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I spent most of this week reading a doorstop book so rather than a short post about what I did read, how about covers? First, another Ace Double, one cover by Kelly Freas—

And the other by Ace Books’ dependable Jack Gaughan.

Next, the improbably named Steele Savage gives us the cover of a John Brunner classic.

George Barr illustrates H.G. Wells.

And Ed Emshwiller to finish up.

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Dictatorship advocate Curtis Yarvin recently got an interview in the NYT (not a direct link, but there’s a gift link in the LGM post) which includes the deep, deep insight that “When I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before Enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK.”

As I said in the initial link, it’s hard to say whether Yarvin is that clueless or spewing bullshit (to their credit, the interviewer pushed back a little). Because even in Jane Austen, it was a hard life if you didn’t find a man and there were few other options available. And as Yarvin points out, these are well-off women — the further down you go, the harsher life was. And even well-off women had no legal right to control their own money, could be beaten or abused (spousal rape would have been perfectly legal) or locked up in an asylum if their husband got pissed. But as the kind of right-wing dictatorship Yarvin wants is going to be misogynist, he has to pretend that women not having control over their own lives won’t be so bad, just like Bryan Caplan does.

Yarvin argues that voting gives women nothing but the illusion of power; if it was only an illusion, I doubt it would bother him as much. And it’s not just about power — voting, as Jamelle Bouie puts it, is an assertion of equal rights as a citizen in our Republic. Which an appalling number of people can’t stand.

As someone said in the LGM comments it’s hard to imagine a feminist radical arguing we need a dictatorship to get rid of patriarchy would get the same treatment. I don’t recall the mainstream media being at all fond of Andrew Dworkin, a radical feminist whose writing was way sharper than Yarvin’s: “We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.” Like I said Monday, that’s too horrifying to contemplate.

In other news, despite the Supreme Court throwing out the recent lawsuit to ban mifeprestone (nobody had standing to sue) Judge Matthew “I hate abortion” Kacsmaryk refuses to let the case die.

A male attorney slipped his wife anti-abortion drugs because he didn’t want the baby. In a state that claims abortion is murder, the man got 180 days in jail.

Pulp reprint company Steeger Books has provided me with a number of neat books such as Hades and Hocus Pocus. When they had a pre-Christmas sales I picked up the two sequels to Lester Dent’s Talking Toad and threw in the ebook of Paul Ernst’s THE COMPLETE TALES OF DOCTOR SATAN.

I know Paul Ernst primarily from the Avenger, a pulp crimefighter from Street and Smith who appeared under the same Kenneth Robeson house name as Doc Savage (the introduction by John Pelan lists many other works by Eernst). Doctor Satan was a villain-centric series of eight stories that ran in multiple issues of Weird Tales. Pelan says, correctly, that reading them too close together will make the formula stale. He’s correct, but they don’t work any better read individually.

Certainly the openings are impressive. In the first story, “Doctor Satan,” for instance, several wealthy men die when a small tree roots in their body and grows rapidly through their skulls. It’s the work of the eponymous villain, the son of one of America’s most prestigious, wealthiest families. Bored with the perks of his status, he itches for more thrills, and he’s getting them through crime. A master of weird science and the occult, his tricks in subsequent stories including summoning lightning bolts, turning flesh transparent (pay up or walk around like a skeleton), and contacting the dead to learn their secrets. While he’s into crime for thrills, he does want the money: forcing his victims to pay up is proof he’s won the game.

Opposing him is Ascott Keane, another child of wealth who lets the world think of him as another callow socialite. In reality Keane has mastered the same skills as Doctor Satan and uses them in his vocation, fighting crime. In the first story he realizes how Doctor Satan is growing those hell-trees and sets out to thwart his blackmail scam. Once Keane crosses Satan’s path, the schemer will stop at nothing to destroy the man who defeated him.

Pelan suggests Satan turning to crime out of boredom is inadequate as a motive. I disagree: it’s a large part of what drives Dr. Mabuse in his first film and that’s a classic. Mabuse, however, plays on a much bigger scale than Doctor Satan: for all his spectacular murder methods, each story deals with a single crime campaign so the villain never builds up any momentum.

A bigger problem is that being a thrill-killer doesn’t give him any personality — he’s interchangeable with any mad, cackling fiend from that era, whether in serials, comics or pulps. He could enjoy having a worthy opponent, as the Joker often did with Batman … instead, he just hates Keane. Who has no personality either, other than being heroic. And as we never see Keane when he’s not on the case his having a secret identity doesn’t matter much. Even Satan’s aides, a fur-covered monkey man (not literally, more like a sideshow freak) and a legless brute man, could as easily be generic thugs. We never see the brute throw down with Keane, as I usually expect with that kind of hired muscle.

Overall, it’s a useful guide in how not to do it.

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One of the reasons I don’t have a clear map for upholding the good during the coming four years is that we don’t know yet how bad it will be or what form the bad will take. Case in point, Elon Musk is really throwing his weight around, not just here but in other countries (which fits with this thread on Bluesky). He could end up much more influential in the next administration than I imagined; while Trump might not like that (or all the Co-President Musk jokes flying around online), Musk’s super-wealth may mean he can’t be kicked aside as easily as other players in a more subordinate position. I’ve no idea how that will play out.

Then there’s the shutdown. While Glorious Supreme Leader Trump and Vance are trying to blame the Democrats, the Dems were on board with an earlier bipartisan deal; Trump didn’t like it and with Musk’s support, killed the deal. The new bill is significantly worse and Mike “Biblical Worldview” Johnson couldn’t hold his party together to pass it. What happens next, I don’t know, though as Paul Campos says, shutdowns are one area where the media and the public have no trouble blaming Republicans (good!).

While it’ll be great if The Felon’s administration keeps tripping over its own feet, I doubt it will trip so much as to be harmless. As this article discusses, lots of innocent people will suffer. And Trump clearly wants to use his power to shut up or punish anyone who defies him, protests or offers “accurate descriptions about him, or equal application of the law to him.” He’s vicious and he has plenty of power to act on his petty urges. And while Dems refused to sign off on the funding measure, I agree with Jamelle Bouie and Jennifer Rubin that now that Trump’s won, Democrats seem way too willing to be cooperative team players.

However, as Bouie also says (I lost the link), it isn’t hopeless. People have protested and challenged tyrants in the Communist Bloc, China, the Middle East and South America. In our own country, black Americans fought segregation in an era when the law offered them no protection. They fought for years before the federal government showed any interested in backing them. Some of them died, some of them were brutally injured, some of them were forced to flee their homes. But they won. No guarantees we’ll succeed in preserving American democracy but Trump returning to the White House doesn’t mean we have lost and will never win again. As Courtney Milan says, “The fight for freedom is never over. It is just sometimes harder than others.”

First, what do you want to fight for? There is, unfortunately no shortage of issues: immigration, keeping families together, voting rights, protecting schools from right-wing school boards, abortion rights, freedom of religion. Figure out what cause and causes you want to support and fight for.

Next, go looking for organizations that work in that field, local or national. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel and doing so would waste a lot of energy we can put to better use. There are organizations working on every issue imaginable. Find one to work with. Ask them what you can do.

Third (another suggestion on BlueSky), if nothing else give them money. You may want to do more and we’ll probably need to do more (even if I don’t know what, yet) but money helps. Money matters.

Fourth, Teen Vogue makes the added point that “A better show of our political identity is how we make changes in the world around us, not our slogans and mission statements.” Or as Goethe said long ago, we know ourselves by doing, not by thinking.

This month, mindful of point three, I donated a little extra. Next month — well, I’m still working on that. But read this article from The 19th about people who are already working it out.

(This was supposed to go live this afternoon but I screwed up).

Last weekend I made one of my favorite bread recipes, Maryetta’s oatmeal bread from Beard on Bread.

That’s significant because I think I’ve been in a funk about cooking for a while. I still cook and the food is healthy but I’ve been relying on the same old recipes much more than usual. I can’t pin down a reason but possibly I’m getting back into the swing of it. I cooked a couple of new recipes recently too.

Another shift or tentative shift is that devoting Friday to blogging and email isn’t working as well as I want. For whatever reason I seem to be getting a lot more email (legit stuff, not spam) and it takes me a lot more time to get through it. Then I don’t get all my blogging done — this week I only had one post at Atomic Junk Shop, reposting an old column about the loneliness of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Another shift: Snowdrop hanging around. It was so cold this week that TYG took Wisp into the bedroom at night, closed the door and had me sleep in the spare room. That way when I woke up I could invite Snowdrop in without Wisp trying to bolt. That let me lure him to the couch to sit with me where it was warm.

He’s happy to sit next to me and doze for hours — he’ll even do it before he asks for food. But only as long as the door’s open. It can only be slightly open; I froze my butt off quite a bit this week. Still, the closer he gets to maybe, possibly becoming an indoor cat …

Workwise, this week was frustrating. I was on the brink of finishing this editing go-round for Southern Discomfort (one edit-my-edits round to go, then done. No, seriously, done). However Carrboro — the town I cover — filed a lawsuit against Duke Energy yesterday, charging the utility knew for decades that climate change was a problem, did nothing and lied about it. That’s big news — governments have sued oil and coal companies but not utilities — so I had to research it, call people, interview them and write the thing. Which is now live.

I’m now within thirty pages of the end. However I’ve made so many changes in so many places it’ll take one final round of proofreading to make sure I didn’t throw in some mistakes along the way. It can still be done this month.

That was pretty much it. I’d planned to get some Jekyll and Hyde done but the newspaper work took care of that. Still it’s good work, and it pays. That’s why I don’t turn it down very often.

Oh, and my copy of The Ceaseless Way arrived in the mail. I’m so happy to have it in hard copy — and to be free of working on it.

You can buy it in paperback or ebook. Cover by GetCovers based on concepts by Arden Brooks.

Because there ain’t no such thing in the 21st century. Vaccines work; we’ve known that for longer than this country’s been around. They save lives. It’s like claiming you’re a round-Earth skeptic — you’re either an ignorant crackpot or a lying fraud. As Albert Burneko puts it, “Vaccine denier” simply is not flattering to Kennedy; “vaccine skeptic” makes him seem … well, like the kind of person that antivaxxers like to think they are: serious, flinty-eyed question-askers, rather than stubborn assholes stamping their feet and refusing to learn what can be fully known because they want some special hidden truth of their own.

At any rate, “vaccine skeptic” certainly is nicer and less contentious than calling Kennedy a motivated bullshitter, a peddler of antiscientific garbage, the type of dogshit-brained imbecile who will stiff-arm all that can be learned from centuries of medical research and practice because he preferred what he learned from a 25-second TikTok video made by a spiral-eyed homeschool casualty who’ll be hospitalized next month with an illness that hasn’t sickened a human being since the Bronze Age. That laundering does him a favor he doesn’t remotely deserve, but it is especially egregious now that Kennedy seems very likely to end up holding a powerful position in national government. It’s that last bit, as much as his famous name, that wins Kennedy that favor; if this clammy lummox is going to be in charge of something important, then the Times must do its customary job of dressing him for the part.”

Or as Scott Lemieux put it, questioning Kennedy’s fitness for the job would be questioning TFG’s judgment and they don’t want to do that.

Nor will RFK’s position lead to illuminating discussions about public health. That’s like saying that putting a Holocaust denier into the Education Department would lead to illuminating discussions about the truth of history. His concerns about chronic illness are based on bad statistics and he’s blamed diabetes, asthma and ADD on vaccines. Indeed, it sounds at that link like he thinks inflicting chronic disease is deliberate, an old and hoary idea (doctors cause disease to get rich! has been around a while)

Or consider this point from David Bowman on Bluesky: RFK’s argument that vaccines cause autism is “the belief that autism is worse than death.”

And it’s not like the anti-vax movement needs health: vax opposition has already led to a surge in measles cases worldwide. We do not need a guy in charge who says government and big pharma should stop researching treatment for infectious diseases. And whose arguments about vaccines, Wi-Fi and other ideas sound scientific but are not science at all.

As Alexandra Petri says: “We’re doing our best to give the people what they want. For many years we thought what they wanted was clean drinking water, safe and tested vaccines to drive down deaths from childhood diseases, and food that is produced in sanitary conditions so the people who eat it don’t get sick. But we were wrong, and the change starts now.”

It doesn’t help that foreign scientific talent may not get visas to work here under the TFG regime.

Last week I wrote that no matter what Republicans say about The Felon having a mandate — meaning he should get anything he wants because The People Have Spoken — mandates are bullshit. (So is the argument that as he won despite his criminal convictions, therefore he shouldn’t suffer punishment). From my state, North Carolina, a case in point: Josh Stein won the governorship over “black Nazi” Mark Robinson but the Republican legislature doesn’t care the people have spoken. Instead they’re stripping power from the governor and the new Democratic attorney general and transferring it to themselves or Republican state officials. Having gerrymandered themselves a banana republic one-party legislature years ago, they’ve been pulling this stuff whenever Dems win an office.

In this case they’ve attached the restrictions to a hurricane relief bill to pressure their Dem colleagues into supporting it. Hope the Dems don’t bite because less Republican power is definitely a good thing. Thanks again, Tricia Cotham — the pro-choice, pro-gay Dem who switched parties and policies after her next-to-last election (this year, alas, she won re-election narrowly), giving the Repubs a veto-proof majority if they all hang together.

Next topic: what do Democrats do now? Which is actually two topics, first how the outgoing leadership should react to the TFG presidency. For months they’ve been warning, accurately, of what a catastrophe it’s going to be; now they’re greeting him at the White House and saluting him as the new leader as if he were just a regular pol. Never mind that some people are seriously ready to flee America for fear of 47’s revenge.

I suspect that in most people who get to that level of government there’s a strong impulse to play by the rules and the mores, at least outwardly. And the rules are, you hand off to the new guy. Faced with the unprecedented situation of handing off to a would-be (will-be) dictator, they’re falling back on acting like it’s any ordinary transition.

I get that. But as pointed out at the link (and in coments), they should be doing more. Keep speaking up. Encourage people to resist peacefully. Give advice on what to do. I’ve seen all kinds of suggestions for what Biden can do in his remaining time, such as pardoning lots of federal prisoners. Maybe there’s more.

The second topic is how Democrats proceed forward. Unsurprisingly we’re already seeing calls to reject identity politics. Dem Rep. Elissa Slotkin, for instance says identity politics is dead and Dems should take direction “not from the faculty lounge but the assembly line.”

This is something I’ve seen since Reagan was popular in the early 1980s (contrary to legend, much less popular by the end of his term), a desperate flex to drop support for gay/women’s/POC rights and pursue those salt of the Earth working-class Republican voters who have no patience with this fussy stuff about deadnaming and saying masculinity is toxic and thinking about diversity instead of just hiring the best person (curiously things like The Felon hiring a bunch of white people because he saw them on TV are of course never held up as a problem the way POC or women getting positions of authority is. Just as him running as the champion of white males isn’t seen as identity politics).

Slotkin assumes, apparently, that there are no women or POC on the assembly line or that if there are, they’re concerned about all the bread-and-butter economic stuff and not rights of minorities. But racism and sexism aren’t some abstract academic theory with no real significance. They’re serious forces that hurt people, deny them jobs, make their jobs so toxic they can’t keep at them, and sometimes they kill. Pushing for equality — which is 90 percent of liberal identity politics — is the right course. If it doesn’t win votes — well, it’s still the right course.

And I doubt Slotkin has any evidence this is what killed Harris’ shot — it’s not like she was running everyday on pronouns and gay rights. As the Guardian said eight years back, blaming identity politics for TFG’s win is like blaming civil rights for Jim Crow. The Republicans who object to using someone’s preferred pronouns aren’t saying “I’d support trans rights if not for that.” Just as the people who used to pretend they couldn’t stomach gays because of all those Awful Perverted Antics At Gay Pride Parades are just horrified when two gays don matching tuxedos and plight eternal love to each other.

As Winifred Burton says on BluSky, some of this is probably Dems who don’t want to put any more effort into supporting minorities or women’s rights than they absolutely have to. Even if it’s not, it’s putting us on the wrong side — and it won’t work. “We want to be better Republicans” is not a rallying cry anyone’s going to get behind. My compliments to the Democrats — AOC for instance — who aren’t having it.

Another point is that even though Republicans run up red ink and mismanage the economy the public perception of the party doesn’t seem to change.

To wrap up on an up note, Matt Gaetz last week declined the attorney-general nomination. And after the smirking chimp gave up his house seat too … I’m guessing whatever’s in the House Ethics Committee report must be dynamite. I hope they release it and nuke his career, though I’m sure he’d do fine as a host on OAN or Newsmax. Of course, lots of horrible nominees remain and Gaetz’ replacement will be awful but I’ve been enjoying his sudden fall nonetheless.

I picked up MONSTERS AND MAD SCIENTISTS: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie by Andrew Tudor to see if it had any insight into Dr. Jekyll (I think it does, though I’m not sure what yet). Tudor takes the analytical approach of counting mad scientist and mad science films from the 1930s through the 1980s and looking at how science and scientists are treated. He concludes that while the 1930s were keen on Misguided Visionaries, later mad scientists are likely to be Pure Evil and science itself exists as a threat without a mad scientist figure (e.g., radiation-spawned monstrosities of the 1950s). While it wasn’t a point the book brought up it did make me realize one difference between Jekyll and Frankenstein is that it’s much harder for Jekyll to destroy the monster he’s created.

BROKEN WORDS: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics by Jonathan Dudley, argues that although evangelical conservatives insist their claims about abortion, evolution, homosexuality, etc. are based on the word of God, they ignore that it’s their interpretations of the Bible and that it’s open to be interpreted in other ways (as Mark Noll has written, both abolitionists and slaveowners cited the Bible prior to the Civil War). Raised evangelical, Dudley is horrified at the turn to the right his wing of the faith has taken, though he points out that liberal evangelicals are prone to the same weakness.

TWO-GUN WITCH by Bishop O’Connell has an elven bounty hunter in the post-Civil War West (I had a depressing feeling this was going to go with “elves are the Native Americans in this world” but no, they coexist and are both discriminated against) hunt down an unspeakably evil magus who turns out to be artificially tainted with dark magic. But who could do that? What would they stand to gain? This was a good read, though more leisurely-paced and character-centric than I expect from a weird western.

I was less entertained by Richard Kadrey’s THE EVERYTHING BOX which feels like an unsuccessful attempt to knock off Good Omens. In the aftermath of Noah’s flood, an angel assigned to wipe out the survivors loses the accursed box of plagues he was given for that purpose; in the modern world, a thief, his poltergeist sidekick and an FBI agent all get involved in the hunt for the McGuffin. Everything from the banter to the inept angel felt too familiar to keep going with this one.

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