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           ELECT YOUR PEOPLE'S POLICE                            by Norman Spinrad If something isn't done, and done fast, a civil war in the United States is just a shot or a Molotov Cocktail away. But how and by who?   If there is one American who could stand up before the protesters and be listened to it is surely the one and only former President of the United States, Barack Obama. Live before the largest crowd possible and of course well televised.  What should he say? He should speak the hard truth to the leaderless protesters that what they are doing is counterproductive to their own confusion of diverse and general causes which if even possible would take decades of legislation to accomplish. What is needed  immediately is a strong significant and reachable demand. Demand that the head of all police departments in the United States--cities, towns, states everywhere--be elected by the  people their police are mandated to protect and serve. Open elections with
DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN THE SONG AND VIDEO UPDATED BY JOE CADY Music   by Joe Cady and Norman Spinrad Lyrics and vocal by Norman Spinrad SEE AND HEAR IT ON YOUTUBE
                                   QUARANTINE                               by Norman Spinrad  If it wasn’t the best of times, at least it wasn’t the worst of times, or something like that, which is the opening line of a novel called A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and it seemed like this would be only a tale of one. Back in the day before the Quarantine, Manhattan island was the heart and soul and pocketbook of New York City, to the extent that New York could have been said to have all three, Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Broadway and 42nd Street, and all that jazz. When you saw a movie or a TV show or an ad featuring New York, the Big Apple was Manhattan, not anything in what some visiting Californian must have dubbed the “Outer Boroughs,” the moral equivalent of Anaheim or Eagle Rock as far as a Hollywood wise guy was concerned. Not that I was a Hollywood wise guy just because my sales office happened to be located on the seventh floor of one of those unglamorous glass towers at the

THE 21ST CENTURY SHAMAN

        THE 21ST CENTURY SHAMAN                          Alternate Medicines and the Scientific Method                     by  Norman Spinrad           Written   over a decade ago as a proposal for a book that never got written  but all too pertinent  to the era of the coronavirus                     There are many medical systems on this planet, some of them ancient, some of them new, more of them that not based on metaphorical systems. Only “Western” or “alliopathic” medicine is based on rigorous science.  But many of the traditional non-western systems cure some conditions cure some conditions but not others. Many of these cures work in practice, but not in theory. That is they do work, but not for the reasons the theory behind them contends, metaphoric shamanic systems that over centuries evolved them over trial and error, and some of these belief-based cures can do real harm.  With the ones that do work, the shamans know they work, but are mistaken as to how. So what i
VITAMIN C VERSES CORONAVIRUS Why I've not yet read this anywhere I don't know but that is why I'm duty-bound to do it myself: Vitamin C will be effective against the Coronavirus, personally, and collectively. Vitamin C promotes the body's creation of Interferon which is key to the strength of the immune system. Everyone should take at least 2000mg of Vitamin C, 1000 in the morning, 1000 in the evening, some say another 1000 mid-day. This is not curative, this is cautionary, keeping your immune system running at maximum. If you start to suspect that you may be feeling early symptoms take 1000 mg of Vitamin C an hour until your urine turns bright yellow, which means that your Vitamin C is at maximum and you are pissing away the rest. This will not always stop the infection but it frequently will. I am not making this up, it was discovered and elucidated by Linus Pauling, a Nobel class biochemist. Decades ago, I suffered chronic urinary infection like many men. When I

VIVA LA FONDO DE CULTURA ECONOMICA

   VIVA LA FONDO DE CULTURA ECONOMICA  It started with my then agent telling me that a Mexican publisher wanted to publish BUG JACK BARRON in a cheap Mexican edition for a small advance.  BUG JACK BARRON had been published in Spanish, but not in Mexico, since, like English language rights split between the US and Britain, Spanish language rights are generally split between Spain and Latin America.  I shrugged, and said okay, not knowing much more about it, except that it was Paco Taibo, who I knew years ago,  was making the deal, and I didn't think much more about it then. But then Paco asked me to come to Mexico City for the book launch, which was also going to be the launch of a new collection of the overall publisher, La Fondo de Cultura Economica.  What is that ? I asked, and Paco told me the brief version. La Fondo de Cultura Economica is a non-profit publisher subsidized by the Mexican government which publishes 500 books a year, distributes the books of other publ

VIVA MEXICO!

                                                VIVA MEXICO They said we were mad but we were not mad.   Paco Taibo, the director of  the Fondo de Cultura Economica, had asked me to come to Mexico  for the launching of the new Mexican edition of BUG JACK BARRON by the Fondo De Cultura Economica, the publisher owned by the Mexican government, something wonderful and important, and I had accepted,so that I could not back out.  But Dona was still incapable of walking very far without me, she had managed to walk two blocks or so, nothing further, and I could not leave her alone. So what could we do?  Well of course we got on an airplane for 12 hours and flew 5700 miles to Mexico City, what else, wouldn't you?  People in Paris thought that was crazy, of course, but as it turned out, it was doing well by doing good. The Fondo de Cultura Economica is like nothing else in the world that I've known.  It is a publisher, it is a distributer, it publishes 500 books a year,

DIRECT ACTION CAN DO IT!

                     DIRECT ACTION Virginia with 13 electoral votes has now joined the Compact.  The magic number is 270.  Now the count to it is 209 and rising.  Only 61 more electoral votes to go.  Which state will be next?  Which state will be the one to finally make it so?  Save American Constitutional Democracy from the coming singularity via The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact   In 2016  Clinton got 3 million more popular votes than Trump but Trump was elected President against the will of the majority of the American voters and the odds are that something like it is going to happen again in 2020. And if it does, the Constitution of the United States will be revealed as incompatible with American Democracy and something cannot help but give. There cannot fail to be a paradigm shift AKA a revolution against the Constitution as it stands. Indeed there has already been a quite Constitutional coup already via the Electoral College. One thing is sure--Donald Trump

THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

                         Free story of the week THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES This story was first published in ANALOG.  It is set in what we now know about our universe--billions of planets in our galaxy, billions of galaxies in our universe, virtually certain millions of biospheres in our galaxies, surely we will discover other sapient cultures.  And then what? We will know they are there, but then what? One thing is sure, it will change speculative fiction, indeed fiction period, because any fiction that doesn't face this existential reality will be outdated.                                THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES                                             by Norman Spinrad No member of the Order of the Galactic Eye has ever gone down there because we can’t, but I doubt than any of us would if we could.  Destiny is that to which one may aspire and therefor a potential choice, but fate is what is written in one’s stars. Or in our case in our DNA.  Written there by those dow