Category Archives: View

View 839 Thursday, August 21, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

This is a day book, and I suppose it ought to include a bit of a diary on getting old. It’s going to happen to all of you, at least those who aren’t already older than me, which is not likely to be very many.

One thing about getting older is that everything takes longer. Surprisingly longer. And by everything I mean everything, including trivial tasks and errands, and they all compound to use up your time. You drop things more and it takes a lot more time to pick them up. And of course you forget where things are, or what their names are. But there’s more to it than that. You also tend to ramble.

About thirty years ago I concluded that smoking cost you ten years. I reckon I’m now into the ten years I bought by quitting. A story goes with that. At the time I quit smoking Roberta and I were designing and building my new office suite. It was designed with a high cathedral ceiling with exhaust fans at the peak so that Larry Niven, who continued to smoke, could work in it.

Poul Anderson quit just before I did, and one day a package arrived, of all of Poul’s favorite pipes including some rather expensive ones. This was just before I quit, so I gave them to Larry and got on with building my new office suite upstairs. And just before the construction was complete, Larry quit smoking. That left me with an office designed so that friends could smoke in it, but I didn’t know many people who smoked. Moreover, part of the office suite is a balcony/patio/garden place to sit and keep bird feeders and bird baths, which was intended in part to be another place friends could smoke without bothering me.

As it turned out, I still had a few friends who smoked. One was Bob Bloch, who never quit. Obviously I wasn’t going to make him go out on the balcony. Another was Ginny Heinlein. So I got some use out of my high peak ceiling and exhaust fans.

One of the features of getting old is a decidedly strong tendency to ramble, as the above shows. The key points in the above are that I did quit smoking more than thirty years ago, and I’m pretty sure that’s one reason I’m able to write this. Another is that I have an upstairs balcony patio where I have bird feeders including hummingbird and oriole feeders. This morning when I came upstairs to get dressed and stat the day, I noticed that the two oriole feeders were full of bees. That of course leads to another ramble.

Oriole feeders are different from hummingbird feeders, because orioles have larger beaks, and must perch to feed: they can’t hover. So an oriole feeder has a perch associated with each feeder hole, and the hole is larger than on a humming bird feeder. This doesn’t bother the humming birds at all. Some use the perches and some don’t bother, and bigger holes don’t present them with any problems. Alas, big holes don’t present any problems with bees, either, and they soon find the feeders and enter them through the feeding holes, and drown. Meanwhile other bees come. Soon the feeder is a fuzzy ball of bees, and the birds give up.

The solution is either to use humming bird feeders, with tiny holes the bees can’t get into; but alas that means visits by frustrated orioles. Orioles are rare in Southern California, or at least they certainly have been in Studio City. I first saw them about fifteen years ago, having not seen any at the humming bird feeders for twenty years before that. They’re very distinctive birds. They are also very skittish. But then I found a new kind of oriole feeder, which has large feeding holes, but on the perch there is a plastic part with a ring that has a small hole; this covers the big hole. Sounds complicated, but it’s not.

I’d show you a picture but yet one more time devouring bug has surfaced. My big Lumix camera is ancient but it works just fine. Back when I was doing the column regularly I got the latest and greatest of stuff from vendors, particularly Kingston whom I considered reliable and worth paying a premium for their products because when I first started making my own computers memory problems was a vexing difficulty – difficult to identify and generally irregular. Never had any such problem with Kingston, had that problem with some other brands. By now most memory is equally reliable. Anyway Kingston sent me a Micro SD card with a larger SD card adapter. It worked in the Panasonic Lumix . Still does. Hundreds of pictures on it. I haven’t peeled any off it for about a year I think, but I just took one of the bird feeder. When I put it in the SD Card Reader and plugged in the USB plug, my Windows 7 machine trundled for a moment then told me I needed to format the card in the reader. I know this arrangement worked a year ago, but not now. I tried the reader and card on another Windows 7 system and on a Windows 8 system, and the result was the same each time. It wanted to reformat all my pictures. Now I have to solve that problem, and discovering it took up nearly an hour.

Anyway, here’s the picture. I used my iPhone and mailed it to myself. As you can see there’s a little plastic thing attached to the perch that makes the feeding hole small. When a humming bird lands on the perch nothing happens. When an oriole lands, the bird is heavy enough to move the perch down, moving the small hole guard thing down and exposing the large feeding hole. Orioles get used to this fast.

All of which is a ramble on what happened when I came upstairs this morning and discovered my feeders covered with bees. I rescued them and filled one again hoping that the bees had learned a lesson. I also ordered two new feeders on the theory that the spring system had worn out, and after I did that I noticed that they now sell replacement parts for the hole cover and the paste on flower that surrounds the holes so I ordered some of those. And it all took over an hour. It shouldn’t have taken over an hour, but it sure did.

Yesterday I had to go out to COSTCO. I’m happy enough with my COSTCO hearing aids – indeed more than happy with them – and with the audio technician at COSTCO, but their administrative system sucks dead bunnies. I mislaid the controller device for my hearing aids. Unlike a cell phone I can’t call it so it will tell me where it is. I am sure it’s within 50 feet of where I sit, but that 50 feet of Chaos Manor. I won’t find it until I buy a new one. So I went out to COSTCO and ordered a new one. But that was weeks ago and I heard nothing from them, and phone calls got a voicemail which never was returned, so yesterday I went out there. Turns out the new one was never ordered although I had paid for it. That got the wheels turning again, and I’m sure all will be well in a week or so, but getting to Costco took me over an hour although it shouldn’t be more than twenty five minutes. Nothing important happened, but I managed a wrong turn on a route I have taken for thirty years. Not sure why. I drive more carefully than I used to, for the obvious reason that my reaction times are not likely to be what they used to be. I always pull over into a safe place before consulting my iPhone map. But it makes a half hour trip into an hour.

Just as the search for a way to get my pictures off a Kingston Micro SD card and into a computer is taking up vast amounts of time. (The Mac won’t read the card either). I am using a Belkin High Speed USB 2.0 15-in-1 Media Reader and Writer, and I am sure I have carried and used that device for years. Possibly it has become corrupted, although it’s hard to see what might have happened to it. More likely something wrong with the memory card, or even more likely, the interface that converts the Micro SD into a regular SD card which is what the camera thinks it has in it. So I’ll plug along until I find the answer because I do these silly things so you don’t have to, but I am discovering that the most important thing you learn about getting older is that everything – every doggone thing – takes longer.

I hate commenting on breaking news, but when something like the Missouri situation happens it’s hard to ignore even though the early “news” that comes out is seldom factual, and sometimes it’s bizarre. Early accounts had Brown shot in the back while running away. Two autopsies have said there were no shots to his back. One is in the top if the head (which is what killed him) and most combat veterans will tell you that ducking like that while charging into fire is fairly common. (Running toward people shooting at you isn’t likely to be successful whatever you do, of course.) The officer seems to have sustained some rather severe injuries.

I am not naïve, and I know that there have been police officers who just didn’t care much, relying on the thin blue line to protect them no matter what; but fewer and fewer of those are entering the force, and this chap was a four year or so veteran; not a rookie but not a long time career cop either.

If I had to write a scenario for it now, I’d suppose that the officer was unaware that Brown had recently committed theft and battery in the course of robbery. He was merely telling Brown to get out of the street. Brown of course was aware that he was now likely to be wanted for robbery assault. Why that would result in wanting to get some licks on a cop before going away isn’t known to me, and in fact I’d think it unlikely, but then I can’t think of any reason why I’d do any harm to an armed man; the payoff is pretty low and the consequences can be very high. As Niven says, don’t throw crap at an armed man, and don’t stand next to people who are throwing crap at armed men; primary rules for good health.

The Caliphate has raised the stakes again. I don’t know who is calling the shots for them, but it’s clear that someone is hoping to provoke a heavy retaliation from the United States. They’ve had that journalist for a long time; why bring him out now? Given the Moslem mentality it’s possible that someone believes that Allah will not allow his people to fail, and thus provoking the United States is precisely what is needed to invoke the power of the almighty; but surely that is not the motivation of the leadership of ISIS? It certainly isn’t the motivation of those funding ISIS.

The crisis in Iraq/Syria is tailor made for inviting US intervention to stabilize Kurdistan and our Kurdish ‘allies’, and we no long need to worry about irritating the Turks; it isn’t as if they are our allies any longer. Of all the factions over there, the Kurds are our best prospect as long term associates. I say associate, but it’s probably the wrong word. Ally isn’t a good one either. We have many common interests – including that they continue to resist and be strong – but we have conflicting interests as well. The Kurds have a good reputation for keeping their promises. Richard Lionheart was able to make a stable truce with Saladin that lasted far longer than such things usually do, and there have been plenty of other instances since those Third Crusade times. The Kurdish Sultanate was knocked apart by the Mongols; Elizabeth’s court received a request for military aid against the Mongols, and it was seriously considered, but rejected on  financial and logistic grounds.

The situation also makes clear something I have been saying for a long time: the primary mission of air power is to establish air supremacy. The Air Force boasted that no US Army units were lost to enemy air power during the entire Korean War, and that’s very likely true. Of course we did lose some troops to friendly air power, but that happens in war. I note that it’s hard to admit that truth even today after all these years.

But once you establish air supremacy you have to do something with it, and USAF isn’t built to perform that mission, and has few officers who want to. There’s no great advancement in flying a Warthog – and that’s true whether you are Army or Air Force. Yet Warthogs – I use the term as generic for air platforms designed and optimized for support of the field army – are the key to victory in this kind of war. If we could base a couple of squadrons of Warthogs in the Kurd area, and send really good air strike controllers to work with the Peshmerga, most of northern Iraq and a good part of Syria would fall to the combination. The only threat to air support is ground weapons, and the Air Force has the means for taking out much of that; it’s part of the air supremacy mission, and that they understand very well. What the Air Force doesn’t want is the kind of airplanes that are useful only when someone else is flying cover for them. Well, of course there are strategic bombers, but they don’t count; they aren’t Stuka dive bomber substitutes for cannon. They’re strategic bombers and by definition that’s part of the USAF mission. It’s aircraft that can’t dogfight and which come in low and slow – the old P-47 Thunderbolt was great for that – and which can go around busting up supply convoys, trains, infantry columns, that the Air Force doesn’t want.  It doesn’t want them because they aren’t big bombers or super hot fighters, and the only way to high rank in the Air Force is to pilot a big bomber or a hot fighter.  It’s built into their DNA.

t am arguing the case for a USAAF again. An Amy Air Force designed and built to do close support of and be an integral part of the field army. It needn’t be more expensive than tanks and artillery. The infantry remains the Queen of Battles, and the Cavalry the Knights, but there is room for an Army Air Corps. That’s what wins these asymmetric wars. Look at the early fight in Afghanistan.

Yes, irregulars can make a territory hard to govern; but we don’t need to govern overseas territories. We need them to stop harboring our enemies. The Marines can’t do it all, nor would we want them to. Historically the Navy and Marines respond to emergencies, but it takes the Congress to send the War Department into battle; as it should. But a few regiments of Rangers with squadrons of close support air craft can deny territory to most of the enemies we face. That’s the force we need.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 839 Monday, August 18, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Managed to get through the day. Roberta is still disabled, and everything takes about three times as long. Tomorrow I’ll have to do errands. Woke up with great intentions, but didn’t actually accomplish much. So it goes.

It’s not clear about the Los Angeles case, but in the Missouri police shooting the story that is emerging is quite different from the one that the early ‘witnesses’ were telling. All the autopsies show that the young man was shot several times but all from the front. All from the front. As to the story that he was a ‘gentle giant’, the giant part holds up but the gentility would be disputed by the 711 clerk who tried to accost him for shop lifting. An intimidating giant would not be a great exaggeration. And apparently he was coming rapidly toward the policeman who shot him.

Now I have my resentments of police who shoot first and worry about it later, pleading personal safety. They knew they were taking certain risks when they became sworn officers – indeed that’s what being a sworn officer is. The Long Beach police who didn’t make their presence known, then shot an inebriated man sitting on a friend’s porch because he knew he was too drunk to drive, and idly playing with a garden hose nozzle that from a distance resembled a firearm strikes me as somewhat questionable. The man was dead before he knew there was anyone seeing him brandish his deadly hose nozzle; and yes, I can sympathize with the officers who claim to feel terrible about it all, but I don’t think that case was anything like within any policy I would approve of.

But when someone wanted for felony assault in commission of a robbery runs toward a policeman, the case for the policeman to defend himself is clear; how much force he is authorized may be debatable, but it’s a close debate. I’ve never been a policeman but I was a high ranking city official for a short period, and I am very glad we have people who do want to be police.

http://www.commdiginews.com/news-2/innocent-victim-or-provocative-thug-who-was-michael-brown-23970/

Governments have, and should have, a monopoly on the legal use of violence. There can be exceptions, and there have been relatively free societies in which enforcement of some judgments was not part of the government’s job. But by and large civilizations work better if there’s a minimum of violence and it’s restricted to the authorities. Most societies, for most of history, made a distinction between the civil authorities and the military, and that extended not only to personnel but to weapons. Civil authorities didn’t look like soldiers and didn’t act like them, and if a situation called for military action the military was called in – and it was a big deal.

Lately the militarization of the local civil police has become a considerable problem. Even more of concern has been the arming of federal peace officers with the implements of war. The BATF has often acted more like an invading army than a tax collection agency. But that’s a a discussion for another time.

What rights?

Hi Jerry,

I’m sure you’ve read this already, but just in case I thought I’d send the link along. It seems the California Supreme Court is now saying when you remain silent in front of investigators this can be used against you in court. I’ve been reading your site for a very long time and I know your opinion on speaking to investigators, especially since the Martha Stewart travesty, but now it seems not speaking can be just as bad as saying something and having it completely turned around by a crafty lawyer. It appears if The State wants you in jail, you’re going to jail.

http://news.yahoo.com/court-silence-used-against-suspects-185551462.html

"Court: Silence can be used against suspects

"AP  By Bill Elias

"Wading into a legally tangled vehicular manslaughter case, a sharply divided high court on Thursday effectively reinstated the felony conviction of a man accused in a 2007 San Francisco Bay Area crash that left an 8-year-old girl dead and her sister and mother injured.

"Richard Tom was sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter after authorities said he was speeding and slammed into another vehicle at a Redwood City intersection.

"Prosecutors repeatedly told jurors during the trial that Tom’s failure to ask about the victims immediately after the crash but before police read him his so-called Miranda rights showed his guilt."

Tell me again the purpose a Constitution serves?

Braxton Cook

One of my sons tells of reading stories from the California Sixth Grade Reader to his daughter.

I read the Beethoven story to her and she loved it. Considering how she’s always singing and dancing (and now making movies), I thought it was a good insight into the artistic discover process.=

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=chaosmanor-20&camp=14573&creative=327641

I’ve just come back from almost 20 days in Israel including the first two days of this (so called) truce, I say so called because in the last three days well over 60 missiles have been launched against the border towns in Israel and the IDF has mostly responded.

Life in Israel does go on, people go to work, school is out so there’s the problem of what to do with the kids, where is it safe for them to go, nevertheless you noticed much lower traffic levels and people sticking to doing exactly what they needed to do. In a large country like the US it may be difficult to understand the moral impact of the deaths of those 63 men had. To gauge it properly one would have to have a kid in the army or to be stand at the central station in Beersheva (when the weekend ends and busses and trains arrive bringing the soldiers in) everyone of those soldiers is someone’s son, and while this may seem trite it is a powerful truth at the most basic levels in Israeli society. This in turn, together with a keen acknowledgement of the suffering experienced by southern communities (which have been showered with mortars and missiles for years, but out of sight etc.) have led to a new position among many Israelis.

There has to be a solution, but there is strong resistance to any kind of proposal that will leave Hamas armed and able to replenish its stores. Meanwhile the fact that the Jewish state did not roll over and play dead does not sit well with many governments, not only Erdogan in Turkey said that Jews should condemn Israel, many Latin American governments, supposedly democratic ones, have followed Brazil’s lead in attacking Israel. And that in turn when taken with the very public declarations made by officials all over the place is driving antisemistism to levels unseen in 50 years (since the Eichmann trials).

Please note, this is not impromptu antisemitism, when someone takes all night to paint anti Jewish signs along 3 miles of highway it speaks of an organization with a lot of people willing to do such work. And history teaches, clearly, what follows. Latin American governments see nothing wrong in Iran, ISIS, the slaughter of Nazarene Christians in the Middle East and the extinction of ancient communities, but they will solidly stand with the political and ideological blood brothers (and I mean blood in the literal sense as Hamas has hounded and persecuted Christians in Gaza for quite some time) of such barbarians. Evidently the left leaning governments of the region believed there is no risk in promoting these anti-western parties. It may well be that they will find out they were wrong, but by then it’ll be way too late.

I’m no authority on sin, but despair is not an option, my grandparents survived the Tsar’s (and his Cossack’s) pogroms, we need, as a civilization, to find a way to stand up to this new crop of culture killers. Upon reading about their cruelty and ruthlessness I’m inclined to believe the story about the burning of the Alexandria library authorized by an Arab chieftain who said "the Koran is enough".

Ariel Fabius A/S CTS

I don’t believe in or encourage hyphenated Americans. You are either an American (U.S. in this context) or you are not. The use of the hyphen is divisive and feeds the slice and dice mentality in the guise of diversity that seeks to pit one group of Americans against another to the disadvantage of all except for those who fancy themselves as "The Ruling Class".

This nation used to be a melting-pot, a blend of many ethnicities, national origins and faiths, each contributing and enhancing the whole. As a kid I don’t recall anyone using the hyphen to any degree. We were a nation where people from all over the globe could study and learn to be an American, speaking, reading and writing the American version of English, a language that incorporated words and constructs from many languages. A few of the "old country" traditions were retained and eventually blended into a culture that became distinctly American.

My direct lineage is French, British (English, Welsh, Irish, Scot), German and Swedish. So what am I? I am an American. If you think of yourself as anything but American you play directly into the hands of those who get and hold political office and seek to rule rather than govern by manipulating emotion and dividing us into small, ineffective groups.

If you are going to recognize accomplishment – or sins – the individual should be the one recognized, not whatever group(s) to which that individual may belong. No group is purely good or purely evil. My father would sometimes remark that every family, no matter how accomplished or distinguished, has a horse-thief or two lurking in the family closet.

The increasing level of divisiveness being peddled as "diversity" for the last several years is troubling on several levels but especially since it isolates groups and creates friction that we do not need. In my role as a military officer I served with people from north, south, east and west, white, black, yellow, brown and every shade in between. Ancestry was world-wide as were religious practices. I respected and admired them all. By the time I was active the services were all fully integrated and if the subject came up, in fact we were all army green (I guess it’s blue, now). I can’t imagine the army without these people. So we had diversity, if that is thought desirable, but, more importantly, we had commonality – in language, in traditions of the service, in our responsibilities under the UCMJ, in the principles of soldiering and in our mutual loyalty to our service, our commanders, our unit and to each other.

What those who have never served don’t seem to understand is that although we wore the same uniform, swore the same oath, conform to the same regulations we are still individuals with our own families, traditions, interests and backgrounds. We never lost those things when we became members of the larger organization. Indeed, in many respects, who and what we are was enhanced by our membership in the larger society.

The divisiveness being promoted in the civilian world is not doing good. In fact, it reduces individuality and enforces a type of conformity that is not desirable in that it isolates the various groups from the larger society. This is particularly true when it comes to language. If you can’t communicate you can’t participate in any meaningful way and can easily be manipulated. The manipulators have their interests in mind, not yours.

Ralph

I have no case to make for encouraging diversity.  E Pluribus Unum has worked very well for this Republic, and diversity seems bent on tearing that unity apart.

Sun’s 100 year period of high activity may be ending…

Helsinki Times

http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/themes/themes/science-and-technology/11590-hundred-year-period-of-increased-solar-activity-coming-to-end.html

Guess more fossil fuels will need to be burned, lest the "coming ice age" prognosticators of the 1970s turn out to be correct after all.

Charles Brumbelow

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 839 Sunday, August 17, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

My son Phillip with family is on the way back to Virginia, so it should be calm at Chaos Manor but of course it is not. Roberta managed to bang her foot and do something to a toe, and this morning it was clear that something was wrong, so we hunted up a crutch from the last time we were out there, and after church and breakfast we paid another visit to the Kaiser Emergency Room. Once again a pleasant experience – well, as pleasant as anything like that can be; everyone we encountered was pleasant, and fortunately we weren’t taking up time that ought to have gone to greater emergencies. An X-ray showed that the toe was indeed broken, but no complications. Treatment consisted of a bit of gauze and tape provided by the RN, and instructions from the physician to stay off her foot as much as possible, find the other crutch and use that too, no hikes for four weeks, take the recommended dosage of NSAID for as long as it hurts, and come back out to a regular physician in a week. Also an odd sort of shoe that looks like “medical equipment” and thus will be taxed heavily. All of which other than the shoe like affair was what we expected, but better to take no chances.

So all is well, but that can use up a day. The good part of it was that I had stowed a magazine in my brief case to read while waiting, and it had reviews of two books I would probably not have known about: Paul Johnson with a short (and given that it’s Johnson, likely to be very readable) biography of Mozart, which Roberta will definitely want, and Christopher Tolkien has put out his father’s famous (to his students) but previously unpublished translation of Beowulf along with many of his lecture notes from Tolkien’s days as professor of Anglo-Saxon. That sounded so interesting that I ordered two, one to give Niven – he doesn’t read this daybook so don’t tell him. I’ll have reviews of both in the Chaos Manor Review column I’m preparing.

The Review is slow in preparation because I’ve been subject to interruptions, and since it’s not in a regular magazine I haven’t had deadlines to meet. That turns out to be a mistake, and once I get this thing going again I’ll give myself deadlines – probably the 10^th of the Month as I did in BYTE days – as an incentive to ignore the funk and get to work.

The California Sixth Grade Reader continues to sell well, and I have enough inquiries about a POD print version that we’re looking into it. The Kindle version http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=California+sixth+grade+reader gets periodic spikes in sales as someone mentions it. Big spike after Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit mention. When I got this

Hi Jerry,

In case you haven’t heard about it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFrYEV07p4I

It’s worth 5 minutes of your time.

I hope everything continues to be well with you.

– Paul

I wondered if there would be a similar spike in sales. Not quite, but still noticeable. That seems to be the way eBook sales grow: a series of spikes, each of which settles back but to a higher constant sales level than before the spike. I do hope the book will continue to catch on with home schoolers and charter schools. In any event, The Struggle for Stupidity is an interesting lecture, and there’s a commentary at http://therightscoop.com/bill-whittle-the-struggle-for-stupidity/ that is worth a click.

We published the Sixth Grade Reader because I hoped it would make the point that American schools really have gone downhill since World War I and the Great Depression. Yes, there’s a lot more to be learned, about science and technology, and that leaves less room for classic stories like Jason and the Argonauts, and Horatius at the Bridge; but I haven’t seen much indication that what is being learned in their place is equivalent to learning the joy of reading, nor is the utility all that great – particularly in fifth and sixth grade.

I understand that the education establishment, which receives orders of magnitude more money per student than any education system including the most expensive private academies did back in 1914, has many reasons why today’s schools seem shabby compared to what was being learned back in the first half of the Twentieth Century.  One is that we now try to educate ALL the students, so therefore it’s naturally going to be a great deal more difficult.  I don’t think they have thought that statement through; the implications are important. If there’s a segment of the population – a large segment, because at least 85% of the school age kids went to school through sixth grade in 1914 – that just can’t manage concepts like The King of the Golden River, or Longfellow’s poetry, who is it, and is it wise to dumb down the entire school system in order to accommodate them?  I’d have thought education more important now for a successful future than it was back then.  Is it that there’s more poor protoplasm in the schools than there used to be, and we must invest orders of magnitude in resources to accommodate them? 

Surely no one wants to say that.  So why does it take ten times as much money to teach kids Fun With Dick and Jane than it did to get them reading Ruskin and Longfellow?

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 838 Thursday, August 14, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Think of this week as part of a vacation but I am preparing the latest Chaos Manor Reviews. Thanks to those who have commented on what it would take to make you love Windows Nine.  I meant it as a serious question and most of you have treated it as such.  Thanks again.

E Pluribus Unum

Caliphate

Dear Mr. Pournelle:

The "Caliphate," together with other results of the Arab Spring, has me pondering Hobbes’ Leviathan, next to Lincoln’s comments at Gettysburg: "whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." While I suspect you’re quite right that, after Bremer, no better result was likely, I’m wondering whether, first, any better result was likely from the beginning, and second, whether there’s any real possibility that we can "restabilize and get out." To put it in ugly terms: was Saddam Hussain (or some similar Leviathan) the best deal Iraq was ever going to get?

You’ve commented, quite rightly I believe, that a free government can only survive when it’s possible to lose an election without catastrophe for you and yours. Combine a tendency toward fragmentation (see not only the Arab world, but Scotland, and, I personally think, the Tea Party) with a history of tyranny which leaves no expectation that survival without power is possible, and I begin to wonder whether there’s any chance of a stable result in someplace like Iraq without overwhelming force; government without the consent of the governed, since too many of the governed insist on being petty tyrants themselves.

I find this an appalling thought. Can you propose any plausible counter-argument?

Yours,

Allan E. Johnson

The conservative view of the place of the United States in this world has always been that we provide a well armed and well defended example of a free people living under a constitutional order. Periodic attempts to export our views never worked well, whether the export was on the points of Marine bayonets, or in books and pamphlets. Our ides converted Simon Bolivar, and the constitution of Venezuela looked very like the constitution of the United States, but in over a hundred and fifty years Venezuela never had a single peaceful transfer of power due to an election. Our military attempt to export our Republic to the Philippines didn’t work very well, and the Liberian experiment wasn’t a great deal more successful.

But the premise of the United States, the really founding principle, was e pluribus unum – that from many peoples we would create one people, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, and those phrases were not taken lightly. As the late William Buckley observed, you could study and learn to become an American. That wasn’t true of other nations. You could not learn to be Swiss, or a Swede or a German; but you could learn to become an American.

Diversity was not a goal of this mixture. Certainly you could be an Irish-American, or an Italian-American, and we had parades and lodges to prove it, but you were American first; and while we tolerated various sub-cultures, diversity as such was not a goal. The goal is one people living in harmony. The original civil rights movements understood that: its goal was not a diversity of cultures all to be treated as equally valuable but rather the admission of minorities into the general culture. Some diversities were tolerated – they had to be, given the multiple origins – but nothing like all of them.

This was in contrast to, say, Gothic Spain, in which the Visigoths had one set of laws and judges, and the former Roman inhabitants had another. There had been plenty of diverse polities in classical times. The problem is one of loyalties. Diverse societies tended to become empires, with loyalty to a central emperor, a king of kings, who protected the various sub-cultures from each other.

When we went into Iraq it was obvious to everyone but political theorists that Iraq already had its diversity, and some of the diverse elements hated the others. The dominant Baathists were predominately Sunni, but the Party was “pan-Arabic” and played down the religious differences. Shiite leaders were expected to be loyal to the nation and to its leaders, and many were. The result was a military that was more nationalist than Sunni, and it was this military force which held the key to rebuilding Iraq. Whether that could have been done in the classical Imperial manner – using Iraqi forces to govern, while the Legions of American troops stayed in background – is not known. The classical technique has worked in the past in Iraq and Syria. What could not work was the establishment of liberal democracy in a decade. The result of disbanding the Army and a policy of de-Baathization was predictable and in fact predicted.

For many generations the American schools taught American children that our nation was unique. This is no longer taught in our schools; rather the opposite. The unity of American culture is no longer thought to be desirable. Diversity, rather than unity, is now the modern intellectual goal. Among people for whom Sunni and Shiite opposition has meant defiance and death for centuries this is not likely to work. In the United States some customs and practices common and accepted in Islam are not acceptable to American law and are considered barbaric. We are now engaged in a test of whether the principle of e pluribus unum can survive such diversity.

History shows that the American Melting Pot can work wonders. It has assimilated Irish, Jews, Poles, Sicilians, Goths, Cossacks, Japanese, Chinese, Polynesians, and a large number of Native Americans and freed slaves into the American mixture, and in two world wars proved that assimilation into a political and social culture derived mostly from English protestants could create a unified force capable of nearly any imaginable military goal.

History has not shown that this can be exported, nor has it shown that it can survive a deliberate attempt to abandon the principle of e pluribus unum. It has worked well to unite a large and diverse land into the most powerful nation in the history of the world. No outside enemy can destroy it; but it can be disassembled from within.  It could not be imposed on Iraq, and the victory in Iraq closely following the collapse of the Soviet Union was not a signal that history had ended and there was nothing left but to cheer as liberal democracy encompassed the world. Liberal democracy was known to be unstable in 1787 when the Philadelphia Convention rejected it.  It remains unstable in the 21st Century.

I said this as Arab Spring began:

For those with grievances who want to demonstrate: choose your side carefully. Be very careful who you support. Arab Spring in Cairo is turning into Islamist Fall. Raids on the Christian community. Armed conflict between Army enlisted troops and the police. Egyptian officers losing control of their conflict soldiers. That way lies – well, there are several paths, as those who have read their Aristotle and Cicero know full well. It may lead to Caesar. Or as Mill said

Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing … but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Of course few are fortunate enough to find an Akbar or Charlemagne. Usually they find themselves in the Hobbesian state of nature, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Then they seek Caesar, which leads to Tiberius and Caligula. Good luck brings them Claudius – then Nero.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/charlemagne-or-akbaror-liberty/

I have found no reason to retract the view.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.