I wasn't talking about it before, mostly because I have a low taste for surprising people, but I've been on a weight-reduction project since early September. So far, I've lost about forty pounds - the goal's been about sixty or sixty-five. You know, within spitting distance of what the doctors say is the upper bounds of how heavy somebody my height ought to be. I don't feel like I've lost the weight, but my belt says otherwise, seeing as I had to drill a couple extra holes in it, to keep my pants from sliding off. When my mother saw me this weekend, she exclaimed in alarm that I looked like my Uncle Dave. This was worrisome to her because her brother Dave got real thin real fast a few years ago, due to his diabetes. I had to reassure her that the weight-loss was intentional.

It's been a strange experience so far. I find myself with a lot more time on my hands than I used to have - I had apparently been spending a lot of time eating. I'm spending a lot less time in restaurants, and a lot more time at home or walking around town. Home's kind of boring with no-one else in the house. I was apparently substituting food for other people, too. Poker two-three times a week has been taking care of that problem to a certain extent.

I was walking a heck of a lot for a while there. Three to eight miles a day, depending on the weather. I've suspended that particular activity, to a certain extent, due to what seemed like an incipient case of Achilles tendonitis. Yes, I'm pretty sure what that was - I looked up the symptoms and followed the instructions - a rather elaborate take on "stop doing that".

Well, I suppose it's one way to keep oneself entertained. I can see how some folks make a hobby out of losing and gaining weight. I'm gonna see if I can avoid the other side of that caloric bipolar condition.

The day after resolving to not waste money on DVDs, I go and blow a hundred dollars on Amazon on CDs and books. Foolishness will find its own level, no matter how you dam it back with resolution.

But hey! Hank Williams Sr! More Johnny Cash! And, er, a Rahxephon soundtrack.

I must be driving Amazon's customer prediction app batshit.

Update: No, just karmically investing in my own self-frustration. Somehow Amazon's customer interface and my own inattention resulted in my ordering a CD I already owned, and Amazon was so unusually prompt and pseudo-efficient that the order is now "pending shipment" and thus can't be modified by, say, cancelling the CD I already have, and do not want a second copy thereof. And they won't let me go through the returns process until the damnable thing *ships*.

Well, at least it gave me the opportunity to notice that my manga order was going to get devoured by the holiday shipping monster. I can bloody well buy my manga locally; if you're going to assess me a "holiday" shipping penalty, I can take my business elsewhere, Amazon. And I will.

Ratsa fratsa friggin' "customer interfaces"....

I'm in lust. Especially given this. You can see wall-plugs here, so the designs *probably* aren't neo-Amish back-to-the-earth Luddite bushwalla. My one qualm is that the interior walls look low and shallow, which would make for rotten bookshelf feng shui. Well, that and for someone as unhandy as yours truly, this is kind of a Mt. Everest of arts-and-crafts overkill.

But lord almighty, it sounds cheap. Wonder if they're discounting all the plumbing and wiring from the cost estimates?

Via a NRO article on the rebuilding prospects in Pakistani Kashmir.

Well, Open Source Media is live - and slow as hell. Dunno about the whole thing, I liked the old name better. We'll see if it shakes out to something worthwhile. I suppose I could use a good newswire aggregator, which looks like it might be in the offing, although the current offering is kind of shotgun-blast indiscriminate.

And of course, the Senate Banking Committee just almost-unanimously voted to recommend Bernanke to the full Senate, where he's expected to be quickly confirmed. Given that they only questioned him for about three hours yesterday, I'd say that's definitely a quick turn-around by Senate standards. The hold-out was Bunning of Kentucky. Wasn't there some sort of thing about him being just barely re-elected due to what seemed to be the initial onset of senility?

Yes, I'm aware that the whole debt-deflation gold-standard thing is Friedman and Schwartz (edit: or maybe Fisher), not original to Bernanke et al.; I'm not all that well-versed on monatarism, so most of this is new to me. The details of Bernanke's essays are mostly revolving around research filling out and proving the various monetarist hypothesises (hypothesii? What’s the plural of hypothesis?) and some other stuff about searching for "non-monetary" secondary effects of the deflation, having to do with agency costs and the effects of the loss of "credit intermediation" through bank failures.

Deep Discount DVD is having another one of its sales, and I had a whole slate of stuff lined up and shoppingcarted, when I had to shut down my machine & reboot. This gave me enough time and hassle-motivation to reconsider wasting over $150 (even at discount prices) on more goddamned DVDs. I'm never going to save a dime if I'm always wasting the ready on unnecessary crap.

I'm resolving to not buy another DVD until I finish watching that discounted set of Nadia that's languishing in my DVD machine. Which isn't going to happen anytime soon, because re-watching that series is reminding me just how extremely irritating Nadia was as a protagonist, and how minimally-written the series was for most of its run.

In other news, Guru-Guru Pon-Chan is about five times as much fun as it has any right to be, given that it's a shoujo comedy about a golden retriever who finds a way to become a were-human for tru luv. The second volume is actually an improvement on the first, with the addition of a straight-faced, deranged rival for Ponta's affections. I can't believe the same artist went on from Guru-Guru Pon-Chan to write the plodding, sickly-sad multiple-personality disorder comedy, Othello.

I've been slowly wading through Bernanke's Great Depression essays, mostly by carefully picking over the equation sections and not worrying my soft little liberal arts head too much over the math. Bernanke and his co-authors are generally kind enough to stick to the high points, anyways. Nothing about daring and innovative real estate debt instruments yet, Jessica. Bernanke seems to be of the opinion that Fed overresponses and mis-responses to speculative behaviour was more directly to blame for the start of the Depression than the speculative behavior itself, anyways.

There's a lot of talk about "gold-inflow sterilization". What that means, apparently, is that the interwar gold standard's central flaw was the wide-spread statutory imposition of counter-inflationary "ceilings", but a general absence of counter-deflationary "floors" except by standards of central bank behavior. When gold starts pouring out of a country, that country's central bank or central-bank-functional-equivalent was not only supposed to deflate its other reserves and currency monetarily, but were usually required to by statute - the various "fractional reserve" policies. However, when gold starts pouring *into* a country, by gold-standard logic, the central bank ought to set into place a policy of inflation to expand its own monetary supply to reflect a steady or representative picture of the gold reserves moving into that country's banking system. But there were generally no legislation compelling this sort of behavior, and it flew in the face of anti-speculative conservatism to do such a thing. Thus, France and the US at the beginning of the Depression absorbed a great deal of gold from the rest of Europe due to deliberate anti-speculative deflationary policies, but without inflating their currency to make this inflow proportionally less attractive, thus perpetuating the flow and causing an imbalance. The result was out-of-control deflation, leading to "debt deflation" and degradation of assets and all sorts of nasty stuff.

Massive, meaty analysis of Turtledove's fascist-Confederacy series here. I gave up on that series about two books back, mostly for stylistic reasons. The blogger takes Turtledove's world-building dead seriously, and I think I agree with most of his conclusions, although I have to say that his assumption, which drives his argument that the British would shift to a Northern alliance in the late Victorian/early Edwardian, that a post-secession USA would build its industrial infrastructure in the same vulnerable-to-Canada fashion as was historically the case, strikes me as flawed. Admittedly, much of the infrastructure is geographically-driven, but there is margin for adjustment. The points about the necessity of militarization of the Lakes are, however, entirely cogent.

Via Instapundit.

Correction: that's no blogger, that's Jim Bennett, late of UPI's syndicated "Anglosphere" column.

Crap. American Funds' Growth Fund of America is one-third of my retirement plan right now. I'm way too young, and far too close to the left side of my investment curve, for my "Growth" mutual fund to be peaking. This suggests it'll be a quickly-ripening turd by the time I'm hoping to be hitting my up-curve.

"But every once in a while I can feel Syria over the mountains as though it’s breathing on us."

What an image!

A Feast For Crows just showed up. Only what, three years late? Maybe we'll see the next one before January 1st, 2010. Or Martin's death of old age, whichever comes first.

Stephen Green of Vodkapundit has posted that monster essay he's been promising for the last couple weeks. It's not bad, but the repeated cries of "media war" "media war" has brought something to the top of my mind from the festering stews out back.

Ernest May wrote a book about the quick and unexpected victory of Nazi Germany in the spring of 1940 called Strange Victory which was mostly about French intelligence failures and French planning failures, but one of the lesser points, which I think is currently quite apt, is the notable British strategic and logistical failures of that spring.

The British military intellectuals were determined to not fight the last war again. Contrary to the usual myths about Western allied doctrinal failures and the legends of the Maginot Line, the militaries of the West were determined to never fight those bloody ground-stalemates again, a sort of decades-long fear of Benet's spectral soldiers:

All night they marched, the infantrymen under pack,
But the hands gripping the rifles were naked bone
And the hollow pits of the eyes stared, vacant and black,
When the moonlight shone.

The gas mask lay like a blot on the empty chest,
The slanting helmets were spattered with rust and mold,
But they burrowed the hill for the machine gun nest
As they had of old.

And the guns rolled, and the tanks, but there was no sound,
Never the gasp or rustle of living men
Where the skeletons strung their wire on disputed ground....
I knew them, then.

"It is eighteen years," I cried. "You must come no more."
"We know your names. We know that you are the dead.
Must you march forever from France and the last, blind war?"
"Fool! From the next!" they said.

Strange Victory shows in passing the calculating British economists in ill-fitting uniform, calculating the resources and the logistics and the essential weaknesses of the Axis over the long-term. They calculated that they would fight a long war behind an expected ground stalemate and the armored walls of the British Navy, they calculated they could wage what Green calls in passing a "macroeconomic war". There was nothing wrong with their calculations - they all added up, and they dictated the wasteful expansion and diversion of their war to Norway, to interdict German logistical supplies.

The problem, of course, was that there would be no ground stalemate, no time in which to wage the expected future-war, no planned economic-war. While the British soldier-economists plotted their long term, far-sighted strategy, they let pass the unforgiving minute. They learned that wars were still fought with bullets, and chests, and bodies to stop the cannon-blasted breaches.

The cries of "media war, media war" make me think of those wise warrior-economists, who made the mistake of planning, not for the last war, but for the war after the next.

Hey, Fred - this review of a book called Sprawl: a Compact History makes it seem like a useful counter to the Crabgrass Frontier and the whole New Urbanist thing that you've been talking about recently. Hard to tell from a review, but it sounds like the writer might be stretching a bit, if all that nonsense about ancient Roman villas is indicative of the actual content, though.

Dimitri Rotov asks what's happened to Edward Hagerman, author of The American Civil War and the Origin of Modern Warfare. I haven't read this book yet, but I've encountered it in footnotes often enough, especially in Hess and Nosworthy.

The answer seems to be that Hagerman isn't a Civil War historian, strictly speaking. He's an academic historian from York University in Toronto, and he's moved on to other military matters. His name is all over what looks like a massive left-wing conspiracy theory about alleged American biological warfare in the Korean War due to a book he co-authored in 1999, The United States and Biological Warfare. There's some suggestion that some of the key evidence that Hagerman and his co-author relied on in accusing the United States of waging biological warfare in Korea was most likely enemy propaganda.

Personally, reading the authors' unpublished reply to a negative New York Times review, it sounds to me as if they were neck deep in the Kool-Aid. Their key argument seems to be that Mao and Zhou believed that their troops were being bombed with anthrax, and why would they be lying in their own internal documents? I think the recent experience with Hussein's own people's belief that they had WMD, when they had not, and long experience with the endemic paranoia, myopia, and inclination to believe ones' own propaganda, characteristic of totalitarian governments, ought to make anyone careful about generalizing from the apparent beliefs of tyrants. When you throw into the mixture Kim Il Sung's well-known habit of manipulating his patrons and allies without compunction or restraint, and I can't imagine why you would ever want to rely on anything controversial coming out of that end of the historical record.

In short, I don't buy it, not a bit.

Well, so much for that. The big downpour late yesterday afternoon washed most of the leaves out of the canopy, at least here in the valley.

Nothing much going on. Getting a lot of reading in, although I kind of stalled partway through the new Pratchett paperback. The Crowbar cancelled their last poker tournament without much in the way of advance notice, which made for a pointless trip to State College. Since there's a new round of tournaments starting up at the HiWay Pizza out on North Atherton, it's probably for the best. The Crowbar was a dingy, sticky dump of a venue, anyways. Let the bar-bands have it.

We've gotten a much better leaf-turning season than I had expected, given the semi-drought conditions throughout most of the last year or so. The trees on the mountain slopes have all turned a near-perfect, uniform shade of orange, with just the slightest tinge of green from the few hold-outs. Many of the valley floor trees have lost their leaves, but there's the occasional tree with a glorious set of bright crayola orange leaves. There was a set of them towering over the Catholic cemetery at the top of Bishop Street this morning, glowing in the early-morning sun and fast-fading mist, stark against the blue sky and lit up like a flame.

I love this time of year.

I was pretty pissed when the Pennsylvania legislature voted itself an unconstitutional same-term payraise last summer, so I was equally happy this morning to see the headlines in this morning's paper as I took my morning walk about town. Repeal! Ha!

Sometimes the right thing happens, if you give it time and a bit of bile.

Spent the morning and early afternoon waiting on a new computer at work. Boredom is my muse. That meddlesome bitch. ^_^

Rock, stone, willful self
Our crystalline seed
An inorganic creation
Unceasing in a sort of
Unmoving motion
Forming without effort
Or helping hand
Each element converging on
A welcoming surface
The design inherent
In the adamantine core
Which,
Doing nothing
Draws the whole
Into its destined shape.

Rock, stone, blinded self
Flung into unknowns
And endless expanses
unmoving uncertain unknown
But never indetermined
Set in a certain course
Isolate
And unchanging
Determined in the beginning
By an initial collision
Hurtling through empty
Voiding spaces
Unchanging nothingness
Parted solely by the passage
No hope of volition
Our existence a decision
And the consequences to come.

Can an essay be both masturbatory and utter horseshit at the same time? Perhaps not in strict metaphoric terms, but almost certainly so in practical terms given this egregious example.

Or perhaps the entire effort is an exercise in high irony, an act of academic parody. If so, it's neither all that funny, nor particularly clever. Sometimes stupid is just stupid.