Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
I need to mention another older book on this blog, Saul
D. Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals”,
as analyzed here on infed by Mike Seal. The book, 196 pages, was originally published
in 1971 by Random House.
One of its most shocking quotes: “He who sacrifices
the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of
‘personal salvation’; he doesn’t care enough for people to ‘be corrupted’ for
them.”That is, “the end justifies the
means”. If I had to give in to this, I would
prefer not to exist at all.
Another one “He who sacrifices the mass good for his
personal conscience has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation’; he
doesn’t care enough for people to ‘be corrupted’ for them.”/
Or, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and
polarize it (Alinsky 1972: 130). This is perhaps Saul Alinsky’s most
controversial rule and is the counter to the common idea that we should not
make things personal.
The book comes up at the start of Karlyn Borysenko’s
video on the trials of Elisa Parrett, a newly tenured professor of English at
the Washington Institute of Technology, who was investigated for 8 months after
objecting to segregated sessions teaching white fragility and critical theory
at the workplace (although she visited the Trump rally Jan 6 but did not go
into the Capitol).Reason magazine
describes the whole situation in an essay April 5 by Jesse Sengal.
Embed of Wikipedia picture, click for attribution.
Don Lemon, CNN night anchor at 10 PM, gives an
interview to Time Magazine (March 29, p. 104), Jannell Ross, about his new book
from Little Brown, 224 pages, “This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About
Racism”, link.
An interesting part of the interview is how Lemon
distinguishes “point of view” from “opinion”.Indeed, in my own life, a succession of episodes, one leading to the
next and always with irony, establishes a “point of view”, where I am unwilling
to go along with a superficial idea of group-centered tribal justice.
The interviewer challenges Lemon on his earlier
comments five years ago to black youths, “pull up your pants”.He says there is no real contradiction among
his statements of position.
There is mention in the online(not print) review of
the Online German Coast Slave Uprising on the Mississippu River in 1811.
There are sporadic reports online about shrinking male
fertility and even “primary organ” size, as a result of chemical pollution. TRTWorld proffers thearticle “What’s behind
the epidemic of shrinking genitals and low male fertility?” It warns that boys are poisoned in the womb,
and are growing up with low drive, obesity, diabetes, and lack of
masculinity.
But the article leads to a discussion of a book in GQ,
review by Andrew Zalewski, book by Shanna Swan, “Count Down: How Our Modern
World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive
Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race”, from Scribner, Feb.
2021, 304 pages hardcover. Zalewski
interviews Swan, who warns we face a dystopian world like “The Handmaid’s Tale” (or maybe the 2006 film "Children of Men").
Some of her
findings are based on an Oxford Update ("Human Reproduction Update" from 2017), to which she contributed.
It’s ironic that, with all the talk of non-binary status,
gay men desire masculinity and potency from partners strictly out of upward
affiliation rather than procreation. Swan may be hinting at what George Gilder
had called “Sexual Suicide’ in a 1973 Quadrangle book.
DarkHorse Podcast Clips with Bret Weinstein offers
what amounts to a book review of Ibram X. Kendi’s“Be Antiracist: A Journal for Awareness,
Reflection and Action”, from One World, Oct. 2020.
The philosophy of the book forces everyone into a
binary state.There is no in between
(not racist and not actively and publicly anti-racist as a public ally).The video explores the logical contradictions
that come from such a position, resulting that eliminating the possibilities
that are inconvenient happen only out of seizing power, not out of moral
rightness in itself. Weinstein points out some internal logical contradictions in the idea of equity as compared to equality. Jordan Peterson has done the same in the past.
I don’t see that this was covered in John Fish’s
survey reviewed here June 6, 2020 (even in the comments).
Kendi has many other related books, including children’s,
at this Amazon link.
Kendi’s work seems to have taken over the controversial
“diversity training” lesson plans from Robin DiAngelo.
Morgan Ome, assistant editor of The Atlantic,
interviews author Cathy Park Hong, “Minor Feelings: As Asian American Reckoning”,
in this article saying “this time it feels different’. The paperback reprint is from One World (March
2, 2021, 224 pages).
Yes, after four years of Trump, and the international
politics of COVID.
But before, Hong writes, there was often competition
among different minorities, especially in Los Angeles, as they settled
different neighborhoods and developed enclaves of business.Today the idea of expected “allyship” seems to
have spread.
Corcoran Hall, GWU, where I attempted organic chemistry in 1963
Let’s cover two very strong and detailed New York Magazine
articles about Covid19, in the Intelligencer series.
The first is Nicholson Baker, Jan 4, 2021, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis”, with the byline “For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses
in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not starting one. But what if…”?
Let me make the biggest observation from this piece of
all.Somehow, he says that Wuhan is the
only foreign lab the US has supported for significant time, cut off by Obama, apparently
resumed briefly under Trump.
The booklet article comprises fourteen (roman numeral)
sections.The last starts with “Here’s
what I think happened”. It starts with
the Mojiang Mines incident in 2012, with a sample winding up in Wuhan Virology
Lab (and other places), attracting the attention of Peter Daszek and Shi
Zhengli. A SARS-like coronavirus sample called BtCoV/4991 (also called RatG13,
as in videos by Peak Prosperity’s Chris Martenson, May 4, 2020) was studied
extensively, resulting in papers. However, the Mojiang virus does not seem to
have been as transmissible, particularly before or without symptoms, person to
person. A change called furin cleavage accomplished that (when the spike protein
opens up the receptor).
Now other sources have told me that furin cleavage
does occur in nature, even in influenza, particularly in persons or animals
with more than one simultaneous viral infection. And there is other evidence
that humans, in China, maybe Europe and even the US, had mild cases in late 2019.It ‘s possible that the virus was transmissible
among humans by the early fall of 2019 if accidentally introduced, and that
increased contagion happened with a mutation in a human, maybe
immunocompromised.We’re seeing that
pattern with variants, which have become more troublesome since this article was
published.
Still, workplaces have accidents.In my own career in IT, there were two
mishaps that were particularly troubling, one in 1976 and another in 1991, and
either one might have become career ending.Lab accidents will inevitably happen.
And there is a lot of other reliable reporting of
coincidental news from China in late 2019, including the October 2019
communications blackout at the virology lab.
Personally, I was a klutz in the lab myself, dropping
chemistry (at GWU) as a major in late 1963 (just before the assassination)
after an accident where I cut my hand severely, while working in my first job in
rheology at NBS at the old Van Ness Street location. I wound up in math. The
computers.Then my own brand of journalism.
But I remember the trips with a dolly to
the oil shed.
The other big article is more recent, March 15, 2021, “How the West Lost COVID19”, by David Wallace-Wells. The byline is “How did so many rich countries
get it so wrong? How did others get it so right?”
One important point:the real lighter for the epidemic in the west was northern Italy.It spread out much more quickly than from
China.In Italy, the virus had a minor
mutation (from a “D” to “G”) which seemed to make it more amendable to
superspreader transmission events, although it didn’t change the clinical
course.That says that the virus is
capable of engineering itself a lot to escape defenses, just in nature.
The countries that suppressed the virus quickly were
either (1) isolated (New Zealand) or relatively low population density
countries (Australia), or (2) willing to subject citizens to automated contact
tracing and mandatory strict quarantines and isolation (South Korea, Taiwan),
or frankly authoritarian (Vietnam, besides China itself).
Just how remarkable is SARS_CoV2 for a respiratory virus for causing long term damage to many organs in protracted cases? Measles can do that, but our vaccine for it is nearly 100% (I got measles in 1950 before my 7th birthday; maybe it did affect my coordination and strength later). But most viruses that cause long-term damage and auto-immune disease are enteroviruses (sometimes arboviruses).
The regard that governments should have for disruption
of individuals, suddenly, is something we haven’t covered systematically
enough.It goes beyond surveillance, as
Electronic Frontier Foundation would see it.It certainly causes job losses.In China and maybe other countries, it has led to personal property destruction,
too. The argument for becoming so strict on individuals, rather than hoping for herd immunity and vaccines, is what if the virus really is much more deadly, down the road. What if it caused an airborne-transmitted variety of "AIDS"? Or maybe sterility in most people? ["Children of Men", 2006 film.] Or inevitable intellectual decline in most of the infected? We don't know that this couldn't happen. (But arguments like that were hurled by the religious right at gay men in the 1980s. You can't prove a negative, and "there is always a first time".) We were shocked by how quickly we were thrown into personal crises by unimagined circumstances, and that we could individually be held responsible for the possibility that our contaminated bodies had become deadly weapons (the mask issue). Perhaps that could force us into top-down localization, which China already has.
The far Left, Umair Haque of Eudaimonia, has scolded
Americans for their hyperindividualism and unwillingness to identify with the
common good of the larger group, and blamed capitalism.Indeed, it’s quite disturbing, that in
retrospect, the whole pandemic, with its Goldilocks property of being a mild
disease for maybe a majority of people but deadly for some, and catastrophic
life long for others (the long haulers), could have been imagined as designed
to conquer the West with communism with a plausibly deniable biological
attack.That is what drives some of the
fury on the right, having lives they did not earn taken away from them. There is also the implication that letting people make up their own minds as to how to behave (like on masks) could have resulted in a "survival of the fittest" scenario which can be viewed as a preview to eventual fascism.
The enclosed video comes from New York Magazine on April 30, 2020, when students volunteered to be infected with SARS_CoV2. The magazine is definitely defined as part of mainstream media commentary, and is not advancing extremism in broaching a very sensitive topic for some people.
The narrative begins with the work of a physician
Zijian Chen, at Mt Sinai in NYC, after he was appointed to be in charge of
post-COVID care in the spring of 2020. He saw many more patients than he had
expected, including other physicians and professionals (one was a dietician).
Many of them were relatively young (even under 40) and
many were women, who were not supposed to be as vulnerable to severe COVID as
men.They reported having “mild” cases. But they seemed to have trouble with breathing
and heart rate, “brain fog” and muscle pains, sometimes digestion.
The underlying problem is dysautonomia, abnormal
function of the autonomous nervous system. The virus seems to damage the peripheral
nervous system even in mild cases, maybe through autoimmunity. The article also
discusses a condition called POTS, “postural orthostatic tachycardic syndrome”. Of some help in therapy is retraining patients to breathe more deeply, which may be difficult because of some lung scarring.
It is unusual for a respiratory virus to cause so much
systemic damage (enteroviruses are more likely to do this) but that is partly
because the virus can lock onto receptors that many tissues have, especially
ACE2, a capability that evolved with
bats, with their high metabolisms.
We could have a public health problem for years, where
10-30% of those with noticeable disease fight off the disability caused by “long
hauler COVID”.Who pays for this.
You have to wonder, when people belligerently say they
won’t wear masks, if, outside of possibly believing in the hoax theory, simply believe
in “survival of the fittest”, literally, that the disease is a purge of the unworthy
whom the virus has tested, and that belief certainly comports with fascism.It certainly can drive the angry indignation
of the “left”.
Perpetual student in the UK Jack Edwards entertains us
with “A day in the life of a book research assistant: Work in publishing”.
I didn’t know large trade publishers assign research
assistants (who are contractors) to assist authors in getting together all the research
material, to target potential audiences and bookstore marketing.
During London’s second big lockdown over the new
variant, he works at home in an immaculate flat (you have to have a clutterless
space, and I am too old school), and he gives us a desk tour.
He also pitches a book he is reading, a self-help
book, “Think Like a Monk”, by Jack Shetty (Sept 2020, Simon $ Schuster),Google books link for preview.
Wikipedia embed picture: British recruits during WW1,
p.d., Wikipedia embed, click for attribution.
ABC News and the Associated Press report that six Dr.
Seuss children’s books will be removed from publication by Dr. Seuss
Enterprises, the trust that preserves his legacy, story by Mark Pratt. The books were felt, however unintentionally,
to preserve racial and gender-related stereotypes by the cultural standards of
today. The book series publisher is Random
House Children’s Books.
I see also in the story that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little
House on the Prairie” novels have fallen into cultural disfavor over portrayal
of native Americans.I remember the
series for Michael Landon, who had a premature death from pancreatic cancer in
the summer of 1991 at age 54, and there are new stories that he may have been
exposed to carcinogens at a filming site in California.He became ill on a ski trip in early
1991.
I remember the Little Golden Book “Little Black Sambo”
(author Helen Bannerman, illustrator Gustav Tenggren) as a boy, and today the
title sounds racist. There is also a “ Story of Little Black Sambo”, the only “authorized”
hardcover.The original book stems from
1922, and the Little Golden Book came out in 1948.
Wikipedia explains the long historyof the controversy
over this book, which went through some changes, and it is more nuanced than
you would think.
Here also is the Wikipedia article on book censorship
in the US.
She believes we have a false sense of security from
the recent drops, which is leveling off this week, after last week’s horrible
weather in the Midwest and Texas.The
drop in death rates and ICU is partly attributable to vaccinating people in
care facilities.
But young adults have not been vaccinated yet.Essential workers will help.People in large households will help.Young adults living alone (this seems like
gay men especially) as adults have, ironically, very little disease right now,
given the past.
We should be concerned that the variants may be more aggressive
with young adults (as there are sporadic horror stories in the media, but they don’t
hit close to home yet).
We should also be very concerned if the virus keeps on
becoming more evasive and aggressive, despite our previous expectations.
She does talk a lot about behavioral change, and
perhaps personal social values changes.
One question that sounds critical:with the new variants retain their high dispersion,
with most spread in super-spreader events?Or could surfaces and even personal hygiene turn out to become more
important than they have so far?
The Epoch Times (whatever its supposed connections to
China and the CCP’s agenda, publishing a conservative newspaper) reports that
Amazon has “quietly” removed a high-profile book “criticizing transgender
ideology”.
In 2018, Matthew J. Franck had written the book review, “Pressing Pause on the ‘Transgender Moment’”: Ryan T. Anderson’s “When
Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” (Encounter Books). If
you press the link on Amazon, you get a “sorry, couldn’t find that page”.
I sometimes get offers of samples of children’s books
that seem to promote transgenderism in minors, and I have let them pass.In real life, I don’t know any cases of
puberty blockers or surgery in younger minors, middle school, etc.This does not sound like something that
happens a lot.When there is a genuine
physical medical reason, that may well be a different matter.But it is relatively uncommon.
There isn’t much video from the author on
YouTube;if you look, you see where he
is coming from.
But I am not one for saying everyone has to declare
their pronouns, or use “their” when you really know the person is a he or she.
Update: March 2: Amazon has quietly published content guidelines that mention "hate speech". The Epoch Times (paywall now) and Free Beacon Times have published stories about this development.
“This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The
Cyberweapons Arms Race” is almost too encyclopedic to be the warning it should
be.Author Nicole Perlroth has worked
for years as a security reporter for the New York Times.This 491—page opus looks like the career
output. The publisher is Bloomsbury, with hardcover ISBN 078-1-63557-605-4.There is an Author’s Note, Prologue, seven
parts, 23 chapters, an Epilogue, Acknowledgements, Endnotes, and Index.The Prologue adds 27 Roman-numbered pages.A Prologue or Introduction is part of the book and should be numbered as such. The
Prologue chronicles Ukraine’s power outages at the hands of the Russians, where
the Russians were showing off what they could do.
The New York Times has a short review by Jonathan Tepperman
Feb. 9, 2021, “The most serious security risks facing the United States”, link.
The basic premise is that the United States drew first
blood by using cyber as a weapon itself, most notably with the Stuxnet worm against
Iran, to interfere with its getting nuclear weapons.
The biggest controversies are zero-day vulnerabilities
– those that hackers can exploit with immediate effect on existing systems, and
a strategy called Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP), a system of weapons
for the government to keep in its arsenal.
In the meantime, we have seen all kinds of counter
attacks, of Sony Pictures by North Korea over a movie at the end of 2014,
leading to the ongoing hack of the Solar Winds contractor firm.Recently, there was a hack in Florida at the
time of the Super Bowl trying to poison a water supply.
The warnings in Ted Koppel’s “Lights Out” (Nov 10,
2015) seem grim indeed.
I ordered a hardcover copy of “Heaven and Hell: A History
of the After Life”, by Bart D. Ehrman, sometime back because, well, of my
current situation with age and the pandemic, and my writing, where certain
character are “angels” (particularly in the screenplay “Epiphany”).
The publisher is a biggie, Simon & Schuster, ISBN
978-1-5011-3673-3, 326 pages, endnotes and index starts at 297, fourteen
chapters.
I expect to do a more thorough review on Wordpress
after some time, but I want to note that the middle chapters provide a sequence
of views, from the old testament (“why wait for a resurrection?”), then Jesus himself,
and finally the apostle Paul.
One theme that comes up is that for many people who
did not “make it”, death is simply annihilation, and back to
non-existence.Indeed, it seems, if the
brain is physically intact, even after death, there might occur a “life review”
and time could stretch out infinitely and create the impression of eternal
life, if one never “converges” to death.But if the brain is destroyed traumatically, as in war, of some forms of
self-harm, or by an enemy with religiously based destruction, there could be no
opportunity for such an indefinite extension. Paul, particularly, wanted the
reward for the faithful (remember “faith” = “works”) to come with some kind of
re-embodiment, as an angel.In theory,
at least in the realm of science fiction, this opens up the idea that “angels”
are those who came back (the opposite of “the Leftovers” as in the HBO series).
There is a review of the book by Ben Corbitt for Saint
Matthias Episcopal Church, link.
One of my own issues is my own personal agency.Given a sequence of ironies in my life, the
current pandemic challenges my agency (really, almost as a result of quantum
theory, when I was privileged enough to escape the things that happen to most
people, so I get caught in the paradoxes posed by lockdowns, quarantines and
maybe sequestrations). Situations can occur that would seem to nullify what I
had believed in my whole life.Would I
want more than annihilation if I was triaged?This is all quite disturbing. I would have to be much more willing to bond with people "where they are" with less of my own individuality than I have been. That sounds like the tale of the "Rich Young Ruler"
I just got (purchased through Amazon) my copy of Andy
Ngo’s book, “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy”,
published by Center Street in New York and Nashville, 308 pages in hardcover,
main text ending at page 238, with index, volumes of endnotes, an introduction,
afterword, and twelve chapters.ISBN is
978-1-5460-5956-1.
Many in the mainstream media will be very critical of
Ngo’s opus, such as (Los Angeles Times) Alexander Nazaryam, with an article whose headline appears to
imply that Antifa is not a “real enemy”.
Ngo starts out his introduction by the depiction of
his milkshaking and beating in June 2020 in Portland.
His epilogue describes his parents’ expropriation
while in Vietnam after the Americans left in 1975, their forced reeducation
until their long escape.They were
regarded as criminal by communism merely having unearned capital from the labor
of workers.
Of course, I won’t diminish the gravity of the Capitol
riots on January 6 or their significance. Generally speaking (not always) white
supremacist groups are far “better” armed than the relatively amateurish antifa
“cells”.A major exception in the past
would have been the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Patty Hearst, for
example.But the demands of the Left
seem to be that the “privileged” accept arbitrary disruptions of their property
and businesses and honor their quid pro quo’s, demands to join them in quid pro
quo’s and reparations for past sins of their ancestors.This is a case of classical Marxist (or even
Maoist) moral theory getting mixed up with critical race theory.Ngo maintains that the rise of Antifa
corresponds with the growth of Black Lives Matter.
I will cover this in more detail soon on my Wordpress
Media Reviews blog.
Ngo is gay, but his index does not mention homosexuality
or gender issues. See the Los Angeles Blade article by Karen Ocamb.
Photo embed from Wikipedia, click for attribution
(from Skidmore).
They talk about author websites, and their embedded
blogs, which they say are more obviously appropriate for non-fiction and for
fiction, where you might have little to say about the novel itself
regularly.They like Wordpress, and they
are not decisive about whether you should use a package.
They talk about liability insurance, which they say
would be unusual for fiction (but conceivable if you based the novel and real
people and didn’t obscure things).Generally, you won’t be able to get media perils very easily anyway, and
it isn’t clear that it would cover much (whether regular torts like libel, or
even copyright or trademark infringement, a troubling possibility from trolls,
like with the CASE Act (copyright). Yet large media companies have the
insurance, and it is arguable (as was suggested in 2008 before the financial
crisis) to propose requiring it for authors (who usually do have to indemnify
their publishers, but this is self-publishing).They also warn that you could have to be concerned about safety
liability if you hold events after the pandemic winds down.
They also talk about business organization, including proprietorship
and LLC.You may have to watch zoning
laws in your locality or bylaws if you are in a condo or HOA.
The first positive case in the District of Columbia
was announced by Mayor Bowser on Saturday, Feb. 29.
There were no cases in Virginia until early March.
But whole families started getting infected, sometimes
with serious results, and by the end of March lower income people in larger
households, who could not isolate, were starting to get it.
It would spread among different demographics with the
reopenings.In the fall, it would be
college students spreading it home.
Families would have little gatherings, and everyone
would get sick in a few days.
Among younger adults, or even older adults living
alone with lower exposures, actual illness would be much less common.But in some families, many would be come very
ill and would have deaths, sometimes after a prolonged time on ventilators. Some
adults would have to go to skilled nursing facilities to learn to walk again
after “recovery”.
Time Magazine has published a controversial article “The
Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved to 2020 Election.”
Much of the article examines the work of organizer and
labor operative Mike Podhozer to lead the effort to keep the entire electoral
process under a kind of supervision.It
had started perhaps with a 2019 dinner in Mark Zuckerberg’s home.
There were enormous Zoom meetings with many operatives
throughout 2020, mainly to deal with the challenges that the pandemic could
present with normal voting in person legally. Obviously, Trump did not want to
see any changes that would lead to increases in turnout for black or other
minority voters (outside of his own base). A major problem was that poll work
is often done by elderly workers, who arguably could not work safely on Nov. 3
(I talked to Fairfax County about this and was told that persons over 70 need
not work).By and large, states are free
to change their rules on how voting works, as long as legislatures have authorized
election administrators to do so.
Other problems included the poll watchers.Republican poll watchers claimed that the
were kept away, and poll workers claim they were harassed by watchers not
wearing masks.
A particular threat was that in swing states,
officials might be “bullied” into letting Republican-controlled electors choose
the electors and override voters(all
part of “stop the steal”).
Tim Pool had a run-in with Twitter, not allowing a major
tweet to be retweeted or linked, as he stated the facts about the article. Cassandra Fairbanks was suspended for a day
on Twitter for posting a particular story about alleged fraudulent delivery of
ballots in Michigan, after the story had been ruled false.Her claim (however questionable) is on
Gateway Pundit (link, if you want to see it) and can be read online on Telegram.(She is also on Gab, which is down now.) Timcast IRL examines the matter with Jack Posobiec in this video.
But it is correct to say that a “cabal” did “fortify”
the election so that unusual maneuvers by Trump, leading to the insurrection,
could not change the result.
Johnny Kaufmann has anarticlefor Atlanta Magazine
and station WABE (“where Atlanta meets NPR”), “Inside the Battle for Fulton County’s
Votes”, which you can read (long), or listen to as a podcast (30 minutes).
Many of the complications resulted from a plumbing
failure in the State Farm Arena where the Fulton County ballot processing took
place. It’s ironic because the facility sat vacant after March 11, 2020, the
day the world ended, on a day that the Atlanta Hawks lost a basketball game to
the New York Knicks, and then all major league sports shut down as players
started testing positive.The failure occurred
as a result of excess unrelieved water pressure in an unused, unentered men’s
bathroom, overflowing the urinals.
The article discusses some specific personnel, the difficulties
they faced, and the indignation from Trumplikins when Georgia went for Biden
(even before, while they counted) and then when the runoffs went for the Democrats,
too.
I worked a 16 hour day in the Virginia primary March
3, but the county decided that those over 70 need not work the election.
Voting in a pandemic did provide a tremendous
challenge.
Picture: Atlanta State Farm Arena, p.d., embed from Wikipedia, click for attribution
Tucker Carlson (of course!) interviewed Colleen
Oefelein, who was fired from a literary agency merely for having Parler and Gab
accounts.
National Review has a news story about the Jennifer De
Chiara Literary Agency and its firing her, by Zachary Evans.EugeneVolokh examines this question in Reason, as to whether New York State law might
have prohibited the firing and as to what “recreational activity” means and whether
it includes political speech (in promoting books or even in authoring
them).I went through this issue with my
own employer in the 1990s and actually took a corporate transfer to avoid an
issue.
In fact I have a Parler account but have never posted
on it.She says she posted the same
contents on Parler and Gab as on Twitter and she has never had a problem with
Twitter.
In other words, her employer (as a book literary
agent) doesn’t want one of its associates even “associating with” people on the
right by using platforms that tend to attract them (that might include video channels
like Bitchute).
Indeed, Gab lost its hosting in 2018 after one of its
members launched the Pittsburgh attack.Most of these platforms have had to go to hosts like Epik.
It’s disturbing that a mainstream literary agency
would behave this way.But there is a
great sense of nod to anti-racism and critical theory coming into mainstream corporate
thought, as we have seen with the social media platforms, largely as a result
of the stresses on the country and extreme political polarization, exacerbated
by Trump and the events Jan. 6 at the Capitol.
The book business is also stressed by the pandemic
lockdowns and closures, which certainly interfere with events at both chain and
larger (or even neighborhood) bookstores.Agents want to see authors sympathetic and interested in solving these
problems. Now that I think about it, I haven’t
noticed many (or even any) Zoom book events, because people want to meet authors
in person and get signed copies.
There is also a concern in the literary business that authors
are willing to “write what other people want to read” rather than just what
they want to say.This has political
overtones.“Identarianism” (and
addressing people where they are, as in handbook-style writing) is sometimes
seen as more appropriate than a detached, academic, distant style (that sound
elitist and in the last few years has become offensive to some people).That was particularly an issue with my issue
of the past, “gays in the military”.
We may see a world where writers are expected to see
some “social credit” if they are to be heard at all, and critical theory indeed
mixes in with that.It’s a big concern right
now, and an existential threat to writers who want to remain “independent”of outside “collective” pressures from others.
.
Apparently an author, Ernest Cline, is using the DMCA
takedown to stop criticism of his book “Ready Player Two” (Ballantine, 2020) by
making lengthy quotes in social media (especially Twitter).
Katie Smith explains for the Boston Globe, with some of
the amputated tweets, here.
Electronic Frontier Foundation also weighs in with
this op-ed.
The February 2021 issue of Wired (Conde Nast: I have
both print and digital subscription) offers, as its entire issue, excerpts
(Chapter 1, 2, and 4) from a new novel “2034: A Novel of the Next World War” by
Elliot Ackerman and James Admiral Stavridis (USN), with illustrations by Owen
Freeman, from Penguin Press, 320 pages, ISBN 978-1984881250. The magazine issue titles itself “A History of
the Next World War”. Ackerman has an earlier contribution in Wired, Oct 30, 2020, "A Navy SEAL, a Quadcopter, and a Quest to Save Lives in Combat".
The novel appears to start with the capture of a
Chinese boat called the WenRui, based on the name of someone associated the Maoist
1960s Cultural Revolution. It seems to have a lot to do with Chinese intentions
regarding Taiwan, territory around Hong Kong, Iran, and parts of the Middle
East.(Chapter 1 is titled “The Wenrui
Incident”.)
The narrative seems to start on March 12, 2034 (a
Sunday) and one of the domestic characters in Washington is Dr. Sandeep
Chowdhury, who apparently lives with his mother in middle age (bachelorhood?)That evening (in Chapter 2, titled “Blackout”),
a complete blackout of much of the US occurs, as he flies to Beijing.Apparently service (including cell and Internet)
gets restored in a few days.
Chapter 3 is called “Blinding the Elephant” and Chapter
4 is “Red Lines”.
I believe there is an issue of cutting transoceanic
cables.But it isn’t real obvious what
causes the total blackout, other than compounding of effects of hacking such
was what happened recently with “Solar Winds” and “Fire Eye”.One major possibility would be the widespread
use of non-nuclear magnetic flux weapons that can produce an EMP effect (and
they may wipe out unprotected [Faraday cage} electronics.The US had considered this kind of attack on North
Korea in February 2018 before the Winter Olympics and saner voices calmed Trump
down. Another possibility could be
attacks on utilities that break “air gaps”.None of these things have actually happened to civilian facilities in
western countries so far.But the US military
has used such weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan in some circumstances.
At least we have a new president who will take normal
responsibility for the military (and intelligence services) now.
I don't think this novel is quite the equivalent of an another "One Second After". I wonder if my own novel ("Angel's Brother") would make for an interesting issue of Wired ("LOL").
I don’t know of this is in the book or not, but I’ve embedded
a Wikipedia picture of Woody Island, which China and two other countries claim
now, in the South China Sea (click for attribution).
Subtitle: “An account of the life and works of Mason
Locke Weems- patriot, pitchman. Author, and purveyor of morality to the
citizenry of early United States of America”
Saturday, January 2, 2021 was a mild day in northern
Virginia, and given the circumstances of social distancing, I went on a short
day trip,.alone, to Dumfries, just off I-95, and visited the outdoor area of
the Weems Bott Museum.
discuss G W biography
There is a sign that talks about the first biography
of George Washington, authored by a pastor Mason Locke Weems (which is an
expensive collectible on Amazon) who in turn gets a biography by Lewis Leary,
which is bookbound in colonial style.It’s
pretty easy to imagine it being assigned in an English class in high school in
eleventh grade (American literature). Maybe this year for online school.
The parson made bringing, selling and distributing
books to rural areas away from the coastal cities, which had few bookstores, a
life priority.That’s rather ironic for
me.
The book has a silly middle chapter “To all the
singles … the pleasures of the married state”, which in rather verbose flowery
manner preaches and lists family values, in an era when people needed to have
many children.
Blacks, who were usually slaves, are spoken about with
some deference in Weems’s own writings, as were native Americans, who were (incorrectly)
viewed as not well socialized.
Two important pieces in the latest “The Atlantic”.
Adam Sewer writes that “The Capital Rioters Weren’t Low-Class”. He refers to them as small-business
owners, real-estate brokers, and former military service members who thought
they had the “inviolable right to rule”. He gives many examples for comparison from
the Reconstruction and early 20th Century, almost out of “Gone with
the Wind”, the second half of which depicts many clandestine meetings early in
the Reconstruction while Scarlett rebuilt Tara.
Worse still, David A. Graham writes “Why the rioters thought they could get away with it.” Indeed, they didn’t wear masks, rather Halloween
costumes (the one guy with the medieval tattoo had the left side of his chest
shaved for the body art), and rather behaved like spoiled white boys supporting
Antifa in Portland.
When members of the House hid, the Republicans didn’t
wear masks, and at least one Democratic member now tests positive, and has
gotten a monoclonal antibody shot, and seems to have few symptoms now. Yet, “those
Republicans” acted as if, you’re old or infirm and vulnerable, it’s your problem.
An early January 2021 issue of New York Magazine has a
book-length article (paywall, but they seem to allow this one) by Rob Nicholson,
“The Lab-Leak Hypothesis”.The tagline, “For
decades, scientists have been hot-wiring virusesin hopes of preventing a pandemic, not
causing one.But what if?....” (ir came from a lab?)
The article is in seven parts, looks at the “death by
natural causes” idea, and sets up a scenario how a sample was stored from the
Mojiang Caves accident in 2012.The
theory is similar to Chris Martenson on Peak Prosperity on May 4, 2020 (then
the codon was called PRRA),The article describes
gain-of-function experiments with many pathogens with the US involved in many
of them.And with the safety concerns
about the BS4-level Wuhan lab,’
The article pays a lot of attention to furin cleavage,
but this can occur naturally when there are other infections in a person (it
even happens with influenza).
Still, it sounds like a pretty convincing “screenplay
treatment” for what really could have happened.
There is a recent update in Nature on the Mojiang bat cave incident in 2012.
None of this relieves Americans (and people in other
western countries like especially the UK right now) of their new “moral”
responsibility not to let the strong infect the weak.
Remember that New York and The New Yorker (often pubs
Ronan Farrow) are different periodicals, but sometimes their styles overlap. I wonder what Farrow would come up with on
this topic.
Yunnan mountain scene, Wikipedia embed, click for attribution
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
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