"Rats, Bats, and Vats" by Eric Flint and Dave Freer

Imagine someone distilled the minds of Michael Bay and Neill Blomkamp, ran them through a blender, added some of Gaiman's love of classic literature, and then put them into a book.

Basically, it's fantastic.

I love it when Sci-Fi doesn't try to refer to "spacey" things just to remind the audience that it's sci-fi (*cough*HonorHarrington*cough*), such as in this case, where the main cast consists of a vat-grown soldier and genetically engineered rats and bats with implants in their heads to make them smart. And Irish, apparently. The implants came with several different old books, and they identified with the underdogs, and now they act Irish.

Anyway, characters also refer to an operation reminding them of something from DVDs from old Earth. Not "pre-holo" or "pre-dispora" or whatever Honor Harrington characters would say. DVDs. I had to stop and make sure I was reading a Baen book.

Get it if you like several hundred pages made up almost entirely of banter and crude humor. Like I said, Michael Bay. It would help a little if you were passingly familiar with Bronte. Like I said, Neil Gaiman.

Congress didn't say pizza is a vegetable - Wash. Post

Basically, they said that the tomato sauce on a slice of pizza is enough to be counted as a serving of vegetables.

Note how the comments have the obligatory people who are twisting logic into a pretzel to try and make it fit into the original misconception. Specifically, saying pizza contains a serving of vegetables "means" schools can say Pizza is a vegetable.

Morderkaine wrote:
Congress is IN EFFECT saying that pizza contains 1 serving of vegetables/fruit. That is a HUGE difference from saying pizza is a vegetable. It also contains a serving of grains, possibly part of a serving of meat, dairy from the cheese, etc. Its just pointing out that there are some fruits/veggies in it. Not saying its not a fatty, unhealthy food, just that veggies/fruit is in there somewhere. Count onion, green peppers, etc that can be added and its closer to a full sized serving.

What Washpost45 just said is that saying a plate of fried chicken, corn and spinach contains 2 servings of vegetables is almost no difference from saying fried chicken is a vegetable. The meal contains 2 servings of veggies, but that doesn't mean the entire thing is.

And then there's the logical soft shoe over to "This isn't important! What's really important is that Congress isn't doing the job we put them in office to do!" No one making that argument, oddly enough, seems to bother to say what that job actually is.

The further adventures of JohnGalt

Previously.

Turns out he's the kind of person who can only argue against straw men, then whines about it when people point out he's not responding to what they're actually saying, responding with accusations of "brow-beating", "dishonesty" and "being uncivil". And he's a Ayn Rand fan, which seems to have something to do with his "I am always right" vaguely-Randian viewpoint. That's one of my biggest problems with Objectivism. No one wants to think they're the small constraining the great.

Cops use Pedator drone on criminals - LA Times

Cop shows up at a ranch looking for cattle, with a warrant. Occupants chase him off with guns. Cop calls in backup from three other counties, on account of the place being 3,000 acres. They also used a Predator drone. Predator drone locates the family, and police use that information to capture them safely.

This has, of course, led to the knee-jerk comparisons to 1984, as well as the military. Except the Predator belonged to Customs and Borders, which is authorized to work with civilian law enforcement at their discretion, and spotting something from a flying plane falls under plain-sight laws, presumably under the same logic that would allow a cop to intervene if he was walking down the street and saw someone being assaulted through a living-room window. The comparisons to 1984 are entirely baseless; this wasn't the cops spying on people for funsies, this was the cops using a tool to try to safely apprehend people they were going after already. No one wants another Waco or Ruby Ridge.

Ironically, if you look at the comments of another article from the LA Times just a few weeks ago, some people are rather enthusiastic about getting their own little toys and using them to violate others privacy. And, of course, on both there are people who say to shoot down the drones, no matter who uses them.

Basically, the police want to use a cheaper, quieter alternative to choppers, and they might be approved for civilian use as well. There are concerns about criminal use and privacy concerns.

I wonder how long before this makes it into a CSI episode?