Do you know how the professional seducer operates? Are you able to detect one at work? What if the seducer is aiming his wiles at you? In his novels, Robert A. Heinlein made several observations about con men and their operations. Their aggregate import can be stated as follows: The con man selects …
Category: rants
Jun 20 2022
On Being Left Alone
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Thank you, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche! How many times have we heard that or some equivalent? It was the central theme of both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. (The similarities …
Dec 10 2021
Intentionally Untitled
“When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.” – Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road Some pieces need no titles. Others can’t abide them. As for the quote above, hang in there. …
Sep 01 2021
A Comment On Commentary
Back in the heyday of blogging, everyone and his halfwit Uncle Herman had a blog. There were, at peak, over 50 million such sites. Most, of course, were of no broad consequence: little was posted there, and most of that was worthless. However, they gave their “proprietors” a sense that they could be listened …
May 26 2021
Unforced And Uncorrected Errors
In his book In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, one of Charles Murray’s arguments for the policies he advocates is that they watch the correct “dependent variables:” When the way we add up results is combined with the difficulties of operationalizing hard-to-reify constructs, the nature of what I call “the dependent variable …
Mar 02 2021
“Not Perfect”
Have you said or written any of these things, or anything like them? “The GOP isn’t perfect.” “America isn’t perfect.” “Trump isn’t perfect.” If so, I have a question for you…no, let me rephrase that: I have a demand for you: Either define perfect Or shut up. Take your time. Show your …
Jan 28 2021
How Do I Detest WordPress? Let Me Count The Ways…
Approximately 538 trillion people, aware that I was relocating from Blogger, have: Exhorted me to use WordPress; Assured me that “You’re going to love it.” That group includes (of course) Mike Hendrix, whose assistance in creating this blog was invaluable. You could say Mike is a WordPress fan. He assumed that I would take to …
June is Fidelity Month!
Fran’s Recent Novels
Margaret’s Recent Novels
