While I’m notorious in AH circles as someone who insists that a AH story be (1) A GOOD STORY and (2) have some historical basis, not to mention (3) be one simple Point Of Divergence, not a whole mess of them (I can deal with some cascade effects, but not simultaneous stuff) – I give a lot of latitude to someone who gets those points clearly covered.

Some famous AH works don’t fit those rules, really.  The most common is the time-travellers-come-back-and-yoink-with-the-past…such as THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH and ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME.  Both involved near-present types who introduce themselves and their tech into a ‘past’ world, but I can deal with the way it’s presented, even though the time travel in neither one is ever explained in a reasonable way.

Another failing in AH stuff is a sheer lack of imagination!  The number of things I have seen cross my desk as a Sidewise judge or in general that revolve around the following topics – to the point of making one want to slam the next one up across the room and into the recycling bin – drive me nuts.

No, I’m talking about Robert McNamara, one of my particular historical nemeses, considering the number of important things that he messed up, destroyed or ruined. Not to mention the uncountable dead.

Sometimes, you end up with a movie or book or story that you just get stuck on - as in, you’re at page 138, and the early part of the book is good, but the author has just gone off on a tear with some weird artsy material that passes all rational understanding, and you just put the darn thing down and you don’t pick it up again for a while.

Other people may say - oh, it’s really good, keep reading - but you’re just stuck.  You can’t summon the presence of mind to pick it up again and slog onwards.

Right now, I’m stuck on Oscar Wao - on my Kindle.  I’ve got a ton of Sidewise (Alternate History awards) reading to do, and just like every other thing in the literary world, the stuff for the awards could be seen as another application of Sturgeon’s Law.  But they take priority, and some of it’s really good.  And the best is far more understandable than this…

Wikipedia says:

Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, various Spanish dialects and hip-hop inflected urban English, the novel is also a meditation on story-telling, Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, the contours of authoritarian power and the long horrifying history of slavery in the New World.

No kidding. Luckily, there is a glossary at the end of the thing, and I’m forever going back and forth to make sense of the damn book.  Spanish is not my best language, and colloquial Spanish interlaced with Dominican Republic slang and historical references is really really hard to follow if you’re not familiar with it.

(About all I knew before this about the DR was a tiny bit about Trujillo, about the same about a US intervention there when I was a kid, Sammy Sosa [and that only because you couldn't live in Chicago for a while without hearing all about him - you think I care about beisbol?] and some stuff from a Canadian documentary about Haitians in the DR working as near-slaves in a sugar plantation.)

Yes, it’s something that I will get back to, but not anytime soon.  (If you’re curious as to where I got hung up, it’s when the story flips back to the youth of Oscar’s harridan of a mother in the rural Dominican Republic; I got to thoroughly hate the witch so much that I found reading about her as a smouldering young woman just too annoying to deal with.)

Anything like this for you guys?  Something that you wanted to like but just got stuck in the middle?  Maybe you eventually dug yourself out (I can’t tell you how many times I stopped and started on Dhalgren) and maybe you eventually got rid of the book.

• “The way to a woman’s BLANK is through her BLANK“,
• the Obama’s dog will be a BLANK,
• Nixon and LBJ had worried opinions about the BLANKs all around them, as did the FBI
• Jefferson Davis had a BLANK spy in his home and
  
• Teaching BLANK language in Summer School can get dangerous.  (h/t Deb Geisler)

In early December on the LJ side, I did a ‘rate the Presidents’ competition to see what my readers thought of the US Presidents.  The raw results and comments are still there  - and these are the results, sorted by Mean (statistical results under the cut; the spreadsheet itself is here).

Sets: One (Washington -> Harrison), Two (Tyler->McKinley), Three (TRoosevelt->Carter); Four (Reagan->GW Bush)

What I found interesting was the high SD for the more controversial picks - e.g, President A was good in this area, horrible in that area.    Some were problematic; how do you rate a President who served for very little time and died in office?  The breakdown seemed to be: (sorted by Median)

1-3 (horrible), 4 (bad), 5 (mediocre), 6 (nice try), 7 (pretty decent), 8 (darn good), 9 (walks on water).

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Being a student of American History and Political Science, I’ve noticed something since - oh, 1930.  When some Republicans, the more wingnut sorts, are behind the eight-ball and trying to stir things up, they call the Democrats commies, socialists or commie sympathizers.  And traitors to the realm.

Go back and check out the commentary about FDR, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy, and so on, and you’ll see this sort of nonsense over and over again.  It’s not just the province of Joe McCarthy.

Progressive political movements in this country are NOT socialist.  I mean, I know real socialists, Wobblies and such, and they are the fringe of politics in this country and always have been.

I know that there’s people who go on at length about Obama in particular, being socialist, and that’s utter nonsense.  He’s a center-left sort, very cautious, uninterested in ideology.  The closest to a real rip-snorting socialist in the last round of Democratic candidates was Congressman Kucinich.    Notice how much support he got.  (Or there’s Ralph Nader, who is a whole lot closer to being a socialist than Obama.)

Since the beginning of the New Deal, we have lived in a somewhat ’socialized’ country.  I’ve studied Marxism since college, and I’m a fervent anti-Communist.  But the numerous reforms created since then that were fought against by the Republican party are legion, and they have made our lives a whole lot better.

• Banking reform, including the Glass-Steagall act and the FDIC and SEC.  The New Deal essentially *saved* capitalism and banking.
• Taking the country off the Gold standard.
• Farm Price Supports, Rural Electrification and the TVA
• the CCC and many road and school building projects
• various dam projects on the Colorado and Columbia rivers, increasing hydroelectricity and making Las Vegas possible.
• Social Security
• GI Bill
• Voting Rights reform and modern Civil Rights
• Medicare and Medicaid
• Federal aid to Education, including loans and grants for college attendees.

But to be honest, the two things that stick in my craw is that the biggest Socialistic measure for many years was just accomplished as part of the bailout plan; partially nationalizing many banks.  By Bush and his cabinet.  And the reason that Palin can afford to be so hot on tax-reduction is the collective ownership by the state of Alaska of tax revenues and profits from the North Slope oil - eliminating most taxes and involving massive paybacks annually to every Alaskan.

That sure sounds socialist to me….

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.

I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do know that I’m a Race Traitor for adopting a non-white, right?).  I’ve listed to my daughter ask me about swastikas that she saw marked up on her school grounds, and have to explain about people who hate her for her ethnicity.  I’ve seen it in action for nearly fifty years, in all of its ugliness.  I know better than to apply that badge easily or thoughtlessly.  And that racism is something that is everywhere, in every country and racial group.

However, I do think that McCain is an opportunist without honor who has thugs working for him who are willing to pull every trick in the book and use any tool to get him elected, including racist ones to amplify the stuff Hillary first brought out and tried to use against Obama.   If McCain had any honor, he’d go out of his way to squelch it all.

The people who support Obama the most, by and large, are the young who are civic-minded and are beyond the ideas of racism or absolute adherence to a party. The people who are the most against him tend to be the older ones who can’t get past the idea of voting for a Democrat (no matter how bad the Republican) or a black (no matter how awful a candidate the white guy is) for President.

And there are people who have very specific issues.  If you are totally wrapped around anti-abortion issues, you may well feel that Palin’s basic advocacy of that position trumps anything else.  If you are fixed in the idea that taxes are an evil in all situations, and you make over $600,000 a year, you may find McCain’s low tax strategies far more important of an issue than any other.

Much more below the cut.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

NASA is looking at the problem of maintaining the ISS if the Russians and the USA are having a p!ss!ng match, especially when there won’t be an American option for getting up there from 2010-2015 (at least).  Where’s an X-20 when you need it?

NASA has for years relied to some extent on Russian spacecraft for transport to the space station, and the agency will spend $719 million for cargo, crew and emergency return services from 2009 to 2011. The yet-to-be negotiated agreement would cover all crew and cargo transport until 2015, except for any work that can be provided by fledgling American companies and European and Japanese cargo craft with limited or no track records.

John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Washington-based think tank, said sentiment in the nation and in Congress is running strongly against Russia. He said the waiver could be added quietly to a must-pass bill, but “Congress could very well say, ‘The hell with the Russians, we won’t approve the waiver,’ even if it badly hurts our program and interests.”

At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak.

My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount of material that isn’t in book form, and I’m going through that all the time and hacking away at it to be able to organize and marshal the stuff. At present, the idea is to digitize everything, and use various management utilities to be able to find and figure out what’s what.

Here’s a *short* list of the topics I’m still digging for:

As regular readers here may note, I’m a news junkie, and the one news show that I regularly catch is Keith Olbermann’s COUNTDOWN on MSNBC at night.  In the morning, we used to listen to NPR, but the radio has been crapping out on the reception of same, and until I can fix it, and it *stays* fixed, I have to listen to WGN, which is Susan’s fallback station, which is largely ‘newsish’.   It grates on me, and there’s zero depth to their stuff, and I miss that from NPR.

I have always been fond of radio.  I have a AM-FM-Shortwave receiver in my car, and I’ve listened to Shortwave stations since - oh, 1968.  My dad was in the Signal Corps in WWII, and had a taste for radio, and was willing to play to my interest in same.  (Never got a ham license because I am not any good whatsoever at Morse Code.  Now that the code is considerably cut away, I don’t have the time for my Internet habit, so I wouldn’t have the time for Ham Radio.)

But I do not listen to stuff for rank assholery.  Oh, granted, I’ve even listened to Rush Limbaugh a few times, and there’s far weirder stuff out there - there’s a host of seriously woo-woo stations on the shortwave bands that go for the far fringe elements - the militia / Oklahoma City Bomber sorts, you name it.   But I’m a centrist who believes strongly in the idea that we shouldn’t need to have the state make the rules for our behaviour, but we should know better and behave as if we wanted to be in a civil society.

That means that I don’t care for the shock jocks, the political bully boys and girls, the people who slander first and fail to see the point in asking questions later.   Sure, there’s honesty and calling a spade a spade.  But there’s also saying things because you know they’ll get a raise out of people because you profit off the negativity you spew while you’re being ‘entertaining’, or ‘cute’, or ‘protecting our side’.   Making a living off of cruelty, slander, hate reinforcement or extremism is disgusting, and it’s not entertaining, cute or worth listening to.

I don’t.  I make it a point, personally, to not allow those punks near me.

The Imus firing, to me, is akin to the problems that Howard Stern and other shock-jocks have had - they say this stuff because they think they’re cute.  The stations watch the rating soar, and it adds to the level of degradation in civil discourse.   And sometimes, they go so far that they do something seriously stupid, and they go *smack* into the wall from the resultant public anger of this one.

But it’s not something that’s new.  It’s just that finally, people decided that enough was enough.  It’s not enough to see Imus out; I’d love to see people sit on top of Glenn Beck, Rush, Coulter, Sharpton and a lot of other people who make up stuff to promote themselves and their own particular brand of viciousness.  I see it every day in political discourse, especially since Newt Gingrich decided that slash-and-burn worked at stirring up the base and the hell with working for the public good.  With that, you end up with Dubya and Rove and the politics of personal destruction instead of the way Barry Goldwater dealt with Walter Jenkins.

So it’s a start, like that dumb lawyers-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean ‘joke’, a start at cleaning house.  I doubt it will change anything much, but a cleaning out of the jerks and a return to a saner, more straightforward  way of discussing things would be wonderful.

Looking forward at the 2008 ratrace for President, I’m amazed at the level of you’ve-got-to-be-kidding that I hear from the audience at the level of people running - and how early this stuff is going off towards Serious Running. More after the cut.

Below the cut is a item from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo that brings it all together; what it comes down to for the election in reality is - as per Reagan’s brilliant summation in 1980 - “are you better off today than four years ago?”

I think what is pushing the Democratic revolt in Ohio, from what I could see, was that the economic situation there is sucking badly, and the Powers That Be are so busy with crapola that they aren’t busy taking care of the state and its citizens and their welfare.  And I think that this is getting to be the situation in a lot of places around the country.

Meredith has been watching a ton of TV, and TV ads for candidates.  She’s got the idea that the Democrats are the good guys, and the Republicans are the bad guys, and in her six-year-old world, that’s the simple way to look at it.  She’s honestly surprised that Daddy isn’t a Democrat like Mommy and Grandma, was stunned that I used to be a Republican and was triply stunned the other night to find out that her hero Abe Lincoln was a Republican.

The other day, I was trying to assemble a set of terms of Bushit Bingo, where you have Bingo cards with different Bush common statements on them, and you pass them out before a speech to see who can Bingo on the terms in the speech.  Bush was trying to get through an hour-long press conference without really saying anything aside of ’stay the course’ and I noticed that ‘the stakes’ kept coming up over and over.

The GOP is about to run one last scare-the-crap commercial on TV that basically suggests  that Osama has suitcase nukes, and if you don’t vote for us, he’ll use them.  On you.  And boy, did it ever remind me of the infamous Daisy commercial that LBJ used.

This link gives you both the GOP on from 2006 and the Daisy from 1964.

If I’d have been of age in 1964, I probably would have voted for Goldwater then, and I remember seeing this commercial then.   I have since been disgusted beyond measure with the Johnson campaign for that election, and again with the Republicans this time.

Both are witless fearmongering.  If Osama had suitcase nukes, he would have used them by now - smuggled in over our porous borders, thanks to the people who don’t want to tighten them up because it would upset business tycoons. And I, unlike Bush, don’t believe anything bin Laden says for public consumption.  Ever.