Another Free Kindle Book (For Limited Time)

Anybody remember Mad Magazine back when it was funny? Hmm, probably not. Well, anyway, it was hilarious once upon a time.

How ’bout the early movies of Mel Brooks and the Zucker Brothers? (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Airplane, Airplane II) Get the picture now?

That gives you an idea of the type of humor to be found in this short political satire The Greater Good. But it’s not from the typical/obligatory left-wing perspective–quite the opposite.

Well, hmm. It’s written as if it is, in fact, from the typical/obligatory leftist/feminist/homophile slant, but with razor sarcasm that lampoons the typical Marxist (usually called “liberal”), feminist and white knight memes, tropes and so-called logic.

It’s free for a couple days.

Fight Card Novella for the Kindle Goes Free

The Fight Card series is a growing collection of retro-pulp boxing novellas–deliberate throwbacks to the sports fiction of yesteryear by some of today’s most talented authors (writing under the house name “Jack Tunney”). Fight Card has spun off into MMA, romance and such, but Tomato Can Comeback is from the original hardboiled series.

Set in Detroit, 1954, it’s the story of a young man fighting to redeem himself, both physically and psychologically. It’s free for a couple days on Amazon.

Our Dysfunctional Love For the Underdog

There’s no need to fear!

Once upon a time, during one of my battalion’s “field problems” (exercises/wargames) out in Camp Mackall, we captured a prisoner from the opfor. He became a minor novelty because he had a Ranger tab (and not every officer and NCO in Division had been to Ranger School yet). We dropped a 60 pound rucksack on his back, tied his hands behind him and blindfolded him, then just took him along with us.

There was an E-7 in my company I’ll simply refer to as “the Weenie.” He was a walking stereotype–some pogue who originally had a supply M.O.S. who volunteered for Drill Sergeant duty, then went Infantry, then Airborne, as a way to more rapidly accumulate rank. There’s a lot I could say about the Weenie, but for now I’ll limit it to this: He could never have met the physical demands and standards of the Airborne had he entered as lower enlisted.

Back to the story. Our “P.O.W.” tried to escape. The Weenie happened to be right next to him. Blindfolded and trying to run through Carolina bush is nothing to try at home, kids. The prisoner tripped on something, and, off-balance, was wrestled to the ground by the Weenie (who, I must make clear, had both hands free, was not blindfolded, nor did he have a rucksack on at the time).

Having witnessed the incident with my own eyes, I was dumbfounded to hear the stories about it in following weeks–often from other eye-witnesses. “Did you see (the Weenie) body-slam that Ranger?” “No kidding?” “Yeah man, he put his _________ in the dirt!”

I should add the fact that everybody hated the Weenie. Including those who made these kind of comments. But evidently the only thing that mattered was that the Weenie had bested a Ranger.

It was years before I put this in the psychological context of American culture.

Americans love the underdog, and we always have. Heck, we WERE the underdog, when we won our independence–and for the rematch with Great Britain in 1812.

There’s still a lot of sympathy for the Confederacy during the Civil War from people who abhor slavery. Why? Because they were smaller, lacked the resources of the North, but fought a better fight and came close to winning despite their disadvantages.

And it’s not just Texans who get misty-eyed about the Alamo.

Our love of the underdog explains all the Rocky movies. It explains why we cheered when the US hockey team (amateurs) stunned the professional USSR team at Lake Placid, but booed when the US finally fielded professional athletes to compete against the professional athletes of other nations in the Olympics. It explains why a movie was made about Billie-Jean King winning a tennis match against some old geriatric fart.

I suspect our subconscious attraction to the underdog has had an effect on American culture in far deeper ways.

Take the involvement of the United States in Vietnam–the first “war” the USA ever lost. It was lost by design. Commanders were strategically and tactically hogtied by the very administration that insisted on embroiling our military there. That same administration sold the quagmire as a “police action”, like Korea, which is why I often refuse to call it a war. Nevertheless, even people who know all this often characterize the conflict as a great upset: the big, mean American bully with helicopters and jets and all kinds of expensive, sophisticated doodads, trying to oppress the poor downtrodden proletariat, was heroically defeated by the fighting spirit of the Viet Cong/NVA underdogs because we just couldn’t fight in the jungle (tell the Japanese that). It just makes for a better story that way, despite the facts.

SInce WWII America’s been a superpower, so we don’t have the underdog thang workin’ for us. That plays into the prevailing attitude about our history, as well as foreign policy and so much else. The haters of America know how to tap into this tendency, crafting news stories, school curriculum, and entertainment to take advantage.

Some of the “poor children” you’ve been hearing about.

It plays into the invasion of our southern border and why our elected officials choose to neglect their duty. But those same politicians are just fine with treating Americans like criminals at airports and random roadside checkpoints, with unwarranted searches, wiretaps, assassinating or indefinitely detaining American citizens without trial. Because we’re the home team and illegal aliens are the poor underdogs, see?  That’s also why there’s no outrage about them collecting welfare and stealing our elections, and why it would be the most horrific crime since the Inquisition if Americans did the same thing to any other country.

What should we do about the situation on our border with Mexico? I know! Force full cavity searches on US citizens at every airport. And send the First Family on some more multimillion dollar vacations.

This syndrome plays into why there’s no outrage about our government arming, equipping and funding anti-American terrorist organizations while waging a perpetual undeclared war against terror that requires the stripping of rights from US taxpayers (who are the past and potentially future victims of said terrorists). We’re Americans. We don’t deserve all the freedom and prosperity we still have. Those poor downtrodden souls who follow the Religion of Peace have the odds stacked against them and deserve a piece of our pie.

We borrow billions from China then give it back to them as foreign aid, then pay them interest on the money we gave them. Our handouts and investments have built them into a superpower. The Teflon Traitor (and others) let them raid our patent office and steal the intellectual property of US citizens, and gave them military secrets they plan on using against us. But it’s all good, ’cause they’re the underdog. They’ve only murdered about 80 million (not counting what they’ve done in Tibet and elsewhere) and treat their own people worse than beasts of burden; but Americans are the real villains because what businesses still exist here don’t pay for enough birth control for female employees. They’re the underdogs; we’re the mean old home team.

 

It plays into why the government, in such a fanatical hurry to assume powers not delegated to it, and to violate our rights for “homeland security,” refuses to consider shutting down travel between the US and the areas of the Ebola epidemic. Better to bring Ebola into the USA than to inconvenience the poor Third World underdogs who want to fly here, shake hands, make friends and infect influence people. If it becomes an epidemic here, blame the nurses. But Americans deserve Ebola anyway ’cause we’re the hometown bullies and it’s about time we had to suffer like other people do. Check your privilege, America. And keep bringing infected folks here.

This underdogphilia plays out in just about every aspect of our society, but perhaps it’s most blatant in the gender wars. Regardless of the facts about who did what, females are the ironclad underdogs in divorce court; to the police (and, well, everybody else, too) on domestic disturbance calls; to the leftist media on every topic from the Hugo Awards to #gamergate. The victim card is always women’s to play, even as pop culture so desperately tries to convince us they are tougher than men. They’re not expected to meet the same standards as men in the military, or work as hard as men in civilian occupations, yet they’re lionized like triumphant overcomers because they rode their special treatment to a hero’s finish line, and the official story we keep hearing is that they work harder than men and  they’re held to higher standards. They’re legends in their own minds, and in the minds of white knights all across the fruited plain.

Because they’re underdogs.

Some Red Pill Truths in Gone Girl

There’s no way to avoid spoilers in this post, so if you plan on watching Gone Girl but haven’t yet, read no further.

The author/screenwriter (same person, as I understand it) had fun messing with the audience’s mind. There is a series of revelations which has you, at first, liking the Ben Affleck character (Nick Dunne), then despising him, then sympathizing with him again. Feelings toward the character of his wife (Amy Dunne, played by Rosamund Pike) will be mirror-opposite at each stage.

So first of all, Nick uses alpha game to woo and seduce Amy. My damaged old ears didn’t catch all their witty banter, but apparently Nick taylored his game just right for her. He fell into the wonitus (“1-itus”) trap that so many men do, and after dating her for a couple years, married her.

Here’s where it gets kinda muddy from the red pill perspective, because she had the money, not him, which makes her the provider I guess. They do wind up living on her money; she makes him sign a pre-nup; and she buys a bar for Nick and his sister to run. What you learn about Amy over the course of the flick is, on top of being a diabolical psychotic mastermind, she’s also a domineering skank who likes to keep her man on a leash. This isn’t always obvious because the plot unfolds partially from her point of view…and she’s an accomplished, remorseless liar.

It seems Nick becomes a lot more beta once he’s married to Amy and, predictably, she grows to despise him because of it. There are other complications too, like losing jobs, a sick mother, and a relocation from New York to Missouri. After finding work as a teacher, Nick begins an affair with a former student. This is what kicks Amy’s twisted psyche into high gear.

Amy masterminds the faking of her own murder and framing Nick for the crime. And it works pretty well for most of the movie–both on the police and the audience. But Nick catches wise and there’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse dynamic for a while.

There are a couple especially noteworthy scenes for the manosphere.

In one, Amy admits privately to Nick that she became disgusted with him when he stopped using game; and when he demonstrated a form of game again (during a television interview), she just had to get him back, and so came out of hiding.

In another scene, we see that another woman (a detective) is the only one in law enforcement who sees right through Amy. But Amy’s got the white knight federal agents eating out of the palm of her hand, and they stifle the valid suspicions of the detective because V.

(V for Vagina; victim… take your pick. One equals the other to a white knight.)

I confess that, the way the movie ended, I felt like a rape victim myself. I have no intention of reading the novel it was based on. Nick resigns himself to staying in the clutches of this evil, murderous whore, and confessing on national TV to crimes he never committed (abusing her; money-grubbing; etc.) because, after faking a pregnancy earlier, it turns out she really is pregnant now.

It’s tempting to wonder if the author/screenwriter pulled all these themes right out of the manosphere.

And yet the author/screenwriter is a woman. Is this a warning, or what?

Action Adventure and Feminism Part 3

So now we know how it started, pretty much. But the amazon superninja didn’t immigrate from comic books to movies right away. And when she did, it was a gradual incursion.

The idea of a  120 pound woman physically dominating a 180 pound man in any kind of combat is laughable. So it’s fitting that the first cultural conditioning began in comedies.

(Even male couch potatoes are easily stronger than the average female. Yes, martial arts can make up for some physiological advantages, and according to action movies, every woman is a master; but I’d wager there are still a lot more men studying martial arts than women…in the real world, anyway.)

(You might want to skip forward to 6:40 or so in the clip below.)

The gender role reversals were very subtle in, say, the Howard Hawks comedies. But the more zany the comedy, the more masculine the women and effeminate the men. One would think people watching a comedy would know better than to take anything in it seriously, but when watching a movie, a person’s defenses are significantly weakened due to their suspension of disbelief, and ideas can infest directly into the subconscious. Hollywood knows this, of course, and has used this technique to influence the thinking of Joe Public regarding nearly every subject–especially politics.

By the 1970s amazon superninjas began showing up in non-comedy genres to a noticeable extent. By the 1990s it was obligatory in action movies, and becoming so in adventure fiction. Of course comic books were way ahead of the curve, having started down this road in the early 1940s.

TO BE CONTINUED…

When the Other Shoe Drops

I’ve banished cable from my house and never did get the converter for over-the-air TV broadcasts, so the only thing coming into my living room is internet. Still, there’s a lot of movies and even TV shows you can watch via Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, etc.

While I usually avoid TV series like the plague, there’s one I began watching as part of bonding time with my young son.

Lincoln Heights is only a few years old, and is part cop show; part family drama. Some of the drama is really contrived, and the first two seasons had some typical TV stupidity (which originates at the writing stage, usually), but there were some positive aspects that made it worth the pain.

Eddy Sutton, the father/husband character, is the kind of cop I wish still existed. He doesn’t sit on his lard ass eating doughnuts at a speed trap, waiting to gouge taxpayers out of their hard-earned wages for not wearing seat belts or tinting their windows. He’s not on a power trip. He didn’t join the police so he could get stick time, taser people, have sex with prostitutes for free or get away with murder. Unlike real cops, he’d probably even give a damn when you’ve been robbed. He might even have fingerprints taken at the crime scene when the victim’s not a V.I.P.

Eddy Sutton wants to serve and protect the citizens who foot the bill for his paycheck. It might be a stretch, but you might even argue that he knows his job is to protect individual rights. In other words, a fictional cop. If not a fantasy cop. He’s a guy I would actually tell my son (or daughter, or wife) to run and find if I’m not around but some sort of threat is.

Jenny Sutton (his wife) is a nurse, a good woman and a good mother. The three children are written and acted realistically for their ages. Their screen time tends to be laden with melodramatic angst…which is a little too much reality for me but I think it’s what sucked my own child into the narrative.

Then we got to Season Three.

Episode One ramped up the stupidity, but everybody has bad days (especially writers and directors) so we hung in there.

Then in Episode Two or thereabouts, whoever calls the shots for Lincoln Heights jumped on the homosexual bandwagon. Somehow a TV show slipped through the cracks and for two whole seasons failed to display a sodomite character and ram a homophile message down our throats. In Homowood, Commiefornia that’s a reckless, inexcusable oversight.

And wouldn’t you know, the Sympathetic Gay Character is the child of the new preacher in town and his stereotypical phony hypocrite wife. Are TV writers still patting themselves on the back for stale bupkus like this or has it sunk in yet how hackneyed their plot devices are?

I don’t know why, but rather than just quit cold turkey, I skipped forward to get past the cut-and-paste sodomite soapbox. I noticed that, though they’re trying to be subtle about it, they’re also sneaking an anti-gun theme into the series. In Season Three the show goes downhill fast.

My best guess is, whoever wrote the first two seasons moved on to something else. A typical establishment hack took over and, as predictably as a bowel movement after prune juice, began tweaking every thread in the show to align it with every other show on the idiot box.

It’s surprising that it took two seasons before this happened.

 

Hollywood Wants a Dictator

The behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in the Ministry of Entertainment, both bean counters and creative types (directors, screenwriters, etc.) have been predominantly leftist at least as far back as the New Deal. In those years, some of the actors, stunt men and others had dissenting political ideas. But as the left’s stranglehold on the movie industry became more ironclad, fewer and fewer people in the industry had either the courage nor the capability for independent thought required to venture away from the dominant socialist ideology.

So it’s absolutely no surprise to hear about actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s nauseating zeal at her fundraiser for Obama.

“I am one of your biggest fans, if not the biggest,” and when handing him the microphone, Paltrow said to (Obama), “You’re so handsome that I can’t speak properly.” In the middle of her worship session, she added, like a good, mindless follower of a ruling elitist, “It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass.”

Grieve not, Coobama-dictatormrade Paltrow, that’s exactly what’s been happening. Praise be to the ghost of Stalin, now Americans can be killed or imprisoned forever without trial on the sole whim of Messiah Hussein. Ain’t it wonderful?

Anyone old enough to remember how Edward James Olmos, during his masturbatory gush about the election of Bill Clinton, asked the Teflon Traitor to “think of us as your children”?

Or how about this one from Comrade Foxx?

And here’s Comrade Rock:

Now how could you argue with such an educated argument? Obviously the framers of the Constitution were wrong when they made our public servants answerable to the people, and not the other way around. These movie stars know how it oughta be.

Continue buying their crap and making them rich so they can maintain the epidemic of idiocy in our culture.

A Desert Called Peace

I haven’t read much science fiction in the last several years. I knew there must be some good sci-fi being published somewhere…I just hadn’t found any for quite a while. When I saw the cover for Tom Kratman’s The Rods and the Axe, I had to say, “Hmm…”

Someone advised me that I should read the Carrera series in sequence, and the first one in the series was free, so no risk, right?

Kratman sets out an alternate history post-9/11, but chose an interesting method to present it.

A space probe discovers a wormhole (or something like that) to another solar system, where there is a planet just as delicately balanced as Earth is (read that: able to sustain human life). Colonization begins. Then, partly by design, partly by accident (coincidence? Cosmic symmetry? The manipulation of Galactus?), the geopolitical landscape on Terra Nova turns out nearly identical to Earth’s in the 20th Century.

I think reading the series in sequence was good advice. By doing so it was easy to grasp that FSC=USA; Taurus=Europe; Volga=Russia; Balboa=Panama, the Great Global War=WWII, etc. I didn’t know whether to groan or to chuckle at references like “Operation Green Fork” and “Amnesty Interplanetary.”

Carrera (whose real name is Hennesey) is a veteran of Green Fork who remained in Balboa afterward. When his family is wiped out in the 9/11ish attacks, he is presented a unique opportunity for revenge. He builds a de facto private army in Balboa, and obtains a contract to assist the FSC in their War on Terror.

Much of the book focuses on the building of this army. The rank and unit structure is based on the Roman model–legions, cohorts, centuries, etc. The rest of the book illustrates a better way to have conducted the occupation of Iraq. This was interesting, and enough effort was put into Carrera’s character that it never devolved into a field manual.

While the average writer tends to highlight the use of torture to get information from terrorists, and use it to horrify the reader, a few writers take pains to justify the use of torture in interrogation. Kratman keeps justification to a minimum, but describes the methods just a bit too precisely for the more squeamish readers. Personally, I’ve never been remotely involved with a decision to torture or not; and I’m thankful for that.

The closest I came to irritation was with the sketch of future history on Earth. Specifically, the assumption that the USA as we know it will still exist into the late 21st Century, and will still be a superpower. If this was written soon after the 9/11 attacks, I guess the naive optimism among Neocons would lead to assumptions like this. But these days a person has to really be blind to make such a forecast.

Oh, and speaking of naivete`: the theatrical gimmick used to embarrass the bleeding-heart from Amnesty Interplanetary would have SOOOOOO backfired. I found the concept silly to begin with–like a plan hatched by the Little Rascals or something. And the success of the whole venture hinges on the integrity of the press. In other words: epic fail. Since when does the press let something as trivial as the truth keep them from pushing a narrative they endorse? And you just handed them video footage on a silver platter!

As a set-up to a series, Desert Called Peace was effective. I’ve already got the second book, Carniflex. I’ll see how things progress.

Action-Adventure and Feminism Part 2

We are currently inundated with Amazon superninjas in action-adventure, whether it be on the big screen, small screen, printed page or videogame. And not just action-adventure anymore, either. As mentioned in Part One, this feminist myth has obviously become a de facto requirement for any form of entertainment aimed at an ostensibly male audience.

Where did it all start?

 

It’s no mistake that I refer to these characters as “Amazon superninjas.” You can trace this fetish back to the Amazon stories in Greek mythology. A lot can be analyzed on this subject, but one aspect I’ll point out before moving on is that this mythical race of women warriors lived in an all-female civilization. The only men they allowed into their culture were male slaves, for breeding purposes.

Fast forward to the 20th Century, and along comes a psychologist in the early 1940s, by the name of William Moulton Marston. Though no state allowed such arrangements to be called “marriage” back during his time, he lived in a menage a trois with two women–one his legal wife; the other a former student.

The late ’30s and early ’40s are known as the Golden Age of comic books. Superman came on the scene in 1938, and inspired a boom in comic book heroes. Another cultural phenomenon had infested society during the Depression years, evidently (though far more surreptitiously): bondage and female domination.

Here’s something Marston wrote:

“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound… Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society… Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.”

Because he chose the word “people” instead of “men,” it’s probable that he didn’t just enjoy getting tied up by his live-in mistresses, but enjoyed watching them tie each other up, too.

Like many pied pipers before and since, Marston recognized pop culture as a potential tool for mass indoctrination. He published a couple articles, one of which was titled: “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” and shortly thereafter was hired by the company which later became DC.

In a 1943 issue of “The American Scholar”, Marston would write:

“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power.”

Mistress Elizabeth Marston (his legal wife) told Bill to invent a female superhero.

“Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

Whatever else you can call a guy like William Moulton Marston, he was a mangina in his private life and a white knight in his public one. He obediently set forth, with all his psychological weaponry, to advance the cause of Team Womyn.

During the Depression and War years, superhero comic books were read by (and marketed to) primarily pre-adolescent boys. This was the target demographic for Marston’s psycho-cultural conditioning. Here’s a summary of his strategy, from Marston’s own typewriter:

“Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!”

 

After all, Bill was obviously proud of his arrangement with Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne.

Marston developed a character he called “Suprema.” He dipped into mythology and pulled out the Amazons. Suprema was from an advanced Amazon civilization, but would become an agent of FDR’s federal government and fight it’s enemies. The name of the Amazon colony would be “Paradise Island.”

If you’ve ever been around a bunch of women living together for any length of time, then you know it’s anything BUT paradise.

Ahem.

Suprema was given a skimpy costume that was scandalous for its time. Though a corset/push-up bra, short-shorts (or a tiny-miniskirt) and tall boots would become fashion for some women half a century later, the only women who wore such an outfit in those days either performed in kinky stag films or posed for kinky stag mags. Bondage toys were added to Suprema’s utilities: slave shackles on her wrists that could deflect bullets, and a magic golden lasso that forced confessions from the person bound by it.

William Moulton Marston adopted the pseudonym Charles Moulton, and changed Suprema’s name, too. The same month that Imperial Japan surprised and devastated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Wonder Woman was unleashed on the young boys of America.

(Actually, comic books were routinely distributed months before the publication date on the cover, but the significance of that date was too much to go unmentioned.)

There were obvious lesbian/bisexual implications from the beginning, and bondage was a consistent motif. Wonder Woman was regularly either a victim or perpetrator–sometimes both in the same story. Had people in the WWII generation been half as aware of kinky sexual fetishes as they are now, DC could never have gotten away with printing such material for minors.

Early on, a pilot (Steve Trevor) crashed on Paradise Island, and became an ostensible love interest for the butch super-babe. This presented opportunities for gender-role reversal in several comic stories. Trevor often played the part of dude-in-distress, in need of rescue from his dame-in-shining-girdle.

And, of course, each issue with the Amazon princess depicted her physically overpowering men. Even Roman gods were no match for her in combat.wonderwoman

There was an explosion of four-color Amazons during that time (though unlike WW, most weren’t literally Amazons). Writers and artists rushed to bring out Sun Girl, Miss Masque, the Black Cat, the Blonde Phantom, Phantom Lady and Miss America, to name a few. Heroines like Sheena  and Rulah brought female domination fantasy to the jungle. Gender-role-reversal and female dominance were common themes with them, too.

But the impact of this character (and the ideology that spawned her) pushed far beyond her short-lived Golden Age comic book imitations.  The baby boomers didn’t just embrace the conditioning from New Deal socialist writers in Hollywood and New York; they would grow to take this female supremacy concept to new levels.

TO BE CONTINUED…