Spokesperson Drew Hammill said the assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation.

Nancy Pelosi was not in the residence at the time. pic.twitter.com/TltjUJfhyO

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 28, 2022

I guarantee you that the assailants are either Black or illegal immigrants and neither had any idea who Paul or Nancy Pelosi are.

If they were white men, especially if they had the faintest association with the Right the media would be exploding with how this was Right Wing extremist political violence.

That the media is not doing this speaks volumes about the assailants even though the police haven’t said anything.

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1585395267552960512?t=d7YybSPeHUR9jRa_Orye1A&s=19

A lot of people commented on just how useless this girl must be at Twitter that her day includes all of this bullshit and wine drinking.

But I wanted to point out something that everyone else seemed to miss.

The macha tea, wine one tap, yoga room, everything about that workspace seemed like a spa for women.

During her meeting, I didn’t see any men.

Where are they?

I suspect that they are in a cubicle farm somewhere being code monkeys.

85% of computer science and programming majors are men.

I highly suspect that in Silicon Valley, male privilege is being one of the core competency programmers slamming out code all day and never seeing daylight while all the useless people are enjoying company provided Macha and red wine in a day spa made possible by your work.

This article about the recent school shooting in Missouri is a master class in everything wrong with the our media, politics, and public discourse.

St. Louis school shooting suspect had AR-15-style rifle, 600 rounds of ammunition: Police

A 19-year-old former student was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and more than 600 rounds of ammunition when he opened fire at a St. Louis, Missouri, high school on Monday morning, killing two and injuring several others, according to authorities.

The suspect, who also died during an exchange of gunfire at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School, was identified by police as Orlando Harris, who graduated from the high school last year.

Harris, who had no criminal history, left a handwritten document in his car speaking about his desire to “conduct this school shooting,” St. Louis Police Commissioner Michael Sack said at a news conference Tuesday.

Sack said Harris wrote: “I don’t have any friends, I don’t have any family, I’ve never had a girlfriend, I’ve never had a social life.” Sack said Harris called himself an “isolated loner,” which was a “perfect storm for a mass shooter.”

The shooter gave his motivation right there.

He was a loaner with no friends and no social life.

The media heaps fame and notoriety on school shooters.

Our society puts fame above all else.

For a loaner and a loser, becoming a school shooter is a way to become famous and well known, a center of public attention.

“It’s very easy to get guns,” Sack said at a news conference Monday. “I’ve said it before — the gun laws in Missouri [are] very broad … they can carry them openly down any street, and there’s really nothing we can do.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the shooting at Monday’s press briefing, saying, “We need additional action to stop the scourge of gun violence.”

“Every day that the Senate fails to send assault weapons ban to the president’s desk, or waits to take … other commonsense actions, is a day too late for our families and communities impacted by gun violence,” she told reporters.

But politicians and the media, evident from the headline of this very article, focus on the guns and everything but their power to and willingness to make a school shooter famous.

Our system encourages broken boys to do horrible things to get their names on TV and then the powers that created this system everyone but themselves.

If we’re going to restrict people’s Constitutional rights to stop school shootings, before we create one more gun law, we should ban the media from reporting on school shootings to eliminate the fame factor for school shooters.

I am not a High Fantasy fan.

When I do read books where magic is a central theme to the story, I enjoy worlds where magic is something other than wands and spells.

I loved the magic of necromancy using bells from the Abhrosen trilogy by Garth Nix.  I also enjoyed the portrayal of magic in The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo and The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman.

I’m also a (mostly) observant Jew.  One of the difficulties I have with magic in books is how they make it impossible to square the circle of magic existing in a world with organized religions.  I.e., what separates magic from miracles?  For instance, in Harry Potter, they celebrate Christmas, but if you know magic to be real, why would the miracle of the death and resurrection of Christ be the cornerstone of your religion?  I’m sort of surprised that nobody said “Jesus was a wizard, Harry.”

But I digress…

So I have been fucking around with an idea for a world in which magic exists that takes a non-traditional approach to magic and ties it in with certain ideas from monotheistic religion.  I currently have no plot for a story in this world but I thought the world would be interesting.

In the beginning, there was nothing.  Then God created the heavens and the earth and all the things between and within.

This is, in the strictest sense, magic.  Magic is the creative power of God.  The power to will something into existence and create something from nothing.

We as people were made in the image of God,   we possess a soul.  That soul is the tiniest spark of divinity within us.  It is what elevates us above the animals, and one of the things that separates us from the animals is the ability to be creative, a power that derives from our soul.

If you have ever listened to a great piece of music or seen a great work of art and felt as though your soul has been moved, that is the faintest bit of magic.  It is the intangible quality in a piece of sublime creativity, channeled from the spark of divinity within a person that transcends the elements and invokes the power of God.

Among the greatest examples is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.  Whenever it is played, virtually every person within earshot will stop and listen.  They will want to participate in the music.  The desire to sing or hum along or wave their arms like a composer is undeniable.

Why?

That is the magic, the divine creativity in such a beautiful piece of music, reaching out and drawing power from the souls of all who hear it to become something more powerful than just the compression and rarefaction of air molecules in a sound wave.

Consider the Pieta or the Veiled Christ (Giuseppe Sanmartino), statues carved from marble so perfectly that you swear that if you were to reach out and touch the folds of the Virgin Mother’s robe Christ’s veil, they would be soft and move like cloth.

In the Jewish tradition, we have the story of the Golem.  A wise and ancient Rabbi who creates a man from mud and whispers into its ear the name of God causing the mud man to come to life.  That is an act of creativity that draws directly from the power of God.

So how do we get from that concept of magic to practicing magicians?

A magician is someone who studies and hones the skill of sublime creativity.

The power of magic in the magician’s ability to borrow the power of God and will something into existence.

A sculptor who creates a sculpture of a man that is so perfect he comes to life.

A painter that can manifest the subject of a painting into reality.

A musician who can play a piece of music so deep that it doesn’t just stir the soul like the 9th Symphony, but actually dominates the listener’s free will and manipulates them.

Being more of a technical person myself, I thought of having magical technopaths that can create clockwork machines so complex that they manipulate the universe.  I wanted to tie this one into the Antikythera Mechanism.  Rather than a machine that predicts the movement of the stars and the tides, a clockwork that actually controlled the motion of the moon in its elliptical and ebb and flow of the sea.

I also had an idea for an ancient order of of magical lissiers or tapissiers who slowly manipulate events and human civilization by weaving an unending tapestry of life on earth.

Magic in this world would be more subtle and deeply impactful.

Also, anyone can make the effort to become a magician, people are not born into it, but it is a closely guarded secret and not well known outside of the practitioners.

It would be lots of master and apprentice-type education, perhaps with some small schools led by guilds in specific magical arts.  Masters would seek out people who display extraordinary talents and then show them what the true unlocking of their talent can do.

Of course, since people are literally playing with the power of God, problems are bound to happen, which is where I can start to stick in the plot.

It’s an idea in the raw that needs a lot of fleshing out.  I just wanted to come up with a novel form of a magical universe that has a vaguely plausible magic origin story.

–

Update:

Based on a comment, I wanted to explain just a little more on what separates a magician from a great master.  I don’t think I was clear enough.

Like the Rabbi of the Golem story, a magician is someone who knows the secret of how to deliberately channel the spark of divinity for creation.

A great artist will do it by accident but the difference between a great artist and a magician is the knowledge and purposeful skill of engaging in an act of sublime creativity.

That said, in this world, a lot of great masters would be magicians.  Leonardo Di Vinci would be a perfect example.  So would Michelangelo and Beethoven.

Clearly, people with the skills of being great masters would be people capable of learning to control of the spark of sublime diving creation.  But they would also engage in lesser great works of art.

So the closely guarded secret from above that is kept within the magic community is the transcendent knowledge that separates great skill from sublime creativity.

As I noted before, Kanye West has been saying some antisemitic bullshit about the Jews running this and that and profiting off the death of black people.

Then he went to Twitter with this bullshit quote:

https://twitter.com/HiPics90/status/1585208989440016384?s=20&t=InAQmRBBa0SHJHSi-CVf-A

See, you’re not allowed to criticize the Jews because they are in charge.

The justification for antisemitic statements is antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Circular logic is circular.

Of course, this puts Jews in a position where we can’t prove the negative.

“What Kanye said was antisemitic.  Abortion is not a conspiracy by Jewish doctors to kill black babies.”

“If you’re saying you can’t criticize the Jews that means the Jews are in charge and are crushing criticism of them.”

The more the Jews push back the more the conspiracy theory is reinforced in its believers.

Thats the problem with conspiracy theories, and antisemitic conspiracy theories in particular, the attempt to disprove them is taken as evidence that reinforces them.

We have already been the targeted by the Woke Left for their antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews as oppressive interlopers, now we have Kanye leading some weird pro-life alt-right against us too.

I’ve had a story bouncing around in my head for a while.

It’s not sci-fi but a sort of crime thriller detective story.

I’ve been wanting to turn it into a book for some time.

I’ve been listening to Larry Correa’s Writer Dojo podcast and reading writer’s help guides.

There are lots of articles and posts on how to accept criticism and be open minded about what other people say about your work.

What I want to know is how do you get past that point where you write several pages, look at it, say to yourself “this is utter dog shit, who the fuck wants to read this garbage,” delete it all, then tell yourself that it’s not worth wasting any more effort because nobody will ever want to publish this and if you self publish it you can throw all that money straight into the trash?

I have no desire or illusions if grandeur to be a professional writer.  In fact, the more I read of Larry’s blog about what being a professional writer entails, the less I want that.

It also helps that I really like my day job and am very good at it.

I just want to tell my story and if I make enough money to pay off a loan on a used car will consider that a victory.

But I hate every word I put down with such vehemence that I can even get that far.

I almost envy the writers who are so egotistical that they can’t take criticism because at least they believe in themselves.

A professional lifetime spent in calculated risk aversion is the worst thing you can do to yourself if you want to be creative.

https://twitter.com/br_1836/status/1584739709665783808?s=20&t=HpLMiGy8Yvb0zRq1I7469Q

Ouch!

She caught her forehead and her nose.  She’s lucky she didn’t damage her eye.

She is definitely going to need stitches to fix that.

Social media was a mistake.