I just had the opportunity to organize my thoughts on the bailout failure & the Pelosi speech, which I'm basically cutting-and-pasting from a comment over at Jason's blog.

Think of it this way: the Republican congressional fence-sitters were being asked to do something which violated their principles & their own understanding of their constituents' opinions. Then they were told by the individuals on the other side who were soliciting this marginal betrayal of their principles and their constituents "oh, yes, and by the way? we're going to use your aid as a club to beat you over the head with in the press."

Speaker Pelosi stood up & told the Republican waverers that there was *no* cover for them in voting for the bill. It was a violation of their principles, against the reported will of their constituents, and on top of that, the Democratic leadership was promising to use their aye votes against them in the coming campaign.

She changed the equation from '(claimed national interest + bipartisan cover) - (principles + constituent opinion) = 0' to 'claimed national interest - (principles + constituent opinion + partisan PR shitstorm)= LOSE' with that speech.

Hell, now that I've laid it out myself, I would have changed my vote, too. I wager the only reason Peterson voted 'aye' was that he's retiring, and he doesn't need to give a damn. The equation works out for him - his expected successor G.T. is running around yelling his opposition to the bailout as loud as his lungs will allow.

Oh, and by the way? True Blood is a mess of an adaptation. Very disappointing. Tonally all over the place, and way too strident & shrill for the source material. Part of the charm of the Southern Vampire books was the dry, underplayed country humor & setting. The books are very much flyover country material. The HBO adaptation's tone is closer to "Anita Blake" cut with a Hollywood-style condescension towards Southern Gothics. Oversexed with an emphasis on trailer-freakery. It's like a trash-off between the unsympathetic, predatory, amoral supporting cast and the incidental vampires that just kill people and feed off the bodies.

Took a break off from politics last weekend, and went down to Lancaster County to spend some time with old roommates & celebrate Big Dave's birthday. I lasted until Saturday morning before I went out for a 'walk' to find the closest thing to a morning paper & see how the debate went.

Back to the phones tonight.

Gurren Lagann is the best thing Gainax has ever done, bar none. It's like FLCL without all the emo and motormouth, Abenobashi without the self-indulgent genre-parody, Evangelion without the clinical depressive at the helm. It's almost uniformly gorgeous (excepting of course the infamous fourth episode, which really was just a bad-art episode, all things being equal), endlessly enthusiastic, *serious-minded*, smart, quick-footed, well-structured, and just flat-out fun. It is an almost-perfect mecha anime.

Now if market gotterdammerungs were only susceptible to deus ex Spiral Power...

Ha!

The Glorious Mirrorball, folks. He and his staff will be here for the next four years and change, if you so wish it.

Of course, Palin's people managed to start their message off with a bad typo, so YMMV.

Well, it's been a quiet week in Puddle Soonbegone, on the edge of karst country. I got a call on my answering machine when I got home last night, from my opposite number asking me to vote for the Glorious Mirrorball. Interesting presentation, a good deal more tribal & demanding than our approach, which emphasizes the merit of our candidates over any direct request for the recipient's vote. I'm divided over whether their approach is tactically more effective. The professionals say that you do need to actually straight-out ask for the voter's vote, explicitly. We tend to talk about "support" rather than baldly laying out the v-word.

It's not a happy thing, calling and interrupting private lives for tiny fragments, which put together into the whole, might possibly add up into some sort of transient public advantage - if everybody down the line has done the right thing, maybe. I suppose it's simpler if you hold some sort of corporatist or collectivist ideal: that it's the duty of the vanguard to lead the proletariat, or something about the masses uniting to throw of the shackles of etcetera, or the soul of the nation uniting to throw off the chains of international capitalism. Fascists are, after all, ideologically better suited to harassing the common man into dropping his private concerns and concentrating on the wider arena. To the individualist, what they were doing before you called them *is* the proper and right use of what little time they have. Any possible cause to which you might direct their precious time and attention will be, at best, of secondary importance.

This is why these campaign seasons should be sharp, furious, and above all, short. It's just a shame that it takes so long to get a GOTV operation up to speed. There's no such thing as a running start.

I tried listening to the AM station in town. AM radio is so low-tech, and kind of hard to listen to. There's all that atmospheric buzz, and the ads are mostly schmuckbait for goldbugs, far as I can tell.

Argh. I was arguing with a retired instructor in international law on Friday about Palin's knowledge or lack thereof of the subject, but it seems we were both arguing from false premises. ABC chopped the hell out of that interview. Naked bias. Every afternoon I drive into State College to make campaign calls, listening to NPR news is like listening to the opposition's summation of the day's events. They're barely pretending any more.

Ye gods. It's the Obama Nation's very own fish symbol! How very, very - wait a minute, is this a Republican dirty trick? Doesn't look like it at first blush. No hits on Snopes yet, though.

Useful list of Palin rumors & some attempts at explanation.

Link stolen from the Instapundit, as has some others recently. Hey, it's getting to be busy around here.

Michael Yon article on the Kajaki engineering convoy mission last week, with impressive photographs from a combat photographer who was with 3 Para during the fighting that cleared the Taliban positions along and around the convoy route.

John Judis thinks that Obama a) implicitly rejected the community organizer approach to problem-solving in the late Eighties as he left Chicago for law school and b) did so because he thought that Alinsky-style "self-interest against entrenched power" led directly to squalid, irrational, racist identity politics. I think it's a brilliant attempt to project Judis' own analysis of Alinsky's anti-politics onto the perfect ideological mirror which is Barrack Obama, but I can't say I'm convinced. All the actual quotes from Obama are oblique and abstract, which could easily be re-intrepreted by an unsympathetic auditor as an orthodox left-political argument in the traditional manner of old-school Fabian socialism, instead of the almost neo-conservative critique which Judis wants Obama to have embraced.

But the stuff about Alinskian community organizations like SON/SOC degenerating into blatant white-flight race-baiting is interesting and new information, at least to me.

Well, I'm here at work waiting on a DNS propagation issue for a botched server switch, and contemplating my 8 AM customer support shift starting later this morning, and wondering if I should just skip going home whenever we actually get some action on the DNS thing.

Caffeine. I need caffeine.

This is the very definition of cool. But it's also a nasty sign of just how out-of-control southern Afghanistan is. We've almost won in Iraq, but Afghanistan is a nasty, unpalatable mess. One of the worst problems is that we can't put that much more in-country more than what's already there, for fear of collapsing the various extremely tenuous supply conduits into the country. The Russians have just shut down the northern supply route, and the one through Pakistan is going through the heart of what's shaping up to be a really ferocious tribal war. I'd say civil war, but there's precious little central government in the NWFP for anybody to rebel against. Right now, it looks like the militias of one tribe or coalition of clans against the Taliban and the militias of the other tribe or coalition of clans. (I don't understand the cultural structure of the NWFP enough to tell if the two "tribes" I've seen mentioned are exhaustive, or just the particular combatants in the dogfight.)

Check out the blackshirt brigade. This is the world you made: faceless goons spraying poison in the face of octogenarians as a form of political expression.

The modern freikorps at play in the streets of St. Paul.

So the Republican campaign office in State College is a cramped set of rooms above a child-friendly toy store on Allen Street. Down Allen a half-block is the Obama regional headquarters. When the press reported this fact, I had assumed that the Obama people had snapped up that storefront that the Bush-Cheney people used back in 2004, right on the street, friendly open full-length windows - used to be a video shop that specialized in anime rentals back in the day. Surprisingly, this is not the case. The landowners have leveled the old building - a fifties semi-classic hugging the line between charming chrome-tailfin and concrete brutalist monstrostity - and are in the process of putting up a brand new two-story monstrosity in its place.

No, the Obama people went and rented the old AT&T building, a frowning, severe, two-story monument in dark brown brick and smoked glass. It's as inviting as a bunker, an impression which they're trying to off-set with a cheery explosion of posters and hand-written notices plastered all over the front door, which looks like it could hold off Summer Glau for at least a minute or two.

But they're definitely burning the midnight oil in there. Lights were on after 8 PM on Labor Day.

Dude. Palin's a hacktivist. Well, OK, not really. But she's got sharp knuckles and doesn't pull punches. Given yesterday's news about her precocious engaged-and-knocked-up seventeen-year-old daughter and this, I'm going to upgrade the "Heinlein juvenile heroine" to "mid-career Heinlein protagonist". Let's just stay away from the Number of the Beast, though, OK? That'd be going a bit too far.

Via the usual.

Sen. Ken Salazar (CO-Idiot) was just kvetching that Palin was somebody "nobody's heard of".

Firstly, as I said, I was talking up Palin to my father in April. People who pay a lot of attention are criminally myopic if they've never heard of Palin. It's like never having heard of Sibelius or Napolitino.

Secondly, people who *don't* pay attention to politics aren't likely to hear of *any* second-tier VP-class politician. I asked my great-aunt the morning after the Biden pick if she'd ever heard of him. No, no she hadn't. Generally speaking, you're lucky if Joe Sixpack or Janet Housecoat knows 1) the current president and vice president 2) the speaker of the house 3) their own governor 4) their own senators.

McCain-Palin '08.

Huh. I believe I was telling my folks back in April that I thought she'd be the best choice McCain could make. I think I can live with that.

I went over to the Thompson campaign office on Allegheny Street yesterday afternoon for a campaign kick-off open house. There was an unfamiliar Mini Cooper with a Hillary sticker outside the office. It was there hours later, when I walked by coming back from the grocery store. It must have belonged to one of the campaign workers. That's taking Operation Chaos a bit far, don't you think? I didn't even keep a Bush/Cheney 2004 sticker on my car after the election - I had intentionally gotten a magnetic so that it could be easily removed afterwords.

Cars festooned with bumper stickers is a leftist affection. Campaign advertising is for the campaign season.

Speaking of which, when is that McCain running mate announcement going to happen? Can't put out campaign materials without the blipping running mate.

Oh, btw: Thompson's good with faces. He remembered me from the Bush campaign office in 2004.

I followed a link from the Corner to a Daily Kos post by Keith Obermann throwing Dana Milbank under his own personal bus, and noted in passing the comment count. 1019 comments.

1019.

Who could read that many comments, or even care to try? That's nuts!

Of course, taking an egotistical over-promoted ex-sportscaster as your own personal political redeemer is nuts in the first place, but good Zod people! Who has that kind of time?

So it's vice-presidential vetting season, and rumor has it that McCain will be announcing a running mate in the next week or so. I'm not sure if Obama's ready yet - from the number of people bounced off of his vetting committee for various subprime lending malfeances, I'm not even sure if he has a vetting committee in action, or whether they've decided to just run his ego for vice-president & moved on to planning the inevitable transition instead of worrying over minor details like VP candidates. Is "hack to be named later" a valid choice?

Anyways, everybody's thinking about McCain's best choices, which leaves me wondering about worst choices. What politicians or personalities would be guaranteed to cause their ticket to crash and burn in the most picturesque manner possible? For McCain, the bad choices are almost endless, although time and fickle fame have undermined some of the best jokes - does anybody even remember who Zell Miller or Trent Lott is these days? 2004 was such a long time ago... Ah. But it will take a true spirit of perversity to properly torpedo Obama in the second compartment. Whose baggage is heavy enough to fatally over-balance the UNS Audacity?

The most timely of bad choices would be, of course, John Edwards. "Ma, Ma, where's my pa?" I'd say something about the Obama people missing the scandal because of their reliance on the determinedly blind mainstream media, but of course, lefties just pretend to not read the tabloids. They'll know. Politicians may be too high in the instep to buy their own groceries, but their aides will have seen the National Enquirer covers the next time they pick up the boss's skim milk. But really, Edwards is kind of boring, even for a worst vice presidential pick, even with the two-time loser aspect of the choice.

Who's flashier? Bill Ayers, of course, but that's more of a dream-candidate for those of us who follow the wingnut commentariat, and anyways, he's not actually a politician, unless you consider terrorism to be politics by other means. Michelle Obama, for that trifeca of misguided "feminism means riding on a husband's coat-tails" pandering, sullen anti-Americanism, and complete and total political inexperience. But it's hard to picture Michelle Obama as a sort of Eva Peron/Cristina Fernandez figure. Harder than it was the she-Nixon, at any rate.

With the Countrywide thing having blown up so comprehensively, I think we'll be spared the prospect of a Dodd vice-presidency, which will make for a less sleep-inducing VP debate, if nothing else. Whom among the other Democratic presidential '08 candidates would be crazed enough to keep us awake? Kucinich is almost plausible, if you honestly believe that the nutroots are pissed enough by the gestures towards the rightward tack since HC bowed out. Utterly and totally nuts, but plausable. And hey - Ohio! Favorite son! Remember when they used to put favorite sons in the VP slot, and it actually worked? When was the last time that happened? 1996, I guess.

But you know, few really plausable VP presidential choices for Obama are hole-beneath-the-water-line disasters. Sibelius, or Napolitano have few serious down-sides that I'm aware of, and although Bill Richardson supposedly has some dreadful portrait-of-Dorian-Gray in the attic that pundits like Mickey Kaus love to drop horrid hints about, I can't imagine it was that bad without it having come out during the Obama-HC hatefest in the spring. There are *tons* of female Democratic governors to choose from, and none of them are likely to blow up the campaign. Some are even red-state figures. Although really, I don't think Napolitano's Arizona is in play this year, any more than Palin's Alaska is.

I started out planning on making fun of McCain-Lieberman (speaking of two-time losers) or McCain-Helms (nothing like a dead racist to make a live Republican look progressive in comparison) or even McCain-Ventura (Why pretend to be Republican any more? Parties are dead!). But I realize now that the only choice McCain could surprise me with is McCain-Romney. Because really, anything would be an improvement on the expected choice.

But why listen to me? What do I know? I loved the idea of Kemp in 1996.

Jack's probably still available for another run.

Wow. Dark Knight is a hell of a ride. Some pretty ugly philosophy and politics coiling in its bitter heart, but then we always knew that there was a fascist core to the Batman mythos, didn't we?

Weird thing? Batman himself almost disappears from the movie. The focus is so tight on all the secondary characters and villains that the nominal protagonist disappears over the event horizon. By the end of the movie, Bruce Wayne and his alter ego are like a black hole, disappearing within the abyssal requirements of the story. Batman becomes the abyss. I like that.

I'm impressed with how they used Harvey Dent. It works much better than what I was afraid they'd do with the character.

I'm a little worried about how much there is to the movie. I left the theatre thinking about how we have to drive up the intensity of everything any more - how what was very simple becomes with time either more and more baroque, or in the case of Dark Knight, condensed and concentrated. There's just so much story compressed into the film, that it feels like the material for three Seventies-era movies. But the story isn't rushed, or cluttered, or spackled-together like last year's Spiderman 3. The script & editing are a clockwork marvel of syncronization and economy.

Watchmen's trailer looks impressive. Actuallly, it looks a lot better than the actual comic, which honestly wasn't all that polished or artistically distinguished. Watchmen's virtues lay in the writing, and in layout itself. Now that I think about it, the Watchmen trailer looks like the version of the comic which might have been produced if the art had been given to one of the Nineties gold-foil crowd instead of Dave Gibbons.

No blood for uranium!

Now if the greentards would just let us build some pebblebed reactors to put the booty to use...

Congratulations, Supreme Court! You've put yourself in a position where reputable and otherwise-rational members of the public are approvingly quoting Andrew Jackson on the subject of respecting your decisions. It takes some work to put modern-day PC-sensitized responsible adults in the same camp with the architect of the Trail of Tears.

I can't express just how stupid this is. In 2000? The Court pissed off the die-hard Democratic partisans. In 2008? Anyone who actually gives a damn about the military and foreign policy (as opposed to those who think of foreign policy as an extension of their moral self-regard). What are you going to do in 2012? Well, some of you won't be doing anything other than obeying the second law of thermodynamics, because the probabilities approach unity that one of you senile old wrecks will kick the bucket before then, but God only knows what monstrous idiocy the collective Court will be capable of if the Obamanation has the appointing of your successors, un-restrained by a Republican majority in the Senate.

And if you think there's a Republican majority in the cards for either house in the next four years, I've got a house in Mogadishu for sale. I'm sure it'll appreciate in value once the war's over, right?

Well, the Seventies are making a comeback. They're talking about stagflation, and the guys at work who live in Toftrees are trying to make a carpool work. I don't have to 'pool, because I walk to work. It'd be nice to walk up with other folk, but nobody from town seems into it.

Oh, and I'm never buying milk from Dollar General again. This is the second or third time that a half-gallon's gone sour on me before it was more than three-fifths used. Waste of money....

Obama's channeling Preston Brooks now? Makes sense, given that he's a Democratic descendant of slave-owning border ruffians.

Cicadas all over the sidewalks down in town. Ugly little things, look more like a cross between coachroaches and hornets than your usual flat-black cicada model. Yech.

So, I promised a discussion of Franceschi and Weider's the Wars Against Napoleon. I greatly regretted this promise, because it required I actually finish the book, a task which I would have just as well let drop uncompleted. Even if I did pay hardback prices for the thrice-blasted thing.

The book is being sold as a revisionist work arguing the diplomatic case of Napoleon I's innocence and genuinely peaceable nature. This would be a substantial burden for the most scholarly and clever of authors, as Napoleon has become a by-word in the English-speaking world as an aggressor, a tyrant, and a degenerate. Franceschi and Weider are neither clever, nor do they demonstrate any scholarly characteristics, I must report.

First of all, diplomatic history is a long-winded and detailing sort of affair. I should have been well-warned to note that this work of diplomatic history was barely more than two hundred pages long. What detail is contained within its few pages tends more towards the military, than the diplomatic. Perhaps the authors were confused by the word "Wars" in their title, and concluded that they were obliged to include great swathes of text about the operational and tactical events of Napoleon's many, many campaigns. Nevertheless, in a book proporting to tear the diplomatic mask from the warlike visage of the Bonaparte family's wicked royalist enemies, the material on diplomacy and politics is sparse, spotty, and underwhelming. We get barely three pages on Tilsit, two or three pages scattered here and there on Amiens, and maybe a page and a half on Luneville. A few paragraphs here and there about Campoformio, etc. Meanwhile, the maneuvering behind the establishment of the myriad Bonapartist puppet-states justifying what still looks to me like Napoleon's many aggressions and invasions are airly dismissed with bald nonsense which the North Korean's propagandists would blush to commit to print.

For instance, this on the enthroning of a Bonaparte brother over the Netherlands:

On the institutional plane, the Dutch threw themselves into the arms of Revolutionary France to escape the stadholders (governors of the country.) At the time, the Netherlands had a republican regime presided by the "Grand Pensioner" Schimmelpenninck. In 1806 the Batavian authorities took advantage of their leader's illness to request of Napoleon that he give them his brother Joseph as king. Joseph had earned their respect the previous year while commanding a Franco-Dutch corps. The proclamation was issued on June 5.

Thus was one of the oldest republics in Europe placed under a monarchy by the banner-carriers of the revolutionary Rights of Man!

Kindly note, the lack of citation in the above quote. There is none. In the entire book. Apparently the authors received their enlightenment on the subject via divine revelation, because there is no worldly credit given anywhere outside the obsequious acknowledgments contained within the brief preface. Not even quotes from correspondence and contemporary works are properly cited such that a reader not inclined to take the authors at their word might consult the originals.

This book is an act of contrascholasticism. The authors appear actively contemptuous of the notion of active readership, of the idea that their book might act as any sort of gateway for a journey deeper into the subject. Their word is, apparently final.

They also seem disinclined to persuade or convince an uncertain or open-minded audience. The text is littered with rhetorical, unearned daggers flung at the enemies of Napoleon, often out of context. Bernadotte, the general who turned against Napoleon once he became Crown Prince of Sweden, never appears in the text without an accompanying shriek of rage against his eventual betrayal of the peaceable emperor. Every other personage of note who did not stand with Napoleon until Saint Helena are likewise pummelled about their unworthy heads and shoulders.

Look, I was willing to entertain the idea that the monarchs of Europe were perfidious and brought Napoleon's catastrophes upon their own heads. Hell, I bought the book, didn't I? But once you wade through two hundred pages of:

In foreign affairs, the domain more relevant to our subject, Napoleon's first concern was to reassure the European monarchies. He attempted to disarm their hysterical hostility by informing them that he accepted the Treaty of Paris, thereby indicating that he renounced any claim to reconquer the frontiers of 1792 and instead engaged to respect those of 1789.

it becomes difficult to maintain equanimity and balance. Oh, and please note - the above was a description of the diplomatic maneuvers during "Hundred Days", and Napoleon fought the whole of that spring's campaign in Belgium, which is decidedly on the wrong side of the 1789 borders.

Really, this book is naked apologetic. They write to defend their hero, against every insult ever essayed by an opponent. Check this out - this is their defense of the then-Consul's slaughter of prisoners in Jaffa during the Egyptian campaign:

Confronted with a fait accompli, Bonaparte found himself in a nightmarish issue of conscience. Already suffering from a shortage of provisions for his soldiers, he was unable to feed this additional mass of humanity under any circumstances. Nor could he spare sufficient soldiers to guard them, being cruelly undermanned as a result of operations. Simply to abandon these men to their fate would be to condemn them to a slow and horrible death in the desert. Finally, in the rigid oriental mindset, any measure of clemency would be perceived as a weakeness of will tha would probably encourage even more ferocious resistence in future combats. It was thus that Bonaparte was obliged to resolve his moral crisis by taking the terrible decision to exterminate the prisoners under indescribable conditions.

What a prince.

In short, this book leaves me more ignorant of the subject than I was when I first opened its leaves. What few new facts one might glean from the authors' presentation are so compromised by their unrelenting partisanship, refusal to cite sources, and blatant bias that I find myself unable to accept any of it as true. Their endorsement of interpretations I've encountered previously have undermined the legitimacy of said interpretations by that very endorsement.

In short, I regret that I ever encountered this horrid little volume of pestiferous Bonapartist propaganda.

Dude.

Oh, and btw? The Wars Against Napoleon is shaping up to be a ripe piece of unaddorned sophistry, a bare-bones apologia for tyranny. I'm regretting having bought it. I'll have to track back to see who talked me into it - it was either someone on the Corner or Dimitri, I think.

Huh. Iron Man's playing at the Garman tonight. Sounds like a plan.

So it's National History Day season, and the Valentine Hill Road was echoing this fine morning with the outraged bellows of yours truly, reading his way through the senior papers. Vietnam War papers. [shudder]

So I've been watching fansubs of the first season of Space Battleship Yamato. It's more fun than I had expected, but lord, the science! The continuity errors! The enemy race changes *skin color* ten episodes into the show! With no in-story explanation why the Gamilons were a healthy pink until the Pluto base was destroyed! Well, except for that subordinate of Desslar's - he was always a sickly purple. There's no women on board the Yamato, except for one episode, where they're all over the place, then after that, it's just Yuki again. The travel-times make my head ache, and the galactic geography makes the original Battlestar Galactica seem reasonable and rational in comparison.

But on the other hand, you've got mad Seventies futuristic designs, great music, those trippy Matsumoto characters, and Captain Okita. Gotta love Captain Okita. And Sanada, grinning suicidally as he blows up the Gamilon-trap-of-the week with bombs in his own prosthetic limbs. He rocks.

Fred: Obama will say any pin-headed thing he feels like on foreign affairs, so long as it doesn't require him to actually follow through with any of it. I'm not president or running for president; if I say "invade Pakistan!", it'd just be some fool saying something stupid on the internet. Obama, on the other hand, had somebody mis-brief him & blurted out, stupidly, some idiocy about invading a nominal allied state during the campaign season.

The reason that Pakistan is such a hellacious problem is that they're nominally our allies. (Same with the Saudis, but the Royal Family isn't a nuclear power. Yet.) Without causus belli, we can't out-right invade the technically sovereign state of Pakistan. The CIA crawls all over that county with the half-hearted connivance of the Pakistanis - there was one heck of a wild-west show in the Kyber Agency recently. We conduct quiet cross-border attacks all the time. But I *don't* think we should declare open war on the Frontier Agencies. It's not the delicate or nuanced way to go about things.

But more importantly, Afghanistan isn't a cultural or political priority. Afghanistan is a proxy to a proxy, at least two removes from the strategic pivot. All we can do in Afghanistan is kill jihadis. More importantly, we can *lose* in Afghanistan, but we can't win there. It's an attritional fight, and the modern United States isn't a power which can win on attritional terms. It only works if we change our terms, our definitions. Afghanistan is far enough out of the Islamic heartland that it'll never register as anything other than "an affair of posts". You can win hearts and minds locally in Afghanistan proper, but what you do in that country won't swing the Islamic public regionally or internationally one way or the other.

Iraq is the emotional heartland of the modern Islamic world, or at least as close as we can get without waging war on a nominal sovereign allied state. And last year the Salafis wrecked themselves in front of the Muslim world, right in the heart of the old caliphate. They butchered and they slaughtered and they demonstrated their ideals before the cameras.

Iraq was where we could show the Islamic world a choice of definitions: does "Muslim" mean takfirism, salafism? Or are the Takfiri devil-worshipers, nihilistic, solipistic, savages, criminals - safely *not Muslim*?

I'm sanguine about Iraq because it looks like Iraq broke the Sunni regional threat. Since last summer, it's been a worry about whether there would be a count-rout and regional civil war between the resurgent Shia trends - the "Shia Crescent" - and a beaten Sunni cultural trend. The unexpected "Iranian subversion" mini-civil war seems to have put paid to the threat of the "Shia Crescent", though.

On a related note, I'm having difficulty figuring out what the heck happened last month in Basra and Sadr City, but there are a couple of alternate interpretations.

1) The various Iranian-suborned groups in the Iraqi Shia community had a falling-out-between-thieves, and the Iranians tried to salvage the situation by throwing the Sadrists to the wolves.
2) al Maliki had a sudden surge of patriotic feeling, and decided to assert national control over Basra.
3) Sadr failed to impress anyone in Teheran with his ability to mobilize the masses, and the fighting was *started* by Iranian intervention, against Sadr.
4) al Maliki and SIIC finally gave in to American badgering, and decided to reconcile with the Sunni Awakening folks by waging their own little demonstrative war-against-terrrorists-and-takfiri. Sadr, being the least politically apt and by far the youngest and dumbest of Shia powerbrokers, got chosen as the judas goat for this demonstration. The governmental Shia factions, having fought and won a much more conventional war against their own head-choppers and lunatics, are now exploiting an opportunity to meet on common terms with the newly-sympathetic Sunni Awakening community leaders.

I like #4 much more than the other explanations of what's going on. It explains what happened to the abortive "Shia Awakening" movement from last winter. If the Shias in government let that go on for too long, they would have failed to protect their phoney-baloney jobs. In order to avoid another bottom-up counter-insurgency, they and the Iranians are colluding to make the pacification of the south a top-down national project. It *sounds* like the Iranians may have out-maneuvered themselves, though. And there was always a chance that the Iranians would shoot themselves in the foot like this. Whenever you try to buy everybody in a factional snake-pit, you end up buying nobody; because all the factions are bought off equally, none of them feel beholden for the money and support delivered. Aid becomes tribute when it is expected, and leverage depends upon uncertainty.

Huh, long weekends.

I'm feeling kind of optimistic about the war this morning, but then, I haven't read the news sites yet this morning. I'm going to put a placer down and say that I believe that we're winning in Iraq today, and that it'll finally settle down into a low-level series of terroristic outbursts and border flareups with Iran. I'm not as sanguine about the prospect of war with Iran, and the ongoing deterioration of Afghanistan. We've ceded a certain amount of control in Afghanistan to NATO, so to one degree or another that situation is kind of out of control, and that's always worrisome. One of the things I'll be looking for in a future administration is a healthy re-engagement with Afghanistan, and the proxy-war with Pakistan's demons which "Afghanistan" represents.

I spent part of this last weekend talking with a once-estranged friend who's going to be deploying to Iraq by the end of the year with one of the new Stryker brigades. He seems pretty optimistic, but then, he hasn't been actively deployed since the second year of the Bosnia deployment. I didn't hear anything I haven't been hearing elsewhere in my own little personal echo-chamber, so take that as you will.

But Fred, I can't imagine that it's a good idea to use adjectives like "savage" when talking about Muslims, Shia or Sunni. Words have meaning, and I like to reserve such explosive and loaded terms for actual savages, like the takfiri and the terrorists and the criminals hired by both.

Huh. The Clearfield wallah beat my-neighbor-the-carpetbagger. Guess I'll definitely be voting Republican in the generals, unless this Thompson fellow turns out to be a sheep-molester or something like that. And, since they seem to have done well enough in shaking the trees & emptying the closets of skeletons - Walker, sucks to be you, dude - I'm guessing that possibility is pretty slight.

But it's not good when the Democrats roll out more primary votes than the Republicans in such a traditionally Republican, rural district, especially when the Republican congressional race is that heavily-contested. About 69.5k to more than 71k? Not good, folks. Pennsyltucky is starting to go blue in the face.

And yes, the Shrew made her numbers. It's gonna go to a second ballot at the least. Woo-hoo! Contested convention!

Can we lock the gates behind them?

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily.

Hitchens, of course. Who would know from knifing beloved, sainted figures like grandmothers and Mother Teresa. In Hitchens' defense, of course, is the fact that the sacred cows he gores are ours, not his.

There's a competitive race for the Fifth Congressional District of Pennsylvania for the first time in twelve years. It's a heck of a mess over on the Red side of the aisle with nine contenders. Luckily, I got pissed off in the spring of 2003 & re-registered as an ass, er, I mean Democrat. This means that I only have to care about the *Democratic* primaries, and have no say in the other contest, and thus, justifiably, no reason to care until after the primaries are over. I've only got a choice between three candidates. They are as follows:

Mark B. McCracken. The only thing I know about him is what I've read in the CDT, namely, he's a county commissioner from Clearfield, and has an ill-thought-out "bring 'em home now" position on Iraq. I don't think so.

Rick Vilello, the mayor of Lock Haven. Again, never heard of him before now. And frankly? Mayors in Central Pennsylvania are nonentities. I couldn't tell you *Bellefonte*'s mayor without resorting to Google. (I checked, far as I can tell, it's still Stanley Goldman.) The point here, is that it isn't really a serious stepping stone. His position on Iraq is worse than McCracken's - glib, stupid, and dangerous.

Finally, there's Bill Cahir, my carpetbagging Iraq-war veteran neighbor. As expected, his position is solid and uncontroversial - like Hillary Clinton on a very good day, or a typical moderate-Republican office-holder on a terse day. See it through, political goalposts, training, don't leave chaos behind us, etc. Exactly what you'd expect from someone from the O'Hanlon side of the Party.

Oh, would you look at that - somebody's put up wiki pages on the candidates. Here's McCracken's. Hmm. Lots of stupid talk about fiscal responsibility. As if a freshman from the sticks would get on the Appropriations Committee. I mean, Peterson is, but he's been around for a good long while. They don't make you a cardinal during your first term, Mr. Commissioner! And frankly? A Clearfield politician pushing for *ethanol* is just a purblind fool. He should be stumping for coal-to-gasoline if he had his constituents actual interests at heart. Plonk.

Rick Vilello doesn't have a wiki entry, but he does have his own, awful-looking campaign site. He seems to think that lumber is an alternate fuel source. I'm not sure if that means methanol or woodburners. His issues page sounds like bad Obama - all cheap parallel rhetoric and airy assertion. The bottom-most part of the page actually *rolls off the template*. I'm still not sure what exactly he proposes for "Economic Development and Rural Development", except by that construction he considers them distinct and separate items...

Here's Cahir's wiki. Igh, he worked for both Ted Kennedy and Harris Wofford. That's not a good sign. Iraq proposals in detail... what's "Operation Homeward Bound"? That sounds fraught. Google brings up something which I don't think is the same thing, given the internal details. Economically speaking, he seems to be a big "government partnership" guy, which isn't good. I'd hope that we'd all learned better during the Nineties, but I guess statism and borderline corporatism is an occupational hazard among Beltway denizens, and one of Cahir's biggest weaknesses is that he is a Beltway denizen, first as a Senate aide, then as a reporter on the congressional beat. His big-brain interventionist healthcare proposals require serious tax increases, so that's a big "no". But at least there's some details here.

At first pass, looks like I'll be voting for my carpetbagger neighbor in the primaries, but I'd have to be offered a pretty repulsive or lunatic alternative to vote for him in November. He's too statist on taxation & government intervention for me to be happy with him given what I'm seeing, but he seems better than the other Democratic alternatives.

Now that's how you do a sex scandal. That's sin on a monumental scale. That's hypocrisy and chutzpah worthy of respect.

Oh, what would we do without the spinal-reflexive perversity and contrariness of Slate? Surprisingly, they found somebody other than Christopher Hitchens to write this week's poison obituary.

The moonbat nest on the other side of Trinity Methodist, next to the Presbyterian Church's little parking lot, has been decorated by a massive poster or tapestry of the Dear Leader in the front window. Big BHO himself, four times as large as life and staring out at the passers-by on Spring Street, like a poster of one of the "Four Beards" in some drear Orwellian square. What makes nominal Americans indulge in such cult-of-personality antics? Is the the instinctive need of the weak reed for the safety of a snug, well-bundled fasces?

Huh.

I read Under the Banner of Heaven this weekend, after running into a lot of recent references to it in online discussions of Mormon polygamy. What a disappointment! I don't believe I've ever encountered an allegedly mainstream book of nonfiction wherein the author thought it appropriate to accuse the founder of a religion of being a practitioner of "necromancy". Furthermore, the book is totally lacking in footnotes, and suffers heavily from "stuff some pissed-off ex-polygamists told me which I will now regurgitate".

Don't get me wrong, I suspect the premise of the book - that polygamy, and specifically patriarchal religious polygyny, is inherently destructive of societies, families, and individuals - is basically true. I'd like to read a balanced, well-researched examination of the thesis in the Mormon context. Instead I got a shrieking exemplar of "moral panic" journalism.

Looks like a new neighbor of mine, Bill Cahir, is moving back into the District to run for the Democratic nomination for Peterson's seat. He's a journalist and a Marine in the reserves, with two tours in Iraq under his belt. His pro-blog's here, I'm still looking it over.
I'm technically a Democrat, and there really isn't time enough to re-register Republican before the April primaries. I should probably do some research on the Democratic candidates for the seat.

Update: it seems more like a summary of his political reporting for a local paper the next district over than anything from his own political opinions or positions. A lot of stuff about US Rep. Dent, from the Lehigh Valley.

My new temporary crown came loose after a single day of wear. I guess that's one way to get me to stop snacking at my desk... where's that dental glue they gave me...

Nothing much going on in my world. I've been reading some new manga.

Suppli is a pretty-looking, well-put-together working-single manga, slice-of-life stuff. I'm not really clear on why it was shrink-wrapped and emblazoned with an "adult content" label, as I can't even remember if there was any nudity in it, let alone anything more racy. Red River, for an alternate example, had the usual bodice-ripping, and since our protagonist has been raped away to Middle Kingdom-era Egypt, there's acres of exposed breasts on every other page-layout. Anyways, Suppli: pretty good manga, at least for the first volume. Nothing much going on - it's just about a girl in her late twenties trying to figure out what happened and when it was that she stopped having a life outside of work - but it's a very lush, aesthetic sort of nothing. There isn't any fancy hook like Tramps Like Us had, no racy "keeping boys as pets" to catch the casual reader's attention. I'll give it another volume or two before I decide whether it's better or worse than Tramps Like Us, but for now it's pretty much on the same wavelength.


Wild Ones, on the other hand, is all high-concept, little execution. The hook is that our protagonist has just been orphaned, with no close relatives; she finds out that the reason she didn't have any close relatives was because her maternal grandfather is a yakuza don and her mother had cut all ties. She gets adopted into a compound of stereotypical yakuza males and wackiness is expected to ensue. Sadly, not nearly as much wackiness as one might have hoped - this is no Gakusen, and of course somebody decided that our yakuza princess needed an age-appropriate beau to play kishi to her hime - or ojou as the case might be. Eh, it's not terrible, and maybe it'll get better in later volumes.

SA is one where it *better* improve in later volumes, because the first volume is horrifically repetitive and the art frankly sucks. The plot is pretty much Kare Kano crossed with Ouran High School Host Club - a pathologically competitive heroine struggling to beat her ice-king love-interest within the context of a high school elite called "SA" or "Special A", in reference to the Japanese habit of segregating their classes by A-B-C-D-E cadres. It's got some spark of entertainment, and it livened up a slow evening the other day, but the mangaka can only repeat the same two-page rote introduction of the same caste of characters before I wind up for a quick cast of the book 'gainst the nearest flat surface. Also? if you're going to build up an accomplishment-gradient for your class structure, if you want *any* sort of suspense or tension - show some movement. Class isn't caste, and if you're going to fill a book with elite children of company presidents, I want to see one of those companies go down in flames and take the smug elite brat with it. Movement makes for drama - it's a character arc, not a line for the love of pete.

The manga for Welcome to the NHK is up to its fifth volume, and I'm now officially out of my comfort area. You can only do so many things to a character or set of characters before I get freaked out, and the protagonist's stubborn insistence on finding rock-bottom and then breaking out dynamite & blasting caps to see if he can get any lower - the scenes with him back at home with the folks - that, my friends, has helped me find my inner freakout. I think I've had enough of Welcome to the NHK and hikkikomori in general. It just isn't a good subject for fiction.

Ugh, thanks Iowa. A choice between the Christian socialist and an antiwar apparachnik wrapped in Horatio Alger clothing. I'd probably go with Obama, but only because I *don't* miss elections.

And I might change my mind if there were a single pro-war independent. No matter how crazy.

Now that I think about it, both Huckabee and Obama are Christian socialists. Clinton's pretty big on the social gospel herself, but she's got other things going on. For that matter, think of what happens in the Islamic world when an apostate becomes the most powerful man in the world. They're gonna go apeshit. Obama may not be interested in war, but war will definitely be interested in him.

Wait, Peterson is retiring? He's only been a US Representative for a dozen years or so. His predecessor in the district lasted eighteen years. Peterson's been a *good* congressman, and I haven't heard a peep about any challengers - we're as close to a pocket borough as you get in the US, even if he wasn't a pretty good fit for the region. Is he sick? Not seriously, according to the press release.

That'll throw the cat in among the canaries. I don't think anyone in the district was prepared to have a contested congressional election worth talking about, and at the same time that Peterson's been in a very public slapfight with the governor over I-80, at that!

Who're the possible candidates? Corman's a joke, most of the Centre County state senators and representatives are Democrats except for Benninghoff, who's got some seniority but is too much of an old state bull to make the jump to national. Maybe James Rhodes from Clinton? Hanna's got the seniority for the Democratic side of things, and is conservative enough to be an old Democratic bull in a deeply hick-red district. Causer from Potter seems kind of young, but likely. What about Joe Scarneti? He's pretty loud on the subject of Fast Eddie's turnpike scam. Sam Smith from Jefferson, on the other hand, looks too old to be running for Congress for the first time.

So what are the great film renditions of Empty Manhattan? I can think of the following:

The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Anti-racism inversion of a deeply bigoted Victorian novel starring Harry Belafonte. Pretty damned good, and the Manhattan offered is stark, and modernist, and sleek, and utterly inhuman. The machine grinding on after its care-takers have left, still well-greased, oiled, and precise in the absence of any purpose.

The Devil's Advocate. It's a late-period New York-as-Babylon apocalypse, Gordon -Gecko-taken-to-the-fantastic-extreme film. A horror movie that uses surreality to emphasize alienation and grotesqueries, the empty-streets-of-Manhattan scenes are used to establish the end of the Masquerade, and the beginning of the End-of-Days. So, this movie's empty-streets-of-Gotham are intended to evoke anxiety - ye olde fear-and-trembling.

I'm having trouble thinking of other dead-Manhattan or empty-Manhattan movies. Anyone have anything to add?

Wow, the new "Viridian Collection" edition boxsets from Funimation are spectacularly cheap. Cardboard sleeves cheap. The Tenchi Muyo GXP set just showed up in the mail, and if I hadn't paid roughly $1.15 an episode, I'd be feeling a bit gypped right about now. Hope the discs don't come out of the sleeves auto-scratched, which I seem to remember was a problem with the similarly-packaged early PAL Buffy season 2 sets back in the early days of DVD. Those PAL Buffy collections weren't nearly as sleazy-cheap as this GXP set is. Mind you, I paid twice as much for the PAL Buffy set... which reminds me, would anyone want some decade-old Buffy PAL dvds? I've got the first three seasons sitting around gathering dust on a back shelf. Got an aging APEX DVD player chip-modded to play PAL discs, too.

I just read the novella "I Am Legend". The title makes a lot more sense for *that* story than for the movie. I'm not quite clear why they bothered hanging the title on the new movie - the movie's story had more in common with 28 Days Later and other modern-day zombie flicks than Matheson's story. I suppose there's the bacteriological explanation of the scourge, the madness of the characters, their inclination towards mad science, and their essential isolation. In the end, the novella is an ironic late-modern version of Lovecraft's "the Outsider", about the loneliness of becoming the monster. The Neville of the movie never explicitly becomes the scourge and monster that the Neville of the novella has already become on the first page. His monstrousness is less explicit, less textual, left to interpretation, and subverted by Smith's essential decency as a film presence.

I Am Legend isn't nearly as bad as the critics made it sound. It's actually pretty good - sort of like Castaway with monsters. Castaway's another movie that had an excellent first two-thirds, followed by a shaky final act. But to be honest, I didn't hate the ending of I Am Legend. I could have done without the nearly ten minute excerpt of Shrek - even Steven Spielberg shouldn't be allowed to get away with that kind of stuff any more - but in general I was able to suspend disbelief and go with the internal logic of the ending.

There's a lot of talk about how inherently likeable and amiable Will Smith is as an actor, but one of the marvels of the story was how aged and morally damaged his Robert Neville is by what he's seen and done. The usual moral calculus of zombie movies is inverted by the establishment of this Neville as a scientist and virologist. Despite some idiot claims by some reviewers, Smith's Neville doesn't start the movie hunting or slaughtering the monsters. Rather, he seems to be avoiding them as much as possible, and when he captures one, it's to test out a promising cure on the slavering thing which used to be a girl. Later, we see photographic records of each monster which he's captured and killed in the process of testing his serums. It's an unsettling moment, as you suddenly look again at your protagonist and see a mad scientist and borderline serial-killer in the place of a heroic castaway. It's all means to an end, but you can see that he's operating by habit and routine - that he's going through the motions of a plan, the soundness and righteousness of which he has mostly forgotten.

Smith's Neville lives so much on the surfaces of things because the depths have monsters. He moves from light to light, sealing himself up and locking down as the light goes away. He populates his locales with manikins, and carries on conversations, and has lost his way among them to such an extent that when one is moved out of its place, he becomes confused, violent, and makes a terrible mistake.

Smith's Neville is a man so morally fractured by his failures and successes that he's more a mosaic of partial personalities than a whole man. Inside his townhouse, he's a loving family man - to a family consisting solely of his dog. Inside his lab, he's a rigorous scientist. In his open-air office at the end of a dockside pier, he's a parody of a bureaucrat, waiting for other survivors, of whom he's given up all other hope except for those few designated hours by the river. When the shutters close, he hides with his dog in the darkness. The only thing holding his parts together is the only other person in his life - his dog Sam. Sam is the one thing holding his life together, and when she dies, then Neville goes smash.

The movie goes smash a bit as well, although not so much that I wasn't able to enjoy everything that followed. The CGI was terrible, not in that it was technically bad - although it didn't impress me all that much - but rather that it is a terrible temptation to cinematographers and directors. CGI is a cheat, a shortcut. It requires no discipline on the part of artists, and thus it relieves the pressure on decision-makers to make choices, to commit to one action at a time. CGI allows blazingly-fast action sequences, and the faster they go, the cheaper the cost, because all of that blur can hide all sorts of shortcuts and cheats and render-tricks. Instead of showing one single clash, with a small and well-defined set of actors or objects in motion, CGI allows and almost seems to demand a blur of mobs in motion. Blur isn't interesting, and mobs multiplied by cut-and-paste are basically expensive wallpaper, and about as threatening.

There are honestly cool things in the last third of I Am Legend. Every single one of them would have been better with at least half of the CGI animation cuts excised. I don't know why they thought they needed spectacle beyond the scenes of Empty Manhattan. Those were far, far more powerful than any of the swirling killer-zombie cuts of the last third. The head monster was most alarming when he was *still*. Whenever he moved, he became an effect, and then action wallpaper.

Too bad. American movies aren't going to get better until they fire half the animators, and send the directors off to make films with real-world special effects. Real explosive squibs and stuntmen teach a certain respect for the craft which isn't much different from fear. But fear teaches. Ask John Landis.

So I ended up buying a Chevy this weekend. I walked up to the dealership at the mall, and they happened to have a brand-new metallic-tangerine-orange Aveo five-door on the backlot still wrapped up with the shipping tape they use to keep it from getting banged up in the shipping racks. I got what I think was a fairly good deal; after I took it out for a test-drive, I tried to get out the door in enough time to catch the 11:08 bus from the mall into town, go check out some other dealerships on North Atherton. He pulled the usual "what can I do to get you in this car" routine, and I said, wildly, "$1000 off the sale price" in an attempt to get away without offense. They coughed up, mostly, and it was a good enough price to make up for not being a Honda or Toyota. To be honest, most of my reasons for getting a car from the latter was tied up in maintenance and quality concerns, and multiple thousands of dollars less than I would have been paying otherwise tends to make up for the difference.

So, Aveo. My mother called it "cute" when she looked it up online while I was talking to her on the phone, and I can't deny it. I was greatly amused by the color, as my father has a golf cart in that exact color, which is supposedly the same color as the Charger he owned when my parents met. It's a small car, but remarkably high off the ground - the driver's seat is higher off the pavement than any previous car I've owned. We'll see how good it is in ice and slush; Saturday wasn't nearly foul enough to provide ideal crap-weather driving conditions for the test drive, and no tractor-trailers appeared conveniently on the stretch of I-99 we took for the highway test-drive, so we'll see just how much buffeting this little hatchback can take from the big trucks moving fast. I've never been much of a leadfoot, anyways, so it seems like enough car under the hood to get me where I need to go.

It's an automatic; sorry, Jessica. ^_^

I'm in the market for a new economy subcompact, preferably something small, efficient & low-maintenance, which isn't likely to be blown off the interstate by an aggressive semi or a strong winter cross-wind.

What do you think about the Toyota Yaris, Honda Fit, or, oh, I don't know, the Suzuki Reno? Does the Toyota reputation for being a good snow-pig include tiny little micros like the Yaris?

(Although I have to say that the State College Suzuki dealership *reeks* of "fly-by-night", and the Toyota dealership doesn't have any three-door Yaris automatic transmissions on the lot, which is off-putting.)

Shameful confession time: I've long confused Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer. It appears that I've never read a thing by Norman Mailer.

I've gotten some complaints that I've failed to check-in recently. Sorry about that, it's a little busy here at work.

Mostly it's that I'm not an interesting person these days. Last week or so, I've been watching Legend of Galactic Heroes and reading Girl Genius. I quit the Con, and only really see people every other month or so.

I've got a good bit saved towards a down payment on a house, but the market is a dog's breakfast, and everybody says I'd be a damned fool to buy, or even think of buying. I know *two* people with surplus houses in Massachusetts they can't unload, for instance. (Not that I'd be in the market for a house in Massachusetts - my savings would disappear like snow on a lavaflow if I threw it into *that* market.)

Be seeing y'all around, but frankly I don't have anything much to say that I haven't said once or twice in the archives somewhere.

My Esperanto Club dues are unpayed for the last four years. They keep dunning me. In English.

Best line of the week.

Wait a minute... there are 73,000 UAW autoworkers supporting 340,000 retirees & surviving spouses of retirees? There's a five to one support ratio for workers to pensioners in the unionized auto industry?

I'd *heard* that there was an impossible situation brewing among the Big Three, but I'd no idea it was so apocalyptic. I can only hope none of my 401k mutual funds have anything invested in those companies...

I should mention that the work in Tallyrand turned out to be a sewage construction project - they're laying a sewer line under Spring Creek and the whole of the park, going I know not where - there once was a CDT article, but it's been devoured by the CDT's contempt for public archiving.

They're dredging the pond between the footbridge & the dam in Tallyrand Park. They've got barriers up & have opened the spillways into the millrace, and the only thing running in the lower bed of Spring Creek is the runoff from the Big Spring. Very odd looking, but I guess they had to do it - the aquatic weeds were over over the surface of the creek in July, and it would just get worse. But it looks like heck for the time being - they've torn up the grass in Tallyrand something fierce, and there's construction rubbish all over the place.

On the other hand, they're also cleaning up the mess from the Bush House ruins. Not sure if they're going to rebuild, or just extend Tallyrand along the site of the old building. At this point, I'd wager "more park". There just isn't that much demand for buildings in downtown Bellefonte - the Bush House had been mostly unoccupied when it burned, anyways.

For that matter, I see that the developer pulled down his sign with the five-story "Academy Heights" condo fantasy on the grounds of the old burned-down Academy slums. It's a season for the end of dreams & the demolition of uncapitalized wishes unfulfilled.

Winter is coming.

BTW, Valentine Hill Road is a remarkably different place at 1 AM at night than it is in the light of day. The stretch through the Kelly Springs to the Willowbank bridge over the Logan Branch in particular has a creeping freakishness which wouldn't be out of place in a Pennsylvanian "Legend of Sleepy Hollow", especially that place beside the hillside where the factory floodlights across the merging creeks cut golden slashes through the dark trees and mist. I've never made the trip down the hill in quite so short a time, feeling quite the Ichabod as I bolted for home.

This extended series of essays on the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce is easily the coolest thing I've seen this month. It's not so much a series of essays as the outline of a extended bout of serious research on Bierce, the circumstances of his disappearance, the events of the Mexican Revolution, and the various personalities writing about Bierce & using his disappearance and apparent death for various reasons. It's about half-way to a dissertation, but written in a much more lucid and open style than that scholastic accusation might lead the cynical to suspect.

Anyways: keen longish chunk of text on the mystery of Bierce.

Via Dimitri.

(Sorry if this is cryptic & weird, it's getting busy here at work. Rushed.)

Interesting post on St. Cyprian of Carthage, who's apparently been confused with a less-well-known St. Cyprian of Antioch in the Spanish-speaking world and thus has an undeserved following among 'white witches' and other practitioners of Catholic-flavoured magic. Not the kind of blog I expected to find, trolling an unvisited section of the otakusphere - a bit overly Catholic for my tastes, but intermittently quite interesting.

Huh. I'm getting a *lot* of corn out of the Delta this year, in areas which are traditionally primarily cotton growing centres. I guess all that palaver about ethanol crowding out foodstocks & starving the world might be a little overdrawn, if the cash crop getting displaced is heavily-subsidized, inedible cotton. Of course, this isn't good for our direct customers, who make a lot of money supplying cotton needs, and not nearly as much on corn.

$80 to cross Pennsylvania on I-80? Good God, that's extortionate! All of you dingbats who voted Rendell back into the statehouse? Yes, you, over there, you too. You're all to blame for this. You can be damned sure that Swann wouldn't have attempted to beggar the north half of the state to fund SEPTA.

Look, I like light rail. I take the MTA every time I go down to Baltimore. But I like it because it's monstrously subsidized. If the Hunt Valley-BWI line charged what it actually cost to run, there's no way in heck I'd bother, no matter how exorbitant downtown Baltimore parking fees or BWI long-term parking got.

I'm reading Fleming's Washington's Secret War and I came across the chapter on the great fraud, "Lieutenant-General" Baron von Steuben. I can't for the life of me make out why this grand comedic figure has never been the subject of a slapstick movie. He's such a histrionic buffoon, that you'd think the big comedic actors would jump at a chance to play him. Is it his initial inability to speak English? You'd think it would have been a natural subject for the silent-film comedians, a pompous junior Prussian officer pretending to be a lieutenant-general & shaming all the officers of the Continental Army by lowering himself to drill troops like a common sergeant, all the while ranting profanely in three languages through a series of quickly-exhausted translators.

There's also that bit about him quickly rattling out a manual of arms overnight - I guess that's where Bujold got the "does this make me a space pirate?" scene from the Warrior's Apprentice.

While I was down in Maryland last weekend, my friend Bill loaned me a copy of a book on hikikomori, parasaito, and other Japanese social maladies, entitled Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation. It proports to be a book on how Japan is wrecking its recent generations, but the book actually delivered is not quite what was promised.

For one thing, the author isn't very good. He's the very model of the New Republic-style neo-liberal - shallowly pro-market in a dogmatic, narrow, and unconsidered fashion. A ship without ballast & a shallow keel, he gets blown about by sudden gusts, more enthralled by metaphor than details or depth. In comparing Japan and the Japanese with the West & Westerners, or even the Japanese & the Koreans, he exaggerates differences. The Koreans aren't nearly as individualistic as he portrays, the Japanese not as conservative. He has a remarkable blind spot for politics & leftism in general. To read his take, you'd think the political riots & unrest of the sixties hadn't happened in Japan. I was amused when he obscured the political affiliations of a prominent female Japanese politician (presumably a higher-up in the Socialist Party, from context) who kept divorcing her long-suffering husband for bureaucratic reasons.

As Bill warned, the author doesn't spend nearly as much time as you'd expect on the actual social issues in question, preferring to regurgitate shallow and biased pomposities about Japanese business practices at considerable length. The research is shallow and bare-boned, and I left the book with no more confidence in the common wisdom about hikikomori than I had beforehand. And really, that's all that's offered - a regurgitation of common wisdom.

In the end, it's a crap book. It gets worse as the book gets closer to the end. You can really tell that a journalist wrote it - it's essentially a very long thumbsucker with random factoids thrown into the text to fill out the length, stitched together with poorly-thought-out opinions, prejudices, bias, and over-worked metaphors. I wasn't surprised when he mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments that he's worked in Northern California all of his life. And that last revelation about his pet hikikomori having retreated to his room, drugged to the gills by his overprotective and hostile mother - good lord, what a thing to drop in passing as you're leaving the book! Very "Carrie" or even "Misery" - something Stephen King at any rate, and it left me wondering what these parents do with their hermit-children when nobody is looking.

One thing in passing - using Takashi Murakami as your example of popular anime "cool"? How sodding San-Fran/NYC effete snob can you possibly get? This is the Warholesque tool who picked up the big-eye technique to wow the gallery-folk. Real people don't care about what the Andy Warhols do in their expensive little lofts. Murakami isn't an "anime artist", he's the art-world equivalent of Ben Dunn.

Mind you, a good part of this is my loss of enthusiasm for anime fandom in general. They aren't growing up, Martha. Or else, they're in that awful, awkward, unpleasant phase which seems to go on way, way too long. The charm of cute, bubbly female anime fandom has long since worn off. Between the petty thieves in the dealers room, scam artists ripping off the terminally clueless, the horrible 4-chan horde, and general mild lawlessness and ugliness, I'm ready to toss the whole stinking lot out of Eden. It doesn't help that no-one can properly define what good an anime con is for, anymore. I spent AnimeNEXT playing poker or working, and I spent The Con just plain flat-out working, 7 AM to after midnight for the whole weekend. I'm not seeing why these things are worth attending, which makes it harder to explain to a family on a Sunday morning why they're paying $60 for the three hours or so before we close shop and blow away with the tumbleweeds.

I've badly burnt out on The Con again. I can only take so many years of playing glorified hall monitor for the world's largest and freakiest high school before I break. I could do the job again if pressed, but I don't want to associate with the people who run things, I don't want to have to implement their idiot over-complicated schemes for joyless beige panopticon classification, and I'm tired of the crap in general.

Your average con staffer has an enthusiasm half-life of about three years. It's been about five years since I re-joined the Con, which means I'm about due to flake out.

I'm thinking that unless somebody comes to me with hat in hand to say "please stay with the con, and no you don't have to force people to sign their real names to their badges, get rid of Free Sunday Afternoon Con, explain why we're getting rid of the multiple badge designs, enter at-door registrations during the convention, assign members their over-eighteen stamps/wristbands at the door, and implement all the rest of our brilliant, mind-meltingly impractical schemes to make your conlife miserable & you, personally hated by the membership, Mitch" - well, then. Find somebody else to waste their vacation time working far harder than they do at their actual for-pay jobs.

BTW, it appears that the British *are*, in a sense, indirectly responsible for the recent plague of badgers in the Basra area which the locals are loudly denouncing them for. The badgers are fleeing the once-drained salt marshes north and east of the city, which the coalition has been re-flooding as part of a restoration project for the Midian saltmarshes. Sounds as if the badgers originally came from the north, and thus are unusual critters in the Basra region.

Not that I give two figs for the destroyed habitat of a species which has only been in residence for a dozen years, but it's amusing that a pious ecological restoration project (which, note you, I fully support) is causing politically significant ecological disruption of its very own.

Hey-ho. Yes, I'm still with the living. It's just the busy season here at work, and somehow I ended up volunteering for two different cons this month, which means I ended up taking a lot of vacation time during the busy season. Ooops.

I'm mostly using this post to clear out some of the old links on the right hand side.

Geez. Everybody and their brother are watching Shingu now. I suppose I ought to keep an eye out for the next time it gets discounted on Right Stuf. To be honest, I've got viewing material piled to the ceiling, more than enough for the next several months. Heck, I've even got Stellvia in the pile, thanks to the latest Pioneer Geneon 10/25 disc sale.

Bwa!

I have to back him up on that - the anime fan gets conditioned to take video in twenty-three minute chunks, and watching a live-action TV drama at forty-five minutes or an hour - if you're watching it old-school, with commercials & all - can be kind of unbalancing.

So I'm trying to hide from this year's Bellefonte Cruise. The last two years, I staffed a convention in New Jersey to avoid the 'Cruise; this year, that convention is running first weekend in July, so I'm kind of stuck here. We went over to a guy's apartment in Toftrees to watch the last three Star Trek movies, but that was over too long. I'm sitting here at work, trying to kill time. At home, it's like I'm under siege by the car savages from the Road Warrior. Revving engines, fumes, lily-white, tattooed, pot-bellied crackers as far as the watering eye can see. At least they don't have the car stereo contest on my block this year. No, it's just the food court right outside my door. Fried bread and grease stink bad enough I closed my front window.

Meh. I prefer it when they're just burning the dearly departed in the crematory across the parking lot. It's quieter, and smells less.

I guess I'll go home & play anime loud enough that I can't hear the barbarians hammering at the gates.

OK, two volumes into the Dark Horse manga Reiko the Body Shop, I'm giving up. I had heard that it was worth the preposterous Japlish title & gore factor, and the first volume gave me some reason to think there might be something there. The grotesque violence and blood-splatter came with a certain vicious-minded willingness to follow through, and I kind of respected that. On the other hand, the artwork was bad enough that a friend, upon looking at it, asked if it was American, and the writing wasn't exactly brilliant.

The second volume, sadly, drops everything that made the first volume marginally interesting. The protagonist is no longer an ice-blooded money-grubbing mercenary who barely cares about the living, nor are we expected to sympathize with the victimized, risen dead as they tear apart living villains. Instead, it's a fight-the-evil-wizard slog of the most generic, cliche-worn thread, teeming with one-trick necromancers & their pet, customized zombies. The zombies aren't aggrieved characters with their own emotional arcs, they're grotesque Pokemon. It's lame.

It's kind of shocking just how lame the second volume is in comparison with the first. Even the way that almost every new character introduced in the second volume is gorily dismembered during the course of the book doesn't make up for the lameness they sprayed all over the walls in their death-throes.

I'm finally reading Albion's Seed. Interesting material, reads very much as the summary of an entire school's worth of research, rather than the product of the sort of solitary hero-historian stance you usually encounter in Civil War history. I suppose that's due to the statistics-heavy cultural/demographic nature of the material, which is inherently dense and intensive on the sort of heavy-duty archive gruntwork for which grad students & doctoral candidates employed en mass are best suited. The author is quite harsh on late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth colonial-history revisionists, especially those who campaigned against the notion of Virginia being led by "distressed cavaliers", and he directly dings some of them for having pushed their thesis without actually having done the heavy lifting in English archives that would have disproved the revisionist argument that the Virginian founders were plebian and commercial pretenders to gentility.

Also started reading the first volume of the Del Rey re-translation of Parasyte. Excessively literal in places, I suppose to compensate for the very, very loose translation of the old Tokyo-Pop version. Still a lot of fun, teeth-grindingly literal sound effects and all.

Wow, Spiderman 3 was bad. Like, walk-out-in-the-middle bad. I didn't bother to look up any reviews because the second movie had been so good, but I should have remembered the sequel half-life rule. The chances of a good second sequel following a good first sequel is vanishingly small... It was as if they couldn't find a decent script, and just took the first three off of the top of the pile, dropped them into a blender, and poured a glassful of the results into a mug. It was about twenty minutes too long, was full of logic flaws & deus ex machina, and was over-crowded with villains. It certainly didn't help that the writers included almost every bad idea ever inflicted on the Spiderman comic, though they managed to resist the Gwen Stacy clone thing. I guess they needed to hold something really bad in reserve for the inevitable direct-to-video fourth movie.

Oh, and Stan Lee? Go home, and stop inserting yourself into Marvel franchise material. I know it's the only thing left to you after the suits bounced you out of control oh so many years ago, but I'm tired of seeing, and worse, hearing from you.

Ugh. The downside of online banking - one mistake, and you're hemorrhaging overdraft fees left and right until the offending bank posts the correction. *That* CD wasn't worth the $32(d4) worth of overdrafts it accidentally generated by being drawn from my checking account instead of my savings account... Not even when you count the extra 0.75% APR.

Meanwhile, my company is moving from a Simple IRA retirement plan with American Funds to a 401k plan with another mutual fund family, and the paperwork got messed up in my case. Monday night I had to talk someone from American out of her plan to mail me several years worth of accumulated retirement savings at my home address. Yeah, that wouldn't generate a massive tax event, thanks ever so much. They told me it was fixed yesterday here at work, and then I got home to another answering machine message last night with the same girl burbling about "not being able to hold this cheque after [today]". The front office says they'll talk her down from whatever new insanity American was about to inflict upon my karma-whipped financial corpus.

Beh. I'm in a mood to go get drunk or something. It'd help if I actually had something to do here at work other than sit and stew. Whenever things get really mangled, the calls stop coming and I temporarily have nothing to do while the customers deal with their immediate issues. Then everything comes down like an avalanche. I hate this sort of silence. It always portends bad things.

Went to see 300 on its first (and probably only) weekend at the Garman Opera House. Saturday afternoon matinee - just me and another middle-aged guy. The hard-left owners of the Opera House could *not* have been enthused at this turnout. I can't imagine why they scheduled it - clearly their usual art-house crowd wasn't up for what Fred called the other day "fascist warporn", and the extensive nudity and violence wasn't going to bring in the family audience which is the other mainstay of the Opera House's traffic.

Not that I can argue with Fred's description. Frank Miller has always flirted with fascistic imagery and the logic of fascism. Lots of emphasis on physical perfection, warrior ethos, blood-and-soil, a nihilistic fixation on "good deaths", a distrust of traditional elites & elders, elected or otherwise - all of this was in The Dark Knight Returns, it's just a lot more obvious when he's playing with Spartans & right-wing mythmaking than back when he was cracking on Reagan & Superman.

It was probably the depiction of the physically deformed Spartan traitor that tipped things over the brink for me. The use of the deformed to represent moral depravity & social weakness is an old, bad habit of the fascistic and the old right, and it would be kind of ugly to find it in a movie made in the second half of the Twentieth, let alone in 2007. I'd say the same thing about the leprous-looking ephors, except that Mel Gibson pulled the same stunt with the literal leper-father of Robert the Bruce back in Braveheart.

All that aside, as far as fascist warporn goes, 300 is pretty cracking good. I fear that film is an inherently irrational medium, and that you can only choose your irrationalities when it comes to works of art in that medium - do you want your warporn to be communist, pacifist, or fascist? Of the three, I'd probably prefer fascist in a time of war. It's less demoralizing. But it isn't really a good set of choices, is it?

OK, I'm about ready for Bleach's Soul Society arc to end.

Finally.

I appreciated the manga's initial punk aesthetic & monster-of-the-week plotting. It wasn't substantial, but it was interesting and entertaining. I was even willing to put up with all the archaic half-translated Japanese gibberish - ryoka, zapakoto, etc - as part of the ambiance. What I'm increasingly unwilling to put up with is the ten volumes or so of glacial soul reaper quarreling, posturing, and meandering about, destroying spiritual architecture in the Harry Potter-meets-Kyoto-of-the-dead dramatic wasteland of the Soul Society. Enough already.

There's like a thousand members of the guards companies, and I swear the mangaka is determined to make every single one a character, complete with backstory, motivation, and moral arc. Not that I can tell them apart - they've all got peculiar archaic Japanese names, and half the time I can't even guess right about the sex of a particular individual. The author gives them numbers and rank, and I still get confused about which one is which.

I'm ready to see the whole damn place burned to the ground and re-populated with hollows. Which is another thing - what happened to fighting the hollows? They were kind of neat, in a chilling, the-abyss-stares-also sort of way. We haven't seen one except in flashbacks for lord only knows how many chapters.

Doesn't help that the effect that the mangaka is going for - Soul Society order bad, hulk smash! - is kind of... obnoxious. The "good guys" are, objectively viewed, anarchist scum. They're invading a sovereign state with the aim of abducting a duly convicted condemned criminal who's admitted her own guilt, and are provoking a rebellion & civil war among a military force which clearly was designed to keep individuals with appalling intrinsic power & violent instincts from rampaging about, destroying everything around them. The soul reapers are dangerous, morally suspect, and difficult to control even under a ferocious and unforgiving system of discipline. I shudder to think what they'd be like in a Hobbesean state of nature.

I'd be more sympathetic to the newspaper claim that we lost a "landmark" in the accidental burning of the Bellfonte Victorian Manor if it hadn't been one of five bed-and-breakfasts on Linn Street alone. Two of which are for sale, last time I looked. Walked past the gutted remains yesterday, and yes indeedy, it is quite gutted. But, seeing as it's a brick victorian, I suspect that they could rebuild it if they were so inclined with their insurance money. It had been a fairly nice house before the fire.

As for the historical landmarkiness of the place - this is Bellefonte. You can't walk your dog without it pissing on a Victorian. Often one that's worthy of being pissed on by a dog - we've got a lot of crap old Victorians. Not so much on Linn Street, but then, Linn and Curtin Streets are the heart of gentrified Bellefonte. Go one block over to Lamb Street, and you're looking at a much more representative selection of surviving Victoriana. Although it seems as if the gentrified and the ghettoized buildings burn down at about the same rate of flamage. Being a gentrifying yuppie restorer apparently doesn't mean much in terms of fireproofing your property.

I noticed a team of Amishmen pouring concrete for the foundations of a new set of those crap townhouses going up at the top of Valentine Hill Road. They had a token English to operate the concrete mixing truck. The very fact that Amishmen, those paragons of handcraftmenship, are involved in the construction of those aesthetically revolting monuments to the Quick Construction Buck, let alone in a concrete-pouring capacity, has boggled my mind.

I read an arrogant article in a frou-frou magazine while I eating lunch in a Chinese buffet in Baltimore last summer, just before the Con. The writer went on for many pages about the disappearing Amish heartland, buried under by gentrification, expanding sprawl, and the dreaded McMansion plague. I now find myself wondering just how many of the foot soldiers of that invasion of the Mennonite Paradise Lost were, in fact, well-bearded Amish mercenaries, cashing in on the boom & plowing under their "heritage".

Oh, well. Just my post-modern moment for the month.

To carry the story over from Thursday... I ended up driving into State College to pick up the last few weeks' worth of manga from the 'Swap and ate at Ponderosa. Steak & a good, long ransack of the buffet. Five courses of beef!

Skip Beat volume 5. They're now advertising it as "by the author of Tokyo Crazy Paradise". That's great and all - I've heard good things about Tokyo Crazy Paradise & even read a couple scanslated chapters of it - but that itself is the problem. I read them in scanslation. Nobody's published Tokyo Crazy Paradise in English, although there was a rumor for a while that Viz had the license. Why are you advertising a manga in its fifth volume in the English market with a comic which isn't even available yet? Oh, well. Maybe it's a hint that they're getting ready to publish. Tokyo Crazy Paradise looks like fun - it's sort of like Burst Angel with a cross-dressing heroine & bishie yakuza.

Last volume of Please Save My Earth. Eh, it doesn't end all that well. All that drama & elaborate Rashomon-style flashbacks, and it all kind of deflates in a trainwreck of a climax. It bore more resemblance to a classic Takahashi pileup than the conclusion of a proper reincarnation drama. The coda was fairly sweet, though. If the author had only resisted the temptation to have the whole cast in on the climax, it would have been a much, much better finale. As it was, she managed to make the ending of a series in the twenty-first volume feel rushed and slap-dash. Meh.

Well, heck. I almost forgot. Today's the fifth annual International Eat An Animal For PETA Day. I'll have to stop at the Burger King tonight & get myself around a triple-decker.

Walking in to work earlier this week, during that last semi-big snowfall, I made the discovery that while rain might roll proverbially off the back of ducks, snow does not do the same. It's somewhat odd to discover the local waterfowl happily paddling about in Spring Creek during a snowstorm, backs heaped about an inch high with piles of fresh fluffy late-winter snow. Shame I didn't have a camera with me...

I don't really do ACW blogging much anymore, but since Dimitri doesn't have comments and I don't have his email address on hand, this is the only way to comment on a recent item on his blog, which notes a letter-writer's peculiar quote of Lincoln claiming to have incited the war, and an even more peculiar quote from Karl Marx describing the war as "a tariff war", and turning upon a "Northern lust for sovereignty". I don't know about the Fox letter of Lincoln's quoted, but the Karl Marx cite is a deliberate distortion. It's from one of Marx's wartime newspaper essays, and as I thought when I read Dimitri's post, the sentiment is not Marx's own. He was characterizing the view-point of a class of London newspapers, noting contemptuously:

It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place.

Karl Marx was strongly pro-Northern in sympathy, as even a cursory reading of his wartime writings on the subject will reveal. He considered it a war of capitalist against feudalist, and naturally chose to approve of the more dialectically advanced antagonist.

Wow, this is pretty ugly stuff - the Cherokee Nation is threatening to purge its roles of Cherokee "freedmen" - members of the tribe who draw their line of descent from freed ex-slaves of Cherokee ownership. I honestly thought we were past this sort of stone racism. Admittedly, it seems tied up in petty tribal politics & it looks like the main goal is to narrow down the number of people with a claim to a part of the gambling pie, but come on, really.

I didn't think the Cherokee were all that big into gambling, though - isn't there too many of them for something as inherently limited as reservation gambling to pay off? I mean, the economics make sense when you're talking about a pocket-sized tribe like the New England remnants, but a three-hundred-thousand-member group like the Cherokee? The money'd be like a drop of ink in a rainbarrel, even if they did purge everyone with a slave ancestor.

Wheee. Obama's descended from slaveholders. Whoop-de-friggin'-do. I'd be willing to bet that at least 80% of all American blacks are descended from slaveowners. The only novelty in Obama's case is that the lineage is from his white, American mother, and not the father from which he gets the pigmentage which makes him "black" by racemongering standards. The discovery of slaveowning ancestors probably gives his "blackness" more cultural credibility.

I haven't found any evidence of direct-ancestor slaveowners, but some of the New York Thorns in the richer, Episcopalian families were. The New Jersey line we're descended from were modest country folk, and were lucky if they owned land, let alone other people.

Via K.J. Lopez at the Corner.

Huh. The Pakistanis coughed up a Taliban minister. If they're going to produce an al Queda or Taliban target every time a prominent American official visits, then we need to send Cheney over there at least once a fortnight for the foreseeable future. Well, at least until they run out of ISI-subsidized malefactors to sacrifice on the altar of false-hearted alliance. Not as if the vice president seems to be doing anything else of value these days, other than playing clay pigeon for opportunistic Afghani terrorists.

There's something about the Right Stuf's 25-for-$100 sales that brings out the bumbling moron in yours truly. Last time around, I screwed up while ordering & forgot to ask for the free shipping, and had to beg and plead via email to get that amended. This time I missed the coupon code box (where you're supposed to enter "abundance10" or "abundance25" to get the respective 10-for-$50 or 25-for-$100 deals) and ended up ordering almost $700 worth of DVDs I only sort-of-wanted for full price.

Damn, I hope they straighten that order out. It'd be nice if their ordering interface was a tad more forgiving of errors & mistakes. Betcha they'd have less of a customer service load if you could cancel or amend orders prior to processing. As it is, if you've given the system your credit card information, you're stuck until the customer service staff get back to you on your problem.