Tax season ended for me on April 14; this was the first time since I started working for H&R Block that I haven’t worked April 15, but to be honest, this season has been enough of a pain in the ass for me that I didn’t mind knocking off a day early…well, a month and a day early, since the season was extended to May 17, but my contract ended on April 16 and I was in no mood to volunteer to work the extended season. Already done my part to keep the Las Vegas hotels afloat this year, thank you very much. Anyhow, before I pitch into the book reviews, a couple of links of interest to folks interested in SF and/or popular culture.
First, Nick Monroe does a thorough demolition of an idiot who blames the poor reception of the disastrous Star Wars sequels on Gamergate, Donald Trump, Q, white supremacy and God knows what all. Long but well worth reading, because this Rewriting Ripley is hardly unique – as those of us who were with the Sad Puppies a few years back can attest.
Secondly, Vox Day’s Arkhaven Comics has launched an alternative to Webtoons, Arktoons. The site aims to be competition not only to Webtoons but to the dying mainstream comics companies, who it certainly has beat on not only quantity of content but quality.
Thirdly, after neglecting the poor thing for far too long, I am updating Wombat’s Bookshelf, which is just what it says on the label: an index to the book reviews I’ve done here. I’ve gotten caught up through the end of 2019, and I should have 2020 and 2021 done by this evening. I invite you to take a look and see if there’s anything you missed; the site includes helpful links not just to the posts but to Amazon for the books reviewed.
Finally, I don’t remember often enough to beat the drum for the National Fantasy Fan Federation, now celebrating its 80th year. In addition to the monthly newsletter, the N3F also publishes eight zines covering just about every aspect of geek culture, with a ton of reviews. Public (non-voting) memberships are free, voting memberships start at $6/year, and all publications come to your email box in PDF format regardless of your membership level. (Disclaimer: I am the treasurer & membership/recruitment-wallah.) Silicon Valley delenda est.
Probably the best thing I’ve read in the last month or so is the H. Beam Piper Megapack, which includes just about all the SF Piper ever published (except, oddly enough, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen) plus two non-SF novels, Rebel Raider and Murder In The Gunroom. Now, if you have the Ace/Baen anthologies and novels from the 1980s, you already have most of what’s in this book, but for 99 cents it’s still a great deal – and a lot more portable than the paperbacks.
I was not nearly so impressed with Marko Kloos’ Aftershocks, the first in a new series from him. We meet the protagonist as he’s being released from a POW camp, having been on the losing end of an interplanetary war – which somebody seems to want to restart. Regardless of George R.R. Martin’s opinion, this is not nearly as good as Kloos’ Frontlines series; there was nothing about it that made me interested in looking at the sequels, whether or not they’re free through Kindle Unlimited. Now, Orders Of Battle, on the other hand, that’ll be worth the $6 it’ll cost to keep it. The seventh novel in the aforementioned Frontlines series, this tale of a reconnaissance in force against the former colony planet Willoughby, held by the alien Lankies since the beginning of the war, grabs you and drags you in – perhaps because you know the protagonist (and his wife) very well after six books, and perhaps because Kloos is writing a straightforward space opera instead of farting around with skulduggery and secret plots.
That’s something Peter Nealen does a lot better, quite frankly. Took me a while to finish up Thunder Run, which is the sixth in his Maelstrom Rising series, but when I did, it delivered. The story is still with the Triarii Grex Luporum teams in Europe, where the EDC is still trying to put the screws to Poland and the other Eastern European nations who are tired of their supranational shit. Things aren’t going well for the Poles and their fellow rebels, but the EDC isn’t having things all their own way, either. Nealen does a good job of covering everything from tactical combat up to and including the Big Picture, both military and political. I am looking forward to the next book, Area Denial, which is due out in September.
Some of you may remember Moe Lane from his previous life as a political blogger; he’s given that up to blog about books, music, movies, and role-playing games, and is also writing books, like the most excellent Frozen Dreams, Set in a post-apocalyptic Baja California, it’s a fantasy that starts with the premise that magic has returned with rather brutal effects on the America we know and love. Officially, there’s no magic or magicians in New California’s Cin City, but unofficially, the cleaning ladies and stagehands know more than they’ll say about the subject, and that’s a good thing for Shamus Tom Vargas, who’s been Called to Clear a murder case. If you ever wondered what a mashup of noir detective film and urban fantasy was like, well, here’s your chance to find out. An excellent deal at $2.99.
Even as the Derek Chauvin case was fresh in memory — the reading of the verdict in a Minneapolis courtroom, the shackling of the former police officer, the jubilation at what many saw as justice in the death of George Floyd — even then, blood flowed on America’s streets.
And even then, some of that blood was shed at the hands of law enforcement.
At least six people were fatally shot by officers across the United States in the 24 hours after jurors reached a verdict in the murder case against Chauvin on Tuesday. The roll call of the dead is distressing:
A 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio.
An oft-arrested man in Escondido, California.
A 42-year-old man in eastern North Carolina. . . .
An unidentified man in San Antonio.
Another man, killed in the same city within hours of the first.
A 31-year-old man in central Massachusetts.
The circumstances surrounding each death differ widely.
Were they engaged in crime? Were they resisting arrest? Did they pose a threat of deadly violence? “Circumstances . . . differ widely,” we are told, but all the Associated Press and the headline writers at the Huffington Post are interested in is the number, with the implication that the lives of innocent Americans everywhere are endangered by the police.
What is the point of issuing pistols to police officers, if they never shoot any criminals? In 2020, about 1,200 suspects were shot to death by cops — a hundred a month — and very few of those shootings could legitimately be considered “controversial.” For every questionable police shooting, there are many dozens of cases that are strictly “local news” because either (a) the suspect was white, and there’s no racial angle to exploit, or (b) the suspect was so flagrantly dangerous not even Ben Crump would object to cops shooting him dead.
My point is that cops shooting bad guys is not a rare event in America, and thank God for that, because the potential of getting shot — the credible threat — is what makes law enforcement effective. Why would anyone cooperate with a police officer otherwise?
What the Associated Press has done is to foster the false impression — a standard trope of BLM propaganda — that suspects who get shot by cops generally don’t deserve to be shot, that police are routinely using deadly force where it is not necessary or lawful. The only purpose this propaganda serves is to encourage more criminals to resist arrest, which will predictably result in more suspects being shot by cops, while at the same time every report of a suspect being killed will result in more riots and more political pressure to reduce law enforcement.
Even if someone is charging at you with a knife, cops can’t shoot them — that’s the madhouse toward which the media seek to lead us.
The journalists responsible for this are truly “the enemy of the people.”
It was a beautiful sunny day in Tonopah today, so I opened the kitchen window while I played video games. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
An autopsy later showed that Jones’ urine and blood tested positive for phencyclidine, or PCP, a hallucinogen. . . .
Jones had a felony conviction on his record and would have faced a mandatory three years in prison if convicted on a charge of being a felon in possession of a weapon.
The loaded .45 Jones was carrying on the night of Nov. 19, 2020, had been purchased by his brother. We do not know — the article in the Omaha World-Herald doesn’t tell us — whether the brother acted as a “straw man” purchaser to provide his criminal brother with a weapon, which would be a federal felony. Liberals are always proclaiming they want “common sense” gun-control laws, and prohibiting convicted felons from possessing firearms is about as common-sense as it gets. Need I explain the relevance of this to the death of Kenneth Jones?
Contrary to what liberals would have us believe, there are already numerous laws — federal, state and local — which regulate the sale and possession of firearms.
Criminals do not obey gun-control laws. If it were in their nature to obey laws, they wouldn’t be criminals, would they?
and
The way to prevent “gun violence” (a phrase beloved by the liberal media) is to enforce existing laws.
Guess whose job it is to enforce laws?
Oh, wait — it’s the police! And liberals hate the police.
So it’s about 7:30 on a November night, a week before Thanksgiving, when Omaha police officers Dan Faulkner and Rich Martier are on patrol on the south side of Omaha, on South 27th Street about a mile west of the Missouri River. Let me ask the reader: What do you know about Omaha? And what do you know about standard police procedures?
Knowing nothing at all about the geography of Omaha, I would hazard a guess that the city’s south side includes what most people would call “bad neighborhoods,” that the south side is home to most of Omaha’s black population, and is also where most gun violence in the city occurs. Because the job of law enforcement is to prevent crime and apprehend criminals, I would further speculate that Omaha cops spend a lot of time patrolling the south side of the city: “Hunt where the ducks are,” as the old adage goes. All of which is to say, it was not a coincidence that officers Faulkner and Martier were in the vicinity of South 27th Street on the evening of Nov. 19. They’re both four-year veterans of the force, and had probably spent a lot of time in that neighborhood, so when they saw a Dodge Charger driving erratically, they knew what was up.
“Probable cause” — an impaired driver, that was what they suspected. There were three women in the car, and Kenneth Jones was in the back seat on the driver’s side. Even before they exited their patrol vehicle, the cops saw Jones reaching around in the back seat. If you’ve watched enough bodycam videos on YouTube — you are subscribed to the Police Activity channel, right? — you’ve seen this scenario played out dozens of times in office-involved shootings: Cops pull over a bad guy, notice him moving around in the vehicle in a way that suggests he’s trying to hide something, and the order is shouted: “Show me your hands!”
Before we get to the video, let me digress for a moment and ask you to consider something: What is the point of issuing pistols to police officers, if they never shoot any criminals? In 2020, about 1,200 suspects were shot to death by cops — a hundred a month — and very few of those shootings could legitimately be considered “controversial.” For every questionable police shooting, there are many dozens of cases that are strictly “local news” because either (a) the suspect was white, and there’s no racial angle to exploit, or (b) the suspect was so flagrantly dangerous not even Ben Crump would object to cops shooting him dead.
My point is that cops shooting bad guys is not a rare event in America, and thank God for that, because the potential of getting shot — the credible threat — is what makes law enforcement effective. Why would anyone cooperate with a police officer otherwise?
You’re driving 90 mph and see the blue lights in your rearview mirror, why not just keep going, if the cop can’t shoot you? The cop wants to put you in handcuffs? Just say “no,” because he can’t shoot you. That gun on the officer’s hip is there for a reason, you see. If cops were prohibited from using their guns, there would be no real law enforcement, and criminals would be able to perpetrate felonies with impunity.
This is the future anarchy toward which anti-cop rhetoric is leading us. America will become a society in which criminals have no fear of police, in which no one will be safe from violent predators. And while I’m digressing, let me ask: How many unsolved homicides have there been in Omaha in the past 15 or 20 years? I ask this because Kenneth Jones was 35 years old and had apparent been perpetrating felonies his entire adult life. He had been busted at least three times on weapons charges, and in 2014 was sentenced to prison: “Jones was released on May 3, 2018 after serving three-and-a-half years with 191 days of good time, according to records from the Department of Corrections.” Is anyone foolish enough to believe that Jones was in the habit of carrying weapons for peaceful and legal purposes? No, don’t be silly — he was a full-time criminal, and the pistol was a tool of his felonious trade. We will never know how many people Kenneth Jones robbed, assaulted, or murdered during the course of his criminal life, but we do know this: He’ll never shoot anyone again.
“I’ve got my f**king gun right on your face.”
Say what you will, but you can’t say Officer Martier failed to explain the situation clearly to Kenneth Jones. Everybody else in the car raised their hands, but Jones kept reaching around, because he knew damned well he was going back to prison if he got caught with that gun.
How often have you heard liberal advocates of gun control speak about the need to “get guns off our streets”? Well, how do they suppose this is going to happen? Whose job will it be to apprehend criminals and confiscate their weapons? Cops, that’s who. And what will happen when, predictably, criminals don’t cooperate with the program?
You just watched the video. Now imagine how many more shootings like this we’re going to see if Democrats enact new gun-control laws.
Maybe you think more laws are the answer to the “gun violence” problem, but in my opinion, the real solution to the problem is more effective enforcement of the laws we already have. And really, how could any American be against effective law enforcement?
We have talked before about this case (“Nika Holbert and the BLM Myth”), but I must again address the death of Nika Holbert because one of the YouTube channels I watch regularly has featured it.
John Correia’s Active Self Protection channel is both entertaining and educational. If you want to see real-life violent confrontations analyzed by a specialist in self-defense, this is the channel for you. Seldom do I ever disagree with John Correia, but in analyzing the shootout between Holbert and Officer Josh Baker, Correia suggest that the way to prevent such incidents is to end “the drug war.” Watch the video:
John is just wrong on this issue of “the drug war,” and I’ll explain why.
Narcotic use is a proxy for stupidity. Yes, there are people at Harvard with drug habits, and plenty of folks with high SAT scores might enjoy the occasional tab of ecstasy or toot of coke, but in general — as a sociological statistic — dopeheads are not valedictorians. Beyond that simple fact of life, an important but less-appreciated aspect of the “drug war” is that the way you get busted for dope is by being stupid.
When I was a teenage dopehead, the importance of avoiding interactions with the law-enforcement community was obvious enough. You didn’t want to be caught “holding,” as we said, especially when you were involved in the, uh, commercial distribution of illegal substances.
A smart dopehead would not be driving around with dope in the car. Leave your stash at home, dude. But if you are going to carry dope with you, maybe you shouldn’t be driving a car owned by a drug dealer with six felony warrants. That was Nika Holbert’s stupid mistake, followed by the even more stupid mistake of pulling a gun on a cop.
Think of this in terms of incentives. As a society, it behooves us to reward intelligence, to make sure that the smartest people get into positions where their intelligence can be most usefully employed. Without clever people to design computers and so forth, our civilization’s technological advancement would be impaired. But the obverse this principle is also true — stupidity must be penalized. Why? Because stupid people, if left to do as they please, will screw things up for everybody.
Who Broke the Milkshake Machine?
Everything wrong in our country — from traffic jams to lousy restaurant service to the presidency of Joe Biden — is the fault of stupid people.
Think about all the ways stupid people make your life worse. Say you pull into the drive-thru line at McDonald’s. You’re going to wait longer than necessary because, somewhere up ahead of you in the line, there is a stupid person who can’t get their order right. Instead of ordering something simple — “Give me a Number Three meal” — they have to do it all complicated, and not communicating very clearly. Because they’re stupid. When you finally get to order your large chocolate milkshake, they tell you, “Sorry, the milkshake machine’s broken.” Why? Who broke the milkshake machine? A stupid person, that’s who.
Excuse me for digressing into a gripe about my pet peeves, but my point is, there is a shortage of intelligent people in America, whereas we have a vast surplus of stupidity. Why? Incentives.
As a society, we are no longer sufficiently penalizing stupidity. Among the potential penalties for being stupid is a loss of income, but apparently you can’t fire people for being stupid nowadays, because they’ll sue for “worker’s rights” or whatever, which is why McDonald’s keeps hiring idiots who don’t know how a milkshake machine works.
This same basic problem is why a fat idiot thinks she can drive around with dope in her purse and a pistol in a car owned by a drug dealer, but starts shrieking like an innocent victim when a cop tries to put the handcuffs on her. And then gets killed because she is apparently too stupid to know what happens when you point a pistol at a cop.
According to online records from both Metro and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Nika Holbert’s criminal background includes several repeat misdemeanors, including driving with a revoked license and theft under $500. Holbert also had a felony drug charge from 2010.
Her last listed interaction with law enforcement was a public indecency charge in 2017.
“Live and learn” as the old adage says, but stupidity is incurable. The only way to protect society against the harm caused by stupid people is by quarantine — put them behind bars so that they can’t make life miserable for the rest of us. Alas, however, stupid people are voters, and they tend to vote for the kind of politicians who think the answer to every problem is to make life easier for the stupid people who elect them.
“Let’s decriminalize drugs,” say the stupid people, who are statistically more likely to be dopeheads, and also more likely to get caught. Then the politicians who pander to such people get elected, and when their stupid policies turn communities into nightmare wastelands, everyone pretends to be surprised by this predictable outcome. Oregon legalized dope, and Portland is a lunatic hellscape. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
While we’re at it, let’s discuss the role of technology in what happened to Nika Holbert. You see, the reason she got pulled over was because he ran the license plate number on the Camaro she was driving and learned it was owned by a drug dealer with six outstanding warrants. Cops now have computers in their patrol cars that make it much easier to do this and, in many jurisdictions, police cars are equipped with automatic scanning devices that alert cops to vehicles that are stolen, or with other issues including outstanding warrants. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the Democrat-controlled city council in Nashville considered tag-scanning technology to be “controversial”:
License plate reader technology was previously banned in Metro Nashville back in 2017.
After street racing problems caused public safety concerns, the conversation has been brought back into focus for the Metro Council. At the start of 2020 three different bills looked to address how LPRs could be utilized properly in Nashville.
“We need some more tools in our toolbox in order to help completely eradicate this dangerous activity,” District 26 Councilmember Courtney Johnston said.
Johnston, whose legislation was deferred until February 2, said she listened to people’s concerns on how the technology would affect policing and privacy.
Who are the “people” who have these “concerns”? The same people, I suspect, who got tag-scanners banned in Nashville in 2017.
Stupid people, that’s who. You see, stupidity is a hereditary trait, and so there are a lot of people out walking around on our nation’s streets — voting for Democrats, and attending city council meetings — who have stupid relatives in prison. When you see a story in the media talking about how the “community” is concerned that police are being too successful at putting criminals behind bars, this “community” sentiment comes from the stupid relatives of stupid criminals.
Man, if I’d been stupid enough to get myself shot by cops back when I was a teenage dopehead, my family wouldn’t have been “demanding answers.” My kinfolk are smart enough it would have been obvious to them that I’d simply suffered the predictable consequences of stupidity.
“No, sir. I have nothing to say. I understand that I have the right to have my attorney present during questioning.”
Never went to prison, because I’m not stupid.
Also, eventually, I realized the error of my ways, and one of my youthful errors was hanging around with losers and troublemakers.
This is another reason why I’m against John Correia’s idea of surrendering to stupid people in what he calls “the drug war.”
Some People Should Ride the Bus
Stupid behavior leads to bad consequences, and smart people eventually notice this pattern, either in their own lives or by observing the lives of others. It is only the truly stupid among us — the hopeless dimwits — who are repeatedly in trouble with the law.
Did I mention that Nika Holbert’s criminal record was released by officials? As evidence of incorrigible stupidity, it’s quite conclusive. She kept getting caught for driving without a license, or driving with fake tags on the car, or possessing small quantities of marijuana, which are exactly the kind of things that stupid people get caught doing.
Stupid people should not be allowed to drive. That’s why we have public transportation, for people who are too stupid to drive. What part of “Nika should have been riding the bus” do I need to explain here?
America’s problem is not merely our failure to penalize stupidity, but also that intelligent people are far too polite for their own good. We have been taught that it’s wrong — “insensitive” or too “judgmental” — to make stupid people feel ashamed of their stupidity. This is an unfortunate consequence of the “self-esteem” cult that took root in our education system decades ago. The emergence of this cult was a typical example of what happens when mediocre minds (think, education majors) are exposed to sociology statistics without proper adult supervision.
Some education professional noticed that (a) successful people tend to have (b) high self-esteem, and concluded that (b) was the cause of (a).
Notice how I just assumed that the reader is (a) capable of understanding analogies and (b) familiar with Broadway musicals. This is because I understand that 1,500 words into a blog post is not where you find people who should be riding the bus, IYKWIMAITYD.
No, the kind of people who are still reading after 1,500 words are extraordinarily intelligent. So smart are my blog readers, in fact, that some of them are designing space robots for NASA.
And driving German cars. I don’t know if there are any sociological studies on this, but based on a small sample of space-robot engineers, I have observed a distinct preference for German automobiles. However, correlation is not causation, and simply buying a Volkswagen won’t turn you into a NASA engineer, the same way that high self-esteem won’t make you successful. This is the error of the Cult of Self-Esteem, which has ruined our school system because teachers think they can make kids succeed simply by telling them how wonderful they are.
That’s why no one ever told Nika Holbert she was too stupid to be allowed to drive a car. And she ended up getting shot for it.
