Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

#7 H.I.V.E. : Higher Institute of Villainous Education by Mark Walden

I have the distinct feeling the phrase "Hogwart's for supervillains" came up in the pitch for this novel. Because that's largely what it is.
A group of 13 year olds with talents for mischief and crime are abducted by a mysterious organization to their elite training facility on an island inside an active-looking volcano. There they're taught courses like Basic Villainy by a cast of colorful teachers.

Now, with a description like that, your first reaction is going to either be "How lame!" or "How awesome!" Mine was the second. I loves me some supervillainy. Though for budding supervillains, most of the characters are friendly, courageous, loyal, etc. So they're not really that bad. Not even the big baddie who runs the place. Which is really the easier way to write "bad guys", make them pretty much admirable people, then add the trappings like mechanical hands and death rays and henchthugs and so on. The ending leaves it wide open for a series (presumably following the further years of the class) so it remains to be seen how things will be handled if the kids actually start doing nefarious deeds. All in all, probably not worth a hardcover price, but decent enough to read from the library or similar.

Previous Books:
#1: Grave Peril
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#4: Bad Prince Charlie
#5: Making Money
#6: How to Win Friends and Influence People

...is to write a self-help book and fleece a bunch of people who need help out of their money.

Okay, context. I've started reading The Secret, this book that's been on Oprah at least twice and a couple of the other daytime talk shows and we've been selling a zillion copies of it, the DVD, the audiobook, and the CD soundtrack. I'm only about 30 pages in, because I can't keep reading it that long, because it's crap. Seriously. It fills almost every cliche of crappy new-agey self-help books. But as far as I can tell, "the Secret" is "What you think is what you get". Which is crap. And now as I read this, I feel worse and worse about all the people we sell it to. But let me get back to "the Secret" they're talking about, and why it's crap.

Basically, it takes the power of positive thinking and dresses it up in a lot of pseudo-mystical and pseudo-scientific gobbledygook without caring about the accuracy of either. They talk about the "law of attraction" which means what you think about is what you draw to you, and try and couch it in terms of "frequencies" or "magnetism" or even more fun, quantum physics. And so by this theory, everybody who's ever died in a natural disaster or through something like say, war, violence, heart disease, or having a piano dropped on them is responsible for their own deaths. What a crock of shit. Not just because it shares the same flaw as the whole idea of karma, which is to blame the victim, but because it denies the existence of any sort of objective reality. Yes, I know the arguments that our entire world we see is created by our brain interpreting the messages from our senses, so we can't REALLY know, etc, blah blah blah. And that's stupid too. Not something you can disprove with formal logic (or even by smacking the True Believer sometimes), but it's absolutely no help. If the rest of the world's an illusion, how do you know you're not too? Or it's not all just a giant simulation using you as a battery (or co-processor, in a slightly more scientifically plausible version of The Matrix). You can't. But since pretty much all of our observations match up to the idea of their being a real objective world outside of ourselves that we can touch and influence but don't have complete control over, that sure seems like the best bet. Or at least the best bet to act like.

So with objective reality as a working hypothesis, that nullifies the whole "Secret" right there. Yeah, positive thinking is good to an extent, especially for people who continually undermine themselves with their own actions because they expect to fail (not that I'd know anything about that, personally, of course), but just thinking doesn't do anything. Thoughts are just patterns in your brain until and unless you act on them. So they only have any effect in how they get you to act. By their deeds they shall be judged.

So, I might force myself to finish reading the rest of The Secret and see if there's anything at all useful in there, but I'm not expecting much. And it's sad, it's not even entertaining crackpottery, or anything new and interesting that can make me think "Man, that's not true, but it'd be kinda cool if it was." Everything The Secret tries to do has already been done better, like by Mage: The Ascension.

I just finished reading Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber. It's about Willie Sutton, one of the most famous and successful bank robbers in American history, who robbed almost a hundred banks and broke out of jail three times.

The irony of the title is it comes from a famous quote in an interview, where a reporter asked him "Why do you keep robbing banks?" "Because that's where the money is." But according to him in the book, he never actually said that.

And it is a fascinating book. It doesn't go into much detail about the bank robberies, because why should it? Most of the plans actually were fairly simple, he'd disguise himself as a cop or Fedex guy or something and get into the bank when there was just one person there, before it opened, then corral the other employees as they came in and convince the manager to open the safe, then walk out. He comes off as a real gentleman bank robber. Sure, it's his autobiography, so he'd have every reason to make himself look good, but it's still fascinating.

The other thing, though? Most of the book is about being in jail. He spent like thirty years in jail all told, the chapter about one of the escape plans skips over several years. He spent all of World War II in jail. He finally got out of jail thanks to a lot of legal wrangling on Christmas Eve, 1969. But the parts about jail are fascinating in themselves. Especially the kinds of hellholes some of them were, and reading him talking about the changes that came to the prisons in the times he was there. The whole book was completely interesting, and gave me all sorts of ideas.