China, now “leading the world in innovation,” invented a terrifying microwave pain gun
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Know Your Enemy
The world is reeling In the wake of terror attacks in Pakistan, Canada, and Australia. The slaughter of more than 130 children at a school in Peshawar is evil incarnate, and it is impossible to see the images of those small coffins without feeling rage and sadness. These terrorists systematically slaughtered kids in a school. It will happen again until this brand of extreme Islam is stamped out. This enemy is relentless and hungry, and there is nothing but evil in him. Bring on the waterboarding.
When the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, there was little outcry around the world. I recall watching a few stories on the news about them at the time. It wasn’t until 9-11 that we started paying attention here in the United States. More than a decade later, we are still engaging these evil sons of bitches. They receive funding from a global network of “charities,” as well as weapons and training from nations. Pakistan itself divides the Taliban into separate categories, with the “good Taliban” waging jihad outside their own borders.
I keep hearing about the moderate, decent Muslims around the world who insist that Islam is a peaceful religion. This may be true in theory but it is most certainly not true in practice. ISIS is spreading like a virulent disease, sweeping through Syria and Iraq, lopping off heads, raping and killing with wanton abandon. Where are the voices of protest from the streets of Jerusalem, the cries of outrage in Tehran? When will we see edicts from a group of the most influential clerics calling for war against these dangerous killers which threaten to plunge the world into darkness? The west cannot wage this war alone.
Other religions have their share of blood on their hands. Christianity has been perverted to wage war and commit atrocities. The Inquisition was terrible, and the Crusades stained countless battlefields with blood. Even now, there are nut-case extremist people who call themselves Christians who say awful things, advocate violence, and make other people of faith look evil by association. Here’s the thing, though. Other Christians jump all over these fringe crazies, ostracize them and isolate them. Whether you are Catholic or not, it’s hard to say that the Pope is an evil, violent man who is pushing for war.
Islam needs to come together to reclaim their religion. They need to say, “enough is enough, these terrorists do not represent our beliefs, and here is why…” And they need to act upon it. Stop funding these extremists, cease giving safe haven to terror groups, put the Imams in jail who are brainwashing kids to strap bombs to themselves. So far, though, the world has seen little in the way of Islam policing itself. There is too much resentment of the west, too much distaste for Christians, years of bottled up anger seething beneath the surface of placid smiles.
Only light can drive out the darkness. Only love can defeat hate. When I see videos of an innocent reporter getting his head sawed off, when I see these little children covered in blood, I admit I feel hate rising in me. I don’t want it, but it’s there. I try not to make generalizations, I try to keep an open mind and believe that most people are decent and kind. If these terror groups hope to instill fear, I believe they are failing. They instill hate. They want a religious war, and in the end, they will have it, dragging the world into it with them, consuming our humanity.
I hold my young boys tight, and when I see them playing Army together, sometimes I have tears in my eyes because I fear what they will be doing in ten years. I fear that this war will be upon us, and my boys will be carrying real assault rifles and keeping their heads down because darkness has already won.
Torture and the Terrorist
There is a great deal of howling and gnashing of teeth regarding the Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report which details the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used to obtain information from terror suspects over the last decade. The report reveals some practices that many people find objectionable. China and Russia are wagging fingers and calling the United States out for hypocrisy. Senator John McCain stated that our country has lost its honor. I’m fairly liberal on most issues. This is not one. Call me a hypocrite.
The Senate report delves into the treatment of 119 detainees. Not thousands, not hundreds. 119 men. I understand that the rule of law is important to our civilization. I respect human rights and civil liberties, and I am thankful I live in a nation which champions those causes around the globe. I understand the danger of a slippery slope. I don’t like the idea of a shadowy organization beholden to none operating at will, subverting our values.
On the other hand…
If sleep deprivation and water boarding could have prevented 9-11, would it have been justified? To save thousands of lives, would it be acceptable to force a terror suspect to listen to Brittany Spears music until his ears bleed? How much collateral damage is too much? How many innocent lives are lost every month in the ongoing war on terror? How many American troops have fallen fighting Al Queda?
Remember these guys? I wish they’d been strapped into a chair on September Tenth, a burly Special Forces operator beating them to a fruit-juicy pulp before they decided to hop on planes and kill thousands of people.
This is war. It’s a different kind of war than all of our nation’s previous engagements. The enemy crosses borders at will, from the mountains of Pakistan, the rocks and valleys of Afghanistan, to the deserts of Africa. This enemy is motivated by hatred and religious zeal, and is plotting against us right now. This foe will not hesitate to kill innocents, to torture and maim women and children, and his goal is nothing short of the complete destruction of our way of life. He hides behind children, wears no uniform, and melts into the crowds of the market or subway. He likes to blow things up, and is willing to strap a bomb to himself, inflicting the highest amount of damage possible with ball-bearings that fly out in all directions, tearing through flesh and bone. There is no mercy in him.
This is who we fight. An enemy with no fear of death, who in fact takes comfort in the promised rewards of martyrdom in the afterlife. This war is only just beginning, and will continue to rage for the rest of this century.
I fear America has lost its stomach for war. If war were not necessary, this would be a good thing. Peace comes through strength, though. War is brutish and ugly, and sometimes the only choices are between two evils. In World War II, bombs killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. In Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden, the United States unleashed firestorms. The goal was to win the war. It was awful, yet brutally effective.
I don’t mind that these terrorists were subjected to torture. Some things should remain secret. I sleep better at night knowing there are soldiers standing at the gates against the barbarians.
Permuted Press – Enjoy The Apocalypse
Racism in America
We can deny a thing, but this does not make it any less true. Racism exists and continues to shape America, and while some still dispute this, it remains a fact. Can we, as a people, overcome this legacy, or is the nation doomed to repeat the same mistakes repeatedly, inventing new tragedies along the way?
Racism is more than one thing.
There are different kinds of racism, but at it’s core is a generalization, a stereotype, which is used to define an entire group of people based upon ethnicity. It is limiting, reducing the content of a person’s character to the color of their skin.
Institutional Racism
When racism is codified, when the promise of equal protection under the law is broken, the country itself is undermined.Police officers shoot and kill unarmed kids without consequence. Racial profiling. Gerrymandering in minority areas to split up districts so that the vote is diluted. The inequities in our Criminal Justice system in which black offenders are far more likely than Anglos to receive harsh sentences. The disparity in funding for schools and education between affluent areas and inner cities. Institutional racism dates back to the origins of our country, when slaves were deemed to be less than human. The Emancipation Proclamation began to address this, and the Jim Crow laws were finally repealed, and the Voting Rights Act was a great step toward dismantling institutional racism. It lingers, still, though, and all you have to do is flip through cable news to see it.
This is directly linked to economics. Poverty perpetuates racism. Lack of jobs, education, and opportunity creates an endless cycle. A war on poverty is also a war on racism; this is the battle we need to be fighting, not a war against eachother.
Cultural Racism
Racism is part of the American psyche, woven into our collective history. It thrives in the South, but is by no means limited by geography. Stereotypes, played out again and again on television and movies, in music and the stories that the news decides to focus on, reinforce this kind of racism. This works both ways, too. In many black communities, there is a distrust of white people, of the police, and the feeling that not only is their voice not heard, but that it does not matter. This distrust, distaste, this sense of unfairness spills into the streets, simmering in the shadows until it explodes with violence.
Individual Racism
Each person must make the choice to be color-blind. It starts with us. If collectively we choose to see a person for who they are, not by the color of their skin or the clothes they wear or the car they drive, then racism will cease to plague the nation.
Closet racists are the worst. They fill a pew on Sunday morning and spew hatred on Sunday night. They choose sides, rather than choosing a person. They don’t consider themselves to be racist, yet their actions prove otherwise, their veiled condescension, the hypocrisy they wear like a coat. When the media seizes upon cases like Trayvon Martin or the killing in Ferguson, these are the people who assume that a kid deserved to die, rather than question their own beliefs or the facts of the case. They call in to talk shows like Rush Limbaugh, hide behind anonymity on social media, and broadcast hatred and division with snarky memes and mean headlines.
If this continues…
The country is becoming increasingly diverse. America has always been a melting pot, but it’s been the rich white folks who have made policy decisions since our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. As time goes on, the balance of power will shift. It’s already happening, and there is much screaming and gnashing of teeth over this fact. It’s inevitable, though. Within two generations, white folks are going to be in the minority.
There have been calls for civil war, revolt, secession, assassination and violence from extremists who are terrified of the changes coming to America. Rather than work within the system, they seem to want to break it entirely. This kind of thinking is seditious, dangerous, and gaining traction. As we move into the next election cycle, it’s going to get even worse.
We need to vote for responsible leaders, and do it in every single election.
But people are decent and good, for the most part...
The next generation will be better than mine. My kids don’t really see race. I think each subsequent generation will improve upon the one before, and that with time, the lingering vestiges of racism can be stamped out. It takes time, effort, and teaching our children. It takes honest dialogue and love for one another.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Check out my books on Amazon! Next year, The Tears of Abraham will be published, a novel about the coming American Civil War.
Tired of That Bullshit: Here it Comes
The BMW scooted down a mile of traffic and cut in one car ahead of me, not merging, but slashing, his actions, and those of the same ilk, causing the the traffic jam in the first place, when there were people like me who would have let him go ahead and slip in without causing everyone else to slam on their brakes.
THOSE guys, drive me nuts.
Those guys are everywhere, it seems. The ones who think they are more important than anyone else, bringing civilized folk to an abrupt halt, while they cut in and get what they think they deserve. There are fewer of them, those predatory self-important hyenas who fancy themselves lions but who are nothing more than carrion-feeders, than there are decent and good people. The school of fish is a buffet for the souless shark.
I’m a big man, and I’ve never lost a fight, not a man-to-man fight. Been beat down by groups a few times. I’ve been shot at and stabbed at and had my nose broken and my eyes swollen shut, but my scars are honest and earned. There is no such thing as a friendly fight, but there is a difference between a fair fight and a sucker punch,. Except, in today’s society, there is no distinction, and perhaps there never was.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, ” Appear weak when you are strong, and appear strong when you are weak.” The guy in the BMW with a short-guy complex is winning in America. He is weak, and yet we, the people, are defeated. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson would smack that guy in the face. Or, not. Our founding Fathers were Mercedes kind of people. They were short, wealthy, and male. They owned slaves, land, and “cut in” even though it made Britain rather angry. They were brilliant, and they got richer because of the American Revolution, no more saints than Bill Gates or Carnegie or Warren Buffet.
Americans are getting cut off by that guy. It’s been happening since the first boots landed on the New World. The people with money and clout dictated what everyone else would do. They made the laws, established an oligarchy, and enforced their will by killing and burning and revolting when it suited them to do so. They gave the rest of us a chance, gave a nation room to breathe, until the United States became great, not because of these bastards, but in spite of them. America stayed one nation through the bloodletting of the Civil War, not because the industrialists and plantation owners deemed it so, but because Lincoln was willing to spill blood for that ideal. American boys paid that price in blood at Antietam and Gettysburg and all over the eastern United States, which were anything but united. In World War Two, the Greatest Generation fought and bled and died from Omaha Beach to Berlin for that dream of freedom and a nation that stands as a city on a hill, a beacon of righteousness. Generations have died for a flag and an ideal which could be true, but which is being stolen right now,.
The sonsofbitches that think they are above everyone else, then as now, did not allow their sons to be put in harm’s way. They did not fight themselves, but chose to hide behind wealth and position and condescending smiles. They cut in, assuming, aggressive, and entitled. Along the way, they created a news network and convinced people that whatever sprang from that network was the Truth.” If FOX says it, coming from a college dropout or pretty blond, then it must be true,” thinks a whole segment of our great nation. Go ahead, and cut in. I won’t be angry. It’s all right with me because—
“Screw you, cutting in front of me, you entitled sonofatbitch!”
I’ll just speed up a bit so that you can’t get in, and blithely smile at you while you rage, and then cut ahead in line and get in anyway, causing this whole traffic jam. Nothing gets done, really, except that the jerk got in ahead anyway. And that is that bullshit.
The country is gridlocked by assholes.
The bank bailouts, the stock market crash, the worst Congress in history, the lies perpetrated by certain networks, prove this.The fear, misinformation, ignorance, bigotry, and outright hatred spewed by those in power and those with a vested interest in it prove that nothing is going to happen in terms of real legislation. Change? No. Because the king likes to be king, and who can blame him? The thing is to convince the paupers that they are kings. And that happened. They did that!
The rich will continue to get richer, though, and they’ll claim that they are hurting. They’ll try to convince the rest of the country that poor people are poor because they are lazy and rich people are rich because they are good and Americans will buy it and let them cut in.
There will be a wreck. I’ll be that guy that really slows traffic down. Because I’ll ram the next son of a bitch in a BMW that cuts me off, I’ll floor it in my work truck, and I won’t give a damn. And when he gets out of his car, pressed white shirt and angry and talking about lawyers, I’ll knock him right on his ass, because I don’t care anymore about the traffic jam and fairness and that bullshit that I’ve been putting up with while people like this steal from me. I’ll punch him in the eye because that’s what I’ve been wanting to do, every time I’ve been stuck in this traffic for the last twenty years.
That’s what I’m going to do, and that’s because I’m sick and tired of that bullshit.
Interstellar: Review
I grew up reading science fiction, and it remains my favorite genre of film and books. Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Silverberg, Rober Zelazny, Heinlein, Azimov, and Greg Bear remain some of my favorite authors. I enjoy the hard-sci fi as well as more playful space opera. I love the first Star Wars movies, and I also really like Contact. I loved The Edge of Tomorrow. Heck, I even liked Riddick.
So it was with great anticipation I forked out the extra bucks to see Interstellar on a super-big screen. I’d been looking forward to this one since I’d seen the trailer for it last year.
Of course, I was doomed to disappointment. It’s a rare thing when lofty expectations are met. It’s a decent movie, but I was hoping for something, well, stellar.
I liked the premise, the idea that the Earth had turned against humanity, leaving mankind no choice but to reach for the stars. The scenes of cars and trucks laden with people migrating to anywhere else were reminiscent of the Dust Bowl and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
The acting was good, with Michael Cane and Mathew McConaughey delivering solid performances. The special effects were excellent, and there were some breathtaking scenes in space.
But there were too many moments where I scratched my head and said “What???” I had to resist the urge to turn to my wife and criticize the movie, risking the wrath of fellow movie goers, and I didn’t want to be THAT guy. So I sipped my drink and simmered.
My issue with this movie is that it pretends to be smarter than it actually is. Had I gone into the movie with a different set of expectations, I think I would have enjoyed the film much more.
SPOILER ALERT
When the crew is on the planet with the massive tidal surge and a character drags her feet instead of returning to the ship, I cringed.
When they decide to investigate planets orbiting a black hole, I thought, why the hell would they do that. Black holes are inherently unstable, dangerous things you stay away from.
When the survivors leave a planet and within ten seconds are drawn into the black hole’s gravitational pull, I rolled my eyes. When they arrive at this black hole minutes later, not crushed by the gravity, I squirmed in my seat.
In the library of time, where past and present are laid out in extra dimensional space, I wondered what the hell was going on.
And the ending, where our hero decides to return, somehow without any time distortion, drove me nuts.
So there it is. I found the movie to be visually stunning, and emotional, but the massive plot holes and shoddy science detracted from the overall experience. If I’d known going in that the movie was essentially silly, I could have rolled with the inexplicable twists and turns and made up physics.
It’s worth watching on the big screen, just be prepared.
How to Kill Adverbs and Adjectives
Inspiration Point
Objects of Wrath, half price.
My publisher, Permuted Press, is running a promotion this week for Objects of Wrath; more than eight hours worth of adventure set in America after the next global war. Readers say that the novel “sits at the intersection of The Road and Full Metal Jacket.”
“
I truly enjoyed this book, and it probably one of the best reads I’ve had so far this year. ”
The final book in the series comes out in February. Curl up by a cracking fire and spend a day immersed in a world that may yet come to be.
Author Sean T. Smith 