Eating a bit of crow; Work on the Reader project.

View 757 Monday, January 07, 2013

When I first heard the name Brennan as nominee for head of the CIA my failing memory brought up the image of L. Paul Brennan, the proconsul who disbanded the Iraqi Army and brought about the end of order in Iraq after the American conquest there. Fortunately it was my failing memory: John Brennan is a different Brennan entirely.

I doubt anyone else is as absent minded as I am, but just in case…

If the purpose of the President is to disengage from the Middle East, Mr. Chuck Hegel is probably the right one to do it. This appointment to Secretary of Defense has a number of implications. Logically it would mean we will concentrate on developing domestic energy supplies – real ones, not windmills and ground based solar panels – but logic is not always the best predictor of US policy.

(Regarding windmills and solar panels: they can be useful and effective for particular uses. But the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine at night, and you can’t use unpredictable energy sources for baseline power generation. 0

I am hearing that the President has told the Speaker that we no longer have a spending problem: the problem in spending was caused by health care mismanagement and ObamaCare will fix that. We still have a revenue problem; we need more taxes on wealthy income. We can use that money to reduce the deficit. There isn’t a spending problem, but there is a revenue problem.

There is a great deal to write about today, and I’ll get to it, but it’s time for a walk.

PROOF of Senility.  The luckless proconsul who disbanded the Iraqi Army was L Paul Bremer, not Brenner, as I should have seen when I looked it up with Google – I did, I did, I really did –  ah well. The horrible part of this is that while I could not think of any reason why he would do so, I couldn’t reject out of hand that the President might appoint Bremer to be CIA Director. Horrible.  I seem to run toward absent mindedness lately, but I can still get some work done.

It was a very good walk. Sable is lively and you wouldn’t know there is anything wrong. She limps a bit, but she was eager to go on further rather than turn back home; which is good for all of us. We’ve been cutting our walks short.

I am working on the introduction and commentaries on the California Sixth Grade Reader. This has been a project that took a great deal longer than I intended, but we are in the final stages. The book is public domain; I will put up the eBook edition for a low price. At one time this was perhaps the best Sixth Grade Reader in the United States; we’ll get to that in the introduction. Thanks to Rick Hellewell and John Vogt for getting it to the point where I can finish it, and particularly to Rick for bugging me to get it done. It’s an important thing to be published. It is infinitely better than any middle school reader in general use now that I am aware of. Perhaps there are some better in circulation among some communities but I don’t know of a public school reader that’s better. For that matter I don’t know of many that are competent or even acceptable. The next step would be to add some modern stories to the collection – after all this was published in 1914 – but any sixth grader will be better off for having read this before tackling ‘modern’ stories written for 7^th grade and above.

And I had better get back to work on it.