View 707 Thursday, December 29, 2011

Mark Steyn, substituting for Rush Limbaugh this morning, says that Newt Gingrich is wrong on first principles: it is simply wrong in a free society for the government to require you to have health insurance, and anyone who believes that is beyond the pale, a liberal or socialist, not a conservative.

In fact Gingrich hasn’t been quite so clear in his “endorsement”, but leave that. Is it true that any consideration of mandated insurance is simply anathema?

Well, we can postulate that a free country ought not dictate what its citizens should buy, and that is perhaps a fundamental principle. Yet while there is certainly a sense in which that is true, it neglects other principles and facts, none of them particularly obscure.

To begin with, it is certainly no less conservative to insist that someone pay for his own health insurance than it is to insist that someone else pay for it. If you aren’t obliged to provide your own insurance, should someone else be so obliged?

And that is the essence of the health care debate.

One answer is that no one is obligated to pay for anyone’s health care insurance. It’s a free country and you’re free to have insurance or not, as you determine by your needs and income. That was the case for most of the history of this Republic: you’re on your own. If you get sick, pay your own bills. If you must, seek charity, or else be sick, languish, suffer, and if your illness is sufficiently severe, die. This is a free country. You are free to pay your own way, but you are not free to demand that others pay your medical bills.

Of course if you have had the forethought to buy health insurance, you are in good shape. If you have not, then pay your bills. Whatever you do, this is no business of the government.

The problem is that this doesn’t really seem acceptable. People are born with defects that prevent them from getting medical insurance. Others develop problems. These people encounter the problem of “pre existing condition.” They plead they would have bought health care insurance but the pre existing conditions make the premiums too high. Others say they once were insured, but when their conditions developed, the insurance company dropped them. It is barbaric simply to ignore all these people. In order for a man to love his country, his country ought to be lovely. Look at these innocent victims. Surely we must do something?

And over time, particularly in boom times when the nation was getting richer, in many parts of the country and perhaps nationally, a new consensus was developed: first, that there ought to be a safety net, then that people have a right to health care insurance, and their birth defects, or health problems developed over time, should not prevent them from obtaining it. Nor is it fair for the insurance companies to charge premiums consistent with the risks the company is assuming.

Thus came the demand for health care insurance available to all at the same price. Of course that’s not insurance at all except in the sense that we are all insuring each other: we all pay and we all benefit. But that requires that we all pay, without exception, and that requires mandated insurance, and we’re back to where we started, except that now we find it is the will of the people that there be this universal insurance policy. Can’t we just accept that and get on with it? And thus Obama Care, modeled in some ways on the Massachusetts system implemented by the Democratic legislature of Massachusetts and the Republican Governor, then Mitt Romney.

And there we are. Meanwhile, the costs skyrocket, in large part because those who receive the benefits are not those who pay for them, and those who pay for them have no control over what benefits are paid. Everyone wants the system to deliver more but cost less. This squeezes some health care providers while opening up the gates to fraud for others. If a system were designed to insure runaway costs while infuriating dedicated health professionals it could not work better to accomplish those nefarious purposes than the system we have now. It doesn’t work, we can’t afford it, and it tramples what we once thought were liberties; yet how is it conservative to overlook people dying in waiting rooms? Or –

That discussion can go on for a long time, and involve any number of well meaning people.

It hardly matters whom we shall elect as President so long as these fundamental questions continue unresolved, and castigating one or another of the candidates as not sufficiently conservative does nothing until we establish just what is a conservative position. No one wants things to go on as they do. No one wants to bite the bullet and come out for “Death Panels” — health care committees that allocate the available health care resources. There doesn’t seem to be much desire for simply nationalizing the health care system and having done with it. And every year, we spend more money and get less for it.

There aren’t many ways out of this swamp, and none that will not infuriate some people. And it’s never going to be addressed if it becomes a third rail, a subject discussable only at peril.

It does seem to me that there is a constitutional solution: make it clear that the federal government has neither the obligation nor the power to solve it. National health care perhaps ought to be a national concern, but it is not mentioned in the constitution, and thus is not a power granted to the Federal government. If this be any government’s concern it is the business of the states. One may argue that all government ought to get out of the health care business, but that, surely, is a matter of politics; but I argue vigorously that as concerns the Federal Government, it is not politics but law. The Constitution didn’t give the Federal Government that power, just as it did not give the Federal Government the power to provide, interfere with, or regulate education.

Leave these matters to the states. Meanwhile, if the Congress wants to show how well it can provide health care and education, it has the undoubted right to take over the health care and education systems in the District of Columbia. Let it show how well it can do there. If what it does works well, it may be tried by the states. If it turns into a bureaucratic mess, the states can avoid the Federal methods.

Leave these matters to the States. Get the Federal government out of the health care and education business.

December 29, 2011 1100 AM

I’m writing this at the kitchen table on Khaos, my Mac Book Air. One set of workmen have left. They finally found the cracked and leaking six inch of gas pipe. This was the third attempt. Each previous time ended with supposed success, but turned out to be This Time For Sure. All would be well for a couple of hours and then we would smell gas. The first time was at ten PM. The Gas Company technician, a very pleasant man who turned out to have kids who read science fiction so I gave him a copy of Starswarm, was able to show us how to turn off the section where the leak was while leaving the water heaters, but because it was after ten PM he was alone and they don’t crawl under the house unless they have a partner. Yesterday the contractors came out twice, and each time thought they had found it, but last night there was once again the smell of gas. This time they actually found a pipe with an actual crack in it, and replaced it. They’ve been gone for an hour, all the relevant valves are open, there’s heat in Roberta’s bathroom which was the whole point of the operation, and there is no smell of gas in the hallway. I believe we can at last rejoice.

The moral of the story is that Roberta’s persistence in finding a reliable firm to do the work fixing her bathroom heater has paid off in spades and big casino.

Now she’s out taking Sable for a walk, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table while the plasterer fixes our ornate dining room cornice which was damaged by leaks from my upstairs bathroom, which had to be repaired and – but you get the idea. Chaos Manor has been sufficiently chaotic for the month. With luck it will all be over by Saturday. Meanwhile one of us has to be downstairs while there are workmen in the house, which is why I am working with my wonderful Mac Book Air at the kitchen table.

I’d forgotten how nice the Air is for working. My normal work position involves a Henry Miller chair and a keyboard at precisely the height I want, and big monitor screens. I don’t have any of that at the kitchen table. It takes a bit of getting used to. First I set the Air far enough back on the table so that I can rest my arms on the table and my fingers properly on the keyboard. Strange at first, but after a few minutes it turns out to be very natural.

Of course the Air saved my sanity back when I was getting my brain burned out – 50,000 rads of high energy X-rays to eliminate the inoperable lump in my head – and I was daily in the Kaiser Sunset radiology facility waiting room. I was able to work there, and that’s about the only thing that kept me sane. Clearly the treatment worked since I am still here and they can’t find any traces of cancer left.

Of course the Air saved my sanity back when I was getting my brain burned out – 50,000 rads of high energy X-rays to eliminate the inoperable lump in my head – and I was daily in the Kaiser Sunset radiology facility waiting room. I was able to work there, and that’s about the only thing that kept me sane. Clearly the treatment worked since I am still here and they can’t find any traces of cancer left.

The Mac Book Air – mine is named Kaos for the Goddess of Air – is a remarkably useful device. I don’t think it’s quite enough computer to be one’s only system, and my main machine remains Bette, a quad core Windows 7 machine and a 23” screen. If I am going somewhere for days and I need a system to set up in the hotel room and leave it in place, I tend to carry a ThinkPad; but for just knocking about writing wherever I happen to be, cruising the Internet at need, and just generally having a computer to use, the Air is wonderful. Lightweight, good battery life, gorgeous to look at, and easily carried in a small brief case or messenger bag. She’s not fast but she’s fast enough, and she’s easy to use in awkward places.

And, suddenly, all is well. The gas lines are fixed, the plasterer is done, Roberta is back from her walk, and I can go back up to the office. I can say I enjoyed resuming my affair with Khaos. She really is gorgeous.

For some of my early impressions of the Mac Book Air, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q2/view512.html

At work at the breakfast table with Khaos, the Mac Book Air.

Khaos at work. The Mac Book Air (mine is an old one, of course) is my favorite carryable if I need to get some real work done.

Did the real Cheetah die in 1938? A chimp named Cheetah died at 80 this week, but the conspiracy theorists claim that the real Cheetah died, and this one is a fake.

There was apparently a major problem with the site today. It has been hacked up and fixed, although there’s now contemplation of some internal structure changes (which you won’t see).  I believe all is well there now. Thanks.

View 707 Tuesday, December 27, 2011

I am weary of saying that I am not an apologist for Newt Gingrich, then writing as if I am; but the headlines give me little choice. I have long said that Newt would not have been my first choice for President, but he is an old friend, and he would be a far better President than our current one. The nomination ought to be based on rational discussion, not on headline gotchas. There is a sense in which the future of the Republic depends on this principle. The Internet Age followed rapidly on the TV age which followed the Radio Age, and all of those had enormous effects on the way we choose our national leaders. Now we have Facebook and Twitter, and instant polls, and what gets lost in all this is any rational discussion of issues.

As for example the Wall Street Journal front page headline” Gingrich Applauded Romney’s Health Plan” (link) which begins “Newt Gingrich voiced enthusiasm for Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law when it was passed five years ago, the same plan he has been denouncing over the past few months as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination.”

Way down in the page 4 continuation it says

At the same time, the essay cautioned that the Massachusetts plan may not work. It warned that the state has an "exhaustive" list of health-coverage requirements that prohibit insurers from offering basic plans with high deductibles. It predicted that state residents earning little more than $30,000 a year—the threshold for an individual to qualify for subsidized coverage—would be "in jeopardy of being priced out of the system." Instead, the newsletter said, "we propose that a more realistic approach might be to limit the mandate to those individuals earning upward of $54,000 per year."

It also gave a nod to the concept of making it easier for Americans to purchase insurance across state lines, an idea widely backed by Republicans as a mechanism to make coverage cheaper through competition.

A follow-up August 2006 newsletter from the center called Mr. Romney’s plan "the most interesting effort to solve the uninsured problem in America today." It praised "a Republican governor working with a Democratic state legislature to find a bipartisan reform that is based on market-oriented principles." (link)

The entire article comes closer to a rational presentation, but the entire front page is not. Nor, despite the argumentation posing as a front page news article, is it clear that Mr. Gingrich’s position on the Romney plan for Massachusetts is not consistent with principled conservatism. I would have thought that the notion of state’s rights and allowing the states to experiment with solutions to very sticky problems was almost the essence of the Constitution of 1787.

Certainly the conservative position on health care is that it is not a national “problem” to be “solved” by national action. Whether or not any government actions can “solve” whatever is meant by the problem of health insurance, I for one am glad of the Massachusetts experiment. Like X projects in aerospace, it is an experiment that gives us some data rather than models and theory; and I cannot think that Gingrich’s “approval” of the Romney plan is somehow indicative of any betrayal of conservative principles. If some kind of universal health insurance program is going to work anywhere, it should work in Mass., a wealthy and highly educated state able to afford it if anyone could.

Any discussion of conservative principles and health care has to begin with some facts. One of those facts is that the courts have in essence nationalized a form of universal health care: they have decreed that emergency rooms cannot turn people away for lack of insurance or other means to pay for the treatment they demand. Moreover, there is, I think, a general consensus among the American People that the spirit of this mandate is acceptable: people should not die in hospital waiting rooms while trying to prove they can pay. Of course that seldom happens, and often the treatment demanded is not urgently needed, but we are agreed that people ought not be denied emergency care.

That simple principle works with some populations with strong moral and ethical principles that include limits on what they think they are entitled to. It works in many American communities to this day. It may work in Massachusetts for all I know. It does not work in Southern California, where eleven hospitals have closed their emergency rooms, and the once world class trauma center network we had is nearly forgotten. The hospitals close their emergency rooms because they can’t afford to keep them open: the alternative would be to close the whole hospital. (Another alternative, triage in the waiting room doesn’t work and subjects the hospitals to crippling law suits. The Courts in essence won’t permit it.)

And that is the essence of the “health insurance problem.” Insurance is not welfare, and requiring equal premiums for all insured – granting the ‘right’ to insurance for those with pre-conditions at the same premium as those in good health – is not insurance at all. The obvious strategy for those with crippling pre-conditions is to buy the insurance, while for those in good health it makes sense to buy no insurance at all until symptoms appear, then rush out and buy it. Given that rational economic strategy of the customers, the obvious rational strategy of insurance companies is to declare bankruptcy, and for their executives to get into some other line of work, possibly as welfare administrators.

As Mitt Romney has repeatedly said, in Massachusetts they had about 8% population without health insurance. Everyone else was satisfied with what they had. The plan, which was passed by a Democratic Party controlled legislature, attempted to deal with that situation and provide for the 8%. In theory it wouldn’t affect anyone else. How well it works is worthy of study, but it is the business of the people of Massachusetts, not mine. In Los Angeles County we have had eleven emergency rooms close down, considerable stress on those remaining, and the loss of our once renowned Trauma Network. I don’t know what the situation is in Boston. Were I in the health care business I would pay more attention.

The real question is, who is obliged to pay for what? If an elderly uninsured person has a heart attack and requires emergency care, who is obliged to pay for it? What is my personal obligation? And for that matter, if I have a heart attack, should you pay for it? (I will quickly acknowledge that when I did have medical problems, I had no lack of free expert advice from readers and subscribers, for which I am extremely grateful; but I think that is a different matter. None of that was compelled.)

That is really the essence of it all: who should be compelled to pay? Should the physicians and technicians be compelled to render their services for free? That seems unfair. It is also unlikely to produce a good supply of highly educated and qualified physicians, nurses, and technicians. And yes: I do understand that the supply has in the past been artificially limited (or at least that this is contended) in order to keep the price of those services artificially high, so the compulsion is not so monstrous as it seems – but that leads off to another question about who is compelled to pay for medical and technical training, the costs of such education, and the monstrous quality of the school system. And we haven’t time to deal with that.

We don’t even have time to deal with the question of “who must be compelled to pay and for what?” – yet that is the essence of the “health insurance” problem. When I was young the matter was simple enough. You paid for your own medical services, and if that proved to be beyond your means you sold property, or borrowed money, or did whatever was required; or you didn’t pay and the doctors gave you what service they thought you might deserve of their charity. There wasn’t much medical insurance as such. There were charity hospitals, mostly run by Christian religious organizations.

Health Insurance became widespread largely because it was a way for employers to compete for good workers during a labor shortage in a time of wage controls: the business could deduct the insurance payments as a cost of doing business, while the insurance benefit was not taxed as income for the laborer. The result was widespread insurance among the employed, and that led to the situation of establishing one’s insurance status when being admitted to hospital – and that led to the horror stories of people dying in the waiting room while filling out forms. And that made health insurance a political problem.

But the political problem never really addressed the question: Who must pay for what? What are you obligated to pay for my health problems?

Once we establish that principle we can look at mechanisms for dealing with it; and having a cold look at this first principle should once and for all establish a simple fact: it is not a federal problem. It may be a state problem: Massachusetts chose to make it one for the people of that state. That will depend on the ethical and moral principles of the people of that state: and given the relentless war on religion, that may be an interesting picture. Perhaps the answer is simple: a relentless drive for entitlement to the masses at the expense of the productive. This has happened before through history. The Framers of our Constitution hoped to avoid this at least on a national level by limiting the power of the federal government: but leaving matters to the states means that states will approach such matters in different ways.

I have no definitive answers here, but it does seem to me that before we talk about the mechanisms of “solving the health insurance problem” we deal with the more fundamental question: “who must pay for someone else’s health care?” and on what moral or ethical principle is that obligation based. Until this is answered we have only the simple principle of “democracy”: You have it, and we want it. Republics fall when that becomes the basis of government, and the rich turn to a protector, usually a ‘friend of the people”. The result is seldom to anyone’s liking, as we say with the Soviet experiments.

Of course that kind of democracy usually does produce a ruling class.

I do understand that politics takes over from rational discussion. When that happens the trumpets of leadership become uncertain. The personality substituting for Rush Limbaugh, for example, is today in near despair, while desperately proclaiming Newt Gingrich a liar for his comments on Romney’s Massachusetts health care. After all, didn’t he approve it? But it’s a bit more complex than that. Newt is wrong to impute to Romney a desire to impose the Massachusetts plan on the nation. I don’t recall Romney ever wanting to do so. He has, correctly, defended the state’s right to the experiment.

Newt is correct in denouncing Obamacare and saying that the Massachusetts plan must not be imposed on the United States. He was correct when he said it was an interesting experiment. He is playing politics when he attributes to Romney a desire to impose this on the nation. I certainly would not have advised him to do that. I will say that Mr. Gingrich has been far less negative in his campaigning than his Republican establishment enemies have been.

Newt thinks a lot and he says what he thinks. It was true when I was associated with him and it is true now. He generally surrounds himself with smart people who are not afraid to tell him he’s wrong, and he tends to enjoy those discussions. This is a very good practice for a legislator. It is less so for a commander in chief, but it is not a fatal flaw for a president. The President of the United States is not the Emperor. His whimsical decrees do not have immediate effect. The most important requirement for President is a dedication to the Constitution. That, I think, applies to every one of the Republican candidates.

Reagan once told us as a general rule to nominate the most conservative electable candidate. That was good advice then and it still is.

View 707 Monday, December 26, 2011

Happy New Year.

A professor in Maryland has an article in the New York Times about word processors and novelist. He doesn’t seem to have done any homework at all. He references a 1985 Stephen King preface, and is apparently intent on digging about in the Microsoft archives, but he hasn’t bothered to talk to the people who were actually writing with computers in the 1979-1984 era. It took mo no time at all to Google up “LORD OF CHAOS MANOR : Hoping for a message from a long-lost friend” from the Los Angeles Times, and it was a quite late development. The LA Times article even mentions the 1982 novel Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which was a New York Times bestseller and for a while was on the list of the best 100 science fiction novels of all time. Considering that it was written in the dawn of the computer age, it holds up pretty well after all these years, and still sells quite well in eBook editions. Of course it was written on Z-80 computers – Niven had Tony Pietsch build 2 duplicates of Ezekial, one for himself and one for his wife Marilyn on the theory that he’d have a spare if ever needed. I managed to write the first science fiction novel using a computer. The late Dr.Robert Foreward of Hughes Laboratory wasn’t far behind: he used a UNIX system and an early UNIX line editing language called TECO that I had experimented with during a visit to MIT and decided was too difficult.

The LA Times article gets one thing wrong: although old Ezekial, my friend who happened to be a Z-80 computer, was given up for dead, he was revived at the request of the Smithsonian. I got him back together and shipped him off, then went to Washington to unpack him. The Smithsonian only wanted him for a display as the first computer to have been used to write a science fiction novel, but I wanted to wake him up so he could see where he was. I did that, and he got a good look before I put him back to sleep. For years he was in the hall of communications and computers, next to an old Imsai 8080. They closed that wing for refurbishment, and I think he’s back in the basement. For several years I used to say to people “How many people have you met who have their personal computer on display at the Smithsonian? In future the answer will be all of them.”

I wrote the first articles on Writing With Computers for BYTE and an unsuccessful McGraw Hill spin-off back in 1979, and in 1980 I started doing a BYTE column. At first it was just a series of articles on small computers, but BYTE’s Carl Helmers liked it and it became Computing At Chaos Manor. Meanwhile I kept writing science fiction and Niven and I produced Footfall, published in 1985. It was a New York Times #1 best seller.

As to the origins of word processing, the main contenders in the 1978-1981 era were WANG dedicated word processors and S-100 computers running the CP/M operating system. Barry Longyear wrote his SF works on a Wang, and Asimov’s published an article by Longyear and me in the form of a disputation. I contended that it was better to use a general purpose computer rather than a dedicated word processor. Events proved me right.

After IBM came out with DOS the picture changed from CP/M to DOS as the best selling operating system and Microsoft early on saw that word processing would be a major seller, but when Microsoft Word first came out it wasn’t good enough to induce Niven and me to change. We continued to use a series of programs, from the early Electric Pencil to Tony Pietsch’s WRITE to Semantec’s Q&A Write for quite a while until the Microsoft Word Czar Chris Peters asked us what it would take to get us to go over to WORD. We told him, and he did it. Since Microsoft had integrated the CDROM version of Bookshelf, an excellent spelling checker, and a thesaurus into Word we changed over, and we’ve used WORD ever since despite a concerted effort by Word Perfect to get us into their camp. Word Perfect’s spelling and grammar checkers were (then) better than Microsoft’s, but the Bookshelf and Thesaurus features were decisive.

There’s more on this in an old interview I did http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-SciFi-com-talks-to-SF.html . If Professor Kirschenbaum want to know more about the early history of word processing, I’m easy to find.

Bette, one of several computers I write with now. Zeke, my old friend who happened to be a Z-80, ran at 1 MHZ, featured 2 64-Kilobyte 8” floppy disks, and 64 Kilobytes of memory. Bette has 4 CPU chips, a terabyte of disk storage space, and 8 gigabytes of memory. And she runs considerably faster than the 2 MHZ that Zeke eventually upgraded to.

Another place to find more on this is http://use.perl.org/~Mark+Leighton+Fisher/journal/30464.

And Eric Pobirs has found in one of my anthologies, Black Holes, I mentioned using a computer write this stuff on, including a story of my introducing Niven to small computers. I think I’m probably safe enough on my claims…

I wrote the above after a number of readers referred me to the NYT article. My thanks to all of them. Here’s one:

Word processors and Authors article (NYTimes)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processing.html

"The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time."

Mr. Pournelle,

When I read this article I thought back to all the stories you related in the old Byte magazine column you wrote, Chaos Manor. In those stories over the years I got the sense that not only were you an early adopter of technology, but you USED it regularly to get work done. So it occurred to me after reading this article in the NYTimes that the Professor from UMD, was concentrating on what seemed to be a very narrow group of well known and big name authors. People who had money to buy products like Wang word processors (Stephen King) while interesting for historic value, don’t really cover enough of the ‘range’ of the history of word processing software as it came to be defined.

So I wanted to toss this article over the fence to you. And ask, can this guy do a better job of covering the ‘history of word processing’ than he seems to be presenting in this article? I’m sure you have some both historical and anecdotal evidence to further lengthen the timeline beyond the ‘Late ’70s’. But I don’t want to be too presumptuous, I could just as easily be wrong, and off-base by thinking word processing was adopted earlier than the NYTimes covers it. But I thought at least a primary ‘source’ should be consulted, and you were the first person I thought of. Happy New Year to you. All the best. And I will always fondly remember reading, and will continue to read Chaos Manor.

Eric Likness

By the time I got Zeke, there was a technical book store called “American Word Processing” in the Silverlake district in Los Angeles. It wasn’t very large, but it carried books on small computers, and of course sold BYTE Magazine. Most Word Processors were dedicated Wang systems and were mostly used in legal offices. Barry Longyear got a Wang about the time I got Zeke, and we debated over dedicated word processors vs. “real computers” but in private (by letters!) and in published articles.

While searching for other stuff, I found this early discussion of what this place is about. It seemed appropriate to reference:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/debates/meta.html

View 706 Thursday, December 22, 2011

WINTERSET

This time for sure. Sometime since midnight last night was the winter solstice (for the Northern hemisphere), which is not the same as the solar aphelion. The aphelion is the moment of the year when the Earth is farthest from the Sun. Oddly enough that will be next summer; we’re about two weeks from perihelion. Solstice is not concerned with Earth’s eccentricity, but rather with the tilt in the axis that makes the Sun appear to travel south as the year wanes, then just before year end begin to travel north (well it looks like it’s travelling north) until the start of summer.

The solstice is the moment that the Sun is furthest south as seen from the surface of the Earth, but that sometimes happens at night, so the actual solstice day is the dawn closest to that moment; at least that’s my understanding, and apparently the way that Stonehenge and other archeoastronomical observatories were built. It’s all more or less explained at http://www.archaeoastronomy.com/seasons.html and easy enough to understand if you focus on it.

One confession: as one gets older, it takes more concentration, even if you once knew it all intuitively . So it goes. If you want to know the aphelion, solstice, perihelion, equinox, and other dates, there’s a good table of them at http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/almanac/seasondate.htm .

Of course that includes 2013 which assumes that we get past 21 December 2012, which is both Winter Solstice (North) 2012 and the end of the last Great Cycle in the Mayan Calendar. Some have interpreted this as the Mayan End of Days, others in various other ways. The Naval Observatory evidently believes there will be a year 2013. As to why the year end doesn’t come exactly at solstice (which would in fact be a logical time to begin a New Year), it’s partly Pope Gregory’s fault for only taking away eleven days, partly Julius Caesar’s fault for not taking away some more, and if you really want to know more about that you can do your own research.

The fascinating thing is that given the Internet and a good pocket phone, the annoying absent-mindedness that come with getting old doesn’t matter so much, since it’s easy enough to look stuff up when something – like the name of the girl who could do everything her famous partner could do backwards and in high heels – slips your mind even if you can remember everything else about her. I know. It happened to me yesterday. I couldn’t remember her name, nor her partner’s name, although I could remember Gene Kelley;s name and that her partner was his gentlemanly counterpart and – Well you get the idea. It took about a minute to find out her name by looking up ‘backwards and in high heels’. Absentmindedness is an inconvenience not a disability. You’d think that so long as the Internet continues to exist we can never have a Dark Age, but I’m not so sure. I dealt with that, just a bit, in my CoDominium stories.

As a nation we have certainly forgotten that once we had essentially no illiterate Americans who had been through 4 grades in school. Essentially none. We did it before and we can do it again, or more elegantly, what Americans have done Americans can aspire to. Those who say that it’s different now because we try to educate all may have a point, but it only illustrates the Dark Age we are in: if you grant that there is some percentage of the population who simply cannot be taught to read, that hardly addresses the situation we are in, where the system has in essence given up on a fairly large portion of normal and dull normal children, while at the same time charter and private effort schools in the same neighborhoods can take in all comers and have what amounts to 100% literacy. Not only have we forgotten what we have done, we apparently cannot notice what is going on around us. So it goes. Merry Christmas.

The House has decided that discretion is the better part of valour in dealing with the White House on the subject of “tax cuts.” Largely on the advice of the Wall Street Journal they have decided to defer to the Senate. Or at least the leadership has decided to: it remains to be seen whether they can actually get that “unanimous consent” that in theory is going to be required. The Speaker is acting as if this is a done deal, so perhaps so; I am no expert on House Rules. It does seem a bit odd.

Given that the Tea Party Republicans who defeated the two month extension do not seem to have had any real strategy or narrative to go with just saying no, this was probably inevitable: as Newt observed first hand, even with a lot of smart guys on your team it’s hard to win a short term Public Relations battle with the White House. The Republican leadership could not withstand the pressure. Whether this will have any long term political cost is debatable. In any event, according to the Speaker, the extension to the “tax cut” will be continued so there won’t be any unpleasant January surprises in pay checks – at least for those who still have pay check.

The US is out of Iraq and fifty seven people have been killed in bombings. Chaos is feared. There is no word on what is happening in the Kurdish portion of Iraq, but it’s hard to believe that they intend to stay in a “country” that’s having a civil war in the capital. Of course the US is not out of Germany (60,000 or so troops still there) but perhaps that is a different situation. I don’t do breaking news, but I am hardly astonished, not will I be astonished if Iraq breaks up into a Kurdish Republic, a Sunni protectorate of Saudi Arabia, and a Shiite protectorate of Iran. Breaking Iraq into three more cohesive nations was always the most likely outcome (rise of a new dictator was second most likely), but we chose to try nation building. We will be fortunate if what now results is not much worse than it would have been had we guided the breakup.

It’s the Christmas season. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and God Bless the United States.

Don’t read this in Christmas season, but for the record you will want at some point to read http://www.treppenwitz.com/2011/07/who-what-where-why-and-when.html .