Making Sense of Lefty Craziness

My whole life is devoted to exposing and explaining the phenomenon of the Left. After all, in the last two centuries, humans in the US have increased their per capita income by 30 times. And right now the folks in the historically dominant cultures of China and India are catching as as fast as they know how. See my Great Enrichment page. Scroll down to the bottom and look at India and China.

But what did it? The evidence is pretty clear. It is the social cooperation of the market and its prices that did it.

But why now? Why the last 200 years and not a millennium earlier? My judgement is that the industrial revolution represents an absolute watershed in human social cooperation. Before the industrial revolution only one thing mattered: food-growing land, and the ability to defend it from predators. So the most important thing in the world was the ability to have armed men to defend and protect that land and its people from all the world.

Thus village Big Men, warrior aristocracies, patriarchy, armies, marcher lords and their glorification in palaces and temples and jewel-encrusted magnificence. Because they were absolutely needed.

Of course these warrior elites monstrously abused their roles: hey, who doesn't. But they were vital. And you can see why, from my justification of government power.

Every warrant for government power requires the existence of an existential peril for which force is the only solution.

When the whole world depends on keeping its food-growing land from pirates and plunderers, then it is pretty obvious that the only thing that matters is an armed defense.

But suppose the day came when the existential peril of someone snitching our food-growing land went away? Without an "existential peril" there is no need for government power; people can just go about their business. If anyone has a problem, they can go to the courts, or get together with other people and work out an agreement to solve the problem.

Now that land doesn't matter any more, because food is cheap and being transported across the world in huge grain-ships, now there is a lot less "existential peril" to worry about.

So what should the robin do then, poor thing? What are warrior elites and government leaders and would-be saviors going to do? The answer is obvious: make it up; think up some existential peril that needs the application of force, make it up out of whole cloth if you have to, and then go out and terrify the populace into supporting some new expansion of government power, and provide work for desk warriors and left-wing activists.

Of course, not all existential perils are fake. Here's one that is real: urban gangs. The growth of cities in the wake of the industrial revolution brought a lot of people to the city who had not yet learned the bourgeois ethos of buying and selling and live and let live. So they settled into ethnic enclaves in city slums and the young men formed criminal gangs to protect the ethnic turf, just as they had from time immemorial. But to the rest of society these ethnic enclaves and their gang defenders looked (and look to this day) as an existential threat to the peace of the city. That's how the Brits came to legislate the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 for London. You can understand why Sir Robert Peel brought this legislation to the House of Commons just by reading a bit of Dickens and learning about Bill Sykes and Fagin and other colorful urban characters.

These ethnic enclaves of recently arrived immigrants to the city and their associated gangs have persisted up to the present moment, because humans are still moving off the land into the city. In the US we now have the notorious Salvadorean gang MS-13 that  goes along with immigrant Salvadorean enclaves. In London they now have Muslim gangs operating out of the East End slums that used to by Cockney slums and are now Muslims enclaves. Ordinary middle-class people want protection from these newly-arrived immigrants to the city whose culture is, from the middle-class point of view, atavistic.

By the way, there is nothing remarkable about urban criminal gangs. They operate just like any other "armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants to reward their supporters." The only irregular thing about them is that they are rival governments operating inside the boundaries of nation states. Clearly, in many urban areas, the traditional politicians have developed a modus operandi with the criminal gangs about which we are not supposed to inquire.

OK, so city policing is warranted because criminal gangs are an existential peril, not to mention an insult to the traditional government. But what about everything else?

I think that "everything else" is pretty well a ginned up fake "existential peril."

And the thing is that once you have persuaded people of one existential peril then you pretty soon find out that you need another existential peril to get the punters to the voting booth. The obvious way to do this is to raise ordinary day-to-day problems to the level of a National Crisis. If you don't do this crisis mongering then pretty soon people don't think that they really need quite so much government -- or at least quite so much taxes.

This is why I characterize the Left as a Great Reaction. It is a cultural movement that cannot get its arms around the fact that we live in a pretty safe and secure world and we don't need government force to solve all our problems. Yes, but. We humans are programmed to know that the world is full of existential problems. Any hunter-gatherer tribe can tell you about the creepy-crawlies in the rain forest, and the dangerous predatory animals, and then there is the dangerous predatory tribe next door.

Ask yourself: how do we humans learn how to live in a peaceable world in which we do not have to be on our guard every moment against the dawn raid from the neighboring tribe. Answer: it's going to take a while.

And in the period of transition we are going to be assailed by would-be noble warriors insisting that the world is going to end unless we all come together to Save the Planet.

Here is my big beef about government today. Many government programs amount to cultural barriers to learning how to live as an independent responsible citizen in the city.

Government pension programs discourage people from learning how to save and take advantage of the capital markets to start a business or build wealth.

Government healthcare programs discourage people from deciding just how much they want to save for end-of-life and how much they are prepared to let nature take its course.

Government education programs sidestep the question of just what each of us wants to do and/or should do to prepare our children for the adult world. For instance, home-schooling seems  to encourage children to find their own way to adulthood. Private schools for the professional class are all about preparing children of the professional class for entry to selective colleges and careers in the professional class. But public government schools? You tell me what they are all about today.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that most government social programs are interventions that prevent the poor and the immigrant from learning the script of the middle-class city.

And I think that is a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, the left serves up existential panics, from day to day. Women suffering from sexual harassment! Gays from homophobia! Women earning less than men! Transgenders without the right bathroom! Carbon dioxide going to fry the Earth!

The whole point of the left's helpless victims is to create a sense of existential peril and a warrant for government action. Because if there is no existential peril there is no warrant for government action.

And maybe there isn't even a need for an educated, evolved national or global elite.

The Fault, Dear Liberals, is Not In Your Stars

When Cassius was trying to push Brutus to pull the trigger on their little Caesarian coup, he famously said:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

And the fault, dear liberals, is not that you chaps don't have a majority on the Supreme Court, or the Senate or the House or Hillary Clinton in the White House.

The fault is in yourselves, that you believe in the gods of politics.

It is fascinating, is it not, that immediately after the Brits and then the Yanks built a politics on the notion of the limitation of political power the Frenchies immediately tried the opposite, with a revolution that combined all power -- political, economic, cultural, and military -- in the state, even though the primary advocate of the separation of powers was their very own Montesquieu.

How's that totalitarian (i.e., totalizing all power in the ruling class) working out, lefties? How did it work out in the Soviet Union? In China? In Cambodia? In Cuba? In Venezuela?

Yeah. We all agree that it didn't work too well in Germany. National Socialism, they called it. "Socialism in One Country" is what Stalin called it.

And so began the modern cult of political activism, that what is needful is that "we" -- enlightened, educated people like us -- should be given the reins of political power so that we can transform a corrupt society into a realm of peace and justice.

I'm here to say that I don't think it has worked, any of it.

I don't think the government social welfare programs started by Bismarck were a good idea. It would have been much better if the workers had built their own social welfare organizations. They were working on it, you know, back in the 19th century, with labor unions, friendly societies, and fraternal organizations. I wonder what all that would look like today if we have left them all in peace.

I'm skeptical about government education. You want government to do things that never change, because government is terrible at doing reform. Clearly, education of children today would not look like education when half the population was illiterate. Or most people went from high school into the local factory. How should we educate children today? Bueller? Anyone?

I'm skeptical about the civil rights revolution. I certainly believe that government should be forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race and sex. Anyway, what we have today is not race-blind, sex-blind government, but government that actively and deliberately discriminates on the basis of race and sex, because diversity and inclusion. How did that happen, anyway?

I'm skeptical about the sexual revolution, because it clearly demoralizes and victimizes women. That is why feminists are insisting that girls are helpless victims that men must be carefully taught to observe the rules about sexual contact -- just like the Victorian gentleman of whom we've heard tell. And as for abortion, I'd say that a woman that can't say No to sex, because everyone else is giving it away, is obviously going to insist on saying No to an unwanted baby.

And as for "political correctness" and postmodernism, I'd say that it is the final stage in a failed millennial cult that has been predicting the end of the world and is still trying to patch up its failed millennarianism after the End of the World date has come and gone. Our faith is the One True Faith! Of course it is! And anyone that disagrees is a witch and a heretic, a racist, sexist homophobe!

See, here's how I look at it. If the government is going to look after us, from cradle to grave, where is the dignity of responsibility and self-reliance? Where even is the nobility in charitable giving?

If the government is going to adjudicate all questions of discrimination in the private sector, where is the virtue is treating other people as you would like yourself to be treated, of taking a flier on a minority youth of questionable past?

And if we are all forced to be members of the state secular religion of political correctness, what happens if that religion is a false religion? And how would we tell? I just finished a book of short novels by Robert A. Heinlein, at the end of which he remarks:

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it up by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, and driving underground all heretics.

OK, so he got it wrong. It is driving underground all heretics on social media, then locking them up, then killing them. In that order. And don't you forget it.

Yet what we know from modern science and from the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that all "change" comes from heretics and rebels, from the one lucky guy, some nobody among a hundred people trying something new, that comes up with something useful.

So let us hope that what we are seeing in our politics right now is the existential panic of a ruling class and its supporters that cannot believe that their comfortable assumption of their virtue and their faith in politics, that all is melting into air, and that the end of their hegemony, is coming, closer than you think.

What Women Want: Running the Clock Back

It is pretty obvious that well-born women are batting on a bit of a sticky wicket these days. The #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen hashtags, not to mention the "Campus Rape" issue demonstrate that, at least for well-born women of good families that go to private schools and select colleges and end up in the professions, all is not well.

In part this is, as Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago, that the public square was constructed by men for men centuries ago. But what about women?

Let us merely consider the British Common Law that has developed all kinds of precedents about every kind of legal situation, including the question of rape. If an accusation is made in the legal system, what are the rules? In fact there is a forest of rules about everything, all of which may be found to have originated in some legal dispute decades or centuries ago. But those rules were developed by men over legal disputes in which the judge and the contesting attorneys were all men.

What if there had been women in that process all those years ago? Would the precedents have been different? Of course they would. You can see this merely by thinking about my notion of the male Culture of Insult versus the female Culture of Complaint. Clearly, I would say, the legal system is a regularization and civilizing of the male Culture of Insult which used to decide disputes by single combat and lex talionis. Suppose the legal system had been instead a regularization and softening of the female Culture of Complaint. It is said, for instance, that when women complain to their husbands about something they don't want him to actually do something about the complaint; they just want to register the complaint.

Is this true about the complainant against Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh? Is this a female complaint, as per the Culture of Complaint? Does she just want her pain and her rage at her humiliation decades ago to be registered and acknowledged by society? And if we adjust our justice system to accommodate the female Culture of Complaint what then? Would it still work?

We have, in fact, implemented the female Culture of Complaint in response the to campus "Rape Crisis," by removing the presumption of innocence and the right of the accused to confront the accuser. Many people say that the result has been monstrous injustice. But if the standard for the public square is to accommodate the female Culture of Complaint then the open outcry of accusation and defense, which seem to belong to the male Culture of Insult, would need to be modified.

But wait. We could say that the female Culture of Complaint is an artifact of the patriarchy where women had no formal power and were forced to get their way by subterfuge and manipulation. If women are to come into the public square maybe there is no option other than to act as a responsible actor and accept the give and take of the public square and the male-developed and male-modified Culture of Insult.

And yet, if we accept the settled science that women score higher in "agreeableness" while men score higher in "aggressiveness" then clearly women are at a disadvantage in a public institution when a sexual advance is made or a need for aggressive action is warranted. Does this mean that a woman should never be alone with a man in a public institution to protect her from sexual aggression? Should she always have an advocate in salary negotiations to provide an aggression assist?

My own view is that the sexual revolution plus feminism has tied women in knots. After all, if there is the Pill and abortion, then why not Do It? Well, the answer is "women's pain." Women just do not approach sex as men do. According to the settled science, women experience emotional pain and anxiety more than men do. They experience severe emotional pain at any sexual breakup, whether an alcohol-fueled one-night stand or a "relationship" that is terminated by a man "not yet ready for marriage" or the end of a 20-year marriage. In the old days these realities were accommodated by prohibitions against pre-marital sex, especially by naive girls, the protection of girls from exposure to sexual situations, the difficulty of avoiding conception, the danger of abortion, and the barriers against divorce.

Complicating this is the quick-and-dirty way that liberals have implemented their sexual agenda using the US Supreme Court, with Roe v. Wade on abortion and Obergefell v. Hodges on gay marriage. As I understand, the Court was surprised that its Roe v. Wade decision provoked such backlash.

Yeah. Did anyone ever ask non-well-born women what they thought about abortion? Or the sexual revolution in general? How about minority women? What do they think about all this?

The fact is that morals and ethics and politics and the like are all games that ruling-class people play with each other. They typically call on the lower orders as their foot-soldiers in their ruling-class power games but really don't spend too much time figuring out the needs and desires of their political foot-soldiers. After who really cares about what the lower orders think?

My feeling is that we have only just begun to deal with the emergence of women into the public square, and that nobody, least of all women, have a clue "what women want."

It is also true that we have only just begun to deal with the fact of the end of the agricultural age, and the related mega-migration to the cities.

And it is a mere 10,000 years since the dawn of agriculture, and we humans, according to the psychologists, are still basically programmed as hunter-gatherers.

But then, if we had everything figured out, what would be the point of life, the universe and everything?

Fumblegate: Beginning of the End or End of the Beginning

In a way it is iconic. A liberal woman pysch. professor lifts a 35-year-old sexual humiliation into the latest battle over the Supreme Court.

And how did it come to light? Because she raised the issue in couples counselling in 2012. Forgive my cynicism, but I read couples counselling as a power play by a woman who is not sufficiently persuaded that her "partner" acknowledges her complete supremacy in the relationship. So bringing up a sexual harassment episode from high school would be a really cool tactical play. But really! Everyone knows that memories are totally unreliable, because we embroider them over the years.

For instance, I like to say that my departed father used to preface remarks with "at my advanced age." But my daughter tells me I am wrong. My dad said something similar, but not those exact words.

But how do you deal with an accusation like this, given that you really cannot treat a woman accuser like you could a man and subject him to second-degree cross-examination? Because the patriarchy. The Zman has the answer:

All of this reminds me of something I’ve noticed when dealing with feminist women. The best thing is to dominate them... In the company of feminists, I often begin talking about repealing the 19th Amendment. I’m polite, but firm. The results are always positive.

And then move on and cancel the sexual revolution, and abortion on demand, and no-fault divorce, and gay marriage and everything else that is a distraction from the basic job of men and women: getting kids on the ground and then out of the nest, with a regular supply of food and clothing during the years in-between and an occasional application of Murdstonian "firmness" just to make it fair.

My first boss always complained that we software guys were always "going off on tangents."  Ain't that the truth: anything but getting on with the difficulties of the real job we are supposed to be doing.

OK. So GOP senators can't question the cosmic truth of a 35-year-old smear. But maybe President Trump can. After all, no pussy-hat feminist is going to vote for him anyway.

But, having got over my rage at Democrat perfidy, I return to my basic message. When a political movement is descending to Borking and smears it is not a sign that it is winning but that it is flailing around wondering what went wrong. That is the message of Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton.

Brinton argues that revolutions get to their Reign of Terror and Virtue stage because the revolution is failing to transform the world as promised. So the moderate revolutionaries get replaced by the Robespierres, and the Kerenskys by the Lenins and the Stalins. And they resort to the tactics of the World War I generals: one more Big Push should get us to the Promised Land.

So in our own Reign of Twitter and Virtue-Signalling (tee-hee) the message we should be getting is that the project of the left is failing, and so the natural response of the left is to amp it up, to search for heretics, to burn witches. For it cannot be that their whole world view is a lie and a Great Reaction back to the culture and politics of the agricultural age and its slavery and its rigid social hierarchy and its grinding poverty.

And don't forget that the Supreme Court is the holy of holies for the progressive project, for it has enabled the progressives to enact their agenda outside of the to-and-fro of democratic politics and its messy compromises and its need to persuade rather than bully. And yet, having built their house upon sand they are horrified to discover that they are always one vote away from Hurricane Donald coming in and wiping their ill-founded notions away with the tide.

Remember this: if the liberals lose the Supreme Court they lose everything. And if you think that Post-election Stress Disorder is a thing, you ain't seen nothing yet.

My Take: Ten Years after the Crash

It was September 15, 2008 that the financial services firm Lehman Brothers collapsed and the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, proprietor, decided not to bail it out.

Then followed the worst financial crash in the United States of America since the Great Crash of 1929. Look: crashes and panics are part of capitalism, in the same way that invasions and famines are part of agriculture. Oh, and slavery. I'd says that panics and crashes and the subsequent recessions are the better option. But I am biased.

So who was to blame? Greedy bankers? Evil Wall Street firms? Derivatives brokers? Regulators asleep at the switch? Smarmy politicians? Or all of the above?

The following is my individual, idiosyncratic analysis. Your mileage may vary.

The first thing to understand is the message of Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street. La Wik's page here. Bagehot wrote the book after the Panic of 1866 following the failure of Overton, Gurney, and Company, "a wholesale discount bank located at 65 Lombard Street, London". During the crisis the Bank of England was unable to stop the panic with loans from its own resources, so it had to be backed up by the UK government.

For me, the message of Bagehot's book is his analysis of the credit system, that is, borrowings in money-denominated securities. The fact is that the credit system is a maze of borrowings to and fro, so when a question arises about the "soundness" of a financial firm -- such as Lehman or Overton -- the people buying and selling in the credit markets start to wonder. They ask themselves how deep their own counterparties were invested in the debt securities of the failed firm. And they get cautious; they wonder if they will get paid. Hello credit crisis.

So Bagehot decreed that two things are necessary for a healthy financial system. First, securities must be properly collateralized so that they can be liquidated without loss to the lender. Second, borrowers must be able to service the loan. If either of these are in question, you gotta panic.

In the boom of the 2000s there were lots of insufficiently collateralized loans which couldn't be fully liquidated if the borrower defaulted, and there were lots of borrowers that really couldn't service their loans. So when the housing market peaked in 2006 there were a lot of insufficiently collateralized mortgages around. Not good.

But why were there all those bad mortgages and "liar loans" to people with bad credit? Greedy bankers? Not exactly. Regulators asleep at the switch? Come on! When do regulators ever do their job?

The second thing to understand about the crash is that it had been federal government policy ever since the Great Depression to subsidize the housing market, to help Americans become homeowners.

One of the policies to help this out was the 30-year fixed mortgage. Hello sanity? You mean to say that you can forecast the economy and the housing market out 30 years and still have a solid security? Before the Great Depression the most you could get was a 10-year mortgage with a balloon payment at the end which meant that you would have to refinance at the then going interest rate.

Plus the government in 1938 started up the Federal National Mortgage Association, a government-sponsored enterprise that issued bonds based on baskets of mortgages. No problem, right, particularly if Fannie Mae bought good solid well-collateralized mortgages? Well, it all started out pretty nice, but then things got a bit out of hand, as this chart from usgovernmentspending.com of Agency Debt, mostly Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, shows.



Golly. Who knew! Agency Debt went from nothing to 10 percent of GDP in 1980, then all the way to 55 percent of GDP when the crash came in 2008. Now remember, the federal debt is about 100 percent of GDP. So here we have an additional 50 percent of GDP effectively guaranteed by the federal government. What could go wrong?

And as the years went by the quality of Agency debt went down, as various federal mandates required banks to extend mortgages to less-qualified borrowers (to fight evil red-lining). And then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started goals of increasing their mortgage purchases of less-qualified borrowers and less collateralized mortgages. Then the derivatives guys got into the action, by using derivatives to lay off the risk on the quality of mortgage packages and provide triple-A securities required by insurance companies and pension funds. What could go wrong?

Thirdly, little Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, failed to follow the dictum of Walter Bagehot that there should be a "lender of last resort" during a financial crisis. Bagehot's idea was that the Bank of England should "Lend freely. At a high rate of interest. On good banking securities." But even then, the Bank of England didn't have enough equity to do the job, so it relied on the credit of the UK Treasury. In our day, I would say that lender of last resort means you don't let any financial institution collapse. Period. Oh, you strip the owners and stockholders of their equity. You make a clean sweep of mansions in the Hamptons. You even make the bondholders take a haircut. But that is after the panic is over. And you use the full faith and credit of the United States government to keep the credit system going. See, in the Crash of 2008, interest rates on US Treasuries went down. People wanted US Treasury securities. They didn't think that the US government was going down. But little Ben Bernanke decided he didn't have the legal authority to take over Lehman Brothers with all those low-rate Treasury bills.

Well, little Ben. Given what we now know about how the Deep State takes care of its own, I think that a bit of courage by you would have gone a long way to moderate the Crash and the Great Recession. Think how cool Obama, the first black president, would have looked as the economy surged in the 2010s! Think how many Latino homeowners wouldn't have been wiped out!

But you choked, Ben. Just like a true Swamp Creature.

OK. But what do we do now?

I think that the basic problem is that governments are used to betting the whole country -- with the National Debt -- on their projects. And why not? If Zimbabwe or Venezuela goes down, the ruler himself doesn't suffer. Not so long as there are Swiss bank accounts.

Let me make this clear. When the ruling class bets the country with debt, or when the ruling class forces college students to bet their futures with college debt, the ruling class usually doesn't suffer if the bet doesn't pan out. But when ordinary people get over their heads with debt then they certainly do suffer.

The fact is that debt is always a big bet on the future. It bets the borrower's future income on a nice house now, and if the borrower fails and the loan can't be fully liquidated then it is the lender that takes the fall. And the borrower is wiped out. But the point of debt financing is that it is supposed to be low risk. Sorry, Charlie. In my book 80 percent 30-year mortgages are not low risk. Not for the borrower; not for the lender. That's why we have all the federal guarantees and subsidies: to paper over the real risks.

We have securities for high risk propositions: they are called stocks, equities. They are really cool.

The problem is that the way that governments finance their wars is by betting the whole country on winning the war by flooding the economy with its debt securities and its paper money. Strictly speaking, wars should be financed with equity. But they are not. Because governments can afford to break the rules, particularly when the whole country is at stake. And maybe that is as it should be.

But should the government bet the country on "affordable housing?" Or on grandpa's Social Security pension?  Or grandma's Medicare health care? Or Suzie Snowflake's college education? I don't think so. And the reason is that government just cannot bear to pull the punchbowl away in the middle of the party; they just do not have a clue when it is time to adjust things and maybe pull back a bit. And anyway, politicians and bureaucrats and regulators don't have a clue. You might say that someone should have known in the 2000s that something was out of kilter with housing. No doubt. So who does the "someone" button-hole? President George W. Bush? But he was executing on a cunning plan to get Latino votes with affordable housing. Liberals that care about the poor and marginalized? But they are clueless about anything except the latest liberal political scam.

Yeah. My solution to housing crises and crashes and so on is to get the government out of it, and that the government only borrow for wars. But I do demand that the little Ben Bernanke of the next panic do his job and act as lender of last resort, and get with the program.

In the Crash of 2008 you may have heard about the $700 billion bailout. But did you know about the $16 trillion guarantee of money-market mutual funds? Check it out. Do you think that the feds could have managed the whole thing with a federal guarantee instead of the $700 billion TARP game? Who knows.

The main thing to understand about governments and ruling classes and Deep States and Swamps is that they are idiots. They really do not have a clue what they are doing. So the less money they get their hands on the better.

So why doesn't the rest of America agree with me? Are they dumb or something, or am I.

A Highly Satisfactory Tech Experience

Lady Marjorie and I are taking a trip to India in December, and the question arose: what should we do about cell service? Last time we went, in early 2009, we just went without. But we survived on wi-fi in the hotels. And I managed to update usgovernmentspending.com when the 2010 budget came out by finding a good wi-fi spot in the hotel in Pondicherry. I had loaded my little Dell laptop with all the stuff I needed do load up the budget data onto my provider's server.

But this is 2018, buster. So what about a SIM card for India? Last time I visited my daughter in France I got a temporary SIM card which worked OK, except for a dead period about a day in. Hey, said a friend of Marjorie's! Switch to Google's Project Fi, which allows calls and texts and data in most foreign countries. No extra charge -- most of the time!

Done deal, I said, and ordered up a new SIM card. It costs $20 a month for calls and text and $10 per GB with a max of $60 per month. That's great because I use very little data unless I'm out of town. Only problem is that I needed a new phone, because Google piggy-backs on whatever provider is available, and that needs a newer phone, Google said. So that was $200.

The conversion from my existing Ting service was nominal, except it took almost 48 hours to start receiving texts. Pretty soon I discovered that I would pay for exactly the data used, rather than for the next tranche as with my Ting account. Then I talked to a guy in the cell-phone industry, and he said that his Project Fi had worked in every foreign country except Oman. Oh man.

But the first real test was a trip to Sol-Duc Hot Springs resort in the Olympic National Park at the end of a 12 mile drive up from US 101. How well did Project Fi do in the all-American wilderness?

Last year when we drove up to Sol-Duc I lost my Ting signal (actually T-Mobile) before the turnoff to Sol-Duc, and Lady Marjorie lost Verizon at Mile 7 on the Sol-Duc road. No cell service -- and no wi-fi -- at Sol-Duc. Sorry pal!

But this time both Lady Marjorie's Verizon and my new Project Fi were good up till almost Mile 12. Still no cell service at the Sol-Duc resort itself. They say that Project Fi does not use Verizon, but it sure looked as though it was using Verizon on the Sol-Duc road, especially as both the Project Fi phone and the Verizon phone lost signal at exactly the same point.

That was Wednesday. Today, Thursday, we drove down the Sol-Duc road to a parking spot between Mile 7 and 8 and got signal and data. So I could post my blog post and Lady Marjorie could answer dozens of texts and emails. Then back up into the wilderness. What a world!

New Rules: The border of the civilized world is the border between signal and no signal. Beyond the boundary of cell service there be dragons!

The next test is to go up to Canada and see if Project Fi performs up there. If it does, I think that Lady Marjorie will convert to Project Fi too. Then we will be able to text each other from the front seat to the back seat on the road in India. For free. Providing we are not off-piste in some national park, surrounded by tigers.

Daniel Quinn's Rickety Path to the Future

In a way, Daniel Quinn of Beyond Civilization is just like me. He is trying to find a way out of the dreadful hierarchical culture in which we find ourselves. But he and I have rather different ideas about what is good and what is bad and what needs to change.

In the Good Old Days, he says, humans lived it tribes and were as happy as tribes -- or lions and tigers and bears. But then came the agricultural revolution and hierarchy, with Pharaohs at the top and serfs at the bottom. A great life for Pharaohs, but not so good for the folks that had to build the pyramids.

See, he writes, a tribe is like a circus, where everybody pitches in and does their bit without griping. Everybody instinctively understands that everybody has to pitch in to make the circus a success.

Except, old chum, that tribes and circuses come and go like the wind, and when they go they disappear into the void, known only to God. Whereas the Pharaoh and his food-built pyramids lasted for a thousand years.

The thing about the agricultural age is that it formalized hierarchy. Don't tell me that the old tribes didn't have hierarchy; of course they did, just as the troops of the great apes have hierarchy. It's just that it seems that all the cultures of the agricultural age had big-time hierarchy, with kings and armies and priests and then serfdom and slavery for the guys at the bottom.

Now Daniel Quinn claims that the lost Central American civilizations -- Maya, Toltec, and whatnot -- mysteriously ended and nobody knows why; on his view it seems that the people, the proles, just "walked away." And so can we.

Hey, Dan. I doubt it. Think Venezuela. The proles are perfectly happy to live in a vile hierarchical Bolivarian regime. And when the whole thing starts to fall apart they don't demand reform. They just sit there taking their bennies from the regime until the money runs out. Then, and only then, they start to walk away, as the Venezuelans are now doing.

Here's what I think really happens when things start to go wrong. The people rebel, whether it is the peasants with pitchforks of the early Second Millennium, Walt Tyler and all, or the Captain Swing agricultural laborers smashing the threshing machines, or the Luddites smashing machine looms, or the workers in the late 19th century getting shirty during capitalistic financial panics and depressions. But their rebellions are the useless actions of cornered rats. Now maybe this is just the slave behavior of the lower orders of the agricultural age carried over into the new world order of capitalism, but I doubt it. Otherwise we wouldn't talk about cornered rats.

But let us be clear. The point about agricultural empires is that there are a lot more people living in them than there used to be when everyone was just living in a tribal village. And this is a big thing.

So when an agricultural empire breaks up and grass starts growing up in the cracks, and people start walking away, what you don't see is the millions of people that are dying in the process as the agricultural empire resets to village. This is because of the millions that did not survive to tell their tale. All stories in this world are survivor stories. The rest are only known to archaeologists thousand of years later.

What Daniel Quinn wants us all to do is to break out of the hierarchical civilizational model and start inventing new tribes, where people come together spontaneously to form some enterprise, kinda like the Eastern Mountain News that he and his wife and a couple of other folks created out of nothing in Madrid, New Mexico, a while back. They just paid themselves out of the proceeds each week. No wages, no benefits. They just adjusted their demands on the organization to fit the proceeds.

Couldn't agree more, pal. Only your ignorance of the nature of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, and the price system, and the fact that your Beyond Civilization came out just before the Tech Startup Culture became a thing means that you really do not get what is trying to be born right here in the good old USA.

For instance, you don't have many nice things to say about today's billionaires, the Bill Gateses of the world. But do you know what I heard from a guy that heard it from a guy that spoke to Gates? He asked Bill Gates why he bothered to take Microsoft public. And Gates replied that he did it in order to share the company with the employees. And that is the implied contract in all tech startups. If we make it big then we go public and everybody gets a bit of the loot.

Quinn is also a bit dismissive of the wage culture, taking the Marxist view that wages dehumanize the workers, making them into mere drones. But the thing about wages is that they remove from the workers the day-to-day risks of a farm or of a business, which means that the owners and the bond-holders have to take a bigger risk. I suspect that most people really do not like to shoulder the day to day risks of life, and that this goes deeper than the learned subordination of the agricultural age. In fact, I believe that business owners are pretty cunning about this. They provide a lot more than just cash wages, such  as health insurance and pensions and vacations and sick leave and stuff. All that makes it hard for wage-earning employees to pick up and leave all that for another job.

In other words I'd say that most people just want to belong and stay where they belong. They do not get up and git unless they are well-and-truly forced to do.

Now I believe that our modern capitalistic era represents an amazing New Dawn for the human race, because through the nature of the price "system" and the marketplace, we folks today are constantly informed of the value of the service we provide our fellow humans. And if we try a new venture the price system pretty quickly tells us whether we have a good idea or not. This is radically different from the hierarchical static world of the agricultural age where most people were subordinate peasants and had to be because of their intrinsic vulnerability to pirates and plunderers.

In other words I would say that many of us humans are willing and eager to invent a new form of tribalism, of spontaneous belonging and enterprise if it weren't for stick-in-the-muds like Daniel Quinn that have worshipped too long at the altar of environmentalism, sustainability and divided the world into good people like him that want to save the world from "maximum harm" and bad people that just want to get on. Daniel Quinn has listened to too much of the bad news about violence and poverty and waste and poisoning of the environment to have read the counter-narrative of today's reduced violence of 5 violent deaths per 100,0000 in the capitalist world against 50 per 100,000 in the Medieval world and 500 per 100,000 in the hunter-gatherer world. Or that when societies get to about $10,000 per capita GDP they start cleaning up the environment. Etc.

But we humans are afflicted by the folks running a Great Reaction that are trying to hobble and prevent what Quinn says he is trying to encourage.

OK, great. Only, to my mind, Daniel Quinn has his feet planted too firmly in the camp of the Great Reaction to really help with the folks walking away from the crumbling wreck of what he calls the "Taker" culture.

For instance, our liberal friends make a big deal about the sins of slavery. Yeah, well, according to Max Weber and others slavery was a particular characteristic of the agricultural age. And it is curious that on the very cusp of the transition from the agricultural age slavery reaching its most perfect manifestation in the slave sugar plantation in which slaves cultivated the efficient C4-photoynthesis cane sugar plant and got fed with C4 corn. But in the new age slavery doesn't pay, according to Weber. We need more responsible workers now. So we made a big deal about the immorality of slavery, had a knockdown-drag-out Civil War about it and then had the early 20th century wars which we may hope were the last hurrah of slavery, including drafted soldiers (really slave soldiers).

So I dare say that the new models of enterprise in the Internet age will just throw the old ways in the garbage can of history.

But I don't know if Daniel Quinn will really like it. There is a lot in him that seems to revel in the old ways of Good and Bad, with Nietzsche's "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves, as in non-sustainable practices that are Going To Kill the Planet!

And he seems especially immured in the creative culture that, in my view, is a poor substitute for the creation and rearing of children. His Ishmael novel is apparently about a kid that was real nice and sang and played the guitar, but never found a purpose to get his life going. So he committed suicide. Well, since the kid didn't find a girl and marry her and get some children going I can understand that. And I notice that Quinn mentions his wife Rennie but no children.

Here's my problem with this. I suspect the reason that humans got with the hierarchy and the serfdom and the slavery and the exploitation of the agricultural age is that it was better at getting kids on the ground and out of the nest that you could get from life in the hunter-gatherer tribe. Agriculture sustains a lot more humans on this planet than hunter-gathering. Energy-fed industry sustains a heck of a lot more humans than agriculture, although there is a risk, which liberals obsess over, that we may kill the planet in the process. But hey, liberals, maybe not!

Because however we argue about Pharaohs enslaving us and "maximum harm" and growing our own food instead of just picking it up as we wander through the forest, there is one and one only point to human life. Generation. The next generation. If we get the next generation on the ground and out of  the nest, then we are doing OK, at least for now. But anyone that doesn't put kids on the ground is not pulling their weight. And in my view anyone that doesn't put kids on the ground is liable to suffer from many of what the Freuds and the Jungs called "neuroses," whatever that meant. I guess we call it "mental health problems" now. Quinn thinks that the incidence of mental health problems is way up. I wonder why.

Right now I am reading the last part of Nietzsche's Also Spake Zarathustra in which he is supposed to show us what he really means by the higher man, or Superman, or Übermensch. That is what we are all working on, Nietzsche, Chantrill, and Quinn. But what, Zarathustra, is that higher man really going to be, presuming he won't be the Blond Beast of whom we've heard tell?

Stay tuned till next week.