The California legislature is considering a comprehensive net neutrality bill, which the big corporations like AT&T really hate. I’d like to see it become law for you all, because that would mean us little people in flyover country who don’t have any significance at all could then point to you as a shining example.

We need you to contact your representatives and tell them to get off their butts and do the right thing, and ignore those well-heeled lobbyists who are waving money at them.

Contact:

Ben Hueso (Chair) | 916–651–4040 | @BenHueso
Robert Hertzberg | 916–651–4018 | @SenateHertzberg
Steve Bradford | 916–651–4035 | @SteveBradford
Henry Stern | 916–651–4027 | @HenrySternCA
Jerry Hill | 916–651–4013

Tell them to support SB 822 to restore net neutrality.

We look at the world now and wonder how the alt-right could possibly have any popularity at all — such odious ideas, such terrible ignorant people. But the seeds were planted a long time ago. I was just reading Starship Stormtroopers, a 1977 essay by Michael Moorcock, in which he looks back on recent issues in science fiction, colored by the experience of the Vietnam War and the protests against it. I remember that time, and what I think of are the hippies, and campus radicals, and revolutionary music, and peace and love and rejecting bourgeois capitalism. And now I wonder how did that generation grow up to populate the worst, most corrupt, most destructive government in our history?

The answer is right there in that culture of the 60s-70s. We just didn’t notice the contradictions imbedded in it, which Moorcock points out in the context of the popular SF readings of the day.

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them — a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants — a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence — a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of ‘decadence’ in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping — not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Ouch. I read all of those authors, but at least I can say I came to detest them, with the exception of Lovecraft, which I’ve always read as hilariously badly written dystopian kitsch. But otherwise, I agree — even Tolkien, who has become even more popular today thanks to that series of wildly successful movies, created a wierdly asexual, regressive, pastoral universe where old traditional values, like aristocracy and kingship, were revered. Moorcock also hammers on that.

The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity — but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of ‘good leadership’; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators — fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) — the answer is always leadership, ‘decency’, paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values…

Leading to the present day, where that paternalism is worshipped, and yelling about decency and Christian values is a mask over the most atrocious corruption.

At least his characterization of John Campbell is vastly entertaining, if horrifying.

Indeed, it’s often been shown that sf supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a ‘Waldo’ handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell’s image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone’s standard into a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an ‘alternative’ that was, of course, no alternative at all. Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and aired for the first time in Astounding as ‘Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind’), a perpetual motion machine known as the ‘Dean Drive’, a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren’t ‘abused’, and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were ‘natural’ slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were ‘against’ emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in ‘leaderless’ riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all — ‘science-fiction’ — ‘psychology’ — Jesus Christ!’- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell’s arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views — an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.

Now I’m left feeling like nothing ever changes.

It’s official: Paul Ryan won’t be running for re-election. He’s the 39th Republican to announce a retirement from office this year. It’s almost as if they know something.

He stated his two major accomplishments:

Ryan had long championed overhauling the tax code, a goal accomplished with the passage last year of the sweeping GOP tax bill.

“That’s something I’ve been working on my entire adult life,” Ryan said at his news conference.

He cited tax reform and rebuilding the military as his two biggest achievements and said he wants to accomplish more before stepping down.

What? He’s proud of a tax reform that’s a bonanza for the filthy rich and increases our debt?

Someone tell me when our military was weak and needed strengthening, because right now all I see is expensive overkill. So Ryan helped make that worse?

I think it’s more like he’s done all the damage he can do, and he’s getting out to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.

Paul Waldman, specifically. He outright says that Trump is a crook.

One remarkable thing about the 2016 election is the way Trump’s business career was given such a superficial examination by the media as a whole. Again and again, some crazy story or unusual aspect of his financial life would be the topic of one or two investigative stories, but those stories wouldn’t get picked up by other outlets.

Making this more problematic, Trump isn’t someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America. He ran scams like Trump University to con struggling people out of their money. He lent his name to pyramid schemes. He bankrupted casinos and still somehow made millions while others were left holding the bag. He refused to pay vendors. He exploited foreign workers. He used illegal labor. He discriminated against African American renters. He violated Federal Trade Commission rules on stock purchases. He did business with the mob and with Eastern European kleptocrats. His properties became the go-to vehicle for Russian oligarchs and mobsters to launder their money.

So it was no accident that when he ran for president, the people who joined him in his quest were also a collection of grifters, liars, and crooks — people such as Paul Manafort. Those were the kind of operators Trump has attracted all his life. Honest, upright people with a deep respect for the law don’t go to work for Donald Trump.

That is remarkable. All throughout the election campaign, those horrible little stories about Trump’s sleazy business practices would trickle out — we all saw them — and then the press would shrug and move on to something else (Hillary’s emails!). Any one of those things would have scuttled an ordinary candidate: heck, Howard Dean made a loud yell and boom, it was all anyone talked about and it killed his presidential run. Trump wouldn’t even release his tax returns, which should have had everyone deeply suspicious.

We don’t just have a corrupt president, we have a corrupt media.

Rohrabacher is outraged that Orange County has been building temporary shelters for the poor and homeless.

More than 1,000 people protested at the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting last month, where officials were considering a plan to relocate those who had been moved from near the river to temporary shelters in the area. That plan apparently inspired Rohrabacher to speak out, issuing a statement titled “Homeless Shelter Nonsense,” in which he complained about the homeless population insinuating that homelessness was somehow a choice.

“The chickens are coming home to roost after almost a decade of Liberal/Left control of our state and federal government,” Rohrabacher wrote. “Those chickens have ended up in Orange County.”

In the statement, Rohrabacher called “county financed homeless compounds” a “spectacle” and a “travesty.”

“As a parent who owns a modest home in an Orange County neighborhood, I join the outrage that we are assuming responsibility for homeless people, taking care of their basic needs and elongating their agony by removing the necessity to make fundamental decisions about the way they live their lives,” he said. Providing them with “a place to stay and basic sustenance,” he added, “will not change them for the better and will encourage more such people to come to Orange County.”

He actually has quite a nice house. It looks roomy and a bit rambly, and the only problem with it might be the protesters who like to hang around outside it waving signs. The spectacle in his neighborhood might be reduced if they kicked him out.

Meanwhile, here’s what an Orange County homeless shelter looks like.

Rohrabacher wants — no, he thinks the poor deserve — to live in even worse conditions than that. He’s not alone.

Rohrabacher is hardly the first to put his foot in his mouth on the topic: last week, a Republican group in Colorado apologized for a tweet and Facebook post saying that “Republicans hate poor people.”

“Out of self-respect — be a Republican,” the posts from the Alamosa Republicans read. “Democrats love poor people because they think that poor people will vote Democrat. Republicans hate poor people because they think the dignity of man is above being poor.”

You know, there are a lot of loud, indignant Christians in the Republican party. I’ve read the Bible, but I don’t think they have.

We can’t have those darned kids voting! The Morris city council met to discuss shutting down half of our polling locations, and of course the one that they singled out for closure was the one on the university campus.

City Manager Hill stated when he came to Morris he was surprised to see there were six voting precincts. Hill indicated is it hard to staff a voting place and believes the future of voting is that less and less people will come to the polls. Hill suggested getting rid of the University as a polling place because a polling place should be readily accessible and comfortable to get in and out of and they have no parking. Hill stated the Armory would be a good option. Hill noted after the 2020 census takes place the city can look at some redistricting. Hill pointed out that there needs to be a better job of getting people to register before Election Day.

You see, the university doesn’t count. There are 1700 students here, out of a total population of 5000, so it would be more convenient to make the students walk into town to vote, rather than having an accessible location on campus. Also, this university has a heck of a lot of parking.

If they are concerned about staffing, we have a lot of motivated young people here, and I’m sure some of them would be willing to volunteer at any of the six polling places. I’ve worked at them before. Rather than resigning themselves to fewer people coming to the polls, maybe our city officials ought to be working harder to tap into the pool of democratic activists that can be found at any university.

Local people have put together a response. The letter can be signed online by other locals who are concerned (I’ll refrain from posting a link to that here, but if you’re a Morris resident and don’t know where to find it, email me and I’ll send you a link.)

Kevin Williamson is an unpleasant kind of person — the ugly conservative who really ought to be mumbling in a gutter somewhere, despised and pitied, but instead got himself a paying job at the National Review…which, come to think of it, is a kind of gutter. He’s the kind of guy who repeatedly insists that women ought to be executed for having abortions, which tells me that he’s absent any theory of mind or empathy, and ought to be labeled as a sociopath.

This weekend, Kevin Williamson, whose Twitter bio describes him as a “roving reporter for the National Review,” declared on Twitter that all abortions should be treated as premeditated homicide, and that women who have had abortions should face capital punishment, namely hanging. No exceptions.

@Green_Footballs Yes, I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014

I have hanging more in mind. @LeveyIsLaw @charlescwcooke
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) September 28, 2014

Well, he doesn’t work for the National Review anymore.

Instead, he’s been hired by The Atlantic.

On Thursday, the magazine — which is now led by Iraq War cheerleader Jeffrey Goldberg — announced a new opinion and commentary section, “Ideas.” The staff of this new section includes two current Atlantic writers, economics writer Annie Lowrey and former MSNBC host and contributor Alex Wagner, and two new hires: the writer and academic Ibram X. Kendi and National Review columnist Kevin D. Williamson.

Williamson holds a long list of odious views, and I don’t just mean repellant to liberals, but so vile and stupid that they should not be held by thinking human beings.

It’s a strange time. In an era when the worst president and the worst congress in the history of the country are in charge, our national media, led by cowards, are hedging their bets by hiring conservative scum. Instead of challenging great wrongs, they seem instead to be concerned with pandering to the wrong-doers.

YouTube is cracking down, and banning all those macho gun-flogging videos that have apparently been so popular with the more violent segment of society. So the poor gun exhibitionists have had to find a venue that will tolerate them.

They have. It’s called PornHub.

I can’t imagine a more appropriate choice. Not to disparage the harmless people who just like to show off their primary and secondary sexual characteristics in action, but gun-nuts do at least have something in common with obsessive and unrealistic displays of penises in ecstasy.