He is Khan-like, though.

If I were making this a kids' series for the Disney Channel, I'd call it That's So Khan.

I might do companion shows called Deanna Explains It All and Where In The World Is Hiraku Sulu?

Ah: A commenter, I think, nails it:

I thought it was supposed to be Gary Mitchell.

I assume he means the Star Fleet officer who gets godlike powers while on an alien world and then a godlike ego to match it. I forget the title of the episode -- it was the second or third one. Where No Man Has Gone Before or something.

This would explain his wearing the Star Fleet uniform.

Hikaru: Geeks tell me it's not Hideki. I was pretty close, though.

Posted by: Ace at 04:32 PM | Comments (369)
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Just to repeat: I realized I had not set up enough time to set up the guest-bloggers and such, and so could not really take next week off. I'm taking the following week off, the week of the 17th.

Why yes, that will segue into Christmas and wind up basically being a half month off with occasional days on. Correct!

I'll write to people who offered to guest blog this week. So, I'll have a week to get all that into shape, and everyone set up and such.

Posted by: Ace at 03:12 PM | Comments (207)
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I don't believe the headline I just wrote. I just wrote that to make a point.

I heard Hannity talking about this story. The facts are these: A couple of Australian DJs called an English nurse, on a pretext call, attempting to weasel out some information about Kate Middleton's pregnancy. Two days later she died. It's being investigated as a possible suicide (or maybe, at this point, it definitely is a suicide).

Hannity listened to the call and didn't think the woman revealed anything that would cause her later consternation. He thinks the call either didn't provoke the suicide (if it was a suicide), or else there's something else going on, something we don't know about.

However, People on the Internet are calling for the DJs' heads.

And all of this reminds me of the furore* over the murder/suicide of that football player whose name I already forgot.

I think Costas' remarks -- Let's end "gun culture" and pass laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals (or... potential criminals, aka "currently law abiding citizens") -- and the Loud Internet Noises over the DJs' crank call both exhibit the same stupid thoughtless arrogance.

Let's say you typically drive five miles over the speed limit on your way to work. One day, you are forced to brake quickly, but you can't brake fully in time, and you rear-end another car, and suffer $2000 in total damages to you car and the one you hit.

Later on your tell someone about this. You mention, as you think of it, that you were driving 5 mph over the speed limit, and wonder, gee, maybe that contributed to my failure to brake in time.

What's the most automatic, thoughtless thing the guy you're talking to can say? And he's almost guaranteed to say it, too.

"Well, I guess you shouldn't have gone over 5 mph today."

Now the person saying this doesn't want to be a dick. This is a Mom sort of thing to say, and I'm not knocking Moms. I love Moms, especially my own. I'm just noting this a common example of what I'm driving at.

The most reflexive --and I mean that in a bad way, as in "involuntary" and "without rational thought," the verbal equivalent of a sneeze -- thing to say after any setback is to set one's mind back to the hours immediately before the setback, pick out one thing that might have contributed to the setback, and announce, "Well, you shouldn't have done that."

People have this natural, automatic, reflexive thought. Name the setback -- whatever setback you like, from inconvenience to calamity -- and people will automatically, immediately search back for an event somewhere in the chain of causation and then wisely announce, "You shouldn't have taken Action X."

In a way it's kind of true -- if Action X is indeed part of the chain of causation, it is possible that deviating from the chain of causation at an step would avoid Setback Y. Often we never really know which Actions were necessary for the Result, but we can guess maybe Action X, maybe Action B, Maybe Action Delta. If you just hadn't done X, B, or Delta, maybe result Y wouldn't have followed.

When I call this "thoughtless" I don't mean rude, or inconsiderate. I mean more in the basic, original sense of "thoughtless" -- without any thought. Just, as I say, a verbal sneeze, or perhaps more accurately a semi-logical geshundheit.

There's nothing wrong when Mom does it to you after your fender-bender, though you probably will give her a glare and say, "Mom? Seriously? I need this right now?"

The problem comes when this sort of automatic, thoughtless "Well you shouldn't have done X" reflex is ported over to the world of politics, and people begin thinking this is some Serious Thought.

You know how you can actually avoid all road collisions? You can just not go anywhere at all. You can just stay in your house all day.

The fallacy of this type of thinking is that it resolutely fails to consider the other side of the coin -- what is lost by simply not doing something. Usually this sort of thing is said after a major setback, and the thing You Shouldn't Have Done is pretty small, so you don't really argue with it.

But consider that fender-bender. A lot of things probably contributed to it, including the fact you only got 4 hours of sleep last night and so your reflexes weren't at top form, but then, your obligations to your employer and your spouse and children require you to get sleep than you'd like. And you probably could have gotten your tires changed a few months ago, but you needed that money for rent. And fresh brake pads, gee, we haven't even considered brake pads. You could have taken your car to the shop instead of taking your daughter to her soccer game.

You also could have taken other roads -- even if they are slower and not as direct.

You really could have done a hundred other things differently.

And the thing is, you made all of these decisions -- some of which may have impacted your fender-bender -- for the sake of convenience. Some decisions may have been suspect -- if your tires were almost bald, well, that was a bad gamble for the sake of convenience -- and other ones were relatively rational choices. You probably don't replace your brake pads every month, for example.

Could you? Sure. Would that increase your braking power? Probably. Should you replace your brake pads every month, then? No. It's crazy.

People -- not just liberals, but all people -- tend to think like this. Whenever something bad happens, we want to trace in our mind a chain of actions that would not have led to the negative outcome, and then extract a lesson from it. Whenever one experiences a negative outcome, one does try to salvage something from it, and and often that takes the form of a lesson for future behavior.

And that's a human thing. And, in fact, we survived as a species precisely because we did that for 100,000 years. When Yahno the Spear-Thrower was gored by the white-bearded mammoth, and died a horrible, slow, gut-wound death, our ancestors made a note: Do not engage the mammoth from the front, like Yahno did.

However, this type of thinking is best first guess type stuff, and often irrational. For example, another lesson our ancestors might have learned was Never engage a mammoth while wearing a Green Feather in one's hair like Yahno did; green feathers are unlucky, and hated by the Gods of the Hunt. Yahno did wear a green feather; but it's unlikely that had anything to do with his demise. More likely it was that Attack From the Front thing. It was also probably more about him missing with his spear, for that matter.

The problem with all of this is that it indulges the human tendency towards epistemological arrogance, assuming we know all there is to know about a chain of events when we usually don't know jack f'n' shit about it. And it gets far worse when we start talking about politics, because now we're not talking about a personal rule about not wearing a Green Feather in one's hair on hunt day.

Now we're talking about a federal f'n' law, the Safe and Prudent Mammoth Hunting Act of 2012 (aka "Yahno's Law"), which now puts the government in charge of inspecting the coloration of your warrior-feathers.

The human mind runs to two things, which seem contradictory, but aren't contradictory at all: Superstition and science. Superstition is just the first early draft of science. Alchemy became chemistry and astrology became astronomy and searching the Koran for secret messages from God encoded in its text became crytpography.

But we should always remember our first guesses generally tend to superstitions, and not science. Science comes much later, after a lot of thought and a bunch of experiments. The first efforts will tend to be "Don't wear the green feathers, they are taboo" and "Maybe we should just make it a law that you can't use guns to murder people" (um, I think that's already on the books) and "DJs should never, ever call nurses!" and "You should have psychically realized that today, and just today, you should not exceed the speed limit by 5mph but should actually drive 3mph under it. Again, just for today."

This is all, what's the word, total crap. This is all baffled, confused primitives using superstitious thinking to make sense of a big, chaotic world filled with what we call "Random chance" (which is really just shorthand for "casualities too complicated and convoluted for us to trace") by the process of babbling up short, simple statements about How You Could Have Avoided That.

We're the same primitives -- our brains haven't changed all that much -- and while our superstitions take a different form, they're still as stupid as they ever were.

"We need to discuss our gun culture" = "We need to stop offending the gods with all these feathers of unclean colors." Even the language we use for this crap -- "discuss" our gun culture -- is about talking out loud to express our collective tribal concerns over the matter.

You know -- like a prayer chanted at a rain dance.

Anyway, I fear that what I've written here is incoherent. Well, I know what I meant to say, anyway. In my mind it all hangs together beautifully.

But this is a first draft. At some point I'll clean this up and turn my first superstitions into something more cogent and rational.

* British spelling of furor. I'm going for a Klassy kind of blog, you know. Since I'm talking about culture, I think I should start spelling furor as "furore."

Posted by: Ace at 02:12 PM | Comments (389)
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When Pop Stars Meet.

I like the part about killing troops' families, too.

Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives

Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture

Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers

Kill them all slowly and painfully

But Celebrities are too awesome to concern themselves with basic morality and decency. Celebrities are far too busy for the low thoughts of the common man.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (406)
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Evening morons. I'm at work so y'all enjoy your Friday night for me.

Have GPS Devices Taken The Fun Out Of Navigation? Man you gotta know the basics before you rely on the gee whiz electronic gizmos. It's a bit of work to do it old school but it keeps your brain active and it can be a check to see if the electronic gear you are using is running correctly. We truly are screwed as a country if the power goes out and people don't have their apps to do basic stuff for them anymore. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:00 PM | Comments (656)
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This is a good point: Although liberals are laughing at conservatives' frustrations and the very human responses to it, they themselves experienced similar frustrations, and had similar responses to them, after Bush's reelection.

This is an important point: 96% of the reason conservatives are viewed as "weird" or "extreme" or what-have-you is that the media, controlled by the left, covers-up/embargoes their own excesses (and, when forced to report upon such excesses, supply a lot of "context" which justifies these excesses), but of course loves reporting similar conservative statements (without any justifying "context," needless to say).

It hardly needs to be said, at least on the right, that Jonathan Chait was not pilloried as a "hater" for his infamous "Why I Hate George W. Bush" column. Instead, it was celebrated -- among the left, I mean; they didn't broadly report it to the general public -- for how it so daringly captured the real feeling of the left.

Needless to say my own "Why I Hate Barack Hussein Obama" column would not be celebrated as "daring," "honest," "bracing," or "cathartic." It would be a hate crime and a symptom of possibly dangerous impulses.

This is what I hate more than anything else: the hypocrisy, the division of citizens into two classes, the Privileged Class, which has a broad license and range of liberty, and the Disfavored Underclass, whose liberty is sharply restricted.

And they'll call themselves patriots and Sons of the Enlightenment. They're Sons of Gramsci and Sons of Marx and Sons of Mao, not Sons of the Enlightenment.

But when you have the near exclusive right to write your own bio, you can be anything you'd like people to think you are.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (338)
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"In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions - infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them." --- Secretary of State Cordell Hull's response to the "Hull Note", or "Outline for Proposed Basis of Agreement Between the United States and Japan" Japanese notice that negotiations were at an impass, commonly called "The 14-part message." which was to have been delivered prior to the attack* but transcription took too long.

Had he lived to this day, he might never have imagined his own government was also capable of uttering such falsehoods and distortions.

* or that I could screw that up. Thanks Gromit

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:02 AM | Comments (248)
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I wrote about this a while ago, before the election, and somehow I wound up on an old post discussing it again. It's worth noting again:

When Joe Biden endorsed gay marriage in May, he cited Will & Grace as the single-most important driving force in transforming public opinion on the subject. In so doing he actually confirmed the long-standing fear of conservatives—that a coterie of Hollywood elites had undertaken an invidious and utterly successfully propaganda campaign, and had transmuted the cultural majority into a minority. Set aside the substance of the matter and consider the process of it—that is, think of it from the conservative point of view, if you don’t happen to be one. Imagine that large chunks of your entertainment mocked your values and even transformed once-uncontroversial beliefs of yours into a kind of bigotry that might be greeted with revulsion.

YouÂ’d probably be angry, too.

He makes a good case for the fact that Hollywood (= the news and entertainment media) has a monopoly on popular culture messaging — what the PoMos would call “hegemonic discourse.” This is dog-bites-man stuff to conservatives, of course, but even at this late date, it will come as a controversial claim to many liberals. Chait makes a point that usually falls to right-wingers to make: that Hollywood liberals are pleased to take credit for their power to change hearts and minds and therefore the culture when it suits them, but plead otherwise when it doesn’t.

The truth is, they really do have this power, and, as Chait avers, have triumphed completely. It is overstating matters to say that politics are a sideshow conservatives have to console themselves in the face of overwhelming defeat in the culture. But itÂ’s not overstating matters by much. Chait tells of some fascinating research from Brazil and India speaking of televisionÂ’s ability to radically alter social practices, simply by undermining traditional culture with a countercultural message.

More Chait:

For the most part, your television is not consciously attempting to alter your political beliefs. It is mainly transmitting an ethos in which greed is not only bad but the main wellspring of evil, authority figures of all kinds are often untrustworthy, sexual freedom is absolute, and social equality of all kinds is paramount. Within the moral universe of this culture, the merits of these values are self-evident. But to the large bloc of America that does not share this ethos, it looks like a smug, self-perpetuating collusion against them.

Â… This capacity to mold the moral premises of large segments of the public, and especially the youngest and most impressionable elements, may or may not be unfair. What it is undoubtedly is a source of cultural (and hence political) power. Liberals like to believe that our strength derives solely from the natural concordance of the people, that we represent what most Americans believe, or would believe if not for the distorting rightward pull of Fox News and the Koch brothers and the rest. Conservatives surely do benefit from these outposts of power, and most would rather indulge their own populist fantasies than admit it. But they do have a point about one thing: We liberals owe not a small measure of our success to the propaganda campaign of a tiny, disproportionately influential cultural elite.

Drehrer goes on to discuss this further -- the left's complete domination of the imaginative arts -- and is worth reading (particularly for the quotes).

He also quotes another writer, a Christian discussing what might be called the Imagination Gap. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 AM | Comments (473)
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When any other sort of company screws up, that is part of its one-paragraph description forever. If the media writes about, say, Dow Corning, they'll mention the lawsuits against them over the allegedly unsafe silicone breast implant device. And so on.

For some crazy reason, that never seems to happen with the media, huh? Even their natural competitors, other media outlets, observe the Rules of the Cartel and never mention each other's legal problems in later capsule mentions of each other. This Washington Post piece doesn't note the fact that NBC rigged cars to blow up for a Dateline special. And it discusses the suit in terms of humorous derision.

Zimmerman thus didn’t volunteer a racial profile of Martin; he was asked to provide it, a point that the lawsuit makes in colorful fashion: “NBC created this false and defamatory misimpression using the oldest form of yellow journalism: manipulating Zimmerman’s own words, splicing together disparate parts of the recording to create illusions of statements that Zimmerman never actually made.”

...

Following a public uproar over the tape-doctoring, NBC News issued a statement on the matter saying this: “During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers.”

Such contrition didn’t impress the Zimmerman camp. “Only after the defendants’ malicious acts were uncovered and exposed by other media outlets … did defendant NBC ‘apologize’ and terminate some of those in its employ responsible for the yellow journalism identified in this Complaint.” Zimmerman himself never received an apology from the defendants, according to the suit.

The suit doesn’t specify a dollar amount of damages that Zimmerman is seeking. “That’s showmanship,” says James Beasley, the Philadelphia-based lawyer representing Zimmerman in the suit.

It's so funny to think that citizens can hold media organizations accountable for their malicious slanders. What sillyheads! All this "showmanship" and "colorful" filings! Why this man must be some sort of crazy Tea Partier.

And also, a racist.

Posted by: Ace at 06:21 AM | Comments (460)
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Happy Friday.

Two bombs were found and destroyed ahead of Sec. Clinton's visit today to ... Northern Ireland.

Obama's job approval rating continues to climb.

Seattle police spokesman on the first day of legal marijuana sales/use: "The police department believes that, under state law, you may responsibly get baked, order some pizzas and enjoy a Lord of the Rings marathon in the privacy of your own home, if you want to."

NHL negotiations have broken down. Again.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:53 AM | Comments (555)
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