Category: Other Writing

Does Russia Have Any Functional Nukes?

Thunderf00t—who I don’t always agree with or necessarily like—makes an excellent point around the 18 minute mark in this video. The jist of it is this: nuclear weapons are fragile as hell and expensive to maintain (to the tune of ~$1 million per year). If not properly cared for, they don’t kaBOOOOM!🤯 and Chernobyl us all to Mad Max land. Instead, they look perfectly fine and useful, but when you go to launch them, they fizzle like damp firecrackers (albeit damp firecrackers that can spread radiation; but still, while awful, a dirty bomb is not a nuclear bomb).

Russia is a first-order corrupt kleptocracy, as demonstrated by their current Ukrainian misadventure. If they haven’t been maintaining the cheap and easy stuff (like tanks), then they sure as hell aren’t maintaining the expensive stuff that’s hard to spot check for compliance (like nukes).

(Honestly, the whole video makes a series of inter-nesting excellent points, and is worth watching. The major thrust is that there are a lot of dogwhistles blowing out there, signaling who is and is not an actual nuclear superpower.)

famous ∧ children’s author ∧ British ⇒ antisemite

From Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic (1896):

A picture of the “examples” (presumably of syllogisms) on page 109 of Lewis Carroll’s “Symbolic Logic” (1896). The examples read as follows: #19 A prudent man shuns hyaenas; No banker is imprudent. No banker fails to shun hyaenas. #20 All wasps are unfriendly; No puppies are unfriendly. Puppies are not wasps. #21 No Jews are honest; Some Gentiles are rich. Some rich people are dishonest.

POSIT: IF you are a famous children’s author AND you are British THEN you are an antisemite.

(cf. Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling, this asshat, probably Rudyard Kipling, etc.)

As an aside, the fact that Carroll (who came from a family of high-church Anglicans and took holy orders) wrote #21 tends to give credence to #20: All W.A.S.Ps are unfriendly.

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: “This Place is Best Shunned” made the 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List/Ballot

My novelette “This Place is Best Shunned” made the 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List/Ballot. (Story is free-to-read online, linked from the list.)

Voting on the Locus Award is open to all. Ballot deadline is April 15, and you may come back and add to or change your votes anytime until then.

banner graphic reads "2022 Recommended Reading"

RECOMMENDED READ “Mister Ice Cold” by Gahan Wilson

RECOMMENDED READ “Mister Ice Cold” by Gahan Wilson

I first read this when I was 12—already an avid reader of OMNI, the 100% perfect magazine for my adolescent Mysteries of the Unknown pre-X-Files brain—and it changed my world:

The chant-like repetition!

The onomatopoeia!

The unheimlich at its core, the disconcerting flesh it shows peeking through the drowsy mundane skin of the midwestern suburbs (where I myself lived)–stumbling across this story was like like bitting into an orange that turns out to be full of blood-moist teeth and a Chinese fortune.

The goddamned art!!! 

Art from "Mister Ice Cold" by Gahan Wilson (originally published in Omni magazine #139, April, 1990) caption reads: Mister Ice Cold never opens the bottom right door in the back of his truck.

The second person?!

In many ways it was exactly the sort of story I’d always want to write forever after.  “In the Sharing Place” is warped by the enormous gravity of this story–and especially its art–forever looming large just below the horizon of my brain. 

(Incidentally, if you wanna read “In the Sharing Place” right now, $3 Patreon Patrons get instant access to the story, audiobook, and 40-minute analog horror film versions.)

And, predictably, it was Ellen Datlow (esteemed editor of the Best Horror of the Year anthologies) who commissioned “Mister Ice Cold” and put it in OMNI—and thus into the hands of a 12-year-old kid outside Detroit who really should have been practicing his Torah portion, not up late reading a slick from the drugstore.

GahanWilson-MisterIceCold-OMNI-139-Apr1990Download

A reminder of why I (a nominally White Jew) love MLK

Brief reflections on MLK Day from a younger me:

“Dr. Martin Luther King, the Eight Commandments, and Bending the Arc of History”

Remember: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice—provided that we get up every morning and put our weight towards bending that mutherfucker. It ain’t gonna bend on its own.

BURIED LEDE ALERT: Japanese monkeys ride deer like ponies?!? (for Flashback Friday)

You may recall this brief news item from 2017, about “adolescent female monkeys in Japan engaging in sexual behaviors with adult deer”:

(Aside: Is anyone else weirded out that the deer always look at the camera? That doesn’t seem like happenstance. Like… is it… is it part of the kink for them? ’cause that makes me sorta feel… like, I don’t want to be made a part of this without my consent. That’s all I’m saying. I do not consent to this.)

What may have slipped past you was this parenthetical toss-off from the first—and least sensationalistic—mainstream coverage: “Scientists Say Japanese Monkeys Are Having ‘Sexual Interactions’ With Deer” (Thanks, NPR!)

Japanese macaques are known to ride deer like humans ride horses, for fun or transportation — behavior the deer seem to tolerate in exchange for grooming and discarded food.

So, just an FYI: Japanese monkeys are in the midst of domesticating deer—you know, for fun, or transportation, or (as we did before them) to increase their travel range and capacity to haul loads.  Loads, like, I dunno, the lifeless bodies of the defenseless denizens of Tokyo, after marauding teen-nympho sex monkeys start raiding that once grand metropolis, charging in under cover of night astride their deer consorts, cutting us down, smashing our skulls, and feasting on the goo within!!!  IT’S IN REVELATIONS, PEOPLE!!!

Anyway, point being there are are only two ways this story ends, and neither of them is good. Our future is either this:

or this:

(first posted back in Dec 2017; lightly revised since. no updates on macaque progress toward world domination)

Don’t know why, but this image disturbs the hell out of me

I can’t swim, so the ocean is baseline scary for me, but man, there’s something about this lonely planet bouncing around out in the middle of a sunless sea that—and the very notion of an entire planet that’s less dense than water—the whole thing gives me the… 🥶💀 yikes! Creep City!

(And it doesn’t help that Saturn is watching us, and probably planning to devour us as well.)