Cold as hell

I stood on the platform shivering. I couldn't understand why; it's not that cold and there is nothing like the nasty winds that New England winters too often bring,

Maybe it had something to do with the radio station where I'd spent the day working; that place is always cold in the winter and hit in the summer. The thermometer on the control room wall read 60 Fahrenheit, and the kitchen and much of the broadcast area wasn't much warmer.

Tonight at midnight my Dover, NH client will be switching to the new ABC News satellite feed from the one they've been getting from Westwood One. `For reasons known only to ABC News, they're not giving us any overlap period where both feeds are usable in case the new one has problems, and they're pulling the switch at midnight on a major holiday. That doesn't inspire confidence.

As 2014 is coming to an end, it's worth looking back on. This year no one important to me died, but my father's health broke and he is now in a nursing home. I've been visiting him regularly, but sometimes he does not seem to know I'm there.

My work is going OK, but I'm looking for new opportunities, and particularly at running my own radio station or group of stations. I won't be able to keep going forever as I am; my clients won't be around forever, and I sense age creeping up on me.

I have a new girlfriend, Janet; I met her on OKCupid in June. Things are going well, but it is something of an long-distance relationship; she lives in Maine.

If I could find work there, I'd be happy to live in Maine, even if it is even colder there than here,

The train has been stuck behind a disabled commuter train; as I write this, we are finally moving again. We are at least 45 minutes late. I se the Merrimack River glimmering in the darkness to my right, so we are almost in Haverhill. North of there there is no commuter rail service, and we have only our opposite number and Pan Am to get in our way.

Yes, Pan Am is a railroad now. It is weird seeing the Pan Am logo on locomotives and boxcars instead of airliners.

This is Haverhill, and there are two attractive young women on the platform in short skirts. They must be freezing their asses off.

I see the tower lights for 92.5 WXRV "The River" to my right. I worked there briefly in 2007.

We are running an hour late. I should have brought a snack. I suppose I could go see what they're selling in the lounge car.

What ese happened in 2014? Nothing good on the political front; the Republicans now control 2/3 of the state legislatures and both houses of Congress. Barack Obama started his presidency with Democrats in charge of both the House and the Senate, where they had 60 seats. He's done such a poor job of making his case that people are voting against their own best interests, electing ostriches who deny demonstrable fact in pursuit of their own narrow interests. Mitch McConnell is a contemptible person with no loyalty to anyone but himself. If I lived in Kentucky I'd be embarrassed to show my face.

2014 was the year ISIS emerged as a major new power in the Middle East. My gut feeling, based on my exposure to Islam back in the seventies, is that this administration's response is dead wrong. You cannot discredit political Islam by throwing bombs and troops at it. You can't fight extremism with an army; it is the wrong tool. It only gives legitimacy to a medievalism that, left to itself, would quickly reveal its inadequacy in the modern world.

The other day I remembered that in 1979, having just graduated from college with a degree in classical Arabic, I interviewed for a job with the NSA. The process took long enough that, having found work in radio, I declined to go back for a second interview with the agency. I am wondering whether I could have had any impact on what I feel is now a disastrously wrong foreign policy, had I made a different choice. Pretty much everyone in the Muslim world hates us now, even in countries like Turkey that are nominally our allies.

That said, I am not a persuader by nature. When people tell me I'm wrong, I leave them to do as they please. And I wouldn't have been able to stomach working for Ronald Reagan. That man and the ideology he promoted so well ruined America.

I just found out yesterday that Radio Moscow, or the Voice of Russia as it ame to be called after 1991, no longer exists. There are no more shortwave broadcasts from Russia (nor from Canada or the Netherlands). Who would have thought that such a day would come?

Actually, it is not quite true that there are no more shortwave broadcasts from Canada. Radio Canada International is gone, and its long time antenna farm at Sackville, New Brunswick dismantled, but there are a handful of low powered stations on the 49-meter band that relay local Canadian AM stations; one of them is CFCX in Montreal, which puts a pretty good signal into Boston.

I do believe shortwave broadcasting will come back when the next cold or hot war comes. It is pretty much the only way to reach listeners without the consent of their governments. But in the meantime, a lot of the stations I remember from my youth are gone. One that remains on the air is Radio Havana, Cuba, still "transmitting from Cuba, free territory of the Americas". Not for long, though; the present thaw in US-Cuban relations can only herald the end of socialism on that island, which is too small and weak to resist the economic pressures of global capitalism. The socialist regime will die with Raul Castro, I think, if not before.

It is ironic, I think, that the Obama regime is behaving toward the Cubans as I would have it behave toward Iran and ISIS. The attraction of all those dollars and the culture they promote is more than any country smaller than China can withstand, whatever its ideology, The Chinese and their corrupt Russian allies are the countries our military should be looking at, not Syria or Iraq.

2014 was the year Libya fell into civil war, a war that never would have happened had not the Obama administration and its European allies decided to overthrow the Qadhdhafi regime two years ago. It is ironic that every regime we have overthrown in the Muslim world, beginning with Afghanistan in the 1980's, has been a secular government, and in its wake hs come chaos and Islamism. If we had set out to involve ourselves in endless pointless wars, we could not have done better. And do not believe the President's insistence that the Afghan war is over, and we have moved on; it is not, nor have we. The Middle East is our Peninsula Campaign, our Spanish quagmire, if not our march on Moscow.

We are past Dover, NH, now, a little more than halfway to Portland, and the train is moving along nicely, albeit still an hour behind schedule. I do wish I had brought along an apple or two. I may have to come back down here tomorrow, if the ABC News thing blows up in my face; ugh. At least it's not going to snow.

I am reading a book by a couple of Russian journalists about the FSB, the Russian security service that is the successor of the old KGB. It is a fascinating read. The Putin regime is corrupt to the core, the last fruit of Stalin's wrecking of Lenin's legacy during the 1930's. No Marxist who looks at Russia today can ever again imagine that the establishment of socialism in one country is anything more than provisional. In the end governments have to deliver on their promises; they must remain accountable to the working people they serve, or lose their support. And in the absence of that support, corruption rots the state.

"This thing all things devours: birds, beasts, trees, flowers; gnaws iron, bites steel, grinds hard stones to meal; slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountains down." Tolkien spoke of time, but corruption, the relentless advance of the social entropy that is the unchecked self-interest of the privileged, has much the same effect. I see plenty of it here in America, the world capital of unchecked self-interest, for capitalism is no more immune to it than socialism,

We are past Wells now. Saco is the next stop; then Portland, the end of the line for this train. I hope that pizza place is still open,

Happy new year, y'all!