This weird one is by Robert Foster.
A more conventional but less intriguing SF cover by Alex Schomburg
I’m a Clifford Simak fan so I don’t need a cover to sell me on his work — but I do like this cover. I don’t know the artist though it looks to me like Leo and Diane Dillon.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
He is not, in fact, any sort of thought leader unless your thoughts are Hate Immigrants! Kill The Untermenschen!
Nevertheless he recently declared that God wanted the Toddler in office for our 250th celebration. To which I reply:
1)Lots of Republicans said exactly that about W during his first term and he didn’t turn America into a shining city on the hill. Hell, his eight years ended up so dreadful (the housing bubble, 9/11, the senseless invasion of Iraq for non-existent WMDs, the FEMA failure in Hurricane Katrina) even Republicans try to pretend he didn’t exist.
2)Let us assume Miller is right and God wanted the Toddler in office this year. So? If God is the all-powerful arbiter of human events (as opposed to letting us exercise free will) then presumably he did — and he also wanted Biden in office in 2020 (otherwise the Toddler wouldn’t be eligible to run in 2024). And for that matter must have decreed W, Obama and Clinton step into the Oval Office. So the Toddler President isn’t anything special.
3)Alternatively let’s assume he is indeed special. Again, so? God scourged Israel with endless conquerors and bad kings — who’s to say the Toddler is a blessing rather than a curse?
I’m sure some of y’all aren’t God-believers but even for those who are, Miller’s logic is — well, he doesn’t have any.
Filed under Politics
This Saturday, Southern Discomfort goes live, though the Kindle version won’t publish until the 18th (I don’t know why). This will be the last post about the supporting cast, focusing on my grieving daoine sidhe, Olwen McAlister and the community she and the late Aubric founded, Pharisee County Georgia. Spoilers ahead, though nothing that I think ruins the book (one reason I’m not blogging about my villain, Gwalchmai — I think I’d have to give away too much).
As y’all eventually learn, Olwen and Aubric McAlister were daoine sidhe — elves — who like most of their kind spent centuries flitting between England and their otherworldly realm, the Hither Country. When the Puritans came to power after the English Civil War, however, they saw the fae as demons and sought to drive them out. Ringing the church bells, for instance; in themselves, they’re harmless but rung with malice towards elvenkind, they create agony. The sidhe closed the gates to their realm and fled into a further plane, the Thither Country. From there, they can never return.
Aubric and Olwen were different. They liked life in the mortal realm so they fled to Ireland, outside the Puritan reach. There they lived outside a small mortal town where people respected the old ways. All was well … until Cromwell’s forces invaded and crushed the Irish. Olwen and Aubric fled again, across the sea to the New World, taking with them the townsfolk in a magical boat. They arrived and wound up settling in Georgia before it was even a colony.
As Katharine Briggs’ Encyclopedia of Fairies makes clear, the fae of British folklore are not pleasant people. I developed Olwen and Aubric — whom Gwalchmai has murdered before the book begins — with that in mind. They’re immortal; from their perspective any pain they inflict on mortals will be over in an eyeblink; who cares about the suffering of mayflies? Their own suffering, by contrast, is a long-lasting thing. They hold grudges and they take revenge when they’re crossed, and it’s easier than you’d think to cross them.
By the time the book starts, Olwen has been watching over the people of Pharisee for three centuries and it’s mellowed her. She might be disdainful of outsiders’ lives but Pharisee folk? They’re hers. She will protect them, as she’s always done. She’s as close as I’ve ever come to a “morally gray” character, as so many book ads put it. The good stuff she does is noble and compassionate, the bad stuff is very bad. I think I’ve done a good job acknowledging both.
Then there’s Pharisee itself. I made the right call in casting Maria, an outsider, as my protagonist. She doesn’t know what’s going on, she’s primarily concerned with herself rather than Pharisee; I thought at one point about turning Joan Slattery into the protagonist. I realized if I did that, the exposition would get awkward: Joan already knows everything about Pharisee. Sharing information with the reader would take either me providing info-dumps or Joan having “as you know” conversations. An outsider slowly learning the truth, works much better.
However the more I worked on the book, the more I realized Maria wasn’t enough. Even adding Rachel, Liz and Joan wasn’t enough. Because this wasn’t just the story of the individual residents, it’s the story of the entire county (primarily the town of Pharisee). What it’s been like for them flourishing under the guidance of Olwen and Aubric. How they’ve adapted as outsiders have become residents, buying up property and turning it into a bedroom community for Atlanta commuters. What happens when Aubric, one of their rocks for 300 years, lies dead.
So my POV cast is quite large. Sheriff Slattery. Father Michael, the senior Catholic priest. His brother Harry, the head of the county commission. Military attorney Captain Jeff Carpenter. Dr. Aaron Moreno, one of the new physicians in town. His daughter Susan. Some of them know the truth; some don’t. Together they make up the mosaic of Pharisee. Which Gwalchmai is on the brink of smashing to pieces.
I’ll be announcing the book release Saturday, with links.
My cover is by Samantha Collins, the other artist is unknown to me. All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Southern Discomfort, Writing
Last month I ran a post about Maine Senatorial candidate Gerald Platner and the men who defended his Nazi tattoo and his adultery — don’t Democrats realize that real people are flawed and messy? Rejecting him is just “HR lady politics” according to Matt Stoller. Another pundit, Ken Klippenstein, suggested it’s better to have someone flesh and blood and manly rather than “real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”
Turns out Stoller and Klippenstein should have listened to the HR ladies: a woman who used to date him says he raped her. The woman, Jenny Racicot, provided evidence too: “emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner.” Some discussion here. Apparently the Maine Dems can swap out another candidate if Platner steps down from the race quickly enough. Sounds like he might do it. If he’s genuinely committed to opposing the Toddler and fascism, he should, whether or not we can win with Candidate B.
I’d like to say something deep about this. I got nothing. It’s frustrating to think control of the Senate, and thereby appointments to SCOTUS, might hinge on this mess. However dumping a rapist is absolutely the right and necessary choice.
Racicot says she waited because she supports his politics, just not him. As journalist Marisa Kabas says, “this dynamic described by jenny racicot is, as i understand it, very common among progressive women in maine. they’ve been put in an impossible position and feel like they’re tanking platner’s campaign when in reality he did that on his own by being a violent and reckless person.” As Elizabeth Wrigley-Field puts it “One of my hardest-won political lessons is that it’s never, ever worth it to treat ppl as ~indispensable no matter what they do~ —bc we see the contributions & potential of the abusive men & we don’t get to see that in the women they drive out. We never actually get to know what we’ve squandered”
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
As y’all have doubtless heard, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 last week to preserve birthright citizenship. Which is a good thing, whether you’re a citizen or not. Though the vote not being 9-0 is alarming; Gorsuch, Thomas and Alito wanted it done, Kavanaugh does too but thinks it’s a job for Congress.
This has not gone over well with Republican pundits who are horrified that a child born to an illegal Haitian immigrant is as American as they are (the Heritage Foundation too, unsurprisingly).
Justice Alito (Injustice Alito?) complains that if he has to share the country with birthright citizens, it degrades his citizenship. Theocratic misogynyist Matt Walsh isn’t much happier.
Spoiler, when he talks about a country like the one our ancestors had, he means white. Not that it was ever all white but at least the white man was securely dominant. As Paul Campos says, when the Toddler rants about “communists” he means immigrants and Jews.
As far as Walsh’s nostalgia for the past, I get that. I’d love to live in a country where Republicans couldn’t just shrug and declare nothing can be done when they see a school shooting. Where a man who tried to overthrow the government on 1/6 and is currently the most corrupt president of all time faces Republican rage the way Nixon did.
Some on the right are even more blatant about saying the quiet parts out loud. One poster on FB declared this country has to stay at least 90 percent white and that freed slaves should not have been allowed to become citizens. Someone else claimed that foreign agents sneak into this country so their babies are born American, then go home and bring them up in Communist China or wherever, train them as spies, then send them over as sleeper agents. Camestros Felapton spots another right-winger making the same arguments.
Others just lie. NC State Rep. Reece Pyrtle claims a recently passed bill which dumps on DEI and pressures local governments to cooperate more with ICE is just to “protect our citizens.” When ICE routinely detains citizens with no consequence, not to mention shooting and killing them, it’s not about protecting them. It’s about keeping America white.
Even more common are right-wingers treating this as some radical new interpretation of the law SCOTUS just made up. As witness Steven Crowder above saying the court “just decided” that a baby born to immigrants is as American as Crowder’s kids. Outgoing Rep. Chip Roy lies the court “manufactured out of thin air” the concept of birthright citizenship. His solution: end all immigration. Other Republicans have a less drastic proposal: ban pregnant women from entering America! Rep. Troy Nehls suggests a 10 year ban and putting a sheet over the Statue of Liberty because of all that pro-immigration stuff written on her.
As I said Saturday, I’d prefer legal immigration; however my solution is to expand the legal limit so everyone now sneaking over the border can come legitimately. For Republicans legal immigration by people of color is just as disgusting, as Fox’ Laura Ingraham once made clear. Or the business owner who responded to the accidental drowning death of an an autistic Muslim child by posting on their company website to demand all Muslims leave America. Or Kremlin Benny Johnson who “jokes” that the only connection between black women and American independence was that Thomas Jefferson raped some black women.
Me, I’m with Cheryl Rofer: immigration is a good thing. And anyone who thinks this will only affect illegal aliens, consider that if your birth certificate doesn’t prove you’re American, almost nothing will.
It’s a rare win for justice at SCOTUS though all it would take is one new right-wing justice to tilt the balance. Then there’sthe other horrible decision allowing the Toddler to fire heads of nominally independent agencies except the Federal Reserve. As often happens with this court, there’s no logic other than “The Toddler always wins — unless it would affect my finances or the finances of the rich people who give me little presents.” And supporting bans on trans women in athletics. And gutting campaign finance restrictions which this year will be big help to Republicans.
They have a lot of power. There are more of us than them. How that will play out — well, let’s do our best to make it play out the right way.
Filed under Politics
When I read James Turner’s Rex Libris about an immortal librarian who’s a one-man army, I called it “enjoyable bizarre.” The sequel REX LIBRIS: The Book of Monsters isn’t as bizarre — it comes closer to a conventional urban fantasy about a monster-fighting hero — but it’s still a lot of fun. The plot involves a reference guide to monsters from which horrors are seeping out into the real world (“This kind of thing never happens with home renovation books.”) and Rex, in turn, gets sucked in and finds unpleasant surprises. While I’d have liked more library adventures, I’d definitely pick up V3 if one had happened. It didn’t.
DC FINEST: Hawkman — Wings Across Time collects the Silver Age Hawkman’s adventures from his debut in Brave and the Bold, then backing up Adam Strange in Mystery In Space, then the first 11 issues of his own book. I already have most of the material in the originals and the missing ones in the Showcase Presents Hawkman black and white book. However it’s nice to have the missing ones in color. All the stories were written by Gardner Fox; Joe Kubert drew the Brave and the Bold adventures, then the art passed to Murphy Anderson (who did the cover here).
The tales are an odd mix. Initially they have a strong pulp feel, then Hawkman and Hawkgirl — cops from the planet Thanagar, studying how Earth police battle crime — take on a string of ordinary thieves with gimmicks, not that different from some of Batman’s foes. In Hawkman proper, we get super-villains and SF mixed. A fun collection.
THE CURIE SOCIETY by Janet Harvey, Sonia Liao and Heather Einhorn has three teenagers recruited into the eponymous secret society of women scientists. Can the underage genius, the young rebel and the overpressured overachiever learn to work together, let alone become friends? How will they deal with an unethical former member offering an alternative approach?
I love the concept but this is the first in a series and spends too much time setting things up for the future rather than standing on its own. I could also have done without a reference to “PLO terrorists” in an early flashbacks — it feels like a gratuitous anti-Arab stereotype, especially as the terrorists play no role in the story otherwise (and the PLO was at the time the Palestinian government, not an active terrorist group). In fairness I am not the target audience.
When I read Walt Kelly’s The Best of Pogo back in 2017, I said I’d have preferred less reminiscences about the classic comic strip and more strips. Turns out our library has POGO: The Complete Syndicated Strips Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Yonder so my wish is answered. This covers the initial couple of years of the daily strip, first in the liberal paper The Star, then wider syndication, plus a separate section for the Sunday strips (which ran a separate continuity so a paper could run Pogo six days a week, Sundays only or both).
This really shouldn’t work for me; as a long-time Southerner, a strip stuffed with ignorant, unschooled Bayou folks would normally get my back up (even though they’re mostly good-hearted and sympathetic). However the adventures of lovable Pogo, gluttonous alligator Albert, misanthropic Porkypine and the others come off charming and funny instead.
Much like the same publisher’s Complete Peanuts run, this has several text features: a biography of Kelly, an explanation of how Sunday strips worked (the top two panels were unrelated to the rest so the paper could cut them for space), and explanations of some of the then-contemporary references. It’s a terrific volume though I think having to write and draw the Sunday strips to meet the space limitations worked against Kelly’s strengths. I’ve already reserved V2.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
(No movie reviews today. Independence Day column instead!)
In his book Invisible Bridge, Ron Perlstein has a bemused sneer about the Bicentennial celebration. He sounds astonished that even with America collapsing around us, Americans could sort of agree to celebrate. It reflects the general tone of the book that the 1970s sucked and we all knew it (at the link, author Thomas Hine expresses an alternative view).
The Bicentennial did indeed feel like a big deal in 1976. And for a couple of years before. Comic books tied in to it. Products of all sorts flaunted their Americanness. And for all the problems Perlstein talks about, there was a lot of optimism. The Vietnam War had ended, the US and the USSR had thawed the Cold War somewhat, women’s rights and black rights had advanced massively from a decade earlier. 18 year olds had the right to vote. The pill and Roe v Wade meant women could be sexually active without having to bear a child. Nixon had been driven from office after Watergate revealed his unfitness for office. That (and related revelations about the CIA and the FBI) was shocking but it was proof we could solve our problems and do better. We would do better. And the president at the time, Gerald Ford, realized the Bicentennial was not about him.
Recently JD Vance declared that by modern standards, Nixon’s crimes were trivial. He meant it as a defense — the deep state destroyed Nixon, like they’re trying to destroy the Toddler! — but it’s more like an indictment of how far we’ve fallen. The Toddler commits about one Watergate class crime a week, like using taxpayer money to build his stupid ballroom, then lying about it.. Nixon had a secret list of enemies he wanted to punish; the Toddler blatantly targets the media for not kissing his ass and someone was just indicted for supposedly sabotaging Widdle Donny’s precious reflecting pool. That’s horrifying and I’m sure the evidence is as flimsy as all the other pool-related charges. And as unjust as sentencing protesters as anti-ICE terrorists.
Small wonder nobody’s showing up for his 250th anniversary events. It seems to be a mix of lack of interest, heat and incompetent organizing. As John Scalzi puts it, “a malignant narcissist decided to make a national celebration mostly about himself, and that malignant narcissist is also an actual fascist, so that kind of sucked all the fun out of it this year.”
Like Scalzi, I believe justice will prevail. It may take long enough that we will not live to see its end; many of those who labored against slavery and segregation did not. As historian Kevin Leman says, “For most of its American existence, slavery was not contested. It was not being loudly defended because it was not being loudly challenged. It was simply the air that colonial economies breathed. The Germantown Quakers may have protested it in 1688, but their petition was quietly tabled and largely forgotten.” It was a long fight to discredit it, and too many people today are still nostalgic for it.
But as the radical priest Daniel Berrigan once put it, we do the right thing and fight the good fight because they’re right and good, not because we’re guaranteed victory. As a Christian, I believe that’s what god wants from us. As a human being, I agree with blogger Fred Clark that we should do the right thing because the alternative is becoming a ginormous jackhole. Seriously, who would you rather be, Martin Luther King or JD Vance?
As I’ve said before, I’m not sure what policies we should embrace going forward. As a number of liberals are saying, we need change. Definitely structural government reforms to undo some of the damage (packing the court, for instance, to neutralize the Sinister Six). Practical stuff, the little helpful things Mayor Mamdani is doing in NYC. Speak out against Republican fascism, and the little stupid things, like the way the Toddler’s wasting our tax dollars on monuments to himself. And a vision: equality for all, end rape over the next 20 years, universal literacy. Change the immigration laws so everyone currently entering illegal can enter legally. Do not throw anyone under the bus. Remind everyone that we are patriots and some of us are Christians — Republicans don’t get to define those terms and claim them as their own.
Any one of those will be difficult, and face lots of opposition. As I’ve said previously, even defining what “equality for all” means and how we get there is hard work. But we might as well shoot big.
And we should remember that if a former slave like Frederick Douglass could press on against the odds so can we: “Douglass did not end in despair and neither should we. His closing lines are not triumphalist, but they are resolute. Even with freedom of speech and the ballot “fallen before the shot-guns of the South,” he urged that we “bate no jot of heart or hope.” The heart of the nation, he maintained, was “still sound and strong.””
Filed under Politics
First the blood: Saturday I made my regular donation to the Red Cross. They’ve remodeled their facility and I was the first “power red” (double dose of red blood cells) donor there. I wrapped up just a little too soon for someone from the regional HQ to photograph me, darn it. That would have been kind of cool.
Tuesday, it was cat day: time to take Snowdrop in for his wellness exam and shots. He’s way harder to cage for the trip than Wisp; she’ll let us pick her up which gives us a chance to shove her in. Snow’s less trusting. However I got a dose of gabapentin — painkiller that also makes ’em sleepy — into him with a small morning meal. That left him just groggy enough to load into a cat carrier. He’s mostly in good shape, however he does have a heart murmur. Those can be bad in cats so we’re waiting to see what the labwork says.
Minor bonus, they applied his topical heartworm/flea med so we don’t have to do that again for two months.
Borders: as I type this, the theme I use for this blog has suddenly dropped the illustration on the vertical borders so there’s nothing but the image at the top. Maybe it’s a temporary thing and it’s gone by now. Maybe I’ll have to change themes because the brown border looks dreadful. I haven’t had a chance to do anything about it yet.
Knees: Tuesday, after TYG brought Snowdrop home, I went to physical therapy. Nothing major but my left knee gives me twinges in certain positions. I’d like it to stop. The therapist gave me a set of exercises which I’ve been working on. Too soon for any miracle cures, though. I also got a sleep apnea kit in the mail — my doctor thought that might relate to my recurrent insomnia — and I spent three nights with a testing kit on, making me feel like a cyborg. My grimace below is because I also felt like Hannibal Lector in his muzzle in Silence of the Lambs.
I slept better than I expected with that thing on. However it was choppy, which contributed to my tiredness for some of the week. Plus the pets were needier than usual. Still I got some good stuff done. Articles for The Local Reporter on Carrboro’s 2027 budget and the drought’s impact on Carrboro (not up yet). That took up Monday and Tuesday.
Wednesday I tackled the next chapter of Let No Man Put Asunder. Didn’t go well. The changes I’m making are good but they’re the kind that require further changes — if the sinister Community of All simply puts everyone in Bluestone in a stoned trance, Mandy doesn’t have the conflict of fighting innocent mind-controlled people. It still works better and fits the Community’s strange goals; however I have no idea what comes next. And Wednesday I was most tired.
Thursday I worked on “Die and Let Live.” It’s steadily improving but ends up way too talky as Colin and Deadbeat explain what’s been happening and everyone debates ethics. Either I shift some of that material earlier in the story, I come up with a more dramatic ending or both (ideally both).
I also got the first scene of a new story. My mind generated several new details: one character, Claire, comes from the town of Riddle Grove where her family lives at Enigma Towers. And their last name, Maistery, sounds a lot like “Mystery” if you say it aloud. Her estranged best friend notes the pattern and decides they’ll make a joke about it later. I have no idea what it means but it isn’t anything funny. So my mind’s clearly engaged — not enough to figure out what comes next yet.
Today was, as usual, devoted to next week’s blog posts, planning what to write, and emptying my in-box. Plus we took Trixie and Plushie in for some shots and, as Plushie’s been walking wobbly recently, asked the vet about it. She says he might have some back pain and recommended upping his gabapentin dose for now. Makes sense as we lowered it a couple of months back. We’ll see if it helps.
What made the visit memorable is that Plushie expressed his displeasure by pooping on the exam room floor. And then several alarmingly runny poops after that. Hopefully it’s just a momentary lapse and not the return of his dread diarrhea. We’ll see.
And now for something completely cool, author’s copies of Southern Discomfort arrived this week.
Cover by Samantha Collins. All rights are mine.
They put us through the wringer some weeks, and eventually it catches up with them.
Filed under The Dog Ate My Homework
That’s the kind of argument you’d get from a B-movie mad scientist back in the last century: sure, there might be some adverse side-effects from their experiments, maybe the patients didn’t exactly consent — but how can science advance if you worry about ethics? Now Jeff Bezos has made that exact argument about AI (this clip comes from a twitter account by one Lisa Kippy):
There is a boatload of bullshit packed into that statement like the assumption LLMs will eventually become “a super-intelligence that could solve all our resource problems.” And that the growth of data centers, despite their demands for electricity and water, are a good, no a great thing, because science! We can’t worry about things like humans having adequate water for their needs — after all, it’s not like they’re Jeff Bezos or someone whose thirst matters.
This adds to the reasons for hating AI that Paul Krugman discusses here. For all their talk about the wonderful future ahead, what they tell us, repeatedly, is that AI is going to take all our jobs. Marc Andreesen literally claims it will take all the brain-power and creative jobs except, of course, venture capitalists like himself — no mere computer intelligence could do what he does (Kevin Leman discusses, more accurately, why LLMs can’t do what historians do)! Krugman remembers other techbros predicting 20 percent unemployment due to LLMs. Plus it will replace all creative work so authors, musicians and others can do … what? Somehow I don’t think they imagine the Jetsons kind of future where we can make a good living working an hour a day pushing buttons.
And as Krugman notes, we’re being pushed to use LLMs in various ways, whether we want to our not. My writer’s group had to put in more effort than we should to stop Zoom’s AI from recording us reading our stories. Nothing nefarious — it was an automatic, like taking minutes — but we still don’t fancy someone recording our work without our consent. Silicon Valley screams about how wonderful it is but it’s spreading more from pressure than the enthusiasm with which we adopted home computers or the Internet. Apparently even businesses are discovering the cost is not worth the output that results, as Krugman and 404 Media note.
Or consider California State University insisting they have to invest in AI to train their students for the “AI-driven future of work.” Which assumes the future will be driven by LLMs and that training to use them is the best use of the college’s money. Meanwhile, in the actual working world, the use of LLMs by both job-seekers and hirers is wreaking havoc on the job market.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising tech companies are presenting themselves as victims of some radical conspiracy. Kevin O’Leary, who’s developing a data center in Utah, had to walk back his accusations opponents of his center were proxies for China. Cops are monitoring criticism of data centers because who knows, maybe the critics wi’ll turn violent. One man who spoke out against data centers at a city council meeting was arrested for speaking too long. It would have been appropriate for cops to escort him out for speaking beyond the public-comment limits but arrest? That’s insane. Perhaps cops like AI because companies are so willing to share surveillance data without any Fourth Amendment concerns.
In other LLM notes:
Companies have figured out how to manipulate LLM searches for data.
LLMs are not helpful at answering small-molecule mass spectrometry questions.
How bad will Google going with AI summaries over actual links hurt online companies?
For a nonfiction writer, the only way to ensure LLMs aren’t giving you false data is not to use them.
If LLMs are sentient, so is the computer game Age of Empires.
“AI systems are beginning to replicate the same anti-LGBTQ bias and misinformation problems that have long plagued social platforms, according to a new GLAAD report previewed at Axios’ AI+NY Summit. The problems GLAAD flags — biased training data, privacy risks, automated discrimination, misinformation and the suppression of legitimate speech — extend beyond LGBTQ users to other minorities and groups in political disfavor.”
“Less than a day after President Donald Trump falsely suggested that Ilhan Omar had staged an attack on herself, the images started to circulate. In AI-generated fake photos that soon flooded both X and Facebook, the Minnesota representative is depicted posing next to the man who invaded a town hall meeting and sprayed apple cider vinegar on her from a syringe. In the AI-generated images, Omar and the man are both smiling; in some, the congresswoman is foisting a wad of cash, presumably to suggest that she bribed her attacker. “
I’ll close with some advice from David Dark: “Be the non-AI generated content you want to see in the world.”
