Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 618
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 10 sign-ups; 6 cancellations; Total= 4
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
IT'S VIDEO THURSDAY, AND MORE! (You could take this to mean that: a) Gary is feeling lazy; b) Gary is hopelessly overworked; c) Gary is terribly ill and in pain; d) Gary is procrastinating; e) Gary has been called away on a mission to assassinate Facebook managers who run buggy servers and a horrible GUI. Take your pick!)
Remember, at Amygdala and our new corporate partner, Viridian Dynamics, we believe all our readers are special and individual:
We believe you like violence in vegetables; meet the Big Bertha of pumpkin cannons:
Did you realize that Eric Idle has recast Monty Python and is touring with Monty Python's greatest hits?
Among the cast: Alan Tudyk and Jane Leeves. If I attended the Ricardo Montalban Theatre, I'd have to restrain an urge to bellow "KHAAAAANNNN!" It would just seem called for.
At Amygdala, we believe in time-saving. Kill Bill Parts 1 & 2, in One Minute, in One Take (and titles):
Having saved those four hours, if you like, you can watch The History Channel's new documentary on Tolkien's mythology and Tolkien's personal history; they'll doubtless show this again several thousand times. I haven't seen all of it yet, but since part of it is on Tolkien's experiences in WWI, I expect Hitler will put in his mandatory History Channel appearance.
Or you could go with their documentary on space wars.
Speaking of such, want your Star Wars without clunky George Lucas dialogue?
Lots more about that and lots more links here. All the beautiful SW visual art, and no wincing.
Still with your Amygdala, genre fans? Nathan Fillion explains why he takes off his pants to tell kids to turn down their radio:
I'm not sure if you can see this unless you're on Facebook, but if you can, you must check out this magnificent new USB attachment for delivering wine. C'est révolutionnaire!
Want to just get away from it all? I'm not a huge Disney fan, but this is definitely a feel-good, kewl, short video.
I had to look up what "tilt-shift" photography was, myself, but *you* probably already know.
On a coal-powered terraformed Mars, a milquetoast office drone stumbles across an otherworldly portal which spurs him into conflict with computer viruses made real, with the aid of a sarcastic female techno-geek and her wacky pet, culminating in a philosophical argument punctuated by violence. The title: The Metadroid.
Fred Pohl makes a Brooklyn-born-and-bred-boy's heart beat with pride.
Captain of her own spaceship, currently visiting Saturn, Carolyn Porco.
On an incongruously serious note, if you read this, you can keep a candle of memory flickering just a moment longer. And the moral questions it raises may, perhaps, flicker much longer within you.
Thus provoking a lot of dirty words, causing Jesse Sheidlower of the OED to explain why it's so hard to put sex in the dictionary, and that question you've always wondered about: "Can a Woman 'Prong' a Man?"
Or absinthe, bourbon, chai tea, irish cream, lavender, pomegranate tangerine, wasabi ginger, or white russian flavored. Got questions? Read the FAQ; you won't be sorry. Includes such highlights as:
Are your absinthe lollys legal?
Yep. After a ridiculously long prohibition, absinthe has officially made a comeback. The US Government recently approved the sale of absinthe within certain guidelines, namely that there is less than 10ppm of thujone. Our Absinthe Lollipops contain an amount of thujone that is within the legal limits set by the US regulatory authorities and of the European Union.
Do you use real bacon in your candy?
Indeed we do. And across the board we only use the most high-quality ingredients available. So that bacon? It’s not just real- it’s sustainably farmed.
Will the absinthe lollipops get me wasted?
Our absinthe lollipops will get you as wasted as will beer-battered chicken, bourbon-infused BBQ sauce, or lasagna alla vodka- which is to say, no: they do not contain alcohol. Furthermore, the myth of thujone is just that.
Now that you've eaten, you need sports entertainment. One black hole wrestles another! Two black holes enter NGC 6240 , one black hole leaves! Okay, stays.
EVERYONE PLAY THE HOME GAME!Make. Money. Fast. by playing the distributed Big Brother game! Can you say "government-sponored voyeurism"? I knew you could!
Britain, already one of the most snooped-upon nations on Earth, is about to become a nation of snoopers.
A network of citizen crimewatchers will be given the chance of winning up to £1,000 by monitoring CCTV security cameras over the internet.
The cameras’ owners will pay a fee to have users watch the footage. The scheme, Internet Eyes, is being promoted as a game and is expected to go “live” next month with a test run in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Subscribers will be able to register free and will be given up to four cameras to monitor.
Eventually the consortium behind the idea hopes to have internet users around the world focused on Britain’s 4.2 million security cameras, waiting to see and report a crime in return for cash prizes.
[...] In addition to camera footage, the Internet Eyes website will also feature a rogues’ gallery of criminals along with a list of their offences and which internet user helped to catch them.
Tony Morgan, who set up the site, said: “This could turn out to be the best crime prevention weapon there’s ever been. I wanted to combine the serious business of stopping crime with the incentive of winning money.
Yes. Yes, because everything is better if you can win money for it.
My follow-up idea, good only in the United States, China, and Iran (where I have patents pending): live electrocutions of prisoners sentenced to die, while home viewers compete for cash prizes as to who can click fastest to actually execute the prisoner before anyone else does! It's crime deterrence with the incentive of winning money!
Back in Britain:
[...] Subscribers will try to collect points by monitoring cameras in real time. If they see anything suspicious, they will click a button to send a still picture and text message to the camera’s owner.
The owner will then send a feedback e-mail to the person reporting the incident, indicating whether there has been a crime or suspected crime.
Users will be awarded one point for spotting a suspected crime and three if they see an actual crime. They can also lose points if the camera operator decides that the alert was not a crime.
I'm just sorry Phil Dick didn't live to read this stuff, and confirm for himself just how accurately he modeled Teh Future than _Analog_ ever did. (Where are my L5 colonies, Mr. Smarty-Pants Campbell? Eh? Eh?)
Regardless, what Britain needs are more CCTV cameras:
[...] Britain is one of the world’s most monitored societies, with one camera per fourteen people. It has 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, but only one per cent of the global population.
To be sure, David Brin would approve, and Charles Platt tells me on Facebook that: "The cameras aren't going to go away. Therefore, it's better to have equal access to them than access only by a privileged few."
So I'm not worried! I just want a cut of the profits! And I think my home execution game is going to earn me teh big bucks!
Does anyone here speak Mandarin? Farsi? I'll cut you in if you help me negotiate the deal!
But even if I just get a deal in the U.S.: profit!
[...] Liberty Counsel has therefore named this special new prayer-in-action program Adopt a Liberal. And that's exactly what we invite you to do -- adopt a liberal who is in authority for regular, intense prayer in accord with St. Paul's admonition to his disciple, Timothy. In fact, we expect that many of our friends and supporters will choose to adopt many liberals as subjects of regular prayer!
How does it work, you ask?
Here's How it Works...
Pick one or more of the liberals from the list we have posted online at www.LC.org, or choose your own liberal(s) to adopt. If you are led to choose one or more of the liberals we have selected for consideration, please read their brief biographical statement, including the reasons they stand in need of prayer.
Pray earnestly and intensely for them! Pray that the Lord would move upon them and cause them to be the kind of leaders who will encourage others to lead "a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence." We encourage you to seek the Lord's guidance on how to pray for your liberal(s), always allowing Him to temper your prayer with His love and mercy.
Join Us as We Pray for God's Powerful
Intervention in Many Liberals' Lives
Please pray daily for the liberal(s) of your choice, so each can become a good influence on our Nation's culture. Prayer is powerful! It allows God to change the minds of those for whom we are praying. In fact, we fully expect that many of our adoptees will "graduate" from this prayer program with vivid testimonies of God having changed their lives and worldviews!
I nominate myself as "The "Unknown Liberal."
No, really, that's a choice. You can't make this crap up.
The "Unknown Liberal"
There will likely be additional liberals the Lord may bring to mind who desperately need your prayers. Feel free to select your own unique liberal and adopt them for prayer, perhaps even nominating one or more liberals for listing on our website by emailing us at liberty@LC.org.
Here's something I bet you didn't know about one of their picks:
John Holdren, White House Director of Science and Technology
President Obama's 'Science Czar' is one of the administration's many unelected, unconfirmed, and unaccountable senior policy officials. Holdren has suggested compulsory sterilization and abortion as appropriate policies for population control. He is on record as calling for the national government dictating how large families can be. Dr. Holdren is a 'one world order' proponent, stating that, 'a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources.' In an article he co-authored, Holdren advocated sterilization through government-controlled tainting of the water supply.
I believe this with all my heart and soul.
Other picks, and terrifying facts about them: Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State:
[...] She advocated that homosexuals should be able to serve in the military without concealing their unnatural sexual preferences and she co-sponsored a bill that was intended to provide benefits to domestic partners of Federal employees.
Barney Frank, Congressman, Massachusetts:
[...] Americans United for Separation of Church and State concluded that he is 100% committed to their stated goal of suppressing religious expression in public life
Yes. That is their goal, and Barney Frank is committed to it. As am I.
Then there's:
Barry Lynn, Executive Director of AU
Reverend Barry W. Lynn is the radical Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU). His group uses "whistle blowing" techniques to harass Christian groups and churches, trying to embroil conservative and religious organizations in legal battles over their tax-exempt status. AU conveniently overlooks abuses by leftist groups. [...]
Of course, that could because "leftist groups" don't try to get government to endorse their religion. That, I'm sure, has nothing whatever to do with it.
But enough of these small fry, you say! What about the true anti-Christ, Barack Obama? Aside from his other faults, it turns out that :
[...] His policy initiatives have favored socialism, the homosexual agenda, and the funding of infant genocide around the world.
I'd like to see a lot more of that socialism and advancement of the homosexual agenda, but I guess I'll just have to settle for "infant genocide." (And here I was previously unaware that "infants" were a distinct "national, ethnical, racial or religious group," but Liberty Counsel has much to teach all of us!)
You may have noticed that a lot of Liberty Counsel's claims are flat-out lies. Don't let that disturb you! There is, after all, nothing in the Bible/Torah about lying.
Right?
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5. More if you want to know the others you should pray for, but they're the usual spawn-of-the-devil suspects.
Liberty University
Distance Learning
Liberty Theological Seminary
Liberty Christian Academy
Liberty Online Academy
Liberty Home Bible Institute
Wilmington School of the Bible
ORGANIZATIONS
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More arms than any three cephalopods put together!
Oh, yes, you may have wondered what "Scaremare" is. Me, too. It's this. Wait, what the fuck is that?, you ask.
Aside from one hell a slow-loading animation, that is.
I'm glad you asked!
Since 1972, more than 300,000 people from several states have made the trip through the House of Death that you are about to take.
So, just what is the purpose of this House that everyone wants to visit?
Simply stated, Scaremare presents fun-house rooms and scenes of death in order to confront people with the question “What happens after I die?”
Groups of people are escorted on a 20 minute tour through the House. At the end of the tour, visitors are presented with an answer to this question and given the life-changing message of Jesus Christ. Approximately 26,000 people have made decisions for Christ over the past two decades. So you see, this House of Death really can show you the Way of Life!
Visitors, do please consider making even a tiny donation via the PayPal buttons on the left sidebar; I recently twice had to replace my computer, have to move soon, and have little income right now beyond people's subscriptions to, and donations to, this blog, while I'm waiting to see if my Social Security Disability application is approved. Thanks, and apologies for the commercial.
DON'T WORRY, BLOGGERS. Some are already in the typical unnecessary tizzy that comes from not fact-checking a news item. Here is the actual FTC press release on their new policy:
[...] The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.
[...] The flooding of the Internet with "bogus product reviews," as the National Law Journal recently described, is known as "astroturfing."
The Federal Trade Commission wants to tighten up on it all. So the FTC is revising its "Guidelines Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."
The guidelines haven't been revised since 1980, so blog postings aren't covered. The feds want to incorporate blogs and tweak the language in the guidelines a bit to help consumers better understand what they can realistically expect from the advertised product and who exactly is reviewing the item.
So under the new guidelines, the bloggers and advertisers would be required to disclose compensation, such as payment or even that they received free samples (something the advertising industry opposes because, well, it's a sample, not a payment).
But the idea is that consumers should know the relationship between the blogger and the product manufacturer.
The FTC takes the position that a blogger who not only gets paid but receives free samples might be more inclined to speak favorably about a product.
The other question is about results. The FTC wants that clear, too.
So rather than "results may vary," consumers would more likely see something like "the average person will lose 2 pounds" instead of the 50 pounds that the now-perfect model in the picture says she lost.
Commissioners are expected to get a final version of the new guidelines and vote this fall — only the new guidelines won't carry any direct penalty.
So why craft guidelines that appear to be toothless tigers?
"They basically help advertisers stay out of trouble," said Betsy Lordan, a spokeswoman for the FTC.
But how?
Barry Reingold, a lawyer with Perkins and Coie LLP of Washington, D.C., and a representative of the advertising industry, says the FTC will be able to go after advertisers with the new guidelines. He says an advertiser that violates the guidelines would then be looked at for false advertising, which is illegal and punishable.
Italic emphasis mine.
So: bloggers, no worries. Advertisers that astroturf: worry.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5.
ADDENDUM, 3:07 p.m. the FTC’s Richard Cleland muddies the waters by being a dick, but the bottom line is still that no blogger can get fined, so it doesn't matter what Dick Cleland thinks.
Link via Elissa Malcohn on Facebook. (Who is, incidentally, my only fellow elementary school classmate and friend who went on to become a writer, let alone a fantasy, poetry, and fiction writer, among her many talents.)
[...] Richard Cleland: "That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law. To the extent that I have seen and heard, people are not objecting to the disclosure requirements but to the fear of penalty if they inadvertently make a mistake. That's the thing I don't think people need to be concerned about. There's no monetary penalty, in terms of the first violation, even in the worst case. Our approach is going to be educational, particularly with bloggers. We're focusing on the advertisers: What kind of education are you providing them, are you monitoring the bloggers and whether what they're saying is true?"
Unless you're an advertising company, or a blogger for a major company, you still have nothing to worry about.
PLEASE STOP, I'M BORED was not the reaction I had to yesterday's 2009 Ig® Nobel Prize Ceremony, which I watched on their live video feed. (Sorry,Flash Forward: I had a better date.)
I did a bit of live-blogging in comments at my Facebook page, which probably about three people read. Hilarious ceremony!
There was a silver robot! Okay, a woman colored silver to look like a robot.
The official mechanism to deal with acceptors who went on too long? An 8-year-old girl who walks out and cries: "Please stop! I'm bored! Please stop! I'm bored! Please stop! I'm bored!"
Until the speaker stops. This works really well. All awards ceremonies should do this!
The Hugo ceremonies, I should say, could learn a lot from the Ig Nobel ceremony, although the King And Queen of Swedish Meatballs was purely Ig Nobel.
[...] The Nobel laureates who physically handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new winners:
Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine, 1993)
Wolfgang Ketterle (physics, 2001)
Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986)
Paul Krugman (economics, 2008)
Roy Glauber (physics, 2005) \
Frank Wilczek (physics, 2004)
Martin Chalfie (chemistry, 2008)
Orhan Pamuk (literature 2006)
William Lipscomb (chemistry, 1976)
Then:
The 24/7 Lectures, in which several of the world's top thinkers explained his or her subject twice:
FIRST: a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS*
AND THEN: a clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN (7) WORDS.
The lecturers and their topics:
Wade Adams, director of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science & Technology, at Rice University. Topic: Nanotechnology.
Stephen Wolfram, creator of Wolfram Alpha and of Mathematica, and author of the book A New Kind of Science. Topic: Genius.
Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and 2008 Nobel laureate in economics. Topic: Economics
Deborah J. Anderson, Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Microbiology at Boston University School of Medicine, and 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner. Topic: Contraception
Followed by "The Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest."
Regrettably, it seems that the Ceremony will not be made available on the web any time soon. As a substitute, the Ig Nobel Tour of the UK, which was sponsored by the British Science Association as part of the National Science and Engineering Week, March 6-15, 2009, and is much much slower, far less zippy, and, hey, very long!:
And a short ABC News news report on the 2008 prizes:
He explains how they're not ridiculing science, which is very much true! (Charles Platt, for the record, has told me he disagrees; in turn, I respectfully disagree with Charles.)
You'll probably have a lot more patience with the short second video than the long first one.
I was hoping Betsy Devine would blog about the ceremony, given that her husband, Frank Wilczek, was a participant, but as yet, no such post.
The official list of Ignataries. (The website is, unsurprisingly, very slow today; you may want to come back later, if it's still slow when you try clicking.)
The actual honored winners (for real, and valuable, though funny, science):
VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
REFERENCE: "Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production," Catherine Bertenshaw [Douglas] and Peter Rowlinson, Anthrozoos, vol. 22, no. 1, March 2009, pp. 59-69. DOI: 10.2752/175303708X390473.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Peter Rowlinson. Catherine Douglas was unable to travel because she recently gave birth; she sent a photo of herself, her new daughter dressed in a cow suit, and a cow.
PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42. DOI:10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Stephan Bolliger
ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.
REFERENCE: "Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila," Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M. Castano, 2008, arXiv:0806.1485.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Javier Morales and Miguel Apátiga
MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.
REFERENCE: "Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?", Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism, vol. 41, no. 5, 1998, pp. 949-50.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Donald Unger
PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.
REFERENCE: "Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins," Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, Nature, vol. 450, 1075-1078 (December 13, 2007). DOI:10.1038/nature06342.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Katherine Whitcome and Daniel Lieberman
LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means "Driving License".
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: [Karolina Lewestam, a Polish citizen and holder of a Polish driver's license, speaking on behalf of all her fellow Polish licensed drivers, expressed her good wishes to the Irish police service.]
PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
REFERENCE: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007 for a “Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.”
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Elena Bodnar.
MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).
REFERENCE: Zimbabwe's Casino Economy — Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges, Gideon Gono, ZPH Publishers, Harare, 2008, ISBN 978-079-743-679-4.
BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.
REFERENCE: "Microbial Treatment of Kitchen Refuse With Enzyme-Producing Thermophilic Bacteria From Giant Panda Feces," Fumiaki Taguchia, Song Guofua, and Zhang Guanglei, Seibutsu-kogaku Kaishi, vol. 79, no 12, 2001, pp. 463-9. [and abstracted in Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering, vol. 92, no. 6, 2001, p. 602.]
REFERENCE: "Microbial Treatment of Food-Production Waste with Thermopile Enzyme-Producing Bacterial Flora from a Giant Panda" [in Japanese], Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, Yasunori Sugai, Hiroyasu Kudo and Akira Koikeda, Journal of the Japan Society of Waste Management Experts, vol. 14, no. 2, 2003, pp. , 76-82.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Fumiaki Taguchi
Alas that you can't see the video of the ceremony; you'll just have to take my word, or not, that it was hilarious, very fast-paced, and a great show. With science!
To make up with this lack, a completely unconnected video that nonetheless, despite my being relatively indifferent to things Disney, made me feel good to watch:
I like videos that make me smile, because I was born anxious. Which is why I keep putting off blogging about this latter piece, but you should read it!
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for that last, if you want to know yet more about depressed and anxious people like me! Click on the other links as interested. Check the Disney video, which was made with tilt-shift photography, which you probably know all about, but I had to look up.
The Annals of Improbable Research, in free low-res PDF, and higher-res versions you can pay for. The ceremony has among its co-sponsors the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students (SPS), and the Harvard Computer Society.
I also regret to report that my first experiment with using Blogger's New Editing software, and the "Compose" option did not go well; I had just about finished, and was back to editing final bits of spacing in "edit HTML" mode when the editor abruptly swallowed half my post, immediately saved the new "draft" over the old one, and that was that, leaving me to reconstruct the first half from scratch again. Wot. A. Time. Saver.
I'm still proceeding -- slowly -- through the process of switching to a new, more modern, template, and I hope it will go more smoothly than composing this post did.
By the way, does anyone have any tips as to how to create an account to comment on a Wordpress blog? There doesn't seem to be a damned thing here about it, and the help only turns up info on how to install comments on your Wordpress blog, and so on. Meanwhile, few Wordpress blogs seem to bother to explain the secret of how you create an account. They just ask you to log in, and offer to help you find the lost password for the account you don't have. Neither is this any use.
ADDENDUM, October 3rd, 2009, 8:41 p.m.: I more or less gained a general understanding of this via the distinction between wordpress.org and wordpress.com being pointed out to me, and also that some wordpress blogs use their own, unlabeled, system of registration to comment which requires owner approval. So I have an account now, but still have problems with certain blogs. Thanks to Keith Ivey on Facebook for help, and John Robinson via email.
YOU SAY NEWCLEAR, I SAY MORECLEAR, LET'S ALL SAY NUCLEAR, let's call the whole war off.
I just want to go on record with what I've elaborated at length upon in blog comments elsewhere many times in the past year or more, which is that this is what I believe is far and away most likely the case:
[...] Mr. Sick, like some in the intelligence community, said he believed that Iran might intend to stop short of building a weapon while creating “breakout capability” — the ability to make a bomb in a matter of months in the future. That chain of events might allow room for later intervention.
Without actually constructing a bomb, Iran could gain the influence of being an almost nuclear power, without facing the repercussions that would ensue if it finished the job.
Setting aside whatever difficulties might ensue in possibly backing down from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's fatwa forbiding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons as un-Islamic, reportedly saying "[w]e fundamentally reject nuclear weapons," there are huge downsides to Iran actually testing a nuclear weapon, were they to proceed with weaponizing sufficient Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) to High Enriched Uranium (somewhere between 20% and 85% enriched), which there are no actual signs of them doing, and yet almost all of the deterrent benefits of simply achieving break-out capacity, such as Japan maintains, are there by remaining in a state of being able to construct a nuclear weapon in short order, whether a matter of weeks or months, with far less downside than actually assembling a working weapon.
So unless Iran were to feel threatened enough, or otherwise see some major advantage to be gained that would outweigh the obvious downside of proceeding to enrich their LEU to HEU, and then further actually constructing and testing a fission bomb, it seems only logical to conclude that they would be most likely to, if not remain at their current status of simply producing LEU usable only for energy production, go no further than break-out capacity.
And let me also emphasize that while designing a constructing a basic fission device is relatively technically trivial nowadays, constructing one small enough to fit on a missile is not.
If you'd like to know more about how easy it is to construct a nuclear weapon, once you have fissionable material, just ask truck driver John Coster-Mullen, aka "Atomic John," or simply read the fascinating New Yorker piece on him from the December 15th, 2008 issue, which you should anyway, because it's a damn good reading.
Meanwhile, to restate the banal:
[...] Greg Thielmann, an intelligence analyst in the State Department before the Iraq war, said he believed that the Iran intelligence assessments were far more balanced, in part because there was not the urgent pressure from the White House to reach a particular conclusion, as there was in 2002. But he said he was bothered by what he said was an exaggerated sense of crisis over the Iranian nuclear issue.
“Some people are saying time’s running out and we have to act by the end of the year,” said Mr. Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association. “I’ve been arguing that we have years, not months. The facts argue for a calmer approach.”
[...] If the West does impose “draconian sanction” they will shove Iran firmly into China’s orbit unless China is onside with the sanctions. It is unlikely China will be. China has very consistently supported the individual sovereignty of various countries the West tries to use sanctions against (both Burma and Sudan, among others), and they are willing to back it up with large amounts of aid, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but for cold hard pragmatic reasons.
One major arm of China’s foreign policy is to lock up as much access to natural resources as possible and helping Iran is part of that policy.
[...] Citing unnamed traders and bankers, the Financial Times said state-owned Chinese oil companies were selling the petrol through intermediaries and now accounted for a third of Tehran's gasoline imports.
[...]
Between 30,000 and 40,000 barrels of gasoline per day of Chinese petrol makes its way from Asian spot markets to Iran through third parties, the report said, quoting Lawrence Eagles, head of commodities research at JP Morgan.
This accounts about 33 percent of Iran's import of 120,000 barrels per day, the report said.
[...]
Shum said China this year added new refining capacity and in August exported 140,000 barrels of gasoline per day, the highest level this year, although the data did not give a breakdown of the destination countries.
He said one third of Iran's imports is "well within the capacity of China to supply" given the high volume of its gasoline shipments.
[...] Iran is constructing seven refineries in an effort to boost its crude and gas refining capacity by more than 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), a senior oil official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"The construction of seven refineries has started with the investment of 15 billion euros ($23.22 billion)," Mehr news agency quoted Aminollah Eskandari, a director of the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC) as saying. "About 1.56 million barrels will be added to the country's capacity to refine crude oil and gas derivatives," he added.
[...]
Tehran, in 2006 started on a multi-billion dollar, five-year programme to expand and upgrade its domestic refining capacity to 3.3 million bpd from the current 1.65 million bpd.
Eskandari said all seven refineries would be on stream by 2012.
All further sanctions are apt to do is cause more Iranians to undergo some annoying gasoline shortages for a couple of years -- maybe -- and rightfully blame the United States, and cause them to further grudgingly support their government in defending their country's lawful right under Article 4, section 1 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes:
[...] 1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty.
Yes, we can get into the weeds of the various applicable UN Security Council resolutions, but you can read up on those for yourself, elsewhere; my point is as regards the likely effect of sanctions on the polity of Iran, and the considerable unlikeliness of sanctions keeping Iran from proceeding to nuclear weapons break-out capacity, if that's what the Iranian government decides is in its own national interest.
Incidentally, if Israel's government was crazy and stupid enough to attempt an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, they wouldn't have pass through Iraqi airspace, as I discussed in three comments in a row here, and in some comments following those, in Obsidian Wings comments back in early August.
As the United States and its allies consider further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fear that such punishment could have unintended consequences, strengthening the government's hand against domestic dissent and triggering an even harsher crackdown on political foes.
[...]
Opposition leaders have denounced what they view as Ahmadinejad's antagonistic foreign policy, but they are in no position to criticize the previously undisclosed construction near Qom of a second uranium-enrichment plant -- the latest bone of contention between Iran and the West -- for fear of being targeted as traitors to a national cause: the pursuit of nuclear energy and technological advancement.
Like I said.
ADDENDUM, October 1st, 1:05 p.m. I should add that Iran started rationing gasoline in June 2007, and although there were a few riots initially, by November of 2008:
[...] Iran's Oil Minister Gholam-Hossein Nozari said on Saturday that gasoline rationing scheme has helped the country to curb the consumption as much as 20 million liters a day, Iran's Energy and Oil Information Network (SHANA) reported.
So it's not as if Iranians aren't used to gasoline rationing.
ADDENDUM, October 1st, 6:34 p.m.: Scott Ritter's view.
GENEVA — Iran agreed in principle Thursday to ship most of its enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be refined for exclusively peaceful uses, in what Western diplomats called a significant, but interim, measure to ease concerns over its nuclear program.
[...]
Under the tentative deal, Iran would ship what a U.S. official said was "most" of its approximately 3,300 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be further refined. French technicians then would fabricate it into fuel rods and return it to Tehran to power a nuclear research reactor that's used to make isotopes for nuclear medicine
[...]
The State Department allowed Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, to visit Washington on Wednesday, waiving regulations that usually confine Iranian diplomats within a 25-mile radius of the United Nations in downtown Manhattan. Mottaki didn't meet U.S. officials, but visited Iran's interests section, which is overseen by Pakistan, because the United States and Iran have no diplomatic relations.
ADDENDUM, October 4th, 4:21 p.m.: Sensible advice worth considering from Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. Via Juan Cole. Also an interesting report asserting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's family has Jewish roots.
ADDENDUM, October 5th, 2009, 3:24 p.m.: see also Fareed Zakaria on "They May Not Want The Bomb And other unexpected truths."
BAN A BOOK TOMORROW. No, that's not right. Stop people from banning books! That's the ticket. It's the American Library Association's annual Banned Books week.
And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group
His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence
TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age
group
Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
Reasons: occult/satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence
Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
Reasons: occult/satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint,
sexually explicit, and violence
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually
explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group
Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age
group
Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen
Reasons: homosexuality and unsuited to age group
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper
Reasons: sexually explicit and unsuited to age group
[...] How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?
I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile-- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
The irony mark or irony point (⸮) (French: point d’ironie; also called a snark or zing) is a proposed punctuation mark that was suggested to be used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level (e.g. irony, sarcasm, etc.). It is illustrated by a small, elevated, backward-facing question mark. The irony mark has never been used widely. It appears occasionally in obscure artistic or literary publications.
Admen were the first to employ this method by crossing out the “old” price. A lower price would be written beside the old one, which kept standing there for comparison. Of course, the viewer sees both prices.
On the other hand, it was a common practice ؟humor؟ in sf fanzines since at least 1951, if not earlier. No shit fooling.
Meanwhile, all the kids have been talking this weekend about this strikingly accurate, for the most part, article from Life magazine issue of May 21, 1951 on sf fandom.
Remember to defy the deros with dianetics, kids!
It's nice to see the LASFS insurgents of Francis Towner Laney, Charles Burbee, Elmer Perdue, and others, who laughed at Forry Ackerman and friend's antics, referred to, if not by name. Ah, Sweet Idiocy!
And, yes, postcard fanzines were well-known in the Forties, when the leading newszine, the Ansible of its day, was Bob Tucker's FanewsCard, later carried on by others.
(Why, yes, that once famous sf fan, Joe Kennedy, did become vastly more famous X. J. Kennedy, famous poet, editor, and teacher.)
The article even works in a reference to the "true fan."
One particularly delightful aspect is the description of the then-super-hot controversy in sf fandom, the Shaver Myster, which was egged on by canny sf editor and former fan, Ray Palmer. Why, yes, that is who The Atom was named after by famous comic book editor and former fan contemporary of Palmer's, Julie Schwartz.
As I blogged not all that long ago, I recently had an exchange with Roger Ebert about the Shaver Mystery.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for Life, or it isn't worth living.
A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: "If you can slice it, we can build it."
That's because layers mean everything to the environmentally-friendly construction process called Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3150, and its operation sounds like something straight out of science fiction.
[...] To make EBF3 work there are two key requirements: A detailed three-dimensional drawing of the object to be created must be available, and the material the object is to be made from must be compatible for use with an electron beam.
First, the drawing is needed to break up the object into layers, with each cross-section used to guide the electron beam and source of metal in reproducing the object, building it up layer by layer.
If you take a slice through a typical truss, you can see a couple of dots in each cross-section that move as you go from layer to layer," Taminger said. "When complete, you see those moving dots actually allowed you to build a diagonal brace into the truss."
Second, the material must be compatible with the electron beam so that it can be heated by the stream of energy and briefly turned into liquid form, making aluminum an ideal material to be used, along with other metals.
In fact, the EBF3 can handle two different sources of metal—also called feed stock—at the same time, either by mixing them together into a unique alloy or embedding one material inside another.
Useful!
[...] Future lunar base crews could use EBF3 to manufacture spare parts as needed, rather than rely on a supply of parts launched from Earth. Astronauts might be able to mine feed stock from the lunar soil, or even recycle used landing craft stages by melting them.
But the immediate and greatest potential for the process is in the aviation industry where major structural segments of an airliner, or casings for a jet engine, could be manufactured for about $1,000 per pound less than conventional means, Taminger said.
Environmental savings also are made possible by deploying EBF3, she added.
[...] The US Navy has just completed a 10-megajoule test fire of their huge rail gun. For the first time ever, they fired a projectile with a velocity of 8,270 feet per second. That's an amazing 5,640 mph, and the gun is only firing at a third of its potential power.
[...]
Yesterday's test firing at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division used just some of the potential 32-megajoules the laboratory test gun is capable of, and that's only half the 64-megajoules the Navy is aiming at for the final weapon. Expect even more dramatic videos, sometime soon.
NOT A SIDESHOW. Mitch Wagner interviews Avedon Carol on politics, dancing in Second Life, health care reform, and such like.
I have enough trouble keeping up half of a First Life.
I have to hire on more writers to post under my name, here, and elsewhere.
That Avedon Carol is articulate, and a credit to her race; you'd almost think she'd done tons of tv and radio interviews, or something.
She's also worth listening to. Fans might listen to how she explains the relevance of Jerry Jacks to health care reform. Anyone interested in American politics, human rights, or health care reform, should listen to her.
Avedon, of course, famously blogs at the invaluable Sideshow, which I assume you all read.
Read Avedon's blog; listen to her interview: yes.
While we're mentioning people who are also crucial figures in the development of feminist sf fandom, let me get a head start on something I'll be blogging more about later, which is that Susan Wood's Aspidistra is now available here in PDF form.
Shortly the same will also be up at efanzines.com. I'll let you know. [Now available here.]
The Best Of Susan Wood, Jerry Kaufman's long out of print collection from 1982 of Susan's work, will also soon be up at both sites.
Kudos to Taral for doing the scanning from his own copies. Scanning Aspidistra was his own initiative, after I've spent many weeks of various kinds of work to be able to get "The Best of Susan Wood" finally put online; again, thanks to Taral for the last-minute scanning.
Thanks go to Joe Siclari at fanac.org, and Bill Burns at efanzines.com, for their hosting and responsibility for uploading, and, of course, respective care of both invaluable sites for science fiction fanhistory and classic fanzines. Thanks also to fanac.org webmaster Jack Weaver!
Again, I'll be doing a more elaborate post about the Susan Wood collection and postings, with more context, and more people to thank, soon. (Thanks, Debbie Notkin! Thanks for encouragement, Steve Davidson and Cheryl Morgan; thanks for help and encouragment, Moshe Feder! Thanks, Jerry Kaufman, for all your original work!)
ADDENDUM, September 23rd, 2009, 4:31 a.m.: links to the Aspidistras and The Best Of Susan Wood, along with a Foreword by Taral can be found here at efanzines.com; thanks to Taral for his work and help.
ADDENDUM, September 23rd, 2009, 1:39 p.m.: I have now created the Facebook Group Page, "Friends of Susan Wood," open to any and all people interested in Susan Wood. It should be globally readable by everybody, not merely members of Facebook. Various links now there. It is not a page just for people who personally knew Susan!
ADDENDUM, September 23rd, 2009, 5:37 p.m.: See also all of Energumen, Hugo-winning fanzine co-edited by Mike Glicksohn and Susan Wood Glicksohn.
ADDENDUM, September 23rd, 2009, 6:01: p.m.: Feminist sf fans might find particularly worthwhile, starting on Page 55 of Best of Susan Wood, her Aussiecon (1975) report, "Propeller Beanie," which also talks a lot about the GOH, Ursula Le Guin, whose book of essays, The Language Of The Night Susan went on to compile, edit, and see published, which has been through a number of editions and publisher. Google books link here.
(See links at Facebook page for more info on that, and how to obtain copies.)
On page 61, "Tidepool" begins, one of Susan's fannish accounts of being one of the early University professors first teaching sf.
The fanzine she refers to that she did, Genre Plat, she co-edited for a couple of years with Allyn Cadogan, then of San Francisco, and with a third fan, a longtime fan, who had gafiated for a number of years and recently become active again in the mid-Seventies; first in Toronto, then in Vancouver.
His name was and is "William Gibson," aka "Bill Gibson," and he later sold some science fiction. You may have heard of him.
What might most interest you is the article beginning on page 68: "People's Programming."
Susan founded feminist sf fandom in that article.
It's that simple. Go read it.
That's the piece that I'd like to first get put into text, HTML, form.
Susan won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer 1974, 1977 (a tie) and 1981, and was nominated in 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, and 1978. She was co-Fan Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia, in 1975.
WHEATON BANGS INTO LIZARD PEOPLE. Why most geeks who have noticed it (and don't utterly disdain television) have learned to likeThe Big Bang Theory:
[...] Prady said that he and his writers made it an early goal to write these four guys as real people, which meant including idiosyncrasies that sometimes come with being a geek.
“One of the tasks of creating a series is to create interesting characters that are distinct from each other,” Prady said. “We think very carefully about why one character might have a particular reaction that another character doesn’t share. The four of them have very different backgrounds. They have had very different paths through life that affect who they are. There are things they love in common and there are things they don’t share. That also extends to their fandom. I think they are generally game to indulge each other’s passions but I don’t think it’s uniform. By making them distinct, you make them people you are interested in knowing.”
[...]
Prady said that the reason Leonard, Sheldon, Wolowitz, and Koothrappali may resonate so well is because they all reflect many of the loves that live within the actual “Big Bang” writers’ room.
“In terms of their non-work passions, they come from the passions in the room,” Prady said. “For example, the deep and abiding love this writing staff has for Ron Moore’s ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ It is deep and rich and profound, and that’s why the characters love it. And there is their love of ‘Star Trek,’ which by the way is not uniform in the room. There are people like me who know every episode of every single series and then there are people where ‘Trek’ is not their thing.
The subject header:
[...] “In episode six, Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher on ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’) is going to be here and will play himself,” Prady revealed. “Because Wil lives very close to where our characters live in real life, it’s not inconceivable that they share a comic book store and they would encounter each other. Given that Wil is going to play himself, we are going to discover that Wil Wheaton is the one member of the ‘Star Trek’ family that Sheldon hates,” he said. “We will learn that he loved Wesley Crusher but there was a moment between them in the past and ever since then Wheaton is his third most hated person.”
Also:
[...] “One of the things we decided from the beginning was that the science would be accurate and when the characters talked about their work it would be legitimate,” Prady said.
It's a good piece.
Meanwhile, every good geek should be aware of, or learn to, play rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock:
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5, or more if you're a geek.
I don't know why you'd be reading this blog if you were a geek, though. I mean, what are the odds?
Nigeria's government is asking cinemas to stop showing a science fiction film, District Nine, that it says denigrates the country's image.
I'm tempted to make jokes about being offended by "sci-fi," rather than "sf" films, myself, but that would date me.
And I already have hairy enough palms.
It's good to know that:
[...] But Mr Khumbanyiwa said Nigerians in the cast did not seem worried by the portrayal of their country.
He suggested that the film, which depicts people wanting to eat aliens to gain the superhuman powers, should not be taken too literally.
"It's a story, you know," he said. "It's not like Nigerians do eat aliens. Aliens don't even exist in the first place."
But aliens are so delicious!
Michael Dirda reviewedTHE COMPLETE STORIES OF J.G. BALLARD. Digressively, I recently argued that New Worlds under Michael Moorcock holds up pretty damn well, and a lot more so than Analog from the same period.
Mike Glyer pointed to more stories about J. R. R. Tolkien's immensely brief "career" at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
US science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson thinks British science fiction is in a golden age. It's time it won some literary awards – and for everyone to give it a go
Stories by KEN MACLEOD, IAN MCDONALD, GEOFF RYMAN, NICOLA GRIFFITH, STEPHEN BAXTER, PAUL MCAULEY, and JUSTINA ROBSON, they shout at us! And rightfully so!
I wouldn't count links to Dr. Horrible at the Emmies not rotting, but we'll give it a try:
For more literary tastes, watch and listen as Margaret Atwood explained to the PBS NewsHour earlier this evening that she writes speculative fiction, not science fiction, because people think of science fiction as "Attack Of The Lizard People." [CORRECTION: "Lizard Men"; Amygdala apologizes to Margaret Atwood for misquoting her on this extremely important distinction!]
[...] ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications. [...] BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Teenage serial killer destroys town in fit of semi-religious fervor. [...] CONAN THE BARBARIAN: Petty thief murders religious leader. [...] DOCTOR WHO: Elderly man serially abducts young women. [...] SUPERMAN RETURNS: Illegal immigrant is deadbeat dad.
You get the idea.
Now, get out of here to those links, before I uncomfortably summarize why you come back here: because you can't resist.
ADDENDUM, 9/22/09, 12:24 p.m.: Jeannette Winterson reviews Atwood in the Sunday Times Book Review, noting:
[...] That’s what happens in Margaret Atwood’s new novel, “The Year of the Flood,” her latest excursion into what’s sometimes called her “science fiction,” though she prefers “speculative fiction.” If we have to have a label, that’s a better one, since part of Atwood’s mastery as a writer is to use herself as a creative computer, modeling possible futures projected from the available data — in human terms, where we are now.
Crystal Lee Sutton, whose defiance of factory bosses invigorated a long-running battle to unionize Southern mill workers and formed the dramatic heart of the Academy Award-winning movie "Norma Rae," died Sept. 11 in Burlington, N.C. She was 68.
[...]
In 1973, Sutton worked at the J.P. Stevens textile plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. Fed up with the poor pay and working conditions, she joined the Textile Workers Union of America and became an organizer whose activism quickly earned the wrath of management.
Moments after being fired, she wrote "UNION" on a piece of cardboard, climbed onto a table in the middle of the factory floor and raised the sign for co-workers to see. Stunned by her courage, they switched off their machines and focused on the 33-year-old mother of three who earned $2.65 an hour.
Some raised their fingers in a V for victory, but a union contract was still years away.
The victory that day was over fear.
"Stand up for what you believe in, no matter how hard it makes life for you," Sutton, reflecting on her iconic protest, told the Burlington Times News last year. "Do not give up, and always say what you believe."
Word.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5. Support good jobs: buy union.
ADDENDUM, 4:20 p.m.: D. brings this to my attention in comments:
[...] Crystal Lee Jordan, the union activist from North Carolina that inspired Sally Field’s Oscar winning performance in Norma Rae, died on Friday because her health insurance company delayed her cancer treatment. Sutton was diagnosed with meningioma but waited two months to begin taking needed medication because her health insurance refused to cover it. While they debated about whether or not the medicine was included in her policy, the cancer spread through her nervous system making the medicine ultimately ineffective. Sutton herself openly criticized the U.S. health care system as an abuse of the power and potentially murderous for the working class. Her criticism got her insurance company to ultimately approve the medicine she needed, too late.
Based on this, which I'd actually read earlier, but entirely forgotten had crucial info.
[...] The total of America's military bases in other people's countries in 2005, according to official sources, was 737.
But:
[...] These numbers, although staggeringly big, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2005 Base Structure Report fails, for instance, to mention any garrisons in Kosovo (or Serbia, of which Kosovo is still officially a province) -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained ever since by the KBR corporation (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root), a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston.
The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq (106 garrisons as of May 2005), Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though the U.S. military has established colossal base structures in the Persian Gulf and Central Asian areas since 9/11. By way of excuse, a note in the preface says that "facilities provided by other nations at foreign locations" are not included, although this is not strictly true. The report does include twenty sites in Turkey, all owned by the Turkish government and used jointly with the Americans. The Pentagon continues to omit from its accounts most of the $5 billion worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure.
[...] According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 46 million Americans, or 18 percent of the population under the age of 65, were without health insurance in 2007, their latest data available.
[...]
# The large majority of the uninsured (85 percent) are native or naturalized citizens. # Nearly 1.3 million full-time workers lost their health insurance in 2006. # Over 8 in 10 uninsured people come from working families
Do Your Own Math Scale: 5 out of 5. Rock on, USA.
Think of the video as a rockin' adult version of Sesame Street. With a beat you can dance to.
[...] During the fermentation process of making wine, by-products are left over which are often just discarded as waste and the friends reasoned that since these by-products contain the goodness of wine in an even more concentrated form, and without the alcohol, shouldn’t it be more often used and consumed by humans?
I like the way these folks think.
[...] He proposed his company develop a method to turn the by-products into a powder preserving as many of the natural, healthy properties of wine as possible - the proteins, B vitamins, minerals and polyphenols, which are thought to prevent heart or circulation diseases, inflammation and thrombosis.
[...]
“We didn’t just want to extract the nutrients from red wine and press them into pills,” says ProVino’s project leader Gabriele Randel. “We worked from the principle that if omega-3-fatty acids are good for you, it’s better to eat fish than to swallow a -supplement. By adding red wine powder to products we also wanted to keep some of the taste and colour of red wine.”
[...]
Randel’s personal favourites were yoghurt drinks and other dairy products, like ice-cream, and pastries, cakes and chocolates.
My people! For others:
[...] Skin creams using the powder were more effective than red to violet eye-shadow and some wine properties could be good for the skin, including having anti-wrinkle effects. However consumers would have to get used to the idea of applying a cream which is initially violet although does not stay red when absorbed into the skin, says Randel. A face mask using the powder was successful because the tartaric acid in the grapes formed crystals if preserved at a high level. “It had a softening and cleansing effect,” she says.
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
Make your notes now for your next intended murder. Also:
[...] Using some of the same techniques, it may be possible to scavenge anyone’s DNA from a discarded drinking cup or cigarette butt and turn it into a saliva sample that could be submitted to a genetic testing company that measures ancestry or the risk of getting various diseases. Celebrities might have to fear “genetic paparazzi,” said Gail H. Javitt of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University.
[...] This photo of Stephan's Quintet, also known as Hickson Compact Group 92, was taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3. Stephan's Quintet, as the name implies, is a group of five galaxies. The name, however, is a bit of a misnomer. Studies have shown that group member NGC 7320, at upper left, is actually a foreground galaxy about seven times closer to Earth than the rest of the group.
Japan has gotten its new space freighter off the ground from its Tanegashima base.
The freighter is carrying about 4.5 tonnes of cargo on this maiden flight. It has the capacity to carry six tonnes.
Over the next few years, the HTV, and the other robotic re-supply ships like it, will be central to the operation of a fully crewed, fully functional ISS.
Essential use: space garbage truck.
[...] As the freighter's supplies are used up, the ship will be filled with station rubbish.
A Georgian cave has yielded what scientists say are the earliest examples of humans making cords.
The microscopic fibres, discovered accidentally while scientists were searching for pollen samples, are around 30,000 years old.
A team reports in the journal Science that ancient humans probably used the plant fibres to carry tools, weave baskets or make garments.
Some of the fibres are coloured and appear to have been dyed.
The fibres were discovered preserved within layers of mud in Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia.
The microscopic fibres, discovered accidentally while scientists were searching for pollen samples, are around 30,000 years old.
"It's impossible to know exactly how they were used, but some of them are twisted," said Ofer Bar-Yosef, a researcher from Harvard University in the US who took part in the study.
[...] His latest exhibition, called Toothpick City II - Temples and Towers, features more than 40 famous religious and tall buildings from around the world.
[...]
He combined his childhood passion of toothpicks with his more adult interest in architecture in 2003, following three months of unemployment.
All is explained!
[...] His first Toothpick City, called History of Skyscrapers, was sold to a museum in Mallorca, Spain. It took two years to build and has 50 buildings.
Ambitions for his work:
[...] "I want this exhibit to be a celebration of religious diversity, architectural achievement and historical accuracy - or just 'wow, that's a lot of toothpicks'.
"No one has built all these buildings to the same scale and put them side by side before - let alone out of toothpicks.
"I really wanted to see what it would look like.
"If you can't travel the world, I want people to see this exhibit and think they just did.
People who are very very very confused. "[C]elebration of religious diversity, architectural achievement and historical accuracy - or just 'wow, that's a lot of toothpicks'"?
Amygdala should install a polling widgit again, clearly.
Meanwhile, I'm sure this man is a huge hit on dating websites. Slideshow!
A computer system is under development that can automatically combine images of the Martian surface, captured by landers or rovers, in order to reproduce a three dimensional view of the red planet. The resulting model can be viewed from any angle, giving astronomers a realistic and immersive impression of the landscape.
This is cool, but actually reconstructing Mars, possibly every few minutes, would be vastly cooler. Think of the vacation possibilities, people!
[...] The Thermal Laser Weapon is a device that attaches to standard rail system on military rifles. Like the vehicle-mounted Active Denial System, it works by heating up the outer layer of skin, causing a very painful burning sensation without — in theory — causing any actual damage. The Active Denial System uses short microwaves, the Thermal Laser Weapon uses an infra-red laser. Work on the device is a direct outgrowth of the work on thermal lasers described in Danger Room last year; field testing of the Thermal Laser Weapon by the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate was announced this week.
The Thermal Laser’s immediate ancestor was the PHaSR (allegedly short for “Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response,” although the makers confess to being Star Trek fans). The PHaSR was a big, bulky weapon which combined an infra-red laser with a laser dazzler to produce a repel effect. Only the heating effect is mentioned for the Thermal Laser, but it seems likely that a visible laser would also be incorporated if only as an adjunct to aiming.
I could never have guessed that the makers were Star Trek fans.
Especially if you're going to protest in San Diego:
As town halls unfolded across the country without incident, San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore took it upon himself to place military equipment used in Iraq to repel terrorists, at two San Diego events. The device is also used by the U.S. Navy to repel terrorists from ships.
Gore, who is now under fire for his decision to place the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) at town hall events, went on record to explain his decision making.
[...]
“Why would you use a LRAD when members of Congress invited people to talk about health care? The majority of the attendees are probably on Medicare. Are we going after terrorists on walkers now?” LaSuer said.
Remember! You can't be too safe when protecting us from terrists!
[...] The LRAD uses a concentrated sound wave or beam that causes a lot of ear pain, bleeding or death when pointed at a direct source. According to the manufacturer’s website “the directionality of the LRAD device reduces the risk of exposing nearby personnel or peripheral bystanders to harmful audio levels.” So why use this equipment for crowd control?
Looking to Gore’s past history with the FBI Ruby Ridge incident and 9/11 Commission report, LaSuer questions the current Sheriff’s decision making. “Gore deployed a weapon that we use against terrorists on American citizens- shame on him.”
When pressed about the need to use such a lethal device at public town halls Gore states, “It was placed there for reserve and that’s all I can say.”
Another lifetime law enforcement deputy, Bruce Ruff says, “The potential use of lethality is pure incompetence by Sheriff Gore.”
And he'll probably win re-election in a landslide.
"I, for one, would go to Phobos or Deimos in a heartbeat, even without any hope of landing on Mars," says planetary scientist Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute, a California-based research organisation.
Me, too!
[...] But the insidious threat of space radiation in the form of galactic cosmic rays could keep astronauts confined much closer to home.
[...]
Relatively lightweight aluminium or plastic shielding can block charged particles from the sun. But it would take impractically thick and heavy shields to stop the higher-energy galactic cosmic rays. "Shielding is not a solution to the risk problem," says Frank Cucinotta, chief scientist for radiation studies at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Moooommmm! Why can't I go out and play in space and get Fantastic Four powers?!?
Another possibility:
[...] Alternative technologies - which would generate bubbles of plasma that could protect spacecraft without adding much weight - are still at an early stage of development.
[...] Jacquie took a quiz 'If you were an element, which element would you be?' The answer was: Metal
3 people liked this
Mike commented: Sweet!
Verity commented: What does that mean?
Jacquie commented: @Verity, it's just a bit of fun.
Verity commented: I meant, what does it mean, 'the answer was Metal'? Since when was 'metal' an element? It's not a chemical element, it's not an earth-wind-and-fire element. What does it mean?
Jacquie commented: It's just a bit of fun.
Verity commented: In what respect are you like a metal? Do you form a salt and water when dilute hydrochloric acid is added to you? Are you malleable and ductile?
Jacquie commented: It's just a bit of fun.
Verity commented: I've googled up this quiz. Q5 is 'If you carried a wepon [sic] what would it be?' Why are you answering this illiterate rubbish?
Jacquie commented: It's just a bit of fun.
View all 37 comments.
This last stolen again from D. Langford on, yes, Facebook!
Read The Rest Scale: 4.5 out of 5 for that last one, for oh the laffs.
And, really, if L. Ron Hubbard could cobble up a religion out of e-meters and enneagrams, just think what a magnificent religion I could conjure up by using all of the above bits. We could, dare I say it? Rule the world!
Mama said geek you out.
ADDENDUM, 1:15 p.m.: Welcome Pharyngulareaders! You can find your Talk Like A Pirate Day historical post here.
Chip Delany, Polymath. What Damon Knight really said about science fiction and pointing. A post inspired by Charlie Stross. Some silly science fiction and comics stuff. Perverts raging though science fiction, and other scurrilous gossip here! Further wacky science fiction stuff, with videos, and piccies, here!
Also, I recently lived through another fire, minor this time, but lost various computer and electronic equipment, none of which was paid for by insurance, and that after having to entirely replace my computer a few months ago, so do please feel free to consider hitting the tip jar PayPal links in the sidebar, if you're feeling kind and generous today.
ARGH, DEJA VU, MATIES. Return with Amygdala to 2006, when we asked "Oy, vey, talk like a pirate, nu? Why do Jews not get their fair credit as pirates, matey?"
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 in celebration of the confluence of this day and these days, and to learn about Real Jewish Pirates.
No, not Bernie Madoff.
ADDENDUM, September 19th, 10:43 p.m.: Before TLAP Day ends, this, via John Hedtke on Facebook.
REAGAN WAS A LENINIST. They owe it all to Herbert George Wells. Reagan:
Reagan said:
[...] I couldn’t help but - when you stop to think that we’re all God’s children, wherever we live in the world, I couldn’t help but say to him [Gorbachev] just how easy his task and mine might be if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet outside in the universe. We’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together.
In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world. And yet I ask - is not an alien force already among us?
Lenin told the British science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who interviewed him in the Kremlin in 1920, that if life were discovered on other planets, revolutionary violence would no longer be necessary: "Human ideas—he told Wells—are based on the scale of the planet we live in. They are based on the assumption that the technical potentialities, as they develop, will never overstep 'the earthly limit.' If we succeed in making contact with the other planets, all our philosophical, social and moral ideas will have to be revised, and in this event these potentialities will become limitless and will put an end to violence as a necessary means of progress." —Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2002)
Lenin quote via Gerry Canavan, via Robert Farley on Facebook. (Yes, I've finally rejoined; friend me now! It is your destiny!)
And thus, Q.E.D., scientific romances are proven to be amongst the greatest influences in modern world history.
This also proves, given the Wells influence, that Reagan secretly wanted to follow his ultimate master and secretly believed that:
His most consistent political ideal was the World State. He stated in his autobiography that from 1900 onward he considered a World State inevitable. He envisioned the state to be a planned society that will advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to advance by merit rather than birth. During his work on the League of Nations charter, he opposed any mention of democracy. He feared the average citizen could never be educated or aware enough to decide major world issues. Therefore, he favoured suffrage to be limited to scientists, organisers, engineers, and others of merit, though he believed citizens should have as much freedom as possible without restricting the freedom of others.
Who says I can't combine my sf and political blogging?
I should note that although I don't believe it's documented, I'd bet almost anything that Reagan surely would have seen The Day The Earth Stood Still.
So, if you break the code successfully, Reagan, in his role as head of the screen actors guild, made sure that picture was made as a way of saying Farewell To His Master, Lenin.
A disguised Lenin stands behind Michael Rennie, who was merely playing the role Ronald Reagan, behind the scenes, as Leninist theory calls for, made into a movie part:
It all falls into place.
BREAKING…BREAKING…MUST CREDIT AMYGDALA!!!
Read The Rest Scale: 1 out of 5 except for possibly reading the original Harry Bates story that "Day The Earth Stood Still" was adapted from, and, of course, the second half of my own post where I first delved into the well-known fact that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's books. (If you like that sort of thing, go back to uber-nut Pam Geller's uber-birther post.)
And everyone should always read more about H. G. Wells; fascinating guy.
Definitely check out this last piece by Nicholas de Villiers, which is entitled Documentary and the anamnesis of queer space: The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, and is a long critical piece itself.
Fred Barney Taylor’s recent documentary portrait [...] is in fact a double portrait. It is at once an affectionate portrayal of the prolific science fiction author and cultural critic known to his friends as “Chip” and a picture of New York City’s changing queer sexual landscape. Delany acts as our “guide,” not unlike eccentric New York tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch in The Cruise (Miller, 1998), whose theories of “the cruise” (pedestrian tactics of enjoyment) versus “the anti-cruise” (controlling technocratic strategies, the ideology of the “grid plan”) have great affinity with both Delany and de Certeau.
Like Delany’s brilliantly reflexive memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, Taylor’s film illustrates Delany’s life through a series of what Roland Barthes called biographemes (preferences, inflections, details to which the author might be distilled).
[...]
We could also place The Polymath in a series of recent “intellectual profile” documentaries such as Zizek! (Taylor, 2005) and Derrida (Dick & Kofman, 2002) or perhaps Esther Robinson’s A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (2007), which has a similar ambient electronic soundtrack.
[...]
[Chip] explains, “I’m the kind of person who basically thinks about writing all day long, and all the time.” He reveals that he broke up with a lover who said, “Don’t you think about anything except writing?” to which he admits,
“The sad answer to that is ‘no.’ My perception of myself is there’s not a lot of me there, there’s just a big emptiness in which there are a whole lot of words swimming around all the time—sentences, fragments of sentences—that’s how I perceive what me is.”
[...]
[Jonathan] Letham argues that Delany “never saw boundaries” and thus makes us question boundaries like that established between high and low art (we see Delany at a comic shop, then a modern art museum).
[...]
In The Polymath, Delany frankly states,
“I think that heterosexual monogamy is a really vicious and silly way to live.”
Since he has seen so many made miserable by it, he does not therefore “agree with it.” But he compares it to a religious choice, and thus he respects it the way one must have respect for other religions.
I finally got around to rejoining Facebook yesterday, surmounting this this past event, and Chip Delany mentioned to me this morning that:
Yes, Gary, it's Chip Delany. Will be coming down to Raleigh, NC, to speak at Duke, just after your birthday. I'll be there from the 10th of Nomember to the 12th.
I've checked the Duke University calendar for the month of November, to no avail, but hope to find out the exact date and time soon, and see Chip, which would be lovely.
If memory doesn't fail me, the last time I saw him in person was at a party at his apartment in the late Eighties, and, of course, I'll never forget sleeping with Chip for five nights in August of 1983.
Okay, it was sharing a bed platonically when he and Don Keller let me crash with them, but it sounds so much more exciting the other way.
Then in 2007 I noticed in a local paper that Chip was either speaking at, or teaching a class, or both -- definitely teaching a class -- at a local school in Boulder, where I had been living since December, 2001 (probably Naropa University) -- and figured I'd try to see if I could audit the class, or go if he was public speaking, and then I managed, as is my fashion, to get completely distracted that week, and totally forgot about it until after the fact.
So I'm blogging this to help remind myself to not miss Chip here in the Triangle come November.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 for the Nicholas de Villiers piece, if you're at all interested in queer theory, Chip, or queer inter-class interracial social institutions, and, you know, Chip-like subjects.
Also, pictures!
For another film on a much more controversial figure, see here; it's a pretty good portrayal. Dreams With Sharp Teeth currently available from Netflix, Amazon, etc. (Buy via that last link and I get some pennies; Netflix is cheaper, though.)
It just occurred to me to wonder whatever happened to J. J. Pierce, who spent so much time and energy denouncing the "New Wave" in sf back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, to the point of aneurysm; could this possibly be the same guy? I recall that John R. Pierce was his father.
The Wikipedia entry makes no mention of family, but other sources confirm that John Jeremy Pierce was John R. Pierce's son.
J. R. Pierce, to digress, was a fascinating guy:
John Robinson Pierce, the father of communications satellites and a writer of science fiction who came to Stanford to pursue his longtime interests in computer music and psychoacoustics, died April 2, 2002 at the age of 92. [...] In 1948 he coined the term "transistor" for the small, electronic switch invented at Bell Labs. But he is probably most famous for proposing the scientific groundwork that made unmanned communications satellites a reality. He urged NASA to build a satellite based on his design, and it was launched in 1960. Essentially a large polyester balloon covered with aluminum foil, Echo I bounced radio waves from a Jet Propulsion Laboratory antenna near Goldstone, Calif., to a Bell Labs station in New Jersey. The first message was recorded by President Eisenhower. The project's success led to the construction and 1962 launch of the first commercial communications satellite, Telstar I, which broadcast the first live television signals across the Atlantic.
[...] He was inventor of the Pierce Gun, a vacuum tube that transmits electrons and is used in satellites and, among other things, the klystrons that power the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Richard Lyon, one of his younger colleagues in the later years at Caltech, notes that his 1948 paper `The Philosophy of PCM' with Claude Shannon and Barney Oliver marked the beginning of the inexorable conversion of analog media to digital, starting with the digitization of short-haul telephony by the Bell System in the 1960s.
And much more.
John Pierce the younger was more than a little fierce, and not at all quiet, in the Sixties and Seventies in his opinion that if your science fiction didn't revolve around very very hard science, it was -- well, he may have left the casual reader or listener with the impression that he felt that burning at the stake would be too good for such writers.
J. J. Pierce became an expert on Cordwainer Smith, and was for a short time editor of Galaxy.
A little googling shows me that Darrell Schweitzer wrote about J. J. Pierce in 2007 that Pierce:
[...] published an article about his editorial experiences recently in The New York Review of Science Fiction, entitled ‘A Year of Torment’. He wasn’t merely making bricks without straw as editor of Galaxy. He was making bricks without mud. That he produced anything at all under the circumstances was remarkable.
Forgive me for this slightly wandering exercise in nostalgic curiosity, but somehow thinking about Chip, and then HE, made me think of those days of the late Sixties, and my early fanzine reading circa 1971-2, when J. J. was so energetically still denouncing the Evil New Wave, and I wonder how he looks back on all that now.
I try to never miss a Leverage or a Burn Notice these days. Not stuff that will change anyone's life, but if you're in the mood for relaxing popcorn, good fun.
[...] The Jack Trevor Story Memorial Prize is awarded sporadically, and is presented by [Michael] Moorcock, literary executor of Trevor's estate. Moorcock explained the audurous selection process in 2006:
The rules vary. They are fairly arbitrary. Sometimes it's a fair selection made from a number of writers. Sometimes it's to a writer who could do with the dosh (but is funny). Sometimes it depends on the size of the bribe offered to the committee. Which, sometimes, is just me.
When the prize was first awarded it was scrupulously fair. But, as in the course of all such prizes, it is now totally corrupt.
It is generally awarded for a work of fiction or body of work which, in the opinion of the committee, best celebrates the spirit of Jack Trevor Story. The conditions of the prize are that the money shall be spent in a week to a fortnight and the author have nothing to show for it at the end of that time. This is to recall Mr Story's famous reply to the bankruptcy judge who enquired where a substantial sum of money paid to him for film rights had gone -- "You know how it is, judge. Two hundred or two thousand, it always lasts a week to a fortnight." [...]
Meanwhile, could someone tell Wikipedia that sf fans have been picking up fanzines as soon as they arrived in the snail mail, and immediately flipping through them looking for their own name, and calling this "ego-scanning" since the early Forties; it's not a concept invented on the internet.
Read The Rest Scale: oh, you'll know if you want to or not; but that last one may not be what you anticipate.
My best Wil Wheaton post. My first. No, wait, it was this one, in January, 2002; but it was just a link, back in the days when I could do posts just that short. And did 20 or more posts a day.
No, really. (Two perfectly randomly picked weeks from back in the day.)
Have I said "no" enough times in this post? No?
ADDENDUM, September 9th, 2009, 5:12 p.m.: A cool cool Tesla coil short video from Dorkbot San Francisco. Via Twisted Physics, indirectly via Cheryl Morgan, who has another Tesla coil demo played with a rocking version of the Dr. Who theme, live.
THE LATE ABIGAIL FROST POST. I hate writing posts when friends of mine die.
The more I liked them, the harder it is.
Which is why so often I haven't written posts for so many friends who have died in in the past almost eight years I've been blogging: it keeps happening, and it hurts each time, and it hurts more to write about the loss.
One post I've put off is about Abigail Frost. Abi died on May 1st, 2009, at the age of 57.
Abi was one of the brightest, sharpest, most acerbic minds ever to move through fandom, and given how many of those sorts of minds have come out of British fandom, that's saying a lot.
She was a good friend to another brilliant British writer, Roz Kaveney. Avedon Carol is another writer and blogger who has now long lived in Britain, who was a good friend to Abi.
Avedon briefly mentioned Abi's passing here. Roz Kaveney wrote much more here, and a bit more here and here.
Since then, David Langford, another mutual good friend of Abi's and mine and so many, has worked hard to compile this terrific collection of some of Abi's fannish and other writings, as well as a handful of photos.
I first encountered Abi Frost as one fanzine fan in the pre-internet days usually first encountered another fanzine fan, particularly one who lived a great distance away -- in this case, a continent away, continents we had each yet to, respectively, visit -- in her fanzine writings, which appeared in a multitude of British fanzines. She was also to be found mentioned in many British convention and party reports.
In 1991, Abi ran for TAFF, the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund which, since 1954, has sent a European (originally and still usually a British) fan to North America (originally and still mostly to the U.S.), and vice versa, every other year or so, and Abi soundly lost to Pam Wells.
In 1993 she ran again, and won. I first met her in person on her TAFF trip, when I hosted her in NYC, at a time I was roommates with the late Robert Legault, one of the best copyeditors in publishing, and particularly, but not limited to, the science fiction world. Robert was, during the week Abi was in NYC, away traveling that month.
(And, digressing, contrary to rumors then and since, I paid half the month's rent on that apartment much of the time I lived there, and years later, just a few years ago, finally repaid Robert the remainder of the money I owed him.)
I got along fabulously with Abi; later, I was terribly glad to be able to spend a day with her on my Farber Fundtrip to England in November of 1996.
Self-centeredly, because people who read my blog know me, I'm going to give you some samples of some bits of writing where Abi mentioned me.
Before a planned Worldcon trip in 1990:
Things I don't want to do at the Worldcon at ConFiction, in the Hague, the Netherlands: Fall in love with a Bulgarian; eat pickled herrings; get poisoned by the North Sea; [...] get sued for libel; lose my passport; drop my shoes in the sea; fail to recognise Gary Farber; [...] meet millions of Scientologists; turn up incorrectly dressed at the Casino; eat pickled herrings; go to the Perry Rhodan event; eat pickled herrings.
Chicken Bones 2 (1990)
She need never have feared: the last Worldcon I've made it to was in Boston in 1989.
Abigail arrived in America, and wrote an In Progress report, dispatched to David Langford. A few excerpts:
[...] IF IT'S SEATTLE THIS MUST BE WEDNESDAY
Arrived at JFK Wednesday evening; G Farber waiting and even recognisable at the gate. Despite all my elaborate precautions against being taken for a wetback (most of my Abbey National account converted to traveller's cheques, addresses of practically everyone I know in the States, Official Looking Letters from ReinCONation and from J Bowman masquerading as WSFS Inc, lunch invitation from Famous New York Publishers etc) they just waved me through Immigration and I was mildly disappointed. Renewed acquaintance with subway and crashed out in the famously grungy Lower East Side.
[...]
Met Gary at the Tor lobby to walk about in search of a bar which, he said, sold good American beer; then decided we hadn't enough time so started walking in the other direction to meet le tout New York for dinner. I'd forgotten that aspect. Le tout New York was fine, and talked all the time. Back to Clinton Street for party. Crazed and increasingly desperate search for paper cups along the way ('Couldn't you decant soft drinks into empty beer bottles?' I suggested, and got looked at like something out of Animal House. Paper cups! We must have paper cups!). Lise Eisenberg discovered plastic bottles of what, if it's reached California and I have anything to do with it, will be the next British fan cult:
Blue Stuff, aka Blue Raspberry Drink. 100% chemicals and very nice with gin. Ended up pouring half my gin into a soda bottle to take with me, and leaving half as a thank-you for the unrich Farber. Don't Americans drink gin?
It would seem not. In Minneapolis Geri Sullivan and Jeff Schalles pressed the best part of a bottle on me, bought for Chuck Harris was it last year and not finished indeed barely started by him. I did my best for the honour of Britain with it, especially once I'd discovered that consuite sour cut with club soda made a fairly reasonable mixer in the absence of tonic.
ReinCONation was -- wonderful? weird? I am still weighing up its sheer strangeness. Everyone tells me it's the nearest thing to a British convention in the US;. substitute consuite-life for bar-life and yes, I can see it. I failed to get to much of the programme (partly because, in the hotel that hosts vast Minicons, it was just so far away), but we have nothing like as much fan programming anywhere, even at Mexicon. But the fan panel I went to seemed just like home, except that all the panellists seemed much more articulate than any of our usual suspects. But... but... there was something I don't think I'll ever quite nail down that was that little bit alien.
I come from a fandom, indeed a national class culture, where the sign of total acceptance is that they start to ignore you; when they really love you they insult you. I suspect it has to do with the upperclass life in which everybody was at boarding school with everybody else and remembers them being sick at dancing class at the age of seven. I don't come from that segment of society, but it's sort of in the water and in any case if, like me, you get sent from a decent state school to Oxford you rapidly learn to sink or swim in it. Your typical Minneapolis fan has an almost imperturbably sunny nature, an inalienable friendliness, which is not at all easy for your standard sharp and snarling London fan to deal with. If you encountered anything like this at home it would be phoney to the nth degree; here it isn't. Step back and try to imagine Michael Ashley here. It's painful. Try to imagine Chris Bell. It's hilarious. Try to imagine me, and I suppose it's just puzzling. [The Plain People of Fandom: You overestimate yourself, sunshine. It's obscene, that's what it is.]
Farber gave me a good tip before I left NYC: 'If there's anything to do with music going on, go; it's not bloody filk.' Dead right there, mate. Are you listening, Glasgow? Give these people a slot and a decent sized room with a PA and tell them just to fill it for the evening. I was too tired to take in much of the Friday night concert but the Saturday jam sessions were a delight.
[...]
SO FAR, SO [*COUGH!*]
Have not yet been assaulted by rabid anti-smokers; in fact people seem apologetic about it. Having no great trouble really. In fact, all this bit is is a convenient spot to tell you about, oh, god, I can't remember the name of the place, but it's near Gary's housesit. Imagine Spaghetti Junction, the Blackwall Tunnel exit and Hyde Park Corner all rolled together. Lots of cars, coming from several different directions, and it's rush hour and they're all standing there packed together with the engines running. Above the whole unbeautiful mess is a billboard advertising cigarettes, with compulsory Surgeon-General's Warning, which the random factors have made: CIGARETTE SMOKE CONTAINS CARBON MONOXIDE. At this point, Get a Life! seems an appropriate response.
[...]
WILL SOMEBODY ELSE PLEASE DO THIS
In the nature of things, when staying two nights with G Farber you end up with a certain amount of what I am normally far too grand to call smoffing. Result of this one is suggestion of a new fan fund: exchange between anglophone and non-anglophone countries. This is plainly the next frontier for fan funds; question is, how to do it at all without things getting totally smeared all over the place, and how not to make it we-the-anglophones-spreading-the-true- gospel-to-the-underprivileged.
Think about it. Talk about it. Then execute it brilliantly without me or Gary having to do a hand's turn, please.
I miss Abigail. I will always regret that though I thought of her many times in recent years, during which she'd almost entirely stayed far far away from science fiction fandom, other than a few friends such as Roz Kaveney, David Langford, and Avedon Carol, I'd never written her in snail mail to regain contact. So far as I know, she never did get online.
I never even knew that she was ill with cancer, until suddenly I'd heard that she died.
She was sharp as hell, burned brightly, and deserved so much more than life, and fandom, handed her.
One thing I'll never do is forget her.
Read some of what you've missed in this collection of just some of her fine writings, as collected by D. Langford.
To quote the famous Langford, who earns Hugos like other people earn wages:
I'm sure you'll have your own favourites from Abigail's now-on-line works; don't let me influence you over-much! Going through all that material led to to many happy rediscoveries. Two particularly fine pieces of personal writing, according to me, are Splinters & Mysteries and A Mitcham Mint.
Gary's Read The Rest Scale: she wrote a variety of shiny, sparkling articles; few require arcane knowledge of sf fandom to appreciate; try a dip in and out.
Having gained the permission of Roz, I may eventually have a part two of this post, taking up the story of just how badly Abi was treated by science fiction fandom, in her later years, and why, how tragic and wrongheaded it was, and why this sort of thing should never be allowed to happen,
But that's for another day and another post.
To read A Mitcham Mint is to understand why Abi and I understood each other so well.
ADDENDUM, September 7th, 2009, 9:32 p.m.: People who don't understand how the internet works might want to know that there are these things called "referrer logs," and they tell you such information as IP addresses of where you get hits from, as well as much other info about the computers and people that read your website, including the ISP, geographic location of the source, what operating system you use, what browser you use, and much else, such as, for instance: "http://groups.yahoo.com/group/inthebar/messages/227848?l=1," "http://groups.yahoo.com/group/inthebar/messages/227852?l=1," etc." Or if you're, say, clicking from an email sent to or from a Yahoo mail account. And so on.
The internet: don't try using it without knowing what you're doing.
YUM, YUM, YUM. Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of the Japan's incoming Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has had interesting experiences:
[...] To his credit, Mr Hatoyama, who will formally become Prime Minister in a fortnight after a landslide election victory last Sunday, does not appear in the least embarrassed by his wife’s eccentricities, and nor do his fellow citizens. She falls into the category of public figure known as “tarento”, or “talent” — televisual artists or entertainers who are expected and encouraged to be more flamboyant and unpredictable than the rest of us.
[...]
It was in a book of interviews with prominent people, entitled Most Bizarre Things I’ve Encountered, that she revealed her extraterrestrial jaunt, which occurred during her first marriage. “While my body was sleeping, I think my spirit flew on a triangular-shaped UFO to Venus,” she said. “It was an extremely beautiful place and was very green.”
Since it became likely, earlier this year, that Mr Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan were likely to form the next government, she has been extensively interviewed on the daytime “wide shows” aimed at Japanese housewives. It was during one of these that she spoke of her past-life friendship with Cruise and her ambition to make a film with him.
“He was Japanese in his past life, and we were together so when I see him, I will say, ‘Hi. It’s been a long time’, and he will immediately understand,” she said. “I will win the Oscar for sure. About seven years ago my husband Yukio said to me, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s a nice dream . . .’ but these days, he encourages me and he sits at his computer translating the script into English even though he is tired after work.”
She also described how she “eats the sun” every morning. She closed her eyes and mimed the act of removing pieces from the sky. “Yum, yum, yum,” she said, placing the imaginary solar morsels in her mouth. “I get energy from it. My husband also does this.”
[...] "I eat the sun," Miyuki says, raising her arms as if to tear pieces off an imaginary sun. "Like this: yum, yum, yum. It gives me enormous energy. My husband has recently started doing that too." Clearly, this is where Gordon Brown has been going wrong.
Someone should bring Mel Brooks up to speed on this genre, if possible.
View The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for metacommentary on Downfall parodies, mocking Nazis, and when considering Patrick Buchanan's apologetics for Hitler.
And because it's immensely funny.
Recontextualism: wholesome fun for the whole family.
Amygdala Looks Back: a 2003 post on Patrick Buchanan and paleoconservatism.
(Note: I was not writing any kind of defense of neo-conservatism, and, yes, I was being reductionist, and no, I wouldn't describe neo-conservatism that way at all, today; but it was a thread among legitimate attacks on neo-conservatism at the time; I mention all this in case anyone misunderstands and wants to revisit the past lacking that context; the point of that post was to attack paleo-conservatism, and Buchanan, not to favorably compare neo-conservatives to them. I'd write a different post six and a half years later. Maybe this one! Wait, more meta!)
WHAT DAMON KNIGHT ACTUALLY SAID ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION.
Let's run through this again: people forever have been saying things like this: "I keep coming back to Damon Knight’s ostensive definition: science fiction is what I point to when I say science fiction."
[...] My other take on his thoughts are this: since SF has always suffered under a lack of truly formal definitioning, other than the the Knightian “what I am pointing at”, I propose that we elect a SCIENCE FICTION KNIGHT once every year, who’s sole purpose and function will be to “POINT AT THINGS AND DECLAIM.”
I recently wrote someone an email on this yet again. Me:
This is not what damon said or wrote. I've made a point over the decades of trying (generally futilely) to correct the small but significant way in which this endlessly repeated misquote differs from what damon actually wrote [...]
Although I no longer have access to my copy, you can also check your copy of A Sense of Wonder to confirm the original. It's a point I went into on Usenet a few dozen times, back in the Nineties, and earlier on panels and conversations in the Eighties and Seventies.
What he wrote was "Science fiction is what we point to when we say 'science fiction.'"
Damon was always very irate when people would misquote it as "I" rather than "we" because the point of this small and subtle, but meaningful, distinction, is that it's not an attempt to say "I, Damon Knight, an authority figure, am defining sf when I point to something," but rather that there is is, however much we disagree as individuals, and as groups, within something of a group consensus within the sf community.
[...]
Follow-up on damon's quote: I characterized it in this exchange thusly, on Usenet in 1998 [slightly reformatted for clarity]:
Chris Lawson View profile More options Apr 16 1998, 3:00 am Newsgroups: alt.tv.babylon-5, alt.tv.star-trek.ds9, rec.arts.sf.science, rec.arts.sf.tv, rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5, rec.arts.startrek.current From: c...@ozemail.com.au (Chris Lawson) Date: 1998/04/16 Subject: Re: Damon Knight's Definition Of SF (was Re: Star Trek)
[...]
gfarber@panix.com (Gary Farber) wrote:
[snip]
>: I thought it was what >: Damon Knight pointed at and >: said that it was science fiction.
> No. Damon's statement is the > most misquoted in > the history of sf. His > statement is "science fiction > is what WE point at and say > is 'science fiction." > Emphasis on the "we" added by me. > His point was that > he was not an authority > figure, that no one > individual has authority to > make such a ruling, and > that we presuppose agreement > as to whether a given > work is sf or not when we > discuss it.
[...]
Later on Usenet, in the Nineties, I put it this way:
The significant different from 'I' to 'we'' is that 'we' incorporates a mutual understanding on the part of those discussing it, and is not an authoritarian dictum on the part of an individual, and most assuredly is not an authoritarian dictum on the part of Damon Knight that he gets to personally rule on What Is SF.
And here is Damon himself writing to the point in December of 1996, belatedly responding to my post earlier that year, and the previous and subsequent discussion:
knight Dec 21 1996, 4:00 am Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.composition From: dkni...@efn.org Date: 1996/12/21 Subject: sf definition
Browsing upstream with DejaNews, I found a couple of references to my definition of science fiction, mentioned as if it were well known to everybody: "Science fiction is whatever I point to when I say science fiction."
And indeed it is well known to everybody, but I never said it. What I wrote, on page 1 of In Search of Wonder, was:
1. That the term "science fiction" is a misnomer, that trying to get two enthusiasts to agree on a definition of it leads only to bloody knuckles; that better labels have been devised (Heinlein's suggestion, "speculative fiction," is the best, I think), but that we're stuck with this one; and that it will do us no particular harm if we remember that, like "The Saturday Evening Post," it means what we point to when we say it.
It's on p. 11 now, because a chapter has been added before it in the new expanded third edition, $20 at your local huckster's or from Advent:Publishers, Box A3228, Chicago, IL 60690. Tell your friends. :)
Damon
I know the actual quote will never catch up the massively more popular misquote, but pass it on: it's we, not I.
Read The Rest Scale: 1 out of 5, though feel free to read Crotchety's post on various matters.
In Search of Wonder, the first serious book of sf criticism ever written, a collection of former fanzine criticism by Damon Knight, is available here from NESFA Press:
This expanded Third Edition is 150,000 words, up from 120,000 in the 1967 Second Edition, and double the length of the 1956 First Edition (and that's not even counting 33 pages of bibliography and index).
Damon Knight effectively invented science fiction criticism. His reviews were not mere statements of his personal preferences—his skillful essays analyzed the books and told why they were good or bad, to the edification of readers, the delight of good writers, and the embarrassment of bad ones.
In this unique critical study of science fiction, Mr. Knight works on the principle that science fiction is a form of literature which needs no apologies and no special dispensations: it can and should be judged by the same high standards that apply to all literature. His incisive and knowing criticism covers the field brilliantly, from "Classics" to "Chuckleheads."
This new edition adds a chapter of autobiography, articles on writing and teaching science fiction, and other fascinating essays.
[....]
Recommended to all scholars and historians of the science fiction field, sez me.
ADDENDUM, 7:50 p.m.: I'm really flattered that Mike Resnick (whom I've always had tremendous respect for, incidentally), in comments here, seems to blame me for the decline and fall of Worldcons:
[...] I look at Gary Farber's comments, and I'm convinced nothing will be done; he likes it just the way it is, and his name is Legion among the SMOFs.
My powers are far more awesome than I ever conceived.
And as I said in comments there, I direct anyone interested in "definitions" of science fiction to my post on Samuel R. Delany's comments on that evergreen.
Key sentence: “What can not be defined are genres.”
Call him a terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything else you want, but understand that he is willing -- no, anxious -- to give his life for his cause. Call him also a captive, and know that he works with others as part of a team, like the Sept. 11 hijackers, all of whom died, willingly. Ishmael is someone I invented, but he is not a far-fetched creation. You and I know he exists, has existed and will exist again. He is the enemy.
How do we get him to reveal his group's plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard.
Now he is in American custody. What will happen? How do we get him to reveal his group's plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard. It will, in fact, be harder than it used to be. He can no longer be waterboarded. He knows this. He cannot be deprived of more than a set amount of sleep. He cannot be beaten or thrown up against even a soft wall. He cannot be threatened with shooting or even frightened by the prospect of an electric drill. Nothing really can be threatened against his relatives -- that they will be killed or sexually abused.
He knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line -- that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running. Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.
This business of what constitutes torture is a complicated matter.
No, let’s call him “your mother.”
How do we get her to reveal her group’s plans and the names of her colleagues? It will be hard.
If only she could be beaten or thrown up against even a soft wall. If only she could be threatened with shooting or even frightened by the prospect of an electric drill. If only she really could be threatened against her relatives -- that they will be killed or sexually abused.
That would be so much better.
But for Richard Cohen, it's "complicated."
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. He makes me ashamed to share being Jewish, and male, and an American. And a biped.
A wiki is a website that uses wiki software, allowing the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked Web pages, using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor, within the browser.[1][2] Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems.
Most wikis serve a specific purpose, and off topic material is promptly removed by the user community. Such is the case of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia.[2] In contrast, open purpose wikis accept all sorts of content without rigid rules as to how the content should be organized.
Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work."[3] "Wiki" (English pronunciation: /wiːkiː/) is a Hawaiian word for "fast".[4] "Wiki" can be expanded as "What I Know Is," but this is a backronym.[5]
There are a lot of links; go hit my link to read all the links.
Warning! This had a thoughtful reader review/comment, giving the book only 3 out of 5 stars:
Lacking essential information This book lacks criteria for discerning between huge ships and merely really big ships. Some well-designed lists, charts or colorful pop-up sections would have been nice for readers who were unsure what size of ship they were avoiding.
ADDENDUM, 12:39 p.m.: Speaking of Scalzi, who informed me that he's already been sent some of the above balm, I swiped this from him, on the GFail Apocalypse:
It's been years now since Blogger (aka "Google") has gone out, but at one time it was known to happen now and again.
Yahoo Mail's servers occasionally seem to flicker, but I don't recall any outages on their part that lasted a significant amount of time; just lots of dumb GUI changes, but those are mandated by law, you know.
CONTRACTING FOR LORD OF THE FLIES. Worried about the war in Afghanistan being a quagmire, with more troops being asked for, for a decade-plus committment, to support a corrupt, incompletent, government that few in Afghanistan see as legitimate?
Civilian contractors working for the Pentagon in Afghanistan not only outnumber the uniformed troops, according to a report by a Congressional research group, but also form the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel recorded in any war in the history of the United States.
Italics mine. Yes, that's right, more than in Iraq! And look how splendidlythat worked out!
So:
[...] As of March this year, contractors made up 57 percent of the Pentagon’s force in Afghanistan, and if the figure is averaged over the past two years, it is 65 percent, according to the report by the Congressional Research Service.
How does that compare to historical usage?
So how is that use of contractors and privatized "security" going in Afghanistan?
Guards hired by the US state department to protect diplomats and staff at the country's embassy in Afghanistan live and work in a "Lord of the Flies" environment in which they are subjected to hazing and other inappropriate behaviour by supervisors, a government oversight group said yesterday.
In a 10-page letter to the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the independent Project on Government Oversight said the situation had led to a breakdown in morale and leadership that compromises security at the embassy in Kabul, where nearly 1,000 US diplomats, staff and Afghan nationals work.
[...]
One email from a guard describes lurid conditions at Camp Sullivan, the guards' quarters a few miles from the embassy. The message described scenes of abuse including guards and supervisors urinating on people and "threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity".
A number of guards say such conditions have created a "climate of fear and coercion". Those who refuse to participate are often ridiculed, humiliated or even fired, they said.
ArmorGroup's management is aware of the conditions but has not stopped it or disciplined those responsible, the letter says. Two supervisors alleged to be the worst offenders have been allowed to resign and may now be working on other US contracts, the group said.
[...]
The group's investigation found sleep-deprived guards regularly logging 14-hour days, language barriers that impair critical communications and a failure by the state department to hold the contractor accountable.
It cites a July 2007 warning from the department to ArmorGroup that detailed more than a dozen performance deficiencies, including too few guards and armoured vehicles. Another "cure notice" was sent less than a year later, raising other problems and criticising the contractor for failing to fix the prior ones.
In July 2008, however, the department extended the contract for another year, according to the notice. More problems surfaced and more warning notices followed.
[...] The report quotes an e-mail from a guard currently working for the contractor, describing scenes of guards and supervisors “peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks” and drinking “vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks”.
In another incident, a male Afghan caterer complained last month of being grabbed by a supervisor and told: “You are very good for f***ing.” The supervisor, who was in only his underwear, also brandished bottles of alcohol.
Contractors in Afghanistan are making big money for bad work
A highway that begins crumbling before it is finished. A school with a collapsed roof. A clinic with faulty plumbing. A farmers’ cooperative that farmers can’t use. Afghan police and military that, after training, are incapable of providing the most basic security. And contractors walking away with millions of dollars in aid money for the work. The Bush Administration touts the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan as a success story. Perhaps, in comparison to the violence-plagued efforts in Iraq and the incompetence-riddled efforts on the American Gulf Coast, everything is relative. A new report “Afghanistan, Inc.,” issued by the non-profit organization CorpWatch, details the bungled reconstruction effort in Afghanistan.
Massive open-ended contracts have been granted without competitive bidding or with limited competition to many of the same politically connected corporations which are doing similar work in Iraq: Kellogg, Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton), DynCorp, Blackwater, The Louis Berger Group, The Rendon Group and many more. Engineers, consultants, and mercenaries make as much as $1,000 a day, while the Afghans they employ make $5 per day.
These companies are pocketing millions, and leaving behind a people increasingly frustrated and angry with the results.
[...] In numerous e-mails, the guards describe a crisis in discipline and morale, understaffing, sleep deprivation, "threats and intimidation." One guard refers to a group of guards and supervisors from the security contractor ArmorGroup as "sexual predators, deviants running rampant."
Guards provided dozens of graphic photos and videos depicting shocking scenes of hazing and humiliation by superiors, most of them too lewd to show. The guards recount a climate of fear and coercion where those who refuse to participate are retaliated against, even fired.
The State Department contracts with a private security firm - ArmorGroup North America, owned by Wackenhut. ArmorGroup employs 450 guards at the Kabul Embassy - two-thirds from Nepal and India, the rest from the U.S. and other English-speaking nations.
[...] "It makes sense to get rid of the clerks and replace them with trigger-pullers," one Pentagon source told the paper. None of the officials who spoke to the Times were named, as the plans have not yet been officially announced, according to the report
[...]
Officials who spoke to the Times said many of the non-combat troops rotated out of Afghanistan would likely be replaced by civilian contractors.
[...]
An influx of 14,000 more private contractors could increase friction between Washington and Afghan leaders at a time when violence is increasing and questions over corruption in Kabul are getting louder.
From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees.
The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.
And it's working well, right?
[...] The targets are selected by the C.I.A., and employees at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., pull the trigger remotely. Only a handful of the agency’s employees actually work at the Predator bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the current and former employees said.
They said that Blackwater’s direct role in these operations had sometimes led to disputes with the C.I.A. Sometimes when a Predator misses a target, agency employees accuse Blackwater of poor bomb assembly, they said. In one instance last year recounted by the employees, a 500-pound bomb dropped off a Predator before it hit the target, leading to a frantic search for the unexploded bomb in the remote Afghan-Pakistani border region. It was eventually found about 100 yards from the original target.
Winning hearts and minds by privatization and sending lots more U.S. troops, to defend a government that steals their election.
[...] The leaders of the tribe, who live in a district called Shorabak, prepared to deliver a local landslide.
But it never happened, the tribal leaders said.
Instead, aides to Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali — the leader of the Kandahar provincial council and the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan — detained the governor of Shorabak, Delaga Bariz, and shut down all of the district’s 45 polling sites on election day. The ballot boxes were taken to Shorabak’s district headquarters, where, Mr. Bariz and other tribal leaders said, local police officers stuffed them with thousands of ballots.
At the end of the day, 23,900 ballots were shipped to Kabul, Mr. Bariz said, with every one marked for President Karzai.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for the election report, and feel free to check out the video and picture gallery.
ADDENDUM, 11:44 p.m.: I should make clear that I've moved passed the skepticism phase on minimizing our presence in Afghanistan, and into the we-should-definitely-mostly-move-out category. I'm no Walter Cronkite, but my ending audio quote is where I'm now at. Hope is not a plan, and I have too much of a feeling that I've seen this movie before, in Southeast Asia, and don't want to see the remake.
And here's a conservative thought: Cohen points to Anthony Cordesman saying:
[...] U.S. forces need to "hold" and keep the Afghan population secure, and "build" enough secure local governance and economic activity to give Afghans reason to trust their government and allied forces. They must build the provincial, district and local government capabilities that the Kabul government cannot and will not build for them.
Why is it that so many are always so prepared to do such things abroad, but not at home?
We're back to LBJ's attempt to have guns and butter. Let's have butter.
[...] “The analogy of Lyndon Johnson suggests itself very profoundly,” said David M. Kennedy, the Stanford University historian. Mr. Obama, he said, must avoid letting Afghanistan shadow his presidency as Vietnam did Mr. Johnson’s. “He needs to worry about the outcome of that intervention and policy and how it could spill over into everything else he wants to accomplish.”
By several accounts, that risk weighs on Mr. Obama these days. Mr. Kennedy was among a group of historians who had dinner with Mr. Obama at the White House earlier this summer where the president expressed concern that Afghanistan could yet hijack his presidency. Although Mr. Kennedy said he could not discuss the off-the-record conversation, others in the room said Mr. Obama acknowledged the L.B.J. risk.
“He said he has a problem,” said one person who attended that dinner at the end of June, insisting on anonymity to share private discussions. “This is not just something he can turn his back on and walk away from. But it’s an issue he understands could be a danger to his administration.”
Another person there was Robert Caro, the L.B.J. biographer who was struck that Mr. Johnson made some of his most fateful decisions about Vietnam in the same dining room. “All I could think of when I was sitting there and this subject came up was the setting,” he said. “You had such an awareness of how things can go wrong.”
Without quoting what the president said, Mr. Caro said it was clear Mr. Obama understood that precedent. “Any president with a grasp of history — and it seems to me President Obama has a deep understanding of history — would have to be very aware of what happened in another war to derail a great domestic agenda,” he said.
Of course "aware" does not necessarily mean "aware enough."
NOT ALTERNATE EARTHS, JUST RARE. I, for one, welcome our new Chinese, etc.
[...] China currently accounts for 93 percent of production of so-called rare earth elements — and more than 99 percent of the output for two of these elements, dysprosium and terbium, vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications like missiles.
[...]
In each of the last three years, China has reduced the amount of rare earths that can be exported. This year’s export quotas are on track to be the smallest yet. But what is really starting to alarm Western governments and multinationals alike is the possibility that exports will be further restricted.
[...]
They sell for up to $300 a kilogram, or up to about $150 a pound for material like terbium, which is in particularly short supply. Dysprosium is $110 a kilo, or about $50 a pound. Less scare rare earth like neodymium sells for only a fraction of that.
[...]
A single mine in Baotou, in China’s Inner Mongolia, produces half of the world’s rare earths. Much of the rest — particularly some of the rarest elements most needed for products from wind turbines to Prius cars — comes from small, often unlicensed mines in southern China.
China produces over 99 percent of dysprosium and terbium and 95 percent of neodymium. These are vital to many green energy technologies, including high-strength, lightweight magnets used in wind turbines, as well as military applications.
You might think I just wanted to write a post that used the words dysprosium, terbium, and neodymium, but you'd be wrong.
, etc. (Buy via that last link and I get some pennies; Netflix is cheaper, though.)
