Review: HOUR OF THE RAT, Lisa Brackmann

Hour of the Rat by Lisa Brackmann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The protagonist is engaging, the local color and descriptions of life in modern China are fascinating, and the writing is top-notch. Problem is, the story doesn't finish. The book just ends, and not even on a cliffhanger. Nothing is resolved, the situation is still as perilous as it ever was, and the reader, one supposes, just has to buy the next volume to find out what happens next. This always annoys me. I don't mind series, and I don't even mind story arcs that go from book to book, but I just feel like each book should have at least one self-contained story. Even the rambling Song of Ice and Fire series ends each book on a high note or turning point. This just feels like the author wrote till she hit the deadline and quit. YMMV, of course, and it that sort of thing doesn't bother you, then this is a fine read.


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The Folkenflik Revelation

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In his recent book “Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires,” National Public Radio media correspondent David Folkenflik describes, in no-holds-barred detail, how Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch built his company News Corp “from a small paper in Adelaide, Australia, into a multimedia empire.”

Among the details of scandals and corporate infighting is a revelation that’s gotten some people’s backs up: that the Fox News PR department actually hired people to go on the Internet — on blogs, message boards and other public outlets — and “post pro-Fox rants” on websites.

“One former staffer,” Folkenflik writes, “recalled using 20 different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had 100.” They were provided various technological work-arounds to disguise the fact that their pro-Fox commentary was coming from within online accounts associated with Fox itself.

When I read this, I immediately thought two things: (1) Is “David Folkenflik” not the coolest name ever? And (2) wait, you mean I can’t trust the rantings of anonymous strangers on Internet comment boards to be the real thing?

I’m shocked; shocked, I tell you.

It is a striking phenomenon that you notice in online discussions: Make some mention of Fox News’ decided rightward slant and obvious bias, and someone will immediately and vigorously leap to their defense, usually by attacking MSNBC (on the often erroneous assumption that anyone who regards Fox as nakedly partisan must be a huge MSNBC fan).

You never see that sort of passionate defense of CNN, CBS, et al., and you rarely see it of MSNBC. It had not occurred to me it could be the result of paid shills. The technique is called “sock puppetry”: pretending to be someone you’re not to bolster a particular point of view or promote a product. It’s a well-known tactic in PR and marketing.

During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, for example, speculators developed a technique called “pump and dump”: anonymously going on influential stock trading message boards to tout a “great, underrated” stock (which the pumper, of course, owned a lot of), driving up the price, then selling it by the bushel basket when it peaked.

More recently, a “sock puppetry” scandal broke out in the publishing world last year when it was revealed that British thriller author RJ Ellory was creating aliases with which to go online and post not just glowing reviews of his own books, but nasty “one-star” reviews on Amazon and other book sites trashing authors with whom he felt he was in competition.

Ellory later apologized, but another Brit author, Stephen Leather, defiantly announced that he’d go online under his own name and under various other names and various other characters. “You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself,” adding that everyone else does it too. (For the record, I haven’t, and hope I never will.)

Sound crazy? To paraphrase “Chinatown”: Forget about it, Jake. It’s the Internet. What probably surprises some people about the Folkenflik revelations is that a news network (as opposed to a writer trying to flog his own work to a jaded public) is using fake identities and deception to try to promote or defend its brand.

But it really shouldn’t. Not just because it’s Fox News, but because televised news in general is becoming less and less about excellence in reporting, and more and more about marketing and branding, stars and image. Fox is just better at it.

Take, for example, the set — or, as they call it, the “news deck”— that Fox reporter Shepard Smith recently revealed to the public for his show. There are 55-inch touchscreens that can be “put on the air at a moment’s notice”! A 38-foot-long “video wall” upon which Smith can move and shuffle images with what looks like a Wii controller on steroids!

The whole thing looks like Starfleet Central Control. It makes CNN’s absurd election-night coverage, which featured correspondents “beaming in” with a blue haze around them like the Princess Leia hologram in the first “Star Wars” movie, look downright puny.

Which is entirely the point. News isn’t news anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s what someone long ago dubbed “infotainment.” That’s why so many “analysis” shows are nothing but people yelling crazy, inflammatory crap at each other, and why most reportage of “breaking stories” is a steady stream of rumor, supposition and plain just making stuff up.

News is a commodity, a product, and it’s being marketed like one, with the various sources targeting their various demographics and all the stops — including online sock puppetry — pulled out to sell the product.

Whether the product is all sizzle and no steak is not their concern.

We're Up and Lurching Again

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Well, I know we’re all glad that’s over. The House and the Senate have finally reached both a continuing resolution to keep the government running at current funding levels and a raising of the debt ceiling so we can continue to pay the bills we’ve already run up.

This came about after a small but noisy group of Teahadists decided to take the government and the economy hostage to try to undo the legislative loss they’d suffered when they were unable to defeat the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Once again, they assumed that everyone hated and feared President Obama and his “Care” as much as they did, and once again, they were wrong. Even the people who disliked or distrusted the ACA weren’t, in the final analysis, willing to destroy the country’s credit rating and its already shaky ability to function to magically make it go away.

When it became apparent that the president and the Democrats were, for once, united, and that the legislative process does not include threatening to dynamite the government if a bill you don’t like got passed, the desperate and doomed Teahadists and their hapless enablers in the Republican Party began strutting and raging like Al Pacino’s bumbling bank-robber-turned-hostage-taker playing to the crowd by yelling at the cops outside the bank in the movie “Dog Day Afternoon.”

Some of my favorite (and by “favorite” I mean “I had to laugh to keep from banging my head against the wall”) moments:

— Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-Kindergarten) fuming, “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.” If you ever needed a quote to perfectly sum up the incoherent, unfocused rage and childish hissyfits that characterize the current American right, there you have it.

— Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert deriding John McCain’s criticism of the Teahadists by saying John McCain (who was a POW) was “a guy that’s been to Syria and supported al-Qaida and the rebels” — followed by McCain’s shrugging off the insult by saying, “If someone has no intelligence, I don’t view it as being a malicious statement.” Zing!

(By the way, there are some people who like to email me to express their outrage that I’m disrespecting Sen. McCain’s military service every time I say something less than complimentary about him. I’m sure you’ll want to express your displeasure to Loony Louie at his website: http:// gohmert.house.gov/contact/. Don’t bother thanking me, I’m here to help.)

— Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham admitting that while the Republicans “overplayed their hand,” he was “frustrated” at the refusal of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the president to negotiate with a gun to their heads.

“This is a very frustrated Lindsey Graham,” he added, “which is a very dangerous thing.” It would have sounded a lot more impressive if Graham didn’t sound like Aunt Pittypat from “Gone With the Wind” when he said it.

— GOP strategist Alex Castellanos likening Ted Cruz’ Quixotic crusade to “having bunny sex” — something that feels good while you’re doing it, but which is ultimately destructive because the population boom leads to an inevitable bust.

To which host Anderson Cooper incredulously asked, “Are you high?” and Castellanos replied: “I wish I was.” (By that time, he wasn’t the only one.) The next night, Cooper showed up with an actual bunny for Castellanos, who thankfully did not try to make a date with it.

— A group protesting the closure of war memorials by marching on the White House and waving Confederate battle flags. 

Because nothing says you love your country more than brandishing the flag of the people who made war on it because they lost an election.

In the end, for all their posturing, the Tealiban got nothing.

 They chose Obamacare as their hill to die on, and die on it they did, but not before costing the U.S. economy an estimated $24 billion (according to Standard and Poor’s).

People who contracted with their government suffered from the delays in contracts and payments. People trying to buy homes with FHA or VA loans found their closings delayed because the personnel needed to verify their incomes were “furloughed.” In short, for one brief moment, the government functioned exactly as it would if the Teabaggers had their way, which is to say barely at all. And people didn’t like it one bit.

So now the government is up and running again. Well, not so much running as lurching and staggering ahead toward the next crisis like an addled drunk who briefly rallies from slumbering in the gutter to make a few hundred more yards of progress toward home before collapsing again under an inviting oak tree, all the while swearing to himself, “I’m never doing this again.” I hope they don’t, but I’m not betting on it.

Make Up Your Minds: Is The ACA Slavery or the Holocaust?

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I’ve noted before how our crowded media environment has led politicians to resort to wilder and wilder rhetoric and crazy hyperbole to try to draw attention to their side.

But I have to say, the current fight over the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) has created some truly grade-A hysteria among its opponents, both on the right and the left.

For instance, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has been fond of using his stump speech to claim that the resistance of some states to implementing the Affordable Care Act is analogous to the states that refused to honor fugitive slave laws in the pre-Civil War period.

Venerable conservative George Will, whom I used to actually respect, parroted what has apparently been distributed via fax, text and email as the latest anti-Obamacare talking point.

“I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’” he groused, “as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law, and then we change them.”

New Hampshire State Rep. Bill O’Brien apparently got the memo, too. He called Obamacare “a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that allowed slave-owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African-Americans.”

To be fair, some on the left are as prone to overheated rhetoric over the ACA as those on the right. Michael Moore, for example, lambasted Obamacare because it didn’t ban the health insurance industry altogether and create a single payer system. “If you’re going to ban slavery,” he said, “ban slavery.”

Yes, because a law that keeps insurance companies from denying you coverage based on pre-existing conditions is exactly like a law requiring that human beings who achieved freedom be returned to owners who would most likely beat them half to death with a bullwhip before castrating them for running away.

And having to have health insurance is exactly like being forced to pick cotton from sunup to sundown, having your wives and daughters subject to rape, and living under constant fear of having your family broken up and sold to someone hundreds of miles away. It’s eerie how similar those two things are.

For some Republicans, however, comparing the ACA with slavery doesn’t create the horror they’re looking for. Nothing will do for them but to equate it with the Holocaust, because after all, nothing makes you look more reasonable and level-headed than the knee-jerk Hitler reference.

“You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo — the IRS,” said Maine Gov. Paul Lepage. Sheryl Nuxoll, a Republican state senator from Idaho, characterized the health care exchanges set up under the ACA as “much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps.”

Ted Cruz, in his famous “Green Eggs and Ham” faux filibuster, compared Republicans who doubted the efficacy of his “defund Obamacare or we shut down the government” strategy to the European powers who rolled over for Hitler in the 1930s.

Yes, because creating an online health care marketplace where people can compare and contract different plans is exactly like forcing people into an unheated cattle car with no room to sit or lie down and no sanitary facilities and taking them hundreds of miles to a hellhole where they’ll be tattooed with numbers on their arms and either worked to death or herded into extermination chambers and asphyxiated en masse with Prussic acid. Those are entirely the same thing.

Here’s the thing about the health care system: You really can’t opt out of it. At some point, you’re going to get sick, and you will receive medical care. We don’t just let sick people die for lack of money, because despite the efforts of the Teahadists, we’re still a civilized country. And if you don’t have the means to pay for it, then the rest of us foot the bill.

While the ACA isn’t perfect, it is one means of making sure that more people have the ability to pay for the medical care they get. It was arrived at by grueling negotiation and multiple compromises, and it was found constitutional by the Supreme Court.

Equating it with slavery or the Holocaust makes you look like the kind of teenage drama queen for whom cleaning her room before she goes out is The End of Life As She Knows It.

Lose the tantrums and grow up.

Review: BROKEN HARBOR by Tana French

Broken Harbor by Tana French
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy and his new partner Richie Curran get called out to investigate a brutal crime in a crumbling, failed, mostly empty housing estate. Two children are dead, smothered in their beds. The unemployed father is dead of multiple stab wounds and the mother is barely alive and unconscious.

The detectives immediately find more strange and unsettling things at the Spain house. There are holes smashed in the walls, with video cameras pointed at the holes and at the hatch to the attic (which is covered with wire, as if to keep something from getting out). The wife had confided in her sister that she thought an intruder had been entering the house unobserved over the past few months. And someone has set up an observation post in the empty house across the street so as to watch the place.

It's the slow peeling away of the layers of this mystery that keeps the reader fascinated and engaged. If you're looking for an edge of your seat, "who will survive and what will be left of them" thriller with the heroes in danger at every turn, this is not the book for you. The drama and conflict comes in the interaction of the characters and in their personal lives, particularly Mick's travails with his mentally unbalanced sister Dina and the memories they both carry of their mother's suicide at the beach resort that was replaced by the development where the murders took place. This means that the book sometimes gets a little slow and talky. I also had trouble swallowing one of Richie's decisions, one that's the setup for the major reveal. It just didn't seem like something that character would do.

But, as always with Tana French, the prose is absolutely beautiful--I stopped to read the soliloquy at the beginning of Chapter 18 three times because it was so perfect, even though I knew there was a major turning point about to happen. And the ending was absolutely shattering. Recommended.


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The Creature From Planet Koch

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If you’ve turned on your TV at all in the past couple of weeks, you’ve seen the ad.

Funded by the billionaire right-wing Koch Brothers through the organization “Americans for Prosperity,” the ad features a gray-haired woman of a certain age, identified only as “Tricia,” railing against the Affordable Care Act.

“Obamacare is dangerous. It can’t be implemented,” says Tricia (described on the AFP website as “an AFP activist and cancer survivor”) in a hectoring, indignant tone that suggests that she thinks “Obamacare” is a synonym for “killing puppies.”

“Your well-being judged by a bureaucrat in D.C. is devastating,” she goes on to say. Powerful stuff, and it makes you think. Mostly it makes you think, “What the heck planet has this woman been living on?”

You don’t want bureaucrats intervening in your health care, “Tricia”? Then I assume, despite your apparent age, that you’re either not on Medicare or you’re not using it. You’ve also clearly never dealt with private insurance — you know, the type that’s going to still be covering most people now that “Obamacare” is coming into full effect.

Because I can tell you, if you had, you’d know that having people you don’t know giving the thumbs-up or thumbs-down on your health care decisions is pretty much the norm, whether those people are in Washington or in a corporate headquarters far, far away.

You like being able to pick your own doctor? Great, so do the rest of us — and we can, so long as our doctor or hospital is “in network.” Who decides who’s in “network”? News flash, Trish: It ain’t the patient, and it never has been, at least if you live in the same world most of us do.

“Tricia” mentions that she’s had cancer twice and gotten great care. So I assume she’s been on the same insurance all her life and never had to worry about not being able to switch insurance companies because her cancer would be a “pre-existing condition.” Not only that, but she’s probably also been able to afford to pay if a doctor she wants is not “in network.”

No, I think I know what planet “Tricia” is from. She’s an emissary from Planet Koch, the Billionaire Planet, where people can afford to have CEO-level corporate insurance or can pay health costs out of pocket and pick their doctor if insurance doesn’t come through.

But that’s not the planet where most of us live. Most of us live in a world where it’s a relief to not be terrified of changing jobs because a new insurance plan might call your kid’s asthma or your wife’s arthritis a “pre-existing condition” and refuse to cover it.

We live in a world where full coverage for preventive care makes sense. We live in a world where we look forward to finally being able to compare plans, including their costs, side by side, in an open marketplace.

We live in a world where we look forward to more stories like that of 61-year-old Arkansan Butch Matthews, who’d been paying for his own insurance for years and watching the price go up and up and up, but who recently went on Arkansas’ new exchange and found a better plan with a lower deductible for a thousand dollars less a month.

Those exchanges, by the way, may be the thing that scares the Koch Brothers, those Creatures from The Billionaire Planet, the most.

How many times have you heard someone say that they’d like to change from a job they hate, or they’d like to start their own business, but they couldn’t afford to lose their family’s health insurance? The fear of bankruptcy due to uncovered medical expenses is the thing that has kept people in thrall to lousy jobs and bad bosses for years. And that’s just changed.

True, a lot of people will still be getting health insurance provided for them (and picked out for them) by their employers. A survey by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans found that fewer than 3 percent of employers were “at least somewhat likely” to drop coverage for full-time employees, and only .5 percent said they definitely would.

But what happens if employers do start cutting insurance benefits, say, by designating workers as “part time,” and more and more people go to the exchanges for their insurance? How will the Creatures From the Billionaire Planet keep the workers in line then?

Answer: They won’t. And that’s why they’re so desperate, and why they’re running dishonest ads like this one.