Chuck-ese

Ubik by Phillip K. Dick

The whole half-life/cold-pac setup was very Matrix-y.  Jory is a fairly accurate analog to Agent Smith, especially when he first reveals himself to Joe Chip (who makes a terrible Neo).The end of the book, where Runciter finds a Joe Chip quarter, left the reader still uncertain about the reality of the situation he characters found themselves in, as well as mightily pissed off.

Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle

May Day Mystery quote: “‘Religion must necessarily produce industry and frugality,’ Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, proclaimed, ‘and these cannot but produce riches.’” (Boyle, Kevin. Arc of Justice. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004. pg 50)

On January 1st 1923, a white mob from Sumner, Florida attacked the black town of Rosewood, killed 17 of its citizens, and forced the rest to flee before the town was put to the torch. (pg 123) This is not something they teach you in history class.

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

Funny the whole way through.

The Truth, with Jokes by Al Franken

Also funny the whole way through, as well as insightful. His line about “[t]he ‘I will stop you from doing good because I don’t want you to get the credit’ thing” was particularly resonant. (pg 142)

The System of the World by Neil Stephenson

Entertaining. Of particular note is the scene on pgs 485-6 where Saturn (Peter Hoxton) tells the rest of his Clubb the difference between what he told the innkeeper, what the publican thinks, what he told the patrons, and the “conclusions” the patrons drew. “That’s not what they think. They think that you are Sodomites.”

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This book was depressing as hell, but compelling. It brought a new paradigm to the post-apocalyptic  society, one in so few people are actually killed in whatever vague event it was the ended the world that the majority of the suffering was caused by the flood of people who descended like locusts upon the land. (This is, or course, my interpretation. Usually in post-apocalyptic fiction, society reverts to some prior stage of human progress. That supposes that the number of people in urban areas were killed and the food that is available in the remainder cities is enough to prevent the urbanites from swamping the agricultural areas.)

Next on the Reading List:

The text of the Frank-Dodd bail-out.

The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank

The Dark Side by Jane Mayer

Law and the Long War by Benjamin Wittes

China: From the 1911 Revolution to Liberation

You’d think that the main-stream media, or even someone like NPR, would have made at least a small mention that the Lakota Sioux have declared their independence from the United States! But, alas, I’ve heard nothing about it on the news or on the radio since I first ran across this article on reddit.

Further Reading:

Lakota People

Republic of Lakotah

Republic of Lakotah official web site 

So, I was browsing the list of blog post “drafts” I had, and I found this one, wich simply contained a list of sex-related links. I don’t know quite where I was going with this, but some of the articles are rather interesting. So, I’ll just annotate them and leave them to you.
Intercourse and Intelligence: This article explores the correlation between one’s IQ and the likelihood that one is still a virgin. The data shows that the smarter the individual, the less likely they were at any given age to have engaged in various romantic interactions. According to this nifty chart, there is a 62% chance that I will still be a virgin at the end of college. The percentage of arts majors who are virgins isn’t any big surprise to me, the little sluts.
<http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligence.php>

Why Porn Turns Men Off the Real Thing: A rather intreaguing article about…well, what the title says. I’ve seen this talked about before from a radically different kind of source, so there might be something to it afterall. (I mean, if not for an endorsement of this idea on the Tucker Max Message board a bit ago, I’d dismiss this as crazy feminist ranting.)
<http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/>

Pornography and the End of Masculinity: Does porn cause violence against woman? This seems to be a slightly contradictory theory than the one presented in the abover article.
<http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/62833>

Sex Dreams Equal 8% of Adult’s Dreams: Masturbation accounts for 6% of all reported dreams, if I’m reading this correctly. What the hell is up with that? You’re dreaming about fantasizing about someone…
<http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20070614/sex-dreams-equal-8-percent-of-adults-dreams?src=rss_psychtoday>

Is Pornography a Catalyst of Sexual Violence?: Same general idea as #3.
<http://www.reason.com/news/show/123330.html?>

How Porn Ruined Sex: A recap of #2.
<http://jezebel.com/gossip/how-porn-ruined-sex/how-about-you-dont-come-on-my-face-on-the-first-date-333148.php>

Despite the amount of stuff I had in that draft, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of content here. Surprise surprise…

I was reading David Wong’s “The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey” yesterday. A agreed with some of the points, disagreed with others, and generally liked the article. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading the comments, and was stupified by the fanboyism and dickish behavior that abounds. Here’s an example:

Jonathane
It’s pretty clear from these ideas what kind of gamer you are. Maybe you should change the name of the thread to ‘7 commandments dumb action games for console fans should obey’. I can’t take anyone who mocks oblivion or half life seriously.

While he has the right to his opinion, completely disregarding someone’s arguments because that person (and not necessarily the given argument) challenges your beliefs is the sort of thing that gets us into great (meaning large, not possesing good qualities [quite the opposite]) debates about politics, religion, science, video-game consoles, and any intersections of the aforesaid subjects. When people pull out their ignorant-jackass comments, other people follow:

Oregano Angercock
I think it’s pretty clear what kind of gamer jonathane is. An incredibly fat gamer.

Another ad-hom attack, but worse in that it is pure insult and has nothing to do with anything Jonathane said. This poster was just being a huge dick. But that’s how things go, it’s human nature. I offend your sensabilities, so you put up your defenses, I put up mine, and nothing gets resolved, and we get the big mess that society’s in right now. This is ones of the downsides to having an open exchange of ideas: everyone gets to contribute, fucking retarded or not. The other is that everybody gets to choose what they want to believe out of the swirling mass of information, fucking retarded or not. You could have put in some of the one hundred million (100,000,000) hours of human thought that went into Wikipedia, or you could spend a couple of minutes (heh) thinking up and typing the above response.

Everybody knows that people on the internet are more than willing to let out their inner fucktard (see the comment by John Watts), yet few realize that that is just an extension of what people do naturally, that it’s putting the brakes on the advancement of human thought and limiting the progress people can make as a community just as surely as it makes us cringe in disgust when we read it on the internet.

[Although we do now know that this type of verbal defensiveness is a manifestation of “bad” high self-esteem.]

Arthur C. Clarke was sucked out the pod bay doors of life last week. That’s the third literary setback the world has endured in the past 365 days.

Oh yes, make sure you Match It For Pratchett.

This is, by far, the worst designed website I have ever seen. Ever.

One of the best lists of religious comandments I’ve read thus far in my life. I especially dig 1, 2, 3, 4, and 10.

From Terry Pratchet’s Men at Arms:

“…the Captain Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” It all makes perfect sense if you think abou it. (Pg. 29)

The paragraph on dwarf religion at the bottom of pg 76 and top of 77.

Bottom of 110-top of 111, about the rich who “could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.”

Call me paranoid, but the first thing I heard in the morning when NPR announced that a bomb had gone off at an Army recruiter in NYC, the first thing I thought wasn’t “Was anybody hurt?” but rather something along the lines of “Oh God, we’re going after Iran.” Is that so far fetched? We all know how George W. Bush thinks! It wouldn’t be out of character for the government to declare it a terror attack and use it as justification to start putting a harder squeeze on the American people.

In a shocking turn of events, the Department of Homeland Security and Army are not treating it as an act of terrorism! Kudos to the stormtroopers for acting with a little restraint.

(Link)

Playmobil Security Checkpoint playset: I cannot for the life of me belive that this is legitimate. read the comments. They’re all pretty true.

Torture:…by any other name…

Exposing the Telecom industry, one billboard at a time.

Internal Passports: a la Soviet Russia

The best part of reading old speculative fiction is reading all the predictions about the current era, and seeing how close they came. I’m currently reading I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein, which I’m not too enamoured with. However, I did find one set of predictions he made interesting enough to comment on.

On pages 64-5 of my edition, the narrator talks about the political climate of the unspecified by clearly imminent time. In it, he identifies the major right-wing political parties as the SDS and the PLA, and their liberal opponents as the Constitutional Liberation Rally. The Democratic, Republican, and Socialist parties are labeled with the adjective “splinter.” While it is striking how he makes the three “major” political groups flip-flop political alignments (the SDS, for those who don’t know, were the fore-runner of the Weathermen; the PLA can only be assumed to mean People’s Liberation Army; and the Constitution Party that he knew was a conservative movement, to be differentiated from the paleoconservative former U.S. Taxpayers Party), it is also inconceivable to anyone in this day and age how any party could have dislodged the Democratic and Republican parties from thier traditional tyrannical dominance of the U.S. political process. Times of upheaval will tend to make one believe that things can actually happen.

Also, he got the average American’s short news-attention-span dead on.

“Your servant is aware that from ancient times there have been discussions of the worth of parties. It is only to be hoped that a ruler will distinguish between those of gentlemen and those of inferior men. In general, gentlemen join with outher gentlemen in parties because of common principles, while inferior men join with other inferior men for reasons of common profit.” - Ouyang Xiu, in Roberts, J.A.G. The Complete History of China. Sutton Publishing, 2005. Page 135.