View 575 June 15 - 21, 2009 (original) (raw)
Monday, June 15, 2009
We continue to hear news of unrest in Iran, but it's becoming pretty clear that there's no great uprising in Iran. The mullahs retain power and the Revolutionary Guard still has control. Iran's population decline continues, but they have money and guns and centrifuges and a lot more resources than North Korea. Oriental Despotisms tend to be eternal until pushed aside by some outside force. They seldom fall to internal dissent. Arthur Koestler believed that a sufficient condition for the fall of totalitarian states was the free exchange of ideas within the state. It doesn't look as if that is the case. It certainly helps to have complete control of the flow of information, but that is becoming increasingly difficult with today's technologies. Koestler's dictum may have been correct when he made it. The free flow of information may have been enough at one time: but bureaucracies -- structures for the continuation of control organizations for the good of the organization -- evolve and change and learn how to deal with new threats. That may have happened here.
Freedom is never free, and is always the enemy of structured bureaucracies. Free people are not equal and equal people are not free. Equality can be a weapon in the hands of the bureaucracy. All one needs is to insist on equality of outcomes.
In logic, a false statement implies the universe class. In human affairs, authority to accomplish the impossible implies absolute power. I just thought of that proposition, but it seems apt.
================
Niven and I went up the hill today. The dog is flat, I'm pretty tired, and we know how to open the next book. It's a good story with lots of room for action as we introduce characters and viewpoints. It's going to work.
=============
Middle east map.
Dr. Pournelle:
I found this to be more of a challenge than I had thought: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/
ust_fun/games/mapgame.htmljomath
I missed a couple of them myself, which was a bit surprising.
==============
Was Cicero the Nostradamus of rational thought?
So what have we learned in 2,063 years ?
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." - Cicero - 55 BC
Evidently nothing...
==================
And here is something very serious to worry about:
http://www.latimes.com/news/
science/la-sci-wheat-rust14-2009
jun14,0,2930855.story
It appears inevitable.
=====================
And have a look at flash cookies over in mail; if you don't know about these, you should.
=================
I have, I fear, not made myself clear.
Why I'm Not Subscribing
Mr. Pournelle:
I like your computer columns and, as a retired Librarian, I am always particularly interested and amused by your reflections on the publishing industry.
About subscribing to your site: you ask, "If you didn't and haven't, why not?" That's probably a rhetorical question, but I'll take it as a serious one.
I am a retired civil servant living on a state government pension. You've made it abundantly clear that in your opinion I don't deserve either my original pay or my pension; that I am fleecing decent taxpayers; that I am a burden on the state; that paying my pension will "ruin everyone who does not have a government guaranteed cost of living pension." (Chaos Manor Reviews, Thursday, June 11, 2009)
And here I thought I made a good moral decision, all those decades ago when I chose to go into a low-paying career of public service, to spend 35 years bringing information to adults and trying to instill a love and respect of learning and knowledge in generations of children. Instead, I find that my measly $26,000/year pension with its maximum 3%/year COLA is going to lead to the bankruptcy of the nation. Had I only known!
I certainly wouldn't want to burden your conscience by forcing any of my ill-gotten gains on you. It's dirty money; obviously you don't want any of it. And THAT is why I choose not to subscribe.
-Janet Kerns
It's clear that living in California, where public employee unions pretty well govern the state and act like thugs, has caused me to to make generalizations that I don't believe and never meant. For that I will apologize. For teh record: I certainly do not believe that there ought be no public servants. I do believe that we have far too many of them in California, and that NASA certainly had far too many during the many years I dealt with NASA.
And of course Mrs. Pournelle was a teacher of last resort in the LA County juvenile justice system for many years, and is now retired.
In every bureaucracy there are those who try to accomplish the goals the organization was created to accomplish. In many cases those are necessary -- yeah, admirable -- goals. The Civil Service Commission offered me GS-13 to manage operations research for the Army's aviation program -- this was in 1972 -- and I very nearly took that. And of course there are many people in NASA who have accomplished great things.
Some tasks must be done by government. Some are better done as contract services. These are decisions made by legislatures and are part of the political process. In general my view is that government is far too large, and consumes far too much of the output of the United States, but I would never argue that it's all needless, nor do I think I know what the exact balance between public and private sector ought to be. I believe there ought to be public schools, and I have high regard for the teachers who really try to keep civilization going. I also know that more and more the system favors everyone but the best teachers. Merit pay for excellent work is denounced and incompetent teachers are defended by the teachers unions; this is not good for education. But there are also those who labor hard at what often seems to be a hopeless task. Civilization needs such people.
On the other hand: we have, in California, both civil service provisions and public employee unions. The result has been a public disaster that can't be undone. I suspect this is not the only place where that has happened.
The official story is that we have to pay civil service people enough in both pay and benefits to attract them away from private enterprise which presumably is eager to hire them. While this may well be true for some state and city employees, most people don't believe it to be true of all or even most of them. In a collapsing economy one suspects that some are redundant and others overpaid. Yet the rhetoric of their union representatives is increasingly strident. The state is broke, but no one must be paid less. Companies may lay people off but never shall the state. Salaries are cut in the rest of the world, but not in state offices. Pensions may never be reduced, there can never be premiums or copayments for health insurance (some public employee contracts actually provide what amounts to unlimited health insurance at no cost whatever). There must be rises in taxes because there cannot be cuts in payments. And that, I fear, is what we in California hear every hour of every day. That may have infected my brain.
So: my apologies to those who do the genuine work of keeping civilization together. We certainly need driver's licenses, enforcement of compulsory rabies shots for dogs, fire protection, law enforcement, and so forth; and if I have seemed to imply that we don't, my apologies.
Having said that, I'll repeat: I think we need government, but I also think we have more of it than we need. The old joke is that we should rejoice because we don't get all the government we pay for. And the Iron Law of Bureaucracy always prevails -- including, I would wager, even in the offices where the writer of that letter works.
Incidentally, a 3% COA adjustment isn't going to amount to much when the deficits are running to trillions.
=================
From another conference:
The bottom line is that in 2005 Ahmadinejad won a landslide victory over Oligarch/Ayatollah Rafsanjani, and a few days ago, he allegedly won an almost identical landslide victory over Oligarch/Ayatollah Rafsanjani's personal candidate, Mousavi. Since he'd spent the last four years as president distributing tens of billions of dollars of oil money to large segments of the Iranian population (rather than personally stealing much of it like Rafsanjani did when he was president!), none of this seems enormously surprising to me.
Once again, I must emphasize that I am NOT an Iranian specialist, and for all I know, Ahmed-whatever and his friends really DID steal the election. But there's absolutely no evidence for that, and some plausible arguments on the other side.
I know even less about Iran. I don't speak Farsi, and few Iranians outside Tehran speak English. Interestingly, many Iranian experts do not speak Farsi, so how they manage to find out what is going on in the villages and anyplace outside downtown Tehran is a bit of a mystery to me. My own view was that the Shah with his White Revolution was probably the best path Iran had, but that's based largely on Iranian friends who were supporters of the Shah and spent most of their lives in exile here.
I also suspect that Western cultural weapons of mass destruction will have their effects on Iran whatever the mullahs desire.
For platinum subscription:
Platinum subscribers enable me to work on what I think is important without worrying about economics. My thanks to all of you.
Patron Subscription:
Did you subscribe and never hear from me? Click here!.
