Daily Archives: Dec 16, 2011

View 705 Friday, December 16, 2011

I was up late finishing the proofreading of STARSWARM, which I got off to my agent; it was pretty clean, and with luck it will be up as a kindle book early next week.

I am now off to Niven’s for consultation on Anvil, which is moving along as I think of ways to tell a very complex story about reform and redemption. Structure of a novel like this is tricky.

I’ll try to catch up shortly. But mostly I’m in fiction mode just now.

The debate went well last night. All the candidates looked good. They’ve stopped bruising each other and are beginning to talk about what to do to get this country out of the mess we are in. Any one of them would be a better president than the one we have.

There is clearly a need to reform the judicial system. It has to be done carefully: there is no more delicate issue. Tinkering with the judicial system and the rule of law must be done carefully and with reluctance: one approaches the defects of one’s country as you would the wounds of a father, not with joy but with sorrow and great care. We don’t want to gut the courts, nor reduce their power in their proper domains; but the courts have done an Iron Law expansion into areas and jurisdictions they must not have. An example is the Warren Court declaring that the State Senates of essentially all the states had been unconstitutional for the entire period of the Republic: in other words that the nation that adopted the constitutional amendments was itself unconstitutional. That absurdity should have been met by Congress with stern measures. Instead, the structure of state government with checks and balances was changed from republic to democracy, Los Angeles was now free to despoil northern California of its water, and all the political balances built over the decades were thrown out in a flurry of “democracy.”

There were other such radical changes, and they continue. Yet the basic structure of the Republic can’t be lost in the efforts to restore the balances of the Republic.  It is good to see that these matters are now up for debate. It is better that an historian participates in them.

And now I have got to get out of here to work.

From an interview by Newt Gingrich in the New York Times.

"I asked the speaker if he believed in space aliens. “It’s mathematically
plausible,” he replied, joking that he hoped a friend who had written about
space-traveling pachyderms was prescient, to speed up Republican
colonization of outer space."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/opinion/dowd-honeymoons-in-space.html?ref=opinion&gwh=0CE53840E8E9E715760DD7CF66BEC6ED