Woo-hoo! Lookit those clods fly!
The last three days, they've been dynamiting in the fields on the other side of the Restek running track/leechfield. I talked to a worker, and he said that they were putting in a sewer main tap for a new three-hundred-unit residential subdivision, connecting into the county sewers via our industrial park's system.
They're dynamiting because this whole ridge is about three inches of topsoil on top of solid dolomite. If you need to do any sort of serious landscaping or ground work, you're going to need to break out the explosives, because you aren't gonna get anywhere with simple digging machinery. Probably explains why the development of this area has been so painfully slow - too expensive in comparison with the other possible projects on more forgiving plots.
Friday, February 24, 2006
Monkey money?!? MONKEY MONEY?!? An Indian who runs an Rotterdam-based steel-making conglomerate makes a hostile takeover bid for a rival European steelmaking firm and the head of that firm has the brass-balls gall to refer to said Indian's offer as "monkey money"?
OK, Europeans don't get to call Americans "racist" any more. I revoke their stone-throwing privileges until they get some shutters installed over the glass shingles.
"Monkey money". Christ on a crutch.
I see that it's supposedly some sort of French idiom. I don't goddamn care. It sure as hell sounds prejudiced in English, and I'll bet you my nest egg that Mittal does the majority of his business in English, just like every other Anglo-Dutch or international-Indian businessman on the face of the planet. And I'm also pretty sure that if an American businessman of the status and alleged calibre of someone like Guy Dolle produced such a racially-charged brainfart as "monkey money" in earshot of the American press, he'd be running a hot-dog stand in Omaha inside of a month. If he was particularly young - more likely he'd be clipping coupons in Boca for the rest of his very, very long retirement.
OK, Europeans don't get to call Americans "racist" any more. I revoke their stone-throwing privileges until they get some shutters installed over the glass shingles.
"Monkey money". Christ on a crutch.
I see that it's supposedly some sort of French idiom. I don't goddamn care. It sure as hell sounds prejudiced in English, and I'll bet you my nest egg that Mittal does the majority of his business in English, just like every other Anglo-Dutch or international-Indian businessman on the face of the planet. And I'm also pretty sure that if an American businessman of the status and alleged calibre of someone like Guy Dolle produced such a racially-charged brainfart as "monkey money" in earshot of the American press, he'd be running a hot-dog stand in Omaha inside of a month. If he was particularly young - more likely he'd be clipping coupons in Boca for the rest of his very, very long retirement.
I was watching my uncle get an editor's award on C-SPAN last night, which meant wading through a lot of other newspaper folk getting their awards. (Well, more like skimming through - I kept flipping back and forth from watching a DVD of Akira.) He was given it by Ben Bradlee. I thought Bradlee was dead?
My mother called partway through, and I ended up swearing like a sailor in front of her about that idiot editorial cartoonist who spent fifteen minutes reading his cartoons out loud. One presumes that if the association gave you an award for your work, they would BE FAMILIAR WITH IT, YOU FOOL! Also, he didn't say word one about the Danish matter, but found the time to whinge comically about NSA monitoring. Yeah, you brave, brilliant artist, go ahead and "make mock o' uniforms that guard you" - you know they'll not CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF & BURN YOUR HOUSE like certain other folk whom apparently don't exist in your cartoon world outside of Hillary Clinton in a burkha. Wonder if that has anything to do with the whole "chop your head off & burn your house" factor?
Bah.
Oh, well. Congrats, Uncle Ron.
My mother called partway through, and I ended up swearing like a sailor in front of her about that idiot editorial cartoonist who spent fifteen minutes reading his cartoons out loud. One presumes that if the association gave you an award for your work, they would BE FAMILIAR WITH IT, YOU FOOL! Also, he didn't say word one about the Danish matter, but found the time to whinge comically about NSA monitoring. Yeah, you brave, brilliant artist, go ahead and "make mock o' uniforms that guard you" - you know they'll not CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF & BURN YOUR HOUSE like certain other folk whom apparently don't exist in your cartoon world outside of Hillary Clinton in a burkha. Wonder if that has anything to do with the whole "chop your head off & burn your house" factor?
Bah.
Oh, well. Congrats, Uncle Ron.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Article on the move of "space opera" from pejorative insult to semi-legitimate subgenre. I think the authors exaggerate the ignorance of post-1975 fans as to the original, pejorative sense of the term; also, their definition of modern, 1980s-era space opera as being generally optimistic is rather... myopic, given the examples offered. How are the collected works of Iain M. Banks particularly optimistic, even in comparison with the gloomy bastards of the New Wave?
Found it via Coffee & Ink.
Found it via Coffee & Ink.
Yezidis! Michael Totten met with the "Baba Sheikh" - introduced to him as a sort of "pope of the Yezidi" - and visited a temple-town called Lalish in Kurdistan, which the Yezidi call their "Mecca". Deeply cool.
Bill Bennett & Alan Dershowitz:
What two perspectives are those, social paleo-conservatism and newly-minted neo-conservatism? I mean, Alan Dershowitz wrote a book semi-in-favor of judicial torture, for the love of mike. You don't slide much further to the right of that without getting into Franco territory, to slide deeper into Godwin territory myself.
No arguments with the substance of their argument - I'm not too sweet on the supine mainstream press on a good day when they *aren't* bearing the throat to aggrieved violent street-thugs & bearded maniacs. But ad hominem has a value independent of invective - who makes the argument informs the value of the argument in a practical fashion.
A voice testifying against interest is more interesting and more convincing than a person arguing his or her own case, to the benefit of his or her own intellectual trend or inclination. This is why a "hey! this liberal is talking up a conservative argument" or "wow! look at this reactionary attacking this Republican administration" only has impact for the first few iterations for any particular actor before that actor expends his or her "testimony against interest" ad hominem value, and becomes a voice for the side he or she is now habitually supports.
I'm thinking in particular of Roger L. Simon and Christopher Hitchens, who both played the "leftist in support of the war" hand so hard that they're essentially spent as voices of the "left", and probably Pat Buchanan & the Lew Rockwell libertarians for counter-examples thereof on the left, although I don't pay close attention to the leftward version of this phenomenon, and those might not be the best possible examples.
Via Glenn, who bought the "two perspectives" line hook & sinker.
We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree...
What two perspectives are those, social paleo-conservatism and newly-minted neo-conservatism? I mean, Alan Dershowitz wrote a book semi-in-favor of judicial torture, for the love of mike. You don't slide much further to the right of that without getting into Franco territory, to slide deeper into Godwin territory myself.
No arguments with the substance of their argument - I'm not too sweet on the supine mainstream press on a good day when they *aren't* bearing the throat to aggrieved violent street-thugs & bearded maniacs. But ad hominem has a value independent of invective - who makes the argument informs the value of the argument in a practical fashion.
A voice testifying against interest is more interesting and more convincing than a person arguing his or her own case, to the benefit of his or her own intellectual trend or inclination. This is why a "hey! this liberal is talking up a conservative argument" or "wow! look at this reactionary attacking this Republican administration" only has impact for the first few iterations for any particular actor before that actor expends his or her "testimony against interest" ad hominem value, and becomes a voice for the side he or she is now habitually supports.
I'm thinking in particular of Roger L. Simon and Christopher Hitchens, who both played the "leftist in support of the war" hand so hard that they're essentially spent as voices of the "left", and probably Pat Buchanan & the Lew Rockwell libertarians for counter-examples thereof on the left, although I don't pay close attention to the leftward version of this phenomenon, and those might not be the best possible examples.
Via Glenn, who bought the "two perspectives" line hook & sinker.
Ah, and it's a fine graupelly morning.
When did they change the spelling from "grapple" to "graupel"? Damned froggy of them, if you ask me.
When did they change the spelling from "grapple" to "graupel"? Damned froggy of them, if you ask me.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Jessica, you were talking about gold few weeks back. What do you think of this article? I know what I think on the subject, but I'm generally biased against the whole gold-bug notion, so I suppose I'm not the most objective of voices where gold is concerned. I like the idea that the increasing wealth of the Indian & Chinese consumer is buying up the price of jewelry.
There is some heavy shit going down around the world. I won't belabor the potential ugliness of the Samarra Shi'ite shrine bombing, because it's all over Rantburg and the rest of the blogsphere, and because it's so clearly a situation on the verge of a full-blown pogrom. But this bit from Michael Ledeen about the riots in Benghazi is something I had *not* noticed, and illustrates just how much gets covered up & ignored when emotion & knee-jerk reaction filters the news, on the right as well as the left.
Those Benghazi riots, with more than a dozen dead, got reported as just another particularly violent set of protests in the wave of anti-Danish-cartoon violence. But Ledeen's emailer suggests that A) it actually had more to do with a calculated anti-Italian move by the Libyan government and B) the actual violence occurred after the authorities lost control of their rent-a-mob and it turned into a nasty anti-regime riot bordering on an uprising. Ledeen & his emailer make it sound like a mini-Hama in the offing, which would be deeply, deeply ugly if it's the case.
Those Benghazi riots, with more than a dozen dead, got reported as just another particularly violent set of protests in the wave of anti-Danish-cartoon violence. But Ledeen's emailer suggests that A) it actually had more to do with a calculated anti-Italian move by the Libyan government and B) the actual violence occurred after the authorities lost control of their rent-a-mob and it turned into a nasty anti-regime riot bordering on an uprising. Ledeen & his emailer make it sound like a mini-Hama in the offing, which would be deeply, deeply ugly if it's the case.
Gah! I innocently enter "Genesis" into an EPA label lookup engine, and get buried under with sixty instances from a company named "Frank Miller & Sons". Rat bait, herbicide, weedkiller, insecticide, algicide - they've named every single blamed thing they sell "Genesis"! It's like George Foreman & his multiple sons George, except the Foreman family isn't running an inventory system with their boys' names!
There's an insecticide needle in here somewhere... ahah! Found it! The one Bayer CropScience 'un in the haystack.
There's an insecticide needle in here somewhere... ahah! Found it! The one Bayer CropScience 'un in the haystack.
Mind-warper for the day: Eric S. Raymond's essay on the legacy of Stalinist memetic warfare. Essentially, he's re-imagined the post-Marxist/transnational progressivist intellectual hangover as a species of pollution - the imaginative equivalent of buried nukes or bioweapons contaminating intellectual groundwaters. Hell, on a small scale, those WWI-era shells French farmers still keep getting blown up by now and again in the fields of the Somme or Meuse. He calls this poisoning by abandoned, unguided Stalinist intellectual warfare Gramscian damage.
Raymond:
I've always called it "the monster in your mind" when I've encountered this societal rage in others, although usually not to their face. But Raymond seems to be making a case for the intellectual equivalent of environmental poisoning: not ideological vampirism, but Stalinist lead poisoning, the product of a stunting of a person's moral and intellectual growth at a vulnerable age.
Raymond doesn't stop with that idea. He goes on:
He worries that the replacement which fills in the space left by the termination of the "suicidalist" ideology will be a monster, less likely a jihadist caliphate than a radicalized, hateful European-style fascism, bitter from repeated terror-nukings:
I recognize this is over-quoting, but I love that last sentence with a pure and platonic ardour.
Via Instapundit this morning.
Raymond:
The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating.
I've always called it "the monster in your mind" when I've encountered this societal rage in others, although usually not to their face. But Raymond seems to be making a case for the intellectual equivalent of environmental poisoning: not ideological vampirism, but Stalinist lead poisoning, the product of a stunting of a person's moral and intellectual growth at a vulnerable age.
Raymond doesn't stop with that idea. He goes on:
Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.
He worries that the replacement which fills in the space left by the termination of the "suicidalist" ideology will be a monster, less likely a jihadist caliphate than a radicalized, hateful European-style fascism, bitter from repeated terror-nukings:
The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking "“crusader" cities, they'’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.
I recognize this is over-quoting, but I love that last sentence with a pure and platonic ardour.
Via Instapundit this morning.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Played poker most of the weekend. Saturday was kind of odd. The host's schoolteacher-in-training fiancee was playing Spanish-language Taboo with her friends, and it degenerated into what the host said was a mix of a political argument and really fithy girl-talk. Still, it was a better night than Friday, when the host was pouring gallons of beer & a concoction made mostly out of apple rum into everyone, and half the table was falling-down drunk. I was the most sober player at the table, and I *still* lost my shirt. I think maybe I ought to dial it back a bit - I'm losing more than is good for my continued sunny disposition.
Speaking of sun or the notable lack thereof, how about those wild temperature swings? Cold as heck last night; even my mother down in Florida was complaining about how cold it has gotten. Betcha the Canadian High Plains are baking again, though - seems to this winter's pattern, with the High Plains & the East swapping warm and frigid air masses back and forth.
Speaking of sun or the notable lack thereof, how about those wild temperature swings? Cold as heck last night; even my mother down in Florida was complaining about how cold it has gotten. Betcha the Canadian High Plains are baking again, though - seems to this winter's pattern, with the High Plains & the East swapping warm and frigid air masses back and forth.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Check out this mindwarping taxonomy of American libertarian trends using, apparently, Fischer's subcultural tropes from Albion's Seed. I have *got* to read that book.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Hey, Fred, I was wrong - we hadn't been completely thrown out of that Uzbekistan airbase. They're still straggling on out, over six months after we were given our walking papers.
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