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Solstice 2011

Dies Natalis Invicti Solis

December 22nd 2011

Every December, I write a “Solstice piece”, and the theme is the same; this is the turnabout point, from now on, the days are getting longer, and eventually it will be spring.

Of course, there’s another element that I tend not to dwell upon. And that is that the Solstice is also the first day of Winter. And it’s just going to stay winter for another 90 days or so.

In fact, in eastern Canada, among other places, old man winter blows right through the Solstice and keeps right on intensifying. The snowiest and coldest month is often February, not December. For folks who depend on nice weather for their comfort and ease—and that’s most of us—the worst is yet to come. It will be a while for the days to be noticeably longer, and in the far north, it may be weeks or even a month or two before the first brief glimmer of blue sky to the south reminds people that there’s still a sun down there somewhere.

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A Hitch in Time

The world loses a philosophical giant

December 18th 2011

 About six months ago, I got to see a video of Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of Britain, in debate. I had seen Blair give speeches, and duck and weave on the fly during the Parliamentary Question Hour. I knew he was articulate, could think fast on his feet, and had a encyclopaedic memory. I used to watch him speak and debate, and then watch then-President Bush, and wonder if America had any future at all.

I expected the debate to be a clash of the titans. I knew what a formidable force Hitchens was, but I also knew the man was ill, and I was taken aback when I saw him, hair gone because of the radiation treatments and swollen and puffy from the steroids. His voice was raspy from the cancerous outrages his esophagus had taken.

I also knew that Blair, who could argue convincingly for principles he did not believe in, would be arguing for ones that he did believe in now. A freshly minted Catholic, he had come out of the denominational closet the day after he stepped down as Britain’s PM and it was now legal for him to do so. (It’s still illegal for a Catholic to be Prime Minister in Britain, which shows they can be profoundly stupid, too).

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The Big Leak

Julian Assange may have killed the rationale for the Afghanistan occupation

July 26th 2010

In the long run, the little-noted news report that the Kepler space probe has produced evidence that terrestrial planets (small, solid, and cool, like earth) are widespread in the galaxy may prove to be a more important story than the announcement that Wikileaks had 90,000 US military documents detailing what a hopeless clusterfuck Afghanistan was, which has produced “Moon type” headlines around the world.

For the sake of humanity, I hope the Kepler story proves to be more important. It offers humanity a future; the Afghanistan story questions whether humanity is entitled to a future, or capable of surviving into it.

The Kepler story isn’t very sexy. It’s just slight variations of light in stars captured by a space camera. No images of steaming alien jungles with six-legged purple brontosauri munching palm fronds unconcernedly, or aerial shots of vast cities with flying cars and transportation pods. Just pinpricks of light that get slightly dimmer and stay that way for a while, and the amount it dims, times the length of time it dims, tells us how far out from the star the planet is, and how big it is. Even Spielberg would have trouble making that dramatic.

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