Shameless book promo

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I’ve started writing again after a ten-year pause, so it’s pretty much like starting from scratch and I can use all the help I can get. The first two books of a three-book science fiction series, Insurgents and Awakening, are available on Amazon now, and the third, Survivors, will be up in a week or two. (The books work as stand-alone novels; you don’t have to read them as a series, though I think they’re more fun that way.) All three are/will be available in paperback and e-book editions, and the e-books are free in Kindle Unlimited.

There’s an excerpt from Insurgents here and the first chapter of Awakening here, if anybody’s interested.

I hope ChicagoBoyz readers will find the trilogy interesting, since it’s meant to be the chronicle of a totalitarian society’s collapse over a period of several generations.

If anybody happens to read one, I would be very grateful for a review.

Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman: The ‘Resistance’ vs. George Washington

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The conclusion of Seth’s brief piece:

But for some reason the Trump administration continues to stand by the 2009 opinion, drawn up when Mr. Obama was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which came with a $1.4 million award. The Office of Legal Counsel concluded Mr. Obama could accept the money, but the opinion simply assumed the Foreign Emoluments Clause applied to the presidency. It was taken as a given with no citations either to judicial rulings or to the practices established by Washington and other founders.
 
We have submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in New York, the District of Columbia and Maryland explaining this argument. At a minimum, the historical record should give Justice pause. But ideally the department would abandon the 2009 opinion and argue in court that the president is not governed by this clause. Mr. Trump’s adversaries are arguing that Washington and Jefferson were crooks.

(The full column is behind a pay wall but is worth reading if you have access.)

History Weekend: Revisiting “Atomic Diplomacy,” the “Million Casualty Lie,” and Casualty Planning for the Invasion of Japan

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When I wrote my Sept 2nd column “Happy VJ-Day, Plus 72 Years,” last month, it was with the intent to show a couple of things.   First, that “Atomic Diplomacy” — the belief that USA dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan to intimidate the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War — was a Leftist identity based belief system unsupported by the real historical record.   And second, that it’s genesis was due to the lies and cover up of those lies by a generation of high level US national security bureaucrats like Paul Nitze and WW2 generation flag rank politicians for decades after World War II.

This column will expand on that second point by revisiting “Atomic Diplomacy,” the “Million Casualty Lie” founding myth that it pushed and recent research finds by research partner Ryan Crierie and I had on the War Department casualty planning for the Invasion of Japan.

In addition to the lies of Paul Nitze so well laid out by Paul Newman’s various books, which my last VJ-Day column dealt with, there was in fact a great deal of lying about the American casualties and the Atomic bomb.   It was a “Million Casualty Lie,”   but the Atomic Diplomacy Historical Revisionists got the lie vector 180 degrees wrong.

The Post War American military, and General Marshall in particular, was in fact hiding a much bigger casualty number for the conquest of Japan and the destruction of the Imperial Japanese military.   And they had been hiding it from public view since July 1944.

The following will show that the War Department planning process is where these lies were born during the war,   where these institutional lies were spread from and the how/why/who kept these lies going in the decades afterwards.

Chart 2. War Plans Division, War Department General Staff: 21 December 1941
Figure 1 — War Plans Division, War Department General Staff: 21 December 1941.   A simple organizational chart reflecting inadequate planning for a global war. Source:  OPD 312, 105

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Harvey’s Horrid Hollywood Handmaidens

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I don’t normally comment on popular culture, but the  ‘Hurricane Harvey Weinstein”  Hollywood sex scandal marks a such a radical change in our “cultural high ground” that it deserves comment based on observation’s I’ve read from Twitter commentator Thomas Wictor and science fiction and fantasy writer John Ringo over on Instapundit.

First, Thomas Wictor was a music journalist for 10 years in Hollywood and has just posted a tweetstorm about  Harvey Weinstein Hollywood sex scandal in light  his experiences then.

See this link for the concise posting of those tweets —

Short form: Everybody knew about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory nature…and were silent.
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Second, John Ringo also commented upon the ‘Hurricane Harvey Weinstein” Hollywood sex scandal   here —
and Ringo closed it out thus —

…So do liberal actresses and models and all the rest really think conservative men are the worst human beings in the world?

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Yes. Yes, they do. Because they have to work every day with some of the ACTUALLY worst human beings in the world. And they have to believe conservative men are worse. Otherwise, there’s no point to being on the ‘good’ side.

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Thus when Donald Trump said some needlessly crass things and alleged to have groped women, they immediately saw in him not just Harvey (all the rest of the abusers in Hollywood High not to mention Billy ‘I did not rape that woman’ Clinton) but WORSE THAN HARVEY.

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Because Trump has to be worse. They can’t really be slaves to some of the most vile human beings on the face of the planet.

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Got news for you ladies: Yes, yes, you are. You enable them every day and by doing so you not only support the abusers, you directly or indirectly tell all the hurt new cheerleaders: Welcome to the bigs, sis. Now shut up and act.

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You’re blaming the wrong side.

And both these observations together   made me realize that  Margaret Atwood’s  1985 novel “The  Handmaid’s Tale” wasn’t so much about a conservative  patriarchal  dystopia converting  women into tools of the patriarchy than her projecting her life  experiences in the  Harvey Weinsteinesque  “rape culture” in the patriarchal male dominated, progressive left, media institutions onto conservative men a’la Ringo.

In other words, if Ringo’s Lefty Female/Feminist Projection model holds and I think it does,   Margaret Atwood appears to have been as much a “Handmaiden” in 1985 as was Ashley Judd was in 2016.   And so is every other lefty actress who was screeching at Pres. Trump, that Harvey Weinstein “Helped” career wise, including most of the actresses given Oscar’s over the last 20 years.

All those Hollywood women’s achievements are now tainted not only by the question of whether or not they slept with  Harvey Weinstein, but how complicit they were in enabling his Handmaiden style systematic patriarchal abuse of women for decades.

Because we know from Ringo’s and Wictor’s observations — and by what what these actresses said about Pres. Trump, and what they didn’t say about Harvey Weinstein — that they are all  “Harvey’s Horrid Hollywood Handmaidens.”