Not that there's anything wrong with that.

More like one of those remote comets that come into conservative view once every aeon.

In the Conservative sphere, I agree: on the other hand, "high minded and incomprehensible" would be a reasonably accurate description of, say, Tom Freidman.

I assume they use the term "incoherent" in reference to this site's lack of a single view of "conservatism" (i.e., religious-social cons, libertarians, neo-cons, and Tea Party types are all represented here).

Finally, a Pope who can relate to today's youth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXNMs8D-Ow

Francis cleans up nicely for his Vatican appearance. But I bet that World of Warcraft designer is in big trouble.

I quit reading too soon. You're right: its not just a two-fer --or three-fer, counting the obesity costs-- but a four-fer, helping to further the ethanol/carbon scam. (Wonder how much higher the CO2 generated by one lb of cane/beet sugar production is than  the equivalent of corn syrup--I bet it's significant.)

As featured on the front page of today's WSJ: one USDA program has subsidized (guaranteed) loans to sugar producers ($862 million), secured by their production. Now that the loan program has succeeded in its goal of increasing supply of sugar, the USDA is shocked to discover that that inter alia has lead to lower sugar commodity prices, making default on the loans (and inability to realize on the security therefor) more likely. Solution: USDA will buy 400,000 lbs of sugar (to store? destroy?), in the hopes of driving up the price of sugar. One wasteful USDA program literally drives more wasteful USDA spending.

And, of course, all this in the name of subsidizing increased sugar production in a country facing an obseity epidemic driving up the costs of all medical entitlements for the state and federal  governments.

“We’ve got to appeal to younger voters, the West Coast, people who view Republicans as in league with crony capitalists and the wealthy, and those who are suspicious of endless foreign interventions,” Rand Paul says. “Otherwise, we are going to become a niche product for red states.”

In this brief statement, Rand Paul not only lays out an effective political message and strategy, but one based in principle. In particular, he identifies two areas that Romney (for whatever reason) was unable to run against Obama on: crony capitalism and endless foreign interventions.  This, to me, is a more promising path to how the Republican Party can compete in a Presidential election, than any cheap identity politics.

I suspect that Rand Paul is being targeted and isolated by the neo-conservatives like Kristol and Frum precisely because his filibuster was so successful.

Rand Paul represents a threat to the dominant foreign policy paradigm of the Republican Party, the progressive "make the world safe for democracy" interventionists who see the War on Terror as the next 40 year "long war." Anyone who questions that paradigm is to be labeled an isolationist, and marginalized in the way his father Ron Paul was. 

A filibuster that was "sound and fury, signifying nothing?" Why discuss it at all then? Methinks the neo-cons doth protest too much.

" Incorporated in this new idea of conservatism was an expansive view of America as a promoter and protector of liberty around the world and as such it recruited many intellectuals formerly of the left, the neo-conservatives, to its ranks."

This caught my eye. I suspect the important battle that will be fought over the next several election cycles is whether this (Wilsonian/Rooseveltian) progressive conception of the American foreign and military role in the world is still at the core of conservatism and/or the Republican Party. The  Cold War, in which America faced a monolithic Communist threat that bore many similarities to the Axis threat we had just defeated in WWII, marginalized the Jacksonian strain in both parties as "isolationist." 

However, the neo-conservative conceptualization of the "War on Terror" as another long Cold War, requiring 40 years of similar limited war/nation-building exercises in spreading democracy is about to get a huge reappraisal: Afghanistan is already looking like a Vietnam-scale failure. The marginalization of  Rand Paul is but a first shot. That battle will make the "Young Earth Creationist" debates seem like civil philosophic discussions.

I love hearing the legal phrase "arbitrary and capricious" applied to Mayor Bloomberg, that most sanctimonious of nannies. I can see him prancing down the beach on the Isle of Capri, sporting a pair of brightly colored capris, as he arbitrarily knocks large cups of soda from the hands of random passersby.

Like you, I am somewhat ambivalent on the general question. I can see Murray's (and I suppose, Szalay's) point that high IQ hipsters enjoy an unfair advantage in risk-assessment and self-control in a libertarian pleasure-seeking society, but I see plenty of individual examples of generational decline (drugs, yes, but mostly endless quests to "find myself") among the hipster class, too.

Calling on the sons and daughters of privilege to lead a cultural return to traditional religious or stoic values seems the thinnest of reeds for Murray to spin hope despite his bleak statistics.

I suppose Murray would argue that high enough IQ does confer at least some kind of control over immediate desires and urges, as well as ability to rationally predict consequences and analyze choices (e.g., present value of a particular BA degree vs. cost in loans). Cultural values can be thought of as conferring the advantage of the high IQ individual's analysis on the entire social order.

Troy argues that affluence generally undermines discipline. Sabrdance, like Szalay, is pointing out that hipsters enjoy the fruits of bourgeoise values without defending them.

Modern humans seem genetically designed for scarcity, and by the same token poorly adapted to sustained material comfort. It seems that the basic restlessness of our minds, a necessary survival trait in 300,000 years of hunter-gatherer existence, particularly at the margins of an erratically receding Ice Age, responds to prosperity by expanding our pleasurable wants to replace the physical needs.

A spiritual perspective can offer a life of monastic denial as an alternative to this cycle. Similarly, the calvinist religious view resisted this natural progression, valorizing the simple life for the man in the world (which was credited with the saving/investment bias creating modern capitalism). But with the general weakening of all spiritual traditions in the First World, and the valorizing of consumption, the kind of natural cultural decline first observed in ancient times seems to describe our fate.

That does seem to be a downside to economic success, something in human nature, that resets our expectations at perfection. You see it early: the 3 year old kid that gets everything he wanted and more for his birthday melts down in tears and rage at the slightest thing going wrong as the birthday party winds down.

The whole plaintiff's bar plays to that mythic standard of perfection, as do the nannystaters: "if it only saves one life...." You see it in the proliferation of the cult of victimization on campuses, the whole "microaggression" site obsession: people detecting ever more subtle levels of insult in every human interaction, scrambling to establish which racial/ethnic/gendered/disabled group is most entitled to have their exquisite sensibilities honored in the most casual of transactions.

I sometimes wonder if the whole society, just in the name of self preservation shouldn't take the whole Lenten thing back to basics: 40 days in the wilderness annually, just to remember what real life is.

The Baby Boomer bill is coming due on Medicare and Social Security every year since 2011. That will drive federal spending up close to 3.4% no matter if the rest of the federal budget is frozen or even reduced.

No proposals from conservative think tanks or politicians for dealing with the Social Security have contemplated changes that do not phase in, for people 55 or younger. Anything more radical than that, and you are simply handing Democrats the over 65 vote, with no possibility of ever getting even the long-term reforms.

As for Medicare, Paul Ryan does a brilliant thing in his budget; he assumes the same savings in growth rate that Obama has used, but assumes repeal of Obamacare (which diverts those savings to support that entitlement). This allows conservatives to educate the public about the shell game that ACA represents.

If you as a libertarian have a better budget plan, that deals with the reality of boomers retiring over the next 20 years and its impacts on growth of federal spending, get specific on what it is. We can judge its political reality.