Google, eBooks, and Independent Booksellers

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/30books.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1277910326-Fw4UDJlKI9ZqZTaJ/23WGw

Found this on the New York Times the other day.

If Google can overcome the advantage the other online booksellers have, this could be very interesting for the eBook market and very beneficial for the independent and small-town booksellers.

And I'm sure college students, who have to shell out a lot of money for books, will love Google providing textbooks in bulk, even in an electronic form.

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The No-Fly List is Unconstitutional and Un-American

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/no-fly/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

I was aware of the "no-fly list" before, but I never really pondered the constitutionality of it.

However, this article points out very well that people--including many U.S. citizens--are being denied the ability to travel on private aircraft by an un-appealable decree of some security personnel.  No due process involved.  As a result, there are people stranded in foreign countries unable to get home.

The case of Ayman Latif, a disabled Marine veteran who needs to fly to the US from Egypt for medical treatment, strikes me as particularly aggravating.  Repeat after me: Disabled.  Marine.  Veteran.  In other words, I fail to see how he's going to hijack an aircraft, and being a freaking U.S. Marine, is a lot less likely to have sold out to the enemy than John Q. Public.

I am aware there are dangerous people who would do us harm out there, but there are legal mechanisms already in existence for dealing with this kind of thing.  To be arbitrarily denied the use of airplanes by some bureaucratic decree is un-American (the whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect Americans from the kind of arbitrary abuses of power common in almost every other country in the world at the time) and in all likelihood, unconstitutional.

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Although this is not a deprival of liberty in the same way that being imprisoned is, it is still a denial of liberty in other ways.  Freedom of travel, for example.  Although there is not an explicitly-enumerated right to freedom of travel, I present to you the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Therefore, if the feds are going to put someone, especially an American citizen, on the no-fly list, they should have to go through the same legal process the government needs to go through to search or arrest someone.  This way, evidence can be weighed, appeals made, that kind of thing.  If we're dealing with people who are abroad, perhaps they could participate via tele-conferencing or some kind of Internet chat-like mechanism.

Methinks if this was not done in the name of defending against terrorism, a lot more conservatives would be opposed to it.

I mean, think about it.  Imagine you're just going around on your daily business and suddenly you're barred from flying.  No reason given, no appeal, and no clear-cut way to get off this list.  This would be a gross abuse of government power, but many people will reflexively defend it in the name of national security.

Let us remember the quote from Ben Franklin:

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

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Tibetans, Chinese, and Evolution

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/science/02tibet.html?_r=1

Now this is very interesting.  I think I'll send this to my old East Asian history professor to see what he's got to say about it.  I'm mostly interested in the "population bottleneck" among the Han Chinese and what events in Chinese history might explain that.

Although I've always been interested in science, I haven't been keeping up to a large degree with the use of genetics to track ancestry.  The most recent news item I recall based on that subject involved the exact timing of the divergence between humans and other primates and since it was posted on my alternate-history forum, the headline (which had to do with when humans and apes stopped mating with each other) provoked a lot of crude humor.

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A Brief Retraction Re: My Birth-Control Article

I posted the NYT link and the link to my blog in the Chat forum of my alternate-history site, in order to drum up discussion and hits for the blog.

The user whose handle is Blairwitch749 works in the health-care industry--and has gotten in some mighty battles with the pro-national health care contigent, which is mostly European--and he didn't think making hormonal birth control over-the-counter was such a good idea.

He went into a great deal of detail about how doctors do extensive blood-testing, calibration for the recipient's weight, etc. to ensure they've got it right when they prescribe hormonal birth control.  If a doctor's involvement is required to that degree, keeping it a prescription drug might be prudent, or at least the matter should be discussed more thoroughly first.

Due to the fact I am not 100% sure BW is correct on the matter (I have not independently verified the process) and the fact that a large thrust of my earlier comments were a defense of secularism in government from a Christian perspective, I will leave the older article up.

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Food and Drug Administration Being Stupid

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/8-year-old-burn-558429.html

The FDA has refused to allow a boy who was recently very badly burned to undergo a procedure in which his own skin cells are cultured and transplanted.  Instead, they will try to fix his burns with skin from his scalp and scrotum.

(Speaking as a male, the latter part doesn't sound healthy.)

I cannot think of any legitimate reason for the FDA to refuse to allow the boy to undergo this experimental treatment, especially since the family wants it.  If they're concerned about the boy's well-being, they can always make the family sign a waiver.

This is so aggravating I rejoined http://www.congress.org/, which enables one to write one's state and federal representatives with just one click, in order to write Obama, both Senators, and my U.S. Representative (Lynn Westmoreland) asking them to put pressure on the FDA to reverse their decision.

If the rest of you can do that as well, we might see the idiocy logjam being broken.  It strikes me as a case of bureaucracy, so sufficient public outrage should be enough to force them to change their minds.

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Revisions and Feminism

Just revised and re-submitted my story "Westernmost Throne" to Daverana Enterprises for inclusion in a possible eBook/print collection.  It's now twice as long (2,181 words vs. 1,004 words) and features a stronger female protagonist.

The story was first titled "He Who Sits on the Westernmost Throne" and told the tale of a campaign secretary who discovers her boss--a senator named Richard Sanchez who is on the verge of being elected president--is really 3,000 years old and has made a covenant with some kind of evil supernatural entity in exchange for immortality and supernatural powers.  The following prophecy is made by the evil power...

“He who wields the Amulet of Fire and sits in the westernmost throne shall rule the wide world forever. I will live in him and he will live in Me."

The story was originally written for a "political horror" contest the Athens alternative paper Flagpole was putting on around the time of the 2004 election.  Therefore, I had a strict word count of 1,000 words.  The original story ended with the senator announcing to the secretary that she would be his queen when he took over the world and leaning in to kiss her.  She screams when she sees his tongue is forked...

Thing is, the stories in my collection are very male-dominated.  There aren't many female characters and a significant number of them are damsel-in-distress types (some English girls abducted by Vikings, a woman attacked by an evil immortal hoping to corrupt her boyfriend, and a teenage noblewoman kidnapped by an oceanic snake-prince who hopes to marry her).  The latter I deliberately wrote as a subversion of that trope (I have her throwing the protagonist a dart when he is being beaten by the villain, enabling him to turn the tables, and then she quizzes him to make sure he's whom he claims he is), but that's one story out of around 10.

(Part of this has to do with the fact I hold men who abuse women in special disdain and writing them as villains enables me to kill them in various creative ways, but this could be interpreted as me thinking women weak and in need of saving, which is both insulting and commercially-unviable.  This isn't the 30s with its brass-brassiered heroines menaced by tentacled beasties anymore.)

In the revised story, protagonist Karen Hutchinson physically resists Sanchez's advances and a brawl breaks out.  She tears away the Amulet of Fire and then smashes it, causing Sanchez to age 3,000 years in a few seconds and die.  She then realizes that if Sanchez is found dead, she will be a suspect in his death and by telling the police that he was 3,000 years old, had made deals with demons, attempted to rape her, and then was going to take over the world would make her look like an insane murderess.

Then the evil power starts to speak to her.  Tempted by her desire to avoid jail (and to be free of the fear of violent men many women have and possibly implement Sanchez's political agenda, which she agreed with), she takes up the ruby from the amulet and becomes the evil power's new agent.

I suspect someone will say that she's not really a strong woman because she gives into temptation rather than doing the right thing, regardless of the consequences, but at the same time, she is much less passive (saving herself rather than waiting for someone else to save her) and becomes much more physically powerful.  Assuming she becomes like Sanchez, this means living for thousands of years, being able to teleport, greatly augmented physical strength, etc.  Female empowerment, literally.

In You Suck: A Love Story, the female protagonist (who was transformed into a vampire in the previous book, Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story) wanders the streets in a bad part of town at night and, when cat-called by some gang members, talks trash right back.  She ponders how before, as a woman, she was always afraid of being robbed, raped, etc., but thanks to her transformation, she doesn't need to worry about that anymore.

(In the prior book, three street criminals attack her at a laundry at 3 AM and she proceeds to tear two of them apart and seriously wound a third.  You go, girl.)

My protagonist undergoes a similar transformation--although not a vampire, she doesn't need to fear odious men anymore.  I pity any D.C. hooligan who tries to bother her on her way home at night.

I also upgraded her job.  Originally, Karen was a secretary of some indeterminate sort, a stereotypically female job.  In the new version, she's Sanchez's press secretary (or at least one of them), a very powerful position.  Furthermore, she is described as having gotten the position rather young, indicating talent on her part.  Hopefully this will make her a stronger female character.

Also, my friend Rob sent me an article about how fantasy is becoming more successful than science fiction because it is more inclusive of women and strong female roles, while SF is becoming increasingly male-dominated and militaristic.  Having a heroine who kills a would-be rapist and takes his place as a powerful supernatural being strikes me as something many women would appreciate more than damsel-in-distress roles and hopefully this will increase my sales.

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In Defense of General McChrystal...

General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has been summoned to the White House after Rolling Stone published an article in which McChrystal's aides mock various federal officials and claim that McChrystal said certain unflattering comments about Obama himself.  The two will be meeting today and it is possible the meeting will endw ith McChrystal's resignation or even his firing.

Here's the article:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

Many people believe he should be relieved of command, as Douglas MacArthur was when he attempted to go around President Harry Truman in order to attack targets in China during the Korean War.  They say this is essential toward maintaining civilian control of the military.

Thing is, MacArthur's situation and McChrystal's situation are two entirely different things.

For starters, it is indisputable that MacArthur appealed to Congressional leaders after Truman vetoed his plans.  However, from what I've read, the aides are saying McChrystal said these things--McChrystal is not on-record as saying these things himself.  Although healthy whistle-blowing should be encouraged to prevent wrongdoing, we don't want to have a culture of denunciation like existed in Stalin's Russia during the purges.

(This was something I learned in my Modern Russia class in college--the purges weren't just Stalin commanding people be killed or imprisoned, but a full-blown popular hysteria, a witch hunt, against "wreckers" and spies.)

The most damning, insubordinate comments are not even alleged to have come from McChrystal.  They come from his aides.  The aides allege McChrystal said Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" at a meeting with his generals, but it was someone else who went on arant against Joe Biden.

A member of my alternate-history forum whose handle is Skokie cited this regulation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice online yesterday:

Punitive Articles of the UCMJ



Article 88—Contempt toward officials

“Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”
 
McChrystal made some unpleasant remarks about an ambassador, but an ambassador does not fall under those rules.  Furthermore, McChrystal's alleged remarks about Obama are not necessarily "contemptuous."  In and of themselves, they aren't insulting, plus, in context, he might not have been criticizing Obama himself.
 
(Perhaps he was criticizing the generals for making Obama uncomfortable?)
 
However, the above regulations definitely nail the aides.  If McChrystal is punished, it should be for allowing his aides to get themselves into trouble (or, if the article accurately describes him as usurping the prerogatives of the State Department, for that), not for alleged insubordination on his part.

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The Case for Making Birth Control Pills Over-the-Counter

I was reading the New York Times today and I came across the following opinion column:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/opinion/22blanchard.html

I think it's time for my regularly-scheduled controversial opinion, so here goes...

I think it would be a good idea to make birth-control pills over-the-counter instead of requiring a doctor's prescription. 

In my opinion, drugs should be prescription-only if they're dangerous enough to need a doctor's guidance in their uses or if misuse would cause large-scale problems--think all these diseases we've thought we'd conquered becoming antibiotic-resistant because people don't finish their antibiotic prescriptions or badger doctors into prescribing them unnecessarily.

According to the article, which was written by someone who knows what they're talking about, the first situation is not an issue.  I've googled progestin, the one the author believes should be made over-the-counter first, and I can't really find anything about dangers from it.

Since there aren't any negative effects to the wider society I can think of, I do not think whether or not one can buy birth control pills over-the-counter or not is really any of the government's business.

Now I'll discuss something that will inevitably come up if someone proposes this--religion and its associated morality.  I'll stick with Christianity, since it's my own religion and the most influential religion in the United States.

If birth control were more widely available and people knew how to use it, there would be fewer unplanned pregnancies and thus fewer abortions.  If abortion is morally equivalent to killing (aka unjustified in most circumstances), it is imperative that abortions be reduced.  This will help accomplish that.  Fewer unplanned pregnancies means a smaller burden on both public and private charitable assistance, making more resources available for people in that unfortunate situation.  This in turn will make abortion--something few women contemplate with relish, based on the reports I've heard about women coming out of these clinics crying--less attractive.

Now, onto sex.  It is true that Christianity teaches sex outside of marriage is immoral and it is true that, if oral contraceptives were more widely available, I would imagine more sex outside of marriage would occur, since it would reduce the danger of unplanned pregnancy.

That being said, I don't think the number of people deterred from having sex outside of marriage by merely having to get a prescription for birth control pills is all that large.  It strikes me as more probable that people simply take the risk, which circles back to my point about abortion.  Basically, they're for the most part going to sin anyway and cause more problems for both themselves and others without oral contraceptives than without.  It's a lesser-evil argument; although an individual may choose to reject both the lesser evil and the greater evil and bear the consequences, this is not practical for governance.

Furthermore, it's not just people having sex outside of marriage who use oral contraceptives, but also married people who, for various reasons, wish to delay having children.  The Bible condemns sex outside of marriage; beyond 1 Corinthians 7:5 (in which spouses are told not to deny one another sex, lest the other partner be tempted to commit adultery), I do not recall any New Testament commandments pertaining to sex within marriage.

(There is the Old Testament case of Onan, who "spilled his seed upon the ground" and got zapped from on high, but he didn't want to father children in his brother's name AT ALL, not just at a more convenient time.  Claiming that story is a commandment against all birth control is reading too much into it.)

On a wider note, it is imprudent to have the government serve as an enforcer for our particular theology or moral code.  After all, someday we might lose our cultural and political dominance (some of the long-term trends don't look good) and we don't want the precedent we set to be used against us. 

The Founding Fathers created a secular government for this reason; they saw the wars of religion in Europe and the mutual persecution depending on which sect was in power (England, in which the Catholic Henry VIII persecuted Protestants until he became one himself and then began persecuting Catholics, comes to mind).  Unless it is a public matter--and for the reasons I've outlined above, oral contraception is not--the law should not be involved.

Let us remember that the secularly-governed United States is the most religious developed country, while the European countries that had state churches of one flavor or another have become extremely secularized.  It was our ancestors' tendency to use government to enforce the predominance of their sect that contributed to the decline of Christianity in Europe--let us remember that Deism emerged in the aftermath of the religious wars.

Furthermore, nowhere does the New Testament suggest that Christians should seek to take control of the government and use it to serve "Christian" ends.  In fact, in 1 Timothy 2:2 in which Paul exhorts his associate Timothy to pray for "kings and all those in authority," it is not so that they may become Paul and Timothy's enforcers, but so that they might leave the early Christians alone.

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News Article Round-Up

I periodically send myself Internet links home to blog about, but they stack up in my Inbox because I find something else more immediately interesting before I can get to them.

So I'm going to put all of them together in this entry, with commentary.

http://www.slate.com/id/2255385/

This article compares the Drug War to Prohibition and does a good job proving why the Drug War, like Prohibition, is a bad idea.  The author also compares the end of Prohibition during the Depression--to get tax revenue from alcohol--and said the current economic climate provides an incentive to legalize and tax currently-illegal narcotics.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20006930-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

An offshore wind farm in the Great Lakes.  This would be a really good idea.  It might cost a bit in the short run, but it would reduce coal/fossil fuel consumption in the long run and provide high-tech jobs.  And luckily, there aren't any Kennedies to muck up this project like they did with Cape Wind in Massachusetts.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/17/lawmaker-warns-drug-cartel-danger-public-parks-intensifying/

Okay, this is getting ridiculous.  We can't go into our bloody parks because hooligans have taken it over.  Although legalizing and taxing drugs will take business away from the cartels, getting that accomplished will take far more effort than changing the laws to allow the Border Patrol and other law enforcement to use vehicles in national parks.  The criminals are already damaging the environment in the parks and are going to keep on doing it, so it's not like avoiding using vehicles in this scenario is going to be a net benefit for the environment.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100617/wl_time/08599199697300

Some good news from Afghanistan.  The Iraq War was an unnecessary distraction from fighting al-Qaeda and other Islamists, but copying the successful "Sons of Iraq" model used to help quell the Sunni insurgency seems to be working in Afghanistan.

Of course, we need to be sure these militias are being integrated into the Afghan government as to ensure long-run stability after we leave.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20008016-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

This deals with one of the problems with electric cars--where to recharge--rather nicely.  Some privacy concerns, but electric-usage data is something the power company already collects (and the government could subpoena if it wished), so no need to flip out.

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Just Ordered Two Books

Just ordered Hiero's Journey and The Unforsaken Hiero off Amazon.com's ZShops, where one can buy used books cheaply.

I read both of these books when I was in high school, if I recall correctly.  Back then, I was a regular haunter of the Cobb County Public Library System.  I think I found Hiero's Journey at the Mountain View Public Library, where I went if the now-defunct Merchant's Walk library was closed (Mountain View was open on Sunday) or if I wanted access to more books.

The series takes place 5,000 years after "The Death"--a 1970s-era nuclear war--and follows Per (Father) Hiero Desteen, a telepathic Metis (mixed French and Indian) Catholic priest from present-day western Canada, as he travels into the post-apocalyptic US (which was affected much worse than Western Canada) in search of computer technology.  He needs this so his abbey can organize its hard-copy files (of which it has a lot) to glean militarily-useful technology and fight off the Brotherhood of the Unclean, a coalition of of evil descendants of defense-industry scientists intent on ruling the world.

(That this organization would maintain its purpose for 5,000 years is a bit ridiculous.  I would have set the story perhaps 100 to 200 years after The Death.)

Hiero's Journey was better than The Unforsaken Hiero, but they're both part of the same series (and the second book wasn't bad--there's an ancient intelligent telepathic giant snail named Solitaire who became self-aware as a result of The Death and is kind of cool), so I felt like owning the whole thing.  Both books have been out of print for a long time, so I was able to snap up two copies for around a buck each, plus shipping and handling.

It is unfortunate Sterling E. Lanier lost interest in the series, never finished it, and now will never finish it (he's dead). The second novel ends with Hiero and some friends setting off for present-day Florida, where some evil power has taken his girlfriend (priestly celibacy is no longer required) and some others captive. I would have loved to read a third book and it would be nice if some of his family members have access to his notes and can finish his story.

(Heck, the time may come where I may produce a movie based on those books.  The remnant technology depicted might need to be updated a bit, but it's doable.)

The first book exerted some influence over my novel Escape from the Wastelands.  I was at the Lawrenceville writing group once and, bored with a particular submission being discussed, wrote a scene for later in the story where my protagonist Andrew Sutter confronts a "thirsty ghost," some kind of post-apocalyptic nuclear mutant vampire, in the sandy ruins of an Old World city after he becomes separated from the army of Karras Merrill.

My inspiration for that scene was from Hiero's Journey, where Hiero encounters some kind of evil telepathic humanoid in the swamps and narrow escapes what is hinted to be a Fate Worse Than Death (a fate described as both physical pain and psychological bondage) thanks to the help of a bear with whom he'd telepathically established a friendship.  The Dweller in the Mist, the evil in question, was pretty creepy, and even the villainous Brotherhood of the Unclean fear it as something older and more powerful than they.

The "thirsty ghost" that Andrew encounters is a bit less tough of a customer than the Dweller in the Mist, but then, Andrew is on his own except for his horse, which is terrified of the creature and is little help.  I hope I can write a sequence as good as author Sterling Lanier did.

Unfortunately for my readers who are members of my Kennesaw and Lawrenceville writing groups, we won't meet the "thirsty ghost" until many, many chapters from now.  I just finished the first draft of Chapter Six, which will be my contribution to the 6/26 meetup of the Kennesaw group.

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"Ultramarines" Teaser Released

On my alternate-history forum, where I first learned about the Ultramarines film I blogged about earlier, the user whose handle is BlackWave posted the following trailer.



He didn't think very highly of it.  He flat-out said "it sucks."

I disagreed.  The credits sequence is a bit trippy and shoddy and the animation quality could be better, but they assembled a very good voice cast.  Terrence Stamp, John Hurt, and Sean Pertwee are fairly well-known actors; Stamp himself has been active since the 1960s at least.

I'll wait until I can see more to state whether or not this one is good or bad, but I am inclined to reserve judgement.

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A Possible Home for "Coil Gun" and "Picking Up Plans in Palma"

On my alternate-history Internet forum, one of our members posted a link to an anthology publishing stories dealing with alternate-history and time travel.

http://libraryofthelivingdead.lefora.com/2010/06/10/a-glitch-in-the-continuumsubmissions-open/

I currently have "Coil Gun" under consideration at Tales of the Unanticipated and "Picking Up Plans in Palma" under consideration at Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, both of which pay better and are more prestigious markets than this anthology.

However, Tales will have its response back to me by August 31 and IGMS should respond by August or September.  Since the anthology's deadline is mid-October, I'll have time to tinker some more and send them one, since they don't accept multiple submissions.

Still pondering writing a screenplay version of "Palma," but I haven't done anything on that end yet.

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Revising "Escape from the Wastelands," Self-Publishing, and a Character's Blog

I've spent the last couple of hours waffling between surfing the Internet (including an earlier update on this blog) and revising my novel Escape from the Wastelands.

At my Kennesaw writing group yesterday, in addition to pointing out some issues with the latest version of Chapter Five, one member said that my sentences tending to be long and have a lot of commas.  This slowed the reader down.  This is rather ironic, given how in both the Kennesaw writing group and especially in my Lawrenceville writing group, I regularly leave comments on manuscripts with such advice as "break up this sentence" or "this should be its own sentence," in order to make things punchier.

So I've been going over the first five chapters of Escape, practicing what I preach.  This issue is particularly bad in the earlier chapters, although it is less so in the later chapters where there's more violence and, consequently, shorter, punchier sentences.

I'll finish this process with Escape (and make the last revisions to Chapter Five) this afternoon.  I'll apply this to my other writings later on.

Also, when I was hanging out with my folks yesterday, my Dad gave me a Wall Street Journal article he'd saved about Print on Demand, self-publishing, eBooks, and other related topics.  I was already aware of this topic to some degree, since I used it as the basis for my blog post on the possible return of the pulp magazines.  However, this one had a lot of specific information on different entities like Apple and Amazon, who publish eBooks for their respective electronic platforms.  Amazon currently offers authors who publish with them 70% of the money, while Apple is going to do the same.

I'm currently working on a collection of short fiction with Daverana Enterprises, but if that project falls through, I might give Amazon or some similar service a try.  Between my own theories, the stuff my Dad gave me, and an e-mail from my friend Nick last week, this is starting to look interesting.

Here's the article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575253132121412028.html

Also, I came across this blog I'd read a long time ago and I still think is rather cool.

http://darthside.blogspot.com/

Basically, Darth Vader is telling his life story--and, more particularly, the events of the original trilogy--via the mechanism of a blog.  It's funny in places and quite interesting in places.  For example, the entry "The Tao of Sith" is a fascinating look at Sith philosophy.

I've got another unfinished novel entitled The Gates of Vasharia.  This project is a significantly more complex than the Wastelands novels and deals with issues I don't have a lot of experience with, like marriage, the trauma of civil war, etc.  That's one reason I've decided to put it aside and finish Escape first.

As a means of viral marketing for the Vasharia novels when I finish them, I wondered if I should have a blog from the perspective of Patrick Sain Rassam, the Dux Primoris of the armies of Mahonistan (one of Vasharia's two continents), known by his supporters as the Wolf King and by his enemies as the Dark Lord.

Patrick is not a villain like Vader, but an anti-hero.  He has virtues (bravery, loyalty, honor, intelligence, martial skill, vision, and a strong sense of fairness), but many character flaws (social clutziness, holding grudges, a quick temper, a guilt complex, insecurity, pettiness, a bit of an ends-justify-the-means mentality, and a propensity to, in TVTropes terms, to Pay Evil Unto Evil) that contribute to several acts that are, how shall I put delicately, extremely ethically dubious.  The fact he surrounds himself with the trappings of supervillainy as means of dealing with his insecurity and intimidating his enemies doesn't help.

A blog from his perspective could be used as a viral marketing strategy (much like how the creators of Cloverfield created web-sites for a soft drink that plays a role in the film), provide insights into Patrick's past and mindset that aren't revealed in the books (most of the first novel is told from the perspective of Patrick's comrade-turned-enemy Dux Cal Grenville, who is the real protagonist of the story), serve as another creative outlet, and possibly even serve as the basis for another book. 

After all, Stephanie Meyer has started writing another book, telling the tale of Twilight from the perspective of Edward, as well as a novella telling the tale of one of the later books from the perspective of another character (The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella).  Assuming I'm successful and can generate even an eighth of the fan-base she's got, they'd love this.  And although Cal is higher on the moral food chain than Patrick is, Patrick as I envision him has got enough bad-boy appeal that I expect the project would get a lot of attention.

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Help Support Charitable Work in Rwanda

My friend from high school Meghan Goyer and a girl I don't know are doing relief work in Rwanda right now, with Meghan doing some research for her master's thesis as well.

They've raised some money already, enough to go on the trip, but they'll need additional funds as well.  They're been soliciting donations on their blog, which also describes what they're doing over there on a day-by-day basis.

Here's a link where you can donate via PayPal or find an address to write a check.

http://caroandmeginrwanda.blogspot.com/p/estimated-budget.html

Here's the main blog site:

http://caroandmeginrwanda.blogspot.com/

I think the blog itself will be interesting enough, considering all the cultural information I can copy down into my "Character Sketches" file.

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The Return of the Pulps, Online?

On more than one occasion, I've pondered the media markets of the pre-television era and wondered if my fiction-writing career would have been better if I'd been born in, say, 1900 or so. 

Assuming of course I didn't die of the Spanish flu (or some other disease curable by antibiotics, as I think happened to a distant relative who died of pneumonia that could have been treated today) or didn't get drafted and die in a trench during the First World War, I could have had a full-time job writing for the pulp magazines of the era, so named because they were printed on rather cheap paper.  Robert Howard, Robert Heinlein, and H.P. Lovecraft did, after all, as did many other well-known sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers.

Of course, television and other socio-cultural changes helped destroy the pulp magazines.  However, I am now wondering if, thanks to technological advances, a media market similar to the old days could be coming back.

My only two fiction sales have been made, not to the significantly-fewer (and thus choosier) print markets of our day, but to two web-based publications, the now-defunct Chimaera Serials and the BattleTech site BattleCorps, which has a $10 per month subscription fee and sells individual stories as PDFs for around $2.00 each.  When I was in college, I also "sold" a historical piece called "That Dreadful Day" to the online publication Cry, Havoc (I say "sold" because I would have only made money if a certain hit threshold was reached and that did not happen), which was released in PDF form.

I'm working on a collection of short stories with Daverana Enterprises, a small press that's moving away from print and towards eBook markets centered around Kindles and similar technology--I believe the current policy is that a print run will only be considered if one sells 100 eBooks.

Thanks to the digital revolution, one does not need big printing presses, elaborate distribution networks, etc. to have a publication anymore.  One can keep it entirely online, with print-on-demand for print copies if you feel the need.  It is now much cheaper--and thus easier--to start one's own publication, just like how it used to be.

Unfortunately, thus far, the pay rates of the old days--when $0.01 per word was a decent chunk of money--have not returned. Most of the web-based markets are in the lower pay scales at Ralan.com.

Still, we're at the early stages of the trend.  Stephen King released one of his books, The Plant, as an eBook and if I recall correctly, it failed.  The eBook market is now significantly more advanced.

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The Brookings Institute Report on Passenger Rail

For the last few months, the Spalding County branch of Georgians for Passenger Rail has been raising money to pay for a report by the Brookings Institute on the feasibility of a passenger rail line from Atlanta to Macon.

Here's the full PDF of the report, which is posted on the state organization's web-site:

http://www.georgiarail.org/Brookings%20Institute%20Study.pdf

Looks really interesting, and if it takes a lot of cars off the road (primarily people who work in only one place the entire day--if I wanted to do this, I'd need to live near a station and leave my car at the office most of the week, which would be difficult if I wanted to drive somewhere in the evening), it would do wonders for Atlanta's notorious traffic and (so I've heard) air pollution.  Plus it should reduce gas prices, if many cars are taken off the road.

One issue people who don't support passenger rail have raised is what to do transport-wise when one gets to the city.  In Atlanta, this could be less problematic due to the presence of MARTA rail lines to other places (if I took the train to something in Atlanta, I would probably use this) as well as the bus system. 

However, I am not aware of there being similarly-convenient public transportaton options in some of the other cities along the line.  Macon and Clayton County look to have a respectable bus system, but it seems Henry County (site of the Hampton station) and Spalding County (site of the Griffin station) only have on-call bus service, not a regular bus system in the mode of Athens (whose bus service I sometimes used when a student at UGA).

One praise for the report--clearly whoever wrote it has read How To Win Friends and Influence People.  He acknowledges the usefulness of the car-centric 20th Century mode of development rather than mindlessly attacking it, but said that this needs to be updated for the 21st Century.

Thing is, between capital costs from 2016 to 2018 (construction) and maintenace/operations from 2018 to 2030, it's going to come out to $725 million.  That's quite a pretty penny there.  There's a federal earmark for rail on the Southside that the state has held for several years, but it's not going to cover all or even most of that (IIRC it was around $37 million).

Paying for that is going to be tricky, especially since the majority of public-transit does not pay for itself at the fare-box (if I recall correctly, for example, the only profitable AMTRAK line is one of the ones up north).  This means the project will have to be subsidized by taxes.  The goal is that economic development brought about by the rail line--people moving to areas served by the rail so they can take the train to work, for example, increased travel to Atlanta due to reduced traffic issues, money that would have been spent on gas elsewhere, etc--will provide the increased tax revenues needed to get the project going without it burdening the taxpayers.

However, the report does suggest that conservative estimates of local revenue could pay for a significant--$400+ million--chunk of this project.  Other sources of revenue include public-private partnerships, for example.  If the train has got a fair number of passengers, this could mean advertising and businesses setting up there, much like how the Atlanta airport has got all kinds of restaurants and the like there.  The TSPLOST I mentioned in my blog earlier, if it passes in 2012, could be used to provide funds as well, although the report acknowledges that the cities where the stations will go are in different tax jurisdictions and this will require an intergovernmental agreement on spending the tax monies.

Now for the ideological issue.  It may seem odd for me, a Libertarian and/or conservative (I tend to view Libertarianism as a type of conservatism, a view not universally shared), to profess support for this project, which is in effect a very large tax-funded program. 

However, I think that as far as the constitutionality of the project is concerned, it's up there with the Interstate Highway system.  Transportation infrastructure has historically been something the government has done.  The Atlanta airport is public, for example, even though it is used by private airlines and has a significant number of private vendors.

In fact, this project on even sounder constitutional footing than the Interstate system, since it's a state project, with the feds only chipping in some funds and not doing it themselves.

I wonder if there's a Henry County chapter of Georgians for Passenger Rail I could join?  Convincing the more rural sectors of Metro Atlanta to support the project is going to be more difficult than convincing Atlantans, I imagine.

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A Draka/Stargate Follow-Up

In an earlier post, I included the link to "Snakepit: A Stargate/Draka Crossover" in which a Goa'uld in a crippled starship blundered into the world of S.M. Stirling's Draka in the aftermath of the Final War in which the Draka defeated the United States and our allies. 

It's really quite interesting and well-thought-out.  The author makes the Draka timeline a "butterfly" of the death of Ra in the human revolt that drove the System Lords off Earth (as opposed to Ra surviving and being killed by American soldiers in the mid-1990s, as happened in the movie).  There are other interesting spin-offs, like the Tollans using their advanced technology to conquer and rule over other human societies and the alien called Loki being the one behind the Draka's rise to power.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4765465/1/Snakepit_A_Stargate_Draka_crossover

Well, D.S. has made two additional stories that take place in the interlude between "Snakepit" and the planned sequel, "Stars of Iron," both of which are based on story arcs from "Snakepit."

Here's the first one, "The Rebirth of the Janissaries."

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5984950/1/Rebirth_of_the_Janissaries_Snakepit_interlude_1

In this one, the Tollans make an arrangement with the Draka to loan them former Citizen commanders of Janissaries (soldiers raised from the slave population, who at this point have been largely replaced by genetically-engineered ape creatures called ghouloons) to train a new, larger Tollan army according to Draka standards.  The Draka Archon Eric von Shrakenberg approves it, much to the aggravation of the Draka secret police who don't like the idea of future "Yoke-fodder" getting too strong to handle.

(That's the point--Eric hates the slave system and basically had to have his hand forced into launching the Final War.  He's making the Tollans harder to enslave in the long run, all while making it seem he's building a strong bulwark for the Draka against the System Lords.)

So the Draka send their officers, who start training the Tollans Draka-style--rather brutally, and with encouragement to commit war crimes.  In this story, the Tollans did not enfranchise the peoples of the conquered worlds until about 40 years before and a lot of the Tollan political elite don't think that was a good idea, so the Tollans don't need a whole lot of encouragement.  And one young Tollan man, who was subjected to various indignities by Goa'uld soldiers along with his fiancee, is showing signs of slipping into the Dark Side.

The second story covers Ann Rayner, a Draka soldier who was essentially killed by an incursion of some kind of advanced silicon-based life-form through the Draka-controlled stargate on the moon.  The Draka and Tollans used a captured Goa'uld sarcophagus to essentially bring her back to life, but she was so damaged, the sarcophagus couldn't rebuild what was there and instead had to rebuild from the basic human template.

There's a slight problem with that, as Rayner is a Homo drakensis, not an ordinary human.  She comes back "funny"--in this case, with her built-in dominance drives dialed down significantly.  She comes to realize that the Draka system is evil as well, at least as far as enslaving ordinary Homo sapiens is concerned (she doesn't mind a symbiotic relationship with the passive, biddable Homo servus because both species are designed for this). 

On leave in the Tollan capital, she ponders a lot while engaging in romance with a Tollan artist (who I was hoping was part of Tollan Intelligence and they'd find out the truth about their new allies, but that's not the case).

Here's the link to that too:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5998038/1/Loving_on_the_edge_of_a_bladeSnakepit_interlude_2

Here's to hoping the secret police don't find out what she's become and try to "fix" her or kill her.  Given that she's still an immortal drakensis, she can steer the Draka in a more moral direction for centuries to come.

If I had the funds and could get the Draka rights from Baen and Stargate rights from MGM, I'd love to produce the "Snakepit" universe as a TV series.  Think SG-1, but far darker, with full-blown villain protagonists.  Given the content, it'd have to be on HBO, Showtime (as SG-1 was, for while), Cinemax, or another premium channel.  Given how much controversy the concept could raise (victorious bad guys rampaging around, lots of sex and violence, etc), getting permission to do this would cost a gigantic sum of money.  And then there'd be the cost of actually making it...

Still, a man can dream.

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Productivity Update and Thoughts on Screenwriting

Just submitted my espionage/SF short story "Picking Up Plans in Palma," which is set in my Afrikaner alternate-history universe, to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.  Made some revisions to it, including removing some passive voice where appropriate and toning down some of the language to meet IGMS's content standards.

Said content standards include no sexual content likely to garner more than a PG-13 rating and no language that would get an R.  There does not appear to be a content-standard for violence, which is probably where my story is the worst offender. 

(A character gets detained at gunpoint and tortured, shoots another character twice, gets in a running gun battle with some police, buries his thumb into an armed frogman's eye, and to top it off, is attacked by a bull shark.)

As far as sexual content was concerned, two characters being in a sexual relationship (but not married) was a major plot point but nothing is depicted (beyond them being in bed together), so there shouldn't be any problems there.  I replaced the F-bomb with some lesser profanities or no profanity at all to meet the language standards, which is probably where my story conflicted with the content standards the worst.

Response time: Three months.  The story had gotten rejected by several of the higher-end markets like Analog and Asimov's, but several of the rejection letters were personalized.  Getting better and better.   :)  It's the first time I've submitted a piece of short fiction anywhere since March.

Yesterday, I had the notion that Palma might make a good film.  It's got the best character development of all my short fiction, at least where the protagonist is concerned, plus it doesn't lob expository bombs at the reader to explain why this world is different from our own. 

The only problem I can think of is that it covers too short of a time period--around an hour of real time--to adapt directly into a film.  I'd probably need to write some additional material covering the relationship between intelligence-analyst Connor Kelly and his Afrikaner emigre lover Katje de Lange (which would take place before he goes in-country) and probably covering her unhappy familial situation back home (her brother has joined the ideologically-extremist group driving the Afrikaner Confederation toward the eventual World War III with the United States and her emigration has estranged her from other family members).  That'd elaborate on the other characters--one member of the Lawrenceville group said other than Connor, the characters were flat--and take up more running time.

Perhaps I should get hold of the film Fatherland.  It's an alternate-history film (based on a novel by Robert Harris, IIRC) that drops the viewer directly into a 1964 where the Nazis turned back D-Day and managed to turn the tables on the Russians and are now trying to make peace with the US.  That could help me figure out how to explain the world without boring the viewer to death with history lessons.

(Based on reviews on Amazon, it seems there's some kind of opening montage with a voice-over.  Perhaps I could do something like the opening map-sequence of Enemy at the Gates featuring the expansion of the Afrikaner Confederation as opposed to the expansion of Nazi Germany.)

Hmm...here's an outline.  The opening montage with the map and voice-over, then the agent Bernstein hiding the titular plans in a public bathroom in the city of Palma before being shot by Afrikaner security goons, Connor getting the assignment, Connor "visiting" Katje and momentarily discussing her familial situation, a scene showing her father arguing religion and politics with her brother back home, an Indiana Jones-style map sequence showing how Connor got into the Confederation, and then we pick up with him going into the bathroom (the beginning of the actual story).  No flashback sequences for expository purposes, unlike the short story.

Sound good?

Wrote some additional material for Escape from the Wastelands while waiting for a friend to pick me up for my church's retreat last weekend.  Most of it covers the beginning of Chapter Six, in which Andrew and some of his friends attempt to contest the Flesh-Eater entry into Carroll Town (at the cost of most of their lives).  There's some material I inserted into Chapter Five, which elaborates on the political situation in the empire of the antagonist Grendel and just how much of an SOB he is.

(Given how Grendel brought peace to an area torn by warlordism for decades if not centuries, I expect some readers will think him the hero and Andrew--who will eventually bring him down--as the villain, the way some people think the Rebels of Star Wars and the Varden of Eragon are jeopardizing the peace and well-being of the common folk and provoking atrocities by not submitting to the villain's rule.  Grendel pondering a plan to backstab one of his vassals and replace the man with his son with the captive sister of the former ruler of the area will be a nice "Kick the Dog" moment.)

I'm not going to inflict Chapter Five on my Kennesaw group a third time (we're discussing it on Saturday), but I'll probably send it to the Lawrenceville group, since they've only seen it once.  After tomorrow, I'll try to finish Chapter Six for the next Kennesaw meeting.

Fallen behind some on The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, since Escape takes precedence over fan-fiction.  In terms of the story, I'm at the equivalent of the point in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen where Sam and Mikaela have their talk about how perhaps it's too dangerous for her to be involved with him.  This is even more blatant in this story than in the actual film, since Mikaela, her dad, and Agent Simmons were briefly abducted by Starscream, who hoped to use them as hostages.

(In the film, it was Sam on the receiving end of most of the Decepticon shenanigans, to the point of coming either close to death or being killed off for real and then being resurrected.  Mikaela got mussed some, but wasn't in the same kind of peril she was in my story.  Upping the danger to her makes it clearer Sam is unselfishly concerned for her well-being when he makes his remarks about her being with him being dangerous.)

Still haven't figured out how to get the the college-age cast (Sam, Mikaela, Leo) to North Africa for the final showdown.  I'm thinking that perhaps the attempt to defend the Fallen's tomb against the Decepticons goes worse than planned and so they have to rush the reinforcement of the site.  The kids could get bundled onto the airplane by mistake in all the hubbub and it wouldn't be implausible.

Hmm...Simmons, being primarily an intelligence type, shouldn't be there either, but I did want to keep the scene from the film where he calls in naval gunfire on Devastator.  Perhaps he sees the kids being dragged onto the plane and chases after them, only to get stuck on the plane himself?

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"The New Daughter" Trailer

Saw the poster for this at the Blockbuster the other day while renting the first episodes of True Blood: The Complete Second Season .

On one hand, the fact that Kevin Costner is now headlining a direct-to-video horror movie does not appear to bode well for his career, despite having won Academy Awards and other honors in the past.

On the other hand, this direct-to-video film is based on the short story "The New Daughter," which appears  in Nocturnes, an anthology of horror fiction by the Irish writer John Connolly.  I read the book back when I lived in Marietta and there are some very good stories in it. 

One of them, "The Erlking," even inspired me to put some allusions to Angela Carter's short story of the same name in one of my lesser novel ideas (basically a space-opera potboiler that might not ever see the light of day).  That one was pretty darn good and descriptive in its own right.  Another story, one about clowns, creeped even me out, and that's saying something.

So I might watch this movie, to encourage more films to be made off short stories.

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"Jonah Hex" Trailer

Here's the trailer for Jonah Hex, which comes out in mid-June.



Jonah Hex is based one of the lesser-known DC comics characters.  It looks like they've changed his origin story a bit, based on how he gets the facial scarring.

I think the movie looks rather cool.  It's a fantasy Western with a protagonist with supernatural powers blowing things up and seeking revenge, all with steampunk-style uber-guns.  Definitely going to see this one.

Now I guess I can see if Megan Fox really can act or if she's just a pretty face.  I've only seen her in the Transformers movies, in which she played a high-school girl.  She apparently had a similar role in Jennifer's Body, which I did not see.

Playing a high-schooler when one is in one's early 20s doesn't seem too difficult.  She seemed to pull it off well enough in Transformers, although I've heard Jennifer's Body was rather bad.  Playing an 1880s heavily-armed hooker is an entirely different matter.

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Introducing...The Dragon

In the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf ,the titular hero's third and final enemy is a dragon, which he defeats at the cost of his own life.

Since I'm trying to tie in "Beowulf" with the sage of Andrew Sutter, whose tale will begin in Escape from the Wastelands and continue through several books, I needed three opponents for our hero. 

The first was the warlord Grendel who took his nom de guerre from a partial copy of "Beowulf" he found in a ruin.  The second, standing in for Grendel's mother, was a coalition of Grendel's sons waging an insurgency in their father's old homeland.

However, I hadn't fully nailed down the third opponent.  I mentioned several possibilities in an earlier blog entry, but I reviewed my "idea file" and those were for later stories that would cover the descendants of Andrew (or his sister Sarah).  I didn't have a third enemy for Andrew to die killing.

So I came up with a new one.  Decades after Andrew put down the revolt of Grendel's sons, long-sealed passes into the mountains north of the empire Grendel founded and Andrew took from him are blown open and new armies emerge from them to put an end to the post-apocalyptic technological renaissance that two generations of peace had brought about.

These armies are commanded, not by a human enemy, but an ancient artificially-intelligent war machine that had been dug up and managed to take control of the entire region and organize it into its own dominion.  Now, using ancient, forbidden weapons (possibly nukes?), it has blasted open the long-closed roads south and is moving out to rule the world.

The notion of an AI using armies of living soldiers is not entirely alien to speculative fiction.  The novel When Heaven Fell depicts most of the galaxy under the control of a cybernetic "Master Race" of AIs that entered the Milky Way 100,000 years ago and recruited armies from conquered species, including our own, to expand its control and eventually fight a new enemy that is strongly implied to have defeated them and has now coming calling.

Plus, if it turns out "the dragon" is really something resembling SkyNet, it could provide another hint as to just how a world technologically adept enough to build blacktop roads, use what I've hinted are M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles for war, and revive dinosaurs and create creatures that never existed (the "rippers" occasionally seen in the early chapters of Escape) using genetic technology could get knocked back to roughly (American) Civil War levels of technology.

(Imagine the Terminator universe if the Russian counterstrike on the US destroyed SkyNet's communications links outside its bunker.  Cut off from surviving human troops it can deceive or machine units under its direct control, it sits there waiting for centuries until somebody finds the bunker and, not knowing it's there, plugs it back in.)

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In Support of Abortion Alternatives...

In the town of Milner near where I work, Rock Springs Church has established Melba's Manor, a home for unwed mothers.

http://www.melbasmanor.com/

My co-worker did the first story on Melba's Manor:

Rock Springs Church to open maternity home

However, I reported on when Mike Huckabee, one of the more successful 2008 Republican presidential candidates, came to speak at a fund-raiser for the manor:

Huckabee delivers pro-life message

In his speech, Huckabee revealed that Pastor Bennie Tate was the son of an unwed mother who chose not to abort him.  As Huckabee pointed out, it is one thing to oppose abortion but another thing to provide an alternative.  Most women who have abortions would rather not have had them and through Melba's Manor, Rock Springs Church has provided an alternative, at least for the few women it is able to serve with its current resources.

I call on all of you my readers to support Melba's Manor or organizations like it.  This is something that both pro-life and pro-choice people can do. 

The pro-lifers should support it because abortion isn't going away anytime soon and providing options for unwed mothers is a good way to prevent it; the pro-choicers should support it because (I think) the majority of them don't like abortion even if they think outlawing it would be the greater evil.  Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said abortion should "safe, legal, and rare," after all.

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Rand Paul Victorious in Kentucky

Rand Paul, son of 2008 Republican candidate Ron Paul, has just won the Kentucky Republican primary for the U.S. Senate race in November.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/us/politics/19elect.html

It's not clear who he will be facing on the Democratic side, as I don't think the results of that election are in yet.

As my friends know, I supported Ron Paul in 2008, writing a great many letters to likely primary voters in several states on his behalf.  One of them even wrote back.  His letter started out with "are you nuts" and accused Ron Paul of being some Perot-like figure, even though he repeatedly said he would not run on a third-party ticket.

As we all know, Paul ultimately lost, and lost badly (he won very few delegates and no states), but although he failed, the network the father established may well have helped the son out significantly.  The younger Paul's political opponents tried to make a big deal about how he was heavily supported by people from out of state, but that didn't seem to work this time.

All that remains to be seen now is if he can win in November.  That would be rather cool, as he represents the side of the Republican Party that is fiscally conservative and sticks to it, unlike the GOP of the Bush years that helped run up an ungodly amount of debt.  He also is a big fan of restricting government surveillance powers and improving citizens' privacy, something the GOP appears to have forgotten with the Patriot Act and the statist attitude that no honest citizen has anything to hide.

I wonder how the winning Democrat will campaign against him.  Paul's Republican opponent had a site called "Rand Paul's Strange Ideas" which tried to make him sound like a lefty moonbat.  It would be highly entertaining if the Democrat ended up trying to out-conservative him.

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The Federal Bill That Can Make You Disappear

My friend Brian was so kind as to inform me via Facebook of a new bill that would pose a grave threat to the civil liberties of American citizens.

Here's the link to the full bill:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s3081/text

Of particular note is this section here:

SEC. 5. DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.



9An individual, or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States  any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.
 
This would basically authorize things like detention of Jose Padilla--an American citizen who was taken off a plane at an airport and held incommunicado as an "enemy combatant "with ever-changing justification for several years until the federal government, faced with a Supreme Court challenge it could no longer avoid, deigned to file charges in a civilian court.

The U.S. Constitution was devised in part to prevent abuses like this, with such things like the right to habeus corpus, a speedy trial, etc.  It does not say "with the exception of terrorism."

If an American citizen is determined to be a member of al Qaeda, there exists a procedure already--try them for treason, for making war against the U.S. or providing aid and comfort to its enemies.  That is the legal, constitutional way of dealing with such people, and has already been applied to Adam Gadahn.  And, if the penalty is justified (it more than likely is), hang them.

This is the United States, not some banana republic.  No U.S. President, nor member of Congress or any government official whatsoever, has no right to make anyone disappear.

Those interested in making their voices heard about this abomination should go to http://www.congress.org/ and use it to write the president, their senators, and their local representative to keep this thing from even coming close to becoming law.

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$1 Trillion Spent on War on Drugs, To Little Overall Benefit

Found this online Friday.  This is likely to grind some people's gears big-time, but here goes...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100513/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/failed_drug_war

I used to be a strong supporter of the War on Drugs, primarily due to the rather scary effects of PCP and other, harder drugs.

Then, when I was a senior in high school, I reached the conclusion that punishing non-violent drug offenders was just as morally bankrupt as punishing non-violent gun offenders (something I already opposed).  If you light up a joint in your basement or if you keep an AK-47 in your basement and it doesn't affect anyone else, it is nobody's business but yours.

Furthermore research confirmed my position.  Particularly galling is the fact that the drug war has been used to enable police abuses--if an officer finds drugs on your property, even if someone else put them there (say, some pothead toking up on your property when you're not there), they can confiscate your property and due-process doesn't apply, since it's allegedly the property being punished and not the person.

Here are some articles about the abuses of asset-forfeiture laws, typically done as the result of the war on drugs:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket

http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3114&Itemid=165

http://www.fear.org/

Even worse is when the drug-war laws allow unethical government agencies to deliberately destroy people by framing them for involvement in the drug trade, something that's much easier than, say, framing them for illegally dumping toxic waste or for murder:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_n4_v25/ai_14171968/

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/03/camden_police_officer_in_polic.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Johnston_shooting

http://www.ktul.com/news/stories/0510/733560.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-texas-profiling_wittmar10,0,6051682.story

(Lest anyone think otherwise, the above portion is not an attack on law-enforcement officers who are ethical and do not abuse their positions--the majority of the profession.  They are the thin blue line protecting decent folk from the hooliganry and it is in the interest of the police profession as a whole to end the WoD, both to prevent abuses of it from tarring their good name and to enable them to focus on things that are a greater danger to the community.)

One thing in the article in particular stuck out at me:

"To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven't made any difference is ridiculous," (former drug czar John P.) Walters said. "It destroys everything we've done. It's saying all the people involved in law enforcment, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's work is misguided."

Is the government's Herculean effort to eradicate illegal drug use in this country so weak that mere criticism can "destroy everything we've done"?  Given the vast amounts of effort spent on it, the vast leviathans of governmental and law-enforcement power brought to bear on the problem, that's pretty pathetic if it's true.

(It's not.)

Furthermore, criticizing the drug war is not the same as criticizing drug treatment and prevention.  I don't think anyone sane who opposes the drug war also opposes telling kids not to start doing drugs or treating people who are addicted. 

Drug use is a destructive, nasty thing that ruins lives and in many cases kills people.  In an earlier Facebook note, I suggested making schoolkids watch the films Requiem for a Dream and Alpha Dog to open their eyes to the brutal reality of drug addiction and dealing.  Especially Requiem--that movie is scary.

My concern is that the cure is worse than the disease, especially given the abuses that it has enabled and the mind-bogglingly vast financial cost. 

And thirdly, Walters' argument comes off as really politically-correct.  "Don't say that, it's offensive!"  Other than his opening sentence, he makes no attempt to defend the drug war on factual grounds--instead, he resorts to claims that this is insulting to everyone who has tried to fight drug abuse.

Since I don't like to criticize without offering a solution, here is an idea:


The way the government deals with alcohol (destructive if overused) and cigarettes (destructive in general, and more addictive than some illegal drugs) might be better--regulate and tax to reduce the harm and generate revenue and use some of that revenue fund prevention and treatment efforts.

This could serve as a means of replacing the revenues law-enforcement agencies might lose if the drug-war-spawned asset-forfeiture ends. 

After all, legalizing and taxing marijuana alone could generate $40 billion to $100 billion per year.

http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2009/03/legalize_mariju.html

Imagine all the money currently flowing to the drug gangs instead flowing into the local, state, and federal governments.  That's a veritable river of cash that can be used to close the deficit, pay down debt, keep other taxes low, and invest in worthwhile projects.

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Dumping on Mexico

I got a couple of comments on the farm subsidies article, which was posted on my friend Fred's blog "Seeking Liberty," and when I went to read them, I found that Wordpress automatically generates links that readers of blog articles might be interesting.

So I found this one here:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/dumping-on-mexico/

It elaborates on the point I made about "dumping" subsidized crops on Mexico, which undermine Mexican farmers that cannot compete with them because they can't get the same kind of subsidies our farmers can.

No comments in the article about illegal immigration--one logical consequence of Mexican (and I believe other Central American) farmers not being able to make a living anymore and understandably not wanting to starve to death--but some people in the comments section pointed this out.

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Intertextuality and "Escape from the Wastelands"

Purchased Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition) from a local bookstore yesterday, probably the first new book I've purchased in years. 

(Thanks to Amazon.com's ZShops and Half.com, it's easy to find books I wanted used for much less.)

I intended to use it to add intertextuality to my novel Escape from the Wastelands, which will hopefully make it deeper and more financially successful.  Thus far, I've read read some of the introduction, but based on some passages quoted, I've already gotten some ideas for the early career of antagonist Grendel Black.

Grendel (the monster) is described as being a creautre from the moors.  Grendel Black's homeland is in the northwestern part of the world of Escape and I've given little thought to its geography other than making it somewhat similar to Scandinavia.  I think I'll add some moors there and make it so that he hid in the moors after his family was killed in a clan war.  In an Old World (pre-apocalyptic) ruin in the moors, he found a partial copy of Beowulf and, having read about the fell deeds of Grendel, took the name for himself.

(A member of the Lawrenceville writing group suggested this be a name he adopted for himself and this seemed like a sensible suggestion.)

The moors will also be Grendel's base for his early career as a mercenary and "regulator" (an Old West term for a hired gun cattle barons used to protect their herds), paralleling Grendel's raids on Heorot from the moors.

In the long run, the three-parted aspect of Beowulf can also provide a basis for the career of my protagonist, Andrew Sutter.  Andrew will first defeat Grendel himself (the planned first four books).  Then he will defeat an insurgency led by Grendel's sons in his old homeland (analogous to the Sunni Triangle in Iraq), with the land itself being an analogy for Grendel's mother.

The third foe, analogous to the dragon and like the dragon faced many years later, Andrew will beat but die in the process.  Not sure who that foe will be--I had pondered a cross-dimensional invasion (enemies more technologically advanced but significantly few in number--think the time-traveling South Africans of The Guns of the South, who aid the Confederacy but then betray it), one of Grendel's generals who had been turned into a vampire, or even a falling-out with the allies who helped make Andrew Emperor in Grendel's place.

(Considering how Beowulf ends on a rather ominious note--without Beowulf, the Geats have no king to protect them from their gathering enemies--the possibility of a renewed war and the fragile post-apocalyptic civilizational renaissance ending is nice and dark.)

I've been feeling a bit under the weather lately (had what might have been an attack of food poisoning early Wednesday morning), so I might sign off, lie down, and read more of Beowulf.  Then I'll have more of substance to add to this.

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Productivity Update

I just added a new chapter to The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, which I had allowed to sit unupdated for nearly a month.  The lead-up to the great battle in Morocco in which Megatron attempts to free the Fallen from his tomb (under Jbel Toubkal, a mountain near Marrakesh) and Starscream makes his bid for power has begun...

Unfortunately, I'm rapidly approaching an impasse.  In the film, Sam, Mikaela, and Leo end up in Egypt when Jetfire creates a "space bridge" (some kind of wormhole) and takes them there.  Since I replaced the "wake up Jetfire in a museum" plot with the plot I remember from the original Transformers animated series (Starscream digs Jetfire out of a glacier), this isn't going to happen.

At present, my plan to get the kids to Morocco (to have them there for the final battle, like in the movie) involves them accidentally getting swept onto an American military aircraft that's headed there.  Thing is, unless the soldiers boarding the aircraft are in a VERY big hurry, they'd get noticed and put off the plane.  I'm disinclined to have them stow away, lest Sam get "Flanderized"* into someone mindlessly self-sacrificing to the point of being a suicidal idiot.

(*A TVTropes term in which one character trait gets amplified to a ridiculous degree.  It comes from Flanders turning more and more into a religious zealot to the exclusion of other traits in The Simpsons.  It could also be applied to Quagmire's sexual perversity, which was less pronounced earlier in Family Guy.)

After all, I already had him attempt to trade himself to the Decepticons for a kidnapped Mikaela, Mr. Banes, and Simmons, in a move that other characters and readers recognized was idiotic to an extreme.

Any ideas?  I've only got six chapters left and hopefully I'll be able to finish it before July.

Also, I posted an author's note in The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince that both provides a glimpse of what the Potterverse would look like 17 years after Voldemort's (permanent) defeat in that world's 1979 and linked back to this blog.  The note serves a dual purpose of expending my last ideas pertaining to that story and (hopefully) attracting more readers here, since this blog did not exist in 2008 when I wrote "Wrath."

My final piece of non-original work is another alternate version of the Draka timeline on my alternate-history forum.  In the novel Under the Yoke (second in the original trilogy), there's a scene where a Draka character states that if the Domination didn't have atomic weapons, the United States could have forced them out of Europe and Eastern China, which the Draka conquered in that timeline's version of WWII.

Thing is, the Draka's primary ability to threaten the North American mainland is via submarine and the Alliance for Democracy is dominated by the US, Britain, and Japan, all of whom have extensive naval-warfare experience.  The Alliance nuclear arsenal is also more powerful and more advanced than that of the Draka.

So, I figured in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Alliance could have launched a successful nuclear first-strike on the Domination, using their superiority in aircraft and ships to destroy the Draka sea-based nuclear deterrent before it could do significant damage.  It's improbable they could sell a "war to the death" to their electorates so soon after WWII, but driving the Draka back to their pre-war start lines with the aid of the still-not-entirely-enslaved populations of Eurasia would be an easier sell.

But after the war, with "frontline" Alliance states like Britain, India, and Japan taking worse nuclear damage than the US and the Domination truncated and with its ruling-class and slave-soldiery taking a severe beating, the Alliance might well weaken or even dissolve.  And the Draka, descended from history's losers, might well be inclined to revenge...

(Plus I'm thinking that post-Draka Europe might well be dominated by Communists and other extreme leftists and form a third power-bloc.  That'd be a real downer ending there--the rump Alliance and the resurgent Draka blast each other to bits and the world ends up going Red.)

Here's the link: Limited Alliance-Draka War.

I may update the timeline later tonight.  Right now, it's gotten 550+ hits on AH.com and considering how I've been posting blog posts there as well as on Facebook, I think I'm recruiting more and more of them as readers.

Now, as far as original fiction is concerned, I have submitted Chapter Five of Escape from the Wastelands to my Kennesaw writing group.  I have already tweaked it based on some comments received from two of my fellow writers.

Given my decision to get some serious intertextuality going with Beowulf, I think I might order a copy of the actual epic and see what I can glean from it.  Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos got a whole lot of critical acclaim through intertextuality with the Iliad and Shakespeare, so perhaps intertextuality with Beowulf will raise my planned post-apocalyptic-paperpack series to new levels of credibility (and hopefully, when the time comes, higher sales and movie deals).

I have also just gotten a rejection slip from Asimov's for my short story "Picking Up Plans in Palma," which takes place in my Afrikaner universe.  This rejection slip was rather different from older rejections I've gotten from that magazine.  It's still a form letter, but my name is handwritten into the salutation, editor Sheila Williams signed it herself, and the letter states that the story is "not quite right" but they'd like to see more fiction from me.

Considering how "Palma" is basically an alternate-history spy story with only vague science-fiction content (the "MacGuffin" of the story is plans for an orbiting battle-station and a character fears having an orbital projectile dropped on him), I think if I can get something as good as "Palma" that's more explicitly SF, I might have a good chance of selling it.

Awesome.

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