Recently in Society & Culture Category

Um... abortion is safer than birth?

Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.

Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.

It's not safer for the baby though.

(HT: James Taranto.)

Rand Simberg nails the pro-abortion left for opposing abortion prerequisites that pale in comparison to restrictions on guy buyers.

Recently, the Texas legislature passed (and the governor signed) a law with a seemingly modest requirement -- that any woman getting an abortion in the state of Texas be allowed (and required) to see a sonogram of the fetus twenty-four hours prior to the surgery.

Note what the law doesn't do. It doesn't prevent a woman from getting an abortion. It (at most) slows her down by one day from doing so, should she choose to go through with it.

Contrast this with the hoops that gun owners must often jump through to purchase firearms -- background checks, waiting periods, purchase limits within a certain amount of time. Or the requirement that they undergo training, spending money and investing time, to get a permit to carry their weapons, even in states where it is allowed. All of these are far more onerous than the simple requirement that a woman have an ultrasound picture taken of her womb, and see it.

He is correct in asserting that "pro-choice" is a misnomer: these leftists are pro-abortion. Is there some reason they're hesitant to embrace that? I'm pro-gun, not just pro-the-choice-to-buy-a-gun. Nothing embarrassing about that. Are they embarrassed to be pro-abortion?

Well, to be honest, they should be embarrassed. Abortion is abhorrent and detestable, and so are the activists who promote it and the industry that profits from it.

The WSJ does a great job explaining why Mitt Romney's tax rates are (and should be) low.

Start with the fact that, like Warren Buffett, Mr. Romney said he makes most of his money from investments, not wages or salary. Thus his income is really taxed twice: once at the corporate tax rate of 35%, then again at a 15% tax rate when it is passed through to him as dividends or via capital gains from the sale of stock.

All income from businesses is eventually passed through to the owners, so to ignore business taxes creates a statistical illusion that makes it appear that the rich pay less than they really do. By this logic, if the corporate tax rate were raised to, say, 60% from today's 35% and the dividend and capital gains tax were cut to zero, it would appear that business owners were getting away with paying no federal tax at all.

This all-too-conveniently confuses the incidence of a tax with the burden of a tax. The marginal tax rate on every additional dollar of capital gains and dividend income from corporate profits can reach as high as 44.75% at the federal level (assuming a company pays the 35% top corporate rate), not 15%.

James Taranto points out that inflation also gnaws away at capital gains.

In the case of capital gains--profit on the sale of an asset--there is an additional argument. If you bought stock for $1,000 in 1990 and sold it for $2,000 in 2010, you'd pay taxes on the $1,000 difference--even though part of the appreciation reflects the decline in the value of money. A thousand dollars in 1990 dollars is a bit under $1,650 in 2010 dollars, so you'd pay $150 in taxes on real (after-inflation) income of $350, an effective rate of 43%. Taxing the same income at the current top ordinary rate of 35% would wipe out almost all the gains--and this during two decades in which inflation has generally been low.

The problem isn't that capital is taxed too lightly, but rather than income is taxed too heavily.

This infographic about Millennials (age ~18-29) is encouraging to me! This excerpt shows why Millennials won't be taking my job:

Hmmm... which sounds more productive: "Technology use & work ethic" or "Technology use & music / pop culture"?

Also good for me, entering the job market during a recession (as Millennials are doing) hurts your long-term career prospects:

Sociologists have shown that being born in a recession dampens your earnings throughout your lifetime, simply because the first jobs you get are the ones that define much of your success in later life. Almost all the wage increases that you'll get arrive before you're 40. Thus, if you enter the workforce and struggle to find a job, you'll be consistently hobbled by a lack of experience and tenure.

So will Millennials continue voting Democrat for the rest of their lives now that they've cut their teeth on Obama? Or will they -- gasp -- grow up as they age? My guess is the latter. Comparing the work ethic of a 30-something generation that is having children to the work ethic of the 20-something generation is kind of absurd. Didn't people use to say that Generation X was full of no-good stoner grunge-rock layabouts?

So maybe I should be worried after all!

Why are there so few blacks at the #Occupy camps?

Many a brow was furrowed in concern, many a chin was earnestly wagged on the subject of Tea Party racism. Did Blacks avoid Tea Party events, the press wondered, because racist Tea Partiers kept them away, or because Blacks were smart enough to realize that the Tea Party agenda was a racial hate and oppression agenda?

Here at Via Meadia we have been noting the relative plenitude of palefaces at the OWS protests and the protesters we personally know have tended to be of the upper middle class white liberal artsy type. We have waited for the wave of investigative journalism seeking the reasons for Black absenteeism -- but so far we have been disappointed. Black failure to attend right wing demonstrations appears to be a mysterious matter demanding detailed investigation, but there is nothing to discuss when they shun left wing ones. Moreover, a relative absence of Black faces in right wing crowds clearly demonstrates the racism of both the protesters and their ideas, while an absence of Black faces in left wing crowds means -- absolutely nothing.

The gulf between blacks and elite whites does not bode well for the Democrats' 2012 election strategy.

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment -- professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists -- and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

No wonder the Left sees separateness and inequality everywhere they look... they're the heart of it. Perhaps this gulf is not a problem, but is actually essential to the Democrats' plan?

Megan McArdle elucidates a point I've attempted to make about meritocracy: qualities that lead to success in a meritocracy can be transmitted across generations as surely as aristocracy can be.

You can argue about why this is--are the upper middle class transmitting real skills, or pull? But does it matter? As an editor at The Economist once noted to me, it's actually rather more worrying if what they're giving their children is a strong education and an absolutely ferocious work ethic. An aristocracy that simply bequeaths money and social position to its children will eventually fall. And aristocracy that bequeaths the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else is self perpetuating.

And self-legitimating. The old aristocracy was, I think, at least dimly aware that it wasn't quite fair for them to have what they had by mere virtue of being born to the right parents. But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard. (Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.) Whatever the systemic injustices, it's also quite clear to everyone . . . even parasitic leeches of investment bankers . . . that their salaries only come as the result of frantic effort.

The ability of one's parents to confer such enduring advantages is obviously unfair. And while I don't want to say that a society cannot last that way--obviously, many have, for hundreds of years--I don't think it's healthy for society. It is hard to get civic engagement, or respect for the law, when the bottom 40% or so feels that the game is rigged.

I'm not sure that the situation is "rigged" in the same way as in an aristocracy, but it is clear that parents and family can confer significant advantages or disadvantages even in a meritocracy. It's not obvious to me how this could be avoided... those in power now will naturally wield that power in a way that gives their children the best possible opportunities.

How would upper-middle-class parents feel about children who had only a 17% chance of achieving a household income above $90,000? They would be horrified. And then they would busily start using the full scope of their talents--their financial resources, their educational skills, and their social capital--to "fix it".

These instincts would operate in a meritocracy, an aristocracy, or a Marxist utopia.

Apparently the #OCCUPY losers have so many rapists that the women have requested their own shelters.

Zuccotti Park has become so overrun by sexual predators attacking women in the night that organizers felt compelled to set up a female-only sleeping tent yesterday to keep the sickos away.

The large, metal-framed "safety tent" -- which will be guarded by an all-female patrol -- can accommodate as many as 18 people and will be used during the day for women-only meetings, said Occupy Wall Street organizers.

"This is all about safety in numbers," said Becky Wartell, 24, a protester from Portland, Maine.

So many angles.

1. Get a gun.

2. Why the heck are so many of your comrades rapists?

3. Aren't there any good men to protect the women?

The primary function of civilization is to prevent crazies from taking your stuff and raping your women. Let's keep careful notes about how the world would look if the #OCCUPY thugs were in charge of more than a half-acre park.

I don't remember hearing about any rapes at the Tea Party rallies, do you?

Ann Althouse asks if the special tent is discriminatory:

If there were a few attacks by black people, would they set up a white-only section? Why stigmatize all the men as criminals based on the acts of a few?

Allah Pundit notes that the media has been treating the #OCCUPY losers a lot better than they did the Tea Partiers:

This can't be repeated enough: With a few exceptions, foremost among them the New York Post, the coverage of OWS protests compared to the coverage of tea-party protests is the worst media double standard in recent history. Nothing compares, because nothing else involves this much distortion on both ends of the coverage. It's not just that most press outlets (like the protesters themselves) look the other way at depravity happening inside Obamaville, it's that for years they treated the tea-party movement as some sort of feral mob that was forever on the brink of rampaging through the streets -- like, say, Occupy Oakland just did.

Robert Stacy McCain points out that #OCCUPY shouldn't be considered "non-violet" no matter what they claim.

We can no longer tolerate media assertions that this is a non-violent movement. When your purpose is to inspire hatred, to threaten and intimidate, when you trespass and obstruct traffic, when you chant obscenities and deliberately seek to provoke confrontations -- no, you're not being non-violent, no matter how often you claim to be "peaceful."

But who can expect honesty from such savages? And who can any longer doubt that the mainstream media are acting as accessories to this criminal movement by pretending that the "Occupy [Whatever]" mob's regular eruptions of violence and criminality are atypical aberrations?

The longer this goes on, the worse it will get for the Democrats and the Left... so in that sense it's great. Let these losers discredit themselves for a generation.

(HT: Instapundit.)

David Post writes about an atrocious new intellectual property bill that threatens to destroy the internet as we know it as well as eliminate our rights to privacy and due process. It's sponsored by the various media corporations who have been hurt by internet file sharing and the looming death of society's intellectual property regime. Go ahead and read about it... it's pretty absurd.

However, it's hard for me to get worked up over the bill. Why? Because the internet always wins. It won all over the Middle East and North Africa, it's winning in China, it's winning against the Republican political machine, and it will defeat the intellectual property rent-seekers. Any IP that is widely disseminated to the public will not be protected. Deal with it.

And of course it's not going to work. I guarantee that. It's too easy to circumvent -- anyone who understands the technology will agree with that. Sure, it will ensnare many unlawful actors. But at Internet scale, ensnaring some of the bad guys does not and cannot appreciably affect the conduct in question. Think of it this way: If there are 10 bad guys out there, and you've got a way to catch, say, 5 of them, that's usually a pretty good scheme. We'll have 5 fewer bad guys, and who knows, maybe just by probabilistic chance you'll catch all 10; after all, if you're 50 percent likely on average to catch each bad guy, it's unlikely but by no means impossible that you'll get 'em all.

But if there are 10 million bad guys and you get rid of half of them, there are still 5 million bad guys out there. And, with intellectual property, 5 million bad guys can do precisely as much "damage" to your intellectual property as 10 million. If "stamping out copyright infringement" looks like a nightmarish game of whack-a-mole that you can't possibly win -- well, I'm sorry about that, but that's just the way the world is, so get over it. There's more -- much more -- peer-to-peer file-sharing going on today than in the heyday of Napster and Grokster. Deal with it -- not by killing my Internet, thank you very much.

The internet will win. Our modern-day Neanderthals need to adapt.

Using the language of the Occupy Wall Street mobs, one supporter says it's "time to kill the wealthy".

Several influential New York state lawmakers have received threatening mails saying it is "time to kill the wealthy" if they don't renew the state's tax surcharge on millionaires, according to reports.

"It's time to tax the millionaires!" reads the email, according to WTEN in Albany. "If you don't, I'm going to pay a visit with my carbine to one of those tech companies you are so proud of and shoot every spoiled Ivy League [expletive] I can find." ...

The email, with the threatening subject line of, "time to kill the wealthy," was detailed and disturbing.

"How hard is it for us to stake out one of the obvious access roads to some tech company, tail an employee home and toss a liquor bottle full of flaming gasoline through their nice picture window into their cute house," wrote the author of the email.

This sentiment will definitely help President Obama get re-elected!

Fascinating claim that I'll have to ponder: male employment is much more important for society than female employment.

As earned-income increases, marriage rates also increase. A man is simply not a viable potential spouse until he can earn enough to support a family, regardless of the wife's income. Most women want to "marry up" financially, and those of us who promote marriage must take this into account. The employment and income of men is much more important for a healthy society than that of women.

Implication: If stable marriages and families are important for society, then our policies should focus on increasing male employment and income.

Further claim:

A society that wishes to prosper in peace must ensure that the overwhelming majority of young men can marry and keep their wives. As we are not doing that, and there appears to be little appetite for enacting the policies which would encourage that, we should prepare ourselves for our inevitable decline and the destruction that will follow it.

Why have 165+ people recently gone missing from cruise ships? Because they've been murdered.

According to the U.S.-based International Cruise Victims Association, 165 people have gone missing at sea since 1995, with at least 13 this year alone -- many of them from vessels popular with British holidaymakers. ...

But is the idea of someone 'slipping overboard' credible? The rails on cruise ships are at least 3ft 6in high, which makes it incredibly difficult for anyone -- even someone who might be drunk or ill -- to pitch overboard.

Bonk on the head from behind, and then one good shove over the railing. Adios, chum!

When a person disappears from a cruise ship does their home country investigate? Nope! Police from the country where the ship is registered do the investigation, if one is even performed. Do you think that cop from the Bahamas is going to fly around the world interviewing passengers and collecting evidence? Yeah, me neither.

Potential murderers:

1. The most likely killer is always the spouse. Guess who will also have the easiest time luring you onto the floating abattoir?

2. Serial killers. I bet it isn't hard to cruise using a fake identity, not that investigators are ever likely to question you anyway.

3. Robbers. People cruise with jewelry, passports, and other valuables.

4. Co-workers. Crew members go missing too! Co-workers in close proximity for long periods of time have plenty of opportunity for making enemies (anger/jealousy over promotions, romance, etc.).

5. Stowaways. Sneak on board then kill someone and assume their identity for the duration. Or kill someone while they're off the ship on a tour.

Needless to say, I won't be taking a cruise any time soon.

I was thinking about the current concept of copyright protection this morning, and it made me quite angry. I doubt I can capture the full scope of my mental rant, but allow me to summarize:

1. The purpose of protecting authors' exclusive rights to exploit their works is to incentivize creativity. It's a bargain between creators and society: we'll use the threat of violence to protect your creative works, and in exchange that work will enter into the public domain after a certain amount of time.

2. Copyright laws are specifically authorized by the Constitution, and in 1790 terms were set as 14 years with 14-year renewal if the author was still alive. That seems too long to me, but not unreasonable or unjust.

3. Current US law appears to protect copyright for up to 120 years or life-of-the-author plus 70 years. This is completely insane. There's no way to reasonably argue that authors will refuse to be creative if their great, great grandchildren don't maintain the exclusive right to exploit the author's work. Current law is an abuse of process: large companies (e.g., Disney) earn money from copyrights and then use that money to lobby Congress for copyright extensions. Repeat ad nauseum.

4. The smartest one of us wouldn't be able to do more than smear poop on a cave wall in the shape of a buffalo without the thousands of years of intellectual property bequeathed to us by our ancestors for free. This inheritance is of incalculable value, and 99% of what we do now is derived from this legacy. In this light, is society's benefit from Mickey Mouse really worth the tens of billions of dollars that Disney has extracted from us by means of copyright laws?

5. The RIAA and MPAA would have us believe that without intellectual property laws our culture would grind to a halt as creators refused to create. Stupid. For thousands of years artists, writers, and musicians have created amazing works of art, all without the benefit of copyright protection. It's ludicrous to argue that they'd stop now if their exclusive rights were protected only for a decade rather than 120 years or life-of-the-author plus 70 or whatever.

6. Copyright is dying. There's no way that the generation that is currently in college will ever convict anyone of copyright violations for music, book, or movie "piracy". It just won't happen. The end. Copyright is a distortion of the natural order that can only exist if it is mutually beneficial to authors and society. That balance is so far out of whack now that there's going to be whiplash when the existing copyright system finally collapses. (I put "piracy" in quotes, because many copyrighted works should be in the public domain and be a part of our common heritage and cultural legacy. You can't "pirate" what you have a right to possess.)

7. If the Tea Party were savvy, they'd make freedom from stifling copyrights a plank in their political platform and quickly win over millions of young voters.

If you're pregnant with twins and you kill one of the babies, is that just half an abortion?

As Jenny lay on the obstetrician's examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn't want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment -- and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny's abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.

Almost as if? So... killing one baby isn't even half an abortion. If abortions aren't bad at all anyway, why hesitate to call killing one unborn baby an abortion, much less half an abortion?

Jenny's decision to reduce twins to a single fetus was never really in doubt. The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children. Even the twins would be robbed, because, at best, she could give each one only half of her attention and, she feared, only half of her love. Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. "This is bad, but it's not anywhere as bad as neglecting your child or not giving everything you can to the children you have," she told me, referring to the reduction. She and her husband worked out this moral calculation on their own, and they intend to never tell anyone about it. Jenny is certain that no one, not even her closest friends, would understand, and she doesn't want to be the object of their curiosity or feel the sting of their judgment.

If I were killing babies I'd keep it secret too.

What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math's the same either way: one fewer fetus. Perhaps it's because twin reduction (unlike abortion) involves selecting one fetus over another, when either one is equally wanted. Perhaps it's our culture's idealized notion of twins as lifelong soul mates, two halves of one whole. Or perhaps it's because the desire for more choices conflicts with our discomfort about meddling with ever more aspects of reproduction.

Is killing one of two really more controversial? I was surprised to hear that opinion. To me, killing a baby is no more or less acceptable if that baby has a sibling or a twin.

The justification for eliminating some fetuses in a multiple pregnancy was always to increase a woman's chance of bringing home a healthy baby, because medical risks rise with every fetus she carries. The procedure, which is usually performed around Week 12 of a pregnancy, involves a fatal injection of potassium chloride into the fetal chest. The dead fetus shrivels over time and remains in the womb until delivery. Some physicians found reduction unnerving, particularly because the procedure is viewed under ultrasound, making it quite visually explicit, which is not the case with abortion.

Yes, I can see why it would be especially unnerving to actually watch a baby be killed. That's because killing a healthy baby for the sake of convenience is evil.

Alte writes about high-IQ dating from a woman's perspective.

Because of the demographic factors that high IQ men outnumber high IQ women (2:1 to 5:1, depending upon her IQ) and that many high-IQ women do not want to marry, traditional, marriage-minded high-IQ women have little trouble finding spouses -- as long as they don't wait too long, of course. That is because of assortative mating, which results in the fact that most married couples are within 20 IQ points of each other. Although not every man is impressed by a woman's credentials and career, few men want to marry someone markedly less intelligent than they are.

To understand this, it is important to note that a person with an IQ=140 is as different from a person of IQ=120, as he is from a person of IQ=100, as he is from a person of IQ=80. A man of 140 IQ will naturally prefer women of IQ>120 for marriage because he will have difficulty relating to, and communicating with, a less-intelligent woman. She likely won't get his jokes, understand his work, captivate his mind, or share his interests. Although he might have sex with her, he will be disinclined to marry her. This might go some way toward explaining why promiscuous super-high IQ men report finding women so "interchangeable" and uninteresting -- hence all of the talk about sexbots. High IQ women are rare enough that it is unlikely that these men are "pumping-n-dumping" their way through their particular pool of ideal potential spouses, but are rather lowering their "intelligence standard" a bit, in order to accumulate more short-term partners.

So a person with an IQ of 140 is likely to marry someone in the 120-160 range. This means that a woman with an IQ of 140 will have a larger range of partners to choose from because there are so few eligible women at the far-range. This female-advantage increases dramatically as you move rightward from IQ 120, a theory which mirrors my own dating experiences, and those of the other high IQ women that I know. Although we might get less random male attention than other women, the attention we do receive tends to be more exclusive and intense, and we are more highly-valued by our mates. In other words, it is more difficult for us to find someone suitable to date, but it is easier for us to choose a marriage partner from among our dates.

It's always interesting to me to read about dating from behind enemy lines, so to speak.

The always brilliant Mark Steyn on the London riots:

Her Majesty's cowed and craven politically correct constabulary stand around with their riot shields and Robocop gear as young rioters lob concrete through store windows to steal the electronic toys which provide their only non-narcotic or alcoholic amusement. I chanced to be in Piccadilly for the springtime riots when the police failed to stop the mob from smashing the windows of the Ritz and other upscale emporia, so it goes without saying that they wouldn't lift a finger to protect less-prestigious private property from thugs. Some of whom are as young as 9 years old. And girls.

Yet a police force all but entirely useless when it comes to preventing crime or maintaining public order has time to police everything else. When Sam Brown observed en passant to a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street in Oxford, "Do you know your horse is gay?", he was surrounded within minutes by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed, tossed in the slammer overnight, and fined 80 pounds. Mr. Brown's "homophobic comments," explained a spokesmoron for Thames Valley Police, were "not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area." The zealous crackdown on Sam Brown's hippohomophobia has not been replicated in the present disturbances. Anyone who has so much as glanced at British policing policy over the past two decades would be hard pressed to argue which party on the streets of London, the thugs or the cops, is more irredeemably stupid.

The social welfare state has infantilized its citizens (or "subjects" in the UK).

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the Earth's surface and a quarter of its population. When you're imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

Feral humans are victims of "tolerance":

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline -- tough love -- which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Most peoples' dogs are better behaved than these humans.

For the past few hundred years Western Civilization has grown "nicer" as we've grown richer. It should be clear though: America isn't nicer now than in 1776 because we're more "enlightened" -- we can afford to be nicer because by historical standards we're so insanely wealthy. I'm not just talking about monetary wealth, but also social and institutional wealth. How much is the "rule of law" worth? How much are 43 consecutive peaceful transfers of power worth? Trillions of dollars.

Richard Fernandez points out that this social capital isn't unlimited, and that societies can experience their equivalents of "bank runs".

In one sense legitimacy is the fiction on which society is based. It is to government what confidence is to a bank. As long as everyone believes that the bank will pay the depositor no one will demand all his money back. As long as most believe that the King's justice is effectively invincible, no one will challenge it. But when a government behaves in a supine manner for an extended period -- or a bank refuses to pay out without a good reason -- then doubts begin to grow. Both legitimacy and confidence are more severely tested and once it is known that there isn't enough money in the bank to pay everyone nor enough cops in the station house to arrest everyone then the fiction is bust.

A deadly cycle begins to set in. Both the government -- or the bank -- have to make payouts in force or money more frequently than they otherwise would. There is a "run" on this key resource and their are bankrupted. Financially in the bank's case and politically in the case of government. When confidence finally dwindles to its last remaining levels the declining institution must either risk everything on the last throw to restore it or face collapse. ...

But whether the preferred term for this quantity is 'legitimacy', 'confidence', the 'strong horse' or 'design margin', the presumption on the political Left since the War has been that Western Society has an infinite or nearly infinite supply of it. It seemed impossible to them that a society with a Big Design Margin might eventually become one with a Small Design Margin. And even if it did, why do Design Margins matter anyway?

There's always another dollar to distribute or tax; another regulation to be imposed; another rule of war; another apology that can be made. We can play whatever the handicap. Haven't we always won despite? Religion and national myth can be denigrated to any extent desired, while hostile ideologies can be simultaneously exalted. We're so rich we shouldn't care.

The problem is that the Left doesn't realize that we can be nice because we're rich. If they squander the wealth on idealism for too long, eventually it will run out. When we can no longer afford to be nice, we'll stop.

It seems like a simple idea and you wonder why not everybody gets it. But you have to realize that the Left, in accomplishing the ruin of a society -- by debasing the coin of its culture if not its actual coin -- always starts and finishes by meaning well. That's the get out of jail card: idealism. They genuinely set out the improve the world and if you knew them you would have no reason to doubt the purity of their motives. In fact, they are genuinely just as surprised as anyone else when it doesn't work.

The catastrophe, when it comes, begins always for the children, the youths, the yoots, the utes. Then it fails. But don't worry. They'll try harder the next time and then they'll succeed. They're idealists after all.

Conservatives don't always realize that we are rich enough to be nice, but the Left needs to recognize that our wealth is not unlimited. Most Conservatives don't want to end up with a situation like the one below, but we're also not going to tolerate a situation like the one we're seeing in London.

(HT: Instapundit for the image.)

Walter Russell Mead has written a brilliant analysis of the crisis facing the progressive movement.

Meanwhile, Greenberg has not yet come to grips with the deepest and most difficult aspect of the crisis of liberal legitimacy. He roots the dangerous and corrupting special interests outside the state: with their money and their lobbying the corporations and the fat cats influence and pervert the state. But the state and its servants do not, in Greenberg's story, constitute a special interest of their own.

This is not how voters see it. For large numbers of voters the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest. It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses.

The problem goes even deeper than hostility toward perceived featherbedding and life tenure for government workers. The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.

This perception, also, is rooted in truth. The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich. It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses. From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.

Read the whole thing. He's spot-on. Continual failure and blundering by the government undermines the progressive vision of a powerful, benevolent ruling class. The country is sick of it.

Some Colombian women have started a sex strike to force their husbands to pressure the government to pave the road to their village.

Dubbed the "strike of crossed legs," the women in the town of Barbacoas near the Pacific coast are trying to persuade their husbands to pressure local authorities to properly maintain the main road out of their village which stretches some 35 miles (56 kilometers) before reaching the nearest town. Many husbands of the women on strike, however, said that they would prefer that their wives engage in a hunger strike instead.

Oh yeah, call them fat, that'll help.

(HT: James Taranto.)

James Taranto notes that gays aren't responsible for the decline of marriage.

Deroy Murdock made a good point some years back when he observed, in a column posted at NRO, that "social conservatives who blow their stacks over homosexual matrimony's supposed threat to traditional marriage tomorrow should focus on the far greater damage that heterosexuals are wreaking on that venerable institution today."

Murdock should have written "have wreaked for decades," because the developments we note all long predate any serious consideration of the idea of same-sex marriage. And it must be said that some social conservatives--notably Maggie Gallagher, another frequent National Review contributor--do take a broader view of the subject. As a political matter, however, outside the area of abortion it is hard to find a constituency whose members are eager to subject themselves to greater obligations or constraints in the name of social stability or for the good of the next generation.

Thus for the foreseeable future, civil marriage is likely to retain its character as little more than a financial arrangement. To be sure, many individual marriages are deeply committed relationships. But under a regime that permits either spouse to opt out of the commitment at will, the legal recognition of marriage is mere symbolism.

The people most responsible for the decline of marriage as an institution are the divorced people who didn't value their own marriages.