Hypocrisy

How many of the people who think “The government can’t tell me to wear a mask,” are perfectly fine with the government telling people who they can marry?

When a politician of Party X does something wrong, whether you even care or think they should resign/be impeached depends largely on if you are a member of Party X or not.

Some people think schools shouldn’t teach sex ed because that is a parent’s job.  Some of these very same people want those very same teachers to lead their children in prayer.

There are derogatory terms for every group of people.  Which ones you find offensive depends on which ones you use.

How many of the people who say you can’t do anything to interfere with the owning of guns because the Second Amendment is in the Constitution, go ape shit when they hear someone speaking Spanish?  Apparently, that Freedom of Speech part from the First Amendment only applies to English.

Year End Ebook Sale!

From now until January 1, you can grab five of my ebooks for free!  The books in question are Political Pies, “The Future is Coming,” “The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories,” “Lonely Phoenix,” and “Relics.” If you’re looking for short stories, science fiction, and essays about future technology, I have you covered.

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. My stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

“The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories” is a collection of five, short, scifi stories to provide a sample of my writing.

A being from the distant future with almost unlimited powers comes back to help Ian Steele make the world a better place in “The Most Powerful Man in the World.” One bookstore customer has an entirely different reason for wanting books in “Black Market Books.” “Motherhood” tells the story of Thomas Gillespie, the surrogate mother for a baby AI. “Storyteller” is about an author thinking his book into existence. And “Deadworld” is about the alien world humans are reborn on – in alien bodies – after we die.

In “Lonely Phoenix,” board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian partway to a new colony world. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

This work contains some profanity and sexual situations. It is intended for mature audiences only.

A plague that kills men has devastated the world’s population. Only a few thousand boys and men were able to be quarantined. But Mike Shay is the only man known to have a natural immunity to the plague. Therefore, he is practically the only man in a world of women. He spends his days reading, playing video games, and making the occasional sperm donation. Then Dr. Veronica Barrett shows up, disrupting what passes for his life. She says she’s there to investigate his “mental wellbeing,” but is there more to her visit?

Instead of the normal, adolescent, heterosexual male fantasy of being the only guy on a planet of women, “Relics” tries to give a more realistic view of Mike’s life.

Is it time for a new Constitution?

Before I really start, to counter anyone saying that I’m anti-American because I ask if we should change our Constitution, we’ve done it before.  Our Revolutionary War ended in 1783 securing our independence, and our current Constitution took effect in 1789.   Was this a lawless land in between?  No.  We had the Articles of Confederation.  They were the first draft of government and they were revised and replaced by a second draft.  All I’m asking is it time for a third?

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Several years ago as a bit of a project for a scifi story I was working on, I started updating the Constitution.  By updating I mean taking various amendments on who can vote and Presidential succession and just working them into the main body of the Constitution.  Other changes were completely scrapping the Electoral College and clarifying some things like in the First Amendment.  (Some people argue that a comma was added or dropped – I forget which right now – which gives a different reading, usually more favorable to whatever position they already have.)

It was a fun way to kill an afternoon, but in the last few years I’ve started thinking about it more and more.  Largely because in the last few years I’ve seen more and more people who love the Constitution but seem to hate the government based on that Constitution.  They’ll say that the current government has overstepped its bound and conducts un-Constitutional actions, even if the Supreme Court – which the Constitution says are the ones who determine what is and isn’t Constitutional – says otherwise.  

Is our current government perfect?  Fuck no.  Could it be better?  One would hope.  How sad would it be if this were the pinnacle of political achievement?  At what point are fixes no longer possible from within the system, and we need to start over?  Before anyone dismisses me as a raving fanatic, the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence “…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ….” Of course in the next sentence they also said, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ….”

My thoughts on Brexit

I haven’t really said anything about the Brexit vote because I’m an American who hadn’t really heard of it until a couple of weeks before it happened and I only know about certain issues that the people I follow have talked about.  But my overall feeling right now is that if there is a second vote – which it seems enough people are calling for so it probably should happen – the results will most likely be flipped.  Settling the matter once and for all.

Just kidding.

One of the Brexit issues I heard about is something I’ve also heard here in America about people not wanting other people hundreds of miles away from them making laws that the first group of people don’t agree with but still have to live with.  Some of these people talk almost as if there are only two options: one with no laws or regulations and one with a tyrannical government imposing overreaching laws and regulations.  It seems they deny the possibility of good governance with commonsense laws and regulations. 

Question, should it be legal for me to take a spoon and dig out someone’s eye if I didn’t like the way they were looking at me?  The vast majority of people would say no.  (If you said yes, you need to seek professional, mental help.)  Would that count as a good, commonsense law then?  If so, why should it only apply to a certain geographic set of people?  Especially if they are only a certain geographic set of people because centuries ago other people just drew some lines on a map?  Should we work only on smaller, more local governance, or better overall governance?

You might be interested in this other post I did on another site: Do not knowingly harm others.