I’m back from Thanksgiving and making an early New Year’s vow to lose a few pounds, at least the ones corresponding to the extra mince meat and pumpkin pie.  The mince meat pie is a special weakness of mine, but I’ll admit that I tend to overeat on this maximal food consumption of days.

Over-consumption seems to be a common thing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  I’m always amazed by the thousands of people that stand in line since 4 a.m. in order to get into the store first and snatch up all those items on sale.  The advantage here is that I can relax, look at the news and say to myself, “What fools these mortals be.”

Internet Monday has become almost as bad.  Suddenly my e-mail increases by twenty per cent as every on-line company I have done business with sends me the equivalent of junk mail.  Correction: I shouldn’t say every.  My trusted website design firm doesn’t badger me with promotions, for example.

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Thanksgiving, they say, is a time to give thanks.  I suppose the original intent was to give thanks to God for his bounty, but we Americans tend to enjoy the bounty (overeating) in a purely secular manner.  I wonder if the indigestion from the stuffing and the pumpkin pies with whipped cream makes a lot of us forget what the holiday is really about.  In order to partially correct for this, let me make some irreverent suggestions on how people might give thanks.

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The decision to try five of the Gitmo terrorists in NYC has generated a lot of debate recently.  Along with many other people, I have mixed thoughts on the subject.

For personal reasons, I’d like the terrorists to be tried in a military court, convicted, and then shot, the latter only because I can’t think of a punishment that’s suitably horrible for them.  Those that argue that 9/11 wasn’t a military action forget the U. S. Navy’s battles against pirates, from the Barbary pirates of the early 1800′s to the Somalia pirates of today.  One can argue that any organized attack against U.S. citizens or U.S. assets should always be considered a military action and those making the attack enemy combatants.

In the abstract, though, I empathize with the idea that we live in a civilized country that is not run by the military, so an attack against U.S. citizens could be tried in a U.S. court (Timothy McVeigh is an example).  One leans that way also if one considers that we are trying to show the world how democracy is supposed to work.  So we probably will have to take the chance that some clever defense lawyer denies the 9/11 victims justice by reducing the punishment of their attackers, or, even worse, by getting them off without any punishment and with a free trip home.

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As promised a few weeks ago, the trusty website design people at Monkey C Media have updated my website to feature my new novel The Midas Bomb and performed a little housecleaning besides.  For those new to this website, The Midas Bomb is the prequel to Full Medical and Soldiers of God, although each one of these novels can be read independently of the others.  The Midas Bomb considers a lethal mix of the Wall Street financial meltdown (in some sense, home-grown terrorism, especially for those with 401(k)’s) and new terrorist attacks on the city that never sleeps.

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I’ve always preferred Dean Koontz over Stephen King.  King can sell books, to be sure, but he just doesn’t write as well as Koontz.  Koontz not only sells books, but he is the literary master of suspense and terror.  He has made his publishers rich; millions of his books have been bought.  He is the Asimov of his genre, producing a lot of high quality tales for hungry readers.

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It has been often said that a presidential candidate must win the extremes of his party in the primary and then move to the middle for the general election.  Last Tuesday’s election in upstate New York offers a new wrinkle on this piece of wisdom.

In that historically red district of New York the Republican Party had to eat crow.  They endorsed the ultra-conservative Doug Hoffman over moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava.  She left the race after receiving a pounding from Republican extremists and threw her support to Democrat Bill Owens, who won the election in spite of the mudslinging by the likes of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh.  The lesson: by supporting the extremist and removing their moderate candidate , the Republicans forced the voters, who normally move to the middle, to vote for the only candidate left there, the Democrat.  Ms. Scozzafava, you have the last laugh.

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The contentious battles between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, red states and blue states, and on and on, have made lots of news during the last decade of last century and this first decade of this century.  Many would say that these battles all reduce to the same thing: liberal or progressive values versus conservative ones.

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I haven’t dedicated enough blog space to the dangers of electronic privacy invasion and identity theft, so this review of The Broken Window helps to fill the void.  Talk about fiction with social relevance!  Deaver’s novel is a scary expose of how Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and every fascist’s dream of complete control over citizens’ lives, can be achieved.  We have the tools to do this to ourselves right now-it is no longer just in the realm of sci-fi.

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