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Monday, September 13, 2010

.Friday the 13th falls on Monday this month.

 

Day of Unburning, Day of Martyrdom

We got past the Great Koran Burning Day. I haven't heard where, but I presume that here and there across the planet there were Koran burnings, Bible burnings, crucifix tramplings, days of devotion, novenas, rosaries said, desecrations of shrines devoted to Mary, desecrations of shrines devoted to Ishtar, and various other acts of devotion, rage, unease, satire and irony, etc. The pastor of that formerly obscure church of fifty in Florida, after many quibblings and a long and fruitless trip to Manhattan, eventually decided that not only was he not going to burn a Koran last Saturday, but he was never going to do so. The dozen or so people who promptly stepped forward to take his place in the hopes of gaining media attention were properly ignored, and peace returns to the Internet.

A quick Googling of "burn a Koran" gets 32 million results. Narrowing it to "Burn + Koran" gets it down to 25 million. Among the top stories are an Iranian fatwah calling for death to those who burn a Koran, and a story about two Afghans who managed to get themselves killed while protesting against the burning that didn't take place. I am not an expert on Islamic doctrine, so I am left to wonder what reward one gets for protecting against something that didn't take place. I have minor regrets that none of this happened while we were writing Escape from Hell.  I might have included one of those unfortunate people in the story.

===================

The radio is telling me that the outrage of the American people stopped the burning, and this is a triumph of our dedication to religious freedom. I'd have thought that religious freedom included the right to burn someone else's books, trample on the crucifix as an initiation ritual, nail theses denouncing the Pope to the door of the local church -- well, nails are destructive; duct tape them?

==============

I am finishing the September column. Alas, things keep happening to me that need to go into the column, which I suppose is a good thing since it's something to write about, but it keeps delaying the completion. I should have it done by tonight and up in the next day or so after it circulates among my splendid group of advisors. I make no great secret that a good part of the success of my BYTE column was due to a splendid BYTE editors who worked on it. Writers are notoriously bad at editing their own output, and nearly every writer I know turns out a better story when there are good editors involved. In some cases there wouldn't be a story without the editor -- Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins come to mind. Fortunately I have a knowledgeable group of advisors who find my errors before you ever see them.

================

The battle for the soul of the nation continues. Having turned out the Creeps in 2008, the nation now needs to rid itself of the Nuts. Of course the Creeps are not yet gone, and there is a struggle within the Republican Party between the newcomers, mostly conservative but some rather radical populist, and the Old Guard. Recall that it was the Old Guard who in 1996 ran the only man that Clinton could beat because -- well, because it was Bob Dole's turn.

This election is critical. Fortunately, although the Republicans are not yet entirely free of the country club Republican (some of whom did yeoman service after the 2008 debacle; this isn't a universal condemnation) the nation will be safe with a large Republican victory this November; the larger the better, in fact. They won't get a veto proof majority, so government for the next few years will be a coalition without much in the way of radical changes. And the larger the Republican majority, the more of the country club members can be purged without losing control.

The country won't really be safe until we have two parties we can trust enough that every election isn't a battle for the soul of the nation. That is going to take considerable time, and there will have to be compromises along the way. The good news is that there is a way.

=================

There is mail, and down at the bottom a reply from a Global Warming Believer to my inquiry about 0.1 degree accuracies.

 

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday, September 14, 2010   

Iran has graciously sold one of the hostages for half a million dollars. She has of course praised and thanked the regime that imprisoned her lest she endanger her boyfriend and his friend who remain in durance until a price can be fixed for them.

Iran observers see in all this a murky view into the conflict among the civil government, the mullahs, and the Revolutionary Guard, the three power factions in Iran. Reading those tea leaves is very much a special skill, and I decline to comment.

A thought experiment. Imagine a large pile of Korans including some rare old ones. Imagine an offer to sell those to Iran in exchange for our citizens, the alternative being that we torch the books. What would happen? I suppose we need to go back to haggling over the price of our citizens. I do note that kidnapping for ransom is an ancient custom along the Silk Road.

=========

I am grinding away trying to catch up on work. Niven just called and we had an interesting chat about big planets far out from their suns. Another time. I need to catch up.

There is more mail on temperature measurements.

=======

Apparently there is some confusion about measurement errors. If I take 1,000 measurements, each accurate to, say, 1 mm accuracy, will I now have established the "true" length of my table to 0.1 mm?  Suppose my tape measure is off by 0.5 mm? Suppose I have a bunch of tape measures, each with a different inaccuracy, and I choose among them at random? Does it matter whether I replace each measure and shake well each time, as opposed to tossing the tape I just used into the basket? If I have a sailor measuring a water sample temperature with a glass mercury thermometer, does it matter whether it's always the same sailor, or if a different sailor does it each day? Does one of them need spectacles?

Getting data more accurate than your primary instrument can deliver in a single observation requires some assumptions (or data) about the distribution of the errors that makes your instrument inaccurate and untrustworthy. Is it the eyesight of the observer? Can that be corrected with spectacles? Are these observations independent of each other?

I have a bathroom scale that gives me digital data to the nearest 0.5 pound. It does its own rounding and I don't know how it does it. If I weigh myself every morning after breakfast and write all those numbers down for a year, then add them up and divide by 365, will I now know my average weight to 0.01 pounds? Is that my "true" weight for the year?  If I make a chart with the 5 year running average of my "annual weight", do I know more if I display it accurate to the nearest 0.1 pounds, or will charting to the nearest pound be sufficiently informative? If my weight decreased by 0.1 pounds a year for the past five years do I worry about starving to death?

==============

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday,  September 15, 2010

Eye appointment, the kind that requires Roberta to drive me because it's with drops, this morning, and uncharacteristically Kaiser had managed to get the records fouled up and had lost sight of my appointment. Everyone was nice about it and they managed to get me in an hour later than my appointed time, and all went well, but it did eat up all morning and some of the afternoon.

The Tea Party candidates won in a couple of Republican primaries, and significantly the Democrats who voted against Obama Care and were threatened with political extinction by the Pelosi wing all won their primaries. The Country Club Republicans have for years exhorted us to have a "big tent" and cautioned conservatives to stand by the Party when Country Clubbers won in primaries or otherwise got the nominations. It will be interesting to see what the defeated Country Clubbers will do now that they have lost and a conservative candidate is the Republican nominee.  I suspect some will discover new allegiances, and their stories will change, but I can hope for better.  Given the importance of stopping the charge toward socialism that Pelosi/Obama have directed, Republican unity is important. That's across the board, of course. This election is important and party unity will matter. A lot.

There is mail and a comment on this.

I can hardly see. The effects of the drops continue. I'm going to go have lunch assuming I can find the kitchen.

==============

iPad to be sold in all Best Buy stores.

<http://www.i4u.com/39322/
apple-ipad-be-available-all-best-
buy-stores-september-26>

- Roland Dobbins

The iPad is changing publishing rapidly as millions sell. And its popularity continues.

See also "It's Raining Android Tablets."

===============

Comment on the election in mail.

==========

The Foundations of Statistics by Leonard J Savage

Jerry,

Dr. Savage's book is in a Dover reprint, at a good price.

He had quite the career working with Minsky and Friedman.

< >  The Foundations of Statistics by Leonard J. Savage

Regards, Charles Adams

Fair warning: it is not an easy  book to read, even for those with considerable background in mathematics and logic. It is an important work on understanding just what statistics can and cannot do, and perhaps the best single work to read on that.

============

 

 

 

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Thursday,  September 16, 2010

The Big Tent and the Ground Game

It's a big party. One wonders why Castle isn't now out endorsing Christine O'Donnell. Is the party big enough to accommodate conservatives? We're often told that it's big enough to support the Country Club Republicans. The professional politicians are Horrified: Castle was a sure win. How dare those Tea Party people choose someone else? But they did, and for once the election was about more than just who won. For once people cared about the outcome. That scares the professionals.

The nation has had enough of professional politics. Sometime issues are so important that issues go viral. We've done this before, as John Quincy Adams discovered to his horror when Andy Jackson of Tennessee swept in and abolished the National Bank and demolished much of the central economic control brought in by the Federalists; as Jimmy Carter found to his chagrin, and for that matter as Obama taught us in 2008. Sometimes issues count even when the people don't know much more than that things aren't right, and the people in power aren't doing right by us.

There is room in a conservative political party for trimmers and professionals, for those who rule by pragmatism rather than ideology. The tension among those types can be beneficial. A politically pure conservative party can't get a national consensus on many important issues.  Some of us don't want one on many issues.  Subsidiarity is in my judgment one of the important principles of conservatism. An example is abortion. The abortion issue divides many: how can you let those people in Missouri regulate something as fundamental as the right for a woman to choose, and thus force her to have a baby against her will? How dare you allow those people in California to permit the slaughter of the innocents and murder the unborn? And those arguments are important -- but not at the Federal level, because Congress has not the power to forbid or enable abortion except in the District of Columbia and in military hospitals. However strongly you or I may feel about the issue, what they do in Missouri or Maryland or Louisiana is not our business unless we live there. But that's another story. Choose your favorite issue: there are many best left to the states no matter how passionately we may feel.

But having asserted itself it is now important to the Tea Party movement that O'Donnell win this election in Delaware. A lot of the influence of the Tea Party is now bound up in this race. Having turned out what amounts to a sure win for the Republicans in favor of the Tea Party candidate, it behooves the movement to deliver the votes. Winning excuses much to the professional politicians. Those who can deliver the votes get to call the tunes.

There are two paths to political power. One is money: those who have more money than time can be selective in their donations, but they have to make some. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. One can do party work, or one can pay someone else to do it. The big donors as well as the Unions have long known this and do it effectively, thus their great influence in Democratic policies.

But there's another key to political influence: all the advertisements in the world don't work if people don't actually fill out their ballots and turn them in: go to the polls on election day, or send in their absentee ballot because someone they trust took the trouble to come around and help them do it, and see that the ballot actually gets into the mail box.

In just about every election I know of, if the losing side had managed to get about half of those who would have voted for them had they bothered to vote, the result would be different. This is the secret of the political machines, which are organized to get out the vote.

A major key to winning elections is the ground game: those who are organized to get the vote to the polls or the absentee ballot into the ballot box on election day have the ultimate control of political parties. Precinct work has changed a lot since Heinlein wrote Take Back Your Government. Precinct workers need to learn new techniques; but control of the precincts and the ground game is still the key to control of political parties. One reason for the influence of the social conservatives has been their ability to turn out the troops at rallies, and to get people to the polls and absentee ballots in the ballot boxes. One reason for a comparative lack of influence of economic conservatives is that they are far more likely to go write a blog entry than to do anything to deliver the vote. So it goes.

Precinct work can get old fast, but it's still effective, and still a path to political influence. And some like it. Others would prefer to give money.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

==

News flash: O'Donnell is now out of debt, having raised about a million dollars (at least in pledges) since the primary result was announced. Professional political managers take notice. And Meg Whitman might pay attention too....

 

 

Economic Recovery: The Nuclear Option

Everyone is concerned about the economic recovery, which doesn't seem to be happening; unemployment is higher now than before the summer of recovery. Economists seem addicted to spending on the Keynesian model, but the stimulus bill doesn't seem to have worked and the magic Keynesian multiplier seems to have taken a vacation. Keynes famously said

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

http://www.demablogue.com/economics/
can-krugman-make-useless-work-useful/

We didn't exactly try that, although the New Deal came close a few times. See Amity Shlaes The Forgotten Man (print) (Kindle) for details.

One thing we have not tried is the Nuclear Option. Take what's left of the TARP fund, and all the unspent stimulus money, and all the money we contemplate putting into more stimulus plans, and borrow some more, and invest in nuclear power plants. Not just one or two. At least 100 plants, each of 1000 megawatts output. Use both Congressional and Presidential power to impose one "good enough" design so that the cost of each plant goes down in a typical learning curve. Impose restrictions on the circling legal vultures who look for way to get rich by inserting themselves into the process. Redefine the crime of barratry to make it quite risky to go out drumming up legal business by shutting down the effort.

Set it all up to be run like the TVA, only with explicit legislation forbidding unionization of the operating plants (and for that matter of the construction efforts, but we can compromise on that if that's needed to get the work going). Put into the legislation the establishment of a Nuclear Power Service, officered by graduates of a new Service Academy along the lines of Annapolis. The initial officers can come from Annapolis and West Point and Colorado Springs as the new Academy is formed and educates its first class of cadets. The point is to make the Nuclear Power Service as immune to Pournelle's Iron Law as possible, complete with up or out rules as in the Navy. The Service would be like the Navy: routine operation over long periods of time without war or combat, but ready for any emergency, with a goal of never having a problem. In the Navy you don't run your ship aground. Few ever do. If it happens, your career is over even though it wasn't your fault and everyone knows that. It was still your ship. The goal is having no problems. Of course that doesn't always work, and problems get swept under rugs, and the Iron Law creeps in as it always does; but the Nuclear Power Service, like the TWA and the Navy and unlike many bureaucracies would have an objective measure of success up to the level of Site Commander: does it deliver the power without problems?

I will leave the details for another discussion. My point is that we have invested a trillion dollars in Middle East wars, and we spend a trillion a year on Middle East Oil, and the return on those expenditures is quite low.

Cheap energy is the key to progress and economic growth. Cheap energy with a minimum of regulations produces more growth; the number of regulations we can tolerate goes up as energy costs go down.

Cheap energy is a good investment in the future. We can debate over private enterprise and nuclear power: the record of private nuclear power plants is good. I know that some are worried about the cost-cutting practices of nuclear plants, and the possibility of safety compromises as a result, and while the record of treating these plants as regulated public utilities is good, some continue to worry about that; the solution is a Nuclear Power Service, with attention to training and motivation details. Nuclear Energy doesn't produce CO2, and releases less radioactivity to the environment than coal plants do. It's clean, it's green, and it's a lot more cost effective/competitive than wind or rooftop solar.

And build 100 -- I'd go for more -- 1000 MW nuclear plants would employ a lot of people, almost instantly if the legal eagle/buzzards can be controlled.

It's one way out of the Great Recession.

==========

http://www.disinfo.com/
2010/09/who-parked-the-moon/

I had not read all of this when I posted the link to it yesterday. Now I have, and I still find it interesting, but  unlikely. Certainly startling. I recall some of the debate on that many years ago when Carl still sat with the press corps for drinks after AAAS meetings. It was fun speculation.

===============

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday,  September 17, 2010

Constitution Day

 

Self Government

Mail has an interesting letter from my friend and sometime collaborator Mike Flynn on the way things have changed in precinct politics, and it's worth taking the time to go read it. Precinct politics has changed a lot from the days of Heinlein's "Take Back Your Government" and even from the time in 1962 when I was able to go from novice to county chairman in a couple of years through heavy duty precinct work. It didn't hurt that I was able to write pretty good speeches. In those days America was pretty well governed by about 50,000 self-selected local precinct workers. Oh, sure, it wasn't direct government, but then how could it be? But the Goldwater movement, and later Reagan, both had their roots in precinct work: by conservative efforts in the precincts, either by becoming precinct workers themselves, or by campaigning among them for conservative ideas, being persuasive not confrontational, and by conforming to party discipline, which is to say, if we lost in the primary, we didn't walk off in a huff and denounce the winning candidate.

Reagan's notion of the Big Tent included not speaking ill of fellow Republicans. That didn't stop him from being an effective political conservative, although sometimes he had to make compromises -- particularly in California -- in order to govern. I didn't much care for campaigning for some of the Country Club Republicans, but that came with the job in those days, and when I later became a political professional I adhered to the rules. In those days you could be a principled but successful political professional. My late friend Lyn Nofziger proved that.

Much has changed since that time, but not everywhere. Precinct work has changed, and it's sometimes harder to rise in the party hierarchy, but it's still possible.

Which brings us to an elementary point that is often overlooked: in order to have self government, it is necessary to have citizens who are willing to govern. You can't leave government to professionals without closer supervision or it's not self government any longer. Many of those who complain the loudest about the government they get have done little if anything about it. Some haven't bothered to vote. Far fewer have seen to it that someone else votes. Few have given money to candidates of their choice, few have attended rallies for their candidates. Many have blogged with varying degrees of effectiveness, but blogging is not enough. Some have supported journals and blogs that express views they agree with or at least think ought to be aired, and that's admirable -- this place couldn't stay open without subscribers -- but that's not really enough in critical times.

If you want self government you have to be willing to participate in politics. You have have no interest in politics, but that emphatically does not insure that politics has no interest in you; you ignore it at your peril. I understand that many have no time to devote to precinct work and taking back their government; they have to find some other way to participate in self government. For some that will be financial. For others it will take the part of encouraging others to participate, possibly of enabling others to participate. When I was a youngster the city of Memphis was pretty well governed by a city boss who held no political office, and a number of city commissions mostly filled by unpaid housewives. I understand that "housewife" is no longer thought a respectable appellation in some circles. Is "homemaker" better? In those times much of the middle class understood that if you want self government  you have to be willing to participate in government, else you'll get governed by someone else -- and after a while you may not be allowed to participate.

Self government is much declined in these United States, but it is not gone, and it is not impossible. There are fewer home makers (of either sex) than in those times. Families often need two incomes in order to survive in the brave new world of government enforcement of sexual equality, disabilities acts, regulations, rules, inspections, supervisors of inspections, inspector generals, enforcement officers, rules, and the taxes to pay for all that structure. Note also that the structure is not going to go away by itself. It took a long time to assemble, and disassembly will take a while also -- assuming that we want it disassembled. Note also that if you want a lot of government, it becomes a lot harder for it to be self government. Hiram Johnson thought to reform California city governments by restructuring them to take much of the power of government from elected politicians and hand it out to commissions and commissioners. That worked for a while, but over time the city councils became full time paid positions, the city commissions became more structured with large paid staffs and became political perks rather than citizen supervisory boards -- after all, the city had so much to do, don't we need continuity and full time councils to supervise all this?  And so forth. The notion that a group of citizens could supervise full time city employees -- the original argument for civil service, after all -- faded out. Perhaps it is time to reexamine that notion.

This ramble has gone on long enough. My point is simple. If you want to take back your government, you must understand that you have to be prepared to participate. Self government requires that the governed be willing to take their turns governing. George Washington always considered himself first and foremost a Virginia gentleman planter, second a soldier, and only then a politician. When I was young we learned early in school to admire Cincinatus. I suspect most of our children have no idea who that was. Perhaps they can find out on line; they sure won't learn it from their civics texts.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

==========================

I wasn't in the professional political management game long enough to call it a career. At the time I could have done that I had my doubts about my ability to do political management without compromising principles, and came to the conclusion that while it was possible -- Lyn Nofziger being a prime example -- it was difficult; and my talents would be better employed in other ways. At one point I was ready to sell my house and move to Washington; I'm glad I didn't.

=================

I have lost most of my respect for Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer since the O'Donnell victory. Perhaps I misunderstand. I had actually thought Krauthammer a bit more than just a haughty neoconservative hoping to be adopted into the ruling class. Rove is a hired gun and a very good one, and his statements about O'Donnell were very grave errors possibly prompted by some pressure from the ruling country club party leaders; I hadn't expected Rove to believe differently, but I was surprised that he said it after the primary results. It shows he has less political judgment than I thought, because his going on record that way is going to cost him. Krauthammer I had expected better from. Ah well.

=================

My son Richard works for Congressman Rohrabacher and has asked me to post this. Dana had long been a friend, and I have always supported him for Congress although I do not live in his district. He supports the concepts of X Projects and Prizes as a way to encourage technological progress without building large government structures. I do not often post political appeals.

Dana Rohrabacher is a top Republican on the House Science Committee. He is a rare politician who is interested in science and technology for what it can do for our country, not just his district or re-election prospects. He is seen by many in Congress as an expert in aerospace and technology, yet Dana is the first to admit he knows what he doesn't know. Having someone like Dana in a position of leadership could be the most important step for commercial space, NASA, and the exploration of our solar system.

Dana is working hard to move up in the House leadership and needs your support. Help send a message to Washington that we need freedom, science and technology to get our economy on track. Dana's campaign committee has created a website www.techpatriots.com to get the word out to people interested in science and technology. Dana is building a campaign war chest to support candidates who share his vision of commercial space. Please visit the website or go directly to the contribution page: http://techpatriots.ning.com/page/donate-1

=================

IGNORE THE FOLLOWING: IT IS NO LONGER A PROBLEM:

I sent this email to my advisors group today, and Bob Thompson replied

Post this on your View page today. I'll bet you'll get all sorts of help. If you ask for them, I'll bet lots of your readers will send you electronic copies.

So I will:

Mote in God's Eye 

It is not in Kindle and Niven and I own the rights, so I want to get it put up in Amazon and iTunes.

I don't have a good electronic copy of course, and actually I don't know much about formatting for those editions although I don't expect big problems finding out.

Advice, help, anything else appreciated. I suspect this may sell a couple of thousand copies. Perhaps more. We can then go on to Gripping Hand or Mote Around Murcheson's Eye... Help?

Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor

THANKS to all who responded. We now have good copies. Thanks again.

===========================

Constitution Day

There was a time when every public school in the nation, including those of the Old South where the Civil War was still remembered as the Lost Cause, taught that the Constitution of the United States was unique, the beginning of a new era, a government created after a revolution but without the great bloodshed and turmoil that usually accompanies such events. England had experience the Civil War and the the Year They Killed the King. There had been the Commonwealth that abolished Christmas. Then came the Glorious Revolution. A hundred years later came the Constitution of the United States of America.

We learned that in civics classes, and in elementary political science classes in high school, and in most political science classes in universities. That is no longer fashionable in academia, where they are more likely to point to the imperfections of the Constitution, and denounce the notion of American exceptionalism, and students are more likely to be assigned books by one or another unknown modern deconstructing the Constitution than any part of de Tocqueville.

Part of the English tradition was regularization of the courts, and establishment of ministerial responsibility to Parliament. The King could not hold court in the Star Chamber, a court unknown to the law; and from the time of King William, a minister holding the confidence of Parliament proposed and administered the laws. The King had his prerogatives and many continued in England well after that hot summer of 1787 when the Constitution was written and approved in an assembly not often matched in the history of the world. When Franklin was asked what had they decided -- "What have you given us, monarchy or a republic?" Dr. Franklin replied "A republic, madam. If you can keep it."

We kept it for about two hundred years. We can still restore it.

===============

And on Constitution Day the President has appointed a Czar, a position unknown to the law, as a Great Officer of State who will hold Star Chamber power over much of the finance of America. This is not a move in the direction of a Republic. Officers of the United States require the approval of the Senate. Congress may allow the President to delegate appointment of inferior officers, but this is not such a case. Congress has not created the position of Czar of finances. President Obama acted purportedly because his control of Congress and the Senate is not large enough to prevent the Republican minority from blocking the appointment of Elizabeth Warren as head of the Financial Protection Agency, and instead has by Presidential edict created the post of Czar to be held by a personal advisor exempt from senatorial confirmation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Saturday,  September 18, 2010

Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal column "Why It's Time for the Tea Party" http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB1000142405274870344060
4575496221482123504.html is very much worth your time, particularly if you are involved with the Tea Party movement. Her list of reasons why it's time for a change in the US isn't going to tell regular readers of this column very much, but her discussion of the consequences is important. It explains why the Tea Party must either become a real political party, or must begin to develop into an influential and sometimes commanding wing of the Republican Party. There is also a lesson in there for the Country Club Republicans and the so-called moderate Republicans.

Reagan had a chance to build something permanent, but he was also faced with a number of problems, and he was reluctant to put enough pressure on the Country Club under Bush. When Bush fired every Reaganite in the White House the day he took office, he showed that the Country Club wasn't going to give up: but by then Reagan wasn't a powerful force. The mantle had passed to Newt Gingrich and his advisors, particularly Tony Blankley. The Country Club struck back, running the only man Clinton could beat in 1996 because, well, because he was ruling class and it was his turn. That didn't turn out well, and might have been an opportunity to rebuild the Republican in a way that reflected a new alignment of moderates and conservatives; but Newt was vulnerable, and surrounded by the Country Club establishment that did its level best to build walls around him, and the realignment that might have been built tumbled when Newt resigned as Speaker.  And so much for history.

One important paragraph in Miss Noonan's column:

But establishments exist for a reason. It is true that the party establishment is compromised, and by many things, but one of them is experience. They've lived through a lot, seen a lot, know the national terrain. They know how things work. They know the history. I wonder if tea party members know how fragile are the institutions that help keep the country together.

City bosses in the old days understood the phenomenon of civic movements to clean up the city and turn the rascals out. They called them "Good Government" movements in public. Among themselves they called them "googoos", and that's the term professional political workers (politicians and managers) used and probably still use. The remedy for googoos was time. Once the googoos got in, they lost interest. Their candidates could either be drawn into the machine, or, more likely, simply defeated the old fashioned way in later elections because they had no real base or organization.

The Tea Party needs to understand this.

And for the moment, the Tea Party needs to decide something else: the Country Club is behaving badly, with their defeated candidates running spoiler campaigns, and generally acting like thugs. The temptation is for the Tea Party people to do the same in the places where Tea Party candidates did not win the primaries. It is important not to yield to those temptations. It's going to take time to rebuild the Republican Party, and one thing we must all realize is that conservatives aren't going to win everything. About half the country calls itself conservative, but many of those who do so are really moderates who believe that government should and must do many things that "real" conservatives think ought to be left to associations or not done at all. Many people who call themselves "conservative" in polls are horrified at the huge intrusions of government in their lives, but they are accustomed to some of them. We have for years been building a society in which everybody plunders everybody, and while we are weary of being plundered, we enj0y the plunder.

Bastiat said long ago that you can have a society in which the few plunder the many (which is eventually what all societies become), the many plunder the few (which is unstable but obviously popular), everybody plunders everybody (which is what we have developed from the Old Republic), and nobody plunders anybody. The latter was what he favored, and is in theory the goal of the Libertarians, but it is a difficult state to achieve. In part because that's because we don't really agree on plunder, and we don't really agree on what services government ought to provide. I thought of an example of that while on my walk this morning: a young mother was getting her small child into the car. The amount of equipment it takes legally to transport a small child is astonishing. All my children grew up in an era in which seat belts were an option available on a new car for a price, and car seats didn't exist at all. They survived. Is it freedom or irresponsibility to allow parents to drive children without a federally approved car seat? Is enforcing that restriction a legitimate act of government? I suspect there would be wide disagreement on this even among the Tea Party people.

[Aside: to me, the answer to most of that is obvious: leave it to the States. Get the Federal government out of that business, and dismiss the federal employees involved in enforcement. If California and Rhode Island want that kind of protection for children being transported, let them do that, and let them pay for it. And if it is contended that it's much more efficient to centralize all this (and will make it much easier as well as more lucrative for manufacturers) let us have a real national debate on the whole concept of what the federal government is for (other than for paying federal workers) and what it is not for. But then my view is that transparency and subsidiarity are among the most important principles of real conservatism. ]

Europe abandoned the two-party system long ago. The result has been socialism and bureaucracy. Multi-party systems are not the answer. For a very long time the Republic was stable. A two party system was key to that, and in my judgment is important for a return to the Old Republic.

It is Tea Party Time, and it appears that those who sympathize and believe that we are indeed Taxed Enough, Already will win the next election. The time to start thinking about what to do with that victory is now. And if you missed my screed on self government yesterday, it would be well to go read it now.

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I am a bit disturbed but hardly astonished by the bitterness and anger in the President's radio message today. He apparently resents his loss of popularity, and since he can't blame that on George Bush, and he certainly doesn't accept that he is unpopular now because his policies and accomplishment are unpopular disasters. That leaves conspiracies among "the rich" and other vague conspirators who have seduced the people with high priced advertisements and lies. He doesn't seem to realize that this expresses a rather dim view of the people to govern themselves. One wonders if this is because he used high priced advertisements and lots of misrepresentations of his own later policies to gain his high popularity and the election?

But now he is the target of the good government people and those who want change. He is no longer the one the people have been waiting for, and apparently it hurts; not enough to cause a change as Clinton did, but it hurts.

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Thanks to all who responded to the MOTE inquiry. I have good copies of Mote now. I also find that Baen offered an eBook of this some time ago. More another time.  Thanks again.

 

 

 

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Sunday,  September 19, 2010

.I used the day to catch up with other matters.

An observation: I agree that the Country Club Republicans don't play fair. I never thought they did. Their idea of a Big Tent is one that leaves them in control. When they lose a primary, somehow the calls for party unity are muted. Well, yes, we believe in party unity, but not for THAT ONE.

In the November election for the Senate one votes for a Republican or for Harry Reid, since when it comes down to brass tacks the Democrats always vote together. There are several Republican candidates whose views I don't much care for, and a couple who sometimes seem downright nutty. Hardly matters. They aren't going to dismantle Social Security or abolish MediCare, and that's regardless of the merits of doing those things. The real question is whether the Democrats will have the power to implement the rest of the Reid/Pelosi agenda.

 

 

 

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