#still making conceptual soup w this.

[catilinas]

lucan, pharsalia 6.719-25, 6.762-70, 6.820-7 trans. a.s. kline / hadestown obcr, way down hadestown (reprise) / tamsyn muir, gideon the ninth / richard siken, the language of birds / lucan, pharsalia 9.980-6 trans. a.s. kline

poetic immortality (this is a threat)

[badolmen]

‘Where did the vanilla extract joke come from???’ I’m no memeologist but I put money on the thyrell four word horror story post “two cups of vanilla extract”

[quenthel]

ok ill give it up. new wow lore stuff is actually very fun esp w the dragons.

Like Kalecgos was just this weirdo who fucked the sunwell and then dated Jaina for 2 seconds and then abandoned her when she got angry that Garrosh blew up her home. Like most dragon writing was highkey sexist w a million r*pe scenarios forever but they are excavating all that p well and by that i mean rewriting that bit of the lore.

Like Kalecgos going from that to becoming like a weird dad and being all like “yes my close... colleague Khadgar :)” and eating soup w the tuskarr and just trying to find the rest of his flight to unite them is very sweet. I also love that they made Senegos relevant again and his humanoid form is an old troll and he tells stories abt how he loved to play katamari with the bugs around the graveyard and shit. I also just generally loved the new quests abt the blue dragonflight bc so far the ones i saw were all weird losers. Conceptually they are very cool bc they are the wizzer dragons but they are all losers it seems and i love that (minus Stellagose bc she rules and she should get a gf).

I also love Wrathion Sabellian and Emberthal, like the black dragonflight stuff ig is very nice. I also like that Emberthal is clearly into that other female drachtyr who is the healer and that her humanoid form is just a tall guy. Ik its a bit cheap to make dragons the trans characters bc of the visage stuff but still its nice. I just wish they made Alexsztrasza’s boytoy Krasus plot relevant i want him to be the ultimate wifeguy to ever exist.

[gag-magazine]

A Taste of the Old Country

By Nicholas Reardon , Art By Sam Horne

Soup time

I remember the good times i had as a kid. I remember playing sticks and rocks with the neighborhood. I remember driving bicycle w/o a helmet, jumping out of large trees. I remember the nights yelling really loud and throwing glass bottles into metal trashn m cans. 

I remember late nights, after a really long game of sticks and rocks, we’d be lying on the street and hear in the distance sound of dinnerbell ringing in kitchenwindow. We’d scramble over each other,tripping on rocks we left out, running back to the house as fast as possible.

My mother (Norah) stands in the doorway, magnificent smile, arms outstretched to accept the the neighborhood into her home.

We'd rally around the dinner table, my brothers and sisters already ready with their spoons. I’d look up at Norah, asking her from the bottom of my empty stomach: 

“I wonder what’s for dinner.”

“Son,” Norah would say with that magnificent smile, “it’s soup time.”

Recipe #1: Nicholas paul reardon signature soup (the house guest)

This soup comes from a recipe my hippie aunt from colorado taught me in pennsylvania. that summer, I moved around the east coast and stayed in many different homes belonging to family or friends, each time making this soup for them to show my gratitude. This soup is very sentimental to me and is also very exciting because still it seems like every time I make it, it ends up tasting different.

Ingredients:

Olive oil

5 garlic

4 sweet potatoes (japanese)

3 celery

2 tomatoes

1 onion 

Can chick peas (also called garbonzos)

tamari (soysauce)

Hot water

Spice guide:

Alot of:

paprika

Abit of:

turmeric

Basil  

c salt

Alittle of:

cinnamon

cheyenne pepper

bay leaf

Instructions:

Saute onions, garlic,     celery and sweet potatoes in the biggest pot you have with olive oil until its starts to smell like something (5 minutes)

Add spices (consult spice guide) and the water and cover the pot with a lid, simmer, walk away (15 minutes)

Come back and add other veggies and chickpeas and tamari (or garbonzos), stand over the pot and look at the vegetables until they are soft as you want (~10 min)

Recipe #2 - Chicken noodle soup

Invented in the months preceding WW2 by cambell’s soup company, chicken noodle soup may be one of the most famous soups ever conceived. Combining chicken and noodles, this soup’s iconic status lies in its simplicity, eaten by both sick children and sick adults. As a vegetarian, I’ve decided to put my own twist on this soup classic.

Ingredients:

Miso paste

Hot water

Udon

Mushrooms

Splash of soysauce

Instructions:

Fill pot with water, watch until it boils

Add great spoonfuls of miso paste, soysauce until broth is as powerfulas you want

Add udon and mushrooms and cook until they become edible

Recipe #3 - Salty potato soup

                                This soup was born out of trying to use all the leftover potatoes on top of the fridge. Somehow every time it’s made it ends up being too salty idk how this keeps happening.

Ingredients:

5 potatoes (middle size)

Coconut milk orAlmond milk

Splash of heavy whipping cream

Butter (great amount)

1 white onion

5 garlic cloves smashed and sliced

Pepper, oregano, thyme, salt (you must be careful)

Instructions

Saute garlic and white onion in a pan over low heat until they become delicious

Boil pot of water with salt

Put potatoes in the water and have patience, stir when the urge comes to you

When soft, mash the potatoes that made you wait, leave some big chunks

Add garlic and onions to pot along with butter and milk(s) and seasonings and more salt to taste

When you discover you made it too salty, try adding more water or milk to counteract this

Concede that there is no way to turn back the clock and learn to be happy with your mistakes (it tastes salty good)

Recipe #4 - conceptual grandma’s soup (the longest stew)

Look at this guy smoking, ho h!o  This a beautiful book I-

So-

I didn’t even open it. I wanted to open it with you.

So part of the uhh–

Look the end of it. It’s signed. Feel it.

Part of the idea, part of the recipes I’m writing with the soup chapter, I wanted to umm— include in the chapter the soup that you told me your grandma—or grandma— made for you when you were growing up. The carrot stew.

Oh ho ho yes— yes. Ye-he-he-hes hahahaha. Do you know what it is honestly? It is–it is the most cheap thing that you could do. She would go on the—she’d go to the butcher and the chunks of meat that we’re kinda cutoffs—yeah, yeah yeah, and then we’d take that home and make a little [unintelligible] bunch of it, and then she’d throw it right in the pot with water in it. And then she would, and then she’d throw the cut—I’d help cut the carrots, and cut the celery— uhh just basic stuff just that was maybe even it. 

So can you go over—

Put some carrots in there—

Can you go over just the basic ingredient list?

Well I just did. Meat, water—

Okay. What—

Uhhhh, I think she put salt in there. Maybe a few other stuff out of a shaker. Maybe something out of a shaker though. The spices, a rack, 2 or 3 things in there. So—

What—what kinda spices?

—the water. Like uhhhhhhhhhh, I think she went in like—it’s a deer look! Wait. Is that a creature or—?

I don’t know.

Okay well, so it was uhhh chunks of meat for sure, and then lots of em, and then a lot of potatoes! And I’d peel the potatoes and we’d chop em—

What, what, what seasonings would you—

Seasonings. I think it was uhhhhh… [long pause]. [unintelligible] yup, she put in  [unintelligible] I think it was celery, the         celery seeds. The seed right? Celery I thi–celery she would, celery seed. The celery seed in there. Maybe some, nothing spicy it was so bland it would kill a horse. Okay? And it was purely for survival purposes only it was inexpensive: carrots, celery and beans [beef?]. And potatoes. And mostly potatoes; spread the meat out. So we’d make 2–3 pots of that because there were 2 tables with kids. And the big table with the adults, and the little table with the kids.

So what was the preparation for the—soup?

So back to the spices. Okay then pepper was in there for sure. Pepper. Not fresh ground but out of the McCormick’s thing. And uhhh… [very long pause] …and the salt too frankly was. Thes— oh look there it’s another dead creature in the road. Uhhh. [pause] Maybe rosemary actually, ro-rosemary, rosemary, thyme… Nothing fresh in there at all, ha except the celery looked green.

I heard that thyme is running out.

What thyme?

Thyme is running out.

What thyme is running out?

It was a joke.

Oh. So yes, we eat that stew—there see the sacred grounds [long unintelligible section].

I’m recording the–

Okay. So back to spices. So okay? Then it would boil for—she would go to sleep for 8 hours—she’d come home from work, she’d go to sleep, and then we’d eat it for 3 days.

What’d she do for work?

She was a miranda[?] she worked on men’s surgeon board[?], on her feet for all night from 11 to 7am, come home put in on the 9 kids, and then wake up at 3, we’d all come home, maybe she’d get up at 5 so we’d help cook dinner—

The soup. 

—chopping. A lot of soup— 

You’d make the soup—

—a lot of stew. That’s what she called it—

Focus—focus on the preparation, the recipe

—all day she cooked it. She’d put a lid on it big pot—

So, what? So you’d chop the, you’d chop the—

—chopped it, chopped the—

—you’d chop the—the, step-by-step

—you’d chop the carrots, into chunks two inches or so long, chunks, and slices, and chunks! I don’t know. It was uh umm.

And the potatoes.

Carrot sticks, okay? Carrot sticks. And everything boiled to the point where you could apply it with a plaster of paris knife[?]. Okay? Everything was so overcooked it was unbelievable. The st—the potatoes would melt in your mouth like mush and be like: mashed potatoes! Because while she’s sleeping it's cooking.

It sounds delicious.

It would be for a dog. And then—sorry mom—and then, and then it kept us alive that was the idea. So nobody overate because it didn’t taste very good and then you’d fill it with peanut butter jelly. That’s it! That was the Reardon Hoagie, and that was mom’s stew.

Thank you very much.

That’s all I want to say about that.

…Is that forest gump? A forest gump quote?

Okay now let me read.

Okay.

Introduction - “Recipes for Elliot” by Nicholas Reardon

[hideyseek]

50 Questions You’ve Never Been Asked

tagged by @usersoup <3

What is the colour of your hairbrush?  it is .. black and turquoise, though i must admit that since i’ve cut my hair i rarely use it. 

Name a food you never eat? huh. caviar? i tend to forget about the existence of foods i don’t eat until i’m on the instacard website. chocolate ice cream, i guess. that’s like, a normal-person food i never consume.

Are you typically too warm or too cold? i am constantly too cold. as i type this i am in my apartment in sweatpants under a blanket and my roommate is in shorts and a tshirt.

What were you doing 45 minutes ago? mm i was reading a room of one’s own, at risk of sounding like the pretentious humanities major i am. i’m reading it out of desperation (we are in possession of the writer’s block and we would like to give it up as soon as possible), after having had it in my head to read since i came across a lin-manuel miranda tween in like 2015 telling all young writers to read it

What is your favourite candy bar? i don’t really like.. candy. twix or butterfingers, if i had to pick one at gunpoint.

Have you ever been to a professional sports event? yEAH u fucking bet i went to winterguard international championships twice in high school and bands of america championships once (both as part of my school’s winter/colorguard). i’ve never gone to a pro sportsball match though. 

What is the last thing you said out loud? oh, are you really out there alone? (at my roommate, who is on the balcony with a desk lamp rigged up for optimal dirtball making).   

What is your favourite ice cream? vanilla. or hazelnut. i fucking love hazelnut. 

What was the last thing you had to drink? not to associate myself with brands, but i am drinking sprite as i type this. 

Do you like your wallet? yes! i had my wallet nicked on a bus in the middle of the semester and my replacement is a lovely narrow black folding wallet that i am infinitely fond of.

What was the last thing you ate? the dregs of my cheezits, pepper jack flavor

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend? mm no, though during my phone call with my grandma earlier this week she told me i should buy more clothes no less than four times. she thinks i should own and wear more “pretty girl clothes” and i haven’t the heart to tell her that i think gender is fake. 

The last sporting event you watched? i participated in a harry potter pub quiz over zoom the other week, if that counts. otherwise, probably something televised and american football related, several months ago.

What is your favourite flavour of popcorn? KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN

Who is the last person you sent a text message to? oH thank god i have an interesting answer to this one -- my stage manager/playwright friend, whose recent play i am dying to get a copy of.

Ever go camping? yeah. my family used to go every august with some family friends. 

Do you take vitamins? mm just vitamin d. (fuck off this was not meant to be a dick joke).

Do you go to church every Sunday? nah.

Do you have a tan? not anymore... even during the semester i spend most of my time underground in a basement rehearsal space or in the on-campus computer labs. (hence the vitamin d)

Do you prefer Chinese food or pizza? these are?? not equivalent at all in terms of scope? chinese food, of course. 

Do you drink your soda with a straw? nah. can-to-mouth for me. 

What colour socks do you usually wear? depends on how cold i am: i have some very lovely warm purple socks and some red and black socks that my dear friend gifted me for christmas last? year? but otherwise i have just sports shoes height white socks and black socks.

Do you ever drive above the speed limit? i am gay, i do not drive.

What terrifies you? failure, mostly. i hate that that’s my answer, but there you go. failure, or being putting myself in a situation where i don’t really have a choice in what happens to me.  

Look to your left, what do you see? mm, i just moved from the study to bed so: the empty space in the loft bed railing where the ladder is, a blank wall, the edge and hinges of the bedroom wall.

What chore do you hate? none, really? i’ll get really passive-aggressive about some of the small apartment tidying things in my head, but not often enough that anything comes to mind now. 

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent? how my linguistics prof last semester had folks self-identify if they spoke non-american english in the middle of lecture

What’s your favourite soda? hm, hm. oH. there’s a vietnamese sandwich place in my hometown that has the best lychee soda. (a handful of google image searches informs me this is elisha aerated brand)

Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive-thru? hm, most of the time when i’m going to fast food i’m going to in-n-out with either a pile of theater people or my high school friend group, so sitting. er, going in.

Who’s the last person you talked to? roommates, in person. 

Favourite cut of beef? i could not name cuts of beef if u asked me to really nicely. actually jk i know uh, ox... oxtail? i like oxtail soup.

Last song you listened to? am in the middle of listening to trenchh by cavetown but i’ve been alternating fob and cavetown and bastille on shuffle on spotify.

Last book you read? ella enchanted by gail carson levine, because it is my #1 comfort book.

Favourite day of the week? i like thursdays. they just sound nice.

Can you say the alphabet backwards? if i had like, several minutes, i probably could do it. but everything after w would involve me counting (counting? reciting?) from the beginning.

How do you like you coffee? i’ll drink it any way but black. i have discovered i do not like dalgona coffee. but i like the dark chocolate mocha that peet’s does in the winter a ridiculous amount.

Favourite pair of shoes? i have this pair of converse that’s grey stripes that always makes me feel like a Cool Arts Student, even though it’s actively terrible for my arches. 

The time you normally go to bed? to bed? midnightish. to being asleep? usually 1-2ish. 

The time you normally get up? eleven in the morning, apparently, since that’s what’s been happening now that i’m not setting alarms. during the school year, usually 7:30 or 8 because i work in the scene shop half the mornings of the week.

What do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets? conceptually? sunsets. aesthetically? also sunsets. metaphorically, though, i prefer sunrises.

How many blankets on your bed? i’ve got a blanket (duvet, maybe? comforter? i have never really vibed with these western concepts of bedding) and another knitted blanket. 

Describe your kitchen plates: black and square and slightly chipped because roommates and i get a bit aggressive with cramming them onto the drying rack. 

Do you have a favourite alcoholic beverage? i like hard cider. (i like soft cider better than hard cider, but the apple taste drowns out the alcohol taste enough for me to have a pretty good time.) 

Do you play cards? haha yeah. whenever i’m home i play 24 with my little brother and lose a lot. or my family’ll play 21. or BS, which i fucking hate because i cannot lie for shit.

What colour is your car? still gay, still don’t drive.

Can you change a tire? mmmmmmmmmmm no. i have a shocking lack of car-related life skills for someone holding down a job that mostly involves wrenches. 

Your favourite province? oh boy. hubei province, bc there’s no country specification and this feels less impersonal than if i were to just point somewhere in australia. 

Favourite job you’ve ever had? hm, let’s limit this to work i’ve done for money, just to narrow the field down. (i tend to like the work i do a lot.) i really really enjoy working as a sound technician, especially as a mic assistant (it checks my “meeting people” box and my “helping people with their emotions” box and my “storytelling for an audience” box because at the theater i work at, pre-show mic check is me talking about my day and has resulted in a handful of people telling me i should try standup). the hours and pay are kind of crap, though. you don’t get friday nights when your friday nights are spent backstage of the same show you’ve heard twenty million times at this point. i also enjoy teaching computer science, because i just fucking like computer science. christ, i just,, miss being at work :c the production of newsies i was gonna do this summer got canceled. 

How did you get your biggest scar? mm, pass. 

What did you do today that made someone else happy? i, hm. everything that comes to mind feels vaguely manipulative, since i can’t really tell if people were made happy? oh! i had an extended slack conversation with one of the academic interns for the cs class i help teach that was basically just us bonding over word humor. he seems like the kind of person who would have gotten a kick out of it. 

I tag: @kittog @wali21 @capt-ann @lemon-yellow @iamanonniemouse @raccoon-sex-dungeon @snakesonacartesianplane @eternalflarg @swimmingseafish (do it if u want! don’t let me bully u into anything)

[backstorywithdanalewis]

Beirut Tears - The blast the what now? Link to podcast:  https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/5059493 Please share this podcast Back Story with Dana Lewis

Speaker 1: (00:00) What is the cause of that explosion? Was it accidental?  Speaker 2: (00:03) I don't believe into the conspiracy theory. I believe acception coincidences. Speaker 1: (00:18) Hi everyone. I'm Dana Lewis and welcome to this special edition of backstory. They root in crisis. Speaker 2: (00:31) The death toll has risen overnight and that massive explosion in Beirut the death toll has climbed. Speaker 1: (00:37) I told them it's going to increase in the coming. Alison Speaker 2: (00:39) Lebanese security officials say that that Speaker 1: (00:42) Was triggered by explicit material that was stored in a warehouse in the much of Beirut is shattered this morning by one of the most powerful peacetime explosions ever Speaker 2: (00:58) Nuclear bomb. I couldn't even take my bed Speaker 1: (01:02) As a reporter. I've been to Lebanon. There is always, it seems some national meltdown or political gridlock. This is something else. A massive explosion in Bay root shattered. The city, a blast so intense. It was felt 150 miles away in Cyprus. 135 bed, 5,000 injured, 300,000 displaced from their homes. First, it was a fire in the port at around 5:54 PM. Then 14 minutes later, initial report say 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stupidly stored there. Detonated the big blessed makes the Beirut event. One of the most powerful industrial explosions on record in this backstory, we take you to Beirut and talk to the former foreign minister. But first here is a friend who was also a part time producer and full time businessmen who was trying to survive and he's taking time to help others by joining me now from Beirut is Danny khoury who was Speaker 2: (02:13) As a businessman and somebody I've known for a long time and he's helped journalists in Lebanon. And he's a good friend. And Danny, how are you doing? Hi, Dana, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. So far we survived this one. How close did it come to you? As you know, um, I also I'm in the bar business, so I was actually at one bar that is about two kilometers away from the blast, but we own another bar that was just like 300 meters away from the blast. And that was, that was deadly. Uh, luckily with none of our stuff, uh, diet, the only injuries, but a lot of we lost a of friends in that area. It was an it's an area full of bars and restaurants, and it's very vibrant, full of tourists as well. dany khoury: (03:09) The only, the only good thing that I could say about it was the COVID-19 had a bit of restrictions about bars. They were not supposed to open only restaurants and restaurant bars. So luckily the bar visitors were not there. Usually they come early for happy hours and otherwise it would have been a massacre. It was still a massacre, but it wasn't like 170 people died. This is so sad, but otherwise it would have been much more than that. This is on Germain street [inaudible] as you know, that the port area outdoors, the seaside. So it was amazing. And Miami high end, it was like one long street, actually they're connected to each other. So, uh, um, I was eating, I was eating today surveys. There were about 280 restaurants and bars in that area. That's completely, uh, destroyed. Like, I mean, dana lewis : (04:18) Hundreds of, I mean, I love that city. It's beautiful. And you and I have been gemmayzeh street together and we've eaten there together and, and, uh, I love Beirut. It's a fantastic city and, but there are hundreds of buildings that are gutted by this and some of them are gonna fold down. I mean, the damage is, it's almost too difficult to describe to people. dany khoury: (04:41) Well, uh, Dana , uh, there are about maybe like 20,000 buildings that were, that were like partially destroyed. Maybe, maybe a few, few thousands that completely demolished like grounded level. A lot of like the, the new, uh, the new high rise that were built there. They're all like modern buildings was like full of glass fronts and they're like lofts kinda kind of, uh, can apartments. Uh, those were the buildings where a lot of people actually died over there because of the size of the blast was like humongous. Like I still, every time I go there and see, I look at the Robyn, I am shocked again and again, and every day I go there and like, I'm still shocked. I cannot, I cannot, I cannot still imagine it in my head. dana lewis : (05:37) You're running. You've been running a soup kitchen for people you've been doing free food. Have you? dany khoury: (05:43) Well, um, it's exactly. Um, I started a new conceptual store. That's a bit far off the pace where I was actually, so we only lost the glass door over there. So after making a phone call to the bar that I own, and then making sure that the staff were okay, call a few friends, phone calls were like really hard to connect because they were like heavy galling. Like everybody was calling everybody. So like, there was like, it was cutting off most of the time. So the only thing I could think about was to actually, um, do something and try to help. The only thing that crossed my mind is like, since I have like a food store, why not cooking. So I called all the staff after they were like, I sent them home. I called them back to come back. And then we started cooking. dany khoury: (06:39) We started to like, in my, in my opinion, I didn't know the size of the blast or the number of casualties or the misplaced and everybody. So I thought like of making, I don't know, 15, 16 years, whatever, whatever I could, I am able to do. So we ended up doing 110 the first day, second day, 380. Now we're like, we reach a hundred, we reached 1060 meals. Uh, basically most of the food is going to the Lebanese food bank and the volunteers on the ground. And this place, people that some people like they still, their houses are still there, but they have no doors, no windows. So they cannot leave their house to actually buy groceries order or cook because the probably like, I don't know, they lost the kitchen or something. So what we are doing now, not just me, a lot of people doing that. Also, dana lewis : (07:34) If anybody wanted to listening to this, wanted to support you, is there a way they can do that? dany khoury: (07:40) Well, I'm, I'm, I'm not an NGO. I'm an individual, a place me and my brother, we own this shop. So we're doing it on an individual basis. Like we're not accepting money because like, I don't want to be taking money and putting it in my account and then mess up with this. dana lewis : (07:57) People can get to red cross or whatever. dany khoury: (08:00) Exactly. So what I'm trying to do is to actually, we asked for the goods, we asked for food for dry food, for rice meat, the chicken, vegetables, whatever you can give us oil, butter, cheese, whatever people give us. We cook them when we cook different meals. Sometimes they like seven, eight minutes a day just to actually do, just to reach the maximum number of meals per day. dana lewis : (08:27) Who do you think is responsible for this? I mean, they said it was a bunch of fertilizer that was stored. What, you know, I'm not going to put you on that. Say what do people say in Bay root? I mean, w dany khoury: (08:39) They believe they know you are familiar with them. It means you've been coming here. And for the past, I dunno, like what 14, 15 years now, you know how politics here in Lebanon, how corruption is. So, um, for, for me, I blamed the government. First of all, I blame everyone in the government because everyone knew that there was a nuclear bomb laying there at the Harbor. And no one had actually blinked an eye, you know? So, uh, there was no warning after the first blast. They could have warn everyone because the first blast it took them, like, I don't know, like half an hour, maybe even more. And then the second one, uh, exploded and destroyed the city. They could at least have sent a warning to people to do, to leave that area, knowing what they were hiding over there. dana lewis : (09:25) There was there indeed that much time between that initial fire. dany khoury: (09:29) And then the second, the actual fight started, yes. Started, started like, I don't know, I guess around 30 minutes or even more maybe. And then there was a small blast. And then there was the second blast. That was that actually the fire had started earlier because firemen went there, they were trying to put off the fire. And this is when the second explosion happened and then killed almost everyone and destroyed half of the city. Speaker 4: (09:57) I don't think somebody set this off. You think that dany khoury: (09:59) I am, I am sure it's a manmade. It's not just, you know, uh, because every military, uh, experts that actually watched the videos and discuss that over TV, and they were brought here for investigation, not official investigations, but like a lot of newspapers and journalists and TVs, they brought experts to just to understand what is the nature of this explosion. So everyone was saying that this is definitely a manmade, because like, there is no way on earth that this kind of ammonium nitrate can explode by itself and neither can explode by a fire next to it because you cannot, you cannot put it on. So there has to be some kind of like a trigger, you know, it has to be a trigger that so that you can explode that thing. A lot of things, a lot of people there's a lot of theories. Some say maybe it was Israel that, uh, threw a bomb over there. dany khoury: (10:56) Maybe some, uh, some say that it was, it could be a torpedo from underwater. Some, some could say like it's a sabotage. Somebody went there and placed the bomb. And so, but the, the, the, the weird thing about it is that, that thing, that, that ship had 2,750 tons of, uh, ammonium nitrate laying there at the port. So every military expert expert that have seen such a thing, or that studies such a case been saying that the size of explosion of Beirut is not more than 600, not more than 500 tons of night of ammonium nitrate. So there's another 200, 2,300 at least, uh, 2,200 tons that are missing. So in this case, I don't know, like you can fingers at any day elections. It could be the ISIS, it could be the Syrian opposition. It could be the Syrian regime. It could be Hezbollah. It could be, it could be anybody. Speaker 3: (12:05) We need a, you probably need an independent investigation in there, but, uh, I think the government has an effect Speaker 2: (12:12) We need that. We definitely need that because, uh, as you know, we have no more trust in that government that is handling the investigation today. dana lewis : (12:20) Everybody go from now. I mean, I assume people are just kind of stumbling forward day by day, trying to repair what they have left, just in terms of even just trying to get glass back into apartments and have places to live and stay. I mean, where do you go from here? dany khoury: (12:39) Uh, it's uh, it's not easy. Um, maybe you, like, you've seen footage, maybe you've seen the radians that explosion, maybe you like, you have an idea about the size of destruction, but no, you don't actually, you have to be here and see with your own eyes. The size of the structure. We apparently need, like, I don't know, 5,000 type of like large ships full of glass to cover all the windows and doors that were broken. It's like 15 kilometers away from radians of the blast that you see, the glasses were shattered all over. Speaker 3: (13:21) Imagine how, how much damage you can see in the photographs. And some of the video, you see some areas. Speaker 2: (13:29) I know I saw, I saw before I saw the actual place than before, before I went there and I was like, Oh, okay. We know like, we've lived that I lived the civil war. It was like, you know, just like any other bond, like big bump, not big a deal, but no, when I went, when I went there, like, it's massive. It's like, it's incredible. You cannot see the end of it. You cannot see the end of destruction at one point when everything is level to the ground. And then, but you can not see how far it is. It's too far, man. It's like, it's like a desert. The whole explosion made on the Inforce. Concrete at the port at the Harbor is, was hunt. What was actually 42 meters deep, incredible that's like enforced concrete that was broken and destroyed into pieces. And then down in the water and you know, that water can take a hit. So it was like 40 to 42 meters deep. That's crazy. This is like, we wouldn't you man. We have knew literally we were new Speaker 3: (14:41) Beirut was in Lebanon was already reeling from COVID-19 right. The economy Speaker 2: (14:48) Let's go with 19. And it was also the economic that we've been living on since, since last August, actually, it's been like a year now where, um, in October 17, everybody went down the street because of the exchange rate of the dollar. It was going too high. And there was like a lack of dollars, you know, like we need, if you need to buy things, we, we, we actually import everything. So we need to pay for that. The goods that we're importing and we were missing the daughters. So a lot of fraud that started going on on the 17th of October last year because of the economy situation, because of the lack of the daughters, because of the unstable politics. So the Lebanese people were really suffering. It's been over two years, but it was about seventies, October, where everybody went Speaker 3: (15:42) Route and Lebanon is not going to recover unless there's an international effort to come in Speaker 2: (15:48) And help finance reconstruction, you know? Um, I've, I've, I've been like, I only thought about that and we, we just don't need international aid for reconstruction. We just need an international aid to, to make at least the before for this government, before this system that we're living in the hands of politicians and parties in Lebanon, we have, we have hope we are hardworking people. We know how to manage things all over the world. I know that all Lebanese around the world would come back and build Lebanon again and again and again, but this time we will not build for politicians that will destroy after that. Any thank you for connecting. Speaker 3: (16:39) And, uh, my, you know, my heart goes out to everybody in Lebanon and Speaker 2: (16:43) Thank you, my friend. dana lewis : (16:48) Alright. [inaudible] is former foreign minister of Lebanon and speaks to us from Beirut gabran bassil  First of all, how are you? dana lewis : (16:55) Were you affected by this blast yourself? Everybody was affected. Thank you for receiving me. I know it's getting great attention everywhere, because this is disasters to the country. Everybody has somebody who was hurt or demolished. This is beyond imagination. What has happened dana lewis : (17:21) Beyond imagination? When, when I look at the video on the photographs, because I've been to Beirut dana lewis : (17:27) And I know Gemmayzeh  street, and I know that area, and I'm just shocked on top that it adds to the many that we are going through on top of COVID-19. We have deep financial could. I says, so gebran bassil : (17:50) The country is really going through a very bad period where our main focus now is how to save it because a country like Lebanon cannot go into chaos. This will be disastrous, not only to Lebanon, but will be disastrous to the region and to the West. Everybody should work together on forwarding this dana lewis : (18:10) Number of the government. You are still a member of parliament. The government was forced to resign from all reports. There's political fragmentation. There are corruption issues, sectarian politics, mismanagement in government. People are furious in the street. You know, I have to say, and I don't mean to make light of it in any way, but it seems like the situation is normal Speaker 5: (18:34) Because you often Speaker 3: (18:36) Rolling from one crisis to another. gebran bassil : (18:40) You know, this is, this is our history. The problem is people, especially those who are in power are used to face problems to go from a crisis to another. But this is not normal for the, for the normal people. Because at the end of the day, they get tired and they leave. They don't find jobs. They lack to be, to share or to experience their human values. Sometimes their freedom, their dignity, they feel it's touched and they can leave. So, uh, no it's not normal for a small country like ours to take the load of all the problems of the region to mention to you. One of them is, uh, having 200 refugees and displaced per square kilometer over the last 60 years for the Palestinians and nine, 10 years for the Syrians, dana lewis : (19:40) Syrian refugees. Are you housing now? Is it still a million? gebran bassil : (19:44) It was above a million. It was one and a half million. We don't know the real figures now because during the last crisis, many had to leave. Then they stopped because of, uh, of Corona. So we don't have, I don't have at least the last figures, but I guess it's above 1 million, but imagine 1 million over 10,000 square kilometers. So take it to a country like the U S having 100 per square kilometer and take the figures. You will see if you can get there for 200 million, let's say, uh, another nationality coming, all of a sudden to your country Speaker 3: (20:28) Are blamed right now for a lot of the problems in the country. The economic mismanagement of the country, Lebanon was already on its way. Speaker 5: (20:35) As you mentioned financially, before this happened, dana lewis : (20:40) All of it aggravated by COVID-19 would you honestly go back in a coalition with Iran and serious puppets? gebran bassil : (20:48) No, actually everybody is in coalition. Uh, Lebanon was cause, well, you know, they are part of the parliament and they are part of every government since years. And the national unity governments, when we say a national government means that it includes everybody. So, uh, this is a matter also our internal security, whether we go into accelerating our internal problems and we go into internal fights or, uh, or no, I would say that Hezbollah is responsible and everybody is responsible for this, uh, level of corruption. Nobody I believe is helping and, and fighting corruption really. And nobody is really helping and following the path of freeform. Yes, this is where we as free patriotic movement, we blame everybody including as well. Speaker 3: (21:49) But you were in the coalition with them. Speaker 5: (21:51) Yes, yes. Yes. Speaker 3: (21:53) Aren't you by, by cooperating with that party, with that group, with an organization that Americans still consider a terrorist organization, um, are you not encouraging this state within a state? Speaker 5: (22:09) You know, and you know, as well, uh, our elected, they have the biggest portion of waters and liver. So the problem, if anybody has a problem with as well, it's not with a small number of people, a group of people is a whole population. Speaker 3: (22:29) Are they changing? Because you talk about people, I don't mean to interrupt, but you talk about people being disillusioned right now with corruption and some of the problems, is there another faction emerging, not within the Hezbollah, but maybe a part from the Hezbollah where people say, okay, we don't want these, this, these parties that are aligned with Syria or Iran. We want Lebanese, only parties that are going to try to get our economy and our lives back together. The problem in Lebanon gebran bassil : (22:58) As a sectarian country, and we have what we call the consensual democracy. So everybody has to be on board and every confession has a Vitara and Hezbollah and Amal, which we call the sheep, do your shear, the sheep, do they represent the big majority of the, she has above 90%. So people still follow them and excluding them is excluding a whole community. And this does not work in our consensual democracy and our confessional systems. So again, as I told you, it's not isolating or putting apart a small group of people. It is a whole, uh, community that is part of your society, and that is embedded everywhere. So you cannot treat the matter of Hezbollah in Lebanon, like being a terrorist organization, because they are not considered as such because the other resistance against Israel and, and second told you, you cannot accuse all the shares of Lebanon, of being terrorists and Outlaws and put them outside the government and departments Speaker 3: (24:18) Stick by the United States, then to kind of treat the Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and not understand fully the sectarian policy politics within Lebanon. Speaker 5: (24:27) You know, this is a major difference that we have with the United States, because we believe that the policy of isolation that the U S adopted before it was many countries did not tell with scuba was North Korea, was Iran was enact. When you have the dual isolation policy, I believe engaging with people and with countries for a big country, like the U S believing in democracy and acceptance of the other. I think it's more useful, and that gave more better results before isolation can create more extremism and more fighting, which is not helpful for our work. dana lewis : (25:09) What is the risk? If you know, if countries that have a little more economic muscle like Britain, like France, like Germany like America, if they don't help Lebanon right now, what is it? gebran bassil : (25:21) The risk, the risk to peace, the risk to security in that region. The risk is what we have always warned about that you have a chaotic situation in Lebanon, which would encourage people to go to extremism to extremists. And terrorist will take Lebanon as a, as a hub, unfortunately, where immigrants will not be able to stay the displace and the refugees. And there will be an overflow from Lebanon towards the region. The same that happened from Syria towards Europe. And look how Europe were unable to sustain the number of series that a small country like Lebanon sustained for over nine years. Now, the whole continent of Europe was not able to absorb the number of series that live absorbed. So imagine more and more will will come. This will create a reaction from, you know, from the rightest in Europe profusing, and this will create more division within the Western societies, also Lebanon, as a model of tolerance, when you break it and you make it fall, what will emerge from this, uh, an empty model, which is extremism. dana lewis : (26:39) Let me come back to where we started, because I know you have limited time, and that is first of all, do you have, do you believe what is the cause of that explosion? Was it accidental? gebran bassil : (26:49) I cannot frankly tell before the investigation, but I don't really believe into the conspiracy theory in order, I believe exceptional coincidences that came all together. Uh, the way the political results of that also are intriguing. And as if something was, was really prepared before, as if this is a way to have different engagement was delivered, and I hope it will be a chance to open up to Lebanon again and help the country to go over this crisis, because I think it will be a very big mistake to let Lebanon fall, because this is a place that is open, you know, to the West and to the East. And it can be bridging for peace for stability and the region. And it can be a really a good backyard for Europe and the same for, for the video, for the Mediterranean. So Speaker 3: (27:57) Whatever, Speaker 5: (27:58) As the cause of that blast, dana lewis : (28:01) You know, you just said two things to me, and I found them contradictory. And maybe because you haven't decided in your own mind, but just to be clear, you don't feel it was an act of terror, but at the same time, you can't discount that maybe it was, is that essentially what Speaker 5: (28:18) Somehow, because the evidence until now nothing shows that there is something coming from outside. It can be a sabotage, but this should be something from outside that they get. And the same time, the political results as if, you know, you need that blast to start this certain process. What I'm trying to say, that process can take us to put more pressure on Lebanon and make it fall, or it can take us to another path that opens up to Lebanon and gives a chance for the country to please dana lewis : (28:54) When you you've toured. No doubt. I know you're in, you're in Beirut. You've probably been going on to these neighborhoods in these buildings, and I've heard there are hundreds of buildings. I mean, do you, is there a price tag on reconstruction repair? What does the international community need to do to help Beirut right now? Speaker 5: (29:13) You know, I think the best idea is for each country willing to help, to take on its own, uh, the reconstruction of the building of a street or a whole neighborhood, because Lebanon and especially the road has, uh, an antique, uh, architecture that is inherited from the Frenchman date and from, uh, Western architecture. And we should preserve architecture is boring. But when you go to Beirut, you really understand love for architecture because you want, you drive through the streets and you look at those buildings and they're beautiful, and it is a lovely, lovely suit. Yeah, it does actually at this, the mixture of architecture really resembles to the mixture of civilization, able to call her to go home and, you know, to live the experience of diversity, look marks on the facades of buildings, exactly new, new, uh, futuristic architecture alongside, whereas an and, and, and, uh, uh, old house, you know, or architecture or together, uh, you know, they give the root its beauty, and this is what we should preserve Beirut. gebran bassil : (30:30) It's not only architecture. It is an ancient, uh, school for democracy for human rights. It was the first democracy in the East, and it should be preserved as a pioneer of the human values and that part of the region where extremism is fighting and confronting moderation. And this is a big question for the West. What do you want? You want the middle East, a place to export for you terrorists or to export for you. Lack Lebanese are integrated in your societies to export to you brains and good people willing to add to your society. This is the big question, and this is where you cannot consider that whatever happens in Lebanon is irrelevant to your societies. We, uh, you know, calling for, for peace, we are calling to preserve Lebanon as a model of tolerance. Don't turn it into another Libya and to another Syria. And to another Iraq, we went through 15 years of war. We had enough, you know, and time is now for reconstruction for prosperity. All we need is pressure to go through the forms, not pressure to break the Lebanese model. You're very generous with your time. It's so important to talk to you and good luck to you and to all the great my friends in Beirut. We love the city. We wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you very much. dana lewis : (32:07) That's this edition of backstory podcast. If you care about Beirut, you can donate through the red cross and many other frontline charities, like the UN. They could use your help. Please subscribe to backstory and share wherever you listen to podcasts. We're on every major podcast platform from Apple to Stitcher to overcast. There's just too many dimension. I also post the video portions of my interviews on my YouTube channel. You can watch them there as well. I'm Dana Lewis. Thanks for listening. And I'll talk to you again soon. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/5059493

@gebran_bassil #beirut #lebanon #backstory @danykhoury [inaudible].

[sradford]

Thread + Footnotes on Art and Ideas of Post-Modernism

Postmodernism as a mode of thinking has come to practice in such a way that for most people it discourages transformative acts/thought

A lot of artsy types who cling to it w/o really understanding it so this a lot. It started imo with the neogeo movement

----------(Which I would also argue is just a perversion of postmodernism in art which started w/ Dada. Neogeo is pomo1 in the philosophical sense)

I'd also argue that postmodernism as Dada has a stronger link to post-structuralism in philosophy than postmodern philosophers of the 20th century

When postmodernism became a means of categorization rather than understanding in art is when it ceased to mean anything worthwhile

In truth I very much dislike the "post" epithet applied to arts in general. It's egotistical and ahistorical2

Granted it DOES arise in points of very fertile points in the punctuated equilibrium of art/cultural evolution

However this ignores the mechanism for the results. You aren't the first after but rather the next in line. This doesn't diminish you

Postmodernism relishes in flatly stating categorical divides because it so desperately wants to be one. I'm getting lost3 here however-

-either/or isn't the salient dichotomy here but one of temporal/linear divide. Postmodernism also often mistakes categorization as value

Can it be value of better/worse? Yes but not necessarily so. A rose by any other name of course, but rebranding is often obvious4

"All sentences are either analytical or synthetic" nonsense, the analytic is synthetic as well. Such is the nature of communication

This fails to see the forest for the trees and imposes that misinformed duality on the whole of the ideology in the art context5

This is why I become leery of so much postmodern/self-described postmodern art by young artists. It's reference, purely

The referential is a synthetic act however so is transformation. Synthetic isn't bad it is our nature to synthesize

----------(Nature6 being the wrong word/verbiage/tone of course, perhaps rather tendency?)

This should b e embraced rather than locked up. What can I learn from YOU aside from the artists you like and your thoughts on them

Referential work, despite my soft spot for it, functions more as commentary and essay than objé/idée d'art to me.

It all comes back to source rather than product and I am of the opinion that ideally it should all come back to the product

The art you produce should be the focus of its making. The references should be within that scope but not the sole thing there

I always come back to food and cooking when I try to make a point via simile and good art is like soup. The flavors must mingle

"Piña colada"7 "fruit punch" as flavors also represent this. They contain parts that can be recognized but are identified via their wholeness

Put simply "Piña Colada" is Piña Colada flavored in our minds and we then dissect it as "pineapple" and "coconut"

It's conceptualized as itself with an acknowledgement of its components in this conceptualization

Similarly, one should work to produce conceptually sound art in this manner

1 Post-modernism as a term arose on two different occasions within the early 20th and arguably late 19th century. The first in reference to art that deliberately deconstructs the mode and methodology of making art, and the second a movement in philosophy that crossed analytical and continental fields to shift understanding to a mode of pattern recognition, generally focusing on defining the in and out group of whatever they’re philosophizing. At least for this thread’s purposes it will be treated as such.

2 It posits oneself as doing something revolutionary by observing the past of the past and informing ones own path thusly. However this is how all progress works. It is still part of the pattern. It ignores how very ingrained post-modernism is to “modernism” and observes itself as a departure rather than following a logical antecedent.

3 In other words, post-modernism attempts to parse something more recent thinkers like Deleuze and LaRuelle have articulated much better in recent years as something more coherent with the post-modernism of Dada and the early 20th century.

4 Often I find people to take labels as the product/thing-its-applied-to which I view as a symptom of simply not understanding the ideas one hopes to espouse. Preaching self criticality while failing to practice. Generally hypocrites are still right, however the initial statement is essentially wrong outside of admitting perception is shaped by tangental things. “A rose by any other name” point being we wouldn’t know it as “rose” in the first place, my addendum illustrating that renaming things shouldn’t fool you, but often it does unless you are aware of it. C’est la vie I suppose

5 Hence neogeo as the first instance of the philosophical “categorization” pomo rather than the Dada “structural” pomo. Neogeo, or rather early Koons being the touchstone I specifically intend to refer to, is primarily a medium of categorization and display rather than making or transforming. Art of context rather than content. Perhaps putting the cart before the horse when both are required and the horse makes the cart move.

6 Nature always leaves unsavory connotations, which is a shame honestly.

7 I just like Pina Colada. A counterexample/something that lacks this mingling of flavors is peanut butter and jelly. It is even conceptualized as separate, which maybe fuzzes the point but nontheless illustrates it sufficiently.

[realestate63141]

Early Signpost of The Trump Era: Heinlein's 'Future History' and Asimov's 'Foundation' at 75

As the bizarre, toxic yet darkly fascinating year 2016 has faded completely into an unknown 2017, a question or two occurs with relevance to the next few years. Did legendary science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein predict much of what has just happened in a series of stories he worked out before the United States entered World War II? In his 'Future History' series, Heinlein did point to a presidential election which occurs right about, well, now as the moment in which the United States falls into "a dictatorship of superstition." The cause? The election, during the nation's most tempestuous and combustible of campaigns, of an anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-foreigner populist appealing to racists and fundamentalist Christians and uber-rich reactionaries who wins a narrow victory. In the last presidential election for 75 years. Who was it who said it can't happen here? And, oh yes, did legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov give rise to a fateful fascination with the deeply flawed notion of predictive statistical modeling of complex historical events like, say, presidential elections with his fictional but highly influential faux science of "paychohistory?" It was the summer of 2015 when I realized I had somehow awakened in a universe that felt much like a cheesy SyFy Channel movie. A real estate hustler/reality TV star notorious for slapping his name on everything making a very serious stab at the White House ... Man, that made Marvel movies seem like Shakespeare! But if it's a science fictional world, why not the best? Besides, there was something oddly familiar about it. I never saw the movie (which has not yet been made), but I may have read the book.

Leonard Nimoy reads part I of Robert A. Heinlein's 'Future History' story about Rhysling, the blind bard of the spaceways, 'The Green Hills of Earth.' Think of a cross between Rudyard Kipling and Bob Dylan. Seventy-five years ago, way back in late but still pre-Pearl Harbor 1941, two young science fiction writers on opposite coasts -- beached former naval officer Heinlein and bookish Columbia PhD-to-be Asimov, worked out what would become famous fictional formulations of humanity's future on this planet and beyond. After the fashion of H.G. Wells, the two engaged in what Heinlein was to dub "speculative fiction," laying out potential futures with at least some realistic foundation. Both young authors who, with Arthur C. Clarke of '2001: A Space Odyssey' fame would form the so-called "Big Three" grand masters of the Golden Age of science fiction, wrote in those early days for a New York-based magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Heinlein was an Annapolis honors grad and fencing star whose promising career as a U.S. naval officer was cut short by grave ill health. Invalided out of the Navy, the beached former lieutenant landed in the land of a great many beaches, Southern California. There he studied physics for a little while at UCLA grad school before becoming a leading light in Upton Sinclair's unsuccessful End Poverty In California (EPIC) campaign for governor at the height of the Great Depression. After losing to a conservative Republican in a race for the California legislature, and trying his hand at silver mining, Heinlein, tired of living on his service pension and even more tired of politics, gave short story writing a whirl. He became an almost instant success as a science fiction writer, quickly becoming a star with seminal editor John W. Campbell's Astounding. Isaac Asimov, 13 years younger, was in a different place. Like Heinlein, he'd begun writing science fiction in the late 1930s. Unlike Heinlein, who hailed from heartland Kansas City and had seen and acted in the world and around it as a naval officer and political opetative, Asimov was a Russian Jewish immigrant at age 3, all of whose experience was as a student. Seventy-five years ago, Asimov had just finished a Columbia master's degree in biochemistry and was casting about for a killer story idea for his imposing editor Campbell, whom he took regular subway rides to visit. Noting that Campbell liked the idea of a "history of the future" -- the editor had finally gotten Heinlein to agree to publication in the magazine of the "Future History" timeline which guided his writing out in California -- Asimov came up with the idea for a short story on the fall of a galactic empire. After finishing up his concept on yet another New York subway ride to the Astounding offices, Asimov found that Campbell loved it. But the editor, also known for writing a little tale called 'The Thing,' told Asimov that the story had to be much longer than a short story. In late 1941, Asimov had the concept worked out, with the first installment ready to go. That and a few other "novelettes," which would in the early 1950s become the full-length novel 'Foundation,' were to be finiushed up and appear in 1942 after Asimov was at his wartime job with Heinlein and others at the Navy's aeronautical lab in Philadelphia. The rest of the war would interrupt what would become Asimov's famed 'Foundation Trilogy,' with most the stories running in magazine serialization in the '40s and then appearing as three novels in the early '50s. But the conception and early execution was already in place. In 'Foundation,' 'Foundation and Empire,' and 'Second Foundation," Asimov was to deliver on the concept he worked out with Campbell. A smug, hidebound, very wealthy galactic empire of the far future was, like the Rome described in the Gibbons history Asimov so loved, on an inevitable downward spiral. Only the efforts of a relatively small group of committed intellectuals led by a genius, utilizing the new predictive science of "psychohistory" -- a sort of massively souped-up mathematical sociology -- could save humanity. Not from a thousand years of decline, turbulence, chaos, and ultimate hope, but from 30,000 years of barbarism. It was an especially thrilling notion for a certain type of intellectual, so much so that quite a number of today's players -- from Newt Gingrich on the right to Paul Krugman on the left -- have cited the 'Foundation' saga as their inspiration to do what they do. The notion of visionary Professor Hari Seldon and, especially, his psychohistory, was that compelling for them. Out west, Robert Heinlein had put the finishing touches on his first pass through the 'Future History' series that inspired Campbell to push Asimov into his own series. From his base in LA's Laurel Canyon -- just a few blocks from the future home of legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (where Crosby, Stills & Nash came together as a group), less than a mile from Jerry Brown's house during Governorship 1.0 -- Heinlein had developed something much more grounded in the present as extrapolated into the future. Rather than essay a far-flung galactic empire of a future so distant that the location of Earth has become a mystery, Heinlein instead extrapolated a future taking America and her successor federations from the Great Depression to the stars. No wonder Campbell was so excited about it as the real America struggled to emerge from depression and isolationism. As it happened, Heinlein wrote his 'Future History' stories out of sequence. They were stories from a shared fictional universe, sold and published as stories, not as full-fledged novels. That's how pulp publishing worked in the "Golden Age." Today Heinlein might have spent his entire career on fleshing out the ideas he had in the first couple years of his writing. Conceptually, it was all a work in progress from 1939 to late 1941, when he published in the pages of Astounding, the novella 'Methuselah's Children,' the tale of a group of Americans persecuted for the supposed technological secret of of their bred-for long lives even in the post-dictatorship social utopia that, in full-fledged novel mode in the late '50s, was to prove the rather premature series capper. They steal a generational starship and, with a few technological breakthroughs, make the first successful, though not at all satisfying, voyages to other star systems. In it, Heinlein introduced his counterpart to Asimov's Hari Seldon, a character that would prove to be the most enduring -- if very much overused in late stage Heinlein -- Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long. Unlike Hari Seldon, Lazarus Long is not the genius inventor of a practically omniscient new super-science using statistics to somehow forecast complex historical dynamics into the far future -- attention, 2016 presidential polling model fans, heh -- he is more a very capable if hardly infallible or invincible survivor/adventurer. A sometime difference maker, he's certainly not above determining that discretion is the better part of valor. For example, he sees the advent of America's "dictatorship of superstition" as his cue not to lead the resistance but to go off-world. He is, in other words, something of a Humphrey Bogart character, presaging 'Casablanca's' Rick Blaine. Not that Heinlein did not provide a thrilling and rather ingeniously worked out tale of the Second American Revolution. Published a few months before he attended the 1940 Democratic national convention in Chicago to support Franklin D. Roosevelt's re-nomination for his historic third term as president, 'If This Goes On --,' like almost all of Heinlein's 'Future History' stories, features a different point of view character. In this case, the future Hugo Award-winning tale features recent West Point grad John Lyle, a rather obtuse young Army lieutenant proudly serving in the elite New Jerusalem palace guard of the phony televangelist who won election as the last President of the United States. Through a quirk of fate, he comes to question his faith, discovering he has been spoon fed a diet of fake news and false history from supposedly divinely inspired "psychometricians" skilled in the decidedly unholy arts of staged events, manipulative advertising, and overall conditioning of a mass audience.

Leonard Nimoy reads part II of 'The Green Hills of Earth.' The result is a thrilling entertainment, not to mention a pretty convincing yarn about how a theocratic-oriented dictatorship might be overthrown. Not as easily as one might think, since generations of conditioning have brainwashed more than a quarter of the populace. Added to the roughly 40 percent of the already devout, most of which was naturally attuned to authoritarian politics -- and doesn't that sound familiar? -- some tricky moves I won't spoil prove to be necessary to pull off an armed liberation movement. Between 1939 and 1941, Heinlein wrote more than a dozen tales of his 'Future History,' from short stories to short novels, taking humanity from the Depression to the stars, with mass psychosis and dictatorship providing a fateful interregnum in between the two. He left gaps in the story, of course, which he intended to fill in during the early and mid-'40s. A world war intervened. But the shape of his futurism was clear. First, a pair of scientists invent and then give away a technology to break the power company monopoly over the energy base of the economy with cheap, ubiquitous solar power. Then our present gridlocked and polluting mode of transport is largely averted by high-speed mass transit. And then humanity gets to the Moon, a little later than in real life, but in more sustained fashion since this is accomplished not by the government but by a visionary entrepreneur finding a new outlet for his enterprise with the absence of the power monopoly. Hmm, these issues sound familiar ... Since space travel has to be made to pay off as more than a PR extravaganza in the Cold War, there is no choice but to push on outward bound. As a result, the exploration of the Moon is not a culmination, as it was for the unimaginative Richard Nixon but only the beginning of a push throughout the solar system, with off-world colonies and all their attendant issues. No wonder Elon Musk, widely cited as a model for Robert Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark/Iron Man, is a Heinlein fan. Or, perhaps put another way, no wonder he became Elon Musk after reading Heinlein. After World War II, Heinlein did fill in most of the gaps left in his 1939 to 1941 first pass through the 'Future History.' Heinlein, who was to be the first science fiction writer to take the genre onto the mainstream best-seller lists -- he's the author of such controversial classics as 'Stranger In A Strange Land,' 'Starship Troopers,' and 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress' -- before all that took scifi into the Saturday Evening Post and other big general interest magazines after the war, focusing on the fictional heyday of solar system exploration. He had a particular knack for making space travel seem normal, placing recognizable people in extraordinary situations. In 1950, he and Asimov both moved to transform their schemas into book form. Asimov converted his stories into a trilogy of novels, the aforementioned 'Foundation Trilogy.' Heinlein had a more sprawling five-volume collection of stories and novels in mind. It began very well with the fully fleshed out tale of the new technological base for the economy and the great leap into space. 'The Man Who Sold the Moon' was both Volume One of the 'Future History' stories and a Hugo Award-winning short novel by the same name about visionary entrepreneur D.D. Harriman. But the publisher proved to be problematic, so in the end only three volumes were produced, with the final fleshing out of late 1941's novella, 'Methuselah's Children', by the late '50s a full-length novel, proving a de facto Volume 4. Given what turned out to be a poor deal with a malfuntioning publisher, it simply made more financial sense for Heinlein to launch a new series with a big New York publisher for the so-called "Heinlein juveniles." These novels, written for precocious younger readers, but which satisfy grown-ups today, also takes in a rather realistic view of space exploration and humanity's expansion across the solar system and beyond. Although the 'Future History's' Volume One, 'The Man Who Sold the Moon,' was quickly joined in the early '50s by 'The Green Hills of Earth' (Volume Two) dealing with the heyday of solar system exploration and colonization, and 'Revolt In 2100,' a Volume Three dealing with the revolution against the American dictatorship and the more rational and just society which succeeds it, substantial elements were unfortunately lost in the shuffle. The planned Volume Four, 'The Sound of His Wings' was to have been three novellas -- the eponymous title along with 'Eclipse' and 'The Stone Pillow' -- about the ascendance of an American dictatorship, America's turn sharply inwards, and the profound effect this has on the rest of human society on Earth and elsewhere. And largely lost, too, was the full Volume 5 expansion of 'Methuselah's Children' and beyond, 'The Endless Frontier' about the rise of interstellar exploration and civilization with a final return to the cradle of humanity and what it all has meant, a concluding novella fittingly titled 'Da Capo.' But what's left is more than enough. In 1966, Asimov's more complete, if less compelling 'Foundation Trilogy' edged out Heinlein's 'Future History' and a few other such works, including one called 'The Lord of the Rings,' to win the Hugo Award as best science fiction/fantasy series of all time. If such an award were contested again, Frank Herbert's 'Dune' saga -- which was just underway at the time -- would undoubtedly also be in the running. Much as I like Asimov and appreciate his work, in the 'Foundation Trilogy' -- which was further extended decades later with prequels and sequels not nearly as compelling -- he doesn't so much tell stories as have his characters talk about what just happened. Or in the case of Hari Seldon's posthumous holographic appearances at predicted nexus points in history, discuss in rather delphic terms what is about to happen. Heinlein, in contrast, is a storyteller. Though much of his later work, once he became really famous, is wildly discursive if not bloviating, the 'Future History' stories are models of speed and concision. The longest novel is just over 200 pages in length. His late stage loquaciousness was usually expressed by a frequently tiresome all-knowing point of view character. Heinlein, who was also plagued by health issues, increasingly got out of control on that score after the runaway success of 'Stranger In A Strange Land,' with its still tolerable know-it-all Jubal Harshaw, who in any event gets routinely tossed in his own swimming pool when he becomes too much for his irked secretaries. Late stage Heinlein is also knocked by many for his libertarian-inflected, frequently sex-drenched conservatism. Heinlein's all too dutiful authorized biographer, the late William Patterson, is too quick to accept Heinlein's assertion that his politics never changed. He ignores the obvious. Heinlein's third and final wife, Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein, was a staunch right-winger. And his second wife, Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein, to whom he was married during his EPIC days and the beginning of his science fiction career on into the aftermath of World War II, was a staunch left-winger. When he married his third wife, Heinlein left LA for Colorado Springs. He returned to California, this time to Santa Cruz in the north, nearly two decades later, just before finishing his last great book, 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.' Heinlein's third wife's conservative enthusiasm extended to the John Birch Society, fortunately a bridge too far for Heinlein himself, who had their names removed from an endorsement of paranoid Bircher founder Robert Welch. Yet she was quite influential, so much so that when the 'Future History' series was re-released in one large volume by a big New York publisher as 'The Past Through Tomorrow' in 1967, she succeeded in having the decidedly leftish first story in the sequence, '"Let There Be Light,"' removed from the collection. Even though the story, named after the motto of the University of California which Heinlein attended as a graduate student, not to mention a key phrase from the Bible, depicting the solar energy breakthrough that breaks the back of the power monopoly and re-powers the entire future society is critical to the entire underpinning of the scenario. Like most of Heinlein, the 'Future History' generally features highly competent, can-do oriented yet fallible, non-superheroic protagonists. (There are even, especially for those decidedly sexist days, some interesting and impactful female characters, including the co-inventor of the liberating solar power tech.) But where the protagonists become arguably conservative later on, here and in most of his '50s work they are mostly liberals, albeit with a streak of the libertarian. They are capable and highly intelligent, if a bit sardonic, people of the 1940s, from a variety of backgrounds, acting in futuristic settings. Asimov's characters in the 'Foundation' stories, in contrast, tend to be liberal intellectual types and commercial burgers, reflecting his New York City background, as well as aristocrats and generals drawn from history. And many of them, charmingly enough, seem to be carrying personal atomic-powered devices. To be sure, Donald Trump is not Heinlein's Nehemiah Scudder. He's not a televangelist from the sticks, excuse me, the heartland of America. But as described in other stories and in an essay by Heinlein published with Volume Three of the series, 'Revolt In 2100,' in which he says he would probably not write any more about Scudder because he dislikes him so (leaving out the financial problems with the publisher), it is clear there are major similarities.

Dude, where's my flying car? Here Howard Stark, in 'Captain America: The First Avenger,' previews his version of the classic exemplar of '40s futurism. Heinlein missed the personal computer, but did get the mobile phone and some other elements of our own science fictional present. Not to mention our presidential election. Here's Heinlein, in his essay on the rise of his know-nothing American dictator, written long before I was born. "Promise a material heaven here on Earth, add a dash of anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-"furriners" in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening -- particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington." Striking, isn't it? Make a few slight adjustments to the ethnic boogie men and you have the election we just held. How did Heinlein think it would turn out? Not well. At least, not for a long time, as he notes in the essay, which accompanies the 'Future History's' Volume Three, 'Revolt In 2100.' "The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed." In the downbeat novella which closes the mostly very upbeat Volume Two, "Logic of Empire,' a friend at tale's end counsels the protagonist who has discovered whay amounts to thinly veiled slavery on colonized Venus. (Remember that these stories were written when people imagined that the cloud cover of Venus might conceal a jungle world, rather than an incredibly hot atmosphere full of noxious gases.) "Sweet reasonableness won't get you anywhere in this racket. To make yourself heard you have to be a demagogue, or a rabble-rousing political preacher like this fellow Nehemiah Scudder. We're going merrily to hell and it won't stop until it winds up in a crash." "But -- Oh the devil! What can we do about it?" "Nothing, Things are bound to get a whole lot worse before they can get any better. Let's have a drink." This certainly is an era of demagoguery and dumbed down debate. Trump is as much a hyper-opportunistic product of the culture as its leader. But with regard to Trump, I'm not nearly as downbeat as Heinlein was in his scenario. He even had his ultimate favorite character of all time, Lazarus Long, go off-planet for the duration of the American dictatorship, some 75 years. Not that heading off-world is an option, of course. Whereas "Let's have a drink," the close of Heinlein's Volume Two, is. It's just not a very socially useful one. Perhaps my longstanding worries about Trump's decided tendencies toward know-nothingism an neo-fascism will come to nothing. After all, it may be that Trump, who not long ago was a Democrat, and once backed my presidential candidate, Gary Hart (a Heinlein fan growing up, incidentally), is just faking it as part of his drive for power. The problem is that one tends to become what one pretends to be. And Trump's appointments are, if anything, mostly more extreme than is the norm even for a very conservative Republican Party. In fact, much like Heinlein's Nehemiah Scudder, a Trump who barely won -- he lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and barely won the electoral college with very narrow wins in a few states that another Democrat would probably have defended -- is now pretending as though he really does have a mandate for sweeping actions which most oppose. What seems most likely is not that Trump is a true ideologue but that he is the erratic personality and consummate opportunist that his Twitter history and far too frequent dysfunctional campaigning -- .. from DIYS http://ift.tt/2iHLFtf

[realestate63141]

Early Signpost of The Trump Era: Heinlein's 'Future History' and Asimov's 'Foundation' at 75

As the bizarre, toxic yet darkly fascinating year 2016 has faded completely into an unknown 2017, a question or two occurs with relevance to the next few years. Did legendary science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein predict much of what has just happened in a series of stories he worked out before the United States entered World War II? In his 'Future History' series, Heinlein did point to a presidential election which occurs right about, well, now as the moment in which the United States falls into "a dictatorship of superstition." The cause? The election, during the nation's most tempestuous and combustible of campaigns, of an anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-foreigner populist appealing to racists and fundamentalist Christians and uber-rich reactionaries who wins a narrow victory. In the last presidential election for 75 years. Who was it who said it can't happen here? And, oh yes, did legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov give rise to a fateful fascination with the deeply flawed notion of predictive statistical modeling of complex historical events like, say, presidential elections with his fictional but highly influential faux science of "paychohistory?" It was the summer of 2015 when I realized I had somehow awakened in a universe that felt much like a cheesy SyFy Channel movie. A real estate hustler/reality TV star notorious for slapping his name on everything making a very serious stab at the White House ... Man, that made Marvel movies seem like Shakespeare! But if it's a science fictional world, why not the best? Besides, there was something oddly familiar about it. I never saw the movie (which has not yet been made), but I may have read the book.

Leonard Nimoy reads part I of Robert A. Heinlein's 'Future History' story about Rhysling, the blind bard of the spaceways, 'The Green Hills of Earth.' Think of a cross between Rudyard Kipling and Bob Dylan. Seventy-five years ago, way back in late but still pre-Pearl Harbor 1941, two young science fiction writers on opposite coasts -- beached former naval officer Heinlein and bookish Columbia PhD-to-be Asimov, worked out what would become famous fictional formulations of humanity's future on this planet and beyond. After the fashion of H.G. Wells, the two engaged in what Heinlein was to dub "speculative fiction," laying out potential futures with at least some realistic foundation. Both young authors who, with Arthur C. Clarke of '2001: A Space Odyssey' fame would form the so-called "Big Three" grand masters of the Golden Age of science fiction, wrote in those early days for a New York-based magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Heinlein was an Annapolis honors grad and fencing star whose promising career as a U.S. naval officer was cut short by grave ill health. Invalided out of the Navy, the beached former lieutenant landed in the land of a great many beaches, Southern California. There he studied physics for a little while at UCLA grad school before becoming a leading light in Upton Sinclair's unsuccessful End Poverty In California (EPIC) campaign for governor at the height of the Great Depression. After losing to a conservative Republican in a race for the California legislature, and trying his hand at silver mining, Heinlein, tired of living on his service pension and even more tired of politics, gave short story writing a whirl. He became an almost instant success as a science fiction writer, quickly becoming a star with seminal editor John W. Campbell's Astounding. Isaac Asimov, 13 years younger, was in a different place. Like Heinlein, he'd begun writing science fiction in the late 1930s. Unlike Heinlein, who hailed from heartland Kansas City and had seen and acted in the world and around it as a naval officer and political opetative, Asimov was a Russian Jewish immigrant at age 3, all of whose experience was as a student. Seventy-five years ago, Asimov had just finished a Columbia master's degree in biochemistry and was casting about for a killer story idea for his imposing editor Campbell, whom he took regular subway rides to visit. Noting that Campbell liked the idea of a "history of the future" -- the editor had finally gotten Heinlein to agree to publication in the magazine of the "Future History" timeline which guided his writing out in California -- Asimov came up with the idea for a short story on the fall of a galactic empire. After finishing up his concept on yet another New York subway ride to the Astounding offices, Asimov found that Campbell loved it. But the editor, also known for writing a little tale called 'The Thing,' told Asimov that the story had to be much longer than a short story. In late 1941, Asimov had the concept worked out, with the first installment ready to go. That and a few other "novelettes," which would in the early 1950s become the full-length novel 'Foundation,' were to be finiushed up and appear in 1942 after Asimov was at his wartime job with Heinlein and others at the Navy's aeronautical lab in Philadelphia. The rest of the war would interrupt what would become Asimov's famed 'Foundation Trilogy,' with most the stories running in magazine serialization in the '40s and then appearing as three novels in the early '50s. But the conception and early execution was already in place. In 'Foundation,' 'Foundation and Empire,' and 'Second Foundation," Asimov was to deliver on the concept he worked out with Campbell. A smug, hidebound, very wealthy galactic empire of the far future was, like the Rome described in the Gibbons history Asimov so loved, on an inevitable downward spiral. Only the efforts of a relatively small group of committed intellectuals led by a genius, utilizing the new predictive science of "psychohistory" -- a sort of massively souped-up mathematical sociology -- could save humanity. Not from a thousand years of decline, turbulence, chaos, and ultimate hope, but from 30,000 years of barbarism. It was an especially thrilling notion for a certain type of intellectual, so much so that quite a number of today's players -- from Newt Gingrich on the right to Paul Krugman on the left -- have cited the 'Foundation' saga as their inspiration to do what they do. The notion of visionary Professor Hari Seldon and, especially, his psychohistory, was that compelling for them. Out west, Robert Heinlein had put the finishing touches on his first pass through the 'Future History' series that inspired Campbell to push Asimov into his own series. From his base in LA's Laurel Canyon -- just a few blocks from the future home of legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (where Crosby, Stills & Nash came together as a group), less than a mile from Jerry Brown's house during Governorship 1.0 -- Heinlein had developed something much more grounded in the present as extrapolated into the future. Rather than essay a far-flung galactic empire of a future so distant that the location of Earth has become a mystery, Heinlein instead extrapolated a future taking America and her successor federations from the Great Depression to the stars. No wonder Campbell was so excited about it as the real America struggled to emerge from depression and isolationism. As it happened, Heinlein wrote his 'Future History' stories out of sequence. They were stories from a shared fictional universe, sold and published as stories, not as full-fledged novels. That's how pulp publishing worked in the "Golden Age." Today Heinlein might have spent his entire career on fleshing out the ideas he had in the first couple years of his writing. Conceptually, it was all a work in progress from 1939 to late 1941, when he published in the pages of Astounding, the novella 'Methuselah's Children,' the tale of a group of Americans persecuted for the supposed technological secret of of their bred-for long lives even in the post-dictatorship social utopia that, in full-fledged novel mode in the late '50s, was to prove the rather premature series capper. They steal a generational starship and, with a few technological breakthroughs, make the first successful, though not at all satisfying, voyages to other star systems. In it, Heinlein introduced his counterpart to Asimov's Hari Seldon, a character that would prove to be the most enduring -- if very much overused in late stage Heinlein -- Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long. Unlike Hari Seldon, Lazarus Long is not the genius inventor of a practically omniscient new super-science using statistics to somehow forecast complex historical dynamics into the far future -- attention, 2016 presidential polling model fans, heh -- he is more a very capable if hardly infallible or invincible survivor/adventurer. A sometime difference maker, he's certainly not above determining that discretion is the better part of valor. For example, he sees the advent of America's "dictatorship of superstition" as his cue not to lead the resistance but to go off-world. He is, in other words, something of a Humphrey Bogart character, presaging 'Casablanca's' Rick Blaine. Not that Heinlein did not provide a thrilling and rather ingeniously worked out tale of the Second American Revolution. Published a few months before he attended the 1940 Democratic national convention in Chicago to support Franklin D. Roosevelt's re-nomination for his historic third term as president, 'If This Goes On --,' like almost all of Heinlein's 'Future History' stories, features a different point of view character. In this case, the future Hugo Award-winning tale features recent West Point grad John Lyle, a rather obtuse young Army lieutenant proudly serving in the elite New Jerusalem palace guard of the phony televangelist who won election as the last President of the United States. Through a quirk of fate, he comes to question his faith, discovering he has been spoon fed a diet of fake news and false history from supposedly divinely inspired "psychometricians" skilled in the decidedly unholy arts of staged events, manipulative advertising, and overall conditioning of a mass audience.

Leonard Nimoy reads part II of 'The Green Hills of Earth.' The result is a thrilling entertainment, not to mention a pretty convincing yarn about how a theocratic-oriented dictatorship might be overthrown. Not as easily as one might think, since generations of conditioning have brainwashed more than a quarter of the populace. Added to the roughly 40 percent of the already devout, most of which was naturally attuned to authoritarian politics -- and doesn't that sound familiar? -- some tricky moves I won't spoil prove to be necessary to pull off an armed liberation movement. Between 1939 and 1941, Heinlein wrote more than a dozen tales of his 'Future History,' from short stories to short novels, taking humanity from the Depression to the stars, with mass psychosis and dictatorship providing a fateful interregnum in between the two. He left gaps in the story, of course, which he intended to fill in during the early and mid-'40s. A world war intervened. But the shape of his futurism was clear. First, a pair of scientists invent and then give away a technology to break the power company monopoly over the energy base of the economy with cheap, ubiquitous solar power. Then our present gridlocked and polluting mode of transport is largely averted by high-speed mass transit. And then humanity gets to the Moon, a little later than in real life, but in more sustained fashion since this is accomplished not by the government but by a visionary entrepreneur finding a new outlet for his enterprise with the absence of the power monopoly. Hmm, these issues sound familiar ... Since space travel has to be made to pay off as more than a PR extravaganza in the Cold War, there is no choice but to push on outward bound. As a result, the exploration of the Moon is not a culmination, as it was for the unimaginative Richard Nixon but only the beginning of a push throughout the solar system, with off-world colonies and all their attendant issues. No wonder Elon Musk, widely cited as a model for Robert Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark/Iron Man, is a Heinlein fan. Or, perhaps put another way, no wonder he became Elon Musk after reading Heinlein. After World War II, Heinlein did fill in most of the gaps left in his 1939 to 1941 first pass through the 'Future History.' Heinlein, who was to be the first science fiction writer to take the genre onto the mainstream best-seller lists -- he's the author of such controversial classics as 'Stranger In A Strange Land,' 'Starship Troopers,' and 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress' -- before all that took scifi into the Saturday Evening Post and other big general interest magazines after the war, focusing on the fictional heyday of solar system exploration. He had a particular knack for making space travel seem normal, placing recognizable people in extraordinary situations. In 1950, he and Asimov both moved to transform their schemas into book form. Asimov converted his stories into a trilogy of novels, the aforementioned 'Foundation Trilogy.' Heinlein had a more sprawling five-volume collection of stories and novels in mind. It began very well with the fully fleshed out tale of the new technological base for the economy and the great leap into space. 'The Man Who Sold the Moon' was both Volume One of the 'Future History' stories and a Hugo Award-winning short novel by the same name about visionary entrepreneur D.D. Harriman. But the publisher proved to be problematic, so in the end only three volumes were produced, with the final fleshing out of late 1941's novella, 'Methuselah's Children', by the late '50s a full-length novel, proving a de facto Volume 4. Given what turned out to be a poor deal with a malfuntioning publisher, it simply made more financial sense for Heinlein to launch a new series with a big New York publisher for the so-called "Heinlein juveniles." These novels, written for precocious younger readers, but which satisfy grown-ups today, also takes in a rather realistic view of space exploration and humanity's expansion across the solar system and beyond. Although the 'Future History's' Volume One, 'The Man Who Sold the Moon,' was quickly joined in the early '50s by 'The Green Hills of Earth' (Volume Two) dealing with the heyday of solar system exploration and colonization, and 'Revolt In 2100,' a Volume Three dealing with the revolution against the American dictatorship and the more rational and just society which succeeds it, substantial elements were unfortunately lost in the shuffle. The planned Volume Four, 'The Sound of His Wings' was to have been three novellas -- the eponymous title along with 'Eclipse' and 'The Stone Pillow' -- about the ascendance of an American dictatorship, America's turn sharply inwards, and the profound effect this has on the rest of human society on Earth and elsewhere. And largely lost, too, was the full Volume 5 expansion of 'Methuselah's Children' and beyond, 'The Endless Frontier' about the rise of interstellar exploration and civilization with a final return to the cradle of humanity and what it all has meant, a concluding novella fittingly titled 'Da Capo.' But what's left is more than enough. In 1966, Asimov's more complete, if less compelling 'Foundation Trilogy' edged out Heinlein's 'Future History' and a few other such works, including one called 'The Lord of the Rings,' to win the Hugo Award as best science fiction/fantasy series of all time. If such an award were contested again, Frank Herbert's 'Dune' saga -- which was just underway at the time -- would undoubtedly also be in the running. Much as I like Asimov and appreciate his work, in the 'Foundation Trilogy' -- which was further extended decades later with prequels and sequels not nearly as compelling -- he doesn't so much tell stories as have his characters talk about what just happened. Or in the case of Hari Seldon's posthumous holographic appearances at predicted nexus points in history, discuss in rather delphic terms what is about to happen. Heinlein, in contrast, is a storyteller. Though much of his later work, once he became really famous, is wildly discursive if not bloviating, the 'Future History' stories are models of speed and concision. The longest novel is just over 200 pages in length. His late stage loquaciousness was usually expressed by a frequently tiresome all-knowing point of view character. Heinlein, who was also plagued by health issues, increasingly got out of control on that score after the runaway success of 'Stranger In A Strange Land,' with its still tolerable know-it-all Jubal Harshaw, who in any event gets routinely tossed in his own swimming pool when he becomes too much for his irked secretaries. Late stage Heinlein is also knocked by many for his libertarian-inflected, frequently sex-drenched conservatism. Heinlein's all too dutiful authorized biographer, the late William Patterson, is too quick to accept Heinlein's assertion that his politics never changed. He ignores the obvious. Heinlein's third and final wife, Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein, was a staunch right-winger. And his second wife, Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein, to whom he was married during his EPIC days and the beginning of his science fiction career on into the aftermath of World War II, was a staunch left-winger. When he married his third wife, Heinlein left LA for Colorado Springs. He returned to California, this time to Santa Cruz in the north, nearly two decades later, just before finishing his last great book, 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.' Heinlein's third wife's conservative enthusiasm extended to the John Birch Society, fortunately a bridge too far for Heinlein himself, who had their names removed from an endorsement of paranoid Bircher founder Robert Welch. Yet she was quite influential, so much so that when the 'Future History' series was re-released in one large volume by a big New York publisher as 'The Past Through Tomorrow' in 1967, she succeeded in having the decidedly leftish first story in the sequence, '"Let There Be Light,"' removed from the collection. Even though the story, named after the motto of the University of California which Heinlein attended as a graduate student, not to mention a key phrase from the Bible, depicting the solar energy breakthrough that breaks the back of the power monopoly and re-powers the entire future society is critical to the entire underpinning of the scenario. Like most of Heinlein, the 'Future History' generally features highly competent, can-do oriented yet fallible, non-superheroic protagonists. (There are even, especially for those decidedly sexist days, some interesting and impactful female characters, including the co-inventor of the liberating solar power tech.) But where the protagonists become arguably conservative later on, here and in most of his '50s work they are mostly liberals, albeit with a streak of the libertarian. They are capable and highly intelligent, if a bit sardonic, people of the 1940s, from a variety of backgrounds, acting in futuristic settings. Asimov's characters in the 'Foundation' stories, in contrast, tend to be liberal intellectual types and commercial burgers, reflecting his New York City background, as well as aristocrats and generals drawn from history. And many of them, charmingly enough, seem to be carrying personal atomic-powered devices. To be sure, Donald Trump is not Heinlein's Nehemiah Scudder. He's not a televangelist from the sticks, excuse me, the heartland of America. But as described in other stories and in an essay by Heinlein published with Volume Three of the series, 'Revolt In 2100,' in which he says he would probably not write any more about Scudder because he dislikes him so (leaving out the financial problems with the publisher), it is clear there are major similarities.

Dude, where's my flying car? Here Howard Stark, in 'Captain America: The First Avenger,' previews his version of the classic exemplar of '40s futurism. Heinlein missed the personal computer, but did get the mobile phone and some other elements of our own science fictional present. Not to mention our presidential election. Here's Heinlein, in his essay on the rise of his know-nothing American dictator, written long before I was born. "Promise a material heaven here on Earth, add a dash of anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-"furriners" in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening -- particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington." Striking, isn't it? Make a few slight adjustments to the ethnic boogie men and you have the election we just held. How did Heinlein think it would turn out? Not well. At least, not for a long time, as he notes in the essay, which accompanies the 'Future History's' Volume Three, 'Revolt In 2100.' "The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed." In the downbeat novella which closes the mostly very upbeat Volume Two, "Logic of Empire,' a friend at tale's end counsels the protagonist who has discovered whay amounts to thinly veiled slavery on colonized Venus. (Remember that these stories were written when people imagined that the cloud cover of Venus might conceal a jungle world, rather than an incredibly hot atmosphere full of noxious gases.) "Sweet reasonableness won't get you anywhere in this racket. To make yourself heard you have to be a demagogue, or a rabble-rousing political preacher like this fellow Nehemiah Scudder. We're going merrily to hell and it won't stop until it winds up in a crash." "But -- Oh the devil! What can we do about it?" "Nothing, Things are bound to get a whole lot worse before they can get any better. Let's have a drink." This certainly is an era of demagoguery and dumbed down debate. Trump is as much a hyper-opportunistic product of the culture as its leader. But with regard to Trump, I'm not nearly as downbeat as Heinlein was in his scenario. He even had his ultimate favorite character of all time, Lazarus Long, go off-planet for the duration of the American dictatorship, some 75 years. Not that heading off-world is an option, of course. Whereas "Let's have a drink," the close of Heinlein's Volume Two, is. It's just not a very socially useful one. Perhaps my longstanding worries about Trump's decided tendencies toward know-nothingism an neo-fascism will come to nothing. After all, it may be that Trump, who not long ago was a Democrat, and once backed my presidential candidate, Gary Hart (a Heinlein fan growing up, incidentally), is just faking it as part of his drive for power. The problem is that one tends to become what one pretends to be. And Trump's appointments are, if anything, mostly more extreme than is the norm even for a very conservative Republican Party. In fact, much like Heinlein's Nehemiah Scudder, a Trump who barely won -- he lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and barely won the electoral college with very narrow wins in a few states that another Democrat would probably have defended -- is now pretending as though he really does have a mandate for sweeping actions which most oppose. What seems most likely is not that Trump is a true ideologue but that he is the erratic personality and consummate opportunist that his Twitter history and far too frequent dysfunctional campaigning -- .. from DIYS http://ift.tt/2iHLFtf