A Quick Word About PIPA/SOPA

It’s simple. The sledgehammer method combating piracy will not work. It stomps all over the First Amendment – and those first ten amendments have been used as toilet paper by the powers that be for a while now – and only serves to fuel the anger of an already righteously indignant citizenry even further.

Congress has, time and again, proven its inability to handle matters of technology. Witness the hearings into Microsoft’s practices in the late 1990′s, wherein Sun’s Scott McNealy told an ignorant subcommittee, “Why does it take thirty-two lines of code in Windows to sign your name?” Given how network authentication is done in most operating systems, including Sun’s, that’s actually pretty lean code. The Senator questioning McNealy did not know that, and even Bill Gates smirked when the Senator didn’t quite realize his leg had been seriously pulled.

Now these geniuses want to regulate the Internet.

No. The only possible outcome of PIPA/SOPA is the muffling of American citizens by corporate interests who will be given far too much power to quash whomever offends them in the name of “copyright infringement.” Copyright infringement is bad; suppression of free speech is treason. Do the math.

Tell your senators and representative to vote no on these ill-thought-out, poorly written bills. If they vote yes, let them know they need to update their resumes. Do not tolerate this attack on our rights.

Before We Get Too Far Into This Election Year…

It’s 2012. Which means we are in for about 10 months of the most obnoxious mud-slinging since… um… 2010. For the good of America, I am usurping authority to institute the following ban list for 2012. You are not allowed to use these terms for the rest of the year.

Presumptive nominee – Yes, I know. Mitt’s the only GOP candidate not in dire need of some sort of anti-psychotic medication, which pretty much makes him the safest bet to get the Republican nod this year. But until it’s glaringly obvious that the others have dropped out or have been mathematically eliminated from consideration, could we please stop using the term “presumptive nominee”? Four years ago, they had already been calling Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee since 2004. How’d that work out for you? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Presumptive nominee means all the delegates are pledged, and all that remains is the dog-and-pony show we call the convention.

1% – If you make over $34,000 a year, you are the 1%. You have more money than 99% of the rest of the world. Oh, but you say, we’re speaking relatively. OK, let’s look at the 1% in America. Quite a few of you protesting are in that 1%. It’s not the 1% causing all the trouble. It’s a specific subset of them. Who are they? Bankers. Wall Street traders. Congressional lobbyists. The 1%? It’s less than the 1%. That’s the real crime.

Lies of the liberal media – Look, wingnuts, when your guy gets called out, it’s not a lie. It’s the truth. Sometimes, the truth hurts. Deal with it.

Obamacare – Let’s look at this one in the cold light of day, shall we? Last I checked, we don’t have a Canadian style healthcare system (and I’ve yet to meet a Canadian who thinks it’s horrible. I asked. Think of that next time you want to give me a lecture.) We have a law that says the insurance companies have to spend more time insuring you and less time denying you your insulin because the CEO needs to buy a new fur-lined sink.

Socialist/Fascist – I’ve yet to meet an American who actually knows the definition of “socialist.” Certainly no one in the Tea Party. Likewise, the term “fascist” to describe political opponents of either stripe needs to go into cold storage. Let us be honest in our descriptions of those whose political opinions juxtapose with their lack of any sort of social grace. Let us use the politically correct term “asshole.”

Politically challenged – If you have to refer to people who disagree with you as “politically challenged,” you’re an idiot. No exceptions. Knock it off.

Rethuglican – OK, seriously? To criticize a wingnut, you sound like a wingnut? It doesn’t make your point. It makes you sound like a moron. It’s like when wingnuts refer to CNN as the “Communist News Network.” All that tells me is you don’t have a leg to stand on, even if you do.

Basically, what I’m asking is to quit sounding like a dumbass when you talk politics. We generously spend our tax dollars to pay other people to do that.

Northcoast Shakedown: Who’d Work At TTG

It’s no secret that Nick Kepler’s former employer and biggest client, TTG Insurance, is loosely based on the former employer I discreetly call BigHugeCo. But just how closely is it based? One former coworker told me there was no way someone could make up all those characters without basing them on real people.

I had to explain that basing a character on a real person becomes limiting because you start trying to force fit the real person into the imaginary character. Counterintuitively, the character becomes less believable. But the company?

TTG is a property/casualty insurance company, the people who insure your car, your house, your business. Like BigHugeCo, they have a life insurance division. Because BigHugeCo was large enough at the time to have the most common lines of business in insurance, it allowed me to pattern TTG’s structure after theirs. They had a personal lines (Home and auto), competing commercial and specialty insurance (Trust me. I worked there 11 years and that one still confuses me.), and, of course, life insurance, which is a whole ‘nother animal.

But what was the working environment like? Physically, very similar. BigHugeCo’s campus, before a major move last year, was scattered over several buildings in downtown Cincinnati. Likewise, I picked several buildings to house TTG’s various and sundry division and corporate units. The building where Nick works really does house the regional office of another insurance company. I altered the street address slightly to avoid implying that Nick worked for Chicago Title & Insurance, but still imply that TTG actually occupied the building.

As for the people there…

Well… No. My coworkers at BigHugeCo were pretty normal folks. The closest we ever came to a Ken Giamatti (the Commercial Lines exec who gives Nick a hard time in Northcoast Shakedown) was a middle manager who had some… um… interesting photos on his hard drive. Stupid, but not earth-shattering or even enough to put him on unemployment. Some of the more unpleasant characters in the book would not have lasted very long at BigHugeCo. Screaming was not considered a viable management technique. When it is, even in this economy, one generally updates their resume when it is.

But the resemblance also ends when you go back to what I said about basing characters on real people. I really dislike roman a clefs since inevitably, the story gets stilted trying to make fictional characters bend to the author’s perception of their real world counterparts. It’s one thing to write historical fiction and speculate on how real people behaved and acted. It’s entirely different when you write a novel that is, by definition, supposed to be fiction. I used BigHugeCo’s structure to design a fictional company, but every company has its own personality. I had to let TTG’s corporate personality evolve on its own.

Amazon | Nook

Giovanni Gelati Talks With Me About Northcoast Shakedown

It’s the G Spot on Blog Talk Radio. Check it out and don’t miss this week’s other guests, including forensics expert DP Lyle.

Listen to internet radio with GelatisScoop on Blog Talk Radio

The Big Switch

If you clicked on jamesrwinter.net and ended up here instead, that’s not a mistake. As you can see from the recent redesign of the blog, Edged in Blue now contains all the same information as the old web site. It’s just easier to update everything in one place.

Plus, if jamesrwinter.com/.net all point here, and jamesrwinter.net becomes the most common address I give out, I can eventually move the blog to a private host or even WordPress Pro without confusing the hell out of everyone if and when that happens.

Of course, that might mean a few changes to how I generate content, but those changes are probably long overdue anyway.

So if you clicked one site and got this one, you’re in the right place. Welcome to my new cyberpad.

Ladies And Gentlemen, The Dirty Three-Thirty

My nephew’s band. The band of the 2010′s. The next Foo Fighters.

Yeah, I’m biased. Can you blame me?

Thursday Reviews: Headstone, Nerve

Headstone

Ken Bruen

The Celtic Tiger that is modern Ireland is broke, and Jack Taylor wanders through the wreckage of it all. He’s battered, angry, and nursing addictions to Xanax and Jameson. Yet he’s about to be happy as he’s found a woman, an American writer, who accepts Jack for what he is – broken, flawed, but better than he gives himself credit for.

Naturally, author Ken Bruen loves to torture the poor soul. I’m convinced he sleeps with a Jack Taylor voodoo doll under his pillow. And the first needle Bruen sticks in his wounded warrior, first seen in The Guards, is the near-fatal beating of his nemesis, Father Malachy. Thus comes the opening salvo from Headstone, a gang of doped-up, privileged psychopaths who misread Darwin and see it as justification for a killing spree. And they’d like Jack to participate in their master plan – as a victim. But they don’t kill him right off the bat. They’re out to kill clergy, gays, and “the vulnerable” (as in the mentally handicapped.) Their leader is a self-styled Charlie Manson type who calls himself “Bine.” Makes him sound like a pathetic loser who thinks he’s a Batman supervillain, only Bine is dangerous as hell. His minions damn near kill Jack’s Guard friend, Ridge, and manage to shake the unshakeable Zen calm of Stewart, the one man in all of Galway who could actually save Jack from himself.

Headstone even manages to wound Jack physically in a way so horrific it still makes me cringe to think about reading it. Meant to scare Jack and corner him for the “big event,” Bine miscalculates. Because backing Jack Taylor into a corner puts him in the path of the most dangerous force in all of Ireland – Jack’s blind, unrelenting rage.

I’m not sure how much longer Jack Taylor can go on. There’s considerably less of him left at the end of the book. A couple of subplots drag him across lines one would swear he’d never cross, and of course, Bruen is never one for the happy ending. However, his poetic style is very much intact here, and the story is as much about Ridge and Stewart as it is Taylor, showing an evolution to the series.

Nerve

Taylor Clark

Taylor Clark, an admitted neurotic journalist, has undertaken a study of fear. Why do we choke? Why do we worry? Why do we lose our cool? And one thing Clark learned in the process is that those who appear to be cool and calm under pressure, to somehow summon superhuman poise and concentration in the face of danger are just as scared as those who have curled up in the fetal position to whimper.

What Clark shows us, with the help of neuroscientists and combat instructors, is that the biggest mistake anyone can make under extreme duress is to fight fear. Because while you’re fighting your fear, the building is on fire and the bear has time to slice you into People McNuggets. What separates the heroes from the rest of us is embracing the fear. You’re in danger. You’re supposed to be afraid.

Clark also breaks down fear. The actual emotion, fear, is an automatic response to a sudden threat. There are two small sections of the brain called the amygdala that seize control to make us fight, fly, or freeze, depending on the circumstances. The amygdala are amazing in their ability to store instinctive and remembered fears. However, they’re very user unfriendly, not relinquishing fear memories easily. And some of the response defy logic. It’s why some people have bizarre phobias, like the color orange and so on.

Anxiety, which gives rise to obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, and anxiety disorders (hence the name), is really the brain’s reasoning center trying to process and plan for a danger. Used properly, our impulses for anxiety help the amygdala automate desired responses to threats. It’s why some police officers can shoot a suspect when threatened yet not remember it. On the downside, anxiety causes us to worry about things like asteroid impacts and acts of terrorism that likely will never happen to us.

The third and final component is stress, which is simply the brain overloaded by various stimuli. Like fear – which keeps us from getting killed – and anxiety – which makes us think ahead, stress is not always a bad thing. Some people thrive on it. Others just shut down.

Clark goes through the mechanics of fear step by step and shows how some overcome performance anxiety or perform admirably in the face of extreme danger. It helps to embrace the fear and recognize it for what it is, to face what causes anxiety (which is anxiety’s evolutionary purpose: Hey, stupid, you might want to do something about that saber tooth tiger that’s been eyeing you for the last hour), and manage the stress. When that happens, some people discover that they perform better. Clark’s point: Avoidance, bad; confrontation (of the cause of fear), good. (But do please still run when the bear decides you’d make a nice chew toy.) He also shows how a sense of humor can diffuse a situation, such as when astronaut Gordon Cooper had to guide his dead space capsule back to Earth with no instruments long before Apollo 13 took a lifeboat to the moon.

For anyone paralyzed by fear and anxiety, this book is a must.

Four More Years?

Let’s get this out of the way right now. I’ll be voting Obama in November. Yes, I know. I just made a bunch of Republicans howl in agony, but then I have the same reaction when I see the gang of morons they’re trotting out this year. And why should they run their best and brightest? Why run Rob Portman or Bobby Jindahl or Chris Christie against an incumbent? Likewise, what motivation did Hillary Clinton have to run in 2004?

Let’s be honest. Unless the incumbent is Richard Nixon, Warren Harding, or James Buchanan, canning the incumbent while there’s a war on or the economy’s in the tank is generally a bad idea. Why? Well, look at this year’s field. To a candidate, their chief position is “I’m not Obama.” Hmm… Very much identical to the John Kerry “I’m not Bush” platform. Do I have to reiterate why such a candidate’s every second on television is time stolen from my life?

If you want to oust an incumbent (Jerry Ford does not count.), you have to run a Lincoln or a Roosevelt or a Reagan, someone who can motivate the nation and move them to be better, even the opposition. Obama gets compared to Jimmy Carter a lot, but you don’t run Chester Arthur against Jimmy Carter (or, for that matter, Jerry Ford). You need FDR or JFK or Reagan. People want a leader. Like the Democrats in 1976, the Republicans are only putting up cannon fodder.

But my vote will be a vote for Obama, not a vote against (insert GOP cannon fodder here). Why?

There are a number of reasons. For starters, healthcare reform. And I just made a bunch of Tea Party heads explode. Doesn’t bother me. Most of what the Tea Party has said about healthcare bears little resemblance to fact anyway. (And I know some idiot is going to rattle off a bunch of “facts” in the comment section. Save your breath.) We didn’t get healthcare reform. We got insurance reform. Basically, you have to buy insurance and quit overburdening the ER because you wanted to wait until it’s almost too late to stick it to the hospital. And dude, I totally understand why people do that. I’ve done it. I like having insurance better. In return, insurance companies are not allowed to screw you quite so badly anymore. They can’t tell you they’re just going to let you die because you’re diabetic or had toe nail fungus when you were 25. Perfect?

No, but if you want perfect, I suggest Mother Goose. Oh, wait. Perfect does not exist in fairy tales, either. Oh, well.

Second, let’s look at the economy. Pinheads like Beck and Hannity have done a good job selling people on the idea that somehow, the junior senator from Illinois, through a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy (TM), caused the Great Recession in a bid to turn us into a socialist Islamic republic. For those of us not on crack, the truth is less spectacular, but it did light a fuse that started with the Tea Party and is now burning through the Occupy movement. Put the blame squarely where it belongs. Not on Obama or even Bush, not even the one percent. It’s the banking industry. If ever there was a business that had its head so firmly up its collective ass…

Well, there’s the recording industry, and I’m still outraged they didn’t all go bankrupt. But the banks have been in a collective stupor for a very long time now. They’re like your idiot drunken brother-in-law. Take the locks off the gun cabinet, and he gets into all sorts of trouble. The only problem is that if you don’t bail out your brother-in-law, Thanksgiving is a little quieter this year. If you don’t bail out the banks, well…

The problem is then you end up bailing lots of other people out because, well, the banks managed to lose everyone’s money and now wants all of theirs. So if the banks are whining because Mr. Obama won’t let them sell liar loans anymore, screw ‘em. If you thought Gordon Gecko was the hero of Wall Street, you’re too stupid to live.

But the thing that keeps me firmly in the Obama camp is that he’s not a hardliner. Let me be blunt here. Hardliners are worthless. Hardliners cause just about every bad thing that happens in the world. In American, hardliners (both left and right) love to invoke the Founding Fathers to justify their inflexible thinking and unyielding approach to governance (until some sweet, sweet pork comes their way. Don’t kid yourselves. Everyone who says they don’t take pork is a serial offender. Every. Single. One.) Never mind that said Founding Fathers agreed on virtually nothing and could only birth a nation and write a Constitution through debate and compromise. If you’re not open to compromise, would you kindly get the fuck out of my government and leave my country for someplace more your speed? Like North Korea?

That’s not to say I’m happy with Obama. I’m not. I’m disappointed.

For one thing, Obama is too wishy-washy. In the recent biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs told Walter Isaacson he was massively frustrated with Obama for constantly telling him why things can’t get done. OK, one of my complaints about George Bush was that he was The Decider. Not that I dislike decisiveness; I just want a bit more thought and finesse to go into the process. On the other hand, Barry needs to be more decisive. I need once to hear Obama look, not just at the GOP, but at his own party and go, “You know what? Fuck you. I’m the president. This is my job. Lead. Follow. Get the hell out of the way.” We haven’t had that for about twelve years. Not with any degree of nuance or skill, anyway.

Second, this is a horrible cabinet. Gates, followed by Panetta, and Hillary Clinton are the only ones who really shine. That’s it. The rest of them? Yes, these are better people than George W. Bush had around him, but hell, I’ve been on beer league softball teams that could do better than Bush’s cabinet. Geithner is even more wishy-washy than Obama. As Treasury secretary, he should have spent the last four years putting the fear of God into the banks and AIG. Instead, he does it to GM and Chrysler. You know. The companies that actually build stuff and employ people, not spend their days trying to con investors into financing liar loans. And then there’s Steven Chu, the genius behind the Solyndra deal that’s become a symbol of what people hate about Obama’s administration. That guy should have been fired the day Solyndra filed for bankruptcy.

And let’s look at the stimulus, shall we? In principle, pumping money into the economy is classic Keynseian economics. Even Milton Friedman cited it as part of the basis for his own hands-off approach to the economy. But you have to put money into things like highways and the power grid and the Internet. Stuff that will generate income and jobs when they’re finished. (Hmm… Didn’t Clinton do this? Oh, yeah. He presided over a boom.) You don’t fund cops and teachers for a couple of years only to have them laid off again when there’s no more money coming in. And you don’t let idiots like Steven Chu make deals with companies like Solyndra. If you’re going to go that route, you might as well send out those stimulus checks Bush was so fond of. On second thought, don’t. My taxes are going to go up enough as it is when that bill finally comes due. (Yes, Virginia. Your taxes already went up 10 years ago. You just haven’t gotten the bill yet.)

And finally, there is the NDAA. Last I checked, Johnny Reb wasn’t marching on Washington or Gettysburg. That all ended slightly over a century before I was born. The NDAA extends a really bad policy of the government wiping its ass with the Fourth Amendment that started with the Patriot Act. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever for warrantless wiretaps – NONE – nor the suspension of habeas corpus. Yet the Obama Administration actually asked for this to be put into the NDAA.  I’ve got a problem with that.

“Ah, ha!” some of the few Republicans who haven’t stopped reading this to put pins in their Jim Winter voodoo dolls say, “there’s why you shouldn’t vote for him.”

Um, well…  Name me a candidate in the GOP slate who wouldn’t have signed that bill. Ron Paul? OK, name one with a serious shot at the nomination.

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

I’m not happy with this year’s election, but unless someone breaks into a hotel at the GOP convention, none of the bozos wanting to be the new president give me any compelling reason to change course.

If anything, they inspire me to push for reconciliation with Britain.

But only if we can have Eddie Izzard as our governor-general.

Northcoast Shakedown: Cleveland Rocks!

As you can see by the cover of ebook version of Northcoast Shakedown, the book’s setting is Cleveland. In fact, since it’s original publication, I’ve been identified with the city. Despite almost three years of My Town Monday posts about my current home, Cincinnati, I still get asked about how things are in Cleveland.

Honestly? I don’t know. I moved out of the Greater Cleveland area in 1988 and arrived in Cincinnati in 1991. A few years ago when I was going through a divorce, I contemplated leaving Cincinnati and starting over. I’m sorry to say Cleveland was not on my list of possible new hometowns. No, I was looking at Chicago or San Francisco. (Then I met this cute blonde who gave me a very compelling reason to stay put: She said yes to my marriage proposal. Suddenly, Chicago wasn’t in the cards.)

So why Cleveland?

Well, let’s consider my current home. It’s a sleepy, conservative Ohio River town with more in common with Memphis and St. Louis than Cleveland or Columbus. It took me over a decade to really embrace my adopted home. During that decade, I still pined for the shores of Lake Erie. Cleveland has about as much in common with the city on the other end of I-71 as New York has with Los Angeles. They’re both American cities of similar size. And that’s it.

Cleveland has a patchwork ethnic mix more like those in Chicago or New York than Cincinnati and Columbus. The architecture is different. The music is different. Once upon a time, Cleveland was one of those cities where you needed a following in music if you ever hoped to break big in New York or LA. The city is rough, often and gleefully crude, and unabashedly earthy in its attitudes and language. It’s biggest rival is Pittsburgh, a rivalry that has forged a bond through economic hardship and common ethnic, religious, and political makeup. Besides, it’s two hours away on the Turnpike.

And Cleveland has never taken the worst blows anyone can deal it lying down. It’s river caught fire. It’s baseball team was a laughingstock for three decades. Someone kidnapped its football team, but the city forced the NFL to leave the records, the team name, and the franchise in place while they built a new home for the Browns. Hit hard with the housing collapse, Cleveland, like Detroit to the west, simply bulldozed the abandoned neighborhoods and pressed on with a decades-long plan to remake the lakefront.

Cleveland takes its share of abuse, much of it unfair, and yet it’s still there.

And while Cincinnati has a lot to offer and certainly enough character to support yet another crime series set here, telling stories in Cleveland is like stepping into a smokey blues bar and hearing Buddy Guy or the ghost of Stevie Ray Vaughan making that guitar cry.

Amazon | Nook

Caught In My Own Web

Well, I finished the new jamesrwinter.net. Don’t go looking for it. I never pointed the domain to it. Why?

Two reasons. One, it looks like crap. Oh, that’s fixable. Since I’m not trained in graphic arts, I would need to put a lot more time into the site’s design. Unfortunately, I was too busy trying to get the backend to work properly.  The second problem is more technical. I wanted to use ASP.Net to run the page. The trouble is running ASP.Net on GoDaddy is slooooow. How slow?

It’s a common complaint that ASP.Net pages with frequent round trips to the database can be slow to render. A robust server able to handle the traffic can prevent this.  However, a simple table or rss feed should not be much of a problem. The database I used was not that big, and the feeds – Twitter and WordPress – are generally rapid loads. But I’m hosting on GoDaddy, and all the hot commercials with Danica Patrick can’t cover up the fact GoDaddy’s performance is somewhat lacking at times, especially with ASP.Net sites.

So I’ve got an ugly site on a slow host. What does one do?

I backed up and looked at my whole web presence. Why redo the site at all? Virtually everything that’s on the web site is on this blog. All the books. All the short stories. Just rewrite the bio, add a contact page, and a new FAQ. Oh, and here’s a hint if you’re going to put a FAQ page: Turn the comments on so visitors can frequently ask questions.

Since we’re trying to play up the brand, I picked a new WordPress theme (and now you know why Edged in Blue is no longer edged in blue) that better plays to Northcoast Shakedown‘s cover. When I go to release Second Hand Goods or The Compleat Winter (which I keep threatening), I’ll change the theme accordingly.

Eventually, I’d like to build my own, even if it’s a WordPress-based site, designing the graphics myself. But rather than waste money on a poorly performing host and devoting more time than I have at present to the graphics, it just makes sense to consolidate everything here. When the time comes, I’ll go host shopping and take a lot more time into doing the graphics.

So welcome to the new jamesrwinter.net.  The address will point here by the end of this week. Until then, jamesrwinter.net will continue to point at the venerable old web site.