Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 167
July 3, 2014
Irish Stew #31…
Item: Politics and futbol…. I use the Spanish spelling here because the U.S. is the only country in the world where football doesn’t mean soccer. We have American and Canadian football, NCAA and pro football, tackle and touch football, and arena football, all variations of a game unrelated to soccer (it’s more related to rugby). Futbol’s World Cup, like the Olympics, is an international festival of sport where patriotism can be displayed, flags waved, and bragging rights gained without much v...
July 2, 2014
Review of Beverly Garside’s I and You…
(Beverly Garside, I and You, 2013, CreateSpace, 978-1492187424)
How delicious satire is when it’s well done! Irish have it in their DNA—just look at Shaw, Wilde, Swift, and others who have skewered the British elites—so I love satire even though I can’t write it well. Political satire, of course, is generally hated by the satirized and loved by those who agree with it. In this book, you’ll find political satire that is hilarious in its best moments and at least enjoyable in its worst, unless y...
July 1, 2014
The enemy of my enemy is my friend?
Much U.S. foreign policy follows this dogma. Now Obama wants $500 million—that’s point five billion, in American’s crazy accounting—to help out the Syrian rebels. Not only is this a 180-degree turn in policy with respect to the civil war there, it’s a bad mistake. Clearly, Obama is trying to appease hawks in Congress who accuse him of dropping the ball in Iraq—oh yes, the old neocon contingent is piping up there too—and maybe trying to do something in a situation where there is no easy soluti...
June 26, 2014
What’s with this denial of global warming?
John Stuart pointed it out. Ignoring all the crude jokes and spiffy graphics, he talked about four ex-EPA leaders serving four different Republican presidents (all the way back to Reagan) stating before Congress that global warming is a problem we MUST solve. Those weren’t the exact words, but that’s the idea. It was amusing to hear this, of course, coming from Republican mouths that usually “speak with a forked tongue” (maybe all the good old white boys that stole land from Native Americans...
June 24, 2014
Stay out of Iraq!
I’ve probably established my counter terrorism credentials in this blog. I think terrorists are the scum of the Earth and shouldn’t even be treated like human beings because they’re fanatical, psychopathic murderers. That said, the title of this post might seem contradictory. Counter terrorism isn’t a good reason to return to Iraq. The reasons for staying out are crystal clear, in fact. First, Iraq is embroiled in a civil war. I don’t care how much oil and natural gas they produce or could pr...
June 20, 2014
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #67…
#385: Hanging up Steve’s shorts. I hope you’ve enjoyed the free short stories found in the series “What Happened to Those Characters?” I’d been planning this for a while, but believe me when I say it’s not easy to come up with a new story every week. I’d venture to say it’s more difficult than NaNoWriMo, but I’ve never done that—of course, people who have probably haven’t written that many short stories in that amount of time either. I’m crazy and they’re crazy, but sometimes you have to chal...
June 19, 2014
The inverse Casimir effect in politics…
First, some physics. The Casimir effect is an electromagnetic phenomenon. You can interpret it multiple ways, as the consequence of van der Waals forces, the polarization of the QED vacuum, or the result of random zero-point EM field fluctuations. The observed physical phenomena: two conducting plates will attract in a vacuum all by their lonesome. It’s named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir.
Because your eyes might have already glazed over, I’ll get to the point: what’s happening in...
June 18, 2014
What Happened to those Characters? Forced Retirement (Jing-Wei Liu)
[This is the ninth and last installment in a series of short stories titled “What Happened to Those Characters?”. (It’s the last until next fall, at least.) Each one revisits a character or characters from one of my novels and takes a peek at what happened later. Today it’s Jing-Wei Liu from Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder. In software, you always have another bug; in writing, there’s always another edit to make. Somehow Rafael Ortiz, NYPD Detective Chen’s old partner, of the “Detective...
June 17, 2014
Why does the GOP have a problem with immigration?
The pundits claim that one reason Eric Cantor lost in his conservative Virginia safe haven was that his opponent is more anti-immigration reform and the voters there loved that. How do we explain the GOP-dominated House’s problems associated with reforming immigration? The Virginia results give the answer, at least in that district: GOP voters hate immigrants.
That answer is too simple, though, so we must probe deeper into the dark corners of GOP leaders’ thoughts. They pander to their constit...
June 13, 2014
Movie Reviews #4…
#11: Tricked. Although it’s Friday the 13th, there’s nothing supernatural here. Far from it. As Michael Moore points out (he’s a bit biased, of course), documentaries just aren’t shown in theaters anymore (our loss). So, every year, I look forward to seeing some of the best in our Montclair Film Festival. Tricked caught my attention this year, maybe because it provided valuable background material for my new novel The Collector (scheduled for release later this year—an excerpt is in Aristocra...
