Mark Gander: Blog

I decided to move back the dates, so I resubmitted certain chapters, just so that it's plausible that babies are starting to be born. Otherwise, that's a bit of a long gestation.

My apologies about any confusion about the dates. Also, as you can see, I changed my original plans of separating the Clarke story into different stories, preferring to keep it in the same, longer serial instead. It's just a lot simpler and makes it easier to reference earlier information to keep the narrative consistent with itself.

Now that Joe Biden has chosen his running mate, and likely handpicked successor in the event of any 25th Amendment scenarios very plausible given his poor health, let us review the pros and cons of a Vice-President Kamala Harris.

There are a number of things against Kamala:

1. Her several civil and human rights violations as California Attorney General and San Francisco, including keeping an innocent man on death row, preserving cash bail, keeping people in prison past their sentences, harassing (often transgender) sex workers, criminalizing truancy, and jailing people for mere marijuana possession.
2. Her support for the Swedish Model of partial legalization of sex work instead of the full decriminalization of sex work as in New Zealand.
3. Her anti-gun stance is more than a little extreme. It's not a moderate, background check thing. It goes much further than possibly Beto's.
4. Doesn't stop her from hypocritically owning a gun herself or using bodyguards.
5. She is far too cozy with bankers and billionaires.
6. She's too friendly to AIPAC, the Israel lobby.
7. She supports civil asset forfeiture.
8. She thinks that any criticism of the Democratic party is some kind of betrayal, even constructive criticism.
9. She is known to be tied with Hillary Clinton, so likely to share the same reckless, wasteful, lawless foreign policy of wars of aggression launched without the consent of Congress.
10. She directly benefits from the prison industrial complex.
11. She advocated censorship of social media.
12. She didn't prosecute the pedo priests.

Now, the pros:

1. She favors, if not a UBI exactly, something similar.
2. She's a co-sponsor of the Heroes Act.
3. She is at least on some issues pro-LGBT rights and helped achieve marriage equality in California by not defending Proposition 8. As a pansexual guy, that isn't small potatoes.
4. She has favored some, if flawed, version of single-payer health care.
5. She had the balls to confront Biden on his coziness with segregationists.
6. She stated that she believed Biden's accusers, though that's awkward now that she's his running mate.
7. She sponsored the LIFT Act, which would have at least somewhat reversed the reverse Robin Hoodism of the tax code that favored the ultra rich.
8. She now favors legalized pot.
9. She did show some principles in refusing to seek the death penalty, even if she also defended it in court.
10. What she did to Kavanaugh. It still sticks in Trump's craw.
11. I'd like to see her and Pence go at it. I don't even know who'd win, but it is likely to be a brutal brawl. By the way, will Karen have to stand next to him as they debate?
12. Maybe her drubbing in the primaries might, just might, one could always hope, make her slightly less arrogant.
13. Maya Rudolph. Four Years of Maya Rudolph. Enough said.
14. She's not Susan Rice. So, not an actual war criminal. Yet.
15. Her anti-recidivism program.

I have reached a point in the Slut Ray series that it's clear that I will need to find a natural separation and divide it into at least two books of this saga. And to think that this story was inspired by the frequent complaints about slutty wives who get "zapped by the Martian Slut Ray." Things have definitely gone down a rabbit hole here.

So, yeah, it's gonna be a wild ride. The next part of the story will be a little later in time, of course. There will be a lot more zapping and conversion, not to mention disintegrations, naturally.

Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian: (enjoy!)

10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.

9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.

8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.

7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees!

6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.

5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.

4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."

3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity.

2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God.

1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a Christian.

Much of my writing, though by no means all of it, is escapist fantasy. It is meant to break free of our reality and explore the uncharted realm of the imagination. Granted, that is helped by having such a wild imagination as I possess, one that doesn't assume that some things are impossible, but asks, "what if they were possible?"

Realism certainly has a place in literature. I just never felt the desire or need to bind myself too firmly to it. After all, truth is stranger than fiction, is it not, and in fiction, what happens to the characters is their truth. This particular username is even more about magic, sci-fi, and other forms of escapism, as well as dystopian scenarios, than some of my others.