Now reading

The Legacies of Betrayal anthology (Graham McNeill, editor) from the simply upbeat Warhammer 40K blokes at Black Library/Games Workshop, who decided to add the phrase "let the galaxy burn" under the main title in case you didn't quite get the point.

Stay trendy and dumb, and the money will roll right in

It's not just that Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP empire has expanded to the point of being an extremely viable boutique (read: overpriced and vacuously trendy) business based on all sorts of ridiculous air-filled woo, but that the promotion of said woo in the face of all sorts of counterevidence (such as from gynecologist Jen Gunter) seems to not have slowed her death march into the land of big money quackery down one bit:

At Harvard, G.P. called these moments “cultural firestorms.” “I can monetize those eyeballs,” she told the students. Goop had learned to do a special kind of dark art: to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present shall we call it cultural ambivalence about G.P. herself and turn them into cash. It’s never clickbait, she told the class. “It’s a cultural firestorm when it’s about a woman’s vagina.” The room was silent. She then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!” as if she were yodeling.

(Yeah, I know - those last three sentences almost seem like a scene written by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in one of their more cynical moments, but no, she apparently really did do that.)

As of June, there were 2.4 million unique visitors to the site per month, according to the numbers Goop provided me. The podcast, which is mostly hosted by Loehnen and features interviews with wellness practitioners, receives 100,000 to 650,000 listens per week. Goop wanted to publish articles about autoimmune diseases and infrared saunas and thyroids, and now it can, on its own terms — sort of.

After a few too many cultural firestorms, and with investors to think about, G.P. made some changes. Goop has hired a lawyer to vet all claims on the site. It hired an editor away from Condé Nast to run the magazine. It hired a man with a Ph.D. in nutritional science, and a director of science and research who is a former Stanford professor. And in September, Goop, sigh, is hiring a full-time fact-checker. G.P. chose to see it as “necessary growing pain.”

Oh, but I can actually think of a better cure for those growing pains: actually involving more than just one former Stanford professor, but a number of actual doctors and scientists - if not to debunk some of this nonsense, then to provide something at least resembling a counterpoint to the mindless cheerleading for all of this crap.

I just don't think it'll happen. Too much work, and too hard on Gwyneth's sizeable bank account. Which, of course, is the real beneficiary here.

Idiot, Uninterrupted: You Gotta Have Friends...

So the latest odd strategy by the legal defenders of the Orange Thing In The White House is that he had his most famous proxy assert - no lie, now - that collusion with the Russians just wasn't illegal, period. Never mind the fact that this little idea seems to fly in the face of the Republic of Trumpistan's previous assertions that there was no such collusion - it's all okay now, according to Angry Grandpa Rudy.

Unfortunately, though, there's all of this:

So far, special counsel Robert Mueller has accused the Russians of hacking into Democrats' computers and stealing emails, as well as trying to stoke U.S. tensions before the 2016 election using social media. Mueller has already accused Trump's former campaign chairman and another top aide of working as foreign agents for Ukrainian interests and funneling millions of dollars from the work into offshore accounts used to fund lavish lifestyles.

Mueller might decide, for example, that a crime was committed if he finds evidence that an American was involved in the hack of Democrats, either by soliciting it or paying someone to do it.

The investigation also has exposed Moscow's aggressive outreach to the Trump campaign, including a promise of "dirt" on Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in a meeting attended by Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr.

If Trump or his aides knew in advance that Russia had the trove of stolen emails and did nothing to alert federal authorities, they could be accused of covering up the crime of stolen emails or working as foreign agents. Although it's rare for the Justice Department to charge people for not reporting illegal behavior, it's also not often that a special counsel team, with a wide-ranging mandate to find wrongdoing, is on the case.

As well, a conspiracy to defraud the United States can be used to refer to any two people using "deceit, craft, or trickery" to interfere with governmental functions, such as an election.

In other words, "collusion" might be shorthand. But if it relates to Russia and U.S. elections, it can still be very much against the law.

Idiot, Uninterrupted: The Sequel

And so The Donald walked back his bizarre assertions about Russia's innocence in hacking the DNC in 2016.

Oh, wait. He didn't. Or did he? It's getting harder and harder to tell, since President Unintelligible believes that any answer he gives will always be the right one, no matter how much it contradicts previous ones.

Meanwhile, fear the deadly threat that is...Montenegro. All 600,000+ of 'em. Maybe they'll invade Milwaukee or some other city equivalent to their gigantic population.

Idiot, Uninterrupted

So you were one of the people who thought that the Federal indictment against 12 Russian GRU agents would actually convince one Donald J. Trump that being more assertive in his upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin was a good idea, right?

Guess again.

What's actually shocking about all of this (other than Trump's sniveling, conspiracy-mongering performance at that post-meeting press conference) is that Trump is now - and deservedly so - getting dogpiled on by seemingly everyone, including high-ranking members of his own party who weren't joining in on the fun previously. Even more shocking is that commentators on Fox News went after him despite the fact that most of their broadcasts fed the very large rodents running amok in his imagination. As you might guess, it was only the complete lunatics and/or self-serving demagogues who decided not to join in, including repulsive tragedy ghoul and all-around blithering dipshit Alex Jones. Then again, if Jones hadn't responded to a Putin dog whistle about George Soros positively I'd be astounded to the point where I'd be checking my pulse.

Equally astounding was President Unintelligible's complete lack of a handle on outward reality during this burning Hindenburg of a presser. You would think - or at least hope - that he'd lay off the conspiracy theory sauce for half a minute, but of course not. All in the service of improving relations with Russia, of course, although Charles P. Pierce pointed out why that really isn't much of a good thing, if at all:

Compared to the president* on Monday, Neville Chamberlain was Conan the Barbarian. In an unprecedented exercise in national self-abasement, the president* threw the American system of justice, the credibility of the intelligence community, and both Robert Mueller and Hillary Clinton into the woodchipper in order to keep faith with a former KGB thug who leads a failing kleptocracy who, just as an added fillip, and right at the end of their mutually disgraceful fandango, issued a non-denial denial of whether or not his government has compromising material on the president*. He's a laff riot, is our Vlad.

They're both cutups. Top rate comedians, in fact.

Too bad the joke is on everybody else.

Ron Paul, "libertarian" icon

If there's anything I've learned over the last few years it's that Paul's political groupies really need to get over themselves because of certain things he's behind, such as this bit of recycled vileness (although he - or people who worked for him - have done that sort of thing before) that was recently Tweeted from his account. It's as if there's a mandatory rule in his thinking that says that everything sensible he says has to be followed up by something equally stark raving batshit.

In Memoriam: Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018

Harlan could be an incredibly prickly, combative individual - almost to the point of self-parody at times, especially when some of the fights were ones he probably shouldn't have picked - but he was also one of the SF authors who kept my interest in the genre going during my teenage years, and his short fiction (which was almost all of his output, since he wrote only a handful of novels) was easily some of the best I've ever read.

F*ck "civility"

There are professional columnists and more prominent bloggers who can say what I want to (and they will - see the links below) with far more politeness than I can muster right now, but the amount of gut punches that I took with a series of Supreme Court rulings this week - and practically all of them by an ideologically lock-stepping 5 to 4 vote - pissed me off to the point where I wanted no part of social media because I knew exactly how I would initially react on it. The title of this post is certainly more than a tipoff as to my sentiments, but let's face it: I knew that things would get bad if Trump had his way with the courts, and "bad" may be an understatement. We now have a much more restrictive, corporatist, downright elitist political landscape to deal with, and it's all because a idiotic Foghorn Leghorn cartoon made human flesh from Kentucky refused to even give a previous nominee the courtesy of a straightforward "no" vote in the Senate.

There are a lot of people out there who are now calling for "civility" towards an alleged President who shows none towards an incredibly wide-ranging group of others: domestic political opponents and allies alike, members of his own administration, foreign allies, you name it. The nicest he's been lately is to a Stalinist retread (third of a continuing series!) who leads the government of one of the worst human rights violators in Asia, if not the entire world. And then there's his esteemed Russian friend, of course. He can't ever not give him a thumbs-up for being such a great role model, right?

So before you ask me for civility directed at someone like that, ask yourself this - why should I? Or anyone else, for that matter? Especially when you know returning the favor (what we used to call "civil discourse" in a previous day)would never be considered?

Feel free to peruse the following pieces by Ed Brayton, Charles P. Pierce, Heather Digby Parton and Jordan Weissman for more on the events of the week.

Now reading

Shella by Andrew Vachss.

Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 21: The Fifth Season

Hugo winner: The Fifth Season, 2016, by N.K. Jemisin

My take: I had real trouble finding a copy of it around the time the 2016 vote for the Hugos came up, and there's a reason for that. Had a certain unpleasant incident involving the SFWA not happened, TFS might've been considered solely on its considerable literary merits without any outside controversy concerning issues involving racism in professional SF circles. Yes, there's tons of angst. Shitloads of it, in fact. But the angst fully flows from the plot and narrative and isn't ginned up for any easy sympathy with the characters on the business end of the book's events. I'll definitely get around to the two sequels.

Nuggety? Despite the fact there's plenty of action and more than a few nerve-wracking moments this just doesn't fit Torgersen's criteria. There's too much literary sensibility and not enough (or even any) kowtowing to supposedly traditionalist (read: space opera) SF conceits, which essentially means that TFS is far more a book about 21st century sensibilities than even some of the shiniest Bright New Future predictions of golden age SF. And like it or not, that's progress.

Repulsive

...is exactly what you can call this new Federal policy towards certain classes of Asylum seekers:

The policy (US Attorney General) Jeff Sessions took aim at lies at the heart of an area of immigration law that has been hotly contested over the past two decades. During that time, advocates for victims of domestic violence have succeeded in winning cases that liberalized the law to protect victims of abuse or extortion whose home governments couldn’t or wouldn’t protect them. Many of the immigrants granted asylum as a result were fleeing Central American nations that offer little protection to victims of domestic abuse and gangs.

The government does not appear to keep statistics on exactly how many asylum claims fall into the categories Sessions is now excluding, but advocates estimate that domestic violence victims seeking asylum number in the tens of thousands each year. A large share of those requests have been successful, as a result of several administrative rulings and court cases during the Obama administration.

“There are many, many Central American women and women from other parts of the world who have been able to obtain protection,” said Denise Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. “Many women sitting right now in detention under these claims might lose their right to obtain protection and be deported to dangerous situations.”

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees had urged Sessions against changing the asylum rules. It warned that such action would violate international agreements the U.S. has entered into concerned refugees and would subject victims to being returned to situations where their lives are in danger. The American Bar Assn. warned that ending the asylum eligibility for victims of domestic violence “would further victimize those most in need of protection.”

So, yeah, trouble all around: both for former (and, to be perfectly blunt about it, possible future) victims affected by this policy change, but also in terms of our living up to those inconvenient little things called "international agreements" as well. And a humanitarian one that most sane people wouldn't argue with in the first place, to boot.

Then again, international agreements? Even among formerly close allies? Who the hell needs those these days?