New on OnlySky: One terawatt per year

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about some unexpectedly hopeful news that shows progress fighting climate change.

The war with Iran has supercharged the world’s drive toward renewable energy. As oil and gas prices soar, people everywhere are looking for alternatives, like electric vehicles and plug-in solar panels. But is there enough renewable energy to displace fossil fuels in time to make a difference?

The answer is yes. Green energy is still a fraction of the world’s energy portfolio, but its share is climbing exponentially. It took almost seventy years to deploy the first terawatt of solar power, and only two years after that to deploy the second. We now have the industrial capacity to build an additional terawatt each and every year, which at a sustained pace would completely decarbonize the economy in less than twenty years. A future is in sight, not too distant, where we dispense with fossil fuels entirely.

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 member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

When gasoline is cheap, consumers flock to buy huge, wasteful trucks and SUVs. But Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused prices to spike. As the price of gas climbs, more and more people are starting to see these fuel-guzzling vehicles as a painful financial burden.

According to surveys, $4 a gallon is the threshold at which a majority of Americans start cutting back on driving or looking at more fuel-efficient vehicles. The data bears that out: since the war started, there’s been a sharp upsurge of interest in EVs.

Gas-burning cars will always be at the mercy of the global oil market. Prices swing dramatically and unpredictably. A war half a world away brings instant pain in the pocketbook.

Meanwhile, electric vehicles are cheaper to recharge. They’re powered by the cheapest electricity in history, and they get the equivalent of 100 to 140 miles per gallon. Perhaps even more important, they’re dependably cheaper, especially if they’re powered by electricity generated by local renewables. No dictatorial regime or warmongering theocracy can shut off the sun or the wind.

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The Probability Broach: Inside job

The gate to the Alnwick Poison Garden of poisonous plants

The Probability Broach, chapter 16

Win and his friends are trying to alert the North American Confederacy to the Hamiltonian threat in their midst. Conveniently, one of said friends is Jenny Smythe, the president of the NAC.

The NAC has a Congress, but it doesn’t meet regularly—only when all the members feel like it. So, she heads out to spread the word:

As Jenny flitted about the continent persuading balky Congresspersons into their first parley in three decades, Lucy acted as anchor, relaying messages, confirming “crazy” stories, arranging tickets and travel schedules.

So what did Lieutenant Bear do to make himself feel useful? Zilch. Well, I had some minor value as Exhibit A: the Barbarian from the Land of the Bomb. Wonderful.

With no part to play, Win feels bored and useless. He’s moping around the house, drinking and feeling sorry for himself. (Once again, no one seems to care that he’s unemployed, nor hints that he needs to make a financial contribution.)

Lucy notices his funk and and tries to cheer him up (“Winnie, you look like the Before model in a cocaine commercial”).

She laughed suddenly. “Tell me, boy, you planning to stick around? I mean after Deejay’s thingamajig’s back in working order?”

That caught me by surprise. “Haven’t thought about it much.” I’d been thinking about very little else. “I guess I just assumed—”

“All you talk about’s ‘back-home-this’ and ‘back-home-that’—what in lumbago’s a girl gonna assume?”

“I just never imagined—besides, I have obligations back home.”

… “Who says you’re obligated to attend the funeral of your own civilization or get buried with it?”

This is an entirely unwarranted show of confidence on Lucy’s part, considering they know for a fact that Madison is preparing to bring in an invading army equipped with atomic bombs, and there’s nothing they can do to stop him because his private property rights are sacrosanct.

Given that the North American Confederacy is facing a threat of nuclear holocaust, isn’t it a little premature to be discussing Win’s plans for the future? What makes Lucy so sure they’re going to win, or that the world won’t be left a radioactive wasteland even if they do? Shouldn’t they at least acknowledge the possibility that Win’s world might end up being the safer place to seek refuge?

They’re still contemplating this when Ed bursts in. He’s been reviewing the footage they took from Madison’s house, including the room where the villains are building their own Probability Broach, and he’s belatedly made a connection.

As you may remember, before Win showed up, Ed was investigating a theft from a company called Paratronics, which makes parts that are essential for building interdimensional portals. It turns out the machinery they saw in Madison’s house was built from those stolen parts. Ed is furious at himself for not figuring this out earlier:

“Anyway, that basement’s got every dial and gauge, every coil, transistor, and interociter that’s missing from Bertram’s warehouse, that’s what!”

…I had an idea. “Now we can take Madison to court… He can’t plead ignorance with a basement full of stolen parts!”

“Sorry,” Lucy said, “That information was obtained unethic—”

“But I thought that could be taken care of! Don’t keep changing the rules!”

Yet again, the ethics of this society interfere with our heroes seeking justice. But this is an especially puzzling obstacle for Smith to lay in the path of his protagonists.

He’s referring to a legal doctrine called “fruit of the poisonous tree”. It says that prosecutors can’t use evidence against you at trial if they broke the law to get it. It’s supposed to be the incentive for police to apply for search warrants, rather than breaking into your house whenever they feel like it to rummage around for evidence of a crime.

But, again, there are no search warrants here, because there are no laws here. Ed and Win aren’t public servants who are sworn to uphold established precedents; they’re private parties who don’t answer to anyone. Are there really codes of ethics that prevent them from using evidence acquired through shady methods? If so, who enforces them? Are these codes so universally agreed upon that they couldn’t bring a case with any hope of success?

(Also, an obvious point: Why do Ed and Win have to say where they obtained the footage of Madison’s house? Why not just say it came from an anonymous tipster?)

It’s hard to imagine how any crime could be solved in this world, if all you have to do is keep stolen goods in your house. No one can enter without your permission, and even if someone did, they wouldn’t be able to use anything they discovered against you. Also, as we saw previously, no one knows about fingerprints, and there are no ID documents or other means of identifying a stranger if you don’t know them on sight. What on earth is left for a private investigator like Ed to do?

But even discounting that obstacle, Ed says there’s a bigger problem:

“Oh, if we retrieved Bertram’s property, it’d delay Madison, but he’d acquire what he needs eventually, and we’d be right back where we are now. But what really makes me mad is that, in order to sue, you need a victim, a complainant. Once I’d done the analysis, I called Bertram.”

“And?” I said, not liking where this was headed.

“And he was very upset. I found out why later on—he’d flown the coop. Forsyth’s team watched Madison greet him at the door, and they weren’t exactly acting like enemies.”

“So Bertram’s been stealing from his own company,” I said. “For the Cause, no doubt.”

This is a classic needlessly complicated villain plan.

Ed has discovered that Freeman K. Bertram, the Paratronics CEO, and Madison, the would-be world conqueror, are in cahoots. But rather than just sell Madison the parts to build his own Probability Broach, Bertram schemes with Madison to steal them, and then… hires Ed to solve the crime he masterminded?

Why bother with this? Bertram has no reason for this subterfuge—he’s in charge of the company! He can sell to whoever he wants! In this anarcho-capitalist world, you can be sure there’s no law preventing him from doing so. If he wanted to be really devious, he could do it through a chain of shell companies, so no one can trace the purchases, or arrange some kind of kickback scheme, to reimburse Madison for the cost.

But instead of using the legitimate methods available to him, he schemes to commit this completely unnecessary crime. That ends up being the only thing that puts the heroes on his trail.

Image credit: Amanda Slater, released under CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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The Probability Broach: Do no harm

A medical caduceus laid on top of a stack of dollar bills

The Probability Broach, chapter 16

We previously read that, while Ed and Win were burgling John Jay Madison’s house to get evidence of his evil plan, he returned the favor by sending his thugs after their friend Clarissa Olson. In this week’s installment, Clarissa explains what happened:

“I’d stayed late with a client who’s having a rough regeneration—geriotic complications to be cleared up before the limb can replace itself… Anyway, I went home and freshened up, intending to come over here and see what mischief these two had accomplished at Madison’s. Just as I was starting out the front door, a couple of huge men smashed it in. I ran back through the house, but someone was there with a machine gun, shattering my windows.”

“How many were there?”

… “Two in the front, and the one out by the pool, with the hideous scars—I turned around again and practically ran into them. I had my Webley out, and sort of waved it around with the trigger held back.”

Lucy chuckled. “Walked right into it, the jerks.” She held one of the wicked little projectiles, eleven caliber, an inch or so long. “A thousand of these a minute, ten thousand feet a second. It’d ruin your whole day, wouldn’t it?” I examined the pistol with considerably more respect. Its barrel was a single massive coil, driving little steel needles by linear induction. There were hundreds in its magazine.

In case you’ve forgotten, Clarissa is the doctor who operated on Win and saved his life when he was gunned down and almost killed. She never asks him to pay for this, which is arguably in keeping with medical ethics, although it’s puzzling in an anarcho-capitalist world where money and profit is supposed to rule everything.

But in this chapter, we see a different side of her. She’s a healer who saves lives, but she’s also a stone-cold killer who wields a deadly flechette gun (sci-fi sometimes calls this kind of weapon a “needler”), and shoots men dead without a qualm.

Obviously, this is an indulgence of authorial fantasy on L. Neil Smith’s part: the sexy blonde doctor who’s also a badass gunslinger. But what about the ethics of this? Isn’t there an inherent contradiction in the idea of a healer who goes armed to kill?

The Hippocratic Oath is famous for its clause to “do no harm“. That vow is echoed in modern medical oaths, like the Declaration of Geneva, in which doctors swear to “maintain the utmost respect for human life”.

This even applies to military medics, who, according to the Geneva Conventions, are supposed to be noncombatants. They have a moral duty to render aid to anyone in need, including wounded soldiers from the other side.

Doctors aren’t forbidden to defend themselves if they’re in danger, of course. But you’d think a good doctor would be at least a little conflicted about having to shoot two people dead. That ethical conflict is never alluded to or explored in this book.

This raises a related question: Are there pacifists in the North American Confederacy? Is it possible to exist in this society while abstaining from violence—or are such people easy pickings for the first thug who knows they won’t defend themselves? This is another of those questions that a gun fetishist like Smith never considers.

Clarissa explains that she got away unscathed, but her home was destroyed:

“I stepped over the bodies, ran out front, and drove away. There was a blinding flash in my rear viewscreen and a huge ball of fire”—she shook her head sadly—”pointless destruction for its own sake. They’ll pour me a new house, and my professional records are transmitted every day to the insurance company, but my furniture, clothes—everything is gone.”

Lucy invites Clarissa to stay with her in the meantime, while Ed gives orders to increase their private guard (yet again). Win, still outraged, says: “Madison couldn’t get to us, so he decided to pick on you, probably as a threat to hold over our heads. As far as I’m concerned, it would have worked, too.”

He’s still fuming that they can’t just round up some goons and go repay Madison in kind, but his friends again tell him that that’s not the way it works here. However, Lucy says she has another idea. She has a connection that’s about to pay off:

“Ladies and gentlemen…” Lucy announced from the hallway, “The President of the North American Confederacy!”

The president entered, pausing a moment to commiserate with Forsyth, expressing pleasure at meeting Deejay, nodding grimly over the news while being introduced to Clarissa, greeting Ed like an old friend. Under the peculiar circumstances, I had to be introduced to the president, too. But no one had to introduce her to me.

I know Jenny Noble when I see her.

This is the NAC’s alternate version of Jenny Noble, the libertarian activist Win met in his own world (although her name is Jenny Smythe here, for avoidance of confusion).

In this world, she’s the president of the North American Confederacy. The NAC has a president and a legislature, although they’re symbolic figures with no real authority or power, as you’d expect in an anarchy. However, she’s apprised of the situation and she says she can help:

“I’ve been trying to tell you that, with any luck, the Confederacy’s going to pay for everything!”

Lucy narrowed suspicious eyes. “How y’figure that, girl?” I was interested, too, since there didn’t seem to be enough government on the whole planet to buy Forsyth a box of ammunition.

Jenny laughed. “It’s really very simple. In a week or so, there’ll be people standing in line to contribute. You see, I’ve decided there’s only one way to deal with the Hamiltonians. I’m calling a session of the Continental Congress.”

Is this anarcho-capitalist Congress going to show an unprecedented burst of community spirit? Will they come together to save the day through collective action?

Here’s a hint: Take your best guess about what would happen in real life when a bunch of selfish individualists assemble to argue about which one of them should deal with a threat. That’s pretty much how it plays out in this book.

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New on OnlySky: The stupidity of the Iran war

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the war with Iran and Trump’s continuing efforts to go down in history as the worst president America has ever had.

As a candidate, Trump’s only good idea was to oppose new foreign wars. Now he’s thrown that aside, just like he’s discarded every other principle he ever paid lip service to, and started an unprovoked war with Iran in the middle of peace talks. He’s committed all the evils he promised, plus all the evils he denounced.

But rather than the conflict ending in easy victory just because we killed some of their leaders, Iran refused to surrender. They’re bombarding American bases and allies all over the Middle East with ballistic missiles and drones. They’ve closed the Strait of Hormuz, causing a worldwide oil price shock, inflation, and likely an economic recession or even a depression.

Obviously, I’m not on the side of the mullahs, who are a gang of brutal and repressive fanatics who slaughter their own people for protesting. I wish Iran could be reconstructed as a secular democracy. But theocratic fundamentalism isn’t a problem that can be solved by dropping bombs from a plane.

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:

The sheer stupidity, incuriosity, and smugly self-satisfied ignorance of this administration defies belief. Even Trump doesn’t know why we’re at war. He and his henchmen have offered a fog bank of shifting justifications about why he did this—to bring about regime change? to end Iran’s nuclear program? to heed Israel’s wishes? or something else entirely?

Whatever the reason, we started this war with no forethought, no plan, and no preparation. Trump and his lackeys seemed to think they could drop some bombs, kill the ayatollah, and immediately impose a new, compliant ruler. It was a wildly delusional fantasy of easy victory, similar to Vladimir Putin expecting to conquer Ukraine in three days.

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The Probability Broach: Turf wars

The coat of arms of the East India Company

The Probability Broach, chapter 16

Ed and Win Bear have burgled the house of their enemy, John Jay Madison, and successfully retrieved proof of his evil schemes.

At the same time, Madison sent his goons after their friend Clarissa Olson. She escaped, shaken but unharmed. But she’s outraged—they all are—because Win is showing his friends the military training films from his world that he took from Madison’s place. Specifically, the ones about the atomic bomb:

“Horrible!” cried Clarissa. Ed sat paralyzed, his face a frozen mask.

… “They purpose doing that to us?” Deejay trembled with anger as the films showed buildings, automobiles, ships resting innocently at anchor, vaporized beneath the mushroom cloud.

“Only if you don’t knuckle under. It’s pretty simple. An old game where I come from. They finish their Broach, bring in troops and weapons, and the Hamiltonians are suddenly in charge—under SecPol supervision, of course.”

Win grimly explains that there’s no chance of fighting the bad guys when they make their move. Once they have their own Probability Broach, they can appear anywhere, and with nuclear weapons, they can hold entire cities for ransom. He concludes, “Give them a week and they’ll own this world. With the resources and the technology available here, they’ll own mine, too.”

Fortunately, Dr. Deejay Thorens, the scientist, tells them there’s still time. She reviewed the recordings that Win made in Madison’s house, and she’s concluded that they’re weeks away from getting their Broach working. (In this book, as in Atlas Shrugged, all smart and competent people have the same politics. Only libertarian capitalists can invent anything, and people with other ideologies can only clumsily copy what they come up with.)

But they’re still under a deadline. Win is exasperated that they know what Madison is planning, but under the laws of this anarchist society, they can’t do anything about it. Captain Forsyth, the chimpanzee bodyguard-for-hire, explains why:

“I don’t understand! These people have shot me, attacked Ed and the captain, murdered their own hitman, and now this latest outrage on Clarissa! Why don’t we just round up some muscle and—”

Lucy sighed. “Winnie, ain’t a body in this room—least of all me—wouldn’t do that in a minute, ‘specially after what happened to Clarissa last night, but… nobody’s gonna break into that fortress of theirs twice.”

“That’s right,” the captain said. “My dispatcher says they’ve ordered three squads from Brookstone’s, and a weapons specialist. That means lasers—big ones.” He wrinkled his upper lip and bared his teeth—definitely not an expression of good humor among his people.

In the last chapter, Ed suggested that once they had the evidence in hand, they could sue Madison for attempted world domination. Even L. Neil Smith seems to realize how ludicrous this is, as it’s never brought up again. (Even if they sue him and he loses, what stops him from just bringing in the nukes and conquering the world anyway?)

“Why not get four squads, then, and even bigger lasers? Once everybody understands, every security company in Laporte will—”

“Companies don’t fight each other… Nobody’d last five minutes in this business—wouldn’t deserve to—if all justice amounted to were ‘My thugs’re tougher’n yours!’ We’re supposed to preserve the peace—otherwise, we’d just go back to your arrangement, and have some real wars.”

“What the captain isn’t saying,” Ed added, “is that there’s simply no profit in smashing one another to pieces. That was settled, long ago.”

As a historical howler, this ranks right up there with Ayn Rand claiming there were no “fortunes by conquest” in America.

Smith says that only governments wage war, and because there’s no government in his anarcho-capitalist world, war is nonexistent. There are private security companies with armies at their disposal, but they only deploy them to protect their clients. They don’t fight each other directly, because it wouldn’t be profitable to do so.

Really? Private wars aren’t profitable? History begs to differ.

In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to a group of merchants to manage trade with Britain’s Asian colonies. This became the British East India Company, one of the world’s first corporations. It was run by a board of directors and sold shares of stock to the public to raise capital.

The East India Company was immensely profitable, and it used those profits to form private militaries to protect its trade routes and enforce its brand of law and order in the colonies it administered. At the height of its power, it commanded a quarter-million soldiers—more than the actual British army. It had infantry, cavalry and artillery, as well as its own navy.

Its “branch officers” wrote the laws and controlled the justice systems in the British colonies it managed. As Dave Roos writes on History.com:

This would be the equivalent of Exxon Mobil drilling for oil in coastal Mexico, taking over a major Mexican city using private armed guards, and then electing a corporate middle manager as the mayor, judge and executioner.

The East India Company’s most infamous exploit was the Opium Wars. Chinese porcelain, silk and tea were in high demand in Europe, but there was little that China wanted in exchange. British merchants had the bright idea to export opium to China, getting people addicted and raking in the cash. When the Chinese emperors tried to outlaw the drug, the East India Company called in the warships. China was defeated and forced to agree to one-sided terms.

Also, the U.K. wasn’t the only colonial power at the time; other European nations had similar trading companies. Did these firms fight each other? Yes, yes they did.

To gain control of India, the British East India Company had to elbow out its colonial competitors. It defeated the Dutch East India Company in the 1759 Battle of Chinsurah, and the French East India Company in the Carnatic Wars.

Granted, in this era, the line between corporation and state was blurry. The trading companies served the interests of their monarchs, and could call in the mother country’s military at will. But to say that capitalists found war unprofitable is utterly false.

Colonialism was very profitable for the colonizing power—which, of course, is why it happened! With so much money at stake, those who stood to profit were more than willing to go to war, to gain control of a rival’s turf or to defend their own. L. Neil Smith has to ignore vast swaths of history to say otherwise.

Back in the book, Win’s friends give him a mini-history lesson about why security companies don’t fight each other:

Lucy nodded. “Little village off the East Coast—one gang decided they’d try running things, four or five other companies objected. Before the dust settled, they’d nearly wiped each other out. Manhattan, if I recall correct. Ever since, security outfits—and their insurance companies—have been big supporters of adjudication.”

This is Smith’s explanation of why there’s no New York City in the North American Confederacy, although it doesn’t explain why it was never rebuilt. (It’s an excellent natural harbor that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Hudson River, making it an ideal shipping port. That’s why the city was built there in the first place.)

But I see a bigger problem with this. If two security companies go to adjudication, and the bigger, better-armed one loses the case, is it going to peacefully accept that? Again, it ignores history and human nature to say yes.

The reason it works this way in our world is because the state, which operates the judicial system, also has a monopoly on force. If you ignore a court’s ruling, it can deploy state power to enforce it. Litigants are compelled to accept judicial settlements, rather than continuing their argument by other means.

Smith assumes that if you remove the state backstop, judges will still have unquestioned authority, even though they have no way to enforce their judgments. This is more libertarian cargo-cult thinking.

When powerful and unaccountable entities don’t get their way, they pull out the big guns. In addition to the colonial trading companies, a modern example is drug cartels who go to war in the streets over turf.

These are privately owned, profit-driven firms in the libertarian sense, so why do they fight and kill each other? According to L. Neil Smith, there’s no profit in that. Why don’t they just work out a peaceful arbitration process among themselves and voluntarily agree to respect the results? It sounds absurd—but that’s exactly what Smith expects to happen.

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New on OnlySky: Reforestation

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about some surprisingly hopeful news: the planet’s forests are growing back.

As agricultural technology becomes more efficient and more people move to cities rather than rural villages, marginal land has been returning to nature. Planet-wide, the rate of deforestation peaked in the 1980s, and it’s been decreasing ever since. In many places, like North America, Europe and China, there’s been a net gain of forest cover since 1990. It turns out nature can regenerate surprisingly fast, if only we give it the opportunity.

Some countries are still cutting down forests, especially tropical developing nations like Brazil and Indonesia. However, a majority of that destruction comes from domestic demand – not cash crops grown for export, as you might assume. That too is a hopeful sign, because it means these countries might soon go through the green transition that many industrialized nations have already completed.

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 member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

While Western-style consumption on a mass scale is unsustainable for the planet, it’s also true that more advanced economies have less environmental impact.

As technology continues to improve, we can adopt more planet-friendly methods—like vertical farming, or agrivoltaics that provide both food and renewable energy, or even precision fermentation and other advanced biotechnology to grow meat substitutes.

These green technologies are a step above fossil-fuel-driven industrial agriculture, which is a step above slash-and-burn farming or subsistence agriculture that requires cutting down trees for firewood. As societies move up this technology curve, their impact on the planet decreases.

If we disseminate these technologies to countries that haven’t yet adopted them—and especially if all us privileged Westerners eat a few less hamburgers—it’s very possible that global deforestation will slow to a halt and then go into reverse. We may well see reforestation on a planetary scale occurring within our lifetimes.

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The Probability Broach: You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore

A novelty watch with Richard Nixon's face and the text 'Nixon says: I'm not a crook'

The Probability Broach, chapter 15

Ed and Win Bear are committing crimes in the name of justice. They’ve broken into the house of their archenemy John Jay Madison to find proof of his schemes. They’re both sweating bullets as they move through the darkened mansion, because what they’re doing is completely illegal in this anarcho-capitalist society. If Madison returns and catches them in the act, he has every right to shoot them on the spot.

They split up to search the place. Win’s first discovery is a room where the bad guys have built their own Probability Broach, using the plans Deejay gave to Vaughn Meiss that the villains stole when they killed him:

I drew my revolver, lifted the hook with its muzzle, and opened the door carefully. Nobody home, but it seemed very familiar: same cabinets, same tangles of wire, a replica of Deejay’s cluttered lab, and of the infernal machinery that had propelled me here.

…The sight, surrounded as I was with dormant Broach machinery, made me uneasy. If I went through a hole in this world, where would I end up?

This isn’t a surprise to him, since he saw some old foes palling around with Madison during their stakeout. It’s confirmation of what he suspected: the government thugs from his world and the Hamiltonian wannabe dictators from this one have joined forces to conquer the North American Confederacy.

After taking pictures of everything, he heads upstairs. In Madison’s private office, he meets Ed, who’s found some damning evidence:

“In the lecture-hall closet, carefully tucked into a pile of table linens – these…” Three canned reels of sixteen millimeter film lay on the desk, half concealed in a fancy napkin. I struck another match:

TF 53-9354
CLASSIFIED
MOPPING UP IN THE ATOMIC AGE
POST-STRIKE TACTICAL DEPLOYMENT
PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT

Win recognizes them as military training films from his world. One is about how hydrogen bombs work. Another concerns “anti-guerrilla counter-insurgency”.

They’re running short on time, but there was a room off the kitchen that Madison conspicuously avoided showing them when he gave them a tour of his house. Naturally, Ed and Win both want to see what he was hiding:

Huddled on the floor between two hanging beef carcasses was a body, frozen stiff. Oddly, it didn’t seem cold in the tiny room. “What is this place?”

“Paratronic freezer. Something like a microwave oven, only the other way around. Shuts down when the door opens.”

…Ed rotated the body onto its face. Clothing and flesh were tattered at the back, as if blasted with a shotgun – nothing fatal, just messy and painful. Some of those gleaming particles wouldn’t be ice, but glass from my bedroom window. We’d found our intruder.

It’s the frozen corpse of the hitman who broke into Ed’s house at night and almost slit Win’s throat. Whether as punishment for his failure, or just to keep him from talking, Madison locked him in the freezer until he froze to death.

This is standard Hollywood-villain stuff, but what tips this scene into black comedy is the identity of the dead man:

“Tricky Dick Milhous,” Ed said, “a third-rate second-story man. He’s no assassin, just a petty crook. Nice way they paid him off. Couldn’t have been pleasant, freezing in the dark.”

Okay, that’s pretty funny.

In our world, Richard Nixon is best known for plotting to burglarize and illegally wiretap his political rivals, then when he got caught, resigning the presidency in disgrace rather than face impeachment. (Those were the days when Republicans at least pretended to believe in the law, as opposed to now, when they’ve enthusiastically embraced crime as long as it’s their guy doing it.)

L. Neil Smith pays tribute to Nixon’s rotten legacy of lawbreaking by making him a petty criminal for hire. I have to admit it’s fitting.

Ed and Win have run out of time. The discovery of Nixon’s body delayed them for too long. Ed’s defeater is no longer able to suppress Madison’s burglar alarms, which start blaring.

They make a beeline for the exit. But by the time they get outside, Madison’s private security has shown up and has the place surrounded. Rather than try to run or fight, Win pulls a Bavarian Fire Drill:

I turned the corner, strode deliberately down the sidewalk, Ed dithering along behind me for once, and right up to the front door of the Alexander Hamilton Society. Guards were milling in and out.

“Bear Brothers, consulting detectives,” I rapped. “We’re staking out a burglar. Find him yet?”

The patrol boss looked us over with a grudging smile. “Ed! Might’ve known you’d show up. Didn’t know you had a brother…”

Ed opened his mouth, I barged ahead with “Win Bear, Captain, just in from, uh, Tlingit. It’s Tricky Dick Milhous we’re looking for. Busted into a place we’re… responsible for the other night, and damn near killed a resident.”

Since these guards are on Madison’s payroll, they have a right to search his house. Ed and Win wait tensely, with Madison’s stolen training films stashed under their coats. After forty-five minutes, the guards find Nixon’s body. Madison’s alarm system locks all the doors in the house automatically when it goes off, so they assume he got trapped in the freezer after breaking in.

All in all, Ed and Win’s burglary was a success. They found the proof they needed and got away clean. They know Madison’s guards will report everything to him, including the fact that Ed and Win were at the scene. But even if Madison discovers what they took, he won’t be able to contradict their story without tipping his hand. (Win imagines the conversation: “And if it isn’t a burglar, Mr. Madison, what’s he doing here?”)

But when they get in the car, they get unwelcome news:

The Telecom lit up, Lucy’s worried face crammed in the focus beside Forsyth’s. “Get back here quick, boys! While you were doin’ it to them, they’ve gone an’ done it to Clarissa!”

The villains weren’t idle, as Ed and Win assumed. While they were stealing from Madison, he sent his thugs after their friend Clarissa Olson, the doctor who treated Win. It’s enough to make you think there might be some advantage to having dedicated law enforcement, instead of having to guess which of your friends might get attacked next and then hiring private security to protect them!

Image credit: Joe Haupt, released under CC BY 2.0 license

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New on OnlySky: The Bible is too woke

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the arrival of a day you always knew was coming: evangelical Christians have swung so far right, the Bible is now too liberal for them to tolerate.

This isn’t satire or the punchline of a joke. When John Piper, a staunchly conservative Baptist theologian with a decades-long reputation for orthodoxy, quoted a biblical verse about welcoming immigrants, his fellow evangelicals instantly turned on him and attacked him in a wave of berserk fury. Does this show that MAGA Christians are on the verge of abandoning the Bible entirely to push their white supremacist theology?

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 all fairness, the teachings of Jesus as depicted by the New Testament gospels were never popular among Christians. With a tiny handful of exceptions, they never followed his commands to refrain from violence, to pray in private, to give away all their wealth to the poor, or to abandon their families and live as wandering mendicant preachers.

But most theologians, however conservative, at least paid them lip service. This is the first instance I’m aware of where a Christian faced a barrage of attacks and hostility from his peers, not for making an interpretation that others found tendentious, but merely for quoting the Bible. This feels like a crossing-the-Rubicon moment, one where Christians explicitly reject a biblical moral because they dislike it.

Conservative theology erodes this verse away to meaninglessness. In the tortured ouroboros of their interpretation, immigrants are only welcome as long as they obey all of the host country’s laws—including the laws being wielded to say they’re not allowed. It’s a perfect catch-22 of absurdity.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Crime is everywhere, crime, crime

A bag of burglar's tools

The Probability Broach, chapter 15

(If you don’t know where the title is from, allow me to introduce you to the Lyttle Lytton Contest.)

Let’s review what The Probability Broach has told us about how its world works.

L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy is an anarcho-capitalist society with no police, no laws and no justice system. Furthermore, everyone is armed and ready to kill at a moment’s notice.

According to its author, what makes this society function—as opposed to collapsing into an endless war of all against all—is that there are unwritten rules which everyone respects.

People in the NAC have free speech; no one will blow your head off because they don’t like something you said. If someone attacks you and you shoot them in self-defense, that’s allowable; but if you disarm them, you can’t execute them in cold blood, you have to turn them over to a neutral third party for a trial. Everyone has private property rights; you can’t break into someone’s house and take it over just because you like it better than yours.

Got it? Good. Now let’s look at some passages in the text which show that this is all a dirty lie.

As we saw last week, our heroes know that the villain, John Jay Madison, is plotting to take over the world. But they have no proof. They’re sure that the evidence is in Madison’s house, but there’s no such thing as a search warrant here. So they resolve to do the only thing they can do, which is to illegally break into his house and retrieve it themselves.

Ed and Win Bear are parked outside Madison’s house, engaged in the time-honored ritual of the stakeout:

“Look out!” Ed whispered. We slumped farther down as a pair of enormous black hovercars—the Frontenac, lately repaired, and its twin brother—came around a corner and pulled up in front of the house.

This is the car that fired on Win and almost killed him. The fact that Madison owns it still doesn’t help them, because there’s no law enforcement to which they can report this incriminating fact.

Ed offered me a set of goggles with half-inch slabs for lenses. I started to strap them on, thought better of it, and simply held them before my eyes. “Infrared?” I asked. The images were in color, the hues wildly distorted. The Frontenacs were still black, but the landscaping was sickly shades of red-violet.

“Paratronic. Convert almost anything to visible wavelengths, with pretty strange results sometimes, depending on the—quiet!”

A gang of people have emerged from Madison’s front door. Two of them are Madison and his butler. The other two are people Win recognizes all too well, because they’re from his world.

One is Otis Bealls, former boss of the murdered physicist Vaughn Meiss. The other is Oscar Burgess, the scarred secret-police thug who tried to shut down Win’s investigation.

None of this comes as a surprise to Win, but he wonders just how deep this plot goes:

The gears in my head were grinding. I wasn’t surprised that SecPol had been on my trail, but Burgess himself? Unless they had their own Broach working, he must have followed me to Fort Collins, into the lab, and out through Meiss’s machine. How many others had made it through before the one we’d found got buried in the collapsed excavation?

Fortunately, the villains are leaving. They pile into their car and drive off. Once they’re gone, Ed and Win circle around to the back side of Madison’s mansion.

They crouch by the door, and Ed pulls out an unfamiliar device. Pay close attention to this part:

Ed produced a device, slid out an antenna, and unfolded a sharp-pointed ground stake.

“This is my defeater—like the one our burglar used.”

“I hope it works better than his did.”

As you may remember, in an earlier chapter, Win was almost murdered by an assassin who broke into Ed’s home. The hitman got in with the help of a defeater, a piece of tech that disables someone else’s burglar alarms.

As I pointed out at the time, there’s no non-criminal use for such a device. The fact that you can go out and buy one—apparently there are businesses that manufacture them—has unsavory implications for the NAC. Why would that business even exist, if everyone here is so unfailingly respectful of everyone else’s private property?

And now we find out that Ed Bear, one of the heroes, owns one too!

Ed explains that his defeater works on a different principle: it connects to his computer at home, and if they trip any sensors, his computer will “start arguing” with Madison’s computer and delay the alarm from going off. Once that happens, they’ll have a few extra minutes to make their getaway.

My hands shook as I accepted another gadget. “S-sorry. I’m used to working the other side of the burglary game!”

“Calm down! You don’t hear my teeth chattering, and I’m not used to it, either.”

This is an outright lie. It has to be. If Ed isn’t used to burglarizing other people’s houses, why would he own a device whose only purpose is to help him do that?

But wait, you say. Maybe Ed is an honest man who never usually stoops so low. Maybe he bought the defeater just for this job.

Nope—because as the next paragraph shows, he owns other burglary tools too, and he has experience with them:

The back porch wasn’t locked, but the floorboards were real groaners. By the time Ed was doing things to the back door with tiny tools, I was surprised my pants were still dry. He taped the latch to keep it from springing shut.

Lockpicking isn’t something you just pick up! It takes lots and lots of practice to be good at it. (People like Lockpicking Lawyer just make it look easy.) There’s no way Ed would be able to do this on his first try. He’s clearly done it before.

Based on this chapter, all the NAC’s rhetoric about the sanctity of private property rights is so much lip service. They all say it, but no one believes it. Everyone in this world owns crime stuff and has practice in using it.

This tracks with other evidence from the text. It’s supposed to be illegal to torture or threaten a captive, but Win did just that, and his friends all overlooked it. They were a little upset, but they didn’t cast him out or shun him, the way people in the NAC are supposed to do to wrongdoers.

The conclusion to draw from this, even if the author didn’t intend it, is that these unwritten “rights” are worthless. People in the NAC hypocritically claim to respect them, but flagrantly violate them whenever it serves their interests. I’d argue that that’s unintentionally realistic, and exactly what we should expect in a society like this.

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