It’s an election year, and we all know what that means.  As a public service, I’d like to propose the following self-diagnostic for fellow news and politics junkies like myself. 

Take the Quiz!

1. Does the NYT regularly wimp out by posting outrageously conservative editorials? 
2. Is Fox News Fair and Balanced?
3. Do you look to BeingLiberal or WorldNetDaily for a refreshing view of what moderate liberals or conservatives think?
4. Have you ever REALLY looked forward to reposting something you read by DailyKos or LewRockwell?
5. Is the Republican Party doing everything in its power to take women’s freedoms away by controlling their sex lives?
6. Is President Barack Obama a Communist Muslim from Kenya?
7. Is Ben Bernanke a heroic figure who saved the economy in 2008? 
8. Is the Banking Industry a giant Jewish Conspiracy to enslave the world?
9. Are Progressives the same thing as Liberals?
10. Are Libertarians the same thing as Conservatives?
11. Was Andrew Breitbart a hate-filled scumbag?
12. Has there been a systematic cover-up of the Clintons’ politically-motivated murders? 
13. Are there any substantive differences between the writing styles of Maureen Dowd and Ann Coulter? 

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be suffering from Ideological Conditioning Disorder.  This Disorder usually results from having been played like a cheap violin by figures in a major political party or movement, and tends to result in a narrowing of perspective and inability to understand why anyone could ever be so stupid and/or evil to disagree with a given political perspective, aka, yours.

But fear not!  There is a cure:  sit down, have a beer, and shut the fuck up. Meanwhile, as a necessary part of your return to homo sapiens cogitans, may we recommend you spend some time at the following internet news service… for perspective.

I have gradually become convinced that, contrary to its original expectations, Facebook simply cannot support any meaningful blogging elements.  Which in retrospect isn’t much of a surprise, since it’s 90% marketing vehicle, 10% contact software.  But it had elements which in theory would have done the job.

The Happycrow has landed.  On, to judge by the Republican Presidential Primary, a dead squirrel.

Yum….. 

Because… well…. damn.

Now, I grant you, skinny models are one thing.  But this is something else.  Now that I think about it, though, when apparently all a gal has to do to be “hot” right now is NOT be a kielbasa with feet, apparently skinny has become pejorative?  I missed that memo….

All-round overachiever, former student, and inventor of Physics Explains History.  Check it out, she’s got a bunch of these….

Be glad you don’t live in a shithole like China, where it’s apparently completely acceptable (albeit technically illegal) to cram people into factories and work them 17+ hours a day, 7 days a week.  Yeah, that’s what 80 hours of overtime means.  It took a “rash of suicides” for anybody to get some sunshine onto this and for anybody to care.  How many is a “rash,” one wonders?

Don’t think making people stand out in the sun and repeat slogans is going to help, assholes.  How about giving them enough time off to sleep seven hours a day AND wash their faces?

“That’s how I got started in politics.  I got a marketable commodity– one vote….before long I had sixty men back of me and formed the George Washington Plunkitt Association.  What did the district leader say when I called at headquarters?  I didn’t have to call headquarters.” – Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

If Armey and Kibbe thinks the job of the Tea Party is to take over the Republican Party — a laudable idea, given that describing the party as sclerotic would be charitable — and the Tea Party at large agrees, the smartest thing they could do is to take Plunkitt’s advice to heart.  Form a Committee of Correspondance (equally, you could call it a Vigilance Committee) in each and every district, and say “Here’s our Contract From America.  We’ve got X votes that will knock you right out of the primary unless you agree to it and keep your word regarding it.  Violate it, and you’re gone.”

That X will vary, district-by-district.  In heavily blue states, it may require strategic primary voting in order to support whoever’s closest — the Dems have done this for years.  That’s a local strategic decision that’s none of my business — after all, what concerns me is MY congresscritter and his incessant runaway spending.

Macchiavelli and his “miserable and rare examples” works for the taxpayers, too.  Want to see an honest politician?  When yours pulls something cute, “cry Havoc and let slip the sword of Damocles.”  Do it for ten years straight.  The rest of them will get the message.

WOW.

I’d like to preface this post with an acknowledgement that on a personal level, I’m quite lucky, as unlike a lot of people who are currently unemployed, I have part-time work for the fall available for the asking, from people who would be very happy to see me doing it.  That said, I’d say that employment agencies are probably best avoided at the moment unless it’s for specialist work, as they’re so overwhelmed that I actually received, get this…

A rejection letter from a temp agency.

Wanna see what one looks like? Read the full post »

Pop-Sci is all a-gaggle at a vest using shear fluids to support kevlar.

BUT: 

In the tests, BAE scientists used a gas gun to fire ball-bearing bullets at nearly 1,000 feet per second at two test materials — 31 layers of regular Kevlar and 10 layers of Kevlar combined with the shear-thickening liquid.

The shear-thickening liquid stopped the bullets more quickly and prevented them from penetrating as deeply, the BBC says. British media got a preview of the materials at a BAE facility in Bristol, England.

The part that should be making people scratch their heads is “ball-bearing bullets.”  Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.  Spherical projectiles have terrible ballistics and awful penetration.  That’s why bullets, shotgun pellets aside, are ogival penetrators, not spherical ones.  So the million-dollar, or, Pound, question, as the case may be is, why is BAE having to resort to a test that will at best be realistic regarding certain types of notoriously sub-par 1950s communist ammunition?

As noted earlier, and now will be making even more grounds, Prime Minister Erdogan’s rationale for democracy is in order to destroy it.

Well.  No shit?  That’s why we keep giving billions of dollars to Egypt, after all.

I think this is a tempest in a teapot, and we should cut the strings on all these folks.  Egypt’s aid is a bribe not to go to war with Israel?

Are you kidding me?? Anybody seen the state of Egyptian military readiness?  Okay, the Turks are better, for all that, and Erdogan and restore his dreams of Anatolian empire (while dismantling the Istanbul cosmopolitanism for which the country was so famous).  Meh.

The islamist crowd wants to run full speed to sharia.  I say, push their elbow.  Let ‘em.  Help the bastards out.  Because nothing, and I mean nothing, puts the lie to islamic fundamentalism and debunks the idea that theocracies have any future other than widespread misery, like the experience of living under one.  As a few of my favorite political savants pointed out, in succint but powerful terms, all the way back in 1982.

What can you say about a guy who makes 1200+ 10-minute educational videos, and just releases them on Youtube?

You say the man’s totally effing awesome, that’s what you say.

We’re reaching a point where basic educational technology is going to totally upset the apple cart.  As a guy working in the industry, I can’t wait.

Not for being rude, or anything of the sort — but simply because they don’t “get it.”

So, I was in Store 2930 in Irving last Friday, and ordered a book on Mudbox (a 3d modelling software).  I was promised by the store clerk that the book qualified for free expedited shipping, but that because of the Memorial Day holiday, shipping would take until Tuesday.  Perfectly reasonable.

Tuesday passed.  Wednesday passed.

Thursday I called the store.

Within the ten minutes of my phone call, the expected arrival date they quoted changed from 6/2 (a day late, but they ship UPS, and UPS is often late, I think that’s why they throw the boxes at your door rather than setting them down gently), to 6/5.  Wait a minute, that didn’t make any sense — how could the date change?  So the receiving manager, who saw the change, got me in touch with the store manager, who promised to check in on it and call me back.

Everything was courteous and professional, and she called back within ten minutes.  The answer, it turns out, is that my order had not gotten into their system until 6/2, Tuesday.  For a Friday order, because I ~”ordered it in the afternoon, so it was perfectly reasonable that it would get into the system on the next business day.”

In other words, B&N promised one thing, couldn’t deliver, and then tried to sell me on the idea that the problem was with my expectations, rather than that they overpromised and under-delivered.

That’s not how a successful business operates — certainly not in the 21st century, where any competent electronic store system should have purchases “in the system” within minutes maximum:  what are they doing, waiting for some data-entry drone to enter it manually from a sheet of paper?  That kind of system was on its way out in the 90s.  I know, I temped a couple of them. 

I’m still waiting for my book, which will arrive hopefully by Friday.  Because I really don’t have a choice.  But a company that oversells, underdelivers, and then tries to sell me on the idea that the problem was my fault for being a rube and believing them, is a company that’s not getting any additional business.  Sure, I’ll come by the cafe and have some quiche and coffee, browse for some scifi.. but for anything serious, they’ve lost my business.  I’m sure they’ll survive:  my wife and I are small fry, ordering maybe $5-700 bucks a year in books.  But that’s 5-7 that will be going to Amazon.

For one and only reason:  when they say I’ll have it on Tuesday…. by damn, I have it on Tuesday.

Wait, what’s going on here?

Well, the column writer quotes Bastiat, so you have a pretty good ide awhat he’s going to say…. but on the other hand, he’s citing a Harvard economic study — it would be VERY interesting to find out whether the guys who wrote it have anything to do with Lawrence Lessig’s anti-corruption stuff.

AAAAAAND, here’s the study.  It’s written in Academic, but at least it’s not Austrian High-Academic Incomprehensprache.

Well, not really.   Our mortgage is… as the house has lost a quarter of its value last year, and a few years of mortgage payments have effectively turned into rent payments.

This happens again next year, we really WILL be underwater.

So why am I happy?  Well, it’s this little thing call “sunk costs” and “property taxes.”  What’s paid is already out the door — no getting that money back again.  But lower home value (and it’s down by a third over the last two years) means in the future, that we’ll be paying that much less out each month in property tax escrow… meaning we actually pay down the house faster with the same monthly payment we’ve been making.

So… celebration time!  All I gotta hope for is that the politicos continue to screw things up, and the house will be paid off in three or four years!

Bane of all computer geeks who ever played Baldur’s Gate.

Yeah, I know, you didn’t. Shut up.  =)

Anyway, this is the body of the narsty little monster that chewed up all my little toons.  I’m starting to get the hang of box-modelling in 3dsMax… but don’t have the brain cells for doing the head tonight.

Okay, got the head done.

You don’t see the chelicerae (pointy teeth) very well from this angle, of course.  Now on to figure out how to rig a skeleton for this puppy, and then texturing.

I pay attention to Lawrence Lessig, even when I disagree on the details.