This is the church that hosted Trump

Of course it is.

Church warned to stop claiming COVID can be eliminated with air filtration

Trump's kind of Christianity.

Gantry's, too. And Sharon Falconer's.

The attorney general of Arizona issued a warning letter to a megachurch that claims its air filtration system "kills 99 percent of COVID within 10 minutes."

Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent the letter to Phoenix's Dream City Church on Thursday, saying that their claim -- which Brnovich said was not backed by any science -- may be illegal.

"In the absence of scientific evidence regarding COVID-19 specifically, statements suggesting that a product could provide nearly guaranteed protection from COVID-19 infections create a misrepresentation or a false promise. 

Misrepresentations and false promises are illegal under A.R.S. § 44-1522," Brnovich wrote.

The church, which can seat 3,000 people, had also claimed "when you come into [the church's] auditorium, 99 percent of COVID is gone" and "you can know when you come down here, you'll be safe and protected," according to his letter.

Dream City Church, which has six other locations, made some of the claims in a Facebook video ahead of hosting President Donald Trump this week.

The end of La Peste

The ending is so rough.

Tarrou dies hard, watched over by Rieux and his mother, Rieux gets a telegram telling him his wife has died in the sanitarium, and Cottard freaks at the departure of the plague and starts shooting people out of his window.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Drove to the South Hills Village where I parked at the Food Court.

Took a walk outdoors, circumnavigating the parking lot.

Then drove to Riverside Park on the South Side on the Mon and parked in the shade of a tree with a view of the road, the river, and the Birmingham Bridge.

Read for a bit more than an hour, Camus, La Peste.

It was Tarrou's autobiographical speech about his rejection of killing and his bonding swim with Doctor Rieux.

Tiamat's Wrath

Just finished a book for the first time in months.

An excellent entry in the best sci-fi series I've read in more than fifty years, since I read Asimov's Foundation and Empire series as a teenager.

And it looks like the Asimov series is still in print.

Ringing bells, many and loud

Oran under lockdown in The Plague is in so many ways, right down to details of everyday life, similar to America - and probably any country at all, really - under lockdown in the face of Covid-19.

Isolation, quarantine, the suspension of wakes and funerals, the overwhelming of hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries, the end of so much of normal daily life, work-related or not.

It all feels so contemporary.

The Nigger of the Narcissus

From the very beginning you wonder what the heck Conrad is doing or saying about race.

Finally, in Chapter 4, Jimmy Wait and Donkin are there to make more or less Nietzschean political points which do not as such reflect well on Conrad's contemporary acceptability, though it might be too harsh, reading him quite that way, and the storm is there to make the metaphysical points that maybe do and maybe don't.

One hell of a story eh?

And lovely English prose.

Don Quixote

Phooey. He was not a fighter for lost causes, but for imaginary ones.

James S. A. Corey didn't know that? Neither of them?

The Expanse series

Why do 2 guys living in New Mexico write in Brit English?

"Lift" for "elevator", for example.

Our contemporary, and not

By ch 43 or so, the portrait of the whore Nancy's love for and complete subjection to Sykes, her pimp, her lover, and the animal whose shameless violent attacks may yet kill her, is full.

Oliver Twist.

The Expanse

Amazon picked up the series dropped in 2018 by SyFy and gave us Season 3.

Season 4 will be available in December and Amazon has already committed to a Season 5.

The most remarkable space opera series since Azimov.

I'm reading the books and have just finished No 5.

So far, the only one in which nothing to do with the protomolecule or associated technology or history had a significant role.

Night Soldiers

Alan Furst's novel first reveals the tyranny of Soviet Russia by displaying Stalin's tyrannical behavior regarding members of the leadership of the Communist Party and the NKVD.

And as to that, the official orders to officers serving abroad to return to the Soviet Union, known to all to be orders to return for execution that, in general, no one dared disobey, are a nice parallel to the way things went in the empire of the Turks, its tyranny most neatly depicted in the mind of one of Furst's heroes, early in the book, in the practice of sending an official a garotte, indicating he should kill himself.

Which, generally, he did.

But the difficulty with this view of the situation is that, much like Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, it hides the inherent tyranny of Soviet Communism behind the tyranny of Stalin, personally, while it hides his tyrannical rule of the entire country behind his tyrannical treatment of party members and officials.

On the other hand, Furst's treatment in the same novel of the Spanish Civil War is almost entirely satisfactory.

Reading Oliver Twist

I think I have read this before, but it was a long time ago and I really don't remember any of it as I now read along.

I am a couple of dozen pages in and I must say that from his birth onward, whenever Oliver has been onstage (so to speak) so far, he has always bawled his eyes out.

The lad cannot get a moment's peace.

Oh, no. You are so wrong.

Jill Muller's 2003 introduction to the Barnes and Noble Oliver Twist.

The myth of "gentility" as an inborn trait may have helped the author to come to terms with the social humiliations of his youth, but it severely undermines the effectiveness of Oliver Twist as social criticism.

If Oliver is to arouse readers' indignation at the plight of children in workhouses, it is essential that they view him not as a specimen of unique virtue and sensitivity, but as a typical case.

Pshaw.

Her introduction is intelligent and helpful but marred, here and there, with twaddle.

Eliot and her politics

Silas Marner, by George Eliot.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Doesn't sound like a leftist, does she?

Have you heard of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa?

Her utter lack of sympathy with Molly, Godfrey's abandoned wife, speaks volumes.

Chapter 12, for example.

And why is Silas a miser, come to that?

For saving his money or for his anguish at its theft?

It is all he has to keep him from death from exposure or starvation.

But Eliot cannot see that, she cannot paint it into his character.

She sees him full of concern for his gold, but she, and so he, sees nothing of what it is for.

Or she sees it but gives it no weight, at all.

Dickens winding up

A happy ending, of course, for Barnaby Rudge, with betrothals previously prevented now arranged.

Hugh and the hangman are hanged while the legs of the treacherous 'prentice, his greatest pride, are crushed irremediably.

Haredale declaims, "Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honor, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means. Those that cannot are bad; and may be counted so at once, and left alone."

Barnaby is rescued and the treacherous Miggs, attempting to resume her job at the Vardens', is cast out.

Interestingly, D found it good for Haredale to kill Sir John Chester in the penultimate chapter.

Rounding out the happy endings.

Except that Gordon, surely guilty, ought not to have been acquitted in his trial for High Treason.

An idea born of fantasy, sci-fi, and envy

Billionaires Shouldn’t Live Forever

They won't.

Nor will anyone.

The sun will explode and turn the planet to space-ash and, if that doesn't quite do it, there's always heat-death at the end of the universe.

Krugman, class warrior.

Some writers of speculative fiction at least imagined something like what eventually happened. 

Richard K. Morgan’s 2003 novel “Altered Carbon,” made into a TV series in 2018, envisioned a society in which wealthy “meths” (for Methuselah) could transfer their consciousness into newly grown clones.

That’s not how the actual technology works, and Morgan’s term never caught on; most of us prefer the portmanteau “evergarchs,” for oligarchs who seemingly go on forever. 

But Morgan’s vision of a society utterly corrupted by near-immortal privilege turned out to be all too accurate.

. . . .

But nothing is forever, even in an era of life extension. 

Public rage against the evergarchs has been building for decades, and it may now have reached boiling point.

So what should be done? 

Some are proposing that we simply try to diminish the evergarchs’ influence with steep taxes on huge fortunes, which is a good idea in any case. 

But there were real concerns about tax evasion even when oligarchs were merely mortal; imagine how good people can get at hiding their assets when they can spend decades, even generations, building their tax shelters.

No, life extension for a privileged few is, by its nature, a socially destructive technology, and the time has come to ban it. 

Take the evergarchs off their treatments, so that they start aging like everyone else, and don’t let anyone else get started. 

Prosecute anyone who tries to evade the ban, which shouldn’t be hard to determine: Billionaires may sometimes manage to hide their assets, but they can’t hide failure to age.

Dickens v. the rabble

In the later chapters of Barnaby Rudge, D repeatedly portrays the rioters as violent, murderous criminals bent more on limitless destruction and anarchy than any real political goal.

Their actions repeatedly stem from hatred of the authorities and the haves - however little or much they have - , and it is these latter, persons with property, who have his undivided and wholly unabashed sympathy and loyalty.

Along with defenders of property, order, and authority.

Dickens a socialist?

Not on your life.

Which is not at all to deny his endless, heartfelt, and sincere sympathy for the deserving poor or his support for both private charity and state action aimed at relief within the context of a wholly undisturbed capitalism.

Who was it, which converted red, wrote that the entire red plague of the 20th Century was based on blind hatred of the bourgeoisie?

Oh, yes.

Francois Furet.

Though he was certainly not alone in that.

Of course, that plague was over by 1990.

A whole generation of adults was born and came to maturity after that.

Barnaby Rudge

By the end of Chapter 32 the romantic, marital prospects of the two young men, Joe Willet and Ned Chester, and of the objects of their respective loves, Dolly Varden and Emma Haredale, are in ruins, brought about by lies told to fools by one of their fathers, Sir John Chester.

With Chapter 33 the narrative leaps forward 5 years.

In the next few chapters, D introduces us to George Gordon, not Lord Byron, and the movement of Protestant reaction he led, whose disquiet eventually led to the Gordon Riots.

Readers of D always find new occasions to pause and consider whether he might agree with J. S. Mill's public declaration, "The poor, in the lump, are bad," though perhaps tempted to extend the observation beyond that class without a specified limit.

And how near a man can come to combining personal misanthropy and personal humanitarianism.

Contempt for the rabble and support for democratic reform.

And the like.

D's Gordon seems a gentleman more than half sincere, but partly a crank not entirely taken in by himself.

His El Segundo, Gashford, seems a better educated and even more fraudulent Gantry playing Rasputin to Gordon's Czar.

Hugo the endless blabberer

Hugo's two greatest novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables, needed editorial restraint at least as much as the second volume of War and Peace, but the author was too powerful to be bossed around.

Many years ago, editors of these works did for the reading public what those editors had been unable to do, cutting the blathering and publishing abridged editions.

That seems to have gone out of fashion.

But I suppose it doesn't matter, since most readers seem to have given up on literature and now prefer genre fiction.

Correction. B&N has an abridged edition of Les Mis that's merely 896 pages long.

Victor Hugo's Notre Dame novel tops bestseller list after fire

And, no, the unabridged first French edition did not run to eleven volumes, but only two.

How odd

Slaughter writes repeatedly of a Wingmaster 12 gauge rifle.

It is a shotgun, not a rifle.

Reading A Faint Cold Fear.