New Science Fiction Release — Wrath of Leviathan

Our new release, The Wrath of Leviathan, by T.C. Weber, is now available. It’s book 2 of the cyberpunk BetterWorld trilogy, and is available as a physical book and also as ePub, Mobi, and PDF e-books. Set against a background of an even more repressive security-state USA, with monopolization of the media by a manipulative megacorporation, MediaCorp (think Fox and Facebook combined and on steroids), The Wrath of Leviathan continues the tale of a group of hackers and activists who’ve resorted to illegality to break the stranglehold of the government and MediaCorp on the communications and political systems, and who are being hounded mercilessly and murderously as a result.

The first book of the trilogy, Sleep State Interrupt, was a nominee for the 2017 Compton Crook Award for Best First Science Fiction Novel.

If you’re a reviewer or blogger, review e-copies of both Sleep State Interrupt and Wrath of Leviathan are now available via NetGalley.

The final book of the trilogy, Zero-Day Rising, is scheduled for publication in 2019.

Why I Deleted My Facebook Account, and Why You Should Delete Yours

About ten years ago I set up a Facebook account purely in order to get back in touch with old friends I’d lost touch with. Mission accomplished.

After that, I left the account to moulder, but for very occasional interactions with those old friends.

Now it’s time to terminate that account. And I’d urge you to do the same.

Why?

• Facebook has poisoned political discourse in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world.

How?

There are three primary ways it’s done this:

• Facebook feeds you “news” you already agree with. This aggravates problems with both under-informed leftist and rightist subscribers in that it reinforces established, irrational views. Facebook for the most part doesn’t expose or challenge already established ignorant viewpoints. It reinforces them.
• Facebook promotes a “let’s you and him fight” attitude by thrusting into your face the most obnoxious opinions opposed to yours. That drives engagement (time spent on Facebook). It’ll raise your blood pressure, leave you depressed, will leave no one convinced of the rightness of your viewpoint — and increase your time spent on Facebook.
• Facebook encourages people to think they’re informed, no matter how crazy the views it pushes at them. To put this another way, other than being spoon fed crazy conspiracy theories, how could the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist have gone in guns blazing?

Beyond that:

• Facebook is a “walled garden” controlled by self-interested oligarchs, the exact opposite of the “open Internet” a lot of us were hoping for two decades ago. The Facebook oligarchs harvest and sell your/our data, and their purchasers use that data to sell us things we don’t need and politicians and political movements we really don’t need.

And beyond that:

• Facebook is the ideal means for repressive governments to spy on citizens. This goes beyond direct surveillance — very easy via Facebook — to the set-up of honey traps to ensnare political opponents. “Black Lives Matter”? (They do.) The FBI (in all probability) and Russians (certainly) have set up fake “black lives matter” accounts to lure political dissidents, mislead them, and track them.

Then there’s the obvious:

• Facebook is a huge time suck, and wasting time on it will not only pour your precious time down the drain but will waste the time you could use to do something — anything — more useful.

And after that, for the few who want to use Facebook to good ends:

• Almost any other means of online organizing (see vpn, TOR browser) is safer than Facebook.

Here’s a link to how to deactivate or delete your Facebook account. I hope you’ll do either.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/how-to-delete-facebook-account-2950145

I’m now free of the near unmitigated evil of Facebook.

Please join me.

Again, your choice: family photos, cat videos, and enabling those who exploit and oppress you, or a temporary minor inconvenience. Your choice.

(There’s a great new book on the topic, Antisocial Media, that I’ll review here shortly. More details when I do so. Please stay tuned.)

 

 

4th of July Report: Trump’s America and Hitler’s Germany

(We ran two earlier, considerably shorter versions of this post in years past under the title “Nazi Germany and the U.S.A.” As you might have noticed, things have changed a bit lately, hence this update.)

* * *

REFERENCES TO FASCISM abound in American political discourse. Unfortunately, most of those using the term wouldn’t recognize fascism if it bit ’em on the butt, and use it as a catch-all pejorative for anything or anyone they dislike. But the term does have a specific meaning.

Very briefly, as exemplified in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, fascism is an extreme right-wing, phony-populist ideology and political-economic system (which Mussolini dubbed “the corporate state”), the key features of which are strident nationalism, militarism and military worship, a one-party state, a dictatorial leader with a personality cult, a capitalist economic system integrated with state institutions (to the mutual benefit of capitalists and fascist politicians), suppression of independent unions, government use of media as a propaganda instrument, suppression of civil liberties and all forms of political opposition, and an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy.

The racism, racial scapegoating, and racial persecution that permeated German fascism are not part of fascism per se, unless one wants to classify extreme nationalism as racism. There’s a case to be made for that, but for now let’s consider them as separate maladies. But since the topic of this post is the comparison of Nazi Germany to the U.S.A., we will consider racism as well as fascism in the following comparisons.

Getting to the headline topic, just how similar is the present-day U.S. to Nazi Germany? Let’s look at specifics:

 

Nationalism

• Nazi Germany: See Deutschland Uber Alles, Triumph of the Will, Lebensraum, etc., etc.
• US.: “American exceptionalism,” “God Bless America,” “Manifest Destiny,” “Make America Great Again,” etc., etc. From ideological justification for invasions, territorial annexations, and military interventions to everyday trivialities (Nazi armbands in Deutschland, flag worship in “the land of the free”), America gives Nazi Germany a run for its money as regards nationalism.

Corporate Capitalist Domination

• Nazi Germany: The German industrialists (notably the Krup armaments company) were key Hitler backers, and benefited handsomely from his rule.
• U.S.: Trump has filled his cabinet with people from the fossil fuels industry (e.g., Rex Tillerson, former head of ExxonMobil) and big banks, notably Goldman Sachs (Steven Mnuchin, et al.); Obama’s primary 2008 backers were Wall Street firms and the pharmaceutical companies; Bush/Cheney’s were the energy companies.

Of late, Trump’s slavishness to the interests of the big corporations has become blindingly obvious with his dismantling of clean air and water regulations (which safeguard public health while impeding corporate profits), his attempts to open millions of acres of federal lands (including national monuments) to desecration by mining and fossil fuels corporations, his (and other Republicans’) attempts to restrict access to Medicaid, to allow the insurance industry to discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions, and his refusal to do anything about the obscene price of prescription drugs and the obscene profits of the drug companies. (Trump’s “plan” to reduce drug costs was complete bullshit designed only to string along the gullible while providing cover for the continued gouging of the public by big pharma. The fact that pharma stocks spiked immediately after Trump released the details of his “plan” tells you all you need to know about it.)

Militarism

• Nazi Germany: The Nazis constructed the world’s most powerful military in six years (1933-1939).
• U.S.: Last year, U.S. military spending accounted for approximately 43% of the world’s military spending, and the U.S. has hundreds of military bases overseas. With the aid of his accomplices in Congress, Trump just boosted the “defense” budget to approximately $700 billion, not including the tens of billions in the “black budget.” The figures aren’t final yet, but it’s a good bet that current U.S. military spending not only considerably outstrips any other nation’s (China’s is hard to judge because of secrecy, but may be as high as $250 billion), but could quite possibly now account for a full half of the world’s military spending.

Military Worship

• Nazi Germany: Do I really need to cite examples?
• U.S.: “Support our troops!” “Our heroes!” “Thank you for your service!”

Military worship is almost a state religion in the United States. Tune in to almost any baseball broadcast for abundant examples; this worship even extends to those on what passes for the left in the United States: Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow.

Military Aggression

• Nazi Germany: “Lebensraum” — you know the rest.
• U.S.: To cite only examples from the last half-century where there were significant numbers of “boots on the ground,” Vietnam (1959-1973), the Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia (1970), Grenada (1983), Panama (1988-1990), Kuwait/Iraq (1991), Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraq (2003-2011). And this doesn’t even include bombing campaigns and drone warfare. Then there’s the matter of proxy aggression enabled via logistical and intelligence support by the U.S. The most horrific current example is the brutal Saudi intervention in the Yemeni civil war.

Misuse and Misrepresentation of Science

• The Nazis suppressed “Jewish science,” financially supported and sponsored fringe pseudoscience (into the supposed superiority of Aryans, among other things), and based government policy (including the Holocaust)  on that fringe pseudoscience. They mutilated science to force it to fit into the procrustean bed of their ideology, and millions died as a result.
• U.S.: Here, the misleading “science” is supplied by the major corporations and their bought-and-paid-for “scientists,” who denigrate real science while promoting corporate-sponsored studies that promote corporate interests. Prominent examples include the efforts of the tobacco, pesticide, and sugar industries to present their deadly products as safe while vilifying scientists whose research demonstrated the actual effects of their products. Tens of millions have almost certainly died as a result.

Currently, the most serious such assault on science is corporate-funded climate change denial. It’s been obvious for decades that climate change is real and a deadly threat, and over 95% of climate scientists agree — and have agreed for decades — that it is. Yet the fossil fuels corporations have funded and promoted the work of a very few contrarians (whose work doesn’t, upon examination, hold up) to cast doubt on climate change science so that they can wring every last dollar from coal, oil, and natural gas.

Now, official U.S. policy is based on climate change denial pseudoscience. Trump has filled his administration with science deniers, especially climate change deniers, notably Scott Pruitt at the EPA, who are busy undoing clean air and water regulations, are doing their best to promote use of dirty fossil fuels, and are discouraging the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Trump has even proposed public subsidies for money-losing coal-fired power plants that utilities are planning to close.

As in Nazi Germany, government policy is based on willful ignorance of science. Millions upon millions will almost certainly die as a result, unless the government drastically reverses its course and implements evidence-based policies based on the work of climate scientists.

(For more on all this, see Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science [revised & expanded], by John Grant. Full disclosure: See Sharp Press published Corrupted Science.)

Incarceration and Slave Labor

• Nazi Germany: The Nazis built concentration camps holding (and exterminating) millions, and employing slave labor.
• U.S.: In comparison, the U.S. has by far the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, far outstripping China, with only Russia’s incarceration rate being anywhere near that of the U.S. Slave labor is routine in America’s prisons.

Justice System

• Nazi Germany: The Nazis had a three-tiered “justice” system: one for the rich and powerful (who could get away with virtually anything); a second for the average citizen; a third for despised minorities and political foes.
• U.S.: There’s also three-tiered “justice” system here: one for the rich and powerful (who can get away with virtually anything); a second for middle-class white people; and a third for almost everyone else.

Obama’s “Justice” Department never even investigated the largest financial fraud in world history that led to the 2008 crash, let alone charged those responsible. Prosecutors routinely pile on charges against average citizens to blackmail them into plea bargaining and pleading guilty to charges of which they’re not guilty; it’s no accident that America’s prisons are filled with poor people, especially blacks and hispanics who can’t afford bail and good legal representation; at the same time cops routinely get away with murder of blacks, hispanics, and poor whites.

Suppression of Unions

• Nazi Germany: In Nazi Germany, the government tightly controlled the unions, and used them as arms of the state.
• U.S.: In the U.S., the government merely suppresses strikes when “in the national interest” and allows corporations to crush union organizing drives through intimidation and by firing anyone who dares to attempt to organize.  Of late, the Supremes have further crippled the unions by outlawing the collection of fees from nonmembers who the unions represent in collective bargaining. (Admittedly, the sell-out, hierarchical, visionless AFL-CIO unions bear considerable responsibility for this sad state of affairs.)

Free Speech

• Nazi Germany: Total suppression of free speech; direct government control of the media.
• U.S.: There’s near total corporate control of the media, and suppression of free speech when it shows the faintest sign of threatening, or even embarrassing, the government or the corporations that control the government. The Obama and Trump administrations have viciously gone after whistleblowers and reporters who have exposed their wrongdoing — Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, James Risen, Reality Winner, et al.

Trump routinely attacks journalists who report anything even slightly embarrassing to him, or who point out any of his almost innumerable lies. Of late, he’s upped the ante by attacking the press as the “enemy of the American people” in a transparent attempt to intimidate the press and provoke the anger of his worshippers.

As well, Trump routinely lies about damn near everything, great and small — Politifact clasifies 69% of his statements as being “mostly false” or worse — counting on the fact that the press (e.g., New York Times) is reluctant to label his lies as lies, allowing Trump to muddy the waters and mislead the public.

Fortunately, Trump doesn’t have complete control of the media. But he does have the sycophantic tools at Fox “News,” Breitbart, InfoWars, and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber. Almost worse, 67% of Americans get at least some of their news from social media sites such as Facebook, with an unknown percentage getting all of their news from these platforms (predominantly Facebook). What makes this dangerous is that Facebook feeds them news reports that, based on their previous “likes” and other use, reinforces their existing beliefs and prejudices.

Add that to Trump’s denigration of the free press and you end up with a significant part of the population that’s woefully misinformed.

Other Civil Liberties

• Nazi Germany: Total suppression.
• U.S.: Suppression when individuals exercising those liberties show the faintest sign of threatening the government or the corporations that control the government. The coordinated suppression (by the FBI, local governments, and corporate security agencies) of the Occupy Wall Street Movement nationwide in 2011/2012 is the latest large-scale example.

Spying Upon Citizens

• Nazi Germany: The government had a massive eavesdropping operation. No citizen was safe from government scrutiny.
• U.S.: The FBI, DHS, and NSA — and let’s not forget Facebook — make the Nazis look like amateurs.

Free Elections

• Nazi Germany: Total suppression
• U.S.: U.S. citizens have the opportunity to vote for the millionaire and billionaire representatives (over half of Congress at last count, plus the president) of the two wings of the property party: one wing being authoritarian, corporate-servant, science-denying theofascists, the other wing being merely authoritarian corporate servants who routinely betray those who elect them. As well, the Republicans are doing their best to destroy what passes for American electoral democracy through egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression on an industrial scale.

Racism

• Nazi Germany: Do I even need to cite details?
• U.S.: (We’ll restrict ourselves here to the present.) The “justice” system imprisons blacks at a rate over five times that of whites, and hispanics at a rate about 30% higher than whites. Cops routinely get away with murdering poor people, a disproportionate number of them blacks and hispanics. Median household wealth for whites is 13 times that of blacks. And median household income for whites is 60% higher than that of blacks and hispanics.

As well, the Republican Party’s longtime “southern strategy” — and its largely successful attempts to disenfranchise black voters — was and still is designed to appeal to racists.

Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric and racial scapegoating of Mexicans and other hispanics is merely the cherry atop this merde sundae.

Victimhood

• Nazi Germany: Hitler and the Nazis whined constantly about the German people being victims of the Jews (under 1% of the population at the time) and the supposedly vast Jewish conspiracy permeating all facets of social and economic life, even depicting Jewish people in propaganda films as vermin: rats. In short, Hitler stirred up hatred of a powerless minority by presenting them as victimizers rather than victims.
• U.S.: Trump whines constantly about an “invasion” of Latin American immigrants — fleeing horrific violence and political and social repression — who he portrays as rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and gang members endangering the nation through a supposed crime wave. (In reality, per capita criminal activity by Latin American immigrants is lower than that of Americans as a whole.)  In short, Trump stirs up hatred of a powerless minority by presenting them as victimizers rather than victims.

Personality Cult

• Nazi Germany: Again, do I even need to cite details?
• U.S.A.: Trump worship is rampant on the evangelical right, who see this steaming pile of viciousness, hypocrisy, and narcissism as the means to their theofascist ends. And Trump encourages such sycophancy. The cringe-inducing filmed cabinet meeting last year in which cabinet secretaries heaped fulsome (in both senses of the word) praise and thanks on the dear leader is but one example. Another example: Last July presidential aide and Trump toady Steven Miller said on Fox “News” that Trump — who would likely flunk a fourth-grade English test — was the “best orator to hold that office [president] in generations.” All hail the Glorious Leader.

 

Yes, there still are significant differences between Nazi Germany and the U.S.A.  But they grow smaller with every passing day.

Review: Bandwidth, by Eliot Peper

(Bandwidth, by Eliot Peper. 47 North, 2018, 252 pp., $24.95)

reviewed by Zeke Teflon

(Warning: This review contains mild spoilers concerning the first two dozen or so pages of the book.)

In recent years, the beer mega corporations have been buying up independent small breweries. They’re continuing to use the small breweries’ names as marketing tools while avoiding disclosure of the relationship of the formerly independent breweries with the conglomerates. The list of fake craft brands includes Ballast Point, Breckenridge, Kona, Pyramid, Redhook. . . . . The list goes on.

Now this trend has reached the publishing industry in perhaps even worse form. Meet 47 North.

When I picked up Bandwidth and saw the 47 North logo and name, I said “Ah! another small press publishing science fiction! Haven’t seen this before!” Then, after I finished the book and was preparing to write this review, I looked at the fine print on the copyright page. It read in part, “Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47 North are trademarks of Amazon.com Inc. or its affiliates.”

So, we’ve now reached the point where we not only have fake craft breweries, but also fake small presses. (Yes, I know, traditional large publishing houses — almost all bought up in recent years by media conglomerates — have imprints, but Amazon is not a traditional publisher: it’s now vertically integrated in its bookselling/publishing arm, and seems to be attempting to achieve a monopoly in the bookselling trade. It’s already close, selling approximately 50% of all print books in the U.S. and 70% of e-books.)

As well, Amazon (following in the steps of the chain bookstores) has been largely responsible for the decimation of American independent bookstores over the last two decades, and has also been an absolute disaster for small presses. (The reasons for this are too complicated to go into in this review, however you can read more about the damage Amazon does to small publishers here and here.)

So, what to do about a book published by one of the tentacles of this octopus? To review or not to review? (Not coincidentally, U.S. independent bookstores almost across the board refuse to carry books published by Amazon.)

Unfortunately, I liked Bandwidth and don’t want to hold the publisher against the author, so . . . . .

Bandwidth is a near-future techno-thriller whose primary character, Dag Calhoun, is a highly placed lobbyist for sale to anyone with the money to buy. Those with the cash include fossil-fuels corporations engaged in climate-change denial, and The Feed, a world-spanning company that has subsumed Facebook, Google, and to a large extent the Internet itself, and to which almost all people are connected 24 hours a day.

While on a lobbying assignment in Mexico City, Dag meets a mysterious woman, and shortly after is shocked to find that someone has total access to his Feed and its archives, including information that could send him and his clients to prison.

From there, he goes on a quest to find the woman who he suspects is the one responsible for the data breach.

The remainder of the book revolves around Dag’s search, how Facebook-like entities can be used to shape perceptions and even personalities, the character transformation Dag undergoes — he’s initially very unlikable — while on his quest, climate change, climate-change denial, and especially whether the ends, no matter how high minded, ever justify the means.

Peper comes down on the right side of this question in Bandwidth, which makes his choice of a publisher highly ironic. It would have been hard for him to find a more evil means of conveying his message that the ends never justify the means. If he was conscious of the damage Amazon has done, and is continuing to do, to independent bookstores and small presses, his choice of Amazon as a publisher was quite hypocritical.

Authors, however, are often amazingly oblivious to the workings of the bookselling and book publishing industries, so it’s entirely possible that Peper wasn’t aware of how toxic Amazon is to the book trade, small publishers, and ultimately the authors those small presses publish.

Despite the clear contradiction between Bandwidth‘s noble message and its odious means of delivery, I do recommend the book.

* * *

Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia (pdf sample here). He’s currently working on the sequel, two translations, a nonfiction book, two compilations, and an unrelated sci-fi novel in his copious free time.

 

 

 

 

Time once again for Interesting and Marginally Useful Internet Crap

It’s been a while since we put up an installment in our ongoing “interesting an marginally useful internet crap” series. Well, wait no more. Hold onto your hats and enjoy. We’ll start with the mind-bogglingly sick:

• Let’s says you’re a religious organization with a history and ongoing problem of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. How do you deal with it? Well, the first step is easy: you continue to present yourself as a paragon of virtue, the ultimate moral authority. But beyond that? If you’re the Catholic Church, you transfer the problem to another parish. If you’re evangelical, you forgive the transgressor and welcome him back (and keep sending him “prayer offerings” or voting for him) as long as he says he repents — never mind his actually doing anything about his transgressions. (Among innumerable examples, see former U.S. Senator David “Diaper Man” Vitter and Jim “Weasel Jesus” Bakker.)
• But what do you do about abuse if you’re the squeaky clean Mormon Church? Let’s say your clergy (in most cases bishops) get requests from wives for counseling about violent physical abuse from their husbands? What to do? If you’re a Mormon bishop, the answer is obvious: tell the women that the abuse is their fault, that they should stay in the abusive relationship, and that if they leave they’re risking their eternal salvation.
• Speaking of creepy things Mormon, it’s a normal practice in that church for grown men, Mormon bishops, in one-on-one “worthiness” interviews, to grill and shame prepubescent and pubescent boys and girls about their sexual fantasies and masturbation. Lately, victims of this abuse have recorded some of these disgusting sessions and have then taken the recordings to a Mormon whistleblower site, Protect LDS Children, where they’ve been posted online. The Mormon hierarchy’s response? Are they ending this horrible, abusive practice? Nope, far from it: they tried to get the Utah legislature to change the state’s wiretapping law so as to prohibit the recording of the invasive interviews.
• And while we’re on the topic of disgusting things . . . Donald Trump. (Apologies to Steven Colbert for stealing that joke.) Trump famously bragged that he could kill someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it. We’d go further: Donald Trump could strangle a dog and then sodomize its corpse on national TV, and his followers would praise him for it, speaking admiringly of how “out of the box” and what a “different kind of president” he is. So, even though Trump’s minions seem immune to reason and allergic to objective reality — in fact, they seem proud of being willfully ignorant — if you have friends or relatives who are Trump supporters but don’t yet have that glassy-eyed, thousand-yard stare, you might point them in the direction of “101 Ways Donald Trump has Betrayed his Populist Agenda.”
• As well, James Risen, the former New York Times journalist Obama’s “justice” department came close to jailing in Obama’s anti-whistleblower jihad, has a lengthy, highly detailed and well worth reading series on The Intercept titled, “Is Donald Trump a Traitor?“
• While we’re on the topic of assholes, Deadspin recently put out its annual post compiled from emergency room reports, “What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?“
• In the “please, please, tell me this isn’t true” category, a right-wing Swiss politician, Daniel Regli, has blamed gay suicides on “incontinence due to weakened anal muscles” rather than on homophobia, discrimination, and gay bashings.
• We can’t think of a good transition to this one, so we’ll just say that for once an Onion piece is not only amusing but has useful and timely information: how to delete your Facebook account.
• If you’d like some good news (yes, there actually is some), TechXplore has a short article explaining energy-source economics, “Fossil fuels blown away by wind in cost terms“; the piece also covers photovoltaics in addition to wind.
• Finally, every now and then a news item just makes you want to smile. The BBC recently published such an item: “South African lions eat ‘poacher’, leaving only his head.” The BBC quotes Limpopo police spokesman Moatshe Ngoepe as saying of the victim, whose head was found next to a loaded hunting rifle, “They ate his body, almost all of it, leaving only his head and some remains.”

And, other than saying Bon appetit! . . . Th . . . Th . . . Th . . . Th . . . Th . . . Th . . . That’s all folks!

Quote of the Day 5-28-16 (Peter Sunde, co-founder Pirate Bay, on Facebook)

“Facebook is the biggest nation in the world and we have a dictator, if you look at it from a democracy standpoint, Mark Zuckerberg is a dictator. I did not elect him. He sets the rules. . . . And really you can’t opt out of Facebook. I’m not on Facebook but there are a lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates from my friends, people stop talking to you, because you’re not on Facebook. So it has real life implications.”

–Peter Sunde at the NextWeb conference on 5-27-16

(on why so many people–myself included–find Facebook repugnant: it’s a “closed garden” with “tenders” accountable to no one; it’s the opposite of the “open Internet” we were hoping for in the ‘net’s early days)