The Probability Broach: The inevitable deus ex machina

Set design from the play "Andromède" - the gods show up to decree an ending

The Probability Broach, chapter 23

Win and his friends are sitting on the curb, dejected and humiliated, outside the children’s birthday party they just violently crashed. Win narrates that they later “settled out of court” to compensate the kids for the trauma of having guns pointed in their faces.

“Wait!” Something else clicked in my head. “I’ve just had another thought.”

“Did it hurt?” Lucy and Ed asked simultaneously. Clarissa grimaced and put a hand delicately over her mouth. I like loyalty in a woman.

“Okay, wise-asses. Burgess was regional head of the most important federal agency in the country. There were a couple thousand flunkies available to get their hands dirty for him on field operations. So why his personal involvement in this whole thing? Why did he return to the Meiss murder scene? Why did he follow me to Fort Collins? Why did he kill everyone who interfered with him: Meiss, MacDonald, all the attempts on me?”

Lucy nodded impatiently.

“He was up to something on his own,” I finished. “Something he didn’t want others—especially his bosses—horning in on.”

Win concludes that Burgess was most likely keeping the Probability Broach a secret even from the U.S. government, biding his time while he figured out how to exploit it for maximum personal gain. But since Win killed Burgess in a duel at the Continental Congress, Madison and his allies will have to reestablish contact with the other side before they can usher in their invasion force.

This is good news, because it means the North American Confederacy isn’t going to be nuked the day after tomorrow. However, they still have to figure out where the bad guys are hiding out.

Since it’s not in Fort Collins, Win suspects the next logical spot is in Denver, the regional headquarters of SecPol in his world. He calls up Deejay and Oolorie, the scientists who first built the Probability Broach. In an earlier chapter, they mentioned that they were developing a device that could detect when and where someone else is using one. He’s hoping they’ll have it ready by now, and Deejay obliges him:

“Win, I was just about to try your number again. I wanted—”

“We’ve been otherwise occupied,” I grimaced, outlining our recent humiliation and such conclusions as we’d reached. “You mentioned building a device to detect someone else’s use of a Broach?”

“But that’s why I’ve—We finished it this morning. A simple matter of harmonics. We could have saved you all the trouble you got into!”

Apparently, Deejay didn’t try doing anything with this device until Win called her up to ask about it. It’s like a video game, where NPCs with vital quest information just stand around like inanimate objects until the player approaches them and opens a dialog box.

(Side note: Do Deejay and Oolorie feel any sense of guilt, or at least responsibility, for inventing the device that’s the reason their civilization is threatened with nuclear annihilation? Do they have any sentiments similar to Oppenheimer’s famous quote? That’s a moral question that TPB never addresses.)

Deejay asks another pertinent question: once they find the bad guys, what are they going to do? Win says they’ll kick the door down and come in guns blazing, the way he was planning to do with the kids’ birthday party. But Oolorie the cetacean scientist has qualms (much like Lucy, who goes back and forth several times on this—first saying it’s immoral to break into someone else’s house no matter what, then assisting Win in doing so, then saying it’s immoral again):

“Have you not also reasoned that you will be violating their rights, as fully as they plan to violate ours? Would you—”

“Fuck all this philosophy jazz!” I shouted. “This is a matter of survival!”

“And importing unprincipled behavior is an aid to that end? My poor ignorant—”

“I agree, Win,” Deejay interrupted diplomatically. “It’s not only suicidal, but morally wrong, as well.”

“And unnecessary,” the principled porpoise added. “Nothing encourages ethical practices so well as a practical alternative to evil.”

Win asks what they mean by that, and Deejay says they’ve discovered an “interference factor”—a way for one Probability Broach device to scramble another one’s signal. If they can get close enough to where Madison and his henchmen are setting up, they can jam the bad guys’ Broach and prevent them from contacting anyone in Win’s world.

Now the heroes have a plan. But Deejay warns that they’ll have to get close, because it requires great precision. If their alignment is a tiny bit off, the two interfering Broach devices will go “concentric”—i.e., whatever goes into one comes out the other, even if they’re in the same universe. (Think this will be relevant later?)

I looked at Ed, then back at the Telecom. “How difficult would it be to set your machinery up somewhere else?”

She considered. “Providing we had sufficient power? All we’d need is a pinhole, and detection hardly requires—”

“Great! We’re all going on a little trip!”

In the penultimate chapter of this book, the expected deus ex machina has finally made its appearance.

As we’ve discussed, an anarchist world has no good way to counter either an invading army, or a homegrown mafia that tries to seize power over others. Because it doesn’t have a monopoly on force in its own territory, an anarchy can’t effectively defend itself against organized threats.

Despite being a right-wing anarchist himself, Smith seems to agree with this criticism. When his archvillain John Jay Madison made exactly this point, no one was able to think of a convincing response or come up with a plan to counter him. It’s remarkable that a utopian political novel intended to sing the praises of anarcho-capitalism instead gives a clear illustration of how it’s fatally flawed.

To rescue his political philosophy, Smith introduces a last-minute deus ex machina. By using the “interference factor” discovered by the scientists, the protagonists can foil Madison’s plot without having to come up with a way the NAC could defeat an armed invasion. But that doesn’t do anything to establish the plausibility of this philosophy in the real world, which doesn’t have such conveniently magical technology.

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New on OnlySky: Our shady future

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the rapid rollout of solar power as a rare bright spot in a world feeling the consequences of climate change.

Renewables are being deployed at a massive and accelerating scale, and they’re poised to become the planet’s dominant energy source in the very near future. But if they’re not going to compete with human beings for living space or farmland, we’re going to need lots of places to put them. This column reviews some of the newer and more creative ideas where they can be placed with relatively little impact – from big-box store rooftops, to parking lot canopies, to capped landfills and brownfields, to solar panels designed to cover canals or float on the surface of reservoirs.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

In the summer of 2026, Europe broiled in a record-shattering heatwave that brought triple-digit temperatures to a swath of countries from France and the United Kingdom to Germany and Poland. At least ten thousand people have died from the heat, and devastating wildfires raged across wine country in France and Spain. Parching drought across the continent has sent river levels plunging to record lows, revealing shipwrecks submerged for decades.

In hospitals, the heat is so intense that nurses are passing out and scanning machines are failing—especially since many European hospitals don’t have air conditioning, never having needed it before.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, wildfires raging in Canada shrouded major cities in a haze of smoke. Parts of Texas were slammed by the second 1,000-year storm in two years, causing massive floods. The American West is, yet again, having an awful fire season.

But as vast as the scale of the crisis is, we shouldn’t lose hope, because humanity is finally rising to the challenge. Renewables are being deployed at a breakneck pace, and still accelerating.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: You and what army?

A black-and-white photo of soldiers marching on parade

The Probability Broach, chapter 22

John Jay Madison and his gang of Hamiltonians have gotten away and are preparing to launch their invasion of the North American Confederacy. It’s up to Win Bear and his friends (and only them, apparently—more on this in a minute) to find and stop them before that happens.

While they’re debating what to do, Win has a lightbulb moment. The Probability Broach links the same geographic spot in both universes, so he reasons that any invasion is going to originate from U.S. government territory in his world. If they find the corresponding spot in this world, that should be where Madison is hiding out.

Fortunately, Win has a map of Colorado from his world that he brought with him:

The map was grimy and blood-stained. I unfolded it gingerly. In these late, great days of the Republic, you never know when you might want to turn Uncle Irving in for operating an unregistered Xerox machine. One advantage to a police state is that it’s easy to find the police: all maps printed in the Land of the Formerly Free are required to indicate local SecPol offices with a brand new little map symbol, a mailed fist grasping an unsheathed dagger. Yech.

But don’t forget, the problem with Win’s world is that bad guys have too many rights!

Consulting the map, Win finds a SecPol outpost smack in the middle of (his) town. He and his friends do some figuring to determine where in this world the corresponding spot would be, then prepare to stage a commando raid. They arm themselves with their biggest guns:

I strapped on my Smith & Wesson, tucked the derringer into what passes for hip pockets, and added the Browning for good measure. I thought about it for a while and added the Bowie knife to my belt.

Lucy had arrived with the mate to her Gabbet Fairfax. One was bad enough, two were even worse. The huge pistols were wearing her instead of the other way around.

…Ed had a spare .375 as I expected, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. He was holding the first two-handed piece I’d seen here, a very, very large-bore Coltomatic, firing clusters of evil-looking fléchettes that could fill an alley full of whistling death at a touch of the trigger.

So that whole Continental Congress really was for nothing, huh?

Since the book never points this out, I will: Despite Win presenting evidence of the danger to the entire population of North America, no one else reaches out to them or offers them any help with this mission. No one volunteers to join the fight, to supply them with backup or extra firepower. No one else even launches their own independent effort to stop Madison. Even with the North American Confederacy facing nuclear annihilation, the entire populace seems perfectly content to leave it up to these four random people to do something about it.

Armed to the teeth, they head out in Ed’s hovercraft to where their calculations say Madison should be hiding out:

“Let’s see that map, Lucy.” Ed looked back over his shoulder. He was running full fans, and I kept watching for road company traffic cops. Hate to get busted doing 175 in a 90 zone.

I quote this paragraph only because Smith’s offhand mention of “road company traffic cops” is the only time in the book that anything like this is mentioned or alluded to.

In an anarcho-capitalist society like this one, there should be private fiefdoms on every block. It should be like the “franchise nations” from Snow Crash, where every business and gated community has its own laws and its own armed security to enforce them. This shouldn’t be a land of untrammeled freedom, but a patchwork of petty kingdoms where the laws change multiple times over the course of a single trip across a city.

They arrive at their destination, a pleasant suburban house with no sign of nefarious intent. But our heroes are too crafty to be fooled by its innocuous appearance:

Ed motioned silently: Lucy should circle around back. He went for a side entrance, Clarissa and I took the front. Halfway up the curving walk, we dropped into a canter. I gained the doorstep, flattened beside the door, and tried the knob. Open.

…We ducked down a short corridor and to the left, weaving, jumping at shadows. I heard Lucy shout something, Ed crashing the side door, just as we exploded into the living room.

“ALL RIGHT!” I screamed. “FREEZE, YOU—”

“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday, dear…”

“—bastards?” I finished lamely, both pistols pointed from a crouch, Clarissa leveling hers over my shoulder. Ed stared grimly down the barrel of his fléchette gun. Lucy looked like Clint Eastwood in drag. We had ’em covered, dead to rights: about sixteen five-year-olds and their mothers, sitting around a table, birthday cake in the center blazing idiotically away.

This scene is supposed to be funny—traumatizing children with guns for comedy’s sake!—but realistically, it should have ended in a bloodbath.

The very first thing that Smith showed us about the North American Confederacy is that everyone is armed and ready to defend themselves at a split-second’s notice. You have to be, after all, since there’s no state to protect you from wrongdoers.

Even if everyone in the NAC has Lucy’s almost superhuman ability to exercise restraint in a crowded public place, this isn’t one of those. As far as any of these people know, they’re under attack in their own home by armed invaders.

When a burly stranger kicks down your front door while screaming and waving a gun, that’s not the time to stay calm and ask clarifying questions to make sure it wasn’t a well-intentioned mistake. That’s the time to dive behind the table, whip out your gun and start blasting. So why don’t they?

Smith alludes to this possibility by having Win narrate, “I’m grateful we weren’t a year or two later. Around age six or seven, little Confederates begin acquiring handguns the same way I got my first bike”—but none of that explains why the adults at the party didn’t open fire.

This is a consistent problem throughout the book, as in the earlier scene where Win plows through a crowd of people like a football linebacker—somehow without getting shot or stabbed. (Or even challenged to a duel!)

Smith says that guns keep the peace in this world, but he never shows that happening in the only way it could possibly happen. For all that he claimed to love weapons, as an anarcho-capitalist libertarian, he flinched from following through with his own premise.

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The Probability Broach: Checks, unbalanced

A set of balance scales

The Probability Broach, chapter 22

This chapter opens with another of Smith’s fake quotes, but this one is especially eyebrow-raising because it valorizes a real-life murderer:

Despite Hamiltonian claims to the contrary, the Federalist Constitution contained no “checks and balances.” The Executive, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all were tentacles of the same octopus. All received sustenance at the same nipple. All had a single interest in common, power. Look for checks and balances in the marketplace: anyone who hangs out his shingle as a judge and cannot render adjudication satisfactory enough to be paid by those he judges will seek another profession or starve. And that, indeed, is justice.

—Professor Leon Czolgosz
Federalist Fallacies

We’ve been over this before, but to reiterate the gigantic and obvious problem with this scheme: if judges are paid by the people who bring them their cases, they’ll always rule for the person who can afford to pay more. I can’t tell if Smith is so naive that this never occurred to him, or if he knew it was a possibility but ignored it for ideological reasons.

This means that, in the North American Confederacy, the rich can commit crimes with impunity. They can harass, torment and abuse others as much as they like, and if they get sued, they can just write a check to their hired judge to make all the consequences vanish. As the saying goes, if the only penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the poor who can’t afford it.

This is evidence for my point that power is like water. In the last chapter, Smith bragged that he’d invented a society where, since there was no government, nobody would have power over others. But he’s wrong. He didn’t find a way to get rid of coercive power; he just changed the form it takes, and ensured there are even fewer checks or balances on how the rich can exercise it.

Ironically, America’s founders weren’t so naive. They thought more deeply than Smith about ways their system could be abused or subverted, and they knew full well that government officials would seek to expand their own power at the expense of others.

That’s what motivated the famous line from the Federalist Papers about how “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”. In other words, by dividing the powers of government among different branches, each one’s natural desire for power would ensure that they’d hold each other in check. No one would want to let the others become more powerful at their own expense.

You could argue that it didn’t work. As we’ve seen in recent decades, the presidency has become steadily more powerful at the expense of the legislature, to the extent that conservatives are arguing that the president is functionally a king with limitless power to break or ignore laws. But the founders were at least cognizant of the problem, which is more than you can say for libertarian tracts like this book.

Getting back to the plot, Win successfully rescued his friends Ed and Clarissa from being frozen to death, but that’s all he’s accomplished. Madison has escaped and destroyed all the evidence of where he went:

Every scrap of paper in the building lay in the wastebaskets, reduced to a fine white ash. They’d been through this before, in a dozen countries, and were good at it. Downstairs was a different story: tangled broken wiring, scarred woodwork, splintered crates as if they’d made the decision to move at leisure, then gotten hurried halfway through.

“They’re rabbitted, all right.” I told Ed as we surveyed Bealls’s empty workroom. “As soon as he’s set up again, they’ll have their weapons and manpower.”

“The question is, where’s he setting up?”

“Lucy, even if we knew,” I answered bitterly, “how could we do anything about it? You people and your goddamned principles!”

Are we perhaps not reading the same book? Because I seem to recall that, just a few pages earlier, Win, Lucy and their hired guards kicked down Madison’s front door and raided his house to rescue their friends.

Why was that an allowable act, according to whatever passes for law in the NAC? And whatever reason they have to justify it, why couldn’t they do the same thing again if they can find Madison’s new hideout?

She kicked at an empty carton. “I dunno. Guess I’d rather have my principles shot from under me than finish ’em off myself. We do have two real live witnesses now. We could make kidnapping charges stick this time.”

Clarissa shook her head, “I’m afraid not, Lucy. We never saw any of the real leaders, just Mikva and his two henchmen. Madison was in Gallatinopolis at the time, with several thousand reputable witnesses.”

Swell, I thought. They could set up, pull whole armies through, and no one could stop them until they started initiating force-and by then…

It seems like L. Neil Smith is coming up with increasingly contrived excuses not to invoke his own legal system. Even if Ed and Clarissa never saw Madison himself, only his henchmen… they were being held captive in his house. How is that not a relevant fact to bring to a judicial proceeding?

We already know that they have no notion of fingerprints or, apparently, forensic evidence in general. Is the North American Confederacy’s justice system so spectacularly useless that you can’t accuse anyone of a crime unless you personally witnessed them committing it, in broad daylight with their face uncovered, while cackling villainously and monologuing about how they were knowingly breaking the law by doing so?

Far be it from me to fix Smith’s plot holes for him, but a better solution would be the one we already saw at the Continental Congress: any judicial proceeding takes time, and that’s the one thing the protagonists don’t have. Even if he’s caught dead to rights, Madison could use procedural technicalities to stall until he gets his Probability Broach working and brings his armies through, at which point it’d be too late.

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New on OnlySky: Abolish the Senate

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about why we should get rid of the Senate once and for all.

Despite their willingness to fight and die for democracy, despite everything they sacrificed for democracy, the American founders didn’t actually trust democracy. They designed America’s constitutional system to create multiple barriers to the will of the common people. The Senate was one of those.

For a long time, it’s hampered the functioning of the legislative branch, preventing the party that wins elections from being able to govern as it wishes. In our time, it’s become worse than ever, constantly creating artificial crises and paralyzing government shutdowns, and blocking legislation that’s supported by majorities of the public. It’s time to scrap the Senate. But is there any realistic chance of that happening?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

The biggest problem with the Senate is its electoral malapportionment. Each state gets two votes, regardless of size. The most populous American state, California, has almost 40 million residents; and those 40 million people get the same two votes in the Senate as the least populous state, Wyoming, which has a bit over half a million people. In other words, every resident of Wyoming enjoys almost eighty times as much representation at the federal level as every Californian.

To highlight the absurdity, consider that Los Angeles County alone has more inhabitants than forty U.S. states. But Angelenos still get just two votes in the Senate, and they don’t even have those two votes all to themselves; they have to share them with the rest of California.

In theory, the 26 smallest states—which together account for less than 18% of the U.S. population—could control a majority of votes in the Senate. They could veto legislation supported by the other 82% of Americans.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Breaking and entering

A wooden door with a rusted, antique lock

The Probability Broach, chapter 21

In the last chapter, Win Bear and his friends failed to stop John Jay Madison at the Continental Congress, or even persuade the rest of the North American Confederacy to help in any way. However, they got a clue to the location of their kidnapped friends Ed and Clarissa: a turncoat henchman said they were being held at Hamilton House, Madison’s residence.

Win and Lucy take a “cannonball” transport to get there in record time, and they call Captain Forsyth and the rest of his private bodyguards to meet them there for backup:

A hovercraft on full fans skated up to the curb. Pistols drawn, Forsyth and two of his men jumped out.

I straightened. “Let’s hit the door!” I charged up the steps, bounded onto the porch, drawing my forty-one, and blasted the lock panel with three quick shots. The door creaked open. No one was there to greet us.

“Search the place!” I ran wildly through deserted corridors, nearly shooting several man-size pieces of covered furniture. The entire house seemed empty.

Wait. Why do they suddenly have the right to break into Madison’s house?

The North American Confederacy is supposed to treat private property as inviolable; it’s pretty much the only right they recognize. In an earlier chapter, the protagonists had an intense debate about whether to trespass on Madison’s property to uncover evidence of his crimes. Ed and Win eventually burglarized the place in the middle of the night, sweating bullets the whole time, and only narrowly escaped.

But now Win busts down his front door with no qualms. Why? Because one of Madison’s goons told him he could?

You could write this off as Win being so angry, exhausted and desperate that he no longer cares for such niceties. That would be a perfectly adequate explanation, except that Captain Forsyth and the rest of his squad willingly assist Win in breaking in, with no idea what they’re walking into.

We were told that security companies don’t fight each other in the North American Confederacy; they compel their clients to work together to resolve disputes peacefully. However, that doesn’t seem to be true either. What if Madison had left his hired guards behind? How did they know they weren’t about to kick off a security-company war?

The real explanation is that L. Neil Smith, like Ayn Rand, believes in protagonist-centered morality. Whatever he says about freedom and non-initiation of force, his actual core principle is: “The good guys are allowed to break whatever rules they want because they’re the good guys, and you know they’re the good guys because they say they are.”

This hypocrisy further underlines the point that an anarcho-capitalist society couldn’t work the way Smith insists it would. If his protagonists actually followed its rules, and didn’t have the all-purpose morality exemption their author grants them, the villains would have succeeded in their world-conquest plot.

But regardless, their search comes to naught. The house is deserted; all the machinery Madison was building to create his own Probability Broach has been shipped out. The bad guys have made a clean getaway. There’s no sign of Ed or Clarissa.

They’re about to give their friends up for dead, when Win has a brainstorm. He kicks down the freezer door—the same one where they found the frozen body of Richard Nixon—and Ed and Clarissa tumble out. They’re hypothermic, covered in frost, but alive. Strangely, they’re also wrapped in aluminum foil like mummies.

After Win and Lucy make some hot coffee to help their friends warm up (this is technically stealing Madison’s property, but no one seems to care at this point), Clarissa explains. The foil shielded them, somewhat, from the high-tech “paratronic” freezing rays:

“Paratronic radiation,” Clarissa explained, “the kind used to keep patients in stasis. It damps molecular motion, but metallic objects interfere, slow the process down. It doesn’t matter with something like frozen food, but with patients you have to be very careful. That’s why you didn’t get stasis, Win. Too many bullet fragments. Anyway, we peeled foil off a lot of food in there, and wrapped it around ourselves.” She’d finished her hot drink. Lucy shoved another into her hand. “It wouldn’t have bought us much time, but—”

“Enough to save our lives!” said Ed.

If this freezer is so dangerous to human life, shouldn’t it have an emergency release to open the door from inside?

In the real world, Congress passed a law called the Refrigerator Safety Act for just this reason, to force a redesign of refrigerator doors in response to children getting trapped and suffocating. Of course, an anarcho-capitalist society like the NAC has no one whose job it is to care about dangers like that, so that tracks.

Win and Lucy fill their friends in on how they utterly failed to accomplish anything at the Continental Congress. As Lucy notes, the bad guys didn’t really need to go anywhere: “They had us stopped in Gallatinopolis, and they knew it.”

The only bright spot is that the Hamiltonians (for some reason) neither killed Ed and Clarissa immediately, nor took them away to continue using them as hostages. They’re grateful for the rescue, all the more so because it turns out—at this late date—that Clarissa is in love with Win:

“There we were,” mused Ed, “freezing our asses off in there, and all she could do was blubber about never seeing you again, and how worried you must be. That’s why she thought of the aluminum foil—said it’d give you a little more time to rescue us! Never stopped hoping, right up to when we heard you blow the hinges off the front door. About half an hour after I’d given us up for dead.”

There isn’t really any justification for this, other than that the book is almost over and Smith wanted his hero to get a love interest. Until now, Clarissa has treated Win like a barbarian; she was furious at him when he tortured a prisoner to make him talk. But by authorial fiat, she now reverses her opinion and falls in love with Win, without even attempting to justify what redeeming characteristics she thinks he has.

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The Probability Broach: Cannonball run

An artillery barrel pointed at the viewer

The Probability Broach, chapter 21

Chapter 21 of TPB begins with another fictional quote, this one attributed to “Rosalie Wilderlane” (a reference to real-life libertarian author Rose Wilder Lane, who was also the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder):

The source of every human misery, the cause of every war, the great issue before every society for six thousand years has been the question, “Who shall have the power?” The significance of the Whiskey Rebellion is that, for the first time in history, individuals created a civilization in which the answer to that question is “Nobody!”

Impossible.

As I’ve observed before, power is like water. It can’t be squeezed out of existence; it will always take the shape of the society it exists within. In a democracy, power rests with the will of the majority. In capitalism, it’s held by those who have the most money, which they can convert into material resources or into influence to compel others to do their bidding.

Smith clearly doesn’t believe that no one in this society has power. He’s shown massive skyscrapers, road networks, irrigation projects, and other monumental works. The creation of these logically requires some person or group of people with the ability to control and coordinate the labor of thousands or millions of others. That’s what power is. If it’s literally impossible to have war or oppression because no one can exert any control over anyone else, it should also be impossible to build roads, bridges and skyscrapers.

In the last chapter, Madison’s turncoat ally Freeman K. Bertram gave Ed and Lucy a clue to where their friends Ed and Clarissa are being held hostage. For some reason (because the main characters do everything), rather than calling local security to handle it, they’re going themselves. They’re taking the fastest means of transport available in the North American Confederacy, a vehicle used only in emergencies:

Attendants hustled us out of the hoverbuggy toward a stubby metal cylinder the size of a Volkswagen bus. The nose was sandblasted and missing paint, the stern scorched and blistered. Between them was an oval hatch, and the legend Columbiad. Then we were through the six-inch hull, being belted into deeply cushioned seats. The machine’s interior was almost featureless: two couches in tandem facing a Telecom screen, no windows, and, when the door slammed shut like a coffin lid, dimly lit by a few instrument pilots.

Smith tells us that this method of transit is called a “cannonball”. It consists of a tunnel with the air pumped out to create a vacuum, and liquid hydrogen and oxygen poured in behind the vessel and ignited to accelerate it to immense speed. Win quips, “Now I knew what a rifle shell feels like.”

As the vehicle began moving ponderously, a man appeared in the screen, head and shoulders, wearing coveralls like the attendants who’d sealed us in. “Columbiad, Traffic Control. We’ll have you chambered in a moment. Please don’t touch any controls, keep your arms and legs within the couches. You’ll be pulling close to six G’s. Questions?”

The vehicle slanted downward ominously, rocking from side to side. “Where will this frammis dump us out?” Lucy asked unperturbed.

The controller glanced down at his keyboard. “Right now you’re simply routed for LAP. You have a specific destination in mind?”

“How about eighty-nine Tucker Circle?” I asked sarcastically, trying to ignore my heartbeat. He punched his console, paused, punched some more, then looked up.

“We’ll shunt you into the underground system, to the south-east corner of that block. Be prepared to exit quickly—I could only get a thirteen-second window between two scheduled trains. Your restraints will release when you drop below five mph, door-releases to your left will be illuminated. Good luck. Keep your hands and feet inside the couches.”

This may be a nitpick, but I have to say it: Did no one ask Win and Lucy to sign liability releases before getting into this contraption?

The text itself compares this mode of transport to being shot out of a giant cannon. Even if nothing goes wrong and the vessel doesn’t explode catastrophically, or miss its target and splatter them across the landscape, the immense G-force could certainly cause a fatal heart attack or a stroke in someone who’s in poor health. And to cap it all off, when they land, they only have thirteen seconds to get out—presumably before they get hit by a train!

I don’t care how advanced the NAC is, this must be an incredibly dangerous way to travel. Even if they have no laws governing whether this or any other form of transportation can exist, we know they have civil liability suits against the makers of harmful products. Smith brought this up himself as a solution to how an anarcho-capitalist society could put a stop to pollution. If one of these cannonballs blows up, shouldn’t the passengers’ next of kin sue this company out of existence?

An invisible hippopotamus suddenly draped its full weight the length of my body. I tried screaming, but couldn’t even breathe. My bruised arm began burning; I couldn’t move to see whether it hung over the edge of the couch. Too late anyway, I figured. I found myself wishing I’d taken time to arrange certain private parts a little more carefully. I was going to have bruises in some strange places.

…Another sudden lurch and the deceleration eased off. Suddenly we were in an ordinary subway tunnel. We rocked, gasping and screeching, to a halt. I let the belts fall from me, saw Lucy hit the door, and followed her into the coolness of a shopping center, up the escalator as fast as our elbows could push us, and out, blinking in the sunlight.

I’d left my coat in North Dakota. I wondered who was paying for the ride.

I’m assuming L. Neil Smith just put this part in because he thought it was cool, but it says a lot about how his anarcho-capitalist society manages risk. Namely, it doesn’t.

Libertarians are supposed to be against initiating force. In any vaguely rational society, that should include not subjecting your neighbors to unreasonable risk of harm. If you build a shooting range on your property, you should have to build walls and backstops, and not just assume that no stray bullet will ever miss the target and crash through the windows of the kindergarten next door.

The NAC as Smith depicts it is a far wilder and more chaotic place. It’s a society where anyone can do anything, regardless of the danger it poses to others. Individual freedom reigns supreme, to the extent that you can swing your fist regardless of whether someone else’s face is in the way.

We saw this in the chapter about highway safety, or rather the lack thereof. You can drive a car powered by nuclear reactors, speed at hundreds of miles an hour, or drive drunk without a problem. But this chapter makes the problem even more glaringly obvious.

I mentioned the personal liability of the travelers who willingly board these vehicles, but there’s also the collective risk imposed on everyone by a means of transport that amounts to firing giant artillery shells across continental distances. What if one of these cannonballs misses its target and comes crashing through your roof? What if they collide with one of those big fancy zeppelins? You think people complain about the noise and hazards of living near an airport—imagine what it would do to your property values to live underneath their firing trajectory!

Who on earth built this? How did they test it? How did they fend off the inevitable onslaught of complaints and objections, in a society where every angry NIMBY is armed and has the power to take justice into their own hands? Smith neglects these questions for the sake of cool, which only highlights how deeply unrealistic his utopia is.

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New on OnlySky: Why can’t America have Israel’s welfare state?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the generous benefits that Israel provides its citizens, and whether Americans are paying for it.

In the richest nation in the world, millions of Americans go hungry, can’t afford health care or are weighed down by student-loan debt. Meanwhile, the far smaller and less wealthy Israel offers a broad range of safety-net and welfare programs to its people: universal health care, state-funded IVF, cash allowances for children, heavily subsidized tuition, and more. This feels especially infuriating, considering that Israel is far and away the largest recipient of American foreign aid since World War II.

Are we spending billions of dollars per year to lavish benefits on another country that we can’t have for ourselves, and getting dragged into globally disastrous wars in the bargain? What else could we be doing with that money at home, if we weren’t using it to fund campaigns of genocidal destruction?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

Taken as a whole, Israel’s welfare state offers similar benefits to those that are available in many wealthy and developed nations, such as western Europe or Scandinavia. It’s not exceptionally generous by world standards, but it is generous by comparison with America’s skimpy safety net and crushingly expensive cost of necessities like education and healthcare.

And therein lies the rub—because, for decades, the United States has funneled billions of American taxpayer dollars to support and defend Israel. In effect, one could argue, we were paying for Israel’s people to enjoy benefits that we didn’t have for ourselves.

When lockstep alliance with Israel was a keystone dogma of both major party establishments, there was little chance of this cushy deal changing. However, polls show that voters’ support for Israel is rapidly declining—especially among Democrats, but among Republicans as well. Perhaps it’s time we reevaluated how much Americans are getting out of this special relationship, and what else we could be doing with that money.

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The Probability Broach: Pistols at dawn

Art of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton

The Probability Broach, chapter 20

The Continental Congress has ended. Win Bear and his friends spent enormous amounts of effort convincing the delegates to meet, so they could warn everyone about the imminent Hamiltonian invasion. Then, after all that work, they belatedly realized they forgot to come up with a plan for what to do about it.

John Jay Madison is gloating that they know all the details of his world-conquest plot, and there’s still nothing they can do to stop him. They have no borders to fortify; they can’t forbid anyone from entering the North American Confederacy, regardless of hostile intent; they can’t outlaw weapons. This anarcho-capitalist society is helpless to defend itself.

But, of course, there’s one thing they haven’t tried. The North American Confederacy has no laws, so it’s not illegal to just kill someone if you’re mad at them.

To that end, Win shoves through the crowd, intending to catch Madison and challenge him to a duel. But he screws it up:

I fixed my gaze on Madison and half a dozen others converging on him. Leaping the row of consoles, I strode along the table, not caring whose fingers I stomped… I braced myself, and raised a hand. Suddenly Madison was pushed aside. I struck the upraised arm of Oscar Burgess, who grinned. “Say your piece, so we can get it on, Bear!”

I ignored him. “Madison, my quarrel’s with you!”

Madison looked innocent. “Then why did you challenge Mr. Burgess?”

“What?”

“There are a thousand witnesses around us who saw it.”

Win accidentally challenged Oscar Burgess, the secret-police goon from his world who was also Win’s firearms instructor at the academy. As we saw in an earlier chapter, he found out about the Probability Broach and traveled through it to this world, where he made an alliance with Madison.

You can’t take a challenge back, and Burgess is gleefully eager for the chance, so Win reluctantly agrees to follow through. The two face off at a distance of twenty yards, and at a signal, they draw and fire:

I brought my gun to bear, too late. Over my front sight, Burgess’s muzzle blossomed brightly. A sharp bite in my right forearm, and I knew I was hit. He’d corrected faster than I’d counted on. I pulled the trigger once, twice, hoping to connect before he fired a second shot. I pulled the trigger once again.

The Smith & Wesson bucked and roared, spewing fire at Burgess. Two fist-size crimson gouts splashed his shirt-front, and his head exploded in a hazy red mist. His feet left the floor, he slammed against a desk and sank, blood obscenely pumping from his wounds, head smoking hideously where the upper half had vanished, mocked by the smoking Luger in his hand.

Win expects to see his arm blown off, but he only has a flesh wound. In a million-to-one coincidence (the kind that crops up nine times out of ten), Burgess’ bullet ricocheted off a brass button on his shirt cuff.

For plot purposes, I have no problem with that. What is problematic is that this supposedly civilized society still thinks a duel is the appropriate way to settle a dispute.

In our world, most countries outlawed dueling centuries ago, recognizing what a senseless waste of life it was. It makes perverse sense that an anarcho-capitalist world would revive this barbaric custom. (This casts a different light on the claim that the North American Confederacy has only a dozen murders per decade. Want to bet they don’t count deaths in duels as “murder”?)

In general, people want a legal system that’s oriented toward, you know, justice—examining the evidence, finding the truth, and delivering a fair result. This system offers none of that. Instead, the person with more combat prowess will almost always win, regardless of whether they’re in the right. People who enjoy violence and are good at inflicting it will dominate over those who value justice, truth and fairness.

This is regression to a medieval worldview, literally. Medieval societies practiced trial by combat because they believed that God would ensure the innocent always triumphed. It was obviously erroneous superstition in service of a might-makes-right philosophy.

In the moment of victory, Win suddenly hears gunshots behind him. He whirls around, too late, but the danger is already passed.

The shots came from Freeman K. Bertram, the corporate manager who was on Madison’s side. Madison himself made his getaway in the confusion, but one of his thugs was about to shoot Win in the back. Bertram had an attack of conscience and shot the thug first, saving Win’s life. But in exchange, he received a gruesome stomach wound:

“Win Bear!” Bertram whispered. I put an ear down to his face… trying not to look away. “Never shot a man before. Your friends… Ham—Hamilton House. It’s so cold! Cold!” He stopped talking and gurgled. I knew that sound. I closed his eyes, holding them until they’d stay shut by themselves.

Win thinks Bertram is dead, but his friends tell him to leave the man alone. An ambulance was already called before the duel began, and because the North American Confederacy has advanced medical technology, he’ll make a full recovery:

I looked at Lucy in disbelief. “He’ll be okay?”

“Will be if y’don’t put his eyes out.”

“You mean I’m going to have to kill Burgess all over again?”

“Are you kidding? Boy, you blew his head clean in half! Let me be the first to congrat—”

I didn’t hear the rest. I was busy puking in living color on a nationwide hookup.

This scene is a weird plus-one, minus-one.

As Smith has shown us, he’s an obsessed gun fetishist who thinks everyone should carry guns, including children, and bring them everywhere, including on airplanes. He claims the right to bear arms takes precedence over everything else, and that a politician’s position on guns sums up their entire political philosophy and personal character.

But, oddly enough, he doesn’t glamorize gun violence. He doesn’t treat it as satisfying and righteous when inflicted on the deserving, the way most right-wing keyboard warriors do. Even a hardened cop like Win vomits after killing a man, rather than coolly uttering a James Bond-style quip. (“Guess he really lost his head back there!”)

He probably wrote the scene for black comedy, but it’s still a realistic depiction of the traumatic aftereffects of violence. It’s an unusually sober interlude of realism in a book that’s otherwise so gung-ho about it.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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New on OnlySky: Wildfire skies are back

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the double whammy of extreme weather that besieged the United States this month: first fires, then floods, coming so quickly that there was scarcely a break between them.

For the second time in three years, millions of people are living under hazy skies polluted with wildfire smoke. This is the signature of climate change, as Canada’s boreal forests are growing warmer and drier, becoming increasingly susceptible to massive fires each summer. At the same time, warmer oceans turbocharge storm systems, giving rise to rainfall outside the range of what urban planners designed for. The thunderstorms that finally washed the smoke away brought flash flooding that swamped highways and buildings in the New York area.

This weather whiplash – not one kind of extreme weather, but every kind of extreme weather at once – is a foretaste of what the future is going to be like. It’s too late to prevent climate change, and so we have to start thinking about ways to design our civilization to adapt to it.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

This is weather whiplash playing out before our eyes. Global warming isn’t altering the climate along a single dimension, making it hotter without any other side effects. Instead, it makes every kind of extreme weather more likely.

New York City isn’t the only place suffering these disasters; far from it. Similar climate-change-driven catastrophes have been sweeping over every part of the nation, from the 2018 Camp Fire in California to 2024’s Hurricane Helene in the American South to the deadly Texas floods of 2025.

For those who aren’t wearing ideological blinders, these record-breaking fires and floods are like the Earth screaming at us. They’re undeniable evidence that climate change isn’t a distant future prospect, something we can leave for our descendants to worry about. It’s a crisis of the present, and millions of people who contributed to causing it are suffering the consequences.

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