The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by JBWoodford:

Let me hasten slowly to the defense of Clancy-as-he-was, with the caveat that I haven't read anything of his since the villainous Japanese plutocrats one...Debt of Honor? In his Super Bowl-gets-nuked book (which I may be misremembering), the superhuman ex-SEAL and his sidekick have captured the people who actually set the bomb. Ex-SEAL tortures them to find out who they were working for, if there was another bomb, like that. They spill their guts and finger the Clancyverse Khomeini. Ex-SEAL passes this info up the chain of command, whereupon the President decides he's going to nuke the city of Qom to get the Khomeini-analog. However, Our Hero refuses to back up the President on this, precipitating some sort of Constitutional crisis. This turns out (what a surprise!) to be the right thing to do: The bombers lied. They wanted to wreck the reputation of the US in the Middle East, and wiping out a city that way to get one person would have done that. Eerily prescient, eh?

Anyway, I find it kind of interesting that Clancy-as-he-was wrote a ticking time bomb story where the Good Guys used torture and got demonstrably incorrect information. The authors inspired by him don't seem to have gotten the message, though.

Re If all stories..., it reminded me more than a little of Randall Garrett and Lin Carter's "Masters of the Metropolis," only dryer and less pulpy. Long live Sam IM4SF+ and his Wonder Sense!

I call your attention to the following use for AOL CD's:

Optical spectrometers.

My wife teaches high school chemistry, so we saved up a bunch of CD's for her classes. Breaking them all up into wedges was incredibly tedious, but the results are pretty impressive (esp. if you've got sodium-vapor streetlights).

JBWoodford

WRT speculation that Bush Jr. might have been working for the CIA, if you think nepotism might've been behind it the dates don't match up. Bush Sr. was named DCI in January 1976, a couple of years after Jr. was out of the TANG.

Frankly, once you get past nepotism I don't see any reason for the CIA to *want* Bush Jr. At the time (and some might say even now), he had no particular qualifications for intelligence work (yeah, yeah, insert obvious remark here), and if he'd done anything along those lines I can't really see him keeping quiet about it this long.

JBWoodford

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