Category Archives: Culture

20 Years On

 

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and flight 93 that is generally assumed to have its target the capital but was thwarted by its passengers at the cost of their own lives.

I remember clearly where I was how I heard about the attacks. At the time I was working an overnight shift at a laboratory that performed drug testing for commercial clients. I loaded and ran a large machine that processed the samples. I was far from a scientist but a worker with basic skills and to help pass the hours I listened to radio during the night. Every night as the dawn came atmospheric changes began interfering with reception and usually, I had to shut off the radio for the last hour or so of my shift. On Sep 11th, 2001, just as the signal was degrading beyond usability, I hear the first reports that a plane has collided with one of the towers at the WTC. I assumed it was probably some light civilian aircraft and heard no more as noise swamped the signal.

At the time I used mass transit to get home and at the bus stop a random person was trying to tell me that a tower had collapsed. At this point I still had no confirmed information that it had been a massive airliner and assumed this person was passing on rumor or speculation. (Even before the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter there was plenty of bad and fake information out there.) When I reached the 7-11 just blocks from my apartment, I saw the video playing on their television and understood that the world had changed.

 

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My Latest YouTube Fascinations

 

There are lots of crappy YouTube channels pouring poison and lies into a public discourse but there are also loads of content that is educational and fun and belonging to the latter category are some of the channels I’ve discovered doing ‘reaction’ videos. These are people who are watching movies and television, usually for the first time, and reacting to the unfolding story. I’ve discovered three channels that for quite different reasons I find fun and relaxing to watch. These are presented in no particular order.

Natalie Gold A young women who works in the film industry Natalie’s videos provide the most reaction of my three favorite channels. She screams, laughs, and cries very easily but also given her vocation she has a sharp eye for performance, and artistic choices.

Millennial Movie Mondays Ashleigh Burton is a millennial whose life has zigged and zagged her past may cultural movie markers and is now experiencing many of these films for the first time. She is funny with a sarcastic sense of humor and willing to take unpopular stands on popular movies. Watching her channel can make someone feel older especially when something that used to be as culturally all-consuming as a Rambo reference is answered with a ‘Huh? What does that refer to?’

Fictionaldarling This young woman doesn’t overtly display her name and approaches her watches and they are often re-watches not first-time viewings, from a decidedly fannish perspective invested in the characters and their relationships.

 

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Remington — Sadistic Assholes

 

I hadn’t planned on two political posts back-to-back, but a bit of news sent my blood boiling and made this morning’s essay inevitable.

First off let me state that I do think the second amendment as written was intended as an individual right but like all rights that is not absolute. It can certainly be met with restrictions and regulation. So, my anger does not spring from a well of hatred towards guns or their owners.

Nearly nine years ago an evil man strode into Sandy Hook elementary school and slaughtered children and teachers.

Federal law, rightfully or wrongfully, protects gun manufactures from liability in how their products are used but parents or the gun-down children filed a suit in court not focused on the use but on the advertising used to sell the guns and a lead defendant is the arms company Remington. I do not know if their case has merit or not, I have not studied the law in the matter and that is something for the courts to determine. Remington as much as any person has a right to their day in court and to their defense.

When you sue or are sued you have a right to force the other side to retain and produce documents and evidence. IN this case the plaintiffs are demanding internal documents and such pertaining to Remington’s advertising campaigns. That’s fair, that the crux of the matter in the lawsuit.

Remington on the other hand is demand the attendance, grades, and disciplinarily records of murdered children.

How the actual fuck does any of that pertain to defending themselves over their advertising choices? I can’t see any conceivable way this at all bears upon the question before the court.

To me this stinks of nothing more than mental torture, of harassment, perhaps to cause enough metal trauma and anguish to force the parents to leave the suit.

Everyone has a right to a full and vigorous defense, everyone. Everyone also gets to reap the whirlwind of being a vicious, cruel, asshole which Remington and their lawyers seem intent on reaping.

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Texan Stasi

 

The Stasi were the Secret Police of Communist East Germany tasked, among other things, with watching the population for signs of disloyalty. Recruiting people to spy upon their friends, neighbors, and family near the end of the brutal murderous regime the Stasi had informants that comprised over 2% of the nation’s population. Turning neighbor against neighbor particularly with payments and profits is a lessoned well learned by the Republicans of Texas.

This week a new Texan lawn, one that is blatantly unconstitutional, went into effect after the conservative Supreme Court of the United States of American declined to issue a stay to put the novel legal tactic on hold. Texas made illegal all abortions, save that to explicitly prevent the death of the mother, after six weeks of pregnancy, in direct contradiction to nearly 50 years of constitutional precedent. But rather than making the enforcement of the law a matter for the state of Texas the law places enforced in the hands of the public by way of civil action creating standing for anyone who wishes it to sue any and all person involved in performing, assisting, or in any way aiding the abortion of its procurement. The law also creates a floor of ‘damages’ with this standing of $10,000, allows for the plaintiff to recover their legal expensive should they prove victorious in court while also disallowing the defend to recovery their legal costs should they prevail. By removing the state as the enforcement the Texan GOP hopes, and so far, has been correct in their plot, to make this difficult to review, halt, or reverse in the courts. Resolving this by way of the courts could take years and lots of money and contrary to Conservative propaganda most abortion services providers are far from rich.

Never create a political power you aren’t willing to give to your political opponents.

There are already rumblings, though I fear it will never come to more than talk, of ‘Blue’ states retaliating in kind. Pass blatantly unconstitutional gun control laws and put enforcement into the hand of the public with ruinous ‘damages’ and expensive court fess.  Frankly I wish this would happen. Not because I am an avid supporter of gun control, I have dear friends that are gun collectors, enthusiasts, and merchants, but I also have dear friends and family that are women and whose right are being trampled for utter bullshit and if this is the sort of pain that must be inflicted to protect them, then so be it.

 

 

 

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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I’ll Take The Earthquakes

 

My family in Florida often comments that they could never live in California, terrified of the earth suddenly moving under their feet. I’ve ridden out a few earthquakes including one that sent waves rippling along the wall of a Denny’s I was sitting in and they are frightening but not as scary as the governor of Florida and willingness to slaughter the people in his quest to become the next leader of the Turd Reich.

Last year, at the very start of the year, I was planning a trip to Florida to see my family and celebrate the release of my first novel, Vulcan’s Forge. The pandemic killed those plans, my sales, and north of 600,000 Americans. Despite this Florida’s governor not only will not implement the simplest anti-covid measure but actually threatens those who do. California may have vast wildfires and earthquakes but do not elect our deadly disasters.

Yes, my current governor is subject to a specious recall and may be a Nexus 5 Replicant but he is not actively acting to slaughter me and my family.

 

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Odds and Ends

 

Here’s a potpourri of thoughts for this Wednesday morning.

1) I’m Bummed: I had been so looking forward to attending in person 2021’s Horrible Imaginings Film Festival but with Orange County’s COVID-19 positivity rate above 20%, the theater instituting a quite reasonable mask mandate, and my own somewhat compromised immune system due to arthritis medications it just doesn’t make sense to go in person. So just like last year I will be watching the films virtually.

2) The Face-Eating-Leopards that in the GOP Base is beyond control. It is both ironic and terrifying that the former guy himself, the Turd that stained our democracy and attempted to overthrow a fair and free election, was booed by his own crowd for suggesting that people get vaccinated. I am horrified that things are going to get worse before they get better.

3) I am now experimenting with greater post processing of the pictures I am taking with my DSLR. Here’s a color pushed and modified photo of a trip to the shore I took last year.

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A Few Thoughts on Afghanistan

 

What is transpiring in the graveyard of empire is a terrible crime against humanity that women, girls, LGBTQ, non-believers, and other will bear the horrid costs of.

That said going into Afghanistan on a nation building project was in all likelihood a fool’s errand. Before the invasion but following the attacks of 9/11, the United States gave the Taliban leadership of that country an option to avoid invasion, surrender the terrorists to us. They rejected that offer and we invaded to get those that had killed 3000 of our own. (And now one of own political institutions shares culpability in killing 200 hundred times as many Americans.)

Our goal should have been getting al-Qaeda and then leaving. But that is don and the past cannot be changed. What to do now?

We should get every translator and their kin out of the country that wants to leave. If you have no loyalty you have nothing.

This should not extend in any manner to senior Afghani politicians scooping money into their pockets. Those who used the occupation as an excuse to fleece the country we owe no loyalty to; I have no issues leaving them on their own and closing our doors in their faces.

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Quick Hits

 

Just a few unrelated thoughts and observations this morning.

 

COVID-19: Well, this is fucked. We could have been well on the way to controlling the pandemic in the US and then turning our considerable resources to helping the rest of the world, but no, our fascist-adjacent party insists on throwing their tantrum modeled upon their orange god-king and screwing it up for everyone.

 

New Novel: I’ve started act break work on my new novel about alien ‘non-contact.’ I’m hoping within a week to have an outline and to be ready for actual scene writing.

 

Marvel’s What if …: the new series an anthology of animated alternate versions of MCU stories, the premier being what is Agent Carter got the super solider serum instead of Steve. It worked but I wasn’t blown away.

 

 

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Returning to Our Winter of Discontent

 

COVID 19 cases continue to rise alarmingly fast. The United States has sufficient quantities of vaccine to immunize every single adult in the country. The right’s base, following decades of anti-science and anti-expertise propaganda follow their orange god/king with the fever of fanatics foregoing vaccination even as their elite take the shot along with their followers money.

This is the current situation in America and though last week so half-hearted and weak attempts my ‘conservative’ elites to urges their base to get vaccinated those efforts has evaporated and case rates and death continue to rise.

This is summer. People are out and about in the open air lessening the spread and still the rates are climbing fast. When winter comes and people remain indoor sharing their breathing air over and over it may be very very bad.

“Break through’ infections, infection among the vaccinated, are happening but those who have been vaccinated even if they get COVID are not winding up in the hospital or the morgue. We will lose more people, a lot more people, all the flatter a thin-skinned lying narcissist about an election he lost.

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Someone Lighted the Nut-Signal Yesterday

 

After months of anti-vaxx messaging, fear-mongering, and countless people suffering pain and death to appease a spoiled pamper man-baby in Florida ‘conservative’ news and twitter yesterday suddenly began broadcasting the urgent needs for people to be vaccinated. Tweets from the Senate minority leader, commentary from Fox News and other ‘conservative’ quarters all began singing from the same hymn.

I do not know why a sanity suddenly burst like a star flare over the right and while I expect it to fade as quickly as that flare, I still welcome it.

It’s with great doubt that I would entertain the concept that a sudden empathy for the people suffering and dying motivated these elites to urge a rational and urgently needed course of action. Yesterday’s messengers have been long vaccinated themselves against this plague and all too content to let others die slow lingering isolated deaths for brief political points making empathy an impossibly high hurdle for any sensible person’s suspension of disbelief.

No, I would look to some motivated, selfish, self-interest for the sudden, and in all likelihood, temporary change in messaging. Perhaps the growing hospitalizations has depressed fundraising and the flood of cash slowed frightening the politicians. Perhaps the suburbs fled the right even more as death and disease replaced low taxation as the most identifying aspect of the Republican party. Or maybe, just maybe, someone with a little foresight, able to peer into the misty future beyond the 24 hours news cycle understood that being anti-vaxx actually resulted in killing the very voters who would be insane enough to return them to power. Despite losing the popular vote by seven or so million the GOP lost the White House only by a margin of fifty or so thousand votes a margin easily expanded by a pandemic that concentrated itself within their base.

 

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