Author: leeduigon

A recent study by the prestigious British medical magazine, The Lancet, shows that New York City residents are living longer, these days. How come?

“Experts… are crediting Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s health initiatives during the last decade” for making New Yorkers live longer–banning smoking, banning trans-fat, banning soda, and so on. Maybe it only seems longer to those who have to live under the Bloomberg regime. A lot longer.

I do wish the experts would leave the fantasies to us fantasy writers! Hello! Can anybody do simple logic around here? There is no evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between Bloomberg’s meddling in people’s lives and the length of those lives. There is no longitudinal study. You’d have to follow the lives of people born at the same time those policies were instituted, keep the policies in place throughout those people’s lives, see how long they live–and then compare them to the life-spans of New Yorkers who lived before Bloomberg started banning everything.

It would be just as logical to say New Yorkers’ life-spans have increased since Alex Rodriguez started playing for the Yankees.

In fact, it would be just as true to say they started living longer since my book, Bell Mountain, was published. I knew it had to be good for something beyond mere entertainment!

Please feel free to pass this good news on to your friends who want to live longer.

Have you noticed that, in the United States and Canada, you cannot possibly get into trouble for saying vile things about Christians and Christianity? But oh, boy, are you in hot water if you venture to speak even the slightest discouraging word about any other religion!

Even more zealously protected than non-Christian religions, and held much more sacrosanct, are the various perversions celebrated in our senile Western world these days. There are Democrats who will actually condemn you for “transphobia.” And what the dickens is transphobia? When I type it out, my computer puts a red line under it, indicating there is no such word. But it seems to denote, in the so-called minds of liberals, an unreasonable aversion–by which they mean any aversion at all–to persons whose whole lives revolve around trying to inhabit the gender opposite the one they were born into.

But if you are out there to say false, insulting, and filthy things about Christians, you’ll get an invitation to the White House if you say it loud enough.

How did this come to be the case, in what once were Christian countries?

I dreamed of Narnia last night. No kidding–I was there. You should have seen the colors: indefinably different from ours, and overwhelmingly beautiful.

I found myself in a forest, in an army. An old knight with a long, white mustache was handing out… umbrellas, of all things. I got one, too. “Aslan says this is all we’ll need today,” he explained. Then it started to rain: and I understood we were going to go into a battle in which God had already won the victory.

Then, of course, I woke up. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Couldn’t get back, either. But I’m thankful for the bit I did receive, and I find my spirits buoyed by it. You don’t easily forget a dream like that.

Let me just get this off my chest…

The recently-concluded world championship chess match between Vishy Anand (India) and Boris Gelfand (Israel)–in which Anand successfully defended his title–was mind-crushingly dull. And if they keep it up like this, top-level chess will go extinct.

First they played twelve regular games of chess–ten of which were draws! Each won a single game, leading to a series of “rapid chess” (in which less time is allowed) to break the tie. Anand won one of those and Gelfand didn’t, sparing the world a tie-breaking series of “blitz” (real, real fast chess). And if that had wound up tied, too? Flip a coin? Perhaps a game of battleship?

Don’t even ask what the purse was for this stultifying exhibition of futility. It would only depress you if you knew.

These were boring games! But in championship-quality chess, everybody trains with chess computers using the same software, everybody endlessly studies everybody else’s games, and the world’s top masters wind up playing the same tedious moves all the time, each hoping the other guy falls into a cataleptic trance or something… And with so much money at stake, no one dares try anything original.

Imagine any other sport in which 10 out of 12 games end in a tie. Maybe if they knocked $50,000 off the purse for each draw, the players would change their ways. Or had these big impatient guys on hand to beat the masters up every time they played to a draw… I dunno, but they’ve got to do something. And just about anything would be an improvement.

I’m a fantasy writer. I make things up–the wilder, the better. Years ago, I was a horror writer. I made up things that were intended to be scary.

Meanwhile, back in the real world this week, the New Mexico Appeals Court ruled that of course the state government can order Christians to do things that violate their religious beliefs. The court was referring to the 2006 case of a mom-and-pop photography business, owned by Christians, that declined to memorialize a lesbian pseudo-wedding. The fine for such “hateful” behavior was in excess of $6,000–a sum that is able to ruin a small business. Do what the lesbians want, or you lose your livelihood.

The original decision was made by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission. You would think these bloody things were unconstitutional. “Human Rights” denotes the practice of elevating the rights of homosexuals over the rights of everybody else. The practice has been honed to a fine art in Canada, where there is no constitution–only some “Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms” that somehow allows Canadian jurisprudence to proceed according to the assumption that Canadians have only those freedoms which the government says they have–on any given day.

As an example of fantastic thinking that would do credit to any fantasy writer, we have this from the official website of the Ontario Human Rights Commission: “The Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that society must be designed to be inclusive of all persons…” Therefore, the OHRC has the authority to police the “organizational culture” of a company or a voluntary association, right down to the level of “informal social behavior, such as communication, decision-making and interpersonal relationships, which are the evidence of deeply held and largely unconscious values, assumptions and behavioral norms…” (emphasis added)

Warning, warning, warning! They are coming for your freedoms, people. Who’s “they”? The progressives; the elite; the wise; the whoopee crowd–why even answer? You know right well who they are! They mean to erase your liberty, and it’s already late in the day to stop them.

I’m a fantasy writer, and I can’t even begin to make up stuff like this.

Fiction abounds in criminal masterminds like Dr. Fu Manchu, Professor James Moriarity, Lord Reesh, et al. What they all have in common is, they’re smart. That’s why it takes someone like Sherlock Holmes to stop them.

We, poor devils, live in a real world dominated by stupid masterminds. Their schemes are too stupid to succeed, but they do just as much harm, maybe even more, than Moriarity and Co.

Our masterminds think socialism really works, there are 57 states in the United States, society is better off without marriage and the family, you can spend your way out of debt, and so on. Even the people we think are really smart are really stupid. Hundreds of Nobel Prize winners have signed on to the Humanist Manifesto II–a document that recommends a mix of atheism, abortion, suicide, and homosexuality as the solution to the world’s problems.

If you wrote a fantasy novel or a detective novel featuring the machinations of a really stupid mastermind, it would be classed as unimaginative fiction. People would think you were trying to write a Democrat Party platform. “Duh! How about we tax the pants off people who work, and give the money to people who don’t work? That ought to get the economy humming!” There are real-life stupid masterminds working on that very scheme even as you read this. And others just as addled.

Go ahead, try it yourself–try to write a story in which the villain is a big stupid idiot whose asinine ideas can’t possibly result in anything but chaos and misery.

You’ll find you’re writing about real life.