Fire From Above

 

 

The strongest radiation storm since 2005 is raging on the sun. You know things have been ominously quiet up there, but that is over.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded a monster ultraviolet plume on Sunday, a colossal jet of “coronal mass ejection”  from sunspot 1402. The charged particles will strike the earth this morning, and I cannot tell you if it will affect the State of the Union address by the President tonight.

These things can, of course, and the solar impact on the weather and the climate is one of those things that is imperfectly understood. They are re-routing airline flights and turning satellites so that their more shielded sides are facing the blast.

I am hoping that we keep the global positioning system and other space-borne conveniences of modern life. Everything seems to be up in the air these days, and with the State of the Union Address tonight, I am expecting the themes that will plague us until election day this November will be trotted out and given a trial run.

I don’t think they are going to turn on the television at Willow, but naturally I am interested in how the message is going to be spun for consumption by the lumpen electorate.

Naturally, the blast won’t mimic the majestic plume of ejectorate of the solar flare. Our political classes specialize only in emitting heated oxygen and C02, both of which are normally harmless, but can have a greenhouse effect all their own.

Mitt and Newt are demonstrating that big time down in Florida. Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney are savaging themselves to the point that both are wounded, and perhaps fatally. I have always thought the former Speaker was basically unelectable, an Mr. Romney may be too patrician to campaign well in the general election.

The whole mess about the taxes is a case in point. Mitt apparently posted his taxes for 2009-10, and from what the media is telling us this morning, he coughed up $3 million each year to the IRS, and $7 million to charities, which strikes me as a lot.

The commentators hasten to remind us that even though his check to the government had a lot of zeros in it, the percentage amounted only to the 15% of the capital gains rate. Since he did not have a paycheck, per se, he falls into the Warren Buffett category of taxpayers who really want to pay more but can’t get around to it unless everyone else does, too.

I can’t dredge up either a lot of enthusiasm for Mr. Romney’s careful adherence to the law, nor a lot of envy about the fact that he can get away with it. I am confident that the President will seek the most advantageous rate for his own filings once this ceases to be a litmus test on privilege- everyone, including Mr. Buffett, do the same thing.

Oh, did I mention that Warren’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC railroad is among the U.S. and Canadian firms that stand to benefit from the Administration’s principled decision rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline permit?

I am not wasting a lot of time worrying about it. There is too much going on here trying to do estate paperwork and parse files, the oldest of which was done on Mom’s Smith-Corona in 1962. If you want to have fun on the internet, try to track an insurance company down through the years that has changed names more frequently than Newt’s wives. It is strange that the people of South Carolina gave him a pass on that. I am going to vote in the Virginia primary, I think, because all you have to do is show up and claim you are one.

Someone sent me a quiz the other day sort of like the ones in Cosmopolitan about finding your g-spot, and about as relevant. It was designed to show where you actually are on the political spectrum. There were five questions on social issues, and five on national economic policy. Having answered with the usual ambiguity, I discovered that I was mostly with the Centrist-Libertarian-Left side of the distribution, by which I favor same-sex marriage for those who like it, legalization of some things, and reinstatement of some sort of national service, feel a slid “maybe” on government bail-outs and strong on national defense.

There isn’t anyone who wants any of those things running at the moment, so I intend to withhold any decisions. There is going to be so much time to listen to what the campaigns have raised so much money to spend on telling us.

This is a centrist nation at its heart, and the desperate play to the base of both parties- pandering to the ridiculous- is demeaning to democracy but that it what it is, here is the somewhat threadbare Greatest Republic on Earth.

There is one thing, though.

It turns out that Mitt and I share something more than having a father who worked for the other one in Detroit.

I graduated from college in 1973- the pivot point on when the great city of Detroit pivoted between Law and Order politics on the right, and Big Government on the left.

I had secured, much to my surprise, a living wage from the McGraw-Hill Book Company to travel to an assortment of higher education concerns in Southeastern Michigan, and had intended to stay right there in Looney-tunes Ann Arbor. Management was smarter than I was. When they asked about the location from which I would be working, they specifically told me that hanging around with my college buddies was out of the question.

I wasn’t exactly broke, but close enough to it, and the folks were eager to see me off the family payroll. I started to look around, and saw an opportunity that did not come with a lease or damage deposit.

My pal George’s folks had bucked the trend in mass urban flight after the riots, and traded the ranch-style house in Bloomfield Hills for a mansion on Afton Street in the Palmer Woods neighborhood of NW Detroit, not far from the border at Eight Mile. just after the riots, entranced with the private security in the development and the posh luxury of the stately manor, originally chartered by the fabled Burton Abstract and Title family.

 

I did not know until this week that the house had another owner along the way- George and Lenore Romney. I am confident that the kids used all the available bedrooms, and I may have had my quarters above the three-car garage in the same room as Mitt.

Nice house. But of course the Romney’s had plenty of dough, and got out of Detroit while the getting was good.

Oh, Detroit runs out of cash in March and may go into State-controlled receivership. The local activist groups are incensed at the abrogation of local sovereignty, though of course, this is a completely self-inflicted wound, courtesy of the late Mayor-for-Life Coleman Young and finished off by the self-aggrandizing swindler Kwame Kilpatrick.

Too bad. It was a great city in its day. I am deliberately not going to extend the metaphor to anything else in particular. I have to get in the shower and be ready for the solar flare.

Copyright 2012
Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com