Gun-fondlers reach a new low

There exists a real group of gun nuts who virtue-signal to each other by posting photos of themselves holding guns to their crotches — loaded guns. I’m not sure why. It seems to violate basic principles of gun safety, for one thing.

The predictable event has occurred: one of these happy-go-lucky twits has shot himself in the testicles. Before you read the link, ask yourself what lesson the gun-ballers should take from this, and how the other participants in the “game” should respond. If you want to guess right, begin by assuming these people are already colossal idiots.

Yes. They made the victim of the self-inflicted wound the president of the group. After all, he shot himself in the balls with a .45, so he’s clearly presidential material. Very American. I am so proud to be a member of this species.

You have two things to look forward to this weekend

It’ll be my last weekend before classes come crashing down on my head, so I’m going to take advantage of it.

Skepticon starts tomorrow! Tune in!

I’m looking forward to this as well: Lovecraft Country airs on Sunday!

It’s a great book, and it looks like HBO is doing right by it. There’s a write-up in the LA Times about that horrible racist, HP Lovecraft, and why he is surprisingly popular.

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

“He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.”

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?

This is not a conspiracy theory

The sitting president of the United States is scheming to steal the next election. This ought to be on the top of our minds as we are all looking forward to exercising our democratic rights, that just as Congress has stood by unwilling (rather, actively participated in the corruption) to act as the executive branch goes wild and as the judicial branch has been poisoned for a generation, Donald Trump is looking at the polls, seeing his only option is cheating.

The US Postal Service has issued a warning that they can’t make the delivery schedule for ballots in two states, so far.

The U.S. Postal Service has warned at least two states — Washington and the battleground state of Pennsylvania — that some mail-in ballots are at risk of not being delivered on time to be counted in the November general election because the states’ deadlines are too tight for its “delivery standards.”

Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of USPS, expressed the agency’s concern regarding this “mismatch” in two separate letters to Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, and Kim Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state. The Philadelphia Inquirer was the first to report on the letters, which were dated July 29 and July 31, respectively.

Marshall warned in the letters that some of the states’ deadlines concerning mail-in ballots were “incongruous” and “incompatible” with the Postal Service’s delivery standards. “This mismatch,” he wrote, “creates a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted under your laws as we understand them.”

Trump has openly declared that he won’t support mechanisms to allow continued voting during the pandemic.

President Trump on Thursday said he opposes both election aid for states and an emergency bailout for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, putting at risk the nation’s ability to administer the Nov. 3 elections.

Trump has been attacking mail balloting and the integrity of the vote for months, but his latest broadside makes explicit his intent to stand in the way of urgently needed money to help state and local officials administer elections during the coronavirus pandemic. With nearly 180 million Americans eligible to vote by mail, the president’s actions could usher in widespread delays, long lines and voter disenfranchisement this fall, voting rights advocates said.

Trump said his purpose is to prevent Democrats from expanding mail-balloting, which he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud. The president has also previously admitted that he believes mail voting would allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates, including himself.

He’s doing this in plain sight. He is brazenly opposing free and fair elections because he knows he would be deposed.

What are we going to do about it?

I remember the helplessness when the Supreme Court handed a presidential election to George W. Bush — we all let it happen because we had faith in the rule of law and democratic institutions. That faith is gone now, completely demolished by the actions of the Republican party and the passivity of the Democrats. Now we have a president who intends to deny huge numbers of people the right to vote, all because a fair election would damage his evil party.

What are we going to do about it when the rule of law fails?

Finally, a reporter asks a necessary question

That’s S.V. Dáte, of the Huffington Post. When will the rest of those reporters get that kind of spine?

By the way, Trump is now Just Asking Questions about Kamala Harris’s eligibility to run for office. We knew that would be coming: she’s black, she’s a woman, she can’t possibly be qualified. Screw Newsweek for thinking this was an issue worth raising.

Hey, Donald Trump keeps blithering about his Scot and German ancestry. I think we need to consider the possibility that he’s a foreign agent.

Trump is already interfering in the election

We just voted by mail in the Minnesota elections, but it may be more difficult in November: Trump is openly trying to suppress votes.

President Trump says the U.S. Postal Service is incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because it cannot access the emergency funding he is blocking, and made clear that requests for additional aid were nonstarters in coronavirus relief negotiations.

Trump, who has been railing against mail-in balloting for months, said the cash-strapped agency’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.” Speaking Wednesday at his daily pandemic news briefing, Trump said he would not approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs.

The only reason it’s “cash-strapped” is that Republicans have been ham-stringing the postal service for decades, and now they’re preparing to simply destroy the whole institution so they can rig the vote. They really hate democracy, don’t they?

Never go back in time to read old books

Things change. You change. You can never go back again. Over the last few months, I’ve been on a time-travel reading jag, and I revisited some books I haven’t looked at in at least 30 or 40 years, and sheesh, was I disappointed. I guess my lesson is that if ever I do manage to travel backwards in time, I shouldn’t do it, because everything old just sucked.

First up, Hawksbill Station, by Robert Silverberg. It was published in 1968, and it shows. Hawksbill Station is a penal colony in the Cambrian, time-travel is one-way so you’ll never get home again, and the government was casting all the hippie-type “revolutionaries” there. Silverberg has some odd ideas about what 60s era protesters did; his protagonist reminisces about casually raping women (no, that’s not what he’s being punished for) and how his apartment was “stacked with sprawling exhausted naked females”. There are no women in the story — the powers that be keep men in separate penal colonies, separated by millions of years — so Silverberg doesn’t have to write any women characters. Nothing really happens in the story, except that they eventually learn that two-way time travel has been perfected. It’s a time-travel story that doesn’t actually use the time-travel concept, and could have instead been set in a prison in the middle of the Pacific or the Sahara, so I was disappointed that there wasn’t even the slightest attempt to pursue the magic of seeing what the Cambrian was actually like. It was ploddingly written, too, and was a slog to get through, even though it’s short.

Please, please, please, if you’re going to write a story about going back to a distant time, use the time period. That’s the whole point!

I thought the next one would have to be better: Mastodonia, by Clifford Simak. I have more respect for Simak as a writer than I do Silverberg, but again, he makes the same mistake. In this one, a semi-retired professor and his archaeologist girlfriend have bought a farm in Wisconsin that has a mysterious crater on the property — it’s the site of an ancient spaceship crash. Their time-travel method is a bit of a reach. One of the aliens survived, and has been living there all this time, and it has the power to open time-tunnels to anywhere in the past. The magic alien is just an arbitrary gimmick to give them time-travel capability, but otherwise that particular aspect of the story goes nowhere.

But hey, it starts out fun! The protagonist accidentally stumbles into one of the time-tunnels, and sees a herd of mastodons before stumbling back. This is where I’d expect a professor-type to be excited about the ability to study the past, and a host of ideas to light up behind his eyes — at least, that’s what would happen to me. But no. No, not at all.

They start trying to figure out how to get rich off this discovery. Most of the novel is taken up with the pair jetting about the country trying to set up lucrative deals to use the time-tunnels. Primarily, they make arrangements with a safari company to send rich clients back to the Cretaceous with elephant guns to shoot dinosaurs. There are no ethical concerns expressed. There is no consideration of what one could actually learn from the Mesozoic. Nope, it’s all wheelin’ and dealin’, and complaining about how the IRS was going to take their money and how terrible it was that the government was stepping in to regulate their business when one expedition of rich fucks gets eaten by a pack of giant carnivores.

Jesus. Capitalism really does ruin everything. It certainly made this book boring.

Now I’m thinking that there are few good books about time-travel. One exception is Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick. Most of the story is about the machinations of the people who police time-travel, but it gets one thing supremely right, the wonder and awe of scientists who actually get to sample the biology of the past. They recruit researchers by just showing up at their lab with a small dinosaur head in a cooler, and that’s enough to get them excited and whip out their scalpels, to start drooling over the possibility. They have conferences on dinosaur systematics, physiology, and anatomy! That rings true. Swanwick actually captures how his protagonists would think.

Another exception is The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, which I consider the very best time-travel novel ever written. This one isn’t focused on the science, though, but will instead appeal to anyone who fantasizes about using a time machine to explore 19th century literary history. Come on, you know we all want to have a conversation with Lord Byron and Keats, right? It does get a little (OK, a lot) twisty with a plot about trying to achieve immortality via a body-jumping magical werewolf, but at least in that one the rich capitalist is most definitely the bad guy.

Have you got a favorite time-travel story? My primary conclusion isn’t that time-travel is a terrible premise for a novel, but that any SF novel written before about 1980 has a high probability of being total crap. Prove me wrong.