Birthers: a clarification

Back in 2008, when Senator Barack Obama was running for president, a group of Hillary Clinton dead-enders called PUMAs started running with a conspiracy theory claiming that Obama's Hawaiian birth had been faked somehow, and that he was actually born in Kenya, and was thus ineligible to serve as President of the United States. This was despite the fact that the Clinton campaign itself had found Obama's birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper. The PUMA conspiracy theory quickly spread to various right wing sources, including Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and, eventually, Donald Trump. The proponents of this conspiracy theory became known as birthers, by analogy with the 9/11 attack conspiracy theorists, known as truthers.

In an amusing sequel to the birther phenomenon, Donald Trump, now himself the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, is claiming that rival candidate Senator Ted Cruz's Canadian birth makes him ineligible to serve as president. Because of the similarity of the claims against Cruz and Obama, and because Trump himself has made the same claim against both men, the term "birther" is being applied to Trump and other figures who are disputing Cruz's eligibility.

This is wrong. The anti-Obama conspiracy-mongers were called birthers because the heart of their conspiracy theory involved disputing that Obama was born in the United States. That is not the case with Cruz. Everyone, including Cruz himself, agrees that he was not born in the United States. Thus, there is no actual conspiracy theory involved; only the legal question of whether Cruz's universally-acknowledged foreign birth disqualifies him for the presidency.

If you want a term for the people who dispute Cruz's eligibility, you might call them "natural-borners", because the issue they raise is whether Cruz is a natural-born citizen within the meaning of the Constitution. Thus, Trump is both a "birther" and a "natural-borner", while Mary Brigid McManamon is a "natural-borner" but not a "birther".

Cruz's current natural-borner controversy is particularly amusing because, had it not been for the birthers making a prolonged fuss about Obama's alleged foreign birth, the question of Cruz's actual foreign birth might not even have come up.

General Philip Benner

General Philip Benner (1762 - 1832) was a businessman in the iron trade from Pennsylvania. Benner Township, in Centre County, is named after him.

Born in East Viincent township, Chester County on May 19, 1762, at a young age Benner served in the American Revolutionary War. Benner went into the iron smelting business after the war in Coventry, Chester County, with a store in East Vincent. After marrying Ruth Roberts (1765 - 1827), Benner purchased land in what was then Upper Bald Eagle Township, Mifflin County in 1792, and established an iron foundry there two years later. It may have been around this time that Benner was commissioned a major-general of militia, the source of his military title. Benner's business interests in the area expanded to include a grist mill and a slitting mill by the time Centre County was established in 1800. From 1802 to 1811, Benner was involved in a legal dispute over the ownership of his land, which ended with him losing his case and being compelled to buy his land a second time.

With the land dispute settled, Benner expanded production from his iron foundry, opening up a trade in iron with Pittsburgh and the western counties. In 1821, Benner became the first president of the Centre & Kishacoquillas Turnpike Company, and assisted in the construction of the turnpike. Benner also contributed to the construction of water-works in the borough of Bellefonte, as well as several houses there. Benner opened stores in Bellefonte and Ferguson township.

As Benner's businesses were expanding in the 1820s, the United States was emerging from the Era of Good Feeling and entering the period of the Second Party System, when the rise of Andrew Jackson split the dominant Democratic-Republican Party into pro- and anti-Jackson factions. Benner was a Jackson supporter, and he served as a presidential elector for the 1824 Jackson-Calhoun ticket. Following Jackson's defeat in the 1824 election, his supporters began building up a new, populist political machine, the foundation of the modern Democratic Party. Benner took part in this partisan activity by establishing the Centre Democrat in 1827.

Despite his general success as a businessman, Benner did suffer the occasional setback. He once spent $50,000 financing the building of a steamboat in Pittsburgh, and loading it with a cargo of iron. The steamboat captain Benner hired was supposed to sell the iron and use to proceeds to purchase a cargo of tobacco for return to Pittsburgh. Instead, he sold the steamboat along with the iron, and absconded to Europe with the money.

Mrs. Ruth Benner died on January 7, 1827 at the age of sixty-two. Her husband died five years later, on July 27, 1832. The couple had eight children.

David Bowie 1947-2016

Today's embedded music video features David Bowie performing the title track from the 1986 film Absolute Beginners.

Scorpions in a Bottle: The Carlisle Commission

In For Want of a Nail, Sobel takes a page from our own history, and has Lord North send a peace commission to the Continental Congress in the spring of 1778 headed by the Earl of Carlisle. In our own history, this came after the surrender of Burgoyne's army at the Battle of Saratoga, and was a desperate attempt by North to forestall a military alliance between the American rebels and the French. In our history, North deliberately deceived the commission's members by failing to tell them that he had ordered General Clinton to evacuate Philadelphia. Had he done so, of course, the commissioners would have known that their mission was doomed to failure, and they would have refused to go. As it was, the mission had already failed before the commissioners set out from London, since the Americans and the French had already signed an alliance in February.

One would expect that a British victory at Saratoga would have made the North ministry more determined than ever to use military force to crush the American rebellion. This would have been consistent with 15 years of previous British policy, which was based on a dismissal of American concerns and contempt for the Americans as people. However, Sobel was evidently interested in exploring a world where the Americans returned to being loyal British subjects, and a long, costly British military campaign in America, even if successful, would have sowed the seeds of lasting enmity between Britain and America. So, instead of military conquest, Sobel shows us a British government willing to use negotiations, and satisfaction of American grievances, to end the war. In the Sobel Timeline, the Carlisle Commission basically offers the Americans the same terms as it did in our history. With the Rebellion going much worse for the Americans, this turns out to be an offer that the Americans can't refuse.

* * *

(this section continues on from the Joseph Galloway section)

In London, rumors of victory and defeat in America came hard upon one another’s heels. Word came first of defeat at Bennington, then at Freeman’s Farm, then at Bemis Heights. All of London held its breath, as if fearing that the next news from America would tell of Burgoyne’s surrender to Gates. Instead, news came of Gates’ defeat, and the disintegration of his army. Burgoyne’s victory, along with Howe’s capture of Philadelphia and his repulse of Washington’s counterattack, raised the prestige of the North ministry, and discredited those like Burke and Wilkes who had denounced the ministry’s America policy. Finally, North received word from Paul Wentworth, his agent in Paris, that the French government had grown discouraged by the news from America and was cutting off its supplies of money and arms to the rebels. Wentworth also reported that he had been approached by Franklin, who wished to negotiate an end to the Rebellion and the return of the colonies to British rule. [1]

If the Americans had given up hope of winning their independence, North had given up hope of the military conquest of the rebellious colonies. Burgoyne’s report on his victory had stressed the failure of the expected Loyalist uprising to occur, and the stiff resistance he had encountered from the rebels. He also emphasized the precarious nature of his occupation of Albany, and the general anti-British sentiment of the surrounding country. [2] With these facts in mind, on February 16, 1778, North called a secret meeting of the Cabinet to discuss a possible negotiated settlement of the conflict. No one present disagreed with North’s analysis of the general situation: the ministry had erred badly in its response to the Americans’ growing intransigence in the Crisis, misreading the temper of the American colonists, and the strength of Loyalist sentiment. Instead of cowing the Americans into submission, the ministry’s policies had stiffened the Americans’ resolve to resist, and finally driven them into open rebellion.

Without revealing the source of his information, North informed the Cabinet that the Americans were prepared to return to British rule provided that there was a general settlement of colonial grievances along the lines of Galloway’s Plan of Union. There were heated objections from a few members, notably Lord Germain, but a majority of the Cabinet sided with North, as long as the proposal was seen to emanate from the ministry rather than the colonists. A month later, a commission headed by the Earl of Carlisle was sent to the Congress to offer the proposed settlement. [3]

Events in America continued to favor the reconciliationists. Disillusioned former soldiers from the Continental Army blamed the Congress, and the revolutionary state governments, for the military failures suffered at Saratoga-Albany and Philadelphia. In Virginia, for instance, Governor Patrick Henry was deposed by Theodorick Bland, who had served as a cavalry commander in the Continental Army under Washington. Bland and his supporters (most of whom, like him, were former members of the Continental Army), raised up Edmund Pendleton in Henry’s place. Pendleton issued instructions to Virginia’s delegation to the Congress to support efforts at reconciliation with Britain, leading to the resignations of the radical members Richard Henry Lee and Joseph Jones. [4]

Events in Virginia were echoed elsewhere in the rebellious colonies. By the time the Earl of Carlisle’s commission arrived in America in early May, reconciliationists had gained control of the Congress, and Galloway was one of its most prominent members, replacing Carroll as President on May 23. Under Galloway’s leadership, the Congress agreed on May 27 to ask Lord North for an armistice based on the Carlisle proposals. Carlisle sent word to the British military leadership of the agreement, and they began making preparations for the joint military rule of the reunited colonies that would cause them to be known as the Four Viceroys. The formal articles for armistice were signed by Carlisle and Galloway on June 12, 1778, and over the next two weeks most of the remaining rebel militia surrendered to their British counterparts. The North American Rebellion was over. [5]

1. Dame Brook Alyson. Lord North and His Times (London, 2001), pp. 356-62.

2. Wesley Van Luvender. The Military Thought and Actions of John Burgoyne (New York, 1944), p. 476-79.

3. Henderson Bundy. The Carlisle Commission (New York, 2005), pp. 34-36.

4. Patricia Foster Gooch. Virginia in Rebellion, 1775-1778 (Norfolk, 1997), pp. 282-93.

5. Bundy. The Carlisle Commission, pp. 203-11.

More armed white men

So, a bunch of armed white men have taken over an unoccupied building in a wildlife refuge in Oregon, in defense of a couple of imprisoned poachers, Dwight Hammond, Jr. and his son Steven Hammond (in other words, more armed white men). Needless to say, the armed white men in question are a group of right-wing gun nuts. The leader of the armed white men, Ammon Bundy, says in a YouTube video that God told him and his followers to take over the building: "I began to understand how the Lord felt about the Hammonds," Bundy says in the video. "I began to understand how the Lord felt about Harney County and about this country. And I clearly understood that the Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds".

This just confirms my belief that white men are the greatest danger facing our country. None of us will be safe until the government recognizes the danger posed by white men and takes firm steps to bring them under control. I suggest implanting chips in their heads that cause them to lose consciousness when activated. In a country where white men have disproportionate control of political and economic power, it's the only way to ensure the safety and security of everyone else.

The Invisible Man IV: Mr. Cuss Interviews the Stranger

Having spent the first three chapters of The Invisible Man describing the stranger's arrival in Iping, Wells shifts to a more general account of his residency there. The stranger mostly keeps to himself in the Coach and Horses, and only goes out into the village after nightfall. There are several theories about the stranger's behavior: Mrs. Hall is satisfied with the stranger's own explanation that he is an experimenter who suffered a disfiguring accident. Teddy Henfrey thinks he is a criminal hiding out from the police. The schoolteacher Gould thinks he is an anarchist planning to commit an act of terrorism. The postman Fearenside continues to believe that he is a piebald half-breed.Whatever the explanation, the villagers generally dislike him. However, Mrs. Hall is content to allow him to stay in her inn as long as he pays his bills on time.

One day, towards Whitsuntide (ie just before Whitsunday, which in 1896 fell on May 24), the village doctor, Mr. Cuss, is driven by curiosity to speak with the stranger. The stranger explains that he is trying to recreate a prescription he was given, but which was blown into a lit fire and burned to ashes while he wasn't looking. Cuss then notices that the stranger is missing a hand. Oddly, his sleeve isn't pinned up; it moves around as though there were an arm inside it, even though he can see that there is no arm. When Cuss draws the stranger's attention to this odd phenomenon, the stranger lifts his arm up and points the sleeve directly at the doctor's face. Then, to the doctor's astonishment, he feels his nose being tweaked, as though by a finger and thumb.

Cuss is badly frightened. He knocks the sleeve away and flees the inn. After he tells his story to Bunting, the local vicar, that man says gravely, "It's a most remarkable story. It's really a most remarkable story."

Sobel Wiki: Remaking a Continent

This month's featured article at the Sobel Wiki is on the Kinkaid Canal, the Sobel Timeline counterpart to our own Panama Canal.

As is often the case with the Sobel Timeline, the Kinkaid Canal is a sort of funhouse-mirror version of the Panama Canal. First and foremost, it is in Nicaragua rather than Panama. This is actually a pretty high-probability event. There were a number of proposals in our own time for a canal through Nicaragua, one of them made by none other than then-Secretary of State Henry Clay in 1826. Clay's proposal was turned down, due in part to political instability in Central America, and due to the fact that the British controlled a lot of the territory in the vicinity of the proposed canal route.

The British were not a problem in the Sobel Timeline, for reasons that Sobel never revealed. He makes no mention of the British colony at Belize, though his frontispiece map shows it as part of the Mexican state of Chiapas. He also doesn't say how the British lost control of the Mosquito Coast, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. All he does say is that Central America is united into a single country called Guatemala (or as he inexplicably spells it, Guatamala), and that this country has spent years disputing possession of the Isthmus of Panama with the South American nation of New Granada. It is this, more than anything else, that convinces Sobel's master Robber Baron, Bernard Kramer, to opt for a canal through undisputed Guatemalan territory.

Kramer Associates was originally formed in 1865 as a consortium of California businessmen with the purpose of improving transportation links between their state and the North Atlantic nations, and especially with the Caribbean coast of the United States of Mexico. Building an interoceanic canal is the obvious project for K.A. to undertake, and Kramer spends his first five years as head of K.A. laying the groundwork for it.

In our own history, the U.S. Navy assisted Panamanian separatists who seceded from Columbia in 1903, as part of a project by President Roosevelt to build a canal. In the Sobel Timeline, it was Kramer's company, acting independently of the Mexican government, that financed a coup d'etat in Guatemala as part of the canal project. The canal received its final name after Mexican President Omar Kinkaid was assassinated, and Kramer decided to name the recently-completed canal after him. This may have started a trend in the Sobel Timeline, because a British canal in Egypt was named, not after the Gulf of Suez, but after Queen Victoria.

Btw, the map of the Kinkaid Canal at the top of this blog post was created by For All Nails mastermind Noel Maurer, who later went on to co-author a book on the Panama Canal with his fellow FAN alumnus Carlos Yu.

What I Believe

As we look back on the year 2015, I think we would all do well to remember actor/director/comedian Steve Martin's heartfelt message "What I Believe", as true today as when he recorded it back in 1981.

Who is Snoke?

No need for spoiler warnings here, because I won't be talking about any particular plot points in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Instead, I'll focus on an odd bit of background: Supreme Leader Snoke, head of the evil First Order.

The most pressing question concerning Snoke is who is he? The prequel trilogy dealt with several of the older characters in the original trilogy, including both of the major bad guys: Palpatine and Darth Vader. So, say what you want about the prequels (and plenty can be said about them), at least they didn't leave us hanging about who these guys were.

Snoke, on the other hand, is just sort of there, running the First Order. His name suggests ...

You know what? I'm going to pause this analysis for a bit to reflect on what a terrible, terrible name "Snoke" is. Snoke is no proper name for an Evil Overlord. An Evil Overlord name needs to be something Greco-Latinate like Sidious or Galactus or Thanos or Davros; or else something that sounds just plain evil like Morgoth or Voldemort. But Snoke? Snoke is the name you give to the comic relief character, or at best to the plucky sidekick. You do not name the Evil Overlord Snoke.

Where was I? Oh yeah, his name (which is, I must repeat, just terrible) doesn't suggest a Sith Lord, even though he seems to be a master of the Dark Side of the Force. Maybe he's just some bush league Force sensitive bad guy who happened to luck his way into the leadership of the First Order. Or ..

Or you may be familiar with a fan theory that was making the rounds a few months ago, arguing that Jar Jar Binks was the secret mastermind behind the rise of the Galactic Empire in the prequel trilogy. Is it possible that Darth Jar Jar is Snoke? True, Snoke looks nothing like Jar Jar, but bear in mind that we never actually see Snoke in the flesh. He's always just an image, a hologram issuing orders to Kylo Ren and General Hox, and images can be manipulated, or even created from scratch. The Darth Jar Jar theory suggests that Jar Jar always operates from behind the scenes, using Palpatine as a catspaw in the prequel trilogy (and presumably in the original trilogy as well). Creating a holographic alter ego to act as the face of the First Order would be completely in character for Darth Jar Jar.

In that case, maybe the name Snoke is Jar Jar's crowning achievement: giving the presumed evil mastermind a name that's even more ridiculous than his own.

The Invisible Man III: The Thousand and One Bottles

We resume the tale of The Invisible Man the day after he takes a room at the Coach and Horses. Mr. Fearenside, the postman, has brought the stranger's belongings from the railway station: a couple of normal traveler's trunks, a box of books, and a dozen or so assorted other boxes. Mr. Hall's curiosity gets the better of him, and he looks in one of them. He finds dozens of bottles packed in straw. The stranger emerges from the inn to supervise the unloading of his boxes, and is immediately set upon by Mr. Fearenside's dog, who rips one of the stranger's gloves and tears a pantleg. The postman uses his whip to drive the dog away, and the stranger rushes back inside the inn. Mr. Hall follows him to his room and enters. Inside the dark room he gets a brief impression of three empty spots in the bandaged face, and a handless arm, before a sudden blow sends him tumbling out of the room.

The two trunks are brought to the stranger's room, while the rest of the boxes are delivered to the parlour. The stranger unpacks the bottles and sets to work combining their contents in a set of test tubes. Mrs. Hall pauses outside the parlour long enough to hear the stranger groan in dismay at the vast scope of the project before him.

Later that afternoon, while Mr. Fearenside is having a beer with Mr. Henfrey, he reveals that after his dog tore the stranger's clothing, there was nothing but blackness within. Given that the stranger's nose is pink, the two men come to the conclusion that he is some sort of piebald half-breed.

We also learn in this chapter that the date of the stranger's arrival is February 29, and thus that the story takes place in a leap year, most likely 1896, the year before its publication, and probably the year Wells wrote it. The incident of the dog in the daytime took place the next day, on March 1. If the story was indeed set in 1896, then the stranger would have arrived in Iping on a Saturday.

The Invisible Man II: Mr. Teddy Henfrey's First Impressions

 In chapter II of The Invisible Man, we are introduced to Mr. Teddy Henfrey, the local clock-jobber. If anybody in the Bramblehurst-Iping Metropolitan Area has a clock that needs repairing, Mr. Teddy Henfrey is the man to call. He turns up at the Coach and Horses around four in the afternoon, as the light of this snowy day is starting to fade. Mrs. Hall is pleased to see him, since he has his bag of tools with him, and the clock in the parlour has an hour hand that won't move.

The parlour of course is the room her mysterious guest has rented for the week, so for Mrs. Hall the arrival of Mr. Henfrey is doubly fortuitous. She taps lightly at the parlour door and ushers Mr. Henfrey in. Her guest is asleep in the armchair facing the fireplace, and the dying embers provide the only illumination. She can just about make out his bandaged and goggled head in the dim light, but to her astonishment she can't see any sign of his jaw; it's as though his mouth has expanded to absorb the lower quarter of his face.

Then the mysterious man wakes up and holds a muffler over his mouth, and Mrs. Hall decides she was seeing things. She asks her guest if Mr. Henfrey can come in and fix the clock, and he agrees. He then asks Mrs. Hall to fix him some tea after Mr. Henfrey is finished, and she agrees. He also inquires again about the boxes he left at the train station, and Mrs. Hall explains that she has told the postman, who will be picking them up the next day. The guest once more asks whether that's the earliest he can have them, and Mrs. Hall, now becoming annoyed by his persistence, tells him again that, yes, that's the earliest he can have them.

The guest, clearly not wishing to see his hostess become annoyed with him, explains that he is an inventor, and that the boxes contain his supplies and apparatus. This increases the landlady's opinion of her guest, and he goes on to explain:

"My reason for coming to Iping," he proceeded, with a certain deliberation of manner, "was ... a desire for solitude. I do not wish to be disturbed in my work. In addition to my work, an accident—"

"I thought as much," said Mrs. Hall to herself.

"—necessitates a certain retirement. My eyes—are sometimes so weak and painful that I have to shut myself up in the dark for hours together. Lock myself up. Sometimes—now and then. Not at present, certainly. At such times the slightest disturbance, the entry of a stranger into the room, is a source of excruciating annoyance to me—it is well these things should be understood."

"Certainly, sir," said Mrs. Hall. "And if I might make so bold as to ask—"

"That I think, is all," said the stranger, with that quietly irresistible air of finality he could assume at will. Mrs. Hall reserved her question and sympathy for a better occasion.

As he sets to work on the clock, Mr. Henfrey is just as unnerved by the guest's appearance as Mrs. Hall was, and he deliberately takes his time working on the clock so he'll have more time to rubberneck. The guest sees what Mr. Henfrey is up to, and becomes annoyed. When Mr. Henfrey tries an opening conversational gambit about the weather, the guest interrupts him. "Why don't you finish and go?" said the rigid figure, evidently in a state of painfully suppressed rage. "All you've got to do is to fix the hour-hand on its axle. You're simply humbugging—"

Mr. Henfrey quickly finishes his work and retreats from the Coach and Horses. On his way into town, he passes Mrs. Hall's husband, who is returning from a trip to a neighboring village in the inn's horse and carriage. We learn that Mr. Hall and his wife are recently wed, and Mr. Henfrey surmises from Mr. Hall's driving that he remained at the neighboring village for a while to wet his whistle.

Mr. Henfrey warns Mr. Hall that he's got "a rum 'un" at the Coach and Horses. He darkly suggests that the guest has disguised himself for some nefarious purpose, and expresses alarm over the fact that the guest hasn't revealed his name. Mr. Hall decides he'd better look into the matter, but when he arrives at the inn Mrs. Hall gives him hell for staying away so long. After the guest retires to his bedroom for the night, Mr. Hall sneaks into the parlour to make sure he hasn't nicked any of the furnishings. He sees a sheet of mathematical computations that the guest left behind, but is not impressed by it.

When retiring for the night he instructed Mrs. Hall to look very closely at the stranger's luggage when it came next day.

"You mind your own business, Hall," said Mrs. Hall, "and I'll mind mine."

She was all the more inclined to snap at Hall because the stranger was undoubtedly an unusually strange sort of stranger, and she was by no means assured about him in her own mind. In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.

The outstanding question the reader is left with from chapter II is not anything to do with the mysterious stranger, but what Mr. and Mrs. Hall see in each other. Mr. Henfrey observes that Mr. Hall is "a man of sluggish apprehension", and apparently he's also lazy and rather too fond of the bottle. Not only do they not act like newlyweds, they act like an old married couple who have grown heartily sick of each other. Is it possible that the two of them had a drunken night of sexual hijinks that left her pregnant and in need of a husband? Or does he know some dark secret about her, perhaps regarding the mysterious death of a previous husband, and blackmailed himself into a comfortable situation with the owner of a moderately profitable business?

Perhaps we'll learn the answers to these questions in chapter III, "The Thousand and One Bottles."

"Trump's Deal" jumps the shark

 "Trump's Deal" famously began in 1984, when NBC approached veteran television producer Stephen J. Cannell about creating a "prime time soap" for them in the mold of ABC's "Dallas" and "Dynasty". Cannell agreed, and that fall NBC premiered the hour-long drama starring Ted Danson as New York City real-estate mogul Donald Trump and Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova as his wife Ivana. NBC got the backdrop of wealth and high fashion it wanted, but it also inevitably got Cannell's quirky humor. "Trump's Deal" was as much a satire of the prime time soap genre as a member of it. Danson's Trump was a loud, vulgar buffoon who moved among New York's wealthy elite like a rhino among a herd of thoroughbred horses.

The series was not the blockbuster NBC had been hoping for, but it quickly won a dedicated fanbase, and its solid ratings made it a fixture on the network. However, network executives clashed with Cannell over the direction of the series in 1990, and he left the show. Series star Danson took over production of the show, and he made a series of changes to the show that alienated longtime fans, including writing out co-star Porizkova in favor of Shelly Long, with whom he had co-starred in the short-lived sitcom "Cheers".  The series' rating fell sharply, and NBC cancelled "Trump's Deal" in 1992.

The series was unexpectedly revived in 2004 due to a chance meeting between Danson and actor/comedian/producer Gary Shandling. Shandling was best known for "The Larry Sanders Show" (1992-1998), an HBO series in which he played a talk show host, with the series centered around the production of the talk show. Shandling was looking to produce a similar series about a reality show. Danson convinced Shandling to use the Donald Trump character as the host of the series, and the result was the second incarnation of "Trump's Deal". Now the Trump character was the host of a reality show called "The Apprentice" where he tyrannized a group of would-be business executives, firing one at the end of each episode.

"Trump's Deal" was facing cancellation again last year when Danson arranged for the series to move from HBO to AMC, this time with Aaron Sorkin as producer. Once again, the series underwent a radical change in format. Now, the Trump character was running for president in the Republican primary. Sorkin took advantage of cutting-edge CGI to show the Trump character interacting with actual Republican primary candidates, including Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and Dr. Ben Carson.

Unfortunately, Sorkin's own liberal political ideology has turned "Trump's Deal" into a travesty. The loud, vulgar buffoon has been transformed into a loud, vulgar racist ideologue. And not content with having Trump run as a Republican, Sorkin has him leading the candidate field by a large margin. The result is a bizarre alternate version of the Republican primary, with frontrunner Bush reduced to a pathetic also-ran, Dr. Carson parodied as a somnolent know-nothing evangelical Christian, and Fiorina launching a series of defamatory attacks on Planned Parenthood.

Sorkin clearly intends to continue the series by having the Trump character win the Republican nomination, and rumors from the production suggest he intends to have Trump win the general election. Sorkin apparently seeks to turn "Trump's Deal" into a dark mirror-image of his celebrated NBC series "The West Wing" (1999-2006), showing a crazed Republican administration under Trump. We can only hope that AMC has better sense than to renew the series for a second year.

The Invisible Man I: The Strange Man's Arrival

Now that I've finished reading (and blogging about) H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, I've decided to move on to his third scientific romance (and fifth novel), The Invisible Man, a Grotesque Romance. Like Moreau, The Invisible Man is a classic SF novel that shares the fate of all classics: everybody has heard of it, but hardly anybody has read it, including me.

Unlike Wellls' two previous scientific romances, The Time Machine and Moreau, The Invisible Man does not have a framing story or a first-person narrator. We simply have an ordinary third-person narrative, which opens with the arrival of a man at a country inn. The inn is the Coach and Horses in Bramblehurst, a fictional town in West Sussex. It's early February, there's a driving snowstorm, and the man apparently walked all the way from the railway station carrying a small black suitcase. Given the weather, it's not surprising that the man is bundled from head to toe. What is surprising is that the man is wearing goggles, so that the only visible part of his entire body is the tip of his nose. The man pays two sovereigns* for a room, and the inn's owner, Mrs. Hall, is not inclined to argue with such a generous guest, especially given how rare guests are at this time of year. Mrs. Hall, by the way, speaks with a bucolic accent that Sam Gamgee would find perfectly familiar, scolding her lethargic servant, "ain't you done them taters yet, Millie?"

Oddly, when Mrs. Hall offers to take the man's hat and coat and hang them in the inn's kitchen to dry, the man refuses, saying, "I prefer to keep them on." He also never removes his goggles. The man sits down and warms himself in front of the fire in the inn's parlour, still wearing his hat and coat. When Mrs. Hall brings the man his lunch, she sees that he has finally removed his hat, revealing that his whole head is bandaged, and she assumes that he has been injured. When she hints about it to him, he neither confirms nor denies her supposition. He does mention that he left some baggage at Bramblehurst railway station, and asks whether anyone can go get it for him. Mrs. Hall tells him that it won't arrive until the next day. It seems that the road to the station is too steep to travel in the snow. The man, though disappointed, resigns himself to the wait. He spends the rest of the day alone in the parlour.

Mrs. Hall is quite perplexed at her guest's peculiar refusal to allow his face to be seen. The reader, however, knowing that the story is called The Invisible Man, will have his own suspicions about the man's reasons. We will doubtless learn more of the man's story in chapter II: "Mr. Teddy Henfrey's First Impressions".


*A sovereign is a gold coin worth £1.

Moreau After Dark

H.G. Wells was not a man to shy away from the most intimate aspects of humanity. However, writing in the late Victorian Era, he could not be as explicit as he may have wished to be. For instance, in The Island of Doctor Moreau, you have a situation where three men are living on an island full of uplifted animals of both sexes. If the uplifted female animals are sufficiently human, the men are going to be sexually attracted to them. Wells never actually comes right out and says that any of his human men are banging the animal girls, but if you read between the lines, it becomes clear that, yeah, they are.

In chapter XV, "Concerning the Beast Folk", for instance, Prendick makes an odd observation about Montgomery: "I fancied even then that he had a sneaking kindness for some of these metamorphosed brutes, a vicious sympathy with some of their ways, but that he attempted to veil it from me at first." This sentence is sufficiently opaque that Prendick/Wells might have been talking about anything, but given the attitudes of the time, the only subject he would need to be opaque about would be sex. In addition, a few paragraphs earlier, Prendick/Wells states that "The females were less numerous than the males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy the Law enjoined." In other words, the Law included a prohibition against rape and sexual promiscuity, but most of the male uplifted animals ignored it, and it doesn't require a great stretch of the imagination to believe that this was the "vicious sympathy with some of their ways" that Montgomery exhibited.

As for Prendick himself, after Moreau and Montgomery are killed, he takes to living in the village established by the uplifted animals. As the uplifts slowly revert to animalism, Prendick remarks on "how the quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in the first month of my loneliness became a shuddering horror to recall." Again, this is sufficiently vague that Prendick/Wells could be talking about anything; it is suggestive because there is only one topic he would need to be this vague about.

A few decades later, when Hollywood made its first film version of this novel, "Island of Lost Souls" it was made explicit that the Prendick character (named Parker in the film) was attracted to an uplifted panther woman named Lota. Every subsequent dramatization of the novel includes a romance between the variously-named Prendick character and an uplifted animal woman, because every Hollywood movie needs a romance plotline, and the writers can't resist the idea of a match between a human man and an uplifted animal woman.

Moreau XXII: The Man Alone

As chapter XXII: "The Man Alone" opens, Prendick sets out from the island of Doctor Moreau on board a ship's boat. As he drifts along, eating and drinking sparingly from his stores, he finds that he doesn't particularly want to return to the company of his fellow humans. He remains adrift for three days before being rescued by a brig sailing from Apia to San Francisco.

In his introduction, Prendick's nephew states that his uncle was rescued on January 5, 1888. Working backwards from this, we find that Prendick first saw the boat's sail on December 31, 1887. He first boarded it, dumped its deceased occupants on the beach, and sailed off on January 1, 1888; the next day he made his last visit to the island for food and water, then set out for the open sea.

Prendick tells his story to the captain and first mate of the brig, but they refuse to believe him and decide he must have been driven mad by solitude. After that, he keeps his story to himself, feigning amnesia to avoid explaining how he spent the eleven months after the wreck of the Lady Vain.

Although he of course doesn't use the term, it is clear that Prendick is suffering from post-traumatic stress. He observes, "My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind,—such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel."

Prendick's PTSD results in his being unable to relax around other people. He can't rid himself of the feeling that they, too, are uplifted animals (as in a sense they are, though due to natural evolution rather than Moreau's brutal surgery), and that at any time they may start to revert to animalism as Moreau's experimental subjects did. Once back in London, Prendick tells his story one more time, to a psychiatrist who knew Moreau, and who is inclined to give Prendick the benefit of the doubt. The psychiatrist is able to help Prendick come to terms with his experience, though he is never entirely free from the terror. In the end. Prendick leaves London and takes up residence in the unpopulated countryside, where he reads and conducts chemical and astronomical research. His greatest solace is to look up into the night sky and contemplate the stars.

Prendick's nephew notes that the only island known in the region his uncle was picked up was Noble's Isle, "a small volcanic islet and uninhabited. It was visited in 1891 by H. M. S. Scorpion. A party of sailors then landed, but found nothing living thereon except certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some rather peculiar rats." Noble's Isle is an invention of Wells; the area where he places it is an open stretch of the Pacific Ocean about 500 miles west of the Galapagos Islands.

Moreau XXI: The Reversion of the Beast Folk

As chapter XXI: "The Reversion of the Beast Folk" opens, Prendick acknowledges that he has "became one among the Beast People in the Island of Doctor Moreau." He awakens at night to find that the uplifted St. Bernard dog has joined him in his hut. The uplifted dog declares himself Prendick's slave, and Prendick accepts him. With a faithful servant at his side, Prendick's courage revives. Together, the two of them join a score of the other uplifted animals who have gathered together around a fire. Prendick repeats that Moreau is not dead, and is still watching over them.

“The House of Pain is gone,” said I. “It will come again. The Master you cannot see; yet even now he listens among you.”

“True, true!” said the Dog-man.

They were staggered at my assurance. An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

Over the course of the next hour, Prendick manages to convince a few of the uplifted animals, and sow enough doubt in the minds of the others to ensure his own safety and maintain the force of the Law.

However, Moreau's surgical uplifting was not permanent. By slow degrees, his experimental subjects lose their grip on humanity and revert to animalism. As they do so, Prendick and the uplifted dog move out of the uplift village and set up a separate hut in the ruins of the burned-out compound. "Some memory of pain, I found, still made that place the safest from the Beast Folk."

Prendick keeps watch for ships, especially the Ipecacuanha, but the few he sees never come close enough for him to signal them. By September or October, after his arm has healed, Prendick starts to build a raft, but he is severely hampered by his own lack of mechanical skill. After his first attempt fails, Prendick is moping in his hut when the uplifted sloth -- by now almost completely reverted -- returns. Prendick eventually realizes that the sloth wants him to follow it, and he does. The sloth leads him to a clearing in the jungle where he finds that the hyena-swine has killed the St. Bernard. The predator growls at Prendick, and simultaneously Prendick shoots it as it leaps at him. The hyena-swine knocks Prendick down, but it is already dead from his shot, and he is able to crawl out from underneath it.

With the animals almost completely reverted, Prendick realizes that he has to leave the island to save himself from them, and he makes another attempt to build a raft. Before he can launch it into the sea, he sees a sail slowly approaching the island. Prendick builds a signal fire, but the boat ignores it. The next day, the boat is close enough for Prendick to see that its two passengers are dead. The boat beaches itself, and Prendick goes aboard. He finds that one of the dead men has red hair like the captain of the Ipecacuanha. (In his introduction, Prendick's nephew states that the Ipecacuanha had gone missing.)

Prendick tilts the boat over and drags the corpses out. This immediately attracts three of the remaining carnivores, two wolves and a bear-bull hybrid. Prendick pushes the boat out to sea and climbs in. He sails around to a stream near the former village of the uplifted animals, fills an empty keg from the boat, collects some fruit, and kills two rabbits with the last of his cartridges. Prendick is ready at last to leave the island of Doctor Moreau.

Moreau XX: Alone with the Beast Folk

As chapter XX: "Alone with the Beast Folk" opens, Prendick faces three of Moreau's uplifted animals single-handed -- literally, since his left arm was broken the day before. Observing that "There was nothing for it but courage," he decides -- again literally -- that he needs to have the whip hand. He retrieve's Montgomery's whip from the beach and uses it to cow the three uplifted animals into submission. He then orders them to carry the bodies of Montgomery and the uplifts into the sea for disposal.

While the first three uplifted animals are carrying bodies into the sea, a fourth comes onto the beach. This is an uplifted hyena-swine hybrid, currently the biggest, most dangerous carnivore on the island. Prendick orders the uplifted hyena-swine to submit, but he refuses. Prendick does not mean to leave up alive, and fires the revolver at him, but, regrettably, misses. The uplifted hybrid runs off, but Prendick knows he doesn't dare fire and miss a second time lest his mystique as "the Man with the Whip" be damaged.

The first three uplifted animals finish taking the bodies into the sea, and Prendick dismisses them. With the crisis past, he suffers a failure of nerve. It occurs to him that there is no place on the island that he can rest or sleep. He knows that he ought to go among the uplifted animals and firmly establish his dominion over them, especially with the hyena-swine uncowed, but by this time he is exhausted. He has been up for over 24 hours, his arm is broken, and he never fully recovered his strength from the ordeal of being shipwrecked. Instead, he retreats to a point where the beach runs out to a coral reef, and sits down facing the island.

Prendick's fears overwhelm him. He notices that one of the bodies has washed up on the beach to his left, but he cannot deal with it. Instead, he moves away from it. As he does so, one of the three uplifted animals he had gained control of, an uplifted St. Bernard dog, approaches him. Prendick pulls out his pistol and yells for the uplifted dog to go away. "May I not come near you?" the uplifted dog asks, but Prendick is too fearful to allow it. He picks up a stone and drives the dog away.

So in solitude I came round by the ravine of the Beast People, and hiding among the weeds and reeds that separated this crevice from the sea I watched such of them as appeared, trying to judge from their gestures and appearance how the death of Moreau and Montgomery and the destruction of the House of Pain had affected them. I know now the folly of my cowardice. Had I kept my courage up to the level of the dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast People. As it was I lost the opportunity, and sank to the position of a mere leader among my fellows.

Driven by hunger, Prendick approaches some of the uplifted animals and asks where he can find food. An uplifted ox-boar hybrid tells him, “There is food in the huts." Prendick enters one of the huts, eats some fruit he finds there, cleans it out, and builds a barricade across the entrance. Then he falls asleep.

A challenge to Donald Trump

Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump made headlines yesterday when he called for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on.” Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that Trump is being such a wishy-washy, namby-pamby weakling.

Let's face it, ALL monotheistic religions are pretty frightening. How can you not be frightened when somebody declares that all gods but his own are false? History shows that every monotheistic religion has carried out wars of aggression against members of other religions, and justified their actions by claiming that their enemies worshiped false gods.

Therefore, I call on Mr. Trump to prove that he's serious about defending the United States. We need to ban all followers of monotheistic religions from entering this country until our leaders can "figure out what is going on." Anything less is just setting ourselves up for more attacks by religious fanatics.

Moreau XIX: Montgomery's Bank Holiday

Chapter XIX: "Montgomery's Bank Holiday"

Once they've finished piling the corpses of Moreau's victims atop Moreau himself, Prendick and Montgomery sit down together to plan out their future. Prendick wants them to leave the island, but Montgomery insists that's out of the question. Whatever it was that Montgomery did to get himself exiled from England, he's convinced that there's no going back for him.

Montgomery starts drinking again, and while he's sozzled, he decides to share his brandy with the uplifted animals. When Prendick tries to stop him, Montgomery pulls a pistol on him, and Prendick relents. After Montgomery leaves, Prendick starts making plans to leave the island himself. Under the light of a full moon he goes into the supply shed and starts gathering food and other supplies for the journey.

Prendick's preparations are interrupted when he hears a shot fired outside the compound. In the dawn's early light he finds a crowd of uplifted animals gathered around a bonfire. He fires his pistol and most of them scatter. All that remain are Montgomery and four of the uplifts, all lying on the ground. All but one of the uplifts, including the Speaker of the Law and M'ling, are dead. The only survivors are Montgomery himself and an uplifted wolf who has been so badly burned that Prendick shoots him. Montgomery has been throttled by the Speaker of the Law, and is dying.

While he stares at the scene in front of him, Prendick hears a thud and hiss behind him. He sees that the compound is on fire, and realizes that he must have upset his oil lamp when he ran outside. Then he looks back and realizes that Montgomery built the bonfire by chopping up the boats. Montgomery dies as the sun rises, and Prendick sees three uplifted animals emerge from the brush. Prendick is the last human on the island.

The casual detail of the full moon allows us to assign a date to Montgomery's Bank Holiday.The Lady Vain went down on February 1, 1887. Prendick drifted in the Lady Vain's boat for eight days, and was rescued on February 9. Two days later, Prendick revives, and shares his story with Montgomery. The next day, February 12, Prendick is stranded on the island of Dr. Moreau. Seven or eight weeks later, or possibly more, the puma escapes and Moreau is killed. Seven weeks would bring us to April 2, and eight weeks to April 9. The full moon falls on April 8, so Moreau's death would mostly likely have taken place on Thursday, April 7, and chapter XIX ends with the sun rising on the morning of Friday, April 8, 1887.

Moreau XVIII: The Finding of Moreau

As chapter XVIII, "The Finding of Moreau" opens, Montgomery is ready to drown himself in brandy, but Prendick won't let him. He insists they have to go out and find out what happened to Moreau. Prendick overrides Montgomery's feeble protests, and after a quick meal, the two men and M'ling go out.

We learn for the first time that it was Prendick's left arm that was broken when the puma freed herself. One can picture how it happened. Prendick would have been staring out at the sea holding his cigarette in his right hand. He hears the sound of the puma pulling her chain out of the wall and knocking down Moreau, he turns and sees her running toward the entrance. He raises his left arm, because even as startled as he is, he won't risk any damage to his precious cigarette. The puma knocks him down, breaking his left arm, and runs off. Presumably, Prendick's care for his cigarette comes to naught in the end, and he drops it at this point as the force of the puma's blow sends him rolling over and over in the sand.

Prendick ignores whatever pain he is suffering in his left arm, which was broken by the puma only hours before, and leads the others out of the compound, carrying a pistol in his good hand. M'ling had lost his hatchet earlier in the day when he was grappling with the uplifted swine, and he doesn't bother replacing it. As Prendick observes, "Teeth were his weapons, when it came to fighting." Montgomery carries the other pistol, but he does not have it at the ready -- he simply follows the others with his hands in his pockets.

M'ling leads the group through the jungle, "his shoulder hunched, his strange black head moving with quick starts as he peered first on this side of the way and then on that." Montgomery follows him, still half-sozzled, and Prendick brings up the rear, revolver in hand. After making their way for some time, M'ling suddenly stops, and Montgomery almost runs into him.

Half a dozen uplifted animals emerge from the jungle, led by the Speaker of the Law, a gray-haired uplift whose animal origins Prendick never mentions. The uplifts are in shock, and they reveal to Prendick's group that Moreau is dead. The next question the uplifts have for Montgomery is whether there is still a Law.

Prendick, thinking fast, steps in front of Montogmery and says:

“Children of the Law, he is not dead!” M'ling turned his sharp eyes on me. “He has changed his shape; he has changed his body,” I went on. “For a time you will not see him. He is—there,” I pointed upward, “where he can watch you. You cannot see him, but he can see you. Fear the Law!”

I looked at them squarely. They flinched.

Having re-asserted control over the uplifts,  Prendick inquires about the puma, and learns that she is also dead. He orders the uplifts to lead them to Moreau's body, and the group sets out.

During their journey, they are interrupted by a disturbance:

Then came a yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus rushed by us shrieking. Immediately after appeared a monster in headlong pursuit, blood-bedabbled, who was amongst us almost before he could stop his career. The grey Thing leapt aside. M'ling, with a snarl, flew at it, and was struck aside. Montgomery fired and missed, bowed his head, threw up his arm, and turned to run. I fired, and the Thing still came on; fired again, point-blank, into its ugly face. I saw its features vanish in a flash: its face was driven in. Yet it passed me, gripped Montgomery, and holding him, fell headlong beside him and pulled him sprawling upon itself in its death-agony.

I found myself alone with M'ling, the dead brute, and the prostrate man. Montgomery raised himself slowly and stared in a muddled way at the shattered Beast Man beside him. It more than half sobered him. He scrambled to his feet. Then I saw the grey Thing returning cautiously through the trees.

“See,” said I, pointing to the dead brute, “is the Law not alive? This came of breaking the Law.”

He peered at the body. “He sends the Fire that kills,” said he, in his deep voice, repeating part of the Ritual. The others gathered round and stared for a space.

When the party reaches the site of Moreau's final battle with the puma, it is clear that both are indeed dead. Moreau shot the puma in the shoulder, but the puma was able to  brain Moreau with its chain. The puma is half-devoured.

The uplifts assist Prendick in carrying Moreau's body back to the compound. They all leave, and M'ling leaves with them. Prendick locks the gate, then he and Montgomery go into Moreau's laboratory, where they "put an end to all we found living there."

This chapter ends with Prendick and Montgomery in a precarious position. Moreau is dead, and their control over the uplifts is on shaky ground. Prendick is able to salvage the situation for the time being by spinning a tale of Moreau's spirit keeping watch over the island, and by killing one uplift who is breaking the Law (and incidentally keeping an uplifted sloth from being killed and eaten). However, the situation is clearly unstable. How long will the uplifts allow themselves to be cowed by an invisible Moreau, when they clearly saw Moreau dead?

Moreau's death also marks a change in Prendick's fortunes. Montgomery is incapable of dealing with the sudden crisis. It is Prendick who insists on going out to learn Moreau's fate, and it is Prendick whose quick thinking prevents the collapse of the Law that keeps the uplifts docile. With Moreau gone and Montgomery sinking into an alcoholic stupor, Prendick is now the de facto leader of the island's bizarre society. To see how he deals with his perilous situation, tune in for chapter XIX, "Montgomery's Bank Holiday".