Sunday Morning Reading Material First Sunday in August 2011- Holy Catan Batman Edition
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It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for Cleaning playing Batman as soon as you get home and can tear yourself away from Catan on your phone. Or Sundays might be for having brunch with a good friend sleeping in. Sundays are occasionally for looking forward to live-altering surgeries. Though perhaps Sundays are for recursively reflecting on the sentence you’re reading right now and wondering how I knew that you’d be recursively reading this sentence. And then cursing again.
This week: The US pushed back the clock on financial Armageddon by setting off a large nuclear warhead in it’s economy. Also this week: the American political world acted surprised by the fallout from this self-inflicted attack. Also: NASA sent some legos to Jupiter. Also also: tens of thousands of Verison workers went on strike.
Let’s start this Sunday off with a Hymn. There’s only one that you ever need to know, and it goes like this Boom De Yata
I almost think this comic was written by someone who knows me.
Over the past several years, many of my fellow progressives have been demanding that President Obama stop being so damned nice, and start going on a left wing tear that will utterly transform America. He can’t. Much as I use the first person when speaking of progressives, most of the country– most of the Democratic party– doesn’t. The failure for this lays strictly with those of us in the progressive community. It is our job to convince people that we’re right. It’s Obama’s job to get away with as much as he can get away with.
The fastest way to piss me off is to express the view that humans are evil, stupid, or in some other way deficient. My general sense is that no matter how odd a tradition might look to an outsider, it’s probably got a very good reason to continue being celebrated.
One of the scarier parts of being an American at the dawn of the 21st century is how badly messed up our system of governance is. I honestly can’t think of a single piece of infrastructure that doesn’t need fixing. Our roads? In need of repair. Congress? People have been advocating that the president become a dictator because Congress is so bad. Our system of promoting the useful arts and science is doing the opposite.
One of the scarier parts of our Intellectual property laws is the way that it inhibits or prohibits anyone other than the Rights Holder from preserving shared cultural heritage. With the current version of IP laws, the Christian Bible couldn’t have been written. The paper would have literally rotted to nothing before anyone would have been allowed to hand copy it.
Tom Lehrer gave up satire because reality was outpacing his cynicism.
In some very real sense, I simply am Punning Pundit. It’s a name I use everywhere; I respond to it when shouted. I do use my own birth name– I have a small bit of bemused pride at having come from a line of men with my same name. Not everyone is so lucky. For some people the ability to hide their real names is a matter of life and death.
Spider man? He wears a mask because he catches criminals just like flies. Also: He’s a young black/Latino man. Or, rather, he will be going forward. The fact that superhero ethnicity is so plastic is a huge sign of how far things have come.
There are certain things that everyone “just knows” about how ridiculous certain events are. For instance: the lady who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonalds. Or Van Halen’s bowl of Brownless M&M. The thing that everyone “just knows” about both of those stories is wrong.
Congress passes a lot of laws. Most of them are actually fairly pointless, but every now and then they do important work. Sadly, though, congresspeople are human- and so laws have unintended consequences
In serious onion news, labor won the right to collectively bargain against capital- an entity that always bargains collectively in it’s own interests. Remember kids: you don’t have to write for free, work for cheep, or fight alone. Only your enemies want you to.
Maybe if DC writers were unionized, they’d have a better understanding of how to treat their female characters. Probably not. But the work environment for their female staff might be less hostile.
Bob Dylan once said that “Money Doesn’t Talk, it Swears“. More importantly, I think, is that money makes politicians swear fealty. This can actually be good- I feel very comfortable helping city council members swear that they’ll stand up for the iron worker’s union. And if a state legislator kneels before the Chamber of Commerce, I want to know that, too. This new ability for unlimited bribery where only the recipient and giver know who’s interests are being served, though, is scary.
This story line needs a small amendment: 2009: progressives give up on Obama.
Sometime before humanity settled down into villages, we traded genetic evolution for memetic evolution. We humans haven’t reached the top of the food pyramid by being fast, strong, or sharp-clawed. Instead, we’re smart and inventive. Memetic evolution, though is as path-dependent as it’s meat-based counterpart. I wonder what sorts of advancements we would have made had we taken a very small left turn down some other technological path?
I’m not merely a gamer, I’m a PC gamer. Not for any reasons of snobbery, but I simply spend most of my time in front of the PC and so it makes sense that I’d game there as well. For some reason, big lable game developers hate me. Which is a weird way to try and get my money.
To summarize points 1-4: Don’t be a dick. Which reminds me: I need to write a post about how to insult people.
If you click just one link:
This week’s theme was a short prayer for the zombie Apocalypse. It might actually be the only thing that saves the economy. In the comments, let me know if you read this weekly missive for my writing, or for the links themselves.
Maybe you’re a shitty cameraman, I don’t know!
