Gary McGath

About Gary McGath

I am a freelance technical writer in Plaistow, NH.

Book discussion: Free to Move

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books freedom law liberty on by

Darth Vader saying: Not happy with the Empire? Then move to Another GalaxyIt’s a curious thing that the people who say you should leave the country if you don’t like it are so often the ones who favor legal barriers to doing it. Having the option is a valuable freedom, though.

We take for granted the freedom of Americans to travel from one part of the country to another, or at least we did until 2020. Now governments are imposing interstate travel restrictions in a futile attempt to contain a virus which is already on both sides of every state line. Shortly before I started writing this, I learned that if I travel six miles to Massachusetts, I now have to show a recent negative COVID-19 test or quarantine for 14 days. I don’t know how they plan to enforce it. Putting checkpoints on every road that crosses the state line would be ridiculous. Maybe they’ll pull over cars with out-of-state plates and demand test documentation. Maybe friends and family members will start standing on opposite sides of the state line to talk to each other as the police watch to make sure they don’t step over the border.

The freedom to “vote with your feet” is the topic of Ilya Somin’s book, Free to Move. Somin is probably best known for his writing in the collaborative legal blog “The Volokh Conspiracy.” He presents an argument for maximizing the freedom to relocate from one country, state, or town to another.
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Book Discussion: Brave New World 2

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged dystopia fiction science fiction on by

Brave New World coverThe early 1930s were a bad time for people who loved freedom. The Communists had taken over in Russia, as had the Fascists in Italy, and the Nazis were fast gaining power in Germany. The world economy had just crashed. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his novel of what the totalitarian future might be like.

It hasn’t held its popularity as well as Orwell’s 1984, but it may be a better prediction of the future. In Huxley’s dystopia, there are no secret police or torture chambers. The police use tranquilizers rather than lethal bullets. People are punished by reassignment rather than death or prison. It works because everyone is brainwashed from birth and controlled by drugs. Organized rebellions don’t happen. The models for 1984 were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Brave New World is closer to modern China.
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Alert to writers who use Audible

This entry was posted in Writing as business and tagged Amazon Audible audiobook on by

An article on File 770 reports that Audible has been encouraging readers to return audiobooks for refunds. They can return them as much as a year later, after reading the entire book. Surely it should take less time and reading than that to decided that you hate a book and wish you hadn’t spent the money on it.

The return counts as a revoked sale. The author gets no royalties, even though the reader got a year’s worth of use out of the book.
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Book Discussion: Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged biography books history religion on by

When I started my research on The Magic Battery, I needed to find out about the Reformation in Germany. I’d picked that period because it was a time of change and technological advancement, a good background to set changes in magic against. Learning about Martin Luther was important, since I wanted to understand the ongoing conflict of ideas. At the same time, I wanted to learn about daily life in that period. It’s easy enough to get information on the emperors and electors, the wars and alliances, the states and borders. Finding out how people traveled, ate, and married took more work.

Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet turned out to be very useful for both purposes. It tells the story of Luther’s life while including lots of details about how he lived. It gives a lot of insight into how people thought in those days.
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Book discussion: Flim-Flam!

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books scams skepticism on by

James Randi, stage magician (“the Amazing Randi”), skeptic, and writer, died on October 20, 2020. He was someone I really admired. He took on nonsense and demolished it. He gave Penn and Teller their start. This post is about one of his books mostly so I can talk about him. The book is Flim-Flam!, published in 1982. I don’t think it’s currently in print, but used copies are easy to find.

He took apart many claims of paranormal phenomena such as astrology, fairy photography, and faith healing, using facts and logic. Sometimes this made him unpopular, but he had fun doing it.

He pointed out that even smart people (like you and me, right?) can be fooled. Scientists can be especially gullible because they aren’t used to dealing with nonsense and fakery.

Randi was famous for offering a monetary reward to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal abilities. Originally it was for $10,000, and later he increased it to a million dollars. In Flim-Flam, he wrote:

I have carried around with me ever since a check in that amount [$10,000], immediately awardable to a successful applicant. … The offer is still open, and will be during my lifetime. It is stipulated in my will that if the amount is still unclaimed and available upon my death, the same offer will be made by my estate in perpetuity.

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To Hell with Twitter

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged Twitter on by

I am furious. Therefore I will choose my words very carefully.

The ex-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad posted on Twitter: “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.” In context, he was cheering on the brutal murder of Samuel Paty. Twitter did not suspend his account and was slow to delete that tweet.

I responded with what I consider an appropriate level of outrage and called on Twitter to remove his account.

As a result, my Twitter account is now suspended. If Twitter went to the trouble of suspending an account as obscure as mine (524 followers, last I checked), it likely did the same to a lot of other people criticizing Mahathir Mohamad, though I don’t know.
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Book discussion: Fahrenheit 451 1

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged censorship fiction science fiction on by

“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”

Those are the opening words of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They could also have been the words of whoever torched Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore in Minneapolis. (The crowdfunding campaign to restore it is still active.)

The arsonist might have gone on, as the protagonist’s thoughts do: “You weren’t burning anyone, you were burning things! And since things really couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don’t scream or whimper … there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up.” The goons who write in defense of looting and burning regularly say there’s nothing wrong with destroying mere property.
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Book discussion: Small Gods and Hogfather 1

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged fantasy fiction humor on by

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels combine humor with commentary on serious issues. My favorite in the series is Small Gods. It doesn’t have a close connection with any other Discworld book. Its time period is earlier than most of them, except for Pyramids.

If you haven’t read any Discworld books, you should! In brief, Discworld is a flat planet whose sun orbits around it. It lies on the backs of four gigantic elephants. They, in turn, stand on the back of Great A’Tuin, a turtle who swims through space, making even the elephants look small. However, if you live where the priests of the great god Om hold power, saying this could get you into trouble. They insist, in spite of all the evidence, that their world is a globe.

Discworld has many gods. They live on belief. If no one believes in them, they dwindle into helplessness and become the small gods. Om used to be a great god, but at the start of the story, he’s well on his way to becoming a small one. He has powerful priests, and Omnia’s terrified populace obeys the commandments of his prophets — but no one actually believes in him. They believe in the Quisition and its power to torture and kill heretics.
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