Taking Out The Laundry

Posted on | September 5, 2017 | Comments Off on Taking Out The Laundry

Welcome to another all-too-infrequent book post at The Other McCain. As you might have guessed from the post title, this post is mostly going to be about Charles Stross’ Laundry novels, which are about the adventures of “Bob Howard”, a rising star in the British agency tasked with defending Her Majesty’s realms against occult and extradimensional threats. An obscure survival of the Second World War’s Special Operations Executive, the Laundry is forever contending with not just horrors from beyond time and space, but the bureaucratic regulations afflicting the civil servants of Her Majesty’s Government, and as Bob rises in rank, it seems that he’s been spending almost as much time fighting the waves of paperwork as he has been dealing with things like the Sleeper in the Pyramid.

With The Rhesus Chart, Stross takes the focus off Howard and also stops writing pastiches of famous British spy novels, and in my arrogant opinion, the next four Laundry novels are a lot better for it. Most of the focus of The Rhesus Chart is on Bob’s former girlfriend Mhari and the unfortunate mathematical discovery that puts her and her (surviving) fellow bankers on the Laundry’s org chart, to say nothing of a duel that has lethal consequences for quite a few Laundry staffers we’ve come to know. This is followed by The Annihilation Score, wherein Bob has to pick up the workload of a certain Deputy Senior Secretary (or is it Deeply Scary Sorcerer?) and is mostly out of the picture; the protagonist of The Annihilation Score is his now-estranged wife and Laundry comrade Dr. Dominique (“Mo”) O’Brien, keeper of a certain very lethal violin – and new head of an office tasked with dealing with a sudden increase in superheroes (and supervillians) in England’s green and pleasant land. Just to add to her stress levels, the aforementioned Mhari is assigned as her executive assistant, and Ramona Random (formerly of the U.S. Black Chamber, last seen in The Jennifer Morgue), shows up as her liaison to the Deep Ones, and as if all that weren’t enough, her violin seems to be developing a nasty habit of showing up in her dreams…

Which brings us to The Nightmare Stacks. The Laundry’s senior staff has been decimated, their headquarters destroyed, and so it falls to new recruits Alex Schwartz and Dr. Peter Russell, D. Theology (the latter guiltily worrying about his parish while he’s on Laundry duty) to scope out a new location in Leeds, which unfortunately for poor Alex, is his hometown that he’s been avoiding like the plague. Little does he know that he’s about to meet a girl who finds his condition fascinating, because she’s not from around here…and from “around here”, I mean Earth. Great for Alex. Not so great for Leeds. Everything comes to a head in the latest book, The Delirium Brief, and we’re reunited with all our favorite characters from the previous books (to say nothing of a few villains) as the unthinkable happens – having survived PLAN RED RABBIT, Her Majesty’s Government needs a scapegoat, and what better way to sweep everything under the rug than by firing everyone at the Laundry and privatising the remains? Unfortunately, the PM and his crew haven’t realized that the Laundry is responsible to a higher authority, and with people like Bob, Mo, Mhari, Alex, Cassie, and the legendary BASHFUL INCENDIARY against them, HMG has definitely bitten off more than they can chew.

All in all, I like the last four Laundry novels a lot. They’re very different than the first four, and while they’re operating in the same urban fantasy space as Delta Green, the Dresden Files, and the Monster Hunter International series, having them set in the UK instead of the US gives them a very different flavor, quite aside from the middle-aged punk aesthetic that helps bring Bob and Mo together. Very much worth reading, all of them.

Also on my Kindle was Mark Wandrey’s Cartwright’s Cavaliers, a coming-of-age novel in which the protagonist has to rebuild the legendary mercenary company is mother drove into the ground. Fortunately, young Jim Cartwright has a few friends with some old but useful hardware, and with a little guts, a little moxie, and a lot of luck, he just might make a go of things. Nominated for a Dragon Award this year, and definitely recommended.

Also also, The LawDog Files comes recommended by The International Lord Of Hate himself, and rightly so, because this collection of tales about enforcing the law in the West Texas town of Bugscuffle is full of weirdness and hilarity, including the famous Case of the Pink Gorilla Suit. Well worth your time if borrowed through Kindle Unlimited or your money if you buy it straight up.

Category: Books

Rule 5 Sunday: Butts! Boobs! The Final OUTRAGE!!!

Posted on | September 3, 2017 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

A few years ago, before completely succumbing to a severe social justice infection, Marvel Comics hired Italian artist Milo Manara to do an alternate cover for Spider-Woman #1. Inevitably, Manara’s cover sparked OUTRAGE! from critics who deemed the character excessively sexualized, and Marvel backed down in a hurry. Not so Frank Cho, mischievous champion of hot chicks in comics, especially hot chicks with huge racks. Cho did a number of “sample” comic covers for fans at comic conventions, which were extremely popular among everyone but the usual “feminist” scolds, who Cho made sure to further provoke with the inclusion of a hooded Spider-Gwen head announcing her “Outrage!” in the corner of every cover.
As usual, the following links are to pics generally considered NSFW. The management is not responsible for any OUTRAGE!!! you may be afflicted by as a result in failing to exercise discretion in your clicking. Roll Tide.

Milo Manara’s Spider-Woman #1 variant cover art.

Spider-Gwen reprise by Frank Cho

The continuing OUTRAGE!!!

Ninety Miles from Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, Girls With Guns, and The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1. No Goodstuff this week (hopefully the Thai junta hasn’t cut off his intertubes), but Animal Magnetism contributes Rule Five Windy Day Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s contributions this week include Epic Boat Sex, Bethany Woodruff, Forbidden Planet, Burning Man 2017, White After Labor Day, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Jackie De Shannon.

A View From The Beach brings us Marlow’s Horse, Fish Pic Friday – Tilefish, Reason #5668 That Trump Was Elected, Tanlines Thursday, Way Back Wednesday, I Think It’s Going to Rain Today, Reason #5661 – #5666 That Trump Was Elected, Persian Risks Beheading to Bring You Boobs, How Much Is that Gas Anyway? and Are the Cute a Constitutionally Protected Class?

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Kelly Giddish, his Vintage Babe is Glynis Johns, Sex in Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret, and we have a late score from the 10th century: Vikings 49, Equal Opportunity 3. At Dustbury, it’s Frederique van der Wal and Janet Mock.

Thanks to everyone for their links!

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women
Amazon Personal Bra Boutique

Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: The One You Love To Hate

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: OUTRAGE!! (Parte Dos)
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

‘We Will Not Set Arbitrary Timelines’: Kellogg Has Skin in Afghanistan Game
Proof Positive
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Behind The Sun
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

More ‘Antifa’ Violence in Berkeley
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 08.28.17
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.29.17
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Democrats: The Atheist Anti-American Feminist Gun-Grabber Man-Hating Party
EBL

Professor Fired After Claiming ‘Evil’ Texas Deserved Deadly Hurricane as ‘Karma’
EBL

‘Antifa’ Professor Facing 40 Years in Prison for Assault Claims … Victimhood?
A View From The Beach
EBL
Adam Piggott

In The Mailbox Leftovers: 08.30.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Dry-Humping the Patriarchy, Because @LaurenJauregui Is a Feminist Like That
Welcome To My Playpen
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.31.17
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 09.01.17
Proof Positive
EBL

The New New Left and The Great Twerking Meltdown of 2013

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | Comments Off on The New New Left and The Great Twerking Meltdown of 2013

by Smitty

Instapundit points to Charles R. Kesler in the Clairmont Review of Books, The Old New Left and the New New Left. He resonated with a book I’ve nearly finished. Note this passage (emphasis mine), in addition to reading the whole thing:

It hasn’t disappeared entirely, but the theory embraced by today’s campus Left is far different from that of the ’60s New Left. The Port Huron Statement reflected deep intellectual engagement, if not exactly seriousness. Its contemporary influences included Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956). Marcuse, a student of Martin Heidegger’s, had perhaps the primary philosophical influence on the movement, and along with other writers helped to connect it, however tendentiously, to Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and Rousseau.
The new New Left has no comparable philosophical grounding or intellectual foundation. A widely adopted primer of its thought (used in the Claremont Colleges, for instance), Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, now in its third edition, nods in the direction of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, but these are dusty portraits on the wall rather than active intellectual interests. The book presumes the truth of an easy-going and politically convenient postmodernism without ever establishing it, or reflecting on the alternative. But that’s what’s so handy about postmodernism, isn’t it? It lets you get on with it—skip past the questions of truth and justice, and get right to the delicious matter of power.

The slippery snowflake slope resembles what’s occurred in the culture. Consider Camille Paglia’s critique of Miley Cyrus and the Great Twerking Meltdown of 2013 (emphasis also mine):

The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European art-film eroticism and that were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.
Young performers will probably never equal or surpass the genuine shocks delivered by the young Madonna, as when she sensually rolled around in a lacy wedding dress and thumped her chest with the mic while singing “Like a Virgin” at the first MTV awards show in 1984. Her influence was massive and profound, on a global scale.
But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.
Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

Morally, mentally, and physically (as one’s understanding of the crotch damage goes) the Left looks nihilistic. It feeds virally off its American cultural host, trying to destroy it. Fortunately for god-fearing Americans, the only thing the Left can eradicate is itself.

I just don’t see how the Left (Democrats/media/universities) recover. Their success thus far, as in all asymmetric warfare, has been predicated upon not getting caught out in the open. This Commie strategy has gone a long way on passive aggression. With Her Majesty’s loss, they seem to be trying a more active approach. But it has a stench of desperation about it. Because, in contrast to the Lefty degeneration alluded to in the two quotations above, conservative intelligence has been on the increase (I think).

Ultimately, the lesson of the Book of Exodus beckons. People who’ve been reduced to slaves, and their children, are unfit for the mission. We have to understand that reversing Gramsci’s Long March is going to take a couple of generations. We have to focus on building actual knowledge in the next generations, and protecting their Precious Bodily Fluids from Lefty poisoning.

Category: Culture

Email to @betsyscribeindc

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | Comments Off on Email to @betsyscribeindc

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
— Rhett Butler, Gone With the Wind

Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2017 6:09PM ET
From: Robert McCain
To: Betsy Rothstein
BCC: Bert the Samoan Lawyer

Dear Miss Rothstein:
As the old show-biz saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so I am in your debt for the Aug. 30 Daily Caller article headlined, “Journo Welcomes Female Wrath Into His Life.” When you emailed me in reply to the press release for next Saturday’s event in Worcester, I was a little too busy to reply immediately, but did ask you to phone me the next day, and later sent you replies to your initial questions. Well, that didn’t make it into your story, but I was rather amused to see you included this:

The Mirror also sought comment from Washington journalists who are familiar with his work.
“I think the guy is bad news,” said a Washington journalist. “Seems like a parody of the racist, sexist Neanderthal that the opponents want to portray all Republicans as being.”
“He’s gross,” said a female Washington writer when asked for comment. “You can disagree with feminism without being derisive about women.”
When McCain worked The Washington Times, The Mirror has learned that some female coworkers found him “funny” and others thought he was “offensive.”

Whether some anonymous writer thinks of me as a Neanderthal is of no consequence, but I fully agree with your second source: Disagreeing with feminism doesn’t mean being “derisive about women,” and I am not.

This is a point I made myself in reply to one of your email questions. You asked how I viewed women “generally,” and in my answer I said, “There obviously is no correct answer to such a question, because no one views women ‘generally.’ Rather, every intelligent person views people as individuals, and we tend to be offended by generalizations about groups.” Elsewhere in my reply, I remarked on the unfortunate tendency to think that any man who criticizes feminism is somehow “anti-woman.” This is some like saying a critic of Marxism is “anti-worker,” and is self-evidently false. Radical ideologues who insist that all opponents of their identity-politics movement are motivated by bad faith (mala fides) are engaged in a dishonest rhetorical game, and become offended when their tactics are exposed. During the Cold War, Communists always engaged in character assassination against their enemies, because Communism was (and still is) indefensible on its merits.

Elsewhere in your article, you seem interested in reviving the ancient fable that I am some kind of “white supremacist,” which falls into the category of fake news, as President Trump might say. As I told the pathetic bungler Max Blumenthal a dozen years ago, I’m too lazy to be evil. You might also want to consult my November 2009 blog post, “How to Reply to the Southern Poverty Law Center (If You Must).”

All of this is “asked and answered,” and there are many friends who could testify to my innocence in this regard, but why bother? In the Trump Age, liberals expect us to believe that all 65 million Americans who voted Republican last fall are crypto-Nazis, so I suppose I was just a few years early in being smeared as a “hater.” Now that you’re working for a notorious bastion of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, I suppose I should welcome you to the club with the secret handshake, etc.

Considering how the Left’s character assassins are always slinging mud at their enemies, no sane man with a regard for his own reputation would become a conservative, but no one’s ever accused me of being sane. This email is BCC’d to my friend Bert the Samoan Lawyer, who can attest that I’ve been notoriously crazy as long as he’s known me, going back to my career as the music columnist “Doctor Rock” at Jacksonville (Ala.) State University. Of course, I was a Democrat back then, and there weren’t any left-wing media clairvoyants probing my subconscious mind for evidence of Thought Crime, so maybe I was a dangerous “alt-right” extremist the whole time, without even realizing it. But I digress . . .

A basic problem with Washington, D.C., is that it is a town full of utterly selfish people intent on climbing the Ziggurat of Ambition. Everybody’s concerned about their “image” and enhancing their “connections” by sucking up to those they perceive as influential. In their constant scramble for advantage, these status-conscious people often develop the habit of disparaging others behind their backs, and organizing clandestine attacks on those they deem enemies or rivals. A few months ago, I found myself at a CPAC party being yelled at by a certain GOP operative because of an old quarrel between two acquaintances. This was a quarrel that I had attempted to prevent, but my friends had disregarded my advice and so, inadvertently, this led someone to make me out to be the Bad Guy, and this GOP operative felt the need to get up in my face.

What can anyone do, in such a situation? Once upon a time, an insult might result in an invitation to the old Bladensburg dueling grounds, but nowadays it’s mainly just people badmouthing each other behind their backs, and trying to get people fired from their jobs by giving anonymous quotes to reporters. That’s at least 90% of the explanation for why, more than a decade ago, malcontent employees and disgruntled ex-employees of The Washington Times decided to make me the scapegoat for their grievances with the newspaper’s senior editors. As for the other 10%, I long ago said as much in my own defense as was necessary, and there’s no need to repeat all that today. Anyway, I need to wrap this up because Alabama’s playing Florida State tonight, and I wouldn’t want to miss the kickoff. Thanks again for the publicity, ma’am. Roll Tide!

— RSM

Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Transgender Victimhood Narrative Sustains Further Embarrassment

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | 3 Comments

Nothing is more important to the self-esteem of Democrats than the belief that they are fighting on behalf of Victims of Oppression. The Democrat Party is organized as an identity-politics coalition and promotes the idea that victims exist categorically and oppression is systemic: All women are victims of sexism, all black people are victims of racism, all gay people are victims of homophobia, etc. Democrats and their media allies wage continual propaganda campaigns to sell these identity group victimhood narratives. This is how, for example, the shooting death of a robbery suspect in Ferguson, Missouri, got turned into a nationwide crisis, because the Democrats who run CNN decided this particular incident should be the subject of 24/7 coverage in order to promote the victimhood narrative of “Black Lives Matter.”

Commercial conglomerates are eager to play along with this propaganda, as a matter of corporate public relations, because they don’t want to be perceived as guilty of “hate,” which is the implicit accusation against anyone who disputes the social-justice victimhood narrative. This explains why so much ballyhoo accompanied L’Oreal’s announcement last month that a British DJ named Munroe Burgdorf would become the makeup company’s first transgender “brand ambassador.”

Munroe Bergdorf makes history as the first openly
trans woman to land her own L’Oréal UK campaign
— Mic, Aug. 28

Munroe Bergdorf Opens Up About Being
a Trans Woman in a Beauty Campaign
— W, Aug. 30

Munroe Bergdorf Is The First Transgender
Model To Star In A L’Oréal Campaign
— Nylon, Aug. 31

This was P.R. hype, not journalism, and because fashion magazines are publicity agents for their advertisers, Munroe Bergdorf even got a byline in Vogue for an article entitled, “What Makeup Means to Me”:

To be the first trans woman in a L’Oréal Paris UK campaign feels amazing, and also kind of crazy. When I got the email about it I was just sat with my mum and I couldn’t believe it. But I think it’s great – I mean, as women we’re all so varied and L’Oréal are allowing more women to see themselves represented. It can be alienating, to see the same images all of the time and for none of them to relate to you. . . .

Yes, “representation” — which is to say, tokenism and quotas — is all the rage in media nowadays, as if being able to see our own images reflected back to us by TV, movies and advertisements is an inalienable right. This rhetoric fosters a sense of narcissistic entitlement on the part of those who claim that their identities are “marginalized” because they are “underrepresented” in media: “This TV show is oppressing me!”

Hiring a mixed-race transgender “ambassador” like Munroe Bergdorf was the ultimate diversity gesture for L’Oreal, a company that made about $3.7 billion profit from about $150 billion revenue in 2016. How did this cynical “social justice” pandering work out? Not very well:

With a dizzying fanfare, she was brought in as the ‘face of modern diversity’.
But days after she was announced as L’Oreal’s first transgender model, Munroe Bergdorf launched an extraordinary rant declaring all white people racist.
And [Thursday] L’Oreal confirmed the 29-year-old British star, who appeared in its recent ‘#allworthit’ campaign with Cheryl Cole and Katie Piper, has been dropped from her lucrative new role.
In a lengthy Facebook rant, she wrote: ‘Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people.
‘Because most of ya’ll don’t even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour. Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggressions to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this s***.
‘Come see me when you realise that racism isn’t learned, it’s inherited and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege.
‘Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth… then we can talk.
‘Until then stay acting shocked about how the world continues to stay f***** at the hands of your ancestors and your heads that remain buried in the sand with hands over your ears.’

Never mind that, in condemning white people as “the most violent and oppressive force on nature on Earth,” Bergdorf was denouncing his/“her” own mother (a white woman from a working-class background in northern England) and also the 87% white majority of British people. Also, never mind the white people (whose “entire existence is drenched in racism”) that run L’Oreal and paid Bergdorf as their “ambassador.” Objective facts are irrelevant to the victimhood narratives that sustain the identity politics ideology of 21st-century progressivism.

Munroe Bergdorf’s self-inflicted career destruction might be evidence of mental illness, but at least he/“she” isn’t an axe-wielding maniac:

The triumph of postmodern Third Wave feminist theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix, to summarize the key points of Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble — has unleashed a tsunami of weirdness, a tidal wave of confusion and conflict.
Consider, for example, the case of Karl Amati, a brilliant young student from Australia who decided as a teenager that he should become a “she,” and traveled to Thailand in 2015 to undergo sex-change surgery.
Ms. Amati, now 24, recently made headlines in Australia, when police say she went on a violent rampage and attacked three people with an axe at a convenience store . . .

Read the whole thing at The Patriarch Tree.

Pardon me for suggesting that the Obergefell ruling was the pivotal event that spawned our current epidemic of social/political insanity. pic.twitter.com/72vB2BlxYo

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) September 1, 2017

* * * * *

Readers can come hear me speak, and get a copy of my book Sex Trouble, next Saturday, Sept. 9, in Leominster, Massachusetts, at an event hosted by Da Tech Guy blog, the Worcester Tea Party and Granite Grok.

Tickets for this buffet luncheon event are available online, and I hope all my friends in the New England area will attend.

If you can’t make it to next week’s luncheon, however, you might want to chip in to the Shoe Leather Fund, because I’ll be spending five days up there and hope to visit Harvard University and other institutes of higher learning in the region, just to see what kind of lunacy the Gender Studies crowd is promulgating on campus this fall. Please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Gays, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

#Evergreen New York Times Ditty

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | Comments Off on #Evergreen New York Times Ditty

by Smitty

If you want to win a bet,
Go against truth in the NYeT:
Pravda-on-the-Hudson likes it wrong. (1/2)

— IGotOverMachoGrande (@smitty_one_each) September 2, 2017

Facts always seem to hide,
From their lyin' Commie pride,
Like talent from a wretched hip-hop song. (2/2)

— IGotOverMachoGrande (@smitty_one_each) September 2, 2017

Retweet these to Stick It To The Man.

Category: humor, Journalism, New York Times