Journal of No. 118

Dream relocation or Lovecraftian descent into madness?


 At 5 years old, [Sara O'Neil] told her mom [in Iowa] that she’d live by the ocean someday.

As an adult, she made her dream a reality. Sara joined the Navy, married, had four kids and, for more than two decades, built a life in Southern California.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with it the realization that the Golden State’s liberal politics didn’t align with hers.

Wanting to feel grounded during a tumultuous time, Sara and Johnny started going back to church. They picked Calvary Imperial Beach chapel, part of the sprawling Costa Mesa megachurch that was meeting in person — in defiance of state restrictions on large gatherings.

Sara, then a nurse at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women & Newborns, managed to get a medical exemption [for the COVID vaccination] because she said she’d experienced an anaphylactic shock with a previous vaccine. After three interviews, Johnny, a Navy vet turned firefighter, won a religious exemption.

Still, COVID-era California weighed on them. Sara worried that she might be living in the end times the Bible prophesied.

And as Sara and Johnny soon learned, their new church had an outpost in Iowa, stocked with people like them.

So Sara and her husband, Johnny, a Southland native with a sunny disposition to match, packed up and joined the droves of Californians leaving the state, some for political reasons.

The church attracts 30 to 40 attendees on any given Sunday, and members say about half are from the Golden State. In the Ames church, the newcomers found a community of like-minded folks. Together they worried about vaccines, prayed outside Planned Parenthood offices and said blessings at antiabortion clinics.

Johnny, she said, will more than likely vote for Trump, whose track record he trusts. Sara’s views are complicated. She blames Trump for the first pandemic lockdowns, and for funding vaccine research. Although Trump “was obnoxious to listen to,” Sara excuses his racist comments, such as characterizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” 

The couple, who both served in the military after Sept. 11, 2001 — Sara in the Persian Gulf — now doubt that Al Qaeda carried out the attacks, a view that is unsupported by evidence.

“I think 9/11 was a CIA mission, and I think they blew up that building,” Johnny said. “There’s too much evidence. I’ve seen too many videos.”

the oldest two kids reminisced with their parents about one of the things they miss most about California: the state’s diversity.

At his Iowa high school, Johnathan still can’t believe how his friends at school casually use a derogatory slur as a nickname for the one Black student on the football team.

“Casual racism, I will say, that’s a real thing,” he said. “I didn’t think it was a real thing until I moved out here.”

[The Family] insisted that they’re still all in, despite their gripes about Iowa’s lack of diversity and limited understanding of Mexican food.

Jonathan Lethem started his career with a kangaroo detective, and I was on board. But after he moved back to New York, he has become a lot more New York, so Chronic City was a bit of a tough go for me, even if it's sort of a shadow Manhattan with hypnotic Macguffins and an escaped tiger (or is it?). It was also strange to read this at the same time as rereading Blaylock's The Last Coin. Both Blaylock and Lethem have some Phil Dickian influences, but I'm much more in tune with the wild parrots of Seal Beach than the Black Mirror version of Seinfeld. But as always, flashes of genius in the writing.

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White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, by Anthea D. Butler

Occasionally unfair and overly polemic, this still provides some great historical information on American evangelicalism, providing some great 'receipts' in the form of quotes from the mouths of prominent evangelicals. A real eye opener is a speech given by black evangelist Tom Skinner in 1970 at the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s conference. “To a great extent, the evangelical church in America supported the status quo. It supported slavery; it supported segregation; it preached against any attempt of the black man to stand on his own two feet.” This was around the time that Falwell and Bob Jones ran segregated schools. Butler would have us believe evangelicalism ignored Skinner's call and hasn't changed one iota since then, and she disregards as tokenism the few nods and appearances of blacks at more recent events. While I agree what a lot of what I've seen of modern evangelicalism from Obama to today has been really ugly, I think there has been at least three iotas of positive change in the past 50 years. Far too little and far too slow, obviously. Some notes I took through the book:

Here are Skinner’s words: Understand that for those of us in the Black community, it was not the evangelical who came and taught us our worth and dignity as Black men. It was not the Bible-believing fundamentalist who stood up and told us that Black was beautiful. It was not the evangelical who preached to us that we should stand on our own two feet and be men, be proud that Black was beautiful, and that God could work his life out through our redeemed Blackness. Rather, it took Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and the Brothers to declare to us our dignity.

An interesting survey of Greek thought through the lens of 'atheism' from the earliest Greeks to the advent of Christian Rome.

The religion of the Greeks was a very different kind of thing than Christianity, so 'atheism' or 'impiety' meant something very different as well. For the Greeks religion was more practice and performance, rather than theological litmus tests.

Atheism was not really a word that people self-applied, but it (like now) was used more to denigrate your political or philosophical enemies. For that reason, and the lack of complete sources, Whitmarsh has to pick his way through the surviving bits and epitomes and satires to try to draw a picture of ancient Greek philosophical atheism. There's not much there there, but he does a good job showing the threads that remain.

Anyway, some of my random notes:


Atheists: snarky jerks for 2500 years.

 Educated , by Tara Westover, is another book pick of the NYT/PBS Now Read This book club.

Westover grew up in Idaho in a strict Mormon family that stands out even among Mormon families in Idaho. Her father was not merely religious, but mistrustful of the government, doctors, vaccinations, medicine, education. Tara (after the fact) diagnoses him with bipolar disorder, but it's hard to separate mental illness from the extremes of conspiratorial antigovernment survivalist thinking. At any rate, while some of her older siblings had some schooling, Tara as the youngest grew up during the most extreme era of dad's thinking. She didn't go to school at all, and it would be charitable to call her home life 'unschooling'.  Not only that, but she didn't have a birth certificate until she was 9.

Mom makes herbal remedies and gets training as a midwife. Dad makes a living at scrap dealing. Much of her childhood reminiscences are of horrible industrial accidents caused by willful negligence on her father's part, usually with her or her siblings as the victims. One brother somehow studies enough to go to college, and form a role model for her. She studies enough to get a decent ACT score and get admitted to BYU, where she is soon a fish out of water, even moreso than you or I would be at BYU, but for different reasons.

One significant event is a lecture class where she has to ask what the word "Holocaust" means. That's how profound her ignorance was. And although her ignorance was 'honest', being ignorant of the Holocaust was probably too close to Holocaust-denial, so she faced a certain amount of moral censure from the class.

I wish there were more details like this included, that track the change from ignorance to knowledge, or from false knowledge to true knowledge (as when she slowly comes to understand that aspirin and antibiotics are not, in fact, poisons.)

But while her life story is certainly one of gaining degrees at BYU and Cambridge and Harvard, there is not enough insight (to satisfy me) about how her worldview changes. The actual story she's telling is more about the increasing distance between her and her parents (and the shifting alliances among siblings and other relations). 

Perfect segue into Far Cry 5, set in the Mountain West, where a religious cult with doomsday prepper attitudes takes over a county. It's not much of a stretch to cast Tara's family as the bad guys. As a rookie law enforcement agent, you get sent in to arrest the head of the cult. Let's just say it doesn't go well, and pretty soon, you're in Far Cry mode. Hiding in the bushes with a bow and arrow, slowly taking out the bad guys and liberating territory for decent folk.

Now coming from a series which has been justly criticized for regressive attitudes, this entry sends some subliminal prosocial attitudes. Sure, it's violent as fuck as you kill bad guys with bigger and larger explody things (although the bow and arrow combat system is still extremely satisfying). But the bad guys are anti-government forces. And you slowly gather allies among the good honest folk. When you take over an outpost, you literally put up an American flag. Now, if this were set in the Middle East or Africa, it would be jingoistic colonialism (and most of the rest of the Far Cry series has been set in remote parts of the world where it's been easy to see it as white dude versus nonwhite dudes.) But here they've twisted it around, and made the treasonous rebel scum the enemy. America, Fuck Yeah!

Lots of good stuff to flesh out the game. Some good creepy music from the cult. A few hilarious characters ("I've been shot!... In the wiener!"). Recreating the stunts of daredevil Clutch Nixon. And the simple joy of slinking around a compound with Peaches the mountain lion, slaughtering cultists.

Tuesday

OldWiseGuy's link: whites are almost TWICE as likely to be killed by police officers.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, between 1999 and 2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks.

essentialsaltes: The bolded text is a lie. An obvious lie. A childish lie. Only the innumerate would fall for such a transparent lie.

OldWiseGuy: 1.9 times is "almost twice" (unless my math is off).

Iluvatar: Do you know what percentage of the population is made up by blacks? Do you know why that's important to your argument?

OldWiseGuy: So what is the "truth of the matter"?

essentialsaltes: Iluvatar ... and I have been trying to help you find the truth for yourself. Start with iluvatar's questions

Wednesday

OldWiseGuy: I asked for your opinion, not help with mine.

essentialsaltes: Sorry, no. You asked for the truth. The truth is independent of opinion.

You can find it if you go about the process with an honest and unbiased mind. If I just give it to you, you'll just reject it. Go back and answer Iluvatar's questions. You'll find it for yourself.

[TL;DR]

essentialsaltes: Excellent. Do you agree then, that it is not a fact (or a statistic) that "whites are almost TWICE as likely to be killed by police officers."

Thursday

OldWiseGuy: I already conceded that point, in post 29. You're beating a dead horse here.

Saturday

2Timothy2:15: Here are some more stats. Stats clearly show that more white people are killed by police year over year than any other race. 

essentialsaltes: Yes, and more right handed people are on death row than left handers. That's not the relevant statistic.

Even our local curmudgeon OldWiseGuy conceded this point. Black people are more likely to be killed by police, year after year. That is the relevant statistic.

2Timothy2:15: If black people are more likely to be killed the numbers would match, which they don't.

Why Violence Has Declined takes a long, long, too-long look at rates of violence over the past umpty-thousand years from our hunter-gatherer forebears to today. Pinker has marshalled a shitload of facts and statistics, and though there may be some niggling details here and there, on the whole, he's pretty convincing that rates of murder, war, and violence have declined per capita. This does require an explanation, and I think Pinker certainly outlines many ideas that contribute, but he doesn't seem to present a very strong thesis for an explanation. Rather he takes us on a plodding journey through the museum of ideas that every political philosopher has considered. The book plods so much that I found much of it a chore to get through. Reading through the outline in Wikipedia is good enough -- just feel certain that each point is held up by a few hundred footnotes each.

One of the ideas that did stick with me was that many violent acts are considered acts of justice by their perpetrators. They are not doing wrong, they are taking justice into their own hands. That bitch stole my man -- smack. That driver cut me off -- blam. Obviously, these solutions are not terribly rational, and generally frowned upon by Leviathan. I think it could extend to larger actions -- riots in Watts and LA. It doesn't make any fucking sense, but there was some ache for a justice that was not going to come from traditional channels.

Now, I have plodded so slowly through the book that that idea lodged some time ago. And then as I mulled it over in my mind, I considered the Trump voters in the lead-up to the election. Can a vote be an act of violence? A stupid plea for justice when you're aching for a justice that was not going to come from traditional channels? Mmmmm... no, I can't quite bring myself to consider a vote for Trump to be an act of violence. And then the vote actually happened, and Trump won. I still can't quite elevate it to an act of violence. But I think a lot of my friends may consider it to have been an act of violence. And certainly we have seen (even given some level of pernicious fakes) that some Trump supporters have been emboldened to enact actual violence. And we've also seen protests of Trump that have also risen to the level of violence.

Now I have to tread carefully here, because I think there are significant differences between the two sides. It is not just that I am trapped in my bubble and not their bubble (and I'll get to the bubble later, especially since almost everyone who will read this is in my liberal bubble). At the same time, the people (considered as people) in the two camps. Are not all that different.

Now apparently the worst thing I could possibly do is to suggest that we should reach out and hug the other side and unite. Which is fine, because I'm not suggesting that. When Trump has rotten plans, they should be fought. And many of his plans are rotten.

But possibly I'm saying something even worse. That people are people. And people on both sides are not all that different. And to realize that, it definitely helps to spend time outside your bubble.

Many of you know of the long years I've spent in the mission fields of Christian websites, spreading the good news of rationality and fact-based argument. It is not easy work, because they are beset by demons that deceive them. And again, it's not about compromise -- I think the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and they think it's 6,000 years old. I'm not looking to compromise at 2,250,003,000 years old. Wait, I'm rambling a little too much, but maybe we'll come back to this.

Another bit of bubble escape was listening to the infuriating drive-time talk show on a Christian radio station, though I haven't in many years. Until election night. As I drove home, feeling pretty confident that it was going to be close (my prediction: Hillary 278 EV) but would go blue, I turned that station on hoping for election news and... delicious Christian tears. Because that's a thing now. Enjoying people's tears. And because I'm a bad person.



And I got those tears. But I did not find them enjoyable. pout

A young Latina called in to the show. Her voice shook with raw emotion, clearly crying. Hillary was going to win, and as everyone in the conservative Christian bubble knew (as did I since I'd been visiting), Hillary believed that "deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs have to be changed". And as it was being spun in the bubble, this young woman knew that President Hillary was going to forcibly change religious beliefs in America. She was genuinely, fearfully afraid that hers was the last generation that was going to hear the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.

All bullshit, of course. But the tears and pain in that bubble were real. Just like they were real when Obama was elected in 2008 and was going to take everyone's guns.

Anyway, fast-forward a few hours, and suddenly the tears were on the other foot. (Shut up.) There were organized cry-ins. And, and... the other side mocked it. They were enjoying those tears! How could they be so cruel?



Not all that different.

But they're all racists!

Yes, half of Trump voters hold implicit bias against POC. And only a third of Hillary voters do.

Not all that different.

But Trump's spouting ugly racism!

Well, yeah. Again, I don't want to rest on any false equivalencies. But if you want to characterize the GOP as full of racists, then you should step inside the other bubble and look at yourself.

You support murdering babies. You literally want doctors to crush the skulls of infants with forceps.
You want perverts to molest our delicate American girlhood in the bathroom at Target.
You want religious expression to be locked inside the walls of churches.
You let the biased(*) lame-stream media do your thinking for you.

[* I'm too tired, but to its credit, the media finally decided that he said/she said journalistic equivalency was no longer valid. Trump was lying. They called him on it. They endorsed Hillary. But... it does feed the narrative that the media is biased against Trump.]

You want them to stop being racist and join the correct party? Well, maybe you should stop killing babies, and join the correct party.

You scoff when people say they aren't racist, but voted for Trump? Well, what do you think of Tim Kaine, who personally opposes abortion, but stood for VP of the Democrat Party? And he's by no means alone. There are Democrats who think abortion is murder. If you can be against baby-murdering, and vote for a baby-murdering candidate, then surely you can be a non-racist and vote for a racist candidate. Sure, it must be a terrible internal conflict. Sucks to be them. But they got their racism/baby-killing just like the people-of-yesteryear got Skinemax with the package.

Not all that different.

But they are so very fact-challenged!

Well yes. That's what I combat the most. You give them a snopes link, and they don't believe snopes. You provide the links on the snopes page to the NYT, and they don't believe the NYT. There are some people there whose solitary (it appears) information source is infowars(*). They were primed and ready to believe crap like a Kenyan born Obama, or a Jade Helm takeover of Texas. Because it fits their narrative.

(* I'm too tired, but if you're getting info from occupydemocrats or Huffpo... Not all that different.)

In our bubble, the narrative is that Trump is a sexual predator. And I'm morally certain that Trump has grabbed more unwilling pussies than trans people have assaulted anybody in a bathroom. So the woman who accused Trump of raping her when she was a teenager fits the narrative. But when the press conference was announced, my baloney detector started beeping. Because (for better or worse) before I am a Democrat or a liberal, I am a skeptic. A court of law is where these things are decided, not at press conferences or FBI memos. And when the press conference was cancelled due to 'threats', my suspicion grew. It was not impossible that threats had deterred some poor woman, but I was not buying it at this point. But a lot of other people were. They railed against the Trumpeters who had cowed this woman. Maybe Trump had bought her off. How many millions did it take him? And then two days later, she dropped the suit. No cause given. Bought off? Full of shit? We may never know. But a retracted anonymous accusation is not much to hang something on, unless the narrative is more important than evidence.

And if you point to snopes articles showing that some cases of 'postelection Trump supporter racism' are imaginary... some people don't want to hear that shit. It doesn't fit the narrative.

I've showed dozens of snopes articles to conservatives, and know what it feels like to be ignored. So when it comes from the other side, it just shows that...

Not all that different.

We all laughed (I did, I'm a bad person) at that stupid bint who cut a backwards B on her face.



But we were also mad. She perpetrated a pernicious lie to denigrate a particular political candidate.

We were furious. She lied to say a black man did this. I hate her.

And now Trump supporters tore the hijab off a woman. Stole her wallet. That feeds the narrative.
But it's bullshit. All a lie.

C'mon now, everyone. Let's laugh at her. And hate her. C'mon. She made a pernicious lie to denigrate a particular political candidate. She lied to say white men did this to her. I hate her. I really do. But more importantly...

Not all that different.

As promised, this book review has devolved. Let me pull it back, at least briefly.

"According to Hofstede's data, countries differ along six dimensions. One of them is Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation: 'Long-term oriented societies foster pragmatic virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular saving, persistence, and adapting to changing circumstances. Short-term oriented societies foster virtues related to the past and present such as national pride, respect for tradition, preservation of 'face' and fulfilling social obligations.'"

Those are not bad descriptors of the two societies living in their bubbles that exist within America. The liberal and the conservative.

One of my regrets about the election is that so much was about the personalities and less about the issues. I have read that the Clinton campaign gamely released insightful policy statements to the media, but they never reached me. Since the Donald sucked all the oxygen in the primary fight, one would have thought that the Clinton team would strive harder in the general to make sure its message got out, but it didn't. Honestly, perhaps I'm giving them credit for having a message, because from my standpoint, most of what I heard from the Hillary campaign was...

It's her fucking turn. She cashed in her chips to keep the competition away. Only that asshole Sanders and McWhatever didn't get the memo. "Trump is awful. I'm not Trump."

Though true, this is not compelling. She could've done better with "I will be the third Obama term."

Anyway, one of the few policy things that did come out (because I watch closely) is for the coal miners of America.

HuffPo:

"Hillary Clinton has a $30 billion, 4,300-word plan to retrain coal workers that covers everything from education and infrastructure to tax credits and school funding.

Donald Trump’s coal plan is a duckface thumbs-up in a miner’s hard hat and a rant about hair spray, President Barack Obama and China."

Retrain coal workers? That's "adapting to changing circumstances". That's a Long-Term society strategy. And it's right.

A duckface thumbs-up? Well, if you can see through the HuffPo bias, that's a strategy oriented on today. Short-term. For the white working class families that are struggling.

And now, for you in my liberal well-informed bubble. Surely you are cognizant of the current spot price for coal.

No? Well, there are lots of reasons for it, but coal prices have tripled recently. And although US miners have not (yet) seen much of a boon, due to the horrible EPA, and Obama rules about coal-fueled power plants, a Trump presidency is clearly going to change that. Yes, there are certainly problems with burning coal like there is no tomorrow, but... if you are a part of an unemployed coal-mining family in Pennsylvania or Ohio focused on today... then you are part of the Short-Term Society, and I can see reasons other than racism to vote for Trump. And they did. And they are legitimately mad when we say their votes were racist.

In conclusion:

WE'RE ALL A BUNCH OF APES WHO ONLY RELATIVELY RECENTLY LEARNED TO WEAR CLOTHES AND NOT KILL EACH OTHER SO MUCH.

"Club Monarch, an afterschool bible club, was run in part by teachers and routinely given preferential treatment at Mariposa Elementary School in Brea, Calif. The club was mentioned in the weekly newsletter and listed in the school calendar. The newsletter announcements asked students to "Stop by the office to sign up." There were posters around the school exclusively advertising the club. At a back-to-school night, the principal effusively praised and recommended the club. And the club was allowed to begin its meetings a mere five minutes after the school day ended.
...
The school was distributing Club Monarch registration forms to its students and coordinating registration, instructing parents to return the forms to the school office or to their child's teacher. Records showed that school staff members were routinely planning and coordinating Club Monarch meetings via their school email accounts, often during the school day. Superintendent Mason actually spoke at a Club Monarch meeting in February, "sharing ... the heart of Jesus with the children," according to the club's Facebook page."

Now, after school religious clubs (indeed 'worship clubs') are allowed (so sayeth the Supreme Court) if schools open their doors to any and all comers, but the context has been for outside groups coming in, and without any support from the school: "the children required their parents' permission to attend the Club's activities; they were not permitted to "loiter outside classrooms after the schoolday has ended". The Club was using space on the school grounds into which elementary school children did not typically venture during school hours, and ... The instructors are not schoolteachers."

In this case, it was very much an inside job, and with plenty of support from the school and its employees. I bet the meeting between the district lawyers and the super was interesting. Perhaps in an overdose of CYA -- though indeed this is what the FFRF called for -- the final decision was to disband the club entirely.

(* I went to high school in Brea)

Islands of Space by John W. Campbell is the kind of gee-whiz space opera that makes Buck Rogers look nuanced. A passel of superscientist men effortlessly invent multiple impossible inventions and generally behave like 12-year-old boys with their new godlike powers.

"The Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women..." FAIL

"Islands of Space is generally credited with introducing the concepts of hyperspace and the warp drive to science fiction." So that's something, anyway.

It's also interesting that the book interpolates the plot from his story "Dead Knowledge," which I liked quite a bit. Here, apart from the bare bones of the plot, all of the atmosphere and emotion has been drained away, probably because it would not have meshed with the whizbang mood of the novel.

I'm glad even the people of long ago smelled this one as a stinker. Ted Sturgeon thought it was crap (and he, of all people, would know). "This is a real lousy book."

---

Rachel Held Evans is probably best known for A Year Of Biblical Womanhood, chronicling her attempt to live according to the Bible's rules for women. But recently she was quoted in an article in (I think) Smithsonian about her hometown of Dayton, famous as the site of the Scopes Trial in 1925. She intimated that the attitudes in Dayton haven't changed much, and her story of asking too many questions in a community that has all the answers (and doesn't like pesky questions) was published as Evolving in Monkey Town. I couldn't pass up a title like that.

Sadly(?), the creationism/evolutionism angle is not really a major part of the story, just useful as a title that would get me to buy it (it worked!) [I gather that the title was originally the title of her blog]. It's actually a little maddening that what little she says about it seems to indicate that the question is still an open one in her mind. The book has since been retitled "Faith Unravelled", though that's a bit of a misnomer as well. It's more a story of her journey of faith. She starts as a model member of the local community, multiple winner of her school's Best Christian Attitude award, and a graduate of [William Jennings] Bryan College, a place literally founded in the wake of the Monkey Trial to defend a Biblical worldview. More recently than the book, Bryan College changed its statement of faith to include the belief in a literal, specially created, Adam and Eve, resulting in the departure of some faculty members.

As a thoughtful, reflective, skeptical, millennial, she navigates her theology to come to a place where she can recognize that (although no one wants to admit it, and some may be too unreflective to even be aware of it) every Christian 'picks and chooses' verses and interpretations of the bible based on their own particular biases and experience. I generally like her picks and choices, and it must be tough to swim against the stream. Asking questions no one wants to hear, and then coming up with unpopular answers. "I was called a socialist and a baby killer. People questioned my commitment to my faith, and my country, some suggesting that I may face eternal consequences for my decision [to vote for Barack Obama]."

At the same time, it's clear that her questioning has its limits. "Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue."

My answer to that is a quote from the Great Beast. Crowley may have been an extravagant old fraud, but he sometimes had a piquant way with words:

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening;
I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."

The Discovery Institute "is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of the pseudoscience intelligent design."

Although the DI has tried to hold the party line that Intelligent Design (ID) is just about the science (although it may have 'philosophical implications'), it is a poorly kept secret that the goals of the organization (as outlined in the Wedge Document, for instance) show it to be a religious organization devoted to affirm "God's reality".

This is all prelude to say that the NCSE now reports that the the DI is merging with the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, which was founded for the purpose of "proclaiming, publishing, preaching, teaching, promoting, broadcasting, disseminating, and otherwise making known the Christian gospel and understanding of the Bible and the light it sheds on the academic and social issues of our day."

FTE is also notable as being the publisher of creation science textbooks, including Of Pandas And People, the famous missing link between creation science and intelligent design literature ("cdesign proponentsists"). The book featured prominently in the Kitzmiller trial and decision, which coincidentally celebrated its 10th anniversary a few days ago. Merry Kitzmas!

Alif the Unseen, by G Willow Wilson.

Although the plot suffers from some obviousness and just-in-time logistics, it's really a fun read. Half-Arab hacker in an unnamed Arab emirate starts with girl trouble, and winds up with supernatural trouble, with jinn and other elements of Islamic mythology. Sort of a crazy Arabian Night tale for the digital age. The author is a convert and lived in Egypt for some time, so there are a lot of interesting cultural details that are no doubt from her experiences. It's a little odd that the (rather secular) hacker has to get a bit in tune with his inner Muslim, but it follows from the premise that the supernatural in the world is based in the truth of Islam.

---

Salvage and Demolition, by Tim Powers.

A fine novella of time travel. A little unsatisfying because much is left unexplained, yet at the same time, padding it out longer with explanation would probably not make it any more satisfying, so maybe that's not a problem after all. Some nice illustration (as always) from JK Potter.

---

The Wind's Twelve Quarters, by Ursula K. LeGuin.

A collection of 17 short stories, including some that eventually mutated into novels. It's neat to see some of the origins of Earthsea. Less so for some of the other entries, or her 'psychomyths'. And it's hard to read "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" for a second time with fresh eyes.