So, local elections coming up next week. I've moved to a new precinct - Bellefonte South. The real estate boosters call most of the precinct "Rainbow's End" - a neighborhood of neat, aging, well-kept ranches and Cape Cods - but I'm pretty sure my slice of town's still Downtown, which is noticeably lower-class, decrepit, and mostly tumble-down Victorian.
As for the ballot, well... There's no choices to speak of for mayor, tax collector, or the school directors. That last one - the system's set up to only deliver four choices for four seats - is sort of annoying, as our school district has a nasty habit of jumping at Cadillac solutions to problems & driving our school property taxes to county highs. Especially since they've been sniveling about insufficient classroom space for the primary school kids, which suggests they're getting ready to go on another construction binge.
I'm voting straight Republican on the judges, I think. I haven't noticed any serious beefs about any of the choices in that section, and Republicans are heuristically preferable to Democrats or anyone who would run for a judge's seat on the Libertarian ticket. Absent, of course, credible and convincing testimony to the contrary in individual cases.
The big local race is for District Attorney. The Republican incumbent has gotten caught up in a scandal over an assistant district attorney's inability to keep his private life and his job separate - there are a couple of lawsuits or somesuch ongoing, and a case or two got overturned because of the scandal. That's bad, but the Democratic opponent (whom I voted for in the Democratic primary, mind you) isn't really a very attractive alternative. She's a classic squishy soft-on-crime Clintonite faker, and I hate her signs - very liberal-fascist "smiley face on the sole of our jackboots" creepy. I'll probably hold my nose and vote for the guy who needs to keep a better eye on his jerkass subordinates. I will probably vote for the incumbents in the other county offices.
Lastly, borough council & the precinct offices. Council's a "race" between a Democratic "facilities manager" (I think that means janitorial super?) and a Republican who didn't even bother to respond to the local paper's request for information. Some research shows that he's an older DJ who's heavily involved in all the festivals and events-planning in the borough - all that crap that the Curtin Hill toffs live for, which clutters up Downtown for those sods who actually live there. Just based on my impressions of those two, I'm going to go with the Democrat - he seems less likely to waste my property taxes on the festival chrome, and more likely to waste it on guys leaning on shovels. Eh, a bit of a trade-off.
The Judge of Election and so forth are all "write-in". What the heck's up with that? Is there anybody running things in this precinct?
Thursday, October 29, 2009
If any population in the United States deserves this sort of treatment, it's the government-happy employees of the federal government who drive to and through the District of Columbia and the deep-blue inhabitants of that fair territory. They won't learn the lesson, though. They'll just fume "If Comrade Obama only knew! He'd put it right!"
Monday, October 26, 2009
If you've never heard of shad planking as an extreme example of political "sign war" excess, this is absolutely gob-smacking.
Well, isn't this lovely. There's a Star Chamber in Great Britain which exists to find elderly individuals incompetent (because of Alzheimers, dementia or mental illness), seize their assets, and presumably lock them away in a facility. I'd call it enslavement except people generally make slaves of those whom they might find of use. This is rather that sort of slavery where the benefit to the slaver is entirely of a moral cast: the beneficial glow of having done a good work, of having saved these old dears from the exploitations of their grasping, depraved parasite spawn, of having put them into a gentle, soothing trajectory towards the Great Recycling Box in the Turf.
All great evils are done by those who think highly of their moral certitudes.
All great evils are done by those who think highly of their moral certitudes.
"If Rachel’s people are 'nothing,' what does that say about mine?"
A link encountered in a comment thread on the rise of the English neo-Fascist BNP.
A link encountered in a comment thread on the rise of the English neo-Fascist BNP.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Some poor schmuck in town bought a 2010 Nissan Cube; it was parked on High Street Saturday morning. I was astounded and revolted. After a bit of staring in horrified fascination, I called a friend to share the revulsion.
It is quite honestly the worst-looking car I've ever seen. Some might offer the Aztek as a rival, but you can kind of see where they were going with the Aztek - it's just a streamlined, cubist variant on the minivan aesthetic, one that goes terribly, eye-slicingly wrong. The Cube is a whole different class of 'orrible.
To start off with, it's a cube, a box on wheels - but it's a cube defined entirely with curves, not a single straight edge that I could identify in ten minutes of awe-struck examination. Every curve takes away from all the others, and the whole is much, much less than the parts.
The Cube isn't much bigger than my Aveo, but it's slightly taller, and has to have twice the air-resistence, because the front window is the closest thing to a straight line on the vehicle. It's at about a 65 to 70 degree slope, perfectly calculated to suck airflow downwards into the scoop under the hood & devour forward momentum. The only way it could be worse is if it had a Jeep-style perfect vertical sheet of glass.
Said scoop is the next abomination in this parade of horrible. It's about five-six inches wide, and four inches deep, a great little pit for slush, ice, and snow to accumulate in bad weather, and mess with the thermal balance and weight of the car. It's an utterly, formlessly worthless aesthetic touch which will just make life miserable for the owner in winter weather. The interior is bedeviled with a bizarre ripple ridging effect cast into the ceiling around the dome light, as if it were a rock tossed into a pond. Why? Damned if I know.
Lastly, the hatch door opens sidewise, like a RAV4 or a CR-V. This car is too small and close to the ground to compete with those mini-SUVs - it's *not* a crossover, far as I can tell. It's more in the way of a competitor to the HHC, as if someone would actually want to compete with a half-car, half-stationwagon like that. The main thing accomplished by making the hatch open sidewise, is to greatly increase the required opening radius, and to render the layout of the vehicle irrepairably unbalanced - distressingly asymmetric, like a vehicle designed by that aesthetic vandal, Frank Gehry.
Someone once accused the Chrysler K-Car of not being a car, but rather the box the car came in. Likewise, the Nissan Cube isn't so much a car, as the vacuum-sealed clamshell it was shipped in: the sort of clamshell which takes a pair of scissors, a boxcutter, and a lighter to get open. The sort of packaging which hates the purchaser.
This car is an aesthetic offense against the gods of design. The designers ought to be tarred and feathered, and run out of Nishi-ku on a rail.
It is quite honestly the worst-looking car I've ever seen. Some might offer the Aztek as a rival, but you can kind of see where they were going with the Aztek - it's just a streamlined, cubist variant on the minivan aesthetic, one that goes terribly, eye-slicingly wrong. The Cube is a whole different class of 'orrible.
To start off with, it's a cube, a box on wheels - but it's a cube defined entirely with curves, not a single straight edge that I could identify in ten minutes of awe-struck examination. Every curve takes away from all the others, and the whole is much, much less than the parts.
The Cube isn't much bigger than my Aveo, but it's slightly taller, and has to have twice the air-resistence, because the front window is the closest thing to a straight line on the vehicle. It's at about a 65 to 70 degree slope, perfectly calculated to suck airflow downwards into the scoop under the hood & devour forward momentum. The only way it could be worse is if it had a Jeep-style perfect vertical sheet of glass.
Said scoop is the next abomination in this parade of horrible. It's about five-six inches wide, and four inches deep, a great little pit for slush, ice, and snow to accumulate in bad weather, and mess with the thermal balance and weight of the car. It's an utterly, formlessly worthless aesthetic touch which will just make life miserable for the owner in winter weather. The interior is bedeviled with a bizarre ripple ridging effect cast into the ceiling around the dome light, as if it were a rock tossed into a pond. Why? Damned if I know.
Lastly, the hatch door opens sidewise, like a RAV4 or a CR-V. This car is too small and close to the ground to compete with those mini-SUVs - it's *not* a crossover, far as I can tell. It's more in the way of a competitor to the HHC, as if someone would actually want to compete with a half-car, half-stationwagon like that. The main thing accomplished by making the hatch open sidewise, is to greatly increase the required opening radius, and to render the layout of the vehicle irrepairably unbalanced - distressingly asymmetric, like a vehicle designed by that aesthetic vandal, Frank Gehry.
Someone once accused the Chrysler K-Car of not being a car, but rather the box the car came in. Likewise, the Nissan Cube isn't so much a car, as the vacuum-sealed clamshell it was shipped in: the sort of clamshell which takes a pair of scissors, a boxcutter, and a lighter to get open. The sort of packaging which hates the purchaser.
This car is an aesthetic offense against the gods of design. The designers ought to be tarred and feathered, and run out of Nishi-ku on a rail.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Article on Steven Vincent Benet and John Brown's Body. I almost said that it's my favorite poem, but to be strictly honest, Benet is my favorite poet. It's true that there are long stretches of John Brown's Body that are kind of precious and others which are too much of their time. There are long stretches of John Brown's Body which I think count among the greatest things written in English, especially his summation of John Brown the man, and some scene-setting sections at the beginning. Other passages, especially the western stuff set after Shiloh, are... kind of Narmish. I think his best work was probably the Burning City, which included the superlative "Litany for Dictatorships" and "Nightmare, with Angels", as well as "Ode to the Austrian Socialists" and a lot of harrowing, doomful premonitions of the apocalyptic coming war which Benet wouldn't survive.
I've been playing around in the kitchen the last week or so, mostly with garlic, cooking oil, and green onions. I kind of went overboard with the garlic last night. Everything tasted like really overconcentrated garlic juice for the rest of the evening, including diet Mountain Dew and cups of water.
Heavy, heavy snowfall. About two and a half inches off the top of my car this morning, and there was a small tree down over the fence at the back of the condo association property - didn't look like it caused any damage, except maybe to that guy's bird feeding apparatus.
Radio reports say that the southeast section of the county got hit monstrous hard - six inches of sodden October snow around Port Matilda. Rightwing Prof lives down that way, on this side of Skytop. Hopefully Gray's Woods didn't get too badly hammered.
Radio reports say that the southeast section of the county got hit monstrous hard - six inches of sodden October snow around Port Matilda. Rightwing Prof lives down that way, on this side of Skytop. Hopefully Gray's Woods didn't get too badly hammered.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
We're losing another employee here at work. Middle of the worst recession of my lifetime, and everybody's jumping ship.
Anybody need work as a system administrator with experience in CentOS & Red Hat Linux management? There's a list of requirements as long as my arm.
BTW, so much for "no snow accumulation". There's a half-inch on the boardwalk outside my office-closet window.
Anybody need work as a system administrator with experience in CentOS & Red Hat Linux management? There's a list of requirements as long as my arm.
BTW, so much for "no snow accumulation". There's a half-inch on the boardwalk outside my office-closet window.
I *so* know what I'm giving *somebody* for Christmas this year.
I just have to figure out who's the lucky relative.
To be honest, I'll probably buy it for myself & then push it on somebody else after I'm done with it. It looks cheap enough.
h/t.
I just have to figure out who's the lucky relative.
To be honest, I'll probably buy it for myself & then push it on somebody else after I'm done with it. It looks cheap enough.
h/t.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Figured out how to start up & light the pilot light on my propane space-heater yesterday, and in the process also found my propane supplier. Apparently I do *not* own that big honking tank under my porch, and the supplier was quite wroth to find that the previous owner had moved without notifying them of this fact. They were willing to transfer the contract to me easily enough, and the cost seems reasonable for the first tank & rental. We'll see how much I end up using in a year. Wonder if I'm responsible for maintenance on that tank? It's starting to look a bit rusty, and when I thought I owned it, I had been contemplating giving it a new coat of paint.
I was fiddling with my propane furnace/space-heater/what-have-you because I had been talking with my friend Jason earlier that day, who had lost two propane tanks to their actual owners from his new house last week. Apparently the previous owners were renting their propane tanks, and hadn't bothered to inform the new owners of this. The tanks just disappeared from behind his garage one morning, taken by the propane supplier without so much as a by-your-leave. So he bought a replacement tank & was getting it filled at a station down the road from his new place. For him, the purchase-price of the tank was an improvement over the rental cost, long-term. I don't know, we'll see how I fare. I've got a much bigger tank, and the terms aren't horrible.
I was fiddling with my propane furnace/space-heater/what-have-you because I had been talking with my friend Jason earlier that day, who had lost two propane tanks to their actual owners from his new house last week. Apparently the previous owners were renting their propane tanks, and hadn't bothered to inform the new owners of this. The tanks just disappeared from behind his garage one morning, taken by the propane supplier without so much as a by-your-leave. So he bought a replacement tank & was getting it filled at a station down the road from his new place. For him, the purchase-price of the tank was an improvement over the rental cost, long-term. I don't know, we'll see how I fare. I've got a much bigger tank, and the terms aren't horrible.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Damn straight, Lech. Buncha obsequious lap-dogs, apologizing for the misbehavior of their degenerate corrupt brothers in the Olympic oligarchy, a way for them to say "it's not you, God-Emperor Barack, it's America!"
Let's just hope the God-Emperor's post-Nobel career isn't as ill-starred as fellow recipients Arafat, el Baradei, Carter, Rabin, Gorbachev, or Aung San Suu Kyi. Maybe the God-Emperor can demonstrate some grace by actually deigning to meet with fellow Nobel laureate the Dalai Lama the next time he's in town, instead of crudely snubbing him like he did last week.
Let's just hope the God-Emperor's post-Nobel career isn't as ill-starred as fellow recipients Arafat, el Baradei, Carter, Rabin, Gorbachev, or Aung San Suu Kyi. Maybe the God-Emperor can demonstrate some grace by actually deigning to meet with fellow Nobel laureate the Dalai Lama the next time he's in town, instead of crudely snubbing him like he did last week.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
There's an independent trying to get to the right of the Republican candidate in the New Jersey gubernatorial race. He's proposing extensive property and corporate tax cuts to be replaced with what sounds like a vigorous VAT - he calls it a sales tax, but a "sales tax" that's applicable to things outside of retail sales - sounds like services, etc, from what he's talking about - is more of a value-added tax if you ask me.
It *sounds* good, but VATs require a pretty hefty social contract to work right. Once you put the whole of the small business community into the position of reporting their revenue in detail to the government and impose a significant surtax, there's a heck of an incentive for cheating. New Jersey is rather infamous for a, how should I put it, less-than-world-class social contract.
It *sounds* good, but VATs require a pretty hefty social contract to work right. Once you put the whole of the small business community into the position of reporting their revenue in detail to the government and impose a significant surtax, there's a heck of an incentive for cheating. New Jersey is rather infamous for a, how should I put it, less-than-world-class social contract.
Monday, October 05, 2009
So, Starship Operators had a fairly dire first three episodes. Oh, not in terms of animation, but there were way too many characters, they didn't spend much time establishing the setting or backstory, and the framing conceit is more, well, conceited than usual.
Said conceit: when their home planet in the galactic sticks is overrun by the neighborhood militaristic alliance - "the Kingdom" - a shipful of military cadets on a long-range training cruise arrange a "deal" with a powerful media network based off of Earth - the Galactic Network will finance their rebellion in exchange for broadcast rights. It's Survivor: Doomed Intergalactic War! This is a bit high-concept for my usual tastes, and when it was getting fansubbed, I never got past those three initial episodes. They were killing people off I hadn't even identified as individuals yet, and the nominal heroine didn't seem to be doing much of anything heroic, or even particularly distinctive.
I was buying pretty much anything I wouldn't be embarrassed to have on my shelves last summer, so this ended up in my "to-watch" stack, even though it hadn't been good enough to watch *free* the last time 'round. Luckily for me, it got better. Fast.
The version of war the writers and animators handed us - once things settled down & all the goofy adolescent bushwalla had been disposed of - was actually pretty nifty. It bears more resemblance to Walter Jon Williams' Praxis trilogy than Legend of Galactic Heroes, Star Wars, or most other supposed space operas. It really does feel like real fighting - hours and days of suspenseful boredom punctuated by seconds of screaming terror. Range and reaction arcs introduce actual tactics and operational art into the fighting, and logistics & strategy do their proper jobs of framing the respective pace and purpose of the fighting, concepts that probably will be alien to someone fed solely upon TV and film SF.
Furthermore, the heroine justifies her existence, and visibly & coherently demonstrates operational planning & wargaming, while not actually being the captain of the ship. We have an actual G-3, people! Although they call her "deputy captain", so points off for that.
Characters die in unnecessary and tragic fashion, and likable characters' failures cause those tragedies. Youth's idealism is used by the avuncular cynics who could be characterized as the cinders left by the ambitious idealism of earlier generations. Losing battles are resolved by unrelated, well-foreshadowed political developments. In the end, our protagonists don't so much triumph, as survive. For the most part.
In short, Spaceship Operators is an excellent little space opera. Shame it stumbled so badly getting out of the gate.
Said conceit: when their home planet in the galactic sticks is overrun by the neighborhood militaristic alliance - "the Kingdom" - a shipful of military cadets on a long-range training cruise arrange a "deal" with a powerful media network based off of Earth - the Galactic Network will finance their rebellion in exchange for broadcast rights. It's Survivor: Doomed Intergalactic War! This is a bit high-concept for my usual tastes, and when it was getting fansubbed, I never got past those three initial episodes. They were killing people off I hadn't even identified as individuals yet, and the nominal heroine didn't seem to be doing much of anything heroic, or even particularly distinctive.
I was buying pretty much anything I wouldn't be embarrassed to have on my shelves last summer, so this ended up in my "to-watch" stack, even though it hadn't been good enough to watch *free* the last time 'round. Luckily for me, it got better. Fast.
The version of war the writers and animators handed us - once things settled down & all the goofy adolescent bushwalla had been disposed of - was actually pretty nifty. It bears more resemblance to Walter Jon Williams' Praxis trilogy than Legend of Galactic Heroes, Star Wars, or most other supposed space operas. It really does feel like real fighting - hours and days of suspenseful boredom punctuated by seconds of screaming terror. Range and reaction arcs introduce actual tactics and operational art into the fighting, and logistics & strategy do their proper jobs of framing the respective pace and purpose of the fighting, concepts that probably will be alien to someone fed solely upon TV and film SF.
Furthermore, the heroine justifies her existence, and visibly & coherently demonstrates operational planning & wargaming, while not actually being the captain of the ship. We have an actual G-3, people! Although they call her "deputy captain", so points off for that.
Characters die in unnecessary and tragic fashion, and likable characters' failures cause those tragedies. Youth's idealism is used by the avuncular cynics who could be characterized as the cinders left by the ambitious idealism of earlier generations. Losing battles are resolved by unrelated, well-foreshadowed political developments. In the end, our protagonists don't so much triumph, as survive. For the most part.
In short, Spaceship Operators is an excellent little space opera. Shame it stumbled so badly getting out of the gate.
We were sitting around watching the Penn State game on Saturday after helping a friend move, and as usual, I paid more attention to the commercials than the football. Lots and lots of advertising for Big Ten universities - wonder if they think of football as a loss-leader for recruiting students these days?
The most interesting ad was for an "office F-150" from Ford. Internet ready! Ten years ago I'd have scoffed at the idea of an "office edition" pickup truck. Not anymore. I took one look at that, and said "the farmers and field reps will love the hell out of that thing". Sure enough, I was talking to a location manager this morning, and she had seen the same ad, and was thinking about getting them the next time her office's leases were up on their current vehicles. She was also talking about taking wifi'd tablet PCs into the field for recordkeeping real-time with our system. Wi-fi. In cropland.
It's a strange world, and getting stranger by the day. Here's hoping the Singularity saves us from our political idiocies before those idiocies starve us out.
The most interesting ad was for an "office F-150" from Ford. Internet ready! Ten years ago I'd have scoffed at the idea of an "office edition" pickup truck. Not anymore. I took one look at that, and said "the farmers and field reps will love the hell out of that thing". Sure enough, I was talking to a location manager this morning, and she had seen the same ad, and was thinking about getting them the next time her office's leases were up on their current vehicles. She was also talking about taking wifi'd tablet PCs into the field for recordkeeping real-time with our system. Wi-fi. In cropland.
It's a strange world, and getting stranger by the day. Here's hoping the Singularity saves us from our political idiocies before those idiocies starve us out.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Dear Professor Mankiw: please learn the difference between "reign" and "rein". Here's a hint: don't use "reign" unless you're making fun of somebody's monarchical pretensions, or discussing the Who's discography. You'll almost always be wanting to say "rein".
I'd have emailed you, but you don't seem to have an email address on your blog anymore.
[Update: somebody pointed it out to him since I first squawked. No point in removing the post, but it's no longer incorrect.]
I'd have emailed you, but you don't seem to have an email address on your blog anymore.
[Update: somebody pointed it out to him since I first squawked. No point in removing the post, but it's no longer incorrect.]
Damn, it's chilly out this morning. I was just out testing an update on our PDA application, which requires walking around until the GPS fires up & stablizes. Somehow I always choose to do this just as it's getting ready to drizzle, never fails. The monocloud is overhead, the cold rain is starting, and coat weather is definitely in effect.
Brrr.
Brrr.
Monday, September 28, 2009
I'd be more impressed with Palin and her new whatever-the-hell-it-is-she's-doing, if she got herself elected to the House in 2010. I was utterly Not Amused by the July resignation. I'm not fond of quitters, and we have enough chatterboxes and speakers-for-hire in the wings right now.
Get a job, Sarah. Hell, same goes for J.C. Watts and Newt Gingrich.
Get a job, Sarah. Hell, same goes for J.C. Watts and Newt Gingrich.
With the FDP in coalition with the Christian Democrats, Germany's officially and de facto to the right of the US. It's odd that economic disaster made Europe as a whole turn right, while the idiots at home go left. Maybe it's a function of who's in charge when "rocks fall, everybody dies"?
Friday, September 25, 2009
Hah! This is funny. The anarchist thugs tried to storm the G-20 summit at the convention center, on the north side of Downtown. They apparently started out in Oakland, rallied in a park in Lawrenceville, and tried to march through the Strip District, where the cops kicked their collective asses back into Lawrenceville. Then they tried again, apparently through Bloomsfield and back into Oakland. See what they *didn't* try? The Hill District.
White boys too scared to go roistering through the Hill? I don't know, it's been fifteen years since I lived in Pittsburgh, maybe the Hill's become a series of tony gated communities since then.
I see that the AP thinks that Lower Lawrenceville is an outlying neighborhood. Here's a hint: no, it isn't. Edgewood is outlying. Swissvale and Wilkinsburg are so outlying they aren't even in the city. But Lawrenceville's pretty much the heart of the city. The only actual residential district closer to Downtown is the Hill.
Well, and Polish Hill, I suppose. But that's a cul-de-sac. You can't get to Downtown from Polish Hill.
White boys too scared to go roistering through the Hill? I don't know, it's been fifteen years since I lived in Pittsburgh, maybe the Hill's become a series of tony gated communities since then.
I see that the AP thinks that Lower Lawrenceville is an outlying neighborhood. Here's a hint: no, it isn't. Edgewood is outlying. Swissvale and Wilkinsburg are so outlying they aren't even in the city. But Lawrenceville's pretty much the heart of the city. The only actual residential district closer to Downtown is the Hill.
Well, and Polish Hill, I suppose. But that's a cul-de-sac. You can't get to Downtown from Polish Hill.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
When I saw Fafner in fansubs a few years back, it didn't impress me. It was yet another Evangelion/Rahxephon clone with a horribly confusing mass of in-media-res unexplained technobabble & a swarm of interchangeable characters made indistinguishable by a particularly poor implementation of Hisashi Hirai's usual polished but identical character designs. I only got about five or six episodes in before giving it up as impenetrable and gnostic. Despite all that, I bought the Geneon DVDs in a recent 25-for-$100 sale anyways. I just got around to watching them.
Boy, did *that* show improve wildly in the second half. The first half's a terrible slog, full of difficult-to-understand characters & outright unlikeable characters. The writing's also kind of slap-dash and unhelpful right up to episode fourteen or so. By that point, however, they've killed off, exiled, or otherwise banished all the annoying characters, and explained the motivations of the confusing characters. More importantly, I think, I could finally remember everybody's names.
Suddenly, everything falls into place, and Fafner goes from dull giant robot knock-off to full-caps AWESOME. The philosophy stops being gnomic, and settles into a thoughtful, non-denominational Shinto vs. nihilistic Buddhist groove. Deaths and battles stop being pointless, and gain resonance and tragic depth. Everybody takes a level in charisma, and the token chick suddenly turns into a cold-blooded godlike sniping killing machine. The Girl in a Box climbs out of her box and turns into a Card-Carrying Deity - to the point that there's an objection during a court-martial that "you can't let God testify in court!' She has at least three distinct Crowning Moments of Awesome by my count. Tsubaki basically steals the show away from the yaoi-bait protagonists.
Even the ending rocked. Fafner's a classic instance of Growing the Beard.
Boy, did *that* show improve wildly in the second half. The first half's a terrible slog, full of difficult-to-understand characters & outright unlikeable characters. The writing's also kind of slap-dash and unhelpful right up to episode fourteen or so. By that point, however, they've killed off, exiled, or otherwise banished all the annoying characters, and explained the motivations of the confusing characters. More importantly, I think, I could finally remember everybody's names.
Suddenly, everything falls into place, and Fafner goes from dull giant robot knock-off to full-caps AWESOME. The philosophy stops being gnomic, and settles into a thoughtful, non-denominational Shinto vs. nihilistic Buddhist groove. Deaths and battles stop being pointless, and gain resonance and tragic depth. Everybody takes a level in charisma, and the token chick suddenly turns into a cold-blooded godlike sniping killing machine. The Girl in a Box climbs out of her box and turns into a Card-Carrying Deity - to the point that there's an objection during a court-martial that "you can't let God testify in court!' She has at least three distinct Crowning Moments of Awesome by my count. Tsubaki basically steals the show away from the yaoi-bait protagonists.
Even the ending rocked. Fafner's a classic instance of Growing the Beard.
Monday, September 21, 2009
I was in a meeting this morning; we were making fun of a co-worker whose script had produced a phantasmic 17 trillion acres of soybeans in cultivation, and I made some crack about a "Norman Borlaug Memorial database" in passing. After the meeting, another co-worker asked me what I knew about Borlaug and it came out that he had worked with him in the Seventies. In fact, he had been at the famous banquet where Borlaug had came in to accept his Nobel Peace Prize still covered in dirt from the Mexican fields he had been working in. My co-worker insisted it had actually happened, and wasn't theatre or urban legend. He described Borlaug's successes as a combination of building on prior foundations, a lot of work, and more than a little luck.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
I am couched. They're a lot bigger than they looked on the showroom floor. The delivery guys did a hell of a job getting those beasts into my split-level townhouse with the awkwardly placed screen doors and ballisters all over the place.
The place looks a lot smaller with huge new couches eating up the floorspace. Maybe I won't go crazy with the side-tables and coffee tables after all...
The place looks a lot smaller with huge new couches eating up the floorspace. Maybe I won't go crazy with the side-tables and coffee tables after all...
Monday, September 14, 2009
Finally watched the end of Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex 2nd GiG - I watched about half of that season when the fansubs were coming out, and bounced *hard* off of the Full Metal Jacket knockoff episode. (Incidentally, it wasn't the obnoxious anti-Americanism of that episode that riled me - it was the preposterous poker hands that the writer used as a framing device. I never, ever want to see a straight flush take a four-of-a-kind in a no-wilds five-card game in fiction ever again.)
Question for anybody who remembers the ending: who the heck did Prime Minister Kayabuki appeal to, off-screen, to resolve the "secret coup d'etat" part of the crisis? She's been cut off from control over the military by her Cabinet Secretary, and she does *something* which he thinks is unwarranted and foolish which checkmates him, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Did she somehow appeal to the populace? Unlikely - the series is deeply contemptuous of Japanese popular sovereignty. The General Staff? The Emperor?
*Is* there an Emperor in the GitS:SAC future? It's hard to tell in almost all anime if the Imperial apparatus "exists", because of the clutch of taboos which would leave someone who only knew Japan from its popular culture to assume that it was a bureaucratic republic without any trace of monarchy. The wall is so high and strong and sturdy that I often forget about that aspect of things political, and the only reason I'm even thinking about this now is because that last episode of GitS:SAC was named "the Return of Patriotism", and the High Modern definition of Japanese patriotism is, after all, State Shinto & Emperor-worship.
All that business about Silvestre and his taxonomy of revolutions and whether to count the original "Individual Eleven" as revolutionaries is kind of bizarre divorced of any mention of the actual ideology of the prewar militarist terrorists - namely, the classic Appeal to the Emperor, and the liquidation of his erring ministers. Assassination attempts against figurehead prime ministers like Kayabuki don't make real-world sense without that ideological structure providing the explanation. It's like talking about twentieth century terrorism without discussing Marxism, or twenty-first century terrorism without mentioning Islam.
Question for anybody who remembers the ending: who the heck did Prime Minister Kayabuki appeal to, off-screen, to resolve the "secret coup d'etat" part of the crisis? She's been cut off from control over the military by her Cabinet Secretary, and she does *something* which he thinks is unwarranted and foolish which checkmates him, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Did she somehow appeal to the populace? Unlikely - the series is deeply contemptuous of Japanese popular sovereignty. The General Staff? The Emperor?
*Is* there an Emperor in the GitS:SAC future? It's hard to tell in almost all anime if the Imperial apparatus "exists", because of the clutch of taboos which would leave someone who only knew Japan from its popular culture to assume that it was a bureaucratic republic without any trace of monarchy. The wall is so high and strong and sturdy that I often forget about that aspect of things political, and the only reason I'm even thinking about this now is because that last episode of GitS:SAC was named "the Return of Patriotism", and the High Modern definition of Japanese patriotism is, after all, State Shinto & Emperor-worship.
All that business about Silvestre and his taxonomy of revolutions and whether to count the original "Individual Eleven" as revolutionaries is kind of bizarre divorced of any mention of the actual ideology of the prewar militarist terrorists - namely, the classic Appeal to the Emperor, and the liquidation of his erring ministers. Assassination attempts against figurehead prime ministers like Kayabuki don't make real-world sense without that ideological structure providing the explanation. It's like talking about twentieth century terrorism without discussing Marxism, or twenty-first century terrorism without mentioning Islam.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Norman Borlaug has died. If you don't know the name of the man whose work saved more human lives than were taken from us by Mao, Stalin, and Hitler and all their followers put together, then correct your ignorance, for god's sake. We should make our heroes better-known than our villains, and Borlaug should be held up to every schoolchild as the very best exemplar of the scientist-hero. I have very few heroes - Norman Borlaug was one of them.
"Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."
h/t
"Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."
h/t
Friday, September 11, 2009
Remembering September 2001 is sort of odd. The thing was, I was openly contemptuous of the president at the time. I hadn't voted for him, and didn't like him all that much. I thought he was small, and unworthy, and an embarrassment. He was going to be a nobody, another Ford. His response to the attacks made him. Our collective response to the attacks made a lot of little people hate him. Some clung to the president and to the flag in hysterics, producing embarrassing spectacles which made them look like fools in later years when they turned on him. I wonder whether Andrew Sullivan wishes for a memory hole, or is he big enough of an Orwell fan to recognize that bit of hypocrisy? Others immediately began constructing conspiracy theories, and thus are incapable of embarrassment.
I don't know, at the time, I just hoped that the idiot in the Oval Office wouldn't make things too much worse. I had little faith that any real recovery was in the offing. It seemed like the end of the American Century.
But he put our remaining weight into the problem. He set Rumsfeld into the field, and the watch-word was "lean forward". Instead of Imperial Chaos Trumphant, the response to the attacks smothered a lot of long-smouldering brushfires. There were fewer wars, fewer deaths, but we were involved in more of them. Prosperity returned for a brief, if, in retrospect, rather false, flowering. I had hopes in the spring year of 2005 that all might be right with the world, that we were on the long upward slope of "the Long Now".
No, it didn't last. First the democracy bubble burst, then the economic bubble. Nowadays, I just worry that all of his efforts only delayed that end a few years, that despite everything, the decline was only postponed.
Would disaster make anything of the current president? Does he have any hidden depths?
I hope we don't find out.
I don't know, at the time, I just hoped that the idiot in the Oval Office wouldn't make things too much worse. I had little faith that any real recovery was in the offing. It seemed like the end of the American Century.
But he put our remaining weight into the problem. He set Rumsfeld into the field, and the watch-word was "lean forward". Instead of Imperial Chaos Trumphant, the response to the attacks smothered a lot of long-smouldering brushfires. There were fewer wars, fewer deaths, but we were involved in more of them. Prosperity returned for a brief, if, in retrospect, rather false, flowering. I had hopes in the spring year of 2005 that all might be right with the world, that we were on the long upward slope of "the Long Now".
No, it didn't last. First the democracy bubble burst, then the economic bubble. Nowadays, I just worry that all of his efforts only delayed that end a few years, that despite everything, the decline was only postponed.
Would disaster make anything of the current president? Does he have any hidden depths?
I hope we don't find out.
I never knew that the anonymous Allah had been living a few blocks from the towers. I don't read him as much as I ought to...
There are people who want to make this day a "Day of Service". That sounds an awful lot like "Servitude" to me. These people sometimes seem as if they think of men as chattel in bondage to the benevolent State. The heck with that.
There are people who want to call today "Patriot Day". Jingoism may be a healthier response to attack than supine surrender, but I find it difficult to embrace bluster, and I carry Gramscian damage of my own.
Personally, I prefer to think of 9/11 as a day of warning, a reminder that civilization is fragile and life is brief. Those terrible, oppressively empty blue skies weighed heavy in the week after the fall of the towers, like the devil's own mono no aware:
There are people who want to call today "Patriot Day". Jingoism may be a healthier response to attack than supine surrender, but I find it difficult to embrace bluster, and I carry Gramscian damage of my own.
Personally, I prefer to think of 9/11 as a day of warning, a reminder that civilization is fragile and life is brief. Those terrible, oppressively empty blue skies weighed heavy in the week after the fall of the towers, like the devil's own mono no aware:
Gion shouja no kane no koe
shogyou mujou no hibiki ari.
Shara souju no hana no iro
jousha hissui no kotowari o arawasu.
Ogoreru hito mo hisashikarazu,
Tada haru no yo no yume no gotoshi.
Takeki mono mo tsui ni horobinu.
Hitoe ni kaze no mae no chiri ni onaji.
The song of the bells of the cloister of Gion
Sings of the impermanence of all things.
The split-souled four-limbed sala bush
Her flowers' hue showeth one truth:
That to flourish is to fall
That proud men are so but a while
That pride passeth like a dream of a spring's night
That the valiant are so only to be destroyed
That all shall be blown like dust in the wind.
This is kind of ugly. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I've read neither Fiasco nor the Gamble, although I've read a ton of reviews and analysis of both books. After reading that both the positive portrayal of a particular officer & his unit in Fiasco and the harshly negative one in the Gamble are based on the exact same five-day period of time Ricks spent with that officer & his men, I'm not sure I'll get around to it. That information is, frankly, damning. Especially in conjunction with Ricks' admission that the difference is based entirely on the officer's post-Fiasco public opposition to Ricks' favored strategies. It suggests to me that Ricks is incapable of processing information in a semi-objective manner: doesn't this mean that his analysis is highly colorable by personal factors?
I recognize the glass-houses character of that observation, but nonetheless, I'm a little tired of COIN pieties this month. I can't help but feel that there are good Marines like Sgt. Bill Cahir dying in Afghanistan while wearing ideological shackles forged by Ricks' beloved counter-insurgency specialists.
H/T Jason van Steenwyk
I recognize the glass-houses character of that observation, but nonetheless, I'm a little tired of COIN pieties this month. I can't help but feel that there are good Marines like Sgt. Bill Cahir dying in Afghanistan while wearing ideological shackles forged by Ricks' beloved counter-insurgency specialists.
H/T Jason van Steenwyk
Neil Gaiman has recently deigned to inform fandom that George R.R. Martin is not our [expletive deleted].
Yeah, you know what? There's a fanfic writer who drives me batty because she keeps starting new stories while leaving a major novel-length work half-undone. Worse, most of the new stories are based on a fairly serious spoiler for the *unwritten portion* of the unfinished work. I've gotten to the point where I'm willing to tolerate it because:
While I concede that neither George R.R. Martin nor Neil Gaiman are my "[expletive deleted]", they are supposed to be compensated professionals. Martin's increasing indiscipline and inability to deliver a conclusion to his "A Song of Ice and Fire" serial is, in point of fact, an infraction of promise. I've paid a fair amount of money for his door-stoppers - hard-cover prices, in point of fact. Heck, I've imported the British edition in a couple of cases - I still get spam from amazon.co.uk because of those purchases. This isn't free ice-cream. I'm not a free rider, I'm not an entitled, pirating brat. I'm someone who expects a story that bloody well ends.
If anything, Martin's fans are peeved that he's contracted Epic Fantasitisis - producing an undisciplined, bloated, cancerous mess of a story which refuses to end. It was supposed to be a four-book series. Then five. Now six? And he refuses to deliver the fifth. Each book takes an exponentially longer period of time to deliver than the last. At the current rate, we may get the fifth book before Martin dies. We're not likely to get the sixth book before *I* die!
So bite me, Gaiman. Martin promises books on deadlines. He fails to deliver said books anywhere near the promised date. We are entitled to expect the fulfillment of promises, even if they're not enforced by the legalities of contract. Neither artists nor writers are classes protected from the consequences of their infidelities. If your word should be worth squat, redeem it.
H/T Glenn, who I think gives the both of them too much credit. Instapundit is also free ice cream - and he's far, far FAR more reliable than the alleged compensated professional Martin.
Yeah, you know what? There's a fanfic writer who drives me batty because she keeps starting new stories while leaving a major novel-length work half-undone. Worse, most of the new stories are based on a fairly serious spoiler for the *unwritten portion* of the unfinished work. I've gotten to the point where I'm willing to tolerate it because:
A) She's not a professional, she does this in her spare time
B) I'm not paying a dime for it - it's free ice cream
C) I'm still getting the occasionally interesting bit of prose out of her
While I concede that neither George R.R. Martin nor Neil Gaiman are my "[expletive deleted]", they are supposed to be compensated professionals. Martin's increasing indiscipline and inability to deliver a conclusion to his "A Song of Ice and Fire" serial is, in point of fact, an infraction of promise. I've paid a fair amount of money for his door-stoppers - hard-cover prices, in point of fact. Heck, I've imported the British edition in a couple of cases - I still get spam from amazon.co.uk because of those purchases. This isn't free ice-cream. I'm not a free rider, I'm not an entitled, pirating brat. I'm someone who expects a story that bloody well ends.
If anything, Martin's fans are peeved that he's contracted Epic Fantasitisis - producing an undisciplined, bloated, cancerous mess of a story which refuses to end. It was supposed to be a four-book series. Then five. Now six? And he refuses to deliver the fifth. Each book takes an exponentially longer period of time to deliver than the last. At the current rate, we may get the fifth book before Martin dies. We're not likely to get the sixth book before *I* die!
So bite me, Gaiman. Martin promises books on deadlines. He fails to deliver said books anywhere near the promised date. We are entitled to expect the fulfillment of promises, even if they're not enforced by the legalities of contract. Neither artists nor writers are classes protected from the consequences of their infidelities. If your word should be worth squat, redeem it.
H/T Glenn, who I think gives the both of them too much credit. Instapundit is also free ice cream - and he's far, far FAR more reliable than the alleged compensated professional Martin.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
For anybody out there who hasn't twigged to it in the last thirty years of public demonstration, Yoshiyuki Tomino is a pompous moron.
If you're not going to let somebody produce another Overman King Gainer under your name, then shut up and retire, you old fool.
Update: OK, maybe the old fool gets a bye for hosting a Gundam-themed wedding under the life-size Gundam. Well played, old man.
If you're not going to let somebody produce another Overman King Gainer under your name, then shut up and retire, you old fool.
Update: OK, maybe the old fool gets a bye for hosting a Gundam-themed wedding under the life-size Gundam. Well played, old man.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
This post on the latest press abomination inadvertently reminded me of the Fighting Red Onion Head by mentioning the iconic photograph which was the inspiration of Penn State's most reviled piece of monumental lawn sculpture. Igael Tumarkin, hah?
Hah!
Tempting, but I have my couches scheduled for delivery on Saturday. Politics is politics, but interior decorating is Serious Business.
BTW, Specter bragged at his State College town hall that his father had been part of the Bonus March. Wonder if he'll connect that particular bit of personal history with the descent of pissed-off lumpenproles in vast numbers next weekend upon his natural hometown, Inside The Beltway?
Tempting, but I have my couches scheduled for delivery on Saturday. Politics is politics, but interior decorating is Serious Business.
BTW, Specter bragged at his State College town hall that his father had been part of the Bonus March. Wonder if he'll connect that particular bit of personal history with the descent of pissed-off lumpenproles in vast numbers next weekend upon his natural hometown, Inside The Beltway?
Friday, September 04, 2009
To expand on yesterday's thoughts:
The goal of progressive societal reforms should be the more effective use of the cumulative attention of the masses, and the more parsimonious usage of the attention of the elite. The qualities of these reforms should be simplification, dispersion, and stabilization.
The core insight of social neoconservative thought was that the dispersal of liberal attitudes - cultural libertarianism & hedonism - from the elites to the masses, resulted in a societal catastrophe as indulgences of the avante garde, rich in social capital, spread to the working and lower classes with their corresponding poverty in said cushion of social capital. The familial and pharmacological affectations which a single female lawyer can handle, destroys the woman who takes in the lawyer's wash.
As this is generally true for the social and cultural spheres, so, I suggest, it might be true for economic spheres, with a slightly different cause. While cultural elites are rich in social capital, the meritocratic elite is rich in cleverness: the ability to make sense of fiscal and legal complexity, and a generally superior capacity for finding the cracks in increasingly legalized and complicated webs of options, rules, regulations and prohibitions. The fiendishly complex legal code under which a trained business lawyer can make a killing, traps the merely average in a distracting, time-wasting wilderness of opaque options, most of which can entangle the simple in accidental illegalities. The simple are forced to apply to the clever and well-trained to do what would be simple absent the interference of increasing layers of contradicting regulation. All of this is a drag on economic behavior, from grand decisions down to the details of daily life.
Legalization is poison to the general masses. It introduces cleverness into everything it touches, upgrades every task affected such that mere common understanding no longer suffices. An army of lawyers and para-lawyers and accountants spread out, flowing into every crack opened by each new wave of regulation, eating up the substance of the land, so to speak.
This is not to say that more complex instruments and options should be legislated out of existence: that's the "tyranny of choice" crowd, and they're a bunch of goddamn fascists. But the web of legalities, of regulation and petty statutory obligation which force the simple into complexity - this is an active evil. It's the legal community reproducing, lawyers writing increasingly complicated code for producing more opportunities for lawyers interpreting the growing thicket of complex code. In programming, these sorts of spaghetti codebases are sometimes written accidentally, by inept hacks, and sometimes written intentionally, to pad somebody's long-term employment security, but it always results in an intractable mess of barely-functional trash which isn't expandable, maintainable, or alterable without tossing the whole damn thing out & re-writing from scratch.
The goal of progressive societal reforms should be the more effective use of the cumulative attention of the masses, and the more parsimonious usage of the attention of the elite. The qualities of these reforms should be simplification, dispersion, and stabilization.
The core insight of social neoconservative thought was that the dispersal of liberal attitudes - cultural libertarianism & hedonism - from the elites to the masses, resulted in a societal catastrophe as indulgences of the avante garde, rich in social capital, spread to the working and lower classes with their corresponding poverty in said cushion of social capital. The familial and pharmacological affectations which a single female lawyer can handle, destroys the woman who takes in the lawyer's wash.
As this is generally true for the social and cultural spheres, so, I suggest, it might be true for economic spheres, with a slightly different cause. While cultural elites are rich in social capital, the meritocratic elite is rich in cleverness: the ability to make sense of fiscal and legal complexity, and a generally superior capacity for finding the cracks in increasingly legalized and complicated webs of options, rules, regulations and prohibitions. The fiendishly complex legal code under which a trained business lawyer can make a killing, traps the merely average in a distracting, time-wasting wilderness of opaque options, most of which can entangle the simple in accidental illegalities. The simple are forced to apply to the clever and well-trained to do what would be simple absent the interference of increasing layers of contradicting regulation. All of this is a drag on economic behavior, from grand decisions down to the details of daily life.
Legalization is poison to the general masses. It introduces cleverness into everything it touches, upgrades every task affected such that mere common understanding no longer suffices. An army of lawyers and para-lawyers and accountants spread out, flowing into every crack opened by each new wave of regulation, eating up the substance of the land, so to speak.
This is not to say that more complex instruments and options should be legislated out of existence: that's the "tyranny of choice" crowd, and they're a bunch of goddamn fascists. But the web of legalities, of regulation and petty statutory obligation which force the simple into complexity - this is an active evil. It's the legal community reproducing, lawyers writing increasingly complicated code for producing more opportunities for lawyers interpreting the growing thicket of complex code. In programming, these sorts of spaghetti codebases are sometimes written accidentally, by inept hacks, and sometimes written intentionally, to pad somebody's long-term employment security, but it always results in an intractable mess of barely-functional trash which isn't expandable, maintainable, or alterable without tossing the whole damn thing out & re-writing from scratch.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
I commented on this account of a Steny Hoyer public forum, and since I do have some intellectual vanity, I'm going to replicate some of it here:
Yes, I know it's basically rote Hayek orthodoxy, but just because it's a truism, doesn't mean it isn't important. The world's full of brilliant people who aren't smart enough to run both their lives *and* mine. Full disclosure: I'm not a member of Mensa like the author of that post, nor would I be qualified for membership; at my best, I'm high-end normal on the IQ scale, and what little intelligence I have, is in verbal rather than rational or mathematical intelligence.
It's a matter of high irony that I ended up in a position where they have me helping write equations for custom fertilizer prescriptions, and proofing financial planner calculations. The president of the company is probably a genius, with a PhD in meteorology who works 16 hour days, at least seventy hours a week. He is *painfully* bright, and works way harder than I ever do, but he has a reputation for making messes because he tries to think through every project that comes to his attention - and then after he gets distracted by the next problem, others have to come along & work out what *supposed* to come next. It used to drive me batty when he'd do his own book-keeping chores, wasting *hours* on searches for a fifty-cent error - in essence, doing my job for me back when I was his receptionist & book-keeper. That was a long time ago, hopefully the people who replaced me in that job have long since broken him of that habit.
But what I'm saying, here, is that attention is the bottleneck of the technocratic economy, the one truly scarce resource. Centralizing economic decisions takes the precious attention of the truly brilliant, and uses it to replace the much more copious attention of the rest of society. It's a misallocation, wherein a monstrously expensive scarce resource is used to substitute for a dirt-cheap, technically inferior resource which is so ubiquitous as to be unworthy of valuation.
...Personally, I'm of the opinion that there's no large-scale social problem which is addressable by centralized rationality - which is to say, technocratic approaches. Science and engineering are the fortes of the technological approach. Once you get into macroeconomic affairs, human rationality reaches its limits.
Health care is a *fiendishly* macroeconomic complex, and the more technocrats attempt to centralize and rationalize the systems involved, the worse the situation will get. Any reforms essayed *have* to put their emphasis on decentralization, simplification, and reducing centralized oversight, or else it will just make things worse. A crowd isn't smarter than a single genius, but the crowd can manage its collective affairs better *in the aggregate* than the genius could for them.
It's a simple matter of economy of attention. Even the most brilliant of men can only concentrate on a few things at a time, no matter how excellently or effectively or quickly he organizes his thought. Even the dimmest member of the crowd has a significant fraction of the capacity for attention that the would-be technocrat has for that dimmest member's individual situation.
Yes, I know it's basically rote Hayek orthodoxy, but just because it's a truism, doesn't mean it isn't important. The world's full of brilliant people who aren't smart enough to run both their lives *and* mine. Full disclosure: I'm not a member of Mensa like the author of that post, nor would I be qualified for membership; at my best, I'm high-end normal on the IQ scale, and what little intelligence I have, is in verbal rather than rational or mathematical intelligence.
It's a matter of high irony that I ended up in a position where they have me helping write equations for custom fertilizer prescriptions, and proofing financial planner calculations. The president of the company is probably a genius, with a PhD in meteorology who works 16 hour days, at least seventy hours a week. He is *painfully* bright, and works way harder than I ever do, but he has a reputation for making messes because he tries to think through every project that comes to his attention - and then after he gets distracted by the next problem, others have to come along & work out what *supposed* to come next. It used to drive me batty when he'd do his own book-keeping chores, wasting *hours* on searches for a fifty-cent error - in essence, doing my job for me back when I was his receptionist & book-keeper. That was a long time ago, hopefully the people who replaced me in that job have long since broken him of that habit.
But what I'm saying, here, is that attention is the bottleneck of the technocratic economy, the one truly scarce resource. Centralizing economic decisions takes the precious attention of the truly brilliant, and uses it to replace the much more copious attention of the rest of society. It's a misallocation, wherein a monstrously expensive scarce resource is used to substitute for a dirt-cheap, technically inferior resource which is so ubiquitous as to be unworthy of valuation.
Skimming this article, I just realized something. Politically-cynical people like to call the two major American political parties the "stupid party" and the "evil party". Partisans like to say that's because Republicans are actively unsophisticated, undereducated, and generally ignorant, while Democrats hate the country, are contemptuous of morality and codes of honor, and are in favor of theft (taxes), murder (abortion), and debauchery (sex & drugs). But it occurs to me, reading the reasons that various pompous liberal pundits loved the president, and are now disappointed in his performance, that perhaps these distinctions aren't so much positive as negative.
That is, it isn't that Republicans are stupid - they're just less worried about being thought stupid. Their value system, on average & in the mass aggregate, doesn't put much weight on knowledge and sophistication. Some studies I've seen suggested that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have a bachelor degree, but less likely to have any postgraduate education - that is, it's important to go to college, but there isn't that extra push into a masters or PhD or JD or whatever. Meanwhile, it isn't that Democrats are actively malevolent, they're just less worried about explicitly moral judgments. They're concerned more with practical ethics and situational evaluations of human situations than they are with foundational moralities - the verities. Democrats tend to be malleable in a moral sense because they don't take seriously the idea of moral permanence.
But beyond those two tendencies, the Democrat cares passionately about being thought knowledgeable and well-informed - Huffington's admiration for Obama's ability to "communicate complex ideas". Meanwhile the Republican is passionate about being judged righteous: Lincoln's "prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side" & Palin's paraphrase of that prayer.
Republicans are "stupid" because their priority is righteousness, and Democrats are "evil" because their priority is intelligence. Would you rather be thought a fool, or be damned to perdition?
That is, it isn't that Republicans are stupid - they're just less worried about being thought stupid. Their value system, on average & in the mass aggregate, doesn't put much weight on knowledge and sophistication. Some studies I've seen suggested that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have a bachelor degree, but less likely to have any postgraduate education - that is, it's important to go to college, but there isn't that extra push into a masters or PhD or JD or whatever. Meanwhile, it isn't that Democrats are actively malevolent, they're just less worried about explicitly moral judgments. They're concerned more with practical ethics and situational evaluations of human situations than they are with foundational moralities - the verities. Democrats tend to be malleable in a moral sense because they don't take seriously the idea of moral permanence.
But beyond those two tendencies, the Democrat cares passionately about being thought knowledgeable and well-informed - Huffington's admiration for Obama's ability to "communicate complex ideas". Meanwhile the Republican is passionate about being judged righteous: Lincoln's "prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side" & Palin's paraphrase of that prayer.
Republicans are "stupid" because their priority is righteousness, and Democrats are "evil" because their priority is intelligence. Would you rather be thought a fool, or be damned to perdition?
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Yay, my first mortgage payment. One down, 359 to go.
My parents were visiting, looking the place over, and helping getting it cleaned up & aiding in some repairs. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting closer. My dad discovered that the reason the icemaker/water tap on the fridge didn't work was because somebody had connected it with the hot water, which obviously was turned off by the prior owner.
Still haven't figured out how to turn off the outside water spigot for the season. Hopefully one of the other condo owners will know.
Thanks, Mon and Dad, for all the help this week, and for the housewarming gifts. Aunt Bobby, thanks for the dishes.
My parents were visiting, looking the place over, and helping getting it cleaned up & aiding in some repairs. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting closer. My dad discovered that the reason the icemaker/water tap on the fridge didn't work was because somebody had connected it with the hot water, which obviously was turned off by the prior owner.
Still haven't figured out how to turn off the outside water spigot for the season. Hopefully one of the other condo owners will know.
Thanks, Mon and Dad, for all the help this week, and for the housewarming gifts. Aunt Bobby, thanks for the dishes.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Upon hearing that Michael Dukakis might be given the Kennedy ancestral Senate seat if the planned corrupt bargain is concluded, I wondered what had happened to the loser of the '88 presidential election. Apparently, he's been serving on the board of directors of Amtrak, of all blasted things. Other than that, he's been teaching college students at undistinguished universities, and pushing for the re-introduction of hoary old political machine tactics in Democratic electioneering. At first, I marveled that a former Democratic candidate for president had been reduced to stirrup-holding for the Kennedy clan until they can get their affairs in order & reclaim the family Senate seat. Now I'm just glad that somebody's doing something to keep Mike out of the gutter.
You know, I kind of think Glenn Beck's a little unhinged. Hard to take in large doses - paranoid, over-the-top, more than a little strident. Since I don't bother with cable, I don't even watch the show, although I listen to him on the radio when I'm out and about.
But this is rubbish, and actively wicked public behavior on the part of the activists & the gutless companies. I see Applebee's is on that list; I was thinking of taking my parents out to there this weekend.
I won't now.
But this is rubbish, and actively wicked public behavior on the part of the activists & the gutless companies. I see Applebee's is on that list; I was thinking of taking my parents out to there this weekend.
I won't now.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Stuff like this is nauseating. It's a classic example of what I was talking about earlier about the channels of communication external to rhetoric. The student was speaking the *words*, the rhetoric which he personally had chosen, but unbeknownst to him, an alien and satirical non-verbal framing was being used against him by the interview team to undermine and negate his message, his idea. He was made a mockery of - completely, totally and entirely without recourse to any sort of overt rhetoric.
One of the more irritating offhand comments from an older woman in the line for the Specter town hall earlier this month was something to the effect that she could change my mind if I only went to her meetings for a sustained period of time - the insinuation was of weeks of discussion, as if her stance was so sophisticated and well-substantiated that it couldn't be grasped without long hours of detailed explanation. I'm willing to bet that she was some sort of instructor, and probably in the education department. Some of these folks seem to think that the only thing lacking in our enlightenment is a proper period of enforced indoctrination, of the proper hours spent in the pews listening from the first exordium to the last peroration. These guys. They just don't seem to get that their facts are, perhaps, not facts at all, but rather, framing devices, elaborately and tediously disguised rhetoric.
Ironically enough, I also talked to said evangelical of the single-payer faith about rhetoric, words, and ideas, and whether there was something in politics beyond rhetoric, and whether rhetoric held primacy. I suggested that the ideas behind the words were more important than the words themselves, and that there was not a single channel of communication. She thought I was talking about violence, but what I meant was comportment - those nonverbal expressions of intent and ideals. Ah, well.
Ironically enough, I also talked to said evangelical of the single-payer faith about rhetoric, words, and ideas, and whether there was something in politics beyond rhetoric, and whether rhetoric held primacy. I suggested that the ideas behind the words were more important than the words themselves, and that there was not a single channel of communication. She thought I was talking about violence, but what I meant was comportment - those nonverbal expressions of intent and ideals. Ah, well.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Ways in which this little remembrance day for the Abomination Which Walked Like A Kennedy reminds me that I should count our blessings:
Obama could have been a drunken, entitled serial philanderer with a predilection for public sexual assaults. He hasn't been swiving press nymphets in the White House pool, no matter how much they'd probably appreciate it.
Obama could have been a man who embodied the worst sort of incestuous political oligarchy. He isn't a child of privileged, aristocratic wealth.
Obama could have harnessed an actual talent for legislative affairs to his abhorrent political beliefs and goals. His demonstrable parliamentary mediocrity is a blessing, really.
Obama hasn't abandoned allies to a terrible death in Communist concentration camps, or financed leftist groups to kill and terrorize members of an ethnic group which he has a personal hatred for. Yet. But best to keep an eye on Honduras and the rest of the Caribbean, I suppose.
So congrats, Edward! Your timely death has gone a small distance in reconciling me with President Obama.
Obama could have been a drunken, entitled serial philanderer with a predilection for public sexual assaults. He hasn't been swiving press nymphets in the White House pool, no matter how much they'd probably appreciate it.
Obama could have been a man who embodied the worst sort of incestuous political oligarchy. He isn't a child of privileged, aristocratic wealth.
Obama could have harnessed an actual talent for legislative affairs to his abhorrent political beliefs and goals. His demonstrable parliamentary mediocrity is a blessing, really.
Obama hasn't abandoned allies to a terrible death in Communist concentration camps, or financed leftist groups to kill and terrorize members of an ethnic group which he has a personal hatred for. Yet. But best to keep an eye on Honduras and the rest of the Caribbean, I suppose.
So congrats, Edward! Your timely death has gone a small distance in reconciling me with President Obama.
Obama used the phase "bold, persistent experimentation" in re-nominating Bernanke? I wonder if Bernanke grimaced? You know a crock of liquid feces is about to fall on your head whenever a pundit or politician pulls that one out of the mothballs. Some quick googling shows that even conservative types have foolishly the phrase, so it isn't as if it's a partisan thing... it's just a marker that the speaker hasn't bothered to read the Forgotten Man, or any other useful book on the era.
And another thing: what's this rubbish about saying nothing bad about the deceased? What's the societal value in this? Making the bereaved feel better? The only reason I can think of is the avoidance of blood feuds, wherein maligning Cletus's late, drunken clod of an uncle will cause Cletus and all of his mean-tempered kin come knocking on your door to club in your pointed skull. I'm not sure I feel the need to buy into that kind of clannish customary law.
Grace? Grace is how political losers demonstrate moral superiority. Nobody ever lauds grace in a winner, and in the rare cases where they do, it's the sort of lordly grace where the serf is allowed his "dignity", to crawl away in silence and solitude to recoup what hath been taken from him. No winner is owed a demonstration of "grace", and the last Senator Kennedy was nothing if not life's winner - a drunken, treacherous slob who reveled in familial privilege, a shake-and-bake aristocrat with his own political fiefdom, a senatorial seat left to him in entailment by his brother's political will, held by a family retainer in wardship until the advent of the young lord's majority.
Edward Kennedy was aristocratic swine. The legacy of the Kennedy family is an abomination, a living insult against the honor of the Republic.
Good men have bled and died to kill the idea of inherited power in this nation. Be damned to those who celebrate it with officious funerary rites!
Be damned to his bereaved, who are a pack of trust-fund parasites, no doubt squabbling sotto voce over his political legacy as they do their best to look solemn and miserable for the cameras!
Be damned to his mourners, who are the half of them slavish worshipers of oligarchy, and the rest idolaters of the State, and neither of them worthy of the franchise won for them by their ancestors and preserved for them by too few of their peers!
Grace? Grace is how political losers demonstrate moral superiority. Nobody ever lauds grace in a winner, and in the rare cases where they do, it's the sort of lordly grace where the serf is allowed his "dignity", to crawl away in silence and solitude to recoup what hath been taken from him. No winner is owed a demonstration of "grace", and the last Senator Kennedy was nothing if not life's winner - a drunken, treacherous slob who reveled in familial privilege, a shake-and-bake aristocrat with his own political fiefdom, a senatorial seat left to him in entailment by his brother's political will, held by a family retainer in wardship until the advent of the young lord's majority.
Edward Kennedy was aristocratic swine. The legacy of the Kennedy family is an abomination, a living insult against the honor of the Republic.
Good men have bled and died to kill the idea of inherited power in this nation. Be damned to those who celebrate it with officious funerary rites!
Be damned to his bereaved, who are a pack of trust-fund parasites, no doubt squabbling sotto voce over his political legacy as they do their best to look solemn and miserable for the cameras!
Be damned to his mourners, who are the half of them slavish worshipers of oligarchy, and the rest idolaters of the State, and neither of them worthy of the franchise won for them by their ancestors and preserved for them by too few of their peers!
Steven Den Beste opines that the late Ted Kennedy loved his country, and did his best to serve it, and thus we should render unto his memory respect. If such was ever the case, I've never seen the evidence. That man conspired with the Soviets, supported ultranationalist and leftist terrorism in Northern Ireland, was instrumental in the deliberate betrayal of our allies in Indochina, and personally killed an innocent woman. If there is a hell, Edward Kennedy is burning in it tonight.
Note I say nothing of domestic affairs. I spit on his memory not because of political differences, but because I believe the man was the exact and perfect opposite of a patriot. So far as I can tell, he placed person, clan and ideology first, second, and third; his only allegiances to the nation were completely rhetorical in nature.
OK, OK. At least he wasn't a Trotsky.
Note I say nothing of domestic affairs. I spit on his memory not because of political differences, but because I believe the man was the exact and perfect opposite of a patriot. So far as I can tell, he placed person, clan and ideology first, second, and third; his only allegiances to the nation were completely rhetorical in nature.
OK, OK. At least he wasn't a Trotsky.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
While I was walking home from the Dollar General with a couple two-liters, I had some kid in a sedan stop me looking for directions. He said he'd just moved into the neighborhood, and needed directions to the nearest Walmart. This was at the corner of Spring Street and Crawford Lane, way the heck up a hill way the heck away from any major roads, so either he was really lost or really had just moved.
I tried repeatedly to give him said directions, while avoiding the construction down on Water Street, but he was apparently so utterly new to town that he didn't even know what the Benner Pike was, and barely seemed cognizant of the existence of I-99. I suppose it didn't help that I couldn't remember the name on the sign for the mall exit for I-99 - Benner something or other, I thought.
BTW, don't believe this website - while it *is* Shiloh Road, that's not what's on the exit signs.
(google google google)
Dale Summit! Nobody I'm aware of considers this to be a real place, but it's there on the I-99 interchange's exit signs.
I was kind of tempted to ask him how he had gotten *into* town, as he didn't seem to know any of the roads leading into it.
I tried repeatedly to give him said directions, while avoiding the construction down on Water Street, but he was apparently so utterly new to town that he didn't even know what the Benner Pike was, and barely seemed cognizant of the existence of I-99. I suppose it didn't help that I couldn't remember the name on the sign for the mall exit for I-99 - Benner something or other, I thought.
BTW, don't believe this website - while it *is* Shiloh Road, that's not what's on the exit signs.
(google google google)
Dale Summit! Nobody I'm aware of considers this to be a real place, but it's there on the I-99 interchange's exit signs.
I was kind of tempted to ask him how he had gotten *into* town, as he didn't seem to know any of the roads leading into it.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Deutschland uber Alles? Is that a joke? Who the hell uses something like that in any context outside of a war documentary?
OK, that wasn't my finest hour, or four hours as it turned out.
Upon reflection I remembered that I had the evening shift today, so I could make that "public forum" Sen. Casey was holding in Lock Haven. I took the shortest route from Bellefonte to Lock Haven, only to find out the bridge on Rt. 150 between Mill Hall and Lock Haven was closed. That took a heck of a lot of searching around to find an alternate route - I'm not that familiar with Clinton County. I eventually found my way to the hall - a small-to-mid-size auditorium on the campus of Lock Haven University.
I got there about 8 AM, with the doors to open at 8:45, in expectation of a line. Instead, I found a small gaggle of aging and potbellied AFSCME members in t-shirts with armfuls of posters: "In America, Health Care Should be A Right" or something like that. A few actual people showed up, but there was never more than a hundred or so throughout the event, including staffers, press, activists, union members, and uniformed security. Pretty much a bust, but that's the kind of turnout you get when your advance notice is an email twenty-some hours before the event, and a small notice in the local paper. Who the heck reads the Lock Haven Express outside of southern Clinton County?
The senator wasn't there when it was time to start, so they hemmed and hawed and eventually put on his advance man & the "panel" of hard-luck storytellers who were supposed to soften us up & get us all weepy and open-pocketed. Did I ever mention how much I hate emotional blackmail? Even if it comes in the package of a somewhat young, attractive woman with a husband with Lou Gehrig's Disease. Hard cases make for bad law, and that goes double for health care law. Nerts to that.
It turned out that the senator had foolishly flown from Scranton to Lock Haven, only to find out that fog had socked in the field at Lock Haven. They wasted time and fuel circling, and eventually landed in Williamsport & drove to the event from there. They would have made better time if they had just driven from Scranton. Fools.
I hadn't realized how tall Casey is. He's thinner and taller than I'd expected. He's apparently on the Senate Health Committee, and is miserably proud of his bill. It's possible it's a radically different bill than the 1200-page House version which has been making the rounds, the binder he brandished didn't look nearly big enough to hold the House version. From what the man said over an hour of allegedly random questions from the audience, it's blindingly obvious that he doesn't take the CBO seriously, and has little to no understanding of economics, supply and demand, or basic cause and effect. He's not pushing single-payer like Specter is, but I think he's owned the current version of the bill more than Specter. Casey is unpersuadable, because he's invested in his pixy-dust fantasies of free health care, and apparently has a case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the contradiction between cutting costs & expanding coverage.
I was a lot more quiet than I was last time with Specter, because the questions submitted before the senator arrived & the format suggested that there was at least a chance of my question coming up. Also, the room wasn't simpatico to my sentiments, and context is important, I guess. I did say some things, and caught a couple glares from the guy a couple rows ahead of me. Eventually, things had gotten too late for me to justify blowing off work, and I was starting to get mentally out the door.
That's when the senator started bragging about how wonderful Geisinger Health System was, how it was such a model of efficiency and effective cost-cutting, and how his bill had taken a bunch of lessons from Geisinger & was going to force those lessons on the rest of the industry. I got madder the longer I thought about that. If this private concern had done so well in fashioning solutions under the current system - why the hell shouldn't we just let Geisinger & their private imitators proceed? Why shouldn't we let the profit incentive give those innovators the success their innovations offer - lower costs, better service, popularity in the market? Senator Casey doesn't seem to conceive of a large-scale success which isn't predicated upon extensive intervention by the government.
Then some idiot started waxing poetic about the wonders of Canadian socialized medicine & how his wife's experience in a Montreal emergency room refuted all claims of rationing - this in response to a guy who said he had family in Canada & was worried about importing that model somewhere down the line. And the crowd of aging leftist sheep loudly approved the old fool's meaningless anecdote with a round of enthusiastic applause.
That was it.
I stormed out.
And not quietly, I sadly confess.
I'm ashamed of my behavior. Not that Casey doesn't deserve disrespect - he's a callow, ignorant empty suit who is where he is solely by family connection. But I should have just left, without loudly telling him to enjoy his echo chamber. It was... unproductive.
BTW, this analysis of the House version of the bill is a significant part of why I'm pissed about the prospect of passage today.
Upon reflection I remembered that I had the evening shift today, so I could make that "public forum" Sen. Casey was holding in Lock Haven. I took the shortest route from Bellefonte to Lock Haven, only to find out the bridge on Rt. 150 between Mill Hall and Lock Haven was closed. That took a heck of a lot of searching around to find an alternate route - I'm not that familiar with Clinton County. I eventually found my way to the hall - a small-to-mid-size auditorium on the campus of Lock Haven University.
I got there about 8 AM, with the doors to open at 8:45, in expectation of a line. Instead, I found a small gaggle of aging and potbellied AFSCME members in t-shirts with armfuls of posters: "In America, Health Care Should be A Right" or something like that. A few actual people showed up, but there was never more than a hundred or so throughout the event, including staffers, press, activists, union members, and uniformed security. Pretty much a bust, but that's the kind of turnout you get when your advance notice is an email twenty-some hours before the event, and a small notice in the local paper. Who the heck reads the Lock Haven Express outside of southern Clinton County?
The senator wasn't there when it was time to start, so they hemmed and hawed and eventually put on his advance man & the "panel" of hard-luck storytellers who were supposed to soften us up & get us all weepy and open-pocketed. Did I ever mention how much I hate emotional blackmail? Even if it comes in the package of a somewhat young, attractive woman with a husband with Lou Gehrig's Disease. Hard cases make for bad law, and that goes double for health care law. Nerts to that.
It turned out that the senator had foolishly flown from Scranton to Lock Haven, only to find out that fog had socked in the field at Lock Haven. They wasted time and fuel circling, and eventually landed in Williamsport & drove to the event from there. They would have made better time if they had just driven from Scranton. Fools.
I hadn't realized how tall Casey is. He's thinner and taller than I'd expected. He's apparently on the Senate Health Committee, and is miserably proud of his bill. It's possible it's a radically different bill than the 1200-page House version which has been making the rounds, the binder he brandished didn't look nearly big enough to hold the House version. From what the man said over an hour of allegedly random questions from the audience, it's blindingly obvious that he doesn't take the CBO seriously, and has little to no understanding of economics, supply and demand, or basic cause and effect. He's not pushing single-payer like Specter is, but I think he's owned the current version of the bill more than Specter. Casey is unpersuadable, because he's invested in his pixy-dust fantasies of free health care, and apparently has a case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the contradiction between cutting costs & expanding coverage.
I was a lot more quiet than I was last time with Specter, because the questions submitted before the senator arrived & the format suggested that there was at least a chance of my question coming up. Also, the room wasn't simpatico to my sentiments, and context is important, I guess. I did say some things, and caught a couple glares from the guy a couple rows ahead of me. Eventually, things had gotten too late for me to justify blowing off work, and I was starting to get mentally out the door.
That's when the senator started bragging about how wonderful Geisinger Health System was, how it was such a model of efficiency and effective cost-cutting, and how his bill had taken a bunch of lessons from Geisinger & was going to force those lessons on the rest of the industry. I got madder the longer I thought about that. If this private concern had done so well in fashioning solutions under the current system - why the hell shouldn't we just let Geisinger & their private imitators proceed? Why shouldn't we let the profit incentive give those innovators the success their innovations offer - lower costs, better service, popularity in the market? Senator Casey doesn't seem to conceive of a large-scale success which isn't predicated upon extensive intervention by the government.
Then some idiot started waxing poetic about the wonders of Canadian socialized medicine & how his wife's experience in a Montreal emergency room refuted all claims of rationing - this in response to a guy who said he had family in Canada & was worried about importing that model somewhere down the line. And the crowd of aging leftist sheep loudly approved the old fool's meaningless anecdote with a round of enthusiastic applause.
That was it.
I stormed out.
And not quietly, I sadly confess.
I'm ashamed of my behavior. Not that Casey doesn't deserve disrespect - he's a callow, ignorant empty suit who is where he is solely by family connection. But I should have just left, without loudly telling him to enjoy his echo chamber. It was... unproductive.
BTW, this analysis of the House version of the bill is a significant part of why I'm pissed about the prospect of passage today.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Hmm. Senator Casey's holding "public forums" in Lock Haven & Johnstown tomorrow. That's a hell of a short notice. I sure as heck can't make those. Here's the details for anybody googling:
On Thursday, August 20th, I will be hosting two public forums to discuss the Affordable Health Choices Act, the Senate's Health Care Bill. Details for each forum are below. Please plan to come early. Doors will open an hour before each event and seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
Public Forum #1:
Thursday, August 20 at 9:45 am
Lock Haven University
Price Performance Center
Lock Haven, Pennsylvania
Doors open to the public at 8:45 am.
Seating is first-come, first-served.
Public Forum #2:
Thursday, August 20 at 2:00 pm
The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Living and Learning Center
Heritage Hall
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Doors open to the public at 1:00 pm.
Seating is first-come, first-served.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Awful news last weekend. I hadn't even noticed that William Cahir had been called up again. I voted for him in the primary last year, although I probably wouldn't have voted for him in the general, given our disagreements on most domestic policy questions. He was a patriot and braver than I could hope to be. I greatly regret never having talked to him.
There's still a real war out there in central Asia, and it's looking increasingly nasty. Sgt. Cahir was in Civil Affairs, and was killed by direct fire. There's an ugly reality encoded in those two facts in combination with each other. I've heard the fighting in Helmand compared with Second Fallujah in intensity & scale. Michael Yon's been reporting significant British losses as well. There aren't nearly as many of our soldiers in Afghanistan as there are in Iraq, and they're much, much more exposed right now.
This isn't the end of this.
And the ugly truth is, the only reason we're there is pride and commitment. They're there because they've been committed, and it behooves us to break the notion that Americans can be out-waited, or scratched to death with ineffective little cuts. Vietnam & Somalia established an impression which has to be dispelled. Far more than in Iraq, which represents an actual strategic national and ideological interest, the Afghan War is being fought solely to kill the idea that America has no staying power.
Bill Cahir died as part of a plan to protect non-combatants on a battlefield. He gave his life for people he not only didn't know, but had most likely never even seen. He died to establish a certain idea of how American Marines behave, in fidelity to the laws of war & humanity. In the very best sense of the word, he died for pride. Pride that says our soldiers and marines fight within laws, that we as a nation fulfil our commitments, and our warriors are ever faithful.
There's still a real war out there in central Asia, and it's looking increasingly nasty. Sgt. Cahir was in Civil Affairs, and was killed by direct fire. There's an ugly reality encoded in those two facts in combination with each other. I've heard the fighting in Helmand compared with Second Fallujah in intensity & scale. Michael Yon's been reporting significant British losses as well. There aren't nearly as many of our soldiers in Afghanistan as there are in Iraq, and they're much, much more exposed right now.
This isn't the end of this.
And the ugly truth is, the only reason we're there is pride and commitment. They're there because they've been committed, and it behooves us to break the notion that Americans can be out-waited, or scratched to death with ineffective little cuts. Vietnam & Somalia established an impression which has to be dispelled. Far more than in Iraq, which represents an actual strategic national and ideological interest, the Afghan War is being fought solely to kill the idea that America has no staying power.
Bill Cahir died as part of a plan to protect non-combatants on a battlefield. He gave his life for people he not only didn't know, but had most likely never even seen. He died to establish a certain idea of how American Marines behave, in fidelity to the laws of war & humanity. In the very best sense of the word, he died for pride. Pride that says our soldiers and marines fight within laws, that we as a nation fulfil our commitments, and our warriors are ever faithful.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Specter apparently was meeting with a party activist group prior to the open town hall, which explains the loud minority of passionate single-payer types in the crowd, up front-right. He apparently told them that the rest of us wouldn't be representative of the rest of America. Which he knows by telepathy, I guess. The polls don't bear out this belief, far as I can tell.
So, I went to the town hall with Senator Weathervane.
There was a big, fancy bus for one of the anti-reform groups, driving past the line of folks waiting outside the conference center. Way to buy into the Democrats' complaints about bussed-in ringers, you knuckleheads!
I'm not going to relate everything the old so-and-so said, because most of it was nonsense and the rest was boring. He kept going on about selling cantaloupes with his father in Wichita. And Bonus Marchers! At one point he kevetched about his WWI-era vet father never getting his $500 bonus. A bunch of us in the back asked, more or less simultaneously, if he'd retire if we gave him his father's $500.
Specter doesn't really sound like he's from Pennsylvania - it isn't an eastern accent, it isn't yunzer or hillbilly or anything like that. It isn't even recognizably immigrant like a couple of the questioners, one of which was somebody from coal mining country who him hell over cap-and-trade, and had an accent I couldn't place - sounded sort of like Welsh crossed with a Germanic dialect. But the way Specter talks... it's like the Senate has evolved its own microdialect, full of orotund wide vowels and pseudo-Southern gothic pretensions.
I had never realized just how big of a socialist tool Specter was. I guess I've never listened to more than five minutes of him, and never about this sort of thing. He was usually nattering on about Judiciary Committee stuff, now that I think about it. His biggest beef with the current health care bill is the lack of a single-payer system. I don't understand him - he goes on about balanced budgets, and line-item vetoes, and preserving jobs - and then turns around and demands gold-plated government health care, and cap-and-trade monstrosities, and the budget-busting stimulus act. He never talks about raising taxes, except that's the only way to square this circle of his.
He was *bragging* about his time on the Veteran's Affairs committee, and how wonderful the VA was as a model for public health care. Some sheep-like member of the single-payer herd in the front right of the room bleated something about the VA, civil service, and prison health care systems as marvelous examples of how to do public-option health care properly. I couldn't help myself - I yelled something along the lines of "prison health care for everyone!"
In short, Specter isn't really persuadable on the subject. He's home, and happy, and stubborn. As far as he's concerned, a woman's right to choose ends at the womb - government can't tell you to not have an abortion, but he wants 'em to hector patients about smoking, diet, and all the rest of the heavy hand of preventative care.
There was a big, fancy bus for one of the anti-reform groups, driving past the line of folks waiting outside the conference center. Way to buy into the Democrats' complaints about bussed-in ringers, you knuckleheads!
I'm not going to relate everything the old so-and-so said, because most of it was nonsense and the rest was boring. He kept going on about selling cantaloupes with his father in Wichita. And Bonus Marchers! At one point he kevetched about his WWI-era vet father never getting his $500 bonus. A bunch of us in the back asked, more or less simultaneously, if he'd retire if we gave him his father's $500.
Specter doesn't really sound like he's from Pennsylvania - it isn't an eastern accent, it isn't yunzer or hillbilly or anything like that. It isn't even recognizably immigrant like a couple of the questioners, one of which was somebody from coal mining country who him hell over cap-and-trade, and had an accent I couldn't place - sounded sort of like Welsh crossed with a Germanic dialect. But the way Specter talks... it's like the Senate has evolved its own microdialect, full of orotund wide vowels and pseudo-Southern gothic pretensions.
I had never realized just how big of a socialist tool Specter was. I guess I've never listened to more than five minutes of him, and never about this sort of thing. He was usually nattering on about Judiciary Committee stuff, now that I think about it. His biggest beef with the current health care bill is the lack of a single-payer system. I don't understand him - he goes on about balanced budgets, and line-item vetoes, and preserving jobs - and then turns around and demands gold-plated government health care, and cap-and-trade monstrosities, and the budget-busting stimulus act. He never talks about raising taxes, except that's the only way to square this circle of his.
He was *bragging* about his time on the Veteran's Affairs committee, and how wonderful the VA was as a model for public health care. Some sheep-like member of the single-payer herd in the front right of the room bleated something about the VA, civil service, and prison health care systems as marvelous examples of how to do public-option health care properly. I couldn't help myself - I yelled something along the lines of "prison health care for everyone!"
In short, Specter isn't really persuadable on the subject. He's home, and happy, and stubborn. As far as he's concerned, a woman's right to choose ends at the womb - government can't tell you to not have an abortion, but he wants 'em to hector patients about smoking, diet, and all the rest of the heavy hand of preventative care.
Monday, August 10, 2009
So, I'm in the new place, and cleaning out the old apartment. Good thing the landlady's getting rid of the carpets, because they're a mess in places. A bad, leaky roof will do that to you. Also, turns out there was a huge, nasty mold spot behind the apartment's refrigerator. Any suggestions on how to clean that up? Luckily it's not naked paint - some sort of plasticy-fabric-substance, like a rubberized weave. Also, what's best for cleaning out an under-used refrigerator with mildew issues? Vinegar?
Friday, August 07, 2009
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
I guess one could say that President Obama cares less about the poor than a used-car salesman does.
Now, I don't think that's exactly fair - Cash for Clunkers is as much or more of a Congressional horror as it is a creature of the Administration. But the White House has made the decision to defer to Congress & enthusiastically supports, prepares, and serves for supper the monstrosities that careless blind giant vomits out upon the national kitchen table. Obama's minions are fully committed to this destruction of wealth, to this assault upon the resources of the industrious poor. It is a welfare program which transfers government funds to those who can *almost* afford new cars, while wasting marginal & distressed assets which would otherwise populate the purchasable stock for those with the time and skills to maintain creaky old vehicles who also are without the funds to buy new cars, even with a 4.5k helping hand by the government.
Frex - a guy here at work bought a new F150, a bigger truck, with a handshake deal with a third party who was going to buy his six-year-old extended-bed Ranger. That third party's planned financing fell through, and for a while this guy had two trucks (and two truck payments!) on his hands. The third party eventually re-negotiated a less generous financing plan, but my co-worker was stuck with the additional cost of carrying that payment for an extra month. Cash for Clunkers encourages people like my co-worker to buy, oh, I don't know, some hypothetical hybrid truck with miracle gas mileage, and destroy the Ranger. The struggling third-party buyer, who could barely wrangle financing for a six-year-old Ranger, would then be utterly SOL.
Update: This guy has a clever, if nasty, idea, but I rather think that if the Cash for Clunkers thing runs out, and many people follow his particular scam, that the resale value of CfC vehicles will be artificially depressed by the drug of his fellow scammers' assets on the market. Using assets to launder money tends to reduce the price of the asset in question in a manner roughly related to the convenience and difficulties of cleaning and the easiness of the unearned profit. In short, the transaction costs will consume some of the 4.5k, the final end-user will claim her share of the 4.5k, and a certain portion of the windfall will simply be a dead loss lost to the friction of the scam.
This is somewhat related to how my exploit of the first-time home buyer credit of this season will not be fully captured in value by yours truly, because I expect the asset I just bought was partially inflated by the prospect of the credit in the market. When December rolls around & the tax credit window closes, I expect that inflation will drain out of the market as well, thus reducing the apparent value of my asset. A certain part of that inflation was not real, but rather a temporary artificial fluctuation in response to the government incentive. The seller captured that portion of the value, insofar as I was willing to pay the premium. Now, it wasn't the full 8,000, because qualified first-time buyers are not the whole of the buying public - they aren't even a majority, although they might be a slight plurality. In weighing the advantages and disadvantages of this, I had to take into account the natural and direct governmental components in future inflationary trends, which *won't* disappear in December with the expiration of the first-time buyer tax credit.
Also, 8,000 is 8,000. I was willing to pay what I paid to get the house then. It was the reasonable cost of the asset, and if I can recapture some portion of that after the fact, great! But I don't expect to cash in on my place like a short-time investment. For one thing, I've committed to living in it for the medium-to-long term. I was living in the same rented apartment for nine years. I don't have happy feet.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Why does this chaos sound like a sheet metal postmodern reenactment of FDR's old herd slaughters? With the wrecking yards refusing to take economically ruined scrap cars, are they going to end up burying the 'clunkers' in mass graves in already half-regulated-to-death landfills?
Unintended Consequences, thy name is 'Efficiency by Diktat'!
Unintended Consequences, thy name is 'Efficiency by Diktat'!
I've made some progress this weekend - did some painting, got most of it done, although it looks like I will need to re-do the edging in the living room. I'm not so good with the paint brush, I'm afraid. I'm going to go ahead and schedule a steam-cleaning company for the first floor's carpets, to see if we can kill that cat-smell. Then, hopefully, start seriously moving this weekend coming up.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Well, I'm a homeowner.
Now's the time for me to bumble about & run into sharp-edged things in the dark, I suppose. My shampooing attempt on the downstairs carpet seems to have come up short on the "must and cat-smell" front. I've had someone recommend getting a steam-cleaning outfit in to take care of it. Meanwhile, I'm going to work on spackling & wallpainting this weekend. Am I going to get any dry weather?
Poll question: I need to change my voter registration to reflect my new address - I *think* I'm moving into a new ward. Should I change parties while I'm at it? I've been tactically Democratic since February 2003, but I get more conservative and culturally Republican by the week. Should I re-register *tactically* or *culturally*?
Now's the time for me to bumble about & run into sharp-edged things in the dark, I suppose. My shampooing attempt on the downstairs carpet seems to have come up short on the "must and cat-smell" front. I've had someone recommend getting a steam-cleaning outfit in to take care of it. Meanwhile, I'm going to work on spackling & wallpainting this weekend. Am I going to get any dry weather?
Poll question: I need to change my voter registration to reflect my new address - I *think* I'm moving into a new ward. Should I change parties while I'm at it? I've been tactically Democratic since February 2003, but I get more conservative and culturally Republican by the week. Should I re-register *tactically* or *culturally*?
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
'Endless Eight' finally gets to Hitler. This is easily the least political use I've seen of the Downfall clip.
h/t
h/t
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
A guy here at work is getting married. I observed that he had just bought a house & wondered why they had waited until now. Apparently there's a serious income gap in the mortgage terms available to couples and singles, and we tend to fall into it here at work. They're holding the wedding after the grace period allowed by the terms of his mortgage financing. I had wondered about that one-year ban on cohabitating in my mortgage application.
But he was grousing about one of the places they were getting registered with. They assigned them a sales rep who was trying to get them to put every white elephant and overpriced geegaw in the inventory on their registry. It never occurred to me that these registry things could be opportunities for high-pressure sales offensives. After all, it isn't "your money", so it's a chance to hit a couple where they're weakest - somebody else's wallet. The end result is a lot of unnecessary fancy plate & silver utensils collecting dust in one of those display cabinets like the one my former landlord was trying to get me to buy last weekend when I wandered into his distressed-antiques furniture place & mentioned that I was setting up housekeeping, of a sort.
But he was grousing about one of the places they were getting registered with. They assigned them a sales rep who was trying to get them to put every white elephant and overpriced geegaw in the inventory on their registry. It never occurred to me that these registry things could be opportunities for high-pressure sales offensives. After all, it isn't "your money", so it's a chance to hit a couple where they're weakest - somebody else's wallet. The end result is a lot of unnecessary fancy plate & silver utensils collecting dust in one of those display cabinets like the one my former landlord was trying to get me to buy last weekend when I wandered into his distressed-antiques furniture place & mentioned that I was setting up housekeeping, of a sort.
Monday, July 27, 2009
I threw out most of my MSiA toys on Sunday, after pulling down a toy-model of the Albion from Gundam 0083 off of the top of a shelf & discovering that it had turned *brown*. The MSiA toys were mostly cast from a foul, cheap sort of rubbery plastic, especially the stuff made for the North American market. It wilts, changes color, and generally doesn't hold up well. I saved a couple of the sturdier pieces which shouldn't look like crap on a shelf, and tossed the rest of the box into the trash. In retrospect that particular hobby was a waste of money, although disassembling them and putting them back together gave me something to do with my hands while talking on the phone to particularly annoying HighQ customers back in the day.
So, I found a friend with a burn-barrel and we destroyed my excess personal papers, which had accumulated to the point where I wasn't willing to haul it with to me to a new domicile. An overflowing paper-case whose overflow filled three plastic disposable shopping bag, it took about an hour or so to incinerate the lot. Mostly ten years' worth of phone & electic bills & banking statements, but there was an awful lot of health insurance rubbish, and a fair amount of old Otakon paperwork - floor plans, hotel proposals, decorators' proposals, that sort of thing. My old passport - used once, expired eight years ago. Into the fire, all of it. Well, except a few things which just didn't need to go up in flames. That all will go into the trash - no personal information or old confidential Otakorp stuff.
I should mostly be ready to move by Thursday, which is the closing. After that, I may need to take a day or so to figure out what I should take care of before moving anything in - I have a toilet to fix, a ceiling-crack to do something with - spackle? I dunno - and assess the paint in the family/TV room on the first floor - should I give it a new coat of paint before moving anything into it?
I should mostly be ready to move by Thursday, which is the closing. After that, I may need to take a day or so to figure out what I should take care of before moving anything in - I have a toilet to fix, a ceiling-crack to do something with - spackle? I dunno - and assess the paint in the family/TV room on the first floor - should I give it a new coat of paint before moving anything into it?
Friday, July 24, 2009
Oh, man. Kyoto Animation's apparently collectively decided to become the otaku Andy Warhol. The same damn episode, re-animated, re-recorded and slightly modified - not just four times, not six, but - what, eight is the current guess?
Lunatics.
And now I'm embarrassed, because someone else has already had this epiphany.
Lunatics.
And now I'm embarrassed, because someone else has already had this epiphany.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
You don't get much more badass than this. Girl Genius just keeps getting better & better.
Dresden Codak may operate at a higher artistic level, but it's also a once-a-month sort of operation, and is almost openly hostile to linear narrative. The Foglios crank out three color pages a week like atomic clockwork, with an exceptional narrative flow. Order of the Stick has a similar fidelity to strong, well-written narrative, but Burlew's art style is just less demanding than the Foglios', and he's not nearly as reliable, albeit not bad by online standards; also, the fake-RPG story and subcreation is clever but doesn't even pretend to originality.
Perhaps the closest competitor to Girl Genius is Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary, which has long since outgrown its original crap art & comic-sociopathy humor for a polished style & intricate space-opera plotting. But in the end, Schlock Mercenary is a *strip*, while Girl Genius is a graphic-novel serial. The Foglios are operating under a different and more demanding set of artistic constraints than Tayler. Also? Schlock Mercenary is a comedy which pulled a Cerebus, while Girl Genius has always been a serious story with a wide streak of comedic relief-style humor.
Dresden Codak may operate at a higher artistic level, but it's also a once-a-month sort of operation, and is almost openly hostile to linear narrative. The Foglios crank out three color pages a week like atomic clockwork, with an exceptional narrative flow. Order of the Stick has a similar fidelity to strong, well-written narrative, but Burlew's art style is just less demanding than the Foglios', and he's not nearly as reliable, albeit not bad by online standards; also, the fake-RPG story and subcreation is clever but doesn't even pretend to originality.
Perhaps the closest competitor to Girl Genius is Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary, which has long since outgrown its original crap art & comic-sociopathy humor for a polished style & intricate space-opera plotting. But in the end, Schlock Mercenary is a *strip*, while Girl Genius is a graphic-novel serial. The Foglios are operating under a different and more demanding set of artistic constraints than Tayler. Also? Schlock Mercenary is a comedy which pulled a Cerebus, while Girl Genius has always been a serious story with a wide streak of comedic relief-style humor.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Man, I love Dresden Codak. Even though I only get about one joke in three, googling the references usually causes a follow-on snicker.
I was down visiting in Pittsburgh last weekend. I spent the weekend pestering my great-aunt - who's terribly shaky on her pins & keeps wobbling around without her cane saying that she's fine so long as she can balance herself on the walls or furniture in her house - to always carry her cane around & to be more careful of falls.
Karma took notice of this, and as I was packing up my stuff and walking out of her guest room with arms full of a bulky overnight bag, my toe caught on a stool she keeps in her hallway. I took a full-on face-fault header into the floor, right in front of her. Luckily I didn't bring her down with me, so no harm no foul, but boy was that embarrassing. Much to her credit, she didn't burst out laughing like I would have if I were in her shoes.
Hopefully I've used up all the bad-fall luck in that house for the next couple weeks.
Karma took notice of this, and as I was packing up my stuff and walking out of her guest room with arms full of a bulky overnight bag, my toe caught on a stool she keeps in her hallway. I took a full-on face-fault header into the floor, right in front of her. Luckily I didn't bring her down with me, so no harm no foul, but boy was that embarrassing. Much to her credit, she didn't burst out laughing like I would have if I were in her shoes.
Hopefully I've used up all the bad-fall luck in that house for the next couple weeks.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Watching (and reading) a lot of Ranma 1/2 th' last week or so. The TV series ends fairly strongly, in an episodic, unfinished fashion, but that unfinished character suits an episodic series - a heck of a lot better than the way they (didn't) end Inuyasha, a shounen quest show if I ever saw one. I'm taking the OAVs slowly, as it's now high summer & walking season. Better to be out and about than cooped up inside with a TV & DVD player.
But I really liked Nodoka as a character, more than I thought I would from the descriptions I'd heard over the years. She's quite sweet & even-tempered, not at all the sort of fool who you'd expect would marry someone as monstrous and worthless as Genma Saotome. Only a walking catastrophe like Genma could take someone like that & turn her into an aspiring familicide. By the end of the TV series, I had come to hate Genma Saotome with the fire of a burning sun. The heck with harmless old Happosai, with his lechery, petty larceny and fire-bombs - Genma is the true villain of the story.
Everything wretched, or wrong, or mis-aligned in the world of the Tendo household was wrecked upon it by the will of Genma Saotome. That first trip to the Cursed Springs? Genma. Ranma's serial fiancees? Genma, again and again and again. Ranma's pugnacity, inarticulateness, and incapacity to effectively display emotion? Genma's insistence on raising him without a mother. I wouldn't at all be surprised if Soun & Genma's original apprenticeship to Happosai was somehow Genma's fault.
OK, OK, it's hard to blame the evils of the Kunou family on Genma. But I'm working on it. He *did* once affiance Ranma to Kodachi, so there's that...
But I really liked Nodoka as a character, more than I thought I would from the descriptions I'd heard over the years. She's quite sweet & even-tempered, not at all the sort of fool who you'd expect would marry someone as monstrous and worthless as Genma Saotome. Only a walking catastrophe like Genma could take someone like that & turn her into an aspiring familicide. By the end of the TV series, I had come to hate Genma Saotome with the fire of a burning sun. The heck with harmless old Happosai, with his lechery, petty larceny and fire-bombs - Genma is the true villain of the story.
Everything wretched, or wrong, or mis-aligned in the world of the Tendo household was wrecked upon it by the will of Genma Saotome. That first trip to the Cursed Springs? Genma. Ranma's serial fiancees? Genma, again and again and again. Ranma's pugnacity, inarticulateness, and incapacity to effectively display emotion? Genma's insistence on raising him without a mother. I wouldn't at all be surprised if Soun & Genma's original apprenticeship to Happosai was somehow Genma's fault.
OK, OK, it's hard to blame the evils of the Kunou family on Genma. But I'm working on it. He *did* once affiance Ranma to Kodachi, so there's that...
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Well, it looks like I'll be a homeowner come August. I was holding off until the inspections on account of last month's failed attempt, what with the foundations and the carpenter ants and the maintenance and the HEY LADY!
Ahem.
This one went much more smoothly. It's a split-level condominium in a modest little six-unit in the borough, on Crawford Lane at the top of the hill in the southwest ward. They're putting in a new roof on the units, and it sounds like they'll be working on that while I'll be moving in. There's some minor stuff to fix, but every place has its quirks. I'll be in the market for furniture, though. I don't have nearly enough stuff for a place this size, and a lot of what I do have ought to go right into the trash. You accumulate a lot of rubbish furniture unworthy of a decent home, renting as long as I have.
But hey, you know, I'm going to successfully shift from creditor to debtor status. With the dollar about to go over the falls, I figure it's the proper posture. Even if they surprise me & stave off the hyperinflation to come, I'll still have a decent place to hang my figurative hat.
Ahem.
This one went much more smoothly. It's a split-level condominium in a modest little six-unit in the borough, on Crawford Lane at the top of the hill in the southwest ward. They're putting in a new roof on the units, and it sounds like they'll be working on that while I'll be moving in. There's some minor stuff to fix, but every place has its quirks. I'll be in the market for furniture, though. I don't have nearly enough stuff for a place this size, and a lot of what I do have ought to go right into the trash. You accumulate a lot of rubbish furniture unworthy of a decent home, renting as long as I have.
But hey, you know, I'm going to successfully shift from creditor to debtor status. With the dollar about to go over the falls, I figure it's the proper posture. Even if they surprise me & stave off the hyperinflation to come, I'll still have a decent place to hang my figurative hat.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Daemones Diogenissimus
Restless I was born
And searching even in the womb
Quickly my path worn
And back and forth and back and forth
Like a shuttlecock across the loom
To find that thing they call
“Understanding” or “knowledge” or “God”
But most often truth.
Diogenes they called me
And damned the light of my lamp
And avoided my footsteps
As I hove into view.
I was searching
For my first honest man
And after a time
For any honest man
Or woman, or god, or book,
Or mythical beast,
And still, the most mythical
Of them all
The honest man
Far more rare than
Two-headed amphibians
Or chimerical monstrous
Combinative horrors
Is that rare beast,
Whom I have yet to find
The honest man.
He was not among the Italian cult
Whoring their intellect in the
Geometric Temple.
He was not arguing
In the Athenian mob
He was not to be found
With the wise men
Masons and fishwives.
He was not driving slaves
Or helots or peasants
Nor a brother of the Spartan lords.
No, he was not found in any of those places.
But artists? Truth and wisdom,
If you exist,
I tell to you and the
Unhearing troubled heavens
If you exist to be troubled,
Troubled you are by the
Omnipresent
Odoriferous
Abominations of the artist.
Everywhere I went, I found them.
Daubing the fields in false and frivolous colors,
I found the painters plying their trade.
Flattering the rich and powerful,
I found the poets planning their praise
I found them again, called
Demogogues and sophists and tribunes
Bragging of their telling
Of truth to power,
Meaning that truth that is a means
And a way to power.
Again I found them, with instruments
Flattering women
And the love of women
And the love of the love of women
Or boys, or sheep, or whatever
Desires
Best paid for the lacquer on their lutes
And the fat on their bones.
Singing! Oh, the singing,
Lie upon lie upon lie
Flattering half-falsehoods at best
Utter tripe in the main
And such an unplumbed
Obstructed
Main it was
Stinking to the much-abused
Much-maligned
Much-polluted heavens,
Rising along with the sacrifice-fires
Of the hypocrite priests
And the alchemist-cheats
And the vaporous oracles
With their vaguities so much worse
Than pure simple musical lies.
All the hours and days of my life
I walked by the light
Of my flickering lamp
And not one glimpse
Did I gain of my prey,
And not one word
Did I hear which led
Me anywhere but through
The same sodding muck
Of human delusion
Derision
And lying despair.
Thus did I come
To my dishonored grave
And within the tomb
They laid my
False foul flesh
For not even in myself
Did I find the honesty
Or understanding of truth.
From that putrid space
Burst what I have become
Restless still
And deathless with hunger.
The lamp burns
Now without oil to fuel
And through the darkened hours
I stalk my honest man.
Well should they fear
The liars and cheats
The light of my lamp
That splits the stillness of the night.
Even in darkness
With no-one to hear
Not one of the artists
Will tell me the truth
And those who knowing
The lies they sell
Those I destroy
For the sound of their demolition
For the sake of rage and despair.
Some trying to save
Their lying souls
Will offer long-winded stories
And beautiful songs
And marvels and wonders
And glorious prose
And some I will grant license
And some I will spare
In experimental hope that
Terror and awe
Might forge from artistry,
Fear and trembling
Some semblance of truth
Or a guide-post
But each essay and trial
Dare disappoint my hope
That subject I shall leave hanging
Strung up by the rope
I had lent him before.
Mitch Hagmaier
6/5/2005
(Heavily edited & revised, 6/17/09)
And searching even in the womb
Quickly my path worn
And back and forth and back and forth
Like a shuttlecock across the loom
To find that thing they call
“Understanding” or “knowledge” or “God”
But most often truth.
Diogenes they called me
And damned the light of my lamp
And avoided my footsteps
As I hove into view.
I was searching
For my first honest man
And after a time
For any honest man
Or woman, or god, or book,
Or mythical beast,
And still, the most mythical
Of them all
The honest man
Far more rare than
Two-headed amphibians
Or chimerical monstrous
Combinative horrors
Is that rare beast,
Whom I have yet to find
The honest man.
He was not among the Italian cult
Whoring their intellect in the
Geometric Temple.
He was not arguing
In the Athenian mob
He was not to be found
With the wise men
Masons and fishwives.
He was not driving slaves
Or helots or peasants
Nor a brother of the Spartan lords.
No, he was not found in any of those places.
But artists? Truth and wisdom,
If you exist,
I tell to you and the
Unhearing troubled heavens
If you exist to be troubled,
Troubled you are by the
Omnipresent
Odoriferous
Abominations of the artist.
Everywhere I went, I found them.
Daubing the fields in false and frivolous colors,
I found the painters plying their trade.
Flattering the rich and powerful,
I found the poets planning their praise
I found them again, called
Demogogues and sophists and tribunes
Bragging of their telling
Of truth to power,
Meaning that truth that is a means
And a way to power.
Again I found them, with instruments
Flattering women
And the love of women
And the love of the love of women
Or boys, or sheep, or whatever
Desires
Best paid for the lacquer on their lutes
And the fat on their bones.
Singing! Oh, the singing,
Lie upon lie upon lie
Flattering half-falsehoods at best
Utter tripe in the main
And such an unplumbed
Obstructed
Main it was
Stinking to the much-abused
Much-maligned
Much-polluted heavens,
Rising along with the sacrifice-fires
Of the hypocrite priests
And the alchemist-cheats
And the vaporous oracles
With their vaguities so much worse
Than pure simple musical lies.
All the hours and days of my life
I walked by the light
Of my flickering lamp
And not one glimpse
Did I gain of my prey,
And not one word
Did I hear which led
Me anywhere but through
The same sodding muck
Of human delusion
Derision
And lying despair.
Thus did I come
To my dishonored grave
And within the tomb
They laid my
False foul flesh
For not even in myself
Did I find the honesty
Or understanding of truth.
From that putrid space
Burst what I have become
Restless still
And deathless with hunger.
The lamp burns
Now without oil to fuel
And through the darkened hours
I stalk my honest man.
Well should they fear
The liars and cheats
The light of my lamp
That splits the stillness of the night.
Even in darkness
With no-one to hear
Not one of the artists
Will tell me the truth
And those who knowing
The lies they sell
Those I destroy
For the sound of their demolition
For the sake of rage and despair.
Some trying to save
Their lying souls
Will offer long-winded stories
And beautiful songs
And marvels and wonders
And glorious prose
And some I will grant license
And some I will spare
In experimental hope that
Terror and awe
Might forge from artistry,
Fear and trembling
Some semblance of truth
Or a guide-post
But each essay and trial
Dare disappoint my hope
That subject I shall leave hanging
Strung up by the rope
I had lent him before.
Mitch Hagmaier
6/5/2005
(Heavily edited & revised, 6/17/09)
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
I've just been in a mood recently. The weather's been dreary, or I've been under the weather, or both in conspiracy with each other have been at me at once, and the sum and total of current existence is the monocloud, looming, over a landscape of overpriced, ill-kept real-estate. In the financial news, the sucker's rally is in full roar, and summer's long static roar looks to be even longer and even louder than is its usual wont. It's very likely that I'll miss the interest rate sweet spot, as nothing's reaching out & grabbing me after last month's pricy mis-fire.
I can't help but think that on a purely utilitarian basis that I don't belong in an owned house, by myself. Houses are for families, not for unmotivated solitary men. I had thought about getting a cheap house in Phillipsburg, but the long miserable commute and the uninspiring nature of that hill-town just made all of my ambition curl up and die a shameful, slovenly death in a roadside ditch halfway down the Allegheny Front.
While I was walking a suburb of that town, I encountered an honest-to-God "Here, Hold My Beer" moment, in which a pair of hicks in black wife-beaters had clearly gotten tired of chopping down a thick tree by the side of an attached garage, having taken chips out of each side of the trunk without seriously cutting into the heartwood. They had wrapped a narrow little cable around the trunk about eight feet up from the roots, and attached it to a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and one of the wife-beaters was revving the Jeep, trying to pull the tree down by main force. They were probably lucky that the cable gave way before the root system, because I figured about even odds that it would have pulled down the garage wall along with the trunk if they had succeeded. Meanwhile, the narrow little cable snapped at a join, and went whipping about. I had kept my distance expecting this to happen, and luckily, none of the other onlookers got caught in the rebound. But geez, that really didn't strike me as the sort of neighborhood I needed to be a part of.
I can't help but think that on a purely utilitarian basis that I don't belong in an owned house, by myself. Houses are for families, not for unmotivated solitary men. I had thought about getting a cheap house in Phillipsburg, but the long miserable commute and the uninspiring nature of that hill-town just made all of my ambition curl up and die a shameful, slovenly death in a roadside ditch halfway down the Allegheny Front.
While I was walking a suburb of that town, I encountered an honest-to-God "Here, Hold My Beer" moment, in which a pair of hicks in black wife-beaters had clearly gotten tired of chopping down a thick tree by the side of an attached garage, having taken chips out of each side of the trunk without seriously cutting into the heartwood. They had wrapped a narrow little cable around the trunk about eight feet up from the roots, and attached it to a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and one of the wife-beaters was revving the Jeep, trying to pull the tree down by main force. They were probably lucky that the cable gave way before the root system, because I figured about even odds that it would have pulled down the garage wall along with the trunk if they had succeeded. Meanwhile, the narrow little cable snapped at a join, and went whipping about. I had kept my distance expecting this to happen, and luckily, none of the other onlookers got caught in the rebound. But geez, that really didn't strike me as the sort of neighborhood I needed to be a part of.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
I've been watching My Otome, which is a fun example of what's known by the TV Tropes people as a Pink Bishoujo Ghetto, of the superhero subspecies. It's a SF fantasy set on a world where nations' militaries are supplemented or replaced by nanotechnologically overpowered female knight-servants known as "Otome". Think OMAC: One Maiden Army Corps.
I'm also watching Flag, which is a Real Robot super-realistic Twenty-Minutes-Into-The-Future show about a combat photographer embedded with an elite UN strike force involved in a central Asian civil war. It's stylistically exciting, done in a hard-edged "found footage" documentary style, with absolutely no compromises with narrative - every second of story is pieced together from video by the narrator character, and the protagonist is mostly heard, not seen.
It's a strange juxtaposition, My Otome and Flag, because it's so much easier to accept My Otome on its own terms. Suspension of disbelief is far, far easier when you're presented with magical nanotechnological works of wonder - it makes every other conceit of unreality and whimsy go down that much more easier, like a mouthful of milk prior to gobbling a plate full of dry cookies. Flag on the other hand, with its hypocritical officers prating on about roadmaps for peace and its M1 tanks getting ambushed in tight urban kill-zones and its photo-realism, doesn't get an ounce of consideration from yours truly. When the elite UN strike force (btw - bwa hahaha!) feels the need to perform aerial reconnaissance by piling into a Little Bird with a side-mounted "Predator drone" & *flying* into a canyon, all I could do was scream in horror and disbelief. A) Predators are much, much bigger than that silly little contraption B) the whole point of using UAVs is to *not* put your scouts in physical proximity to danger C) why were they flying *in* the canyon?
I think I'm going to call it the "Military Realism Uncanny Valley". The closer your fiction gets to actual contemporary realism, the more sensitive the viewer/reader gets to inaccuracies. Putting giant robots or magical girls into "realistic" war fiction is the narrative equivalent of robots with expressive skin-like surfaces & facial mimicry - it ceases to be "cute" and instead sets off all of our ingrained BS detectors. We cease to be amused by the rough similarities and instead are repelled by the subtle failures. The difference between watching a charming performance and feeling like you're being deceived?
I'm also watching Flag, which is a Real Robot super-realistic Twenty-Minutes-Into-The-Future show about a combat photographer embedded with an elite UN strike force involved in a central Asian civil war. It's stylistically exciting, done in a hard-edged "found footage" documentary style, with absolutely no compromises with narrative - every second of story is pieced together from video by the narrator character, and the protagonist is mostly heard, not seen.
It's a strange juxtaposition, My Otome and Flag, because it's so much easier to accept My Otome on its own terms. Suspension of disbelief is far, far easier when you're presented with magical nanotechnological works of wonder - it makes every other conceit of unreality and whimsy go down that much more easier, like a mouthful of milk prior to gobbling a plate full of dry cookies. Flag on the other hand, with its hypocritical officers prating on about roadmaps for peace and its M1 tanks getting ambushed in tight urban kill-zones and its photo-realism, doesn't get an ounce of consideration from yours truly. When the elite UN strike force (btw - bwa hahaha!) feels the need to perform aerial reconnaissance by piling into a Little Bird with a side-mounted "Predator drone" & *flying* into a canyon, all I could do was scream in horror and disbelief. A) Predators are much, much bigger than that silly little contraption B) the whole point of using UAVs is to *not* put your scouts in physical proximity to danger C) why were they flying *in* the canyon?
I think I'm going to call it the "Military Realism Uncanny Valley". The closer your fiction gets to actual contemporary realism, the more sensitive the viewer/reader gets to inaccuracies. Putting giant robots or magical girls into "realistic" war fiction is the narrative equivalent of robots with expressive skin-like surfaces & facial mimicry - it ceases to be "cute" and instead sets off all of our ingrained BS detectors. We cease to be amused by the rough similarities and instead are repelled by the subtle failures. The difference between watching a charming performance and feeling like you're being deceived?
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
OK, crap like this is why I told somebody during the campaign that Joe Biden was "smart by Senate standards". Which is to say, slow on his best day, and a complete and utter moron the rest of the time.
That being said, underneath the Naval Observatory doesn't seem particularly secure if you're afraid of a suitcase nuke going off in the District, I don't care how hardened the bunker is. Shouldn't it be somewhere more distant, like Cheyenne Mountain or that place they built in the Catoctins for Congress back during the cold war?
That being said, underneath the Naval Observatory doesn't seem particularly secure if you're afraid of a suitcase nuke going off in the District, I don't care how hardened the bunker is. Shouldn't it be somewhere more distant, like Cheyenne Mountain or that place they built in the Catoctins for Congress back during the cold war?
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!
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!
Thursday, May 07, 2009
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!
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!
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