Taxes, Sable, Oath of Fealty, and are we really at war?

View 769 Friday, April 05, 2013

I am still in the throes of taxes. I took an hour off for a walk to the bank. It’s the longest walk Sable has had for weeks, and she was fine, vigorous on the way there, and while a bit slower coming back, not dragging at all, and interested in sniffing everything. She’s doing fine. She limps a bit, and we keep a bracing bandage on her cancerous leg, but she doesn’t seem any worse than she was in December when she was diagnosed. She’s still a happy dog.

For those who have not the foggiest notion of what I am talking about, Sable is a Red Siberian Husky about ten years old, vigorous and healthy except that she has cancer in one leg. It’s inoperable although there’s a chance that amputating her right front leg will get her another year. We have decided she’d be miserable as a cripple, so we are essentially doing nothing; so long as she is happy and not in pain all is well. When she’s no longer happy about living we have a decision to make. Frankly I thought that would have happened by now, but in fact she seems no worse now than she did in December. She limps a little and is just a little less active – she no longer plays werewolf on our walks – but she’s curious, happy, and likes people particularly children, and everyone knows her.

Tuesday the neighbor house next door was tented for termites and some of the tentage came into our back yard, where Sable sleeps and relieves herself. Since she’s a very active, curious and smart dog it would not be wise to let her loose with a strange object in the yard that might contain lethal gas, so we had to keep her in the house Tuesday and Wednesday nights, taking her for short walks like any other city dweller with a big dog. She didn’t like that at all. She knows us enough to be able to work the system, which she did at every opportunity, the goal in mind being to get another treat. She keeps score by the number of treats she can talk us out of. Huskies are great dogs, but they are very intelligent, and they have a strong sense of entitlement. They are very loyal but they tend to be cooperative rather than obedient.

Anyway Thursday morning the tentage was removed and Sable was able to go back to a normal routine. She also spent more time outside than usual, enjoying her post down by the gate where she watches the kids going to school.

Thursday Niven picked me up in the morning and we drove down to UC Irvine for a day long academic session on science fiction in California with particular emphasis on the best-selling novel Oath of Fealty http://www.amazon.com/Oath-of-Fealty-ebook/dp/B004LRPQQ6/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 by Niven and Pournelle. It turns out that while the arcology Todos Santos which was the scene of our story doesn’t exist, something a lot like it exists at UC Irvine – a closed community of workers and intellectuals, with limited interaction with the outside world, and some sense of antagonism toward outsiders – the standard town and gown writ large because Irvine, like the original plan Walt Disney had for EPCOT, is pretty well closed to residence by people not part of the university in some way.

The conference was really interesting, and we’ll have a larger report another time. They brought in Steve Barnes from Atlanta, and scholars like Sheryl Vint from UC Riverside. More details here http://file770.com/?tag=jerry-pournelle. It all went well, the discussion was interesting, and the scholars have drawn more out of the book than I thought they would. They are pretty well right on what we had intended. And many of trends forecast for America in our novel are happening: see Murray’s Coming Apart. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421 We also discussed The Burning City, another novel that takes place in California, but 14,000 years ago before all the magic went away.

I had a great time, but that used up the day and evening, and today was devoured by taxes as will be tomorrow. Sunday I will be out at the paperback book fair http://www.la-vintage-paperback-show.com/ I generally go to dinner with old friends after that. It may be a bit sparse around here for a week.

North Korea

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

You were concerned that no one seemed to be taking the DPRK’s threats very seriously. One group of people are , and that is the Chinese.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/05/china-refuses-north-korea-request-for-envoy/

Looks to me as if China wants a buffer state between it and South Korea. China neither wants war with the United States nor does it want its sphere of influence reduced. Thus the Chinese are moving armored columns to the border. If regime change is to be effected in North Korea because the ruler is mad, it will be they who replace him with another ostensibly Communist ruler. Thus the current status quo will be preserved.

I strongly doubt it will happen. I would be very surprised if their new leader didn’t change his tack to only the normal bluster of a Stalinist state. Of course, if the Chinese were to depose him and replace the current DPRK with their own brand of communism-in-name-only, it might be the next best thing to unification. A prosperous DPRK could be a source of cheap labor for China, wouldn’t export WMDs, and would be less likely to embroil China in war.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I have a lot of similar information on this. China, I am told, is quite concerned with the legalities of the state of war that North Korea has pronounced. So far there appears to be no trend toward evacuation of Seoul although some large corporations have sent their top executives to more southern cities. Some sources are saying that the state of war is a mistranslation; others insist that it is not. North Korea’s chief of state is not always perfectly understood. China would be reluctant to go in and effect a change, but China is in no condition to care for a million refugees. Chinese on the Chinese side of the North Korean border are said to despise Koreans, and Koreans seen in the streets are denounced to the authorities. China doesn’t want a US ally on their border, but they also don’t want the responsibility for North Korea. Rehabilitating the DPRK will be an economic task of the magnitude of rehabilitating East Germany; it’s within the capability of South Korea but it will not at all be easy.

As to projections of war, North Korean artillery is mostly recycled former Soviet artillery, old but still usable; the age and state of the ammunition isn’t really known. North Korean gunners have not had many live fire exercises because of economic restrictions. The old maxim in the field artillery was that it takes two fire missions to make a gunner. As Clausewitz observed, war is very simple but the simplest things are very difficult. Those not experienced have difficulty comprehending what Clausewitz called friction. The border guns pose a threat to Seoul and South Korea.

It’s a pity we don’t have battleships. A couple those over the horizon could have a very good effect in an artillery duel.

Australian Sky News is reporting troops movements. http://www.news.com.au/world-news/intercepted-north-korean-military-communications-reveal-plan-to-launch-missile/story-fndir2ev-1226612936097 We live in interesting times.