AdamSmith

I am not an acronym either. i am queer. I lovingly fuck and get fucked by every gender. I find that enlarges me, and us.

Again...

I find the lassitudes of time & age & experience, & adequate exercise (or lack thereof), far more interesting -- and engaging, in every way -- than whatever the surgeon's [read: embalmer's] knife may accomplish.

DJT seems, interestingly, not nearly as non compos mentis as his own tweets self-portray him. Still, little match for the Eye of Sauron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

Childhood's End From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about a novel. For other uses, see Childhood's End (disambiguation). Childhood's End Cover of first edition hardcover Author Arthur C. Clarke Cover artist Richard M. Powers Country United Kingdom Language English Genre Science fiction Publisher Ballantine Books Publication date 1953 Media type Print (hardcover and paperback) Pages 214 ISBN 0-345-34795-1 OCLC 36566890 Childhood's End is a 1953 science fiction novel by the British author Arthur C. Clarke. The story follows the peaceful alien invasion[1] of Earth by the mysterious Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirectalien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture. Clarke's idea for the book began with his short story "Guardian Angel" (1946), which he expanded into a novel in 1952, incorporating it as the first part of the book, "Earth and the Overlords". Completed and published in 1953, Childhood's Endsold out its first printing, received good reviews, and became Clarke's first successful novel. The book is often regarded by both readers and critics as Clarke's best novel,[2] and is described as "a classic of alien literature".[3] Along with The Songs of Distant Earth (1986), Clarke considered Childhood's End to be one of his favourites of his own novels.[4] The novel was nominated for the Retro Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2004. Several attempts to adapt the novel into a film or miniseries have been made with varying levels of success. Director Stanley Kubrick expressed interest in the 1960s, but collaborated with Clarke on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) instead. The novel's theme of transcendent evolution also appears in Clarke's Space Odyssey series. In 1997, the BBC produced a two-hour radio dramatization of Childhood's End that was adapted by Tony Mulholland. The Syfy Channel produced a three-part, four-hour television mini-series of Childhood's End, which was broadcast on December 14–16, 2015. Contents [hide] 1Plot summary 1.1Earth and the Overlords 1.2The Golden Age 1.3The Last Generation 2Publication history 2.1Original short story 2.2Development into full-length novel 2.3Publication 3Reception 4Adaptations 5See also 6Notes 7References 8Further reading 9External links Plot summary[edit] The novel is divided into three parts, following a third-person omniscient narrative with no main character.[5] Earth and the Overlords[edit] In the late 20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union are competing to launch the first spacecraft into orbit, for military purposes. When vast alien spaceships suddenly position themselves above Earth's principal cities, the space race ceases. After one week, the aliens announce they are assuming supervision of international affairs, to prevent humanity's extinction. They become known as the Overlords. In general, they let humans go on conducting their affairs in their own way. They overtly interfere only twice: in South Africa, where sometime before their arrival Apartheid had collapsed and was replaced with savage persecution of the white minority; and in Spain, where they put an end to bull fighting. Some humans are suspicious of the Overlords' benign intent, as they never visibly appear. The Overlord Karellen, the "Supervisor for Earth," who speaks directly only to Rikki Stormgren, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, tells Stormgren that the Overlords will reveal themselves in 50 years, when humanity will have become used to their presence. Stormgren smuggles a device onto Karellen's ship in an attempt to see Karellen's true form. He partially succeeds, is shocked by what he sees, and chooses to keep silent. The Golden Age[edit] Men called them Overlords They had come from outer space— they had brought peace and prosperity to Earth But then the change began. It appeared first in the children —frightening, incomprehensible. Now the Overlords made their announcement: This was to be the first step in the elimination of the human race and the beginning of—What? —Original back cover quote, paperback edition Humankind enters a golden age of prosperity at the expense of creativity. Five decades after their arrival, the Overlords reveal their appearance, resembling the traditional Christian folk images of demons: large bipeds with cloven hooves, leathery wings, horns, and tails. The Overlords are interested in psychic research, which humans suppose is part of their anthropological study. Rupert Boyce, a prolific book collector on the subject, allows one Overlord, Rashaverak, to study these books at his home. To impress his friends with Rashaverak's presence, Boyce holds a party, during which he makes use of a Ouija board. Jan Rodricks, an astrophysicist and Rupert's brother-in-law, asks the identity of the Overlords' home star. George Greggson's future wife Jean faints as the Ouija board reveals a number which has no meaning to most of the guests. But Jan recognizes it as a star-catalog number and learns that it is consistent with the direction in which Overlord supply ships appear and disappear. With the help of an oceanographer friend, Jan stows away on an Overlord supply ship and travels 40 light-years to their home planet. Due to the time dilation of special relativity at near-light speeds, the elapsed time on the ship is only a few weeks, and he arranges to endure it in drug-induced hibernation. The Last Generation[edit] Although humanity and the Overlords have peaceful relations, some believe human innovation is being suppressed and that culture is becoming stagnant. One of these groups establishes New Athens, an island colony in the middle of the Pacific Ocean devoted to the creative arts, which George and Jean Greggson join. The Overlords conceal a special interest in the Greggsons' children, Jeffrey and Jennifer Anne, and intervene to save Jeffrey's life when a tsunami strikes the island. The Overlords have been watching them since the incident with the Ouija board, which revealed the seed of the coming transformation hidden within Jean. Well over a century after the Overlords' arrival, human children, beginning with the Greggsons', begin to display clairvoyance and telekinetic powers. Karellen reveals the Overlords' purpose; they serve the Overmind, a vast cosmic intelligence, born of amalgamated ancient civilizations, and freed from the limitations of material existence. The Overlords themselves are unable to join the Overmind, but serve it as a bridge species, fostering other races' eventual union with it. As Karellen explains, the time of humanity as a race composed of single individuals with a concrete identity is coming to an end. The children's minds reach into each other and merge into a single vast group consciousness. If the Pacific were to be dried up, the islands dotting it would lose their identity as islands and become part of a new continent; in the same way, the children cease to be the individuals which their parents knew and become something else, completely alien to the "old type of human". For the transformed children's safety — and also because it is painful for their parents to see what they had become — they are segregated on a continent of their own. No more human children are born, and many parents die or commit suicide. The members of New Athens destroy themselves with a nuclear bomb. Jan Rodricks emerges from hibernation on the Overlord supply ship and arrives on their planet. The Overlords permit him a glimpse of how the Overmind communicates with them. When Jan returns to Earth (approximately 80 years after his departure by Earth time) he finds an unexpectedly altered planet. Humanity has effectively become extinct, and he is now the last man alive. Hundreds of millions of children – no longer fitting what Rodricks defines as "human" – remain on the quarantined continent, having become a single intelligence readying themselves to join the Overmind. Some Overlords remain on Earth to study the children from a safe distance. When the evolved children mentally alter the Moon's rotation and make other planetary manipulations, it becomes too dangerous to remain. The departing Overlords offer to take Rodricks with them, but he chooses to stay to witness Earth's end, and transmit a report of what he sees. Before they depart, Rodricks asks Rashaverak what encounter the Overlords had with humanity in the past, according to an assumption that the fear that humans had of their "demonic" form was due to a traumatic encounter with them in the distant past; but Rashaverak explains that the primal fear experienced by humans was not due to a racial memory, but a racial premonition of the Overlords' role in their metamorphosis. The Overlords are eager to escape from their own evolutionary dead end by studying the Overmind, so Rodricks's information is potentially of great value to them. By radio, Rodricks describes a vast burning column ascending from the planet. As the column disappears, Rodricks experiences a profound sense of emptiness when the children have gone. Then material objects and the Earth itself begin to dissolve into transparency. Jan reports no fear, but a powerful sense of fulfillment. The Earth evaporates in a flash of light. Karellen looks back at the receding Solar System and gives a final salute to the human species... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood's_End

...First, there is the titular wizard himself. Ged is a superb creation, by any measure, and was the Archmage of my bookshelf even before he became the Archmage of Earthsea. He was by far the easiest wizard to relate to, and the least derivative I knew. Not to belittle TH White’s, Tolkien’s or Susan Cooper’s wizards (never belittle a wizard of any stripe), but they are variants on the archetype of Merlin, a Caucasian scholarly aristocrat amongst sorcerers, who appears fully formed and with little room for character development. Where the Merlins reveal themselves layer by layer, Ged grows. Each section of the novel is a stage in “Ged’s Progress”: from a village lout called Duny in Ten Alders, “wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud and proud and full of temper”, to an impatient apprentice at Re Albi, hungry for power for its own sake, to a brash student on Roke prone to inverted snobbery, to a chastened survivor on Low Torning and Pendor, to a guest in a trap on wintry Osskil, to a fugitive returning to Gont, and finally to a hunter going to his own death. The narrative is powered by Ged’s vices and virtues, and this intertwining of character and plot gives A Wizard of Earthsea an inherent rightness, like a progression of unexpected yet satisfying chord changes. Any reader with experience of adolescence will recognise herself, or himself, in Ged’s portrait, and because we identify with Ged’s failings, we worry for him, can hardly bear to look when disaster hits, and afterwards care deeply about his fate. Compared to Ged, the novel’s other characters are minor ones in terms of “screen time” and only three appear in more than one episode of Ged’s life: Ogion the Silent, Ged’s master on Gont; Vetch, a friend who sometimes knows Ged better than Ged knows Ged; and Serret, an ill-intentioned sorceress. Yet even the characters that appear most fleetingly seem to be endowed by Le Guin with a fully thought-out inner life, so that when they speak, act and respond, they do so as human beings who have lived lives as full, broken, light, dark, messy and real as Ged’s and ours. Here a fisherman named Pechvarry, whose dying son Ged tried but failed to save, meets the young wizard on his victorious return from Pendor: “‘I did not know you were so mighty, my lord.’ There was fear in that because he had dared make Ged his friend, but there was reproach in it also. Ged had not saved a little child, though he had slain dragons.” How human this brief passage makes Pechvarry, how conflicted, and how visible it makes his scars. Le Guin’s thumbnail sketches contain the psychological depth of oil paintings. The notion that these people on the periphery of Ged’s story aren’t real never crosses my mind. Pechvarry et al. are still out there in their corner of Earthsea, getting on with their lives. As for the titular wizard, so for his titular world. “The rhythmic structure of narrative is both journey-like and architectural,” Le Guin has written. “Great novels offer us not only a series of events, but a place, a landscape of the imagination which we can inhabit and return to. This may be particularly clear in the ‘secondary universe’ of fantasy, where not only the action but the setting is avowedly invented by the author.” Earthsea is an archipelago, dense with islands at its centre and sparser at its edges, and after my first reading, it joined Tolkien’s Middle-earth to form an elite fantasy-world super-league of two. (George RR Martin’s Westeros has since made it three, but CS Lewis’s Narnia feels too fey and allegorical to qualify.) Tolkien, whose influence Le Guin acknowledges, casts a long shadow over 20th-century fantasy, and yet (after donning my riot gear) I would argue that Earthsea is a superior creation to Middle-earth. No territory is as fertile as virgin territory, but Tolkien’s sylvan elves, earthy dwarves, cod-Arthurian knights, scrotum-faced orcs and Dark Lords in implausible towers have ossified into cliche. Earthsea is a fantasy world, and proud of it, mapped by its creator in 1966–7 on a large sheet of butcher’s paper with crayons in a house full of young children. Earthsea has magic, dragons, its own myths and prehistory; but its magic is weighted with metaphysics, its dragons are psychodragons of air and mind, more akin to dangerous Chinese sages than Tolkien’s Smaug; and Earthsea is so human a world – with trade-routes, local politics, class hierarchies, infant mortality, abuse, addiction and slavery – that its fantastical elements feel almost quotidian. Even Earthsea’s islands, with names such as Atnini, Komokome, Selidor and the Isle of the Ear, have a habit of morphing into islands in each reader’s memory: the Hebrides, the Cyclades, the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, or Hawaii... https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/23/david-mitchell-wizard-of-earthsea-tolkien-george-rr-martin

The standing water breeds reptiles of the mind.

Also... The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/23/david-mitchell-wizard-of-earthsea-tolkien-george-rr-martin

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/14/she-makes-the-ordinary-feel-as-important-as-the-epic-the-gift-of-ursula-le-guin

Alas. Godspeed. Ursula K Le Guin, sci-fi and fantasy author, dies at 88 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/23/ursula-k-le-guin-sci-fi-fantasy-author-dies-at-88

WaPo: Mueller seeks to question Trump https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/23/politics/mueller-question-trump/index.html

Here he is our beloved Suckrates.

Actually, only to pun on @MsGuy's use of the word 'cut'.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r7T9muqv7bY