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Book Review: Come and Take Them III

RW provides the third review of Come and Take Them by Tom Kratman:

Tom Kratman’s Come and Take Them is the fifth book in his Carrera series.  This review of C&TT is based on this particular work alone since I have not read any of the previous four books in the Carrera series, which obviously influences my perception of key elements such as major characters and ideas, since many of these were most likely developed thoroughly in the thousands of pages that precede C&TT but only touched upon here.  With that caveat in place, I conditionally give a high recommendation for C&TT.  There are tradeoffs that the author made that weaken particular elements of the work when analyzed individually; but these decisions were made to forcefully drive the story forward, and the overall effect is that the work holds together very strongly.  Personally I enjoyed the book and plan to read the others in the series, but it is not hard to see where some people would not like Kratman’s style or opinions.

Characters (4/10)  Character development is sparse in C&TT.  One reason is that many among this “cast of thousands” (think Spartacus) serve little purpose other than to catch bullets (recommendation:  wait until a character has been mentioned in at least three chapters before becoming emotionally invested).  Kratman portrays these minor characters just enough so that the reader senses their humanity, then he shows them dying either heroically or cowardly, and usually gruesomely, very reminiscent of the realism found in Homer’s battle scenes.  For the major characters who were introduced earlier in the series, there is just enough description within either the introduction or from the context of their actions and thoughts to be able to reasonably infer what motivates them.  Occasionally the author will spend a brief moment elaborating on a character, particularly if it helps explain the actions that the he will take shortly, and less frequently as a bridge to other works in the series.  A third group, important characters who first appear in C&TT, lead to the rather poor review, as their introduction is little more than the author filling in a basic template.  Males are introduced with name, country of origin, and military rank or organizational position.  Females get the same introduction, but also with the vital statistics of hair color, eye color, breast size, and sexual orientation (somewhat comically, a woman’s first thought when meeting someone in this world is about sex).  Granted, these descriptions are more than adequate if the target audience is male, but this is one of the tradeoffs that Kratman makes: providing the bare minimum character development necessary for the story to proceed.

Prose (6/10)  Kratman’s perspective as narrator is very masculine, very militaristic.  This is not a criticism; it is very clean and direct and perfectly complements the tone of a book primarily about war.  A couple of notes about the structure of the book that I began to appreciate: the chapters are almost uniformly ten pages in length, and chapters do not end with the forced contrivance of cliff-hangers.  In other words, Kratman allows the reader to reach a good stopping point in short order, and also he has enough confidence in his storytelling that he doesn’t need to string you along to keep you interested.  The scoring for this element is mid-range for three reasons.  First, it is a warning to readers who prefer a more florid tome – I recall seeing only one metaphor in the entire 563 pages.  Second, and probably more important to readers of science fiction, is the description of the landscape of Terra Nova, which is essentially Earth’s geography physically and politically, except where the author says it’s different.  If you are looking for new worlds to explore, then move along.  Likewise, Kratman gives sufficient yet concise descriptions of the military technology employed, so readers will not confuse him with Clancy when it comes to details.  Similar to the final assessment of character development, each of these three criticisms represent tradeoffs that the author made to keep the story on track.

Plot (8/10)  The briefest of summaries is that Balboa defends itself against an attack by the elitist Tauran Union (change the names to Panama and European Union and you’ll be up to speed).  Carrera is the main protagonist, who makes most of the military decisions for Balboa, rightfully so, seeing how it apparently is his money that purchases the military equipment and supports most of the economy.  Over half of the book is about the preparations that he engages the country in to make it ready for the imminent battle.  An interesting, though not fully developed, parallel thread is Carrera preparing his son Hamilcar for adulthood.  This appears to be an arc that plays out over the series, with some issues brought up in C&TT that will probably be instrumental in later volumes.  Similar arcs are passed through while potential new storylines are introduced, but primarily the story takes place within the boundaries of Balboa and is mainly contained to the time around the preparation for and execution of the battle.  Even though a substantial portion of the book is about preparing for battle, Kratman keeps the story flowing by building tension as events escalate.  He efficiently provides enough detail of the military equipment along with strategies and tactics to keep the story interesting but not overburdened.  When the battle finally commences, Kratman switches gears to short blurbs, very briefly describing battlefields all across the countryside.  Who is winning individual battles is fairly clear, but who is winning the overall war, not so much.  Overall the storyline was thoroughly engaging.

Ideas (8/10)  There appear to be continuously developing themes over the series regarding national identity and political structures which are continued in C&TT.  Other ideas briefly discussed include whether measurements of intelligence correspond to leadership aptitude and whether it is ethically acceptable to include physically and mentally handicapped and also children in the military.  Though apparently discussed more thoroughly in the fourth book of the series, the Amazon Legion, there is a discussion of how military units comprised exclusively of women, or homosexuals, would function in battle.  But the overarching idea of this book goes back to the title: “Come and Take Them” (if there were any doubt as to the reference, “Molon Labe” on the front cover should dispel it).  There are essential elements that must be true for that quote to have any backbone.  First is whether you should possess “them.”  Kratman addresses this by contrasting militarized Balboans to their pacifist neighbors to the east, the residents of Santa Josefina, who rely on the goodwill and peaceful intentions of the rest of the world.  They are overrun by the Taurans and don’t even recognize it.  Second, you must possess “them” prior to the time you need them.  Balboa procures various weapons, from heavy artillery and armaments to their own navy and small air force, while recognizing that there are opportunity costs.  Third, you must know how to use “them.”  Carrera sets up a three-tier military of highly trained regular, reserve, and militia units, along with establishing multiple military academies across the country.  Finally, you must be willing to use “them.”  After the Balboans decide to go all in, now the Taurans must determine how committed they are to victory – is it worth the cost to them as much as it is to Balboa?  These questions are pertinent to both the preparedness of a country as well as to individuals and families.

QUANTUM MORTIS: Steve’s perspective

Confession: I am a control freak. You can ask anyone, especially my wife and co-workers. If a project is to be done right and done on time, I want to do it solo and want it done my way. In the past few years I’ve been learning, albeit slowly, to give up some control when necessary. I took part in a collaborative writing effort with my fellow authors from Marcher Lord Press. We started up a fantasy story that took a couple months to write, with each of us contributing approximately a short to medium length chapter. While I did do the intro and set up the characters, it was freeing to adapt to other writers’ imagination as they took the plot in directions I hadn’t considered.

Also, having five books edited for publication makes one give up control incrementally. It’s either that or you get really pissed off every time the boss-man tells you this is how it’s going to be in your book. Which I sometimes still do. In early February I approached Vox about writing stories for the game he had in development for the world of Selenoth. After exchanging a few emails, Vox phoned me with a different idea: a co-writing project in which we would create a sci-fi murder mystery.

I was intrigued. Never done something like that before, which meant I was excited about the challenge. Vox already had the politics, planets and religions of a story universe sketched out. That appealed to me because it meant less work. It took me a week to brainstorm ideas and whip up a first chapter.

I had no idea how he’d receive the idea. In a phone conversation prior to emailing him that first chapter, I found out that our visions for the overall story had about 75 percent in common, without even consulting each other on details. That’s when the lightbulb lit and I told myself, “I can work with this guy.”

So I hunkered down and wrote long segments, and sent them to Vox on occasion. He would change it as he saw fit, and we often overlapped, with him sending revised sections as I closed in on the finale. I don’t think I argued with any of his changes because when he told me them I went, “Well, that’s way cool!”

My only pet peeve was that Vox preferred phone contact, and I’m an email guy. It’s a minor thing and I got over it, about halfway through the process, because most of our calls ended with clear direction for the story and characters. Took me six months to pound out Quantum Mortis, and Vox another month and a half to write his portions and put on the finishing touches. Not too shabby.

I still shake my head and wonder, “How on Earth did I write a novel and let someone else change it into a finished product that was still part mine, yet not the same thing I came up with?” The trick was not being wholly wedded to the characters and plot from the get go. Told myself,  “Relax. Have fun with the people, the places and especially the action . That way if things get rewritten or cut, it’s no big deal.”

And you know what? It wasn’t. The control freak had loosened his grip. Well, somewhat. Vox wasn’t too scary. I liked that our brains were on the same wavelength when it came to character development and blowing things up. We put together a great story, a hell of a fun thing to write, and hope you enjoy the result of our collaboration.

And yes, the second installment of Chief Graven Tower’s explosive investigations is well underway.
 – Steve Rzasa

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published on 2 December 2013 and will retail for $22.99 in hardcover and $4.99 in ebook.  You can preorder the hardcover and receive a free copy of the ebook for $14.99 if you do so before December 1st.

UPDATE: If you’re thinking of preordering, here is a little more incentive. The page count turned out to be higher than estimated, at 326 pages, so the retail price of the hardcover will be $22.99, not $19.99. The preorder price is still $14.99 and the ebook price will be $4.99.

The Church of England is not the Church

After decades of slow-motion suicide, the Church of England decides that killing itself faster is the cure:

The Church of England is just ‘one generation away from extinction’, the former Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday. Lord Carey laid the blame at the feet of Church leaders who he said should be ‘ashamed’ of their failure to bring youngsters into their services.

His stark message was echoed by the Archbishop of York, who told the General Synod that compared to the need to attract new worshippers, ‘everything else is like re-arranging furniture when the house is on fire’.

The Most Reverend John Sentamu told the Synod – where leaders will debate how to persuade traditionalists to accept women bishops – that they spent too long ‘arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair’….

Church of England Sunday congregations are running at half the numbers of the 1960s, and over the past two decades Roman Catholic churchgoing has seen a similar decline. Christian numbers are rising fast in some parts of the world, notably in Africa. Worldwide, the Anglican churches have between 70 and 80 million followers – many of whom look to the Church of England for a lead.

Embrace the world and die. Abandon Biblical doctrine and die. Permit women in leadership and die. The Church can, and will, survive any amount of persecution. The Gates of Hell themselves cannot prevail, much less bloodthirsty atheist dictators.

But the one thing no church can survive is cutting itself off from its own source of life and nourishment. There are always a plethora of excellent, logical, and convincing reasons why the Church should embrace sin, abandon doctrine, and walk upon the broad and easy path to the approval of the world. And the churches swayed by that reasoning always end up dying. The pursuit of approval always ends in apostasy and societal apathy.

The BLS employment numbers are fake

As many suspected at the time, the pre-2012 election unemployment rate was even more fraudulent than is customary:

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy. And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked. The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

Those of you who have read RGD will recall that in the chapter entitled “No One Knows Anything”, I pointed out that the various numbers reported by the BLS and the BEA cannot possibly be legitimate. GDP, CPI, U3, all of them are fiction. The margins of error are greater than the difference between reported growth and reported contraction, thereby rendering Keynesian theory unworkable in practice. And they are extraordinarily expensive fictions, because material policies with effects in the trillions are being made and justified on the basis of those known and confirmed fictions.

This is just one more proof of the superiority of the Austrian logical approach to Keynesian pseudo-pragmatism. I once likened the attempts to manage the economy as trying to steer a car with a sledgehammer: it’s not very precise and you’re probably first going to wreck the steering wheel and then the car. But trying to manage the economy on the basis of numbers you know are manufactured is like trying to steer a car with a sledgehammer while wearing the wrong prescription sunglasses.

The Great Depression 2.0 is not coming. We are now in the fifth year of it, regardless of what the BLS and the BEA are telling you.

Book Review: Come and Take Them II

CK is the second to review Come and Take Them, by Tom Kratman.

Tom Kratman’s Come and Take Them is an exciting continuation of his
Carreraverse series, and lays some interesting foundations for future
series developments. While it is possible to enjoy CATT on it’s own
merits, I recommend that readers read the rest of the series first, as I
will explain further into the review.

Prose: 7/10  Competently done,
describes the action clearly concisely and with verisimilitude. There are
no particular passages that stand out as literary masterpieces. I
believe that this is a deliberate stylistic choice as the main concern
of the novel is to tell the story, and especially with this series,
convey the ideas therein. Since this novel is as much a polemic as a
story, and the author personally hates too clever by half literary
pretension, the prose is deliberately stripped down. Of particular value
is the description of combat, and it’s vagaries. Our society has fewer
and fewer people familiar with just how dangerous modern combat can be,
and far too many x box warriors who think a SEAL team can kill anything.
In it’s own way, the stripped down, economical use of language portrays
the difficulties combat more effectively by focusing on the
essentials. 
Plot: 6/10  Above average, especially for
military technothriller/ military scifi. Things go wrong, the Good Guys
are not infallible, and the Bad Guys aren’t totally incompetent.
Mistakes are made on both sides, for understandable reasons. The
Balboans fail to anticipate an obvious antagonists’ attempt to seize
power, starting the war they wished to avoid. While things go generally
the way they want, serious errors are made that could have disastrous
repercussions. The Taurans, despite being arrogant, vain, and encumbered
by a sclerotic bureaucracy, are brave, tough and competent. and are
able to inflict serious damage on their adversaries. The twists and
somewhat telegraphed, and there are no major surprises, but it doesn’t
bog down anywhere, and enjoyable throughout.
Characters 8/10  Perhaps the author’s
strongest suit as a writer is the ability to create believable,
fallible characters. Every major character is complex, with
understandable motivations, emotions, and actions that flow logically
from those motivations. Each character also has strengths as well as
flaws. For instance, Raul Parilla the President of Balboa, is personally
brave, honest, and loyal, yet can be indecisive and overly cautious.
Admiral Wallenstein is sexually perverse, vain, and yet determined,
capable and politically savvy. No one side has a lock on virtue, or on
vice, and the conflict is heightened by the wholly believable goals and
motivations of the characters.
Ideas 7/10  Perhaps the least ideological
book the author has published, the Ideas developed earlier in the series
are worked out here in a more straight forward action oriented manner.
For instance the heavily ideological Amazon Legion was nearly all
polemic, and the action covered there in brief is treated with more
detail in this book. This however is still a Kratman book, and ideas are
always behind the scenes somewhere. Readers of VP do not need to be
told that our elites are perverse, vain, totalitarian, and humorless,
but others might yet have faith in them. Come and Take Them demolishes
that Faith rather effectively. The individual soldiers of Taurus are
portrayed in an almost wholly favorable light, brave, resourceful, and
tough. The leadership of Taurus, The Federated States, the Old Earth
Peace Fleet, and Balboas neighbors have none of the virtues associated
with maintaining civilization. This I think is the key to understanding
the whole series, and why I believe that this book and the associated
series are must reads for anyone interested in preserving civilization.
I rated the novel as 28/40, very good, but not a
Great Book. Why do I believe this series is a must read for all
civilized people? Simple, Tom Kratman is not primarily a novelist, he is
a pro civilizational polemicist whose chosen medium is novels. After
all Heinlein and Rand did more for libertarianism than any economics
text by Rothbard, despite Rothbard’s superior intellectual rigor.
Stories are the best way to reach the average person, and are far more
enjoyable than political tracts to read, so Tom tells stories.
Tom predicted US losses in the Middle East years ago, because we
refused to recognize the nature of our enemy and act accordingly. In A
Desert Called Peace and Carnifex, Tom show what an actual winning
strategy would look like, and shows further why our present elite are
unable to execute such a strategy for purely ideological reasons. In
addition, the decadence, sexual perversion, disloyalty, and arrogance of
our bankster-political elite are on display throughout the series. Tom
shows some familiarity with taboo topics such as HBD and the SMP which
is refreshing.  
I don’t know if Tom is familiar with the Anon Conservative, but
these books are a textbook of how to perform an amygdala hijack of
leftist rabbits. Read negative Amazon reviews of Amazon Legion or Watch on the Rhine. Leftists
literally can’t comprehend the book, engage with the ideas, or even
begin to refute them. For instance through the whole series, some
opposition soldiers are portrayed as brave, loyal and deserving of
respect, even if their leaders aren’t. The Iraqi and Jihadis analogues
are treated with more respect than the liberal progressive in the
analogous US and EU, and they deserve it. 
This of course terrifies rabbits because they themselves are
neither brave or loyal, and if the wolves they depend upon to protect
them, feed them, keep them warm and make thier stuff ever have enough,
they are going to die, and they know it. Note that competence while
desired, is not necessarily required to be worthy of in group loyalty.
For instance, the legion takes care of the totally disabled and their
families, at considerable expense, because they are members of the
legion. The purely transactional relationships of the elite are shown to
be ultimately hollow and worthless, as are our current rabbits promises
and relationships. If you value civilization and want to preserve it,
you can do yourself a favor and read the Carrera Series, or anything
else by Tom Kratman.

Hey, you voted for him

Walter Russell Mead piles on:

All this has plunged the White House into the deepest hole of the Obama presidency to date, but the biggest shock isn’t about the cruddy rollout, the kludgy law or the disingenuous sales job by which it was passed. The biggest shock and the most damning revelation came in the President’s hasty and awkward press conference when President Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:

 “OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.”

This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.

However, Instapundit cruelly, but necessarily, points out that Mead voted for the guy:

“And much as I love Walter Russell Mead, I note that he voted for this guy, and blandly assumed that an Ivy League pedigree was some sort of assurance of competence. Not so much. And it’s not as if the signs weren’t there, for those able to see them.”

I can only assume Mead hasn’t had much contact with Ivy League graduates. For the most part, their uselessness is only surpassed by how impressed they are with their own academic credentials. And the more Affirmative Action the Ivy League graduate, the more hopelessly inept they tend to be. Think about what knobs your class president and valedictorian were. Then recall that with the exception of Brown and Dartmouth, the Ivy League universities are absolutely full of class presidents and valedictorians who are firmly convinced that, as Chiefs, they don’t have to know anything about how all that Indian stuff works.

The real death of Erwin Rommel

This first-person account
of the death of the brilliant German general illustrates why one should
never believe the Official Government-Approved Histories:

A
seven-page report [Dr Friedrich Breiderhoff] made to Cologne police on
July 22 1960 has now been found in the city’s archive in which he
details how he was threatened with pain of death by an S.S. man to lie
on Rommel’s death certificate.

Dr Breiderhoff was
brought from his post at the reserve military hospital at Ulm where he
was the chief physician. He was told to inspect a person in a car
outside by two senior army officers. He told police: ‘It was Herr
Rommel.  His hat and his marshall’s baton were lying to the right of his
upper body on the floor.

“Then a man in civilian dress
appeared and ordered me to begin resuscitation attempts and told me
that I must not tell the staff that he was dead. I made a direct cardiac
injection and then attempts at resuscitation with heart massage and
breathing exercises, as if the Field Marshall had drowned.  I felt
completely that Rommel was a dead man already. Then an S.S. man ordered
me to remove the vomit from his mouth and I found an empty cyanide
capsule in his throat covered with brown and yellow mucus. I was then
ordered that I had to put ‘heart attack’ on the death certificate on the
express orders of the High Command of the Armed Forces.”

Now,
I very much doubt that anyone still believes that Rommel died of
natural causes, but the point is that even when the factual information
is documented and in the possession of the government authorities, it
often fails to make its way out to the public.

Announcing QUANTUM MORTIS

About twelve years ago, not long after writing the short story “Medal for a Marine”, I started writing another short story. This one concerned the murder of a man in exile from his home planet. I didn’t get very far on it before setting it aside, in fact, I didn’t even make it to the actual murder. Nevertheless, I had a very clear picture of the murder, the SF setting, and the detective. Heavily influenced by Fifth Frontier War, the story was set in a futuristic world that was a combination of the Traveller universe and the Space Lords universe. I should probably explain that Space Lords was a 1997 attempt to design a science fiction MMO that was a thousand-year extrapolation from the worlds of Rebel Moon Rising. We never really did much more than discuss it with Microsoft in a desultory manner, but for the next 16 years, the design document sat untouched on a hard drive.

In early 2013, I happened to run across the fragment of the short story. Having almost completely forgotten about it, it read as if someone else had written it. I thought it compared rather well to most of the SF I’d read since then, (China Mieville and Neal Stephenson aside), but realized that with four more 850-page TAODAL novels to write, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to get around to that SF world for at least another six years. So, I contacted one of the guys who had expressed interest in publishing a Selenoth-related story through First Sword and suggested that we collaborate on turning that story fragment into a SF mystery series.  Steve agreed, we wrote the novel together, and we are very pleased make the following announcement:

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published by Marcher Lord Hinterlands on December 2, 2013. It is 326 pages and will retail for $4.99 ebook and $22.99 hardcover. Those who preorder the hardcover by December 1st can do so for a discounted price of $14.99 and in addition to the hardcover will also receive a copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted in either epub or mobi format (please specify) via email the day before release.

The independent planet of Rhysalan
provides contractual Sanctuary to 1,462 governments-in-exile. It is the
responsibility of the Military Crimes Investigation Division,
specifically, the Xenocriminology and Alien Relations department, to
keep a firm leash on the hundreds of thousands of xenos residing
on-planet. Assassinations, revolutions, civil wars, and attempted
planetary genocides are all in a day’s work for Chief Warrant Officer
Graven Tower, MCID-XAR.


In addition to a missile-armed aerovar,
his trusty Sphinx CPB-18, and MCID’s extremely liberal policies concerning
collateral damage and civilian casualties, Chief Tower is assisted by
his extreme xenophobia as well as a military-grade augmented machine
intelligence that believes it has found God. So when the
disintegrated remnants of the heir apparent of an alien royal house
are discovered on the streets of Trans Paradis, the question is not
so much whether the killers will eventually be found, but if
it is the criminals or the crime investigators who will contribute
more to the final body count. 

QUANTUM MORTIS is the new
action-packed Mil-SF mystery series from Vox Day, author of the epic
fantasy series The Arts of Dark and Light. Written with Steve
Rzasa, author of The Word Reclaimed, QUANTUM MORTIS A Man
Disrupted is the first novel in the series featuring Graven
Tower, MCID.

However, as it happens, there is more. Steve is an unusually fast writer, especially in comparison with me. So, while he was waiting for me to turn the first draft into a final draft, he decided to make use of the time to write a short story concerning another of Graven Tower’s murder investigations. One thing led to another and by the time we were done with QM:AMD, we had also completed a novella that stood up rather nicely on its own. Since releasing A Magic Broken in company with A Throne of Bones worked rather well, Marcher Lord didn’t see any reason to not adopt a similar approach in the science fiction arena.

So, we are pleased to announce that QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills will also be published on December 2, 2013. It is the equivalent of about 50 pages and will retail for $2.99 in ebook-only. As those familiar with Selenoth probably suspect, Gravity Kills will be enrolled in the Kindle Select program and will be periodically available for free download in 2014 as an introduction to the many worlds of Quantum Mortis.

Speaking of Amazon, I am looking for one more volunteer to read and review QM:GK. If you are interested doing so and expect to be able to read one of the ebooks by December 2nd and post a review on Amazon, please send me an email with QM:GK in the subject and specify if you prefer epub or mobi.

UPDATE: Steve has also announced the book on his blog. If you would like to ask him anything about it, I would encourage you to do so there.

VPFL Week 10

73 Greenfield Grizzlies (8-2)
64 Mounds View Meerkats (4-6)

75 Bane Sidhe (6-4)
51 Fromundah Cheezheads (7-3)

53 RR Redbeards (6-4)
46 Suburban Churchians (4-6)

69 Bailout Banksters (5-5)
58 63Mercury Marauders (4-6)

84 Boot Hill Hangmen (3-7)
47 Bradford Gamma Rays (3-7)

My season is essentially over, with both Aaron Rodgers and Arian Foster being sidelined by injury. Even so, there is NO excuse for last week’s loss to the Grizzlies, as ANY starting quarterback would have been enough to give me the 10 points I needed for the win. But I simply forgot that Rodgers was out and started him.

So, it’s looking like the four playoff contenders are Greenfield, Fromundah, last season’s champs, and much to everyone’s surprise, the slow-starting Redbeards.

Troll Ban: Anonagain

Apparently excess exposure to the Left has caused Anonagain another allergic reaction or something.

Vox has decided he’s going to be a complete asshole and delete my responses to the yappy little anklebiters on his blog,
and even those comments that are on topic but don’t express the correct
attitude, so I’ve decided to simply respond to the frothing little
yappers from my own blog.


Hey Vox, you really can go fuck yourself. I don’t mind getting deleted,
and I don’t give a flying fuck what your personal opinion is of me, but I
am not going to hang around your blog to be treated unfairly and
disrespected by you or anyone else. When you leave their BS OT comments
up and delete only mine, you’re being an asshole. But I am going to
respond – no balding little Napoleon is going to prevent me from
finishing what those fuckers started. It’s not the first time you’ve
done this. The fact that you can’t keep your bitter betas from going
into a feeding frenzy is not my problem, it’s yours – you attract
pathetic losers looking for their testosterone fix from you….

I had to mass-delete her comments a year or two ago when she descended into a shrewish slough of vulgarity, but let it go when she came back and behaved herself. Unfortunately, the emotionally incontinent usually end up losing control sooner or later.  Perhaps she and Real American can one day find happiness together on another blog, cursing virulently at each other 24-7.

She can write whatever she wants on her own blog. She simply won’t be participating in the discussions here. The thing is, I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you happen to be on: if you insist on attacking people in a vulgar manner then you’re not going to be doing it here for long. The chief hallmark of the troll is his insistence on going where he is neither invited nor wanted. But secondary characteristics are vulgarity, a predilection for attacking others, and an extreme sensitivity to being disrespected, which usually concerns the comment-deletion.

I’m not the only one who has noticed that the civility of the discourse has improved considerably with just six troll bans: Andrew Marston, Kilo Papa, Phoenician, Golf Pro, Ann Morgan, and Real American. I very much hope five more won’t be necessary, but to be honest, I’m too busy with various projects to waste any time policing the comments of those who can’t control themselves. So, understand that by the time I am deleting your comments, my finger is already on the trigger and I am the world’s most perfect equalitarian when it comes to pulling it.

It’s nothing personal. It doesn’t really matter to me or the thousands of other people who pass by here from time to time if there are seven trolls who happen to be banned or eight. But it is perhaps worth noting that at least two of those trolls have been repeatedly banned from a number of other sites.

But this conclusion really says it all about the troll’s narcissistic mindset:

I’ve had enough of the backbiting little fuckers and being deleted by Vox whenever I try to defend myself against detractors, or being scolded like a child. He can run his blog however he likes, that’s his business – and he can also delete all my comments and shove them up his ass for all I care. If nobody in the universe reads any of these posts here, that’s fine by me. Comments are not welcome, except by invitation. I don’t give a fuck what most people think.
– Posted by Taylor at 12:54 AM

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The troll doesn’t care, and in fact doesn’t even want to hear what anyone else thinks… but is obsessed with everyone else hearing what it has to say.