Hilary! has a tough hill to climb

Don't believe the hype. Mr. Trump is in great shape. I say that as someone who would have accepted almost anyone over him. Down to the convention I was hoping for some kind of coup that would make John Kasich the nominee.

Mr. Trump has clearly tapped into something here. He's even gotten me to reexamine some of my beliefs vis a vis trade, etc. With the sainted minority vote he polls no worse that Romney and McCain. I think he'll do a bit better.

What's more interesting, really is everything Hillary! has to overcome.

One of my rules on presidential elections is the candidate only gets one chance. If you miss it, too bad. 1988 was Bob Dole's year. He blew it. 2000 was my man, John Wayne McCain's year. He blew that. Both lost handily in 1996 and 2006, respectively. Sorry, Hillary! but 2008 was your year and you messed it up.

Hillary! is playing defense. Mr. Trump is expanding the map. I saw a poll that showed Hillary! only get 47% of the vote in NY state. Think about THAT for a moment. Now, she'll win the state, don't you worry. But she's going to have to spend time and effort to do it. Also, if Chris Christie can win NJ, why not Mr. Trump? Mr. Trump is on the offense in PA. Mr. Trump is trolling for new voters, while Hillary! is struggling to keep hers.

Hillary! is also trying to do something that is very hard to do. That is replace a two term president of the same party. Just ask Richard Nixon, the sitting VP who lost in 1960, or Algore, the evil megalomaniac sitting VP in 2000. Heck, ask John McCain. Its but done twice, Martin Van Buren in 1836 and Bush the Elder in 1988.

Lastly, and maybe more importantly, Hillary! is an awful, awful candidate. Do we really need to go over this again? That voice, that personality, her complete lack of fixed belief....

Of course all these means we're looking at President Trump.

What the hell, America. What the hell...

Summer of the Shark

Someone pointed out on Twitter yesterday that the Chandra Levy case was trending. WTF? From the Hill:

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia said that it believed it could no longer prove the murder case against Ingmar Guandique "beyond a reasonable doubt" and moved to drop the case "based on recent unforeseen developments that were investigated over the past week."

Briefly, Chandra Levy was an intern for Congressman Gary Condit who disappeared. Turns out Condit was schtooping her and in order to hide this fact, did nothing to cooperate with the cops. Or some such. I really don't care about the details. As my friend Bill Katz says, for the summer of 2001 the news was all-Chandra, all the time.

Frankly, I had no idea this was still a thing.

That was the summer of Chandra, and shark attacks; the summer of the shark. That was the summer when Corey Widmer, and NFL lineman dropped dead during training camp from heat exhaustion. It was the summer I finished my first semester at an on-line college (which people still needed explained to them) on a dial-up modem.

Of course, ll that was obliterated on 9/11.

A few days after the attack, when Bush made his address to congress the camera paused briefly on Condit. It was surreal. Like the rest of the country I had forgotten all about him. It was surreal, like watching someone from another era suddenly appear. Which is exactly what happened, wasn't it?

Gary Condit was the happiest man in Washington.

Bill!

So the other night Bill Clinton vouched for Hillary's character assuring us what a wonderful woman she is and how lucky he was to....

Yeah whatever.

I really don't know why he was speaking. Whether you're talking about the '92 and '96 presidential elections, the off year elections of '93, '94 and '97, or even 2000, Bill Clinton has no coat-tales. When the conversation is about Bill, Dems lose.

I don't care, I find myself nostalgic for his time in office. Sure he is a scoundrel, a rogue, liar, sex-fiend, pervert and overall sexual predator. The man ran a pretty good ship. Now, this didn't start until after the '94 midterms when he got grownups in charge like Leon Panetta and Robert Rubin, and had a GOP controlled congress to keep him honest. But those five years from '95 to 2000 sow mind-boggling economic growth and employments and the dot-com boom. That's when we all learned we could invest in the stock market ourselves and order stuff  online and deliver it right to our homes.

Personally I was living in Northern Virginia at the time, and one of my overwhelming memories of the period is air conditioning. From June to August you're looking at 95+ temps every day. Nights were beautiful though. Aesthetically the style sticks out too. I'm thinking of movies like The Matrix, or Fight club, the overwhelming presence of green-gray colors. Then there was the 70's revival, disco and bell-bottoms. Its the era when I permanently checked out of the popular music scene...

Ahhhh....

Updates

The editor extraordinaire has Castro's Folly and is ready to kill me. Which means things are coming along fine.

The Final Storm is at 60,000 words. I am unraveling and reworking the intro. I have 20,000 words worth of tank battle on the Polish Plain. I may axe most of this. Readers are welcome to weigh in.

I got Pershing in Command back from the agent and am reading through that yet again. On the 50th edit we are seeing things we never saw before. Each read through is worth of course.

To Survive the Earth will be available on Kindle by the first weekend in August.

Silent Voters

My friend William Katz quotes Nate Silver of 538 at length:

Now we are in the post-convention phase of the campaign. Trump leads by .2 percent in the RCP Average and has cleared 44 percent of the vote. FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 46.1 percent chance of winning overall and a 54.5 percent chance of winning on Election Day, if things look then the way they do today. Yet we continue to hear arguments as to why he just won’t win: She’ll move into the lead after her convention, or after the debates, or when people go into the polls and have a final soul-searching moment.

Bill makes an excellent anecdotal about his waitress who after a bit of prodding admits she is voting for Mr. Trump. Bill calls such people 'Silent Trumpsters'. We have seen this phenomenon before. In the big elections of the last few years, the U.S. Congressional Elections, Israel, the UK and the Brexit, pollsters and pundits misread the public. In all four of those cases the right won the election after being down in the polls. Silent voters came through.

Given all the abuse Trump takes in the press, would you tell a pollster you supported him?

Me, when pollsters call, and they do, I mess with them, but that's a subject for another post.

Bill also talks about pundits panning Mr. Trumps acceptance speech. They are dead wrong. Mr. Trump nailed it, it was perfect for what he was trying to do.

So Nate Silver, who nailed 2012 sees where Trump is headed.

Silver and I are complete agreement except for one thing. He thinks Mr. Trump is the weakest GOP candidate. That's wrong. The only GOP candidate who Hillary definitely would have beaten is Jeb! Bush.

The Grand Review

The above photo is an inset of Washington's Grand Review of the Union Army, 23-24 May 1865. I've never been a huge Civil War fan, but lately I've been writing some articles on the topic for a magazine, and I must say the Grand Review was quite a spectacle.

Essentially the Grand Review was a two day victory parade of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the West, 135,000 men moving from Capitol Hill down Pennsylvania Avenue and past the White House. Here was a great review stand for dignitaries.

On day one marched the Army of the Potomac, resplendent in their uniforms, shinned buckles and forward slopping Kepi. Sitting in the review stand, Sherman realized that his Western Army of Midwestern men could never match the easterners in spit and polish soldiering. So he didn't try. Instead the men who had marched from across Tennessee, down through Georgia and then up through the Carolina's and Virginia presented themselves as is. The westerners wore ragged uniforms and broad-brimmed slouch hats, wagons and ambulances in the rear with pack animals. Sherman's men presented themselves as they were on the great march. A long snaking column of 60,000 gleaming, triumphant bayonets.

The two great armies were a metaphor for the nation, the polished and refined east contrasted with the more rough and tumble west. Of course the proud rebels of the Army of Northern staggered home in defeat.

The above inset is taken from a Mathew Brady photograph of the review stand and it's just fascinating. The row of soldiers in the fore is an honor guard but very functional above them, second from left is President Johnson to the viewers right sits Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Now for the best part. Third from right is General Sherman, and on the far left, General Grant. Just amazing.

Below is a presentation of most of the known photographs of the review.

Voting for Mother

Via my FB friend Kathy Shaidle Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, makes an excellent point about something I've believed for a decade:

Clinton will probably win the vote of women. Her problem is men. If you ask a man why he doesn’t like Hillary Clinton, he might say something about her policies and her history. But the persuasion filter says the real reason men don’t like Clinton is that they can’t stand listening to her. Her speaking style reminds men of every bad relationship they have ever had with a woman. We’re all irrational sexists on some level, and Clinton sounds to many male ears like a disgruntled ex-wife, or perhaps your mom who had a really bad day. That’s a problem if you need the male vote.

Whoooooboy!

Men, we've all known women like Hillary; the humorless girl ruining history class with her presentation on Shulimeth Firestone (I don't care how the name is spelled), the overbearing girlfriend who can't sit quietly through an action thriller cheese-fest (Road House! Cobra!), your bitch co-worker who ruins the Friday meeting with announcements about feminist weekend activities.

Hillary's! voice, THAT voice, that grating, hectoring voice which seems to be saying, 'Is that really workplace appropriate?'

I am reminded of a brief encounter I had in school twenty years ago when the prof, this guy, mentioned the Unabomber and a Marxist Beta with goatee and glasses said, 'What's wrong with the Unabomber?' Remembering that the Unabomber murdered a guy in the office next to my grandfather's I said, 'He's killing people,' to which the feminist sitting next to me (she was as good looking as a feminist in an elite D.C. college could have been) turned to me and said, 'So are white, Caucasian males'.

For two decades we've been talking about a gender gap. Well, how is Hillary! going to close this one? Especially when she's up against the ultimate ego driven alpha-male with the fashion model wife and the accomplished, tough and beautiful daughter. Mr. Trump, as I have called him since the Apprentice, is a man's man. And the best thing about him, he is self confident enough to simply be himself. Say what you want about Mr. Trump, we know who he is. What's more masculine than that?

When I see men with Hillary! T-shirts, inevitably their skinny, wearing glasses, flip-flops (if you ever see me in flip-flops you may assume I have been kidnapped  and replaced with a life-life robot by aliens who don't really I wouldn't be caught dead in flip-flops) has curly hair and glasses. He walks across the parking lot and gets into his black Volkswagon with his 'another man for choice' bumper sticker. This man is menstruating. He sits down when he takes a piss. He drinks something called 'shandy'. He enjoys spending time with his mother-in-law.

Which makes sense, since a voting for Hillary! is like voting for mother.

Iron Fist With a Star of David Tattoo

Here are the Israelis again, once more promising to unleash hell when Hezbollah attacks:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said, “If the quiet is kept, those facing us will enjoy quiet.” Then he warned that Hezbollah aggression would be met by “an iron fist.”

And here are the Israelis showing just what they are up against:

A photograph of Muhaybib, a town south of here, is covered with red squares marking the placement of what the Israelis say are command posts, anti-tank positions, tunnels and launch pads. Israel says there are 90 buildings in the village of 1,100 people and that 35 buildings are being used by Hezbollah.

The interesting thing here is that the Israelis are being so open about what they know.

The frightening thing is that they're telling the world that they don't give a damn about civilian casualties this time. That's a message to the west, the Arab world, and the people living in those targeted villages.

In Israel Strikes, I  portrayed Hezbollah launching a massive missile war with the IDF rolling across the border and engaging everything South of the Litani River, the approximate northern boundary of Hezbollah controlled territory. Four years after the fact I think I got things right, only in the coming war, things will be much worse.

With an arsenal of 100,000 rockets Hezbollah can keep Israel under a bombardment not seen by a Western Country since the Battle of Britain. I expect thousands of Israeli casualties. The IDF will have no choice but to roll into Lebanon and occupy everything south of the Litani. This of course will lead to a great battle in which the Israelis will take hundreds of casualties and loose dozens of vehicles (they lost 24 in the last war).

Might I suggest reading Israel Strikes before its overtaken by events?

To Survive the Earth...

...is now out on Nook, and hard copy. Kindle coming -10 days.

The war for the Earth continues.

In Massachusetts, three bored men take down an Alien ship, and boy are their wives mad...
Federal agents crisscross the country making preparations for the alien's Arrival... 
In California a Girl Scout Troop holes up in the mountains...
Above Venus, the aliens capture a Russian vessel...
The Indian Space Navy launches an attack on Ceres...

Trumped up Speech

I've never seen a convention speech quite like Mr. Trump's last night. Overall I thought it ran long, but I liked it. I liked the tidbits at the end, replacing Scalia, repealing Obamacare, and I loved, loved, his bit about the TSA. That wanna-be gestapo is a national disgrace. 

My own sense is that he gave the kind of speech Donald Trump would give if Donald Trump was trying to be serious. One can't tell Mr. Trump to give a measured policy-wonk speech, it just wouldn't work.

I also came away thinking that he is going to fight. The last GOP nominee to do that was Bush...the elder. Dole, Bush II, McCain, Romney, none of them would fight.

Now go to you tube and look at the clip of Bush the elder savaging Dan Rather. That's what's needed.

By the way, the guy standing behind the camera and holding up q-cards for Bush was Roger Ailes.

Trumped Up!

I liked Melania's speech and I loved Chris Chrisite's speech. That's my governor. So go to hell.

Mr. Trump is trying a different tack with his campaign and convention. Will it work? I dunno.

Here is what I do know, the policy wonk conventions, the speeches talking about top marginal tax rates, school vouchers, flat taxes and medicare reform are all flops. I should know. I've written before about being the Gen X conservative, the policy wonk type with all this ideas about bettering government. We came of age in the 1990's after the great existential battles of the 70's and 80's were won. The right won those battles because they were talking about broad themes, no boring audiences with the minutia of private garbage collection vs  public. Private is better btw. Rubio and Cruz, they're my guys, and they're also planning vacations in November.

I suppose the great architect of this kind of conservatism is Karl Rove, Bush's campaign guru. He watched what the Clintons did to Newt, the ultimate conservative policy-wonk and concluded you had to play defense, you had to be safe.

Karl Rove is a loser.

I love how other losers are lecturing Mr. Trump on what he has to do. Bob Dole says he needs to make amends. Norm Coleman, who lost the '98 governor's race in MN to Jesse Ventura, only won his senate race in '02 because of extraordinary circumstances, and lost that seat in 2008 to Al Franken, won't vote for him. Jeb! is boycotting the convention.

He blew the 2000 election, Bush was leading with a week left and Rove told him to take it easy, don't do too much, don't make a mistake, sit on the lead, prevent mistakes. Anyone whose ever watched an NFL game  knows how this ended. The prevent defense prevents you from winning. OK, he won in 2004 but think that was more to the organizational skills of grand game operators like Ed Gillespie and Ken Mehlman.

In 2012, Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS which spent something like a hundred million bucks, was humiliated.

So basically, the guys like me, well, we don't know much about winning presidential elections.

Say what you want about Mr. Trump, he's a winner.

World War 1990, release order

Ok readers, you tell me. World War 1990, which do you want to see first? The Final Storm where the war is wrapped up, or...Castro's Folly and Pacific Storm where we deal with side theaters of the war and THEN the Final Storm.

Your volume order choices:

Uno-
Arctic Storm
Eastern Storm
The Final Storm
Castro's Folly
Pacific Storm

Deus:

Arctic Storm 
Eastern Storm
Castro's Folly
Pacific Storm
The Final Storm

Bear in mind that whatever the release order, volumes I, II, and III are all taking place at the same time, its just the order you want to see them.

Rock of Ages, Rock of Ages, Still Rollin, Rock and Rollin'

Apropos of the previous post, Armageddon It, last week Mrs. Stroock and I saw Def Leppard last week.

This is the 5th or 6th Def Leppard concert I've been to, all within the last ten years.

I've written before about my love of Def Leppard. I cover some of this in the article linked above.

My love began in march of 1988, when I saw the Poor Some Sugar on Me video for the first time. Now, I already knew about Def Leppard. My older sister got their Pyromania album in 1983. Being a boy I thought the cover was cool. Pyromania was huge, but the follow up, Hysteria was even more popular.

I always thought of them as a hard-rock rather than a metal band. The distinction doesn't really matter anymore, but for what its worth, here's their video for Rocket:

They talk about Queen, heck they talk about Elton John and a lot of 70's Brit glam rock.

Interesting.

In 1988 this meant nothing to me. Brit glam rock never really made it over here across the pond.

Now, one of Def Leppard's real musical achievements was cranking out a metal album in D. One was not supposed to be able to do that. Hysteria really takes advantage of Def Leppard's ability to harmonize, and I think that is really their best attribute. In short, those guys can sing. Here's the best example:

 That chorus is a wall of D, and its magnificent.

Now, back to Def Leppard's glam rock roots, here's Sweet from 1975:

There's D in your face.

Anyway, back to the show last week. Def Leppard played three songs off their new album. The rest of the playlist:

Armageddon it, Let's Get Rocked, Rock On, Rocket, Foolin, Let's Get Rocked, Bringin' on the Heart Break, Animal, Love Bites Poor Some Sugar on Me; and the encore was Photograph and Rock of Ages.

Good fun, good fun.

Armageddon It

Via Politico, an interesting article on Britain's nuclear deterrent:

The British approached a nuclear holocaust differently, and in an appropriately British fashion. Rather than rely on high-tech gadgetry, their prime ministers handwrote “Letters of Last Resort,” and then locked those letters inside of a safe inside of another safe, and placed them in the control rooms of the nation’s nuclear submarines. The safes will only be accessible to the sub’s commander and deputy, who must decide together when Britain has been entirely destroyed.

For decades now, Britain has maintained a force of four SSBN subs, one of which is always at sea. I actually dealt with something like this in To Defend the Earth, In The Waiting Below, an American sub cruises of the California coast on a doomsday patrol. The final decision was in captain's hands.

In World War 1990: Operation Arctic Storm, Prime Minister Thatcher says to the BBC, 'Any time I think I have to destroy the Soviet Union, I will.'

The nuclear arsenals of Britain and France always complicated Soviet nuclear planning. Even if the United States were destroyed both nations maintained nuclear deterrents. What to do about those in case of nuclear war? British nuclear forces were on alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Prime Minister McMillan was in contact with President Kennedy.

Interestingly, Britain only developed its own nukes to show it was still a world power and prove to the US they were still an important ally. They really weren't all that concerned with the Soviets.

As far as those instructions from British Prime Ministers they usually came down to; retaliate, do nothing, put yourself in command of an allied navy. This would mean the United States of course, or perhaps Canada or Australia.

On the Beach, certainly a nuclear Armageddon film, opens with a U.S. submarine arriving in Australia and asking for orders.

Creative Terror

Again. This time most creatively. Using a truck is low tech and brilliant. I am surprised this has not been tried before. I wonder what looms next?

Back in the 1990's, when this was just a theoretical exercise, my Capital Hill friends and I used to theorize about how one could commit a mass casualty attack on Congress.

We determined it was pretty easy. Get a job on the Hill. Difficult but not impossible. Even a job in the massive service employee work force would do. The House side had a big parking garage. There was no inspection before entering. Simply fill your trunk with weapons and ammo.

Now, even back then the Hill had pretty good security. While a public building that anyone could enter, those entrances had metal detectors and three or four Capital Cops. There were also Capital Cops conducting random patrols throughout. So after the shooting began it would not be long before our terrorist was up against armed police. One would want to conduct this attack with two or three other terrorists.

Not impossible to work out, at least back in the 1990's.

Of course, in 1994 Tom Clancy published Debt of Honor, which ends with a Japanese airline pilot Kamikazing Capital Hill.

Oh, how they laughed at that one.

So my little plot ain't so far fetched is it.

During the Cold War the Pentagon used to convene meetings of Hollywood types to dream up war scenarios, see Twilight Zone at the Pentagon.

After 9-11 they did the same. You want to tell me Michael Mann couldn't come up with the most spectacular terrorist attack ever?

Different Universes

Over at Marginal Revolution, an interesting question:

In the Star Trek world there is virtual reality, personal replicators, powerful weapons, and, it seems, a very high standard of living for most of humanity....n Star Wars, the early episodes show some very prosperous societies. Still, droids are abused, there is widespread slavery, lots of people seem to live at subsistence, and eventually much of the galaxy falls under the Jedi Reign of Terror.

Time and place are the answers.

Star Trek was conceived alongside the post war Utopian of Kennedy, of NASA, of an America combating racism, poverty, etc. Gene Roddenberry wrote those Star Trek scripts as the nation was in the midst of a post-war, sleek, space age architectural revolution. Man as going to the moon, after all.

The sleek modernism of Star Trek became even more pronounced in The Next Generation. All those computers, all that metal, all those pastels. Jean Luc Picard's Enterprise looked clean to the point that it was downright sterile. The Federation looked dull, a place where nothing ever happened.

Which is fine really. Would you rather live in Canada or Congo? Nothing's ever happened in Canada. Now Congo on the other hand....but that's a subject for another post, isn't it?

Star Wars, well it was written and filmed in the 70's. 

Nothing more need be said.

Surviving To Survive the Earth

That's it! The final, final edits for To Survive the Earth are going in today.

I wash my hands of the whole thing!

I never again want to think about Federal agents preparing for Arrival, captured Soviet ship captains, AR-15 packing teenage Girl Scouts in mountain strongholds (sounds like a Russ Meyer film), small Kentucky towns freezing in the war's aftermath, or in the Indian Space Navy launching a combined assault on Ceres and Europa.

I am done, finished. Now on with To Liberate Mars, assuming my editor doesn't blow my head off.

Actually, I'm cranking out Castro's Folly, Operation Pacific Storm, and The Final Storm, but the reader will know what I mean.

The Age of Mediocrity and Mendacity

Well that was an interesting week, no?

Riots in the streets, police officer gunned down, political influence used to save the elite from prison....

We live in the Age of Obama.

It's usually unfair to judge a president until he's left office but I'll give it a go:

The country is racially polarized.

The economy is stuck in permanent mediocrity.

Healthcare is more expensive and harder to get.

Government offices are weaponized against the president's political opponents.

The armed forces are hollowed out.

The Middle East is in tatters.

China is on the march.

Russia makes gains.

Our enemies laugh at us.

Our Allies fear us.

Take from a prof, never elect a college prof to the Oval Office.

I missed W on 1.20.09 and I miss him now.

Almost Back

Still at the beach but heading back tomorrow, which means this will be a light day. We are all singed and tired; going to the beach is tiring business after all.

That was a momentous week, wasn't it?

My brilliant and lovely editor has finished the last round of To Survive the Earth. I will enter final changes this week.

I am editing the 2nd draft of Castro's Folly and will send it to said editor this week. (aren't you on vacation?-Ed) Yes, but I have three kids, which means I get to relax when I get back from the beach. Who do you thinks lugs all the umbrellas and chairs around? I always work, always. Which means in the mornings, while the kids are getting on their sun scream (family joke) I'm thinking about Contras and Olifant tanks.

World War 1990: The Final Storm is now 60,000 words, I'm thinking it will come in at 90,000 but we'll see.

Funny thing, before the Final Storm comes out I'm publishing Pacific Storm, which I have done no work on. Why write The Final Storm first? I dunno, seemed like a good idea at the time.

Off to the Beach

Posting will be light or non-existent.

That said the editorial team is hard at work on To Survive the Earth, Castro's Folly, and The Final Storm.

On the New Cover

The old cover featured a Russian tank spewing fire at some unseen target. It was pretty cool, and I think it will be the Cover for To Liberate Mars. However, of the six stories in To Survive the Earth, only one involves real combat, and I thought the old cover was a bit misleading.

This new cover kinda, sorta shows a scene from the book. Four stories take place on earth, two take place elsewhere. Also, India is in the background, and let's just say, that's kinda important.

The editor, who advised me to change the cover, or talked me into it I should say, has the latest and last proof.

To Survive the Earth is scheduled for release in August.

To Survive the Earth

New Cover:

Soon.

Somber Somme

One hundred years ago today the battle of the Somme began. Technically, I suppose the centennial
was a week ago, as the Brits preceded their suicidal death charge with a week long artillery bombardment.

We have written before how us Yanks don't always appreciate the Great War. We certainly don't appreciate the Somme.

Before this awful battle, the British had been fighting the Germans with their professional army, honed in 1914 and whittled down in the bloody battles of 1915. The army that went over the top in the Somme was new, hundreds of thousands of men specially recruited for the grand push, the 'pals' battalions. These were  regional units. An American Civil War buff will know what happened next.

Whole towns got wiped in the opening minutes. Postwar Britain was a good place to be a swinging bachelor. The British lost 60,000 men on the first day and their can-do, optimistic Edwardian virtue. The Somme is the most important thing to happen to the Brits in the 20th century.

The nation has never really recovered. Twenty years later Britain passed off leadership of the English speaking world to the United States. During the great conferences of World War II, the British were very reluctant to invade Europe. In 1944 Marshall finally told the Brits, either we go this year, or we are going to shift our focus to the Pacific. A knowing British officer told Marshall, 'You are arguing against the casualties of the Somme.'