Well, it’s almost here. The Great Day. The Last Page. Yup, the Mayan calendar is supposed to run out, what, tonight? Tomorrow? Yes, all the prophets are lined up in their pointy hats, and all the Doomsday preppers are checking their larders to see if maybe they should add another case of beef jerky or, more important, buy a couple more rifles/shotguns/mortars/bazookas. Well, they are  part of a long, long tradition. Making book on the end of the world has been  around about as long as it took  OG, the stoneager, to figure out that some of his fellow cave dwellers weren’t too smart, and that he could make his own life a lot easier by off-loading some of his work onto them, while he entered Dream Time and communed with the Spirit of the Lion, Antelope or whatever spirits happened to be around and feel like talking, or ‘talking’, since I can’t imagine real spirits just sitting around someplace and gassing, like a bunch of geezers in front of some pot-bellied stove.  The Economist has a story and also a very nice chart detailing several of the major apocalyptic movements and prophets, most of whom didn’t last too long. If you give too-detailed predicitions about The End, and it doesn’t happen, that sort of shakes your credibility. Fortunately, though, most of the Flock will still swallow some ‘re-interpretation’ of the Message, so you’ll probably be OK.  Way back in the Middle Ages, quite a few such movements got started, and stopped, because the authorities were very unhappy about crowds of folk moving around the countryside yelling about this or that. The medieval states were what the Poli Sci crowd calls ‘weak states’. There was a limit to what authority could do, and uprisings had to be dealt with swiftly or they could make real trouble. The ‘strong’ states of today are more tolerant but not all of them. China, for example, is really anxious about one Christian sect that claims Christ has returned in the form of a woman and is in hiding in China, and the end is just around the corner. Since much of the Chinese leadership’s working day is taken up with ensuring ‘stability’, meaning that everybody is supposed to be working and not asking inconvenient questions, any kind of millennialist preaching is upsetting.   Many Chinese saw the movie 2012 and too many started taking it seriously. But, a buck’s a buck and the more entrepreneurial are relieving their fellows of rather large sums on what looks very much like DoomsDay  Prepping in the Middle Kingdom: ball-shaped pods that float, houseboats that will rise in the flood, beef jerkey, and all the rest of the necessities. Hey, they’re gonna buy it from somebody, so they might as well buy it from me. The group in question plays pretty rough. Some observers call it a racket, pure and simple. The gummint doesn’t like some of the preaching either, which describes the fall of the the Great Red Dragon. Hmmmmm…..I wonder what they’re talking about. They won’t be the first or the last to talk themelves into a long stretch behind barbed wire out west in the Gobi desert someplace.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/world/asia/doomsday-chatter-makes-chinese-government-nervous.html?partner=rssemc=rss&_r=0

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11

On this day in 1941 carrier-based Japanese naval aircraft attacked the US Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. This action was designed to cripple American intervention in Japan’s plan to seize territories in Southeast Asia that were good sources of raw materials for its industry, and to realize plans for a much greater Japanese Empire, to destroy the colonial empires of the European nations which in the case of the Dutch East Indies had existed for more than three centuries.The Pearl Harbor raid brought, dragged rather, the USA into the Second World War. Hitler obligingly declared war on America three days later, and the USA was in it up to the hilt. War has its own logic, and matters developed in ways none of the belligerents could have foreseen or wanted. And we deal even now with the consequences of those developments.  The immediate result of the Pearl Harbor attack was  the loss of  several large ships, and damage to many more, in addition to almost three thousand casualties. Japanese forces swept over the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), important Pacific island bases, Burma, Hong Kong and Malaya, capturing the British base at Singapore. But those months were only the prelude to a long, bloody struggle that came close, at times. to a war of extermination. It all started on this day in 1941.

It’s official. Two of the largest publishers left standing around will merger their identities into a new company. I’ll spare you the corporate boiler plate about  how excited everyone is at the new situation and all the challenges it will bring. My, yes!  Random House is a favorite of mine, for purely sentimental reasons. There is nothing sentimental about the publishing biz, but never mind. RH at one time produced high-quality editions of important books, well bound, nicely laid out, with good type face, and all for the sum of one dollar. That was, as you can easily tell, a very long time ago.The books formed part of what was called The Modern Library, and the project was the brainchild of RH president, Bennett Cerf. Cerf suspected that more people would read good books if the  price were lower and the quality still pretty high.  RH was a pretty good house, but it was absorbed by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann, and run as a fief. Now the Germans want to get rid of it.  Pearson, in the UK, is also a publishing conglom and it wants to get rid of Penguin too, so a kind of shotgun wedding was arranged.  Penguin got started back in the 1930s as a publisher of paperback books. It published classics, detective stories, fiction, travel pieces.  In later  years, the house went on to publish in hard back and expanded the line considerably. I don’t know what the new outfit will be called, but I wish them, it, well.  It seems like the last stand of the cavalry in Fort Apache.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/pearson-bertelsmann-confi_n_2038108.html?utm_hp_ref=books