Back of the Envelope

Yay, I'm getting it up almost on time this week!

Sluggy Freelance — So, despite being a ruthless murderer who sold hundreds of souls to Rithuly in order to escape from the Never, Kesandru isn't such a bad guy. Interesting... I suppose anyone can reform their ways. Rammer discovers some bad news in the meantime: it turns out that Aylee's a ghoul. The bottom line is that the ghouls don't serve Rithuly, because they're not former humans at all: they're aliens!

Day by Day — Zed jokes with pilots about Al Gore, and Jan deals with the new media generation of soldiers. Meanwhile, Skye and Sam debate the fairness doctrine.

Scary Go Round — Mother Shipton's plan doesn't involve saving the world so much as collecting the ingredients for a spell. That's the reason she has Amy all tied up. Meanwhile, the destruction of the world is beginning with the marriage of Erin, but her rapidly shrinking body no longer interests Bob.

Dominic Deegan — No comics this week. The artist's dealing with a tough time.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Margaret's whipping the guys into shape, which in her case involves nun-chucks and the threat of bodily harm. Good luck with that.

Schlock Mercenary — Tagon's in a bad mood, and he takes it out by going shooting, carving Xinchub's head in Schlock's comic book and filling it full of holes. Meanwhile, Xinchub's been cut in half. It remains to be seen whether he, like Kevyn, can survive certain death.

I'll be hosting the next Storyblogging Carnival, the seventy-third, here at Back of the Envelope. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals. This next carnival will be going up July 2nd.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, June 30th. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

I meant to get this up sooner. There was a problem with the permalink at first but it should be fixed now. Anyway... the latest Storyblogging Carnival is up at Dodgeblogium. Thanks for hosting it, Andrew, and I apologize for not getting the link up sooner.

This is the third time I've done this. We're getting pretty close to being the fortnightly webcomic update.

Sluggy Freelance — Torg meets Defense Secretary Rammer, who believes Torg's story of being a dimensional traveler. He also covers the origin story of the zombies, and tells him that most of humanity has moved to outer space. He then takes him to meet the president, who turns out to be... Kesandru! Bad guy alert! Torg knows too much.

Day by Day — Skye and Sam talk about the joys of pregnancy, Zed checks in from Iraq from time to time and in between looks over the journalists' shoulders. And in Washington, it's politics as usual.

Scary Go Round — Shelley's attempts to steal a space shuttle aren't exactly successful. She'll have to rely on other methods to get the moon's attention. It seems that the rest of the team's are having pretty good luck, though. And Erin's all set to marry Bob: no one seems to have realized what's going on there. However, it almost seems as if Erin is shrinking.

Dominic Deegan — The Chosen who came to Barthis for revenge has kind of lost interest in the whole deal, what with great food, nice clothes, and a friendly Dominic Deegan. I get the impression that Dominic knows exactly what's going on.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Marsha delivers something to Margaret from Mike. We still don't know what it is. While she's planning a break-in, Blue is looking for ways to keep tabs on Dave, and has a run-in with Jay. Fortunately, she's smarter than he thinks... she's already figured that some Dave's bullet wounds came from him.

Schlock Mercenary — Tagon tries to sell his crew on extracting Xinchub. He fails, so he has to turn Petey down, even when he offers 20x the original pay. There's some concern that Tagon is coming down with a case of morality, but apparently hatred as motivation to turn down a job doesn't count as morality. Meanwhile, Schlock's involved in a firearms safety comic book scam.

Andrew Ian Dodge will be hosting the next Storyblogging Carnival, the seventy-second, at Dodgeblogium. I'll link to Andrew's announcement post as soon as I see it. Meanwhile, if you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals. This next carnival will be going up June 18th. If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at lagwolf-at-mac-dot-com, including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, June 16th.

So the house has passed a law which bans cloning, except that what it really bans is reproductive cloning, not cloning for destruction. This is, of course, the opposite of what we should want.

While I consider cloning for destruction (also called therapeutic cloning) to be abhorrent, I don't have the same moral objection to cloning for reproduction: creating a living human being who is a clone of another. I would argue that it is not inherently wrong to produce a human being who is the genetic duplicate of another. An identical twin, for example, is genetically the same as another person. However, I'm hard pressed to think of a reason to do so which is not immoral. It may be that I am nitpicking here. Let's say that the technology has progressed to the point where it is relatively easy to produce a human clone, without any of the nasty health issues that clones usually suffer these days. Why would you want to do so? Cloning, by definition, produces a person who is nearly the same as another person, so barring extraordinary circumstances, that's the reason why you would use it. There are many reasons for doing so, most of them obviously wrong. For example, you may want to produce a clone so that you can harvest his organs to save the original. You may want to reproduce a loved one, so you have, in some sense, his companionship again. You may want to reproduce one of the great scientists or political leaders of the previous generation. You may want to test that nature vs. nurture hypothesis. In none of these reasons are you valuing the clone as a person in and of himself: in every case, you assign value to the original, and the clone's status is second class.

So my objection for cloning for reproduction is not opposition to creating a clone, but rather that the motivation for doing so devalues the life and dignity of the clone. That said, plenty of children throughout history have been produced for the wrong reasons. We do not try to regulate how or why children are produced. So do objections to every imaginable motivation for human cloning constitute sufficient reason to ban an action which in itself is not objectionable? Perhaps it is worthwhile to ban an act which can only conceivably come from bad motives, but I readily admit that I cannot imagine every possible motive. Does banning the act of cloning further devalue those clones who may be produced illegally?

I don't really know the answers to these questions, I'll admit.

I've been staying out of the immigration debate. I've said some stuff on it before, mostly to the tune that the worker visa isn't really a bad idea, but it's tricky to implement. And having absorbed more of the debate before, it's obvious that the enforcement side is really, really tough, and we do a terrible job of it. In other words, I'm torn between the two sides without any substantial investment in either, which makes me just dead tired of the debate and the amazing level of venom involved. I really think that Jonah Goldberg gets it right in his USA Today article:

Conservatives normally take great pride in the caliber of our intramural debates. But this is a shameful moment.

Oh, to be sure, there are racists, bigots, xenophobes and the like among the critics of immigration reform. Of this I am quite sure. I am also certain there are people who believe that the marketplace is the highest source of values, and the bottom line is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.
...
But you know what? Even if these are the overriding motives for all of the combatants in the debate over immigration reform, none of them is publicly using these arguments to justify his position. No one — of any consequence at least — is saying we need to keep the Mexicans out because they're racially inferior. No one is openly pushing amnesty as a vital first step toward the nullification of the U.S. Constitution.

Perhaps chief among the many problems with these sorts of accusations is that they help no one, advance nothing. Only those already convinced cheer the unsubstantiated charges of villainy. Indeed, crying racism to delegitimize an opponent's legitimate arguments is typically a left-wing tactic, and conservatives do not color themselves with glory by mimicking it.

So can we please calm down and discuss this more rationally, and without the name-calling?

If I keep letting this slip, it'll soon become a fortnightly webcomic update. I'll try to do better next week, I promise.

Sluggy Freelance — It's been two weeks of guest comics. The first one was Bikini Suicide Sasha Days, with a lot less Sasha than you'd expect considering her name was in the title. The second had Zoe pining for Torg, and her consciences cooperating to goad her on, which of course results in camel-related injuries. It was great fun, but I'm glad we're back to seeing how Torg and Aylee are getting on in another dimension.

Day by Day — Jan and Zed are getting along okay in Iraq, despite a bout of airsickness for Jan. Damon's doing his best to help the pregnant Sam, and meanwhile has a run-in with her sister Skye, who isn't exactly friendly towards him.

Scary Go Round — John Allison's been running some guest comics for the past two weeks, covering a wide range of ideas, generally revolving around Amy and Shelley, or sometimes the Boy and Esther So we get robotic Prime Ministers, advertisements for cupcakes in Esther's dark music, and a giant Shelley in a short skirt.


Dominic Deegan — Dominic's brother, Gregory, has a bit of a magical mishap. His magic, which keeps him in top physical condition, has gone overboard, making him a wee bit hulk-like. Dominic helps him turn it off, reducing him to a skinny weakling in the process. One of the Chosen has come hunting him for revenge, but in his current condition he's unrecognizable.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — With Mike's death, Margaret is taking over NOES. It's good to see that she's so proactive, planning to go have a talk with Joe, who's slightly psychotic and has a tendency towards possession. She also plans on whipping the guys into shape with intense physical training. Not a bad idea overall, but her plans for physical training probably fall under what some people call torture.

Schlock Mercenary — With the mission to rescue Xinchub, Tagon's got to convince his crew to do the job. They aren't exactly eager, as most of them would rather just kill him, slowly and painfully. Xinchub's busy trying to survive being king, what with rebels after him, Jeevee quite willing to see him dead, and the UNS unhappy with a former military officer becoming the leader of a foreign planet. What do you do when everyone wants you dead?

Welcome to the seventy-first Storyblogging Carnival. This one is a bit unusual as a number of entries come from a single writer, Jeremiah Lewis. Jeremiah's a great writer, but because of technical problems, some of his submissions to recent carnivals were lost, so we're putting them all in this one. Since they're all part of his fifty word series, they're all really short. Enjoy.

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The Weekend After
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 50 word brief story rated R.

Reflections on a violation.

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Marketing Education
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 50 word brief story rated PG.

An executive makes the evening news.

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Ancient Vessel
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 50 word brief story rated PG.

A valuable antiquity, overlooked.

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Entertainment is a Killer
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 50 word brief story rated R.

The secret life of clowns.

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Marriage Proposal
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 50 word brief story rated PG.

For some things, only a shotgun will do.

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Jesussic Park
by Mark Rayner of The Skwib
A 800 word brief story rated PG-13.

Imagining what the Sermon on the Mount would have sounded like if there were raptors (and a T-Rex).

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Crippled
by Elvis D of 365fiction
A 1,398 word brief story rated R.

The ultimate test of artificial intelligence.

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This concludes the seventy-first Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.