The Economy is NOT a Deity! Review of “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy.” By Anat Shenker-Osorio

By spocko, on October 17th, 2012%

Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy

If you are like me (and the odds are 89.5 to 1 that you are) you have heard this line seventy Brazilian times since you started paying attention to messages or talking points on issues. “The right wing does a much better job than the left when it comes to messaging.” Amiright or amiright? Then the person talking (sometimes you) will say, “You know what we need? A Frank Luntz on our side, someone who can come up with stuff like “death panels” or “Job Creators” and then get everyone to repeat them. Next someone who reads books will shout, ‘Lakoff!! Frames! Don’t Think of an Elephant!” as if Lakoff, his books and his defunct institute is any match for the fully-funded, focus-group-tested, linguistically robust messaging work conservatives do. And don’t get me started on the multi-million dollar right wing infrastructure of belief tanks and media. (Seriously, don’t get me started, I’m really pissed off about it and I can pontificate and whine about it for hours.)

But here’s the thing, we do have a Frank Luntz on the left, and she does great messaging work for us. Her . . . → Read More: The Economy is NOT a Deity! Review of “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy.” By Anat Shenker-Osorio

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When Drones Attack! Daniel Suarez’s book Kill Decision

By spocko, on September 6th, 2012%

Daniel Suarez’s book Kill Decision takes on the topic of drones, especially autonomous drones that can make their own, “Kill Decisions” as in, “Identify and Kill that person” with no human in the loop. (Gee, with no humans in the loop, drones with guns will screw up the NRA slogan. “Guns don’t kill people, autonomous drones with guns and kill decision programming, kill people.”)

I was excited to read Daniel Suarez’s new book, “Kill Decision” because Daemon and Freedom (TM) were the two best SF books I read last year. While this book doesn’t rise to their heights it is still a good techno-thriller that contains a few of the big issues Suarez developed in Daemon and Freedom.

The Kill Decision characters aren’t totally stock, but still follow some of the same guidelines of caste that I’ve seen in other techno-thrillers.

Military caste interfaces with civilians. Civilian scientists caste learn how great the military folks are. Military folks grudgingly learn to respect the civilians. Together they trace down the bad guys.

Tension! Action! Gadgets! Guns! Things that explode! Thrills!

It’s a real “page turner” as they used to say before eBooks. (I wonder what they say now?” Kill Decision is . . . → Read More: When Drones Attack! Daniel Suarez’s book Kill Decision

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