Inaguration Week

In contrast to many, I found myself detachedly observing last week's festivities in DC, like an anthropologist from a 1970s sf story studying a mass ritual of a distant society.

Perhaps I would have entered into the spirit of the event if I'd seen unequivocal evidence that President Obama's inaguration embodied the achievement of an ideal expressed forty-five years ago, that the US would be a country where a man is judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character; but instead, all I saw were the thick fingerprints of vote banks, oneupmanship among the self-anointed, and manufactured consent.

President Obama is a Chicago Bragadino, an adept player to people's fantasies. (See Greene, Law 32, and favian saw this a year ago). And just like his Venetian alchemist forebear, President Obama is a symptom of our Fourth Republic's decline, not its cause.

You may doubt my pessimism is warranted. After all, President Obama has tapped smart people with advanced degrees from Ivy and comparable universities for his staff, e.g. Holdren, Sunstein, and Summers. What could go wrong?

I thought I was a genius

a few weeks ago, when I realized that regardless how they are formally constituted, whether as direct democracies, absolute dictatorships, or something in between, all governments tend toward oligarchy.

Two prongs drive this process, one from the bottom and one from the top. I'll illustrate it with reference to our dear old Fourth Republic, but the principles are universal.

At bottom, the great mass of people are ignorant. The average US voter has little understanding of the issues of the day and falls back on decision making shortcuts. As Cialdini demonstrates, those shortcuts are exploited by opinion leaders, such as those in charge of brand management for the Donkey and Elephant parties; community leaders; people on tv or the internet; the organs of the information ministry; etc. Call your congressman, pull the lever, click-whirr. The opinion leaders are part of our oligarchy.

Universal suffrage is not required for an opinion leader to form the great mass of people into a weapon; simple ochlocracy, which seethes below the surface when a reasonably large number of people are gathered, will suffice. See 1, 2, 3.

At top, the formal ruling class is insular. Our politicians live and work in a drained swamp probably hundreds or thousands of miles from where my US readers. As such, they are surrounded by a phalanx of bodymen and grooms of the stool. Politicians and their sycophants send their children to the same school; they take the same subway line to and from work; they are in bed together, sometimes quite literally. Our politicians only emerge every 2, 4, or 6 years to kiss enough babies and eat in enough diners to give the opinion leaders referenced above enough raw material to work with. The rest of the time, whoever controls the flow of information into Washington controls the ruling class.

Further, the formal ruling class is as ill-informed as the great mass of the people. See 1, 2 (scroll down to "Stupak"), 3, 4 (scroll down to "Mars").

So I'm a genius for seeing this inexorable tend toward oligarchy, right? Except German sociologist Robert Michels came up with it in 1911.

Extrapolation & Speculation

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Work, worldbuilding for my next sf novel, "an undertaking of great advantage, but no one to know what it is" (unless I phone you), and the quiet pleasures of domestic life have occupied my energies the last two months. Plus, it two weeks after Hurricane Ike for our electricity to be restored.

My previous post and the intervening election remind me of some "how to write sf" book I read in high school or college. (I remember the tan metal shelves and fluorescent lights of the second or third floor of Fondren Library). The author raised a distinction between extrapolation and speculation. My previous post is an extrapolation; so too is the negative correlation between number of uses of the word "recession" by the New York Times and the incumbent party's share of the popular vote. Extrapolation is cautious, sober, linear; speculation is a wild-assed guess, piling all your chips on the black swan.

"President Obama" is pure speculation. Five years ago, no one would have extrapolated the election of the first black US president in 2008: the prominent black political figures of the day either didn't want the job (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice), had tried for it and failed miserably (Jesse Jackson), or had maxed out their positions under the Peter Principle (Charles Rangel, Sheila Jackson-Lee, etc). It would have required a pure leap of faith to predict the first black US president would be (a) half-Kenyan, (b) a then-Illinois state senator, and (c) the beneficiary of a sex scandal involving the actress who played Seven of Nine in order to gain the Governor/Senator/Vice President status held by every non-incumbent major party presidential candidate since about 1952.

Was it John Gardner in The Art of Fiction who pointed out, "Of course truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense"?

What will the next four years bring? Let me extrapolate:

Obama will be a Jimmy Carter with more melanin:-- and I say that knowing Jimmy Carter had a handful of sound policies, such as airline deregulation and allowing the Federal Reserve under Volcker to implement austerity measures that broke the post-Nixon stagflation. However, Obama will enter popular memory, like Carter, as being indecisive, especially in foreign affairs.

Something I'm very interested in seeing during the Obama presidency is how the disillusionment will play out. Obama had to play the hope card to topple Hillary for the Dem nomination this year, but the chickens will come home to roost. Rebellions don't happen when the hopeless have no hope; they happen when the hopeful have those hopes dashed.

So now I'll speculate:

In 2011, a black man will try to assassinate Pres. Obama. ("Try" in the sense of being arrested with weapons in Obama's vicinity).

In 2012, a Republican candidate will gain his party's nomination by building a youth movement out of unemployed white liberal-arts graduates between the ages of 22-26.

Presidential election rules of thumb

Now that both major party tickets have been decided for 2008, it's a fitting time to look at a couple of rules of thumb for predicting a winner.

Americans like presidents with British names
British here means vaguely English, with fairly bland Scots or Irish names, e.g. McKinley, Kennedy, or Reagan, being included. 39 of 43 presidents have had British names. The exceptions? Van Buren, T. Roosevelt, and F. Roosevelt were all descendants of the New Amsterdam Dutch elite and thus were New York's equivalent of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Eisenhower was a commanding general in a victorious war, a German-American equivalent of Jackson or Grant. Besides, he had the good British-sounding nickname "Ike."

For 2008, advantage: McCain.

The three-syllable ticket
Since World War II, the major party ticket whose surnames total closer to three syllables is 9-2-4 in winning the presidency. Since the mass adoption of color TV (before 1968), the tendency is even more pronounced: 8-0-2. Why? Non-British names are often more than two syllables (e.g. Eisenhower, Kefauver, Goldwater, Ferraro, Dukakis, Lieberman). Also, a common stress pattern in a three-syllable ticket is AaB (Reagan-Bush, Clinton-Gore), which provides an aural combination of power and restraint more pleasing to the ear than the thudding AB (Ford-Dole, Bush-Quayle, Dole-Kemp), the dog-trot AaBb (Carter-Mondale), or the mouth-mush of any five-syllable ticket (Mondale-Ferraro, Dukakis-Bentsen).

For 2008, advantage: McCain-Palin (4 syllables to 5).

Xenosociology 1: Division of Labor

I've known for a while that essentially every intelligent alien species would invent money, but it only occurred to me today that they also would invent the division of labor. Because essentially every intelligent alien species will be social (for reasons I'll address in another post), they would be able to break a complex task into simpler, specialized tasks for the different members of their group. Because they would be embroiled in intraspecies conflict (ditto), the need for military advantage would drive specialization.

Why you should care about the Mauritania coup

First, in case you haven't heard, here's la Wik on the subject.

Second, I assume you don't care. This seems a safe assumption. Furthermore, if you do already care, I suspect it's for the political correct reasons endemic to overeducated members of Western civilization--soldiers should stay out of politics, former president Abdallahi was elected (with the votes of about 12% of the population!), the Pentagon was probably behind it, etc.

Alternatively, you might care because Mauritanians are Muslim and you're a resident of the dar al-Harb. Although I respect your right to define an Other in order to try to galvanize your pseudotraditionalist vision for Western civilization, no, that's not it either.

What's the better reason you should care? Because there are four trends, two technological and two social, that will make Mauritania important in the next few decades. Do I hear laughter? Shall we go back in time to 1955 and ask your (grand)father if the US would lose a war in Vietnam within twenty years? We all have tidy visions of the future, derived by extrapolating the present, and they're all wrong.

Why will Mauritania be important? Background: it has a million square kilometers of the Sahara desert and about 450 miles of Atlantic coastline. (Map and data from the CIA World Factbook).

Trend 1: photovoltaics, aka solar cells, are continually getting cheaper and more efficient. But regardless of the efficiency of the solar cell itself, you'll get more energy from it if it's located in a desert. Mauritania is almost entirely desert. Hmmm. We could generate a lot of electricity there, but how can we get it to the US (or Western Europe)?

Trend 2: materials that are superconductors at liquid nitrogen temperatures are well known. We already know how to handle liquid nitrogen (trust me; I grew up on a farm with beef cattle and I've made liquid nitrogen ice cream in the lab) and the exotic copper alloys will get cheaper to make. A 4000-mile superconducting cable, sheathed in a liquid nitrogen jacket, laid across the Atlantic is not impossible, though it will probably always be relatively expensive. Don't we have a million square kilometers of desert from LA to El Paso?

Trend 3: Environmentalist NIMBYism. To provide an appreciable amount of our power needs will take a lot of land area covered with solar cells. True, unlike wind power, the Kennedys don't have vacation homes in the desert Southwest, but celebrities, the wealthy, and local politicians have a fondness for places like Santa Fe and Sedona. Also, there may actually be real environmental impacts from covering half of Arizona with solar cells. Just like concrete, they're impervious to rainwater, and desert plants generally aren't shade tolerant. But we have to export the environmental impact somewhere....

Trend 4: Post-Bono dogooderism. Though an uncouth sentiment in Western civilization today, the UNHCR/foreign aid approach to dealing with the Third World has failed. Not from lack of money--in recent years, Mauritania received 15% of GDP as foreign aid. (Aid totals here, GDP here). Eventually, even high-ranking people at NGOs and government bureaucracies will realize handouts don't promote literacy, education, health, women's rights, minority rights, manumission, etc., and instead, a welfare-to-work, Operation Bootstrap, handup-not-handout strategy will be more effective. (This process will be helped when the bureaucrats and NGO leaders realize their organizations' sizes, budgets, and prestige will remain large and continue to grow regardless of the particular services they provide). Figleaf neoliberal globalization with some pleasant rhetoric and an NGO's customers, that is, its donors who want to buy good feelings by giving money to help the poor, will lap it up. (Insert image of purchases from Pier 1 loaded into the back of a Volvo station wagon). Mauritania will be a golden opportunity for figleafed neoliberal globalization--jobs for the locals! A few megawatts for the local electricity supply!

Obama's logo

Yesterday afternoon, I waited at a red light behind a car with an Obama bumper sticker, and I was really impressed with Obama's logo.

The capital O in his surname becomes an encompassing circle, which symbolizes both social communion and the integration of the self.

The rising sun symbolizes birth and rebirth; the beginning of a season of growth; the banishment of darkness. Consider how fitting it is that the synoptic gospels state the women found the empty tomb at dawn in the springtime. The encompassing circle also fits with this, as it symbolizes the birth canal, through which new life enters the world.

The plowed field symbolizes nature's bounty (which obviously belongs equally to us all) and reminds us of our debt to those who work to bring that bounty to our tables. It evokes quiet pride in the hearts of small town and rural Americans and strikes a chord of back-to-the-land longing in the hearts of post-hippie environmentalists.

Obama's logo is especially powerful compared to Hillary's. Hers looks like a tired rehash of previous campaign logos, with the words "Kerry '04" or "Carter '76" photoshopped out.

Given its symbolic power, whether or not he wins the Democratic nomination or the general election, I am confident that Obama's logo will be studied by campaign managers for decades to come.

SCI FI Weekly Retro Gallery Image

Here's an old one from 2006, inspired by "Arizona Dream" by Philippe Bullot, #473 on this page.

We left the north dock of the New Ruidoso arcology about ten in the morning. The brown terrain, scuffed by low brush, flowed beneath our aircars. The jagged paired peaks of Mesa Doble loomed on the right and the autopilot took us close enough to see the strata of pale and dark rock striping across the mesa.

"Far enough?" Derome asked from the trailing aircar. Our aircar projected his voice to sound as if it came from behind us.

Our aircar also answered his question, 14.8 km, but I turned my head anyway to pour the data into deeper parts of my brain and the aircar obliged by blocking my eye's view of the cabin's back wall with a camera-collected view through the air behind us. Derome's aircar, like ours an aerofoil cabin with two lifters mounted on forward, chicane nacelles, had passed Mesa Doble. Behind the mesa, fading in the haze, New Ruidoso climbed, its jagged profile formed of sharp edges, a mimic of the mesa. They said New Ruidoso's architecture showed respect for the natural landscape, but at that moment it seemed to mock it with its size and its straight lines. Inside our relatives and acquaintances dreamed in Virtual, tended by machines, sheltered by buckytube walls.

"Far enough," I said.

Derome's aircar yawed a bit and then sped up. He'd already punched the hacked-up override. "Race you to the river and back!" he shouted as he passed us.

SCI FI Weekly Gallery Image 19 November 2007

Sorry, between the Thanksgiving holiday and technical difficulties with my smartphone, my entry in the series for "Oblate" by Angelis Jara, #552 on this page, is late.

Eric climbed down the dropship's ladder and jumped off the last rung to the surface of the flowing lava. The cryocompressors in his boot soles hardened the molten surface and his newly-formed raft of igneous rock bobbed on the glowing lava lake. Vaporized helium flowed through tubing up his legs and lower back and radiated heat out of his suit's angel wings.

He had not thought of Anjara for a few weeks but he thought of her now. He remembered how she arched her back and sucked in breath through her teeth when he licked her labia and clitoris while his fingers stroked her G-spot. He remembered the moss-green couch and the retro brick accent wall in her apartment and how she and he sat over wide deep mugs of coffee and plotted his conquest of the world of xenogeology. Here he was, six and a half years later, leading the expedition to the magma wells of Beta Comae Berenices III-B, hated by older scientists like Geli Munday and her cohort, envied by his socially-inept peers. He was only here because of Anjara.

He froze in place but his mind swirled. He clung to the primary research questions to anchor his thoughts. Did tidal forces caused by the primary planet and the other moon explain B's still-molten core? Did the pillars of translucent komatiite date back to the moon's origin or a later impact event?

I'll never forget you, he'd said, in a last desperate attempt to make her stay out of pity.

She must have rented the worldweary expression and tone of voice from some marketer of personality traits, because he knew then and now Anjara had none of her own. The half-life of memory is seven years, she replied.

He had never cried after she ended their affair and he needed to. He needed to cry, to honor his memories of their time together and to redeem the years of byzantine academic intrigue and emotionless hookups since then. The realization rushed on him and his suit stiffened to assure his balance. His suit telltales, displayed inside his faceplate, showed his heart rate and blood pressure in their yellow zones.

Cry now, tears to be captured by the expedition's data stream? And let Geli Munday and his other enemies whisper mockingly about him in the corridors of the institute's xenogeology department?

SCI FI Gallery Image 12 November 2007

The latest in this series was inspired by "Bugdropship Liftoff" by Manfred Thraller, #551 on this page.

Lt. Harrell finished his pre-flight walkaround of the dropship. The left hind tarsal claw showed some reentry blistering but otherwise she checked out. Harrell reached for the rope ladder to climb up but hesitated. SOP gave dropship pilots three hours turnaround time during an Orbit-to-Surface Round Trip and he might as well use it. The setting sun lit the puffy edges of low cumulus clouds
and a brisk breeze rustled across the lifeless rockstrewn plain. Within the square defined by the shield generators, the recon base showed as humps of buried shelters. Most of the six people based there would be asleep or on duty
wrangling their robots, but someone might be at liberty to swap stories over cups of moonshine.

Mr. Redmon spoke in his mind's ear. --Lieutenant, is your bug physically unable to perform?--

--No,-- Harrell replied, quite consciously leaving off sir. He could chauffeur the civilian without repecting him.

--I ordered you to shove off as soon as you did your post- and pre-flight checks.--

Harrell stared past the humped shelters toward low tan hills five miles away. --SOP calls for me to give a surface base CO one hour to bundle and load packages for return to the flagship.--

Through the link he felt Redmon seethe. --Lieutenant, while I am dirtside I am the commanding officer of all I survey. Now get your ass upstairs or I'll fill your life with more bullshit than a Texas barnyard. Do you roger me?--

--I roger you. Mr. Redmon.-- He turned his back on the base, scaled his bug's thorax, and pulled the rope ladder into the cockpit after him. He tapped the controls and the bug jumped on its springy legs, pushing Harrell into his
seat. At the top of the jump the minidrives kicked in, pushing him deeper and filling the bottom of the window views with spilling yellow-white light. He turned the bug toward the sunset and his orbital insertion and wondered what kind of bribe to the dropship group's XO would free him from returning to pick up the civilian.

SCI FI Weekly Classic Gallery Image

I've been doing this series of sf-writing calisthenics for a while. Here's an early snippet, inspired by "Point of View" by Jérôme Bois, Cover no. 470 (April 24, 2006) on this page. (The seated woman and the servitor were visible when it was the SCI FI Weekly cover image, trust me).

"Birds don't fly in straight lines."

Across the room, legs crossed on a chair hung from the ceiling on slender carbon fiber, Priya looked up. Her gesture stopped the servitor carrying a tray with espresso
cups in mid-bow. Past the servitor, Arminius stood and stared out the window. He wore the gray trousers and green shirt combination she was certain represented a bug in his valet's software. Hands clasped behind him, his profile showed his gaze tracing straight lines through the air outside between their flat and the ziggurats downtown.

"You see a bird?" Every so often one strayed in from the
sea of wilderness outside the city, or snuck through the ductwork from the arcology's atrium.

He shook his head with a slight smile. "The aircars. Traffic control has them travelling in straight lines, but why? We've decoded the brains of birds and could code the same into the cpus of aircars."

"Birds fly into windows. You want an aircar to do the same?"

SCI FI Weekly Gallery Image 5 November 2007

This week's entry is inspired by "The Search on Glacialis Luna," by Paul Gibson, cover no. 550 on this page.

Beta Comae Berenices had risen, but that only made conditions worse, Gib thought. Under the yellow sunlight, vapor steamed out of the open holes in the ice, cloaking the surface in a thick fog. Outcroppings of magnetite thrust jaggedly out of the pack ice and spoofed the scanner on Gib's airscout with false leads. Every kilometer, Unité observation towers stood on three spindly legs, but the sensors running around the circumeference of each tower's circular top deck had been designed for warmer planets and gave unreliable data.

Even if the impediments magically disappeared, the odds were high (p = 0.91, the airscout's Bayesian system guessed) the artifact had impacted too hard and smashed against a magnetite pillar or plunged through the pack ice into the sea below. This was a fool's errand. Gib slowed the airscout and left it hovering while his mouth contorted and he shook his head at the futility of the search. He turned the stick and upped the throttle to head for home.

"Monsieur Pauli asks that you continue the search," the airscout said in its cheery alto voice. "He will continue to pay you 125% of expenses, plus time spent."

Gib hovered again. M. Pauli knew the odds were against finding the artifact, but if he were willing to spend more money--

--The artifact must be worth a lot.

"I'll be glad to keep searching," Gib said. He pushed the airscout forward at low speed and tasked every spare cpu cycle on stripping magnetite ghosts from the scanner data.

Sci Fi Weekly Gallery Image 29 October 2007

Looks like SCI FI Weekly didn't get a picture up this week. Here's my entry in the series for Alex NIKO, "SinE City: Free Port" (Cover no. 548 here)

The sky above the city was empty this morning. All the spacers at liberty and slumming bobos slept late after their debaucheries the night before. L.X. throttled down the thrusters on the runabout and levelled off above the city. The rooftops, slabbed and angled like the offcuts at a giant's stoneworks, stood like an archipelago in a sea of morning haze. The haze and smooth surfaces veiled the inner workings of the city, where crimes against nature could be indulged in the flesh and, for an added price, the chirurgical vats and neuroanatomical programmers could strip those crimes' evidence from body and mind. OKIN tolerated the free port, aware of the needs satisfied therein and confident its gates and scanners could contain the city's excesses and preserve the narrow-minded serenity of the realm beyond.

L.X. patted the black leather messenger bag on the seat beside him, sipped hot green tea, and dove to meet those waiting for him.

Sci Fi Weekly Gallery Image 8 October 2007

Since I'm getting international acclaim for these snippets, time to get back in the saddle, though I confess I was difficult to inspire with this one. Nothing against Christoph Gerber's "Space Tour," #546 on this page, but views of ringed gas giants from one of their moons have been pretty common lately.

Tof pressed his nose against the ship's window. Outside lay a rock-strewn desert out of ancient Arizona or Alpha Centauri IV. "Isn't it neat?"

Gerber banked the shuttle. They flew low, below the tops of the natural spires of khaki basalt rising above the plain a few hundred meters apart. Flying between them left his augmented reflexes unchallenged. "It's a marginally habitable moon."

"But Grand-Orb is so close! You can see its clouds and count its rings!"

Gerber sighed. "It's a ringed gas giant. The galaxy is full of them. This trip is just a milk run. It's the antisense of wonder."

Movie reviews: Barbarella and 300

The last couple of months have been busy with work and play. Here are a pair of movie reviews for you:

It came as a fitting surprise, the kind that resolves a question you weren't consciously aware your subconscious had asked, to find after seeing the movie that Barbarella was based on a French comic book. At times, one can sense the title character reflects the beautiful-naif archetype of Gaullist-era pop culture I first encountered in the Clementine books my father had stashed away in a bottom shelf of the bookcase. Sadly, the film suffers from Roger Vadim's ham-handed direction. Few things are as tedious as the adolescent taboo-nudging of a previous generation, which was especially regrettable given the truly interesting potential of the conflict between the sexually-innocent Barbarella and the mad scientist Durand Durand. Alas, Vadim gives us his then-wife Jane Fonda's nude silhouette and some ludicrous dialogue (e.g., Barbarella tells the blind angel to "look out!"). The film had a few good moments, such as Barbarella shorting out the Orgasmotron, and Barbarella and Dildano using the intimacy pill to make love a la Terre, plus I could see themes, blurry through Zeitgeist transmission, from the atrocity exhibition that was '60s New Wave British sf, but those moments were few and far between.

300 is of course the highly-fictionalized epic story of a group of white men with ripped abs slaughtering thousands of veiled Asiatics and servile Negroes in the name of truth, justice, and the Spartan way. To be fair, effeminate Xerxes with his overdubbed breathy-bass voice has some Caucasians in his employ, but they are twisted and monstrous (and they aren't spearcarriers, either). Think of it as a sword-and-sandal version of The Iron Dream; it is the best piece of gay fascist post-September 11 propaganda I have yet seen. To be fair, the earliest fight scenes were well-done, before the viewer was numbed with their repetitiveness, and the symbolism of Ephialtes--whom Leonidas wants to stand and Xerxes wants to kneel--was more evocative than I expected.