The gods of the Copybook Headings

View 704 Thursday, December 08, 2011

The latest polls show Newt Gingrich leading in almost all the early Republican nomination events. Mitt Romney, who has campaigned for the Independent and Moderate vote while leaving the rest of the field to compete for the conservative Republicans, now has a decision to make.

Of course the establishment criticism of Newt is that he’s not a “real” conservative and never has been. Since many of those making that criticism have little idea of what conservative views are, that is not surprising.

Understand: I am not an apologist for Newt Gingrich, and I have said many times I would rather see him as Speaker than as President. I have also said many times than anyone in that field of Republican candidates would be a better President than Barrack Hussein Obama, who is busily showing that there are worse fates than to have Jimmy Carter as one’s chief executive.

In classic military science, officers are divided into Brilliant vs. Stupid, and Lazy vs. Active. Now understand, these are relative terms: we are assuming that this is not Lake Wobegon, and even the Stupid can be pretty smart compared to the general population; stupid is probably the wrong word although it is the one generally used in these discussions. You will see what I mean in a moment.

This produces four classes of officers. What do you do with them?

First, the commanders, from company to regiment to division to army to army group: which class do you want as commanders? The answer is that you want them Brilliant and Lazy. Then for their Chief of Staff you want the Brilliant and Active. The reasoning is simple enough. The Active tend never to leave well enough alone. They drive the troops mad with new schemes for improvement. Your units go to hell.

However, you need the Brilliant and Active in the picture, just not as commanders. Someone has to recognize problems and look for solutions and agitate for improvements. You want the man at the top to understand this, and select among the various recommendations those which are needed – and which are affordable. But you want the agitation for improvement, else things atrophy.

So far so good. Now what do you do with the Stupid and Lazy? Why, that’s the bulk of your officer corps. They follow orders, and if they come up with awful ideas they aren’t so active as to try to implement them. As to the Stupid and Active, you encourage them to get out and go away. You have no place for them.

I summarize here discussions which have quite literally gone on for a thousand years, and which have to fold in with the unassessable, such as leadership ability and charisma. Can this officer get the troops to follow him? Even when the mission is clearly badly planned and unlikely to succeed? And so forth. And the old adage, that if you don’t trust an officer with troops, you put him in Intelligence; reasons for not trusting judgment with troops vary and are not identical with the Brilliant/Stupid division, and binary categorizations like that aren’t always useful models anyway. There is always a continuum.

I bring this up because candidates who are brilliant but active can be a problem when the office sought is President of the United States.

I also remind you that I have had this discussion with Newt, not once but several times. I also remind you that Russell Kirk once said “What is Conservatism? Conservatism is enjoyment!” He was the classic brilliant but lazy intellectual; he also understood that the United States is in trouble, and it is time to “prune and fertilize” the nation. And Annette Kirk, his wife, was the author of the summary phrase of the National Commission on Education: “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.” (A Nation at Risk, sometimes known as the Seaborg Commission from Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg.)

That is still the case. We have a national education system that is indistinguishable from an act of war on the people of the United States. We do not seem to have many candidates who are aware of that. The nation is still at risk.

And let me repeat, anyone on that stage is preferable, and by a lot, to what we have.

But the Presidency is not the only office, and this notion that it is has been one of the problems. Ideally we would have a Congress that understood that some problems are truly national, and require the attention of the federal government; but many more, probably most, are not the business of Washington, and the government ought to get out of the game. As to the role of the federal government in education, the proper role is for the Congress to set up, in the District of Columbia, the best system of education it can devise, and let that be a beacon to the world. And if it cannot do that, it ought to abandon the pretense that it knows how to run schools In Kansas City, Missouri, or Mineral Well, Mississippi, or anywhere else.

The Congress and President alike ought to find it absurd that the United States borrows money from China in order to pay Federal officers to inspect magician stage acts to be certain that the magicians have a federal license to use rabbits in their act. I suspect we can all make other lists of things the federal government pays for that are absurd on their face, and then another list of things that may or may not be worth doing, but which we simply cannot afford. We need to examine what is called “regulatory science” and understand that regulatory science is to science as duck hunters are to ducks. We need a Congress that understands that the purpose of the Constitution is to insure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It is not the purpose of the Federal government to deliver hot lunches to school children. That may be the business of the states, but it is the business of the federal government to protect the rights of some states to opt out of that, not force them to serve the free lunches.

But we all know that, and I ramble.

I have not discussed these matters with all the Republican candidates. I have discussed them, in depth, with one of them, and he remains my friend.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. And the continued expansion of the federal government has the effect of favoring equality over freedom.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm

The story is coming out: when it was realized that the Iranians had managed to take control of the Rq-170 Sentinel drone, President Obama was offered several alternative actions to recapture or destroy it. He chose none of them, and now the drone with its electronics intact is on display in Persia, and doubtless will be sold to China. It’s an odd way to conduct a war. Of course the assumption that such equipment could be deployed without using advanced encryption for its controls was at best questionable. Some sources say that it was sheer arrogance: the US is so far in advance that we didn’t need that. This assumes that the People’s Liberation Army would not be cooperating with Iran, or else assumes that China is also well behind the US; both those assumptions are questionable at best.

There is more to this story than is coming out. Apparently we had contingency plans for what to do in this situation, but for some reason the preventive action, hardware encryption of the control signals, was not taken in the first place. We’ll keep watch.