Trends

Trends are like rabbit trails.  They do not necessarily go where we might think at first glance.  "If trends continue" is roughly equivalent to "a priest, a rabbi, and a duck walk into a bar", still, they do give us something to consider.  Today Sultan Knish is talking about "Why Terrorists Kill":

Israel has been hailed as the Start-Up Nation for its dot com companies, but more Middle Eastern youth are joining a different kind of start-up. Get some guns, get some friends, head to Syria and take over a village, town or a few city blocks. Control the bakeries, the oil production and the protection money from Christian businessmen.

Don't bother finishing college. You won't need it where you're going. Your business plan is simple and the profits are impressive. Call your men [a] brigade.

Certainly this is true, but it also sounds like something else.  What is the difference between a gang of Muslim terrorists taking over a town in Syria and a gang of Black Muslim terrorists taking over neighborhoods in an American city?  I feel an eerie parallel between the claims of Mideast Muslim groups and the claims of Al Sharpton.  Are the trends in American urban violence heading us toward the Palestinian-ization of the United States?

Probably not.  Still, I read the other day that the U.S. is the third most violent nation on the planet -- I suppose in terms of murders.  However, if we remove three urban centers -- Chicago, Detroit, and (I think) New York City, instead of being third from the top, we move to fourth -- FROM THE BOTTOM.  That would seem to indicate there is already a very distinct cultural divergence.

Back in the early '80s, I used to joke with a co-worker about how to create the perfect state.  We decided that we would take Missouri, give St. Louis City to Illnois, Jackson County to Kansas, everything north of the Missouri River to Iowa, then join the southern half of Missouri to northern Arkansas.  Times have changed a lot, but the notion that there is a serious split between the outlooks of urban and rural populations is still valid.  It is not just a matter of age demographics.  Young people in more rural areas have a different worldview than the same age groups in large cities.

It doesn't take much looking around the internet to realize that there is a counter movement to the urban gangs.  Patriot groups and militias are also organizing and talking about tribes, taking over and controlling areas.  Some of these militia folks are offering classes not just in self-defense but in military tactics and such.  How much of it is in the realm of fantasy and fraud I don't know. 

There is always danger in tribalism and revolution.  I understand and share the frustration of a federal government no longer restrained by the rule of law insisting, nevertheless, that we "subjects" are bound by it.  It would not take much of a change in the thinking of most Americans for Washington, D.C. to become completely irrelevant.  Their relevance now is mostly an illusion, albeit one that a lot of us find comforting and unwilling surrender.  Yet.  The federal government rules these days less by the consent of the governed than by the threat of violence, by entrenched bureaucratic regulation, by police state thuggery, and by propaganda. 

The federal constituency are those parasites who live off of government, from inner city welfare queens to the millions of bureaucrats feeding at the public trough.  As long as leviathan nurses them, it can count on their votes, and upon containing the violence -- if trends continue.  But the punch line is coming.