Family Planning law Title X assistance in the hands of Evangelicals... again

Bush has apparently appointed another anti-contraceptives activist to Title X. Dr. Susan Orr campaigned against requiring health insurers to cover contraceptives, claiming that it would violate the conscience of insurer. She said that requiring it "would make everyone collaborators in the culture of death." She has also said that birth control should not be covered under insurance anyway because "fertility is not a disease."

I don't see why anyone is at all surprised by this. As I blogged back in November of last year, the previous nominee to Title X, believed that the brain's receptors to sexual pleasure have a limited lifespan and if you have premarital sex, or even masturbate, you use up those receptors and "diminish the power of your brain to maintain a permanent bond with an individual."

This is clearly a trophy posting that the Bush administration believes it can give to the religious right without seriously risking its political capital elsewhere. That's it. Fuck the families who need its support.

Must write faster!

I was in the library today, looking at all the bad science fiction writers who seem to have wild books of derring-do on the shelves. Some of them seemed to be terrific rehashes of themes that have been beaten about since the 1950s, soldiers doing soldiery things, AIs doing HAL-ish things, and so on. And I started to angst because, really, the one big thing missing from my first Caprice Starr novel was, well, the big thing. Every good SF book's got one. Something huge falls from the sky was a popular one for a while. Set us up the bomb. Illyan Simon forgetting himself for a moment at dinner. That sort of big thing.

I hadn't come up with one. I was thinking, I should have everything I needed: I had corruption, and pecadillos that bordered on the local culture's obscene-beyond-words, and threatened riots breaking out because the obscene-beyond-words gets mistranslated into a different kind of obscenity. I had the bright, slightly neurotic heroine with the mysterios background, the sad mysterious sidekick, the mustache-twirling villain (man, the priest with a rubber fetish was a godsend), I had the ready-to-explode Slums of Mars ™, full of a half-million down-and-outers marooned in underground tenements arcologies maintained by a Mars Agricultural Syndicate resentful at the constant, government-imposed upkeep of an aging, creaky infrastucture and its ungrateful occupants...

Oh.

Must write faster.

Very strange drug reaction

So, I'm almost over this damn flu, I hope. I've been much better today. I have almost all of the energy I've been missing for the past week, no weird loss of body temperature integrity, no noticeable fever or explicit weakness. Hopefully, I'll be up to real human interaction in a couple of days.

For the past three days, however, something very odd has happened to me when I've slept. I've been having exceptionally vivid dreams, dreams that I remember. I never remember my dreams, and yet I've had three nights in a row that I recall one clearly. All three were straightforward narratives, too, one a very simple erotic dream involving Omaha, one was a slice-of-life scene with Omaha with no oddity or eroticsm to it whatsover, and the third was-- and this was really weird-- a vignette in which I was the POV character in a Journal Entry story (and no, not Shardik, but Darzi from the Peren & Darzi stories), and Darzi was dreaming about boinking the woman with whom he just had a mutual "let's just be friends" moment when last I wrote about him. It was the scene I'd planned on writing, only in monomaniacal first person and full color. Quite nifty, actually. Dreaming about dreaming about fucking. Hmm.

The only drug in common on all three days was dextromethorphan^[?], 30mg, way under the typical dosage (200mg) needed to induce anything vaguely like the mild hallucinogenic effects described in the literature.

Just a weird thing to notice.