Things I did not know, vol XCIII

A bunch of States have State Dinosaurs? 

I guess that since it's true that nobody's Life, Liberty, or Property are safe when the Legislature is in session, I have to approve of all the time that went into passing these bills. 

Is there an Extinction Level Event coming for the Deep State?

An Extinction Level Event is when something - we typically don't really understand what - causes a mass die-off, with 60% or more of species disappearing. The most famous of these was the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs (if you believe that; I'm skeptical that the answer to their demise is so neat and tidy).

Well Donald Trump said he's going to appoint Elon Musk to lead a "Government Efficiency Commission":

Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”

There's no need to look at Tesla's 50% Electric Vehicle market share, or compare SpaceX's launch rate to, well, the rest of the world combined.  Most relevant to this discussion is how Elon cut 80% of Twitter's headcount, turning the company around.

Even though reports have Government employees cutting back expenditures in anticipation of potential cuts, lots of folks are skeptical that this can be done at all.

I'm not one of the skeptics, because I've seen this my very own self, in my career at Three Letter Intelligence Agency.  It was the mid-1980s and I was a wet-behind-the-ears Electronics Engineer in the COMSEC R&D organization.  Their recent triumph was the introduction of the STU-III secure telephone.

The STU-III was a technological marvel, providing high level (Type 1) encryption in a telephony device that, well, worked like a telephone.  And it was delivered 2 years early because of a manager who might be described as the 1980s COMSEC version of Elon Musk.

Walt Deeley was a very senior Intelligence Manager.  He is listed on the NSA's web site:

As Deputy Director of Communications Security in the early 1980s, Mr. Deeley pushed the development and deployment of the STU-III secure telephone, which has been called the most significant improvement to the security of government voice communications in fifty years. He perceived the need for a new approach, and deployed an affordable and effective telephone security system within two years.

...


Walter Deeley was known as a strong-willed manager who pushed his subordinates hard to get results. While a tough taskmaster, the technical advances and mission achievements he led made the United States more secure.

Bold added by me.  Let me give some additional color around that.  He was a legend in the COMSEC R&D organization.  His reputation was equal parts admiration and fear - it was almost like he who must not be named.  People remembered the careers he derailed in his quest for an encrypting telephone.

One story told to me by an old hand was how Deeley had come into the office one Saturday to see how the program was working.  He called down to the program office, and the phone rang and rang and rang.  Finally one guy who happened to be in the office on the weekend answered.  Deeley asked for the Program Manager.  When told that the PM wasn't in because it was a Saturday, Deeley told the guy who was there that he was the new PM and to see him first thing on Monday.  It was very Elon-Must-at-Twitter.

True story - at least I believed it was.  And I for sure wasn't the only one there who did.

So to those who say you can't change how the Government works, color me skeptical.  I'm skeptical because I've actually seen it change (well, heard from people who did).

The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the Federal Agencies.  I think the answer is to use business-as-usual: different offices play office politics against each other to get budget and headcount.  That's how the game is played.  So set up an incentive structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and duplications to save their own skins.  I expect that this would pay big dividends.

It's sort of like setting one type of dinosaur against another, in a battle to the death.

UPDATE 28 OCTOBER 2024 14:51: Elon says they can reduce the Federal budget by $2 Trillion.

It may be that my best year of posting was ten years ago

There were a lot of thoughtful posts that I put up in 2010 - and especially in the first half of 2010.  One of the reasons that I went through a "my best blogging days" funk in 2013 and 2014 was that maybe my best days were past by then.  I'm a little less convinced of this now, but there's no denying that the quality of the posts here were well above average ten years ago.

Ten years ago I put up this post, which presaged (but didn't predict) the Trump revolution.  Trump's use of social media to bypass the gatekeepers is as strong an example of disruptive innovation as you will ever see.  You can still hearing the roaring of the Never Trump Dinosaurs, enraged at the political asteroid that is upending their world.

[UPDATE 24 February 2020 11:59: Peter has an outstanding post with a ten year old discussion of the collapse of America's ruling class.  It dovetails with this very, very well. /UPDATE]

Originally posted 24 February 2010.

The intelligence of the political class

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

- Ambrose Bierce

Robert Bakker's monumentally interesting book The Dinosaur Heresies is a must-read for anyone who - like me - is a dino fan. In it, he argues convincingly that dinosaurs were warm blooded and led active lives. This view has, in the years since its 1986 publication, become more or less orthodox science.

He also argues - much less convincingly - that they were intelligent. It may be that we have poor ways to measure intelligence based on the fossil record, and in any case intelligence is probably overrated as a survival trait. But it seems to me that dinosaur's intelligence was, well, stupid.

They're not the only ones. George Will is by any rational measure a very intelligent man. Educated at Oxford and Princeton, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he embodies the virtues of what David Brooks called the "educated class".

And yet we see times when his intelligence is stupid, like his latest piece on Sarah Palin. He writes of populism, and misses not only center mass, but the entire target:

America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism. But the reaction against this must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. 

His analysis is logical, consistent, well thought out, and entirely wrong. The reason is that he's playing by the old rules, and hasn't adjusted to how the Internet has changed politics. There's no roadmap, and so the old careful analysis techniques - the weights assigned to various attributes that have led to success in the past - are no longer any guide.

Clayton Christensen wrote the single most terrifying business book I've ever read. In The Innovator's Dilemma, he says that it's obvious why badly-managed companies go out of business (they're badly managed, duh). He asks a very interesting question: why do well-managed companies go out of business? He says that it's all about managing innovation.

Christensen posits two types of innovation. Continuous innovation (what he calls sustaining technologies) is easy to manage: it's more of what we have, only better. Well managed companies excel at growing sustaining technologies. There are also revolutionary innovations (what he calls disruptive technologies) that change how the game is played. It doesn't matter how much better your buggy whip is, you won't be able to grow your business on that product line.

Companies almost always fail at managing disruptive technology transformations, because they are well managed. The entire corporate structure is based on producing and selling at a particular price point. A product that kills your cash cow because it's priced 50% lower probably can't be sold effectively at that company, no matter how brilliantly disruptive it is. IBM sold million dollar mainframe computers. While they certainly knew how to make minicomputers, all the incentives were for them to push customers to bigger and more expensive machines. Minicomputers couldn't become too compelling without undercutting the quarterly sales targets, and so DEC ate IBM's lunch. And then Compaq ate DEC's lunch with PCs.

There is a massively disruptive force reshaping politics today, and the current establishment doesn't know how to deal with it. And so they continue to do what they've always done, because it's what made them successful. Right now, they're dismissing the changes. Will, again:

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution. 

Ah, but what happens when populism no longer needs the press, because the Internet lets the movement organize without the help - and even against the efforts - of the current political gatekeepers? What happens to populism when it's combined with this disruptive innovation?

Walter Russell Meade gets it. The Tea Partiers may have been relegated to the Long Tail by the political gatekeepers, but they are a storming of the gates:

But you don’t have to buy every line item (or even any line item) in the emerging Tea Party program to see the movement’s potential. Its ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help’ of experts and professionals. No idea has deeper roots in American history and culture and by global standards Americans have historically distrusted doctors, lawyers, bankers, preachers and professors: everybody who presumes that their special insider knowledge gives them a special right to decide what’s best for the rest of us and historically no political force has been stronger than the determination of ordinary Americans to flatten the social and political hierarchy.

Now that's enabled by the disruptive technology of the Internet. George Will, despite all his intelligence - maybe because of his intelligence - cannot be a part of this New Revolution. He's made a highly successful career out of brilliantly managing sustaining political innovations. But the game has changed, and the emergence of talent from the Internet's Long Tail, without the need for the blessings of his educated class, seems to have him out of his depth. "Intellectual ordinariness"? He just doesn't see how Palin is harnessing the Internet better than anyone. She's brilliantly riding the disruptive wave.

He doesn't see, even though it's right before his eyes. His intelligence seems to be making him stupid. The dinosaurs smell a change in the air, and roar their defiance.

The Persecution of the Deplorables

To the commission chosen to superintend the sacrifices. From Aurelia Ammonous, daughter of Mystus, of the Moeris quarter, priestess of the god Petesouchos, the great, the mighty, the immortal, and priestess of the gods in the Moeris quarter. I have sacrificed to the gods all my life, and now again, in accordance with the decree and in your presence, I have made sacrifice, and poured a libation, and partaken of the sacred victims. I request you to certify this below.

- Certificate of required sacrifice to Emperor Decius, 250 AD

Haec pictura ab Wikipedia

The Roman Empire was massive, and even in the disastrous third century stretched from Scotland to Egypt.  Unlike the old Republic of four centuries before, it was not a single ethnic nation-state.  Instead, its 50 million subjects were from many different groups, all ruled by a single state apparatus.

Quite frankly, even in the 3rd century that state apparatus was pretty effective.  There were surprisingly few armed rebellions against Roman rule - the fighting was mostly civil war style battles between rival claims to the Imperial throne.

What held this vast and diverse population together was not a shared history or common language, but rather a shared acceptance of Roman political institutions as, if not just, then at least a damned sight better than the alternative.  Key to this acceptance was recognition of the office of Emperor as the head of the Roman world.

This is an enormously important point, and you really can't understand the remarkable success of the Roman Empire without knowing a bit of the official state propaganda about the office of the Emperor.  Patrick Wyman goes into this in some depth in episode 5 of his great Fall Of Rome podcast: Just How Screwed Up Was The Late Roman Empire?

You can't understand the persecutions of the Christians without understanding the propaganda about the Emperors.  The persecutions weren't about religion at all; instead, they were a mandatory, public acknowledgement of acceptance of that Imperial propaganda.  It was a matter of state security, you might say, and it's not accidental that you didn't see these persecutions during the height of the empire (Trajan through Marcus Aurelius), but rather during the difficult years of the third century when it looks for a while that things might fall apart.

The fly in the ointment, as you well know, is that the Christians did see this as religious, and a lot of martyrs filled out the list of saints.  Their clinging to their guns and religion was seen as subversive to the state in its hour of need.

We see this happening today.  Roseanne Barr's show was canceled because she sent out a supposedly racist tweet.  Disney's stated reason for killing their top show doesn't have a lot of credibility, because they also canceled Tim Allen's Last Man Standing show a year back.  It was their second most popular show at the time, and he hadn't made any comments like she did.  It was just here today, and gone tomorrow.

And does anyone remember Brendan Eich, the former head of the  Mozilla Foundation?  Gone, because he donated to a political campaign as a private citizen.  Beyond these shores, we see more of the same.  Tommy Robinson has been jailed in England because he speaks HateFacts™.  The EU just tried to keep a nationalist Italian government from forming - the reaction to the Italian election was so dictatorial that even George Soros tried to wave the EU off.  Seventy percent of College students support suppression of free speech on Campus.

It's all quite strange, unless you think about the Decian Persecutions.  The Global Elites are feeling threatened all over, just like the Roman Emperors did in 250 AD.  The elections of Donald Trump, Brexit, and populist revolts across western Europe show that the "glue" holding together the current Western Progressive Empire is breaking down.  The diverse populations that once accepted the rule of the Global Elite are now restive, and questioning the legitimacy of that elite.

And so the people must sacrifice to the Emperor or pay the consequences.

That means publicly mouthing the required platitudes about globalism, progressivism, diversity, and the rest of the pantheon of Imperial propaganda - this is to demonstrate the citizen's allegiance to the anointed rulers.

And those who don't - who, say, have a popular TV show that showcases conservative or libertarian or populist ideas running counter to that propaganda?  They have to go.  The elites must make an example of them, to influence weaker minds that might be wavering from full public support of the official Imperial propaganda.

It won't work, of course, any more than it worked for Decian or his successors.  What it did then was to harden the resolve of the persecuted Christians and build support for them among their non-Christian neighbors who were revolted at the senseless cruelty of the persecutions.  It is doing this today, as the legitimacy of the global elite and its imperial propaganda is rejected  by a growing number of Deplorables, world wide.  We know this because we see the persecutions, which are a result, not a cause.

The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the wind, and roar their defiance.

UPDATE 10 June 2018 16:08: Lots of examples of official and unofficial persecution here.

Trump's intellectual revolution

Isegoria finds a fascinating article (at Politico, of all places) that paints Steve Bannon as perhaps the most interesting man in Washington, D.C. - at least intellectually:

But if Bannon has been the driving force behind the frenzy of activity in the White House, less attention has been paid to the network of political philosophers who have shaped his thinking and who now enjoy a direct line to the White House.

They are not mainstream thinkers, but their writings help to explain the commotion that has defined the Trump administration’s early days. They include a Lebanese-American author known for his theories about hard-to-predict events; an obscure Silicon Valley computer scientist whose online political tracts herald a “Dark Enlightenment”; and a former Wall Street executive who urged Donald Trump’s election in anonymous manifestos by likening the trajectory of the country to that of a hijacked airplane—and who now works for the National Security Council.

Woah!  Readers not familiar with the concept of the "Dark Enlightenment" (and who are a glutton for punishment) will find this idea explored in a dozen or more posts here over the last 5 or 6 years.  It sets the stage for understanding Politico's article on what is really an intellectual revolution.  I'm kind of stunned to find this at ground zero of the Trump White House.

My take is that this is very, very bad news for the anti-Trump side.  All of the intellectual action for at least a couple of decades has been on the other side from them:

And thus we see described all we need to entirely understand Thomas Friedman's oeuvre: "adequately predictable".  While I disagree with much that is in the book (in this, I clearly benefit from knowing the history of the last 50 years, which Galbraith could not), this is a tour de forcewhich is an absolute pleasure to read.

It's also brought into sharper focus some of the things I've written in the last year, The Long Tail of the Internet and the Election of 2010, and especially The intelligence of the Political Class.  Really, all of the posts containing the line The dinosaurs smell a change in the air, and roar their defiance.  It's really all about a class that has lived comfortable and adequately predictable lives, now struggling in a suddenly unpredictable world.

And who are now finding that this intellectual revolution is at the center of the Trump revolution.

There's a lot to read in all these links, but this is big, big stuff.  I must say that I am more impressed with Donald Trump today than I was yesterday.  He doesn't think small or conventional thoughts, and it doesn't look like he surrounds himself with those that do.

Donald Trump: Ha, Ha, only serious

Computer programming culture (called "hacker" culture in the days before the term got co-opted by Black Hats; these were the original guys who figured out how to code supercomputers, the computers that landed Our Guys on the Moon, and who created the Internet) had a bunch of puns and plays on words.  This isn't surprising when you consider that most of these hackers were exceptionally bright and thought in ways very different from the mainstream.

You can find a huge collection of these in the Jargon File (highly recommended reading, but you are warned that you will lose hours reading through this).  Looking at the Donald Trump phenomenon, one of these sayings came to mind:

ha ha only serious

[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a wannabee, or in larval stage. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also hacker humor, and koan.

I think that Trump entered the campaign in a ha-ha-only-serious way: an ironic joke with a hard core of disquieting truth.  He was the only one on the stage who would say what the Political Class refused to say but what a large part of the Republic believed in their heart of hearts - but were not permitted to say in "polite society" because shut up, hater.

And every time he opens his mouth and emits what the Political Class deems to be a "gaffe", his poll numbers go up.  I don't think that anyone understands this, including Trump.  However, half of having luck is getting yourself in a position where you can be lucky, and my opinion is that Trump is almost certainly too opportunistic to let an opportunity like this pass.

I'm not the only one who seems to think this way.  Heartiste (WARNING!!! Site is extremely non politically correct and many people - including perhaps all of my Lady Readers - are very likely to be offended by other posts there.  This post is entirely safe except for Democrats) posts an email tip that he received from someone claiming insider knowledge about Trumps campaign:

I just got told by a friend that Trump hired the former lawfirm of the RNC.
Why does this matter?
Word on the street in Chattanooga (where Trump has and retains many high end connections) is that Trump went into the campaign with two intentions.
One was to ‘shake things up’.

The second was to raise his profile with Chinese investors for fund raising for a new casino.

He really didn’t intend to get big numbers in the US and didn’t intend to actually ‘go for the goal.’ Which was why he came in with no primary ground game. He didn’t intend to even get 5%.

With the recent success the question was ‘what now?’ Go for closing the deal or back out? Some of his more inflammatory comments were tests to see if he could flame out. And his poll numbers just rise.

If he has retained a political lawfirm it can only be to create a ground game.

There's a lot more about how this is very, very different from the way that the GOP Establishment runs campaigns.  If true, it may be game changing - it would certainly be very difficult for the Political Class to combat this.  Heartiste comments:

I don’t doubt Trump entered this race thinking he couldn’t win, and that his initial motivation was partly narcissistic (in fact all politicians are narcissists to a degree), partly self-aggrandizement. But then he saw that he could win, and that he had tapped a deep well of dissatisfaction among people by simply speaking his mind the way he likes to speak (i.e., not like a weeping p***y).

The level of dissatisfaction with the Political Class in this country is at epidemic proportions.  The Political Class has assumed that if they offer the populace no real choice, that they can continue with their binge of crony capitalism and keep getting away with their lies.  And now someone has tapped into that dissatisfaction in a way that they may not be able to thwart.

Is this a good thing?  Beats me - he seems a bit Caesarish for my taste.  But the screams of the Political Class (including the media, but I repeat myself) are deafening.  Remember, it's the kicked dog that yelps, and I have precisely zero sympathy for any of them.

The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze and roar their defiance.

Anarcho-Capitalism 2.0

One of the big tech buzz phrases lately is "the Internet of Things".  Moore's Law has suggested that computing power and memory roughly double ever 18 months.  It's gotten to the point where your cell phone doesn't just have more computing power than the systems that plotted the Moon landing, it has millions of times more power than that.  The trajectory is smaller, faster, cheaper, less power draw.

I myself have been playing this tech game for so long that I remember the ROACH chip - the Router On A CHip.  That's so pedestrian now as to be all quaint and retro.  A smartphone is only possible because all the myriad components (and their connecting communications busses) have long since collapsed into a single flake of silicon.

And so to the Internet Of Things.  What happens when computers appear in anything?  Camp Borepatch has six (!) heating/cooling zones, with smart thermostats that talk to each other over internal wiring.  The last owner put all that in, and the technology is likely nearly ten years old.  Your car has dozens of computers.  The IPv6 address space has billions and billions of unique addresses, so all of these can be Internet enabled, allowing them to talk to each other and work cooperatively to solve problems that nobody has thought of before, because positing a solution would have seemed absurd on its face.

Silicon Valley in general (and Cisco in particular) are all over this as the Next Big Thing.

The problem is that current Operating Systems stink.  More specifically, they were designed for the Apollo era - even Linux dates back to Unix which first got its stirrings in the 1960s.  The network is a marvel of redundancy and resiliency (as indeed DARPA had designed it to be, again, back in the '60s), but networks go down and we're quite a long way from applications that gracefully handle network outages.  The problem is that error handling is at the application level, which means that you have to write it for each of the apps on the system.  Every. Single. App.  It's like having to handle network addressing at the app level, rather than at the OS.  Actually, it's worse.

The current computing paradigm is broken when you think of it scaling to billions of processors distributed randomly around the world.  Too bad for the Internet Of Things.

Or is it?  Clark at Popehat has a very interesting (and a pretty technical) overview of Urbit, which shows the promise of shattering the data center into a billion shiny computing shards:

Nock programs are tree structures.


This is not unprecedented – Lisp ("The greatest single programming language ever designed.") does too.

And here – suddenly – the conceptual Legos start clicking together.

Because a Nock program is functional, it operates without caring what machine its on, what time it is, what the phase of the moon is.

Every Nock program is a tree, or a pyramid. Every subsection of the tree is also a tree. Meaning that each subsection of a Nock program is a smaller Nock program that can operate on any machine in the world, at any time, without caring what the phase of the moon is. Meaning that a Nock program can be sliced up with a high carbon steel blade, tossed to the winds, and the partial results reassembled when they arrive back wafted on the wings of unreliable data transport.

Nock programs – and parts of programs – operate without side effects. You can calculate something a thousand times without changing the state of the world. Meaning that if you're unsure if you've got good network connectivity, you can delegate this chunk of your program not just to one other machine, but to a thousand other machines and wait for any one of them to succeed.

Moore's Law says that all of these billions of network node devices will be smarter in 18 months - twice as smart.  As people replace (say) smart light bulbs in 5 years, that's 3 generations of performance improvement.  There will be 8 times the computing power available in the Internet Of Things - and Urbit/Nock let you harness that.

It actually lets anyone harness that:

Nock supports and assumes full encryption of data channels, so not only can you spread computation across the three machines in your home office, you can spread it across three thousand machines across the world.

The list goes on and on.

Envisioning and defining Nock took a stroke of genius. Implementing it, and Hoon, and Urbit, will be a long road.

But once it's all done, it will function like an amazingly solid, square, and robust foundation. All sorts of things that are hard now, because we have built our modern computational civilization on a foundation of sand will become easy. We have vast industries based around doing really hard work fixing problems that modern computing has but a Nock infrastructure would not – Akamai, for example, pulls in $1.6 billion per year by solving the problem that modern URLs don't work like BitTorrent / Urbit URLs.

When an idea, properly implemented, can destroy multiple different ten-billion-dollar-a-year-industries as a side effect it is, I assert, worth thinking about.

I imagine that some of you have been following the "Anarcho" part of all of this and wondering where the "Capitalism" part comes in.  That's it, right there.  With a billion networked computers all more powerful than the computer you're reading this on right now, computing ceases to be a scarce commodity.  This quite frankly turns the field of computer security on its head - while I don't know that this doesn't solve the problem of Denial Of Service, I don't know that it won't.  After all, if your computer (whatever that means in an Urbit world) is DDoS'ed, why couldn't your Nock programs just run somewhere else?

You can see why Cisco is pushing this so hard - the network essentially becomes the computer (as the old Sun Microsystems advert put it).  It makes Cisco's networking gear more valuable.

And now to the really subversive part.  Clark again:

Back in the early days of the internet when Usenet was cutting edge, there was a gent by the name of Timothy C May who formed the cypherpunk mailing list.
His signature block at the time read

Timothy C. May, Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of government.

I bring up his sig block because in list form it functions like an avalanche. The first few nouns are obvious and unimportant – a few grains of snow sliding. The next few are derived from the first in a strict syllogism-like fashion, and then the train / avalanche / whatever gains speed, and finally we've got black markets, and soon after that we've got the collapse of government. And it all started with a single snowflake landing at the beginning of the sig block.

Timothy C May saw Bitcoin. He saw Tor. He didn't know the name that Anonymous would take, and he didn't know that the Dread Pirate Roberts would run Silkroad, and he didn't know that Chelsea Manning would release those documents. …but he knew that something like that would happen. And, make no mistake, we're still only seeing small patches of hillside snow give way. Despite the ominous slippages of snowbanks, Timothy C May's real avalanche hasn't even started.

I suggest that Urbit may very well have a similar trajectory. Functional programming language. Small core. Decentralization.

First someone will rewrite Tor in it – a trivial exercise. Then some silly toy-like web browser and maybe a matching web server. They won't get much traction. Then someone will write something cool – a decentralized jukebox that leverages Urbit's privileges, delegation and neo-feudalist access control lists to give permissions to one's own friends and family and uses the built in cryptography to hide the files from the MPAA. Or maybe someone will code a MMORPG that does amazingly detailed rendering of algorithmically created dungeons by using spare cycles on the machines of game players (actually delegating the gaming firms core servers out onto customer hardware).

Probably it will be something I haven't imagined.

Will this happen?  Who knows?  But Silicon Valley is pushing this because it (rightly) sees a paradigm shift.  The folks at the Fed.Gov are clueless, shambling dinosaurs (otherwise they'd work in Silicon Valley, duh - yes, that sounds arrogant; yes, it's true).  And so, if this happens, the Fed.Gov won't realize it until it's already happened.  Until the paradigm toothpaste has shifted out of the tube.

And the punch line?  Imagine how much metadata the NSA will have to analyze with 2 orders of magnitude more computers each doing 3 orders of magnitude encrypted, randomized network connections?  They will need 100,000 times the compute and storage capacity within a decade.  And more importantly, the imagination to know how to make this work.  And they'll need a further 100,000 times the power ten years further out.

Let us know how that works for ya, Ft. Meade.  There's no way that the NSA has increased their computing power by a factor of ten billion in the last 20 years.  They won't do that in the next 20, either.

The world is far less predictable, and far less controllable than anyone thinks.  It's very probably less predictable and controllable than anyone can imagine - at the very time that Progressives think that they can lock down control over the populations and institute the New Jerusalem.  Let us know how that works for ya, Progs.

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true.

- Freeman Dyson

Bootnote: What is the man behind Urbit?  His name is Curtis Yarvin, and he works in Silicon Valley.  He also goes by the nom de blog of Mencius Moldbug. We've seen him before here.  Clark addresses this obliquely in the comments to his post:

The neo-reactionary stuff on Urbit that seems to be decoration is not. It is the whole point.

If Yarvin (and Cisco, and Silicon Valley) can pull this off, this is Big, big stuff.  RTWT, including the comments which are packed full of smart.

If you want to be informed about Global Warming, this is mandatory viewing

It's long been known that there's a very close correlation between Solar Magnetic Activity (Sunspots) and climate. This is the best introduction to the subject that I've seen.



This is science that the Scientific Community is not interested in pursuing, perhaps because there are no financial grants to be had by saying that an increased Government control of the economy won't Save The Earth™. The film actually shows this is gory detail, as Scientists® confront Svensmark telling him that his experiment is "worthless" without giving a scientific reason why.

It also explains how Sagittarius killed the Dinosaurs.  This is long time-scales science.  And this is brutal:



OK, then.  But if you actually want to, you know, understand the science (as opposed to The Science®), then this is must-see Borepatch TV.  And read the links.  The next time that some smarmy Prog Bastard sneers that "the Scienciness™ is settled", ask him about the Svenskmark Hypothesis and it's scientific strengths and weaknesses.  And then stand back and enjoy him squirming.

And if you really want to twist the knife, let him run down and then turn to someone else and say "He doesn't know."

What really killed off the Dinosaurs?

It may have been volcanoes:

Tens of thousands of years of lava flow from the Deccan Traps, a volcanic region near Mumbai in present-day India, may have spewed poisonous levels of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and caused the mass extinction through the resulting global warming and ocean acidification, the research suggests.

The findings, presented Wednesday (Dec. 5) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are the latest volley in an ongoing debate over whether an asteroid or volcanism killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago in the mass die-off known as the K-T extinction.

I've been skeptical of the asteroid-strike theory for quite a while.  I may be skeptical of this, too.

My tribe is not your tribe

Six months ago, Bob left a comment to this post:

Ted, have you even mentioned any men or women that you would be willing to support for President? All I've read at the blogs I visit is variations on I won't vote for Romney, he's too like Obama, I won't vote for Ron Paul, he's too crazy. Damnit, then, who is this paragon of conservative virtue who has been eliminated/sat out the race? Name him/her.

Fair question.  We don't, after all, get the luxury of voting for Philosopher Kings.  I've been pretty negative about the candidates.  I haven't squared my shoulders and stepped up to square the circle as to who to vote for.  All right, then, here are the candidates and the reasons to vote for them.

Mitt Romney.  He's not Barack Obama.  I've said (at length, as is my wont) that this is an exceptionally poor reason to vote for him, but it's what he has.  He's a big government policy wonk, and a wonk must needs wonk.  Please no what about the SCOTUS comments, since he'll appoint nothing but David Souters.  Al Fin puts it well (although he entirely leaves out the fact that Romney will do precisely nothing about any of the problems he describes:

In other words, Obama cannot be given the total blame for America's ongoing decline. Without the huge and bloated government bureaucracies, government employee unions, a thoroughly corrupted media and academia, and a dumbed down electorate, Obama would have never been given the power to enact his program of indoctrination, so thoroughly ingrained into his young mind in childhood and adolescence.

Barack Obama.  He's not Mitt Romney.  This is as stupid as it sounds, but you should stop and ask yourself why the mirror image argument isn't equally stupid.  Please no what about the SCOTUS comments, since the if the GOP is too supine to filibuster his obnoxious nominees (*cough* Eric Holder *cough*) then they deserve to join the Passenger Pigeon and Dodo birds in the museum of Wait, what?

Gary Johnson.  This is the most interesting candidate for a whole hearted  "for him, not agin him" vote.  Aretae pointed out that if the Libertarian Party gets 5% of the vote, they get matching Federal election funds in the next cycle.  Since we will have either a disastrous Obama Administration or a disastrous Romney Administration, a (funded) Libertarian alternative may actually help nudge the GOP down that sylvan path to join the Whigs in the graveyard of failed political parties.  Please no what sort of Libertarian are you to want Government funding comments; I'm a libertarian, not a Libertarian.  Given that Romney is looking to walk away from Obama across most of this fair Republic, most readers will find themselves in a precinct where their vote will not count against Romney but will count for a more viable alternative next time around.  As to Gary Johnson qua Gary Johnson, all I can say is who?

Roseanne Barr.  Crotch grabbin' at the National Anthem is indeed compelling, but not enough to beat out Johnson.  Sorry honey*.

CPUSA candidate.  There's got to be one.  I mean, Gus Hall is gone, but some Comrade must have filled those shoes.  Actually it wouldn't make much difference if you voted for this dude since we're all dirty commies anyway.  Yeah, even you.

So Bob, I think I'll probably vote for Gary Johnson to speed the crackup of the Dinosaur parties.  Not that it is likely to help much.  But you did ask.

* I only say "honey" to cause the vapors among the brassiere burning crowd.

News you can use: Duck Bill Dinosaurs had best teeth EVAH

OK, this is completely useless information but helps explain how the Hadrosaurs were so wildly successful:

The results, published today in the journal Science show how tough the prehistoric grinders were - and they were perfect for grinding and slicing plants that fed the hadrosaurs for so long.

"These guys were like walking pulp mills," Erickson says. Wear on the tooth actually improved its grinding ability, making these toothy dinos dental unparalleled marvels compared to today's chewers - such as horses and buffalos - which have much simpler tooth setups.

Earlier research had shown that hadrosaurs had up to 1,400 teeth packed behind their bills, and that these fell out and were replaced continually over the year, almost like today's sharks that can replace lost teeth with backup pearly whites.

The flat-topped teeth allowed hadrosaurs to grind through low-lying grasses, the tough leaves of plants, such as horsetails and ferns, and the woody bits of conifers.

In short, there was always something for the animal to eat.  No wonder they were so successful - this opened up huge energy inputs that other species couldn't touch.

The last war chariots

Image via Wikipedia

Even in Alexander the Great's time, the War Chariot was an anachronism.  The height of the Age of Chariots was the battle of Kadesh, a thousand years earlier.  And as yet October 1st dawned, the King of Kings had assembled two hundred chariots on that plain of Arbela.

As the lines approached each other, the trumpeters on both sides sounded the attack and the troops charged each other with a loud shout. First the scythed chariots swung into action at full gallop and created great alarm and terror among the Macedonians, especially since Mazaeus in command of the cavalry made their attack more frightening by supporting with his dense squadrons of horse.

- Diodorus Siculus, 17.40

Alexander had met Darius once before, at the battle of Issus.  Arbela (perhaps more commonly referred to these days as Gaugamela) also saw a huge host arrayed before the young Macedonians.  For the Persians reflected the Old Order, inheritors of all the power and riches of the Cradle of Civilization itself.  It was the Old Order vs. the Upstarts, in an ancient test of Schumpeter's Gale.  It was an inflection point: either things would continue as they were or they would change utterly.

The Old Order was swept away, in Alexander's greatest of all his great victories.  Not for nothing does history call him "The Great" - Alexander was able to see past the vast numbers and gathered power of the Persian host and see the weaknesses, and how to exploit them.

As the phalanx joined shields, however, all beat upon their shields with their spears as the king had commanded and a great din arose. As the horses shied off, most of the chariots were turned about and bore hard with irresistible impact against their own ranks. Others continued on against the Macedonian lines, but as the soldiers opened wide gaps in their ranks the chariots were channel led through these.

- Diodorus

It was the last great charge by war chariots, in the last gasp of the old Mesopotamian orders which were not able to match the new.  The battle was won by courage, as Alexander himself led his Companions in a daring assault on the Great King himself.  Alexander knew where courage was to be found, and where it would be wanting.

For a short time there ensued a hand-to-hand fight; but when the Macedonian cavalry, commanded by Alexander himself, pressed on vigorously, thrusting themselves against the Persians and striking their faces with their spears, and when the Macedonian phalanx in dense array and bristling with long pikes had also made an attack upon them, all things together appeared full of terror to Darius, who had already long been in a state of fear, so that he was the first to turn and flee.

- Arrian,  Anabasis

Roman mosaic ca. 200 BC, copy of Hellenistic original ca. 300 BC

Courage won the day, along with knowledge.  Free men fight harder than slaves.  Freedom is a greater motivator than the promise of gold, or power, or station.  Alexander knew this, and conquered.

We see before us a similarly fearsome host, this October 1st.  It too is vast, assembled of the hangers on of an ancient order, motivated by hope of gold, or power, or station in the existing Old Order.  With us are only those who would have freedom as they've know it, those who do not choose to bow their heads to a self-described "elite" who would use the ancient power of of the hieratic state to keep themselves raised above us.

We're told that the battle is over, before it is well joined.  We're told that the polls are done, complete, unanimous: Alexander is toast.  We're told by a breathless media that an Ambassador dead by Darius' incompetence is not the story, but that Alexander's mean and thoughtless criticism of the Persian State Department's cowardly apology means that the Macedonians are finished.  Finished, you hear?

After all, has not the Main Stream Media carefully leveled the ground of the battlefield, so that the Great King's chariots can reach maximum speed?

We look back from the modern day and wonder how Alexander could possibly have lost.  He alone had realized that the Old Order had passed, and harnessed the New Order.  In the twinkling of the eye he swept the Ancient Kingdoms before him.  Seven years after marching his army out the gates of Pella he stood on the banks of the Indus river, weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer.

A decade hence we will look back on the election of 2012 through that same prism, wondering how anyone once thought that the Old Order with its Media lapdogs could have tried to command the tides of history to ebb.  All of the Old Order's allies are weak, which is why their arguments are so laughably empty.  The idea that people will vote for the Old Order, ignoring their own financial situations (down since Obama assumed office) or their prospects for future prosperity (down since Obama assumed office) or the prospects for their children's prosperity (crushed under a lack of jobs and student debts that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy) is to laugh.  The fact that we hear this from the Old Order media - best know for their mystified What's The Matter With Kansas? - tells you all you need to know about how the Progressive Order is out of gas.

Ignore the fearsome host arrayed before you, they are the last gasp of the Ancient World.  Their chariots are an anachronism, and their motivation makes them weak.  The host is an illusion, and will break and run.

This was a second success for the Persians, and Alexander saw that it was time for him to offset the discomfiture of his forces by his own intervention with the royal squadron and the rest of the elite horse guards, and rode hard against Dareius. The Persian king received their attack and fighting from a chariot hurled javelins against his opponents, and many supported him. As the kings approached each other, Alexander flung a javelin at Dareius and missed him, but struck the driver standing beside him and knocked him to the ground. A shout went up at this from the Persians around Dareius, and those at a greater distance thought that the king had fallen. They were the first to take to flight, and they were followed by those next to them, and steadily, little by little, the solid ranks of Dareius's guard disintegrated. As both flanks became closed, the king himself was alarmed and retreated. The flight thus became general.

- Diodorus

Looking back, History seems pre-determined.  Ruling orders try to make it look that way at the time, no matter how weak their position.  The moving finger even now writes; having writ, it prepares to move on.

The media shrieks its support of Obama, and its contempt of Romney.  The chariots mass for their final charge.  The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze, and roar their defiance.

Full frontal mockery

It used to be that the Republican Party was the party for squares.  All of the Cool Kids hung out over with the Democrats, who would mock the stodgy, clueless GOP types unmercifully.

I missed exactly when that changed, but change it did.  Now it's the GOP that's gleefully trolling the Democrats.

Hot Air at the DNC: ban corporate profits, it feels good to belong to the Government.  I actually had a little bit of that here, myself:

The Daily Show: Democrats are the party of tolerance, except for those they don't like.

I could go on, but you get the point.  And so back to my question: when did the Democrats become the boring, stuffy, not-too-bright party of the easily trolled?

Remember, this is the party that fetishizes smart.  That couldn't get enough of yucking it up about a village in Texas missing its idiot, and I can see Russia from my house.  All of the people in all of these videos no doubt are absolutely convinced that they're smarter than you and I.

For the life of me, I don't get it.  But the GOP is putting this online with a joy that used to be 100% reserved for Democrats.  You can cut the mockery with a knife, it's so thick.  And the punchline?

The Democrats don't have the slightest clue that this has happened.

I can see a GOP landslide from my house.  Not sure that it would be a good thing but they can't be any dumber and more self assured of their moral worthiness than the Democrats are.  The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze, and think the meteor smell is the smell of victory.

Action, reaction

Anyone who doesn't take Truth seriously in small matters can't be trusted in large ones either.

- Albert Einstein

The Intellectual Class has seen itself go from success to success, taking over the Universities, the Media, and all the "chattering class" organs of the Republic.  The Long March through the Institutions has been, to their minds, a complete success.  And so they have commenced using the power granted those institutions by the People as a tool to reshape the People.

As the Church Lady used to say, "Well isn't that special?"

There's a word that this Intellectual Class dares nor speak.  Words have power, as they well know, and to voice the spectre is to summon it.  And so they stumble dumbly past the graveyard, eyes averted, hoping to once again cheat fate.  They do not see the gulf between their supposed virtues as thought leaders, and their flinching from facing the thoughts so common today throughout this Republic.  Talking only to themselves, in their own petty, closed circles, they have become incompetent to actually deal with the Truth as it really is.

I speak as the offspring of that same Intellectual Class, once who grew up immersed in that mindset.  Seeing yourself as the Intellectual Vanguard.  As Monty Python once put it, I got better.

Recognizing the Truth is a virtue.  There's Marketing, and there's what's actually true.  As the old saying goes, "Marketing doesn't change the Truth, it just makes it better."  The Left may flatter themselves that they can sell anything if they use pretty words, because the People are idiots.  We all know better.

And so the Long March through the institutions has turned out to be a disaster for the Intellectual Class, as the People have seen the politicization of those institutions.  The Left has turned high trust environments into low trust environments.


Action, reaction.

And now the Internet roars onto the scene, breaking business models as far as the eye can see.  Remember Sun Microsystems?  They were the "dot in dot com."  They couldn't harness the power of the Internet, and they got passed by.  Gone, as if they never were.

Information wants to, and will, be free.  And the People find that gives them power, power against the chattering classes that thought that they controlled all the communications channels.  They watch horrified, cow-like in their lack of comprehension, when the message gets out despite their best efforts.



There's no blocking this signal - it bypasses the (unofficial) Organs Of The State (the Media and the Universities), and spreads from blog to blog, from person to person.  It spread from Blue to me.  He says that someone should post it every day.  Now you have it in front of you: how will you spread it?

Because the message cuts through the pretty words that the Intellectual Elite thought they could get the (dumb, but don't tell them) People to swallow, it cuts through the rationalizations, it cuts through the professorial double talk.  It says this:



The People are smarter than the Chattering Classes think.  Wile they are willing to be led, they are unwilling to be ruled.  They bow to no one, and don't think highly of those that do.

The Elites keep telling us that we should be more like Europe.  The People in Europe have never been Citizens, despite the pretty words and fancy rhetoric.  They've always been subjects - to Monarchs, or Dictators, or the current EU which is a Dictatorship Of The Elite with a good PR Agency.

Things are different here, and while the People are happy to get government benefits when they're on offer, the American People are still a practical bunch.  Who when the chips truly are down, will not flinch from the truth.  Who will not cast their eyes down when walking past a graveyard, or when greeting a foreign Monarch.

As I said: now you have it in front of you: how will you spread it?

Truth.  It will set you free.  The Elites are horrified by this - by a simple truth, stated plainly, without the "allowed" pretty words and spin.  Unvarnished.  Bare.  A truth that they can't convince a "stupid" People to believe.

The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze, and roar their defiance.

Three things cannot long be hidden: the Sun, the Moon, and the Truth.

- The Buddha

The death of centralized power

I posted about this a couple days ago, but this brilliant post at Zero Hedge lays out why:

The primary "news" narrative may be the failure of the euro, but the master narrative is much, much bigger: centralization has failed. The failure of Europe's "ultimate centralization project" is but a symptom of a global failure of centralization.

Though many look at China's command-economy as proof that the model of Elite-controlled centralization is a roaring success, let's check in on China's stability and distribution of prosperity in 2021 before declaring centralization an enduring success. The pressure cooker is already hissing and the flame is being turned up every day.

What's the key driver of this master narrative? Technology, specifically, the Internet. Gatekeepers and centralized authority are no match for decentralized knowledge and decision-making. Once a people don't need to rely on a centralized authority to tell them what to do, the centralized authority becomes a costly impediment, a tax on the entire society and economy.

RTWT.  The dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze, and roar their defiance.

Epic asskicking ...

... is epic.  It's impossible to excerpt, but you'll thank me for pointing it out once you've read it.  To save everyone time, let me just say "You're welcome" right now.

Via Ken at Popehat, who adds this delicious bit of ass kickery directed towards the lawyer involved:

Charles Carreon likes and supports one type of bullying — the type that makes money for him, the type he is licensed by the State Bar to use — but hates and condemns another kind, the kind that doesn't make him money, the kind that any sort of rube who never went to law school can employ.

...

Our system privileges Charles Carreon to issue that threat, rather than jailing or flogging him for it. And so Carreon supports bullying like that. He's got a license to do it. He knows that his licensed threats — coming, as they do, on the [slightly odd] letterhead of a lawyer — inspire far more fear and stress than the complaints of a mere citizen, and by God he plays it to the hilt.

By contrast, Charles Carreon doesn't like shows of force that you or I can muster.

There's even more, and it's even better.  The Internet has shattered all sorts of business models, and the folks who used to be on top find to their astonishment that their status is not what they assumed it used to be.  The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze, and roar their defiance.

Asteroids can ruin your whole day

An important lesson for our children, no doubt.

And a great darkness descended upon the land

Then Hashem said to Moshe: Hold out your arm towards the sky that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be touched. Moshe held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days.

- Shemot 10:21-23

Pharaoh (Austin's own [Republican] Congressman Lamar Smith) has hardened his heart, and intends to bind us to the RIAA with the mighty chains of the SOPA and PIPA legislation.  And so a great darkness descends upon the land.

Peter rounds up the SOPA legislation Internet General Strike.  I agree with him - this is important.  The Internet has become mission critical, and has revolutionized politics throughout the world.  Turning the keys of the greatest communications medium ever devised by the mind of man over to Dinosaurs stuck in a dieing business model (that would be both the RIAA and the Dinosaur Political Parties) is madness.

It is, indeed, ceding the Promised Land to Pharaoh.

And so today I join the Internet General Strike.  This is a taste of what the Internet will be, should SOPA and PIPA become law of the land.  The Internet Ice Cream Machine is clenching its fist in Solidarity with Peter, Wikipedia, and all believers in truth and freedom.

I would gently remind my readers, though, that they should gaze upon Rep. Lamar Smith.  See, with eyes of seeing.  The GOP is not your friend.  Yea, they bring down darkness across the land.

I will be back tomorrow, after our Industrial Action.  I urge my fellow bloggers to join me in going dark today.  Join us, and shoulder to shoulder we will face down the Moloch State.  Show Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) that we will not go gently into that good night of central control.  We don't think it is for our good, or society's.

For it will be very difficult to persuade men of sense that he who with dry eyes and satisfaction of mind can deliver his brother to the executioner to be burnt alive, does sincerely and heartily concern himself to save that brother from the flames of hell in the world to come.

- John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration

The Dinosaurs smell a change on the breeze.  They roar their defiance, but we don't care.

UPDATE:  You need to watch this.


PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

There is a form here that you can enter your address and email, and it will email your Senators.  If you do this, you should change the wording in the body.

Robb also has good advice.

Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring

A lot of people think of Classical Music as completely SWPL.  Aristocratically commissioned, it's the the type of concert you go to in white tie and tails, or your most elegant evening gown and jewels.

Not the sort of thing where you expect the local Po-Po show up by the Intermission.

That's what happened on opening night for this piece.  Stravinsky, inspired by the rhythms of heavy industry, created a ballet using entirely unconventional music, and then sprung it on an unsuspecting Parisian public in 1913.  Fistfights between supporters and detractors broke out in the aisles, during the performance.  The police (sort of) restored order by the Intermission.

Composer Camille Saint-Saëns is said to have stormed out in the middle.  Forget the music; I'd have paid cash money just to watch the Soccer Ballet Hooligans.

A generation later, this was mainstream, used in Disney's Fantasia.





I loved the Dinosaur battle, even if they were in a swamp.  But it was the 1940s, after all, and that was the current "Science is Settled" "consensus".



Their visual effects are impaired by the distinct lack of Parisian Gentlemen, in full white tie and tails, engaged in fisticuffs.

Awesome.

Why are Progressive politicians so short-sighted?

(Image source)

The greatest chess players think many moves ahead.  Rather than focusing on the current move, they (likely intuitively) analyze what the impact of this move will be in four, or six, or ten moves in the future.  Computers have essentially replaced humans as the best chess players, because they've become powerful enough to plot all possible moves, for twenty or thirty moves in the future.  Then it's a simple sort routine to rank the most useful moves at the top.

Progressive politicians sure don't seem to be doing that.  Offered for your consideration, as Exhibit A for the case of the (Thinking) People v. Progressives, the fiscal disaster that is ObamaCare:

Speaking of ill-considered financial decisions made by politicians intent on their policy priorities, new emails revealed by the AP show that the administration was warned that parts of ObamaCare were a financial disaster--but plowed ahead anyway.

...

The administration seems to think that it can fix the program--but the only workable fix appears to be making the thing mandatory rather than optional, which is hardly what they said when they were  passing it.

There are two possibilities here: they might have been incompetent, which is what most people are assuming.  Or this might have been the plan all along, to get the Country into a "Oops, we need this because it's a crisis" situation.

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter for this discussion.  The important question is this: What did they think would happen when people find out?

Offered as Exhibit B: Australia's economy-destroying Carbon Tax:

Firstly there’s the anti-democratic nature of it: apparently [Prime Minister] Gillard is doing things that are considered utterly beyond the pale in other nations. Ergas suggests that by granting “property rights” she is threatening to make the cost of removing her legislation all but insurmountable. (For all the world, it appears she’s determined to stop the opposition offering the people the choice to remove the carbon tax. Could it be, that for the sake of an advantage in the next election campaign she’s tossing the country down the nearest black hole?)

Secondly, the Australian Carbon Tax is a freakishly large sacrificial offering: Australians will be hit for  $391 for every man, woman and child, and that’s just the first year (according to the government estimates). Compare this to the EU. There in the land-of-exploding-economies,  each good citizen has had to fork out  the vast grand sum of (wait for it)  … one dollar fifty cents each (yes, $1.50). And, it gets worse, (how do you satirize this?)  — that’s the cumulative total since the EU started trading in 2005.

Maybe they'll pass it, and maybe they won't.  Maybe it'll be too insanely expensive to unwind once passed, or maybe it won't.  That will be a topic for another day, but the question at hand is the same as for the Democrats here Stateside: What do they think will happen when people find out what it does to them?

Both of these seem, quite frankly, as verging on the suicidal.  There's a new New York Times/CBS News poll out.  It's very interesting.  Here are some answers to the question "What do you think is the most important problem facing he country today?"

Healthcare: 3%
Environment: zero percent (yes, zero)
Economy: 27%
Jobs: 32%

Admittedly, this is the US public, not the Australian public, but I'll happily bet cash money that polls are similar with the Aussie public (please leave all wager offers in the comments; the ammo fund is running low here at FOB Borepatch).

So we see not just a minor miscalculation, but a situation where the math is off by a factor of ten.  Something is going on here, with supposedly intelligent and canny politicians burning (with Carbon Offsets for the Australian Labour Party, no  doubt) serious political capital.  To the first glance, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would say Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Immodestly, I'd like to suggest an answer to this conundrum.  It's Gramscian Damage once again.  As Progressives came to control all of the intellectual institutions (especially the Media and the University) in the Post-War years, they gradually squeezed conservative thought from "legitimate" discussion.  Of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and so it was replaced by a lot of twaddle.  A year ago, I described what happened next:

The Long March Through The Institutions is complete, but the results are not what were expected:

• American's trust in the news media has been falling since 1976.
• Newspaper circulation has been falling since 1990.
• None of the top dozen highest grossing Hollywood films has been made in the last 25 years (counting in inflation-adjusted dollars).
• Previously respected initiatives like the Environmental Movement are no longer respected.
• Trust that the Government will do the right thing has been falling since the early 1960s, from a high around 80% to the mid 20% range.

But the Progressive Politicians are indoctrinated members of the intellectual institutions, fully steeped in the dogma that Progressive politics is a one-way ratchet (every now and again a new shift leftward; never a shift back).  And so their eye is on the lookout for that ever elusive moment when the ratchet can be tightened another click.  Who really cares about the consequences, because it's a one-way ratchet, right?

Except it's not:

The deal was that the government would buy social peace. The problem for the people who make up the government is that the way to make a name for themselves is with bigger, more visionary projects. Let's take a simple example: city planning. The first really big advance was a Cartesian grid pattern for streets: north/south avenues and east/west streets. So what do you do if you're the next urban planner? Maybe radial grand avenues (like in Paris), but this isn't as useful. What if you're the 426th urban planner? The biggest wins are at the beginning.

And so with social programs. Bismark and FDR plausibly did save industrial capitalism, by helping to ameliorate people's fears of future poverty. It was actually a near thing, too, as a study of post-War Britain shows. So how does a new, ambitious politician make a name for himself? Go big, or go home.

But if you go big, you spend big (or you inflate big, which doesn't win in the long run). And so back to the deal: social peace in return for industrial capitalism. If the politicians have a different view of social peace than population, then there's your contradiction. Remember, the early gains are always the biggest. The biggest gains in people's perception of safety against future poverty were handled by Bismark, FDR, and LBJ.

Which puts Obama, Pelosi, and Harry Reid in a deep hole of contradiction. The health care bill is very unpopular, in no small measure because most people are generally happy with their health care program. Sure, some are not covered, and people with pre-existing conditions are screwed, but we're talking most people. And so you see a ratcheting up of the scare talk (it's a crisis!) at the same time that the details of the program are hidden (vote for the bill so we can see what's in it), and people aren't buying it. It's the Bismarkian Welfare State that's scaring people now.

It's been said that Gramsci's goal was not an intelligentsia that could argue more effectively against counter-Progressive ideas.  Rather, it was an intelligentsia where counter-Progressive ideas would not be able to be formed in the thinker's mind.

And so we look at ObamaCare, or the Australian death-by-Carbon-tax proposals and ask what did they think would happen when people find out?  They look at you with uncomprehending eyes.  It's a one-way ratchet.

Most people are happy with their health care, but the Progressive State may have to take it away because of the coming fiscal crisis (interesting that so many provisions only kick in after the 2012 elections).  Health care only concerns 3% of the population.  Global Warming doesn't even move the meter (zero percent), and yet Australian families are staring at $1000+ a year in taxes.

So what's coming?  A reckoning*.



The Dinosaurs became so closely adapted to their climate that, while dominating the ecosystem, they lived on the very edge of the abyss.  Today's Progressives have used a Gramscian strategy to adpat themselves very closely indeed to a top-down world dominated by a philosophically monocultural elite.  But the Elite sees the meteoric glow of the Team Party in the gloaming, and wonders what it might mean to their one-way ratchet.

The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze, and roar their defiance.

* I suspect that your Gormogons are behind this (always a good starting assumption, actually).  Not only is this cunningly subtle intellectual misdirection, Doc Holiday is their Huckleberry.  Coincidence?  I think not.