Instapundit Says: Buy This Book

The man's sex obsession is on view for all to see. My kinda guy. The book:

Lube Jobs: A Woman's Guide to Great Maintenance Sex

If you buy the book from the above link it is almost $2 cheaper than the Instapundit link. I wonder why? And if I use this link the price is up $1.

Lube Jobs: A Woman's Guide to Great Maintenance Sex

Interesting. Further: I just checked again and the first link is now the same price as the Instapundit link and the second link is now $1 less than either price. A real time market to be sure. Well. Maybe. Oh yeah. If you buy from one of my links I get a cut at no cost to you.

From the review section:

Some 20 suggested scenarios include creative manual, oral, toy-enhanced, and coital approaches, including body shots (a porn staple), front-seat fellatio, backseat bonking with porn on the laptop, bathtub blow jobs, and closet canoodling. While the constant servicing-a-car wordplay may annoy some readers, the advice is sound and fun. Lighthearted illustrations would have been a nice touch, but the book does quite well as is. Most people spend the largest part of their adulthood slogging through committed relationships, and they need books like this. Recommended for public libraries."
--Library Journal --

The library was never that exciting when I was growing up. Except for the National Geographic. Other wise known as "Half-Naked Savages". Of course with my Dad's box of Playboys in the basement (I kid you not) I didn't visit the library nears as often as I might otherwise have needed to.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Rolling Back Socialism In America

An e-mail friend suggested I take a look at A Common-Sense Platform for the 21st Century. From the excerpt I read it looks pretty good. It is all about how to roll back socialism in America in the 21st Century.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Free Book

Ed Driscoll notes that J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night is available for free download.

“Just look at TV news or read a newspaper,” Schulman said. “Plot point after plot point is identical. In my 1979 novel I have General Motors go bankrupt — General Motors then files for bankruptcy. I have Europe issue a common currency in my novel called the ‘eurofranc’ — the European Union then goes and issues the ‘euro.’ In my novel I have a European Chancellor, based in France, accuse the U.S. President of having the monetary policies of a banana republic — then the President of the European Union — also based in France — slams U.S. plans to spend its way out of recession as ‘a road to hell’ and says President Barack Obama’s massive stimulus package and banking bailout ‘will undermine the liquidity of the global financial market.’ The copycat nature of all these plot points and dialogue” — says Schulman — “could not be more obvious!”

You can read the Amazon reviews at:

J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night

Note: there are only about 12,000 more copies available for download. Don't wait if you want a free copy.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Beaver Nation

While reading a review of the book Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History I came across this interesting tit bit (British spelling).

Then there's the year 1620, when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. Instead of seeing this as the first great turning point in the nation's colonial history, the date "when America began," Bunker argues that we might consider 1628 as an alternative. That was the year that colonial leaders sailed up the Kennebec River in southern Maine to establish a half-forgotten trading post at a place called Cushnoc, staking their claim as New England's primary dealers in beaver pelts. Only by investing in that highly desirable commodity did the settlers finally prove themselves to be more that mere "dabblers, clinging to their footholds along the coast." Beaver skins -- the single way "the Pilgrims could find the money to pay their debts and finance new supplies from home" -- transformed a tenuous, fragile community into something permanent.

Funny thing is that my first mate did a lot of trapping when she was growing up. We were talking about it the other day and #1 daughter was not amused. And #1 daughter is also not amused with the first mate's proficiency in firearms. I'm hoping that once she gets more real wold experience her attitude will change.

Popular history is that the Pilgrims went hungry due to bad luck.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation 1620 - 1647,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable.

So a society based on communal profits and theft does not work well. Where is the USSR when you need them?

But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, "instead of famine now God gave them plenty," Bradford wrote, "and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God." Thereafter, he wrote, "any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.

So what did work?

... in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609-10, called "The Starving Time," the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.

Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth. In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was "plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure." He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, "we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now."

So how socialist does a country have to become before it stops working? I don't want to find out.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Nook e-Reader

I note that Barnes and Nobel is offering the Nook e-Reader. I wonder if it is safe for children? I wonder what they were thinking? I can just hear the conversations: "Not tonight dear, but the Nook e is fully charged."

Amazon sells them if you have to have a look:

Barnes and Noble NOOK e-reader

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Zama Ombies

So I'm noodling across the net and came across a reference to this book:

Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation

So naturally I'm interested in the reviews. Here is one reviewer, E. Berry "zeetwo8", whose family is having buyers remorse.

I can't believe where we are at this present time in America. My whole family voted for Barack...I mean my whole family..we are all white working class people. We usually get together for major family events, of which was my mother's 85th birthday. It was not too long before politics was brought up and I have to say, on save my admitted socialist sister attending NYU journalism program, we are all kinda' shell shocked about what just went down in D.C. with the vote on health care. We all talk about how this system needs fixing, as a couple of us are in the health care industry. But, the way this was passed has left most, not all, but most of us very troubled.

Well a lot of us tried to warn you but you were so caught up in hope and change that your eyes glazed over whenever we tried talking reason.

The reviewer does finish off on a positive note.

This book has really opened my eyes and made me really slow down, take a chill pill and slowly, patiently and OBJECTIVELY watch what politicians say and do so that one can make a more reasoned decision.

Thanks Jason for writing this book for my generation. With this new perspective, we have no excuse for repeating this mistake...

You are not going to get anything even close to OBJECTIVE if you keep getting your news from Amalgamated Pravda Inc. Anyway - there is more good stuff in the review. Go read it.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Book Wars

Amazon and Apple are having a book war. Which is to say a war over who will get the biggest market share for electronic books.

“One defends when his strength is inadequate, he attacks when it is abundant.”—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Apple iPad isn’t even available yet, but already it is forcing Amazon (stock symbol AMZN) to respond in a variety of ways to protect its competing Kindle eBook business. Amazon just snapped up a touchscreen technology startup, presumably to update the already ancient-looking Kindle. Emboldened book publishers are pushing back on Amazon’s $9.99 pricing now that they can sell the same eBooks on the iPad for $14.99, and Amazon is capitulating. And the Kindle team at Amazon, which once had an arrogant approach towards publishers when it was the only game in town, is now bending over backwards to solicit their loyalty, says one editor at a publishing company who has noticed the change in tone.

The coming battle between Apple (stock symbol AAPL) and Amazon will occur on many fronts, but the place where Apple can really hurt Amazon is on pricing. Just as Apple initially did with 99-cent songs on iTunes, Amazon imposed a uniform $9.99 price on bestsellers in the Kindle Store. A single price helps to establish markets for new product categories, especially when that price is at a discount to the physical alternative. While the 99-cent strategy worked well for Apple in digital music, in books Apple doing a jujitsu move on Amazon by allowing publishers to have more control over the pricing. Now Macmillan is demanding that Amazon sell its eBooks for $14.99, and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is making similar grumblings about HarperCollins.

So far Apple and Amazon have different digital formats. That means you can't read books you buy from Amazon on your Apple reader. And vice versa. This is similar to the floppy disk wars in the early days of the home computer. I don't see such incompatibilities lasting more than a few years.

Another thing I see happening is a reduction in prices. For one thing high prices will encourage pirates. Just as they do for music. Why should a song which costs under 1¢ to deliver have to cost $1.00? If the artist was getting 50¢ of that it might be a reasonable deal. At least you are supporting the artist.

But that is not how it works.

The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

Which although a different type of publishing explains why my friend Sgt Mom self publishes and self promotes her own work. You can by her books on Amazon.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tales Of Government Run Health Care

This is anecdotal evidence. We don't know if Actual Government Run American Healthcare will work better or WORSE than these anecdotes.

I haven't read the book. So far all four reviews are five star. It could be the author's brother in law and his married cousin though. But this excerpt I got by e-mail was interesting.

Fourteen Hospitals Turn Away Critically-Injured Elderly Man

Rescue workers in Japan called fourteen hospitals before finding one that would take an elderly bicyclist who collided with a motorcycle.

The accident, which occurred at 10:15 pm in the Japanese city of Itami, left the 69-year-old bicyclist, who was not identified, in critical condition with back and head injuries. Paramedics arrived on the scene five minutes after the crash and administered first aid. Yet, for about an hour, they were unsuccessful at locating a hospital to treat the man.

Helpless, the elderly man waited in the ambulance at the accident scene as hospital after hospital rejected treating him, citing unavailable beds, staff shortages and a lack of equipment and specialists. All told, fourteen hospitals in the neighboring prefectures - i.e., governing districts - of Hyogo and Osaka refused his entry.

"There were four other emergency calls in the same time frame of that night," explained Mitsuhisa Ikemoto, the fire department spokesman. "[A]s a result, we were unable to find a hospital."

It took a second round of calls for rescue workers to find a hospital. Finally, at 11:30 that night - 75 minutes after the accident - they took him to a hospital in Itami, which had initially declined to accept him. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that the hospital's resources that night were unsatisfactory.

You can read the rest by buying the book. Just click on the book picture above. Or you can download the book.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sara Palin's Going Rogue #5 On Amazon

Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue: An American Life is available for pre-order on Amazon and it is already up to #5 and there is not even a picture of the dust jacket available.

I guess she is not as popular as every one thought.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Book Review For Pelosi

Doug Giles reviews a book Speaker Pelosi should read. Giles explains why Pelosi needs it.

That’s why parents and grandparents who loathe what the media and various institutions are trying to do to our boys need Miniter’s new book more than Pelosi needs Jesus and a straight jacket.

Read the whole review. It has a few more amusing quips like the one quoted.

And the book? The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide: Recovering the Lost Art of Manhood.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sgt. Mom Says I Should Flog Her Books

Sgt. Mom says I should flog her books. They do get good reviews.

An outstanding set of historical novels, December 12, 2008

By Al Past (Beeville, TX USA)

Is there anything better than a good book? Better than a book that tells an absorbing story, that's peopled with characters you care about, living through exciting times, set among real events, and that leaves you with a better understanding as well as thoroughly entertained?

Of course there is something better: two books like that. And even better still, three. The Adelsverein Trilogy, by Celia Hayes, is such a trilogy. What The Leopard does for Italy and Gone With the Wind does for the American South, The Adelsverein Trilogy does for Texas, and does it in style.

That review was specifically for: Adelsverein the Gathering - Book One of The Adelsverein Trilogy. The other two books in the trilogy are:
Adelsverein: The Sowing - Book Two of the Adelsverein Trilogy
Adelsverein: The Harvesting - Book Three of the Adelsverein Trilogy

So if you need a little reading material for these cold (what ever happened to global warming?) winter days, buy the books.

Note: Sgt. Mom also has her own blog at Salon.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sgt. Mom Has A New Book

Sgt. Mom says the book is part of "...a trilogy, about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country in the 19th century. Did you know that in Gillespie County became almost solidly German between one decade and the next, and that German was the common language up until the 1920's?".

Here is an excerpt.

A dazzle in his eyes and a roar of noise in his ears: Carl Becker swam up to consciousness and a rough hand shaking his shoulder… the uninjured one. Even at that, pain stabbed up unto his skull, harsh as the Mexican lancer’s blade striking him down in a cavalry skirmish outside of Monterray… how many days ago?

“Rudi… is it the soldiers coming for us?” he mumbled in German, and the hand shook him again, commanding

“Speak English, you blockheaded Dutchman… Are you fit enough to walk out of here?”
Carl squinted against the light of a lantern held above his head, and focused against a blur on the face of the man holding it. Ford… Jack’s adjutant.

“I feel like dogshit, Rip.” He mumbled in reply, and coughed painfully. Rip Ford set down the lantern carefully, and checked the blood-caked bandages on Carl’s left shoulder.

“There ain’t no bubbling coming out of the deepest cut,” he remarked, with professional assurance, and Carl remembered how was said around the campfire that Rip Ford had once trained as a doctor, long before coming to Texas. “So that bastard of a lancer missed your lung by a squeak, but I think you got the lung-fever or the ague sure enough, and a busted collar-bone to boot. You ain’t gonna get any better in this-here cesspit. We got some of the boys heading home, now that their enlistments are up, and a courier going with them. There’s a place in an empty supply wagon for you, if you can walk to it. You got a home, they can take you to?”

There is more at the link. More excerpts from the Adelsverein Trilogy here and here and here and here.

Use the following links to order To Truckee's Trail and pre-order the Adelsverein Trilogy. Especially have a look at the To Truckee's Trail link. Sgt. Mom is looking good.

Eric of Classical Values reviewed Truckee's Trail and liked it. Here is a bit of what Eric said:

It is a riveting read. Close calls with Indian war parties, political treachery, near starvation and freezing to death, and inevitable illnesses and deaths. It's truly amazing that they made it.

Sgt. Mom sent me this note by e-mail: "I need all the links and interest that I can [get] otherwise I will have to go and get a real job, soon." Help her keep writing. Buy a case of her books and send them to friends.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Geometry

I have had to get in rather deeper into geometry than is my usual for the past 30 or so years (since my dome building daze - I built 3 or 4 and even lived in Bucky's Dome in Carbondale - he was no longer a resident alas) because of my design work on the Bussard Fusion Reactor which is ongoing at the IEC Fusion Technology blog and on the IEC Fusion Newsgroup.

There is a plan for the design of the second demonstration reactor to change from a cubical arrangement of magnets to an arrangement that forms a dodecahedron. Which got me doing some research on the matter of edge lengths vs radius and other such questions in order to work out the geometry.

In doing my research I came across an extraordinary book on the platonic solids. It explains how the cube is related to the dodecahedron. Through the magic of computers this is the clearest explanation of the connection I have yet come across. In other words - pretty pictures.

Another thing that makes this interesting is that it is an e-book. I recently blogged about a friend of mine (Sgt. Mom) in Plan B From Outer Space who is going a similar route although in her case an actual book will be delivered. I wonder how the ISBN system will cope?

Book selling and buying is going to face an earthquake from this direction. Or to mix the metaphors, this train is just starting to get up some steam.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

Plan B From Outer Space

My friend Sgt. Mom, from the Daily Brief has an idea and some chapters of a book she wants to get published. She needs your help. I'll let her explain:

So here's the story, of a blogger (me, of course) who wrote a long multi-part essay a couple of years ago about an incident in history which had always intrigued her, and after posting it, some readers were also intrigued, since they had never heard of it before. And one the readers thought it might make an interesting movie proposal, so I did one, which didn’t go anywhere except to a friend of that reader about a year later. The friend thought it would be better to write a novel, because movies based on published novels were an easier sell. So, when I got let go from a corporate admin job a year ago, I sat down and wrote a ripping good historical read, based on all the stuff I had written before.

I was obsessed by the original story of the 1844 wagon-train party who were the first to take their wagons over the Sierra Nevada ., two years ahead of the Donner Party, yet who did not loose a member of the party, even though they also were caught in the snow. Since they were the first to discover the Truckee Pass over the mountains, they also met an incredible challenge of establishing a new trail. How did they manage to work together? Who were they, and what sort of experience did they bring to this great venture? And what did they experience, this handful of men, women and children, once they stepped off into the trackless wilderness a hundred and sixty years ago,?

I had come to believe that their story was the sort of story that we needed to rediscover. We need to be reassured that our forbearers were brave, competent people, capable of working together, of looking out for each other, of daring the wilderness, or any other challenge with grace and courage. We need to get back to our stories, and I felt very strongly that this is one of them.

So I went gamboling playfully in the literary trenches for much of the last year trying to interest an agent and/or a publisher. I have now gone through all the Book of Agents and the Book of Publishers Who Deign To Consider Un-Agented Submissions (all both of them) and been rejected. Hey, and it isn’t because I suck as a writer, either. Everyone who has read the manuscript over the last year has said "God, what a riveting story... and why have I never heard of these people!?"

The problem seems to be, as I gather from lurking meaningfully in neighborhood of a lot of book and literary-industrial blogs, is there is a hell of a lot of dreck along with the merely OK to Pretty Damned Good Stuff. The traditional publishing world seems to be swamped up to it’s gorgeously nipped and tucked neck, which kind of seriously affects how they can handle the not-inconsiderable quantity of fairly OK to Pretty Damned Good stuff which winds up on the shelves of your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

And that stuff which makes it past the gatekeepers is still in absolutely unmanageable quantities. All the competent and ethical agents seem to have about all they can do to look at hundreds of similar OK to Pretty Damned Good submissions clamoring for their attention and time and make a snap decision on accepting and managing the tiny percentage of those that will pay off with the least amount of effort on their part.

They kept sending me these letters admitting that they just didn’t feel the passion for my book that they felt was necessary to represent me adequately. No one feels sufficiently passionate about “To Truckee’s Trail” except for me, and those dozen people who have read the entire thing and loved it passionately too. Unfortunately, all those people were just readers and other writers.

And being a military retiree with a mortgage and trying to make it as a freelance writer, I am perennially broke so, here goes Plan B.; a fund drive to do a POD version, to buy advertising, and put review copies where they will do the most good. I’ve set up a Paypal link at The Daily Brief, for anyone who wants a good old-fashioned ripping yard about the Frontier, about the people who built America, or maybe even just have the fun of seeing an unknown writer make an end-run around the literary-industrial complex.

I think I can promise an autographed copy of “To Truckee’s Trail” to anyone who contributes over a certain amount, too.

Hey, it works for Public Radio, doesn’t it?

Sample Chapter

Cross Posted at Classical Values