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Ah, flowery June, when brooks send up a cheerful tune. The Muckdogs won their home opener last night before the largest Opening Day crowd in years. The sun has chased away, or at least agreed to coexist with, the clouds. And herewith a piece by yours truly from the Daily Caller about a certain movie that begins its long march across the nation’s Cineplex complex next Friday.

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The Washington Times has a piece by Ryan James Girdusky suggesting that traditionalist conservatives have something to learn from hipsters. And vice versa.

Traditionalist conservatives should emulate hipsters. In many respects, they do certain things better. Hipsters have created a counter-culture vastly opposed to corporatism in exchange for localism, a mixture of 1970s punk rock style and a hippie philosophy with a touch of Robert Nisbet’s communitarianism.

Hate it or love it, Hipsters are more effective and widespread in their rejection of corporate capitalism than anything the right has produced. Yet, their apostasy is doomed to an expiration date because their cultural unity is not based on permanent things or first principles.

More:

In Robert Putnam’s landmark book Bowling Alone, the author makes the case that traditional religion promotes social capital, which is responsible for keeping together families, friendships, and communities. Putnam writes, “Religiosity rivals education as a powerful correlate of most forms of civic engagement.”  Privatized morality does not instill the social capital that traditional religion embodies.

So for all the work of creating the hipster subculture, it will not last, because it is not rooted, as was true for the bohemian subculture of the 1960s. Without faith, there’s no foundation. Without a foundation, a community cannot survive.

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The New Republic has a cover story on Rand Paul. The author takes it upon herself to 1) show how quickly Paul is becoming a major player with real White House prospects, and 2) warn her readers about how dangerous his constitutionalism and “isolationist” foreign policy is. Despite the ominous overtones, it’s an interesting read. Questions: Would Paul make a good President? Could he win the Republican nomination? The general election?

I apologize in advance for talking about this when the election is years away…

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Is there such thing as a private email? Are there limits to what the government can access? From The Washington Post:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

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Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

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Community isn’t easy:

In college I took political theory classes that routinely covered the subject of community. The classes even emphasized our era’s tragic shortage of intergenerational concern. It makes for great conversation in a classroom hundreds or thousands of miles from your elderly neighbors and relatives. You can talk about the defense of widows with ardor, your high heels crossed and your pencil poised over a notebook. But you don’t realize what community costs.

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TAC has a review by Sale that champions nullification and (perhaps) secession.

Nullification acts have been introduced in state legislatures all across the country, particularly in the last few months: no fewer than 10 states took up proposals in the last week of February. According to one estimate at the Tenth Amendment Center, which tracks such things, there are more than 70 proposed bills to nullify federal laws and practices now in state legislatures, sometimes consciously labeled nullification, sometimes not.

For example, 12 states have introduced proposals for state marijuana laws in defiance of federal regulations under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, joining the 15 states that have already passed various decriminalization provisions, including most recently Washington and Colorado. (Interestingly, they are not confined to blue or red states but stretch across the land: Alaska, Washington, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Michigan, Arkansas, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine.)

State laws against National Defense Authorization Act provisions that allow the president to detain indefinitely anyone, citizen or not, whom he suspects of terrorist ties, have been introduced in almost half the states, again from coast to coast, and passed in Arizona, Utah, Maine, and recently Virginia—the state that first used nullification, in 1798, against the Alien and Sedition Acts.

These state-centered attempts to limit the federal government represent one hopeful sign in a long struggle. Interestingly, there are folks on both the left and the right supporting these measures. Can they succeed? Will they?

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In this brief and fairly interesting TED talk Alex Laskey suggests that social, not material, science can help us save energy–and therefore money (and maybe, by extension, the planet, though there I have my doubts).

What he says seems to me like another example of what Rene Girard called mediated desire.  One hopes that violence isn’t its consequence, though there, again, I have my doubts.

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