New on OnlySky: Christians are AI-pilled

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about a surprising new finding: practicing Christians are more likely to use and trust AI than the general public or the nonreligious demographic – and that includes questions about faith and theology. Several different studies independently confirm this stranger-than-fiction result.

Why are some believers consulting chatbots in preference to asking their own clergy members or reading the Bible? My hypothesis is that AI is a natural fit for them. It fills the same niche in their lives as their belief in God: to people who’ve been taught not to think for themselves and to rely on outside guidance for every major decision, AI gives them that, without the inconvenience and friction of attending church. It’s always there, always listens, takes their most trivial concerns seriously, heaps praise upon them and tells them they’re right no matter what. It’s a true deus ex machina that does everything they’ve ever really wanted from God.

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:

Naively, you might have expected that churchgoing Christians would be less likely to use or trust AI. After all, these believers have been taught to trust the Bible as the only source of truth and their church as its supreme interpreter. It seems like they should be suspicious of any source of information that isn’t deeply rooted in their own faith tradition, let alone a new and enigmatic intelligence concocted by Silicon Valley.

But this expectation is wrong. In fact, practicing Christians are more likely to consult AI—for religious and nonreligious questions alike.

The million-dollar question is, why have so many believers embraced this technology?

The statistical relationship between frequency of church attendance and trust in AI should be a clue. The more fervently a person believes, the more likely they are to embrace AI—because AI serves the same purpose in their lives as their religion does. To be perhaps too blunt, it alleviates the need to think for yourself.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: A day late and a dollar short

An antique analog clock face

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

In the final chapter of TPB, L. Neil Smith tries to wrap up some loose ends. He seems to recognize, belatedly, that it made his alleged utopia look bad for them to be utterly helpless in the face of an invasion. In an attempt to make up for this, Win narrates that the Continental Congress reconvened after he departed and swung into action after all:

I don’t know why I expected that stubborn congregation to sit on their hands with the world collapsing around their ears. Too used to the U.S. Congress, I guess.

But… they did!

That’s indisputable. The Continental Congress had the threat explained to them in detail. They heard firsthand testimony and video evidence. The villain confessed his entire plan. And in the face of all that proof, they voted to adjourn without taking any action, because doing anything to thwart the bad guys would have violated their rights.

This is a retcon on Smith’s part. In the earlier chapters, he made a big deal about how difficult it was to get Congress to assemble in the first place, because it requires the active participation of at least 90% of the population of North America, and because it meets in an unappealing remote area as an intentional obstacle. It normally meets only once every few decades, if that, and this one took weeks of work by the protagonists to persuade enough influential people to make it happen.

Once they voted to adjourn, that should have been it. Most people would have lost interest and gone home. The idea that Congress could easily be called back into session very shortly afterward flies in the face of what the author tells us about how this society works.

The explosions in Saint Charles and Auraria didn’t really change anything—maybe relaxed the timetable a little—because the Confederacy has decided to strike back. Not against the Hamiltonians, who were never regarded as a significant threat, but against SecPol and the culture that allows such an abomination to exist. And not with Confederate A-bombs or troops, but in the same way that Sequoyah won the Mexican War: with ideas.

There’s a lot of fundraising and enlistment going on in the Confederacy now. We’re preparing to change a world, an entire universe, and drag the United States of America, kicking and screaming, through two centuries of peace and freedom it managed to miss by letting Alexander Hamilton screw things up back in 1789.

Win narrates that the Propertarian Party in his world, as well as a few other politically amenable organizations, are about to receive funding and support from the North American Confederacy. It’s at this point that we find out that this whole story is a manuscript he wrote that’s being sent to them:

You can’t draft anybody or raise war taxes here, but you can ask folks to chip in, and try to explain why it’s important. And you can try to explain to the Propertarian Party why the first copy of this manuscript and an initial seventy-five pounds of 999 fine have suddenly materialized in the middle of their conference table.

This sounds like an anarchist-friendly plan: voluntary and peaceful, changing people’s minds with words and ideas rather than with force. Too bad that under the circumstances, it would have been much too little, too late.

As TPB spent most of its length reminding us, the Hamiltonians from this world and SecPol from Win’s world were prepared to conquer the North American Confederacy with overwhelming force. They were going to drop nuclear bombs to destroy any potential centers of resistance, then march armies through the Probability Broach portal to subjugate the survivors. And they would have succeeded, if not for a last-minute technological deus ex machina combined with Win’s completely accidental meddling.

This isn’t the kind of threat that can be countered with political tracts about the virtues of anarcho-capitalism. The NAC’s peaceful evangelism would have been utterly futile in the face of an organized enemy willing to use violence and terror to get their way.

The “persuade everyone to be an anarchist” plan would only have a chance of succeeding in a tolerant society with free speech—but Smith has insisted all along that Win doesn’t live in that kind of world. He lives in a dystopia where government black helicopters blast unauthorized radio stations, and jackbooted secret police haul people off to reeducation camps or even murder them outright to suppress the slightest whisper of dissent.

Ironically, if you think armed resistance against such an oppressive regime would be a better plan, then it would appear the nonhuman sapients of the NAC are smarter than the humans:

The simians are preparing a small army of volunteers to travel across the Broach. They have a tough job ahead of them, taking their borrowed culture to relatives who have, as yet, no culture at all. I’d love to see the first CIA reports of well-dressed, heavily armed “infrahumans” roaming the African countryside.

Ooloorie haughtily assures me that her own people will have no such difficulties. Cetacean civilization, she claims, was already ancient when H. sapiens was discovering the useful properties of obsidian. I’ve spent a lot of Telecom time with her while I’m recovering, listening to fascinating stories: how porpoises first discovered the forgotten world above the sea; how they decided to observe and protect man until he was fit company for civilized beings; how the finny folk met in a roving, decades-long convention, deciding at last to let the Confederacy join them.

So watch out, tuna fishermen! As I’ve had reason to learn, lasers are nasty weapons.

Smith continues his bizarre insistence that apes and cetaceans didn’t need to be uplifted to intelligence, but that they were intelligent all along—in Win’s world (the “real world”) as well as in the North American Confederacy.

If cetacean civilization is as ancient and as advanced as Smith says, it makes no sense that Win’s world wouldn’t have found out about it. How could it be possible that we’ve been hunting whales or drowning dolphins in fishing nets without suffering retributive attacks from cetacean armies with frickin’ laser beams?

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The Probability Broach: The irrevocable crime

A set of balance scales

The Probability Broach, chapter 24

When we left off, Win Bear’s ignorance had indirectly caused the villains of TPB to blow themselves up. The Hamiltonian plot is foiled; no nuclear bombs or invading armies are coming through the portal; the North American Confederacy is saved. Happy ending, ticker-tape parade, et cetera.

But wait a minute. There’s a problem that L. Neil Smith glides right past.

As we read earlier in the book, if a Probability Broach closes when an object is partway through, you get a big explosion on both ends. The size of the explosion depends on the mass distribution of the object. Depending on how much mass there is, it could be into the megaton range.

Win and his friends were on the smaller side of the blast, so they escaped with only minor injuries:

The explosion in Auraria was a mild summer breeze compared to what had happened across the river. Clarissa and I were last out of the building, and escaped with mostly minor scrapes and flash burns. She lost the back half of her coveralls, and, sadly, a lot of her beautiful hair. Protecting her eyes, I got a little careless about my own, so I am now sporting a rakish eyepatch until they clone me a transplant.

At least Lucy says it’s rakish.

But if the explosion on the other side was much bigger, what happened to the innocent people who were living next to the Hamiltonians’ hideout? Does Win feel any guilt about that?

Fortunately for his protagonist, Smith has an answer to this:

The Saint Charles Town explosion left a crater a hundred yards across. Of Madison and his people, we never found so much as a shirt button. Their hideout was an isolated building in the middle of an abandoned buffalo feedlot. I was grateful for that, although neighbors who had to shovel themselves out from under several kilotons of bison flops weren’t quite so happy.

This convenient coincidence spares Win from having innocent deaths on his conscience. However, we can infer he wouldn’t have been too bothered either way. He holds the misanthropic attitude common to libertarians, as we see when he speculates about what would have happened if the Hamiltonians had made contact with his world and the explosion had taken place there instead:

It could have been worse. The coextant point in Denver is a densely populated area, the four-hundred block of East Eighth Avenue. Thousands might have died, even some who didn’t deserve to.

With these lines, Smith figures he’s disposed of the problem. But he didn’t. There’s a loose end he’s forgotten to tie up.

Even if no innocents were killed in the explosion, Madison and his confederates certainly were. Are there any legal ramifications for that? There must have been an investigation into what caused it. Does Win have to face criminal charges or answer to a tribunal?

Smith’s implicit assumption is that the Hamiltonians were bad guys and no one mourns them, so no one would care that Win effectively murdered them by sabotaging their technology. But that’s not true. People have rights in the North American Confederacy, remember?

In fact, they take those rights so seriously that the entire Continental Congress voted to disband in the face of a looming invasion, because thwarting the plot would require violating individual rights and they don’t do that no matter the stakes. If the Congress was unable to take action against Madison for that reason, why doesn’t Win get in trouble for doing the thing they refused to do?

Perhaps most people don’t like the Hamiltonians, but Madison should have had some next of kin. Even if he had no relatives, he must have had other ideological allies in the world who would care that he was dead. In the very last resort, one of those professional civil liberties groups that represent people with no other representation should have looked into it. There should have been someone to lay charges against Win.

As Smith said in an earlier chapter, the NAC’s law requires criminals to make restitution to their victims. If you commit an “irrevocable crime, like murder” for which restitution is impossible, then you get ostracized from civilization and either accept lifelong exile to the asteroid mines or else face death by starvation.

So, why doesn’t Win face any punishment? True, he didn’t cause the explosion singlehandedly, but he definitely played a part in it (the legal system calls this comparative fault). If it’s not murder, it’s manslaughter at the very least. Why isn’t he being sent to the asteroids?

It would be one thing if Smith wrote that there was an investigation and Win was acquitted. But he doesn’t. Just as in the earlier scene where Win tortured a prisoner—and, again, should have faced punishment for that under the NAC’s laws, but didn’t—the author takes it for granted that his protagonists are exempt from consequences.

I doubt that Smith noticed this inconsistency, which is a telling piece of evidence for what he really cares about. His overriding belief, like many other conservatives, is that laws should only apply to the outgroup, not to people like him and to those he cares about. He proves it in his own novel, going to great effort to describe a society where everyone’s rights have ironclad protection, then showing people flagrantly violating those rights but facing no consequences for doing so. This dangerous hypocrisy is an object lesson in why people with this ideology should never get to exercise power in the real world.

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The Probability Broach: Somebody else’s problem

A statue of the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys

The Probability Broach, chapter 23

Having escaped pursuit in last week’s plot-obligatory car chase scene, Win and his friends have set up shop in Saint Charles Town, the North American Confederacy’s parallel version of Denver. That’s close enough to the villains’ hideout for scientist Deejay Thorens to set up her modified Probability Broach, which will let them jam the bad guys’ Broach and prevent them from bringing in their invasion force:

It was dark by the time Deejay sat back, turning knobs and watching the Telecom. Abruptly, the screen blossomed into an intricate moiré pattern. She began making frantic adjustments.

“I think I’ve got something here! Wait—yes, here it is! He’s just warming up again! Okay, I’ve got him. Hand me that meter, Lucy… we’ll know more in a few minutes.”

…She inserted a slender filament into the guts of the machine, plugged the other end into the Telecom, pushing buttons. I jumped three feet as the screen bulged with the proximity-distorted image of John Jay Madison.

…The picture backed off and swooped around the room in Saint Charles, panning 360 degrees to catch Madison’s associates: Skinner, others I recognized from the Continental Congress, finally resting on Bealls himself, up to his armpits in haywired paratronics.

Deejay explains that the interface is one-way; they can see the bad guys, but not vice versa. The villains are having an animated conversation, presumably about how to get their device working and reestablish contact with the evil government of Win’s world.

Deejay started turning knobs again, the viewpoint whirled dizzily. “Forward a bit,” she muttered. “A little more… there! Now I’ll punch up a short program, and—Good! Bealls is still calibrating. When he goes on full power, we’ll match him, foul up his field symmetry, maybe give him some feedback to play with. The best part is, he’ll never figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t know enough field theory yet.”

Clarissa crossed over to the ‘com, dragging me along. We watched Bealls’s distorted, sweaty face as he concentrated. “One thing I don’t understand, Deejay,” she said. “Do we have to watch him every minute, from now on, just to prevent him communicating with the other side?”

“That’s the cockroach in the hollandaise, all right!” Lucy muttered grimly. “Say, y’don’t suppose we could put a couple dozen slugs through this contraption of yours and…”

… “Sorry, boys. It’s a great idea, but we simply don’t have the power. On regular wall current, this Broach is good for about three-tenths-of-an-inch diameter. I can louse up Beall’s operations, but that’ll have to satisfy us until we think of something else.”

“Nuts!” Lucy complained. “Can’t get a fifty-caliber bullet through a thirty-caliber hole!”

I include this dialogue because it shows that the protagonists take for granted something they shouldn’t take for granted: namely, that they’re the only ones in the world who can or will do anything about Madison.

The problem, as Clarissa states, is that they can use Deejay’s technology to scramble Madison’s Probability Broach, but it requires active effort and proximity. Unless Madison gives up, which he’s not likely to do, they’ll have to stay near him and watch him 24/7. It’s a lifetime commitment to keep the North American Confederacy from being invaded.

But wait a minute. Why is it up to these people specifically to do that?

After all, Win and his friends made their case to all the delegates at the Continental Congress and, in theory, all the people of North America. Everyone who saw the films of nuclear war was appropriately shocked and horrified. Our protagonists should have a huge pool of volunteers eager to assist them.

Deejay could train others in the use of her Broach jammer, and they could set up a rotating schedule to watch Madison and block his device whenever he tried using it. This would be an anarchist-friendly solution, even, since it would thwart his evil plan without initiating force or violating anyone’s rights.

But that possibility is never discussed, nor even mentioned as an option. Nor does anyone else seek the protagonists out to offer assistance. It’s as if the entire population of the North American Confederacy has collectively decided that this isn’t their problem, and they’ll leave it up to this small self-selected handful of people to do something about it.

Obviously, L. Neil Smith wrote it this way for plot purposes. He wants his main characters to be the ones who save the day, so he doesn’t have strangers get involved.

However, whether he realized it or not, this is a perfect demonstration of how an anarcho-capitalist society would fail. When selfishness is the rule, there’s a strong incentive to ignore collective dangers in the hope that someone else will deal with them.

It’s the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: why should I spend my time and resources, or risk my own safety, to solve a problem when all those other selfish jerks will just sit back and get a free ride off my efforts? And because everyone reasons this way, no one does anything.

This is a problem in our society, where commons problems like homelessness, climate change, pollution, groundwater depletion, species extinction due to overharvesting, and other such issues tend to go unsolved until a government steps in. In a society based purely on capitalism, with no authority that can compel people to cooperate, no one will want to be helpful at their own expense. As a result, big problems will fester and multiply unless a few heroic suckers are willing to sacrifice themselves. That’s exactly what we see here.

Bealls starts to power up his device, and Deejay tries to jam it—but recall she said that if her alignment is off by a tiny bit, the two Broaches will go “concentric”, becoming a portal linking two points in the same world. No prizes for guessing that Chekhov’s gun is about to go off:

“Here it comes!” Deejay warned. “I’ve got to be careful now. It tends to drift. Don’t jog my elbow!” She sat tensed at the controls, making minute adjustments. The screen blurred, then sprang into a mind-twisting kaleidoscopic display. “Shit!” Deejay startled all of us, ripping the fiber-optic tube out of the interface. “It’s gone concentric!”

A tiny silvery button popped out of the Broach and sprouted toward us on a slender supporting rod. When the second joint passed the interface, I recognized it. “Not a manuscript!” I whispered hoarsely. “Not even a note! That’s an antenna, an ordinary walkie-talkie antenna!” On impulse I snatched a pair of vise-grips from the bench and clamped them onto the chrome-plated shaft. “Let the son of a bitch figure that one out!”

The antenna stopped sliding into the room, backed up suddenly until the pliers banged against the Broach chassis, arched forward, and retreated again, trapped.

Win chortles at his prank (he starts recounting an obscene joke about a vice squad and a public bathroom), but he’s forgotten something extremely important. If a Probability Broach shuts down while something is partway through the portal, you get a big bang.

Luckily for him, Deejay is quicker on the uptake and realizes what’s about to happen:

“Out!” Deejay screamed in horror, pointing at her instruments. “Get out of here before he shuts the field down!” She scrambled for the exit, dragging Lucy by the gunbelt. I shoved Clarissa through the door behind Ed, just making it to the sidewalk outside, when—

The world erupted in fire and thunder. Windows bulged and splashed, twin balls of fire either side of the door… My hair and eyebrows crisped and singed. The world was hell, a raging, incoherent furious roar.

Yet, even above the explosion we’d escaped, I could hear a distant rumble, see the smoke and flame of a vastly greater cataclysm, a mile across the river in Saint Charles.

And so, the day is saved—not by the heroes’ clever plan or bold action, but by Win’s blundering combined with another sci-fi deus ex machina.

Given how Smith hails firearms as the solution to every problem, you’d think he’d want to dispatch the villains in an exciting, climactic shootout. At the very least, there should have been a final face-to-face confrontation between Win and his archnemesis. But none of that happens. There’s no heroic gunplay, no Dirty Harry monologues, no James Bond-style action-hero quips.

Instead, the bad guys blow themselves up: offscreen, by accident, and without even the satisfaction of realizing what’s about to happen to them. It’s a disappointingly anticlimactic ending.

There’s one more short chapter of TPB, in which Smith tries to wrap up loose ends and summarize the moral of the story. Next week, I’ll deconstruct that chapter and offer some thoughts on the book as a whole.

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New on OnlySky: The energy crisis is coming

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the 1970s-style oil crisis we may be about to suffer because of the Trump administration’s ruinous stupidity.

The war that America started but can’t finish is spiraling into disaster. Our military in the Persian Gulf proved to be a paper tiger, and our promises to protect our allies were hollow. Iran already controls the Strait of Hormuz, and its allies the Houthis have seized the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. These are the twin chokepoints for Middle East oil. Now that they have control over both, Iran and its proxies can cut off shipments at will and inflict massive pain and suffering on any country that’s dependent on fossil fuel to run its economy.

It didn’t have to be this way. We should never have gotten ourselves embroiled in this pointless and unwinnable war. On a larger scale, we could have electrified the global economy years ago, switching to clean, dependable green power and severing our dependence on Mideast autocrats. But we didn’t do any of that, and we’re all going to pay the price: shortages, high inflation, and potentially the end of the petrodollar agreement that made America the world’s superpower.

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:

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for America’s war, Saudi Arabia had a fallback option. They could transport their oil through a pipeline running east-to-west across the country, to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. But shipping the oil onward from Yanbu to points south and east requires passing through Bab el-Mandeb… which the Houthis now control.

This isn’t a complete blockade, because oil can also travel north through the Red Sea, going through the Suez Canal. That means Mideast oil could still reach Europe, though countries in Asia are in a much worse position. On the other hand, Iran and its proxies can also attack the Saudi east-to-west pipeline… which they did this week, shutting it down for an indefinite time.

With Iran and its allies controlling both straits and bombing oil infrastructure at will, they’ve pinched the arteries of the world economy. This is a disaster for America and its allies. It’s our worst strategic defeat in decades, possibly ever.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: The inevitable car chase scene

A wrecked car engulfed in flames

The Probability Broach, chapter 23

We’ve gotten almost to the end of TPB without a car chase. Especially since this is a society with no speed limits or safety regulations, that’s a heck of a missed opportunity to show some good old high-speed carnage. Fortunately for us, L. Neil Smith is about to rectify that.

Win and his friends are headed toward Denver—”Saint Charles Town” in the North American Confederacy’s parallel geography—to get sufficiently close to Madison’s hideout that they can use their Probability Broach to jam his, thereby preventing him from bringing armies or nukes through the dimensional portal.

They’re taking Ed’s hovercraft, riding along “Greenway 2000”, one of the North American Confederacy’s superhighways. Smith describes it as resembling a rounded W—two parallel troughs, one for each direction, covered with “mutated crabgrass” and packed with machinery underneath the ground to supply “guidance, information and entertainment”, as well as induction power for vehicles that propel themselves that way.

They’re flying down the Greenway at 355 miles per hour, with Ed’s super-advanced vehicle navigating autonomously for the most part, when they notice another car approaching rapidly:

A long slender shape flew beside us, paralleling the right-hand road crest, perhaps twenty-five feet off the ground, and dropping to our speed.

“I was an idiot!” Ed growled. “So busy watching Madison it never occurred to me he’d be watching us! Hold on!”

The aircraft pulled ahead, suddenly veered to the left, plopping clumsily into the roadbed. It wobbled a little on its rapidly inflating skirt and rode the camber down ahead of us.

…A rear section of the intruder gaped open—the turbulence inside must have been unbearable—the ugly nozzle of a weapon pointed at us. Ed slammed on the brakes, fishtailed wildly, while the barrel ahead spouted flames. Our windshield starred; a deafening whistle shrieked through the car.

Obviously, the bad guys subscribe to the Imperial Stormtrooper school of marksmanship, so none of our heroes are hit. But the other car is right in front of them, effectively brake-checking them and forcing them to slow down, giving them no chance to outspeed their adversary and get away.

“Any way we can shoot back?” I yelled.

Ed jerked the wheel through evasive maneuvers, skidding up the right bank, then slowly back to the center. “No! If he keeps slowing, we won’t have enough momentum to climb the bank. He’ll have us trapped!”

Still no government help!

In these final chapters of the book, it’s more and more noticeable that Win and his friends are completely on their own. Couldn’t the Continental Congress have given them something? A small force of volunteers? An honor guard to escort them? Couldn’t the delegates have passed the hat to pay for some armed bodyguards, even?

But no. For all their selflessness in warning the NAC of its collective danger, the good guys got nothing whatsoever in return.

Then again, Win and his friends seem as if they’re equally to blame. An earlier passage alluded to “road company traffic cops”, so such things must exist here in some form. Despite this, they don’t attempt to call 911, or whatever the local equivalent is, when they’re being shot at.

Is it because the idea just didn’t occur to them in the heat of the moment, despite characters like Ed and Lucy being NAC natives? Or—a darker interpretation—is it because these private cops won’t intervene in 300-mile-per-hour shootouts, but only turn up afterwards to clean the blood off the highway and ticket the survivors?

I’ve said it before, but for a book that was supposedly written to make the case for anarcho-capitalism, TPB doesn’t paint a very appealing picture of this society. Smith tells us that the NAC is a thoroughly peaceful and civilized place, but then he turns around and writes a scene like this, depicting the highways as Mad Max death courses where another driver might open fire on you in a fit of road rage, and if that happens, there’s not even anyone you can call to rescue you.

Worse, the protagonists are all but defenseless against this attack. Given that everyone in the NAC is so gung-ho about weapons, you might think Ed’s car would have bulletproof windows or built-in guns a la the Batmobile, but it doesn’t.

Instead, Win tells Ed to open the rear hatch and then try to pass the other car so he can get a clear shot at them. Ed comes up with a clever way to do it:

Engines bellowed above the hurricane inside the car. We surged forward, upward, yanking my ears down to my belly-button, and left the ground with a lurch. The other car passed beneath us, then we were down with a bump… I climbed off the floor and rested my gun on the seat back, sighting as the hatch flopped wildly in the wind.

…I laid the glowing dot on a shadowy figure at the controls, pumping the trigger as fast as I could. Slapslapslap! My own side window disintegrated, glass and chrome spouted from the other car, smoke began to pour out. They slowed, spilling dense black clouds, swerving desperately for an off-ramp.

They didn’t make it. The car glanced off a concrete pillar and came apart, smearing itself down the right embankment. Burning shards and a wall of smoke dashed across the road.

It’s the classic Hollywood car-chase scene, through and through. All it’s missing is the single burning wheel rolling out of the wreckage.

It’s not clear who the driver of the other car was—presumably it was another of the Hamiltonians’ disposable henchmen—but what’s especially confusing about this scene is how Madison found out that Ed, Win and the gang were on his tail. He certainly doesn’t have a spy among the protagonists.

Also, this scene implies that Madison was aware they were coming for him, but that isn’t true. As subsequent events in this chapter will show, he has no idea what the good guys are planning and ends up being caught totally off guard. I’m sure Smith didn’t intend this reading, but it’s plausible that Madison actually had nothing to do with this encounter, and this is just a normal Tuesday morning commute in the NAC!

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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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