Brain Quest: A Fantastic Voyage through the Progressive Mind

Available on December 26, 2017! Reserve your copy today for $0.99 and get a huge discount off the regular price. Pre-order now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Smashwords and other select retailers.

Brain Quest

Mission Nemo simply must succeed. If the crew of the Super Small Miniaturized Nano-like Operations Wessel S. S. Minnow fails to destroy the inoperable anti-capitalist coagulum lodged in Maurice Moore’s progressive brain, how will General De Klein’s Federal Department of Antidotes operatives at SUCFACE Mission Control find out if Leftylometazoline (aka LeftX) really works? Would this usher in the final stage of the liberal clerisy’s clandestine collectivist conspiracy to abolish our few remaining individual freedoms forever? That would not please President Thump one microscopic little bit.

Join Major Miles Stone and his disturbingly alluring crew on their miniaturized mission through the left and lefter hemispheres of the progressive brain. Their fantastic voyage is a race against time that takes them through such redoubtable regions as the Clinton Vortex, the Che Guevara Gray Area and the Obama Trauma Center itself. Here they bravely confront such anatomical monstrosities as the fantasist frontalis, the hyperbolthalamus and the dreaded pious aspiration node. Their progressive brain journey only gets progressively worse as they are repeatedly attacked by repulsive swarms of nanny neurons, doomsday dendrons, robin hoodlums and the formidable radical egalitarian bacterium. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, and their deadly arsenal of passing phasers, millennial mindset missiles, moral busybody antibodies and Condescendium®, the Minnow would be lost. The Minnow would be lost.

The tension never stops building during this thrilling tale of adventure, danger, suspense and romance. And lust. Will Captain Hanna Grenada’s irresistible animal magnetism finally seduce the Major into experiencing something vaguely resembling basic human emotion? Can the all too communicative HAL 9999 super computer and his annoying eye drones really be trusted to operate the ship? And will the Minnow’s political corrector deflectors and smug shields hold, allowing Stone and his crew to reach their target and ignite the liberal bombast bomb in time? I could tell you but that would ruin the suspense.

Not your everyday dystopian science-fiction erotic horror political thriller, this bombastic bombshell of a book knows no shame when it comes to overwhelming you with its serious silliness, wanton wackiness and forthright, flat-out farce. Purchase it now before it is too late or something. Soon to be made into a major motion picture. Or maybe it has been already. There is also time travel involved here, after all.

German Doves Demand Pigeon Deployment

As expected and secretly hoped for, the proposal to send German military-surveillance drones to monitor the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine has run into a thicket of legal problems.

Drones

To pacify Moscow and the German doves opposed to the deployment, German pigeon drones will now be used instead.

France and Germany said they would consider providing drones. But their request to send armed teams as well to safeguard the drone operators could run into resistance at the OSCE, a civilian organization that includes Russia, which would have to agree to the plan.

Since When Does Ukraine Have A Graffiti Problem?

German drones could soon fly over eastern Ukraine? I thought they were only used for patrolling railyards by night to fight graffiti spraying terrorists here in Germany.

Drone

Or to harass the Bundeskanzlerin in Dresden. Or to terrify passengers on commercial airplanes trying to land in Kabul. Hey, practice makes perfect, I guess.

France and Germany are preparing to send their unmanned aircraft as part of the ongoing OSCE mission. The first soldiers from those countries arrived in Ukraine Tuesday to evaluate the conditions on the ground.

German Army Wants Armed Drones Just In Case

So it can have the military ability to answer with a resounding no if anybody ever asks them to use them, I mean.

Drones

What on earth are they smoking over there with Colonel Klink these days, anyway?

Drone-opponents worry that having armed drones at the Bundeswehr’s disposal will lower inhibitions to use them, too. There is also the fear that fully automatic drones will at some point be able to make decisions regarding life or death. UAVs can already take off and land by themselves and – once programmed – fly routes without human involvement.

But Our Battle Drones Will Only Be Used For Goodness And Niceness

And they won’t stink, either.

Drone

The Bundeswehr Association and the commander of German troops in Afghanistan have expressed their support for the acquisition of battle drones to protect their soldiers.

Let the long, agonizing and hypocritical debate begin!

“Wenn Soldatinnen und Soldaten in den Einsatz geschickt werden, dann muss ihnen auch das Optimum an Ausrüstung zur Verfügung gestellt werden.”

German Sky Already Falling With Bad Robots

Datenschutz! Datenschutz, Datenschutz, Datenschutz Datenschutz. Robot insects.

Robot

Drones. Datenschutz. Robots. Amazon. Amazon drone robots. New ideas. Bad technology. Technology bad. Bad ideas.

Then there’s the Datenschutz part.

Jeff Bezos. Darth Vader. Das Imperium schlägt zurück (The Empire Strikes Back).

Technisch ist es möglich, der Datenschutz aber ist heikel.

If It Works, Fix It

This is another one of those “only in Germany” numbers. Or maybe it isn’t (I’m slowly losing track of what’s going on out there in “the real world”).

Graffiti

The Deutsche Bahn’s program to use small drones to patrol railyards by night in a bid to fight graffiti spraying graffiti terrorists has suffered a setback. Although the test flights worked out just wunderbar, the German Luftsicherheitsbehörden (air security authority) has stopped the program for now as no night flight permits have been permitted – for drones designed to patrol railyards by night. Ordnung muss sein already.

This is actually a bit of a relief for me, to tell you the truth. Before reading the article I was convinced that the flights had been cancelled due to Fluglärm issues. Fluglärm (aircraft noise) is a big honking major awesome all-important obsession for all Germans at all times in all regions and all locations all over the country (and tomorrow the world) and I was sure that I was about to read how these mini-drones were simply too loud for the Anwohner (local residents), whoever or wherever they were.

Whew! That wasn’t the case, like I said. At least not this time. But let’s just wait and see what happens when/if these things are ever actually allowed to fly.

“Die Tests sind exzellent gelaufen, ein hervorragendes Einsatzmittel. Jedoch erteilen die Luftsicherheitsbehörden der Länder derzeit keine Fluggenehmigung für die Nachtstunden.”

The Dresden Drone Escapade

I guess this was the last Pirate Party fraternity boy prank before the election. Or forever, for that matter. They’re history here now, just in case you didn’t know.

And just in general, the varying reactions to the drone’s presence (Merkel’s smirk, the death stare from the other lady, and the range of reactions in between from the men on the podium) hint at the general way humans will react to the increased presence of robots and drones in everyday life.

Germans Shocked To Learn That American Drones Are Not Being Used To Fight Graffiti

While Germans are in the process of introducing small drones to patrol railyards by night in a bid to fight graffiti spraying terrorists, many were shocked to learn that American drones (piloted by soldiers stationed in Stuttgart and Ramstein) are being used to fight terrorists of another caliber in Somalia.

Drones

This puts Germans in a moral dilemma (something they are not at all accustomed to), because this yucky business of using drones to kill people who are planning to kill you (as in you Americans) is wrong because we (as in you Americans) are somehow responsible for having turned these terrorists into terrorists in the first place and if yucky things like piloting drones absolutely positively has to take place then it should take place on American soil and nowhere near a pleasant and peaceful place like Germany were yucky things of this nature are ausgeschlossen (impossible) from the get-go. Except for a little graffiti here and there, maybe. You see, we (as in we Germans) are pacifists.

In other words go ahead if you must, but not here. Because we know nothing, Colonel Hogan, nothing!

“Die Tötung eines Tatverdächtigen mithilfe einer bewaffneten Drohne außerhalb eines bewaffneten Konflikts” könne, wenn die Bundesregierung davon wisse und nicht protestiere, die “Beteiligung an einem völkerrechtlichen Delikt sein.”