Who *are* the greatest living Americans? It's a hard question, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, "call no man lucky until he is dead", similarly, trust no evaluations of greatness until their accomplishments have stood the test of time and weathered a crisis or three. Five years ago, Alan Greenspan would have been on my list. Three and a half years ago, Ben Bernanke would have been on it. At one point George Soros was a candidate, before I read more about him & realized just how much of a villain with good publicity he really was.

Secondly, don't confuse good intentions with greatness. George W. Bush is a good man, and occasionally a competent politician and passable statesman. He still failed when it was important, and left a mess for those that come after him. The same goes for most politicians, whom as a class are generally second-rate intellects and second-rate human beings, at best.

Thirdly, it really does seem as if fewer and fewer real innovators, real leaders, real thinkers are left in our polity. The true giants were by and large pre-boomers, and are dying off at a rapid pace. Milton Friedman is gone, so is Norman Borlaug, Ronald Reagan, Sam Walton... The heroic figure has largely been eclipsed by the celebrity in the public eye. Despite all the self-serving Randian piffle of the last two years, there are no John Galts or Howard Roarks on the national scene; the best we can offer is Donald Trump. We don't really have any true robber-barons, and many of those we have, aren't Americans at all, like Rupert Murdoch or Richard Branson.

Fourthly, there may be a set of "greatest living Americans" whom no-one has ever heard of, "for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." Our awful, worthless media are of no help in this regard.

I don't know, I'd essay Rudy Guiliani, if only for how he did the one thing that no-one would have ever expected in the days of my childhood - redeeming unredeemable Gotham, diverting it from its self-demolition, if only for a generation, if only for a bit... Perhaps T. Boone Pickens? It's sometimes hard to tell a true captain of industry from a self-promoting con artist of monumental proportions. Look at Lee Iaccoca!

Logically speaking, there should be some great man or woman lurking in the medical research field, with all the activity of the last thirty years, but it's all been so bureaucratized and corporatized, it's hard to spot the motive man among the Organization Men... I don't know, maybe Leland Hartwell or Robert Horvitz.

(While looking around, I noticed this strange duck, Ahmed H. Zewail. Can't decide if he's technically an American or an Egyptian. He seems to live in the US, with citizenship, but anyone who has rumors about him running for the presidency of another nation is a dubious example of an "American". It's like claiming Golda Meir as an American, I think.)

Nanotechnology would seem to be a fertile field for earth-shakers, but the only people in that field I'm likely to have heard of - like Eric Drexler - are most likely nothing more than popularizers. Huh, looking around, some of the American candidates in nanotechnology are already dead - Richard Smalley for one. The field hasn't even come close to fulfilling even a hint of its promise, and already the pioneers are leaving us. Yet another example of how greatness is only proven in many cases posthumously. Examples like Norman Borlaug are rare indeed!

Oh heck yeah. Although really, playing hard-ball welfare-paternalism in a season of massive popular dependence on the dole might not be the most tactically sound attitude.

We had another fire in my end of town, BTW. Third fire on Bishop in the last year, second one on that block. A badly run-down rental duplex on one of the worst blocks in town. Pretty crowded area, they couldn't fit all of the fire trucks close enough to bring all the equipment to bear. Ironically enough, all of these fires have been within a block and a half of the Undine fire station. I wasn't the only looky-loo, half the town was crowded around rubbernecking.

Now that I look at the local paper, I see that those additional sirens I heard afterwards was due to another fire over in the Bush Extension on Reynolds Avenue. The duplex sounds like a total loss. I had thought it was a Victorian, but the owner claims it was 1930s-vintage.

There's some pretty ferocious discussion in the comments of the duplex story about the regulation of Section 8 housing, with commentary about how many of these units in Bellefonte have burnt due to bad wiring. As for the later comments... I'm sorry, but if you're on public assistance, the way you live your life is everyone's business, and you shouldn't beg with one breath and demand respect for your privacy with the next breath. Speaking of breath, I saw at least one very young firefighter sitting wiped out back on South Ridge by the ambulance, either heatstroked or suffering from smoke inhalation.

Well, hell. Apparently Del Rey's bailing out of the manga publishing business, possibly in favor of packaging for Kodansha USA instead, distributing for hire. While the shift-over might conceivably occur painlessly, industry folk suggest that Kodansha has been spectacularly inept so far, and "trainwreck inside the station" is the way to bet.

This kind of sucks. I'll have to tally up the Del Rey titles I've been buying which will either be terminally delayed, or just plain terminated. Let's see...

Nodame Cantabile - no great loss here, it should have ended a couple volumes back. It's just been spinning wheels since about three volumes into the Paris continuation of the story.

XXXholic - again, this is a manga past its prime. The most interesting character has disappeared, CLAMP is relying more and more heavily on cross-overs with a separate title I honestly can't stand, and there just isn't much more life in the story.

Genshiken - actually, this title was finished, but word just popped last month that the mangaka is reviving it. A delay wouldn't affect matters here at all, since we wouldn't see a new volume for over a year regardless.

Moyasimon - this is the one which will hurt. It's a fun comic, but we've gotten two volumes in as many years. Another delay of another year will just kill interest, and thus kill the title dead.

My Heavenly Hockey Club - honestly, this comic is the second-weakest Ai Morinaga title in US release. I would gladly see this one killed dead in exchange for another volume of Duck Prince, orphaned by the CPM implosion.

Princess Resurrection - fun; but I barely noticed its failure to release. Put it in the "please don't kill her!" column, but barely.

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei - boy, this one is snakebit in the US. The brilliant SHAFT anime adaptation is stuck in turnaround, imprisoned by MediaBlaster's slow-motion demolition. Still and all, I like it, and it was getting better with time and repetition. Jokes which were merely amusing in the first two volumes were positively lacerating by the third or fourth time around in later volumes. Repetition is very kind to Koji Kumeta's sort of humor.

the Wallflower - speaking of repetition... this manga is over twenty volumes long. If it were about anything substantial, its welcome would be long-since worn-out. But the recent volumes were what they've always been - pleasant ways to waste an hour without thinking too hard.

School Rumble - again, nothing great or grand, but the recent omnibus was a good way to kill a couple hours. It's close to the end, I hear...

Yozakura Quartet - this one just never paid off on its promise; the story was gloomy and down-beat, compared to the characterization and tone. "Tonal dissonance" and failure to make much sense left this comic an exercise in pretty nothingness.

A presidential order to stop whining has apparently been taken as an invitation to snivel instead. If only all opportunities for schadenfreude were so harmless...

You know, at this point, just assume any smartass link-based comment is due to an Instapundit h/t unless otherwise noted.

Huh. You learn something new every day. Apparently Germany's been paying off its Treaty of Versailles war debt for the last twenty years, or more accurately, paying off the bonds that the Weimar Republic issued in the early 30s to settle their war reparations obligations. The bonds were repudiated by the Third Reich, sat around until the West German government agreed in principle to resume payment after reunification in the early 50s, and the reunited Germany started actually paying the debt in 1991.

That's... very German.

Noticed via Red State, of all places.

Meh. In this situation, I think I believe inter arma enim silent leges - "In times of war, the law falls silent." Anwar Awlaki might be an American citizen, but he is self-exiled, in rebellion against constituted authority, and actively plotting to murder his fellow citizens. He can either surrender himself to said duly constituted authority, or die screaming in some Yemeni shithole.

Really, it's his choice.

I like this:
If you’re not willing to have somebody hauled off at gunpoint over the project, then it’s probably not a legitimate concern of the state.

Via Instapundit, although I'd probably have come across it myself later in the day.

During the weekend, I walk around Bellefonte while reading. I see most of the streets in town once or twice a month during the sunny season. I've yet to see a single political sign in town since they pulled down the primary signs, and only a single new political bumpersticker, an ant-Jim "raging anti-Semite" Moran sticker on a car with Virginia plates. But it does look like somebody from the Sestak campaign did a pamphlet drop in Rainbow's End this morning. Not a very efficient one - I saw a couple stuffed under windshield wiper blades here and there.

I'm reading a book on the Lindsay years in New York City, called the Ungovernable City. A little slow going, and intermittently *very* irritating. For those of you who aren't New Yorkers of a certain age, John Lindsay was the first "the next JFK", a tall and stylish liberal congressman from Manhattan's only Republican district, who successfully rolled into the Mayor's office at the head of one of those typical Gotham "fusion" tickets which regularly leverages left-ish Republican politicians into office at the head of coalitions of irate "reform" democrats. (See La Guardia, Mitchel and, I suppose, Bloomsberg in a sense.) He was the Fair-Haired Boy for about a year, mooted for the Republican presidential nomination for '68, all that. Very moddish, liked to walk the streets of New York's ghetto districts, surrounded by a swarm of Ivy League grads, liked to talk a good libertarian game.

Unfortunately, Lindsay's "libertarianism" was the sort that assumes a bloated government & believes that the way to control inequitable distribution of power is to enlarge the problem with bigger and bigger organizations & centralized, patriarchal authority. Not, in point of fact, actually any sort of libertarianism at all, but rather a recognizably liberal brand of fascism. His people were very fond of labeling all of their many enemies as "racist". Of course, back then, a number of those enemies actually *were* racist - look up what the acronym "SPONGE" abbreviates, if you care for a sample. But the Lindsay crowd was fond of stunts like trying to tie William F. Buckley to the Birchers... anyways, I think I would have gone batty dealing with that time. Liberalism was in the saddle, and beside it rode Riots, Rent Control, Youth Rebellion and Family Dissolution.

Is it pretentious to read xkvd even though you need wikipedia to get the math jokes? (Especially if you still don't get it after a quarter-hour reading & not understanding how Ackermann functions work?)

Oh, btw: another explanation I didn't get. (Having read through it three times now... nope, still not getting it.)

Hah! Such confidence in the campaign prowess of their bosses! I suppose it pays to think ahead, and prepare parachutes while you can.

I've been watching the Delaware disaster with a mixture amusement and horror. Prior to the primary election I didn't think much of O'Donnell, but the event has made me think even less of Castle and the NRSC in particular. This sort of feckless, squalid ineptitude is exactly why I've refused to give a dollar to that collection of grasping, sordid hacks, no matter how many times they hire out a call-bank to sweet-talk me into donating. Still and all, it's hard to take Delaware seriously; as far as I'm concerned, it's just three wayward counties of the Commonwealth that fast-talked themselves into a separate seats at the Continental Congress. Nowadays, it's the conglomerate capital of the country, more corporate lawyers per square meter than any place on earth, and proof positive that the modern corporation isn't synonymous with conservatism, Republicanism, or free-market ideology in general.

So, I've been quiet for too long. For the most part, I've just been walking and reading (mostly nonfiction - spent like three weeks on Caro's behemoth biography of Robert Moses) and working through my backlog of DVDs. I've been buying more than I have time to watch, and frankly, I've not the most active of social calendars to begin with. I had some old friends in from out of town on Labor Day weekend.

Hmm.

I suppose I could talk about my recent Kyoto Animation binge. I had a fairly positive reaction to their galge (visual novel? I don't know, I sometimes have difficulty telling the two genres apart) adaptations Clannad and Clannad After Story. So, the next time I spotted them on sale, I bought their earlier Key adaptations, Kanon and Air.

Apparently some folks group them together as Key's "Seasons", Clannad being "spring", Kanon "winter" and Air "summer" - I don't know if one of Key's other visual novels is the missing "autumn" or if it's just the three. The seasonal themes of Air and Kanon are much more obvious and intuitive than Clannad's, which is more notational, and frankly, I think that somebody, somewhere just forced the "fit" by grabbing for the cherry blossom scene at the beginning of that later series.

Kanon turned out to be definitely worth the purchase, and was full of "scenery porn" and sharp writing. There's a lot of excellent animation in that show, and very little in the way of "kwality". Like Clannad, it starts out cheery and light-minded, with a lot of easy, cynical Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya-style humor, but it's all sandbagging in preparation for the mother of all tear-jerkers. The Kyoto Animation Kanon is like a fiendish, diabolical machine for the harvest of the tears of otaku, and it was wrought *very* cleverly indeed.

The strange thing is, is that the Kyoto Animation two-cour Kanon of 2006 was a remake of the original one-cour TV series from Toei in 2002. I made the mistake of tryng to watch Big Dave's archival copy of the fansubs of the Toei Kanon sometime last decade, and came across so utterly, completely repulsed and bored that I only got through the second episode by inventing monstrous serial-killer backstories for all the characters, effectively turning it into a filler-episode version of When They Cry. Even then, it was deadly boring, mutt-ugly, and pointless. The relation between the Kyoto and Toei versions is as that between the lightning and the lightning bug. Still and all, the story in Clannad is sharper, smarter, and more focused. Where Kanon is a exercise in magical realism, full of illogic and set in a town where winter is eternal and spring never comes, Clannad borders on science fiction, has a rigorous and logical underpinning below its leaps of fantasy, and occurs in an actual place, rather than the magical dying marchenland of Kanon.

So much for Kanon; Air is a different story, one of narrational failure and promising apprentice-work. If Kyoto's Kanon is the product of solid, accomplished, even inspired journeymen, and Clannad is a true masterwork, Air is the beautiful trainwreck which justified the resources the latter series were offered. And it is, intermittently, beautiful. You can see flashes of the trademark Kyoto "flushed" character animation, of gorgeous gem-like background art, of the occasional seamless, fluid action scene. But more often, the characters are flat over unincorporated backgrounds, floating, and erratically placed. The early episodes often feature the head-on square-in-the-frame staring-out-at-the-audience one-shots which are so stereotypical of visual novels and dating sim games.

Worse, the writing, which felt like a "rough draft" of Kanon 2006 in the first half of Air, went absolutely to hell in the last third, until at the end, I honestly couldn't tell what the hell had *supposed* to have happened, the emotional dissonance and apparent narration having so utterly derailed the presentation that I'm still not sure what I was supposed to take away from the experience. Happily, the US release doesn't end on the TV series' maddening note, but continues with the two OAVs Kyoto released, set in the middle of the narrative with the Heian-era characters on their fugitive journey through the mountains. A central part of the narrative failure of the TV series, which dropped the modern-day characters for two-three episodes for the adventures and tragedy of their ancient ancestors, was thus somewhat redeemed by the OAVs.

Anyways, Air will probably enrage you if you have any felt need for coherent narrative, but it still is pretty to look at & stops in some entertaining places prior to going smash in a truly spectacular trainwreck in the final episodes.

Kon's last testament, posted by his family and friends to his website. It sounds very much like his interviews in happier days, it sounds like him.

I will say this: by his own testimony, he was apparently going to an acupuncturist and a chiropractor for his pains, and it sounds (although he does not come out and say it) that he got to a doctor too late for a saving diagnosis. Did alternative medicine's quacks kill him by neglect? Maybe not, apparently pancreatic cancer is so deadly because it produces no early symptoms, and is very difficult to diagnose in time to keep it from going metastatic. By the time Kon was going to a chiropractor for bone pain, it was probably already too late. But the chiropractor was definitely the wrong choice. Doctors, drugs, chemotherapy and surgery done six months earlier might have given him at least a little more time.

h/t

Oh, man, this is a catastrophe for anime. Satoshi Kon was one of the real greats working in theatrical animation, fearless, brilliant and warm-hearted. It came out of nowhere, too - he was apparently diagnosed with cancer in *May*. He was so young...

He never made a bad film, or a boring one. He should have had twenty more years of great art ahead of him.

He was so *good*. The field is full of erratic geniuses, flakes and competent hacks - Kon was one of the few truly balanced, brilliant animators. He was too damn young to be taken like this.

He should have had productive decades of real greatness ahead of him. This makes Millennium Actress suddenly very... poignant. Like he had been trying to make the dozen films he somehow instinctively knew he'd never have time to finish.

And Paprika, and Paranoia Agent... so many of his anime were such headlong, desperately crowded races against the clock, filling every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds dreamt.

So, a fairly active weekend, at least for me. My Uncle Ron dropped by for lunch Saturday on his way back to Ohio from a meeting outside of Scranton, and I showed him around Bellefonte. It's been a couple years since I last saw him, and he looks good - retirement's been agreeing with him so far.

Sunday, Jason and Tristana held a garden party at their place out on Airport Road, and we got sozzled on mint juleps & played croquet on their vast half-acre lawn. There was a crowd of over a dozen, and only one person remembered the rules. We ended up playing well into the twilight, shifting the course under the flood lights out front by the garage in the early evening. I made a variant on my usual stir-fry, a mush of spinach, mushrooms, bean sprouts and pasta, *heavily* seasoned with a lot of garlic & rosemary, with just enough fish to keep it from being a vegetarian dish. It seems to have gone over well, so that worked out nicely. Mint juleps are a murderous beverage, by the way - one glass contained two to three shots of bourbon with a little water & some mint and sugar to flavor the mix. A glass and a half and I was quite wobbly for a while there.

This morning I went to pay my utilities, and discovered that it had been due a full week before they *mailed* the bill. The secretary down at the borough business office was quite resigned, and accepted payment with an apology - all the bills this quarter were issued with the same typo. Oops.

Saw someone run the railroad crossing on Water Street, just before a gravel train with *three* engines came rumbling across the tracks, while I waited in traffic, on my way to work just now. I've never seen a load that heavy come out of the Pleasant Gap quarries - they must have had a sudden upsurge in orders. But seriously, people. Don't run the railroad crossings like that. It ain't safe. If he had waited to do that fifteen seconds later, they would have been pulling his crossover out of Spring Creek with a crane.

So I played tour guide for the folks at Gettysburg last weekend. A co-worker who does reenacting occasionally recommended a tower on the south end of the field that I hadn't remembered. When we got there, I realized why - it was over seventy feet tall, and I'm more than a little acrophobic. So's my father, when it comes down to it. Add in my mother's issues with stairs, and it was kind of a stretch. I gave my description of Sickles' salient & the Longstreet assault at the top of that tower with my hands firmly vacuum-sealed to the railing, and we got down as soon as we could. Great view, though.

I apparently annoyed a Gouverneur Warren fan with my short-hand summation of his career while we visited Little Round Top. He turned around and gave us a Look. The next morning, I talked to someone at our hotel who apparently had been standing nearby with his family during the incident & had appreciated my gloss on the events. His daughter apparently wants to take a degree in history, and I explained the possible career-paths, or lack thereof, available for people who choose that particular major. The short-hand is "lawyer, history professor, or well-educated member of the general public". It really isn't a "technical training" degree. At best, it gives you some experience in writing and structured research.

The old Cyclorama building has become a real disgrace - not only do they have it sealed away behind a decrepit chain-link fence, but they've let all the lawn within a hundred yards of it go to wrack and ruin. This would be fine and all if it were in some distant field, but we're talking about four hundred yards from the Angle and right up against Ziegler's Grove. There are a dozen regimental monuments standing forelorn among the weeds and overgrown grass, and it looks like hell. I wouldn't object to them tearing down the Cyclorama building - it is a dump and all - but they ought to do something about the seediness of the immediate environs.

Hmmm. This sounds pretty important, and it maps to what I understand about the thought-processes of Europeans and Israelis (and, notably, which the writer doesn't address, why non-post-nationalist Americans are so much more likely to be pro-Israeli, for that matter).

The writer thinks in terms of Israel vs. the European Union model, but what immediately occurred to me is the collapse of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a multi-national empire, not a nation-state, but what impressed the European (and American!) by-standers was the racial-nationalist element of the borderline-genocidal fight between the Croats and the Serbs, both against the Bosniak Muslims, and the Serbs against the Kosovar Albanians. Where Americans saw *tribalism*, Europeans saw *nationalism* as the operative evil at work. The American solution was carving out viable nation-states for the various sides to transfer their tribal impulses into adherence to beneficial nation-state patriotism; the European impulse is to "enlarge the problem" by replacing the old multi-national empire of Yugoslavia with a south-eastern extension of the new multi-national imperium, the European Union.

h/t

Hey, we're all Spartacus Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals For The Ninth Circuit now!

Is it just me, or is Glenn Reynolds starting to sound positively pissed-off about something? He doesn't sound quite like his usual "happy warrior" easy-going self. That bit's more of a bitter Lewis Black jab than the usual gentle Instapundit jibe.

Jason at Blogsuki summed up the knotted, spiked half-comedy and half-tragedy wonder of Clannad much better than I could. Even if he was a Kyou-fixated Obama-voting doofus.

I've been enjoying Clannad After Story an awful lot. I wouldn't have imagined that an animation team would take the after-the-resolution of a dating sim & make a family drama of it. The whole show is basically post-climax, except they're not treating it that way. The heroine is sickly, so she ends up repeating her senior year - again! She's actually a year older than the protagonist, because they met on her second go round at trying to graduate. He was a goof-off during high school - a self-described "delinquent" - so he ends up getting work where he can, and ends up becoming an apprentice electrician with a small local contractor. The show spends two-three episodes with the protagonist as he works his way into the honest-to-god Japanese blue-collar lifestyle.

The above was written before I watched the second half of the second season. Wow, what a series of gut-punches. The entire series, both seasons, are in retrospect *not* dating-sim stuff, but rather a rather sharp-edged family drama with magical realist overtones that just uses the *furniture* of moe dating sims. I can't believe I once dismissed this series as "retard moe". Sorry, Kyoto.

I still think K-On! is stupid, though.

Life and work on Cicero Street's "raper's row" in the Seventies. I'd never heard the term before, apparently it's Mametesque slang for a very Mametesque place, a no-hope used-car strip. The place the writer describes makes the dealership in Used Cars seem positively idyllic and idealistic by comparison. *Everybody* at this place was screwing everybody, and it worked, until the guy running it learned about the scams which affected him, and failed to roll with the revelations.

h/t

So TRSI cancelled my order for the latest Nodame Cantabile volume, and I hear they canceled a pile of other Del Rey titles. My newer order of Del Rey stuff - mostly Zetsubou Sensei, XXXHolic, and School Rumble books - is still active, and it looks like some of it is waiting on the next ship cycle to drop in the mail, so Del Rey isn't completely gone, yet. Heck, I'm not even all that upset about not getting the new Nodame, it hasn't really gone anywhere in the last three volumes at least, the mangaka's been treading water ever since she shipped all the characters off to Paris. It really ought to have wrapped up when the protagonist conquered his airplane phobia, the rest of it's just inertia and the attractions of a steady readership draw for the editors-in-chief.

But I don't like where this is going with Del Rey. They got the ground cut out from underneath them by Kadokawa, who hasn't really bothered to follow up with any significant new or active titles from their in-house label. It's been all back-catalog omnibuses and license recycling. Meanwhile, the companies which are increasingly uninterested in *selling* us manga have been cracking down on the pirate sites from whom folks can *steal* manga. I'm not really clear on what the financial advantage of suing pirates out of existence *is* if you aren't willing to provide the service being pirated.

All I know right now is that I'd kind of like to read the next volumes of Nodame or Kurohime, and nobody will sell either to me.

I believe for now I'll follow GayPatriot's line on the whole overturn-of-Prop 8 thing.

Personally, I'm thinking that gay marriage is a social experiment, and I prefer social experiments to be undertaken under controlled, limited, and voluntary conditions. If there were some way to break off the Bay Area into its own little administrative region, I'm sure that the locals would be happy to have their experiment - even the local conservatives have by and large made their peace with the San Francisco spirit, and those few hold-outs like Michael Savage seem to thrive off of being the counter-culture to the counter-culture anyways. But California is a bigger place than just the Bay, and apparently the majority of the state's voters don't want to be caught up in yet another state-wide social experiment. This idiot judge, by tying the rejection of Prop 8 into specious constitutional arguments, is threatening to produce a *national-level* social experiment. That's the opposite of controlled & limited, and by striking down all the extant laws, voluntary as well.

I don't know, maybe all this crap is for the best. Maybe it'll result in a Great Divorce of the state and marriage, sever the apparatus of no-fault divorces, tax status, "starter marriages", and all the rest of it from the serious social business of family formation. But the last time the social elites went off on one of these lets-meddle-with-divorce tears, the result was the Long Sixties, and I don't think I want to see that on a national scale. I kind of want to see what it does to a liberal city like San Francisco over a fifteen-year period, before I'll agree to subject the whole country to that sort of blind fiddling about.

h/t

I was wondering if G.T. was running opposed this year for the 5th Congressional District. Apparently not. The Democrats somehow managed to nominate an assistant manager at the State College Five Guys burger joint for our congressional district. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure Michael Pipes is a great guy and all, but is he even old enough to run? A college freshman in 2004... hrm, it's probably pretty close.

I guess we don't get to make fun of South Carolina and Alvin Greene any more. What, there wasn't a wild-eyed university professor they could have sprayed down, shaved, and stuffed into a cheap suit?

This is ironic, as I've been thinking recently that I can't get excited about Corbett, but I kind of want to do something to help Toomey. Corbett's foot-fault with the libertarians over pestering Twitter over some anonymous messages didn't really set right with me, and although I will vote for him, I just can't see clear to stumping for him. But yeah, I'll vote against a tax-crazed Democrat any day, especially if he's stupid enough to tax yunzers' Arn.

Toomey, on the other hand, is a solid Club for Growth fiscal conservative, and we need him in the Senate. Sestak seems to be dumber than Casey Junior, and I wasn't sure if that was possible. The only question, is how to help. My experience in 2008 left me feeling like all that cold-calling just alienated people & drove people away from the ticket. 2004 frankly felt kind of similar, although I mostly did door-to-door that year. Toomey seems to have enough money, and sometimes it seems as if political donations just get siphoned off by the campaign consultancy and other parasites.

Some leftist tool is apparently plotting to burn a confederate battle flag in front of a tea party rally.

As the transparently obvious goal is to call tea partiers racists by insinuation, I suppose the platonically proper response would be to put the fire out by pissing on the burning rag, and then curb-stomp the prick for his insinuated insult to the crowd.

But since tea party crowds are by and large older, nonviolent, and more even-tempered than I, I imagine that the most that will happen is that he gets arrested on some sort of fire-code violation.

So I finally installed the window air-conditioner last night, with help from Jason. Maybe I should get a unit that I can actually install without help, but it came with the house, and it still functions. It turns out that a dehumidifier sucks up about half as much electricity as a functioning air conditioner, and produces waste-heat to boot, so there's no significant advantage in going without air conditioning. If I lived in the arid West it might make sense, but the house tends towards the humid even on the driest of days.

I was thinking about the history taught in school when I was a kid, back in the '80s. I can't imagine it's improved much at all since then, but from my limited vantage-point, it's become more intensely itself, which is a bad thing.

It's important that K-through-12 public-school kids attend "social studies" classes, rather than history. It's important because they get taught "social studies" history. American history as taught in those classes, especially in that period between the Civil War and the Great Depression, is taught according to a very rigid point of view.

Because it is taught by union fanatics, labor history of the period is presented in a very Whiggish, march-towards-the-Wagner-Act sort of melodrama, in which the literal proletariat suffers from repeated impositions of Marxist-style ideology - defined classically as a superstructure of false beliefs concocted by a dominant class to suppress the natural expression of subordinate & oppressed classes. The interests of labor and entrepreneurs and their true history is distorted through this lens of Organized Labor Triumphant, the messy details reduced to narratives of secular Crusade & martyrdom.

Large swathes of Gilded Age political history is absolutely impenetrable to struggling students, because it is taught by public servants who are more interested in their predecessors' passion play of reform and independence through civil service reform. Real and vital political struggles between interest groups - between entrepreneurs, rent-seekers, speculators, the arrogant legions of the rising professional class, and the various and diametrically opposed political machines - get washed out in a sepia blur of "reformers against the bosses". Again, a sort of reverse Whiggish progression makes incoherent characterless bosh of the events in all their true colors.

The great arguments over currency is usually repellent and confused in the classroom, because the teachers are poorly educated on the subject of economics, business, and money. The "Marxist moment" has long since passed in the training academies, but that incorrect and debunked set of doctrines haven't been replaced by anything useful or even equally false, but rather nothing at all. How can "social studies" teachers teach about the conflict over greenbacks, hard currency, and bimetallism, if they don't even really understand Gresham's Law?

Lastly, the Progressive Era is usually taught as a bloodless extension of the "Reform Era", as a culmination of "American Liberalism" and its goals, mostly because "social studies" are taught by political progressives, who were raised to believe that their ideology was something called "liberalism" and thus a descendant of nineteenth-century Liberalism and Whiggery. This means that the students are often mis-educated into the belief that the Progressives were something organic, popular, and arising from the national character, rather than a modernizing crisis of that character, and the failure of confidence in the American project. The current Beckian-Goldbergian assault upon Wilson, Croly and the Progressives is such a popular revisionist trend these days *because* of the emptiness and falsity of the narrative taught in the schools about this era and that movement. The Progressive-Whiggish myth of the era creates massive cases of cognitive dissonance when the student encounters the actual historical details later in life.

All of which, I suppose, is a lead-up to a recommendation of a pair of books I've read this summer - David Pietrusza's 1920: the Year of Six Presidents and Ken Okrent's Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition. These two books address two sides of the "Progressive Moment". 1920 does so from the angle of Wilson's harsh and disruptive totalizing rule and the step-back from the brink that took place in that election year. Last Call looks at the era from the angle of that most quintessentially American of Progressive projects, Prohibition, a conversion of the Whiggish temperance movement into a corporatist, regimented, stubbornly transformative apparat, and how that social and political movement's encounter with human nature deformed the American economy and civil society, and was defeated in the end by corruption, individual initiative, human nature, and the collapse of the technocratically managed economy.

So, it is summer. I get kind of lethargic in summer, if y'all haven't noticed. Slow-thinking and unimaginative, uncreative even.

Which is a not-very-roundabout way of vamping for the home audience, folks. Yes, I'm still with the living, if not so much with the demonstrative interpretive dance. Originality and authenticity are equally rubbish values, anyways. Cleverness and craft takes originality and authenticity like a full house takes two pair. Especially in Omaha hold 'em.

The old home town is still there, variously seedy and newfangled-unfamiliar. There are folks who live their whole lives in the hometown, work at the same jobs their fathers and grand-fathers worked. I talked to a former neighbor-kid who's now running his grandfather's firm with his brother, for instance. Other folks, like our family, are kind of nomadic, slowly shifting stakes from one camp-ground to another, over the course of decades, sure, but still nonetheless essentially transient. We don't really *stick* for generations on one plot of land. It doesn't seem to be our nature. Strange, really, because otherwise we're pretty stolid folk.

Well, stolid for a lot of rootless gypsies, that is. ^_^

So yeah...

All I can say, is that sometimes you wake up with a nearly-fully-formed thought that wants to be let out. It's generally better to let it out, I suppose.

Oh, btw - sounds like Alvin Greene paid his Senatorial paperwork fees out of his unemployment cheques, at least in part. I gotta say, the prospect of someone saving over ten thousand dollars from two years of unemployment is pretty impressive - I think more of him for it. While he might be something of a narcissistic clown, at least he's a self-made loon.

I woke this morning to a radical sky
The world dyed red, pouring through a cracked-open door
And every eastward window
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning
A city some where is burning
The reflections of its flames
And agonized death
Is reflected in the raging
Of my placid Pennsylvanian dawn.

I woke dreaming
Of laughing vicious crowds
Of idle rich children, assaulting the streets
Of some inner Parisian bohemian museum-piece
Like schoolkids run amuck
Through a preserved waxwork display
Of expatriate imagination
The French existential ideal
Stuffed and mounted and put on display
A disneyesque trap
For intellectual tourists
To waste the riches of their elders'
Long fruitful toil

I shouted "ordered liberty" at the masked mob
Amateurishly brandishing card-board battering rams
More intent on hurting themselves and their peers
Than anything around them.
It was they that respected the display
And I the interloper
In their 1968 of the night.

Their happy cruel clowning
That suited this stage
The curdled imagining of
Streets cobbled with pretension
Ineffectuality,
Detachment,
And meaningless riot.

Out in the gray brutal suburbs
The mob of reality lurked
Hostile, alien, hopeless
Lit by the light of small burning
French cars
The desparate disordered ruined wreckage
of a foreign working class
Imported by a country
That no longed needed them
Their strong arms made weak
By the collapse of a world
Built from things and hope.

Now the inner country
Subsists on the revenue
Of a different set of imports
Exporting the memories
Of expatriate nostalgia-tours
And dreams of hedonism
To those who would be
Cynical wanderers in the ruins
Wherein they could be woken
From their well-fed nightmares
To these burning clouds of
This radical sky.

In other CDT news, a side-mention in an article on a police back-pay issue in Bellefonte brings up a plan to convert the old Gamble mill-race to hydroelectic generation. That's a pretty nifty idea, but I have to wonder how much of an installation would be required to wire it into the grid, and whether it would be worth the investment. While it's a consistent flow in most years, Spring Creek *is* somewhat variable in drought years.

As for not having any near-by projects requiring the power - the whole town has street lighting. I'd imagine that it could be run into the grid, given some transformers and the like. I don't know, Dad's the electrical engineer in the family.

Looks like Webster's Books is folding tent. Something about being behind on the rent, "starting two years ago", whatever that means. Before it was Websters, it was Seven Mountains Books, then before that it was the Book Swap. Svoboda's got folded into the operation at some point during its existence if I recall correctly, which means that two families of independent booksellers are leaving State College's downtown this month. Supposedly there's another location out in Patton Twp somewhere, and I have to agree with the angry people in the comments, it isn't kosher to be opening new locations when you can't pay the rent on your downtown lease. Rather looks like a "strategic default" move from this remote vantage-point.

Look, the reason *I* stopped going there was the raging political polarization, their increasing prices, the stink of coffee (despite the smartass comments about hippie stench, I never noticed any such thing - but I can't abide strong coffee odor), and my having moved out of the immediate State College area some ten years ago. Websters long ago became... repellent to most of its potential customers. The only people they were interested in appealing to - fair-trade fanatics, localvores, leftie college professors, students, and hangers-on - are, as a rule, cheap, cheats, or contemptuous of the profit motive. That isn't a long-term path to profitability.

Looks like Fred's still alive - he was defending his former business partners in the comments. I wonder if they still have the warehouse under the block across the street - Fred used to say that the majority of the business's cash flow was in the mail-delivery online business through Amazon and other outlets.

"Sorry. That last paragraph was supposed to be in defense of the film, but I got distracted by the thought that someday, somebody might quote me on a DVD box."

Aw. come on, Howard. That's the sort of mishap that you can drink out on for a decade or two! Sort of like being publicly abused by Harlan Ellison used to be a badge of honor on the fan circuit.

Hrm, my tax refund finally processed. More than it should be - they apparently pay interest. What should I do with it? I'm thinking of plowing it back into the principal on my house.

So I was sitting in my basement watching Fringe last night when I started hearing these muffled booming noises. Apparently Bellefonte was celebrating the Fourth of July on the First again. So I walked down Crawford Street about a quarter-mile until I could see the fireworks in the distance. Must have been setting them off from behind of the high school or from the fields around Governors' Park. Not bad for a podunk little burg like ours, I suppose.

Fringe is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's going to turn into another overwrought J.J. Abrams MacGuffin-chase like Alias. First three episodes were pretty OK, and it has a strong sense of place in its Boston setting.

On the subject of microfracking chemicals, my father forwarded this link to me last night. I was looking through the list, and X-Cide 207 caught my eye - it's an industrial microbicide and fungicide, and is pretty nasty. It's explicitly labeled for fracking, and most of the rest of the chemicals look like similar biocides, industrial solvents, surfactants, and the like. Hrm, also Bio Clear 1000 and its relatives, which are also nasty microbicides - "slimacide", "algaecide", etc. Various caustic and acidic agents....

The nasty stuff looks like it is used to keep algaeal blooms from forming in the fracking circulatory system.

For the nasty stuff, it depends on concentrations, I suppose. This sort of stuff will be present in industrial brownfields. But as the article points out, these are all essentially trace substances in a slurry whose vast bulk is composed of the pure drinking-class water the Marcellus operators are extracting out of my industrial park's pumps. The list includes a number of rather dubious-looking environmentally-sensitive replacements for dirtier compounds. I say "dubious" because these sorts of substitutions tend to be less effective than the old poisons.

Eh, it's possible that somewhere down the line some of this stuff could get out into the general water table. But keep in mind that the old mines are volcanoes of nastier stuff all over this state's minefield regions, and all of them were cut right into the water-table, open sieves of heavy metal seepage. Even the worst case isn't going to be anything like the old mercury poisonings of the "golden age" of industrial mining operations. Heck, there are flooded, abandoned quarries all through this region with crystalline-clear water the color of nothing in nature - crystal-clear because nothing can live in the waters. I've been told that if you go swimming in some of them, you're going to get skin burns.

Did y'all know that indie comics god Wil Eisner wrote a Vietnam-era illustrated maintenance comic for the M16A1 assault rifle? It's very distinctively Eisner-esque. I knew he wrote some sort of book about the war, but I never got around to reading it. His best book is still probably A Contract With God... but this pamphlet is surprisingly engaging for something about equipment maintenance.

h/t

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