Merry Christmas. The FICA cut is back, we’re out of Iraq, and Iraq is bombing.

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.