A rushing wind howls without rhythm and wild

Driving over the sere sleeping slopes

Rising and falling without pattern or meaning

Bringing up such a racket, percussive rattling of

The half-dead limbs and spidery half-broken

Twigs of winter-stunned wooded life waiting

Cacophony piled upon cacophony, yet the rattling

Brings rhythm into the previously-empty world

Emergent harmonies of limbs all more or less alike

Of a common length and flex and yet

Enough variance to bring high and low tones,

Fast and slow syncopations

Until the empty wood like an orchestra tuning

Stills

At the sound of three sharp cracks

A bough falls alone

Like a wand without conductor's guiding hand

And the wind and the wood sing forth in concert

For the sleeping squirrels and crows amazed awake.

Red skies at morning
Yellow and blackened
Blue in the west
The sun winks over the
Limb of the world
And is closed by
Pinked eyelid skies
The roaring is muffled
In swift cotton-swabbing
Rushing cloud-banks and
The kindled bronze
Slopes in the west
Flare and burn out
Storm rushing over
The troubled face of the deep
Sailors take warning.

In this predawn darkness
Defeated
Routed
In flight before the morning light
It roars overhead
Freight-train Fate
Crushing the air between
Steel wheels and steel rail
Howling affronted by
The dying possibility of
The night that was past
Cries judgment of the day
In the moment of its birth
Predestinate by that vast
Rumbling
Howl.

Let us look at her now, let us see her plain,
She will never be quite like this again.
Her house is rocking under the blast
And she hears it tremble, and still stands fast,
But this is the last, this is the last.
The last of the wine and the white corn meal,
The last high fiddle singing the reel,
The last of the silk with the Paris label,
The last blood-thoroughbred safe in the stable
- Yellow corn meal and a jackass colt,
A door that swings on a broken bolt,
Brittle old letters spotted with tears
And a wound that rankles for fifty years -
This is the last of  Wingate Hall,
The last bright August before the Fall,
Death  has been near, and Death has passed,
But this is the last, this is the last.
There will be hope, and a scratching pen,
There will be cooking for tired men,
The waiting for news with shut, hard fists,
And the blurred, strange names in the battle-lists,
The April sun and the April rain,
But never this day come back again.

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body, excerpt from Book IV

There are no apocalypses, no universal objective ends, not that we know of.  But for every life, there is a last bright August before the Fall, and some feel it, that cold whisper of winter in the pre-harvest heat of rank summer, the first leaf falling far in advance of the turning of the color, the weather turning for him and him alone.  Our endings are individual, no matter how we project them onto the screen of our times.  The best we can do is not let our times project themselves upon us, prematurely.  I would like to think that the Mayan and the Camping raptures were a passing thing, but such projections of individual ends of the world will no doubt continue, as failures mount, and the brightness fades from more family fires.

The hills are echoing with Feu de joie, and fireworks, but this year, they sing to me:

There is no future, there is no past,
There is only this hour and it goes fast,
Hurry, hurry, this is the last,
This is the last,
This is the last.

     That prison is ourselves that we have built,
     And, being so, its loneliness is just,
     And, being so, its loneliness endures.
     But, if another came,
                          What would we say?
     What can the blind say, given back their eyes?
     No, it must be as it has always been.
     We are all prisoners in that degree
     And will remain so, but I think I know
     This - God is not a jailor....

-Steven Vincent Benet, excerpt from John Brown's Body, Book 5

Lincoln really was a Hebraic saint, for the mid-century American modernists - a beau ideal for the Ugly American - not smart, not beautiful, not quick, but making a virtue of stubbornness and essential honesty. When did we lose our way? Was it when the Ugly American became a taunt and an accusation, rather than a quiet, self-effacing assertion of battered virtue? When the Quiet American replaced it in the hearts of the wise? When the educated and would-be elite spat scorn at the "middle-brow" staring back at them in the mirror?

So much for hopes and dreams.  Turns out, they were "the ghosts in the burning city of our time..."

"This is for you who are to come, with Time,
And gaze upon our ruins with strange eyes."

Nightmares and Visitants really is a heartbreaking book.  He saw death on the march, saw the tens of millions that would suffer, would break, and die.  He's largely forgotten now, which is another sign of our decline and coming fall.

We will not be saved, because we don't deserve to be saved.  We have more wealth than any people to ever trod this earth, and less wisdom than ever.  We have more people in school, than ever, and they seem engaged in the destruction of understanding and knowledge. 

The country wants to be a child again.  A simple majority has chosen to vote themselves back into the womb.  But they've put the management of that vast national womb in the hands of a chaotic crowd of imbeciles, incompetents and, I fear, at least a few abortionists.

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professorial-historical-economic and irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model T or even an early Napier,
They'd have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow,
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World! "
He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc and a dozen other scientists, writers, and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there'd never been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace) like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!
Take it nearer home," he said.
'Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skilful, certainly they created.
And, in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully till Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet and gunpowder and they had to get married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skulls, the handsome folk, the excellent scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with the sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucius, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander—'
Just to take half a dozen—
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"

He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Arcs, snouted for gas-masks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the pre-fabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In fact, you will not be saved."
Then he showed his hand:
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and the armies sprang up.

"Nightmare, with Angels", Steven Vincent Benet 1935

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.

excerpt from "Litany for Dictatorships", Steven Vincent Benet, 1935.

I woke to a dream of my whole neighborhood lined up outside the precinct, waiting for the doors to open.  They turned and asked me "where have you been?"

In this freakish, horribly nostalgic season of old miseries and old terrors, there are sad truths, and then there are persistent hopes.

In the pre-morning darkness, I believe in my neighbors. I believe that we haven't yet gone into that greater darkness which is behind the darkness.

I believe I see, in my mind's eye, that colored scrap of cloth above the scorched battlements, beginning to lift on the first faint breath of a predawn breeze.

Get out and vote.  Every damn last one of you all.

Well, that was relatively mild, at least so far.  Doesn't look like any major flooding in the borough as of yet.  The business park lost its power for an hour or so yesterday afternoon, so the office is covered in heavy-duty power cords leading back to the generator power taps.  Technically we're closed, but what am I going to do, sit around the house and watch anime all day long?

Jason woke me up last night to ask if town was on fire, apparently there was some sort of dramatic reddish-purple glow in the skies to his west.  Ended up going out into the heart of the storm, got a bit soaked, best anyone could guess - Jason wasn't the only one to see the glow - is that one of the transformers down at the substation northwest of town must have exploded, but not in such a way as to bring down the power, at least not in town.

Other than the creeks being up and a lot of rain, not a lot of visible damage, at least between here and home.

Long day yesterday knocking on doors.  A bunch of different neighborhoods.  Patton Township is kind of odd, one set of blocks looks like rural Florida, the next Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the next Park Forest, which is ironic, because the neighborhood is about two miles from, well, Park Forest. ^_^

One thing I encountered, which I haven't seen before, is two townhouse developments with enclosed courtyards and the "front door" hidden behind closed gates.  Like a dozen or two dozen one-family gated communities.  Like gated communities for hostile, suspicious loners and misanthropes.  Your front door is your window on the world, on the rest of humanity.  Hiding it behind a six-and-a-half-foot-tall gate is just... secretive and repellant.  One guy invited me into his courtyard, and I swear to god, sat me down with a pair of axes buried in a stump sitting behind me.  Very unnerving, and he was one of the more welcoming denizens of those particular streets.

Bad morning, better afternoon, fairly good evening as far as the fruits of my local corner of the campaign.  Ended up talking to one retiree for twenty minutes, which was interesting and all, but I was trying to beat the sun for the end of that particular neighborhood's strike-list.

Heads up, the Romney campaign office in State College (205 E Beaver, first floor on the left as you come in the main entrance on Beaver) had Romney/Ryan yard signs as of Saturday evening.  I spent about twenty minutes putting together signs that evening while I was waiting for the office manager to get back from dinner.  They also had R/R bumper stickers, I grabbed one because I don't have a yard to put a sign in.

Shortly after Brazier died, Obama issued a statement saying of the man he had once helped put 15 poor families on the street in the dead of winter:

"There is no way that we can replace the gentle heart and boundless determination that Bishop Brazier brought to some of the most pressing challenges facing Chicago and our nation."

From this article "vetting" the sitting president.   It's astonishingly awful.  The next time someone calls Romney a heartless plutocrat, point this out to them.

How the hell did they get away with it?  I'm pretty sure anyone trying to do so in Pennsylvania would be sued up one wall of the courthouse and smeared down the other wall like a nasty outtake from the Exorcist.

"The government is the only thing we all belong to."

Someone actually said that, put it in a video, and broadcast it at the Democratic National Convention, letting it go out over C-SPAN.  Intentionally.  That's horrible, sick.  That's a declaration of aspirational slavery, of willingness to be owned.

Man, I'm so glad I re-registered Republican when I bought a house in '09 and moved my residence.  I don't think I could take the shame of being a registered Democrat with that sort of thing being said in my name.

h/t.

New mainstream media stylebook definition of "a lie": a Republican national candidate accurately and precisely describing an embarrassing fact or narrative of events which casts a Democratic national candidate in a negative light.

Also, based on the report on the radio on the drive in this morning?  "independent fact-checkers" should now be taken to read "captive re-tweeters of in-house Democratic campaign talking points".  It's very strange - the convention coverage on NPR in the evening isn't especially over-the-top aside from E.J. Dionne - but the morning news is pure Mouth of Sauron, Democratic party propaganda plain and simple.

I went to the Romney victory centre in State College this evening, to make a few calls and watch the convention on their C-Span link.  The calls didn't go so great - they're still knocking the bugs out of the hookup for the phone survey system, and I'm just terrible at the scripted phone calling system.  I'm just not a salesman, and I'm  not good at scripts.  More interestingly, there was a journalism professor who thought it meet to send her students into the victory centre to pester the volunteers on convention week & find the less well-coached, well-prepared volunteers in order to harass them into silly arguments.

After the phone system crashed in early-days bug teething - typical for this time of year - I heard the professor baiting the least-prepared and most-voluble volunteer into all sorts of silly statements.  He's young, and unprepared, and pugnacious, and silly as all hell.  So I intervened.  I made the argument for limited government, Hayekian or even Burkean limitations upon government policy swagger, and quoted A Man for All Seasons, which the professora either had never heard of, or was willing to let me go toddling over the edge of the precipice.  Admittedly, I let myself riff randomly on my old, personal theory about Obama being a physical and moral coward, but towards the end, I managed to touch on the idea that the democrats are too fond of absolutist abuse of "Imperial Presidency" renunciation of small-R republican checks and balances, talking about the Obama administration abuse of executive orders in re: the workfare cancellation and the DREAM Act enactment via executive order.  Since I had a copy of Remini's third volume of his long-ass Andrew Jackson biography, I talked about his tendency towards direct-democracy pretensions and how that turned into a species of tyranny despite his claims to constitutionality and adherence to classic Jeffersonian limited-government constitutional piety.

I \dunno if I changed any minds there.  Most of her students had already left by that point, the only one listening was the young girl who had interviewed me earlier, whom I hadn't given really any thing of value.  The hard-shell ideologue who had baited the youngblood fool into jabbering about gay marriage and birth out of wedlock seems to have left long before I started debating her professor.  Which is a shame, because these were all journalism students, except for the professor, and really, somebody should have burned into their psyche the understanding that baiting some random young fool into a response you were looking for is in no way a valid goal for honest, objective journalists.  The idea is to bring forth the basic ideas of the organization under investigation, not to torment the young and foolish until they provide a hook for  your partisan distortion of what you think they're about.

We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:  the readiness is all.

That damnable neurological experiment showing a gap between impulse and decision which was used to suggest that conscious will was an illusion, an artifact of will rather than the thing itself - another group has come forward with further experimentation and evidence suggesting that the predestinates were mistaking a sort of wilful carrying wave of varying intensity for the act of choice itself.  That further suggests what laymen have long known - certain people have a property of faster, more decisive action, and that quality of rapid, sharp decision is both dependent on state of mind, and an exhaustible resource, which after long periods of use, leaves an otherwise agile and forceful mind flacid and incapable of further emotional and mental effort.

Of course, I, wanting evidence of free will, am more likely to accept this presentation as it re-establishes a predicate which I find palatable.  But should I reject a finding because it squares with my prejudgment?

h/t

So I went to see a matinee showing of The Dark Knight Rises, there was some talk about a mass shooting in Colorado on the radio, but I didn't hear until I got out of the showing that it had been in a midnight showing of the same damn movie.  That was... odd.

The movie was kind of a disappointment, BTW.  Much more like Batman Begins than Dark Knight - very much a movie of pieces, poorly digested chunks and scenes without any real integration or thematic consistency.  I don't know why Nolan finds the Ra's al-Ghul/League of Shadows storyline so engrossing, but it... just doesn't work.  At least not for me, but then, I react poorly to "all-powerful conspiracy" narratives, I tend to fear and respect chaos (the Shuler Joker) more than hidden order (the League of Shadows et al).  Mostly because I tend to think that man-directed hidden orders are inherently fragile and implausible.  Mafias don't produce terrorist political revolutionary conspiracies - political revolutionary conspiracies and terrorist cults degenerate into mafias and fissiparous criminal families.  Entropy only really works in one direction, and Eternal All-Encompassing Ideological Conspiracy is a violation of the second socio-political law of thermodynamics.

Also, the Miranda Tate character makes no sense.

Longmire is a pretty good cop show.  About a Wyoming sheriff in a county on the Montana border, lots of rural West politics, decent if not brilliant writing.  Nice to see Katie Sackhoff getting work, and Lou Diamond Phillips has gotten better with age.  They're going to have trouble after a season or so with believability, though - rural ranching counties just don't have that many murders compared to LA or New York.  It'll turn into a grittier version of Cabot Cove in short order, I fear.

This report that H&R Block messed up their joke Bruce Wayne-vs-Peter Parker tax comparison by totally blowing the charitable-deduction rule -  you can't deduct more than 50% of your adjusted gross income with charitable contributions, you can only roll the excess over to later years - doesn't exactly fill me with confidence in their tax-preparation service.  I've been using their cheap online service for the last four years, since it's relatively quick - takes a long afternoon - and the results *looked* good.  But now I worry about what might happen if I get randomly audited and it turns out that their code is based on wild guesses instead of solid tax advice.  I've never understood the way the "Making America Work" deduction works in their online software, for instance - did they screw that up somehow? 

I don't have a complicated financial life - mortgage, single, not that many charitable contributions, local and state taxes, no real income outside of work, few medical expenses - so I'm not *seriously* worried.  But... concerned, maybe.  Does anyone else have a favored, cheap tax-preparation service?  I can't see actually hiring a CPA, I just don't have that sort of cash flow to justify it.

(BTW, I saw that gag tax ad on a comics webzine a couple weeks ago.  Laughed, didn't think much about it past that.  But there's a difference between a webgag and a for-real advertisement for tax preparation services.  Screw-ups are fine for the former, all good for a laugh - but if you're selling your expertise?  Argh.)

via the usual.

Jay Cost argues that Roberts was playing a long game in the tradition of John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, leveraging a decision in favor of the current administration in order to advance the long-term interests of the opposition party.  That would be more strikingly clever if John Marshall's political party, the embattled Federalists, hadn't been a dead letter inside of fifteen years after Marbury v. Madison.  Their shattered remnants eventually were absorbed by one of the Monroe-era factions of the other, dominant party, and most of their policy goals were left drying on the rack for decades afterwards.

In the long run, we are all dead.

(Sean Trende, whom Jay Cost used to work with, gets deeper into the history of Marbury v. Madison here. 

We had a storm blow through last night about quarter to three.  Glad I woke up, because I had my windows open upstairs, and the floors would have gotten (more) soaked.  Not only could I walk in the dark by the lightning flashes, I suspect I could have read by it, the strikes were so rapid and sustained.  Limbs were down all over town, but the cleanup crews were going gangbusters, and no roads were blocked on my way in to work.

It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

Boy, Chief Justice Roberts really doesn't care about poor people, you know?  If they want to vote to burn down their own houses, he'll let 'em.  It's refreshingly anti-paternalistic, but also... kind of castle-in-the-sky.  Congress has become increasingly incapable of hacking through the tangled thickets of rank, over-grown legal code.  People had kind of hoped that the Court would help matters by cutting the Gordian Knot.  But the Chief Justice doesn't fancy himself an Alexander the Great, to take sword in hand and destroy the puzzle for us.

Anybody have a set of tweezers?

So, like everyone else with a political interest, I'm waiting on the expected Obamacare rulings today.  It's due sometime after 10 AM Eastern.  SCOTUSblog usually runs a live-chat during these sessions, I was hanging out there last Thursday and Monday for the last two of these sessions.

So, I went to the doctor the other day.  Relatively good news - nothing seriously wrong with me, I just have to change my diet.  No more eating like a college kid.  Sigh.  I've gotten fat again.

Update: Well, crap .   Looks like it was mostly sustained, 5-4.  They called BS on the "it's not a tax" thing.  But that was always happy horses**t, and everybody knew it. Only thing we got out of it was a talking point for the elections.  Between that and getting rid of the ACA monster, I would have preferred they killed the monster instead.  Politicians come and go, but the evil they do lives on after them.  This probably means that the ratchet has snapped into place, we'll never be rid of this remora.

I heard a lot of good reports for the Whedon/Mutant Enemy horror film the Cabin in the Woods recently, so I went out to catch the matinee.  I'm not normally a horror fan, and have completely avoided the recent trend in sadistic puzzle-torture-box franchises like Saw and Hostel and the like.  I don't even particularly enjoy your run-of-the-mill zombie-apocalypse flick, so perhaps I was being self-deluded in thinking this movie would be my sort of thing, but I've been fond of previous Mutant Enemy productions, and went in smiling.

I am not going to cater to anyone's highly sensitive NO SPOILERS sensibilities, for either the Cabin in the Woods or Tucker & Dale Vs Evil so please don't read further if that's a problem for you.

Anyways, I went in expecting something half-comedic, since that was the sales pitch that everybody was making.  I did *not* find it to be particularly funny, but then, nihilistic slaughter-porn about elder gods, evil bureaucracy, and metafictional commentary about slasher pictures probably shouldn't be funny to anyone with a functioning moral sense.  The Cabin in the Woods has a close didactic relationship with its contemporaneously filmed peer Inglourious Basterds, as both of them are essentially j'accuse diatribes against the target audience, with evil villains who watch satirically nasty filmatic depictions of abomination with sadistic enjoyment, so that when those paper villains are subsequently horribly destroyed by each film's nominal protagonists, the audience is primed to applaud their own condemnation-by-proxy, just punishment, and symbolic demolition.  The proper (and probably intended) response to both films is a combination of sickened revulsion and shame, a feeling that one has participated in something vile and degrading.  Both movies are in effect anti-spectacles, aimed at destroying the audience's emotional connection with the genres they are satirizing, namely, war spectaculars and slasher pictures.

Mind you, both films are spectacularly well-constructed, well-made, and highly polished - marvels of technical competence, especially in their screenwriting and script-doctoring aspects.  This emphasis on the Cabin in the Woods's supposed surprises and secrets is exaggerated, really.  The lack of any strong characters or emotional provision of connection to those characters leaves the audience with plenty of time to take in the fairly broad hints and suggestions which serve in place of explicit explanation of the premise.  It's pretty obvious from about ten-fifteen minutes into the movie that the story is one of ritual sacrifice, the details which are filled in afterwards are just that, details and justifications.  Instead of elder gods, those "downstairs" might as well be the actual viewing audience - it would have only made the movie just a hair more metafictional.

Some people have noted that the film sort of acts like a hard-R long episode of Buffy or Angel, with the nameless corporation running the ritual sacrifice acting as sort of a vicious blend of Buffy's Initiative and Angel's Wolfram & Hart.  The problem here is that the Initiative season was the weakest season of Buffy, unsatisfactory and overpoliticized, and I, at least, had as much of Wolfram & Hart from the Mutant Enemy crew as I ever cared to see.  Furthermore, the Cabin in the Woods acts as so much of a literal Bottle Show that there's no sense of how the events interact with a greater world.  So, when (SPOILER!) the surviving kids destroy the world, the movie almost gets you to celebrate; the script certainly acts like it wants you to buy-in to the conceit that "we've had our turn", so wipe out the world, sure, fine, kill everybody!  It only works because the kids are shown as having no family, no ties, no human life beyond their status as, well, status-seeking college grinds.

That leads into the next problem, which is the writers have built into the film this conceit that society is "sacrificing youth out of envy", that torture-porn slasher films are all about hatred of the young, vital, and beautiful, that somehow the inevitable demolition of Hollywood, music-industry, and other entertainment flash-in-the-pan celebrities are baked into the cake.  Now, this may be some sort of reflection of the creative industries themselves - there's been some ripping horrible stories of systemic child molestation, prostitution, and epic "using" coming out of that sector in the last three-four years or so - but it's a total non sequitur for describing the world in general.  Furthermore, given that the audience for slasher pictures are usually (or at least traditionally, among a segment of "geek culture" the youth-culture genres of their youth end up becoming increasingly creepy and age-inappropriate as they fail to let go of their expiring youth) teenagers and young adults.  Normally, these films don't cater to the middle-aged and elderly, you know?

But basically, my complaint about the movie is that it just made me sad, upset, and depressed.  I don't go to movies to feel bad, and I don't like movies that are trying to get me to agree with the thesis that "people suck and should be allowed to self-destruct".

That brings me around to a movie I also had heard some good buzz about, but which never made it to theaters in my section of the country, or came and went without me having noticed in time: Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil.  I used the "rental" feature on Amazon on Demand, and watched it yesterday afternoon as a palate-cleanser.  The evil murderous, bigoted hillbillies were presented without any real irony or sympathy in the Cabin in the Woods, they were just vicious, clownish animals used by the evil conspiracy to destroy the victim college kids, they had no moral agency of their own.  Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, on the other hand, is made from the view-point of a pair of clownish hillbillies, the Tucker and Dale of the title.  They, themselves, have bought their very own Cabin in the Woods, and they've just blown into the woods with a trailer and truckbed full of horribly dangerous sharp implements, planning on renovating that sucker into a nice "vacation house".

I've observed elsewhere that there are two species of TV police procedural, one made by creators who fear chaos and the world, and one made by creators who fear the devil and evil designs.  The latter is filled with wicked conspiracies of the rich and malign, like Castle;  the former features protagonists always struggling against a tide of petty evils and wickedness, marinating in a bubbling cauldron of stupidities, selfishness, and desires gone awry - shows like the Shield and The Closer.  The Cabin in the Woods is very much an exemplar of a conspiracy show, a Manichaean fable of corporatist, bureaucratic demiurges building a wicked world in a bottle within they plan to destroy their children.  Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a chaos story, wherein the innate craziness and emotions of the children are the problem, the threat.  The eventual antagonist of the latter movie is a Knight Templar gone horribly, horribly wrong.  He rants and raves about Evil, with an explicit "E", and his paranoias, stories about old murders, and seething hate for "hillbillies" - born out of his mother's survival of a previous massacre as a Final Girl - spark the second, accidental massacre.

In the Cabin in the Woods, the college kids are manipulated towards their bloody ends by a careful conspiracy of banal evil, a corporatist act of puppeteering.  The college kids of Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil are panicky, ignorant, and horribly, horribly careless.  They *are* the children running about in the rye field by the cliff in Salinger's evocative metaphor, bound to go charging blindly out over the abyss without some careful adult to catch them before they fall.  Or, at least, by a pair of dimwitted, amiable country boys just looking to help.

In the Cabin in the Woods, the college kids' stupidity is carefully crafted, created, and pr-ordained by evil intent - the monstrousness is so by corporatist agency.  In Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, their stupidity is innate, the result of kids being kids, addled by adrenaline, fear, paranoia, pot, and massive, comedic carelessness.  The hillbillies have their own faults, aggravated by too much alcohol, stupidity, and their own adrenalized outrage, but the kids are the drivers of the confrontation, and by and large kill themselves or each other.  In the end, the movie's incidents are described by the media as an inexplicable mass suicide, and to a certain extent, that's the truth.  Only one kid is saved from the cliff hidden in the rye, but at least she's saved.  It's the distinction which saves the movie, keeps it from being another sadistic exercise in torture, humanizes it.  As much as Shaun of the Dead, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a comedy in the end, a buddy picture, and something of a romance.  It isn't one-fifth as well-made as the Cabin in the Woods, and is full of plot holes and okay-sure-whatever arbitrary scripting, but at least the core emotion is marginally uplifting.

So, I've been very, very inactive.  Sorry.

Senatorial primaries today.  Rohrer has been getting on my last nerve, Smith just sends glossy mail, but the damnedest thing... Welch called me personally last  night, or at least, someone of about the right age and accent claiming to be Welch, so it must have been him.  I said I was worried if a US Senatorial candidate was calling individual, not especially active voters on Primary Eve, but he was the candidate which most closely matches my personal inclinations.  So...he's basically a Toomey guy, young, successful entrepreneur - runs some sort of med-tech manufacturer down in Chester - and is more than a little defensive about having been a Democrat in 2008.  I told him I agreed that the important part was campaigning for McCain in the General Election, which he did.

So, go out and vote Welch?  The other guys either aren't trying, or are kind of obnoxious.

Doing my due diligence on the convention delegates , I'm thinking Styn, Haas, and Corman for the delegates, and Settle, Flavin and Salmon for the alternates.  Maher for Auditor General, because his opponent seems to be simultaneously a dilettante *and* a banking lobbyist, which isn't what I'm looking for in a glorified Head Accountant for the Commonwealth.

A technical exercise:

The dream repeating in every night
Dreaming emptily and lightly of darkness
Deeper and deeper until the waking light
Afloat like embered paper-scraps burning
Over warm and scented gusts of wind
Ends my restless and loveless waiting

Within, the dream-walls echo, waiting
Wherein, breathing, some fragment of night
Drawing the air into lungs this wind
Exhaling heatened, the air to the darkness
Unknowing embraced by that silent burning
Unseen in those long moments without light

Oh, how long are the hours between light and light
How often do I spend those dreaming nights waiting
The candles too dear to waste in burning
Away the looming unseeing walls of night
And the heatened chambers, even in darkness
Stifling without the charity of a chilling wind

And what would I do, in those nights without wind
If in that restless sleep of slender light
Those rustling dreadful legions of darkness
slipped past my opened window and candle, waiting
Tumbled lit into the curtain to bring the night
Into a sudden furious holocaust burning?

That harsh and solitary burning
Flicked into life by some wicked wind
Flame asunder this peaceful night
Kindled blankets combusted under flame-lit light
And burn away the flannel under which lies waiting
My unknown soul hiding in darkness?

Better then to lie alone in that darkness
And forebear this tempting candle's burning
Spend rather these nights in restless waiting
And lock the casement 'gainst a vagrant wind
In timid fear of careless wax-lit light
And dream alone of endless night

Hold, darkness - birth me a passionate wind!
Spark a slumbering ember into burning light!
And fire! Consummate this waiting night!

Reading a set of annotations on Bujold's A Civil Campaign, I found myself reading about sestinas, and decided to write one to understand the form a little better. Back when I was writing bad poetry, someone accused me of being a "formalist", although my actual knowledge of the traditional forms was appallingly slight. I figured I ought to try my hand at this at least once.

I've started reading Caro's [four? - the first volume claims three, but you know how trilogies' waistlines expand once they sit down to the dinner table] volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. These two sentences, wrote about the Texas Hill Country, have to be the saddest things you can possibly say about agricultural land:

It was rich because it was virgin. And it could only be virgin once.

But then, how often can something like that be said of the land the southern smallfarmer encountered on their slow-motion pillage across the continent? They lacked science, and prudence, and made up for it with passion. And I don't like this business about homesteads not being subject to foreclosure or bankruptcy - this chapter is entitled "the Trap", but that little detail about Texas Homestead law just screams "trap" to me. You can't own something if you can't lose it, and you can't learn from your folly if you're protected from its consequences. I guess you can lose the land you bought in the normal course of events, but then, that means in a failure, you're left with forty or a hundred and fifty acres and an operation that requires three hundred or three thousand acres to actually turn a profit - depends on the local conditions, really.

Speaking of conditions, before this, I was reading Pietrusza's book on the 1948 elections, and while talking about farming agitation about prices, and Dewey's failure to answer those concerns, he points out that corn prices had dropped suddenly in 1947-8 from $2.50 a bushel to $1.60, or thereabouts. Current corn futures as of this moment is $6.58 a bushel. Think about that - the inflation-adjusted cost of a 1948 bushel of corn was ~$22. Admittedly they were also averaging 38 bushels to the acre instead of today's 168 or so, but damn, that's an expensive baseline for feedstock.

"Shame, son, is a gateway to grace." I say this as a Penn State grad who still lives up the valley from the university: shaming has educational, social and moral functions. Nothing and no-one ever changes without someone who's capable of it feeling ashamed of the way things are, the way they are, and doing something hard and real that might relieve them of that mortifying sensation of having done something shameful, or have allowed something shameful to continue.

It's not a guarantee, and many's the man who weaseled his way out of that discomfiting inner conversation through sophistry, cheap justification or mere rationalization, but shame, naked shame, is salvation to those willing to listen to that hectoring, mocking, damning sound.

We've all lived in this valley, and known that there was something unnatural about the position of power the football program was allowed. It was a snowball rolling down the slope of our acquiescence, and it was bound to hurt someone downslope, in some way or fashion. It could have been petty corruption, as at Ohio State, or student misbehavior, but for our sins, it was something worse. They're painting over murals downtown and bringing in retired FBI bureaucrats to whitewash the less tangible things, but it's all the same - a twisting away from an ugly set of facts, and a disinclination to see how far the rot has gone.

You don't fix dry-rot by painting it over, it must be dug out, and the planks too far-gone must be torn up, thrown away, and replaced. But before the replacement, listen to that shaming sound and tell me, what was it that allowed this rot to take hold? There must be no unanswerable icons, no secret, sunless gardens of privilege. Consider removing the policing power from the university as a step in the right direction - when the university's toy security detail answered to the administration instead of independently of the power-structure which itself was at fault, that, itself, was an obstruction. The police and the university ought to be, in some non-destructive fashion, at odds with each other, if the watchmen are to be properly watched.

But this can't be placed entirely at the feet of faceless bureaucracy. The football program was too beloved of the general public, too protected by sentiment, for a proper sense of shame to make any sort of impression upon those with wickedness brewing rot in their hearts. Sports should not occupy such a ritualized , pseudo-religious niche in the folkways of a healthy society. Is it because there's a lack of public religion in this college environment? Honestly, I don't know - I'm such an agnostic, I'm seriously detached from the religious life of the community. The football game pilgrimage was the one thing that united the increasingly-leftwing university/student community and the middle-of-the-road nonpolitical-sort-of-conservative alumni and county communities outside of the Centre Region townships and the borough.

Where do we find the social discipline to make right what men's crooked natures inevitably make wrong? A scourging may be necessary, some sort of bonfire of our vanities. It's easy enough, for one such as I, who never cared for the football program, to propose or endorse notions of a suspension of that program for a period of years. That's *easy*, and this should be hard - for everyone, not just the football people. What other solutions are on offer?

Welcome to the new aristocracy, as the New Class morphs into the second coming of the Whiggish gentry, entitled and arrogant. Except that the Adamses and their ilk put in decades of work in governance and diplomacy to back up their pretensions to the "natural aristocracy", with John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and *his* son Charles Adams between them logging more cross-Atlantic diplomatic travel time than anyone else until the advent of Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy".

It wasn't until the effete fourth generation and Henry Adams' endless self-education that we even *approximate* the self-regarding uselessness of the modern "little princelings". What has Chelsea Clinton done in her life, other than follow in the train of her mother, who herself caught power like an STD from her ex-President husband? This dynastic crap is the reason I voted against Bush in 2000.

h/t

Ah, the joys of root canals. The anesthetic hasn't worn off yet, and I keep trying to answer the phone sounding like a Down's Syndrome kid.

There were scads of new people at last night's Otto's get-together. Two of them turned out to be a couple who had been in New York with the "Occupy Wall Street" mob getting arrested on Brooklyn Bridge. The guy was infuriated that I kept snickering at his righteous difference-making revolutionary status; apparently it makes up for his nowhere non-union job with the university. Funny thing is, he's being forced to work part-time because he won't join the union, and somehow that's the fault of The Man instead of the Teamsters. Real sense of cognitive dissonance there.

He's pissed about Obama too, and kept going on about not wanting "the lesser of two evils", and was yammering about how the Obamabots were trying to take over the Wall Street neo-commie campaign. Towards the end of the night, I said something about how I was a firm believer in the least of presented evils. One of the other new people asked in anticipatory horror who I'd vote for, and I admitted as how I'm still looking at Rick Perry. Apparently the WIC thing is a big to-do in Democratic circles. I got dragged into the discussion, but at the end I pointed out that in conservative new media, people are much more agitated about Green corporate welfare like Solyndra than actual welfare scamming, O'Keefe showboating about ACORN and similar organizations aside.

I should be more sympathetic to Joe Protester, because I had a rough late Nineties stuck in nowhere jobs, and I was pretty pissed and radical (for me, at least) about it. But the sympathy bleeds away when you start rambling starry-eyed about the wonderful "non-profit, non-profit" farming communes in Burlington, VT and how they give food away to the homeless and spend their free time taking care of the elderly and blah, blah, anarcho-commie blah. His wife/girlfriend was pretty quiet, and seemed to have a grad-student job with the Agriculture College with prospects.

The rest of the new people were law-clerk buddies of a friend of a friend. Wasn't able to talk much with them, I hate our usual table at Otto's, it's an echoing, exposed, cramped pen of a booth. You can't hear what somebody's saying three or four people over unless they're yelling across the table like Joe Protester.

Michael Yon has been on the front lines for the better part of a decade, but he still has an eye for truly beautiful, mad photography. I've never heard of kishmesh khana before, nor even that Afghanistan had any vineyards to speak of, let alone beautiful, fertile ones like the one Yon was photographing in the middle of a violent, close-quarters infantry campaign. The vineyards sound like the bocage in miniature.

Holy crap! Documentary evidence that the linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure ("no level of radiation exposure is harmless") was established upon systemic & deliberate suppression of contrary experimental results by a Nobel Prize recipient! That there was contrary evidence is not, today, surprising - actual experimental results have demonstrated otherwise since then - but the initial prestige-established no-threshold rule is enshrined by radiation paranoia and institutional inertia.

And the good people wonder why the rest of us are less and less willing to take the scientifically credentialed at their naked word!

h/t Ace of Spades headlines.

While I agree entirely with Ace's point about this really irritating anti-Stewart piece, it's hard to take

That's true but that is a rather minor problem compared to the first. And, in the scheme of things, someone might be justified in noting that both are comparatively minor problems to obsess about; that media criticism is, necessarily, a relatively trivial pursuit. Add into that that among the various ways one could engage this relatively minor topic, Stewart's chosen the least important way, and that means that for all his influence, his mission itself concerns the most trivial critique in a field that is already rather trivial.

from a guy who spent two obsessive weeks delivering hub-to-hub, time-on-target saturation shelling on the head of a minority-party congressman for using twitter to send pictures of his junk to female admirers. I can't think of a more trivial display by a major right-wing blogger, at least not this year.

Pennsylvania going Nebraska/Maine in the Electoral College? Stupid idea, and it reeks of cowardice on the part of the state GOP- an admission that they're never going to take the state again in a presidential year.

There's a lot of chatter this week about the post office going bankrupt. By my count, there are as many as twenty-one unnecessary and excess post offices in Centre County. Every little burg in the hills doesn't need its own staffed office, and there are way too many branch offices in State College. Most of those are probably buildings with one to three walls of post office boxes and a bored staffer holding down a desk. I've never even heard about some of the branch offices in State College. They could easily consolidate those PO boxes into existing structures.

Barack Obama is not unaware of this game. He gets to play elbows out while his opposition has to be doubly careful to avoid anything that is remotely seems racist. In the short term, it is a pain in the ass, but in the long run, it forces conservatives to argue facts, logic and reason — and it actually is quite liberating to be unable to attack the person.

- Don Surber

A pretty sentiment, but I don't know how true it is.

Just a place-holder, to let people know I still live, and haven't been washed downhill.

Yet.

I watched the first Eden of the East movie last evening, King of Eden. The Eden of the East TV series was a typical noitaminA show - eleven episodes, no guaranteed ending. The idea was that they'd provide the ending in two theatrical films, of which King of Eden was the first. The TV series was kind of cleverly confusing, a little bit like Total Recall in the sense that the male lead erased his memory just before the first episode starts, and there's the whole mystery behind why he did so, what the savior game is about, and all that. By the end of the series, you can almost forgive them for never really paying off on that mystery, as there's a lot of fun weirdness on the way to that non-ending.

The TV ending is suitably spectacular and has an air of completion about it, even though nothing really is solved in the end. Since the goal of the savior's game is to rescue Japan and its NEETs from economic and demographic damnation, you can see why it's easy to not pay off on the promise. If somebody actually had an answer to Japan's demographic doom which even made narrative sense, let alone real-world sense, people would be all over it like white on rice.

So, the first movie - time to start paying off, right? Not so much.

Instead of picking up where we left, we find ourselves with the heroine, traveling to the irrelevant Americas once again, this time New York City. It's six months after the TV climax, wherein everybody got arrested for... well, I'm not sure what - apparently saving Japan from blowing itself to oblivion? The protagonist disappeared, the Eden of the East kids managed to set up as a real social-media corporation, profiting from the mother of all publicity stunts, and our heroine... goes chasing after the missing protagonist. Her logic for how she's going to find him doesn't even make narrative sense, the Game people are still manipulating things in nonsensical fashion, they're still screwing around with the poor, much-put-upon mayfly prime ministers of Japan, and the writers are still trying to wring humor out of Japanese kids with illegal firearms bumbling around iconic American cityscapes.

The male lead has wiped his memory *again*, and he's still getting chased by various Game people. Rockets rain down on trucks, tedious startup office humor is indulged in, and I damn near fell asleep from the boredom of it all. The whole movie was just an indulgent animation crew chasing its tail on the big screen. It wasn't offensive, but it also wasn't really a worthy use of an hour and a half of my time, or my money. What the hell, Production IG?

I probably won't bother with the final movie. The ending of the TV series, as incomplete as it was, was at least some sort of ending. Bah.

Hmmm.

I've been favoring Perry the last couple of weeks, ever since Gingrich imploded and it suddenly looked like Perry was a probability in the race. Before that? Maybe Daniels, but he turned out to have the opposite of a Midas Touch, just wading into every gopher hole and barbwire tangle he could find between points A and B on any particular topic.

But I fully admit I don't know Perry that well. The fact that he's never lost a race is... a bit troubling. That tends to breed arrogance. The Aggie thing is going to make him a real punching-bag among the culture snobs who up to this point have occupied their time calling Palin and Bachmann "crazy" and other words starting in "c".

Bush the younger sort of turned himself into a Texan, a play-acting, theatrical version of a Texan. It was mostly real, at least as real as Reagan's cowboy act, but it was sort of an act - he was a Yale man, from a family of Yale men. Perry is, apparently, the son of hard-scrabble dryland cotton farmers. I'm not sure whether the "tenant farmer" label means that they were actual impoverished sharecropper types, or that they operated an agribusiness which rented land on an industrial scale. Given that a bit of googling shows that Perry's father was a county commissioner suggests the latter, I think.

The article sells the idea that Perry's a hardass. Look around the news this month, and I ask you - do we want a hard man in 2012, or another softly-softly "crusty but lovable" type like McCain?

Oh, well, we'll see how he operates once he's all the way into the race. He's still only toe-deep into the campaign muck.

h/t

Marshall MacLuhan was a devout Catholic his entire life? My mind is officially blown.

Combine that with Jack Kerouac's reported Catholicism and I have this bizarre mental image of

The twinkling lights of stubborn faith
Swimming serenely between the organic flakes of
Plankton, diatoms and
The dying oceanic masses
The algeaic snow that float slowly
Falling from those teeming sun-lit shallows
Into the godless depths of the deep

I don't disagree with the writer's assessment of MacLuhan, I read one of MacLuhan's books about ten years back, or at least the first third or so. It was interesting, but so very muddle-headed and arbitrary and riddled with intrinsic contradictions that I dropped him as a charlatan part-way through. I suppose you could classify him as a writer whose manifest and extensive errors are challenging to the intelligent reader, sort of like Karl Marx. Although likewise, he's a serious danger to the hard-charging would-be believer looking for a doctrine and a faith.

(h/t

“For his own good, they ought to take him into the woodshed and say, ‘if you want to survive in this work environment, you’ve got to keep your word, you’ve got to be cordial and congenial and civil even when you’re disagreeing,” said Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) “It makes for a very hard career otherwise.”

You know, talking about taking an adult black male - Allen West, an army colonel & freshman US Representative from Florida - "into the woodshed" - isn't just play-act political-kabuki-pretense fake-racism, I kind of think it may be actual working-definition racism. And seeing as how the email Rep. Moore is having kittens over was in response to an intemperate speech in the well of the House, I can't say as how I can see why the Dems have any grounds for crying "congeniality" or "civility".

h/t, although for a change, Insty's actually down-playing the offensiveness behind his link.

My parents were in town this weekend on their yearly northern progession, visiting friends and relatives in four states. I took them to Arts Fest in State College on Saturday, and a Spikes game on Sunday. Arts Fest was crowded, and hot. We did a quick circuit of the booths, and marveled at the amazingly high-priced art. I ran into a couple co-workers and out-of-town friends while we were walking around the festival. It's the week for running into people, everyone comes into town!

It was the first time I went to a Spikes game. The field was beautiful - perfectly manicured, everything new and shiny. The team was... not very good. They got three runners on base in both the eighth and ninth innings and just couldn't get anyone home. The other team wasn't much better, but they were good enough. The field's staff ran around like maniacs entertaining the crowd with frat-boy-type games & distractions, doing their best to keep the crowd from paying too much attention to how bad the team was playing. It ended with a really nice fireworks display. I have to wonder how much my company pays for the season tickets I used - there was a cranky season-ticket holder sitting next to my dad complaining about the team & talking about how much season tickets cost; it isn't cheap.

Ugh, I managed to get rootkitted by a stubborn set of trojans early this morning, and it took seven hours to clean up the mess. I *think* I'm in the clear, but it took three additional malware programs on top of my installed McAfee, and I managed to burke my relationship with the various Google/gmail/blogger interlocking web-applications. I'm mostly posting this to see if I can get it to work.

There some sections of the internet which just aren't safe, no matter what prophylactics you keep on hand. Firewall, paid-up & up-to-date paid antivirals, using a low-trust dummy account, and it *still* slipped on through as if it was strolling in the front door. Manga scanslation sites are the modern-day equivalent of a 19th century San Francisco coolie whorehouse - you'll catch a virtual STD just walking the sidewalk outside it.

Update: and just as I start making jokes about STDs, I lay eyes on this. I dunno that this untreatable gonorrhea business is particularly new, though. We've had untreatable STDs - from the ugly-embarrassing (herpes) to the lethal (AIDS) for decades. But we really, really need new antibiotics, and the morons in charge are too busy harassing the drug companies to be bothered with things like public hygiene.

I could not believe the abject display of tongue-bathing NPR and CNN was giving the Huntsman campaign announcement yesterday evening. Are they capable of this sort of calculated sabotage, or are they so utterly detached from the attitudes and emotional temperament of the conservative side of the country that they honestly can't anticipate the reactions of the average GOP primary voter, and think that a disloyal former ambassador - whose main policy positions in the Obama era (cap & trade, the stimulus) are vehemently despised by libertarians and TEA Party types - will somehow find a constituency?

Look, his social conservative credentials - pro-life, pro-gun rights - are going to be crippled by two other factors:

1) *Everybody* is pro-life this time 'round, unless Giuliani makes another pass at being rejected.
2) *Everybody* is pro-gun rights this time 'round. It's not as if this is policy rocket-science, especially with the Gunwalker scandal brewing.

He'll split the anti-war, isolationist vote with Ron Paul. At this point, the way to distinguish yourself from the pack is to be *pro* interventionist - I'm not saying that there's a vast majority of primary voters who *aren't* tired of the Terror War, but everybody else seems to have been flirting with war-fatigued voters.

He *won't* attract religious social conservatives because of the whole Mormon thing - I'm not saying that it's a dealbreaker, but it isn't exactly a selling point, either. They'd fall in behind the nominee, Mormon or not, but they've got their own tribal candidates - Bachmann, Cain, Pawlenty, Santorum, or maybe Perry. Romney is supposed to bring in the secular fiscal conservatives, except that the RomneyCare thing has pretty much crippled him among those who pay attention. Which basically leaves the Rockefeller liberal rump, if there are any remaining above ground... I guess Huntsman is the Rockefeller Republican candidate. That gets him, what, a dozen or so primary voters?

And now that it's a "Democratic" amendment, most of the non-farm Democratic Senators piled on & brought the Coburn anti-ethanol-subsidy measure past cloture. This article is pretty muddle-headed, as far as I can tell, they actually *lost* one Republican on this vote - Chambliss apparently went squirrelly on the second vote. And our pet imbecile, Casey, went and voted with Chambliss. But anyways, the exact same set of corn-belt Republicans voted against the measure as earlier in the week, it was just the coastal Democrats finally voting their constituents' interest that brought it over the hurdle. But the Hill is bound and determined to sell the Democratic spin that it was the Republicans that came around, rather than themselves. In reality, this was a straight-up regional vote, the corn belt against the rest of the country, with Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and the Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky delegations falling in with the majority.

h/t

Sigh. On the plus side, the only Republican votes for this were from the Greater Corn Belt, if you include Mississippi, which since the advent of the Great Ethanol Subsidy, has been increasingly shifting from cotton cultivation to growing corn for ethanol. Although Arkansas should technically be making the same move as Mississippi, and yet both senators, the Democratic Pryor *and* the new Republican Boozman, voted for the Coburn amendment. Kentucky's a minor member of the corn belt as well, and yet both of Kentucky's Republican senators piled into the "yes" column; if Rand Paul had voted against this, he probably would have been eaten alive by his supporters. The Maine Sisters, the Alabama Porkbarrellers, the Republican West - they all went anti-ethanol. Hell, even Brown kept to the straight and narrow.

So, in short, what we have here is a *corn belt* Republican problem, not a whole-party problem.

h/t

Update: apparently this was the fruit of Grover Norquist's demented anti-genius. He's so petrified of the spectre of anything anyone could possibly characterize as a "tax increase" that he's stomping about, defending distortive corporate-welfare abominations like the ethanol "tax credit". Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform is an abscess on the conservative movement, a corruption. The best construction to place upon his organization's activities is that they've slid from pro-capitalist tax reform to pro-big-business tax-credit farming. A more likely construction is that he was always in this for the lobbying opportunities, and that his little cottage industry is built upon lobbying and rent-seeking under the color of "tax reform".

Anyways, his obnoxious insistence on characterizing the elimination of subsidies as "tax increases" gave most of the corn-belt Republicans enough cover to do the locally expedient thing instead of the principled thing. Damn him, anyways.

If the idiots in charge provoke a second Falklands War, I want their heads on pikes along the National Mall. But you don't always get what you want, and it is amazing what they can do without actually producing legal cause for impeachment. Actual war-mongering against a stalwart ally not being technically a violation of oath or established law, to my knowledge...

I’m more disgusted by a congressman’s unpaid parking tickets than I am by his sexual fetishes.

- Bob Turner, the Republican challenger Rep. Anthony Weiner defeated in the 2010 congressional elections, in his response to Weiner's disgrace. He's surprisingly eloquent for a defeated candidate in a no-hope congressional district. And you can't help but love a guy who uses Animal Farm to discuss a sordid political sort-of-sex scandal.

There was some talk a while back about whether high student debt was a factor in whether you'd want to date someone.

Appropos of nothing in particular, did anyone know that the Department of Education has a SWAT team?

h/t

I just got around to reading Walter Jon William's newish novel, Deep State, a sequel to his This Is Not A Game. Basically, it's a novel about someone provoking an Arab Spring-style social-media revolution in a post-coup Turkey written just before the Arab Spring broke out. I spent part of the book arguing with his Turkish politics and history - he seems to buy into the "evil drug-running Kurd-slaughtering Military" narrative of Turkish politics. The AKP doesn't even seem to exist in his world-construction; even more weirdly, some off-the-cuff details here and there strongly suggests that the entire war on terror never happened - there's some suggestion that there was never an invasion of Iraq, given some of the geographical and basing details of the CIA or Company-like organization sponsoring the revolution.

Still and all, Williams can build a functioning political universe, even if I have to re-classify it as an alternate-present story in order to get over some details. I wonder if he was irritated to have the Arab Spring disorders so closely mimic his story, or delighted?

I suppose I should unpack that: anyone who aspires to the possession of a "cathedral-like personality" is a walking case of malignant, intellectual narcissism. And I wasn't joking about the man's post being too damn long; I indeed, did not read it all. It read like the standard war-cry of the disinherited intellectual: Respect Mah Authoritah!

TL;DR

h/t

Add this to the pile of "unexpected anti-Green screeds from nonintuitive sources". Although Michael Lind isn't a movement Greenie like Monbriot, Salon is certainly part of the old-guard bien pensant Left - the Nation on Internet Time, rendered sclerotic and irrelevant inside of a decade instead of the generations it took that hoary old publication of the red-diapered left. Hell, this Lind article declaring an end to Peal Carbon Fuel is actually to *my* right - I'm not 99% certain the way he seems to be on the subject.

Found this in the Ace of Spades news sidebar which is unlinkable, still.

Important post-Memorial Day reading.

Note the bit about how the defunding of the NGO development projects by the global recession and an Arab Spring-inspired collapse in jihadi funding has done more to knock the insurgency in the head than years of red-handed war. Especially note how we were funding both sides of the war by letting Taliban facilitators sleaze their way into subcontracting both NGO and military development projects, and then claiming the benefits as Talib-provided. So much for "soft power projection", eh?

Via the usual source.

I just asked the office manager what happened to the milk I had bought Monday morning before work & hadn't been able to take home until last night. She said she threw it out - "It expired May 22nd!"

Jodi, I said - it's May 11th.

Apparently she thought it had been sitting in there since *last* May.

Oh, well. ^_^

OK, I just had a conversation with a non-political co-worker who didn't believe that they actually killed bin Laden. This "burial at sea" BS is going to seriously bite us in the ass. When *I'm* the guy defending the current imbeciles against charges of conspiratorial fraud & "wag-the-dog"ism... that ain't good. And it started off with me laughing at some reporter doofus accidentally reporting the death of "Obama", in a typo that's bound to haunt that guy's career from here on out.

This, on the other hand, is shameful. Death, even of a devil or a monster, should never be celebrated.

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of the Tao never used them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.

Man, I haven't read the Dao De Jing in years.

h/t

I went out yesterday to see the "May flowers" our prolific April showers have foretold.

I got rained on.

Hmm. So they finally got him. And he wasn't in a brick border fortress in Waziristan or a cave in Nuristan, but a McMansion in an Islamabad suburb, living among the families of ISI bureaucrats.

Are we going to just pretend that our nation's greatest enemy wasn't being protected by the intelligence ministry of an alleged ally whom we've been giving billions yearly in military aid? We have the body. Next time you meet a Pakistani, ask them what their government would have done, if they were in our shoes.

I have difficulty expressing myself in an even and non-incendiary tone right now.

It was an April Fool's joke, but I like the idea of moving back to the old "Hardee Hat" Stetsons of the Civil War and Frontier days. It just has a better feel to it than the black berets.

h/t Ace of Spades sidebar - dunno how to direct-link those, sadly.

Man, I'd never think to see George "Moonbat" Monbriot write something like this. It could be an old Gregg Easterbrook column in the Marty Peretz-edited salad days of The New Republic. When you have ol' Moonbat telling the panicky MSM to calm the hell down about an environmental catastrophe...

Heck, I was even yelling at some perverse paleocons to stop sniveling about Obama's allegedly unconstitutional Libyan adventure the other day over on Rantburg.

Strange days indeed. Everything's upside down, and it could turn back rightside up again at any moment.

Insty h/t.

I saw this link in the Althouse comments today. A real panacea for today's ration of panic about the Fukushima plants, which have even infected most of the conservative, pro-nuclear blogs and sites.

Man, Ishihara can be uncomfortably close to Hitler in temperament. Please don't call the man a "conservative", he's a fascist, capitalism-hating, racist, will-to-power extremist. And maybe Yamakan might want to think about getting into politics and giving up on anime - he's not much of an artist, and seems to love controversy and fighting things out in the media when he should be concentrating on current projects.

Lucid, clear explanation of the Fukushima partial meltdown. Long story short, it was ugly, but a forty-year old reactor at a troubled plant with a spotty maintenance history took two beyond-design-specification disasters in close succession & didn't kill anybody or poison its environs. It sounds like all the radiation casualties will be plant employees.

Frankly, the horrible damage done by the tsunami tearing through the grease, oil, and lubricant-contaminated environs of every port on the Tohoku coast & depositing all of those industrial poisons and toxic wreckage over the once-fruitful coastal plains is the actual environmental disaster to consider in this catastrophe. Those were beautiful fields being submerged under that black, foul hell-tide. They aren't beautiful anymore, and I'm not sure anybody should be eating food grown off of them for the next couple seasons at least.

We need nukes, damnit. The more of them we can build in safe locales (and yes, if nothing else, putting our nuclear power plants in places where we don't have to use design tolerances keyed to survival from a 9.0 earthquake and inundation by a 30-foot tsunami strikes me as *cheaper*, cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain), the better. A modern economy won't be run from power-plants burning unicorn farts and pixy dust, it's either nukes, coal, or gas - and the more of each, the fewer little old ladies get to freeze to death in the depths of winter when it comes down to the limitations. There are bureaucrats in Japan right now, cold-bloodedly plotting rolling blackouts in order to stretch the torn ends of their shredded power infrastructure around the Fukushima-shaped-hole torn in their power net. Redundancy is life.

Explanation link from Rand Simberg; youtube link from the Brickmuppet.

Yesterday was another busy day on the pumpkin catapult front. We finished assembling the devices and tested them in Jason's back yard while he kept an eye on a smoldering pile of crop refuse and brush which he was burning in order to try and kill off a late-blight infestation in his tomato patch in preparation for the new season.

My direct-fire spring-pull ballista was kind of a damp squib. It fired, reliably, but no further than about twenty-five feet - about the same range as a high-end SuperSoaker. It wasn't really designed to be adjustable, so that was it, boom, 25 ft. So, the finished device works, but isn't much more than a bulky, wonky-looking toy. At least the spring didn't fail - we had padded it out with a series of rubber sheets around the pull-axle, which was enough to keep it from self-destructing. Speaking of which...

Jason's spring-torsion trebuchet started out brillantly, destroying the sweet onion we had been using as a pumpkin-substitute (we managed to directly smack into a branch of the big maple behind Jason's house, which pretty much put paid to that object as a throwable payload), and firing for another two-dozen pulls with a light obsidian-pumicy rock about the right size and shape. After changing the angle of attack on the throwing arm, and modifying the base to add a trigger and a shelf for the sling and projectile, we got it up to throwing small rocks about 80-90 ft across Jason's yard - just shy of his property line. Then the spring failed.

Happily, since the spring was in a protective sleeve (actually, the leg of a pair of blue-jean trousers) and it wasn't really under explosive outward pressure, it didn't hurt anybody. When we took it apart to see what happened, we found that one of the mounting pegs had also snapped, which explained one of the earlier "SPRONG!" noises the machine had made on an earlier cranking. So, we had been putting a lot of stresses on this device. The spring failed just above the welds holding it to the octogonal plate holding the mounting pegs; best guess is that the heat from the welding process weakened the aged spring (to remind y'all, this had been taken out of a trashed automotive shock-absorber) enough that it eventually failed under pressure. The mounting peg was a separate issue, and the design group concluded that having used drillcore for the mounting peg had been a mistake - it was too hard and rigid for the horizontal sheer force being placed upon it by the design. We should have used mild steel instead.

They went back to the drawing table, and quickly banged out a replacement design based on a completely different principle, which would allow the salvaging of as many parts of the wrecked device as possible. The new device would use the second salvaged shock-absorber spring in a compression device - playing to the actual design usage of the original manufacturing process. The spring was mounted in a box on the base, with a bottom-plunger on braided steel cord threaded through the spring, so as to pull directly upwards, distributed through the body of the device by the construction of the box. The steel cord will be wrapped around a pulley-cam on a moving axle, which will be welded to the salvaged throwing arm. This retains the torsion motion, while avoiding any weld-work on the surviving reserve spring. We spent yesterday afternoon and evening putting together the new base & welding together the pulley-cam & modifying the original three-quarters-inch bar, which had been a non-moving support element in the old device & which had to be reworked to turn it into a smoothly-turning axle in some brass bushings.

Spent a few more hours in Jason G's basement yesterday, until the snow got too alarming for me to be out and about. We (well, mostly Jason) came up with a welded double-hook for the draw/catch/release on my device's shuttle. After fighting with some basic hooks I bought at Triangle Supply, Jason got an evil look in his eye and declared that he'd make his own. So he did, out of a bit of steel barstock he had on hand, reaming out an end, tapping it for a 1/4 screw socket, and then bending out two hooks with wrench, hammer, anvil, and cutter. Then he shaped the ends with a metal-grinder and used his welding rig to mate the parts together. Doublehook!

We drove a simple bar-based pull through the side of the device, and test-fired it in the garage, with nothing on the shuttle. That was probably a mistake. The light, store-bought spring was powerful enough to damage itself without any weight on the shuttle to bleed off energy. Jason had talked me into wrapping some rubber around the top axle, which probably kept the spring from shattering entirely, but after one dry-fire, the spring had herniated visibly. We talked about inserting a compression-spring ahead of the pull-spring to absorb some of that recoil shock, and he thought that we could probably just snip off the herniated section & re-bend a new hook to replace the removed section, but by then we had noticed that the weathe had dropped an inch and a half of snow while we had been mucking around with drilling and testing.

Meanwhile, he's still working on his welded-steel monster, and we built the wood frame for the base. He also started in on drilling out the plates for holding his fulcrum axle, but none of his proper drills were large enough to drive the holes needed to hold the 3/4ths inch steel bar he's using for his axle. So he drilled out as big as he could go, and then started setting up the plates on his power lathe with a four-corner chock and a, I don't know what you call it, lathe arm? After a couple minutes of this, he sighed, said it would take hours, and put it aside for when I wasn't there.

So there we are, Jason's device is coming along slowly, and mine got to its first partial-build test fire, and is going back for some re-design. And we got at least three-four inches of heavy snow last night - I haven't been outside yet to see what damage the night left us.

I had a busy Saturday. Jason G, who has a big workshop in his basement & garage, wanted to try building pumpkin-throwing devices for Jessica's little event in the fall, and his girlfriend was out of town for the weekend. So we spent the morning with Dan W, digging through piles of scrap at a junkyard in the ruins of a quarry facility outside of Pleasant Gap. We ended buying about fifty pounds of aluminum and iron bars, springs and the like, then hit a tractor supply shop and Triangle Lumber over near Jason's house. We met a couple of university folk back at Jason's place - Antonios whom I know from Otto's Tuesdays, and a guy named Jim who I think was at Jason's Superbowl party this year.

I was going for a simple spring-pull ballista, while Jason had this idea for a torsion-axle trebuchet design. I really just banged about without much estimation, calculation, or design, building a wooden frame around a nicely-formed piece of aluminum scrap. The frame and shuttle was mostly done by yesterday evening, although there's a lot of work & thought required in figuring out the exact nature and details of the pull and latch mechanism. I'm thinking a simple latch hanging off of the shuttle, and a cross-bar just before the full extent of the spring, so that the latch can simply "drop" onto the bar when pulled back across the locking cross-bar during cocking. When the device is inverted and placed into firing position, the latch can easily be yanked down by cord, triggering the device.

Dan W and I *tried* to assemble the device so that the formed-aluminum slot at the core was properly aligned so that the latch would be placed at the rear of the aluminum core, but I'm not sure if it'll do so or no. If not, we can always set up a bar across the top of the device instead, although that'll be yet another failure point. At least we went with a cheap and new heavy-duty door spring instead of the ancient and far-too-strong car-shock-absorber springs which we bought at the scrapyard. To be honest, this device doesn't feel like it'll throw a pumpkin all that far, if it works at all. But what the hey.

Jason's device is much more elaborate, and looking kind of steampunkish. He and Antonios and Jim were working all afternoon and evening on a lot of grinding, metal-cutting, and welding tasks, modifying one of the shock-absorber springs and building a delicate, cross-supported throwing arm out of little strips of steel. The in-process result I looked at at the end of the evening was about five-six pounds, I guess. Most of the mass of the device will be in the fulcrum cross-arm and the base of the device, I guess. My machine has most of its mass already - the only thing to be added is the latching mechanism, a detachable pull-stirrup, and another cross-bar.

Antonios is some sort of chemistry PhD, a professor I think, and he spent much of the afternoon filabustering, trying to come up with rules-lawyering ways around the "mechanical advantage only" design requirements. Talking about water-pressure rockets, gunpowder, dynamite, air-pressure - but mostly going on about a preposterous Mentos and Diet Pepsi driven device. I told him about the dry-ice and water in a two-liter toy we had made back at the Witch House which destroyed a garbage can.

But anyrate, yesterday, we tinkered, and made a heck of a mess in Jason's garage and workshop.