The Other McCain

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

Laura Ingraham Fights The Good Fight, George Will Looks A Tool

Posted on | February 9, 2014 | 35 Comments

by Smitty (h/t Breitbart)

In an era where

  • Congress can’t budget regularly or sanely,
  • laws are passed unread,
  • law are enforced by the Rule of Winning the News Cycle,
  • the Federal Reserve prints money at will to prop up the Dow Jones,
  • labor force participation is the lowest since the Carter administration,

George Will’s notion that we need to reform immigration to replenish the workforce seems daft. As the husband of a legal immigrant, my most generous position is that we overlook whatever rules were broken by people overstaying, and permit everyone who is here now applying for citizenship, and using the existing system to legalize themselves.

Give the illegal aliens some time, say, a one year stay of execution for everyone to get their junk together, and start using the system, as it exists, to establish themselves. The first thing you do to honor the rule of law is start playing by it. The USCIS system, warts and all, is relatively unfair to everyone, and avoids the appearance of being a mere vote-buying scheme.

But illegal aliens have to know that this is a no-kidding up-or-out moment. After that grace time, let the deportations begin. No sob stories. You put up a daily countdown, you let people know that any games of chicken will be held against them. After the deadline, remaining illegal aliens are dead to us.

All of the above would require leadership, which is sorely lacking today.

George Will, your typically cogent arguments sounded completely hollow before Laura Ingraham.

Update: thanks to Fire Andrea Mitchell for video on YouTube
One other addendum to the above is that I’d also be for shoring up the borders during any grace period proffered.

Category: Immigration

How @JAMyerson Blamed @SarahPalinUSA for Tucson

Posted on | February 9, 2014 | 24 Comments

While the beatdown on Jesse Myerson’s communist advocacy will continue — compelled by the impersonal forces of history — we can take a brief detour to examine what he wrote after Jared Loughner’s deadly January 2011 shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona.

Beyond Blood Libel: A Refudiation of
Sarah Palin’s Lone Gunman Theory

You can read the whole thing, if you have a masochistic appetite for bad writing, but here’s a sample paragraph:

But even if it cannot be demonstrated that Loughner’s act grew out of the right-wing violence-glorifying culture, there remain critical pieces of context for understanding how culpability for violence is not the sole possession of the man who pulls the trigger. Arizona made the deepest cuts in the country to their mental health budget; Loughner was an obvious victim of this policy, standing as he did to benefit from such funding. Having been removed from school and rejected from the military on the grounds of his mental instability did not, owing to Arizona’s lax standards regarding firearms, prevent him from buying a gun, another important point.

Oh, so “culpability for violence is not the sole possession of the man who pulls the trigger,” which might come as a surprise to Jared Loughner, who pleaded guilty and was sentence to life in prison, but this is how Marxists think, see? Your belief in individual responsibility is “false consciousness,” and in fact you are rendered helpless by the oppressive power of the capitalist bourgeosie, as represented in the person of a certain Republican politician:

Obviously, Sarah Palin finds a link between Islamic extremism and terrorism against America, and she is right to, even though it contradicts her “lone gunman” point. I wonder, though, whether she would have made the same point about crimes beginning and ending with those who commit them if Jared Lee Loughner had been named Abdul Aziz. Wouldn’t she be right to suspect that a widespread inchoate movement which rallies around weapon-related symbols and idioms and has been known on a considerable number of occasions to resort to violence might have produced this result?

Readers will recall that, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, some idiot leftists claimed that a “target” map — showing Democrats that Sarah Palin’s political action committee had hoped to defeat in 2010 — was to blame for Loughner’s rampage at a public meeting for “targeted” Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. Myerson admits he initially believed Loughner was a right-winger:

I myself thought, at the first reports of the shooting, that, on the balance, he probably was quite likely to be a Beck-head, and I think I was right to suspect that and to remain wary of such people.
Thing is, though, I’m a sucker for empirical evidence, and mostly it does not point to Jared Lee Loughner as a foil-hat right-wing lunatic (after the mold of, say, Timothy McVeigh), gold obsession notwithstanding. In fact, a friend of his told Good Morning America, “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio.”

Coincidentally, Myerson seems to have lost interest in “empirical evidence” regarding the Tucson shooter just about the time Loughner’s friends and acquaintances started explaining that the gunman’s political beliefs were “liberal” or “radical.”

Of course, schizophrenia has no ideology, but Jared Loughner‘s descent into madness — after breaking up with a girlfriend, he started using marijuana, LSD and salvia divonorum, and dropped out of high school — was certainly not a right-wing phenomenon. And there was an unusual influence on Jared Loughner’s worldview:

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “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.”
The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner’s disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. . . .

You can read the rest of my Jan. 17, 2011, American Spectator column. Myerson obviously never read it, because he seems never to read anything that doesn’t confirm his own paranoid beliefs. Despite his self-declared devotion to “empirical evidence,” Myerson is in fact fanatically devoted to the conspiratorial worldview of Marxism. This ideological devotion more or less requires Myerson to ignore the significance of Zeitgeist as a factor in Loughner’s madness.

Myerson didn’t really want to understand why Loughner did what he did. The deaths of six people in Tucson were of interest to Myerson only insofar as they could advance the Left’s agenda.

 

Category: Intellectuals, Sarah Palin

Weaponized Rule 5 @MickfromVic

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

I denounce Mick from Vic for this wanton savagery:

Category: Rule 5

Three Realizations About #ObamaCare

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 18 Comments

by Smitty From Is Obamacare Unraveling?

. . .the administration was thinking of extending the individual health insurance policies that Obamacare was supposed to have cancelled for as much as three more years. . . .with the literal drop dead date for these old policies hitting by December 31, 2014, that would have meant those final cancellation letters would have had to go out about election day 2014. That would have meant that the administration was going to have to live through the cancelled policy nightmare all over again––but this time on election day. The health insurance plans hate the idea of another three-year reprieve. They have been counting on the relatively healthy block of prior business pouring into the new Obamacare exchanges to help stabilize the rates as lots of previously uninsured and sicker people come flooding in. . . . Republicans, and a few vulnerable Democrats, had essentially called for this last fall when legislation was floated in both the House and Senate with the “If You Like Your Policy You Can Keep It,” proposals.

Which brings me to the following:

  1. Hayek wins. Again.
  2. The insurance companies may have thought they were dealing with the pleasant Cthulhu, but the insurers are as much on the menu as the rubes who gave this no-talent rodeo clown a pass last November.
  3. The GOP is as much at fault for all of this idiocy, insofar as it plays the Progressive game, and doesn’t offer substantial reform that redistributes power, not wealth.

Other than the general political/economic collapse that’s unfolding in our country this year, things are going well. I’ve been studying to take the PMP exam a week from Monday. Come to think of it, though, our debt and misery seems to have increased with the number of advanced degrees and certifications issued. So maybe that’s a bad idea, overall. via Hot Air headlines

Category: Health Care

Boy-Crazy Teacher Meredith Powell Raped Tacoma Teenagers, Police Say

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 69 Comments

A 24-year-old Lincoln High School math teacher was charged Thursday with “two counts of third-degree child rape and communication with a minor for immoral purposes via electronic communication,” and on Friday she pleaded not guilty:

Meredith Powell performed oral sex on a 15-year-old student in her Tacoma classroom last month and sent him nude photos of herself taking a bath using the application Snapchat.
Documents said she also admitted to exchanging inappropriate texts with and having sexual contact with a second student, 16, during a Jan. 17 assembly in which they stayed behind and met in her classroom.
A third student, age 17, who was in her class during a prior year said he and Powell exchanged sexual text messages but did not have sexual contact.

According to an arrest affidavit, however, Meredith Powell admitted her crimes to Tacoma Police detectives:

On February 6, 2014, detective interviewed the victims. [He] disclosed the following: The day of the MLK assembly [Jan. 17, the boy] went to the defendant’s classroom. They kissed, he touched her breasts, and she touched his chest under his shirt. [The boy] then digitally penetrated her vagina. On the day of the assembly, [the boy] sent her a text asking if she wanted to stay behind and she agreed to.
During his interview, [a second boy] disclosed the following: The defendant is his teacher. They sent texts to each other and she sent him pictures of her naked in a bathtub. [The second boy] and the defendant kissed a few days after the MLK Day assembly when he went to her classroom and the door was locked. The defendant kissed [the second boy] and he touched her buttocks and breasts. The defendant touched [the second boy]’s chest under his shirt and performed oral sex on him. [The second boy] digitally penetrated the defendant. . . .
Detectives re-contacted the defendant and advised of her Miranda rights which she waived. She admitted the following: She preformed oral sex on [one of the boys] and her classroom door was possibly locked. He put his mouth on her breast and digitally penetrated her vagina. She told him to stop. She sent him a snapchat pictures. She thought they were of her in the bathtub and one of her in bed in the dark. The defendant admitted [one of the boys] put his mouth on her breast and digitally penetrated her vagina. They began texting after New Year’s Eve and it became inappropriate. She touched [one of the boy]’s penis over his clothes and he put his finger into her vagina. She knew her actions were wrong … When asked what she would say to the students’ parents, she said she would apologize.

“She said she would apologize”? Translation: “Hey, I’m totally sorry I got caught playing with your teenage son’s boner and stuff.”

Having recently written several items (e.g., “She Craved the Taste of Boy Flesh,” Jan. 12, and “Police: Ex-Teacher Tonya Drueppel, 33, Had Sex With 13-Year-Old ‘Girlfriend’,” Jan. 30) about sex-crime cases involving female teacher, I notice that this latest case in Tacoma is getting more media coverage than most, with reports at the Daily Mail, Daily Caller and NY Daily News. This can be explained simply: (a) the accused teacher is a skinny young blonde with a nice smile, (b) she seems to have had a habit of posting selfies on Facebook and Pinterest, providing lots of photo potential, and (c) the affidavit offers lurid details.

Dan Riehl comments on Miss Powell’s alleged crimes:

“There has to be some psychological stuff going on.
She could have just gone to a bar and found some
age appropriate men if all she wanted was some casual sex.”

 

We could speculate on what kind of “psychological stuff” Meredith Powell had “going on,” but that doesn’t explain what would seem to be a trend of these sex-crazed perverts, most of whom are not as photogenic as Meredith Powell. If more and more female teachers are having sex with teenage boys, you can’t really explain any one particular case except in the context of that trend.

However, let me make a simple observation: It is what it is.

When someone is apprehended in deviant behavior, the “why”/”how” questions — “How did they get so messed-up in the head?” — arouse our curiosity. But without a detailed personal history and psychological profile of the perpetrator, we can’t really answer those questions. The simplest explanation is that they made their personal choices and did what they wanted to do. If a woman is accused of giving a teenage boy a blow job, well, maybe she likes giving blow jobs to teenage boys.

Just throwing that out there as a possibility.

Finally, a friend on Twitter points out that Lincoln High is an urban school with lots of diversity: The students body is 27% white, 23% black, 23% Hispanic and 16% Asian, so maybe Miss Powell got kind of carried away with her celebration of multiculturalism.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex, Washington State

The Renegade Jesse Myerson

Posted on | February 8, 2014 | 89 Comments

Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) in a March 2012 cable TV appearance.

“Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.
“The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws. . . .
“One cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies . . . revolutionary violence of one class against another.”
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

When Lenin was wounded in an August 1918 assassination attempt, Josef Stalin knew what to do. The future Soviet dictator sent a telegram to Moscow, announcing that he was “instituting open and systematic mass terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents.”

Stalin ignorantly blamed “the hirelings of the bourgeoisie” for the shooting of Lenin, but in fact the would-be assassin was a 28-year-old Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan, who had spent 11 years at hard labor in tsarist prisons after being arrested for her part in a terrorist bombing plot when she was 16. What inspired Kaplan’s resolve to assassinate Lenin was the forcible suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, less than three months after the overthrow of the Kerensky government in October 1917 .

Lenin never erred on the side of leniency. Kaplan was executed with a bullet to the back of the head four days after her assassination attempt, as the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red Terror which, among thousands of deliberate atrocities, resulted in the summary execution of some 800 members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

“[T]here is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
— Karl Marx, 1848

Communism’s explicit and enthusiastic embrace of violent “revolutionary terror” is among the many facts that self-described communist Jesse Myerson seeks to ignore or evade in pretending to correct our “huge misconceptions about communism.”

Supposing the enemies of communism to be as ignorant as himself, Myerson boasts of making “points” that his opponents are incapable of answering, thus to display his imaginary intellectual superiority. Myerson’s posing is intended, as I explained yesterday, for entirely selfish purposes: By presenting himself as an insuperable advocate of far-left “progressive” ideas, he expects to be praised and admired, and thus to be elevated to a position of leadership, obtaining for himself not only fame as a sort of radical celebrity, but also an easy income as a Professional Progressive Thinker.

Glorious Idol of the Obscure Masses

Myerson’s sociopathic dishonesty suits him well for this project of pseudo-revolutionary self-advancement, and his resemblance to Anonymous “famewhore” Barrett Brown is not coincidental, the main differences being that (a) Barrett is a much better writer, and (b) Barrett had the courage of his convictions, with the result that (c) Barrett is now in federal custody awaiting trial on enough felony charges to put him in prison for life, while (d) Myerson is still running free, getting paid to publish in Salon.com and Rolling Stone, and enjoying as much sex, drugs and rock-and-roll as he can afford.

Nice work, if you can get it, but not every leftist enjoys the privileges of the radical celebrity elite. For every rock star type like Myerson, there are many hundreds of their ideological comrades who toil in obscurity on behalf of the progressive cause. The leftist masses, by their silent acceptance of Myerson’s leadership, thereby acknowledge their inferiority to him: If they were as capable as Myerson of articulating their shared beliefs, they would be his equal. Instead, because Myerson is better than them, he gets the Rolling Stone commissions and the invitations to appear on cable TV talk shows. The role assigned to the progressive masses is merely to admire and applaud Jesse Myerson, contenting themselves to bask in his reflected glory.

Sic semper hoc.

The extreme egoism of communist leaders is a trait displayed throughout the history of the movement since Marx’s ridiculous insistence that only his socialism was “scientific.” Yet such is Jesse Myerson’s egoism that he imagines himself superior even to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. At least they had the integrity to admit that the abolition of private property — the expropriation of the bourgeosie — could only be accomplished by violent revolution, and that the victors of such a revolution would have to employ the methods of violent terror to establish their dictatorship.

When Myerson’s Jan. 3 Rolling Stone article drew criticism, he responded that he did not “want the 1% dead just dispossessed.”

This was ridiculous, as any true communist could have seen. Does this young Bard College alumnus expect that billionaires will voluntarily surrender their wealth? Eh, never mind: Myerson deleted the Tweet, evidently in embarrassment.

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is … And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.”
— Friedrich Engels, 1872

Nearly two decades ago, after undertaking a careful study of Marxist philosophy, I concluded that 19th-century Germans were envious of the French Revolution and craved a sans-culotte epoch to call their own. Marxism’s “dialectical materialism,” with its allegedly scientific devotion to historical development, assigned to the French Revolution a sort of runner-up trophy in history, declaring that the quest for political equality that had inspired the uprising of 1789 was mere “bourgeois democracy,” destined soon to be eclipsed by the coming socialist revolution of the proletariat. Though Marxism advocated internationalism and appealed to the “workers of the world,” its authors were distinctly German — deriving their concept of the dialectic from Hegel — and it was generally expected that Germany, with its advanced industrial economy, would be the scene of the outbreak of the proleterian revolution.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in backward Russia, critical sniping from the German social-democrat Karl Kautsky inspired contemptuous sarcasm from Lenin and Trotsky. But who could not pity the hapless German socialists? Here their own idea had been unexpectedly successful in an inferior nation — one the German army had beaten in the World War — and there was an unmistakable humiliation in the fact that the German people had once more lost out in the world-historic revolutionary sweepstakes. The 19th-century German socialists Marx and Engels borrowed the idea of revolutionary terror from 18th-century France, and yet it was 20th-century Russians who experienced the bloody fulfillment of that hand-me-down nightmare vision.

“Marx and Engels hammered out the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . the idea that the political autocracy of the proletariat is the ‘sole form in which it can realize its control of the state.’ . . . The man who repudiates terrorism in principle . . . must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism.”
— Leon Trotsky, 1920

Terroristic violence is the sine qua non of communism, first in overthrowing the capitalist order and then in maintaining the authority of its revolutionary dictatorship “unrestricted by any laws.”

This explicit rejection of civil rights and the Rule of Law, this maniacal devotion to violence as a core principle, guaranteed that the Soviet government would be a murderous totalitarianism. Nevertheless, self-described communist Jesse Myerson airily dismisses the bloody record of Marxist-Leninist regimes with a bit of rhetorical arm-waving as he lectures us on our “huge misconceptions about communism.” Revolutionary violence disappears in a fog of moral equivalence:

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state’s willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch’s mansions, libertarian that he is, he’s going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn’t a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.
This is true both of personal possessions and private property, but it is important not to confuse the two. Property implies not a good, but a title — deeds, contracts, stocks, bonds, mortgages, &c. When Marxists talk of collectivizing ownership claims on land or “the means of production,” we are in the realm of property; when Fox Business Channel hosts move to confiscate my tie, we are in the realm of personal possessions. Communism necessarily distributes property universally, but, at least as far as this communist is concerned, can still allow you to keep your smartphone. Deal?

Ah! We are ignorantly confused between “personal possessions and private property,” Myerson tells us, so that the principle which justifies expropriation of a billionaire’s wealth (property) will not be extended to your iPhone (a mere possession).

Of course, in actual practice — as opposed to Myerson’s word games — communism’s lawlessness routinely resulted in ordinary people being deprived not only of property and personal possessions, but also deprived of liberty and life. Beyond its inherent tendency toward terroristic violence, communism proved itself incapable of producing an adequate supply of those consumer goods (not just sophisticated devices like iPhones, but also such mundane items as shoes and bread) that Myerson takes for granted in capitalist America.

So not only do the rich people lose their wealth, but everybody else is doomed to hopeless poverty and — oh, yes, by the way — your communist rulers might decide to kill you and a few million other people, just so nobody forgets who’s in charge.

The Secret Elitism of the Occupy Movement

Did I mention that Jesse Myerson’s original claim to fame was as “media coordinator” for Occupy Wall Street? Remember when that mob of smelly losers shut down the Brooklyn Bridge?

New York City police say about 700 protesters have been arrested after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and blocked traffic lanes for several hours.
On the second week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street movement, a large group of marchers broke off from others on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway and headed across the Brooklyn-bound lanes.
Police say demonstrators spilled onto the roadway Saturday night after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway. They face charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Some of the protesters said that authorities had tricked, trapped and then arrested them, according to The New York Times.
“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” Occupy Wall Street media coordinator Jesse Myerson told the newspaper.

Blame the cops! Yes, that’s it — the cops tricked us into breaking the law!

Here’s another bit from the same October 2011 article:

Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and social inequality took their “solidarity march” to Brooklyn, but battled in a war of words against officers, chanting “We are not criminals” and “Let us go!”
Some protesters tried to get away as officers started handcuffing members of the group. Dozens of protesters were seen handcuffed and sitting on the span as three buses were called in to take them away, witnesses and organizers said.
The New York Times reported a few protesters had “clambered dangerously up the structure of the bridge to get to the wooden pedestrian walkway, which is about 15 feet above the road.”
Erin Larkins, a graduate student at Columbia University who says she and her boyfriend have $130,000 combined in student loan debt, was among the thousands of protesters on the bridge. She said a friend persuaded her to join the march and she’s glad she did.
“I don’t think we’re asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again,” Larkins wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

Oh, noes! A graduate student at Columbia (annual tuition, $44,716) is eating rice and beans and worrying how she and her boyfriend can pay their rent because . . . corporate greed! Social inequality!

Why do these neo-communists always have to attend elite private schools? Jesse Myerson attended Bard College (annual tuition $45,730) where he majored in theater and “human rights studies.”

Why would Myerson pay so much to attend an elite school in Annandale when, a half-hour drive away in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess Community College boasts that it offers “the lowest tuition in New York state,” just $3,200 a year? After a couple years getting your associate’s degree at DCC, then you could transfer to a SUNY campus — say, Albany, about an hour’s drive from Annandale — where annual tuition is $5,800.

Although I don’t know if Bard College requires any math classes to get a degree in human rights, by my calculations, the difference in tuition between attending Bard ($182,920 for four years) and going the DCC/SUNY-Albany route ($18,000) is $164,920.

Saving yourself $164,920 in tuition might not put you into the 1%, but it sure will buy a lot of rice and beans, so . . .

Why did Jesse Myerson go to Bard? Because he’s better than you.

Myerson’s intellectual superiority to others is both the premise and conclusion of his every argument, and you don’t expect someone with such superior qualities to rub shoulders with those lowbrow plebians at community college, do you? No, of course not. Educating the revolutionary vanguard requires the “prestigious faculty” and “vibrant” campus life “with world-class performing arts venues” that only an elite private $45,730-a-year liberal arts college can provide.

This young communist can’t be bothered to learn history or economics, nor has he studied Marxist theory enough to understand that his rejection of revolutionary terror condemns him to the same “renegade” category to which Lenin assigned the pathetic Kautsky. And this same Jesse Myerson (Bard ’08) presumes to enlighten us as to our “huge misconceptions about communism”?

“The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

At least Marx got that much right . . .

 

Category: Culture, Economics, History, Intellectuals

Meanwhile, Elsewhere In The Culture War…

Posted on | February 7, 2014 | 21 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


While Stacy is off trying to pound sense into the thick skulls of young Marxist wannabees, I feel compelled to help fill the content gap, and since I’ve actually been able to get some reading in between stints in the tax mines, I have a few things I’d like to recommend.


First off, Casey Neumiller (who wrote the action-packed Dead Man’s Fugue) sent me a review copy of his fantasy novel Destiny’s Heir, a nice coming-of-age story involving a young magician’s apprentice, the best thief in the local guild, and the epic theft that brings them together only to realize they’ve opened an ENORMOUS can of worms. Not just your average derivative elf & dwarf crap; this is an original combination of picaresque tale and Bildungsroman. Worth your time.


Also worth your time is Brian McClellan’s Promise of Blood, recommended by Schlock Mercenary creator Howard Tayler in his blog. Gunpowder weapons don’t usually mix well with classic high fantasy, since they sort of clash with the medieval aesthetic and all that, but McClellan makes it work in this bloody tale of magic, revolution, regicide and mystery whose style reminds me somewhat of Paula Volsky’s The Gates of Twilight. Mr. Tayler is right – McClellan’s writing chops are excellent, and the story is compelling. Also, it’s only $1.99 on the Kindle.


Marko Kloos has a sequel out to Terms of Enlistment, and there’s a reason Lines of Departure is currently #2 on the Kindle War & Military Fiction list. Our hero Andrew Grayson is back, having moved from shipboard neural net manager to forward observer for the drop teams the North American Confederacy is sending to hit back at the implacable Lankies – the aliens that have so far wrecked every human colony outside the “30 line” without a still-divided humanity being able to even slow them up. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Grayson finds out during an all-too-brief shore leave on Earth that things dirtside are exponentially worse than they were when he enlisted, with many cities so close to rebellion as makes no difference. The real meat of the novel begins when Grayson’s leave ends and he finds himself assigned to a task force constituted mostly of old starships seconds away from the scrapyard and staffed with a brigade of mutinous Homeland Defense (was Territorial Army) troops. Some of the Amazon reviewers think this may be a better and tighter novel than Terms of Enlistment, and I’m not sure they’re wrong. Got this for free through the Kindle Lending Library program, but I think I’ll be shelling out my $4.99 next month when the loan expires. Very much worth it.


Speaking of sequels, knowing librarians has its privileges, and one of those is occasionally getting ARCs of books I wanted to buy anyway. For example, John Ringo’s To Sail a Darkling Sea, which I’d been agonizing over buying when a friend dropped the ARC in my lap. This is, of course, the sequel to Under a Graveyard Sky, which shows you the end of the world up close and personal as a virulent genengineered flu converts most of humanity into highly-infectious zombies. Among the few survivors are Steven Smith, a/k/a “Commodore Wolf”, who sets out with his family to rescue as many people from boats and ships adrift in the Atlantic as they can, rebuilding civilization one life raft at a time. The sequel mainly continues the story, with the added amusement of surviving Marines, sailors and Coast Guardsmen trying to help make Smith’s teenage daughters Faith and Sophia (Shewolf and Seawolf, respectively) into leaders de jure as well as de facto. As you may recall, the zombie horror subgenre bores me to tears – but for some reason, Ringo manages to hold my interest while dancing from greasy organizational stuff to a bit of the old ultra-violence to turning none-too-bright security guards and support staff into zombie killers to slams at chairborne officers who know a lot about management but damn little about leadership. A fun read, and highly recommended.


So…what have you been reading?


Category: Books

In The Mailbox, 02.07.14

Posted on | February 7, 2014 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: We Told You So!
Proof Positive: Putin It Straight
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Nancy Pelosi Pulls A Jesse Myerson
Michelle Malkin: The Left’s Valentine To Defiant Jihad-Enabler Lynne Stewart
Doug Powers: Susan Rice Blames A Video Again
Twitchy: Olivia Wilde Asks What’s Holding Back Equality For Women


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: More Than One In Six Men 26-54 Don’t Have Jobs
American Thinker: Targeting The IRS
Blackfive: Palate Cleanser – What Are 1000 High School Students Doing In My Hotel?
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Good Luck Getting Care, That Will Be $5000
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin – Pray For Noel Sheppard
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, February 6
Jammie Wearing Fools: Breaking – “No, Liberals Don’t Control The Democratic Party”
Joe For America: The White House Is Still Lying About The Keystone Pipeline
JustOneMinute: Power Station Snipers
Pat Dollard: Wisconsin II – California Initiative Would Render Public Sector Union Money Useless In Elections
Protein Wisdom: If Intentionalism/Language In Politics Is Fundamentally Unserious, Why Does The Left Want You To Ignore It?
Shot In The Dark: Journalism Saves The Day
The Jawa Report: Heartbreak! Christians In Central African Republic Expel Muslims
The Lonely Conservative: Report Finds Only 1.6% Of Americans Work For Minimum Wage
This Ain’t Hell: Waving A Hero
Megan McArdle: “Doc Shock” Reaches The Masses


Deadline to submit links for tomorrow’s FMJRA is noon on Saturday.
DO IT.
Deadline to submit links for Rule 5 Sunday is midnight Saturday.
DO THAT TOO.


Category: Linkagery
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin