Chrononautic Log

August 28, 2003

Courtesy of Nick Mamatas, this gem from the Weekly Worker:

Five young Ukrainian conspirators — seemingly with a background in the ‘official communist’ Komsomol and well able to pick up the vital factional nuances of left politics in the Anglo-Saxon world — managed to pass themselves off as ‘sections’ of anything up to 12 different organisations. A feat which might be explained by the claim that they first met each other in an “amateur acting troupe.”

Those stung include Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Sheila Torrance’s Workers Revolutionary Party and its ‘Fourth International’, the US-based League for a Revolutionary Party, the Committees of Correspondence (publishers of News and Letters), the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and Workers Power, along with its burlesque League for the Fifth International. Plans were also being hatched to establish links with colonel Gaddafi and his regime in Libya — that at least might have proved to be a real money-spinner.

Using a whole string of aliases — Alexander, Ivor, Ivan, Jukuv, Kyril, Marsha, Alyosha, Ihor, Pugachov, Mikhail, Oleksity, Sergey Kozubenkow, Vadym Yevtoshok, Vassily, Viktor, Vitality, Yakov — Boris Pastukh, Oleg Vernik (assistant lecturer at a Kiev law school and mastermind of the fraud), Oleksander Zvorsky (born 1972), Yuri Baronov (born 1984) and Zakhar Popovich (born 1976) recreated in fictional microcosm the factional struggles and rivalries that plague the left in Britain and the US. Negotiations, polemics, splits and all. This doubtlessly pleased their ‘masters’ in London and New York no end.

In a spirit of internationalism, but presumably with an eye to outdoing their rivals on the left, various groups channelled money and material resources to aid those whom they believed to be their co-thinkers. For example, it seems that at least three organisations were supplying cash for the upkeep of an ‘office’ in Kiev.

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August 26, 2003

Note that this is not an exhaustive list; for instance, I don’t intend to miss the Tor party if I can avoid it. But it is a list of everything I have times and dates for.

Further bulletins as events warrant, but probably after it’s too late to do anything about them.

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August 22, 2003

I just watched a yellowjacket fly up to the two-foot spiderweb outside my fifth-floor office window, latch onto the mummified body of a mayfly, and fly off with it. (Or most of it. It looks like the yellowjacket found it easier to detach the body from the wings than detatch the wings from the spiderweb.)

Aside from some practical instruction regarding mosquitoes and cockroaches, my childhood education in entomology was limited to a very simple and straightforward Standard Model, presented in fables and children’s books and the occasional Bible story. The Standard Model included five Fundamental Bugs: Ants, Bees, Spiders, Flies, and Grasshoppers (or Locusts).

Yellowjackets that steal food out of spiders’ webs were not in any way part of the Standard Model.

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August 21, 2003

So last night Lara calls me and wakes me up and tells me to go up onto the roof of my apartment building and look at Mars. “It’s the best look you’re going to get for three hundred years,” she says.

I’m skeptical. I have lousy color vision, and planets all look the same to me. But I pull on some clothes and go upstairs and look southeast and MAN-SLAYING ARES; ARES THE SHIELD-PIERCER; ARES, SACKER OF TOWNS; ARES, INSATIABLE IN WAR it’s the brightest thing in the sky and it’s redder than a harvest moon.

Figure 1. Artist’s impression of Mars

Naturally I spent the rest of the night fitfully dreaming that I was a teenage colonist on an imperfectly terraformed Mars, being treated like an untouchable by the aristocractic third- and fourth-generation colonists; and waking up gasping, convinced that my lungs were atrophying like those of Manue in Walter Miller’s “Crucifixus Etiam” / “The Sower Does Not Reap”.

But it was worth it.

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August 20, 2003

Will Shetterly notes that yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup that toppled Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in favor of “Light of the Aryans” Shah Reza Pahlavi.

In the name, naturally, of fighting communism.

And, hey, not only did the Brits got to keep their oil wells for another 25 years — on top of that, we also got the Mercedes-Benz G500.

Anyone hear anything about Ahmed Chalabi’s taste in cars?

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Jed points out John Clute’s review of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. What mostly interests Jed about the review is Clute’s use of language, so let me apologize in advance if I give the mistaken impression that he’s somehow responsible for the following rant:

Am I the only one who’s totally sick of the SF community’s feud with Margaret Atwood? It seems like I can’t read an issue of Ansible these days without an Atwood SF-bashing quote; the things she says may be silly and it may be immature of her to say them, but why does anyone the SF world feel compelled to pay attention?

I don’t buy Clute’s argument that “every slurry in the face of honest discourse damages [this] fragile world.” The world’s not that fragile, and considering the violence that is daily done in this world to honest discourse on every subject from religion to economics to landscape architecture, Atwood’s remarks are a very low-pressure slurry indeed.

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August 16, 2003

Courtesy of Rob, finally a candidate for governor of California that we can all get behind, even if it’s only in order to keep him where we can see him.

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Normally I wouldn’t resort to this; but my grandfather used to say that if you tell your dreams before breakfast, they’ll come true. Last night I dreamed I got a check for a reprint (!) sale of a story I couldn’t quite remember writing, to a market I couldn’t quite remember having heard of.

That sounds like nice work if you can get it, so I’m drawing the vever and putting out the rum.

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August 14, 2003

It’s probably not news to anyone that the power is out across half the Northeast, and I’m sure we’ll get reports trickling in from the usual sources before too long. But, not surprisingly, I haven’t been able to get through to any of the folks I know back there by phone. So if anyone’s got any eyewitness reports, let me know.

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And bullets, and grenades, pretty much anything else. I guess the good news is, hafnium-178m2 looks to be just as much of a pain to refine as enriched uranium, so they should stay out of the hands of everyone but the rich countries for a while. And the rich countries don’t have much incentive to make them, since the kind of wars they’re fighting these days are pushing them toward weapons that are more discriminate in who they kill, and not less.

The New Scientist article is a little vague, seeming to blur the line between “energy” and “destructive power” — a gamma-ray burst may deliver the same number of joules as a ton of TNT, but it’s unlikely to leave the same crater. That said, these suckers sound like bad news: comparable to neutron bombs (in that they kill live things but leave buildings standing) but, apparently, cleaner simpler and easier to scale down to “thinkable” size. If someone finds a use case for them they could be very bad news.

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I’d just like to call attention to Rob’s erudite expression of outrage over the Pentagon’s plan to allow Congress’ appropriation of extra combat pay for American soldiers to lapse, now that tens of thousands of American soldiers are actually in combat.

If the Pentagon can’t find the money to pay our soldiers, it should ask the Congress for more. And if the Congress is worried about keeping expenses down, it should clearly state to the American public, and to our soldiers, which specific programs it values more than the men and women fighting and dying for their country.

I’m sure this will do no end of good for the troops’ morale.

(Yes, Rob has a brother in the 82nd Airborne, and last I heard he was still in Afghanistan. Anyone who thinks this means Rob is insufficiently unbiased to express an opinion on the issue is welcome to stand up and get smacked.)

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William Gibson has come up with something that I think has the makings of an excellent if cruel convention drinking game:

Yep. Indeed, I was attempting a wry funny. In fact, I continued to attempt them all day, privately, having constructed the following blurbic boilerplate :

“[TITLE] is like watching [AUTHOR 1] worry the bloated corpse of [AUTHOR #2].”

And some of them were really funny, or so I thought, but I’d never post them here, else someone assume I had it in for whomever I’d happened to plug into slots #2 and #3. (Filling #1 is at once the most challenging and rewarding, you’ll find.)

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August 12, 2003

USA Today is reporting that new DNA tests seem to indicate that Otzi, the Neolithic hunter whose body was found in the Alps twelve years ago, killed at least two people before he was brought down:

In 2001, an Italian radiologist found an arrowhead embedded in Otzi’s shoulder. Otzi had been hit from behind and managed to pull out only the shaft. That discovery led Eduard Egarter, Bolanzo’s chief medical examiner and curator of Otzi’s body, to look for more evidence of a fight.

Alois Pirpamer, one of the climbers who found Otzi, told Egarter that the Iceman had been clutching a knife in his right hand at the time of the discovery. The knife came loose when the body was pulled from the ice. . . .

Egarter matched the knife to the hand and found a deep gash on the hand that had been missed in previous studies. He then found another cut on the left hand and bruises on the torso, as if Otzi had been beaten. . . . Blood from one person was found on the back of Otzi’s cloak, and blood from two people was found on the same arrow in his quiver. More blood was on the knife.

Quilici says the team suspects blood on the back of the cloak may have come from a wounded colleague that Otzi was carrying over his shoulder. Loy says blood of two people was found on the same arrow, suggesting Otzi killed both men and retrieved the arrow.

The newspaper is reporting it as “‘Iceman’ was murdered,” which I think is an interesting jump to conclusions. (Of course, this is USA Today we’re talking about.) The new findings don’t seem to tell us anything new about how Otzi actually died; just a little more about his last days. It’s clear that he was shot, and it may have been that wound that eventually killed him; but the physical evidence doesn’t tell us who shot first, or why.

Still, until we find the other guys, it’s hard not to sympathize with Otzi. Dying alone and on the run in the Alps in 5300 BC — man, that’s a hard way to go.

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August 11, 2003

House Budget Chairman Jim Nussle last week declared, “tax cuts don't cause deficits.”

—— the Wall Street Journal, via Brad deLong

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Ken “Caesar” Fisher of ArsTechnica (one of the more venerable and respected blog-like sites from the days before blogs were called blogs) notices an interesting dynamic:

There seems to be a growing disparity over just what the point of an online discussion is. . . . Sometimes I think we forget that the kinds of discussions we have online are totally different from most real-life conversations. There’s the obvious stuff: we're not discussing things in person, and we may not know who we’re talking with. There’s a bigger issue, however, and that’s the illusion that the discussion’s partners are limited to only people participating in the thread by posting in it.

I think the purpose of online discussions is in part about informing that third party, all those people who read, but don’t reply. That’s why I’m not typically bothered by topics that seem to end up in stalemates. A good online discussion should inform people as to multiple sides of an argument.

One of those things that we all ought to know, but often forget anyway.

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Yeah, it’s Al Gore. So what?

Normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table, talk through the choices before us and make a decision. But that didn’t really happen with this war — not the way it should have. And as a result, too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price, for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons that we didn’t have a better public debate before the Iraq War started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turn out to have been completely wrong. . . .

And it’s not just in foreign policy. The same thing has been happening in economic policy, where we’ve also got another huge and threatening mess on our hands. I'm convinced that one reason we've had so many nasty surprises in our economy is that the country somehow got lots of false impressions about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted . . .

[W]hether you're a Democrat or a Republican — or an Independent, a Libertarian, a Green or a Mugwump — you've got a big stake in making sure that Representative Democracy works the way it is supposed to. And today, it just isn’t working very well. We all need to figure out how to fix it because we simply cannot keep on making such bad decisions on the basis of false impressions and mistaken assumptions.

. . . I think it has a lot to do with the way we seek the truth and try in good faith to use facts as the basis for debates about our future — allowing for the unavoidable tendency we all have to get swept up in our enthusiasms.

. . . Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we’re all used to that. I’ve even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty. . . .

So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.

We can only hope.

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August 10, 2003

Fig. 1. Mystery space monster over Seattle Center

As seen on the Seattle Times website less than half an hour ago. (Caption added by yours truly, but what else could it be?)

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August 9, 2003

Will Shetterly has put up a brilliant page with some letters and pictures from his niece Brandi, a US Marine currently serving in Iraq. There’s not much there, but what there is is both funny and touching. I wish all those folks who think you can’t support the troops unless you support the war knew someone like Mr. Shetterly.

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The rapidly metastizing synopsis now stands at just shy of 6000 words, and is probably between half and three-fourths done. The Space Opera to be Named Later is now, officially, The Planetary Romance to be Named Later.

Also, Charlie Stross’s Singularity Sky turns out to only anticipate two or three of my ideas, thank God. I really need to start moving faster if I want to catch up.

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August 8, 2003

— and not, that is, just a Western journalist’s overreaction to Japan’s general low level of backround right-wing zealotry —

[AP] Just a few years ago, talk about possessing nuclear weapons would have been the pinnacle of taboo in Japan, the only nation to suffer atomic attacks. But the nuclear ambitions of neighboring North Korea now have this nation thinking the unthinkable, even as it marks the anniversaries this week of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings — should Japan have its own atomic arsenal? . . . “If people had voiced such opinions a few years ago, they would have been branded weirdoes,” said Hideo Hosoi, editor in chief of The Shokun. “We’re starting to be able to talk about it in a rational and normal way.”

— then the world is in even worse shape than I thought it was.

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I’ll be arriving early Friday evening and leaving midday Monday; staying at the Fairmont Royal York. I know Greg, Jed, Scott, and Jay Lake are going to be there — who else? (Hot wings?)

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August 5, 2003

You can always look half-smart by making sweeping claims about the general ignorance and foolishness of everybody. But it’s a conservative bet. You’ll never lose a lot, but you’ll never come up with a really new insight, either.

——Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in Electrolite’s comments section

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In light of recent(ish) discussions on the subject of religion:

Religion is a set of beliefs and practices about things that do not map one-to-one to the real world.

——Lydia Nickerson in Electrolite’s comments section

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August 1, 2003

This is more or less a reprint of an email I just sent to Rob (aka “aphrael”), in response to the question “Do you know why nobody’s ever done a post-apocalyptic story predicated on the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano?” I didn’t have a real answer to that, but it got me thinking.

It seems to me that a post-apocalyptic story is likely to be successful only if it taps into an existing meme or, preferably, an existing fear. During the Cold War everybody, but everybody, was afraid of nuclear war, so it was easy to get a lot of mileage out of that. The destruction of the environment is a perennial favorite these days. Comets and asteroids are part of the collective consciousness, now that they’ve become the standard model for mass extinctions. Plague of any kind is always a crowd-pleaser, as are space aliens, and Jesus. So all of those can pretty easily be made to work.

But very few people in the US really think much about volcanoes, even those of us who live well within the potential superheated toxic gas footprint of one; so volcano fear just doesn’t resonate. A smart editor will realize that and not buy the story, unless it’s got something else going for it.

On a side note, I just realized that structurally, at least, “28 Days Later” is in many ways the movie they should have made out of Brin’s The Postman.

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Some guy named Derek (not our Derek) has posted an amusing pre-review of the next Star Wars movie. Among the tidbits in the “What Worked” section:

Yoda, Padmé, Anakin and Obi-Wan all make an appearance on the galaxy-wide broadcast “The Jehr-quat Springer Show” in which Padmé’s change of heart is announced to a packed hooting and trilling audience of various species. Anakin leaves the studio in a huff to a roar of audience approval. Padmé then quietly announces to a shocked audience that Anakin is the father of her unborn children. Yoda briefly closes his eyes, opens them, then taps his hand on Padmé’s thigh and says “Your life do I want to share, provide for them I will” and the crowd goes totally apeshit.

If the final product makes this much sense, we’ll be lucky. (Warning: spoilers!)

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