One of the upsides to living in the panopticon is the ability to call powerful people on things they were saying a few years ago. Glen Greenwald has begun to do so, noticing that many liberals who were against the 2005 and 2006 NSA wiretap allegations are very much in favor of more egregious intrusions now that the executive branch is in the Democratic Party’s hands.

The obvious conclusion is that such people are partisan hacks. The charitable conclusion is that such people have been doing some hard thinking in the last eight years. The paranoid conclusion is they have been turned by the spooks. Whatever the reason, it is worth compiling a list of some of the flip floppers for future reference.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is the second-most preposterous example. (Our transparency president and the shaved baboon he calls vice president are, in tandem, the most ridiculous example.) In 2005, despite her being on the Senate Intelligence Committee, she claimed she had no idea what was going on and was worried it might be something illegal. By 2006 she said NSA spying was a very serious violation of the Fourth Amendment. Now she says Snowden is a “traitor” and that this much broader spy program is “protecting America.” Was she turned by the spooks? Did she fix the law so that there is nothing to worry about now? Is she senile? It is difficult to say, but her opinion certainly seems to be different, and she hasn’t explained why.

Senator Barbara Boxer (also D-CA) wondered aloud if NSA spying constituted an impeachable offense in 2005. She even asked for clarification from telecommunications companies on their collection of metadata in 2006. She has expressed no public opinion about the current scandal. Were her doubts laid to rest? Perhaps the spooks told her to keep her yap shut this time? It would be good for America if Senator Boxer were to bring the subject up again, if only to clarify why we shouldn’t be worried.

The phenomenon is bipartisan. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) had serious issues with the Bush policy in 2006. She doesn’t have a problem with the Obama telephone metadata policy today, assuring us that “security ensures our freedom.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was against the NSA wiretapping process in 2005, stating that it didn’t have “any legal basis.” Now Senator Graham says he is “glad the NSA is trying to find out what terrorists are up to overseas and inside the country,” apparently trusting in the kangaroo FISA courts to make everything all better.

Lying liar Senator Stuart Smalley (D-MN) was vilifying NSA domestic spy programs in 2006 but is smugly supporting them today.

The Foreign Policy Association’s resident bubblehead, Rosa Brooks, said the domestic spying program was unspeakably horrible back in 2005. Nowadays she seems more worried about Amazon knowing what kinds of books she prefers and people noticing that she’s said a lot of idiotic things over the years.

Political commentators are not immune to the disease. Mark Steyn seemed to be all for domestic spying back then. Now that Obama gets to protect us from terrorism, he seems to think the surveillance state is useless.

Michelle Malkin openly admits to having changed her mind. While she supported Bush’s efforts, she says that the Obama programs are worse.

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CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer said in 2006 that the Bush Administration was up to something illegal. While he hasn’t decided what to think of the present NSA imbroglio, he says that Snowden is a no-good “narcissistic” skunk who should have remained in America so the spooks can have their way with him.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen labeled the reasons given for the 2006 NSA intercepts “a concatenation of fibs, exaggerations, misinterpretations, selected evidence, hype, false leads, vile suggestions, felonious deletions and the like.” Now that Obama is doing it, he considers it “no story” and “what Google does” and generally wonders what all the fuss is about.

It is difficult to make anything of the rapidly changing opinions of these alleged public servants. We know the intelligence agencies are huge, powerful, and mostly unaccountable. We know our spooks have been up to no good; they’ve been caught destroying records dealing with torture allegations. The courts let them get away with it. Whether or not you think this is a necessary evil, it indicates the legal system is not doing anything to hold intelligence agencies accountable for misdeeds. There are ominous signs that there are much worse things happening.

If I had to guess, the domestic spying programs are unnecessary and probably ineffective for “preventing terrorism.” If these programs are necessary to avoid a daily fare of fire and blood, we need better ideas. An obvious one is properly functioning border controls. One of the reasons the NSA “needs” all that data on US citizens is the simple fact that there are so many foreigners living here, legally and otherwise. If we were to stop invading the world while inviting the world to move here, there would be fewer potential dangerous foreigners within the “homeland” to worry about. Giving up our civil liberties in return for lower wages and more kebab restaurants seems a poor bargain.

If the NSA actually can stop terrorism with this kind of surveillance, every sane individual should be petrified of people with access to this data. While it is true that many businesses have access to intimate personal data, businesses only have some pieces of the data and are mostly interested in using it to sell you more stuff you don’t need. The government has all the data, making it much more intrusive. The government also has armies and the ability to throw citizens into secret prisons. Businesses are also not training for war with American citizens; the government is.

Regardless of the programs’ effectiveness, the spooks need public oversight. Doddering Dianne Feinstein’s word on the matter and secret kangaroo courts do not remotely qualify as “public oversight.” If the courts could empower a Torquemada to spend years investigating whether President Bubba got a hummer from a homely chubbins, they can certainly appoint a tribune of the people to investigate and report on what our spooks and their foreign partners are doing.

Thanks to the UK Guardian, everyone now knows the NSA is spying on US citizens. Our reptilian Congress critters are wondering what the big deal is, since they’ve been authorizing it all along. While some of the recent revelations are new to the general public, our lizard masters in Congress are correct: This has been hiding in plain sight for years now. The Federation of Atomic Scientsts has been reporting on this for decades. Whistleblowers and journalists have been talking about these programs for generations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has actually been filing lawsuits against the NSA and the telecom industry on these specific issues for years now. Of course the government is electronically spying on its citizens; it’s trivial and cheap to do, and up until now, nobody but a few doughty libertarians at the EFF has complained.

There are two revelations under discussion right now. One is the disclosure that Verizon had a blanket order to give all domestic telephone traffic “metadata” to the NSA. The other is the PRISM system for spying on Internet traffic.

The Verizon matter is not limited to Verizon. We can safely assume that all telephone companies are doing this with all US-based telephone metadata. The original legal excuse for this is the 1978 “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” (FISA). Secret FISA courts have been established to protect the American people from intrusive spying. They are the ones issuing these orders. The FISA courts have become kangaroo courts; they almost never deny the intelligence agencies what they want. Further legal justification was provided by Title II, sections 211 and 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. The common-sense idea behind it is that we need a way of tracking foreign intelligence agents in the US. In 1978, before cell phones were in widespread use, it was easy to protect US citizens’ privacy. Telephones were tied to physical addresses—bug the foreign residents, problem solved. Nowadays, one can buy a cell phone for $10 cash and throw it away after one use. Thanks to idiotic immigration laws, there are also a lot more foreigners living here. Therefore, to continue the program, unless we deport all the foreigners, the government actually does need all telephone records to keep track of foreign use of our telecommunications networks.

Telephone metadata is all data except the actual message. What cell-phone towers are you near at any given moment? Did you send someone a text message or use the Internet on your “smart” phone? Did you call someone, and whom did you call? With this “metadata,” the government knows who you are, where you are, and whom you talk to. Supposedly they cannot obtain the contents of actual communications without a court order issued by the kangaroo FISA courts. In principle, the contents of your messages to non-suspected foreign agents are “safe,” but the NSA has a history of lying.

Using only the metadata, the government knows where everyone with a cellular telephone is when they communicate with others, whom they are communicating with, and what their social networks are. Apologists have pointed out that, well, so do the telephone companies. But telephone companies don’t have armies, secret police, or engage in blackmail; they have marketing departments. They also don’t have all the data; they only have the data they have gathered. The NSA has all the companies’ data.

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The PRISM project gives the NSA access to most data kept by large companies on the Internet. Such data includes chat logs, emails, photographs, video conferences, search history, voice over IP, file transfers—the lot. The NSA has probably always scanned this Internet information while it is “on the wire.” The adoption of the encrypted “hypertext transfer protocol secure” (AKA the “https” in your browser) has made much of this far more difficult than the direct tapping of Internet wires. So the NSA needs access to your data via the service provider to make sure you’re not talking to “foreign agents.”

All major participants have categorically denied participation in the PRISM project. This is probably because it is a jailable offense to admit to doing secret intelligence work for the US government; all FISA requests and national-security letters come with a gag order. The White House has recently admitted to the program with the disclaimer, “It cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States.” These carefully chosen words are probably true on some level. The NSA probably doesn’t care what the average citizen is doing on Facebook or Yahoo! They do have access to the data should they decide to care.

If you are a reporter, whistleblower, or ever speak to foreigners, they probably care. If I were an American investigative reporter, whistleblower, or worried about conversations with foreigners, I’d use Yandex exclusively, probably via the Tor network. Unlike Google, Yandex is guaranteed NSA-free, as it is based in Russia. It is not completely NSA-proof, as they doubtless have other tricks, but at least our spooks are not sitting on the servers. What a state of affairs when Russia’s FSB is more trustworthy than America’s NSA!

These two “secret” programs are by no means the only government privacy invasions happening right now. These are tiny programs in the vast budgets allocated to signal intelligence. We know that there are about 850,000 citizens doing secret things and at least $75 billion allocated to intelligence work, which is roughly the GDP of Maine and Vermont combined. This seems like a rather large number in an “open society.” While some of this work is probably necessary, its sheer size should be a cause for concern. These programs’ obvious invasiveness demands harsh oversight at the very least.

I have a modest proposal. If there is truly nothing to worry about, all domestic government employees, officials, lobbyists, apologists, and contractors should be compelled by law to publish their telephone metadata records and personal Internet communications to the general public. Private-sector data-miners (AKA me) will keep track of it and report on our findings. Doubtless it will provide interesting information about the rampant corruption and foreign-agent contacts in our government. While terrorism is a problem, it seems to me that corruption and foreign agents’ influence on domestic politics is a more serious problem. If they have nothing to hide, they should have nothing to worry about. Surely the “transparency president” would agree?

According to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind survey, 29% of US citizens polled say they believe that “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Of the five potential responses to this question—“agree, disagree, neither, unsure, no answer”—only 47% of those polled (31% of Republicans) overtly disagree with the statement. 

Looking at current cultural indicators, it seems more surprising that so few people harbor revolutionary sentiments.

Our ruling caste rivals the ancient Roman emperors for personal decadence and corruption. An official from the FBI says corruption is America’s leading problem. Americans have little faith in important national institutions: Congress, the healthcare system, the financial system, the schools, the criminal-justice system, big business, and the media. Other than the military, and to a lesser extent the police, all major national institutions are widely loathed.

The government and various unaccountable NGOs are actively subverting the borders while citizens wallow in 14% U6 unemployment rates. Our economic elites tell us that immigrants are necessary for economic growth, but for 90% of the population, economic growth has remained stagnant or gone backwards since 1970. The egregious lies and omissions of our mass-media politburo are so bad, Larry King has gone to work for Pravda. The IRS harasses conservative political groups with impunity. The government spies on its citizens. The government drives tanks and flies military helicopters around our major cities in response to the towering threat of two Crock-Pot-wielding foreigners who were settled here and subsidized by the government in the first place.

Almost 0.75% of the US population is in prison at any given moment—the highest rate in the world. A consequence of this is that 9% of American men will go to prison in their lifetimes. One in four Americans has some kind of criminal record. American men have a 52% chance of being arrested in their lifetimes.

On the family front, overzealous CPS workers and police in California recently took a five-month-old infant away from his parents for seeking a second opinion over a life-threatening surgery. California CPS workers didn’t mind when a lesbian couple began giving their 8-year-old boy a sex change. Thanks to our financial elites, manufacturing output has fallen into a bottomless abyss, except for ammunition makers, who can’t make enough to feed both the government and nervous citizens. 

The situation appears grim, but the question presents itself: Which Americans are going to lead an armed revolt against the present regime? There are none. While people may be unhappy at the state of things, there is no political vanguard with ideas or organizational skills. Demographics are also not friendly to the potential revolution. Revolutions are largely fought by young men. While there are occasional signs of independent-minded youth, the exceptional among them are either rotting in jail, working on their startup ideas, or going expat. The average among them are drugged, cowed, atomized from their communities, and presently useless to themselves and others.

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Veteran Marine and libertarian radio host Adam Kokesh is the most prominent American right-wing figure currently making actual revolutionary noises. After spending a few nights in jail, he changed his mind about his peaceful march on Washington with loaded rifles and is now calling for an “open source” demonstration in all 50 state capitals. In other words, he is a loon who has no idea how to organize a movement against looming tyranny any more than the incompetent grubbinses at Occupy Wall Street did. 

Modern governments are good at pacifying their citizens. The present system uses plenty of old-fashioned Soviet-style repression, jailing large fractions of the populace pour encourager les autres, depriving thought criminals of their livelihood, and overtly controlling the sparse mass media that remains. They also use the old British imperial techniques of pacifying restive populations with pornography, social atomization, importing workers to pit against the native populace, psychoactive drugs, and cheap entertainment. While the people are obviously not content, they are pacified, and for the system to continue on its present trajectory, that is enough. The Ottoman Empire wasn’t terribly popular, either, and it lasted 400 years.

In the US, most people wouldn’t put themselves through the most trivial inconvenience for any reason. Which militia group would feed, house, or protect their fellow citizens in an actual crisis? Will Paultards give a disgraced comrade a job to support himself and his family, or will they leave him to starve on the “free market?” How many conservative apparatchiks or blog apes have a dozen or a hundred allies he can depend on in a fistfight, let alone a revolution against the most powerful government in human history?

Keyboard and barroom revolutionaries are plentiful. The actual requirement for any sort of revolution in the country is a Hezbollah or Golden Dawn type movement: a group that provides government services without being the government. The closest thing we have to a political vanguard in the US at present is the group bringing the blessings of gender-neutral restrooms to the republic. Even if you believe in that sort of thing, it is hardly a threat to the powers that be.

A revolution against the government is the sheerest fantasy, no matter how well-armed the citizenry is. Since the most trusted institution in America at present is the military, if nuts such as Kokesh, OWS, or the glory-hole patrol began causing real problems, the most likely outcome will be martial law such as we recently saw in Boston.

If there is to be a revolt against the present system, it will come from trained experts. The only experts we have are in veterans’ groups. The American Legion, for example, used to be a serious political force that people feared, and with good reason. The Department of Homeland Security agrees: Veterans are being watched as potential domestic insurgents. I think the American Legion is as likely to bring about meaningful change as they are to pilot a Winnebago to Jupiter, but if I were a would-be revolutionary rather than a would-be expatriate, that is where I would target my efforts.

Meanwhile, political discontents should put away their revolutionary fantasies and join a local civic group. Befriending local Rotary Club members is more likely to be useful during a civil war than a stockpile of grain and ammo.

Adria Richards

The “microaggressions” website reads like comedy. It is pathetic and funny, yet it is beginning to look like the manifesto of our future overlords: a tyranny of the aggrieved, abetted by the powerful, lording it over anyone who dares open their yap. It sounds crazy, but it isn’t. It is happening daily in “culturally advanced” areas of Western Civilization.

Last week’s most celebrated microaggression: Miz Adria Richards experienced dismay at the telling of an off-color joke at a Python programming language convention. Miz Richards was not being addressed directly; she eavesdropped on someone else’s conversation. It was not a very clever joke, even if you speak nerd. The dastardly malefactor made a dorky jape about his large dongles. Dongles are those USB things that have replaced floppy discs. Miz Richards doesn’t seem to know this. She also took umbrage with an alleged subsequent statement about “forking that guy’s repository.” The phrase “forking a repo” refers to using someone else’s software for your own development purposes. It is generally considered a nerdy compliment for someone to fork your repository; it means they think your software is good. The forker’s friend, who was referring to an earlier speaker at the conference, claims the comment was intended in exactly this fashion. Miz Richards took it as some kind of off-color joke that demeans women and prevents them from becoming software engineers, despite the fact the speaker was obviously referring to “forking” a male.

Open-source website “github” makes an actual crude pun about “hardcore forking action” when you fork a repository and nobody has complained yet. I guess one would have to actually fork some software from the thing to notice this; not a common occurrence in the lives of the perpetually aggrieved. Miz Richards herself had made a much more crass dong joke a mere two hours earlier on her Twitter account. Apparently the sinfulness of dong jokes depends on who is telling them.

Self-aggrandizing witch hunts seem to be the 21st-century approach to dealing with juvenile humor. Miz Richards proceeded to instigate one by Tweeting a photo of the sinners and her interpretation of their hurtful words, which she deemed to be “Not cool.” She later compounded this with a bubble-headed blog post in which her dismay was transmuted into “Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard.”

In a sane society, the entire incident would have been ignored. Instead it was taken up by the sanctimonious mob and trumpeted to the skies as an incident of Towering Importance. The dorky dongle-joke guy was cashiered from his job. He has a wife and three children. Don’t make dongle jokes if you have a wife and three children. Dongle jokes are not technically illegal, but in our modern era of social totalitarianism, they may as well be.

Hackers from 4chan, who tend to be fond of dong jokes, were outraged at this injustice. They proceeded to cause problems for Miz Richards’s employer. Now she has been made redundant. This may seem like some kind of twisted justice, but I have a hard time seeing it that way. The best possible outcome from this is lawsuits galore, with our dong-joking dongle-offended heroine taking up an even more destructive career as a full-time Torquemada.

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It is worth noting that Miz Richards isn’t anything like a software developer. Her official job title is “developer evangelist,” which I think means “salesgirl” in the San Francisco dot-com dialect. I doubt she has ever coded anything in Python and was thus out of her depth at a Python conference. Her crunchbase profile says that “She produces videos and online content to explain technology to the world.” Some of the videos demonstrate astonishing technical ignorance, unless you think connecting a laptop to a big screen is interesting. It wouldn’t be a big change to go from leveraging her considerable skill at self-promotion to producing dumb videos and online content for the purpose of full-time insane political activism. Who else would hire her at this point? 

One of the ironic consequences of this Döngledämmerung is that association with this creep will cause authentic hacker girls to be unfairly vilified. While there are doubtless some programmer girls who share her character defects, most I have known are pleasant and hardworking introverts—the opposite of megalomaniacal attention-seekers perpetually demanding redress for imagined slights. Their semi-autistic male colleagues will inevitably be even more awkward and evasive around them, and potential employers will be more reluctant to hire them for fear of costly future Döngledämmerungs.

Researchers in Great Britain have found that 73% of their citizens are considered “official victims.” If we count double victimhood, up to 109% of their populace are considered “victims.” Being female, black, and Jewish, Miz Richards scores triple victim points by this accounting. I only count her as a victim once—for losing her job. This non-incident involved two or three people, and it directly ruined at least five people’s well-being. Two companies and one very large programmer community will experience fallout from this for months or years. This makes thousands of people the “victims” of the actions of one or two mildly crass men and one hysterical woman. Those British researchers are optimists.

A sane society would not attribute any importance to this non-incident. So long as large groups of people subscribe to insane conspiracy theories masquerading as sociology, this will only get worse. So long as the subjective dismay experienced by certain privileged people is elevated to totemic significance, social totalitarianism will only become more oppressive. Well-meaning dunces continue to yammer on about “systems of oppression” involving dongle jokes. Losing your job over a dumb joke is overt oppression. The idea that an ill-chosen word overheard by a fellow citizen may end your career is despotism, not tolerance. 

While I endeavor to have good manners and think others should too, I do not wish to live in a country where people live in fear that they could lose their livelihood for some illusory sin. I don’t understand why other people seem to accept this as natural and just. We laugh at a country that puts feminists in jail for desecrating a Church; maybe the Russians have the right idea.

The sport of wrestling has suffered a slow decline over the last 100 years. Professional wrestling was a legitimate and popular sport in the United States 100 years ago. Gladiators such as Frank Gotch, George Hackenschmidt, and Stanislaus Zbyszko were the sports superstars of their era. The late 1920s saw the bastardization of pro wrestling into the burlesque show it is today, poignantly documented in the noir classic Night and the City. As a college or Olympic sport, wrestling has suffered blows from Title IX and rule changes which make it more boring and injury-prone.

The most recent insult: The executive board of the Olympic Committee has removed wrestling from the Games. The core sports remaining include such apogees of athletic achievement as canoeing, handball, ping-pong, badminton, sailing, golf, rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and volleyball. Barring a reinstatement, wrestling will be replaced with softball, climbing, karate, roller skating, squash, water skiing, and possibly even a form of Chinese acrobatics called wushu.

The basis for the Olympic Committee decision is elusive. The committee has mumbled vague things about low television popularity and ticket sales, but the facts indicate otherwise. Wags have noticed that Olympic Committee Executive Board responsible for the decision is mostly drawn from nations that do not excel at wrestling. This claim appears specious, as the nations represented on the committee won more medals in wrestling (two for Sweden, one for Ukraine) than pentathalon (one for Britain) or water polo (one for Spain, one for Australia). The nations of the executive committee did do well in ping-pong (10 medals total), so perhaps they had different priorities.

The IOC has been trying to get rid of the Greco-Roman version of wrestling since 2002. There is no female division in Greco-Roman wrestling. The IOC is concerned enough with gender equity to mention it twice in their list of official criteria for evaluation of sports for inclusion. Even boxing has a female division these days, and there will doubtless eventually be male Olympic rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming events. Others have speculated that wrestling had problems with doping scandals, though wrestling compares favorably in this regard with ping-pong or equestrian sports; only one wrestler tested positive in last year’s Olympic Games. A Russian wrestling coach has posited a “gay conspiracy” against the sport, but considering the tastes of most gay men, this seems unlikely.

It is not necessary to speculate about the Olympic Committee’s motives. The shibboleths of the age explain well enough. “Sports” such as skateboarding, BMX bicycling, water skiing, and roller skating have grown Olympic pretensions because they’re popular. Such sports are popular because they are infantile and require no special human qualities. They require skill, but only the type of skill developed while wearing a retard helmet. No special athletic quality is required for skateboarding. No special strength of character is required for water skiing or waving pretty ribbons around in rhythmic gymnastic competitions.

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Wrestling, by contrast, requires long, grueling training, superhuman strength, speed, courage, discipline, nerve, endurance of pain and injury, concentration, and preposterous amounts of skill and strategy. Wrestling involves facing an actual opponent in the most direct and intimate way conceivable. Wrestling, unlike volleyball or sailing, is not something any lout with the apportioned number of appendages can do. The differences between an Olympic badminton player and a guy who plays with his nine-year-old niece at the family picnic are probably not obvious to the untrained eye. But put an Olympic wrestler on the mat with any non-wrestler, and the hierarchy of athletic achievement will be obvious before they take off their shirts.

Modern right-thinkers loathe hierarchy. Wrestling is the most hierarchical of Olympic sports. Wrestling had to go because it is a vivid and primal embarrassment to the types of pious equalist halfwits who get to sit on committees such as this. Wrestling is not some silly game you play at the beach or at family gatherings; it is primordial combat. This is as against modern “elite” felicities as dueling with pistols. Modern “elites” contemplate wrestling with the same horror that a Victorian dowager would view a homosexual orgy.

There are 4,500-year-old Sumerian and ancient Egyptian representations of the classic wrestling holds. There are no 4,500-year-old representations of ping-pong ninjas or volleyball players. Reputedly the oldest book in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh featured no contests of synchronized swimming between Enkidu and Gilgamesh. It was a wrestling match between primal forces of the wilds and civilization. The good Lord didn’t challenge Jacob to a game of handball to test his mettle. “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.” Would the Jews have been God’s chosen people if Jacob had won a game of ping-pong?

The Iliad didn’t feature a dramatic badminton match between Odysseus and Ajax. There were no ancient Greeks vying for the laurels in canoeing or golf, but the wrestling matches from the Olympics 2,300 years ago are remembered to this day. Feudal Europe trained kings in the arts of wrestling, and the greatest American presidents were wrestlers rather than golfers. The first modern Olympics had no roller skating, water skiing, or badminton, but wrestling was contested, as it has been every year since then.

Wrestling requires more physical prowess than ping-pong, softball, or golf. It also requires more personal character and courage than water skiing, sailing, or canoeing. US Special Forces organizations preferentially recruit high-school wrestlers for their physical qualities and strength of will. Special-forces recruiters don’t go after BMX bicyclists, badminton adepts, trampoline experts, synchronized swimmers, or ping-pong champions. What manner of egalitarian ninny thinks ping-pong or golf is a superior sport to wrestling? The mincing blockheads who sit on Olympic committees these days are more like community-college sociology professors than commandos. We can doubtless look forward to the ever popular “putting the condom on the banana” and the “spot the racist” events in future Games.

Image of wrestlers courtesy of Shuttterstock

Fifty percent of Americans think atheists are a pain in the ass. Only half as many dislike Muslims, despite the national hobby of raining electric death on Muslims the world over. The reason for this disparity should be obvious: Modern public atheists are more annoying. While I know many pleasant Muslims, I can’t think of a single public representative of atheism who isn’t an obnoxious dung heap.

In my years upon this old rock, I’ve been bothered by Baha’is, surveyed by Scientologists, molested by Mormons, questioned by commies, besieged by Baptists, proselytized by Protestants, swayed by Sunnis, troubled by Taoists, and pestered by pagans. Everyone who has sweated me with their particular sacred belief has politely ceased to bother me when I informed them that I was not interested—everyone except atheists who insist I’m disbelieving improperly.

Modern atheists have their own saints, detailed taboos, purification rituals, demons, superstitions, and a deep sense of sin. This pattern of human group behavior is probably innate, but it is particularly annoying when allegedly ultra-rational people display it.

Consider the “A+ movement.” They call themselves “A+” because they’re self-regarding atheists “plus” some other stuff. The A+ “movement” was founded as a result of the debate around the Elevatordammerung, a cataclysm that ensued when a socially inept nerdling asked a cabbage-headed pinup girl for a cup of coffee while in an elevator. The resulting tumult eventually spawned the A+ schism with the part of the “atheist movement” who found this as silly as the rest of the world did.

The A+ sect is effectively a religion. They do not consider themselves to be such, but their superstitions saturate their lives in ways that put ultra-Orthodox Jews to shame. The A+ communion is fanatically Manichaean. They fervently believe that the world is evil and can only be purified by their efforts to bring the world to A+ holiness. 

What are the tenets of the A+ creed? For all intents and purposes, A+holes worship their own suffering. A+hole saints are people who suffer. Most especially, A+hole saints are people who suffer dismay, such as that experienced when being asked for coffee by an unattractive person in an elevator. A+hole devils, by contrast, are well-adjusted and therefore are hated fiercely. 

The A+holes have peculiar superstitions where moralistic mana is accorded to those with the least “privilege.” What they mean by “privilege” is a sort of phlogiston carried by white people, heterosexuals, males, religious people, people who disagree with them, and people who identify with the sex chromosomes and genital organs with which they were born. Such “privilege” embodies the A+ concept of original sin. Their purification ritual consists of confessing one’s sins in the public forum and groveling before the grouchy saints and the holy icons as penance. 

The taboos of A+holes are multitudinous. The ultimate taboo is questioning the tenets of the faith. Despite their alleged mission “to apply skepticism and critical thinking to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, GLBT issues, politics, poverty and crime,” application of skepticism and critical thinking to those subjects is strictly forbidden. Many religions require one to believe in deeply contradictory ideas at the same time; A+holery is no different.

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They have many other exotic circumlocutions for addressing their saints. For example, they have precisely delineated how to talk about transsexuals and prostitutes. There are extensive A+ taboos dealing with gender interaction (anything involving elevators is right out). They have taboos against inadvertently offending the aged. Most delightful is the concept of the “trigger warning,” which warns the saints that they may find something unclean which may disturb their saintly A+ repose. Trigger warnings are required when expressing mild disagreement and remembering the former name-calling and disagreements listed in their exhaustive enemies lists. Such trigger warnings are not necessary when making holy war upon devils and witches such as heterosexual Christians. Since they are devils, their feelings are not important, and holy war brings joy to the saints. 

The A+ crowd is considered important by the credulous. It seems to me that they’re mostly interesting for being a pure strain, a seething petri dish of neurotic misery. It is of scientific interest to study this disease in its isolated form so vaccines and antitoxins can be developed. The pestilence embodied in the A+hole faith has already spread far and wide throughout Western Civilization. 

What emotional complex causes human beings to become wild-eyed totalitarian numskulls in the name of “sensitivity?” As with many religious beliefs, their ideas start with seething ressentiment. Unhappy people often blame others for their misery. Unworthy people come up with elaborate justifications for why it is everyone else’s fault. The old Christian formula of “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first” has been recycled in the guise of the “privilege” phlogiston. Their hurt feelings and oversensitive natures are now sacred relics among the faithful. It is status and power, at least among the faithful and chivalrous enablers, social goods otherwise denied to them due to fortune and poor choices in life. There are plenty of talentless, lazy dunderheads looking for a faith which accords them status for being malcontented slobs. 

While the A+holes do not constitute all of public atheism, the remainder is no better. Alpha atheist Dawkins thinks telling children about Jesus is worse than sexually molesting them. In the second tier you have attention-seeking primates such as PZ Myers desecrating a communion wafer and a Koran, and, to be fair, one of Dawkins’s books. It’s a performance about as edifying as flinging poo from the monkey cage. Myers is probably physiologically incapable of breaking actual atheist taboos, such as saying something which might be remotely construed as sexist or racist, no matter how true it might be. In the third tier of public atheists are idiots who sue the local city council for saying a prayer before meetings. I’d wish a plague on their houses, but all their houses are already asylums for the emotionally challenged.

I don’t believe in any gods, but the public evidence on display indicates that lack of belief isn’t worth bragging about, either. I can’t continue to call myself an atheist for fear someone will confuse me with unpleasant cartoon characters.

I think Rudyard Kipling had the right idea calling himself a “God-fearing Christian Atheist.” Until the Atheist Anti-Defamation League sends the present crop of public atheists to the stockade with tar and feathers, I’m going to call myself that. It beats being confused with an A+hole.

Most sensible Americans agree that foreign lobbyists are a pox on the nation, but few realize how egregious the process has become. American citizens should be able to band together to lobby Congress for their interests, but not foreign agents without proper supervision by law enforcement.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 to keep track of the no-good foreign skunks who attempt to subvert the American people’s will in favor of a foreign power. Everyone agrees that politicians should only be bribed by US citizens; otherwise, the “lobbying” should be called “espionage.” Everyone agrees, it seems, except for the politicians.

Modern politicians hate FARA, which was defanged in 1966. Nobody has been successfully prosecuted under the Act since then. By 1995 with the passage of the Lobbying Disclosure Act, it became legal for foreigners to directly lobby a congressman so long as they tell everybody about it. Prior to 1966, foreign agents were not even allowed to disseminate propaganda aimed at changing government policy. After 1995, foreigners can disseminate all the propaganda they like without any government oversight. Foreign lobbyists are still legally obligated to register with the Justice Department, but it wasn’t until 2007 that information on them was made public on the Internet. Prior to that, reporters had to pay hefty fees to examine the information in a room in DC.

You still can’t search on a government website to find out which dirty foreigner is currently greasing your congressman. The data was presented on FARA’s website in scanned form and was not searchable until 2009, when the Sunlight Foundation and ProPublica made it available in searchable form.

Querying the database produces interesting results. For example, Japan’s government spends millions on lobbying. So does Turkey’s.

More alarmingly, another site says the Republic of Georgia spent over $5 million on lobbying since 2002. McCain’s foreign policy advisor received some of this money, which probably accounts for some of the old coot’s truculence toward Russia.

Our friends the Israelis? The State of Israel spent $1,439,104.42 on various lobbyists. The World Zionist Organization, registered foreign agents of Israel, spent a whopping $14,770,796 over the same time frame.

What’s left out of the database is more interesting. The Pakistani government’s total FARA-registered lobbying outlays were listed as above $4 million in the period covered by the foreign lobbying website. The Kashmiri American Council has been lobbying in the interests of Pakistan’s intelligence services since 1990 and has dumped an additional few million dollars into the pot. While this has escaped wide notice, a few young mainstream conservatives are livid. I’m assuming the older ones are worried someone will notice certain embarrassing historical parallels.

Think I’m being unfair to mainstream conservatives? Perhaps you’ve never heard of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). The MEK is a terrorist group in Iran and Iraq. The State Department has declared them terrorists, making all commerce with them highly illegal. The MEK are radical Shiites who run their organization like a cult, and just to keep it interesting, they are also feminist Marxists. They were involved in 1979’s takeover of the US Embassy in Iran. They have killed several US citizens. They have shelled and assassinated many innocent Iranians, before and after the Ayatollahs took over. They torture their own members and people they don’t like. They were muscle for Saddam Hussein; he used them to suppress 1991’s Kurdish uprising. When we disarmed MEK in Iraq in 2003, they had a stash of 2,139 tanks as well as armored personnel carriers, rocket launchers, and artillery pieces Saddam Hussein had supplied. No sane American should be involved with the MEK, except to ascertain how many bullets it takes to kill them.

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Still, movement conservatives love ‘em. Rudy Giuliani has been spotted flirting with Maryam Rajavi, the loony bird who faces for the outfit. Neocon mustache-boy John Bolton says they are most excellent allies. Tom Ridge depicts them as misunderstood bunny rabbits. Newt Gingrich has been caught on camera accepting flowers from Mrs. Rajavi. Bush Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend says they fight for our freedom.

To be fair, the MEK has also bribed plenty of politicians on the other side of the aisle. Notables include Louis Freeh, Bill Richardson, and Wesley Clark. Liberal hero Howard Dean was quoted as saying, “I have actually had dinner with Mrs. Rajavi on numerous occasions. I do not find her very terrorist-like.”

The MEK’s website has additional quotes from famous Americans betraying their country. Also of interest are the 99 signatories to a congressional resolution supporting MEK. With their flair for understatement, the RAND Institute describes the MEK as “Skilled Manipulators of Public Opinion.”

How do they do it? What makes all these “great Americans” say such nice things about a pack of dangerous loonies? Well, there is the money. Many of these politicians have been given generous “speaking fees.” Apparently the going rate is $20,000 to $40,000 to yammer on for ten minutes about what they had for breakfast.

There are other extenuating circumstances of a sort. At the very least, the MEK are providing intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program. There is also speculation that they carried out the recent assassinations of Iranian nuclear workers. Seymour Hersh informs us that they’re receiving special forces training in Nevada.

Espionage in the service of empire is dirty work, and reasonable people can disagree as to whether or not it is necessary to do business with evil creeps such as the MEK. No reasonable person can think it is OK for American politicians to accept money from a terrorist organization in return for lobbying services, whether or not they are intelligence assets. It should be illegal for any foreigners to bribe our politicians. That’s why we have laws such as FARA.

The MEK are a particularly ham-fisted lot who are easy to spot, despite their not registering as foreign agents with the Justice Department. The MEK is merely the scum at the surface of the black lagoon. This is how the sausage gets made in the twilight of empire. These are our leaders.

Wallowing in their feelings of superiority over the tinfoil-helmet brigade, the enlightened establishment enjoys tittering over right-wing bumpkins who supposedly believe in conspiracy theories.

With apologies to Richard Hofstadter, I don’t think the right has a monopoly on conspiracy theories.

In fact, conspiracy theories are the very basis of the modern left-wing Weltanschauung. Your average liberal believes in their conspiracy theories with such religious fervor, he’ll think you a moral reprobate merely for expressing doubt in his wacky ideas. You can’t be a modern liberal without believing in such conspiracy theories. Not believing in them makes you an evil reactionary conservative who doesn’t deserve employment or a place in polite society. Liberal conspiracy theories are so all-pervasive, they’re not only enshrined in law; people have stopped noticing that they are actual conspiracy theories.
 
I figure the smug chuckling among the Puffington Host crowd is an exotic manifestation of projection analogous to the way cheating housewives are always first to suspect their husbands are up to no good. Whatever the source, a taxonomy of their crazy ideas is in order.

Liberals believe that a male conspiracy prevents women from excelling in mathematics and the hard sciences. The reason that no woman in all of human history has invented the transistor radio or the C compiler (we can blame a chick for COBOL) is attributed to sexist conspiracies. The fact that there are fewer lady physicists than man physicists is attributed to sexism by people with Ph.D.s in physics. People who are presumably familiar with the concept of standard deviation and mean can’t understand why a sample population with a larger observed standard deviation in intelligence has more outliers. They consider an invisible and pervasive sexist conspiracy to be a more reasonable explanation.

There are very serious penalties for even expressing mild acknowledgement of biological facts about the sexes in the modern workplace. How is the sexist cabal supposed to conspire to keep the dames from excelling at mathematics and computer nerdery? Though I am an awful sexist man-pig for noticing these things, I’ve happily worked with the woman physics and computer nerds I’ve come across, and I’ve even tried my best to pump up their self-esteem and help them in any way I can. No group of fellow man-pigs has ever so much as hinted of the conspiracy’s existence to me, let alone given me the directives for how to keep chicks down. Yet we are all required to believe in the conspiracy’s existence to the extent that speech codes and campus witch hunts are the norm. If they get their way, the liberals will insist on equal outcomes in higher scientific education, which will be the end of American science.

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According to liberals, sexual continence occurs in virtually all urban civilizations because the patriarchal conspiracy has a malignant wish to make everyone sad and sexually frustrated. The idea that common venereal diseases were lethal before the invention of antibiotics seems to me a pertinent fact that’s more obvious than patriarchal conspiracies. I always thought that culture was a machine for transmitting survival tactics to its members. This probably makes me a bad person.

There is the “creationism of the left,” the blind leftist belief that human evolution and cultural development rendered all people from all points of the compass with identical abilities. The observed differences between races and cultures are believed to be the result of conspiracy on the part of the allegedly dominant tribe, viz., white people. These very same white people have in recent years passed fearsome laws which dictate that one must discriminate against white people. These same white people have elected politicians who seem hell-bent on making them a minority within their own country. The racist conspiracy is so all-fired powerful that it manages to keep everyone else down, despite voting for the laws which discriminate against…white people.

Why did the racist conspiracy of white people do these things? How does it manage these things? Who is in charge, and where do I sign up for my white privileges? What is the all-powerful racist conspirators’ ultimate plan, and why do they want these things? To believe in an all-powerful modern racist conspiracy, you’d have to believe in a cabal that actually wants to humiliate other tribes by making itself a small, oppressed, demoralized, self-flagellating minority which still manages to do better than other tribes, barring Asians and Jews. This seems peculiar behavior from the racist white people conspiracy. 

Then there’s the idea that basic social customs are some kind of conspiracy. According to this trope, the nationalism that seems to spontaneously occur in almost all cultures is a form of mass psychosis. The idea that sticking with your fellows keeps you from being invaded and slaughtered seems a more parsimonious explanation to me.

The list is long. From the Koch brothers conspiracy to the big-oil conspiracy to the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” your average leftist lives in a truly paranoid Manichean world of sinister cabals.

There are conspiracies in the world. But if you want me to believe in sinister cabals, you must point to real people and concrete actions. Nebulous and all-pervasive conspiracies to explain unpleasant facts seem a lot crazier than people who worry about fluoridated water.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

The possible discovery of the Higgs boson was announced on the Fourth of July. Confused nerds feigned excitement. I yawned and threw another sausage on the grill. The Higgs boson is inarguably an important idea in High Energy Physics. It is also a deeply ironic idea. The irony requires some understanding of modern physics’ history, personalities, and business.

Physics is the science of matter and energy. If your knowledge of physics comes from popular sources, you probably think that physicists only study abstruse entities such as the Higgs boson. But such arcana are only studied by one branch of physics, generally known as “High Energy Physics.” It is called “High Energy” because the interactions studied only happen at preposterously high energy levels far removed from anything we see in the universe, let alone everyday life. The Higgs boson was observed at around 125 billion electron volts. By contrast, a hydrogen bomb’s nuclear-fusion reaction releases energy of around 17 million electron volts per nucleus fused. The bomb reaction takes place at around 100,000 electron volts. Burning hydrogen chemically releases only a few electron volts of energy per hydrogen atom. Room-temperature molecular energies are around 1/40 electron volts. The photons in cell-phone radiation are something like 1/10,000 electron volts.

Physicists study the high-energy limit of physics because nature’s forces seem to unify and simplify there. There is a theory called “the Standard Model” which unifies three of nature’s four forces into one mathematical structure. The theory has been considered verified since 1973, when physicists at CERN discovered the W and Z bosons. The Higgs boson was the last unobserved piece of this theory; hence the excitement.

The way the High Energy guys tell the story, once their Standard Model is complete and unified with gravity, we understand everything and the rest is just chemistry. The High Energy branch of physics has dominated research since the 1950s. The High Energy guys have more theorists and money for their experiments than other branches of physics. Every physics department I’ve visited in the US has a proportion of High Energy Physicists ranging from a quarter to half of the total head count.

The “Higgs idea” was first proposed way back in 1962 by Philip W. Anderson. Higgs and others developed the more mathematically complete relativistic theory in 1964. Anderson isn’t a High Energy Physicist; his idea for the Anderson-Higgs boson came from his studies of lower-energy macroscopic matter’s properties.

It’s ironic that Anderson had the original idea and gets little credit for it. The greater irony is the fact that Anderson has been a critic of High Energy Physics’ hyper-reductionist approach. His famous essay “More Is Different” makes the argument that reductionism doesn’t get us far in understanding the universe. While the Standard Model is very good in the high-energy limit, it is generally useless in the study of lower-energy phenomena, some of which may be very interesting and relevant to human beings. We certainly know more about High Energy Physics’ ultra-microscopic world than we used to, but this hasn’t increased our physical understanding of the rest of the world.

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Anderson won the Nobel Prize for one of the most beautiful results in the last 80 years: Anderson localization, which describes a mechanism for localizing electrons in solids. While the intellectually insecure general public goes bananas over the Anderson-Higgs boson’s discovery, few have noticed the sublimeness of Anderson localization. The UC Berkeley Physics Department hasn’t even shown Anderson the courtesy of purchasing his latest book for their library.

High Energy Physics has problems unknown to the public. There are more High Energy theorists than ever before, but there are very few experiments that can be done to motivate or verify new theories. The Anderson-Higgs boson was postulated almost 50 years ago; it took that long for the experimental physicists to build a machine capable of finding it. Critics such as Anderson have pointed out that theory without close coupling to observation and experimentation no longer follows the scientific method. While modern High Energy theory is fascinating mathematics, there is no way of telling if it is physically true without experimental results.

Experimental High Energy Physics has a different illness. A vast apparatus is required to do experiments at the relevant high energies. Individual High Energy experimental physicists no longer conduct experiments—they’re generally cogs in an enormous engineering project. When the newsworthy results are eventually published, the paper will have thousands of names on it. A 2008 paper by one of the two groups who detected the Anderson-Higgs boson had over 2,900 “coauthors.” Many physicists enter the field in hopes of intellectual glory and scientific achievement, but how much of that is left after you share it with a few thousand people?

The tub-thumpers and popularizers are caterwauling about the Higgs discovery’s potentially wondrous technological benefits. There will likely be none, ever. There were none after the far more momentous discovery of the W and Z bosons in 1973. For historical contrast, James Clerk Maxwell wrote down the unification theory between electricity and magnetism in 1862. Forty years later, humanity was in the electrical age.

The difference is obvious: Electromagnetism is a low-energy phenomenon, and technologies could be developed from it using ordinary matter. The things the High Energy Johnnies worry about require heroic efforts to see at all. While their studies are interesting in the abstract, they are technologically barren.

I don’t begrudge the High Energy Physicists their pittance of government largesse for their projects. I do begrudge them their human capital. Clever people decry the human talent allocated to the financial-services industry, but a High Energy Physicist’s life seems grim compared to one dedicated to mammon. High Energy theorists are mostly decoupled from experiment. The experimental guys labor in obscurity on enormous projects. Why not return to physics’ heroic roots, where individuals and small teams could make important contributions? Why not a little more respect and maybe a documentary or two for “Low Energy Physics”?

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In the abstract world of economic thought, certain abstract thinkers have come upon the idea that “stimulus” spending will cure what ails you. 

This pleasant bromide seems to have originated in the widely held myth that Hoover was an advocate of “austerity,” whereas FDR cured the Great Depression by spending like a drunken sailor. It is easy to think this, as it is a lie so often repeated it is now accepted as truth, even by people who should know better. I thought it was true myself until I read some newspapers from the era. In fact, Hoover was as up to date and modern as FDR was, creating all manner of public-works programs as a form of financial stimulus. Hoover was arguably the originator of the “financial stimulus” idea. Hoover first tested it in the post-WWI Europe reconstruction efforts which made him famous enough to be elected president. Hoover also increased the top income tax rate from 25% to 63% to pay for his stimulus, a remedy which would likely please modern-day stimulation fans.

FDR was really more of a fan of austerity than Hoover, attempting several times to get deficit spending under control. Hoover expanded the national debt from around 16% to 40% of GNP. FDR kept it at around 40% right up until 1941. Other harebrained schemes FDR attempted are little mentioned these days. The National Recovery Administration fixed prices, dictated profits, limited productivity, and more or less attempted to run the economy the way the Fascisti did. FDR socialized the gold supply, created tree-planting work gangs to keep underemployed young people off the streets, and created vast make-work programs in government-owned industries. He also engaged in giant infrastructure projects such as the building of dams, schools, houses, airports, bridges, canals, and hospitals.

None of these projects made a difference. The economy was still an employment disaster in 1939, but at least we had some new “stuff” as a result of these economic tinkerings. It also didn’t incur any new debts, unlike modern “stimulus” ideas, which appear to have only stimulated banker paychecks.

The Great Depression only seemed to right itself once the nation geared up for war and made actual improvements to productive capacity. It wasn’t mindless “stimulus” spending that involved digging holes, then filling them in again. This was a genuine investment in the nation’s productive capacity. It was little different from a business issuing bonds to build new and more efficient factory equipment. I believe that this probably had important benefits for the American economy. 

Deficit spending during WWII was almost entirely invested in factory and technological infrastructure needed to fight the war. Thousands of boats, tanks, and aircraft were built in vast new factories. Sewing-machine and typewriter factories were improved and automated to produce M1 rifles. Vast new electronics industries sprang up to produce the wonder weapons of sonar and radar and the hundreds of thousands of radios required for warfare. New technologies and supporting industries were developed: nuclear power, rocketry, jet aircraft engines, computers, and spread-spectrum radio transmission. All of these technologies improved human power over nature, created new industries, and improved economic productivity in ways which could scarcely have been understood at the time.

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When the war was done, the debt was paid back to the American citizens who owned it. They used the loot to buy things they put off purchasing during the war such as new automobiles and radios. They also used the windfall to purchase things such as refrigerators and televisions, which weren’t available before the wartime investment in technology and infrastructure. Since the national debt was almost entirely owed to US citizens, there was plenty of moolah to go around for purchasing such objects. 

If you are an economist or have otherwise never done honest work, you are apparently required to believe that it doesn’t matter how you spend the “stimulus” money. This peculiar theorem is justified with the magical properties of something called “aggregate demand.” Paul Krugman is the noisiest hierophant of this odd idea, but it appears to have spread like herpes in a San Francisco bathhouse. Felix Salmon, an otherwise reasonable financial journalist, wants to use imaginary money to hire teachers, firemen, and worthless bureaucrats if we can’t find anything better for people to do. Unless the teachers, firemen, and bureaucrats are going to build factories capable of making things which can’t presently be made, such a plan seems doomed. We might better serve the nation by paying would-be “public servants” to stay at home, smoke cigarettes, and sniff glue; at least they won’t be bothering anyone and we won’t have to pay their retirement packages.

I don’t think the government should attempt to invest in new technological infrastructure. The small efforts the Obama Administration made have been in predictably virtuous-sounding baloney which will never work. I also don’t agree with Krugman that we should gear up for a war with space aliens. If we had serious people in the Pentagon rather than science-fiction nerds, they wouldn’t be asking for crackpot ideas such as the F-35. We’ll get no help from their lot; they appear to get all their ideas from the same third-rate science fiction that Krugman does.

To be useful in ending economic depressions, an investment must increase human power over nature. If stimulator ding-dongs in Krugmanistan were to suggest dumping a few hundred billion into something likely to generate new technologies and industries—for example, a space-colonization program or a project to create truly autonomous robots—I might take them seriously. Meanwhile, they look like a bunch of irresponsible kids who want to use the family credit card to buy hookers and booze.

Mitt Romney has gone on record with the crackpot idea that the Russians are America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” To my knowledge, no noted Kremlinologists have bothered to weigh in on this topic, so it is left to me to untangle his curious word-pretzel. My credentials for this task consist of reading the news, dating a couple of devushkas, and taking a pleasant vacation in the Crimea in nearby Ukraine, where I was fortunate enough to speak with a few intelligent cabdrivers. This humble expertise apparently makes me better informed than Willard Mitt Romney on US-Russia relations.

The Russian Federation was founded on Christmas Day 1991. Early developments were encouraging. The Russians were willing to take American advice on reordering their decaying economic system. American economist grandees were dispatched, and their ideas were acted upon with what appeared to be artless credulity.

The result was that the Russian economy imploded. Russian men’s life expectancy suddenly fell by years, vast swaths of the economy were given away to sinister oligarchs, and the entire nation was thrown into chaotic gangsterism. What is worse, some of the American economists hired to help the Russians profited from all of this, and the gangster oligarchs were often supported by powerful American interests.

I’m no diplomat and have no certificates in the political sciences. As such I am unsure of the correct protocol for accidental economic extermination of a friendly nation. The actual diplomatic response was along the lines of, “Ha ha, you trusted us.” Most Americans involved in that debacle were promoted. Larry Summers, who masterminded the operation, was eventually made Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard. While I do not think our government set out to deliberately vaporize Russia’s economy, I wouldn’t blame a Russian for suspecting so.

In 1999, the US and NATO engaged in a war against the Serbs, whom the Russians look on as “little brothers” due to their linguistic and religious ties. NATO, which appears to have invaded nonbelligerent nations on…more…than…one…occasion, has since expanded right up to Russian borders.

In spite of this American perfidy, the Russians gave the green light to the US and NATO to set up bases on their border after the 9/11 attacks. How did we repay the Russians for their trusting generosity? In 2002, Putin suggested Russia might be invited to join NATO. Numskull diplomats told him to wait in line with Latvia. Later in the year, the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty, ostensibly to build defenses against Iran…in the Czech Republic and Poland. The Russians offered the US one of their radar facilities in Azerbaijan, which is a lot closer to Iran than the Czech Republic is. The US said no, fueling Russian paranoia that this missile defense was aimed at weakening their remaining nuclear deterrent.

In 2004, something called the Orange Revolution happened in Ukraine. The American media framed it as a battle between Tatar despotism in the person of Viktor Yanukovych against the forces of democracy and disco music in the person of Victor Yuschenko. If you believe the Western media, the brave Ukrainians stood up and put disco-democracy in charge. The reality is, this was a fight between American and Russian intelligence agencies, each attempting to put their favored proxies in charge of Ukraine. The Ukrainian people eventually realized this and threw Yuschenko out of office as soon as they were able. He remains the most unpopular president in Ukrainian history. His wife is widely suspected of being an American spook. Who is in charge in Ukraine now? The alleged villain of the Orange Revolution, Viktor Yanukovych.

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The nadir of US-Russia relations came with the Georgia Abkhazia/South Ossetia war. Mikheil Saakashvili, the US-backed numskull from the Rose Revolution, decided to shell Russian troops. The Russians told them to cut it out. The Georgians didn’t. The Russians invaded Georgia and put an end to the shelling. Saakashvili was hoping the Americans would send in the Marines for a shooting war with the Russians. You’d never know our Georgian proxies started this war from listening to the American media, who were madly whooping for the Georgians. Fortunately, some adult decided that fighting World War III because we put a gun-happy bubblehead in charge of Georgia would be a poor use of American resources. The American media wailed that Soviet tyranny had returned. After about two months the Russians withdrew, just like they said they would.

The Western media has hailed the color revolutions as a blossoming of democracy in former Soviet states. The Russians perceive them as hostile American interference in their local affairs. Georgia had been part of Russia since 1801. Eastern Ukraine had been part of Russia since 1795. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol, which is a city in Ukraine. Kiev contains the spiritual center of Russian religion, and the Kievan Rus were the cultural origin of the Russian people. The Russians have more interests in Ukraine and Georgia than we do. If the Russians or Chinese were meddling in Canada and Mexico’s political affairs, we might suspect them of ill intentions. Naturally, the Russians resent our preposterous attempts to interfere with matters on their borders.

While candidate Romney’s magical underpants are in a bunch over Obama’s Russia policy, US-Russia relations have improved over the last three years. Obama managed to wring a nuclear reduction treaty out of the Russians. The Russians have saved our bacon in Afghanistan by allowing us the use of their airspace to ship supplies to fight the Taliban. The Russians even allowed US troops to march in their 2010 Victory Day parade. They’re still bent out of shape at the US for our recent treacheries, but things have realistically never been better.

Romney’s plan to further alienate the Russians serves no purpose other than pleasing the crackpots who run our senile military-industrial complex. The Russians aren’t going to invade anyone. They can barely deal with their vast internal problems. The Eastern European missile-defense system “against Iran” is useless and it would make the Russkies happy if the US would abandon it, or at least let Russian inspectors visit. While people complain about the Russians possibly assassinating people, complaining about it seems rather odd as the US presently reserves the right to openly assassinate its own citizens.

Russia is not the Soviet Union. Russia is more like France, with more natural resources and worse food. The sooner our politicians realize that the Russians are more like Frenchmen with a peculiar affection for beets, the saner our policies will be.

In these dark days of the republic, sourpusses abound. Less than a third of the country thinks it is on the right track. Unemployment is up, confidence is down, and the economy remains a disaster area. Nazis recently got 7% of the vote in Greece. Techno-masturbatoriums such as Facebook are touted as technological innovation. Political correctness has reached the point of self-parody. The financial Rube Goldberg contraption known as the euro might explode, and the American people have become a bunch of chicken-hearted goose steppers who call the police when they experience mild social discomfort.

Despite all this, I am guardedly optimistic about the near future. Here are a few pieces of good news.

1) Race relations aren’t as bad as they were in the 1960s.
Sure, there are threats of people rioting in the streets over the Trayvon Martin case. Sure, there are “flash mob” incidents galore. But things still aren’t as bad as they were in the 1960s. Cities burned then. Rochester, Harlem, Benton Harbor, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Watts, Newark, Kansas City, Detroit, Buffalo, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Louisville, and many more. Things are not wonderful now: Diversity will always bring social problems, but we are not experiencing the low-level racial civil war of the 1960s.

2) Society isn’t changing very quickly for the worse.
Conservatives may argue that society is endlessly worse than it was in the late 1960s. That may be true, but the rate of change is slower. In 1959, we were a society of grey-flannel-suited men and respectable housewives. In 1969, we were a society of flower children, rioting minorities, and crazy ladies. Society in 2002 wasn’t that much different from 2012. I can’t think of any crazy present-day obsessions which did not exist in 2002. The only major difference between now and 1992 is that the gay-marriage crowd is louder. Maybe liberals ran out of insane ideas. Maybe people are just sick of constant social change. Maybe further change would cause complete societal collapse. Who cares why? I’m happy things are not obviously very much more insane than they were 10 years ago.

3) Overall debt is decreasing.
Yes, yes, I know, the national debt is out of control. However, the good news is that the financial-services industry, corporations, and individual households are all deleveraging. This means the overall amount of money America owes to the world and to itself is going down.

4) Obama wasn’t as bad as people thought he would be.
A clever friend likes to put it this way: “I’m proud that my country can elect a mediocre nonentity, whatever his race.” Obama turned out more or less as I expected: a centrist of dubious competence who appointed cronies from his team. This isn’t the socialist gun-grabbing apocalyptic figure the more excitable heartland conservatives predicted. Obama didn’t raise taxes appreciably. He didn’t make a fool of himself in front of foreign leaders any more than our previous president did. He has helped run up the national debt for no apparent reason, invaded a few more countries, and for some reason he seems fond of insurance companies, but these missteps could also have been expected from the other guy.

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5) Vast swaths of the entertainment industry and mass media are dying.
Sure, television is much, much worse than it used to be. Movies have decayed to the point where most of them are remakes or taken from comic books. Pop music is algorithmic dreck. Magazines and newspapers seem designed for retarded fifth-graders. Who cares? They’re dying! Huzzah for all the unemployed Hollyweird and music-industry types. Raspberries at the unemployed mass-media goons who have profited from keeping Americans ignorant. I look forward to seeing the whole lot of these tasteless wretches in breadlines.

6) People are sick of wars...and hippies.
The early 21st century’s antiwar movement was right, but for all the wrong reasons. With a few exceptions they weren’t against the wars because they were useless expenditures of blood and treasure. They were against the wars because they hate rednecks who serve in the military. Such unpleasant antiwar types made neoconservatives look like reasonable statesmen in comparison and probably made the war in Iraq possible. Most of these numskulls were silent as the Obama Administration expanded our wars to Yemen and Libya. I find it heartening that despite—or perhaps because—these loudmouths have shut up, most Americans were against the war in Libya and are against the one proposed in Syria.

7) Illegal aliens are going home.
Sure, this is mostly because we’re broke and a few states decided to enforce the laws, but they’re still leaving.

8) Violent crime isn’t that bad.
Violent-crime rates peaked around 1992. They have been declining since then. I don’t know why, though I assume it has something to do with the fact that the US has the world’s largest absolute and per-capita prison population. I’d prefer returning to the days of yore when crime was much lower than it is now and we were not imprisoning people at Soviet Union rates, but I’m glad that things aren’t as bad as they used to be.

I’m not religious, nor am I a proponent of intelligent design (ID). But I am amused by alleged rationalists who think strident disbelief makes them enlightened primates rather than obnoxious atheistic evangelists. It interests me terribly that such people are so unhinged and emotional about their allegedly rational views. I scratch my chin and puff on my pipe when alleged free-thinkers fret about children being brainwashed with religion but have no qualms when the state forces ideological conformity on young minds.

The delusion that one must be an atheist to be a first-rate scientist is common among professional atheists. I can think of several religious Nobel Prize-winning physicists offhand: Abdus Salam, Joe Taylor, Bill Phillips, Antony Hewish, and C. H. Townes. There are doubtless more if you care to look.

An even more preposterous (yet widely held) delusion is the idea that teaching the standard model of evolution is necessary to produce the next generation of young scientists. Evolutionary biology has very little connection to other fields of scientific enquiry, including most of biology. I also know at least one very talented and productive scientist who has issues with the standard evolutionary model: David Snoke. I worked for him briefly. The subject never came up in the past, as it’s not particularly relevant when plugging in lasers and aligning copper oxide crystals. Considering the recent creationism controversy in Tennessee, I thought it might be of interest to hear from an intelligent ID advocate.

Professor Snoke has an impressive publications list. He’s also a genuinely nice guy, which is not something I can say for a lot of folks with much shorter publications lists.

What kind of science are you working on these days?
Solid-state optics, Exciton and Polariton physics; primarily experimental with some theory and numerics work.

What are your main scientific beefs with evolution?
Define what you mean by “evolution!” People mean many things when they use the word. Some people define evolution as simply change over time, which very few people would disagree with. But others mean that undirected processes can explain everything that has happened from the time of the Big Bang. Do I believe that organisms change over time as a result of natural selection? Certainly! But I don’t think that this is the only mechanism. For example, nobody has a serious model which can actually explain the origins of life, and natural selection can’t work until simple life exists with something like 30,000 biological machines. There are also messy issues with phylogenetic trees and horizontal gene transfer: Much present evolutionary theory is in a turmoil because of this. Clearly natural selection is a mechanism with much explanatory power, but it is not the only mechanism. The work by ID people to show that natural selection can’t explain a lot of things is generally good science; shooting down theories is an activity which has a long history in science; it is part of the process.

Do you think some kind of directed evolution could be compatible with the Bible?
Certainly many in the ID community believe something like this. I am not persuaded by the strong version of this: the idea that everything was rigged at the Big Bang to end up the way it presently is. Some “Young Earth creationists” worry that the first chapters of Genesis must give exact history. I don’t think our interpretation of the Bible or the present scientific consensus is sacrosanct. The scientific consensus may be wrong; but if science tells us some new things, that can motivate us to look at the Bible in other ways.

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Do you think being a Christian has made you a better scientist?
Well, if you have all your chips invested in being a successful scientist, it’s much more difficult to admit that you are wrong. Being a Christian allows me to be humble about cases when my views might be wrong, which allows more self-correction. It also allows me to be skeptical and ask questions that an atheist might not think to ask. Like the person from Missouri, I can say “show me” in regard to evolutionary theories.

Other than writing a paper with Michael Behe, do your ideas about ID inform any other areas of research?
Certainly; a recent example is an article to be published in Annals of Physics where I and my coworkers derive the second law of thermodynamics from quantum field theory considerations. The genesis of this idea came about from some intelligent-design arguments I was thinking about. I’m also presently working on a numerical project relating to combinatorial optimization, which was originally inspired by some ID ideas.

Do you have problems with other scientists because of your views?
When talking with people in the physics world, there is generally respect for religion. Many physicists are religious; evangelical Christians, Jewish people, Catholics, Muslims. It’s rare to get a push back to the idea of an “ordering principle.” Scientists know that the world is orderly. Some scientists seem to hold deistic beliefs; the idea that there is something more, some ordering principle, but they don’t feel comfortable saying “God” or adopting religious beliefs.

Do you know any non-Christian creationists?
By “creationists” I assume you mean people who believe we can see the hand of God in nature, that not everything can be explained by undirected random processes. There are quite a few associated with the Discovery Institute. Gerald Schroeder is a well-known Jewish scholar, as is David Berlinski, who has agnostic leanings. Antony Flew is a deist who converted from atheism in part because of intelligent-design arguments. Michael Denton is an agnostic, and I believe a Platonist, who believes that ideas exist independently and instantiate themselves. Most people who are interested in ID have very complex views that are difficult to reduce to a sound bite. Journalists like to comment as if everything were a football game. They seem to see the debate as between two teams, with Dawkins-type evolutionists on one side and Young Earth creationists on the other. The real world is much more complex than this. There are theistic evolutionists like the evangelical Francis Collins, ID-friendly evolutionists like the Catholic Michael Behe, and people who might insert a few miracles at certain times, such as evangelical chemist Fritz Schaefer.

What do you think of “Internet skeptics?”
I don’t go to blog or discussion-group types of things very much; I have a day job and many responsibilities and interests. This sort of activity also seems to appeal to a particular personality type. It seems to be a rule on such things that the guy who writes the most “wins,” which isn’t a very good way at arriving at the truth. There are, of course, many Christians who engage in this sort of thing; the personality type who likes this sort of thing isn’t restricted to Internet skeptics.

How do you react with dumb people try to be condescending toward you because you’re religious?
Well, it doesn’t happen very often. In most circles I travel in, people are aware that I am a physics professor. Occasionally you’ll have to hold your tongue at a party when someone rants about “stupid evangelical Christians.”

The modern age offers no refuge from the state. The world’s habitable unpopulated regions are firmly under sovereign nations’ regulation. There is still adventure to be had in the world, but there’s no frontier, no place to carve out a new way of life free from the state’s meddlings.

Over the last 50 years various dreamers have tried to fill this freedom vacuum. One idea is to build a large ship or ocean platform in international waters and experiment with new systems of government. Called seasteading, it has recently been revived by the Seasteading Institute and its CEO, Patri Friedman. Iconoclastic venture capitalist Peter Thiel has blessed the think tank with his loot and his good name.

The engineering isn’t out of reach; the Soviets were building cities in the middle of oceans decades ago. A big question is how such a micro-nation would make enough money to support the structure and inhabitants. Aquaculture is an obvious if unexciting solution. More in the libertarian spirit are subversions of nearby nations’ laws. Gambling barges have existed for some time, and ideas as colorful as offshore brothels and plastic-surgery hospitals have been floated. One of the more promising schemes is using an offshore startup incubator to further debauch the H-1B process for obtaining cheap labor. It is not clear why this would work any better than less literal offshoring (and it has been tried), but it seems less likely to incur the wrath of the great powers.

Seasteading has a historical antecedent which still exists: Sealand, whose structure is based on British sea fort that had been built for air defense in World War II. An eccentric British adventurer named Paddy Roy Bates took over the fort, declared it a sovereign kingdom in 1967, and based its economy on illegal radio advertising. The British legal system has taken a largely beneficent view of Sealand; the British do love their eccentrics. Despite its diminutive size, Sealand has had a colorful history. There have been attacks, coups, governments in exile, and fires. It is regularly brought up as a potential data haven for websites in legal difficulty such as WikiLeaks or Pirate Bay.

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Seasteading and related ideas have been common in libertarian circles over the years. There are a half-dozen or so examples of attempts at this sort of thing, with varying levels of comedic puissance. One example seems most comparable to the modern efforts. As with the Seasteading Institute, it was started by libertarians and funded by a wealthy benefactor (in this case, Michael Oliver). Unlike the Seasteading Institute, these guys actually got beyond the kaffeeklatsch stage.

Their first project, the Republic of Minerva, was a 15-acre platform and tower built on a South Pacific coral reef in 1972. The idea was to make money issuing flags of convenience to ships and perhaps open a Sin City-style seaside resort to take advantage of the fine climate. Unfortunately, they announced their New Jerusalem to regional governments as well as potential investors. A local heavyweight, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, decided that new land was his, despite it being 260 miles from Tonga. Reports differ as to the Republic of Minerva’s conquest, but it allegedly was a festive affair with brass-band accompaniment. No Minervans were present to contest the invasion. The Tongans didn’t stay the night; there isn’t much to do on an otherwise uninhabited coral reef.

Michael Oliver later started a group called the Phoenix Foundation with famed investment advisor Harry D. Schultz and objectivist pinup boy Nathaniel Branden. The goal was to set up a South Pacific libertarian paradise on an island called Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. The New Hebrides was set for independence from its British/French condominium in 1980, and the Oliver gang was backing a local pro-independence group. This time, it almost worked: The French recognized their independence on June 3, 1980. The rest of the newly independent New Hebrides didn’t think much of this, so they obtained military assistance from the mighty nation of Papua New Guinea and crushed the libertarian rebellion in the appropriately named Coconut War.

Michael Oliver’s efforts ought to be an object lesson to would-be seasteaders. You can’t have a real country without actual human beings who have skin in the game. In fact, you need bona-fide desperados who are willing to fight for their freedom, which is presumably why Mr. Oliver became interested in backing local rebels.

It’s not so clear that libertarians have a clear grasp of human nature. If the libertarians won the Coconut War, their libertarian paradise in the New Hebrides would probably have ended up much like the rest of the New Hebrides, as there weren’t many libertarians living there.

Seasteading has libertarian goals, but some kind of central planning system is needed to manage large, man-made structures. Whether you call it “taxes” or “use fees” isn’t going to matter much to the captive audience that lives there. Opportunists are going to be extremely interested in what you’re up to in your libertarian paradise. If it’s offensively illegal, they’re probably going to squash it as the authorities eventually did in Hong Kong’s anarcho-capitalist paradise of Kowloon Walled City. Considering the experiences of Mr. Oliver and his associates, diplomats and a well-organized militia would seem essential (if expensive) ingredients. Until libertarians are willing to fight for their liberty, the idea seems unlikely to work.

In The Odyssey, Theoclymenus asks of Telemachus, “Among men, who are you? Tell me also of your city and parents.” Old-fashioned folks who haven’t been poisoned by the current age will ask similar questions. The answers are generally more revealing than what passes for modern small talk. These days, one can answer questions such as this by spitting into a test tube.

Genetic anthropology is a new field made possible by the availability of inexpensive DNA microarray chips. Physical anthropologists have speculated for over a century as to the origins of different tribes of men based on anthropomorphic measurements, paleoanthropology, linguistics, archeology, and studying place names. My modest studies of the Anglo Saxon language indicate that the physical anthropologists of over 100 years ago knew rather a lot about recent human origins in well-studied places such as Great Britain. With the advent of cheap gene sequencing, researchers are able to study prehistoric human migrations in the absence of other kinds of evidence. New knowledge about one’s origins also becomes available to the individual almost as soon as it is available to the scientific community.

Amateur genealogists were early adopters of this technology. Folks interested in their patrilineal line could get their Y chromosome sequenced. For the matrilineal line there are mitochondrial DNA tests. In both cases, the DNA is passed down the respective lines unchanged, excepting for chance mutations. Other genealogical tests compare “autosomal DNA” (AKA the part of your genetic code which doesn’t relate to sex) to folks who submitted their genetic code to the database. This is useful for finding distant cousins who could potentially fill you in on blank spots on the family tree.

According to my testing service, my Y chromosome (haplogroup R1b1a2a1a1*) originates from a Stone Age Atlantis in the North Sea known as “Doggerland.” Much as I’d love to imagine myself as a man from some forgotten Atlantis, this story is almost certainly fanciful nonsense. Doggerland is real, but the idea that my particular Y chromosome has something to do with it originated in a discussion on an online forum. It is not based on any deep analysis of empirical data; it was an individual’s guess based on incomplete data, and many well-informed people think it was a bad guess. At present, nobody really knows the tribe from which my Y chromosome is derived. Thus far, we only know that they were Northern European: Celts, Saxons, or pre-Indo-European aboriginals, with the prevailing wisdom leaning toward Germans. As my Y-chromosome group is fairly common in Scotland and my name is supposed to be Scottish (a people made up of Celts, Germans, and aboriginals), I’ll split the difference. One interesting negative result from the Y chromosome test: Though my Scottish clan was allegedly founded by a son of the legendary 5th-century Irish King Niall of the Nine Hostages, my Y chromosome indicates that I’m not a direct descendant of his.

My mitochondrial DNA group is ostensibly of “black Irish” extraction. According to the testing service, the same group (H6a) is scattered around Europe with peaks in the Middle East and Caucasus. Oddly, everyone in the testing service’s special-interest group for H6a was of Irish or Scandinavian extraction. This means that either the research is inaccurate or not many Middle Easterners and Georgians use the testing service.

My autosomal DNA results netted several distant cousins from the Hoffman side of my mother’s family. Grandpa always maintained that the Hoffmans were ordinary Germans, but the big noses in the family pictures had us wondering if they might be from one of Israel’s lost tribes. My distant Hoffman cousins informed me that the Hoffmans were ordinary gentile Germans originally from Bavaria. So much for my Israeli passport.

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The tests give some broad ideas as to your overall ancestry using autosomal DNA. My results revealed something fairly obvious from my family history and the mirror: I’m a white guy whose ancestors are from Western Europe. I have no apparent African, Asian, or American Indian ancestry. I was hoping to know more fine detail, such as my percentage of German versus Celt à la Cavalli-Sforza, but the available online tests aren’t that specific and the research behind the tests is still underway. There are other tools available for the numerate, but they are not specific enough to classify a man as an Englishman versus a Scot. They do well at telling the difference between a Japanese and a Nigerian, however.

One of the more amusing results of the autosomal-DNA tests: I am allegedly 3% Neanderthal. I am in the 95th percentile of Neanderthality among human beings. If true, this makes every woman I have been involved with eerily prescient about my heritage. The results were available shortly after the research hit the newspapers, making it an exciting feature of the testing service, but there are reasons to be skeptical of the idea. Whatever the ultimate results of the Neanderthal hybridization hypothesis, folks who have had their genes sequenced will eventually know whether or not their ancestors were Neanderthals.

While I wax skeptical as to some of the results the commercial testing services yield, this work is very much in flux. These tests do get the broad strokes right. For people who have only vague ideas as to their ancestry, the results will be enlightening. The results can be very specific if you happen to have won the luck of the genetic draw and have a bloodline which is well-documented and studied.

Fairly crude algorithms present the commercial results, with copy written by people who don’t fully understand the methodology behind the results nor, for that matter, the subject itself. This situation will improve with time; the testing services have only been around for a few years. The open-source tools and databases for analyzing your genetic history are also improving. Hundreds of scientists are feverishly at work on this subject, and new results are published daily.

At some point, we’ll know things such as who comprised the Iron Age Hallstatt culture or who the Bronze Age Beaker people really were. We’ll also be able to pinpoint their modern descendants. More importantly, we as individuals will know where we fit into the historical tapestry. We’ll no longer be amorphously “white,” “black,” or “brown.” We will be able to see the lines of our people back to before recorded history.