The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Did You Know …?

Posted on | March 9, 2015 | 44 Comments

“International Women’s Day” (IWD) is a Communist holiday. Despite my extensive knowledge of communist history, I didn’t know this until I saw a post on the Tumblr blog of Mehreen Kasana, a Pakistani-born radical feminist who lives in New York:

This time when you celebrate International Women’s Day, make it a point to remember that it started off as International Working Women’s Day until the bourgeoisie hijacked it and removed its class component to present a false and unified ‘sisterhood’ so that women were discouraged from participating in the struggle against upper class hegemony.

Thank you for the tip, Ms. Kasana! It’s amazing the things the bourgeoisie can learn by reading feminist Tumblr blogs. So I checked Wikipedia, and sure enough, it’s true: The first International Women’s Day was organized in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America, and this anti-capitalist holiday played a pivotal role in history:

In 1917 demonstrations marking International Women’s Day in Saint Petersburg on the last Sunday in February (which fell on March 8 on the Gregorian calendar) initiated the February Revolution. Women in Saint Petersburg went on strike that day for “Bread and Peace” — demanding the end of World War I, an end to Russian food shortages, and the end of czarism. [Bolshevik revolutionary] Leon Trotsky wrote, “23 February (8th March) was International Woman’s Day and meetings and actions were foreseen. But we did not imagine that this ‘Women’s Day’ would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date. But in morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for support of the strike … which led to mass strike … all went out into the streets.”
Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai and Vladimir Lenin made it an official holiday in the Soviet Union … On May 8th, 1965 by the decree of the USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet International Women’s Day was declared a non-working day in the USSR “in commemoration of the outstanding merits of Soviet women in communistic construction, in the defense of their Fatherland during the Great Patriotic War, in their heroism and selflessness at the front and in the rear, and also marking the great contribution of women to strengthening friendship between peoples, and the struggle for peace. But still, women’s day must be celebrated as are other holidays.”
From its official adoption in Russia following the Soviet Revolution in 1917 the holiday was predominantly celebrated in communist and socialist countries.

You can read more of that history here (PDF).

America won the Cold War, but the deadly totalitarian ideology of the Soviet Union — the “Evil Empire” as Ronald Reagan famously called it — has been resurrected in the name of feminism.

Honestly, I knew nothing of this history Sunday when I noticed friends on Twitter mocking International Women’s Day.

As far as I knew then, International Women’s Day was just one of those silly occasions created by the United Nations and promoted by the tax-exempt non-profit feminist groups that feed at the trough where governments and gigantic foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Gates, etc.) shovel out grants to crusading liberal do-gooder types in sensible shoes. Then I noticed radical feminist Laurie Penny pimping IWD.

That’s right: Laurie Penny’s book quoted Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik commissar who helped make IWD a holiday in the Soviet Union! Let’s quote the commissar, eh?

“The communist economy does away with the family. In the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . the family loses its significance as an economic unit. The external economic functions of the family disappear . . .
“Once the family has been stripped of its economic functions and its responsibilities towards the younger generation and is no longer central to the existence of the woman, it has ceased to be a family.”
— Alexandra Kollontai, 1921

This, my friends, is the ideology celebrated on the communist holiday International Women’s Day. The more you know about feminism, the more you recognize its familiar totalitarian agenda.

Despite our “upper class hegemony,” my oppressed wife and I must still pay that bourgeois capitalist electricity bill. Please help your comrades in this struggle: Hit the freaking tip jar!





 

Category: Culture, Feminism, History, Sex Trouble

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Spring Thaw?

Posted on | March 8, 2015 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The weather here in the Washington area was a (relatively) balmy 52 this afternoon, and is supposed to remain decently warm for the rest of the week, which means we’ll soon start seeing attractive women outdoors wearing short jackets instead of coats that look closely related to comforters or air mattresses. In the meantime, it’s time again for Rule 5 Sunday, since everybody likes a pretty girl.

Persephone, the Greek goddess of spring, being stalked by her future husband Hades, god of the underworld.

As usual, many of the following links are to pics normally considered NSFW. Exercise discretion in your clicking.

Goodstuff leads off this week with Queens of the Jungle: The Sheena Dynasty, followed by 90 Miles from Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls with Guns. Animal Magnetism chips in with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, Loose Endz offers Crazy Climate Snow Bunnies, and First Street Journal brings us more Women with Weapons.


EBL’s thundering herd this week includes Dakota Johnson, Debbie Harry, Stacy’s Sex Trouble and Rule 5 Feminists, Lauren Bacall, Scott Walker’s Attractive Spokeswomen, and Molly Parker.

A View from the Beach offers Dancing with Julianne Hough, Take a Load Off…, Salt That Popcorn, Betting on Beauty, Hailey Clauson Gets a New Paint Job, 69 With Debby Harry, Oregon Library Girl Pleads Not Indecent, and A Basic Instinct for Money.

At Soylent Siberia, it’s mocha coffee creamer, Leftover Lesbians, Monday Motivationer In Like A Lion, Overnighty Acid Flashback, Tuesday Titillation Adrienn, And Because She Was Such A Hit…, Humpday Hawtness, Falconsword Fursday Feral Fur, Fursday Overnighty Auburn Awesome, Corset Crumpets, T-GIF Friday Like Magic, Leonard is Lamenting Lesbian Loss, Weekender Who’s Fairest, and Bath Night with Lidia.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Elvira Egmond, his Vintage Babe is Luise Rainer, and Sex in Advertising is covered this week by Carl’s Jr. At Dustbury, it’s Mistinguett and Julianne Moore.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for inclusion in next week’s Rule 5 roundup is midnight on Saturday, March 14. Links on the topic of pi (or pie) will be especially appreciated due to their topical nature.


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Category: Rule 5

Issa: Her Majesty & #OccupyResoluteDesk Are Both Beyond Justice & They Know It

Posted on | March 8, 2015 | 36 Comments

by Smitty

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Sunday suggested that Hillary Clinton could face criminal charges if she knowingly withholds emails from congressional investigators.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Issa noted that “voluntary cooperation does not guarantee that it’s a crime not to deliver all” requested emails.

Setting up your own security is both:

  • boneheaded due to risks, and
  • looks kinda like a precursor to shady moves.

But how, under the sun, are you going to bring charges, and actually carry out a trial?

Stipulate for a moment that you do. What difference, at that point, would it make? Irrespective of the Rodeo Clown’s personal contempt for Her Majesty, President Jarrett is going to put a pardon in front of the meat puppet for one of those elegant signatures.

Corporate integrity is like driver courage in bad weather, I realized in last Thursday’s slush. We’re going to go a little slower than the biggest coward on the road, no matter the conditions. The organization as a whole is going to be slightly slimier than the lowest cretin in the lot. When you’re beset with zero-integrity dirtbags like Occupy Resolute Desk and Her Majesty, the miracle is that we’re not closer to a banana republic than we already are.

The GOP needs to quit boring everyone with the potential for justice that is no longer attainable in this corrupt system. What’s needful is that the facts be broadcast, the plan to refresh our federal government promulgated, and the reform package put to voters for 2016.

Don’t bore me, Issa.

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton

Columnist Uses Libel in ‘Hate Speech’ Attack on First Amendment Rights

Posted on | March 8, 2015 | 81 Comments

“Take your meds before reading,” warns Kathy Shaidle about a Times of Israel column by “human rights activist” Dinah Silverstein:

In the world today, it is universally accepted that hate speech is not free speech. International human rights law . . . mandates legal protections against hate speech. . . . Every single human rights group in existence strongly supports hate speech laws and continually works to have them expanded. All countries now have laws against hate speech.
All countries, that is, except for the United States. In the US, all manner of hateful and discriminatory expression is permitted under the guise of “freedom of speech.” . . .

(Permit me to interrupt here to exercise my First Amendment freedom to say damn “the world today” and damn “human rights.”)

[T]he US steadfastly refuses to protect vulnerable minorities from even the most extreme forms of hate speech. In the landmark case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, the United States Supreme Court even ruled that KKK members have the right to advocate violence against minorities as “free speech.” . . .

(Violence is illegal. However, proving that Hateful Statement A led to Violent Felony B can be problematic, which is what Brandenburg was really about. Please continue, Ms. Silverstein.)

Human rights groups have complained for decades about America’s failure to enact laws against hate speech and the UN Human Rights Council has repeatedly expressed deep concern about America’s refusal to protect vulnerable minorities from hate speech, but nothing has ever been done to remedy the problem. . . .

(Even “human rights” whiners are protected by the First Amendment.)

What many Americans don’t seem to understand is that failing to pass laws against hate speech not only violates fundamental human rights, but also explicitly violates international law.

(And while we’re at it, damn “international law.”)

More recently, racist hate speech against Muslims inspired Anders Behring Breivik to slaughter 77 people in Norway, while hate speech from the likes of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh incited right-wing extremist Jared Lee Loughner to go on a shooting spree in Arizona.

STOP RIGHT THERE, YOU DESPICABLE LIAR!

  1. Loughner was not a “right-wing extremist”;
    and
  2. His apparent inspiration was a 9/11 Truther conspiracy film.

Read “Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession” if you want to learn about the anti-Christian, anti-capitalism paranoid cult “documentary” that evidently “incited” the Tucson massacre:

“I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”

Please read the whole thing. I spent about three or four days in January 2011 researching the background on Loughner and the Zeitgeist cult. As I complained at the time, once evidence emerged that Loughner was not a “right-wing extremist” — rather quite the opposite — everybody in the major media mysteriously lost interest in his motives. Hey, if they couldn’t promote hatred of Christianity and hatred of capitalism, what would liberal journalists do for a living?

The world if full of “international law” and “human rights” and every other species of dishonest evil, and if America alone stands against this dangerous tide of tyranny, so be it.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786

If any lying “human rights activist” thinks they can stop me from telling the truth, they’d better bring a damned army.




 

 

Category: Constitution, Kathy Shaidle

Life Sentences for Michigan Couple Who Raped 1-Year-Old Girl on Video

Posted on | March 8, 2015 | 111 Comments

Michael Emory (left) and Stevie Foehl (right)

American society is rapidly approaching maximum degeneracy:

A Michigan couple convicted of filming each other sexually abusing a 1-year-old girl received life prison sentences Thursday.
Stevie Foehl, 28, and her boyfriend, Michael Emory, 26, pleaded guilty to a slew of sex crime charges in January. Cops found videos of the unthinkable sexual assault on Emory’s computer, which they seized while he was being investigated on separate sex abuse charges.
“I don’t know how to quantify the horror this child was put through,” Judge Dennis Lieber said at the sentencing Thursday, in which Emory got three consecutive life sentences, and Foehl received life in prison.
Emory came under investigation in February 2013 after police learned of his alleged sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. Cops say the offender made contact with the teen through Craigslist, where she offered her services as a baby sitter. Her parents found out and reported it to the police.
Emory and Foehl fled, and police searched their apartment in Alpine Township. There, they found a computer containing the graphic video, which even veteran investigators found difficult to watch.
“To a person, this is the worst, one of the worst [child sex cases] they’ve had to work,” Kent County Undersheriff John Hess told WZZM.
The FBI and local authorities arrested the couple in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in August 2013. They were extradited to Michigan to face the charges against them.

Human life is cheapened a nation that accepts more than 1 million abortions a year as “a woman’s right to choose.”

If it is not wrong to kill an unborn baby, is anything wrong?

Matthew 18:6, Luke 17:2, Mark 9:42.

 

Category: Crime, Michigan, Sex

FMJRA 2.0: Daylight Savings Time Edition

Posted on | March 8, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Hey, @natashavc, Sorry Your Dishonest Scott Walker Smear Got Breitbarted
The Lonely Conservative
Batshit Crazy News
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

Rule 5 Sunday: Post-CPAC/Blogbash Edition
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny

Sex Trouble: Yes, Feminists DO ‘Practice Witchcraft … and Become Lesbians’
Ed Driscoll
Batshit Crazy News
Political Hat

Unfortunate Metaphor Alert: IRS Assigns Blind Worker To Lerner Case
Batshit Crazy News
The Pirate’s Cove
A View from the Beach

400 Men Castrated by Cult?
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

FMJRA 2.0: Day Late And A CPAC Short
Batshit Crazy News

Answer: Her Majesty Hath Decreed Him ‘Jebalicious’ To Her Chamber Pot Media
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Bibi Speaks, Pelosi Weeps
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox, 03.02.15
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Proof Positive

The Motives of Moody Loners
Batshit Crazy News
Rotten Chestnuts

Two California Teachers Charged in Beach Sex Party With Five Teenage Boys
Batshit Crazy News

Not Making This Up
Batshit Crazy News

That Carlin Bit About ‘Just Cleaning His Gun When It Suddenly Went Off…’
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Fast News

Bad Christianity, Worse Atheism
Batshit Crazy News

Police Charge Ohio Democrat With Faking His Own Kidnapping
Political Rift
Batshit Crazy News

Welfare for Terrorists
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Muslim Men Who Join ISIS ‘Attracted by the Entire Sexual Slaves Fantasy’
Dyspepsia Generation
Freedom’s Floodgates

The Flap Over EmailGate Makes No Sense
Batshit Crazy News

Server, Serve Her: Clinton Crumbling
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

Sympathy For The Prodigal Chief Justice
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

Liberal Feature; Conservative Bug
Batshit Crazy News

All Dates Are Morally Equivalent; Questions Are Raaaaacist: Shut Up
Batshit Crazy News

‘There Is No Spoon’: Radical Feminism and the Paranoid Matrix of Patriarchy
Regular Right Guy
Living In Anglo-America
Batshit Crazy News
First Street Journal

The #Pluggernaut Must Run
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (23)
  2.  Regular Right Guy (11)

Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery!



Category: FMJRA Award

No, Sir, You Cannot Be a Feminist

Posted on | March 7, 2015 | 33 Comments

Feminists gather in their covens on Tumblr.com:

raddefemme:
convincing an anti-feminist man that he’s actually a feminist because he believes in “the equality of the sexes” may seem like a victory, but in the end all you’ve done is convince a woman-hater that he’s a feminist.

celtyradfem:
This is actually very dangerous. If a man is anti-feminist it’s because he hates women not because of some misunderstanding. Don’t waste your time and energy on convincing a woman hater he’s really a nice guy deep down. All you’ll do is give him a bigger victim complex when things don’t go his way.
Anti-feminism is the political defense of woman hating — Andrea Dworkin

One of the most amazing things is to see how feminists, whose movement is not only anti-male but also anti-heterosexual, become angry when confronted with their own words. This eminent professor or that popular feminist author you’ve quoted does not actually speak for the movement, the feminist will insist, and how dare you suggest that all feminists agree with Andrew Dworkin . . . or Charlotte Bunch, Mary Daly, Marilyn Frye, Monique Wittig, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, Joyce Trebilcot, Janice Raymond, Shulamith Firestone, Susan Brownmiller, Sally Miller Gearhart, Judith Butler, Sheila Jeffreys, Gayle Rubin . . .

Feminists have spent decades erecting a wall that divides their esoteric doctrine — the core beliefs which form the theoretical basis of their ideology, the language feminists use when speaking among themselves — from their movement’s exoteric discourse, the “mainstream” rhetoric feminists use in speaking to the public. This separation, which conceals from public view the nature of radical feminist theory as it is taught in university Women’s Studies programs, is essential to preserving the credibility of feminism as a respectable movement concerned only with “equality” and “fairness” for women.

Just before launching the Sex Trouble project last June, I wrote a post called “You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!” (An allusion to a line from the movie Patton, in case you didn’t know.) For months, I had explored the canon of radical feminist literature, publishing commentaries based on that literature, and resisting the urging from readers to write a book about it. Anyone who has ever gone through the ordeal of Publishing Hell knows that a book deadline is a soul-destroying nightmare, and I’d been through that human meat-grinder more than once. But this feminist stuff kept piling up and it was apparent that no one else was crazy enough to try to make sense of it all, so I decided to risk it. What I aimed to do was to tear down the wall separating feminism’s esoteric doctrine from its exoteric discourse, to make readers understand how the day-to-day eruptions of feminist insanity we see in the headlines are connected to this core theory of the movement.

What we see, if we study carefully and pay close attention, is a movement of Having Cake and Eating It, Too. That is to say, feminists claim unlimited license to vilify men as violent oppressors, to denounce marriage and motherhood as slavery, to impugn religion, to call for the destruction of society in order to “smash patriarchy” and yet — here is the catch — they expect to be taken seriously when they denounce as a hateful misogynist anyone who objects to their radical agenda.

“If a man is anti-feminist it’s because he hates women,” says the feminist on Tumblr, assuming that only feminists are reading her words, and thus expecting that the Dworkin quote — “Anti-feminism is the political defense of woman hating” — will be accepted as the final word on the matter. But wait just a minute: Who is “raddefemme,” whose quote generated more than 5,000 notes on Tumlbr in less than three day?

“florence … 19 … lesbian … white … very neuroatypical.”

Search for definition of “neuroatypical”:

Neuroatypical is used to describe people who have bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia, circadian rhythm disorders, developmental speech disorders, Parkinson’s disease, dyslexia, and dyspraxia.

In other words, it’s a fancy synonym for “crazy.”

Here then, we have a crazy teenage lesbian acting as self-appointed arbiter of feminism, warning her fellow radicals not to persuade males that feminism means “the equality of the sexes” because doing so would merely “convince a woman-hater that he’s a feminist.” Perfect!

“All that is necessary to discredit feminism is to tell the truth about feminism.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature

They make my work so easy sometimes.

What is feminism? If “the equality of the sexes” is not the goal of this movement, what is their goal? Feminism as we now know it began with the radical New Left of the 1960s. Consider an example: Charlotte Bunch became part of an “anti-imperialist” (which is to say, pro-communist) faction of the Women’s Liberation movement, and participated in such key events as the 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant. In 1970, Bunch traveled to Hanoi as part of an “antiwar” (which is to say, pro-communist) delegation, then returned to Washington, D.C., where in the summer of 1970 she and her husband, antiwar activist Jim Weeks, moved into a communal house with Bunch’s best friend, Sharon Deevey, Deevey’s husband, and a lesbian named Joan Biren. Deevey and Biren were lovers, and soon departed to live in an all-lesbian house, leaving Bunch with the two men. Eventually, Bunch was seduced by lesbian radical Rita Mae Brown and left her husband to form a lesbian separatist collective known as The Furies.

All of this is recounted on pages 174-176 of Susan Brownmiller’s 1999 book In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. We have elsewhere cited Bunch’s 1972 manifesto “Lesbians in Revolt,” and here we will quote one of Bunch’s radical comrades in The Furies collective, Ginny Berson:

We are angry because we are oppressed by male supremacy. We have been f–ked over all our lives by a system which is based on the domination of men over women. . . . It is a system in which heterosexuality is rigidly enforced and Lesbianism rigidly suppressed. . . .
Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.

Well, there you have it in so many words. It was 1972 and, despite Ginny Berson’s demand that “every woman must make” the choice of lesbianism to “end male supremacy,” most women rejected her demand. Most women still reject her demand, and so this “system . . . based on the domination of men over women” continues to operate.

The patriarchy is still open for business.

Ginny Berson? Oh, she went on to become co-founder of Olivia Records, worked for 16 years for Pacifica Radio and eventually became vice president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB). Berson’s comrade Charlotte Bunch, of course, became an esteemed Women’s Studies professor at Rutgers University. Isn’t it weird how, despite being “f–ked over” and “oppressed” by this system of male domination, these women nevertheless enjoy prestigious careers within the Feminist-Industrial Complex? Yet here were are, more than four decades after Bunch and Berson declared war on heterosexuality and “male supremacy,” and crazy teenage lesbians are on Tumblr warning about the dangers of letting men think they can become feminists by endorsing “the equality of the sexes.”

There is something wrong with this picture, don’t you agree? Feminism is a movement that always succeeds but never declares victory. That is to say, there is never any end to feminist demands, no final objective which, once attained, will cause them to proclaim, “That’s it. We won.” So long as anyone is still free to oppose their movement — until feminists have achieved total power — they will continue discovering grievances to protest and keep demanding more! more! more!

Feminism is not a democratic movement about “equality,” it’s a totalitarian movement about power, and there is no limit, no feasible stopping point on their march to power. So long as any man has liberty or property, so long as Christians are free to preach the gospel and practice their faith, so long as young women dream of marrying men and having babies rather than becoming lesbian cat ladies — so long as anyone still resists feminism’s imperious demands for gynocratic supremacy, the movement will continue its militant aggression.

Feminism has declared war on human nature, a war it can never win. Yet the Feminist-Industrial Complex, based in academia and non-profit organizations funded with millions of dollars in tax-exempt contributions, continues to gain political power and wield cultural influence, so that this war can never end. Come back in another 10 or 20 years and, no matter how much more “progress” toward “equality” feminism has achieved by that time, the lesbian cat ladies will still be screaming as loudly as ever about how oppressed and victimized they are by misogyny and patriarchy.

What kind of man would listen while a feminist tried to “convince” him to believe in “the equality of the sexes”? 

Even if she’s attractive, what is to be gained by listening to her angry feminist lecture? She’s either crazy or a lesbian or both.

“Nah, baby,” he says. “I don’t believe in equality. I believe in love.”

And then just walk away.

 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Space Battleship Yamato
And Other Disasters

Posted on | March 7, 2015 | 14 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


It’s been a couple months since the last book post, I think, and with tax season being the usual pain in the butt that it is, I haven’t had time to do much reading – at least not of anything new. Let’s start at the beginning and work forward, shall we?

I apologize if the post title gives the impression that Space Battleship Yamato, which I saw on Amazon Instant Video, is a horrible movie. It’s not. It’s extremely faithful to the 1977 movie edited from the first season of Star Blazers. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, Earth is being slowly destroyed by a radioactive bombardment conducted by the Gamilons, against whom Earth’s most advanced weapons are useless. Bitter ex-pilot Kodai finds a message capsule while prospecting for scrap on the surface, and the capsule contains designs for powerful new engines, a new weapon called the Wave Motion Gun, and the promise of technology to reverse the damage done by the Gamilons – if Earth can reach the faraway planet of Iskander. Earth’s High Command uses this technology to rebuild the legendary battleship Yamato into an interstellar dreadnought to break through the Gamilon forces, and Kodai volunteers for duty aboard her – which puts him in immediate conflict with Captain Okita, who Kodai holds responsible for his brother’s death, and Yuki, a fellow pilot who despises Kodai for resigning and (she feels) abandoning his fellow pilots. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a very good one, and well worth the $4 rental.

John Ringo’s Strands of Sorrow is the concluding novel to his Black Tide Rising series about the outbreak of a highly infectious zombie plague and how the survivors manage to fight back and re-establish some semblance of civilization. Much of the plot revolves around the problems caused by the rescue of senior civilian and military personnel who aren’t well-equipped (emotionally or mentally) to deal with the zombie hordes, which eventually forces the Smith sisters (better known to their compatriots as Shewolf and Seawolf) into a desperate act to keep things from sliding back into Hell. Recommended.

Not quite on the same topic, but still decent reading, is Sam Schall’s Duty from Ashes, the sequel to Vengeance from Ashes. In this second book, Major Ashlyn Shaw and her Marines get to take the fight to the enemy…but there are forces behind the scenes that Major Shaw and her superiors don’t even suspect are there. Good brain candy at a decent price.

On a completely unrelated subject, there’s Mike Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet, a collection of jokes, quips and occasionally serious material that much like South Park has something to offend everyone. if you follow Mike on Facebook, you’ve probably seen a lot of this before, but it is handy to have it all in one place.

Also in the non-fiction category is Stanley G. Payne’s Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Professor Payne has a reputation as the foremost American scholar of Fascism and its derivative philosophies, and if this book is any example of his other works, it’s a well-deserved reputation. He spends much of the book pointing out the differences in origin, philosophy, and effects of Italian Fascism, German Naziism, and Spanish Falangism, to say nothing of dozens of other movements often called fascist, whether they were or not. Worth reading, if only to gather ammunition against leftards abusing a term which has a very specific meaning.

Finally, one of the nominees on the Sad Puppies list is John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them, and it’s true: this tale begins long after most other fairy tales end, with its hero a middle-aged man whose childhood adventures are a faded memory. I found Wright’s tale wrenching and touching by turns, and wish he’d spent more words showing us what happened instead of having Tommy relate some of the events as he’s talking to the friends he’s trying to recruit into another adventure; at times, the writing style verges on the Lovecraftian. Still, it’s a grand little tale, and I can’t recommend it enough.


Category: Books
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