Climategate: history's message

I am not a historian or a statistician. Nonetheless I had been skimming Climate Audit for a couple of years and knew enough to write, in January 2009, "Michael Mann should be in prison." I continue to enthusiastically endorse this view. I also do know a bit about the past.

And the past has sent me its report on Climategate. It is a short message - quite pithy - full of punch. I transcribed it this week from my favorite Ouija board. At the planchette: me and my 2-year-old daughter, Sibyl.

After data corrections, the text reads:

Your entire system of government is incurably insane.

I realize that to many UR readers, this case is already clear. However, the folder is fat. What's neat about the CRU emails is that they provide a much shorter path to the same conclusion. Today's post is light climbing for lazy hikers.

To achieve reactionary enlightenment in a single, burning leap, we'll demonstrate that this spirit message from the ancestors, despite its incredibly dubious provenance, is correct in every word. First, we're going to explain insane; then, we're going to explain incurably; then, we're going to explain your entire system of government. Also, do you have a beer in the fridge? You might need it.

First, let's focus on the word insane. The American Heritage Dictionary gives us, as 3rd meaning:

very foolish; absurd.

took insane risks behind the wheel.

The Urban Dictionary gives us, as 2nd definition:

another term for cool and crazy. someone that does something really cool and crazy is insane but in a good way. also something that u are unlikely to do urself.

I cant believe u jumped off the roof of that two story building, it was insane.

We'll assume the ancestors are speaking both to my level-headed driving, and Sibyl's fearless youth. When they say "insane," they intend an Empsonian ambiguity of the second type: both definitions at once. Their condemnation, sober and penetrating, is not unmixed with awe.

So we know what it means for a person to be insane. But what does it mean for a government to be insane? Like a person, a government is insane when it makes spectacularly bad decisions - the governmental equivalent of jumping off two-story buildings. To be more precise, an insane government or person is seen to exercise spectacularly bad judgment.

Judgment is a universal faculty: the process of decision. Every time it decides to do X or not do Y, every person real or fictive exercises judgment. Thus we can ask whether fictive persons, such as your government, exercise good or bad judgment, by asking whether they make good or bad decisions. Even if this decision process is opaque, its result can be defined in terms of actions. By definition, whatever it does must be what it decided to do.

Are these decisions generally good, or generally bad? Are the actions generally effective, or generally ineffective? Is your person or institution marching from success to success, or careening from disaster to disaster? If the latter, it is either insane or unlucky; if the former, either sane or lucky. As Bismarck put it: "fools, drunks, and the United States."

As we see, the difference can be difficult to determine. In general, judgment is conserved: to know judgment, takes judgment. If decisions could be assessed automatically, they could be taken automatically. More on this later.

Many people sense intuitively that Washington's judgment is quite poor these days. But, in general, they do not and cannot know (a) why it does the things it does, (b) what else it could have done, or (c) what would have been the result of (b). The opaque problem is really quite hard. And Washington is really quite opaque.

Except for these little security breaches! In this one small department, we know how the sausage is made. A field day for the student of present history, as saints everywhere stand up for openness and transparency. (It's funny how often we are reminded that CRU was, in fact, legally obliged to release this information - yes, even the emails - under UK FOIA. The first rule of Freedom of Information Act is: you do not talk about Freedom of Information Act.)

The emails are certainly not the entire process of judgment that produced the anti-carbon movement. But there is no reason to think they are not a representative sample of that decision process. We don't see the entire IPCC community; just a slice of it. We only see the sausage being made; not prepared, served and eaten. But we know that birds of a feather flock together, and we know that what goes into the skin is what ends up on our plates.

It is certainly a long way from Science magazine to Federal Register. But not as far as many think. Think of this leg of the decision process - from hockey stick to cap-n-trade - as a slow, arduous, but essentially automatic mechanism, like colonic peristalsis. The various political glands in the pipeline, including Public Opinion Itself, can exert resistance, but not insert independent input. They are brakes, but not motors. They can stall the process, but not stop it, and certainly not turn the wheel and do something else instead. More on this later.

But first: the insanity. Let's get a tight handle on this question of insanity. Remember: a diagnosis of insanity only requires one insane act, so long as the act is sufficiently insane. Clearly, it's the ancestors' judgment that anti-carbonism is in this category. As we will see later, the problem is general. But first, let us pretend it is specific.

You can go to work every day of your life. You can be a good husband and a loving father. If you strip naked except for a chicken mask and climb the Golden Gate Bridge, you need counseling. Whether or not you jump. USG has not quite jumped yet, but it still seems likely.

For a diagnosis of insanity, we need two things. We need insane reasoning on an insane scale. Foibles are not manias. Otherwise, the diagnosis is inflated. True insanity, as in your naked chicken-mask adventure, can only be conferred by the stakes of the decision - which, if not spectacular, would disappoint at least the Urban Dictionary.

So let's look at the stakes of the carbon decision. As the Times helpfully informs us:

So what is all this going to cost? The short answer is trillions of dollars over the next few decades. It is a significant sum but a relatively small fraction of the world’s total economic output.

A relatively small fraction! A relatively small fraction. Of course, consider the alternative:

“People often ask about the costs,” said Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche Bank Asset Management, who tracks climate policy for the bank. “But the figures people tend to cite don’t take into account conservation and efficiency measures that are easily available. And they don’t look at the cost of inaction, which is the extinction of the human race. Period.”

"Period." Period.

(And let's not forget "easily available." Kevin, honey, my own dear mother was a budget and policy analyst at EERE in the Hazel O'Leary years. She worked for Joe Romm. And she could tell you a thing or two about "conservation and efficiency." Perhaps, with your 37-million-dollar bonus this year, you could take off some time and come to my condo, install O-rings on all the doors and windows, and fill the walls with hemp fiber, so that I can legally sell it after 2016. Or better yet, I could just securitize it right now and get you to take it off my hands. Yes - when in doubt on any subject, I always turn to that pillar of farsighted judgment, Wall Street.)

But I digress. Surely we could be content with this analysis, because surely any decision which pits "trillions of dollars" against "the extinction of the human race" is a big one. Let us measure the stakes, however, only in terms of the cost of action. As compared to the cost of inaction, it is relatively undisputed. Of course, acting incurs its cost whether the problem is real or not.

In reality, there's no way a cost like the cost of carbon action can be measured in mere money. Consider one mainstream proposal of today, endorsed by President Obama and many other world leaders: reducing carbon emissions to 80% of 1990 levels, by 2050.

Presumably a proposal like this corresponds to said "trillions of dollars" - a completely empty soundbite, of course, but something an innocent person might read as "a few trillion dollars." Say, perhaps, "7.5 trillion dollars." I'm just guessing here, of course.

Knowing as we now do what goes into the sausage, we feel perfectly entitled to sneer at whatever study, process or press-release could possibly have produced whatever ridiculous non-number lies behind the ridiculous non-number "trillions of dollars." First, this entire information pipeline is clearly sweating it to produce the smallest possible number in the reader's mind. Second, it implies a capacity for predictive macroeconomic modeling which does not exist. Third, what on earth will a dollar buy you in 2050, anyway?

In reality, to consider an action of this impact through the lens of antiseptic monetary exponents, churned out by some irreproducible spreadsheet, is to avoid considering it at all. Since the planned carbon action is a significant event on a significant historical scale, it must be considered as history. It must be analyzed with the tools of the narrative historian.

Now, I have an easy way to picture 2050: my daughter, Sibyl, will be 42 in 2050. As a student of history, I also have an easy way to picture an 80% reduction in fossil-fuel use: Germany and Japan in, say, 1944. The little Nips, for instance, had a very active alternative-energy program. I believe turpentine from pine trees was a key component. The primary sources display little fondness for this weird fuel.

An 80% energy cutoff goes beyond any mere economic calculation. It is a punitive measure of military proportions - to which one might subject a defeated enemy nation - for the purpose of collective penal subjugation.

Unfortunately, this concept itself is quite alien to the modern American mind. Which is a little strange, if you don't mind me saying so. Because it was applied in the lives of those now living - by Americans. Let's try and refresh our memories here.

Germany in 1945 was a defeated enemy nation. In August 1944, FDR himself commented on a State Department draft plan for the occupation of Germany - a draft much milder than the eventual Morgenthau Plan. (Believe it or not, State under FDR was actually a relative center of conservatism within USG.) Too mild for the happy man with the cigarette holder:

This so-called Handbook is pretty bad. I should like to know how it came to be written and who approved it down the line. If it has not been sent out as approved, all copies should be withdrawn.

It gives me the impression that Germany is to be restored just as much as the Netherlands or Belgium and the people of Germany brought back as quickly as possible to their prewar estate... The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war - the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.

No problem, Boss! Under JCS 1067, food imports to a food-deficit nation were terminated, and the entire population of Germany put on a 1000-calorie-a-day diet for most of 1946 and 1947. Fortunately, official records reveal only a negligible increase in the death rate, from 11.9 deaths per 1000 per annum prewar, to 12.1 per 1000 under JCS 1067. Obviously, the Germans were simply fat. They needed the Morgenthau diet. Indeed, their present slimness and good health may be a result.

I am not aware of any similar figures for German postwar energy consumption. But 80% sounds about right. (The destruction of coal mines was a major aspect of the "pastoral" treatment.) Then again, one can argue that the Germans both needed and deserved the Morgenthau protocol. After all, it worked, didn't it? Not just a dietetic therapy - also a psychiatric treatment.

And FDR's diagnosis is at the very least defensible. At the risk of wandering too far from carbon, however, let's take a quick look at the decision-making environment from which policies like Morgenthau/1067 emerged. This is perhaps best summarized by an entry in arch-New Dealer Felix Frankfurter's diary, from January 18, 1943:

We talked a good deal about poor Missy LeHand - Sam Rosenman understanding, as very, very few people do the extraordinary beneficent role that Missy played in the Roosevelt Administration until her illness in 1941 because of the very remarkable judgment, disinterestedness, and pertinacity which she combined. Sam agreed with me that Missy's enforced withdrawal is a calamity of world dimensions in view of F.D.R.'s responsibility for world affairs.

Sam said he always regarded her as one of the five most important people in the U.S. during the Roosevelt Administration, to which I replied that she seemed to me always to be the best most influential factor in the Administration, the President apart.

One reason for this was, on which Sam and I agreed, that not the least important aspect of Missy's devotion to the President expressed itself in courageous truth-speaking to him. She was one of the very, very few people who was not a yes-man, who crossed the President in the sense that she told him not what she knew to be his view of what he wanted to hear, but what were, in fact, her true views and convictions.

LeHand, of course, was FDR's mistress. (And, to be fair, private secretary - a real job). One senses that Frankfurter and Rosenman, in this conversation, are relieving each other of any subconscious qualms that their own relationships with FDR did not display this quality of frank plain speaking.

The point is: the FDR administration was, in reality, a monarchical court. Caesar did not call himself king, either - but he was. FDR had (more or less) the powers of an absolute monarch, the manners of an absolute monarch, and the private life of an absolute monarch. In the lives of those now living, the United States of America was a functioning monarchy which could, and did, punish a defeated enemy nation with intentional collective malnutrition. Fact. This is why I like to study 20th-century history: no one knows the first thing about it.

This is the secret of the New Deal: monarchy, by any other name. Personal government. It would be going too far to describe FDR as one of my favorite personal rulers of all time. But, like his great adversary, he had some very talented and effective people working for him. And in their domains, too, these prefects (most notably, Harry Hopkins) ruled with absolute personal authority. In short: the Führerprinzip. There is nothing like it in Washington today - though personal authority remains the norm, of course, in the private sector.

Frankly, for all their many faults, I would take FDR and his whole weird crew back in an instant. To not improve on a bureaucracy, especially a well-aged bureaucracy, a monarchy has to be a pretty shitty monarchy. FDR was a lousy manager and a shit in general, but he wasn't that shitty. Alas, the court of FDR can no more be restored than the court of Frederick the Great. (And I'd certainly prefer the court of Frederick the Great.) But we are digressing - though not without point. More later.

Back to carbon. In any case, the mainstream proposals for anti-carbon regulation bear a broad general resemblance to the treatment of a defeated enemy nation. A rather guilty nation, too. FDR, for all his faults, was a good country squire. He would certainly never have inflicted any such cure on his own dear serfs.

But then again, FDR was just a big softy. Are not the Americans a guilty nation, as well? What have we not heard of their crimes, which are both epic and ongoing? Are not they, too, engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization? A Baltic German might say: what comes around, goes around. Surely it is only natural that New Deal Washington, once willing to make total war on the Germans, would eventually grow hard and cynical enough to make total war on the Americans. Evil need not ripen rapidly.

One can also argue, of course, that between 2010 and 2050, exciting new energy technologies will be developed that will entirely cancel, even reverse, this arduous punishment that we must otherwise endure. After all, look at all the exciting new energy technologies invented between 1970 and 2010! My mother could also tell you a thing or two about "alternative energy." And we note that Hitler, too, had his Wunderwaffen. If he wanted to have a war with the likes of FDR, he probably should have made sure he had them first.

So: this is what I see when I hear "80 by 50." I see America as Germany Year Zero, minus the B-24 craters. (In fact, last time I looked at Detroit, I could swear I saw one or two of those. Can you even imagine Detroit, 2050? Even without "80 in 50," it'll make Mad Max look like Enchanted April.) I see my daughter, Sibyl, as a middle-aged woman, trying to make ends meet in the freezing, flickering fluorescent ruins of a formerly industrial civilization. Indeed, she won't even have carbon dioxide to keep her warm. She certainly won't be able to afford any carbon - all of which will be in the hands of Kevin Parker, or his heirs and assigns.

But I digress, again. Frankly, I'm ranting. And I exaggerate - slightly. All of this may be an exaggeration - but how exaggerated does it need to be? I don't want to be judgmental here. We are only considering the stakes. We have not yet examined the reasoning. Let's go there.

If a relatively small fraction of global output, or even a relatively large fraction, can save the human race, of course, humanity needs to divert that output and save itself. Anything else would be... insane. There is such a thing as a high-stakes decision. This is clearly one. I don't want Sibyl stumbling around in the ruins of some American Kaliningrad. I would rather she had a planet to stumble around on at all, though.

Similarly, if the alien sensor is on the second tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, only the aliens can save us from the explosion of Jupiter, alien sensors demand alien input, and an alien looks like a naked man in a chicken mask, it would be insane of you not to scale the bridge and save the planet. Or at least try. Otherwise, when Jupiter explodes, Earth will be destroyed - period.

So we cannot dismiss the decision as insane, merely by examining the insane scale of the solution - no matter how farfetched. If the problem is real and the solution is the only way to solve it, bring on the turpentine. For this mean 2050, Sibyl will just have to grow up mean. I'll take that space heater out of her room right away.

So let's get back to the main event: the reasoning.

The reasoning behind the anti-carbon movement rests on three pillars of science. Or rather: Pillars of Science. By historical standards, each Pillar is inconceivably massive - consuming more scientist-hours, say, than all of physics before 1900. Or something like that. In impact alone, they've surely earned their majuscules.

The first Pillar of Science (A) is the evidence that global warming is harmful to children and other living things. Note that I say GW, not AGW - any global warming, whether natural or human-caused. Harm cannot be a function of cause. If anthropogenic warming is harmful in any material sense, non-anthropogenic warming must be equally harmful. We'll return to this delicate philosophical point.

Of course, every media consumer is repeatedly reminded of major results within this impact category. A is by far the thickest Pillar, as there is an almost infinite variety of such impacts. (Consider the complete list of things caused by global warming.)

The second and third Pillars of Science (B and C) together constitute the evidence that anthropogenic carbon dioxide increases (the Keeling curve, of which I have not seen much good skepticism - but ya really never know with these clowns) are causing GW. Pillar B is paleoclimatology: the hockey stick and its cousins. Pillar C is climate modeling - the GCMs. Together, Pillars B and C are the pillars of causality.

We combine A, B and C to support the logic for climate action. The logic: fossil fuel emissions cause increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. (Sound so far as I know.) Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide cause increases in global temperature. (Pillars B and C - causality.) Increases in global temperature are harmful to children and other living things. (Pillar A - impact.)

Now, the direct impact of the CRU email leak is on Pillar B - paleoclimatology. Pillar B, in fact, has been pretty much wiped out by this event. As we'll see, it never had any scientific credibility, but now it has lost something even more precious - its reputation. "Reputation, reputation, reputation! O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial." Indeed. The reputation will be restored in time, for the field if not the individuals. I think. (More on this later.) But for now, it is quite interesting to see AGW standing on A and C alone.

To take a look at the smoking ruins of Pillar B, let's start with the words of Professor Edward R. Cook, "Dr. Dendro," Doherty Senior Scholar and Director, Tree-Ring Laboratory, Columbia University:

Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I
almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will
show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year
extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we
believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what
the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know
with certainty that we know fuck-all).

"We know with certainty that we know fuck-all."

How responsible of you, Professor Cook, to inform the public of this. Not. (Does the name Henry Blodget ring any bells for you?) Actually, the full email is even more interesting. More later.

But even if we knew more than "fuck-all," even if genuine paleoclimatology (useful perhaps for other purposes, if not this purpose) delivered all Mann's goods, Pillar B would remain bogus. Whether the science is good or fraudulent, reliable or irreproducible; whatever the shape of the graph; paleoclimatology cannot come anywhere proving the case for anti-carbon action. What it can do is what it does, which is make nice graphs that look good in a Powerpoint or press release.

Suppose the "hockey stick" were entirely authentic. Across the last millennium, the shaft of the stick, temperature gradually declines, until it begins to ramp upward in its "unprecedented" climb - the blade of the stick, matching the climb in CO2. Beautiful!

But what does it really prove? Jack. It proves that two century-long trends of (very) roughly the same shape occurred simultaneously. Also, there is a plausible physical mechanism to connect them. Does this prove a causal relation between the two graphs? Not in the slightest.

It certainly suggests a causal relation between the two graphs. It is physically plausible that the CO2 caused the blade of the hockey stick. It is also physically plausible that the climate is insensitive to the CO2 forcing, and something else caused the blade. Imagine if you claimed to be able to predict, say, the stock market, on the basis of a vast, rough coincidence like this. A single piece of entirely circumstantial evidence.

If Pillar B was sufficient, Pillar C would not be needed. In fact, just by the fact that B is weak, we can see that C must be no stronger. If C were not weak, its proponents would take all possible pains to differentiate it from the weak B. As it so happens, we have the email for B (the Mann circle, paleoclimatology), but not C (the Hansen circle, climate modeling). The public behavior of the Model Masters is quite similar to that of the Hockey Team, and the two are broadly allied. Therefore, we can safely assume that their Outlook folders smell quite similar.

To anyone with any understanding of engineering, the proposition that Earth's climate can be modeled with any real predictive power, using the computing technology of 2009, is preposterous. Nor is it that computers need to get ten times as fast. They need to get 10^10 times as fast - at least. Possibly 10^20 or 10^30. With actual, real Earth computers, chemists still have great difficulty in constructing predictive models of individual molecules.

As a friend who teaches statistics and works at a bioinformatics company described it, prescribing any public policy based on the results of GCMs is like prescribing a drug on the basis of the chemical's behavior in a computational model of a cell. We have models of cells, just as we have models of Earth's atmosphere. Again, it would be going too far to describe these models as worthless. But no one but a damn fool could regard them as accurate.

Chemists, in fact, seem to be some of the last real old-school scientists out there. If you want a more detailed discussion of GCMs and their limitations, with a very conservative analysis, see chemist Pat Frank's article in Skeptic Magazine. But basically, the claim that there exists a predictive model of the entire planetary atmosphere is like the claim that there exists a 10,000-mpg carburetor. In science, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Such evidence as exists for GCM forecasting skill barely approaches the ordinary.

Here is what a GCM is: a simulation program that resembles an accurate model of Earth's atmosphere. That is, when you run it, the resulting planet looks plausible. The simulated Earth does not turn into Pluto or Venus. Although sometimes preventing it from doing so requires arbitrary flux adjustments, ie, fudge factors.

Newer GCMs have concealed these adjustments, but they still parameterize tens or hundreds of physical processes that they cannot possibly compute. These parameters are, themselves, fudge factors. They cannot be otherwise. As John von Neumann put it: "with four parameters I can fit an elephant, with five I can make him wriggle his trunk."

Alas, the difference between resembles and predicts is the difference between observing Mars and flying to Mars. Real engineers know how hard it is to verify models of systems that are ten or twenty orders of magnitude simpler than the general circulation. In attempting to build long-term predictive models of Earth's atmosphere, the climate modelers are simply pretending to try to solve a problem which is, in fact, entirely intractable. In short: sunbeams from cucumbers. Their results are random at best - and at worst, far worse.

Because we know the intellectual climate under which the Hockey Team (their own phrase, btw) operated. It was a climate in which data was openly described as "good" or "bad," depending on whether or not it fed the ravenous propaganda machine. To be more precise: data with the right shape was considered more likely to be accurate, data with the wrong shape was considered to be incorrect or erroneous. Textbook confirmation bias.

We can see this mentality even in Professor Schmidt's original response to "Mike's Nature trick." This entire post is a masterpiece of post-scientific spin. But observe the following:

Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

In other words: this data series, which conflicts with our hypothesis, should not be presented to "policymakers." Not because we are an evil conspiracy bent on Communist world domination - just because the conflicting data is clearly incorrect.

Obviously, the proxies do not match the temperature post 1960. Obviously, this is because of some added noise signal, perhaps itself anthropogenic in nature, which is affecting the trees, the measurements, or both, and hiding the real temperature signal. Therefore, this data is invalid; it is nonmeaningful; the most accurate picture of reality is presented by discarding it. Therefore, what our data says is that trees tell us nothing about temperature after 1960. Since this is exactly what we believe, we are being completely honest in truncating the graph.

Considering the quality of raw data in paleoclimatology, this is always a reasonable interpretation. Unfortunately, there is an alternative reasonable interpretation: that the data is meaningful, but the hypothesis is incorrect. The post 1960 data is not contaminated by some unusual force. The proxy signal is not only inaccurate post 1960, when it is easily checked against accurate temperature records, but also inaccurate pre 1960, when it is not. The presence of post-1960 divergence suggests the possibility of pre-1960 divergence.

This interpretation is not considered. To the contrary, it is concealed. It needs to be, for the eye - seeing the full curve - lights at once upon it. The eye is pretty good at Occam's Razor.

If I owned a dog that had done this, I would kick the dog. And as for "plain sight," all I can say is: "Beware of the Leopard." Professor Schmidt knows perfectly well that his "policymakers" are in reality policy-rubber-stampers. They do not go looking for arcane technical papers in disused lavatories. They go looking for GIFs they can put in their slides. Or their people do, anyway. More on this later.

Since the paleos are best friends with the modelers in the entire IPCC effort, again, we can expect them to do the same sort of business in the same sort of way. Therefore, we can expect them to treat good data as correct data, and bad data as the product of error. Surely there is no shortage of bugs in the development of a GCM. Therefore, there is no shortage of opportunities for bad data to be quite unconsciously rectified - eg, through parameter tuning. And since there is no 10,000-mpg carburetor and none of the model results can possibly be valid anyway, it is all bad data. This is not science, but its cruel false parody.

As in paleoclimatology, the combination of coordination bias with random data is effectively no more than a power-transmission belt. It produces perfectly motivated science, reproducing the views of the scientist with great clarity and vigor. For the past 10 or 15 years, paleoclimatology has been more or less what Michael Mann wanted to to be. He is truly our Climate Stalin. Again, it is almost certain that the GCMs have done the same for Hansen. And depending on how well they have convinced themselves, they may not even know it.

So what do Pillars B and C give us? Pillar B is a weak piece of circumstantial evidence which appears to have been fraudulently fabricated. Pillar C is sunbeams from cucumbers. In short: styrofoam. Whatever is supporting the AGW-mitigation movement, it is not Pillars B and C.

However much time, money, and intelligence is invested in Pillars B and C, there is no chance that they will produce any information relevant to any rational decision process in this area. Or at least such is my judgment. Everyone's judgment, of course, is their own.

We turn to Pillar A - the fat one. Actually, no auditing whatsoever is required to show that Pillar A is, like B and C, meaningless for the purpose of deciding this question. From many small bricks of reason, Pillar A creates unreason. This can be demonstrated entirely by philosophy.

Pillar A asserts: global warming is materially harmful to humanity. Now, I realize that there are some who consider even this a small-minded view - even if global warming was beneficial to humanity, anthropogenic (non-natural) warming could be undesirable in some other metaphysical sense, harmful to some other X, etc, etc.

However, if the problem were entirely metaphysical, presumably it would be difficult to persuade every government on earth to concern itself. Similarly, if there was some tradeoff between X and humanity - policy Q being good for X, but bad for humanity - this too would be hard to defend. Especially in terms of democracy, in which everyone believes. If X does not get a vote, a government that favors its interests of those of humans, which do vote, can only be described as a betrayal of democracy. Hard to argue in these terms.

So it is not typically defended in these terms, whatever its actual believers may actually believe. Since the case for anti-carbon action is almost always stated in terms of material human impact, it can and should be challenged on the same terms.

Therefore, in considering only the material impact of global warming on humanity, we must restrict our logical processes to work exclusively by material rules. For instance, if we say that A is better than B, we must also say that B is worse than A. If we also know that B is better than C, we know that A is better than C. Ie: general utility is scalar and totally ordered.

From this axiom alone, we can deduce that there is some optimal planetary temperature, as defined by material impact on humanity. Any action (natural or anthropogenic) that moves the planetary temperature away from this optimal point is harmful; any action that moves the planetary temperature toward this optimal point is beneficial. It is very difficult to characterize this optimal point, of course - it requires many subjective value decisions. But whatever the results of those value decisions, some optimal point must exist.

If the present planetary temperature is above the optimal point, incremental warming is harmful. If the present planetary temperature is below the optimal point, incremental warming is beneficial. Again, no evidence is required for these conclusions - they are purely deductive.

Therefore, the material case for AGW mitigation depends existentially on the assertion that the present temperature is near, at, or above the optimal point. Otherwise, AGW is not harmful but benign - even if Pillars B and C were perfectly sound.

Pillar A is a vast collection of observations and projections of purported harm which global warmth appears to have caused, be causing, or risk causing. Again, don't miss the list. From the standpoint of reasoning about carbon-emissions mitigation, all this work is entirely useless, even though much of it is no doubt good science.

If there was any intent to incorporate Pillar A in a rational decision process, it would be necessary to fund a comparable investment in Pillar A` - a complete list of the material benefits of warming. For comparison, we would also like to see a Pillar A``, a complete list of the material harms of cooling, and a Pillar A```, a complete list of the material benefits of cooling. By examining all these lists, each collected by exactly the same process for maximum comparability, a person or persons with good judgment could compare them and decide whether Earth's temperature at present is too low, too high, or just right.

Of course, no one is producing Pillars A`, A``, and A```. The process that produces Pillar A pretends to be a process that produces factual materials as an objective background for judgment. Just as Caesar pretended to be just a private citizen, or FDR just a president. In reality, since it is not equally focused on collecting all sides of the question, it cannot possibly be interpreted as a rational attempt to assess the optimal point.

Unfortunately, the very existence of Pillar A makes the problem of assessing the optimal point much more expensive and difficult. Because of the anti-carbon movement, for the foreseeable future there will be more science, far more science, pointing to harmful impacts of warming, than benign impacts of warming, harmful impacts of cooling, or benign impacts of cooling.

But this disparity is not the result of any physical phenomenon - but a political phenomenon, anti-carbonism. Pillar A is therefore an artifact which must be ignored: a burden, not an aid, to judgment.

In case something in you resists this realization, here is a comment from a pseudonymous informed insider which describes how Pillar A was generated. The pseudonymous scientist quotes Nigel Calder:

If I wanted to do research on, shall we say, the squirrels of Sussex, what I would do – and this is any time from 1990 onwards – I would write my grant application saying: “I want to investigate the nut-gathering behaviour of squirrels with special reference to the effects of global warming – and that way I get my money. If I forget to mention global warming, I might not get the money.

Thus again, we see gross irrationality. Pillar A is nonpertinent to any rational decision process, because it is not actually a body of information designed to be used for assessing the optimal temperature point, the only rational process for which it could conceivably be useful. This would require detailed comparison to A`, a body of work which does not exist and is not being collected.

Note also that even Calder, taking a skeptical position in a skeptic's documentary, does not bother to speak of harmful effects of global warming on squirrels. Rather, to those involved in the great endeavor of collecting Pillar A, effect means harmful effect - as if it were axiomatically asserted that the optimal temperature is the present temperature. Indeed, from a certain metaphysical perspective, it makes no sense to speak of any change both anthropogenic and benign. Again: insanity. Here not far from the surface.

Nonetheless, it might actually be nice to answer the question. What is the optimal point? Hard question. Easier question: is the present temperature above, below, or at the optimal point?

Still not an easy question, of course. But there is a good practical way to inquire: discard Pillar A. There is an easy way to discard Pillar A: consider the scientific consensus as of not 2010, but, say, 1965. Or any point definitively prior to the fertilizing influence of the anti-carbon movement on the scientific community. For instance, we could ask the founder of the CRU himself, the pioneering climatologist Hubert Lamb.

What we would instantly find is that in the pre-IPCC era, climatologists (such as Professor Lamb) simply took it for granted that the present temperature is well below the optimal point. This can easily be seen in the names they assigned to past periods warmer than the present - such as the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Holocene Climate Optimum. Had they considered this a serious question for debate, it would have been easy to choose a neutral name.

We can easily see the reasoning behind "Optimum" by looking at a more recent historical precursor to the AGW movement: the embarrassing false step of the global-cooling movement. We have always been at war with Eastasia. However, Time magazine has performed the decidedly anti-Orwellian act of making its entire 20th-century archive free, and apparently unexpurgated, on line. So you can click here, and see what Time said when we were at war with Oceania. Pillar A`` makes a small appearance. One of the things you'll notice is that much, much less effort is required to conjure disasters due to global cooling, than disasters due to global warming. Crop failures and starvation don't involve a long chain of fanciful inference.

Therefore, it is not just a fallacy to rely on Pillar A to show that GW (anthropogenic or natural) is harmful. Rather, the best way to decide whether GW is harmful or benign is to disregard Pillar A, and consider the consensus judgment of climatologists from the era in which that judgment was of only academic interest. This algorithm tells us that GW is probably on balance benign - at least, to the material interests of humans. Pillar A is not only irrelevant, but probably wrong.

Thus, we see that all three pillars of the AGW syllogism are incapable of providing significant support to any rational argument. Pillar A is irrelevant and probably wrong; Pillar B is feeble at best, fraudulent at worst; Pillar C is irrelevant. Thus, any decision to mitigate AGW on the basis of A, B, and C can only be irrational, ie, insane.

Does this reasoning tell us that AGW (a) is not a real effect, or (b) is not worth mitigating? No. This reasoning tells us that almost everyone arguing for carbon control, since they are relying on some combination of A, B, and C, is jacked up on crack like Superbunny. Their argument is almost entirely unsupported - a real freeway on styrofoam pillars.

There are thousands of individual scientists working on Pillars A, B, and C. Are all these individuals individually insane? Are they getting naked in chicken masks? Of course not. It is the collective institution, your government, which is insane. And it is only insane in the sense that it is not acting, as it claims to be, rationally in the public interest. Its actions, explained in other terms, make perfect sense. We will shortly dive into the emails and see these terms.

Now, one of these actions does appear to be the active cultivation of delusional thinking - eg, the logic of the anti-carbon movement. Note that unless your government is somewhere in the serious boonies, it generally believes - collectively and individually - whatever delusions it propagates. Its propaganda is always sincere. Its advocates have already taken the basic precaution of first convincing themselves. Delusion is the normal human condition, not to be confused with insanity.

Abandoning these delusions, thinking again from scratch, we still have the question of carbon. While Pillars A, B, and C do not add up to anything like an argument for this massive program of collective economic punishment, the existence of a delusional argument is not relevant to any independent evaluation.

But the presence, even the ubiquity, of a bad argument is not relevant to independent evaluation. Let me take this test, therefore. What is my best judgment on the carbon question?

According to my judgment, carbon emissions are not worth mitigating. First: we know that sometime during Sibyl's lifetime, fossil-fuel emissions are likely to double atmospheric CO2. Second: we know that the effect of doubled CO2 is a thermal forcing roughly comparable to an increase in solar intensity of 0.3%. Third: we know that planetary temperature is probably below the optimal point, and probably dominated by negative feedbacks (the last, admittedly, a more speculative guess). Therefore, my guess is that the impact of CO2 forcing will be positive if any, and of little significance on a historical scale. The opportunity cost of freezing or reversing carbon emissions strikes me as quite significant on a historical scale.

Your judgment may differ. That's the thing about judgment: judgment is always human and personal. There is no procedure which can make decisions without human judgment - at least, no sane procedure. More on this later.

But this essay, frankly, is behind schedule. I have an entire sentence of reconstructed Ouija text to sell. I have only sold the last word - insane. I feel the sale on insane is made. Let's get cracking on incurably.

To see why the insanity is incurable, we need to dig a little deeper into these awful, awful emails. Who are these people? What exactly are we looking at, here? It's certainly not the court of FDR - but what is it?

To start, let's look at another little leak that just slipped out. From Michael Schlesinger, modeling bigwig, to Andy Revkin, Times reporter - and accidentally cced to Steven Hayward, corporate shill - December 5:

Shame on you for this gutter reportage. This is the second time this week I have written you thereon, the first about giving space in your blog to the Pielkes.

The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists. Of course, your blog is your blog. But, I sense that you are about to experience the 'Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.

"The 'Big Cutoff.'"

You see: I am not at all exaggerating when I compare these people to Stalin. If this section of the essay had a title, it might be Michael Mann: Court of the Green Tsar. Or possibly that Carlylean chestnut, Satan's Invisible World Displayed. What a Satan's world we have before us!

That's right: Satan. I think this really sets the correct tone for any serious historical examination of the climate emails. As Ranke put it, the first task of a historian is to see the thing as it really was. Jefferson should not be studied as if he were Tony Soprano, or vice versa. It is perfectly possible to produce a historical work, comprised entirely of absolutely factual facts, in which a Jefferson is portrayed as a gangster (for instance, Frederick Scott Oliver's Alexander Hamilton (1903) is not far). Or, of course, a gangster as a Jefferson.

Thus, we can see Mann as a Darwin, or as a Stalin. Whichever is the truth, the other is nothing but a lie. Regardless of its absolutely factual facts. Of course, to see Stalin in Mann is to see Satan in both Stalin and Mann; but what is shocking in this? Is it news that Satan walks up and down in the earth? He has to walk up and down somewhere. Why not Penn State?

The historian who refuses to believe in Satan labors at a crippling professional disadvantage, like the cabdriver who refuses to believe in buses. Satan's footprints are all over history. No region or period is exempt.

As always: if the reality wie es eigentlich gewesen would surprise you, you have been misinformed. Were you surprised by the tone and content of these communications, between these persons? Then you were previously misinformed. There's no great shame in it. Please consider checking your perceptions for other errors. If Satan is not sly, Satan is not Satan.

Present history has a special frisson: the reality still exists. We can know the thing not as it was, but as it is. We are going out live here at UR. Lubos Motl, far too optimistically, is trying to match the timeline with his own dear Velvet Revolution. Not going to happen. Nonetheless, the truth has a power.

Continuing with the Stalin analogy, let us take a quick look at the IPCC movement today.

First, we have a very definite inner-party schism between the climate Bolsheviks at realclimate, the true Hockey Team, and the climate Mensheviks such as von Storch and Zorita or Curry. Broadly, the Bolshevik position on AGW is that nothing is wrong; the Menshevik position is that personal wrongdoing is apparent. Both believe, or pretend to believe, that future climatology should proceed on an exclusively pure and virginal open-source basis, as I'm sure it will. (Which does not mean it can't be gamed. As I'm sure it will.)

Both are in an extremely delicate and high-pressure position - Bolsheviks because the weird, unprecedented mass mind of the Internet has turned against them, Mensheviks because they must dance quite adroitly to remain in contact with both reality and their own profession. Between them is the even more delicate position of reporters like Revkin, who are - as they say in the movies - far too close to the story.

My prediction: the Menshevik position will prevail. The Bolshevik leaders will be replaced. Perhaps even punished. And the Bolshevik party will prevail, the Mensheviks being entirely defeated. Within a few years, the field will be rejuvenated by a new generation of young Bolsheviks, the proteges of Jones and Mann, who produce ecocratic confirmation-bias noise using pure, virginal open-source methods with the utmost rigor and professionalism. Menshevik researchers will be gradually defunded and destroyed by bureaucratic infighting; junior Mensheviks will see their careers dead-end, senior ones will atrophy and become isolated. Whereas any Bolshevik who suffers a little now will later be hailed as a martyr.

So the Bolshevik party is really the path of future success, and it is the Bolsheviks we must study. Fortunately, we have their emails! Or at least enough of them. And we note that just as in the Court of the Red Tsar, the most devastating story is found in the internal politics.

What we see, in a regime like Stalin's, is that everyone around Stalin is terrified of Stalin. Rank does not make your life safer. Rank makes your life uglier.

For a normal instance of internal dissent, Cook and Briffa in 2002 (hat tip: Steven Hayward). Briffa writes to Cook:

I have just read this letter - and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other "target" series, such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage he has produced over the last few years, and ... (better say no more)

"Better say no more." Cook replies:

Of course, I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike's recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating. The only way to deal with this whole issue is to show in a detailed study that his estimates are clearly deficient in multi-centennial power, something that you actually did in your Perspectives piece, even if it was not clearly stated because of editorial cuts. It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.

"It would be too aggravating." And three years earlier, this memorable exchange. First, from Mann:

From: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 13:00:09 -0400 (EDT)
To: juppenbrink@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Dear all,

Thanks for working so hard to insure a final product that was acceptable to all. I think that Keith and Tim are to be commended on a fine job w/ the final version of the Perspectives piece that appeared, and I thank Julia for her especially difficult editorial task.

I appreciate having had the opportunity to respond to the original draft. I think this opportunity is very important in such cases (ie, where a particular author/groups work is the focus of a commentary by someone else), and hope that this would be considered standard procedure in the future in such instances.

I think we have some honest disagreements amonst us about some of the underlying issues, but these were fairly treated in the piece and that's what is important (The choice of wording in the final version was much better too. Wording matters!).

Thanks all for the hard work and a job well done. I like to think that my feedback helped here--so I take some pride here as well.

best regards,
mike

Which Bradley quotes in its entirety, and then adds - to Briffa alone -

From: "Raymond S. Bradley"
To: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: vomit
Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 07:25:34 -0400

Excuse me while I puke...
Ray

Do we even need to know what this is about? I'm afraid this is not at all a happy workplace. Watching this stuff, you develop real sympathy for the likes of Cook and Briffa - as for, say, Bukharin and Zinoviev.

People like this are just ordinary, weak people who happened to be standing around when and where the Adversary chose to appear. They follow him not because they love him, but because they are in his power. Occasionally they pipe up, and he slaps them down - with whatever force he has at his disposal. Stalin sent Molotov's own wife to Siberia, and kept him in the Politburo.

So, for instance, as the crap starts to hit the fan in 2003, we see Briffa pedal and spin:

I agree with this idea in principle. Whatever scientific differences and fascination with the nuances of techniques we may /may not share, this whole process [ie: McIntyre's initial hockey-stick audit] represents the most despicable example of slander and down right deliberate perversion of the scientific process, and bias (unverified) work being used to influence public perception and due political process.

It is, however, essential that you (we) do not get caught up in the frenzy that these people are trying to generate, and that will more than likely lead to error on our part or some premature remarks that we might regret. I do think the statement re Mike's results needs making, but only after it can be based on repeated work and in full collaboration of us all. I am happy to push Tim to take the lead and collaborate in this - and I feel we could get sanction very quickly from the DEFRA if needed.

BUT this must be done calmly, and in the meantime a restrained statement but out saying we have full confidence in Mike's objectivity and independence - which we can not say of the sceptics. In fact I am moved tomorrow to contact Nature and urge them to do an editorial on this. The political machinations in Washington should NOT dictate the agenda or scheduling of the work - but some cool statement can be made saying we believe the "prats have really fucked up someway" - and that the premature publication of their paper is reprehensible. Much of the detail in Mike's response though is not sensible (sorry Mike) and is rising to their bait.

"The prats have really fucked up someway." I wish I had an audio clip of this.

Again, you feel for Briffa. He knows that Mann is dragging him down to hell. He knows it. To be brutally frank, he knows he is engaged in something that looks a hell of a lot like a criminal enterprise. Yet, he follows. Exactly the position of millions of mid-level officials in the 20th-century totalitarian state. (And also very reminiscent of Carmela Soprano.)

It doesn't take a whole evil Politburo to be evil. It just takes a Stalin. The people who founded Bolshevism most certainly did not intend to produce the result that was Stalinism. This is why so many of them had to get the "Big Cutoff." God only knows what these people are thinking, as they read each others' emails. We have only one Hockey Team email post-leak - the one above. What wouldn't you give to see what they're sending each other these days? Alas, I suspect these days you'd have to start tapping the pay phones.

In any context, private or public, the consequence of this "Management Secrets of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria" universe is a flood of little aborted non-coups, all of which amount to mere muttering in the hallways. Our final example will be the email we looked at earlier, Cook's "fuck-all" opus:

From: Edward Cook
To: Keith Briffa
Subject: An idea to pass by you
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 08:32:11 -0400

Hi Keith,

After the meeting in Norway, where I presented the Esper stuff as described in the extended abstract I sent you, and hearing Bradley's follow-up talk on how everybody but him has fucked up in reconstructing past NH temperatures over the past 1000 years (this is a bit of an overstatement on my part I must admit, but his air of papal infallibility is really quite nauseating at times), I have come up with an idea that I want you to be involved in. Consider the tentative title:

"Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Over The Past Millennium: Where Are
The Greatest Uncertainties?"

"Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Over The Past Millennium: We Know With Certainty That We Know Fuck-All." (And it's not that anyone knows fuck-all about the Southern.)

Authors: Cook, Briffa, Esper, Osborn, D'Arrigo, Bradley(?), Jones (??), Mann (infinite?) - I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too personally invested in things now (i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in - Bradley hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they can contribute without just defending their past work - this is the key to having anyone involved. Be honest. Lay it all out on the table and don't start by assuming that ANY reconstruction is better than any other.

Now, this is beautiful. Did you see what we just got there? Did you catch that? We got something very like an org chart of the Hockey Team. The rank corresponds to the number of question marks. Cook, Briffa, Esper, Osborn, D'Arrigo: soldiers. Bradley: capo. Jones: underboss. Mann: boss. No surprise, then, that Mann just threw Jones under the bus - or at least tried to. These people are genuinely unbelievable.

Formally, of course, most of these individual are organizationally independent. Yet they appear to be bound together by some informal - one might almost say, invisible - but remarkably cohesive - bond. At least, they appear to despise each other, yet continue working together. This property is normally only found in actual, formal organizations.

In this case, I suspect it has something to do with (a) funding, and/or (b) collective guilt. Certainly everyone in Lenin's Politburo, not to mention Stalin's, knew that they had blood on their collective hands. Complicity is always the soul of loyalty.

Speaking of Stalin, this problem of finding the real organization inside the official organization always reminds me of one of the 20th century's most important primary sources: Sidney and Beatrice Webb's essay Is Stalin a Dictator?, from their classic Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (1935). Bear in mind - the Webbs, in their Fabian capacity, are two of the most significant intellectual inspirations for the entire New Deal regime.

This piece is just classic. The first paragraph and a half gives it away:

Sometimes it is asserted that, whereas the form may be otherwise, the fact is that, whilst the Communist Party controls the whole administration, the Party itself, and thus indirectly the whole state, is governed by the will of a single person, Josef Stalin.

First let it be noted that, unlike Mussolini, Hitler and other modern dictators, Stalin is not invested by law with any authority over his fellow-citizens, and not even over the members of the Party to which he belongs. He has not even the extensive power which the Congress of the United States has temporarily conferred upon President Roosevelt, or that which the American Constitution entrusts for four years to every successive president. So far as grade or dignity is concerned, Stalin is in no sense the highest official in the USSR, or even in the Communist Party...

"The extensive power which the Congress of the United States has temporarily conferred upon President Roosevelt..." what? History, you see, is full of secrets. Not secrets of fact, generally, but secrets of story. Secrets nonetheless. More later on this.

We finish the forensic part of our discussion, with Cook's ultimate professional fantasy:

Here are my ideas for the paper in a nutshell (please bear with me):

1) Describe the past work (Mann, Briffa, Jones, Crowley, Esper, yada, yada, yada) and their data over-laps.

2) Use the Briffa&Osborn "Blowing Hot And Cold" annually-resolved recons (plus Crowley?)(boreholes not included) for comparison because they are all scaled identically to the same NH extra-tropics temperatures and the Mann version only includes that part of the NH (we could include Mann's full NH recon as well, but he would probably go ballistic, and also the new Mann&Jones mess?)

[...]

7) Publish, retire, and don't leave a forwarding address

"Publish, retire, and don't leave a forwarding address."

Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I
almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will
show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year
extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we
believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what
the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know
with certainty that we know fuck-all).
[...]
If you don't want to do it, just say so and I will drop the whole idea like a hot potato. I honestly don't want to do it without your participation. If you want to be the lead on it, I am fine with that too.

Cheers,
Ed

Needless to say, nothing like this rebellion seems to have happened. Need we read more? Frankly, I feel we know these people. I hope you agree.

Now, let's get to this incurable bit. The ancestors told us: your entire system of government is incurably insane. Incurably? What can they possibly have meant by that?

We can only return to diligent semantics. To cure this insanity is to heal it, eradicate it, restore this thick knot of black pus to clear pink healthy muscle. The term is always absolute. The ancestors do not speak of palliative or protective measures, which of course are legion. Surely, we can defend ourselves - individually or collectively - from this madness. But we cannot cure it, for it is incurable. Or so the ancestors assert.

Of course, it is not time, or humanity, or America, or any metaphysical concept, which is incurable. It is only your government. This is not a metaphysical organization. It is a physical institution. It is sovereign, which makes it special - but not in this regard. Clearly there is no institutional ill, public or private, which cannot be cured by entirely new management. When in doubt, simply discharge all the old personnel and hire an entirely new staff. At the sovereign level, this is generally described as regime change.

So what the ancestors really mean is: this insanity cannot be cured, by any means short of regime change. You knew this! Of course you knew it. Because you have no idea how anyone could possibly cure it.

I think this fact accounts for much of the disorienting, demoralizing impact of Climategate. The climate loyalist is cognitively uncomfortable because he knows he is wrong. The climate dissident is cognitively uncomfortable because he knows he is right, but he has no idea what could possibly be done about it. There's a fine reason for this: nothing can possibly be done about it.

Since he has no structural program for change, the climate dissident reverts to folk activism. He helps spread the good news, and leaves it at that. He doesn't ask: what can be done? This is because nothing can be done. The insanity is incurable. One can erase it from one's own mind, or help others erase it. One cannot resist it.

That grim, fluorescent future! Coming soon, to a defeated nation near you. Everything older, grayer, cheaper, dirtier. Otherwise, no change. This is history's message: absolutely ineluctable. Sibyl, time will feed you the bone. To see why, one need only examine the details. Let's do so.

We posit the contrary: this insanity can be cured. How, in that case, could it be cured? Let us examine some possible, or not-so-possible, cures.

First, Mann and Jones could get the axe. This is clearly a required result for any process claiming to be curative - the pons asinorum of climatology reform. Maximum impact will be achieved if these men actually go to prison, although I'd say there is less than a 5% chance of that. But even a little community service would really send a message.

I think most dissidents expect that Mann and Jones will lose their positions. This would not surprise me at all, though I would not bet on it either. On the other hand, in terms of strict scientific misconduct, the offences of Robert Gallo were much greater, and despite considerable damage he retains a position of respect in the scientific community.

Jones, of course, is more likely to really get it in the neck. It's always the underboss who takes the fall, willingly or not. And after all, the man admitted to breaking the law in his own email. Frankly, his continued existence no longer serves the needs of the organization.

Suppose Mann and Jones go to prison? Following our contrapositive path, let's consider this best-case scenario. No doubt most climate dissidents would be wildly enthused by this result. As would I, of course. I'm an old-fashioned sort of gentleman and love to see a scoundrel swing.

But does this constitute a cure? Again, the suggestion is risible. It's like saying that you've performed a successful breast-cancer operation, when you've taken a biopsy. That particular fleck of cancerous tissue will certainly trouble the patient no more.

For instance, it is not even clear that Mann is the top of this network. For instance, in one email, he refers to our friends in higher places. Who are these friends, exactly? Ah, for a really aggressive domestic-intelligence program. J. Edgar would know. So would Yezhov or Yagoda.

The idea that removing one or two or three individuals could damage this network, which is informal, widely distributed, and not even clearly hierarchical, is preposterous. It will only create martyrs. Certainly, anyone who does not show proper respect for the martyrs is not with the program - not a team player. There is a Big Cutoff in his future.

As Clive Crook points out, we are simply not looking at contamination within one area of climate science. We are looking at the entire field. There is simply no conceivable procedure for purging a whole department. Many suspicious, grayish-looking lumps are visible. Removing any, even all, of the lumps is not even conceivably therapeutic. It is just a way to injure the patient.

Sure; we can expect the standards of research integrity in climate science to increase. But this is not the patient healing. This is the tumor healing. As we've seen, the entire endeavor of climate science, as now constituted, is entirely sinister and without merit. We don't want the tumor to heal. We want the tumor to die. The entire tumor. Otherwise, we certainly cannot claim a cure!

The personal incompetence, dissembling and manipulation of Mann and Jones is not the cancer. It is a symptom of the cancer. No one could possibly claim that these individuals are exceptional, at least within climatology. The discovery of their crude, Stalinist methods has been helpful in bringing public attention to the condition. We can only hope that it continues as long as possible. It inflames the immune system, which can only benefit the patient.

But suppressing the bad science in Pillar B, and replacing it with good science, is not an effective way to render the collective argument of Pillars A, B, and C rational. It is just a way to make a delusional proposition more superficially attractive. Moreover, repressing a few of the bad scientists is not even an effective way to suppress the bad science. Thus, this is just not a curative path we're looking at.

Second, public opinion could be turned against the entire anti-carbon movement. As it certainly has been - to some extent. Well! In a democracy, there is always the temptation to define popularity as victory. There is also the temptation to define being proven right as victory.

Any student of history knows better. Dissidents with an interest in actual curative processes should avoid these temptations, which have led many in other times and places to dead ends of unjustified optimism.

Popularity is not victory. Even truth is not victory. Victory is victory. Victory means: the San Francisco Academy of Sciences takes down its two-million-dollar permanent global-warming exhibit. Victory means: all the ordinary people who were part of this movement, who worked for it or even just believed in it, are embarrassed to have been associated with it.

Yes: universal belief in the carbon crisis has not been achieved. It will probably not be achieved, at least not any time soon. So? The entire thrust of Pillars A, B, and C, as we saw, is not to provide factual information for reasonable judgment, but to provide supporting information for a public-awareness campaign. This campaign - visible in eerie, Eurocratic, Orwellian documents like the rules of the game, found in FOIA.zip, by what appears to be the British version of Fenton Communications - has not won. But it has not lost, either. And the fight is yet young! A luta continua!

If these gentlemen can't educate you, they will educate your children. If they can't educate your children, they will still be around to give your grandchildren a go. They are patient, and they can afford to be patient. After all, they are in power and you are out of it. They can continue indefinitely with minority support, simply because there is no mechanism (short of regime change) by which any majority can displace them. Popularity is not victory. Truth is not victory. Victory is victory. This is the sad and wicked reality of the world.

Struggling nobly against broad popular ignorance is the normal position of a movement like the anti-carbon movement. Maoist (ie, New Left) to the core, it is guerrilla to the utmost. Defeated in the valleys, it retreats to the hills. Denied the masses, it seizes the elites. It loves nothing better than this attitude of resistance to popular opinion, in which it hardens and grows stronger. It can operate for indefinite periods of time from this Yenan, without winning or anywhere near. And history suggests that, regardless of the truth, it probably will win. The early abolitionists fought for decades as a tiny, ridiculed minority. Today any deviation from their views is a crime.

For instance, if anti-carbonism can be defeated now - a task of implausible difficulty - what ensures that it will stay defeated? Nothing at all. Once it prevails, however, it will create a structure of interests which is absolutely unassailable. Indeed perhaps as it already has, but nothing as compared to the world in which the US adopts anti-carbon measures like "80 by 50."

The belief that our entire system of government - including, but not limited to, this particular decision - is self-correcting, or even correctable by unusual effort - is widespread. It is also entirely unfounded. The study of history has left me with few stronger conclusions.

Third, we could abandon present political reality, acknowledge that this tumor is not curable by any conventional means, and apply the study of history to unconventional means. Alas, history does not supply any cures both real and practical. But, by showing us what a real cure looks like, it finishes the task of convincing us that any practical cure is unattainable.

We're going to look at two historical examples of a purge of the required dimensions, one of which (X) was unsuccessful, and the other of which (Y) was successful. This will give us the general impression that any curative therapy must be stronger than X, but need not be stronger than Y. I think this is a generally accurate impression. It also gives us the impression that any therapy nowhere near as strong as X is of dubious efficacy at best. As a student of history, I would also concur with this judgment.

Treatment X is McCarthyism, which failed. Treatment Y is denazification, which succeeded.

Unfortunately, most educated people are just as misinformed about the historical nature of the McCarthy period as they are about global warming. What? You thought this was the only distortion in your default reference frame? Oh, my Lord, the innocence.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Those who lie about the past are generally found lying about the present. Surely, if you can come to believe that you were completely misinformed on the subject of climate sensitivity, you can extend that same newborn skepticism to this important and little-known historical era, always forgotten or misrepresented. As always, 20th-century history is the hardest to learn and the most rewarding.

The reality behind "McCarthyism" - a good recent history is that of Stanton Evans - was one in which Americans discovered that their government had been employing, in positions of great responsibility, individuals known as "Communists," who were often extremely capable and brilliant, but who did not seem to have the best interests of Americans at heart, and seemed capable of misleading them with disturbing facility. There are no more Communists - not in the literal sense of the word. But surely the parallel is clear.

In particular, Americans discovered that their own foreign-policy organs, not to mention their own official press, had been consciously and deliberately misinforming them about the nature of events and regimes in Russia and China. Oceans being oceans, these events had relatively little direct impact on Americans. (Except, of course, in the Korean War, where American soldiers fought a major conflict against the Jeffersonian reformers to whom its diplomats had just delivered a quarter of humanity.) However, their effects on Russians and Chinese were dire. Especially the Chinese.

USG, or at least its foreign-policy organs, or certain networks therein, were seen correctly to bear culpability in this matter. (In modern-day historical works, for instance, you can see the correct history in either Jay Taylor's life of Chiang Kai-shek or Jung Chang's Mao. Chang doesn't give a crap about American politics; Taylor is himself a former Foreign Service officer. If you read either work, or any other reliable source, you will come away with the feeling that "George Marshall" is a perfectly sensible answer to the perfectly sensible question of "who lost China?".)

The basic problem faced by McCarthyism was that McCarthy's shop itself, run in practice by the freakish legal child-prodigy Roy Cohn, was a tiny dog that had caught a very large car. There was no substantive way to differentiate between a New Dealer and a Communist. After all, between the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and the Anglo-Soviet split of '45-'48, the two had been essentially the same movement. The two were also littered with homologous doctrinal doxology - starting, but not ending, with "progressive."

Therefore, McCarthyism had to operate under an essentially erroneous narrative of foreign subversion. Broadly, in general, his specific charges were accurate. The many sub-rosa connections to the Russian intelligence agencies that he uncovered were real. But the meaning of those connections were completely misinterpreted. As a result, a false picture was presented, both by McCarthy's allies at the time and by his present conservative defenders.

A man like Harry Dexter White did not see himself as a tool of the KGB. A man like Harry Dexter White saw the KGB as a tool of Harry Dexter White. The KGB could put him down in their files as a tool; I'm sure they did; and perhaps, in the end, they were right. But to White and many others like him, America should have been working with the Soviets as with the British, because the two systems were on a path to convergence. No one then or now would think anything of any contact between British intelligence and anyone in Washington.

This is actually not a reassuring conclusion at all. The problem is that it directs complicity in the other direction. Instead of the crime of workin' secretly fer furriners, ie, Stalin, the FDR administration strikes me as more likely to be prosecuted by history for employing Stalin. Who certainly made quite a steely iron fist. It is neither unusual nor unfair, however, for a leader to be prosecuted for the work of his henchmen. The Boss cannot be expected to have executed his victims personally - as if he were, say, Saddam Hussein.

But I digress. The point is not the accuracy of McCarthy's charges, but the actual effectiveness of his actual purge. There is no doubt that many Communists and other progressives, across a fairly wide cross-section of American institutions, not entirely sparing even the most elite, were purged as a result of McCarthyism. In that sense, the purge succeeded. The tumor regressed.

A little. And not for long. We can see easily that McCarthyism failed. If McCarthyism had succeeded, McCarthy would today be hailed as a hero, and his victims execrated as villains. Since his victims are hailed as martyrs, and he is execrated as a villain, we can see easily that he lost. Any successes were only temporary. The tumor came back - and prevailed. Taste the bone!

Needless to say, I have seen no seriously-proposed response to Climategate that sounds even a hundredth part as toxic as McCarthyism. At most, dissidents demand the heads of Mann and Jones. They don't demand a thorough, savage purge of the warmists throughout Washington and beyond.

It is the warmists, of course, who talk of McCarthyism. The denialists deny any such intention. Yet McCarthyism itself was quite insufficient to solve a remarkably similar problem. Whatever treatment climate science demands, it is something much stronger than anything Tailgunner Joe had in his medicine cabinet.

No! If we're going to actually clean up climate science, rather than just make an Alger Hiss of Michael Mann, we're going to have to take Rutger Hauer's advice in Split Second, and find ourselves some bigger guns. It was Raoul Duke, in his infamous Police Chief editorial, who pointed out the difference between tear gas and nerve gas. CS just slaps at the problem - a nerve agent solves it. Clearly, mere McCarthyism is in the tear-gas category.

So we're going to have to go all the way and look at a purge which actually worked. Fortunately, we have already discussed this period of history: denazification. Get your Persilscheine now! Here at UR we have a practically pathological obsession with the practice of history through primary sources. There is no better primary source on denazification than the original bureaucratic directive under which it was conducted - the notorious JCS 1067.

This should be read in its entirety, noting carefully everything that feels like a euphemism. It generally is. However, today we are only concerned with the means by which JCS 1067 accomplished its primary goal - the permanent eradication from the German mind and government of National Socialism and anything even remotely like it.

I reproduce section 6 of JCS 1067, "Denazification," in full:

a. A Proclamation dissolving the Nazi Party, its formations, affiliated associations and supervised organizations, and all Nazi public institutions which were set up as instruments of Party domination, and prohibiting their revival in any form, should be promulgated by the Control Council. You will assure the prompt effectuation of that policy in your zone and will make every effort to prevent the reconstitution of any such organization in underground, disguised or secret form. Responsibility for continuing desirable non-political social services of dissolved Party organizations may be transferred by the Control Council to appropriate central agencies and by you to appropriate local agencies.

b. The laws purporting to establish the political structure of National Socialism and the basis of the Hitler regime and all laws, decrees and regulations which establish discriminations on grounds of race, nationality, creed or political opinions should be abrogated by the Control Council. You will render them inoperative in your zone.

c. All members of the Nazi party who have been more than nominal participants in its activities all active supporters of Nazism or militarism and all other persons hostile to Allied purposes will be removed and excluded from public office and from positions of importance in quasi-public and private enterprises such as (1) civic, economic and labor organizations, (2) corporations and other organizations in which the German government or subdivisions have a major financial interest, (3) industry, commerce, agriculture, and finance, (4) education, and (5) the press, publishing houses and other agencies disseminating news and propaganda.

Persons are to be treated as more than nominal participants in Party activities and as active supporters of Nazism or militarism when they have (1) held office or otherwise been active at any level from local to national in the party and its subordinate organizations, or in organizations which further militaristic doctrines, (2) authorized or participated affirmatively in any Nazi crimes, racial persecutions or discriminations, (3) been avowed believers in Nazism or racial and militaristic creeds, or (4) voluntarily given substantial moral or material support or political assistance of any kind to the Nazi Party or Nazi officials and leaders.

No such persons shall be retained in any of the categories of employment listed above because of administrative necessity, convenience or expediency.

d. Property, real and personal, owned or controlled by the Nazi party, its formations, affiliated associations and supervised organizations, and by all persons subject to arrest under the provisions of paragraph 8, and found within your zone, will be taken under your control pending a decision by the Control Council or higher authority as to its eventual disposition.

e. All archives, monuments and museums of Nazi inception, or which are devoted to the perpetuation of German militarism, will be taken under your control and their properties held pending decision as to their disposition by the Control Council.

f. You will make special efforts to preserve from destruction and take under your control records, plans, books, documents, papers, files, and scientific, industrial and other information and data belonging to or controlled by the following:

(1) The Central German Government and its subdivisions, German military organizations, organizations engaged in military research, and such other governmental agencies as may be deemed advisable;

(2) The Nazi Party, its formations, affiliated associations and supervised organizations;

(3) All police organizations, including security and political police;

(4) Important economic organizations and industrial establishments including those controlled by the Nazi Party or its personnel;

(5) Institutes and special bureaus devoting themselves to racial, political, militaristic or similar research or propaganda.

Fuckin' awesome! (Note how we don't forget to deal with those damned museum exhibits.)

If you replace "militarist" with "environmentalist," etc, I think you get a rough but reasonable description of the sort of purge which would be needed to actually cure USG and its many tentacles of the insanity we've been looking at. Basically, denazification is so far beyond McCarthyism, it isn't even slightly fucking funny. It's the nerve gas - a real, proper cleansing. No, sir, you won't find any bedbugs when you move back in to this building! Sir, we've given it the complete treatment!

And of course it's also the sort of thing we associate with the Nazis themselves. Mainly because it's the sort of thing the Nazis did. There's nothing much wrong with your bog-standard history of the Nazis. No - all surviving distortions concern the other side of the conflict.

However, we again digress. It should be clear that in 2009, a thorough, JCS 1067-style purge of the ecocrats, old school, is nowhere near the realm of the political possible. It's even farther from reality than mere McCarthyism, which is both ineffective and unachievable. Thus, as students of history, we can be confident in our diagnosis: incurable.

At least, incurable except in the context of regime change. The way to look at the denazification analogy is not to say that nothing like JCS 1067 can ever happen again, ever, in history. History never works this way. The present, which always seems special in the present, always becomes the past. If such a purge was physically possible once, it is physically possible again.

More to the point, once you postulate any such effort, you can only really imagine it in the context of regime change. You simply can't imagine it under the present political reality. The present reality would have to end; another reality would have to come into existence. At present regime change seems quite unlikely, but history proves that it happens. Thus, again: insanity, incurable except by means of regime change. The ancestors are vindicated again.

Therefore, we continue on to the first, most difficult, and most devastating part of the message: your entire form of government. What can this mean? Whatever it means, it seems calculated to encourage us to take an extremely broad and existential view of the problem. We should certainly not be seeing Climategate as an isolated case.

But could it be? When confronted by questions of this nature, I always fall back on the great Punch cartoon of the curate's egg. Completely mis-explained by Wikipedia, but at least you can see the actual cartoon.

The point is that the curate, who is both hilariously timid and hilariously polite, takes a bite of a rotten egg. His mouth is immediately filled with sulfur, corruption, filth. But he has no evidence that the rest of the egg is rotten - only the bite he just took. He therefore declares the rest of it excellent. As in theory it may well be. In governments and in eggs.

Thus, our immediate reaction upon discovering this monstrous hoax is to follow the curate's example. We therefore declare that, to protect the excellent reputation of Science, climatology must be purged. The rotten part of the egg must be removed. Leaving the rest - which is, again, excellent.

I would certainly not regard this as a disaster. (In fact, I think the whole field of climatology should probably just be turned off for ten or fifteen years. Let it lie fallow.) However, local regime change in climatology alone can only be described as an effective solution (though politically unrealistic) if the problem with climatology is unique, exceptional, unprecedented. The rest of the egg being excellent.

Ie: since the reputation of climatology did not match its reality, it seems reasonable to wonder if the fungus has sent its tendrils anywhere else. Before we start reflexively defending what turns out to be, in fact, indefensible. It seems to me there has been enough of that. Indeed, the general absence of any such broad curiosity, in the early response to Climategate, is so striking that this absence itself can only be seen as an epiphenomenon of collective insanity.

Basically, we have entirely failed to even address a very important question. We have failed to ask why this happened. Until we understand the why of anti-carbonism - not the meteorological why, the historical why - we cannot possibly search for other nests of the infection. According to the ancestors, of course, there is no use; it is everywhere. And they may just be right.

Here is the original cause of the insanity: an failure of judgment. The original sin of Climategate is the belief that good government can be produced without human judgment, by some automatic formula or procedure. Including, though not limited to, the scientific method.

Typically in previous historical eras the process of automatic policy determination was more colorful, and involved some sort of prop. Such as an ox liver. But the urge is the same. If a decision is made by some formal process, however spurious its logic, it is therefore removed from the dangerous realm of personal government. For instance, no one need be personally responsible for it. Obviously this is very appealing to the bureaucratic mind.

Recall my one-paragraph dismissal of AGW as a major problem. This is my own judgment. It may be good judgment or bad judgment. But - in your entire system of government - there is nowhere to insert the judgment. On AGW, USG acts with bad judgment, because it pretends to act without judgment at all. Judgment, nonetheless, is found - and not good judgment.

If you search the CRU emails for the Orwellian term policymakers, for instance, you get 12 hits. This word is chosen from the same school of misleading language under which Stalin becomes a mere administrative assistant. It is absolutely clear that in reality, "policymakers" do not actually make policies. They enact policies. The policies are made in the same forge as the data.

In other words, the ideal "policymakers" in Michael Mann's world, who are of course also the progressive policymakers, are not in actual fact contributing actual judgment to the process of making policy. They are saying: the scientists tell us we need to do it. They are deferring to Michael Mann's judgment. They are, in a word, passing the buck. Actually thinking, as in my judgment process, is quite beyond their pay grade. No one is paid to do this.

By using words like "policymaker," scientists such as Mann disguise the fact that it is actually themselves who are exercising the judgment. Of course, someone has to make the decision. If Michael Mann decides that he doesn't want to play Climate Stalin anymore, and no one else wants the job, there will be no Climate Stalin. Historically, someone else tends to want the job, although personal authority will generally fragment over time. Bureaucracy, however, remains bureaucracy. Brezhnev is not always an improvement on Stalin.

Why do Mann and his colleagues act and talk like Stalin and his Politburo? Because they are Stalin and his Politburo - at least, within their own narrow field. Mann cannot order anyone actually shot, so he doesn't. If he could, why assume he wouldn't? Once again, it's not like there is a big fence which keeps Satan out of the United States. Within the domain of climate science and climate policy, the IPCC circle is as sovereign as it gets. They may be resisted by rogue (ie, Republican) "policymakers" - but these dinosaurs are weaker in every generation.

Thus, while it appears formally that human judgment has been eliminated from government, this is not actually the case. The judgment has just been delegated to the climate scientists, who are nominally just providing background information to the "policymakers." In reality, Stalin was in charge of Russia. In reality, Mann, Jones, Hansen et al are in charge of climate policy.

This is why it's so difficult to get these guys out of power. They are in power. Nature abhors a vacuum. There is only one way in which a sovereign leaves office: by losing his job to the new sovereign, who takes it up and does it instead. This applies to institutions as well as persons. Since it is sovereign in its department, the IPCC community cannot be displaced by anything short of a coup - and since the Mann group is quite strongly rooted in the general fabric of government, it is at least as plausible to imagine this as a general coup. Ie, regime change.

Here is what the ancestors meant by your entire system of government. They meant that the policy process that produced AGW mitigation is the normal (for the 20th century) process of public policy, which is more or less how your entire system of government makes all its decisions. Because of its newness, the AGW policy process is in fact an unusually regular and ideal case of this structure. It is not an archaic exception, but the latest, greatest thing.

Therefore, the AGW insanity cannot be regarded as an exception or special case. Rather, it is best interpreted as an unusually transparent example of a general or systematic corruption. Most other instances of this corruption are opaque to us, because we do not have their emails. Thus, they are invisible, and we are free to behave as if they did not exist. But they do exist - and if you wonder why everything seems so badly-governed these days, this is more or less it.

Let's try to summarize this problem and how it arose. We'll see this at two levels: the philosophical level, and the historical level.

The problem: bad judgment in government. The cause: a philosophy of government which promoted the belief that policy could be formulated mechanically, by delegating it to neutral and objective experts. To conceal this dramatic shift in sovereignty, the old political institutions were retained and in fact continued to function, much like the Roman Senate under the Roman Empire. Under the Caesars, the Senate was no longer a body of governing statesmen. In appearance, however, they remained "policymakers."

The modern politician, rare exceptions excepted (eg, Daniel Patrick Moynihan), is not a statesman. He is an actor playing a statesman. This is a full-time job, a specialty, and not an easy one. There is simply no room for this individual to have his own, individual whims, theories and opinions. His handlers may be so good at their jobs that they convince him that he has his own judgment, but in reality he delegates his trust to them completely. He has no other option.

So delegating public policy to the scientists had an obvious effect. It made the scientists the policymakers - human judgment is conserved. The judgment became theirs. Hence Michael Mann, Climate Stalin. Granted effective sovereign power in his own field, he started to behave like a sovereign. And if he hadn't, someone else would have. No shortage of potential Stalins in this world. Satan's job is never tough to fill.

The great Victorian historian Lord Acton made a famous observation: power corrupts. Ironically, he is (quite unfairly) remembered for little else. The mechanism behind the corruption of power is fascinating and worthy of its own long discussion, and I'm not even sure Acton understood it correctly. But this would be a digression, and we've already digressed too much. Let's just take it as an axiom. People already believe it anyway.

We see immediately that when sovereign authority is initially granted to an individual, group, or institution, especially if it is granted suddenly, without warning, and with no preceding period of protracted drooling, the result may well be quite good. Why? Because the judgment of those who have power thrust upon them thus is uncontaminated by the Acton effect. In good individuals, in fact, power tends to confer responsibility - they rise to its challenge.

Over time, however, these institutions are corrupted. They become arrogant and... insane. Good individuals outcompete the bad ones. Hubert Lamb retires; he is replaced by Phil Jones. Under Boromir, Gondor is just another province of Mordor. Both, after all, are ruled by the Ring!

And this degradation, once again, is entirely irreparable. Or rather: it can only be repaired by replacing the corrupted institutions with new institutions. It certainly cannot be repaired by replacing the corrupt institutions with old institutions - ie, the preceding generation. Not only were these institutions perhaps quite corrupt themselves, they are no longer a practical option. Because they no longer exist.

This is the point that conservatives just can't get. An unseated sovereign rapidly ceases to be capable of ruling - if it continues to exist at all. The Bourbon court cannot be restored, because it does not exist. The Roman Republic could not be restored, despite all the tumults of the Empire years, despite the fact that the Senate still existed - why? Because the Senate was no longer a plausible governing body. It was no more than a collection of the Emperor's placemen.

Needless to say, the American Old Deal is in exactly the same position. So when I see otherwise sensible conservatives, such as Paul at Powerline, write things like this:

Many years ago, I learned that under the American model of governance, Congress (the representative of the people) enacted legislation; the executive branch implemented the legislation; and the Supreme Court became involved, in rare instances, at the back end of the process. However, this model has, in a sense, been reversed when it comes to regulating carbon dioxide -- a matter of enormous potential consequences for both the environment and the U.S. economy.

In 2007, the Supreme Court decided that carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. It therefore held that the EPA had not only the power but the duty to regulate this gas. Thus, nine unelected individuals issued, in effect, a directive to the executive branch.

Yesterday, the bureaucrats at the EPA announced that carbon dioxide and several other gases pose a danger to the environment and the health of Americans and that, accordingly, EPA would begin writing regulations to reduce emissions. EPA's administrator added, however, that she would prefer that Congress pass legislation to accomplish the same task.

As Sen. John Kerry aptly characterized the situation, "the message to Congress is crystal clear: get moving."

Thus, the executive branch, in response to a directive from judges, is now attempting to pressure Congress into taking action that, from all appearances, Congress does not want to take.

If this is democracy, it seems like a new kind of democracy.

- I despair. Paul! Darling! Love! Apple of my heart! If you wanted to fight that battle, you should have been born in the 1850s, not the 1950s. Because it was over a century ago. At least. Doesn't the phrase "Progressive Era" ring any bells for you? Bueller? Bueller?

The "American model of governance," as described by Paul, if it ever existed as anything like this pretty abstraction, ceased to exist in 1933. Its replacement is indeed a "new kind of democracy," and always has been. It is our kind. To wish for any other is entirely futile, for this is the kind we have. It was not always; but the past exists only in our imaginations. It can be recreated, of course, but so can many better things.

Congress is simply not a plausible governing body, because Congress is simply not a collection of statesmen. It is a collection of party hacks, basically actors in the world's dullest reality show, perhaps with a few amateurish proto-statesmen in the mix. Since these people do not habitually exercise the function of statesmen, namely sovereign judgment, there is no realistic program under which power can be restored to their hands. Their hands are too limp to hold it. Exactly the same was true of the Senate of the Roman Empire.

Similarly, others (again, typically Republicans) dream of a restoration of populist democracy, in which red-blooded Americans take back their government directly - without any of those corrupt politicians. Again: dream on. The American voting population, as a collective body, is nowhere near fit to hold the reins of government. It is not some collection of misunderstood statesmen. Indeed, it knows almost nothing of the reality of how Washington actually works. It is as unfit to govern as I am to fly a 747.

Those who dream of turning this clock back, of restoring defunct political arrangements or institutions, must answer this question: why would anyone who got their hands on power, then convey it to some other incompetent party? The answer is simple: they wouldn't, and shouldn't. If their goal is personal aggrandizement, they keep the power themselves. If their goal is competence, they keep the power themselves, or transfer it to some competent authority. Thus, the Republic is not restored; should not be restored; cannot be restored.

Of course, if a time machine had actually transported the entire Roman aristocracy of 200 BC, the Scipios and Catos and what not, into the collapsing Empire of 400 AD, I am sure the Scipios and Catos would have lost little time in setting things right. The Rome of 400 AD had an aristocracy as well, and quite a cultured one; but it consisted of Sidonius and Claudian, not Scipio and Cato. Note that this governing class, too, exercised strikingly poor judgment.

The human element is essential. A Senate of Sidoniuses and Claudians is not a Senate of Scipios and Catos, whatever its parliamentary procedures. In fact, there is a very simple reason why the Washington of 2009 makes such poor decisions. It is the same reason that the Rome of 409 made bad decisions.

Washington makes poor decisions because in Washington, the true art of general statesmanship, the broad art of judgment in government, is neither studied, nor taught, nor practiced, nor even sought. The cockpit is locked; whatever is in it, is not a pilot; we are all on the plane.

The ancestors, understandably, are a little upset by this. I have explained the problem philosophically; now, to finish, I want to explain how it happened, historically, to us. And since the ancestors have been so enlightening with their pithy little sentence, I want to let them explain it in their own words. Delivered without benefit of Ouija board.

These words make sense to me. I hope they make sense to you. If not, I have failed in communicating something. Try reading the whole works, not just these samples.

First, let's look at one of the most talented and effective non-monarchical governments in history, the aristocratic Parliamentary system of Victorian Britain. This regime cannot have been too effective, because it no longer exists. Obviously, it in some way neglected its own security: a fatal lapse in any sovereign. In its heyday, though, it pretty much kicked everyone's ass.

How did HMG in this golden age solve the problem of judgment? Let's hear it from the great legal philosopher John Austin, founder of Victorian jurisprudence.

From his Plea for the Constitution (1859):

It must be remarked, moreover, that the individual members of the Parliament speaking generally belong to aristocratical or elevated classes. The position of the Head of the State, and the stations held by the Peers, are too obvious to need comment. For the most part the members of the House of Commons are men of hereditary or acquired wealth, and can afford to devote themselves to practical politics without pecuniary reward; for a well founded dislike of political adventurers (or aspirants to seats in Parliament with a view to pecuniary gain) has hitherto disposed the electoral body to reject candidates without independent means. For the most part, therefore, the members of the House of Commons are drawn from the vast body who may be styled an aristocracy of independent gentlemen.
[...]
The reproach of aristocratical tendencies, so often brought against the British Government, is founded on the influence exercised in Parliament, and in the country at large, by the aristocracy (composed of the Lords and the higher Commonalty), which we have ventured to style a political aristocracy, on account of its special vocation to practical politics. We therefore will try to describe, as briefly and clearly as possible, the advantages accruing to the country from the existence of this aristocracy, and from the functions which it performs.

The art of statesmanship, like other high and difficult arts, can only be acquired by those who make it their principal business. The aristocracy in question, being men of independent means, can afford to devote themselves to public life; whilst men whose time and thoughts are absorbed by their private affairs cannot give themselves thoroughly to the concerns of the nation. From the possession of an aristocratical body specially affected to practical politics, the nation derives the well known advantages which arise from the division of labour. A larger proportion of competent statesmen will naturally be furnished by a body comparatively skilled, than by the bodies (far more numerous) whose attention to public interests is necessarily intermittent, and whose knowledge of those interests is therefore necessarily superficial. To this it must be added that in consequence of the high and undisputed positions occupied socially by the aristocracy in question, they naturally acquire a cool self-possession, a quick insight into men, and a skill in dealing with men which are specially necessary to statesmen in a free and Parliamentary country.

In other words: pretty much the same way the Roman Republic solved the problem.

Note in particular that when these gentry were landed gentry, as once almost exclusively, they came to Parliament with extensive experience in personal government. Well into the 19th century, the English country squire retained an essentially feudal role in local administration; he was the king of his shire, so to speak. In short, this caste was to governing as Hasids are to diamonds, Syrians to bodegas, or Patels to motels.

Again, note that there is simply no way to restore this system of government. The institutions, as they were, were dependent on the aristocrats Austin describes. This population no longer exists. Thus, the institutions cannot be restored. No Patels, no motels.

Britain still has an aristocracy, of course. Generally, it is the same aristocracy as the American - a truly global elite. You can see its doings, or at least its pretenses, if you read Vanity Fair. This set, no longer a caste, is rich, intelligent, influential, cultivated, beautiful; in every superficial way, everything an aristocracy should be. Completely beyond distinctions of birth, of course; admitted only by wealth or achievement.

And terribly concerned with its carbon footprint. A Sidonius-and-Claudian bureaucratic aristocracy, not a Cato-and-Scipio ruling aristocracy. Very fit for decoration; not at all fit for government. Again, perfectly intelligent - just awfully misinformed, with little or no education or experience in the "high and difficult art."

Britain is a good country on which to track the 19th and 20th centuries. Its form of government, while democratic (by Austin's definition - and if you lack your own theory of sovereignty which you prefer for some reason, I'd just stick with Austin's) throughout the period, goes from strongly aristocratic at the beginning, to strongly bureaucratic at the end. In the end it converges with that of the United States, as does everyone's. But the US itself is a cultural backwater for most of the 19th. Next to the Victorians, it is barely worth noticing.

When we look at the Gilded Age, Old Deal or Third Republic regime in the United States, what we see is a good deal uglier than its British counterpart, but still relatively functional. This is the golden age of the boss and the interest - more plutocratic than aristocratic. Still, the difference between plutocracy and aristocracy is a subtle one at best. The Victorian aristocracy was perfectly open to honest wealth, more or less honestly acquired.

And the American captains of industry were just that - captains. Thus, a Senate controlled corruptly by corrupt interests was also a Senate of talents and powers, more or less fit by experience to govern. (Nor was the Victorian election exactly a festival of human purity.) Moreover, the US at this time had a strong militaristic tradition, inherited from the Civil War through institutions like the GAR - still visible in many period statues. This, too, imparted fiber.

In retrospect, like the Victorian era, the Gilded Age strikes me as a golden age of good government. Its architecture certainly tells a better story than ours, and architecture seldom lies. Viewed close up by those living in it, however, the period could be quite unattractive. Under a strong enough microscope, anything looks ugly.

Moreover, though fundamentally aristocratic in the management of the State, these regimes remained democratic in their foundation of sovereignty. Democratic forces - to be precise, populist forces, not controlled or instructed by the legitimate authorities - were etching away at the aristocratic bastions. For all the reasons you don't want Sarah Palin on the throne of FDR, these democratic forces tended to exhibit extremely poor judgment.

Enter the new formula of sovereignty, the Progressive or Fabian version. Succinctly summarized by that arch-pundit of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann, in his Drift and Mastery:

The bureaucratic dreams of reformers often bear a striking resemblance to the honest fantasies of the utopians. What we are coming to call State Socialism is in fact an attempt to impose a benevolent governing class on humanity. Oh, for wise and powerful officials to bring order out of chaos, end the "muddle," and make men clean, sober, and civic-minded.

There is no real understanding of democracy in the State Socialist, for he doesn't attempt to build with the assent and voluntary cooperation of men and women. But he avoids the laborious and disheartening method of popular education, and takes satisfaction in devising a ruling class, inspired by him, as a short-cut to perfection.

Drift and Mastery was published in... 1914. So much for the KGB theory of the 20th century. (That said, Lippmann, genuinely one of the 20th century's most influential intellectuals, himself was always close to the Soviets - and his longtime secretary was in fact an agent.)

Lippmann is an exceedingly tricky and dangerous writer, always worth reading but never to be trusted. He is often found projecting his own machinations onto others. He himself, of course, is one of these "reformers," and he would inspire many generations of "wise and powerful officials." This is the tradition of government that leads directly to Michael Mann.

What's especially interesting is his distinction between good democratic reform and that nasty "State Socialism." This form of government, the Platonic guardianship of scientific bureaucrats, is harmful and dangerous if it acts without obtaining the consent of the governed. If it does obtain the consent of the governed, the inherent wisdom of the People will restrain it from any insanity in which it might otherwise be tempted to indulge.

Of course, those of us who have read the CRU emails know exactly how this system goes about obtaining the consent of the governed. In all 20th-century regimes, those that maintained active political systems and those that did not, the scientocrats simply took on an additional function. Besides rulers, they became propaganda masters. They obtained the consent of the governed, all right. They did it by producing everything the governed watched, read, studied or taught. This was called public education. Since it was entirely based on the truth, there was nothing wrong with it at all.

(This, to me, is one of the most interesting effects of Climategate. This system is just not working as well as it's supposed to. There are too many alternate information paths. A substantial percentage of the voting population simply refuses to be properly educated. It prefers to persist in its scandalous ignorance. Indeed it is often quite genuinely ignorant - frequently getting the right answer for the wrong reason.

But this stubborn resistance is just that - resistance. It can and will be worn down and surpassed. It does not even attempt to fight back, because it cannot. For instance, EPA does not need Congressional action to regulate carbon. It wants Congressional action, because it wants the same cloak of democratic consent that Lippmann describes. Since it does not actually need this consent, however, its courtship of public opinion can only be described as camouflage.)

The history of the US in the 20th century is the history of a long, slow progress from the Old Deal's corrupt, quasi-aristocratic plutocracy, to Lippmann's egalitarian, bureaucratic scientocracy. The former certainly had many flaws. But the latter's growing tendency to collectively punish its own citizens, for some random invented reason that makes no sense at all, is really quite remarkable.

The reason we can describe the present American regime as the New Deal state is that most of the actual change in this transition happened under the revolutionary monarchy of FDR. (For the actual linkage of state and university, see under: Brains Trust.) The Washington of 1945 bears little more than nominal resemblance to the Washington of 1933, for FDR and his henchmen exercised more or less absolute management authority over USG. The Washington of 2009 looks a lot like the Washington of 1945, and that of 1933 like that of 1909.

What is especially interesting is the attitude of the liberal, progressive or New Dealer toward democracy - not democracy as an abstract ideal, but democracy as a form of government. As an abstract ideal, your progressive adores democracy. As a form of government, he despises it. He calls it "politics." Politics is very important to the progressive, but only in a ceremonial capacity. It must not be confused with the actual task of policy formulation, which must always be left to the "wise and powerful officials." Per Lippmann's advice, these must always obtain the consent of the governed - so that their authority is never threatened by popular tumult.

The scientocratic system of government which gave us Professor Mann, therefore, can be seen as a sort of adaptive consequence of that fundamentally turbulent and revolutionary form of government, democracy. Since active democracy, in which unguided popular movements actually clash and compete for power, is extremely unstable, it tends to collapse into more stable forms. While retaining the nominal institutions of democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty, these actually function in traditional autocratic, oligarchic or theocratic modes.

And therein hangs our third ancestor. Now, some have described the dramatic formula of UR as having a rather Tolkienesque feel; others may connect it more with C.S. Lewis; I certainly grew up reading both. But above all, I grew up reading Isaac Asimov.

If my journey into the awesome, humbling lost library that is Google Books was a film and needed a name, it might be called "Searching for Hari Seldon." With more or less the entire Victorian corpus, modulo a bit of copyfraud, the Hari Seldon game is to enquire of this Library: which writers of the 19th would feel most justified, in their understanding of the eternal nature of history, humanity and government, by the events of the 20th? Whose crystal ball worked? Whose archived holograms delivered the news?

Broadly speaking, I think the answer is clear. Hari Seldon is Carlyle - the late Carlyle, of the Pamphlets. I consider myself a Carlylean pretty much the way a Marxist is a Marxist. There is simply no significant phenomenon of the 20th century not fully anticipated. Almost alone Carlyle predicts that the 20th will be a century of political chaos and mass murder, and he says not what but also why. And what a writer! Religions could easily be founded on the man - and perhaps should be.

But there's no reason the Library need contain only one Seldon. Our mission today suggests a different candidate: another titan of Victorian letters, Sir Henry Maine. Here is history's actual message on Climategate, delivered without benefit of Ouija: Maine's Popular Government (1885). The Ouija board adds, Glenn Reynolds style: read the whole thing. It's quite readable, especially if you can tolerate UR.

I will leave you with some samples. What is unique about Maine, even among his fellow Seldons, is that he is not just the greatest Victorian scholar of comparative government; he does not just correctly predict his future and our past; he also predicts our future. At least, in Maine you find many predictions which come true; few which come false; and a few which have not yet come.

First, watch him refine Austin's understanding of aristocracy and democracy:

The most interesting, and on the whole the most successful, experiments in popular government, are those which have frankly recognised the difficulty under which it labours.

At the head of these we must place the virtually English discovery of government by Representation, which caused Parliamentary institutions to be preserved in these islands from the destruction which overtook them everywhere else, and to devolve as an inheritance upon the United States. Under this system, when it was in its prime, an electoral body, never in this country extraordinarily large, chose a number of persons to represent it in Parliament, leaving them unfettered by express instructions, but having with them at most a general understanding, that they would strive to give a particular direction to public policy.

The effect was to diminish the difficulties of popular government, in exact proportion to the diminution in the number of persons who had to decide public questions. But this famous system is evidently in decay, through the ascendency over it which is being gradually obtained by the vulgar assumption that great masses of men can directly decide all necessary questions for themselves.

The agency, by which the representative is sought to be turned into the mere mouthpiece of opinions collected in the locality which sent him to the House of Commons, is we need hardly say that which is generally supposed to have been introduced from the United States under the name of the Caucus, but which had very possibly a domestic exemplar in the ecclesiastical organisation of the Wesleyan Methodists.

The old Italian toxicologists are said to have always arranged their discoveries in a series of three terms - first the poison, next the antidote, thirdly the drug which neutralised the antidote. The antidote to the fundamental infirmities of democracy was Representation, but the drug which defeats it has now been found in the Caucus.

By "Caucus" Maine means, of course, the modern political party. Note his perfect description of the same paradox we see in Lippmann's work - the spontaneous appearance of an antidote to democracy, often promoted under the very name of democracy itself. You knew, of course, that representative government was an antidote to democracy; you also knew that progressive scientocracy was an antidote to democracy; you never connected these two points. Or associated them with "the old Italian toxicologists."

Note also that in 21st-century scientific bureaucracy, we have seen only two of these three steps. We have seen democracy and its antidote. The latter quite toxic itself, and growing only more so. We have not, however, seen the neutralizing drug - yet.

Here Maine explains his theory of aristocratic judgment:

Under all systems of government, under Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy alike, it is a mere chance whether the individual called to the direction of public affairs will be qualified for the undertaking; but the chance of his competence, so far from being less under Aristocracy than under the other two systems, is distinctly greater. If the qualities proper for the conduct of government can be secured in a limited class or body of men, there is a strong probability that they will be transmitted to the corresponding class in the next generation, although no assertion be possible as to individuals.

Whether - and this is the last objection - the age of aristocracies be over, I cannot take upon myself to say. I have sometimes thought it one of the chief drawbacks on modern democracy that, while it gives birth to despotism with the greatest facility, it does not seem to be capable of producing aristocracy, though from that form of political and social ascendency all improvement has hitherto sprung.

But wait:

But some of the keenest observers of democratic society in our day do not share this opinion Noticing that the modern movement towards democracy is coupled with a movement towards scientific perfection, they appear to be persuaded that the world will some day fall under intellectual aristocracies.

Society is to become the Church of a sort of political Calvinism, in which the Elect are to be the men with exceptional brains, This seems to be the view suggested by French democratic society to M. Ernest Renan. Whether such an aristocracy, if it wielded all the power which the command of all scientific results placed in its hands, would be exactly beneficent may possibly be doubted.

Our exact problem in a nutshell - 125 years ago.

The faults to which the older privileged orders are liable are plain enough and at times very serious. They are in some characters idleness, luxuriousness, insolence, and frivolity; in others, and more particularly in our day, they are timidity, distrust of the permanence of anything ancient and great, and (what is worse) a belief that no reputation can be made by a member of an ancient and great institution except by helping to pull it down.

But assuming the utmost indulgence in these faults, I may be permitted to doubt whether mankind would derive unmixed advantage from putting in their place an ascetic aristocracy of men of science, with intellects perfected by unremitting exercise, absolutely confident in themselves and absolutely sure of their conclusions.

Yeah.

Maine misses one small point here: this "ascetic aristocracy" will degenerate in talents, as well as morals. One fact that rings loud and clear from the CRU emails is the basically second-rate nature of these bureaucratic pseudoscientists - not just evil, but also not that bright. Though still aristocrats of unremitting intellectual exercise, to be sure, next to the broad population. We can't all be Feynman.

And finally - the future:

The question, however, will not long or deeply trouble those who, like me, have the strongest suspicion that, if there really arise a conflict between Democracy and Science, Democracy, which is already taking precautions against the enemy, will certainly win.

This is how bad Sir Henry Maine is. Not only does he tell us about the great battle at the end of time which will pit Democracy against Science, a conflict unthinkable to you and I until this freakish spirit chat with the ancestors, but now perfectly clear and clearly inevitable - but he has no dog in that fight. Bow to the ancestors! For lo, their greatness is palpable.

Frankly, I remain skeptical. In real life, Hari Seldon never gets it exactly right. Science has already proven far more durable than Maine imagined. Its destined foe, Democracy, has never been weaker or more contemptible. Still, if history shows us anything about the latter, it shows us that Democracy can lie dormant and apathetic and seemingly dead for decades, even centuries, then burst out again in volcanic explosions of frenzied mob energy, irrational, irresponsible and irresistible, driving God knows where in a river of heads on pikes.

Should we prefer this? Or the long grim gray decaying reign of Michael Mann, Climate Stalin? Democracy, infinitely stranger and more dangerous; Science, the frozen tyrant we now know. Dear reader, the ancestors have left this one to you.

Gold and the central banks: the game theory

"About to" was definitely an overstatement! But since I first discussed the matter in 2006, the world has made remarkable strides towards understanding the monetary role of gold. I doubt this has anything to do with "John Law," but you never know - perhaps his post is responsible for a buck or two of the price. All kinds of people read teh Internets.

In case anyone with a lot of dollars is reading today, my position on the gold price is the same as in 2006. If gold will eventually be remonetized, gold is insanely cheap. If gold will never be remonetized, gold is insanely expensive. It's one or the other. Therefore, if you guess right about this question, you will make huge profits, and if you guess wrong take huge losses.

Your guess is probably better than mine, so I will refrain from making one. I note, however, that in 2006 the remonetization of gold was a decidedly fringe perspective. Now it appears regularly in the headlines. It is still a long way from happening. So there is plenty of time to hop on this bandwagon before it either rolls to glory, or off a cliff.

My specific prediction for the future of the gold-dollar exchange rate is: if there are more sellers than buyers, the gold price will go down. Otherwise, it will go up. You can quote me on this.

Aside from the traditional jewelry markets, which remain quite important as a demand contributor, what sets the gold price is the balance of buyers and sellers in the market for monetary or "investment" gold. If money is moving into gold, gold goes up. If money is moving out of gold, gold goes down. Given the existence of involuntary sellers (such as gold miners), some money always has to be moving in.

(Actually, I've never really understood why gold miners sell gold, beyond recouping the cost of mining. Why don't they just retain all profits, in gold, on their balance sheets? Why resort to old-fashioned dividends? That's certainly the way we play it here in Silicon Valley. All the more so for a gold miner which voluntarily sells gold, and whose shareholders are thus betting both ways in the gold market. Ideally, of course, the shares of a gold miner would be priced in gold, but this is really asking too much of 21st-century financial innovation. The 22nd might get to it.)

There is some interesting news on the flow front, which is that central banks have become net buyers, rather than sellers, of gold. Obviously, this trend changes the flow and drives the price up. If it reverses, of course, the gold price will go back down. Most industry observers believe that reserve-accumulating central banks will continue diversifying into gold. I am not an industry observer, but I agree.

Now, here is the interesting part. The game-theoretic process which in the past has selected gold and/or silver as monetary goods, which may just as easily operate in the future, and which may even be starting to operate now, is a form of distributed coordination. Previously, I have described this coordination game as a game involving a large number of small players - retail investors, as Wall Street would put it. However, the game theory works just as well for a small number of large players. Such as the central banks.

Moreover, the game theory only works if the players understand it. This is the nature of any Schelling point. Understanding can spread more easily among a small number of large players, than a large number of small players. Therefore, it seems like a fun exercise to restate the theory in these very different terms. After all - anyone can read teh Internets.

The accumulating CBs (China, Russia, India, Japan, the Gulf, etc) face a simple problem. Some good has to be the international reserve currency, and thus experience price appreciation due to monetary demand. At present, this good is the dollar (and dollar bonds).

The dollar, however, is diluting at a rapid pace, owing to the fiscal incontinence of USG. If you consider the dollar as an sovereign equity instrument, which I do, USG is in what looks a lot like an equity death spiral. USG is continuously issuing large amounts of new equity to finance its operations. This could end well, but history does not suggest that it will.

(Dollar as sovereign equity, Cliffs Notes version: the dollar is not a debt, since it is not a promise of anything. It must therefore be equity. If the dollar is a share, a dollar bond is a restricted share. For a fully-diluted valuation, restricted and contingent liabilities must be included.)

Thus, central bankers (such as those in Beijing) feel their assets are performing badly. This can easily be made a media issue. Which might involuntarily affect their careers. Thus, they seek other currencies in which to park their cash. Preferably, currencies which are not falling like a rock.

However, central bankers have a unique investment problem which you and I do not face. They have so much money that, anywhere they put it, they will move the market. For example, if reserve managers worldwide switch half their dollars into GBP, the following events will occur - coefficients are entirely random:

1. The pound goes up to $8.
2. Britain's economy collapses.
3. The BNP seize power and print trillions of pounds to pay their skinhead armies.
4. The pound goes back down to 10 cents.
5. The central banker loses the people's money and is hanged in the street by mobs.

If you are anyone who has large amounts of money, central banker or no, your goal is to spend that money in a way that does not move the market. Ideally, you would like to buy at a price set by supply and demand (not including you). You would rather not buy at a price set by supply and demand (including you). This is a tricky task in which many are paid much to succeed.

Market-moving purchases - as we'll see later in the program - pose a special challenge to accounting. They create what George Soros calls reflexivity. Standard 14th-century Italian double-entry accounting, while perfect if you are running a bodega, is not capable of handling this matter. Because central bankers are not used to thinking about monetary game theory, and have no idea how to integrate this with their 14th-century accounting, they fail to see the optimal strategy.

The problem that breaks Florentine accounting is: if I drive the market up by buying, how should I value what I just bought? Should I mark it to the market price? If so, I am marking it to supply and demand (including me)? Or should I mark it to the price I could sell it for? If so, I am marking it to supply and demand (not including me). The larger the position, the larger the difference between demand (including me) and demand (not including me).

Suppose, for example, that you have 50 billion dollars, and you use this stash to buy the entire 2008 and 2009 peanut crops. You triple the price of peanut contracts. Congratulations! Your position is now valued at $150 billion. You've made a 200% profit. You've made money just by marking to market. You should be a spammer.

This is called "market manipulation," or more specifically "cornering the market," and it happens to be illegal. But even if it was not illegal, it would be unprofitable, because you cannot generally profit with this strategy - as you sell, you are driving the price back down. Your peanut contracts are valued at $150 billion - but can you get $150 billion for them? You can't buy lunch with peanut contracts.

This is called the burying-the-corpse problem, the corpse being the vast quantity of peanuts that you have bought but don't intend to eat. The accounting profit is indeed a mirage. Unless of course you can bury the corpse - ie, get some other fool to take all those peanuts off your hands, at anything like the inflated price you have created.

There is an easy way to avoid this entire weirdness. Spread it around. Diversify. Don't make market-moving purchases. For the standard large investor, and doubly for the standard central banker, distorting the market with a purchase is considered a rookie mistake.

Thus the old-school CB answer to gold, now just beginning to fade. When asked why a return to the gold standard is impossible, the standard answer is: "there isn't enough gold."

What this means is that the stock of monetary gold is relatively small compared to the number of dollars it would have to absorb, were gold to replace the dollar as the international reserve currency. (Ie, not even considering the awful possibility that ordinary citizens decide to redirect their savings into the yellow dog and 100%-backed instruments, obviating the entire concept of a reserve currency.)

Thus, if CBs buy large quantities of gold, they drive the gold price up. Or more precisely, if they exchange large numbers of dollars for gold, they drive the gold-dollar ratio up. Or at least, so theory predicts. And for once, practice seems to match theory - at least, in China:

“Gold is definitely an alternative, but when we buy, the price goes up. We have to do it carefully so as not stimulate the market,” he said.

Indeed. Hu Liaoxian is even trying to jawbone the gold market down:

“We must keep in mind the long-term effects when considering what to use as our reserves,” she said. “We must watch out for bubbles forming on certain assets and be careful in those areas.”
[...]
However, officials in Beijing are aware that China’s $2.3 trillion reserves are now so enormous that the central bank cannot buy much gold without distorting the price, so they have adopted a de facto policy of buying in a calibrated fashion each time prices fall back to their rising trend line – “buying the dips” in trading parlance. Experts say that China is putting a floor under the gold price but does not chase rallies once they are under way.

Either Mr. Cheng and Ms. Hu do not understand the game theory of monetary formation - or they do and they are playing it close to the chests. If they - or their colleagues - ever figure out the game, God help the dollar.

When a CB buys gold, four things happen. One: the CB insures itself against the chance of gold remonetization. Two: the chance of gold remonetization increases. Three: the gold price goes up. Four: the buyer looks good, because the assets he bought went up.

How is this different from buying the pound, or buying peanuts? Because the price increase in the pound, or in peanuts, is unsustainable. What goes up has to come back down. For their own different reasons, the pound and peanuts are incapable of absorbing total global monetary demand, and acting as a stable international currency. Therefore, a sophisticated investor of large money avoids generating phantom profits by distorting the market in pounds or peanuts.

With gold, it is different. What goes up can go back down, as it did in the '80s. (In 1980, it looked rather as if gold was to be remonetized. Then Volcker saved the dollar with 20% interest rates. Of course, at the time America was also a net creditor.) But because we know that gold is a viable monetary system, we know that when gold goes up, it does not have to come down. If it doesn't come down, that means gold has been (re-)monetized. Peanuts cannot be monetized - they cannot become arbitrarily expensive. Gold can. Therefore, the decision calculi for gold and peanut purchases are fundamentally different.

The gold price has been increasing at roughly 20% a year since 2001. Perhaps coincidentally, the global dollar supply is diluting at rates not too different from this. Betting on the continuation of this trend is not difficult - one the way to bet on it is to buy gold. Which causes the trend to continue. Reflexivity! The dollar itself is a bubble, held up by the monetary demand for dollars - and the dollar does not appear to be an especially stable currency.

Thus there is an entirely different Nash equilibrium out there - one in which all the central banks dump the dollar for gold. This causes the gold price to skyrocket, creating permanent profits for all the reserve-accumulating central banks.

Don't believe me? Think about it. When remonetization is complete, by definition the CBs will be computing their accounts in gold. Since the price of gold in dollars, under this scenario, is much higher than it is today, it will look like the CB made an enormous profit on the transaction: in exchange for green pieces of paper, now of minimal value, it received good gold. Or it was foolish and held on to the green paper, in which case its bankers are lynched in the street.

This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The more gold the CBs buy, the more incentive they have to buy gold. Because if the game ends with gold winning, the game will be scored by how much gold you got for your dollars. This will be a consequence of how soon the CB exchanged its dollars for gold. Devil take the hindmost! A classic panic scenario. A melt-up for gold; a melt-down for the dollar.

In other words, when gold is remonetized, the numerator and denominator on the "gold price" are exchanged. The relevant price is now the "dollar price." What is a dollar worth? How many milligrams of gold can you trade it for? This piece of paper is a financial security, n'est ce pas? Does this security yield gold, own gold, redeem itself for gold, etc? No? If you want it to be worth anything, you might want to change that...

Here is the difference between gold and peanuts. No one will ever ask how many peanuts a dollar is worth, because peanuts will never be a monetary good. For one thing, it is too easy to grow them. Gold can be monetized, and peanuts cannot be monetized, because of fundamental physical differences between gold and peanuts.

Every monetary system is a self-supporting market-manipulation scheme of this type. As Willem Buiter points out, money is the bubble that doesn't pop. In a free market, a currency is stable if and only if the currency is reasonably watertight and does not dilute much. In this panic - the same panic "John Law" anticipated - we see the "dollar bubble" popping, and a new "gold bubble" forming. If someone finds a way to print gold, of course, the gold bubble will pop and some other good will accept its monetary demand - rhodium, perhaps. Or baseball cards.

So, if Cheng Siwei and Hu Xiaolian understood the game theory, they might go ahead and "stimulate the market." China cannot prevent her purchases from stimulating the market. But she can ensure that when she stimulates the market, she stimulates it first - thus getting the best price. And thus ending up with the most gold.

Collectively, the central bankers of the world might agree that they do not want gold to be remonetized. Individually, it is in their interest to defect from this consensus. As the American Century decays, individual motivations tend to become more prominent. You and I are not in a free market - but the central banks are.

And there is another individual motivation that CBs might have for remonetizing. Suppose a large exporter, such as China, which undervalues its currency and runs a large trade surplus as a result, takes a huge radical step and goes all the way to a 100%-reserve gold currency. The ultimate hard currency. If this succeeds, China is the new England - the financial capital of the world, forever. Everyone else's money? In a word: pesos. Hard currency is Chinese currency. China's natural supremacy over the barbarian kingdoms of the West is restored.

There is a practical problem with Chinese remonetization: China has very little gold. Even after the PBoC converts all its dollars to gold - even at the gold price generated by this conversion - it will not have enough gold to back all the yuan in circulation. At least, not at the present yuan-dollar ratio.

When a CB fully remonetizes by converting its balance sheet to hard gold, a fiat-currency note becomes an equity share in the central bank's gold pool and can be valued as such. What is the share worth, in gold? What are the central bank's assets, measured in gold? Same question. If the CB has 1000 tons of gold and has issued 1 trillion notes, each note is worth a milligram of gold. Gold accounting - not so hard.

In other words, to fully remonetize to gold, China (or any country, even the US with Fort Knox), will have to devalue its currency. The entire event obviously devalues all fiat currencies against gold, because it sends the price from $1000 an ounce to something more like $20,000. But since the US has a huge hoard of gold, the dollar needs to devalue less against gold than other currencies, such as the yuan. Thus, in any full remonetization, China must devalue the yuan against the dollar.

Now: class, what is the economic effect of a devaluation? What are central bankers around the world struggling desperately to accomplish? Same question! The answer is: "stimulus." Devaluation is inflationary; inflation is a stimulant. Age-old economic truths. China's low gold reserve is not a problem, but an opportunity. It is not a bug - but a feature.

Of course, if you resort routinely to devaluation or any other stimulus, you become a stimulus junkie. You get chronic inflation - fiscal needle-tracks. But this cannot happen as the result of remonetizing to gold. Because - duh! At the end of the game, your economy is on the gold standard. You are a healthy financial and industrial power, not a strung-out inflation junkie. England in the 1870s, not Argentina in the 1970s.

And ideally a you've gone all the way to a 100%-reserve hard-money standard, which means no more booms and busts. So, when I propose remonetization, what I'm saying to central bankers is the equivalent of saying to a heroin addict: after a hit of this junk, you'll feel so high for so long, you'll never want to shoot up again! If you can find a junkie who wouldn't take this offer, your country has some very unusual junkies.

In previous centuries, the phenomenon we know as a "recession" was sometimes described as a "shortage of money." I too am experiencing a shortage of money - can anyone give me some money? Doesn't everyone have a shortage of money? But the term, which seems silly, is actually quite reasonable - a shortage of money is actually an excess of debt. An economy experiences a shortage of money when it has run up unsustainable debts. It is collectively bankrupt. Its actors tend to find themselves individually bankrupt as well. Hence, recession.

For instance, the classical gold standard of the Bank of England era failed because, after World War I, the gold cover (ratio of CB-guaranteed gold debts, to CB gold) was just too high. This, too, was a shortage of money - a shortage of gold. The correct answer would have been to share the pain equally all around, by devaluing the pound and other currencies against gold - ie, making them reflect their actual gold value. But this was too politically painful; so instead, the entire system was allowed to collapse. Some consider this a good outcome.

But the global economy does not have a shortage of gold. It has a shortage of dollars. It is not oppressed by unpayable gold debts. It is oppressed by unpayable dollar debts. (If lending were restricted to self-interested market actors who need a dollar to lend a dollar, ie not the Fed, you'd really see that shortage.) When you revalue gold, carried on the balance sheet at $42 an ounce, to the post-remonetization price of tens of thousands an ounce, what are you doing? Creating one heck of a lot of new dollars.

Therefore, if Cheng Siwei and Hu Xiaolian follow my advice, join the bubble instead of fighting it, and unilaterally remonetize with devaluation, China should experience the following results:

First: dramatic stimulus to the Chinese economy. Second: dramatic inflow of gold into China. Third: dramatic, but temporary, inflation, in the context of boom conditions and general prosperity. Fourth: eventual stabilization, with China a wealthy First World country which is the world's financial and industrial leader. Fifth: large gold-plated statues of Cheng Siwei and Hu Xiaolian are erected all over China.

Of course, remonetization would also produce enormous profits for gold speculators. Ie, anyone else who jumps on the bandwagon. Currency transitions are inherently turbulent processes. Central banks, as they should, hate turbulence.

On the other hand, if there is no option but to make the transition, it may be better to rip the band-aid off fast than slowly. It is certainly better to understand the situation - and once you understand it, the outcome seems difficult to resist. As in many cases, the CBs may just need to move faster and more decisively than the speculators.

The reason I still expect gold remonetization to happen - in the long term, not tomorrow! - is that there's simply no other viable alternative. Everyone knows that the global economy needs a new currency. Most can see that the dollar cannot be saved or replaced by any other sovereign currency or basket thereof - because no central bank could tolerate the economic effects of the upward revaluation that would result if its currency replaced the dollar in CB portfolios. When the impossible is eliminated, the improbable becomes a certainty.

Climategate and other correspondence

Since UR readers are no strangers to Steve McIntyre, I assume they are also no strangers to the event of the week - or possibly the month: Climategate.

I would not have attached the "-gate," a journo-ism which at best aspires to banality. But here it at least achieves that banality. It still sounds stoopid - but it does not oversell the event.

No? Really? Oh, I don't think so at all. First, the original, from Dr. Thompson:

"Jesus, this Watergate thing is unbelievable. It's terrible, like finding out your wife is running around but you don't want to hear about it."

-- Remark of a fat man from Nashville sharing a taxi with Ralph Steadman

So there are a hundred or more people wandering around Washington today who have heard "the real stuff," as they put it - and despite their professional caution when the obvious question arises, there is one reaction they all feel free to agree on: that nobody who felt shocked, depressed or angry after reading the edited White House Transcripts should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes, except under heavy sedation or locked in a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for any length of time to the real stuff without feeling a compulsion to do something like drive down to the White House and throw a bag of live rats over the fence.

Yes... looking back at that line I just wrote, it occurs to me that almost half the people I know have been feeling that kind of compulsion almost steadily for the last eight or nine years. My friend Yail Bloor, for instance, claims to have thrown a whole garbage can full of live rats, roaches, and assorted small vermin over the White House fence about a week before Lyndon Johnson announced his retirement in 1968. "It was a wonderful feeling," he says, "but only because it was Johnson. I knew, for some reason, that he would really hate the sight of big rats on the White House lawn." He paused and reached for his snuffbox, taking a huge hit of Dr. Johnson's in each nostril.

"I'm not sure why," he went on, "but I wouldn't get any satisfaction out of doing a thing like that to Nixon. He might actually like rats."

As it so happens, back in the Clinton administration my own dear mother found herself working for none other than for Joe Romm at DOE. So I have heard "the real stuff." Would Joe Romm actually like rats? He probably would. But then again, they might shun him.

And a few people seem to be reacting much like the fat man in Nashville. For instance: George Monbiot. Jesus! Nobody believes in the Presidency these days. At least, nobody under 80. The rest of us know it's just a bad reality show. But Science! Jesus - Science! When Science is running around behind your back, you really don't want to know.

(In actual fact, the Presidency had been operating as a basically Nixonian institution since 1933. If anything, Nixon toned that shit down. It was not before the '70s that the Press gained both the courage and the motivation to challenge the White House. The coup was accomplished. The god abandoned Antony. And the White House can never be above the law again, not even if there is a Democrat in it.)

So Watergate marks the transition between the Middle New Deal and the Late New Deal. Or perhaps the Early and the Middle. As a student of history, I am reluctant to commit to any such chronology while the era remains ongoing. I expect it to remain ongoing for a while. Nonetheless, Chesterfieldian symptoms are not hard to observe.

Since the event is not oversold, it may well be that Climategate turns out to be a good endpoint for another era that needs an end: the 20th century. Just as "the sixties" are really the period from 1966 through 1974, or something like that, it is commonplace to date the historical 19th century from either 1815, 1789 or 1776 to 1914. If we follow this convention, we can say that the 20th century, as a political era, lasted from June 28, 1914 to November 19, 2009. And I'm going to go out on another big limb here and hope that, as a political era, it will not be missed.

Basically, in the 19th century, Hayek's professional intellectuals became the dominant influence over Anglo-American public policy. In the 20th century, sovereignty was captured entirely by their intellectual institutions - other forces retaining some powers of resistance, but no initiative. (And Anglo-American public policy became everyone's public policy.) These institutions now being thoroughly corrupted, their corruption now visible to all, we can only be doomed to spend the 21st extracting them from their offices. Or at least, wishing we could.

The basic problem here is one of sovereignty. Namely: Mike Mann, Phil Jones, and their friends exercise - or have been exercising - a little local slice of sovereignty over climate science for about the last ten years or so. If you were in the club and/or toed the line, you got to be a climate scientist. If not, you didn't.

We can tell that Mann and Jones were sovereign, because they were not responsible to anyone. There was no party in the world authorized to check their work. There still is no party in the world authorized to check their work. (Perhaps there is some way to get the issue to the Supreme Court. If so, it is not obvious.) Within the domain of climate science, their authority was roughly as absolute as Stalin's. Their methods, too, were comparably aggressive. Had this security breach not occurred, this situation might have persisted indefinitely - and, indeed, it may still persist indefinitely. The Soviet Union outlived Stalin. Climate science will outlive Mann and Jones, even if they do get the boot personally. I am not at all sure they will.

Worst of all, Mann and Jones were and are sovereign over billions of minds. Literally: what a billion people know of "global warming" is the beautiful smoothed curves of Mann and Jones. (And others, of course, in their little Party - climate science, as we've seen, being a one-party state.) Then again, hundreds of millions believed in Stalin. (Counting Americans - from '41 to '48.) What about this is surprising? It is, or was, the 20th century. In that century God abandoned his traditional affection for fools and drunks, devoting himself entirely to the United States. But even God's patience has its limits.

The sovereign university is entirely impervious to external purification. Nor can it be expected to purify itself. It probably cannot be separated from power without destroying it entirely. Perhaps it cannot be separated from power at all. And there exists no plausible replacement; nor, if there was one, any plausible way of installing it.

If Science is sovereign, it is corrupted by power. We can see this because we can see that Science is sovereign, and we can see that it has become corrupt. But if Science be not sovereign, it must be subordinate to some other sovereign power. Mike and Phil must deliver their reports to this power. It must look down on them and say: "Mike and Phil: your data is crap, your code is crap, you are crap. You had sat too long for any good you have been doing lately! Security will be here in a minute to escort you out of the building." Of course this power, if corrupt, will have all the power it needs to corrupt Science. And of course, in 2009 no such thing can be imagined.

This is an old problem and it has not changed, nor will it soon. But what did change on November 19th: it just became much, much easier to convince any reasonable person that there is something seriously wrong with government by university. Of course, most reasonable people are not even aware that this is the form of the New Deal state. These emails, however, cannot fail to attract unwanted attention to the uncomfortable reality of the matter.

Because a fallible sovereign is a very different thing from an infallible one. It is easy to mistake an infallible sovereign for a vacuum of sovereignty, the perpetuum mobile of political engineering. If the University is infallible, its advice is the mere truth and not in any sense an action. Once the master's hand is seen to wobble, however -

Let alone to delete emails. Ye gods! It's almost as if there was a person inside the machine. Indeed every sovereign in history has sought to stress this impersonal or superhuman character, though most have phrased it in more spiritual terms. If the peasants knew that mere men wore the sacred masks of the gods, they might have the impertinence to think we had mere necks...

Anyway. I could go on in this vein for decades. But it's Thanksgiving, and I don't have decades. Neither do you, I suppose. You get the point. You have probably already read about the CRU leak, and even seen some of the emails. If not, I direct you to Bishop Hill's summaries. I just want to emphasize a few less obvious issues.

First: the Mann group is not a mere mafia, clique or even "conspiracy" within mainstream climate science. The Mann group is mainstream climate science. (And prosopography, despite popular opinion, is an essential historical tool.) You can't talk seriously about removing these dogfsckers from the IPCC process, for instance. They are the IPCC process.

(You can see this easily by looking at their entirely successful attempts to purge any institutional opposition, eg, "unreliable" editors. Once you establish a bureaucratic reign of terror, you cannot possibly slacken in your attentions to Madame Guillotine. Otherwise, your enemies - who are probably just as nasty as you are - will sense weakness and stab you in the back. So there is no room for weak sisters. Everyone is either in, or out.)

The practical effect of a decade-plus of Stalinist science: there exists no alternative. This is only one of the reasons that anyone expecting concrete near-term results from Climategate is far too optimistic. For many reasons, it will prove impossible to remove climate science from the domain of Mann, Jones et al. But one of the most fundamental is that there is no such thing as "skeptical climate science." The opposition is, like any set negatively defined, unorganized - a bureaucratic null. It cannot seize power, because it does not exist.

Second: again, anyone expecting any serious proximate result from this event is expecting far too much. The University may not be infallible - but it has extraordinary powers of bureaucratic resistance. It is not unkillable, but this event comes about as close to killing it - in the near term - as a pimple on your ass comes to killing you.

Within its own square centimeter of skin, an ass pimple is a pretty big event. Zillions of cells die in an ass pimple. Nonetheless, on the historic scale, an ass pimple is no big deal. A man can be killed, true, by a septic ass pimple, but it is very unlikely. The expected result is a patch of fresh new skin on your ass.

The Mann-Jones group is climate science. But this group is more than just Mann and Jones - much more. The specific individuals named in these emails are certainly suffering some career damage. Who knows? If all the dice roll the right way, one or two might even go to jail. Some certainly appear to have committed criminal offenses. But climate science will endure. It will certainly not be purged and rebooted. If that cat could be belled, someone would have belled it!

So here is what will happen to climate science if Mann, Jones, et all go to jail: it will become stronger. Considerably stronger. At least, in the near and medium term.

What happens when you kill the top 20 members of al-Qaeda? Everyone in the top 200 joins the competition to replace them. Decapitation is not an effective attack against a disorganized institution. For every Mann or Jones, there are 10 or 20 ex-students trained by a Mann or Jones. Do not these disciples aspire to their mentors' positions? Damn tooting they do! Moreover, just because they lose their leader, does not mean that leader will be replaced by those who are the most disloyal to him.

In short, any such involuntary circulation of elites will have a notably beneficial effect on the entire movement. The reader of the CRU emails cannot help but fail to notice what was already obvious: as scientific minds, Mike and Phil are most definitely among the second-rate. Why? They are leaders in climate science simply because of their seniority; they got in when paleoclimatology and climate modeling were (as they deserve to be) scientific backwaters; through bureaucratic ruthlessness, they made their field big and powerful.

Therefore, not only do these pioneers have many disciples, but the disciples were attracted to a hot - no pun intended - and growing field. Thus, they are likely to be both more ambitious than their sacrificed former leaders, and more talented. If Mann, Jones et al get the axe and become poison in any position of formal authority, even if they lose their jobs, even if they go to jail, their former students will continue to worship them (and exclude any of their peers who don't).

Their fate, in other words, will be exactly that of the State Department's so-called China Hands - who did indeed "lose China." For Mike Mann, read Owen Lattimore. This generation of bureaucrats is revered for a reason - it essentially founded the modern academic field of international relations. It may be challenged, tentatively, by internal revisionists - but not by external opponents. It has no external opponents. It strangled them all.

The thing about paleoclimatology and climate modeling is that both are such marginal sciences, if they can even be considered scientific at all, that their results can be fudged without any of the embarrassing foibles revealed in the CRU emails. We do see a lot of what could almost be described as conscious bias in the CRU methodology - there are "good" data (warm) and "bad" data (not so warm). We also see that overall, the data set is a major dog's breakfast.

It is not necessary for climate science to be in the hands of these B- students. Their own students are not A+ men, because A+ men are too delicate to operate in this kind of sinister bureaucratic context - but they are A and A- men. Thus, we can expect that in the long run, climate science will repair itself and produce a new body of work, consisting as before largely of "good" data, but of "good" data composed with apparent professionalism and honesty. I do not expect that this will happen, because I do not expect that Mann and Jones will actually get the axe. However, if they do get the axe, this is what I expect to happen. In either case, it will surely be the trend in the long run.

Those activists attempting to resist the political aggressions of climate science have been strengthened, but only for a time. And the denialists have to win every time; the alarmists only need to win once. Possibly the goal of a global carbon tax has been set back two, three, even five years. Historically? No big deal.

Third: one of the easiest, yet most important, observations to be had from these emails is that the climate-science community is entirely sincere. They are not a conspiracy. They are something much more dangerous: true believers.

In their minds, AGW is an entirely real phenomenon. There is not a particle of doubt. And since there is not a particle of doubt, Mann, Jones et all see their task not as one of teasing Nature's secrets from her, but as one of public communication. They take their roles in the Modern Structure with complete seriousness - like all those with actual power.

This is why "good" data is good, and "bad" data is bad. "Good" data is useful data. It is data that helps them in their task of saving the planet. Bad data interferes with this task. And furthermore, since they know that that the problem is real, bad data is just that - it is data that is obviously contaminated, incorrect, or otherwise corrupt. No shortage of that in paleoclimatology! In any real science, data selection is never entirely without art. (It is just not meant to be a secret art.)

Take, for instance, Mike's Nature trick. (Don't miss Gavin's disingenuous excuse.) To the naive observer, the most reasonable explanation of the divergence problem - the fact that historical temperature proxies diverge with the instrumental record, just as the instruments are getting good - is evidence that there is some existential problem with the entire exercise of paleoclimatology. But since a paleoclimatologist will never consider this possibility, he instead skips to the second most reasonable explanation: that some source of noise, probably itself anthropogenic, has contaminated the recent end of the graph. A "non-temperature signal."

He therefore removes this noise by cutting off the proxy record at 1960 or 1980, and smoothing its end with the temperature record. While drawing the two as separate lines on a graph, intended for public communication. Now the proxy record, instead of peeling off in a weird decline, smoothly converges with the modern instrumental record. Beautiful! By two entirely independent means, scientists have teased the same truth from Nature's purse. The message is harmonious and clear, rather than muddy and confused.

Does Mike know he is fudging the numbers? Of course he knows he is fudging the numbers. He probably drove 65 on his way to the office, too. In his mind, Mike is removing a confusing red herring in order to present a deeper, more accurate truth. If - as with the deleted emails - he knows he is breaking the law, he exhibits mens rea, he thinks of it almost as an act of civil disobedience. He is mis-crossing a T or two, in order to save the planet. The only difference between him and Martin Luther King is that it was useful to the civil-rights movement for Dr. King to get arrested, whereas it is more useful to the Earth for Dr. Mann not to get arrested. Therefore, the former disobeyed publicly; the latter, surreptitiously. Todo por la causa.

Thus the resistance to this unbelievable, impertinent "auditing" campaign. There is a simple reason why the Manns and Joneses of the world believe that they are oppressed by an evil conspiracy, fomented by the sinister carbon barons. They are actually being charitable. The only alternative of which they can conceive is that McIntyre and these other awful people are not merely corrupt, but just plain evil.

Because the price of crossing the T's and dotting the I's is the price of not saving the planet. It is the price of helping the people who want to destroy the planet. The idea that all these people, obviously bright people, would spontaneously come together all over the Internet, just for the purpose of advancing evil, is a vision simply too dark to contemplate. Therefore, it is best to assume that all these people are simply shills and lobbyists. As many of them obviously are!

I'm not saying I believe this. I'm just explaining what the world looks like from behind the eyes of a true believer - and how, to be specific, these people can feel innocent and yet act guilty. In their minds, they are guilty of aggressive paperwork. They are indeed being persecuted unfairly. In the face of this incredible conspiracy, what can they do but conspire a little themselves? They're trying to save the planet, and some wild mafia of sick Internet geeks, plus of course the usual right-wing corporate shills, are trying to get them fired and prosecuted for clicking this instead of that in their email window. Jesus Christ! In a situation like this, a little shrillness and collusion is to be expected! And so on.

On a similar note, it is especially interesting to notice the response of the Internet's "libertarian lite" bloggers - Megan McArdle, Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson. These people all have two things in common. One, none of them is particularly concerned by the way the Mann-Jones group operates. Two, all of them are professionally associated with the Cathedral - ie, Press or University. Stara struktura!

Is this because McArdle, Cowen, Caplan and Hanson are evil? Have their souls been eaten? Sort of, but not exactly. It's because they've seen this kind of stuff. They are, after all, on the inside. Why would it surprise them? Kling is more conservative:

In my days as a macroeconometric model jockey, I often used "add factors" to make the equations fit the data better. But I never used them to distort the data. I disagree with those who think that "climategate" is a typical scientific brouhaha. This is at least one standard deviation away from normal academic behavior.

One standard deviation! I think Arnold is exactly right. It's about one standard deviation away from normal academic behavior. Possibly even one and a half. Two? No, I wouldn't say two. Two would be going a little far...

Among this craven crew, Professor Hanson is particularly frank. The boldface is his:

Yup, this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not. If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opinions on global warming. I’ve never done this stuff, and I’d like to think I wouldn’t, but that is cheap talk since I haven’t had the opportunity. This works as a “scandal” only because of academia’s overly idealistic public image.

It is a shame that academia works this way, and an academia where this stuff didn’t happen would probably be more accurate. But even our flawed academic consensus is usually more accurate than its contrarians, and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right.

If you don’t like this state of affairs join me in trying to develop a more reliable consensus mechanism on such topics: prediction markets.

You'll note that Professor Hanson is saying the same thing as me - with only three differences.

One: this doesn't change his opinion of global warming. Nor does it change mine. But he started out believing in it! Somehow, the actual facts of the matter are too unimportant to engage his attention. Does this inspire you to engage Professor Hanson to help overcome your biases?

Two: he expresses no shame whatsoever at being a member of this basically criminal endeavor. Indeed, if he has ever before bothered to inform his readers of the nature of his Mafia oath, I missed the post. How kind of him, to help his readers overcome their bias! You know, the one toward unconditionally trusting the products of Science - just on account of the name, it seems.

And three: his "solution" is... well... retarded. Like any design for the production of government by formula without human intervention, it is a perpetual-motion machine. There is no way to produce good government (or good management) without good people in a good organizational structure. Professor Hanson is certainly not the first to dabble in the transformation, by ritual mathematics, of base metals into precious. He would be the first, however, to make it work!

But other than that, he's exactly right. What you'll find, historically, is that his is the perspective of every decent cog in a bad wheel: not even slightly unaware or demented. There are never good cogs in a bad wheel, but there are always decent ones. You will find this exact same Oriental mentality in: Reinhard Spitzy's How We Squandered The Reich (National Socialism); Alexander Barmine's One Who Survived (early Communism); or Victor Klemperer's The Lesser Evil (late Communism).

The perspective is that - sure - the system is bad. It is bad. Criminal? Sure. Thus, anyone who has seen the machine from the inside cannot possibly be surprised by Climategate. That's just how professors behave! At least, now that professors run the world. Acton gets it right again.

But what's the alternative? There isn't any alternative. I mean, if the professors stop running the world, who will take over? Who else can run a world? Anyone in here got some world-running experience? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller...

Therefore, the System must be reformed from the inside by men and women of good will, who will make up for its various crimes by creating a new socialism with a human face. Yadda yadda. Exit: the New Deal State. Enter: the New Deal State, with prediction markets. Or "charter cities." Or whatever. Not that any of these professorial innovations have any chance of actually happening, of course. Frankly, it'd be stupid if it wasn't so funny.

When I read apologiae of this species, I am of course reminded of Carlyle:

No: at all costs it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease. Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange!

Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial, - what you in your iconoclast humor call shams - all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them.

Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honorable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue salable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis?

Alas, Carlyle went quite unheard in his time. Shams did not cease; nor have they. And where is England now? Spiceries still come, if mainly from the East. Lawyers plead, and the rest. Scrip, though, does not move so well as formerly. And as for the banker...

So here at UR, we take a slightly different perspective from Professor Hanson et al. We do not believe the problem can be solved by any conceivable improvement. Rather, we observe that it has been generally getting worse, and expect that it will continue to get worse. We see a set of institutions in need of no renovation, but replacement. New formulas are not needed; it is the present ones, rather, which will have to go.

Carlyle again:

And to such length have we at last brought it, by our wilful, conscious and now long-continued method of using varnish, instead of actual repair by honest carpentry, of what we all knew and saw to have gone undeniably wrong in our procedures and affairs! Method deliberately, steadily, and even solemnly continued, with much admiration of it from ourselves and others, as the best and only good one, for above two hundred years.

Ever since that annus mirabilis of 1660, when Oliver Cromwell's dead clay was hung on the gibbet, and a much easier "reign of Christ" under the divine gentleman called Charles II was thought the fit thing, this has been our steady method: varnish, varnish; if a thing have grown so rotten that it yawns palpable, and is so inexpressibly ugly that the eyes of the very populace discern it and detest it, - bring out a new pot of varnish, with the requisite supply of putty; and lay it on handsomely. Don't spare varnish; how well it will all look in a few days, if laid on well! Varnish alone is cheap and is safe; avoid carpentering, chiselling, sawing and hammering on the old quiet House; - dry-rot is in it, who knows how deep; don't disturb the old beams and junctures: varnish, varnish, if you will be blessed by gods and men!

This is called the constitutional System, Conservative System, and other fine names; and this at last has its fruits, such as we see. Mendacity hanging in the very air we breathe; all men become, unconsciously or half or wholly consciously, liars to their own souls and to other men's; grimacing, finessing, periphrasing, in continual hypocrisy of word, by way of varnish to continual past, present, future, misperformance of thing: - clearly sincere about nothing whatever, except in silence, about the appetites of their own huge belly, and the readiest method of assuaging these.

If you don't like this state of affairs, join me in trying to root these rats from their holes with fire, gas and electricity - and replace them with a real, working King, from whose royal eye every slimy rodent-thing must shrink. Selah.

(Also: if this is just not enough for you this week, there are additional conversations here and here and here and here.)

A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 9d)

Today, we're going to step boldly forward in the Procedure and look at how to capture America.

This essay should be of interest to anyone seeking instructions for any kind of fascist coup. However, this coup design (which is not fascist, but reactionary) depends on the information weapon we've just designed - the Antiversity. If you don't have an Antiversity or anything like it, I'm afraid you'll need a different recipe.

Note that no one now has an Antiversity or anything like it, and they don't exactly grow on trees. So, if you'd rather not have a fascist coup at all, there is no need to fear. Really!

That said, I will take the liberty of speaking of the First Step in the past tense. In the First Step, we built the Antiversity - a new intellectual power supply for USG. In the Second Step, patriotic Americans peacefully exercise their democratic rights to disconnect the present power supply, the University, and plug in the Antiversity. Once the Antiversity holds full sovereignty, it continues the Procedure, dissolving USG and replacing it with a New Structure of its own design. America under the New Structure is the Third Step - to be considered later.

First, let's tackle this interesting word: patriotic. Can a patriotic American support a reactionary coup whose ultimate goal is to terminate democracy? Absolutely! He is patriotic because he genuinely loves America, his great country, and its good people.

He is patriotic not because he attaches his unreasoning affection to any particular acronym, rulebook, or personnel force. Or to any name, flag, slogan, or religion. He takes those things as he finds them. He need not find them good. If he has to choose between America and USG, he will always choose America. In short: he is a patriot, not a moron.

Can democracy terminate democracy? Isn't this a contradiction in terms? Not at all. Here is one straightforward way by which Americans can terminate democracy: elect a President who has promised to cancel the Constitution. Once he is inaugurated, he can cancel the Constitution. Of course, the military must also support this autogolpe. This given, the operation is trivial and entirely safe. Self-coups are the best, safest and most reliable kind. Unfortunately, they are not always the most practical, but they at least set the standard we must strive for.

The basic question facing any potential supporter of a coup is: do you prefer this government, or would you rather take your chances with that government? Do you want to stick with the serviceable old Modern Structure, or go wild with the high-tech New Structure? Since sovereignty is irreversible, this is never an easy decision. The New Structure is designed to last forever. Of course, so was the Modern Structure. Do you think it will? That would be pretty good for 1789. Or even 1933.

You support a coup if you would like to see this change, assuming it can be made instantly and nonviolently. This is a much lower bar than joining a coup, which is something you should do only if you think it actually will succeed. Otherwise, your efforts are a waste of time - at best. Governments don't like to be existentially threatened.

The coup planner faces three basic tasks. First, he must design the new regime - yes, before the coup. (Poor attention to this task is perhaps the most common cause of coups gone wrong.) Second, he must recruit enough supporters to complete the operation. Third, he must coordinate his supporters to perform it.

In the Internet era, coups - especially democratic coups - are much easier. Why? Because, once enough people have stopped supporting the present government, a coup is simply a matter of communication and coordination. The Internet is very good at these things.

Still, without the Antiversity, I'm just not sure it can be done. The problem, in a coup, is not getting people to oppose their present government. There is never any shortage of potential supporters. The coup planner's problem is getting people to support his coup. This, as so often here on UR, is a coordination problem. The Left is spontaneously coordinated; the Right, alas, must coordinate itself. (If there is one reason why the Left tends to win, this is it.)

This coordination problem, along with many of the coup planner's other tasks, is no longer solvable by an individual - or even a conspiracy. The job can be done only by an institution - such as the Antiversity. Again, for an individual or conspiracy, you need a different recipe. Sorry. Also, no one can use this formula now, because there is no Antiversity. Sorry if I repeat myself - I would just hate to scare anyone out there in the viewing audience.

To begin the Second Step, the First Step must be complete. When the First Step is complete, the Antiversity exists, and it is not a baby either. It has come together as a genuine institution. It is a substantial institution - perhaps not with as many contributors as Wikipedia has today, but in that ballpark. It is a prestigious institution, widely respected for the excellence of its collective judgment - if not always agreed with. And it has some central decision-making body which can make it act, more or less, as a unit. I would be shocked if any such thing existed before 2019.

That said, 2019 will happen sooner or later, and so will 2029. The future exists - it is just uncertain. And history is by no means over! So let's take this bad boy out for a spin and see what she can do.

First, the Antiversity challenges USG by just existing. The University is a comprehensive Ministry of Truth. It provides a complete and accurate official truth service. So who are these asshats, who claim to have their own truth? Some bureaucrat, charged to look into it, finds that the asshats do have their own truth. He grows disheartened. He does not complete his report.

Simply put, the Antiversity is the root of a belief system which is to USG as Protestantism is to the Catholic Church. Everyone who has even heard of it knows it is possible to stop believing in the University, and this alone is a serious problem. USG is not a military despotism. It is a democratic government. It is and will always be existentially dependent on popular support. Since USG is guided by the University, if you don't believe in the University, you don't believe in USG. You think the Pope is just some guy in a funny hat. You're a problem, buddy.

But the Antiversity is not just limited to just existing. It can attack. It should attack. It will attack. How does it attack? The Antiversity attacks USG by studying it.

USG has never received anything like an independent historical audit, let alone the brutal proctoscopy to which the Antiversity will subject it. USG is, of course, part of history; the Antiversity cannot study history without it. So it will eventually be asking the questions: what the hell happened? And why? How, for instance, did Washington take over the world? And why?

At least in the first volume, the Antiversity's consensus is likely to pay a heavy debt to the 19th-century British perspective - such as that of Lecky. Up through the middle of the 20th century, the London view tends to produce the most independent, learned, and distanced interpretations of America: for obvious reasons. Duh. Therefore, if you have to start somewhere, start with the Victorians. Today's Americans are entirely innocent of the Victorian narrative - and especially innocent of what that bad boy looks like when projected forward to 2009. Kimbo Slice is in the cage, wearing full lawn-tennis attire.

But history is only a start. Most Americans do not care about history - except recent history, which they call "the present." One can regard the study of USG present as a case of history, but this approaches the pedantic. It probably deserves its own department: Washingtology.

Washingtology is an applied discipline, like archaeology. Its mission is simply to study the real Washington. This mission requires no engagement with any of USG's PR arms. Washingtology is not journalism. It is the study of what Washington is and does - never what it says. Unless that speech is in some sense an action.

(One of the few systematic mendacities that I see across the entire spectrum of American punditry is the convention of writing as if political actors personally wrote, or believed, their lines. Of course, all these pundits know that the speeches are composed by teams of professional writers. Nonetheless, they invariably report these speeches as if they were actually personal productions. They never say: "Today in St. Louis, President Obama read a White House speech which called for..." They never say: "Today in St. Louis, the White House called for..." They say: "Today in St. Louis, President Obama called for..." This is a classic Orwellian abuse of English. The Founders would have considered the institution of professional speechwriting, and the resulting cardboard television presidents, one of the stranger and more contemptible features of our contemptible and very strange Modern Structure, which somehow masquerades as their own invention.)

What does the Antiversity do when it proctoscopes USG? For every agency, unit, or acronym within USG, it creates a knowledge base. It knows, more or less, what the acronym does, who works for it, what its budget is, etc. It understands the acronym's bureaucratic purpose, decodes its public emissions, identifies its friends in Congress, etc, etc, etc.

More daringly, the Antiversity can (within the bounds of law) develop a way to verify the identity of USG employees. This allows Washingtologists to develop secure, reliable and anonymous inside sources within the Beltway. It can even create communities for them - for instance, host a conversation in which employees of agency X, and agency X alone, can communicate safely and anonymously. Not only does this compromise the loyalty of the agency X, it ensures that the Antiversity can understand it better than its own management. More on these custom communities later...

Moreover, the Antiversity is not at all limited to the study of USG proper. It can study the entire EUSG - University, Press, NGOs, contractors, and all others controlling or controlled by USG. This opens up a remarkable number of tempting targets. For instance, every working journalist and every working professor deserves his or her own dossier at the Antiversity. No, this is not even slightly creepy. When you accept the responsibility of informing the public, you accept the public's right to study you and your work.

USG is a huge creature. Almost no one knows anything about it. Washingtology is a vast task of collecting, assimilating, and selecting information about this beast. As always in history, the end product is a story: what is it? What is it doing? What has it done in the past? What is it likely to do in the future?

I actually know something about seeing governments in this way, because my father was a Foreign Service officer, and he used to let me proofread his (unclassified) cables. Essentially, Washingtologists will study USG the way USG studies its satellites. Since the assessments in State Department reporting are not meant for public consumption, they are reports on the reality of the satellite government - with which Foggy Bottom (purportedly) concerns itself. This reporting style is not generally available to the public, and no one reports on Washington itself this way. At least not since Dupuy de Lôme. Nonetheless, it can be done.

Comparing Washingtology with journalism is like comparing a discussion of some issue in the cable traffic from US Embassy Lisbon, to the same issue on the front page of the Jornal de Notícias. It's not just that the two are written in a different language, although there is that too. It is not even that the former has more facts, though perhaps it does. It's that one is designed to inform the natives, and the other is designed to inform the desk officer.

America - and America alone - has no desk officer. But the truth is out there. The Antiversity must thirst like a viper for this unknown knowledge, and extract it from the sand's very dew.

There is a little bit of Washingtology in the world today. The British site fakecharities.org is an excellent bit of work on the other side of the pond. Righty-o, chaps! David Horowitz has produced a decent prosopography of the broader Left at discoverthenetworks.org. Most amusingly, the Washington Post itself has come forward with the hilariously named, and hilariously peppy, whorunsgov.com. I cannot avoid rhyming the first syllable with "door." Compare this site with the Post itself; see the difference between Washingtology and journalism.

Once the Washingtologists understand Washington, they can report on it. Ie, write short narratives describing its latest doings. This, too, is not journalism. At least, it is qualitatively distinct from the present profession. Perhaps the word should just be retired. "Blogging" sounds a lot better.

(Under the New Structure, having been a Modern Structure journalist will be a nontrivial point of personal ignominy - like having worked as an officer in the Wehrmacht, or a DP for Girls Gone Wild, or a trader for Madoff. Not something you want on your resume. Solution: learn to surf, then claim you were surfing. To get your name off the public list, you'll also need to file a full disclosure, and sign some forms. Really not a big deal. Certainly nothing like some other fascist coups I could imagine. Why fly with the rest? If you need to fly, fly with the best.)

The Antiversity, of course, is not a propaganda device. It is a truth machine. Its efforts are devoted to obtaining the truth for itself, not spreading the good news to others. The latter is a relatively trivial task given the former, and confusing the two greatly interferes with the former.

Nonetheless, once the Antiversity learns the truth, anyone can blog about it. Or produce an audio segment. Or a video segment. Certainly, by 2019, the Antiversity will have no trouble in communicating its truths to the People, through any medium which can stimulate their senses.

Public communication, originating entirely outside the Antiversity, cannot and should not be controlled. However, outlets within the general idea sphere of the Antiversity, and responsible to it rather than the University, can easily identify themselves as such. If they do not, or if their communications are inaccurate, it is obviously not the Antiversity's fault.

The trick with public communication is to move down the IQ ladder very cautiously and steadily. It's important that distorted versions of the Antiversity's vision not circulate among morons, as of course they will. However, the effect must be minimized. When propagandizing on behalf of the truth, always try to bring the audience up to your level; never descend to its.

As this slowly descending inverse waterline creeps down to the meat of the bell curve, that population - accustomed to seeing USG, including of course its local arms, through authorized eyes, will suddenly have the chance to see it through unauthorized eyes. Unauthorized and very critical eyes, with no interest whatsoever in illusions. The reality of USG needs no exaggeration.

But it is not that difficult to persuade Americans to despise USG. Americans already despise USG, although they don't generally put it that way. As an institution of propaganda, the Antiversity can whip them into a white rage with the artfully-presented truth. (Did I say a white rage? Sorry - poetic diction. A diverse rage, surely. Just white with righteous justification.) They are already remarkably annoyed and disappointed, however.

And they do nothing. Politically, the Americans are the victim of a vicious cycle: they are apathetic because they are powerless, and powerless because they are apathetic. The political apathy of the modern American voter would amaze and terrify his great-grandfathers.

Have you ever seen a contemporary description, perhaps by a European observer, of a 19th-century American election? It's like a college football game. Human madness unleashed upon the earth. Indeed, the fundamental human passion for tribal conflict has been transferred largely to harmless megasports - one of the real political achievements of the 20th century. (And indeed one bound to last. Which will outlast the other? Ohio State proper, or the Buckeyes?)

This change can be reversed. The gene pool has not changed much at all. Real political lightning is surely still hidden in the American heart - indeed the human heart. If not the chimp heart. If the hominid does not struggle for power, it can only be that he is powerless. Take your foot off him, and he springs up! But he is the opposite of a spring; the more he is compressed, the less he presses. He knows how to submit, as well as how to challenge and rule. This creature has quite a hunk of brain on the top of its spine. He didn't evolve yesterday.

This, for instance, is why there were few rebellions against the Soviet Union: the State had pressed its people to the floor. In general, weakness is the cause of all rebellion. Strength is the cure for all rebellion. You have heard the opposite, but you have heard wrong. Sorry.

Multiple-equilibrium games work like this. They are hyperbolic. They exhibit a Matthew effect. They have - if I can bear to cite Malcolm Gladwell - tipping points. Populists and conservatives - ie, enemies of socialism - have been largely barred from the levers of power in USG since the Hoover administration. The longer they remain out of power, the more their power decreases. Thus, the level to which an actual grass-roots movement (such as the tea parties) can influence public policy is almost zero.

Conventional democratic politics can stall public policy, but cannot change its direction. The mob is notoriously absent-minded; it forgets itself, and worries about something else; the policy goes through. This is the natural result of civil service reform. Either the People control the government, or they don't. If they control the government, they can fire the bureaucrats. If they can't fire the bureaucrats, they don't control the government. It really is that simple.

But our plan is not a plan to elect a political party, or to implement some policy, or to stall some policy, or etc. It is a plan for a democratic coup - a complete regime change. This cannot be done without actually capturing the government. Clearly, it is anything but a case of conventional democratic politics. However, until the regime change, it works entirely by lawful methods. After the regime change, of course, its word is law. The coup is a political singularity.

For instance, the rule in conventional democratic politics - followed rigorously for centuries - is to be as broad and vague about your ideals and desires as possible, so as to attract the largest possible base. Consider the tea parties. What were they about? Their namesake - a thoroughly left-wing phenomenon, a mob of vandals who masked their faces like Hamas to ransack a private business whose only crime was obeying the law? A mood, a feeling, a thought? Maybe an agenda, if a negative agenda counts? No to healthcare reform? But not just no to healthcare reform...

It was, and is, nowhere near clear. No surprise. The more people you get, the more powerful you feel. Unfortunately, if those people are milling about randomly in a "big tent" the size of Nebraska, you have accomplished very little in terms of coordinating support. You have not coordinated anything. All you have is a feeling. If you could get a million people behind some defined objective, you might be able to get that objective to happen.

But if the tea parties were promoting an actual manifesto, they would have had a much harder time recruiting. This would just have been weird. When you involve yourself in something like a tea party, you feel that you are contributing your thoughts, your ideas, your dreams, to a collective movement. This is the experience of conventional democratic politics. The last thing a democratic party wants to do is to crush those dreams, brutally, with its own.

Thus, conventional democratic politics cannot bring about a coup. No big surprise there. Only unconventional democratic politics can succeed. An unconventional party can only be organized along lines that will be familiar to any student of the revolutionary movements of the early 20th century, including both parties of the Right and Left. We can describe this as an existential party; it demands a fundamental and complete change of government. Such a party cannot, of course, be anything but upfront about this goal. It cannot mind being called anti-democratic. It is anti-democratic.

Power is what works; it can be used for good or evil. All significant existential movements, from the Bolsheviks to the Nazis, the Sandinistas to the Legion of the Archangel Michael, share these five design features:

One, the Party is exclusive, rather than inclusive. A democratic party is like a church: anyone can walk in, sit down, and listen to the sermon. An anti-democratic party is like a club: if you want to be a member, you have to apply. Moreover, if you want to stay a member, you have to keep paying your dues. Both metaphorically and financially.

Two, the Party enforces an ideological standard. The Party leadership decides on the Party line. You are, of course, free to have your own opinions. You are just not free to confuse them with the Party's opinions. As a Party member, you know the Party line and can spout it like a tape recorder. You can also rant on your own account. And you know the difference - that's all. The Party is most certainly not a soul-enslaving totalitarian cult.

Three, the Party proposes a concrete program. If you vote to transfer power to the Party, you know exactly what you're voting for. You are not voting for the box labeled "Surprise." If everyone else puts their votes in that same box, you know exactly what's going to happen.

Four, the Party eschews and despises partial authority. The question of what a responsible statesman would do with an existing pseudo-executive position under the Modern Structure - mayor, governor, even President - is only theoretically interesting. A responsible statesman would never accept any such position. His work would be sabotaged by those who retain the rest of said authority. Therefore, it would visibly appear to have failed. Moreover, even if it managed to succeed, it might well be reported otherwise. Better to hold back. The Party is organized to transcend democracy, not to repair it.

Fifth, the Party is inherently a shadow government. It is perfectly possible for the Party to build the new government under the laws of the old government. It just can't be activated (no, not even a little bit!) under the laws of the old government. (It can give demos, however.)

This mechanism is not known to the American political tradition. What do I mean by a shadow government? As so often at UR, we'll use as our example... National Socialism. Remember, a Nazi pistol is just a pistol.

The distinguished Australian historian Stephen Roberts, who lived in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1937 and produced the essential prewar source The House That Hitler Built, wrote:

The machine, it is true, carried much dead weight, and organization in certain provinces was notoriously lax; but, on the whole, the Party came to provide a definite shadow State.

When I was admitted to the Party archives at Munich and shown some of the earliest documents, I was struck by the breadth of the point of view behind the system, even in the infancy of the Party. Here were no hasty pencillings and fugitive scraps of paper. Even when the Party had but a single stenographer, its files were handled as if they were the archives of a great nation, and the most insignificant details of meetings were minuted and checked and counter-checked. They were treated as State papers, and it is quite clear from the documents themselves that there has been no retrospective building up of a system that did not exist at a time. It is beyond doubt that the men who organized the Secretariat of the Party in the first few years acted as if they were managing a nation. The inculcation of such an outlook over a decade made the ultimate transference of power much easier than it otherwise would have been.

Lenin's thugs, of course, played it the same way. Does this shock you? You knew we were talking about seizing power. Power, of course, can be used for good or for evil. By the Nazis, by the Communists, or by you and I.

You see the process of seizing power the anti-democratic way. First, you build a government outside the government. That government already has a mind: the Antiversity. All it needs is a body. The Party. The Party! Embrace it. Embrace the vision. Embrace the edge.

And all one must do, to join that Party, is switch one's intellectual allegiance - from the University, to the Antiversity. The convert must follow the latter as he once followed the former: absolutely and unconditionally. The client submission module is already in place. We're just changing the server address. Moreover, the doctrines of the Antiversity, because they actually make sense, are much more compact - they consume fewer neurons and demand far less background processing. Your very skull will sigh with relief.

You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was... Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler's talents - I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job.

I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don't think anyone could. Again, a true collective intelligence is essential. The Antiversity must not only be much smarter than me, but also much wiser. (And better at answering its email.)

So, beyond the mere spreading of seditious truths - which is really First Step material - let's look at how the Antiversity organizes a coup. In the First Step, the Antiversity assembled itself. In the Second Step, the Antiversity has three action items:

First, the Antiversity must design a Program. The Program says: if we receive formal sovereign authority, this is what we expect to do with it. The Program includes both a decision architecture for the New Structure, and a policy roadmap for the transitional administration.

I see no point in discussing the policies of the Program. Again, I am not Hitler. The Antiversity must be built first, and that will take at least ten years. Who knows what the world will be like in ten years? Cogitation on the Third Step should be left to one's own private heart. Frankly, I have been rash in even mentioning these matters.

However, it's clear how the Program starts: the Party seizes power, and executes its policy roadmap. Or... actually, no. This is not how the Program starts. This is how Brand X starts. This, for instance, is how Hitler started. And how Mussolini started. Needless to say, the Program has to be much more subtle, elegant and advanced.

There are many differences between the Program and the Nazi path to power. They both have one thing in common, of course: they produce an absolute dictatorship. However, this shocking resemblance can easily overshadow some critical engineering changes - notably the following.

The key safety change is that the Party is designed to seize power, but not hold power. The typical revolutionary party becomes an appendage of the revolutionary state - a permanent placenta. The placenta is a specialized organ for a specialized environment: the womb. Once the baby is born, it's useless. She'd never learn to crawl with this beef pancake hanging on her belly. If the Party must be preserved after its victory, it must at least be severed from power.

So here is how the Program starts: the Party holds power for only as long as it takes to hire a qualified administrator - an experienced corporate CEO, perhaps. It then presents that administrator with (a) a conflict-free responsibility structure; and (b) absolute sovereign authority. (b) will come first; (a) remains merely the Party for longer. (In the Program, there is never an administrator who is both absolute and irresponsible.)

But the entire transition should be complete within a year. After this, the Party has no more reason to exist; and, indeed, it should dissolve. Its central structure disbands. It continues to exist in a certain sense as a social network, but its organizational life is over. The Party is a temporary organism - designed to win and die. Its career is its larval stage.

Thus, though UR is completely attached to the theory that not only does power corrupt, but potential power corrupts, the Party can become as corrupt as it wants. Because it will never exercise actual authority in government - unlike the Nazis and the Bolsheviks.

Second, given this clever design, the Antiversity must actually organize the Party. Without actually prejudging the design, let us call the set of patriotic and responsible citizens who support the Program the Plinth.

The Plinth must (a) obey the principles of existential politics as described above; (b) conduct all operations in a perfectly democratic, transparent and responsible way; and (c) place its absolute confidence in the Antiversity and the Program.

As with any existential party, the goal of the Plinth is to capture absolute sovereign authority. If Americans do not have the power to entirely oust and replace their government by entirely democratic means, whatever proportion of the population they need to do so, they are simply the autocratic servants of those parts of state that they cannot so oust. Popular government is a corpse; that corpse, by its own principles, must be discarded by any means necessary. So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. If you can't have the Plinth - you need the Plinth.

And indeed, although the Plinth is not an inherently covert organization, it is certainly designed to operate covertly if for some ridiculous reason this ever becomes necessary. In much the same way that an A320 is designed for a water landing. Even in covert mode, the Plinth is not designed to commit any actual crime or injustice; but unjust laws can prevent it from operating at all, if it is required to operate according to these laws. Because it is designed along basically Leninist lines, it has at least the theoretical option of going underground.

Third, the Antiversity must continue to exist, so that it can advise the Plinth and its successor, the New Structure. It is intended to be a permanent design - which means it is intended to be a nonsovereign design. This one-time event should be its only brush with power. For the rest of the future, it produces advice. Which the advised are quite free to disregard. This is the honest relationship of a legitimate consultant - not the creepy hypnotic grip of an intellectual Svengali.

At this premature date, I feel this is about as far as a coup design can be sketched. Certainly the first and third parts above can stand little examination. The Plinth, however, is another matter. It is the thing that has to be built. But how can it possibly be built? Let us delve deeper.

First, I want to examine two trends that I think will advance over the next decade, making it easier to both assemble and install the Plinth. Here at UR, we skate to where the puck will be. Second, I want to look at two processes: the process of assembling the Plinth, and the process of seizing power once it is built.

The first trend is spontaneous deprogramming. Here is the problem: the Modern Structure is complete. The ancien regime is no more. Therefore, it is simply impossible for the progressive movement to generate anything like the energy it generated in the '60s. The whole Obama experience, in particular, is a major downer. But this apathy would be growing anyway. It is just increasingly obvious that the '60s will never be repeated. The logs it burned are ash.

What this means in practice: in practice, for a young person, it is very hard to squeeze any power or status out of the Left. All the institutions of the Left are bureaucratically stable. If you join them, you join them as an intern. If you want to achieve any status through them, you have to suck your way up a very long, greasy pole. It is just not exciting to be a mainstream left-wing activist. The lifestyle is grim and boring. You can be an extreme left-wing activist, like an Earth Firster, which is a little more exciting; but still exudes an ugly flavor of desire and futility.

Young people seek power and status. This is natural. It will always be the case. However, they are young; so they seek not the things that will bring them power now, but the things that will bring them power when they are of age to rule. Not, of course, that this is a conscious strategy; it is more a matter of evolutionary biology. But it still works. The number of former '60s radicals in positions of power today is remarkable.

Thus, it is better to say that young people seek potential power and status. If an elite is open to new talent, they will seek it in that elite. If an elite is not open to new talent, or if the process of entering it excludes much of that talent...

In this case, we see a prerevolutionary condition. The classic case is late 19th-century Russia. Young elites, instead of being attracted to careers in the administrative or clerical arms of the Czarist state, were attracted to revolutionary activism - plotting to replace that regime. They seek a different path to power - not an existing path, but a potential and hypothetical path.

Why? I imagine that, to work and rise in the late Czarist bureaucracy, one had to both swallow and regurgitate some rather stale bagels of the mind. Certainly the literature of the period gives one that impression. Also, Jews were disliked. Rather actively disliked, as a matter of fact. Some of my ancestors left Imperial Russia on account of this nonsense.

The alternative? Communism. Out of the fire, into the frying pan. Or rather - out of the sauna, into the crematorium. Nonetheless, a prerevolutionary condition is a prerevolutionary condition. Better the good should take advantage of it, than the evil.

Let me show you a tiny, microscopic, little prerevolutionary condition, right here in 2009. This is the hot new phenomenon of Tweed Rides. Look at the gallery. What's going on here, Mr. Jones? Who in the bloody hell are these bloody chaps?

More to the point: why are ultra-British Victorian and Edwardian fashions fashionable, suddenly, in 2009? Does it have anything to do with Barack Obama? And will it last? Who the hell knows. I am anything but a trendologist. Here, however, is my theory.

My theory is that these eras are in fashion because they are edgy. They are dangerous. Every man and woman in the pictures you see is under 40 and went to an American or European college. In this so-called place of education, they were instructed that the eras which produced these clothing styles were evil.

Moreover, the most evil people in this era were rich white people - the people who wore tweed. People such as Edward VII. That's quite a difference, n'est ce pas? Barack Obama, and Edward VII? Nobody thinks this, I'm sure. The subconscious is quite sufficient.

Thus, the tweed craze is that most commonplace of youth phenomena - symbolic rebellion. Tweed culture is a lot like the swing movement in Nazi Germany - a relatively subtle denial of authority, delivered as a coded fashion message. Just as there could not possibly be any respect between the Hitler Youth thug and the Swing Kid, there cannot possibly be any respect between the Tweed Rider and the granola-munching hippie with whitey dreads. Culturally, this is war.

Of course, tweed is a harmless fashion statement. But you know: if a nigga has spent his entire Saturday trying to look like Sir Henry Maine, dress like Sir Henry Maine, talk like Sir Henry Maine, and act like Sir Henry Maine, how hard can it be to get him to read Sir Henry Maine? That's what I'm saying: a prerevolutionary condition. (Or rather, a prereactionary one.)

There's no reason at all that reactionary ideology can't hitch a ride on reactionary fashion. The two should flourish for exactly the same reasons, under exactly the same conditions, in exactly the same kinds of minds.

Moreover, if I am correct in my somewhat optimistic reading of this microtrend, with its obvious potential to be as ephemeral as any other fad, it will not be ephemeral (though it may evolve). My reasoning: if the tweed life is a subtle protest, it is an exercise of collective power. If it is an exercise of collective power, this fashion statement in some form is likely to be enduring, for the same reason that ghetto thugs will never stop wearing baggy clothes: you can hide a piece under them. When fashion confers power, fashion sticks around. On the other hand, this whole Tweed Movement could be complete bullshit - the thing could disappear in a few months. UR does not make financial recommendations or confer fashion advice.

The second trend is what, for lack of a better word, I call recorporatization. Unfortunately, this requires using the word corporation in its unusual second meaning - that of corporatism. Someone needs to invent a catchier locution. Unfortunately, I am fresh out today.

America was once renowned for its voluntary and independent community organizations. Tocqueville expends countless pages on lavish praise for the American passion of voluntarism. For various reasons, these were almost entirely atomized in the 20th century. For a modern American, your tribe is your employer, your university, or perhaps your church. Perhaps you volunteer at one of the many official charities. (Any charity which accepts grants is an official charity.) These are extremely cold, impersonal, and soulless forms of engagement. This is by no means a coincidence; basically, you are interacting with others through the Post Office.

Reactionaries adore the natural corporative structures of society, and diagnose a sick society by their disappearance and/or coordination. All 20th-century regimes destroyed or suborned the voluntary structures in their societies, producing the usual gray, totalitarian anomie. Why? To any inherently unstable regime, such as a democracy, guilds and orders and brotherhoods and lodges and the like are dangerous institutions; they are easily assembled into threatening combinations. The simple, atomized state of mere individuals is much safer.

The trend that we are seeing is the reconstruction, thanks to teh Internets, of private voluntary peer communities. A good example is Sermo, a private discussion board only for doctors. What do doctors talk about on Sermo? I have no idea. I'm not a doctor. I can't read the board.

However, I discovered Sermo because I read some news story that mentioned this press release. See this document. Frankly: crap like this is the reason society was decorporatized in the first place. Who the hell do these people think they are? The AMA? The AMA supports President Obama's health-care reform. Now there's the legitimate voice of American medicine.

Well... no. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point Sermo just assimilates the AMA, more or less the way the Soviet Union assimilated Latvia. What is the AMA? A bunch of guys in an office with a fancy name. What is Sermo? Actual, legitimate democratic power. Or more precisely, aristocratic power. Or even more precisely: corporative power.

For instance: there's really nothing stopping someone from recreating Sermo for... the police. Or... the military. In fact, if you read the comments on police blogs, you'll see another prerevolutionary condition! And this is in public! (Albeit anonymously. Verified anonymity, as in "anonymous Marine captain in Texas," is an especially potent device.)

This is the art of the reactionary agitator. He is always persuading the little chips of uranium to cuddle up and get more comfortable with each other. Society has more than enough uranium for a Reaction. It is not shaped like a Reaction, but it is getting more so. Atomized, the doctors are nothing. Organized...

Another interesting and important class of corporative institutions is local institutions. For example: Sermo for San Francisco homeowners. If San Francisco homeowners develop a collective consciousness, their relationship to the government of San Francisco is not unlike Sermo's relationship to the AMA. Hm.

If homeowners think X, and supervisors do Y, how do homeowners respond? Homeowners think: this is our city. This is our government. We're the ones that pay for it. And it's slapping us in the face every day. This is simply unacceptable. (Check out the comments on that last link - including the votes. Votes like 500 to 3 - for the reactionary position. In San Francisco.) Now, if we can have a meeting of the minds with Sermo for San Francisco policemen...

Once corporative institutions exist, they can think as communities. They can publish manifestos, like the Sermo appeal. They can develop party lines. They can liaise with other communities. They can perform all kinds of incredibly powerful and dangerous political stunts. No, there was very much a reason why 20th-century liberalism was so anticorporatist - just like the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. The corporatives must be assimilated, coordinated or destroyed. "As you wish, Lord Vader."

Worst of all, corporatives can consider and disseminate alternative narratives of anything - or everything. They can be infiltrated. The Antiversity is a dream and the Plinth is a dream squared; but it's never too soon to start infiltrating. (In fact, just the fact that you're reading this pretty much makes you a sleeper agent. Perhaps I should consider disseminating some sort of patches or cards, like Steve Zissou.)

It is the combination of rebellious reactionary exuberance, driven by the irresistible energy of youth and talent, combined with the rise of new voluntary community structures, that over the next ten or twenty years will begin to create a general prerevolutionary condition. But how do we exploit that condition?

All right. We're in 2019. Even given deprogramming and recorporatization, given an Antiversity - how do we do it? How do we build the Party? The modern world, in 2019, will still be the modern world. How, in the modern world, do you recruit a Leninist party of pure Carlylean reaction, dedicated implacably to the downfall of the Constitution and its replacement with an iron-hard corporate dictatorship?

Actually, history has a precise example of what needs to happen to America. America needs to be colonized. It needs to be reorganized under imperial rule. Unfortunately, America is the world's greatest country already - no one is available to colonize it. Therefore, Americans will have to do the job themselves.

For instance, the acknowledged master of colonial government is Lord Cromer, who found Egypt in chaos and bankruptcy and instituted a European standard of government. We, too, would like a European standard of government. To achieve this goal, we have joined our efforts in the Colonialist Party.

Or possibly the Imperialist Party. Or, perhaps not now but at some more daring day, the Racist Party. (Whose platform could only demand absolutely race-blind government.) Many other names of this general valence, utterly defiant yet somehow nonthreatening, completely serious but vaguely ironic, are available.

But let us eschew all these big, flashy banners, and call the project by its internal codename. This is what cool people who know it will actually call it. It's an unusual word, of no particular metaphorical definition: the Plinth. Again, I want to emphasize the fact that not only does the Plinth not exist, it cannot exist until the Antiversity exists; and the Antiversity does not exist.

The Plinth, quite simply, is the existential party of responsible thought. It appeals to responsible and intelligent people - parents, homeowners, schoolteachers. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Students at top-level universities. Republicans and Democrats, of course. Ice People, Chinamen, Hindoos; Boers, steers, and queers; mulattos, Hispanics, and Jews. Everyone intelligent, mature and open-minded, regardless of race, color, creed, or sexual preference. Of course, in practice everyone will be white, just like at Burning Man.

The Plinth can recruit new members in only one way: educating them. To join the Plinth, you need to educate yourself at least superficially in the doctrines of the Plinth. These simple instructional materials, prepared of course by the Antiversity, contain a brief general reorientation, and a short overview of actual history, economics, and political science. Basically, you need to read a little book and take a little test. It's like getting your political driver's license. Not difficult at all.

How is the Plinth structured? Much like any revolutionary party of the early 20th century. All instructions come to you from the headquarters - Reaction Control. This is a small office of professional reactionaries, whose role is entirely administrative (not ideological) in nature. The Antiversity dreams its dreams; it floats its castles in the air; Reaction Control executes them.

Is this at all creepy? Let's stop, for a moment, and consider whether what we're proposing is creepy. I hold that it is not, in fact, creepy. And here is why.

To the extent that Reaction Control is the administrative creation of the Antiversity, it is indeed the case that the Antiversity is plotting to take over the world. If the Antiversity is plotting to take over the world, it can and will be corrupted by power in just the same way as the University. It might even be worse - before it achieves power. And after that, it will degrade quite rapidly. So, yes, this would be creepy.

Let's look at the safety interlocks on this baby. First, as we saw earlier, the Antiversity creates Reaction Control, but Reaction Control is not in any way responsible to or governed by the Antiversity. At least formally, this missile is fire-and-forget.

Once Reaction Control is born, the administrative tie is severed; the relationship is advisory alone. Thus, the Antiversity is not intellectually contaminated by the activism and raw power lust of the Plinth. Or at least, it is contaminated temporarily and as little as possible. Moreover, the fact that the Plinth can only win by speaking the truth is a major barrier to any kind of power distortion.

And then, of course, there is another Morgul-condom: once the Plinth wins, it forms the New Structure and ceases to exist. Furthermore, it is a conflict of interest to hold or have held any formal responsibility in of any two of these organizations: Antiversity, Plinth, New Structure. At every step, the people have to change. Otherwise, we could expect contamination. There will surely be some bad eggs anyway, but there's no reason to invite them.

And please don't misunderstand: this is not a James Bond operation. Until it actually seizes power, everything the Plinth does is legal. The Plinth is not a violent existential party. Ie, it is not a terrorist organization. Quite the converse! The Plinth is a nonviolent existential party. It is merely conducting a campaign of information terrorism. This is not just legal - it's encouraged. Plinthers are merely activists. (In fact, volunteering for the Plinth next summer would look great on your college application. It's not like we don't have a plan to end world poverty.)

Reaction Control does three things. One: it assigns Plinthers to cells. Two: it publishes the Update. Three: it coordinates any distributed actions.

The general pattern of 20th-century revolutionary parties is a cellular structure. While this was originally designed for illegal, underground activity, in which the Plinth does not engage, it is also a perfect way to use the Internet to organize a social network.

Simply put: here's how you join the Plinth. Either (a) you are recruited by a friend, who is already in a cell; you study the Short Course, pass the test, join your friend's cell. Or (b) you find the Plinth on the Internet, study the Short Course, pass the test, and are assigned to a local cell by Reaction Control. Either way, you spend three months as a candidate member, than are confirmed or rejected by the cell. If confirmed, you are a full member and must pay dues.

Cells meet - in person - at least once a month to maintain their active status. At a cell meeting, members can be expected to discuss the latest issue or issues of the Update, which is issued once a week and tells Plinthers what happened this week. There may also be reading assignments, etc. It's easy to assign reading when you're not particularly interested in reading anything post 1922. The fundamental goal of a cell is to maintain the Plinth as a social network with a well-informed, reactionary collective consciousness - this requires intellectual awareness. Note that this is more or less how the CPUSA, for instance, operated in its heyday.

(And note what Reaction Control, in practice, does for your life. It goes out and finds you like-minded friends. It creates a social life. Many, of course, already have a perfectly adequate social life - but not all. This effect has been of tremendous advantage to revolutionary parties of the past.)

Cells also elect leaders, and these leaders form cells of their own. This is the traditional structure of a revolutionary party - why mess with what works? At the top is Reaction Control, whose leaders (while initially appointed by the Antiversity) are of course elected by the Plinth.

The Plinth, proper, is not designed to contain an electoral majority of citizens. Even once they had achieved power, the revolutionary parties of the early 20th century never made members of all citizens. The Party was designed to be a revolutionary elite, and an elite it remained, even in power. (The Plinth, of course, is dissolved once it wins - it is a sort of political placenta, not at all useful to the actual New Structure.)

Therefore, the Plinth will not prevail through the mere votes of Plinthers. It needs to recruit an outer core of sympathizers - supporters, but not members. To do so, it must propagate its message outside the actual Plinth. There are several ways to do so.

One is mass public action - demonstrations. These, of course, must be (a) entirely legal; and (b) extremely successful and impressive. Any demonstration of less than 100 people is a failure by definition. Also, all demonstrations must include fiery public speeches, preferably not by Hitler impersonators. Tweed or some other stylish, quasi-formal uniform is highly recommended. Colored shirts are most definitely out. Ties are good - cravats and bowties are better. Red, yellow, gold or orange are always good colors for male neckwear.

Two is Gramscian infiltration. Everything that can be infiltrated should be infiltrated, of course, but reactionaries should focus especially on the least politicized and least official networks in society - the workplace, and the new voluntary institutions. (Including, of course, Facebook.)

One simple, fun infiltration game is a subtle dress code, to recognize fellow reactionaries at work or play. For example, if your acquaintance or coworker wears orange, gold, or yellow shirts only on prime-numbered days of the month, he or she is almost certainly a reactionary. These are attractive colors on prime days, but very unattractive on non-prime days. If you note a coworker following this pattern, you may have a comrade in the office. Approach in private and give the password: "Pumpkins." If the answer is "Carlyle," the connection is made. You can watch each other's back in work and play. Teams or groups of reactionaries may exhibit a visually striking, yet plausibly deniable, appearance.

Obviously, as the Plinth and Antiversity gain prominence and legitimacy, these tricks become less necessary. But they are still fun. Frankly, Americans have simply never experienced the excitement of political organization. This is because they have no meaningful politics. The idea that they could organize democratically to seize power is entirely foreign to them, simply because nothing of the sort has been practical for quite some time. It is teh Internets, of course, that have changed the rules.

What is the end of all this? The end is power. Let's end our discussion by looking at how to seize power. The Plinth, after all this organizing and stuff, is going to have to seize power. D'oh!

There are two ways for an existential party to seize power in a democracy. One is the direct way: it can create new institutions of government, to which the people and/or security forces spontaneously redirect their allegiance. This was the method chosen by the Founders in 1787. The Constitutional Convention was authorized by the Congress of the Confederation, but it never returned to that Congress for approval. Rather, it solicited direct approval from the states.

The direct coup is harder and more dangerous. It really is technically illegal. It is essential to ensure the complete and undivided loyalty of the security forces. Nonetheless, once done, it's done. The obvious rule of power applies: the Plinth never fails. If it would fail, it doesn't try. If it opts for civil disobedience - ie, nonviolent lawbreaking - it does it once, for the stake of full sovereignty. And when it dares, it wins.

In the direct coup, the body that requests the loyalty of the security forces must represent the public opinion of responsible society. It is Sermo for all responsible people. It says, without shame or bashfulness: for responsible government, the responsible must rule. The rights of the irresponsible must be respected, but not their voices. The existing regime is irresponsible because it was selected by irresponsible people acting through irresponsible institutions. It supposedly exists to serve our purposes; it is not serving them. It had sat long enough.

An indirect or self-coup, in which a democratically-elected executive tears up the lawbook and instead executes the Program, is much safer and more straightforward. It requires a real majority, however, which is hard - and can be made arbitrarily harder by the Modern Structure, which is intent on securing itself by importing an arbitrary number of new citizens. This, like many of its other tricks, is quite familiar to the student of the late Roman Republic.

Finally, it's important to note that either of these paths can be practiced at any political level. The ideal level is the national level - the Program is a national plan. The Antiversity can also develop Programs for states and even cities that wish to secede and become sovereign, however. Any coastal or border state or city should find this relatively straightforward.

One of the things you learn when you read about 19th-century USG is that its 20th-century successor simply does not exhibit the same level of political cohesion. Apathy again. The 19th-century American was an incredibly politicized, democratically engaged, and - not least - macho and violent creature. It is not surprising that in 1861, when a bunch of states tried to secede, the rest broke out in a paroxysm of enthusiasm for a war to save the Union. (It was certainly not a war to free the slaves - not in 1861, anyway.) If you were teleported into that mania, you would speak the language, but you would feel no other cultural connection to the people. You'd feel more or less as if you'd been sent to an insane asylum.

In 2009, or at any later date, what will happen if a state government tries to secede? So long as it has strong internal public support and the support of the state security forces, it will - secede. Nothing at all will happen. The state will simply become an independent country. Washington simply does not have anything like the political energy to coerce a seceding state. It barely has the political energy to coerce a seceding city. Americans simply are not going to shoot at other Americans for this reason. If this assertion is true, as I believe it is, state police with shotguns can easily thwart the entire US military in a secession situation. The latter simply won't attack. They will not be ordered to. The hate just isn't there.

The idea that any national force could prevent a state from seceding strikes me as rather like the idea that the US will guarantee Israel against Iran's nuclear weapons, by promising nuclear retaliation against Iran if Iran nukes Tel Aviv. Frankly, I don't think the America of today - the America that prohibits its own soldiers from shooting back at the Taliban, if the Taliban are shooting from a house - has the stones to nuke Russia if Russia nukes America (not that it will). The proposition that Washington could or would incinerate millions of Iranians, whatever the Iranian government did to Israel, is ridiculous. It is simply reverse presentism - anachronistic translation of past assumptions to the present. Washington once had an ideology that allowed it to nuke cities for reasons of state, but not now.

Similarly, Washington once had an ideology that allowed it to coerce states, or combinations of states, or even cities, that wanted to be independent. But not now. I would not say the thing is trivial, but any state, or even major coastal city, can almost certainly succeed if it plays its cards right.

In short: the only proposition on which the Reaction depends is the proposition that history is not over. Historically, the political problem faced by the Antiversity and Plinth seems relatively solvable. It seems impossible in terms of conventional American politics, but the whole point of the Reaction is a return to historical standards.

By historical standards, there is arguably no meaningful democratic politics in America today. There is certainly no meaningful democratic politics in most of Europe. Thus the Plinth is doing what any dissidents in a totalitarian state must: working to restore democracy, in a state whose constitutional belief is that it already is a democracy. The Plinth differs only in that it does not believe pure democracy is a valid description of any stable sovereign decision structure - and therefore proposes its own structure, which is designed to be stable, responsible, and effective, but emphatically not democratic. In short, the Plinth is just like an anti-Communist dissident organization, such as Solidarity, except that it sees democracy as a means, not an end. To reach that end, it may be necessary to restore democracy. It cannot be necessary to retain democracy.

The fundamental question is: can it be done? Most, I'm sure, would say no. Most might well be right. For another answer to the question, however, I leave you with Hilaire Belloc:

There is a triumph of influence which all of us have known and against which many of us have struggled. It is certainly not a force which one can resist, still less is it effected by (though it often accompanies) the success of armies.

It is the pressure and at last the conquest of ideas when they have this three-fold power: first, that they are novel and attack those parts of the mind still sensitive; secondly, that they are expounded with conviction (conviction necessary to the conveyance of doctrine); and, thirdly, that they form a system and are final.

Obviously, this profile fits UR to a T. In particular, observe the importance of focus. The tea parties, as a right-wing imitation of a left-wing phenomenon, are completely without focus; they are diffuse and distributed, as any leftist movement must be if it wishes to remain leftist. Therefore, they are weak despite their large numbers - they cannot think or act collectively. They will certainly never out-left the Left!

The essence of Right is effective structural and intellectual coordination. Operating a right-wing movement by left-wing techniques is an excellent way to fail. The Left spontaneously coordinates itself; the Right must be coordinated by actual leadership. In the Reaction, structural and intellectual leadership are supplied by the Plinth and the Antiversity, respectively. In the National Socialist German Workers' Party, they were supplied by Hitler and Goebbels, respectively. Hopefully the difference will be easy to observe.

Actually, Belloc (who was a bit of a Nazi himself) is not writing about the Nazis. He is writing (in 1906) about 7th-century Islam. With a century more hindsight, I'd actually venture to disagree with him on one point: I think armies are pretty effective in effecting the conquest of ideas. Nonetheless, his analysis is excellent and not at all restricted to the soldiers of Allah.

History buffs will note that contemporary commenters on the rise of National Socialism also often compared Hitler to Mohammed and Nazism to Islam. They were liberals, of course, not neocons, and they meant real 7th-century Islam, not its modern imitation. (Our "Islamism" is just another strain of Third World nationalism, a bug that has been kicking around the planet for at least a century. It is best seen as an opportunistic infection of democracy.)

Therefore, my own designs are inspired by the experience of Hitler, Muhammad, and Jesus. As well as Octavian, Franco, and William I. Also important to my thinking are Frederick the Great, Mussolini, and Napoleon. And we can't forget a few American luminaries, such as Ben Hill, J. Edgar Hoover, and Harry Hopkins. History is largely the study of political force, which is an extension of military force. Generals must study generalship by studying battles - any battles, all battles, without regard to the character or merits of the participants. Those who aim to design any system of political force must likewise learn from any and all parties, leaders and movements of the past, American or foreign, vicious or virtuous.

(And specifically, if the question is whether patriotic Americans are allowed to learn from the Nazis, I think that question was more or less answered when NASA shipped the German ICBM program to Alabama. When SS-Sturmbannführer von Braun's spaceship landed on the moon, did patriotic Americans applaud? Or did they shout: "Boo! Hiss! Nazis!" Apollo 11, of course, was not made in underground caves by starving slave laborers. Therefore, it seems that one can copy the things the Nazis did right, and discard the things they did wrong. One can fail in this; one can fail in anything.)

Above all, then, the Reaction depends on one question. Will good people undertake it? No - will great people undertake it? If so, it will happen, and I think succeed. The most important thing about this entire project: at every step, in every thing it does, it must attract the best, it must repel, defeat or confine the worst, and it must be entirely and in the deepest sense of the word fun. If it is not possible to achieve these qualities, it is probably impossible to implement the Reaction. And of course, it may be impossible anyway. The required effort and achievement may just exceed human powers - even with the full power of teh Internets.

If so, there is no reason to despair. History has been a lot worse. It is getting worse; but not, by historical standards, that fast. (Unless you have the misfortune to live in South Africa.) And even if barbarism does steepen its pace, the consolations of Boethius remain available.

Better Boethius than Claudian, I say. Better truth in a cage than lies in purple. Truth will not remain in a cage, nor lies in purple. Not gently does this inversion revert. The force is not ours; the force is Clio's. Heck - God's. But

"Nay, by God, Donald, we must help him to mend it!"

Mencius Moldbug
San Francisco; November 2009

Hunting for whites after the cancellation of the release of money

There was recently a disturbance in an area of Paris that is normally much better shielded from the world's slings and arrows: the 7th arrondissement. This created some striking still and moving images which can be viewed, by French speakers, at the racist Frogblog François Desouche. One is at once reminded of that darkest of modern French voices, M. Raspail.

Due to the universal degradation of the 20th-century mind, I am an uneducated boor and have no French. Presumably others here are in the same predicament. Therefore, I thought I would allow Google to translate some of the comments left by various ranids chez M. Desouche. I suspect many of these mots were bons to start with, and Le Goog has only improved them. If you want the original story, it is not bad with TF1.

The article's title:

Hunting for whites after the cancellation of the release of money

There is no text, only video and images. From the comments...

Commentary No. 701 (UNDERDOG):

In countries where Paris will end soon in a can, you are in and all in a garbage can.

Commentary No. 705 (Although anti-Thinking):

It is not Fdesouche of extreme-right, or else it is the reality that is far right!

Commentary No. 713 (chris):

It is their denial of the reality that their farts in the mouth.

Commentary No. 714 (badger):

A little deeper and "the evening of the morning" will be within reach of real people who souffrent.

Commentary No. 715 (Jaime Horta):

I have carefully the article by Daniel Schneidermann very politically correct, which critics are limited to superficial acquaintances politico-media-financial and alleged exploitation of misery.

Unfortunately the causes of this fiasco is much more simple and trivial, measuring the lack of citizenship, in total disregard of others' freedom and physical integrity, as the concealment of the most elementary laws governing collective societies, all with hundreds or thousands of offenders, criminal extravagant unbridled behavior by staggering impunity they enjoy and widely abused.

Commentary No. 721 (Herzl):

Under an unspoken racism on the part of gouvernantsqui is to be perceived as if they were "animals" (or disabled, etc..), We forgive them all. They can shoot at police, burning cars, etc.. Etc..

But one of us raises his voice, uses only one word louder than the other, and it is cooked, it does not forgive him.

IT IS ONLY TO remember the arrogant tone of the officer who stops you in town for a minor offense ... but it is important to "dump" its frustration of not being able to bludgeon the pests that the emmerdent every day!!

Commentary No. 722 (sardoz):

Belle invention, the color photo, the whole world can see the state of France after 40 years of living together and métissolatrie Jacobin.

Commentary No. 726 (Eisbär)

The sores of urban city centers are beginning to feel the spicy breath of youth and diversity of their vivrensembleu soft neck ... My opinion is that requests for exiles, overseas positions and applicants for a destination Erasmus will face a serious inflation in the months and years to come.

Commentary No. 727 (Eisbär):

On the last video image "fugitive" bobo a young female currently in Vélib escape before the troops "of Syldavian humiliated and misunderstood" was born on my dirty face chalk male hetero morning smile any loan of cynicism ...

Reviled or who evil thinks.

Commentary No. 730 (patton):

well me and unfortunately I say that the violence committed by raccaille Afro-magrebhine in the 7th arrondissement is very bien.j hope that residents and shopkeepers will understand that they too do not have the abbri this type of event. I also hope that this will open the yeux. Sur the situation experienced by thousands of their countrymen who are not lucky enough to live in neighborhoods until the preserves.la solution would be locked up all this scum and deport them and their families by military in the country of their ancestors in withdrawing well on their way to the card itentite "French" and that French nationality as the artcle provides for a civil code. ditto for the "French "Algerian who fouttu brothel in France following the defeat in Algeria. if they love both the country of their parents and who they return and if it still will be the coffin or the bag.

Commentary No. 731 (Dear Rasade):

Have you the link to the picture of the wild with his machete, extract the video of the riot? Thank you to give.

Commentary No. 734 (florent):

What is worrying is that this type of marketing campaign has held in other countries and in France it turns to confrontation.

When we listened to the comments, there was a cultural vacuum recess (we want the mesh ...), a concept of money disconnected from his senses.

Furthermore, they realize the actual cost of things? I mean it's easy to break but how are they able to conceive, create, produce, car, bus, Glass Window?

We meet with monsters consumer but that is disconnected from the reality of the object. They know how to use it but do understand that very few functioning and especially its cost in terms of energy, hard-working people around the world for their offer turnkey.

He does not understand the meaning of the struggle and the commitment to long term, they are in the company of zapping, the instant and instinctual. They want so they will do anything to have. They eat and are in a samsaric any dissatisfaction that grows increasingly angry. They are not adults but eternally young in search of lost again in search of new sensation. They are acculturated people, uprooted for the most part. They are perfect soldier as a leader.

They hate France and the French but French. They hate America but are dressed from head to foot all their bearings and cultures comes from the USA. They report a fascination repulsion toward the West. They live in a world of violence and hate relation between future.

There has listened to conversations, vocabulary (often poor) and use words to understand the mindset. The language is a reflection of an open mind and the way we perceive the world around us.

Once the finding gives what?

We'll have to reclaim neighborhoods and the first political act that is linked to everything else, is the rejection of illegal immigrants (working or not), stop all subsidies associations. Let the French take over the leadership role on its own territory. The right of the soil must also be stopped.

We'll have to sign a social contract for engagement with responsibilities in French society. You do not come in France to do business (that is to say making money after all means) and enjoy benefits.

For young people who were born in France, he will have justice more appropriate. The sanctions must be based on education and redress. You break, you pay and you redo. The money must be taken where it is located (home, car, bank account, social security benefits in the family ...)

For foreigners, the double jeopardy should not be in order, it should be mandatory expulsion, with responsibility for the whole family. When AC deal in the family everyone knows and everyone benefits.

When the next riots that will happen is the weapon with curfew!

For multi juvenile offenders, the army or in Djibouti in the forests of Guiana, with a development project to the key.

There is strong that we will bring calm and tranquility. Because the rate things are going is civil war in less than 10 years, with looting in Paris al'arrive!

Commentary No. 743 (Zombienation):

Henceforth, and in agreement with the City team, any public event involving at least 100 people is not recommended for Caucasians. We invite you to celebrate the music in you, dancing to the Techno Parade in front of your TV to show your couch.

Commentary No. 756 (Rosco):

Basically, those who are most to blame in such case, it is the fds. All these different, they do their job: their thing is to make runs to Paris and to attack anything that moves. They love it and would be wrong to deny, since nobody's stopping them seriously.

Opposite, the cops, who should rust at all is, simply to arrest two or three. Judges release them instead to exercise the utmost severity. Media defend them and wallow in denial of reality. Policies refuse to take their responsibilities. And fds base continue to vote UMPS.

In short, we have what we deserve. I hate the different, but I can not blame them for doing exactly what I'd do it for them. When there's an open bar, would be stupid for ordering a perrier and request the bill.

Commentary No. 761 (Stay Behind):

To calm the animal, he must let go, not the money, but real cats.

Anyway. This is just from the top page. Clearly, I could go on forever. Let me add one more:

Commentary No. 116 (Claudy):

Testimony:

For me I found myself caught in the middle of the riot at any time, and I am amazed at the gap that may exist (as usual) between what I saw my eyes and what the media reported.

What they call "degradation of urban furniture" and "angry people" were actually strips of black armed with crutches came exclusively to vandalize and rob people. I have witnessed attacks on people for their camera or camera, these people face in blood does not seem to understand what happens to them.

The most outrageous is that the police were visible throughout the riots, some companies have invested boulevards after 2h, when everything was finished ...

So as usual tonight at 20h information will be a brief 20 seconds before entering the main subject and elementary imposed by the media: the football god.

And too bad for the victims of blood I saw, too bad for traders whose window was shattered, so much the worse for mothers asphyxiated in gas tear gas, never mind the tourists who will never return in Paris ...

I noticed that it happens for a very long time: the police are back, the media obscure the subject, and the victims?

They do not care.

Fortunately, here at UR, we do care! Ah, our human liabilities...

The Dire Problem and the Virtual Option

To think about government in the democratic tense is to think (and talk - and write) in terms of policies. Most people do not know any other way. The democratic thinker, prudent or foolish, cretin or physicist, thinks: if I were king, what would I do about X or Y or Z? Health care or Afghanistan or banking? The precondition is always omitted, and always implied.

Since not only is the thinker not king, not only are there are no more kings in the world, but the thinker believes there never will and never should be any, any such thought is so impotent as to insult sobriety. One might as well ask: if I were God, what would I do about mosquitoes?

Normally, nothing but a tab of Owsley's plus a hefty Bolivian chaser could bring a conceit so vain and fantastic to the sustained attention of the neurologically uncompromised brain. Dear reader, if you doubt, I commend you to Steve Randy Waldman's brush with power. It is said that Tim Geithner stopped by. The wise man is the man who knows the brush for what it is - not taking it for actual contact. Yet the thinker, if not perhaps so wise as Steve Randy Waldman, is a normal man. He has not taken any heavy drugs. He has not sustained any head injuries. Or so he assumes...

Not only is our philosopher restricted to voting Democrat or Republican, even Democrats and Republicans are quite restricted in the range of legitimate policies they may in practice pursue. Thus the political mind is doubly vacant - tohu vabohu. No wonder today's American, whose great-great-grandfathers paraded by torch, formed secret societies, cast eagled generals in bronze, could give a crap. He is politically apathetic, because he is subconsciously wise. Reality impinges upon his motivation at a direct level.

This generalization, of course, applies only to the audience. Ie: punters, marks or turkeys. The Washington of 2009 is first and foremost a show - and no small production. The gaffer does not fall in love with the leading lady or weep at the fate of the tragic hero. The entire cast and crew believe they are making a great movie, a movie that matters, a movie that is real. They care. But they care differently. The experience of the audience is not the experience of the production.

When people who are actually influential in formulating the policies which the Beltway makes, ie have actual power as opposed to Walter Mitty power, think, what they do is to invent facts. Or at least collect them. The result, in any case, is in every case some form of science. That this result is custom-made to imply, or even better assume, policy X or Y or Z, and made so well a monkey too blind to find a banana in its hand could see it, is seldom remarked upon by the participants.

Here at UR, we define political perspective as historical narrative. Your political position is a function of your interpretation of the past, up to and including now. If you read history the Republican way, you are a Republican. If you read history the Democratic way, you are a Democrat. If you read history the Jacobite way, you are a Jacobite. The facts may vary, slightly, but facts are the least of history's art.

The Jacobite history of 2009, unlike the other two, is not found at your local library. One would need to be a full-beer Jacobite, finely preserved and not in any way tin-plated, to write it. Or at least, be able to fake it. A tough ho to row, but here at UR we persevere. While Jacobite may not quite be an exact description - I am actually quite weak on the 17th and 18th centuries - this blog is certainly very far to the right. Today, perhaps we'll see how far.

For another post I'm working on, I felt compelled to name historical figures who could serve as endpoints on a spectrum of absolute left and right. I came up with Prince Kropotkin and Cato the Younger. Some people talk about Attila the Hun. But frankly, Attila was a leftist. Nigga say he to the right of Marcus Porcius Cato, that nigga mean business.

For me, the left-right spectrum is defined by the two forms of political power: influence and command, persuasion and compulsion. If A is exercising power over B, A's decisions determine B's actions. This is either because A has persuaded B to do what A wants, or because A has compelled B to do it. Either way, A is the big boss in charge. His testicles swell.

An organization is perfectly Left if it operates entirely on the principle of persuasion - that is, cooperation by consensus, without any hierarchy, interest or position. Of course, no nontrivial organization can operate entirely on this basis, so nontrivial organization can be perfectly leftist - let alone a sovereign state, which must defend itself by definition. Officerless armies have also been tried once or twice, generally without great success.

An organization is perfectly Right if it operates entirely on the principle of compulsion, without ambiguity, informality or conflicts of interest. My ideal state - the joint-stock republic, controlled equitably by its beneficiary shareholders, and secured by end-to-end cryptographic command - is perfectly Right, because its decision structure is entirely compulsory.

Unlike any mere paper standard, the neocameralist JSR is self-enforcing and physically secure. No one need be persuaded to follow its rules, ever. The design is internally stable - it stands up of its own accord, as any sovereign decision structure should. Unlike classical republican forms, it has no tendency to decay into democracy, and it lacks any inherent internal conflicts of interest. It may not last forever, but it is designed to last forever.

(So, yes: I to the right of Cato. Yo bitches can fear me. I like the Ass Meat Research Group.)

Notice, for instance, that under a purely compulsory sovereign, there is no need for propaganda. The joint-stock republic has no reason to concern itself with the political opinions of its residents - because no coalition of its subjects has the practical power to threaten its security. Thus it may treat them as what they are: its customers. Hopefully a somewhat warmer bond, making the political question moot. How hard is it, really, to keep the shoppers from looting the Wal-Mart?

This sudden evaporation of all zombie memes and public lies, of entire doctrines heretofore appearing remarkably pink-cheeked but animated only by the arteries of power, is just one of the many delightful surprises that the return of absolute sovereignty, however long it takes, will spring upon the world. What's funny is that the ordinary educated American, a devoted reader of the New York Times, considers political and politicized some of his most foul terms of abuse. Once the democracy show is finally canceled, he will see just how right he was.

Such a blessed miracle can only come to pass, however, if its evangelists are as clear about its problems as its advantages. If not clearer.

Thus, I want to break the rule I started with, and talk policy. There is one problem facing humanity that must be solved by any design for a USG 5 - not just mine. A good way to demonstrate the superiority of my design is to show how it states and addresses this problem. If the problem engages you, translate it into your world and solve it there.

The Dire Problem is so dire that I cannot just tell you what it is. Dear reader, I fear your head still remains partially attached to the real world. In the real world, the Dire Problem cannot be solved; thus, it cannot be contemplated. Only in my fantasy world can it be solved. Therefore, not to solve it but to contemplate it, we must descend deeper into the fantasy. Details!

Whatever title he assumes, the CEO of a joint-stock republic holds one position, famous across history, found in every country: that is king. Our king should probably have prior experience as a mere corporate CEO, which is why I take the statistical liberty of assuming his testicles.

A king is a king because his job is the job of kingship. The selection process is immaterial. A king may inherit the job, he may be elected, he may be selected. Moreover, while any true king is absolute in authority, no king can be irresponsible - that would make him dictator, not king.

Every king is responsible to some persistent, ie eternal, institution. Ideally, that institution has the power to switch kings, and no other direct authority. A hereditary king is responsible to the royal family. An elected king is responsible to those who elected him. Etc.

The standard American corporate architecture, in which the CEO is responsible to a board of directors, elected by the shareholders, works reasonably well - at least in theory. However, if elections seem repugnant or dangerous due to their unfortunate democratic associations, there is an aristocratic solution which avoids elections and should produce a body of equal or greater responsibility.

Simply appoint the 50 or 60 largest shareholders as a senate. Senators vote by weight of shares. The size of any such assembly should be under the Dunbar number. Shareholders whose holding is under this bar may (or may not) select any senator as their proxy, adding their weight to his. Thus, all shareholders are represented equally in a body of manageable size. The senate can even be reduced to board size, for minimum overhead.

The senatorial design is superior to the representative design, because it places no professional intermediaries between the owners and the management. Rather, the latter are directly responsible to the former. While a layer of delegation can work quite well, all sorts of cruft can also creep into it.

However the responsibility structure is designed, it is absolutely essential that no significant conflicts of interest exist within it. Shareholders, for instance, share the interests of their property by definition. A royal family is a family business. Not one king in European history can be found who ruined his own country to enrich himself, like an African dictator.

Large shareholders will often have conflicts of interest with the sovereigns they own, due to the sheer financial size and variety of business interests they may hold. There is no solution to this problem but a careful initial distribution of the shares, and a command structure that allows the Senate to block the votes of shares whose holders are conflicted. Ideally, the shares are widely enough spread that these conflicts disappear in the noise. Position limits are an excellent idea. Ideally, large positions become concentrated among ultra-wealthy families, whose members can serve as a durable senatorial aristocracy.

Other well-structured sovereign corporations are often good shareholders, especially among a family of states created through the same process. For example, an easy way to break up USG is to convert it to a keiretsu of cross-held sovereign states, whose shares of each state are initially held by the other 49. This ensures that responsible management, if initially selected, will remain quite responsible. These shares can then be distributed carefully and broadly across a global financial market, shifting responsibility to a broad cross-section of human prudence.

This corporate banality is sound. But it is not glorious. If the job of the sovereign CEO is the position of king, why not assume that position's ancient and honorable styles and ornaments? We could start with the name, and the majuscule: King. These alone may seem ridiculous at first, but the reality of power will infuse them - as it always has. Similarly, if our board of directors is a senate, let it be a Senate! The term, after all, is far older than Washington.

Armed with these dignities, we must pick a state. I pick my own: California. The question of policy is thus: as King of Royal California, absolute in authority but responsible to a Senate of major shareholders, what would I do about X or Y or Z? Note that by making the precondition of policy more fantastic, we have also made it more concrete.

What will the return of royal government mean for California? A recent network TV series, Kings, made a stab at imagining a modern monarchy. Mrs. Moldbug and I rented the pilot. It was not good. I constantly felt the desire to enter the screen, seize the camera, and redirect it from the royal family to the royal administration. Alas.

After so many years of grim, mindless democracy, the return of true kingship can mean only one thing for Anglo-American civilization, in California or anywhere else: a glorious rebirth. It is a permanent occasion for public glory. Its date will be celebrated for the next century. Life before the Restoration will seem inconceivably ugly, boring, weird and dangerous, like life under Communism. (And the fall of Communism will seem the first step in the fall of democracy.)

In the first few months of royal administration, both the King's subjects and his real estate learn what it feels like to be treated as what they are - assets. These assets, like German machine tools operated without lubricant in Magnitogorsk, are in an extremely deteriorated condition. This neglect of capital is of course visible in the massive financial delinquency of the democratic era.

After six months of the King's peace, it is safe for any Californian to walk anywhere in any Californian city, at any time of day or night. Every human in the state is legal and identified. The trade balance is neutralized, creating new industries sufficient to employ all Californians. All post-1950 architecture is classified for demolition and replacement. Young Californians in all grades are tackling their new classical curriculum. And so on. Life has become better, comrades! Life has become more joyful.

This is the frame of mind in which Royal California sets out to solve the Dire Problem. Next to this problem, all the king's other problems are straightforward and unworthy of notice. They were only phantoms of democracy. Government, in reality, is not hard at all. All manner of seemingly intractable woes will dissolve before the King's golden and tireless energy. But the Dire Problem is different.

The Dire Problem is that, while all the land in California is of positive value (since, for all its faults, the environmental stewardship of the late USG 4 was excellent), the same cannot be said for its population. No king would allow his population quality to sink to such a state; no king has reigned in California for almost two centuries.

Many Californians - most Californians - are assets. That is: productive citizens, or children who will grow up and become productive citizens. Their place is the left side of the balance sheet. Their presence in California increases California's productive power, and thus its value as a financial asset.

As the King begins the transition from democracy, however, he sees at once that many Californians - certainly millions - are financial liabilities. These are unproductive citizens. Their place on the balance sheet is on the right. To put it crudely, a ten-cent bullet in the nape of each neck would send California's market capitalization soaring - often by a cool million per neck.

And we are just getting started. The ex-subject can then be dissected for his organs. Do you know what organs are worth? This is profit!

If we claim to derive the responsibility of government from mere financial prudence, we must explain why the business strategy of culling unwanted subjects for their organs is not viable. Most would not find this profitable strategy consistent with responsibility. Yet, since a sovereign is sovereign, no higher sovereign can exist to outlaw or preclude it. The design must solve this problem on its own.

The simplest, broadest, and most essential prevention against this degenerate result is the observation that the royal government is a government of law, and a government of law does not commit mass murder. For instance, no such government could take office without promising to preserve and defend its new subjects, certainly precluding any such genocide.

A sovereign that breaks its promises, especially in such a ghoulish way, is a sovereign that its subjects cannot trust. This in turn is a much less valuable sovereign. Who wants to stay in the Hotel California? The whole idea of the King's peace is that you can take a shower without worrying about Norman Bates. Property values just went through the floor, and what is a country but its property?

More specifically, these human liabilities are indeed just that - liabilities. The royal government cannot possibly take office without assuming the financial liability to keep these unfortunates alive and in a condition of human dignity. This will appear on the right side of Royal California's balance sheet, just like its bond coupons. Moreover, the right to be kept alive, etc, at California's expense, appears on the left side of a human liability's balance sheet. Just like his IRA.

Thus, despite its inherently mercenary form as a reactionary corporate monarchy, an omnipotent uber-state whose soul is a little dried-up pea, Royal California will not actually be executing hapless peasants for their organs. This is nice to know.

But do we really know it? The explanation that Royal California will not harvest the poor for their organs, because it will have promised not to harvest the poor for their organs, and its most valuable asset is its reputation, while certainly accurate, is too narrow for me. Having established this legalistic defense, let us reinforce it with further realities.

More broadly, Royal California will in all cases treat her subjects as human beings. The maintenance of equity, as well as law, is crucial to her reputation. Thus, the Genickschuss is out, with or without the organ harvesting.

Carlylean to its core, the ideology of Royal California is that the King is God's proxy on earth; whatever God would have him do, that is justice; the King, having done his best to divine God's will, shall see it done. Or else he is no king, but a piece of cardboard, a "Canadian lumber-log." Clearly, God is not in favor of harvesting the poor for their organs. You're probably thinking of Huitzilopochtli. So this is another safeguard.

This still does not satisfy me, however. The Dire Problem is a Dire Problem. It is not to be dismissed so lightly. Let us turn, and face it more broadly. Again, it faces not only Royal California, but every California.

Stated most boldly, the Dire Problem is that there is a line of productive competence beneath which a human being is a liability, not an asset, to the society including him. This calculation is made in terms of the marginal human - does California gain or lose by adding one person just like this person? For millions, the answer is surely the latter.

Worse, with the steady advance of technology, this line rises. That is: the demand for low-skilled human labor shrinks. Abstract economics provides no guarantee whatsoever that the marginal able-bodied man with an IQ of 80 can feed himself by his own labors. If you doubt this line, simply lower it until you doubt it no more. At least logically, there is a biological continuum between humans and chimpanzees, and the latter are surely liabilities.

Why does this matter? It matters because either (a) a man can feed himself, or (b) he dies horribly of starvation, or (c) someone else feeds him. If (a), he is an asset. If (c), he is a liability - to someone. If (b), he makes a horrible mess and fuss while dying, and is thus in that sense a liability. Moreover, the presence of the poor becomes extremely unpleasant well before the starvation point.

It is useless to say that there are no human liabilities. Royal California was born to do God's work in California. If your God is into fibbing or averting his eyes, he is some other deity. Our fellow sees only the truth, and speaks it. Come on, man! Let the glory and horror of the world unfold itself before your eyes. There are human assets, and human liabilities. Calling the latter the former is a terrible error, a blasphemy. God can wish a thing and make it so, but not you.

Think of the glories of emptiness and solitude. You, yourself, have gone into the wild to find them. Everyone reads Thoreau in high school. Not everyone reads Robinson Jeffers, but they probably should. Any subscriber to Outside magazine can relate trivially to Jeffers' Inhumanism. Are not all humans, of themselves, born revolting, filthy apes - on the right side of the ledger? Must not they struggle to even break even, and contribute to civilization?

Let those of us born with golden brains, therefore - the tiny top sliver that Ralph Adams Cram called human, as opposed to anthropoid - inherit the earth, through the talent that was born in our hands and minds. As for the anthropoids? Their hearts will always beat in our chests. Their brains can be frozen, and perhaps scanned someday when we have the technology.

Imagine the garden that a population of ten or twenty million - all the most human of humanity - could make of the earth. Would they miss the six billion? Not a chance. Would the planet seem empty and boring without the favelas of Rio, the projects of Baltimore, the huge human warrens of Lagos? Not a chance. Nor, if your taste runs to Gaia, would the Earth. And if the few can figure out how to preserve the organs of the many, this new nobility can live for millennia!

Anyway. I am not actually making this Swiftian proposal. On the contrary! As I've said, I oppose it. Nonetheless, it is important to present it, because the attraction is real. At least to some of us. Besides, what else are you going to do with the huge human warrens of Lagos? Lagos is not in California, at least not yet. But the latter is hardly without its pits.

We now face the Dire Problem squarely. The King has two constraints.

First, his solution must be consistent with human dignity. For his model of dignity in charity, he chooses the system of Maimonides. (Note that USG 4's system of taxpayer charity, the "welfare state," is all the way down at a Maimonides 8, since donors are unwilling. As for the effects, the sage is entirely validated.)

Second, once the first constraint is solved, the solution's effect on free citizens must be as close as possible to the effect of our organ-harvesting proposal. In other words, any solution to the Dire Problem can be defined as a humane alternative to genocide.

Such a humane alternative will not cost ten cents a head. It will not yield valuable organs. It will produce a society consisting entirely of productive citizens and their dependents, which takes Robert Putnam's research to its opposite endpoint. Those who have experienced no such society are mistaken to scoff at it; had they ever tasted any such community, they would never give it up. The King who brings it will silence catcalls and make believers.

Let's approach this problem of human dependency in more detail. What does the King do with his mindless, menacing, misbegotten masses?

First, the King's law is that either a human being is a free, taxpaying yeoman, or a ward. A ward is any dependent - anyone not responsible to provide for his or her support. The general principle of wardship is that every ward must have a patron, who is responsible for supporting the ward, authorized to direct and discipline the ward, and liable for the ward's offenses. This is not my idea - it is straight out of Roman law.

The trivial and common example of the patron-ward relationship is the relationship between parents and children, or children and their superannuated parents. Familial dependents are simply none of the King's business; his law upholds, rather than challenging, these structures.

We turn, therefore, to wards of the State. These come in three classes: (a) criminal, (b) indigent, and (c) mentally incompetent. (a) and (c) are always with us; the heart of the Dire Problem is (b), because there is no realistic constraint on the size of (b). Indeed, as we approach the Singularity, (b) tends to include everyone - golden brains or not. That is, as machine intelligence increases, economic demand for human intelligence at every level goes to zero. Oops!

As we'll see, the solution for (b) may help us with both (c) and (a). (c) is immemorial - I have little to say on the question. As for (a), crime does not much trouble the King - not with his aggressive use of modern forensic and security technologies.

Widespread crime is an epiphenomenon of democracy. In Royal California, you are much more likely to be attacked by a wild animal than a feral human, and there are none of either in the cities. Dangerous bipeds are simply not in circulation. So long as your children are old enough to understand traffic safety, they can wander up and down Market Street all night if you care to let them.

The standard of public safety is independent of the threat. Whether your rights are violated by an agent of the King or an independent criminal, you experience the same violation. The democratic failure to eradicate crime is thus best defined as a form of state terror, with the same unlovely motivations always found in a government which torments its subjects. (Crime in Britain, for instance, increased by two orders of magnitude in the last century, as that country terminated its ancient aristocracy and entered its present democratic tailspin.)

The Victorian ability to nearly eradicate serious crime, even with Victorian forensic technology, is a testament to that age's genius for the rule of men. Most of today's criminals are not psychopaths, biologically defective goods; they are, or at least conceive of themselves, as free warriors against civilized society. A government which can not only detain these warriors, but conquer and defeat them, breaking their martial spirit, can resocialize them.

This was once routinely done in American prisons, or any prison for that matter. For example, in the French Catholic novelist Paul Bourget's 1893 tour d'Amérique, Outre-mer, he visits The Tombs in New York:

We had not been ten minutes in it when we began to see convicts laboring in some earthworks But for their uniforms of white, with broad dark stripes, we might have taken them for workingmen at their ordinary task. Absorption in work is so essential a characteristic of American life that these convicts seemed not different from free workmen. Their countenances were not more sad than those of engineers on their locomotives or smelters in their foundry.
[...]
The workshops were, therefore, filled with workmen who do excellent work at a low cost. In pavilions surrounding the central building, there was a forge and a cabinet shop, a shoe factory and a locksmithy, and so on through the whole range of trades. We saw rows of tailors, painters, bookbinders, clockmakers, peacefully at work.

How were criminals reduced to these peaceful trades? They were broken - forced to work, or be beaten and starve. They were ruled. The King is not afraid to rule.

We move on to the genuinely hard problem - (b). Here we are dealing with human beings who have done nothing wrong, and have therefore nothing to be punished for. They simply happen to lack the ability to provide for themselves on the free market.

First, the King has no compunction whatsoever in creating economic distortions that produce employment for low-skilled humans. A good example of such a distortion in the modern world are laws prohibiting self-service gas stations, as in New Jersey or Oregon. These distortions have gotten a bad name among today's thinkers, because makework is typically the symptom of some corrupt political combination. As the King's will, it will have a different flavor.

As both a good Carlylean and a good Misesian, the King condemns economism - the theory that any economic indicator can measure human happiness. His goal is a fulfilled and dignified society, not maximum production of widgets. Is it better that teenagers get work experience during the summer, or that gas costs five cents a gallon less? The question is not a function of any mathematical formula. It is a question of judgment and taste. All that free-market economics will tell you is that, if you prohibit self service, there will be more jobs for gas-station attendants, and gas will cost more. It cannot tell you whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

There may be no jobs for men with an IQ of 80 in Royal California - at least, not in a Royal California whose roads are paved by asphalt rollers. But suppose its roads are paved in brick? A man with an IQ of 80 can lay brick, do it well, and obtain dignity from the task. Nothing whatsoever prevents the King from distorting markets to create demand for the supply he has.

The anthropoid remains a liability. The full-service gas tax is a tax. The man with the 130 IQ will not obtain his neighbor's liver, and will still have to support him. But, the dependency being sufficiently indirect, he supports a free and dignified man - a yeoman, in fact, if a dull one. Work is not so ennobling that it can convert a low-browed cretin into the Marquis de Lafayette, but it can convert him into a man decent enough to walk the King's streets.

Or not. The low-browed man of 70 (and remember - for every 130, there is a 70) may still require special supervision. Besides a job, he needs a patron. Productivity he has, but direction and discipline he still requires. His patron may be a charity, or a profitable corporation, or even - gasp - an individual.

In the last case, of course, we have reinvented slavery. Gasp! Since the bond of natural familial kindness is not present in the case of an unrelated ward, the King keeps a close watch on this relationship to protect human dignity. Nonetheless, his wards are farmed out - it is always better to be a private ward than the ward of the State. Bureaucratic slavery is slavery at its worst. Adult foster care, as perhaps we will call it, is a far more human and dignified relationship.

The combination of calculated market distortion and private patronage, therefore, is the King's primary approach to the Dire Problem. By carefully chosen technical restrictions and the like, he can sculpt a labor demand which roughly approximates the actual labor supply. By finding patrons for those not responsible enough to be responsible for themselves, he ensures that these individuals have direction as well as productive value.

Financially, this is quite inferior to sculpting a labor demand through organ harvesting. But if organ harvesting is out of the question, technology restriction is the first and best solution for the problem of mass indigence. It is certainly far superior to the Virtual Option, both financially and humanely.

The Virtual Option! For the first time, whispers of this scheme pass our lips. What is it?

To enter the frame of mind that allows us to conceive the Virtual Option, let us leave California, and return to the vast slums of Lagos, or any other Third World city. Anyone who saw District 9 will be familiar with the concept. That was not a set. Now, imagine yourself in a helicopter, day after day, touring these fermenting pits of rancid humanity, around the world - from Lagos to Rio, from Rio to Manila, from Manila to Soweto. Foul bile rises in your gorge. What king could employ these masses? What highways will they brick? What masters would have them, even as slaves? The horror, the horror...

No! God will not allow these foul armies to fester as ulcers on the earth. As is plain by smell, from birth he cursed these cities and their shambling bipeds. God's California was not made for such creatures. It is true that there are no favelas in California - now. There are also quite a few people in California who believe that no person is illegal. And more every day. Someday, in the lives of those now living, the borders will open. Lagos will come to California. And then we'll really need a King. Harvest the organs! But no, God will not let us do that either. Bummer.

The King must scrape these orcs from the earth. Knowing God's will, he knows that God wishes them vanished, dissipated, vaporized, gone. Their former middens, scoured and made state parks, clean and fresh with trees and grass. Their disappearance, celebrated by state holiday. On the other hand, he insists that they retain human dignity - preferably, indeed, augment it. How do you execute people while maintaining their dignity? I'm afraid you don't.

Thus the Virtual Option - our humane alternative to genocide. Under the Virtual Option, the King does not round up the slum dwellers and execute them with captive-bolt pistols. The King condemns the slum, clears it, and requires all its former residents to obtain civilized housing. If a human being cannot support himself in a civilized manner in the King's economy, which has been carefully tweaked to match labor demand to labor supply, the King does not provide a "safety net" in the 20th-century style, in which he may lounge, sag, bob and fester forever. No - then, it is time for the Virtual Option.

If you accept the Virtual Option - always a voluntary decision, even if you have no other viable options - California will house, feed and care for you indefinitely. It will also provide you with a rich, fulfilling life offering every opportunity to obtain dignity, respect and even social status. However, this life will be a virtual life. In your real life, your freedom will be extremely restricted: to the point of imprisonment. You may even be sealed in a pod.

The result is that the ward (a) disappears from society, and (b) retains or (hopefully) increases his level of dignity and fulfillment. He remains a financial liability, because it is still necessary to prepare his meals and maintain his pod. But other residents of California no longer feel menaced by his presence. For he is no longer present among them.

To make the Virtual Option work, of course, a virtual life must provide real human dignity. This technology is not at present available, or anywhere close. Let us inquire into the matter.

First, consider two existing virtual-world games: Second Life and World of Warcrack. Excuse me - Warcraft. I have barely touched a computer game in the last 10 years, and even when I was in college, which was a dreadfully long time ago, I preferred single-player games. However, even I am aware that Second Life is boring and full of losers and perverts, whereas WoW is furiously addictive even to many people with an actual first life.

Why? Because the designers of Second Life, being good San Francisco progressives, forgot something very important in their virtual world. They forgot that life needs purpose. In Second Life, your character just wanders around chatting, displaying sexual decorations and laughing stupidly at weird funny stuff. Not coincidentally, this is more or less the San Francisco 20-something bohemian idea of the good life.

In WoW, you are in a Dungeons & Dragons universe. You go on quests, get points, kill monsters and/or each other. Result: Linden makes layoffs, Blizzard makes bank. Blizzard's virtual world provides its characters with a built-in system of meaning, however crude. Linden's assumes that mere socialization is sufficient to satisfy the human drive for purpose.

All the virtual-world games in existence today are intended as just that: games. Or rather, toys. Many people with real lives invest a considerable amount of time in Warcrack, but most are embarrassed by it. A toy of this sort is simply not designed to absorb the entire life of a human being, granting it meaning and dignity even inside a sealed pod. Thus, it cannot even come close to making the Virtual Option a genuine option.

The technology, however, advances. Here at UR, we skate to where the puck will be - our dreams are dreamed for the future, not the present. Can we imagine a virtual world more compelling than reality? Easily. Every novelist does.

In the real world, meaning and purpose are hard to find. In the virtual world, they are trivial to invent. Go slay an dragon, or illuminate a manuscript, or accumulate a golden hoard. The dragon is a data structure, the manuscript could be illuminated in PDF, the golden hoard is a mere integer. All this meaning is makework - invention. Its real meaning: nil. So what? It feels real, and this is sufficient for dignity.

The pod, of course, will need an all-around sensory upgrade. Immersive audio and video are requirements. Haptic interfaces are essential for high-dexterity work with tools, instruments and weapons. Mechanical sexual stimulation is a no-brainer. And why not drugs? The virtualized ward is hardly about to go out and drive while intoxicated. The Dionysian experience, too, is a part of human dignity.

But life is not just about pleasure. It is about hard work and struggle and pain. A pair of pedals hooked up to a generator provides hard work - if your virtual job is pulling a rickshaw, you have to pull that rickshaw; if you are running from a dragon, you need to run. Harmless but intense artificial pain is easily produced. And most daring, is true death possible in virtual reality? For those with the need to risk their lives - bravery, too, is essentially human - a small needle will relieve them of the burden if they gamble and fail.

The mere existence of a population locked in to the virtual world, whether by direct compulsion or practical necessity, makes the game into reality. Reality is anything you can't leave. The feeling of intensity, in such a game, will be beyond anything World of Warcraft can imagine. Indeed, the free yeoman may well pay liberally to vacation in this world, a Middle-Earth with real orcs.

And the real world, outside it, is unencumbered by the semi-human detritus of the insane democratic experiment with massive dysgenic reproduction. Instead, the lush and varied Monegasque landscape of Royal California, populated entirely by civilized and productive human beings, will be punctuated by occasional strange towers: pod racks. Even these can be in the desert, where no one but the lizards will have to look at them.

This is the Virtual Option: the translation of the underclass to cyberspace. All around the world, anywhere there is a slum with an XBox in it, the Virtual Option is taking shape. King or no King, soon it will be real. Men will say: now, we can see the Dire Problem, and our hearts remain at rest. For we have seen the worst-case scenario, and we are prepared to apply it. Pod racks! The ultimate reactionary answer to the entire social question.

Could we all end up in a videogame? Remember, as the power of the machines increases, the demand for human labor at every intellectual level decreases. If the last two brains on earth are mine and Terence Tao's, I know who's getting virtualized first. Of course, at this point we would be ceding mastery to some evil machine intelligence that wanted to rule the planet and dispatch its last human overseers. Finally, we have descended too far into fantasy - not that the problem is uninteresting, just underspecified.

But my conscience feels clear in proposing this solution, because I feel it would be entirely possible to build a virtual reality in which a person such as myself would maintain human dignity. After all, there's a reason I stopped playing videogames: I find them absorbing. Just about everyone does, crude and primitive as the games of 2009 (or, heck, 1989) are. And the smaller the mind, the more easily absorbed.

So the techno-dictators of the 21st century will have no difficulty whatsoever in capturing and absorbing the mindless mass. As usual, we see only one obstacle between us and this bright future: democracy. This is the true Dire Problem - not bad demographics alone, but the combination of bad demographics and bad politics. Fix the latter, and everything is possible.

Alien Acid Beast

You have seen, on plate-glass fronts,
The frosted, shapeless letters. Kant:
If a lion could talk, we would not
Understand him. If we could read
This, we would not understand it.
Last night some alien acid beast,
Entirely sulfuric in metabolism,
Odious to God and all the universe,
Slithered by and wrote its name
In its own burning fingertip grease.
Lord! We clutch our coats about us,
And move rapidly on. But a thing
I didn't know: today I saw a man
Buffing it off a window with a rotor.
I had assumed the glass was totaled.
Order emerges; acid meets base;
Beast is prey as well as predator;
God is often cruel but never boring.