wkwillis: The major foreign holders of American debt aren't rich foreign individuals; they're (central banks of) foreign governments, most notably China. And they keep buying more, even knowing that the value of those holdings, in Chinese currency, is foredoomed to drop. As long as we're talking conspiracy theories, is it all that far-fetched to argue that the Chinese know all this, and are explicitly gambling that a calamitous decline in the value of the dollar, at a time which they can effectively choose themselves, can be arranged to hurt us more than the decline in the value of their American bond holdings will hurt them?

All: as long as we're looking for a conspiracy behind the behavior of the folks currently in power in America, don't overlook straight-up religious fanaticism --- think, perhaps, of a Christian-tinged Aum Shin-Rikyo seeking to do the lord's work by bringing about the apocalypse. Or of the group described in Jesus plus Nothing, who see Hitler and Stalin as role models, and one of whose leaders says at one point, in effect, that raping little girls is just peachy so long as you're doing it with Jesus in your heart. (This is non-fiction, names several real U.S. Senators and Congressmen as being tied to the group, and did not lead to a libel suit; fictional variations on the theme are probably too numerous to easily list).

Of course, it's entirely likely that these guys and Charlie's Trots could each see the other as useful idiots...

Michael, what makes you think I believe the Neoconservatives run the US government, as opposed to being one element of a multi-way coalition that mostly marches under the banner of the Republican party?

Gary: if I was going to get political in this blog you could expect daily diatribes calling for a ban on Christmas, re-education camps for proponents of "intelligent design", and a progressive capital gains tax. (Not to mention the abolition of civil rights normally associated with real human beings -- such as the ability to sue for libel -- for publicly listed companies, and really far-reaching changes to intellectual property law.) I'd also be calling for Tony Blair's head onna stick, every other Tuesday. However, I do not see myself as The Daily Kos.UK, and I've got a job to do, namely entertaining people (rather than crawling up their sinuses and jabbing at them with a pointy stick).

Jack: my understanding is that M3 includes all sorts of interesting overseas deposits and large investments. Eurodollars, that sort of thing. If the presses are rolling to pay for certain current expensive ventures (like, cutting taxes and simultaneously running a hugely expensive war) then that's the first place the inflationary effects are going to show up. In other words, if they expect the bottom to drop out of the dollar over the next year, ceasing to publish M3 maybe buys them a few weeks or even months. Noticed how high the price of Gold has gone lately?

Rumsfeld isn't a neoconservative, though. And if he were, he wouldn't have been important in Nixon's administration. After all, Nixon (advised by Henry Kissinger) shaped his foreign policy by the rules of Realpolitik. Benjamin Disraeli was one of his models. The genuine neocons then (Henry "Scoop" Jackson was the most important) Nixon viewed as ignorant, moralizing blunderers who impeded his work.

"British reporting on US politics is much more comprehensive than the other way round" -- no doubt, but if the reporting isn't accurate, being comprehensive doesn't help you any. The picture circulated in the British press of neocons as a new Illuminati, bending the US government to their nefarious will, is just plain wrong, on both their origins and their methods. Better to be uninformed and know it, than to be confidently mistaken ...

I note with interest that the Fed is to stop issuing updates on the M3 money supply next March...

Charile, what's your take on why this is significant? IIRC, the M3 measure covers things like the number of outstanding mutual money-market shares; is the implication that something big is going to happen on the second derivative of the US money supply?

"I generally try to avoid getting political in this blog, because (being a mercenary sort) I'm not inclined to piss off one sector or another of my audience and potential customer base."

Wow. Well, that's an interesting theory.

All I can advise is not acting as if this described reality.

Not that I tend to disagree with your views (and I've not read the rest of your entry beyond this). I'm just wowing at the notion that this might resemble reality as I know it. (To be sure, I 97% know Charlie Stross from the web and fandom, and have actually read, sorry, relatively little of his fiction; but the above asserts a notion about the Charlie blog, not the Charlie fiction.)

You generally avoid getting political? Um, interesting notion. Also, I am a Klingon. Named "Marie." And I rool.

The US Libertarians are the last of the pre-Gladstonite abolish-the-corn-laws Liberals. (Go on, pick a Libertarian and call them a Liberal, I dare you!)

As for the neocons being active early, I know damn well that Don Rumsfeld is SecDef for the second time, having debuted in the job under Nixon (or was it Ford?). Their grubby little fingerprints have been visible for a long time, although as a dominant strain in US foreign policy they only came under the full glare of public scrutiny in early 2000.

British reporting on US politics is much more comprehensive than the other way round.

It's a fine conspiracy theory, Charlie, but I'm afraid you're not the first one to have thought of it. Here's Tom Tomorrow's take on it from a few months ago: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=19635

Actually I'd have read the bomb-throwing anarchists of Rochard's World in _Singularity Sky_ as the neocons; theoreticians and academics sure of what is good for the little people sitting around plotting to get their hands on the levers of power and use the State for its true purpose, to spread the Revolution. ... In the UK our political world was immunised from that sort of idiocy ...

Well, speaking as an American who's been studying the US political debate for 15 years, I assure you the neocons are not that sort of idiots. (The Libertarian Party, now, they are that sort. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Mr. Stross modeled the anarchists of Rochard's World directly on them.) And, as I said before, they're not Straussians or Trotskyites either.

The fact is, you and Mr. Stross, relying on UK political reporting, can't get any accurate idea of US political factions. For instance, the neocons were already influential in US politics all the way back in Reagan's presidency, and there was nothing secret or furtive about it. When did you Brits first hear of them -- 2002?

Charles, as usual, you're right on all counts. I am carefully avoiding an ad hominem attack on Bostrom, but there are Extropians who refuse to deal with him now, and people who have withdrawn their writing from his forthcoming anthology. You're right about Dyson. My article in Quantum was explicitly a commentary on Dyson, with careful quotations and full citation, based on his publications and several long face-to-face conversations. When Heinlein carefully cited me by name for a quote in his Antimatter chapter of "Expanded Universe," I wrote him a 20-page thank you letter. In the scademic/scientific world there is a protocol for citation. Heinlein showed that a gentleman meets the higher standard of doing so outside the formal literature, i.e. Science Fiction. Problem is, with brilliant authors on the cutting edge (Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Bruce Sterling, etc.) the boundary between science and fiction is fuzzy, fractal, and misunderstood by many.

Edited by author 12-03-2005 10:44 AM
Let's assume that George Bush, Jr. actually knows what he is doing, watches events change, and changes his behaviour in accordance.
No, seriously. And I'm not saying he's a deep cover agent for the Weather Underground either, though maybe he is. Could be. The Weather Underground was patriotic, too.
Anyway, what has George Bush Jr. accomplished in the last five years to make America a better place?
1. He has very thoroughly bankrupted us by spending lots and lots of borrowed money. That is, he didn't spend all our money. Fifty years of the cold war spent all of our money calculated as the replacement value of all the physical assets of America. What he has done isn't even spending more borrowed money than all the rich people in America have in their (tax free) Swiss bank accounts. That was already gone when he took office.
What he did was spend money borrowed from overseas. When we default (because no one's going to give us any free money any more) the people who aren't going to get paid are the people who had money in a Cayman islands account that they can't claim from the Group of Paris or whoever does America's workout process. These people are the Eurotrash tax evaders, the WaBenzi corruption specialists, the Narcotraficantes, the Oil Sheikhs, etc. Ie the most dangerous people in the world.
Defunding these people was a good idea. Worth every penny of their money that we borrowed and spent.
2. What else did he do? Well, he took all the people in the National Guard and Reserves and demonstrated to them that miltary service wasn't an opportunity to get paid while you run around and pretend to be a soldier, you might have to actually be a soldier now and again. And in the case of Iraq, again, and again, and again. This is transforming the US armed forces from a red county redneck, black, and Hispanic organisation dedicated to learning job skills into a blue county containing armed forces that look a lot more like America and are full of people who are joing up while an actual war is going on. This is a very good idea from my point of view.
3. He is replacing military budgets full of aircraft and other boondoggles with budgets full of UAVs that are much more usefull in a real war. Granted, for every billion dollars he spends before it can get to the military budget he's spending only a few million in UAV funding, but it's a start.
4. Also he is destroying the Republican party. My boss was one of the few black people who voted for Bush in the last two elections. He made unsolicited antiBush remarks to me last month. He isn't the only guy who has made that kind of remark to me. Bush is a drag on the Republicans, big time. Good. Every time some Republican gets perp walked because they think that if Bush is in office they can steal anything not nailed down and not go to jail, I wiggle with joy.
So what's not to like?
In addition, he gave us a live ammo test of what worked and didn't work. We are cancelling a huge boondoggle fighter and attack aircraft program to increase UAV, mineclearing, CCC, body armor, night vision, etc, capability. All very usefull. Good work, Junior!
He also managed to so thoroughly botch the recovery of New Orleans that most of the people flooded out are not going to return because they have put down roots elsewhere. Which means that at least one downtown (and a culturally important one) is evacuated to the rest of America. So it won't be destroyed in case of nuclear attack when Iran finally does get the bomb. Score on for civil defense.

Michael Brazier: I understand the New Republic in _Singularity Sky_ was meant for a satire on neoconservatives.

 Actually I'd have read the bomb-throwing anarchists of Rochard's World in _Singularity Sky_ as the neocons; theoreticians and academics sure of what is good for the little people sitting around plotting to get their hands on the levers of power and use the State for its true purpose, to spread the Revolution. I've seen at least one right-wing commentator decry this book because of Charlie's obvious attempts to make them the heroes of the story. The fact the revolutionaries are manifestly incompetent and stupid seemed to have slipped under his radar.

 In the UK our political world was immunised from that sort of idiocy by the university student unions of the 70s which gave anyone with a room-temperature IQ (measured in Rankin) a bellyfull of mindless rhetoric and agitprop before they got kicked out with or without a degree. After that a political movement of the sort Strauss engendered would be laughed at. In the US it got elected to power. Weird.

Dan: With the Soviet Union no longer around, there is only one superpower. Therefore, the remaining superpower can easily run the world. (The Russian Federation's government seems not to have noticed that Russia is no longer a superpower.)

It generally takes at least one generation for an ex-superpower to realize that it is no longer a superpower. Look at Spain, France, or the UK as object lessons in this.

First corollary: after the USA ceases to be a superpower it will take a generation for the message to sink in.

(NB: I'm not sure that isn't happening right now. I note with interest that the Fed is to stop issuing updates on the M3 money supply next March -- that's probably far more significant than any day-to-day death toll in Iraq.)

Jonathan: IIRC, Nick Bostom was a regular on the Extropians mailing list more than a decade ago, back when it was still an interesting place to be. He pre-dated my arrival there, I think. And if you want to trace the ambiplasma idea back all the way, why not acknowledge Freeman Dyson?

Michael Brazier: I understand the New Republic in _Singularity Sky_ was meant for a satire on neoconservatives. Dunno where you got that idea from, but it's wrong. (Back in the mid nineties when I was writing that book I'd never heard of the neocons -- neither had most people.) They're a satire on the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Big Spaceships, or -- less obviously -- on the type of personality that feels nostalgic for such a milieu. Backfilling after the event, the way the New Republic is run is a dead ringer for a Straussian state, aristocrats who follow the dictum that war is the health of the nation being manipulated behind the scenes by the Curator's Office. I suspect I may make this explicit in any forthcoming sequels ...

Mr. Stross, ideas of Trotsky and Strauss have had some influence on the neoconservatives in America, but that's not the central defining thing about them. "Neoconservative" means, quite simply, a former social democrat who started voting Republican. These people began from a political point very much like the place you stand, only they stood there forty years ago. They watched Lyndon Johnson enact a host of social-democrat reforms, and saw them mostly fail, and then tried to work out why. The only name you were right to connect with them is Gladstone's.
<p>I understand the New Republic in _Singularity Sky_ was meant for a satire on neoconservatives. You may have hit off Leo Strauss to perfection, but the neoconservatives are far closer to Rachel Mansour -- from her job of covert agent for liberty, through her past careers of peace activist and SWAT officer specializing in WMD attacks, to her indignant fury at the structural injustices of the New Republic.

Edging slightly away from the politics into the wackier metaphysical speculation... Bostrom's "simulation argument" paper of 2003 got good press. But it was not original, compared to earlier treatment in the Science Fiction literature. For example (he said self-servingly) a decade earlier there was: "Human Destiny and the End of Time" [Quantum, No.39, Winter 1991/1992, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877; ISSN 0198-6686]. It specifically and quantitatively suggested the overwhelming likelihood that we were simulated by electron-positron ambiplasma beings after the universe had all tunnelled into black holes and those black holes had all evaporated by Hawking radiation. Greg Benford acknowledges this as the source of his electron-positron ambiplasma beings detected near the center of our galaxy, radiating gamma rays by annihilation, his his Tides of Light / Galactic Center series of novels. As usual, scientists and science fiction authors publish first, and then some academic philosopher rediscovers a watered-down version. Any day now some professor will deconstruct "Accelerando" and think he invented the singularity. Not to knock Bostrom's Transhumanist credentials, mind you, I'd guess the odds are that he simply forgot that he got the idea by reading Benford, and never knew that Benford started writing that wonderful fiction before my nonfictional article gave him a neat way to resolve some plots in the later novels of the series. Anyone out there have a copy to confirm my otherwise odd assertion?

On origins: I think you also need to take into account the history of American intervention in South America, Central America, and associated islands. Note: If American intervention was as certain a force for good as Us imperialists seem to think, Haiti would be a paradise.

Another factor: There were two superpowers. With the Soviet Union no longer around, there is only one superpower. Therefore, the remaining superpower can easily run the world. (The Russian Federation's government seems not to have noticed that Russia is no longer a superpower.)

There's a joke about the lone lawyer in a small town who was in bad financial shape because he didn't have enough business. Then another lawyer came to town, and there was more than enough business for both. I suspect there can't be a lone superpower; two are needed, so that each can offer to defend lesser powers against the other.

Yes, I have to acknowledge that my Jade Theory came to me worryingly soon after reading Brin's analysis of this situation. Morphic resonance, for sure.

OTOH, people just cock things up sometimes. Look, for example, at the political career and legacy of Napoleon III, for example. Top conspirator: shite emperor.

But GWB is a man who has been raised never having to clean up his own mess in any sense whatsoever. He is the anti-Eleanor Roosevelt. Add that to a dash of Haliburton's FailedState-Industrial Complex, and a future composed of the least attractive bits of Baxter, Stephenson and Brunner seems increasingly likely.

Bastards. Let's build the the elevator and leave them to it. Some days I feel like I'd pedal up it if necessary.