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Thursday, June 26th 2014
Michael Sheldon
Our City Council wants businesses to pay a fee for each employee--also known as a "head tax."
Posted Thu Jun 26 2014 14:14
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Most of the terrorist activity in Seattle is planned by our City Council and implemented by the Department of Transportation (SDOT) and Department of Revenue (DOR). They employ a two-pronged strategy. The first part involves pummeling any business owner foolish enough to try to make a profit. And, in part two, they punish consumers who attempt to patronize these businesses.
All of these strategies are now in place and can be readily observed. Seattle's new $15 per hour minimum wage has made national headlines as it's the highest in the land. Also known as the Guaranteed Youth Unemployment Mandate, this measure effectively channels young people into institutions of "higher" learning where their overpriced tuition payments contribute positively to the nation's debt load, at the same time supporting salaries for boatloads of college administrators (party cadres) as well as for a few professors.
Last weekend you could observe a parade of these Fifteen-$-Per-Hour (F$PH) folks at your leisure. SDOT blocked off major traffic arteries heading north out of downtown. The ostensible reason for this coordinated operation was to allow safe access to the Fremont Solstice Day Parade, known chiefly as a pagan celebration of naked bicycling.
However, the road closures created massive traffic back-ups extending miles from the actual parade. Clearly SDOT is war-gaming a population control scenario where major routes into and out of the city are cut and then a provocative event is staged somewhere within the perimeter. Panic ensues and then martial law can be implemented.
The latest gambit is the head tax. The brainchild of Kshama Sawant (the only openly avowed socialist on the City Council) and Nick Licata, the head tax would be combined with further increases to the cost of parking for the public. In one brilliantly calculated stroke, this measure would further increase F$PH unemployment rates, drive business owners closer to bankruptcy, and encourage people to shop elsewhere. Emptying out downtown will make it easier for buses to get around. And everyone knows that free-range buses--even the empty ones--are better for the environment.
We are lucky to live in a city where Big Brother is watching us.
Wednesday, June 25th 2014
David S Bernstein
The Curious Liberal Apologies for Marion Zimmer Bradley
Posted Wed Jun 25 2014 14:03
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Jason Cordova writes a guest post on Sarah Hoyt's blog that boils with justifiable outrage over liberal Fantasy authors and fans flocking to support their late High Priestess, Marion Zimmer Bradley, over revelations that she and her boyfriend were serial child abusers. If you're not familiar with the story (and have a strong stomach) I urge you to check out these links and others.
As a boy, I enjoyed some of Zimmer Bradley's works like Mists of Avalon, while others seemed to exist solely to score leftist political points -- while these were often lost on my adolescent self, the sexual politics certainly detracted from the storyline. Knowing what I know now, I'll never be able to pick up one of her works again without feeling dirty.
The publisher in me wonders what her editors and publishers knew at the time. Were they in the dark? Did they have an inkling, but decide to turn a blind eye in order to protect a valuable author? I don't ask in order to judge, but because these questions are much tougher for a publisher than they are for a reader.
As a reader I can choose to tune out any author based on their politics or their character. But as a publisher, sometimes you wonder whether you have a responsibility to the work and to readers to give a work of substance and quality an audience -- even if the author is otherwise odious.
My inclination is to apply a test of character as well as one of quality to authors I want to publish, but is that fair? Seldom is the case as clear cut as Zimmer Bradley's. As a young editor I pursued Stephen Glassas an author before it became known that he was a phony, despite warnings from a couple of smart folks that his stories didn't ring true. If I had succeeded in landing him, would I be complicit in his fabrications?
Here at Liberty Island we do our best to make sure the authors we publish are folks you would be happy to have as next door neighbors, but it seems inevitable that (being human) we'll fail that test at some point. And when that happens people will have the right to question and judge us based on the decisions we made. It's only fair.
Tuesday, June 24th 2014
Tom Weiss
Posted Tue Jun 24 2014 17:15
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Oscar Levant has been quoted as saying "There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line."
As an artist, Levant could get away with erasing that line, as can any number of actors or comedians or writers who, in one moment of brilliance, can produce a work that is timeless. Mel Gibson may be a violent, racist drunk but Braveheart is a masterpiece. Clint Eastwood may be a serial philanderer but his body of work is unparalleled.
As an Army officer, Jim Gant didn't inhabit that world.
The soldiers of the Special Operations Forces (SOF) inhabit a world that is different, to be sure. Their selection process is arduous, they train separately from conventional forces, and perhaps most surprisingly they prosecute an entirely different kind of war, apart from the conventional forces often headquartered on the same base.
They live and work in a grey area. They're in the Army but they're 'Special.' They operate in the same battlespace but they often don't tell conventional forces what they're doing or thinking. They're supposed to live by the same rules but they don't - and often flagrantly flout them.
This is the world inhabited by Jim Gant. Please read every word of this article, it's one of the best pieces of journalism I've read in a while.
Full disclosure - I served with Jim Gant in Baghdad in the summer of 2007. He'd just been promoted to Major and had just won the Silver Star, and one of my only memories of him is that he yelled at me. The background of that fight isn't important except to say that, even though we were the same rank, I gave him a lot a respect and leeway because I had the feeling he was special.
At that time, years before the events described in this article, Jim Gant had gone native. If you want to prevail in a counterinsurgency campaign, 'going native' to one degree or another is essential. Counterinsurgency is less about the military and more about the personal. But 'going native' involves some risk because the US Army is, first and foremost, an organization with rules.
Some of those rules are silly. For example, we were directed not to bring pornography into Iraq or Afghanistan, ostensibly because we did not want to insult the Mulsim religion. We needn't have worried. Iraqi soldiers showed me more pornography on their phones and computers than I think I've seen in the rest of my life combined. I heard one senior Iraqi officer tell a story about purchasing a "sexy" DVD from a street vendor in the weeks after Saddam's regime fell, only to be disappointed that the DVD didn't contain porn.
Rules prohibiting alcohol were perhaps less silly, in that there is a very good case to be made against it. But a blanket prohibition is arguably counterproductive. A former Iraqi General lived right outside of my Joint Security Station in Baghdad and invited me over for a glass of Scotch one night - I had to politely decline but to this day I wonder what I could have learned if I took him up on his offer. A group of Kurdish Policemen invited me to spend Nowruz with them and during the celebration they broke out bottles of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam and proceeded to drink them in front of me - making fun of me as they did.
The prohibitions on sex are just insane - who thinks that young women and men sent into combat, away from their families for 9 months or a year at at a time, are going to have carnal impulses they won't be able to satisfy on their own?
Getting back to Jim Gant, it is generally accepted in the SOF community that none of the rules I discuss above about pornography, alcohol, or sex, exist within their compounds while they are deployed. Already operating in that "grey area" outside of the normal Army command and control structure, it wouldn't make sense to rigidly adhere to rules that make little sense in the first place.
SOF were also allowed to have what are called "modified grooming standards." Which means they can grow beards and wear native clothing and try to blend in as much as possible with the local populace. Regular Army couldn't do this, (because, rules) but SOF could and Jim Gant did to great effect.
And because of their rigorous selection processes, and because of Gant's successes in Iraq, he was given an usual amount of leeway - even for a Green Beret - in the violent Kunar Province in Afghanistan. Until I read this article I didn't know Jim and I were in Afghanistan at the same time, but it didn't surprise me. Jim always struck me as a guy more at home in combat than he was actually at home.
If there's any point to this blog post it's this - Gant was on the right track. He has an understanding of counterinsurgency and how to ingratiate yourself with the indigenous population. An Army officer's loyalties, first and foremost, have to lie with his country and his mission. One of the risks of 'going native' like Jim Gant did is to blur that line, to identify more with the local tribesman than you do with your comrades in arms. But our fortunes in Afghanistan depend upon the support of tribes like the ones Jim befriended. As the Sunni Awakening in Anbar province in Iraq had shown us, support of the local tribes can be as effective as hundreds of thousands of troops.
In the end Jim was undone by a by-the-book West Point officer with less time in the Army than Jim had in combat. Given his training the young officer was forced to report what he saw, and if I had to guess I'd say Jim always knew his days were numbered.
So who was right? I don't think there can be any doubt that they both were. Jim lived on a razor's edge, he couldn't operate any other way. The young Lieutenant was borne of a world where the most pertinent question is "How's the cow?" (an inside West Point joke). The Army itself had set up this structure, given SOF such leeway and tolerated it's rules violations, and had set the stage for a genius like Jim Gant to emerge.
I suspect Jim Gant sleeps well at night knowing he did the right thing. And even though it lost a special officer, I suspect the Army does as well.
Why are all the white people picking on my favorite team?
Posted Tue Jun 24 2014 15:47
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Just once, I'd like to turn on the radio, TV, or Facebook first thing in the AM without being told what thoughts are unacceptable that day.
The latest crusade launched by our intellectual betters concerns my beloved Washington Redskins. It turns out that I have been a racist for the past 47 years because I cheer for a team with an "offensive" and "racist" name.
Never mind that the people telling me this are all white (I have nothing against white folks, heck half my family is white and unlike the president I don't resent them for it). Or that it's highly unlikely any of them actually knows an Indian (at least of the American kind). They know better; it has been decided; and my thought crime must be eliminated.
But that is the bizarre age we live in. It's no longer about whether the majority should listen to, and be sensitive to, the sensibilities of minorities - after all, in a democracy that's just good sense and good manners and thankfully that's become a settled question in most circles.
Rather, we see a small but vocal group of cultural elites adopt the supposed causes of minorities as a cudgel to beat submission out of their political adversaries -- and even more to prove their own moral superiority.
Someone please save us from scolds, wannabe commissars, and spoiled brats.
Monday, June 23rd 2014
David Churchill Barrow
The Boston Tea Party.
Posted Mon Jun 23 2014 20:19
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The East India Company was "too big to fail." It had a monopoly on the importation of tea to Britain and thence to her colonies, but the Dutch didn't lay tarriffs or taxes on their tea, and so smuggling Dutch tea, especially in America, was a popular and profitable pastime. Huge surplusses of the stuff began to pile up in British warehouses. What to do - repeal the taxes? Of course not. By virtue of the Tea Act of 1773, the Company would be allowed to ship tea directly to the Americas (cutting out middlemen) and it would be taxed there upon landing. With a brilliant application of crony capitalism, certain favored parties would be granted profitable licenses as tea consignees.
The colonists, especially in that radical hothouse called Boston, had at least two problems with this. First, there was that "taxation without representation" jazz we all read about in fifth grade or so (or should have). More directly, the tax money collected would pay the salaries of royal governors, judges and certain officials (like revenue men) and the local legislatures would lose control of the purse - These men would be unanswerable to the people they governed.
Several ships laden with tons of tea set sail for American ports. Royal governors in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston knew the public sentiment well enough to allow the protesters to force the tea consignees to resign, and to let the ships sail peacefully back to England. Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts was another matter. He was tired of that loudmouth Sam Adams and that whole bloody lot calling themselves "Sons of Liberty," and it was high time for their comeuppance. Oh, and two of his sons were designated tea consignees - Imagine that... The Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver were going back emptied of their cargo, and that was that. Turns out the Sons of Liberty agreed, they just differed with the Governor on exactly where the tea was going.
There is a story that Sam Adams triggered the raid on the tea with the codewords "This meeting can do nothing further to save the country!" announced before a large crowd at the Old South Meeting House. Whether this is true or whether he simply lost control of the meeting, dozens of the Sons of Liberty dispersed, and then reassembled; many of them wearing old blankets, soot on their faces and feathers in their hair, in a hillarious attempt to look like Mohawks. Nobody was about to mistake these guys for actual Indians - they looked more like a minstrel show caricature. So what was this all about? Obviously they wanted to make it hard to identify individuals, but there was a message they wanted to send - They were AMERICANS now, not merely colonial Englishmen. The Indian was a symbol peculiar to America, and so was the tool they chose for the task at hand; the tomahawk (though some more civilized types could only manage to grab a simple hatchet).
As a raucous crowd cheered them on, they dumped 342 smashed chests of tea into Boston harbor.
The loss of what today would be millions of dollars worth of tea was not about to go unnoticed at Whitehall, and the patriots knew it, but they had seen no other honorable way out:
Last night 3 Cargoes of Bohea Tea were emptied into the sea. This Morning a Man of War Sails. This is the most magnificient Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire... This however is but an Attack upon property. Another similar Exertion of popular Power, may produce the destruction of lives... What Measures will the Ministry take, in Consequence of this? Will they resent it? Will they dare to resent it? Will they punish us? How? By quartering troops upon us? by annulling our Charter?
Diary of John Adams, December 17, 1773.
Well John, the answer is "D. All of the above." Local militias began to squirrel away guns, powder and shot. The countdown to bloodshed among erstwhile bretheren had begun.
Sunday, June 22nd 2014
Stephen McDonald
Posted Sun Jun 22 2014 20:57
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A former reporter is appalled by the insensitive toys she chose to purchase (h/t Isegoria):
After the arrival of the Playmobil fort, I tried to explain to my son that the Native Americans were protecting themselves and reacting to the expansion of American settlers into their land. My kids attend a school where they learn that the Native Americans were forced into California Missions and mistreated. Even in preschool they learn about civil rights and the fight of Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers. So I thought that dealing with this would be no problem.
The self-parody is strong in this one.
But putting out a set with pioneers and Indians killing each other without any context for the 5-year-old that will be playing with it is reckless. I'm sure not every kid who opens that fort is getting a lecture about Native Americans. And yes, we do live in liberal San Francisco. When my son talks about getting a Playmobil wedding set, I'm sure he wouldn't be at all surprised if the set had two men or two women on the altar. Now that is something I'd like to see, Playmobil.
Of course you would.
One wonders why Dick Cheney hasn't used his dark powers to win the lottery, make Jennifer Lopez fall in love with him, or keep the Kardashians off of television.
Posted Sun Jun 22 2014 15:03
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I try to balance my reading - I'll read Powerlineblog.com or Instapundit and then I'll read the Puffington Host or Salon.com. I'll see myself in disagreement at times with the former, but the latter can put me in a blogging mood.
And so it is with Andrew O'Hehir's latest at Salon, "Dick Cheney, Iraq and the ghosts of Vietnam."
To start with, you have to marvel at a man who can cause such apoplectic convulsions of hatred close to six years after leaving office. Many hard-left liberals are still disappointed that Scooter Libby, not Cheney, was sent to jail by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Some even continue to argue thatLibby lied to protect Cheney, even though Fitzgerald and Secretary of State Colin Powellknew at the outsetthat it was Richard Armitage who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Bob Novak (although it was David Corn who later made it public that Plame was a covert agent).
All of this forms the backdrop to O'Hehir's piece, which responds to the former Vice President'srecent WSJ op-edwhile not responding to it at all. Instead of quoting Cheney's piece - there is not one link or quotation - he characterizes it as "all blame for the actual or impending Iraqi disaster should be assigned to the cut-and-run pussies of the current administration, and none at all to the one that lied its way into the whole catastrophic misadventure in the first place." (Interesting that a liberal can use a slang term for a female body part as a pejorative, butLarry Correia can't).
There are several things to note about this sentence. First, it's focus on blame. O'Hehir argues that it's not Obama's fault we invaded Iraq. Second is his characterization of the "lies" that led us into Iraq. Third, there's no actual foreign policy analysis here. O'Hehir is writing a partisan political piece, he doesn't care what actually happens to the Shia or Sunni or Kurds in the region - he may care, to be fair, but they never come up.
The war he wants to talk about isn't even Iraq - it's Vietnam. He blames the invasion of Iraq on what he calls PVSD - Post-Vietnam Stress Disorder. Iraq wasn't actually about Saddam or WMDs or terrorism or genocide. The people that voted for and ordered the invasion thought that "a foreign war with a plausible-sounding excuse, and one that ended with a clean victory, would be good for America and might restore the sense of national unity and purpose we putatively lost in the '60."
I know that journalists and columnists will - even if there is no important news of the day - report it to you like there were. But this is something quite beyond comprehension.
Let's state the obvious, the US had already gotten over PVSD, in whatever form it ever actually existed. Anyone remember the 1991 Gulf War? I do. I was a college student, in ROTC, watching live on television the first war to enter my consciousness. I remember watching CNN (at the time it was the only choice) and calling my dad later to ask if he thought the war would still be going on when I graduated. I remember hearing the comparisons to Vietnam made by reporters who - I figured out later - had absolutely no clue what they were talking about. I remember newsmen playing up the size of the Iraqi Army, how effective and battle tested it was from it's war with Iran and it's lightning invasion of Kuwait. In the words of Joe Biden, Operation Desert Storm was a Big F'ing Deal.
For a long time afterwards, I had a hard time squaring the news coverage I saw with the completely lopsided result. How could that happen? It wasn't until I had a full understanding of our military and had read the bookInto the Storm, by Tom Clancy, that I figured it out.
(As an aside, I heard Joe Galloway, who co-wroteWe Were Soldiers Once...and Young, tell a great story about how General Schwarzkopf used CNN and other media outlets to convince Saddam that he was making an amphibious assault on Kuwait, thereby changing the defensive alignment of Saddam's forces and leading to the lopsided defeat)
PVSD was dead, long dead, by the time Bush and Cheney were contemplating the invasion of Iraq. But they were dealing with the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, which, by choice, failed to remove Saddam from power. Blame - something O'Hehir focuses on - could be traced to this decision, but just bringing up this war would invalidate the PVSD point he wants to make so he simply ignores it.
He wants to focus on blame. His judgment is "those who shaped policy and held the levers of power, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, deserve most of the blame for the recycled fiasco of Iraq." Why they deserve most of the blame isn't immediately evident, O'Hehir trusts that his liberal readership will simply nod along in agreement to this line of thinking. But it deserves a little analysis.
It deserves analysis because it's unbelievably condescending. O'Hehir is, in effect, saying that those uneducated brown people in Iraq can't be trusted to work things out amongst themselves, so they should be governed by a sadistic, genocidal maniac from a minority religious group because he's the only one who can keep them in line. O'Hehir and others condemn the US for unleashing sectarian hatred in Iraq without passing comment - at all - on the hatred itself.
Does O'Hehir describe the hatred? No. The word "Sunni" appears once, the words Shia and Kurd and Islam not at all. He's not interested in Iraq, he's interested in Iraq as it applies to US politics, and specifically how it can me make Dick Cheney look like an idiot. Or a dark wizard.
Here is O'Hehir toward the end of the piece, "Obama must feel as if his presidency has been cursed by a malicious wizard; the principal foreign-policy pledge that got him elected, and that he more or less fulfilled, is unraveling as if by magic."We know who that dark wizard is.
Cheney apparently has some wicked powers if he can convince tens of thousands of people to hate each other because of centuries old religious disagreements. One wonders why he hasn't used those powers to win the lottery, make Jennifer Lopez fall in love with him, or keep the Kardashians off of television.
O'Hehir is a partisan so his only goal here is to absolve Obama of guilt, but the blame here is equally spread. Bush probably shouldn't have invaded, the Iraqi Sunni and Shia didn't have to actively fight the American forces who were trying to give them their country back, and Obama didn't have to abandon Iraq when it was clear that our presence there was a stabilizing force on the country.
But that's not a point O'Hehir can make, because the only thing he's serious about is his partisanship.
Saturday, June 21st 2014
Stephanie Souders
Posted Sat Jun 21 2014 23:34
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I tried to copy a post from my blog, but since the formatting didn't work out, let's try posting links instead:
A Brain Dump on Diversity in SF/F - Part One
A Brain Dump on Diversity in SF/F - Part Two
Wednesday, June 18th 2014
The Heritage Foundation is only creepy if you're a liberal who disagrees with their values.
Posted Wed Jun 18 2014 17:05
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This is kind of an inside-baseball Washington story that I usually don't care much about, but it caught my eye because I am a former Heritage intern and have fond memories of my time there.
On Monday The Heritage Foundation held a panel discussion on Benghazi. It's a think tank, they hold panel discussions all the time, and for whatever reason Dana Milbank decided he was going to attend this one.
Strike that - I think I know the reason.
Milbank's bio at the Washington Post calls him a "reporter", but in fact Milbank is a very liberal columnist who spend years appearing on the Keith Olbermann showCountdown. Anyone see that show? Didn't think so. Anyone think Olbermann is going to talk to someone who doesn't agree with his viewpoint? Nope.
The only reason a liberal Washington Post reporter goes to a Heritage Foundation event is to get dirt. Milbank thought he found was he was looking for and wrote a column about it.
EDIT: Link not working - see here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-heritages-ugly-benghazi-panel/2014/06/16/b8bd423c-f5a3-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html
Heritage (not surprisingly) disagreed with Milbank's assertions and Media Matters for America, of all places, dug up a video of the exchange Milbank spends most of his column on.
Armed with this video, Dylan Byers wrote a column calling Milbank's reporting a "disaster."
Byers details all the places where the video contradicts Milbank's reporting while leaving open the possibility that Milbank, having been in the room at the time, may have seen something the video didn't capture.
Not about to be shown up by Politico, Milbankfired back todaywith another column defending his reporting and doubling down on the "hateful Heritage" narrative he laid out in his first column.
If you're interested, read all three columns. If you're not, just read Dylan Byers and watch the video he posted (about 9 minutes long).
Milbank's disdain focuses on two things - (1) Brigitte Gabriel's response to a question posed by a woman named Saba Ahmed, and (2) the response to that answer from the crowd in attendance.
I'd heard the name Brigitte Gabriel before, but couldn't remember where so I Googled her. After you watch the video read the first paragraphof thislinkand then think about her answer again.
So here we have a question from a Muslim woman answered by a Lebanese Christian woman who as a child was wounded and saw her house destroyed by Islamic militants. Is Gabriel not supposed to be just a little bit passionate about her views? Milbank missed a huge story here, but it doesn't fit his narrative so he discarded it.
Her answer does get a lengthy applause from the crowd but that's likely because they know and understand her history.
What Milbank's columns are really saying is that he doesn't understand conservatives. A couple years ago University of Virginia ProfessorJonathan Haidtwrote a book suggesting that liberals have a harder time understanding the ideological positions of conservatives. This is the kind of ignorance Milbank puts on display here.
He goes on about the creepiness of Heritage, quoting Brian Beutler at the New Republic (a leftist publication) saying "the video format in general does a disservice to how uncomfortable lopsided encounters in that strange environment really are. It's really jarring, and difficult to dislodge."
The Heritage Foundation was, during my time there, home to some of the nicest, most gracious people I've ever met. Panel discussions - and I've attended more than a few - were always respectful and all viewpoints were welcomed, as evidenced by the video of that day's event.
It's only creepy if you're a liberal who disagrees with the values and ideals Heritage espouses.
This is really Milbank's issue - but he can't say this because he's a "neutral" reporter.
Life would be a lot simpler - but perhaps less fun (?) - if he could just scrape up the courage to say what he's really thinking.
Tuesday, June 17th 2014
Aaron Smith
So I've read the Game of Thrones books several times and I'm being surprised. That's the strength that we're seeing from multimedia exploration of stories. Keep things fresh for the readers!
Posted Tue Jun 17 2014 21:40
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So I've read the Sword of Fire and Ice books several times and I'm being surprised. Briggitte lived longer. Arya got to laugh at the absurdity of her journey with the Hound and just miss seeing her sister. And I waited for baited breath for Tyrion to kill his father. They might have let the SOB live. The show runners are just that depraved.
And I love it! They keep the important things (Red Wedding, Tyrion's trial) but they make changes that don't kill or obviously alter the story from its central permmise.
That's the strength that we're seeing from multimedia exploration of stories. I've actually enjoyed the Dexter and True Blood on television more than I like the books. It's because the universe is new and fresh, plus actors taking the characters in new ways.And, let's be honest, sometimes the team of writers working on a project are better than the single author working on it. Plus, they're going to overtake George R.R. Martin soon. He will be getting ideas from HBO soon.
I'm amazed at how the world of content creation is opening up and as writers we need to be planning that with our works and be prepared to not be devastated if HBO changes our works. #firstworldwriterproblems