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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 .

View 706 Wednesday, December 21, 2011

WINTERSET EVE

Conventionally, Winter began on the 21^st of December when I was growing up, but apparently there has been a redefinition to make the winter solstice, which happens tomorrow just after midnight EST, or 2100 Los Angeles time, making tomorrow, December 22^nd, the official Winterset.

Interestingly, the term winterset, which was the popular name for the depth of winter for most of my life, has nearly vanished from Google, replaced at the top by towns of that name, schools, and other commercial information. There is on the front page a link to the 1936 movie made from Maxwell Anderson’s Broadway stage play Winterset, which debuted Burgess Meredith. Anderson did a number of screen plays, including Joan of Arc, Mary, Queen of Scots, and other movies you’ve heard of. Winterset is about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. (note)

The whole thing is explained quite well at http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/celsph.html if you care. Interestingly, in Scandinavia and other very cold places, the beginning of Winter is considered to follow All Saints Day, and the winter solstice, Winterset, is considered the depth of winter. Stonehenge was built to mark Winterset and give a dramatic display on sunrise of the winter solstice; from this day on the days get longer, and the northern hemisphere receives more solar radiation, but due to residual effects the climate in most of the northern hemisphere continues to be colder.

Fur bearing animals generally begin growing winter fur when the days are getting shorter, and cease to grow it when the days are lengthening. Sable seems to have ceased growing winter fur, and has shed a lot of hers during warm snaps, but then she lives here in Southern California. She sleeps outside in what amounts to a dog shed, but we’ve had only a couple of nights cold enough to cause her to curl into a ball. A really cold night causes her to curl up into a very tight ball with her tail over her nose. She likes the current weather.

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(note) The Sacco-Vanzetti case and the 1927 execution of the two anarchists was an item of discussion well into the 1950’s, and sometimes continues to this day. It is worth study in these days of terrorism and counter terrorism – defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti mailed bombs to governors and there were other acts which today would be classed as acts of terror – although not many study it, largely because it has become fairly clear that Sacco was in fact guilty. Vanzetti may have been an accomplice, but to what degree of involvement can be questioned. Carlo Tresca, the anarchist leader who probably knew, said that Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was not; but Tresca meant by ‘guilty’ actual participation in the robbery. The Wikipedia discussion of the case is relatively good, and the story of the controversy itself and the arguments made on all sides is worth knowing for anyone involved in teaching or even writing about courts and justice.

I’ve been rambling to avoid discussing the flap over the budget “tax cut” flap. It’s a mess, and it takes a lot of definitions before rational discussion can even begin.

And everyone is weary of a nation that continues to pay bunny inspectors, borrows money from China to send aid to North Korea, and insists on continued raises for highly paid government employees while desperately finding ways to “raise revenue.”

The House rejection of the 2 month continuation of the FICA “tax cut” has sparked a vicious attack on the Republican leadership from the Wall Street Journal, and this from former Speaker Gingrich:

DES MOINES, Iowa—Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says Congress’s failure to extend a payroll tax cut for millions of workers is an "absurd dereliction of duty." His chief rival, Mitt Romney, declined to comment.

Gingrich especially faulted the Senate, saying its decision to adjourn without extending the tax cut for a full year is an example of why the public is sick of Washington and sick of politics.

The Democratic-controlled Senate had voted to extend the tax cut for two months. But the Republican-led House killed that bill and called for opening negotiations on a yearlong extension of the tax break.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2011/12/21/feud_between_romney_gingrich_intensifies/

Newt went through all this before, during the budget crisis with Clinton in which the government was actually shut down because Clinton vetoed the appropriation bill. As Newt points out, Clinton rejected the budget, but Congress got the blame, with Newt portrayed as the Gingrich that destroyed Christmas.

The Wall Street Journal says

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he’s spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204791104577110573867064702.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Note that what was rejected was a two month extension of what is not supposed to be considered a tax cut at all: that is, the FICA payroll payment funds Social Security and is supposed to go into a Trust Fund, and while it is indistinguishable from a tax to those who pay it, it’s said to be a contribution to a retirement fund, a sort of compulsory savings/insurance payment. It isn’t supposed to affect government operations revenue at all; but since Congress long ago set it up so that the money that goes into the Trust Fund is replaced by Treasury Bonds so that government spending can continue to rise monotonically, FICA revenue certainly does affect operations revenue.

The chief effect of the House rejection of the 2-month extension of this tax cut will be political: which party can spin it better? The Wall Street Journal has conceded that the Democrats will win that. Newt, who was the Gingrich who destroyed Christmas, is on record as saying that it’s pretty hard for the House to win a spin battle with the President. I suspect we are about to have another demonstration of that.

Lost in the noise is the fact that a major element of the Senate Compromise was eliminating the Congressional approval of the Canadian oil pipe line. Everyone is concentrating on extending the ‘tax cut’ for 2 months rather than a year, and is ignoring the oil pipeline crisis. At some point the Republicans might notice this. After all, the pipeline is popular even with the Congressional Democrats; it’s only President Obama who is in thrall to the Greens and particularly the liberal Californians, who hates it.

There are a lot of oil pipelines in the United States. See http://www.pipeline101.com/Overview/crude-pl.html for a quick summary. The pipeline at present at issue is about 600 miles long, tiny compared to the hundreds of thousands of miles of existing fuel pipelines, and its environmental effects are tiny compared to what we’re doing now. The Canadians have oil. They need to sell it to someone. They would prefer to sell it to the United States, and presumably the United States would rather pay money for oil to Canada than to Venezuela or Saudi Arabia. Had the pipeline been offered in the payroll tax cut extension it would have passed overwhelmingly.

We need that oil. Obama is refusing to let us buy it. The Canadians are now talking about building a pipeline west to Vancouver. The Chinese would be very ready to buy it.

There are a great number of economic effects in play here. The Oil Cartel would suffer as crude prices fall. Of course they would never pay lobbyists to oppose the Canadian pipeline. We can think of other affected interests, but surely their lobbyists have no influence with the President, who rejects the pipeline because – well, because he can.

And if Obama remains in office in 2013 the Canadians will build their pipeline to the West.

View 706 Tuesday, December 20, 2011

My novel STARSWARM is now available as an eBook on Amazon and elsewhere. The eBook edition contains the Introduction that was in the hardbound print edition but was dropped in later paperback and quality paperback editions. The introduction has some memorabilia about Mr. Heinlein and my mad friend Dan Mac Lean on how the book came to be written. Starswarm is usually classed as a ‘juvenile’, and it was certainly written to appeal to that market, but I followed Robert Heinlein’s rules on ‘juveniles’ when I wrote it: no sex scenes, and as Robert used to say, a juvenile has young protagonists and you can put in more science and explanations of what’s going on in juvenile works; which is to say it’s a good story, and has always appealed to adults as well as to the 10 – 15 year olds it was sort of written for. It has long been one of my favorite books, and I found when I proofread the eBook edition, it holds up quite well on the science including computers. It takes place on a frontier planet and the technology is quite reasonable for such a place. Obviously when an author reviews his own book the recommendation is predictable: Recommended. Also available for Nook. (That may still be in process).

The news media report an uptick in President Obama’s popularity. The payroll tax cut and the Keystone pipeline issues are said to be a part of that, although I am not sure why this makes the President more popular.

I find that the Keystone Pipeline issue is not well understood, and I’ll do a short explanation of it as I understand it when I get back from my walk. Meanwhile Thomas Sowell, who is on my short list of people I pay attention to, has endorsed Newt Gingrich in a short essay on the importance of the upcoming election. He begins with statements I certainly agree with:

If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office.

What the media call Gingrich’s “baggage” concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress. This kind of stuff makes lots of talking points that we will no doubt hear, again and again, over the next weeks and months.

More on all of this when I get back from my walk.

Everyone is speculating about North Korea, which means that no one knows. That includes the US Department of State. One State department official has said that Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Sung Taek, who is married to Kim Jong Il’s younger sister, will be the temporary ruler while Kim Jon Un learns the dictator business. The aunt and uncle were prominently at the public ceremony of homage to Kim Jon Il’s body. There was no sign of Kim Jong Un’s two brothers, one of whom lives in Macao.

Assuming that North Korea is organized and governed much as Stalin’s Russia is, there will be three power structures: Party, Army, and State Security or secret police. They cooperate, but there is rivalry: after the death of Stalin the Army and the Party cooperated to prevent Beria from assuming control of the government, and it was a very near thing, decided when Beria fumbled in an attempt to draw an automatic pistol during a meeting of the Presidium at which Khrushchev accused Beria of being a career hack with no devotion to the Party, and two colonels loyal to Marshal Zhukov came into the meeting room and seized the chief of the secret police. The official story has Beria tried, convicted, and executed in the following weeks, but there is evidence that Beria was shot in the corridor just outside the Presidium Chambers. Beria’s NKVD loyalists were guarding the Kremlin but he had not brought them into the meeting. Apparently North Korea’s story will not be quite that dramatic.

There are no reliable reports of dissent within the Military or the Party. Even less is known about the North Korean secret police. Surely there are technocrats who understand the cost of the dictatorship and the excessive military spending, and the need for economic reforms, but the only sources of information the west has are dissenters, and none of them has ever told a story of any kind of dissent, organized or not. North Korea remains a hermit state, but it seems extraordinarily stable, a refutation to theory of the inevitability of revolt and reform.

Meanwhile, there are reports that a dozen demonstrators have been killed in Cairo as the street mob demands that the military step down and turn over power to someone else. The Army claims that it has not killed anyone. It is not clear who is in charge of the security forces.

We live in interesting times.

View 706 Monday, December 19, 2011

Two Days Before Winterset

‘Tis the week before Christmas, my upstairs bathroom is occupied by workmen putting in the new floor, and we slept late. The weather outside is gloomy and chilly, a bad day for Southern California but for most of the United States and Europe it would be called a mild winter day.

Sales of eBook readers including eBook capable Tablets is high and projected to be higher, meaning I presume – hope – that sales of eBooks will be high. This is great news for writers. Whether eBook sales will entirely compensate for the loss of book stores isn’t certain, but I’m pretty sure it will more than compensate. When eBook sales first began to be significant, the attention was focused on their effect on best-sellers, and there was great concern over that; but in fact the biggest effect, so far as I can tell, has been on backlist sales. Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer were both best sellers in their time. They were reissued a few times, and enjoyed a spike in sales each time, but there wasn’t a lot of steady sale in the past few years. This is presumably because most book stores have limited space for back list books, and what space they devote to the back list comes out of space they could give to mid-list author new books.

With eBooks there is no competition for shelf space between new mid-list books and older books. They’re all available, and the store is always open. Both Mote and Hammer have been selling quite steadily as eBooks, and in fact have now sold more as eBooks than they did in their last print reissues. Other authors can tell the same story.

Good stories have always sold during hard economic times. It doesn’t cost much to wrap up in a blanket and curl up with a good book on a cold gray day. Of course in a bad economy a lot of the story sales were in used books, so the effect on story tellers was indirect, but this year it’s different. The used book stores are dying out just as the independent and mall book stores are vanishing in all but a few fortunate places. There remain the Huge Book Stores and the eBook sellers. eBook readers deliver ever better user experiences while falling in price. The effect has been good for story tellers.

Dear Leader Kim Jong Il has died of a heart attack. North Korea has been far more opaque than the USSR ever was, and apparently we have no idea what happens next. We don’t even know the exact age of youngest son Kim Jong Eun, apparently the anointed successor, nor is there much information about factions or even policy issues. Given what we spend on intelligence it’s astonishing how little we do know about what’s going on in North Korea. World dictators can take note: tyrants with nukes are treated differently from other tyrants, and having a few nukes is a far better insurance policy for yourself and your heirs than having a few hundred million in gold coins. Gold may get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can’t protect you from NATO air attacks even if you denucleated yourself and called the American President “son” and tried to reach out for the extended hand. If Qaddaffi had spent a few tens of millions on a couple of surplus Soviet nukes back during the collapse, he or one of his sons would be in a palace in Tripoli today.

I wonder if the Iranians know this? Saddam knew it, but he was a bit late in applying the knowledge.

So: denucleating yourself will not save you. Signing a peace treaty with Israel and being a military ally of the United States for forty years will not save you. Giving an interview to Barbara Walters may not save you or your sons. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/08/barbara-walters-syria-interview-frightened_n_1137591.html The evidence is that having nukes will save you, and may assure the safety and perhaps the accession of your son. We’ll see.

The Wall Street Journal has an op ed piece entitled “Gringrich’s Worthy Brain Pulse” (link) praising Newt for being the only candidate (including the President) who takes seriously the threat of an EMP weapon. While it’s not likely that a single EMP weapon could reduce the United States to a medieval economy, a small nation dedicated to that end might be able to accomplish it with several. The collapse of the world into a new dark age was once a standard theme in science fiction.

Dark ages happen not when you forget how to do something, but when you have forgotten that ever you could do it. The French peasant in the dark ages didn’t even suspect that his ancestors during Roman times harvested nearly an order of magnitude more grain per acre than he could. Part of that discrepancy was climate change – the Roman Warm period was over and the Viking Warm hadn’t come yet – but much of it was lost farming techniques.

Harrison Brown a long time ago in The Challenge of Man’s Future (link and link) argued that it would be harder to reconstruct the Industrial Age than it was to get to it in the first place – that perhaps it would be impossible. I read that book as an undergraduate, and was so affected by it that, when I became President of the Science Fiction Writers of America and put on the annual Nebula Awards show, I invited Professor Brown to be one of the speakers. Building civilizations is not so easy as we imagine.

Whatever Newt’s abilities to decide things every day – and that’s a very tough job if you care to do it (some Presidents don’t) – it would be well to have someone in the presidency who pays attention to ideas like this, rather than someone who laughs at all that science fiction stuff. Or so I have long believed.

Merry Christmas

Michael Whiddon I need an email address…   I’m finally catching up on recording all the subscriptions, but I can’t finish yours…

Same for Anthony Lobre. Thanks