far as claiming that it was the fault of capitalism that small beer breweries had to close down in the city. He wasn't receptive to alternative explanations. Let's look closer at this anti-capitalist sentiment common in the West today.

The single most common anti-capitalist argument you come across is that thanks to capitalism, when tied with globalism, big corporations buy up smaller businesses and destroy economic diversity. McDonald's, Taco Bell and Wal-Mart are textbook examples used to support this argument. People tend to forget that while these multi-national corporations are huge and do overrun similar business chains, there are still lots of successful alternatives. For every McDonald's in Sweden there are 5-7 alternatives, specializing on similar but not identical food selection. How many small Mexican food restaurants don't pop up every day, and Walmart is simply the giant among a whole bunch of we-serve-it-all-to-a-lower-price stores. The idea that big corporations by default kill smaller businesses is simply not true.

Young people may only see McDonald's everywhere and figure they've been duped. They may be right--McDonald's food is garbage served to people who cannot burn what they eat, but they're forgetting that big producers have been around for a long time, much longer than what modern day capitalism has been. This is especially true in European countries, where it was common (and in some cases still is) with one big company producing all the kitchen drawers, radiators or doors in people's homes. They took it for granted that it was simply the best product available. Today you can choose from hundreds of different producers, just in your average bigger city.

What do we do if we still say no to (largely) free business and tree? What alternatives to we expect to exist? The truth is that we'd still end up with large central producers and government-owned companies. Imagine the State of California taking over Microsoft and start producing Windows 8, or the state of France producing one bicycle model for all its citizens. I'm sure we'd see a dramatic drop in technical development and a lot of bureaucratic dysfunction swimming in tax money. The alternative to a one-size-fits-all economy has historically been the free market economy. We know it works, because that's how nations became prosperous, and it's been the best way to nurture and safe guard small enterprise culture.

People shoot the messenger when they're putting all blame on capitalism for fast food, plastic kitchen tools and uninspiring Tex-Mex salads. To illustrate the example in a completely different area, read this excerpt from a chat conversation about pop music and the fine arts:

Me: i can't believe some people plan their nights around watching reality tv, that has to be bad for the brain
Her (12:59:36 PM): My sister does. At least on Tuesdays.
Her (12:59:39 PM): She loves American Idol
Me (12:59:42 PM): yuck
Her (12:59:53 PM): I love Idol, actually.
Me (1:00:15 PM): how does ellen degeneras have any credibility to be a judge in music, she has no background in music; she just has a famous name and a happy face (which is just a bag of tricks; anyone can appear happy)
Her (1:00:42 PM): Because they wanted a judge that wasn't involved in the music industry.
Me (1:00:51 PM): well what's she know about quality singing?
Her (1:00:52 PM): People in the industry see music differently than people who just watch the show.
Me (1:01:11 PM): oh, that's a good thing?
Her (1:01:15 PM): Their definition of a good artist a lot of the time differs from non performers.
Me (1:01:45 PM): yea and they don't know what good is if they have no experience in music
Her (1:02:01 PM): But they know what they like and what they don't like.
Her (1:02:14 PM): Hence the reason people actually watch the show and vote.

What's funny about this conversation is not that the girl suggests American Idol is fun to watch. It's the guy's misunderstanding of what she is trying to say: the show captures people's interest because it bears a meaningful relation to our time. If we'd lived in 15th Century France, we'd probably observe the masses listen to something else that is trendy. But if we think 50 Cent is producing garbage music for wiggers, it's not the fault of popular music itself, but rather we are making a critique of culture and of mass psychology. I'm not sure in which society the masses have ever been smart enough to understand Beethoven or vote New Right, but we need to realize it's fantasy talk.

Just like popular music did not kill classical music, capitalism isn't killing small business. On the contrary, we need to look at people's attitudes and values. Competition on a free market offers us possibilities. The choices we make define how the market will develop. Me, I always go to a local hair dresser, I prefer locally produced food, I buy records of independent artists I enjoy, I tend to go to smaller clothing chains than the big and faceless ones, I like small churches, and the type of record stores you find in basements on odd street addresses. In Western capitalism we have choices to make.

The fact that many people prefer to go to McDonald's over Joe's Taco Grill is a sign of cultural convenience rather than system failure. I, for one, don't really have a problem with a strong fast food industry, as long as I pay minimum fees for the people who destroy their health because of it. Me, and many others who increasingly think locally, will continue to support small businesses and local shops. It doesn't stop me from grabbing a Big Mac sometimes or finding something interesting at a Wal-Mart-ish superstore. But if we want to preserve local business culture and people's economic independence from bureaucrats, we need to change our way of thinking and choosing, not reverting back to soft Soviet babysitting. Down that road there are few beer breweries and even fewer church communities..

Growing up, my mother worked and also did a great job parenting three children who, I have to face reality, weren't always angels. She happened to work at the school we attended as soon as her last one was in Kindergarten. Pretty convenient, and it kept her from Marge Simpson syndrome; cleaning for no reason and being cooped up in a house all day.

My mother is a bright woman who grew up in the 1960s and married in the 1970s - not in the counterculture, but rather in a traditional Italian household surrounded by friends and relatives in the same situation. She had her share of rebellion and has enjoyed plenty of nights out with the girls, but to this day, I can see that the values she took from her parents, even if they were a bit strict at times, were gladly passed down to her children. The fact that she's considered "a classic" by my wife and friends is no surprise: she's a great hostess who welcomes people into her home and takes great pride in keeping a clean home; she works hard and still has time to prepare dinner most nights for those remaining in her house; she always wants family around no matter how busy it makes her or no matter how tired she gets.

My wife's mother is much the same way; she did all of the work in raising her children herself and from what I understand was also strict at times. She has run a day care out of her house for decades after working in television and traveling during the 1970s. She's had a full life of hard work and parenting, she just chose not to pursue a career she knew was at odds with parenting once she had children.

To me, this is the working mom. Working moms put family first and worry about career later. Both examples noted above would be considered sacrelig by the modern mentality of "career first, materialism next, kids third."

So it confuses me that much more when I hear complaints about work-life balance from people who choose to delve into careers they know full well will take up most of their waking hours:

Listen to Nicole Russo, the mother of two young girls, and a partner at O’Neill Hospitality and Entertainment, speaking on a recent morning at a volunteer event before starting her day at work, then going home to West Roxbury to do the bath and bedtime routine. “People say, ‘you should do yoga, you should do Pilates, something for yourself for an hour.’ But who has an hour? Who has time for inner peace?"

If there’s one thing that’s harder to take than your own lack of equilibrium, it’s someone else’s success in that realm. To say “I spend time with my kids, and I volunteer, and I’m blessed with a wonderfully flexible job, and my husband and I have date night every Saturday,’’ is akin to boasting “I’ve got firm thighs."

But perhaps the best advice comes from the unbalanced moms themselves. Asked if they had work-life balance, many let out a long “ha ha ha ha.’’ In other words, when all else fails, laugh.

I'm not sure many working mothers can relate to someone who's a partner at an entertainment company. Someone in that position probably has a client-facing job and has to put a smile on for strangers all day, then come home tired to her family. The only difference is, people in roles like that often have the Blackberry buzzing all through dinner, and usually are left wondering what their kids are doing when their kids realize Mom is too busy with her other life to discipline them or keep a watch on them.

Parents end up doing the worst job they possibly can by thinking of themselves first and their kids second. Anyone who has a career or kids can appreciate that sometimes there aren't enough hours in the day. But to stay in a career that gobbles up all your free time, then complaining there isn't enough time afterward, is lost on someone like me. Plenty of mothers choose careers that allow flexible hours, and many of them are just as tired at the end of the day. Trading the fancy title and corner office for, say, a human services job that doesn't pay as well but offers night time hours offers the reward of leaving the job at work and making family first priority when home.

And just so there's no mistaking the motive: the same goes for men. If you find you don't even know your kids as they're in their formative years of school and choosing sports they will play through high school, it might be time to ease back a bit on the business travel or late meetings and make it a point to stay home more. Plenty of men who have jobs that require travel just don't make time for weekend hobbies like golfing which are mutually exclusive with being a Dad on the weekends.

As for me, though the income potential may be higher elsewhere, my current employer offers the type of flexibility that is worth more than a few dollars more in my paycheck every two weeks.

America's healthcare debate stunned Europe. How could Americans be offended by a reform that didn't even move close to a socialization of the private healthcare system? Sarah Palin talked about death panels, funded abortions and government take-overs. Most of which had some theoretical relevance, but no practical meaning whatsoever. In retrospect, with the rise of the Tea Party movements, we can now see that the conservative resistance against ObamaCare was 80 % impulse and 20 % actual dispute.

Traditionally there are two forms of freedom: positive and negative freedom. Positive freedom entails what citizens are allowed to do by law and constitution, such as criticizing their leaders without having their family shot by the authorities. Negative freedom entails what the government, or someone else, is not allowed to do to any citizen, such as stealing their private property or torturing them for fun. Our constitutions provide us with positive freedoms, and the really masterly constitutions also suggest a philosophy of negative freedoms, particularly on the role of government. America is a historical example of this.

The fact of the matter is that ObamaCare may not be a socialized healthcare system, but very well a system pointing in that direction. It's getting close to the kind of single-payer healthcare they've got in Switzerland or Germany, which essentially is a heavily regulated market system, i.e. soft socialism. Americans, thinking this system could be for better or for worse, reacted on pure gut feeling. They know that a similar system in other areas of society have turned disastrous for Europe, so why would it be any better on providing healthcare? It's a reaction spawned out of a negative freedom idea: we want to work and pay for as much as possible ourselves, otherwise we end up subsidize an ineffective system slowly eating itself up.

The fusion of positive and negative freedom works like soldier and guardian; it asserts what it can do and protects the ability to continue doing it in the future. Countries low on negative freedom, like the Northern European countries, have evidently also lost much of their belief in their positive freedoms, because few people even bother to protect their rights and stop increased governmental intrusion. As a result they've handed that protective impulse over to the government itself, which abuses it for its own sake. Americans are witnessing this constitutional suicide in Europe, and therefore revolt at any such tendencies displayed at home.

American Tea Party protests were born to ensure that we not only demand our rights to ensure they remain rights, but at the same time continue to push back ideas that threaten those rights or seek to subvert them. A case of cautious slippery-slope logic: yes, maybe ObamaCare will improve certain conditions of our current system, but if we approve of it, aren't we more likely to approve of similar reforms in the future? Why stop at forced insurance? Maybe if we look at the somewhat dramatic "don't tread on me" warnings chanted by Tea Partiers in this light, we'll be able to recognize that this is exactly what they are: cautious warning signs that a significant portion of society is being paternalized. And so they push back.

In "The happiness of the people," Charles Murray makes the same prediction every Anglo-American journalist has been making about immigration and European welfare for decades:

The European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birthrates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.

The argument seems to rest upon the notion that the welfare system in the past did work, but because immigration brought outside cultural values, the system will eventually break down. But is this really true? First, let's look at some recent history of Swedish economics:

Beginning in the 1870s, however, Sweden created the conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world's fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third-highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. By the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

People often forget that Sweden didn't became rich because of its post-60s welfare model, but rather despite it. Naturally, such a model would never have existed unless there already were strong unions and labor movements who pushed for social democracy rather than capitalism. These are the inherent "Swedish" values behind the Scandinavian experiment. The idea of inborn cultural values that profess this welfare model is simply a myth.

But the real fallacy behind Murray & Co's reasoning lies not in the myth of homogenous welfare values. The real question is whether "alien values" is a threat to the welfare model at all. Consider the welfare society as an organism. It operates bureaucratically; as long as its citizens go to work and pay their taxes, the system basically works. In a more capitalist society where deregulations eventually lead to a greater civic sector where people are dependent upon each other, cultural homogenity becomes more important.

You can therefore live practically your whole life in moderate isolation from your neighbors and community, as long as you bring home cash and send off taxes. You'll survive, and if there is trouble, an agency will continue to support you. The dependence on other people is minimal. This is why Sweden is an extremely individualist society with great tolerance for subcultures, often baffling non-Europeans. In a society where you rely much more upon your own actions and those of the community, you will need to find common ground quickly. This is where cultural values come in.

Immigrants to Scandinavia can therefore keep their Muslim, Jewish or Hindu identity and still make it multiculturally, because they will live much of their lives in isolation from native Scandinavians, or end up in another multicultural community just like their families and relatives. It "works," because the citizens of Scandinavia are financing a system making it possible to live as secluded as possible. The only alien values threatening the welfare model are those that break with the ethics that profess hard work, little pay and heavy taxes. Most cultures can and will adapt to that model, since they'll maintain a good material standard in return.

There does exist such a break in values, but there are reasons to suggest it will even out over time across generations. The real immigration threat to the Swedish model is rather the costs, and the model itself, which, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, thrives on "running out of other people's money to spend." Aware European conservatives therefore take the immigration issue seriously, but even more profess the greatest systematic threat is the system itself, which preferably would return to the high-growth, pre-60's model that made Sweden prosperous and economically competitive.

Why do people freak out when we say that their dreams of self-realization is hogwash, and that being single all your life may be a pathetic excuse for never growing up? Because we're hitting home truths you don't want to hear. Tough luck--that's what we're here for.

If you've read this site long enough, you've observed that we believe politics and philosophy intersect with lifestyle: dating, training, cooking, dressing and playing. We believe it's all interrelated to one another. Everyone who disagrees with the current political status quo, e.g. progressivism, agrees that we should change our lives. No one wants to talk about how though.

So when Frank told me he had a baby coming, I asked him to start up a conservative family blog, and the idea here was that if people really believe in these ideas, they probably also want proof that they work in real life. If not, what's the point of it all? (Well, you can always join the tarditionalist, I mean traditionalist crowd, and sit at home all day and read Indian scriptures to arm yourself with poetry against the society that gave you a home, but it remains unclear how you're ever going to rise above the sudra caste by doing so).

Frank's blog, in its entirety, from start to continuity, is proof of what we talk about. We can now see that cooking your own food, repairing your own house, being a real man to nurture a real woman, taking care of a family, bringing in your own money and spending it the way you see fit, not only works, but creates a better life for all men and women out there. Even in the face of disasters, taking personal responsibility and using saved resources is a safe plan to success. Put simply, the politics we describe can be applied by moderate to highly intelligent people, and make them more powerful, more cultural and more independent. How's that sound?

What scares people is the threshold to a tougher but more rewarding life. However, once you cross it, you will never regret it. Wouldn't it be awesome to stop listening to whiny feminists and walking in the paths of the men who came before you? Or aiming for a job that would make you financially independent from tedious welfare plans treating you like a lazy animal? Or finding a decent mate and watching a genetic copy of yourself see the first light of the day? Or extinguishing that gruesome loneliness by joining a community and learning new things from new people you thought you'd never meet? There is opportunity out there, you just have to cease it. Frank, like or dislike him, made his own choices, and if we're to trust his writings, he seems pretty damn satisfied with life.

An old conservative era is slowly coming to an end. We're seeing it in Europe, where the past crony-rightism of Berlusconi types and the weak leadership of social liberals come under frequent fire. Most notably, in America, there's been serious talk of a "GOP crisis" for years since the end of the Bush Administration. Tea Party movements are opening fire against the Republican establishment and radical Right-wingers in Europe are transforming old conservatives who have sold out to social liberalism and social democracy.

This old era now belongs to the past. The new age is that of a New Right. An age without central movements, but central ideas and motivations. But what does it really mean to subscribe to something like this? The New Right, to be perfectly clear, attacks both the Left and the Right. It is highly self-critical and lacks central ideological authority. While it remains anti-Left, to better understand its framework, you have to look at where it parts from the traditional Republican Right. And these are the patterns we may discern:

• Environment: The old Right was often environmentalist in character, but refused to compromise with industrial and economic development. "Progress" was the name of the game, but as the world increasingly became a filthy place to live in, New Rightists began to promote capitalism and environmentalism at the same time, some even suggesting the government should restrain population numbers. The idea? We want to live well off, but because of our numbers, all of us cannot do it, so we need to rethink both technology and urban design.

  At the front: Michael E. Arth, politician and urban designer, attempts to unite fiscal conservatism with progressive environmentalism. Current with a new book: Democracy and the Common Wealth: Breaking the Stranglehold of the Special Interests.

• Foreign policy: After the Cold War, Reagan was a hero for standing up for Western values, but when the Bush Administration began to see its mission to spread those values to the rest of the world, New Rightists spoke out and said the empire couldn't afford it. Some even went as far as saying that America's status as super power may be over soon. This shifted the focus away from the strength of West, to how it relates to the rest of the world. This culminated in the death of neoconservatism in America, and the rise of anti-Islamic, pro-patriotic sentiment in Europe.

  At the Front: Ron Paul, libertarian and Austrian-schooled presidential candidate. Made great news during the previous presidential election when suggesting that America had created its own foreign enemies and that the Iraq War was not handled properly by government and military agencies.
  In Europe, Dutch politician Geert Wilders warned that the issue Europeans should be worried about is not whether we are superior to other people or not, but whether our values match those of non-Western values. His conclusion was no, and everyone was offended, especially the old Right.

• Economy: When the economic crisis hit America, and later Europe, political leaders began to question the authority of capitalism. New Rightists fathomed this criticism but suggested that while capitalism is superior to any other economic system we've ever designed, it's been overthrown by bureaucrats and governments who control the market to promote special interests. By doing so, New Rightists highlighted the fact that any economic system can be manipulated behind closed doors, unless there is a regulating force stopping it from doing so. The invisible hand, not so invisible after all?

  At the Front: Peter Schiff, libertarian and Austrian-schooled, predicted the economic downturn in America years before it took place. At that time he was publically ridiculed for his viewpoints. When proven right, the old Right began to listen to what he and others had to say about the impact of growing government on the free market system. The message was too radical for any American President, regardless of political color: let that which spells failure, fail, so we can move on to stabilize markets and create jobs. Economic purists took notes and became followers.

• Culture: After the Second World War, patriotism and nationalism transformed into ethnic and cultural masochism in Europe. The old Right wanted to remain enemies of the old Fascist and Nazi regimes, so it adopted the same policies. The New Right became fed up with the urban sprawl, social decay and cultural confusion caused by leftist-driven multiculture, and said no. Even more radically, it suggested a more compassionate form of cultural nationalism is possible, one based on mutual respect rather than racism. If suppressed, it argued, the West will lose belief in itself and self-destruct.

  At the Front: Mark Steyn, conservative agitator and columnist, flamed the leftist-liberal establishment in Canada for trying to promote religious and cultural diversity over constitutional rights. Later moving to America and becoming the European voice in American old-school conservatism, Steyn controversially suggested America was the last outpost of Western civilization not yet fully succumbed to alien values and liberal-government supremacy. His attack on ideological multiculturalism remains epic.

• HBD (Human Biological Diversity): When Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein wrote the Bell Curve, it immediately became highly controversial. Its main thesis was the cause; it claimed scientifically that biology matters far more than social environment for the development, character and ability of social and racial groups. This sparked a slow revolution among conservatives of the old Right, who increasingly began to believe that humans cannot and should not be socialized to become equal, but instead pursue interests based on ability. The New Right thus began calling itself believers of HBD, human biological diversity, and suggested liberal leftists denied science in favor of social utopia.

  At the Front: Steve Sailer, famous American columnist and author, trespassed into forbidden territory by covering news about the relation between social culture and genetics. He found that genetics is superior to any social model of how humans interact and work, and that we therefore haven't changed much the last thousand years or so. His influence remains large in America, where smaller movements of conservative-leaning people have begun to apply similar theories on gender roles, dating, race relations and even music.

So what does all of this add up to? The New Right is first and foremost against entitlement programs and extended government control of areas in society that used to be civic or cultural in nature. To beat back what it perceives as being socialist policies, it upholds the nuclear family model, free business enterprise and traditional culture as central to society. It also seeks to challenge the mainstream environmentalism with conservationism, or the belief that it's more important to conserve free land for functioning ecosystems and designing sustainable infrastructure, rather than buying the right ecoproducts in the stores.

Perhaps what most clearly distinguishes the New Right from the old Right is the tendency to believe more in evolutionary and biological answers than in social and environmental answers. The New Right refuses to worship race and class, but recognizes their reality in society and seeks to understand them on scientific terms. While scrutinizing the Western empire-building post WWII, the New Right embraces local decision making and decentralized power to bring authorities closer to the people they govern, while emphasizing strong and persistant leadership in the service of constitutional tradition.

In our book store we list some of the most fascinating, penetrating and forward-thinking literature circulating among the New Right. We add more as we continue our journey.

Over the years, most of my political or activist phases were influenced by proximal men in my life. Honestly, I have very little individual drive to actively pursue collectivist politics, which is ironic considering this forum. I most definitely have views, even by incidental virtue of being a philosophy student, in which CORRUPT acts as a great means of expression. However, becoming familiar with the community that surrounds this website, I have noticed two things:

1. It is heavily male-dominated.

2. There is a strong, and surprisingly diverse, political and cultural community orbiting around CORRUPT and its associated family of websites.

I don't think it's because women inherently find it hard to identify with romantic-traditionalist, classically conservative views, but because women don't feel compelled by the need to belong to a politically-driven, and willing collective movements in the way that men enjoy being organizers of their community.

I find myself actively involved in traditionalist revival in so far as the passive intellectual content exists, but I never found myself interest (period) in assuming leading, political roles. I would venture that most women in this sphere have significant others who actively stimulate their interest in the political component of the New Right.

I find myself manifesting the same energies that provoke the collective high in romantic or familial endeavours. Put simply, and this may seem very simple, I have never been passionate about politics the way that I could be passionate about a man, but I see men having the capacity to be passionate about politics to equal or even rival that of a woman.

"The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills," says Nietzsche. This is an important point to acknowledge because the lack of female involvement in the New Right should never be taken as plain opposition, especially relative to the amount of female involvement amongst liberals.

I theorize that liberals, amongst a host of reasons, but specifically pertaining to this argument, have larger numbers of female involvement because it's a kind of politics that relies on inaction -- the welfare state being a glaring case in point. It doesn't involve the proactive will and the individualistic spirit of classic conservatism.

Alex's recent article about politics struck home for me. I've never lived in Europe so I'll take his description of European-style multi-party politics as accurate. Being a Swede, he also managed to nail the US-style dual-party model.

People in the US vote for platitudes, not action. In fact, most voters would probably admit that they don't expect their vote to result in action if they vote for the winning candidate. They just want a guy in office who will "get the job done", meaning work toward a stated goal, or platform. If he doesn't get it done, it was the fault of those damn Dems (or Republicans).

As I recall, when Clinton had a Republican Congress he got more done and drifted toward the middle, though people ended up criticizing his foreign policy after he left office. Obama will likely end up with a similar legacy, only his will be worse as the country goes broke and he's voted out of office after one term (my prediction, at least). People got scared when Bush had a Republican Congress so they started voting in more Dems during the next elections.

This tells me that Americans don't trust one party to run the whole show. We choose to have both sides fighting it out in faraway Washington, DC. The majority of voters are middle class folks who want to cut their grass, watch TV, and not worry that one party is overtaking our government.

If one party had full control of both Houses of Congress and the presidency for a great length of time, the charade Ron Paul mentions would be exposed. That one party would likely muck things up badly enough that we'd need to consider replacing that one party, or placing control of the country in the hands of the other. And that's no good, because that means only one party remains and our options are limited.

Coke needs Pepsi, McDonalds needs Burger King, and Democrats and Republicans need each other in this regard. Things have been too good for too long in the States, so people want to continue living that illusion even when it's not true anymore, and damn the consequences. And we wonder why we've allowed the already-powerful centralized government to become more powerful in recent years. This is what happens when no one is guarding the cookie jar; people help themselves.

This is indicative of a population scared of action and satisfied with the status quo. Sure, let's pay the nice men in suits money and occasionally flip on CNN to see who is saying what. Let's see which Senator is caught soliciting gay sex in a public restroom today. The show goes on, the stage matters not; the audience would sit there clapping even as the theater burns down.

One good thing we can take from our ever more dire political situation in the States is that other parties and grassroots movements are finally getting some good press. One hopes this exposes a few facts:

• Different people in different regions have different needs and agendas, and this is okay. The US is a huge place. People in Vermont do not want their tax money going to help fund a bankrupt California government which has, for too long, sucked its populace dry of funds for corrupt energy pricing games and illegal immigration benefits. Nor should they want their tax money going all the way to California. There are dire emergencies which require States band together to help one another, and then there's just piss-poor organization and corrupt State government, for which no one outside that State should be forced to pay.
• From the point above, we can gather that it's not in our interests to have many government functions fully centralized. Health care is a great example. The needs in Wyoming may be different than those in New York State. Of course, there should always be an affordable option, but health care is a scarce good, and the government should be careful not to tread on that good - not because we fear a government takeover of health care (ahem), but rather it's our tradition to allow pricing to occur as freely as possible, with limited government action only when a dire need exists.
• Most grassroots movements are generally conservative in nature. As a result, we can gather that politically active people not involved in these grassroots movements are satisfied with the dog and pony show, or else they'd join up with a cause, maybe picket on Washington, DC. Which further tells us that if there's a problem, it's the passive-aggressive voting of people who are more interested in entitlements and benefits than rewarding hard work and the individuals who make the gears turn in our society. The reason we're seeing these smaller, localized movements toward something different is because the people who would work hard toward a more self-sustaining and future-oriented model are at odds with the current system.

Alex is correct in that we'll likely see the end of this two-party system sometime in the next century or so. If not, it will only prolong the decline of our once great nation of thinkers and doers.

Rip the band-aid off quickly; don't pull it off slowly thinking you'll avoid the pain!

- All I know is that God punishes all evil.
- Then how come he left Europe alone?

Overheard from an American sitcom.

Europe has always been obsessed with power. It used to exert that power by building huge empires and spreading Western culture around the world. When it suffered cycles of cultural exhaustion, namely going through a series of democratic revolutions, it began to turn that force inward against itself. The result became the modern welfare state.

The European welfare model thrives on the excessive capital Europe has accumulated over time. The power it conveys, which may not be as flashy as the American overseas power, is strong but tricky, because most of it is spent guarding and babysitting its own citizens. Authorities and bureaucracies love to exert power, so when there's not a war going on, they begin using it against their own people to stay in control. And citizens learn to embrace it, because it spells safety to them.

What's worrying about the last health care bill just passed in America, is not the supposed socialism involved. Obamacare is still so extreme to the Right that no European government would ever be able to pass it through an election. What's worrying is that the European power language has begun shooting sparks around American voters. Americans are beginning to equate welfare with safety. It's the same language European leaders use to continue expand their governmental power in every direction, from religion, sex, food, lifestyle and environment, to sports, gambling, private finance, alcohol...you name it.

Brett Stevens fills in:

With Obamacare, we see our society fragment in two: those who want paternalism, and those who want natural selection. The natural selection types are the confident ones who want a meritocratic system of success, a community which filters out threats like pedophiles and criminals so they can safely raise kids, and to be away from the hive-mind. The paternalistic types want government to guarantee them protection on their streets populated with threats, want a safety net in case they don’t succeed, and want to be in the hive-mind so other people can affirm that they’re smart or worthy.

This split will never be reconciled. The first group, who tend toward the right, are the civilizations builders. They make successful places from nothing. The second group are the parasites and the predators who make huge profits by manipulating them, and they come after a civilization has been successful and help leech away its wealth and intelligence. It’s no different than how, in a forest, if you lie down in the open you will soon be consumed by blood-sucking parasites of all types. This is how nature exerts an equal and opposite reaction on anything that wishes to survive. In the case of our society, this equal and opposite reaction threatens to sink us.

This polarization between Right and Left means America's long-standing values and virtues are now undergoing European scrutiny, which they never really have been forced to do. It's therefore crucial to understand the history of Europe and the modern problems it faces to know what America will face in a few decades if it decides to continue down the Obamarama road.

Modern European problems, which threaten to kill most of Western civilization as we know it, include fatally low birth rates, ethnic and cultural riots, exploding suburbs, unemployment, a gigantic and ever-growing public sector, Islamic terrorism, health problems and lack of real political choice. Combined, these problems have the possibility of reconstructing a new Yugoslavia, or a post-Soviet redux scenario. In any case, it spells self-destruction, unless a new system is embraced.

Obama's health care bill is in many ways moderate, knowing the Democrats will still face Republican backlash during next election over this issue, but it's clear about its general direction. It points to Europe. And Europe points to disaster:

The Journal informed us that once Obamacare passed, three big changes would materialize within six months:

• Insurers wouldn't be allowed to cancel policies just because a person became sick or to place lifetime caps on care.
• New insurance plans would have to pay full cost of certain preventive care and exempt such care from deductibles.
• Children could stay on their parents' insurance policies until their 26th birthday.

The last may help the insurance companies since young people are generally healthier -- except that people probably won't sign up until their children get sick. The first two items, however, are a recipe for insurance company disaster. The first will encourage people to wait until they're sick before buying insurance. The second will encourage extraordinary overuse. No longer do you have to be sick to visit the doctor. You can just go for "preventive" reasons. Preventive care increases overall costs in the system. Once in awhile an individual may catch a disease in an early stage, but hundred others will be checked with no impact. Preventative services are not that costly and would be best paid for by individuals. Universal preventive care will send insurance company costs soaring.

So will the companies will be allowed to raise their rates? Not a chance. While one foot of Obamacare is on the gas pedal, the other is on the brake, putting federal price controls on insurance company premiums. The results will be insurance company bankruptcies. At that point we'll have to have a "public option." There will be no one left selling health insurance.

Some will ask why Europe "works." The answer to that question begs for a clarification of what the question means. The real question should be: How does the European model work? And the answer to that question is through high taxation, an aggressive and overtly protective welfare government that continues to grow in every branch, people losing their belief in independence, and cultures slowly dying away while being replaced by commercialism and government-sponsored activities. It's like living in a day care center, only this is all the youth you've got to spend.

In the health care sector, no one really knows how to stop the growing spending in Europe. What everyone knows is that quality suffers when we enter a recession. That means longer waiting queues (you normally wait a few hours to meet a doctor at the emergency anyway), fewer experts, more traveling between hospitals, faster and less concentrated examinations (in Europe, doctors often send you home with a bottle of pills, because otherwise you'll end up costing too much) and, of course, the fat pigs getting rich. In America, health insurance companies thrive. In Europe, bureaucrats thrive, mostly for just managing another bureaucrat.

European history repeats itself. It's abusing power again, but not anymore against colonies abroad, but against people at home. It's shuffling power and money around like toys in a huge system no one really is able to manage properly anymore. It's too big and too ineffective. According to the European Central Bank, Sweden, embraced and hailed by misled socialist fanatics and Obama fans, has got the world's most ineffeciant public sector. According to same study, the American public sector is the world's most efficient. Can you dig that? Europe is economic disaster. People who call Obamacare Communist are morons, but people who praise it are probably the biggest losers of our time.

Of the many reasons I don't ascribe to political labels, one is the inability of a movement or label to uniformly possess the same content across languages and borders. Another more glaringly obvious reason is that it means you accept and understand the idiocy and absurdity of the individual actions done in the name of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, or whatever empty ideology you may ascribe to. In particular reference are the slurs used by tea party protestors against health care reform against black and gay members of Congress.

When Rep. Barney Frank, report Talking Points Memo, "rounded a corner to leave the building, an older protestor yelled "Barney, you faggot." The surrounding crowd of protestors then erupted in laughter."

Seriously? This is the kind of jocular, schoolyard taunting that stands to completely invalidate any meaningful position that may be held against healthcare reform. Understanding the wider context of American conservatism, and the idea that uncredentialed journalists like Glenn Beck are allowed to dominate the airwaves, it seems apocalyptically expected. A double case-in-point is the following interview with Beck and Palin.

Rife with theatrics, contrived emotional pleas, and masturbatory schizophrenically-paranoid commentary, I legitimately wonder if American conservatives who fail to see the self-parodical hilarity of their beliefs have lost their mind.

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.