No Sale

So, there wasn't a pony after all.

I just bought a somewhat expensive education in things that can go wrong with buying an old house, and what to look for in 'bargain' houses.

1) It may seem like it'll be easier to deal with an owner directly, rather than going through a real estate agent. You'd be wrong. The agents bring with them a certain structure and discipline to the process which protects both sides of the transaction, even if they're mostly acting in the interests of the seller. In 'for sale by owner' transactions, you're playing without a net. I was lucky enough to have a co-worker who used to work in real estate law, who helped me along the way, and whose aid in preparation and drafting got me out of my trouble with most of my skin intact. Others might not be so lucky.

2) Houses are fiendishly complicated machines, and you really can't look them over in a single viewing. Every time I set foot in my aborted would-be purchase, I saw different things. Most of the time what I saw was unwelcome, which is why I waved off in the end.

3) Older houses are archaeological sites. They change with every new project their various owners performed, and few contractors have a proper respect for their predecessors' necessary structural elements. The house in question was build in the early fifties partially on an older house's fieldstone foundation; this was the start of the problem, most likely. Later contractors put a set of stairs into the basement, without proper support. Closets were built into rooms. The second floor bathroom's bathtub was moved back four-five feet from its original location, taking space from what used to be a walk-in closet. The house was expanded to the rear, twice. A roofed front porch was put in, without fully sealing the holes knocked in the brickwork.

4) The foundation is the spinal column of a house. If there's something wrong with that, the house is crippled. The house in question had at least four attempts to shore up the original failed foundation design over the course of fifty-some years. My sin in this transaction was in not noticing this initially. It was a complicated basement, and I should have thought through why it was that complicated.

5) Drainage is important. Even if you aren't in a flood area, if your gutters are ill-placed and you have bad slopes around your foundation, you've bought yourself a long-term heartache.

6) If it seems cheap for the square footage, there's probably a reason. If you can't see it, look harder.

7) A thorough housing inspection is the buyer's best insurance. Don't ask them to cut corners. Mine saved me years of misery.

8) Dryers need to be vented *outdoors*. Venting into your basement is a bad idea - it just introduces moisture directly into the foundation.

9) Closing costs are always more expensive than you think when you start house-shopping. Keep that money in reserve.

10) A draconian mortgage officer is also your friend. If they're tight with their money, they'll force you to be careful about your purchase. Also, they make for a dandy enforcer on your transaction. "They won't give me a mortgage because of this that and the other thing" is a great conversation-ender, or negotiation tool, if you've still got the sand for the purchase.

11) If you're not happy with the house as the closing starts to approach - get out. You're going to be living there, don't walk in the door hating it.

12) Be careful about tripping yourself up with the terms of your contract & deadlines. Give yourself enough time between the inspections & your mortgage application commitment date.

13) If you're not handy, why the hell would you buy yourself a fixer-upper? Old houses are almost always project houses; don't get yourself into more than you can handle.

So, I've got my deposit back, and I'm feeling free as a bird. I wish the owner the best of luck in dealing with his foundation fixes. He was very good about giving me my deposit back & terminating the contract. He's got a heck of a job on his hands, and I'm just glad it isn't in mine any more.

Wheee!

So, another history day judging in the can. I don't know why, but this year's left me a lot more tired than usual. The best senior paper in my section was thrown out because the author failed to make his interview - really disappointing, really. Got into a number of arguments about Noam Chomsky.

That kid who interviewed me at the Palin rally last October turned out to be one of Bruce Teeple's daughters. Apparently I made it into some sort of documentary she was working on, and he recognized me.

Oh, and my Otakon messenger bag died. I need a new man-purse!

Ugh. The Heavy Weather Bruce Sterling is back. This is why I read more and more non-fiction and comic books: SF writers as a class are turning into psychotic infants. See also: John Scalzi & Charles Stross.

On the plus side.. Vega wasn't a trilogy? The good thing about post-Singularity novels? No contemporary politics to let the author inflict his crazy on you. And I'm starting to think they're all crazy...

Had a bunch of fun at the Monroes' trap shoot last weekend. The Monroes and Craig Rusch brought out their spring-load clay trap throwers to a target range in the gamelands northwest of Allentown, and about twenty of use went out & had a ball on the shotgun range. I put a bunch of shells through that old pump-action shotgun I bought off a co-worker last fall, and shot pretty well. It's still got that double-load problem with the magazine clip, but all that means is that it basically is limited to a single shell in the magazine, which works for the only thing I'm going to do with the weapon, which is trap-shooting.

Jon Acheson brought his semi-automatic Kalashnikov shotgun with the clip-feed magazine. He does well enough with it, but I saw it jam a couple times with other shooters trying it out, when they used el-cheapo Winchester shells. Shotgun shells just aren't made to be clip-fed, the mechanism likes to chew on the plastic. I've decided to avoid the Winchester brand anyways, on general principles. I tried Jon's gun out, but I just can't get used to semi-automatic on a shotgun - it throws off my rhythm to not have to rack the next shell into the chamber.

The Monroes invited us all over to their place afterwards for gaming & munchies. I was feeling pretty under the weather by then, and I just hope that I didn't give anybody my cold. Most everybody was pretty sunburned by then - most of us had forgone sunscreen, which was probably a mistake.

Ha ha ha ha!

I love stories like this: great white anthropologist - or at least, a science writer *posing* as such - goes off into the hinterlands, and brings back a racy story of primitives waging reprisal wars over blood-feuds. They've been doing this crap for a century or more, safely wrapped in their assumptions of civilized New York & distant, ignorant New Guinean hillbillies, never shall the twain meet.

Except this is 2009, and somebody in Papua New Guinea apparently has DSL, and read the article. Now two "tribesmen" are suing that hack Jared Diamond for defamation.

This is one of those stories "too good to fact-check". Which is exactly how Diamond got himself into this mess. Ha!

h/t Instapundit, the one-man newspaper.

I've been reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations this last week. I'd only read the usual assigned excerpts - on division of labor in pins manufacture, of course - back in school. Aside from the strange archaic usages - he uses the term "police" in a fashion utterly alien to modern usage, for instance, almost synonymous with "statute", really - it's quite engaging.

I find that it helps to read period works of analysis like this in an aggressive, argumentative mind-set. Even Smith can argue fallacies, and the free-market commonplaces of economic theory did not spring full-grown from this book, after all. With some effort, you can follow his developing argument against mercantilism, but if you don't pay attention, it can disappear under modern economic assumptions. He's much more hostile to entrepreneurs and labour-centric than his reputation would lead one to assume. You can see why intellectuals & academics as a class would *hate* Smith - he's quite uncompromising in judging them as a class as "unproductive", along with lawyers, courtiers, the military and the clerical order. He's also quite conservative on banking matters, endorsing maximum rates of interest to suppress speculative investment & opposing paper currency likely to gain circulation among consumers, judging paper to be a pure replacement for specie & not at all a supplement.

This passage has never been more apt:

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

One thing I was thinking about at the rally, was "you poor suckers haven't seen anything yet." This isn't going to be a bad year for taxes. The bill hasn't come due yet - the President and his merry band have been partying and scheduling for further parties on our credit, not our cash. For almost half of the country, the federal government doesn't tax us at all except for the entitlement payroll taxes. For now, they're concentrating on the capitalized classes.

Obviously, as Lady Thatcher once said, you eventually run out of other people's money. They can only float so much debt with foreign investment money until they'll have to start funding all of that debt. That means taxing the hell out of the rich. The rich will respond to incentives as the rich do, and will do their best to no long meet the official definition of "rich", which to coffer-minded taxmen, looks like taxable income streams. Y'all will recognize that particular situation under its suddenly-fashionable alias, Depression. Also, the taxmen will discover that there ain't enough rich to fund the new debt now that "the rich" has become a moving target. They're gonna have to re-define "rich" to include enough targets to make the game worth the hunt. Ten Years After had it wrong - it's "tax the rich, feed the poor, till we're all 'rich' e'er more".

The Great Re-Definition is coming. When it does, some people will want to know what happened, and how "we're" going to get out of this trap. The rest of us will already know what happened.

You eventually run out of other people's money.

So I stopped by the Tea Party on Frazier Street yesterday & dropped my local tax return in the mail while I was there. Signed the petition, although I have to admit that I only read the blasted thing *after* signing. Good thing it wasn't anything sketchy, right? Your basic petition of grievances, remarkably well-put-together for something that mentioned the recent outrageous DHS "study" classifying fervent opposition politics & federalist opinions as markers of "domestic terrorism". With something like that, it had to have been composed on the fly the weekend before the event.

There was maybe two hundred people there when I was by. I didn't pay much attention to the speakers; somebody asked me if I wanted to hold a sign, and I told him I hadn't made it, it wasn't *my* sign. I'm not much for signs, anyways. I'm not really sure what good these things do, either. We're stuck with the current administration for the next three and three-quarters years, and the current congress for the next two years. There just isn't that much leverage in Centre County. About all we could do is make the leftist university twits in State College who voted for the current disaster miserable, and there isn't much point in that. Stupid goes right to the bone, it's not as if they make a cream for it.

Oh, well.

Can anyone explain to this dim liberal-arts major why credit default swaps aren't simply institutional, marketized, commodified moral hazard?

Say I'm pondering doing something madly risky, bordering on daft: like, for instance, radically expanding my trucking fleet in the face of a possible oil shock. I hedge against the chance of fuel costs wrecking my expansion by buying fancy financial instruments which promise to cover my losses in the event of a cost bump. My competitors, not wanting to get edged out, all do the same thing, resulting in a short-term profitable event for the financial industry as we all dump significant change into their hands. But we're all betting on a certainty, and the oil costs hit all of us at once, and we all cash in our swaps. Not only have we distorted the market in oil and shipping by producing an excess of road traffic & trucking and a shortage of fuel, we've also smashed up the bottom lines of the various firms which let us buy insurance on a self-fulfilling prophesy. It's even possible that the hedging helped *produce* the oil shock by distorting the market in the first place!

The only difference between this credit-default-swap business and a legislature interfering in the market by subsidizing fuel prices is that the newfangled method removes government entirely from the business of moral hazard: haven't they privatized hazard? Instead of buying a congressman to get a chance at cheap gas, I've bought a financial instrument from Wall Street! Either way, I'm socializing risk, and privatizing profit. I'm buying the opportunity to make *somebody else* catch the flack for my consequences, right?

Thought for the day:

Truth is only stranger than fiction because narrative is inherently familiar. Narrative is a creature of fiction. Actual strangeness is essentially alienated. Understanding comes with interpretation - re-writing experiences into a coherency which can only approximate the actual, in the creation of a personal narrative, the incorporation of the alien into your fiction, your version of reality. In this sense, the familiar is antonymic to the strange, as fiction is to truth.

Ugh. I just looked up the M3 money supply curve. That quantitative easing thing was bigger than I thought. Today, I feel punished for saving.

Hyperinflation, here we come!

An email, sent to my district's representative in the House:

Mr. Thompson, I did some campaigning for you during the election last fall, so believe me that I don't relish the need for this message. But I am deeply disappointed to find that you had a part in the recent passage of a bill of attainder against employees of the TARP beneficiaries. While no-one can be enthusiastic about the rights and privileges of overeducated, overpaid, arrogant finance professionals, especially ones employed by organizations enjoying the inappropriate benefits of government funds, that can't lead us into illicit, immoral, or uncivilized responses to provocation.

The recent bill is, in my layman's opinion, unconstitutional. Congress's constitutional warrant explicitly excludes the ability to pass bills of attainder, which I define as a class of legislation designed to confiscate the property of individuals as a punitive response to political actions. A bill designed to reclaim monies legitimately paid under legal contract via punitive taxation meets this definition by my lights, and I believe that I am not being irrational or excitable in making this characterization.

Furthermore, although post-facto taxation is not itself (so far as I know) unconstitutional, it is is immoral and unethical. The fashion in which this bill combines attainder and post-facto legislation with the expressed intent of an assault upon private contracts only makes the act the more inexcusable.

In a time of Democratic legislative dominance, the party of the opposition has an even greater obligation to defend both the spirit and the letter of the law. Such doors, once opened in the heat of the moment, cannot be so easily closed!

The constitution and the culture of the law which it under-pins must be our bulwark in times of crisis and emergency. Kindly stop knocking holes in our foundation!

And this one is literally about wealth destruction - a theoretical solution to the below-zero interest rate in which the Treasury announces the de-tenderization [sp?] of a randomly statistical sampling of currency in circulation at a set period, to discourage cash holdings in a time of sub-zero return on investment.

...who commanded this? what God? what Angel!
To keep the gen'rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestraind performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science,
That men get rich by

- William Blake, America, a Prophesy

Just got some spam for St. Patrick's Day gifts. This is a holiday for giving presents now?

I thought it was a day for aspiring alcoholics to pretend to be Irish, wear green, and drink themselves cross-eyed.

Watchmen. In short? It's very much a Zach Snyder movie, despite what I'd heard beforehand. It's got interludes of brilliance, and is interesting even in its failures. I especially liked how they shifted Veidt's trendy lefty do-gooder conceits from the slightly artificial nuclear freeze one-worldism of Moore's now-archaic script to a contemporary 'watermelon' environmental extremism which expresses itself in what looked like the deliberate assassination of Lee Iaccoca. (This new trendy leftism will look as archaic and foolish in twenty years as Moore's original script does now, mark my words.) They even papered over the cartoonish bigotry of the New Frontiersman editor in the coda, who was gassing on about minorities in the comic book & was whinging about 'hippie communes' in the filmed version.

But I didn't much like the ending, which inverted the purpose of the big evil plot, and tore out the heart of the ending. The *point* of the comic book's resolution was a renunciation of superheroism in favor of Veidt's one-world progressive futurism. The filmed ending was a reversion to type, with the definite suggestion that the New Soviet Couple are cheerfully polishing new toys & new latex duds in the basement, getting ready to go out every night 'at 3 AM to do something stupid'. While I don't particularly *like* Moore's politics and ideas, it was his story.

The movie was too long for a theatre experience, and too short to invest the audience in the climactic disaster, which was reduced to a CGI annihilation of streetside ciphers, most of which they hadn't had time to introduce to us in an already-overstuffed narrative.

I liked 300 better.

So, I continue to be pure poison for automobile companies. First, I killed Daewoo by buying my first new car, a 2000 Lanos, from those poor suckers. Then, I went and bought a Chevy Aveo-5 from GM in December 2007. Result? Dead company walking. I zombify car manufacturers with my cursed cheques.

I was out profiting from the anime industry's agonies this weekend. Best Buy has mostly given up on selling anime DVDs, and they're liquidating their anime sections in most of their stores, starting the first of March. I went over to the Patton Twp Best Buy & grabbed a pile of stuff I wouldn't normally bother with if it weren't at least 60% off MRSP. As usual, it turns out that at least some of the stuff I hadn't bothered with up to now was pretty dang nifty.

Case in point: Negima!?. I avoided the manga originally, because it seemed like anything other than original. A Ken Akamatsu harem comedy with a prepubescent harem lead and thirty-some utterly interchangable girls? It seemed like there'd be better "girlswarm" stories out there, so I passed. The word on the first anime adaptation of Negima, sold as Negima! in North America, was even worse - that the character designs were literally interchangeable, the story tedious, and the fanservice bizarrely nonexistent - for a harem comedy!

Apparently the Japanese license-holders noticed that the first try by Xebec was a dud, but decided that the Akamatsu brand was worth a second go with another studio, and they opted for Shaft. You hear a lot of trash-talking about Shaft, but they've got a creative team somewhere in the bowels of that operation which is just boiling over with hyperactive style. The closest thing I've seen to the new version, sold confusingly as Negima!? in North America, was the fansubs of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei (aka "Goodbye, Mr. Despair"). It's got the same hyper stylism, although Negima!? tends more towards turbocharged 60s New Wave splitscreening than Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei's skeezy Japanese noir. It's also got the eruption of chalkboard message non sequiturs, which I always thought was the factor which would have made SZS unlicenseable, due to its rapid-fire pace and potential for frying subtitling crews; although Negima!?'s chalkboard non sequiturs are much less rapid-fire than SZS's, it still broke the subtitler a couple times in the first couple episodes.

But anyway, Shaft's Negima!?: excellent. Also, fun! The only real problem is that there are far, far too many characters, and I found I couldn't remember the names of more than a half-dozen or so. It's literally a girl-swarm, a mob of characters, introduced in a swirl which leaves you the impression that there are people out there, but far too many to take in at once. The gag in the opening credits is that the girls are all labelled by roster number - and only roster number, their little seat numbers cryptically floating along behind them in a surreal sepia-tone landscape constructed of stacked school-desks.

Quote of the day:

I suppose once you get locked into a serious sword collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

I guess there's just something about anime cons which invite Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas references.

So, Herr Deutsches Finanzspam has prompted me to dig up my Haloscan account password and edit out his mindless comment spammery, something I haven't bothered with no matter how pissed off I've been on political occasions. Congrats, D-F! You've figured out how to fruitlessly spam a journal with a readership in the low dozens, all of them in a language other than German!

Bah! Europeans!

Some manga turn into a chore, or a slog, after a dozen volumes or so. Bleach, in particular, lost headway about volume nine or so, and degenerated into a flashy recitation of incomprehensible half-translated archaic-Japanese called attacks which was tolerable only because the layout and style is so slick and breezy that the story is over before you can really get up a head of "I don't care about these people", thus leaving *just* enough good-will to not take the next three volumes off the pre-order list.

Other manga go through phases of the moon, in turn bland, self-plagiarizing and repetitive, and light, airy & delightful. The Wallflower is my exemplar of this elliptical class of comic. Some of the mid-teen volumes were flat and undistinguished, but the latest, volume 18, has suddenly blown the doors off the morgue, leaving a set of wildly-swinging chrome hinges rattlingly metallically upon the door-frame. Suddenly Takenaga-the-dark-haired-bishounen is an actual *person* instead of a hair-colored cipher; the goth-loli tertiary characters return and prove that a "rule of four" works even better in comedy than hoary old "rule of three" gags, and Sunako returns to her proper central place in the chaos. The Wallflower is suddenly, giddily *fun* again. Wonderful!

Now, one can only wish that Skip Beat can pull off the same trick. Because I'm getting tired of the narrow rut that particular comedy manga has gotten locked into.

Meanwhile, on the anime front, I'm enjoying the early episodes of Shakugan no Shana. The first dozen or so episodes are gorgeous, beautifully animated, and dark, dark, dark. The show lives in an existential abyss, with an undead protagonist who's literally a thing (mono), a walking magical shell designed to keep the universe from imploding around the sudden absence after a monster ate the original person (hito) - devoured his "existence". Now he's watching his romantic interest fight said monsters. Said romantic interest is herself an emotionally undeveloped cipher who doesn't really think of herself as a person, having been Raised-by-Wolves to the point where she doesn't really have a name - just a sword and a mission. He names her after her sword. This is a strange foundation for what eventually turns into a tsundere love comedy, but there you are. It doesn't live up to the early episodes, from what I remember of the fansubs, and rumor has it that the second, unlicensed season is a trainwreck. Oh, well. The beginning is a gem, and the ending credits absolutely rock.

Kessler Syndrome warning, part three. Although it sounds like this wasn't so much the *result* of incipient Kessler, as it is yet another contribution towards the eventual onset of Kessler Syndrome, namely, a chaos of untrackable self-propagating debris fields which makes the maintenance of any sort of useful orbital infrastructure impracticable.

It's a shame the Planetes anime was so annoying, because Kessler Syndrome was the core high-concept behind the story - the protagonists worked in a "debris section" which was dedicated to staving off KS by cleaning up debris fields before they start to cause chain-collisions in the first place. Manga was ok, but incomplete.

When I saw this 1/10 Gundam model, a small voice in the back of my head whispered "lawn jockey".

Although I'm not sure that the plastic or vinyl it's made of would be weather-resistant. Hell of a thing, to waste 3.3k on a five-foot-plus novelty lawn-jockey and then let it rot to pieces in the front yard.

Viz's Otomen is as inconsequential as everybody's been saying. The schtick is that the protagonist is a boy with a 'feminine heart' - likes cute things, has the skill-set and hobbies of a yamato nadeshiko, reads shoujo manga, etc etc sexist blah; his father abandoned his family to work in a tranny bar, so the protagonist has been emotionally crippled by his damaged mother & is fixated on being 'manly', largely through being stoic & mastering every martial art out there. It's bloody 'orrible. The author has absolutely nothing of interest to say, and everything done in the comic has been done better in School Rumble, Ouran, Gatcha Gacha or a hundred other high-school romantic comedies. The protagonist is a walking ready-made pansy-hardass cliche, his love interest is a tomboy cipher, and the loki character - a teenaged male mangaka writing award-winning shoujo manga under a feminine pseudonym - is an undermotivated, impossible contrivance who comes off less realistic than if he had been a talking dog or a magical girl's mascot. It's not worth another volume, series dropped.

Oshinbo, on the other hand, was a joybomb surprise. I bought the first volume mostly out of cultural obligation - it seems like it would be a weaboo check-point rather than anything particularly exciting in and of its own merit. Boy, was that wrong. I'm about the polar opposite of a 'foodie', one of those gastronomic obsessives who constantly go on about their cooking habits. I eat out of cans & a microwave. Still, Oshinbo makes a rollicking good time out of that exact sort of niggling technical obsession with food, food preparation, and presentation.

It's a series about cultural status anxiety, and how that false consciousness which comes with status anxiety wars with the actual authentic practice and experience of a practical art like cooking. The details of the art in question is a matter of execution & technique rather than essence, which is the constant struggle between wanting to do something, and wanting to show off how you do it. The stories picked out for the American edition of Oshinbo - the ongoing comic in Japan has been on-going for decades, and the publisher decided to just print highlights instead of pretending to print the whole massive series - are focused on what the writer calls 'washoku' - a sort of denationalized Japanese cultural/culinary spirit. The two antagonists of the story - the punk Yamaoka and his curmudgeon father Kaihara - are respectively a journalist and an artist-artisan who compete in a series of face-offs over the composition of an "ultimate menu" of the Platonic ideal of the Japanese culinary art.

It's *fun*, kind of silly, and very, very open-hearted. It might just have been the editorial choices made in publishing an American edition, but half the stories in the first volume are about Western weaboo types showing up snotty or arrogant or mistaken Japanese about this or that aspect of the true art, about foreigners being more open to washoku, being more willing to learn.

Oshinbo's art is very simple, but tasteful. The emphasis is on the food, and on things rather than people, who by and large are relatively simple cartoons existing to express attitudes, comedy, and passions in an efficient manner. I found myself regretting somewhat the choice to present high-lights, but I can see why they thought they couldn't get away with publishing 102 volumes of food-snob comics in the current market.

You know, unnamed webcomic artist, when you beg for money on your front page, and then I find that you've let most of your back-log go out of print, I suffer a sudden lack of desire to pay for your free ice cream, no matter how much I believe in the freeware concept.

The Long Tail helps those that help themselves, Mr. Unnamed Webcomic Artist. Maybe I ought to go help Howard Taylor, who *doesn't* waste my time with unfunny, labored, interminable Harry Potter parodies. And more to the point, is capable of keeping his overpriced comics in stock on Amazon.

On second thought, no. I've been seriously overconsuming on pop crap recently, and it sounds like I have to take my car into the shop again, for the second time in three months.

Read through Kyle Baker's Nat Turner last night. For those who have never heard of Baker, go read Why I Hate Saturn and The Cowboy Wally Show, they're two of the best books to come out of the Eighties indie comics scene. He's mellowed a lot since the cynical misanthropies of those two classics, but he's still an interesting and fearless artist. He went through a rather Chuck Jonesish phase in the late Nineties (You Are Here and King David are highlights, if seriously different in tone from each other.), and later kind of went avuncular, writing "life with the family" Dave-Berryish autobiographical stuff like the Bakers. So, I knew that a Nat Turner comic from Baker would be *interesting*, if nothing else.

It's certainly that. The book is more in the style of his Eighties indie stuff, all painterly sepia-tone browns and tans, more in the style of an illustrated chapbook than your standard gutters-and-word-balloons comic. The text is a series of excerpts or highlights of the pamphlet "Confessions of Nat Turner", published right after his execution & written in a typically turgid pre-Victorian style. Baker's native style was perhaps an unfortunate fit with the Nineteenth-century pomposity of the text, as the two tend to emphasize each others' tendencies into faults, inflating Baker's visual wit into buffoonery and the text's attempts at dignity into pretension and bombast.

But Baker doesn't try to sugarcoat anything, or make allowances, or excuses, any more than the original "Confessions" did. It's all there, in bloody, violent, merciless browns and tans. The second half left me wondering why anyone would find Turner an inspiration for anything other than regret and horror. The first half, on the other hand, almost elevated the subject into a religious figure. The text and the imagery lead me to compare Turner with his contemporary prophet, Joseph Smith, who was going through much of the same plow-side revelation at about the same time. The parallels are striking, if probably not intended by the author. Religious radicalism was in the air in the 1820s and 1830s, there's no doubt about that. He sort of steals a base by starting the book with the capture, enslavement, and middle passage of Nat Turner's grandmother, since it isn't covered, properly speaking, by the text, but it's some of the most compelling imagery of the book, and worth the diversion from the subject matter. It probably would have been more appropriate to a book on the Amstad mutiny, though.

What I kind of lost the track of in the course of reading was how the first half led somehow into the second half, how Turner's religious revelation turned suddenly into an exterminationist rebellion. Because that was, indeed, what the prophet Turner delivered - a determined slaughter of every white within axe-reach, from infant to invalid. Baker papers it over with some wordless montages of broken families, but there isn't enough middle here to satisfy my questions. This is the point where Baker's choice to rely on text and images rather than traditional comic-book stylings causes a narrative break-down. Who's that losing his children? Is it Turner? Was Turner married? Or was that a flash-back? Too many visual cues from traditional comic visual syntax are missing in the style Baker is using, when he needs to play these sorts of narrative tricks it causes confusion in the reader, or at least, this reader.

And when I said earlier that Baker doesn't paper over the bloodshed, he certainly doesn't. It occupies a good third of the book, and it's horrible. He doesn't shy from making the insurrectionaries look like monsters, and shows un-named whites suppressing the armed slaves in a fairly heroic light, which you wouldn't expect in a modern adaptation aimed at the guilt-industry crowd. He even throws in the old stand-by of post-bellum nostalgia, the faithful house-slave desperately trying to save his family, comically shucking-and-jiving for the bloodthirsty band while the whites run for it.

In the end, it's kind of chaotic, and mournful, and strange. Certainly haunts you afterwards, I'll say that much for it.

Oh, BTW, my formerly-moonbat neighbors have finally taken down their Obama drapes. As an act of reciprocity, I vow to no longer call them "moonbats", "personality cultists", or "fascists".

I felt 35% less oppressed this weekend. Life's looking up!

AAUGH!

*This* is why federal pig-slopping "stimulus" spending is INSANELY inefficient. What does a school district with sharply declining enrollment, recently constructed buildings, and a preposterous *FOURTEEN* unoccupied school buildings need? Eighty-some million federal dollars for yet more unnecessary and un-needed construction!

Maybe Milwaukee will import some career arsonists from Detroit so that they can collect the insurance on their new buildings, because I can't fathom any other benefit to this particular scheme other than keeping Wisconsin construction employees fully employed. Why not just go whole-hog and just start burying bundles of hundred-dollar bills for people to dig up again?

I ordered the first disc of Nerima Daikon Brothers to fill out an order the other month, having not heard much of anything about it - or at least, not much of anything which stuck. It was stuck in among a hundred other C-list titles that ADV dumped into the market like a freighter full of cattle in shark-infested waters - apparently on the theory that if you throw enough of 'em in there, the sharks will eventually get too full to eat at least *some* of your beeves.

Uh, anyways - Nerima Daikon Brothers. It's a Nabeshin late-night anime, and not one of his hack-work directing-for-some-studio-spark make-work shows, like the Wallflower or Tenchi Muyou GXP. Remember Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemi? Yeah, that level of hyper bad taste. Except as a musical. A really sketchy, slapdash, cynical musical about the dreams of a suburban radish farmer, his host-club loser of a brother, and their gold-digging over-the-hill-former-idol cousin from Okayama. All of them dressed in a loose Nabeshin-eque approximation of the traditional attire of "Hassidic diamond merchants".

The show goes like this: introductory half-assed musical number in their daikon radish field. One or more members of the 'band' gets scammed by the bottom-feeding predator-of-the-week, via one or more short, hyper musical numbers; this is usually punctuated by a song-and-dance number from the loan-shark kanban musume dancers & their portable-shrine ATM of Doom. The Brothers escape, go to a back-alley pawnshop, to rent a preposterous weapon or device to defeat the villains (and rob them of all their ill-gotten gains), which they inveigle via song from "Oyaji", a shadowy figure with the traditional Nabeshin afro voiced by the director himself. One more violent song-and-dance routine later, justice is served, and Oyaji's pet "pandaikon" shows up with all the other victims-of-the-week, who walk off with all the Brothers' stolen wealth, leaving them destitute in their radish field to song-fight with their annoyed neighbors who probably thought that living next to a daikon field in sleepy Nerima would have been *quieter* than some more urban ward, right?

The songs aren't particularly brilliant - Sondheim isn't exactly quaking in his boots - but it's all delivered with a cock-eyed sloppy enthusiasm which makes it impossible to hate. The subject matter is pretty damned sketchy - the first episode is basically an extended homosexual casting-couch gag - which probably explains why it didn't get more notice back when it first came out. But it isn't all making-fun-of-teh-gheys, and the rest of the first disc mocks Korean pachinko parlours, predatory hospital operators, and mobbed-up cops. I was a little disappointed the Korean pachinko episode stayed within the relatively safe confines of "boy, the Koreans love their kimchee and cosmetic surgery, don't they?" and "housewives love them some Korean prettyboy actors", when I, personally, would have gone with the obvious North Korean commie-gangster line. But hey, it's still pretty funny, if kind of bigoted.

And damn, are there a lot of extras on the first disc. I started watching the disc, and just kept going and going until hey! Time to go to work! I'm definitely going to have to get the rest of the season the next time I make a TRSI order; we'll see what the next sale is coming up this Thursday.

Heck of a thaw on Sunday. Walked to the grocery store in a t-shirt, after turning back to leave my winter jacket at my apartment. Saw a woman up on High Street dumping salt on her sidewalk, and told her to wait until dark, because it was just going to get washed into the street-gutters without affecting the inevitable night-time ice-slicks that this sort of mid-winter thaws leave all over every down-hill flat surface.

Listened to the Super Bowl on the radio. Living without cable has a certain old-timey charm occasionally. You really do live in a different world when you interact with the polity via radio and print. Even if the print is online blogs instead of the daily paper...

God, what a pompous ass. Textbook projection. Wanna bet Ron has a heavily foxed, falling-apart copy of Catcher in the Rye somewhere near his bed-post? Probably hidden behind a bookstore-fresh, never-read copy of Franny and Zooey.

Not that I'm much of a Billy Joel fan. "We Didn't Start The Fire" is galactically bad, and most of his stuff is kind of eh. Rosenbaum's right about "Allentown" being crap, but not because of any sort of imagined contempt. The song is phony, artifical and worse, schmaltz. It's a college-student's idea of what life's like, and what it used to be like, in a dying factory town. It's an act of imagination by a not-particularly-imaginative hack. But Joel was occasionally a skilled hack on other occasions - I liked "River of Dreams" and some of his blue-eyed soul stuff - so I'm inclined to give him an existential pass.

Just don't make me listen to "We Didn't Start The Fire" or "Allentown" again.

Ha!

Jim Geraghty, live-blogging the RNC officers' elections:

Another reporter notes that the RNC has to be out of the ballroom by 5 p.m. because a wedding is slated to use the room starting at 5:30. Besides the RNC Chair, the RNC has to elect several other positions, including co-chair, secretary, and treasurer.

Every con-runner's been in that position. It's just a hell of a lot more... prosaic and small-time than anything you'd associate with the guys running one of the two national political parties.

Well, crap. I don't follow too many TokyoPop titles anymore, but I've already had two or three orphaned manga from them - Suppli and Platinum Garden - and two titles from their light novel line which is now one with the ages. It's better than Viz seizing up & falling over, but it's never good when the former-leader in an industry segment starts zombifying before our eyes like this.

Embarrassing confession time: not only do I regularly confuse Arthur Miller with Norman Mailer, but I also have been conflating Norah Vincent with Sarah Vowell. Oops. Well, at least I managed to *not* give my sister the cross-dressing lesbian journalist's latest socially subversive performance-art piece for Christmas. Lucky for me, it didn't come out in time. Which reminds me, I need to get around to finding my own copy of the Wordy Shipmates to read.

In my defense, they're both semi-comedic writers with last names starting with "V" who've written for Salon, which is probably where I got the idea that they were the same person. Yes, I used to read Salon.

I told you I used to be a very bad Republican.

h/t Glenn Reynolds.

Did you know that Wil Eisner's last comic book was a collaboration with Umberto Eco about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery? Ordered, but geez, that puts some really rank crap into my "Recommendations" listings on Amazon.

When did Momotato Daioh turn into a Unarian math? A few years ago? At any rate, January 1st is Apert for Momotato.

I'm getting kind of wroth with Del Rey & their slipping standards. Yozakura Quartet is an OK-if-not-great urban-fantasy comic, but the translation is just full of holes. They'll translate all the silly crap in interstitials about tertiary characters' favorite musicians and and comedians, but when the protagonist obstentiously writes something portentous in the heroine's mayoral log as the introduction to a big, showy Power Walk, then hey, the readers don't need to know just what the heck he was writing, right? It was just left in the original kanji & kana.

The translator did similar things in previous volumes, where we were just given the original, untranslated Japanese bulonium terms for various invented fantasy elements of the plot, without any explanation of what the hell the characters were talking about for chapters at a time. Now, admittedly, the original terms used were probably gibberish in Japanese as well, but it looks like they were a lot less obscure in the original than in the version delivered to the American audience. And I still say there's too much gassing on about obscure Japanese pop culture references in the endnotes, and not enough explanation of the made-up fantastic elements. It's a serious lack of prioritization of translation, if you ask me.

Wheee! Cartoon binge! Dennou Coil, Red Garden, and various favorite episodes from the Dini/Timm Superman late-Nineties series. I never got around to watching the fansubs of the last few episodes of Red Garden, so it's nice to know how that series ended. Very "Twilight of the Gods", really. The two-part OVA "Dead Girls" was pretty unexpected. I'm not sure what it was I was expecting - some sort of flashback or re-telling of the main story, maybe? But the delivered show was peculiar in a way which I can't really describe without massively spoiling the TV series. Dead Girls was an awful lot like Batman Beyond, actually. Cut maybe with Anne Rice.

But Dennou Coil. I'm kind of on the fence about how to rave about that show. It's like the demon spawn of My Neighbor Totoro and Serial Experiments Lain, half cheery Miyazaki-NHK children's extravaganza, half gloomy haunted cyberpunkish psychological mystery. On the one hand, bright spritely Ghibliesque crowd-pleasing spectaculars, and on the other hand, complicated emo wangst, tormented little kids in peril, and urban legends about dead girls. I'm not sure if the mainstream would eat it up, or be completely confused and repelled. It's utterly brilliant, but there was perhaps about a half-episode's too much of the wangst and emotional gnashing-of-teeth in the conclusion. It *needs* to be released in North America, but I'm not sure if it'd be successful. It bears strong structural and thematic resemblance to Fantastic Children, and that pretty much dropped into the marketplace & sank without a ripple.

Up late last night listening to the commentary on Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt Russell and John Carpenter have known each other too long to be doing commentaries together. They spent five entire minutes bragging past each other about their respective teenagers instead of talking about the film. It was like a ringside seat at someone's family reunion. What the hell ever happened to Dennis Dun, anyways? Nothing but TV bit parts since Prince of Darkness.

Finally got around to watching the Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz OAVs, and they're complete and total hogwash. Pretty, but horribly, horribly stupid. A meaningless re-tread of the same rattle-brained set of themes as the TV series, which at least had the virtue of simplicity and single-mindedness. None of the characters' motivations in the OAVs made any sense, and stuff seemed to happen just because they had finished storyboards available to animate from. One can't help but figure that randomly shuffling the storyboards wouldn't have materially affected the story.

I'd forgotten just how disgusting some episodes of Requiem from the Darkness could get. I watched the fansubs, back when it was still being called "Hundred Ghost Stories", and bought the Geneon DVDs on the cheap last year. It isn't a show that you can marathon in a single sitting, so I've been watching an episode here and there. Last night, I sat down to eat some cheddar sausages and watch a single episode, and got murder, necrophilia, gas-bloated corpses, and maggots with my dinner. You know it's an ugly show for dinnertime viewing when the least repulsive episode on a disc is about child dismemberment. Lucky I have a strong stomach...

So I was thinking about the other day's Dark Knight drivel, and worrying that I might be wandering into "Grand Inquisitor" territory. Do you think Bruce Wayne's ending position in that movie could be described as Grand Inquisitor lite? It is a deliberate reliance on falsehood and self-scapegoating on the part of an elite to save the souls of the general run of humanity, in short, an argument that salvation must forever travel with a bodyguard of lies.

But then, the Grand Inquisitor is more about freedom and agency than the problem of evil. Different cultures, different politics, different fixations, I suppose. Subjugation for us isn't the issue it was to the Russian intellectual, after all. If Batman in all his incarnations is about anything, thematically, it's about civic lawlessness, urban disorder, the problem of evil in the city.

There is no real hunger in Gotham, as there is in Doestoyevsky's Russia, or the Grand Inquisitor's Seville, and thus all that about bread goes over our heads, whereas in Doestoyevsky, it was intended to go right through the literal gut. "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!" For those who have seen what virtues the well-fed, fat, lawless poor are capable of, this is an ironic demand. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." Oh, how ironic this one is, when the fools of Hollywood pledge their literal servitude to a new king on the day of his crowning.

But really, truly, the cup of "Mystery" and its self-regarding moral pride is a temptation. It's hard to not get caught up with Ivan in his enthusiasm for his creation's towering egotism.

I don't know why, but it feels colder this morning than it did last week, when we had the real Arctic cold round these parts. Maybe because I had the heat turned up further to compensate last week? But I'm sitting at my desk here at work, and my toes are still half-frozen a half-hour after coming into the office. It's not as if I'm the one setting the thermostat here in the the office.

So, I got the news last night that Neal, my former roommate from the days at Quest Labs, has shipped out for the Sandbox. He & the rest of the 56th Stryker Brigade should be passing through Kuwait into the theatre in the next week or so. Good luck to the Bloody Bucket, and here's hoping the elections go quietly and safely.

Stay safe if you can, and kick ass if you have to.

Jessica's requested meme, from One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg, by Eric Wittenberg et al:

Imagine a long column of cavalry winding its way up the mountain side, on a road dug out of the mountain side, which sloped at an angle of thirty degrees just wide enough for four horses to march abreast - on one side a deep abyss and on the other an impassable barrier, in the shape of a steep embankment; the hour ten o'clock at night, a drizzling rain falling, the sky overcast, and so dark as literally not to be able to see one's own hand if placed within a foot of the organs of vision; the whole command, both men and animals, worn out with fatigue and loss of sleep...

It is, itself, a quote from a New York Times correspondent's description of Custer's brigade riding towards what would be a successful ambush of a retreating Confederate wagon train in Monterrey Pass over South Mountain after Gettysburg.

Fabius Maximus tried to illustrate the real-world application of the Dark Knight aphorism about men who 'just want to watch the world burn', and went seriously into the ditches by citing one Baju Bajrangi, a Hindu nationalist-fascist, terrorist and murderer. As Bill Quick points out, Bajrangi isn't a *textbook* pure-nihilist, in that he's clearly reacting to an initial atrocity with reciprocal atrocities. But I'm not satisfied with Quick's answer. It's incomplete, at least partially because the moral tableau established by that movie is incompletely described by Fabius Maximus. Let me explain.

The Dark Knight's action isn't just about a nihilist-terrorist and his hero-opposite. Rather, the movie presents us with The Joker, our man who 'wants to see the world burn', and two would-be heroes, established man-within-the-system District Attorney Harvey Dent, and the masked vigilante, Bruce Wayne/Batman. The Joker's goal isn't physical destruction for its own sake, but rather moral destruction. The world he wants to burn isn't tangible, physical, or ephiphomenal, but rather existential. He wants to burn down moral constructs, what he sees as social fictions. He's looking to find the flaw in the shining lie which is Harvey Dent, Pugnacious Hero-Reformer of the Corrupt City, and smash him utterly.

I can't remember where I picked this up, but somewhere out there is an archaic definition of "monster" as "in fiction, a person warped such that his or her personality presents a moral or ethical lesson." The Joker is convinced of the essential, irredeemable wickedness of man, and is looking for a person to make into his monster, a public soul to carve into the most shocking and monstrous of moral lessons. The middle of the Dark Knight, in which he places Dent into an impossible situation & shatters him into the disfigured, monstrous Two-Face, is The Joker's lit brand flung into the prepared bon-fire which is Gotham. Two-Face is the world set on fire, the atrocious response to atrocity.

In so far as the monster Two-Face is Harvey Dent in flames, he is the world on fire. He's an example of moral corruption and madness, whose very existence spreads the fire as sparks on rooftops in a crowded tinder-dry city. It's only when that fire-brand is extinguished and its very existence buried as in an unmarked grave by Wayne that The Joker's plot is defeated. In order to preserve the Heroic Dent, Wayne co-opts Two-Face's crimes & obscures The Joker's monster by subsuming him in Wayne's own moral lesson, a monster called the Batman.

There's a rich lode of metaphors in this narrative, and the Man Who Wants To See The World Burn is probably the most trivial of these. There are men like this throughout the academy, and all over Hollywood. Every third hip-hop, rock, and punk musician is probably somewhat inclined towards this point of view. Cheap nihilism is more common than not in the absence of proper moral instruction, and that particular duty has been neglected for the last hundred years and more. Socialized sociopathy is the end-result of the refusal to offer proper moral instruction on the part of our teachers and parents. The prisons are full of them, and if the streets are not even fuller, it's only because The Joker's belief that mankind is universally, essentially and irredeemably corrupt is at least as wrong as the belief that man is born free & everywhere lives in chains. Perhaps this is somewhat occluded by the relative rarity of socialized sociopaths with The Joker's corrupted-Calvinist view-point, as the more popular mind-sets are Rousseauian, in either the anarchic or totalizing trends.

But enough of that. We've had five generations of perfected brand-burning, fire-bombing, and pre-meditated arson. Men like Harvey Dent are even more common than the cheap nihilists, and Fabius Maximus's Bajrangi sounds like a Two-Face to me - not a man who wants to see the world burn, but rather the world itself on fire. He is the atrocious response to atrocity. Jokers are answerable on their own terms, as arsonists to be stripped of their matches, but what do you do with a man on fire? Extinguishing them seems often to be the simplest answer.

So, I ended up helping a friend move out on Saturday. Quite by accident - called as I walked past their place on the way to the grocery store, found out that was the day they were packing up her stuff in a U-Haul. So, I stuck around and helped them pack a U-Haul on what had been promised to be The Coldest Day Of The Year. We warmed up fast, but boy, U-Haul ramps are fun with slush-slicked bootheels. We couldn't get into the self-storage locker at first, and had to take a trenching tool to the ice-pack to free it from the deathly Icy Grip of Winter. We made much fun of her Saarinen-esque stackable chairlike torture devices.

They dropped me off at the grocery store on the way out of town. You don't often see a 24-foot U-Haul making a u-turn in the Weis Market parking lot. Least not around these parts.

Anime licensing wish-list:

1)Bamboo Blade. Hey, Funimation! You bothered to issue cease-and-desists for Enoki Films, why not follow up on that ukase with an actual license? It's a damned good sports anime, relatively light-hearted with a serious, ethical core which places moral development over competitive advantage.

2)Zipang re-release. I bought the first volume of the Geneon singles release cheap at TRSI, and got around to watching it yesterday. It seems like the sixth volume is unavailable, and Funimation/Geneon hasn't talked about doing a re-release in half-season or full-season sets. Admittedly, a time-travel war anime about a JSDF AEGIS destroyer flung back into WWII from the Japanese point of view isn't exactly the best fit for American audiences, but the first four episodes weren't nearly as jingoistic or morally myopic as they could have been, given the typical Japanese blind spots on the Pacific War.

3)Kodocha 2nd season set. This is more of a complaint about the new Funimation release, which is peppered with mysterious Japanese audio drop-outs. At first I thought it was more legal-issue fall-out from the SMAP hissyfit which ate the original Kodocha opening animation & those intermittent appearances by the band in the anime proper, but said audio drop-outs appear periodically in situations where there oughtn't be any sort of musical background. What's up with that?

Since I have nothing of importance to say, I thought I should start nattering on about unimportant crap again, if only to reassure any folks who might be wondering that no, I have not yet made my way for the Grey Havens...

I've been buying a *lot* of manga. It's much, much cheaper in bulk at TRSI, and I went on a serious binge late last fall. As a result, I've got dozens of volumes sitting on my to-read stack on my 'breakfast table'.

One of the pleasant surprises has been CMX's Dorothea, by one-named mangaka Cuvie. CMX is one of those publishers which is a total crapshoot: they seem to just pick licenses out of a hat, so that there's no real guarantee one way or the other. Dorothea is one of the pleasant "hits" - a historical Joan-of-Arcish sword-and-politics comic from their high-end "Mature" imprint. The heroine is an albino swordmaiden-type from a vaguely pagan pocket of the late-fifteenth-century Germanies who goes off to be a mercenary with a Landesknecht company to "see the world with her own eyes", in hopes of preserving her homeland.

The political details and realism is relatively high, and impressively well-thought-out, at least for manga. There's an acknowledgment of both sides of most arguments, and while our heroine's intentions are manga-pure, she still lives in a real, consequential world. She's virtuously opposed to mercenary looting, and yet her intervention is ferociously rebuffed by the protected with the furious observation that she had just personally slaughtered the protector of the household being looted.

I say "relatively" because the details are kind of wonky - German Waldensians were supposedly pacifistic and certainly aren't famous for being witch-burners, and Nauders & Ems are on opposite sides of the Germanies from each other - but hey, you make allowances for mangaka, especially when they start in on abtruse subjects like 15th-century German religious politics. And it's clearly supposed to be some sort of alternate-history...

Important post on the limits of centralized command in COIN, namely, the perils of "Major Hundred Miles". But I've recently heard a training story about an artillery officer which suggest that there can be reason to ride pretty close on any particular officer's tendency to think with his nifty new smart shell toy.

Um, yikes. I certainly hope this idea of a diffused nano-balloon-mirror weather machine is as thermodynamically impractical as it sounds, because otherwise, civilization is pretty thoroughly screwed. That would be the mother of all hydraulic tyrannies, "the devil's excrement" crossed with a truly ubiquitous Sword-of-Damocles scenario.

H/T Dr. Reynolds.

So, what did I find upon returning from Florida for a week with the folks? More than a ton of ice mounded up in front of the steps leading up to my front door. Apparently the new guy they had clearing the lots at the funeral home got confused about where he was supposed to put the snow-pile and decided to sock me in. Took hours & a proper set of heavy iron ice-chipping tools to clear a path to my door. Ah, global warming, how I love your paradoxical nonsensicality! See how you bewitch dimwitted neighbors into inconveniencing me?

I'm sure it's Al Gore's fault, somehow. He's called down the gods of anthropogenic ecological malice to curse my existence for doubting his prophecy, like Elisha's disrespecting by a mob of boys was avenged by the Almighty via a pair of bears, sent to devour his small and impertinent mockers.

This article on a paper claiming that reforestation resulting from depopulation of the New World after the post-Columbian pandemics was a trigger for the Little Ice Age was interesting, if fantastical. IIRC, they still can't agree on something as simple as whether the early voyagers brought back syphilis in the late 15th Century. Building an anthropogenic cause for the Little Ice Age on this sort of rickety foundation seems so amazingly Rube Goldbergish as to be practically impossible to prove. It's the very essence of "Just So" explication.

I thought I had written something about Charlie Stross in the past, but a quick google-check doesn't reveal anything. I find him a very frustrating, hit-or-miss sort of writer. His politics are typical muddle-headed hedonist-leftist twaddle - he's the sort of reflexive-instinctive 'libertarian' whose ideals could only exist in the comforting bosom of Mother Government. But he occasionally has a bright spark of lively plot and prose - most especially in the cubicle satire/spy novel/Lovecraftian pastiche The Atrocity Archives and the first volume of his Zelazny-Princes in Amber pastiche, the Family Trade. Come to think of it, the books of his which I've tolerated or liked have, by and large, been piggyback science-fictional rides upon the fantasy giants of the past. He's better known for his singularity-themed novels, but I took a strong disliking to the single example of that particular flavor of Stross, so pfft on that.

Anyways, I finally got around to reading the fourth volume of his "Merchant Princes" series, the Merchants' War, after skipping the hardback edition on the strength, or lack thereof, of the third volume, the Clan Corporate, which left me irritated and and a little bored with Stross's increasingly inept and sympathetic protagonist. The fourth volume picks up some steam by broadening the viewpoint of the narrative wildly, with less than a fifth of the book told from heroine Miriam/Helge's dull, pointless point of view. There's lots of action in the fourth book, almost all of it occurring where Miriam ain't, which makes this installment a great improvement over the third book. So, yay on that front.

Sadly, Stross's ability to maintain an American 'voice' seems like it's slipping badly with the Merchants' War. While I've been known to indulge heavily in anglicianisms like extraneous 'u's in words like 'colour', I do accept that there are distinctions between the standard American 'voice' and the British 'voice', and the Scottish Stross doesn't do too well in this volume, repeatedly having American characters pick up 'torches' or talk about being 'in hospital' and so forth. Since there's only one viewpoint character who could conceivably be pictured as "British", with every other major or secondary character either being Americans or native speakers of a teutonicized alternative-world feudal language, this kept yanking me out of the story and into an unwanted textual-analysis mode which I don't generally relish.

Also, the story doesn't so much end on a cliff-hanger as just *thwapt!* slaps up against the back cover, as if the last thirty pages just weren't bound with the rest of the manuscript. And what in previous books was a laudable refusal to inject his repulsive personal political views into an otherwise-contemporary hot-button narrative has broken down with this volume, as he wastes fifteen or twenty pages on a pointless, off-message, graceless insinuation that someone in the Reagan administration had apparently intended to blow up Boston in a fake-terrorist attack in the late Eighties, and he later has a sinister sock-puppet government spook spout stupid Truther claims about bin Laden having been a rogue agent of the American government, and salivating about the prospect of a terrorist nuke going off, again, in Boston. Bah.

Anyways, the series as a whole isn't a total waste of time, but the aspects which most attracted in the early volumes have faded or been left to the wayside, and the books are largely carrying themselves on the strength of plot, action, intrigue, and good old pulpy forward momentum. YMMV.

Sen. Casey's office auto-emailer replied to that message about the Detroit bailout proposals. With some wallpaper about FDIC and TARP, didn't even mention GM or Detroit. Guess the auto-reply emailer classified me as a financial/banking crank instead of someone pissed at the American carmakers.

This comment is the most reassuring thing I've heard out of Washington since the election. Cabinet-level nominations are fairly small ball in my eyes - the tone and attitude of an administration is set a) in the Oval Office and b) in the sub-Cabinet nominations and appointments.

One of the things that scared me the most about Obama was his Carter-like earnestness and apparent lack of spontaneous humor. He seemed to have no goofiness to him. That gag about Richardson's beard sounds spontaneous and unscripted - either Obama's speechwriters are really, really good at scripting ad libs, or he actually made a Joke. A real one, the sort of stupid, doofus gag I'd expect from Bush the Younger in the days before the office ground him down into a grey stolid paste.

Snerk!

Hey folks, want to see the urban heat island effect in action? Check this 'un out. Once they moved that station next to a *BARBECUE*, the station records show an obvious and distinct upward bias which "continues to this day".

NOAA's response to this sort of cheap mockery? Hiding the evidence.

Woo-hoo! Let's hear it for the Indian Navy's INS Tabar, which did what the rest of the swarm of warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden *should* be doing - blow a Somali pirate 'mothership' right out of the water!

Whenever I get particularly down and Mark-Steynish about the future of humanity, I remember that while Brazil is the country of the future (and always will be!), India *is* that future. And I remember that alongside that leftist-socialist fatalistic failure which is the Gandhian nightmare, walks the ghost of Rudyard Kipling's India, pugnacious, imperial, forth-right and British in a fashion that the pygmies inhabiting the United Kingdom have not pretended to since the Suez Crisis.

Amazing. I just got an email from GM trying to get me to pester my senators and congressman to bail their improvident, incompetent, inept corporation out with my tax money. I don't remember giving them my email address when I bought my Aveo, but apparently I did.

I'm thinking "no". I'm thinking of pestering Specter to *not* give them a thin red cent, since NPR was gassing on about him being friendly to the idea. In fact, I just sent this to Specter and Casey:

I am contacting you as a citizen of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and as a voter to vehemently and emphatically demand that you *NOT* support or vote for any scheme which extends one more dime's worth of public credit underwritten by our hard-earned taxes to those incompetent, improvident, hopelessly inept clowns who run the Detroit automakers.

I cannot think of a greater waste of public resources and a more shameless appeal to the squalid self-interest of a pack of over-paid, over-compensated, over-indulged UAW retirees and "employees" than these repeated and utterly futile 'bailouts' of a company which is not so much dedicated to the production of quality automobiles, as to the ongoing support and subsidy of bloated union pensioners and their dependents.

What justice is there in the extraction of payroll taxes from unpensioned, impoverished convenience store clerks, grocery-store stockboys, shoe salesmen, and other losers in life's lottery - all of them either going without health care or scrambling and scrimping and saving to afford sky-high premiums - in order to subsidize the obscene "Cadillac" health plans and bloated, underfunded pensions of these Princes of the Union?

Let GM die. Let the monster go bankrupt, and complete the process of capital-destruction which has brought that once-great company to the brink upon which it now totters. Do not throw good money after bad, do not piss away the public's wealth in an attempt to salvage long-lost private wealth.

The pensioners of the UAW can rely on Social Security and Medicare and their own personal savings like the rest of retired America. They were paid and over-paid throughout their working lifetimes. If the end result of all those wages is nothing but empty bank-accounts and the broken promises of a defaulted pension - well, those self-same excessive wages, fairly bargained by an over-enthusiastic pack of union jackals in defiance of the interests of now-destroyed investor capital, came with their own eventual price-tag, did they not?

Wow. I seem to be to the left of The Artist Currently Known As Prince on gay marriage. What a strange world - and it's getting stranger by the day.

An interesting and rather infuriating reminder that ideas have consequences, and that there are vandals at large in academia. An important explanation for that link: Mark Grimsley is a leftist whom I am almost positive is an enthusiastic Obama supporter, and with whose contemporary politics I almost certainly will have massive disagreements on any number of questions. But he is an honest historian, and his description of Royster and Stout's Gramscian assault upon the necessary political myths which underpin American democratic consensus is pretty vein-popping.

Look, if you spend time explaining how vital a particular intellectual tradition is in making modern politics operational, and then proceed to plant rhetorical dynamite under that tradition and start waving a lit taper around the fuse, I can't help but think that you don't mean your country well.

Welcome to the New Misogyny. I believe a quote from A Man For All Seasons seems apropos:

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Tradition may be unfair, and confining, and absolutely Not Fun. Cultural norms may be arbitrary and unpleasant and unobliging to your own person sense of necessities and right conduct. But both are grown by the organic operation of societies in motion, laid down by the steady beat of ancestral heels, such that those paths which eroded away were abandoned, and those paths which cut impassable bogs were let to go to wrack and weed. Culture and tradition tends to keep to the passable routes, and proper tradition-drawn law then laid down down macadam over those least worst social by-ways.

When our uncles and aunts threw down all the fences and hedge-rows and went counter-culturally off-roading, they left a trackless maze of muddy ripped-up lawns, ruined fields, eroded hill-sides. The current generation is getting ready to lay down gravel on some of those wayward new folk-ways, and the feminist press is whinging about just how roundabout, unpleasant, and ill-directed a New Social Road-Map their cartographers are being presented by the gravellers.

Well congratulations, sunshine. The old roads were hard, coarse, and indirect, but at least they got where we were going: marriage, family, children, continuity. I'll be damned if I know where these new roads are going, but it certainly looks like no-where I want to be.

Yeah, Steve Schmidt is scum, and McCain's advisers were apparently a pack of complete and total defeatists. McCain's at fault for having hired the lot of them, but really, discussing whether to concede the election during preparations for the final debate is just absolutely worthless. Every single one of them should never have another job in politics or anything to do with government. The ground-level people were doing their best to keep up morale while these cheese-eating surrender monkeys were apparently mentally updating their resumes during strategy meetings.

And the Obama people apparently believe their own bullcrap about criticism being hate speech, to judge from the cowflops in that article indirectly blaming Palin for death threats.

As far as this Houdini stuff is concerned, if they were actually using this magic new system, they weren't bothering with it in my local area that I've seen or heard of. The other side's pollwatchers were taking records longhand, and drifting in and out of my precinct, not even pretending to really care about whether their people were making it to the polls. Admittedly, Bellefonte West trends somewhat conservative...

Wow. I've never really paid much attention to Rahm Emanuel before. The son of an Irgun member and namesake of a member of the Stern Gang, known for violent outbursts and a savage temper, as Obama's Chief of Staff? The anti-Semites will have a collective aneurysm.

Maybe Israel will survive the next four years after all.

While I'm on the subject of hopes for the mirror: Social Security.

Please, please, please raise the retirement-age kick-in threshold. Do it now so that the boomers don't blow out the budget. Social Security was supposed to support the incapacitated elderly, not a horde of physically-fit aging gentlefolk-of-leisure.

Sorry, Mom, Dad. I appreciate all the money you lavished on my raising and education, and I don't begrudge the last five years or so in which you were able to spend your time playing golf and gardening in central Florida, but if only on grounds of social utility, the economy could have used your labor and productivity.

It always was a lie that Social Security was any sort of retirement plan, and it's becoming increasingly clear that most legacy pension plans are likewise funded with air and bureaucratic bullcrap.

Mirror, mirror, please don't let McDermott kill the 401k system & force everyone into a parallel government-regulated and partially-operated "savings" system. In the short term, that would shatter the stock market, and in the long term, it would impoverish the working classes, pauperizing them and accustoming them to null or negative real interest-rate returns on investment, like the Japanese and their postal savings incubus. Please, prove me a liar when I campaigned on the dark suggestion that you'd let the McDermotts in Congress do something that disastrous.

I want to be wrong.

Well, looks like we might be going back to the old Sixties-style New Frontier Big Science pork buffets. Expect lots and lots of resources poured down dry holes. Meanwhile, of the two institutions which actually produced significant technological advances, Bell Labs is gone, gone, gone with the wind, and I fear DARPA is about to get six inches of bodkin through the thorax.

Prove me wrong, mirrorball man.

Please.

Huh. If Obama picks Holbrooke, that's a definite upside. McCain certainly wouldn't have had the leverage to name a complete and utter bastard like Richard Holbrooke as Secretary of State. I happen to approve of complete and utter bastards when it comes to diplomacy. "Softly-softly" is excessively overrated in a diplomat, and Foggy Bottom could use a cleaning-out with bactine and a blow-torch.

And the cannibals are already gathering in the clearings, scenting weakness. The more pugnacity a prospective Obama administration shows towards our national enemies, the better the chances we'll survive Biden's Global Test with limbs and dignity intact.

Well, life goes on.

OK, folks. I'll be out campaigning from now until the close of polls on Tuesday. This is me getting ready to go radio-silent. I'll be making calls during reasonable hours, and then working as a 'striker' in my local polling place during Election Day.

I do this because I believe that Obama is a danger, that he is a demagogue, and an idoloter of the state, and is fundamentally hostile to civil society and free enterprise. I believe he would cripple the American economy and the American military with his inexperience, his executive incapacity, and his demonstrated disregard for constitutional norms. His campaign has been an extended demonstration of the Orwellian Newthink principle, in which welfare is called 'tax cuts', government taxation is equated to a test of patriotism, it's selfish to object to the taxation of others, and to be one's brother's keeper is to fling him onto the public dole & into the care of strangers.

Now, I'm not going to tell you that our campaign will win. The polls still look unfavorable, and while any one poll can be wrong, if the aggregate stays against you as long as they have this season, your chances are pretty bleak. It would be easy to give up hope and go crawl into a corner.

Don't do what's easy. Don't put down burdens before their time. Don't give up before you're done.

Do what's right.

Even if it doesn't matter. Even if it's futile. Even if all your effort work slips quiet into the dark water and, leaving no ripples behind, disappears from sight un-remarked. Do what's right because it's right, and not for any other reason, not success, not victory, not even peace of mind.

Because we cannot perform miracles. We can only do every last thing that is in our power consistent with honor. It is only when we have done every last thing within our power and consistent with our honor that we can dare to ask for miracles.

There's nothing sharper and more ferocious than a convert: three ways the tanked media will try to depress Republican/Hillcrat turnout.

I've got to track down something by this guy after the election. The idea of a male, African-American enka singer is just mind-bogglingly goofy-cool. I'm only afraid that mere reality can't possibly live up to the imagined potentials.

Ha!

A masterpiece of truthiness.

So, I ended up working the Palin rally last night. The call centre was shut down to concentrate attention on the event, so it wasn't as if I had anything better to do. It was my first political rally, well, ever. Unless you count walking past the Bush and Gov. Brown rallies on Old Main Lawn on the way to classes in '92, which I don't, since I didn't really care that much at the time.

I hadn't gotten around to getting a ticket for the event last weekend, so I just walked up to the waiting line to see if there was anything I could do. Ran into the guys running the county campaign operations, and Anthony gave me a volunteer badge & recruited me to go help with line control.

While we waited for the volunteers to be let into Rec Hall, I spotted some performance-artist protesters with the usual ugly signs. I went over to talk to them, to see what they thought they were accomplishing. Got into a minor debate with a clown-Palin-impersonator, and was a little intemperate. Not terribly, but a little. She kept chirping about her opinions... wish I had remembered the line about "opinions are prejudices with a college education". I said something about being sorry about what their politicians will do to them if their hopes come true, and then I think I turned off the Palin-pierrot by being sincere. She was looking for validation, not pity. Especially after I told her little group that I was technically pro-choice, and compared what they were doing to the pro-life protesters with the screaming-horror posters, back in the old days of the abortion clinic in the HFL Building. That kind of intrigued her less flamboyant friend, and we chatted a bit about my beliefs and priorities, until Anthony gave me a poke and I saw that they were letting the volunteers into the building.

Inside, I was tasked to play human traffic cone, and keep the folks moving into the bleachers and around the room until we filled things up. This took more energy than you'd think, if not an awful lot of mental acuity. Somebody had told one of the reporters following the Palin campaign about me, and I spent a good chunk of my time as a human traffic cone being interviewed by one Eli Saslow, or being photographed in action by a staff photographer.

I hope I wasn't too impolitic, but I tried to be as honest and forthright as I could be about what it is I do for the campaign here at the grass-roots, and what I expect and hope and fear for in the election. I said I was "half enthusiastic and half fey", and talked about why I "went all in", and what that means in terms of a volunteering commitment. I also talked about how many Democratic volunteers there are with the campaign in Centre County, and pointed him at Anthony Biviano, the door-to-door guy who basically canvassed the better part of College Township by his lonesome.

After about two-and-a-half hours of this, the Centre County staffers told the volunteers to go find the reserved section, and I went on up to take a seat. By that time I was both hoarse and tired, so I was glad for the rest. It looked like somebody had been deliberately sending the folks with Obama shirts and stickers to the volunteer section, presumably to keep things under control if there was any acting up. In the event, everyone was well-behaved and perfectly civil, so there wasn't any disruptions or unpleasantness. I had missed the Benninghoff and Thompson speeches while I was still playing traffic cone, but got into the stands in time for the Hank Williams, Jr. set.

I've never been a big fan of modern country, but I have a CD of Hank Williams, Sr., and I can appreciate the younger Williams' material for what it is. He was playing up the hillbilly angle pretty fiercely, and was a little un-PC at times, but in general it was a pretty good performance. He's written a campaign song for the trail, called 'McCain-Palin Tradition'; as campaign songs go, it wasn't half-bad. He played some of 'I Walk the Line', and that was cool.

They got the crowd pretty riled up for Gov. Palin, and then a small woman came out on stage, but it was just an aide coming out with the Governor's speech, then a procession of other aides cleared off Williams' equipment, and I amused myself by reading parts of the Governor's prepared speech over the shoulders of the operators of the teleprompter. Eventually, the Governor came out, and gave a pretty good stump speech, partially from the version on the teleprompter, and partially improvised. She's clearly given versions of this speech often enough to barely glance at the teleprompter, and to wander on and off the script as the situation and circumstances warrant. It was a good, solid, beautifully-delivered stump speech, hitting all the necessary elements of the address I'd expect from a Republican running for national office. I've heard parts of it from the convention speech, and parts of it from the vice-presidential debate, and others I've read in campaign coverage. I yelled myself a little more hoarse along with the rest of the crowd.

She really is an excellent, excellent politician. It was a beautiful performance; I can't imagine any of the vice-presidential candidates of the last forty years doing a better job; there may have been VP candidates with better policy chops - Jack Kemp comes to mind, and there may have been VP candidates with better experience and gravitas - Admiral Stockdale leaps immediately to mind. But Jack Kemp had the personal charisma and presence of an asthmatic beagle, and the press & a bad vice-presidential debate shattered the Admiral and made all of his heroism and sacrifice invisible, blotted out by the black shadow of a bad SNL skit.

There was about a hundred and fifty O-bots making noise and waving pictures of their Dear Leader at the rally attendees as we left the building. Some of the O-bots had ginned up a giant "Obamaville" banner on an oversized sheet strung between two two-by-fours. I couldn't believe they'd deliberately evoke Hoovervilles by associating the concept of shanty-towns strung together by the evicted homeless victims of a prior Great Depression - with *THEIR HERO*! I said as much to a journalism student, and we chatted a bit about my concerns about Obama supporters and their cult-of-personality habits and inclinations, pointing out their fondness for blown-up photos and images of their idol. I suppose you could call it my second interview of the evening, or possibly my third, if you count the protest-pierrots at the beginning of the evening.

I'd guess that there was at least five thousand in Rec Hall, and probably northwards of 6500 - there officially is seating capacity for 7200, but they had a section across the top of the auditorium blocked off by a big "Country First" sign. It was pretty much a full house, and we had kids with Obama shirts sitting in the stairs & folks leaning on the upper wall around the running-track during the speech proper, and the hundreds standing on the floor between the press stands at mid-court and the stage. Northwards of 6500 seems exceedingly likely, I would think.

Update: CDT says 7500, H/T rightwingprof @ Right Wing Nation.

Brrr!

Al Gore must be in town.

I did the numbers on the McCain health care proposal for the folks at my company, based off the new health insurance plan they're rolling out next month. Looks like it's a slam-dunk for me, personally - my total-cost-to-company is less than the $5000 credit, let alone the after-tax cost which would be incurred under the McCain plan. The full-coverage all-family plan is about three times more expensive, but it's still far and away neutral & the marginal tax increase caused by making the plan & employee contributions after-tax would be more than covered by the $5000 credit. In fact, the plan cost would have to be increased radically to incur an actual net tax increase.

Mind you, my company plan isn't particularly stingy. It's a good plan, from what the folks with families and kids say. Personally, I barely consume health care myself, and what I do is minor stuff out of pocket.

Me, I think this means that the Obama people are trying to cut Fast Eddie and his people out of the slop-line, and Rendell was shrieking because his boys weren't going to get their taste. After all, who needs ward heelers when you've got an army of fanatical 'community organizers' to replace the old bulls and sleaze merchants?

This could be a very good sign, by the way. City machines run on experience and weaselly little rat-[expletive]s who know where the cracks are in a neighborhood, where the votes hide and who's movable by which levers. College kids and out-of-towners can't replace that kind of experience and guile, that was the lesson of the Howard Dean campaign. It might mean that Philadelphia's vaunted get-out-the-voter-fraud engine might be short a few functioning spark-plugs come the contest.

I will be so blackly amused if the Obama Youth get their wish & their mirrorball messiah turns around and drafts their slacker asses. What the heck did you *think* all that palaver about "saving our souls" and "national service" was *about*, you young schmucks? Obama and Biden need a big, dumb army of raw recruits if they're going to go running around intervening in Darfur and provoking Pakistan. The current smart, professional, small army isn't big enough and crude enough to be the sort of blunt club clumsy fools can swing without cutting their own achilles tendons.

Although to be honest, I suspect the new draft will be for Bellamy-esque "industrial armies", set to work "organizing" society and replacing the institutions of civil society, replacing legitimate businesses where-ever possible, and so forth. They'll probably start by setting the little fools to patching asphalt. Expect tons of 'public works projects', putting up 'improvements' which will begin to crumble before they're even finished.

And here I thought we might have a calmer, less violent election season than 2004's...

Sigh.

I was kind of wishfully thinking last night that one possible upside was the half-remembered false memory that Obama might be in favor of raising the Social Security retirement age to fix *that* coming disaster, and with a catastrophic Democratic congressional majority, he might be in a position to push painful entitlement changes.

Yeah, yeah, I know, and we'll fuel our flex-fuel hybrid vehicles with reprocessed unicorn farts. Bear with me, I was looking for the upside to a possible electoral disaster.

But no, he's selling a rise in taxes to cover the coming funding gaps. No neo-liberal hard choices for the Lightbringer! Everything can be papered over by screwing the rich! Won't that be fun! Grilled unicorn on a stick for everyone!

On a lighter note, in some quarters they're apparently slamming the Toledo native for not going by his first name. I should probably introduce y'all to myself, seeing as I've been lying to y'all all these years: my first name's actually Charles.

Like "Joe", I go by a nickname based on my middle name. I don't know - or care! - why Joe does this, but I do it because I come from a fairly long line of Charles Hagmaiers, and my parents didn't care to go searching for a new diminutive, so they just went with the middle name instead. I was just as glad, to be honest - I could have groaned under an unfortunate nickname like my paternal grandfather Chick. I can't imagine what my school-life might have been with that hanging around my neck.

So it's a conspiracy! We evil conservative plants are sneaking around behind your back, pretending and faking behind false names. Just like "Sam" Grant, "Cump" Sherman, and all of those examples the Minuteman pulled out in that link.

Boo!

And Obama the Fair rubbed his face, and mused in front of his courtiers, "will no-one rid me of this turbulent plumber?"

Oh, God. Uncle Ron, how could you? Let your vicious young turks seize upon a home-town boy, rip his life apart before the crowd, and fling the bloody shreds to the hungry cannibal press? You *know* this will destroy him, no matter how good of a man he might have been.

Is there a reason you're not off destroying the life of, oh, say Obama's campaign treasurer, Uncle Ron?

So McCain put out his economic plan of the week, to follow up on Obama's plan-of-the-week. It had some sort of capital gains component to it. Obama responded, by mocking the idea of capital gains, sniggering that nobody's going to be enjoying capital gains anytime soon.

Think about that one, Obamaheads. Either Mr. Man can't think more than three months ahead of the game, or he doesn't care if anyone makes capital gains for the foreseeable future. No, he's too busy making plans to tax you so that he can turn around and give you a check. He's too busy planning on making *your* income the *government's* income, to be redistributed to you, and your neighbor, and *his* insolvent, drug-dealing neighbor who runs a meth lab out of her nominally-foreclosed too-expensive-for-her-means bubble-McMansion.

Obama just signaled with a big ol' three-story-tall signal-flag that he doesn't care to encourage business. That he isn't interested in the traditional liberal-New Democrat vision of business as a herd of sheep to be kept healthy, well-sheared, and growing wool for the new season. No, that's not Barack Obama's vision of private business.

To Barack Obama, private business is a vast buffalo herd, uncontrollable, unownable, a resource for his enemies, an obstacle for the socialist future, an obstruction to the iron rails he intends to lay across our national landscape. The Treasury Department in an Obama Administration will be a mercenary band handed buffalo guns, sent out like "Buffalo Bill" Cody to slaughter private business and leave the corpses to rot in heaping hills scattered across the landscape.

Friends, you and I are the Lakota.

Enjoy the Rez when they pen you in.