Dems Governing Like Weasels

So here we are again.  Instead of going to Congress to get a resolution or a declaration of war on ISIS, President Obama is trying to weasel out of it by asserting that the Congressional resolution from the Bush era is all he needs.

What on earth does the president think he is doing? The point of going to Congress is not about some weaselly legal point.  It is that when the president goes to war he needs to establish some kind of consensus from the rest of the ruling class and from the American people that he needs to go to war.

The legal beagle stuff is beside the point.  The point is that when the leader of a nation takes it to war he needs the nation to be united, more or less, behind him.  He needs to persuade the nation that war is necessary.  He needs to get the opposition on board; he needs to establish a bipartisan consensus.

This is not rocket science.  This is common sense.

But the Obama administration has seemed to do everything under a blanket, or with cunning sleights of hand. This may seem awfully clever to the lawyers working out the legal ploys, but it misses the point.

If you are the leader of the country you must lead it. You must set forth what you want to do, win an election, and then do it. You must be on the phone the whole time wheedling and cajoling the great barons of the realm.

And that is exactly what Candidate and President Obama has not done.

First of all, Obama ran as a moderate, which he is not. Then he pushed through his economic stimulus program without Republican votes. Then he pushed through Obamacare without Republican votes.

It misses the point to say: Oh well, Republicans opposed everything the president proposed. Of course they did. That's why the president gets on the phone and buys the votes of the moderates in the middle. Like the ladies from Maine. Only he didn't.

Then he tried to put lefty extremists on the National Labor Relations Board, by nominating them to recess appointments when the US Senate wasn't in recess. Then his Environmental Protection Agency has been run as an extension of the greenie foundations. Then his IRS has harassed Tea Party groups. Then his Justice Department has been used as a catspaw in the liberal race theater operations.

My point is that this means that nothing the Obama administration has done is cast in stone. Because the president never got a bipartisan consensus on anything. Republicans can come in in 2017 and reverse everything, because the Obama administration never took the trouble to persuade and to make its agenda a national agenda.

Yesterday I read a horrified piece about the Democrats' "CATALIST" voter database. It was used in 2008 and 2012 to turn out the liberal base. J. Christian Adams wonders if Republicans will ever be able to win a presidential election again.

Maybe, maybe not.  Technology like CATALIST is all very well, but if you don't do the politics right, by leading and persuading, then you are going to find, in the end, that you have riled up the whole of the rest of America against you.

Rush Limbaugh has a catchphrase that liberals can't admit who they are, because if they did they could never win an election. But with the Obama administration the liberals are telling us who they are in a rather clear fashion.  They are all about gaming the system, using their insider status and contacts, using any means to achieve their ends.  And when backroom stuff doesn't work then they send out the SJWs, the social justice warriors, to bully and intimidate.

Well, I'm reading a book about the French Reformation, The Beginning of Ideology by Donald R. Kelley. It's all about ideological bullying in France in the 16th century.  And it ends up with massacres and a nasty civil war.

That is what liberals are ginning up. That's what they'd know they were doing. If they had any wisdom. Which they don't.

This isn't rocket science. It's time for President Obama to realize that the job of president is to lead and persuade. It is not to weasel.

Peter Thiel's Challenge

I just happened upon a 90 minute video interview of capitalist Peter Thiel -- as in PayPal, Facebook -- conducted by an obseqious Bill Kristol.

I can well understand Kristol's hesitating politeness.  Thiel is an impressive man, who obviously thinks about and knows his stuff. For instance, he writes in praise of monopoly against free competition: "Competition is for Losers." He means, of course, that you want to start a business where it will be difficult for people to copy you and catch up with you. As in PayPal and Facebook. You'll never make much money in a commodity business where a ton of steel is a ton of steel.

Mind you, Thiel talks in a veiled way.  He says that PayPal solved its problems with fraud with a combination of big data and the human factor.  What does that mean?

And what about the new Apple Pay and all the other payments solutions for mobile devices? Are they coming up with something new or merely playing catch-up?

But here is the takeaway for me on Thiel. He says that one question he likes to ask when interviewing job applicants is this:

Tell me something that other people don't believe in. And that's true.

That notion aligns with Thiel's preference for financing opportunities that will yield monopoly profits. It means in many cases doing something that other people think is impossible. For instance, you'd think that the banks and credit card folks would have got into the payments-by-email business before PayPal. After all, money transaction is what they do. But in fact, according to Thiel, they didn't, and the reason they didn't is that they thought that payments by email would be too hard, because of the fraud.

Kristol asked Thiel about his Question? How do people answer it? Usually they don't.  They fake it. And Thiel then went into a discussion of the social nature of opinion.  People just don't tend to stray too far from the herd.

Thiel got me to thinking.  What would I say in response to his question? Here's my first attempt.

Most people don't believe that the free market is just and fair. They think it needs to be hedged around by regulation and government ukase. They think, perhaps not as passionately as the Occupy protesters, that we need a government with a gun to the head of employers. In fact business runs on trust, and the way to succeed in the market place is to make sure that all your transactions reward and amplify trust.

That's not to say that there isn't cheating and fraud in the world. But the way to succeed is to use TIT-FOR-TAT. Trust first, and then continue to trust if the other person is trustworthy. And avoid a "last transaction" because that's when it pays to cheat.

Here's another. Most people think of government as a powerful patron. You want to stay in good with your patron and collect the crumbs that fall from the master's table. But in reality government always betrays you. That's because government is force. It uses everyone that supports it as an army uses its soldiers, as cannon fodder in its campaign of force, in its endless wars, foreign and domestic.

Thiel's point is that you'll never amount to anything unless you've done a bit of contrarian thinking. Because if the herd is ever to change direction then someone has to swerve away from the herd and start off in a different direction.

Here We Go Again With Liberal Malaise

There really is a reason for the Six Year Itch.  After six years of a president even his supporters can begin to see that he's a fool and a charlatan.

So it was with Bush, so it is with Obama. So it wasn't with Clinton because the Republicans, in moving to impeach Clinton for crimes that would have sunk a Nixon, riled up the Clinton partisans for one more assault on the breach.

With a Democrat in the White House the Six Year Itch at the midterm election in a president's second term inspires the liberal pundits to civilizational exhaustion. The job is just too big for one man, they said after only three years of Carter.  But for Roger Cohen in the New York Times it's "The Great Unraveling." No, Roger, it isn't. It's just another routine failure of liberalism. But I get why it would feel that way to a liberal.

Beheadings? Yes, that's what you get when small insurgencies are on the loose because the big boys can't get their act together.

Aggression? Yes, that's what happens when you get fools talking about the importance of "soft" power over "hard" power.

Breakup? Yes, that's what happens when you weaken the national myth in the minds of the people with the cultural Marxist the multicultural myth.

And so on.

So the liberals are demoralized.  So their ideas are failing wherever they are tried. So what?

The problem is that we have nothing to replace liberalism.

Oh, sure; modern conservatism is better all round for America and the world.  But nobody is excited about it. There is no militant movement that is mobilizing a new generation to flush out the old order and replace it with something new. Instead the kids are all riled up about pot legalization and gay marriage.  Squirrel!

It's déjà vu all over again.

Thirty-five years ago in the Carter malaise liberals were telling us that America was ungovernable.  That we were entering a period of decline.  That there was nothing we could do about it.

Then along came Ronald Reagan. He showed that we could revive the economy, could govern America, could win the Cold War.

But what he couldn't do was move the needle on entitlements. So here we are 35 years later and the entitlements are eating us alive, but still nobody dares suggest reform.  The Elizabeth Warren Democrats are even calling for Social Security benefit increases!

If you look back at the great social/religious movements, starting with the Reformation, they were driven by young people, folks like Martin Luther rebelling against their royal official fathers. Young punks like Marx rebelling against their hauts bourgeois fathers. Young punks like the Sixties radicals pretending to rebel against their liberal fathers.

That is what is missing today.  There are no young punks planning revolution.  There are just the dumb-as-posts Occupy guys that are the drugged-up dupes of the ruling class.

Ten years ago and more liberals like Robert William Fogel were worried stiff that the evangelical Christians were building a Fourth Great Awakening that would take out liberalism and its beloved egalitarianism. So much for that fear.

No.  I suspect we must wait for the moment when African Americans and Hispanics start to become "haves" and start to want freedom and responsible individualism and start to rebel against their liberal masters and say "leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities." I don't want your stinkin' free stuff. That quote is from Eric Hoffer.

Meanwhile my work is to think through what the charismatic leader of this future movement will want to know and say.  And I think it starts with the fact that the payroll taxes that fund the entitlement programs are monstrously unjust to a responsible individual who says "leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities."

That's because the welfare state is based on the proposition that the workers give their savings to the government in payroll taxes and the government decides when and how to give it back to them.

Only a person unfit for freedom could tolerate such a system. Give my money to the politicians so they can buy votes for 30 years until it's time for me to retire?  You must be joking!

But that's the attitude it will take if we are ever to reform the current cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful and deluded system.

Marxism, Power and Freedom

Eric Hoffer writes that when the "scribes" are in, working for the ruling class, they are happy to do its bidding and order the lower orders around.  But when the scribes are out, meaning that the government can't afford them after a societal collapse, then the scribes decide to represent the "people" and enter a phase where they critique the ruling class.

In our day, I suppose, the scribes do both.  Our educated elite critiques the ruling class on behalf of the traditionally marginalized and it also delights in expert-ology, commissioning like-minded experts to boost its social theories and create government programs to implement them.

What the educated want, says Hoffer, is "power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action."

That is why the educated fell in love with Marxism.  It said: the workers are being horribly exploited by capitalism.  Therefore we should give absolute political power, lordship, and opportunities to run things to the educated elite to liberate the workers from their slavery.

In fact the opposite happened.  Wherever Marxism was tried the workers got oppressed and exploited worse than before.

When it became clear that economic Marxism wasn't working, because despite Marx's prophecy of worker "immiseration" the workers were doing better, the Frankfurt School universalized the oppression paradigm into cultural Marxism or multiculturalism. Now any social group could be identified as oppressed and exploited.  Therefore we should give absolute political power, lordship and the power to name and shame to the educated elite to liberate the marginalized from their oppression.

I am not saying here that the educated elite -- the "scribes" -- are cynics.  They are just attracted to political power, and instinctively look and find occasion for political power.  They see the suffering workers and say "there oughta be a law." They look at blacks and women and gays and want to do something about it.  But the only thing they know to do, or want to do, involves politics. And government. And force.

I have been studying individualism over the past year or two, and I keep getting impressed by the radicalism of it. Responsible individualism says: hey fellas, relax! As long as people are trustworthy and obey the law we can dial down the amount of government and just let people get on with getting and spending, producin' and consumin'. Because invisible hand and comparative advantage and man-as-social-animal.

Opposed to this is the eternal human experience that the dawn raid might be tomorrow! We can see this in the current flap over ISIS. People see a couple of beheadings on TV and are immediately convinced that the US is at risk.  All down the ages humans have had to be on their toes against an attack by the neighboring village, seafaring Vikings, or neighboring princedom. It seems counter-intuitive to be able to trust businessmen, or Jews, or strangers.

Hoffer again.

The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities.

 Right before that he says "people unfit for freedom — who cannot do much with it — are hungry for power." Yeah, as in "power to the people!" and "all power to the Soviets!"

Now you can see what the Marxists and the progressives have done.  They have put themselves at the head of people still "unfit for freedom" and led them on a search for power.

But the reality of the last few centuries is that when people are released to freedom, the ones that want it, they get right to work.  And they grow, learn, and realize their capacities.  It is only the people stuck in the ghetto of power worship that fail to benefit from the world of freedom. In fact, as we have seen, the followers of the educated elite have descended into the most horrible social dysfunctions.

The truth in the Marxist canon is that people that believe in power, the people "unfit for freedom" need some sort of solace to relieve their sense of powerlessness. But the real solution to their problem is to grow them into "haves," help them achieve a modest competence, so that they can live in the world with confidence and vote for the freedom that is the gateway to real self-command and peace with the world.

But the identity politics that the left serves up is a dead end for those that give up their birthright for its mess of benefits.

The Ordinary Middle Class on the "Golden Princess"

ON BOARD GOLDEN PRINCESS IN INSIDE PASSAGE  Cruise passengers, according to John Derbyshire, are predominantly over-50s.  No doubt he's right, and I've been observing these ordinary American middle-class over 50s the last few days as they "come back new" on board the Golden Princess.  I'll tell you what I think.

You don't get to see the ordinary middle class where I live in liberal Seattle.  You only get to see the precious people that drive Subarus and Priuses and Volvos.  Liberal Seattleites are obviously richer and younger and more educated than the Princess cruisers. And I dare say they enjoy more economic security too. Tenure, don't you know.

But you do get to see the ordinary middle class on board the Golden Princess.

It all makes me think how cruelly the ruling class has treated the ordinary middle class these last few years. Yes, things seem hunky-dory in liberal Seattle: house prices are up, tear-downs are starting in every street. But the daughter of an acquaintance outside the magic liberal circle is just getting life restarted after the hell of the Great Recession in which she lost her home.

You look at those folks on the cruise and you wonder how they are doing with savings account interest down at zero. You think of how they probably blame the banks for this. You think of how they are paying much higher health insurance premiums and deductibles.  You think about how these stolid people are coping with the miserable Obama economy.  Can they hope to retire? If they retire will their teacher and health-worker pensions be there when the state and local government financial crisis deepens?

And what happens to them when the Fed starts raising interest rates, probably because the inflationary boom from zero interest rates is causing even Obama officials to worry about the future?

I think that the ruling class should be forced to take a cruise once a year -- incognito, without staff and perquisites -- so they can see and hear what they are doing to the ordinary American middle class.

I don't suppose it will do any good, but it might make them pause in their grand plans for this affordable program or that necessary subsidy.

It's telling that the present Affordable Care Act had a predecessor.  Remember "affordable housing?"  That was the siren song that got us into the Great Recession as all the folks that had borrowed against their houses, desperately trying to ride the real-estate bull, and all the folks that had strained their finances to the utmost to afford their dream house, all those folks went to the wall.

Was it really fair or just to subject these ordinary people to all this heavy financial weather? First they got ripped off because they came late to the real-estate party.  Then their nest egg got crushed when the market collapsed.

Of course, the politicians and the activists and their willing accomplices in the media have persuaded everyone that it was all the bankers' fault.  Really, the old saw about patriotism being the last resort of the scoundrel had it completely wrong. Instead we should say that any politician that blames the bankers is a monster. Because the government runs the credit system and has done ever since the Dutch invented central banking.

Yes, I know. The people voted for the scoundrels; they had it coming. But the whole point of the Progressive movement of the late 19th century of which today's liberals are the residual legatees was that the educated experts and their rational policy analysts would be above petty partisan politicking and crude corruption. Liberals insisted then and insist now that they are the evolved ones, the educated ones, the rational ones. That's what gives them the license to blame bankers and businessmen and racists, sexists and homophobes.

Only it's all a lie.  Liberals have lied and lied again; they have blindfolded the American people and turned them around and confused and misled them. And now the American people are screwed.

You only have one life to live. When the politicians go to the Fed to get them out of a jam as they did in 2008 and in all the years since, it means that the American people are getting screwed; it means that the government is going to get in their pockets and relieve them of a good portion of their wages and their savings. All because of promises that should never have been made by the sort of people that liberals claimed to be.  And the American people will never get their money or their lives back.

If there were any justice in the world liberals would be on the run right now like the French aristocrats in 1792. But since there isn't any justice I expect that liberals will get another couple of chances to ruin the nation before the American people rise up in righteous rebellion.

Of course then it will be too late.

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.