• Green Bay News-Chronicle: A pitch for ‘rational anarchy’ The author uses ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” to explain the concept of holding office holders persobnally responsibile for their own behavior. It’s a radical concept, I admit:

Wyoming Knott, our heroine, challenges the concept: “Too much power in the hands of individuals - surely you would not want, well, H-missiles for example - to be controlled by one irresponsible person?”

“My point is that one person is responsible. Always,” de la Paz replies.

“If H-bombs exist - and they do - some man controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as ’state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.”

Might sound like gobbledygook to many folks, but it sounds like common sense to me. Commit a misdeed, and the devil didn’t make me do it, the company didn’t make me do it, not even the government made me do it - and I certainly cannot fall back on the old standby “I was just following orders,” because only I am responsible for my actions.

• BBC: Amateur rocket fired into space

An amateur unmanned rocket has been launched into space from the Nevada desert - the first time this has been achieved by a privately-built vehicle.

The Civilian Space eXploration Team’s 6.5m (21ft) GoFast rocket is understood to have exceeded an altitude of 100km.

“It just roared off the pad and flew into space,” said rocketeer and CSXT avionics manager Eric Knight.

The GoFast vehicle and its payload sent back signals from space before falling down to Earth for recovery.
—
The achievement comes at a time when it is widely expected that the first private astronaut will go into space in the next few weeks.

In the “The Man Who Sold The Moon” and “Requiem,” millionaire D.D. Harriman finances the first manned mission to the Moon. It was a private, not public, endeavor done for commercial purposes.

No human has stepped on the face of the Moon since the last NASA trip, financed by the U.S. government.

Sixteen years ago today, Robert A. Heinlein died. He remains the greatest science fiction writer ever, even though he is not the household name as is Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. RAH fandom is notoriously fervent in their admiration. Many, including myself. Consider him some sort of guru.

I got most of my political beliefs from Heinlein.

Heinlein’s politics baffled many. And they baffled me, at first.

He was a liberal who campaigned for socialist Upton Sinclair in the 1930s. He campaigned against a ban on nuclear testing in the 1950s and for Barry Goldwater in the 1960s.

He advocated free love in “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

He seemed to advocate letting only veterans have the power to vote in “Starship Troopers.” That book earned him an undeserved reputation as a “fascist,” an opinion held by ignoramuses who don’t understand the true meanign of the term.

His novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is a primer in libertarian philosophy. He would have been disgusted by modern members of the Libertarian Party, who recently seem to blame America itself for the attacks against us. Heinlein would have enlisted on Sept. 11, had he been able.

More than anyone else, Heinlein is responsible for my evolution from a liberal Democrat into a libertarian. It didn’t happen all at once, of course. I read his books because I enjoyed them, but was disturbed by some of the radical ideas. I tried to not read any more, but doggone it, the first one was so much fun, I had to pick up another. Then another.

I made a pact with myself: I would read every single thing the man wrote, but I would not let them change my mind about anything. Nosiree. I was a liberal and I knew that was the right position because anything not liberal was conservative, and conservatives were bigots, they wanted to keep the work class down and were pro war.

So I read and enjoyed. After Heinlein died, I could only re-read his stuff. I began to admit to myself that a lot of what he was saying made sense. He certainly didn’t seem like the hateful conservative monster my parents warned me about. I read an interview in which Heinlein described himself as essentially a libertarian.

I was baffled. Wasn’t the Libertarian Party those strange people who based their campaigns on legalizing drug use and prostitution? Oh, yeah, they want the government to stop interfering with people’s lives.

Heh. ‘In a perfect world, sure,’ I thought. ‘But we need the government to help us.’

The older I got, the more I realized that the government isn’t helping.

I think it was during Clinton’s second term in office when I realized that the party for which I had been voting since I was able to do so was every bit as bad the Republicans, and that both parties were more concerned about staying in office than in living up to their principles. Besides, two decades of paying taxes so that others get rich or at least avoid their own responsibilities had taken their toll.

I joined the LP. Of course, I quit two years later after 9/11 because the LP’s position on the War on Terror is that it’s all America’s fault. Screw ‘em.

Heinlein would have punched Harry Browne in the nose if he could.

Heinlein hated to be considered anyone’s guru. His books were designed to make people think and to ask questions about what they really think about what is wrong or right. They were also about fun.

But make no mistake: If more people read Heinlein’s books and paid attention to what he was trying to say, then the world would be a better place.

Heinlein set his stories on the Moon and Mars, in the future and in alternative universes. But, they were about politics, culture, society, family, religion and sex (lots of sex). In the end, readers come away with a simple philosophy: Assume responsibility for yourself, let other people do the same, and things just might work out for the better.

It’s certainly a small-”L” libertarian system of belief. It certainly had its effect on me.

Don’t take my word for it. Go down to your bookstore and see for yourself.

You won’t get brainwashed. But it might brush away some of those cobwebs in your brain.

What’s the matter? Afraid you might learn something?

UPDATE: I cannot think of a better essay on why Heinlein is important that this article by J. Neil Schulman, posted on the Heinlein Society Website.

The Scotsman newspaper doesn’t like changes being planned for universities and invoked Robert Heinlein and other science fiction writers to explain why:

THE PRIME contractor for the first manned expedition to Mars was Edinburgh University - at least according to the renowned science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, in his classic 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein was not the first to set the future in Edinburgh. And Jules Verne has an Edinburgh University professor of geology, Oliver Lindenbrook, set out on a Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Along the way, he discovers the secrets of evolution and what happened to the dinosaurs. Of course, that discovery might be disputed by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger - he who discovered “The Lost World” - whom Doyle informs us was a famous graduate of Edinburgh University.

Scotland’s universities are our local pride and joy, but they are much more than that: they have helped shape the entire western imagination, as well as created the modern scientific and technical world. From the pre-Reformation world when Scottish Latin scholars at Aberdeen and St Andrews universities dominated European thinking, through the 18th-century Enlightenment, which gave us Adam Smith and David Hume, to the age of science, which gave us Lord Kelvin, Clerk Maxwell and Darwin, Scottish higher education institutions have predominated. So it is not surprising that generations of science fiction writers, American and European, have seen our universities as blazing an intellectual trail into the future. Unfortunately, Robert Heinlein and Jules Verne did not imagine that the Scots themselves might one day deliberately sabotage the very institutions that have served humanity so well, never mind laid the foundations for the modern Scottish economy.

I also find that my arguments make more sense when I toss in a Heinlein quote or two. I only borrow from the best.