Have You Now, or Have You Ever Been a Creationist?

It was Douglas Adams in his remarkable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who coined the felicitous phrase about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

For the fact is that we do not know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. But we insist that life, the universe, and everything should have a meaning, and for that we humans have gods.

It is the conceit of many moderns that we have done away with gods, and have now determined to stand naked in the world clothed only in the truth of Darwin and evolution. God didn't create the world; evolution did. All this talk of God and Creation is mere creationism, the crude insertion of "skyhooks" into the world to explain what we cannot, at least not yet, explain.

Enter Matt Ridley and The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge. Ridley proposes that it is not just animals and plants that evolve through their selfish genes. It is everything.

And anyone that demands a higher authority for, e.g., managing the economy, is nothing but a creationist. And you know what those people are like. Think Canada's liberal darling Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale. Only, of course, Atwood sensibly confines her examination of creationists and fundamentalists to the religious ones.

We humans do not just demand gods to wisely direct our moral and political affairs from above. We imagine it in all corners of our life, from religion to culture to the economy to education. It cannot be that grubby and ordinary humans, combining together in voluntary cooperation, can improve on the edicts of kings, bishops, moralists, and professors.

Rubbish, writes Ridley. If you look around, you will find that everything in the universe proceeds in a bottom-up way, by felicitous combinations and innovations. And it is not usually some lone genius that makes the breakthrough, but several people, all trying to solve the problem du jour.

For instance, in addition to Darwin there was Wallace. And there were several people in addition to Einstein around 1900 that were trying to solve the problem that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. Einstein got there first, and to him the glory. But in no time there was quantum mechanics, an amazing collaboration of minds unlocking the secrets of the sub-atomic world.

And if you need a confirmation of the idea of evolution, here is a piece by Vaclav Smil from IEEE Spectrum about the five "Stages of Electronics," the evolution from Maxwell's unified theory of electricity, magnetism and light down to the present ubiquity of hand-held smart electronics. It is staggering that from the problem of figuring out light, magnetism, electricity, and everything, we have arrived in a little over a century at $100 smartphones that provide instant video communication across the world and a window on all the knowledge of the world. And nobody was in charge.

Matt Ridley, who is a climate skeptic, is making the argument against top-down wisdom from the right. But I am reading, courtesy of a liberal friend, The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere is the abstract side and logical side and the right hemisphere is the experiential and emotional side. The book proceeds from a detailed exposition of the current science of the brain to a critique of culture. The left hemisphere, says the blurb,

has grabbed more than its fair share of power, resulting in a society where a rigid and bureaucratic obsession with structure, narrow self-interest and a mechanistic view of the world hold sway, at an enormous cost to human happiness and the world around us.

Yes, but, according to chaps like me, the problem is the usual suspects like the back page quotes from Huffington Post and the Times Literary Supplement. It is their conceits and their prejudices and their appetite for power from which issue all the problems of the world, including bureaucracy and mechanism. So I wonder how McGilchrist makes his argument which, according to chapter headings, goes through renaissance and reformation and  enlightenment and romanticism and industrial revolution and modernism and postmodernism. I can't believe that he takes too close a cut against our present evolved, educated, administrative ruling class and cultural elite. But we will see.

However, despite all the talk of creationism, of skyhooks and turtles-all-the-way-down to deal with the problem of what lies on the other side of the boundaries of knowledge, we humans still, as we ever, insist on the question of the meaning of it all, life, the universe, and everything.

And in my view the more knowledge we accumulate about the world and beyond it to the universe the bigger the question becomes. What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

Because if life, the universe, and everything do not have a meaning, or an origin, or a design, or a purpose then what does that mean?

It Is AstroTurf All the Way Down

If you want to know the secret of life, the universe and everything, there is a problem. At some point, you hit a brick wall, the horizon of your knowledge.

So the deep thinkers of the world have come up with a useful skyhook. The world, they say, is sitting on a turtle. But what about the turtle? What is the turtle sitting on? There is only one answer to that. It is turtles, all the way down.

Conservatives have a similar problem when trying the analyze the meaning of the left and its peaceful protests. How much of it is real unprompted bottom-up assemblies of ordinary people presenting their grievances to the government? And how much of it is top-down AstroTurf ginned up by the ruling class and its bribed apologists, bought and paid for by the irrepressible George Soros.

There was a famous moment, during the rise of the Tea Party, when then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the Tea Party of being AstroTurf, a creature of right-wing moneybags,

This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.

Well, it is certainly true that in due course the Tea Party got the support of Koch Brothers money. As you can imagine that the MSM was right on it. But in the beginning nobody had a clue where the Tea Party was coming from. Nancy Pelosi couldn't understand a peaceful protest that was not wholly owned by rich kids playing at revolution.

I am talking about folks like the young "Refuse Fascism" activist on Tucker Carlson, determined to protest and Resist the fascist Donald Trump.  As they sing on South Pacific, you have to be carefully taught, to hate and to fear, to protest and to Resist.

So now we learn that the spontaneous protests at the townhalls of Republican congressmen are the "Townhall Project" of Jimmy Dahman, a former Clinton campaign volunteer.

His Facebook page lists the youthful Dahman’s current position as Deputy Organizing Director at Ohio Together, and former positions as Regional Organizing Director at Hillary for America and Organizer (Party) at Hillary for Iowa.

Well, of course. It is AstroTurf all the way down when you are pushing back against the outrage of Republicans daring to roll back the administrative state's Obamacare project.

Not that I am surprised. The activists that I have seen on various video of GOP townhalls featured well-born women with well-born hairdos. I'm sorry, but women like that are not helpless people about to lose their Obamacare exchange health-insurance policies in the general meltdown of government health care.

But it is important for GOP elected representatives to know whether they are dealing with a genuine groundswell of opposition to Obamacare repeal and replace, or whether the protests are just the usual left-wing rent-a-mob featuring paid activists bused in by the deep state.

After all, the whole point of "activism" and "peaceful protest" and "resistance" is to make it look as if the grass roots are rising in rebellion, and that a tidal wave of rebellion will engulf the racists and sexists and homophobes unless they submit.

But what I would like to know is what that young woman talking over Tucker Carlson really thinks she is doing. I mean, it is all very well to talk about resisting, and brandishing manifestos featuring  NO! in 72 point type. But what is this young woman really proposing? Peaceful protests? Actual riots? Attacks on police stations? Armed insurrection? I could tell that Tucker Carlson was trying to get Sunsara Taylor to tell him what she was really proposing to do about Hitlerian Trumpian fascism. But the canny activist refused the bait and just kept talking about protest and resist and NO!

So Sunsara Taylor is probably just a pretty piece of AstroTurf wearing the obligatory Rachel Maddow eyeglasses.

Deep State or Paper Tiger?

The big question facing America is just how hard and how successfully the so-called "Deep State" will push to stop Donald Trump and his agenda.

We have seen it take out Gen. Flynn, President Trump's choice for National Security Advisor. And we have seen curious leaks of conversations between President Trump and foreign leaders. And we have seen the push-back against President Trump's refugee ban.

And presumably the Deep State was involved in the humiliation of gay controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos.

The telling thing to me about these actions is their penny-ante nature, the fact that the "Deep State" is identifying itself not in a sweeping coup against the president but in a minor-league score-settling acts.

I'm not an expert in bureaucratic process, but I would say, from a military strategy standpoint, that the president's opponents don't want to be IDing themselves so early and so unnecessarily. I'd say that the EPA bureaucrats do not want to be signalling their opposition to Trump by calling their congressmen to oppose Scott Pruitt; that just makes it easier for Trump to shut down whole areas of the EPA by executive order.

The Deep State may have the power to obstruct a lot of President Trump's effort to slow immigration and deport illegals. Only problem is that his policy is pretty popular with ordinary Americans and many legal immigrants.

Here's George Will saying that "conservatives will distance themselves from Trump by midsummer." Really?

Anything is possible, but I'd say that the very fact that President Trump is acting like a "strong leader" means that it will be very difficult for conservative waverers to jump ship in the near future. The whole point of strong leadership and military discipline is the get the troops committed to the leader and the cause so that they keep on battling, even when the tide of battle turns against them.

I'd say that the secret of Trump's success thus far is that he has been doing precisely what the Republican base and the basket of deplorables want him to do. He has been sticking it to the liberal ruling class and telling them to put it where the sun don't shine. The themes of his campaign -- America First, halt immigration, stop outsourcing, fix Obamacare -- are cunningly chosen to be popular with ordinary Americans and unpopular with the liberal ruling class.

Think about it:

Do ordinary Americans want low gas prices or do they want to save the planet?

Do ordinary American women want transgender bathrooms or do they want single-sex bathrooms where they feel safe from male predators?

Do ordinary Americans want to compete with illegal immigrants for entry-level jobs or do they want them to be sent home?

Do ordinary Americans want to fight microaggressions and create safe spaces, or do they want to be free of the fear that a careless word at work could cost them their job, courtesy of the harpies in HR?

I'd say that if the economy fails to take off, and we get a recession before 2020 then all bets are off.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that the Deep State is a paper tiger. When it comes to the crunch the folks in the bureaucracy are going to want to hold onto their life-time jobs and their pensions. And if there are a few with more imagination than sense, I would suggest the Bing doctrine for President Trump. A couple of high-profile firings of disobedient bureaucrats should, in Voltaire's words, suffice to encourager les autres.

The point is that many battles in history are decided by the side that gives up last. And in 2016 Republicans and Americans chose a leader who seems to be just the person to be the last to give up.

Mirror Mirror: Who is the Incompetent One in the Land

All of our liberal and lefty friends are chanting in unison, as if at a peaceful protest, that Trump is Incompetent.

Maybe they are right. Or maybe they haven't gotten out lately. Maybe they have been too protected by The New York Times and NPR from the dreadful record of President Obama's incompetence.

Here is D.C. McAllister going into chapter and verse about Obama's incompetence, as in

• November 2010: Democratic senators say Obama "out of his league."
• October 2010: Guardian reports officials "outside inner circle" leaving administration
• June 2010: Mort Zuckerman says that "world sees Obama as incompetent and amateur."

And so on. Golly, who knew that wise heads were saying that back then? 

As Robert W. Merry writes, the fact is that the US and the world are facing an existential crisis. Here in the US it looks like this:

Wall Street dominates...  Public-employee unions utilize their power... Corporations foster tax-code provisions that allow them to game the system. “Crony capitalism’’ runs rampant. Members of Congress tilt the political system to favor incumbency. A national-debt burden threatens the country’s financial health. Uncontrolled immigration threatens... The nation’s industrial base has been hollowed out, and the vast American working class—the bedrock of the FDR coalition—is squeezed to the point of desperation.

And that is just the US. What about the world?

 China... wants to expunge American military power from Asia. The Middle East is aflame, largely as a result of mindless U.S. interventions there. Western civilization’s European heartland is threatened from without by mass immigration and from within by waves of populist nationalism bent on destroying the postwar experiment in political consolidation. Tensions are on the rise everywhere—between Sunnis and Shia in the Middle East, between the United States and Russia, between China and its neighbors, between southern and northern Europe over currency issues, between the United States and Iran. 

If you look back at 2015, Merry writes, just before Trump descended his escalator, "everyone" was expecting a status-quo election between the Bush clan and the Clinton clan.

Can you spell "incompetence?" As in SNAFU, Situation Normal, All F*cked Up?

Look, all government is incompetent, all the time. Government lurches from one disaster to another. But government has something that you don't have. It has apologists and flacks whose job is to spin dross into gold. This goes on until the regime collapses and then everyone agrees that the old regime was the worst political dynasty since the later Roman emperors, or the Bourbons in France after 1815 who had famously forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

Take the US. In the 1850s it failed to keep the nation together and descended into a bloody civil war. After the war it screwed up the aftermath, both in the Reconstruction of the South and in the resumption of gold payments that resulted in a huge crash in 1873 and a depression. Then there was another depression in the 1890s, followed by a crash in 1907, followed by the folly of World War I. Then the nations of the world screwed up the resumption of the peacetime economy, resulting in the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression and another World War! Since then there have been wars, riots, inflation, the tech bubble, the real-estate bubble, the Great Recession, and the great racial divides of the Obama era.

Who were the geniuses putting us through disaster after disaster?

Look at the United States right now. Here we have the white working class descending into despair. We have African Americans denied their proper entry into the middle class by a liberal plantation that has destroyed the African-American family, killed millions of its babies in utero, and kept them separate from the great American center. We have illegal immigrants that, on the one hand are exploited because of their illegal status, and on the other take jobs from ordinary Americans that don't want to accept slave-labor wages.

Meanwhile the ruling class of the United States is all worked up about global warming, spending tens of billions on "science" and crony capitalism. And it is really focused on gay marriage, transgender bathrooms, and the sexual distress of well-born women students in the nation's universities.

What could possibly go wrong?

And the experts are telling us that, after one month, President Trump is a failure?

The only thing to remember is the reply of Adam Smith to a young nobleman worried about the defeat of Gen. Burgoyne in the colonies back during the disaster of the revolt of the colonials in North America. He told his young friend that there is always a lot of ruin in a nation.

But don't tell that to your Venezuelan friend. Sometimes the isolated instances of ruin in a nation combine into a general ruin and conflagration.

Making Sense of Trump's Attack on the Media

With regard to President Trump I take the position that Trump is not an idiot; he only plays one on TV.

So what are we to think about Donald Trump's broad-based attack on the media, those chappies that Glenn Reynolds calls "Democratic operatives with bylines."

It all seems as plain as day to me. But maybe I have got it wrong.

Anyway, here goes.

The Republican base has been getting very angry lately that its leaders do not "fight." We mean that Republican politicians, at least since the first President Bush, tend to cave to the Democrats, so that Republican governance became Democrat-lite. During the George W. Bush administration this became official policy, with "compassionate conservatism" and the No Child Left Behind Act compromise with Sen. Ted Kennedy.

According to the conservative narrative this attempt to make nice with the Democrats was a failure. In the first place, Democrats never conceded the 2000 election and encouraged their partisans to believe that Bush was "selected no elected," and secondly the Democrats went into full anti-war mode when President Bush "did something" about 9/11 by executing on the bipartisan policy of "regime change" in Iraq.

The Obama administration, according to the conservative base, was a direct attack on America as we know it, pushing every liberal nostrum without attempting to do any bipartisan compromise. Particularly egregious, from my view, was the abandonment of welfare reform and its central policy of a work requirement. BIg-time government welfare, on my view, is not merely injustice; it is cultural genocide on the recipients.

Then, of course, there was the Obama administration's culture war agenda that amounted to cultural war on Christian conservatives, using the power of the state to punish conservatives for their views, from weaponizing the IRS on the Tea Party to the demand that Christian conservatives provide services for gay weddings.

(Parenthetically, this is why Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He felt, as a libertarian, that the civil rights acts should apply only to government. He wanted it to be illegal for government to discriminate by race, but not be illegal for business to discriminate by race. He just wanted to undo Jim Crow laws and Davis-Bacon Acts that forced business to discriminate by race.)

Fast-forward to the 2016 presidential race. The leading candidate after the extinguishing of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), turned out to be Ted Cruz, who had made a point about getting in the face of the Democrats as a rookie Senator. Oh, and then there was Donald Trump, but he was a joke.

It turned out that Donald Trump was way better at getting into peoples' faces than Ted Cruz. That's probably because Trump is a people person, and Ted Cruz is manifestly not. People just don't like Cruz, face to face.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of President Trump. He has been elected to stick it to the opposition. But Trump is a deal-maker; he knows that sooner or later he is going to have to make deals with Democrats over immigration, Obamacare, taxes, whatever. So it is not a very good idea to attack Democrats, the very people that he is going to have to deal with. Politicians are touchy about insults and slights. How did things work out for Obama, who made no bones about attacking Republicans?

So what does President Trump do, to stick it to the opposition, while still serving his supporters with red meat to snack upon?

Simple. He attacks the liberal media, the MSM of who you've heard tell, the Democratic operatives with bylines. He appoints the liberal elite media as the official opposition. Is that brilliant, or what?

Now look at what happened at last Thursday's press conference that was either a train wreck or the most amazing thing since sliced bread, according to your partisan affiliation. Trump took a question from a young black reporter that asked him about talking to the Congressional Black Caucus. Oh yeah, said Trump. He had thought he had a meeting with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), but Cummings backed out. Could the reporter arrange a meeting?

This is, as they say, trolling, Grandmaster Level. The result, after lots of huffing and puffing, is that Trump has a meeting set up with Cummings and the Congressional Black Caucus. Those were the chaps, you may remember, that boycotted his inauguration.

Fast forward to Trump's rally at Melbourne, FL on Saturday, Feb. 18. The warm-up was conducted by a couple of black women, using the cadences of the black churches, and around the podium were placards reading BlacksforTrumpt2020.com. Golly, what could that be all about?

Look, the longer that liberals keep insisting that Donald Trump is a fool and that his month-old administration is a train wreck the better. There is a new game in town, and liberals don't have a clue how to play it.

Could it be that the Trump administration is executing on a deliberate strategy to confuse the opposition with multiple initiatives, with noise and confusion, to make it difficult for the opposition to achieve strategic concentration in opposing the complete range of his policies?

It is a commonplace to remark that businessmen don't know how to operate in the political arena. But suppose that a businessman like Trump is more like an army general that has learned how to run a battle and keep a cool head despite the utter confusion and conflicting signals and fear and panic? Our modern politicians seem to like everything calm and quiet, with a somnolent bureaucracy to execute on policy in its own sweet time.

Obviously, the Trump administration is not going to be like that.

Finding Yourself "Outside the System"

Ever think that you are living in a different world than everyone else? Do you feel that you are "outside the system" looking in?

That's what one of my readers wrote to me, and it made me think.

Of course, there is every reason why my reader Brad would feel outside the system. As he writes,

I try do the right things, work taxes avoid trouble and generally avoid the system we are outside because we are self-sufficient. 

When you write something like that you are announcing yourself as a Person of the Responsible Self, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. To be a Person of the Responsible Self is everything that is right and good, but it don't get no respect in our society, because our society is ruled by the People of the Creative Self, and our ruling class thinks that People of the Responsible Self are all racists, sexists, homophobes, haters, and xenophobes.

On the view of the People of the Creative Self the meaning of life, the universe and everything is about being a creative artist, challenging all boundaries, breaking the mold of the ordinary and crafting a new world out of the rubble of the old. Everything is up for grabs, from work, family, sex, you name it. A critical part of the agenda is the caring and compassionate advocacy for People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants and women and minorities and marginalized people, and protecting them from the hate and bigotry of the People of the Responsible Self.

No wonder that the People of the Responsible Self feel left "outside the system."

But I think that the world view of the People of the Creative Self is sick and wrong.

First of all, it is utterly mad to imagine that the creatives should have license to do anything they want. Most attempts at creating something new are hopeless failures. That is why so many people would like to become artists and writers but so few actually make it. That is why almost all business startups are failures. Society needs strong defenses against would-be creators, and my model for this is the Hero's Journey of Joseph Campbell. If you want to be a creative hero, then you will have to go down into the underworld and suffer many trials and setbacks. Only when you have proved your mettle can you return to society and benefit it with your hard-won wisdom. Obviously this concept is completely different from the current notion that society should pay for artists and creatives to learn their chops, and then listen in awe to to the pearls of wisdom falling from their lips of their betters.

Secondly, on the schema of developmental psychologists like Ken Wilber and Clare Graves, the proper relationship between supposedly advanced people and less advanced people is that the more advanced people should be understanding and compassionate of those less advanced. Thus the advanced and evolved People of the Creative Self should, using their advanced knowledge, understand the People of the Responsible Self, and accommodate their less-advanced culture and world view. But it is the usual practice among self-described advanced people to regard those less advanced as stupid and bigoted. And so we have, in the advanced West, an overclass of People of the Creative Self that works daily to marginalize and humiliate the People of the Responsible Self as racists, sexists, and homophobes.

There are two options for a people that find themselves dominated and humiliated by its ruling class. It can submit, according to the good old advice that "resistance is futile." Or it can mount a head of rebellion.

Rather obviously, according to my view, the Trump phenomenon is a rebellion of the People of the Responsible Self against its cruel and unjust overlords, the People of the Creative Self.

Will the rebellion succeed? Or will it be put down, with prejudice?

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of the Story of Mankind.

Worse Than Watergate? Really?

The usual Democratic suspects are right, of course. Any scandal is "worse than Watergate" because Watergate was not about the crime -- of over-eager operatives burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Richard Nixon had to leave office because he allowed himself to get involved in the coverup of the Watergate burglaries.

However, my Democratic friends should recall that the only reason we had a Watergate scandal was because Richard Nixon was a Republican president at a time when both houses of Congress were Democratic.

And then as now, Democrats just could not believe that the Republicans had beaten them in a presidential election. So they were striking out any way they could.

And back then they had the power to obstruct and impeach a president. Because they had majorities in Congress.

Remember the last time we heard from the intelligence community? It was during the Bush administration when an aide to Vice-President Cheney, Scooter Libby, was convicted of lying to investigators. Liberals at the time were outraged that the cover of CIA employee Valerie Plame had been blown by Bush administration officials.

Of course, there was no attempt by the intelligence community to embarrass the Obama administration during its eight years, not even when it sicced the IRS on the Tea Party. But now that the Republicans are back in power, it's Katie bar the door.

It will be interesting to see if the "deep state" succeeds in taking out more of President Trump's people. My guess is that, yes, they will.

But I also expect that they will fail to derail the Trump express. Why? Because they are small people. They are small people using their positions to embarrass the president. But I doubt if they have the cojones to come right out and kill the king.

And that is the point. When you go to kill a king you had better succeed. Otherwise you have merely taught him how to go after you.

I'd say that the leaks of presidential conversations with foreign leaders, and the leaks of conversations between Gen. Flynn and the Russians, are penny-ante stuff. Why would the president's enemies in the deep state tip their hand so soon?

They are behaving as though they are begging him to cut them off at the knees. They are giving him all the excuse he needs to clean house ruthlessly, from the CIA and the NSA down to the lowly EPA.

There's a piece in The Wall Street Journal right now about "Spies Keep Trump in Dark on Intelligence in Sign of Mistrust." Sorry pal. You don't get to "mistrust" the president. You are his creatures, and if you don't like it you can get out.

All I can say is that this is exactly why we racist, sexist, homophobic Republican base voters elected Donald Trump. We elected him to deal with the Cathedral, the Deep State, the administrative state, whatever you want to call it.

And it looks like that is exactly what he is going to do.