[Note from Steve: On this day of remembrance, it’s difficult for me to post just about anything related to the business of publishing books. NYC is the the book-publishing capital of the world, but it’s also where the worst terrorist attack on complete innocents occurred on this day back in 2001 about when I was thinking seriously of retiring from my day-job to write full-time. We lost a dear family member on that terrible day (his eulogy is found in my first published novel, Full Medical); we also lost several friends and colleagues. Terrorists are sick, subhuman fanatics, but let’s remember all their innocent victims today. Read on, if you think it will help you get through the day. Writing what follows was therapeutic for me, so please bear with me.]

***

Every so often, I google “Steven M Moore” to see how well that search engine has kept up with this blog and my publishing efforts. It’s often enlightening. (For example, these blog articles often are listed, but never those from my political blog. Maybe that’s not surprising? Some social media sites claim to be apolitical, which now often means, “Don’t promote anything that appears like a political statement.” Or, it can also mean, “We don’t promote anything that’s progressive because we Silicon Valley VIPs are apolitical fascists!” Take your pick.)

In this process of rediscovering my internet presence, I’ve concluded that when I started my publishing career back in 2006 (with Full Medical)—that was also when I started this website—I should have created a pen name. (You might have realized that I finally got one, but it’s only used for my YA writing.) There are too many Steve Moores around; even too many Steven M. Moores.

People often quote Smith as the most common surname (Jack Smith is now a notable one!), but Moore is right up there. So’s the first name Steve or Steven (compared to Stephen). So you’ll find Steven Moores who are critics, economists, felons, pediatricians, politicians, and fiction and non-fiction writers. On the internet, I compete with all of them. As far as book promotion goes, that means you can sometimes peruse ten pages of Google output and still find references to me and my oeuvre (more blog posts now than books, unfortunately).

After publishing forty-plus books, it’s a bit too late for me to change! In fact, the time to choose a pen name was before I published the sci-fi thriller Full Medical. Maybe that mistake is the main cause of my anemic sales figures? I don’t believe so. I think it’s more because people won’t find any of my stories by googling “sci-fi,” “thrillers,” or “mysteries.” Google probably also pays more attention to books published by the old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables (i.e., by those old, formulaic authors writing for the big publishing conglomerates, what those publishers consider “sure bets” in the publishing horse race).

No, I can’t blame the lack of a pen name for my low sales figures. That lack may contribute, but there are many other factors, including competition, of course. Now, with more books being published than ever before—self-published, small press, and Big Five conglomerates’ books—and fewer people reading books—computer games, streaming video, and social media numbing the minds of people and pacifying them–publishing has become even more competitive. For readers, that’s a win: Many more books at lower prices (at least from self-publishers and small presses). For writers? Too many of us have to be satisfied with authoring books only because we love storytelling. Lack of a pen name is only a small hurdle out of many an author must jump over, to be honest.

Yet a catchy pen name like Mark Twain might have helped me. Has any MFA student written a thesis about whether it helped Samuel Clemens? (I sort of did that in the eighth grade, but it was just a year-ending writing assignment in civics…and my information came from our public library, not Google!)

***

[No ad today. See my note above.]

The Saudi Arabian prince isn’t just another Arab strongman consolidating his dictatorial power; he’s also creating his own Hitler-like genocide against the Houthis in Yemen. His secretive and despotic government supports Sunnis in Yemen.  Because Iran supports the Houthi Shi’ites there, Saudi Arabia is using starvation and cholera as weapons to murder the Houthis. These include women and children, innocent victims of an evil regime.

The NY Times in a rather misleading article called the prince’s actions another manifestation of the Arab Spring. Far from it. I guess the Times’s writers went into a trance with things like allowing women to drive, as if cosmetic changes in this dark and closed society could turn Saudi devils into angels! This is all just spin conjured up to distract the West, and the NY Times swallowed it and extolled the virtues of the “new regime” in a piece of irresponsible journalism at best and unpaid Saudi propaganda at worst.

The rotting core below the tip of this reformist iceberg is dangerous and depressing.  The images of starving and sick children on the November 19^th segment of CBS’s Sixty Minutes should make anyone who isn’t a neo-Nazi cringe and grimace. Conservatives in the U.S. generally don’t watch Sixty Minutes, but they should have watched this episode, especially considering the NY Times blatant bias. Starvation and cholera aren’t pretty wherever they occur, but weaponizing them is a new invention. Leave it to the duplicitous Saudis to turn them into weapons in their campaign for political and religious domination in the region.

The Saudis didn’t just settle with creating modern terrorism. Most of the 9/11 murderers were Saudis. Bin Laden was a Saudi. And the Saudi government funds religious schools that brainwash young men so they become violent terrorists—Saudi terrorists. ISIS never became a 16^th-century-style caliphate; Saudi Arabia already was long before ISIS! If Iran is a rogue nation, so is Saudi Arabia. They both destabilize the region via their radical brands of Islam. Their only commonality is their hatred for Israel. Neither nation is any friend of the U.S. or the West, yet the very military equipment we’ve sold to the Saudis is now used to murder Houthis in Yemen.

(more…)

Ideological truth is an oxymoron.  We spent the last two centuries debunking ideologies—all the different –isms, like Marxism, Nazism, Zionism, Socialism, Communism, and so forth.  We are still fighting some of those.  They’re like shingles—dormant viruses that awaken from time to time to attack the body politic.

This century we are increasing our understanding of how the human brain works.  It has a marvelous capacity for reason and logic, often creating great thoughts, inventing new technologies, and making works of artistic splendor.  It also has a nasty way of getting its wires crossed, short-circuited, and contradictory to common sense and logic.  The latter problems can often be described as brainwashing when it comes to ideologies.  Brainwashing can be inflicted by others, or it can be self-inflicted.  Ideologies are often the tools for doing both.

Small-minded people become easily addicted to ideologies.  The latter provide a closed system of minutia that’s attractive to such people, easy solutions for problems perceive in their lives, real or imagined, simple solutions that ignore complexities and conflicting relationships to other problems.  An ideology is a one-size-fits-all approach to a small life of parochial thought that allows people to get on with their mundane and sometimes suffering lives.  Ideologies encompass religion; they’re all the opium of the masses.

We can’t be too vocal in our condemnation of power-hungry demagogues who exploit these weaknesses of simple-minded people.  A radical iman preaching jihad is the scum of the earth.  But a Marxist preaching about how wonderful the world will be when workers rule, or a priest telling impoverished peasants their reward will be in the hereafter, these are in the same class and deserve condemnation too.

But those who swallow this malarkey also deserve condemnation.  They are negating their human potential to do and create great things; they are living a life of lazy intellect by accepting ideological truths as fact.  There are no seven virgins awaiting the suicide bomber; there is no worker’s paradise awaiting the Marxists’ followers, only a brutal dictatorship of the proletariat; and there is no place among the angels awaiting the pious and exploited peasant.

(more…)

Remembering 9/11 shouldn’t be a NYC event, or events at the sites where the four planes crashed.  It should be a national and world event.  Nearly 3,000 innocents died that day at the hands of Muslim jihadists, most of them Saudi Arabians who graduated from that country’s religious schools.  Bin Laden, the planner and cheerleader for the terrorist dogs, was also Saudi.

But we can’t blame one nation or a respected worldwide religion for this attack.  We must blame a terrorist ideology that exploits poverty and ignorance to brainwash its adherents and condones the torture and murder of innocents.  Religion is just the cover story—no true religion can ever condone such treacherous deeds.

We must carry on the fight against terrorism, imported or domestic.  At the same time, we can never forget the innocent victims of these terrorist attacks or the friends and families who are still grieving.  Too many Americans have forgotten.  No one should, because we are all targets now.  To give up the fight would dishonor the innocent victims’ sacrifice.  Their murders won’t be avenged until terrorism is stopped.

I lost friends and a relative that day.  I won’t forget.  You all know me as a compassionate and progressive person.  But I have no compassion for terrorism or its practitioners, only loathing.  On this day, I’ll try to get beyond that, though, and just remember who we lost on 9/11.

And so it goes…

For all readers who love conspiracies, here’s a real-life one for you: Nearly fourteen years after 9/11, all the report about that horrific day has been released except for twenty-eight pages classified as Top Secret.  It turns out that these missing pages focus on the involvement of the Saudi government’s role in the attack.  If what’s written there isn’t damaging to the Saudis, why are these pages Top Secret?  Looks like the media might be dancing to the same conspiracy band too—the media roosters certainly aren’t squawking much about it.

In this blog I’ve often referred to the duplicitous Saudis.  Most 9/11 terrorists were Saudis.  We can’t determine the Saudi government’s guilt by association, but I don’t base my claim of duplicity on the nationality of the 9/11 terrorists.  There are other facts that justify my claim.  Maybe the nationality of the terrorists is all just a coincidence—wink, wink—just like it’s a coincidence that bin Laden came from a rich Saudi family.

First duplicity fact: the Saudi royal family has always walked a tightrope by pretending to be friends with the U.S. while supporting oppressive, Sixth Century Islamic rules and sponsoring religious schools where jihad is taught.  Those schools give rise to terrorists in general and the 9/11 terrorists in particular.  Poor saps are educated AKA brainwashed by “religious leaders” who completely distort the teachings of the Koran at best and read into it violence and murder at worst.  They don’t teach; they indoctrinate.  And the Saudi government encourages this by supporting them.

(more…)

At the time I’m beginning to write this post, a carrier battle group is headed for Yemen’s coast to enforce a blockade against Irani ships attempting to help Yemen’s rebels.  Why?  They’re supporting Saudi Arabia’s bombing of said rebels.  The Saudis announced they were going to stop but the bombing continues.  One problem?  Saudi Arabia is NOT our friend, and Iran is NOT our friend.  Second problem?  This is an internecine dust-up between Sunnis and Shi’ites, so what the hell do we think we’re doing taking sides in a religious war?  Third problem?  Al Qaeda in Yemen has been a severe thorn in our sides for a long time, so who cares if the Shi’ites wipe those particular Sunnis out?

The details: (1) Saudi Arabian royalty, in order to save their well-padded asses, have been walking a tightrope for decades, pretending to be our friends while supporting the Saudi religious schools that instill hatred and produced Sunni jihadists like bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists.  Why do you think members of the royal family fled the U.S. after 9/11?  Washington knew and still knows, at least in intelligence circles, that Saudis are duplicitous scoundrels.  They don’t want Shi’ites nipping at their backsides in Yemen and probably are rooting for ISIS in their war against Iran-supported regimes like Hassad’s because the ISIS monsters are, after all, Sunnis.  They might be supporting ISIS too; they’ve certainly supported al Qaeda, that terrorist group that now seems tame in comparison to the crazy ISIS wild boars.  For the Saudis, the only good Shi’ite is a dead Shi’ite.

Point (2): How ironic is it that Iran wants to end economic sanctions while at the same time striking out against Sunnis in Yemen?  They and their brethren are the flip side of the Saudis: for them the only good Sunni is a dead Sunni.  Makes me wonder if this internecine battle between rival Muslim sects isn’t all about greed and power and exterminating anyone who disagrees with their warped versions of Islam.  No, not wonder.  Call it bringing out this Hatfields v. McCoy’s battle into the open.  The Palestinian problem, that justifiable desire for a Palestinian state, has receded to the point where it’s become irrelevant to everyone in the region except Israelis and Palestinians, notwithstanding Netanyahu’s stupid ploys to guarantee his survival by painting it as something else.  Instead of sending our sailors into harm’s way, we should just tell the Supreme Leader of Iran’s floundering theocracy to cease and desist, or all talks about lifting economic sanctions are off.

(more…)

Genocide is extreme ethnic cleansing, a holocaust…remembering the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire!

Egypt’s persecution of Christians, once controlled by a brutal dictatorship, is now sanctioned by an equally brutal military junta.  ISIS’ persecution, at best forced conversions of Christians to Islam, and at worst their bloody beheadings, are in the news, the stories often accompanied by gruesome YouTube videos.   A recent CBS Sixty Minutes’ segment portrayed the plight of Christians in Iraq, ironically more protected under Saddam Hussein, once persecuted by al Qaeda in Iraq, and now threatened by ISIS.  Iran’s persecution of Christians has only diminished because the Ayatollahs want to remove the West’s sanctions.  Recently, Christians in Kenya (most of the 147 victims) were separated from Muslims and shot exection-style by Somalian al Qaeda members.  Where Christians and Muslims once coexisted, Christians are now in the crosshairs of radical Islam.

Religious intolerance isn’t new, of course.  It’s inherited from the ancients who followed the doctrine “My tribe…good; your tribe…bad!”  It’s inherited from that long evolutionary development of ape men and women mimicking their gorilla and chimp cousins (ever see one group of chimps wage war on another?—geez, they seem almost human!).  In the Age of Enlightenment philosophers tried to argue against ALL discrimination, but religious discrimination was so ingrained that our Founding Fathers made religious freedom #1 in the Bill of Rights.  (Never mind that it’s now being used to discriminate in Indiana and elsewhere—until we modify the Bill of Rights to bring it up to date and prohibit discrimination for sexual orientation, this will continue.  One right being used to attack another is ironic, at best, and dangerous—we consider freedom of speech a right, but you still can’t yell “Fire!” in a theater, because that tramples on other rights.)

(more…)

[I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

While drone surveillance and attacks and Special Ops are a better military solution than “boots on the ground,” there’s no doubt that ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups will only be defeated if the countries affected wage effective war against these militant Islamic groups.  The key word is “effective.”  Remember that ISIS received a big boost when poorly trained Iraqi forces ran for their lives, often in their underwear—equipment left behind, much of it American, is now in ISIS’ hands.  That has to stop.  Western presence is justified there for equipping and training local forces so that these fiascos aren’t repeated.

That said, the West isn’t doing nearly enough to hurt these groups where it’s most effective—financially and personnel-wise.  I’m reminded of World War Two where indifference, peaceniks, and anti-Semitic sentiments conspired to give Hitler a free hand in Europe.  We don’t need another Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand either and hope Islamic nations will destroy the extremists in their midst without our help.  The recent Twitter action, for example, while a good start, is a drop in the bucket.  The West needs a concerted effort to stop all finances flowing into the illegal insurgent groups.  Funds must be frozen and their propaganda machine must be dismantled.  We can be good at that, and it’s the least we can do.

(more…)

Recent history, let’s say 1950s on, hasn’t been kind to our stupid foreign policy mantra that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” especially in the Middle East.  We created the Shah in Iran as a favor to the Brits, toppling a democratically elected regime there, and we’re still paying for it.  We armed al Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and we’re still paying for it.  We “saved” Iraq from Saddam Hussein, who, for all his faults, held all that country’s factions together.  Dubya, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, in their greedy little minds, only saw dollar signs from Iraqi oil.  They really did nothing to contribute to democracy or a stable government there.  And we’re still paying for it!

While my last post on this subject encouraged Obama to bomb the hell out of ISIS everywhere possible, including Syria, and a second beheading only underlines the need to stop these mad dogs, it’s high time we rethink our foreign policy mantra.  Its corollary seems to be “When you choose friends that way, watch out!”  Yes, air strikes are needed against ISIS now.  No doubt about it.  But there are other priorities to worry about.

(more…)