scanning for life-signs

Yeah, and I’ve never figured out the security feature that makes scanning for life-signs more effective when you sign a little song to the computer. But sometimes I guess it’s just more urgent to know, little life signs, where are you?

That’s pretty much exactly how it seems to me. I guess I understand how American fans who were born after 9/11 and Facebook might have a different perspective, because privacy means something different now–but it’s cognitive empathy, which means I understand their feelings, not the sympathetic empathy of someone who shares it.

Ironically, I learned these cognitive empathy skills from Captain Picard, and still consider TNG possibly the best way to expose young people to the skill. :-)

Section 31 were created as the bad guys! Genocidal maniacs who Sisko and crew fought against every step of the way.

And I don’t use the phrase “genocidal maniacs” lightly, but they were literally xenocidal and Sloane was, as a spy, less of an Ian Fleming James Bond type and more of a John le Carré type—an actual maniac in the piece of human wreckage who’s been turned violent and crazy by the stress of war.

(I really wish his end had come at Sisko’s hands, and involved contrasting Sisko’s actions in Pale Moonlight with Sloan and 31’s degeneration in to xenophobic crimes of extermination, and how both shared the same origin but ended up in very different places.

Isn’t there a version of Superman where he lands in Siberia instead of Saskatchewan and ends up a good Soviet citizen?

I don’t know what the most similar novel to The Neverending Sacrifice might be, but I think the exact opposite is probably the 1970s novels satirizing the British Raj called The Flashman Papers. They are incredibly funny, highly offensive, beautiful assaults on the landed gentry, set during one of the most incompetent, badly failed military expeditions to Afghanistan in the history of badly failed military expeditions to Afghanistan–the British one.

No, not the American one with British help–the actual British one, from way back in the seventeenth century.

If the Leif Ericson class didn’t exist, how could it be in the handbook??!