Stephen Green of Vodkapundit has posted that monster essay he's been promising for the last couple weeks. It's not bad, but the repeated cries of "media war" "media war" has brought something to the top of my mind from the festering stews out back.

Ernest May wrote a book about the quick and unexpected victory of Nazi Germany in the spring of 1940 called Strange Victory which was mostly about French intelligence failures and French planning failures, but one of the lesser points, which I think is currently quite apt, is the notable British strategic and logistical failures of that spring.

The British military intellectuals were determined to not fight the last war again. Contrary to the usual myths about Western allied doctrinal failures and the legends of the Maginot Line, the militaries of the West were determined to never fight those bloody ground-stalemates again, a sort of decades-long fear of Benet's spectral soldiers:

All night they marched, the infantrymen under pack,
But the hands gripping the rifles were naked bone
And the hollow pits of the eyes stared, vacant and black,
When the moonlight shone.

The gas mask lay like a blot on the empty chest,
The slanting helmets were spattered with rust and mold,
But they burrowed the hill for the machine gun nest
As they had of old.

And the guns rolled, and the tanks, but there was no sound,
Never the gasp or rustle of living men
Where the skeletons strung their wire on disputed ground....
I knew them, then.

"It is eighteen years," I cried. "You must come no more."
"We know your names. We know that you are the dead.
Must you march forever from France and the last, blind war?"
"Fool! From the next!" they said.

Strange Victory shows in passing the calculating British economists in ill-fitting uniform, calculating the resources and the logistics and the essential weaknesses of the Axis over the long-term. They calculated that they would fight a long war behind an expected ground stalemate and the armored walls of the British Navy, they calculated they could wage what Green calls in passing a "macroeconomic war". There was nothing wrong with their calculations - they all added up, and they dictated the wasteful expansion and diversion of their war to Norway, to interdict German logistical supplies.

The problem, of course, was that there would be no ground stalemate, no time in which to wage the expected future-war, no planned economic-war. While the British soldier-economists plotted their long term, far-sighted strategy, they let pass the unforgiving minute. They learned that wars were still fought with bullets, and chests, and bodies to stop the cannon-blasted breaches.

The cries of "media war, media war" make me think of those wise warrior-economists, who made the mistake of planning, not for the last war, but for the war after the next.

Hey, Fred - this review of a book called Sprawl: a Compact History makes it seem like a useful counter to the Crabgrass Frontier and the whole New Urbanist thing that you've been talking about recently. Hard to tell from a review, but it sounds like the writer might be stretching a bit, if all that nonsense about ancient Roman villas is indicative of the actual content, though.

Dimitri Rotov asks what's happened to Edward Hagerman, author of The American Civil War and the Origin of Modern Warfare. I haven't read this book yet, but I've encountered it in footnotes often enough, especially in Hess and Nosworthy.

The answer seems to be that Hagerman isn't a Civil War historian, strictly speaking. He's an academic historian from York University in Toronto, and he's moved on to other military matters. His name is all over what looks like a massive left-wing conspiracy theory about alleged American biological warfare in the Korean War due to a book he co-authored in 1999, The United States and Biological Warfare. There's some suggestion that some of the key evidence that Hagerman and his co-author relied on in accusing the United States of waging biological warfare in Korea was most likely enemy propaganda.

Personally, reading the authors' unpublished reply to a negative New York Times review, it sounds to me as if they were neck deep in the Kool-Aid. Their key argument seems to be that Mao and Zhou believed that their troops were being bombed with anthrax, and why would they be lying in their own internal documents? I think the recent experience with Hussein's own people's belief that they had WMD, when they had not, and long experience with the endemic paranoia, myopia, and inclination to believe ones' own propaganda, characteristic of totalitarian governments, ought to make anyone careful about generalizing from the apparent beliefs of tyrants. When you throw into the mixture Kim Il Sung's well-known habit of manipulating his patrons and allies without compunction or restraint, and I can't imagine why you would ever want to rely on anything controversial coming out of that end of the historical record.

In short, I don't buy it, not a bit.

Well, so much for that. The big downpour late yesterday afternoon washed most of the leaves out of the canopy, at least here in the valley.

Nothing much going on. Getting a lot of reading in, although I kind of stalled partway through the new Pratchett paperback. The Crowbar cancelled their last poker tournament without much in the way of advance notice, which made for a pointless trip to State College. Since there's a new round of tournaments starting up at the HiWay Pizza out on North Atherton, it's probably for the best. The Crowbar was a dingy, sticky dump of a venue, anyways. Let the bar-bands have it.

We've gotten a much better leaf-turning season than I had expected, given the semi-drought conditions throughout most of the last year or so. The trees on the mountain slopes have all turned a near-perfect, uniform shade of orange, with just the slightest tinge of green from the few hold-outs. Many of the valley floor trees have lost their leaves, but there's the occasional tree with a glorious set of bright crayola orange leaves. There was a set of them towering over the Catholic cemetery at the top of Bishop Street this morning, glowing in the early-morning sun and fast-fading mist, stark against the blue sky and lit up like a flame.

I love this time of year.

I was pretty pissed when the Pennsylvania legislature voted itself an unconstitutional same-term payraise last summer, so I was equally happy this morning to see the headlines in this morning's paper as I took my morning walk about town. Repeal! Ha!

Sometimes the right thing happens, if you give it time and a bit of bile.

Spent the morning and early afternoon waiting on a new computer at work. Boredom is my muse. That meddlesome bitch. ^_^

Rock, stone, willful self
Our crystalline seed
An inorganic creation
Unceasing in a sort of
Unmoving motion
Forming without effort
Or helping hand
Each element converging on
A welcoming surface
The design inherent
In the adamantine core
Which,
Doing nothing
Draws the whole
Into its destined shape.

Rock, stone, blinded self
Flung into unknowns
And endless expanses
unmoving uncertain unknown
But never indetermined
Set in a certain course
Isolate
And unchanging
Determined in the beginning
By an initial collision
Hurtling through empty
Voiding spaces
Unchanging nothingness
Parted solely by the passage
No hope of volition
Our existence a decision
And the consequences to come.

Can an essay be both masturbatory and utter horseshit at the same time? Perhaps not in strict metaphoric terms, but almost certainly so in practical terms given this egregious example.

Or perhaps the entire effort is an exercise in high irony, an act of academic parody. If so, it's neither all that funny, nor particularly clever. Sometimes stupid is just stupid.

I'm going over next week's ballot to see if there's any issues I ought to be thinking about.

There's some paper on Judge Nigro, enough so I'm thinking of voting "no". The other judge, Newman, seems inoffensive if dull. That's the whole and total of state items on the ballot. Eh, off years.

Countywide, it's the big district attorney face-off, as these things tend to be lifetime offices unless the DA gets caught with a sheep, or, you know, disappears suspiciously off the face of the earth. Which, I suppose, would still make it a lifetime office in the latter case... Arnold hasn't done anything since the primaries to make me think anything more of her than I did at the time. The one debate note I looked into had her complaining that a police union endorsement of her opponent, Madeira, wasn't actually an endorsement by the police. Not impressive. Which is sort of a shame, because Madeira hasn't done anything to get me enthused about backing him, either - I'm not particularly fond of a prosecutor who seems to specialize primarily in drug cases. Madeira probably gets it in a tight race to the bottom, unless he's found with a sheep before next week.

Geez, there's a race between a Lose and a Luse for jury commissioner. That's ripe for typo-driven upset. Ann Lose, the Republican, is the incumbent, and I remember her being a perfectly amiable and inoffensive presence at my last two jury call-ups. I'm going to try to remember the right spelling, and vote for the incumbent.

Incidentally, there's a Patrica Lose running for tax collector in Bellefonte on a write-in campaign - I saw two of her signs while walking on Curtin Hill yesterday. I expect they're some sort of relatives. I've seen too much of how much of a pain-in-the-ass write-in ballots are for the ladies who run the election to be enthused about that campaign. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to *be* a tax collector on the ballot - what happened to Thal? To make it even more confusing, Patricia Lose is also on the Bellefonte West ballot for Judge of Elections. Admittedly, Judge of Elections is definitely not a full-time position, and I think Tax Collector might be; it's definitely more of a year-round sort of thing.

As for the rest of the local choices, only Bellefonte West gets any choices to speak of - we actually have more council candidates than council seats, and we have a contest for inspector of elections - lucky us. I think I'm going to vote for Leah Ranio - I slightly know both candidates, and she seems the better choice.

As for the council candidates, we have the Republican incumbents DeCusati and Heidt versus a Democratic challenger, Joanne Tosti-Vasey. Tosti-Vasey doesn't look familiar, and she compares poorly to the relative newcomer, DeCusati, who replaced an incumbent who died in office. Looks like the Repubs for council.

We have, of course, no choices for school district - that was all resolved during the primaries.

Meh. Boring year.

You know it's bad for AD Vision when they have one of their cut-rate store-on-fire sales and I can't justify buying enough to cover the shipping charge. There's a lot of relatively new stuff in there, too. It can't be good for their long-term business when people like me get the idea that it's never worth-while to buy the first version of an ADV title, because we'll inevitably see a brick of that thing we paid in excess of a hundred dollars for in the single-disc version, selling at a cut-rate bargain-bin price of ten dollars - Daiguard, BTW, which is definitely worth the shipping charge if you haven't seen it yet.

At least they're finally getting around to the second volume of Princess Tutu. Watch me buy it at almost retail, like a schmuck.

Caught Solty Rei last evening, before we had to toddle off for the weekly home-game. Dave and I were arguing over whether it was a direct rip of Blade Runner, or a strictly derivative rip of Bubblegum Crisis. I was doing pretty well on the Blade Runner front, until two chixor in partial Knight Sabre battlesuit armor showed up, chasing a lolicyborg. The show was fun for about five minutes' worth of "spot the homage/ripoff", but after that, I had to pay attention to the actual plot, which was tedious, and the writing, which was nearly indescribably inept. Solty Rei's script felt like it was written by a replicant - someone who knew what scripts were, and what they were supposed to accomplish, but was comprehensively incapable of making any actual human connection with the emotional needs of the story. The writing staff of Solty Rei failed the scriptwriting equivalent of a Voight-Kampff empathy test.

I finished reading three of Eric Wittenberg's books on Civil War eastern Union Cavalry - Little Phil, the Union Cavalry Comes of Age, and Protecting the Flanks. I bought the latter two sight-unseen, and was somewhat disappointed in the physical presentation and brevity of Protecting the Flanks, which turned out to be a short tactical study married to a battlefield guide.

Protecting the Flanks also had one of the least reader-friendly fonts I have ever encountered in a professional publication - the dashes were light, thin marks at a forty-five degree angle to the line of text, and visually indistinguishable from paper flaws in an indifferent light. The text was also laid out double-spaced, as if it were a high school term paper. I'm inclined mostly to blame the publisher rather than the author, but lord, what a mess. I had never read much about the cavalry actions east of the main armies at Gettysburg, though, so what little there was of Protecting the Flanks was worth the slight cost, I suppose.

Little Phil is the latest in a relatively popular micro-genre, the enthusiastic revilement of Phillip "Little Phil" Sheridan. To be frank, so many people have had so little good to say about Sheridan over the years, that the idea that he's some sort of paragon of military virtue worth tearing down to reveal the rotten truth behind the lie, is kind of foreign to me, as if the sentiment had been translated poorly from a not-particularly-translation-friendly dialect like Pashtun or Osaka-ben. Ah, I suppose this is what comes of fads of revision and counter-revision, each new song-and-dance seeming old to those that don't generally read that which has been out of the book-stores for a generation or more. After all, I've never read Battle Cry of Freedom, or Lincoln Finds a General or most of that general run of book.

Huh. The results of the Con's corporate elections were apparently posted on the website, and it ended up being a news item on Anime News Network. That's kind of freaky - it's got to be the first time any non-staffer other than our lawyer has ever really paid attention to how the Con (or strictly speaking, the corporation which runs the Con) is governed. An amazing number of people (insidery-type people from other cons, actually) are surprised to discover that the same dusty slate of silverbacks haven't been running the con for Methuselah years.

Looks like the local paper, the Centre Daily Times, has gone in pretty heavily for blogs. I'm going to give this one, Happy Valley, a trial to see if it's worth keeping up with. If nothing else, it at least promises to give an online CDT where the links don't go dead seven days after publication. I think.

Passing by Tora Bora and cruising leisurely over the Khyber Pass, there seemed to be something surreal about leaving a combat zone to head to a disaster area. It seemed the we were, in effect calling time out from the war to go to an earthquake.

v/Blackfive.

"I used to watch action movies when I was a kid, I loved them," laughed Xena, a conservative Muslim who chose her pseudonym from the film character, Xena the Warrior Princess. "My favorite actor is [Jean-Claude] Van Damme."

Xena, the heavily armed conservative Muslim. It's a story about a Lebanon-based security company which uses "modest-looking" women literally riding shotgun on their clients' trucks in Iraq. Xena is the least-serious of the bunch - the rest sound really pissed-off and ready to kill things, with an emphasis on the kidnappers and slaughterers who prey on the shipping industry in Iraq.

Via Instapundit.

Huge goddamn snowflakes the size of racquetballs are falling right now here in the middle Valley. We weren't supposed to get anything below 1500 feet, but this stuff is sticking like heck, and we're about 1280 here at the office. Pretty as hell, against the bright orange fall leaves in the patch of woods outside my office window. It's gonna accumulate at this rate - probably not enough to muck up the roads, but certainly enough to cover the lawns and fields. The meteorologists are positively giddy. The one snow-doubter is being taunted with his breakfast of crow.

The invite for next year's National History Day thing just came. The theme for 2006? "Taking a Stand in History: People, Ideas, Events". You think the resulting papers, projects, and documentaries will be a tad... political?

The kids already get a pretty hefty shove down that slippery goddamn slope from their NEA-addled lefty-zomboid teachers in a normal year, with a neutral theme. Why not just go ahead with something like "From Each According to Their Abilities: Parties, Vanguards and the Dialectic" while you're at it?

Calm morning in an otherwise busy week here at work.

We've been watching the new shows for the fall anime season. They're actually pretty good for a change - for the most part, 2005 had been a pretty lame year for new anime. Admittedly, fall is when the studios and networks roll out their decent shows. Winter is an afterthought, and summer is for galfeltch and harems. It's usually spring and fall, and this year's spring was utterly forgettable for the most part.

New fall shows...


I didn't really like the Blood movie when it came out way back when. It wasn't really much more than a proof-of-concept for computer-assisted animation composition & editing, and the actual story and such just didn't do anything for me. They finally got around to doing a TV version called Blood +, which skips quickly from the Vietnam War-era setting of the movie into the usual contemporary timeframe which most TV anime are set in. But hey! at least the show is set in Okinawa instead of the usual indeterminate-Kanto blandness. Our protagonist is a relatively well-adjusted amnesiac version of the movie's flattened-affect schoolgirl killing-machine, which is an improvement right there. The idea of a flattened-affect female protagonist works a lot better in theory than it did in the movie. The new, TV version of Saya gives us some emotional material to work with, when she starts regressing into said killing-machine mode. The TV premiere also has a lot more style and flair going for it than did the movie, which was a pretty straightforward bit of realism, if your version of realism features seven-foot-tall maneating bat-creatures and katana-swinging, emotionless schoolgirls. I'm definitely looking forward to more episodes of this. Not without some trepidation, though - last year Tsukuyomi MOON PHASE started out as a bold, stylish and sharp vampire show, and look where *that* mess ended up.

Shakugan no Shana, on the other hand, looks to be this season's Melody of Oblivion. On first glance it appeared to be a fighting-psychic-teenagers kind of kludge like the execrable Tokyo Underground, but then our bland good-natured protagonist got his torso split down the middle at the shoulder by what I expected would be his love-interest, and she told him the reason that he wasn't dead was that his soul had been eaten, and that he was a walking puppet of the gods, or some such thing. Very freaksome, and off-putting. It's a little like the third season of Sailor Moon if all the people whose hearts were taken by the monsters-of-the-week lost them permanently, and went stumbling off through their lives Stepford-Wife-style with the soul equivalent of clockwork substituting for what they really used to be. Our narrator and protagonist isn't really a person, he's a self-aware thing, by the logic of the show. The actual aware actors - monsters and anti-heroine alike - treat him with the dismissive and annoyed contempt one might give a parrot in a cage at a business meeting. It'll probably sucking pretty soon - lord knows, Melody of Oblivion did - but it might be worth paying some attention until then.

Paradise Kiss was a hell of a manga, sharp and pretty and funny as all heck on the march. I didn't really see how they were going to make an anime out of it, and now that I've seen the result, I'm not sure why they bothered. Apparently somebody wanted to do something avant-garde hip and goofy-cool, and since the manga was all of those things... If you haven't read the manga - do it now! it's short at five volumes, and Tokyo Pop is re-printing it! - the protagonist starts out as a joyless grind of a high school senior who gets scouted by a bunch of art-school weirdos looking for a model for their fashion-studio output. Somebody pulled a major boner by getting Madhouse to run the production, though. Madhouse is one of these studios which produce highly polished, well-animated material with all the grit, soul, and poetry drained out of them. If you're lucky, they'll remove the trepaine and patch up the skull, leaving said production to shuffle, zombie-like, off into the usual obscurity of Madhouse releases. I seem to remember that Gantz was a mostly-Madhouse affair - so was the bland and charmless TV version of X. Madhouse's director's idea of "hip and quirky" apparently features the heavy usage of garish and intrusive photo-montage scene-wipes and a peculiar form of comic superdeformity which bears no resemblance to either Ai Yawaza's distinctive oddness, or the usual cliche run of off-the-shelf smallbodied wackiness. There's no here, here.

Aria is bland and forgettable. It's one of these cute-girls-doing-cute-harmless-things-in-a-pretty-setting shows. It's gotten a lot of good buzz, because a certain class of fanboy are collective suckers for this sort of nonevent bullshit. Bah, I say.

Mai Otome is not really a sequel of Mai Hime, which was a good show about one-half of the time. Rather, it's more of an old-fashioned re-use of character designs in a new story, in the way that old manga and anime creators like Tezuka, Leiji Matsumoto, and Go Nagai would recycle their characters and character-designs as if they were actors, dropping them into whatever story they wanted to tell. The new show is another powerful-schoolgirls story, except it's set in some sort of retro-futuristic Ruritania where the school is an elite training academy for "Otome" ["maidens"], who are basically massively powerful human weapons trained and socialized like samurai-slash-maidservants. It's very well animated, the characters and situations are lively, and it's quite yurirific. Much better start than Mai Hime which started slow and sloppy and only occasionally rose to the occasion afterwards.

Jigoku Shoujo, or Hell Girl, is this season's Hundred Ghost Stories, or what did they call that when it got imported? Oh, yeah, Requiem from the Darkness. Er, anyways - Jigoku Shoujo is a supernatural-people-giving-normal-people-what-they-deserve horror-type show. There were exactly zero sympathetic characters in the first episode, which really put me off. Looks like the world of this show is populated by victims and assholes. It's also got this nasty thing where when the victim-of-the-week gets what she wants, her soul gets claimed, and said victim goes humming happily into the sunset. The moral of the story being, apparently, that the happy are soulless. Er, no thank you. Next!

Ginban Kaleidoscope is some kind of shoujo sports anime in which the protagonist is an arrogant, nasty little piece of work, an ice-skater who habitually refers to herself as "the billion-dollar-girl". She gets her comeuppance when she flames out in some sort of competition in Montreal and knocks herself out on the ice. This somehow results in her being haunted by a Canadian boy-ghost, and she spends the rest of the episode carrying on like a crazy person. This doesn't get her committed to an insane asylum like it ought to, apparently because ice-skating prima donnas are functionally indistinguishable from your average proto-schizophrenic teenager undergoing her first psychotic break. Art isn't quite as bad as I heard, but it wasn't particularly good, and for a show about an ice-skater, there's precious little material on the ice, which you'd think would be the selling-point you'd want to push in a first episode.

My landlord's secretary showed up on my porch last night with another woman about my age, saying that new lady was thinking about buying the building, and asking if they could look around. I said "yes" before thinking about it, and found myself making excuses for my bachelorish lack of basic housekeeping skills and general sloth. The place wasn't filthy, but it wasn't clean by any reasonable standard. Kind of mortifying, really.

The would-be owner was going on about how big the space was, noting that my living room was "bigger than [her] apartment". I found myself wondering how someone living in an efficiency (because lord knows, my living room isn't much bigger than 12'x14') could afford to buy a three-apartment building, no matter how depressed the Bellefonte real estate market might be. Then I realized that she probably wouldn't be renting out the building, but rather would be fixing it up as a residence. Then I started worrying about my monthly lease, which makes it painfully easy to set me out on my ear on the kerb with my stuff piled around me.

I hate moving. Ben thinks it'll be good for me to get moved out to a better place - he hates my apartment's layout - due to the leaking roof and the poor maintenance and all the rest of it. I still hate moving.

I finished reading the sequel to Dies the Fire, the Protector's War, last weekend as I rudely read during the Con's elections meeting in Harrisburg. [Jessica, it's a shame you don't come to these any more. There was discussion of Federal Reserve policy and the ramifications of the coming replacement of Greenspan in the context of non-profit financial decisions. I plagarized your opinions shamelessly. The elections themselves were something of a waste, as there was very little of controversy, and what controversy there were elicited long-winded opinions from what seemed like every member present. At great length.] The first book was very much a stand-alone affair - it ended quite solidly, and sufficed unto itself. The sequel, on the other hand, is quite explicitly a serial affair, and ends on an annoyingly vague rising note, with the actual fate of several characters unstated but quite definite. Stirling just didn't want to *tell* us before we went on the the next book in what is apparently going to be a trilogy. Bah.

Oh, and the new book establishes retroactively that the survival rate world-wide was less than 1%, not 10%. Seems rather exaggerated.

Fascinating hand-annotation of a translation of the Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter from Athena of Terrorism Unveiled. Very interesting - especially the line "more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media". The tone of the letter in general sounds like R.E. Lee corresponding with one of his less clever subordinates. Zawahiri is a scary-smart guy. I think I'm more worried about him than that poetic bastard, bin Laden.

I started going to the Tuesday night poker tournaments at Bar Bleu last night, after Dave talked me into taping the show I had been watching on Tuesday nights. This makes two nights a week spent playing cards in smoky bars. Hope the conservatives are right about secondary smoke not being a big cancer risk...

I made the final table at Bar Bleu, which seems like a bigger deal than it was at Crowbar's much smaller Sunday night tournaments. I wouldn't have thought that they'd be able to fit so many tables in a tiny little basement bar like Bar Bleu, but there it was, eight tables, 64 players, all in a room that couldn't have been bigger than 25' by 30'. I'd never been down there before - it's down a set of stairs from *inside* of a barbecue place called Buelah's, in the storefront where Mario & Luigi's used to be on Garner Street. It has a nice atmosphere, very oldfashioned-jazzy, especially compared with Crowbar's black paint-and-sticky-floor lowest-common-drunk-college-student ambience.

A lot of the same folks from Sunday nights were. I learned the names of a number of them - Jason, who got to the final table next to me, and got knocked out not long after I took a dive. Jackie, who was the last woman surviving in the tournament, and who I knocked out myself not two hands after someone mentioned that the waitresses were rooting for her. The guy who came in second, an intense, thin guy hiding behind a precarious, intimidating tower of white 5,000 chips was the one who ripped my head off at the final table, not five minutes after said final table formed. He got stuck in a blinds-exchange with the other big gun, a bald youngish guy with a goatee in a retro, coarse sports jacket. Finally, the bald guy finally clipped the white-tower guy for good and wrapped up the night.

The blinds schedule is fierce, quick and difficult, and at the moment I was knocked out, the big blind was one-fourth of my previously-respectable 40,000. It's really hard not to go all-in with mediocre hands when you're already that pot-committed by the big blind. I kept looking to get in at some point before being stuck on the big blind, but nothing showed *until* I was on the big. An ace-six off-suit wasn't enough when white-tower-of-intimidation guy made his pair of kings, but I can't complain. I got to the final table on a series of lucky wins made off of higher kickers. I just got antsy once the blinds hit 5000/10000, and jumped blind.

The organizer was talking about a third tournament series starting up later in the season at a pizza place/bar on North Atherton, which means that if you're obsessive enough, or bored enough, you could end up playing three nights a week. Since it's free and all, it's not as if it would be a serious commitment of anything other than personal time.

Walter Jon Williams' latest space opera novel came out last week - Conventions of War. It's pretty good, if a little less focused and a little less structured than the first two in the series. He gets distracted by a shipboard murder-mystery for a good chunk of the book, and it results in a somewhat undigested, lumpy sort of narrative, but no individual portion of the book is bad on its own merits. It was a good way to waste a few autumn days.

What really needs work, however, is the presentation by the publisher, EOS. The cover is the most bland of greenish-black-nondescript-ships-against-a-starscape&planet layout, and I actually had a co-worker pick up the book from my desk & mock the blurb-text. "Dread Empire's Fall" is a pretty cheesy series-title, too. If it wasn't for my deep respect for Williams as a writer, I would have never given these books a second glance.

Oookay. The newbies at PSSFS posted a list of "Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature" which is about two or three pages long and prominently features Terry Goodkind and Timothy Zahn. I suppose I ought to be happy it isn't Robert Jordan and James Hogan, oughtn't I? I honestly can't tell if it's supposed to be a joke or not...

You know what's ironic? Reading an article about the joys of "guilty pleasure" movies like Cruel Intentions and the Devil's Advocate which concludes rapturously with an exclamation about how central the erotic sense of place is in these big-budget studio pictures, and then noticing that the author's from Oakland.

Somebody's taken their Gertrude Stein way too seriously.

S.M. Stirling is a very much hit-or-miss writer in my opinion. He can be pretty good in a pulpy sort of way, and he can also be one of the laziest hacks this side of Turtledove. Dies the Fire is definitely Stirling on one of his better days. It's basically the flip side of his Nantucket novels - the premise being that the same event that flung the island of Nantucket into the 13th century BC also effectively destroyed modern civilization by selectively re-writing the local laws of physics. The extant theory is that "Alien Space Bats decided to take away our toys" - electronics, electricity, explosives, gunpowder, even steam engines all are no longer functional under the new rules. Unsurprisingly, this wrecks humanity on an apocalyptic scale, causing the death by starvation and subsequent disease of at least 90% of humanity within six months of the change.

It sounds like a pretty grim story, and it is in places. But it's hard to get too nasty in a conventional narrative due to the weak anthropic principle - the protagonists have to survive if there's going to be much of a story. In the case of Dies the Fire, said surviving protagonists are various refugees, including a large number of Wiccans, SCAdians, and other hobbyists with the elements of the right sort of experience and training to survive in a world suddenly re-set almost to the 11th Century AD. Stirling is pretty well-known as a fairly conservative, libertarianish sort of writer within the community, and he's wildly unpopular among the left set in fandom for his opinions and his inclination to get into endless arguments in public fora like rec.arts.sf.written. It's rather surprising that he wrote a post-apocalyptic novel about Pacific Northwestern Wiccans and hippies ruling the world, (or at least Oregon) but there it is.

The subject-matter and the setting is very reminiscent of some of Stirling's early stuff, like Snowbrother and the other Fifth millennium books. In fact, I was groping for the comparison, when I realized that I was comparing two of Stirling's novels with each other... I wonder what ever happened to Shirley Meier, anyways?

I still think Stirling wildly overstates just how productive people, no matter how well-motivated, can be in short periods of time. It was a problem with the Nantucket novels, in which our collective heroes had constructed a world-spanning fully-realized civilization inside of ten years, and it's something of a problem with Dies the Fire, which presents trained cavalry, full-scale fortifications, and seige weapony with six months of the event. Civil War era cavalry was supposed to take two years to become well-trained, and that was unarmored, with relatively simple equipment like breechloading carbines. I can't imagine that horseback archers could be *quicker* to train up...

Still, an enjoyable read. I've got the sequel, the Protector's War, on order.

I got an email from the RNC asking me (and presumably every blogger with two readers and a rightward tilt) to help with the Harriet Miers mess the White House has gotten themselves into. Generally, when the social conservatives are pissed about a judicial pick, you'd think that the more moderate wings of the party would be happier. Frankly, Miers is one of those rare cases where she's got something to annoy everybody. NPR was positively giddy last evening - probably because it's such a inept selection that even they can hear the war-drums in the base. On the other hand, that requires the libs in public radio to understand and follow the dictum "never interrupt your opponent while he's making a mistake", and I don't know that we've ever seen that sort of wisdom from the sparks of NPR.

Miers is a crony of Bush's, the woman who took over Gonzales's job when he went off to be Attorney General. She was Bush's *personal lawyer* back in the Eighties. Never been on any sort of bench. From all accounts, a fanatical Bush family partisan. Sounds like a perfect fit for where she is right now - on the White House staff. A Supreme Court Justice? In what universe?

I campaigned for a war-time Republican president, not the Ghost of Lyndon Johnson.

You're on your own, Ken Mehlman!

Serenity was a bit of a disappointment. Admittedly, I was never one of those "brownshirt" types - if for no other reason, than I'm not into fascist self-identifications. Whedon *had* to have known the provenance of "[x]shirts", right? It's basic political literacy. But all that aside, I did like Firefly, enough to buy the DVD set and watch 'em a couple of times.

Firefly was a fun, small show - an extended family of rogues and no-better-than-they-ought-to-bes bumping around the edges of a harsh and largely uncaring universe. I liked that about the TV series - that there was a bigger world out there that gave nary a damn about our heroes. The world didn't revolve around them, and that was a good thing. They were, after all, crooks. Whedon was quite explicit about this thematic element of the show - that it was an existentialist universe, and that any meaning was made by the characters.

Serenity, on the other hand, is decidedly *not* an existentialist film. At least, I can't see that in it. There's a clash between the conservative rebel protagonists, and the idealistic, zealous authorities. Said authorities, which could be characterized in the TV series as a vast, numb, heedless beast, oppressively large and unloving but not particularly swift or clever, became in the movie a smallish conspiracy of savage, nanny-state conspirators and true believers. I could see where Whedon was going with the Darkness at Noon, 1984 line of attack, but it isn't really a theme that *works* in an action piece. For one thing, it's a much more Burkean/Russell Kirk/early neo-conservative sort of attack than what he was pushing with the TV series. It's very much the sort of thing that I associate with P.J. O'Rourke and his hostility towards government and idealism of any sort.

I really have some cognitive dissonance issues with a tireless-Kerry-campaigner like Whedon writing a film like this. I strongly suspect that I've misunderstood the line of argument, but I can't help but see what I see: idealists' best intentions destroy anything they touch, and they must be fought in the name of the imperfectability of man. The Mal of Serenity *is* WFB's conservative standing athwart history, shouting "Stop!"

The movie has other issues, such as the discard of much of the series' atmosphere and humor for the Logan's-Run-by-way-of-Frank-Gehry bits on Miranda and the big space battle bits and the Reaver butcheries. I think it wouldn't have felt so much out of place as a big two-hour, two-episode show-piece within a full Whedonesque season of context, although that would have presumed a great deal of re-writing, I suppose. But as a stand-alone, it was fairly bleak and lacking in what I found charming about the Firefly concept.

Both Fillon and Whedon have complained about the way the network made them lighten up Fillon's Mal, and have indicated that the original conception was more bleak and Serenity-like. If this was the idea, I think I'm with the suits. Mal is harsh and more than a little unlikable, once you remove those grace notes of black humor and buffoonery.

For those still doing the public poetry thing, here's a report of a Baghdad poetry meeting in what sounds like Uday's old stamping grounds, if I've got the location right.

The exceedingly large number of manga I ended up buying at the 'Swap yesterday inspired me to finally clean up my manga and new books around the apartment. I organized the manga, moved it into my bedroom, and used the extra shelfspace to shelve the dozens of books I've bought over the last half-year or so that have been occupying every horizontal surface in the apartment that wasn't carpet. Now I'm half-paranoid that the towering stack of manga piled on my dresser drawer is going to shift in the night and block my bedroom door, trapping me in there to die of unemployment and starvation. Or, you know, compel me to actually clean up again. Whichever.

Bought one of those OEL manga that I've been hearing so much about, Rikvah's Steady Beat. It shows some promise - the artist seems to have layout down pat and the artwork and pacing shows improvement throughout the first volume. But lord almighty, is this a rocky start. The first chapter is highly disjointed and staccato, and it took me until half-way through the book to realize that it was set in Texas, and not DC. What is shown and what is told aren't exactly in sync - our protagonist complains about her religious, Republican [state?] senator of a mother, and worries about impropriety, but the mother in question is a single mother, dressed more like a very young congressional aide or intern, and barely mentions religion at all. The angles in the story don't all add up to a proper 180 degrees, although it isn't nearly as distorted as, say, Bizenghast's discount video-game scripting.

The whole situation of these OEL first volumes reminds me a bit of Cerebus and Dave Sim's problems with artistic discontinuity. When an artist piles into an epic, or even an only somewhat long-form story from first principles, said artist's teething problems get stapled onto the front-end of what might otherwise be, eventually, a classic genre work. Thus, Cerebus goes through a dozen and a half chapters of rather crude Conan the Barbarian parody before it turns into the sharp social and political satire of High Society and Church and State. I suppose what I'm getting at is that the manga-inspired tendency to reach for long-form ongoing serial before a series of short works tends to import the OEL artists' apprentice and journeyman-work into immediate attempts at master-work.

I don't think web-comics are the answer, either, because that sort of page-per-day or three-pages-per-week format breeds gag-comicry in its practitioners. A half-dozen pages every other week - such as is practiced by artists like Kittyhawk - strikes me as potentially fruitful, but those artists seem particularly prone to sudden burn-out and disappearance.

I dunno.

Ugh. Spoilers for Serenity all over the damned place. Looking forward to it, but I kind of want to experience it as a movie, not as a series of disconnected plot-points and thirty-second clips, thank y'all very much.

Um, there's been three US military fatalities from IEDs in the Basra area in the last couple days or so. Two on "convoy operations" and one today on a "combat logistics patrol". That's the British sector - are they moving US troops down there?

Well, no, not exactly. The icasualties.org writeup makes the incidents sound like they're near Basra, but a closer examination of the CENTCOM releases and the mission of the two units affected - a Wisconsin battalion (2/127th Infantry) on Kuwaiti convoy protection duty and Texas's 56th Brigade Combat Team, occupying the desert southwest of Iraq - suggests that somebody was getting kind of loose with their geographical definitions. On second glance, this isn't some unheralded US reinforcement of the frazzled British, who have been slowly losing control of the situation in Basra.

Is it a Sunni insurgent move to try to interdict the Kuwait log-line? Shaibah, where the two Wisconsin soldiers were killed, is the British logistics base, and two British Fusiliers were killed in a similar incident Sept. 5 in the same location, so maybe not.

I don't know, any sign of a local Sadrist insurrection in Basra gets me worried, and indications that US troops are being shifted into the sector are especially worrisome. On closer examination, these *aren't* the signs I'm looking for. At worst, it's an indication that the Iranians are starting to stalk the British logistics routes, in preparation for a sort of slow-motion guerilla siege, to keep them from interfering with the Basra political situation.

Kind of busy this week. Rome is a bit of a pleasant surprise, aside from the deeply annoying animated-graffiti opening credits.

Meh. Now the 4k and 12k models bring Rita right over Galveston. She's more erratic than a drunken sailor on shore leave.

Talk in the office is that Rita is going to break east, due to it moving so slowly that it's making it's break north around that eastward-moving low much further east than it would have otherwise. It's going to hit West Louisiana halfway to New Orleans. Maybe Morgan City?

New Orleans is going to get some storm surge. The levees might break again.

Speaking of oil and states of emergency, it looks like Rita has both become a real monster, and has shifted such that they're now predicting a strike between Matagorda and the Sabine River - which is to say that she's going to whack every oil platform and derrick on the central Gulf coast which *wasn't* smashed up by Katrina. At least it isn't going to be the worst-case for Galveston that was predicted by last night's four-kilometre models, which predicted a strike directly on the Matagorda coast, giving Galveston the worst of the upper-right quadrant. This morning, it looks like Rita might *not* reduce Galveston to flooded splinters.

Wherever she hits is gonna look like a mid-yield nuke went off, though. Hope they've got those rigs locked down tight.

Glenn Reynolds has been pushing the Porkbusters project - the idea that each local blogger ought to find what the 2005 pork/set-asides were for his area and district, and press the local US Representative and US Senators to volunteer to repeal said pork in the interest of offsetting the Katrina cleanup costs. Intellectually, this appeals to me, but I'm having trouble figuring out whether what I'm looking at is, properly speaking, pork.

The relevant website is here, but the only stuff I could find was a scattering of six-figure bequests to various regional and local hospitals & Alpha EMS for "equipment", and a drug-education program over in Clearfield County. I'm conflicted over whether this sort of thing is obnoxious pork, or not. On the one hand, it's a lot of money by *my* standards. On the other hand, it's peanuts compared to the tens of millions sprayed over the Philly and Pittsburgh sections of the state for job retraining and access construction, and all these little ACoE budget-items for various rivers that I didn't think needed all that much in the way of control. But, you see - all that isn't local to *me*, so it's kind of hypocritical to harp on that stuff if I can't offer something locally.

Surprisingly, none of the construction work on I-99 and Rt. 322 is listed on the website. I'm not sure if they don't consider infrastructure construction "pork", or if the work was financed in a previous year, or if the appropriations went through what that site considers proper procedures, and thus isn't technically pork by their definition.

Listening to NPR coming in this morning, they had a report that our idiot, greedhead state senate here in Pennsylvania passed an anti-gouging measure that fines gas station owners if they rapidly increase prices, 20% over the previous high or something like that. I can't give you details because it doesn't seem to be available anywhere online, yet. But here's the bill I think they're talking about.

Here's the key section:

by an amount equal to or in excess of 20% of the average price at which the same or similar consumer goods or services were obtainable in the affected area during the last seven days immediately prior to the declared state of emergency.

Hey, why not repeal the laws of gravity and momentum while you're at it, you collective geniuses of the commonwealth? That way, I can count on the effects of your wisdom and beneficence to protect me from the skull-crushing effects of my own stupidity the next time I decide to jump off a 10-story building! Or my car can escape damage the next time some half-wit rear-ends me on the Benner Pike, due to your hypothetical legislative negation of the power of collision!

This is why they ought to teach basic goddamn economics in elementary school - so that our candle-witted legislators can get certain basic concepts drummed through their thick skulls before they drop out or just stop listening.

Look: prices are signals. They tell us certain vital things about the items for sale - namely, supplies, and the extent of demand. Without those accurate, undistorted price-signals, we as consumers have no good, reliable way of knowing what the rational response in a market *is*.

People with no real immediate need hoard, against fant'sied future want. Merchants sell all their product, and find that they cannot afford to re-stock because someone up the line is cognizant of the laws of supply and demand, or else some other merchant just cornered the local market because *she* decided to hoard against the possibility of a descent of the next set of price-blind hoarders at *her* station. The other gas station guy down the street, who has ties you'd best not look too closely into, always has gas - even though his sign always says "sold out". You just have to have the green, and not talk too much like a cop sniffing around. Supply shocks turn into droughts, and then recessions, and worst of all, stagflation. Suddenly, it's Jimmy Carter time all over again!

Furthermore, screwing with the price of vital product provides a perverse disincentive to *correct* supply problems. When you refuse to let the middlemen take large short-term profits, they have no capital to finance the long-term profits of their suppliers and the eventual producers. If there's no financial incentive for the suppliers to quickly re-instate supply networks, then the work gets done on the mañana principle, and the supply shock stretches out for weeks instead of days, months instead of weeks. If there's no financial incentive for the producers to bring new resources online to satisfy demand gone wanting, then no new resources appear. Did you see what happened when it became clear that crude prices were going north of $60 and staying there? Suddenly we had more than a half-dozen oil companies looking into oil shale production. If this bill becomes law, the states of emergency will stretch out, one after the other, until they merge together into one continuous, inescapable, miserable, perpetual "state of emergency".

Rapid price fluctuation isn't a crime. It's a clarion call, a tocsin - it's a fire alarm. Collecting and destroying all of the fire-alarms in your house won't save it from burning, it'll just make sure that none of your neighbors wake before your flaming roof-top sparks their own roofs ablaze!

Morons!

Looks like our own, nepotistically inept state senator, Jake Corman, is one of the many, many sponsors of this bill. It passed unanimously in the senate. There is a movement in Pennsylvania to clear out every single legislator, both houses, due to the recent legislative salary-grab. They're called Clean Sweep. I strongly suggest y'all take a look at 'em, and give it some consideration. We couldn't do worse than this.

Mrs. T over at Fistful of Euros tried to explain the "overhanging mandates" situation and why the CDU winning the delayed Dresden I elections (a local neo-Nazi candidate died, thus derailing the legalities for that district, and forced a delayed vote) might actually cause the CDU to *lose* a seat. I read the post twice, and I still don't understand the exact mechanism, but then I never was any good at higher math. I'm now regretting my failure to take calculus in school - I suspect it might have come in handy right about now.

The Germans no longer get to make fun of the American electoral college. This "overhanging mandate" business is deranged.

Hot damn - the Port of New Orleans reopened yesterday. It sounds like only some parts opened, but the fact that it's now even partially functional is excellent economic news. The logistical disruption of the nation's single largest bulk-port being off line for at least three months was a large part of the expected fall-out from the hurricane. Between this and the radically lower death-toll in recent reports, it's looking like a pretty good week.

(News initially via this Rantburg post.)

Adam Sullivan at the Karmic Inquisition is back.

First of all lessons learned from my sister's wedding this weekend? Accordion players should never, ever be allowed amplification. The one hired by her new in-laws had one of those amps that go to eleven.

Boston is a hell of a town. You can really see what they mean when they say that the road system in that end of the country is directly derived from the traces left by colonial cattle herds. The inner suburbs seem to be one continuous rolling rush-hour, from early in the morning to late at night. I could not believe the land prices - I met someone who had bought a small suburban house for $700,000, and then proceeded to knock it down in preparation for building a real house. They just wanted the plot.

My sister was marrying into a Serb immigrant family. Very friendly folks, and most of them either doctors or engineers. I'm told that the Serb Orthodox community in the greater Boston area is capitalizing on the Catholic diocese's lawsuit-driven bankruptcy to pick up a building which they are getting ready to renovate into an Orthodox church. The place they're currently using, however, wasn't big enough for the relatively modest crowd we were expecting, so they borrowed a Greek Orthodox church in Cambridge for the ceremony. Nice place, just re-painted. I think the Greek custodian thought we were a little rowdy, though. He didn't look like he approved of the jug of box-wine which came in with the groomsmen.

The groom's family cheerfully showed said groomsmen, who were by and large his college buddies, how to perform the very folkloric offering ceremony before the wedding. They came to the hotel where we were camped out in Waltham - nominally our father's "house", but it isn't as if they could truck down to my Dad's new place in Florida - with "wandering musicians", a "Voivode" (I believe it means "prince" or "duke", but I know next to no Serbo-Croatian, so YMMV) shotgun in hand, a wine-bearer, a handful of silver coins, and a loaf of bread. The "wandering musicians" was the aforementioned accordion player (sans amplifier, thankfully), the Voivode was the groom's best man, and the shotgun had been replaced with a much-less-unlawful trumpet, played by the *other* best man's young son - more on that anon - who actually knew how to blow a trumpet, it being his and all.

The Voivode was supposed to discharge the "shotgun" to bring the bride's father out of his abode, so as to initiate the negotiation. This might have actually have been necessary if we had gone back up to the seventh floor to our rooms as the groomsmen asked - we managed to convince them that this would take far too much time, and compromised on going around the corner of the lobby, just out of sight of the party in the foyer. After a long delay - the accordion-player was unaccountably missing, and it took some time to locate him - the groomsmen came around the corner, and began the ceremony.

The wine-bearer passed around the jug of box-wine, to everybody *but* my father - we had established the night before that he couldn't drink due to a medical condition, and that the offering would be a large faux pas - and the silver coins and bread were presented. The groom's uncle - the patriarch of the family - offered my mother a handful of wild flowers, although I wasn't clear on what exactly this meant. There was a bit of a bobble while it was explained to my father that they were supposed to tear the loaf in half, and I think I missed the obligatory speech by the Voivode about the virtues of the groom and prospective son-in-law. I was busy talking to the other usher about whether we should get going to the church, as various frictions and delays had made us somewhat late.

All this time, curious revelers from the bar mitzvah, which had actually hired the hall we were half-occupying, looked on in amusement. I still don't know how my parents talked the hotel management into allowing all this to occur in what was a very busy lobby on a fairly active weekend.

The wedding itself was a classic Orthodox affair, with two priests singing the liturgy in what I thought was Serbo-Croatian, although my Lebanese uncle confused me afterwards by talking about "Slavonic" and liturgical languages, and I'm now not quite sure which it was. Once we got into the church, the best-friend "best man" was replaced by the groom's brother. It seems that the head priest was something of a stickler on the details, and he insisted that either the maid of honor or the best man be baptized into their church. Anyways...

The two priests crowned the couple with large red-and-gold crowns - my sister's went slightly askew partway through the ceremony, and I was somewhat afraid that it would fall off as they circled the altar three times. Happily, it stayed in place, perhaps held on by her veil-and-tiara assemblage. The groom's father sang in Slavic, and my Orthodox aunt read in English, a passage - Ephesians 5:21-33 - as an instruction to the new couple. That came across as very, hrm, unreconstructed, and it's exactly the sort of thing that modern couples are usually careful to dance around. The Apostle Paul really was a stodgy old so-and-so. But it was that kind of wedding - very old-fashioned.

The reception was at a suburban country club, and very lavish, at least by my standards. The tyranny of the photographer reigned unchecked, and there was much milling about the greens under a large oak tree, as every possible arrangement of the bride, the groom, the parents, and the wedding party was photographed on what was a beautiful early fall day - clear blue skies, cool breeze, etc. Inside the clubhouse, the accordion player found his amplifier, and much dancing commenced. It was pretty loud, but a half-hour or so after the entree was served, the accordion player and his group were replaced by an old-fashioned rock band, and things got quieter. There was remarkably little of the usual speech-making that I expect of wedding receptions, which I suppose was what they wanted.

My sister shone with joy throughout the day. It was a happy day, and one she deserved. When the videocamera came my way, I wished them many quiet, happy years.

Better.

But still weak on the whole "unable to see own contradictions" front. Is an administration which pays scrupulous attention to the law a desirable thing, or an undesirable thing? Greg's abu Ghraib/Gitmo hyperventilations were monumental and extensive. He doesn't get a pass from me when he starts demanding legal shortcuts, or when he starts decrying slowness due to the now-necessary involvement of ponderous legal teams when it comes to the deployment of large, young, armed men and the provision of security. This is what you were screaming for, Greg. This is the world you wanted.

Live with it.

I'm withholding judgement on Brown until the full story is in. That means he gets two weeks after they finish draining New Orleans - I figure that'll give everyone time to shake out all the half-truths, ass-coverings, and rumor-mongering. Not that I think at this point that he'll come out smelling like roses - but there's a lot of people who fucked up bigtime who'll want to be making the most obviously guilty-looking their goat. I'm fairly worried that Brown is going to end up being that judas goat. Damn every last one of you who thinks you can lay your guilt on a designated goat. Yes, I mean "you". And "you", too. And me, too.

No judas goats. No panic-decisions. No policy-by-disaster-response. No reflex politics.

Via Dan, who got me to re-read a post by Greg which I had angrily skimmed earlier.

Oh, and by the way? No dick-measuring contests about how "my charity contribution numbers are higher than yours". Yes, I mean you. Show some goddamn common sense.

Ahem.

Via Peaktalk.

Josh Trevino, aka Tacitus, is leaving RedState, and returning to his old stomping grounds. He argues here what I don't have the intellectual confidence to propose - both the abandonment of the site of New Orleans, and the controlled breaking of the Mississippi levees in favor of a new main channel through the Atchafalaya Basin.

Unfortunately, Tacitus-the-group-blog always suffered from a voluble and overpopulated community, which made for a lot of noise. I kind of stopped paying attention to it once Trevino moved over to RedState, and the last time I looked in, it had been mostly taken over by the leftist gadflies which had once been Trevino/Tacitus's loyal opposition. Well, I'll hang out for a while, see if it's worth sticking around now that the master of the house is running things again.

The tropical depression to the east of Florida will become Tropical Storm Ophelia pretty soon, but bossman says that it looks to impale itself on the south Georgia coast before it becomes anything other than a big blow. Sixty-ish winds by landfall, probably on the Space Coast. Of course, it's not got a lot of guidance, so who knows? Its cone of prediction is literally a circle.

The Guardian reminds us all of something that's easy to forget when the news networks are blasting sentiment 24/7 at us: disasters produce information vacuums which are quickly filled with the wildest sort of rumor and fearful imaginings re-told telephone-game-style as reports of atrocity and outrage. The cannibalism lie was just the most obnoxious of this species of worry exaggerated into outright falsehood.

It's sometimes hard to remember that under all that bias and poor management, the Guardian is a real paper with real reporters. This is a reminder.

Dan Darling has a post and thread on Winds of Change which I think is pretty succinct. Be sure to read the comments, which are of unusual quality, especially the one referencing the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic.

I saw that Afghanistan gave $100,000 for hurricane relief. This is sort of why I'm kind of disturbed by the acceptance of foreign aid for Katrina. I know it's kind of small to reject such aid on nationalist grounds - it would put us in the same inferiority-complex category of overproud India, who rejected tsunami aid last December - but it's still kind of futile to take a couple hundred thousand from a country which we're supporting to the tune of a billion or so.

I can't help but wish that the ambassador would just drop the money back into the Afghan development general fund when the cameras and Afghanis leave, kind of like when my great-aunt insisted on pressing a twenty on me for doing something minor around the house, and I tried to sneak it back into her purse when she wasn't watching. I suck at subterfuge - she caught me doing it. I got a pretty good talking-to, and she watched me like a hawk until I left the house to make sure I didn't sneak it into a bowl or something on the way out.

On the other hand, we have the purgative pleasure of infantile rage. I'm getting quite tired of Greg and his tireless search for the perfect judas-goat. Accuracy and consistency and truthfulness are not as important in his world as the need to find the perfect vehicle for the conveyance of his guilt and remorse. It's a good thing Donald Rumsfeld is such a sturdy ass - else he would have long since collapsed under the metaphorical weight of Greg's projections.

Grow up, Greg. It's one of the obligations of adulthood.

Yes, I realize he was going on about cultural superiority, and moral education, and the volunteerism thing was a distraction. Sue me, I got distracted.

Am I the only one on the centre-right who finds Bill Whittle to be insufferably narcissistic? Every time I follow a link to one of his self-regarding essays, I find myself ashamed to agree with his opinions - even in part - which in the objective abstract ought to be utterly unobjectionable. The concept of valuing first-responders and volunteers over attention-whores and activists seems pretty basic - but bragging about your own activities and history in this context is repulsive. Modesty - it's in most dictionaries. Try and look it up, Bill.

No, I didn't finish reading the essay - I've got better things to do than indulge logorrhea.

Mickey Kaus inadvertently demonstrates the old adage "hard cases make bad law" by arguing in favor of a total demolishment of the federal system in the light of the problems with the Katrina response. This is the same panicky paternalism which brought us the municipal governmental reform movement after the 1900 Galveston hurricane, and thus, inadvertently and indirectly, a whole phalanx of rotten Progressive ideas like direct election of senators, referenda and recall, and the elitist habit of policy-by-unelected-commission.

Policy in reaction to disaster and catastrophe is the very reason conservatives exist. There is a serious argument that the Department of Homeland Security bureaucratic reorganization driven by the reaction to the *last* catastrophe was largely responsible for the disorganized and scatterbrained FEMA response this time around. The reaction to the 1927 floods drove the construction of all the massive river levees which have helped gut the southeastern Louisiana wetlands which used to partially protect the region from this sort of disaster.

In a federal system, where one of the state elements of the system proves itself in a time of crisis to be nonfunctional, while other state elements are marginally or mostly functional and the federal element is marginally functional, the answer is not to trash the system and come up with a new idea. For one thing, the friction of politics and the dynamics of large groups guarantees that your new system will be utterly untested and half-implemented by the time of the next disaster. For another thing, you don't repair a car which has blown a tire by buying another car. You either get a new tire, or patch the punctured one.

Louisiana has always been a problem state. It's the only Napoleonic state in the Union. Its corruption is legendary. It is notably poor. Louisiana's state election dynamics during my lifetime have been notable for their "racist" versus "corrupt" dichotomies - remember "vote for the crook - it's important"? In what other state in the Union is there a viable, overtly racist electoral option? I mean, other than the Al Sharpton Dog & Pony Revue...

Anyways, the national government can't just take over a state government and install a new one. That's almost as impractical as Kaus's New Union proposal. But the people of Louisiana might want to think it over, and in a serious manner. In the 'laboratory of democracy", I'd call Louisiana's experiment a fairly instructive failure.

I haven't been buying much anime recently. At least partially this is because I've come to the rueful conclusion that I've been a sucker for buying the early releases - as they come out, DVD by DVD. After the fourth or fifth series got released as a cheapass "brick" compilation at a third of the price I paid for the initial individual DVDs, I sort of gave up. Yeah, I'm a slow learner - so what?

But bargain-sales are just as good or better than waiting for the brick, and it's even better when the bricks themselves has been remaindered. I'm not the biggest fan of Nadia, but at $30 for the whole series in two sets plus CD soundtracks, why the hell not? [Seems as if everybody else kind of agrees - looks like the first set is sold out already.]

Now if I could just figure out if the half-wits at ADV actually placed my order, or if their online ordering system ate it with some fava beans and a nice chianti...

On the Peak Oil front, have you seen this? They claim to have figured out a way of roasting oil shale in situ so as to produce a significant amount of natural gas and light crude from deposits, at a cost which is viable as long as oil prices stay over $30/bbl. Check out the article - it's fiendishly clever, and sounds like a real winner if nobody's exaggerating or coloring based on expectations of future improvements. They've done test bores, and are supposed to start something more substantial in February. It sounds as if Colorado could be the Persian Gulf of the 21st century if this pans out. I will say that I didn't quite understand the described environmental protection scheme, which had something to do with surrounding the bores with an outer shell of ice to lock in the cooking mixture or something like that.

Link via Instapundit.

Daylight.

I've said and thought a lot of things in the last few days that in retrospect I regret, at least for the tone and timing, if not for the sentiments in and of themselves. Most of this you wouldn't have seen unless you came from the blog comment sections in question, and for this I apologize. I'm a sour-tempered, antisocial person, and I am lacking in regards to tact and respect for the opinions of others. I don't take back a word of it, but I regret that I said a lot of it as early as I did.

Who would have thought that New Orleans was so close to the brink of civilization? I've never been there, so I had no real inkling how bad the back-street neighborhoods were, nor how fast things would disintegrate once the drugs ran out and the armed junkies started prowling. It's going to be a mess once all the refugees are sorted, because it seems as if there's a lot of bad apples in the baskets, and the baskets are going to be scattered all throughout the Deep South. It'll be an interesting experimental test of the theory that concentrations of bad actors results in amplified criminal environments beyond what you'd expect of the relative numbers involved.

I stand by my contention that New Orleans as a major city ought not to be rebuilt. The site is too abhorrent to imagine us re-using it again. The exposure of New Orleans on the hurricane coast will only get worse as long as the Mississippi is constrained in the main channel levee system. You can either cut the levees, and let the Mississippi act the way nature intended, or you can abandon the city of New Orleans. I'd be inclined in a perfect world to do both, but in the world we live in, the main channel carries too much of the nation's commerce, and the port of New Orleans is too important to write off as a relocation expense. The same goes for the petrochemical infrastructure, which has to be a higher priority than the reconstruction of below-river-level housing in and around New Orleans.

To be brutal, the impoverished can be impoverished as well in Bismarck or Fargo or Detroit as they can in the currently-under-water Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The relatively-well-off, who have lost so much more, ought to have both the resources and the basic good sense to find themselves safer accommodations than that which can be re-built in what has proven itself to be an appalling death-trap.

To be brief, I believe that government emergency funds aimed towards residential and non-vital business reconstruction in the New Orleans flood zone ought to be diverted to relocation funds, aimed at buying out the inhabitants of vulnerable areas of New Orleans and the environs. We may be stuck with a major, economically vital port in that area, but there's no reason in the world worth the financing of the return hundreds of thousands of inhabitants back into what's proven itself to be an obscenely dangerous and isolated locale.

I had hoped for the opportunity for us to shut down the city of New Orleans over a gentle decade of discouragement and gradual abandonment. Nature closed that option rather decisively, sad to say. Oh, well.

Here's something I wrote last year about the prospects of the lower Mississippi. For some reason I expected the culprit to be the river, not the lake.

On a thoroughly unserious note, apparently there was a multi-event World Cosplay Summit that Anime Expo was involved with in some fashion. It was "controversial", because some sort of modelling agency was behind the whole thing, and deliberately and transparently rigged the contest so that their pre-packaged set of Italian models "won". Apparently everyone else involved are volcanically pissed off about the whole thing, including the staff of Anime Expo. What a way to run a carnival...

The half of the blogsphere which isn't on Blogger or Typepad is down today. What, is the serverfarm for whatever service they're all using located in downtown New Orleans or something?

Goddamn it. A crucial levee gave way catastrophically last night about 1 AM Central. New Orleans is under water. NPR wasn't talking about it when I drove in an hour ago. What the hell?

There's nothing quite as embarrassing as apocalyptic fears and musings, written in darkness, then read in the light of day. Oh, well.

Sounds like New Orleans will survive to embarrass its collective self for at least one more Marti Gras. That's one vote from the nature caucus for "benevolent deity", I suppose.

A break in the fog.

Of course, where some folks might see the hand of god, others see the hidden hand of conspiratorial government. Would you rather live in a world controlled by a beneficient deity, or an all-powerful, secretive government? Yeah, me neither.

No creature on this earth is more prone to the search for signs and portents than the Christian strayed into agnostic doubt. A childhood's training to the search of the natural world for the traces of the divine and a lifetime's frustrated failure only hones the desire for evidence of the hand of God in nature's affair. This is why Intelligent Design often has friends in strange quarters, and why monstrous events breed wishful thinking as an application of poorly stored manure breeds flies - that is, like the plagues of Egypt.

New Orleans has a history of wickedness. She was a great slaver's entrepot, and a haven for pirates, and a home for famous whores. She was Babylon, and Sodom, and Gomorrah. Her centuries-long survival on the hurricane coast, increasingly exposed and vulnerable with each new grain of silt dropped by the heavy-laden and unnatural Mississippi, preserved in its precarious bed solely for the benefit of the wicked old port, has been a sort of secular miracle. Her continued existence is an argument for a God that loves mankind, even a fallen and savage mankind like that of the city of New Orleans. It is also a strong argument against the sort of vengeful, bitter god of justice and wrath who destroys evil cities and brutally enforces a communal law of shared guilt.

But just as every city is both Gomorrah and Jerusalem, New Orleans is also a city of believers, full of the faithful and innocents. Many of them, poor beyond escape, patiently lined up beside the Superdome, home of the Saints, their last sanctuary, a citadel, the highest ground the city has to offer. What does the sins of history have to do with a woman trying to save her family? She could get out, herself, but she stays with members of her family who could not. She says she has put her life in God's hand, and states for the record that if she should die, it is God's will. Ten honest men such as she, and how could God drown even such a city as New Orleans? On Bourbon Street, the fools party on as the stormclouds appear.

Joe Bastardi wailed all yesterday long, Centre County's own Jeremiah, crying Israel! O Israel! I could not see how the city could survive the storm, which would roll over her walls, smash in her levees, and sweep the hungry sea through her streets.

The morning has brought a thick fog through which I cannot see. The natural expectation is a disaster of biblical proportions. There are a hundred thousands trapped in an exposed city, and it is hard to see how the winds will not smash in the windows of their towers, how the waters will not rush over their walls and wash their elevated dead in a choleratic soup of past pestilences returned.

But the hurricane has weakened, inexplicably. She has shifted, eastwards - attracted, perhaps, by the new-born sins of the Mississippi casino coast? Will it be enough to spare the walls of the city? They say she could have withstood a Cat 3. It's now going to be a Cat 4. If New Orleans survives this, I cannot but say that it would shake my faith in doubt.

I sit in the fog, waiting for miracles.

They're done expanding the Walmart up on Benner Pike into a "SuperWalmart", and halfway done putting in that new arcade to it's immediate west. The effect is quite striking. What was once a wide-open field which gave a long view across the length and breadth of the valley towards the distant Bald Eagles is now yet another claustrophobic chunk of exurbia. It could be Cranberry Township, or Ocala, or Secausus. I'm not generally an anti-development blowhard, but I'll miss that empty field. It gave the Nittany Mall area an expansive feeling - a sense that we weren't being crowded in.

Oh, well. Everything changes.

Hey, sorry, there was more work awaiting my return from vacation than I really expected. I spend so much time twiddling my thumbs at work - how is it that I can take four days off and it's a mountain high enough to rival the Bald Eagles?

The con went well, I am told. A little exhausting, though - I'm not getting any younger. The membership cap did strange things to our attendance patterns - about 10% absenteeism from our prereg'd folks. I'm currently pondering if that means we can get away with a nine-percent increase in our cap, next year. There were about five news, network, or documentary crews trawling the convention, including MTV. Twenty years ago, having MTV come to something I helped run would have been infinitely cool. Nowadays? Meh.

There's a con policy against hand-signs or placards offering or requesting physical contact, especially in exchange for considerations - "will yaoi for pocky", "glomp me", etc. Aside from the horrid grammar and poor taste, our lawyer assured us that these signs represented invitations to solicitation, or offers of same. Definitely against the law, even in laid-back Baltimore. Thus, "spec ops" (the current designation of what was once upon a time, in a less litigious time, called con security) spent a significant amount of effort over the weekend on confiscating and collecting these signs. They had them taped together in a massive collage that took up most of the northern wall of the spec ops room. I dubbed it the "Wall of Glomp".

I had a friend in State College. His name was Robert Rector; he was constantly dropping in on us at Quest Labs and later at the Witch House. He was considerably older than any of us, by ten to twenty years. In a certain sense he was our "sempai", in that he had been a member of PSSFS forever and a day. He lived out in the borough, in a house he had bought for himself and his then-wife, who had left him not long before I first met him in '92 or so. The marvel wasn't that she left him, but that she had stayed around as long as she did.

Bob was a child in an adult's body. He didn't peel the wings off of flies, but he did snicker at the thought. He had a gross sense of humor, and a delight in the offense taken by others in just about everything. You can still find his comments in the PSSFS attendance sheets archives - look for the "Uncle Mo" and Dr. Jane Poynter entries. He was known for drawing sprawling immensely offensive cartoons on the chalkboards at PSSFS meetings, about the Challenger disaster, Michael Jackson child molestation rumors, and Deliverance-themed gags. He was mildly obsessed by Deliverance, at least partially because he bore something of a resemblance to Ned Beatty - one of his more annoying habits was "squealing like a pig" whenever somebody got homophobic or the subject came up - quite disturbing and a bit nerve-wracking if you were doing something else in the room at the time. Bob was endlessly embarrassing.

He was also more than a little racist. He would go on for hours about Marion Barry, racial quotas, and various other race-themed irritations, most of which I've expunged from my memory because I didn't want to dwell on Bob's race issues. He insisted that he was "black" and that he had color in the woodpile somewhere, and that if we'd ever meet his father, his father was much darker than he. I've since seen pictures of Bob's father, and Bob was selling a bill of goods. Bob just thought it was amusing that blacks insisted that they couldn't be racist, and tried to wedge himself in under that exemption. He loved NWA, and insisted on repeating fragments of their raps in pretty much the same spirit as the pig-squealing.

Bob didn't really work for a living, which always made me think a little less of him - I've got a serious Puritan work ethic bias going, I'm afraid. He said that he managed his family's investments, which seemed to us to be a silly sort of pretension, and that it meant that he was living off of his father's beneficence. Just recently, I discovered that his father had left $10 million dollars in bequests to both of his alma maters - $20 millions all told. Apparently Bob wasn't kidding about the investments - his father had been a surgeon, and the family wasn't old wealth or anything. Bob must really have made that killing on Pfizer that he said he did.

The last time I saw him, he and Dave had visited me at my new digs in Bellefonte, and we had gone out to eat at the Bellefonte Wok, where he insisted on making a series of anti-Chinese jokes in front of the waiters. I kind of yelled at him about that, and then I didn't see him any more. He continued to hang out at Dave's new place in Briarwood for a few more months, and then Dave got tired of his bullshit, and told him to get lost. And he did. And didn't come back. Eventually we noticed that his house was up for sale, and the assumption was that he had gotten tired of kids twenty years younger than him cursing him out, and went back to his parents' farm outside Chambersburg, where he and his father had entertained themselves by collecting tanks and other armored vehicles for their notational "Franklin Military Museum".

I wondered occasionally what happened to him, but I only found out last night, when an idle google search brought up his father's death and bequests. Bob hadn't been important enough for people to notice when he went away, but his father had been a pillar of the community, and he got column-inches, generously enough that they mentioned the fact that his sons had died before he passed. From here, I was able to find Bob's very brief death notices. Bob had died a few days after Dave told him to get lost, shortly after the New Year, in January 2001. We're still not sure what he died of, but he was overweight and lived alone, and our best guess is a heart attack.

For more than four years now, I've had Bob in the back of my mind, judging the world partially by how he would see it, how he would make fun of our increasing political correctness, our need for propriety, our need for decorum. I somehow assumed he was in somebody else's living room, bringing "tribute" and embarrassing the hell out of his hosts before others. It's very strange that the world has been without Bob for four and a half years now. I'm sorry that he's missed so much that would have brought him joy, even if that joy would have been mostly schadenfreude over our failures and petty evils. I can't imagine that a man who drew horrible cartoons of shuttle disasters and who once wore a Waffen-SS uniform through a convention full of rabbis missed something like the September 11 disasters. It just seems... unfair.

Goodbye, Bob.

A good deal of air has been let out of what remained of the "no global warming" argument.

As far as I can tell from the article and from a conversation with my meteorologist officemate, it goes like this:

One of the most important disagreements between observations and climatology models has been the daytime upper-atmosphere temperatures, which have been nonintuitively trending *downwards* since the Seventies, while everything else has been trending upwards, including *nightime* upper-atmosphere temperatures. What these guys from California are arguing is that this anomalous cooling trend is an artifact of improvements in weather-balloon technology.

The sensor-packages get warmed by direct sunlight, and the heat shielding technology before the mid-Seventies weren't good enough to keep this from biasing the temperature results. Whenever they introduced better shielding in the weather balloons used by a station or service, a discontinuity resulted in the data-stream. Since weather satellites' remote-sensing results were directly calibrated to the weather-balloon direct-sensing data, this bias was also present in pre-improvement satellite data as well, and if the re-calibration was done eventually against the new weather-balloons, the satellite data would no doubt have had something of a delay discontinuity, as they trumbled along on their own, only later being re-calibrated to the "new" standard temperatures. As my officemate notes, this should have been detected in the initial testing of the new technology, and probably can be demonstrated by running both sets of sensor packages off of the same weather-balloon, if you can still find the old models.

As far as I can tell, though, it seems as if authors of previous studies knew about the discontinuity effect, and had adjusted for it in some fashion. From some rather cryptic comments in the last third of the linked article, it sounds as if the authors of the new study are of the opinion that the previous corrections were incorrectly done, and that the discontinuity wasn't properly removed by the method used. Essentially, it's the same story as the infamous "hockey-stick", except it's biting against the anti-warming case this time. I can't go any further on that line without knowing more than what we're given in this article, and it's almost certain that I wouldn't understand the math specifics if I had them.

My officemate said that he never really credited the "no warming" argument, and points to significant Arctic icemelt and Alaskan permafrost melting as more important signifiers anyways. But he's not generally a "hair-on-fire" kind of guy, so YMMV.

HT to the guys at Rantburg, even if they don't seem to understand why an erroneously warmer Seventies and normal Eighties-to-the-present would give a false-positive cooling trend appearance.

Just pruning my blogroll a bit, elminating some snark, some people I'm not actually reading all that much, and getting rid of the distinctions - as if the people not labeled "friends" aren't, or the parts not labeled "the blogsphere" are somehow separate from the same.

This guy is feeling unlinked.. Let's see if he notices this. I was checking track-backs on one of Pixy's deliberate flamewar threads. Hey, at least he can do trackbacks. We freebie blogger untermenschen are too lowly and technically inept to be trusted with a powerful and dangerous tool like trackbacks. Kind of like those kids they insist on giving the safety scissors...

This is big shit. When Weldon and his "Able Danger" song-and-dance first came over the wires, I didn't get too excited, because Weldon is one of those Chicken Littles who always get hissy and hyper over flaky stuff which often turns out to be so much hot air. But they got the 9/11 Commission people to admit that A)"Able Danger" was real, B) "Able Danger" *did* get some sort of hit on Atta and three of the other 9/11 shahids and that C) somebody on the 9/11 Commission staff had been briefed by "Able Danger".

This means that the 9/11 Commission people suppressed information contrary to their conclusions, and as Geraghty argues, that it is now much more highly likely that the Clinton-era "wall" between security agencies, the military, and other security elements was directly and squarely responsible for the success of the 9/11 attacks. It also might help explain why we haven't had a repeat of the attacks - that after "the wall" was dismantled, large-scale would-be terrorist conspiracies are visible enough in the States to be caught or disrupted before they get anywhere near their targets.

If I might go out on a limb here... it's possible that we now know who was responsible for the 9/11 failures, and her name is Jamie Gorelick.

Update: Devil's advocate viewpoint, via a Minuteman link.

Second update: Whoops. A weekend later, and it turns out that Weldon has mostly led us off a cliff. No mention of Atta's name to the Commission people, and it kind of sounds as if Weldon's source didn't put 2 and 2 together on the "making" of Atta until pretty late in the game. I should have stayed with my first instinct, which was to dismiss Weldon as an excitable flake. Oops.

The middle part of Touch features the introduction of a taciturn replacement coach, who shows up, beats up the protagonist, makes everybody do drills in massed close order, fires the part-time manager love-interest, and generally carries on like your typical tough-love it's-for-the-kids-own-good Japanese-sports-ideal bullshitter.

This crap drives me absolutely nuts, and since the show uses dogs to make you sympathize with characters, and they give tough-love temp-coach a cute little brown puppy which he seems to like, I was crawling the walls in outrage, fighting against the narrative, if you know what I mean by that. The real-world versions of this kind of shitheel are brutal assholes, who practice a species of child-abuse, and the romanticization of this sort of behaviour is an abominable Japanese habit.

Then Touch surprised me. At first I put the new coach's habit of sending minors off to buy his beer and cigarettes down as a sort of Bad News Bears reference. I was still expecting them to find out that the coach is a quietly noble man who's doing it all for love of baseball. (Gag!) But his teaching methods are shown to drive off new club members, and causes lots of injuries. He *doesn't* teach the protagonist how to hit better, and intentionally screws with the club so that they're incapable of playing a game without being humiliated. He's portrayed as brutal, sadistic, cowardly in a subtle fashion, and totally irresponsible. In a show in which villains are notably absent - the players and coaches of other, rival teams are invariably either comically harmless or admirably noble, and the characters' responsible adults are generally feckless and mildly irresponsible - they suddenly produce an actual villain some fifty episodes into the story, and in the persona of an expected tough-love role-model!

Tres cool.

The writer really got me!

Ah-hah! They finally put up that piece on the year I ran the convention on said convention's website. A few typos here and there, but not too bad.

I'm taking a mild liking to the new Full Metal Panic series. It isn't really fun, like Fumoffu was, but it's much more engaging on an episode-by-episode basis. The last episode actually failed to make me hate Tessa, which is fairly unprecedented. It's not great television or anything, but it doesn't suck, which is more than I'll say for the last year or so's worth of television anime.

Touch continues to charm. The first season ended differently from how I recall the first movie ending, but I'm thinking that the TV version is better. Less sentimental and overwrought. I was thinking that they don't make decent sports anime any more, but then it occurred to me that I hadn't even paid attention to shounen football-anime Eyeshield 21. Should I?