I’m not a conspiracy theorist. For a variety of reasons I’m not about to get into in this particular forum, I don’t believe the U.S. government was responsible for 9/11, but I do believe, when given a window of opportunity, our government takes advantage. I think, given the last 15 years, history bears that out.

Maddow, in a very readable and approachable way, documents the way in which this has happened and is happening in our military and foreign policy. She starts with Reagan, who was the first to really work in earnest to erode the separation of powers so very clearly written into the U.S. Constitution and prop up the Executive Branch as war-maker in chief. Lest you think her criticism is partisan, she makes clear that every president since, more or less, has either kept the status quo or sought to gain new authority for the Office of the President.

It’s terrifying.

(Also, as an aside, Trump’s candidacy is less unbelievable when considered in the context of Reagan’s path to the presidency. The Gipper also just liked to make shit up.)

There are others who have written on this topic in greater detail, from the military or judicial or political perspective, but this is by far the most accessible discussion of what’s really at risk when we wage wars that occur outside the public eye, or, rather, without any of the public investment our founding fathers deemed necessary if our country was going to spend tax dollars and lives “defending our borders.”

I don’t think Bernie Sanders is going to turn around America. I think the vast majority of his policies, even if he should somehow manage to win both the primary and the general (unlikely) don’t stand a chance in Hell of making it through Congress. But of all the candidates, he’s the only one I can see turning the tide on this one and rescinding some of the powers stolen from Congress by the presidents before him. Honestly, that’s reason enough for me.

But this book isn’t about Bernie Sanders, or about politics, partisan or otherwise. It’s about a bloated Defense Department, a greedy Executive Branch, and an American public that’s content to look the other way. I think you should read it.

Have you ever read the Starbridge novel series by A. C. Crispin? It’s one of my favorites, and I see very few people who seem aware of it.

flamingoslim:

rikmach:

vaspider:

nehirose:

vaspider:

flamingoslim:

seananmcguire:

vaspider:

rikmach:

vaspider:

seananmcguire:

vaspider:

I haven’t! Tell me why I should read it. 😀

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH OMIGOSH.

Okay, so first of all, this series was so far ahead of its time. Like, we say now that we want more diversity in science fiction. Well, Starbridge had people of all different kinds–gender, race, physical ability, mental ability, and yes, species, because it’s a series about aliens that uses those aliens to say things about humanity, but not at the expense of pretending that all humans (or all aliens) must thus be One Generic Type Or We Lose The Metaphor.

There is a planet of birds whose voices are so powerful that only the Deaf can safely work with them, because otherwise they can kill you, and the books about them are explicitly anti-ableism and anti-colonialist.

There is a planet of lemurs (sort of) where they are all born a neutral gender and transform when they enter adulthood, where gender identity is treated as personal and social, while tied to biology in a very unique way.

There is a cat-person planet that will break your heart.

From an extra-universal standpoint, A.C. Crispin used the series as a way to boost a lot of other authors who might not have been as well-known, sharing a byline and thus sharing the credit, and bringing their ideas to a wide and eager audience.

So good. So good.

….omg.

I’m gonna have to put this on my to-read list right after this book I’m trying to finish. :p I promised someone I’d finish it asap.

Heh, looks like someone else beat me to gushing about how awesome this series is. But yes, they’re amazingly progressive, especially for when they’re written. Female protagonists all over the place, People of Color, people of different faiths, people with disabilities, and so on. The humans are diverse as the aliens. Heck, it was Book Three before there was a male protagonist.

I hope you enjoy! Strap in for a wild ride, my friend. Jeez, imagine, someone knowing who the hell I’m talking about when I reference Dr. Blanket or Tesa.

Haha. It will likely be a while before I get to them, but I will let you know once I do!

DR. BLANKET FOREVER.

seananmcguire, thank you so much for your kind words about the StarBridge books. I was A.C. (Ann) Crispin’s co-author on two of them, Silent Dances and Silent Songs, the ones about the Deaf Interrelator. I remember Ann coming up with the Dr. Blanket character and how much fun it was to work Dr. Blanket into some of the other books. Ann was one of my dearest friends, and working on those books with her was a joy. Fortunately, they’re available as ebooks and as audiobooks again after years of being out of print. Thanks for telling others about them and sharing your joy.

How cool is this? I love the Internet sometimes.

it’s been bugging me every time i see this post go around – i couldn’t remember why, but i finally did. a.c crispin was desperately familiar – all i could remember is that i knew the name, and knew i had loved their books, but my memory is so slapshot-crapshoot it’s a wonder that remains, some days. anyway. i couldn’t remember what books or why i had such positive associations with the name, but it finally came to me.

while i haven’t read any of her original works (terrible, i know) she wrote some of the books that shaped my eager, greedy-for-more little sci-fi nerd childhood.

gryphon’s eyrie and songsmith, which i found when i was nine or ten, after i’d exhausted all of my new school’s andre norton books and went looking for more.

yesterday’s son and time for yesterday, written the year before i was born and the year i turned four, which i found in the shelves of our dining room bookcase when i was nine, maybe ten. they were some of the first star trek books i ever read, some of the first sci-fi i discovered on my own (even though they were my parents’, i think my dad’s specifically). sarek, when i was ten, because it was a new star trek book about one of my favorite characters and being written by one of my favorite star trek authors.

the han solo trilogy, when i was twelve or thirteen, for similar reasons.

(i’m pretty sure the witch world books were borrows from the library down the street, unsure if the star wars were purchased or borrowed, but the three star treks were not only owned, but re-read so many times that i should probably buy digital copies the next time i re-read them just for the sake of keeping them intact.)

Eee! Neat!

Oh my god, Kathleen O’Malley responded to a Tumblr thread I helped start!

EEEEEEEE! My life is complete!

But yes, Ms. Crispin wrote a lot of excellent books in other settings before her original series, and I strongly recommend reading them.

I just love her original works, and recommend reading them more.

God, I so wish there was a Starbridge fandom. That would be so awesome.

Dear rikmach, I am startled (in a good way) that you would have any idea who I am. Thank you so much for your kind words. Somewhere during the creation of the StarBridge series, I got swallowed by fandom and let my pro writing slide, something that exasperated Ann (A.C. Crispin) to no end (though she was always supportive). Yes, all of A.C. Crispin’s books are terrific and I am forever grateful that I had the opportunity to know her and have even a small part in their development. Ann and I became close friends when she wrote Yesterday’s Son and asked me to edit it. (There’s an acknowledgement to me in the book that refers to me as “the Red Queen.”) The experience cemented our relationship. Ann’s husband and I frequently discuss ways to promote Ann’s books to a wider audience. We, too, wish there was a StarBridge fandom. I’m open to suggestions! (Again, thank you so much for your comments. It made my day.)

“Actually, a Hydra conspiracy would be less disturbing”: a national security reading list

shinelikethunder:

wintercyan:

shinelikethunder:

I did not deliberately set out to make my past few months’ nonfiction reading into a rec list for a more in-depth look at the political issues addressed in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Honest. (Mostly honest. The Paperclip book might’ve caught my eye in part because of the shoutout in Cap 2.) But one of the reasons I fell in love with the movie was the great big middle finger it gave the American national-security complex… and then when I was tumbling ever further down the nonfiction rabbit hole and things started sounding eerily familiar, I realized, duh, the scriptwriters for TWS were probably reading a lot of the same books I was.

I don’t make any claim that this is an exhaustive list. As noted, it’s a straight-up list of books I’ve picked up recently, so I have no doubt there are other relevant ones I’m missing. But it’s a pretty solid overview. So without further ado, I give you: the “Actually, a Hydra conspiracy would be less disturbing” national security reading list.

Jane Mayer – The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.

Tom Engelhardt – Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Dana Priest and William Arkin – Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.

Annie Jacobsen – Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America.

More detailed writeups and a bit of a rant under the read-more link. (Gist of the rant: The best and scariest thing about Cap 2 is that the most disturbing things about SHIELD/Hydra are 100% based in fact.)

Keep reading

For those with an interest in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I’d add Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth to this list.

Coming back to this list, I’d also like to add Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. Schneier is no paranoid crank or partisan hack; he’s been a well known, widely respected computer security expert since the mid-late 90s, and he has a knack for distilling very technical issues down to the essentials of what it all means and why it matters. He’s also a reliably lucid voice on broader issues of security, risk, fear, the establishment of trust, and the foundations of civil society.

I’m telling you all this because the apocalyptic wasteland described in this book, which will make you want to flush your phone down the toilet and never drive or take public transit anywhere ever again, is actually a pretty restrained take on the situation from a guy who knows what he’s talking about and understands the needs, stakes, and motivations of all parties involved.

(Notably, Schneier does not encourage you to flush your phone down the toilet, or up stakes and move to a bunker in Montana. Part of his point is that if seeing the very tip of the data-exploitation iceberg makes you feel like you have to, something is horribly out of whack and there’s no actual reason Certain Parties need to be given unfettered, unsupervised access to every single thing they ask for.)

Zola’s algorithm is already out there, more versions of it than anyone knows how to count, ticking away in the cloud. To paraphrase a different Schneier quote, it’s bad civic hygiene to sit around waiting for someone to decide that building death helicarriers out of it would be a great way to keep the world safe.

copperbadge:

daroos replied to your post:skipthedemon replied to your post:Sleepy…

Is Decisive a book? Is it a book I need? It sounds like a book I need.

Decisive is a book, and I firmly believe that everyone of our generation should at least try reading it.

Chip and Dan Heath are two terrifyingly intelligent brothers who have written a series of books that are, really, at base, how to hack the brain of yourself and everyone else around you in healthy, positive ways – they’re not quite self-help books, more like…guidebooks to adulting. Two of their books, Made to Stick and Switch, are primarily about business, but have personal applications also – they’re both about effecting permanent change, or knowing when to make a change.

Decisive is about techniques for making better decisions and how to give yourself more options when faced with a choice. For example, they briefly talk about making a pro/con list (and the history of it – apparently Ben Franklin really loved them) but then they talk about moving beyond the pro/con list to more sophisticated techniques that help to exclude emotional bias.

Like, they talk about “hedging”, where you give yourself a taste of each option or you hedge your investment in a choice. If my main concern was whether I’d be happy in Boston or whether I’d want to move back to Chicago, I might “hedge” by putting most of my stuff in cheap pod storage, going to Boston with just the basics, and sending for my stuff in six months if I was still happy there, or moving back if I found I wasn’t. If I wanted to make the move permanent, I wouldn’t pay significantly more than if I’d moved six months earlier, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t pay to move at all, just a sort of convenience fee for storage.

And just thinking about hedging helped me say “No, I don’t need to do that. I know I’ll like the city, I just don’t know about the job” which helped me focus on the real concerns I have as opposed to the extraneous stuff.

Last time I used the book’s techniques, I was trying to decide whether to leave my job (because it was moving south and would make my commute hard) or move south to be closer to it, and I used their “set a deadline” advice. Rather than immediately choosing one or the other, I decided to jobsearch for six months, and if I hadn’t found anything, I’d stop jobsearching and start looking for apartments. It worked really well, and that’s how I ended up in this sweet condo I’ve got now. 😀

Anyway, I strongly recommend all three books; I think they are exceptional for helping people cope with a very uncertain world. But Decisive has been the most directly useful to me in my personal life. Every time I’m faced with a decision of this agonizing, terrifying size, I re-read the book to try and find the best way to move forward. It always has something to offer that I’d forgotten about. 🙂