Indignant Desert Birds

This is the greatest thing

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for laying about. Or working on layouts. Or selling brunch to the post-church, pre-rapture crowd. Sundays are for music, good and bad. Or Sundays are for blowing raspberries at the last bits of a head injury.

This week: The US House of Representatives passed a debt deal that will not pass the US Senate. A major labor action came to a semi-successful conclusion, and there will be a football season after all. Also this week: Spain called for elections- possibly as a result of the Spanish “indignant” movement. How did no one tell me about these wonderful protesters? Also also: Wars, rumors of wars.

Before we begin in earnest, I want to apologize to any of my customers who I may have gotten sick. See: without health insurance, or paid time off, I’m heavily penalized for staying home from work. As a result, if I get sick, so do a lot of other people. Other countries have mandatory sick leave, but some many of our citizens feel that creating laws about that would be a step towards government tyranny.

My life needs more boardgames. But so many of them are expensive! Cheapass games does exactly what their name implies- gives you a high-quality game as cheaply as possible. Some of them are even free.

I’ve said before, possibly even last week, that most people only think they hate board games. Most people have only played Monopoly and Risk, and those are both very bad games. Turns out that Monopoly is much better than I’d thought- I’d simply been playing it wrong.

One of the awesome things about video games is the way they can be a power fantasy. In real life, I’ve got to be a living part of the economy. If I fail to show for work, I’m probably going to start starving eventually. In a game, I can save the universe and build a civilization. Even when I’ve done government work, I’ve enjoyed playing Sim City- the problems are at the very least solvable. The problem with games is an extension of this- your character really is the center of the universe. This wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal if we didn’t live in a patriarchal society. However, with games being yet another media telling people that women have no sexual agency save that granted by men, it becomes problematic.

The Smurfs movie. Oh, the Smurfs movie. I can’t even begin to understand who thought it might be a good idea. Honestly, I had no idea that it started as a comic in 1958. Given it’s origins, it makes sense that it would have some archaic notions of gender dichotomy. None of which explains why, in 2011, there is only one female Smurf. That’s kind of unSmurfing believable.

A very small, thumbnail history of India. Because gaming, at it’s best, tells us about the society we live in, and the one we think we live in.

The second best press release of all time.

I can’t find the specific quote, but Antonio Gramsci once made the observation that for propaganda to be effective, it needs to operate at two levels. The first is aimed at the elite, the little lies they tell themselves with the psudosophistication of unknowingly regurgitated thought. The second is aimed at the masses, the unsubtle lies endlessly repeated. This is why the Right has both Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza. The Left lacks this sort of institution. It also lacks governing power.

We lefties keep trying to explains that the stimulus worked, but it wasn’t big enough. If we had every morning DJ in America explaining this simple fact, there is no way that congress would be more worried about debt than about joblessness. Debt is the line the Right is pushing, and so it’s what Washington thinks is important.

One of the weirder aspects of American public policy is the public blindspot regarding the link between taxes and spending. Americans love getting government services. We don’t always realize we are getting those services, but we’ll notice when they’re gone.

Gravity is a universal constant, right? Nope! Yup! Kinda!. I do love finding out that not only are we wrong about something, but that we’ve always been wrong about it. Not only that: there’s no guarantee that we’re right about it now.

I used to do “musical interludes”, but my main sources for new music seem to have dried up. If anyone wants to point out some music blogs, please do so in the comments. In the mean time: that contradicts Mark 12:17. The point of being a secular society is specifically to keep the various religions and sects from tearing America apart with their different notions of “the good”.

Some prayers, though, can only be heeded by government action. Some prayers should be unnecessary, but have been made so by our continued refusal to understand how to properly invest. The prayer, in other words, isn’t so much aimed at a deity, but at Washington DC.

Everything you need to know about the patriarchy, you can learn from slave-Leia.

I’ve got a weakness for hats. One of the reasons I am looking forward to getting a haircut is so that I can wear my fedora the way it’s meant to be worn. But in the mean time, I have a couple of hats which are specifically for when my hair is too long.

Whitey was on the moon. A black lady was sewing his protective garments. To me, this is a perfect encapsulation of American history from about 1492 until roughly… I dunno: 1970? White (male) Americans doing extraordinary things, being backed up and assisted by Black Americans who were thrust into the (too oft uncredited) supporting role for no better reason than skin color.

American race relations bears a striking resemblance to this calculator.

Since I started taking the Adderall, my coffee intake has dramatically decreased. Turns out that caffeine activates almost the same mental pathways as the ones I needed activated. And so I drank too much coffee. Some days, though, you just need to wake up. Adderall can increase the mental bandwidth, but it can’t actually make you more alert. For that you need coffee. And if one cup won’t do there’s Black Blood of the Earth.

The state of the Internet: 2011 edition. Which ought to have been the name of this week’s post, really.

My childhood wasn’t this awesome.

Along those lines: this is the best argument for having children.

News media does a terrible job at presenting information. The inverted pyramid style of writing is designed for short attention spans, but basically guarantees that nothing worth reading will exist past the third paragraph. Headlines are written by people who have little familiarity with story. Whitespace is an oft-touted ideal, but one that is rarely achieved. Media’s online presentation is even worse.

If you read just one thing:

This story is essential reading for anyone wondering what “meta”, or “post modern” mean. Critical theorist Unite! You have nothing to lose but your identity selves!

This week’s theme has been… Damn if I know. In the comments section, sound off if you use an RSS reader.

I am your grandmother.

Tags: Sunday, Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
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Damn it feels good.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for waking up after not enough sleep and running to work. Alternately, Sundays might be for next steps. Perhaps Sundays are for gardening up in Tacoma (finish your damned book!). Or Sundays are for working on completing a Lego game to 100%. Then again, perhaps Sundays are simply for recovery.

This week American Republicans once more decided to juggle fire over the American economy. Also this week: Norway experienced it’s worst moment of violence since the end of the Second World War. In happier news: New York State began implementing marriage equality.

Years back I was sort of sickened and astounded by the idea of Prussian Blue. Prussian Blue were a teenaged neo-Nazi pop sensation. It seems that they’ve grown up a bit, and had a change of heart. Score one for the good guys.

Music is weird. It is communication that isn’t quite speech. Music is always signal and never noise– even when the sets of sound might be noise in other contexts. It is fundamental to the human experience, and yet not at all unique to our species.

I’m a huge fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I find that of all the genres of fiction, they have the greatest potential for A) exploring the boundaries of the human condition and B) letting me enjoy the spectacle of dragons battling spaceships. The problem with creating whole new universes and laws of physics is that there is an ever present temptation to ignore internal consistency of the universe an author has created. That’s when I check out. I’m not sure why animated/drawn works tend to entice authors to break their own rules more than other media. But my experience shows they do.

I cannot begin to understand politics as anything other than an expression of values. Likewise: fiction is a way of exploring values in extreme circumstances. We may never have actually been faced with a “ticking bomb” scenario, but 24 let us think about how we might deal with it. Likewise, epic fantasy lets us understand how ordinary people can do extraordinary evil- or good.

The games industry loves to deride Metacritic, mostly because they’re overly reliant on it. There seems to be a general belief in the industry that a game that scores a “90″ is somehow better than one that scores an “89″. Metacritic has a fairly flawed methodology, but can be a useful rough-guide when making buying decisions. After reading this this, I can’t help but respect them a bit more. Now: if only a games journalist had done the work of actually finding out who had been de-listed.

I can almost, but not quite, wrap my brain around this decision. Traditionally at parties like this, several men are complete jackasses. The response to this was not to ban the jackasses, but to ban their targets. Victim blaming, in plainer terms. Bizarrely, this will have the effect of telling the jackasses that their behavior is acceptable.

San Francisco (and California) allows citizens to amend foundational document without imput from elected officials. This has always struck me as a bad way to make policy– sort of like making changes to an operating system every time you want to watch a new movie. Currently, in order to fix an oopie of a law, citizens have to go back to the polls and fiddle with typos. One of our Supervisors is putting forth an obvious solution to this problem.

Remember kids Cops are not allowed to help you. They are only allowed to hurt you. Once they’ve decided to hone in on you, they’ve created an adversarial relationship with you. They’re hoping you don’t know this.

When archaeologists were trying to understand Viking society, they looked at gravesites, saw that most of the corpses were buried with swords, and concluded that Vikings were mostly male. Recently scientists did some bone analysis on those vikings and discovered two things. Firstly: roughly half those vikings were female. Secondly: institutional gender bias can create enormous problems when trying to understand the world.

Quidditch.

Many people think they hate playing board games. I don’t actually think this is true. I think, rather, that most people have a natural aversion to shitty board games. Most of the board games we played as kids were shitty. About 15 years ago, that began to change.

Borders books is going out of business. I am not surprised about this, every interaction I’d ever had with that company was at least slightly negative. I was left with the sense of a company implementing a bad plan. I feel rather badly for the hourly employees- they’ll be left with nothing.

The Republican Party is really fucking crazy.

On Saturday, I overheard a Dad talking with his daughter. “Are you a knight, or a princess? A princess knight?” In 2011, girls can do anything. Well, mostly anything.

“People down on the Peninsula act as if “the city” is atrociously far away, as if it’s not just a 18-20 minute drive. I work in the city every day and it’s not far away. People act as if you need to set aside a “day trip” just to go to the city. Meanwhile, Luke and I are able to hop on BART and get to the city to have dinner and be back home in less than 2.5 hours.” HINT HINT!

Data. Without data we have guesswork and conjecture. With data, we have information and with information we can have a plan. Whenever I read a news article summarizing a study, I know that the article will give me terrible data.

Context is key.

The Rapture failed to arrive a month or so back. This was by and large good news: the world will not be destroyed by an angry divinity in the next several years. It did, however, leave true believers to piece together lives they’d largely abandoned, without the rock of their church to anchor them.

I can’t say that I know the cause and effect, but great nations dare great things. By having a crewed space program, America was making a statement that we would be constantly pushing against the boundaries of the known. By scaling back our ambitions, we’re declaring retreat before the oncoming forces of entropy.

Some people question the value of NASA. I barely know how to begin answering those questions. I don’t understand the mindset doesn’t understand the value of pushing the limits of human knowledge.

Even if America does fall into the dark ages, become a third-rate power, and abandon space, humanity will not.

If you read just one thing:

Pure, distilled evil

This week’s theme was a defiant scream against a gathering darkness. In the comments section, leave your war cry.

Tags: Sunday by Punning Pundit
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I want to play this.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for playing wizarding games with Legos on your TV. Or Sundays might be for reading the most anticipated fantasy novel of the past 6 years. Or Sundays might be for swimming. Perhaps, though, just perhaps, Sundays are for feeding the hungry masses. Sundays are certainly for watching the US become the best Soccer playing nation on Earth.

This week was a sort of holding pattern in world history. The various wars continued, and in many cases worsened. The US’s ongoing Constitutional crisis failed to be resolved. The world’s most evil media mogul had some of his more nefarious deeds exposed. Oh, and for added pessimism, the birthplace and only home of the human species continued to get less habitable.

Was all that too depressing? Help fight back against entropy of the human spirit

I think I’m wired differently from most folks. If I asked a woman to be my partner, to have and to hold, etc and so forth, and she told me that I couldn’t help plan the ceremony because “it’s her day… I don’t even think I could begin to be involved with someone who might have that attitude. Simillarly, it would never occur to me to call a small child “pretty”. Talking about books? I can do that all day long…

The women of our species have been engaged in a fearsome match to lay claim to the title of World’s Best Soccer players. America looks set to win the whole thing this year, in large part because we have tried to implement some form of equality between our genders.

I’ve said it before: I love sports. Humans perfecting their physical and mental skills and showing them off before the world. One of the problems with sports, however, is that athletes tend to shorten their lives– literally spending their health in the pursuit of excellence. Which is a reason why I enjoy esports. All the drama and excellence of physical sports, with none of the life-threatening injury.

The economy is terrible. It’s not simply bad because we’re not making as much money. An awful lot of us are sitting around doing nothing. 2 years ago, I was happily working 50-60 hours a week. Currently I’m begging for 30. The economy is keeping me from being able to contribute as much as I am capable of. This is true for a lot of people.

In 2010, the American healthcare system had 2 major problems. First? It woefully underserved the American public. Secondly: it was wildly overpriced. In 2014, America is set to correct the first of these problems. Unfortunately, the price for fixing the first problem was to not touch the second problem– overcharging the American people for healthcare puts money into someone’s pocket. So that’s the next struggle.

Science is scary.

During the darkest hours of 2 November 2004, there were two conversations held between myself and the other Orwellians. Firstly: I was berating them for voting for Ralph motherfucking Nader. Secondly, I was trying to explain to them why California Succession wouldn’t really work.Our current borders are very defensible– but we wouldn’t keep half the State.

Perhaps I should have been lecturing Robb Stark about securing his borders. If so, there might still have been a King of the North.

Google has done some amazing things. They revolutionized email by turning it into a profit center, rather than a loss leader. They have pioneered efforts to make data centers as energy efficient as possible. They also make science fair awards out of Lego brick.

True story: Once upon a time, I was meeting a dear friend in Ohio. I borrowed a car and met her at the airport. “Something you need to know– they don’t have Burritos here.” My friend was shocked. The lady I’d borrowed the car from piped up “Yes we do! There’s a Chipotle on the way back to the office!” My friend Howled her displeasure. “THEY DON’T HAVE BURRITOS IN THIS STATE?!” Burritos would be the national food of California, if we were a nation.

English, like any good comic, steals shamelessly from it’s betters. I yammer a great deal on this bog about the prescitpionist/descriptionist divide. No one, however, questions the need for the language to grow, evolve, and maim it’s memetic competition.

I once tried to explain to one of my sisters how (7+1) * (7+1) can equal 100. I was eventually able to, but the concept that our number system can be somewhat arbitrary is a mindbending one. Similarly, it has only been one year since Neptune was discovered.

When Grover Norquist decided to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub, the last week of American history is what he has been hoping for. The “beast” has been starved metaphorically. Soon, many Americans who rely on government assistance shall be literally starving. We need to prevent this.

One easy solution to the problem? run the printing presses. This isn’t quite as dangerous as it sounds. Historically, America has run ~4% inflation. Currently, America is running about 0% inflation (gas has gone up. Everything else has gone down). Getting inflation back to historic norms would put a lot of cash into the hands of Americans. Things could be bought. Demand would spike. Business would recover. People would be making taxable income once more!

Gold is incredibly valuable. Why, we can make jewelry and computer parts from it. If we were still using it as money, every computer in the world would cost a lot more–and the information revolution might never have happened.

The internet justifies its existence.

By creating these words that you are reading right now, I am laying claim to a copyright of them. The problem is that in order to read them, a person has to copy them onto their local machine. This is done without my express permission, and is therefore arguably illegal under copyright law. The entire electronic age is built on copying; this makes copyright protections a weird, untenable beast. Some other form of intellectual property protection must be found, and quickly.

Every now and then I read something like this and wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without IP laws at all.

10 simple fashion rules for men.

San Diego has Legoland, Aircraft Carriers, and a board game museum. Sounds like a place I need to visit.

If you read just one thing:

Phone companies are letting people scam you, because they make money when it happens. When credit card companies were engaged in the same sorts of sordid practices, the government set out strict rules preventing it. When it started up with phone companies, government took them at their word that they’d take care of it. Expecting any industry to regulate against its financial interest is simply absurd.

This week’s theme has been gender roles and my own inability to think of anything clever to say. In the comments section, tell me how useful 8hrs of sleep might be.

Tags: Sunday by Punning Pundit
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[[Warning: The only important part of a Transformers movie is that giant robots will be fighting one another. You know that going in. Spoilers are thus impossible. To the extent that a spoiler might be possible for this film, I will spoil it. If that keeps you from seeing this movie, say "thank you".]]

This movie is bad. All it really needs to do is give a half-decent excuse for robots to beat one another up, and it fails. It does, however, do one extraordinarily thing right: It calls Michael Bay- the movie’s director/producer!- a giant douchebag. I’m not sure he noticed.

Hollywood formulates dictates that there is a girl (Carly Spencer) in this sort of movie. She isn’t there to be an independent actor, but rather to be a Princess Peach– a motivating force for someone else to act on behalf of. Some of the minor characters in the movie actually seem to balk at putting themselves in danger so that the hero (Sam Witwicky) can rescue his girl, but they go along with the plan once they figure out that the world is also at stake.

I’m not kidding about that.

In a triumph for the say-don’t-show school of storytelling, Carly’s is presented as a intelligent, capable individual. We see her working for the White House, running logistics for a global corporation, and are told that she’s worked for the British Embassy in Washington DC. She is in every way more fit to be the story’s lead than the actual dude performing that role.

Perhaps Sam is meant to be an audience stand in. A sort of everyperson hero that we can empathize with. That would help explain his constant inability to quite nail the suave behavior that he seems to be aiming for. After all: who among us hasn’t done some really dumb things that we’d rather everyone forget about? This doesn’t seem quite right, however. Sam’s buffoonery is rewarded. It is as if Director Michael Bay doesn’t know the difference between actually awesome behavior and a parody of such. Could it be that he has mistaken Duke Nukem for something other than a cautionary tale?

In a classic display of the male gaze, through the first half of the movie, the camera reduces Carly to a sex object. When she’s in a shot, her secondary sex characteristics are on full display.

Michael Bay has had this problem with women before. Indeed, in the words of one Bay defender “Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality.” Presumably he means “16-year-old [boy]“.

So for the first half or so of the movie, the camera is perving on the female lead. And at one point one of the characters- Bruce Brazos- actually does a double take at her. And everyone in the room reacts badly. Like he’d ruined their fun game by calling attention to it. From that moment on, the camera treats Carly as a human being. I think we can thank the editorial staff for that beautiful and wicked commentary on Transformers and sexism.

Now, if only the writers had come up with something interesting for her to say.

Tags: Feminism, human rights, movies and television by Punning Pundit
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It seems that Mitch McConnell hates the fact that Democrats won’t go along with his ideas. The fact that his ideas are terrible is sort of besides the point. Remember that gridlock comes, not from congressional obstinance, but from legitimate disagreement about the best course of action for America. That disagreement is good and healthy, but in order to properly weigh and measure which side has the better plan, they must be allowed to implement that plan.

So McConnall has a… call it a vestige of a point. The American political system really is broken. In 2008, Americans elected Obama and a huge Democratic majority. They promised to pass a huge stimulus, pass healthcare reform, and end the war in Iraq.

We ended up with… a continued involvement in Iraq, a barely adequate healthcare reform, and a Federal economic stimulus that almost (but didn’t quite) do enough to cover the anti-stimulus being done by the various states.

The reasons for this had little to do with the leadership of Obama or Pelosi (or Reid!), and everything to do with the mechanics of Congress. It is shockingly easy for a small group of elected officials to gum up all of Congress and keep it from doing anything. Blaming Obama for this is a bit like blaming an engine installer for auto body damage.

If we tried the Democratic plan and it failed, I’d agree that McConnell should be allowed his turn to fix things. Instead, he was able to block the Democrats from implementing their plans, and is furious that Democrats are able to block his.

Tags: conservative, pestilence, politics by Punning Pundit
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It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for departing for points East– Texas, and West– Big Bear. Alternately Sundays are for mourning the sad fact that Space Shuttle will no longer depart for points unknown. Also: Sundays are for enjoying the last day of your vacation before returning home on Monday. Also? Sundays doing the things you have to, instead of the things you’d really like to.

This week Japan was rocked by another major earthquake- that fortunately produced only a minor tsunami. Also this week: South Sudan officially became the Earth’s newest sovereign State. In a display of mind-boggling stupidity, half of America’s major political parties pushed America one step closer to ending itself as a great power by deciding to default on America’s debt.

This week, let’s try and start off light. If you’re a man– or anyone who wants to dress in traditionally male-coded ways– you might want to know how to dress. A person might never develop an intrinsic sense of what the next step ought to be, but like all arts, dressing well merely takes practice.

Imagine my surprise the first time I saw a Herd of Bison roaming around the middle of Golden Gate Park. I had previously believed that it was only movies in which double takes occurred. I do hope the herd recovers.

Empathy is the human ability to say “yeah, that could be me in that situation”. In some ways it’s a cheep way of finding justice. In other ways, it’s the only way that many of we humans seem to stumble into justice. I can’t help but wonder if last week’s decision about games being art was influenced by the fact that many of the current justices know a game designer.

Empathy may be cheap, but without out it, we end up with some rather strange mental disorders.

One of the more bizarre spectacles of the healthcare debate is that we had to sacrifice cost-controls for universality. Getting an edifice of universal healthcare up and running was incredibly important to America’s continued commitment to social justice. Healthcare costs are still going up, though. And America needs to fix this problem quickly.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

San Francisco is a young city, but with a weird and wonderful history. Ours was the city in which the United Nations was born. Ours was the city in which China reopened relations with non-Soviet world. And ours was the city in which Mexican food was invented.

I’ve been following this story all week. Dude walks into a gallery, sees a Picasso, takes it off the wall, sticks it under his arm, and walks out. I’d like to believe that this was a spur of the moment decision, but it doesn’t seem to have been. The art thief/waiter’s bail has been set at $5 million. To raise the money, he’s planning on stealing 19 more Picasso sketches.

This is what the phrase Epic Win was coined for.

Google launched Google+ last week. It’s a great service, but an incredibly awkward name. When Google had to create a style guide to help people figure out how to grammatically incorporate their strange creation into our language, it should have been a sign to try something else.

One of the more frustrating aspects of the prescriptivist/descriptivist fights is that the prescriptivists are correct– right up until the moment they are wrong. Language is a shared attempt at communication that only works when participants agree on meaning. An English person who calls an American “love” is going to create a whole lot of confusion. Different cultures attach very different values to identical sets of inputs.

A cereal coma is when a person eats so much breakfast that they pass out. A serial comma is a useful tool for marking certain kinds of distinctions in lists. Me? I’d love some computer programmers to weigh in…

There are days when I really need this button.

Back in 2008, I was in Ohio working on a campaign. You may have heard about it– we did alright. While I was there, I kept hearing horror stories about the 2004 and 2006 elections. In African American districts, for instance, 4 precincts might be put into the same polling station. Each voter would have to stand in the correct (hour long) line in order to cast a valid vote. The lines were differentiated by a (small) hand written note at the front of the (again, hour long) line. Voters who failed to see the note would be told to stand in the correct line, or forfeit their right to vote. In 2008, there was a new Secretary of State, and new rules– voters were given better voting layouts, and more specific instructions about how to ensure their vote would count. Republicans have begun rolling back these protections.

Every time i seat an African American guest in the back of my restaurant, I mentally cringe. I know that I’m good at what I do, and the decisions I make are the correct ones. But still, the optics are bad. How much worse, thento use gangs of black convicts to work the fields of former plantations in a former slave state? Didn’t anyone think this through? Did one person not step up and say that it looked too bad to be right? This is a stench in the nostrils of the gods.

If a human being made this sort of mistake, they would do everything in their power to fix it. Guy would have medical care for a year. Guy would get his car back– or get a new and better car. Guy’s employer would hire him back, or a new job would be found for him. A human did not make this mistake. A corporation did. Corporations literally lack the capacity for shame. And this guy is screwed.

Giant battle blimps are a wacky idea that just might work! Except they’re fucking stupid. Blimps literally went out with the biplane for the very good reason that a wooden biplane was the only aircraft a blimp could outfight. By using blimps as battlefield surveillance, we’re assuming utter control of the skies. We’re also assuming that our opponents won’t have ground-air missiles capable of hitting a gigantic stationary target. Maybe I’m utterly wrong about this. Maybe the pentagon has thought through my objections and has good answers. Maybe.

How Does your coffee taste?

It probably says something about how immersed I am in the language of video games that I’m not sure how much of this article is technical jargon. I’m say that because it’s a fascinating study about how a very tricky problem got solved. It’s a small example of the genius of our species: a once seemingly insurmountable problem has become routine and easy to solve.

About to start talking about the failures of American government. Before I begin, let’s have an amusing list of possible alternatives.

Here in San Francisco, pot is considered fairly normal. While technically illegal, the police are officially instructed by the City that they have far better things to do with their time. I had to have this story of Reefer Madness explained to me. It seems that the Federal government has literally declared pot to be a more dangerous drug than Cocaine. I can think of only one reason for this: the government has secret knowledge that pot is an alien plot to control our minds and steal our precious bodily fluids.

It’s one thing for the courts to dismantle every protection that Americans have come to rely on. It’s another thing entirely to teach corporations how to get away with violating worker’s rights. Corporate America is slowly building up an entire extra-legal system where citizenship counts for nothing. Money don’t vote- it swears.

Admiral Zhou was the last of the great Chinese explorers. He traveled from China to the West Coast of India, and possibly all the way to Africa. On his last trip, he came home to discover a cabal of eunuchs had taken over his country. These gonadless men cut the budget for his explorations. A few years later, a European discovered America, and Europeans would go on to dominate China for centuries. America no longer has a human-crewed space program. Humanity will go into space. America will not. Good luck Europe and China. The future belongs to you.

“That’s the way Democracy dies- to thunderous applause”. Those were my thoughts 18 months ago when President Obama announced that he was creating a deficit commission. The commission wasn’t the problem. The problem- the scary part- was the way he specifically linked an Executive Order as the way around a failed Senate vote. There is a real problem with the American political system. We’re solving it the easy way, the cheap way, the way Rome solved it: Empire. Constitutional reform is needed. Stealth reform that situates a supreme executive at the head of a vast bureaucracy will be a disaster for our descendants.

If you read just one link:

This is a good one. Back in February of 1996, the Atlantic published an article about Why Americans Hate the Media. America has some deep problems that are being left undressed. The media has become the worst possible thing it can be. It’s not that the media is biased. Yellow journalism would be preferable to what they are: lazy.

I’ve been reading Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order. It’s almost custom build to be superfluous for me, and it’s dedicated to an International Relations laughingstock. Having said that, there are some insights in the book that need to be more widely shared.

This week’s theme was humans doing human things and letting our government fail. So in the comments section, let me know your favorite word starting with the letter S.

Doggies!

Tags: Sunday by Punning Pundit
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It’s Monday morning. Monday mornings are usually about starting the work week. This Monday? If you’re an American, this Monday is for eating hot dogs and lighting stuff on fire to celebrate the day America signed the paperwork for Independence.

This week: NASA’s clever plan to stop sending shuttles into space was crucial to thwarting the asteroid which could have wiped out human life. Also: the fires that ravaged much of the Sonoran desert have begun to be brought under control. This week a governor in Syria was dismissed because he refused to imitate Bull Connor.

When I was unemployed and without income, I started looking for ways to spend as little money as I could. I unplugged my TV, and the electric bill plummeted. A great many modern conveniences drink power to save seconds. Shutting these things off can add a few dollars back into a wallet.

I make a point of reading contracts before I sign them. Never once been asked to give away my first born, but it could happen. Rule of thumb: if the contract is dense with legal verbiage, I assume that I’ll need a lawyer to get me out of it. If the contract as a mandatory arbitration clause, I assume I’m going to get screwed.

Immigration is a tricky thing. On the one wrist, we’re a nation full of tired, huddled masses yearning to breath free. On the other wrist ZOMG! People who speak languages I don’t know, and eat foods I’ve never had! Me? I like hot sauce on my pasta noodles. If the trade off for that is making it harder for me to eavesdrop on people I share a train with, so be it.

Humanity is amazing. If you put a person in society which has a different accent- or language- that person will adapt. Some of us better than others, but that language- or accent- will be incorporated to some extent. This would seem to indicate that we humans are very much used to moving around and mixing with one another. Migration is a survival trait. When lawmakers attempt to block migration, they attempt to dismiss what may be a fundamental human need. That’s never going to work well.

This wasn’t so much over scripted as it was performance art.

America is the third most populous nation on Earth. The first and second most populous nations have extremely impoverished infrastructure. As a result, the US is the richest nation on Earth. This does not mean that US citizens are better off than citizens of other first world nations. In fact, our refusal to pay more to the government means that our extra wealth is sucked away by non-governmental bureaucracies, making us much poorer than we have to be.

In America, we don’t tax the rich, and don’t give social services to the poor. The rich like to whine about their tax rates, but that’s a ploy to keep them low. The argument seems to be that rich people, by virtue of employing non-rich people, have fulfilled their social obligations. This does implicitly deny that the labor “market” isn’t really a market. So there’s that.

There is a reason that the immigrant community prefers to use the phrase “undocumented worker” rather than “illegal alien”. People come to America because it is the “Land of Opportunity”. Everyone knows that if you come to this country, you have to work. And if you work, you pay taxes. Labor pays taxes, but capital doesn’t. That’s why it’s called a “Capitalist” system.

Speaking of Capitalism

There is a reason why, in King Henry the 6th Part 2, the villain says “The First thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. Lawyers, like any tool, can be used for good or ill. In a civil society, they are the last line of defense against abuses by the powerful. There is little wonder, then, that the Republican party is trying so very hard to destroy the sorts of lawyers who sue companies that sell poison.

How Email was invented

I stopped using Facebook a few weeks back. Unbeknownst to me, Google was planning on launching it’s own social network this week. So that’s a plus. Google and Facebook have very different attitudes. Google is like being at a party. And I ask my friend about sunglasses. And she takes me around to all my friends and gets their opinions and comes back tome. And then says “oh, BTW, Dude you don’t know paid me to let you know about his shop. I checked it out, and it seems alright.” Facebook, though, is like being at a party and asking about sunglasses, when a dude in a trench coat walks up and is all “You want sunglasses? I got sunglasses right here, in my pocket. What kind do you want? I’ll sell ‘em to you. Here’s a picture of your mom wearin’ ‘em.” Facebook and Google may do similar things with their social network, but style and intent are an important consideration.

The 21st century is seeing everything go digital. Even that most analog of media– books– have been digitized and put into the cloud. It should come as no surprise that signature gathering is going digital. Or would, if the law allowed for it. I do think the court is correct in it’s reasoning. There is no obvious injustice in the lack of electronic signature gathering, and so the court doesn’t need to intervene in a purely logistical question.

The police are armed. The police are public servants. They are, in the most literal and dangerous sense, your tax dollars at work. This suggests that they ought to be recorded at every possible (professional) moment. Any officer who says they don’t wish to be recorded ought to be held in the deepest suspicion.

In order to lose weight, he needed a pair of things. Firstly, he needed a government willing to tell companies to explain what food they were selling him. Secondly, he needed a government to create conditions whereby walking was a real possibility. Those were exactly the conditions which allowed me to lose 100 pounds.

The word of the week? Theodicy. Know it. Use it. Love it. Or bad things will happen to you.

We nerds and geeks are human. Therefore we need love and partnership. Being human, many of us are bad at finding it. Being geeks, our advice columns are awesome.

One of the deciding factors in the case “Brown Vs. the Board of Education” was that separate could inherently never be equal. One arbitrarily chosen group became the default, and the other inevitably becomes lesser. Data showed that black children were coming desire to play with white dolls instead of black ones– they had internalized the racism. How much easier would it be to internalize sexism when playing games from a first person perspective? As with most forms of institutional “isms”, the problem isn’t so much with any given decision, but the net impact of most decisions coming down the same way.

The Geek Girl Bill of Rights mostly boils down to one: Geek girls have the right to demand respect as both geeks and as girls. Interestingly, most of the attached Geek Girl Commandments would be unnecessary were the men to take the Bill of Rights seriously. So Geek boys: don’t be dicks.

Once upon a time I was a bookseller. A dad and his 8 years oldish son came up to me with a copy of American Gods. Dad asked me if it was a good book. I waxed enthusiastic for a while. He then asked if it was appropriate for someone his son’s age. I looked at him for a second and said that it might be a bit mature– not owing so much to sex or violence, but purely thematically. There are lots of things in that book that a child simply won’t have the life experience to understand. I have yet to see a ratings system which captures this distinction in any sensible way. Instead “mature” seems to be a synonym for “puerile”.

The social value of art is the way it can shape public opinion simply by being engaged with. Artists can create memetic conjunction, disjunction, and contrast to mold minds. All power may flow from the barrel of a gun, but art can determine who holds the gun, and there it is pointed. How much more powerful would an art form be if the creators literally determined every faucet of the world being explored? Millions of people have played Fallout: New Vegas. And all of them have experienced a world in which the LGBT spectrum may not always be respected, but is always present. No movie can possibly make a statement that powerful.

It has always struck me as odd when I’m told that women are less interested in sex than men are. I’ve known women. Many of them. I’ve known men. Many of them. And it seems that the reports I get from men and women cover the same spectrum. Seems that 400 years ago, society pretended that women were always horny and men never were.

I’ve been referring to video games as “art” for a very long time. The US Supreme Court agrees with me. As such, video games are covered under 1st Amendment protection’s protections for speech. The specific law being overturned involved selling violent games to children. The court found that violent games do not tend to make children more prone to violent behavior, and that by restricting access to this form of art to a segment of the population, certain political games might never be made. Indeed, Bioshock is Rated-M (mature), and an intensely political game which tends to demolish the idea of Libertarianism. I’m guessing Scalia hadn’t played it, or he might have ruled differently.

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/pregnesia-by-carla-cassidy-guest-review/”target=”_blank”>So without further ado, my top 26 reasons PREGNESIA by Carla Cassidy is the best book in the history of pregnant amnesiac romance.

If you read just one link:

Companies are doing credit checks before being willing to give people the jobs that will help cover their bills. Class warfare at it’s most raw.

Today’s theme was not being a dick. So let’s enjoy this clip from 1776.

Tags: Sunday, Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
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WordPress ate this post. I had about 1100 words written before it decided to log me out and not save anything. My heart simply isn’t in re-writing everything over the next two hours.

Fuck it. Link 1 Link 2, Link 3.

There’s some good stuff there. Monday is an American holiday, so it’s like a Sunday, right? I’ll do a Sunday-On-Monday post, then.

I have to be at work in a few hours. Have an otter juggling a stone.

Tags: Sunday, Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
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