Recovery; Survival of Freedom and the Sixth Grade Reader; and some numbers to contemplate as I come up for air.

View 796 Monday, October 28, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

I have more or less recovered from the Flu, the horrid stuff is off my face, and I look a bit as if I’d joined one of the Studeneinkorps in Heidelberg, but I am recovering well. Again my thanks to all who subscribed during the Pledge Week, and apologies for bugging out for about a week immediately thereafter. I simply haven’t had much in the way of energy for a while. That too is changing.

I am now down to a couple of tasks that have to take some precedence. First is getting the last of the introductory material together for the Sixth Grade Reader. This is the official California Sixth Grade Reader for 1914, meaning that nearly all the work in it was public domain at the time it was written; it is important for several reason. First you can gauge for yourself the caliber of instruction in the schools for then and now: the sheer “difficulty” of the material that sixth grade students were expected to read, complete with poems that they were to memorize and recite, should be informative. Remember that in California of that time nearly everyone was expected to get through sixth grade. They might not all go to High School, but Sixth Grade? It will also be useful to home schoolers. The poems in the book will be thought difficult by today’s students and many will simply not go through them, but for those who take the trouble the reward is great: one of the great intellectual pleasures of life is good poetry, but it is an acquired taste. We used to make everyone expose themselves to it on the theory that some would like it. It is also a good way to learn to speak the English language well.

We have also decided to reissue the 1981 Anthology Survival of Freedom, which has 375 pages of stories and essays on the title theme. It sold well when it was first published, and lasted a while: and I think there is a place for it again. It contains stories and essays by me, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Ursula Le Guin, Norman Spinrad, Robert Heinlein, and others, all still quite relevant to today’s world despite all the technological changes and the end of the Cold War.

I’ve also been absorbed in a certain amount of time wasting, but my study is nearly cleaned up, and I’m planning a tea party. Not political, just some writer friends over for tea. I haven’t been able to do that for years because my place began to look like one of those hoarder’s mazes where the police find the owner ten years after he died behind a stack of useless junk. That’s mostly thanks to my friend Peter with some help from Eric. There’s still work to be done, but it is not possible to visualize an ending,.

So I haven’t vanished from the Earth, and I am catching up. I know I keep saying Real Soon Now, but I really have made progress. And I look all right except for the dueling scars…

Some numbers to contemplate:

                                 Expenditures in 2011 (Billions of Dollars):

New Homes                    $337 Billion

Automobiles                    $328 Billion

Computers                      $375 Billion

Comply with Tax Code     $392 Billion

These are interesting numbers, and show something of the structure of our national economy. Now contemplate that in 2011 we spent $392 Billion complying with the U.S. Tax Code. That’s not what was paid in taxes. It’s what it cost to pay the taxes and prove they had been properly paid: record keeping, bookkeeping, compliance officers and consultants, legal fees, tax consultants, tax accountants – all the myriad ways that it costs money to fill out and check all the forms that have to be filed with the IRS.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; is this where the nation’s heart truly ought to be? I will have more on this subject another time when I have a bit more energy.

We have considerable mail, and more to say about the health care situation: I invite you ton continue to consider why anyone ought to pay for someone else’s health care. I don’t mean pubic health and sanitation, which are local matters anyway, or communicable diseases. We have seen in the past weeks a ton of stories about people unable to get health insurance because they had pre-existing conditions – which is to say, they were already sick, so no sane insurance company would undertake to pay for their medical care without charging a premium equal to or greater than the expected cost of their care. The remedy in the Affordable Care Act is to require the companies to issue the sick person an insurance policy and charge no more for it than the company charges a well person. This means that the well person must pay a great deal more for his insurance since the policy must also cover some sick people as well. The Affordable Care Act solves that problem by requiring everyone to buy an insurance policy at the new price that covers everyone. This means a enormous increase in the cost of insurance for the young and healthy, who aren’t going to want to pay that much so that someone else’s grandma can have a year in the Intensive Care ward, or the child born with a defective heart can get a heart transplant. That’s a wonderful boon for the parents of the child, but a large burden on the parents of the child not born with a heart defect.

But all that assumes that they young and healthy may grumble, but can be coerced into buying the insurance because the IRS will see to it that they buy it; and that assumes that the economy is vigorous enough to allow all the young people – not just those who manage to grow up and get an education and acquire job skills and find a job, but all of them – will have, inherit, or somehow acquire the money to buy that insurance policy. This does not seem as likely as perhaps it did in boom times.

There are other such matters to consider, and they are not trivial questions. They will have to be answered, once the Federal Exchanges begin working properly.

News items

I remember when the Sony reader was preferable to the Kindle. Now:

http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2013/10/26/sony-withdrawing-from-ebook-reader-market-entirely-in-us/

Then we have:

http://www.publisher…e-the-norm.html

First the electronic rights become worth something.  We noted that back in the BYTE days when computers were rare, and that sparked the debates about information wants to be free, and perhaps electronic rights should not be worth anything to the writers because that exploits the readers, and those who long for information but can’t afford it.  Before that was settled, electronic rights grew in value to the authors, and grew and grew, and some of us observed that electronic rights were now worth as much — yea, verily more — than print rights.

And now the print rights aren’t even being exercised….   Turn the page.  Oops. We don’t do that any more.

Saturday Morning we managed to get up, breakfast, and make our way to a local movie house where we saw a live performance of the Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich’s The Nose, an opera based on the absurd short story of the same name by Nicolai Gogol. I remember reading this as an undergraduate and finding it amusing, and it is amusing as an opera: indeed it is quit faithful to Gogol’s story. As with most modern opera there are no tunes to whistle or hum after you leave the theater, but some of the imagery will stick with you for – well in my case, a day or so. You may be more fortunate. I am not sorry to have gone;. The Los Angeles Opera has hit a doldrums period I fear. The Met will broadcast live Dvorak’s Rusalka in a couple of weeks, with Rene Fleming, and I intend to go see that. If it sounds as if I am still unhappy about the LA Opera spending everything it had on a surreal production of the Ring with staging so bad that one soprano suggested they simply use her CD since no one would hear her in the mask with her face turned away anyway – well, yes. Wagner was not trying for an opera of the absurd and his source was not Gogol.

Query: I keep hearing and seeing news to the effect that Kaiser cancelled the memberships of 160,000 members in California, but I cannot find an actual source to that story, nor anything about who they were, or why the cancellation.  Does anyone know, or is this a rumor?