| Novel Brainstorming |
[May. 1st, 2012|11:58 am] |
Done with exams! I'm looking to write a near-future, optimistic, plausible SF novel this summer, and could use input.
I'm proposing that it's a few decades in the future, and there's a free American republic. Not the United States, but a breakaway nation possibly called the Free States. Its border might look something like the old Confederacy ("Now with 60% less racism!") and parts of the West, and be aggressively taking parts of northern Mexico and expanding into seasteads on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The new nation is a capitalistic, constitutional republic which is rugged, fiercely independent, highly religious, reckless, ambitious, somewhat racist, proud, and internally conflicted. Meanwhile, the old country survives as something like a European state: compassionate, domineering, inward-looking, secular, ashamed of its past, diplomatic, timid. Neither country should be a "straw dystopia" or utopia, and there wasn't a clean break where all the capitalists go one way and vice versa. The Free States are developing advanced technology including medicine the hero will need to survive, and thumbing their noses at the Law of the Sea Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty that close off 99.99999...% of the universe to resource exploitation. The national split was not very bloody, but there's still a long border and long-term bitterness as happened with Canada. ("Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you... may history forget you were ever our brothers!")
I'd be interested to hear whether this setup strikes people as at all plausible, and suggestions for how to portray it. I did an SF novel already, set at the very beginning of a pro-freedom seastead's founding, and that's out to a small publisher now. |
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| McConnell's "Back Off" Comment |
[Apr. 5th, 2012|03:07 pm] |
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-congress/2012/04/mcconnell-to-obama-back-off-scotus-119717.html
Although it's nice to see McConnell telling the president to "back off" on his criticism of the Supreme Court, it's also troubling to see him say this:
"My own preference is well known. If the Court upholds the law, I’ll be disappointed. I’ll disagree with it. But I’ll respect its independence. And then I’ll continue to do everything I can to have this law repealed through the legislative channels that remain available."
I don't think he gets the importance of the case. This is not one where we can say "oh well, we lost" and go on campaigning like it's nothing but a bad political decision. The wrong court ruling here is a fundamental attack on the legal system itself, and on the legitimacy of the government.
On a different note, would Rick and Newt please go away now? |
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| Economic Numbers |
[Feb. 17th, 2012|06:18 pm] |
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/record-12-million-people-fall-out-labor-force-one-month-labor-force-participation-rate-tumbles-
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
According to our government, unemployment is falling. Great news! Except that the labor force participation rate, ie. the share of people who haven't given up looking, has mysteriously fallen more last month than ever before. And while looking for the first link above, I found this article from 2011 Jan. That one noted that unemployment is falling but the participation rate is falling too, so the same shenanigans have been going on for over a year. In fact, the 2011 article says that "almost 2/3rds of the decline in the unemployment rate was related to the decline in the participation rate."
According to our government, we're making progress on cutting back federal spending. Great news! Except that according to the White House's own figures, the president proposes to increase spending every year. The president claims -- and the media are going to parrot -- that this budget strategy is "balanced" because it jacks up taxes but cuts the deficit by around 2.5 dollars for each buck of taxes. Now, since spending is going up, that means there are spending cuts of $0 in this budget, meaning the tax-hike/spending-cut ratio is infinity to one. (In fact, the president boasts about how he's going to raise spending on a lot of specific programs.) How are spending increases explained as deficit reduction? Easy: by the same weaseling both parties have been doing for many years, namely assuming that spending will rise every year and then congratulating yourself if you raise it by slightly less.
We're also hearing that the government might hit its debt ceiling yet again before the election. Don't worry, though; the accountants will do the same creative accounting they did last time to put off any real need for action. |
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| Missing the Point, Getting the Point |
[Feb. 13th, 2012|05:07 pm] |
A friend pointed me yesterday to this interview with Peter Thiel about politics. (Thiel is an alleged libertarian who's one of the main people pushing seasteading.) I told him that Thiel completely missed the point in his political talk. The man sees conservative arguments as being about economics, saying that the conservative movement of the last few decades is all about the inefficiency of the welfare state. Conservatives think taxes shouldn't go higher because the government can't be trusted with the money. And ultimately we're fighting over a shrinking (per capita) economic pie because of a slowdown in technological growth.
In contrast, this much shorter article gets the point Thiel misses. "Yes, the Tea Party has been about spending and debt, about solvency and prosperity. But at its core, the spirit of the Tea Party has always been a reawakening to the threats today's big-government liberalism poses to our constitution of liberty... that the problem with big-government liberalism is not just that it spends our money, or even that it spends more money than we have; it's that it takes away our freedom."
For a lot of Republicans (some of them named Mitt, Rick and Newt) the dispute really is just about whether we should spend a little more, or a lot more. But others get the point that there's a deeper dispute here, and we're forced to decide one way or another on basic legal and moral principles. |
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| Catholic Contraception Mandate |
[Feb. 7th, 2012|05:09 pm] |
Most likely, the White House will back down soon on the contraception/abortion mandate against Catholic groups. The president's not stupid enough to risk losing the Catholic vote. But that raises the question: Will Catholics who were angry about being oppressed by the health care bill, defend my freedom from the same law, as opposed to staying silent so long as they're not the ones being oppressed? I'm hoping this is an unfair worry, but many Catholics are Democrats.
By the way, the fact that this decision would even be made by a White House bureaucrat (the secretary of health and human services) is awful, since it's one of many parts of the health care bill that invited unelected bureaucrats to make up the law's details as they went along.
Normally I'd put more emphasis on the question, "What limits are there on people being granted special exemption from laws because they have religious objections?", but this isn't a good time to antagonize anyone who's feeling oppressed by Washington. |
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