Booga-booga. - 07 October 2007

Good thing that I have a day off tomorrow - finished up The Amber Spyglass and took a little dive back into the Final Fantasy XII world. A few hours later, after finally finding a save point, I sit down to write the entry. Oy. Good Sunday, though - time passed pretty quickly at work, so I wasn’t just there with nothing to do. But it wasn’t the most productive of things, other than finding a good way to cook broccoli (Nyo) that made it a much more palatable thing. w00t.

Two recalls again - ice cream that does not have all its ingredients labeled, and Cargill patties infected with E. coli.

Anyway, hitting the ground running, I can’t verify anything like this independently, so it’s firmly a rumor status, but it's rumored that Warner Brothers has decided no further movies coming from their studio will have female leads. Which sounds like such a monumentally stupid decision that there’s a vanishingly small chance of it becoming true, right? It would be about as true as a doctor claiming to find identifying bite marks on victims where no other forensic expert can, using his own special method. Wait, that one happened, and people were convicted on the strength of that “expertise”.

Something familiar, as if we’d seen it done in other places - the United States is expanding and making its Afghanistan bases more permanent. Digging in for the long run, expecting to be there a while. Is this the first stage in establishing what is basically a permanent war, with the associated resource drain?

Austin Cline considers the usage of mercenaries and "private security" forces in Iraq to be a rather stupid decision as well, considering how much they cost and how much they operate outside the chain of command. More stupid than whatever caused a twelve-inch lizard to swallow and pass a seven-inch rubber lizard through its digestive tract? Maybe. At least as stupid as the decision someone made to willingly strap a helmet on that had a bottle of dry ice fastened to it and walk until it exploded.

There’s another Republican politician in the stall of fame - Talking Points Memo has the account of a would-be Louisiana state senator having made a pass at an undercover agent for bathroom sex.

Crossing the line from stupid to flat-out evil is the epidemic of brutal rape going on in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the seeming inability of anyone to be able to put a stop to it. Congo guerillas are also threatening gorillas by moving into a wildlife preserve. It’s like the country is trying to tear itself apart, or some large group is trying to tear the country apart.

A question to ponder, in the context of Gnosticism is Can Gnosticism be a populist religion? Although the definition involved seemed to be more of an egalitarian thing, but I guess in the sense that everyone can come to it and practice it and get all the “secret knowledge” there is in it, they mean populist. I think I’m a bit definition-confused here. But even beyond that question for the one religion - can all religions make that kind of transition? And if they do, will it be better for them or worse? For religions like The First Church of Galactus, with their tract Galactus is Coming!, the more people that know and practice, the better.

Nigel Willmott in Comment Is Free (a service through Guardian UK) suggests that Richard Dawkins and atheists are cut of the same cloth as Martin Luther and his Protestants when it comes to sparking a revolution where the Church has too much power, inroads into government, the threat of militant Islam... all those things that 1500 seems to have thrown forward into the future to us now. Which could be good, which could be bad, depending on whether this revolution repeats the one done before.

Another potential effect of warming - melting ice has displaced the Alaskan walrus populations onto the northwest shores of the state. Effects of this move are not yet known, but it’s not necessarily a good thing to have populations shifting like that. In other organism news, I’m not sure we can pin this one on global warming, either, but the world's largest organism is a 2,384 acre (965 hectare) giant fungus. And these big things may be par for the fungal course. At some point, we may have to have spore warnings along with all the other air quality alerts.

Gent posted his telephone number because he wanted to talk to people - and got it.. The site where he posted it asked him if he really did want people calling him out of the blue. He did, and they did. Apparently things have gone well so far. We hope they continue to do so, and that there aren’t jokers, prankers, phishers, telemarketers, or stalkers that want to have fun with the number.

So that’s my stuff tonight. Tomorrow is hopefully a very productive day for me. At least, that’s what I hope it turns out to be. *shrug*

To keep yourselves entertained, consider the following question and offer some suggestions: If I were to make a poll on some subject, or to solicit the opinions of the masses on a topic (for furtherance of the Supreme Ideological Organization’s goals, of course - you can’t get ACROSS without it.), on what subject should I ask? Or if I were to attempt to create one of those “I do this, then you respond and post it in your blog” units, then what would be a good thing to do or a good question list to generate?

Feast and Famine. - 08 October 2007

The things that I thought would be hard were easy. The things I thought would be easy were impossible. Bank holiday - credit union not open. Emissions test - check and pass. Doctor’s appointment - check. Dentist’s appointment - check. Department of Licensing - Catastrophic FAIL. But we continue to try and get this to work out. It very well might be an expensive gift, though, if the taxpersons have their way. Makes me wonder if it would be cheaper to sell the car to me for even a ridiculously low price like $1 and base the taxation on that, rather than the value of the car if given as a gift. Augh. That’s twice now I’ve been hit by something that wasn’t mentioned to me at all. But I did come out of this day ahead - emissions pass and appointment x2, in addition to an absolutely fantastic dinner and a bottle of ginger beer afterward far outweighs not being able to put the plates and tabs on yet.

With that, the news. Surprising almost nobody, more people are heading for avatar-ville. The popularity of sites and services that allow one to construct and reconstruct an identity model, then have that model interact are growing, and it’s not just MMOs. Although, one could say that most places where avatars are are exercises in role-playing, so maybe every forum is an MMORPG of some sort. Either way, our digital selves are becoming more and more wedded to our physical selves, and sometimes the two are coexisting in a particular space. Should this bother us, that G-d gives us one face, and we make ourselves another?

Plasteel almost invented by researchers at the University of Michigan. The disqualifying point? Not quite flexible enough to be a plastic steel, but still a very strong plastic. Might be helpful for those flexible readers and the like. Or for building the plastic dome you’ve always wanted around your city. Or that really neat idea involving an iguana ball and your older sister..

Applying the follow-up rule (not quite the floodgate rule, as there wasn’t a whole lot, just another item) - the Mandean people, as close to the "original" Gnostics as you can get, are dying out. The reason? There’s a war going on in their homeland, Iraq. Unintended consequences, indeed. Things are not being helped there with Patraeus saying that Iran is fueling Iraq's violence, going as far to say that the Iranian envoy to Iraq is a member of the Revolutionary Guards force, which the United States has declared a terrorist organization. On the ground, however, the United States military might finally be mounting a serious campaign to win hearts and minds by embedding anthropologists and social scientists in with combat units, so that they can suggest ways of winning local support without having to resort to military force. Might soften the impact of the invasion enough to be palatable. Or it might find ways for the military to do all sorts of cruel things, but without actually offending the local populace.

William F. Buckley manages to make a point for me, although he probably intends it in a different way that I’m going to go. His piece, The war, in the vernacular, describes a fictional communication between a soldier who has voiced his opinion against the war and an unnamed commanding officer. The conversation reads basically as “I‘m against the war! Don’t I have a constitutional freedom that allows me to speak out against the war?“ ”Yes you do, son, but you’re in a military uniform on a military mission right now. Because of that, you saying you’re opposed gives the enemy support and fosters dissent in the ranks. While you’re in this uniform, you support the war and do your job, regardless of what your personal feelings are. Once you get out of uniform, or this conflict ends, then you’re free to voice your opinion on it.“ In essence, the military’s official opinion is your opinion, regardless of what your actual opinion is. While useful for presenting a united front of some sort about how the soldiers think, this seems counterproductive to me - those people who are gung-ho about the conflict are going to be so. Those reluctant should be allowed to voice that reluctance, even if only limited to the matter of ”I personally think this is wrong, but I am a soldier and will thus discharge my duties.“ Trying to enforce groupthink, or the appearance thereof, leads to gross distortions. I’d say more people might actually ”support“ the troops in the way that the Republicans think is the only acceptable way if they weren’t being fed the idea that everybody in uniform supports the conflict fully. I’m drawing in support for the presence of these unwritten rules, as well as providing a different perspective on it, by linking to an excerpt from Howard Kurtz's "Reality Show", describing how anchors and networks do an incredible dance on what to say, when to say it, and how it was going to be presented to the public with regard to the ongoing coverage of the Iraq conflict. In many ways, the mainstream media is a large enforcer and creator of groupthink. If it’s on all the netowrks, then everyone is supposed to think this in this way, right? And then you get what happens when groupthink hits groupthink - the rather messy ideological war that going on as the actual conflict itself goes on. I’d rather have reasonable people in the media laying out why they think Iraq is a success, with minimal references to hot-button issues and without implying that their opponents are somehow un-American by opposing, and reasonable people in the military laying out why they think Iraq is a mistake, without having people jump on them that they’re somehow un-American for believing such, or requiring them to toe the line and say whatever the official position is. Pipe dreams, I know, but it would probably make for better life all around if we knew that we could agree to disagree and we knew that there were people, even in the bastion of one’s ideological opposition, that were reasonable, articulate, and willing to lay out their reasoning in a way that could be understood by all. Hell, it might mean that the American populace finally elects an executive based on policy rather than presentation. Pipe dreams, I know.

In domestic politics, I may be reading a bit too much between the lines here, but in writing an article describing how Senator Clinton is being perceived as "smart" and "experienced, in a positive sort of tone, you could have found a much better picture to lead with. The one there looks like the Senator is about to do what the Scientologist did on daytime talk television. Unless this is the L.A. Times’s way of expressing their disapproval at the Senator’s continued fame.

The Republicans appear to be coalescing around a peculiar strategy - spend many hundreds of billions on an unpopular conflict, yet decry a modest spending bill as fiscally unsound and try to use something like nationalized health care as a spectre to frighten people with. This is balanced by Ms. Pelosi abdicating a key responsibility as Speaker of the House to Mr. Bush, namely the ability to decide whether or not the country should be at war or funding such things.

One got through the screeners when an off-duty sheriff's deputy killed six and critically wounded another. That’s not exactly a reassuring thing to see, but it is hopefully a very isolated incident - although that reminds me, has anything moved forward on the investigation regarding the woman who ”accidentally“ managed to choke herself with her manacles? Moving on to other things in the crime file - a man might get thirty years in prison for shoplifting a doughnut. How does that work? Well, if he pushed the clerk, that’s considered an assault, and shoplifting becomes forcible stealing. Nice upgrade.

Our winner for tonight’s SSRC Quiche, however, goes to British police, who arrested a seventeen year-old and are holding him on terrorism charges, because he is alleged to have had on his person or in his belongings a copy of The Anarchists’ Cookbook . Under terror laws in the United Kingdom, even collecting information that could be used in a terror plot is a crime. So having your regular subscription to 2600 might get you arrested in the United Kingdom. Isn’t that a cheery thought. And thus, we award the Quiche to those who most assuredly deserve every bit of it.

Looking forward into the future, The Futurist magazine offers up the top ten forecasts appearing in their magazine for this year. Everything from a cashless society to an extinction event, speculation about what the world will become in a few years is moving onward. The Wall Street Journal says things are getting better for citizens around the world, despite what the media says, and that they expect this trend to continue. And then smugly says that in the same way, our future people will look back on our doom predictions and laugh at how silly we were.

I still get to wail in despair over the couple who got married at Wally World, though. It’s a store, people. And one with a questionable record on how well it treats employees and customers.

Hitting the Cool Things department (finally!) we have a small replica of an X-wing starfighter equipped with engines, which is cool-looking, but did not stand up well to the first flight test, disintegrating after a few seconds in the air. Microsoft’s X-Box 360 console did better in the heat and stress test when even after being left on a stove with the burner on, still booted and was able to play games. Far and away the winner in this case, however, is Extermination by chocolate, a Dalek done entirely in chocolate.

And thus, I retreat to bed. Everyone should make sure they get enough sleep, or their faculties suffer. Despite the article being about children, I know this applies to adults as well. (Luckily, if we really need to, we can sneak in a lunchtime nap.)