Category: in the news.

books. bullets & links. castle frostbite. in the news. this monkey house.

Isolation update

IMG 2954

We are safely isolating here at Castle Frostbite and doing what we do most of the time anyway, which is to cook food and eat snacks and play games. The kids have been in an online charter school for a year now, so not much has changed around here other than the fact that I still can’t find toilet paper at our usual grocery store.

Life and work continue as we wait out this current craziness. I am busy with CITADEL, third novel in the Palladium Wars series. Number 2, called BALLISTIC, is going to be released next month, and I hope you give it a read because I think it turned out very well. Booklist had some nice things to say about it: “Fans of The Expanse series will enjoy this engaging and fast-moving combination of corporate machinations, police procedural, and interstellar naval combat.” And while we’re on the subject of reviews, LOCUS gave AFTERSHOCKS a very nice review in their April 2020 issue, calling it “a great start to what should be a fun, thought-provoking series.” 

I hope you’re all doing well in your respective isolation headquarters. Maybe one day we’ll have conventions and bar-hopping again, but I have a feeling it won’t be this year. Alas, that will make the company of our friends ever so much sweeter and the overpriced hotel cocktails ever so much tastier.

castle frostbite. health. in the news. new hampshah. travel.

Emerald City ComicCon update

Due to health concerns related to the current coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak, my publisher has decided to cancel their participation at Emerald City Comic Con, so I won’t be in Seattle or at ECCC next week. (Sorry if you were looking to come to panels or get a book or two signed.)

In related news, we just had our first confirmed COVID-19 case in my state, and it’s someone from my county. That person is an employee of the local university hospital, so there’s a good chance people in the Upper Valley are going to buy the local grocery stores empty now. Alas, we here at Castle Frostbite are homebodies even in the most favorable conditions, and we are out in the country, so we are in a good position to ride this out.

 

bullets & links. frontlines. in the news. military life.

Veterans and mental health

Part of what I have tried to accomplish with Frontlines is breaking out of the typical military SF mold a little bit when it comes to depicting soldier mindsets. With the sixth book in particular, I wanted to address the endless wars we tend to fight lately, and their effects on the minds of the men and women we ask to fight those wars. I’m not just talking about PTSD, which is very much on the radar of the non-military public lately because of its prevalence among combat veterans. What I also wanted to show is the difference between the military and civilian worlds, and the alienation and anxiety this difference can cause in combat soldiers, who have to do a radical adaptation from one mindset and environment to a completely different one, mostly without assistance or mental preparation.

This article at the Social Health blog, “Military betrayal, civilian isolation”  addresses the problem in fascinating detail. It’s a year and a half old, but still very much relevant, and it’s incisive and thought-provoking. Long story short: PTSD is a problem, but the mental stress experienced by veterans is much more multi-layered.

in the news. this monkey house.

peel’s principles of policing.

Sir Robert Peel, who in his tenure as Home Secretary established London’s Metropolitan Police in the early 19th century, set forth nine principles of policing. They are as follows:

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

 

Now, if I drew up a list of policing principles with intent to make them diametrically opposed to Peel’s, and then designed a police force around them, what do you think it would look and act like?

Regardless of your stance on the militarization of American police in general and the recent events in Missouri in particular, here’s a simple truth: a police department that loses the trust of the community it serves can no longer fulfill its primary function. 

I am not anti-police—I recognize policing duties as one of the few legitimate and important functions of a state. But the War on Drugs, onerous and liberty-destroying as it is, has merged with the War on Terror, and as a result we have big-city police departments who are perpetually in conflict mode.  It’s not that I mind the cops having AR-15s. What I mind is that “compliance by overwhelming force” has become the first and only tool in the toolbox in many cases. If you dress your cops like soldiers, equip them like soldiers, have them train like soldiers, and adopt the lingo of soldiers, it’s really no surprise when they sooner or later start feeling and acting like soldiers.

I don’t think the War on Terror/Drugs will end any time soon. There are too many jobs involved, too much power to give up, too many agencies making a living and justifying their own existence off perpetuating the whole thing. (Asset forfeiture laws in particular have done more damage to the Bill of Rights that any other piece of legislation in the last 40 years. This policing-for-profit business has to stop.)

I know many police officers who are upstanding both as people and professionals—who take their duties to heart and execute them with integrity and professionalism. But policing as a whole is in dire need of reform in this country, because it’s as far removed from Peel’s Principles of Policing as you can get, and everyone suffers for it: our communities, the officers, and the general respect for the law. 

Where do we go from here? Anywhere but the way we’ve been going, because it’s not working. I’ll leave you with a link to this excellent WaPo article by Radley Balko, who has some insightful examples and suggestions to get our police back to something resembling peace officers instead of law enforcement professionals.

 

idiots. in the news. this monkey house.

news from absurdistan, item #2,912.

Fifth-grader points finger in gun-like fashion; gets suspended from school.

“Level 2 Lookalike Firearm” sure sounds a whole lot less idiotic than “pointing your index finger and thumb”.

Public education is on the ropes in this country not because we aren’t spending enough money on it, but because the lion’s share of it goes toward a huge administrative overhead where we pay people eighty grand of taxpayer cash a year to come up with a level system for “things that totally aren’t guns, but may be shaped that way.”

aminals. asshole of the month. cultural oddities. in the news.

on dogs, chickens, and suburban sensibilities.

There’s a WaPo article in our local fish wrapper about the law regarding dogs who kill poultry. Current law allows for farmers to shoot dogs caught in the act of killing their poultry, and the article had a decidedly…oppositional slant. It tells the story of one Alan Taylor, a real estate developer who brought his two dogs to a farm with him on some business. He let his dogs roam free while chatting about planting grapevines (the article calls the dogs “pups”, even though the accompanying picture shows two fully-grown setter-type dogs in the 40-50lb. range), and they got shot while killing some farmer’s chickens. Both dogs survived, but the vet bills ran over $3,000. The author of the article is very sympathetic toward the dog owner, referring to laws that allow farmers to shoot livestock-killing animals as the “doggie death penalty”.

What really ticked me off about the article was the following quote from the dog owner:

“The simple solution for a rational person is to pick up a phone, but what this law allows people to do is to pick up a gun.”

Mmm-hmmm.

Look, I own dogs, and I own chickens. I understand that your dogs are your companions, and I’d never shoot someone’s pet unless it was in the act of chewing on my kids or killing my animals. But you, sir, are an irresponsible asshole.

The simple solution for a rational person?

Let’s see here and take this simple solution step by step.

There’s a ruckus outside, and when I go to check, I see two dogs in my chicken coop, killing my laying hens. (Two dogs of any size can kill the entire flock in moments. Chickens don’t have much in the way of martial prowess.)

The simple solution (rational person and all that) is for me to run out there, try to separate two riled-up dogs in a killing frenzy from my birds without getting bitten in the process, then check for the tags they may or may not be wearing, keep them away from surviving chickens while I call the number on the tag, hope that someone picks up, and then secure two strange dogs until their owner can show up and collect them?

In other words, the onus of dealing with the situation falls squarely on me, and I should deal with it in the manner you deem rational, despite the fact that it’s your irresponsibility that caused the problem? You are responsible for your animals, and if they run free without supervision, anything that is done by them or to them is squarely on your head, not mine.

“Oh, but they’re just chickens, you stupid trigger-happy country bumpkin. You can just get new ones.”

Even assuming that you’d actually be willing to own up to your dogs’ trespassing and livestock killing instead of just going “Nuh uh! Wasn’t mine! Hank and Boo wouldn’t harm a fly!”, those chickens represent a higher dollar value than even that vet bill you had to pay. Sure, the chicks were maybe two bucks a piece, but I had to build them a coop ($1,000), a covered run ($1,500), and then feed and take care of them daily for months and years. (Care to add up the labor and feed costs for our flock of seven after two years?) And you can’t just replace them on the spot because you can only get new chicks or pullets in the spring, so I’ll be out my investment and the money for all the eggs the hens would have laid in the future, had they not ended up as Hank and Boo’s chew toys.

I love dogs, and I’d be very, very hesitant to shoot someone else’s companion animal and would never do so without severe emergency. But letting your dogs roam free in farm country and then getting pissed off at others for dealing with the results of your irresponsibility in the most expedient and least expensive manner is not rational.  The rational thing would be to keep your damn dogs under control. I love my dogs just like Mr. Taylor loves his, but if I allowed them to escape the property, and some farmer down the road killed them while they were busy slaughtering his laying hens, I wouldn’t blame him in the least for shooting them to prevent thousands of dollars of damage to his poultry. I certainly wouldn’t get all in a huff and cry to the newspaper lady about rational people and the “doggie death penalty.”

idiots. in the news. masters and servants. this monkey house.

the government shutdown diaries.

Tuesday:

Day One of the government shutdown. Park rangers are furloughed. The fires from the grizzly bear riots are painting the night sky over Yellowstone bright orange. Bald eagles are ditching their tracking collars and skipping the country. WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END

***

Wednesday:

Day Two of the government shutdown. They have begun to tear up roads and dismantle all the utility wires. The garbage trucks sit by the side of the road, abandoned. We are freezing in the dark and can’t go anywhere. THANKS, NRA TEABAGGERS.

***

Thursday:

Day Three of the government shutdown. Marauding Canadians are crossing the unguarded northern border in large groups. For now we can placate them with hockey shirts and cheap LASIK, but I fear the worst.

The supermarket has no food left. Without anyone to tell them what size apples are safe to sell, they didn’t want to risk killing us all. At least SOMEONE is looking out for us.

***

Friday:

Day Four of the government shutdown. Without the FCC, everyone on TV and the radio is just screaming random obscenities. In the next town over, people drank raw, unpasteurized milk, and everyone died screaming.

Because there are no more grocery stores, we tried to go out to eat last night. Restaurant was gone. Some fool installed a bathroom urinal with unapproved water throughput and blew the place up when he flushed. SERVES HIM RIGHT, I SAY.

idiots. in the news. this monkey house.

yes, but how is his therapy going?

On court-sanctioned liberty from prison, a convicted rapist in Switzerland killed the therapist who was accompanying him to reintegration therapy, fled the country, and was eventually captured by German police just across the Polish border a few days later.

Let’s see where the Swiss court system could have possibly gone wrong, and play “spot the error”:

  1. A 39-year-old man close to his physical prime, with a history of several violent rape offenses, gets to leave the prison for court-approved therapy.
  2. The therapist they assign to him is a young, attractive female.
  3. The rehabilitation therapy sessions take place at an equestrian center, to which the young, pretty therapist drives the offender without any police escort or other chaperone.
  4. On the way to the equestrian center, they stop at a knife store, where the convicted rapist has been cleared to purchase a hoof scraper knife, to be used for care of his therapy horse.
  5. Instead of a knife suitable for hoof-scraping, the violent rapist purchases a knife better suited for cutting and stabbing.
  6. They never arrive at the equestrian center, and the body of the therapist is found a short time later near Geneva, her throat cut.

Sending a known violent rapist out for reintegration therapy with only a pretty female therapist and then allowing him to purchase knives? Holy shit, Switzerland. I grew up in Germany, so I know a lot of “judicial offender mollycoddling” stories, but this one takes the cake.

How do they treat alcoholics there? Letting them drive to their therapy sessions in a car where “Rehab” plays on repeat, then allowing them to stop at the liquor store (“…but remember, only buy a bottle opener!”), and having them escorted by a giant anthropomorphic martini glass?

in the news. technology. this monkey house. travel.

at least we didn’t fit naugahyde upholstery to the thing.

So Voyager 1 is the first man-made object to officially leave the solar system and travel into interstellar space.

Anyone else bothered by the fact that we sent a thing into space that contains a map to its origin planet and an open invitation?

“Hi, we’re a barely space-faring civilization that you could probably conquer and subjugate with your equivalent of a Boy Scout troop! Here’s a map to our home planet. Stop by anytime!”

Of course, the biggest issue is that we sent out Voyager 1 with an LP on board. We are intergalactic hipster scum.

“These are humpback whale sounds. You’ve probably never heard of them.” <derisive snort by Kurt Waldheim>

idiots. in the news.

i’m all out of weiner jokes, and so is new york city.

This just in: Carlos Danger will not be the mayor of New York City.

I doubt it’s going to keep him from trying to shoulder his way back to the public trough in the future. People like Weiner or Eliot Spitzer don’t really have any other qualifications or employment prospects. I mean, would you hire a guy whose judgment gland is so obviously defective or missing?