License to Work

The Institute for Justice has a new study out comparing the onerous regulations each state puts on entry to various occupations. In the past, they've focused on occupations that are pretty clearly not safety related, so people would see that the goal is fire-walling existing jobs rather than protecting the public. This study focusses on occupations that are favorable to low and medium income people—that is, on entry-level jobs. They've won several cases on occupational freedom for flower arrangers, interior decorators, and tour guides as a few examples.
The tremendous variation between states in how much training, and in the exams required makes it clear that there's no consensus on curriculum and no common core of knowledge across states. By the way, California come out as having the second most onerous licensing regime. People who care about making it easier for low income people to get started should find it easy to oppose California's extensive regulations on everything from landscapers to makeup artists.
Another point that I think IJ ought to make more explicitly is that the public should distrust arguments based on the jobs that would be protected. I think it's commonly the case that entrenched interests easily get popular support by talking about their members who will lose their jobs if some new approach is allowed. IJ's ads should remind us that whenever entrenched interests are able to erect barriers to entry, it means higher prices and less innovation. This applies to restaurants fighting food trucks, teachers fighting charter schools, and taxi cartels fighting new transportation models (Uber and self-driving cars). In each case, we can easily see the incumbents who might lose their jobs, but locking in the existing model means less innovation, and fewer chances to discover more effective ways of teaching, more efficient uses of our roads and ways to reduce the number of cars required, and a larger variety of food and more convenient places to eat.

Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg

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Chris Hibbert

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism shows that, contrary to the accepted viewpoint, fascism came from the left, not the right. Starting a calm discussion about fascism is not an easy task. Most of the time when people use the terms nazi or fascist, the only content is an indication of opprobrium, and this is common enough that it wouldn't be a surprise if most who hear the term don't know much about those who originally adopted the term.

Goldberg shows that the rhetoric of people who called themselves fascists in Europe and the U.S. was quite similar to that of socialists and progressives of the time. The policies that were promoted (if you omit the genocide and racism that were unique to the Nazis, and stick to the political program that was common to Mussolini, Franco, and the Americans who were friendly to the fascist proposals) were socialized medicine, a government retirement program, nationalization of industry to whatever extent required, and letting the government lead.

The term was first turned into a general purpose epithet by the communists, who were upset about the competition they were getting from people with a very similar program to their own. Both were on the left, and urging more government power in service to the common people. The Soviet communists used the term to brand all their opponents regardless of their point of view as "too far right". After the west joined together to fight the Nazis in World War II, it was hard for anyone to defend fascism, even those who were pushing for the same ideas (the progressive ends, not the genocidal one, for the most part.)

Since the press is largely of the left, the public discourse gradually accepted the idea that the fascists were extremists on the right, though their policy goals were not actually much different from those of the communists or progressives.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm pushing this book because it bashes the left. I'm a libertarian, and don't feel more sympathy for the programs of either the modern left or right. See the Advocates for Self Governments' WSPQ to learn more about my ideas if you aren't familiar with them. The point of the book, and the reason it's worth talking about is simply to understand the historical context of modern political discourse.

Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, and Mussolini used leftist, progressive rhetoric to gain and wield power. I could only find a few examples of dictators who should reasonably be called extreme right-wingers (Pinochet, Papadopoulos, Syngman Rhee). There are many others whose rhetoric was anti-communist, and possibly even pro-business, but their actual rule is usually absolutist, kleptocratic, nepotistic (confiscating businesses and allowing family or friends to run them for their own benefit), but not any more friendly to private enterprise than the leftist dictators.

A large part of the rhetoric of fascism is the idea that the people are unified behind the leaders' favorite program, and that the leaders' main goal is to give the people what they want. A favorite tactic of fascists is to continually manufacture new crises, because these often work to bring people together in support of their goals. Unfortunately, this tactic has been co-opted by leaders from all parties, as our own unending wars on poverty, drugs, cancer, and terrorism show.

Goldberg describes the fascist bargain with business this way:

The state says to the industrialist, "You may stay in business and own your factories. In the spirit of cooperation and unity, we will even guarantee you profits and a lack of serious competition. In exchange, we expect you to agree with—and help implement—our political agenda." The moral and economic content of the agenda depends on the nature of the regime. [...] It's fine to say that incestuous relationships between corporations and governments are fascistic. The problem comes when you claim that such arrangements are inherently right-wing.

American presidents on the left and right have been making this kind of offer to business for at least several decades. It's more visible with the current president's handling of the health care law, but past administrations of all stripes have made the same kinds of deals with telecomm, banking, and transportation industries. Communists tend to nationalise businesses, while fascists and progressives co-opt them. The latter isn't more right wing than the former.

There's a lot of meat in Liberal Fascism, as long as you won't have an aversive reaction to a calm discussion of the commonalities between the programs of communists and of historical and modern progressives.

Math Awareness Month

Sorry I didn't post about this earlier in the month. I heard about Math Awareness Month at the Gathering for Gardner in Atlanta last month, and bookmarked their site, but didn't realize how awesome it would be. Every day this month, (advent calendar style), the site reveals another treasure. I've read a few of them, but Vi Hart on hexaflexagons is enormous amounts of fun even if you're not a fan of math. Her penultimate presentation on the dangers of flexagons, and the final one on edible HexaMexigons are hilarious. Visit the site every day for the rest of the month and share your favorites.

Obviousness in Software

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Chris Hibbert

Bob Purvey (a friend who is both a software engineer and a registered Patent Agent) has written a fairly short paper to explain why the patent office doesn't do a good job screening out "obvious" software patents. He observes that the approach they use for patents on pharmaceuticals seems to do a much better job, and shows how it would apply in software.
One of the reasons this is relevant is that whenever the software industry tries to get the federal government to reform the patent laws (since they're so obviously broken as applied to software), congress is counter-lobbied by the drug companies who argue that patents are crucial to their business model, and without the present system, new drug discovery would whither away. Congress, of course, doesn't understand either industry, so they collect contributions from both sides and do nothing. If the software industry had a more focussed proposal, it would be more likely to get the kind of change that would be useful to it.
Purvey's argument is that when deciding whether an application for a patent on a new drug or medical technique is novel, the examiner is expected to consider whether a Person with Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would think of that solution, given a suitable description of the problem. If the approach described is one of a handful that the POSITA would think to try, ("obvious to try") then it's obvious enough to be ineligible for a patent. If it's one of a thousand approaches (in the drug business, this is now common in drug discovery) that you'd have to try, with an unknown likelihood of success then it doesn't count as obvious.
The patent office often grants patents on well-known software techniques applied in new contexts. Purvey argues that the "obvious to try" standard would invalidate those patents because software people are trained in abstraction, and it's obvious to all skilled practitioners that previously known techniques are likely to apply in the new context once you describe the problem correctly. The fact that the patent applicant described the problem with non-standard terminology doesn't invalidate the standard tools, and that should be an acceptable argument when suing to invalidate a patent.
As Purvey showed, that's an accepted standard in drug patent trials. A prominent (pharma) case he talked about in the paper hinged on showing that the patent application used non-standard terminology to describe something that was an obvious combination of published techniques. If lawyers attempting to invalidate a patent brought this standard into play more frequently, more patents would be invalidated quickly. And this is an approach that shouldn't have to wait for new action from legislators.

Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal

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Chris Hibbert

Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken is a fascinating exploration of how we could make reality better by adapting various lessons that designers of today's best alternate reality games (ARGs) have learned and applied to make their games more fun. In order to do so, McGonigal has to spend a good amount of time explaining what makes games fun, sticky, and great arenas for training us to be better at collaboration. I found it very informative, since I'm currently helping develop Ingress, a MMO, real-world, ARG. If you're interested in games, or would like your life to be filled with more fun and more purposive action, I recommend the book.

McGonigal starts out by describing several ways in which games are well designed to draw us in and keep us entertained. One of the more important ways in which games keep us in a state of flow is by arranging challenges so we can always be working just at the comfortable edge of our abilities and constantly trying to get better at whatever we're doing. The psychology literature (follow the previous link) has shown that these are crucial to the kind of happiness that is satisfying over the long-term rather than merely momentarily entertaining.

McGonigal describes ARGs as antiescapist games; games you play to get more out of your real life, as opposed to games you play to escape it.

She describes quite a few games she has designed, some for entertaining other people, some to entertain herself or help herself through a tough period in her life, and some to get people to work together on a collective goal. There are games in each of these categories that are worth learning about, and if you're interested, you should read the book. My favorite is probably SuperBetter, which is an approach to self-help disguised as a game.

While in the midst of writing this book, McGonigal had a serious concussion, and struggled to recover. After a month or two of enforced rest that didn't lead to the hoped-for recovery, she took her game design skills and made a game out of doing a little bit of the right kind of retraining every day. Game design taught her that she should set herself a series of goals that were reachable, but not trivial; that she should enlist friends to provide reinforcement, and that she should find ways to reward herself for sticking to the plan, and for every little bit of progress. The right reward structure keeps you coming back for more. She's shared that approach and the rules framework she devised so others with analogous challenges can follow the same path.

Reality is Broken offers 14 relatively concrete Fixes for Reality. These are lessons from the way modern games are designed that can be applied to the real world to make life more fun and business more productive, to help us achieve important goals collectively, and to help us apply the things we learn while playing to our daily lives and relationships. I don't think she hit all 14 out of the park, but probably 80% are worth paying attention to, which is a pretty high achievement level.

Along the way, McGonigal introduced me to new terms for emotions that I recognized immediately, but didn't have words for before. Fiero (from an Italian word for pride) is a term for the feeling you get from triumph over adversity. It's the feeling that first led to end-zone celebrations, though nowadays those are often more about taunting than celebrating. Another useful term is naches, which is a Yiddish word for pride in the accomplishments of those we've coached or mentored. There's a substantial portion of the Ingress player base that gets their rewards by helping other people get better at the game.

Reality is Broken is a very entertaining presentation of the idea that while modern ARGs are packaged and enjoyed as games, they serve a serious purpose in helping us enjoy our real lives, and some of the ways they do so could be usefully applied outside of the world of games.

The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

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Chris Hibbert

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind argues that our political leanings are strongly tied to our moral intuitions, and explains that people in each of the main political categories have different fundamental tenets that they each believe in strongly. There's some overlap between the various groups, but Haidt presents evidence that there's a lot of consistency within each group. If you hope to convince people on the opposite side of these divides of anything important, it's crucial to understand the foundations their reasoning is based on. If you believe the people you argue with are confused or evil, rather than reasoning from different premises, your arguments will fail to sway them.

In part one, Righteous Mind argues that intuition comes first, and strategic reasoning second. People enter a discussion of morality with instincts that tell them the answers. Most of the arguments they make are driven by their instincts, and little follows from intellectual considerations. Haidt relies heavily on the metaphor of a rider on an elephant. It's possible for the rider to decide which direction they go, but the elephant makes the first choice, and the driver has to convince the elephant if they're to end up somewhere else.

The second part covers the common foundations of our moral instincts. Most philosophers have concluded that morality is based on fairness or avoidance of harm. Haidt's research has shown that across cultures, there are actually six relatively consistent value frameworks that different political camps choose among. He says "The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors."

The third part shows that common feelings about morality bind communities together and blinds members of those communities to the goals, tastes, and priorities of their neighbors. He argues that religion evolved because of its contribution to social cohesion in contrast to the common atheist accusation that it's mostly religion is a memetic parasite that wins at the cost of its carriers.

Haidt is a master at presenting short vignettes that adherents to one viewpoint will say shows immoral behavior and others will be fine with. Whatever your outlook, he knows some stories that your group will be the only one to approve of, and other stories that you'll find to be disturbing while people with other political views won't be bothered. This technique seems to have been the core of the research underlying the book. He uses it to good effect in teasing apart the most basic drivers of people's instincts about right and wrong.

The underlying drives presented in the book. The names represent virtues and the adaptive challenge in the evolutionary environment that they protected us from. Haidt often refers to them just by the name of the virtue, and so will I.

• care/harm
• fairness/cheating
• liberty/oppression
• loyalty/betrayal
• authority/subversion
• sanctity/degradation

Liberals rely on caring, then fairness and liberty. Conservatives rely on all six, somewhat equally. Libertarians rely most on liberty, and a little on fairness. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes. Liberals also have a streak of sanctity, but it usually applies to nature and cleanliness rather than religious faith. Notice that there is no foundation used by the left that is not also important to the right. Liberals reject altogether some of the values that matter to Conservatives. To Liberals, loyalty and respect for authority can be outright negatives.

If you have trouble seeing how virtues other than the ones you believe in can be seen as fundamental, you're going to miss most of the point of the book.

When Haidt's research team asked liberals and conservatives to predict one another's responses to his Moral Foundations survey, they found that conservatives were the best able to understand other's motivations. Liberals seem to assume that where others hold values more weakly than liberals do (because there are other values they hold more strongly) that those with whom they disagree hold the opposite position from them rather than understanding that value but having another, higher priority. Many Liberals, when asked to describe Conservative values, say that they are actively pursuing evil ends. Conservatives, since they use all 6 metrics, can recognize when others are relying on particular values. Libertarians are most handicapped by this standard (having only one prime value), but their advantage is that, being in the minority, they are more used to talking to people with different points of view.

Part three of the book argues first, that humans are uniquely social creatures (He cites Tomasello, an expert on chimpanzee cognition, who said "It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.") Bees and ants sacrifice themselves for the hive, but individual cooperation is extremely rare if you exclude sex and other instinctive behavior. Second, that religion is mostly used to bind us into communities. He argues that we have a built-in "hive switch" that makes us bind more tightly and unthinkingly into groups. The release of oxytocin binds people to their groups, not to humanity as a whole. Finally, he argues that the New Atheists (Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris, primarily) miss the main point of religion, which is to bind people into groups. The fact that they naturally divide everyone into insider and enemy is a consequence of human psychology. The rituals "that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems human [societies] face: cooperation without kinship." Haidt uses these points to support his conclusion that treating people who disagree with us (or merely act differently) as repugnant is a deep-seated reaction.

Haidt says he grew up a liberal, and it was partly due to his studies of different political approaches that led him to a conservative viewpoint. It was also as a result of his studies that he came to see that libertarians have a distinct approach that is straightforward to describe in his framework. The descriptions of the liberal progress narrative (a quote from Christian Smith's Moral, Believing Animals) and the conservative mindset (a description of the "Reagan narrative" from Westen's The Political Brain) are masterful in their contrasts. Smith wrote

Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism…But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitations, and repression.

Westen's description is

Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and Faith at every step of the way. … Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to "understand" them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals, … Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle … and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles. … Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism.

Haidt points out that these are very much descriptions of the American liberal and conservative viewpoints. In other countries, the narrative would be different, and in some, the constellation of values wouldn't align the same way. But in all the countries he's studied, the same 6 underlying values keep coming up in different combinations, and his story problems elicit the same distinctions, when adjusted for local customs and unique traditions.

Haidt believes that the crucial value that liberals misunderstand is moral capital (he's careful to draw a distinction from social capital). He cites Bertrand Russell to make the point: "Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence of tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible." Haidt then says

If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

I found this to be a very helpful book, explaining how different factions see the world, and it's presented in a way that's sympathetic to everyone's views. If you want to argue constructively with people it helps tremendously to be able to understand where they're coming from. Having more of an understanding of other points of view also makes it much easier to hear what someone else's concerns are so you can address those directly. When we misunderstand one another we often talk past one another, not realizing that the other party has different values, rather than misunderstanding our position. Too much of politics today is based on ascribing bad motives to the opposition.

The Hydrogen Sonata: Iain M. Banks

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Chris Hibbert

Iain Banks's final Culture Novel The Hydrogen Sonata goes into greater depth than we've seen before on the process and consequences of a culture's subliming, in which they disappear from reality, and are presumed to gain access to some higher reality. It's a process that requires that an entire society make the decision collectively, and then nearly all of them must carry through roughly simultaneously, or it doesn't work somehow. The process is treated as some kind of graduation for civilizations, and its rhetorical role in the universe of the Culture is to make room for a constant influx of new civilizations arising anew. It's not absolutely required, and many societies have been around since the oldest known sublimations without making the choice.

The Hydrogen Sonata of the title is a composition designed to be played by someone with 4 arms on an eleven-stringed instrument. It's extremely difficult to play, and the focal character Vyr Cossont has been attempting to play it correctly all the way through as her life's project. The point, of course, is that she (and her civilization) is wealthy enough to be able to afford to work on completely frivolous projects like this.

The Gzilt, of which Cossont is a member, has voted to sublime, so Cossont has a limited time to finish her project. While she works on it, she gets embroiled in some shenanigans swirling around the circumstances of the sublimation. When a society decides to sublime, it's customary for others to clear the air if they had any unresolved grievances or issues. The Gzilt's progenitors, the Zihdren had a big secret, but they sublimed quite a while ago. Some Zihdren who missed the event would like to spill the beans, but other parties would prefer the secret remain hidden.

Cossont is reactivated by her old regiment who have heard what the Zihdren plan to say and want to know if it's true. The secret would undercut some of the Gzilt's most cherished beliefs about their civilization's rise. There's not a lot more I can say without giving away the plot. I enjoyed the adventure, and thought that Banks' adventure around the galaxy was quite entertaining. There are interesting chases, fights between highly armed AIs, bizarre characters, awe-inspiring architectural feats, and plenty more.

Julia Robinson Math Festival: November 23 in San Mateo

The Julia Robinson Math Festival has a new web page, and there's an event scheduled for the morning of November 23 in San Mateo. If you want to share your love of math and problem solving, and would enjoy a chance to mentor kids who are having fun puzzling things out, plan to spend the morning at the San Mateo County Office of Education.

They're also looking for sponsors and hosts. Contact them if you can help.

Space Elevator Competitions

A couple of weeks ago someone mentioned Space Elevators, and I said "Oh, it's the end of August, there ought to be results from a Space Elevator challenge. Weren't they doing that annually?" That started me down a path of research and compiling information. It turned out that the International Space Elevator Association was having their annual conference that weekend in Redmond, but without a competition, and the Japan Space Elevator Association had held their competition a week earlier, but there didn't seem to be a place where results were compiled.

As I collected links and results and cross-checked them, and wrote up results, a wikipedia page came into being. I've just posted it, though there's no telling whether it'll last, given wikipedia's unknowable rules and processes.

I've found some details about 9 different competitions, mostly for fast climbers and/or strong tethers. There were a few other competitions that were announced, but which never took place either because no one was ready, no one qualified, or the site fell through.

The most recent climbing results were in Japan in August, where two different teams built climbers that climbed more than a kilometer. The most recent Tether competition I found was in 2011, but I haven't found results for any finisher since 2007, which I think, means the competitors haven't been beating the existing benchmark by a large enough margin. I'm disappointed that the best finishers haven't been published, so we could see how capabilities are growing each year.

The Scar: China Miéville

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Chris Hibbert

China Miéville's The Scar is as dark as Perdido Street Station, which I reviewed previously. The Scar takes place mostly on Armada, a mobile floating pirate "city" of hundreds of lashed-together seafaring vessels. The main viewpoint character is Bellis Coldwine, a linguist who fled her home in New Cobruzon because the authorities seemed to be following her and becomes intimately involved in the future of Armada, all the while scheming to find a way back to her homeland.

This is dark fantasy, with Miéville's colorful prose showing us many shadowy corners of the world. Bellis plans to pay her way to temporary exile by selling her skills as a translator to a sea captain heading to what she hopes will be a short-term destination, but the ship is attacked by pirates, where she is joined by several remade prisoners. Tanner Sack is one such; as punishment for his crimes, he has had tentacles grafted on to his body. After reaching Armada, he adapts to the seafaring life by paying to be magically and surgically transformed into an even more amphibious form, which makes him quite useful in the mobile floating city.

Armada's past peregrinations were mostly random, going to where there were juicy targets for its piratical deprivations. When people are captured, unless they're expected to be a danger to the city, they're welcomed as new citizens, who can find lodging in any of the variously governed ridings that will accept them. Armada's inhabitants include vampires, cactacae (intelligent warrior cactus-people), scabmettlers (who mold their blood into armor before it coagulates), and others. The city is organized as a dozen different "ridings" with separate local government, and no real overall organization, though they manage to coordinate well enough to navigate to places where they can commit piracy and find the sources of information and tools their plans rely on. But the Lovers (a pair infatuated with each other who seem to hold the reins) have a plan that requires Bellis' linguistic skills to read a book in an obscure language, and a dangerous trip to interview the author. Once that's done, Bellis is of little use to them, but she still longs to leave Armada, and willingly assists in the skullduggery of Silas Fennec a spy from New Cobruzon who desperately wants to get a warning back to their home.

The success of Silas' message, and its disastrous consequences for Armada, as well as the initial success of the Lovers' plan and the violent outcome of that adventure keep the story riveting. Miéville continually throws in details of all the different races and societies, which are nearly always unsettling. It is the kind of fantasy where new kinds of magic constantly arise, though he keeps a kind of rough consistency, so characters seldom develop new abilities unless they were obviously the kind of person with hidden secrets or we got to watch them pick up a mysterious object beforehand.

The Lovers' goal is to get to the Scar of the title, an enormous rent in the world where unbridled possibility is loose, and bizarre powers are available. We get an early view of how possibility magic works when Uther Doul, the Lovers' bodyguard, unleashes his "Possible Sword", which he wields as a scattering of possible trajectories of the blade each laying waste to his opponents separately, while he dances lightly through their blades. The sword is a metaphor for quantum uncertainty made manifest. He is also an expert fighter with the sword powered down, since he doesn't know how to recharge it's ancient power source. He explains to Bellis later that the sword's special power is to unleash and make real the consequences of not only one actual outcome, but of a cloud of alternative possibilities.

Doul, already an expert and precise swordsman, taught himself a completely different art in order to make the most of it. He says

"My arm and the sword mine possibilities. For every factual attack there are a thousand possibilities, nigh-sword ghosts, and all of them strike down together.

"Fighting with a Possible Sword, you must never constrain possibilities, I must be an opportunist, not a planner—fighting from the heart, not the mind. Moving suddenly, surprising myself as well as the opponent. Sudden, labile, and formless. So that each strike could be a thousand others, and each of those nigh-swords is strong. That's how to fight with a Possible Sword."

The overall arc of the story is that Bellis escapes from her native city, is kidnapped, longs for home, and keeps taking one action after another at others' suggestion or request that seem likely to help her or her homeland. In the end, she still feels alone in a place she doesn't love. We're better for the journey, though she never frees herself from her captivity. As I said, it has a very dark feel to it. It's fantasy, but the various kinds of magic that are progressively revealed all feel like reasonable parts of this constantly shifting world.

Arctic Rising, Tobias Buckell

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Chris Hibbert

Tobias S. Buckell's Arctic Rising takes place in a near future where climate change has opened up the NorthWest passage, and many parties are struggling to control the economic and ecological prospects of the rapidly growing region.
The novel is a finalist for the Prometheus Award, for which voting is going on now, but the libertarian aspects of the story are not very prominent.
Government and independent agents and agencies play various parts. The protagonist works for the UN Polar Guard and her zeppelin was shot down when she inadvertantly observed a nuke being shipped through the passage. More out of duty to a comrade who was killed in that attack than loyalty, she helps chase down the eco-terrorists who were in the process of releasing a swarm of global-warming-fighting flying mirrors. The adventure, drama, and chase scenes are well told, and the characters are interesting. The science fiction is thin.
The story is not particularly anti-government; about the best I can say for its libertarian bona fides is that the government isn't the strongest force on the scene. Some of the government agents and agencies pay little attention to people's rights, but showing this in the middle of a variety of emergencies isn't a good way to make a strong case.

Actively Disengaged

I just came across a new webcomic, Actively Disengaged that I thought was hilarious. If you're a libertarian, anarchist, voluntarist, or know many people who are, you might like it too.

They apparently publish weekly, and have 70 back comics, so they've been around for a little over a year. I read through the entire set, and laughed, chortled, and grimaced. The art isn't very sophisticated, but the humor is biting.

The ad I clicked on was at Day by Day, which also knows what libertarianism is, and is often sympathetic. If you are wary of nudity, this one won't be for you.  DBD comes out daily, and often reacts to the previous day's news. I often click on the ads at DBD, though not many of the comics stick in my daily reading list.