Quick Hitts

More and more smokers are switching from tobacco cigarettes to e-cigarettes. Instead of smoke from burning tobacco and paper, E-cigs provide water vapor infused with a bit of nicotine and flavoring, (Using an e-cig is referred to as “vaping” instead of smoking, and users are referred to as “vapers.”) There is no tar, carbon monoxide, or any of the other chemicals common to cigarettes. The vapor evaporates in seconds, leaving no odor or second hand smoke. They’re available in a variety of strengths, allowing a vaper to control how much nicotine they get (and ratchet it down, over time, if they want to). They’re available in a variety of flavors. The rechargeable versions are much less expensive than cigarettes – vapers can vape for under a buck a day, as opposed to ten bucks a day for most smokers. 

E-cig manufactures carefully avoid making any health clams, including claims about using them to quit tobacco. Most vapers, though, will tell you they quit cigarettes quickly and easily by switching to e-cigs. They’ll tell you they feel much better than they did when smoking cigarettes. Some vapers keep using e-cigs, others use them as a quitting tool. There aren’t many studies on the subject, but there’s little doubt that water vapor with some nicotine in it is far less harmful than tobacco smoke.

Nicotine nannies should be delighted about such an easy, practical way to reduce the harm to smokers. But they’re not. In fact, they are incensed by e-cigs very existence. E-Cigs are being restricted, regulated and outright outlawed. NYC and LA, who have long been in competition to see who could be the biggest nanny city, are treating them like regular cigarettes, banning them from “public” places, including outdoors. The European Union is working on severe restrictions that are designed to be impossible to meet – in other words, banning them. Why? If the nicotine nannies were really interested in public health, they’d be celebrating e-cigs instead of vilifying them. Their reaction to them makes no sense, unless you add in one other factor.

Hatred. NNs hate smoking, and more importantly, smokers, with a blind seething vehemence that makes Klansmen say, “Whoa, might want to dial that back a bit, buddy.” They view smokers as abnormal sub-humans with no self-control or concern for others. They want smoker’s choices to be limited to “quit or die.” Preferably die.

Stanton Glanz is one of the primary leaders of the current anti-smoker movement. He’s spent the last three decades promoting the “denormalization” of smoking and smokers. That’s right, he and his minions want smokers to be seen as abnormal.

Lucy Page Gaston, one of the first Nicotine Nannies.

NNs portray smokers as dirty, evil people who callously poison everyone around them with deadly second-hand smoke. Smartenized people know SHS is the biggest scam since homeopathy, but the NNs have been very successful getting the public to believe the myth, convincing people that the slightest whiff of smoke is deadly. It’s been their primary weapon for instilling fear and hatred of smokers for the past two decades.

E-Cigs makes SHS fears moot, because there is no SHS. Smokers who become vapers can enjoy their nicotine in a crowded, poorly ventilated room and leave behind no smell and no smoke. Now there’s no reason for the masses to hate and fear them, and the NNs are furious about that.
Hatred isn’t their only motivation; they are also driven by profit and power. Nicotine nannieism can be very lucrative. NNs get hundreds of millions of dollars from the Master Tobacco Settlement and from NGOs like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And NNs love the power, the sheer power, that comes from putting blue-collar bars and restaurants out of business, and harassing smokers at every opportunity.

E-cigs are also a huge threat to the pharmaceutical industry, which makes billions from nicotine replacement therapy (NRT): outrageously expensive and enormously profitable patches and gums and candies. Unfortunately, NRT products are worthless – studies have shown they are less effective than quitting cold turkey – and people are wising up to that. E-cigs, though, are a very effective way of quitting cigarettes, and big pharma doesn’t have a piece of that action.

The NNs are responding with their favorite, time-honored tool: Junk Science. They are making claims that e-cigs are somehow more dangerous than tobacco cigarettes, and desperately funding studies designed to “prove” that e-cigs present a SHS danger. These claims are so ludicrous that the public, which blindly accepted their SHS claims, is responding with laughter.

Like every nanny campaign, they’ve included a “for the childreeeeeeennnnnn” component. The CDC issued a report that said “E-Cigarette use more than doubled among teenagers.” That sounds alarming, until you look at the actual numbers. Use (defined as someone using them in the past month) rose from 1.5% to 2.8%. That, according to their math, is “more than double.”

What they didn’t reveal, until two months later, was that regular cigarette use among teens dropped – by about the same percentage of e-cigs increase.

NNs claim that e-cigs are marketed to kids, but they can’t provide a single example. There are no cartoon mascots or ads directed at teenagers. NNs claim the various flavors are designed to entice kids, because, evidently, adults don’t like strawberry or chocolate or coffee. (I’ve found the various attempts at capturing tobacco flavors in e-cigs are rather nasty, and prefer flavored e-cigs. When I want the taste of tobacco, I’ll smoke a pipe or a cigar.)

There are no health reasons to ban e-cigs. None. The vehement fight against them proves, finally and forever, that nicotine nannies are not motivated by health, not even a little. They are driven is power, money, and most importantly, feeding their hate.

Edited to add:  This quote from one of the nannies banning them in NYC proves the point of this article:  “Gennaro, who co-sponsored the vaping ban, worries that ‘just seeing people smoking things that look identical to cigarettes in subway cars, colleges and public libraries will tend to re-normalize the act of smoking and send the wrong message to kids.'”

He plays the “for the childreeeeennnnnn” card and admits that what really horrifies him is the prospect of smokers being considered normal again.

Version 1.5 of World of Tanks, The Missing Manual is now available. It contains about 20% more content than the first version, and has also been updated to reflect changes in the game.

The version number is now noted on the Intro page. If there’s no version number on your Intro page, you’ve got the old version. You should be able to turn AutoUpdate on and get it delivered to your Kindle automatically. However, the AutoUpdate feature on many Kindle devices has been broken for months. Amazon is “working on it.”

If you bought the earlier version, and it’s not updating, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you the .mobi file, which you can copy to your Kindle via the USB cable.

Loving liberty means standing up for the rights of people you disagree with; people who are doing wrong things for wrong reasons.

Photographer Elaine Huguenin was approached by a lesbian couple who asked her to photograph their wedding. Elaine turned them down. Taking the job, she says, would have been an endorsement of gay marriage, which is against her religion. She was charged with discrimination, and has fought the case all the way up to New Mexico’s Supreme court, which ruled she is guilty of the crime. She wants the case taken to the US Supreme Court.

A wedding photographer and a couple have an employee-employer relationship. The couple is the employer. The left loves forcing employers to hire people they don’t like, but now they’re switching that around, trying to force a potential employee to take a job they’d rather decline.

Here’s a thought experiment for those who side with the couple. Imagine that you’re a photographer in one of the toothless states, where the legal age of consent is 14. You are approached by a Muslim family who is marrying their 14-year-old daughter to a 56-year-old man. The daughter, thoroughly indoctrinated, raises no objections. Like any decent human being, you find this repulsive.

The Muslims leave, and while you’re pondering the best way to handle their request, you get a call from another potential client. They’re having a KKK themed wedding. The bride and groom, both white supremacists, are getting married in sheets. Their band, “The Watermelon Eatin’ Jigaboos,” will be performing in blackface.

Should you be forced to take either of those gigs?

Turning the lesbians away didn’t cause them any harm. Elaine’s beliefs are wrong and bigoted, but she has a right to them. The couple doesn’t have a right to force her to work for them. It really is that simple.

Many atheists, myself included, once passionately believed in our religion. We would fiercely defend it against all critics, usually with canned talking points we knew by heart. When doubts started creeping in, we went on serious searches for answers, and were dismayed by what we found. At first we rejected anything that contradicted our beliefs, but as the evidence piled up that became harder and harder to do. Eventually, it became impossible. We left our beliefs behind (and in some cases, all our friends and family as well) in order to embrace reality and more forward.

I find it very discouraging that so many atheists, the majority of them in my experience, are progressives: far-lefties who believe in the state with the passion they once reserved for religion. They reject religious laws as nothing more than words written down by goat-herders thousands of years ago, but have a great reverence for words written down more recently by weasels in suits. They deny that taxes are taken by the threat of force. They talk endlessly about The Social Contract, a construct as imaginary as The Holy Spirit. When expensive Keynesian economic policies inevitably fail, they insist it was only because they weren’t big enough. They love Obamacare. They will do everything they can to eliminate choice in education – fighting against charter schools, private schools, homeschooling and unschooling. They defend Obama murdering American citizens with drones. They denigrate capitalism, always confusing it with the corporatism we have in place in the US. They refuse to admit that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. And they despise the very idea of libertarianism.

The worst example of this is Humanism, which I’ve written about before. Join any humanist forum and leave a few posts that are liberty-oriented. Talk about the rights of the individual, the invisible hand, or the advantages of free-market capitalism over socialism, then watch how they react. (Do not try this experiment unless you have thick skin and flame-proof underwear.)

Progressives have no idea what libertarianism is. They’ve created a voodoo doll caricature of it, and they hate that doll.

The typical libertarian, according to them, is a selfish loner who doesn’t care about anyone else, not even a little. He wants to create a society that will cater to him while contributing nothing himself. He’d like to live by himself, counting his bullets and his pre-1965 silver coins, only leaving his lair to buy dangerous drugs from vending machines conveniently located on school grounds. On the way, he’ll rub his hands and chuckle as he steps over the corpses of the poor who died in the street for want of food and medical care.

In reality, Libertarians are the same as most other people. We want a happy, productive life full of friends and family, helping out others as much as we can, teaming up with like-minded people to accomplish mutual goals, while being free of violence and coercion. There are only a few things that separate us from the general population: we recognize that the source of most violence and coercion is the government, we rebel against (and often ignore) stupid laws and we are quite willing to let other people lead their lives as they see fit, even if we strongly disapprove of their choices.

(The term “voluntarist” is becoming popular among the liberty-minded. I like it; it encompasses non-violence, involvement, and cooperation in one short word.)

Trying to explain this to a progressive usually a waste of time – it’s like arguing evolution with a fundy. Information on libertarianism is readily available, but they prefer to embrace their ignorance, clinging to it like the religious cling to their gods. Smugly hating the caricature is so much easier than learning the reality.

This is a plea to my friends who are progressive atheists. You know, from experience, how to rigorously examine deeply held beliefs. Please apply that skill set to your political and economic beliefs as well. Ponder the idea of force, and stop denying that it’s the government’s only tool. Figure out how many government “solutions” are responses to problems created by the government in the first place. When there is a problem, ask if it can be better solved by individuals acting freely, rather than by government force. Stop making excuses for the failure of Keynesian policies. Consider the idea that free individuals can, as a direct result of acting in their own best interest, create a society of abundance and liberty. Reject the caricatures of libertarians presented by The Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, and Mother Jones. Visit Reason, The Cato Institute, and other sites that espouse real libertarian thought. Listen to Free Talk Live to hear real libertarians vigorously debate ideas with each other. Smartenize yourself on the subject. Most importantly, stop trying to force your morals and lifestyle on everyone else with laws and rules and regulations.

You can do it. Please, give it a try.

Please.

I just read an article that is so profound, so full of wisdom, so insightful, that it changed the way I look at the world. I’m going to have to alter my entire belief system and way of life, but I’m looking forward to that. Before continuing, please read this remarkable article: Nobel Prize to Deny God? Yep.

I’ve learned so much from this.

I learned that the Nobel Prize isn’t a real thing. Why else would they put it in quotes?

I’d always been under the mistaken impression that the motives for trying to better understand the universe were to improve our lives, and to satisfy simple human curiosity. I never suspected it the real motivation was to deny God. Good to know.

I discovered that the word “billion” is spelled with a “B,” and although ten billion dollars is a fraction of a percent of what godders spend erecting shrines to their various sky daddies, spending it to build a “Particle Collider” is a waste of money. And, considering the quote marks, I was surprised to learn the particle collider isn’t a real thing either.

I’ll admit that I have only a vague understanding of particle physics. I thought the Higgs was being sought to explain why some particles that shouldn’t have mass, do.  But this article taught me it is the particle from which all other particles sprung, via the process of spontaneous combustion.  I feel so much smarter now.

I learned that the press is Marxist. I knew the most of the mass media leans to the left, and some slant in that direction more than others, but Marxist? Wow, that’s a revelation.

I discovered that if we find water on Mars, that will prove humans lived there. So Ray Bradbury wasn’t an author of fiction, he was a historian. Sweet!

I was unaware that the primary purpose of space exploration is to deny the existence of god. I had foolishly believed that the question of God has never been part of space exploration, or any other scientific endeavor. Now I know I was mistaken.

So thank you, Christian Coalition, for Smartenizing me. I have been an atheist for most of my adult life, but your brilliant arguments and insights have changed my mind completely.

I am now off to dedicate my life to Jesus. Hallelujah!

It seems that half the stories and blog posts on the ‘net are now list articles. Here are seven reasons I hate them.

1) Its Lazy Writing – Good articles make a point or three, backing up opinions and ideas with compelling writing. This requires time and craft. List articles, by contrast, are stupidly simple to write, and many of them are tossed together by stupidly simple writers.

Even the titles are artless. Why waste precious minutes creating a compelling title, when you can just pound out something as simple as “7 Reasons I Hate List Articles?”

2) They Create Fake Controversy – Articles listing the n best (or worst) movies or books or albums is a cheap way to generate fake controversy and generate the buzz of meaningless arguments. It insures people will post it to Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest along with their complaints. “I can’t believe they left out Wreckless Eric and included The Fabulous Poodles.” Which, in turn, generates traffic and comments.

3) Padding – It’s easy to inflate the number with worthless items, like this one.

4) None of Them Are As Good As Cracked – When I was a kid, Cracked was the magazine you bought when you couldn’t wait for the next issue of Mad. It was Mad Lite – not quite as good, but passable.

But it’s grown up to be one of the funniest web sites on the net, as well as an excellent skeptic site. You laugh while you learn stuff, a potent and powerful combination. Nearly all of their articles are in a list format. They are the king of list articles – all the others are cheap imitations. Why waste your time with cheap imitations?

5) Slide Shows – Few things are as annoying, and completely unnecessary, as slide shows, and many list articles use them. If you have ten photos (or ten ideas), spread them across two pages instead of forcing readers to click and click and click and click and click and click and click and click and click and click to see them. I’ve seen slide shows featuring a hundred “best albums” or “best books.” It’s a cheap trick to inflate the number of clicks you receive at the expense of the reader’s time and patience. Rather than click through slide shows, I just click the little x on the tab and they magically disappear.

6) I Find Them Oddly Compelling – I often feel compelled to click such articles, and I hate that I’m so easily manipulated. I see “46 Ways To Make a Woman Orgasm” and think, “Gee, what are the three I don’t know about?”

7) They’re Trite – They’re so common and over done my reaction (unless #6 takes over) is to roll my eyes and move on. I’m sick of them, and hope enough readers are getting tired of them that they’ll stop drawing traffic and writers will abandon them.

If you’re tempted to write a list article – don’t. If you’re tempted to click on a link to one – don’t. And if you’re tempted to post a link to one – don’t do that either. Unless it’s a link to this one. Send this to your friends, and make it the last list article you ever link to.

Note: This is not a beginner’s tutorial; it assumes you already know how to use Scrivner.

I got the idea for Blood Witness in the early eighties. I poked at it for a couple of years before I finally sat down and finished it. Then I spent another year on revisions and edits. I made a half-hearted attempt to find an agent before mothballing it. In 2009 I turned it into a podiobook, and then published as an e-book on Amazon in 2012. Total time from concept to publication: 30+ years.

I got the idea for World of Tanks: The Missing Manual, in April of this year. After thinking about it for a week or so, I pulled up Scrivner and started writing. It took about three weeks to complete the first draft. I spent another three weeks polishing and tweaking it, adding new content and creating diagrams. Then I sent it off to my volunteer editors/beta readers.

They sent it back with lots of suggestions and ideas. I implemented about 90% of them. For a final proofreading, I sent it to my daughter, who has never played the game, to see if she found anything confusing, and to find any remaining spelling or grammar errors . Her best catch: Referring to “public battles” as “pubic battles.” That would have made it an entirely different game.

After making the final corrections, I created a cover and uploaded the book to Amazon. Total time from concept to publication – less than four months.

That’s quite an improvement.

World of Tanks is a MMO where players drive around in vintage WWII tanks and shoot at each other. I’ve been playing it for a year or so. There are three classes of tanks, plus tank destroyers, plus artillery. There ten levels (tiers) of each vehicle, spread across six nationalities. There are hundreds of vehicles to pick from, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Vehicles can upgraded with improved modules, outfitted with equipment, and stocked with supplies (which are called “consumables”). Then there’s the crew, which improves with experience, and can be trained in various skills. And that’s just the tank part of the game. Players also need to learn battle tactics, how to manage the in-game economy, the best way to team up with other players, how to find and install game modifications (mods)…so yes, it’s complicated.

I wanted sections on tanks, crew, game economics, strategy and tactics, and a smart-ass glossary, so those were the first documents I put in the project. I started with the tanks, briefly describing the attributes of different nations and tiers. Then I added separate documents for each type of tank, followed by documents that covered different tank modules, equipment and consumables.

I’d usually start with a largish chunk, which I them broke down into separate documents. For instance, I had one document on consumables, which I then broke up by making each consumable a separate sub-document. Most of these documents were just a paragraph or two. I could see how well each one worked as a standalone piece, then, with one click, read the entire Consumables section as one long document. It was simple to juggle the order of each piece to get it just right.

Being able to jump quickly from document to document, adding a bit here and a bit there, made building the manual fairly easy. I’d be writing about, say, consumables, and that would remind me of something about the crew, so I’d click into that document, write, and that would call to mind a particular battle tactic, so I’d click to that document, and the whole book fleshed out rather quickly. When I wasn’t sure where to put something, I put it in an “Odds and Ends” folder. About half of what started there ended up in other places, and the rest stayed; Odds and Ends became a chapter in the book.

The logical order for the contents was Tanks, followed by Crew, Economics, Tactics, Mods, and Odds and Ends. But people would be downloading samples, and I wanted to give them something up front that would pique their interest and make them want to buy the book immediately. The Economics section has detailed advice on how to minimize the grind – the often-excruciating process of working your way though a lousy tank to unlock a good one. That was something that everyone would appreciate. I made Economics the first section of the book with a drag-n-drop.

I was about halfway through WoT:TTM before I gave any thought to labels. When writing fiction I use them to indicate character POV, which helps to see how the story is flowing, and use Status to indicate where a document is in the editing process. (To Do, First draft, Revised First draft, etc.) I’d been using status the same way with WoT:TMM, and wasn’t using labels for anything. About half way into the project I had an idea: why not use the labels for status instead?

Here are the colors I used:

Now I could tell at a glance which parts needed attention, and what kind of attention they needed. It also created a rainbow in the binder, with the changing colors indicating progress.  The white (needs to be written) turned to bright red (first draft), then to light red (polished first draft), which turned to yellow, which turned to light green and then dark green, with occasional interruptions to remind me I needed to create diagrams or do more research.

The beta readers were World of Tanks players, and they found lots of small factual errors, and a few big ones. Some suggestions required major revisions and additions. The binder became more yellow as I made them.

After making the changes I printed the whole thing out on paper and went through it line by line, reading out loud, looking for and correcting anything we’d all missed. As I finished each section, I changed the labels to light green, then sent it off for “final” daughter-edit.

I exported it into an RTF format, then to a Word format, and then into Jutoh, a program that makes producing the final e-books fairly simple. (Yes, I know Scrivner can export to an e-book format, but I prefer the flexibility of Jutoh.)

After publishing it, some of the reviews mentioned spelling/grammar errors, so I sent it to yet another editor, Johnny Virgil, who caught several errors that all the rest of us had missed.

My biggest writing nemesis is distraction. The two main sources of distraction are research and clumsy phrasing.

In a scene that takes place in the mid-80s, a character was drinking Johnny Walker Black. But wait, was that available then? I looked it up, and no, it wasn’t. So I needed to have him drinking a different premium scotch. Should it be something common, or more esoteric? I thought esoteric, but not too esoteric, would be the right choice. That led to looking for reviews and information about scotches of all sorts. I looked at the clock and found I had spent an hour researching that one sentence.

Sometimes it takes far too long to re-work a clumsy sentence. Fixing it, getting it just right, can break my workflow and waste a lot of time.

My solution to both problems is highlighting. If I need to research something, I highlight the sentence in pink. I change the status to “needs research,” except for this project, where I used the label instead. Knowing it will be easy to find and fix the problem later makes it easy to keep writing without getting stalled. The same process works for clumsy phrasing or the not-quite-right word. Those get a yellow highlight in the text and the appropriate status (or label) change.

World of Tanks: The Missing Manual is selling well on Amazon, and getting good reviews. I intend to update it on a semi-regular basis. The game is updated several times a year, which means some of the info in the manual will become outdated, and I keep learning new things I’d like to add. I’ve already started making changes and additions, and the color-coding in the binder makes it very easy to see which sections have been changed or added, and how much work each piece needs. When I’m ready to publish the new version, I’ll be able to pull out the changed/added documents and send them to my editors instead of having them go through the entire book again.

I could have written the whole thing in Word, but it would have frustrating and taken longer, probably much longer. Scrivner made it much easier, and more importantly, helped make it a better book.