Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Book Review: Losing My Magic Sword

Title: Losing My Magic Sword

Author: Jamie M. Samland

Date: 2021

Quote: "A talking sword that alone had the power to defeat the daemon lord, and you lost it? How?"

Ser Vazadon tells the children the story. It's a short book so all I'll mention are two brief trigger warnings: (1) Killing, obviously, of fantasy creatures but with gory details; and (2) Ser Vazadon is a grandpa figure in the present time of the story, but in the past he's recalling he fought the fantasy creatures alongside another knight who was his "partner" and "love"; the kids know he is or used to be "gay." The story is told with flair and whimsy. The magic sword's personality, the possibility that Vazadon wanted to lose it, are not to be missed.   

Monday, July 21, 2025

Web Log Weekender for 7.17-19.25

Lots of links this time...

Announcement 

Due to the upsurge of interest in Bad Poetry, I've found a use for my Substack account. Starting next week I'll post at least one new piece of verse there each week. These poems will not appear here; they'll be available by subscription only unless, and until, they're printed in a book. The first fifty subscriptions will be free of charge. Subscribers will be able to propose forms and topics.

Cat Sanctuary Update 

Serena's kitten is now two-thirds of the way to being called a Miracle. He's resisting the idea of eating solid food. I don't think it's reached emergency level yet. His body has almost stopped gaining size as his legs have grown. He now bounces about looking as if he were on stilts. He's not an active kitten; must be a disappointment to his mother. He'll watch Drudge chasing switches, curled up on my knee, till he falls asleep. 

If someone had a nice, beta-personality, confirmed FIV-negative, single mother cat with one kitten, would Serena let Drudge have a bride and her kitten have a playmate? The mother cat would need to be a true beta, or I wouldn't even bother trying. Serena takes no back talk. The way some prospective temporary or resident cats were afraid Heather was going to behave is the way Serena does behave. A challenge or perceived challenge, including cuddling up to me, would become a fight. Still, Serena did seem to like having daughters who functioned as a team with her. We shall see.

Civil Rights 

I don't agree with Rick Moran, linked below. I think everyone has a natural right to wear a mask or veil. If the veil is white, and worn with a white dress, the default assumption should be that the person is a bride. If the veil is black, and worn with black salwar kamiz or a burqa, the default assumption should be that the person is a Muslim. If the face covering is any other kind, the default assumption should be that the person believes self to be extremely ugly. If, of course, the person does something illegal, then the arresting officers should remove the person's veil. 

Laws against masks were, as Moran mentioned, enacted in some localities to show opposition to the Ku Klux Klan; but they were, in my opinion, unjustified and probably unconstitutional. People have the right to wear what they like. The Ku Klux Klan have the right to wear their regalia if they are peaceably parading around calling attention to themselves so that everyone knows whom to watch. They have no rights to start fires or otherwise harass anyone, but nothing in the Bible or the Constitution says they can't wear dunce caps and bed sheets. 

If people have to be positively identified to gain access to places that are other people's private property, of course, the property owners have a right to demand that they unmask, unveil, show badges or papers or whatever else. But people have as much right to cover their faces on the street as they have to cover their hands.


Fantasy

In real life I think hounding Fauci is not an ideal use of tax money and merely makes Senator Paul look mean...but on the Lost Planet of Nice, if there ever was anything analogous to Anthony Fauci or to the COVID vaccine debacle, they'd make Fauci go to every vaccine survivor on his knees and apologize. On the Planet of Nice, people probably wouldn't kill him, 'cos he's so old and so short. He'd probably soak a lot of trousers, anyway. People would be too nice to mention it...but he'd know.

Glyphosate Awareness, Call to Action 

President Trump seems to be wobbling off course, listening to chemical corporation spox rather than the clear will of the people. He needs to be reminded that he owes his broad coalition at least as much to Secretary Kennedy as to himself, and that he can't afford to lose Gabbard, Musk, or Patel either. 


Here is a form people are using to urge their US Representatives to block efforts to protect Bayer-Monsanto from glyphosate lawsuits, Syngenta from Parkinson's Disease lawsuits, and evil chemical corporations generally from any responsibility for the damage they do to crops, animals, and humans. 
Every American should use it. The system is supposed to send the form to your US Representative, which means Canadians, Mexicans, and also Puerto Ricans can't use it online, but youall can type in your contributions, print the document, and fax copies--our US Representatives need to know that reckless, profit-oriented use of spray "pesticides" is doing damage beyond our US borders!

If I had a fax machine, I'd send the White House a copy, too. Trump won't read the faxes but his staff will have to tell him if the White House fax machines run out of paper from all the howlers people send them. Make it happen, Gentle Readers.


Glyphosate Awareness, Information 

New Roundup formulas have changed within the year as people were demanding refunds on the glufosinate-based version. New versions contain diquat and triclopyr, which affect non-target plants in ways similar to dicamba only moreso:


Even acetic acid, a.k.a. vinegar...it's harmless when people who like the flavor use a little to wilt their raw lettuce, or when gardeners carefully drip or paint a little on a weed stalk; it's not at all harmless when it's sprayed over acres of land. Many of us need to drink more water but over a hundred people in Texas have died from exposure to too much water at one time...

We really have to make farmers aware that spraying poison on the land always was a stupid, unsustainable idea that started vicious spray cycles, and they need to bite the bullet and go spray-free. Yes, it takes the land a few years to recover. Seven to ten years before the ground is profitable to plough. The time can be shortened by applying heavy organic mulch for no-till planting.

Meanwhile, this web site calls everyone's attention to the new EPA regulations on individuals' responsibility for "pesticide" use affecting neighbors and their plants, and the resulting possibilities for civil lawsuits that can and should be used to make it unprofitable for stores to sell "pesticide" sprays. It becomes a good idea to document everything that goes wrong during the week after someone sprayed something outdoors. "Summer colds" are usually associated with staphylococcus bacteria, and "allergies" are often triggered by foods or pollens, but do you or your children suffer from either when not exposed to poison sprays? One summer with the new rules ought to get "pesticide" sprays out of Wal-Marts, Targets, Dollar Stores, and probably Tractor Supplies everywhere.

Guilt and Guilt Trips 

Scott MacFarlane--with a name like that, how can he act so wimpy in public?--claims post-traumatic stress from the fact that people seemed to be blaming him and his censored-media-reporter buddies for the attempted murder of then-Candidate Trump.


Hmm. Can you put yourself in his place? I can. With considerably better reason than reporters have to loathe Trump, I loathe my third cousin Wrymouth Calhoun, Professional Bad Neighbor, who legally (I believe) murdered all but one of his immediate family, a young tree trimmer Mother hired while I was in Washington, our beekeeper and his bees, and other people, and injured both of my parents, and deliberately made his wife's nephew paranoid, and was seriously trying to kill me, before he stumbled into new legislation making it a federal offense to torture animals; e.g. my cats Silver and Pastel. We don't have laws making it a federal offense to kill a dozen human beings by reckless use of "pesticides" but at least we now recognize it as a federal offense to torture cats. The depth of my loathing for this man can be measured by the fact that, if I happened to find him lying paralyzed (by a glyphosate reaction, no doubt) in the road, I wouldn't want to kill him; I wouldn't be able to make him suffer enough. After last week's poem about the hypothetical "you" I should clarify that he's not been sent to the Lorton federal prison yet, nor is it certain that I personally will get the credit for sending him there, though I do look forward to sharing his remarks about selling land to Black people with his future fellow inmates there. But let us imagine, with pleasure, that he's there, being beaten up regularly for making noises like a racist. So, if some murderer spoils the natural course of events by stomping Wrymouth all the way to death, have I killed him? Merely by publicizing the fact that, to all his other sins, this disgrace to humanity added racist trash-talk? 

I don't think so. I think the stomper would be responsible for his own use of his own feet. 

I don't think MacFarlane should have been subject to "mob justice" if Trump had been murdered last year. It might have been understandable, but it would have been cheap and cowardly, to waste even spit on MacFarlane before the shooter was locked up.

I do think MacFarlane should be subject to the condemnation of society for feeding the unjustified violent hate some people feel toward Trump. Anyone can detest Trump, apparently most people who've ever lived in a place his businesses have infested do, but nobody thinks Trump killed anybody. Trump's immediate family is unreasonably large, because of his three wives, but they certainly look well. Trump's former neighbors are alive, healthy, and indignant. Trump has given people abundant reason to want to sell property to other investors, or vote for other candidates--but nobody has a valid reason to want to kill Trump. And too many left-leaning reporters have written irresponsible hatespews that made it sound as if anyone had. 

Microsoft

Breathes there a computer user who can't relate to this video? If only it had been real...this video was inspired by Word 2007, which was admittedly a step down from Word for Windows ME. If it had been real, there would never have been Windows 10.


Poetry 

The face in the photo shown with this poem isn't smiling, but if it were, you know a stench of rotten eggs would come out. A forced smile is like the stench of rotten eggs


Signs of the Time, Discouraging

The endless parade of video "vlogs" people throw out onto the Internet is discouraging enough, all by itself. I let the things run in the order received, which is how it's possible that I listened to some "Bigfoot" nonsense ahead of a presentation by Publius Huldah. So an alleged Alabaman, with a credible accent, even, was telling Jeremiah Byron, "You tell me, what would just strip peaches off the tree...maypops off the vine...?" 

Child. Hungry deer will do that. Raccoons usually don't strip fruit methodically so much as they break branches and throw food about; when they find something they like, fruit or corn or whatever, they'd rather spoil what they can't eat than share it. Possums are small, but they'll eat every bit of sweet fruit they can hold, which is more than you'd imagine was possible. If you have all three of those species you might not even notice having a Bad Neighbor. This Alabaman also claims to have sasquatch, which I can't say are entirely things she dreamed about after eating a lot of maypops. Sasquatch are supposed to be apes, so presumably they love fruit too; supposed to be bigger than gorillas, so presumably they eat a lot of fruit. But between deer, which the Alabaman mentions having, and possums and raccoons, one can easily have whole trees stripped of fruit overnight. There is no need to postulate sasquatch, or even Bad Neighbors, even if one also has those. 

It's discouraging when someone living in rural Alabama does not know this. 

(Is Dawn Possum hungry enough to steal all the Feral Elberta peaches this year? We will soon know. The tree had a nasty dicamba shock this spring and has not produced many. It's sort of miraculous that it's produced baby peaches at all. I've been giving Dawn fruit scraps to lead (presumably her) away from Serena's kitten.

Some may think the idea of an appealing possum is an oxymoron, but...when I first saw Dawn, I thought she was Dare. She wasn't, of course. Not bigger, but she looked fatter, or pregnant. Her white face has pale orange patches that I think border on looking cute--well, I'm accustomed to the species; they're an ugly species; most are uglier. Anyway she came steadily toward me as I was sitting on the steps with the kitten on my knee, and I thought, "Is that animal mad? Is it planning to grab the kitten off my knee?" and then I thought, "Or is it one of Dare's pups, approaching me to beg in the way Silver taught Dare to do?" And since then I've thought it's probably the latter.

What I know for sure about this year's possum: I miss Silver.)

Trump, Thanks to 

I know, I know. Stop wailing and think it through. How do we guide anybody? Through rewards. What is a reward for a man who has everything? In the case of Trump, that would be attention. So let's all thank Trump for affirming this: 


I used to have an LP of a Christian group whose cover of this song I liked better than the original, but Google loves original releases...

Book Review: Taming the Damaged Billionaire Rancher

Title: Taming the Damaged Billionaire Rancher

Author: Olivia Steele

Date: 2023

Quote: "My heart skips a beat when I lock eyes with the one person I had trusted who walked out of my life five years ago."

Whew. How often do reviewers get to write that, even for one individual reviewer, a book moved too fast, didn't include enough details, left too much to the imagination?

If more of them review this book, I think more of them will have that rare pleasure. This is a short, short novelette. We never even visit Chris's ranch. We see the emotional scenes--Annabelle quarrels with her father and attaches herself to his younger, divorced friend Chris; Annabelle bristles when Chris backs away without having violated what was presumably her father's trust, sooner; Annabelle is getting comfortable in Chris's condo in the city when his ex-wife barges in, storms out, but is reconciled with him while readers are turning the page; Annabelle and Chris have sex before the wedding, with mention of unmentionable body parts; Annabelle and Chris have met again because they were involved in a very public-spirited legal case, but we never see them working on it, we're only told they've won. We don't see Annabelle and Chris doing anything but feel and, without some grounding in their thoughts and actions, their feelings don't mean a dang thing to me. They're not characters; they're puppets in a sex education course--all they actively do is run on and off the stage and bump bodies.

Well, it's a romance. You know how it's going to end. You're reading it as a marital aid. So maybe all you were going to read were the emotional scenes anyway. In that case you might appreciate a novel that skips all the effort to make characters in a romance seem believable as based on human beings. If so, Taming the Damaged Billionaire Rancher is for you, even though, from what we see of them, Annabelle is more damaged than Chris, Chris does more of the "taming," and it's even possible that Annabelle is the one who's inherited a ranch she never thinks about--neither of them does any actual ranching...Whatever, de gustibus, and all that. 

Butterfly of the Week: Junod's Swordtail

This week's butterfly is one of the more recently recognized species that were named after living people. Graphium junodi commemorates Henri-Alexandre Junod. While some sources say it's not known to be even threatened, some have listed it as an endangered species.

Roland Trimen, who first described this species and had the privilege of naming it after the Rev. Dr. Junod because Junod sent him specimens, knew nothing about the early life forms, but if you're familiar with butterfly anatomy his description should enable you to draw a picture of the adult:


There are two stories about where to find this butterfly. Some sources say it's only ever found in Mozambique. Some say it's worth looking for in Angola and Zimbabwe, also. The International Swallowtail Butterfly Network say that individuals seen in those countries were probably only visitors.


Photo by Snidge, taken in Mozambique.

According to a guidebook published by the government of Mozambique, a good place to look for this butterfly would be Chimanimani. The book can be viewed online in Portuguese; the discussion starts on page 48. 


A forest-specific discussion in English is online at 


A tour group in Uganda says that Graphium junodi can be seen in Bwindi (admission: $30 per day for foreign visitors). They don't mention whether the butterflies are reared indoors as a display. The species is not known to live in natural conditions in Uganda.


Although an authoritative book on African butterflies states that reports of this species being found in Angola were errors, the species still appears on checklists of butterflies to look for in Angola. They fly fast, according to Pringle as quoted by Williams, and can be mistaken for species with similar looks, especially G. polistratus. Pringle adds that they are found between July and September, and between January and April. 


All butterflies drink water. Many male Swallowtails are most easily found at puddles, even polluted puddles, drinking water with high concentrations of mineral salts. Nearly all photographs of Graphium junodi found online show males at puddles.


Sometimes they join mixed flocks. Photo by Martinmandak.


Another photo by Martinmandak. Hmm...this one's palpating a leaf in the shade of the forest, and the colors show lower contrast than those of the puddle sippers. Does that mean it's female? Nobody can be sure. The ones that lay eggs are female.

The caterpillars are said to resemble other Graphium larvae, with humped backs and four pairs of harmless but unpalatable bristles. 

The pupae are said to have that irregular pyramid shape, with a hump along where the butterfly's back will be, perhaps even more conspicuously than other Graphium chrysalides. 

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Book Review: How Can I Let Go If I Don't Know I'm Holding On

Title: How Can I Let Go if I Don’t Know I’m Holding On

Author: Linda Douty

Date: 2005

Publisher: Morehouse

ISBN: 0-8192-2132-5

Length: 180 pages

Quote: “It is my hope...that this book will encourage you to...practice the art of letting go.”

This is another New Agey “spiritual” book people hand to other people, the kind whose central presupposition is that feelings can be put before facts, that people can feel happier if they just “let go” of anything and everything that they want and don’t have. Meh. There may be people out there for whom this line of thinking leads to lower blood pressure. For me it leads to higher blood pressure. So this is not a book I can recommend highly.

If this book is for you, you’re a person of exceptional strength of character who can resist the temptation to callous selfishness that’s typical of those who preach this kind of “wisdom.” You know that you must keep these “insights” absolutely to yourself. Even if God is leading someone else into a Job-like experience, which is something God might reveal to that person in per prayers but not to you, the meaning of that idea for you is that you need to behave like Job’s friends after, not before, God rebuked them. Shut your mouth, tremble, pray, and offer sacrifices.

Suppose someone you know personally owned a house and worked in an office that have been buried in lava by an erupting volcano. You might think, “I should show them something in Douty’s book!” Recognize this as the voice of the Enemy. Rebuke it. There’s a reason why Jesus never preached about “the art of letting go,” but rather demonstrated the arts of giving and sharing. What is God calling you to let go and sacrifice? Time? Money? Privacy? Listen silently for the Spirit’s guidance, then let go whatever you’ve been blessed with the opportunity to give to your afflicted friend.

Be sure to include that urge you may feel to edit and correct your friend’s emotional feelings. People who have lost their homes and offices are not usually happy. It would be abnormal and a possible warning sign of real mental illness if your friend’s moods didn’t range through grief, anger, and anxiety. Are you feeling an urge to slap a Band-Aid over your friend’s feelings and insist that person seem happy? Kneel at once in prayer. Say, “Dear God, please heal my delusional thinking that I have any business even trying to guess what X is feeling. Please forgive me that I actually had a fantasy about telling X how X is supposed to feel. This difficulty I’m having accepting the way X says X does feel shows that something is badly wrong with me. Please help me to detach my emotions and avoid turning X’s real problems into a demand that X fix my craziness. Please remind me that this is not about me. Please shut my mouth, load down my back, and keep my feet moving until I can get over this mental problem I’m having.”

If temptation returns, try giving your friend all the groceries and money in your house. You may find that a few days without food help you to stop trying to play guru and focus on facts.

The fact is that, even though our desires do lead to suffering, in Christianity that’s good. The suffering is not there to help us eliminate desire and die, as in Buddhism, but to help us reduce the amount of suffering around us. Only in specific, limited senses do Christians think about “the art of letting go,” or “the art of losing.” Ours is basically an activist religion. We fast, rest from our work, abstain from this or that form of pleasure, for limited times and specific purposes—to make time for prayer, save money for a worthy charitable cause, etc.—not to achieve the ultimate obliteration of consciousness as fast as possible. Rather than withdraw from reality and ignore material needs, we engage with reality and help others meet their material needs.

With this in mind, if you are having particular difficulty with some particular need to let some specific thing go...I’d be less inclined to recommend this book than to recommend examining what you are clinging to. You do know you’re holding on, if you need to let something go, and if you think about it you know why. Is mourning for one departed family member interfering with your doing what you need to do for another? (If that’s the problem, what do you feel guilty of having done or not done for the departed family member?) Is a sense of identity with one language, computer program, filing system, etc., interfering with your learning to use a different one? (If that’s the problem, how can you update your sense of identity?) Is your belief that something’s not been resolved inconvenient to someone else? (If that’s the problem, then you might do well to let go the belief that you need that person’s approval.)

I’ve seen so many more situations where Douty’s ideas about “letting go,” as if this were a thing in its own right, were or would have been harmful than situations where they would have been helpful.The primary use of these ideas would be in clinical psychology, for counselling people who can’t bear to rent out the room full of toys that belonged to the children of whom they lost custody ten years ago even though they do know, on one level, that if a 19-year-old does move back into a room full of Fisher-Price houses the first thing that 19-year-old is likely to do is to move the toys out. If you are that person with the rooms still decorated in Fisher-Price and Strawberry Shortcake, by all means read this book.

If someone else handed you this book, please be sure you use it liberally against that person’s manipulative demands. The grandparents who still know their way around their own house don’t need to “let go” of their independence and move into a nursing home; their children need to “let go” of some of their wealth and status symbols, and honor their parents by not putting them into hospices before their time. People who are in mourning doesn’t need to “let go” of their grief; their friends need to “let go” of their craving for superficial happiness and accept their share of the duty of mourning the dead. People who have been unfairly treated don’t need to “let go” of their demands for justice; their neighbors need to “let go” of their complacency, stir themselves up and work for justice along with those who have been done wrong.

Most Americans really need to “let go” of an unhealthy combination of social-emotional stress and physical laziness, a fantasy that “we” (meaning an ever-expanding socialist bureaucracy) can take care of everyone else’s needs while we, individually, watch television. Most of us would like to think that we’re “caring for our friends’ feelings,” and some of us can work up real emotional fits as we vibrato, “I’m sooo sorry that you’re so unhappy! You need to ‘let go’...” Wrong. I re-programmed myself some years ago to recognize “You need to,” in any context in which I might say it, as a cue to say immediately, “I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. What do I need to do right now?”

I do not in fact have to resolve every difficulty everyone I know has. Sometimes I need to feel my discomfort with the fact that I’m not able to do what ought to be done. But in all cases I need to focus on the facts of any situation, and only the facts, and never compound the facts with any idiocy about how I think the person ought to feel, unless and until someone says to me “Everything in my life is going perfectly; my emotional feelings are my only problem.”

Friday, July 18, 2025

Bad Poetry: Survive for Spite

Sometimes surviving is the best revenge,
especially when murder's been attempted.
I'll live to dance on your grave you have vowed
when homicide in self-defense has tempted.
Even when he's been led off in prison orange
while everyone hands you the martyr's crown
and you try to look modest, feeling proud,
with hands flat at your sides, with eyes turned down,
justice has not been done. Nor will it be.
Others had died before the fool met you.
If only they could join the dance, to see
young convicts line up, beat him black and blue,
justice might seem to sprout up like the tree
whose trunk he cut, and sprayed with poison, too.

This topic is too close to real life to provide much fun, actually, but I do thank the Poets & Storytellers United for proposing it. For the gruesome details, see the past six months of this blog. For the denouement, wait another year. 

Celiacs of the world, hang tough, and pray that Secretary Kennedy will be guided to hand us Bayer and Chemchina, on a silver platter, as neatly as he handed old Granola Greens the bans on food additives they've wanted since 1972.
 

Web Log for 7.17.25

Political, but light...

Ethics 


Rand at her clearest. But, perhaps, pessimistic. These conditions have sometimes been reversed.

Radio

Well, I laughed...


It's not that nobody in Gate City would ever want to listen to NPR out of Blacksburg or Floyd or wherever they broadcast from. It's that we have to be at least a hundred miles up the road before that signal comes in. Rural communities not only can't rely on NPR; many, perhaps most, of them can't listen to NPR. I grew up listening to the small local stations, WGAT, WKIN, WKPT, WJCW and later WDUF. Two of those still exist. Radio-locator.com says 34 radio stations can be heard in Gate City but I've never heard most of them. Maybe somebody in town has picked them up one night, probably not on two nights.

(Should "conservatives" listen to NPR? Why not? How many other radio stations do live interviews with authors? Where else would I ever have heard Amy Tan read excerpts from The Joy Luck Club? It's nice to have a car radio dial tuned to NPR...when the car gets into range.)

Television 


Maybe she needs glasses and hearing aids?

(Lens says the cartoon was drawn by Tom Stiglich. I ganked it from Joe Jackson's NSFW, sometimes R-rated site.)

 

Blogjob Book Review: Atlas Shrugged

(Reclaimed from Blogjob. After posting some other things that alluded to this book review, I noticed that I'd not reposted the actual review here...so here it is.)

Title: Atlas Shrugged
        
Author: Ayn Rand
        
Date: 1957
        
Publisher: Signet
        
ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon
        
Length: 1074 pages
        
Quote: “We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it—for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward.”
        
(Note: There's a shorter opinion piece about Atlas Shrugged at http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2013/02/can-students-be-required-to-read-atlas.html ..)

Ayn Rand grew up in the middle of the Russian revolution. As an impressionable teenager, she saw firsthand how dictatorship, even in the name of Communist ideals, inevitably bred corruption, degradation, and inefficiency. In Atlas Shrugged, she imagined how the process might work if the United States adopted Communist ideals. The result is an evolution rather than a revolution (in contemporary terms), but it’s still bloody.
        
Atlas Shrugged is classic science fiction, where potential new developments in physics and chemistry form a large part of the plot. Rand’s focus was on the big industries of greatest economic interest in the early twentieth century—metal, mining, railroads, building, and the new fad for automobiles. Although the band of heroes who save the planet include an old college professor, a musician, a writer, and an actress, none of them get very many lines; the plot centers on a rich mine owner’s son, a metalworks owner who’s invented a new alloy said to be better than steel, a brother and sister who inherit a railroad, a genius physicist who's better known as a pirate, and a man who abandoned an automobile factory whose owners had decided to experiment with socialism. 
        
English was not Rand’s native language. As when reading Joseph Conrad, one doesn’t really expect clever turns of phrase (although Rand surprises readers with a few), or the nuances created by selecting the perfect word; one expects clichés, repetition, the laborious struggle for the right phrase that native speakers of English write their way through but try to prune back before publishing, and one is pleasantly surprised that the book is readable.
        
There are, of course, some near misses. I suspect that, when naming the woman she apparently perceived as a heroine, Rand was under the impression that “Taggart” is a Scandinavian name. It’s Irish, and the combination of “Dagny Taggart” grates on the ear. Of the three men with whom Dagny Taggart sleeps in the course of the plot, Hank Rearden gets by far the most attention, and the most sex scenes...and let’s just say that, as an Irish-American, I find it hard to imagine an Irish couple whose conversations would be so self-conscious, humor-impaired, and grim. Rand was married to an Irish-American and was probably trying too hard not to write about him.
        
Having mentioned Dagny Taggart, let me issue a fair warning. She is, if possible, harder to like than Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, and that’s saying a lot. Biology may prevent Dagny Taggart from committing outright rape, but she does what a woman can do in that direction. She ignores the lifelong friend who’s always loved her, breaks the mining heir’s heart, and wrecks the metal tycoon’s home merely because she “wants” him. While the metal tycoon is sacrificing the business he loves for the woman he loves, Dagny is preparing to dump him for the man she eventually decides she loves. When they finally flop down on the sandbags in an abandoned railway tunnel and get it on, Dagny expresses her lust for this man (well, in those days women weren’t supposed to speak first) by biting his arm, eliciting an even more “viciously painful” kiss, but what has really warmed her up for this moment is flouncing out of an evening party where a lot of rich men have been hanging on her word, in order to stand up, in her satin gown and velvet cape, and order a lot of laborers to toil all night doing their jobs in the old-fashioned way, which most of them would be too young even to know how to do, before she stalked out and waited for this man to follow. It’s not surprising that, although she plays the role of counsellor and grants a sort of absolution to her sister-in-law (“Taggart” means “priest”), Dagny has no female friends. What’s hard to believe is that, at the end of the book, she has any male ones.
        
Dagny is credible, and almost human, at the office, where she functions as an old-fashioned railroad man, while her patronizing elder brother degenerates in every scene. She does seem to enjoy running a railroad line—and, unlike the career women in romance novels, to know something about her business, although her knowledge depends on the fictional properties of “Rearden Metal.” Rand convinces us that Dagny loves railroading the way writers love writing.
        
Other science-fiction devices used in the story are weird new explosives that will remind present-time readers of neutron bombs (only without fallout or radiation), sonic weapons, unexplained breakthroughs in radio technology, and of course the “rays” that shield John Galt’s secret valley, “Atlantis,” from observation by the cruel outside world. Nevertheless, Rand was no scientist, and mainstream readers didn’t dismiss Atlas Shrugged as “merely” science fiction because the plot is mainly about the people; the technology could be changed to set the story either forward or back in history.
        
The story, in my opinion, self-sabotages in two main ways. The most obvious way is that, although it was written as a trilogy, it doesn’t work as a trilogy. The first third of Atlas Shrugged is stage-setting, and is likely to put readers to sleep if they don’t skip, skim, and miss things they’ll need to go back and look up later. You don’t want to know how many nights I read one or two pages of this tome to put myself to sleep.
        
A corollary factor here is that Atlas Shrugged is a story about middle-aged adults. Only two people who seem to be under thirty get speaking parts; both of them are perceived by the other characters as children. During the first third of the book, however, what we see are rich older people talking business and not trying very hard to understand their families. This does nothing to prepare young readers for the kind of adventures they typically look for in fiction, nor does it promise middle-aged readers the kind of adventures so many of us have claimed to want to see our age group having in fiction, although the characters eventually get those adventures. One can hardly blame any reader for putting down the book, saying, “Great Trollope’s ghost! If Silas Lapham had been as long as this...” Atlas Shrugged does not read like The Rise of Silas Lapham, at least not all the way, but one can understand how readers might expect that it will.
        
The other self-destructive tendency this novel has is Rand’s attempt to justify Dagny Taggart at her most repulsive. 1950's nice girls couldn’t, but contemporary nice girls probably can, forgive Dagny for using another man just to relieve her frustration before she decides she’s “in love” with John Galt. (Dagny has only heard of John Galt as a sort of cliché the laborers mention, not a living man, when she whimsically names a section of railroad after him.) Why not Eddie, who’s always been in love with her and never married anyone else? Why Hank, who is married? Because Hank is a conquest; Dagny made an emotional conquest of Eddie before either of them reached puberty, so by now she tends to forget that he’s a man. Hank’s brilliant mind and dedication to his business makes him a prize for Dagny.
        
Rand apparently wanted to believe that Hank has a right to cheat on his wife, Lillian. Lillian deteriorates, as the plot moves along, from a half-educated, shallow, virginal debutante into an embittered hag. Yes, but Hank had a lot to do with that. Of course the 1970's hadn’t happened yet; every daily newspaper in America hadn’t yet barraged every home with the “news” that very few women, probably including Dagny, would enjoy the kind of sex we see Hank and Dagny having. Still, Lillian makes it obvious, in her first scene, that she’s not satisfied. This was what contemporary audiences understood the waspish “gaiety” of her verbal abuse to mean. Therefore, if Hank were really as brilliant as she’s supposed to be, he should have figured out that she wants something from him, and set aside some small portion of his mental energy for figuring out what that might be. She’s not his equal because she’s not been brought up to be his equal; she’s been brought up to be his student, an empty page for him to write on. That was what her parents thought he would want. If he really were a man Dagny or any woman could admire, he would have accepted responsibility for finishing Lillian’s education, instead of blaming her for being ignorant about business, politics, and sex, and “falling in love” with Dagny. Which, as I think about it, I’m not sure I believe either; in real life, weren’t men like Hank usually scared of women like Dagny?
        
Before it’s over Hank will of course accuse Lillian of wanting to kill him. By that time she will, but, as a Nice Girl, the closest she comes to it is to have sex with another man, thereby, in a roundabout and contrived way, killing that man’s sweet young wife. (We first witness the wronged wife’s death as an accident, then hear that it’s been reported as a suicide.) Even before the Age of Therapy, was it not obvious that what this couple had was basically a communication problem?
        
Dagny, as unrepentant homewrecker, actually uses a radio talk show to proclaim that her adulterous fling with Hank “was the ultimate form of admiration for each other...I wanted him, I had him, I was happy,” thereby notifying Hank that his sacrifice for her honor has been worthless to her and the affair is now over. She's ruined his and Lillian's lives; now she's done with him. John Galt, who tells her this behavior was “noble,”  is not to be excused as merely another of the men who’ve been hopelessly “in love” with her for years. He is one of them, the lucky one if getting Dagny can be called luck, but he is speaking for Rand. This was the way Ayn Rand behaved in real life. In real life Rand didn’t dismiss younger men as “kids,” either. Though married, she “honored” her male students with sexual favors and the idea that their wives weren’t good enough for them anyway, then dropped them, sometimes after the divorce, as younger and cuter students came along. Nathaniel Branden, the last younger man to be so “honored,”  wrote at some length about how and why this notion of adultery as compatible with personal honor was a mistake.
        
Then there’s another minor flaw: the world of Atlas Shrugged is demographically unbalanced. (I’ve hesitated to include this paragraph in this review, because I’m not sure how significant it’s meant to be.) Africa and Asia (including Russia) don’t exist. The world consists of North America, South America, and western Europe. All the important people except Dagny are middle-aged Caucasian men. Even Europe has been mostly written off as a continent of passive people, whether their dictators call themselves Catholic, Fascist, or Communist. No character in the book is Asian, Native American, or even noticeably Jewish. No character is positively identified as African-American...but one of the baddies, Cuffy Meigs, has an African nickname, “bleary brown eyes,” and black curly hair. Meigs is the one whose irredeemable awfulness keeps the totalitarians from being able to destroy John Galt’s valley. Other characters, if described, have blond or red hair, blue or green eyes; D’Anconia talks like Tyrone Power’s version of a Spanish-American aristocrat, but he's not described. Rand didn’t completely buy into the racist thinking of the early twentieth century, and wasn’t as impressed by Hitler and Mussolini as many Americans were in the 1930s—she was, after all, Jewish—but if readers wanted to believe that melanin in the human complexion indicated a lower level of evolution, Rand wasn’t going to argue with them. She was a blonde. And she wasn’t trying to impress ethnic-minority readers.
        
Nevertheless, despite these flaws, Atlas Shrugged has some excellent features too. One thing I like is that, although John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjeld have been preparing for a real war against Jim Taggart, his friends, and their liberal-on-Communism philosophy, and although Hank and Dagny have been suffering psychological torture as they try to choose sides in the inevitable war, Rand finds a way to end the story without the war actually breaking out. John and Dagny won’t have to face off against each other, as they’ve feared, after declaring themselves “in love.” Lots of people have starved, killed each other in riots, or been killed as the industrial infrastructure of America has broken down, but all-out civil war hasn’t started. This plot development deserves celebration.
        
The best part in the book is the short story a laborer tells Dagny by way of explaining the cliché “Who is John Galt?” Perhaps this story should have been chapter one; as it is, it comes just after the halfway point. John Galt was, in youth, the brightest and bravest laborer in the automobile company that went socialist. The story is about what he walked away from: the way even small-scale, benign, and semi-voluntary dictatorship inevitably corrupts people and their work. (The same group dynamics can be observed in the families of “helicopter parents,” which Rand luckily hadn’t had and chose not to describe—there are no real children in this novel.) The story is compact and readable, and true. Rand had firsthand knowledge; by now many of us share that knowledge. 
        
The main plot of the book, which develops only in the second 500 pages, is that John Galt has a viable plan for ending the gradual totalitarian takeover of America by giving all the talented people a way to secede from America until America learns to want them back. In order to depict the philosophical conflict fully, Rand had to write it as an unlikely piece of science fiction, where the would-be dictators have gained enough power that the talented people have to rely on those “ray shields” to defend their secluded valley. If read as a metaphor for what needs to happen in real life, the thinking through the absurdity of altruism as a value, the recognition that the Highest Good for all does not require conflict between people, and thus the debunking and reintegration of collectivist morality, this primary plot can even be regarded as true.
        
This central idea could have been a great deal better written, and in fact it was. It was written in nonfiction form—the closest to it in book form, perhaps, being The Conscience of a Conservative. It had already been written in less direct forms—in the more idealistic versions of American history, in the actual histories of schools like Berea College, in the doctrines of several religious denominations, in the histories of various communes and communities, in a crude form even in the histories of the businesses that began when a clerk or department manager said “I’m not going to wait for the boss to retire; I’ll start my own store and run it my own way.” It had been written in children’s stories; there are recognizable undercurrents of the idea in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, in most of Elizabeth Enright’s books, in Carol Kendall’s books and several other favorites of the early and middle twentieth century. Rand, an atheist, wouldn’t have appreciated the link being traced, but the idea of separating from others in order to help the survivors of the others’ self-destructive choices is actually biblical
        
As I read Atlas Shrugged and contemplate the paradox of Rand’s life, I can’t help wondering whether Rand just needed to have spent more years thinking, and reading English, before she began writing, or whether her work really was spoiled by her compulsive, reactionary atheism. There was room for love and joy in her philosophy. Why does it come through so badly? Partly because she chose to write about people whose joy in creativity took a different form from writing, which most writers and readers of books can understand, or music or painting, which are close enough that most writers and readers of books can at least imagine joy in those...but not only that. Rand spent so much energy railing against dysfunctional forms of “altruistic love” that she didn’t give herself much time to write about the glory of real love, although the reader who slogs through to the end of Atlas Shrugged will agree that the characters meant to be sympathetic do reach something like that kind of love in the end. The joy of friendship, partnership, synergistic work, seeing and feeling that what is good for one person really is what is good for the other person, pulsates through most of Atlas Shrugged, but it tends to be covered up by rants—especially rants against less perfect forms of love—and smut. When John and Dagny can enjoy a few minutes of intimacy at last, the attentive (and mature) reader understands that they symbolize a return to social connection after a period of separation, but on the literal level they seem to represent just another fling for a rich girl gone wrong.
        
Rand herself was described by biographers, sympathetic and otherwise, as having much in common with Dagny Taggart. She did stay married, even if it was an “open” (and childless) marriage. She did send money to her relatives who hadn’t been able to emigrate from Russia. She was hospitable, in her way, and had a large circle of loyal friends who have kept her books in print after her death in 1982. It was possible for some people to enjoy her company. Unlike Dagny, she even had a few friendships that weren’t based on sex, a few even with women. In her life as in her novels, she seemed to spend so much time railing against the kind of love she despised, the smother-mothering and guilt-tripping kind, that she found it difficult to say anything about the kind she probably did enjoy. Sad.
        
So, in conclusion...Atlas Shrugged is a severely flawed book by a severely flawed human being, but if you have a lot of time to kill and are old enough to stand those first 400 pages of society-gossip-type writing about off-putting people whose creative talents probably don’t resonate with you, you will eventually understand why some people love this book. I don’t love it. I don’t expect I’ll ever reread it. Rand spent eleven years writing it, and should probably have spent eleven more years revising it into something even libertarian feminist book lovers could be expected to enjoy. Nevertheless, by the time the plot gets moving, the last third of this novel is a satisfying read. Almost good enough to make up for the time you have to spend in the first two thirds to understand what’s happening in the last third.



Cherished Illusions

This is another poem that's fiction, inspired by a bunch of words someone threw out into cyberspace together. I don't know whether any of the talking heads at the various world peace conferences in different European cities used a binder in a color called "New Start yellow."

Anyway, the general idea is based in facts.


The ancient world knew the illusion
that life was peaceful. Water plied
prettily through clepsydra, inspiring
a melody of peace. Intrusion
of enemy troops--slash! smash! now firing
the walls round courtyards!--proved it lie.
Today the group confers a medal
for thought-work toward world peace. The speaker,
though Europe's bleak and Palestine bleaker
in prospect, stands and talks. And talks.
His paper proves him faithful fellow.
Even his binder's "New Start yellow."
A clerk records with mindful pedal:
politically correct, yet false. 

Thursday, July 17, 2025

Web Log for 7.16.25

In which your Auntie Pris takes up arms against the evil Microsoft "Update" Gremlins and ventures forth to reclaim some small fraction of her e-mail and blogroll, to find links and cute things for you...Well, the first thing that needs you attention, that I found, is not cute. It's an evil bill before Congress. Anyway, they're all in alphabetical order by topic, below... 

Communication, with Elected Officials, 101

1. They get masses of messages. The system is set up for that, and they do need to hear from their constituents, but short and simple are good. Postcards are better than letters. (The US Congress have received enough letters with nasty things in the envelopes that they now subject all letters to an automated process designed to destroy nasty things before anyone sees the actual letters, which means a letter may not arrive before the vote on the issue it addressed.) If you've kept a Twitter account you can send them a tweet instead of an e-mail. If your official seems to need a lot of facts and documents, put them below the basic yes/no message and resign yourself to the possibility that they may not be seen--unfortunately, the way the system works, "Do the majority of my constituents say yes or no?" often is more important to an official than "Why do people say yes or no to this?" It never hurts to let an elected official know that there are facts on your side, but it probably does more good to educate other citizens about the facts than to try to give a Congressman a crash course before tomorrow's vote.

2. Messages will probably be read, possibly by some dear little student intern. All messages to elected officials should be fit for delicately nurtured teenaged girls to read. Disagree and clobber them with facts, when necessary, but don't use bad language. 

3. Because of (2), there's no need to make messages fancy; try to make it easy for the student to file messages as pro-this or anti-that. Realistically, all the elected official is likely to have time to do is compare the numbers of messages from each side.

4. And many Washington offices still use phones, because they make it easy for Congressmen to tell who is or is not in their district, so if you still have access to one it's nice to give them the phone number. 

5. A lot of the messages elected officials get are "howlers," usually typed after it's too late for them to do any good even if the senders had mindfully intended to do good. Sometimes officials set up coping mechanisms like asking the student "What's the worst thing anyone's called me today?" By and large they ignore the howlers. Dare to be different. Even if the subject of your e-mail is "Vote NO on" something the official is likely to like, it never hurts to do a little preliminary research. (You're reading this on a computer, so you're part of the global elite who can do the research and write better letters than Schmoe Sixpack.) Has your official voted on similar bills before? What have the effects of per votes been? Is it possible to thank or congratulate person? It never hurts to sound more like an informed, sympathetic observer than like a slob who sends howlers to elected officials as a sort of emotional surrogate for upgrading to a better job.

6. Technically, even though residents of the other forty-nine States and St Croix Island may want to thank Marjorie Taylor Greene for her tweet (linked below), she's not supposed to read messages from outside her district while in Washington. But there's no rule against linking or copying her tweet into whatever you send to your US Rep.

Communication, with Family 

Are people my age really so bored by the young, so fast? 

I think what we have here is a politically motivated effort on the part of the commercial media to drive a wedge between demographic generations. Never mind that, although five years of war followed by the early Waste Age's economic boom did produce an identifiable baby-boom generation, there's been little consistency about subsequent generations; different families had different numbers of them. The adults in the US are clearly inclined to favor fiscal conservatism. The very young still think socialism might be able to work, at least long enough to get them entrapped in whatever dystopia the transhumanists might be able to achieve. So people with bad intentions want to turn the very young against their elders, to tell students that older people don't understaaand anything and don't caaaare any more and can be ignored...

What the older people in the TikTok video are saying is "We've finally been able to park and get off that hormone cycle! We gloat! We don't want to hear about your little emotional feelings any more!"

Well...Parking the hormone cycle and getting off is a wonderful feeling. Women who suddenly find ourselves free from four days of messiness and three days of anemia out of every month, especially, can hardly be blamed for rubbing it in, a little. More astute women at least complain feebly from time to time about their greying hair, so young people can live with their envy.

I'm not very sympathetic to young people with Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I do at least listen when they're honestly frustrated by the sluggish employment market or disappointed in love.


Economy, The

Fellow Americans, your US Reps need to know what's wrong with what somebody's tagged as the Genius Act. It's an evil Genius. Tennessee's Marjorie Taylor Greene sums it all up on one computer screen:


Fantasy, Sick, the Transhumanist 

In the 1980s we thought the Cold War was over, and we'd won, yaaaay. Wendell Berry and fans hoped that we could move on to a more useful Green-vs-Greedhead debate about how to use resources. Some people, however, dream of going beyond the old Marxist dream of Party bosses functioning as kings and everyone else as "proletarians" (like peasants, only without land). They want to function as God and let everyone else be their "creations."

I don't think it can work; I think there is a real God, Who takes a dim view of human hubris, and will make sure the transhumanist fantasy doesn't work. I think the question is whether we can recognize items from the transhumanist agenda and prevent them happening in a pleasant parliamentary way, or whether we'll fall for the bad ideas and suffer the destruction they'll bring.

Here's a documentary movie for those who absorb information from movies:


It explains why the value of, e.g., my old clunker of a fixer-upper truck has actually sextupled in the last three years. You want all machines you use to be "dumb." If it's "smartened" with a chip somewhere, leave it in the store and look for an old secondhand model that was chip-free. 

You may, as I am, be impressed by the efficiency with which new technology allows diabetics to monitor and treat their condition. Your main concern, like mine, be "What happens when the gadgets break down?" You should also be aware, though, of the probability that, when a critical number of active senior citizens are wired up with digital sugar/insulin monitors, someone might decide to free up funds for this expensive treatment from the budget by delivering fatal sugar or insulin shock.

Book Review: Hive

Title: Hive

Author: Jeremiah Ukponrefe

Date: 2020

ISBN: 9781777332914

Quote: "Another day on the job."

In this space opera of a future of barely feudal civilization, two agents of "the Collective" spend another day on the job at a village market, killing unarmed citizens. Opposition to "the Collective," they find, is better organized, with weapons, by at least three groups: the Libertarians, the Amish, and the Hive. The Libertarians and Amish bear no resemblance to any group of people called by those names today, but what the two agents infiltrate is the Hive, in which people seem to be joined in a hivemind dominated by one man. The two agents smash their way through, killing more people as they go, until they can kill that man and look forward to rewards from "the Collective."

If you like books where the idea of a fantasy world is created mainly by words being used to mean things they don't mean in the real world, and the point-of-view characters kill most of the people they meet. you might like this book.