If this is NRx I’m Mao Zedong.

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If this analysis is right, Romney would be sure to lose a 2016 presidential bid. “Voters will compromise on a lot of issues on Election Day but they won’t ever vote for you if they don’t like you or worse yet, think you don’t like them.” That makes him the perfect GOP candidate — delegitimating the opposition, without seizing the poisoned chalice of democratic leadership (i.e. increasingly vacuous symbolic authority). If the electorate grudgingly concede, after renewing his humiliation, he was right, but we voted against him anyway because he didn’t kiss my baby, it’s NRx gravy.

This has to be in some way related:

Romney 2016: Reform conservative. Romney 2020: Buchananite. Romney 2024: Rothbardian. Romney 2028: Neo-reactionary.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 13, 2015

Just to keep Kgaard maximally wound-up (and therefore indirectly troll everybody else on the blog), Jim Quinn navigating amid a flurry of Mises quotes:

Booms brought about by credit expansion ALWAYS end in a contractionary bust. It’s just a matter of when. The level of mal-investment in Japan, Europe, China and the U.S. during the boom created by central bankers is almost incomprehensible in its scale of absurdity. The only beneficiaries have been bankers, corporate insiders, politicians, and shadowy billionaires hiding in plain sight. The illusory boom has already impoverished the working class and the coming bust will invoke civil unrest, social chaos and war.

(I’m in Singapore until the 9th, so erratic online activity until then.)

Walter Russell Mead picks up on a highly-significant political pattern:

What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.

Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.

WRM on the politics of amnesty by executive order:

For many liberal Democrats (as well as for some of their Republican opponents) two key beliefs about immigration shape their political strategies. The first is that Latinos are the new blacks: a permanent racial minority or subgroup in the American political system that will always feel separate from the country’s white population and, like African-Americans, will vote Democratic. On this assumption, the Democratic approach to Hispanic Americans should be clear: the more the merrier. That is a particularly popular view on the more leftish side of the Democratic coalition, where there’s a deep and instinctive fear and loathing of Jacksonian America (those “bitterly clinging” to their guns, their Bibles, and their individualistic economic and social beliefs). The great shining hope of the American left is that a demographic transition through immigration and birthrates will finally make all those tiresome white people largely irrelevant in a new, post-American America that will forget all that exceptionalism nonsense and ditch “Anglo-Saxon” cultural and economic ideas ranging from evangelical religion to libertarian social theory.

If conventional wisdom on the subject is this stark — and Mead is a good weather-vane for that — then Obama might as well put on the Kill Whitey T-shirt, because he’s clearly not fooling anybody. (It’s also worth explicitly noting, for the anti-market trads out there, that your besieged cultural norms and laissez-faire capitalism are on the same radical leftist death list, whether you appreciate the company or not.)

The War Nerd instigates a mutiny against Justine Tunney. That has to be worth a few minutes of your time, surely?

Chaos is raised to some indescribable higher power.

The trailer for the ISIS jihad-porn blockbuster Flames of War is quite something.

The Rubin Report-embedded version. “They’re clearly trying to bring us into a fight …”

ADDED: A little background from the International Business Times:

The new video, titled “Flames of War,” was released late Tuesday by the Al Hayat Media Center, which, according to the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute, was established in May as the media arm of the Islamic State. […] The 52-second-long video, which, at first glance, seems more like a video-game trailer, is replete with slow-motion effects and high-definition images. It shows exploding tanks and Islamic State militants apparently preparing to execute captives before the words “Flames of War” flash on the screen, followed by the words, “Fighting has just begun.” And, before the screen fades to black, the video ends with the words, “Coming Soon.”

Richard Fernandez seizes upon Roger Cohen’s recent NYT lamentation (here) to explore the predicament of America’s narcissistic, ruin-mongering elite, as the world they broke collapses about them:

What’s the alternative to stupidity now? Now that they’ve gone so far it’s almost a shame not to see it through to the end. And therein rests the last remaining chance of the liberal establishment, imploring such divinities as they still believe in — luck maybe — that their hero can create a chaos so complete it will embroil the entire Muslim world, Russia and China in a vast conflagration before it consumes them.

Note: Cohen’s inclusion of a citation from Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings (in the NYT!) is a sure sign of the End Times. It makes me wonder whether the liberal media elite will be desperately chanting Moldbug poetry when Zack finally closes in.

This is apparently a real thing (reformated for additional piety):

Our Chavez, who art in heaven, the Earth, the sea,
And we, delegates, hallowed be thy name.
Thy legacy come, so we can spread it to people here and elsewhere.
Give us this day light to guide us.
Lead us not into the temptation of capitalism;
Deliver us from the evil of oligarchy,
Like the crime of contraband,
Because ours is the homeland, peace, and life.
Forever and ever. Amen.
Viva Chavez!

We owe this contribution to the world’s storehouse of religious ecstasy to María Uribe, representative of Venezuela’s Socialist Party.

The mainstream is running out:

In the broadcast media in particular, there is an implied assumption that “the Scotland moment” is something confined to that country. But the reality across the UK suggests something much deeper and wider, and a simple enough fact: that what is happening north of the border is the most spectacular manifestation of a phenomenon taking root all over – indeed, if the splintering of politics and the rise of new forces on both left and right across Europe are anything to go by, a set of developments not defined by specific national circumstances, but profound social and economic ruptures.

Here, Labour and the Conservatives have recently been scoring their lowest combined share of support. Organisationally, they are both hollowed out and increasingly staffed by wet-behind-the-ears apparatchiks who only compound the parties’ distance from the public. Whether justifiably or not, millions of British people have passed through holding politicians in contempt and now treat them with cold indifference. Let’s face it: the only thing keeping all this alive is the electoral system.

(The whole opinion piece is well worth reading, on panic-socialist Colin Crouch’s ‘post-democracy’ observations in particular. You know things are really beginning to get desperate when the Left begins to have interesting thoughts.)