Come, I will hide nothing from you: it would be blatantly unfair for me to mock the President for choosing Chicago bundler Louis Susman to be the ambassador to the Court of Saint James. You see, unlike a certain subset of the population I know how the game is actually played; certain ambassadorships are considered prestigious, and some aren’t. The ones that are prestigious – and I don’t think that they get much more prestigious than the one for Great Britain – are going to be filled for political reasons, which means that generally they will not be filled by a professional diplomat. The last four were, in fact: a retired admiral, a senior government official/financial guy; a financial/oil guy; and a senior government official/car dealership owner. An investment banker who raised 500 grand for the President is not particularly surprising, in other words… unless you happened to be one of those people who actually believed that line of Obama’s about how he was going to do things differently. As I didn’t and don’t, I really can’t see how I can go off on this, so I won’t.
Besides, the Brits are already doing it for me. Continue reading Obama to make mega-bundler Louis Susman Ambassador to England?
; 
is, but when it’s 1940 and you’re trying to save England you don’t quibble about 
.
)
. Very good alternate-universe stuff, in a conceptual sense. Never really got into the paradoxes (paradoxi?) inherent in the premise of One True Reality and a Multitude of Shadows, but then, neither did H Beam Piper’s 
, so who are we to judge? Well worth reading, in other words.
that triggered this entry. The book is one of the first ones that I can think of that mixed science fiction with Indian themes (that’s Asian Indian, not Native American), and in a fashion that showed an understanding of the source material. A very short synopsis: the main character is in opposition to a society where Hinduism has been co-opted to reinforce the somewhat restrictive rule of its ‘gods.’ This being a science fiction story, that includes a technological form of reincarnation; this also being New Wave, it meant a certain amount of other psionic* abilities. This being written by Roger Zelazny, it’s excellent stuff; the hero foments his rebellion against this co-opted Hinduism by creating Buddhism… with results that would later prove bemusing. All in all, it’s one of those books that you wish had a sequel, but you’re sort of glad doesn’t; it probably wouldn’t have been as good anyway.