Cecilia Vega of ABC News asked President Biden in his first press conference, “Do you find this acceptable?” in reference to the miserable conditions of unaccompanied children at the southern border. (Sorry, Joe, this is a crisis!) Another reporter—maybe from Bloomberg?—asks id the president will draw a red line in reference to Afghanistan troop withdrawal. Many of them ask why the president hasn’t done this or that (hmm, seems to me he’s done a lot in sixty-plus days, but I guess the reporters don’t think so).

These and many other questions reporters ask amount to media looking for the gotchas. Biden in the short time he’s been in office can’t fix what Trump broke during the four years of his administration. When Mr. Biden laughs and says to put Ms. Vega in her place, “Really? Is that a question?”, he’s implying it’s a stupid question because she’s looking for the gotcha, She counters with another stupid question (naturally!) that turns everything upside-down, asking if his plan to contact the relatives of those kids, using the phone numbers they have carried from Central America, doesn’t encourage even more to make the long trek to the border. Sorry, Cecilia, you can’t have it both ways!

Ms. Vega is only one among many ambitious reporters (she just received a promotion to White House correspondent, so she has to increase the number of her gotchas), but she was particularly irritating that day. ABC News did us no favors by replacing one SOB (Jonathan Karl) with another (Cecilia Vega). Karl’s book provides her with a guide on how to be maximally annoying (and maximize her number of gotchas!).

Trump drew the May 1, 2021 line in the sand for Afghanistan, but it never could have been maintained without leaving a bloodbath behind and our allies in a bind (they have more troops there now!). Mr. Biden flubbed a bit here, saying that he could imagine all US troops out of Afghanistan by sometime in 2022—a fuzzy line to be sure. But such questions only serve the media’s and their reporters’ purpose: create the gotchas! From the gotchas, the media creates their beloved scandals, and those sell (see my previous post)—of course, where they really make their money selling is expensive advertising space, those ads made possible by the scandals.

And thus we have the media, publishers, and reporters doing exactly what democracy does not need, yellow journalism, plain and simple. They’re all out to be like the British tabloids. Of course, those adversely affected can always sue. Meghan and Harry just won a big lawsuit. But not even the threat of litigation seems to stop them from looking for the gotchas. And when they can’t find them, media creates its own by quoting people out of context.

For now, looking for the gotchas is largely apolitical in the sense that the media only wants to create something scandalous because scandal sells. The media is not the enemy of the people, but it sure is the enemy of logical and reasonable discourse in the twenty-first century. When I see that NY Times motto, “All the news that’s fit to print,” I just laugh. It should be “We find the gotchas and get you the scandals.” Honest journalism is rare these days. And there are no honest reporters because they are all looking for the gotchas.

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Comments are always welcome.

Hard sci-fi, anyone? The bargain bundle The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection contains three “evergreen” sci-fi novels (i.e. as current and entertaining as the day I finished the manuscripts) that span thousands of years of future history, including the founding of ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) featured in A.B. Carolan’s novels, Rogue Planet, and other stories. In the novel Survivors of the Chaos, readers discover a dystopian Earth where powerful international corporations rule and exploit the planet and the rest of the solar system, even hiding the greatest discovery Humans could ever make, an ET ship that crash-landed on a moon of Saturn. In spite of the chaos, three starships are launched to colonize planets orbiting Sol-type stars. In Sing a Zamba Galactica, readers can follow two colonies’ struggles to survive an ET invasion in near-Earth space; the colonists aren’t alone because new ET friends are there to help. The reader will also  meet new ETs, including Swarm, that strange collective intelligence so important in ITUIP history. In Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, readers will see how a mad industrialist, akin to ones Humans fled decades earlier, plots to rule all of near-Earth peace and end the peace in that corner of the galaxy so dearly won. Three novels for the price of one ebook—a veritable smorgasbord of sci-fi! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (The first edition of Survivors of the Chaos is also available in print from another publisher.)

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

From the Fifty Shades books to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal’s reporting about Gov. Cuomo, we have ample evidence for this truism. Scandal is the opium of the masses today, not religion. Better said, scandal as reported in the media has become the new religion for most people, and they can’t seem to get enough of it. Where there’s a demand, there’s a supplier, and publishers, writers, and media outlets have jumped on the bandwagon and are shoveling the SOS out by the truckful.

We can’t really blame sleaze-meisters like Ronan Farrell or Pierce Morgan, or even Fox News or MSNBC pundits, who are out to shock their viewers. People love their doses of scandal, and others feed that addiction for profit. Blame the media outlets’ producers and writers. The sleaze-meisters are just their toadies.

There’s absolutely no concern for the people who might be hurt unfairly by scandalous accusations for the simple reason that they are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Even when proof of innocence is available—i.e. the scandal doesn’t just reduce to an X-said-Y-said, as in the case of Cuomo (you don’t thing a high percentage of politicos didn’t favor their families with Covid testing or vaccinations?)—the public only remembers the initial claims of scandal and never the proof that there was no scandal, or it was often simply an attack generated by a few disgruntled people with an agenda (Cosby’s case was a classic, because the AG was running for office; in Cuomo’s case, you have a new generation  of pols aching for a chance at power—his first accuser is also running for office and the twenty-years-old story of abuse came from a de Blasio supporter—guess which Dem in NY state is Cuomo’s biggest enemy!).

Often the person accused of scandal has to face a lynch mob spurred on by the likes of Morgan and Farrell, who become judge and jury for the lynching—this group includes such “fair and honest” news media stars as Jake Tapper. The media know scandal sells, there’d demand for it, and they supply it.

This is all exacerbated by the speed of communications nowadays, mostly social media, where bandwagons for scandal abound. Some of us rush to keep up with the scandal; others (I’m one) are more logical and reasonable and say they’ll withhold judgement until all the facts are in (i.e. due process takes place, and the scandal is proven to be true or false in absolute terms, not a storm in a teacup). But most people are scandal mongers—they buy, sell, and consume scandal.

The scandal’s often not there, folks! Some social media sites even create it out of thin air, leading to all those conspiracy theories that seem impossible to debunk.

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If you’re a conservative evangelical or Catholic who voted for Trump in 2016, have you atoned for the sins you committed in setting the US back during the mad and divisive four years of his presidency? If not, you should!

I don’t know what to call those sins. At the very least, they were hypocrisy. At the worst, they were Machiavellian, evil, and political expediency. In any case, people like them made a Faustian deal with the Devil incarnate Trump to further their own agendas.

You may call Michael Cohen a sleazebag or something worse, but he’s atoned for his sins and shown who Trump and his family really are in his tell-all book (probably the most interesting of all the anti-Trump books I’ve read in detail). One scene in that book sticks in my mind. It takes place in Trump Tower where Narcissus le Grand meets with several famous (infamous?) evangelical leaders. They practice the “laying on hands” ceremony and depart convinced that Il Duce has the spirit within him. What a laugh I had! Trump just conned them. He hates and hated people touching him, even before Covid, but Cohen had convinced him to just close his eyes and go along with that cultish ceremony. The ultimate con man and his acolyte, Cohen, conned the evangelical leaders, con men themselves, who were stupid enough to believe the charade.

As long as these people got what they wanted—the worst probably being a Supreme Court now dominated by extreme right-wing conservatives, including Catholic cult member Judge Amy; wasn’t Creepy Clarence, the sexual pervert, enough?—conservative evangelicals and Catholics happily held their noses and looked the other way, especially their leaders who pandered to their base. Families ripped asunder at the border, attacks on our God-given planet Earth, faux displays of religious fervor (violently clearing peaceful demonstrators away to get his photo-op in front of that church, holding up a Bible) are only a few things these Christian conservatives should count as evil deeds their lord and savior Mr. Trump committed. They are complicit in that.

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What do most congressional districts in the US have in common? They’re either reliably controlled by the Dems or the GOP (aka Good Ole Piranhas) because state legislatures have created them to be that way. This process is called gerrymandering.

To quote Wikipedia (warning: I can’t get rid of the links, but they probably don’t work!): “The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander; a portmanteau of the name “Gerry” and “salamander”) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette (not to be confused with the original Boston Gazette) on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States. Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party. [Author’s note: Whoa! That’s really bipartisan!] When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a mythological salamander. Appearing with the term, and helping spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head that supposedly resembled the oddly shaped district.”

In the 21^st century, state legislatures have made gerrymandering into an insidious attack on American democracy. Sure, there’s generally a party mix in congressional districts (you generally don’t know if your neighbor is a wild progressive or staunch conservative), but one party becomes so favored that the other party’s candidate has an enormous electoral hill to climb. That’s the idea, of course! (Like the onerous burden of extended daylight savings time, good ole Massachusetts is responsible for this invention!)

An NYC district that includes Staten Island is typical. The island is Archie Bunker country, but there are no laughs forthcoming here when congressional elections are held. A Dem candidate for the House won in 2018 (much to Trump’s chagrin, because that district includes part of Brooklyn); the district reverted back to the GOP in 2020 when a radical MAGA candidate won (seems like Trump was the only big loser from the GOP in that 2020 election!). That campaign was the worst mudslinging (to put it mildly) campaign I’ve seen in my lifetime—another consequence of gerrymandering, excessive polarization and extremely dirty politics. (If the Dem candidate hadn’t lowered himself to his opponent’s level, he would have done a lot worse!)

In my own NJ district, the political mix is a bit fairer, allowing the Dem representative to squeak by in 2018 and 2020. (Who said NJ is reliably Democratic? Gov. Christie, of bridge-gate fame, was a Good Ole Piranha, after all.) The generally progressive population in the part of my district nearer NYC is outnumbered by the part that extends into the conservative middle of the state, so the Dem candidate, a middle-of-the-road ex-USN chopper pilot and Naval Academy grad, didn’t have easy campaigns. And she will be targeted again by the RNC.

The important point here is that both these cases are about gerrymandered districts, ones created to further political agendas. Some, of course, are created to corral certain areas so they don’t interfere with statewide dominance by one party or the other. Gerrymandering, like voter suppression, is anti-democratic. Its worst effect is that it allows state legislatures, often dominated by GOP fascists, to determine the shape of districts, even though statewide, Dems are elected, as occurred in Georgia and Arizona. (Those same state legislatures, tens of them now, are striving to pass laws that guarantee voter suppression, using the big lie that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, which never occurred, to justify these onerous laws that take away people’s right to vote.)

American democracy can’t survive when elections are rigged by gerrymandering and voter suppression practices and laws. Congressional districts need to reflect natural boundaries—like town and county borders (assuming those are reasonable, which they often aren’t). Redistricting must result in a more favorable mix of voting demographics. Districts should not be drawn or changed by state pols to guarantee their hold on power.

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Comments are always welcome.

Extreme “evergreen books.” The “Clones & Mutants” series contains my first novel, Full Medical (2006, but it has an ebook second edition), where the reader meets the children cloned from important political and religious figures as part of their medical plans. In #2, Evil Agenda, one clone and one mutant battle the evil Vladimir Kalinin (he appears in two series, including this one, and two bridge books). In #3, No Amber Waves of Grain, the clones and mutant battle against a Korean industrialist out for revenge, with (surprise!) Kalinin helping. This sci-fi thriller series will leave readers wondering if some of the portrayed events set in America’s near future (2054+) might already be occurring! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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

With Trump gone, I thought I could just focus on reading, writing, and publishing in this blog, what fiction writers blather about all the time (after all, why shouldn’t a blog reflect its writer’s interests?). With Biden et al saving the nation, I made that assumption. Wow! Was I ever wrong! Narcissus le Grand (Trump the Chump) was only symbolic of a more general problem in the US and around the world: Representative democracy fails to represent the people. Politicians are the problem!

They might not be as evil as Trump (Minority Leaders McCarthy and McConnell, Governors Abbott and DeSantis, PM Orban, Witchy Marine le Pen, and others come very close)—Trump basically represented no one except himself and his family—but I don’t know any current politicians who selflessly put constituents’ interests above their own personal agendas, although I’ll give you that the latter many times just reduce to getting re-elected. Incompetent political hacks are the norm, and pols driven by greed and power are common enough that a lot of people suffer.

Consider NY senators Gillibrand and Schumer, perfect examples of the latter. They jumped on the bandwagon to mercilessly attack Governor Cuomo. That bandwagon is pulled by a lynch mob with greed- and power-driven pols, including the two senators, at the reins and a scandal-crazed media pushing from behind. It’s so weird to see that George Floyd’s murderer receives more due process than Cuomo! Talk about a twisted plot!

I’m not saying that Cuomo’s innocent. He might at least be guilty of creating a toxic work environment. Most people working in a corporation have experienced one—the VIPs there can be real SOBs—I know that because I experienced them in academia and R&D. But people can overreact, innocently or otherwise, making mountains out of molehills. A woman went after one VIP in one of my workplaces for telling her she was “glowing” as a compliment—she was in a family way. That’s perhaps being insensitive, not a sexual assault!

US society often carries political correctness too far, and I’m sick of it, all the more so when people join a lynch mob that allows political hacks to jump in and further their own agendas. That includes Senators Gillibrand and Schumer, of course, who have stepped over a lot of dead bodies on their way to the top. Every pol has committed some of those sins. For example, Gillibrand went after Franken only to increase her own chances in the primaries—fortunately people saw through that scheme of the ex-member of the Good Ole Piranhas.

There’s no reasoned discourse anymore, only ten-second soundbites, often snarky gotchas that make me sick because they only encourage the media’s feeding frenzies. There’s no competence anymore either among politicians, only incompetent hacks posturing to win the next election so they can continue to ruin our lives!

This country and the world have many critical problems that require solutions if humanity is to survive. I repeat: Some solutions are needed so humanity can survive! (I suppose Gaia might have a different opinion about that.) For sane readers of this blog, I shouldn’t have to enumerate them. Ask yourself if your senator and representative are working to solve them. Our representatives are demonstrating many times over that they have no clue at the least and, because of their greed and desire for power, working against humanity at the worst. What do we elect them for? The answer I see now: Obviously not to do the job that needs to be done!

In future blog posts in this category “New Op-Eds,” I will elaborate on this theme. It’s a bipartisan one (although one US party will probably believe that less than the other). This is the least I can do to wake people up so they’ll vote out the pols who do so little for us. I know it won’t help sell my books because some readers will boycott me. So be it!

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Comments are always welcome.

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