The Problem with Legislating Through the Courts

What is the Constitution for? And the courts of law?

It's a good question, and I doubt if anyone has a firm answer.

We can see, however, that the Constitution is still a bloody miracle, and its Electoral College a proof of God's existence. Why? Because the Electoral College is an immensely cunning institution that forces presidential candidates to campaign in the tossup states. So, to win the election you have to put together a coalition of states. And remember this here is the United STATES of America.

The courts of law, I would argue, are for the discovery of issues. Every suit at law is a mess of dashed expectations, and it is the job of the lawyers and judges to try and clear away the brushwood and figure out how to limit the damage.

But our modern elite has decided to use the Constitution and the courts to legislate issues that could not pass in the legislature. It's not surprising. The Founders called the judicial branch of government the aristocratic branch. There's a natural temptation among the best people to push their agenda through the courts because they have the inside track on smart people that have a way with words.

The problem is that judicial decisions aren't really dispositive. Here's an issue that is dispositive. Back in the 1980s, with the rise of the religious right, the religious right in Washington State put up a couple of Initiatives to limit abortion. The Initiatives failed to pass. So abortion is not an issue in Washington State, because the people have spoken.

The problem with Roe v. Wadeισ is that the people have not spoken. Abortion, if you ask me, should be decided in the legislature, not in the courts. See, one thing about legislation is that in order to pass it you have to put together a coalition of interests, and you have to negotiate with all the interests before you cobble together the ugly thing we call a compromise.

Right now, with Roe v. Wade, we have an abortion law that suits the well-born white women that need to control their baby-making so it doesn't interfere with their careers. For lower class women it is different.

Often, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is encouraged by the “sperm donor” who threatens abandonment when faced with the responsibilities of child rearing. The patient is often subjected to family pressure... [to] "make others happy".

What current abortion law does not do it suit the tastes and morals of ordinary middle-class women for whom family and children are the meaning of life. Notice the difference between classes. For the well-born the issue is fitting child-bearing in with all the other things in a rich and blended life. For the lower class it is about deferring to other peoples' needs.

And that is a microcosm of life today in the good old USA. The left is all about implementing its version of the good life, and feeling good about advocating for victims. The middle class is just trying to live its life of following the rules, going to work, obeying the law and wiving and thriving.

And right now the middle class thinks it don't get no respect.

The problem is that the middle class has not really had a say in a bunch of things because they have been decided in the courts, the aristocratic branch of government, rather than in the legislature, the democratic branch of government.

And the ruling class of the better educated and their clients among the traditionally marginalized are terrified that if they lose control of the courts then their whole world view comes crashing down: abortion, gay marriage, diversity and inclusion, government-worker pensions.

Hey, ruling class. Maybe it wasn't so smart of you to found your house upon the shifting sands of the courts rather than the rock of the legislature.

Trump Russia is a Case of Government Operating as Designed

In a piece about the culture at the FBI during the late spying operation on the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump, Victor Davis Hanson asks the question about the culture at the FBI.

[If the culture of the FBI is] exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top... where exactly [did] Peter Strzok (22 years in the FBI) learned that he had a right to interfere in a U.S. election to damage a candidate that he opposed.

And

why would an Andrew McCabe (over 21 years in the FBI) think he had the duty to formulate an “insurance policy” to take out a presidential candidate?

The answer, of course, is quite simple. The whole point of an administrative bureaucracy like an army or a government department is to put the chaps in the hierarchy and especially on the front line into a situation where the natural and obvious thing is to follow the orders from on high.

So if someone in the hierarchy decides upon some course of action, it is sensible for everyone under him to follow orders. Indeed, it would be crazy for anyone not to follow orders. That way leads to a quick exit from the bureaucracy and no pension thank you very much.

So the "widespread wrongdoing at the top" is probably merely "the top" following orders from their superiors in the White House -- or perhaps following the nods and winks from the White House.

Plus, given that everyone knew that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, it would be career suicide to start balking at the effort to keep an eye on Trump, just in case. People in the new Clinton White House would know about the problem chappie at the FBI that wasn't on the team.

The unusual thing is for the director of some bureau to ignore orders from on high, as the guy in charge of the Venona project intercepting and decrypting Soviet communications did back in the 1940s.

The only reason that Venona survived, allowing us to later reconstruct the fateful politics of that era, was that the determined Military Intelligence officer in charge of the project risked a court-martial by directly disobeying the explicit Presidential order and continuing his work.

Normally the bureaucrat in question will go with the flow, because that is the natural and physical thing for a guy in an administrative hierarchy to do.

So, before criticizing any government department or program for its failures, one must start from the fact that 97.2 percent of bureaucrats are going to go with the flow and do whatever they are told. Because they know what is good for them.

Thus, it is laughable to criticize, for example, former Nazi officials for "following orders." Anyone saying that hasn't stopped for a moment to think about the nature of an administrative hierarchy. What is remarkable is to discover a mid-level bureaucrat that is not following orders.

And on that front the case of Bruce and Nellie Ohr is instructive.

Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was perfectly positioned to advance the Russia collusion narrative. He had a rare set of relationships -- ties to opposition researchers and the FBI -- and would use his links to both in 2016 to connect federal law enforcement to those advancing Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.

See, his wife Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS, the chaps that were financing the Steele dossier. So

when Steele invited her [Nellie] and her husband [Bruce] to breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel on July 30, 2016. “Chris Steele was hoping that Bruce would put in a word with the FBI to follow up on the information in some way.”

And he did, because he knew FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Lisa Page. Yeah. So personal relationships can trump the hierarchical relationships of the bureaucracy.

How dare, how dare those scumbags hold that meeting on My Birthday!

And, wouldn't you know, Bruce Ohr never mentioned on his Form 278e Public Financial Disclosure Report, as he was required to do, that his wife was something more than an "independent contractor."

My point is that if you don't want government functionaries spying on political campaigns or putting a word in with a friend among the higher-ups then you shouldn't give government the power in the first place.

Because the mid-level functionary is normally going to "follow orders" from the chap at the top. And the only time he is likely to deviate from that rule is when he has some personal relationship that encourages him to inject that into the bureaucratic process.

That's what happened in the Trump Russia spying operation and that is what will happen next time. Because that is how administrative bureaucracies operate and that is how the guys at the top want them to operate.

Why Have Humans Taught Ourselves to Hate Sex and Ourselves?

One the the benefits of reading Nietzsche is that he throws up ideas as a challenge. He makes an outrageous comment, and he makes you think.

The major thing for me is Nietzsche's attack on Good and Evil and "the priests" that taught us to hate ourselves.

In the old days, Nietzsche proposes, we hated our enemies as good manly men should do. But now we are wimps and last men.

That made me think: What is the point of things like Original Sin? And then I decided that the reason was probably that when people live in large communities, cities even, the men can't go around hating their enemies all the time. The city is about cooperation and the division of labor, in which no man is an island, entire of itself. So quarrelsome men are a problem.

Back-biting women are something else, but we are not talking about that today.

So I would say that, in a city, it is social beneficial if people look at themselves and blame themselves occasionally rather than doing the usual thing and blaming other people for everything. OK, maybe, maybe not. Do you have a better idea?

So now I am reading Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, part one of his Deptford trilogy. (I bought the book at a used bookstore in Coupeville, WA, and the guy in the store wanted to look at the first page: Yes, he said, this is the very book I first read 40 years ago). The first part of the book deals with small-town life in Deptford, near Toronto, and the whole question of dirty sex.

Why, I thought, has this notion of sex being dirty come about? And then I came up with an answer. If you teach women that sex is dirty then they will believe it is dirty like the Good Little Girls they are. And that means that they will have a lot less sex than if they have been carefully taught to look forward to a nightly roll in the hay with hubby. And they will likely have less children. So maybe the "sex is dirty" meme is merely the birth control of olden times. It is curious, is it not, that the modern era celebrates sex-is-fun with the full benefit of the Pill and abortion on demand. OK. Maybe, maybe not. Do you have a better idea?

Another interesting meme in Fifth Business is that the women -- in 1908 -- run the village, mainly because the men do not want to ruin their home lives by disagreeing with their wives. Hello patriarchy?

Do you men connect with this? That it is just not worth proving your point with your wife? Because domestic tranquility? I talked with a guy 15 years ago that spoke about The Catalog. Every time he and his wife had a disagreement his wife would recite The Catalog: all the bad things he had done since they had first met.

OK. I admit I am not impartial in this. I take the position that everything the left proposes is a Bad Idea. The only question is to determine Why.

So there you have it. We think used to think sex is dirty because it helped control over-population, and we hate ourselves because it helps us live in a city of strangers.

There is more stuff like this out there. I know it.

The Left's Practice of Politics

Let us try to understand what the left is doing with its political practice.

I maintain that politics is all about protection. The only warrant for government is existential peril, meaning usually that "our people" are threatened by some invader and conqueror. A people thus threatened are going to coalesce around some leader that promises to protect them from the invader.

When I say "our people" I invoke my theory of "fake tribalism" from my reading of H.R. Hallpike in How We Got Here and On Primitive Society. Hallpike represents modern anthropology as finding that tribalism is a new human invention. The hunter-gatherers didn't have it; members of a hunter-gatherer band that got into an argument with their brothers would just leave and join another band. Tribalism didn't really start until humans started living in villages where they didn't all know each other, and started to coalesce into groups of "we" that protected each other against some "they" in the village. Human tribalism is a recent phenomenon, that probably goes back a mere 15,000 years, max.

In other words, humans in villages that exceeded about 2,500 inhabitants organized themselves exactly like a modern city of immigrants that sorts itself out into ethnic neighborhoods. So I interpret the ethnic neighborhoods of modern cities as people of a previous political entity coming together in a strange land for self-protection.

So I maintain that if you are a would-be leader your task is to define a threat and organize an "our people" to fight that threat. Equally, if you are a group of people that find yourselves under threat then you need to find a leader and a means to forge common identity and interest and use that as a basis for organizing a new tribe.

I propose that the formation of nation states in Europe was a response to a threat, that if the groups of principalities in an area did not combine into a nation then they would be vulnerable to conquest and domination by the neighbor that was so organized.

I argue that the fundamental invention of the left is to convert this notion into organization of sub-national tribes. Thus Marx proposed the tribe of "the workers" that needed to combine under the leadership of vanguard intellectuals and activists in order to avoid being annihilated -- "immiserated" --by bourgeois capitalist predators. I am not arguing here about whether Marx was right in his analysis, but that he certainly succeeded in persuading a bunch of people that he was right.

Notice that there are two possibilities for the emergence of a tribe of "the workers." First would be the spontaneous eruption of a sense of threat among the workers resulting in a search for a leader to protect them. The other possibility is for someone wanting to lead the workers reaching out to them and teaching them to experience themselves as a group under threat.

In my judgment the spontaneous organization of the workers would only occur in a period when the workers were experiencing serious existential peril, such a decline in their industry that would encourage their employers to cut wage rates, or in a general economic crisis. The first kind of action has historically occurred in riots of "saboteurs," or workers making "sabots," or in the riots of agricultural workers in England during the "Captain Swing" riots in the 1820s when landless agricultural laborers were finding themselves replaced by threshing machines. A general economic crisis involving universal suffering tended, in olden times to involve "bread riots," or the lower orders looting food to stay alive.

Leftists have amended and extended the Marxian notion into a general politics of victimhood, in which well-born activists scour the world for a new victim class to represent. This usually involves actual outreach by the activist in question and "raising the consciousness" of the individuals in the target group to teach them how they are victims and how political action would improve their situation. In other words, activists do not wait for people to discover their oppression; it is the job of the activist to discover oppression and then organize the oppressed into a political movement. This was the script being followed by "community organizer" Barack Obama when he went as a young man to South Chicago to organize the laid-off steelworkers there.

Of interest is whether the well-born activist actually helps. Does he identify a problem? Is it a problem that politics can help rectify? Does he propose a solution that would actually help? Will his solution help long-term, or only short-term? And how would he or anyone else know?

We shall return to investigate various left-wing organizing attempts and see whether leftism works.

Usually the Pessimists Are Right

Our age is an Age of Progress. We all live in the confident hope that things are getting better. But, as Nicholas Phillips argues in "The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism," progress is the rare moment of calm after a storm of failure. Great products do not appear by magic; they are the net result of many failed experiments.

Ninety percent of startups and 70 percent of small businesses fail. Just 56 percent of patent applications are granted, and over 90 percent of those patents never make any money. Each year, 30,000 new consumer products are brought to market, and 95 percent of them fail.

Actually, we should rather say that we humans are the complete slaves of prophecy. We are either predicting the End of the World, or the Beginning of the Millennium. In fact, what really happens is that we muddle through, with "we" being the survivors. What happened to the failed businesses, the 95 percent of new consumer products? The soldiers of the defeated empire? They disappear into the void.

What is interesting, I have come to believe in the last few weeks, is "disconfirmation." What happens as you are running a business startup and the numbers just aren't adding up? Initially, you redouble you efforts. What happens if you are predicting runaway global warming and the global temperature readings fail to confirm the predictions of your climate models? Initially, you damn all doubters to hell as "climate deniers."

But at some point...

I think that is the way to understand our liberal and lefty friends. They have been taught, from an early age, to believe in the progressive arc of history, that their political ideas -- all of them -- would inevitably lead to a just and peaceful society. But of course they haven't, for that is not the way of the world. It may be, indeed, that hidden in the pile of lefty doctrine is a good idea that will save the world. But probably, if we apply the lesson of "70 percent of small businesses fail," it is likely that there is only a small chance that leftism will really redeem the world.

Probably, the real outcome will be that a couple of lefty ideas get to be permanent and the rest of its ideology gets thrown out and forgotten. After a bloody and vengeful transition.

But meanwhile our lefty friends are living in the throes of "disconfirmation." The workers aren't living happily ever after, despite a century of the welfare state. Women aren't happy campers, despite the vote and abortion and the sexual revolution and careers. Blacks aren't vaulting into the middle class, despite a half-century of quotas and preferences since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. And now Trump.

What would you do if you were a lefty? It's easy for a conservative to say that the only sensible thing to do is "give it up, lefty." But, according to the notion of prophecy, people don't give up on their cherished beliefs. Not yet. And so our lefty friends are running around blaming Russia and "hate" and "extremism" and racism, sexism, homophobia and every other -ism and -phobia they can think of.

And of course they are covering their ears, shouting I can't hear you, and deplatforming people they don't like. Of course they are. That is what humans do when things start going wrong.

The one thing they are not ready to do is give it up. And they are right not to. After all, when you don't succeed, try, try again. And so urges every prophet, every startup CEO, every general exhorting his troops, every hopeful inventor.

But if you redouble your efforts, and borrow more money to get across the finish line, and finally send the Old Guard against the British squares at the Battle of Waterloo, and then you lose, the failure is complete and all hopes die in the maelstrom of defeat.

Notice that all the old rules, about not using police power to spy on the opponent's campaign, about conceding elections, about not gaming the voting system, about avoiding insults, are all devices to keep the natural human prophetic and conspiratorial instincts in check. Because the prophetic style ends in witch hunts and Inquisitions and massacres, and we don't want that.

Easy for you to say.

Always Celebrate Our Soldiers on D-Day

Rule One for me is always celebrate the soldiers that we sent into our wars. So President Trump exactly hit the spot in Portsmouth and in Normandy when he eulogized the brave men that did their bit in that remarkable seaborne invasion.

Doesn't matter if they were conscripts or volunteers, men or women, black or white, good or bad. We honor our veterans and we especially honor the fallen.

But what gets obscured in the celebration of the ordinary soldier and his extraordinary sacrifice is the bigger question. How come you ruling-class geniuses screwed up?

We elect and then put up with political leaders because we need them to keep us safe. So, whenever there is a war, especially in the modern era, it is because the leaders screwed up.

How come World War I? If the Brit and French leaders had an ounce of sense they would have accommodated the rise of Germany without a stupid bloody war.

How come World War II? If the Allies hadn't humiliated and plundered Germany, and if the US Federal Reserve hadn't blundered in 1929-33 in its first outing as "lender of last resort" then the Germans would never have turned to an Adolf Hitler.

Like I say. Hitler -- and Literally-Hitler in his various GOP incarnations -- is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have failed. And do they ever!

Hey kids! Notice that Germany is now the hegemon of Europe, with France as its comical sidekick, for "there is no slander in an allowed fool." So what were all those wars about? We could have had Germany as the hegemon in 1920 and there is no telling what the Germans might have invented after Kantian and Nietzschean philosophy, modern chemistry, relativity, and quantum mechanics. And don't forget Wagner, the guy that invented movie music.

We properly remember those brave Americans that gave their youth, and often their lives, to the nation's wars. But I also want to remember the millions of others that suffered and died. The millions of poor bloody Germans. The tens of millions of poor bloody Russians. The millions of Jews.

Because all the ordinary people, good, bad and ugly, anywhere, have no option. They get swept up into the power projects of their leaders and they are the ones that suffer and die.

And if they die, it is curtains, the snuffing out of all that might have been.

AirPods, EarPods: Can You Spell Privilege?

Up until a month or two ago, I had no idea about the modern world, that you are nobody unless you have AirPods, those skinny white Bluetooth earbuds from Apple that seem to cost about $139.99 on Amazon. And that say so much about you and your impeccable taste.

As opposed to earbuds for ordinary mortals that seem to range from $19.99 to $49.99. Really! I had no idea.

And then yesterday I was driving in Seattle's yeasty Capitol Hill, where all the gays and lesbians hang out -- and the millennial wannabees wearing artistical black. And there was this guy, wearing an artistical black tee-shirt with "Equality." in big letters across the front.

And guess what! This young man, mad for Equality, was wearing AirPods. (Or maybe he was wearing fake AirPods. You never know.)

I almost rolled down the window to shout "Hey, pal. AirPods have nothing to do with Equality."

Now I like to say to all my liberal friends that Only Use Apple, that I know my place, and that Apple is Not for the Likes of Me.

Because the whole point of Apple, whether iPhones or MacBook Airs -- which have those discreet illuminated Apple logos on the back -- or Apple TV, is that You Can't Afford It.

$1,000 for an iPhone? How about $200 for my Moto 6?

$1,000 for a MacBook Air? How about $139.99 for my Dell Chromebook?

$200 for an Apple TV? How about Amazon's Fire Stick which was $50 and has just dropped to $27 "which is completely unheard of."

$1,000 for an iMac? How about $115 for a refurbished Windows PC?

And now some babe has written a girly article in The Atlantic about "Airpods and the Case for Constant Wear" in case some guy ejaculates in front of you on the subway. It seems that the white Beckies are using their AirPods to avoid interacting with the POCs. Who Knew?

I know. My thought exactly. Talk about White Privilege, darling. You Beckies have No Idea. None.

But the most delicious thing is that these liberal snobs have No Idea what utter snobs and shallow conventional-wisdom repeater stations they are. They think they are the Special People on the cutting edge. Why, all the best people think like them.

Really, all this is good. It shows that our liberals friends have No Idea.

But we already knew that.

Hmm. I just checked on the Apple site. AirPods are $159 with the regular charging case and $199 with the wireless charging case.  Who knew?

OK, I know. There is such a thing as Reverse Snobbery. To tell the world that you are not one of the Special People that wear all the right brands, but an even more Special Person that takes care not to wear all the right brands..

But that is another story.