— compiled by Wombat-socho
OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Dorothy Bland, Dean Of Journalism And Liar
Da Tech Guy: How Obama And The Left View Jews And Israel, In One Paragraph
The Political Hat: Green Energy Scam, Death Ray Victory
Doug Powers: Obama Says There’s Been A Lot of “Misinformation” Spread About Obamacare
Twitchy: Houston Mayor Not Eager To Hear From People She Called “Transphobes”
RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Californians Less Safe After Proposition 47 Passes
American Thinker: Culture Matters
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Host By Robin Cook
Conservatives4Palin: Christie, Huckabee Exit Main Debate Stage
Don Surber: Obama To Environment – Drop Dead
Jammie Wearing Fools: Hitler, So Fashionable In Gaza
Joe For America: Ted Cruz Introduces Bill To List Muslim Brotherhood As Terrorist Organization
JustOneMinute: Exxon Lied, People Died. Or Overheated. Or Something.
Pamela Geller: UC Merced Jihadi’s Manifesto PRAISED ALLAH, But Cops Say Motive Wasn’t Terrorism
Protein Wisdom: Star Wars – International Trailer
Shot In The Dark: Just Another Day In The Life Of Every Saint Paul Conservative
STUMP: Public Pension Watch – Won’t Anybody Think Of The Poor Corrupt Officials?
The Gateway Pundit: Camille Paglia Calls Out “Transgender Mania” – Parents Who Indulge Kids Commit Child Abuse
The Jawa Report: Al-Qaeda, The Kinder, Gentler Islamic Terrorists?
The Lonely Conservative: Rush, The Big Voice On The Right
This Ain’t Hell: Hasan’s Victims Struggle For Benefits
Weasel Zippers: Former CIA Director Woolsey – Unvetted Foreigners Being Hired For TSA And Baggage Handling Positions
Megan McArdle: What’s The Mortality Rate For Unicorns?
Mark Steyn: Stabbers For Allah
, originally a book by Philip K. Dick, and now a TV series by Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz for Amazon Prime Video. The book won the Hugo for Best Novel of 1963, back when Hugos actually meant something, and is an alternate history set fifteen years after the United States lost World War II in 1947. Most of the former United States are part of the Greater German Reich; the three Pacific states plus Nevada, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah belong to a Japanese puppet state, the Pacific States of America; and the remaining pieces of the country between are a neutral zone, sometimes called the Rocky Mountain States or more often, the Neutral Zone. I last read Dick’s book decades ago, and I have to say after watching the first two episodes of the TV series, Scott and Spotnitz have produced something better than the original book. The subversive novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is now a series of “newsreels” distributed by the Resistance, there have been some changes in the cast of characters, but above all, Scott and Spotnitz have introduced a sense of hallucinatory, paranoid surrealism that didn’t exist in the original book, which was a fairly straightforward alternate history along the lines of one of its inspirations, Ward Moore’s 
– which itself is worth reading, for its depiction of the Union as a Third World backwater in the wake of a Civil War defeat, if nothing else. Getting back to the series…what struck me most is that it has a cast full of unreliable narrators. Nothing the characters say can be taken on faith as correct, there is reason to believe that “past” is not what it is claimed to be, and there are strong implications that the “newsreels” are not homemade movies, but rather leaks from our timeline. Can’t wait for the next eight episodes to come out next month!
, a post-apocalyptic tale about a small village in Ireland facing a number of problems, security and the infertility of the local menfolk being the two most pressing. Enter Sergeant O’Meara of the Grenadier Guards and his stolen Challenger MBT…like the first reviewer, I came across some of the stories in this fix-up novel by way of Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War anthologies, and appreciated the sometimes dark, sometimes madcap humor in these tales. Decent brain candy.
, the first in a trilogy written by John Hemry before he took up writing The Lost Fleet novels and went with his birth name of John Campbell. Stark’s War was somewhat of a nightmare for a veteran NCO like me; the picture it paints of a military so isolated from its country that someone in the ranks who was born civilian and not mil is a very rare bird indeed, and an officer corps so addicted to micromanagement and apple-polishing that it no longer recognizes the realities of combat are just two of the many unsettling plot elements of this novel about an American hyperpower as it exists in the mind of the Loony Left: so dominant in terms of economic and military power that no nation or alliance of nations on Earth can stand up to it – which is why Sergeant Stark and his troops of the First Division are raiding foreign installations on the Moon. Good book, perhaps because of the premise and not in spite of it; now available for the Kindle, which is good.
