Fox News, our lovely disinformation network, has invoked science fiction to protect you from health care. Fox News talking-head Neil Cavuto references Soylent Green as a vision of what he thinks of the plans to reform health care. He says that people are going to be encouraged to commit suicide when they get old.

Maybe, maybe not. It’s a wild ass guess. As a science fiction author I think–yeah, that could make a good story. And of course, writing such things would put me in the FICTION section rather than on Fox News, and they seem to think they deserve a non-fiction status. He could also imagine that they would just poor kerosene over you and light you on fire rather than turn you into the food product Soylent Green. (A nice burning hospital bed has better dramatic appeal on camera. Soylent Green’s visualization of the end was a bit weak, in my opinion.

But let’s go with Neil’s scenario no matter how likely or unlikely it is. If you were encouraged to make a choice between assisted suicide and treatment, at least the choice would be yours. Today, the choice is only yours if you can afford (or your insurance will cover it) to pay the cost of the medical procedure. If you can’t, then you don’t have a choice, you just die.

Fox News fails to mention that a single payer health care system doesn’t mean that the wealthy will be kept from buying their own health care.

Maybe I need to say that again: Today, the wealthy can get as much care as they afford. With single payer health care, the wealthy can get as much care as they can afford.

The difference is that the regular guy will be able to get health care too. Will he be encouraged, as in Soylent Green, to give up his life before his time? Not likely. I’ve never heard of this happening in any of the nationalized health care countries: Great Britain, Taiwan, Canada, France, Japan, to name a few.

But being reasonable isn’t a “core competency” of Fox News. That’s not their goal. Their goal is to control your opinion and they’ll use their imagination, their writers, their editors, and their news network to shape you opinion to their will.

Hmm… sounds like a good science fiction story. Have you heard of Max Headroom? Fox News, the next Network 23, hmmm?

Commentary on Neil’s use of Activist SF

Fox News’s use of Soylent Green is an Activist Science Fiction play. Neil is attempting to leverage the cultural understanding of the movie to short-cut his argument to the Fox News viewers. He successfully talks of a situation in the movie and tries to use it to scare the viewer into associating it with what is happening today with single payer health care. Soylent Green’s theme is about the dehumanizing effect overpopulation will have. Health Care also would be dehumanized, so these theme fits with what Neil is saying. But there are some problems here which ultimately make this a not very effective bit of activism:

• Soylent Green, or the book it’s based on, Make Room, Make Room, isn’t a pervasively known in the US. Most of the Fox News audience isn’t going to have a clue.
• Movies with themes of why you should control your population is a pretty liberal concept. The Fox News audience is not liberal except for a sprinkling of Libertarians who watch Fox News because they associate themselves with any movement that says they’re against taxes (whether or not that movement actually reduces taxes)

Now if Neil used references to the Left Behind books and movies, he’d hit his audience square on the mark.

So sometimes I need to get something off my chest. Call it a PSA, a public service announcement (PSA). Is this a PSA for Event Horizon or Verizon? You be the judge. You may be a defender of either of these “products.” If so, comment away. But remember, my mother said I was special. 🙂

The movie, Event Horizon looked good on the commercials: sexy spaceship, strong looking cast, and a goth looking warp drive. I was ready for a great show. Then about thirty minutes into the film, I wanted to leave the theater because the same suspenseful music used in Friday the 13th movies grated my ears to forshadow something wasn’t right.

That’s about what it was like using FiOS: the HD channels were an extraordinary 1080P, the Internet connectivity gave me undreamed of download speed, and the goth looking Verizon router was loaded with features. I have a friend also enjoying blazing speeds but with a fiber home internet package from EATEL – https://www.EATEL.com/residential/internet/. We can both confirm that the latest wave of broadband technology is lightyears ahead of anything we had back in the day. If you consume a lot of data or you watch a lot of HD videos, high-speed fiber internet might be for you.

But then the problems started. The router would reset itself and lose my settings, the WIFI would shut down and come up again. Normally, I would follow something like the AT&T Router login instructions to sort out the router settings but this Verizon one was having none of it. Some features of the router only pretended to work. The equipment acted is if I got massive speed but at the cost of tapping into a universe of infinite evil. It made me wish I could use this guide here with a different router instead of dealing with this hell.

I could almost live with this. After all, were talking about Verizon here. This is the company that cooperated with the so called Patriot Act and sold out Americans to the NSA as part of a warrentless wiretapping program. So their boardroom is comfortable with practicing evil.

But Verizon, in it’s infinite wisdom, decide to block port 80, which means in laymen’s terms, I could no longer host LancerKind.com.

After talking to an amazing number of different people at Verizon, and searching the Internet, I decide that working around this problem wasn’t worth the amount of time it was taking. After another call to Verizon and requesting that they put GIANT warning labels on all their slick FiOS commercials that say: we’ll make your website go dark (unless you want to spend $100/month for a business line), I went back to Comcast.

That was then, this is now. Now I’m in China and rather than brave the Great Firewall and self host LancerKind.com, I’ve thought about using web hosting service www.hostiserver.com. My friends have recommended it to me and it seems pretty reliable.

OK, that’s my PSA. Back to our regular scheduled SF programming.

Hardcovers are really handy, luckily there are places similar to this book printing company that could bring stories to my bookshelf in hardcover form. I know when I’m sitting alone in the dark and reading (I have really good eyesight) and I hear a noise that sounds like someone’s jimmying the door open, I reach for something on my book shelf.

But I reach past the mass market paperbacks, and even the thick and sturdy trade paperbacks. I go right for the hardback book, you know. I want something that can really knock someone’s block off or stop a bullet in a pinch.

So good news! If you’ve been hankering for The Book of the Exodi but have been thinking–naw, trade paperbacks don’t make me feel secure–The Book of the Exodi is now out in hardcover, available from Lulu.com:

http://www.lulu.com/content/hardcover-book/the-book-of-exodi/7410605

I like to keep a copy in my car when I travel. Right between the driver’s seat and the door, where I can get easy access to it if I get into trouble.

A futuristic computer jockey named Diff gets attacked by bad behaving nano-bots during a Halloween party. The short story, “Bit Storm,” is about a future where nano particles have been commoditized to well beyond Diff’s prosthetic hand. Now it’s in makeup, toys, and nifty “Nstant” halloween costumes. Even Diff’s co-worker, Jake, an Artificial Intelligence, insisted on Diff picking him up a cat. Diff took the easy route and got him a nano cat (you don’t have to clean up after a nan cat).

Why does the nano go bezerk at the Halloween party? Have you ever heard of griefers? Being a griefer is a natural part of human development. All those naughty four-year olds spend a good part of their childhood enjoying the reactions they get when they purposefully behave badly. Sadly, not all these little buggers grow up. Some dedicate themselves to a life of causing grief by becoming Protest Warriors and stirring up trouble at peace rallies.  On the MOGS, they are groups of people who band together to cause grief to the other denzines.   Diff meets a griefer who goes by SickDevil and this griefer, like all griefers, has a very reasonable way of looking at the world which supports all of his ill doings.  (Griefers are very smart four-year olds in adult bodies.)  SickDevil challenges Diff to prove SickDevil’s “malthusian outlook,” that it’s “natures order of things” that the planet’s resources (oil, gas, food, water) will only be enjoyed by the strong and that the strong will user the weak to perish ASAP.

And this griefer, SickDevil, is  a nano expert.

This story was co-written by my then wife Shelli during a long road trip between Montana and Seattle.  It was my turn to drive and  I hadn’t finished the scene.  So she did it for me!  Thanks Shelli!  It was probably your part that got the honorable mention.  🙂

As some of you may know, I have moved to XiaMen, China.  In the US, there are many elements of the strange, like Quakers with rocket packs.  It turns out that China has interesting science fictional things happening in this island city of 1.3 million people.

XiaMen has a local chain of bakeries called USM with the slogan, Use Mind Bread Hause:

I’ve tried this psychedelic bread and while I’m forbidden by the government to speak of the mind trip,  it tastes really good!

I feasted on this spectacular specimen for breakfast and had thoughts of Pacific Ocean coconuts the whole day.  It made me rather sea sick, thinking of coconuts bobbing in the ocean.

Think about this when you are eating your rather lame “wonder” bread, hmm?     😉