If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna!

Likewise, if you have to buy a "bimbo box", buy one. Don't try to cushion the blow to your manly ego by buying something some idiot in marketing decided to label a "man van". Hell, I kind of like minivans. They aren't wire-rimmed milquetoasts playing cowboy dress-up like your average SUV, or pickup trucks languishing in two-car garages like big sheepdogs stuck inside a bachelor box with their townhouse-dwelling overcompensating owners.

h/t, although I'm seeing this one everywhere today.

I went on a hell of a DVD-buying binge this last month, due to a confluence of online sales at Deep Discount & Buy.com. My "to-watch" shelves are groaning under the pile, and I'm spending a lot of time in front of the TV, alternating between the box-set of the Shield & various anime series. This week it's Clannad.

I never watched Clannad in fansubs, because I had a bias against Key visual-novel adaptations. I was so utterly bored by Kanon (the awful 2000 Toei version) that for the longest time I referred to the whole subgenre as "retard moe". But I've been favorably impressed by Kyoto Animation's production style, the roseate skin-tones and gorgeous backgrounds, and Sentai's ads on their other releases for Clannad made me regret my initial refusal. So, I bought it expecting "scenery porn" - which means I'd basically be watching it for the landscapes.

So far, the backgrounds are ok, but nothing quite as gem-like as The Second Raid; at least not yet. But the story and writing is unexpectedly amusing, and not nearly as emo & overwrought as online commentary about "Jun Maeda's sad girls in snow" leads one to suspect. The protagonist is a mischievous liar, who likes to amuse himself by staging manzai routines with his gullible nakama of haremettes & token beta-male sidekick. It's nothing great, but so far it's an amusing way to waste a few hours of my life...

Oh, BTW - "clannad" isn't a word - there's a Celtic band which abbreviated "an clann as Dobhar" into "Clannad" for their name, and somebody at Key decided it meant "family" in Gaelic. It doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. But apparently Key intends "Clannad" to refer to the protagonist's search for family via nakama formation.

Oh, and btw - Sentai? If you feel the need to bombard the viewer with heaping piles of on-screen cultural note subtitles, it'd be nice if you put them in a secondary subtitle track. It's a little intrusive, and since I've been watching these things for nearly twenty years now, pretty redundant. Especially all the blow-by-blow details about what the various politeness-level gags mean in the Kotomi arc.

Yeah, if Obama thinks that he's Lincoln, he's apparently settled on Petraeus as his McClellan. Is he going to run CentCom remotely at the same time he's directly commanding in Afghanistan?

The general should remember what happened to Our George. Petraeus' little fainting spell even has a small parallel in McClellan's repeated bouts with typhoid fever [?]

So, the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale boom has touched down here in Bellefonte. At least some of the microfracking operations north of I-80 are pulling some fraction of their millions of gallons of water needed for the fracking process out of two small pumping stations here in the industrial park I work in. These days, there's usually at least one tanker-truck topping off for the trip upcounty to feed the new well-systems, and this Tuesday when I was walking around the loop there were three tankers hooked up to the pumps, and a fourth one passed one of the finished tankers as I headed back to my office.

They must have made arrangements with the Chamber to buy water from the industrial park's permits. Since the park is, at best, one-third full, I guess they had capacity to spare. Freakily enough, one of the regular tanker-trucks was originally a milk tanker, and still has milk placards all over it. I guess the boom came on so hard and fast that they've been re-purposing equipment like the milk tanker.

South Carolina continues to appear collectively determined to prove itself "too small for a country, too large for an insane asylum". The last month's deranged pig-pile on Nikki Haley aside, it appears that an unemployed, incoherent veteran with an outstanding felony charge for mopery has become the state's Democratic nominee against Sen. Jim DeMint.

Oh, well, at least the state's offering a congressional run-off between the state assembly's arguably most conservative (and only black!) Republican and the son of the late Strom Thurmond, one in which said conservative black Republican, Tim Scott, at least has a chance to win, since he did come in first during the primary proper. I entertain myself with the mental image of the old Dixiecrat rotting in his coffin, at a loss on whether to spin clockwise or widdershins.

h/t

Update: Oops. I don't know why, but the fact that South Carolina's felony-charge senatorial nominee is black makes it less funny and a lot more sad. I guess it's easier to laugh at a crazy good ol' boy than a wrecked black vet. That's too much like a guy I knew in college...

Quoth the Professor:

Brooks writes: “If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.”

I took a BA in History from PSU over a dozen years ago. While I *did* read all three of the above, it wasn't because we studied them in class, nor did they appear on any syllabus of any class I took for credit. I had to seek them out and read them on my own hook, usually in between all the busy-work rubbish which clutters up the modern undergraduate experience.

I got more out of my proximity to the library stacks & the bookstores in town than I ever did from in-class assignments. Penn State in the early Nineties had simply assembled the elements for a first-class auto-didactic experience. Whether you did anything with it was your own look-out.

There's a quote from Carlyle carved into the facade of Pattee Library on campus: "The true university is a collection of books". At times I think the faculty took that sentiment a hair too seriously.

I love these sorts of stories. They make me feel like it isn't all sliding into the sewers, and the pipes are starting to back up. Basically, there's a pan-Asian boom in "Gobar Gas", which is a cute South Asian euphemism for dung-fermentation engines which produce quality biofertilizer and limited biogas for home use. The Gurkhas, who are mercenaries recruited from the back hollers of Nepal for those of you who don't really pay attention to British regimental culture, got deployed to Afghanistan, and noticed that the locals, who live in pretty much the same sort of country as back home, hadn't heard of Gobar Gas.

There's a push on to get the Afghans started on a Gobar Gas installation path - if there's a place on the planet with a greater need for fertilizer, cheap local energy, and the preservation of what few trees remain, it's back-country Afghanistan.

Further note on Death and Life of Great American Cities - boy, Jane Jacobs hated cars. Not necessarily on an intellectual level - she tries her damnedest to be even-handed and fair - but you can just smell the fury burning off the paper. A smouldering stench of fried ink. She sounds like a farmer on the losing end of a range-war, seething about lawless cowhands and sheep-herding savages. Lots of bloody-minded fulmnating about "attrition of automobiles by city" and plots to deliberately obstruct vehicular traffic.

Just checking in, I've been pretty busy since Memorial Day weekend. I'm reading Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities which is interesting, but since I'm not finding much to argue with, there's not a lot I can fruitfully write about. I get the impression that she's too infatuated with pointless bustle for its own sake, and I'm not convinced that her diversity is proof against racial tension. I keep thinking that she under-appreciates the logistical horrors her beloved mixed-use economic chaos imposes upon city infrastructure, and I'm having difficulty disassociating my post-modern assumptions that small-scale city commerce is inherently expensive and inconvenient - my childhood experience of going into Pittsburgh and other big-city downtowns mostly in search of rare and old books & anime back in the pre-DVD days.

Also, I have the nastiest suspicion she's working her way into endorsing rent controls, but I haven't finished it yet, so maybe not. I'm still working my way into the opening chapter in the last section, on policy prescriptions.

Whenever you see a story about a politician, ask yourself: Where is the proof that this happened?. I think that's an excellent thing to do.

You want proof that Palin mowed the lawn?

Two comments on a culture-clash post by Althouse on the Palin's creepy new journalist-stalker neighbor.

Yeah, OK, that's it. Stop tasking the president with this oil spill crap. He's an [expletive deleted], but oil spills aren't really his direct responsibility, and the root of his whole faction's ideology is the nationalization of every issue, the governmental usurpation of every problem, every dilemma, every decision. We shouldn't be buying into this whole "the president was hired to fix every problem" delusion, even if it does make for a nifty hammer to batter our partisan opponent currently in office.

In cases like this where the solution isn't obvious or subject to brute-force methods, direct governmental intervention, or properly speaking, militarization of the response is counter-productive. Experimentation and new ideas bubble upwards - they don't seep down. I was intrigued by this idea, which they've been working on for twenty years now, and looking for an opportunity to try out, but I don't want the government grabbing a hold of it and running wild with it, either. Because it probably won't work. I am often intrigued by ideas which don't pan out. Most ideas don't. Small-scale failures are invaluable, because they reveal bad ideas in small crucibles without burning the whole damn lab down.

But government has a bad habit of reinforcing failure, because government operates by ego, not profit or logic. Small-scale offends the healthy ego. If you're going to win, win BIG, and of course you'll win - you're the GOVERNMENT!

Government solutions only really work when the problem is subject to suffocation by enormity. I think it's becoming increasingly obvious that the Gulf oil spill isn't really something that can be suffocated by burying it under with Big.

So PA-12 embarrassed and disappointed us all. Again. I'm done with the 12th, it's a mirage, a white elephant, a rocky shore upon which too many barques have broken. It will be broken up itself in the next redistricting, and hopefully the corrupted populace of that pork-bloated blot upon the landscape won't have too much effect in the politics of the neighboring districts that will have to absorb them.

Meanwhile, every newspaper site I look at this morning is coated in an infuriating slime of pop-ups, intrusively animated ads, and general irritation. Thank the hypothetical I don't have a sound card in this machine, I have no doubt my ears would be ringing with the desperate shrieks of marketing gone mad.

The primary elections for Pennsylvania are coming up a week from today. I have a pretty good idea whom I'm voting for with most of the races - Corbett for governor, Toomey for the Senate, any tea party candidates available for the party functionary offices, and the incumbents for the state legislature. However, there's an unmanageable mass of Republican candidates for lieutenant governor, none of which I've ever heard of, and now I'm wondering if it's worth the effort to figure out which one's least objectionable.

Is the lieutenant governancy worth a bucket of warm spit? We survived five years of the grossly incompetent, senile, or just plain crazy Catherine Baker Knoll, and I see that she died three years ago & was replaced without my having even noticed it. On the other hand, it is useful to have a competent lt. governor on hand if something takes the sitting governor out of office - Schweiker was a better governor than the elected clod he replaced, to cite an example.

So, then, is there a Schweiker lurking in the pack of would-be lt. governors?

Update: Where the heck does the state party apparatus get off endorsing statewide candidates in the primaries? That's reason enough to *not* vote for Cawley. I'm starting to like Kennedy, although I don't fancy an "insurgent" candidate with enough money to air a lengthy radio ad like the one I heard going to lunch this afternoon.

Still and all, while ideological purity is tempting, state offices tend to be technocratic positions, demanding organizational and financial competence. Obama's myth of competence would have *never* have survived a term as governor of Illinois. He merely presents as a technocrat - he obviously has no interest in actual work. All this being a pretty good argument for Jean Craige Pepper, who seems to have decent financial management experience.

Of course, the worry with technocrats is that they'll turn out to be Herbert Hoovers - the Peter Principle writ catastrophically large. Also, you should watch out for signs of corporatist inclinations with candidates with big-business CVs. Are they the sorts that want to reduce governance to "bringing everyone to the table"? The bane of "reasonable men", really. And I don't like the whole paleofeminist come-on. It's tone-deaf and whiny.

Ugh. Kennedy seems like a crank.

Pixy went and challenged his audience to come up with a ten-most-representative list of anime from 2000-2009. First off, in order to come up with these representatives, you need to come up with proper categories for the period under consideration. Und so:

1) Magical Girl

It's debatable whether the Oughts were a good decade for Magical Girl. It's a shoujo category (aside from seinen parodies - see next catagory), and shoujo anime's had a bad, no-good, limping lame decade. The resources have been mostly sucked into otaku rubbish, and fujoshi are a distinctly minor and incidental audience for the anime studios. Furthermore, fujoshi couldn't care less about magical girls. There's something distinctly Showa or early Heisei about traditional mahou shoujo. As the decade wore on, the magical girl show went somewhat sideways - becoming increasingly baroque, odd, or just plain decadent - notable examples include ballet fever-dream Princess Tutu, the slow and cheerful-doomed fatalism of In Search of a Full Moon or the impenetrable, gnomicly endless Pretty Cure franchise. So, creeping in just under the 2000 start-line, I'm going with the final word in old-school magical girl, CLAMP's Card Captor Sakura.

2) Magical Girlfriend

(note, these are completely distinct and mostly-unrelated - see My Wife is a Magical Girl for exception to rule.)

Magical girlfriend, unlike magical girl, is a masculine, otaku-ish wish fulfillment genre - a literal Manic Pixie Dream Girl descends upon nebbish protagonist & makes him into a man. Our heroine is some sort of magical being - goddess, devil, fairy, ghost, etc, etc - who for whatever reason, appears to live with protagonist & make his life wonderfully awful. These are endless, and so forgettable that you find yourself forgetting the details before the DVD stops spinning in the drive, but notable examples include Crazy Shrine Maidens Kannagi, Steel Angel Kurumi, Mahoromatic, and an absolutely endless parade of their peers and lesser lights. This one has to be the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, wherein our protagonist discovers that God is a petulant, bored high school girl who must be entertained upon pain of Armeggedon; think of it as Kierkegaard in a moe moment, Fear and Trembling before the Demiurge in a sailor fuku.

3) The Reverse Harem.

Traditionally, the harem show is male-oriented, but the Oughts saw an influx of harems full of bishounen for the ladies, as the fujoshi cannibalized what remained of the dying shoujo anime market. And we saw a bunch of good ones, such as Pretear, Ouran High School Host Club, and the Wallflower. But as good as those shows are, the rose has to go to the original reverse-harem - 2001's Fruits Basket.

4) Juvenile Delinquents

We don't tend to see many of these over here, because the art-style is generally ugly, the sentiments rather barbaric, and the comedy brash, brutal, and kind of insular. But there were a number of these which worked pretty well in the Oughts - the yakuza-schoolteacher school comedy Gokusen, the magical-girlfriend fusion Midori's Days, the thugs-and-Freddie-Mercury-do-Azumanga Daioh comedy Cromartie High School, and even the much-maligned street-fighting comedy Air Master. But the show to watch in this category is 2002's Tenshi na Konamaiki, whose manga was released in the states by Viz under the name Cheeky Angel. Yeah, I was just saying over on AoD that there isn't a chance in hell of it ever getting licensed in North America. I don't care, it's funny as all heck.

5) Real Robot mecha

There are generally two types of mecha shows, semi-realistic "robots are pilotable tanks", and the broad-wild-crazy "robots are Gods Upon The Earth". This is the former, and as it sounds, it tends more towards the realistic. Mecha doesn't really go out of fashion, but sometimes the fashions take certain fans out of what they're doing in Japan at the moment. I thought about giving this palm to Kyoto Animation's Full Metal Panic: the Second Raid, but that show's a sequel, and its original just didn't have the steam to bring a new fan into the spirit of the thing. So I'm going to go with the glorious, mad, Lord-Byron-beautiful Code Geass, which took an alternate-universe political soap opera, filled it with roller-blading mecha, and put a swanning teen-aged Magnificent Bastard anti-villain at its manic core.

6) God Robot mecha

And while we're on the subject of the two types of mecha, here's the other side of the coin - the giddy, testosterone-poisoned God Robot genre. The Nineties were a better decade for God Robots than the Oughts, what with Evangelion, Rahxephon, Neo-Ranga, and the like, and I could have been convinced to leave this category out for lack of good examples; the only specimens were dripping with irony and the stink of sweaty fanboy parody.

Then Gainax made Gurren Lagann, and all of a sudden we're in the midst of a minor Go Nagai revival. Hot-blooded raging giant robots are back, and they've beaten irony to death with the backside of a ten-ton drill.

7) Psychic Fightin' Teenagers

Now we come to a genre I don't have much use for - Naruto, Tokyo Underground, Tokyo Maijin, Bleach, etc. I thought of going with A Certain Magical Index or its yuri-iffic sequel A Certain Scientific Railgun, but they're neither particularly good nor particularly representative.

Psychic Fightin'Teenagers shows are kind of eh, but it's the sort of eh which people - other people - love the heck out of. But, I do have a fondness for the Bleach manga, and I discovered last year that my father watches it on Cartoon Network. That's enough to pull you out of the pack of shounen jive, Bleach. Congrats, you suck a little less than your peers!

8) Moeblob

Moe is ineffable - to define it is to kill it. I am ashamed to admit that I watch far more of it than I'd like people to think, because it really does sail way, way too close to lolita-complex skeeviness. The Oughts are pretty well dominated by the Reign of Moe, from Azumanga Daioh to Lucky Star to K-On!

I'm tempted to be obnoxious and cite the killer-loli slasher-moe that I'm watching right now, When They Cry, but it isn't all that well-animated, and really, why go for the shock value? So I'm going to grab for something from Shaft and Akiyuki Shinbo, the King of Moe. It has to be Hidemari Sketch, a completely and utterly platonic ideal of moe.

9) Kung Fu, Gun-Fu, and Contemporary Hardasses

Criminals, kempo masters, cops, and gunsels - there's a lot of this going out there; Nabeshin when he's being all serious and calling himself Shinchiro Watanabe is a past master of this sort of thing - see examples like Samurai Champloo, Michiko and Hatchin, and Cowboy Bebop. But this decade's most essential gun-fu calvacade of badassery is Black Lagoon, with its black-and-coal-black morality, corrupted view-point protagonist and his Ax Crazy/Heroic Sociopath kidnapper-slash-love-interest. It really is essential viewing - just don't watch it with children in the room.

10) Weaponized Women

Girls with Guns is *so* Eighties. The Oughts' innovation along these lines have been crudely called "Pokegirls", but I prefer the old gag translation of Saikano, "Weaponized Girlfriend". Sometimes it's literal, like the fighter-plane-legged heroines of Strike Witches, sometimes they're mutated escapees from the magical girl ghetto like Nanoha, and sometimes the badassery is bionic and all on the inside, like Kiddy Grade, but mostly it's cute girls with the individual destructive capacity of a mid-range Third World Military and the aerial agility of aerobatic stunt squadron pilots. This one is definitely going to be One Maiden Army Corps exemplar Mai Otome.

Lies!

Saturday Night Live was never funny. You were just sleep-stoned or otherwise addled enough to laugh at anything said or done with a knowing smirk.

Oh, and "The Moderate Voice" has become horrifically orwellian and echo-chamber nuts. Avoid at all costs.

The irony here, if I understand the thesis, is that the robust, pugnacious, resilient pioneer types whom Robert Heinlein idealized, are precisely the opposite of the actual subjects of a hypothetical Ira Howard Foundation project. Namely, that the heredity which is selected for in marginal and harsh environments - most of human existence prior to the late nineteenth century, in the formulation of the linked essay - is for fast-burners, short-lived members of the species who are capable of surviving deprivation, disease, stress and predation through their youth & long enough to reproduce. Supposedly the removal of such environmental stressors due to the onset of late modernity is allowing slow-burners to reproduce more effectively, thus increasing the average lifespan of the species.

Given that late modernity also presents an increasingly low birth rate to parallel the increase in average lifespan, I rather suspect that this theory is bollocks. I just was amused by the thought of Heinlein rolling over in his grave at the thought of a real world equivalent of his Lazarus Long being an uncoordinated, impractical, hollow-chested, introverted, under-sexed Last Man.

h/t

Big to-do with people stuck in Europe because of Eyjafjallajokull (everybody's joking that the volcano's name looks like the result of letting your cat crawl off your lap onto the keyboard, btw). I was talking to my company's president last night, and he mentioned in passing that our CEO, who hasn't been in the office recently, is stuck in France right now. I joked about him getting a berth on a ship back to the States, and the president rather seriously noted that everything's bought up for months in advance along those terms.

I speculated that there's somebody converting freighters for the passenger trade as we spoke.

Terrible news - John "Sco" Scofield, an old Otakon hand who was con chair in 1998, has died of cancer. I hadn't seen him in years, and had no idea he was sick.

Sco worked for the NSA. He was an old-fashioned tech guy, but he worked in the guest relations department at the con. He was the first chair of the convention who wasn't part of the old "PSSFS-Alumni" clique. He lived in Maryland somewhere between Baltimore and DC. We had a couple of planning meetings at his condo; I remember he had a small pachinko machine in his living room.

The last time I saw him was at a "ComCon" winter gathering back when I had come back to the convention to work as a nameless goon in the registration department. That must have been February 2003. This is kind of a shock, he was far too young for this.

Sadly, the America of new frontiers and bright mornings was long ago. Today we live in Hospice America, where caretakers with first-class temperaments and sharply creased trousers make us comfortable in the face of inevitable decline… and forward the bills for our end-of-greatness care to our children, who will go bankrupt paying them.

Ouch. He gets sharper-tongued as he builds momentum through the following paragraphs. I've been reading Luttwak's Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. It will soon be important to know and advocate those stratagems which have proven themselves over the long run for the weakened and enfeebled hegemon which has lost her strategic depth and has little muscle left to confront threats directly. We operate according to the maxims of Western modernity, of vigour and direct confrontation - the time may soon be coming where our bankruptcy will require we learn the vicious arts of diversion, conspiracy, discord, and careful, parsimonious bribery.

h/t

Thanks to everybody who came on up to Bellefonte for our big alumni gaming get-together & skeet shoot this weekend. It was great having everybody over, I look forward to hosting one of these little get-togethers again.

I'll try to get the kitchen a little better-stocked next time, I promise! ^_^

The new company blog.

There was a little Tea Party protest in front of the Bellefonte courthouse, about two dozen folks clustered in and around the Civil War monument around the feet of Statuary Andrew Curtin. I bought a little Gadsden flag from their donation-table, but I didn't hang around. Today's a work day, right?

There was a two or three-man electric geezer-rock band playing a set over by the courthouse steps. I assumed they were with the protesters. No sign of griefers, but I didn't really bother reading all the signs. If there were any troublemakers, in a "crowd" of twenty-some people, I'd have expected to have heard or seen something. There were at least three people with cameras - possibly more, I passed a woman carrying a tripod the other way when I went over to the square from having dropped some mail off at the post office.

Hahahahahahahahahaha-[wheeeeeezewheeeeze]-hahahaheeeehehahahehehehah[dies]

Snerk.

This whole "crashing the Tea Party" business is a little goofy. The one party I actually went to - in State College on April 15th of last year - had a guy in a tea bag costume whom I was pretty sure was making fun of the gathering. Nobody paid him any mind, because he was a fifty-year-old hippie wearing a man-sized tea bag. "Griefing" is at the same time older than folks give it credit for, and less serious.

Don't get excited until the guys in the black ski masks show up. And it shouldn't matter if the guy holding a blatantly racist sign is a griefer or for real - you still should ask him to go home & leave his racial hang-ups in the closet with the white hood, regardless of whether his klan drag is meant ironically or in dead earnest.

(I should mention that I haven't run into or even seen pictures of these legendary, mythical anti-Obama racist protesters in the actual flesh. It can be hard to tell the mobys from the actual David Dukes online.)

Thought for the day:

Rock smashes scissors
Scissors cut paper
Paper wraps rock
Rock crushes lizard
Lizard poisons Spock
Spock disassembles scissors
Scissors decapitates lizard
Lizard eats paper
Paper refutes Spock.
Spock vaporizes rock.
-the Big Bang Theory's game expansion for "Rock Scissors Paper"

On a walk through town this morning, I discovered two things. Firstly, there's a new used-book store opening in the Crider Exchange, the signs are very cryptic as to when they're actually opening the doors, but it looks like they're still organizing.

Secondly, there was a parade scheduled through town for a welcoming-home ceremony for the State College company of the 112th Infantry. So I got a little flag & watched. For some reason, they put the company's flatbed at the front of the parade, later on I realized that it was because they were going to meet up with their families at the armory and watch the rest of the parade when it wound its way out to the edge of town, but while I was standing down at the courthouse, all I could think was "why isn't the band in front?"

They really need to stop throwing candy to the children at these things. I kind of think it breeds the wrong attitude in the young'ins. Also, it seems kind of hazardous, what with all the scurrying around in the presence of moving vehicles. And the lost bits of candy in the gutters will attract vermin long after the parade is over.

But yeah, welcome home, gentlemen. I understand there's a party for the families out at the armory until 6:30 PM today. Have fun!

You know it's a strange night when you dream about real estate & you aren't even in the market. It eventually evolved into a nightmarish bar-crawl through a peculiar imaginary version of Chicago where they'd built grain-elevators-cum-seawalls across the slums of the South Side to protect against - what, tsunamis from Lake Michigan?

I suppose it was set off by noticing the flocks of for-sale signs springing up all over Bellefonte. Prices look to be going down, too. There's a foreclosure sale over in the neighborhood I used to rent in. There are *two* houses around the place on S. Spring that I almost bought until I came to my senses & realized it was a structural disaster; one of them just got their listing price cut by 5k. I'm queasily wondering how much value my place has lost since my closing...

Yeah, everybody's having fun with Rep. Johnson's befuddled brain-fart about Guam "tipping over", but folks ought to remember that this guy was the lesser of two evils for conservatives a while back when he primaried Cynthia McKinney. I'm not kidding, he got support from Red State. He's *still* the sanest congressman to grace that district this decade.

YEAOWCH!

Stupid &#$@!ing knee joint... about fifteen feet from the employee's entrance at work, my right knee dislocated, bad on a slick bit of heavy frost. Had to punch the kneecap back into place. Boy, that hurt. They saw me inside, and helped me to my desk. This hasn't happened in at least five years, and thank god for that. Hurts like a sunofagun. I'm going to have to find where I left that stupid ace bandage...

There's nothing quite so surreal as sitting in a bar, listening to a Glenn Beck-esque harangue from a Republican, female pagan social worker about the evils of the 2010 census form, and thinking that you aren't nearly as conservative as you thought you were. Strange world.

I got yelled at by a co-worker for having already mailed in my census form. I pointed out that there was very little chance of my household acquiring any additional inhabitants prior to April 1st, and he said that wasn't the point.

And yes, I checked the "Race: Other" & wrote-in "American". If Pakistani counts as a race, so does "American". Heck, an "Asian" is an inhabitant of a continent - any racial definition which includes Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, mainland Hindus, Afghans, Han Chinese, and Iranians can only be as valid as a similarly genetically-blind "American" agglomeration.

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.