Monday, January 30, 2012
Reading List: 11/22/63
- King, Stephen.
11/22/63.
New York: Scribner, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4516-2728-2.
-
I gave up on Stephen King in the early 1990s. I had become
weary of what seemed to me self-indulgent doorstops of novels
which could have been improved by a sharp-pencilled editor
cutting them by one third to one half, but weren't because what
editor would dare strike words by such a celebrated (and
profitable to the publisher) author? I never made it through
either
Gerald's Game
or
Insomnia
and after that I stopped trying. Recently I heard good things
from several sources I respect about the
present work and, despite its formidable
length (850 pages in hardcover), decided to give it a try
(especially since I've always been a fan of time travel
fiction
and
purported fact)
to see if, a decade and a half later, King still “has it”.
The title is the date of the assassination of the U.S. president John F. Kennedy: November the 22nd of 1963 (written in the quaint American
way). In the novel, Jake Epping,
a school teacher in Maine, happens to come across a splice in
time or wormhole or whatever you choose to call it which allows
bidirectional travel between his world in 2011 and September of
1958. Persuaded by the person who discovered the inexplicable
transtemporal portal and revealed it to him, Jake takes upon himself
the mission of returning to the past and living there until November
of 1963 with the goal of averting the assassination and preventing
the pernicious sequelæ which he believed to have originated
in that calamity.
Upon arrival in the past, he discovers from other lesser wrongs he
seeks to right that while the past can be changed, it doesn't
like to be changed and pushes back—it is
mutable but “obdurate”. As he lives his life in
that lost and largely forgotten country which was the U.S.
in the middle of the 20th century, he discovers how much has
been lost compared to our times, and also how far we have
come from commonplace and unperceived injustices and
assaults upon the senses and health of that epoch. Still,
with a few rare exceptions, King forgoes the smug “look
at how much better we are than those rubes” tone that so many
contemporary authors adopt when describing the 1950s; you get
the sense that King has a deep affection for the era
in which he (and I) grew up, and it's apparent here.
I'm going to go behind the curtain now to discuss some of the
details of the novel and the (remarkably few) quibbles I have
with it. I don't consider any of these “big spoilers”,
but others may dissent, so I'd rather err on the side of caution
lest some irritated time traveller come back and….
As I got into the novel, I was afraid I'd end up hurling it
across the room (well, not actually, since I was reading the
Kindle edition and I'm rather fond of my iPad) because the
model of time travel employed just didn't make any sense. But
before long, I began to have a deeper respect for what King
was doing, and by the end of the book I came to appreciate
that what he'd created was largely compatible with the
past/future multiverse picture presented in David Deutsch's
The Fabric of Reality
and my own concept of conscious yet constrained
multiverse navigation in
“ Notes
toward a General Theory of Paranormal Phenomena”.
If this gets made into a movie or miniseries (and that's the way
to bet), I'll bet that scene on p. 178
where the playground roundy-round slowly spins with no kids in
sight on a windless day makes the cut— brrrrr.
A few minutes' reflection will yield several ways that
Jake, given access to the Internet in 2011 and the properties
of the time portal, could have accumulated unlimited funds
to use in the past without taking the risks he did. I'll
avert my eyes here; removing the constraints he
found himself under would torpedo a large part of the plot.
On p. 457 et seq. Jake
refers to an “omnidirectional microphone” when
what is meant is a “directional” or “parabolic”
microphone.
On p. 506 the author states that during the Cuban missile
crisis “American missile bases and the Strategic Air
Command had gone to DEFCON-4 for the first time in history.”
This makes the common error in popular fiction that a higher
number indicates a greater alert condition or closeness to war.
In fact, it goes the other way:
DEFCON 5
corresponds to peacetime—the lowest state of readiness,
while DEFCON 1 means nuclear war is imminent. During the
Cuban missile crisis, SAC was ordered to DEFCON 2 while
the balance of the military was at DEFCON 3.
On p. 635, the righthand man of the dictator of Haiti is
identified as Jean-Claude
“ Baby Doc” Duvalier,
boss of the tonton macoute.
But Baby Doc was born in 1951, and at the time would have been
twelve years old, unlikely to wield such powers.
If the ending doesn't make your eyes mist up, you're probably,
like the protagonist, “not a crying [person]”.
There is a poignant sense of the momentum of events
in the past here which I have not felt in any time travel fiction
since Michael Moorcock's masterpiece
Behold The Man.
Bottom line? King's still got it.
Posted at
23:30
Monday, January 16, 2012
Reading List: The Saturn V F-1 Engine
- Young, Anthony.
The Saturn V F-1 Engine.
Chichester, UK: Springer Praxis, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-387-09629-2.
-
The F-1 rocket engine
which powered the first
(S-IC)
stage of the
Saturn V
booster, which launched all of the Apollo missions to the Moon
and, as a two stage variant, the
Skylab space
station, was one of the singular engineering achievements
of the twentieth century, which this magnificent book chronicles
in exquisite detail. When the U.S. Air Force contracted with
Rocketdyne in 1958 for the preliminary design of a single
chamber engine with between 1 and 1.5 million pounds of thrust,
the largest existing U.S. rocket engine had less than a quarter the
maximum thrust of the proposed new powerplant, and there was no experience
base to provide confidence that problems such as ignition
transients and combustion instability which bedevil liquid
rockets would not prove insuperable when scaling an engine
to such a size. (The Soviets were known to have heavy-lift
boosters, but at the time nobody knew their engine configuration.
In fact, when their details came to be known in the West, they
were discovered to use multiple combustion chambers and/or
clustering of engines precisely to avoid the challenges of
very large engines.)
When the F-1 development began, there was no rocket on the drawing
board intended to use it, nor any mission defined which would
require it. The Air Force had simply established that such an
engine would be adequate to accomplish any military mission
in the foreseeable future. When NASA took over responsibility
for heavy launchers from the Air Force, the F-1 engine became
central to the evolving heavy lifters envisioned for missions
beyond Earth orbit. After Kennedy's decision to mount a manned
lunar landing mission, NASA embarked on a furious effort to define
how such a mission could be accomplished and what hardware would
be required to perform it. The only alternative to heavy lift would
be a large number of launches which assembled the Moon ship
in Earth orbit, which was a daunting prospect at a time when not
only were rockets famously unreliable and difficult to launch on
time, but nobody had ever so much as attempted rendezvous in space,
no less orbital assembly or refuelling operations.
With the eventual choice of
lunar orbit rendezvous
as the mission mode, it became apparent
that it would be possible to perform the lunar landing mission with
a single launch of a booster with 7.5 million pounds of sea level
thrust, which could be obtained from a cluster of five F-1 engines
(which by that time NASA had specified as 1.5 million pounds of
thrust). From the moment the preliminary design of the Saturn V
was defined until Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, the definition,
design, testing, and manufacturing of the F-1 engine was squarely
on the critical path of the Apollo project. If the F-1 did not work,
or was insufficiently reliable to perform in a cluster of five and
launch on time in tight lunar launch windows, or could not have been
manufactured in the quantities required, there would be no
lunar landing. If the schedule of the F-1 slipped, the Apollo project
would slip day-for-day along with its prime mover.
This book recounts the history, rationale, design, development,
testing, refinement, transition to serial production, integration
into test articles and flight hardware, and service history of
this magnificent machine. Sadly, at this remove, some of the key
individuals involved in this project are no longer with us, but
the author tracked down those who remain and discovered
interviews done earlier by other researchers with the departed,
and he stands back and lets them speak, in lengthy quotations,
not just about the engineering and management challenges they
faced and how they were resolved, but what it felt like
to be there, then. You get the palpable sense from these
accounts that despite the tension, schedule and budget
pressure, long hours, and frustration as problem after problem
had to be diagnosed and resolved, these people were having
the time of their lives, and that they knew it
at the time and cherish it even at a half century's remove.
The author has collected more than a hundred contemporary
photographs, many in colour, which complement the text.
A total of sixty-five F-1 engines powered 13 Saturn V flight
vehicles. They performed with 100% reliability.
Posted at
21:01
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Heads up! Transit of Venus, 2012 June 5-6th

One of the rarest of celestial spectacles is the transit of the planet Venus in
front of the disc of the Sun as viewed from the Earth. Indeed, this event did
not occur at all in the twentieth century and takes place only twice in the twenty-first,
the first of which, on June 8th, 2004, you've already missed.
So it's either catch the big show on June 5–6th of 2012 or plan to hang in there
until the next transit of Venus on the 11th of December 2117.
Fortunately, the 2012 transit of Venus occurs near the June solstice, when the Earth's
northern hemisphere is tilted the most toward the Sun, and since the southern
hemisphere is mostly water and ice, the vast majority of the human population
will, given clear skies, be able to observe this celestial show. With the exception of
people in western Africa, the west of Spain, Portugal, the eastern three quarters
of South America, and Antarctica, the transit will be visible, although to many
viewers the transit (which lasts about six hours) will already be in progress at
sunrise or still be in progress at sunset. So while you may not be able to observe
the whole thing, unless you happen to be in one of the sadly deprived regions
this time, you'll at least be able to see Venus as “a spot, not a dot”
crossing the disc of the Sun. The following map courtesy of
Fred
Espenak and NASA/GSFC shows visibility of the transit. As long as you're
not in the darkest shaded area, you'll be able to see it if the weather cooperates.
You can observe the transit of Venus without any optical aid whatsoever
apart from a safe solar filter to protect your eyes. For direct viewing
with the unaided eye,
eclipse specs will do the job. If you want
to view or photograph the transit through binoculars, a telescope, or a camera
lens, you'll need a full-aperture solar filter securely fastened in front of the
objective. Polymer film filters are the most economical, but a
glass, metal-coated filter
will provide a sharper image and better contrast. Whatever filter you choose,
be sure it is securely attached to your viewing device, as even
instantaneous exposure to unfiltered sunlight through optics can result in
blindness or destruction of camera equipment.
You may think this posting precocious, but if you're interested in observing,
photographing, or recording the transit on video, now is the time to decide
on the equipment and techniques you'll use, order any gear you don't have
on hand, and practice observing and imaging the Sun with the equipment
you'll use for the transit. And if, like mine, your full aperture solar filter is
showing its age, take a close look at it and see how much
its many adventures may have degraded its performance and consider
retiring it in favour of one with fewer pinhole defects.
Transits—you want 'em all now?
Happy to oblige!
Posted at
20:19
Monday, January 9, 2012
Reading List: Survivors
- Rawles, James Wesley.
Survivors.
New York: Atria Books, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4391-7280-3.
-
This novel is frequently described as a sequel to the author's
Patriots (December 2008), but in
fact is set in the same time period and broadens the scope
from a small group of scrupulously prepared families coping
with a “grid down” societal collapse in an isolated
and defensible retreat to people all around the U.S. and the
globe in a wide variety of states of readiness dealing with the
day to day exigencies after a hyperinflationary blow-off destroys
paper money worldwide and leads to a breakdown in the just-in-time
economy upon which life in the developed world has become
dependent.
The novel tracks a variety of people in different circumstances:
an Army captain mustered out of active duty in Afghanistan,
an oil man seeking to ride out the calamity doing what he
knows best, a gang leader seeing the collapse of the old
order as the opportunity of a lifetime, and ordinary people
forced to summon extraordinary resources from within themselves
when confronted with circumstances nobody imagined plausible.
Their stories illustrate how even a small degree of preparation
(most importantly, the knowledge and skills you possess, not
the goods and gear you own [although the latter should not be
neglected—without a source of clean water, in 72 hours you're
a refugee, and as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote in
Lucifer's Hammer, “No
place is more than two meals from a revolution”]) can make
all the difference when all the rules change overnight.
Rawles is that rarest of authors: a know-it-all who actually
knows it all—embedded in this story, which can be
read simply as a periapocalyptic thriller, is a wealth of information
for those who wish to make their own preparations for such
discontinuities in their own future light cones. You'll want to
read this book with a browser window open to look up terms and
references to gear dropped in the text (acronyms are defined in the
glossary at the end, but you're on your own in researching
products).
Some mylar-thin thinkers welcome societal collapse; they
imagine it will sweep away the dysfunction and corruption that
surrounds us today and usher in a more honourable and moral
order. Well, that may be the ultimate result (or maybe it won't:
a dark age has its own momentum, and once a culture has not
only forgotten what it knew, but forgotten what it has forgotten,
recovery can take as long or longer than it took to initially
discover what has been lost). Societal collapse, whatever the
cause, will be horrific for those who endure it, many
of whom will not survive and end their days in misery and terror.
Civilisation is a thin veneer on the red in tooth and claw heritage
of our species, and the predators among us will be the first to exploit
the opportunity that a breakdown in order presents.
This novel presents a ruthlessly realistic picture of what
societal collapse looks like to those living it. In a way,
it is airbrushed—we see the carnage in the major metropolitan
areas only from a distance. But for those looking at the
seemingly endless list of “unsustainable” trends
underway at present and wise enough to note that something
which is unsustainable will, perforce, end, this book will
help them think about the aftermath of that end and suggest
preparations which may help riding it out and positioning
themselves to prosper in the inevitable recovery.
Posted at
23:41
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Reading List: Early Warning
- Walsh, Michael.
Early Warning.
New York: Pinnacle Books, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-7860-2043-0.
-
This is the second novel in the author's “Devlin”
series of thrillers. When I read the first,
Hostile Intent, I described it
as a “tangled, muddled mess” and concluded that the author
“may eventually master the thriller, but I doubt I'll read any
of the sequels to find out for myself”. Well, I did
go ahead and read the next book in the series, and I'm
pleased to report that the versatile and accomplished author
(see the review of Hostile Intent for
a brief biography and summary of his other work) has indeed
now mastered the genre and this novel is as tightly plotted, action
packed, and bristling with detail as the work of
Vince Flynn and
Brad Thor.
In this novel, renegade billionaire Emanuel Skorzeny, after having
escaped justice for the depredations he unleashed in the previous
novel, has been reduced to hiding out in jurisdictions which
have no extradition treaty with the United States. NSA covert
agent “Devlin” is on his trail when a coordinated
series of terrorist attacks strike New York City. Feckless
U.S. President Jeb Tyler decides to leave New York's police
Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) to fend for itself to avoid the
débâcle being laid at his feet, but allows
Devlin to be sent in covertly to track down and take out
the malefactors. Devlin assumes his “angel of death”
persona and goes to work, eventually becoming also the
guardian angel of the head of CTU, old school second generation
Irish cop Francis Xavier Byrne.
Devlin and the CTU eventually help the perpetrators achieve
the martyrdom to which they aspire, but not before massive damage is
inflicted upon the city and one terrorist goal accomplished
which may cause even more in the future. How this fits into
Skorzeny's evil schemes still remains to be discovered, as
the mastermind's plot seems to involve not only mayhem on
the streets of Manhattan but also the Higgs boson.
The action and intrigue are leavened by excursions into
cryptography (did you know about the
Poe Cryptographic Challenge?),
the music of
Edward Elgar,
and Devlin's developing relationship with the
enigmatic Iranian expatriate “Maryam”. This is
an entertaining and satisfying thriller, and I'm planning
to read the next episode,
Shock Warning,
in due time.
Posted at
16:50
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Reading List: The Gun
- Chivers, C. J.
The Gun.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-7432-7173-8.
-
Ever since the introduction of firearms into infantry combat,
technology and military doctrine have co-evolved to optimise
the effectiveness of the weapons carried by the individual
soldier. This process requires choosing a compromise among a
long list of desiderata including accuracy, range, rate of fire,
stopping power, size, weight (of both the weapon and its
ammunition, which determines how many rounds an infantryman can
carry), reliability, and the degree of training required to
operate the weapon in both normal and abnormal circumstances.
The “sweet spot” depends upon the technology available
at the time (for example, smokeless powder allowed replacing heavy,
low muzzle velocity, large calibre rounds with lighter supersonic
ammunition), and the environment in which the weapon will be used
(long range and high accuracy over great distances are largely
wasted in jungle and urban combat, where most engagements are
close-up and personal).
Still, ever since the advent of infantry firearms, the rate
of fire an individual soldier can sustain has been
considered a key force multiplier. All things being equal,
a solider who can fire sixteen rounds per minute can do the work
of four soldiers equipped with muzzle loading arms which can
fire only four rounds a minute. As infantry arms progressed from
muzzle loaders to breech loaders to magazine fed lever and bolt actions,
the sustained rate of fire steadily increased. The logical
endpoint of this evolution was a fully automatic infantry weapon:
a rifle which, as long as the trigger was held down and
ammunition remained, would continue to send rounds downrange at
a high cyclic rate. Such a rifle could also be fired in
semiautomatic mode, firing one round every time the trigger
was pulled without any other intervention by the rifleman other
than to change magazines as they were emptied.
This book traces the history of automatic weapons from primitive
volley guns;
through the
Gatling gun,
the first successful high rate of fire weapon (although with
the size and weight of a field artillery piece and requiring
a crew to hand crank it and feed ammunition, it was hardly an
infantry weapon); the
Maxim gun, the
first true machine gun which was responsible for much of the carnage
in World War I; to the
Thompson
submachine gun, which could be carried and fired by a single
person but, using pistol ammunition, lacked the range and stopping
power of an infantry rifle. At the end of World War II, the vast
majority of soldiers carried bolt action or semiautomatic weapons:
fully automatic fire was restricted to crew served support weapons
operated by specially trained gunners.
As military analysts reviewed combat as it happened on the ground
in the battles of World War II, they discovered that long range
aimed fire played only a small part in infantry actions. Instead,
infantry weapons had been used mostly at relatively short ranges
to lay down
suppressive
fire. In this application, rate of fire and the amount of
ammunition a soldier can carry into combat come to the top of
the priority list. Based upon this analysis, even before the end of
the war Soviet armourers launched a design competition for a
next generation rifle which would put automatic fire into the hands
of the ordinary infantryman. After grueling tests under all kinds
of extreme conditions such a weapon might encounter in the field,
the
AK-47, initially
designed by
Mikhail Kalashnikov,
a sergeant tank commander injured in battle, was selected. In 1956 the AK-47
became the standard issue rifle of the Soviet Army, and it and
its subsequent variants, the
AKM (an improved design which
was also lighter and less expensive to manufacture—most of the
weapons one sees today which are called “AK-47s” are
actually based on the AKM design), and the smaller calibre
AK-74. These weapons
and the multitude of clones and variants produced around the world
have become the archetypal small arms of the latter half of the
twentieth century and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable
future in the twenty-first. Nobody knows how many were produced but
almost certainly the number exceeds 100 million, and given the
ruggedness and reliability of the design, most remain operational
today.
This weapon, designed to outfit forces charged with maintaining
order in the Soviet Empire and expanding it to new territories,
quickly slipped the leash and began to circulate among insurgent
forces around the globe—initially infiltrated by Soviet and
Eastern bloc countries to equip communist revolutionaries, an
“after-market” quickly developed which allowed almost
any force wishing to challenge an established power to obtain a weapon
and ammunition which made its irregular fighters the peer of
professional troops. The worldwide dissemination of AK weapons
and their availability at low cost has been a powerful force
destabilising regimes which before could keep their people down with
a relatively small professional army. The author recounts the
legacy of the AK in incidents over the decades and around the
world, and the tragic consequences for those who have found themselves
on the wrong end of this formidable weapon.
United States forces first encountered the AK first hand in
Vietnam, and quickly realised that their
M14
rifles, an attempt to field a full automatic infantry
weapon which used the cartridge of a main battle rifle,
was too large, heavy, and limiting in the amount of ammunition
a soldier could carry to stand up to the AK. The M14's only
advantages: long range and accuracy, were irrelevant in the
Vietnam jungle. While the Soviet procurement and development
of the AK-47 was deliberate and protracted, Pentagon whiz kids
in the U.S. rushed the radically new
M16 into
production and the hands of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The
new rifle, inadequately tested in the field conditions it would
encounter, and deployed with ammunition different from that used
in the test phase, failed frequently and disastrously in the hands
of combat troops with results which were often tragic. What
was supposed to be the most advanced infantry weapon on the planet
often ended up being used as bayonet mount or club by troops in
their last moments of life. The Pentagon responded to this disaster
in the making by covering up the entire matter and destroying the
careers of those who attempted to speak out. Eventually reports
from soldiers in the field made their way to newspapers and
congressmen and the truth began to come out. It took years for
the problems of the M16 to be resolved, and to this day the M16 is
considered less reliable (although more accurate) than the AK.
As an example, compare what it takes to
field strip an M16
compared to an
AK-47. The entire ugly saga of the M16 is documented
in detail here.
This is a fascinating account of the origins, history, and impact
of the small arms which dominate the world today. The author does
an excellent job of sorting through the many legends (especially
from the Soviet era) surrounding these weapons, and sketching
the singular individuals behind their creation.
In the Kindle edition, the table of
contents, end notes, and index are all properly linked to the
text. All of the photographic illustrations are collected at the
very end, after the index.
Posted at
22:28
Friday, December 30, 2011
Tom Swift and His Air Scout Now Online
The twenty-second installment of the Tom Swift saga, Tom Swift and His Air Scout, is now posted in the Tom Swift and His Pocket Library collection. As usual, HTML, PDF, PDA eReader, and plain ASCII text editions suitable for reading off- or online are available.
One problem with building a work of fiction around topical events is that the story is necessarily held hostage to tomorrow's headlines. That is illustrated by this, the second of the Tom Swift novels written during World War I (the first was Tom Swift and His War Tank, published in 1918). The present volume was written during the war but was not published until 1919, at which time the Armistice had gone into effect, rendering a number of comments about the progress of the war in the narrative dated.
In this novel, Tom, inspired by the difficulty he has hearing and being heard over the racket made by the engine while taking his lady friend Mary Nestor for a spin in the sky, vows to invent what today we'd call a “stealth aerial reconnaissance platform” by developing an engine, muffler, and quiet propeller which makes an airplane, even flying as low as a few hundred feet above the terrain, effectively silent to people on the ground. Tom imagines that such a craft will be much in demand for scouting missions above the trenches and behind enemy lines in the European conflict. He embarks upon the project himself, having rejected a generous offer from another aircraft manufacturer to go to work for them. Curious circumstances and evidence of sabotage cause Tom to suspect nefarious forces are out to steal or wreck his design. All of this fades into the background when Mary Nestor's father disappears without a trace while bicycling from the Swift residence back to his house, and Tom mounts a search which remains fruitless even weeks after being turned over to the police.
As Tom Swift fans will anticipate, all of these goings-on are connected in ways which will become apparent as the story progresses, and a satisfactory resolution is obtained in the end. The unsettling corruption wrought by Wilson's War is also on display here. Ned Newton, Tom's friend since childhood, until recently financial manager of the Swift enterprise, and now a banker and Liberty Bond salesman, is revealed to have been covertly spying on Tom and the development of the silent motor and passing on information to the U.S. Secret Service. “Oh, so it was Ned!” exclaims Tom, who appears to consider this betrayal of confidence all hunky-dory—just Ned's “doing his part for Uncle Sam.”
Three public domain Tom Swift novels remain to be posted. When all are complete (this is a long-term project begun in 2004; I have averaged between two and three novels a year), I will revise the already-posted books, bringing their production standards up to those of the more recent postings and incorporating corrections to typographical errors spotted by readers.
Posted at
17:56
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Reading List: Moneymakers
- Tarnoff, Ben.
Moneymakers.
New York: Penguin, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-101-46732-9.
-
Many people think of early America as a time of virtuous
people, hard work, and sound money, all of which have been
debased in our decadent age. Well, there may have been plenty
of the first two, but the fact is that from the colonial era
through the War of Secession, the American economy was built
upon a foundation of dodgy paper money issued by a
bewildering variety of institutions. There were advocates of
hard money during the epoch, but their voices went largely
unheeded because there simply wasn't enough precious metal
on the continent to coin or back currency in the quantity
required by the burgeoning economy. Not until the discovery
of gold in California and silver in Nevada and other western
states in the middle of the 19th century did a metal-backed
monetary system become feasible in America.
Now, whenever authorities, be they colonies, banks, states, or
federal institutions, undertake the economic transubstantiation of
paper into gold by printing something on it, there will
always be enterprising individuals motivated to get into the
business for themselves. This book tells the story
of three of these “moneymakers” (as counterfeiters
were called in early America).
Owen Sullivan was an Irish immigrant who, in the 1740s and '50s set up
shop in a well-appointed cave on the border between New York and
Connecticut and orchestrated a network of printers, distributors, and
passers of bogus notes of the surrounding colonies. Sullivan
was the quintessential golden-tongued confidence man, talking himself
out of jam after jam, and even persuading his captors, when he was
caught and sentenced to be branded with an “R” for
“Rogue” to brand him above the hairline where he
could comb over the mark of shame.
So painful had the colonial experience with paper money been that
the U.S. Constitution
forbade states
to “emit Bills of Credit; make
any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”.
But as the long and sordid history of “limited government”
demonstrates, wherever there is a constitutional constraint, there
is always a clever way for politicians to evade it, and nothing in
the Constitution prevented states from chartering banks which would
then proceed to print their own paper money. When the charter
of Alexander Hamilton's
First
Bank of the United States was allowed to expire, that's exactly
what the states proceeded to do. In Pennsylvania alone, in the single
year of 1814, the state legislature chartered forty-one new banks in
addition to the six already existing. With each of these banks entitled
to print its own paper money (backed, in theory, by gold and silver coin
in their vaults, with the emphasis on in theory), and each of
these notes having its own unique design, this created a veritable paradise
for counterfeiters, and into this paradise stepped counterfeiting
entrepreneur
David Lewis
and master engraver Philander Noble, who set up a distributed and
decentralised gang to pass their wares which could only be brought to
justice by the kind of patient, bottom-up detective work which was
rare in an age where law enforcement was largely the work of
amateurs.
Samuel Upham,
a successful Philadelphia shopkeeper in the 1860s, saw
counterfeiting as a new product line for his shop, along with
stationery and Upham's Hair Dye. When the Philadelphia Inquirer
printed a replica of the Confederate five dollar note, the edition was
much in demand at Upham's shop, and he immediately got in touch with
the newspaper and arranged to purchase the printing plate for the
crude replica of the note and printed three thousand copies with a
strip at the bottom identifying them as replicas with the name and
address of his store. At a penny a piece they sold briskly, and
Upham decided to upgrade and expand his product line. Before long
he offered Confederate currency “curios” in all
denominations, printed from high quality plates on banknote paper,
advertised widely as available in retail and wholesale quantities
for those seeking a souvenir of the war (or several thousand of
them, if you like). These “facsimiles” were indistinguishable
from the real thing to anybody but an expert, and Union troops heading
South and merchants trading across the border found Upham's counterfeits
easy to pass. Allegations were made that the Union encouraged, aided,
and abetted Upham's business in the interest of economic warfare against
the South, but no evidence of this was ever produced. Nonetheless,
Upham and his inevitable competitors were allowed to operate with
impunity, and the flood of bogus money they sent to the South certainly
made a major contribution to the rampant inflation experienced in the
South and made it more difficult for the Confederacy to finance its
war effort.
This is an illuminating and entertaining exploration of banking,
finance, and monetary history in what may seem a simpler age but
was, in its own way, breathtakingly complicated—at the
peak there were more than ten thousand different kinds of
paper money circulating in North America. Readers with a sense of
justice may find themselves wondering why small-scale operators
such as Sullivan and Lewis were tracked down so assiduously and
punished so harshly while contemporary manufacturers of
funny money on the terabuck scale such as Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Mario Draghi
are treated with respect and deference instead of being dispatched
to the pillory and branding iron they so richly deserve for plundering
the savings and future of those from whom their salaries are extorted
under threat of force. To whom I say, just wait….
A Kindle edition is available, in
which the table of contents is linked
to the text, but the index is simply a list of terms, not
linked to their occurrences in the text. The extensive end notes are
keyed to page numbers in the print edition, which are
preserved in the Kindle edition, making navigation
possible, albeit clumsy.
Posted at
18:29
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Reading List: Anomaly
- Cawdron, Peter.
Anomaly.
Los Gatos, CA: Smashwords, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4657-7394-4.
-
One otherwise perfectly normal day, a sphere of space 130 metres in
diameter outside the headquarters of the United Nations in New York
including a slab of pavement and a corner of the General Assembly
building becomes detached from Earth's local reference
frame and begins to rotate, maintaining a fixed orientation with
respect to the distant stars, returning to its original orientation
once per sidereal day. Observers watch in awe as the massive slab of
pavement, severed corner of the U.N. building, and even flagpoles
and flags which happened to fall within the sphere defy gravity and
common sense, turning on end, passing overhead, and then coming back
to their original orientation every day.
Through a strange set of coincidences, schoolteacher David Teller,
who first realised and blurted out on live television that the
anomaly wasn't moving as it appeared to Earth dwellers, but rather
was stationary with respect to the stars, and third-string TV news
reporter Cathy Jones find themselves the public face of the scientific
investigation of the anomaly, conducted by NASA under the direction
of the imposing James Mason, “Director of National Security”.
An off-the-cuff experiment shows that the anomaly has its own local
gravitational field pointing in the original direction, down toward the
slab, and that no barrier separates the inside and outside of the
anomaly. Teller does the acrobatics to climb onto the slab, using a
helium balloon to detect the up direction as he enters into the
anomaly, and observers outside see him standing, perfectly at ease, at
a crazy angle to their own sense of vertical. Sparked by a sudden
brainstorm, Teller does a simple experiment to test whether the anomaly
might be an alien probe attempting to make contact, and the results
set off a sequence of events which, although implausible at times, never
cease to be entertaining and raise the question of whether if we encountered
technologies millions or billions of years more advanced than our own,
we would even distinguish them from natural phenomena (and, conversely,
whether some of the conundrums scientists puzzle over today might be
evidence of such technologies—“dark energy”, anyone?).
The prospect of first contact sets off a firestorm: bureaucratic
turf battles, media struggling for access,
religious leaders trying to put their own spin on what it means,
nations seeking to avoid being cut out of a potential bounty of
knowledge from contact by the U.S., upon whose territory the
anomaly happened to appear. These forces converge toward a conclusion
which will have you saying every few pages, “I didn't see
that coming”, and one of the most unlikely military
confrontations in all of the literature of science fiction and thrillers.
As explained in the after-word, the author is trying to do something
special in this story, which I shall not reveal here to avoid spoiling
your figuring it out for yourself and making your own decision as to
how well he succeeded.
At just 50,000 words, this is a short novel, but it tells its story
well. At this writing, the Kindle edition sells for just US$0.99 (no
print edition is available), so it's a bargain notwithstanding its
brevity.
Posted at
16:15
Monday, December 19, 2011
Reading List: In the Garden of Beasts
- Larson, Erik.
In the Garden of Beasts.
New York: Crown Publishers, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-307-40884-6.
-
Ambassadors to high-profile postings are usually chosen from
political patrons and contributors to the president
who appoints them, depending upon career Foreign Service officers
to provide the in-country expertise needed to carry out their
mandate. Newly-elected Franklin Roosevelt intended to follow
this tradition in choosing his ambassador to Germany, where Hitler
had just taken power, but discovered that none of the candidates
he approached were interested in being sent to represent the
U.S. in Nazi Germany. William E. Dodd, a professor of history
and chairman of the department of history at the University of
Chicago, growing increasingly frustrated with his administrative
duties preventing him from completing his life's work: a comprehensive
history of the ante-bellum American South, mentioned to a friend
in Roosevelt's inner circle that he'd be interested in an
appointment as ambassador to a country like Belgium or the
Netherlands, where he thought his ceremonial obligations would be
sufficiently undemanding that he could concentrate on his
scholarly work.
Dodd was astonished when Roosevelt contacted him directly and
offered him the ambassadorship to Germany. Roosevelt appealed
to Dodd's fervent New Deal sympathies, and argued that in such a
position he could be an exemplar of American liberal values in
a regime hostile to them. Dodd realised from the outset that
a mission to Berlin would doom his history project, but accepted
because he agreed with Roosevelt's goal and also because FDR was
a very persuasive person. His nomination was sent to the Senate
and confirmed the very same day.
Dodd brought his whole family along on the adventure: wife Mattie
and adult son and daughter Bill and Martha. Dodd arrived in Berlin
with an open mind toward the recently-installed Nazi regime. He was
inclined to dismiss the dark view of the career embassy staff and
instead adopt what might be called today “smart diplomacy”,
deceiving himself into believing that by setting an example and
scolding the Nazi slavers he could shame them into civilised behaviour.
He immediately found himself at odds not only with the Nazis but also his
own embassy staff: he railed against the excesses of diplomatic
expense, personally edited the verbose dispatches composed by his
staff to save telegraph charges, and drove his own aged Chevrolet,
shipped from the U.S., to diplomatic functions where all of
the other ambassadors arrived in stately black limousines.
Meanwhile, daughter Martha
embarked upon her own version of
Girl Gone Wild—Third Reich Edition. Initially
exhilarated by the New Germany and swept into its social whirl,
before long she was carrying on simultaneous affairs with
the
head of the Gestapo
and a Soviet NKVD agent operating under diplomatic cover in
Berlin, among others.
Those others included
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl,
who tried to set her up with Hitler (nothing came of it; they met at lunch and that
was it).
Martha's trajectory through life was extraordinary. After affairs with the
head of the Gestapo and one of Hitler's inner circle, she
was recruited by the
NKVD and spied on behalf
of the Soviet Union in Berlin and after her return to the U.S. It is not
clear that she provided anything of value to the Soviets, as she had
no access to state secrets during this period. With investigations of
her Soviet affiliations intensifying in the early 1950s, in 1956 she fled
with her American husband and son to Prague, Czechoslovakia where they lived
until her death in 1990 (they may have spent some time in Cuba, and
apparently applied for Soviet citizenship and were denied it).
Dodd père was much quicker to figure out the true nature of the
Nazi regime. Following Roosevelt's charge to represent American values,
he spoke out against the ever-increasing Nazi domination of every aspect
of German society, and found himself at odds with the patrician
“Pretty Good Club” at the State Department who wished to
avoid making waves, regardless of how malevolent and brutal the adversary
might be. Today, we'd call them the “reset button crowd”. Even
Dodd found the daily influence of immersion in
gleichschaltung
difficult to resist. On several occasions he complained of the influence
of Jewish members of his staff and the difficulties they posed in dealing
with the Nazi regime.
This book focuses upon the first two years of Dodd's tenure as ambassador
in Berlin, as that was the time in which the true nature of the regime
became apparent to him and he decided upon his policy of distancing
himself from it: for example, refusing to attend any Nazi party-related
events such as the Nuremberg rallies. It provides an insightful view of
how seductive a totalitarian regime can be to outsiders who see only
its bright-eyed marching supporters, while ignoring the violence which
sustains it, and how utterly futile “constructive engagement” is
with barbarians that share no common values with civilisation.
Thanks to
James Lileks
for
suggesting this book.
Posted at
23:53
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