Let’s face it: The evacuation from Afghanistan is another “Saigon moment.” But does Biden own it? Multiple presidents have committed blunders there. He’s just joined that gang. I want to go through this dark stretch of American history a bit here. It’s longer than you might remember.

Most people have forgotten the reasons why we were there, especially anyone under forty. “Wait!” you say. “9/11 occurred in 2001, only twenty years ago.” The frustration leading to the current evacuation (supposedly to be completed by August 31) didn’t begin with 9/11. That frustration began long ago and reflects four decades of failed Middle East foreign policy created by numerous US presidents. But the Biden administration’s evacuation will go down in history as the worst since Vietnam.

So I’ll answer that all-too-common reaction springing from the myopic memories of clueless Americans (that group obviously includes Biden and his aides in State and Defense, of course) with a series of what-ifs that summarize the mistakes that have been made.

What if the Russians hadn’t stood up a puppet government in Afghanistan? Sometime ago, “back in the USSR…you don’t know how [un]lucky you are, boy,” Leonid Brezhnev, the Kremlin’s capo back then, wanted to move into the Middle East to have more influence in the Third World (even Israel was in the Third World at the time). They first tried Egypt and that failed (Jimmy Carter got Egypt and Israel to sign a peace accord that has held despite all subsequent problems and recalcitrant Arab and Israeli governments). So old jowly Leonid tried his despotic magic on Afghanistan. The Russians smashed the Taliban tribes and stood up a caretaker government, a puppet of the USSR. Al Qaeda fought back, and the CIA thought they’d be clever and turn Afghanistan into the USSR’s Vietnam by arming al Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban friends. The USSR left in disgrace (it was indeed their first Vietnam moment—the Chechnyan Wars soon followed), but al Qaeda was now entrenched, the Taliban had a resurgence, and the two groups became the best of buddies, with the Taliban protecting al Qaeda and allowing them to plot 9/11. This is only a summary of a lot of bad history for the US, of course, but it all occurred before 9/11.

What if we’d gone into Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt al Qaeda down and then left when we succeeded? Revenge is sweet, so they say, so the US wanted to taste it against bin Laden and his terrorists (mostly Saudis, by the way, and financed by Saudi Arabia, a country that probably financed the Taliban as well…all to promote radical Islam). We chased al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and eventually gave bin Laden what he deserved. Even before bin Laden’s demise, we should have ended our presence in Afghanistan. But no, we stayed. Why? In spite of Dubya’s focus on Iraq, that old nation-building dream that too many nations have tried in the Middle East, Africa, and even southern Europe (the old Yugoslavia), vocalized or not, kept us there. (The only notable success of this policy is Israel—sort of—some would say it’s also become a fascist failure in its turn to fascism.)

In the Middle East, we think we can create democracies and stable governments out of desert mirages where there are no traditions to serve as a foundation. History has shown many times over that citizens of a country have to rise up on their own. (That’s how the USSR eventually crumbled! A desire for freedom and a better life toppled the old Soviet Union, not Carter, Reagan, or any other American leader. Lamentably that desire wasn’t strong enough there, so Putin could take over and make things worse.) Nation-building can’t work if the people themselves don’t want to build a nation…or don’t give a damn, preferring autocracy. The Afghan army did not have the will to fight the Taliban at the beginning of the century; with all the billions spent on equipment and training for them, they still didn’t have it in 2021.

What if Biden had learned from Bush, Obama, and Trump’s mistakes and hadn’t wanted to out-trump Trump? For the last, I’m guessing here, but it sure looks like one of old Joe’s major motivations. He could have done a one-eighty relative to Trump’s meddling in Afghanistan (he did so for many other Trump idiocies), but chose not too, because, unlike Obama who fantasized about a new nation in Afghanistan, Biden wanted to get out of that hellhole. Most Americans agreed with that. Few agree with how the Biden administration went about doing it.

But here’s the rest of the sordid tale: The US tried nation-building in Iraq after Dubya decided to avenge Daddy Bush and correct the latter’s huge error of not marching all the way into Baghdad once and for all as a fitting end to the Gulf War. Obama then left Iraq, and the US got ISIS. ISIS was beaten down with the help of the Kurds, but Trump pulled out of Iraq again, leaving our Kurdish friends behind to be slaughtered by the fascist Erdogan. Now old Joe pulls out of Afghanistan, leaving our Afghan friends behind to suffer the same merciless fate at the hands of the Taliban, who make Erdogan look like a saint.

Okay, maybe old Joe was too senile to learn from Bush and Trump’s mistakes, but he was right there when Obama made the mistake that created ISIS. I guess you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, whether or not they’re senile. Biden was focused on just getting out; he forgot to have a reasonable plan about how to do it. Or his administration did. Not only has Biden turned Afghanistan into yet another Vietnam, continuing America’s string of foreign policy failures and America’s fall into international irrelevance, he’s leaving behind many of our Afghan friends to horribly die just like Trump did with the Kurds.

This is why I give Biden an F on his report card for Afghanistan. Yes, we should have left Afghanistan…years ago! And, especially now, it should have been a well-planned withdrawal. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination. But there’s a lot of people to spread the blame around: the CIA, several presidents, and a whole bunch of myopic fools in State and Defense who should have known better and told Biden so. They, and the American people, for that matter, forgot the debacle in Vietnam. We have abandoned trusted friends who aided us to realize our dreams about nation-building, dreams that inevitably have turned into nightmares.

The Taliban will mercilessly slaughter our Afghan friends. That blood is on Biden’s hands! I hope he can’t sleep at night thinking about it. There’s a special place in his Catholic hell for mass murderers like him. Beating the Donald to the punch—or even feeling constrained to continue Il Duce’s initiatives—hardly justifies his failures. Nothing does.

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Comments are always welcome.

Sleuthing, British-Style. My binge-reading of British-style mysteries during the Covid pandemic has influenced the later novels in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, in particular Death on the Danube, Palettes, Patriots, and Prats, and Leonardo and the Quantum Code. I’ve also written short fiction to honor and celebrate Dame Agatha’s seminal work in this subgenre. Some examples are found in the little collection indicated here–six short novellas–which also contains a glossary of words and phrases from the UK’s rich lexicon of dialects as well a list of British-style novels that I’ve read and enjoyed. The collection is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Smashwords). A second volume is available as a free download (see the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

“Sticks and stones may break my bones (the insurrection at the Capitol) but names will never hurt me” (Republican Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger being called Pelosi Republicans by a fascist Kevin McCarthy). McCarthy and the two Jims, Banks and Jordan, are fascist lackeys of their wannabe fuehrer Donald Trump! None of that trio is a true conservatives by any stretch of the imagination, only stupid serfs of America’s fascist plutocracy bent on destroying American democracy.

In my “Fascist States of America” series of articles (it will finish up this Friday), archived under FSA, I outline this very real plutocratic conspiracy America faces, one much more dangerous than anything right-wing fanatics can dream up as they promote Trump’s Big Lie. Let’s say it like it is: Even with Trump temporarily gone from the White House and banned from Facebook and Twitter, that plutocracy is still hard at work, using their surrogates to find every failure the Founding Fathers wrote into the US Constitution…and then some. Every glitch found there is being exploited, so much so that Biden or any other Democratic president won’t matter much at all, unless they go over to the dark side too, because there are fascist loopholes in the Constitution that allow the plutocracy’s evil servants to bring government to a grinding halt if their toadies aren’t in power.

McConnell, Graham, McCarthy, and the two Jims, along with Trump the Chump, are morons who don’t realize the shitstorm they’re creating. We barely squeaked by last January 6. Cheney and Kinzinger in the House and Romney, Murkowski, and Collins in the Senate, form a small minority of true conservatives, not fascists, who realize how destructive and dangerous the fascists controlling the Good Ole Piranhas have become. The dog days of August are upon us, and I can smell the stench of a coming revolution from the cesspool the plutocracy that the fascist morons are planning. But it might just go the other way too—perhaps a violent revolution?—when the majority of Americans rise up against the dictatorship created by the fascist plutocracy.

While I don’t want to malign Lucy, McCarthy’s actions are like that little obnoxious jerk’s as she takes the football away from Charlie Brown. We have too many Lucys controlling Congress now, and too few good old Charlie Browns who can serve as a legitimate and necessary foil against the exuberant Congress members on the far left, AOC and her little commies. Instead we have mostly fascists in the congressional GOP who are bent on destroying American democracy in their rush to do the plutocracy’s bidding.

That select committee that McConnell and McCarthy are disparaging (remember Moscow Mitch torpedoed the idea of an independent commission!), now with true conservatives Cheney and Kinzinger aboard, should keep answering this fundamental question right through the 2022 elections: Do the majority of American people want a fascist America run by idiots like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, McConnell and McCarthy? I think those two morons know the answer in spite of their kissing the butts of the fascist plutocrats: The majority of Americans would toss them out on their fat fascist butts if they only had the chance!

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You have to wonder why Rupert Murdoch wants his own Fox weather channel. The only reason I can think of is that he’d like to promote the fascist view of climate change using anti-global warming rants masquerading as weather news. Or maybe they’ll be talking about a hurricane and blame Biden and the Dems?

One thing I long ago learned about the Murdoch family: You can’t trust them! They’re dishonest about the news, far beyond a bias (they even managed to piss off Trump—go figure!). Their commentators are scurrilous fascist mouthpieces who cater to the plutocracy (Murdoch is one, of course, who plagues both the UK and the US) and take 1984‘s double-speak and Goebbels’s propaganda lessons to an insidious level. I wonder who’ll be the Sean Hannity of their new weather channel.

Lies about global warming and climate change abound. We don’t need more of them. Fox, Fox Business News, etc. will now be joined by a weather channel of lies, yet another Murdoch media outlet I’ll need to avoid, except for the occasional dip now and then into that cesspool of fascist reporting to make me laugh at its absurdity and wonder if it’ll kill me. I don’t watch Fox now, and I won’t watch their damn weather channel.

If you watch Fox anything any more than that, and especially if you watch nothing else, you’re part of the problem. You’re at least a sucker for fascist propaganda, conspiracy theories, and nasty anti-democratic pundits’ rants, all feeding on moronic viewers like you (with Trump as the lead moron). Democracy can’t function without intelligent participants, but you’re obviously okay with turning ours into a brain-dead fascist state at the service of plutocrats.

Of course, Murdoch is one of the 0.1% that has more wealth than the 90% of the rest of us. He’s a visible plutocrat; most aren’t, making them all the more dangerous. (Some even hide behind a bit of philanthropy, like Koch for Lincoln Center and PBS.) Perhaps the invisible ones are more a danger to democracy? But there they are, smiling like evil, cunning Cheshire cats, contributing the dark money that hastens our descent into a fascist hell designed to their specs. Money and power corrupt, but they all see money as guaranteeing their power, so they want more power to make more money, no matter how they steal it from us.

They backed Trump. He’s such a malleable moron they could pull his puppet strings at will. But, as head lemming, they could keep their hands clean as he did their chore of leading the rest of the marching morons right over the cliff for the plutocrats. You can bet that Murdoch, his familym, and the other plutocrats want Trump back in 2024 so they can finish destroying American democracy.

They say our country is divided. That’s a nice word for what’s going on! And that division line, that border between sanity and insanity, passes right through Fox Media. Or maybe it’s in the center of the insanity? There’s a minority of marching morons across the US who watch Fox, and there’s a majority that’s intelligent enough to boycott Fox. Needless to say, I’m in the last group, and I’ll be boycotting Murdoch’s weather channel. Does anyone sell a Fox filter? Or do the British still have Fox hounds?

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Comments are welcome!

“Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries.” I put ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo through some tight situations in this trilogy, all because of the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). In Muddlin’ Through, she’s falsely convicted of killing her sister and brother-in-law, she escapes, and battles the secret US group that wants her to get the MECHs back from the Russians. In Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By, she moves from the East Coast to the West to start a new life as security chief for a computer games company, only to have CIA and Russian agents hassle her for the MECHs’ location and a psycho stalk her. In Goin’ the Extra Mile, she has to go to Beijing because the Chinese kidnapped her family to force her to tell them where the MECHs are. All three novels should get readers’ hearts pounding. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

In other words, those fascist Good Ole Piranhas in certain states (fascist insurrectionists Cruz and Hawley and other fascists in Congress aren’t among them—they’ve already done their damage) are willing to destroy a 265-year-old democracy to morph it into an autocratic plutocracy, incorrectly proving Putin, Xi, and other demagogues correct, that democracy just doesn’t work. Their reasons should be clear: Il Duce (aka Trump), the plutocrat’s pawn and lemming-in-chief, led the GOP lemmings over the cliff and lost the House, Senate, and presidency in the 2020 election. What a loser!

The only way the current GOP can survive without resorting to fascist rule and destroying our democracy is to change their lazy, fascist ways and actually go out and convince voters they’re not completely incompetent asses and will implement policies that help the average American, not themselves or their uber-rich masters in America’s plutocracy. Demographics are against them, so they resort to voter suppression, an easy and ubiquitous fascist tool to employ because the Good Ole Piranhas now control far too many state legislatures and congressional districts (all those congressional districts are gerrymandered in their favor). In other words, their motto is: We’re winning the game, so let’s cheat some more on behalf of our plutocratic masters!

Making it easier to vote should be a bipartisan goal; that’s a sign of a healthy democracy. Voter suppression means our democracy is sick and spiraling down into the cesspool of fascism. As a recent Doonesbury cartoon strip recently suggested, the Good Ole Piranhas used to get by with claiming their suppression activities are to protect against voter fraud; many still claim this. When the majority of Americans concluded that was only sour grapes and bullshit, these fascists started using a bigger cover story: Trump’s Big Lie that he lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him. Smellier bullshit! Of course, every change made in the voting laws is made more to keep Dems from voting than the members of the fascist party of America!

Smart citizens shouldn’t write this off as free speech in action. A country where anyone believes the Big Lie is no democracy at all. History has shown that autocrats are clever devils (in the US, these are the GOP’s autocratic masters—the GOP leaders are morons, with Trump having the worst IQ). Autocrats will create scapegoats and false causes to support their greedy quests for power. In the US today, they’re succeeding.

They’re in the minority, these fanatical fascists, and they hide under many invisibility cloaks—religion, conspiracies, grievances, and populism. They are a clear and present danger to American democracy and must be stopped…at all cost!

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Comments are always welcome.

“The Last Humans”—a series about biowarfare and its consequences. In Book One, The Last Humans, Penny Castro, forensics diver for the LA County Sheriff’s Department, finds a body on a dive but a lethal pandemic when she surfaces. What follows is a struggle to survive, but she also finds love and hope. In Book Two, The Last Humans: A New Dawn, she and her new hubby are forcefully conscripted by a struggling US government to take revenge against the virus makers. The government wants the pair’s skills badly enough to kidnap their children. Both novels can be found wherever quality ebooks are sold. (But I don’t recommend Amazon, because they confused the two ebooks and won’t correct their error!)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

How stupid can people be? Obviously, from all that’s going on, damn stupid! Stupid enough that they prefer to commit suicide and take others with them rather than use a thoroughly tested and tried solution to a public health emergency, one that is extremely lethal. We hear and read about the rationalizations for this stupid behavior akin to lemmings intent on suicide, following their brethren over the cliff. The lemmings are actually smarter; they’re driven by instinct. The anti-vaxers are just marching morons who swallow political and social misinformation. Let’s analyze some of their rationalizations.

The vaccines don’t yet have FDA approval. The FDA made a huge mistake with that new Alzheimer’s drug, so that approval might not mean that much in the grand scheme of things. But there is approval for all three vaccines available in the US as an urgent response to a deadly pandemic. In other words, while the lack of full approval might sound like a good rationalization, it’s not! Why is it so hard to understand that we are in a public health emergency in this country and around the world? You only need to consider how many people in the US and worldwide have died from Covid-19 to realize how dire the situation is…unless you have the IQ of pond scum!

Sure, we have many distractions, but those should blow past intelligent people who are smart enough to stay focused on this public health emergency. For example, there’s “Ayn” Rand Paul, who seems to be competing for the “biggest ass in Congress” award (he has a lot of competition!). He basically called Dr. Fauci a liar and communist and accused him of collaborating with the Chinese government’s lab in Wuhan. Even if true—that is, the unproven theory that the virus escaped from that lab—someone needs to put a gag on this idiot! This SOB isn’t an epidemiologist; he’s a moronic and radical libertarian who’s just trying to make political points, just another example of how the pandemic has become politicized.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. is yet another example, but at least he’s pretending to offer advice about taking the vaccine, not trying to make political points amongst Trump’s fanatic followers. (Or is he?) He’s against every vaccine! If he’d had his way, this stupid ass would have continued the smallpox and polio epidemics. (Of course, he might have been stinking up diapers back then, instead of stinking up public health now.)  Unfortunately, stupid people commiserate and follow his moronic advice.

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Bezos, Branson, and, to some extent, Musk, are the three rich boys; and who knows what their expensive toys cost? At least Musk actually did something that blows the other two out of the sky: He put NASA back into space without kissing the butt of that old KGB agent, the evil Vladimir Putin.

With Branson’s flight, the hype was over the top: “Democratization of space” and “opening space to everyone” were examples of CNN’s hyperbole repeated again and again by Rachel Crane, whom CNN might now regret hiring (did she qualify just by being an astronaut’s daughter?). Ms. Crane also seems to think that the Mojave Desert is in New Mexico.

I suppose Bezos’s flight will be equally hyperbolic (and I’m not talking about the orbit—besides, that’s a parabola after the rocket motors shut down). He’s already touting he’ll be going higher. And, who knows, the price of his future tickets will undercut Branson’s, because that’s what Amazon does at the beginning of a retail competition. Or maybe he’ll buy out Branson.

Let’s analyze the Bezos and Branson efforts a bit more. Did they really accomplish anything beyond giving those two billionaires a great rollercoaster ride? Wouldn’t all that money have been better spent on finding solutions for global warming?

The answer to the first question is easy: Elon Musk’s successes with Space-X are an integral part of the space effort now and—let’s admit it—saved NASA’s butt, especially for sending personnel to ISS. NASA’s dependence on the Russian mafia’s capo Putin was at best a risky business.

The second question is a bit more difficult to answer? The short answer: We’ll never know now because that money has already been spent! A longer one: Space exploration can never be more important than combatting climate change! Global warming endangers all life on Earth. CNN stupidly stated during the Branson spectacle that one day we would be the UFOs for ETs on some strange planet. BS! That will never happen if life on Earth is reduced to one-celled microorganisms after the planet becomes too much like Venus. We can’t lose sight of the existential challenge of climate control just so two self-centered billionaires can get an emotional rush.

They say Branson is very much an environmentalist. He has to prove it to me by forgetting about the media’s love affair with him and ending his foolish toy-building. Until then, he’s only a narcissistic showman who enjoys being in the limelight far too much.

What about Bezos? Maybe I should just refer that question to his wife? Although I’m a writer who now boycotts Amazon, I have more reasons beyond that boycott than Amazon’s shoddy treatment of authors. Now with his expensive space toys, I have another.

Branson will charge $250K for a ticket into space. What will Bezos charge? As I stated above, he might undercut Branson at first and then pass him—that’s Bezos’s style. In any case, your average Jill or Joe won’t be doing tourism in space anytime soon. And they definitely won’t be footing the bill for a return to the Moon or a trip to Mars. No, Bezos and Branson are more than rich boys with expensive toys. They’re rich billionaires looking to make even more money off space.

I wrote about those in my Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection‘s first novel. The UNSA’s chairwoman outsmarts them, though. Hopefully NASA will do the same for Bezos and Branson. Musk needs some competition. All of space exploration would be less expensive if these three billionaires were actually competing!

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Comments are always welcome.

“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” Binge-reading plus a treasure hunt: What’s not to like? Esther Brookstone takes you around merry olde England, Europe, the Middle East, and South America in her five-book series that also travels through three publishers. You start with saucy Esther, an ex-MI6 spy and Scotland Yard inspector, and her paramour Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent; you move on to their exciting honeymoon cruise on the Danube; and you then return to Esther’s home turf where the old married couple’s adventures continue. The two sleuths are 21^st-century versions of Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Esther’s novels can be found wherever quality ebooks are sold. (Palettes, Patriots, and Prats and Leonardo and the Quantum Code are recent additions to this series, and these last two are not on Amazon.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I’ve decided to be more efficient. Instead of sending a lot of tweets out via Twitter (which those website folks would love me to do, I’m sure), I’ll put them all here in one blog post. There are probably more people following this blog than are following me on that website anyway; and, if not, the audience here might be, generally speaking, more educated (Trump’s right-wing trolls still water down Twitter’s IQ quite a bit).

Will Biden become the world’s worst mass murderer? It’s looking that way! His administration is dragging its heels about evacuating the Afghans who helped coalition forces, the US and its NATO allies. Everyone from cooks to translators, about eighteen thousand of them, are in risk of losing their heads as the Taliban take over the country. Biden et al don’t seem to give a damn. In their haste to outdo Trump and leave Afghanistan, they will only outdo him in how many people Il Duce effectively murdered. The withdraw should have had mechanisms in place before it began. So what if Kabul ends up like looking like Saigon? We got our asses whipped in Afghanistan too, so it should look like Vietnam! No wonder we don’t have many friends in this world.

Did Trump support hit squads? If you’re not troubled by the fact that the elite Saudi paramilitary group in charge of dismembering Kashoggi and murdering other MBS enemies was trained in the US by a State Department school for murderers, you should be. Trump had love affairs with  many despots, but MBS and his cronies held a special place in his heart. Can’t you just see him dancing with the scimitar-loving guards? You should see it now as a warlocks’ dance, Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” providing the musical score.

Will 2022 voters be able to vote? Not if the Good Ole Piranhas, America’s national fascist party, has anything to do with it. Their plan for winning elections? Suppress the vote, making sure all those black and brown people can’t show up. McConnell et al are focused on taking back the House and Senate, and they will try any fascist technique they can imagine to do that. Let’s get rid of the filibuster so we can get something done! Better yet, let’s get rid of the Senate! The Founding Fathers sure screwed us by creating that and the Electoral College, the heavy-duty tools in the fascists’ toolbox.

What happened to climate change? With everything else going on, we tend to forget about the greatest existential threat to humans and all life on Earth. Southerners, who see worse damaging weather events occurring every year now, should have a clue, but they’re too busy with supporting Q-Anon conspiracies, denigrating women who deserve control of their bodies, attacking black and brown people, and other far-right causes. Westerners, who live through hundreds of brush and forest fires and an ever increasing drought, ignore Mother Nature’s warnings. Tired of mask? Just wait to you have to huddle inside because to go out means dressing up like a spaceman due to the heat and pollution. Of course, inside is dangerous too when that power needed to run our ACs becomes rationed. We’re probably beyond the tipping point, but any more delays for a serious attack on global warning will just cause more deaths, and condemn future generations an unlivable planet.

Who do you call, ghostbusters, the police, or a social worker? The first is a joke, of course, but so is the third, a tragic one. When some violent SOB threatens to kill his wife and children, I don’t think social workers will help. When a mental case decides to take his AK and spray a crowd, social workers won’t help. Defunding the police, a far-left death wish, just shows how stupid people have become. Yet the recent mayoral race in NYC came down to just that: One leading candidate was against violence on the city’s streets, and proposed policing reform (needed in many cases), not defunding; another, to appeal to that AOC crowd, which compromises with no one, nationally or locally, prefers social workers. Some of those followers tout social workers as the answer, not cops. The mentioned far-left candidate had her own personal security guards, of course; no social workers for her! God help us!

Will 12 to 30-year-olds allow Covid to continue to kill thousands? It seems like an easy choice: A vaccine that can save your life vs. your anti-vax sentiments, for whatever the reason. Let’s forget about absurd reasons like believing the vaccines contain microchips to turn you into a zombie. Some people, most of them young idiots (or their parents), just think Covid won’t be deadly for them because they have a strong immune system. Moreover, the older ones want to continue to have fun in their lives. If these people were the only ones to die, I wouldn’t mind too much, but they’ll kill others—people with cancer on chemo therapies who can’t take the vaccine, little kids 12 and under, and so forth. Geez, maybe Biden won’t be the greatest mass murderer in US history? It will be the 12 to 30-year-olds who refuse to be vaccinated!

Misconceptions propagated by medical “experts”? Dr. Walensky, along with many other medical gurus, mislead the public. What we see reported on are Covid variants, the delta variant is but one example, that are either more transmittable or more deadly (so far, the vaccines still work with these mutations, but who knows?), but viruses don’t choose to do us more harm by mutating, i.e. become more successful from their point of view (they don’t have one, by the way). All sorts of mutations occur; the ones that aren’t better for the virus’s pandemic succcess don’t proliferate. It’s Darwinian evolution in action at the viral level, pure trial and error, not some sinister enemy wanting to destroy us. In fact, the latter would never be a contagion’s goal, if there were one—what does it do after the hosts are all gone? By ignoring this aspect of Covid, the CDC and other medical organizations are falling into the hands of creationists and other anti-Darwinists! (more…)

To those who lament the PA Supreme Court’s decision to free Mr. Cosby, I’ll paraphrase what someone said (I don’t remember who said it or which side they were on): The US does not have a justice system; it has a legal system. Mr. Steele should never have prosecuted Mr. Cosby, and that DA did a disservice to Ms. Constand by doing so. The previous DA had promised Mr. Cosby no prosecution, and that was legally binding, so he went ahead with a deposition in a civil trial, figuring he wouldn’t need to plead the fifth in a criminal one. Mr. Steele then used that deposition to prosecute him in the criminal trial! The Supreme Court’s decision was spot on.

Mr. Steele caused this mess. Two things are evidence for disbarring this lawyer, unless he’s already left the legal system. First, he was in a hurry. The statute of limitations meant that time was running out. But that leads to the second reason: He was also running for office and needed a high-profile case in a hurry to improve his branding in the marketing sense. Mr. Steele was the real culprit in this case.

The media has avoided this issue and shares some culpability for the fiasco. They ignore the facts when it’s convenient for them to focus on what they consider a better story, the outrage of the victims. They’re culpable too, no doubt about it.

This is a miscarriage of justice on Mr. Steele’s part as well as the media’s complicity in covering up his errors. But perhaps we should add one more ambitious lawyer to the mix? Ms. Allred has made a career of representing abused women. Her moral crime is giving them, including Ms. Constand, false hope. Or maybe Gloria is just naive? I repeat: We have a legal system, not a justice system. Both Steele and Allred are lawyers. They should know the difference.

Given that, women have become so frustrated now that #MeToo goes after their abusers in the court of public opinion where all the people they accuse are guilty until proven innocent. The media are their willing accomplices. That runs the risk of backfiring—public opinion is fickle and often starts to pity the accused. It reminds me when, decades ago, many people running childcare centers were accused of being pedophiles, guilty until proven innocent. I’m not saying some accusations aren’t justified, but there’s a bandwagon effect that so often accompanies those tactics, and people get turned off by them because some lives are unjustly ruined, not quite as badly as with a lynch mob, but near to it.

Mr. Cosby isn’t innocent in the moral sense. The court never claimed that. Too many women came forward, suffering psychological pain in the process. Perhaps Mr. Cosby lured them; or perhaps they were looking for him to shed some star power on themselves. Who knows? And it doesn’t matter. They felt abused. But there was a bandwagon, and it started to roll far too late.

Victims shouldn’t wait to come forward. Otherwise, they risk allowing their abusers to win the public’s pity and sympathy they don’t deserve. By waiting in Mr. Cosby’s case, they sent “America’s Dad,” an eighty-year-old man, to jail. And the Mr. Steele did that illegally.

The women involved were victims, victimized not only by Mr. Cosby, but also by Mr. Steele, Ms. Allred, and the media. Please, please, don’t wait to come forward if you want to punish your abuser. Otherwise, there will be opportunists with an agenda ready to abuse you even more, giving you false hope when our legal system can’t do so legally.

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Comments are always welcome.

Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Trouble again finds Esther Brookstone on her home turf. An old friend from her Oxford days is developing encoding and decoding algorithms that involve entangled quantum states and quantum computers, all motivated by some of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ideas found in a newly discovered notebook of the artist. His project is financed by MI5, but both the Americans and Russians want his results…and so does a mysterious stranger. Cloak-and-dagger suspense abound in this fifth novel of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. Soon available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I might take some flak for this post, but I have three problems with this new holiday.

The first is the obvious one: Why do we need it? The Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) freed the slaves; Abraham Lincoln got the ball rolling, but that little thing called the Civil War, the deadliest war ever on American soil (unless you count Covid), got in the way. It’s no wonder that it took so long (June 19, 1865) to let everyone know about it—there were massive casualties on both sides, including the Union, so there were few soldiers to spread the word. In fact, it’s remarkable it was done so quickly with the war going on. In any case, we should be celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation, not when the last Southerners were forced to free their slaves. Of course, everyone’s still blitzed every January 1, and there’s all that football, which Blacks like to watch as well as anyone else. (And play better than most anyone else, I might add!)

Secondly, because Jim Crow policies in the South continued into the next century, what real meaning does the Emancipation Proclamation or Juneteenth really have? Why not celebrate when the Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2, 1964? Blacks had to suffer through one hundred years of segregation, oppression, KKK violence, and economic inequality in the South and elsewhere, waiting for even that hint of true freedom to occur. Oh yes, that suggested date would have usually interfered with the July 4^th weekend, so Congress opted for MLK’s birthday, January 17, to celebrate gains in civil rights.

Thirdly, and most importantly, how can Congress be so hypocritical to pass legislation creating the Juneteenth holiday and not pass important and necessary legislation to finally seal the deal, the one that the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth, the Civil Rights Act, and others have failed to seal? After 160 years of waiting, it’s high time to ensure voting rights, reform policing, and improved quality of life for Blacks and all minorities! Our representatives in Congress didn’t dare vote against the Juneteenth holiday, and probably did so for all the wrong reasons, hoping that would quiet things down a bit, especially those Good Ole Piranhas who are worried about their chances in 2022. In other words, the GOP still is still hoping with the holiday to keep Jim Crow alive, albeit in new clothes by using the excuse of promoting election integrity—everyone who’s rational sees through that ploy. They continue to call the January 6^th insurrectionists just a few peaceful tourists, ignore the George Floyd Bill, and keep exploiting Blacks and other minorities while widening the income gap between that 0.1 percent and the rest of us.

This last reason corresponds to an existential problem that must be solved if this nation is to survive: We must stop promoting fascism, a fascism all too often based on racism, because fascists like to create scapegoats. Is any current member of the GOP better than a KKK member? Only a few! (Hell, even Joe Manchin should join them.) Reforms must be made, or the oligarchs and plutocrats controlling the strings of their GOP marionettes will have their way and turn us into a country that’s worse than any apartheid or autocratic state (they want it to be both!). Given the current evidence, they’re all well on their way to do just that. They must be stopped!

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Comments are always welcome.

Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Trouble again finds Esther Brookstone on her home turf. An old friend from her Oxford days is developing encoding and decoding algorithms that involve entangled quantum states and quantum computers, all motivated by some of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ideas found in a newly discovered notebook of the artist. His project is financed by MI5, but both the Americans and Russians want his results…and so does a mysterious stranger. Cloak-and-dagger suspense abound in this fifth novel of the series. Coming soon from Draft2Digital to all quality ebook retailers (but not Amazon nor Smashwords)!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Tim Cook was in court not long ago defending Apple against Epic Games, the company that made Fortnite. I’m rooting for Epic. Just to be clear, I’m not a gamer; I hate computer games, because the stories they tell, if they exist, are anemic. I hate Apple a lot more, though! (Almost as much as Amazon.) Just recently we discovered that Apple gave in to Trump’s DOJ subpoenas and released phone records of corporations, reporters, and at least two congressmen who Trump considered his enemies. I assume the company is not completely fascist like some German ones in the 1930s, but they’re certainly not fighting fascism!

From its birth (a bit like Rosemary’s baby’s), the company has bamboozled consumers, making products that are so propriety that they generally worked with only other Apple products. In my old day-job, managers, who stupidly loved playing with their new toys purchased from the tech giant, would struggle to make slides produced on Apple machines compatible with other machines, or vice versa, even though people were supposedly using the same software (usually Microsoft’s, so Bill Gates’s company is also culpable). Even syncing and sharing emails and data from an Apple device was torture for other device users (yes, I remember the iPhones-to-Blackberry problem—Apple won that battle…unfairly). And Apple didn’t give a rat’s ass. They still don’t, because, like Bezos’s Amazon, they think they’re the center of the tech universe!

The legendary arrogance of the corporation isn’t its only sin, of course. How dare they try to monopolize the gaming and music industries? They’ve tried to monopolize the ebook industry too (there’s some weird comfort in that they compete with that evil retailer, Amazon). They farmed out most of their manufacturing to China in order to pay workers less and make more profit, to the detriment of US workers, and they signed deals with that fascist-capitalistic state that would never be permitted in the US. And they’ve invented an anti-tracking app to combat tech spying (I doubt it blocks their own tracking!)—that’s one of the biggest tracking culprits claiming they can police themselves. C’mon!

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