USA


A letter to my MP

I should have sent a letter (well, email, using writetothem.com/) to my MP about Brexit sooner. It was going to be much longer, going on about why we should be running away from any deals or association with Trump, but I felt that might get incoherent, given how appalling his first week and a bit has been.

Dear Rebecca Long-Bailey,

I urge you to vote against the Bill to trigger article 50. Leaving the EU would be disastrous for the country.

A slim majority of voters wanted to leave the EU. I doubt they wanted to destroy the country’s economy to do so, or put us at risk of rushing to do deals with the vile Trump administration. If our relationship with our neighbours must be renegotiated, it must be done by more competent and braver people than our current Government.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Pattinson

There will likely be more letters, and on many diverse subjects, to follow.


Don’t say I didn’t warn you about Trump

Just bumping the content of a couple of posts from earlier this year, and pointing you all at Sounds of Soldiers again. Sounds of Soldiers is currently an incredible bargain at $0.99/£0.99/local equivalent. But, if you want an even better bargain, pick up Britain Looks To The Future (also just $0.99/£0.99/local equivalent), which includes it and eight other great tales by independent British authors.

I did this interview for The Daily Rundown last month in May, and only just worked out where to find it. It’s a little segment on the inspiration for Sounds of Soldiers, and why it’s still relevant- maybe even more relevant- in the age of Trump.

SoundsofSoldiers-cover_thumbI started work on Sounds of Soldiers in November 2008.

Luckily, the premise genuinely was fiction within a few days of starting the project, as Obama was elected US President, rather than McCain. Thus the (implied but not stated outright) backstory for the book- that Sarah Palin rose to commander-in-chief and started a stupid war with Europe- genuinely was fiction. For the next eight years, anyway.

Now, the USA is, once again, teasing us with the potential has delivered the setup for thousands of dystopian novels, in the shape of Donald Trump. Trump’s far scarier than Palin ever was. She’s stupid and incompetent, but he takes those two traits and piles bullying, vindictive, (more) racist, and thin skinned into the mix. If anyone had written President Trump (or even potential-presidential-candidate Trump) before this year, people would have said the character wasn’t believable.

If anything, Sounds of Soldiers is an optimistic read in a world where “The Donald” could be leader of the free world. A Trump inspired future would look a hell of a lot more like Mad Max.


My week in tweets

Not all the tweets. I’ll leave out the automated posts, most of the promo tweets, and the argument with the guy who blamed everything on immigrants and sharia law, but got offended when I told him he was being racist.


Time Trumps

January 20th 2017

It happened just as President elect Donald J Trump went off script whilst swearing his oath of office. A figure appeared from nowhere, gun hand outstretched toward The Donald, finger already pulling the trigger.

She had come from the future, her mission- to kill the President before, on January 25th, he nuked Latvia to prove the country’s Prime Minister wrong and show that his fingers were long enough to press the atomic button.

Even before the bullet had left, she was joined by dozens, maybe hundreds of other assassins. With everything from lasers all the way down to clubs, each of them had come back with a specific mission- eliminate Trump before he could carry out the action that blighted their particular future.

It was one of the lasers, by an almost immeasurable fraction of a second, that got the job done. Which triggered the second wave of temporal assassins. These were dedicated to cutting down Mike Pence before he could institute his plans for homosexual re-education camps and sexuality snooping.

Into the middle of this already confused mess came a pair of twenty-second century Men’s Rights Activists. Angry at the unfair advantages equal wages gave females and the sissification inherent in paternity leave, they had decided to travel back and kill the first female President. Incompetence had shunted them sideways as well as backwards, but they never found that out, as they were burnt to a crisp by one of the many flamethrowers present.

With so many bodies and temporal anomalies overlapping, a critical mass was formed. A gore explosion was followed by collapses in the fourth dimension. Time went crazy.

Washington is now the flickering city, to look at it is to watch a jump cut time-lapse of the city’s past and possible futures. Buildings and people appear and flash away randomly, as the time-line tries to knit itself back together.

The inauguration was ground zero, but the effects have radiated out, and there are pockets of temporal instability all over the world. There are pockets where you can step into the past and pull people and things back. The USA is currently being run by the dream team of Kennedy and Lincoln, snatched up just before their assassinations.

It’s a crazy world, ripe for adventures and wacky hijinks. Annoyingly, I can’t think of any silly stories to tell in it right now.


A Twitter trip to Trumpton

So, Donald Judas* Trump has cleared the number of delegates needed to become the Republican nominee for US President. Which keeps Sounds of Soldiers relevant, and means it stays at 99p/99c at least until November.

To get a feeling for Trump supporters, I’ve been conducting an experiment for the last couple of weeks. I’m following the Twitter stream of one, vocal Trumpeter, highlighting bigoted tweets or retweets from him. I didn’t just pick him at random. In fact, he picked me. I have a twitter account for Garth Owen, and when I put something out on there that mentioned Trump, it got a follow from this guy. He mostly goes on about how awesome Trump is, rather than spewing almost constant racism and hate, as I’ve found others doing within one or two retweets of him. So I haven’t gone out of my way to find the worst example possible, before anyone starts accusing me of that.

What sort of stuff have I found on his timeline? Let’s see-



One remove from my test subject, I found this intelligent commentary. (Update having revisited this account, it now looks more like a parody)-



“Not one of us” What could that possibly mean?



And that’s not including the extended conversations I go into, which included gems such as-



This is just a scratch of the surface, and a few of the tweets I’ve seen this week. I’m going to keep watching, because it’s car-crash levels of compelling. It’s going to be a long, darkly comic and worrying run up to the US elections. Expect irregular trips back to Trumpton.

*What does the J stand for? I recently rewatched a lot of Red Dwarf, so sticking Judas in there is the natural reaction.


Sign this petition to help make the 2016 Quicken Loans Arena Massacre happen

Watching it from the outside, US politics is fascinating, terrifying and hilarious. Usually all at the same time.

When the Republican party gathers to decide which moral vacuum they’re going to put forward to run for President, they’ll be gathered at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. The arena management, sensibly, have a policy saying no guns or weapons are allowed inside. A number of gun nut Republicans have taken offnce at this, and started a petition to have the venue’s right to declare itself a gun free zone overturned.

It’s unlikely (I hope) that they’ll get their way. But if they do, I don’t see how it could end well. There wouldn’t even have to be an argument that escalates to shooting for things to go horribly wrong. All it would take would be one accidental discharge, and a stadium full of paranoid people primed by rhetoric about high crime rates and terrorists would have their guns out. One shot becomes another, becomes a fusillade.

And then, probably before they’ve even got all the bodies to the morgue, the surviving attendees would be making statements about how gun deaths shouldn’t be politicised and announcing that they’ll be praying for the victims.

Source: Petition · Quicken Loans Arena: Allow Open Carry of Firearms at the Quicken Loans Arena during the RNC Convention in July. · Change.org


Trump is really Vicky Pollard, isn’t he

On March 8, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski asked Donald Trump whether he had a foreign policy team. Trump gave a rambling response, saying, “Yes, there is a team. There’s not a team. I’m going to be forming a team. I have met with far more than three people.” On Wednesday morning, Brzezinski gave Trump another shot at the question. She asked him again about his foreign policy team and strategy and, more specifically, whom he consults with consistently.

Trump replied: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. I know what I’m doing, and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people, and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are. But my primary consultant is myself and I have, you know, a good instinct for this stuff.”

Yeah, but no, but yeah, but no. But USA! USA! USA!

Via: Mother Jones


Donald Trump is too gullible to be president – Vox

Who wants to sell Donald Trump a bridge?

His tendency to solicit, repeat, and retweet self-serving falsehoods served up by sycophants and hangers-on should be taken seriously. Among the most important tasks the president has is knowing what to believe, whom to listen to, which facts to trust, and which theories to explore. Trump’s terrible judgment in this regard is one of the many reasons he’s not qualified for the office.

Trump’s record here also undermines the strongest argument for his candidacy: that his showman’s persona is just a front, and at heart he’s a calm, thoughtful, coolheaded businessman who will surround himself with the best people and govern in a pragmatic, results-oriented fashion.

Source: Donald Trump is too gullible to be president – Vox


In these Trumped up times, you need to buy Sounds of Soldiers for 99p

SoundsofSoldiers-cover_thumbI’ve reduced the price of Sounds of Soldiers as it’s so appropriate to current politics. It is now available for 99c/99p/the local equivalent.

Amazon

Smashwords

Five years ago the United States began to self destruct. As momentum toward a nuclear civil war grew at home, US covert kill teams- and then the military- rampaged through Europe attacking imaginary enemies. The USA found itself at war with former allies. Great Britain closed its borders and stayed mostly neutral.

Robert Jones didn’t get on the train out of Paris after it was bombed. He chose to stay on the continent and make a name for himself covering the conflict with reports on his blog. He saw the first blows, witnessed nuclear explosions lighting up the Mediterranean and was present for the final acts.

Now the borders have been reopened and Robert Jones is back from the war. He has returned to Manchester to reconnect with friends and family, to investigate the changes the city has gone through and to find out what life was like away from the warzone. He’s striving for a new, peaceful life, but there are still some ghosts and secrets from his time on the continent which are ready to come back and shake it up.

A novella about what happens when a technothriller goes horribly wrong, Sounds of Soldiers is part travelogue from the future, part war story satire, and takes a look at how the civilians usually ignored by the big war fantasies cope and survive.


Want to know what happens if Trump wins? I already wrote that book

SoundsofSoldiers-cover_thumbI started work on Sounds of Soldiers in November 2008.

Luckily, the premise genuinely was fiction within a few days of starting the project, as Obama was elected US President, rather than McCain. Thus the (implied but not stated outright) backstory for the book- that Sarah Palin rose to commander-in-chief and started a stupid war with Europe- genuinely was fiction. For the next eight years, anyway.

Now, the USA is, once again, teasing us with the potential setup for thousands of dystopian novels, in the shape of Donald Trump. Trump’s far scarier than Palin ever was. She’s stupid and incompetent, but he takes those two traits and piles bullying, vindictive, (more) racist, and thin skinned into the mix. If anyone had written President Trump (or even potential-presidential-candidate Trump) before this year, people would have said the character wasn’t believable.

If anything, Sounds of Soldiers is an optimistic read in a world where “The Donald” could be leader of the free world. A Trump inspired future would look a hell of a lot more like Mad Max.


Sovereign citizens

The sovereign citizen movement in the USA is a peculiar, and dangerous, bunch with ideas right out of the conspiracy theory pick and mix.

Their belief system is complex and rooted in a series of bizarre conspiracy theories that hold that the original US government set up by the Founding Fathers has been replaced with an evil secret government that has sold all US citizens into slavery by using them as collateral against foreign debt.

As explained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, they believe the government creates a secret alternate identity for each American at birth and sets up a secret US Treasury account — sort of like a corporate “trust” — under that alternate identity. The US government funds these “corporate shell” accounts to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

Because the US no longer uses the gold standard, it instead uses these accounts as collateral to back up its currency. The money is said to represent each citizen’s future earning potential. The sovereign citizens thus believe the government has “pledged its citizenry as collateral, by selling their future earning capabilities to foreign investors, effectively enslaving all Americans,” according to the SPLC.

Part of their proof is that birth certificates and other government documents, said to represent this scheme, put names in all capital letters. So whereas Jennifer Williams is the real person, JENNIFER WILLIAMS is the secret Treasury account.

By declaring themselves “sovereign citizens,” members of these groups say they are freeing themselves from government enslavement and separating themselves from their secret, government-created alternate identity.


The Brooklyn Plague

This is a fascinating story of how the bubonic plague nearly hit New York’s harbours at the height of the second world war. Almost as fascinating as the original “Wyoming incident” is the run around the writer went through to find out about it.

This is the story — kept secret at the time, still largely unreported today — of how the most infamous disease in history broke into New York City in the midst of World War II. This is the story of the ominously-named “Wyoming matter,” and how it took me months to track down evidence it ever happened.

Source: The Secret Story Of How Bubonic Plague Nearly Broke Out In New York City


The Texas Floods Are So Big They Ended the State’s Drought

“Rain just doesn’t fall in a civilized fashion in Texas,” says Ronald Kaiser, a water expert at Texas A&M.

The extremes of Texas’ water problems could be a model for growing areas of the world as climate change gets worse. Extreme dry spells followed by devastating floods- which nonetheless top up the water supply.

One question, and I’m sure it’s a dumb one, but I’ll pose it anyway. If they’ve been pumping water out of the aquifers for years, surely they have the beginnings of an infrastructure to pump it back in when there’s an excess above ground. It wouldn’t be any good flood control, but it might help clear the standing water afterwards, as well as topping up the stores.

Source: The Texas Floods Are So Big They Ended the State’s Drought | WIRED


San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmates – Boing Boing

If you ever thought Jean-Claude Van Damme movies were far fetched, you were wrong. Reality is much, much worse.

San Francisco sheriff’s deputy Scott Neu is accused of leading a ring of corrupt jail guards who coerced prisoners into gladiatorial combat with threats of rape and violence.

via San Francisco Sheriff's Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmates – Boing Boing.


Sweet

Sweet, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.

Congratulations to the USA on not electing Mitt Romney. No matter how gracious everyone is saying he was in defeat, you know that, had he won, he would have driven the country into the ground with a combination of Tea Party and corporate inspired policies.

I may even buy some candy to celebrate.


Is it Sounds of Soldiers time yet?

I haven’t commented on this year’s US elections as much as the 2008 one. I’m sure I should have been.

Sounds of Soldiers came, in part from pondering “What if the wrong people win?”, and took place in the aftermath of the sort of stupid war Palin might start after McCain keeled over with a heart attack.

Here’s hoping Romney loses, even though I could see a victory for him and the plastic thingy that would be his vice president would make Sounds of Soldiers even more relevant and no doubt boost sales.