The k2p blog

The number 2017 is an odd number and is a prime (the 306th such).

But, it is not:

• a Fibonacci number,
• a Bell number,
• a Catalan number,
• a regular number (Hamming number),
• a factorial of any number, or
• a perfect number.

In short the number 2017 is quite ordinary.

2016 has been anno horibilis for some but I think it has been just another year. Whether year 2017 is more than just ordinary remains to be seen. But I am more hopeful than fearful.

In the geopolitical sphere the most notable event has been that what looked like the unstoppable march of ISIS at the end of 2015, has in fact reversed and ISIS are now on a hiding to nothing. And it is the Russian intervention in Syria that the world has to thank for that. In the political world, Brexit and Trump’s win have been seismic events. A global trend against the liberal/socialist/elitist world-view of a self-declared “intelligentsia” telling the great unwashed what was good for them, which began before 2016 and will continue for many years yet, has strengthened.

I think this trend is part of an inevitable move to a distributed rather than a centralised system of societies managing themselves. The UN and its many bodies, the EU and the WHO are all examples where centralisation has gone too far. What has been forgotten is that we have to think globally but make decisions and act locally. Global decisions will always eventually be repudiated locally – unless they are imposed by coercion. The trend to distributed decision making is, I think, analagous to the growth of distributed rather than centralised power generation or distributed rather than centralised communication systems

But after some 4.5 billion + 2016 revolutions around the Sun, the Earth now starts on another orbit. The birthday of the Sun on 25th December comes long before the invention of Christianity. At 59°N our day is now just over 6 hours long. Hope rises as the days are again palpably getting longer. By the end of June we will be at close to 18 hours of daylight.

Here’s wishing that 2017 will see many fears unrealised and some hopes being met.

Tags: Sol Invictus

This entry was posted on December 24, 2016 at 7:15 am and is filed under Trivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.