Review - DragonKnight: A Novel by Donita K. Paul

Short review: Bardon stumbles through a glacially slow quest without much thought. But that's okay because Wulder doesn't want you to think, you can just rely on him to fix everything for you.

Haiku
Bardon goes questing
Just by sitting on his ass
No real story here

Full review: Q: What would you get if you wrote a fantasy book filled with pseudo-Christian moralizing but left out anything resembling a real story?

A: You'd get the book DragonKnight.

The Dragonkeeper Chronicles trudge on in this third installment featuring Bardon, a secondary character introduced in DragonQuest (read review), the previous book in the series. The story moves at a glacial pace, filled with frenetic but pointless action that mostly has nothing at all to do with what little plot the book has, and which is periodically interrupted with bits of pseudo-Christian sermonizing that advocate a particularly passive way of dealing with life.

The primary problem with the book is that the plot is basically a haphazard collection of random coincidences strung together that flow by without the characters making any real decisions for themselves. The reason that the characters aimlessly stumble through the events of the book is that the religious message intended to be conveyed is clearly the idea that Wulder (standing in for God) has a plan for everything, and thus there are no coincidences, and the correct course of action is simply to trust in Wulder and everything will turn out okay. This particular piece of religious advocacy in favor of passivity results in a book in which the characters don't actually do much besides react to events as they pop up in front of them, and as one might expect, this makes for a fairly uninteresting story.

The plot of the book, such as it is, involves Bardon setting out on sabbatical for a year of solitude before he decides whether to dedicate his life to serving as a knight of Paladin. When he arrives at his designated sabbatical retreat, he discovers that two emmerlindian women, Granny Kye and her granddaughter N'Rae, and a minneken have taken up residence before him, and they have a quest that needs to be undertaken to boot.

"Wait", I hear you cry, "what the heck is a minneken"? Well, if you must know, it is a miniature race of beings that are somewhat similar in shape and size to a mouse that hails from the previously unmentioned Isle of Kye. This particular minneken, Jue Seeno, has been assigned as N'Rae's protector (although why N'rae needs a mouse-like protector is never really explained, and neither is how Jue was selected for the job). This, of course, runs counter to the assertions in DragonSpell (read review) that there are only seven high races and seven low races, and adding more races will somehow cause earth shattering disaster and signal the end of the world. But, given the introduction of the very humanoid meech dragons in DragonQuest, ignoring anything resembling continuity in world-building seems to be a common practice for Mrs. Paul. In short, what seemed like some clever world construction in DragonSpell turns out to have been just a convenient excuse for a plot MacGuffin, and was cast aside as soon as the MacGuffin was no longer needed.

Bardon, of course, cancels his plans to reflect on whether he wants to dedicate himself to Paladin's service, and instead agrees to help N'Rae find her long-lost father who was imprisoned by a spell cast by Risto that will expire and kill him when a particular comet reaches a particular spot in the sky. Apparently Risto would stop by and renew the spell keeping N'Rae's father in his enchanted slumber every now and then, but since he was killed in the last book he can't do that any more. Lest one stop and wonder why Risto would bother enchanting someone under a spell that he had to check back on periodically rather than just, say, killing them, Mrs. Paul throws in some random action to distract us, having Bardon fight a water snake and then a mountain lion before everyone heads out through the conveniently provided magical portal to a nearby city.

Once there, Bardon sets out to earn some money, and coincidentally there is a kindia breeder who needs several of the animals broken and is offering large sums of money to anyone who can. Like most other fantasy elements, the kindia, a sort of over sized horse with a sloped back and a temperamental disposition, are more or less dropped into the story as a plot device without any kind of foundation laid for their existence as an integral element of the fantasy world they inhabit. After Bardon spends a laborious day training a single kindia, it serendipitously turns out that N'Rae has a unique magical ability that makes taming the breeder's remaining stock a swift and easy process. The breeder, after some more plot extraneous action involving a kindia race, tries to rope N'rae and her special talent into his household by trying to get her to marry his son Holt. The characters kind of mill about randomly for a while, fighting random quiss or sea dragons when the novel slows down too much, getting arrested for stealing food for orphans, getting the orphans handed to their care as punishment, having Holt show up running from his creditors while trying to make passes at N'Rae and taking him in as a member of their crew because, as someone points out, they could use an extra strong body to help out on their quest, and he's handy. The strange appearances of quiss are set up as some sort of mystery involving vile experiments by the wizards Burner Stox and Crim Cropper, but this being a book in The Dragonkeeper Chronicles, this foreshadowing never leads to any kind of pay off in the story. (In point of fact, despite heavy foreshadowing, neither Burner Stox or Crim Cropper show up in the book at all).

The characters continue to drift along without any real urgency, despite the supposedly tight deadline they are on. As with previous books in the series, there's no problem so urgent that one cannot take time out to sit around and drink tea and eat cakes, or have philosophical discussions about how great Wulder is, or stopping to paint pictures. (Granny Kye, despite being an older emmerlindian, isn't very wise, but has the special ability to paint pictures that reveal a person's inner self. As with most fantasy elements of the book, this ability is pretty much useless in the context of the story being told and provides almost no benefit to her or anyone else in the book, despite it being harped upon constantly). This is, as we are told repeatedly, because Wulder has arranged everything according to his plan, and if one is intended to succeed in one's quest, it will turn out okay for you (and I suppose, if Wulder wants you to fail, you're pretty much screwed). So the characters pretty much just wander vaguely in what they assume is the right direction and hope for the best.

Along the way, random coincidences are seen as the hand of Wulder. Stittiponder, a blind orphaned street urchin who hears the wisdom of Wulder via voices only he can hear who had been very briefly introduced as a friend of Toopka's in DragonQuest, pops up thousands of miles away from where he was living on the streets in Vendela. Regidor returns to join Bardon's quest, although he arrives in response to a summons from Dar. Bardon literally stumbles across a gateway that transports him from the far northern tip of Amara almost on top of Kale, which pulls her into the quest serendipitously, and then drags along the wizards Fenworth, Cam, and Lyll as well as Librettowit, Taylaminkaydot, and Toopka, all of whom are introduced to the story using this incredibly clumsy plot device.

One of the few characters who Bardon and N'Rae actively recruit to join them on their quest to free her father, and one of the few who has specialized skills that could help them, is the mapmaker Bromptotterpimdosset, but since it turns out that he isn't theologically pure, they spend some effort trying to get rid of him. This illustrates that any semblance of plot that shows up in the story is clearly of secondary importance as far as Mrs. Paul is concerned. The important part of the book is providing "correct" moral instruction to the intended young adult audience, and that "correct" moral instruction is basically this: don't make any plans, because God will make everything work out for you, and don't associate with anyone who asks any hard questions, because they might pollute your mind with bad thoughts. Bromp serves up some straw men for Regidor and Bardon to shoot down, and is then converted to following Wulder when a random coincidence happens, because, of course, there are no random coincidences, there is only Wulder's plan.

So, the good guys eventually wander around enough and find the enchanted knights they were looking for by accident and then, well, they don't do much of anything for a while (remember, nothing is so urgent that you can't stop for a long lunch with tea and cake several times). Having spent no time at all trying to figure out how to break the enchantment until they found the knights, they meander about the abandoned fortress where they found them for a while until the answer drops in their lap. By that time, both the Pretender has shown up to cause trouble (but not too much trouble, since the characters are all under Wulder's protection and thus cannot be harmed), and Paladin shows up for a deus ex machina moment and everything is wrapped up in a nice bow - including the sudden revelation that Bardon is the son of one of the freed knights, Kale is the daughter of another, and Bardon and N'Rae are cousins (which conveniently solves the clumsy love triangle that Mrs. Paul has half-heartedly set-up between Bardon, N'Rae, and Kale in a manner reminiscent of the clumsy resolution of a similar love triangle in Return of the Jedi).

With the knights rescued, the random non-threats stop showing up and everyone is reunited with their family members. And in a huge anticlimax the wizard Fenworth permanently changes into a tree and Kale is dubbed the new Bog Wizard to replace him. Having milked about fifty pages worth of plot into a 393 page book, Mrs. Paul finally stops preaching the virtues of wandering aimlessly through life and expecting God, excuse me, I mean Wulder, to fix everything for you, and brings the turgid series of moral lessons to an end. With no real story, a pile of foreshadowing that never pays off, a completely random series of events, and a "moral message" that is pretty much a call to passivity, this book is definitely worth missing.

Previous book in the series: DragonQuest: A Novel
Subsequent book in the series: DragonFire: A Novel

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Biased Opinion - Was Dairy Goat Journal Simply Not Paying Attention this Week?

After the huge blowup over Cooks Source lifting Monica Gaudino's article without permission that seems to have essentially ended that magazine as a functioning entity one would think that other publishers would have taken note and realized that taking copyrighted material without getting the copyright holder's consent is illegal, unethical, and could very likely get the internet angry enough to overwhelm your website and destroy your business. Apparently, this message didn't get through to some people, because Dairy Goat Journal has been caught red-handed by Suzanne McMinn in the act of misappropriating one of her photos for their magazine.

I'm not going to go over copyright law again, since I did it in the original Cooks Source post, and anyone who wants to can just go read it there. The only difference between Mrs. Gaudino's story and Mrs. McMinn's is that one concerns printed text and the other concerns a photograph. Copyright law doesn't make a distinction between the two, however, so Mrs. McMinn is entitled to the same protections and has access to the same remedies as Mrs. Gaudino. Thus far, Dairy Goat Journal has also avoided making the outrageously stupid claims that Judith Griggs made concerning the nature of copyright law and the internet, but they have come close to matching Cooks Source for rudeness when caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Dairy Goat Journal also didn't even bother to give Mrs. McMinn credit when they reprinted her work. One also has to wonder if, like Cooks Source, the Dairy Goat Journal has made a practice of lifting material without permission and without attribution. I am cynical enough about human nature that I consider it likely that they have.

Mrs. McMinn says she will sue Dairy Goat Journal if necessary. I hope she doesn't have to and that the magazine will do the right thing, admit their error and compensate her fairly (including additional compensation to make up for their misdeeds), but if they don't, I really do hope that she sues them into oblivion. Publishers need to get the message: you can't take people's copyrighted work without their permission. One would hope that this message would get through without having to make an example of a couple by destroying them via massive statutory damage judgments, but I am not optimistic on that front.

In the interim, I encourage anyone who has the inclination to send an e-mail to the editors of Dairy Goat Journal giving them a piece of your mind on this topic. Their e-mail address (from their website) is [removed, because they later apologized and compensated Ms. McMinn]. Maybe if they get a couple thousand angry e-mails they will figure out that what they have done is wrong and won't be tolerated.

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Biased Opinion - The United States Is Not Built on a Religious Foundation

There is a strain of thought floating about that the United States was founded upon a bedrock of religious principles (almost always asserted to be Christian principles) and that the Framers of the Constitution never meant for religion to be excluded from government. It is a proposition that is attractive to a lot of religious people. The primary problem with this strain of thought is that it is almost entirely unsupportable.

The argument rests on a foundation built from some fairly slender threads, and requires something of a misreading of these threads to work at all. The fundamental problem religious advocates have to overcome is that the U.S. Constitution, the foundational document of the country, doesn't mention "God", "Jesus", or a "Creator". The document only mentions "Lord" once in the date at the end of the document, phrasing the date as the "Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven", which is clearly not an invocation of religion but rather a commonly understood way to express a date. (There are a lot of things that are not in the U.S. Constitution that people claim are there).

The document only mentions religion twice - and both references are negative. First, Article VI, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution prohibits any religious test for holding office. Second, the First Amendment contains the famous Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses that states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". Clearly there isn't much direct support in the U.S. Constitution, so the advocates who claim that the U.S. was founded on religious principles have to turn to some pretty vapor thin claims.

The basic argument usually runs something like this: the Declaration of Independence says "[w]e hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.", and later makes an appeal to the "Supreme Judge" and seeks the "blessings of divine Providence". This, plus the assertion that the framers were deeply religious men is used as the basis for the claim that the United States is, in fact, built on a religious foundation. Sometimes you also see a claim that the preamble of the U.S. Constitution implements these ideas by stating that it is intended to (among other things) "secure the Blessing of Liberty", with the claim that the "blessings" must obviously be blessings from God. This argument is ill-conceived and not very convincing.

 The initial flaw in this argument is that the Declaration of Independence, as brilliant a work of rhetoric as it is, is not any part of the law. It is, at best, an aspirational document. Nothing in the Declaration has any legal weight behind it. Citing it in a legal proceeding would likely get you laughed at. Secondly, the statements concerning unalienable rights have to be read in the context of the philosophical thinking of the time. Compare, for example, the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" line penned by Thomas Jefferson with the similar statement written by Jefferson's intellectual ally George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights:

"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

Both of these very similar statements justifying the reason for government are built upon arguments made by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government, an expression of the philosophical thinking described as "natural law". In fact, both Mason and Jefferson's lines are rough paraphrases of a statement made by John Locke in his "A Letter Concerning Toleration" written in 1689 in which he states "[c]ivil interest I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things . . ." Locke built his theory upon natural law, asserting "[t]he state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it", and further adopting the stance that the law of nature is reason.

Although natural law has been adopted by some religious traditions, asserting that as God is the fountainhead of nature, all natural law is derived from God, in its raw form natural law does not rely upon a divine being as its source. Instead, natural law is supposed to be derived purely from human reason, and in most formulations, rejects an external divine source out of hand. The line grasped at by those asserting a religious foundation for the United States is in actuality an assertion of the supremacy of human reason over revealed wisdom. Locke's political theory was founded on the idea of the social contract. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, Locke believed that human nature was built upon reason and tolerance. When left to their natural state, Locke believed that all people were equal and independent, and had a natural right to defend their “Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions", clearly the antecedent to the phrases used by Mason and Jefferson. Locke assumed that the sole right to defend in the state of nature was not enough, so people established a civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way with help from government in a state of society. Note that this theory is devoid of reference to God or religion, but relies entirely upon human reason as a basis for government.

Further, imagining that Jefferson would make an appeal to divine authority as the source of human rights stretches credulity. Jefferson was openly hostile towards organized religion, and though he didn't come out directly and say it, Jefferson seems to have harbored some atheistic leanings. Just a small selection of Jefferson's quotes reveals his thoughts:

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: And such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."

"As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."

"To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart."

These quotes should lay to rest any assertion that Jefferson had any kind of God bearing any resemblance to the God touted by most "America is a Christian nation" advocates in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. I don't see how anyone could look at Jefferson's collected writings and think, even for a moment, that he would look favorably upon the efforts of people like Pat Robertson in their attempts to mix religion into government. Jefferson also wrote a revised version of the Bible in which he removed all miraculous and mystical elements that has come to be called The Jefferson Bible. And, of course, there is the famous letter Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in which Jefferson declares that the Constitution erects a wall to separate church and state:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."

It is kind of humorous to see Jefferson's text in the Declaration of Independence cited by "Christian nation" advocated in favor of their idea that the United States is a Christian nation, but then see those same people usually turn around and decry the opinions Jefferson expressed in the Danbury letter and other writings. But I suppose that when you are rewriting history, coherence sometimes has to be cast overboard to make one's case.

Of course, Jefferson was only the primary author of the Declaration, the document was passed by the entire Continental Congress, so one could try to argue that many other legislators present were, in fact, voting in favor of a document that implemented a religious form of government. But the evidence for this is fairly thin. Most of the legislators that we know a substantial amount about were deists at most, and almost all were enamoured of the Enlightenment era theories of natural law that downplayed or outright rejected the active role that any divine being had in engendering natural law. The U.S. government, far from being built on a religious foundation, is clearly a vast experiment in bringing Locke's theories concerning government to fruition. Plus, as noted before, the Declaration isn't law, and is not the foundational document of our government. The U.S. Constitution is both.

As most people vaguely remember from high school history class, the Constitution wasn't the first governing document of the United States either. Eleven years separate the signing of the Declaration of Independence from the drafting and signing of the U.S. Constitution. During much of those intervening years, the United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation. Interestingly, the Articles include a fairly direct statement concerning God near the end of the document:

"And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in Congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union."

So it is pretty clear that the legislators of the time knew how to make a direct reference to God in a governing document. But when the delegates convened for the Constitutional Convention that resulted in the current U.S. Constitution, they didn't see fit to include any similar statement in their new document despite having clear guidelines as to how this would be done. God is, in fact, notably absent form the document unless one inserts God as the originator of the "blessings of Liberty" in the preamble, and as we have seen already, this is an assertion that runs counter to the Lockean leanings of the founders. This absence of God in the Constitution wasn't an oversight, but clearly a deliberate omission. Highlighting this, consider that the delegates had the question of God put in front of them pretty early on in the process when Benjamin Franklin (one of only six people to be present for the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution¹) proposed that the delegates open the Convention with a prayer suggesting that "henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business." The delegates not only did not adopt this proposal, they declined to even bring it to a vote, immediately adjourned for the day, and the subject was never raised again. One can only reasonably conclude after this incident that the absence of God from the text of the Constitution was not an oversight, but a purposeful omission.

And soon after the Constitution was implemented, the government made a strong statement that it was not founded as a Christian nation. The occasion was a peace and trade agreement between the United States and Muslim leaders in North Africa. The negotiations were conducted during the presidency of George Washington, and the final document, known as the Treaty of Tripoli, was approved by the Senate and signed by John Adams, the second president. This treaty clearly states that the ". . . Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion . . . ." In short, we have two of the founding fathers making a pretty strong statement that there is no religious foundation underpinning the structure of the Federal government. It seems fairly clear that recent attempts to suggest otherwise are simply wrong.

¹ The six men were: Robert Morris, Ben Franklin, George Clymer, James Wilson, George Read, and Roger Sherman.

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Biased Opinion - Cooks Source Just Doesn't Get It

I have written previously about how Judith Griggs and Cooks Source misappropriated Monica Gaudio's article about apple pies and then Mrs. Griggs responded to Mrs. Gaudio's justified complaints by misstating copyright law, making an apologetic for plagiarism, and an obnoxious claim that she had "improved" the article with her unasked for editing and deserved compensation for that. Well, as one might expect, the internet dropped on top of Cooks Source and Judith Griggs, quickly overwhelming their Facebook page, inundating their advertisers with requests that they withdraw their support for Cooks Source, and uncovering multiple, repeated cases of Cooks Source lifting articles from numerous other sources and republishing them without the copyright holders' consent. Through all this, Cooks Source maintained a stony silence.

Well, today they finally issues what they probably think is an apology. (Note: Cooks Source has taken down their original apology and replaced it with an even sleazier "woe-is-me and blame the victim" post. A blog post by Lisa Gold that preserves some of the original apology text can be found here, and a humorous "corrected" version of the original apology that preserves all the original text in a roundabout way can be found here). I would call it a "non-apology apology". As with everything else that Cooks Source has done in this fiasco, they have shown yet again that they just don't get it. First off, the "apology" starts with four whiny paragraphs about how persecuted Cooks Source has been. That's right, the first thing they do in their "apology" to Mrs. Gaudino is talk about themselves and their trials and tribulations for four long paragraphs, including an appeal for people to "Report Abuse" to Facebook for people who have contacted Cooks Source's former advertisers. I'm not sure how they think that the "Report Abuse" link works on Facebook, but I'm pretty sure that they don't understand it. of course, this is the same crew that asserted that people who were posting negative comments on Cooks Source's Facebook profile were "hackers", so they clearly don't have a clue about much of anything.

After talking about themselves for a couple hundred words, Cooks Source moves on to "apologize" to Mrs. Gaudino, claiming that taking her article without her permission was an "oversight" resulting from overworked staff. Of course, the fact that they have been shown to be serial copyright violators makes that claim ring pretty hollow. Then, they try to cover up the fact that they were caught red-handed stealing Mrs. Gaudino's property by saying, "Monica was given a clear credit for using her article within the publication, and has been paid in the way that she has requested to be paid." This is like a thief offering to pay for stealing something only after he has been caught. Further, Cooks Source only paid up after attempting to stiff arm Mrs. Gaudino by asserting they were allowed to misappropriate her work. When a bank robber offers to give the money he stole back after he's been arrested, he doesn't get any praise, and neither should Cooks Source.

Cooks Source then announces that it is going to change its practices and actually follow copyright law by only publishing work that the original author has given them the right to publish. Then they try to weasel out of even that level of commitment by saying that they have a small staff and cannot check on every article and do the minimum amount of legwork checking to see if they actually have the right to publish something that every professional in the publishing industry accepts as the standard. They close with a mealy mouthed paragraph of whining about how this has damaged their business and a self-serving moan about how this has harmed their readers, all without admitting that the reason that their business has been damaged and their readers supposedly harmed were Cooks Source's own unethical and illegal practices. Their whining on this score is a little like a man convicted of murdering his own mother and father complaining that the judge is heartless for sentencing an orphan to prison.

Cooks Source finally closes by telling everyone to leave Monica Gaudino alone, although there has been no report that I have seen of anyone bothering her. They say she "did what she felt was the right thing", which is a long way from what she actually did - she did what actually was the right thing, and was far more tolerant of Cooks Source's illegal, unethical, and obnoxious behavior than they had any right to expect.

The end result here is that Cooks Source clearly still doesn't understand that what they did was not only wrong, but that it wasn't even a borderline case. They misappropriated property belonging to someone else, and when they came asking for a very modest amount as compensation for their misdeeds, they rebuffed her rudely. And then when this became public and they suffered in the shitstorm they had created for themselves, they had (and still have) the temerity to try to claim that they are the martyred victim. Through all of this Mrs. Gaudino has remained classy, for which I commend her. Cooks Source, on the other hand, has demonstrated that not only are they a sleazy and clueless organization, that they truly deserve the moniker "Crooks Source" that has been stapled to their foreheads.

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Biased Opinion - A Senator Lies to You and Me

Look at the picture above. One of the two people in this picture is a public servant. The other is Senator Jeff DeMint, who is either a complete idiot, or a bald-faced liar. In this Meet the Press interview, he perpetuates a pile of complete untruths about the nature of the Federal deficit, and what must be done to balance the Federal budget. The short version is this: either Jeff DeMint is too stupid to understand the Federal budget (when debating and voting on said budget is a large portion of his fucking job), or he figures that you, me, and everyone else in the world simply won't call him out when he lies about it.

First he exposes a little bit of ignorance when says that raising the debt ceiling is like paying off your credit cards. It isn't. Raising the debt ceiling is like getting a raise on the limit on your credit card. The debt ceiling is, supposedly, a limit on the total amount that the Federal government can borrow. It is supposed to force Congress to exercise a little fiscal discipline by limiting the amount of debt the government can incur. But since Congress sets the debt ceiling and sets the budget, the reality is that the debt ceiling is more or less just a fictional number that gets moved when it is inconvenient for Congress.

This is really a minor peccadillo on DeMint's part. After misstating what the debt ceiling is, DeMint then says he won't vote to raise the debt ceiling unless that raise is accompanied by steps to reduce the deficit and move the budget into balance. And then things come apart for Senator DeMint. The major issue comes when interviewer Gregory David asks exactly how he proposes to reduce the deficit. He claims (among other things) that reducing Federal worker salaries and eliminating government waste will save "hundreds of billions of dollars". He says that we can do a lot of deficit reduction by cutting earmarks. He also says that there is no need to even think about making changes to social security, and proposes increasing the amount spent on medicare. This is all complete bullshit.

As I pointed out here, the non-defense discretionary budget is a relatively small proportion of total Federal spending. Even if you cut it all, the government would still run a deficit. The total cost of the civilian workforce for the Federal government is hard to estimate, since in addition to the salaries paid there are benefits to account for, which makes the calculations murky. I've seen a couple estimates, and the absolute highest I've seen is that in fiscal year 2010, the entire civilian workforce will cost about the Federal government about $260 billion. If you fired every Federal worker and reduced the amount spent on them to zero (you can't, a lot of benefits are for ongoing things like retirement benefits), you'd only save between about a fifth and a fourth of the total deficit. And that requires that you fire everyone. Including the President, every member of Congress, every federal judge, including all the Supreme Court justices, every FBI agent, every IRS agent (and if you fire them, who is going to collect the taxes to pay for everything anyway), every park ranger, every employee of the social security administration, every FDA food inspector, and, well, you get the idea. Just reducing the Federal workforce or cutting worker salaries would get you far less of a deficit reduction.¹ In the overall scheme of things, probably a comparatively trivial amount.

DeMint's other two areas for reducing spending - eliminating government waste and getting rid of earmarks, are too trivial to even consider. The 2010 budget contains about $50 billion in earmarks. Which sounds impressive, until you realize that this amounts to 1.4% of the Federal budget. Government "waste" is always touted as a way to save lots of money, but realistically these concerns are always overblown. If one is generous then maybe a similar amount of money is "wasted" as is spent on earmarks (and defining what is and is not waste is a very murky subject to begin with). Even if you assume you can eliminate earmarks and waste entirely, you're saving, maybe $100 billion. And that assumes you eliminate them entirely.

This also assumes that by not earmarking money, you aren't spending it. All an earmark really is is directed spending. If the government is going to spend, say $50 billion on new airplanes for the Air Force, and a Congressman earmarks $1 billion of that to be spent in his district, all that truly means is that $1 billion of the money has to be spent in that Congressman's district. Eliminating the earmark could mean that the $1 billion in spending is also eliminated, or it could just mean that the total amount to be spent is now at the discretion of the appropriate executive agency officials (in this case, that would probably be the Secretary of the Air Force).

So even in the most optimistic scenario for Senator DeMint, he's saved about $350 billion or so. And that's if he fires everyone, eliminates all waste, and cuts all spending currently intended on earmarks. That still leaves a deficit of about $700 billion. Obviously, even that much budget cutting cannot happen using DeMint's targets (the government couldn't function with no civilian workforce after all), so the best he can reasonably hope for would probably be something closer to $100 billion, and then only if he makes some pretty draconian cuts to the Federal workforce and the pay of Federal workers.  In which case, you've pretty much wrecked the economy of both Virginia and Maryland at least, because Federal workers do, in fact, spend their money where they live, feeding those dollars into the economy and helping fuel the prosperity of their region.

And you may have noticed that none of this gets us even close to making a dent of any real size in the $1.17 trillion deficit the Federal government is expected to run in fiscal year 2010.² The simple fact of the matter is that mandatory spending - social security, medicare, medicaid, interest on the debt, and so on, makes up 60% of Federal spending in a typical year. And as the Baby Boomers age and retire and begin collecting social security and claiming medicare benefits, the dollar total of benefits that the Federal government is obligated to pay is only going to grow. Unless we take serious steps in multiple areas, the budget will never be balanced. We have to, among other things, raise more revenue, cut benefits, and reduce defense spending to have any hope of achieving a balanced budget. And even then it will be questionable if it can be done. And blowhards like Senator DeMint spouting complete bullshit and lying to everyone isn't going to help matters any.

¹ For the record, the Federal government, in my self-interested experience, gets a great deal with respect to its employees. Yes, the average Federal worker gets paid more than the average non-Federal worker (although not anywhere near "twice what the average worker does"). We are also, on average, better educated and have more experience than our non-Federal counterparts. Anecdotally, I would make far more money in the private sector than I make as a Federal lawyer.

² The fiscal year for the Federal government runs from October 1 to September 30. Each fiscal year is designated by the year it starts in. So the fiscal year that started last month on October 1, 2010, which will run until September 30, 2011 is fiscal year 2010.

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Musical Monday - Arlington Rap by Remy Munasifi

This post is probably only going to be of interest to me and the relatively small number of people who have lived in, or are familiar with the Washington D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia. YouTube user GoRemy has crafted a clever video talking about what a tough neighborhood it is, titled Arlington Rap. Arlington, for those who do not know, is also where the George Mason University School of Law is located (I believe this is the "school of hard knocks" referred to in the video). Since I spent three years there, I spent quite a bit of time, as Remy says, "where the sidewalks are brick¹ and the streets are curved". What makes this video really, really funny is that it is pretty much 100% accurate.

So if you are ever in Arlington, you now know that you can go grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks, or the Starbucks, or the Starbucks, or the Starbucks, or the . . .

¹The sidewalks, buildings, free standing walls, and basically all other construction at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville are made from red brick. Everywhere else in Virginia that wants to seem classy pretty much imitates this architectural style.

Previous Musical Monday: A Wave of Reason by Symphony of Science

Subsequent Musical Monday: Fear the Boom and Bust by EconStories

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Review - The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Short review: All the heroes of legend share the same story. Maybe.

Haiku
In our ancient myths
All heroes are similar
Which is what Jung says

Full review: The Hero with a Thousand Faces is Joseph Campbell's magnum opus, and is probably most famous in popular culture as the work that George Lucas claims he used to craft the hero myth of the Star Wars series. The trouble with this assertion is that Campbell's "monomyth" is so over broad and generic that Lucas could have come up with almost any story featuring a heroic protagonist and it would have fit into Campbell's theory. The fact that the central thesis of the book is so completely pointless, coupled with an almost obsessive fascination with the somewhat less than convincing Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, seriously hampers the enjoyment and supposed insights to be derived from this book. The only truly saving grace of the book is Campbell's extensive references to a broad range of mythology to make his points, drawing some interesting parallels between the mythologies of disparate cultures, although they are parallels that simply don't serve to make his case.

Campbell was a leading figure in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion, and this fact is on display throughout this book. Campbell pulls myth stories from a wide variety of cultures and traditions, each intended to highlight some point or another. Those who are ardent followers of a particular faith may find Campbell's treatment of their faith's stories jarring, as he treats all religious stories, whether they be Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, or any other, as mere myths to be analyzed as creations of the human mind. Unfortunately, while Campbell was clearly an expert in mythology, he was also infatuated with Freud and Jung, and throughout the book he tries to shoehorn all of the stories into Jungian archetypes and subject them to Freudian psychoanalysis. Campbell also tries to use both Freud and Jung to draw parallels between the myth stories of older eras, and the unconscious dreams of modern men. Campbell's attempts to drawn parallels between a collection of dream case histories and a selection of events from various myths is particularly unconvincing when one realizes that for almost any event someone would dream about, one could find some story somewhere with which one could draw some sort of comparison. Whether this element of Campbell's book resonates with the reader is entirely dependent upon how one views Freud and Jung. As I don't find much of value in Freud's work, and am only marginally impressed with Jung, these comparisons in the book left me cold.

Campbell's main thesis is that all of the hero myths in human history are merely expressions of a single "monomyth" that transcends culture. The trouble is that Campbell achieves this "monomyth" by the simple expedient of including every possible variation into his definition. A hero is called to quest, does or does not accept, is or is not helped by a wise guide, is or is not granted supernatural aid, does or does not fight an enemy who may or may not have supernatural attributes, does or does not survive and does or does not return home. To dilute things even more, Campbell includes an array of other, sundry possibilities in order to be able to encompass as many mythological stories as possible. And yet, despite having crafted a thesis that appears to be so broad as to be almost meaningless, Campbell still has to stretch some of the stories he cites beyond all recognition to fit them under the umbrella. In short, most hero myths probably are part of the Campbellian monomyth simply because Campbell made the monomyth such a big tent that almost any story could fit under it. While this makes his thesis more or less true, it also makes it pretty much completely worthless.

The book is not, however, completely useless. Campbell is an expert on mythology, and his in-depth analysis of the wide array of mythological stories, symbols, and themes that are detailed in the book gives a good insight into these subjects that would be quite useful to a student of mythology or a storyteller. I have seen many people recommend this book to would-be writers, and I believe that this advice is probably good. However, I think that advice should also come with a warning that the monomyth itself is meaningless, but that the true value in the book is to be found in the way each story is individually dissected and analyzed. This analysis serves to illustrate why some stories seem to draw particular emotional reactions, and why others simply fall flat. While it would probably be a mistake to follow along with Campbell's suggestion that these emotional reactions are universal for humanity, within the particular cultures the stories are drawn from (when viewed through Campbell's lens), the reason the stories resonate with their intended audiences is, to a certain extent, explained by the discussions of the various myth stories detailed in the book.

The idea of a monomyth tying all hero stories together is an enticing one. It is easy to see how Campbell would generate this idea, and why he would spend so much time trying to demonstrate it. It is also easy to see how this idea has caught hold in the modern popular imagination, fueled by the declarations of an individual like George Lucas. The reality is, however, that the pieces just don't add up to the desired conclusion. As a demonstration of the truth of Campbell's monomyth thesis, this book is a failure. On the other hand, as a guide to some of the many types of hero myths that have cropped up in human history, this book is quite good. Overall, while the monomyth thesis and the psychoanalytic ramblings drag the book down, the presentation and analysis of mythology is strong enough to bring this book back up to average.

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Review - Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 34, No. 9 (September 2010) by Sheila Williams (editor)

Stories included:
The Sultan of the Clouds by Geoffrey A. Landis
Backlash by Nancy Fulda
Wheat Rust by Benjamin Crowell
The Palace in the Clouds by Eugene Mirabelli
For Want of a Nail by Mary Robinette Kowal

Poems included:
The Now We Almost Inhabit by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier
Egg Production by Ruth Berman

Special articles included:

Thought Experiments: The View from the Other Side - Science Fiction and Non-Western/Non-Anglophone Countries by Aliette de Bodard

Full review: I've noted numerous times that the various science fiction genre magazines often seem to have unannounced themes in them. The unannounced theme in the September 2010 issue of  Asimov's Science Fiction seems to be "hard science fiction stories", which is slightly unusual, because when compared to Analog, Asimov's usually tends to lean more towards the softer side of science fiction, and dabble in out and out fantasy. In this issue, however, almost every story is either clearly a hard science fiction story, or very close to one. Given this, coupled with the fact that the stories are all pretty good, the resulting issue is a superior one.

The issue starts off with a special article by Aliette de Bodard titled Thought Experiments: The View from the Other Side - Science Fiction and Non-Western/Non-Anglophone Countries that examines science fiction from outside the Anglosphere. It seems odd to describe a genre in which readers happily consume material written by American, English, or Australian authors with equal abandon (and in many cases, in complete ignorance of the nationality of the writer who penned the book they are reading). However, English speaking science fiction seems to have almost no room for authors from outside their sheltered sphere. In her article, de Bodard highlights the science fiction that has been produced outside the U.S., ranging from the long standing tradition of science fiction in Japan to that produced by Brazilian writers to the new interest in science fiction emerging in China and convincingly details why science fiction takes root in some areas and not in others. The article is full of insight into the nature of the history of the genre, and thought-provoking concerning the possible future.

This month's story featured on the cover artwork is The Sultan of the Clouds by Geoffrey A. Landis, and the first of the hard science stories features questions of terraforming, immeasurable wealth, some political machinations, some oppression and a little bit of romance. Set on a colonized Venus, and stuffed full of a heavy heaping of creativity, the story seems to have stemmed from someone posing Landis with the question of how humans could plausibly settle on Venus, and what might happen if they did. The story seems to be a throwback to some of the Arthur C. Clarke or Brian Aldiss stories in which projects to transform planets take place on a massive scale, but this story comes at the problem from the other end during the planning stage, and examines some of the somewhat less than altruistic reasons such a project might be started. It is, through and through, an excellent story.

Wheat Rust by Benjamin Crowell is the second hard science fiction story in the volume, set on a massive generation ship on which various primitive inhabitants are kept from technology (and even the knowledge that technology could exist) by beings that the ship inhabitants have mythologized as "builders". Into the bickering groups in the habitat drop a pair of space suited builders who first set off a political fight, and then set the reluctant protagonist in motion to combat the titular infection that threatens the food supplies of every inhabitant. The story is quite timely as wheat rust has reappeared as a threat to Earth's crops in reality, but unlike the characters in the story, we don't have more or less benevolent "builders" watching over us. One might not expect it from a story like this, but it is loaded with humor and sex which makes it flow by, and the end result is a pretty good story.

The final hard science fiction story in the issue, For Want of a Nail by Mary Robinette Kowal, is also set on a generation ship. In this case the story revolves around the attempts of the main character to repair her family's Artificial Intelligence after it has been dropped. The characters must struggle against their own ignorance, their normal reliance upon the A.I. to handle most tasks for them, and the unpleasant secret that is revealed as a result of the damage to the A.I. The story highlights how helpless humans can be if the technology they depend upon goes awry, and also contains a tragic story of how a person with power can abuse that power in their own self-interest, albeit perfectly understandable self-interest.

Backlash by Nancy Fulda breaks slightly from the hard science theme of the issue by introducing time travel into a story about espionage and terrorism, although the version of time travel described in the story is almost plausible. The protagonist, a retired secret operative, is delivered a botched message from the future and is sent to halt a terrorist plot that threatens to kill half of the city and in the longer term radically changes the government of the United States to a repressive dictatorship. His daughter, her boyfriend and his future wife all get involved while he simultaneously figures out a way to foil the terrorists and deal with the demons of the past. Almost unremarked on in the story is the method by which the potential for a time-travel paradox is resolved, although the characters do realize the tragic consequences of the effects that time travel has upon them. It is a well-done and action filled time-travel story.

The Palace in the Clouds by Eugene Mirabelli is a story reminiscent of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, hypothesizing an airborne Venice, suspended by massive white balloons floating among the clouds. The story is told from the perspective of a young boy let in on the secret of the Venice among the clouds, and intercut with historical background explaining how and why the city was built. The story is something of a fantasy even though nothing in the story actually breaks the laws of physics, and thus everything could be potentially plausible. The floating city is described as beautiful, and almost magical, which lends credence to the stubborn resistance the last inhabitants display, and makes one wish such a place actually existed. The story has a dreamlike and almost unreal quality the brilliantly conveys the image of the doomed drifting platform suspended in the clouds.

With one strong science fiction story after another, the September 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction is an excellent installment of the magazine. If the editors can keep the content of this magazine as consistently high in quality as in this issue, I will be a very happy subscriber. At the risk of sounding a little too eager, this is one of the best issues of Asimov's Science Fiction that has come out recently.

Note: This volume contains For Want of a Nail by Mary Robinette Kowal, the 2011 winner of the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and The Sultan of the Clouds by Geoffrey A. Landis, a 2011 nominee for the Hugo Award for Best Novella.

Previous issue reviewed: August 2010
Subsequent issue reviewed: October/November 2010

2010 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Bridesicle by Will McIntosh

2012 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story

2011 Hugo Award Nominees

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Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Vol. CXXX, No. 10 (October 2010) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
The Rift by John G. Hemry
Midwife Crisis by Dave Creek
The Great Galactic Ghoul by Allen M. Steele
Ghosts Come Home by Justin Stanchfield
The Whole Truth Witness by Kenneth Schneyer
The Alien at the Alamo by Arlan Andrews
Never Saw It Coming by Jerry Oltion

Science fact articles included:

Visit to the Forgotten Planet: What Scientists Are Learning as Messenger Prepares to Orbit Mercury by Richard A. Lovett

Poems included:
We Just Want to Dance by Mary A. Turzillo

Full review: The October 2010 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact is another strong issue of a consistently strong magazine. There is only one weak story in the issue, and it is only about four pages long. On the other hand, there are a couple of very good stories, and the remainder are pretty good as well. This is capped off with an interesting science fact article, and even a fun to read poem about dust devils on Mars by Mary A. Turzillo.

The opening story of the issue is the novella The Rift by John G. Hemry, a sort of Aliens inspired story about a military rescue mission sent to aid a scientific research installation that has been studying the supposedly peaceful alien inhabitants of the planet Imtep. The comparison to Aliens probably makes it seem more simplistic than it is, as the story itself revolves around a cultural misunderstanding between the oblivious humans and the aliens they are studying that leads to tragic consequences. The characters are fairly well-drawn, albeit somewhat stereotypical, and the plot is okay. The only real weakness of the story is that a reasonably astute reader will figure out the source of the cultural offense that set the story in motion. Even so, the Rourke's Drift style nature of the story makes for good reading.

Midwife Crisis by Dave Creek is a kind of reverse version of the Fantastic Voyage story. Instead of miniaturizing humans to fit inside of a normal human to perform surgery, a normal size human (accompanied by an aquatic alien) enters the body of a massive alien to try to help it deliver its unborn child. The story mixes in some genetic engineering, some cross-cultural conflicts, and some of medical science fiction to make a pretty decent story.

The Great Galactic Ghoul by Allen M. Steele is a hard science fiction story about a space rescue operation. The story covers the efforts of the rescuers and the ongoing scientific inquiry as to the source of the disaster against a background of speculation, much of it misinformed and half-baked. This element of the story seems to me to be a direct shot at goofball conspiracy theorists like the "9/11 Truthers", and as such it is pretty well-aimed. The story eventually establishes a very strongly supported rational explanation for the mysterious deaths of six people, but lunatic theories still abound, just like the lunatic "truthers", "birthers", moon-landing hoaxers, and so on. The science in the story is thorough, the mystery is interesting and well thought out, and the commentary is insightful, all of which adds up to a great story. Ghosts Come Home by Justin Stanchfield is another space rescue story, this time set further into the future and mixing in some interesting ideas about genetic engineering and human relationships. The story is well-done, and has a bittersweet conclusion that is still satisfying.

As a lawyer, I was fairly impressed by The Whole Truth Witness by Kenneth Schneyer, a somewhat humorous science fiction story set in a future in which some people have undergone a procedure that is supposed to make it impossible for them to lie. The protagonist, a lawyer having to deal with cases involving such witnesses on the other side is forced to figure out a way to in a case in the face of effectively incontrovertible testimony. The solution is quite creative (and probably a little unethical) which is in line with the humorous nature of the story, although I saw a number of other avenues of attack available to the protagonist that could have been used that would have fit into a more seriously inclined story that examined the impact of such technology on the legal system.

The Alien at the Alamo by Arlan Andrews is a very short and fairly silly story about a man who comes into contact with an alien at the Alamo in Texas. The alien makes a fairly classic comparison between alien and human intelligence (one that showed up in Babylon 5 in G'Kar's mouth) and tests human perception. The whole story is more or less a set-up for a final punch line though, and the punch-line is pretty cliched, which makes the story less than interesting in the end. Also fairly humorous, and touching on the theme of how difficult it is to get bad information out of circulation, is Never Saw It Coming by Jerry Oltion, focused on an amateur astronomer who finds a previously unknown asteroid and accidentally (at first) and intentionally (later) starts a world-wide panic. The story is a well-crafted send up of the science illiteracy and hysteria that permeates much of the media. It is a fairly light-hearted story, so all ends well, but the story is quite fun all the way through.

The science fact article in the issue is Visit to the Forgotten Planet: What Scientists Are Learning as Messenger Prepares to Orbit Mercury by Richard A. Lovett, a discussion of the history and future of the exploration of the planet Mercury. After giving an overview of the past and current efforts to explore the planet, Lovett discusses some of the interesting features that have been uncovered and that scientists hope will be more fully explained by the MESSENGER probe. The article, which serves to bring attention to the "forgotten planet" is quite interesting, and should serve as fodder for some decent fiction stories.

Analog has a well-deserved reputation as a magazine that delivers high-quality science fiction stories, and this issue lives up to that reputation. The Great Galactic Ghoul is probably the best story in the issue, but as a lawyer I have a soft spot for The Whole Truth Witness. However, with the exception of The Alien at the Alamo, every story in this issue is well-worth reading, and Alamo is at least mildly amusing. Consequently, this issue is strongly recommended for any science fiction fan.

Previous issue reviewed: September 2010
Subsequent issue reviewed: November 2010

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Biased Opinion - Cooks Source, Judith Griggs, and Copyright

Well, another case of copyright ignorance has become the talk of the Internet. Apparently, a writer named Monica Gaudio wrote an interesting article about some early apple pie recipes titled A Tale of Two Tarts and posted it on the website Gode Cookery. Later, without asking, and without compensating her, the magazine Cooks Source decided to put her article in their publication. When Mrs. Gaudo contacted them and asked for an apology and some minor compensation, the magazine's managing editor responded with one of the most ignorant and obnoxious responses possible.

"But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me . . . ALWAYS for free!"

Managing editor Judith Griggs manages to misstate copyright law, serves up an attempted apologetic for plagiarism, misunderstands the very nature of the article she stole by saying it needed editing, and has the gall to ask for Ms. Gaudo to pay for the fact that her article was misappropriated. Given this level of ignorant stupidity, Judith Griggs is a woman who has no business working as an editor, or in any other profession in which she isn't carefully supervised. After attempting to take the nice route, I seriously hope Mrs. Gaudo sues Cooks Source for statutory copyright damages and winds up in front of a judge that awards enough damages to put them out of business.

For anyone who does not know, material that is posted to the internet is not public domain. (Actually the term "public domain" drives one of my copyright lawyer friends up the wall. As she points out, "public domain" is not a term that appears in the copyright lexicon. There are works subject to copyright protection, and there are works that are not.) You do not actually have to post a copyright notice for copyright protection to attach to your work, although if you do, at least under U.S. law, you gain some additional legal protections, like the right to sue for statutory damages if your work is infringed. Copyright applies to works of authorship, which includes pictures, sculpture, writing, dance choreography, music, movies, plays, and pretty much every other expression of the artistic mind. Copyright protection attaches to an artistic work of authorship as soon as it is "fixed in a perceivable form". What does "fixed in a perceivable form" mean? Well, it means that the work has been put into a form that others can observe - by being, among other things, painted, written, printed, stored in computer memory, or yes, put onto the internet. This means that Griggs is, quite simply, dead wrong about copyright as it relates to the internet. Publishing something on the internet makes it immediately subject to copyright protection, whether the author puts a notice to that effect or not. In fact, posting something on the internet is often the "fixing in a perceivable form" that makes the contents of the post subject to copyright protection.

(For the record, all of the writing that appears in this blog is copyrighted to me. Any elements that are not copyrighted to me are used for criticism or commentary pursuant to the provisions of 17 U.S.C. § 107).

And it appears that Cooks Source is a serial offender when it comes to misappropriating the work of other people. They appear to have stolen articles from NPR, Food Network, Martha Stewart, and WebMD among others. And someone has conveniently compiled an ongoing list of articles stolen by Cooks Source. The people at Cooks Source seem to have no shame, no ethics, and no conscience. Here's to hoping that they close their thieving doors soon, and everyone associated with this crooked magazine finds themselves unemployed and unemployable.

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Biased Opinion - Marsha Blackburn and the Federal Budget

Last night, as the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives and pared down the Democratic majority in the Senate, Chris Matthews interviewed Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn about how to balance the budget. And Mrs. Blackburn quickly demonstrated that she has no fucking clue concerning the nature of the Federal budget. Either that, or she does understand the Federal budget, and considers Matthews, Maddow, and you and me simply too stupid to see through her bullshit. She first states that we must keep the tax reductions and repeal the Health Care bill, and then when asked how she would balance the budget that she would endorse "across the board" spending cuts.

And then she runs right off the rails.

Matthews asks if this means she is prepared to cut social security, medicare, defense spending and so on. Blackburn immediately backtracks saying that she meant across the board discretionary spending cuts, but that discretionary spending does not include defense spending. At this point, Blackburn has excluded almost all of Federal spending from her definition of "across the board" spending cuts. Some people might be confused by this, but the fact is that in the Federal budget request for the 2009-2010 fiscal year "mandatory spending" (which covers social security, medicare, medicaid, interest on the national debt, and other mandatory entitlement programs such as food stamps) accounts for sixty-one percent (61%) of total Federal spending. Of the remaining thirty-nine percent of federal spending that constituted "discretionary spending", the Department of Defense accounts for just under half of that (48% of discretionary spending), or about eighteen point six percent (18.6%) of total Federal spending. The rest of the government, the part that Blackburn says she'd advocate as candidates for "across the board" spending cuts amounts to just a touch more than twenty percent (20%) of federal spending.

Now before we go on, stop and think about this for a minute. Everything the Federal government does that is not social security, medicare, medicaid, interest on the debt, or defense spending amounts to about 20% of the total amount of money the Federal government spends in a typical year. That includes the Departments of Justice, State, Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, Transportation, Interior, Treasury, Labor, HUD, HHS Homeland Security, and Education, plus NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration, the administrative costs of running the Social Security Administration, and pretty much everything else falls into that 20%. And before someone runs out and starts talking about how much the TARP funds have cost us, the 2009-2010 budget request includes no spending on TARP.

(Just for the record, the budget for NASA amounts to 0.5% of Federal spending in the 2009-2010 budget request. The budget for the National Science Foundation amounts to 0.2% of Federal spending. We spend almost nothing on science in this country).

And even if you cut the budget for all of those agencies to zero, the U.S. would still run a deficit. In 2010, the Federal government estimates it will have receipts of $2.381 trillion (income taxes, social security taxes, corporate taxes, excise taxes, customs duties, and estate and gift taxes for the most part). The total Federal outlays are projected to be $3.552 trillion. This leaves a total deficit of $1.171 trillion. Non-defense discretionary spending in the 2010 budget request amounts to about $704 billion. So, exactly how does Mrs. Blackburn propose to make even a remote dent in the deficit by means of her targeted cuts? (You cannot exclude so much of the budget and credibly call them "across the board"). Either she is shockingly ignorant of the Federal budget, which is inexcusable for a sitting member of Congress, or she thinks we are too stupid to understand that she is spouting bullshit, which is offensive in the extreme.

At this point I'd like to point out the difference between the Federal deficit and the Federal debt. The Federal deficit is how much money the Federal government spends over the amount it brings in during a single year. The Federal debt is the total amount that the Federal government owes overall. While the 2009-2010 Federal deficit is currently projected to be a mammoth $1.171 trillion, the total Federal debt as of October 2010 is a gargantuan $13.6 trillion, more than thirteen times the current deficit. (For comparison purposes, the total gross domestic product of the United States is about $14.3 trillion).

We simply cannot hope to balance the budget by nibbling at the margins like this. It simply cannot be done unless we decide to seriously tackle the question of mandatory spending. And by that I mean addressing the cost of programs like social security, medicare, and medicaid, which make up the lion's share of mandatory spending. We are going to have to take real steps - raising the retirement age, means testing social security, reducing benefits and so on and serious spending cuts in the Department of Defense as well as other areas if we want to have any hope of ever balancing the budget. And we may need to raise more revenue to boot. Mrs. Blackburn claims she wants to have an "adult conversation" about balancing the budget, but then resorts to childish attempts to deflect the conversation from where it needs to be. This is where the adult conversation needs to start. At the current rate, the Federal debt is projected to reach $20 trillion by 2015. The Federal government, at some point, will be unable to borrow money any more.

This is not a question of ideology, or economic models, or party allegiance. This is simple math. We have to get our financial house in order, and quite simply, I don't think that either of the major political parties is prepared to even consider doing what needs to be done in order to accomplish that.

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Review - Khan: Empire of Silver - A Novel of the Khan Empire by Conn Iggulden

Short review: Ogedai's health fails him while Tsubodai and Genghis' grandsons wage war in Eastern Europe.

Haiku
Ogedai now rules
Builds a city, then he dies
Sparks dynastic fight

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Khan: Empire of Silver - A Novel of the Khan Empire is set during the transitional period during the reign of the now mostly forgotten Ogedai Khan, third son and heir of Genghis, between the death of Genghis Khan and the brutal internecine struggle that led to the ascendancy of Mongke Khan. Having swept across most of Central Asia and China during Genghis' lifetime, the Mongols have to set about the more difficult task of ruling an empire, a task that seems to be as agonizing and transformative for the Mongols as it is for their subject nations. In Khan: Empire of Silver, Iggulden ties together the progressing civilizing of the Mongol elite, the vicious military campaigns that led the Mongol warriors to the banks of the Danube, and the complex web of familial relationships that dominated Mongol politics and ultimately proved to be the undoing of their Empire.

Though, as one would expect in a novel that covers the entire breadth of an empire that spans all of Asia, there is a large cast of characters, in a sense, the personal stories of the two central characters of Ogedai and Tsubodai are symbolic of the changes that are taking place in the Mongol nation as a whole. Ogedai, whose power is consolidated as he completes his massive city of Karakorum and cements his position as ruling Khan in the first segment of the book, is also afflicted with personal infirmities that ultimately result in the sacrifice of his own brother Tolui, and an increasing dependence upon those around him to conduct the daily business of exerting his tremendous power. Eventually Ogedai becomes dependent upon others just to stay alive. This seems to reflect the growing pains of the Mongol Empire, which has ascended to the pinnacle of power, dominating all those it has encountered, but has been forced to make a bloody sacrifice of its own people to do so, and, over the course of the book, becomes increasingly dependent upon outsiders to run their vast holdings. The descendants of Genghis are in the driver's seat, but while the Mongol warriors ride through the hardships of winter campaigning in Russia, Chinese bureaucrats assume positions of power within the halls of Karakorum.

And Karakorum itself, built at Ogedai's order in the middle of nowhere at vast expense, is symbolic of the changes thrust upon the Mongols accompanying their position perched atop the world stage. Despite the disdain of many of the older cadre of leaders who had been in Genghis' inner circle, the fundamental truth comes through that ruling over an empire requires that one accept the burdens of civilization as well, because without them, it is impossible to actually rule, as opposed to merely engage in despoiling raids. But the Mongols, a people comprised of nomadic herdsman with a supreme talent for warfare, don't have the skills necessary to build a civilization. So the city that serves as their capital is designed by foreign architects, built by foreign craftsmen, and populated by foreign artisans and merchants while the Mongols themselves live in vast camps outside the city and then journey away to wars in distant lands. Though he does not come out directly and say it, it seems that one point Iggulden is attempting to make is that by becoming so specialized as a war making machine, the Mongol nation has ended up ruling over a hollow empire: they provide the military might, but the empire is run by, and much of the benefits derived by others. In this context, the much touted Mongolian tolerance for the faiths and customs of their subject peoples seems not so much like an act of magnanimous generosity so much as an act of necessary self-interest.

And this is reflected in the story surrounding Tsubodai, whose brilliant and brutal thrust through Russia and into the Balkans dominates the third and final section of the book. Iggulden shows the cunning stratagems employed by Tsubodai to outwit and outmaneuver his enemies, and the utter ruthlessness he employs, driving his forces to fight in the harsh cold of the Russian winter so as to be able to use the frozen rivers as highways leading directly into his foe's towns and cities, and the viciousness with which Tsubodai and his soldiers dispatch those enemies who dare to stand against them. But the larger story is that no matter how brilliant his military maneuvers are, the world is changing around him, represented in the story by the accumulation of Genghis' grandsons Batu, Guyuk, Baidur, and Mongke, all of whom travel with his army and technically outrank him. Sweeping one's enemies before you and gaining glory in battle, while still valued (as this is the reason why so many of Gengis' heirs accompany Tsubodai on his western campaign), clearly takes a secondary position behind jockeying for political advantage. While Tsubodai's skill leading an army to victory is unmatched, he is smart enough to see that his particular set of talents is becoming less and less central to the plans of Genghis' heirs although this realization both galls and chafes him.

This transformation is reflected time and again in the book as the old guard slowly fades away, and is replaced by a collection of new leaders more interested in securing their position within the Empire than in expanding its dominions. The aging warriors are felled by sickness, as with Khasar and Kaichuin, or by subterfuge as with Temuge and Chagatai. It seems symbolic that Temuge's attempt at royal assassination is foiled by a pair of women and a Chinese servant. It seems even more symbolic that while Chagatai's bid for power in the first section of the book involved the massing of thousands of soldiers and a bloody nighttime assault upon the bedchamber of his rival, his own downfall in the final stages of the book is accomplished via subtle intrigue and a kirpan dagger. Having conquered an empire, the Mongols had begun to turn on themselves in pursuit of personal gain. The story of the Mongols to this point had been the story of wars against others, from this point on the story of the Mongols would be dominated by wars against themselves, a point that comes through clearly in the latter stages of Iggulden's book.

The book reaches its climax with Tsubodai's campaign into Hungary that led to his most famous battle in which he defeated and destroyed the Hungarian army led by King Bela in 1241 AD. Instead of following up on this victory and leading the Mongol army to Vienna and into western Europe, the news of the death of Ogedai turns the Horde back to the East, so the Mongolian princes may secure their positions in the new ruling order. In the end, Iggulden adds an author's note in which he states that had Ogedai not died when he did, that western Europe would almost certainly have been overwhelmed and all of the subsequent development of western culture would have been swept away, a position that seems to be a fairly common one. It seems to me that this was not such a foregone conclusion - and the way the historical events are portrayed in the book suggest that as well. That the Mongols could have conquered the Holy Roman Empire, France, and possibly England as well as the rest of western Europe seems to be well within the realm of possibility (and has driven plot lines in several other books, such as Ben Bova's Orion), but they were far from home, and had endured numerous campaigns in which they fought and maneuvered in harsh winter conditions, depleting their ranks and weakening the survivors. Just as Alexander's men rebelled when he came to the borders of India, it seems that at some point the Mongol warriors would have reached the end of their own endurance. One also has to wonder about the ability of the Mongols to subdue western Europe given the historical resilience of the western states - if the Romans were able to recover from the disaster at Cannae within months, would it be outside the realm of possibility for the states of western Europe to recover from the same sort of dismemberment suffered by the eastern European armies? Finally, the increasing influence of Chinese officials in the eastern part of the Mongol Empire suggests that even if the Mongols had conquered western Europe and suppressed any rebellious impulses, that control over the levers of power would have wound up back in the hands of European officials within a generation. But Ogedai did die in 1241, and the Horde turned back as a result, so these are questions that will never be resolved.

Putting aside my idle historical speculation one is left with the fact that Iggulden has delivered a very good piece of fiction rooted in solid historical fact. Of course, the historical record is incomplete and Iggulden has had to fill in the gaps, but he does so in ways that enhance the story, and remain well within the realm of possibility. Iggulden is able to being the panoply of historical figures to life and give them motivations such that when they take actions in the story that match their actual historical actions it seems natural and not forced, deftly avoiding a trap that some historical fiction falls into. As this is the story of the Mongols, the mechanics of warfare and battle are heavily featured and both the skill of the Mongol warriors and generals is highlighted, as well as their vicious ferocity and ruthless character. Effectively combining strong character development, thrilling battle sequences, court intrigue, and historical scholarship that shows the deadly growing pains of a vast empire, Iggulden has crafted an excellent and enjoyable piece of historical fiction.

Previous book in the series: Genghis: Bones of the Hills

Subsequent book in the series: Conqueror: A Novel of Kublai Khan

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Random Thought - Go See My Mother's Artwork

No science fiction or fantasy in this post. My mother is an amazing artist and an art student at George Mason University. Click over and take a look at my mother's online art gallery. I hope you will enjoy it.

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Musical Monday - A Wave of Reason by Symphony of Science

James Randi

YouTube user melodysheep has created another excellent autotuned song extolling the wonders of science. This installment is titled Wave of Reason, and focuses on science as a process of reason that is becoming the dominant mode of thought in the world. While I agree that science and reason are the best way of understanding the world that humanity has come up with, I'm not as optimistic as the scientists in the video given the pervasive push to have bullshit like creationism and intelligent design taught to children as if this sort of pseudo-science junk was based on anything remotely resembling reality. Perhaps it is best to view this video as aspirational - a vision of what the world should be like, regardless of whether it actually is like that now.

The video features Carl Sagan, the author of Cosmos, Bertrand Russell, the author of The Problems of Philosophy, Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith, Michael Shermer, the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, Lawrence Krauss, the author of Fear of Physics, Carolyn Porco, the author of Women Astronomers: Carolyn Porco, Richard Dawkins, the author of The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Feynman, the author of Six Easy Pieces, Phil Plait, the author of Bad Astronomy, and James Randi, the author of The Faith Healers.

This song is unavailable on Amazon, but you can acquire it for free (or a donation of your choosing) on the Symphony of Science Collector's Edition.

Previous Musical Monday: The Case for Mars by Symphony of Science

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Arlington Rap by Remy Munasifi

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Review - Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book Five: The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

Short review: Kronos wants to destroy Olympus, which would mean the end of Western Civilization. Percy Jackson wants to save it. The Gods are busy elsewhere. Does anyone think Kronos wins?

Haiku
Olympians busy
For the Titanomachy
Demigods defend

Full review: As one might expect, all of the hanging plot threads, character issues, and conflicts left over from the previous books featuring Percy Jackson all culminate in The Last Olympian, the final volume of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. While many series experience something of a let down in their final act, as the author struggles to bring his carefully laid plots to a satisfying conclusion, happily The Last Olympian avoids this problem and finishes off this excellent young adult series with a strong story and in a manner that is both unpredictable and yet fully in character for all the participants.

Following the attack on Camp Half-Blood in The Battle of the Labyrinth (read review), Kronos had retired to rally his forces, but also set various plans in motion. After an awkward interlude with plot complication Rachel Dare, the book opens with Percy, along with the demigod Beckendorf (a child of Hephaestus), heading off to try to destroy Kronos' cruise ship of the damned and weaken the forces of the Titans. Although the series has had its share of lethal consequences before - Bianca di Angelo's death, Daedalus' death, and so on - the book signals that things will be getting rough for the final act when Beckendorf meets his end a scant handful of pages into the story.

And the action only accelerates from there. With most of the Olympian gods away to fight the released monster Typhon, and Poseidon defending his undersea kingdom from the forces of the titan Oceanus, Percy and the other inhabitants of Camp Half-Blood are called upon to defend Mount Olympus itself (actually, Manhattan) from Kornos' main forces, including a variety of monsters, disaffected demigods, and several titans (including Prometheus). The demigods are aided by various allied creatures, such as the Party Ponies, the Hunters of Artemis, and various nature spirits, but they are wildly outnumbered. Their position is made even more untenable with the revelation that there is a spy among the supposedly loyal demigods of Camp Half-Blood, and the fact that the entire Ares contingent refuses to fight as a result of feeling snubbed.

Which brings up one of the interesting questions that is more or less unanswered in the book, namely why would anyone remain loyal to the Olympian gods? Riordan presents them in a modern context, with their attributes given a contemporary twist, but keeps them by and large true to their mythologically established personalities. And to the modern eye, the mythological personalities of the Olympian gods are fairly distasteful. They are petty, childish, mostly uncaring of the harm they might cause, and generally indifferent to anything that is not of immediate interest. In this context, and with the additional character background provided in this volume, not only does Luke's turn against the Olympian gods become understandable, one begins to wonder why those who are loyal have remained so. In short, the disaffected demigods and minor gods seem to have a much better basis for choosing Kronos' side than the demigods have for choosing to side with Zeus. Interestingly, Prometheus also turns against the gods in this go round (having supported the Olympian gods in the first Titanomachy), which for those who understand the myth centered on him, seems unsurprising, and is yet another example of the arbitrary and cruel nature of the Olympian gods. But the interesting element here is that the character of Prometheus, who the myths say brought man learning and knowledge, is much more in line with what one would describe as Western civilization than the traditional Olympian gods. Given that Mount Olympus is supposed to be located in the "Heart of the West", and the power of the Olympian gods is supposed to underpin Western civilization, this is an interesting (and probably unintentional) contradiction.

Philosophical contradictions aside, the meat of the book is in the fight for control of Manhattan. And the action in the fight comes fast and furious. Just about every character that has entered the story before gets a chance to shine in the fight, even a couple characters that in previous books died get a nod here, notably Daedalus whose creations Annabeth is able to turn to the side of the demigods in a sequence that adds some much needed levity to the otherwise fairly dark story. As noted elsewhere, the demigods in the Percy Jackson series display a level of power that seems more in line with comic book superheroes than the demigods of Greek legend, a fact which comes in to play in the battle. Ramping up the powers of the demigods is probably the only thing that makes the battle even plausible, as one would expect that Jason, Achilles, and Theseus, a heroic as they are in their myths, would have a hard time standing against one or two monsters, let alone the hundreds that swarm Manhattan's defenders in this story. After many twists and turns, eventually everything leads up to a big showdown with Kronos, and the prophecy that had been hanging over most of the series must finally be fulfilled, and it is, although not in the way that one might expect. In the end, it falls to Percy to convince his father to choose the strategic option though it costs him a tactical defeat. Percy must also rectify the troubles caused by the Olympians own personalities by compelling the Olympians to behave in a more civilized manner than they have in the past. One might question whether a sixteen year old boy, even one who has experienced the incredible highs and lows that Percy Jackson has, could have anything to say that divine beings would need to hear. But since Riordan has kept the capricious and almost cruel nature of the Olympian gods intact as part of his fantasy milieu, the lecture Percy delivers at the close of the second Titanomachy seems to fit the story perfectly and caps off the story with a strong finish.

Overall, this is a strong finish to a very good young adult fantasy series. Despite the generally upbeat ending, Riordan weaves in a fair amount of sadness, as many of the heroic characters who have populated this fantasy world fall in the fight to save Olympus from destruction, and others find themselves at the end of their road having won, but having to face their own disappointments. The very final pages resolve the romantic conundrum of the series, but also serve as a potential springboard for a follow-up series, as the newly installed Oracle announces a new prophecy. But with only that hanging thread left, the story otherwise runs to a very satisfying conclusion and serves as an excellent final act to a fun and engaging series of books.

Previous book in the series: The Battle of the Labyrinth.

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