News, Information, Treason...

BRICS 2, and why I'm not really a B*stard

Another little video meditation on the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa)...

And on why I'm not really a B*stard. Or, anyway, not as much as you might think.

kinda blue #1

Just some kinda sad thoughts about the election...

A (probably useless) letter to the chiefs of the Democratic Party

Like it says...

a little video about love in Ozlandia

Like it says.

Link to the books is below the video

Love in Laverton
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NCGWRLE

Along the Finke
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OZ8K1G6

Beautiful Volcanoes, Ugly Politics

Like it says, a video meditation on beautiful volcanoes and ugly politics...

A video about BRICS and Brazil

A video with a few thoughts about the recent election in Brazil (2014) and the long term prospects for the BRICS...

And for us...

Another video, this one a triffle sad

As it says, another video I did for Belfort & Bastion, also promoting Prometheans. A little different in that it is more meditative and, indeed, a bit sad...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sR3BVuo3-c

the video from the Breaking Bad dam

Here's one little video I did to promote  Anastasia Leach's short story collection, Prometheans. (Link to the book is below the video on Youtube.

The one interesting thing about this is that I shot it (on my phone, obviously) at the John B. Robert Dam, in ABQ, NM. It has the distinction of being a major fixture in the Breaking Bad TV program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DexNTtC_hLY

I'm experimenting with videos

I'm experimenting a bit more with videos at the moment. I'm not quite sure why. I'd never intended this to be a "Vlog." And, certainly, I'm nobody's idea of a photogenic superstar.

Still...it's interesting to play with cameras and special effects, no matter how crude they may be. And, besides, I've not been posting here much. Just haven't had the time mostly, but also the motivation's been a bit lacking. Maybe this refocus me. Re-establish my interest in this, my most personal form of personal expression.

What got me into Vlogging (this time, I've done it before) was doing some mildly promotional videos for Belfort & Bastion, my micro-publishing company. In the the next entries, I'll put links to the places where you can see some of the more interesting of those videos.

Anyway, that's what I'm up to.

cheers
mjt

Xcargo 2 is free!

Seems like I never get a chance to write here any more...

But, as one quick note, my second collection of vintage Xcargo columns is free Today (Aug 26, 2014) through Aug 28, 2014.

So head on over and grab up some cargo!


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MP5XXA2http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MP5XXA2

Explosive-cargo 1 is free for a couple of days

I'm getting away from monsters for a while.

I'm gathering up all the old Xcargo Columns... I mean the early ones, the ones that date back to when Xcargo was an ezine...and publishing them as ebooks on Amazons.

the first collection, dating from the first quarter of 1994, is free tomorrow and the next day, that is Aug 17 and Aug 18.

So, head on over and grab a Cargo or two.

cheers
mjt

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MOPKU54

Monsters 2

I never meant to do more monsters.

I did not intend, again, to visit the subject of horrors. I had no wish to do more pictures of fiends and ogres and damn'd souls, in this world or the next.

Yet, and somewhat to my own disquiet, I discovered that I had (first) stumbled upon a genre unknown to me…i.e., the book or other work meant as a curse…and (second) that there were yet more people in the world who desperately needed cursing.

Here's the background. Sometime I did quasi-published an e-booklet or e-sketchbook entitled Montag's Monsters. itwas a personal thing and rather ridiculous. In it, I displayed a series of illustrations meant to accompany a horror novel I was working on some time ago. The story involved a graduate student who is murdered by a jealous professor. The dead man goes immediately to hell. There, he discovers that each of his professors has preceded him to Hades. Their bodies remain on earth, but their souls are down below, each transformed into the monsters which they actually, if secretly are.

I never finished the book because, well, frankly, it bored me. Or, more precisely, the people in it bored me. The damned were, of course, based on people who I really knew, and who genuinely had harmed me quite badly. Yet, they demonstrated quite well the banality of evil. Like many bullies, they were vile, but not interesting. They were bores and boors. And best left forgotten.

But I had the images already done and I published them. This gave me a certain petty and childish revenge. I could, in my own small and nasty way, portray them as I felt they truly were.


*


As I say, I thought that sort of thing was over for me. I never thought I'd do another monster.

And then…

Then came "ISIS"…The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. A.k.a., ISIL, The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This group appeared in the wreckage of our American "liberation" of Iraq, and the revolution of Syria. It set out to create its own nation in the ruins.

I was only faintly aware of ISIS/ISIL. I knew that its fighters were renowned for their brutality. I knew that they were winning. But other than that, I paid little attention to them. They seemed merely one more group of bloody-minded lunatics, in a world full of bloody-minded lunatics.

Then…but then…I saw a photo. You've probably seen it, too. It was taken by ISIS's own people. It shows a child, a toddler, circled by armed men. He, or she, it is not clear to me, looks up at them confused.

They are, I gather, about to kill the child. I gather they did so.

I saw the photo for the first time last night (August 9, 2014). I went to the web and learned after that the scope of ISIS's horrors. They burn. They mutilate. They torture. They enslave. They are butchering children.

It is part of a larger plan. A strategy, even. ISIS/ISIL uses terror as a weapon. It practices "propaganda of the deed." It commits horrid acts and lets it be known that it does so. And thus the mass murder of children. The message is that "if we can kill these innocents, think what we will do to you."

Alas, it is effective. I have watched the news while the Iraqi armies and Syrian rebels have scattered before the berserkers like leaves before the storm.


*


And they are real. These images. These news stories.

At first, like many others, I had that moment of doubt. There have been so many lies told. Remember WMDs?

But, no. The more I researched the more it seems clear that this is actually happening. That there are real bodies in the desert. That there really are POWs being shot in the head. That there really are women being raped and sold into slavery. That there really are children being murdered.

We cannot doubt it. There have simply been too many reports from too many sources …too many pictures and videos from too many places…too many eye witness accounts from too many creditable men and women …

Quite simply, ISIS/ISIL claims to be brutal and murderous and even joyfully pathological. And I think we must take them at their word.

We would be fools not to.


*


When I realized this…when I realized that the photos of the doomed child were real…I was aghast.

I was horrified that I could do nothing to save him. Or her. I cannot go back in time and pull the guns away from his head. I cannot walk between the killers, pick her up, comfort her, and carry her back to her mother.

I cannot save other children who are even now dying, or will die soon, at the hands of those madmen…

I was and am furious at my helplessness.


*


I could not sleep that night. I tossed and turned. I dreamed. While my wife slept, I went back into my office and checked the web for news. I cheered the victories of the Kurds and the Americans and Brits and the rest. I mourned the dead. I feared for the future.

And I wondered: what could I do to help?

Alas, alas, nothing. Nothing. I can write my congressman. I can post to my blog. I can make appeals.

But otherwise…nothing. I am reduced to watching while yet another group of self-righteous psychopaths inflict horror on the world. How many has it been so far? And just in my own lifetime? Genocides and mass death in how many places? Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia…killing field after killing field. Concentration camp after concentration camp.

And that doesn't even count the genocides that came before me…Holocaust and Holodomor, massacres and horrors…


*


I found myself a little obsessed with the situation in Iraq and Syria. I began to search for some way, however ineffectually, to express my feelings. I needed some way to, well, let it out.

I finally conceived the idea of going back to my little pictures. My "curse book" for lack of a better term. I decided to create a series of images that would portray ISIS/ISIL as it genuinely is…inside, that is. I would portray the souls of its leaders, and soldiers, and sympathizers. I would show the souls made monstrous by crimes against humanity.

I would show the fate that would await them if there is such a place as hell. I doubt that there is, but you never can tell.

I would insult and denigrate them.

*

So, I did more images. This time of ISIS/ISIL's leaders, its volunteers, its sympathizers, its paymasters…

I don't know if I'll publish the pictures. They are grotesque and the world has enough of that sort of thing already. (If you really, really want to see them, let me know. I'll send you copies.)

Though, who knows? Maybe I'll put some of the pictures out into the world.  Here and there. In one form or another.

Maybe I will do so on the theory that they will, somehow, actually impact the ISIS/ISIL psychopaths in their killing fields. Oh, don't get me wrong.  I do not believe in magic. And even if I did, a picture is not a voodoo doll with which to afflict your enemy.

But, still, perhaps these pictures will act like insulting caricatures. Maybe they will make ISIS/ISIL seem pathetic or ridiculous or, even, damned. Maybe one potential Jihadist will see the images, or encounter someone who has, and come away a little less likely to sign up at their local ISIS recruiting station.

Or, maybe, someone in the group or its leadership will see the pictures. Maybe (we can but hope), it will infuriate them. Maybe, in their rage, they will make an error…

And, finally, well, I've said I don’t believe in the supernatural. And I don't. But I could be wrong. Maybe there really is something in sympathetic magic. Or, maybe, ESP exists. Maybe there is some undetected wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum that can be shaped and focused by the human mind.

So, perhaps…just perhaps…these images might somehow cause real damage to those men who are both evil and deranged.

Particularly if not just I but many focus their mental furies upon them.

Let us hope so. Let us hope that many virtuous minds focusing their righteous anger against evil might have good effect.

Might, indeed, be mighty.


*


It may be that by the time you read this, the problem will be solved. Perhaps the ISIS/ISIL state will have collapsed. Perhaps one or more of the world's powers will have intervened and brought the bastards to heel.

Sadly, though, I suspect not. It is simply too complicated and too hellish a problem to solve easily or quickly. I suspect that, as you read this, war continues in what used to be Syria and what used to be Iraq. I suspect that ISIS/ISIL continues to murder and maim.

And even if it does not, then history seems to show there will always be others…of whatever religion or political position…willing and eager to proclaim the Holy War, the Crusade, the Holy War, the Final Solution, the…whatever.

If the original target is gone, then let these images be for those others. All who long for the apocalypse…

All who murder children.


*


If you should ever see these images, you will note several things. For example, I have tried to adapt the vision to the cultural milieu of the individuals in question. I made some pigs or dogs, animals obviously considered unclean in the Levant. In other cases I've shorn them of the male sexual characteristics that are, for them, the signs of personal superiority.

Also, in many (almost all) cases, I've shown the individual subjected to some sort of torture or bondage, frequently with strong sexual overtones, i.e., it is sadomasochistic. I wanted to add that note of perversion because I think it is fitting. "Perversion" as a word implies something evil and sick. But the average sadomasochist is, usually, a fairly harmless individual. It is thus wrong to call him or her a "pervert."

But someone who kills in the name of an all-merciful and loving God, that is a diseased and disgusting individual…a true pervert.


*


In any case, that's what I did. Those were the images I created.

As I say, I will not openly publish them. But, again, if you really want to see them, let me know. And, keep an eye out, you may run across them by accident at this or that place on the 'net.

An aside, if you do see them, you should know that they are protected by a Creative Commons mark. This will specify that you may download them, hold them, keep them…but must not resell them, or claim them as your own. Nor can you adapt them without my permission.

But you can forward them to all and sundry.

Let us hope that, eventually, they come into the hands of ISIS and its people.

And that at that moment, the images become like glass…broken glass…clear, transparent, revealing all, jagged, and, lastly…and horribly….

Wounding.

Cheesecake and Coffee At The End Of The World (as we know it)

Special note: The following is a brief description of a wild and wooly adventure I had with a book that is, alas, no longer publishable…by me, in any case. More importantly, it contains a call to arms and authors (of a certain age). It asks that you who are both writers and members of the Millennial generation take pen in hand …or wordprocessor on desk…and write a great American novel. Or non-fiction blockbuster.

Exactly what kind of book that is…well, you'll have to read the essay to find out.

Also, there are some really amateurish, badly done, probably sexist, and downright silly cheesecake-type illustrations of beautiful women and stalwart men to go along with it. But, to see those, you have to go to the other place this essay is posted, Belfort and Bastion's PWYW page, or right about here:

Cheesecake and Coffee

Or, if you don't want to read the essay at all, and just want the really amateurish, badly done, probably sexist, and downright silly cheesecake-type illustrations of beautiful women and stalwart men, well, there's a link on the PWYW site that will take you to where you can download a bunch of 'em.

Cheers
Mjt



*

                           Cheesecake and Coffee, or the End of the World As We Know It


                                                     By Michael Jay Tucker

1.

So, once again, I offer you a story of an illustrated book that I’m not publishing.

It is a complicated tale: one in which I strive to protect an author, wrestle with the end of the world, and…and ….

Produce pictures of pretty girls and handsome boys. In varying degrees of undress.


2.

It starts like this.

About the time I founded Belfort and Bastion, my little publishing company, I was approached by a talented young writer whom I happened to know from another aspect of my professional life. Let's call him Siegfried.

Anyway Siegfried had several books he wanted to show me. Most of these were travel books…visits to lands new and far (he's a great traveler) and his observations on same.

But, one of these manuscripts was a novel. Part of it was pure fiction, that is, invented, but much of it (like all novels) was autobiographical. Individual details, the general pattern of events…these were from the author's life, and he admitted to me as much.

In the book, the protagonist, like the writer, is a young man, in his mid-20s, from a privileged upper-middle to upper class background. Over the course of the novel, this character flounders about, desperately trying to find some place for himself in life…and failing consistently.

Also, there was an awful lot of sex in the book, and for this reason Siegfried was reluctant to have the work published under his own name. In fact, his family didn't want him to publish it at all.

Eventually, he had gotten their permission to try to publish the work on the condition that he do so under a pseudonym. I suspect, but do not know, that they also gave their consent knowing that I would be the publisher…i.e., someone unknown, whose customers would surely not include family, friends, or important connections.

In any case, we chatted about the problem. I agreed to keep his identity a secret. I even invented the penname he elected to use. Again, to protect his identity, I will not reveal what it was. Suffice to say that it had connections to the Aesthetic Movement of the nineteenth century.

And, like that movement, it had a certain overtone of studied decadence.


3.

Why decadence? Because of the sex.

Siegfried's goal with the book was to explore the ways that people of his generation and his class have been, well, set up. Young people of his cohort, and he is from the upper crust, have been given a rather fearsome set of instructions. They have been told time and time again that they must not have ordinary, everyday, happy lives of moderate means. No. They are supposed to achieve genuine greatness. They are expected to go forth and become CEOs and Senators, great Scientists and Doctors, fabulously successful Entrepreneurs and Artistic Innovators...

The problem is that not everyone can be a CEO, a senator, a famous scientist or doctor, or an innovator of any sort. Most of us can't. Most of us are doomed to lives of mediocrity, if not of outright failure. That is the sad fate decreed by an indifferent heaven to the vast majority of men and women, even when they are gifted and talented. The race, alas, is not always to the swift. Indeed, it usually isn't.

But Siegfried felt that he and millions like him …the children of affluent suburbs across America…had never learned that. They were burdened with, or, rather, poisoned by these vastly unrealistic expectations. They were sent out into the world with the motto do or die…and, most often, discovered the first wasn't really an option.

So, Siegfried's character spends most of his time in frantic activity. He is almost a blur! He tries one thing after another. Surely, surely, something's got to work. Something will allow him to achieve the grandeur that he feels he must somehow obtain…or else, be a total failure.

And in this breathless dash toward a wholly unobtainable goal, sex is something of a distraction. Yet, he cannot help himself. Siegfried's character is an attractive man, and a lusty one, and he finds himself blundering into and out of relationship after relationship. All of them cold and empty. None answering any human need. And yet the protagonist is enmeshed in them. Trapped. A "prisoner of sex."

Thus the connection to decadence. To a sexuality which includes no humanity. Which is casual to the point of indifference.


4.

I thought that was all a rather good idea for a book. Still do, for that matter.

The problem was, I really didn't have a handle on the book that Siegfried had genuinely written. I was so taken with the idea of the protagonist in his struggle to achieve greatness that I missed what the author was really after.

You see, Siegfried's book was a very personal book. It was profoundly autobiographical. It reflected his own struggle to find some way of leaving his mark upon the world. It was the story of one human being in a particular set of circumstances.

But I, being me, interpreted the book instead from my own strange perspective. I am obsessed with the idea that ours is an age of transition…an age that will be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution or even the Neolithic. When it is done, our lives …how we make our livings, where we dwell, who commands and who does not… will be radically different.

I think all this because I cannot help but see the trend toward intellectual industrialization … to computers, to machines. I'm not talking about Artificial Intelligence or the "Singularity" or any of the rest of it. No.

But it is inevitable that most white-collar jobs are going to be as automated as the blue-collar ones before them. Just as the artisan fell before the Assembly Line and the industrial robot, so too will the middle and even the upper manager be increasingly rendered irrelevant by machines. (Every economist, every social planner, should be forced to watch the Jeopardy episode in which IBM's Watson successfully competed with humans. It is…instructive.)

In the long run, I am an optimist about this transition. I think we will see a more comfortable world for it.

But in the short run, I'm afraid that things are going to get very messy, indeed.

And that was the framework into which I tried to shove Siegfried's book. I tried to make it the story of a man who realizes that some ages lend themselves to new explorations, to the winning of empires, to new and stunning insights.

But some ages do not lend themselves to such things. In some ages, the path to greatness is quieter and less evident. In eras when empires collapse, when horizons contract, the resolute hero is the man or woman who fights to conserve what has been gained. He or she is the individual who entrenches, who retreats, who fortifies, who evacuates the innocent to shelter, and who plans the counter-attack.

And having thus realized the nature of his age, the protagonist would, like the older and wiser Candide before him, set out to cultivate the garden to the best of his ability.

In the process, telling his parents, his high school guidance counselors, and all the other self-important and toxic people who would run his life for him…that they can go straight away to hell.

Like I say. I think it's a great idea for a book. I wish someone would write it.

It can't be me, because I'm the wrong generation. It should be someone in their 20s or 30s. Maybe, someday, some young writer will appear with such a book in hand at my door. Or, maybe Siegfried will do the piece.

But, in the meanwhile…


5.

So, I set out to sell Siegfried's opus. And,  I failed.

I failed because I was actually trying to sell the book I wanted to see written. Not the one that Siegfried had written. I marketed a book that existed only in my imagination. That's the book I described in all the supporting materials, the press release, the "about this book" that went on Amazon, and so on.

And, of course, it didn't work. When people downloaded the text, they discovered it was not the story I'd told them it was. So, they did not recommend it to friends and family. They did not review it. Or, if they did, then they did so in grudging tones.

I grew increasingly frustrated. Why, I wondered, wasn't the book selling? It seemed like such an easy pitch…

I went back and re-read the work. Dimly, I began to realize that I'd not understood it.

Or rather, I'd understood it well enough. But I had chosen to promote another book entirely… the one in my head.

And both consumer and creator had genuine reason to be angry at me.


6.

The good news was that Siegfried wasn't angry at me. Or at least didn't elect to show that he was. The bad news was that having perceived my error I didn't know how to correct it. You see, it is hard to sell a personal vision.

Yet, I thought, perhaps, I could do so. First, I'd have to recast the advertising materials to stress the protagonist's genuine condition. That is, I would abandon the conceit that he was Everyman (and -woman) in the Age of Diminished Expectations. Instead, I'd point out that Siegfried's character was what Siegfried himself was, i.e., a semi-aristocrat, the child of the 'burbs, facing the anguishing question of what he could do to be worthy of his nobility.

Second…the sex.

I could stress the sex. I hadn't done so because I'd thought of it as being far less important than the social message of the text. But, on reflection, I realized that it was at the heart of the book. The protagonist is constantly attempting to make human connections, through sex, and never manages to do so.

That was an interesting way to take the marketing—particularly since the protagonist, at one point, considers a career in writing erotica. After all, he has lots of experience. It is just that when he tries to put pen to paper, it all comes out dry and tasteless.

But how to emphasize the sex? That was my problem.  After considerable thought, I had a bit of a brainstorm. Why not illustrate the book?

The wonderful thing about electronic books is that you can have pictures in them quite cheaply. Where a full color illustration in a print book can cost you an arm and a leg, it is pretty simple to slip it into an e-book.

Maybe, I thought, we could even break the book up into a series of illustrated, interconnected sub-sections. It would be like an old-time serial. Each chapter would be published separately, as a stand-alone e-booklet, each with five or six semi-erotic pictures in it.

Where would we get the pictures? Well, that was a problem. However, if we could come up with the money, we might be able to hire an artist to do some illustrations for us. In fact, I knew an artist I might be able to use. I had been at one of the innumerable arts and crafts fairs that regularly pop up in New Mexico and I'd met a woman who did color drawings that looked a bit like those of the great Art Deco illustrator, Louis Icart (1880-1950)—i.e. languid women, lounging in clinging evening gowns, mischievous and lascivious, each faintly considering an evening of passion with whichever swain it is that most attracts her.

Or, if we couldn't come up with the money, I might try something myself. I'm not an artist, God knows, but I might manage something with my little painting programs and the Seashore graphics editor.

In fact, I realized, I should do up some images in any case. If I was going to pitch the idea to Siegfried, I'd need show him a little bit of what I had in in mind. And, besides, I thought it would be cool to something kind of sexual. I'm a good, red-blooded, heterosexual male. I'd enjoy doing those kind of pictures.

And…

And it would make a nice change from all those monsters I'd done as Montag.

I produced several images that might perhaps be used to illustrate such a series. (I ought to stress that they were not based on any particular scenes in the book. I just produced the pictures as something Siegfried and I could use as possible models for something we might do later.)

Then, I gathered up the results and prepared to share them, and my idea, with Siegfried.

Cue the Debacle, stage right…


7.

It was, I think, the day before I intended to actually get in touch with Siegfried and explain what I had in mind.  Martha, my father, and I had all gone down to the big Walmart store on Wyoming and Menaul. We'd seen an advertisement about upgrading our iPhones at the store and we thought it be would be quick, simple, and cheap to do so. (It wasn't. And we didn't. We finally had to go to an AT&T store to get the job done.)

Martha decided to visit the women's department. Dad and I went up to the front where we could get a coffee and he could sit down.

While we were there, lingering over the coffee and watching the whole wide world go by (as it always does at Walmart), my phone beeped. I had email.

I glanced at it.

Siegfried…


8.

Siegfried had a problem. Or, several of them. I only got bits and pieces of the details, and I'm not sure I understood everything, but what it boiled down to was that his novel and his other works had to absolutely…positively…exit the Belfort and Bastion catalog. Right now.

Why? Well, it seems he'd gotten a job with a certain large organization. A powerful one. Doing good things for America everywhere. However, this organization would look with displeasure on an employee who might have authored a book that could be considered …pornographic.

In some of our subsequent communications, in which I basically pleaded with him not to take his stuff out of the B&B catalog, I pointed out that he had published it under a penname. There was no way for his employer to know he'd written it.

He did not exactly say, Yeah, right…but that's what he meant. Had I ever heard the name Edward Snowden? If so, did I really believe that there was anything like privacy or secrecy on the Web?

Oh, I said, in a very small voice.

So down came the novel. And all his other books. They are no longer in our catalog. There's no record they ever even existed.

All gone down the memory hole…

Welcome to the new millennium. When technology was going to make censorship impossible. There was a TED talk that said so. So it must be true.

Right?


9.

I didn't blame Siegfried. He was quite right.  He needed to protect himself.

But I was disappointed. His going meant a big hole in our catalog. And, of course, I had those pictures sitting on my hard drive…just waiting for my wife or someone to run across them and raise an eyebrow. ("So, exactly what are you doing with your computer when you say you're working late.")

At first, I was tempted to trash them. But, then, I thought, well, what the hell? Let's use 'em. Let's just throw 'em out there. Maybe someone will find them arousing. Or at least amusing.

So that's what's here. In this document you read.

Oh, and one other thing.

I still think that someone ought to write that book I described. Someone, somewhere, a member of the Millennial Generation…someone in that age cohort which has taken so much abuse from their elders for being "The Peter Pan" generation, and the "boomerang generation," and all the other well-reasoned insults which basically come down to, "You have not lived up to our expectations…even though the world we have given you is resource poor, threadbare, in debt, and in conflict."

Someone needs to write the book that rejects that criticism as drivel, the slander of self-important and self-aggrandizing old fools...

And that, afterwards, points the way forward. 

The way that leads through sacrifice, and struggle, and pain…and, ultimately, I think, to a new world. A world made pure and golden and one.

So, writers, begin. I await your wisdom. And your manuscripts.

~mjt

The B&B PWYW site

Sorry I've been so long away from Xcargo. I've been doing a bunch of things and they taken up most of my time.

I'll spare you most of the details. But here's one thing I'll mention. If you haven't already read about in one of many other websites (sigh), I'm a starting a new little project with Belfort & Bastion. It's the B&B Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) website.

The idea is as follows: we post e-books, e-art, and so on to the site. You can download them freely, or simply read them on the site. If you like them, then you have the option of paying the creator what you think the material was worth—$0, $2, $50…whatever you decide.

So, if you get a chance, do check it out. You might find something you like.

Onward and upward.

Finally...

Tired. You'll recall that I had an author leave Belfort and Bastion. That meant I had to take all his material off my various sites.

Finally got it done. I have removed all his material...both the stuff he wrote under his own name and the material he'd done under pen names.

Lot of work.

Amusing, really. Takes as much effort to un-publish something as to publish it.

Maybe there is a moral there, somewhere.

First Data Problems Resolved!

So I'm happy to report that my problem with First Data Merchant Services have been resolved almost painlessly. A First Data person contacted me and within a day everything was neatly settled.

Ergo, kudos to First Data! Special thanx to Stacie W. 'Twas above and beyond.

Problems with First Data Merchant Services

So here's my tale of woe.

Early this spring, I thought I needed to have the ability to take credit cards for purchases on my tiny little company's website, BelfortandBastion.com. For companies interested in getting such a capacity, my web hosting providers, GoDaddy, offers a link to First Data Merchant Services a.k.a., First Data.

I filled out the necessary forms, including one that listed my bank account number and the routing number of my bank. However, when I did so, I must have mistyped one of those two numbers. Either way, something went wrong.

Then, in May, I received a note from First Data Merchant Services (or, more precisely, its collection department) saying that I was in default, that I had not paid the $30 a month processing fees, or start-up costs, and billing me $160. The note, by the way, was dated May 12.

I contacted First Data and some very nice person there explained what had happened. When First Data had been unable to collect its fees from my bank account (because I'd mistyped a number), my First Data account had been instantly closed. (She was unable to explain why no one attempted contact me before the account was shut down, but that's beside the point.)

I asked if that meant I no longer had an account with First Data. She said that was correct.

I was not concerned about that because I had realized I really didn't need credit card processing (just yet) for my company, which only sells a few items a year. I therefore said I understood, and was content that I no longer had an account with First Data. I then sent the company a check for what I owed, i.e., $160.

I thought the incident was closed.

However, yesterday, or June 30, I received a "second notice" from First Data's collection department saying that I now owed $235 and that failure to pay could negatively impact my credit rating.

But, of course, the problem is that I thought I no longer had an account with First Data, and so it seems as if I'm being charged credit card processing fees for credit cards that aren't, well, being processed.

So how on earth do I get out of this situation? I've left a message with First Data's collection department, but so far haven't heard back from them.


Thank you so much in advance.

mjt

So you say you want a revolution?

So you say you want a revolution?

Okay, here's what you do.

Step one: CEO pay is now genuinely breathtaking. As everyone knows, the average corporate chieftain (at least in America and to a lesser degree in Europe) earns many, many hundred times what their mid-level employee does. At the moment, boards of directors and stockholders are willing to put up with that because the former have close connections with the CEOs in question and the latter (particularly the smaller ones) don't have a lot of say in the matter.

But, suppose, you went out and gathered up and codified almost everything that a CEO needs to know to run a corporation. It wouldn't be that hard. In a sense, MBA programs have been trying to do exactly the same thing for years.

Okay, then, you take that information and roll it up as online databases, "expert-systems," "knowledge engines," and all the rest of it. Then, go out and license IBM's Watson or some other natural language technology and make that your user interface.

In short, you would then have a system with which almost anyone…anyone at all!... possessing a basic understanding of business could manage the biggest, badest, multi-national corporation on the planet.

Right, now envision the board of directors doing the math: pay multiple zillion-dollar salaries for a rock-star CEO, or offer $100K or so to some middling sort who may or may not even have an MBA.

Pretty soon, even the most incestuous board is going to get tempted…



*


Now…Step Two.

This is harder. It may not even be possible. But consider it…

Make the same system cheap enough to run on every PC on the planet. Make it available to everyone. Make it possible for any human being to have the same skills as the most talented (read "obscenely overpaid") executive on the planet.

Then sit back.

And watch it all change.

*

Onward and upward...

More on Memorial Day

I pick up where I left off.

I must confess, Memorial Day is one of those holidays which concern me—not because I object to the premise. Vets and our fallen deserve all the thanks and glory we can give them.

Rather I am concerned because those who most publicly and noisily celebrate (or denigrate) the holiday seem to do so for their own quite narrow ends, with the Vets themselves being left behind somehow in all the sound and fury.

I think this is true for both the political Right and the political Left. I find them both quite equally guilty.

Let me begin with the Left first. People on that side of the public debate tend to us Memorial Day to disparage War in general. ("What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.")

And that is good and fine. I agree. War is a waste, and evil. But, two things: first, in the process of disparaging war sometimes…sometimes… some members of the Left find themselves disparaging those men and women who have fought in themit In their dialogues there is expressed or implied the idea that soldiers are at best fools, and at worse imperialists and brutes, and either way not worth our sympathy or our support.

The second error of the Left is, I think, more humane, more subtle, but more dangerous. It is that War is not only inevitably wrong but easily avoided. They say that any war, any confrontation, can be escaped if only you make Nice-Nice. If only you are willing to negotiate, to seek compromise… if only you are intelligent enough to sidestep the oncoming truck…then bloodshed simply will not happen.

Ah, but there's the rub. That isn't the case. I don't care how intelligent you, how un-aggressive, how reasonable, how "un-testosteronal," how much on the side of the Angels…eventually you will encounter someone who isn't. Eventually, you will meet someone who simply wants to kill you, or harm your children, or enslave you, and nothing you can do will change their mind. Hitler was not going to learn to love Jews. Stalin would not have seen the error of his ways. European imperialists and slave traders were not going to abandon their wealth for Christian principles. Genghis Khan and his successors were not going to become gentle pastoralists in a day. (In case you're interested, the Khans' mostly unprovoked wars seem to have killed so many people that the world actually grew cooler, as the amount of CO2 in the air was reduced. Fewer people breathing, you see. Plus the fact that farmlands were being abandoned to trees and other carbon sinks.)

In such situations, violence is perfectly justified. It may, indeed, be the only moral course of action, if the alternative is the destruction or degradation of those near and dear to you. It may not be wholesale battle, with armies and warships. It may be a quiet assassination rather than a noisy artillery barrage, but it will be violence all the same.

That the Left does not understand this, is …troubling. And it explains much of why it was that on 9-11, even as the dead fell in rubble to the streets of New York, there were many of the Educated and the Elite who could think of nothing more to say than that "We brought it on ourselves."

Many among them are saying it sill.

*

The Right…

It is worse than the Left. Far worse.

The Right claims to honor the Fallen. To thank the Vet.

But have how you ever noticed how often there is an ulterior motive in what's said? How often the oh-so-pious platitude is accompanied by other things? By a subtext? By the implication that if you support the Vet, if you stand with her or him, then you must also support future wars?

The logic is bizarre, but you hear it time and time again. It is overt, it is covert, it is whispered or shouted from rooftops…but it is there. If you "stand with the Vets, with our boys (and, oh, yes, girls)," then you must also support the War. Any war. Any war on offer. Any war at any time.

It is all the more remarkable because the same people who say these things are so often (albeit not always, but often) the first to vote the cutbacks in services for vets, or their families…the first to cry boondoggle and pork…the last to notice that the men and women they claim to honor are sick, or homeless, or dying in the street…

There is something horrible about that. Something unforgivable.

*

I am appalled by this nation's treatment of its veterans. I am appalled by the numbers—the soaring number of veterans who commit suicide; who suffer from debilitating or deadly diseases that experts pompously announce do not, in fact, exist and therefore do not need to be treated at public expense ("Gulf War Syndrome" was just the first of many); whose lives and families collapse …

I read the other day that there are now more homeless female vets with their children on the street than at any other time in our history.

I find that fact uniquely horrible. There should not be any homeless vets, period. And there should certainly be no homeless mothers who have served in uniform.


*

Oh, an aside…regarding my concern for homeless female vets? I'm told by Those Who Know Best and Are Politically Correct that I've just committed an act of "Positive Sexism." It is, they explain, an act of "Micro-Aggression" which "Denies the Empowerment of Others."

I do not care. That any mother should be without a place for her children to rest their heads is intolerable. That the mother in question should also be a vet makes it all the more terrible.

And those Who Know Best? The Politically Correct?

They can jolly well go suck an egg.

*

Then there is the current VA crisis.

But, then, perhaps the less said about that the better.

It is too horrible.

*

I don't quite know how to end this piece. I've worked at it for a couple of days now. Nothing seems quite right. Nothing seems appropriate.

So, I suppose, I can do no more than default to the same sort of platitudes that I decry in others.

So… like it or not, war exists and always will, regardless of who might be in charge…or how benign that leadership might be. (Even the Second Coming, if you believe in that, is predicated on war.)

And, therefore, like it or not, we will always have among us those who must go to war. Who will die there. Who will suffer and be wounded in body, mind, and soul.

It will be, therefore, always incumbent upon us as a society to respect and care or those who fight for us…to heal their wounds, if possible, and to honor their memories if not.

For us to either proclaim them fools and "imperialists," or to make grand show of our love for them while in fact simply exploiting them for our own political gain, is grotesque.

Grotesque…and dangerous.

For, in time, if we do not support the fallen and the brave, they will begin to ask a very pertinent question.

Two wit, if we are not for them, then why should they be for us?