Monthly Archives: July 2012

View 733 Monday, July 16, 2012

We spent the weekend worrying about Sable, but actually since about 1100 Saturday night she has been fine. By Sunday morning she was eager to eat breakfast. I made the mistake of letting her know I was trying to give her a pill, and that didn’t work out too well, but if I throw her a treat and then a pill she joyfully catches them. And her other pills go in her food dish. She’s pretty well her old self. We presume it was the tomatoes, but the vet gave her some antibiotics which we have to continue until they run out. That’s another couple of days.

But all’s well here, and today we had a normal morning complete with our daily walk.

Some commentators say the political campaign will depend on each candidate blackguarding the other. The President seems to believe so. Most of his recent campaign consists of saying that Governor Romney has too much business experience all of the wrong kind, and various other such allegations. Mr. Romney hasn’t exactly responded in kind, but after the primary campaign it’s clear he knows how. I wouldn’t advise him to do that. He will be far better off if he continues to try to focus on just what has happened in the past three years, and asking if the country wants – or can even endure – more of that. And of course debating Obamacare.

My political management experience is from a far different time, but I would not think it wise to respond to negative attacks. In general they aren’t even worth mentioning. Mr. Romney has been in the public spotlight for a long time now, and there aren’t going to be bimbo eruptions, family scandals, or other such surprises. Those who take new charges seriously aren’t likely to vote for Mr. Romney anyway. The intellectual part of this campaign is likely over: it now comes down to the ground game. If all those who prefer Mr. Romney to Mr. Obama actually get to the polls, the result is likely to be a heavy Republican victory.

The negative campaign we can now expect will be designed to induce despair, weariness, ennui, and any emotion to discourage those who might otherwise get out at vote against the President. There will a a lot of that.

“There is not a man in the country can’t make a living for himself and his family. But he can’t make a living for them and his government too, the way the government is living. What government has got to do is live as cheap as the people.” Will Rogers

I had to go to the bank today. I had a check from Amazon for my German eBook sales. You’d think that it might be in Euros, but it was drawn on an English bank in pounds. It didn’t take long for the manager to figure out what to do. It wasn’t a great amount of money, but I have to say that it was for more than I got for my German sales of print books last year. Moreover it was for the first quarter of this year, which is astonishing. Most publishers pay royalties in summer current for the half a year ending last fall – indeed, I think I have not yet got the royalties for German print book sales from the first half of 2011 (they’d come through my agent), and here’s the eBook sales for first quarter of 2012.

Amazon is revolutionizing the publishing industry. They have made author backlists valuable again, and they are paying on time, not just after a credible threat of lawsuit. The publishing industry may never recover form an innovation like that.

I also had to go to the bank to get a bank officer to sign and stamp in the appropriate box a three-page form from the French government related to my taxes on anything I earn in France. This went to my agent. I suspect the result won’t be much – for some reason I don’t sell too well in France – but the complexity of the form was revealing. Considering that we are only looking at a few hundred dollars at most, this is an awful lot of paper work. Will Rogers comment comes to mind. But the trend seems to be for America to get more government like France. Ah well.

View 732 Saturday, July 14, 2012

Happy Bastille Day

Sable came home from the vet ravenously thirsty, but when she drank water she vomited it. I became concerned about hydration and also about electrolytes. We kept her from other water sources and I began giving her small amounts of water with a pinch of salt at about hour intervals. She continued to have stomach upset until about 2300, then she settled down, and about 0300 I gave her a last drink with some electrolytes and went to bed. This morning she was much more alert, and hungry. We gave her her pills, and a bit of water, and then her breakfast. She are it all and begged for her treats. Not as vigorously as usual, but she was hungry.

We are about to take her for a short walk. She’s not her usual hyper perky self, but she’s interested in the world and eager to go out, so we’re pretty sure things are all right now.

I didn’t get a lot of sleep so I’m a bit behind, but I’ll try to catch up.

I haven’t paid such close attention as I might to the state of the nation, but it’s the silly season. Nothing much has changed. No one has made any gross mistakes unless you can call the President’s promises to fix things in three years or be a one term president a mistake, and that one was made three years ago.

The House has shown that the Republicans can repeal Obamacare if they win this November. This election really does become a plebiscite on just how much of the economy do we want to trust to the Feds.

And I am out for a walk.

Bastille Day

Dr. Pournelle:

I respectfully suggest that there’s not really much to celebrate about this day, certainly if Mr. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s article contains much in the way of fact.

http://culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/Fidelity_archives/parricide.html

If anything, this day should be remembered as the start of a time of monstrous evil, by monstrous men. And a reminder that such things can happen anywhere. Even here.

Mark Schaeber

From the View for July 14, 2008 http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q3/view527.html

Bastille Day

On July 14, 1789, the Paris revolutionaries with aid of the local militia stormed the Bastille, a fortress in downtown Paris which was similar in purpose to the Tower of London. The revolutionaries freed all the prisoners held in the Bastille on royal warrants. They were all aristocrats: four forgers, two madmen, and a young man who had challenged the best swordsman in Paris to a duel, and whose father had him locked up so that the duel could not take place. The garrison consisted largely of invalid and retired French soldiers. After the surrender much of the garrison was slaughtered and their heads paraded on pikes. The four forgers vanished. The two madmen were sent to the common madhouse where they much missed the special treatment they’d had in the Bastille. The final freed prisoner joined the Revolution, became Citizen Egalite, and was later killed by guillotine in the Place de la Concorde for joining the wrong faction.

Since the fall of the Bastille France has enjoyed a number of governments including The Directorate, the Consulate, The First Empire, the Restoration, The 100 Days, The Second Restoration with several variants including the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, The Second Empire, The Commune of Paris, The Third Republic whose Constitution was framed to allow the possible return of the Monarchy, the Vichy regime, and the various permutations since the end of World War Two.

Lest we be too proud, the bloodiest war in US history was our Civil War; and while we have not had any formal changes of government since the Constitution of 1789, our Supreme Court has certainly rewritten the Constitution to the extent that we can probably boast of having at least three different forms of government since the Civil War.

=======

I have often told this story in my comments on Bastille day (e.g. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view318.html) and the true story of the fall of the bastille was always a part of the seminars I taught on political theory. I was in a hurry this morning and neglected to do so.

I always have mixed emotions about this. National patriotic holidays celebrate myths and legends, and myth and legend may be more informative than the historical truth. Much of what we feel for George Washington is from a safe distance. He was a man much larger than life, and far more to be admired that most Kings designated “the Great”, but as the sad movement of ‘truth in history’ of a few years ago told us, he had bad fitting wooden false teeth, and he drank a lot of brandy although there is no evidence that he ever made any important decisions while under its influence. I would rather contemplate General Washington, whose men would have followed him to Hell, sitting in the hot summer weather of Philadelphia presiding over the Constitutional Convention than his evenings in which he tempered the misery of his separation from home and family for the delights of a Philadelphia rooming house and a bottle of brandy.

The legend of the Bastille is that the French people rose up against tyranny in the name of Liberty. Doubtless most of those who assaulted the Bastille thought they were doing so. Alas, the truth is more harsh.  But Edmund Burke dealt with all that in his Reflections on the Revolution, another of those books like Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, The Education of Henry Adams, and The Federalist Papers that civilized people of all nations ought to read at some point in their educational process.

View 732 Friday, July 13, 2012

Sable wouldn’t eat her breakfast this morning. That’s alarming. Breakfast is her most important meal, and she has a ritual of eating it fast so she can beg PetTab vitamins and anything else she can get while we eat breakfast and read the morning papers. This morning she just wanted water.

Then she heard her friend the pool man and got up the energy to go outside, but she still didn’t eat, and we found what has to be the cause: during the night she seems to have found a number of tomatoes and managed to eat them after which she threw them up. Then she drank water and vomited that. And did that again. Clearly time for the vet. By the time we got to the vet she had done more drinking water and vomiting and had perked up a bit but she still passed her uneaten breakfast on the way out the door.

Bottom line she’s been left at the vet. It’s likely the tomatoes and her drinking a purging has probably taken care of much of it but she’ll spend the day there, leaving us worried as you’d imagine so don’t expect any sense from me today. We hope to pick her up this afternoon and get back to normal. And store the tomatoes in the refrigerator in future. But for now we worry.

The rumors are flying about Condoleezza Rice as a possible VP candidate with Romney. The rumor began with Drudge. Juan Williams loves the idea. Surprisingly, Sarah Palin says Ms. Rice would be a wonderful candidate. Others worry about her position on abortion, which appears to be mildly “pro choice” but is never anything she really wants to discuss.

She certainly has experience, and her foreign policy views tend to moderation, and to the conservation of American power. She comes from Stanford which has a number of liberal professors, but she’s a fellow of the Hoover Institution which was an intellectual power center for cold warriors – Possony and Richard Allen were both Hoover Fellows. It isn’t easy to characterize her. She gets along with the Republican establishment but she certainly can’t be said to be an Establishment Republican. She learned her policy trade during the Cold War but she wasn’t really a Cold Warrior.

All of which is probably not really important. Actually I would be astonished if she could be induced to leave her academic security for the political maelstrom with all the journalistic focus on every possible interpretation of every discoverable statement or action in her personal life, from her failed engagement in the seventies to her statements about abortion. She is clearly concerned about the country, and clearly feels it a duty to do what she can to assist the Republican cause; which says a lot about her opinion of the Obama Administration. I think she prefers academic life out of the spotlight, and her recent political activities show an unusual motivation; that should be significant to thoughtful people.

I don’t believe she is seriously considering running for Vice President. I do believe she will support whomever is chosen to be a candidate.

I see that academics but not politicians are beginning to notice that there are fewer workers every year, and more and more people living off entitlements. Fewer children are being born. That means that in future years more and more entitled people will live off the production of fewer and fewer workers.

This limits political alternatives. Austerity – cut entitlements, cut spending. Deficits, but the trend lines are toward more entitled vs. fewer workers, meaning a very unattractive environment to loan into. Revenue enhancement, which is more taxes, which generally lowers productivity and investment and more and more capital becoming annuities for rentier classes – unproductive rich.

There is an alternative, and everyone pays lip service to it, but few seem to take it seriously. That is: it is much easier to divide a large pie than a small one. Increase productivity, preferably by orders of magnitude. Charlie Sheffield and I gave a bit of a vision of that in HIGHER EDUCATION. Of course to divide a pie you must make a pie, and if your notion of productivity is ever more complex financial derivatives and every faster ways to move money in circles, there may come a time when people who actually make something will decide they don’t need your ‘service’ economy. For someone to have a house to live in, someone must have built that house – or at least have made the steel for a prefab. For people to eat bread, someone must grow, harvest, ship, and process grain, and someone else must bake that into bread. If the baker discovers he doesn’t need or can’t afford your financial services, you may have some problems.

I note that much productive machinery is for sale used in America, cheap. And China now makes 46% of the world’s steel. The US manufactures 6%. Contemplate those percentages in the earlier days of Communism and Capitalism.  It wasn’t all that long ago that Stalin hoped to bring Russia’s steel production up toward America’s. He chose central planning as the means to get that. The Five Year Plans would do the job.

America now seems to have adopted the Soviet system of central regulation, and while our productivity per worker is high, we aren’t so big in the world economy as we used to be. In 1950 about 10% of Americans worked in manufacturing, mining, and logging. Now it’s about 4%. Those 4% are highly productive per worker – but there are many unemployed workers, and there is a great deal of idle productivity machinery for sale in the used markets. Some try to take advantage of that but the regulatory environment isn’t what it was in 1950. It takes not only capital but non-productive compliance officers to start a manufacturing business, and the business must be able not only to pay its real expenses but also for non-productive people required by regulations. The result is that many prefer to invest their money elsewhere. In South East Asia, or in China.

Just some things to think about.

We know how to create employment and productivity. We knew that in 1950. It wasn’t five year plans. And if we had any doubts, we could observe the German Economic Miracle.

All right, we won’t try the German Economic Miracle of simply ignoring the regulations and encouraging people to hire anyone willing to work and go make money. Could we at least try increasing the small business exemptions? It would take about a week for Congress to say that in all federal regulations, exemptions that now apply to businesses with x or fewer employees now apply to businesses with x + y% employees. I’d make y 100%, which is to say the exemption is now 2x: if you are exempt from a regulation by dint of having 10 or fewer employees, it is now 20 or fewer; if 40 it is now 80; if 50 it is now 100. And so forth. Easy to understand, no complicated language needed – and it would result in a lot of companies buying some of that used manufacturing equipment and hiring people to use it; it would result in making a bigger pie. Perhaps it would result in less need for regulators, but most of them are aging and will be pensioned soon enough anyway.

And we’d have a bigger pie.

I don’t expect anyone to pay attention to this. But I have never heard a good argument against it.