Thursday, December 31, 2015

Happy 2016

Will 2016 be the most critical year since 1792 in the history of the United States?  It surely will.  With the ratification of the Constitution and the unanimous election of George Washington this country plunged into unknown territory and enjoyed the most  glorious outcome in the history of this planet.  Despite the machinations of Adams, Hamilton and the like, and Lincoln's belligerent rashness, we have risen to the apex of human society, until that ill-conceived political experiment with a strong third party candidate saddled us with the Clinton dynasty.  Hanging on by a chad, we dodged the pseudo scientist, Al Gore, who still claims his father built the interstate highway system, but sadly we ended with the affable but ineffective Bush II.

Former Czech president, Václav Klaus famously observed that the United States could survive Obama, but never the electorate that put him in office.  There has never been a keener observation.  As we contemplate 2016 with five aircraft carriers vulnerably anchored in the same harbor, our military brain trust gutted, Iran being handed nuclear weapons and the phrase "Islamic extremism" stricken from the language, we cling to a bombastic buffoon with ten billion dollars for salvation.


It defies belief to consider that supposedly intelligent creatures can witness the collapse of the most powerful socialist society in history, in fact not just the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its utter disappearance, and still remain convinced that that system is viable.  Russia for all its malignant power is not successor to CCCP.  Twenty-first century Russia is a capitalist country breeding petro-billionaires and prospering on a flood of western imports.  Despite the total failure of communism—socialism being merely a euphemism for communism—an ever larger slice of American society clamors to turn their future wellbeing over to a bloated and impotent bureaucracy that repeatedly has shown itself to be incapable of finding its ass with both hands.


I want to let all of you know that the day in 2007, even before the crisis of Obama landed on us, when I wrote the checks that gave 35% of my retirement savings to the government had a profound effect on me.  Thirty-five percent of my family's future security went into a black hole wherein it was funneled by overpaid miscreants with huge under-funded pensions into the hands of illegal immigrants, families without a single member holding a job since Lyndon Johnson rammed his Great Society down our throats, women without partners who breed for income and trolls living under bridges with stolen grocery carts.  No, I do not condone socialism, nor what it does to the human condition.


In the coming year we are going to be driven mad by politics.  All the posturing, lambasting and lying will have very little effect on the mindset of the electorate who are either crying for relief or firmly wedded to the death spiral of the Obama/Clinton agenda.  Inconsequential issues will drive the outcome.  I don’t know what those issues will be but the survival of the United States teeters on them.  Lest we go the way of the Soviet Union, that is now hardly a footnote in history, we must somehow find effective and intelligent leaders and shun that political contrivance who threatens to be our ruin only for the sake of being the first woman.  It doesn’t matter at all who is her opposition.  The rightminded would cast votes for a Republican chimpanzee or Attila the Hun to be spared from Hillary, but in my own case the GOP candidate is even less important, because in California, as soon as I cast my vote for president, it is nullified by the Electoral College since there is no chance this state will carry the Republican.  That is one unfortunate artifact left in the sublime document adopted in 1792 that may well spell the doom of our nation in 2016.



Happy New Year to all!

Tin Monkeys

Reviewed for ReadersFavorites.com

A truly repulsive human being, a brilliantly eccentric TV scientist and an altruistic sycophant intertwine their lives and deaths. FBI agent Singer with his new partner, idealistic rookie, Anne Goodwin, investigate the bizarre death of mad scientist, Doctor Theodore Grant, whose remains are found at his Ozark Mountains palatial retreat in an unusual condition—dust. The good doctor did, however, leave a video record of his final months as he spiraled into the maelstrom of madness, ultimately professing to have proven the existence of sentient nanobots inhabiting and controlling everyone and everything. Agent Goodwin is young, naive and enamored of the late Doctor Grant. Special Agent Singer is jaded, profane and utterly corrupt. His former partner having been murdered by his wife, who Singer supposedly threw into an abandoned industrial well in revenge for the death of his longtime friend and ally. Singer’s reality is somewhat suspect due to massive doses of Dilaudid, whiskey and insomnia. His behavior attracts the attention of his supervisor who orders his psychiatric evaluation by the voluptuous shrink, Doctor Carrie Dent—this can only exacerbate Singer’s problems. In the meantime, Agent Goodwin goes missing and the loyal agent side of Singer emerges to attempt to rescue his partner, if in a slightly conflicted state. He quickly locates her in a rural campground where she has replicated Doctor Grant’s lethal experiment.

Tin Monkeys is a many-layered onion. Every time one shell falls a whole new parallel universe reveals itself. The reader is hauled from Agent Singer’s gutter to Anne Goodwin’s utopia and into Doctor Grant’s hell, then back again. Andrenik Sergoyan enfolds some, in fact a great deal of cutting edge science into this convoluted tale of micro and macro predestination versus free will. He explores all reaches of the cosmos and theology with equal aplomb and continually returns to the seamy underbelly of a rogue cop’s sordid self-destruction. Tin Monkeys will intrigue, repulse and befuddle you. How can you resist?

I haven't found Tin Monkeys available for sale to date.  I'm sure it will hit the retailers soon.