Judges > Science

The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has taken it upon itself to decide whether a drug is dangerous for human use.

The Thalidomide tragedy in the early 1960s might be history for most Americans, but I had a schoolmate, Amy (full disclosure: with whom I had a crush), who had two fingers and a thumb on one hand. She had it hard, and, in 1st grade, not a lot of mercy and understanding was to be found among the kids. But it didn’t keep her back. Despite Benevolent Drug Companies, the Food and Drug Administration pulled the drug from shelves after reports of birth defects. (Okay, because of a female scientist who wouldn’t shut up). Scientists looked at data made a data-based decision, and issued rules based on same.

To have a flock of eminently unqualified, black-robed, here-for-life judges make decisions about what drugs are or aren’t safe for women is, in a word, bananas. Would you want a bookkeeper to decide which drug to use in what dosage for a heart condition? Maybe ask an embalmer what a good recipe for a roast might be?

I don’t think SCOTUS will get involved in this specious, religiously-slanted issue. To rule to limit mifepristone would open the way for RFK Jr. to lobby for vaccines to be removed from pharmacies and for a certain ex-chief executive to get bleach put into HMO formularies.

Unintended consequences of laws, the foundation of the Shmuley Myers series, rolls out the red carpet for insane ideas brought to their ad absurdum ends. Georgia’s current IVF issue is a small example of it. Getting mifepristone banned would simply make more “sinners,” not more murderers. For some religions’ definition of “sinner.”

Even Wiseasses Can Figure This Out

George Carlin was making the unintended consequences argument about “personhood” decades before his joke turned toxic for Americans.

In other news, book #4 in the Shmuley Myers series should be out at the end of 2024.

Yes, Alabama. Still and Again. I’m Looking at you, Louisiana.

H/T to Legal Eagle!

The court decision calling IVF embryos “people” merely built on the already legalized notion that embryos have personhood. Devin Stone‘s latest video shows the wheels of injustice grind mindlessly in random directions.

I want all future decisions regarding pregnancy, abortion, or reproduction to be ruled on only by people who understand reproduction. Phrases like “extrauterine children…in…a cryogenic nursery.” They’re just trying to catch up with Louisiana, who’ve already hopped down the rabbit hole.

The macabre world of Shmuley Myers and the Preborn Investigation Bureau was a reductio ad absurdum snark. “Don’t people understand the consequences of such a thing?” (Hint: no.) So, we’re faced with (yet) another clash of church vs. state, where one religion’s radical zealots attempt to influence the State (of everyone else).

Read A Day at the Zoo to understand the now-actually-possible (-dare-I-say-probable?) implications of unintended (intended?) consequences.

Why the “Citizenship at Birth” Amendedment in the Shmuley Myers Series is Better than the Status Quo

Currently, my lovely state of Texas ranks amazingly low in child insurance and high in infant and maternal deaths. The current “pro-life” trend apparently starts and stops only with citizens with the means to pay for care. What happens to non-citizens, or those unable to pay for medical services, is not relevant.

In this series’ universe, since every pregnancy means a live citizen, and every non-live-birth a murder investigation, women would be required to have prenatal care. On a high-school nurse’s office, in The Property of Blood, there’s a poster:

1.  Thou shalt place your citizen’s needs above your own.
2.  Thou shalt keep your citizen safe.
3.  Thou shalt shelter your citizen well.
4.  Thou shalt not poison your citizen.
5.  Thou shalt keep your citizen’s home clean.
6.  Thou shalt prepare a safe place for your citizen.
7.  Thou shalt obey your doctors.
8.  Thou shalt keep yourself healthy for your citizen.
9.  Thou shalt feed your citizen as an honored guest.
10. Thou shalt treat your citizen as you would want to be treated.

It’s sad when a dystopian speculative fiction series devoted to unintended consequences is beat by the realities of 2024. The decimation of funds for those most at risk is a blazing proof that it’s not about the women, it’s about propping up the existing (white, moneyed) system.

Unintended Consequences and the Abuse of Corpses

An Ohio woman who miscarried a non-viable fetus stands charged of corpse abuse–of the fetus (see story: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/us/brittany-watts-miscarriage-criminal-charge/index.html). This is added to the increasingly blatant tricks used in states like Texas to ensure all pregnancies result in births, no matter the consequence to the fetus or mother.

The Shmuley Myers mysteries deal with the “law of the land” in this increasingly NOT an alternative history. To those not agreeing with what is not even Christian doctrine but instead a fringe desire to control women, the law is out to get you.

On Jewish Murder Mystery Authors

I’ve been asked about other murder mystery series. Most people know about the Rabbi David Small series by Harry Kemelman. I never connected to it, any more than I found Agatha Christie’s mysteries. My connection to the Jewish detective concept was actually due to Michael Chabon‘s brilliant “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union”, an alternate history tale set in Alaska. I found it more vibrant and police procedural than the dilettante detective concept.

One of my readers casually asked me recently if I’d read anything from Will Thomas. (No, I hadn’t.) I picked up the first book in his Barker & Llewelyn series, “Some Danger Involved,” and was immediately entranced. Thomas’ meticulous descriptions of Jewish customs and traditions set in and adapted for the 19th century. Sheer brilliance. If you like the Shmuley Myers series, Thomas’ dispassionate storytelling is compelling and now I have to spend more precious time plowing through the series.

The fourth novel in the Shmuley Myers series is being written, slowly. Name announcement and teaser to be revealed… anon.

Fictional Blood

In the opening scene of The Property of Blood there’s a scene at a primitivist Christian megachurch. Read the book to get details, but readers have commented about the different ways in which blood has been sacred. Here’s something from the NY Times that surprised me. It’s about Mrs. Vuolo, once a member of the overexposed Duggar family and its rather special brand of Christian belief. Full article here. ‘…As the credits rolled, the children performed a song onstage about the saving blood of Jesus, warbling, “Why should I not be put in hell to suffer for all time?”’

I’m always puzzled when these visions of violence are matched to the worship of someone seen as “representing “The Prince of Peace.”

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving/Friendsgiving. Be safe.

And Now… Excerpt from The Property of Blood

Finally, the upcoming novel! I made my last edits while on an Alaska cruise, “enjoying” COVID symptoms as I finished with the last scenes. Caught a lot of interesting glaciers, all in retreat or dissolution, helped in part by the ship’s massively polluting engines. I wasn’t going to walk from Texas to see it, so…it was the way to go.

A shout-out to Grammarly for giving my editor a run for his money on the ticklish grammar. (Robin comes out way ahead, given the tricky “Shmuley-speak” of the narrator’s sentence construction.) The last piece in the way is the dust jacket. For some reason, this one’s harder to get down than the first two. But I Shall Prevail. Still looking for a publish date in early October.

Buy A Day at the Zoo

Buy A Question of Allegiance

Without further ado, here’s the excerpt:

The scene, from where I stood on the steps of the Followers of Faith Christian Church, looked like the petting zoo of a serial killer. As a Haredi—ultra-Orthodox Jew raised in a Yiddish-speaking neighborhood—this was like watching aliens land. But for an APD homicide detective, the overtime pay was enough to buy a whole week of food. So, keeping peace at a church event was something I would suffer. Hopefully, no one would give me work for mine real job: homicide detective.

On top of the church, at mine back, flew a flag, green and gold in four quarters on a shield, with three purple lambs going across it at a diagonal. Didn’t see this before in the church. You should have it on a flag or something. Like an American flag at a used car dealership it waved, so big it was. Like the church building itself big.

Families disgorged from cars at the far side of a long oval driveway, which circled a bright green grass lawn, each in clothing fancy, as if for services. Not Subsid clothing could I see in the mass.

People walked from there to a fenced pen. Dozens of baby sheep inside it wandered in a broken chorus, crying for their mothers. When not eating the lawn. Their last supper. The smell of manure came and went on the breeze. Already there must have been five thousand people. The event, as listed, said they expected ten. Where outside all those people would fit I wasn’t sure. Certainly not on the grass, which into quarters was split, with clear spaces between for ambulances or police vehicles to quickly get inside the crowd.

A main street ran beyond the driveway. All around the church were low, sooty cement Subsid apartments. All alike, except only with different graffiti on them. The bright spring morning only showed the buildings off with more squalor. Mine grandparents told us stories of before the Amendment, when the president was Nixon. When families could be as small as they wanted. Before being pregnant and not having a baby was murder. Before, when people had things to take or use so as not more babies to bring into the world. Before Subsid became living a life when not enough for people there were jobs. Before the Preborn Investigation Bureau—the PIB—and its investigations of what was in sewers to tell of pregnancy. Before GodMother inquisitions for miscarriage. PIBniks, fech.

The church was like an egg in a nest of sticks. A colossal bubble rising, with columns like Greek temple columns all around it. Below the flag, a cross bloomed at the dome’s crown. Fancier by far than the State Capitol building. Almost exactly like a British royal orb it looked. Only greenish, from the copper roof. And tinged with the soot that covered everything, eventually.

Many of the men in the in the crowded swirl were dressed in white, thin robes with a fabric strip to tie it shut. Exactly like our Jewish kittels. Only on some holidays we wore them—and were in them buried, instead of in a coffin.

I adjusted mine police hat, then tugged at mine service belt. A little tight on me it was. Tight enough to keep mine equipment from falling down. As a detective sergeant in APD’s homicide squad, this for me wasn’t mine usual dress.

“Bored, Shmuley?”

Lieutenant JJ Dawson above me towered by a foot. Mine uniform was just tight; his was custom for him fit. On his face a smile flickered. Dawson was for us detectives the mother hen. Also, our slave driver—and the backup we needed sometimes against the Austin Police Department’s bureaucracy.

“This uniform makes me itch,” I said. Thanks to the Religious Freedom Act, mine usual “uniform” was more traditional: black felt hat with a hatband (no feather, please), black jacket, pants, and shoes. And a white shirt, collar open. Under mine hat a black fabric yarmulke. And under mine shirt a fringed undershirt. Both reminders that we were, from other religions different and held to a high standard. “The penguin suit,” mine mostly charming squad mates called it.

“Welcome to my world.” Lieutenants wore mostly dress uniforms. For all their important meetings to go to. After a moment, down the steps he went to make a circuit. He, like me, was for overtime pay working, so it wasn’t like now he was mine boss.

In the line of parishioners, the men in the families passed money or Subsid vouchers to a man in a white robe with on his head a flat, round, white hat, like a tambourine. A priest, maybe? The priest to the husband or oldest boy gave a small white box.

From the top of the steps I took a break and walked down to the front, near the animals. Nearby was Michael Midas, another Austin homicide detective. Aka, the Golden Boy. With blond hair, too.

He nodded at the zoo. “Do you have this ceremony at Jewish churches too, Myers?”

“We call them synagogues, actually,” I, with a smile, took the sting off the correction. “We ultra-Orthodox Jews, I mean. But no. This is new for me. Is this something your church does?”

His head he shook. “Nah, we just have prayer services a couple of times a week, and a big one on Sunday. Easter’s a longer service, at dawn. This is one of those churches that tries to do things the old biblical way, but for rich folks. Kind of fundamentalists.”

I didn’t know. Not mine biblical way, for sure.

“Although,” he continued, “I’m thinking maybe we won’t have lamb chops this year.”


A bleat came from the large, fenced pen. Three baby sheep got somehow their heads together and tangled in the fencing. A couple of the teenagers, their boots shmeared with animal dung, trotted over to save them from themselves.