Sunday Morning Book Thread 07-24-2016: It's Commies All The Way Down [OregonMuse]

University of Michigan Law Library

Good morning to all of you morons and moronettes and bartenders everywhere and all the ships at sea. Welcome to AoSHQ's stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread, where men are men, all the 'ettes are lovely, safe spaces are for losers, and nobody cares about what kind of snowflake you are, so suck it up, buttercup. And unlike other AoSHQ comment threads, the Sunday Morning Book Thread is so hoity-toity, pants are required. And these don't count.

Geez people, go home and read a book.

There's no hope.

Posted by: Country Boy at July 17, 2016 08:31 PM (zzzTG)

(The AoSHQ Sunday Morning Book Thread approves of moron Country Boy's take on the Pokemon Go fad craze national obsession)

Nood Communism

A couple of weeks back, I was complaining of Howard Zinn and other rat bastard commies rewriting of history to make the American founders out to be nothing but greedy, slaving rich guys. I got an interesting response:

#30: https://tinyurl.com/brjhz

Posted by: Country Singer at July 03, 2016 11:39 AM (GUBah)

The page links to a list of "Current Communist Goals", #30 of which is

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

Sounds about right. So, the question that occurred to me was, where did this list come from? It looks pretty much like the things the rat bastard commies have been up to for the past several decades, but I want to know where it came from. Did the commies just sit down one day and draw it up as a list of action items (perhaps inspired by Lenin's essay What Is To Be Done?) or was it put together by anti-communists who wanted to explain their own observations of what they saw the rat bastards doing?

As it turns out, it's more the latter: the list appeared, unsourced, in the book The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen, who compiled it from a variety of material:

If the student will read the reports of Congressional hearings together with available books by ex-Communists, he will find all of these Communist objectives described in detail. Furthermore, he will come to understand how many well-meaning citizens have become involved in pushing forward the Communist program without realizing it. They became converted to Communist objectives because they accepted superficial Communist slogans. Soon they were thinking precisely the way the Communists wanted them to think.

TNC is an interesting book. In its day, it sold over 2 million copies, according to the Amazon description.

The Naked Communist contains a distillation of more than one hundred books and treatises on communism, many written by Marxist authors. This text that reviewers have called "the most powerful book on communism since J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit" sees the communist as he sees himself - stripped of propaganda and pretense. Readers are offered an explanation of the appeal of communism, its history, its basic and unchanging concepts - even its secret timetable of conquest.

It starts out with a biography of Karl Marx and his friendship with Engels. I did not know that he came from a long line of rabbis, but even so, one day when he was about 5 or 6 years old his father came home and announced "Hey, guess what, we're all Lutherans now." So young Karl was baptized into the Lutheran Church. This switcheroo was so sudden I think it must had quite an effect on how he came to view religion, i.e. all there is to the universe is a bunch of atoms banging around. Marx's materialistic philosophy is discussed in the next chapter, followed by bios of Lenin and Stalin and the history of communism in Russia

Skousen has also written many other books, such as The 5000 Year Leap (which apparently Glenn Beck used to hype back when he was on Fox), The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, as well as a couple of other nood books, The Naked Capitalist and The Naked Socialist.

Also books on Mormon theology and history too numerous to list.

You can actually download The Naked Communist in a variety of formats for free here.

And on a biographical note:

Mr. Skousen and his wife, Jewel Pitcher of San Bernardino, California, are the parents of eight children, 50 grandchildren, and more than 120 great-grandchildren.

And this is why Mormons will soon be taking over the world. They're the only one having lots of children.

Free (but Competitive) Calliope Workshop, NYC

And as long as I'm stealing stuff from Votermom's blog, why stop now?

Taliesin Nexus, in partnership with Liberty Island, is holding Calliope Author's Workshop, which is "a workshop specifically dedicated to authors working in fiction and narrative nonfiction who share an interest in liberty."

The Calliope workshop is from Sept 9-11 in New York City, and the amazing part of it for writers just starting out - it is completely free! If you are selected to participate, they will provide your airfare and hotel accommodations.

This year's faculty includes Sarah Hoyt and other authors and publishers.

This is one of those things I wished I had announced sooner. The deadline for entries is July 31st. Find out how to apply to participate in this workshop at the Taliesin Nexus site.

(H/T NaCly Dog for the cartoon)

Worst President Ever?

We don't need to wait until Jan. 2017 to know this. Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan get it in early with their new book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama:

The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama compiles 200 inconvenient truths about Obama’s presidency—the facts that will shape his legacy: His real record on the economy; the disaster that is Obamacare; his shocking abuses of taxpayer dollars; his bitterly divisive style of governing; his shameless usurping of the Constitution; his scandals and cover ups; his policy failures at home and abroad; the unprecedented expansion of government power... and more.

All of these facts are now at your fingertips in a single source. The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama is your ultimate guide to Obama's real record - the record he’d like history to forget.

Not a bad Kindle deal for $3.99

Moronette Votermom has an interview with Matt Margolis. In her review of the book, she points out this is not some sort of rage anthology, but rather:

[T]he authors use a calm and reasoned tone, there does not seem to be any emotionalism. From the title I was a bit worried that it would have a lot of angry rants but it's not that type of book.

But if it's a rage anthology you're looking for, check out the one-star reviews of this book on Amazon. Not only are they hilarious, but as of this date, there is not one "verified purchase" in the bunch. I know everybody is surprised by this.

Also:

It's more a chronicling of current history. Given how quickly we, the public, forget, and how the media loves to whitewash Democrat actions, I think this is an important book; I'm glad the authors have published it.

Emphasis mine. This is a good point. Someone needs to be standing there at the memory hole, keeping track of what's getting flushed. Hopefully, this book will help serve that purpose.

Request For Beta Readers

Moronette 'right wing whippersnapper' is finishing up her YA novel and needs some fresh eyes to take a look at it:

I'm in search of someone to beta read/edit my first novel, a YA low fantasy (lots of swords, pretty dresses, and poisonous royal courts, but no magic, dragons, or end of the world) with a large helping of romance, a few little mysteries, and a twenty-year feud between two kings to keep everybody engaged. Because of the subject matter, it's probably of more interest to the 'ettes than the 'rons, but I'll take help from anyone who offers. If you're interested, shoot me an email at countrywoman539 at gee mail dot com.

Moron Recommendations

Again dipping into ace's book rec thread (which I've been dining out on for weeks now), a moron who is socking L. Ron Hubbard recommended Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, which, the Amazon blurb describes as

...a deep penetration into the world of Scientology by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, the now-classic study of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—both famous and less well known—and years of archival research, Lawrence Wright uses his extraordinary investigative ability to uncover for us the inner workings of the Church of Scientology.

This rec caught my eye because I am currently reading the other book by Mr. Wright mentioned in the blurb, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

The book starts out with the FBI agent who first notices this WWE heel named Osama bin Laden shouting from a cave in Afghanistan, and his efforts to impress upon his colleagues the necessity of hey, you know, maybe we should keep an eye on this guy.

H/T to moron commenter "Randy Weaver's Revenge" for this rec, who also says

I won't even go into the myriad of conflicts between the CIA and FBI that resulted in no one having the whole picture, thus allowing the attack to proceed.

9/11: the perfect storm of incompetence and suck.

Books By Morons

Part Two of naturalfake's 'Wearing The Cat' series has just been published. The Fox's Den continues the saga of naval dentist Lt. Nick McGill, who

...arrives at MCAS Katsuobushi Japan as the Lieutenant Deluxe, the finest lieutenant, professionally, militarily, dentally, socially, spiritually, that the Old Man has ever had the privilege of serving with in the whole of his Naval career.

McGill has the papers to prove it.

And all it took was a little blackmail.

McGill's idiotic yet brilliant solutions to his dilemmas lead to an exquisite series of surprises, twists, and laughs as just about everything that could possibly go wrong does for McGill. And changes his life forever.

I read the first in the series. It's pretty dang funny. But the humor is for adults.

The Kindle edition is currently priced at 99 cents, so what are you waiting for?

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Moronette 'votermom' is putting together a list of moron authors over on the Goodreads site which is intended to be accessible to non-members. Here is the list she has compiled so far. Let her know if there's an author she's missing.

http://www.bookhorde.org/p/aoshq-authors.html

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Don't forget the AoSHQ reading group on Goodreads. It's meant to support horde writers and to talk about the great books that come up on the book thread. It's called AoSHQ Moron Horde and the link to it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175335-aoshq-moron-horde.

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So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, rumors, threats, and insults may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.

posted by Open Blogger at 08:59 AM

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