Infinity Plus is desperate to give you a FREEEEE book!

Many will fondly recall the website Infinity Plus, which offered an astonishing array of free online fiction, plus reviews, interviews and suchlike stuff. (It's all still there as an archive, if you have a few months' reading time to spare.)

More recently, Keith Brooke -- the Infinity Plus supremo -- has founded Infinity Plus Ebooks, which has been publishing with some success since just before the start of the year . . . even though two of the books concerned are by moi.

Now the first Infinity Plus Ebooks sampler is available. Called Infinities, it has a contents list as follows:

Keith Brooke: "The Man Who Built Heaven" (short story)
Eric Brown: "Venus Macabre" (short story)
Eric Brown: extract from novel A Writer's Life
John Grant: "Wooden Horse" (novelette)
Garry Kilworth: "Phoenix Man" (short story)
Kaitlin Queen: extract from novel One More Unfortunate
Iain Rowan: "One Step Closer" (short story)

Anna Tambour: extract from novel Spotted Lily
Linda Nagata: extract from novel Memory
Scott Nicholson: extract from novel The Red Church
Kristine Kathryn Rusch: extract from novel The Disappeared
Steven Savile: extract from novel The Immortal

Infinities is available for FREEEEE download in .mobi (Kindle) and .epub formats at the Infinity Plus Ebooks site and in these and some other formats from Smashwords.

Just to repeat in case of misunderstanding, it's

!!!FREEEEE!!!

(Classy, eh?)

we could save money by shutting down fire stations

The headline of this Climate Progress piece tells the story, although the article itself is worth reading for the details. Step back Bobby Jindal, whose mockery of volcano monitoring occurred, you'll recall, just scant weeks before Mt St Helens blew its top with what would inevitably have been, without volcano monitoring, heavy casualties.

At the time it was easy to paint Jindal as a lone bonehead on the fringes of the GOP. Not so easy this time 'round. Here's the headline:

Tornado forecasting saved countless lives this week. Too bad Congress, including Alabama’s entire delegation, voted against maintaining forecast quality

Of course, this is the party that thinks the way to tackle global warming is to pretend that it's not happening, and that anyone who says otherwise is part of a grand, DC Comics-style conspiracy by the international climatological community.

Ron Paul insuffiently bigoted for faux-Christian wingnuts

One News Now, the daily ezine that's sent out by a far-right organization called the American Family News Network, reports that even Ron Paul is not wingnut enough for certain elements of its readership demographic.

In an article called "Tea Party Fave in Spotlight for 'Gay' Stance" we discover that one

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center of Military Readiness, says however that Paul supported President Barack Obama and homosexual activists with his vote during last year's lame-duck session of the 111th Congress to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" -- the law excluding homosexuals from serving openly in the U.S. military.

"People should know that Ron Paul voted for gays in the military in 2010," Donnelly states. "I think he should be held accountable for that vote. Certainly anyone who supports the military should question his support of the armed forces with that vote on his record."

Hands up all those who've before now never heard of the Center of Military Readiness. And hands up all those who sniggered in puerile fashion at the juxtaposition of Donnelly's subject matter with the name of the organization she represents.

And most of all hands up anyone who failed to recognize the astonishing level of irrationality behind that non sequitur in Donnelly's last reported sentence.

+++++

As an aside, I think the American Family News Network is the Goebbels PR division of the American Family Association. When I tried to check this in Wikipedia, the article the search engine suggested might be most relevant to my query was the entry on The Onion.

Chucklehead Norris learns how to use Ctrl-C

Among the, er, distinguished (distinguished by what?) punditastical correspondents at the WorldNutsDaily, HQ of Birtherism, there are several standouts . . . In fact, they're all standouts at a webzine where the production of Obama's long-form birth certificate "opens up more questions than it answers", according to Editor-in-Chief Josef Farah. (Might I propose that those Birthers who forge on regardless be hereinafter referred to as the Afterbirthers?)

Unfortunately, Norris's latest islamophobic outburst, "Top 10 U.S. Shariah Infiltrations, Part 2", has attracted the attention of Wonkette's Jack Stuef. Not only is the ignorant hatemongering as obnoxious as you might expect, Norris has, oh dear, lifted it from elsewhere. And not with lots of subtle rewording, either.

Here's one of Stuef's several examples (with appropriate highlighting by me). Norris:

In 2010, a New Jersey family court judge’s refused to grant a restraining order to a woman who was sexually abused by her Moroccan husband and forced repeatedly to have sex with him, ruling that the Muslim husband did not have “criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault”

Or, as the FOX News website put it in its August 5 2010 article "Advocates of Anti-Shariah Measures Alarmed by Judge's Ruling":

A New Jersey family court judge’s decision not to grant a restraining order to a woman who was sexually abused by her Moroccan husband and forced repeatedly to have sex with him [...] he did not have “criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault”

Plagiarism aside, if you feel that Mel Gibson isn't quite vile enough for you to boycott his movies, you might want to think about Chuck Norris instead. Stupid, yes: that's what you expect from anyone who thinks any problem can be solved by kicking someone in the head. But the sheer venom and racism of his public hatemongering go 'way beyond that.