The Message of Glacier Bay

ON BOARD GOLDEN PRINCESS SAILING SOUTH  OK, I spoke too soon. The nice well-spoken park ranger that gave us a commentary on Glacier Bay National Park hardly got into politics at all.

So I was able to enjoy Glacier Bay National Park without having to block my ears to avoid hearing global warming propaganda from a well-paid, well-pensioned government shill.

And Glacier Bay doesn't really help the warmist line that well.  It's a 65 mile long fjord fed by glaciers. According to the Park Service map the entire 65 mile fjord was filled with ice 250 years ago, when European navigators first saw it.  A century later in the middle of the 19th century the ice had retreated 30 miles.  Then, at the furthest retreat in 1925, the ice had retreated another 35 miles, turning the whole of Glacier Bay into a fjord.  By 1966 the ice had advanced a mile, and today's glacier termination is still advanced beyond the 1966 line.  Yay global cooling!

So the National Parks map of the Glacier Bay National Park doesn't really help the warmist line that it's the end of the world unless we act now. Because, according to the record of ice advance and retreat over the last two centuries, there really was a Little Ice Age, whatever Michael E. Mann and his Hockey Stick have to say.  When you cruise down the fjord the main thing you think about is the barrenness of the terrain up towards the northern end and what the whole thing would be like if it were filled up with ice again.  You don't think a twink about global warming; you just think about mountains of ice.

You think, in other words, about ice ages, and how the current climate of the world is ice ages followed by interglacials: 100,000 years of glaciers followed by 10,000 years of warming.

Don't forget, the current interglacial is already 12,000 years old, really long in the tooth for an interglacial.

The temptation for climate deniers like me is to hope for a little cooling, just a little to teach the liberals a lesson.  But then I think, No.  A little cooling would probably not be very good for humans, especially humans in less-developed countries.

Warm climate, the warmth of the interglacial, is what allowed the great human flourishing of the last few millennia. It's all very well to yell and scream and say that a couple degrees warming would mean the end of life as we know it.  But the truth is, we don't know. A couple of degrees would obviously change things; it would make some places wetter, some dryer.  It would make some places hotter, and make other places habitable.  But the truth is, we don't know; more research is needed, and even then we couldn't be sure.

Based on current results, here is what we know. We know that government-sponsored scientists built a bunch of computer climate models based on the notion that more CO2 equals hotter climate because CO2 is a greenhouse gas and they tuned their models to recent temperature trends.  Then they predicted future temperatures and their predictions have turned out wrong. We don't know why the predictions turned out wrong.  It could be that the modelers didn't add in the ocean temperature cycles, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecal Oscillation.  Or it could be that the modelers didn't properly model the Tropical Convergence Zone with its daily convection cycle.  Or it could be something completely different.

But it really focuses the mind to cruise down the middle of Glacier Bay, with a thousand feet of milky water beneath you and the glacier-scarred mountains on either side of you.  It makes you think that a degree or two in temperature fluctuation may not be The Big One.  It makes you think that what we should be doing is thinking about adaptation.  How would be adapt if the climate heats up suddenly?  How would be adapt if the climate cooled down suddenly?

Oh yeah. Adaptation. Survival. Natural Selection. Evolution. Darwin. Science, and all that.

Generally speaking, governments are the worst things in the world to predict the future.  The only thing that governments are good at is gathering everyone together in response to an emergency.  But then people do that instinctively because humans are social animals.

The Old Age is Dying; A New Age is Coming

ON BOARD GOLDEN PRINCESS IN GLACIER BAY I know I should be all excited about sailing into Glacier Bay National Park and go and listen to an over-paid over-pensioned park ranger talk about the wonders of global warming.  Because glacial retreat! But I'm not.

Instead I want to talk about nailing theses up on the church door.  That's because I'm reading a book about the Reformation and Martin Luther and the Huguenots in France in the 16th century. It's called The Beginnings of Ideology: Consciousness and society in the French Reformation by Donald R. Kelley.  The Big Idea is that Martin Luther was the First Ideologue, the first modern that mounted a revolutionary critique of the ruling class and swept the whole of society into an ideological fervor.

Luther achieved this because of the "German art of printing." It became possible for the first time to print and distribute millions of pieces of writing, as pamphlets, placards, propaganda: to touch a nerve in the body politic with the written word.  Since then, of course, we have seen nothing but an unending avalanche of ideological propaganda. Only now it's worse. Because the internet.

Luther's genius, like the genius of the Puritans, the preachers of the Great Awakening, the Marxians, the Fascists, the Environmentalists, was to propagate at the right moment when the world was ready for his message.  An old world was overripe, decayed, corrupt, and a new world was ready to be born.

That is why I come today to write about the old world, the world of the overripe liberal ruling class that we know because of its cruelty, its corruption, its injustice, its waste, its delusion, the old world that is dying.  And I write to prophesy a new world, the new world a-borning.

A ruling class that deserves to rule must do five things.

A ruling class must defend society from the predators and celebrate those who defend us from predation.  But liberals too often excuse the predators and denigrate the defenders.  That is the meaning of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, Rotherham.  Liberals leaped to blame the police, the neighborhood watch volunteer, and in Britain the underage lower-class white girls.  Meanwhile they defended thug teenagers and their "rap" subculture and excused the "Asian males" that preyed upon young girls that didn't have their married biological fathers to defend them.  Then there is national defense.  Liberals wavered in the fight against communism, have been absent in the fight against Islamism.  Meanwhile they make war in the US on bankers, businessmen, and Christian enthusiasts. Because elections.

A ruling class must celebrate the workers and stigmatize the freeloaders.  By that, I mean that our rulers should celebrate the people that go to work every day without expecting or demanding economic justice or special favors through economic legislation.  And the rulers should sneer at the freeloaders that ask "what's in it for me" before they start the day's work.  Needless to say, liberals have spent the last century excusing freeloaders as victims and plundering workers of their wages so they can hand out loot to their supporters.

A ruling class must be merciful to the unfortunate and those who are heavy laden.  And it must quietly assist those who minister to the wretched of the earth.  But liberals have turned this work of charity into a burlesque, turning the relief of the poor into a racket for its supporters, and stripping many of the unfortunate of their dignity, or even basic protection, as in the violence-torn inner cities of the US and the preyed-upon underage "tarts" of Rotherham.  And those that minister to the unfortunate find that they must bend to the political agenda of their liberal masters or find that the government makes their work difficult or impossible.

A ruling class must defend virtue and the mainstream of life and sneer at vice and its suffocations.  But liberals have attacked virtue with the cult of the anti-hero, and they celebrate all kinds of marginal culture: I mean everything from the anti-social "rap" culture to the foolish enthusiasms of educated youth ranging from the cult of creativity to pot to the follies of LGBTQ.

A ruling class must be just, ruling with a light hand, moderating its own enthusiasms and tolerating the enthusiasms of others.  Liberals, we know, do just the opposite; they encourage enthusiasms in their activist believers to the utmost and actively persecute the enthusiasts of all other sects. And woe to those that fail to bow to the liberal household gods.

A ruling class must limit its power.  Power corrupts, and all systems -- especially government systems -- amount to domination.  We humans are social animals, and that means cooperating wherever possible as equals in trusting and intersubjective discourse.  We know that liberals utterly fail in this, as they succumb endlessly to the temptations of power and reduce all societal activity to the dominatory hell of bureaucratic system.

It's time to rise up and throw off the unjust rule of the venal liberal dynasty.  Because the old age is dying, corrupted by its power and its narcissistic self-worship, and a new age is dawning.  The old age of power and privilege, of dishonesty and dishonor, is shriveling before our eyes just like the ever-diminishing Obama presidency, completely demoralized and vitiated by its internal contradictions and its sophomoric delusions.

The new age is dawning, an age of fraternal equality, of freedom, of cooperation, of tolerance.  It will be dedicated above all to the proposition that power, particularly political power, is a dead end of sterility and inhumanity.  The point, the whole point of the human project is the space between the individual and the organs of government and political power.  It is the realm of civil society, where people meet and cooperate and work and dialog and trust as equals.  The catchphrase of the new age is give and exchange, utterly opposed to the liberal era's addiction to force and change.

The great problem of the new age, as in any age, will be dealing with the arc of folly, already perceived by Martin Luther, that young men are obsessed with pretty girls, that 30-year-olds are obsessed by money, 40-year-olds by honor and glory, and 60-year-olds by their own piety. Wisdom is the path of fidelity, of giving before taking, of humility before pride, trusting in knowledge of our hypocrisy and impiety to dissolve our conceit in our imagined piety.

This we believe: in defending against predators, in marginalizing freeloaders, in helping the helpless, in respecting virtue, in limiting power. These we honor: the defenders against the predators, the people that work and strive, the folk that give to the poor, the virtuous that do good when no one is looking, the exemplars that resist the siren call of power.

The time is now.

National Security on the Cruising Frontier

ON BOARD GOLDEN PRINCESS, SKAGWAY, AK  Hey, John Derbyshire!  You have a problem with five cruise ships docked at the bustling metropolis of Juneau, Alaska, population 33,000?  How about four ships docked at Skagway, Alaska, population 800?

Yesterday in Juneau there were two Holland America, one Princess, and one Celebrity boats; today in Skagway we have one Holland America, two Princess, and one Celebrity.

Imagine!  Skagway has docking facilities for four or more thoroughly modern cruise ships.  Think of a little place like that having thoroughly modern docks like that! Somehow, I reckon that I paid for those docks, courtesy of Uncle Sam and his cute little tax collector at the IRS, Lois Lerner.

Anyway, we had a great time at Juneau yesterday.  In the morning we went out to watch the whales in a nice little tender sporting three 250 HP outboards.  Yep, with that kind of power you can get the tourists out to the feeding humpback whales in half an hour at a healthy 30 knots.  That's fast enough to do four 2-hour whalewatching trips per day.  The guide for our trip, Brian, was a photojournalist that gave us a quick digital camera lesson while we were in the bus traveling from the cruise terminal to the whale-watching marina.  You'd be surprised how few of his students had ever shifted their digital cameras out of Auto.

And were those whales hard at it. Feeding on herring, I mean.  And I'm glad to say that they were ably assisted by a bunch of Stella's sea lions.

You may know that our national government's whale enforcement officers have decreed that our nation's whale-watching boats should not approach closer than 100 yards to a whale: a sensible and thoughtful environmental regulation.  You can imagine our consternation when a whale or two carelessly approached our whale-boat well within the legally prescribed limit.  Oh no!  Would the local whale-watching enforcement SWAT team swoop down in a cigarette boat with a 0.5 in machine gun locked and loaded on the foredeck?  It was nip and tuck for a moment, but fortunately nothing happened.  I imagine that the whale-watching enforcement SWAT team was on a break during the fateful minutes when our boat was in violation of the national whale-watching enforcement regulations.  Or maybe the whale enforcement interagency security evaluation team had met that morning and decreed that we were only at WHALESEC0, which does not require the whale-watching SWAT teams to leave their ready room back in Juneau.

Still, it was good to get our cruise cards checked by a security officer sitting next to a MARSEC1 sign. He seemed in the last stages of personal disintegration.

When you get out of the big city you really get to appreciate the exquisite care that our national government takes to ensure our safety.  On the approach to Juneau we were escorted by two US Coastguard cutters, one on the port and one on the starboard, each with a helmeted gunner on the foredeck attending a 0.5 in machine gun.  And that was only for MARSEC1. While sailing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca we encountered a Trident missile submarine on its way to the open ocean. The ineragency nuclear threat evaluation team must have decreed NUCSEC2 that day because there were four US Coastguard cutters accompanying the submarine, one up ahead, one astern, and one on each side of the sub.  (I am assuming here that you can tell how many US Coastguard cutters are needed to escort vulnerable and/or valuable US assets by dividing the SEC number by two).  And you can be sure that there was a skilled Alaskan gunner on the foredeck of each cutter with his hands on the locked and loaded 0.5 in machine gun.  Just in case.

Yes. It's comforting to know that while we sleep peacefully each night in our teeming cities our national government has arranged this robustly planned and executed national security theater performance for our protection.

If only the regular foreign and national security policy establishment that deals with ordinary Islamist proto-states and eternal thug dictators were as robustly organized and executed.

At Sea aboard the Golden Princess

ON BOARD THE GOLDEN PRINCESS 8:00AM MONDAY Here we are sailing eastward through the Frederick Sound into Juneau, Alaska and the humpback whales are spouting.  There are a couple on the port bow, and wow, there are six, no ten whales, no twenty whales spouting on the starboard bow!  Most unusual, says the steward delivering breakfast to our stateroom down in the bowels of the ship on Deck 5. Hey, when the salmon are running we whales gotta get our brekkers before the little monsters escape up the rivers for sex, sex, sex.

Meanwhile up on Deck 15 they are crowded along the rail, with gigantic telephoto lenses ranged alongside smartphones, with everyone snapping away.  But nobody seems to be taking selfies with the whales.

Lady Marjorie and I are sailing on an Alaska cruise out of Seattle with a group doing Argentine tango.  We do a "practica" in the afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00 at the Wheelhouse bar and dance in the Vista Lounge from 10:00 to midnight.  That's early, of course.  In Argentina they start their milongas at midnight, dance till 3:00 or 4:00 am and then go to work at 9:00am.

Yeah.  Now you know what's wrong with Argentina's economy.

Music?  No problem.  We just plug an iPod or a smartphone into the room's sound system.

It's the first cruise for Ordinary Seaman Lady Marjorie and Admiral Chris, so we'll be deciding whether we want to do it again.  Admiral Chris is a veteran sailor, with years of sailing boats from 14 ft sailing dinghies to 30 ft sloops. I've been doing a bit of guerrilla navigation with my smartphone, and I can report that the captain navigated safely from Seattle out through the Strait of San de Fuca and up the west side of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands.  Really, these young chaps don't need to know nuttin'.  Just flick out the smarthphone and start up your GoPilot GPS.

The Golden Princess is rather like a vertical Mall.  There is lots of shopping, an atrium, shops, and bars and restaurants.  100,000 tons of it with 2,500 passengers and 1,000 crew. On Deck 14 are the swimming pools, the all-you-can-eat buffets and the outdoor Movies Under the Stars® screen where football fans can watch the NFL on Sunday while reclining on beach loungers all muffled up in parkas and blankets.

After a couple of days we've decided that we really want to eat in the dining rooms.  The food is "free" either way, but the buffets up on Deck 14 are something of a crowd scene, rather like the free breakfast "bunfight" at a US motel.  It's a little undignified for educated class folks like you and me.

We are having a great time at the Argentine tango.  Lady Marjorie and I met at a tango ball, and we did a lot of tango dancing in our early years together.  But now we have to get it together quickly to deserve to dance with the serious dancers -- like Irene the Russian who dances tango five nights a week and displays the most exquisite ornamentation with her flashing feet.  But there are also the rank beginners, like the young couple from Phoenix that just happened to be in the Wheelhouse bar when we started our practica on Sunday.  We soon had them in the hands of experts, showing them a move or two and getting them eager to Google "Phoenix Argentine tango" when they got home.

The thing about dancing is that, for men, it's all about cherchez la femme. But women of every age absolutely love dancing.  Really, guys.  You should do it.  Not for the children, but for the ladies.

The Failure of GOP Messaging

The First Amendment is supposed to provide for freedom of speech.  And so it does, in a way.  But the civil war of politics is still driven by the contest to control what you are allowed to say.

What you are allowed so say is usually as Democratic talking point.

Here's newly minted Democrat Charlie Crist running down this year's Democratic talking points.  He mentions

equal pay for women, raising the minimum wage, expanding health care to everyone who needs it, and making sure that everyone has a fair shot at success.

What you can't say in America is that the minimum wage is a disaster for young inexperienced workers, and we passed equal pay for women 50 years ago, and "expanding health care for everyone who needs it leads to the disaster of Obamacare.  Why?  Because all those talking points "poll well," and Democrats are going to push them as long as they can get votes with them.

Here's the first Senate debate in North Carolina and the moderator Norah O'Donnell asked the Republican Thom Tillis if "$7.25 was enough" on the minimum wage  Tillis waffled, and you can see why.  Republicans know that the minimum wage is a stupid idea and it creates unemployment.  But there's this:

The minimum wage is one of the few issues, if any, that Democrats can possibly make inroads with white, working class men, who support minimum wage increases.

As if the government can mandate prosperity by legislation.

Actually, the whole debate was about government free stuff from Medicare to education and attacks on Republican attempts to staunch the bleeding.

Or there is this, from a Democratic strategy memo:

[F]or Democrats to make any gains in November, they must increase their advantage among women. Democratic candidates can do this by emphasizing a broad range of women’s issues—including the economy, reproductive health care, and Social Security and Medicare—and weaving these issues into existing advantages among women on such key dimensions as “standing up for the middle class” (+14 Dem overall, +20 Dem among women) and “representing middle class values” (+12 Dem overall, +15 Dem among women).

I suppose you could say that nothing says failure of GOP messaging than the fact that Democrats, the over-under party of the rich and the poor, are considered as "standing up for the middle class" and "representing middle class values."

It's ironic.  The party of big government, whose policies are aimed like an arrow at middle-class autonomy and freedom, is considered by voters to be the party of the middle class.

Cudgeling My Brain on Freeloading

Back when Alger Hiss was trying to pitch himself out of a jam on the Pumpkin Papers and the naughty accusation from rumpled Time writer Whittaker Chambers that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union, he knew that he had a problem. And so he told Congressman Richard Nixon that he had been cudgeling his brain on the way down to testify about whether he knew Whittaker Chambers.  So long ago, back before the War, but Chambers had testified to numerous details about Alger Hiss's domestic arrangements.  How would Chambers know all that if, as Hiss said, he didn't know Chambers?

Well I'm cudgeling my brain right now about the question of freeloading.  I want to show that our liberal ruling class -- and the educated ruling class elsewhere around the world -- has ruined the nation with its reactionary return to feudal politics.  By that I mean that the handouts of free stuff to the voters of the Democratic Party is the same as the handouts that any feudal regime, or any tribal lord, distributes among its supporters.  Just for supporting the ruling class, these supporters get loot. Like the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin.

And that's a problem.  It's a problem economically, because every hand that doesn't contribute to the national commonwealth has a mouth that must be fed by the labor of other people.  And it's a problem morally, because as Nicholas Wade writes, "nothing is more corrosive to a group's cohesion than free riders."

The point is that where you have government you have freeloading.  That's because every government that ever lived depends on its supporters, and its supporters want loot.

There is another way.  It is to anathematize government handouts (from green crony capitalists to middle-class entitlement beneficiaries to welfare recipients) and to base society on the principle that everyone goes out to find work and provide services for other people.

We know what this system is: it is called capitalism.  People go out from their families into the exchange economy and figure out how they can be useful to their fellow humans.  They accept the verdict of the market.  If the market doesn't reward them as much as they would like, they understand that they need to up their skills or improve their service in order to give more and receive more.  No fair complaining to government that life is unfair.

Eric Hoffer ingeniously wrote a confirmation of this notion.  He observed that there are two ways to get the work done.  Either the government can issue orders from the top down.  Or the worker figures it out on his own.

You can see what is implied here.  If the government is making all the decisions then we will never escape the vice of oppression vs. freeloading.  The government will always be making decisions with one eye on its supporters, so it will always deliver a result that is unjust, because it will always favor its supporters.

But the exchange economy is different.  Here there are no little darlings of the ruling class getting their special handouts.  There is just talent and skill and hard work and, above all, being in the right place at the right time.  And it is up to each individual to figure out how to become useful to his fellow humans.

The great question then is why, starting in the middle of the 19th century, there arose a moral and political movement that denied the basic equity of the exchange economy that was already starting to deliver cheap textiles, cheap food, and cheap transportation to the masses.  Why did these moral and political revolutionaries insist that this new industrial exchange economy was nothing but exploitation and oppression?  And why did they think that government, the vehicle of force, was the answer?

The answer is, I suppose, that it doesn't matter.  The Marxians and the Fabians and the Progressives all decided that government -- run by people like them -- was the answer. Period.

Our job is to found a new movement based on the moral argument that all government is unjust, but smaller government in less unjust than bigger government.  And we have such an argument to hand, from lefty Jürgen Habermas.  He argues that all systems, government and business, are inherently dominatory.  If we want to get out from the shadow of domination then we have to treat each other with respect and work out our differences with rational discourse that tries to find a consensus rather than strategically bending other people to our purpose.

But humans will always been tempted to reach for the power of government and cudgel the insolent folk that dare to oppose them.

Hello Liberals: Let's Talk

Here's a telling August 29 tweet from @rogerlsimon:

Not a single #liberal friend of mine wants to discuss politics now. They're humiliated by Obama.

That's a pity, because I'd say that now is a time when conservatives could have a really fruitful talk with their liberal friends.  It wouldn't be the kind of talk that liberals wanted to have back in 2006 when it was all "Bush Lied, People Died."

No, the kind of talk I'd like would be strictly governed by the rules of lefty Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics, a truly intersubjective communication and sincere exchange of truth values between respectful equals.

I feel it's a good time for a talk because exactly because Roger L Simon's liberal friends have all gone silent.  They know that something is wrong.  When people have gone silent like that maybe it is time to have a quiet chat.

As in.

Maybe the feminist concern about a "rape culture" on campus is not quite as important as the race-based grooming and rape of young underclass white girls in the British city of Rotherham.  Maybe there's a problem when normally timid bureaucrats are intimidated with the "diversity" agenda that the left has been pushing for the last generation.

Maybe George W. Bush wasn't a complete idiot about the Middle East.  After all, "regime change" in Iraq was a policy in the Clinton administration. And the Obama policy of retreat seems to have encouraged all kinds of bad actors to emerge from under rocks.  Maybe we should stop the finger-pointing and do a little cooperating.

Maybe liberal activist groups need to dial back a bit on the "killer stats" they use to push their agendas.  There's a piece by Christian Hoff Summers about "Five Feminist Myths That Will Not Die." They range from women's property ownership, sexual slavery, domestic violence, campus assault, and 77 cents on the dollar for women's jobs.

Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to shove Obamacare at us on a bare partisan vote.

Maybe the climate is not quite such a problem as we thought.

Maybe it's not such a good idea to "out" opponents to gay marriage so that they lose their jobs because of their beliefs. Wasn't that what McCarthyism was all about?

Maybe, liberals, it's not such a good idea to turn everything into a political issue.  Look, I get how liberals believe that government is the name for things we do together.  But suppose you are a libertarian or a conservative and you believe that government is force, the apparatus of coercion. If liberals believe that government is a benevolent expert with a rational plan to end oppression and conservatives and libertarians believe that government is force and liberals are legislating liberal morality with their programs, how do we come to a consensus?  We conservatives recall that back in the mid 2000s liberals did not have such a benign view of government.  They saw the Bush administration as a gun to the head of liberalism.  How do we reconcile such radically different views of government?

You see, I think that the idea that government is the name for things we do together, or the idea that "with taxes I buy civilization" is a typical ruling-class delusion. No doubt every ruling class down the ages has a warm feeling about its rule, and thinks of itself as a pipe-smoking father benevolently presiding over a fractious family.  The reality is that, again and again, the people who are not in the ruling class get really angry about the things that the government does to them.  They get the feeling that government is not something we do together; they become convinced that government is something that is done to them.  It doesn't matter if the ruling class decides that the rebellious youth of the day doesn't have a grievance. There's a good argument to be made that the American colonists didn't really have a case against King George.  But they thought they did, and they brought it to a clash of arms, which they ended up winning by the skin of their teeth against the most powerful empire in the world at the time.

That's where I think we are today, liberals.  We conservatives and libertarians don't experience the Obama administration as an administration of hope and change.  We experience it as a corrupt and lawless Chicago-style political machine.  We see President Obama taking all kinds of illegal shortcuts and administrative actions because he can, because the establishment media won't call him on it as they would if he were a Republican.

Maybe all this is just so much noise, and the liberal way will win out and in another ten years we will go to single payer on health care, and we'll have $20 an hour minimum wage and a carbon tax and a successful program to get women into STEM jobs.

But maybe we are at an inflection point.  That, presumably, is what the silence of Roger L Simon's liberal friend means.  His liberal friends are afraid.  They feel the shaking of the foundations and they fear for the future of liberalism.

Maybe Barack Obama will make "progressivism" into just as much of a pejorative as George McGovern made of the word "liberal."  Maybe he will help usher in a generation of Republican governance to replace an utterly discredited Democratic Party.