Happy Birthday Mr. Madison

Today is the 261st anniversary of the birth of James Madison.  Madison was the Father of the Constitution, the Father of the Bill of Rights, and our fourth president. He was a small man. In fact, a contemporary claimed he was “no bigger than half a piece of soap.” Despite a soft voice, he successfully debated Patrick Henry, who at the time was considered the best orator in the United States. His voice might have been low and a bit high pitched, but his words were powerful. It seems fitting that on his birthday we allow Madison to speak for himself.

Read James Madison's words

Heroes, Villains, and Things That Go Bump in The Night

Flavorwire: The Most Divisive Characters in Literary History

Emily Temple has written an interesting piece about divisive characters in literary history. These are not your run-of-the-mill heroes--or even antiheroes. These characters are a small breed set apart from normal and abnormal protagonists. Divisive characters agitate the rest of the cast, and  elicit a strong reaction from readers. For example, Temple calls Scarlett O'Hara, "selfish, vain, spoiled, and sometimes manipulative to the point of sheer cruelty." Scarlett may have been a handful, but Gone With the Wind would be a boring story without her. 

To read the entire article, follow this link.

Top Ten Reasons Congress Can’t Cut Spending

Why is it so hard to cut government spending? Because there are just so many reasons we can’t. Here are top ten excuses carried on a 3X5 card by nearly every politician.

10. Police and firemen will lose their job.

Wasn’t it a grand idea to give local government grants so we could hold police and firefighter jobs hostage.

9. A single mom in Gibbon, Nebraska wrote that this cut would devastate her family.

It would be heartless to hurt this poor, emotionally-distraught woman.

Read the other eight excuses at What Would the Founders Think?

Dueling Entrepreneurs

When a technology is about to break out commercially, entrepreneurs get their competitive spirits up. They want to dominate the marketplace for the new and nifty. Inevitably, a handful of business savvy technologists carve out large segments of the market and stiff arm any upstart that has the audacity to invade their territory.  Before long, there is usually only two to five left standing. Except, they aren't exactly standing ... these titans are gathering up arm's full of cash. Piles of money that mere mortals can't even comprehend.


Is it all really about the money? Not a chance. It's the game. It's about winning, and money is just how we score the game.


I could be talking about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Sergey Brin, but I'm not. I'm researching the next Steve Dancy Tale, and the men who brought this thought to mind lived one hundred and fifty years ago. Today, technology entrepreneurs build their empires along the western seaboard, but during the mid-eighteenth century, they live in New York City and its environs. If you want to see how little has changed in the business of leveraging emerging technologies, read about Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Nikloa Tesla, and their contemporaries. Bringing electricity to the masses was as electrifing as anything this modern bunch is doing with computers and clouds. You'll be startled at the parallels.

Principled Action is Now Available

Principled Action

Lessons from the Origins of the American Republic

by James D. Best

Prior to 1776, world history was primarily written about kings and emperors. The American experiment shook the world. Not only did the colonies break away from the biggest and most powerful empire in history, they took the musings of the brightest thinkers of the Enlightenment and implemented them. The Founding of the United States was simultaneously an armed rebellion against tyranny and a revolution of ideas—ideas that changed the course of world history. Principled Action shows how the Founders built this great nation with sacrifice, courage, and steadfast principles.


A great non-fiction companion book for Tempest at Dawn

Available at Barnes & Noble or Amazon

Our Health Care Quagmire

In those bad ol’ days, the poor were treated at county hospitals. This changed with passage of The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) as part of a larger bill called the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, something many of us are familiar with by the name COBRA. (Some politician once muttered that Americans should be fearful of any bill that contained the word Omnibus.)

EMTALA mandated that hospitals provide emergency service to anyone who showed up at their door, regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay. There were no provisions in the bill for any payments to hospitals for these services.

Read the full article at What Would the Founders Think?

Heroes, Villains, and Things that go Bump in the Night

In a previous post, I wrote about villainous animals and machines, but most villains are human. In my mind, villains are a subset of antagonists, and the very worst villains are yet a further sub-division. In this article, I’ll look at the most depraved villains in modern storytelling. These are really bad guys and gals who have no socially redeeming value. They have three overwhelming characteristics:

1.      they mean the protagonist the worst imaginable harm,

2.      they are smart or brutally forceful—or both,

3.      there is no redemption at the end of the story.

These are the most memorable villains in all of fiction. I have a Pinterest Board titled “Bad to the Bone” that displays pinups of extreme villains that meet the above criteria. It only looks like a crowded field. In fact, bad to the bone antagonists are the exception. Most villains are portrayed with far more subtlety or empathy. The most obvious reason for painting antagonists in gray-tones is that humans are not all good or all bad, but when a villain is expertly portrayed as pure evil, it raises the story to a level that can transcend generations and cultures.

 

As an example, look at Martin Vanger, from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He is not only a second generation serial killer of young girls, he enjoys assaulting and torturing them over an extended period of time. He has no remorse, he shows no mercy, and he neither seeks nor finds redemption. Another example is Elliot Marston in Quigley Down Under, who under false pretenses lures Quigley to Australia to kill aborigines. Other examples include the Wicked Witch of the West, Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, Salieri in Amadeus, Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker, and the front-runner for worst fictional father of all time, Jack Torrance in The Shining. There is only one answer for these extreme villains … death.

 Most stories are about a flawed hero pitted against a villain that harbors some sort of rationalization for his less than pristine behavior. You might call this the decent against the bad, rather than good versus evil. Nuanced characters are more like real life. But sociopaths exist in real life as well. Amon Goeth in Schindler's List is perhaps the most disturbing of my gallery of rogues because he is based on a real person. As in all storytelling, we are meant to take away lessons from tales of good versus evil.

Ameritopia Reviewed

In Ameritopia, Levin pits utopian ideologists against republican theorists who champion the individual. The book is a compact survey course in government theory from Plato to Tocqueville. Plato, Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx are presented in Part I on Utopianism. John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville make up the team on the right, so to speak.

Read the full review at What Would The Founders Think?

Stonewall Grant reviews The Shopkeeper

"The Shopkeeper did not disappoint. It's well written with deep characters (that we care about) and a swift plot that keeps the pages turning.  The descriptions of the vast Nevada country are ample without the overkill. Great dialogue and a well contrived plot."

Read the Full Review

Happy Presidents Day

On President’s Day it seems only fitting that we let the men who’ve held the title speak for themselves.

What Would The Founders Think?

Obama Flexes His New Powers

When the Patient Protection and Affordability Act passed, the administration pooh-poohed the accusation that the national government was taking over sixteen percent of the economy.  They kept repeating that they had not included a single-payer feature, so it must be a free market reform. Similarly, there were vehement denials that the Dodd Frank bill, formally named the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, was a takeover of the financial sector.

Read the full article at What would the Founders Think?

Heroes, Villains, and Things that go Bump in the Night

I’m not generally a fan of mechanized villains. For the most part, they seem like an easy device to turn excessive violence into bloodless mayhem. An example would be the battle droids in Star Wars. Mow hundreds of them down and still receive a PG rating. It’s the same with Megatron in Transformers.

 

There have been some terrific machine villains: machines that were scary, clever, and tough as tempered steel. The irony is that all of the great bad-guy-machines were humanized—which meant they couldn’t be indiscriminately killed by the dozens. My favorite is Roy Batty, the leader of renegade replicants in Blade Runner. Batty was humanized to the extent that he cried,  found redemption, and bid our hero a great life.

 

Spielberg invented a vile machine in Duel, his first full-length movie. The rusted-out semi chased our common-man hero over hill and dale. Granted, there must have been a driver, but we never saw him and the truck itself was portrayed as malevolent. Christine was another wheeled vehicle that seemed more like-like than some of the cast. The Terminator is an obvious example, but the T-800 stayed a mindless robot for the entire first story. It wasn’t until Arnold Schwarzenegger went over to the light-side that later incarnations were humanized. West World’s gunslinger, Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey are other great examples.

Machines can make great villains, but if you want the audience to care if they are defeated, then you need to give them a personality.

5 Worst Typos Ever

Amusing video of 5 Worst Typos ever, including the United States Constitution and the Bible.

By the way, this is an example of great book promotion.

Western Writers of America Roundup Magazine reviews Murder at Thumb Butte

This is a well-plotted mystery, as well as a terrific Old West story. I found the idea of a stock swindle entertaining, especially considering the era in which the story is set. It could’ve been ripped from today’s headlines, but reads entirely authentic to the time period. Best has a great character in Steve Dancy, and has created an excellent cast of secondary characters. — C.K. Crigger

Read the Full Review