Month: October 2011

CPT Thomas J. Casey’s Bronze Star

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by Gary Farber

Published this morning in the Valencia County News-Bulletin of New Mexico: 

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John Casey will tell you the story of his son. He will tell you Thomas J. Casey was always polite and well behaved as a child — had a great attitude, competitive and a team player. 

Casey will tell you Tom made it through the rigors of the Albuquerque Academy and graduated cum laude in 1997 from the University of New Mexico with majors in Spanish and Portuguese.

And Casey will tell you the part of his son's story that he dearly wishes was unwritten.

On Jan. 3, 2008, Army Capt. Thomas J. Casey gave his life defending the men in his unit while on a mission in Iraq. He was 32-years old.

In recognition of his actions, the Army awarded Tom the Bronze Star Medal with Valor. His father and family received the medal on his behalf during a ceremony last month at Fort Riley, Kan. The Bronze Star Medal with Valor is the fourth-highest combat award given by the U.S. Armed Forces.

To be awarded the medal with the "V" device, a soldier's team members must give testimony before the Army's Decoration Board.

From that testimony, and the investigative report written about the day his son died, Casey says he has a pretty good idea of what happened out in the "hinterlands" of rural Iraq.

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Your migrating dinosaur Friday open thread

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by liberal japonicus Though I may be assuming that my foibles are shared by everyone my age, I think that American kids of a certain age, had a fascination with dinosaurs. So if that's the case, this, from the Guardian, discusses recent evidence for dinosaur migrations. What is the evidence? Fricke's team attempted to reconstruct … Read more

The future of Libya open thread

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by liberal japonicus This is an open thread for what's happening in Libya and anything related to that. If anyone has good links, especially to explanations of factions, people who may emerge, stuff like that, I'll try and move them up here as they appear. I'm also wondering if the various gory pictures that I've … Read more

The Last Refuge of Climate Change Skeptics

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by Eric Martin Kevin Drum recounts an intriguing tale of a Koch-funded, climate change skeptic (Richard Muller) who undertook a scientific study to test what were thought to be the hyped numbers about increased global temperatures.  A funny thing happened along the way: Muller's study actually confirmed that, as the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists holds, temperatures over the … Read more

Flat tax and pulling your own weight

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by Doctor Science Herman Cain has lured all the flat-tax advocates out into the open again, and I’m trying to find a more effective way to reply to them than banging my head against the wall and chanting “regressive! regressive!” Here’s a typical specimen, taken from the comments to Paul Krugman’s blog: Why should taxes … Read more

Hamlet’s Father: Orson Scott Card and the nightmare of the patriarchal family

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by Doctor Science

HamletsFatherLast month there was quite a uproar in the sf/fantasy realm over Orson Scott Card’s novella Hamlet’s Father, a re-working of Hamlet in which Hamlet’s father turns out to have been a gay child molester. Rose Fox at Publisher’s Weekly has a good summary of the firestorm; as she says,

But this is the thing about offensiveness grenades: they may look entirely inert for so long that you forget they’re dangerous, but sooner or later, they explode.

One reason for the uproar is that OSC (as he’s often known) is outspokenly anti-homosexual — yonmei’s posts on Dissecting Orson Scott Card go into all the detail you can stomach.

“Hamlet’s Father” was originally published in The Ghost Quartet, four sf/horror novellas edited by Marvin Kaye, so I got it out of the library and read it to judge for myself. What I found was that the people objecting to the story (who actually read it, that is) were mostly IMHO reading it wrong. This is not surprising, because IMHO OSC *wrote* it wrong.

William Alexander at Rain Taxi is wrong when he describes the “punch line” as:

“Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people.

And Publisher’s Weekly is wrong to say:

the focus is primarily on linking homosexuality with the life-destroying horrors of pedophilia

I disagree. The story is not in any developed way about homosexuality, it is about child abuse. In that respect, it’s very much like the rest of OSC’s fiction, which focuses on the figure of an abused child with a consistency I can only call compulsive.

So (IMHO, IMHO, it’s all just A Theory Which Is Mine) OSC wrote it wrong because he’s unable to look clearly at the pictures he himself paints. A basic rule of fiction writing is “Show, Don’t Tell” — and what OSC *shows* is the traditional, patriarchal family as a nightmare of abuse, while what he *tells* is that these are the only “real families” worthy of respect.

I am cutting here for:

TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of fictional and real-life child abuse, emotional and sexual. Survivors take care.

SPOILER WARNING: post and comments may contain spoilers for any work by Orson Scott Card.

PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY WARNING: includes analysis and speculation about the psychological makeup of a living person, verging on Real Person Fic. May contain trace Freudian concepts.

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The first hit of Homestuck is free

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by Doctor Science

In recent months my primary fresh fandom has been Hawaii 5-0, but now that Season 2 has begun we’ve broken up. It’s not me, show, it’s you —

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Steve McGarrett (back to camera) has a few questions for a witness. You can’t tell in this still from episode 2×03, but the guy’s arm is in a sling. Also, it turns out he hasn’t done anything wrong.
— but I’ll talk more about the militarization of American TV police in another post.

So being in the market for a new fandom, I decided to check out the Sprogs’ latest interest: Homestuck by Andrew Hussie (AH) at MS Paint Adventures. It started out as a webcomic about an interactive game, I guess, but by now I’d have to call it a web narrative, or indeed a web *epic*. I really hope to see it nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story next year; IMHO it certainly deserves to win, not least because it’s really science fictional.


A young lady stands in her bedroom. Due to a violent storm, her house has just lost power, along with her wireless internet connection. This has severed her link to a popular video game she was playing with a young man at a critical moment. That young man is relying on this young lady to reestablish a connection somehow. See full-sized at MS Paint Adventures.

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