My view of the intelligence services was formed during the Church hearings in 1975, and all the bad opinions I held then were only affirmed when the news about the CIA’s extreme rendition (kidnapping) and extreme interrogation (torture) protocols broke following 9/11. But then I heard James Clapper talking about his work in the IC…
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The typical DOGE person was a twenty-five-year-old tech guy dying to breathe same air as Elon Musk and only just now grokking the fact that the United States government had three branches.
You could laugh all the way through this book at the sheer Keystone Kops ignorance and idiocy of the DOGE punks Elon Musk and Donald Trump unleashed on the federal government in 2025. The typical Project 2025 person was a middle-aged lawyer who’d spent his career in and around the federal bureaucracy and defined himself…
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I didn’t know you could watch too much Star Trek.
Right after I finished this book, I mean like the next day, Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) attempted to slam dunk former special prosecutor Jack Smith in a congressional hearing. Who stole the ball and swished it, with an assist from Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota). And then Schmitt, incensed that he had been (gasp!) found in…
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Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus
By 2024 Sarah Longwell had conducted four hundred focus groups over eight years and she’s learned some things about American voters of every political persuasion, many of them quoted in this book. As she says in her introduction Listening to what Americans actually think is the only way we can understand why they think and…
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Given today’s headlines, painfully relevant.
DCS Kat Frank of the Warwickshire police, back too early from bereavement leave, demands her boss put her back to work. Fine; he saddles her with the first AI policeman and sets them to work on cold cases involving missing people, mostly as a way to totally disprove the utility of AI in police work.…
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One of the best robot characters ever created in SF
I don’t much like reading books about time travel. Mostly it just makes me dizzy, I don’t deal well with paradoxes. There are a few exceptions, like Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp and Time and Again by Jack Finney. John Varley’s Millennium is another that has taken up permanent occupancy on my…
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