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Friday, October 09, 2009
Assorted
Fran here. Considering the fine work being done lately by my Esteemed Co-Conspirators -- and I trust you've enjoyed the recent submissions by Aaron Brenzel, the vigilant Leonidas, and our eagle-eyed Colonel, to say nothing of the indefatigable whimsy of Akaky and the economic erudition of Scott Angell -- I feel liberated from my traditional obligation to produce a lengthy essay. Of course, being a conservative sort, I'm required to feel just a little guilty about it, but one must press on.
One of the ideas most widely bruited about in libertarian circles is the idea of liberation through longevity: outliving and outrunning the State, probably through developments in space travel and life support in non-Terrestrial environments. The redoubtable Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit, probably the most prominent libertarian in the DextroSphere, is especially enthusiastic about longevity research, as his frequent citations on the subject attest. And indeed, it's difficult to pooh-pooh the notion, given that other methods of resistance to tyranny have yielded so little.
The great Gregory Benford, in his novel Against Infinity, outlined a dynamic that could arise from such a development. Capitalist flight from an Earth completely subjugated by socialism would give rise to extra-Terrestrial enclaves freer than the home world...and provide a powerful impetus to Terran States to extend their authority over those enclaves. We know from experience that socialism is a process of general impoverishment; it needs infusions of life from capitalist societies to forestall collapse. If those societies are off-world, then socialism's tendency toward poverty would require it to open conduits of intercourse with the off-world colonies. Its tendency toward imperialism would impel it to reach out militarily as well, to suppress the competition for population and allegiance the off-world capitalisms would engender. To the extent that the Terran States might succeed at subjugating the off-world societies, it would trigger further waves of capitalist flight: a steady spatial expansion of the boundaries between freedom and tyranny.
Such a progression would be bounded only by longevity and technology. Technology, because it would limit our ability to reach new potential homes; longevity, because the further one must run, the longer one must live to get there. The pace of developments in those areas would of course be fastest in the capitalist societies, which would further sharpen the Terran States' hunger to absorb them.
Live longer, run faster and farther, work ever harder, subdue ever more hostile environments, and face down ever more ravenous threats from behind...say, do you really want to live forever?
Alastair Reynolds is the reigning king of "traditional" science fiction: that is, the sort of SF that embeds a substantial amount of science and technology, either as we currently possess it or as speculation. No one since Larry Niven has poured as much imaginative effort into that genre as Reynolds, and the results are eminently worth it. Every one of his novels is a jewel to be treasured.
Singularly for a writer who spreads his imagination across the Universe, in all his books Reynolds has maintained the speed of light in vacuum as an absolute limit for the propagation of matter and information. A limit of this sort has both constraining and empowering effects: on the one hand, a limit to the rate of travel obviously bounds the movements and decisions of characters; on the other, limits of all sorts are the fundamental challenges to human ingenuity, including the ingenuity of a writer at contriving obstacles for his heroes to surmount.
However, in his most recent novel, House of Suns, Reynolds uses the light speed limitation in a unique way: as a surmountable obstacle in its own right, but with an intriguing catch.
The traditional objection to any possibility of exceeding light speed has been the preservation of causality. One of Larry Niven's early stories, "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation," explored this notion in under two thousand words. Reynolds approaches it much differently, as a motif that powers the major plot thrust of the novel from behind a thick curtain. Despite only becoming visible in the last few pages of the book, it sustains a remarkable tale about genocide and vengeance in a galactic meta-civilization held together by the efforts of "Lines" of "shatterlings." Each Line is a thousand clones of a single audacious explorer. The shatterlings rove the galaxy individually, at light speed, chronicling the progress of local and regional civilizations, cataloguing social and technological developments, and regathering every two hundred thousand years to pool their experiences and make further plans.
Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns: Highly recommended!
According to FOX News, Barack Hussein Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Our inept, ever-campaigning Socialist-in-chief has apparently found kindred spirits on the Peace Prize Committee.
Consider some of the other, recent awardees for the full significance of this selection:
- Yasser Arafat: mass murderer and aspiring tyrant.
- Jimmy Carter: enabler to Yasser Arafat, Ruhollah Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, and Kim Jong-il.
- Al Gore: serial liar and fraudster, with emphasis on phony ecological and climatological crises.
- Wangari Maathai: socialist environmentalist who claims the AIDS virus was engineered as a weapon of war.
- Mikhail Gorbachev: superintended the fall of the Soviet Union and then blamed his former nation's troubles on the capitalist world.
- Rigoberta Menchu: Communist activist and fraudulent "author" of a completely fictitious "autobiography."
- Kofi Annan: international kleptocrat, nepotist, enabler of sexual exploitation of weaker peoples, and enemy of Israel and the United States.
- Mohammed ElBaradei: perennial enemy of Israel and sub rosa collaborator with Iran in its development of nuclear weapons.
'Nuff said.
If it weren't for the Internet, would you have read about this?
When two brand new, shiny black Mercedes SUVs bearing a "Hardin Police Department" logo drove through the main thoroughfare of Hardin, Mont., last week, people took notice.“How many police forces have Mercedes?” said Charlene Warren, a local business owner who has lived in Hardin for more than half a century. “That threw up a red flag.”
And speaking of flags, it did not go unnoticed that the emblem on the sides of the SUVs bore a strong resemblance to the Serbian national flag.
Furthermore, those "police department" cars were rolling through Hardin, a small southeastern Montana town of 3,600 that just happens not to have a police department....
The luxury vehicles that rolled through town belonged to the American Police Force (APF), a California-based security firm that is drafting a contract that will give it control over a $27 million medium-security prison that was built in Hardin more than two years ago, but has never held any prisoners....
“We have covered this story for years now, and for the last month, it’s been one twist and turn from the other” Nick Lough, a reporter at KULR-8 in Billings, Mont., told FOXNews.com.
The latest twist: The owner of APF, Michael Hilton, is a convicted felon, including two convictions in grand theft cases, and an alleged con-artist who, according to some sources, utilizes more than 20 aliases.
And there are people who see no harm in letting the United Nations have control of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Fortunately, there are also people with better vision.
Remain vigilant.
Comments
I just Googled “The Preservation of Causality”. My brains hurts now. Thanks a lot, Francis!
Posted by on 10/09/2009 at 12:11 PMIf you want to know where we are headed (both terrestrially and if we do get off world), read Harry Harrison’s trilogy “To The Stars” (Home World, Wheel World, Star World).
Posted by on 10/11/2009 at 01:39 PM
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