I finished watching Pumpkin Scissors, which was a bargain-bin raid trophy from last month. I had only watched the first episode back when it first aired, and didn't think much of it, having been on some sort of authenticity kick or something like that. It's a show about a military civil affairs unit (more or less, they call it "war relief", but you get the general idea) in a world which recently wrapped up a World War I-type conflict, and is suffering from the mother of all demobilization recessions.

The two protagonists are Randel Oland, a towering, badly damaged stormtrooper with a severe case of institutionalization, and Lieutenant Alice Malvin, an aristocratic enthusiast who just barely missed the war - her academy class graduated on the day of the armistice. She basically picks up Oland from the side of the road - he's a shellshocked headcase, perpetually poleaxed & in search of someone to tell him how to live without the structure that the war gave him. He makes Alice his sin-eater - someone who promises to tell him how to live as something other than the dehumanized, monstrous killer that their empire's deeply amoral military made out of him. In turn, he goes on beserker rampages of shocking viciousness when she lets his leash loose. This isn't one of those bloodless fighting shows where the protagonists never kill anyone - his on-screen body count is in the dozens, although it trails off after the initial ten episodes' bursts of bloodshed.

I didn't pay the show more attention than I did initially because it comes with a somewhat silly gimmick. Oland was part of a bio-soldier engineering project to produce specialized killing machines - chemical troops, flamethrowers, anti-tank troopers, ninja - via obscure, madscience surgery and chemical manipulation. Oland was an "anti-tank trooper", turned into a thing that could charge a tank & basically tear it apart single-handed, with nothing more than a pair of the Jaws of Life and a preposterous fifty-calibre "Doorknocker" anti-armor pistol. The show looks like it's going to be "tank of the week"-style weekly rampages, but they drop that after about four iterations. After that, it turns into something a lot more interesting.

That's because Alice takes over the show, and Oland becomes a supporting character. He's a monster looking for salvation, but Alice is an actual Hero. She's a straightforward, bloody-minded, ruthless, hard-charging lieutenant, who never calls Oland on his monstrous beserker outbursts, or accepts the limitations and compromises demanded by the corruption of the military around her, and the economic failures of society in general. There's one arc which basically consists of Alice's merry band of "war relief" specialists repeatedly arresting the same group of drug dealers (who are victimizing the population of war refugees they're trying to get resettled), only to have them be bailed out the moment they get to headquarters. Eventually, she tries to save the dealers from their own boss, who grew understandably wroth with the hassle and expense of dozens of bailouts, and just ordered his Dragon to incinerate the whole lot of them, soldiers dealers and all.

Anyways, the TV series ends with a long six-episode arc about a gang of petty-marxist workers who were incited by a shadowy conspiracy to descend upon a nobles' ball, pitchforks and axes in hand, to kill a corrupt economic minister & slaughter the feckless, partying nobles while they were in the neighborhood. Alice, attending the ball with her fiance & sisters, spends the next six episodes attempting to defuse the situation in her own way: via the narrative of righteous, judicious violence. It's a fascinating dance of manipulation and pugnacity, as she retrieves her blade, challenges the corrupt, cowering minister to a duel, and proceeds to filibuster the potential massacre into an arrest of all guilty parties.

Eventually.

In the interim, there's a virtuoso display of the practical uses of violence, and an explicit demonstration of how weapons can be tools for changing the minds of your opponent. There's a soliloquy by a minor villain on why bladed weapons (or in his case, a flail) are superior to guns for the purpose of cowing civilians and repelling mobs, talking about the psychological impact of a pointed edge in your face. There's Alice's violent symposium of the purposes of nobility, for the edification of both the angry mob & the rather useless, cowering crowd of effete minor nobility, most of whom are at least a head taller than her. There's how her own troops, having rode to the rescue, eventually yell her down & threaten to put her under arrest for going on a rampage while off duty & without official sanction. And then there's the central set-piece duel, wherein Alice eventually demonstrates how to fight someone with a big, heavy machete when you've got a glorified long dagger. The whole arc is about the primacy of narrative over physical violence. Alice's object is to impose her narrative upon a much larger group of much larger men, and she does it with her principles, a great-lunged bellowing Voice of Authority, and concentrated, charismatic violence. It's *great*.

It's also about an episode and a half too long - like a Dragonball Z fight that seems to take two months to wrap up. But I was willing to give the show the time to make its point.

In short, Pumpkin Scissors is one of those military shows that gets all the details wrong - the unit's moe little secretary is a sergeant major, and thus effectively outranks every other member of that "little festival unit", including the commanding captain - while still getting the spirit of the thing exactly right.

Prof Mankiw claims, piously:

Sin taxes try to correct for behavior that some social planner deems as not sufficiently virtuous

in the process of trying to make a distinction between "sin taxes" and "pigovian taxes". Apparently, pigovian taxes try to correct for behavior which some economist finds to be an offense against economic morality. Oh, I'm sorry, he says "negative externalities", as if that means something other than an economist's notion of virtue.

I'll just note that no legislature has ever enacted a law in favor of the actions of gravity, but there are many which have tried to repeal the laws of thermodynamics.

There was a guy at the McCain campaign office in State College who was stuck doing gun-rights calls, since he apparently sort-of matched the demographic. He kept grousing that he wasn't actually a hard-edge NRA type, and was more of a fisherman than a hunter. But he never expressed any worry that Obama would want to keep him from fly-fishing. I suppose you never do see 'em coming, do you? They're gonna crack down on recreational fishing now, are they?

Eh, I'm not really a fisher, either. And the only thing I shoot with my shotgun is skeet. So I don't really have any skin in this particular fooferaw. But really, are they trying to totally alienate everyone who isn't an agoraphobic concrete canyon-dweller? What's next, extortionate new ecologically-justified green fees for golfers?

h/t

Yeah, if Palin actually does a reality show which doesn't feature ex-effects guys rigging a pair of tractor-trailers to sandwich a subcompact or fishing boats in the Bering Straits, then I'm done with her. I can't stand "reality show" piffle.

h/t

Yeah, you know what? I'm calling for the impeachment of Secretary Clinton, after she knifed our only reliable long-term ally in the back & deliberately acted in such a fashion as to encourage a second invasion of the Falklands. That's Kissinger-class wicked evil.

I know I've said elsewhere that I didn't want to hear any impeachment talk about Obama until he actually does something constituting a high crime or misdemeanor, but provoking an unnecessary war between two of our nominal allies has got to be some sort of illegal. Anyways, Clinton, not the president. Even if it's his idea, she could have resigned.

There's got to be some sort of pro-British plurality in the modern Democratic Party, right? They're not fighting in Belfast anymore, so the Irish aren't hostile anymore, and mant limo liberal types are big on British-style nanny-state social democracy. That's got to have some sort of transitive value, right?

And for those "WASPs must be wrong, first principles" types sure to object about colonialism and all that rot - the Falklands have been occupied continuously and exclusively by subjects of the British crown for over a century and a half, and even before that, the only thing on those islands was a rebellious Argentine penal colony. The United States has a better claim on Cuba than the Argentines have on the Falklands. And no, that's not an assertion of sovereignty over the Communist Wonderland. Just a reducto ad absurdum.

OK, OK.

She can just resign if she wants.

h/t

OK, this is just funny. Melissa Hart was my parents' representative when they still lived in the commonwealth. Apparently she's making enough money as a lobbyist to not worry about abandoning a car in the House parking lot. If you ask me, they have too many spots if you can leave an abandoned car there for *three years*, and not have it towed.

When I saw the Instapundit link, I thought that the malefactor would be Cynthia McKinney, and I was all ready to point and laugh.

More fool me.

But really, this is part of why the Republicans are in such poor odor, even with the current backlash against the socialists. No class, no style, no integrity.

Ye gods! The Indian portion of the "green revolution" is coming to pieces because the dung-brained socialists running the Indian agricultural ministry trapped themselves in a urea subsidy trap, and their farmers are uneducated enough that they think they can power through broad-spectrum nutrient deficiencies via over-fertilizing with urea.

For those of you without a passing acquaintance with basic farming, let me assure you - this is so basic it's almost a truism: nitrogen fertilizer can only address nitrogen deficiencies in a soil. You can't hose down a field with nitrogen & expect good results if your field is sulfur or phosphorus deficient. The only thing that over-fertilizing with nitrogen does is *burn the field*. And pollute the downstream drainage with runoff - really badly, too.

I don't even know how they're seeing any sort of boost by doing so, let alone what the article's quoted farmers claim. I wonder if it's some sort of placebo reporting effect? Maybe there's something I've never heard about that might explain what's going on there - I'm not exactly an agronomist - but it violates everything I thought I knew about Liebig's Barrel.

This is a classic example of the poisonous power of anti-market forces upon the environment. A subsidy imposed for political effect results eventually in ruined farms, environmental devastation, declining yields, and bankrupted farmers, all at taxpayer expense; let's not even talk about the primary market disruptions. Government intervention driving mal-investments, inefficiencies, and pollution. Ain't the anti-market wonderful?

h/t

Update: I asked a guy here at work, and he says that since burning a field with excessive nitrogen can sterilize the soil (and thus destroy the organic matter & microculture), increasing nitrogen usage can to some degree replace the nitrogen-fixing that organic matter & microfauna would normally have contributed to crop growth. So, basically, the farmers who were seeing marginal increases in yield returns with very heavy urea usage had already "killed" their fields, and are now essentially growing on dead soil.

Game, set, match.

Our climate records, due to this back-asswards adjustment of rural stations to match UHI-to-a-fare-thee-well urban stations?

Garbage.

Pfft. What a classic display of "yes, but" Republicanism. Governor Lingle now opposes the psychotically un-American Akaka bill, not on principles, but because recent amendments make it just a little more heavy-handed in its violation of American ideals, just a hair more front-loaded in its offenses against basic decency. Back when it was only lukewarm in its abominations, only somewhat horrible in its repudiation of everything that makes this country worth defending, oh, then, she was all in favor of it.

Keep walking down this road, you idiots, and we'll all have seceded from the country by racial means, forced to make our separate peace by binding ourselves to some squalid default tribal entity in a demonstration of a sort of Grisham's Law of group identity, where bad communitarian politics drive out the good.

Update: Argh!

This is the sort of gonzo eulogy which makes Hitchens so... Hitchens. But I tend (for the most part) to agree with him on Al Haig. I've been somewhat confused by the version of Haig that's appeared in the right blogsphere since his death, it bears no resemblance to the Haig I thought I knew. That Al Haig appeared in Sorley's A Better War as a sort of Renfield to Kissinger's Dracula, a Tyrell for Nixon's Richard III. The Haig I remember as a child during the Reagan adminstration is largely the one Hitchens describes; perhaps I was deluded by the mainstream media of the time, except Hitchens offers quotes from Reagan's journal which echoes the opinion of the journalists of the day. Haig was, as far as I can tell, a scary, unscrupulous General Ripper freshly escaped from the imagination of Stanley Kubrick, run amok on the American political stage.

h/t Mark Levin, who himself kind of scares me some days.

Ha!

"[H]ow can brie be elitist if you can buy it at Sam's Club?"

I don't know, man. I don't do Sam's Club - I don't bother with my company's standing offer of free Sams Club membership. I don't see why they need to waste the $40-$50 yearly fee just for me to buy the same crap I could get at WalMart at a slight bulk discount.

But from at least one lowly perspective, Sam's Club is a tiny bit elitist.

But just a bit.

the need of all of them for expert guidance would cause them to gravitate toward the consensus positions among scientists

The above is a quote from this Reason article, which just pissed me off to no end. The article's about a sociological research project testing the inclinations of loosely (and frankly, ludicrously) defined groups towards accepting or discarding scientific "expert guidance" which supposedly comes from their own or an opposing philosophic tendency.

The entire project, and indeed, the article itself, is predicated on the need for "expert guidance". Not testimony, not research, not evidence - although the writer of the article artfully elides "evidence" and "guidance" as if they were synonymous in a passage later in the article - but "guidance". It's also quite interesting that the study's four tendency-groups doesn't include an "elitist" tendency, although one might suspect that it might fall within the "hierarchical" grouping which is described solely in nasty terms which suggests that neither the writer nor the researchers would place their smug selves within the confines of their own study.

I'm rather perturbed that an allegedly libertarian magazine like Reason would publish something so indulgent of the dogmas and theocratic aspirations of the secular priesthood.

"Consensus positions". Humbug!

h/t

Sigh. I swear politicians and their staffers are getting dumber. That bill reads like a particularly ill-thought-out post by a drunken blogger. Maybe a lesser diary piece on Red State, one by a guy doomed to never, ever get promoted to the front page. Furthermore, it reads like somebody clumsily modeled it on one of those moronic Intelligent-Design-in-the-classroom brainfarts that Deep South legislatures are fond of passing as a way to fly their evangelical front flags.

Just because catastrophic warming is looking highly, highly unlikely doesn't mean you can legislate the opposite opinion, any more than you can legislate the definition of pi. I don't even care if you get the right definition for pi. It isn't a suitable subject for legislation.

h/t the Czar of Muscovy.

Frank J. of IMAO says it right the first time. And he does it almost without clowning around, which has to be a first for him. One thing, though - a fourth party was how the first Republican president got elected. No, seriously, follow my logic:

In the early 1850s, the old Whig Party imploded due to the solution of the problem it had been created to exploit - economic policy and development - and the emergence of new tensions and electoral splits for which that party had no answers - the sectional split, Mormonism, mass immigration, and the growth of Catholicism. The Whig Party itself had been a relatively short-lived creature of the Second Great Awakening, composed largely of politically active evangelicals and religious liberals. By the early Fifties, the Second Great Awakening had largely run its course, and a lot of the movements and trends in said SGA had collapsed of their self-contradictions or mutated beyond the pale of American society - see the Mormon exemplar. Meanwhile, the great developmental economic booms had attracted vast new populations of Europeans - mostly Catholic - who couldn't care less about the hyper-Protestantism which was the lodestone of the Whiggish moment.

Anyways, the Whigs detonated impressively, and the back-wash almost took the Democracy with them. The 1850s saw a lot of serial High Weirdness, including a brief moment when a conspiratorial secret society - led in part by an ex-president who had himself risen to national fame twenty years previously as the bannerman of a political party predicated on the opposition to a conspiratorial secret society - nearly took over the country. The Republicans were just another bit of political weirdness, less strange than the Know-Nothings, but also less broad-based. They decisively lost their first presidential election, and probably would have decayed into yet another regional oddity like Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, New York's Liberal and Conservative Parties, or the LaRouchites, if it weren't for the mad presidential election of 1860.

That was the year that the Democracy finally spun to pieces, and the sitting vice president led the southern Democrats out of their national convention and right into a splinter party. Before the campaign was over, even the border states had their own splinter party, Bell's Constitutional Unionists. Seward's wild little radical Whig third party, taken over by a charismatic former one-term Illinois congressman whom no-one had ever heard of before 1858, swept to a problematic victory due to the intervention of not only a fourth party, but a fifth one as well.

In short, third parties only win when they're not the third party at all, but rather one among a half-dozen, or the only default in an otherwise one-party system, which is, of course, naturally instable.

Yeah, Prof. Mankiw? I call shenanigans. The good professor seems far too fond of resorting to tax increases as a first concession in the best of times, so long as they are "pigovian". Might I suggest that he is just naturally biased towards a typically New England "high taxation" regime, and only has to look for reasons to cater to this inclination?

Also, there are valid political-economic reasons to despise the VAT, mainly for the same reasons that one should be hostile to government-run health insurance system - once the government is allowed a tool of such intrusive capacity, it will never let go of it, and never cede a dime extracted via its use. The VAT may have a theoretical edge over income taxation, but its practical application offers a significant negative externality in terms of the private-public power balance, or lack thereof.

Don't do crap like this, people. It's what the kids call "a dick move". The only reason to ever act politically in this fashion (like voting tactically) is if you think the one you're voting/signing a petition for is actually better than the immediate alternative in the immediate context. This is why I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2008 - not because I wanted the Republican to win (although I did), but because I thought she was the marginally-better option in the race. "Operation Chaos" was amusing but not really a factor in my 2008 primary vote. "The worse the better" is Leninism, and absolute BS no matter which party or faction is pushing for it. Always find the better option, even if that better option is no action at all.

For those playing at home, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana announced his retirement at the absolute last moment, leaving the Democrats in Indiana with only one, crazy-left forlorn-hope candidate with even close to enough petition signatures to get on the primary ballot by the deadline, which is, like, today. If they don't have any primary candidates, Indiana Democratic Party rules provide for a leadership caucus, which is what the Democrats are trying to achieve. What the conservative muckers are trying to do is sabotage that caucus by collecting enough signatures to pitchfork Mrs. Moonbat into the Democratic nomination by default. Not cool, even if I do prefer a generic Republican Senator from Indiana over a generic Democratic Senator. Don't play with dynamite, even if you're confident it wouldn't ever go off.

Well, I'm finally back in the county. Boy, that was a pain. I'm still at work, I guess I'll find out in a couple of minutes whether the house burned down. I guess I'll let you know if it did.

^_^

Well, crap. Man Proposes, Global Warming Disposes. Behold the wreck of my designs: yet *another* Mid-Atlantic storm has canceled my flight tomorrow out of Philly. I'm now tentatively scheduled for Thursday. Assuming the pilot can find the county under that mound of snow that's apparently on its way.

We went up to Gainesville to visit a state park built around a sinkhole, just for something to do for an afternoon. The state park was closed on Mondays.

Grr.

So we went over to the University of Florida and spent fifteen minutes looking for parking, then found that the Museum of Art was *also* closed on Mondays.

Argh!

Luckily, the Museum of Natural History was kind enough to actually be open for a reasonable approximation of normal hours, so we spent an hour or so looking at butterflies and Indian archeological exhibits.

What does Gainesville have against Mondays? What is it, Garfield's adopted home town or something?

Every time I go down to Florida to visit the folks, a nasty storm descends on the Mid-Atlantic and hammers the commonwealth while I'm away. I have to wonder how much of a mound of ice I will find in front of my place *this* time when I get back.

Also, I see that the borough council is giving up control of the local farmer's market to some "farmers' association" which plans to kick non-locals and non-"local producers" (aka "the competition") out of the market. Because nothing promotes competitive pricing, quality produce, and an amiable atmosphere like xenophobic protectionism run amuck. The one councilman who spoke against this power-grab was denounced by foaming Red Guards in the comments section as a damned carpet-bagger who had dared to not be born in town.

While we're at it, SEIU is threatening to unionize the county offices. I suppose I ought to be grateful they haven't done so already, but really, I'm just kind of resigned to the inevitable ballooning of my property tax bill. Damned parasitic thugs, the lot of 'em.

Well, I'm back in Florida, and that means catching up on reading a bit. I read Hoyt's Darkship Thieves during the trip down, since there's been a big booster effort on Instapundit and elsewhere. I can see why - it's solidly in the didactic libertarian Heinleinian style - a swashbuckler with an aggressive James H. Schwartz/Heinlein heroine and a lot of anti-authoritarian posturing. It's not bad, and there are some nice flashes of attitude and style. The heroine is likeable in that unreliable-narrator borderline-sociopathic fashion that's common to post-Heinlein followers of the old man, but the book has a certain early-draft shagginess and shapelessness which suggests that Baen isn't exactly stepping up to the plate in terms of editing and guidance. Also, Hoyt strikes me as flinching a bit from the consequences of her characterization, and repeatedly pulls her punches on the protagonist's alleged hardness. There's a certain amount of "Han [didn't] shoot first" going on there. TV Tropes talks about Faux Action Girls, Hoyt's heroine Athena is a bit of a Faux Heroic Sociopath.

The recent cold snap down here has done a real number on the greenery - it's more of a brownery, right now. Grass, palm trees, bushes, everything's burned brown by the frost. Weather's fine, now, though. I was hearing enough about the big storm coming through up north at home; down here it's sixty-five and overcast. We were just rushing to get as much of the bark mulch into the planters as we could before a rainstorm blew in from the Gulf. Igh, I'm out of shape.

Dude, this call for mass resignations at CRU is by George Monbiot. George Monbiot - the original "Moonbat". Even with that pro-forma tu quoque about unspecified "denier fabrications" at the end, it's still a pretty damning thing from the foremost journalistic drumbeater of the global warming crusade in Old Blighty.

England must have been damn cold this winter for the freeze to penetrate this deep into the AGW hedgerow.

I'm watching the third season of Supernatural, and if the second season was strangely oriented around mildly (or not-so mildly) misogynistic slaughter of young women, the third season's developing what looks like a fascination with violence against evil children. During the attempted drowning scene in "The Kids Are Alright", I commented to myself that this was the single-most screwed up thing I've seen this year, and I've been watching Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne, which is the walking embodiment of Nightmare Fetish Fuel Station. Admittedly, it's been more than a year since the last time I watched the second season of Black Lagoon, so YMMV.

Could I get a real person to make a token comment, btw? I'd like to see if the moderation feature is working properly.

Ugh. Apparently the blogger comments system attracts blogspam in a way that Haloscan didn't. I turned on comment moderation, which is insane on such a low-traffic site. Oh, well.

I've been feeling kind of under the weather. I'm ready for that trip south - get both some sun and some warm air.

A couple of comments from Bill and Ben which were lost to my Haloscan screwup had to do with the Supreme Court striking down McCain/Feingold, and what I thought about it. I guess I'm tentatively encouraged by it, if only because the 2008 election cycle showed the current set of election laws as hollow mockeries which largely benefited lawyers and other rule jockeys, and bred contempt for the rule of electoral law in politics.

I saw this just a minute ago - a letter from a specialist offering an opinion on what it'll mean in the current election cycle. He basically predicts the death of the political parties "as we know them". I don't think anyone's really enthused about the current state of the two national parties - they've been captured by a toxic culture of mercenary consultants, who think in terms of tactics, and care not a whit for principles.

Any time a superstructure of excessive legal complexity is hacked away by a big Supreme Court case like this, it offers space for common-sense use of the opened space. Here's hoping that this is the result, and that it isn't immediately followed by some nasty new legalistic Great Game, that this new Commons isn't immediately enclosed by nimble-witted lawyer-specialists.

The *reason* I just blew up the blog was that I got a notice from Haloscan that the commenting service I was using is going to die, and why don't you sign up for our pay service? Well, the heck with that when Blogger has its own freebie commenting service, but I clearly hit the wrong button in trying to change over... Oh, well. Sorry about that Bill, Ben. Your comments from yesterday were eaten by an imp of the perverse.

Woah, there's a flashback - the latest backup I had on hand was October 2003. People I no longer read...

Ugh, I just blew up the blog. I guess I'll recover from what I have on hand....

I've been looking at digisubs, as I said the other day. There's less cool new stuff out there than there used to be, obviously. Demand is cratering, why expect supply to maintain at previous levels? But anyways...

I didn't even get through a full episode of Ladies vs. Butlers, it was just tedious harem crap. Baka to Test to Shokaiju (translation: Tests, Idiots, and Summoned Beasts) is just stupid, like an inverted Special A crossed with Pokemon, cut with a lot of random idiot humor, except not nearly as interesting as all that makes it sound.

Kimi no Todoke seems kind of... superfluous to the manga. Yeah, it's a nice story, but it seems like it was mostly there on the page to start with. Same thing with the Skip Beat anime, although that show was weirdly truncated at just 25 episodes. At least with Skip Beat, the manga story is so rock-solid and snappy that I was willing to sit through it all again to get my Kyoko grudge fix.

Dance in the Vampire Bund had a mildly interesting first episode, but the second was just vile lolicon rubbish, and I won't be bothering with that again.

I was paging through some shows over the last year or more, too. Canaan's first episode was glossy, but confusing and felt kind of "ugly" - like Black Lagoon without the charm or willingness to admit the wickedness of its protagonists.

The first episode of Eden of the East was intriguing, but then I realized it had been licensed by FUNimation. I guess I'll order it whenever they get around to opening up pre-orders.

Cosmo Fighter Sunred is cheerful, pointless nonsense - like a less cynical Sealab 2021. You can't really take large amounts of it at a time, but since it's a quarter-hour show, you don't have to do so.

The show I've been having the most fun with? Cutey Honey Flash - the old cheesecake-and-violence Go Nagai standard re-done by the Sailor Moon crew, far as I can tell. Of course it never got finished by the fansub crew. Damn it all. ^_^

I used to call Obama "the mirrorball" before he was elected president, because it struck me as the best metaphor for his deliberate affect - a reflective sphere which returns to the viewer a funhouse distortion of whatever hopes or fears the viewer is projecting upon his surface, and an unknown darkened interior known only by whatever lies below the silvered surface.

This is, apparently, what you get once the man in the interior begins to show through. It's frightening in a non-partisan fashion, honestly. What happens if the president has a nervous breakdown? Will his aides wire him up like a puppet, rule through him like Mrs. Wilson after the stroke?

Maybe it isn't what it looks like. Maybe he really does want to be queen, a hand-waving figurehead content to leave governance to some de facto first minister. That's essentially what he tried to do with Reid and Pelosi. In the current analysis, this vision of Her Majesty Barrack I is by far the most preferable of options, like Elizabeth II putting up with Blair with a petulant moue of disgusted resignation. If he wasn't a secret radical, or a would-be tyrant, but merely a limited narcissist satisfied with empty trappings and decorum and adulation - that's survivable, I think. We can make it through the end of his term without any catastrophes if he collapses into an ineffective, inert heap of ceremonial display.

I think.

Mike Pence isn't running for the Senate this year. The insinuation is that he's going to be running for the White House in 2012. If he is... I'm persuadable. He's one of the few truly respectable conservative voices in the House, and frankly, I've had enough of Senatorial presidential candidates. Somebody of substance from the House would be a refreshing change of pace.

The only concern I would have is that I'm not too up to speed on his socon quotient. Is he a creationist or does he have a habit of spouting off about gays or anything overly sketchy like that? It would be best if he wasn't carrying any wedge-issue dynamite...

On the other hand, people have already mooted Mitch Daniels out of Indiana, and two Indiana boys in the same running is going to dilute the support base a bit. It would be good if they didn't split the difference and let that ass Huckabee walk away with the prize.

What, now I'm supposed to be hiding something? I mean, besides the fact that I no longer own a razor?

I've been putzing around with digisubs since getting my DSL. Yeah, yeah - they're illegal, yeah I'm killing anime - I've been killing anime for the better part of a decade, I've heard it all. It's just that I was mooching off of others' venial sins instead of committing my own up to now. And I spend way, way, WAY more than I should on DVDs, much of it on stuff I only sort-of-liked when they were fansubbed, so ppfthptpt!

Along those lines, I actually sat down and watched the infamous "Endless Eight", which, indeed, was as close a simulacra of eternity as I care to waste my time watching. After a while, I realized that it probably didn't seem as tedious and pointless from the animator's point of view. After all, every show they've ever had to work on had some combination of some these "shounen stations of the cross" summer-vacation events, just not all crammed into the same half-hour episode, or even the same half-hour episode repeated eight times. To a certain extent, the "Endless Eight" episodes are a very inside-baseball meditation on the highly structured and mannerist excesses of post-moe Japanese animation, wherein they have to do their onsen episode, their obon matsuri episode, the "test of courage", etc, etc, etc. "Endless Eight" just verbalizes those etceteras, at Andy Kaufman length.

About the sixth of the Endless Eight, I stopped registering the details of the show, and went into a hypnotic fugue, where it all turned into colored flows of aesthetic impressions. I was ready for the eventual shaggy-dog ending when it came; I only groaned in annoyance afterwards. They *almost* got past without a big ol' helping of What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?

I've been watching my new Spice and Wolf DVD set, and I'm already thinking about what a shame that FUNimation (Funimation? FUnimation? I strongly dislike this fascination import companies have with eccentric capitalization ticks like that, you know?) hasn't licensed the second season. There's a good chance they won't, either - the show reminds me strongly of Kino's Journey, in its intellectualism, subdued earth-tone art, and journey-focused storytelling. If Kino's Journey sold more than a couple hundred copies in North America, I'd be very surprised - heck, I didn't even warm to it myself when I first watched it in digisubs. Anyways, Spice and Wolf. It's more anti-religion than I expected, but I suppose I shouldn't have - one of the two protagonists is a pagan wolf-god, she wouldn't be fond of the Church, would she? I've got the opening theme playing in my head right now, and I was singing a bit of the English-lyric ending theme while doing the dishes in the company kitchen this morning. Fun show, if you can get past the rather rapid-fire initial trading-scam involving the exploitation of a secretly planned coin devaluation by dueling merchant-conspiracies.

Spice and Wolf - it's free market moe.

Oh, BTW, whenever someone starts complaining that this country is "ungovernable", take a closer look - most likely, what they mean is that they want to govern by diktat, or have confused governance with dominance. The nation was founded on a constitution designed to protect electoral minorities from the full weight of such oppressive attempts at "governance". Good to see the old scrap of paper still has some efficacy.

There's already some rumbling about Brown presidential prospects, and I have to admit, "I'm nobody's senator but yours" in last night's context was absolutely brilliant rhetoric. But he'll be no more qualified than Obama was for office come 2012, and less qualified than Palin.

It looks to me like we're entering a phase of politics which I suppose you could call "the revenge of Burke's little platoons", retail and insurgent politicians rising and stinging the would-be great and powerful, and then returning to the masses from which they came. There are no well-experienced Reagans, no patrician Roosevelts or well-groomed Kennedys in the wings to mount the white horse and lead the march. That will no doubt alarm those who need parades in their life, but then, without the man on a horse, we won't have to face that last parade led by a riderless horse with boots turned backwards in the stirrups, either.

Experts and powers and authorities, this was your call in the night. Hear it, and be humbled. You were made as we all were, sparked from the mud. You will be as we all will be, one with the mud again.

"Cry more, your tears are delicious". ^_^

OK, now that we've got that out of our systems, enough about the truck. Outside of the heat and giddiness of a david-v.-goliath election, it's going to come off silly. I talked to at least one independent while out drinking last night, and the truck business was embarrassing him - he used it to pull off the usual moderate "both sides are goofy/crazy/evil" shtick.

While I'm feeling chatty, folks who looked askance at then-Senator Santorum's bizarre comments about the slippery slope that might lie beyond Lawrence v. Texas, might want to consider the amazing and horrible things that have come out of Martha Coakley's mouth in the course of her crusade against alleged child-molesters, and specifically in defense of her prosecutorial team's use of fantastical and impossible child testimony.

She's a witch-finder, folks. If it was the 1690s, she'd have been carrying around a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum and whittling her own "witch pricker".

Glenn's ruminating about the now-established precedent of the sitting president using the last two former presidents as fund-raising non-partisan figureheads for big relief efforts. I'd offer Herbert Hoover as a further precedent, except that was how he made his name *before* becoming Commerce Secretary and then president.

I don't know, I don't like this, and I *really* don't like how the UN gave Clinton status as "UN Special Envoy for Haiti" prior to the earthquake. Admittedly, Clinton doesn't seem to have made any effort to actually do anything in the role, but if he had...

The whole thing reeks of the Roman Republican constitutional practice of sending out ex-consuls after their year of service as "proconsuls" to govern provinces of the Republic's empire. It didn't end particularly well, if you remember your Roman history.

Please, folks. Don't hide your kids from the sun. Especially if you live in New England. I started taking a cheap multi-vitamin this week, mostly for the vitamin D, because I'm worried that my morning cereal milk isn't doing nearly enough on that front. But from what that article suggests, multi-vitamins are helpful but not sufficient.

Clay Bond, aka RightWingProf, died yesterday, after a brief but hard fight against a sudden onset of inoperable cancer. He was a good man who I never did manage to meet in person; we were always just missing each other at the State College McCain campaign office. I learned a lot from him, even if we never did agree on whether data was a plural or a collective noun.

The university has lost a great teacher, the county has lost a wise and active citizen, and the internet a vital voice distinguished by its clarity, sanity, and sincerity. The world is a smaller and poorer place for his departure from it.

Wow, I wasn't paying attention, but apparently the Massachusetts special election to replace Kennedy is in two weeks. Those of you who are registered to vote in Massachusetts, please consider going out in the cold and snow to vote for the Republican. The Democratic candidate is a check-box empty-pants-suit apparatchik; the Republican isn't exactly a movement intellectual, but he'd be a solid small-government vote in the Senate, and if there's anything we have a surfeit of in this quarter of the country, it's Government, heavy-handed and full of its own entitlement.

The political class in Washington needs a good scare. Electing a Republican in indigo-blue wouldn't-even-vote-for-Reagan Massachusetts would make 'em soil themselves. And even if you're a hard-left red-diapered yellow-dog Democrat, doesn't the prospect of rattling the cages of those Washington silver-spooners fill you with a certain unholy glee? It's a special election, he won't be in there for a full term, anyways. You can reset yourself to default for the usual generations-long dynast in 2012.

January 19th. Make a splash, Massachusetts! Those prima donnas in New Hampshire shouldn't get all the national political attention.

They're burning used books in Wales this winter because it's cheaper than coal.

I believe that's what's known in the journalism trade as "too good to check"

Here's a cogent, passionate, and lucid argument in favor of Copenhagen Consensus-style environmental action. That is, actions which have an effect today, not in the indefinite, distant, phatasmal future; actions which *directly* benefit the poor and disadvantaged; actions which work with gravity - in which a dollar buys at least a dollar's worth of benefit, if not more.

The common trait of current "alternative energy" schemes from the corporatist center and energy taxation plans from the anti-capitalist left is their economic malignity, wherein two dollars buys a dollar's benefit, or worse, a hundred dollars buys an IOU for a hundred dollars in a hundred years. Furthermore, the schemes of the corporatist center and the anti-capitalist left both privilige elites with superior information flows and access for rent-seeking activity, which reducing the absolute global availability of resources; that combination of elite empowerment and negative-sum wealth reductions is guaranteed to lead to impoverishment and pauperization of disadvantaged populations.

"...As the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade...
We must love one another or die."

Whelp, they're firing off their guns down the hill, it must be midnight. Happy New Year, everybody! Hope y'all have a better 2010 than the 2009 most of us had...

Testing out my new computer & DSL modem... so far so good. Insanely non-problematic, in fact.

Merry Christmas, everybody! I'm up in suburban Boston, visiting with family. Newton Highlands reminds me a lot of the nicer parts of Bellefonte. Lots of Victorians, well-maintained like Bellefonte's Curtin Hill neighborhood. Everything's a lot more cramped, and there's no room for the carriage houses, which means that parking's at a premium.

Milos is cheerful but rambuctious and a little hard to keep up with. He reminds me a lot of little Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, and I'd go out & get my sister a copy of Barrayar if I thought she had enough time to read with an infant and a toddler in the house. Alex, on the other hand, is in the midst of his "eat, sleep, and yell" phase of his life, not that some folk ever grow out of that one. But give him time, he's not much more than two weeks old! ^_^

Who knew there were any actual Dixiecrats left in the Democratic Party, let alone any who'd still be willing to turn GOP? I thought all the professional Dixiecrats bailed back in the first Clinton term.

Of course, if you believe what people will tell political cold-callers, there's still a lot of "Rockefeller Republicans" in Pennsylvania, albeit ones who haven't voted Republican since the Ford administration.

h/t

So we probably lost another building this morning, just down Allegheny from my place. I didn't notice the hub-bub until I tried to drive in to work & found a ton of road-blocks all over the place & water-hoses stretching out for two blocks in all directions. The Cadillac Building was half a block from the Undine Fire Company house, and yet it still was gutted.

Bellefonte, wattaya gonna do? Our state representative's office was in that building, btw. Benninghoff's had pretty bad luck the last few years.

Reading things like this, makes me think that for the people who think "global governance" is a legitimate goal, the UN/NGO political class are a sort of Heian aristocracy, performing obstentiously their stylized roles in the Emperor's court at Nara or Kyoto. Meanwhile, out in the real world, the grotty samurai class runs actual matters, keeping the peace, fighting the enemies of the realm, making the tax money flow to support the court in far-off, fairy-land Kyoto.

The Onin War is the inevitable result of this sort of division between actual governance and legitimacy, if you ask me.

h/t

Apparently Secretary Clinton's been trying to bribe the Chinese with their own borrowed money.

Yeah, that'll go well. Schmucks, we're governed by schmucks.

Yeah, I'm sorry. If you're preferring Pluto over 20th Century Boys in the 2009 Urasawa sweepstakes, you're something of a tool. Pluto is pompous, derivative, overwrought, joyless, and telegraphs like nobody's business. 20th Century Boys, on the other hand, is rooted, spritely, active, agile, and cleverly telegraphed a complete and utter lie so convincingly that I had been prepared to be disappointed in advance of the development - and then was blown away when Urasawa yanked it all out from under us with an old-fashioned narrative time-jump.

Oh, and that critic pulled the usual boner of confusing "dark and gritty" for "mature". Maturity is a mind-set, a willingness to recognize the childishness of the artifacts of childhood, and to set them aside as illusions. 20th Century Boys is about the illusions of childhood, and the complex interaction of nostalgia with illusions, but the villain of the story is a monster of nostalgia, and childish fantasies are the weapons with which he corrupts, subverts, and conquers.

Pluto, on the other hand, is a glossy re-write of the old Tezuka chestnut, with a lot of pious anti-war posturing and tedious, unoriginal rehashing of the hoary "Androids Dreaming of Electric Sheep" theme, with a heavy ladling of Three Laws of Robotics utopian cheese. There was a couple solid chapters at the beginning about a British robot with survivor's guilt, but everything since then has been running in place, with a very annoying detour through Fantastic Racism and an expy anti-robotic sort of Klu Klux Klan organization, complete with white hoods. Bah.

"Because that’s what socialized medicine does: it turns each of us into a little fascist." As the argument goes, once we all have to pay the bill, we have to leave our libertarian inclinations to not care what others do "if it only hurts themselves". Once some perfect little snowflake harms him or her self, we all have to pay for the repairs. Nothing can be private when the state picks up the tab for the damage.

Fair warning on that link, though - some of the accompanying photos are a little not-safe-for-family-viewing.

h/t

I finally got around to watching the end of Mahoromatic last night. I've been duped! It wasn't nearly as bad as rumor has it. Yeah, the last episode is out of left field, but I didn't find it as repulsive and off-tone as the "Gainax Ending" people insisted. Also, now that I've re-watched the first season & those parts of the second that I'd seen before, it's another one of these Gainax/Shaft co-productions which in retrospect feel a lot more Shaft than Gainax.

And boy howdy, there's a lot of nudity in that thar TV show. You don't see nearly that much skin in recent anime, anything made in the last ten years or so.

This is precious. A "Hooverville"-style homeless community with the monnicker "Obamaville". I told you last year, you PSU leftie dipwads.

h/t

Oh, this is grand. Half or more of the concern-trolling, misery-pimping display at Senator Casey's "public health care forum" in Lock Haven last August was a dog-and-pony show about the evils of lifetime coverage limits & how the public-option crusaders were going to slay the evil insurance dragons who were tormenting long-term catastrophic-case victims of the system with this exact device. They had a wife of some poor sod and a nurse of some sort, both with sob stories about the people victimized by this evil practice.

Guess what Reid's Senate bill slipped back to the insurance companies, either as a "stuffing their mouths with gold" measure, or in an attempt to actually "bend the curve" in a significant way? That's right, lifetime coverage limits. Don't you leftist universal-health-care paladins feel stupid, now? Especially that one oleaginous butterball who sat up on Casey's stage, nodding piously over a microphone doing his best "I-feel-your-pain" Bill Clinton impersonation during the wife's sad recitation of the tale of her family's illness-driven demolition.

Now, I'm not saying this particular infidelity affects my opinion on the subject in the least - it doesn't make me happy, nor does it particularly infuriate me. The subject doesn't matter to me in the slightest, except insofar as those who do care like to irritate me in attempts to extract pity or sympathy by holding it over my head as some sort of passive-aggressive Weeping-Rag of Damocles. But here's hoping it breaks the Democratic shield-wall. We could use a weak spot right now, send 'em howling off the field in a fratricidal rout.

h/t, as it usually is, to the good professor.

Welcome to the world, Aleksandar. I've been waiting until your parents named you, and this morning your paternal grandparents sent out the announcement. I hope your brother Milos will take care of you, and please don't be too hard on him - it can sometimes be a little hard to live up to the expectations of a younger sibling. ^_^

Megan McCardle can't abide talk of fraud and conspiracy, because, well, why would scientists commit their careers to fraud and conspiracy? Then she talks about the incremental corruption of the data, and looks at the Darwin example on Watts Up With That, and thinks *that* sort of fudging-to-stay-with-the-pack thing is going on.

Not fraud & conspiracy, but an accumulation of many little white lies.

Apparently she believes in the malevolent boardroom conspiracy of guys in masks calmly plotting bald-faced falsehood under indirect, dramatic lighting, with a guy at the head of the table resting his masked chin on his folded hands, going 'kukuku just as I planned'.

Nonsense!

All big frauds originate in cluttered midnight offices with the customers screaming over the phone for results and missed deadlines, and corners cut *just this once* to meet quarterly figures, and we'll make it up next quarter, or the next, or the next, and each corner cut is cut a little deeper, a little farther into the meat of the work, until there's nothing legit left, just a floor littered with disorderly piles of papers and the discarded shavings of propriety and probity, driftpiles of rubbish which used to belong to someone's integrity.

Fraud is committed in a breathless distressed hurry. Conspiracies consist of harried fraudsters each covering up each others' complicity in each other's accumulated little cut corners. There's no dramatically lit boardroom of conspiracy, no masks, no secret society, no guy in the shadows. Just compromised closed circles of friends.

It's snowfalls like this week's which has reminded me why snow-country architects use gables. They're not ornamental up here in the north, they're vitally useful for keeping the heaps of snow which comes tumbling off the roof from piling up in front of doors and all over walkways and steps! I *should* have gone out & cleared it as it fell, but no, I had to put it off until the morning, when it had all re-frozen into an impenetrable icy mass. The back of a rake & a lot of salt seems to have taken care of the mess, though.

Meh. I guess next season's tax credit won't be enough to pay for a roof re-design, will it? Eh, I suppose messing with roof design is a good way to create potential roof-leaks, anyways.

This is the best argument for Palin the politician I've seen since her July resignation. I guess I'm going to have to read the [expletive deleted] book, after all.

Since this used to be a bad poetry blog, I thought I ought to join the crowd pointing and laughing at Al Gore's rotten scansion. Especially since I once wrote my own global-warming poetical panic attack.

A certain alumni friend of mine who went on to become a drone for one of the Commonwealth's environmental nudge organizations replied angrily this morning to another, more conservative alumin friend's round-robin "ha-ha!" about Professor Mann's CRUhack problems with an angry counter-rant. Said eco-alumni friend is also violently hostile to Scientology, having grown up in Clearwater, Florida, which the Scientologists treat as a sort of Provo, Utah, or Vatican City. That is, if the Mormons or Catholics were a conspiratorial mafia-like pseudo-religious Ponzi scam.

So you see why I find it hilarious to see that somebody has dubbed the Hockey Team crowd "Climate Scientology".

Thanks to the Gormogons commune for cross-linking me the other day, BTW. They're a little hyper, but entertaining in a fashion I don't have the energy for these days. Like a room full of the Allahpundit, before he got all stodgy and turned into the elder statesman of Hot Air.

The batchelor cooking show.

Me, I think I've almost got this fish business down. I marinated way too much tilapia in a muck made of equal parts store-bought ginger/garlic marinade and canola oil, with another big hock of ginger and a couple cloves of garlic diced up and left to sit in the fridge for half a day. The muck & fish were chucked into a frying pan to simmer while I added a can of sliced mushrooms, half a can of bean sprouts, another half a can of sliced carrots, and a handful of green onions, properly cleaned & chopped up. Nuked a bag of pre-seasoned noodles in the meantime to give the concoction some grains, and dumped everything into a big honking bowl and ate it.

It was way too much food for one person, but fairly edible, and cooking it killed nearly forty minutes of a Thanksgiving otherwise occupied with dvd-watching.

On that front, the Dead Zone kind of went to heck after Michael Piller died. It's not a terrible show afterwards, but a lot of the moral core of the story was lost. It turns into yet another why-heartland-religious-folk-suck homily of the sort that TV types adore. One of the charms of the Dead Zone's first few seasons was its capacity for mostly avoiding that pitfall.

Later in the evening I started in on my new Sarah Connor Chronicles DVDs. About the same time that the Dead Zone and Battlestar Galactica lost their religious-moral plots, Sarah Connor found its voice. I had forgotten just how explicitly Christian the text got in the second season, and how earnest it was. The creator-writer was saying on a commentary how his father was giving him grief for going so New Testament when the family was observant Jewish, but that this was where the story went.

I had missed their intention that Cameron was running on free will from the end of the first episode of the second season onwards; I had just accepted the explicit text that her protect-John programming had rebooted properly; apparently the Terminator-vision "Terminate/override" display was *not* supposed to be the future-John hack, but rather the machine "choosing to cross the street against the light". It's a much cooler interpretation, and deepens the impact of the rest of the season. It's a crying shame the show got cancelled. Can't say I'm surprised, though. Watching it on DVD, you really get reminded of how they're filming in southern California. It must have been an extortionately expensive production.

On the plus side, another of my blind-purchases this month was the Tower of Druaga: Aegis of Uruk, and it turned out to be a really nice little show. It was well-animated, sweet-tempered, funny, and had a moral core inside of its faintly-preposterous RPG-style fantasy setting. I especially liked how the protagonist was a "Guardian", a type of warrior trained as a shieldwall specialist, someone whose whole purpose was to protect his fellows with a specialized shield-based tactical system.

I've been noticing the absence of the 'shield' as a physical metaphor in anime - it no doubt has something to do with cultural factors, but the Tower of Druaga definitely avoids that particular issue. The usual empty shounen declarations of desires to "protect" suddenly have substance when the boaster's whole deal is to be an immovable shield. What is ironic when spoken by the typical offensive-minded "sword-spirited" Japanese hero is sheer common-sense heroic when stated by a simple-minded guy with a big heavy shield and a desire to stand like a wall.

I'm a worse person than I was Sunday morning, and I blame Quentin Tarantino for it. I went to see Inglourious Basterds at the dollar theater yesterday afternoon, and came out of it angry, upset, and feeling deeply uncharitable to my fellow man. Tarantino movies have always shown a strong streak of nihilistic sadism in the past, but his ability to tie the meanness and viciousness back into a valid and occasionally sublime artistic summation has let me excuse that streak as part of his aesthetic creative engine. I'm thinking of material like the "Mr. Blonde w/ ear" scene in Reservoir Dogs, the Buck business in the first Kill Bill movie, the "eye" scenes in the second, and basically the whole script for Natural Born Killers. But he never really turned that sadistic nihilism against the viewing audience before like he has in Inglourious Basterds. (Well, I say that, but I've never gotten around to watching his contribution to the Grindhouse double-feature, so maybe it's in that.)

It's an ugly movie, a soul-eroding movie. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Blair Witch Project, but whereas that experiment turned its sadism, hatred, and fury against the film-maker as a class - message: stop looking! stop filming! leave evil be! - Tarantino's movie is a diatribe against the potential viewing audience. It's a film made with a burning rage against those who enjoy war pictures, especially those which fixate upon combat action footage. I'd apologize for spoiling, except that I honestly don't want anyone to see this movie, so I'll come out and describe what upset me:

Tarantino presents the film climax as the symbolic murder of the viewing audience. The set-piece is a three-fold terrorist assault upon a movie theatre filled with the National Socialist elite, complete with the "big four", Hitler, Goebbels et al. They're gathered together in a Paris theatre to watch the 1944 premiere of a high-budget propaganda piece about a German sniper's heroic one-man stand, filmed with the actual sniper a la Audie Murphy's autobiographical post-war film, To Hell and Back. In the build-up to the climatic bloodletting, we're repeatedly assaulted with snips and cuts from the propaganda piece, filmed in a cinema verite style with repeated on-screen killings of American soldiers. It's a brutal, ugly piece, and we're conditioned to hate the audience as they applaud every cleverly filmed death.

At the end, as the sniper-hero turns to the camera to deliver his propagandistic message to the audience, the doctored in-story film cuts out to the piece created by the actual film's heroine. She introduces herself as the Jew who is going to kill them all, in a presentation rather like the Apple 1984 commercial. At the end of the filmed clip, she gives the order to her awaiting accomplice, who starts a fire behind the screen, with an enormous pile of spilled-open nitrate film reels. The resulting cacophony is dominated by her posthumous maniacal laughing face, floating horribly over the smoke and fire and the brutal, gleefully filmed mass death.

Supposedly the whole picture was designed as an experiment in testing the hypothesis, "there isn't anything too terrible you can do to a Nazi in a film". I very much believe it. But the thing is, he's set it up so that there is no moral center to the film. The titular Basterds are murderous, animalistic clowns, with no dignity or humanity to them. The Germans are, well, Nazis - and unstintingly portrayed as such. Even the Marlene Dietrichesque double-agent actress is shown to be duplicitous and murderous. The Jewish heroine - a young woman who survives the murder of her family by the primary antagonist, Col. Landa - is never given an actual positive personality trait. She's as humorless and murderous as the hero of a third-rate Jacobean revenge tragedy; her only putative virtue is her victimhood.

The film ends with the scalping, torturing clown Lt. Raine gleefully proclaiming of one last, pointless mutilation that "I think this might just be my masterpiece." There is no escape from the sadism of this picture. I left the theatre sickened and ashamed to have participated in it by having sat through the whole show. Because the awful thing is, it was a "show", and a horribly gripping one, worse than a train-wreck, because train-wrecks are accidents and every last second of this film was planned. Even the clownishness, the ahistoricality, the bizarre mis-casting of Mike Myers as a British general, the buffoonery of the Hitler portrayal, the random anachronistic rock music and the sheer ludicrousness of the plot don't keep it from being compelling, doesn't keep it from being a coherent filmwatching experience.

But it is, quite simply, a dehumanizing movie. It seems to have been made to demoralize, to derange the moral sense. The film's view of war is a series of atrocities unconstrained by law, purpose, justice, discipline, or morality. But I can't say that it's an honestl anti-war film - the core message is too wrathful, consuming, hateful. The final image, of American soldiers mutilating a Nazi war criminal so that he can't ever take off the uniform, is calculated. The idea of never letting them take off their uniforms is a device which breaks down the bounds between the atrocity of war and the securities of peace which ought to be the concern of a proper anti-war, pacifistic message-picture. This device, and the way that it was placed just prior to the credits, rips open the war-atrocities the picture presents us & spills it into our safe-zones, like a bullet-punctured intestine leaking into a peritoneal sac.

Incidentally, I was the only person in the theater, barring only the occasional usher shuffling through. That theater's days are numbered, if they can't get an audience at a dollar a show, they're doomed.

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-

Source, comment at 09:56:00

Somebody leaked a massive document dump from the British Climate Research Unit, including a dozen years' worth of email spool, via a Russian ftp server in Tomask. There's still the chance that some of it might have been "salted" with faked emails, but CRU is talking to the media as if *they* think it's real, which suggests that their servers have been locked down by the authorities. The above email isn't even the most egregious example of conspiracy to commit fraud against Freedom of Information requests, it's just the one which implicates Dr. Mann of my alma mater, PSU. There are other emails showing members of CRU conspiring to blackball a journal editor who wasn't playng ball, and explicitly manipulating data to produce desired outcomes.

So far, only their pet website is hitting on Google. Keep in mind, RealClimate is actually *hosted* at CRU. It's their house organ. Full story here. BBC limited hang-out here.

A useful index of "hot" emails. I'm going to go ahead and say that this much dirt couldn't have been 'salted'. The sample's almost five carats!

I had a difficult conversation with a conservative co-worker this morning about Sarah Palin's new book. I'm getting kind of tired of the Alaskan merry-go-round. The over-educated fools freak out about her, she goes tabloid on them, they freak out some more, the soc-cons dump on the fools, the fools freak out at *them*, and then the populist right rallies 'round the flag & everyone gets dragged into a cult-of-celebrity policy-free zone.

The thing is, I like most of Palin's principles. Her heart seems to be in the right place, and she has the right policy instincts. But she keeps *engaging* with her detractors. There's too much of the reality-show about her whole scene. I want a politician who can talk like a statesman while spending most of her time in the trenches, working like a dog. The Alaska success story was a big selling point for me - until that appalling July 4th melodramatic resignation display. I worry about Palin being all short-winded flash and surface and cheerful pugnacity.

Worse, I worry about her propensity for opening up fissures, for whittling away at potential governing coalitions. There's a positive blizzard of shavings floating around these days. What we need is coalitional glue - the sort of figures who can get people who honestly can't stand each other to slouch sullenly in close enough proximity to build an approximation of a winning majority.

In short, we need someone who can lure all of you overbred, arrogant twits on the Main Line and in New England back to the GOP. Someone who won't bring out your class resentments and can calm your irrational status anxieties. I'm almost positive that ain't Sarah, and it should now be blindingly obvious it won't be me or anyone who thinks *like* me.

The mirrorball was on Fox News yesterday, advertising for a bipartisan partner to stave off a double-dip recession by massively raising taxes to pay for his obscenely profligate spending spree. Maybe Libby Dole might be interested? Being the Republican tax collector for Democratic welfare states is a Dole family tradition.

Suggestion, office-holding Republicans: don't. They have the majorities. They incurred the debts. They can pay the political price for the necessary taxes. Offer a minority bill repealing the stimulus acts & laying off large chunks of the domestic federal work force instead. Push the Republican health reform bill. Let them own their own irresponsibilities; increased taxes are more likely to cause a double-dip than "loss of public confidence", anyways. The difference between a probability and a near-certainty, admittedly, but still a distinction nonetheless.

"And now, we're going to become absolute tyrants..." sez President Mirrorball. The wonders of the ellipsis, no?

I've been marathoning Dead Zone, which I mostly missed when it was actually on TV & I actually had cable. It's much, much better than I had given it credit for back then. Some of the episodes strongly resemble that old joke about a supposed conundrum offered to philosophy students.

I've also been watching Tears to Tiara, which I bought blind. It's not as good. A bland action-fantasy harem anime, with no sexual tension, placed in a Celtic/Ancient British setting by writers who have never seen anything Celtic or Roman, and have severely stunted imaginative capacity. The show's warriors have never heard of shields, for instance.

The characters constantly kevetch about their lack of weapons, but everybody has swords, and in general are better-armed than the imperial enemy. They hunt *boar* with *longswords*, for the love of mike. Everybody has one set of elaborate-formal clothing, and they wear all of it in every circumstance - from hunting boar to milking a cow to fighting animate skeletons.

Galleys operate themselves, without any apparent crew or effort made by the protagonists to row, sail, or otherwise acknowledge that there's a ship to be run. The central nakama does everything, from hunting expedition to spying trip to forest ambush. Nevermind that said group of protagonists includes a cute, harmless little seeress with no apparent fighting skills. The imperials wear full armor at all times and in all occasions, except for the one chick who is clearly being set up for a heel face turn. Said armor never protects the wearer from being quickly disemboweled by the merciless protagonists, who lead a scrappy band of leathery hillbillies who never die on-screen.

Because of the way that the companies release shows in half-season "coers" these days, I now own half of this show. It's not badly-animated, and it isn't actively offensive. A mild case of OCD demands that I finish out the series, but we're not talking Heroic Age or Romeo+Juliet here. Those two weren't really brilliant shows by any objective measure, but they were highly-animated, clever at times, and very, very pretty. This is more... eh. For a show about a resurrected Great Demon King and his increasing collection of nubile young wives, it's moderately... dull. It's not even entertainingly sketchy.

I'm starting to fear that those people who say that the Large Hadron Collider's failures are due to its capacity for destroying existence - by collapsing the probability array & only allowing those possibilities in which it *doesn't* work - might be on to something. In short, we few possible futures have been spared by the operation of the Weak Anthropic Principle upon a Doomsday Device. Every future in which the LHC *worked* either the first or the second time has been obliterated, allowing only those possible futures where the device was thwarted by the accidents of fate or malice aforethought.

Maybe we ought to destroy the damn thing, if we want to be among the futures spared by the next attempted operation of Europe's Kreation Killing Kontraption.

*snap*

OK, that's it. NPR was burbling about how the apparent fact that yesterday's Fort Hood shootings were the result of Sudden Jihad Syndrome was yet another excuse for the CAIR crowd to cringe and snivel and cower behind the cowl of conditional victimhood. Spokesflacks all swearing on a stack of korans that it had *nothing* to do with religion, please report any anti-Muslim activity to your local law enforcement authority, yadda yadda snivel yadda.

Horsecrap. I don't want to goddamn hear it any more. It's time for the American "Muslim community" to either make a show of active renunciation of jihadis, not just "violence" or "indiscriminate violence", but the actual, real, Islam-espousing fanatics and radicals who have their own stack of Saudi-printed koranic commentary tellin' em to do exactly what that [expletive deleted] down in Texas did.

Some [expletive deleted] on this morning's radio actually said that - "indiscriminate violence", as if the guy had only shot a couple veterans who had actually killed members of al Queda or the Taliban in open warfare then the shooting rampage at Fort Hood would have been *justified* in this [expletive deleted]'s opinion.

Hell, I want to see bonfires. I want to see ceremonial, officious bonfires of Saudi-printed and sponsored Wahhabi propaganda in front of mosques, fed by the congregations of those mosques. I want to see a tangible, open demonstration of renunciation. I want a Bonfire of the Jihadi Vanities.

Because cowering behind a facade of fake victimhood this time ain't gonna cut it. It's your umma, I want to see some maniacs read out of it. The imams in Iraq are capable of explicitly throwing the killers out of the Community of God, of calling them the devil-worshipping death-idolizing monsters they are.

No more cringing in fear of your fellow Americans. Show some proof of cultural solidarity this time, or I'm calling it taqiyya.

Was out looking at computers & ended up buying and watching House of Flying Daggers. Strange movie, at the same time less obnoxiously political than Zhang Yimou's Hero, and much less well-put-together. Eyelines are crossed, fights are botched, actors aren't quite on their marks, etc. Technically weaker, and less polished. It still has moments of that unearthly painterly composition which made Hero so monstrously watchable, but the connective tissue is weak. The beginning, especially, is very stagy, mannerly in an old-fashioned way, like an old 40s Olivier film production. Then you hit the musical dance number, and suddenly it comes together for one of those set-pieces which make this sort of modern wuxia worth watching.

I think part of the problem might have been Yimou acting as his own cinematographer, to judge from that part of the making-of featurette I was able to stay awake through. There was a cinematographer listed, but his other work as one prior to this movie was on non-action titles, and it isn't the same guy who did Hero, who was an old gwailo pro named Doyle with a list of credits longer than my arm.

Wow. What a thing to say about your own mother. Corzine is just all class, isn't he?

Meh, pretty much everyone I voted for except for the judge slates lost. That's perverse - it includes *all* of the Democrats I voted for.

There was a meme going around - what are your top five anime, and what does that say about you? After somebody got me thinking about it from the view-point of "worst five", I buckled down & figured out my five most favorite:

Princess Tutu
Full Metal Panic Fumoffu!/Second Raid
Macross Plus
Maison Ikkoku
Gurren Lagann

I don't know what that means. Maybe I'm political-minded? Trying to balance out the magical girls/shoujo artsy crap with Tutu, the fanboy eye-candy with KyoAni FMP, respectable mecha with the Macross Plus oavs, old-school (and the best Takahashi anime by far) with MI, and the new kids stuff with Lagann? Maybe I'm trying to be *respectable*?

That I'm a bit of a cheat for trying to squeeze both KyoAni FMP series onto a single line?

Has somebody been drugging the Secretary of State? There are things that are true and obvious which cannot be said by a minister of foreign affairs - such as telling the Pakistanis to their faces that they're drunk-rolling whores who play both sides of the street. Which Secretary Clinton effectively did last week.

Look, I voted for her in the 2008 primaries. I *thought* she was more composed than this. I even agree with most of what she said. But the President *has* to sack her after this. It was worse than a crime - it was a mistake.

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?

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!"

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aigh! Snow tonight through Sunday! They're talking about *accumulation*, even down here in the bellybutton of the valley! (Admittedly not until Friday evening, but still!)

Damnit, I used to joke, but please - please! Bring back global warming!

The first hard frost of the season. Had to go dig my ice scraper out of the closet I had tossed it into during the moving process. At least I got the bulbs into the garden-box a week and a half ago, so that's taken care of.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.