I've been watching My Otome, which is a fun example of what's known by the TV Tropes people as a Pink Bishoujo Ghetto, of the superhero subspecies. It's a SF fantasy set on a world where nations' militaries are supplemented or replaced by nanotechnologically overpowered female knight-servants known as "Otome". Think OMAC: One Maiden Army Corps.

I'm also watching Flag, which is a Real Robot super-realistic Twenty-Minutes-Into-The-Future show about a combat photographer embedded with an elite UN strike force involved in a central Asian civil war. It's stylistically exciting, done in a hard-edged "found footage" documentary style, with absolutely no compromises with narrative - every second of story is pieced together from video by the narrator character, and the protagonist is mostly heard, not seen.

It's a strange juxtaposition, My Otome and Flag, because it's so much easier to accept My Otome on its own terms. Suspension of disbelief is far, far easier when you're presented with magical nanotechnological works of wonder - it makes every other conceit of unreality and whimsy go down that much more easier, like a mouthful of milk prior to gobbling a plate full of dry cookies. Flag on the other hand, with its hypocritical officers prating on about roadmaps for peace and its M1 tanks getting ambushed in tight urban kill-zones and its photo-realism, doesn't get an ounce of consideration from yours truly. When the elite UN strike force (btw - bwa hahaha!) feels the need to perform aerial reconnaissance by piling into a Little Bird with a side-mounted "Predator drone" & *flying* into a canyon, all I could do was scream in horror and disbelief. A) Predators are much, much bigger than that silly little contraption B) the whole point of using UAVs is to *not* put your scouts in physical proximity to danger C) why were they flying *in* the canyon?

I think I'm going to call it the "Military Realism Uncanny Valley". The closer your fiction gets to actual contemporary realism, the more sensitive the viewer/reader gets to inaccuracies. Putting giant robots or magical girls into "realistic" war fiction is the narrative equivalent of robots with expressive skin-like surfaces & facial mimicry - it ceases to be "cute" and instead sets off all of our ingrained BS detectors. We cease to be amused by the rough similarities and instead are repelled by the subtle failures. The difference between watching a charming performance and feeling like you're being deceived?

OK, crap like this is why I told somebody during the campaign that Joe Biden was "smart by Senate standards". Which is to say, slow on his best day, and a complete and utter moron the rest of the time.

That being said, underneath the Naval Observatory doesn't seem particularly secure if you're afraid of a suitcase nuke going off in the District, I don't care how hardened the bunker is. Shouldn't it be somewhere more distant, like Cheyenne Mountain or that place they built in the Catoctins for Congress back during the cold war?

No Sale

So, there wasn't a pony after all.

I just bought a somewhat expensive education in things that can go wrong with buying an old house, and what to look for in 'bargain' houses.

1) It may seem like it'll be easier to deal with an owner directly, rather than going through a real estate agent. You'd be wrong. The agents bring with them a certain structure and discipline to the process which protects both sides of the transaction, even if they're mostly acting in the interests of the seller. In 'for sale by owner' transactions, you're playing without a net. I was lucky enough to have a co-worker who used to work in real estate law, who helped me along the way, and whose aid in preparation and drafting got me out of my trouble with most of my skin intact. Others might not be so lucky.

2) Houses are fiendishly complicated machines, and you really can't look them over in a single viewing. Every time I set foot in my aborted would-be purchase, I saw different things. Most of the time what I saw was unwelcome, which is why I waved off in the end.

3) Older houses are archaeological sites. They change with every new project their various owners performed, and few contractors have a proper respect for their predecessors' necessary structural elements. The house in question was build in the early fifties partially on an older house's fieldstone foundation; this was the start of the problem, most likely. Later contractors put a set of stairs into the basement, without proper support. Closets were built into rooms. The second floor bathroom's bathtub was moved back four-five feet from its original location, taking space from what used to be a walk-in closet. The house was expanded to the rear, twice. A roofed front porch was put in, without fully sealing the holes knocked in the brickwork.

4) The foundation is the spinal column of a house. If there's something wrong with that, the house is crippled. The house in question had at least four attempts to shore up the original failed foundation design over the course of fifty-some years. My sin in this transaction was in not noticing this initially. It was a complicated basement, and I should have thought through why it was that complicated.

5) Drainage is important. Even if you aren't in a flood area, if your gutters are ill-placed and you have bad slopes around your foundation, you've bought yourself a long-term heartache.

6) If it seems cheap for the square footage, there's probably a reason. If you can't see it, look harder.

7) A thorough housing inspection is the buyer's best insurance. Don't ask them to cut corners. Mine saved me years of misery.

8) Dryers need to be vented *outdoors*. Venting into your basement is a bad idea - it just introduces moisture directly into the foundation.

9) Closing costs are always more expensive than you think when you start house-shopping. Keep that money in reserve.

10) A draconian mortgage officer is also your friend. If they're tight with their money, they'll force you to be careful about your purchase. Also, they make for a dandy enforcer on your transaction. "They won't give me a mortgage because of this that and the other thing" is a great conversation-ender, or negotiation tool, if you've still got the sand for the purchase.

11) If you're not happy with the house as the closing starts to approach - get out. You're going to be living there, don't walk in the door hating it.

12) Be careful about tripping yourself up with the terms of your contract & deadlines. Give yourself enough time between the inspections & your mortgage application commitment date.

13) If you're not handy, why the hell would you buy yourself a fixer-upper? Old houses are almost always project houses; don't get yourself into more than you can handle.

So, I've got my deposit back, and I'm feeling free as a bird. I wish the owner the best of luck in dealing with his foundation fixes. He was very good about giving me my deposit back & terminating the contract. He's got a heck of a job on his hands, and I'm just glad it isn't in mine any more.

Wheee!

So, another history day judging in the can. I don't know why, but this year's left me a lot more tired than usual. The best senior paper in my section was thrown out because the author failed to make his interview - really disappointing, really. Got into a number of arguments about Noam Chomsky.

That kid who interviewed me at the Palin rally last October turned out to be one of Bruce Teeple's daughters. Apparently I made it into some sort of documentary she was working on, and he recognized me.

Oh, and my Otakon messenger bag died. I need a new man-purse!

Ugh. The Heavy Weather Bruce Sterling is back. This is why I read more and more non-fiction and comic books: SF writers as a class are turning into psychotic infants. See also: John Scalzi & Charles Stross.

On the plus side.. Vega wasn't a trilogy? The good thing about post-Singularity novels? No contemporary politics to let the author inflict his crazy on you. And I'm starting to think they're all crazy...

Had a bunch of fun at the Monroes' trap shoot last weekend. The Monroes and Craig Rusch brought out their spring-load clay trap throwers to a target range in the gamelands northwest of Allentown, and about twenty of use went out & had a ball on the shotgun range. I put a bunch of shells through that old pump-action shotgun I bought off a co-worker last fall, and shot pretty well. It's still got that double-load problem with the magazine clip, but all that means is that it basically is limited to a single shell in the magazine, which works for the only thing I'm going to do with the weapon, which is trap-shooting.

Jon Acheson brought his semi-automatic Kalashnikov shotgun with the clip-feed magazine. He does well enough with it, but I saw it jam a couple times with other shooters trying it out, when they used el-cheapo Winchester shells. Shotgun shells just aren't made to be clip-fed, the mechanism likes to chew on the plastic. I've decided to avoid the Winchester brand anyways, on general principles. I tried Jon's gun out, but I just can't get used to semi-automatic on a shotgun - it throws off my rhythm to not have to rack the next shell into the chamber.

The Monroes invited us all over to their place afterwards for gaming & munchies. I was feeling pretty under the weather by then, and I just hope that I didn't give anybody my cold. Most everybody was pretty sunburned by then - most of us had forgone sunscreen, which was probably a mistake.

Ha ha ha ha!

I love stories like this: great white anthropologist - or at least, a science writer *posing* as such - goes off into the hinterlands, and brings back a racy story of primitives waging reprisal wars over blood-feuds. They've been doing this crap for a century or more, safely wrapped in their assumptions of civilized New York & distant, ignorant New Guinean hillbillies, never shall the twain meet.

Except this is 2009, and somebody in Papua New Guinea apparently has DSL, and read the article. Now two "tribesmen" are suing that hack Jared Diamond for defamation.

This is one of those stories "too good to fact-check". Which is exactly how Diamond got himself into this mess. Ha!

h/t Instapundit, the one-man newspaper.

I've been reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations this last week. I'd only read the usual assigned excerpts - on division of labor in pins manufacture, of course - back in school. Aside from the strange archaic usages - he uses the term "police" in a fashion utterly alien to modern usage, for instance, almost synonymous with "statute", really - it's quite engaging.

I find that it helps to read period works of analysis like this in an aggressive, argumentative mind-set. Even Smith can argue fallacies, and the free-market commonplaces of economic theory did not spring full-grown from this book, after all. With some effort, you can follow his developing argument against mercantilism, but if you don't pay attention, it can disappear under modern economic assumptions. He's much more hostile to entrepreneurs and labour-centric than his reputation would lead one to assume. You can see why intellectuals & academics as a class would *hate* Smith - he's quite uncompromising in judging them as a class as "unproductive", along with lawyers, courtiers, the military and the clerical order. He's also quite conservative on banking matters, endorsing maximum rates of interest to suppress speculative investment & opposing paper currency likely to gain circulation among consumers, judging paper to be a pure replacement for specie & not at all a supplement.

This passage has never been more apt:

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

One thing I was thinking about at the rally, was "you poor suckers haven't seen anything yet." This isn't going to be a bad year for taxes. The bill hasn't come due yet - the President and his merry band have been partying and scheduling for further parties on our credit, not our cash. For almost half of the country, the federal government doesn't tax us at all except for the entitlement payroll taxes. For now, they're concentrating on the capitalized classes.

Obviously, as Lady Thatcher once said, you eventually run out of other people's money. They can only float so much debt with foreign investment money until they'll have to start funding all of that debt. That means taxing the hell out of the rich. The rich will respond to incentives as the rich do, and will do their best to no long meet the official definition of "rich", which to coffer-minded taxmen, looks like taxable income streams. Y'all will recognize that particular situation under its suddenly-fashionable alias, Depression. Also, the taxmen will discover that there ain't enough rich to fund the new debt now that "the rich" has become a moving target. They're gonna have to re-define "rich" to include enough targets to make the game worth the hunt. Ten Years After had it wrong - it's "tax the rich, feed the poor, till we're all 'rich' e'er more".

The Great Re-Definition is coming. When it does, some people will want to know what happened, and how "we're" going to get out of this trap. The rest of us will already know what happened.

You eventually run out of other people's money.

So I stopped by the Tea Party on Frazier Street yesterday & dropped my local tax return in the mail while I was there. Signed the petition, although I have to admit that I only read the blasted thing *after* signing. Good thing it wasn't anything sketchy, right? Your basic petition of grievances, remarkably well-put-together for something that mentioned the recent outrageous DHS "study" classifying fervent opposition politics & federalist opinions as markers of "domestic terrorism". With something like that, it had to have been composed on the fly the weekend before the event.

There was maybe two hundred people there when I was by. I didn't pay much attention to the speakers; somebody asked me if I wanted to hold a sign, and I told him I hadn't made it, it wasn't *my* sign. I'm not much for signs, anyways. I'm not really sure what good these things do, either. We're stuck with the current administration for the next three and three-quarters years, and the current congress for the next two years. There just isn't that much leverage in Centre County. About all we could do is make the leftist university twits in State College who voted for the current disaster miserable, and there isn't much point in that. Stupid goes right to the bone, it's not as if they make a cream for it.

Oh, well.

Can anyone explain to this dim liberal-arts major why credit default swaps aren't simply institutional, marketized, commodified moral hazard?

Say I'm pondering doing something madly risky, bordering on daft: like, for instance, radically expanding my trucking fleet in the face of a possible oil shock. I hedge against the chance of fuel costs wrecking my expansion by buying fancy financial instruments which promise to cover my losses in the event of a cost bump. My competitors, not wanting to get edged out, all do the same thing, resulting in a short-term profitable event for the financial industry as we all dump significant change into their hands. But we're all betting on a certainty, and the oil costs hit all of us at once, and we all cash in our swaps. Not only have we distorted the market in oil and shipping by producing an excess of road traffic & trucking and a shortage of fuel, we've also smashed up the bottom lines of the various firms which let us buy insurance on a self-fulfilling prophesy. It's even possible that the hedging helped *produce* the oil shock by distorting the market in the first place!

The only difference between this credit-default-swap business and a legislature interfering in the market by subsidizing fuel prices is that the newfangled method removes government entirely from the business of moral hazard: haven't they privatized hazard? Instead of buying a congressman to get a chance at cheap gas, I've bought a financial instrument from Wall Street! Either way, I'm socializing risk, and privatizing profit. I'm buying the opportunity to make *somebody else* catch the flack for my consequences, right?

Thought for the day:

Truth is only stranger than fiction because narrative is inherently familiar. Narrative is a creature of fiction. Actual strangeness is essentially alienated. Understanding comes with interpretation - re-writing experiences into a coherency which can only approximate the actual, in the creation of a personal narrative, the incorporation of the alien into your fiction, your version of reality. In this sense, the familiar is antonymic to the strange, as fiction is to truth.

Ugh. I just looked up the M3 money supply curve. That quantitative easing thing was bigger than I thought. Today, I feel punished for saving.

Hyperinflation, here we come!

An email, sent to my district's representative in the House:

Mr. Thompson, I did some campaigning for you during the election last fall, so believe me that I don't relish the need for this message. But I am deeply disappointed to find that you had a part in the recent passage of a bill of attainder against employees of the TARP beneficiaries. While no-one can be enthusiastic about the rights and privileges of overeducated, overpaid, arrogant finance professionals, especially ones employed by organizations enjoying the inappropriate benefits of government funds, that can't lead us into illicit, immoral, or uncivilized responses to provocation.

The recent bill is, in my layman's opinion, unconstitutional. Congress's constitutional warrant explicitly excludes the ability to pass bills of attainder, which I define as a class of legislation designed to confiscate the property of individuals as a punitive response to political actions. A bill designed to reclaim monies legitimately paid under legal contract via punitive taxation meets this definition by my lights, and I believe that I am not being irrational or excitable in making this characterization.

Furthermore, although post-facto taxation is not itself (so far as I know) unconstitutional, it is is immoral and unethical. The fashion in which this bill combines attainder and post-facto legislation with the expressed intent of an assault upon private contracts only makes the act the more inexcusable.

In a time of Democratic legislative dominance, the party of the opposition has an even greater obligation to defend both the spirit and the letter of the law. Such doors, once opened in the heat of the moment, cannot be so easily closed!

The constitution and the culture of the law which it under-pins must be our bulwark in times of crisis and emergency. Kindly stop knocking holes in our foundation!

And this one is literally about wealth destruction - a theoretical solution to the below-zero interest rate in which the Treasury announces the de-tenderization [sp?] of a randomly statistical sampling of currency in circulation at a set period, to discourage cash holdings in a time of sub-zero return on investment.

...who commanded this? what God? what Angel!
To keep the gen'rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestraind performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science,
That men get rich by

- William Blake, America, a Prophesy

Just got some spam for St. Patrick's Day gifts. This is a holiday for giving presents now?

I thought it was a day for aspiring alcoholics to pretend to be Irish, wear green, and drink themselves cross-eyed.

Watchmen. In short? It's very much a Zach Snyder movie, despite what I'd heard beforehand. It's got interludes of brilliance, and is interesting even in its failures. I especially liked how they shifted Veidt's trendy lefty do-gooder conceits from the slightly artificial nuclear freeze one-worldism of Moore's now-archaic script to a contemporary 'watermelon' environmental extremism which expresses itself in what looked like the deliberate assassination of Lee Iaccoca. (This new trendy leftism will look as archaic and foolish in twenty years as Moore's original script does now, mark my words.) They even papered over the cartoonish bigotry of the New Frontiersman editor in the coda, who was gassing on about minorities in the comic book & was whinging about 'hippie communes' in the filmed version.

But I didn't much like the ending, which inverted the purpose of the big evil plot, and tore out the heart of the ending. The *point* of the comic book's resolution was a renunciation of superheroism in favor of Veidt's one-world progressive futurism. The filmed ending was a reversion to type, with the definite suggestion that the New Soviet Couple are cheerfully polishing new toys & new latex duds in the basement, getting ready to go out every night 'at 3 AM to do something stupid'. While I don't particularly *like* Moore's politics and ideas, it was his story.

The movie was too long for a theatre experience, and too short to invest the audience in the climactic disaster, which was reduced to a CGI annihilation of streetside ciphers, most of which they hadn't had time to introduce to us in an already-overstuffed narrative.

I liked 300 better.

So, I continue to be pure poison for automobile companies. First, I killed Daewoo by buying my first new car, a 2000 Lanos, from those poor suckers. Then, I went and bought a Chevy Aveo-5 from GM in December 2007. Result? Dead company walking. I zombify car manufacturers with my cursed cheques.

I was out profiting from the anime industry's agonies this weekend. Best Buy has mostly given up on selling anime DVDs, and they're liquidating their anime sections in most of their stores, starting the first of March. I went over to the Patton Twp Best Buy & grabbed a pile of stuff I wouldn't normally bother with if it weren't at least 60% off MRSP. As usual, it turns out that at least some of the stuff I hadn't bothered with up to now was pretty dang nifty.

Case in point: Negima!?. I avoided the manga originally, because it seemed like anything other than original. A Ken Akamatsu harem comedy with a prepubescent harem lead and thirty-some utterly interchangable girls? It seemed like there'd be better "girlswarm" stories out there, so I passed. The word on the first anime adaptation of Negima, sold as Negima! in North America, was even worse - that the character designs were literally interchangeable, the story tedious, and the fanservice bizarrely nonexistent - for a harem comedy!

Apparently the Japanese license-holders noticed that the first try by Xebec was a dud, but decided that the Akamatsu brand was worth a second go with another studio, and they opted for Shaft. You hear a lot of trash-talking about Shaft, but they've got a creative team somewhere in the bowels of that operation which is just boiling over with hyperactive style. The closest thing I've seen to the new version, sold confusingly as Negima!? in North America, was the fansubs of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei (aka "Goodbye, Mr. Despair"). It's got the same hyper stylism, although Negima!? tends more towards turbocharged 60s New Wave splitscreening than Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei's skeezy Japanese noir. It's also got the eruption of chalkboard message non sequiturs, which I always thought was the factor which would have made SZS unlicenseable, due to its rapid-fire pace and potential for frying subtitling crews; although Negima!?'s chalkboard non sequiturs are much less rapid-fire than SZS's, it still broke the subtitler a couple times in the first couple episodes.

But anyway, Shaft's Negima!?: excellent. Also, fun! The only real problem is that there are far, far too many characters, and I found I couldn't remember the names of more than a half-dozen or so. It's literally a girl-swarm, a mob of characters, introduced in a swirl which leaves you the impression that there are people out there, but far too many to take in at once. The gag in the opening credits is that the girls are all labelled by roster number - and only roster number, their little seat numbers cryptically floating along behind them in a surreal sepia-tone landscape constructed of stacked school-desks.