View 544 November 10 - 16, 2008 (original) (raw)
Friday, November 14, 2008
Republican Principles or Democrats Light?
We are back to ice: there is now serious but not conclusive evidence, convincing to some, that the only thing preventing a new ice age is CO2; and we are busily removing CO2. Now admittedly the serious studies anticipate this happening over a fairly long time period. On the other hand, all the historical evidence is that ice ages happen fast. England went from deciduous trees to frost plains to ice in well under a hundred years, and to kilometers of ice in another hundred. There is similar evidence from lakes in Belgium. When the ice comes, it comes fast.
Note that climate changes are odd. A few miles south of the ice wall average temperatures were not all that much colder than they are now. The ice didn't extinguish life; but it sure made large parts of Europe and North America uninhabitable. Ice is a fire greater threat than a few degrees of temperature rise between new and the end of the century. Prudence demands that we continue to look at the CO2 rise. Prudence also demands that we not wreck the global economy in order to play carbon restriction games that, according to even the most optimistic models, will have only a tiny effect on the average temperature of the Earth in 2090.
Of course no sane person would opt to wreck the economy for such tiny gains; but then the ecology now Fromates (Friends of Man and the Earth; an organization I invented to use in stories I wrote in the 1970's; you can find those stories in Exile -- And Glory! from Baen books. They're still pretty current.) -- the ecology now advocates get around that through flat out lies. This is compounded by the gullibility of many of the Fromates, who take the word of Al Gore and people who actually know better as if it were Revealed Truth. As to the motives of Gore and such like, I can only speculate; but they have done well by the Fromate movement. So have many of the scientists whose grants and/or fame depend on accepting the Fromate position.
The Democratic Party has become stuck on Fromate. Whether this is due to the influence Gore or something else isn't important. The Democratic Party is Fromate Light, and has thus secured the eternal loyalty of the Sierra Club, country club ecology now do-gooders, and other elements of the Fromate coalition. It's part of the Democratic Party victory strategy, which is to build up a voting block group at a time. Some Democrat leaders clearly believe there is scientific validity to the Fromate position. Others, like Obama, are harder to figure out. Presumably Obama is smart enough to understand the real situation, but the evidence is that he has become a True Believer: why else would he jeopardize his victories in critical coal states by stating that he would tax coal use out of existence? But the Democrat position is politically understandable; the Fromate position is worth votes.
What's weird is people like McCain and Schwarzenegger who seem genuinely smitten by the Fromate positions, and who don't seem to want to pay attention to the scientific evidence. The evidence, if fairly considered, is that there is a rise in CO2 levels; doing something about it is terribly expensive, and if only the nations that are interested and who can (barely) afford it adopt strenuous CO2 reduction practices, the effect on CO2 is from very small to trivial. China and India are not going to stop their economic growth -- indeed can't do that. The CO2 rises will continue whether we like it or not, and without regard to what crippling measures we adopt. It may make the governor feel good to lead California toward the Green, but the truth is that the CO2 sensors in Hawaii will take little to no notice, and the effect on global warming of turning California green by shooting all the methane flatulent cows and then turning the state into an uninhabited park would be very small to trivial. I've met the governor, and I cannot believe he is not smart enough to understand this. Perhaps he simply will not listen; it may be that the good will of his wife and her relatives is dependent on his turning off his critical faculties.
But on purely pragmatic grounds the Republicans have no business going Fromate. The Democrats already have the Fromate vote sewed up, and always will: the Fromate position demands Big Government and Government Action, and those who think Government is the solution and not the problem will always choose the Democrats. The Republicans can make all the concessions it likes, but the Sierra Club and the Fromates will always go Democrat.
The Republican Party has fallen victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. The Iron Law states that in every organization there will be two factions. One will be dedicated to the goals of the organization> Examples are dedicated class room teachers in teacher unions, the Old Guard members of the Sierra Club from the days when you could not join the Sierra Club unless you had been backpacking in the High Sierra, etc.; we all know such people. The other faction will be dedicated to the organization itself without any regard to the organization's actual reason for existence. Examples are teacher's union officials, many administrators, the current management of the Sierra Club, etc..; we all know those people, too. Pournelle's Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization.
The horrible part is that in the case of the Republicans, control of the party has gone to incompetents. They have thrown away the principles of limited government and the notion that in general government is not the solution, government is the problem -- and they have gained almost nothing for doing that. Many of those bureaucrats won't even be able to keep their jobs, hurrah.
Face it: the Republicans have more than once tried to be Democrats Light: to go along with the Liberal position that the solution to most problems is to build a bureaucracy and throw money until the problem is covered over, with the proviso that Republicans will do it better and more efficiently. Even were that true, it's a stupid position: the aggregate of bureaucracies that make up the Democratic Party are almost without exception already controlled as the Iron Law would suggest, and those people are pretty thoroughly embedded into the Democratic Party; again we all know groups that would be much better off if they were less politically fastened to the Democrats, but whose leadership won't let that happen. The Republicans will never win those people over.
But do note that playing loyal opposition, Democrat Light, has been effective for many Country Club Republicans: they were allowed to keep their positions and influence. That was the situation when Newt Gingrich organized the Republican takeover of Congress. Unfortunately, without Newt's iron control -- you may ascribe his motive to dedication to principle or to simple desire to keep power -- without Newt's iron control the Republican congress went mad and truly acted as if it were Democrats: it spent money in ways that even the Democrats wouldn't have (then; not now), including the old Wilson/Roosevelt interventionism that generally led to war. There was a time when it was a truism that the Republicans are the party of Depression, the Democrats are the party of War; after Newt the country club Republicans managed to become both.
The only way the Republicans can survive will be to become a party of principle: smaller government, devolution of power to the states, transparency and local control; the old principle Adams stated, "we believe that each man is the best judge of his own interest". Trust the Associations (as Tocqueville described) rather than government, and states more than federal. Give up "right to life" and adopt the constitutional position that abortion ought to be left to the states -- as should education and many other matters. We have plenty of failed experiments in federal control to show that it's not always a good idea and sometimes federalizing things is disastrous.
The Republicans ought also to go back to Washington's principles regarding foreign policy. Not isolationism; but non-intervention unless US interests are clearly at stake. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli--. Rebuild the Navy, keep the Legions strong; and mind our own business. That was once stated as "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Not bad advice.
I haven't the time to enumerate and defend the principles that Republicans ought to adopt; I am not even certain I am the right person to do that. But I am very certain that this is necessary. The country club Republicans used to say that they could take control and implement the Democrat agenda better than the Democrats. They have now given the nation real proof that they can't.
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From security expert Rick Hellewell:
Great Spam News
Dr. Pournelle:
A big spam host in CA was taken offline on Tuesday. One good source for the story is here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/11/12/AR2008111200658.html , since Brian Krebs (the WP columnist) was one of guys responsible. The 'co-location' (a big web site hosting firm) looks to be responsible for up to 80% of the world's spam, along with hosting other offensive sites (child pornography, etc).As of Tuesday, their connection to the Internet was cut off.
As a result, the volume of spam being pumped out by all of those infected computers has gone down by 60% or more. At my office, we usually get about 800,000 messages a day; we block 92%+ as spam. Over the last 24 hours, that incoming volume has been reduced to about 250,000. Others are reporting the same reduction. (More details on Brian Kreb's blog here:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/
2008/11/the_badness_that_was_mccolo.htmlIt will be interesting to see how long this reduction lasts.
Regards, Rick Hellewell
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Well, as an illustration of memory loss: last night the kitchen sink wouldn't drain. Water backed up into the sink.
We'd had this situation before. I was sure I had cleared it. My wife pointed out we didn't have a snake: and in fact we hadn't had one in some years, and I didn't where ours was. Yet I was pretty sure we'd had one, and I supposed I had used it to clear that drain. Access is pretty simple, since there's an access plug on an outside wall about knee height just under the kitchen sink.
So: I went down to the local Ace Hardware and bought a $15 snake. Came home prepared to use it. Got out back and then recalled I hadn't used a snake last time: I'd stuffed the hose into the access port and turned it on, pushed it further in, let it run a while, and Lo! the drain was cleared. It takes two hoses to get to the port from the nearest outlet, and Lo! there was a hose without a metal end lying back in the area where I'd need it. So I connected it to the regular hose in place, stuffed it down the drain to its length, turned on the water, and Voila! Indeed it took less time to clear the drain than it did to go down and buy the unused snake (which is not returnable even if not used, for fairly obvious reasons). Now that I have done it again with the hose I recall using the hose last time; but I had absolutely no memory of doing that, and indeed had a false memory -- which I knew at the time was false! -- of using a snake.
I need to think about that a bit. Memory is an odd thing.
When I was in high school I had eidetic memory: I could recall anything I had every read, page by page if need be. It began to fade as I left high school, but until last year I still had a lot better memory than most people. Now there are these gaps, particularly for names of people and things (I recall the concept, I could build the gadget, but I can't think of it's name; or I recall the person, I can picture him or her, but again the name is gone). Of course Niven has had that kind of memory since I have known him: it took him years to remember which of my kids was which, and we'd often discuss conferences and meetings we'd been to in which he knew what had been said but not who said it. Now I'm learning how to live with Niven's data retrieval system. He seems to have done well with it, so I assume I can also.
And my sink drains properly again.
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