Time's running out on me. - 20 August 2007

Well, tomorrow’s the big packing day. Might be an early update, depending on how much we need to make sure the computer gets secured in all of this. It’s going to be a long drive, I suspect, but that’s the beauty of it - it’ll get done, and then I’ll start my next phase of life. And probably have to wait quite a while for “the rest” to arrive, but that’s the problem with moving cross-country.

In things that are more interesting to my reading audience than my growing anxiety about being able to fit everything I want to into my vehicle, the blog "I, Cringely" talks about the Singularity, and how life leading up to that point is the hard part of getting there. Of course, the Singularity is often debated between the poles of super-life with abundance and immortality everywhere and the dystopian-style future where the machines take over and the humans are slaves. With the potential of artificial life coming down the pipe, the drive to use automatons for military conflicts, and the continued march of better, faster, smaller, it might soon come to pass that maid girl case mods will soon be maid girl androids. My brain sees this, somehow, as the fusion of powerful processors and Real Dolls, which might make for an interesting Ghost in the Shell story. And then I read that Hume memory might function more like RAM than ROM, and wonder what the future will be like, indeed. (This is one of those cases where not having one’s university access is a bit of a trouble. I’m sure a lot of people would like to be able to read the paper the article refers to, yet it is locked away.)

Regarding current military conflicts, for the average Iraqi citizen, medical care, clean water, and basic needs are all scarce at best. And the beatings will no doubt continue until morale improves. Or the ever-elusive “victory” condition is obtained - the real one, not “Mission Accomplished.” Joe Lieberman is focused elsewhere, trying to get Syria to close off its airport and borders to prevent the flow of antagonists from entering Iraq. The Huffington Post says that while the American Psychological Association approved a resolution restricting their members from taking part in interrogations involving specific practices, rather than a blanket ban on their presence. Those who ignore the resolution risk losing their license to practice.

A fang-sharpening exercise for my reading audience is to read Ken Connor's insistence that in the name of tolerance, New York’s public schools are permitting Islam a place in public schools, through education in Arabic and studies of the history of the Middle East. He claims that trying to study the history of the region without studying Islam is impossible, while conveniently neglecting to note that trying to study the history of Western Europe and America will necessitate at least a passing familiarity with Christianity, since it motivates ever-so-much of the history of those regions. And if you dig down past the surface, you find that a lot of people in those regions still have that Christian influence to this day, and they make it manifest in their government, too. You can’t tell me that Islam and the Middle East are intertwined and then say somehow that America and Christianity aren’t. The best you can do to stay self-consistent is to claim that Christianity is somehow the superior interpretation, which plenty of people do. Anyway, go feast.

Despite all of this, though, ingenuity, and probably a certain disregard for societal opinion, prevail. They produce hats made from beer boxes and ridiculously long tarp slides. They create websites for museums dedicated to unicorns under the premise of taking the accounts of creation literally. They post instructions on training a cat to accept a harness and leash. Of course, strange things happen to them, too, like a women being killed by a camel that was trying to mate with her. And they can do dark things, too, like abuse of minors under the premise of "correcting behavior problems". (Not all of those places are like this one, I’m sure, but much like anything, the fringe can sully the reputation of everyone else in the association.)

Not related in any way to any of the previous, excavators may have found the first permanent buildings in what is today known as Montreal. Nothing like history staring you in the face while the future rushes in.

And then they create something beautiful that speaks well of us, and shows that understanding does come to Humes, even if it sometimes seems like it takes forever to get there. Calvin and Hobbes have a lot to teach the world about how to deliver a message. Whether the message is the one about a savior of man, divine in nature, or something like a savior of all mankind, who came from royal surroundings but renounced them, achieved the end of his karma, and then taught his path to others. Or something extolling the virtues of a good cheesesteak. It’s not the thing you’re selling anymore - there’s hundreds of things like it - but how you sell it. Make sure your message is in the right medium. (Which probably means that I’m extraordinarily ill-suited to achieving any sort of change at all.)

Anyway. Tomorrow we pack. Day after, we drive. And from there, some doors close, and others open. The possibilities continue to change, but they never cease to be interesting. Have fun, people. If I decide to, I might enable voice-posting so that I can update from the road. Or I might just keep you all in the dark. Or I’ll designate some unlucky sod to give updates on my progress. However, I go about it, by the end of this week, I will be in Washington.

Early updates for all - 21 August 2007

Doing this early because I’m going to have to pack up the computer tonight, so that in the morning, we get up, have food, and drive. So a daily dose of my insanity, direct to you through the wonders of the Intarwebs.

bradhicks talks about issues local to him as well as more national ones, and today he talks about how much damage the death of a good cop can do, in all the lives that he could have turned around, people he could have helped, and disasters that might have been averted. He also makes mention of how much the death of that cop can be used to promote an agenda that would cause even more harm at the hands of the police to the people on that good cop’s beat. Always seems like the officers who can do the most good are the ones who end up dying before they can accomplish all of it.

AmericaBlog tells us much of what we want to know about those who fill out polls at WorldNetDaily - they're quite in favor of nuking Muslim holy sites. Even better, it’s apparently because it’s “the only language these religion-driven fanatics understand”, according to the clear majority of responses. I’m just waiting for the realization of how well that applies to them, too. Any time now, really, it’ll happen.

A rather interesting sequence of events brought on by the current climate. Diabetics have hospitalizing incidents because officials seize insulin needles, seven-year-old children who have the same name as someone on a trigger list have their flights canceled and are subjected to scrutiny multiple times. Going just by name is rather stupid. I want to see what happens when a John Smith gets on the no-fly list. And, here in the United States, the true colors are coming out - Democrats are saying troop surges are working, while still saying that they should come home. So when push comes to shove, which line will they take - that the surge is working, or that the troops need to come home? This looks like a rather nakedly political move to me. Come election time, there may be some hard questions asked about what to do in Iraq if one of the at least nominally anti-war candidates gets into the office.

I would like to see what Thomas Sowell believes is the real cause of progress when he claims that the American liberal establishment is only concerned with using the poor as weapons, rather than trying to help them in their plight. It may be true, that as people pass out of poverty into well-being that they lose political focus, but it might be for the justifiable reason that there are still plenty of people poor and in need of assistance. But I think Sowell wants to have you believe that liberals want to keep an underclass that they can then exploit for political purposes. Which, if I recall rightly, would be one of the points that Marx fellow he mentions applies to everyone in the capitalist class, not just one’s opponents. The current system doesn’t always do things to help people, like assessing back taxes on a debt cancelled through foreclosure, which would probably not help anyone who was in the situation of being unable to make payments.

Our celebrity news will make pet lovers feel a little better - Michael Vick will accept a plea bargain regarding charges related to a dogfighting ring and plead guilty. Punishment to follow, which may include jail, fines, and/or his exclusion from the professional sports league he is currently a part of.

In technology news, a Microsoft patch that caused many Windows machines to reboot caused an unintentional DoS on Skype. There was also a bug that kept the system down for some time afterward, but the tendency of computers to be set at the defaults, which is “reboot immediately after installing, kthx” for some reason, caused a service outage. And might have made a lot of people curse after losing work they had. Technology having good results, though, comes from The Happiness Project, where Gretchen realizes that listening to the music you like will make you happy, regardless of whether it shows off any sort of “taste” or “sophistication” in your musical choices. Listen to what makes you happy. Do what makes you happy. Even if it is snickering about old Batman comics discussing mistakes, or "boners".

In my case, although the happiness value is somewhat disputed, I must do my packing thing. From here on out, you’ll probably only be serenaded by the sound of my rather non-radiogenic voice. For that, I apologize, but it’s the only way anyone’s getting updates, most likely, for the next few days.