Sunday, December 22, 2013
"Virginia Slave Narratives": a notebook of interviews with former slaves taken in the 1930's, sold at Bacon's Castle
Last Sunday I bought an unusual workbook at Bacon’s Castle,
a historical attraction in southern Virginia described on my Issues Blog, Dec.
16.
The booklet is “Virginia Slave Narratives: A Folk History of
Slavery in Virginia from Interviews with Former Slaves”, from the Federal
Writers Project, 1936-1938 (now sponsored by the Library of Congress),
published by Applewood Books in Bedford, MA.
The ISBN is 1-55705-025-4.
The book comprises photocopies of typewritten (and sometimes
cursive) manuscripts of interviews with former slaves (called “informants”). There are 55 numbered pages, and then 29
pages of appendix, including a glossary of slang terms.
The earliest excerpt describes a little of Nat Turner’s
Slave Revolt at Jerusalem (now Courtland), in which slaves actually killed
white owners (see the same blog posting).
The postings described the drudgery of slave life, in almost
unintelligible English, with no hope of change.
One slave describes an owner who was kindler, and allowed Sundays off
and sometimes dinner in the mansion. Slaves
describe having to ask for permission to marry.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Ernest Jude Navy's "The Truth at Half Staff": yes, I've wondered about these interpretations of history and morality
Author: Ernest Jude Navy
Title: “The Truth at Half Staff”
Publication: Xlibris, 2003, ISBN 1-4010-9147-4, 48 chapters,
303 pages, softcover, with some black-and-white photo illustrations throughout.
Amazon link is here. Note the variability of the reviews.
I ordered this book from Amazon in order to get a feel for
what an XLibris self-published book would be like, since I am self-publishing
my own “Do Ask, Do Tell III” book with the same company (discussed Dec. 12 here). I wanted to find a non-fiction book that
takes up some of the same issues that I do, and where the author seems to
process the issues the same way I did.
This book does fit the mold, even if it is now ten years old.
The book comprises 48 (by my count) unnumbered short
chapters (numbering would have been in order).
This comprises a few poems and collections of sayings at the end, making
up a kind if appendix. Most chapters have their own endnotes. I did wonder why the page size is a little
narrower than for most paperbacks of this nature. These little chapters remind me of my own “sidebars”
on my old “do ask do tell” website.
Navy takes up the popular conceptions about many historical events
and social issues and debunks popular “conservative” notions about how great
America is. (His very first chapter is on Cuba’s Fidel Castro.) I found he shared my concerns about karma and
moral underpinnings of our way of life.
However, he usually keeps his observations to the “group” level and does
not take it down to what should be expected of the individual today.
His overall message is that America, by accurate reading of
history, has been a very racist place, and that many positions (especially of
so-called conservatives, most of all when connected to religion) are predicated
on the idea that “my race is better than yours” and “my faith” or “my social
group” is inherently superior. Navy does
state in one place that he is African-American himself and describes bus
background.
For example, he traces the history of anti-drug laws and
ties them to a desire to keep people of color down. He argues that Lincoln was
racist, and reminds us that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to “rebel”
states. I think I recall that point from
“Virginia and US History” in high school and that the teacher asked an essay
question on this point on the final exam (at Washington-Lee High School in
Arlington, VA) in June, 1960.
He gives an interesting explanation for Pearl Harbor, going
back to an obscure incident in 1853 when the United States forced unfair
treaties on Japan.
His explanation for the Vietnam war caught my attention.
Historians disagree on whether Kennedy would have pursued Vietnam the way LBJ
did, but Kennedy once said in an interview that he did agree with the “domino
theory”. Navy presents the Ho Chi Minh
as wanting only self-rule for all of Vietnam, and says that the Eisenhower administration
partitioned Vietnam, in his view, illegally.
Vietnam was not like Korea, in this author’s view. We all know that some of the later history is
questionable, like LBJ’s manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin. We also know the explanation of Robert
McNamara in his book “In Retrospect” and in the Frakenheimer HBO movie “Path to
War” (movies blog, Oct. 17, 2013). The
war was supported by a draft and a student deferment system that definitely worked
against minorities. I’m surprised I don’t see more explicit discussion of race
with respect to the “cannon fodder” aspect of the draft then. I finally got drafted, but used my education
to “get out of” going to Nam altogether. Was the whole moral debate over
deferments based on a historical fallacy? I remember writing to pastors of my own church
in the 1960’s when I was in graduate school (before I was drafted, note), and
got back a response that we had to trust our political leaders!
Navy gives his own spin on affirmative action and then the
OJ verdict. I won’t say I agree completely
with his reasoning, but I see where he is coming from. (I do have prosecutor
Marcia Clark’s book “Without a Doubt”.)
Navy also shows that American racism (he would have
supported Gode Davis’s film project “American Lynching”) extending to the
treatment of native Americans, which would seem to call into question the moral
basis of most individual American “real property rights”. (Bacon’s Rebellion,
as well as Nat Turner’s Slave Revolt, which I discussed on my Issues blog Dec.
16, would fit into his analysis.)
However, Navy also writes that scientifically, there is no such thing as "race', that it is really a meaningless concept biologically. There are traits that affect appearance that are favored in different parts of the world, particularly as affected by distance from the equator.
Navy's comments on the public v. private school debate emphasizes that public schools must accept all students, and the reason for poorer performance by minorities is the breakdown of the family, and absence of fathers in the home -- which he blames largely on exploitation by greedy capitalism, not on personal morals. He shows that people today do not have looser mores than those in the past.
However, Navy also writes that scientifically, there is no such thing as "race', that it is really a meaningless concept biologically. There are traits that affect appearance that are favored in different parts of the world, particularly as affected by distance from the equator.
Navy's comments on the public v. private school debate emphasizes that public schools must accept all students, and the reason for poorer performance by minorities is the breakdown of the family, and absence of fathers in the home -- which he blames largely on exploitation by greedy capitalism, not on personal morals. He shows that people today do not have looser mores than those in the past.
Navy’s interpretation on “gay rights” is relatively
simple. He sees anti-gay prejudice as
simply dislike of those who are “different”.
In my own writings, I have taken up the idea that anti-gay prejudice has
a lot to do with gay men, in particular, wanting to ‘get out of full
responsibility” for raising kids (the tide is turning on that with the
developments in gay marriage and gay parents) and on making straight men uncomfortable
by kibitzing on the question as to which males are most fit. That sort of
observation drove the early debate on gays in the military and “don’t ask, don’t
tell”/ Navy never goes near that. I should add that I am gay myself, but also
white.
The most provocative chapter of all may be one near the
beginning, “Capitalism / Christianity”, p. 22,
There is a sub-sidebar “Individualism / Collectivism” followed by
another, “Competition” and then “Taxes”.
Grover Norquist, beware! Navy
argues that the “ideology” of Christianity and the teachings in the Gospels
require self-sacrifice and an orientation toward behaving for the common good
and for others. That certainly seems the
case to me, and it has always seemed the parables in the Gospels (like “The
Rich Young Ruler” and the “Talents”) have a lot do with the fact that a lot of personal
outcome, however much we want to preach about “personal responsibility”, comes
down to fortune and luck and the unseen sacrifices of others (an issue which
the forgotten military draft underscores).
I’ll pass along Navy’s YouTube video “You Did Not Build that
Alone” and his criticism of “rugged individualism” of the Ayn Rand sort.
In my mindset, what matters is not just group outcomes and
collective remedies, which (like affirmative action) can result in isolated
temporary injustices to individuals. It’s
more about how the individual should behave, how he or she should balance his
own goals with meeting the needs of others.
There is a general impression that healthful socialization means
learning to provide for and take care of others who are less cognitively “competent”
(that often means children, the elderly, or disabled) within one’s own extended
family or community, and only then moving out into the larger world. I find it very hard to become “involved” in
meeting the adaptive or “real” needs of others when I don’t communicate with
them and I seem to live in a different space, and when I would have been
unwelcome in the past (even if I am solicited now). How is one to behave if one decides that the
aims of one’s family or group are based on an untenable moral foundation? Why even “go to Heaven” then? I’m not to that point in my own thinking, but
Navy’s book takes me closer to it. A related question would be is the individual responsible for giving back more (even interpersonally) because of the "exploitation" committed by his ancestors? That bears on the affirmative action and even reparations issues.
Pictures are mine.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Hedrick Smith's "Who Stole the American Dream?" explains "Inequality for All"
Author: Hedrick Smith
Title: “Who Stole the American Dream?”
Publication: 2012, Random House Trade, ISBN
978-0-8129-8205-3, 6 Parts, 22 Chapters, 580 pages, paper.
Amazon link
The title of this book reminds me of the little short story
“Who Stole the Mona Lisa?” that I wrote in ninth grade English class. The author (“The Russians”) takes the view
that middle class America has been snatched or robbed, and that it was all too
simple for the rich to do.
The shift in policies toward big business accelerated in the
late 1970s, under a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. This all happened after the oil shocks and
then Watergate – but on some economic issues Nixon had turned out to be a
“liberal”. Remember the wage and price
controls?
Smith’s theory is rather like that of Robert Reich in his
film “Inequality for All” (Movies, June 24, 2013). The “Virtuous Circle” broke down as “extreme
capitalism” set in, with its excessive focus on short-term profits for
stakeholders, distorting the markets.
This all help set up 2008.
I remember the mood of the late 1980s, as hostile takeover
artists swept down on stable companies, and employees saw the good old days as
numbered. The business games had a moral
rationalization. If only individual people took on more personal responsibility,
they would be OK.
We see how that all played out, with the weakening of
pensions (partly because of longer life spans) and the switch to “employee
responsibility” with 401(k) plans.
Manufacturing and even some systems and customer support jobs got
offshored, and people took to hucksterism.
But salesmanship started to fail, too, as people wanted to be left alone
and not be inundated with solicitations.
The Internet made it easier for you to “do it yourself”, right?
One could take a libertarian spin on all this, and say the
most capable people did well in this globalized environment. Indeed, some did. But the divide between the rich and the poor
grew, to the point that it god personal.
Indeed, as some left wing observers like Noam Chomsky have said, violent
street crime (or even computer crime) has become a kind of class warfare, and
it could become impossible to contain. The causes for terrorism can be personal as
well as global and religious.
So, social conservatism, harking back to the “Moral Majority”
of the 1980s, can put on its own spin. If people have to contain their psyche,
sexuality and emotional life within the confines of marriage and family, there
is a leveling effect that makes economic inequality for tolerable. Perhaps there’s something to this. Moreover, it isn’t the responsibility of
government to provide for the poor, it’s up to the caring of individuals,
moving out from the family structure.
That’s the conservative rationalization.
The last chapter calls for “armies of volunteers” to execute
social activism (maybe the Occupy movements) as well as caregiving and
charity. Indeed, his prescription
reminds me of libertarian writer Charles Murray’s concern for loss of social
capital in his book “Coming Apart” (March 14, 2012). I’m not a joiner. I don’t like to be recruited for other people’s
agendas. Is that part of the problem?
I bought the book on display at Kammerbooks in Washington
DC.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Final "DADT III" version to be published; has interim release now
I have made a small interim printing of my “final” version
of “Do Ask, Do Tell: Free Speech Is a Fundamental Right, Being ‘Listened To” Is
a Privilege”. Yes, I could call it “Do
Ask, Do Tell III”, as if it were like a movie franchise.
The book has also been submitted for formal publication
through a formal POD publisher (Xlibris, of Author Solutions). The plan is that all e-commerce will be
outsourced to the POS publisher with normal channels on Amazon, Barnes and
Noble, and the like. Hardcopy, paperback, and e-reader (Kindle) will be available.
I discussed the earlier interim “release” here on Oct. 1,
2011, and I described the plans for additional content here on June 27, 2013
and Aug. 20, 2013. One concern was to update some proposals that I had made
back in the 1997 book that history has outrun, particularly with respect to
DOMA and COPA. Another was to add three
fiction segments, as a “Part 2”, which develop the ideas of the non-fiction “Part
1”.
The non-fiction chapters have been further expanded, with more factual detail, and particularly, in the "Foreword" and later "Epilogue", more material on "why I write" and on why I seem aloof from emotions that others expect.
The last two of the stories, in form, are, as road trips,
rather like parallels of one another, set forty years apart. In the “Expedition” story I appear at age 28, and in the “Ocelot”
story I am at current age. The outcomes
are different, although they deal with similar issues. The first of the stories is set in strip-mining
country and could play on the mountaintop removal issue, which was actually
going on in 1972. But all of “Bill’s”
private kind of activism maps into a personal outcome involving others. The “Ocelot” story is set when the country is
braced for a possible solar storm (which actually would have nothing to do with
climate change but has everything to do with “addiction to technology”), and
has a personal outcome which will sound darker.
“Bill” may “get what he wants” but he then has to do what others want,
finally. The end slams the door.
It’s possible to imagine a two-part movie of these two
stories, with flashbacks showing what has happened in the intervening decades,
and what had happened before, particularly Bill’s military service, which may
play on his previous college expulsion in the old “don’t ask, don’t tell” world
that prevailed in civilian life too, but which, disturbingly, paints him as a
bit of a physical and even emotional coward.
The hypothetical film sounds, quite literally, filled with “Roadside Attractions”.
Friday, December 06, 2013
Law journal article ("book") from 2009 on Section 230 immunity looks important now, given recent proposals to weaken it
It may be a little unfair to call this a “book”, but I
thought I would discuss briefly a detailed article by Katy Noeth at the Indiana
University Mauer School of Law, published in the “Federal Communications Law
Journal”, Vol. 1, Iss 3, Article 9, 2009 (20 pages), with the recommended link
here.
The paper can be purchased on Amazon, but can be found
online free.
The author takes the general position that the legal climate
in the United States is not adequate to protect minors in practice from criminal
behavior on the Internet, particularly the possibility of trafficking.
She says quickly that Section 230 of the 1996
Telecommunications Act (the “Communications Decency Act”, the censorship
portions of which were overturned by the Supreme Court in 1997) may prevent the public
from being able to expect supposedly deep-pocketed service providers from
taking precautions to protect vulnerable children, especially those of less well-informed
parents. The general reason for this
exemption is that service providers cannot reasonably review all user content
before posting for possible legal problems.
In this sense, service providers are like utilities rather than
publishers or commercial distributors.
But she quickly points out that there already is an “exception”, when it
comes to enforcing United States Code in criminal matters (like child
pornography). But usually liability
occurs only when the provider knows that the law is being broken in the normal
course of business.
Recently there has been a proposal from the Association of
State Attorneys General to extend the Section 230 exemption to state law.
Noeth traces the immediate aftermath of Section 230, in the
case of Zeran v. America Online. Zeran
had claimed that AOL had a duty to screen all material for defamatory content,
but the Fourth Circuit disagreed (in 1997) because of Section 230.
A more testing case occurred on Yahoo! In 2006 with the
“Candyman” case, where the author notes that Yahoo! apparently knew or strongly
suspected that minors could exploited by a particular customer. Later there would be a case called “Doe v.
MySpace” where apparently the litigation did not even try to claim that MySpace
was a “publisher”.
Noeth recommends several seemingly moderate solutions to the
problem. She thinks that the criminal
exemptions could be more specific (like child pornography or
trafficking {FOSTA}), and that Congress should draw a distinction in the law between child
exploitation and defamation (which is much broader). She specifically says that such a specific
provision would not cause service providers to have to “police” content
generators and account holders. She also says that it would not lead to abusive
litigation.
One point that Noeth stresses is a “knowing” standard. ISP’s or service providers (or bloggers
hosting comments or large forums) would not be responsible for items they did
not know about -- I suppose there could
be a question as to whether a moderator of a large forum could read every
posting and know what is going on. AOL’s
forums back in the 1990s were very large.
Monday, December 02, 2013
Thomas Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was a "new kind of book", in the 19th Century and maybe still today
In the spring of 1962 I started over in college at The
George Washington University (while “living at home”) after the catastrophe at
William and Mary (discussed often elsewhere on these blogs). As a freshman, I somehow placed out of
English 1, basic composition. At GWU, you took a year of literature before
taking the second composition course (English 4) where you “learned how” to
write a term paper. You could write
about anything you wanted, and I think I rehashed a high school paper on Mahler’s
influence on modern composers. We read
Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens) in that class, and I recall an
odd passage in Chapter 8 where Jim Tells Huck (in modern English), “If you’ve got
hairy arms and a hairy chest, it’s a sign you’re going to be rich”. Nobody dared to say anything when the passage
was read aloud in class (in spring 1963, probably in the original text), but I
thought then that the passage was a euphemism for racism in pre Civil War
American History. Spark Notes offers the passage here.
But back in 1962, I had to start out with “English 52B”,
which comprised the second half of English Literature, starting in the late 18th
Century. We had a gray anthology
textbook called “British Poetry and Prose”, and typically were assigned about
50 pages to read, a lot of it poetry, for each 75-minute class, taught by a Mr.
Rutledge, in a dusky first-floor classroom in Monroe Hall, with a good view of
G Street in Washington’s Foggy Bottom, with the old dive “Quigley’s” barely in
sight. (Wordsworth appeared early in the
course, with discussions of why poetry gives “pleasure”, and suitable
recognition of the film “Splendor in the Grass”, which had played into my lost
fall semester at William and Mary).
Mr. Rutledge liked to give “card quizzes”. They counted one fourth of your grade (so you
came to class, but he would drop the lowest two); there would be a midterm and
a final. And sometime around March 20 or
so, he gave us a card quiz on an excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s odd (and
blatantly self-indulgent) novel “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr
Teufelsdrockh”. The Latin lead means “the tailor re-tailored” and the
protagonist’s name means “god-born devil dung”.
Every student failed this pop quiz, including me. The professor had to throw it out. No one understood the point of the writing
from just reading at home. The book is
an example of a poioumenon, which is a work of “metafiction” where the author
layers the inner story inside a “presentation” layer where the author can
address the reader. Among writers’
groups, it’s considered taboo in modern “writing to sell” as stuck up, but
movie narratives do this kind of thing all the time. Many modern books and films consider the
relationship between the narrative story and the presenter or reader itself a
subject to be written about. Think about
“Inception”, “Cloud Atlas”, and the gay sci-fi hit “Judas Kiss”.
In the inner story, the protagonist wanders rural England or
Europe and is spurned in heterosexual love life, and is taken back when he sees
his beloved with another nobleman. He
turns to nihilism, wanting to pretend that he doesn’t exist (hide inside that
museum clam) until he finds a new purpose for living in his own head. It sounds dangerous. And he does find a different woman. But do people feel disappointed when they
have to take “someone else”, and think, “I should have done better than this”? That was how people thought about
relationships, especially in the gay male community, back in the late 1970’s in
the days before AIDS.
The outer layer of the book has an “Editor” account for his
own experience with dealing with the book, getting around to telling the inner
existential (or transcendental) story when he feels like it.
The professor asked an essay question about the concept of
the book (asking for comparisons to other authors’ works or even films) on the
final exam. He thought that students
should understand this approach to writing,
The book is available on Gutenberg in various formats here. And “it’s free”. I tried to download it “free” onto Kindle
(like many classics, it’s also a free download for Amazon Prime subcribers) and
found that the touchpad for typing on my little device didn’t work, don’t know
why. Battery problems? But the html version works fine, and
downloads OK even on a smart phone, and is perfectly readable. In fact, “Chapter II” in Book I caught my eye
with its title, “Editorial Difficulties”, and says that man is a “proselytizing
creature” (even if not a Mormon missionary) and speaks of the Philosophy of
Clothes. The latter would be called “sartorial
taste” and was very much a matter in the office in the 1970s and ‘80s, as
companies (other than IBM and EDS) gradually relaxed their dress codes, making
the choices of flared pants, colored shirts and wide ties very much a modem of
pre-Internet self-expression.
I don't see any evidence that Carlyle's novel has ever become a film. It would make an interesting indie experiment, at least in Britain. Let the BBC, Film 4 and the UK Lottery have a stab at it.
Update:
I got the Kindle download from Amazon to go. It just needed to be fully charged back up before it would work. The Kindle version doesn;t show the three inner "books", somewhat corresponding to various layers of narration by the Editor.
Update: Feb. 11. 2017
Mencius Goldbug writes about Thomas Carlye and "reactionaries" here in 2009. Suddenly this matters, when considering authoritarianism and Donald Trump.
I don't see any evidence that Carlyle's novel has ever become a film. It would make an interesting indie experiment, at least in Britain. Let the BBC, Film 4 and the UK Lottery have a stab at it.
Update:
I got the Kindle download from Amazon to go. It just needed to be fully charged back up before it would work. The Kindle version doesn;t show the three inner "books", somewhat corresponding to various layers of narration by the Editor.
Update: Feb. 11. 2017
Mencius Goldbug writes about Thomas Carlye and "reactionaries" here in 2009. Suddenly this matters, when considering authoritarianism and Donald Trump.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
"Foreign Policy" issue (end of 2012) has important essays on bio risks, financial stability, cyberwar, and leaks
It may seem a stretch to call an issue of a magazine a book,
but every issue of “Foreign Policy” comes across as a book of important
essays. The November/December 2013 issue
is particularly interesting.
The essay that got the most attention from me was Laurie
Garret’s “Biology’s Brave New World: The Promise and Perils of the Synbio
Revolution”. Garret, remember, authored
“The Coming Plague” back in 1995, in which she described some of the world’s
most deadly pathogens, including a detailed account of how a man recovered from
Ebola virus, to become quite bald everywhere. Here, Garrett compares life
itself to “4-D printing”, and then goes on to examine the ethics of experiments
that test the contagiousness of diseases, with particular emphasis on the
controversy over experiments (and publication thereof) regarding increasing the
transmissibility of H5N1 and then H7N9 “bird flu” viruses.
If these viruses
were readily transmitted among mammals through the air, rather than from bird
to mammal, they could become pandemic very quickly. On p. 42, Garrett
speculates on the idea of this being tried with HIV. The problem with this speculation is that
idea led to the rhetoric from the “Dallas Doctors Against AIDS” in the 1980s,
in an attempt to propose a particularly vehement ant-gay law (just before the
HTLV-3 aka HIV virus was announced).
Such speculation could have a drastic impact on individual rights.
There follows a companion essay by Ronald K. Noble, “Keeping
Science in the Right Hands: Policing the New Biological Frontier”.
On p. 88, Alan Greenspan delivers “Never Saw It Coming: Why
the Financial Crisis Took Economists by Surprise” where he talks about the
Jessel Paradox and “morbidly obese fat tails”.
But it seems pretty obvious that by late 2007 the housing market was
unraveling and that so many middle class consumers to expect so much house for
nothing would lead to disaster.
On. P. 97, Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber
discuss “Why Banking Systems Fail: The
Politics Behind Financial Institutions”.
There is an explanation of why unit banking developed on the American
frontier. When I moved to Dallas in
1979, I found out that Texas was a unit-banking state. The authors compare
American banking to the much more stable system in Canada.
On p. 77, Thomas Rid, in “Cyberwar and Peace” argues
“Hacking Can Reduce Real-World Violence”. The author points out that
cyberattacks have killed no one, and would seem to support the idea that a
cyberattack can bring down a properly secured power grid is very fanciful (see
“Grirdlock” (Sept. 5). A physical attack
with an EMP weapon would be a different matter.
On p. 22, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore argue in “The
End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy and the Age of Leaks” that the main
result of the leaks by Edward Snowden and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning are that
the U.S. will have to learn “The Importance of Being Earnest”, and it can no
longer deny engaging in the very behavior that it accuses authoritarian
countries of. On the other hand, what
about compromising civilian and ground sources overseas and putting them at risk
of retaliation?
Thursday, November 07, 2013
Jesse Ventura: "They Killed Our President", JFK conspiracy theories to put even Oliver Stone to shame
Author: Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell and David Wayne
Title: “They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe
There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK”
Publication: Skyhorse, ISBN 978-1-62636-139-3, hardcover, 63
chapters, 4 sections
Amazon link is here.
This book is frontloaded with so many plausible conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 (and the subsequent hit on Oswald by Jack Ruby) that it runs the risk of contradicting itself.
I’ll come back to the heart of the matter in a moment.
Let’s say, though, that the details concerning the physical
evidence, the witnesses, the suspects (Oswald and then Ruby), the internal
memos indicating cover-up, and the political motives of conspirators are rather
overwhelming.
Most of all, of course, is the evidence of more bullets and
more shots fired from the front as well as back, which the Zapruder Film is
supposed to confirm. Oliver Stone
(director of the 1991 film “JFK”) confirmed the ideas on a recent interview
with Piers Morgan.
Ventura discusses the idea that Oswald had a doppleganger,
and that there are contradictory details about his appearance in eyewitness
report. I recall hearing about a “30
year old white male” on the radio while about to leave work (at the old
National Bureau of Standards on Van Ness St. in Washington) after learning
about the event. He also argues that
Oswald could not have gotten to the movie theater in Oak Cliff by the time
Officer Tippett was shot.
The most provocative idea was that JFK was targeted by the right
wing “military industrial complex” that wanted to invade Cuba again and that
even wanted a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Ventura argues that JFK had to fight off his
own generals to bring a peaceful end to the Cuban Missile Crisis (and earlier,
to stalemate in Berlin) to avoid nuclear Armageddon. The belligerent anti-Communism would lead to
the Vietnam war and my own experience with the draft (and the deviseness over
deferments). The CIA was heavily
involved, in setting up double agents (including Oswald) and in colluding with
the Mafia, which feared a crackdown from Kennedy. LBJ, according to this theory, was in on it. On p. 344, Ventura argues that the
conspirators set up “shock incidents” that would appear to be
communist-inspired to justify war. This
very likely continued throughout the 1960s (one could even say that about
Tonkin in 1964). For example, I recall
during Basic in 1968 hearing about the mysterious murder of two Marines in
Georgetown in Washington DC. I mention this incident in my 1969 unpublished novel "The Proles". I also recall
starting my first summer job at the Navy Department in 1965, just about the
time Vietnam was first escalating, and I remember the gung-ho atmosphere.
The book has many quotes, which are displayed with ragged
boundaries on both sides, which is annoying to the eye.
I have met Jesse Ventura at least once, at the HRC dinner in Minneapolis in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11.
Update: November 9
John Kerry told Tom Brokaw on CNN that he no longer believes the Warren Commission "Oswald alone" theory, and says that it was probably a Cuban and Soviet plot, but not necessarily involving the military or CIA. Kerry says he hasn't spent enough time on it to be sure. But the whole case should be re-opened.
Second picture: My previous condo in Dallas, photo taken in Feb. 1985. Yes, it can snow in Dallas.
Update: November 9
John Kerry told Tom Brokaw on CNN that he no longer believes the Warren Commission "Oswald alone" theory, and says that it was probably a Cuban and Soviet plot, but not necessarily involving the military or CIA. Kerry says he hasn't spent enough time on it to be sure. But the whole case should be re-opened.
Second picture: My previous condo in Dallas, photo taken in Feb. 1985. Yes, it can snow in Dallas.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Covenant House offers booklet on its services for homeless children
Recently I received a “free” unsolicited booklet in the mail
from Covenant House, (link ) titled “Sometimes God Has a Kid’s Face”, by Sister Mary Rose McGeady.
The paperback runs 110 pages and does not carry an ISBN.
The fourteen chapters give the stories of various abandoned homeless
children, many of the in New York City. There was a variety of circumstances,
including having been reared in gangs, sold into sex slavery, or simply left at
shelters. One girl was a promising
writer. One boy, on the other hand, struggled
with image problems over obesity.
The booklet has an epilogue, and a variety of tips, aimed at
parents. They sound like common
sense.
But this booklet comes from a
charity taking care of OPC, that is, “other people’s children”. I wondered, do non-parents share a moral
responsibility for this situation? The
book, however, did not try to take a position on that.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Time's booklet "The Science of You"; ideas about character for people "in the twilight zone", as reflected in my own novel manuscripts
Time offers retail outlets another color, heavily
illustrated primer, “The Science of You: The Factors that Shape your Personality”, edited by Stephen Koepp and Neil
Fine.
The oversized album comprises several sections, called
“Nature”, “Nurture”, “Types”, “Disorders”, and a closing essay by Joel Stein,
“The Theory of Humor”.
The earlier essays would complement the book reviewed on
June 1, “I Am a Strange Loop”, as they try to get at what makes a person “me”,
and have a focus of consciousness that can experience (and take the
responsibility for) free will. It all starts with the introductory piece, “What
Shapes Us”, by Jeffrey Kluger.
The essays, while pondering “nature v. nurture”, don’t delve
into the biological aspects of sexual orientation. But they do maintain (as in a piece “Born to
Be Wild” by Alice Park (as if to suggest the David Lynch film “Wild at Heart”) that
genes account for personality traits only by acting together, and probably by
execution from chemical catalysts in what we call “epigenetics”. The longest piece in this section is “Make
Yourself at Home” by David Bjerklie. In
the book “Oddly Normal”, reviewed here Oct. 1, the author noticed the
intractable paradoxes of sexual orientation.
Sometimes it seems connected to physical developmental issues, but then
you run into a gay make capable of playing professional sports, and all the
stereotypes fail.
Jeffrey Kluger offers a piece, “The New Science of Siblings”,
with more analysis of birth order.
Having opposite sex siblings, especially older siblings, may well shape
personality. Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg’s unusual social techniques may have developed because he was
surrounded by three sisters, at least one of whom helps run the finances of
Facebook. Kluger writes, on p. 40, “The
family is a survival unit. Parents agree to care for the kids, the kids agree
to pass on the genes, and they all so what they can to make sure no one is
eaten by wolves.” The second clause is controversial. Maybe that explains why, as an only child, my
homosexuality was so controversial back in the early 1960’s when I was thrown
out of college for admitting it. In
fact, family responsibility, in practice, goes way beyond the requirement to
support and raise the children one sires.
One will wind up with the responsibility anyway. Parents expect older siblings to learn to
take care of younger brothers and sisters, and also expect kids to be prepared
to take care of parents when they age.
That sort of “power” is a perk of having a family within the societal social
structures (children within a legally recognized marriage). People do become responsible for persons who
come into being because of the sexual intercourse and fulfillment of others,
not just themselves.
Further into the book, there is an essay “The Myth of the
Alpha Dog” by Michael Q. Bullerdick, without a a tattooed image of Justin
Timberlake. Social carnivores vary in
social structures, by indeed in some groups (wolves, lions) only the most
endowed males pass on their genes, and the other obey to meet the needs of the
herd. But in humans, leaders are made as
well as born. Generally, larger animals
(like big cats) are not dependable “friends” because they have not been bred to
cooperate with man, but there is no reason that they couldn’t be.
Jeffrey Kluger has an essay “Disorders”, about personality
problems and mental illness. These split
into three areas, the “dramatic”, the “anxious”, and the “odd”. The dramatic includes “borderline”,
“narcissistic” and paranoid schizophrenic, and seems to represent the least
intact people, including those responsible for rampages and perhaps
terrorism. The “anxious” have an “intact
core” but comprise both OCD and OCPD, the distinction between which Kluger
doesn’t clarity. The “odd” includes
“schizoid”, and “schizotypal”, the lone wolves who might become dangerous if
they lose their intactness.
At NIH, I was labeled both as OCD and “schizoid
personality”. When I sat down with
filmmaker Gode Davis (“American Lynching”) for dinner in Providence, RI on New
Year’s Night of 2003, he immediately diagnosed me as having Asperger’s, which
he said he had himself to a mild degree.
You know, the lack of spontaneous body language.
The schizoid personality seems emotionally aloof and
isolated, and disinterred in the social bonds people typically take for granted. It’s hard to separate this from mild autism
or Asperger’s. The OCD can come from the
person’s being concerned about his own performance and a sense that others may
barge in and force him into various forms of social obligation that seem to be
required by the social good. Parents try
to impose that on siblings. The schizoid
sees this as a moral demand from others, not intrinsically necessary for the
self. I think it is possible to relate
all this to the polarity axes in the writings of Paul Rosenfels (April 12,
2006) – masculinity v. femininity, subjectivity v. objectivity, balanced v.
unbalanced. The personalities that
society regards as disordered may most often be unbalanced, but is that because
of society’s need for some conformity?
Kluger follows with an ample piece about self-absorption
(“But Enough About You”), with a picture of a trim, handsome young man. On p. 82, he offers a sidebar on humility, “A
Modest Advantage”. All of this fits into the philosophy of Rick Warren’s “A
Purpose-Driven Life”. Kluger writes
“Evolution suggests that submitting one’s needs is a trait likely to preserved
only in species for which cooperation is necessary for survival.”
David Bjerklie asks if people can change in “Amending Your
Constitution” (is that like being “born again”?) Then Sherry Turkle looks at the impact of
social media and whether it inhabits real world socialization in “Once Upon a
Screen”.
I can recall a Sunday night youth program at the First Baptist Church in the City of Washington DC, in the early spring of 1959, when I was in tenth grade, when a precious teen, a year older, from Florida, gave a talk based on the anagram "YOU".
This may be a convenient place to mention something that
happens in many of my unpublished novel manuscripts, going back to the early
1980s. It’s true that in “The Proles”
(1969) the “me” character starts his purification in Army Basic. But in several documents written in the
1980s, leading up to “Tribunal and Rapture” (1988), the “Me” character gets
sent to a “re-education” Academy in some rural location (whether West Virginia
or west Texas) after losing his job in a minor economic setback. He meets his “ideal man” there, but at the
climax of the novel, when he leaves, the whole world blows up. But what’s interesting is that I regard “someone
like me” not as “disabled” (at least mildly, according to modern values) but as
morally compromised, because “I” am in that gray twilight zone where I can
understand the harm to sustainability of the “common good” if the example I set
if followed by others, which it well might be.
In the novel that I want to present for eventual publication
– and I will get back to it when I get “DADT III” submitted (Oct. 1, 2011 here) – and that book is “Angel’s
Brother”, I have a layering of this idea.
The novel is told from the viewpoint of a male couple, a CIA agent
(married, with a front of being a high school history teacher) and college student,
who develop a relationship. There is a character “Bill” who has an embedded
novel manuscript called “Rain on the Snow”.
That embedded story has an “Academy” which happens to exist in the world
of “Angel’s Brother”. In one subplot,
the college student (“Sal”), who works at the Academy as a language instructor,
approaches Bill, also a student there, and intervenes, giving Bill “what he
wants” so that Bill doesn’t go over the edge and ruin everything. The world approaches a purification (in the
form of a mysterious pandemic) anyway.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Two books on self-publishing
In anticipation of a formal release of my third “Do Ask, Do
Tell” book, I picked up two recent short books on self-publishing.
The larger book is “The Fine Print of Self-Publishing:
Everything You Need to Know About the Costs, Contracts and Process of
Self-Publishing”, Fourth Edition, by Mark Levine, published by Bascom Hill, in
Minneapolis, 2011, with ISBN 978-1-935098-55-3, 274 pages, paper.
The Amazon link is here.
The book classifies various self-publishing companies as to
their reputations with authors. I won’t
go into repeating these here, but I can make some general observations.
Self-publishing support companies have a variety of business
models. Some of them offer an enormous
range of services, charge a lot, and tend to pay low royalties. Authors have been particularly concerned that
they can’t claim the publisher galleys to take to other publishers, at least
without paying a lot more. However, some
authors may need the extensive services and may have a low sales expectation,
and be publishing more as a “reference” for cultural or political impact on debate of
some issue. But some try to push sales
promotion packages onto authors.
Other publishers charge less, pay higher royalties, and
allow publishers ownership of galleys. But these publishing companies are more
selective. They do not accept titles
that they do not expect to sell well, because these companies derive more of
their profit from actually selling book copies than from just supporting
authors. They are more like traditional
publishers, and the right word might be “cooperative publishing” than
self-publishing. This model may work
better for fiction than political or technical writing, and may suit only authors with established public relations contacts in other fields. Examples of these companies include BookLocker and BookPros. As of the time of publication of this book, BookLocker considered five copies sold a month the minimum acceptable transaction volume for an author. It's hard to see, at least from any reasonable math, how this setup would support a business model really based on selling books. It would seem to appeal only to authors who could get published (maybe even with an advance) from traditional publishers, but really are motivated by short-term "profit". It sounds improbable for most writers, even relatively established authors. The question brings up the idea of being hired as a ghostwriter or to assist with someone else's work or life narrative.
I would seem that whether a publishing service is "selective" or "non-selective" would have a big impact on whether the service would have a good rating with authors, a point that the book glosses over -- but that cuts both ways.
I would seem that whether a publishing service is "selective" or "non-selective" would have a big impact on whether the service would have a good rating with authors, a point that the book glosses over -- but that cuts both ways.
A few of them are faith-oriented, and only accept content
agreeable to their religious beliefs. These
companies might appeal to authors who benefit from a publisher brand name
associated with evangelical or other faith.
The early part of the book explains all the general
principles of self-publishing, and gives some advice on what kinds of books do
sell and others do not.
The book explains the publishing contracts in detail. One controversial issue is the
indemnification clause, which gives the publisher the right to sue the author
for legal expenses should there be a tort claim (like libel) against the
publisher. These are quite standard in
the industry, and shocking to authors.
In practice, they are rarely invoked-- although I can imagine that an unscrupulous plaintiff (and attorneys) could file a frivolous SLAPP suit against a self-publishing support company on the "deep pockets" theory, forcing the author to defend the company (and this is a good reason we need a federal anti-SLAPP law). I didn’t see any mention of media perils insurance,
but I wonder if that could become an issue in the future (although it has never
gotten far off the ground in the “amateur” world, as discussed in my main blog
in the fall of 2008). Most publishers
allow the author to keep ownership of the work and move to other publishers,
but they don’t own the actual galleys.
Most don’t appear to care if the author places content on the web, but
some could see that as potentially driving down sales.
The smaller book is “Self-Publishing
Books 101: Helping You Get Published and Noticed”, by Shelley Hitz, with
imprint by the same name, 2012, ISBN 978-1475104592, 48 pages, paper. This booklet covers the mechanics and basics
(like getting an ISBN). It pays
particular attention to the self-help process provided by one particular
company, Create Space. The website for
the book is here.
There are folks who see self-publishing as
controversial. I don’t know if it’s true
now, but Author’s Guild used to accept for members only those authors would
could get advances from publishers and actually make a living from writing.
Ponder why that would be.
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
John Schwartz: "Oddly Normal": a memoir by a father about raising a gay son
Title: “Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their
Teenage Son Come to Terms with this Sexuality”
Publication: Gotham, ISBN 978-1-59240-728-8, 300 pages,
paper
Amazon link Available in many formats, including
Kindle.
First, a note on contents.
The book includes an illustrated story by the son, Joseph, titled “Leo”
The Oddly Normal Boy”, and a short essay by Joseph, “July 4th, or “A
Treatise on the Courtship of the Awkward”, as well as a new Afterword by the
author (the father).
The book is an account by the author of his third child’s
coming to terms, as he grew up, not only with his sexual orientation, but also
with being “different” in some ways that other people, especially in school
systems, find challenging.
This other difference is hard to pin down. It sounds related to milder forms of autism
like Asperger’s syndrome, but that isn’t exactly correct. It seems to relate to a physiological issue
in the way the central nervous system processes sensory information and
attaches significance to sensory impressions, and the way these in turn connect
to motor skills, like those necessary in playing sports or manual labor. I experienced the same issues as I was
growing up, as I have explained often in these blogs and in my own three books
(check Aug. 20 and June 27, and May 30, 2013
on this blog, for starters). From a
purely medical point of view, there has never been a clear explanation. I am seventy years old now, and had to deal
with these issues at a time when they were viewed through a moral lens, like
that of mooching or getting out of physical challenges that other men have to
face. The world looked at sexuality this
way when I grew up because in part there was a belief, maybe partly founded in
religion but not entirely, that for a society to survive, men had to protect
women and children according to gender roles. Having grown up in the 1950’s and early 60’s,
I did not have the benefit of a social climate willing to tolerate open mention
of homosexuality.
The father notes that in his experience many gay men grew up
perceived as gender non-conforming, and sometimes exhibiting “The Sissy Boy
Syndrome”, actually the title of a controversial 1987 book by Richard Green
(Yale University Press”. The subtitle of
that book was “The Development of Homosexuality”. I certainly did fit that stereotype. But in general the stereotype often does not
apply. A few gay men have played
professional sports, even football. I
have known a few who might have played had there not been quasi-military
aversion to their presence in team sports – let’s say, one in a particular a
pitcher would not want to hang a changeup to. In fact, the author notes that his son appeared to develop physically a little earlier than average. There is practically no correlation at all between sexual orientation and aspects of physical appearance or secondary characteristics.
Schawrtz does discuss immutability, although not to the point of explaining "epigenetics", which would give a biological explanation of why a gay man could indeed win an MLB batting title. The question that remains is, if it were a "private choice" rather than innate, why does society make it other people's business? I've never thought that the immutability argument was enough/
Schawrtz does discuss immutability, although not to the point of explaining "epigenetics", which would give a biological explanation of why a gay man could indeed win an MLB batting title. The question that remains is, if it were a "private choice" rather than innate, why does society make it other people's business? I've never thought that the immutability argument was enough/
The parents were quite supportive of their son’s exploring
his own individuality, and they found the school systems, in northern New
Jersey, less so, not out of ill will, but simply the lack of program and
coherent response to students with hard-to-assess special needs.
Nevertheless, the boy, in his tween years, made a suicide
attempt, and wound up in psychiatric care.
This is understandably a difficult episode for a parent to write about
publicly. The son had a good experience with a special summer camp and high
school was much better than middle school (as it was for me, too).
The author does give some synoptic history of “gay rights”,
with a discussion of the history of sodomy laws, gays in the military, and especially
same-sex marriage. He also discusses
the difficulty school systems have with bullying, and the fact that “curriculum
neutrality” policies, like one tried in a Minnesota school district, don’t work
in practice.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Tom Palmer has new anthology, "Why Liberty"
Author (editor): Tom G. Palmer
Title: “Why Liberty: Your Life, Choices, Your Future”
Publication: 2013, by Jameson Books, Atlas and Students for
Liberty; ISBN 978-0-89803-172-0, 143 pages, paper, indexed, A Preface and
twelve essays.
Mr. Palmer is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and is
Executive Vice President for international programs at the Atlas Network.
The book comprises essays by a number or authors : three by
Tom Palmer himself, as well as John Stossel (former ABC News producer and
reporter), Clark Ruper, James Padilioni, Jr., Alexander McCobin, Sarah Skwire.
Aaron Ross Powell, Olumayoma Okediran, Sloane Frost, and Lode Cossaer and
Martin Wegge (together).
A few high points need to be stressed. Tom Palmer’s “The History and Structure of
Libertarian Thought” talks about the “Libertarian Tripod”: individual rights,
spontaneous order, and constitutionally limited government. The idea of spontaneous order occurs with
social insects, and Palmer seems to have more confidence than some that it can
generate eusociality (see the concern by Charles Murray about social capital in
his “Coming Apart”, March 14, 2012 here).
The chapter “The Political Principles of Liberty” by McCobin
seems to get at the deepest controversy.
McCobin compares these to other political principles, which stress ideas
like “fraternalism” (or “fraternity”), the idea that people have an intrinsic
responsibility to provide for others outside of the scope of their own personal
choices or voluntary “contracts”; and “equal outcomes”. McCobin goes on to discuss the difference
between politics and ethics. McCobin
writes that the heart of ethical behavior is to act as if “you” respect the
other person as an independent moral agent. That sounds pretty much like the
“Golden Rule”.
People who are “different” (like me) often report that
others expect them to take responsibilities that they did not elect, and that
these responsibilities compete with or interfere with their own personal goals,
pursuing things that they are good at.
This may happen even though they think they are honest and ethical in
the narrower sense understood by libertarian.
They experience “coercion”, which
may be from the state (the military draft, previous anti-gay social policies),
from family or sometimes other agents like employers. Libertarians obviously focus on not letting
the state apply coercion in personal matters.
But libertarians may not want to interfere with the ability of families
or employers to implement their own notions, as they trust that a properly
functioning free market inhibits irrational discrimination. This often works, but in some areas,
“different” people find that they experience resentment or indignation from
others who claim that “the special” benefitted in the past from the unseen
sacrifices of others, who started farther back in line. Parents, when making wills, may want
unmarried or childless adult children to be prepared to help raise the children
of siblings or care for other family members, and could stipulate that in
wills, and libertarians would not interfere with estates. Libertarians might have an issue when
debating “filial responsibility laws” if
the result of such coercion is to save the taxpayer from supporting other
people’s elders (but you have the same concept with mandatory individual health
insurance under Obamacare). I think that
the ukase (or lack of ) to be prepared to take care of others when necessary
(and not just when you “choose” to have children) is a fundamental moral issue,
transcending ethics even as Palmer and McCobin describe it. .
Okediran (“Africa’s Promise of Liberty”) discusses
libertarian principles in more rural, primitive communities and maintains that
libertarianism can be commensurate with commutarianism, found in intentional
communities (with “income sharing”), which is not the same as communism.
Sloane Frost (“The Tangled Dynamics of State
Interventionism: The Case of Health Care”) gives the usual conservative
arguments against nationalized heath care and traces our current problems to
preferential tax treatment in the past to employer-sponsored health care with
pre-tax dollars.
Aaron Ross Powell introduces an interesting notion of
humility in politics with “The Humble Case for Liberty”.
Amazon does not have this book yet. There is a similarly titled book by Marc Guttman.
Students for Liberty has a site for it here. Palmer handed this out at a GLIL gathering
Sunday September 8, 2003.
The video above shows Palmer talking about an earlier book, “The
Morality of Capitalism:: What Professors Wont Tell You”.
This would be a good place to mention a pair of companion books by David Boaz from the Free Press in the 1990's, "Libertarianism: A Primer" and a companion "Libertarian Reader", a book of essays.
Thursday, September 05, 2013
"Gridlock": former US Senator pens novel warning that cyberattack could destroy the electric power grid, permanently
Authors: Byron L Dorgan and David Hagberg
Title: “Gridlock”
Publication: New York: Forge, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7653-2738-3,
431 pages, hardcover (also available as e-book), 4 Parts, 76 chapters with
Prologue and Epilogue
Amazon link is here.
Mr. Dorgan is a former US Senator and Representative from North
Dakota, and Mr. Hagberg is a former U.S. Air Force cryptographer.
Let’s cut to the chase.
The authors propose a scenario where enemies of the American people (and
it seems to be our “way of life” as much as our government) – specifically Venezuela
and Iran (and maybe Putin’s Russia) – try to cripple the US power grid
permanently with a single computer work coded by a “gifted” and sociopathic
hacker in Amsterdam. It’ a little
confusing as to how it is delivered, and I’ll get back to that in a moment. There’s
also a physical attack on a transformer farm in South Texas, a concept which
sounds a lot more probable.
The book is fast paced, written in short chapters, and has a
number of character, including a hired Russian assassin, and a young sheriff in
North Dakota, himself a Special Forces Afghanistan combat hero who lost a leg
to IED but knows how to use his prosthesis as an additional weapon – along with
his girl friend, a determined journalist.
The novel refers to Hugo Chavez and Ahmadinejad, both out
now, as forming an alliance to teach an arrogant American people a lesson. It’s interesting that Senator Dorgan sees “rogue”
states (which would include North Korea and now Syria) as a bigger threat now than
decentralized terrorists downloading do-it-yourself materials from the Internet
(as with Boston).
The authors lay out a scenario where occasional rural
vandalism against power stations happen, as from disgruntled ranchers. In this scenario, a lineman is sent to repair
damage to a truss in a river valley near the Badlands in western North Dakota
(I was there myself in 1998). Through a
computer hack, he is electrocuted when he thinks the line is de-energized. (Can you imagine doing the job of a lineman? I couldn't do it.) Nearby visitors are sniped, setting up the
chase. A good part of the novel text
does involve the hunting and chasing of the Russian assassin Yuri Makarov (who
reminds me of Clive Barker’s Pie ‘o’ Pah from “Imajica”). The action is crisp and well-written, but
considerable (and happens in many locations and countries). This book would generate a four-hour
screenplay, which could present a problem when Hollywood gets it (unless it’s a
TV or cable miniseries). Who plays the
nimble sheriff Nate Osborne? Joseph
Gordon-Levitt? Ryan Gosling? You wonder if Mark Parrish, Lucas Till or
Reid Ewing should try for a part like this.
Oh, maybe Till could play the hacker. How do you deal with Nate’s leg loss and
prosthesis in filming? For Makarov, you
need an actor who normally seems meaner.
Maybe Ciaran Hinds. Directing him
would even be harder.
Okay, let me get back on subject. (I’d love to cast my own novel.) How was the virus delivered? If it was conveyed by a flash drive (I think
that’s how Stuxnet was placed in Iran), you need a “saboteur”, Hitchcock style,
inside the electric utility industry.
(The Prologue of the novel hints at this, as does the denouement, but in
between the details aren’t shown.) What
I don’t buy is the idea that a remote hacker could transmit a virus through the
Internet to a power grid station. That
would say that a hacker could log on to my laptop (where I type this review) and use
my Internet connection (soon to be used to upload it) to reach the power
station. I think that this simply should
not be possible. There is a branch of
mathematics called graph theory, part of topology, which can calculate whether
such a connected path exists. I think it
should not.
As for the “blackmail” and the announced rolling blackouts,
why can’t the power industry, with the help of the NSA if needed, neutralize
the virus since it knows what it is and knows that it is coming.
Dorgan is right in suggesting that replacing the three large
transformers in Texas would be very time consuming, because in part they have
to come from India. But that tells me
that the biggest threat to the grid comes from physical attack, or perhaps an
electromagnetic pulse (as in “One Second After”, reviewed July 20, 2012), or
even a severe geomagnetic storm. A
physical attack could come from large scale vandalism and conventional
explosives, or even from radio frequency flux guns. I don’t think that the electric power
industry is as well prepared for these more physical threats as it is for
computer viruses which would have to get through some super secure server farms
(one of which is nearby in Ashburn, Loudoun County VA; there are various others
in North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Colorado, etc).
Dorgan says he has changed some details about the power
industry so as not to write a “blueprint” for an attack.
Wikipedia attribution link for Theodore Roosevelt National
Park
Update: Oct. 9, 2013
Look at this story about power grid attacks in Arkansas in the real world, much as in this novel, link.
Update: Oct. 9, 2013
Look at this story about power grid attacks in Arkansas in the real world, much as in this novel, link.
Update: Feb. 5, 2014
The Wall Street Journal discusses an attack on the Metfcalf power substation near San Jose CA on April 16, 2016, blog posting on the Issues Blog today, WSJ link here.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
New details on my plans for my "Do Ask Do Tell III" book and supplements
I am working on the production of my first book since
2003. Actually, I had put a preliminary
version ofo it online in just PDF files in the fall of 2011 (see this blog,
Oct. 1, 2011). It is to be called “Do
Ask Do Tell III: Speech is a Fundamental
Right, Being Listened To Is a Privilege”
I had thought then that I could simply leave the world of
non-fiction book publishing, put everything online, and move on to other
things: a novel (to be called “Angel’s Brother”), a non-fiction video, and some
screenplays.
By the early spring of 2012, just before I went to NYC for a
LGBT book fair, I started got get more calls from my on-demand publisher
(iUniverse) about trying to buy marketing packages and pump up sales of my old
books (particularly the second 2002 book, “Do Ask Do Tell II: When Liberty Is
Stressed”, written after 9/11, but less ambitious than the “epic” first book
that I first self-published with my own print run in 1997; that book went to
print-on-demand with iUniverse in late 2000 after the first printing was sold
out or depleted).
The basic problem with these appeals is that usually, old “public
policy” books don’t sell, because history quickly tends to outrun what the
author wrote. Some old fiction can have
that problem, particularly spy or thriller fiction, if it is grounded in
circumstances that no longer exist and wants the reader to take the protagonist’s
position seriously. That is in contrast
to true historical fiction, like “Gone with the Wind”; the best of this always
sells forever. That’s the stuff in
literature classes centuries later.
For each of my first three books (which include the pamphlet
“Our Fundamental Rights” (1998), the only work not with a DADT title), I
maintained the content with “footnote files”, which added notes keyed to
specific chapters and pages in the printed books.
In time, I would add “sidebar” files and separate essays,
and eventually migrate to blogging in 2006.
There were some other experiments (like with Java starter, and
eventually my web presence became diffuse and hard to pin down. That’s a topic for a different post. What matters here, right now, is the value of
publishing a new book in “finite form”, and being willing to play ball with the
commercial world on how well it does.
The idea of a book, or sequence of books (like a franchise),
with web supplements that are closely keyed to the books, makes it easier for
third parties to work with an author like me, because it is easier for them to
wrap their arms around (conceptually speaking) what I have done. It’s hard to do that with a sprawl of “autonomous”
blogs. To work with others and gain more
opportunities from media third parties (including “the movies”), I do need more
cohesion in my presence, again. I did
have that cohesion for a couple years from 1997 onto 2000 or so, after my first
book came out. That’s partly because
social media as we know it today didn’t exist yet, and it was easier to focus
on a smaller set of ways of delivering content. The Web 2.0+ world has made it
much harder for an author (like me, at least) to keep a presence coherent.
The new book is going to comprise five chapters, topical
rather than chronological. There will be
a prologue and epilogue. In some
topical areas, there is some overlap with the material in the other books,
particularly in some specific areas like the controversy over self-publishing,
and in the direction of the “fair and prosperous workplace”. The “story” narratives will mostly emphasize
history since 2002, but there is some more detailed coverage of a few events
that happened as far back as 1960.
The book, as described, is often rather abstract. I keep finding different entry points into
discussions of various ethical (and therefore social and political) problems,
so sometimes I find myself traveling in circles, rather like a train following
a very complicated model railroad track layout, covering almost the same
material from different vantage points and viewing angles.
Inevitably, after publication, more issues emerge. That’s
partly because history changes quickly (with legislation, litigation, court
opinions, and all kinds of incidents) and partly because in my own mind I tend
to develop new entry points into the same material and draw a certain focus to
these new points. So it will be appropriate
to have some core supplementary essays online (as there were for the 1997
book), and a (new) blog with footnotes keyed to the content of any of the books
(including supplementary core essays), with an “inverted list” (in relational
database terms) to the blog entries so that the reader can trace all the
content from the books.
I do think that for authors and artists today, a mixture of
various media (books, web blogs, social media, music, video) can be
effective. CNN just presented the work
of Marisha Pressl, “Night Film”, as an example of a multi-media project. I have just heard about it, and so I can’t “review”
it. But the feedback I seem to get from
the business world, especially book publishers, that it is morally and
practically important to be able to sell what you write in fixed, printed form.
That is still true even “as the world turns”.
In addition to the “non-fiction” book I’ve described, I’m
actually planning to include three fictional excerpts. They will comprise:
(1)
A Chapter of a 1969 unpublished novel “The
Proles”, which I wrote by hand in Army barracks at Fort Eustis, VA. This chapter gives an account, with
fictitious names (including for me) of my fourteen weeks in Army Basic Combat
Training at Fort Jackson SC early in 1968.
The history of that year is a backdrop.
And, yes, I did get recycled.
(2)
A fiction story, “Expedition” (1981), where I
investigate strip mining in Appalachia with a former graduate school roommate,
and make a surprising find
(3)
A new story, “The Ocelot the Way He Is”
(2013). At the time that his mother is
about to pass away in a hospice, a college-age “acquaintance” invites “Bill” to
a rural ashram, where Bill is shown an even more apocalyptic secret.
It’s possible that these three items might have to be
packaged as a second book, a kind of “DADT III-B”.
I’ll continue the discussion of the “web portion” of this “final
exam” on my main blog soon.
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