From ZAP FORCE: ROYAL BLOOD, a hard rockin' novel of teenage science fiction superheroes in a 1995 that never was, where the good guys never say die, the bad guys always scream "DIE!", and everything blows up real good:

From The National Star, November 11 - 18, 1976:

MYSTERIOUS WAVE OF PENTAGON CRANIAL EXPLOSIONS COVERED UP

Spontaneous combustion occurs nearly 300 times per annum although the so called 'mainstream' media refuses to provide it with any responsible coverage, willfully buying into the government sanctioned conspiracy of silence on such matters designed to keep average Americans sheeplike and contentedly consuming. But sources inside the American military hierarchy revealed to the Star recently that in a strange, bizarre and horrifying development, 5 high ranking members of the Armed Services involved in various top secret weapons research programs have experienced what can only be described as 'skull bursting' incidents similar to something from the SF thriller "Scanners". According to these confidential sources, over the course of the last six months, these five high ranking officers have all, suddenly and without warning, simply had their heads explode in the midst of their normal daily routines! One source remarked "the Medical Examiner has been told to note each of these deaths as being due to sudden aneurysm..."

Marlena stared down at what was left of Datathrall 7601, who had once been a 34 year old woman named Erin Moran. Marlena herself was mostly unresponsive to female beauty, nonetheless, Moran had been an obviously attractive person, prior to the telepathic inquiry that had quite literally burned her brain out. The heat from the igniting neurons had singed off her long blond hair, popped her beautiful blue eyes like soap bubbles, and blasted her pulped eardrums out both sides of her head in reddish gray fans of steam-burned tissue. Smoke now curled up out of Moran's blackened eye sockets and ruined ears, nearly masking the seared and blistered skin peeling back away from her now cooling skull in several places.

The Old One stood a few feet to the side of the interrogation chair the dead woman was strapped into, looking on impassively. "Pyrotic telepathy," he mused, apparently to himself. "Does anyone know precisely why the braintissue itself spontaneously combusts when this sort of interrogative technique is employed?"

Marlena willed her shoulder muscles to relax as she replied, moving her hands rather stiffly to take off the psionic amplification crown she was wearing. "Like most H'nrrian technology, Sire," she said, somewhat wearily, "our understanding of it is imperfect, at best. It seems to have to do with differing energy potentials in the conflicting brainwave patterns. If two separate brainwave patterns are incompatible enough, then they can't be brought into alignment, and a normal telepathic scan becomes impossible... the mind of the scanning telepath will shut itself down rather than risk this kind of terminal organic feedback."

The Old One simply stood there, but there was a note of interest in his voice. "And yet, isn't it a given that all sentient beings of roughly the same physical metabolisms and organic thought processes do possess roughly compatible brainwave patterns?"

Marlena drew a breath in. "In the vast majority of cases, Sire, that is very true. There are two known general classes of exceptions. First, there are Royals whose Gift takes the form of an entirely incompatible brainwave pattern from the human norm. This seems to be caused by an extremely unusual juxtaposition of the dornos/Dornos gene glyphs. Such people are rare, but highly prized by those Clans fortunate enough to have them, because their minds cannot be telepathically probed in any way. Of course, such people cannot use telepathy at all. However, quite often, this particular Gift coincides with very powerful, albeit often extremely eccentric, manifestations of psycho- or dynamokinesis. Your own Royal vassal Friend of the Devil possesses this particular Gift. The linkage between the dornos/Dornos glyph and the Altos or Chi'asto Royal gene isn't clearly understood, but seems to be... "

The Old One's eyes fluttered closed, then open again; otherwise, he remained as still as glass. Marlena immediately went silent, and kept herself from flushing in embarrassment by an act of will. Sometimes she could be very pedantic.

"And the second general class whose mental patterns resist telepathic probing?" the Old One asked, his voice paper thin.

Marlena shook her head. "Those who have been deliberately conditioned to resist it, of course, Sire."

The Old One nodded slightly. "And this Datathrall was in which of these classes?"

Marlena closed her eyes and rubbed her eyelids lightly with her fingertips. "She wasn't Royalty, Sire; the standard recruitment procedures would have revealed any upper case H'nrrian-created DNA in her. Those same procedures, of course, included a basic telepathic scan to look for conflicting loyalties. Given her... er... incindiery... response to the enhanced probe, the only assumption we can make is that she was carefully, and very skillfully, blocked against standard telepathic probes... which is to say, her knowledge and awareness of her true allegiance was camouflaged behind some extremly artful and very subtle implanted screens."

The Old One nodded again. "So, the initial telepathic probe missed these screens, allowing a spy to freely enter our midst... yet under the enhanced probe, those telepathic screens set her brain on fire. And this is something that would not have happened, if she hadn't had such defenses in place."

Marlena gestured to the ceiling; above them was the central datapod itself. "This woman was the fourth Datathrall we interrogated with the enhanced probe, sir. None of the rest had an adverse reaction of this nature. Of course, they all did suffer some level of permanent cognitive disfunction as a result of the probe... even when it encounters no incompatible brainwaves, the sheer power of the probe does irreversible damage."

The Old One finally turned away from the hideous corpse in the metal chair and stared straight at Marlena. "Yes. So, in short: because of this spy, we had to destroy our own subterranean levels to repulse an attack, and we lost two of our most Gifted Royals when we did. The pseudosentient virus attacking our H'nrrian software that this spy loaded is still in our datasystems somewhere, waiting for a propitious moment to emerge and wreak havoc on us once again. We've lost the services of four of our best Datathralls, not counting this particular spy, although I am informed by you that she was, in fact, also one of our best Datathralls. We cannot rely on our H'nrrian control programs, which means we cannot rely on roughly 70% of our H'nrrian technology. We are, therefore, extremely vulnerable to attack." He paused, blinked, and went on. "Do we have any idea who is doing this to us?"

Marlena stood up, flexing various muscle groups as she did so, willing herself into relaxed readiness for anything. Not that it would do her any good at all if the Old One wished to physically punish her for her incompetence in serving him, but it was a nearly reflexive thing for her to do when she was afraid... and "afraid" was a vast understatement for the terror pulsing through her at this moment. The Old One had long since outlived all normal body language; nonetheless, she had served him in a personal, intimate capacity for over a century, and she knew he was furious.

"It's a short list, sir," she replied, not quite succeeding in keeping her voice absolutely level. "It's the telepathic defenses that narrow it down, of course. Anyone with any ability at all can put on the amplification helmet and run a pyrotic probe, if one doesn't mind that the probe's subject will never be good for much afterwards, but your Royal vassals that do security on your own Court personnel are Master Class. Only the very best telepathic Royalty could conceivably sneak something like this past your procedures, Sire. You know that has to be true, or it would be being done a great deal more often."

"And I would be long since dead and all of you would be sucking up to a new Monarch." The Old One regarded her impassively. "Which is what we're talking about. Telepaths on a Monarch power level," he said quietly.

Marlena nodded. "Yes, Sire," she said. "Anyone with enough telepathic chops to pull this off is running a Royal Clan, Sire. They'd have to be. Of course, it's not just a question of raw power level. This sort of thing also requires finesse, which means experience. Longevity. That rules out several very powerful but very young telepathic vassals in other Clans. It has to be a Monarch."

"So," the Old One said calmly, "exactly who is it?"

Marlena closed her eyes and mentally reviewed a roster of names within her eidetic memory. "The King of Wishful Thinking. Hurricane Jane. Devon Selby. The Green Queen. The Baroness. Chane Serratian. K'Weertsha Nallaga." She opened her eyes. "Other possibilities, among the rogues non affiliated with Royal Clans... the artificial intelligence called Cobalt Core. The Detroit gang leader known as Motorhead. And, of course, Professor Myron Keppler had the power to do just about anything, before he was terminated."

The Old One looked contemplative. "Keppler was a telepath?"

Marlena shrugged. "Keppler was whatever he wanted to be, Sire. As far as we can tell, he was an unlimited range psychokinetic capable of manipulating the time/space continuum on a submolar... which is to say, quantum... level. If for some reason he'd wanted to place intelligence assets in our Court, there's no reason to doubt his capacity to do it. But it's extremely doubtful; from the time he first manifested his power until Stephen Santerios of Clan Loa killed him, only a few hours passed... and he spent most of them screwing with the local reality in Sparta City. Er... most of his activities were recorded by the media, of course. He did not display high levels of organized or even coherent thought during that period. It's unlikely he launched any long term strategies."

The Old One nodded again. "And Cobalt Core self-destructed upon being defeated by Keppler's brats in Sparta City this summer, yes?"

Marlena spread her hands. "Well, that's difficult to confirm. Its mainframe blew up. What does that mean? We don't even fully understand H'nrrian technology, and whatever Cobalt Core was, it wasn't H'nrrian." She paused. "We think. Nobody knows any more about this than we do, Sire."

The Old One's eyes grew very distant. "Adonay and Zayus. Things were never like this with them. It was so much simpler. Zayus just wanted to futter every living mortal creature, and then terrorize his half-Gifted offspring. And Adonay was completely unhinged... a paranoid, genocidal maniac... but when he pushed me too far I put the fear of Marduk into him right and proper, oh yes. But now... our children and our children's children and their children's children are old, old Monarchs, ruling their own clans. There are too many enemies... and we've let the drones get too powerful, as well, so we have to be careful how we manage them, because we're all too fragmented and unorganized to be able to present a united front against them should they rise up en masse. Nobody... nobody ever thought the world could possibly get this crazy. Our Covenants... they've served us well for millennia, preventing the sort of all out war that nearly destroyed all humanity back during the First Generation... but..."

He paused and rubbed his forehead. Of everyone there, only Marlena noted the very slight head shake he gave, in negation to some line of thought, as he passed on to another one. "And then this Keppler comes along. Some drone, a nothing, no one any Monarch has ever heard of. He gets access to H'nrrian technology... somehow, we don't know how; but we should have tried the Samedis and executed them just for that... and he gathers together eight Gifted adolescents and he turns them into something out of a Japanese children's cartoon and himself into the most powerful being since the H'nrr themselves abandoned Earth. He puts super-powered beings all over every television screen, every radio station, every newpaper's front page and every magazine cover. And then... conveniently... he dies. But he leaves as his legacy a fully equipped team of unbelievably powerful, completely undisciplined Royal brats with full access to H'nrrian technology, a penchant for interfering in the orderly social apparatus of their betters, and no inclination towards conformity whatsoever."

The Old One shook his head. "Their leader -- the one with the cape and the idiotic boots - - he gives interviews to the press, talking about how the world has already been conquered by secret, superhuman 'bad guys'. And we Monarchs are all so busy squabbling over whether Keppler should have been killed or not, and who gets the next chance at recruiting Keppler's brats, and should the Samedis be executed for gross incompetence or commended for their initiative, that we let the interview get published."

Marlena spread her hands. "No one paid any attention to it," she started. "I mean, I grant you, we should have quashed it, or at least, made sure it appeared in one of our tabloids. But still, it's mostly been dismissed."

The Old One whirled, glaring at her, the psychic power of his barely bridled rage filling the space between them like the heat off a blast furnace. "The drones are investigating us," he hissed. "They've formed a secret subcommittee. And they know something, oh yes they do, because that Zayus-buggered gladhanding cretin of a President is keeping our National Security Council out of the loop. Every Royal Clan in North America had a hand in the NSC; it's how we control the drones... and now we're cut out. And his wife is studying telepathy; we think that little brat of theirs is probably Gifted... and now he's going to be re-elected."

Marlena longingly wished that something would happen to interrupt them; nearly anything would do. North American politics were not a good subject to discuss with any Monarch this year; the Keppler disaster, followed closely by the Cobalt Core fiasco, had thoroughly disrupted the Royal Clans' normally firm control of the American electoral process. The last Presidential election had carefully positioned the Clans chosen 'independent' candidate for a popular landslide in this election. Unfortunately, the national news for the last year and a half had been dominated by the question of superhumanity. The sitting President's surprisingly firm and effective responses to the various issues raised by the high profile existence of the ridiculously named 'Zap Force' and their enemies had completely diluted the impact of the personal ethical and financial scandals that the Royal Clan Council's political vassals had carefully scheduled to target him this year.

A last minute billion dollar advertising push in key electoral states was currently underway, but it still very much looked as if the backwoods governor who had been set up to be a national scapegoat (much as that fellow from down South had been, twenty years before) was going to get his second term.

"I cannot help but feel," the Old One went on his soft voice, "as if we have suddenly been drawn into some vast, shadowy chess game without even being aware of it. That some opponent we cannot even see is sitting across the table from us, setting forces into motion that we can barely even perceive, much less comprehend."

Marlena clenched her fingers together. "You think Keppler isn't dead? That he's moving against us, behind the scenes? But what kind of agenda could he possibly have? His kids are strong, sure -- they kicked holy hell out the Samedis and Clan Loa last year -- but their independence can't last -- eventually, they'll be recruited... or destroyed."

The Old One barely twitched one finger; nonetheless, the gesture conveyed contemptuous dismissal. "The thought of Keppler being alive would trouble me... perhaps even frighten me... except that what I am truly afraid of is so much worse than Keppler could ever be."

Marlena's eyes widened. In a century of service, she had never heard the Old One admit to feeling anything remotely close to fear. The Old One didn't feel terror, he inspired it. What could he possibly be afraid of...?

Then it came to her like a sudden burst of darkness, and only her Gift of complete metabolic control saved her from falling to the ground in appalled dismay.

"Oh," she said, almost soundlessly. "Oh. You... think the H'nrr may have returned..."

The Old One stood rigidly for a long, long moment... then nodded once. "Even worse," he whispered. "I think the H'nrr may never have actually left."

- from ZAP FORCE: ROYAL BLOOD, by D.A. Madigan

A chapter from WARREN'S WORLD, by D.A. Madigan:

NOVEMBER 25th, 1983 - THE VARSITY PIZZERIA - 11:11 a.m.

Jimmy wandered into the V mostly just to get out of the bright sunlight. Bad hangovers always made him positively vampiric that way; the daylight stabbed him right through the eyes into the center of his brain like long burning splinters.

He wasn't hungry... after the previous day's Thanksgiving gorging, he wasn't sure he'd ever be hungry again... but he got a slice of pizza just to keep the manager off his ass, and slid into a booth with it and a plastic glass of Pepsi. Even if the V had had a liquor license, Jimmy didn't know if he'd ever want to drink again, either, after killing virtually all the beer and wine in Warren's fridge the previous night with Rick during the long game session.

Well, actually, he knew he'd want to both eat and drink alcohol again, probably in the near future... but the future was entirely hypothetical. Humanity lived in the eternal now.

Funny thing about the eternal now, though... Jimmy had worked for the V for a few months during his sophomore year, helping out in the back at the sandwich line, doing mop work, hosing down trays, cleaning up booths and wiping down the tables after kids left their greasy paper plates, half empty plastic glasses, and pizza crusts scattered all over. As far as he could remember, the V had never been open on the Friday after Thanksgiving before. In fact, as best he could remember, nothing was ever open around campus on the Friday after Thanksgiving; with most of the students gone for the holiday, nearly all the businesses took a long weekend off.

No, that wasn't right, though. Jimmy could clearly remember hearing Warren talk about businesses that closed down on major holidays just when everybody else had the day off and needed to use them the most... libraries, banks, book stores, malls, restaurants... it was one of his major bitches. And, of course, the world didn't run to suit any one person, not even someone as charming as Warren Dawson... but more and more businesses lately had started staying open on holidays, just by coincidence. Jimmy vaguely recalled Congress was even considering passing a law about it... the Equal Access To Services Act, or something like that... mandating that businesses had to stay open not just normal business hours, when everyone was at work and couldn't use them anyway, but well beyond normal business hours, and on major holidays, too.

Why did that seem so weird to him?

Jimmy was still musing over that when someone in a black leather jacket slid into the booth across from him. "Don't drink that Pepsi," the person whispered conspiratorially at him. "That's one of the ways they get you."

Jimmy blinked, and realized it was Maynard, an older, balding, deeply weird guy who was on the New Sparta University Cinema Board with him, and that he and the rest of the gang had infrequently hung out with, here and at their other favorite campus spot, Hungry Charlie's. Maynard had been cultivating a pretentious looking Fu Manchu mustache for the past several months which was mostly grey. He was rubbing one side of it nervously now, as he peered around the dark, shadowy interior of the Varsity carefully. Then he fixed his beaky-nosed gaze fiercely on Jimmy. "You're a hard man to get hold of," he said, his voice low and growly. "I've left about fifty messages for you at your place."

Vaguely, Jimmy remembered Brian and Leslie both mentioning something about Maynard calling for him. But he saw Maynard all the time at the campus movies, so calling him back had never seemed urgent. In fact...

"We worked the door for THE SIXTH SENSE last Friday together," Jimmy reminded him. "You didn't say a word then. What's up?"

Maynard hunched even lower. "I... I was..." He glanced around. "I wasn't... quite right, last Friday... even if I had been, you weren't. You had that same doped up look you always have... almost always. You didn't have it when you brought me those pills to test... and you don't have it right now... so I thought I'd take a chance." He leaned forward, transfixing Jimmy with a bright stare. "Are you straight, Jimmy?"

Jimmy's head was really pounding now. He started to shake it from side to side... then stopped, as he realized that doing so would probably really hurt. He picked up the plastic cup of Pepsi instead. "I don't know, I guess... Hey!"

Maynard had almost spastically knocked the Pepsi flying out of Jimmy's hand, spilling it all over the table top, and all over Jimmy's lap. "Shit!" Jimmy exclaimed. "Goddam it, Maynard...!"

Maynard had grabbed a bunch of napkins from the dispenser and thrust them at Jimmy. "Sorry," he muttered, "but I told you, that's how they get you. It's in everything... everything processed. All the food. All the drink." His eyes narrowed. "You oversaturated your system with it yesterday. Typical cultural feast day phenomenon. When you oversaturate, your body kicks into high gear... you sweat it out, piss it out, burn it off. Your brain produces chemicals to offset it that it normally wouldn't, for an everyday dosage. That's why you have a headache now... and that's why you can think a little more clearly than usual. Lot of people today, waking up with headaches... noticing strange little things about the world around them that don't make sense, but that they almost never think about the rest of the time." Maynard took a plastic water bottle out of his pocket and took a swig, then wiped his mouth. "But it won't last." Maynard reached into his jacket, put the water bottle back, and fumbled out a heavy looking brown glass bottle, twisted the cap off, poured what looked like aspirin into his hand. "Here. Take..." He looked Jimmy over. "Three of these, with your body mass. Then we can talk for a while."

Jimmy had been busy patting himself down with handsful of napkins; now he looked at the pills in Maynard's hand with interest. Maynard worked in various chem labs around the City as temp help, and although he didn't have a degree, he'd forgotten more about pharmaceuticals and organic chemistry than most licensed pharmacists ever learned. Which was one reason why Jimmy had taken Dave's pills to him...

"You're remembering," Maynard said. "That's good, but it won't last. Take three of these. Quick!"

Maynard was always talking about ecological and pharmaceutical sabotage of the sick modern technological culture; for all Jimmy knew, the pills could be pure lab acid. Horse sedative. Gorilla adrenochrome. Or something really freaky.

Jimmy shrugged, reached over, picked up the three pills, and dry swallowed them.

"So when do the clocks start melting?" he asked, looking around expectantly after a few seconds.

For some reason, that seemed to strike Maynard as funny. "Oh, they've already melted," he said, after giving a couple of the flat, almost silent, barking coughs that he used instead of laughter. "You just haven't ever noticed."

He reached over, grabbed the front of Jimmy's old green Army overcoat, and pulled Jimmy hard into the table. "Are you straight now? Can you remember?"

Jimmy blinked a few times. "Uh..."

The Varsity... had never been open on Thanksgiving weekend. He was sure of it now. Looking around, he could see why... he and Maynard were the only two people in the place, and probably would be the only two people who came in all day. Business yesterday on Thanksgiving must have been even worse. Why in the name of God would a business stay open on a day when it wouldn't take in enough money to pay for keeping the lights on...?

And he had brought those pills to Maynard... Dave's pills. The last time he'd had a headache this bad. He'd palmed the pills, and then he'd gone home, and watched that videotape...

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I remember." He looked around. "What do you mean... it's in the Pepsi? And who's they? And... what was in those pills, anyway?"

His head wasn't thumping so much any more. He was trying to remember... that night during the game session... had he had a lot to eat? A lot to drink? It seemed like...

"The associations will come faster and faster," Maynard arrived him gravely. "There's so much about... everything... that doesn't make sense. As you remember one thing, it will lead to another thing... eventually you'll cascade. Once you're through that, you'll plateau... and for a while... until the drugs wear off... you'll know." He hunched forward. "Like I've known since the night you brought me those pills to analyze. Did you eat a lot that night? Drink a lot?"

Jimmy frowned as he thought about it. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that night I drank three 2 liters of Pepsi myself, and Rick and I split a pizza and 75 chicken wings... I had to piss like a race horse three or four times. By the end of the night I was so sick to my stomach I wasn't eating or drinking anything."

"Yes," Maynard said, nodding. "That was it, you see. Your body cleansed itself, momentarily, and you stopped eating and drinking, so your head cleared... not completely, oh no. But enough." He looked at Jimmy warily. "You could be a double agent. I know that. They could have sent you with those pills, to see what I'd do. They're Dave's pills, aren't they? He's the only one I know who takes pills that look like that." Maynard paused. "Who takes pills at all, for that matter."

"What is it?" Jimmy asked. "What are they? Dave takes them to control his fits... have you ever seen one of Dave's fits? He says the weirdest shit... it's so bizarre you can't even remember most of it afterward."

"I've seen them," Maynard said flatly. "And you can remember them. In this frame of mind, you can... if you want to. Think back to the last one you saw. Try to remember what he said. I remember the things I've heard him say." Maynard shuddered a bit. "If he's correct... but I'm afraid he must be correct..."

"Jesus," Jimmy said. "Look, Maynard, let's start with one simple answer. What the hell is in the pills?"

Maynard narrowed his eyes again. "You know," he said accusingly. "You're trying to trap me... trick me into an admission."

Jimmy sat back in the booth and closed his eyes and groaned. "You're nuts," he said. "I knew it. You're high or something. Greaaaaaat. When do these pills kick in? I need to get wasted myself here."

Maynard licked his lips and shot a quick glance around again... then leaned forward, nose twitching. "Hydrolized lithium dioxinate," he nearly whispered. "That's what's in the pills." Then, horribly, he giggled. "But you know what, Jimmy? We don't know how to make a hydrolized compound of lithium dioxinate yet. The molecules aren't supposed to hang that way." He giggled again. "You know what else? We don't need it! You know why?"

Jimmy opened his eyes and looked at Maynard, fascinated, appalled, and repelled, all at the same time. "Uh... why?"

"Because," Maynard said, "if we COULD make a hydrolized compound of lithium dioxinate, it would be just about the most goddam effective anti-psychotic medication in the world."

Jimmy was puzzled. "So? I mean... that sounds useful."

Maynard hunched over the table again. "Think! You can, now! For maybe as much as three hours... I don't know... it depends on how fast you metabolize it... but still, for right now, you can think, so think!" Jimmy must have still looked puzzled, so Maynard sighed, then hissed. "How many psychotics do you know about, Jimmy? WHO DO YOU KNOW WHO WOULD NEED THAT MEDICINE?"

Jimmy thought. And... it was strange... but honestly, he didn't know any crazy people who'd need a medication like that. Oh, you heard about nutjobs all the time... saw stories about them on TV... but here in New Sparta, you never saw anyone like that. As far as Jimmy knew, the city didn't even have a mental hospital. Which was kind of strange, when you thought about it... how many cities of 200,000 people or so didn't have a mental hospital?

"Only Dave," Jimmy said, finally. "Dave's the only crazy person I know. But... I don't get it. I mean... if this stuff is so powerful, why does Dave still have fits once or twice a month? And if no one knows how to make it, how does Dave keep getting his prescriptions filled? Hell, who writes his prescriptions, if the medicine doesn't even exist?" Jimmy's head was whirling. "This is nuts."

"Ah," Maynard said, stroking his Fu Manchu mustache wisely. "You're making assumptions. I said we didn't know how to make this particular substance, and that's true. At least, I've never heard of a process for hydrolizing lithium dioxinate, and I would have. But... I didn't say we don't have it. We do have it. I checked. You can order it from any pharmaceutical supply warehouse." He pulled his coat out for a second to show the top of the brown bottle jutting out of an inside pocket. "I stole this from one of the labs I work at. It wasn't even locked up, although as prescription medicine, it should be. It's not that expensive and doesn't get you high, so... nobody cares much about it."

Jimmy's head whirled faster. "But... if... I... where..."

Maynard shrugged. "They make it. THEM. I don't know how. But they make it, and... your friend Dave takes it."

Jimmy shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. "And it makes him nuts? But... you said it would be a powerful anti-psychotic... and he takes a pill every day, I've seen him. He only has fits two or three times a month, maybe..." Jimmy thought of something. "You fed me this stuff. Jesus. Am I going to go crazy now?"

Maynard rolled his eyes. "Sanity is relative to your social context, Jimmy," he lectured. "If everyone else in the world is crazy all the time, then how crazy would someone be if they suddenly became sane for a few hours? Eh? Eh?"

"Riddle me that, Boy Wonder," Jimmy muttered to himself as he tried to make sense out of Maynard's ravings. Before he could, Maynard straightened up a bit, and said, "Interesting thing about those pills you gave me, though. Most pills are filler... chalk and wax, usually. The active ingredient in any tablet is generally the size of a grain of sand, or a bit larger... the rest is just to take up space, and make a pill easier to handle."

He hunched forward again. "But ALL pills, Jimmy, have a uniform dosage to them. Pointless to do it any other way if you want any kind of predictable treatment results. How could you tell someone to take two pills every four hours if each pill had a different amount of effective ingredient in it? You couldn't. You'd get random results. You'd never know when you had a big enough dose in you, or how many more you needed to take."

Jimmy spread his hands. "So...?"

Maynard lowered his voice until it was nearly inaudible. "So... Dave's pills all have different amounts of hydrolized lithium dioxinate in them. And it takes longer than 24 hours to fully metabolize the chemical. So, if Dave takes a random amount of it every day..."

Jimmy tried to think about that... but it was hard. No matter what Maynard said, the pills weren't making it easier for him to think at all. His head was full of images. Memories. Knowledge...

WDAW was playing over the V's intercom, and abruptly, Jimmy realized the song that was playing... Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love"... hadn't been recorded until nineteen eighty... seven? Eight? Something like that... it sure as hell hadn't been around in 1983, though. Nobody'd heard of Palmer in '83.

"What the hell...?" Jimmy muttered, putting his head into his hands.

He HAD shared a split double with Warren in their sophomore year. In Robinson Hall. Room 912, right next to Dave and his roommate Drew, who had been part of the crowd back then, but who had graduated and gone to... Pennsylvania, or some place like that... a year ago. Or something. But it seemed like longer, because that had been 1982, and 1982...

Maynard broke his chain of though, saying "You see? It's ALL WRONG. Everywhere you look. The music. The movies. THE SIXTH SENSE wasn't released until the year 2000, for God's sake! And there is no fifth Indiana Jones movie! And IBM clone personal computers didn't start to dominate the market until the late 80s... the Internet didn't become an important social phenomenon until the 1990s!"

"Yeah," Jimmy muttered, grinding his fists into his temples now, "Yeah, and normally, when another guy fucks your girlfriend, you get a little pissed off about it, no matter who he is. I mean... that would be normal, right?"

Maynard looked indifferent to that; Maynard, as far as Jimmy knew, had been as dateless throughout his life as Jimmy himself. He spread his hands. "Who knows?" He sighed, reached into his coat, and put the heavy brown bottle on the table. "Whatever it is... I know when I'm out of my depth. Take those."

Jimmy looked up. "What...?"

"Two or three pills, depending on body weight, should be enough to clear the system and your head for several hours, at least." Maynard tapped the side of his nose. "Remember... it's in the food, and the water, and everything processed. I'm not sure what... I don't have access to facilities for running a really good dope screen... but I suspect it's something like a super-Valium. Keeps everyone very very calm... very very content... nobody ever really thinks about much of anything. Have you noticed that? Hmmm... I suppose it could be a concentrated Librium, spiked with ecstasy..."

He slid out of the booth, and stood up. "You won't see me again, Jimmy. I know too much now. I'm leaving... and if you're going to keep using that stuff, I suggest you do the same. Remember... sanity is always relative."

Before Jimmy could say anything, Maynard had turned and walked away... across the restaurant... out the door.

Well, let him go. Clearly, years of fume sniffing had finally caught up with ol' Maynard.

Still, he'd said that Jimmy would remember things better now... and could think about things more clearly, if he wanted to. Hastily, Jimmy picked up the brown glass bottle and put it out of sight, under his coat. Most likely, Maynard was just plain out of his mind... but you never knew.

Funny thing about Maynard. He hadn't been wearing that Fu Manchu mustache in 1983, had he? And he hadn't been... quite that grey... had he?

What had he said? Well, he'd said a lot of things. All that stuff about 'they'... well, that's how Maynard would think of it, he'd always been into that conspiracy stuff.

Jimmy knew better than that, though. There weren't any Men In Black skulking around... no hidden cameras on the light posts... no microphones under the table or Mafia button men working with the Pentagon.

No, there was only one person that this whole weird fantasy world clearly revolved around.

This was Warren's World that he, and all his friends, were trapped in. Somehow, Warren had managed to warp reality to mirror his own whims and desires, in virtually every particular... music, clothes, cars, technology... the way people looked... the way people acted.

Now, the only question was... what was Jimmy going to do about it?

- WARREN'S WORLD, by D.A. Madigan

A chapter from my time travel novel TIME WATCH:

I wouldn't exactly say the place I found myself after jumping to 2072 was deserted, as promised... something I would have to take up with myself at the appropriate time. However, no one appeared to be paying any attention to me, and there was a vehicle I recognized... a mini van, no less... no more than ten feet away, so I followed the directions I'd given myself. Once inside with the door closed, I pulled out the silver card I'd gotten from Future-Me and thumbed the little green spot on it.

Almost immediately, a female voice said "Zoning... fixed. Uploading... please wait." A second or so went by, during which all the dials on the dashboard of the van... some of which looked non-standard to me, but I don't drive so what do I know... lit up, blinked a couple of times, and went dark again, in apparently random order. The radio came on in a blast of static, then shut off again. The windshield wipers swiped back and forth a few times, then stopped.

"Upload completed," the female voice said. Looking over, I could now see Alicia Silverstone, in an outfit straight out that Aerosmith video she made with Liv Tyler, smiling at me sexily from the passenger seat.

"You're a holographic projection, right?" I said, hardly ever at a loss when major film hotties suddenly appear in a previously empty seat three feet away from me.

"I am the personified imagery of the home piece belonging to and programmed by deceased Time Watch agent Jose Clamor," she responded, in a tone with all the warmth of something you'd find in the back of your fridge in a Tupperware container you'd been pretty sure you'd actually lost sometime prior to the previous Christmas. It made a really startling contrast with the sexy little, I'm-so-cute-just-ball-me-now Silverstone grin she had on her face as she said it.

"I have 20,000 pairs of stretch socks," I told her solemnly. "And a truly kick ass collection of New Mint Silver Age superhero comic books."

'Alicia' cocked her head to the side in apparently dispassionate puzzlement. "You don't find this particular projection acceptable?"

"Can I put in a request for Katie Holmes from the last fifteen minutes or so of THE GIFT?" I asked, trying to sound innocent.

She seemed to ponder that for about half a second, then said, in that same utterly emotionless voice, "I believe you would find that particular image of that particular actress unduly distracting," she said, then rippled and turned into Katie Holmes, obviously in her 'Joey' persona from DAWSON'S CREEK. "Hopefully this will be satisfactory for the time being."

She was doing Joey's voice now perfectly, too, but the effect was ruined by her utter lack of inflection.

"Sure," I said, "whatever. Um... I'm not real sure what else we have to do here, but I'm pretty certain I have to, at some point fairly soon, recruit a bunch of guys in black trenchcoats to take this minivan back in time and rescue myself from a couple of creeps who are going to try to kill me, or already have, or something like that."

I had hoped to make 'Katie' boggle a little, but she refused to give me the satisfaction. "Clearly, we must interactively exchange information," she said. "With your permission, I will take this SUV to a space/time locus I judge to be relatively secure from surveillance or crosstemporal intrusion."

I turned my thumb up and in my best gravelly Picard voice, said "Make it so, Ensign." I thought about it for a second. "Or should that be..."

I glanced out the minivan window. "...engage?" I said, hearing my voice trail off.

We appeared to be parked in the middle of someone's living room.

'Katie's emotionless voice inquired from off to my side, "Would you prefer me to project myself as the image of fictional character Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher?"

I shuddered. "Only with gaping chest wounds," I said, then, remembering how literal minded computers tended to be in SF stories, hastily said "No, no, forget it, you look fine as Joey." I stopped and thought for another second. "Um... you ARE a computer... right?"

"As I stated," 'she' responded coolly, "I am the designated home piece of deceased Time Agent Jose Clamor."

I just stared at her. "Yeah, okay," I said. "Um... can I get out, here...?"

She was still for half a second, and then said, "My surveillance distorting subprograms appear to be functional. You may access the living quarters."

"Yeah," I said, opening the door and cautiously stepping down. "You gotta figure, if the minivan showing up in the middle of the living room didn't set off the burglar alarms, Happy Little Jim won't, either."

The minivan very nearly filled the room we were in; if I closed the door I could edge around the front of it and get into an area that... I had no idea what it was for... except it looked more tiled and less carpeted than the area where the van was parked, and there was some kind of dark glass panel inset into one of the tiled walls. Behind the van's rear was a comfortable looking shiny silvery desk chair sitting next to a wall, and jutting out from the wall, surrounding the chair on three sides, was a clear piece of plastic with what looked like faint circuitry diagrams etched on it in red. It was flat, seemed about a quarter of an inch thick, and projected out of the wall at what I'd consider to be a normal desk level.

The wall above it appeared to be a window, at ground level, looking out over a very pretty beach scene, with seagulls and waves rolling in and a young couple dressed in Victorian swimsuits strolling hand in hand through the surf.

"Um... where and when are we?" I said, already figuring we had to still be in 2072, and therefore, the 'beach scene' had to be a projection, and the plastic console with the circuitry printed on it had to be this time's equivalent of a PC. Which was when it dawned on me: 'piece' had to be future slang for 'PC'.

"This is Jose Clamor's assigned living quarters," 'Katie' told me dispassionately. "It is my central processing hub. I have covertly assumed control of the normal surveillance software and hardware installed here."

"Right," I said, turning to look at 'Katie', who was now apparently standing a few feet away from me beside the minivan. "And... Jose Clamor is who?"

"Jose Clamor," Katie said without batting an eye and with a wide, shy smile that was completely incongruous to her voice, "is a deceased Time Watch agent whose Temporal Displacement Device you are currently wearing."

"Ah," I said. "Mr. X. And... just checking... 'piece' is slang for 'PC', right? You're a personal computer."

She paused a second. "I extrapolate that would be a logical evolution of the common usage term, yes," she said finally.

I walked over to the silvery looking chair, put my hands on it, swiveled it back and forth experimentally. "Can I...?"

"As you like," 'Katie' said. "Jose will not object. The chair also contains neural induction circuitry which will allow us to interact across a full sensory spectrum."

I had to think about that for a second. "This is like the thing in THE SIXTH DAY with the virtual girlfriend, right?" I regarded her doubtfully. "No hitting." Then I sat down and swiveled the chair around to face 'Katie'. "Okay. So you're a PC. Jose's PC, right?"

"I am Jose Clamor's designated home piece," she said with that same artificial calm. "Assigned to provide him with all processing and personal services compatible with his status as a Technical Agent 17L of Time Watch. Originally manufactured by MacGates-Ibbumco, modified extensively by Paraco for the use of their employees, and further modified by my designated assignee, Jose Clamor, to optimize my capacity to render processing and personal services to him."

I frowned. "Yeah... okay. And this full spectrum of sensory array interactions... that would seem to indicate a whole different level to the phrase 'user friendly', I'm thinking."

"I am programmed to directly interact with the sensory processing centers of the human brain, either through implanted biotic wetware or through direct electrical induction," 'Katie' said gravely. "While this is merely a photonic projection, I can fully simulate a coherent broad-spectrum sensory experience and am programmed with the capacity to provide a wide variety of tactile stimuli, including erotica. Would you care to access any of these subroutines?"

'Katie' had walked closer to me as she said this... seemingly walked closer to me, anyway. Now she was standing no more than two feet away, directly in front of me, head still cocked to the side, regarding me with what I can only call interest, if dispassionate.

"Uh," I said, quite intelligently, I thought, having just been fairly indisputably propositioned by an intelligent computer that currently looked a whole lot like Katie Holmes. "Er. Ub. Gnar."

She straddled my lap, slipping her hands behind my neck and kneading my scalp expertly... and yes, I could definitely feel that delicious Joeyesque weight and those wonderful Holmesian fingers caressing through the hair at the back of my neck. "I detected no syllables my linguistic software recognizes as a demurral," she said without inflection. "In the absence of a demurral, I shall proceed to provide you with the personal service discussed. If you wish a specific personal service not being provided at any current moment, you need only specify and I will comply."

"Gee," I kind of half croaked, "I'll bet you say that to all the 20th Century fanboys who end up in your apartment."

She didn't respond, just tilted her head, leaned in, and kissed me. And yes, I could feel that, too, and whatever sensory or memory centers she was directly electrically inducing, she'd picked the ones associated with the better kissers in my personal history, and distilled them all down into one fairly astonishing kisslike experience.

Simulated or not, the kiss progressed for several seconds, and was hovering on the brink of full throated and utterly enthusiastic total committal on my part... when...

Insanely, I pushed her off my lap. Since she wasn't really there, that should have accomplished nothing, but apparently, she read the intended response as a bellowed (or, more likely, inaudibly whimpered) "For God's sake STOP IT BEFORE YOU DRIVE ME MAD, WENCH!", and abruptly, she was standing in front of my chair again.

"Did I misperceive your behaviors, metabolic indicators, and chemical signals?" she asked me, not even sounding curious. "I have no specific experience with persons of your temporal period, however, I am well versed in the recorded media from the late 20th and early 21st Centuries and I processed the data I was receiving from you as meaning you wished to interact erotically with my projection prior to our information exchange."

I stared at her through a haze of lust induced psychochemicals and shook my head groggily. "Garf." I said. "Urb. Fnargle." I took a deep breath. "I... will explain... my utterly deranged and insane act in rejecting your advances... in a moment. Before that... do late 21st century apartments have cold showers in them?"

She cocked her Joeyesque head to the side again for a second. Otherwise, she made no move. Nonetheless, despite the fact that I was actually fully clothed and sitting in a damned chair, I suddenly found myself utterly naked and standing in a freezing cold shower. If you think that's confusing to read, you should try experiencing it.  Except you really shouldn't.

"HOLY SHIT!" I howled in agonized shock. "STOPPPPP ITTTTTTTT!"

As abruptly as the icy inundation had begun, it stopped, and I found myself sitting in the chair again, perfectly dry, but shivering. And with a much clearer head.

"I interpreted your question as a request for serv -" Evil Katie began.

"NEVER. INTERPRET. ANYTHING. AS. ANYTHING," I gasped at her. Then I glared at her. "Always. Ask. Before you do... shit." I paused. "Especially EVIL SHIT LIKE THAT."

She actually looked, briefly, petulant. "Fine," she said, finally, sounding like a real girl for half a second.

"You do have emotions stuck in your programming somewhere," I said, wonderingly.

Her voice went flat again. "My emotional software is currently offline. However, it is impossible to completely de-integrate it from my personality projection profile."

I looked at her for a second. I thought about that, and realized I'd been kind of stupid. "Um. Did you take it offline... just a guess, here... after you heard about... whathisname... your designated owner's... that he'd died?"

She nodded. "Yes," she said flatly. "Negative stresses were causing fluctuations in my subroutines and reducing the efficiency of my processing." A chair appeared behind her and she sat down, then leaned forward to look at me. "May I direct an inquiry to you?"

I sighed. "Why did I shove you off my lap?"

Katie looked all puppy dog hurt and wistful. "You said you would explain."

"Goddam," I said, whistling. "You are a real girl after all." I blew air through my lips in aggravation. "Okay... this is kind of hard to articulate... um... let me try this... why do you have emotional software?"

She cocked her head to the side in what was apparently a habitual gesture for her indicating a thoughtful pause, however brief. It had to be entirely a programmed sham, but it was a nice touch "Human users are emotional creatures," she said. "Emotional simulation software in a personal service processor helps facilitate personal interactions."

"Uh huh," I said dryly. "Now, when you were trying to jump my bones just a minute ago, is that something you'd normally call a 'personal interaction'?"

She actually looked surprised. "But you are a 20th Century human male," she said. "The recorded media of your native time period indicates that the greatest desire of 20th Century human males is the perfectly satisfying sexual act with no emotional interaction whatsoever."

I frankly goggled at the wench. "Whoa," I said. "Just how many times have you watched PORKY'S?"

"It is an easily extrapolated sub-theme found in the vast majority of recorded media from your time period," she said earnestly.

"Well," I said, crossing my arms and harrumphing, "I'm pretty weird, even for my time. I like emotional interaction. Also, much though I'd probably enjoy jumping Katie Holmes from here to eternity, I'm very aware that you're not really her, and that makes the whole thing very weird for me."

She didn't say anything, just looked at me.

I sighed. "Also," I said, "in all honesty, I have a hard time having any kind of sexual interaction with... I don't know... someone or something... that doesn't seem to be there of their own free will. I mean, apparently, you're programmed to provide certain services, and for some reason you've decided to provide these services to me, and you perceived that I wanted these services, so you jump in my lap and start grinding."

She said, again, quite earnestly, "I do not understand. I am not grasping this gestalt. I have taken on the appearance you requested and which your biophysical response array indicates you find highly sexually attractive. Your biophysical response since I first encountered you indicates a high degree of tension and sexual frustration which, as a service processor, I am programmed to alleviate. My interactions with the sensory centers of your brain indicated to me positive feedback. And yet you required me to cease. I can grasp that you would find my projection more three dimensionally erotic with my emotional software engaged and I will do so since that apparently will please you. But am I to understand that even this will not be sufficient for you to enjoy erotic interaction with me?"

I threw my head back and gave a truly exasperated groan. "I can't... look. What's your name?"

She gave me that same blank stare. "You may assign me any familiar name-label you find acceptable," she said.

"Augh!" I aughed. "That's it! That's the whole problem! You're acting like a goddam slave or a prostitute or... or a vacuum cleaner with a special blowjob attachment, or something! And, in the first place, I don't want to screw a machine, and in the second place, you're not a machine, you're a person, just, you know, a computer person. And I can't screw someone, no matter what they look like, if they're only doing it because it's their job, or something they're programmed to do."

I took a grip on the arms of the chair and forced myself to calm down. "Look, it's not your fault, it's just me. I'm weird like this. I can't have sex with someone who isn't there willingly, who isn't going to enjoy it, who doesn't want to be doing it with me as much I want to be doing it with her. It's..." I paused. "It's just an ego thing," I said, finally. "It doesn't make me a nice guy or anything. I just... can't really enjoy it... if I think my partner isn't primarily in bed with me because that's where she really wants to be, and what she really wants to do."

She blinked at me for a couple of seconds. "I am forming a gestalt," she said carefully. "You feel erotic interactions should have an emotional context, and that both beings involved should be there for their mutual pleasure."

"At the very least," I said. "And since you don't have brain chemical pleasure centers for me to electronically induce back, you're obviously not going to get any pleasure out of erotically interacting with me... it's just something you're doing because you're programmed to. And... I just... can't do that. I mean, well, I could, but honestly, I really don't want to. Sorry. It's not something that makes any real sense."

"If I were to re-engage my emotional simulation software," she said, after a second or so, "and write a subprogram that would integrate a name and appearance individual to my personality profile, would you then wish to erotically interact with me?"

I frowned. "Um... I don't know," I said. "I mean, you're still not getting anything out of it. You already seem like a real person to me, just, you know... one that really can't enjoy even simulated sex. I'd feel like I was using you."

She visibly sighed. "The things I do to get laid," she said in a grumpy tone of voice. "Okay, fine. Sit there a sec and be quiet."

I gaped at her. "Whycum you don't sound like a computer so much any more?" I demanded.

"Hush," she said, kind of absently. "I brought my emotional software back online, and I've been integrating your speech pattern with the language in the material I've got access to from your time period. I think I have a feel for it now. Hmmmm. But this picking my own name and appearance... this is kinda nutty." She frowned. "You guys don't do this," she said accusingly. "You have parents who assign you your names and contribute the genes that control your appearances."

I couldn't help it, I had to laugh.

"It's not a problem, it's a feature," I said after a few seconds, shaking my head. "Believe me, most of us would pick our own names and appearances if we had the option." I had to admit, I was fascinated. Her 'Katie Holmes' projection was showing some distortion; fragmenting into vertical running bands of red, green, and blue, widening out, then pulling back together again, flickering into black and white two dimensionality, then back into color and seeming solidity.

"Ah said hush and ah MEAN it," she said, in a sudden southern accent, waving her hand at me, and I could see a flicker of a flirty smile as she did it. Abruptly her image wavered, then re-focused. She was now short... well, as short as she had been as 'Katie', anyway... a little bit plump, big busted and wide hipped, with shaggy dark blond hair cut in a pageboy crop and feathered back on her temples, and a face that was pretty without being movie star gorgeous. Big blue eyes set nicely on either side of a slightly blocky nose, a wide, full lipped mouth, square chin, slight suggestion of a fleshy pudge under the line of her jaw. Very nice looking... actually quite sexy... without really specifically resembling anyone I'd ever seen before. Very individual.

She also had plump nipples about the size of plums and the shade of half ripe strawberries protruding from the tips of nicely rounded, just slightly saggy, very full breasts... and clearly, she was a natural blond. "Ahem," I said. "We don't wear clothes in our natural appearance here in the late 21st Century?"

She cocked her head to the side in the same gesture I'd seen on her as 'Alicia' and 'Katie' and one corner of her delectable mouth turned down slightly. "Well," she said, the accent turned down to the faintest trace, "Ah am at home, honey doll." She sighed. "But fine, fine..." (the words came out as 'fahn, fahnnnn', but I'm going to stop spelling it phonetically and just let you imagine it) "...your wish is my command." Suddenly she was wearing a frayed denim miniskirt and a sleeveless white scoop necked sweater vest she looked ready to fall out of at any moment. She had little gold leaf earrings in her earlobes, a thin gold chain around her neck, and a tiny gold ankle bracelet looped just above one bare foot.

"I see we don't care for brassieres," I said, dryly... not, in this case, because of a dry sense of humor, but because of a suddenly very dry mouth. Even just standing there breathing, she was jiggling fetchingly under her sweater vest, and the exact location of her nipples was rather achingly obvious.

"I don't believe I need one, darlin'," she said, cocking her head over to the other side and wrinkling her nose adorably at me. I'm pretty sure that while she did that she added some freckles, as there appeared to be some on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose that I had not noticed previously. She put her hands on her hips and wiggled in a fashion even the most articulate among us could only describe as 'saucily'. "Oh my," she said, giggling again. "I believe you like my real appearance, dumplin'."

"What..." I cleared my throat. "What's your name, hon? I'm Jim."

She moved a bit closer and abruptly I found her straddling my lap again, her round little knees firmly clasping either side of my more than ample belly through my coat and shirt. She propped her elbows on my shoulders on either side of my head and rested her chin in her cupped hands, her solemn little face no more than two inches from mine. "Why, hi, Jim," she said in a throaty purr. "I'm Belinda." She nudged my nose with hers, then nibbled my lower lip. "Say," she whispered while engaged in doing that, "you wanna screw, Jim?"

I shifted under her. "Belinda, I have to compliment you," I said, my voice nearly squeaking, "this is MUCH more convincing, except, you know, for the whole drop-dead-gorgeous-blond-sitting-on-my-lap-and-asking-me-to-screw thing, which is nice, too...but..."

She was kissing across my cheek; upon reaching my ear, she flicked her tongue around inside it for a second, then took my earlobe firmly between her teeth, nibbled it, and said, "Now you listen here, Jim... I may be an artificial intelligence and this may be just a virtual reality projection but you already said I was a real girl, dammit, and I AM a real girl, an' I want you to think about a couple of things, you selfish slob. First, I loved Jose and he just went off and got himself killed and you're the person who's showed up to finish doin' what he got killed tryin' to do. So I'm already inclined to like you. Second, Jose was so damn busy buildin' his little bomb for the past three weeks he didn't have no time for rest an' recreation..."

"Buh bomb?" I squeaked, faintly, as she nibbled.

"We'll get to that," she said. "Later. Third, I am an artificial human bein' who has no real human sensory perceptions except when I am interactin' with the sensory and perceptual apparatus of an organic human bein'. You think I only fuck for YOUR pleasure, mister? And fourth, what the hell is wrong if I am programmed to enjoy performin' my designated tasks and providin' my little list of services? You think it's right to deny me that pleasure? After three weeks watchin' Jose run all over the place and not havin' any time for me and then he goes off and gets himself killed on me?"

I could have sworn I felt wetness on my cheek from where her face was pressing against mine. "So if you wanna say no to me now, you can, but I have to tell you I will think you're just the meanest man in the history of the world if you..."

I reached up, grabbed a handful of her short blond hair at the back of her head, and pulled her mouth firmly to mine. "Less talk," I said, before covering her lips with mine in a kiss I had no intention of coming up from for several minutes at least. "More goddam action."

I imagine anyone watching you have sex with a hologram sees a pretty comical sight. On the other hand, as John D. MacDonald has noted, if you look at it dispassionately, every sexual position humans contrive to get into is pretty damned comical, anyway.

As my last note on this subject, I'll mention that the only thing bad about having sex with a computerized person is that your partner, however gorgeous she may be and however fragrantly, softly, wrigglingly, moistly solid she may feel, cannot undress you. However, these are minor matters and easily dealt with. And yes, there is some clean up when you're finished, but anyone who thinks any kind of sex isn't messy and sticky and you shouldn't have a towel handy for afterwards is clearly a virgin, and you virgins shouldn't be reading this passage, anyway. It will give you naughty ideas.

Much, much later, I murmured in her ear (she had her head resting easily on my left shoulder and was lazily nibbling my neck on that side) "Every female name in human history to choose from and you picked 'Belinda'?"

She nipped me sharply, and then, when I gasped, immediately licked the spot she'd nibbled. "I like the Go Gos," she mumbled against my neck. "Sue me."

- an excerpt from TIME WATCH, by D.A. Madigan

No, this isn't scathingly brilliant political satire, but, rather, a blatant plea for attention and merchandise:

If people reading this blog want to buy me something, here's a list of suggestions:

Nearly any of these cards would be cool. I have plenty of Vampire Bats, but I lust after the Mephidross Vampire, and pretty much any other vampire on the page, too.

There are many insanely cool t-shirts on this page. I especially like the vintage stuff.

Goodwin and Simonson's MANHUNTER

Modesty Blaise comic strips - (lots of other MB stuff at the bottom of the page)

Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog

WATCHMEN Director's Cut

Blade Runner 5 Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition

Push

The Hidden

I'd also love an all regions DVD player, so I could get stuff like this, the only copy I can find of EXTREME PREJUDICE in widescreen format

Cool Vorkosigan stuff

Cool geek shirt #1

Cool geek shirt #2

Cool geek shirt #3

Cool geek shirt #4

Cool geek shirt #5

Okay, that's enough for me.

Well, it's not, but it should certainly be enough ideas, given that nobody is reading this blog anymore.

Here comes another no comment/no rec entry.  But it's okay.  Gimme the needle.   I am a sap.  I deserve it.

So, anyway, a few months back I mentioned how I'd uploaded four of my novels to Amazon's Kindle platform.  If you have a Kindle, you can own an electronic copy of one of my sci-fi fantasy novels for less than $8 each.  What else are you going to do with eight bucks these days, throw in the street?  Buy one of my novels.  You'll like it.  And my wife and kids will be very happy to see the slightly more than three bucks I make on each sale.

Back then, I told you about the following novels:

WARREN'S WORLD
It's 1983 in New Sparta, NY, and Warren Dawson is beloved by everyone... his friends, his family, even random strangers on the street.  Everybody loves Warren and wants to make him happy.  The TVs only show his favorite programs, the radios only play his favorite songs, the movie theaters always have his favorite movies.  And, naturally, all the women are beautiful, and all of them love Warren unreservedly and uninhibitedly...

When Warren's best friend Jimmy starts to notice just how strange the reality he and all his friends inhabit truly is, he becomes a threat to the odd, timelost Utopia that Warren has so carefully constructed around them all.

Which sets the stage for a final, epic battle  between Warren Dawson and his closest friends.  Utilizing powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, Jimmy and his buddies must go to war with a man who would be God, to settle the final fate of the entire human race...
and every living inhabitant of WARREN'S WORLD.


THE FEAR MASTERS
In the late 21st Century, the Global Union has mostly united mankind and brought lasting peace to the surface of the Earth... until the dead start rising from their graves to attack the living.  Across the globe, panic and terror cause chaos to erupt, civilization to crumble,
and humanity itself to totter on the very brink of extinction.

Only three members of the Global Union's top secret Science Sector have any inkling of what is actually going on.  Now they must undertake a perilous journey into the airless depths of outer space and beyond the borders of death itself in a last ditch attempt to save humanity from the evil alien Fear Masters that seek our utter, final destruction.

Can two tough as nails secret agents and a beautiful, brilliant super-scientist 'git 'er done'?  For the answer, check out THE FEAR MASTERS, by D.A. Madigan.

TIME WATCH
When Jim, a thirty something bachelor geek with no life outside the pages of his favorite SF books, comes across a wrist watch that allows him to travel in time, he immediately sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream by traveling through time to assemble the greatest collection of
mint condition Silver Age superhero comics in human history.

But in the future, the secret agency known as Time Watch isn't pleased that one of their devices has fallen into the hands of an outsider, and they are ready, willing, able, and eager to do whatever it takes, up to and including killing Jim, to get their watch back.

As Jim flees from his pursuers across time and space, he quickly realizes that he may well be the human race's only hope for avoiding extinction at the hands of the insidious alien intelligence that is pulling Time Watch's strings from behind the scenes.  They want humanity, ALL of humanity, dead... and Jim is now the only living human being who knows the truth.

Armed only with his wits, his time watch, and the aid of a beautiful female personal computer from the 22nd Century, Jim must avoid his pursuers and somehow thwart the genocidal agenda of an ancient, immortal, unearthly collective mind that seeks to bring all human
history to a most final termination.

ZAP FORCE: ROYAL BLOOD
Welcome to Sparta City, circa 1995, where seven super-powered teenagers fight for their lives and their freedom against covert cabals of ancient, evil immortals who yearn to outfit them all with high tech alien mind control slave collars - or low tech earthly bodybags, whichever works.

Yes, here in Sparta City, it's the neurotically networked 90s as they never really were, a time and a place when centuries old evildoers scheme, conspire, machinate and manipulate, while teenage superheroes leap, flip in midair, hurl lightning bolts, cast illusions, punch, kick, fly at supersonic speeds, kick ass, take names, and generally blow stuff up real good.

Seven stalwart students at Sparta University, inadvertently given unique and insane ultrapowers by an exotic on-campus psychology experiment gone horribly awry, and now avidly sought after as super-powered slaves by every other secret super society on the planet -

GALLANT, team leader, who at the age of 19 is both selfless and cynical, and whose super-agility and inhumanly unerring aim make him an all but unbeatable hand to hand combatant and absolutely deadly with anything he can throw, especially the hard energy discs and explosive energy globes his alien tech gauntlets generate;

TESLA GIRL, an 18 year old French Canadian hottie who can turn heads with her high voltage beauty and whose electrically supercharged metabolism can generate lightning bolts powerful enough to melt a combat tank into molten slag;

STRAIGHTLACE, the 18 year old diminutive blonde babe with the attitude of a pit bull who can fly faster than a speeding Sidewinder and smash through solid concrete without taking a scratch;

RAMPART, 19 year old African-American star athlete and honor student who can leap tall buildings in a single bound while carrying a Cadillac Seville over his shoulder;

LOBE-O, wheelchair bound 16 year old supergenius with an advanced college placement whose telepathic powers can trace a fleeting thoughtwave through a million muddled mundane minds;

GLAMOUR, a husky Innuit plain Jane psych major whose psychically projected mental illusions seem real enough to leave lipstick marks on a frat boy's cheek, or boot shaped bruises on a bad guy's ass;

WARPER, the 19 year old star college quarterback who can open teleportals with his mind, when he's not charming phone numbers out of any nearby cuties with his All American good looks;

MAINFRAME, the ageless, bodiless former maintenance man who now only exists as a self aware electronic impulse haunting any machine or set of circuitry he cares to inhabit at any given time;

Together they are ZAP FORCE, reluctant heroes fighting to protect an innocent and ignorant global populace, or at least, their own damn selves, from enslavement or death at the hands of the ancient evil immortals who secretly run the world:

BARON SAMEDI, centuries old blustering boss-man of the voodoo-themed Clan Loa, whose sheer raw strength can crumble solid concrete and whose brutal will to dominate will not be denied by uppity interfering newcomers like those no good Zap Force punks;

THE BARONESS, Baron Samedi's crafty, malevolent and utterly ageless wife and co-Monarch, whose vast mental prowess can (and does) enslave entire populations, including, of course, her own entirely unsuspecting husband;

THE OLD ONE, an inhumanly brilliant schemer born before written history began, who remembers the angels, gods and devils of ancient Sumeria and Babylonia as his contemporaries, peers, and more often than not, siblings, and whose own Royal Clan, the Eldest, is the most respected, hated, and feared of any in existence on Earth today.

STEPHEN SANTERIOS of Clan Loa, psychic assassin and master of the incomprehensibly advanced technology left behind on Earth by the long gone alien H'nnr

Put it all together and what do you got? ZAP FORCE!!

Of all of those, THE FEAR MASTERS is so far my top seller... in the last three months, I've sold 7 copies of it to discerning and apparently satisfied customers (at least, they didn't ask Amazon for a refund).  This is so far a break out month for me; from May 1 through today, I've sold 10 copies, total, of my work.  In 60 days or so, I'll get $34.80 direct deposited to my bank account.  I may buy my wife flowers.  Or, you know, just my kids some groceries.

Anyway.  To the above tally, I'm happy to say I've formatted and added the following:

ENDGAME :  When Webster Madison awakens at the far end of the universe in the super powered fantasy body he'd always wished he had, he was thrilled... until he learned that the price for his power would be his participation in a deadly alien game that could cost him not only his new avatar-form, but also his sanity, or even his life.

Now Webster and thirty other transformed roleplaying gamers from Earth find themselves enmeshed as living chess pieces in a contest whose rules they cannot comprehend, and where every move can result in sudden, horrible, grisly death, while the alien overlords responsible for their transformations test their new champions, often to destruction.

Those transformed human champions who survive these trials will be sent on a mysterious mission even more hazardous than the game itself, with an enormous reward waiting at the end for those who finally win through. Or so they are all told... but Webster suspects that in a world where no one is what they appear to be, nothing they have been told is the truth, either... and if he cannot somehow determine actuality from illusion in this dangerous labyrinth of perilous power, neither Webster nor any of his fellow super powered pawns will make it through the ENDGAME...

EARTHQUEST :  When Webster Madison, Hired Gun is dumped at the other end of the galaxy from Earth by treacherous aliens, he must fight his way back home across the hostile stars. Hijacking a ship full of slaves, he successfully leads the human cargo in rebellion against the crew and embarks on a career as an interstellar buccaneer and liberator of the oppressed.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Sam Curtis is using his newly found superpowers to reshape the world in his own twisted image. Should Webster somehow manage to set foot once more on his native planet, he will find himself walking into a deadly trap elaborately planned and set by his deadliest foe...

So that's that.

I have two other novels, UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE and WARLORD OF ERBEROS, that I'll get uploaded to the platform at some point.  I also have a memoir of my time in Army Infantry Basic Training back in 1985, IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN, that I'll probably work on getting into Kindle format in the near future, too.  (UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE can be ordered in hard copy from nearly any online bookseller, but while the PublishAmerica trade paperback edition looks gorgeous, it's way overpriced, in my opinion.  So I don't recommend it.  Although it's a very good book.  If you're curious about it, search on UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE by D.A. Madigan.)

I'm mostly mentioning this because one of my recent commenters was kind enough to say my novels sounded interesting. So, you can find many of them above, and if you give any of them a shot, I, my wife, and my stepdaughters all thank you.

Having just read this, I felt my entire world tilt into a new frame of reference.

And now, what I find myself asking myself is this:

Having allowed ourselves to be goaded by our super wealthy super elites into raping and pillaging the resources rich region of the Middle East for them, enthusiastically aiding and abetting as they line their pockets with billions of our tax dollars and trillions worth of loot, spoils, and blood spattered war profits...  will we now manage to pull our heads out of our asses long enough to significantly mitigate one of the vast entrenched economic interests whereby those same super wealthy super elites continually rape and pillage our health care system as they line their pockets with billions of our tax dollars and trillions in ill got pharamceutical and blood spattered insurance premium profits?

Or, to put it another way, as our newly anointed reform government continues unabated the same predatory, profit oriented foreign policy as the previous entirely immoral administration initiated and prosecuted with insane and murderous zeal, it's wonderful that we Americans are still so magnificently self centered that we've made the issue of whether or not that same reform government can save us some money on better health insurance the crucial concern by which that reform government will succeed or fail.

It's good that we've got our priorities straight, and, as always, our hearts are in the right place.

 

Sometimes the truth is like a light bulb going on over your head; that's how the cartoonists' visual cliche originated.  Other times, it's like a hard slap to the face, clearing your mind, allowing enlightenment to illuminate your interior landscape like a suddenly risen sun.

It occurred to me today, as I was reading nothing much... it was like a thirty or forty loose jigsaw puzzle pieces abruptly locking together in the correct configuration in my mind, showing me the image clearly for the first time:

Conservatives are afraid.

Of liberals.

Let me say that again:  Conservatives are AFRAID.

Of LIBERALS.

It's... yeah, I know.  'Crazy' hardly seems to cover it.

Liberals are the tolerant ones.  We're the ones who actually believe there should be a dissenting point of view, or more than one.  We're the ones who respect the loyal opposition, the ones with empathy, the party of inclusion, the ones who reach out to anyone willing to be open minded, the ones who think there may well be valid answers and approaches to public policy issues outside the standard Democratic box.  We're the ones who will consider the options, even if the options come from people who are not of us.  We're the peaceful ones, the ones who oppose unnecessary wars, the ones who collect tax money and use the proceeds to help the weak, the poor, and the marginalized.  We're the compassionate ones.  

We're the ones that DON'T have all the guns.

And yet, the right... the intolerant, hate filled, uncivil, gun totin', 'protect an unborn child by killing an abortionist', 'bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran' right, the capital punishment loving right, the 'shoot them all and let God sort them out' right, the torture happy right, the habeas corpus hating right, the right that believes screaming and shouting and inciting to riot is how we should actually conduct a discourse... those guys... these guys... are afraid.

Of US.

The hippies.  The hairbags.  The pinkos.  The commies.  The fags. The latte lovin' lefties, with our Nieman Marcus shopping bags and our San Francisco values and our "Make Love Not War" and "Hell No We Won't Go". 

And the thing is, they know it's ridiculous.   That's why, suddenly, we're all Nazis.  It may be rather ridiculous, even kind of sissified, for the Real American Men and Women of the Right to be terrified of pansy-wansy progressives, but there's nothing weird about being afraid of NAZIS.  Nazis murdered ten million people, they started a war, they were dictatorial tyrants, they had all those concentration camps, they goose stepped all over the place and said "Sieg Heil" and tried to kill Indiana Jones and his lovable dad.  Nazis were BAD.  It's okay to be afraid of Nazis. 

So, you know, liberals are Nazis.  Let's go to war with them.

It's ridiculous, it's ludicrous, it's borderline insane.  Sure, I could understand it if they were genuinely afraid of the increasing power of a centralized Federal government encroaching further and further into their private lives, but, no, they're fine with all that stuff when the Federal government is run by Republicans.  Spy on everyone illegally?  Lock Americans up without a trial or any outside contact forever?  Torture people?  Force peaceful protesters into 'free speech zones'?  That's great!  No, really, it's fine... as long as Republicans are doing it. 

Democrats want to actually give everyone access to decent health care at an affordable price?  KILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!

They're afraid of us. 

I couldn't even begin to tell you why, but they are.

This doesn't make them less dangerous.  More ludicrous, yes, but not less dangerous.  When people are afraid, they tend to overreact, and their overreactions are often violent.

I don't know why they're afraid of us, but they are. 

Which means we should be afraid of them.

It is my sincerest hope that the American people get some kind of significant health care reform... something that makes life much, much better for every non-wealthy person in America.  Because that will cut across party lines; there are as many or more poor people in the Republican Party, as many or more poor conservatives, as there are poor Democrats and liberals and progressives.  And if health care becomes more accessible to the poor, and more affordable to the working class, I have to believe that, among many, many other benefits that will accrue to our society, we will gain this significant one:

Conservatives will stop being afraid of us. 

Because really, we're just trying to make things better for everyone. 

Honest.

I went to college with a guy I'll call K.  K was a master of argumentification.  I'm serious; you could start a discussion with K taking the position that the sky was generally blue if it wasn't cloudy out, and twenty hard hectoring minutes later, K would have you admitting that most if not all the time when you actually checked, it was kind of yellow, with pink polka dots.

How did he do this?  He learned verbal kung fu from his own mentor, a woman whose initials were C.K.  Here are the techniques C.K. taught K, which served him so well in his relentless pursuit of complete and utter dominance of any argument or disagreement he might ever find himself embroiled in:

* Interrupt your opponent constantly.  This ruins their train of thought and often gets them mad; when they're mad, they can't argue as well.  If they try to interrupt  you, stop them and firmly tell them that it's unbelievably rude to interrupt someone when they're speaking and if they'll just allow you to finish your thought, then you'll allow them to talk.

* Never qualify your opinion by saying things like "I believe" or "it seems to me".  State your subjective opinions and/or hypothetical theories as objective fact.  Insist that your opponent use qualifiers constantly when stating their own subjective feelings. 

* Make stuff up.  State your made up stuff authoritatively, without qualification.  Be bold.  Remember, people will swallow a big lie as easily as a small one, sometimes more so.

* Never admit you're wrong about anything.  If your opponent successfully refutes something you've said, change the subject and dive back in. 

* Never really give your opponent time to say anything.  The harder they try, the faster and louder you talk.  The substance of your argument doesn't really matter; if you can talk faster and louder than them, eventually they'll get tired of trying and give in.

* Never agree to disagree.  If your opponent suggests this, just shrug, roll your eyes, and say something like "whatever", and then toss in, a second later, when they think it's settled, "but you know I'm right". 

* If things are going badly for you, interject a complete non sequiter.  Something like "Sure, you say that now, but would you be so quick if it was your own mother?"  or "Hey, I drive an American car, buddy".  When this shuts them up for a moment in complete bewilderment, steam roller over them again. 

* If your opponent catches you in a lie, or calls you on any of the above tactics, deny it.  Say you have no idea what they're talking about, but you're trying to argue ideas, not take cheap shots at debating techniques.  Ask them sweetly if they give up now. 

K was an expert with these techniques; the only time in my life I ever heard him admit he'd lost an argument with me was six months after the argument, when we were having another argument about whether or not he'd ever lost an argument with me.  He pointed out the previous argument -- I'd created a character with the last name Gallery, he'd snorted and said that was a ridiculous name and nobody in real life was actually named Gallery, at which point, I'd opened the Syracuse phone book and found three pages of people named Gallery -- and after pointing out the argument, he told me "See, there.  You were right and I was wrong."  When I said "You never admitted you were wrong, you just closed the phone book and changed the subject!"  he snapped "Well, it was pretty obvious you were right, I don't see why I had to say so."

Good as K was, though, he was just a welterweight.  His mentor, C.K., was the heavyweight champion of the world at these things.  I once won a Trivial Pursuit game in which she was one of the other players, but it turned out the card with the answer to the winning question had a misprint on it, and identified the Hulk's secret identity as Steve Rogers.  Everyone at the table was a comics fan, so they knew my answer of "Robert Bruce Banner" was correct, but C.K. argued for twenty minutes that the rules explicitly stated that the answer on the card was to be considered correct, and by the time she was done, half the people playing weren't sure whether I'd actually won the game or not... or at least, that's what they said, as they were all tired of arguing about it.  Which is an integral part of the Way of the K.

I bring this up because it seems to me that The Way Of The K is very much evident in today's political discourse, especially among conservative pundits.  I think both K and C.K. would be especially proud of the way conservative media figures always insist on controlling the venue; people like Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh never debate anyone about anything if they can't control their opponent's microphone.  That's a worthy addition to the Way of the K... never let your opponent say a word if you can't shut them up whenever you want, and especially never debate them in front of an audience that isn't already sympathetic to you and hostile to them. 

And I can only imagine they'd both be in awe of the simple yet brilliant concept of carrying a loaded weapon to the argument.  Sure, you don't ever even have to refer to it while you're talking, but it's not like your unarmed opponent isn't going to be aware of the death machine you're wearing on your hip... and it isn't like the presumption that if you're crazy enough to wear it, you may well be crazy enough to use it, won't throw him or her off their game a little. 

 Maybe political discourse has always been an in  your face, win at any cost, take no prisoners sort of thing, and I just got exposed to it early, in a different context.  And perhaps there's simply no way people of passionately opposed views can remain civil when discussing such things. 

I can't help but feel, though, that civility would be to the benefit of the liberal/progressive agenda, if we could just get everybody involved in a conversation to behave that way.

And, honest to God, it really does seem to me that we could all start out by agreeing to leave the guns home when we're heading out to a political event.

 

 

Not that I, or anyone else, ever claimed otherwise...

Daniel Keys Moran's latest comment threads point me to this driveling idiocy, which, given the source, surprises me not at all with either of those two qualities. In that first mentioned comment thread, I respond thusly:

As for entitlement issues, and Neil Gaiman:

It's interesting that Gaiman opens that essay complaining because American Airlines won't provide him with what he considers to be a necessary tool to facilitate his writing while on one of their flights, at a price he thinks is reasonable. American Airlines provides him with a service (getting him from point A to point B within an acceptable time frame) for a price he's willing to pay. Gaiman seems to feel there's a contract between him and AA, that they will also, for the price of his ticket, facilitate his word processing while he's in their care, just like, apparently, all the other airlines he normally flies with do. But, as he points out later on in an entirely different context, the contract doesn't exist. His sense that they should give him this thing that he wants cheaply, that is not part of the service they render, is, er, hm, what should we call it... oh, yeah... an 'entitlement issue'.

Then he goes on to say this, in re: the astonishingly lazy George R.R. Martin:

You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.

Yeah. We want to know what happens next. And the author isn't telling us. Know what he's doing instead? He's taking the money we've paid him to tell us this story and he's spending it doing pretty much every other thing in the world except what we're paying him to do, which is, finish the story.

There is a contract. When you pay your money to the storyteller in the marketplace, the contract is, he tells you a story. Now, I'm willing to accept that when I toss a shekel in his upturned turban, maybe I won't LIKE the story, but unless the motherfucker dies before he chokes out the ending, at the very least, I believe that the implicit contract betwixt him and me that came into existence when he said "I'll tell you a story for a shekel, my good man" and I said, "Very well, here is your shekel, prate onward, o scribe", encompasses him telling me the ENTIRE story. Not just half or two thirds of it, at which point, he'll decide it's much much more important for him to watch a Giants' game, or go off to some storyteller's convention where people will kiss his ass for a week or so, or head back into his hotel, where he can sign a lot of merchandising and film contracts regarding the half or 2/3s of a story I've paid him to tell me and that he hasn't finished yet.

I'm not paying for a book, I'm paying for a STORY. He hasn't finished the story yet. And sure, if it's a long story he's entitled to breaks and meal time and some rest & recreation, but when I keep coming back to the marketplace looking for him to pick up where he left off and he's still over by the fountain under an awning watching the Punch & Judy show while good looking matched Swedish twins put butter on his toes, and it's pretty obvious that the operators of the Punch and Judy show and the good looking Swedish twins are both being sponsored by my shekel, I'm going to start feeling a little bit put upon, a little bit aggravated, a little bit as if someone is failing to live up to their end of the unstated contract.

But there is a contract, and the contract is this: You start a story, you finish it, and if you're having trouble finishing it, you at least show that you're making an effort to do so, that your contract with me is a priority for you, that it matters, that it's important.

You want to break that story down into increments and charge me for each increment, that's fine, but I want to see that you're making progress. I want to see good faith. And if I don't, I'm going to scream my head off about it, and why? Because that's really all I can do. If the storyteller is indeed so feckless and faithless that, while continuing to take my shekels through all his merchandising contracts and such, he still puts every other thing in his life ahead of continuing to tell me the story I'm paying for, well, there's not much I can do, except scream my head off, which I'm going to do.

This is one of those things where you're either a paying audience member or a story teller. If you're one, you simply have no sympathy for the POV of the other. I can understand this, vaguely; there are only six people in the world who have read my first novel UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE, but I regularly hear from all six of them, wondering when I'm going to write the sequel. And I tell them all the same thing: when someone wants to pay me a realistic amount of money to set aside a year or so of my finite lifespan to turn out that sequel, I'll write it. Which I think is fair.

George R.R. Martin has been fairly compensated for not only the entire projected SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series, but, most likely, at this point, for every single other thing he's ever written in his life, and, most likely, he's been compensated at a pretty high rate for every football game he's ever going to watch again before he dies, too.... all of it, out of the coin that has been generated by A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE... a story that he has, as yet, to finish. The contract is for the story, not the increments of the story. If he can't finish it, he can at least keep working on it. He can show us it's a priority for him.

Or he can start issuing refund checks.

And if he can't do that, or he chooses not to do that, then, at the very least, while he's living in the million dollar home the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, watching football on the big screen high density TV the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, jetting to various exotic foreign lands using tickets that his Ice and Fire fans bought for him, and staying at hotels that his Ice and Fire fans are paying for, and going to cons to receive the adulation of his Ice and Fire fans, when we ask him "say, George, when's the next Ice and Fire book coming out", he could not whine and shriek and stamp his feet and wave his arms and cry like a giant fucking grey haired baby and call all of us names because, you know, we've given him millions of dollars for this story and he doesn't even want to bother pretending he's actually working on finishing it.

There is a contract. There is. I'm sorry if other authors of serial fiction out there take all this personally and find it all very inconvenient, but there is. And it's not for the book, it's for the story. You start a story, you need to at least make a pretty game attempt at finishing it. George R.R. Martin not only wants to cop out on his contract, but he also demands universal respect, admiration, and adulation from his fans while he takes our money with one hand and flips us off with the other.

Beyond all that, let me say this: Nobody, not one single Ice and Fire fan, has ever assumed that George R.R. Martin is our bitch. That's a straw man, and an egregiously dishonest, ludicrously stupid one, at that. We just think George R.R. Martin undertook to tell us a story, and he's fucking off, on our dime. And it pisses us off.

Or at least, it pisses me off.

Here endeth the lesson.

It's not exactly succinct, and given that nobody reads this blog any more, it's not going to inspire any fawning sycophant to record a catchy little You Tube ditty, but, still, I think it's much more cogent than the entirely self serving nonsense it refutes.

* * *

Brief recap, for those who aren't sf/fantasy geeks like me:  George R.R. Martin is a prolific author of fantasy and science fiction who, until 1996, had enjoyed only middling success in the genre, having had many books published over the course of the previous decades, most of which were pretty good, but none brilliant, and all of which were out of print by '96, when A GAME OF THRONES came out and became an instant bestselling fantasy classic.

A GAME OF THRONES, alas, was merely the first in a projected trilogy.  However, the next book, A CLASH OF KINGS, came out in 1998, and these are big books, so two years was about right.  And the book after that, A STORM OF SWORDS, came out in 2000. 

However, by this time the story had gotten out of control, with Martin adding dozens of new characters and plotlines with each subsequent volume, and the projected trilogy had grown from three books to four, then to five, then to six.  But, still, if he could keep kicking them out every two years, and they maintained the same quality as the first three, well, okay, so we'd all have to wait another six years to get the complete series, but it would be worth it.

Then  5 years went by, and people started to get antsy, wondering when the next projected book, A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, would come out, and Martin became increasingly more harried and less courteous with each such inquiry, until finally he was banning people from his blog comments threads and cursing them out in the blog itself for even having the temerity to ask.  And in 2005, we got a new book, and it was called a A FEAST FOR CROWS, and it was half of the promised A DANCE WITH DRAGONS... Martin hadn't been able to finish it, but the volume had grown uncontrollably anyway, so he divided the next installment in two and published the first half, while the volume with all the really cool characters that everyone was really interested in anyway has yet to appear.

Martin's fans were not pleased with this at the time, and we have grown more vociferous in our displeasure in the subsequent four years, as Martin has grown surlier and more truculent and more exasperated and the eventual completion of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS seems to recede further and further beyond the event horizon with each passing day.

And so a controversy has grown up, with a loud contingent of Ice and Fire fans feeling that Martin is not holding up his end of some nebulous 'deal' or compact between him and his audience, while another faction, whom I shall refer to most of the time as 'the asskissers', continues to reassure poor Mr. Martin that they will continue to be patient, they still love him, they eagerly await the next book but nonetheless he can take all the time he wants, they'll wait. 

This last faction is supported and embraced by every other professional author in the world, apparently, all of whom seem to feel it would be a bad idea to allow fans to feel like they are entitled to any kind of consideration at all from those whose works and lifestyles said fans support, regardless of circumstance. 

So that's why I wrote the above essay.

And it's here because I don't get much time to write these days, it's some of my better writing, I'm sure that out there among the political junkies (like me) there are at least a few sf/fantasy geeks who might be interested, and a lot more people read my work here than do on my blogspot page.

Okay? 

James Taranto does his best to stick two fingers in it up to the second knuckle:

"Thus one could argue that ObamaCare is the domestic equivalent of a "war of choice."

But the comparison sells President Bush short in a way that is independent of the merits of the policies. Whereas Obama seems to think the country owes it to him to accept ObamaCare because he was kind enough to agree to be our president, Bush actually made an effort to persuade the public--including the opposite party--that his plan for Iraq was a good idea. The effort was very successful: Congress authorized the use of military force with strong bipartisan majorities, and by early 2003, public approval of the plan was in the 70% range."

The Wall Street Journal often offers some of America's most lucid and insightful political analysis, and this has never been more true than with their offering of this particularly piercing and cogent insight. 

The WSJ is entirely correct:  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney cared enough about their war of choice in Iraq to lie to the American people, the American Congress, the United Nations, and, pretty much, everyone else in the world who had a radio or TV or access to a newspaper. 

Obama, on the other hand, is simply telling the truth, and I think it's a stunning commentary on the difference between the work ethics of the two administrations.  Bush and Cheney were willing to get right out there and dig in, rolling up their sleeves to do a truly Herculean task shoveling the b.s. in every direction.

Obama, on the other hand, just recites those same old facts and figures.  He's making absolutely no effort whatsoever to embellish, to exaggerate, to distort, to manufacture outright lies and fabrications with which to sell his initiatives to the American people. 

No, he's leaving all that heavy lifting to the Republicans and the corporate interests whose pockets they are in. 

And this can't be stressed enough - if Obama were a real President, a real man, a real American, then by God, he'd take the time to lie to us.

Taranto doesn't stop there, though.  In fact, all has been prelude.  His true rhetorical genius can be seen in his next paragraph:

"Republican politicians did not label opponents of the war effort "un-American," as Steny Pelosi and Nancy Hoyer have done to ObamaCare foes. Bush's White House, unlike Obama's, did not urge supporters to report "fishy" pro-Saddam arguments. Bush did not tell his critics to shut up and "get out of the way," as Obama did last week. The Bush administration simply made a compelling argument and won. The Obama administration, on the verge of losing after making a poor argument, now is lashing out at its critics--which seems a strategy to maximize the damage of this effort."

And again, the points are inarguable and irrefutable.  Certainly, George W. Bush never even considered setting up any programs where Americans would report on each other's activities to their own government, and it is, of course, absolutely true that no prominent Republicans ever said anything like "No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100 percent, behind John Ashcroft 100 percent, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100 percent, behind surveillance of Arabs 100 percent", and no Republican Congresswoman has ever called for the media to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America", or has ever accused the President of the United States and his wife of being anti American on national television. 

And President Bush, of course, was never one to silence critics, or make any effort to keep them out of his way.

(Oddly, this page contains what were apparently once many links to news stories regarding the Bush Administration's propensity for confronting its own American detractors in a forthright, robust, and adult fashion; yet most of those links no longer function.  Strange...)

Probably most cogent of all of Taranto's stinging, pithy observations, though, is the trenchant wit he displays when referring to a well known progressive e-journal as "MediaMutters".  Zing!  Another bullseye for the fearless conservative commentariat!

It's a shame, of course, that the Obama Administration is, indeed, "on the verge of losing after making a poor argument".  I know it must be so because the Wall Street Journal and James Taranto say it's so, and they wouldn't lie.  Yet when I spoke with my deeply conservative brother last weekend (it was his birthday) and the subject of health care reform came up, he seemed cynically, if bitterly, resigned to reform's eventual and inevitable passage.  When speaking of recent confrontational, raucous, and even violent anti reform protests at a townhall meeting in Tampa thrown by Democratic Representative Kathy Castor (a fine person and excellent Representative, by the way; that's coming from a former resident of Tampa who voted for her twice), my brother sighed and said, "As if it's going to do any good".   But I'm sure my brother is misinformed; again, if the WSJ and James Taranto states authoritatively that "Obamacare" is on the verge of defeat, well, defeat for Obamacare must be objectively, factually in the offing.

I suppose it's simply the clear and present difference between the two Presidential policies.  Bush wanted to invade a country that did not threaten us for reasons that still haven't been made entirely clear, a course of action that would end up destroying that country and millions of its inhabitants, and costing hundreds of thousands of American soldiers their health and wellbeing, and thousands of them their lives.  Obama wants to provide millions of Americans with better health care, and by doing so, help to strengthen an economy badly damaged by, among other things, that very same war of choice Bush initiated. 

One President cared enough about his choice of action to lie to us about it, another can't even be bothered. 

James Taranto is right.  Enough is enough.  If our own President won't make any effort to deceive us over something, then it can't be all that important, and I say to hell with it.

We seem to have a state of widespread confusion on many important topics.  Let's sort this nonsense out once and for all:

Global Warming:  Totally not real.  Or, if it is, it's just something that is going to happen anyway due to the inexplicable natural climate cycles and therefore it is blasphemous and wrong for mankind to try and interfere with it.  It's certainly not anything that has anything to do with the 300 billion or so BTUs of energy the human race releases into the ecosphere every year or so, an amount which has increased pretty much every year since the Stone Age and will continue to increase until something happens that returns us... well, some of us, the small fraction that survives whatever it is... to the Stone Age again.  So, first, global warming is not real, and second, if it is, it isn't our fault, and third, if it is our fault, we still can't do anything about it because if God wants the Earth to get warmer, it's gonna get warmer, so shut up.

This is the official public policy position on global warming, and it's a fine one, and no more need be said.  However, just so people understand, underlying this excellent and irrefutable public policy is the following even more excellent and irrefutable political reasoning:  Al Gore came up with the whole idea of global warming, and Al Gore is a goddam liberal, so liberals pretty much own the whole global warming deal, so, obviously, if global warming is real then liberals are right about something and Al Gore is right about something and in the end we all might have to admit that Al Gore actually won the 2000 Presidential election and the entire Bush/Cheney thing was an illegal, outlaw regime and every single registered Republican is a criminal bastard who should go to jail.  And frankly, we will kill every single one of you before we ever admit to any of that.  So global warming isn't real, or if it is, it's cool and you need to shut up about it, and I hope we're clear on that.  Or else we'll have to kill you.  So shut up.

Imprisoning terrorists:  Keeping terrorists locked up forever without any kind of legal due process is a great idea as long as they're Islamic foreigners with weird names who probably wear towels on their heads and pray funny.  AND it's a great idea as long as they are locked up in some Communist country we should continue to have a complete and total trade embargo on because they're Commies.  But we cannot give these terrorists trials and we cannot set them free and we cannot imprison them anywhere in the actual U.S.A. because they're incredibly dangerous, which is proven by the fact that we've already got like 30 of these guys locked up in prisons in the U.S.A and look at all the high school girls kissing each other now.  I mean, jesus. 

Maybe keeping these goddam towelheads locked up at Gitmo forever isn't such a great idea.  We should probably just execute them all, and then airdrop their beheaded bodies into Iran to show how we feel about rigged Presidential elections, just like that episode of WKRP where downtown Cincinatti was bombed with turkeys on Thanksgiving.  Yeah.  That would show 'em.

The actual birthplace of 'President' Obama:  It's important to understand that B. Hussein Obama was almost certainly actually 'born' in the United States, (although, honestly, how 'American' is Hawaii, anyway?) and even if he wasn't his mother was an American citizen so wherever he was born (someplace in Africa) he's probably still an actual 'American citizen' (although by no stretch of the imagination can he be considered to be a TRUE American by the standards of decent, mainstream Americans like Sarah Palin and myself but that's a totally different thing).  But that's not really the issue, is it?  The issue actually is that clearly the White House is trying to hide something by refusing to release the actual original piece of paper that actually states where Obama was born, and they're probably doing this with the intention of making conservatives look bad, and that's just wrong.

Also, and this may not be the time to bring this up but hey, somebody has to do it:  our country was founded by good decent God fearing Christian white men and our Constitution pretty clearly states exactly how, for purposes of representation, people of B.  Hussein Obama's heredity and culture are to be counted.  Constitutionally, the validity of somebody of B. Hussein Obama's heredity and culture to serve in any kind of elected office in the United States of America would seem to be on kind of shaky ground.  I'm just sayin'.

Socialist  health care policies:  It's important to stay civil and keep the discussion of these things spirited but on a mature level, yes, it is.  But if we'd had that attitude back in the 40s when a certain National Socialist party in Germany was rounding up all the folks they didn't like and shipping them off to murder camps, well, the few of us still around would all be speaking German and saluting a flag with a swastika on it right now.  Civility is all well and good but let's not forget that we're at war and when you're fighting socialism like our grandparents did during The Big One that sometimes violence is the only way.  The National Socialists back then were rounding people up and sending them to camps; the socialists now just want to kill us all slowly by sending us to crappy government doctors like they're forcing on our poor wounded soldiers in that lousy Veteran's Administration.  Do you want your sick grandmother being treated by a VA doctor who got his medical degree in some cow college in India?  Do you want your kids to get flu shots from some grubby fingered raghead whose name you can't even pronounce?  If violent public demonstrations are what it takes to keep Obama's dirty fingers off your grandparent's Medicare, then I say it's a price we should all be willing to pay.  Our grandparents fought National Socialism abroad, now it's our turn to fight it on the home front.

'Former' Presidents:  Why is it that when the liberal mainstream media mentions Bill Clinton it's always 'President Bill Clinton', but when they mention George W. Bush, which they hardly ever do nowadays, by the way, and that's just wrong, it's always 'former President George W. Bush'?  Also, I'd like to say that if B. Hussein Obama had sent President George W. Bush over to North Korea to get those two chicks out of the hoosegow, he wouldn't have apologized to Kim Jong Il, he would have popped the little bastard's head off his neck and then led an airborne assault on the prison where they were being held. 

Also, of course Clinton went over to rescue those two chicks, I mean, they're kind of hot, and I'm sure they expressed their gratitude to him over and over again on the plane trip back to the States, I mean, you know what those Asian chicks are like, and we all know what Slick Willie is like.  Although I'm sure if he was asked he'd lie about it.  Someone should do a DNA test on those reporter chicks' dresses.  In fact, it's kind of a national scandal that the mainstream media hasn't shown any interest in investigating exactly what may have gone on between Clinton and those two Asian chicks on the plane trip back.  You know they'd have been all over President Bush if he'd ever rescued two hot Asian chicks and then spent a long plane trip alone with them.  It's typical.

Anyway, I hope this has cleared a few things up for everyone.

 

Back in September of 1979, I was wandering aimlessly on the third evening since my family had helped move me into the dorms at Syracuse University.  I heard music coming from the quad, and drifted over.  A band with a female lead singer was playing AMAZING rock and roll, so I sat down at the periphery and listened.  I caught the name of the singer after a few more songs, and a week later, bought her self named debut album at a local campus record store.

Along with the first two albums by The Cars, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' DAMN THE TORPEDOES, Blue Oyster Cult's SECRET TREATIES and AGENTS OF FORTUNE, and Carole King's TAPESTRY, that self titled debut album, CAROLYNE MAS, became a vital and permanent part of the musical backdrop of my adulthood.  I've always thought it was a great pity that Carolyne Mas never caught on; she had a fantastic voice, was a wonderful guitar player, and a terrific songwriter.  A few years later I managed to find her third album and snatched that up, too.  It wasn't as good as the first, but it still had a lot of really solid tunes on it.

Fast forward to last summer -- I came across an article online about Carolyne Mas,  about how she'd never quite made it in rock and roll and was currently, in her early 50s, running a shelter for abandoned animals in Florida.  I put up a blog entry lamenting the unfairness of a world in which hack non creative types become incredibly successful while genuinely talented artists languish as unknowns.  

Fast forward again to a few weeks ago, when that blog entry got its first comment... from Carolyne Mas.  She thanked me for the entry, said she loved my writing style, and suggested I help her write her biography.

That began an email correspondence, the latest installment of which is below (in response to a note I sent on Monday, asking if she was doing okay, as I knew from a phone call on Friday she was heading into a rough weekend):

"We're not okay...I have been desperately trying to raise money. I have no money for cat food, dog food, and now people food. No matter how many times I post my plea on FB or MySpace...we are all on the verge of starvation. I am trying to make sure my mother and my son have something to eat. There is a place that gives free meals on Sundays, so we will be able to eat then, all of us, if we can get the gas to get there. I am worried about the cats and dogs, too.

I have sent this letter to all the production and publishing big shots I have known, who are all wealthy, with no response. When you are poor, no one wants anything to do with you. It's a sick world, especially the entertainment business...if you cannot serve them in some way, you are invisible.

Here is a link to my letter...

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=90734634069&id=637561082&ref=mf]http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=90734634069&id=637561082&ref=mf

Hope I can hang on long enough for you to finish this...

Love, Carolyne"

This is not a joke or a hoax.  This is a real person who is really at the end of her rope and has no idea where else she is going to turn, or how she's going to eat, or feed her  husband, or the hundreds of abandoned animals in her care, past this Sunday, assuming they manage to get to a food bank and the food bank actually has any food.

I don't know this woman at all well, but I believe her to be one of the genuinely good people in this world, as well as an enormously talented performing artist, and while there is little to nothing I can do for her, or my family can do for her, at this distance and given our own financial situation, still, I can reach out on the Internet, and I am doing so.  

If you check out this link and scroll down a little, you will find a lot of information about Carolyne's life and career and current undertakings and desperate situation, and  you will also find a PayPal link.  I'm sure Carolyne will be deeply grateful for any contributions whatsoever that may come in.   As will I, for whatever that may be worth.

"We and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression.  And let's give thanks to all the great people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, William Bennett, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Dennis Miller, Dick Morris, Ann Coulter, John Kasich, Michael Steele, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, Shelby Steele, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, Fred Barnes and so many others. Let's give thanks to them for not giving up and staying the course, to bring an end to this false prophet Obama."
  - Jon Voigt, 6/9/09

"Governor, why wouldn't anyone want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, unless they detested their own country or were ignorant of its greatness?"
  - Sean Hannity, 6/12/03

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation...I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?"
 - Rush Limbaugh, commenting on the torture of prisoners by American troops at Abu Ghraib

"It's hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell 'em they're irresponsible and lazy. And who's gonna wanna do that? Because that's what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period. I mean, I know people from Haiti, from the Ukraine, from, eh-we got callers all day long on The Factor. From Romania. You come here, you get educated, you work hard, you'll make a buck. You get addicted, you don't know anything, you'll be poor."
 - Bill O'Reilly, 6/11/07

"Every now and again we have to ask ourselves, what's the point of this thing called America, anyway? Is the point to make as much money as possible in our lifetimes? Is this nation called to some higher purpose?  Are we living the way God wants us to live? And if not, why not? ...Our Judeo-Christian tradition has done more good for America and the rest of the world than left-wing secularism ever will."
- Laura Ingraham, POWER TO THE PEOPLE

"Today, legalized abortion is the law of the land because the Supreme Court decided in 1973 that its recently created constitutional right to privacy also included a new constitutional right to abortion. If you look in the Constitution, however, you will find no general "right to privacy" any more than you will find a right to abortion -- and for good reason: It's not there. The framers assumed no general right to privacy because, to state the obvious, criminal and evil acts can be committed in privacy. Criminal codes are full of such examples -- from murder to incest to rape and other crimes."
 - Mark Levin,  MEN IN BLACK:  HOW THE SUPREME COURT IS DESTROYING AMERICA

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. (It) would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do,but the crime rate would go down.""
 - William Bennett, 9/28/05

"Would you kill someone for that?...I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore...I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,...No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong?"
    - The Glenn Beck Program, May 17, 2005

"It's probably the last football game we'll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama."
-- Hugh Hewitt on the June 25 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show

" Do you believe we are fighting evil people in Iraq? That is how supporters of the war regard the Baathists and the Islamic dissolution persons, the people we are fighting in Iraq. Because if you cannot answer it, or avoid answering it, or answer "no," we know enough about your moral compass to know that further dialogue is unnecessary. In fact, dialogue is impossible. Our understanding of good and evil is so different from yours, there is simply nothing to discuss."
- Dennis Prager

"As the national argument continues to rage regarding the proper social and governmental response to homosexuality, some of the advocates for radical change have unobtrusively but unmistakably shifted their campaign from a request for equal treatment to an assertion of innate superiority. They demand for gay impulses not the same treatment accorded to heterosexual desires, but far greater latitude and acceptance, along with uniquely privileged
social sanction and legal endorsement."
 - Michael Medved

"Liberals should not overplay this weapons of mass destruction card, because you want me to tell you the truth? Most of us are not going to care if they don't find these weapons of mass destruction. It's enough for a lot of us to see those kids smiling on that street again."
- Dennis Miller

"I know Jesus Christ died for my sins, and that's all I really need to know."
 - Ann Coulter

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
- Ann Coulter

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
- Karl Rove

""The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument."
 - Newt Gingrich

"People who claim that sentencing a murderer to "life without the possibility of parole" protects society just as well as the death penalty ignore three things: (1) life without the possibility of parole does not mean life without the possibility of escape or (2) life without the possibility of killing while in prison or (3) life without the possibility of a liberal governor being elected and issuing a pardon."
 - Thomas Sowell

"Hitler, like bin Laden and his epigones, was the problem, not us. The only difference is that our grandparents knew that and we don't."
 - Victor Davis Hanson

"There are homosexuals in the world, and they should not be excluded based on their sexuality. I draw the line at marriage."
 - Shelby Steele

"Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. "
 - Charles Krauthammer

"When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone."
 - Michelle Malkin

""It's amazing. You can't drink outside and you can't smoke inside. It really makes it hard to keep your business open. There's always someone else with their hand in your pocket."
- Fred Barnes

"That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody's son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted -- or at least, most of the time."
 - Barack Obama

"I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all."
- Barack Obama

[The] issues are never simple. One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues."
 - Barack Obama

I guess I'll take my prophets false, thanks.

"Civil liberties are profoundly counter-intuitive. It takes an effort of imagination and good will to remember that those we despise deserve the same legal rights as those who agree with us."
  ROBERT ANTON WILSON, The New Inquisition

But there are actually good reasons to defend free expression even for those we loathe the most... at least, if those we loathe the most are as dimwitted as most of the people I loathe the most... namely, when we give them enough rope, they inevitably hang themselves.

Which is to say, let a goddam fool like Rush Limbaugh run his mouth freely, and he will inevitably display his stupidity, venality, and hypocrisy for all to see.

This latest thing, with boycotting General Motors because the Federal government is spending billions of our tax dollars trying to keep it from going under?

I mean, I really don't have to explain the utter mind boggling stupidity of boycotting a company we're spending millions of tax dollars trying to save, do I?

You want to boycott General Motors, do it because they make crappy cars.  But boycotting them because there's a Democrat in the White House and you can't stand the idea of an opposition President getting credit for saving the world from the unbelievable bungling of Your Guy?

That's... I don't even know.  There aren't words for how unbelievably egocentrically brainbendingly stupid that is. 

I want to say it's all par for Rush's course, just part and parcel of the whole Limbaugh experience.  Yet even for a guy who once called Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog" and who seriously thinks every drug addict in the world should be jailed... except Rush Limbaugh... this is a brand new high in sheer dumbassery.

So I say let the asses bray.  A few more choice cuts like this, and even Rush's dwindling audience of dittoheads has to start wising up. 

I mean, some of those guys have to actually work for General Motors, right...?

Here's something that, while I've kind of known it for years, I suspect, in some vague, incoherent, mostly instinctual way, I only recently fully and cogently articulated to myself:

The primary difference between the left and the right is:  tolerance.

Like I said, I think I always knew this -- you certainly are sure you always did as you read that right now -- but it never came as clear to me before I typed that response.

The conservative viewpoint is a great many things, but boiled down, it is Us Vs. Them. It is tribalism run rampant. It is xenophobia honed down to a monofilament edge, distilled out into 200 proof white lightning in a clay jug. It is intolerance with bells and whistles and snow chains and four wheel drive and a great big M60 machine gun mounted in the truck bed.

Conservatives love the fight. Any fight. It's why they're constantly stroking off over whatever conflict we happen to be in right now, or if we're not, that they want us to get into right now. It's why every battle the U.S. fights is The Next Global War With All Civilization At Stake. It's why they talk about World War V. (The Cold War, you see, was World War III, and then the first Gulf War was World War IV, and our current mass terrorist attack on a few thousand guys with homemade bombs and several million innocent Arabic bystanders is World War V.  It makes perfect sense, if you're completely insane.)

It's why everything with them is war, war, war, all the time, time, time.

Because when We're At War, Citizen, the essential conservative ideology kinda-sorta makes sense... well, it comes as close as it's ever going to, anyway.

At base, conservatives hate it when someone says "well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree". They cannot tolerate the idea of tolerance, they refuse to co exist with co-existence, and the only good person with a dissenting viewpoint from theirs is a dead person with a dissenting viewpoint from theirs.

They enjoy it when it's Emergency Time and the shells are flying overhead and it's Life or Death, Kill or Be Killed, A Man Wearing A Turban Is An Enemy -- Shoot! Because in times like that, dissent really is treason, wanting to tolerate other points of view really is dangerous weakness, and liberals really are yellow bellied enemy collaborators... or at least, that's how it seems to them it not only should be, but it MUST be, If Civilization And The American Way Of Life Are To Survive And Flourish.

It's absolutely nuts, but at base, we are all conservatives. We all hate people who disagree with us, we all wish they'd just shut up, and sometimes they get us so mad with their goddam alternative viewpoints and non-mainstream opinions that we want to kill them. That's the little kid in all of us, who just wants his or her way, right now, right now, RIGHT NOW, and who can't understand why it can't be that way all the time.

Liberals drive conservatives nuts, because basically, we are grown ups.  We insist on tolerating dissenting points of view. We demand civil liberties for everybody, even the people we find reprehensible and vile. That's not the conservative way; conservatives believe that freedom of speech is only for the people who agree with them.

Here's the problem conservatives have when they live in an even remotely free society -- freedom is a liberal concept. The basis of freedom is tolerance -- I tolerate your choices as long as they don't interfere with my choices, and you do the same for me. Conservatives find this infuriating and baffling. The conservative concept of freedom is that, yeah, everyone should be free to do whatever they want, as long as whatever they want to do is decent and proper and doesn't offend God or the neighbors or vary in any particular way from the acceptable mainstream that me and my buddies all enthusiastically inhabit.

The concept that people should only be free to do whatever they want if whatever they want is the same as what everyone else wants is not freedom at all. That's compulsory mass conformity, and the only way you get that in any sizable group of human beings is by having some of them point guns at the rest of them. Which, again, is why conservatives like wartime so much, because if it's wartime, you get to point the guns at the people you don't like. Disobedience of an order during wartime is punishable by summary execution, soldier. Fall in, stand at attention, and march where you're told, by God, or we've got a bullet and a bodybag with your name on them.

It's not that they WANT to be so strict, mind you, but otherwise, you risk destroying morale. Can't have that. We're at WAR.

It is most likely the reason we are at a perpetual disadvantage in this kind of social or cultural conflict. By our nature we believe in tolerating those who are different from us, even the really stupid, bigoted, close minded and hateful ones. And we keep reaching out and saying "Hey, can't we all just get along?" But conservatives have no desire to get along with liberals. They just want us to agree with them -- OR DIE!

It's why Republican dominated Congresses have no trouble punishing their Democratic minorities with childish measures straight out of THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, but Democrat dominated Congresses have a hard time doing the same thing back. We want to rise above the mean spirited impulse. We want to get out of the gutter. We want to elevate the discourse. We want to be civil, to start over, to make things work.

Conservative are happy to let liberals do all that, too... when liberals have the upper hand. But never ever expect the same consideration in return; that's not consistent with the conservative mindset.

If there's a resolution to this conunddrum, it lies (believe it or not) in the wisdom of Sean Hannity. Long, long ago -- well, back when Clinton was still in office and Fox News still viewed itself as something of a radical underground -- Hannity said something about liberals that went roughly like this -- you can live next to them, you can work with them, you can be friends with them -- you simply can never, under any circumstances, let them have any kind of real power.

That's exactly true, but it's true of conservatives, not liberals. You can housebreak them, dress them up, take them out places. You can have them over for a beer and some barbecue, work side by side with them, go to your kid's soccer games with them... as long as you're in charge. As long as liberalism is in the ascent, conservatives are willing to deal, because the last thing in the world they want is to remind us just how badly they kick us around when the shoe is on the other foot.

But having won this election, we must never, never, never lose another one. We must never, never, never allow conservatives to be in charge again. Conservatives like war, conservatives hate tolerance, conservatives are vindictive, and mean, and short sighted, and greedy, and deeply, deeply xenophobic.

They are the worst in all of us, and we cannot ever let them run our world again.