Clarification

I guess this clarifies that they are okay with stabbing anyone else:

Late Thursday, Benzion Gopstein, the leader of Lehava — which has attempted to stop Jews from marrying Muslims — issued a statement condemning the authorities for allowing the “provocative” parade to take place but clarifying that his group is “against stabbing Jews.”

Let me get this straight

Mullah Omar died two years ago in a hospital in Pakistan. No one outside of the Taliban knew he died until a few days ago when Pakistani intelligence managed to confirm his death somehow and decided to tell the world. Despite the fact that his death occurred two years ago, the Taliban did not figure out his successor until this week.

Apparently, the group really fine with being leaderless, even as they are prosecuting a war with Afghan government forces, right up until the news of Omar's death broke the other day. It is only then that they suddenly (and quickly) designated a successor.

off to see attle

I've never seen it before (except for the airport)

Almaty 2022!

I waiver between not giving a shit at all about the Olympics and actively disliking the whole thing. And I think that hosting Olympic games (as Philly occasionally makes noises about wanting to do) would be an absolute disaster for the city, causing way more problems than it will ever solve.

But that said, for some reason I can't help but root for Kazakhstan to get the 2022 Winter Olympics out of sheer loyalty to the country. Also maybe it would get people to learn more about the place. Also, well, um, considering how much I otherwise don't like the Olympics it doesn't really make much sense. Maybe it's blind faith, but I actually think that if KZ hosts it may be good for the country overall, benefiting in a way that Philadelphia as a host city would not.

Also Almaty has real snow (it snowed when I was there in October ferchristssake). Surely that should count for something in a winter Olympics bid.

UPDATE (7/31/15): Oh well. The vote was close though.

Public shaming is never a good idea

I'm not a fan of big game hunters, but I gotta say I am a little embarrassed to watch so many friends jump on the public shaming bandwagon in this case. I'm not a fan of what Dr. Palmer did and I think he should be prosecuted. But I don't think an online mobs seeking to destroy someone's life is a good thing no matter who the target is.

If there is no polling threshold for the debate, it won't just be 16

This change could cause more problems than Fox has anticipated. Without the polling threshold, every declared GOP presidential candidate is entitled to take part. But there are a lot more declared candidates than Fox News and Politico seem to be aware of.¹ By my count, there are 35 declared Republican Candidates for President, not 16.

In every presidential election, a lot of people run who get zero coverage in the media. I really mean zero, not just Carly Fiorina-style "zero coverage." I'm talking about people like Skip Andrews, John Dummett Jr., and Jack Fellure. People who the national press completely ignores. I believe at least some, if not all of them, meet Fox's remaining criteria for participation (I'm not sure if they all have filed with the FEC, but Fellure, at least, has). If polls are no longer a threshold, why can't they get on TV with the rest of the clowns from the car?

(via Memeorandum)

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1-Speaks volumes, doesn't it?

To answer Dan De Lice's question...

...yes, it looks like the U.S. has sold out the Kurds. That seemed to be the price for getting Turkey on the anti-ISIS bandwagon.

This is all part of a time-honored tradition of Western powers screwing the Kurds. And this screwing is almost in time for the 100th anniversary of Sykes-Picot!

Picking a nit

So I read this sentence in this article about how Turkish sympathy for the Turkic-speaking Uighurs is complicating Turkish-Chinese relations:

Turkey, heir to the Ottoman Empire, has long seen itself as a protector of Turkic-speaking people across the arc of Central Asia — and that includes the mostly Muslim Uighurs in China’s western region of Xinjiang, where ethnic tensions and outbursts of violence between Uighurs and ethnic Han, the dominant group in China, have been rising because of what Uighurs say is official repression, though Chinese officials blame terrorist ideology.

The first part of the sentence is odd, because the Ottoman Empire was not really a protector of Turkic-speaking people. The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic empire that was Turkish ruled, but did not claim territory or justify its legitimacy based on ethnicity like the modern nation-state does. The Ottomans didn't always have good relations with their Turkic-speaking cousins in Central Asia either (e.g.). Pan Turkism (and the broad sympathy that comes with it for far-flung Turkic cousins like the Uighur) didn't exist until the last century of the Ottoman Empire and it is one of the forces that tore that country apart. It's not because modern Turkey is the heir to the Ottoman Empire that it sees itself as a champion of Turkic peoples around the world, it is because nationalism became the new grounds for national legitimacy when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. In that sense, pan-Turkic nationalism is a rejection of their Ottoman legacy, not the product of it.

(Yes, I realize that one sentence does not really matter. This is not a criticism of the overall article or the point it was making. Rather, this is just a reflection of my own obsession with Pan-Turkism (particularly since 2010). For Example. In any case, if I can't pick a nit, what is the point of having a blog?)

Plan B

Why would anyone seriously call for an investigation of this  They would have been crazy not to. Besides, the introduction of a new currency (or even the revival of an old one) has to be planned for in secrecy for it to work.

Obvious anagram steals my idea

Not even a hat tip, Reince?

Cut your hair and get a job

This silly spat between Ted Cruz and William Shatner is the perfect excuse to post this awesome video.



(via)

Papal questions

My big question about the Secret Service's plan to pretty much stop all human activity in the core of Philadelphia for the duration of the Pope's visit is: does this happen everywhere the Pope goes?

The Pope spends a lot of his time traveling the world. The security measures leaked for the Pope's Philadelphia visit are so insane, it is hard to believe this is what every city on every stop of his tour will do. I guess most of those stops are outside of the U.S. and thus outside of the jurisdiction of the U.S. Secret Service.

But if this is just the Secret Service overdoing things, aren't they also in charge of Presidential security? Presidents visit Philadelphia fairly regularly. It happens at least several times a year. Obama was here last week. The Secret Service doesn't shut down the city every time a President shows up. So why is the Pope's visit requiring such a comprehensive shut down of the city's transit system (both public transit and the roads) which will make it impossible for tens of thousands of people to go about their lives, or even see the Pope on his visit?

Besides, the Pope isn't just coming to Philly on his U.S. visit. He will also be in NYC and DC. Is the Secret Service fucking over the residents of those cities as well?

RIP Don Joyce

How the RNC could have narrowed the debate pool and boxed in Trump on a third party run

It is probably too late to change the rules and do it now, but why didn't the RNC make, as a condition of participating in the GOP primary debates, a public disavowal of running for president as an Independent or third party candidate? That would have forced Trump to either rule out a third party candidacy, or be excluded from the debates (which would suggest he is not a serious candidate). The GOP needs to winnow down the debate participants anyway. Am I the only one to think of this?

(I understand that Trump could have disavowed a third party candidacy to get into the debates and then "changed his mind" later on. But that flip-flop would hurt Trump, even if it didn't get rid of him entirely)

The current Pope talks about a wide range of things, shocking American conservatives

This is not surprising at all.

For most of my adult life, Catholicism has been associated in the American public's mind with a particular brand of social conservatism. During that time, the American church has mostly taken public stances on only two political issues: abortion and gay rights. Officially the church has long been anti-poverty, pro-labor, and anti-death penalty, and it opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But if you just followed American politics you would never know it. Under Jean-Paul II and Benedict, the American Catholic church seemed determine to make itself seem like a branch of the Christian right. American Bishops talked about denying Catholic politicians communion because they were pro-choice. But I don't recall any ever floating the idea of denying communion to a politician who was pro-death penalty, even though both the Church's position on abortion and the death penalty stem from the same "pro-life" philosophy.

Pope Francis has not changed the official Catholic position on very many issues. What he has done is talk publicly about the church's position on a wider variety of topics than the American public is used to hearing. For the first time since the late 1970s, there is a Pope who is not presenting himself in the U.S. as Pat Robertson in fancier clothes.

(semi-related posts from my archives: 1 2 3)

Jackass

Senator Lindsey Graham tells Donald Trump to "stop being a jackass."

Trump, determined to prove Graham right, tells everyone Graham's private cell phone number in a speech (and then repeats the number to make sure everyone got it)

Word Wars

Hopefully soon this is how we will all read the headlines.

(via Boing Boing)

Question

Is Donald Trump's candidacy any more ridiculous than Herman Cain's or Michele Bachmann's?

I don't think it is. And I don't recall the DesMoines Register calling for either of them to drop out at this stage of the race in 2011.

Yes, Trump is a buffoon who will never actually be president. But since when has that been any barrier to running for president or getting coverage as a serious candidate?

(via Memeorandum)

I didn't sell out son. I bought in. Keep that in mind.

Josh Israel looks into what happened to the progressive netroots movement and notes that it was largely incorporated into the mainstream media and democratic political structure.

That sounds like a sell-out, and maybe it is. If the goal was authenticity, selling out would be a problem. But that wasn't the goal. The goal was to move the country in a more progressive direction. And the best way to do that is through the existing political and media structures. So in that sense, it worked.

Prisoners of Iran

The Obama Administration got a bit of flack for not including the release of the 3-4 Americans currently being held in Iran (3 are definitely held and the 4th disappeared on Kish, a Persian Gulf Island controlled by Iran, in 2007) to the nuclear deal. But I'm wondering why everyone is assuming that there wasn't some side deal concerning the at least the three confirmed prisoners' release.

The U.S. does not like to openly bargain over hostages. So, for example, instead of explicitly making the release of Alan Gross part of the U.S.-Cuba deal to reestablish relations, Gross was released under a side agreement prisoner swap with Cuba that was a separate deal. Maybe there is a side deal in the works for Amir Hekmati, Saeed Abedini, and Jason Rezaian (I think that Robert Levinson is probably dead). If that's the case, the Administration wouldn't be able to talk about that until the deal is done--possibly the Iranians are waiting to see if Congress can stop the deal.

Of course this is all speculation. Maybe I am grasping at straws. It's just that all three were detained under pretty flimsy charges. It always seemed like the Iranians wanted to use them as bargaining chips.  I would be surprised if the Iranians did not offer to release them as part of the negotiations in exchange for some American concession.

"long considered"

The NYT today:

King Salman of Saudi Arabia met Friday with top political leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, in the most striking example yet of the new king’s willingness to work with Islamist organizations long considered foes.

 The NYT in 2003:

Nearly a year ago, Khalid Mishaal, a senior leader of Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization, attended a charitable fund-raising conference here where he talked at length with Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto Saudi ruler.

According to a summary of the meeting written by a Hamas official, Mr. Mishaal and other Hamas representatives thanked their Saudi hosts for continuing ''to send aid to the people through the civilian and popular channels, despite all the American pressures exerted on them.''

One of the weirdest things about following middle eastern politics is how short everyone's memories are. It is true that Saudi support for Hamas dried up in the middle of the last decade (probably because of American pressure). The Saudis became more hostile to the group when Hamas supported the Arab Spring (the KSA did not) and accepted Iranian funding in the absence of Saudi dollars (thus triggering the Saudis' anti-Shia paranoia). But that has only been the Saudi attitude for the last few years. I don't see how anyone could call them to be "long considered foes" when just over ten years ago the Saudis were Hamas' biggest benefactor.

We didn't need Wikileaks to tell us that

The worst part is how much Saudi paranoia affects U.S. policy.

What the hell is Merkel thinking?

I have been thinking the same thing. For the past 70 years, Germany has made great efforts to convince the world that they are not a country of sadists. The Merkel administration, by insisting on destroying the lives of Greek people to make sure that German banks get a 100% return on the risky loans they made is completely undermining Germany's post-World War Two charm offensive.

That deal with Iran

As I think I've said before,¹ if Iran wants to get the bomb the only way to stop it from doing so is through a negotiated deal with the West.

There is no other realistic option. To stop a nuclear program militarily would be an enormous effort, much harder than the Iraq War, and the U.S. simply has no appetite to try something on that scale (nor should it). Despite years of saber rattling (and the behind the scenes efforts of his Vice President), even President Bush wasn't stupid enough to try a war with Iran. A more limited military strike is not going to do the job and is likely to just accelerate any Iranian efforts to get a nuclear weapon. Other countries that might want to do such a strike--like Saudi Arabia and Israel--can't pull it off (which is why they have been so hell-bent on getting the U.S. to go to war with Iran for them). Opponents of the deal don't seem to get that basic point. In the absence of negotiated limits on Iran's nuclear capabilities, there will be no limits on its capabilities.

On top of that, in these negotiations the U.S. has had a lot more negotiating power on its side than it is likely to have again anytime soon. Since the the Iranian revolution, the U.S. has had a broad regime of sanctions against the Islamic Republic and those sanctions have been completely ineffective because other countries were willing to do business with Iran. The current round of negotiations came about because other countries, notably the European countries who have had a lot of trade with Iran, agreed to impose harsh sanctions on Iran too. The Europeans only signed on because they understood the sanction regime was designed to bring Iran to the table to negotiate a nuclear deal. And it worked! Iran came to the table and negotiated a deal.

If the U.S. Congress rejects the deal, the European sanctions will end. Because Europe has such business ties to Iran, they will not tolerate harsh sanctions with no end date. Again, the Europeans are only doing this because they understand the sanctions to be a temporary arrangement until a more permanent deal is negotiated. Without the possibility of a permanent deal, European resolve will crumble and they will go back to doing business with Iran. American sanctions will stay, but thanks to decades without any trade between the U.S. and Iran, the unilateral American sanctions will go back to being just as ineffective as they were for years before the Europeans signed on.

In other words, if Congress rejects the deal with Iran the likely result will not be a better deal, it will be a worse deal. The sanctions that Iran actually cares about will be lifted without any inspections or limits on Iranian nuclear capabilities.

That said, members of Congress, especially (but not exclusively) the Republican caucus are too stupid and hyper-partisan to realize this. They will decry Obama's deal as a sellout to Iran and claim that it will allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. Then I expect they will reject the deal, thus making it easier for Iran to get nuclear weapons.

I don't think the Iran nuclear deal is a bad deal, but because of domestic American politics I think it is a doomed deal.  I just don't see how it can get through the current Congress. If you are an Iranian who wants both nuclear weapons and to be free from the crippling multilateral sanctions, the so-called Iran-hawks in Congress are about to do you a massive favor.

UPDATE (7/16/15): After reading the comments, I guess I should clarify the last two paragraphs of the post. It is true that this agreement doesn't require Congressional approval. Rather, under the legislation passed a few months ago, the procedure will be that Congress can try to force the president to reject the deal by passing a resolution of disapproval, which the President will then be able to veto. Unless there are enough votes to override the President's veto (which I do not think will happen), Congress will almost certainly not be able to block the agreement in that sense. But my understanding of the deal is that it requires the U.S. to lift sanctions against Iran. Many of those sanctions were passed through the legislative process over the past 36 years, so they will take a Congressional repeal of those sanctions to effectuate those terms of the agreement.

For that reason, I thought (and still think) that Congress can block the U.S. from fulfilling its end of the deal. Maybe that is not correct. Maybe the President has the power to unilaterally waive the sanctions. But if the sanctions were written into a statute, it seems to me that Congress would be able to stop this deal by making sure that the U.S. does not do what it has promised to do by refusing to repeal the sanctions.
[end of update]

--------------------------------------------
1-Although I can't find the specific post that I am thinking of, so maybe I am remember a post I thought about writing but never did?

These polls do not show that Trump can win

Look, Donald Trump has almost zero chance of getting the Republican nomination. Sure, there have been a few polls showing him in first place. But even if you put aside the fact that each of these polls have a large enough margin of error for several other candidates to be the real leader, you can be in first place in a field of 15 candidates with a relatively low percentage of support. That doesn't mean he will get anywhere when there are fewer alternatives divvying up the anti-Trump vote.

In other words, just because he can get about 15% of Republican primary voters to vote for him when there are so many candidates, each with their own slice of the percentage, doesn't mean he can get a majority of Republican primary voters to vote for him.

On the other hand, I'm really glad that GOP strategists are taking Trump seriously.

Thanks to the NRA's election efforts, Democrats should feel free to go on record for gun control

There is absolutely no reason that every Democrat shouldn't feel free to push for stricter gun control. For the past few decades prevailing wisdom has been for Democrats seeking national office should shy away from the gun issue for fear of alienating the gun enthusiast vote. The problem is that in every Presidential election since at least 1992, the NRA and other pro-gun groups have claimed that if elected the Democratic candidate will seize everyone's guns. They have said that regardless of what the Democratic candidate's actual position (or often non-position) on gun control may be. And that has been their claims in every single election (including reelection campaigns) notwithstanding the fact that Democratic presidents keep not seizing everyone's guns, or even trying to.

I suspect that shying away from gun control has delivered exactly zero votes for the Democrats. So why keep doing it? Hopefully, Clinton's new boldness on the gun issue represents a change in the prevailing wisdom.

Symptoms of a larger problem

This is a symptom of a major problem that the Republican party has right now. So is this:

Since the start of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, a vexing question has hovered over his candidacy: Why have so many party leaders — privately appalled by Mr. Trump’s remarks about immigrants from Mexico — not renounced him?

It turns out, interviews show, that the mathematical delicacy of a Republican victory in 2016 — and its dependence on aging, anxious white voters — make it exceedingly perilous for the Republican Party to treat Mr. Trump as the pariah many of its leaders now wish he would become.

Not all Republicans are racist. It is not a "racist party" in the sense that the Dixiecrats were. But the modern Republican party depends on the racist vote. As long as they have to rely upon those voters to win elections, stuff that the party leadership and big money donors find embarrassing (like a last-ditch and hopeless sop to Confederate Flag supporters, and Trump's various verbal eruptions pushing him to the top of the polls) is going to continue to happen.

Moat?

Tunisia is not a huge country and its border with Libya is *only* 459 km (285 mi) long. So I can see how they could plausibly build a wall along that border. But why the hell are they going to build a moat?

Most of Tunisia is in the Sahara. It is really hot. Whatever water is in that moat is going to evaporate away pretty quickly. And its' not like Tunisia has an abundance of water to refill the damn thing as the water keeps disappearing.

Why not just go with a wall and security cameras? That's what all the militarized border areas are going with these days. Who builds a moat in the 21st century? Not even countries with no problem keeping water in liquid form do that.

My secret wish (so secret I'm posting it on the internet)

I'm kinda hoping that something really crazy happens at the end of July and the only candidates who qualify for the debates end up being the most hopeless/least respectable ones. (in other words, Bush, Rubio, and Walker don't make the cut)

Yeah, I know it will never happen, but a boy can dream.

Dinesh D'Souza's attempts to discredit people are ridiculously stupid even if we put aside the fact that they are also fake

Putting aside the question whether D'Souza knew the photo was doctored, what exactly was his point in posting it? Is there something wrong with being in the same room as a Confederate Flag? It's not like she's waiving it in the photo. She doesn't have it displayed on a t-shirt or tatooed on her body. It's just in the background. I would not be surprised if some symbol that I do not approve of have, at some point in my life, been in the background of some place I have been.

ISIS it is

If the group suddenly rose to prominence now, Daesh would be the best name for the group. It's a unique name, it makes a nice word play in Arabic. But the group has been in the news for the past year and American news organizations have not used Daesh very often. So I think it's too late for Daesh.

Among the names that are used in the American press (ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State), I prefer ISIS. It's easier to say than "the Islamic State", abbreviating "Islamic State" as "IS" would cause endless confusion as those are the same letters that make one of the most common verbs in the English language.

ISIS is better than ISIL because it gives me an excuse to post pictures and video from a beloved show from my youth.



Q.E.D.

(I also like how ISIS is Sisi backwards. Surely there is some way for me to use that at some point. I haven't figured it out yet, but I will!)

Bright lights of South Carolina

SC State Senator Lee Bright (challenging the notion that the confederate flag was related to the Dylann Roof incident):

Is it about that flag [or] is it about that lunatic that was waving that flag… I can’t imagine it was over a flag. I think it was just pure evil incarnate. What happened out in Colorado? There wasn’t a Confederate flag. What happened in New Jersey?

What did happen in New Jersey? Was there a recent mass killing there? I couldn't think of any and I live right next to New Jersey. I checked this list of rampage killings and the last one in the Garden State was 38 years ago (August 26, 1977)

I never heard of that NJ mass killing or heard the name Emil Benoist until I googled up that list for this blog post. But there's a funny thing in this August 27, 1977 AP article about his shooting spree:

Friends of Benoist in this tree-lined community blamed a short stint in the Marines at Parris Island, SC, about a year ago, for what they say was a personality change in Benoist.

"He wasn't as tense or as bottled up before he went in. He came back really messed up," one friend said.

I'm not claiming that Benoist was motivated by the confederate flag--there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. And probably Senator Bright was just mixing up his Northeastern states when he cited New Jersey in his speech in the SC Senate (He probably meant Newtown, CT). But I still thought it was amusing that Bright would inadvertently lead to me to the lass rampage shooter in New Jersey who seems to have gone bad because of his time in  South Carolina.

1 reason that Dylan Matthews' list is a mistake

Years ago, I saw an episode of Sliders where the heroes traveled to an alternate universe in which Washington et. al. lost the revolutionary war. It was pretty stupid episode. (Looking through Wikipedia now, I'm pretty sure it was the fifth episode of season one, "The Prince of Wails"  It portrayed modern America as being subject to an oppressive dictatorship under an absolute monarch. I just kept thinking, "if the revolutionary war was lost, wouldn't this country just be like Canada?"

Except it wouldn't. Modern Canada has been influenced a lot by the success of the American experiment with constitutional republicanism. If the American Revolution had failed, Canada would be a very different place (exactly how is hard to say). Same with Britain. It has also been influenced tremendously by the political experience of this country. While I doubt it would be the fascist state portrayed in that Sliders episode, it might be less democratic than the modern UK.

Those reflections on that stupid episode was what I thought of when I read Dylan Matthews' list of "3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake." Even if you believe that the British parliamentary system is better than the American system, I doubt that the British system would be the same if the American Revolution had not happened.

Counterfactuals are hard because influences go in all different directions. If the American south never left the British empire and thus there were a larger more economically influential constituency for slavery in Britain, would Britain have abolished slavery as soon as it did? If Britain held on to its more densely settled North American colonies south of the 45th parallel, would it have been as kind to Native Americans? I have no idea, and neither does Dylan Matthews.

(via Memeorandum)

Unionized chartered schools

There is a theory that the current charter school movement is driven by an effort to bust teachers' unions.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has agreed to take a case which (I expect, given the current composition of the Court) will render dues deduction illegal for public sector employees, which will be a major blow to public sector unions. If my prediction about the outcome of that case is correct, it will mean that private charter schools will be more receptive to unionization than traditional public schools. Considering the current drive to unionize chartered schools, the chartered school movement could end up being a life raft for the survival of teachers' unions.

Trump!

This is pretty awesome. The GOP has already said that it will limit who gets to participate in the official debates, but with Trump polling this well, I don't see how they can keep him out. Which guarantees that the debates will be a complete clown show (they probably would be even without Trump, but Donald is such an outrageous camera hog having him in the debates will make it even better).

SiteMeter

So is SiteMeter dead?

It has been acting wonky for the past week or so and right now the badge on the bottom right of this page is no longer loading. The web site is still there, but it hasn't been updated for a while. (The last post under the "news" section is from February 2009).

It's too bad. I check SiteMeter virtually every day, although it would also not be very surprising. Blogs have been in decline since, well, since about 2009. SiteMeter isn't just for blogs, but I think that's where they got most of their business. It was only a matter of time before someone over there thought it was no longer worth it.

At least StatCounter is still going strong. Plus Blogger has its own in-house stat monitoring system that didn't exist when I started this taco stand so I never got in the habit of looking at. Still, SiteMeter has been logging visits for this site longer than any of those other services.  If it goes, my hits from my first few years will disappear and I will have even less of an idea what the total number is.

Silver lining?

Honestly, the best possible result of this Saudi-led debacle would be if teaches the world that an air bombing campaign is not a good way to accomplish any political or military goals. For the past few years it has been the easy solution to many different problems. Except that it rarely solves anything and instead causes more problems.

I doubt if anyone will learn that lesson (and the Saudis have little incentive to admit their campaign is stupid and counter-productive. Especially considering that this is the baby of the Kingdom's shiny new King who is eager to prove himself), but here's hoping!

Midyear Resolution Report

For resolution A, I have received 13 letters/cards from 6 different people and responded to each.

For resolution B, I have read 5 of the 8 books that are subject to resolution B and completed three of the five trilogies. Specifically, I have read Plague Forge (thus completing the Dire Earth Cycle), The Year of the Flood  and MaddAddam (thus completing the MaddAddam trilogy), Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation (thus completing my reread of the original Foundation trilogy). In addition, I am about halfway through The Magician's Land, which is the 6th book I have resolved to read before year's end. Once I finish that one, I will have completed four of the five trilogies and all I will have left are the last two books in the Silo series.

Because I have met the four book threshold for resolution B, rule #3, my resolution book frequency will not increase in the second half of the year.