Vox Popoli

Ridge’s department last week asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place. Justice was specifically asked to review a recent letter to Ridge from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that state’s Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, “the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election.” Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call.

There haven’t been any major terrorist attacks in the USA since 9/11. That cynical voice inside my head says that providing this “statutory authority” to the federal government will all but assure that we’ll have one soon after it is provided.

Adam Gopnik writes in Paris to the Moon

The performance of Les Trois Petits Cochons, for instance, uses, with slight variations, many of the devices, not to mention the music of the Disney version of the story from the thirties. There are French touches, though. The catastrophe, or climax, comes when the wolf pretends to be a minor official comes to read the water meter. The pigs have to let him into the one remaining house; the French little pigs have to open the door to administration, even when it has an immense jaw and sixty white paper-mache teeth.

This is why there will never be a European Waco or Ruby Ridge. Perhaps in Switzerland, or New Europe, where decades of totalitarian rule have hardened the population’s attitudes about government. But certainly not in France.

America is rather different. We have no long tradition of obedience. We are born rebellious, with the unruly expectation that individual liberty is our natural birthright. We must be educated, confused, fooled and propagandized non-stop in order to even become manageable. Rage Against the Machine is a good example of this significant cultural difference; despite being left-wing pop icons, ideologically pledged to the expansion of central government power, they once notably preached: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” and, just in case one happened to somehow escape the message, repeated it 26 times before punctuating it with one last exclamatory “motherfucker!”

This is not exactly the ideal open-the-door-to-the-government-wolf spirit.

America the idea may be dead, for now. But the recalcitrant individuality that gave her birth still lives, and we can hope that as long as this stubborn fire still burns in American hearts, we may find her again.

Imagine my surprise when I find it is Bill Buckler calling me! And he tells me that my wife says that I would love it, just love it, if he would call me up and finish talking about the increase in debt. I look at the doctor. I think about what he said. I look at the phone. And then I say to Bill, “Sure! I’d love to hear about it!” And so he goes on to say, “Since the beginning of 1998, total US borrowings have climbed from about 255% of US GDP to 302%!”

302% of GDP! My puny little brain is kicked into action, as I think to myself “This is a new record!” Amazingly, I think I know why he ended the sentence with an exclamation point! And look! I’m doing it, too!

And since there must be some reason why those exclamation points are suddenly everywhere, I will remark that this is higher than the 260% of GDP recorded at the height of the market in 1929, and we all know how well THAT turned out!

It’s probably worth pointing out that cumulative US mortgage debt is now $9.618 trillion, which represents 99.298 percent of cumulative US personal income, at $9.686 trillion. I don’t know if the banks can manage to push this number up beyond 100 percent, but considering that the government is deeply underwater itself, it’s pretty clear that the nation is essentially bankrupt.

“But we owe it to ourselves!” some might protest. Except that we don’t. We owe it to China, Japan, and the private bank that is the Federal Reserve. The question is this: who is worse off when the debt gets can no longer be sustained by continued borrowing or quiet inflation, the foreign investors, the bank or the indebted public?

It’s hard to disagree with Buckler’s conclusion:

As I am too busy wailing and cramming boxes of ammunition into a backpack to continue right now, I will leave it to the clever Mr. Buckley to come up with a simile to beautifully sum it all up. Rising to the challenge, he writes, “There is no ‘solution’ to this dilemma, just as there is no ‘solution’ for a man who finds himself in a barrel on the lip of Niagara Falls.”

Enjoy the silence….

Percent change at seasonally adjusted annual rates

03 Months from Feb 2004 TO May 2004: 11.3

06 Months from Nov 2003 TO May 2004: 08.2

12 Months from May 2003 TO May 2004: 05.4

Considering that the stock market is basically flat for the year with this sort of monetary stimulus, the picture is not a pretty one.

UPDATE – had two copy and paste errors in the original post. We apologize to anyone alarmed at the thought that perhaps Mr. Stross’s transdimensional mathematics had seized control of this blog. M3’s pace continues to further increase, by the way, according to the latest reports:

M-3 was up a whopping 31.7 billion for the latest reporting week on a seasonally adjusted basis. It is now up 61.2 billion over the past 3 weeks, and $204 billion over the past ten weeks, rising at an annualized clip of 11.7 percent.

Look, I don’t mind if a thread is hijacked by what turns out to be a more interesting conversation for those involved. But please do not intrude on other threads because you think something unrelated is particularly exciting or important – barring a stock market collapse or another 9/11, in either of those cases, please interrupt away. There’s enough nonsense and spam floating around via email; we don’t need to add to it here, at least not unfiltered.

Had the latest offender, (who shall go unnamed since it was done in innocence), bothered to email me first, I could have told him that he was getting worked up about an old Internet hoax. This was quite obvious in the early versions as they cited bills that did not exist.

Bill writes of the so-called “smart” missiles:

Yeah, what we should have done was say “Hey Saddam, we have a few hundred special ops folks hiding in Baghdad and other major cities, hide-and-seek starts…. Now!”

It seems to escape Bill that this is an admission on his part that a) the government does lie; and b) uses the mainstream media to disseminate its propaganda. The point is not that the government should have endangered its troops by telling the truth about how it was bombing Baghdad – of course they shouldn’t have, although I don’t see why any explanation was required in the first place – but that the US government is perfectly willing to lie and use the media to propagate its lies when it sees fit to do so.

This logically should logically lead Bill to the next two questions: (1) What else are they lying about? (2) What is their justification for doing so?

Finally, I find it hard to believe that anyone would believe that Saddam didn’t know perfectly well that our special ops were crawling all over Iraq both the first and second time around, smart missiles or no smart missiles. The frightening thing about special ops is that the target knows they’re out there, he just doesn’t know where, or how to find them.

The Atrocity Archives

Charles Stross

Golden Gryphon Press

Rating: 8 of 10

There are those books where the cleverness of the author is irksome, where one cannot escape the vague impression that the reader is expected to stop and applaud the literary gymnastics at the end of every chapter. In The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross does not engage in pyrotechnic wordsmithery, but his cleverness is unmistakable.

Stross, (we dearly hope), has conjured up The Laundry from the bowels of his imagination, an esoteric department devoted to cleaning up those nasty messes that result when dimensions collide. The occultic Laundry is one part NSA, one part MI5 and two parts bureaucratic nightmare, as even the most awe-inspiring eldritch horrors are somehow reduced to matters of paperwork and departmental infighting. It is as if 007 was fired for sexual harassment and replaced by 013, a Dilbert in uneasy possession of Lord Voldemort’s powers. The complex synthesis is a most unlikely one, and yet Stross pulls it off with effortless expertise.

A longtime technology columnist for Computer Shopper, Stross presents a world in which modern science and mathematical theory have been used to harness occult power from… elsewhere. The Cold War, it seems, was even more grim and cold than anyone imagined, as the arms race involved far more than the comparatively prosaic threat of nuclear weapons. An insignificant pawn for a minor player in the Great Game, Bob Howard has recently traded the boredom of a desk job for what he hopes will prove a more exciting position in the field. But in this environment, one can never tell when things squamous and rugose will unexpectedly liven up a tedious day at the office with a moment of sheer horror.

Story: 4 of 5. Surely one of the strangest thrillers ever written, the fantastic and science fiction elements only add to the tension. Yes, there are girls that must be rescued and worlds that must be saved, but the unique nature of the threats involved, both wordly and otherwordly, keep the pages ever-turning. There are actually several stories contained within one meta-story, as a related novella, The Concrete Jungle, follows the Archives proper.

Style: 4 of 5. The text is gripping and entertaining throughout, as the juxtaposition of everyman’s office life with the omnipresent possibility of sudden and horrible death is quite amusing. Stross uses his jargon judiciously, piling it on for maximum effect at times, but never allowing it to slow the story down. Like Umberto Eco and Dan Brown, he manages the neat trick of making the reader feel smarter for having immersed himself in his book.

Characters: 3 of 5. Stross’s Howard – an homage to a genre legend – is an amusing protagonist. He is not at all the cliched reluctant hero, but his self-deprecating nature makes his occasional self-doubt all the more real. Stross, for all that he is manifestly an vision writer, still manages to draw his characters with precision and more than a little wry humor.

Creativity: 4.5 of 5. Yes, this is a synthetic creation. His influences – Lovecraft, Stephenson, Fleming, Adams – are obvious, and yet the wizard’s melting pot prduces something new, different and even stylish in a technocratic manner. Stross is perhaps the best “new” writer the science fiction genre has produced since Neal Stephenson; he is certainly the most interesting.

Text Sample:

The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn’t work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing theorem – named after Alan Turing, who you’ll have heard of if you know anything about computers.

That kind of magic works. Unfortunately….

The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understand that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms – translation: all your bank account are belong to us – and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.

This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct – except for the little problem that this isn’t the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back – see Al-Hazred, Nietszche, Lovecraft, Poe, etcetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandlebrot mathematics, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics – computerised or otherwise – draws them forth.

(And you thought running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)

Nate has a little Pan-Galactic book club aborning at his site, which made me wonder if it might be interesting to put together a community book review collection over at voxday.net. I have a distinct review form in mind, and I’m thinking that if Digital Cowboy and I designed the forms for automated entry, the reasonably well-read collection of people here would be able to put together a fairly solid selection of book reviews that might be of use to people in short order.

Is anyone amenable to the suggestion? Let me know if you:

a) like the idea and would like to contribute reviews;

b) like the idea and would like to read reviews;

c) think it’s a dumb idea as one can find plenty of reviews at Amazon.

Basically, I like to see reviews hitting the four distinct aspects of a novel: Story, Style, Characters and Creativity. For example, I would rate Tanith Lee very high on style, somewhat high on creativity, and much lower on story and characters, whereas Rowlins would tend to score much higher on characters and story than on style.

We spend a lot of time discussing the merits of third party voting here, but as I’ve now run across a fourth distinct source that believes that the election will be canceled in between now and November, I thought that I’d at least bring one of the more interestingly paranoid theories to your attention. Is any of this real? I couldn’t possibly say. The only thing of which I am sure is that there are real unanswered questions about the events of 9/11, that there a number of what appear to be logical holes in the official story, and that history suggests that there is more of a power struggle going on beneath the surface than the average person following the national media would be likely to understand.

As a tangential example, I happen to know from a direct source that the story about smart missiles hitting Baghdad was false. The missiles weren’t that smart, instead, there were spotters who had infiltrated into Baghdad who were using lasers to guide the missiles into their targets. A minor inaccuracy, sure, but a blatant misrepresentation of the facts by the government nonetheless. As to the assertion that Israel tested out some of its tactical – if tactical is the word for something that can strike from 600 miles away – nukes in Iraq, I can’t say except that the radiation reported does seem far too high for it to be nothing but expended rounds of depleted uranium.

Conspiracy theory is the most accurate theory of history, the problem with using it to understand what is happening is that one seldom has any idea of which conspiracy is real and likely to be successful until it is all over. Lenin’s takeover of Russia was a conspiracy after all; how many attempts to take over the USA have been made, attempts of which we have never heard? Given Roman history, it stands to reason that more than one individual would very much like to take control of the most powerful military and wealthiest economy in the world.

AJ: Do you think the globalists are going to have the will to carry out another massive attack here in the U.S. to try to get control back over the population and get their agenda back on track? Or do you think they’ve calculated, computed as you said, that that will blow up in their face because so many people now know who the real terrorists are?

DGP: That’s a two-prong question, Alex. I think it deserves a studied answer. The only thing I can say is I’m not sure how it will turn out. But it is very dangerous.

AJ: From watching the globalists, I think they had a plan, they are still following a plan but I think they are shook-up. I think, from the evidence, in fact I know from the evidence, that a lot of things they planned haven’t gone according to schedule and so they don’t know what to do right now.

DGP: This is correct. I think it’s personified in the persona of the Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They almost got him in Baghdad when they fired the salvo, one night, of weaponry and they scared Paul Wolfowitz off. He’s ready to resign or get the hell out.

AJ: You think that was U.S. forces doing that?

DGP: I believe it. It was very well planned again and ..

AJ: Yeah, only U.S. forces would know that he would be there. Yeah.

DGP: That is correct. And the precision of those weapons that came into the hotel. There were eleven rounds in all and I can speak from authenticity that they scared the hell out of Paul Wolfowitz.

I have to admit, I did wonder about that mysterious attempted hit on Wolfowitz, as the modus operandi was very distinct from the usual suicide vehicle, RPG ambush or gang of gunmen. It may a priori be a frightening thing to think that there may be elements in the military now in the midst of planning a coupe-de-etat, but then, it’s not necessarily the case that they are the bad guys either. Perhaps, if they are serious about their oaths to the Constitution, we might even see a return to Constitutional government. In these profoundly interesting times, the only thing of which we can be certain is that we do not have it now.

Could this simply be Y2K-style fearmongering writ large? Definitely. But as with Y2K, we’ll find out soon enough.

From the Borowitz Report:

EDWARDS ASKS KERRY TO STOP GRABBING HIS ASS

Public Displays of Affection ‘Distracting,’ Says Kerry’s No. 2

After a mere two days on the campaign trail, the first signs of tension between John Kerry and running mate John Edwards emerged today as Sen. Edwards requested, firmly and unequivocally, that Mr. Kerry stop grabbing his ass. “I think Sen. Kerry has made it very clear in our joint appearances that he is happy to have me on the ticket,” Mr. Edwards told reporters. “He really doesn’t have to prove it by repeatedly grabbing my ass.”

At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania today, Mr. Edwards was in the middle of a speech when he emitted a high-pitched yelp, apparently in response to yet another unexpected display of affection from Sen. Kerry. “Jesus, John,” a visibly annoyed Mr. Edwards said to Mr. Kerry, who merely stood behind him smiling mischievously.

In a sign that Mr. Kerry’s unwanted embraces may be taking their toll on the newly-minted vice-presidential candidate, Mr. Edwards departed from his prepared remarks, telling hs audience, “There are two Americas – one that gets to grab ass, and one that gets its ass grabbed.”

Intriguingly, a source confirmed that Mr. Kerry’s penchant for ass-grabbing was the principal reason Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Missouri) did not make the Democratic ticket: “The whole idea of it grossed Dick out.”

Elsewhere, indicted former Enron CEO Ken Lay today announced that he would seek amnesty by applying for a position as an Iraqi insurgent.

And in Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft told all Americans to be on the lookout for a terror suspect disguised as an obese man wearing glasses and a baseball cap, accompanied by a documentary film crew.

If they have the Comunards play the convention, we’ll know it’s a serious relationship.