Category: Uncategorized

Lately I’ve been having heretical thoughts. Thoughts I’d have dismissed out of hand a couple of years ago.

For someone who grew up in the seventies and where I grew up, we’re living in very strange times.

People are rising up. All over the world. In Iran, they’re rebelling against the mullahcracy. In Hong Kong those poor kids lasted much longer than we expected, and the media could not keep them quiet. In France the Yellow Jackets go on despite media blackout.  In Holland and Germany (Germany!) the farmers are taking to the streets with their tractors. And yes, in the US the Tea Party though reviled, lied about and infiltrated arguably started it all, and arguably had the greatest influence in growing the sullen resistance of the people.

In fact, judging by the sales of gun and ammo the one thing Americans haven’t done is quiet down. Also judging by how many houses we looked at a couple of years ago that had elaborate survival schemes, we’re not confident everything will be well. And we’re certainly not confident on anyone to protect us. Partly, of course, because we no longer trust our governments or those so called elites. Which is partly — in the US — traceable to the net and the existence of a complete, parallel system of information.

I realized as I was about to type this paragraph that I actually don’t know if this is true in the Asian countries, because — you know — my direct contacts there are free. However with that caveat, in the west it’s easy to presume that the unrest is caused by the internet, by access to other forms of information, even by the ability to contact people across the world for practically no cost. However I’m going to tell you right now and right here that this does not apply in Europe. Sure, they took to the net like a duck to water for all the things we initially took to the net for: recipes, mommy blogs, pictures of grandkids and, of course porn.

What they don’t have is political blogs, alternate news blogs, places where heretical views are spoken or any of that.

Now, if you say “It’s because they have different laws” I’ll say “Sure, whatevs. But they had different — and more repressive — laws before, and it was more expensive to get ahold of the equipment, and yet people still did and had pirate radio stations and what not. Also this is not China, you know, they should be able to get hold of ways to anonymize themselves.

Now, it’s possible it’s just a lag-time. Europe usually lags ten to twenty years behind the US, even when the same tech is available, possibly because we culturally (maybe genetically, but there’s no proof of that) have a tendency to be innovators who jump on things first. Maybe in ten or fifteen years Europe will be a forest of contentious blogs.

Anyway — they have the unrest, even without the blogs — and you know what’s weird? Outright unbelievable for those of us who grew up in the seventies: No communists.

Oh, sure, Europe has black block and antifa. And they’ve managed to enmesh themselves with the yellow jackets — France, what’s up with them, even? — but they are not the majority or — except by college professors — considered a spontaneous movement.

Look, through black-lives-matters and the pussy hatted spectacles, and now with antifa, you don’t even have to dig very deep, or very far to see beneath the surface the money flowing in, from chartered buses to identically printed signs, to–  It’s Soros all the way down.  Which is like turtles, only malevolent, soaked in the sins of the 20th century, and either trying to avenge himself on the world for the Holocaust that stole his childhood, or seeking redemption for the things he did then and continued to do to enrich himself, in all the wrong ways. I don’t know which, and I doubt he does.

But one malevolent man can cause a lot of strife, and he can convince a lot of idiot women that the most important thing in the world is to wear a pussy hat and hit the streets to protest against whatever the hell they’re protesting against today. But it’s also obvious that it’s taking no root: Antifa only acts truly horribly in safe (to them) places like California, Oregon, the lefty East coast and France.

What we aren’t seeing is any kind of vast, clamorous, pro-communist movement, in any of these protests. No, the communists are at the other end of it, in universities and usually in government and bureaucracy, wondering why “can you hear the people rising” is not in their favor, why the world isn’t coming to them to finally crown them as rulers of the world in the bestest system evah.

So what is going on?  And this is my heretical thought: the world is returning to normal.

I confess part of this thought came from D Jason Fleming’s article yesterday. When he mentioned the domino theory, it reminded me of how it looked, back then, in the past: every revolution, every single uprising, red flags would come up, and the ridiculous shouts about “The people, United.”  And if you’d seen a few of these — thanks to Portugal I’d seen a few — you could recognize the signs on TV when they showed others.  For instance, why in hell would both the Portuguese and the Iranian revolutions wave red carnations?  And why the shouts of “The people, united, shall never be defeated” the exact same shouts in Iran, Portugal, in the various revolutions in Africa and South America in that time? And why was there a sameness to the signs?

It wasn’t anything you could point out and say “here’s proof” and DEFINITELY it was nothing you could point to people who wanted to believe. But like with the antifa demonstrations, if you saw a few of them you started getting a feeling “This is not a spontaneous uprising. This is a part of a corporate machine that creates revolutions.”

My heretical thought is that the feeling was right.

Look, it’s not even that heretical. There are books out showing how much money the USSR poured into fomenting revolution abroad.  A country with a GDP between 2 and 4% what the US had spent most of its money fomenting revolution.  This was well advised of course, because the only wealth coming in — and boy, were they broke — came from leeching from other countries that fell under their sway.  And “communist” countries of course went to the USSR because by then they’d become convinced — or their elites had — that the US was out to get them. And got stripped.  What the Russians (it was always the Russians, even when their extended empire was the USSR) did to Africa is unprintable. And mostly they did it by using Cubans as shock troops.

But what if that was all of it? All there was? What if communism really was and remains a theory so stupid that only overeducated intellectuals believe in it unless they’re being pushed, bullied, paid by trained professional agitators to buy into the illusion?

What if the entire idea that communism appeals to the dispossessed, latches on when there is a great inequality, and somehow is part of a dark current in the human mind is completely wrong?

In other words, what if the Domino theory is right, but not in the way we thought in the seventies? What if it wasn’t “They see the other countries rise, and join in” but rather “As soon as the Soviet Block (What we should actually call Black Bloc) absorbs another country, they have some solvency to pour into fomenting revolution in another country?”  And thus the hydra grew.

There is some — slight — proof of this.  Take the French revolution. It was crazy in ways that communism is crazy. Actually exactly the same, including being run by batshit crazy intellectuals.  But it didn’t spread.

Oh, sure, okay, there were “republican” revolutions throughout the world. But weirdly most of them were not like the French revolution.  They weren’t comfortable, and many of them weren’t precisely sane (I’m not actually sure, I’m sorry, that anything that ever happens in Portugal or Spain is sane for instance. And I wouldn’t put Greece, Italy or Ireland very far behind on that.) But they were not the horror show insanity the French revolution became.  Now that could be because of French culture, but I’d say Nah, bra. While crazy France is not an exception in Europe. See above. And I’m sure I’d throw other countries in, if I knew more about them.

And yet, the insanity of communism, not that much different, propagated. To wit, it propagated the minute the USSR came into being after WWII. Before that it was a cult of intellectuals and madmen.

In fact, right after the fall of the USSR there were — briefly — glimpses that the whole Communism International Inc was falling apart.

Those disappeared when Putin got power.  He probably still had his intelligence contacts, but more importantly, he’s a Russian nationalist. His take over meant the old firm was back in business.  As I said, behind the smoke and mirrors, the USSR was Russia, and their “internationalism” was Russian nationalism and supremacy.

And as much trouble as Russia is in, they still have money, and more importantly they still have the machinery of foreign contacts, of people they hold kompromat on in various universities and governments (same as it ever was) and yes, probably international corporations and tech too.

So, why is the world rising now, and rising in a distinctly non-communist way?

Oil.

No, seriously, oil. Despite Obama’s heroic efforts with preventing fracking, the US has become a major oil producer. And oil prices can no longer support Russia’s need for $$$ to foment communist (because it’s useful, and because most of the useful idiots abroad buy this shit) insurrection and (ultimate) Russian power.

Hence why they’re working so hard to overturn the US and make us “Democratic Socialist” aka communist, because that’s what they called themselves in the 70s. Because strip mining the US would give Russia and the communist machine the ability to subjugate the rest of the world. Look how wealthy we are! (I think they’re wrong, btw. We’d not only crash so hard that we’d be net drains, but the insurrection would be a net loss.  But they don’t know that.)

Meanwhile they’re doing what they can by bleeding corporations and millionaires.  Some, maybe, because they’re true believers (and dumbasses) and some because… well… the Russians always had dirt on people. That’s how they got all the aristocratic British spies.

But it’s not enough. And people, real people who haven’t grown up so privileged that they implicitly believe bullshit to make themselves sound “smart” aren’t buying this.

Even the clown car of Dem candidates has to stop and ask Elizabeth Warren “What do you mean Medicare for all? Show us the money.”

Now, it doesn’t mean the dems won’t win and bring the glories of communism here. They have for over a century fine tuned their fraud machine, and motor voter made it impossible, in fact, for us to “true the vote,” even before vote by fraud mail and the “convenience” of voting early (so the left knows how many votes they need to manufacture.) Each of our votes is maybe 1/10th what it should be weighed down by massive amounts of dead and non existent people voting.

And yep, they still lose, at least now and then.

Think about it. They control government, education, news, entertainment (at least the traditional venues.) They propagated their narrative everywhere from the courts to your local newspaper.

And they’re still losing…

Because honestly communism is such a load of fecal matter only those who REALLY want to believe can believe it.

Hark, can you hear the people rising?  And they’re not communist at all.

Whether we stand or fall (and I haven’t given up hope, yet) in ten years it will all be different. If the propaganda and fake insurrection machine manages to take over the US, it might be the final poison pill that kills them.

They ain’t seen nothing like us yet.

In the end we win, they lose. Because reality persists, past all the propaganda.

Be not afraid. Stay chill. Prepare and build. And be ready to rebuild when the smoke lifts and the mirrors are all broken.

 

 

 

No Gratitude Warranted- by D Jason Fleming

The Daily Beast has published a thumbsucker called:

9 Reasons to Thank the USSR: How We Got the Cold War Wrong

Read The Gulag Archipelago and tell me how thankful Solzhenitsyn was. Go ahead, read it. Unabridged. I’ll wait.

That said, what’s funny here is how few of his “reasons to thank the USSR” he actually gives in his list of reasons.

Much of what many of us learned in school about the struggle between the U.S. and USSR was very, very wrong.

Taken out of context, this subhead is actually correct. However, as will become clear, Mr. Brown believes that US public schools are anti-soviet propaganda farms, which is hysterically funny or sad, take your pick.

Brian T. Brown

I already prefer the Australian actor.

Thirty years ago, one of the most historic DIY projects of all time took place. Berliners took apart the wall that had cut their city in half. Thus began the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Isn’t it interesting that Mr. Brown doesn’t see fit to explain that this “DIY project” was undertaken only after it became clear that the DIYers would no longer, as they would have the previous fifty years, be shot for undertaking it? And not by the West Germans, mein Freund. It was the commies who built the wall to keep people in, and shot anyone trying to escape the great and glorious socialism they had.

This glib tone is fatuous. It dishonors those who were murdered by the socialist state for the crime of wanting to be free. But hey, Brown is hip, cool, with it, on fleek, and all that stuff, ain’t he?

Further, to say that dismantling the Berlin Wall is what began the end of the Cold War is… let us say “arguable”. The fall of the Wall would not have happened, or at least not at that moment, if not for the protests for Democracy in Beijing and Tiananmen Square earlier in 1989. And also the brutal suppression of those protests by the communist government of China. You could even argue that would not have happened if not for Ronald Reagan’s continuous rhetoric of freedom, which inspired dissidents in the communist world for a decade.

It was a conflict suffused with fear, paranoia, and a whole lot of lies. This means much of what many of us learned in school about the struggle between the U.S. and USSR was very, very wrong.

The Rosenbergs dindunuffin. Alger Hiss was a good boy. Dalton Trumbo was oppressed, oppressed I tells ya, and never mind that he was proud and preening when he got non-communist writers blacklisted. And all those lessons about how eeeeeeevil capitalism and America are were wrong and bad and…

Wait. He thinks schools teach the USSR was evil and America good?

ten minutes of continuous laughter

Here’s the first buried truth. We fired the first shot. Harry Truman rushed to drop the atom bomb to end the war in Japan to prevent the Soviets from joining the battle in the Pacific. Joseph Stalin got the message. The nuclear arms race was underway.

Brown claims to be a historian, so I do not believe that he is this ignorant. He is banking on his readers not knowing more, which is mendacious.

When did the Soviets infiltrate our government? It wasn’t post-1945.

When did CPUSA, on direct orders from Moscow, try to leverage control of Hollywood through the unions? It wasn’t post-1945.

Hell, when did Soviet spies begin sending back valuable information to Moscow regarding the Manhattan Project? As Brown makes clear in this very same column, it was before the bomb actually dropped.

But nah, they were the good guys, and we were meanies for forcing them to spy on us.

But our enemy, the so-called evil empire, was really a figment of our fevered imaginations.

Um, no. It wasn’t “so-called”, it was evil, and an empire. Any argument that it wasn’t is sophistry.

In fact, the people running the Kremlin were frightened frauds running a fundamentally dysfunctional state forever on the verge of collapse.

None of which makes them good. In fact, it rather supports the idea that they were evil, since desperate men, historically, are far more willing to jettison their principles in the short term.

Yes, they were frightened; yes, I suppose they were frauds; yes, the state was definitely dysfunctional, even though our own intelligence services did not believe that until after the collapse.

So what? None of this contradicts the existence of the gulags, the persecution of the innocent, the exitence of the Eastern Bloc, the show trials, the secret police, or any other facet of the Evil Empire.

Given this asymmetry, the Cold War rivalry was actually a mind-boggling waste of money and lives to wage an inherently lopsided contest with a preordained outcome.

This is amazingly dishonest. Brown is again preying on the assumed ignorance of his readers, inviting them to assume that, since these things are known now, they were always obvious.

For most of the Cold War, kiddies, the overculture in the United States “knew” that the USSR would win and we would lose. The elites and the intellectuals were enamored of the Soviet system, disgusted with ours, and presumed — in spite of all the evidence of history — that when things changed, they would end up in control of everything. (Trotsky might beg to differ, if he didn’t have an icepick in his brain.)

Even in the 1980s, which I remember clearly, Reagan was mocked and derided in the media, endlessly, for calling the USSR the “Evil Empire”, for “provoking” Gorbachev by demanding that he “tear down this wall” (a speech given in June of 1987, two years and several months before it actually fell, and yet what Brown now calls “preordained” was considered stupid, foolish, impossible, and naive), and for foolishly pursuing “idiotic” polices like the Strategic Defense Initiative, derided in the media as “Star Wars”. (SDI has been well-documented to have been one of the factors that caused Moscow to conclude they could never win. They do not teach this in the schools, of course.)

When Yuri Maltsev defected in 1989, the very same year as the “preordained” fall of the Wall, he was debriefed by Dick Cheney regarding the economic condition of the USSR. Maltsev, having been an economic advisor to Gorbachev, had a good idea of what he was talking about. He said that the USSR’s economy was between three and four percent the size of the US economy. Cheney noted that the CIA numbers were closer to forty percent, and suggested that the real number was somewhere in between. (Maltsev smiled and said it was — between three and four percent, just like he had said.)

Our own intelligence community misjudged the health of the Soviet economy by an order of magnitude the very same year the Iron Curtain fell.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the USSR, Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror — one of the few books to accurately describe what the USSR was during the Cold War — was being prepared for reissue, and his publisher asked for a new subtitle, in light of the now-available Soviet archives vindicating the book completely. Conquest’s friend Kingsley Amis suggested “I told you so, you fucking fools.” This would not be a funny suggestion if “everybody knew” what a paper tiger the USSR actually was, would it?

Brown is correct that there were a lot of lies. What he fails to mention is that a lot of the lies were coming from the USSR itself, and that those lies were very effective in skewing perceptions of just how bad things were inside the Iron Curtain.

American schoolchildren were fed a one-sided view of World War II, capped by the conclusion that our superlative industry and unsurpassed genius were the deciding factors in defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. What would the Cold War have been like if, during history class, American kids learned that the world forever owed a debt of gratitude to Soviet forces and Soviet citizens? Their remarkable resilience saved democracy as much as did George Patton and Iwo Jima.

Does Mr. Brown think that Soviet schoolchildren got a balanced view of anything?

Actually, given the utterly delusional view he seems to have of what is taught in American schools, along with his nearly flat-earther-level bias for collectivism, he almost certainly does believe it.

Here are nine reasons why we should’ve thanked the Russians after World War II instead of engaging them in a decades-long Cold War:

And let the running of the bullshit begin!

#1: STUNNING SACRIFICE: On the Eastern front, the Red Army suffered more combat deaths at Stalingrad alone than the U.S. armed forces accumulated during the entirety of World War II.

There is so much he is leaving out here. Like the fact that a lot of those deaths were because Stalin refused to evacuate the cities. And the fact that Soviet soldiers were gunned down by their own officers if they did not charge suicidally into German machine gun fire.

But no, Brown is just impressed by the sheer numbers “sacrificed”. The more bodies you throw onto the pyre, the more just the cause, right? It does not matter if they died stupidly, or uselessly, or because they were executed by their own government for refusing to obey pointless orders. Nope. BIG NUMBER, therefore shut up.

For this we should thank them?

#2: WHAT BOMB: The fight against Japan didn’t conclude only because of America’s atomic attacks. In deciding how soon to surrender, Hirohito and his war cabinet appear to have been more frightened of Stalin’s 11th-hour invasion than of Curtis LeMay’s attempt to bomb the country back to the Stone Age.

This is an interesting bit of rhetorical legerdemain. By using “bomb”, singular, in the boldface header, he gets the reader thinking of the atomic bomb. But what he’s dismissing is the massive bombing campaign prior to that, which leveled Tokyo and most of Japan’s industrial plant at the end of the war.

The Japanese were certainly afraid of the Russians getting involved in the war against them, for excellent historical reasons that are too complicated to go into here. But what was happening in the Japanese government at the end of the war is extremely complicated and not generally known. There were different factions in contention. One faction wanted to fight to the death. A related, but different, faction wanted to enact “The Honorable Death of the Hundred Million”, sending out an order in Hirohito’s name ordering all Japanese to commit suicide in order to shame America before the world. Yet another faction, not in control until Hirohito himself stepped in after the bombing of Nagasaki, had been suing for peace since at least January 1945 through diplomatic channels.

While that power struggle probably included a fear of the Russians getting involved as part of the calculus of the whole thing, the determining factor was, in fact, the two atomic bombings.

We did a pretty good job of bombing Japan back to the stone age, by the by. Know what else we did, without Soviet help? We rebuilt Japan back into an industrial power in the matter of a couple of years.

For this we should thank them?

#3: UPPER VOLTA WITH ROCKETS: Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union struggled to meet the basic requirements of food and shelter. For example, the USSR’s desperate housing shortage could have been ameliorated with taller structures, but the country didn’t possess sufficient raw materials to supply elevators for apartments above five stories.

This has got to be the stupidest point Brown makes. For one thing, even assuming this is true, in what way is this something you and I should thank the USSR for? “Hey, guys, thanks for… not having enough housing… because you can’t build elevators!”

But it is worse than that. When it existed, the USSR had the most land under its control of any polity on the entire planet. Given that fact, why would it matter if they had tall buildings or not? Not being able to build up, they could have built out. Instead of taller buildings, just build more shorter ones. Plenty of room.

But no, they didn’t have the “raw materials” for elevators, therefore they couldn’t build tall buildings, therefore there was a housing shortage.

For this we should thank them?

#4: CHARMING BETRAYAL: The most effective spy cell the Soviets ever had was made up of aristocratic Englishmen schooled at Cambridge. Additionally, multiple physicists working for Britain on the Manhattan Project were Soviet moles and they provided Stalin’s scientists with the blueprints of the atomic bomb even before it was used on Japan. In short, the greatest threat to U.S. national security during the early part of the Cold War may have been our closest ally.

Here Brown admits that the Soviets were working against us before Hiroshima, contradicting what he said above.

Why is it that we should blame Britain for the fact that the Soviets turned a number of Brits into spies? Does Brown think that the Soviets are somehow blameless in recruiting spies to betray their own countries? He does, at least, admit the spying.

For this we should thank them?

#5: THE REAL MENACE: Joseph McCarthy barely believed a word he said and found zero communists in government roles.

Brown can read Joseph McCarthy’s mind, despite McCarthy’s death in the ’50s. (Well, how else are we supposed to know what McCarthy “really” believed? Brown asserts it, so he must be psychic!)

The fact that McCarthy found zero communists in government roles does not mean there were zero communists in government roles.

Because if you read The Black Book of Communism or know about the Venona Project, you know that there damned well were Soviet agents all over the State Department and elsewhere.

The problem wasn’t that McCarthy was wrong. The problem was that McCarthy was correct and completely failed to fix or even improve the situation.

For this we should thank them?

#6: FLAWED GAMESMANSHIP: The domino theory was used first by Dwight Eisenhower to argue that if communist forces in Vietnam succeeded, the contagion of Kremlin-supported regimes could spread to Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. This was a fallacy. Virtually all revolutions during the Cold War were homegrown and, in general, waged to overthrow colonial masters—of all ideologies.

And again, what about this means we should thank the USSR?

The Domino Theory, whatever its faults, is rather an easy thing to understand people accepting at the time. Consider that the USSR turned the entirety of Eastern Europe into a group of puppet states in one year, 1945. Then, just a few years later in 1949, China fell to Mao’s communists. Then there was the Korean War, when North Korea tried to take over the entire peninsula at the urging of Moscow (though Kim Il Sung likely didn’t need all that much urging). Then Cuba went communist in 1959. It kept happening, and for a while there, it seemed to be happening everywhere all at once. (And, indeed, it happened in Cambodia in the mid-70s, too, even as Vietnam fell to communism.)

While it was basically useless as a predictive tool, and was severely flawed if not useless as an analytical tool, it surely did describe, in oversimplified terms, what had actually happened that people already knew.

As for “all revolutions during the Cold War” being “homegrown”, yes, the Communist Party International always managed to find homegrown dupes to act in the way that they wanted. But to pretend that those revolutions did not have Soviet backing is ignorant and ahistorical.

For this we should thank them?

#7: FAKE NEWS: Overall, the U.S. never fell behind the Soviet Union in the development of nuclear weaponry—there was never a bomber gap or a missile gap. The United States developed the first intercontinental nuclear bomber, tested the first hydrogen bomb, launched the first nuclear submarine, introduced the first tactical nuclear weapons, and created the first solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile.

While these things are true, what Brown leaves out is what the perception was at the time. The perception which the USSR very carefully and deliberately cultivated in the international media.

This is why Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin were such propaganda coups — they enhanced and furthered a perception that already existed.

For this we should thank them?

#8: PROLONGED BLOWBACK: In 1977, the Carter administration began a covert CIA program to destabilize the Soviet Union by encouraging ethnic violence and radical Islam in Afghanistan, Soviet Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya. When the Soviets sent 100,000 troops into Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, the U.S. commitment to the anti-Soviet mujahideen surged. This massive, multi-billion-dollar covert operation ended up hatching global jihad.

Wait, so you want me to believe that the Iranian Revolution in 1979 (which really began in early 1978) was caused by Jimmy Carter’s instigating a CIA program in 1977?

twenty minutes of continuous laughter

Yes, I know, he conveniently left out Iran, because it doesn’t fit his narrative. Too fucking bad, because you can’t ignore the main source of Islamic extremism if you’re going to talk about the rise of Islamic extremism.

Yes, we supported the mujahadeen. Yes, that had unforeseen consequences. Yes, we should not have done that, and should be extremely circumspect about such operations in the future.

But do you notice what he’s ignoring, here? The USSR invaded Afghanistan, but somehow we’re the bad guys, because we supported the resistance to the invasion. The invaders, well, they were fine. Us? We’re baaaaaad.

For this we should thank them?

#9: CAUTIONARY TALE: Finally, turning the Soviets into enemies after World War II—instead of thanking them—almost killed us all. Multiple national security experts have asserted that sheer luck is the best explanation for why the Cold War did not conclude with a charred and lifeless planet.

You see, it’s all our fault that the Soviets infiltrated our government and the Manhattan project, stole our nuclear secrets, used them to build a bomb, and then threatened us with nuclear Armageddon. It’s our fault that we didn’t surrender to them instantly. Why did we make them keep hitting us? We were so terrible, we should be ashamed.

They did not nuke us. For this we should thank them?

You know, Brown, maybe they should fucking thank us that we didn’t nuke them? You spent the whole column basically admitting that the USSR was belligerent but too economically weak to really back up that belligerence, and yet we never wiped them off the face of the Earth for doing so, even though, as you imply, it would have been much easier to do than even we thought at the time.

Ever think of that, nitwit?

Brian T. Brown is the author of Someone Is Out to Get Us: A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness, published November 5 by Twelve.

Who is more idiotic, the Useful Idiot, or the Useful Idiot still idioting decades after his cause was tossed on the trash heap?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

This fisking by D. Jason Fleming is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License, some rights reserved.

Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor, Part 5 ― Other Theories & Other Extinctions

By Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Other Theories

Gradual Decline

Some statistical studies indicate that, based on the fossil record, most of the major dinosaur groups were already declining during the Late Cretaceous, though certain herbivore groups appear to proliferate during this period.

The researchers who performed these studies indicate that the dinos’ inability to “replace extinct species with new ones” left them vulnerable to extreme stressor events, such as a major impact.

Not everyone agrees with the studies.

Deccan Traps

The Deccan Traps were a non-explosive form of supervolcano located on the Deccan Plateau of west central India, and even today are generally considered to be one of the largest, if not the largest, volcanic feature on Earth. A volcanic trap consists of one or more long cracks, parallel if multiple, from which low-viscosity basaltic-chemistry lava extrudes. Due to the low viscosity of the melt, eruptions are rarely explosive, but the lava is “runny” and fast-flowing, and traps extrude great quantities of it―anywhere from tens to millions of cubic kilometers of lava. (For more information, see Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano, which discusses traps.) And the Deccan Traps were huge, at about three-quarters of a million cubic MILES of lava extruded.

Extinction would have occurred due to the hypothesized release of copious ash and carbon-and sulfur-compound aerosols into the air, blocking light and reducing photosynthesis in a volcanic winter before causing a runaway greenhouse effect after the ash settled.

But since traps are generally not highly eruptive, getting the ash (and maybe the gases) high enough into the atmosphere to have a GLOBAL negative effect would be difficult.

More, the clay boundary layer doesn’t occur DURING a trap-eruption layer, but BETWEEN them, indicating the Deccan Traps were not erupting at the time of the extinction.

This hypothesis is no longer widely accepted.

Multiple Impactors

Several other known craters have similar geologic ages, and a couple of additional

hypothesized-but-undiscovered craters may add to the tally, too.

When we reconstruct the tectonic plates as they would have existed at the time, all these form an equatorial swath; some therefore propose that Earth was hit by a recently-broken family

of bodies akin to Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

Sea-Level Drop

During the last age of the Cretaceous Period, there seems indisputable evidence that the sea levels fell by a substantial margin. Earlier layers depict the signature of sea beds, while later layers are obviously dry land. There is no obvious explanation for why; the current theory is that the mid-ocean ridges (a spreading tectonic plate boundary, basically elongated volcanoes) stopped erupting and sank under their own weight.

But that wouldn’t have affected deep-water organisms or land creatures at all. Yet all of these were also drastically affected by the K-T extinction.

Multiple Choice

This option is simply, “Choose one from column A, one from column B, one from column C,” until sufficient conditions are reached for the observed data.

But a sufficient condition is a sufficient condition, and the incredible chain of events brought about by the Chicxulub impact would have been a more-than-sufficient condition.

Some recent research indicates that there were, in fact, two back-to-back major extinctions that occurred in this timeframe, one associated with the impact, the other with volcanism (likely the Deccan Traps). The eruption apparently occurred first, and the impact would have finished the matter.

Other Extinction Events

EventTimeframePossible Cause(s)Ordovician-Silurian extinction events (2, back to back)450-440MY Before Present (BP)Global cooling/sea level drop; Possible gamma-ray burstLate Devonian extinction375-360MY BPViluy TrapsPermian-Triassic extinction event aka “The Great Dying”252MY BPSiberian Traps; Wilkes Land impactor; Anoxic eventTriassic-Jurassic extinction event201.3MY BPCentral Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) eruption/breakup of Pangaea; possible impactorCretaceous-Paleogene extinction event66MY BPChicxulub impactor; Deccan Traps

These are only the major extinction events found in the geologic record. More than two dozen can be found or inferred from the fossil record. At least five invoke possible impactor triggers; two invoke other cosmic events, such as a gamma-ray burst or a supernova; nine also invoke various supervolcanic events. Some of these overlap as competing proposed causes.

~~~

For more details, check out INCOMING! The Chicxulub Impactor by Stephanie Osborn on Kindle and Nook. [Note, by buying with the link below you’re giving the blog owner a small percentage of the purchase price.]

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/incoming-the-chicxulub-impactor-stephanie-osborn/1133840127?ean=2940160786032

OR buy one of Stephanie’s fiction books:

Dr. Megan McAllister was already a pretty unusual human — NASA astronaut, professional astronomer, polymath — when she encountered the man in the black suit that night in west Texas. What Division One Agent Echo didn’t know, when he recruited her to the Agency, was that she was even more special.

But he’d find out, soon enough.

To Be Diverse or Not Diverse,
That is the Question

by Dave Truesdale

 

Like many of us, I suppose, I’ve always found a certain degree of disconnect between two opposing positions from Libs and especially the Woke crowd. On one hand they plump for Diversity, the assimilation of all kinds of people into society regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexual proclivity or identification. (Except for diversity of thought, of course, but we’ll set that aside for the moment.) On the other hand, these Woke Libs plump against any sort of Cultural Appropriation, or as Wikipedia defines it:

“Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural misappropriation, is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture.”

On one hand the Diversity they seek seems more of an inclusive nature, while on the other hand the Cultural Appropriation they rail against seems more of an exclusive, or non-inclusive nature, if you will.

Please note that hyperbole raised to the level of a reductio ad absurdum level of argument can often be an effective tool in presenting one’s argument. I now ask you to consider that on the one hand, and where the SF field is concerned, that Liberals, most especially their Woke and highly vocal and activist faction, claims a lack of diversity in the field—the SF field created by, maintained, and overseen by white people, mostly white men1.

That this is patently absurd even on its surface is laughable, but if you say something often enough and loud enough and have the media on your side…. But on the other hand they do not realize that, by their own definition and that of wikipedia, they are appropriating the distinct culture of the SF field, which is an inviolable crime in their eyes.

Using the Libs and their most vocal Woke spear carrier logic, they seek to achieve their goal of diversity in the SF field (except for thought) by blatantly and without regard to the specific cultural phenomenon that is the SF field—which is a unique sub-culture unto itself—to appropriate the field by intimidation and other unethical means, among them belittling and smearing the sub-culture they seem to dislike but wish to become a part of, by attempting to alter or destroy from within many of this specific sub-culture’s most honored institutions, awards2, and its most revered personages.

And over time it has come to the obvious attention of all with an even passing acquaintance with the SF field, its fandom and inner workings and history, that this forceful appropriation (and then destruction) of the field’s awards, founders, and institutions comes not from a love or true affinity for the SF genre and the kind of literature that has spread to worldwide prominence since its formal inception in 1926, but to promote its own social and political agenda with the express intent to destroy and remake and promote the field using its social and political dogma to now define the field, with no intellectual departure from theirs tolerated, including in the field’s in-house publication of record, the SFWA Bulletin, where in recent years what amounts to an overseer censorship panel comprised of its members has been created where none had previously been found necessary since the organization’s founding in 1965, more than half a century ago.

The SF field has always been open to everyone at every level, so the basic anti-diversity claim from the Woke crowd is an outright lie. This has been pointed out to them on numerous occasions over the years, yet they persist in the lie, repeat it often and ever louder, thus revealing their own disingenuous nature, and all the while labeling anyone who disagrees with their viewpoint a racist, sexist, homophobe, because these are the tried and true strawmen guaranteed to shut down any argument.

They scream and holler about cultural appropriation when it comes to the white oppressors in SF, yet use smears and intimidation3 to aid in their attempts to appropriate (and thus balkanize–divide and conquer) the SF field in service to the lie born of the double helix comprised of their social/political agenda of non-diversity in the field.

Speaking of that diversity word again brings to mind how the word itself has been mis-appropriated by the politically correct and holier-than-thou endowed Woke community now enjoying every freedom the SF field has always offered them. A handful of years ago, give or take, some in the SF community (both pros and fans) loudly complained of the relative non-diversity in the novels that had routinely been winning the Hugo and Nebula awards. The non-diversity manifesting itself in a general similarity in the types of themes explored, points of view espoused on certain issues within novels, and a general sameness of approach.

Many more social SF stories were being nominated or winning the awards and had drifted away from true quill SF but maintained their genre bona fides as they masqueraded as SF via a future time stamp or were perhaps set on other worlds or on spaceships, with less and less straight SF types were being considered seriously. The “new” SF had to deal with feelings and emotions and character interaction from a very narrow and limited spectrum of acceptable viewpoints to make the cut.

Very few fans had even read the eventual award winners and few can recall their titles to this day. And many of the winners invariably were published by one, or maybe two, major publishing houses with deep pockets for advertising, word of mouth, and the purchasing of voting memberships for their staffs—year after year after year.

So a cry for change went up and was quickly smothered by calls of racism and sexism and homophobia leveled against, you guessed it, old white men, who, they opined, wanted nothing to do with diversity, that old reliable strawman always riding in to save the day. But do you see what the Wokies did there with the way they interpreted diversity to their favor?

The original long-standing complaint was the lack of diversity (in a broad sense) of story type when it came to the two major SF awards. It had nothing to do with lack of diversity as the Wokies used it: as those who hated people of color, or gays or lesbians or any others to be included under the ever-growing LGBTQ crowd, or women. To be accused of racism or sexism and all the rest of it was a hard act to overcome and make your voice heard above all the orchestrated furor against how utterly evil you were. But this mis-appropriation of the original use of diversity by those complaining of the sameness of much SF was entirely lost in the dust of the windstorm swirling around them. And it lingers to this day. And is totally unjustified.

Diversity is fine and to be sought and applauded. But not when it is used in a hypocritical nature to justify the takeover of an entire genre of literature, nor when its use is suborned to exclude diversity of thought. Controversial subject matter has been the bread and butter of the most fondly remembered—and awarded—stories and novels in science fiction history. But not now. Authors are afraid—outright intimidated—to pen anything truly radical and outside the realm of the accepted PC Woke orthodoxy of themes and treatments. Stories are being trunked, hidden away and not sent to publishers or editors for fear of instant rejection.

And it all has its basis on the big lie of the field being non-diverse in who can write it and who has been horribly and systematically oppressed by it. Hogwash. The forces that led to more men than women writing SF, or people of color getting into the field, didn’t come from within the field but from what real life was taking place in the real world outside the field. When folks of any gender or color found their way to SF, either through its early magazines or conventions or later its films, they were always welcomed with open arms.

We were the one place where nothing mattered but one’s love of science fiction or fantasy. We had always been a safe place from the outside world when we attended a convention for a weekend, or immersed ourselves in a book, or spent a few hours in a darkened theater as our imaginations soared and took us away from our day to day problems.

But that has all changed, at least within the confines of the literary SF world. We welcomed in those with a different social/political philosophy with open arms, welcoming the diversity that has always been endemic to the field. But these new “fans” and authors didn’t wish to assimilate but to overcome the existing status quo and destroy it utterly from within—while not allowing the diversity of thought they so loudly and righteously campaigned on. And now the awards mean almost nothing, for they are selected based on a set of superficial demographics and accepted Truthink instead of literary merit. And even some of the more rational liberal set have come to recognize the fact. But it may be too late. The Hugo and Nebula awards are lost. The trade publication of the genre, the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin (of which I was once editor long before things went south) is now a heavily censored “state” arm of the Woke ruling class (after having excised two of its longtime columnists for the use of what someone considered a sexist characterization, and forcing its female editor to tender her resignation) and is now rife with milque toast Samethink pablum for its new members who don’t know the score yet.

Speaking of new members, there are always new fans coming into the field for one reason or another and they may need some help navigating the do’s and don’t’s so they can make friends and enjoy their experience in SF to its fullest. Wilson (Bob) Tucker wrote the classic Neo-Fan’s Guide to Science Fiction Fandom back in the 1950s and Tucker (1914-2006) updated it seven times over the decades (to make 8 editions), but the most recent update was way back in 1996. I think it’s time to write a brand new one because the old one, while it brings back fond memories of what it meant to be a fan, included a lot of fan history, an early fannish lexicon, and how to behave at conventions and what fandom was about in general, it is now almost a relic of a forgotten and glorious past. All I need is a title and a little help from my friends and I could make it happen. I’m thinking of The Woke Neo-fans Guide to Rightthink Science Fiction Fandom for the Age of Diversity. Too much?

#

1The widely (but wrongly) accepted wisdom in many parts of the SF fan and professional ranks today is that from its inception the genre has actively discouraged anyone not straight, white, and male from writing or editing science fiction, or attending (at its beginnings) small local SF clubs and then its first conventions in the 1930s. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in fact the opposite is true if photos, stories, fan and professional activites by women are to be believed. They are part of the historical record and go back to the field’s official beginnings in the 1920s.
From the introduction to her collection Women of Futures Past (Baen, September 2016), editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch quotes from Eric Leif Davin’s heavily researched Partners in Wonder: Women and The Birth of Science Fiction 1926-1965 (Lexington Books in 2006), where she says that Davin “begins with a list of two hundred and three known women who published in U.S. science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1960.” She then writes: “Amazing Stories’ first issue appeared in April of 1926. In the June 1927 issue, Clare Winger Harris became the first woman to publish a story in a science fiction magazine.” Rusch then quotes Davin: “It was the beginning of a popular and rewarding science fiction career for Harris,” he writes, “(in) a field still so young that it was composed of only a single magazine. Nevertheless, she was there, almost from the beginning, with her name splashed on future covers to attract readers.” [Davin, page 29]” Rusch writes: “Gernsback was deeply aware that he had a female audience for his magazine. He wrote this in his editorial for the September 1926 issue: “A totally unforeseen result of the name (Amazing Stories), strange to say, was that a great many women were already reading the new magazine. This is most encouraging.” [quoted in The Battle of The Sexes in Science Fiction, Justine Larbalestier, Wesleyan University Press, 2002, page 23]”
Again, from Rusch: “In addition, he [Davin] lists twenty-six women who edited “science fiction, fantasy, and weird” magazines in the years between 1928 and 1960.” … “In other words, women not only published stories at the dawn of the modern science fiction era, they edited stories as well.”

2Even political liberals in the SF community who have put up with (or agreed with) some of the Woke shenanigans thus far (the redesigning of at least one award trophy because it was a bust of one of the most iconic figures in horror literature who espoused racist views in the 1920s, and the renaming of two other awards named after highly influential contributors to the field, one a man {an editor} and the other a woman {an author}, because of what are now unacceptable views or actions in either their professional or private lives many decades ago) have begun to cry foul in recent years due to the devaluing of the field’s two major literary awards, the Hugo and the Nebula.
Many (in a non-partisan voice) have asserted that these awards mean nothing now, so co-opted and plainly given only to those whose social or political philosophies align with the Woke Left—or who are writers of non-white ethnicity (mostly female)—that their literary worth is virtually an afterthought if thought of at all.
The past three or four years of Hugo and Nebula fiction award winners bear this out unequivocally. If you are white (and especially those males who do not kow tow to the Woke’s party line PC ideology), you’re out. No awards for you. Belong to a minority (even an artificial one—are you a member of the diabetic minority and has the SF field oppressed or overlooked your work?—they seem to pop up all the time these days), are a person of color, or a woman, and we see that you’re Woke, then you’re one of our kind of people. You wrote someting last year? Great, we’ll see about getting you on the ballot—after all, diversity.

3Documentation abounds of cases where fans have been suspended for a period of time within the dates of a convention or outright ejected from a convention, or professional authors disinvited from their Guest of Honor roles because a lone person has pointed out to a convention committee something objectionable (in their eyes) that the fan or author has said, or written in a story or book, sometimes years in the past. Must every fan or author now adhere to a specific social/political agenda in their speech or written words or be blackballed as a racist or sexist (without proof or given a chance to confront their accusers or rebut such onerous slurs) and ostracized from the community for what amounts to Wrongthink (ala 1984)? Is the accusation now enough in the enlightened Woke world? The evidence continues to mount that it is.
#
Dave Truesdale has edited Tangent and now Tangent Online since July of 1993. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award six times, and the World Fantasy Award once. A former editor of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he also served as a World Fantasy Award judge in 1998, and for several years wrote an original online column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Now retired, he keeps close company with his SF/F library, the coffeepot, and old movie channels on TV. He lives in Kansas City, MO.

There was a comedy show in Portugal in the … eighties? Late seventies? where the punchline was “No, I don’t want you to explain it to me. I only want to understand.”

Lately I feel that way about so many things.  Take gender, for instance. I keep getting told that all sorts of things are true that can’t be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive.

For instance: I’m supposed to believe that gender is a social construct.

Okay, let’s take that and run with it, shall we?

1- Gender is a social construct. Not just at the level of how  males and females behave, but EVERYTHING.

You can become a woman, a man, or indeterminate just by declaring you are one.  That is the entire battle of the pronouns, isn’t it?

So, let’s assume this is absolutely true.

Why bother declaring anything? If gender is a social construct, who cares what you declare? Call yourself human, or a little teapot, and never mind gender at all. Why invent pronouns? Just use what comes to mind.

Please don’t explain. I just want to UNDERSTAND.

2- We live in patriarchy and women are continuously oppressed.

Okay, if gender is a social construct, who the hell is being oppressed? If being a woman is so bad, and we can choose our genders, why would you choose to be a woman?

Please don’t explain. I just want to UNDERSTAND.

3- Women suffer from a “pay gap” which means that women always are paid less than a man.

… Yet people who are “assigned male gender” at birth CHOOSE to be women.  WHY would anyone do that? Why would they CHOOSE to be paid less?

Please don’t explain. I just want to UNDERSTAND.

4- Some people actually have surgery to be their preferred gender/sex.

Why on Earth would you do that, if gender is a social construct? Why go to the expense, pain, potentially irreversible damage, if they’re already whatever gender they say they are, just by declaring it?

Please don’t explain. I just want to UNDERSTAND.

5- People who fall in love with people of the same gender have been historically persecuted and discriminated against.  There was a fight for the ability to marry those they love. In many parts of the world they’re still thrown from roofs or have walls demolished on them.

But if gender is a social construct, who cares who they fall in love with? Couldn’t one of them declare himself/herself the other gender and avoid issues within family? I mean, it’s a lot of work for a pronoun, isn’t it? If that’s the only difference…

Please don’t explain. I just want to UNDERSTAND.

6- Right now people under 18 cannot choose to drink. They cannot choose to marry. They cannot choose to live on their own.  It’s not legal to give them full time jobs.
But they can totally choose to have surgery — irreversible surgery — to alter their gender, even though gender is a social construct, that can be altered by declaring oneself another gender.

How and why does any of this make any sense?

Please don’t explain. I just want to UNDERSTAND.

Don’t explain, because you can explain anything with a self-referent system of sophism that covers up REAL contradictions with bullshit about privilege and oppression, all of it without referent to the outside world.

The truth is that the idea that gender is a mere social construct can’t coexist in a world with any of the other shibboleths the left doesn’t allow us to question.

Which in turn means their only argument is “Shut up, shut up, shut up” — aka “privilege” and telling you you don’t have the right to an opinion.

And yet questioning is what we must do.  And not shut up.

Because their make believe world is not merely a victimless fantasy. It’s a poisonous regime that requires you taint yourself with lies you know are lies, to be allowed to exist.

This same soul-breaking tactic was engaged in by Nazis, Communists and every other dictatorship.  It still is.

Do not sell your soul piecemeal or wholesale by endorsing reality-breaking nonsense.  Spit in big brother’s eye.

There are FOUR lights.

Be not afraid!

 

 

 

It’s always darkest before dawn.  This is not actually true, but it is, metaphorically.

I’m rushed, and have a million things to do today. This is a very scattered post, just a bunch of things running through my uncaffeinated mind.

I leave it as an exercise for the audience to make lists of the reasons not to despair.

I’ll leave you with one: the same people who prattle endlessly about how the demographics are going their way don’t act as if they are.  Also, in that respect, the demographics have been going their way my entire life, according to them and yet, they never get there.

This is probably because people aren’t widgets, which they’re incapable of understanding.

So, protecting and encouraging vote fraud and quite literally dismantling the constitutional republic (Well, what do you think the popular vote compact does?) not the act of people who are confident things are going their way.

There are other examples, but– look at them.  Like Greta Thunberg traveling in a “carbon free” manner, which required the flying of crews back and forth, thereby undoing her savings ten times over, their vaunted “the future belongs to us” is sounding increasingly tinnier and desperate, a potemkin ideology in an avalanche.

Of course, the question is: what comes after?  And that, that is for us to fight for.  The future is unwritten. It’s in our hands.

It’s always darkest before dawn, and you can choose to close the blinds, hide under the bed and keep it dark.  Or not.

I have no idea what lies ahead this year.  Normally — because my subconscious is massively smarter than I — I can tell what is likely, what is most probable.  Now my crystal ball is occluded, my vision dark.  I don’t know.  We might come through this okay.  Or we might not.

And if we don’t, it might be brief or a descent into madness.  And as for what happens to the rest of the world…  I don’t know.

I recently wrote a short story centered on the battle of Cannae which some mark as the turning of the Roman Republic towards empire.  There are reasons to doubt this, honestly. It was in the process before that.

But here’s the thing, on that day, in that one battle, Rome lost an estimated forty thousand people.

But they didn’t surrender. They lowered (and raised) the age of enlistment, they made logical changes, they stopped being naive about the Carthaginians.

Carthage is a memory, mostly remembered as having been destroyed and salted.  Rome… it’s arguable that Rome never fell, or at least that’s the feeling anyone who visits one of her former provinces gets.

Reverses, defeats, can all be temporary.

It all depends on your determination and your willingness to learn.

They say it’s always darker before dawn.

Light a million lamps and hold a flamethrower in reserve.

This is not even the beginning of the end. I’m not sure it’s the end of the beginning.

Never give up, never surrender.

Be not afraid.

*Okay, I came back two days ago and my birthday is tomorrow. I will try to do some writing today, but I’m not even looking at my email till the 19th, because no. And also no. I’m trying to adapt to this “late 50s” thing. I need a moment. Also, honestly, I’m trying not to come down with yet another cold, because these days it takes me forever to recover.  I’m sure my faithful vignette-challenge-creators sent me a word, but since I’m not opening the email, I don’t have it. (I’m not even expecting anything bad. I just don’t wnat to deal with a week and a bit of email until after my bday) So. The challenge will be images.  The rest is normal. – SAH*

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months. One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM RUSS MITCHELL:  Malik The Pawn.

Malik’s star is rising. The village boy’s bravery nets him an award far beyond his station — the chance to serve the Moon Daughter’s Temple for a year. But serving a Goddess isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Malik finds himself possessed and in possession of dangerous secrets, as devastating changes come to a world he hardly comprehends. He will travel with a bitter, taciturn huntress and a healer who’s chained to a past he can’t escape, as Malik struggles to regain his freedom — and his soul.

FROM MARY CATELLI:  Oath Keeper.

Eadwin travels through through wild lands. There, he learns of a ghost, a oath that was broken, and one that was kept.

And thus his decision, which thane to serve as a knight, grows harder.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN:  Eerily Familiar: Familiar Tales Book Seven.

 

Something hunts the hunters . . .

Something waits in the shadows, watching. Lelia Chan and her Familiar, Tay, hear vague rumors of trouble among the shadow mages. Everyone’s heard rumors before, and keeping her boss happy is more important. Then a painting tries to capture her friend. When her mentor and good friend André and his Familiar Rodney both go missing, Lelia has to take charge.

She’s not ready. No shadow mage ever is. But she’ll find a way or die trying.

Things worse than than death hide in the shadows. And they LIKE meeting over-confident young mages . . .

FROM MICHAEL J. HOOTEN:  Till the Conflict Is Over (Enlisted Book 2)

 

Peter Wright not only survived the most deadly space battle in US Navy history, he also managed to defeat the enemy as well. He’s hailed as a hero, and everyone wants to know his story, but all he wants is to avoid everything that reminds him of that day. Instead he endures interviews, cotillions, and the ever-surprising demands of being a celebrity. And also anxiety attacks, suvivor’s guilt, and funerals. Through it all, he wishes he could just be a normal sailor again.

Be careful what you wish for.

FROM BLAKE SMITH:   An American Thanksgiving.

It is Thanksgiving Day, 1865, and Margaret Browne isn’t feeling very thankful. The war is over, and her grown-up sons have returned from the fighting, but her beloved husband remains absent, last seen a captive in a notorious prisoner-of-war camp. The Browne family muddles through their uncertain path, lost without their leader, but when everything begins to go wrong all at once, Margaret must hold together the farm and her family, and turn a disaster into a true day of thanks-giving.

And now for the writing challenge:

Take one of the two pictures below; assume they describe an essential aspect of a novel, that is either character, setting or conflict.

Now write me a couple of first paragraphs that will hook me and make me want to read your novel:

 

 

I woke up feeling 80 years old, and since I’m fairly sure none of you have an aging ray (if you do and you trained it on me, I’m gonna give you sych a kicking.)

I think it’s the result of late nights, unwonted activity (both trying to understand the science behind the talks and honestly sitting still in a classroom (meeting room) all day, a thing I’m singularly bad at. Oh, yeah, I was here.

I have zero idea why I felt the need not to disseminate our whereabouts, but when I get subconscious imperatives like that I obey, even if — particularly if — they make no sense.  Most of the time it’s just paranoia, but the few times that they’ve been right… well… More than paid for the false alarms, in terms of safety or not being bothered.

We drove out. We’d falling out of the habit of long drives when we had the kids, but as with so many things, we’re rediscovering them.  It gives us time to talk and I firmed 2 of the grossly overdue short stories in my mind. Hoping to get them written today.

My health wasn’t helped by the fact that both the conference provided lunches and what we could find were both full of carbs I couldn’t resist.

This is fairly rare, since I usually can withstand anything but corn chips.  Oh, yeah, Wichita has a Mediterranean place that sells fried pita chips. So HAPPY I don’t live there. I’d never be able to stay off them.

Anyway, we left a day early, partly because we didn’t think we could CONTRIBUTE anything to the last day, partly because I thought long days, late nights and not getting exercise were making me susceptible to the thing that was making everyone cough.

It might have. Or I might be just ahead of it. At any rate, I’m going to do a very perfunctory cleaning (Cats shed!) then write.

The only low carb thing was something I attempted before I left. People are now making and selling pasta from heart’s of palm.  I wasn’t particularly impressed by the linguini. It’s no more linguini-like than zucchini strips that are way cheaper. I mean, it LOOKS more like pasta, but that’s obviously not the point.  However I bought some canned for “lasagna” and plan to try it later tonight.  Will report.

We’ll resume regular schedule tomorrow, and hopefully by Monday the cold trying to land will have given up and moved off.

Oh, yeah, Greebo, obviously KNOWING I’d died rejected the impostor who tried to impersonate me until I cornered him and he smelled me.  He’s now acting very clingy. He also lost a lot more weight than the thyroid condition warrants. I suspect, as on previous trips, idiot-boy stopped eating.  I’m not sure exactly how I ended up with a dog in a cat suit, but there it is.  He’s been extravagantly petted this morning, and will sit at my feet while I write.

Oh, NANO: I finished a short while in Wichita. Not a ton, just 6k words. I still need to do a novel.

If we’re going to be honest the masks started falling well before this year.  But I call this year the year of the great disappointment.

Let’s for instance talk about Eric C*aramella whose name is being spelled like a swearword and deserves it: did I go overboard with memes. Sure. I did. Sometimes genetics is destiny, and when I get the Latin up, the legions of Rome go marching through my emotions and…. everything gets red and I become weaponized.  Or as I told Dan: Behold the power of Portuguese autism. It’s like other autism only louder and ruder.

The proper way to deal with that in a society with free speech is to let it be. Of course, if FB hadn’t deleted my very silly meme, I’d never have got that mad.

However how the left deals with it is by trying to stop the speech.

It is a truism that we want them to talk louder and they want us to shut up. And that’s fine.

But that they are trying to shut up A NAME everyone knows (with associations everyone at this point also knows) is a step beyond.

And in personal experience I blocked THIS ONE PERSON who btw should understand free speech since he swore an oath to the constitution.  And I stopped getting suspended by FB for older memes. I had hoped, honestly, nothing would happen, and I could just unblock him.  I am disappointed.

And yes, I know FB is not the government, but his desire to suppress speech tells me he would do it by government fiat and not see anything wrong with it, so long as it was “wrong” speech.

Again, we’ve always known the left wanted to silence us, but that they’re willing to do it on something so trivial and stupid, tells me they want to use people as meat puppets only allowed to say, hear, see and think the “truth” promulgated from the top that day.

Perhaps they wish to live like that. But most of us couldn’t.

And you know what? I wouldn’t WANT to.

Bite me, big brother. I have two middle fingers.

 

 

 

 

Obviously not continuing Stephanie’s series today. Will do tomorrow. Will do something later today.

Late night. Got mildly tipsy. Enough to walk in circles for a while, looking for the elevator.

But am very much alive and okay. Just kind of of slow this morning.