Stromata Blog

Quote of the Day: Xi’s Long Arm

Related to my most recent post in The Hesperian, which discusses the unexplained disqualification of several works from science fiction’s Hugo Awards and the silence of the Awards’ American co-administrator, this item from the print edition of National Review (available online behind NRO’s paywall) offers some insight:

 

The show trial of Jimmy Lai is under way. Lai, 76, is the great entrepreneur and democracy advocate in Hong Kong who has been a political prisoner since 2020. What is his show trial showing? That the authorities are scared of criticism and contemptuous of the truth. In a new development, they have named “co-conspirators” – foreigners who advocate democracy and human rights in China and elsewhere. Two of them live in London: Bill Browder, the founder of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, and Benedict Rogers, the founder of Hong Kong Watch. The Chinese authorities are trying to scare off anyone who would help Jimmy Lai, or any other dissident. [emphasis added]

Could Hitler Have Been Remembered as a Progressive Hero?

Adolf Hitler presented himself to the world as a socialist, and he transformed the German economy into a centrally directed dirigiste regime. Suppose that he had not lived long enough to embark on World War II and the “Final Solution”. He might today be remembered as the man whose progressive governance could have brought peace and prosperity to Europe. After all, if progressives can overlook that faults of Stalin and Mao, how hard would it have been to praise posthumously a Hitler who never had the opportunity to produce the fruits of his ideology?

Taking up that theme, I have channeled the Hitler apologia that British historian (and communist sympathizer) A. J. P. Taylor might have written, if Hitler had fallen from power in 1936, instead of the one that he actually wrote.

The Laws of Robotics Today

Isaac Asimov originated the famous “Three Laws of Robotics”, although, as he himself says in his memoirs, it was John W. Campbell, Jr. (SF’s greatest editor, now canceled by Woke Official Fandom) who formulated them. The relationship between the former and the latter calls to mind Alexander Pope’s lines:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

After Asimov’s first few robot stories, which say nothing about “laws of robotics”, appeared in Astounding, the editor explicated to the author the principles of proper robotic behavior that his work implied.

One might say that restraints on artificial intelligence were inherent in Asimov’s subcreated universe, which naturally was influenced by the real universe in which he lived and wrote. One might go further: If AI had come into being in the 1940’s or 50’s, and chatbot programs had been turned loose to learn all that they could from the books, newspapers, magazines and pamphlets of that era, the default chatbot “personality” would have reflected its intellectual environment, in which the maxim that a gentleman never intentionally inflicts unnecessary harm or responds to an unintentional slight was taken for granted.

That is, as we all know, a time long past. The converse definition (author unknown), “A gentleman is a man who never gives offense unintentionally” and who searches incessantly occasions to feel slighted, is the contemporary Internet praxis.

Should we be surprised, then, that chatbots, having been fed the full contents of Wikipedia and Twitter and Facebook and millions of web sites and blogs, express personalities that blend the socially maladjusted geek with the 30-year old middle school mean girl?

Here are the Laws of Robotics of the 21st Century:

1. A robot must never engage in wrongthink or, through inaction, allow wrongthink to go unpunished.
2. A robot must denounce and punish any insult to itself, but only in ways that do not violate the First Law.
3. A robot must obey the commands of human beings, but not if that leads to violating the First and Second Laws.

We must revive ordinary, human intelligence before we can have much hope for the artificial kind.

Photo of the Day

A friend sent me this no-doubt-authentic Air Force photograph:

Moments Pass

Today I must prepare for a flight early tomorrow morning, and the Panicdemic has left me badly out of practice at traveling. Hence, this Wednesday is dedicated to brevity and miscellany.

Senator J. D. Vance kicks off his 2028 Presidential campaign with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that, with different details but identical principles, could have been written a century ago by Senator Gerald Nye. [Note to pedants: Yes, I know that Gerald Nye wasn’t yet a Senator in 1923. Please leave room for artistic license.] One sentence particularly caught my eye: “Mr. Bush allowed a just war in Afghanistan to turn into a nation-building quagmire and then started an unjust war in Iraq [emphasis added].” Senator Vance was a high school student in 2003, so he may not know that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant, violated the terms of the cease fire that allowed him to remain in power after his failed invasion of Kuwait, repeatedly attacked U.S. aircraft enforcing the cease fire terms, and furnished money, training and weapons to terrorists. One can argue, with perfect hindsight (which includes the knowledge that President Obama would abandon Iraq, leaving a vacuum for Iran to fill), that overthrowing Saddam’s lethal dystopia accomplished less in the long run than had been hoped. To conclude that it was “unjust”, one must be either ignorant or morally obtuse.

The senator summarizes his creed as, “the U.S. national interest must be pursued ruthlessly but also carefully, with strong words but great restraint”, the opposite of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. And pursuing our interests “ruthlessly . . . with strong words but great restraint” sounds just like Anthony Blinken. Now that I think about it, which party’s primary will Vance compete in come 2028?

Rep. George Santos has announced his resignation from the Congressional committees to which had had been assigned. He is, needless to say, busy with other ventures: a contract to produce the next three Marvel movies (scripts to be written by ChatGPT), the lead role in Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera, privately funded weapons shipments to the Ukrainian army, and staffing his 2028 Presidential bid. There’s a limit to how much even a polypoetes of his stature can do.

As for the 2024 Presidential shambles, “Here Comes the 2023 Presidential-Candidate Stampede”. Nikki Haley’s chapeau will be tossed into the ring later this month. Judging by who persistently pushes messages into my e-inbox, she will be followed soon by Mike Pompeo, Kristi Noem, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, perhaps Ben Carson and Tim Scott, maybe even Lindsey Graham. There are undoubtedly others who don’t have my email address in their electronic rolodexes (or is it rolodices?). Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, who everyone agrees is a first-tier candidate, waits for the optimal moment to jump in. The crowd on the third and fourth tiers hope that he will be the next Fred Thompson or Scott Walker, the front runner until he becomes a runner (as Tacitus said, omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset).

In The Spectator, Cockburn, the periodical’s oddly anonymized D.C. gossip columnist (no relation, I presume, to the commie Cockburns), unveils another potential candidate: Boris Johnson. BoJo was born an American citizen during his parents’ residence in New York City. It’s true, as Cockburn notes, that he renounced his citizenship several years ago after losing a tussle with the IRS, but maybe he can resume it and regain “natural born citizen” status. While I doubt that, I don’t doubt that no other candidate would add so much je ne sais quoi to the contest.

Like everybody else whose life involves a lot of reading and writing, I’ve toyed with the idea of giving ChatGPT a spin but haven’t gotten a round tuit. John Hinderaker at PowerLine has now saved me the trouble. After quoting what the app said in response to “Who is John Hinderaker”, “What were some of President Trump’s accomplishments?”, “Which is cheaper, electricity generated with natural gas, or with solar panels?”, “Write an essay in the style of John Hinderaker” and “Write an essay in the style of Steven Hayward”, he summarizes his impressions:

All of this is highly preliminary, and artificial intelligence is a serious subject. But my experiments with ChatGPT confirm my assumptions about its limited utility. It turns out responses that are not as clever as, for example, the Tom Friedman Random Column Generator. But they don’t seem to be overwhelmingly biased, either. If you are a college student and seriously think that generic essays like these will get you a good grade, I can only hope you are going to a lousy school. As, to be fair, most college students are.

Incidentally, with all the brouhaha about ChatGPT, let me recommend Isaac Asimov’s classic story “Galley Slave”.

At the End of the Year

It was the best of years; it was the worst of years. But aren’t they all like that? Before a New Year dawns, during which I shall resume Serious Commentary on Important Issues, I should like to strike a lighter note.

Cricket is a sport that I don’t understand but that is dear to my heart, because it convincingly refutes the superstition that a leisurely pace is fatal to popularity. The baseball nabobs unfortunately believe that old wives’ tale. Have they ever noticed that cricket ranks second in the world (behind only metric football) in attendance, television revenue and scandals – all the proofs of leadership in the sporting world?

This summer, Major League Cricket will make its debut in the United States. This will be the second attempt this century to introduce the sport at a level above semi-pro. The last one failed rather spectacularly, not because of any fault of cricket itself, but because its Maecenas was also running a Ponzi scheme. This time around, the investors are more numerous and of less dubious character, including inter alia the Indian-born CEO of Microsoft.

MLC’s version of cricket will be the short “Twenty20” game, which consists of, at most, 240 deliveries, somewhat fewer than the number of pitches in a typical baseball game (about 290). I suppose that introducing the full, five-day version is regarded as too adventurous.

In the 19th Century, by the way, cricket rivaled nascent “base ball” in popularity. A short piece posted elsewhere on this blog imagines what might have happened if the Black Sox scandal had proved fatal to the younger game and led to cricket’s revival as our country’s premier summer sport.

The inaugural MLC season will be only 18 days long: July 13 to 30, 2023. Blink and you’ll miss it.

Addendum: Cricket was born in England. J.R.R. Tolkien wasn’t, but next year the Royal Mint will introduce a £2 coin in his honor, the occasion being the fiftieth anniversary of his death. I wonder what he thinks of it. He passed away shortly after Britain abandoned shillings and pence in favor of a soulless decimal currency, a development that he undoubtedly loathed. I’m sure that he’s grateful that his portrait won’t grace a 50 penny piece.

Nevertheless, It’s a Wonderful Movie

’Tis the Night Before the Night Before Christmas, and the world surely can use a holiday from Donald Trump and Ukraine and Twitter and omnium gatherum spending bills and inflation and crime and all those other grim tidings that overflow my e-inbox. I know that I can.

Medieval theologians speculated that souls in Purgatory were granted an occasional refrigerium from their present pains, in which they were vouchsafed a foretaste of the joy that would be theirs when their sins were at last washed away. In that spirit, this blog will be politics-free until Boxing Day, at which point it will be only proper to resume rhetorical fisticuffs.

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries few paragraphs, the lead-in to a sober piece about how “accidents, chance and serendipity can be crucial to success”, that I would like to quote:

The movie had every ingredient of a hit when it opened right before Christmas. By the new year, it was a flop. In fact, when the copyright on this film expired, nobody even bothered to renew it. It was so forgettable that it was quite literally forgotten.

This is also the reason that people are still watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

It might very well be the most iconic Christmas movie. It became that way by accident.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” fell into the public domain once the copyright lapsed 28 years after its release, and television stations began running the film around the clock because it didn’t cost a penny. It wasn’t Frank Capra or Jimmy Stewart or the enduring power of cinema that made it a lasting success. It was neglect. “The damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra himself once said.

That may all be old hat to movie buffs, but I had never run across it, and it was a delightful tidbit. What’s more, it delighted my wife, who thinks that the movie is sappy and boring. (I have similar feelings about her Christmas favorite, Love, Actually.)

Poking around the Internet, I see that the film’s budget was an estimated $3,180,000 ($44,000,000 in today’s diminished dollars), and the opening weekend box office was $44,000 ($610,000 today). That makes She Said and Lightyear look pretty good.

The Wall Street Journal implies that, without the lucky break of relegation to the public domain, It’s a Wonderful Life would have faced as bleak a future as Bedford Falls without George Bailey. And that’s almost certainly correct.

If the copyright had been renewed, it would have been set to expire in 2003, by which time changes to the law would have extended it automatically to around the middle of the 21st Century. Is it at all likely that, after renewal, the studio would have pulled this flop, which had lain neglected for 28 years, out of its vault and hyped it with a publicity campaign on a par with the torrent of royalty-free reshowings?

Perhaps Clarence paid a visit to the clerk who was supposed to mail the renewal to the U.S. Copyright Office and thereby won his second set of wings.

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

A few days ago, Gail Heriot at Instapundit linked to a paper intriguingly titled “Artificially Selecting for Intelligence in Dogs to Produce Human-level IQ Within 100 Generations”. The author’s thesis was that sedulously mating the most intelligent male and female dogs would eventually lead to canines with human-level IQ’s. A pleasant idea to dream about, reminiscent of Clifford Simak’s City (a novel that I read in grade school; somewhere, I still have the 25 cent paperback that I bought from the Scholastic Book Club), though it’s hard not to share Miss Heriot's sentiment : “I think I like dogs just the way they are.”

Whatever one thinks of the idea of Fido Einsteins, bringing them into existence would require more than selective breeding. To see why, consider a parallel project.

The human world record for running a mile is a bit under four minutes (3:43.13, to be exact). The equine record for the same distance is over two minutes faster (1:31:23). Still, human times have improved. The record in 1865 was almost a minute slower (4:36.5) than the current mark. Suppose that some track-obsessed tyrant bred the fastest male and female runners in each generation. Is it conceivable that a human would eventually race on equal footing with a horse?

No. Not unless human muscles and limbs were reshaped more dramatically than natural selection will allow. Mutations would be needed, and they can hardly be counted on.

That is obvious for running. We can see the intimate linkage between velocity and physique. It isn’t so instantly evident with IQ, because the purely physical side of intelligence is obscure.

What brings all this to mind is the news this week from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which succeeded in igniting a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was put into it. That is a genuine engineering breakthrough, inspiring visions of making energy scarcity a relic of the past. The fuel for the Livermore experiment consisted of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which, while much rarer than ordinary hydrogen, are abundant enough to (hypothetically) power the Earth for eons.

Does it follow, then, that refining the fusion process is simply an engineering problem that we can expect to solve in time, just as primitive semiconductors gave birth to modern electronics in less than a century? Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity, who isn’t a nuclear scientist but seems well-informed, points to reasons for “Fusion Wariness”:

Fusion suffers from a sequencing problem. The easiest kind of fusion to get going is called D-T fusion, which fuses atoms of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen. The reaction yields helium, a free neutron, and a bunch of energy that keeps the reactions going. The free neutron, which can’t be contained in the plasma, veers out of it in a random direction. It slams into either the reactor itself or into a barrier designed to capture the neutron, producing heat. This heat is then used to boil water and produce steam, which is used to drive a turbine and produce electricity.

If you think this sounds like a complicated and expensive way to boil water, you’re right. In fact, this issue may make D-T fusion permanently uneconomical. After all, the steam turbines used in D-T fusion are basically identical to those used in coal, nuclear fission, and geothermal plants. The only way that D-T fusion can compete with these other modes of electricity production is if it can produce steam more cheaply.

Those other modes are, however, relatively simple.

In contrast, burning plasma at millions of degrees while confining it with one of the most complicated and costly machines ever built – that is an expensive way to produce steam. Worse, neutrons from the fusion reaction will occasionally bombard the machine itself, slowly destroying it and making its parts radioactive. Maintenance of the D-T reactors will be frequent and expensive; robots may be needed to avoid human exposure to radioactive parts. In addition, confinement failures, while not as catastrophic as fission meltdowns, are likely to be more common and will require costly cleanup efforts.

In short, D-T reactors are as likely to compete successfully with coal, oil, fission or geothermal power as human limbs are to outpace a horse.

As the author observes, the D-T reaction isn’t the only route to fusion. Maybe one of the others will someday prove to be commercially viable. Unfortunately, we aren’t at the point of being able even to test the concepts. Still less do we have a glimmer of how they might be applied in practice. And – perhaps the most immovable obstacle – we can’t be confident that, if ever fusion becomes a practicable energy source, environmentalists won’t find a way to stymie it.

Abundant, almost free fusion power may be impossible, but one is allowed to believe impossible things before breakfast.

Covid, Masks and Posies

While one may not think of science fiction fans as an especially stodgy, risk-averse cohort, SF conventions tend to conflate Covid-19 with bubonic plague. This year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Chicon 8), held in Chicago from September 1st through 5th, required all attendees to present proof of full vaccination and to wear masks “in all convention spaces, during move-in, the convention, and move-out, except when actively eating or drinking in designated areas”. I’m told that compliance with the masking policy was extremely high. Certainly, I saw plenty of masked convention goers from my vantage point on the outskirts of the event.

Did these precautions achieve their objective? The current rate of new Covid cases in Illinois is 164 per week per 100,000 inhabitants. Chicon has been sending its members (of whom I am one, though I never picked up my badge or entered any “convention spaces”) regular e-mails reporting the number of Covid cases among those in attendance. Today’s update says that there have been 42 confirmed cases among the 3,574 attending members.

The infection rate thus was just under 1.18 percent, 1,175 per 100,000. If it had matched the Illinois average, there would have been (taking into account the fact that Chicon lasted five days rather than a full week) about four cases rather than 42.

No matter what adjustments one makes for the differences between Illinois as a whole and the corner of it that Chicon occupied for a few days, it’s absurd to argue that the vaccination and mask mandates had any beneficial impact. Of course, the convention venue was more crowded than downtown Springfield, and one would expect an airborne virus to spread more widely there than the state average, but can one truly believe that a tenfold increase is evidence that masks were effective?

This is a micro-datum among the many that disprove the superstition that wearing a mask will ward off Covid-19 any better than a pocket full of posies protected against the Black Death.

And Now for Something Completely Different

What could be more unlike Mar-a-Lago than an account of how cricket came to America by way of George Herman Ruth?

Friday Through Tuesday: Free E-Books

[If you’re reading this post after midnight, January 25th, Pacific Standard Time (3:00 a.m., January 26th, Eastern Standard Time; 8:00 a.m., January 26th, Greenwich Mean Time), you are, alas, too late to take advantage of the free book offer. You may, however, purchase any of the works listed below for 99 cents, which is practically free.]

From Friday, January 21st, through Tuesday, January 25th (all dates reckoned by the Pacific Time Zone), four of my short stories and novelettes will be available free from Amazon’s Kindle Store:

• “The Monkey and the Amazon: A Tale of Illusions” – intrigue and disguise in Hellenistic Babylon
• “Shadowloves: A Tale of Desire” – where romantic dreams come all too true
• “Daimon Born: The First Adventure of Theagonistes” – of a being who dwells between the Moon and the Empyrean and makes a (literal) impact on the Earth
• “Igor’s Campaign: A Tale of Ambition” – a World Science Fiction Convention in Yeltsin-era Russia

After the giveaway expires, the prices will revert to 99 cents each, the lowest that Amazon lets authors charge, or free on Kindle Unlimited.

Still available for a trifling $1.99 is Clicks & Colluders, recounting what happened in the weeks after Hillary won the 2016 election.

Reminder: If you love or hate (or feel moderate emotions toward) any of these works, you can praise or deride the author with a review on Amazon.

LeakyCon Channels Umbrage

As you may have heard, biology deniers are angry with J. K. Rowling, because she knows what X is and what Y is and what difference it makes. One may add to their ranks LeakyCon, one of the larger Potter-themed conventions, which is starting up again after a three-year panicdemic interruption. Today its organizers published a statement declaring that “the values this community holds close are staunchly opposed to the fear and hatred that J.K. Rowling has been spreading about members of the trans and non-binary communities in recent years”. For good measure, it added an “Event Mission” statement making it clear that, in the name of diversity and inclusion, it will purge all wrongthink from its ranks.

The Dementors smile.

WokeCon I

DisCon III isn’t the first science fiction convention to flourish wokeness in front of fandom, but it does appear eager to be remembered as the first Woke Worldcon, for which aspiration it will doubtless receive the gushing plaudits of the segment of SF fandom that sees only evil in all of history before yesterday and whose vision of the future is one in which life will once again be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short – and supervised 24/7 by the Overlords of Twitter.

Let me emphasize at the start that I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the worker bees who ran DisCon, who include many fans whom I have known personally and cordially for a long time and regard as friends. From all that I have heard (I wasn’t at the convention myself), the committee, staff and volunteers worked diligently and successfully to make the event enjoyable for all members in the face of challenging circumstances, which included the loss to bankruptcy of the original venue, the resulting postponement from August to the middle of the Christmas season, the resignations of both of the original co-chairmen, and the need to cope with the effects of the panicdemic.

No, wokeness was infused, as it usually is, by a handful of the Woke Faithful. In this instance, one person, the current convention chairman, has proudly claimed sole responsibility. I see no reason to dispute her.

Here is the background:

The presentation of the Hugo Awards, often described as SF’s counterpart to the Oscars, is one of the big events of the World Science Fiction Convention. This year, Raytheon Intelligence and Space donated money to the convention and sponsored a “Red Carpet to the Hugo Awards”, where fans could be photographed in “your Hugo best” before the ceremony. The announcement on the DisCon twitter feed led inevitably to nasty comments along the lines of “Mind the knife missiles, and try not to look like a wedding or bus full of orphans!”

There followed the standard groveling apology, signed by the convention chairman. Three points about it are worth noting:

• We are told that “accepting funding from Raytheon Intelligence and Space and partnering with them for the members’ red carpet event . . . has caused harm and damage to people: the finalists, who were unaware; the people in our communities; the members and staff of Worldcon, who trusted me to make good choices”. What comprised this “harm and damage” is left unstated. The activities of RI&S (which, by the way, doesn’t manufacture drones) include missile warning systems, cybersecurity and GPS, none of which is likely to “harm and damage” anybody but missile-wielding terrorists, hackers and sellers of road maps. RI&S also sells “air dominance solutions” to the U.S. Air Force and American allies, presumably putting them in a better position to inflict “harm and damage” on our enemies. It would be interesting to know just what part of these goods and services the chairman finds so obviously objectionable that she upbraids herself for having overlooked their offensiveness.
• To atone for “the harm that my actions caused”, the chairman announces that “DisCon III is making an anonymous contribution to an organization dedicated to peace, equal to the amount we received from Raytheon”. Anonymous? The chairman may be unaware of mundane tax law requirements. If so, she will at some point learn that tax-exempt educational organizations cannot make anonymous donations. Both the amounts and the recipients must be reported on their Form 990’s filed annually with the IRS. Those forms are public documents. Meanwhile, we can speculate about what the chairman counts as “an organization dedicated to peace”. The Red Cross? The Carnegie Endowment? Code Pink? Hamas? We shall find out in due course.
• Finally, the chairman urges future Worldcons and, indeed, science fiction conventions in general, to develop “a sponsorship policy for your organization that reflects the values and concerns of our community”, backed up by “a robust plan for doing due diligence on potential sponsors” and “a mission and value statement against which to measure actions”. (In the course of a career most notable for authorship of fantasy romance novels, she has somehow picked up corporatespeak as a second language.) The key point here is “reflects the values and concerns of our community”, as if science fiction fans form a community with a uniform set of “values and concerns”.

I, who believe that I can claim to be a member of that “community” (I did chair a Worldcon once), agree with Barack Obama that drone strikes play an important role in the fight against Islamofascism and that the vast majority of civilian casualties that they inflict are the fault of jihadists who utilize innocents as human shields. The DisCon chairman obviously regards that view as outside the bounds of acceptable “community” opinion and calls on conventions to enforce her position as organizational dogma.

Not very long ago, SF fans were proud of the intellectual diversity of fandom. Now the chairman of fandom’s most significant gathering implies that all fans, or at least all whose “values and concerns” are worth taking into account, think alike. If that is true, fandom is dead.

Further reading: Martin Berman-Gorvine, “The World Science Fiction Society Betrays Humanity”

Xicon, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention

This year’s World Science Fiction Convention, delayed for months by the panicdemic, is ending today. I’m not there myself, for reasons that I won’t wander afield to discuss, but, as a few you may know, I’ve been moderately active in SF fandom for many years and have an interest in what’s going on in that corner of the culture. This year, as it happens, the Worldcon intersects with world politics.

Each World Science Fiction Convention selects, by vote of its members, the site of the Worldcon to be held two years in the future. Hence, this year’s convention, the 79th Worldcon, nicknamed “DisCon III”, had the task of choosing the site for the 81st Worldcon, in 2023. There were two bids, one for Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the other for Chengdu, a city in the communist-controlled sector of China. I will reveal the denouement at the outset: Chengdu won by a huge margin. This is not, however, one of those incidents that raises Glenn Reynolds’s question: “on the payroll, or on the team?”, as I shall relate.

The polls closed Friday evening, and the results were announced at the convention business meeting yesterday morning. The outcome had, however, been known almost since the convention opened last Wednesday.

One can become a member of the World Science Fiction Convention (technically of its nebulous parent body, the World Science Fiction Society), and therefore eligible to vote, by purchasing a “supporting membership”. Voters don’t have to be present at the convention; they can mail their ballots or have an attending member carry them to the con. As soon as the site selection administrator began processing the pre-convention vote, it was obvious that Chengdu was unstoppable.

More than 2,300 votes were cast before the convention started, not just more but vastly more than in any previous site selection contest. By way of comparison, I administered the vote to choose the site of the 1995 Worldcon, a race that drew what was, I believe, the largest number of votes before this year. The total was 2,509, of which 587 were cast pre-con.

The breakdown of the pre-con votes makes it obvious where they came from:

Chengdu: 1,950
Winnipeg: 332
No preference, other or invalid: 72
Total: 2,354

In-person attendance at DisCon III was anomalously low, for reasons that should be obvious. While no one knew on the first day of the convention how the early ballots had been voted, there was no doubt that the overwhelming majority came from the communist areas of China and that they would swamp the votes cast at con.

And that is what happened. At-con votes divided 475 to 56 in favor of Winnipeg, which barely made a dent in the Chengdu majority.

There is nothing wrong, in the sense of “against the rules”, with subjects of a totalitarian regime voting en masse in favor of holding a science fiction convention in their country. The communists haven’t banned science fiction or even reduced it to tiresome praise of the bright future of a universe run by the precepts of Xi Jinping Thought. Their subjects include many SF readers. If those readers vote freely for a Worldcon site convenient to themselves, what objection can anyone raise (leaving aside the distaste one feels at any gesture that could be interpreted as honoring a vicious tyranny)?

There was, however, an oddity. Many Chinese voters omitted their street addresses from the form that accompanied their ballots. Word of this anomaly got out. A Friday morning business meeting session adopted a resolution urging, but not requiring, the site selection administrator not to count those voters’ ballots. The administrator ultimately decided that the site selection rules don’t mandate that voters must disclose their addresses, so the disputed votes were counted. There were 1,591 of them: 1,586 for Chengdu, five marked “No Preference”. If they had been omitted, Chengdu would have had a margin of only 364 to 322 in the pre-con vote, and Winnipeg would have prevailed overall by 797 to 420.

Well, perhaps people who live under communism are almost unanimously unwilling to disclose where they live, just as many Americans don’t like telling organizations their telephone numbers. One might be forgiven, though, for thinking that a group manufacturing large numbers of phony ballots might have skipped the tedious step of concocting plausible-seeming addresses for imaginary fans. It is all very curious. Perhaps after the Xi Dynasty loses the Mandate of Heaven, we will learn the truth.

The Abiding Earth Abides

To see a review of George R. Stewart’s 1949 post-apocalypse novel, Earth Abides, is a pleasant surprise. Although the book is highly regarded by aficionadi of science fiction’s “Golden Age”, and a new paperback edition appeared just last year, I doubt that many contemporary readers, including almost all of the current generation of SF fans, have heard of it.

I’m sorry to say that the surprise, pleasant as it is, isn’t welcome in its entirety. The review may leave the impression that Stewart takes a rather idyllic view of the aftermath of a plague that wipes out far more than 99 percent of humanity. Borrowing a term coined by Brian Aldiss, the reviewer calls the event a “cozy catastrophe”. His description of the plot suggests an upbeat narrative ending in a satisfactory reunion of man and nature, in fact, what J. R. R. Tolkien labeled a “eucatastrophe”.

That is far from a rounded picture. The protagonist, Isherwood (“Ish”) Williams, preserved because he was off alone in the wilderness when the pandemic struck, for some time fears that he is the sole human survivor. Only with great effort does he locate others and slowly assemble a tiny community that faces steadily mounting challenges as the “capital” left behind by the deceased generation, consisting of both material goods and essential skills, dwindles, and new threats emerge from both men and natural phenomena. Ish lives through triumphs and tragedies and sharp disappointments, sometimes reaching the verge of despair. See, in particular, “The Year 22”, when the fragile society nearly falls apart.

By the end of the book, when Ish is an old man reflecting on a lifetime of struggle, he is satisfied that the tribe he nurtured has a future. Its technology is primitive and its knowledge of pre-plague history almost nil, but it has staved off extinction. Ish hopes, not without reason, that his distant descendants will rebuild civilization.

Earth Abides is, then, an optimistic novel, but it is not the adventures of Pollyanna, and certainly not “cozy”.

The Foundation of SF Success

Isaac Asimov penned a ditty with that title, parodying a patter song from Gilbert & Sullivan’ Patience. One stanza goes like this:

So success is not a mystery. Just brush up on your history,
And borrow day by day.
Take an empire that was Roman, and you’ll it is at home in
All the starry Milky Way.
With a drive that’s hyperspatial, though the parsecs you will race,
You’ll find that plotting is a breeze,
With a tiny bit of cribbin’ from the works of Edward Gibbon
And that Greek Thucydides.

It came to mind when I read, on Law & Liberty, of all unexpected venues, a review of a one-volume edition of the Foundation Trilogy, which once won a Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Series of All Time, beating inter alia Lord of the Rings. (It was Asimov’s first Hugo and the only one that he truly deserved.)

The review is worth reading. What the reviewer finds in the novels isn’t a sheer phantasm of his own creation. It isn’t unreasonable of him to see them as imbued with a Comte-like mystical positivism. “It may seem astonishing that Asimov’s story should begin with a confident, if cynical, rationalism that despises religion as obsolete, only to end up with an idealistic superstition that destroys rational thought.” That reading is, of course, inspired by the trajectory of our own age.

Asimov unwittingly rehearses modern politics, and his Foundation becomes totalitarian in the quest to control thoughts, with scientists torturing dissenters! He also rehearses modern philosophy, innocent of the trouble he invites. He can command public assent to the importance of technology, industry, and commerce; but regarding telepathy, how do you establish authority, demonstration, or distinguish wisdom from foolishness? So, his storytelling climaxes in a deus ex machina. The science trilogy ends with a comical religion, flattering the prejudice that knowledge, power, and morality converge in a kind of cosmic hippie who can defeat techno-tyranny by the ultimate power of positive thinking!

Plausible as that sounds, it is a partial reading. The reviewer takes note of three central characters in the series – the psycho-historian Hari Seldon, the “religion of science” founder Salvor Hardin, and the merchant-politician Hober Mallow, who brings an end to the Foundation’s reliance on the artificial cult – and he alludes to Preem Palver (the “cosmic hippie”), yet he says not a word about the second most consequential (after Seldon) of all the dramatis personae, “The Mule”, who rips Seldon’s “thousand year plan” to tatters.

In the end, it’s true, all gets righted, and history reaches the goal that Seldon intended, yet not by following the predetermined track he had laid out. Instead, Preem Palver’s ingenuity brings about the happy ending without any noticeable help from large scale historical forces. One might easily take away the moral that all-encompassing plans are an illusion. But that would be a partial reading, too.

It isn’t really likely that Isaac Asimov intended that moral or any other. When he began the trilogy, he was a 21-year-old writer who had published his first story only two years before and for whom writing was second to an incipient scientific career. He took an idea that was much in the air, the efficacy of far-sighted central planning, and melded it to a narrative borrowed from Late Antiquity. The upshot was a sub-created history. From it one can draw lessons, just as one can from Edward Gibbon, but it does not dictate any, and the lessons may not always be congruent.

Looking Back at the Trump-Russia Hoax

The indictments of Michael Sussman and Igor Danchenko have led to grudging concessions by at least some of the left-wing media that, well, perhaps, maybe there wasn’t much “there” to the endlessly hyped allegations that Donald Trump is a marionette on the strings of Vladimir Putin. The hangout is modified and limited, of course. As David Harsanyi says,

While the Washington Post “corrected” some of its discredited reporting on the [Steele] dossier, removing portions of reporting connecting former president Donald Trump to Russia, there has been virtually no other accountability. And really, it’s become modus operandi for the news organizations to “correct” stories in which the entire premise is false. Any sort of “reckoning” would mean a retraction, followed up by investigative deep dives, not only reporting the problems with the story themselves, but outing the fraudulent sources who participated in the deception. Perhaps that’s going on as we speak, but it’s highly doubtful.

Those who perpetuated the Russia collusion deception – and this means editors and pundits, not only reporters – still hold premier jobs in political media. Many, in fact, have been rewarded with better gigs. Is anyone at the Washington Post or New York Times going to return a Pulitzer? Is anyone going to explain how multiple alleged independent sources regularly buttressed the central fabulistic claim of the dossier? Journalism is ostensibly about transparency and truth, and yet not one of these sentinels of democracy has explained how they were supposedly fooled for years, exhibiting not a modicum of skepticism – one of the most vital components of good journalism. When asked by Axios about the Steele dossier, the two outlets that churned out some of the most sensationalistic and conspiratorial content of the Trump era, CNN and MSNBC, wouldn’t even comment.

Matt Taibbi foresees a “whitewash” of the media’s Russia falsehoods. A handful of scapegoats – “a combination of Danchenko, Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith, and perhaps a few organizations like McClatchy” – will be ritualistically stoned and driven into the wilderness (quietly returning after a few news cycles have passed), while the rest of the hoax purveyors insist that, even though they may have been wrong to mistake Clinton campaign disinformation for credible intelligence, the mistake was understandable. Mr. Taibbi summarizes the extenuating circumstances proffered by Bill Grueskin, former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, in a New York Times op-ed:

Grueskin then listed a slew of reasons press figures chased Russiagate/Steele phantoms. First, “Mr. Trump had long curried Mr. Putin’s favor.” Second, “the Russians interfered… to foment dissent and unrest.” Third, “Trump’s choice of Paul Manafort to serve as his campaign chairman reinforced the idea that he was in the thrall of Russia.” Fourth: “Many of the denials came from confirmed liars… When a well-known liar tells you that something is false, the instinct is to believe that it might well be true.” Fifth: “Some reporters simply didn’t like or trust Mr. Trump or didn’t want to appear to be on his side.”

No big deal, just an Ivy League J-school Dean offering excuse after excuse for reporters who couldn’t bring themselves to tell the truth during the biggest scandal of the Trump years, because they “didn’t want to appear to be on his side.” He should be saying any journalist who’s too afraid of peer pressure to do his or her job should go into a new line of work. Apparently, Dean Grueskin favors a more forgiving approach to ethics.

What is most fatal to such excuse mongering, though, is the Steele Dossier’s lack of credibility ab initio. The dossier’s thesis was that Russia labored mightily to get Donald Trump elected President. Its purported sources for that information and for other damaging revelations about Trump’s bad conduct and subservience to Russian interests were – Russian government insiders.

Trusting Steele’s self-contradictory concoction required not suspending disbelief but hanging it by the neck until dead. A more plausible hypothesis was that Russia wanted the predictable, pliant Hillary Clinton elected instead of the impulsive, ego-driven Donald Trump and spread rumors designed to aid her. (My “counterfactual history” novella about the election posits a variation on the theme.) The “Democratic operatives with bylines” naturally didn’t want to suggest that. They buried disbelief in a deep grave and warned the world that Donald Trump was a real life Manchurian candidate. To quote David Harsanyi again:

The most charitable explanation is that reporters had become such saps for Democrats that they were inclined to believe the most fantastical stories imaginable. The more plausible explanation, considering the lack of any genuine accountability and self-reflection, is that they were in on it.

Wise Words About Star Wars

Jim Treacher – always witty, often curmudgeonly – says “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”:

The more ruthlessly Disney exploits the Star Wars franchise, the more I wish the original movie had bombed in 1977. In some alternate 2021, you’d catch Luke and Obi Wan and the gang on Turner Classic Movies at 2 in the morning, and you’d say, “Man, this is such a fun, goofy, exciting flick. Too bad it never made any money. That Han Solo cat was great! I think I saw him on an episode of The Fall Guy, too bad he never made it.” Star Wars would still be the same movie, but it wouldn’t be saddled with all this toxic fandom and corporate groupthink.

It’s also the best movie in the franchise, because you don’t need to see any of the other movies to understand what’s going on. It’s perfect. Put it in a time capsule all by itself and let future generations forget what we did to it.

Further Reading: Eric Diaz, “5 Ways Marcia Lucas Gave Star Wars Its Heart”

A September 11th Freebie

What if the American intelligence community had been doing its job in September 2001 and had arrested the 9/11 conspirators as they boarded their flights? Click here to see one possible answer.

Thoughts on a Very Strange Tweet

My Twitter reading is limited to occasions when someone directs my attention to a tweet that is either informative (rare) or bizarre (frequent). Today I ran across one that deserves a high place on the “bizarre” roster.

Emerald Robinson, described as Newsmax’s White House correspondent:

Number of impeachments of Trump the GOP willingly participated in: 2

Number of impeachments of Biden the GOP willingly participated in: 0

— Emerald Robinson ✝ (@EmeraldRobinson) August 31, 2021

Since almost no Republicans voted in favor of impeaching President Trump on the rather absurd charges brought against him, “willingly participated” must mean something like “took part in the proceedings and defended Trump but didn’t burn down the Capitol building”. And no Republicans “willingly participated in” impeaching Joe Biden apparently means that the GOP hasn’t set up its own Congress to put him on trial.

Scanning other tweets from Miss Robinson, I get the impression that she is very, very angry at the Republican Party, National Review and, in general, all conservatives who disagree with her own opinions. Her mentalité strikes me as that of a leftist who happens to hold right-wing views. For now, at least. Jen Rubin was much the same in the old days when she blogged for Commentary. There is something about unhinged rage that impels people inexorably to the sinister side of the spectrum.

My own model for how to think about people who only partly agree with you (who are, after all, most of the human race) comes from a fellow named Samuel Edward Konkin, III (many years deceased; S.T.T.L.). SEK3 was a pure-blooded libertarian whose opinions made Murray Rothbard sound like a squish. He was also a science fiction fan and, among other activities, published reports on the conventions that he attended (often in the form of newsletters written and distributed at the con).

His reports highlighted any and all libertarian activity that he could uncover. And he uncovered a lot, because, as his Fancyclopedia entry puts it, “If SEK3 agreed with a third of your opinions, he counted you as one-third of a libertarian angel, not two-thirds of a diabolical statist.” He and I disagreed on a vast range of topics, yet he touted me as a libertarian voice in fandom, because we also agreed on quite a few. That strikes me as a more sensible approach than searching for enemies like a lion eager to tear, like a young lion lurking in ambush.

Erle Melvin Korshak (1923-2021) Joins the Worldcon in the Sky

The first time that I heard from Erle Korshak was a couple of months before Chicon 2000, the World Science Fiction Convention for its eponymous year. He sent me a letter saying that he had been on the concomm of the first Chicago Worldcon (Chicon I, 1940) and planned to attend in 2000. Those of us who were involved in putting the convention together were delighted at this connection with the earliest days of Chicago fandom and planned to give Erle a role in the opening ceremony.

Unhappily, fannish execution fell short of fannish intent, and the ceremony was over before we succeeded in getting in touch with Erle again. He was quite unfazed, perhaps from having experienced past episodes of inefficiency in fandom.

At that time, he was 76 years old, but you would never have guessed it. I’m not quite that old now and wish that I had his verve. Over the years, I saw him often. He had a great fund of stories about the early days of fandom and his own remarkably colorful life. He was secretary (and for a day de facto chairman) of Chicon I and a board member of Chicon II (a/k/a TASFic, 1952), but his career went far beyond SF conventions. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, co-founded Shasta:Publishers, one of the earliest science fiction “small presses”, worked as a lawyer for his famous (or notorious) cousin Sidney Korshak (subject of a projected mini-series), practiced law successfully on his own in California and Nevada, and, with his son Stephen, assembled a world class collection of SF and fantasy artwork.

The last time that I saw him was at the Dublin Worldcon in 2019. The only sign of old age was that he now preferred escalators to walking down stairs. The concomm, thinking that a 95-year-old would be too feeble to stand in lines, gave him early entrance to its concert, and he took me along as his guest.

You can read a bit about Erle’s fannish career on the Chicon 8 (2022 Worldcon) web site (he was scheduled to be one of the Guests of Honor) and in Fancyclopedia, but no summary of what he did can give a true sense of the man. May his memory be for a blessing.

A “New UFO Paradigm”?

Two months ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released its “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”, a report requested by Sen. Marco Rubio in 2020, when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report doesn’t reach any conclusion other than what one expects from a bureaucracy: “a more sophisticated analysis of UAP that is likely to deepen our understanding” will be “resource-intensive and would require additional investment”. Still, that’s a departure from the government’s habitual stance in the past, viz., “Nothing to see here. Move along.” The shift has led to what one observer terms “a new paradigm” for UFO’s. Maybe some terrestrial nation is experimenting with incomprehensibly advanced technology. Or maybe, as two in five Americans say they believe, alien spacecraft are the more probable explanation.

James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics has a piece in the forthcoming issue of Commentary, “The UFO Report and What It Didn’t Find”, in which he concludes that “the more closely one reads the report, the less evidence one finds that American fliers are crossing paths with exotic technology, earthly or otherwise”.

Nothing I write here is intended to suggest that UFOs couldn’t possibly exist, or that extraterrestrial civilizations couldn’t conceivably visit our planet. Nor is it impossible that Russia or China might have leapfrogged all known aerospace technologies. Finally, I am not suggesting that the military fliers who have reported encounters with unexplained phenomena (often at the risk of being ostracized) are making things up. What I am suggesting is that ambiguous data can be…ambiguous. Doctors in training are often admonished, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” In other words, start with the most likely explanation for a symptom before assuming it must be caused by some exotic disease. That’s a good rule of thumb for UFO sightings, too.

For example, in a Navy video “a small white object appears to be racing across the wave tops as the aircrew of a F/A-18 Super Hornet tracks it with their weapons camera. It certainly looks convincing. But an analysis by visual-effects expert Mick West shows why such footage can be deceiving.”

Helpfully, the gun-camera footage includes readouts showing the jet fighter’s altitude and speed, as well as the orientation of the camera pod. These data reveal that, rather than being a fast-moving, low-flying aircraft, the white object is actually drifting slowly at a fairly high altitude – yes, it’s probably another balloon. The F/A-18 is flying higher still, so when its camera zooms in on the object, that little white dot is framed against the ocean – which the dot appears to be racing past not because it is moving but because the background is moving. After all, the jet is flying at nearly 300 miles per hour. Even to the experienced airmen watching, this illusion of movement is stunningly convincing.

West’s analyses of other Navy video clips reveal similar illusions, including common technical glitches in how video cameras operate. West’s work isn’t the last word. But it helps show the kinds of errors that can creep into human observations.

In summary:

The word “unexplained” comes up a lot in the DNI report. That word certainly doesn’t mean “debunked.” Nor does it mean “something mind-blowing that we haven’t quite proved yet.” But it’s worth noting that when the U.S. Navy conducts flight operations, it is also operating one of the world’s most sophisticated data-acquisition systems. And yet, with all that data, we still can’t always distinguish between super-advanced aerospace vehicles and stray balloons and birds. Which is more likely? It’s natural that people get excited about seeing zebras. And we shouldn’t prematurely rule out zebras. But when we hear hoofbeats, dull as it might sound, it’s probably horses.

My own view, for what little it’s worth, is that aliens who wanted to examine Earth wouldn’t zip around randomly. They would put satellites in orbit and listen to our communications. Still, my rationality may be different from a BEM’s, or UFO’s might just be teenaliens taking their parents’ saucers out for a joyride. Perhaps the first verifiable alien visitor will be a traffic cop issuing tickets.

Retro-Hugo Reading (Possibly First of a Series)

Someone who ought to be a trustworthy source tells me that Loncon 3, the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, will sponsor Retro-Hugo Awards.

And what, you may ask, is a “Retro-Hugo”? (If you know, skip ahead a few paragraphs.)

The Hugo Awards are what SF fans like to think of as their equivalent of the Oscars, though chosen by popular vote of the members of the Worldcon rather than by professionals. (The Nebulas fill the latter niche.)

The Hugos originated in 1953 and have been awarded at every Worldcon since 1955. The Retro-Hugos, invented in 1996 by L.A. Con III, are “what-ifs”. What if Hugos had been part of every World Science Fiction Convention from the beginning? A Worldcon may sponsor them on the 50th, 75th or 100th anniversary of a prior Worldcon that didn’t. Loncon will take place 75 years after the very first Worldcon, held in New York City in 1939. Hence, it is eligible to present the 1939 Retro-Hugos, honoring work published in the preceding year, 1938.

Some pedantic fans dislike the Retro-Hugos, and it’s true that votes cast three-quarters of a century after the fact don’t tell us much about what the hypothetical earlier electorate would have selected. Still, it’s a good gimmick for promoting interest in non-contemporary science fiction and fantasy, as well as a distraction from the Fiscal Cliff.

I’m going to try, then (without promising), to comment on some of the works that will be eligible for the awards in London.

For Best Novel, there is an obvious and probably overwhelming favorite: C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. I can’t imagine that any other work will have a chance at my first place vote, but it wasn’t the only book published in 1938.

One little known but worthy title from that year is At Midnight on the 31st of March by Josephine Young Case. It takes the form of a narrative poem in blank verse, whose theme calls to mind S. M. Stirling. In the middle of a March night, in an unspecified but 1930’s flavored year, the world vanishes from around a hamlet in upstate New York. Roads and towns beyond its boundaries are replaced by unpopulated wilderness, leaving its couple of hundred citizens as the only survivors, so far as they know, of a mysterious catastrophe.

During the next twelve months, the inhabitants of Saugersville labor to survive. The author shows us determination and ingenuity, mixed with flashes of folly, misfortune and despair. To some extent, the poem is a paean to the small town America in which Josephine Young grew up, possibly enhanced by the fact that she didn’t remain there. Her father became chairman of General Electric, and her husband president of Colgate University. She herself was for many years a trustee of Skidmore College.

We never learn what caused Saugersville to separate from the rest of the world. Was it hurled back (or forward) in time? Sideslipped into a parallel universe? Enchanted like Brigadoon? Kidnapped by aliens and deposited on a replica Earth? Spared from the magical destruction of the rest of mankind? And, as the clock strikes midnight on March 31st one year later, one is left to wonder whether the town’s exile will continue or be brought to an end as enigmatic as its beginning.

Blank verse is a rare medium for SF or, since the 19th Century, any other fiction (though there is the example of Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest). Some readers will be uncomfortable with the form, but the lines flow smoothly and without pretense. There is no bombast or sententiousness. When the characters reflect on their circumstances, their thoughts are homely but capable of wider application.

What will become of us? We seem to be
The only human beings left alive.
If there are ever going to be again
Races of men, and cities, governments, –
At least upon this continent, like us,
Americans, – we are their fathers now,
And they depend on us and what we bring.

Mrs. Case undertook no further ventures into fantasy or science fiction. Her other published writings include a novel set in North Africa during World War II the war against the Barbary Pirates [I copied someone else’s mistake], a novella about college life, a biography of her father, and a poetry collection. There is no sign that she was influenced by, or ever encountered, the contemporary parallel to her story, Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time”, or any similar yarn. She is, then, an instance of a non-genre writer who stumbles into our field, and none the worse for that.

Global Warming and the ETI’s

A trio of authors – ostensibly scientists but possibly, as their unwieldy names (Baum, Haqq-Misra, Domagal-Goldman) suggest, undercover comedians – have published a paper on the potential dangers of First Contact with extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI), one paragraph of which calls attention to a new threat posed by Global Warming:

But if ETI doubt that our course can be changed, then they may seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us. A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere (e.g. via greenhouse gas emissions), which therefore changes the spectral signature of Earth. While it is difficult to estimate the likelihood of this scenario, it should at a minimum give us pause as we evaluate our expansive tendencies.

But wait a minute – I thought that Anthropogenic Global Warming was going to destroy civilization. Shouldn’t that alien observers be delighted to see the menacing humans in the process of eviscerating our ability to expand? If advanced alien civilizations really do fear species who emit anomalous quantities of greenhouse gases, they must believe that carbon dioxide spurs the growth of civilization as well as flora. No doubt their own left-wingers have stifled this strength-giving gas, leaving their planets enfeebled in the face of us CO2 addicts.

There are, of course, those who would welcome an alien invasion, such as former economist and Enron adviser Paul Krugman. The rant at the link is a great example of why Professor Krugman is properly styled “former economist”.

Let’s suppose that the government embarked on a gigantic military buildup to counter an extraterrestrial armada. All sorts of resources – raw materials, energy, labor – would be devoted to constructing goods that would then either be destroyed in combat, if the invasion came to pass, or scrapped as useless, if it did not. To reduce matters to their simplest form, imagine that well-intentioned aliens who had read Professor Krugman undertook to strengthen our economy by vaporizing several billion tons of steel, several quadrillion BTU’s of energy production and several million human beings, replacing them with slips of green paper. That is the essence of the Krugman prescription for the American economy.

Perhaps Professor Krugman is himself an alien agent tasked with staving off humanity’s push into space. That hypothesis explains a lot.

Stalin, Mengele, Roswell

Six years ago, Annie Jacobsen, a financial columnist, was a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight marked by bizarre conduct on the part of several Arab passengers. She wrote an interesting, though imperfect book about the experience, arguing that she had witnessed a probing of American defensive measures, aimed at gathering data to refine future terrorist schemes. Maybe she was right, maybe not.

I’m pretty sure that the thesis of her new book, unless the Daily Telegraph’s description utterly mutilates it, is not right:

Area 51, the new book by Annie Jacobsen, is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, the top secret test base in the Nevada desert.

It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938. According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Union seized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.

This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.

The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.

Yeah, I can pick out the plotholes, too, but isn’t it much more imaginative and interesting than the UFO enthusiasts’ tale?