Rambling about blessings; Republic or Incompetent Empire

View 767 Thursday, March 21, 2013

Actually this is the Wednesday view but I didn’t get started as soon as I should have, and my automatic dating macro insists that since it’s just after midnight it’s Thursday. I could overwrite it but I don’t intend to write much anyway. I’ve been feeling a bit poorly, and I had to hustle all day doing various things, so I didn’t get much done. I did manage to get to the dentist in time to make myself look good enough to be on the podcast interview with Leo Laporte. That went well, or at least I think it did, and Leo seemed happy enough. I haven’t been able to find it posted yet – at least Google doesn’t seem to find it – but I make no doubt it will appear within a few hours.

[10:30 Reader Dave  says it has appeared as http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/95]

Much of my mail, and Leo for that matter, convince me that I ought to resume my old columns again, and I’ve been mucking about with some of the stuff I’ve been working on. Back in the early days of the computer revolution there was more fun in it, and also the choices were more critical. Now a lot of good stuff has become commodity goods, and it doesn’t matter a lot which brand you buy and use. It’s all pretty good stuff, Good Enough for getting a great deal more work done than people could do before these little machines came into our lives. Everything is cheaper and most of it just works, and Moore’s Law is inexorable: It will keep getting better and better whether we want it to or not. The other day I needed a flashlight. I always keep several flashlights, but I couldn’t find one with good batteries in it, and that annoyed me; so I bought ten of them. They’re generic LED one battery flashlights, and I have seeded them around the house so that they have reached a sort of saturation point, and now I can always find one. Of course they’re as bright as the old multi-battery heavy duty lights I used to have. Makes for great convenience: always be able to find a flashlight. I think I spend twenty bucks on the lot of them batteries and all, and I get free shipping. Sign of the times, and we take it all for granted, as we take for granted that we can get serviceable clothing, pharmaceuticals, fresh vegetables and fruits at any time of the year – I could go on, but I expect the point is clear. Clear to older people, anyway. There will be readers who have always been able to lay hands on a working fountain pen, flashlight, good toothbrush, and uncountable other conveniences that weren’t so easily available even twenty years ago.

Which is to say, Civilization is a blessing, and we should count our blessings when we bemoan what’s happening to the country. Conveniences multiply, and are available to everyone. At the same time civil life becomes less civil, or does depending on where you are. More and more people live in enclaves in which they will never meet anyone not part of a privileged class wealthier than almost anyone I knew when I was growing up – real wealth, that is, with medical care, no uncertainty about food and drink, the ability to fly across the country in hours at need, the ability to communicate with almost anyone anywhere, and get, delivered to your door, clothing which in Biblical days would be called “soft raiment”. What came you to the desert to see? A man clothed in fine raiment? I say to you those wear soft raiment dwell in king’s houses…

How long this will last isn’t so clear. What used to be the necessities of life which kept people working long hours all day are now rights to which all are entitled even if they don’t choose to work at all, what many considered luxuries are now available to all as a matter of right and entitlement, and you don’t even have to be civil to those who provide it to you. Why be polite as a cost of something you deserve as a matter of right?

But I am rambling and it is time for bed, and looking around at all the stuff around me that didn’t exist when I was young, then was the stuff I read about in science fiction novels, and now we can‘t live without it’s sort of overwhelming; and I wonder what those who grew up with it as normal think of this world. I grew up in the Great Depression, and always thought that civilization was fragile. Then came the seemingly unending boom times that began just after World War II and continued, with what now look like rather minor fluctuations, until 2008. But it is now 2013, and it doesn’t look so much like a fluctuation any more. Debt rises, joblessness rises monotonically — I know. I know. Unemployment appears to be falling. Not by much but falling. Alas the number of people without jobs isn’t decreasing. We simply remove from the ranks of the unemployed those who no longer seek work. They’re still jobless. But that’s a matter for another time.

I started counting my blessings, and then started feeling gloomy because the economy isn’t improving – but in a sense it is. Moore’s Law continues inexorably. It can’t last forever. As established in Strategy of Technology, technology grows in S curves, not exponentials. But we don’t seem to have exhausted the potential of the computer revolution yet. Everyone gets a cell phone now. Calculators are essentially free. And that beat goes on. Maybe productivity will grow our way out of all this. We an hope, anyway.

And that really is enough.

For those looking for something meatier to read:

 

Where Higher Education Went Wrong

http://reason.com/archives/2013/03/19/where-higher-education-went-wrong

A series of essays I thought you might like that pretty much agrees with you. I don’t agree with Nick Gillespie’s essay at all, I think we have had more than enough mind blowing in the last 50 years. I’m for solid scholarship, but if don’t invest in the future generation, then we are truly screwed. The rest of the essays are worthwhile.

Phil

Reforming the education system remains terribly important: at the moment the one thing the rich can give their children that most people cannot is a good education.  Cicero was proud to have educated his children himself rather than entrust it to slaves.  We don’t have time to do that any more and leaving it to the professionals may create long lasting problems. If you have pore-school children, teach them to read yourself. It’s not that hard, takes about 70 half-hour lessons over a period of a few months, and when it is done it is done. Once they can read, the schools can’t take that ability away from them.  Of course at the end of first grade your kids may be the only ones in the class who can read, but that’s a better problem to have than illiteracy. Now a certain percentage of kids learn to read no matter what instruction is given to them, but it’s chancy and they don’t learn systematically; better to be sure they can read before they get to school.

At least we know how to teach the kids to read, even if the schools do not.  http://www.jerrypournelle.com/OldReading.html

And, if you’re looking for something else, try this

 http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/lays.html

This is one of the Chaos Manor special reports. There are a lot more, some quite obsolete, some still relevant.  I consider Macaulay quite relevant, as is Roman history. I remind you that Macaulay wrote those essays and poems for the general public.

This is a comment on an item from https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=12850. It came in over a week ago when I was in the middle of some flaps that ate my time, and got neglected. I have been going back and trying to clean up.

We learn nothing!

"The government builds a chicken plant " https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=12850

I laughed aloud, and was also ashamed, all over again. Forgive me if I’ve told you this tale before. At the time of my authority in Wasit Province we were encouraged to find ways to increase employment for the Iraqis. Almost in the same breath, I received an order from Ambassador Bremer’s office in Baghdad to cease the grain harvest and let the crops rot in the field. I was incredulous and inquired as to why… the stated answer was that Iraqi grain/flour/bread did not meet UN standards for health reasons. I protested, after all, Iraqi peoples have been growing grain and making bread from the dawn of the earth (after all, the Garden of Eden WAS in present day Iraq and Cain WAS a crop farmer) and the population surely hadn’t died out from eating bad bread! I was admonished and told to follow the edict. Again, I protested – well, how would the Iraqi people get their bread and how would we insure adherence to "UN" standards? Not to worry – Baghdad would supply the people with UN flour (this at a time when distribution of fuel, food, electricity, water was problematic at best) and engage upon an agricultural program to teach Iraqi farmers how to grow proper crops. My Iraqi friends and counterparts wailed aloud! They’d had UN flour before (remember the embargoes and sanctions?) and it was wholly unsuited to making their bread – it just wouldn’t hold together properly. So I made another attempt, this time explaining the job market to Baghdad. If the farmers couldn’t harvest; how would they, and their workers, get paid for their crops? If the truckers didn’t have grain to haul, how would they earn a living? If the warehouses didn’t have grain to thresh, how would they stay open and pay their employees? If the mills didn’t have grain to mill into flour, how would they stay open and pay their employees? If the truckers didn’t have flour to haul to market, how would they earn a living? If the merchants didn’t have flour to sell to bakers and homemakers, how would they earn a living? If the bakers didn’t have flour to bake, how would they have baked goods to sell? What would the children have to eat without bread? I made the point that I was being asked to create jobs, but also to dismantle the complete economic agricultural engine that PROVIDED jobs in the province!

Oh.

I finally got a stay on the edict and let the market go on it’s merry, haphazard way. That I know of, none of the citizens of my province died from tainted bread or flour in the past 10 years. (I did hear of the subsequent agricultural ‘program’ that was largely ignored by Iraqi farmers. I believe Iraq still feeds itself.)

Jeez… in arrogance, we learn nothing!

s/f

Couv

(PS – in my description above, I neglected to point out that the vigorish owed to all the tribal leaders in the economic process would also be severely curtailed; which was another catalyst for Iraqi howling!)

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

It is a perfect example of what I expected from our invasion of Iraq, and one of the reasons I was very much opposed to starting that war, which was estimated to have a cost of $300 Billion.  I didn’t believe the cost estimate (which is now above $2 Trillion as I understand it).  I have long said that I prefer a Republic, but if we must have Empire, let it be competent empire; our interventions in other people’s affairs are almost invariably examples of incompetent empire.  This is a good example.

The best policy for a Republic is the one voiced by John Quincy Adams: We are the friends of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own. There are a number of choices for a competent empire, but they all involve keeping Legions which we generally do not commit to long term actions,l and forming auxiliary military forces of non-citizens, generally the subjects of puppet regimes, to use in long term commitments – because any Imperial scheme will involve ruling without the general consent of the governed, and we are not only not good at that, we don’t want our regular forces to become good at governing without the consent of the governed.  But that is another discussion.

Had we invested the $300 Billion that the Iraq War was estimated to cost in energy development in the United States, we would now have plentiful energy, a good start on Space Solar Power Satellites, and some X-projects to develop military and space technology.  We would also be at least $2 Trillion less in debt. 

Blood is the price of Admiralty. We paid it, blood and treasure, but that is only a necessary condition of successful empire. It is not sufficient, and Col. Couvillon’s example, one among many, tells us that we do not have the right stuff for this sort of thing. We sure could have had a great energy and space program, though.

Good Morning,

While reading your most recent letters from Brian P. he casually uses this sentence " Often, we are dependent for targeting on the same intelligence agencies which reassured us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction."

I guess the standard program of denial has worked.

We FOUND the labs and mobile production facilities. Some of them were buried near a munitions factory. There are semi-plausible cover stories, but it seems clear that they were not making aspirin or hydrogen gas…

We KNOW he had WMD as his cousin (Chemical Ali) used chemical agents on the Kurds. Western firms sold thousands of tons of chemical agent precursors to the Iraqis. Saddam publicly boasted that he had them.

So I’m always puzzled when intelligent and informed people casually dismiss the intelligence efforts and the evidence found to support them.

When you repeat something loudly enough and long enough, it really does have a way of getting past the filters and into your brain, becoming part of the zeitgeist.

Best wishes,

zuk

We got that wrong, too. We had right, reason, and interest to go in and put paid to Saddam; but it was not in our interest to convert Iraq into a political vacuum. We gave little thought to what would happen after Saddam was out of power.  I say we, but I mean they: Bush paid no attention to the people I knew and worked with.  He also trusted the career cookie pushers of State, which gave us Bremer, whom we did not deserve. The more incompetent Roman Emperors sent unwise and incompetent proconsuls to Iraq, so I suppose we were continuing in the tradition.

When Bush proclaimed from the carrier “Mission Accomplished”, had he acted as if he believed that and began to arrange for someone to take over from the US, it might even have been true. The problem is, who?  The Brits can’t and won’t do it again. We could hardly replace Saddam with the Kuwaiti royal family, or the Saudis.  Jordan?  Chalabi, sometimes known in Iraq as Chalabi the thief? For some reason we did not think these things through before sending in the troops.

One alternative would have been to mass the troops at the border and negotiate with Saddam.  We do not seem even to have thought of that one, which would have been the first move of the older imperialists. Of course this would have been expensive and might have been made to look like incompetence, marching the men up the hill and marching them down again; but  the purpose of war is to bend the enemy to your will. Once Saddam understood that he faced the army that had destroyed his forces in the first Gulf incident, it is likely that he would have been more willing to negotiate terms we could accept – or that one of his generals would.  But we never tried.

Clinton allowed sentiment to push us into the Balkan affair with the result among others of alienating the historically pro-Slavic Russians in order to gain the favor – well, it’s a bit hard to see whose favor we gained or what we got out of it.  The Balkans got the Danube bridges dropped and economic chaos. 

When one sends in the soldiers it is well to know what it is you want them to get for you.

Competent empire is never cheap, but it is far cheaper