In 1923, Felix Dzerzhinsky of the Soviet Union's new State Political Directorate (GPU, which evolves into the NKVD and eventually into the KGB) decides to accellerate the collapse of capitalism and thereby hasten the triumph of socialism by launching a long-term agitprop campaign ( Read more... )

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for attending the First Annual Shareholders' Meeting of FooCorp. We're going to keep things fairly informal here, so you can call me Steve in the Q&A session that will follow. As we're having a Q&A, I'd ask you to hold your questions for it so that we can get through this brief introductory ( Read more... )

Three suspicious fires broke out early this morning here in London: one at a strip bar, the other two at massage parlours ( Read more... )

It's New Year's Eve (for those of us on the Gregorian calendar) and so naturally one's thoughts turn to time and its passage. Not least of which for me because today I found out that I either misremembered the schedule for one of my local buses or it's dropped from 4/hour to 3/hour on the weekend recently ( Read more... )

I just read an item quoting the C.D. Howe Institute that Ottawa is understating the problem of underpaid pension obligations. Juxtaposed with it was an article on the Occupy movement's objections to excessive executive compensation ( Read more... )

Taking a moment out at work between calls to post up what my subconscious decided to throw at me at oh-dark-thirty last night. (Which is why I'm yawning and guzzling OJ at the office. Sorry.)

( Throwing in a Friends-page cut as the dream involves human mutilation... stupid id. )

Needs polish, but I need to exorcise this so that I can get back to work without distraction. (Almost finished for the month! So... close...)

Be it resolved: Ayn Rand's philosophy can be boiled down to, "to each according to his ability, from each according to his need." The consequences of this philosophy are in direct opposition to her ( Read more... )

I think I've figured out why I've been in "snarling badger" mode lately; there's a story hatching in my brain. It is, alas, not a happy story... it's more of a wild-haymaker-to-the-limbic-system story, with all the pain the metaphor implies, and it promises to be a rather unpleasant one to write. It seems to want to be in 2nd person present tense ( Read more... )

Because I haven't done anything with the idea for nigh-on twenty years, feel free to thieve this.

SFnal locked-room murder mystery. The victim, a genetically-engineered telepath, among the first of his/her kind, living in a Faraday cage because the electromagnetic sensitivity required to pick up thoughts makes any source of radio interference ( Read more... )

Y'ever have a chunk of something stuck in your brain that won't let you sleep? Well, here's what got caught in my cerebral folds... an opener for a story I have no intention of ever writing. So, free to a good or bad home:

The first war in space was not fought with lasers or missiles or guns; it was fought with fists and cutlery and tools and ( Read more... )