Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Category: Literature

  • What Are We Reading – September 2019

    SugarFree

    Still working on re-reading The Expanse series. (Too much Borderlands 3, brah.) I hadn’t read the last two books, so I’m into new stuff, finally. Not sure how the TV show is going to handle the [censored]. But the end of the 6th books, Babylon’s Ashes, wouldn’t be the worst place to stop the show so they might not have to worry about it. I should be done with the series in time for my all-horror October tradition.

     

    OMWC

    I will confess that most of my book reading this past month has been in the bathroom. And nothing particularly interesting. Lots of magazines, though. Geeky, geeky magazines.

    So this will be prospective: I’m about to take a plane trip, and my reading on the way will be something beyond geeky. Bob Cordell’s Designing Audio Power Amplifiers was sent to me as a courtesy copy, and I’m anxious to dig in. This is the shit you do when you don’t actually have a life, but it will sustain me through 8-10 hours of airplane and gate area entertainment..

     

    jesse.in.mb

    Atkins New Diet Revolution. The boyfriend wanted to “go keto” and I suggested we maybe read a book about it instead of basing our diet on the whims of Redditors. The BF continued to read random things from Redditors and is getting a bit crazy. I need a beer to handle this and cannot have one. Weep for me Glibertarians.

    Finally finished The Boys which I started months ago and just picked up when I had 20 minutes and a tablet in hand. It was good. The humor felt ’90s transgressive (even though it’s from the mid-aughts): sort of ham-fistedly offensive for the sake of offense, and there was a massive lull of filler stories in the middle but I was glad I finished it up and would still recommend it even with what I perceive as shortcomings.

     

    mexican sharpshooter

    I promised everyone I would read something this month; I finally came through on a promise!  First time this week…

    I read Universal Basic Income:  For and Against by Anthony Sammeroff.  This name might strike a few of you as familiar as this is the person Andrew Yang was scheduled earlier this month to debate regarding UBI, but apparently found better things to do.

    He does go through the arguments for UBI, and many of the theoretical benefits it may provide such a society, and does so in as objective manner one could expect from an opponent of the idea. He doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing against it in this book, rather he questions why modern necessities became so expensive.  Half the book cleverly spells out the reason UBI is not needed, by pointing out all the things proponents of UBI insist is needed because of it’s great expensive is a result of the deleterious effects of government policy on the market.  He discusses housing markets for example, as one area one might spend their monthly stipend, then discusses all the ways government regulations limit housing development, dry up supply, and therefore drive up housing prices.  The market he argues, creates competition necessary to drive the cost of luxuries down to where they are not really luxuries anymore, which raises the standard of living for those at the bottom of the income ladder.

    He even discusses automation and cites case studies performed by the US Air Force that found the drone programs actually increased the number of Airman and contractors needed to make the drones fly—in spite of the fact the drone does not have a pilot and aircrew on board.

    Ultimately the message is remove that one thing that keeps the market from functioning in its natural form, and we don’t really need an arbitrarily defines standard of living issued to everybody.

    JW

    I’m back to cereal boxes, but I’ve expanded my reach to high bran cereal. That gives me time to take the box into the toilet with me for reading.

     

     

  • Subaru Horror Theater Vol, 9: Dream Big

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR-38oCMTEc

     

    “Push her,” her father said.

    “Daaaaaad,” Emily said. “Don’t even joke about that.”

    “Push her off the mountain,” her father said, without a trace of humor. Unconsciously, she drew her younger sister closer and wrapped both arms around her.

    “Do what your father says, dear,” her mother said. “Your sister is only six. There’s plenty of time for us to have another.”

    “Emily?” her sister asked, tipping her head back to look up at her sister.

    “Dad’s just being silly, Sarah,” Emily told her, but she wasn’t able to keep the uncertainty out of her voice.

    “It’ll be quick. Four, maybe five seconds. Look at those rocks down there,” her mother said.

    “A little bit of terror and then nothingness. It will be a release,” her father said, in a low voice. A wind came down the peak that rose next to them and pushed the two sisters as if it was all part of the plan.

    “Emily?” Sarah asked again, blubbering, face smeared with tears. Emily kissed the top of her sister’s blonde mop of hair.

    “It’s just a joke, Shrimply,” Emily whispered into her ear.

    “So you are going to pretend that you love her now?” her mother asked cruelly. “You were on your phone the whole ride up. You didn’t say one word to your sister or me or your father.”

    Emily groaned and hunched over her sister protectively.

    “Mom?” Emily whispered.

    “We bought you that phone so we could contact you when we needed it, not for you to spend all your time with your face in it,” her mother said.

    “Probably some boy,” her father said. “They always come sniffing around when the blood starts.”

    A giant fist grabbed Emily’s stomach and squeezed. She wanted to vomit, to run, to scream. She was hugging her little sister so hard she thought she could hear the child’s bones creak. In her distraction, her mother darted forward and ripped her phone out of her hands.

    “We’ll just see who is so important that you ignore your family,” her mother said, a nasty laugh bubbling up from deep within her.

    “It’s lo…” Emily started and then made herself stop talking.

    “Passcode?” her mother shrieked. “So you are hiding something!”

    “Probably sending out pictures of herself to all them boys in her class,” her father said. “All her dirty parts on the internet.” Her father shook his head in disgust.

    Sarah was crying so hard she could barely catch her breath, snot and tears running off her face to drip onto her sister’s arms. She didn’t even register the fact that Emily took two quick steps back from the edge of the cliff when their parents were poking at her phone.

    “Passcode!” her father snapped.

    “N-n-no,” Emily said.

    “Now, or you both go over. Having an ugly kid with fucked up teeth is one thing, but I’m not letting a whore live in my house.”

    “Both would be easier,” her mother said. She mimed talking on the phone, “Oh, God. I told them they were too close to the cliff. But she was trying to get a photo for her Instagram.”

    “Passcode!” her father screamed.

    “3-4-9-2,” Emily told him.

    “Whore number,” her father muttered, jabbing the numbers into the phone.

    “You’ll need my thumbprint,” Emily said, walking Sarah to them before they could object. They were three feet from the edge as she offered up her thumb and her father pressed the phone to it.

    “Texts,” her mother said, looking over her father’s shoulder.

    “No, pictures,” her father replied. “I want to see what she’s been sending out. What if the guys at work saw this shit? Cucked by my own daughter!”

    Emily picked up Sarah and ran for the car, her shoes slapping against the ancient stone of the mountain. Sarah screamed in surprise.

    “WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE GOING, YOUNG LADY?!?” her father bellowed. It was the voice that had to be obeyed when you were a child. The “about to run out into traffic” voice, the “about to fall off the roof” voice. Her legs and feet tried to comply, tried to ignore her brain and stop running. Emily screamed and managed to keep going. She opened the driver’s side door and threw her sister in, her shoulders and back protesting and got in herself. Her parents had barely covered half the distance before she had the car locked.

    “Out of that car, now!” her mother screeched.

    Her father patted his pockets and then patted them again just as Emily started the car, twisting the keys he had left in the ignition.

    “EMILY!” her father screamed.

    She hadn’t even had her first driving lesson yet. Her father promised to take her on several occasions and always broke his word. She stepped on the brake with her left foot and shifted to drive. She was still crying, she could barely see, her parents were just screaming blobs getting closer.

    “Get down there, Sarah,” she told her sister, pointing at the passenger floorboard. The girl, owl-eyed, slid down her seat bonelessly and curled into a tight ball.

    “I’LL DO IT! I’LL DO IT!” Emily screamed, but her father kept coming.

    She only hit him hard enough the first time to knock him down, backing up past her mother who shook with rage.

    He stood, holding his ribs, his mouth red with blood. “I SHOULD HAVE STOMPED YOU OUT OF HER CUNT THE MOMENT SHE TOLD ME!’ her father shouted.

    Emily felt like she was being stretched and stretched and stretched until something inside her went cold and calm.

    The second time she hit him, he flew over the edge of the cliff, his rage turning to comical surprise.

    Emily backed up again until she had her mother in front of the SUV. She watched her mother shake and gape her mouth open and close. There was a small part of Emily, way down deep, that was screaming, but it was easy to ignore.

    “Stay here,” Emily told Sarah. She took the keys out of the ignition and locked the Aspect with the fob. She balled up the keys in her hand and walked over to her mother.

    “What did you do? What did you do?” her mother asked on a loop.

    “I killed him, Mom,” Emily said gently. “Right over the cliff he wanted me to throw Sarah off.” Emily felt better than she ever had.

    “Maybe he…” her mother started.

    “Yeah, maybe he’s alright,” Emily said. She took her mother’s trembling arm. “You want to go look?”

    Her mother nodded like her head was on a spring. When she started walking toward the cliff, Emily plucked her phone from her mother’s nerveless fingers and put it in her jeans pocket.

    Emily braced herself when she and her mother looked over the edge of the cliff. Her father was not alright. He landed on an upturned knife blade of rock and split in half. His head and arms and torso where further down cliff face than his legs.

    “OH, GOD! OH, GOD!” her mother screamed. Emily swallowed a giggle that bubbled up her throat.

    Her mother turned and grabbed her with both arms and yelled in her face, “What are we GOING TO DO?”

    She didn’t have the rage and shock on her face like her husband when she fell, just a cow-like placidity and mild confusion. Emily looked over the edge of the cliff. Her mother had gone head-first into a crevasse and wedged there, her legs and feet in the air.

    Emily took in the view from the cliff and thought about how beautiful the spot was. It would be a shame when they put in the signs and the railing. Or they might block it off altogether. She took a number of rapid deep breaths and dialed 911.

    “My, my, my parents,” she stuttered, breathless and crying and with just the right amount of hysteria. “They were just trying to take a selfie! They fell! They fell!”

    She walked back to the car, repeating the story and telling the dispatcher sort of where they were. She inspected the Aspect. It looked fine except for a nondescript dent in the front bumper and a couple of drops of blood on the hood. She licked her thumb and said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” to the dispatcher as she wiped the blood away. She cleaned the blood off her thumb with a rock while cradling the phone to her ear with her shoulder and then threw the rock off the cliff.

    “My phone battery,” she said before hanging up the phone, sounding distraught. She needed time to prep Sarah before emergency services arrived. Stupid parents die in a stupid accident. Maybe just tell Sarah to say nothing. Youngest daughter mute from shock.

    The Subaru, her Subaru now, beep-blooped when she unlocked it.

  • What Are We Reading – August 2019

    JW

    I picked up a refurbed Kindle Paperwhite recently, so I’m actually reading something, other than the articles in Playboy.  I took it with me on vacation and started “Leviathan Wakes”, by James S.A. Corey; book 1 of what “The Expanse” is based on.  I enjoyed the series greatly, so I thought it would be fun to see how much it differs from the book.  Short answer, if you go by the show’s seasons, quite a bit.  None of the gubmint characters who figured prominently in the show’s early episodes have been introduced as yet.  No Mars-Belt war in the show either.

    But, it’s solidly enjoyable read and good for the show’s background material, as I like punishing myself with that kind of minutia.

    Who knows, now that I have a Kindle just lying around, maybe I’ll finally start reading regularly again.  Maybe.

    jesse.in.mb

    Finally finished The Last Policeman. It should’ve been an enjoyable procedural set just before the world ends, but I had too much going on to read it in a single siting and it suffered by being broken up into little bits and pieces. I’m currently working on Anne Corlett’s The Space Between the Stars because it was available in the local public library’s audiobook section and it had name recognition from io9’s review of it. It’s actually pretty enjoyable. A plague wipes out everyone but a handful of people were isolated for various reasons spread across Earth’s far-flung colonial system. The government is made up of assholes and the main character just wants to be left alone.

    mexican sharpshooter

    I ain’t got nothin…I’ll pick something up for next time around.

    OMWC

    Most of my reading time has been with such fascinating places as LinkedIn and Monster. But I did pull down an old favorite off the shelf, Charles Coulson’s Valence. One of my long-time geekeries and the thing in college that sidetracked me from an original career aim of engineering to becoming a chemist was an inordinate fascination with what holds molecules together and why they have the shape they do. This book and Pauling’s Nature of the Chemical Bond were almost fetish objects to Young Man With Candy. Did I mention I was a geek? If you were always itching to have a really lucid comparison of the molecular orbital and valence bond approaches to understanding molecular structure and dynamics, you have found Nirvana. The math level is low enough that even old and rusty guys like me can deal with it- basic differential equations and linear algebra.

    Side note: Coulson was also a religious author and coined the phrase “God of the Gaps.” He was the PhD adviser to Peter Higgs of the Higgs Boson fame, and an early advocate of using science to improve food production in the Third World- I would not be surprised to find that he was an inspiration for Norman Borlaug.

     

    SugarFree

    I’m rereading The Expanse series, including all the prequels and interstitial stories. It is some really solid science fiction, something rare these days. I hope Amazon doesn’t screw the pooch with the new season.

    As a side note: Another Life, on Netflix, may be the worst science fiction television of the decade. The plot is derivative–a mash-up of a few other things and done poorly, relies on the “everyone’s an asshole!” model of character development to create drama, the science is laughably bad (why in the fuck would you need to do a gravity slingshot around a sun if you have FTL drive?) and it is seemingly produced and written by people who hate science fiction.

    Brett L

    I went and picked up one of The Expanse novellas, this one the back-story on Amos. Had I read it before the particular book that dealt with Amos’s return to Baltimore (still a shithole, OMWC!, even in 2250) I might have liked it more. It really didn’t add much. As an aside, I binge watched the first three seasons of The Expanse. Although the character playing Amos is too young and thin, the guy playing him does a great job of capturing Amos’s core character as a nice guy who thinks kids should be protected and all other human life is completely worthless. It is a strange, friendly, dead-eyed psychopathy that the actor pretty much nails.

    I also read the first book of Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series. I give it a solid B. It breaks no new ground, the characters are fine, and the story moves along. It does kind of feel like the Koch brothers funded vision of The Laundry Files.

    For business, I picked up Effective Azure DevOps, because while I’m not drinking the devops Flavor-Aid, I did just lose a senior resource, and anything I can do to standardize and automate our build and deploy process will help me deliver a more consistent product and not have to do as much rework, which I no longer have the resources to indulge in where avoidable. Like any other set of IT practices, one should always be aware that your business is not necessarily the one the authors had when they created the process.

     

  • What Are We Reading for July 2019

    OMWC

    One of my “reading words” is “chrestomathy.” I have no idea how to pronounce it, and I keep forgetting to look it up. At least I know what it means, a selection of passages from an author to aid in understanding a language. So between reading “help wanted” ads, writing 75 different versions of my resume, and finishing up a couple paid articles, I grabbed the two volumes of HL Mencken’s eponymous Chrestomathies off our shelves for some comfort. And they really are quite soothing if you are a cantankerous and cynical person, as I am. In this case, the chrestomathy is designed to teach the language of criticism and invective, with a sharp turn toward literary and social insight. Besides his considerable wit, Mencken had a wonderful ear for the sound of language.

    It is not by accident that there has never been a book on Socialism which was also a work of art. Papa Marx’s Das Kapital at once comes to mind. It is as wholly devoid of graces as The Origin of Species or Science and Health; one simply cannot conceive a reasonable man reading it without aversion; it is as revolting as a barrel organ.

    -from “Jack London”

    He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, no matter how idiotic, that will get him votes,and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy

    -from “Notes on Democracy”

     

    SugarFree

    I was all over the place this month, reeling drunkenly from short story to short story, genre to genre, the only novel of note was a re-read of Fight Club, which I’ve done every couple of years since it was published in 1996. It is very, very close to being a perfect novel: black as night, funny and angry, well-written and bold. The novel has been overshadowed by the movie adaption, but the movie is all straight from the book, even lifting large chunks of dialogue directly, but neither diminishes the other. Both should be studied as how to adapt a piece of fiction for the screen, namely, if there’s a good reason to adapt it, maybe don’t throw out all the parts that made the work worth adapting in the first place. [casts Swiss’ patented narrowed-gaze at Altered Carbon, Less Than Zero, World War Z, Starship Troopers, Wanted, ad infinitum]

     

    jesse.in.mb

    My will to read has been blunted by two months of legal documents, application forms and fixing the sub-literate internal and outward-facing forms, paperwork and notices of my workplace. Perhaps I’ll finish the novel I’ve been 2/3 of the way through for four months on my flight to New Jersey today, but I’ll probably just watch a shitty movie on the in-light entertainment system instead.

    mexican sharpshooter

    I am afraid the only thing I read of consequence in the last month is my company’s compliance policy with GDPR, the SOP related to it, and the proposed rewrite I drew up and sent to the lawyers for approval.

    JW

    This week JW is reading palms…with his dick. Drop by JW’s Boutique Palmistry shop and find out the intimate details of your future by giving JW a handy.*

     

    *Lubricant will be provided gratis by jesse.in.mb, apparently this shit has an expiration date.

    SP

    I’m continuing to work my way through Jon Talton’s David Mapstone series in eBooks borrowed from the Maricopa County Library District. I’m on High Country Nocturne. I’m still enjoying them, but the emotional drama with the protagonist’s personal relationships has started wearing on me. I don’t do emotional drama in my own relationships, and I generally don’t want to deal with it in my escapist reading, either.

    However, what I’m mostly concentrating on currently are books on Alzheimer’s, dementia, memory loss, cognitive decline, and how to be an effective caregiver to people undergoing the process. I’m not necessarily fooling myself that we’ll be able to reverse it, but we might be able to slow the progression. Maybe.

    The neuroscience is always fascinating to me, but right now I am really reading to understand more of what my mother-in-law is experiencing and learn new ways to cope with the exhaustion and sadness I am encountering as we enfold her into our home and daily life. We didn’t expect it to be easy, but I’m not sure I fully understood how draining it is emotionally to witness her struggle all day every day.

    If I find any of the books particularly helpful or insightful, I’ll write a standalone post on the topic in August.

  • What Are We Reading – June 2019

    jesse.in.mb

    Gregory Maguire – Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this book. Everything about it feels like it doesn’t resolve, but maybe it’s just a good reflection of life and the small role we play in it.

    Currently working on Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I’m not sure why I like post-Colonial/Indian diaspora literature as much as I do. I distinctly remember reading Roy’s first novel The God of Small Things years ago but couldn’t tell you the plot now. TMoUH reminds me a bit of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with long ambling digressions and personal stories inextricably tied to the historical moment of independence and the partitioning of India and Pakistan. Like MC, I am constantly flipping between getting lost in the daily moments of the characters and just wanting her to get to the fucking point.

     

    OMWC

    I have the Alpha and Omega of essay collections. Let’s start with Alpha, and it encompasses the startling fact that, once upon a time, Fran Lebowitz was actually funny. Yes, amazing. While unpacking boxes of books to be shelved in our new home, I ran across my copy of Social Studies, which was a birthday present given to me when I was in grad school (and admittedly had a bit of a crush on her). This was before she had her long period of writer’s blockade, and morphed into a shrieking harpy resembling Linda Hunt on a bad day. These essays are actually funny, self-deprecating, and showing some insight into the culture of the time. Nothing profound, mind you, but fun and amusing, reminiscent of a similar oeuvre of Robert Benchley forty years previous to this. If you see a remaindered or used copy, grab it.

    The omega is my later-in-life idol, Jorge Luis Borges, who could do it all- novels, short stories, poems, and essays. A brilliant and profound talent, with an imagination that only comes once every few centuries. Being the dullard I am, I have been enjoying another book dug up in our move, Selected Nonfictions, which covers language, history, culture, literature, politics, art… well, everything, really. And in this collection is my single favorite Borges essay, “The Art of Verbal Abuse.” I bet you were thinking I’d pick, “I, a Jew,” you fucking anti-semite. But every essay in here is a gem, immaculately translated, and bursting with insight and beauty.,Don’t wait for a sale or remainder, just buy this. Now.

     

    mexicansharpshooter

    I read this.  I read it for ALL OF YOU.  That’s it.

     

    JW

    Staff: We asked JW to tell us about what he was reading, but we found him curled up, sobbing in a blanket fort with a flashlight and a dog-eared copy of Old Yeller and figured he’d get to it later.

    SugarFree

    I have continued my Lovecraft Mythos kick, reading both early Mythos contributors, especially those writing while Lovecraft was still alive: Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Edward Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner; and Lovecraft’s self-identified influences, collected in H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Tales: The Roots of Modern Horror, edited by Douglas A. Anderson. While familiar faces appear–Poe, Machen, Bierce–I enjoyed reading the more obscure authors like M. L. Humphreys, whose story in the collection, “The Floor Above” (1923), is the only story he or she ever published and oft-anthologized “The Night Wire” (1926) by H. F. Arnold, another lost author. (His or her only other two short stories have never been republished since they originally appeared in pulps.)

     

    Swiss Servator

    Beer list, wine list, spirits list, contract for work, contract for work, contract for work, continuing legal education, continuing legal education…wait here it is!

    Luther’s Small Catechism

    So the United Methodist district I live in is shriveling under the sweaty hand of the bishop who is ever so slightly to the left of Chairman Mao. She has packed the district with mini-mes. And this coterie of pudgy, earnest leftwing, 50-60 somethings are too engaged in various protests and public temper tantrums to conduct much of a church. So I went Protestant shopping. Just across the bean field from my house sits a Lutheran church. So I wandered over, went to a traditional service. Met the pastor later on and he gave me a copy of said book. I got homework. Man, these people are serious. But, I guess it is good to do some due diligence, so I am about 20-25% through right now. I get a bit wary of the “with Explanation” part, but that is just the libertarian in me, I guess.

    As I am in the Commandments, and the basics still, I can’t say much about the more advanced points. Also, I have not been ordered to burn OMWC’s house yet. So I have that going for me.

  • I Want to Tell You About Heshi Socks: A Review of The New Right, by Michael Malice

    First thing first:  About the socks. I bought a couple pairs of these in response to Michael Malice’s book and his delightful podcast (Promo Code: Welcome30).  They are indeed nice.  I am not going to say these socks will change your life when you buy them.  If a pair of socks changes your life, chances are pretty good you are homeless or your life otherwise sucks.  So grab a pair of these socks, and if they change your life, please consider reevaluating the choices you made to get to this point.

     

     

    This is my review of Anchorage Brewing Co Easy Evil Black Raspberry Saison

    As a quick primer on the author:  his Wikipedia page can be found at this link.  For those refusing I enact their labor, Malice is an anarchist is the purest sense.  He is best known for his appearances on Kennedy or his previous book, Dear Reader:  The Unauthorized Biography of Kim Jung Il.  He is has a fairly well-known presence on Twitter; essentially as a troll with a large following.  Ever wonder where the reply of “Your*” in response to the proper use of the word, “you’re” (or vice versa) came from?  That started with him, and is meant to generate an indignant response from the person who made the mistake of making a statement using the second person, is incapable of arguing the merits of the idea, and instead focuses on grammar.  That is what trolling is after all, an attempt to manipulate the emotional response of a half-wit to the troll’s delight.  His latest book The New Right:  A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics, is available here on Amazon.  It is a treatise if sorts, on how culture is derived from the fringe of society and how that fringe is made up of various factions on “the right”.

    He has certain definitions and views that should first be identified before this book is further discussed.

    Conservatism vs. Progressivism:  There is no functional difference between the two, aside from acceptance of the pace and direction culture moves.  He consistently defines a conservative as, “a progressive driving the speed limit”.

    The New Right:

    A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.

    The Cathedral:  An oversimplified definition may be the “Evangelical Left”; universities, the media, and expansive government.  He cites Mencius Moldbug for the concept but a more convenient quote (for me) is from Jim Goad:

    […]cultural progressivism, egalitarianism, social justice, or whatever the fuck you’re calling it these days–is simply Christianity with God removed.  Your “God”–your untouchable premise–is the naively childish and entirely unscientific notion of innate human equality.

    A way to think of this book, is a comparison he makes on his interview with Michael Malice on his podcast to the classic, Dante’s Inferno.  In this book, with assistance of a Roman poet/philosopher Virgil, Dante descends into Hell to witness the eternal punishment of sinners.  One discovers with Dante, the further along the book, the further removed from grace the sin, the further he must descend into Hell, thus the harsher the punishment.  Here the further along the reader goes, he or she descends further from “safe” and “respectable” cultural and political thought.

    Safe and respectable according to whom?  The Cathedral.  This choice in metaphors is not made lightly.

    This book otherwise takes a long look at the intersection of various subgroups that make up the right as Malice sees it.  He begins where many at this site presently are:  the convergence of Murray Rothbard/Pat Buchannan (Anachro-capitalist/Paleo-conservative) wings that came about in the early 1990’s.  This is prescient for me, because this is several years prior to my coming of age and any explanation I was ever given to this philosophy was framed negatively.  He then presents others such as Milo Yionopo… Yoiunoppo…  He presents others such as infamous homosexual agent-provocateur Milo and how The Cathedral, with some success, attempted to take him down a few years ago.  We see this today with Steven Crowder, though his forays with the Cathedral are far too recent, and probably too blasé to be discussed by Malice in this book.  In later chapters he discusses other figures such as Mike Cernivoch, Gavin McGinnes, Anne Coulter, Jared Taylor, Pax Dickinson…and beyond.  It is thorough exposé across a wide spectrum of free thinking people, united only in their opposition to progressives.

    One can look at this book, and the comparison to Dante’s Inferno and view it is as a bit of a warning.  To whom is this warning directed?  At the risk of being declared a heretic around here…you.  YES, YOU.  THE READER.

    OBEY

    An analogy he constantly uses, in spite of it being a cliché, is the red pill.  This of course is a reference to the 1999 movie The Matrix and essentially means one is exposed to the existence of the lie that is Wonderland, and taking the red pill means remaining in Wonderland and following the White Rabbit where it takes you.  In this case the lie is the Cathedral, and the pillars that hold it up.  Once one takes the red pill, he or she becomes acquainted with the symbols and the methods the Cathedral uses to keep the population under control.  The problem of course, is in The Matrix, Morpheus only gives Neo a single red pill.  This is important as only one is needed.  Don’t take the entire bottle.  Another way perhaps to look at this is the movie They Live.  Here it is not a red pill but a pair of sunglasses that allows the wearer to see people as they truly are.  The problem is continually wearing the sunglasses will eventually become painful to look through.

    The analogy of the sunglasses however has several limitations, hence Malice chooses the red pill.  To begin, one first takes the red pill and discovers the truth:  there is no functional difference between progressivism, and conservatism; only the speed at which one is traveling on the road to serfdom.  The problem he finds, is once one discovers this, and immerse oneself in the literature, one begins to question everything.  One sees the media is not to be trusted, then then seeks news and opinion “elsewhere” (ALTERNATIVE FACTS!!).  Once others point out inconsistencies, and that the opinions one seeks “elsewhere” are also to not to be trusted, one descends further into the inferno, and finds oneself making unnecessary if/then connections, or connections that are dangerous to make.  i.e. George Stephanopoulos worked for the Clinton administration and expects to be taken seriously as an objective journalist (red pill), then Nick Gillespie is a cosmopolitan cuck that simply wants to be accepted by his establishment colleagues in the media (two pills), which becomes John Podesta being a tool of a secret society of child molesters (too many red pills), then escalates into taking “race realism” seriously because (((They))) are behind it and casually using racial slurs is okay if the context allows (empty bottle).  “Blood and soil” is all that remains, cowboy….

    Slow down, and think about what you are doing.  Yes, this has occurred here in a site comprised of people that identify themselves as libertarian.  Who remembers PapayaSF?

    Here is a fun example.  SpongeBob Squarepants…is gay.  No seriously, here is an article that makes a rather poor case why SpongeBob is a homosexual.  The rationalist after taking the red pill will say, “C’mon, he’s a Sponge.  Sponges reproduce asexually and its a kids show.”  Too many red pills results in coming across sites like that, and thinking there is a “gay agenda” that is putting subtle messages into children’s programing in an effort to create acceptance of homosexuality, and even make children homosexuals themselves.  After all, the show’s creators said this was certainly not the case but they said it through establishment media and they can’t be trusted…

    …anyways, this beer pours in a manner that I can only describe as “Carbonated Merlot”.  If you are the type that likes sours, or saisons, there is nothing traditional about this beer to make you think it is either, so I have no idea if you will be into it.  The tartness of the black raspberries blasts its way into everything, and it immediately turned me off at first.  You have to let it warm up slightly to get anything else past that.  There is a hint of citrus fruitiness, as it is still a saison, that you might find after letting it sit for a bit.  This is not one to chug, because you probably won’t be able to from the tartness.  Sip it, and enjoy it with a book.

    So the bottom line?  I highly recommend this book, but tread carefully out there, Heshi socks are quite nice, and Anchorage Brewing Co Easy Evil Black Raspberry Saison rates a very respectable  3.8/5.

  • What Are We Reading – May 2019

    It’s the last Friday of the month which means it’s another What Are We Reading. And while the autographed and (concerningly) waterproof print copies of H&H Vol 1: It’s Probably Just a Fart… No, No, It Was Definitely A Trump Election count, keeping up on the latest H&H blog post does not–but it is VERY slimming.

    OMWC

    Of all the Founding Fathers, the least known was the most interesting. Gouverneur Morris had a withered arm from a childhood burn and a wooden leg from a carriage accident, yet still managed to penetrate every vagina that came within reach. He was a brilliant intellectual, a witty conversationalist in several languages, a deep thinker, and wildly undisciplined. Though James Madison generally gets the credit for the Constitution, the actual writing of it was mostly in Morris’s hands. “We The People of the United States…” is pure Morris. Gentleman Revolutionary is Richard Brookheiser’s somewhat brief but eminently readable biography. Morris’s death is somewhat truncated at the end, but I’ll do the spoiler and tell you about it anyway- he dies of an infection caused by his own attempts to remove a urinary blockage by means of reaming his peehole with a whalebone. With no anesthesia, of course. I hope you’re wincing as much as I am.

    Robert Park is a physicist who taught at University of Maryland for many years before becoming Director of Public Information for the American Physical Society. His weekly What’s New columns were “don’t miss” reading for me, and were entertaining, educational, and often infuriating to their targets. Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud was the first (and better) of his two books summarizing case studies in pseudoscience and junk science for fun and profit. One useful distinction Park wrote about was the difference between pseudoscience and junk science, and of course, Langmuir’s genius essays on pathological science make frequent appearances. Park covers various “free energy” scammers, the idiocy and uselessness of manned spaceflight, TV and news media’s roles in the propagation of ignorance, the use of junk epidemiology by lawyers and NGOs, “quantum healing” health frauds, and even the UFO crazes. Delightful reading.

    SugarFree

    I read Patricia Highsmith‘s delightfully acidic Little Tales of Misogyny, a book of very short short stories about all the different ways women are awful. A lesbian misogynist is not as odd as it may seem. I’ve met a couple here and there. To hate something you desire… one will probably shoot up a Shapes in a few years.

    And I’ve been drawn back into The Devil’s Dictionary for probably dozenth time since reading it in high school. If you are ever sick of feeling good about your fellow humans, Ambrose Bierce will set you straight.

    HANDKERCHIEF, n. A small square of silk or linen, used in various ignoble offices about the face and especially serviceable at funerals to conceal the lack of tears. The handkerchief is of recent invention; our ancestors knew nothing of it and entrusted its duties to the sleeve. Shakspeare’s introducing it into the play of “Othello” is an anachronism: Desdemona dried her nose with her skirt, as Dr. Mary Walker and other reformers have done with their coat-tails in our own day — an evidence that revolutions sometimes go backward.

    THEOSOPHY, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science. The modern Theosophist holds, with the Buddhists, that we live an incalculable number of times on this earth, in as many several bodies, because one life is not long enough for our complete spiritual development; that is, a single lifetime does not suffice for us to become as wise and good as we choose to wish to become. To be absolutely wise and good — that is perfection; and the Theosophist is so keen-sighted as to have observed that everything desirous of improvement eventually attains perfection. Less competent observers are disposed to except cats, which seem neither wiser nor better than they were last year. The greatest and fattest of recent Theosophists was the late Madame Blavatsky, who had no cat.

    DEMAGOGUE, n. A political opponent.

    mexicansharpshooter

    I read more than children’s books this month.  Today’s entry is An Economist Walks Into A Brothel, by Allison Schrager, Ph.D.  This is one of those books people read at the airport in front of their boss while traveling because it has a vague relation to work.   The title aside, it is pretty interesting.  The first chapter focuses on The Moonlight Bunny Ranch outside of Carson City, NV.  She business model of the brothel is not necessarily selling services but in selling and delivering them in a manner with the least amount of risk.  For example, as ENB pointed out numerous times, sex workers often experience violence due to their existence in a black market.  As a result, the workers pay an insane fee to the brothel, but why?

    The legal brothel removes nearly all of the risk.  The risk to the worker, in the form of violence, being stiffed by their customer (or a dirty cop), and financially.  The workers are tested weekly, reducing the likelihood of disease, which manages the risk for the customer.  Schrager goes on to explain how risk is managed in other industries as well.

    SP

    I’ve had slightly more recreational reading time this month than I have since the relocation. So, I’ve been diving into two mystery series that are set in and around my new hometown.

    Scottsdale is home to The Poisoned Pen bookstore, from which I used to order. It’s fun that it’s just a short hop away (depending on traffic). The store hosts many, many author events, and I’m hoping to get up there to see Brad Thor in late June.

    First up, the Lena Jones mysteries by local author Betty Webb.  I am really enjoying this well-written series. The protagonist is not a cookie cutter PI and the cases are interesting. Jones is based in Scottsdale, a place I have only rarely ventured (see above), but the cases take her beyond the borders of her city. I’m on book 6.

    I’ve also started Jon Talton’s David Mapstone series. I’m on book 3, Dry Heat, written in 2004. My favorite passage so far: “All these SWAT cops in their paramilitary attire, what did this mean for the health of American civil society? Like surveillance cameras everywhere, pre-employment drug tests, and other subtle assaults on the Constitution.”

    The Mapstone books are set in Phoenix proper, with the native Phoenician protagonist having just moved back to his family’s home in the Willo Historic District at the start of the first volume. Mapstone is a PhD historian, formerly a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office deputy, who is now working as a cold case investigator for MCSO. A nice glimpse of this fast-changing city from a different perspective.

    The library system in Maricopa County is great, with some really terrific resources. I’ve been able to do my casual reading via ebooks from OverDrive. Sorry AMZ.

     

    jesse.in.mb

    Soooooo, I accidentally bought the second book in a series that I wasn’t reading because it was on sale because the plot summary was very similar to the other series by the same author. A.G. Riddle likes his grand genetic conspiracies about human origins. I put away the first two books in the Atlantis Trilogy this month because of some serious sunk-cost fallacy. The books aren’t as bad as some of Brett’s book-club choices, but they aren’t something I’d generally recommend unless you were going to spend time sitting on a very expensive beach and pretend to read while you really watch beautiful people who are having more fun than you walk around in next to nothing, or on an airplane. Currently audio-booking Hiddensee by Gregory Macguire (of Wicked fame), and reading The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters, which has been more charming than I anticipated. I’ll let you know next time (or not).

    Brett L

    Since last I posted here, which I can’t remember how long it has been, I read all of the novels (but not short fiction) in the Expanse series by James SA Corey. The first four or five were great. The sudden appearance of Admiral Thrawn with a super-fleet of alien Star Destroyers I mean, the Martian guy, same plot. Anyhow, good plot. Cool that it took about three books just to set up the main plot. I kind of wish they hadn’t unleashed partial/potential immortality on their universe (Corey is the pen name of a duo), but there is some great space opera along the way. I also read the first two installments of Mark Lawrence’s Impossible Times series. I really loved the Jorg/Red Queen universe. I’ve been so-so on his Nona Grey books. Impossible Times is set in 1986 England where a teenager who’s just finishing leukemia chemotherapy meets his future self, who tells him they invent time travel to save a girl young he just met from brain damage. This young man (Nick) happens to be the son of a math prodigy who strolled in front of a bus. His only resources are his D&D group that happens to include the popular scion of a Motorola VP and a different young athlete. The plot of the first book is entertaining, but the way time travel is set up, it is a foregone conclusion that everything had to happen that way. Also, there’s a random young psychopath who exists only to add constraint and difficulty to the mission. The second book is more of a mess. Both are eminently readable, but feel lots of shortcuts are taken.

    JW

    All I been readin’ is the Bible. But not that fake Bible all the rest of you have been fooled by. I only read my Grandpappy’s Bible. He went thru and cut out all the parts about forgiveness. Grandpappy’s God is a vengeful God and you will all pay in blood for your wickedness.

    Riven

    One of these days, I’m going to finish Crucial Conversations. As I said last month, it’s been pretty helpful for me, professionally. It’s a short book and it should not be taking me so long, but I guess I just haven’t had time. I do, at least, have my next book lined up: Great Minds Speak to You. This was a gift from my sister for my birthday last month. It’s not something I would have picked out for myself, but it takes all kinds, doesn’t it? The version she got me comes with an audio CD, as well… just in case you really want them to speak to you, I suppose. I’m not really sure what to think of it, but I’ll give it a shot when I have some time. I notice that “A Course in Miracles” is a purchase suggestion, based on my interest in Great Minds Speak to You. Maybe you’re not familiar with that book, but it was a favorite of my father’s in the last decade or so. Hm. Seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree at all, does it?

  • What Are We Reading – April, 2019

    Another last Friday of the month and another scramble to present ourselves as citizens of the world: growing intellectually and emotionally by exposing ourselves to the ideas and experiences of others to better understand that which exists outside of ourselves and empathize with those who think, feel and live differently than we do…and also a lot of genre fiction, mostly because of Brett.

    SP

    So I picked up Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe by Lisa Randall. With a title and subtitle like that, one might think this is going to contain groundbreaking research. This is, after all, written by someone who, “studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University.”

    Well, here is what the author says just two pages in: “This book explores a speculative scenario in which my collaborators and I suggest that dark matter might ultimately (and indirectly) have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaur.”

    You know WHO ELSE had collaborators!

    OMWC

    Unpacking our books, I ran across one I hadn’t read in decades, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. In theory, this is a book about critical thinking, examining people’s beliefs regarding alien abductions, faith healing, ESP, spirit mediums, “recovered memory” as part of the Satanic Panic of that time, and many more. Sagan’s continuing theme is that we do not educate our kids well enough for them to develop an effective bullshit filter, and that they don’t learn science properly, it being taught as a collection of facts rather than as a process of arriving at truth (or at least a better approximation of truth). There’s a lot of good stuff packed in there, but it’s difficult to resist yelling and throwing the book across the room since it assumes that teaching must be done by government schools staffed by highly paid government indoctrinators. If only he had examined THAT assumption critically… Lot of gratuitous swiping at religion, much of it deserved, much of it just for effect and moral preening. And somehow, he skims over the evil Janet Reno’s role in sending innocent parents and teachers to jail for secret child sex rituals. Bleh. Read James Randi’s Flim Flam instead.

    Twenty years ago, when Food Network was actually about cooking and teaching, there was a wonderful show called Taste, hosted by David Rosengarten. Each week, Rosengarten would take a single ingredient, teach about it, and demonstrate several dishes to feature it. It was stark, simple, no bullshit, and a delight to watch if you were serious about upping your cooking game. I bought his Dean & Deluca Cookbook, and it rapidly became of one of my go-to books when tackling something new. Something bad must have happened because Taste vanished without a trace. Rosengarten hasn’t, though, and I have been reading It’s All American Food for pleasure and to get ideas on things to cook and how to cook them. Like me, it’s divided into two main sections, the first being American takes on ethnic cuisines (where we twist, bend, and blend dishes into something unrecognizable to its native land, but somehow even more delicious because of the mixing of influences- appropriation, if you will), and the second being regional American cuisines, a concept foreign to non-Americans, who generally don’t understand the rich variety of our geographically diverse foods and cooking methods. Well fuck those Euro-weenie snobs, America is a food paradise, and this book is a celebration of that.

    jesse.in.mb

    Morieux and Tollman – Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexiy without Getting Complicated: Part of my friend’s “Ha, you’re in charge of people…well, let’s fix you” series. Six Simple Rules is short but dense and occasionally feels obtuse, but the ideas that landed have provided immediate paths forward for problems I’d thought were intractable. I see myself referencing the concluding chapter and the rule summaries repeatedly while I struggle through the implications of some of the denser sections.

    Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler – Crucial Conversations I have mixed feelings about this one. It starts off overly self-helpy and frequently praises its own efficacy as part of the way it describes thinking about how you enter into necessarily intense conversations with others. I probably would not have read it if my friend (who has trained with this group professionally) had not pushed it as hard as she did (still trying to fix me), but I’m also glad that I did. It’s helped me avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of saying nothing to avoid conflict and being pushy when I think I’m right in both my personal and professional life and I’ve passed it on to a few friends and coworkers where appropriate. (I was almost done with this one last month but not quite there).

    Recipes for the Cuisinart: Food Processor by James Beard: So I was trying to track down a brioche loaf recipe that I used to make when I first started baking. Everything goes in the food processor, rise, punch down, shape into a loaf and let it rise again. Apparently this recipe was ultimately James Beard’s fault from a midcentury cookbooks put out by Cuisinart. I had to have it. While I was messing around on this front I also picked up America’s Test Kitchen – Food Processor Perfection. I’d recommend the latter over the former although the recipes look solid in the Beard one, they’re also largely midcentury. The best bit was Beard takes a bunch of standard recipes and shows how the device can be more effectively used to speed it up rather than following the recipe as linearly. The ATK one seemed a bit obvious until I started hitting how to effectively slice and grind meat. The BF and I have done bulgogi from thinly shaved tritip, meatballs from short ribs and flap meat and a chuck roast lasagna that have each been spectacular. The food processor managed to steal precious counter space from the Kitchenaid this month.

    Kevin Panetta (author) and Savanna Ganucheau (Illustrator) – Bloom: Cute gay bildungsroman centered on a family bakery in a small east coast town.

    JW

    Genji Monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu. Riven promised tentacles and busty women in school uniforms, but this is just an erudite exploration of the psychology of characters who are both alien in their setting, but contemporary and fresh in the way that the author addresses them as fully realized players in their world. While I’d conten-Oh! Beach volleyball. Later gators.

    SugarFree

    I read a lot of things here and there this month, but the highlight was definitely Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, a novel that contains all the fluids a body can produce, and in excessive amounts. Either a brilliant dissection of the constraints patriarchy places of women’s bodies or a disgusto-porn novel put out by a respectable publisher, it is a pretty wild ride; Walt Whitman taken to the logical extreme:

    Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with
    doctors and calculated close,
    I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

    Riven

    Well, I didn’t manage to get to the books I said I’d hoped to read this month in our last “What Are We Reading.” Wah wah. But it was tax season! And my birthday! And other excuses! Also, I had some personality conflicts at work, which I complained about at length to jesse.in.mb. He said he had been reading this one book, and it had been really helpful for him. So, I also have been reading Crucial Conversations. I have not yet finished it but I’ve tried to using some of the things I have read about at work, and it has been massively helpful. I agree with jesse.in.mb’s thinking above: pretty self-helpy and self-congratulatory so far. I am hoping to actually finish it in May, but even if I don’t, I’m pleased with what I have taken away from it up to this point.

    Can you believe JW believed me? I’m always promising tentacles and busty women in school uniforms–you’d think he would have learned by now.

    mexican sharpshooter

    This month the best book I read was about a cat named Pete, or Pete the Cat if you will.  Today he made a big lunch.  Most people think Pete is a child–he’s not.  He’s a total stoner and if you need proof, here is a photo of the stoned kitty.

    Now Pete was hungry for lunch, and he discovered the sandwich he made was far too large for even Pete with the munchies.  He just kept adding things between two slices of bread until he realized he just had a giant stack of food between two pieces of bread.

    So he invited a couple buddies over, and they each got a piece of the sandwich.

     

  • What Are We Reading – March 2019

    Has it been a month already? Where does the time go? Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. It’s been a fun 30 days or so, right? … Right?

    Heroic Mulatto

    I am currently reading Thrawn: Alliances by Timothy Zahn. Compared to the first entry in his reboot of the Thrawn trilogy, Zahn does a better job with his characterization of Grand Admiral Thrawn. In the first novel, I felt that Zahn played up the ‘fish out of water’ angle too much and Thrawn’s rise read much more like the diary of an Imperial officer with Asperger’s Syndrome who took too much colloidal silver. With Thrawn: Alliances, we see a Thrawn capable of simple and routine social interaction without shitting his pants mid-conversation. That having been said, as a character, Thrawn now seems to suffer from competence porn syndrome. Zahn has yet to find the middle ground where Thrawn can demonstrate that he is the galaxy’s absolute master of military tactics and strategy while still having a realistic and suitable foible. In the end, it could be that despite having created the character in the medium of print, Zahn’s Thrawn cannot compete with the quiet menace of Thrawn as depicted in the Star Wars: Rebels animated series.

    jesse.in.mb

    Andrew Mayne – The Naturalist (books 1-3). Ran through these on Audbile pretty quickly. They are easy enough procedurals although the second and third books lost some of the charm that the first book had because the main character had blossomed from a nerd to a thrill-seeking serial killer hunter by the second book.

    Arkady Strugatsky – Roadside Picnic. I’d been chipping away at this for a while but had mostly stalled out. I’m glad that I took the time to finish it. The enigmatic ending was perfect for the story (although there’s still something that throws me off about Russian genre storytelling). The afterward by one of the authors is a delightful sampling of what it took to get a bowdlerized Roadside Picnic through the publishing process in the USSR.

    I power skimmed a few the books in Humble Bundle’s Eat Like a Geek bundle. Nothing super exciting there. Ice Cube Tray Recipes was a good reminder that I have everything I need to make jello-shots, but a lot of the recommendations were banal for someone who frequently portions and freezes things like homemade chicken stock or caramelized onions in ice cube trays as is. Chinese Street Food looked intriguing. I’m waiting to hear back on a few books with recipes featuring a recently legalized “herb.” I mostly picked it up for the Medieval feasts and Edwardian cooking books, which I’m putting off until I have the chance to dig into them. I really enjoy modern takes on historical cooking such as The New Art of Cookery, A Spanish Friar’s Kitchen Notebook.

    JW

    I’ve been super busy lately, but I am always ready to make time for my favorite author, Chuck Tingle. His latest works have really opened my eyes to the importance of continuous consent and learning to be comfortable with the occasional dry spell. Mr. Tingle is likely the most erudite commentators on contemporary sexual discourse and is absolutely probably not a pen name of SugarFree.

    SugarFree

    I read the Ray Electromatic series by Adam Christopher, a science fiction spin on the oft-imitated Raymond Chandler genre. Set in an alternate 1960s where robots–the clanking metal variety–were introduced and then rejected by the public, the lead character is the last of his kind and the only one programmed to be a private detective. Working in a cliched LA full of secrets, lies and sin, Ray untangles mysteries–when he’s not working his sidejob as a hitman.

    Riven

    Well, I haven’t been able to do much reading outside of investment/work-related articles, but I can tell you about what’s on my bedside stand! …Get your minds out of the gutter; it’s just a big stack of books. OK, it’s a small stack of comic books and two proper books. The first one is Black Jack by our very own Moriah Jovan. Not my usual sci-fi or fantasy, but I am looking forward to branching out while still staying in some familiar territory. (Jack is an “uncouth bond trader,” so maybe there’ll be some interesting finance-related subplot(s)?) I bought this book–and the next one–last August. So. Super busy, or at least too busy to sit down and read a paperback. This month, though! Maybe! The other book is The Very Best of Charles de Lint, which was recommended to me by jesse.in.mb. He had me at “crow girls.” I’m sincerely hoping I can get to each of these in the next month, and give you guys a proper review at the end of April. Wish me luck. Or don’t. You’re adults.

    mexican sharpshooter

    I read an actual book during my vacation in Ireland.  This time I picked 1491:  New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Why would I do that?  As it turns out most of the B&B’s I stayed in happened to have a TV, and quite frankly Irish TV is disturbingly British which means they must love their game shows…

    At any rate, this book is thoroughly researched and suggests many of the lessons we were taught about life in Pre-Columbian America is, to be blunt, wrong.  One of the myths that seems to perpetuate the most is that the Americas were an untouched, pristine wilderness when the first European settlers arrived.  Not so.  What is now postulated is the earliest Spanish explorers arrived in Florida and brought pigs with them.  Why pigs?  Because refrigerators weren’t invented yet and Spaniards like pork.  Pigs often carry diseases and since they are mostly domesticated a plague could’ve jumped from humans to the pigs, or vice versa.  Pigs escaped, became the invasive species they still are today, and came in contact with the Native Americans.  The Native American’s, of course, had little immunity to these diseases and died in biblical proportions.  The explorers left and decades later settlers arrived in time to find that nature had reclaimed most of the continent.

    Its a thought-provoking point of view that if you are into history, I would certainly recommend.

     

  • What Are We Reading – February 2019

    This has been a month of transitions for the secret cabal of Glibertarians who run the site. Location changes, states of being changes (J.W. has finally had her top surgery and would like to be known as Jedwina going forward), so most of us haven’t done much more reading than rental, tax, medical consent or estate paperwork lately. So if you’ve read something, please fill the howling void left behind and let’s give Jedwina some great suggestions to pick for next month.

    jesse.in.mb

    Not a whole hell of a lot to be honest. I keep chipping away at “Roadside Picnic,” which makes video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro 2033 make more sense, but I always have a hard time with the cadence of Russian genre fiction (translated to English) that I can’t quite put my finger on. I burned through a bunch of the Nightwatch series by Sergei Vasilievich Lukyanenko a few years back, and while I enjoyed them immensely as fluff sci-fi/fantasy, something about the storytelling tripped me up while reading them. I’ve also been picking away at Aristotle’s Rhetoric which is equal parts interesting and dry. Some of the allusions to classical figures allude me for I am not well educated, but it’s been very neat to read up on the art and science of making good arguments.

    Brett L

    I re-read most of Nathan Lowell’s Trader’s Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper they’re not super complex books, but kind of easy to get into. Its basically Merchant Marines in Space. Some might find them incredibly boring, but I really like them. I also read Smoke and Summons, kind of a weird, steampunk meets magic book about a woman who is somehow bound to and can be forced to channel a demon. She escapes from her evil magician owner and falls in with a thief who just happens to be the son of the head of the church. It was an interesting read, but obviously part of a much larger work. Written by the woman who wrote the Paper Magician, which, come to think of it is how I would describe that book. Oh, and I re-read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I wish he’d spent a third less time describing TEOTWAKI and a third more time describing the post-human future. Oh, and a metric fuckton of Microsoft Azure documentation.

     

    Old Man With Candy

    As you can imagine, my normally limited reading-for-pleasure time has been more limited than normal. But being sent back to the frigid prairies last week, I had books with me on the airplane, chosen less because of an urge to read them, but what’s tolerable among the few that have been unpacked. It had been decades since I had read the Foundation trilogy and my memories were not as fond as the books’ reputation. I spied Second Foundation among the small pile of available books and grabbed it. It’s readable but… that’s about it. It suffered from every fault I remembered: too stuffed with stilted and unlikely dialog, cardboard characters, predictable plot twists. Meh.

    No excuses needed for Frederik Pohl’s The Siege of Eternity, a sequel to The Other End of Time. I think Pohl was incapable of writing a bad book. This isn’t great Pohl, but it is in every way a better book than Second Foundation. And as a libertarian, I enjoy imagining a future where rebellion against government has broken out everywhere, in this case at the instigation of theologically-driven aliens as part of their attempt at conquest.

     

    SugarFree

    Backed up to read Charles Stross’ The Delirium Brief before finally reading the newest Laundry Files novel, The Labyrinth Index. Still an enjoyable read, but I think Stross is getting bored with writing the series. Another installment without Bob, this time focusing on his psychobitch ex-girlfriend Mahri and her attempt to deal with the United States version of The Laundry, variously referred to as The Black Chamber or the Nazgûl. Anything more would be spoilers.

    It read a wide smattering of short stories about cannibalism and then Shane Stadler’s nasty little foray into torture porn, Exoskeleton. If you’ve been longing for a mash-up of Martyrs, Carrie, and The Boys from Brazil, this is the answer to your prayers…

     

    Mad Scientist

    Jason Fagone’s Ingenious is a story about several of the colorful characters competing in the automotive X-prize: 100 MPG (or equivalent, for battery power) in a car that could be mass produced. The author knows almost nothing about cars or engineering, so this is mostly a tale of the teams building the things, and which of their teammates they don’t get along with, who they love, and blah blah blah. The book isn’t long on environmental doom and gloom, but it’s definitely in there. Some of the teams surprise you with a decent finish in the competition despite their duct tape and bubble gum build. Others, attempting to use a Harley-Davidson engine to spin a generator, drop out early with completely unsurprising problems: too loud, too much vibration, and too unreliable. But made in America, so, you know, fuck yeah. Overall the book is an engaging read, but you won’t learn anything about vehicle engineering.