UPDATED: At Least Five Dead in Shooting at Annapolis, Md., Newspaper Office, Suspect Is a Young White Male

Posted on | June 28, 2018 | 1 Comment

Breaking news from Maryland’s state capital:

A shooting has occurred at the Capital Gazette in Anne Arundel County, a paper that is owned by The Baltimore Sun, according to reports from Gazette staff.
Anne Arundel County Police confirmed there was an “active shooter” at 888 Bestgate Road, where the newspaper’s offices are located. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed it was responding to a “shooting incident” at the Gazette.
Phil Davis, a Gazette reporter, said that multiple people had been shot. Police did not immediately respond to requests for further information.
Police were also at The Baltimore Sun newsroom in Baltimore. Police said there was no threat on the Sun, and that their presence was a precaution.

UPDATE: CBS News:

A law enforcement source confirms to CBS News’ Jeff Pegues that there are injuries.
An aerial view shows a massive police presence and people being led out of a building with their hands raised. Medevac helicopters could also be seen responding.
White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters says President Trump has been briefed on the shooting and “our thoughts and prayers are with all that are affected.”

CNN says sources tell them one person is in custody, although it is not clear whether this is the shooter, and the motive is still unknown.
UPDATE II: Annapolis is about 30 miles south of Baltimore, which is one of the most violent cities in America:

Baltimore has set a new per-capita homicide record as gunmen killed for drugs, cash, payback — or no apparent reason at all.
A surge of homicides in the starkly divided city resulted in 343 killings in 2017, bringing the annual homicide rate to its highest ever — roughly 56 killings per 100,000 people.

Baltimore is second only to St. Louis for highest per capita murder rate. Whether this has any relevance to the shooting in Annapolis, I don’t know, but the point is that six people are murdered during an average week in Baltimore, without ever attracting national media attention, but this shooting at an Annapolis newspaper office is all over CNN.

UPDATE III: Fox News reports:

Multiple deaths were confirmed in Maryland on Thursday after a suspect opened fire outside of the Capital Gazette’s newsroom in Anne Arundel County — as journalists covering the terrifying scene inside their building.
The suspect was apprehended, Sheriff Ron Bateman told Fox News, but local police confirmed news of an “active shooter situation” on Twitter. The FBI’s Baltimore field office has responded to the scene.
Amid the shooting, reporters and employees for the local newspaper continued to do their jobs.
Anthony Messenger, an intern for the news outlet, tweeted of an “active shooter” at 888 Bestgate — the office building of the Gazette. “Please help us,” Messenger wrote.
Reporter Phil Davis detailed more information of what happened in his newsroom online, writing: “A single shooter shot multiple people at my office, some of whom are dead.”
“Gunman shot through the glass door to the office and opened fire on multiple employees,” he said. Davis said that while he couldn’t give a conclusive number of fatalities, “it’s bad.”

UPDATE IV: In a news conference at the scene, authorities confirmed “several” fatalities and “several” wounded. The suspect is in custody and “is being interviewed by detectives.”

UPDATE V: According to CBS News, the shooter is a white male in his 20s who wasn’t carrying any identification and refused to tell authorities his identity. At least five people are dead, while the number of wounded has not been confirmed.

UPDATE VI: CBS News adds further details:

The suspect accused of killing five people in a shooting at a Maryland newspaper had damaged the tips of his fingers in an apparent attempt to thwart efforts by police to identify him by his fingerprints, a law enforcement officials tells CBS News. Authorities said the suspect is a white male in his 20s who they have not yet identified. . . .
The suspect did not have identification on his person. He’s described as having long hair. A law enforcement source says authorities are using other means of identifying him, including facial recognition technology to search databases of passports and driver’s licenses.
A law enforcement source said he carried smoke bombs or flash bangs in his backpack. Police said he used a “long gun” in the shooting, which a source said was a shotgun.
CBS News has also learned the gunman opened fire through the glass door into the newsroom. Eyewitness told authorities the shots sent reporters and other employees under desks and other hiding places.
Pegues reports that investigators will be trying determine the suspect’s motive. They will try to recover the suspect’s electronic devices — if there are any — and to see if he has any social media accounts.

It is important to avoid speculation in the immediate aftermath of incidents like this. What was the gunman’s motive? We don’t know, because we don’t even know who the gunman is yet. Of course, it’s possible that the shooter had some sort of political motive, but so far we have no evidence to indicate what that motive might be.

Category: Crime, Maryland

In The Mailbox: 06.27.18

Posted on | June 28, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Joe For America seems to have hung up his blogging jock, so with Fausta still on the DL, we’re adding PanAm Post to the blogroll at her suggestion.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #299
EBL: SCOTUS Donkey Punches Government Unions
Twitchy: Hot Take – With Justice Kennedy Retiring, It’s Time To Report To The Death Camps
Louder With Crowder: Listen To DNC Hearing Of Justice Kennedy’s Retirement

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Conservative Madness On Immigration, also, Podcast #86 – The Immigration Episode
American Power: Michelle Malkin – The #AbolishICE Fringe Has Become The Democrats’ Mainstream
American Thinker: Leftist Hypocrisy Just Keeps On Coming
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News, also, Animal’s Additional SCOTUS News
BattleSwarm: SCOTUS Strikes Down Public Employee Union Fees For Non-Members
CDR Salamander: Lies, Damn Lies, And Ship Maintenance
Da Tech Guy: Justice Kennedy Leaves With A Flourish, also, Ten One-Line Thoughts Under My Fedora
Don Surber: Behold The Chickensquawk
Dustbury: Scripps Scraps Tulsa Cluster
First Street Journal: SCOTUS And The “Muslim Ban”
The Geller Report: Macron Losing Control Over Muslim-dominated No-Go Areas, Asks Public For Help, also, GOP Rep Calls on Maxine Waters To Resign, Files Censure Motion
Hogewash: Gilmore v. Jones, et al News, More News, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
JustOneMinute: To Quote Joe Biden, This Is A BFD
Legal Insurrection: Trump Gets To Fill Another SCOTUS Seat As Justice Kennedy Retires, also, Trump Voters Now Being Targeted By Media Liberals
PanAm Post: The UN Exposes Maduro’s Atrocities In A Devastating Report
Power Line: Unhinged, also, A Strike For Freedom In Janus Case
Shark Tank: Democrats Split On Abolishing ICE
Shot In The Dark: This Is Today’s DFL
STUMP: Geeking Out – Public Pension Mortality Assumptions
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Communism And You
The Political Hat: The Privilege Of Paying For Your Own Indoctrination
This Ain’t Hell: Manning Fails In Senate Bid, also, Reality Winner Changes Plea
Victory Girls: Mueller Russia Probe Looks For Fall Conclusions
Volokh Conspiracy: The Limited Effects Of The Janus Decision
Weasel Zippers: “Unhinged” – RNC Releases Ad Slamming The Loony Left, also, Chris Matthews Has Meltdown When Asked How Democrats Can Fight Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee
Megan McArdle: Right-Sizing The Twitter Mob
Mark Steyn: The Offset Jet Set

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Category: Linkagery

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | June 27, 2018 | Comments Off on The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

“Youth to End Sexual Violence is one example of how youth-led organizations around the world are standing together in solidarity — demanding a seat at the discussion table for youth survivors, activists, and leaders. It’s young people like us who are providing the most inclusive leadership.”
— Joel Davis, Huffington Post, Dec. 5, 2014

The cost of attending Columbia University is $70,826 a year, including room and board. Joel Davis was not only attending this prestigious Ivy League institution, but also studied classical piano at the Julliard School and had spent a year at England’s elite Oxford University.

Did I mention that Joel Davis is homosexual? Openly and proudly so, attending the February 2017 gala of the pro-gay Human Rights Campaign, and posting selfies kissing his boyfriend, Jonathan Fitzgerald.

Davis was an activist, co-founder of Youth to End Sexual Violence, and now, it would appear, young Mr. Davis is on his way to federal prison:

Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced today the arrest of JOEL DAVIS on charges of enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity, attempted sexual exploitation of a minor, and possession, receipt, and distribution of child pornography. DAVIS was arrested today and will be presented today in Manhattan federal court before the Honorable Kevin N. Fox.
U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said: “Joel Davis started an organization devoted to stopping sexual violence, while allegedly engaged in the duplicitous behavior of sharing explicit images of infants engaged in sexual activity. Davis also allegedly solicited an undercover officer — whom he thought to be a willing participant — to send sexually explicit videos of his nine-year-old daughter, and even to set up a sexual encounter between himself and a two-year-old. The conduct alleged against Joel Davis is as unfathomable as it is sickening, and as this case demonstrates, law enforcement will keep its watchful eye on the darkest corners of the internet to bring predators to justice.”
FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. said: “Having started an organization that pushed for the end of sexual violence, Davis displayed the highest degree of hypocrisy by his alleged attempts to sexually exploit multiple minors. As if this wasn’t repulsive enough, Davis allegedly possessed and distributed utterly explicit images of innocent infants and toddlers being sexually abused by adults. Crimes against children such as those alleged are taken very seriously by the FBI, and we continue to work tirelessly to investigate those who place the most helpless members of the American public at risk.”
According to the allegations in the Complaint sworn out today in Manhattan federal court and statements made during court proceedings:
Over the course of several weeks in June 2018, DAVIS, who started an organization devoted to ending sexual violence, exchanged text messages with law enforcement officers operating in an undercover capacity. During the course of these conversations, DAVIS told the undercover officers that he was sexually interested in children of all ages. DAVIS sent the undercover officers sexually explicit photographs of infants and toddlers, including photographs in which the infants and toddlers were engaged in sexual activity with adults. During the course of text conversations with one of the undercover officers, DAVIS described explicit sexual activity that he intended to engage in with the purported nine-year-old daughter of the undercover officer and with the purported two-year-old daughter of the undercover officer’s girlfriend. DAVIS also repeatedly asked that undercover officer to take naked and sexually explicit pictures and videos of his purported daughter and his purported girlfriend’s toddler daughter and to send the pictures and videos to DAVIS.

Why would a gay man want to have sex with a little girl? The logic of this is mysterious, unless you remember that Joel Davis — in addition to (allegedly) possessing a massive stash of baby porn — was a student at prestigious Columbia University, which recruits practitioners and advocates of every kind of despicable perversion.

That’s what diversity means in the Ivy League. Baby-rapers are always welcome at Columbia, if they’ve got high SAT scores and rich parents.

So if your kid got turned down by Columbia or Harvard (or didn’t bother applying to any of those schools, because there’s no way you could afford it) you should congratulate yourself on your good fortune. What an odious mark of shame it is in the 21st century to attend a so-called “elite” university, where all the students now are degenerate freaks.

Category: Crime, The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

Heterosexual White Male Democrat Loses Primary to Socialist Puerto Rican Woman

Posted on | June 27, 2018 | Comments Off on Heterosexual White Male Democrat Loses Primary to Socialist Puerto Rican Woman

Guys like Joe Crowley have no future as Democrats.

The legacy of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat is that heterosexual white male Democrats are rapidly becoming an endangered species:

Rep. Joe Crowley, one of the top Democrats in the House of Representatives, lost his New York primary in a shocking upset on Tuesday night to community organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Crowley, having fundraised nearly $3 million for the race in New York’s 14th District, fell easily to a first-time candidate with a viral introduction video, a Democratic Socialists of America membership card, and a proudly leftist agenda. She ran on Medicare-for-all, a federal jobs guarantee, and getting tough on Wall Street. The race was called just before 10 pm for Ocasio-Cortez. . . .
Crowley, who has been in Congress since 1999, is the No. 4 Democrat in the House and was widely viewed as an eventual successor to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Though he was a stalwart progressive on nearly every issue, he also had close ties to Wall Street. This made him a formidable fundraiser, something that Ocasio-Cortez turned against Crowley in the primary. She eventually fundraised about $600,000 through small-dollar donors.

Crowley outspent his primary opponent 5-to-1, but he’s a heterosexual white male and she’s a Puerto Rican woman who labeled him a symbol of the “political patriarchy.” Having made identity politics the basis of their last three presidential campaigns — the first black president, then the first female (almost) president — Democrats have been taken over by “intersectionality” and candidates spewing the kind of jargon you used to have to take a college Gender Studies class to learn.

Socialists like Aleandria Ocasio-Cortez now control the Democrat Party.

The Democrats are now anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexuality, not to mention anti-capitalist and ultimately, anti-American.

“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .”

Category: Democrats, New York, Racism, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.26.18

Posted on | June 26, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.26.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: FREEZE ALL MORAL POSTURING
Twitchy: Oliver Willis Trashes Jake Tapper For Calling Keith Ellison Out On Farrakhan
Louder With Crowder: Crowder Confronts Firebomb Lady

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: You Cannot Make Sound Decisions Based On Feelings
American Power: SCOTUS Upholds Trump’s Travel Ban
American Thinker: A Double Injustice Throws A Scare Into The Nation’s Judges
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Pretentious Gasbag News
BattleSwarm: Watch Hollywood Morons Fail A Citizenship Test
CDR Salamander: Development Aid, With Chinese Characteristics
Da Tech Guy: Don’t Forget, They Want You Dead, also, An American In China
Don Surber: Trump’s Luck And The Axis Of Evil
Dustbury: Live At The Apollo
First Street Journal: The Justice Who Speaks The Least But Says The Most
Fred On Everything: Holmes, Uncle Clunk, And An Epic Con Job
The Geller Report: Since 2014 Muslim Migrants Have Killed Or Injured Over 1000 People In Jihad Attacks, also, Rep. Steve King – We Are Heading Toward A Second Civil War
Hogewash: What Would Buckets Do? also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
JustOneMinute: When Trust Is Gone
Legal Insurrection: Restaurant Owner That Booted Sarah Sanders Followed Her Family To Another Restaurant & Started A Protest, also, Reactions To Trump Travel Order Victory
Power Line: Democrat Threatens To Murder Congressman’s Children, also, Sometimes It’s The Crime You Didn’t Commit That Nails You
Shark Tank: The Big U.S. Immigration Balancing Act
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Half-Pint Is RAAAAACIST!
This Ain’t Hell: Army Adding Eight Weeks To Infantry Training, also, Charles Clymer Goes Full Tiara-Boy
Victory Girls: Italy Sticks To Hardline On Migrants
Volokh Conspiracy: The “Travel Ban” Decision In One (Non-Snarky) Sentence
Weasel Zippers: Army Training Will Now Focus On Battlefield Skills, Not Social Issues, also, Feds Warn Antifa To Cease Occupation of ICE Building
Megan McArdle: Defending Samantha Bee Isn’t Principled, It’s Tribalism

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Category: Linkagery

Fear and Loathing in a Highgate Mansion: Johnny Depp Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | June 26, 2018 | 1 Comment

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in 2003 (left) and as a loser in 2018 (right).

If you haven’t read Rolling Stone‘s 10,000-word profile of Johnny Depp, I can summarize it briefly: He’s wrecked. He’s ruined. The Pirates of the Caribbean star has utterly destroyed his career and reputation, and is rapidly approaching financial ruin. The drug-addled 55-year-old actor is living out a 21st-century version of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.

Do you realize that the five Pirates films grossed a combined $4.5 billion? And that Depp’s cut of that gold mine was $600 million? Basic arithmetic tells you that Depp was making $40 million a year — about $750,000 a week — for more than a decade, and there is no logical explanation for why he should be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy now, except for the unfortunate fact that Johnny Depp is a fool. When he first starred as Jack Sparrow, Depp was 40 and had been a celebrity for almost 20 years. He became a teen idol in the late 1980s for his role on the TV series 21 Jump Street, and it’s bizarre to compare the pathetic wreck Depp has become to the handsome young star whose face was once a pinup on the bedroom walls of nearly every 14-year-old girl in America.

Johnny Depp as a teen magazine pinup idol in 1988.

What happened to Johnny Depp? It’s a long and sordid story. Rolling Stone reporter Stephen Rodrick spent three days interviewing Depp at the mansion the actor is renting in London’s Highgate neighborhood, and found Depp mired in self-pity, bitterly scapegoating others for a series of personal and financial misfortunes that are actually his own fault.

Depp is suing his former business manager, accusing Joel Mandel’s firm of swindling him out money. The lawsuit itself was evidence of Depp’s bad judgment because, by suing Mandel’s firm, he gave them a pretext to countersue. When the press got hold of their complaint, detailing the prodigal extravagance of the actor’s lifestyle, the result was a devastating public-relations disaster for Depp, who was already radioactive because of his nasty 2016 divorce from actress Amber Heard. One of the little details Rodrick captures is that one of Depp’s tattoos has been recently altered from “SLIM” (his nickname for Heard) to “SCUM.”

Amber Heard was Mrs. Johnny Depp just long enough to destroy him.

Never marry a bisexual. Excuse me for saying that, but Depp’s marriage to the openly bisexual Heard certainly isn’t the first example of a discernible pattern — guy with a kinky streak marries a bisexual woman thinking he’s found the gold mine of sexual adventure, only to discover that “bisexual” is a synonym for emotionally disturbed.

As a young man, Johnny Depp cut quite a swath through Hollywood, dating actress Winona Ryder and supermodel Kate Moss before settling down in 1998 with French actress Vanessa Paradis, with whom he had two children, Lily-Rose and Jack. In 2006, Depp credited fatherhood with helping him hit his stride as an actor. “You have to have some sort of legacy in truth and honesty that you leave to your kiddies and the people you love,” he said in an interview after the release of the second Pirates film, saying fatherhood gave him a “real foundation, a real strong place to stand in life, in work, in everything.”

Five years later, Depp threw that foundation away. Heard was cast as Depp’s romantic interest in The Rum Diary, based on Hunter S. Thompson’s early novel about his dissolute life as a young reporter in Puerto Rico. Since Depp was executive producer of the movie, obviously he must have approved Heard for that role and, if he was casting his new girlfriend, so to speak, he certainly had an excellent eye for beauty.

Beware of pretty faces that you find.
A pretty face can hide an evil mind. . . .
Odds are you won’t live to see tomorrow.

The lyrics of that old R&B hit might have saved Johnny Depp a world of woe and a lot of money. The plot of The Rum Diary has Depp’s character stealing Heard’s character away from her fiancé, a real-estate developer who is also his boss, which is rather ironic, in retrospect.

Amber Heard was only 22 when she starred with Depp in The Rum Diary.

When filming of The Rum Diary began in 2009, Heard was not yet 23, and Johnny Depp was 45, although he was playing a much younger character. (Thompson was 24 when he wrote the novel.) Heard was a lapsed Catholic girl from Texas who had become an atheist libertarian and a lesbian — or, at least, a lesbian’s girlfriend. In 2008, Heard became the lover of L.A. photographer Tasya van Ree, a woman 10 years her senior. This could not have been a secret to Johnny Depp. Heard publicly “came out” in 2010 at a gay media gala in Hollywood:

I think when I became aware of my role in the media, I had to ask myself an important question “Am I part of the problem?” And I think that when millions and millions of hard-working, tax paying Americans are denied their rights and denied their equality you have to ask yourself what are the factors that are an epidemic problem and that’s what this is. Injustice can never be stood for. It always must be fought against and I just was sick of it being a problem. . . .
I think that the injustice of people staying in the closet is more than I can bear with a clear conscience and I couldn’t sleep at night if I was a part of that problem, if I was part of the lies.
I personally think that if you deny something or if you hide something you’re inadvertently admitting it’s wrong. I don’t feel like I’m wrong. I don’t feel like millions of people are wrong because they love who they love or they were born how they were born. I’m proud to be on the right side of history and I can do nothing more than encourage people to look at their lives and ask “What side of history am I on? Am I doing the right thing or am I doing the wrong thing?”

Oh, no, “the right side of history”!

If her atheism and bisexuality were not enough to warn any man to avoid Amber Heard, that phrase should have been the final deal-breaker. Never date anyone who thinks they’re on “the right side of history.”

Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot — totalitarians always claim to “be on the right side of history,” as Johnny Depp was about to learn.

What was Johnny thinking when he decided to abandon the mother of his two children to take up with a girl half his age who’d been dating a lesbian since she was 22? Well, of course, he wasn’t thinking at all, at least not with the frontal lobes of his cerebral cortex.

Feminists insist that human sexual behavior is “socially constructed,” as if nothing as simple as primal urges could be involved. The thin veneer of civilization which restrains humanity’s animal instincts is more fragile than some allegedly enlightened intellectuals would have us believe. What do we expect to happen when a former teen idol who has made a fortune playing a pirate — by definition, an outlaw — encounters a beautiful young atheist lesbian who considers her sexuality a political statement about being on “the right side of history”?

“Don’t do it, Johnny!” the ghostly voice of Hunter S. Thompson might have been heard warning Depp. “Can’t you see that girl is crazy? She’s as decadent and depraved as Churchill Downs on Derby Day!”

Alas, Depp didn’t heed any voices of caution, ghostly or otherwise. Basic common sense, or the lyrics of that 1966 Johnny Rivers song, should have been enough to tell him that Amber Heard was just poison in a pretty package, but when a guy’s making $40 million a year, he probably figures he can afford to take a long-shot gamble like that. Depp, who had never bothered to marry the mother of his children, dumped her for Heard in 2012, and the couple were married in February 2015. All the omens of the Depp-Heard romance were bad from the start. The Rum Diary was a box-office disaster, panned by critics and ignored by audiences, earning barely half the $45 million it cost to produce. Depp’s marriage to Heard lasted barely a year. She filed for divorce in May 2016, and in December of that year, Heard publicly accused Depp of domestic violence.

She’s on “the right side of history,” remember?

It’s as if a terrible curse has befallen Johnny Depp:

Over the past 18 months, there has been little but bad news for Depp. In addition to the financial woes, there were reports he couldn’t remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece. He had split from his longtime lawyer and agent. And he was alone. His tabloid-scarred divorce from actress Heard is complete, but not before there were persuasive allegations of physical abuse that Depp vehemently denies. Depp’s inner circle had begged him to not wed Heard or to at least obtain a prenup. Depp ignored his loved ones’ advice. And there were whispers that Depp’s recreational drug and alcohol use were crippling him.
During my London visit, Depp is alternately hilarious, sly and incoherent. The days begin after dark and run until first light. There is a scared, hunted look about him. Despite grand talks about hitting the town, we never leave the house. As Depp’s mind leads us down various rabbit holes, I often think of a line that he recited as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland: “Have I gone mad?”

You can read the rest of that sad tale, and if you have sons — I’ve got four of them — you should send it to them via email or Facebook, as a warning of what horrors might await them, should they ever be foolish enough to think they can live like a Caribbean pirate in real life.

Captain Jack Sparrow is now shipwrecked, and probably doomed beyond all hope of redemption. Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum.

Category: Celebrities, Fear. Loathing., Hollywood

Summer Reading List

Posted on | June 26, 2018 | 1 Comment

— by Wombat-socho

Good heavens, it’s been almost six months since I sat down and bashed out a book post. I’ll try to be a little more regular about it, maybe step it up to quarterly from semi-annual. We’ll see how it goes.For those of you who have forgotten how these posts work, here’s the FAQ from about five years ago. I am also amenable to bribery if you have a book you want my opinion on, whether it needs praise or burial. There’s a master list of previous book posts here.

Going from most recent to most aged, I’ll start off with the first two issues of Castalia House’s long-awaited Alt*Hero comics, Crackdown and Rebel’s Cell, which take us to a world where superheroes are mostly government-controlled, especially in the EU where the first issue is set. But as we can see in the closing pages of that issue, even in Europe there are superpowered people not on board with that plan…I read both issues on my Kindle Fire, which does a very good job of rendering the comics, and as far as art and story go, the series is off to a good start.

Back in 2017 I reviewed Mark Wandrey’s Cartwright’s Cavaliers, the first book in the Revelations Cycle he co-wrote with Chris Kennedy. The good news is that the other three novels (Asbaran Solutions, Winged Hussars, and Golden Horde) that set the stage by introducing you to the other companies of the Four Horsemen are every bit as good, and even the short story collection A Fistful of Credits, which includes some names you might recognize -Brad Torgerson, Chris Nuttall, Jon Del Arroz, etc. – upholds the standard. I admit that I jumped ahead to read Chris Kennedy’s A Fiery Sunset, in which the war the Revelations Cycle sets the stage for breaks out, before finishing all 12(!) of the books in the cycle, but I couldn’t wait to see where this was going. This is a great series, full of interesting characters with serious problems in a universe where there’s a lot of strange things and stranger aliens yet to be (re)discovered. Highly Recommended.

On a more practical note, Maggie Hogarth has a second how-to book for artists, writers, and other creative types: Business For The Right-Brained. This is another Three Jaguars book, chock-full of illos featuring Business Manager, Marketer, and most importantly, Artist, but also loaded with practical advice, including the all-important question: do you really want to make a career out of art, regardless of the medium? I can’t recommend this book highly enough; in fact, I took the unusual step of buying it in paperback.

Finally, in the It’s Old But It’s Good Department, Mike Williamson’s A Long Time Until Now is another entry in the “modern soldiers in the past” subgenre, and a very good one it is. Two MRAPs full of assorted grunts, Air Force civil affairs troops, and an engineering lieutenant who’s feeling very much out of his depth wind up being dropped into Paleolithic times, along with small bands of other displaced people including Romans. It’s an absorbing read, and handles the complex personal relations of the squad as they try to figure out what’s going on and deal with it. There are supposed to be sequels on the way, and I for one am looking forward to them.