The 2018 Bad Sex In Writing Nominees

“Empty my tanks,” I’d begged breathlessly, as once more she began drawing me deep inside her pleasure cave. Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her.

Okay, in fairness to the nominees, love scenes are inherently fraught. The nomenclature is emotionally loaded, one false move can invoke giggles or worse--but I think all of that is less a reason to automatically shy away and more a reason to do what you can to get it right. After all, sex is a universal and hugely important aspect of being human, so it would be a shame if novelists were afraid to depict it. 

For me, "getting it right" has more to do with building the foundation than the scene itself. If the characters are solid, if their attraction is real and interesting, if the setup works...then there's at least an opportunity for a satisfying payoff. My rule of thumb is, if what matters is that the characters had sex, you shouldn't show the sex. If what matters is how they had sex, you have to show the sex.

But to analogize to comedy...the funniest punchline in the world is useless if it follows a lame setup. Conversely, if the setup is good, the punchline is relatively easy.

All of this applies to dialogue, too. Probably to everything.

And now that I've shot off my mouth, I'll probably be included in the 2019 list... :D

The Religion of Liberal Hegemony is Overdue For This Kind of Apostasy—and a Reformation, Too

I just finished listening to an outstanding book that I hope will be widely read: The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. It’s a study of what the author, Harvard Kennedy School professor Stephen Walt, calls liberal hegemony, a foreign policy worldview Walt persuasively argues has been disastrous for America and for the world. As the jacket puts it: “Since the end of the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to use U.S. power to spread democracy, open markets, and other liberal values into every nook and cranny of the planet. This strategy was doomed to fail, but its proponents in the foreign policy elite were never held accountable and kept repeating the same mistakes."

As I listened to the book, I found myself thinking that liberal hegemony might be best understood as a kind of secular religion. It has its own priests (whose views often differ from those of lay people); its own orthodoxies (and apostates); its own catechisms. I’ve read studies of how, when a cult believes the world will end on X day and the event doesn’t happen, the cult doesn’t abandon its belief but instead rationalizes the inconsistency, and the psychology there is also reminiscent of liberal hegemony’s refusal to reconsider dogma and resistance to contrary evidence (and even common sense).

All of which is doubly interesting when you consider the way many Americans have been trained to cherry pick religiously inspired violence as the only violence worthy of condemnation. “They kill in the name of Islam, what other religion does that?”…that kind of thing. But the psychology of religion manifests itself more broadly than is immediately obvious, and certainly more people have been killed in the name of liberal hegemony than in the name of other, more obvious gods.

I couldn’t help smiling when in the acknowledgments Walt mentions the paradox of his own establishment credentials: researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses; member of the Council on Foreign Relations; guest scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Brookings Institution; faculty member at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, the University of Chicago, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government…being a proponent of some of Noam Chomsky’s views on education, I thought, “My God, how can someone have a CV like that and still be so insightful?”

I’ve come across two reviews of the book that I think deserve mention.

First was this one, from the Guardian. Overall it was positive, but the writer seemed to be doing the thing where he was afraid of seeming too effusive, so he invented a couple of mild criticisms at the end that were neither warranted nor even coherent. First was chiding Walt for “discounting the possibility that Iran harbors ambitions as a regional hegemon.” Of course Iran would like to be a hegemon—who wouldn’t? I confess that given the opportunity, I myself would probably opt for some sort of personal neighborhood hegemony—it would be a great way to get people to obey the speed limit, talk more softly on their cellphones, and clean up after their dogs. The point of offshore balancing, Walt’s proposed alternative to liberal hegemony, is that it’s a response to the given of hegemonic ambitions. In other words, to paraphrase Madison on “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” if countries (including Iran) didn’t seek hegemony, offshore balancing would be largely pointless. Discount hegemonic ambitions? On the contrary, the existence of those ambitions is what offshore balancing is built on.

The second quibble in the review was that in 2010, Walt looked at Libya as a U.S. policy success. Now, I don’t know anyone beyond John Bolton who would claim that Gaddafi giving up his quest for nuclear weapons as a result of diplomacy was a bad thing. And if it hadn’t been for the excesses of liberal hegemony and a spasm of “R2P" rationalizations, we might not have gone to war (oops, “intervened”) in Libya in 2011 and turned the country into the failed state it remains today. So criticizing anyone for praising the way the United States handled Gaddafi in 2010 is bizarre.

The other review was from the New York Times, by a writer named Jacob Heilbrunn. Overall it was another mostly positive review, but Heilbrunn said some unintentionally fascinating things, including a few that demonstrated liberal hegemony is more a faith-based belief system than it is a rational policy. Here are the parts I found most interesting—and telling:

Some of [Walt's] vexation is personal. He reports that the advertisement he signed [in 2002] attacking the invasion of Iraq has disappeared into the foreign policy memory hole: “In the 16-plus years since the ad was printed,” Walt observes, “none of its signatories have been asked to serve in government or advise a presidential campaign.”

The was an important substantive point—the people who have been consistently wrong have been promoted; the people who have been consistently right have been ignored. Is that even remotely disputable? And even if it were, Walt provides a mountain of evidence to back up his argument. The mention of that letter was only a small bit of it. Walt also had a lot to say about journalists and others who’ve been consistently wrong, and how they keep failing up. That’s a critical substantive point; to try to dismiss it as nothing but personal disappointment is just weird. Especially because even if it were motivated by personal disappointment—and again, it didn’t strike me that way at all—Walt's substantive point would still stand, and still be important.

Why would someone argue like this? My instant take is that Heilbrunn is projecting—that he’s the kind of guy for whom such a point would have been motivated by sour grapes, and he assumes everyone else must be like that, too. And while if Heilbrunn were here, he might argue, “Hey Barry, you’re doing the same thing I did, psychoanalyzing,” I would respond, “Fair enough, Jacob, but your attempt at psychoanalysis was illogical and incoherent and obscured an important substantive point, while I’m doing it to try to understand why someone would say something obviously illogical, incoherent, and obscuring.”

Which probably explains why I don’t get invited to any of the good parties. :D

More:

Walt’s own zest for intellectual combat, though, can lead him into rhetorical overkill. “Instead of being a disciplined body of professionals constrained by a well-informed public and forced by necessity to set priorities and hold themselves accountable,” Walt writes, “today’s foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of the policies they promote.”

Wait, why is that rhetorical overkill? Walt provides a ton of evidence in support. If Heilbrunn disagrees, of course that’s fine, but he can’t just dismiss the argument without also addressing the evidence!

Walt points to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council and the Center for New American Security, among others, as constituting a kind of interlocking directorate that fosters groupthink and consists of mandarins intolerant of dissenting views. But Walt’s depiction of these organizations misses the mark. There’s plenty of debate in Washington; whether it amounts to much is another question.

That was for me the most fascinating paragraph in the review. It’s like the saying, “If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?”

It’s as though Heilbrunn is so deep in a box that he can’t see, even when someone shows him what’s going on with a flashlight. Because sure, there’s plenty of debate. Just like there’s plenty of debate between the Democratic and Republican wings of the party on how much more we should spend on the military—should we spend a lot more, or a really lot more? But that’s a very narrow permissible band of meaningful debate. And the only way someone could miss that is by implicitly buying in to the notion of what’s permissible, and treating anything else as unworthy of consideration. Which is exactly Walt's point about groupthink and intolerance of dissent.

Or to put it another way: to go back to my view of liberal hegemony as a secular religion, sure, there’s plenty of debate among rabbis over the meaning of this or that portion of the Talmud, and within the Vatican about the proper understanding of the Holy Trinity or whatever. But wander into one of those debates and suggest that God doesn’t exist? You’ll get the same kind of intolerant reaction I expect you’d get showing up at, say, the Council on Foreign Relations and saying, “I think America and the world would be better off if America didn’t lead, if we stopped thinking of ourselves as exceptional, if we focused less on National Greatness and more on just being good, and if we cut the military (sorry, the “defense”) budget by 50% and invested the savings in domestic infrastructure.” If you were lucky, you’d simply be dismissed as unserious, which is Blob nomenclature for what formal religions prefer to call “heretical.”

Not that the offshore balancing Walt proposes in lieu of liberal hegemony goes remotely that far—but you get the idea.

In truth, any president who announced such a strategy would immediately initiate a free-for-all around the globe as local potentates tested Washington’s resolve.

But Walt address this assumption—and it is an assumption, or, as I think it’s better understood, a core tenet of the Liberal Hegemony faith. Again, it’s fine if Heilbrunn disagrees, but to do so meaningfully he needs to engage Walt's point that it *is* an assumption, with no empirical evidence behind it (and in fact lots of evidence of the contrary).

Walt also makes the easy assumption that America can remain a pre-eminent power, but the mounting national debt and Trump’s steady conversion of the country into what amounts to a rogue state could lead to a very different outcome. Soon Americans may discover that the only thing more vexing than exercising dominance is forfeiting it.

This was mostly incoherent, but it also wandered beyond incoherence into a weird realm of deafness to what Walt is actually arguing, which is the opposite. Liberal hegemony isn’t just unnecessary and counterproductive; it’s also ruinously expensive. Continuing to pursue it is what causes increased debt. Walt didn’t assume anything—he cautioned that if America wants to remain solvent, we need a way to get more realistic about what commitments are worth investing in and paying for.

Or to put it another way, of course "America can remain a pre-eminent power”—Walt provides a ton of examples and evidence of all our natural advantages (oceans east and west, friendly neighbors north and south, abundant natural resources, etc). We just have to stop doing the galactically stupid stuff, and we ought to be fine. It’s like a person of normal health can remain generally healthy—if he just stops the binge drinking and gets a little sleep. That’s not an assumption, it’s a description of reality—and sound advice from a good doctor.

But advice from all the good doctors in the world won’t make a bit of difference if the patient is determined not to hear. If the patient wants to get well, a good first step would be to heed the wisdom in this book.

Excited to Help Launch The Correspondent!

If you read my stories and periodic blog posts, you know I have an interest in the shortcomings and failures of establishment media. Around the time I wrote The God’s Eye View, that interest led to an online friendship with Jay Rosen, a media professor at NYU. I’ve been reading Jay’s blog PressThink for years, and he’s one of the most insightful people I know on how media works and why good journalism is struggling.

About a year ago, Jay asked if I’d be interested in helping get out the word on The Correspondent, a Dutch news organization expanding into the English-language market. As soon as I looked into it, I was hooked. I think the concept is exceptionally well-conceived, with as good a chance as I can imagine not just of serving readers, but of providing a healthier model for how to cover what’s newsworthy—a model other organizations might emulate.

Jay has a Boing Boing article today on the importance of “Unbreaking News” that lays out the overall approach. The whole post is well worth your time. For example:

The exciting part is the principles that make it go. These are different from any news site you can name. 

Start with no ads, the key move the Dutch founders made. Downstream from that original “no” are others, equally welcome. No click-baity headlines. No auto-play videos. No ugly promos sliding into view as you try to read the article. No “sponsored content.” (No sponsors at all.) No third party—the advertiser—in between you and the people trying to inform you. No need to track you around the internet, or collect data on your browsing habits. No selling of your attention to others. 

Also: no controversy-of-the-day coverage, which happens when editors from different newsrooms react to the same data showing clicks and taps going to a few “hot” stories. These are typically the stories that trigger outrage in the most people. The people at The Correspondent have a phrase for it. “Your antidote to the daily news grind.” If that's an idea you can get behind, then get behind The Correspondent. Join our club. 

Now for the next principle, equally basic. This is not an exclusive club. It’s extremely inclusive. Two reasons I can say that. Yes, you have to pay to be a member. But you pay what you feel you can afford. The Correspondent believes you are smart enough to figure this economy out. A paying membership is the other side of the coin that reads: no ads. And no ads, as we have seen, has all those welcome effects downstream.

The other reason I can say “extremely inclusive” is that The Correspondent is not selling digital subscriptions, as the Washington Post, the London Times, and most local newspapers nowadays do. Paid subscription is a product-consumer relationship: you pay your money and you get the product. If you don’t pay you don’t get it. Membership is different. You join the cause because you believe in the importance of the work. If you believe in the work, you want it to spread, including to non-members.

If The Correspondent’s membership campaign reaches its goal of raising $2.5 million by December 14, it will hire a staff and start publishing, in English, in 2019. When that happens, there will be no “meter” measuring how many articles you have read this month. No one will ever get that notice, “you have used four of your five free clicks.” Any link that comes to people in their social feeds will be clickable and shareable, without limit. In this way it is more like public radio in the U.S. Members who believe in the public radio mission support their NPR station, but everyone can listen.

The differences compared to the NPR system are important too: The Correspondent will have no corporate sponsors. No government funding. And thus no fear of that money getting cut off. Which in turns means no tendency toward false equivalence, no incentive system for “he said, she said” journalism. These are deeply-woven patterns for which I have often criticized NPR.

For more, here are their 10 Founding Principles. And here’s an article from De Correspondent’s founder, Rob Wijnberg—The Problem With Real News—And What We Can Do About It—about why the primary problem isn’t fake news, but rather real news.

Please consider joining this terrific news organization and please help me spread the word by sharing this post. Thanks.

If You Buy From Amazon, Do It At AmazonSmile

Updated Below, January 18, 2023

If you buy from Amazon, do it at AmazonSmile. AmazonSmile is the same Amazon you know—same products, same prices, same service. The difference is, when you log in at AmazonSmile, Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases to the charitable organization of your choice.

My choice is the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection, an organization founded by novelist Andrew Vachss, a lifelong advocate for better laws to protect children from predators. The LDICP produces clear, scientifically grounded, and easily implementable laws designed to protect children. Let me tell you, Livia Lone would be a huge supporter—which is probably why the first acknowledgment of The Killer Collective (February 1) mentions the LDICP, and why the book is dedicated to Andrew and his wife Alice, a former sex-crimes prosecutor and author of the hair-raising and galvanizing memoir Sex Crimes: Then and Now: My Years on the Front Lines Prosecuting Rapists and Confronting Their Collaborators.

If you buy from Amazon, why not do it through AmazonSmile, and ensure that some of your shopping dollars go to organizations like the LDICP?

Update, January 18, 2023

Received this email from Amazon today:

Dear customer, In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favorite charities. However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.  We are writing to let you know that we plan to wind down AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023. We will continue to pursue and invest in other areas where we’ve seen we can make meaningful change—from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science education for students in underserved communities to using our logistics infrastructure and technology to assist broad communities impacted by natural disasters. To help charities that have been a part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, we will be providing them with a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022 through the program, and they will also be able to accrue additional donations until the program officially closes in February. Once AmazonSmile closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists. As a company, we will continue supporting a wide range of other programs that help thousands of charities and communities across the U.S. For instance: Housing Equity Fund: We’re investing $2 billion to build and preserve affordable housing in our hometown communities. In just two years, we’ve provided funding to create more than 14,000 affordable homes—and we expect to build at least 6,000 more in the coming months. These units will host more than 18,000 moderate- to low-income families, many of them with children. In one year alone, our investments have been able to increase the affordable housing stock in communities like Bellevue, Washington and Arlington, Virginia by at least 20%. Amazon Future Engineer: We’ve funded computer science curriculum for more than 600,000 students across over 5,000 schools—all in underserved communities. We have plans to reach an additional 1 million students this year. We’ve also provided immediate assistance to 55,000 students in our hometown communities by giving them warm clothes for the winter, food, and school supplies. Community Delivery Program: We’ve partnered with food banks in 35 U.S. cities to deliver more than 23 million meals, using our logistics infrastructure to help families in need access healthy food – and we plan to deliver 12 million more meals this year alone. In addition to our delivery services, we’ve also donated 30 million meals in communities across the country. Amazon Disaster Relief: We’re using our logistics capabilities, inventory, and cloud technology to provide fast aid to communities affected by natural disasters. For example, we’ve created a Disaster Relief Hub in Atlanta with more than 1 million relief items ready for deployment, our Disaster Relief team has responded to more than 95 natural disasters, and we’ve donated more than 20 million relief products to nonprofits assisting communities on the ground. Community Giving: We support hundreds of local nonprofits doing meaningful work in cities where our employees and their families live. For example, each year we donate hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations working to build stronger communities, from youth sport leagues, to local community colleges, to shelters for families experiencing homelessness. We’ll continue working to make a difference in many ways, and our long-term commitment to our communities remains the same—we’re determined to do every day better for our customers, our employees, and the world at large. Thank you for being an Amazon customer.

Oh Lucy!

I recently stumbled across Oh Lucy!, a movie that bounces back and forth between Tokyo and southern California, which sounded familiar...and I loved it.



I had no idea what to expect beyond what I saw in the trailer and beyond my love of Japan and Japanese culture. The story is fresh, surprising, poignant...just lovely, beautifully written by first time feature writer/director Atsuko Harayanagi. Josh Harnett is terrific, and Shinobu Terajima and Kaho Minami should win awards for their sometimes hilarious, sometimes heart rending portrayal of estranged sisters. Koji Yakusho (remember Tampopo? That's him) is always a pleasure, even in a small role, and relative newcomer Shioli Kutsuna (now in Dead Pool 2) is going to be a star. You don't have to love Japan to love this movie (though it won't hurt, either)--it's just a beautiful human story for anyone. Highly recommended.

Being an easy sell for stories involving Japan, I also recently watched The Outsider, with Jared Leto playing an American inducted into a yakuza family in post-war Japan. This one I can't recommend. Despite some solid performances that rose above the material (Tadanobu Asanobu, who you might know from the various Thor movies, and Shioli Kutsuna again) and good cinematography, the story was cliched, contradictory, and incoherent; the protagonist a dull cipher. Too bad, too, because Jared Leto is a talented actor, and could have done a lot had this smart premise been better written.

Another Earphone!

My second Earphones Award--this one for Zero Sum. Thanks AudioFile Magazine,  I love narrating the audiobooks!

What You Don't Know Can Kill You

I’ve been reading Marc MacYoung since 1989, when I stumbled across his first book—Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons—in a Paladin Press catalogue. I was a Career Trainee the CIA at the time, and MacYoung’s emphasis on thinking like the opposition, situational awareness, and various stages of alertness all tracked perfectly with Agency counter-terror training. I’ve been playing around with martial arts since I was about 15, but I’d never come across a civilian instructor who even touched on this stuff, let alone knew it at least as well as the paramilitary instructors at CIA. Suffice it to say, I was hooked.



And I still am. MacYoung’s latest—What You Don't Know Can Kill You—co-written with firearms instructor Jenna Meek, is essential reading for anyone who recognizes that your problems might be far from over after you’ve physically defended yourself. “Self-defense” is a tricky and surprisingly poorly understood legal concept, and MacYoung and Meek deal with it crisply and clearly, with plenty of case studies and hypotheticals. The book is a fast read, and having just finished it, I feel I have a much more solid idea of how, where, and why doing too much to defend yourself can be as dangerous as doing too little.

I should add that in the course of addressing the ins and outs of legal self-defense claims, and how getting them wrong can put you in prison or in the ground, the authors have also managed to put together a good primer on different types of violence (social, asocial resource predators, asocial process predators) and on various cost-effective counters.

If you’ve invested significant time and money in self-defense training, whether empty-handed or with weapons, I’d strongly recommend that you spend a few more bucks and a few more hours reading this book. Any self-defense system that doesn’t integrate the concepts MacYoung and Meek cover will be dangerously incomplete. It would be a shame to figure that out when it’s too late—especially when you have the opportunity to figure it out so easily right now.

Also recommended: Survive a Shooting, by Alain Burrese. I got to read a pre-release copy recently and the book is comprehensive, practical, and well organized. It goes without saying that it's a terrible shame that a book like Survive a Shooting is needed, but the need obviously exists, and I'm glad Burrese has addressed it.



Bonus: while covering the specific topic, Burrese also offers smart, cost-effective strategies that will help keep you safer in the world generally.

The Night Trade, Out Today!

Today’s the day for The Night Trade, featuring “absolutely first-rate thriller” (New York Times) character Seattle sex crimes detective Livia Lone and former Marine sniper Dox!

I had a blast writing this book. It was an opportunity for Livia to delve more deeply into her past—and to try to complete her revenge. For Dox to continue the emotional and moral journey he began in the short story The Khmer Kill. And most of all, for these two different and dangerous characters to collide and then struggle to figure out a way to trust each other under the worst circumstances.

And if you’re in the Bay Area, come by Kepler’s at 7:30 tonight for the launch, and support your local bookstore.

Thanks and enjoy!

Barry

Livia Lone is back.

For sex-crimes detective Livia Lone, a position with a government anti-trafficking task force is a chance to return to Thailand to ferret out Rithisak Sorm, the kingpin behind her own childhood ordeal.

But after a planned takedown in a nightclub goes 

violently awry, Livia discovers that she's not the only one hunting Sorm. Former marine sniper Dox has a score to settle, too, and working together is the only way to take Sorm out.

Livia and Dox couldn't be less alike. But they share a single-minded creed: the law has to serve justice. And if it doesn't, justice has to be served another way.

What they don't know is that in threatening Sorm, they're also threatening a far-reaching conspiracy—one involving the highest levels of America's own intelligence apparatus. It turns out that killing Sorm just might be the easy part. The real challenge will be payback from his protectors.

Praise for Livia Lone:

An Amazon Best Book of 2016

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of 2016 Selection

An Amazon Best Book of the Month: Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense Category

“An absolutely first-rate thriller...Emotionally true at each beat.” —New York Times Book Review

“An explosive thriller that plunges into the sewer of human smuggling.…Filled with raw power, [Livia Lone] may be the darkest thriller of the year.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“[An] exciting thriller...Eisler keeps a firm hand on the throttle of what could be the first of a rewarding series.” —Publishers Weekly

“Livia is a complex and sympathetic character...Readers of hard-boiled fiction, heavily tinted toward noir, may see in Livia something of Carol O’Connell’s Kathy Mallory, also a cop with an abuse-filled past and an appetite for revenge.” —Booklist

“Readers may be reminded of Stieg Larsson’s beloved Lisbeth Salander when they meet Livia Lone, and will be totally riveted by the story of this woman on a mission to right the wrongs in her past.” —Bookish

“Eisler offers up an astonishingly raw tale that is dark and disturbing, but one that you will want to finish. Both the compelling narrative and the fascinating—yet seriously flawed—heroine are indications that Eisler is at the top of his game.” —RT Book Reviews

“Barry Eisler is back, and then some. [Livia Lone] may be the best and strongest work of his storied career…Livia Lone moves like a freight train…Jump on what appears to be the start of a terrific new series.” —bookreporter

“This electric thriller...keeps you riveted to the end.” —Authorlink

“…a literary home run in every respect…Livia Lone [reaches] a whole new level...” —Providence Journal

“Former CIA agent Barry Eisler's latest sexy cyber thriller follows Seattle PD sex-crimes detective Livia Lone, who knows the monsters she hunts...the story is riveting.” —Boing Boing

“You won’t be able to tear yourself away as the story accelerates into a Tarantino-worthy climax and when you’re left gasping in the wake of its gut-wrenching vigilante justice, you’ll belatedly realize you learned a lot about a social travesty that gets far too little attention…Livia Lone is a harrowing tale with a conscience.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Everything you could want in a great thriller—a badass main character, an emotional and suspenseful plot, lots of high stakes, gritty murders and well-written action scenes.” —Night Owl Reviews

"Child Prostitute" Is A Horrible Lie

If you follow my political blogging, you know I believe nomenclature is critical (data collection vs bulk surveillance, targeted killings vs assassinations, surge vs escalation, EITs instead of torture, detainees vs prisoners, interventions vs war...and on and on).

This is Andrew Vachss on why "child prostitute" is a horrible, propagandistic lie. Read it--and if you see this kind of terminology online somewhere, forward Vachss's post for the writer's consideration. Most people don't adopt shitty terminology out of malice; they just absorb it thoughtlessly through osmosis, then parrot it until someone corrects them. That's what seems to happen to me, at any rate, and I'm grateful to Vachss for bringing this kind of thing to my attention.

The Dark Files: Tonight at 10:00

About a year ago, I was invited to co-host The Dark Files, a special the History Channel was planning that would focus on the Montauk legends--allegations about US government experiments on unwitting human subjects, carried out at Camp Hero, a now-abandoned military base on Montauk, Long Island.

It wasn't a topic I knew much about, and I doubted we'd be able to prove or disprove the legends, which range from the completely believable (mind-control experiments like MKUltra) to the way-out-there (time travel and aliens). But I was curious about what it would be like to make a television special, and intrigued by the opportunity to co-host with independent filmmaker Christoper Garentano, writer and director of The Montauk Chronicles, and with investigative reporter Steve Volk, author of Fringeology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable--And Couldn't. Most of all, I was attracted by the opportunity to use the Montauk legends as a vehicle to explore the hidden history of human experimentation in America.

What's that, you say? Human experimentation? In America?

The question itself reveals the problem. Most Americans would have difficulty believing that our own government could behave in ways we exclusively associate with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's infamous Unit 731. But if we allow ourselves to be seduced by this comforting--and false--belief, we increase the likelihood that our own society could engage in such barbarities in the future, as we have in the past.

Because yes, the US government has allowed syphilis to proceed unchecked in hundreds of poor black men it told were receiving treatment, to see what happens when the disease is untreated. It has subjected prisoners to gruesome dermatological agents and hallucinogens, to study the effects chemical warfare agents. It has fed radioactive material to mentally handicapped children to learn about the impact of nuclear fallout.

And these are just a few examples. There is much, much more.

One of the things I find most disturbing about the history of human experimentation in America is that the experimenters are always the cream of American academia and science--people who doubtless look in the mirror and see only paragons of morality looking back. And their victims are always helpless and marginalized: Prisoners. Children in orphanages. The poorest minorities. The mentally ill.

So the question about Montauk isn't whether human experimentation happened. The question is whether human experimentation also happened there.

If America's dark chapters prove anything, they prove that when no one is looking, the wealthy and powerful will prey on the poor and powerless. These experiments were always conducted in secret, after all. Meaning whatever their own rationalizations, the people who carried them out understood intuitively that the wider society would not approve.

It follows that our best defense against a recrudescence of these horrors is to shine a light on the darker truths of our own history--and our own humanity. I hope The Dark Files, premiering tonight on the History Channel at 10:00 eastern time, will be an important contribution to that effort.

Satire Can't Keep Up With Reality

When I wrote “It’s Just a Leak” in 2010, I thought it was satire. Alas.

John Rain in Zero Sum!

Hi all, I’m excited to announce that the new John Rain novel—ZERO SUM, is out today! This is another prequel, again set in Tokyo ten years following the events of Graveyard of Memories:

Returning to Tokyo in 1982 after a decade of mercenary work in the Philippines, a young John Rain learns that the killing business is now controlled by Victor, a half-Russian, half-Japanese sociopath who has ruthlessly eliminated all potential challengers. Victor gives Rain a choice: kill a government minister or die a grisly death. But the best route to the minister is through his gorgeous Italian wife, Maria, a route that puts Rain on a collision course not only with Victor but with the shadowy forces behind the Russian’s rise to dominance—and the longings of Rain’s own conflicted heart.

It’s a battle between kingpin and newcomer, master and apprentice, a zero-sum contest that can only end with one man dead and the other the world’s foremost assassin.

I’m already hard at work on the follow-up to Livia Lone, out in January 2018, so alas there wasn’t time to tour for Zero Sum. Just one signing—Thursday, June 29, 7:30 PM at Kepler’s in Menlo Park.

Thanks for all your support over the years, and I hope you enjoy Rain’s latest adventure.

Horseshoe Theory

Predictably, ISIS is cheering Trump's Muslim ban (actually, not just predictably. Predicted). Yes, I know, it's not really a Muslim ban. You don't have to convince me. Convince the people ISIS is recruiting with it.

It's not just that targeting refugees, immigrants, and green card holders based on their religion is capricious and cruel. It's that it's dangerous. Once again, the people wrapping themselves most ostentatiously in the flag of national security are the ones who create the most hazards--to the citizenry and to the republic.

When you're about to do the very thing your enemy most ardently hopes you'll do, it doesn't mean ipso facto your move is dumb. But it ought to give you pause, at least.

Defense Against Foreign Danger; Instruments of Tyranny at Home

Consider the way tools of national (in)security policy initially deployed abroad inevitably find their way home: bulk surveillance, black sites, torture, police militarization.

Now consider that one of the CIA’s long-practiced core competencies is undermining regimes it deems threatening or otherwise unfavorable.

James Madison said, “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” Is it possible he was on to something?

Nah, that’s crazy. Only Putin could ever interfere with the sanctity of American democracy.

Another Chance to Get It Right

Anyone who knows the work of novelist Andrew Vachss will recognize his influence on my latest novel, Livia Lone (along with that of his wife, former sex crimes prosecutor Alice Vachss).

I've read most of Vachss's books, but there's one I missed, called Another Chance to Get It Right: A Children's Book for Adults, that was just reissued in a stunning new edition. It's a short read, with gorgeous illustrations, most of them graphic-novel style, and deals with Vachss's signature subject of child protection.

I've been getting a lot of good feedback about Livia Lone, including comparisons to Vachss's work, which is enormously flattering to me. Various people, moved by the story, have asked how they can fight human trafficking and child abuse. Well, unsurprisingly, the best child-protection initiative I’m aware of has been spearheaded by Vachss himself. It’s called The Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection, and anyone who wants to help protect children from the sorts of horrors I depict in Livia Lone can do simply by financing the work of the LDICP. I’ve done so myself and hope anyone reading this post will do so, too. For a few mouse clicks and whatever money you can spare, you can help accomplish a lot of good in the world.

Do it now, while it's on your mind. You can think of it as another chance to get it right.

Why Torture is Now De Facto a Policy Choice, Not a Crime

Absolutely not a surprise that Mike Pence refuses to rule out torture in a Trump administration.

I've been writing about this since 2009. Obama had a duty to prosecute torture; instead, he decided to "look forward as opposed to looking backward," rendering torture a de facto policy choice instead of a crime.

If President X has the power to prohibit torture, it follows that President Y has the power to permit it. Well, now we have President Y. This was not only predictable; it was predicted.

Every 25 Seconds, Cops Arrest Someone for Drug Possession

I urge you to read this article by Alice Speri in the Intercept. 89,000 people jailed--no, not per year, per day.

The war on some drugs is fantastically cruel, counterproductive, self-inflicted insanity. If it were enforced across the board--rather than disproportionately against minorities--two thirds of America's adult population would be in prison.

People who support this madness: would you feel the same way if your kid decided to try a joint and wound up arrested, tried, imprisoned, permanently denied the right to vote even after released and with a permanent felon record afterward? Could you really support prohibition if you knew it would do all that to your own child, rather than assuming that kind of thing only happens to the children of others?

I wish someone would ask this of candidates for high office. But we can at least ask ourselves.

Prohibition Propaganda

Yes, the 1950's level of fear-mongering and bullshit is part of what makes this Diane Feinstein op-ed such an embarrassment. But the real propaganda lies in what's missing: zero consideration of the costs of the status quo the senator prefers--AKA, prohibition.

When rational people evaluate policies, they intuitively know to weigh the costs and benefits of the available alternatives. When someone insists on discussing only the (arguable) costs of only one of the alternatives, that person has abandoned rationality--or is a deliberate propagandist.

Californians, ignore the fear-mongering and the bullshit and the unreason. Rebuke the dinosaurs. Vote YES on Proposition 64 on Nov. 8.

Snowden, the Movie

Gripping drama, potent activism—guest blogging about Oliver Stone’s Snowden biopic over at BoingBoing today.

"The movie succeeded splendidly as popular entertainment. But there’s another level worth discussing, too.

"Logically, it shouldn’t particularly matter who Snowden is. His background, his formative experiences, his motivations, his life—none of these is relevant compared to what we’ve learned from him: that the US government developed and deployed an unprecedented and illegal system of mass surveillance, foreign and domestic; that the head of the US intelligence apparatus was lying about this system in sworn testimony before a Senate oversight committee; that the NSA has been subverting the very encryption standards upon which Internet security—banking, shopping, medical, everything—depends. And so much more. In the face of government actions as toxic to democracy as these, who brought the actions to our attention seems of distinctly secondary importance.

"And yet, I know as a novelist that we humans are wired to focus more on who than we are than what. If I can get you to care sufficiently deeply about my characters, for example, I can afflict them with only the most trivial travails and you’ll still be entertained. Conversely, if you don’t care about my characters, I can put in play the fate of all of civilization and you probably won’t even finish the book. There’s something about our species that makes us understand “what” at least partially through the prism of “who.” This is why so many people give the candidate of their preferred party so much latitude to violate their own party’s stated principles. When your party’s the one doing it, it just feels different.

"So it's no surprise that..."

Read the whole thing over at Boing Boing.

Deep Web--Great Documentary

The other day, I stumbled across an excellent documentary called Deep Web, about the Ross Ulbricht/Silk Road prosecution. I'd followed the story somewhat at the time, but not closely, and the film illuminated a lot of aspects worth considering--including the societal and individual costs of drug prohibition; the dangers of prosecutorial overreach; and the ways people try to create communities beyond governmental intrusion and inanity. Fascinating and highly recommended.