Author: photog

How Many Generals Has Pete Fired?

photog Current Events, Trump ,

February has been keeping me busy with snow and ice removal.  Three snowfalls in one week are predicted.  And the day job has been hectic.  But I’ve managed to write several thousand words on my story this week which is pretty good.  I follow as best I can in the news how Trump is doing in his epic assault on the “managerial state.”  We’ve reached the point in the dance where various Obama-appointed federal judges will veto everything he does.  It’ll be interesting to see if he honors the decisions or just ignores them.  I rather hope he just goes full speed ahead and deals with the consequences later.  It would be so much quicker to just make the changes and let the Deep State deal with a fait accompli.

I didn’t see the game but I watched a few minutes of post-Super Bowl celebrations going on in Philadelphia.  A mob of inebriated cretinous goons combined their strength to yank a traffic light pole out of the ground, smash it with their hands and feet and then throw into the back of an enormous dump truck that they somehow got their hands on.  Unfortunately, it fell out of the truck and onto several of their fellow rioters.  But obviously a good time was had by all.  Ah, the transformative energy of sports.  I’m sure the City of Brotherly Love will rise to new heights on the spiritual boost this championship will provide.  Well, anyway, the rioting, looting and arson probably won’t continue much past Monday.

The world situation grows more chaotic by the week.  The Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange seems to be wobbling and the Ukraine war grinds brutally on.  Trump’s latest tariff project seems to involve imports of aluminum and steel.  I believe we get a lot of aluminum from Canada.  The hydroelectricity in Quebec makes Canadian aluminum competitive with any other world producers.  I’m not sure if Trump is taking another slap at Trudeau.  I think a lot of the steel comes out of China.  I wonder if Trump is serious about that.  It would be a real shot across the bow of Xi Jinping’s economy.  We’ll see.

I’m curious to see if Trump will give a speech where he lays out his big plan for the changes he’s making to government spending.  I mean, it’s great that he’s shutting down the patronage and pork at USAID and other left-wing fronts.  And reducing the federal payroll by as much as possible is also admirable.  But I tend to think that he has some bigger, more comprehensive program in the works.  Now maybe he wants to wait until he’s put out some of these fires like the judges blocking his executive orders.  And maybe he’s working with the Congressional Republicans to push forward some large bill that contains a lot of the items he intends to use to transform the economy.  But right now, it’s very hard to tell what’s going forward and what’s been halted.

I guess I’ll have to be patient for a few more weeks.  After all he hasn’t been in office even a month yet.  It just seems longer because of all the activity he’s produced.  I’m impatiently waiting for Patel, Kennedy and Gabbard to get their votes in the Senate.  I feel like that’s dragging.  But that’s not Trump’s fault.  The Senate Republicans are a sorry looking lot and can barely keep from tripping over their own feet.  But one thing I’d like to hear about is how many generals Pete Hegseth has fired this week.  I think maybe that’s the metric I would use to gauge the effectiveness of the Trump administration.  Yep that’s the one.

Alfalfa, Call the Roll

photog Current Events ,

Donald Trump signed an executive order that specified that the United States federal government only recognizes two sexes; male and female and these equate to the sexes identified by the biological realities of nature.  And he used this basis to forbid biological males from participating in Title IX protected women’s sports.  This provides a basis for activities excluding one sex from the other based on differences in biological identity.  So that’s part one.

But now it’s time to move forward.  Now it’s time to acknowledge that there should be activities that males want to participate without women involved.  And once again, it is based on biology.  It’s very simple.  Women are inherently irritating to men.

Now, I say this as a man whose been married to the same woman for forty-eight years.  This May I’ll have known Camera Girl for fifty years.  She is a delightful woman.  Smart, pretty, wise, witty; you name it.  She is the greatest joy of my whole existence on this planet.  But there are times when I get together with the guys that having her there would be a big mistake.  She’s a woman.  She’s not as lazy as we are.  Or as crass.  And she doesn’t care about nuclear weapons, the Roman Empire, the Lord of the Rings, William Shatner, bad movies in general or anything that would qualify her for a get together with the guys.  And if she did care about those things she would be too strange a woman for me to get involved with.

And even if she was still the same wonderful person she is now and wanted to hang out with the guys, it still would be a bad idea.  And that’s because men occasionally want to escape the company of women.  We want to be unfair and objectivize women and say things about them that they won’t like.  Basically, we want the space and freedom to act like thirteen-year-old boys again.  We want to form our own hierarchies based on whatever primitive and undemocratic criteria we decide on and we absolutely, positively don’t want to fall under the authority of a woman.  Now that’s clear enough.  We want our space.

Now how do we get it back?

It seems to me; the most logical way is to follow reason and fact.  If the Title IX laws protecting separate (but unequal) women’s programs is constitutional then it stands to reason that separate organizations based on the differences between men and women is also constitutional.  Fraternal organization can become just that again.  And sororal clubs can provide women with their own spaces.

Now whether any of the male organizations that have already been neutered by the government can be resuscitated is highly doubtful.  The Boy Scouts of America have just this month officially eliminated the word “boy” from their name.  I don’t see how that damage can be undone.  But new organizations can be started that will replace these hollowed out shells of the past.

And the time to make this happen is now.  With this Supreme Court and President Trump in charge the Justice Department could be the conduit for cases to push for the return of freedom of association.  The only real question is whether there is an organization that would be willing to be the test case.  It should be a new organization that starts fresh and goes after landmark legislation to end the present persecution of male only activities.

And I think the perfect test case should be my own favorite named organization; The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club.  The name says it all.  Now all we have to do is get that feminist Republican jurist on board; John Roberts.

It Grows on You

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,

I think I want to talk about science fiction some more.  I don’t remember the first time I heard the expression “literary science fiction?  But I think it was being used to compare to space opera.  Now I’m not well versed in the history and evolution of science fiction past the 1970s.  Halfway through that decade I became deeply interested in making a living so I didn’t have the leisure to read all of the books coming out.  But what I could tell was some of it didn’t seem to be science fiction.  I can remember reading a couple of Samuel R Delaney books and thinking, “This guy has problems that I’m not interested in.”  And so, I decided that literary science fiction was not for me.

It seemed to me that there should be a middle ground between space opera and Samuel R Delaney.  Without a doubt some of the writers from the olden times like Asimov completely eschewed producing characters that sounded and acted like real live human beings.  Now granted, we don’t expect to get James Joyce when we pick up a book with a cover illustrated with a half-naked woman in the clutches of a giant lobster.  But by the same token once you’ve grown up and have some understanding of what people say and do in real life it would seem to me that an author who wants to make his story interesting would make his people act and speak like … people!

So, if you go back and read, for instance, Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Space” as an adult you may be amazed at how threadbare the writing seems.  The characters are for the most part caricatures of the chivalrous hero battling monsters (literally) to save the damsel in distress.  And this is too far in the other direction from literary s-f.  Space ships, evil giant intelligent amoebas and space-time tearing secret weapons are great stuff but unless the characters have at least some similarities to actual human beings it’s kind of hard to get the readers to want to finish the story.

And there is a pretty wide bandwidth between these extremes.  Writers like Asimov and Clarke didn’t spend much time on characterization.  Hari Seldon and Dave Bowman were thumbnail sketches that barely provided enough description to convince the reader they existed.  But these were plot driven stories and as long as their authors would give us anything at all to allow us to pretend that they were people, we could suspend disbelief.

And Heinlein was able to write dozens of stories that were populated with various flavors and ages of his “competent man” whom I guess we were supposed to imagine were stand-ins for Heinlein himself.  And there was some humanity on display there.  Definitely not James Joyce but voices that were reminiscent of real people (at least somewhat).

And over the decades, characterization, especially in the hands of female authors (authoresses?) has become the dominant ingredient in literary science fiction.  And now it has reached the point where leaving out the science is completely acceptable.  Wonder has been replaced by social justice and grievance reckoning.  That’s how you end up with something like “The Handmaid’s Tale” as the exemplar of successful science fiction.

Well, all of this is very interesting.  But there’s nothing like actually trying to write a full-length novel to show someone just how much work it is to balance along that tightrope between too much and too little characterization.  And the hardest trick (for me) is getting dialog between a man and a woman to work.  I really only have my discussions with Camera Girl as my template.  But we’ve known each other for fifty years so it’s almost a pantomime at this point.  One- or two-word sentence fragments, facial expressions and gestures gets a lot done at this point.  This doesn’t translate into character dialog.  Nor would I want my protagonist to sound like me.  I’m anti-heroic.  I’m more like comic relief.

But it has given me greater respect for good writing, even in other genres.  And I think I’m getting a taste for it.  It grows on you.