Post-Beatles hit for Paul McCartney & Wings from 1976, and McCartney's direct rebuttal to those (including John Lennon) who complained he only wrote sappy love songs. So it only zoomed to #1 on the charts, promptly becoming McCartney's record-setting 27th #1 hit.
McCartney's response, just like in the lyrics: "What's wrong with that?"
Another long, and long overdue, vacation.
Work has been especially grim the past week, due in no small part to teenagers who shouldn't be drinking at all, combining that stupidity with driving, and knocking people off in job lots hereabouts.
We could live a long and happy life not listening to devastated families wailing with grief they feel down to their bones, over jackassically slaughtered loved ones cut down in the prime of life.
So we're getting the hell out of Dodge for some well-earned anything-but-trauma time. Coastal Califrutopia is beautiful this time of year, and we may even get as far north as San Franshitsco, while bumming along taking in the highlights of the central coast. There is also an excuse to do some continued book research during our travels.
There may not even be a Sunday Music post this week (which hasn't happened since the last computer crashed into a smoking hole in the ground some years back), because we may not be anywhere near internet access for a week or more.
Our best wishes to everyone, including a number of correspondent fellow bloggers, currently under God's thumb in central Florida.
By all means, entertain yourselves with the Usual Suspects' Political Sh*tshow, and the bloggers over on the right, while you prepare for sporky times over the next couple of months.
We are temporarily closing comments in our absence, and only during our absence, purely out of a desire to avoid having to wade through any amount of spam and/or bile upon our return. They will re-open immediately upon our return to our humble digs.
Administrivia Note: 208Silver Miner (who evidently couldn't comprehend how low a priority his squabbles have on our life, nor the meaning of "wait your turn") has apparently elected to spank himself on our behalf. Having skipped most of the classes on hydraulics, while learning just enough to activate his internal Dunning-Kruger Switch like a rat in a crack cocaine experiment, he evidently proposes to show how little he learned of logic too, by attempting to prove a negative, and showing the world what he cannot accomplish, as if that somehow disproves what others can. While we invite him to ponder the phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", we yet wish him well, and hope he doesn't leave too purple a mark when he pulls his own pants down on the internet for your entertainment. He would be better advised to hope and pray we fail when we attend to his comeuppance, and realizes that him failing only proves his own incompetence, without settling anything. But we never interfere when our opponent is making a colossal blunder.
Meanwhile, we have a bag to pack, and a gas tank to fill. If we had our druthers, we'd be signing on as a burglar with a wizard and a company of dwarves, but this will have to do in the meantime.
#1 hit for The Association in 1967, since used in about a million places, from commercials to elevator muzak. It sat there on top of the charts for the entire month of July, the peak of "The Summer Of Love", and the Beatles were nowhere to be seen until the end of the month, when "All You Need Is Love" finally showed up at #71.
Beautiful and whimsical anything-but-new-wave retro-pop confection from 1979 by way of the 1960s, courtesy of Blondie, released as follow-up to their Heart Of Glass #1 single. This one hit #1 in several countries, but didn't chart in the U.S. But should have.
h/t CW
Reference please the above pic from CW's daily timewaster site.
Yes, we're sure it's an idyllic place, with gorgeous views, and tucked right in amidst Nature on all sides. Which is rather exactly the problem with it. If we were to name such a homestead, on the order of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, we would name this architectural act of insanity contrary to all common sense Kindling. Calling it Kingsford might be a wee bit too on-the-nose.
My absolutely curmudgeonly response:
"In a canyon, with a wood shake roof. And dead leaves all over it. Might as well just stack full gas cans against the outside walls. And violating just about every other survivability measure in a wildfire zone.
And some fall, the tearful owner will be "Shocked! Shocked, I say..." that's it's about to become a monument to human stupidity during a major brushfire.
This is why some areas should be declared unbuildable, all fire protection withdrawn completely, home insurance legally denied in perpetuity with the full backing of the state, and the entire area redlined from ever receiving a penny of federal disaster relief.
If you can absorb the cost to rebuild it every ten or twenty years out of your own pocket when it inevitably burns to the ground, ROWYBS.
Otherwise, once it burns down and the owner can't eat the cost to put it back, rebuilding permits are denied forever, and it reverts to permanent wild habitat by eminent domain, and the owner given $1/acre.
Now show some rich stupid jackhole's house perched over the waves and built beyond the mean high tide line that gets surf-pummeled by storms every generation or so."
And then, inevitably, Anonymous Yahoo (funny how they're almost always Anonymous, i'n'it?) pipes up:
"But also we are totally opposed to government intervention in people's private lives! Do we know that this property is in a location where brushfires are common? Seems like you want to confiscate these people's property based on a picture. But again, small government and "don't tread on me" or something"
To which load of halt-witted codswallop we reply:
"1) "Totally opposed"? No. Never said any such thing. You conflate "minimal" with "anarchy" at risk to your own argument, with a heaping helping of reductio ad absurdum. Best wishes with that approach.
2) Those are oak trees, growing in a canyon. Brushfire city. Period.
3) I don't want the property confiscated until Reality makes it obvious it never should have been built upon to begin with.
It was jackassical government greed that let some mid-century idiot build there in the first place, to maximize the county's taxable property value. Which then requires more brush crews to save it, and more roads to maintain to get to it.And then more disaster funds when it repeatedly gets burned up.
Government created this problem.
Smaller government would start by ripping out the paved road that gets there, closing the nearest fire stations, condemning the land, and turning it into permanent natural habitat. But that breaks five or ten government rice bowls, and gets entitled idiots all riled up.
I've only seen this about 5M times in my lifetime in this state.
If some idiot wants to build his own private road, or make do by getting supplies in and out by pack mule, and carries the liability for such an idiotic house out of his own pocket, that should be the only way that place gets built.
Dollars to donuts the owner also gets all bent up when coyotes eat his pets, and mountain lions start eyeing his kids, and screams to Uncle Government to "do something". Then pisses and moans when the local fire department tells him that with trees and brush 20' from the house, they've already written it off when a fire breaks out. And he's likely the first in line at the trough when they declare a "disaster" (as opposed to "natural causes x human stupidity", which is also the plot recipe for every episode of Rescue 9-1-1, USCG: Cape Disappointment, and 57 other reality-based shows) once his house is a charred chimney surrounded by ashes.
It was big government that started such nonsense, A to Z, in the first place. Like people along the Mississippi found out a few years back, some places shouldn't have houses on them, ever, unless there's an annual stupidity tax on the property equal to 100% of its assessed value.
If government withdraws all services to such parcels save tax assessments, and cancels utility easements, which currently start a goodly number of brushfires up there in competition with lightning (you could look it up) the problem self-corrects within years, if not months, with no further effort nor public expenditure.
That's minimal government.
Your ball.
For a vivid exemplar of this sort of stupidity right now, google "Rancho Palos Verdes landslide zone", and read up about the latest batch of entitled idiots with more money than common sense, currently pissing, moaning, and harrumphing that gravity has annoyingly reasserted itself in their multi-million-dollar cliffside neighborhood, and demanding that government somehow stop it, and/or recompense them from public funds for their idiotic residential choices.
Boo frickin' hoo."
QED, podex.
Doubtless we'll be seeing further examples from FL and the Gulf Coast in a day or three as well, crying about "How dare Nature impinge upon our desire to build substandard houses in stupid places! Government should pay us for being that dumb!" in 3, 2...
We apologize to CW for buggering up his site with the second entry, or having to. Should he choose to zap all of the above back and forth into oblivion, we wouldn't blame him. His house, his choices. Which is why we moved it here, in case he does exactly that.
The annoyance at idiots who build such houses where they don't belong, purely out of presumption on the public's funds and good wishes, deserves calling out, which is why we have done so.
Ditto the air-headed thoughtlessness of Anonymous Yahoo's asinine riposte. But the lack of critical thinking which underpins such opinions bespeaks that the left end of the IQ bell curve continues to be over-represented both in real life, and on the internet. As always.
As my father pointed out more than once, "You could get rid of all the horses in the world, but you'd still never run out of horses' asses."
UPDATE: And here's the latest edition of The Stupid People's Gravy Train
ass-dollar (n.) 1. Any piece of currency received in change so worn out and raggedy that the recipient rightfully concludes was almost certainly stored up some prior owner's tailpipe at some point in time. e.g. "I got two ass-dollars in change at the drive-thru."
Having received far too many exemplars of the type, we herewith officially coin the term. Use it widely with our sincerest benedictions. They have apparently overrun the circulating bills to the point that the Treasury Department no longer finds it convenient to remove them from circulation.
Just one more indicator of the true state of civilization, and its continued slippage towards mud-hut Turd World status.
Don't even bring up the actual value of same over time.
Softest ballad from a hard-rocking band, melancholy wrapped in beautiful simplicity, and as sweet as a drop of condensed honey, this one being Kansas' biggest hit ever (#6 in the U.S. on Billboard) from 1977. Also, truth be told, the entire Solomonic Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes condensed down to absolute truth in about 8 lines of lyrics.
Just one part of an enormous acting legacy of a once-poor, stuttering boy from Jim Crow Mississippi, later a Ranger-tabbed Army veteran, who became one of the most celebrated voices and actors of any generation. He never took himself too seriously, but always gave his best performance, on stage and screen for 65 years, from Broadway to Dr. Strangelove to Star Wars to The Lion King to The Big Bang Theory, and everything in between.
Aged 93 years, of natural causes, at his home in the Hudson Valley north of NYFC. A truly gentle and incomparable man.
h/t Irish
Feral Irishman, in the above link, posted a podcaster's commentary about the sartorial shortcomings of modern folk.
Au contraire, mes amis.
Have you noticed how no one's holding a gun to your head? That you are entirely free to be a beacon of sartorial splendor every day of your life, and provide a positive counter-example, instead of being Nagging Nelly and worrying about Other People?
There's a colloquial name for that nowadays. It rhymes with "Karen".
What's that, you say? This is all news to you? Color me shocked.
Wear a suit and tie, or a dress for the women, every day of your life, if that's what turns your crank. Show the poor, ignorant boobs what class looks like without opening your mouth or uttering a single word. [Hint: It's never behaving like a scold and a shrew. In fact, the definition of a gentleman is "someone who never discomforts others in any social setting." Here's a cluebat for you: find us the clip of Cary Grant berating anyone else, onscreen or off, for their appearance. We'll wait over here while you work on that.]
I get where you're coming from, and generally dress well as the mood strikes. Whether I do or not, that's my business. But expecting that from everyone else? As if. You're totally out of touch with the why behind that being such a delusionally unreasonable expectation.
People are showing up at the airport in crocs and pajamas, and it's a wonder. Because they know they're going to have to take off their shoes and belt, as if they were inmates, and one time in five be subjected to exactly an inmate's cavity search. (The way you could tell life had gone completely off the rails was when the response of so-called American "leadership" to 9/11 was to violate everyone's personal rights here, instead of blowing entire terrorist countries off the map by the megaton over there, both just because we could, and because it was the correct response to what they had coming. If we'd wiped Mecca and Medina off the map and turned them to smoldering glass monuments to 6th century stupidity on 9/12/01, we wouldn't have had another problem with an entire hemisphere of the world from that day to this.) More to the point here, we wouldn't be reduced to convicts waiting for the gracious permission of the boxcar guards at the TSA telling us when we could put our shoes on.
Frankly, those shiftless, worthless, brainless m*****f****rs are lucky I don't show up with my flying clothes in a paper sack, wearing naught but tear away diapers, and swilling a jug of Metamucil after downing three Ex-Lax bars, and begging for them to ask me to step into secondary screening. They'd never do that a second time, I assure you. And I'd get dressed right there in public, just to shame them even more afterwards. I'm past the point in life where I give a damn about the decorum they think they can enforce, after humiliating and embarrassing (literally) entire planeloads of innocent passengers by the hour, every day for 23 years. But if I gave a sh*t, they'd be the ones I'd give it to. Hopefully while they had their gloved hand checking my prostate, and missing the memo about the explosive I was about to issue from my nether regions.
So tell me, O Great Sartorial Overlord, what is the proper attire for anal rape under color of authority? Inquiring minds want to know.
And then when I get on the airplane, the attire should be either a flight suit, or sweats.
Anything that would permit comfort on cattlecar flights, where the airlines use everything but livestock chutes and cattle prods to load passengers.
If we're going to play "Remember when...?", let's start with calling a spade a spade: they're not "flight attendants", they're stewards and stewardesses. (Hot tip for the self-important flying cocktail waitresses: cruise lines still employ stewards, who don't feel demeaned by that title, but then they have to have learned customer service from someone other than retired Auschwitz camp guards, unlike the sweaty fat-assed water buffaloes hired to hand out tiny soda cans and handful-of-peanuts bags on modern flights.)
Remember when the men working on flights weren't one step from flaming RuPaul drag queens, and the women were hired for both their demeanor and their appearance, and they didn't look like thrice-divorced future box wine cat ladies working at the DMV or WalMart checkout line? And the seats actually were built for someone besides an anorexic emo teen, and didn't leave you feeling like you'd been folded into a torture device and unable to walk after enduring a single cross-country flight?
So maybe if they hadn't stupidly endowed snotty fat-asses with godlike powers and told them they were "flight crew", and instead reminded them they were there for customer service, not Flying Karen Law Enforcement, maybe they wouldn't find themselves facing down drunken slobs at 30,000 feet every day. When you treat people like inmates, they'll meet your expectations, every single time. Every flight longer than 30 minutes is a modern recreation of the Stanford Experiment. Every. Single. Time. (Word to your mother, Airlines: That experiment wasn't supposed to be a guidebook.) If you're not doing that, and they're still behaving like assholes, most passengers would not only be fine with you descending to 10,000 feet to throw them off the plane, they'd actually help. But more often than not, you had it coming, and they like seeing you f***ers get what you deserve.
But if you airborne SS troopers with delusions of grandeur are going to treat passengers like a load of Jews getting off at Treblinka, you're goddamned lucky we don't rise up and kill all of you, every time, on every flight, and leave your dead carcasses jamming up the toilets for the next flight. Don't think that happy accident is going to continue forever with 50:1 odds against you, every single day. You're lucky passengers don't get on in tyvek jumpsuits and fling their shit at you by the hour, just for the way both you and your airlines treat them.
And the DMV? Insolence at your own taxpayer expense, and a work ethic that makes lazy people look like efficiency examples fit to build the pyramids or the Transcontinental Railroad. Let's be fair, most of the midwit 80-IQ employees working at the DMV have already maxxed out in vivid real-life the Peter Principle, and administering eye tests and snapping bad photographs is what it looks like when the fetal alcohol syndrome children of life have finally been promoted beyond their level of competence.
Anyone who doesn't bring a machete and a gun to the DMV, and/or a pillow and sleeping bag, is the soul of compassion and foolish optimism in a real-life version of Dante's Inferno: "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here".
Just spit-balling, but I'm pretty sure the dress code for that experience should be that of Michael Myers in any edition of the Halloween film franchise. Ideally, with a similar bodycount of DMV employees. The rest of us would cheer. And if 200 people walked into any DMV dressed that way on a day other than Halloween, the increase in productivity would be palpable. Hear me, God.
And you're bitching about sunglasses at night? Srsly? I've got three things to answer that:
The Blues Brothers.
Joel in Risky Business.
The Secret Service. (Back before they were incompetent boobs.)
If you still can't figure it out, as Charlie Sheen told Jennifer Grey in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, your problem is you.
And you want me to dress for work??? It is to laugh.
Work stopped being serious business in all but a few professions when Shaneequa, who couldn't pass a basic typing exam because she couldn't find half the letters, let alone spell a word, got promoted two levels above everyone actually competent, and displays the managerial acumen of any member of a headhunter tribe from New Guinea.
When the corporate (or is it coprophiliac? I get the two so easily confused because of their similarity) overlords start treating work seriously, and hiring serious people, and paying serious salaries, that will be the time for getting dressed up for it.
When you hire DIE assclowns, put them in charge, and pay peanuts, expect your employees to act - and dress - like monkeys. Any day anyone in Cubicleville doesn't show up wearing just a shirt and no pants, like any chimpanzee in TV or film ever, it's a victory for holding the line.
Go price a suit, then look at what those employees are paid, and you're goddamned lucky they don't show up looking like The Beverly Hillbillies, nor start acting like the gorillas in Planet Of The Apes.
If you're going to have expectations about other people's kids, you'd better start treating them like human beings instead of circus acts.
Until then? Count your blessings they haven't reverted to throwing their feces instead of eating a daily shit sandwich at the unending indignities of modern life.
Don't even start with me about retail. A cast of millennial 20-nothings glued to their IdiotPhones like lab rats to the crack feeder, who know less about their shop's wares than retards, or the child labor in the Turd World who made them, whether it's fast food or high-end electronics. Stupid shiftless employees are the reason BezosMart has made Jeffie a billionaire, gobbling up retail market share like a wolf turned loose in a rabbit hutch. The correct attire for patronizing a retail establishment is as the Employee Motivation Supervisor on a slave galley. Including the cat o' nine tails, generously applied.
The proper attire for most businesses now should be clown outfits, with floppy shoes and greasepaint. Or a galley slave's loincloth. Both with behavior and body odor to match. People at both ends of the social transaction have simply reverted to the level of interaction provided. And where they haven't, yet, it's mostly a pity, upheld solely by social inertia, and the grace of a merciful deity.
You want to dress up anyways? Goodie for you. Go ahead on. No one's holding you back. I can even link for you half a dozen excellent YouTube channels and blogs to help you get it right.
You want everyone else to do that too? Well, fire the TSA, end body cavity searches as routine, put back normal-dimensioned human-sized seats on airlines, revoke flying Karen cocktail waitresses' godlilke vindictive powers and teach them to treat passengers like guests instead of livestock, and start treating businesses like business, instead of the clown show it is currently, and then you can issue dress codes again.
But frankly, most of the people nominally running things and splendidly turned out are damned lucky they aren't being turned over roasting spits by their so-called underlings.
Tell the class how that worked out for TPTB around 1789 in Paris.
Second single released from the Police's Synchronicity album, making a Top Ten hit (peaked at #8 in the US), helped by this video lip-synched and played at double speed, then slowed down to normal speed, making all the musicians appear to be moving in slow-mo.
Harry Chapin's Top 40 single from 1972, debuted on The Johnny Carson Show, which garnered such an overwhelming response Carson had Chapin back for an unprecedented second night.
I lost track of how many sick days from school his show was the only highlight of a day where the rest of daytime TV was filled with nothing on but horrendous soap opera melodramas or asinine "reality" freak shows, which meant turning the tube off, and actually doing my homework.
h/t WRSA
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| This country, and especially this government, are long overdue for a good housecleaning. Jump, you commie pigs, if you feel froggy. |
"Dear Gov. Tim Walz:
There's no way to dress this up prettier, nor any further need to embellish on it.
As Sen. Kneepads' choice for VP on the Democrat ticket, you, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are quite simply and fundamentally a coward. When it counted most. And an unceasing liar.
It is inarguable that you were a Master Sergeant in your unit of the Minnesota National Guard. Where you, by all accounts, served as a weekend warrior honorably, right up until it counted. But when, having been "frocked" (IOW selected for rank advancement, but not yet actually promoted) to Command Sergeant Major, the highest enlisted rank (other than the Command Sergeant Major of the Army, of which there is only one), you learned that your artillery unit was to be activated for duty and rotated into combat in Iraq in the immediate future.
At that point, not having attended the requisite training academy, and with two years' obligation remaining on your service enlistment commitment, you elected to turn tail, and leave the Notional Guard, rather than go with your artillery unit into a combat zone in Iraq, evading the responsibility of your office and job, abandoning your comrades in the profession of arms at the exact time they needed you the most, and breaking your solemn oath of obligation.
The word for that is cowardice. In this case, in the face of an armed enemy.
There is no greater or viler offense against good order and discipline in the military other than treason itself, and there is no lower form of manhood of any stripe than such naked and inexcusably pusillanimous gutlessness.
People don't hate you enough, and you should die in a fire, with dick cancer, after falling on a bed of spikes, while the fire department hoses you down with concentrated acid.
And then, already having demonstrated to all humanity exactly what sort of an arch-reptilian douchebag you are, you began lying about your exploits in running for political office.
You did not "retire". You were never a Command Sergeant Major. You did not fulfill your oath of office. And there is nothing honorable or circumspect in knowingly and deliberately lying about what you did, and what you failed to do, or the circumstances of it.
It's as if being naked in the town square was not enough proof of your total lack of character or leadership, and you decided thereupon to go a step further, and smear yourself in feces from head to toe. And then resolved to walk around like that for twenty more years.
There is no lower form of life on this planet than what you showed yourself to be, down to your rotted putrescent marrow.
And the people of Minnesota elected you to be their governor, despite there being, per current census data, only about 1,400,000 better-qualified men aged between 21 and 65 years of age in that state with demonstrably fewer defects as both men, and human beings.
You shouldn't simply drop out of the presidential race. You should resign as governor on the grounds of open, naked cowardice, dishonesty, and unabashed and continued fraud, and should seriously consider whether your shortcomings as a man and human being oughtn't recommend to you the necessity of retiring to a quiet room, alone, putting a loaded pistol in your mouth, and opting out of the human race, if there was any shred of human worth possessed in your morally bankrupt meatsuit.
That you won't do even that little to redeem yourself with the least little shred of human dignity left to you should tell anyone in creation exactly what sort of an absolute waste of skin and oxygen you are.
And you should have your nose rubbed in that fundamental character deficit until the last moment of your execrable existence on this planet, and the scorn and derision of the entire nation should be the last sound you hear on earth before you die, and then go straight to Hell.
At your service, pond scum. RSVP: Regrets only, please.
Worst wishes,
-Aesop"
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| If a 250# bag of excrement had legs and a face, it would look exactly like Gov. Tim Walz. |
First track on Bowie's "Let's Dance" album in 1983, released as a single in early fall, and peaking at #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year.
Just a song from a 1981 Psychedelic Furs album which didn't even chart in the States, but somehow spawned the title (and became the title track) of a 1986 John Hughes '80s cult classic, and suddenly it became an Almost Top 40 hit, and gave the band a career-boosting second wind.
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| You are a NO GO at the Tall Enough For The Internet station, bumpkin. |
If you're going to take a whack at derpsplaining things on the Internet that are clearly beyond your basic grasp, maybe - just spitballing, mind you - some folks should pull back on their heads first until they hear a loud popping noise, and it suddenly gets brighter and easier to breathe.
Case in point:
This soopergenius codswallop from some halfwit who knows Jack and Shit about what he opines upon.
"Crooks’ canted his rifle to the left — which means the ejection port was facing to the left at about an 11 o’clock position — for the first three shots."
For the three non-gun-inclined folks reading that, and thus not falling about themselves on the ground in paroxysms of laughter, we post a reminder pic of a typical AR-15-style weapon:
From this one pic, we can state authoritatively that this Internet Soopergenius has clearly cracked the case on how Rooftop Retard could miss anything as large as Trump from within Wrist-Rocket range:
That's because to "cant the rifle to the left" and get the ejection port to face 11 o'clock, Crooks would have to hold the rifle almost upside down.
Nice analysis, Dipshit.
(Unless he was holding the rifle assbackwards, and pointing it at himself. But were that the case, we don't think he'd have managed to fire 8 shots into himself, as the first one would have done the job it took the authorities several seconds to accomplish. So yeah, no, you're still an ignorant idiot for making this entire suggestion.)
Let's help Dr. Derpalot out, since he's obviously never fired anything resembling an AR-15/M-16 rifle in his life, and we'll use bright colors to point out reality:
So to eject cases to the left, by canting the rifle, Crooks would be holding that pistol grip at or beyond the 2 o'clock position, 2/3rds of the way (120° out of 180°) to completely inverted.
Odds that's what really happened: a gajillion to one, against. Duh. As GED dropouts in any ten basic training platoons could have told you in 0.2 seconds, going back only 50+ years to about 1966.
Maybe Dr. Derpalot should bone up on physics and common effing sense, not to mention basic riflery. Just a thought. In his dictionary, the word "beclowned" just has a mirror mounted in the column.
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| Just saying... |
Don't quit your day job, Homer.
And maybe don't talk about things you're totally unfamiliar with, because then you won't be putting an ice pack on your wedding tackle every day, after you trample it with cleats on.
And if you're linking or excerpting this kind of ass-tastic analysis on your blog for anything but comedy relief, you probably need an ice pack for your own junk too, on a regular basis.
But thanks for a lay-up post for today. Those fish in the barrel weren't going to shoot themselves.
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| Blogging: Much easier if these are not your default footwear. |
h/t WRSA
In the linked post, CA takes note of a Substack blogpost discussing the book in the header.
We read that very book a couple of months ago, and reached entirely different conclusions.
First, Jacobsen can write at grade level.
That's the good part of the book.
Now, the bad, and then the ugly.
Most of the people she's talking to about nuclear scenarios haven't been within a country mile of the operating parts of strategic response for anywhere from 20-40 years.
Pardon me all to hell for noting that in strategic planning, that's about three entire lifetimes. If Jacobsen had set out to write a book about the topic in, say, 1985, this book would have been brilliant. It also would have broken about 50 NDAs, and at least three national security felonies. Which would have put most of her confidantes, and herself, in Supermax to this day.
That's the bad.
The ugly?
She concocts her entire "This is plausible, I swear!" scenario around one very specific set of circumstances. One, out of a universe of 10,000 such scenarios.
This is like looking at one of Edison's thousand failures at inventing a working incandescent light bulb, and then focusing all your effort at straw-manning just that one, then damning electric light on that sole basis.
In the book, for GAK (God Alone Knows) Reasons, the Norks pop off a nuke at the U.S., then follow it up with more canned sunshine.
Then, she, from her decades of no experience in nuclear warfighting and planning, decides that the U.S. response would necessarily be to launch nukes over the North Pole, necessitating overflying Russia and China, yet cleverly without informing either of them of this idiot savant strategy.
Leaving those poor boobs in both countries, with inferior predictive abilities, to conclude that the US was attacking them, instead of the Norks.
Leading directly and happily to Jacobsen's nightmare 'Use them or lose them" orgy of everyone launching everything at everyone else. All life in the Northern Hemisphere ends.
QED.
Point Of Order, Shit-For-Brains: Maybe nuclear war planners at the Pentagon, having wargamed that scenario out, from both sides of the chess board, about 10,000 times before it occurred to you, might have, y'know, figured out for their own goddamned selves, a reason or ten why obliterating Norkistan by launching missiles on a polar route over Russian and Chinese territory might be a bad idea, for a few hundred thousand megatons of reasons, and so they wouldn't do that, even without the ankle-biting genius of some half-bright writer coming up with a flaw in that plan all by her lonesome.
Maybe they'd elect to respond with missile subs closer to Norkistan, and leave the Minutemen in their silos.
Or just conventionally bomb the shit out of Norkistan, all the way to the Yalu River. We've seen us do that before.
We're just spitballing here. Meaning it's theoretically possible that someone whose sole military experience is watching movies and talking to people who retired from the military when Daddy Bush was president, might not be privy to the highest levels of military thinking 10, 20, 30 or more years later, and may be talking out her other end about all the things she doesn't know she doesn't know.
SecDef Rummy called those unknown unknowns. Jacobsen's not even familiar with the concept.
Granted, the recent leadership at the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace leaves a lot to be desired, and the lack of military intelligence is a chasm with no discernible bottom, but the steely-eyed missile men who planned and ran SAC when we had such a thing seemed to have a pretty good handle on the whole smart vs. galactically stupid thingie. And they didn't throw out all common sense in the SIOP just because the Soviet Union folded.
In others words, Jacobsen is no Tom Clancy. She's not even a Fred Clancy. Clancy The Clown, maybe.
In fact, most of her nightmares were better covered, and more succinctly, with none of Jacobsen's lurid verbosity, way back in 1972, (fifty years before this topic even occurred to Jacobsen, if you're keeping score) in a spiffy little tome called When War Comes, by Martin Caidin, whose sci-fi book Cyborg was the basis for the whole Six Million Dollar Man television programs, along with books-turned-into-films like Marooned and The Final Countdown.
If you want the actual nuclear, chemical, and biological nightmare list, and just the facts, without any gratuitous advocacy, you should get a copy (nearly free for the asking from the Internet Archive link above), or hunt down a dead tree edition (you can't have our copy, well-thumbed since the 1970s), and bone up on the topic. Little of it is any less applicable as far as it goes than it was the day it went to print.
But that's because Caidin was a stickler, in his fiction and non-fiction, for actual facts.
Jacobsen starts by describing the indescribable horror of a nuclear holocaust, and then works backwards to make one inevitable, simply by assuming she's the smartest person in the room, having the entire US Strategic Command fight this imaginary scenario in the most asinine way she can concoct, and finding the one way such a thing could be stupidly inflicted on humanity, then riding that pale horse to death, whipping it there with unmatched frenzy, and bankrupting a couple of ink companies in the telling.
Which is why, after reading it, we didn't review it or recommend it to anyone. We're simply not cruel enough to do that.
It doesn't age well (as in, by the time you get to the end of the book, you're wishing you'd spent your time on something profitable).
It is, in point of fact, nothing but someone trying to flog the whole premise behind the excremental TV melodrama The Day After, which focused solely on the horrible effects of a nuclear war, and sought to put wind in the sails of the whole Soviet-sponsored nuclear disarmament movement during Reagan's presidency, but which all looked jackassically stupid and short-sighted by 1990, after the Soviet Union imploded, taking the entire premise with it, not least of which all those Soviet rubles for Useful Idiots' astroturfed peace movements.
If Jacobsen had wanted to do society a service, she could have documented that the major reason nuclear war is even being discussed recently is to only an infinitesimal degree the proliferation of nukes to morons like the Kim Family Crime Syndicate in Norkistan, and overwhelmingly a thing again mainly because the darling superhero despot of the half-bright, Vladimir Putin, has rattled Russia's moldering and rusty nuclear saber about 40 times since his disastrous invasion of Ukraine, to try and bluff and bluster his way to a military conquest he cannot win on the ground.
Write a book on the megalomania it takes to think threatening the release of canned sunshine is a reasonable and rational way to achieve ground conquest, and talk about the threat to world peace that is (recognized as such by such shrieking warmongering political partisans as 250-years-neutral-until-Putin Sweden, and every single country that was under Soviet Russia's thumb from 1945-1991). FFS, not even Stalin nor even actual Hitler got Sweden to abandon its centuries-old neutrality, but Putin accomplished that in less than a year of trying.
Print it in Russian, and send copies to Moscow. What the hell, what's 50 years in a Siberian gulag between friends, right Ms. Jacobsen?
Maybe try the same thing for the lunatics in Pakistan and Iran. If you can find anyone there who can read.
Otherwise, absent that effort, Jacobsen is just beating the nuclear disarmament drum again, 50 years after it failed in America and Europe the first time, and beloved mainly of the continued Useful Idiots of the Stalinism that died in Moscow circa Yeltsin, but thrives in American academia and media among the halfwit class.
Save yourself the twenty bucks and multiple hours it would take you to read Jacobsen's drivel. Get a copy of When War Comes, and John Hersey's Hiroshima, and watch some historical newsreels on YouTube instead, and you'll be $20 richer and forty IQ points smarter than you'd get by wasting the time or money on Nuclear War.
If you own a goat, wait for the book to show up in the $2 rack at a bargain bookstore. Then get it, and feed it to the goat. It's cheaper than goat chow at that point, and whatever Billy or Nanny shits out afterwards will be much smarter than what Jacobsen did.
We can't stop you from wasting your time and money, but afterwards, kindly remember that we tried.
TL;DR: When a half-bright second lieutenant, or even a midwit cadet at Colorado Springs could come up with a decent "Why this scenario would be galactically stupid" position paper on their lunch hour recess, you have not found wisdom, nor anything close to it.
Our rating: Were still trying to figure out how to give this sort of codswallop negative stars. We kind of like the idea of giving it five Black Holes:
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ .
Stupidity so concentrated no illumination or information escapes.
Or maybe just Five Piles:
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| That's true; she also has more California swallows than the Mission San Juan Capistrano. |
