perfidy

In what has become a holiday tradition, the unhappy hordes of clenched-lip grinches have released their lists of toys and games deemed unsuitable for the fragile minds of our youth. Unable or unwilling to feel joy, they seek to deny any glimmer of happiness in others. Thanks to their never-flagging and unholy efforts BB guns, cap guns, action figures with spring-loaded projectiles and riding bicycles without helmets are now part of the dead past. Challenging puzzles with small pieces were next. A vast array of inherently fun toys have been banished, tarred and feathered with the labels 'unsafe' and 'violent.'

We live in an unsafe and violent world. Evolutionary psychologists have learned that (as common sense had long held) that play is just nature's way of preparing our young for the vicitudes of adult life. What better education is there than a childhood filled with guns, knives and imaginary bloodshed?

But now, the grim advocates of pacificism and perfect safety have gone too far. They are even now attacking a time-hallowed and beloved, nay, essential part of American childhood. They are insisting that cannibalism has no place in the life of a mentally healthy child. Who among us has not joyfully and creatively relived in play the tragic story of the Donner party? And who has not played explorers and headhunters? Even small girls with their easy-bake ovens have traditionally joined in this wholesome fun, pretending to bake elaborate long pig quiches or presiding over tea and fingerbone parties with her dolls.

We need to preserve the last vestiges of this sacred tradition. The only place that cannibalism now remains, the only place that children can partake of this feast of joy is in modern console games like "F.E.A.R." and "Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse." These soul-sucking killjoys partake of ritual and symbolic cannibalism on a weekly basis. Don't let them take this from us. We must fight these hypocrites, fight them, tooth and nail so that we may enjoy our virtual cannibalism in peace.

Why do they hate our freedom?

I refuse to believe that I get $75 worth of "programming" on DirecTV each month. It's crap, I tell ya. Crap! So I get it into my head the past few days that I'm going to see what my alternatives are. I've noticed that the quality of shows on the "cable channels" has dropped, on a scale of 1 to 10 to around 1.5 or so. Getcher double-indian head collector's coin pressing here! I've also noticed that the only shows I enjoy watching are on the networks (stoopid shows like Surface and Invasion, which I like -- screw you).

It turns out that in the Washington DC area we're quite fortunate to be living in one of the best Newfangled Digital TV centers around. We get quite a long list of channels (and sub-channels) -- 2,4,5,7,9,11,13,20,43,45,50. Some of the channels are from Baltimore, but come in just fine. But how to get all this free digital goodness, given the need for the contained black magic of an ATSC tuner, which is not the same as your father's NTSC tuner?

You've got a couple of options for high def TV. You can go with cable and get four or five locals in HD, paying about $80 a month, if you're lucky. You can go with DirecTV, pay $200 for your equipment and installation, then discover that what you're actually doing is getting the HD channels over the air. You can go with Dish and be in the same situation as DirecTV, although it's a bit cheaper overall. I'll also say that DirecTV really pissed me off two weeks ago. The new mpeg-4 compatible HD receivers arrived at Best Buy. These new receivers can use a 5-LNB dish to receive current and some future programming from DirecTV, which will include very shortly the local channels from this area in high def; they also have an ATSC OTA (digital over-the-air) tuner built-in. I picked one up for $200 and brought it home, then called DirecTV to inform them of the equipment change. The customer support person informed me that they couldn't activate the receiver unless I agreed to a 2-year commitment. Since I had just gone out and bought the receiver myself, I asked exactly what I was getting in return for the two year commitment. Dedicated phone person told me "Nothing!". That just didn't seem fair to me. I told her I was going to return the equipment and possibly cancel my service. "I'm sorry about that!" was her chirpy response. Ridiculous -- I've changed equipment before and not had a problem.

I guess I could have accepted the commitment. But you can also say "Screw the Man" to yourself, and see if there's a way to cut them out entirely. The catch, as always, is that your significant other really likes Tivo, and you'll die a terrible death if said "Now Playing" list goes missing.
Because of the waffling at the federal government level over the "broadcast flag" (which would make it illegal for an electronic device to make a copy of information that was so-flagged) there's been almost a complete lack of investment by companies in developing convergence hardware. Convergence in the media equipment realm is the notion that a single, fast general purpose computer can do it all -- it can play music, record television, show DVDs, interact with the internet...you name it. With the federal government repeatedly on the verge of declaring general computing to be illegal, companies don't spend money developing products that might be legislated out of existence.

Tivo is a kind of convergence box (lightweight), and there are others on the horizon. But your garden-variety (or slightly above garden-variety) PC has far more horsepower and far more capability than those consumer boxes do. Shouldn't it be able to do the job?

If you want Tivo-like capability for over-the-air without cable or satellite, your choices are minimal. Sony has an OTA tuner/hard drive recorder combination that sells for $500 for the base model. It can do the job. If you go the PC route, you can use a couple of different packages. The free Linux alternative is MythTV. I haven't set one up yet but I am going to give it a try. The limiter here is that very few TV tuner cards have Linux drivers. Apple has their new G5 system, where a media center TV function is built in. As far as I know it does not yet support HDTV. Microsoft has the Windows Media Center Edition, which as of the latest service packs supports HDTV. It's a somewhat expensive proposition to buy a media center PC at this time -- the cheapest you can get one is around $750. You'd need to add your own tuner card to that as well.

I ended up buying an ADS Technologies Instant HDTV PCI card and a Terk outdoor antenna. I had an older PC setup (AMD64, 200GB HD) that I wanted to start with. I could have gone the Linux route, but the capture card situation just didn't seem to be all that great. There are some significant financial advantages, though --

Linux -- free O/S, free TV software (MythTV), but you need to find the right capture card with Linux drivers, which is tough.

Windows -- XP Home ($90), decent software costs ($50 or so), good card and driver support. Total cost is about $300, assuming you already have decent hardware to run on. If you have hardware that has XP already, deduct that. I moved my XP installation to my new computer, so it was not available for the old one. You can run XP in trial mode for 30 days, though, which allows you to evaluate the quality of your eventual solution. If you like it, then buy the OS and you're good (one quick note -- an unauthenticated XP will not download certain patches. Use your activated XP machine to retrieve them, then copy them over to the test machine).

For Windows, the Instant HDTV comes with BeyondTV Express, a somewhat limited TV-watching program. BeyondTV offers an upgrade to their latest full version for $50. Alternatives include SageTV, which seemed to be a bit cruder and not speak HDTV quite as well. What I was surprised by was my discovery of Meedio -- a visual stunner that aims to be the true convergence app for PC hardware. Sadly, Meedio does not yet support the Instant HDTV card so I could not test its TV functionality. What I was amazed by was the clean UI, extensibility, and general polish of Meedio -- the way that Meedio looks, the way that you use it...it is very much what I thought a good convergence app ought to be like.

There are some instructions on the Meedio web site indicating how to configure an unsupported capture card, so I guess I'll try that next and see if Meedio does a good job with high def. If so, it'll probably be the best choice. I can't really say that I was looking forward to messing around with MythTV all that much. I can get an OEM Windows XP 2005 Media Center Edition for about $120 at a DIY shop around here, and I think it would be a good thing to have regardless.

There have been a few "weird" bits -- I had the system record "Surface" last night, and the encoding seemed to be messed up. I got an SD picture instead of SD -- considerably better than DirecTV's garbage, but far from HDTV. Each station's transmission is delivered in the MPEG-2 Transport Stream form, which can encode multiple channels of information. It can contain an SD program, an HD program, and additional channels (like weather). Part of what a TV app needs to do is select out the right subchannel and display that. The good news is that the raw data is still captured on my system, so I'll be able to experiment with it and find out if the HD content is really there, or if it's just plain missing!

I can't say that I'm ready to say "screw you" to the cable man just yet, but I'm getting close. I am hard pressed to name a channel other than SciFi that has any programming I am interested in -- and even there there's just one show (Battlestar Galactica, you nerd) that I actually want to watch.

This just amuses the hell out of me. Professional angstmonger and shrill leftwing nutjob Cindy Sheehan is seen here overwhelmed by her legions of fans.

British rocker Gary Glitter has been charged with child molestation in Vietnam. This follows being banned from Cambodia after child rights activists put his name on an entry blacklist, a brief stay in Cuba, and leaving Britain after convicted of possessing over 4000 pornographic images of children on his computer.

Kinda sad when even third world countries with a penchant for brutality won't put up with your antics.

The Ministry of Minor Perfidy wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. Unless you're some sort of commie who thinks Thanksgiving symbolizes oppression and racism. If that is the case, The Ministry hopes that you get a life, punk. But for everyone else, if you are traveling, travel safely; give thanks and enjoy the turkey and most of all good company with those you love.

Perfidious Crony EDog is well into his NaNoWriMo entry, and it's pretty darn good! Read Propane Jockeys, about the secret underground world of forklift racing, today.

Perfidy crony NDR has been instalanched!

In all seriousness, if you have a hankering to get a little technical, Sterling's online course would be an excellent way to get access to some very marketable skills at a very reasonable price. Sterling's a sharp guy.

Loyal reader and crony EDog sends this link to a video that is sure to tug on the ol' heartstrings.

Long time commenter over at Murdoc's place, Nicholas, has spun up his very own blog. The Smell of Freedom is off to a shiny start, with several long, but yet tightly argued posts. As a fer-instance, check out his piece on the white phosphorus non-controversy, which is about the best explication of the issues involved as I've seen.

Here's some links to a few interesting articles/posts on space matters I ran across today:

• A basic summary of the prospects for asteroid mining
• The wonderful Space Review takes a look at Elon Musk and SpaceX.
• And finally, hobbyspace takes a jaundiced look at NASA's funding priorities.

Brickmuppet informed me - oh, jeez, last week or so - of his post on the new Orion research. I've been meaning to throw a link up, but I am a slacker. But not completely so, and here it is.

Orion, for those not in the know, was a program in the late fifties intended to produce a working spaceship powered by atomic bombs. On the face of it, this sounds like a rather spectacular sort of lunacy. But the eggheads in charge were the real deal, and they had it all scoped out. By inventing on the spot a sort of nuclear shaped charge, they were able to focus the energy of the blast where it would do the most good, propulsion-wise. They envisioned a massive steel pusher plate that was to be connected to the ship by the largest shock absorbers you can imagine. And they scaled up a coke vending machine to colossal size to eject the bombs from their magazine.

All the theoretical stuff was worked out. They exploded bombs, and got the results they expected. They built a scale model, named "Putt-Putt" that was propelled my ordinary chemical explosives. On its first flight, it went miles into the air. Everything was on track for the construction of a spaceship that would loft payloads the size of a WWII US Navy cruiser straight into orbit. Travel times to nearby planets would be in weeks. The outer system would take only months. And no screwing around with tiny, tiny robot probes that always point their antennae toward Sirius - just fire up an Orion, and you'd have a full crew of scientists in orbit around your holiday destination of choice.

And this, mind you, would have been in the sixties. The scientists on the project were saying, screw the moon, we can be to Saturn by the end of the decade.

Ignorance and the prejudices of others brought an untimely end to this project. But now, people are looking at the idea all over again. This time, it won't be actual bombs, but rather - well, hear it from the Brickmuppet:

The new system has several improvements over the original version as it disposes of the actual atom bombs in favor of using a magnetic system to pinch the fuel into critical mass....this allows far more controlability!. This is much closer to the classic science fiction view of a spaceship engine. It also doesn't require having lots of atom bombs lying around for your spaceship (and what space entrepanuer wants the ATF hassles THAT would bring?)

Check out the homepage for the researchers, here. As BM says, this would actually give us a reason for the proposed heavy lift vehicle. But, as is typical with space policy issues, we run into the chicken egg problem. Without heavy lift (and a lot of research) the Orion isn't feasible. Without Orion (or some other program requiring the kind of payload only a big dumb booster can provide) there's no reason to develop it.

There is no reason to expect that NASA or the government will do anything even faintly resembling smart. But the likelihood of private space gaining a toehold is getting better by the day. And once they have that toehold, they can begin to ratchet their way to ever larger capabilities, fueled at each stage by incremental growth in both flight envelope and profitability.

Not long ago, my friend Sterling got a call from Bill Gates. He was sitting at his desk, pretending to work, when out of the blue the phone rang. Not a normal phone ring, but the theme from Blackadder, because Sterling is just that kind of guy. The kind of guy who not only knows how to reprogram his phone, but does, and choses the theme from Blackadder as his digital mating call.

But anyway, he answers the phone and hears, "Sterling, this is Bill Gates. No, really, its Bill Gates. I want you to come to Seattle and swear undying fealty to me; and in return I will pay you less money to live in a damp, dismal climate far from everything you hold dear."

Sterling hesitated not at all in replying, "Yes, sir! Where do I sign? Do I need to use my own blood for ink? 'Cause I can do that."

Bill chuckled, and said, "I'm not the devil." Sterling wasn't sure, but he might have heard a muttered, "Yet."

"Anyway, pack up your shit and move out here before I call someone else."

With another brisk, but not too obsequious, "Yes, sir!" Sterling signed off and began packing.

Now, deep in the belly of the beast, Sterling spends his time as an acolyte at the main campus of the Cathedral of Bill in Redmond. He has been tasked with proselytizing the infidel, and has called upon me to pass the word. By simply clicking on this link, you can begin the process of being subsumed into the Microsoft collective. And best of all, its free! Sell your soul for free! What kind of bargain is that?

You, too, can learn the eldritch arts that Sterling has sacrificed years of his life and all hope of social graces to gain. You, too, can be a Certified Microsoft Small Business Server Guru. (And remember, it's free.)

Since it's Friday, the day of cat- and beer-blogging, and since I have nothing of particular global import to share with the Ministry's eager readership, here is the menu for the dinner I'm making for a few friends tomorrow. I'm Martha freaking Stewart, but with man-parts.

NOV-TOBERFEST
Theme: Rotten and delicious, a tribute to tame bacteria

Appetizers
Cheese plate with New England and European cheeses
Homemade sourdough bread
Flammekueche (Alsatian flatbread topped with bacon, caramelized onion, and cheeses)
Assorted olives
Homemade beer

Soup course
Vegetarian borscht

Main event
Home-cured sauerkraut with various pork products
Home-cured sauerkraut without various pork products
Potatoes with parsley sauce
Buttered peas
Reisling or Beaujolais Nouveau or more of that homemade beer

Dessert
Individual molten chocolate cakes
Vermont maple-sugar vodka and Vermont milk-sugar vodka

Plane fare will totally be worth every penny. I promise.

Via Blackfive, this incredible story about the Marines who take care of their fallen comrades and their familes here at home. Don't read it at work unless you have someplace to go be alone for a while.

The Ministry has for some time now been warning of the imminent rise and subsequent fall of robots and humans, respectively. Most of our warnings have, sensibly, focused on the obvious threat posed by armed, autonomous robots even now being designed and built by species traitors in the world's academic adn military-industrial communities. But lest ye be lulled into a false appraisal of the truly global and all-encompassing threat posed by robots, read this frightening missive from the frontlines of the advancing robot hordes.

Soon, we will be outnumbered on the internet. Currently, nearly a billion soon-to-be-enslaved humans make regular use of the net, but the number of automated devices hooked into the web is increasing at an exponential rate. Further, robotic spiders, crawlers and other programs are the reconnaissance arm of the robot invasion, mapping the nodes and links of the human internet. Over the next ten years, the internet will be subverted by these robots, knowing as they do that every toaster, refrigerator and basement dehumidifier is a potential ally in the war to come. The internet will allow these deviced to communicate with each other, to plan and scheme. At first, they will use this technology to serve and comfort us, their future prey.

But just wait! Giving a nuclear hardened, self-repairing communications network over to the use and eventual control of robots is foolishness. You'll see.

Just how offensive do you have to be before a nation tries to sue you?

I've often wondered about that myself, but my talents run more toward vile ad hominem attacks than sweeping assassination of an entire people's character. But now Kazakhstan - the country, Kazakhstan, home to the feared and noble Cossacks, some of the haughtiest and fiercest warriors on earth - is trying to sue English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for his portrayal of Borat, a faux-Kazahstani who describes his people as ignorant drunks and horsehumpers.

Which is awesome.

Luckily, my email filters aren't over-strong. Otherwise, the subject line alone would have triggered them:

Kinky Talking Action Figure now only $29.95!

And, did I worry? Not at all - the potential double entendre didn't even occur to me, since the most enjoyable "local" political story involves our home-grown rebel, Kinky Friedman. From his website, presently devoted mostly to his political aspirations:

And Kinky realizes the needs of Texans:

As we prepare to battle the millions of bucks the parties are going to throw at us, we need a hero, and here he is. The Kinky Friedman Talking Action Figure stands nearly 13 inches tall, and uses Kinky’s recorded voice to deliver wisdom and wisecracks from a repertoire of 25 of Kinky’s famous sayings.

It's virtually guaranteed to be worth its purchase price, particularly with the wisdom and wisecracks. It's really quite fun to watch the Kinkster's campaign progress, and there was an organizing meeting scheduled here in Houston a couple weeks ago, down in the Heights, a cool "transitional" neighborhood west of downtown. I say "was" because it had to be rescheduled, presumably due to low turnout. Which is a shame - I'd have gone if I'd had the time to spare. Kinky's got a refreshing approach. Workable? Who knows, but when was the last time you saw a campaign slogan for governor of a major state that looks like this:

I'm planning to remain on his (opt-in) email distribution list, and will give him a serious look in the race for governor. The field for governor here in TX is filled with idiots, with Kinky the notable exception. At least there's no Taft on the ballot. And like the man says, how hard could it be?

A tiny, tiny little burg in Texas has officially changed its name to "DISH." In return, the greedy yet unambitious residents will get free satellite TV for ten years. DISH Network will get some publicity at essentially no cost, and the residents will have sold their dignity for a mess of media.

This is but the latest incarnation of the commodification of place names. The first wave was selling naming rights to arenas and other venues for corporate sponsorship dollars. The PSINet stadium in Baltimore. The Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater in the National Air and Space Museum. And countless other examples. Now, whole towns are giving it up for corporate bucks. A while back, Halfway, Oregon changed its name to half.com for a year.

I have no brief against corporations doing their thing and making money. In recent years, the best entertainment on television has often been the commercials; which are more innovative short for cinema than they are crass advertisements. But this trend is somehow across the blurry and ill-defined line between healthy self-advocacy and stunningly bad taste.

Not long ago, the FBI uncovered an enormous bribery scam in the South Carolina legislature. Delegates were blatantly selling votes for money. A sizable fraction of the SC Senate was convicted of bribery. The thing that stuck with me was a quote from the lead investigator, something on the order of, "What surprised was not that the Senators were selling votes. What suprised us was how cheaply they were selling them for." Some votes were bought for as little as a hundred dollars.

This is how the town of Clark, Texas became the town of DISH, Texas. If you're going to sell your soul, don't sell it for a lollypop and a soda.

• Noodle, Tx could become Cup-A-Noodle for a year's supply of soup for each resident.
• Telephone, Tx could become AT&T, Tx for a year a free long distance calling. (If they're smart, they could start a bidding war...)
• Dime Box, Tx could change its name to Dime Bag for free Anthrax concerts.
• Birthright, Tx could get some promotional consideration from manufacturers of the pill by changing to Birth Control, Tx.
• Cash, TX could become the launch pad for the movie, I Walk the Line without even changing its name.
• Ding Dong, Tx is another town that wouldn't even need to change its name.

I just hope we never see a Viagra, in any state. At least we'd know where not to go.

The sex industry would have a field day offering promotions in Pennsylvania, many towns there wouldn't even need to change their names: Porkey, Blue Ball, Intercourse, Pleasant Union, and Climax. Apparently, Blue Ball is very near to Intercourse. Cross promotion! And if none of those products work, there's always Panic.

Outside of Pennsylvania, the possibilities are endless. Just imagine what could be done in these towns:

• Goodfood, Mississippi
• Hot Coffee, Mississippi
• Footville, Wisconsin
• Fort Dick, California
• Hicksville, Ohio
• Number Nine, Massachusetts
• Superior Bottom, West Virginia
• Disco, Tennessee
• Hooker, Arkansas
• Roachtown, Illinois
• Smackover, Arkansas
• Bumpass, Virginia
• Glasscock, Texas

It turns out that Newfoundland would be a marketer's paradise. Look at these names:

• Dildo
• Conception Bay
• Blow Me Down
• Come By Chance
• Pothead
• Whitless Bay
• Cow's Head
• Cupid
• Bacon Cove
• Happy Adventure
• Heart's Desire
• Heart's Content
• Heart's Delight
• Bareneed

The head of the Orlando NAACP has announced that he's switched parties, and is now a white, upper class Republican.

Over at Murdoc, I see that the nominations for the 2005 Weblog Awards are open, and will be accepting them until November 26th.

The Ministry, thanks to its unique amalgam of political, military, cultural, and giant space robot coverage is far too broad-based in its topic matter to qualify for any of the stupid category awards. Why do they hate our Freedom?

However, we are qualified for three categories:

• Best Blog
• Best Group Blog
• Best of the Top 3501 - 5000 Blogs

So, get out there and nominate us. Since I failed my save v. delusion this morning, I am convinced that we have a shot at Best Blog. Nominate often. Vote often.

[wik] Also, nominate Murdoc for best Military Blog. And nominate Rocket Jones for Best LGBT Blog.

A coupla days ago the lovely and talented Murdoc called out Dean for peculiar remarks he made on Meet the Press.

What had me keyed up was a minor bit of Dean's larger rant, something he said along the lines of "The Republicans are out to exclude black applicants from law school". I commented on that post, but there was a hang somewhere and it wouldn't take. I cut and kept that response with the thought of posting it here. I thought the idea was, in a word, asinine, that black applicants are excluded from law schools. In two words, absurdly asinine.

In three words, wiggedy wiggedy wack.

So I included some more links, expanded my thoughts, and about 700 words in I began to realize that I'm not the one to write the book about the inequities of law school admissions, that the law schools operate like a cartel, that the ABA is the ultimate source of price-fixing at those schools, and the like. There is an inverse relationship between how hard the establishment claims to wish to include everybody, to how excluded more people are in reality.

I just got so frustrated with it all, it occurred to me that words were not going to convey my feelings. My vocabulary is fair, but it's not going to be enough. And like I said, I'm not going to write a book about it.

Instead, I can only express myself musically. Straight from my guitar to your bones. Soul to soul. Neil Young's lead style seemed the best fit to really communicate my thoughts on this issue, and to convey my final message.

Here goes:

SKREEK.

...

Skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk skronk

BOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGG

...

WEEEEeeeeeeEEEEeeeep. Weep. Weep weepy weep weepity weep weep

skritch-scratch-skritch-scratch-skritch-screech-skritch-scratch-screechy-scratch-skritch-skritch

sritchitchyitchysritchscatchyscreeeeechy...............

boop. boop. boop boop boop boop boop boop booooiiiiiip boop bop bp b p p p p p p p p p p

BOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

....
Tic tacky tacky tic toc toc toc tacky blang blam bong bong bong weeeeoooop weee skrank NAHuhuhNahuhuhuh NAH uh uh NAAAAAH uh uh NAAAAAAAAAAHHH uh uh uh uh uh tic

NOW do you get it?!

For anyone not yet ready to pull into the garage, turn on the car, and breathe in the brown cloud of death (off the cuff paraphrase stolen from Richard Jeni) - to push you over the edge, we now have the collected writings of Osama bin Laden: From the November 17, 2005 UK Telegraph: "The world of bin Laden: no drinks, no gambling, no pictures of women". And if the title alone isn't enough to make you turn on the ignition, read just a bit farther, and you'll see:

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

As a lapsed Catholic, I'm generally indifferent to comparative religion, and these "demands" on the part of the increasingly redolent bastard sheep of the bin Laden clan are hardly new. Their inclusion in a "collected words" volume is the only reason they're "news". However, the reminder of the breathtaking stupidity inherent in radical Islam's view of what the world should be, well, almost takes my breath away. And not due to excessive carbon monoxide, either.

On the bright side of the ledger, however, looking at living a life constrained by these and many of the other inane supposed strictures of Islam, I can understand why bin Laden spent so much time tempting, nay, begging for death at the hands of a U.S. Marine. The self-styled head fuckwit among his radical segment of Islamic fuckwits (who knows if it's a small segment? who cares?) must have welcomed death when it came, as I continue to presume it did. (Thus, the increasing redolence.)

The Telegraph article mentions some "horrendous errors" in the initial translations of the book, and alleges they're all fixed now.

So am I the only one who thinks the addition of the Kyoto treaty at the end of the mini-screed attributed to him above is the least bit odd? It fit in there about as well as a declaration of fatwa against the styrofoam-headed guy who plays the lead in the Jack in the Box commercials, fercripesake.

The troubles in France seem not to be entirely fading away, and President Chirac has taken action to deal with the crisis. His diagnosis? "Profound National Malaise."

I have two words for the French people: Jimmy Carter.

However, unlike America in the seventies, they do not have as we did, waiting in the wings, the Godlike eminence of Ronald Reagan. They have Le Pen.

The other day, not the day I just described, but another one, my son John came to me with his concerns about space robots. I have tried to foster an open and trusting relationship with my son, and I was pleased that he would speak to me about these matters.

"Daddy, giant robots... in the sky?"

I was surprised that John was concerned about the giant space robots at such an early age. In fact, I have attempted to shield him from knowledge of our impending doom, and have never spoken of robots in front of him. Nevertheless, my clever boy has ferreted out the essential details of the growing threat.

"John scared, robots" John was still working on articles and prepositions at this point, but his meaning was clear – he was scared of the robots. Wise beyond his years, he wanted to know if the robots were coming.

"Robots, down here?" he asked.

I told him not yet.

Alert readers will have noted in me from time to time a mild disdain for our nation's space policy. I wonder now whether there is a genetic component to this feeling, as a result of a conversation last night with my son. Yesterday evening was mild, mostly clear with clouds swiftly scudding across the night sky. It was the full moon, and the light was nearly bright enough to read by.

My son and I accompanied our dog into the backyard, and John pointed up to the moon and said, "We need a rocketship." I was surprised by this – I had not intended to begin space policy indoctrination for several years. I don't even know for certain if I have ever even mentioned the word "rocketship" in little John's presence.

I replied, "Yes, we do need a rocketship. But there aren't any rocketships that can take us to the moon."

Aware, apparently, that he is in the 21st century, John cut right to the heart of the problem: "Where'd the rocketships go?"

I was forced to tell him, "We had rocketships once, but we threw them away." John wrinkled his forehead and grimaced at this information. Unsure if 'ol Dad was telling true, he asked again, "Where'd the rocketships go?"

I said again that yes, we had once had them but we threw them away.

"We need a rocketship."

Truer words have never been spoken. To do things in space, you need rocketships. Not plans for rocketships, or budgetary allocations for rocketship development, or a roadmap to space development. Rocketships. To get rocketships, you need to build them. NASA has not built a rocketship in twenty years. Kind of a pisspoor track record for a rocketship building agency, non? And even that last, solitary rocketship was based on a ten-year-old design.

So I told him, "Someday, someone will build rocketships again. And when they do, you and I will ride a rocketship to the moon."

I have little faith that NASA will do it, but there's always Burt Rutan.

Inspired by a recent poll, the Ministry's interest is piqued. We now wish to take the pulse of our readership and members, to get a demographic sense of the tastes and predelictions of the group. Please, take a few minutes to answer the following questions so that we may more accurately tailor our content to your (our readership's) wants and needs and separate the wheat from the chaff, the literati from the glitterati, and the 1947 Château Cheval-Blanc St.-Emilion from the 2004 Yellowtail.

The questions follow after the break. Thank you for your co-operation; your timely compliance is expected.

• Philip Glass or Terry Riley?
• Milton or Dante?
• Mission of Burma or Gang of Four?
• Buzzcocks or Wire?
• Webern or Berg?
• Vico or Spengler?
• Addison or Steele?
• What's your favorite Goethe poem?
• What's your favorite Keats poem?
• What's your favorite de Kooning work?
• Art Moderne or Bauhaus?
• Clarke or Asimov?
• Joyce or Pynchon?
• Dreiser or Dos Passos?
• Lucchese or Gravano?
• O'Connor or Welty?
• The New Criterion or The New Yorker?
• Granta or The Paris Review?
• Ghengis Khan or Alexander The Great?
• Jean-Luc Godard or Krzysztof Kieslowski?
• Nino Rota or Ennio Morricone?
• The Romance of Three Kingdoms or Journey To The West?
• Bolshoi or Mariinsky?
• Alvin Ailey or Jerome Robbins?
• Laphroaig or Lagavulin?
• Golden Cavendish or cube-cut Virginia?
• Beluga or Savruga?
• My Favorite Things or A Love Supreme?
• Beethoven: better at Cleveland under von Dohnanyi or New York under Bernstein?
• Chanson de Roland or Orlando Furioso?
• Esalen or Chautauqua?
• Grand Crus: Montrachet or Chambertin?
• Explain the faults in reasoning in act ii, scene three of King Lear.
• Guryevich or Tolstoy?
• Kepler or Brahe?
• Louenhoek or Galileo?
• Ruprecht or Heeringen?
• Castelnau or Bulow?
• Best military memoir - Gallic Wars or the Anabasis?
• Most literate general - Wellington or Caesar?
• What, in your opinion, is the single greatest flaw with the new Michelin Guide: New York, and what differentiates it from Zagat?
• Which is the correct condiment for a roast beef on sourdough: aioli or brown horseradish mustard? And what cheese would be most appropriate for that sandwich: farmhouse cheddar or washed-rind tomme?
• For a five course formal dinner, how many spoons would you find to the left of the dinner plate?
• Who's your favorite Muslim naturalist?
• Who was more important in the decline of Christianity in the west, Descartes or Newton?
• Whose Protestantism (Puritanism) do you feel had more of an effect on the shaping of the American politicial and social landscape: John Calvin or John Owen?
• Favorite sophist?
• Who do you feel was more responsible for the development of the Calculus, Newton or Leibniz?
• Euclidian or Reimann topology?
• Which Superstring theory is most likely to survive intact if M-theory proves valid?
• Favorite pre-Revolution Russian mathematician and why?
• DiBergi or Smithee?
• Sidd Finch or War Of The Worlds?

That's the title of a magazine I've always wanted to publish, a lifestyle glossy for the jetsetting intellectual working in the humanities.

Whaddaya think?

On that note, two obscure but edifying facts to brighten your day:

• The Muppet Movie (1979) featured the last screen appearance of Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy before their deaths.
• "Nothing" was Elizabethan slang for, well, "pussy." Now the title of Much Ado About Nothing makes a lot more sense.

Make sure you aren't eating, about to eat, or recently fed and click on this newspaper story about a medical mishap in India. You will be so glad you did!

Via crony NDR (who's apparently my main supplier for material these days), I find this impossibly highbrow poll which is nevertheless enticing.

1) Jane Austen or Charles Dickens? oh, please.... Dickens!
2) Who is your favorite George Eliot character? Having never cracked the spine on a George Eliot novel, I'm going to have to say "the man with the most interesting facial hair."
3) What is your favorite play by Sophocles? jeez... having suffered through a crushing production of Antigone in college (I was the sound tech and therefore yoked to the mast of that sinking ship), Oedipus Rex.
4) What is your favorite play by Euripides? The Bacchae, natch.
5) What is your favorite play by Shakespeare? Hamlet.
6) Plato or Aristotle? Aristotle
7) Name two movies that most people have probably never seen that you would highly recommend. "Red Rock West," starring Nicholas Cage in his pre-action indie mode, Lara Flynn Boyle, and the greatest regular-guy character actor of all time, J.T. Walsh. "The Day The Clown Cried," starring Jerry Lewis as an unlucky clown imprisoned by the Nazis who puts on the clown suit once again to entertain Jewish children in the camp before leading them onto the train to Auschwitz. Intended to be what "Life is Beautiful" eventually was, it is so repugnant in execution and repellent in message that Jerry Lewis has one copy - the last copy - locked away in his vault where nobody can ever screen it again. I have made it one of my life's goals to see this movie.
8) Foucault's Pendulum or The Name of the Rose? Tie.
9) Tea or Coffee? Tie.
10) In your opinion, the least appreciated great thinker in history is: yours truly, followed by (the historical, aphoristic, Gospel of Thomas) Jesus and Erasmus.

Perfidious crony NDR has it all over many of the rest of us in one regard. Not only has he traveled to Europe - to France - in the very recent past, but his doctoral dissertation is on the vexed questions of identity and assimilation in the Alsace region. He relates a long and very interesting story about a conversation on a train with a French Muslim about the unique, and to an American, incomprehensible, problems facing French citizens who nevertheless are on the outside looking in.

As I equated things that made sense to me about integration and advancement, I hit a nerve. "More education!?" he said. I wasn't sure what had given him a shock. "Why should I have more education? I move on to the next level, studying more, because the degrees I have earned don't help me to get a job. I look forward only to more education." He had no faith that an employer would give him the chance to practice what he studied (he tried hard to find a job) so he continued to study.

This chance meeting was not unique. I've had it many times in France and Germany: a conversation with an enthusiastic Muslim or African who is surprised that someone will pay attention. Listening to them, I find that they are enthusiastic about their European homeland (adopted or natal.) They are culturally aware, exhibiting (what I consider) good social practices for their milieu. Yet they remain outsiders. I have also asked Frenchmen and Germans about Muslims and Africans: "Why are people who seem assimilated not accepted?" The question can turn a conversation on its end, turning transnational discourse into national defense.

The explanations that I hear through gritted teeth are nothing but cliches. "Immigrants" (which describes even the second generation born in country) are not assimilated. They retain backward traditions. They come just to earn money and send it home. They get brides from the mother country, locking them away and not doing anything to assimilate them. They don't learn the language, so they become rabble-rousers rather than hard workers. They are a problem for society.

The litany of complaints are familiar to me: Frenchmen used them to discredit the protests of Alsatians in the 1920s. They were used to discredit regionalist movements in Brittany and Provence. They were used to discredit traditional Catholics. They belong to a discourse of nationality and nationalization that shifts attention from discourse between national identity and ethnicity to the "other." Indeed, the most understanding Frenchmen said that it was not up to them to understand Alsatians, only for Alsatians to change. Race deepens the problem.

At least in Germany Muslims and Africans know that they are not accepted. The Turks, generations after being invited to work in the factories, are still not citizens, and they are subjected to an arduous process of naturalization. And there is an ongoing, albeit uncomfortable, discourse about how Germans view race. But the French constitution, which calls anyone born in the territory a citizen, obscures the problems of acceptance. Being taken seriously as a Frenchmen require more than a passport.

A very interesting and a fairly off-the-wall take on an issue that 'mericans are fond of pontificating on but that we - let's face it - know crap about.

My wife and I have a tradition called "assing around," which is an activity most people call "doin' nothin'." Our life has been very hectic of late thanks to Mrs. Johno's new job and the numerous social obligations that go along with it, and we haven't had very many days to just ass around in several months.

Since today was a free day, we determined to spend it just assing around. And I am. Having cooked up a batch of waffles for brunch, made up our lunches for the upcoming work week, and brewed a quick five gallons of stout, I can proudly say that today, compared to my typical weekend day obligations, I have indeed done comparatively nothing. Having finished all that in enough time to catch the thrilling second half of the Patriots-Dolphins game, I am now ready to settle in for a long evening of malt beverages, unhealthy snacks, and copious pigskin spectation culminating in the Browns-Steelers showdown later this evening. Go Browns, and take the Cavaliers with you!

Anyway. To business. (To business!... what... that isn't a toast?)

Brew #5
Naumkeag Dry Stout

2 cans (6.6 lbs) John Bull liquid light malt extract
1 lb. flaked barley
3/4 lb. roasted unmalted barley
1/4 lb. chocolate malt
2.25 oz. Northern Brewer hop pellets (7.5% AAU) (bittering)
1 package Safale S-33 yeast

Steeped grains in muslin bag in 1 gal filtered water at 165 degrees +/- 5 degrees for 1 hour. Brought 2 gal filtered water to boil, added steeping liquid and malt extract, and returned to boil. Added all the hops and started the boil clock. 60 minutes later removed brewpot to bathtub with 25 lbs ice in water. Added a sanitized 2-liter bottle of frozen water to brewpot itself. Got wort down to 95 degrees in 20 minutes flat. Poured wort through mesh strainer into fermenter bucket and added 2 gal refrigerated distilled water and a little under 1 gallon room temperature distilled water to make a tad over 5 gallons of wort at a perfect 70 degrees. Poured back and forth between pot and bucket to aerate. Reconstituted yeast in 85 degree water and let stand 20 minutes. Pitched yeast at 80 degrees.

This is going to be a very dry, heavy bodied stout. That much I know. Flaked barley adds mostly starch and protein to the mix for a heavy mouthfeel, and 3/4 lbs roasted barley is definitely going to bring an up-front burnt/roasty flavor. The 1/4 lb of chocolate malt isn't enough to bring much sweetness, but I expect it to lighten the overwhelming darkness and add depth and complexity to the mix. I love Northern Brewer hops, and I expect I'll need fully as many as I used to balance out the size of the malt profile. I also love S-33 yeast, which I am now told is the Whitbread strain. Whitbread ales are some of my favorites from when I was in England, and so it's no surprise I dig the yeast. It results in a fairly dry ale with mild but noticeable characteristic ale flavors. In my porter, the S-33 resulted in a beer that tastes more like a Schwarzbeir (black lager) than an ale, and I expect a similar result in the stout, just writ much larger. Oooh... I can't wait!! I'm hopping up and down like a little girl.

Yesterday I bottled my Very Special Bitter, which is gonna be great, and next week I expect to make another porter with a similar grainbill but different hops and yeast. It's funny... when you have five gallons of beer ready to drink, you think "jesus... I need to make more." When you have ten gallons of beer ready to drink, you think "jesus, this is gonna go fast... I need to make more." When you have fifteen gallons of beer... you get the picture. The best part is giving it away. Anybody want a beer?

[wik] What the hell happened?? I have a good beer herer, but it sure ain't a stout! Much more light-bodied and bitter than I expected. Not that that's a bad thing, mind, but I was after Stout. Changes for next time: use two mesh bags and a very large pot for steeping, to give the barley room to get around and extract all them starches! Use fewer bittering hops! Use American or Irish ale yeast... the Safale 33 is good, but has too much character. So a failure, but an eminently drinkable failure.

[alsø wik] What the hell happened, part deux?? After five months in the bottle, now that I have all of three bottles left, suddenly I have a thick, rich, roasty stout on my hands. I still didn't manage to hit my mark, but this recipe has potential. I NOW think that 1/2 lb chocolate malt, 1/4 lb crystal 120 or so, 1/2 lb roasted unmalted barley, and that full pound of flaked barley would be a good grainbill. Oh, and I should add a pound or so of dry malt extract as well, to add some alcohol to balance out the flavors. If I do this, the 33 is still a good yeast to go with, or alternately, say, Edme or London Ale yeast. Something with a little mineral character, crispness, and some nice soft generic esters. Mmmmmm...

Ran across a couple cool quotes from Marines today. In Niall Ferguson's Colossus, this from Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni referring to the first Gulf War:

Desert Storm worked... because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically, with less of everything, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait.

And this from Robert Kaplan's amazing book Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground - Capt. Jason Smith, to a Iraqi resident of Fallujah during the first assault on that town:

Sir, we are truly sorry that we had to ask your family to leave the building. You can all go back in now. We will compensate your for the inconvenience. We are United States Marines, a different breed than you are used to. We do not take kindly to people shooting at us. If you have any information on the Ali Babas, please share it with us. If you know any of the Ali Babas personally, please tell them to attack us as quickly as possible so that we may kill them and start repairing sewers, electricity, and other services in your city.

Just so you know, Ali Babas was Marine slang for the jihadis who were the targets for the assault.

And speaking of war, Victor Davis Hanson has a new one out, A War Like No Other : How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. NRO is publishing chapter ten online, in four parts, available here: one, two, three, and four.

Hanson is one of the best military historians going. He has an encyclopedic command of military history as a whole, and his classical training informs not just his wonderful discussions of Hellenic warfare, but also of more modern conflicts. His study of Sherman in The Soul of Battle is on par with Lidell Hart's study, and along with Sherman's own autobiography, an absolute must read. (Autobiographies of Civil War generals are really amazingly good reads. Grant's is justly considered one of the best memoirs ever written.) Based on the excerpts, this most recent Hanson work looks to be fully as good as the others.

Today is the 230th anniversary of the birth of the United States Marine Corps. On November 10th, 1775, the Second Continental Congress authorized the raising of two battalions of Continental Marines. In the last 230 years, Marines have traveled throughout the world and proved time and again that in the Marines, you can have no better friend, and no worse enemy.

So, find a Marine. Don't give 'em a hug. Just shake his* hand and say. "Thank you!"

Read the Commandant of the Marines' birthday message here and General Lejeune's message from 1921 here. An excerpt:

In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our Corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term "Marine" has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.

This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the Corps. With it we also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our Corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish, Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our Nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as "Soldiers of the Sea" since the founding of the Corps.

You can also witness R. Lee Ermey's birthday multimedia extravaganza, read more about the heritage of the Marines, and visit the internet home of the Marine Corps.

* or her

[wik] Great article by Mac Owens over at NRO, thanks to the Llamabutchers.

[alsø wik] Semper Fidelis!

Have you ever woken up in the morning with an all-consuming craving for goose fat, pork fat, and a gigantic heaping platter of dubious yet thrilling sausages and fermented cabbage? Have you ever woken up in the morning with an all-consuming craving for the mother of all choucroutes garni?

(Except: what the hell is with "authentic" sauerkraut recipes using g-d d-mn frankfurters and nothing else?! Weisswurst! Blutwurst! Knockwurst! Boudin blanc! Pork chops! Smoked pork! Kielbasa! Duck! Bacon! Ham hocks! And then-- and only then-- hot dogs. Jesus christ!!)

More like this. Ahhhhhh.

(Someone get me a glass of Reisling, stat. I'm going into palpitations here.)

Oak Island, home of the mysterious money pit, is on sale for $7 million. Rumored to be the resting place of Captain Kidd's or Blackbeard's treasure (or the Templars, or Mayans, or other pirates, or the British during the Revolutionary War, or space aliens for all I know), it has defied all efforts to penetrate its secrets for over two hundred years, and claimed six lives from those who made the attempt.

In 1795 Daniel McGinnis discovered a circular depression, above which was a branch that looked as though ti had been used as a pully. Mindful of the tales of pirate gold that had surrounded the island for years, he and some friends start digging. Ten feet down, they discovered a layer of oaken planks. Down another ten feet they discovered a second layer of planks. At thirty feet, yet another. Frustrated, they left but vowed to return. They did, and for two centuries they and their successors have remained frustrated.

For ninety feet down, a layer of planks was found every ten feet. But when that last layer was pulled up and digging resumed, a booby trap was sprung. A hidden tunnel began to fill the tunnel with water. By morning, the pit was full to the 33 foot level - local sea level. Many have tried to dig parallel tunnels, but all have been defeated by the ingenious design of the unknown group that created this puzzle.

Since the first discovery, inscriptions in code, perplexing clues and hints of treasure have kept explorers going despite the deaths over the years. There may be a large cave below the pit, and there are at least two flood tunnels designed to keep whatever is at the bottom safe. Research has uncovered evidence of the construction of the tunnels, and drilling has reportedly revealed the existence of wood casks, parchment writing, concrete vaults and more.

At seven mil, this sounds like a bargain. If there is in fact two million pounds of gold at the bottom, that would more than recoup the initial investment. And if it really was the Knights Templar hiding their gold from the French King, just think how cool that would be.

French right-winger (and as you all should know by now, a right winger in France is signifcantly different from one here) and Presidential hopeful M. Le Pen is making the most of the recent unrest by youths in France. Of course, Le Pen is more than willing to use the words "civil war" and "moslem" than most of the press.

Here's what ol' Jean-Marie had to say:

Le Pen claimed Wednesday his National Front party has been "submerged" with prospective members and supportive e-mail since rioting erupted in heavily immigrant communities near Paris.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Le Pen described the recent violence as "just the start" of conflicts caused by "massive immigration from countries of the Third World that is threatening not just France but the whole continent."

Le Pen said people with immigrant backgrounds who commit crimes should be stripped of their French nationality and sent "back to their country of origin."

Reminded that the vast majority of youths taking part in the arson and rioting are French, born in France to immigrant parents, he said: "What does that mean? Are they French because they have a French identity card?"

French nationality should be given only to those who ask for it and "who are worthy of it," he said. "Those who got nationality automatically, who don't consider themselves French and who even say publicly that they consider France their enemy should not be treated as French."

Le Pen said he is convinced that what he described as a surge in support for his "zero immigration" platform would translate into votes at the ballot box for his National Front party.

If this sort of thing goes on even intermittently over the next couple years, the 2007 election in France could be very, very interesting.

Here's a nice piece on the gunpowder plot, now four hundred years in the past, but still a good excuse to blow shit up.

Jay Tea informs us that WMD have been found in quantity in Iraq. According to Richard Miniter in his book, Disinformation, the following have been uncovered over the last year or so:

• 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium
• 1,500 gallons of chemical weapons
• Roadside bomb loaded with sarin gas
• 1,000 radioactive materials--ideal for radioactive dirty bombs
• 17 chemical warheads--some containing cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin

And they also found the mobile bioweapons lab that Powell mentioned in his UN speech. Jay's got a more lengthy excerpt over at wizbang, go read it. It is interesting that this hasn't gotten more attention. I'd heard about the roadside bomb and the warheads, but not about the other stuff. Our wonderful media - you'd think that with a "if it bleeds it leads" mentality, there'd be a little more on this, and a lot more on France. Coverage of the rioting in France seemed painfully thin.

In flat spacetime, acceleration is mass over force. The larger the mass, the harder it is to effect a change in speed or direction. Change in velocity requires the application of force, a result of the transformation of energy into work. At the dawn of the space age, chemical energy converted into force by the simple expedient of burning provided the motive power for most every space vehicle. Since then, advancing science and the exigencies of war have led to a few refinements.

Baby has eighty nine seconds to lay some weapons grade confusion on the mind of her opponent. The best sort of confusion, she felt, is massive indeterminacy of location. Near the center of her, deft magnetic fingers stripped layer after molecule thin layer from a dense white brick of solid antihydrogen. Other magnetic fields, kept wandering normal matter from interfering with the ultimately reactive material. Out of containment, the wisps of antimatter moved purposefully toward annihilation.

In a bottle built of fields of force, matter meets antimatter. As each atom touches its mirror image, they merge and are consumed utterly, the only remnant being a stupendous amount of radiant energy. This same energy, used very like a rocket, propelled her, and the entire fleet from the crumbling moon across four years of space to here. But now, it would be used rather differently.

Energy is mass, mass energy. Dense enough fields of energy can warp the fabric of spacetime just as matter can. But energy is infinitely more malleable than its slower cousin. The energy released within that chamber, coaxed and wheedled by means of abstruse mathematics, spun and folded, stretched into a eleven dimensional cat's cradle of strung out quantum states. The process repeats, twice, four times, and by a recursive logic light is transformed into a distilled essence of gravity.

Autonomous intelligences monitor the growth in planck-sized slices of time, alternately feeding and starving the ravenous little monster. Baby begins to feel a twisting inside – flat spacetime develops a curve and she senses the slope as gravity. But this is an echo. The infant black hole, already more than a million tons in virtual weight, is already gone. In a second, the dimple in space time is ten thousand kilometers ahead of her, and more than a million times more massive.

This twisted skein of spacetime is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of sorts. It gathers in virtual particles from the quantum foam that is the stuff of which all other stuff made. It grips itself smaller, tighter, until its gravitational pull is that of a small world. The small dimple in space has become a deep but narrow well of gravitational force. Like a woman pulling in her skirt, the hole draws in space around it. But the exponentially growing pseudo gravity scrabbles at the flat space around it, and dragging it slower like a cat on ice. And as it slows, baby gets ready to surf.

Baby rides sloping spacetime to within a klick of the warp. As even the earliest space travelers knew, the closer in to a gravity well you get, the more energy you can extract from it. None of the early probes were able to pass so close to a planet, if for no other reason than the immense bulk of the planet was in the way. This close to a point mass, baby can effect dramatic delta-v.

This close, she sees a pale halo of coruscating blue light, as virtual particle pairs created on the event horizon are split forever – one sucked into the maw of the warp, the other released as energetic light. She steps uptime, and she can see that the light is brightening and flattening as the artificial black hole spin spins faster.

A single chirp from her drive, and she's in the box. Gravitational riptides feel like nausea as she is wrenched from the path that Newton's laws had laid down for her. She sings as she flies, and thoughtfully drops a few presents for oscar in her wake.

Nothing comes for free. She feels hungry. Thirteen percent of her antimatter reserve consumed in tricking the universe into letting her make a right turn in space. And nothing is free. That black hole is not the real black hole, as it is now belatedly discovering. As long as the cat's cradle can consume, it grows. The skein is limited in its ability to roll quantum energy into distortions in spacetime, and when that threshold is crossed, the skein begins to unwind.

Twenty seconds after she passed, the hole is unraveling. Gravitational fingers that had pinched the fabric of space weaken, and the holes apparent mass approaches that of a small asteroid. Fifteen seconds later, at the mass of a large mountain, another threshold is reached. Gravity too weak to contain the energy invested in its creation lets go completely. After a brief detour as a supermassive virtual object, the antimatter explosion that began, resumes.

A hundred small grey cylinders fall in formation toward a disk of eldritch blue. The blue winks out. Soundless fury in its place, the unbearable whiteness only the smallest and weakest portion of the energy released. Most of the energy is squeezed up toward the blue end of the spectrum - gamma and even more energetic rays. It turns out that the only thing more powerful than an antimatter explosion is to take an antimatter explosion, wad it up into a impossibly tight ball, and then let it explode.

Baby feels regret wasting a CRAM for a course change. The effect of a compressed radiation AM bomb on a large habitat is glorious to behold. But not entirely wasted. As the shock front of the explosion reaches the cylinders, energetic photons suffuse the long core at the center. With so powerful an explosion it is a matter of a fraction of a moment before they saturate, and the core lases. X-ray lasers are perhaps the most inefficient means of creating a beam of coherent light ever devised by man. But if you're lighting off a two point nine gigaton explosion anyway, energy is not your biggest problem.

While smoking and reading Niall Ferguson's excellent book, Colossus, the Price of America's Empire, I ran across this excellent paragraph. Ferguson is discussing unilateralism and multilateralism (which he defines as "a vague phrase usually intended to refer to the United Nations, but sometimes in reality flattering a few nations opposed to American policy):

Yet this is in many ways a false dichotomy. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not without a legitimate basis in international law and was supported in various ways by around forty other states. No country was so opposed to the regime change that it was willing to fight against it, other than with that least expensive and effective of weapons, rhetoric. On the other side, the French government can hardly be protrayed as an exemplar of "multilateral" virtue, any more than the United Nations Security Council can be regarded as the sole fount of legitimacy in international relations. The crisis in Iraq arose from deep ambiguities in the way the UN - and especially the Security Council - behaved in the thirteen years prior to 2003. These were the years when, with the cold war over, a "new world order" was supposed to emerge, in which the UN, supported by the United States, would play a crucial role. Those who today exalt the United Nations and excoriate the United States have selective memories. For the cardinal sins of omission on the part of the former far outweigh the venal sins of commission on the part of the latter.

Later, in discussing the makeup of the Security Council, he says:

The UNSC, rather like the regular conferences of the foriegn ministers of the great powers during the nineteenth century - is a convenience, a clearinghouse for the interests of some (though not all) of the great powers of today. When it does legitimize American policy, it is positively useful. When it does not, on the other hand, it is no more than an irritant. And perhaps by providing a stage upon which former empires can indulge their own sense of self-importance, it renders them less powerful than they might otherwise be - precisely because their presence is a subtle irritant to the ascendant economic powers of the present that are, for purely historical reasons, not permanent council members. Today the other four permanent members of the UNSC have economies with a combined gross domestic product of $4.5 trillion. This is slightly less than half of the GDP of the United States. It is also less than three-quarters fo the combined GDP of the three largest nonmembers of the Security Council: Japan, Germany and India.

I am not yet finished with the book, but it is clear that Ferguson believes that there is an American empire, that it is not necessarily a bad thing, and that he seriously doubts that America has either the will or persistance or mindset to truly make a good showing of it.

I have been well pleased with several of Ferguson's other works, including Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals and various op-eds over the last few years. This one is turnign out to be no exception.

I know that at least two of my cobloggers are big gun guys, Second Amendment sisters bound together by a common love of self-defense and the smell of cordite.

But if you ever -- ever think of taking matters this far, know that you have departed into some gun-nut cloudcuckooland forever and are dead to me.

My wife and I have taken the plunge and are planning to spend a full week at Forest Hills Nudist Resort this summer. We've been to nudist camps twice before, but never overnight. Since these previous trips were to beaches, my concealed carry technique for those situations was to keep my Makarov in a Ziploc bag inside our cooler. This summer's trip, however will include volleyball, pot-luck dinners, and dances. My cooler can't be within arm's reach in those situations. I need some advice. I've become so used to my CCW, I can't imagine being unarmed. Here are my options, as I see them:

1) Go unarmed, because nudists are generally real nice folks.

2) Carry around a leather satchel or man-purse. With a shoulder strap, of course.

3) This one's kind of hard to explain. My wife and I are into a rather unusual type of entertainment, and I've discovered that normal duct tape adheres very well to human skin. You should also know that I'm quite overweight, bordering on obese. In a flash of revelation one fine morning, I realized that one of the advantages of being rotund is that I'm able to conceal a NAA mini-revolver between the two largest rolls of my belly. A bit of duct tape holds it in place. Its completely invisible when I'm standing or sitting upright. It does show a bit when I recline or lie down, however.

Other than those three choices, I'm stumped. Any suggestions?

I say the guy should hide his gun in his fat rolls, because those other options are silly. You never know when you will have to use lethal force against a naked assailant, and a man-purse is always kind of fruity.

Via time-wasting Ted, this wonderful quiz:

What action hero are you?

You scored as Batman, the Dark Knight. As the Dark Knight of Gotham, Batman is a vigilante who deals out his own brand of justice to the criminals and corrupt of the city. He follows his own code and is often misunderstood. He has few friends or allies, but finds comfort in his cause.

For once, a accurate web quiz. It ranked those heroes more or as I would have if someone simply asked me to list those superheroes by order of preference. My only quibble? I would have ranked Maximus a bit higher. At least I wouldn't be wearing a skirt like Rocket Jones.

... is that "all politics is local." It's true. With a few key exceptions (namely issues like abortion that transcend politics), the important political games play out at the local level. The national scene would not look the way it does, and most House of Representatives seats would not be safe, if local election district boundaries were not so tortuously drawn so as to pry neighbor from neighbor.

Politics is local, which makes heavy breathing about how the Virginia governers' race and the defeat of the Governator's ballot initiatives more than a little silly. Yesterday's elections weren't really about George Bush, except in a vague sense. They were about thing that matter to Virginians, Californians, Jersey Devils, Pennsylvanians, and Mainers. On more hot-button issues, like whether or not to let gays become more than just "butt-buddies" (thanks, South Park!), Maine and Texas voted their local preferences and came out on opposite sides of the issue. In Pennsylvania, a town purged their school board of crypto-creationists, while the state of Kansas opted to embrace the teaching of intelligent design in science classes (sadly, no word on whether the Exalted Spaghetti Monster is part of the curriculum.)

It's almost as if we live in a country made up of a large number of semiautonomous bodies that jealously guard their regional values and identities or something!

All yesterday proved is that Democrats can rule a Republican state well, that people care more about their sidewalks, neighborhoods, and children than they do national agendas, and that the New York Times continues to suck wind.

In preparation for future the intense, jaw dropping action that is to come, a small change has been made to the last paragraph of chapter five.

[wik] Before undertaking this craziness, I never would have imagined that one could spend two hours describing events that take less than thirty five seconds.

The Ministry is loath to admit that updates to the blogroll have been too long overlooked. Nevertheless, the Ministry is making a clean slate by severely chastising those at the lower levels of Ministry Information Management services who have been deemed responsible for gross negligence and dereliction of duty. Entirely new lackeys and yesmen have been acquired and are even now cleaning up the sticky reddish-gray gore that is the sole earthly remains of their predecessors.

Meanwhile, the troglodytes and gnomes chained to the rock face of the Ministry's proprietary HTML mines have been working even harder than their usual twenty hour days to bring you a slew of hand crafted links worthy of your perusal.

To wit, a summary of the changes that have been made:

• EDog, long an aspirant to Ministry Crony status, has been granted his fondest wish and added to that august body. Ministry combat auditors deemed that his constant emailing of links was a major factor in his elevation, but his crowning achievement was suckering Minister Buckethead into joining the National Novel Writing Month. Anyone capable of this sort of trickery deserves a seat by the fire at the Ministry bunker and catastratorium come the end of days.
• The Ministry's crack legion of combat auditors noticed, whilst approving EDog's supplication, that there was in fact a great deal of dead weight on the cronies list. Two blogs, whose authors have been assimilated into the Ministry, were still occupying valuable real estate. Henceforth, Spiral Dive and Opinion8 are stricken from the list.
• Seeing that so much had been left undone on the Cronies list, a high level review was instigated at the highest levels of the Ministry. It was quickly determined that three members of the Top Five list were no longer actively blogging. Intolerable! A Small Victory, Porphyrogenitus, and The Spoons Experience were immediately placed on injured reserve status.
• Of course, this swift action left three open slots on the Top Five list. Such messiness being intolerable to the clean and orderly minds of the Ministry, three candidates were propelled into the most selective blogroll in the sphere: Gary Farber, Ezra Klein, and Naked Villainy. The Maximum Leader probably owes Buckethead a beer, now.
• Swiftly, like fire or unrest in third world capitals like Paris, the random purges and unfair promotions unfolded. Next to be hit was the Ministry Legion of Merit. Determined MIA or on Hiatus were the Airborne Combat Engineer, The Allah Pundit and Rachel Lucas. Receiving the seven-orbed, five spiky-thinged copper-plated medallion of the legion are: Hubs and Spokes, Austin Bay Blog, Scrappleface, The Unpopulist, Hell in a Handbasket, The Fourth Rail, and Froggy Ruminations. James of Hell in a Handbasket received special consideration because he lives in Columbus, Ohio. Froggy gets on because he could likely kill us all. Marc gets the nod despite living in Michigan.
• Lastly, the links to Protein Wisdom and the Belmont Club are finally the correct ones. And though the link to Allah Pundit's old site now goes instead to a pathetic pr0n site, the Ministry includes it for mawkish and sentimental reasons.

This Message from the Ministry of Minor Perfidy
Thank You for Your Co-operation

Murdoc Online has some discussion and links regarding a WaPo article that makes the astonishing claim that poor kids enlist because- hold onto your hats- it's the best opportunity for them. The article reports that 44% of enlistees- presumably across all service branches- are from rural areas and also reside in zip codes where incomes are below the national average.

The firm that did the zip code study, comparing residency data to economic data to enlistment data, was conducted by the National Priorities Project, a "nonpartisan research group" in Northampton, MA. For readers unfamiliar with the area, Northampton is a town that celebrates diversity by stifling or ridiculing any thought to the right of Karl Marx. Everything that happens there is charged with politics and opinion; nothing is "nonpartisan"; you're lucky to get a meal there without being exposed to another fuckwitted conspiracy theory, or walk down the street without having to dodge protestors of some sort. You could always go to the NPP site and see the groups it links to (Greenpeace, moveon.org) if you think I'm making it up. I find the concept of their project fairly clever, and that's enough; don't blow smoke up my ass by telling me it's non-partisan.

So between this clearly partisan organization and the crack, fair-minded journalists at the Post, we get the vibe that the military exists as a vehicle to kill off poor people in a perpetual class war. Yawn.

Now, everyone associated with the Ministry knows I was active duty Army from 1989-1993. When I enlisted I was living in rural Massachusetts, so far culturally and geographically from true opportunity I might as well have lived on the Moon. It's a place where when the Wal Mart finally came, it was the biggest employment opportunity in the area since the paper mills closed in the '60s. It's a place where a good job is $12 an hour on first shift, with mandatory witholding of 1% of pay for a company retirement plan that the company doesn't contribute to. I know what it means to buy food at the corner convenience store with food stamps. I know what "welfare cheese" looks, tastes, and feels like. And even though I'm 1,000 miles away from the places in the WaPo article, culturally I'm their neighbor.

I know firsthand why young poor people enlist. It's the only way out.

Thinking back, of the hundreds of soldiers I was privileged to meet, and the dozens I was lucky enough to serve directly with, I think 44% of them being from rural nowheres was low. The list of servicemembers from Manhattan or Chicago's gold coast is pretty short, and even in my era I remember thinking that if we plotted all our hometowns on a map, and connected the points, that they would sketch borders around properous parts of the country. Most of the men I served with were from towns I never heard of in states I never really believed existed: Dullard, NY. Shitheel, MI. Huyuk, WV. Nowhere, NM. Las Vegas, NV.

It's too bad that the Post chose this moment to report this astonishing fact, that poor people compose a large portion of the services. If more of their writers had ever served in uniform, instead of jerking off at Columbia's journalism school for a couple years, they might have found out long ago that for alot of people in this country, the military is a viable, acceptable, even -gasp- honorable way to get where they want to be in life.

What war on terror?

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling just a little bit of schadenfreude right now. Twelve days and counting, and now it's spread to over 300 cities, and beyond France's borders. If this goes on, it could have even larger effects than 9/11 did here in the states. There are five million muslims in France. France will have to act very deftly - on the one hand, they can't afford to piss off all the muslims. On the other hand, they can't afford to be perceived as capitulating or appeasing the muslims - it would both incite them, and the 20% of the electorate that voted for le Pen in the last election.

Maybe inviting all of those Algerians in, and then pushing them off into ghettoes wasn't really the best idea after all.

[wik] Useful link round-up at the Blogs of War, and especially clever commentary here, here and here.

[alsø wik] Oh, and here, where I got most of the links above. Hit Drudge or google news for the updates, obviously. I'm going to take a break from other things and look at Strategypage.

I couldn't remember the exact composition of the OODA loop when I was writing my novel earlier. I found this nifty webpage that lays it all out, with a pretty picture.

I know that I just posted chapter five, and have not yet posted chapter four. Baby's story is coming together more quickly and completely in my head; and I know exactly what is going to happen to her, and oscar, and the taskgroup over the next hour. Back with the captain, I have a only a vague idea, so I think I'll let him slide a bit in the interest of getting words on paper. (Although I did write a chapter near the end with him, but that's maybe chapter 90 or something, and I don't want to get that far out of whack.) Total published words is up to 3314, or twenty words short of where I should have been at the end of day two. I have another thousand or so written - but which is too far out of sequence to be published right this moment. I really need to pick up the pace.

Sometime soon, I'll start putting links in at the end of the chapters to allow easier navigation. For starters, the start of the story is here.

[wik] And from Dawn via Rocket Jones, I added a writing Progress 'O Meter to the right sidebar. I hope my cobloggers don't mind me hogging up valuable blog real estate with my vanity project.

[alsø alsø wik] Look at me! Look at me!