Jeff Bezos: fighting the planet's greatest threat

Jeff Bezos made a stir this week, after causing a moment of confusion, with a pledge to donate $10 billion to combat the greatest threat to the planet: socialism.

But he initially misstated the purpose of his grant money as “climate change”, leading to many mistaken reports as journalists hurried to file their stories during the applause between Bezos’s misstatement and the correction.

“Wait, did I say climate change?” said the Amazon billionaire after the hubbub died down, shaking his head and laughing at the obvious blunder. “I’m sorry, how did that come out? I meant to say, to combat socialism, of course. The greatest threat to the planet, du-uh, is socialism. Not—” he made an amused sound like pffft!—“climate change.”

The audience quieted down considerably at the correction, but Bezos went on. “I mean, think about it. Socialism can only exist under an authoritarian government powerful enough to force people to give up their stuff or do whatever the government says to do with it. Obviously, this is a recipe for bad management decisions passing without proper criticism, and hence for irresponsible stewardship of the environment. Which is exactly what we have seen under socialism.

“The greatest environmental disaster on the planet, and it's not even close, has been the destruction of the Aral Sea by the Soviet Union’s misguided diversion of water for irrigation. All the ecosystems of that erstwhile sea and its area have been destroyed. The plains left behind as it recedes are covered with salt and chemical pollutants, carried off by wind as toxic dust storms. The human cost has been enormous.

“Then you have the Chinese Three Gorges Dam. Landslides, drought, disease, millions of people living in its vicinity put in danger, endangered species and whole ecosystems disrupted—even the Chinese government has admitted it was a huge mistake.

“And of course the Soviet Chernobyl disaster, which by any reckoning was two orders of magnitude worse that the roughly contemporary Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in the United States. Estimated deaths came to thousands, a danger zone stretching 20 miles in radius all around the site more than thirty years later.

“Where does nine-tenths of the plastic waste in the oceans come from? Communist China.

“Climate change has been going on since the world began, and the planet has withstood it just fine. I mean, over the two-billion-year history of life on this planet the Sun’s radiance has varied by more than 10 percent. Ten percent! Kinda dwarfs anything you’ll get from carbon dioxide, huh? But socialism, man, that’s bad news from start to finish.

“So I’m proud to donate this money to combat socialism, the greatest threat to the planet,” concluded the world's richest man, ending his remarks to the assembly, where you could have heard a pin drop.   

Number Curiosities

The number 17772 has a property that makes it unique among five-digit numbers: it is the sum of the squares of the five two-digit numbers formed when you read its digits left to right (and cycle back at the end). That is, 

17772= 17x17 + 77x77 + 77x77 + 72x72 + 21x21

Although no other five-digit number has this property, it’s also true that there is a unique five-digit number equal to the sum of the two-digit numbers formed by its own digits reading from RIGHT to LEFT. In other words, there is a unique solution to this “ cryptarithm “ (but note that repeated digits are allowed, so different letters can represent the same digit):

ABCDE = BAxBA + AExAE + EDxED + DCxDC + CBxCB

I found the solutions to both these original problems by using a spreadsheet, and the second one particularly surprised me. Perhaps it will surprise you too.

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, my story ”The Hyland Resolution” in the anthology PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, has a main character who likes number puzzles, and this becomes important in an unexpected way. I hope you’ll pick up the book and enjoy my story as well as all the others!

Clerihews for the Losers

I like to stay hopeful about the future, so it's good to reflect that later this year, someone will lose the election to be the President of the United States. I wrote some clerihews to comemorate the last few losers. Sure, a clerihew is a pretty easy form to write, but what do they want for losing?


1996: Bob Dole

Bob Dole
Lacked a goal.
The Dems would demand what they wanted, and when Bob took the floor,
He'd propose the same thing, but a little less, and cheaper, and slower.


2000: Al Gore

Al Gore
Made 'em snore.
Known for his climate-warming-catastrophe hawking,
Though it unobligingly got cold wherever he was talking.


2004: John Kerry

John Forbes Kerry
Got a great keynote from this other guy, Barry.
Then he 24-7 talked Vietnam,
Till he sounded like a disgruntled-vet version of Miss Havisham.


2008: John McCain

John McCain,
The Times assured us, was broadminded and urbane.
That is, until he got nominated,
Whereafter he was abominated.


2012: Mitt Romney

Governor Mitt Romney
Became his party's nominee.
And campaigned with such chipper politeness,
Even whites were put off by his whiteness.


2016: Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton,
Though marrying a skilled politician was her life's sole noteworthy accomplishment, on
The basis of it, ran for President.
We all know how that went.


Who will be next? No telling. But one thing is certain: you will not find any of my poetry in "The Hyland Resolution", my story in PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA. Enjoy!

The Hyland Resolution

Another story of mine is now published! Whew. Now I have two.

The story is “The Hyland Resolution”, and the anthology that includes it (and lots more) is PLANETARY ANTHOLOGY: LUNA, edited by Declan Finn.

I got the germ of the idea that became the story “The Hyland Resolution” about four years ago next month. I remember because I know what sparked it: it was the episode “For The Girl Who Has Everything” of SUPERGIRL, in which our heroine was attacked by a Kryptonian critter called a Black Mercy (because the Kryptonians used it as a humane method of execution). The Black Mercy’s venom or whatever induces a coma filled with dreams that fulfil the victim’s deepest desires, before ultimately killing him—unless he somehow rejects the happy fantasy.

I only watched the first five or ten minutes, because by the end of its first season I had had my fill of this series and was only tuning in occasionally for long enough to see if the basic idea seemed interesting. Sometime if I only see the beginning of a story, I can abstract out the basic problem that drives the plot and think of a completely different way to present and handle it that might make a good original story. (Perry Mason seems to inspire me that way sometimes.)

I’m probably not the only one who does this: this particular episode’s idea has been around the block many times. I see in Wikipedia that the Supergirl writers cribbed it from a Superman comic (“For The Man Who Has Everything”: even thriftily reusing 83% of the title), and my brother tells me there was an episode of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER on the same idea. Declan Finn, our worthy PAS LUNA editor, pointed me to an episode of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (a very good series I’d never watched till then) where Bruce Wayne is trapped in a dream in which he had never become Batman, because his parents had never been killed. The Nexus in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS is yet another iteration. How far back does this plot concept go, I wonder? Does it trace back to the scene where Odysseus loses some crewmen to the Lotus Eaters?

I don’t know how the SUPERGIRL writers handled it, though my guess would be that it involved a lot of emoting and sharing of feelings. But as I thought about it myself, I realized two things: first, that I did have an original idea how a person could be snapped out of such a fantasy; and second, that my protagonist would be a mathematician. To say more would be to give spoilers. I drafted a very short piece, set on Earth, about a math professor named Charles Hyland. But my first draft seemed to be lacking vitality; I shelved it without even giving it a title and went on with other things for awhile.

Then Superversive Press called for submissions for its Planetary Anthology series. When Jagi Lamplighter wrote me she was working on Luna, and did I have anything with themes of the Moon, loneliness, madness, dreams, and despair, I remembered my draft and returned to it.

It needed fleshing out, and the themes of the anthology provided direction for how I could proceed. Dreams, check. Madness, well, check. Loneliness and despair? What if my mathematician, Charles N. Hyland (the N is for Norbert, but that never comes up in the story), is a man of many troubles, who uses mathematics as an escape for thinking of things that upset him? The Moon … I moved my setting to a university on the Moon in the early days of its colonization, a university in a Lunar city, established by Christians from Central and South America, fleeing the religious persecution of the increasingly secularized governments on Earth, named El Redentor: Spanish for “The Redeemer”. (None of this comes up in the story, either.) The ubiquitous AI that Hyland consults sometimes, like an advanced web search application, I named Thoth, after the Egyptian god of wisdom, records, and the Moon; and I put in a couple other faint allusions (or Easter eggs) of moony lore.

As for the theme of despair, I pulled in an idea I have about the coming century of colonization of the Solar System, that I think SF writers have short-changed … namely, war. For some reason, as far as I know, everyone seems to imagine that the opening up of vast stretches of new real estate on the Moon and elsewhere will all be handled in as peaceful and orderly a fashion as a session of Congress devoted to voting themselves a raise. On the contrary, to me it seems natural that some spots on the Moon and elsewhere are going to be particularly desirable, and the colonizers will inevitably come into conflict over them and turn to their various governments on Earth to defend their interests. The Moon may be a pretty violent place for its first few decades … plenty of conflict for stories, and excuse for despair.

So how would my absent-minded Professor Hyland deal with wartime emergencies? He’d go through the motions while striving to keep his mind on his mathematics. That could give me a nice opening scene, developing his character in the midst of some intense action. At least for me, the opening scene is good for a chuckle.

By the way, for those who enjoy number puzzles (I can never understand why there aren’t more of us), the story contains one or two, understated and in no way essential to enjoying the story, but solvable. Nothing fancy—rather like figuring out why Spock said there were 1,771,561 tribbles in the grain bin that emptied out over Captain Kirk.

Declan and Jagi liked “The Hyland Resolution”, and then we had a long wait as the production of Superversive Press’s Planetary Anthology series slowed down to a halt, and ultimately the publishing enterprise that had produced a lot of good reading closed its doors. But Tuscany Bay Books picked up the project and has issued Pluto and Luna with a new look. “The Hyland Resolution” is one of 22 stories in this 600+ page volume. I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read so far, and I hope you will too.