So far, they’ve managed to not replace all the restaurants with Taco Bells…but how much longer will that continue?  At least toilet paper will never run out:

A Lifestyle So Good, It’s Mandatory

California has effectively decriminalized marijuana (possession of less than an ounce is a civil matter roughly equivalent to a speeding ticket — a rarely written speeding ticket), and the state has a medical (ahem) marijuana program that is, for the moment, largely unregulated. At the same time, the state is launching a progressive jihad against “vaping,” the use of so-called e-cigarettes that deliver nicotine in the form of vapor. The state public-health department says that this is justified by the presence of certain carcinogens — benzene, formaldehyde, nickel, and lead—in e-cigarette vapor. But by California’s own account, all of those chemicals are present in marijuana smoke, too, along with 29 other carcinogens.

If that seems inconsistent to you, you are thinking about it the wrong way: For all of its scientific pretensions and empirical posturing, progressivism is not about evidence, and at its heart it is not even about public policy at all: It is about aesthetics.

The goal of progressivism is not to make the world rational; it’s to make the world Portland.

[…]

Progressivism, especially in its well-heeled coastal expressions, is not a philosophy — it’s a lifestyle. Specifically, it is a brand of conspicuous consumption, which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: no gluten, no bleached flour, no Budweiser, no Walmart, no SUVs, no Toby Keith, etc. The people who set the cultural tone in places such as Berkeley, Seattle, or Austin would no more be caught vaping than they would slurping down a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s — and they conclude without thinking that, therefore, neither should anybody else. The wise man understands that there’s a reason that Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors; the lifestyle progressive in Park Slope shudders in horror at the refined sugar in all of them, and seeks to have them restricted.

“Remember, whenever the word ‘justice’ is modified by an adjective, it’s not justice — it’s payback.”

via The PJ Tatler » They Never Stop, They Never Sleep, They Never Quit.

Some much-needed pushback:

The Ferguson Riots Are Nothing Like The Original Tea Party Protests

If you were reading left-leaning commentators over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, you probably saw a rather strange argument: that looting, arson and rioting in Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown was defensible on the grounds that it was equivalent to the Boston Tea Party or the Stamp Act Riots. The problem with this parallel is that it is at best willfully ignorant of history, and at worst a deliberate call for an escalation to violent revolution.

Given the emotions running high over the Brown case, protests were inevitable, and it was also inevitable that some protesters would get out of hand, as happens with angry crowds. But what happened went well beyond protests, to looting and arson of a Little Caesars pizza joint, a small cake bakery, an antique store, a beauty shop, and other businesses, some of them small concerns owned by local [black] entrepreneurs.

Among the various efforts made by people on the Left to justify or defend this, we had a Time Magazine column, celebrities and other Twitter users and even a teachers’ guide pushing the parallel between the Ferguson rioters and colonial protests against taxation without representation.

There are four major problems with justifying the violence in Ferguson by reference to the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act Riots, either in moral terms or in terms of the effectiveness of this sort of protest.

Click through for the details.