In school we learned that the Luddites were afraid of industrialization, and carried out campaigns of senseless destruction to fight the inevitable. The very term "luddite" has become a pejorative for a backward-lotoking person who rejects progress.

However, a new author has suggested a a more nuanced view of the objections of skilled craftsmen to ( Read more... )

So the House of Representatives is impeaching President Donald J. Trump for the second time, with all of seven days to go before the Inauguration. This is only going to convince a significant portion of the population that it was politically motivated ( Read more... )

There are a lot of people wondering what President Trump has been doing since his speech on the Ellipse on January 6. With his Twitter account closed, we no longer have his regular stream of Tweets, and some people have wondered if the last few before his permaban may have been scripted, even written by someone else. The last we've seen of him is ( Read more... )

Yesterday a video appeared on President Trump's Twitter feed in which he appears to be conceding the election. It quickly went viral and is still available on a number of websites, even after Twitter canceled the @realDonaldTrump account ( Read more... )

Ever since the first of the year, I've been having visions of disaster. Not hallucinations, more like the sort of seeing events in your mind's eye that happens when you're reading a really engaging novel. Images of crowds running in panic, of screams and shots fired, of sirens and explosions. Images of the Capitol and other landmarks of our ( Read more... )

Today is promising to be a day that makes history, and not necessarily in a good way ( Read more... )

I've always been fascinated with storms, especially severe storms. Many of my novels have storms during significant turning points. Khuldhar's War has a storm during the instigating event that gets everything started. The Workhouse War has a storm during a critical turning point, and the subsequent electrical outage is also important. The Steel ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends is from Becky Jones, and is a photograph showing a factory with graffiti on it reading GUNK SMURF. This was a challenging one, because when I first saw it, it suggested a scene from a music video, perhaps a fan video for Coldplay's "Charlie Brown." However, I don't have the video ( Read more... )

Today is the fourth day of protests here in Indianapolis, and the second night with an 8PM curfew. Last night the police were arresting people who were still on the downtown streets after curfew, and I saw several news photos of people being put in paddy wagons to be transported to the lockup ( Read more... )