No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.
That’s from the second letter Paul wrote to Timothy: 2 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 4. Nice to know that First Command, purveyor of life insurance to our men and women in uniform since 1958, and now (thanks to deregulation) a full-service bank that understands the challenges of the military lifestyle, has taken Scripture to heart. Check out the terms of a basic checking account where a private could stash her paycheck:
First Checking Account
- A basic transaction account with no minimum balance requirement.
- Non-interest bearing.
- Avoid the service charge by having their full pay direct deposited into their First Account.
- May write an unlimited number of checks; however, only the first 10 per statement cycle are free. Subsequent checks are $0.50 each.
- First 3 ATM withdrawals per statement cycle incur no charge from First Command Bank; subsequent withdrawals are $1.50 each. (May be subject to additional charge by ATM owner.)
- ATM Rebates limited to 3 transactions. See ATM card details for more information.
- Overdraft protection of $250 is automatically assigned.
- Opening deposit—$25.00
- Monthly service charge—$3.00 any month full pay is not direct deposited.
That’d be all of her paycheck, mind. Directly deposited. But hey: that’s pretty much standard issue for a cheap-ass, ground-level, screw the plebes who aren’t paying attention checking account; college students get to sign up for them every day. Nah, skimble has the goods on First Command’s real money-maker:
If you know anything about mutual funds, you may be familiar with the load, or sales charge, that you must pay for investing in the fund. Two to eight-and-a-half percent is a range of fairly common initial “front-end” loads. But military personnel are being slapped with loads of fifty percent on their savings for retirement…
Well, hey. It’s a variation on cheap-labor conservativism: if you find you can’t cut the rate you pay for labor when all is said and done, you can at least let a crony skim some of the fat. Right?
Credit where credit is due: when a veteran gets soaked by one of those publish-your-own-book deals, First Command will let him place a a Bedside Reading notice. To help move some units.
Looking forward to collecting what would be recollected later.
How could I have forgotten where to find that marginal note? Because I am a dolt, that’s how.
(I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no—if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. But we are not “different”! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am—it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That’s better, said Ada.)
Context is everything (“p. 120. parlez pour vous: speak for yourself,” offers Vivian Darkbloom). —Speaking of which, I shall now remedy the grave disservice of failing to note the delicious synchrony of wood s lot marking Diane di Prima’s birthday scant days after I picked up Memoirs of a Beatnik on a (prurient) whim. There’s frequent delicious synchronies to be found at wood s lot; this is but the latest, which leads us to di Prima’s website, and leads me to add One Too Like Thee to my list of Phantom Books to be Tripped Over Someday if I’m Lucky. (And one does get lucky: why, look! From a year-old number of the Nutmeg Point District Mail:
UNHISTORY AT LAST!
Tor Books will publish Adventures in Unhistory. The last book published during Avram Davidson’s lifetime will once again be available for the edification and pleasure of readers. Not a month goes by but your editor receives multiple inquries from would-be readers, collectors, librarians, and even booksellers seeking what has become a genuine rara avis among recently published books.
Further details, including publication date, will be announced as they become known.
(And though said details have yet to forthcome, this mere hint of an announcement is itself enough to kindle hope in a breast long since inured to stoney disappointment. My breath is yet bated, if not wholly held.)
So: to repair this divarication, I’ll return for a moment to Ada, or Ardor and note an instance of prior art, to be found on p. 86 (“strapontin: folding seat in front,” offers Darkbloom) of the Vintage International trade paperback edition:
Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours. Ada mounted it, uttered a yelp of pain, almost fell off, googled, recovered—and the rear tire burst with a comic bang.
Well. Okay. Maybe not. But still.
Live from Little Beirut.
Aaron, the Demented Lawyer, fights the good fight. Here’s his play-by-play of the President’s recent visit to Little Beirut: who got arrested, and how, and why. (Upshot? Precious few. Downside? Still brutal, still needless, still overly confrontational. Keep those feet on the sidewalk, citizen!) Emma Goldman has more, plus photos, and a link to the blog maintained by Shut Up O’Reilly’s old stomping grounds; she also tells you why it’s so cheesy to breeze into town for a $25K-a-plate fundraiser and stiff the 8% unemployed city with a $200,000 bill. (Do note the Democrat has paid up; the Republican has yet to return the city’s calls.) —The nut graf of it all, as it were:
I guess I don’t really know what to make of all this, except to say that—again—two thirds of the media told a story that didn’t happen to sell fear and anger for profit. This is a city in which something like 75% of the population voted for Gore (that stat comes from memory from The Emerging Democratic Majority). The folks at the protest were exercising their right to tell their president—their president—what they thought of his policies. They were overwhelmingly telling him his priorities were wrong and that he’d better serve the people better. But what do the local media show? The chilling tale of radicals barely kept in check while defiling the good name of the republic. Too bad we can’t vote them out of office.
If you wanted to put some money where it would do some good, you might think nationally, and consider MoveOn.org’s million dollars for democracy; you might think locally. Or you might decide to moon the people’s White House. Act accordingly.
I (sometimes) write like a girl!
or, Shameless self-promotion.
It’s a fun little tool, the Gender Genie. Rich (of Brain Squeezings) took the algorithm developed by by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict an author’s gender, and turned it into a webapp (available here, but also here). (The algorithm itself is almost embarrassingly simple.)
Results? When I write about webcomics and cartoonists, I’m a girl. When I reminisce about college (and not so much Robyn Hitchcock), I’m a girl. When I rant, though, about war or the aftereffects of war (as for instances), I’m a guy. Unless I’m ranting about Ann Coulter, in which case I’m (just barely) a girl. But my fiction—my art; the word games nearest and dearest my heart—well, I’m a guy. Pretty much astoundingly so.
The algorithm tries (simply) to calculate the “involvedness” and “informationalness” of a text. Women, you see, write involvedly—texts that show interaction between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader; men, on the other hand, tend to indicate or specify the things they write about. (I’m not entirely certain why that’s an other hand, but I’m summarizing a paper I’ve only just skimmed, and being cheeky to boot.) The basic flags are based on statistical analyses of texts drawn from the British National Corpus—texts from the BNC have already been labeled for genre, and each word is tagged as belonging to one of their recognized 76 parts of speech. 123 male documents—excuse me, texts generated by men—and 123 texts generated by women were used; these included 179 nonfiction pieces, drawn from the realms of natural science, applied science, social science, world affairs, commerce, the arts, belief/thought, and leisure. Average length was just above 42,000 words, for a total of 25 million words; no single author wrote more than six of the 246 texts.
[Ed. note— My summary of the number of documents chosen is staggeringly wrong, as anyone who paused and took up a calculator could easily see. Please open the comments thread for further discussion by those more numerate than myself. The theory that follows, then, does not obtain as a criticism of the assumptions underlying the algorithm, which nonetheless continues not to live up to projections. Ah, well.]
In other words, I don’t doubt the analysis Koppel and Argamon performed is an accurate enough description of 25 million words of British English as it was used in the 20th century—reflecting the broad usage patterns of male and female speakers and writers. —But you’d think maybe something a little less narrowly focussed might be studied before proclaiming it a universal prescriptor. Eh?
There’s also the fact that correlations seem to be ignored utterly. It’s gender that’s the determinant, not the intended audience, not the school of writing, not the function to which it will be put. As a for instance: presume that texts written in the fields of natural science, applied science and commerce all require a higher degree than average of specificity, indicativeness, informativity. (A safe enough presumption.) Further presume, as one notes that the texts are drawn from those written or spoken in British English in the 20th century, that the sometimes extreme gender prejudice of that benighted age has resulted in the majority of those more specific, indicative, informational texts having been written by men—because women were disproportionately denied opportunities to advance in the fields of natural science, applied science, or commerce; their informativity isn’t represented in the sample not because they were women, but because they were Shakespeare’s sisters. —It’s far from settled, but that no attempt is made to correct for this sort of bias makes the prescriptive power of the algorithm and its underlying assumptions highly suspect. When coupled with the relatively tiny, focussed sample, it’s pretty much useless.
After all, my pieces on webcomics are about groups and relationships and schools of cartoonists, and so, involved; the bit on college is a memoir, and so personal, and so vague and unspecific and relational; political rants need to be specific and, one would hope, full of informativity (unless, it seems, they’re about Ann Coulter); and my fiction—at least, the two pieces cited, which, though one is first person and one is third person, both try for a specific, declarative, one doesn’t want to say clear or lucid or limpid or muscular (gack) style, but—well. Fiction is fiction.
Or is what’s between our legs more important to the shapes our words might take than the purposes to which we intend to put them?
(Overall, the Gender Genie’s running 60/40 in favor of Bzzt! I’m sorry. Try again—though I hasten to point out it’s an unscientific, self-reporting survey. Additional data points: the Spouse writes like a girl—even when she’s writing about strippers. Hmm.)
Democracy in action.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four
In that light, then, marvel at the audacious beauty, the effrontery, the sheer, clueless chutzpah of the Quick Vote poll question on display as of 20.55 Pacific time, 19 August 2003, at The Official Re-election Site for President George W. Bush:
How many working families are benefiting from President Bush’s Jobs and Growth Act?
- 12 million
- 23 million
- 34 million
- 18 million
But! Take heart!
That’s why they can never hope to win. Chaos sneaks in every time. They can cover the world with cameras, but they can’t stop the guys in the monitor rooms from jerking off or playing the fifteenth sequel to Doom for the hundredth time. Total bloody chaos. Christ.
—Grant Morrison, The Invisibles
Because, at 20.56 Pacific Time, 19 August 2003, when you tried to vote (for 12 million) just to see what would happen, this is what you got.
(Holy crap! They’ve got W Stuff! And a GeorgeWBushStore.com! With Interstate W’04 stuff! All put together by The Spalding Group! Which is part of English Emprise! Who’ve been at this for a while! Who also supported our troops, all grass-roots like! Only I guess they don’t support him so much anymore! Chaos!)
Plus c’est la meme chose.
Gail Armstrong is seeking some little comfort. And so I went looking for that marginal note Ada makes to Van: “If we all remembered the same way, we would not be different people,” I think it goes, but I can’t find it, not tonight; it’s a terribly frustrating book, after all—appalling, heartbreaking, beautiful, vicious. This is what it offered up, tonight, instead:
An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”
See? Tedious. Pedantic. Ferocious. Utterly necessary. But ultimately useless. Damn!
So instead I pick up one of my recent obsessions, Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, picked up at Powell’s for a song, and I flip to the passage that first caught my eye:
We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.
The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we had lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.
Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene yet. The affluent post-Korean–war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.
And it’s not that the disaffected we will always have with us, and it’s not that these grim ugly battles have always been fought and look! We’ve largely come out okay. Those are crap lessons, New Age pablum, mealy morals for people who don’t want to listen to older, colder fairy tales. —No, it’s the sharp shock of deja vu: I know this place, though I have never been here before. It’s a backstage pass; a Golden Ticket. It isn’t History, it’s a story you feel in your bones. The world sits up and opens its dead eyes and tells you something three times, and the hairs on your chin stand up. Diane di Prima’s glued to the radio, paranoid, listening as Eisenhower kicks Stevenson’s ass, and I’m on a futon in a second-floor bedroom of a ratty unheated house in Boston watching the bombs fall on Iraq for the first time, and maybe this doesn’t ring true for you at all, but that’s okay, because if we all remembered it the same way, we wouldn’t be different people. Would we?
Comfort. —We all need comfort, but suddenly I’m thinking of Ann, so very tired, who lay down in the Martian snow to die, and then Simon came up out of nowhere and kicked her helmet and turned her suit’s heater back on, dragging her back to the world as it was, as it is, and she kept asking him why, why he wouldn’t just leave her alone and all he could say was because, because, because. It’s not that sort of comfort, where you’re so tired of fighting you just lie down and wait till you stop shivering. (Though they do say freezing to death is a comfortable way to go. —They also say that about drowning.)
Where do we turn for comfort, then? Sometimes I turn to David Chess:
Last year I told y’all about how in my vanished youth I used to go square dancing every few weeks with a certain bunch of people, to a certain caller, and how that caller had had this great handsome house big enough for three or four squares, and I wondered if he still had it? Well over the weekend we went across the river and square danced with roughly those same people, to exactly that caller, in that same house.
A house where some of my fondest childhood memories were formed, and a house I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was just the same, and completely different. Same woods, same rooms, same chairs and benches, same stairs down to the bedrooms downstairs, same livingroom big enough for two squares, and a posible third over in the alcove. But not as enormous as when I was little, not as mysterious, not as filled with that amazing unconscious kid-sense of being cupped in the warm palm of the universe, with everything being taken care of for you by other people, and nothing to do but dance and sing and run around shouting.
It was great fun, and (but) I was all melancholy all night after we got home.
What a world.
Because the trick of it, of course, is that you can’t just order up one of these moments, these bridges and towers, whenever you suddenly need one. You have to have built them out of the stuff you’ve got lying around, or picked up from what somebody else made once, or found, and told you about in a book or a conversation or a song, and so you tucked it away in your pocket and forgot about it until, and you have to have left them just scattered haphazardly across the floor of your memory, and you can’t ever stop; you never reach a moment when there’s finally enough. You have to keep building them and scattering them like bread crumbs, these booby traps benign and otherwise you stumble over when you least expect them but most need them, and suddenly oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
What a world.
How I got to be where I am at the moment.
¡Journalista! is a daily must-read during the week. Dirk Deppey regularly pulls together an entertaingly varied assortment of comics-industry and comics-related news items, with occasional flights into spot-on if cantankerous analysis; just the thing for someone too terribly lazy to keep himself on top of The Comics Journal boards and Comicon.com’s boards and the Pulse and Talkaboutcomics.com and Comixpedia and Sequential Tart and all the other sites I’m leaving out, God knows. (To say nothing of the ever-burgeoning comics blogosphere.) This morning, in addition to a great John Barber rant I’d missed the first time out, Dirk pointed out an article from my own backyard: the Portland Tribune profiled Craig Thompson, whose Blankets is not to be missed. In the profile, Thompson mentions in an off-hand fashion the three books his father has read: “a book by Jerry Falwell about the economy in the apocalypse; Rush Limbaugh’s autobiography, the first one; and the Promise Keepers manual.” Those last two didn’t really engage me—I mean, Rush, you know? And if you’ve seen one stadium full of men in Tommy Hellfighter T-shirts, you’ve seen them all. But the first: Jerry Falwell on economics during the Tribulation? Damn.That’s one of those must-haves for the library, you know?
Unfortunately, some desultory coffee-break Googling (and Amazoning, Powellsing, and aLibrising) failed to turn up a likely candidate. However: I did turn up this interesting-looking essay on the politics of Christian domination—to be dug into later; it seems to speak nicely to this post over at Body and Soul—and Frontline’s site for its show on apocalyptic belief in the Western world, which includes a page on Hal Lindsey and his coattail riders (among which is numbered, of course, good ol’ Jack Van Impe), as well as some much-need historical perspective: Cliff’s Notes backgrounders on the Millerites, the Great Disappointment, and John Darby’s dispensationalism—which features a scrummy-looking chart by Charles Larkin that bounced me through Making Light to the Planet Kolob, from which hasty retreat was beaten back to the Museum of Jurassic Technology—and would you look at the time? So I rounded it off with a dose of Apocamon, Patrick Farley’s manga-bright retelling of the Revelation of St. John the Devine. (Coming soon—Part 3: Attack of the Locusts.) Gotta get ’em all!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a little dizzy.
PROM-1 (AP bounding fragmentation mine, steel casing, former Yugoslavia).
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE MINE
The PROM-1 is a circular AP bounding fragmentation mine with a body made of forged steel. There is a threaded fuze well in the centre on the top of the mine, in which the UPROM-1 external fuze is screwed into. The base of the mine is secured to the bottom of the mine body with five screws. The mine body is pre-fragmented inside. The main explosive charge is made of cast Trotil in earlier models and Hexolite in later models. The propelling charge is made of 3 g. of black powder and is filled into a metal tube located through the centre of the main charge. An internal fuze is located offset inside the mine body. It is initiated by a wire which is attached to the lower side of the fuze and secured to the base of the mine. The fuze is built into the mine at the factory and is not to be removed. The external UPROM-1 fuze is similar to the UPMR-3. The difference is that the UPMR-3 doesn’t have a built in initiation capsule while the UPROM-1 has. The PROM-1 is delivered with two rolls of trip wire, which are 16 m long and covered with polyvinyl-chloride plastic. A hook is fastened in each end of the trip wires for attachment to the fuze and anchor. Although the PROM-1 only comes with two trip wires, it can be set up with up to six trip wires. On the upper side of the UPROM-1 is a carrier on which the pressure star is located. On the top of the carrier is a split ring for connection to trip wires. Under the pressure star is a fuze carrier on which the safety clip is attached by means of a puller. When the puller is down the safety clip is locked and cannot be removed. When the puller is in the horizontal position the safety clip is free to be pulled out. The pressure star carrier is shaped like a rod and has a hole through the end to attach the trip wire split ring. The pressure star has four arms which are directed upwards. In the middle is a hole to insert the pressure star carrier. The mine is normally buried with only the pressure star and the star carrier exposed above the ground.
METHOD OF OPERATION
Required pull of the trip or pressure on the pressure star, pushes an internal cylinder in the fuze down until the retaining balls fall out, releasing the spring loaded striker which strikes the ignition capsule which in turn fires the propelling charge. This creates a pressure between the base and the mine body. The screws on the bottom of the mine breaks and the mine body is thrown upwards until it reaches the end of the anchor wire. The length of the anchor wire is 0,7-0,8 m on older versions and 0,2-0,3 m on newer versions. When the anchor wire becomes tight the spring loaded striker is released and fires the detonator which in turn fires the booster and the main charge.
NEUTRALISING
Trace both ends of the trip wire. Remove the trip wire clip from the mine or cut the wire. Insert safety clip with the puller in the horizontal position into the bed of the fuze. Lock it by lowing the puller down. If a safety clip is not available, a 2 mm wire or nail can be inserted into the hole of the safety clip carrier.
DISARMING
Neutralise the mine. Remove fuze from the mine body.
REMARKS
Lethal radius is 40 m and hazardous radius is 50 m.
Just in case, you know, you ever came across a dark steel cylinder 26 cm tall with some sharp spines on one end, attached to a couple of trip wires, and you were wondering how to keep it from killing you. You’re most likely to run into one in Angola (“the greatest concentration of landmines in the world,” says the BBC, citing some 15 million mines; other sources say anywhere from 6 million to 20 million; 145 of them went off last year, down from 339 in 2001. “Previous attempts at peace did not last, and crime is still widespread,” warns Lonely Planet Angola. “Kidnapping, car-jacking and robbery continue to put foreign travelers at risk. The UK, US and Australian governments are still warning against travel to this hopeful but volatile nation. Stay tuned”)—but the PROM-1’s a popular little number: they’re also found in Mozambique, Iraq, and of course throughout the former Yugoslavia, their country of origin. —The Landmines Database was found via Futurismic, whose permalinks aren’t working for the day in question; “If not for the subject matter, you’d think they were assembly instructions for a Target bookshelf,” says poster Jeremy Lyon. And what blog post on landmines from a Yank still peaceably sipping his morning coffee would be complete without the requisite list of our compatriots and fellow travellers?
Bandwaggonry.
I’m on board—are you? (Yes, mine is an involuted joke. Referencing this, and this [by way of this].) —And now I’m on to something else. (For the record, akashic or otherwise: “FAIR and Balanced, Deceased.”)
Light synthesis.
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
—Karl Kraus
Those days I don’t want to be Avram Davidson when I grow up, I want to be Kenneth Hite. A prolific author, editor, and designer in the benighted backwater of the gaming industry, his Suppressed Transmissions columns are the ne plus ultra for parahistorical High Weirdness. They are available online through the auspices of Steve Jackson’s Pyramid magazine, and access to five years’ worth of Hite archives is itself worth the $20 price of admission. He recently (okay, back in May; I’ve been busy) celebrated his 200th column with a boggling stunt: using little more than chutzpah and silly string, he tied together all two hundred of his columns—reality quakes, Roswellian interventions, Florentine superheroes, timetravelling supercops, Lovecraftian glosses, steam-powered airship empires, qlippothic ultraterrestrials, paramilitary Shakespearean dramaturgy, Fortean bestiaries, Clio’s nightmares, and the occasional UFO—into a monstrously encyclopedic timeline, the backbone continuity of the best Out There conspiracythink soap opera comic book epic that never was. A taste, a generous (if scattershot) taste:
1588: Another major nexus battle, as MI-∞ throws all its resources including a secretly resurrected Arthur and a dramaturgical inversion ritual into defeating the Spanish Armada in all timelines. Various Armadas receive Reptoid, Sphinx, or ZSS aid. A covert Strike Force Chronos team covers Dee’s back, keeping the Lemurians, the nanotech swarms, and less categorizable things at bay. During the commotion, Spring-Heeled Jack slips into reality.
1776: Masonic Civil War erupts between the Washington and Weishaupt factions. The Reptoid-backed Weishaupt faction mounts an internal coup against Dee that replaces MI-∞ with the Occult Empire. During the struggle, the RCS sets up Reality Cornwallis as a fallback, but the American Templars soak 1776 in mythic energies from their limitless Arcadian cornucopia.
1780: It is a dark time for the rebel alliance; the Occult Empire shrouds the skies of America. An elite Strike Force Chronos team flies through a trench in reality to remove the Occult Empire before it existed, leaving only an acausal eclipse over New England on May 19.
1859: To contain Dixie, Argus is forced to confirm MI-∞ agent of influence Joshua Norton as Emperor of America. The planet Vulcan enters our reality, setting off a cosmic struggle between the Sphinxes and MI-∞ over its existence; the battle spreads back in time to spark a covert space race, remove the Earth from Saturn’s orbit, and launch Monstrator.
1909: Weak between two huge impacts, reality folds back to the 1854 splashback under a Futurist assault eventually contained by Rosicrucian art historians.
1938: An astral Martian invasion nearly breaks into our reality through newly-opened Kirlian space, but is contained at the last minute inside Orson Welles’ radio broadcast. The Occult Empire makes a comeback bid by creating the Waste Land in Cleveland, but Eliot Ness’ myth is too strong for it. In the chaos, the Kriegsmarine and Ahnenerbe “stake out” an eimically-secure fastness in Neuschwabenland for the Antarctic Space Nazi Refuge.
2000: Probably unrelated to the bike controversy, a planetary alignment causes a catastrophic Pole Shift; history restored from backup on January 1, 2001. American Presidential election files corrupted in restore, which takes four tries to get right.
If you’re not up for reading them online, then I’ll point you to the first two collections of his columns, available directly from the publisher. Hie thee hence, and here endeth the plug.
Eschaton immanentize!
Via Atrios, we learn that Jack Van Impe (of the Jack Van Impe Ministries) is claiming to have drafted an End Times “outline” at the behest of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Those interested in what it might look like are invited to peruse this wonderful map, which does its damndest to update Late Great Cold War geopolitical apocalyptics for the current post–New-World-Order times, here after the end of history. (There’s also this beautiful poster image, suitable for a PowerPoint presentation.) —And can I just at this point tell you that one of my heroes is Sharon, as played by Mimi Rogers, in those last shattering moments of Michael Tolkin’s apocalypso verité, The Rapture?
Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please:
Spiders 3.5 is up and running. —Mirrored here, if you’re getting sluggish downloads or 503s at the main e-sheep site.
The fight my dog is in.
So I commented on the whole gay Episcopalian bishop thing the other day by saying that I didn’t really have a dog in that fight, but, and Kevin came along and (gently, gently) remonstrated me by pointing out I had the same dog in the fight as any other decent human being would, and I kinda nodded my head and went along with it even though it didn’t feel quite right. And some of that has to do with the fact that I wasn’t raised Episcopalian—we bounced back and forth between Methodists and Presbyterians growing up—and some of that has to do with the fact that my religion as it stands (which would be, what? my beliefs? my cosmology? my moral grounding? my ethical code? my ritualistic practices? my celebrations?) is best described as “other”: lapsed neo-pagan doesn’t quite cut it, and spiritualist atheist and a-anthropic deist are too cheeky to do much good. To say nothing of the fact that, whatever queerness bends the sexual proclivities of the Spouse and myself, we’re rather comfortably ensconced in the lap of heterosexual privilege. So: yeah, gay bishop confirmed, bigots routed for the nonce, good show, but.
Then up came Roz Kaveny, who articulated precisely which fight I’d rather were kicking up dust right now:
The question is not—should the Christian churches split over the question of allowing a few LGBT people to be clergy? The question is, when are the churches going to humble themselves in abject shame for their endless crimes against gay people?
Added bonus: gummitch, in comments, links to a couple of kick-ass Real Live Preacher posts on this subject, which are required reading: the second is a shredding exegesis of the Scripture cited by homophobic bigots, but the first—oh, my Lord, the first—
There, do you see the iron furnace door, gaping open? Do you see the roaring flames? Do you see the huge man with glistening muscles, covered with soot? Do you see him feeding the fire as fast as can with his massive, scooped shovel?
He feeds these flames with the bible, with every book, chapter, and verse that American Christians must burn to support our bloated lifestyles, our selfishness, our materialism, our love of power, our neglect of the poor, our support of injustice, our nationalism, and our pride.
See how frantically he works? Time is short, and he has much to burn. The prophets, the Shema, whole sections of Matthew, most of Luke, the entire book of James. Your blessed 10 commandments? Why would you want to post them on courtroom walls when you’ve burned them in your own cellar?
Do you see? DO YOU SEE? Do you see how we rip, tear, and burn scripture to justify our lives?
The heat from this cursed furnace rises up and warms the complacent worshippers in the pews above. The soot from the fire blackens our stained glass so that we may not see out and no one wants to see in.
Do you smell the reek of this injustice? It is a stink in the nostrils of the very living God. We are dressed in beautiful clothes and we wear pretty smiles, but we stink of this blasphemous holocaust.
Every church in America has a cellar like this. We must shovel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, because every chapter and book we ignore must be burned to warm our comfy pews.
And you come to me with two little scraps of scripture to justify your persecution of God’s children?
Sit down Christian. Sit down and be you silent.
My hat’s off to you, Preacher. (And that image of the soot-covered shoveler does rather wonderful things, cognitively speaking, to the image of conservative Episcopalians smearing their foreheads with ashes in their grief. Doesn’t it?)
—In the interests of fair play, and to change the topic abruptly, I’ll point to this alarmingly good piece of news from Alabama:
The Christian Coalition of America endorsed Riley’s tax plan Wednesday, saying it represents social and economic justice for Alabama. Coalition President Roberta Combs called the plan “visionary and courageous.”
“I think this is a good plan and I think people of faith need to know about the plan,” Combs said.
This doing the right thing stuff could get to be an epidemic.
Shibboleths.
Kevin Drum has a good, if snarky, policy:
Personally, I would refuse to be baited by the kind of person who refers to paper notes as “fiat currency,” but hey—it’s Eugene’s blog and he can do what he likes.
“Fiat currency” is one of those buzz words—buzz terms, I suppose—that does, indeed, signal a certain je ne sais quois. The person using it is being persnicketily specific, to the point of spoiling for a fight: usually, about the gold standard. (Which would you rather have in your bank account: gold, or green cheese?) —Which reminds me of “valuta” (which seems much less buzzy these days), a term I recall from that portion of my youth spent poring over the pages of Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe, trying to glean The Truth. It’s sort of the obverse of fiat currency—rather than value imposed by government fiat, it’s value demanded by citizen fiat, usually that of cranky old men convinced the gummint’s stealing ’em blind. (They bite down on the gold coins you give them—they know the taste of gold, you see.) They also tend to refer to “the franchise”—at least, the cranky old men in my mind’s eye do, the ones so heavily influenced by Heinlein, and I really should stop making fun: while they might have quaint ideas about valuation, and a curious semantic failure when it comes to how government works, and for whom, they would be raising holy hell about crap like this, and holy hell is precisely what we need, right now. Of course, they’d turn right around and try to limit the franchise to those who can solve quadratic equations, or who own real property in fee simple, or give you a number of votes in proportion to the amount you’ve paid in taxes, but that’s a fight we can pick once we’re done putting a stop to this black-box nonsense.
There’s another phrase set rattling by this late-night influx of cranky old men with gold under their mattresses: “blood and treasure.” At first glance, it feels and smells like another one of those cranky old men shibboleths: blood and treasure, what we have paid and spilt, a measure of what’s owed to us. It’s got a nice Founding Fathers ring to it—the Monroe Doctrine, of course:
The political system of the allied powers is essentially different, in this respect, from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments. And to the defence of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted.
Which most likely cribbed it from John Adams:
July 1776 will be the most memorable Epoch in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, this time forward, forever more.
You will think me transported with enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost US to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet through all the Gloom, I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see the End is more than worth all the means. And that Posterity will triumph in those days of transaction, even though we should rue it…which I trust in G-d we shall not.
Or maybe George Washington:
Shall a few designing men, for their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing at the expense of so much time, blood, and treasure? And shall we at last become victims of our own lust of gain?
What’s weird, and a little spooky, to me is that of all the references to “blood and treasure” that Google can find—7,930, as of 10.30 pm or so, Pacific Daylight Savings Time, August 6, 2003—3,250 of them also include the word “Iraq.” Almost half. —And while it’s not that surprising that almost half the references to blood and treasure found on the internet would refer to by far the largest and most active theatre of war in the internet age, and more than a few of those references are the sort of true-blue conservative, libertarian, isolationist, anti-imperialist, anti-preëmptive war stuff you’d expect from these cranky old men, still: there’s Colin Powell, referring to the price in blood and the price in treasure paid by the members of the Coalition of the Willing; there’s Richard Armitage, talking about the expenditure of blood and treasure; there’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking about how it was us that put blood and treasure on the line for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Perhaps there’s something in the water?
Of course, all of this blood and treasure makes me think of pirates. Which is maybe not the image this meme ought to conjure for maximum effectiveness in this particular case, but I’m a lost cause. (Blood? Treasure? Isn’t it more honest to make your purchases as you go, with sweat and valuta?) Thinking of pirates, of course, makes me think of Johnny Depp, and would you look how far afield I’ve strayed?
I should maybe just point you to this book on the art of money me and the Spouse picked up the other night. It’s true: American currency is ugly; the other currencies of the world are far more beautiful. More beautiful, even, than buttery, auric gold. —If we paid them with pretty fiat currency, that comes in rainbow colors and has those shiny anti-counterfeit strips, maybe then those cranky old men would stop writing letters to the editor?
Nah. The 7-11 would still refuse to take anything higher than a twenty. Where’s the justice, I ask? Where?
In your face, Fred Barnes.
Um. I mean. Not that I’m Episcopalian or anything, so it’s not like I actually had much of a dog in this fight—but how can decent folk not feel a surge of triumph when such transparent smear tactics are repudiated, and the good guy ends up winning?
And yet, I’m still not thrilled at the idea of President Dean.
From this week’s Doonesbury FAQ—
What’s up with Trudeau running a big Howard Dean campaign the last few weeks. Is Trudeau in the tank? —M. Mahoney, Sacramento, CA
Damn near. Here’s the skinny for full-disclosure buffs: GBT and Dr. Dean were childhood buddies, having first met at summer camp. During a camp wrestling tournament, the puny Trudeau pinned the athletic Dean twice, an humiliation (attention, biographers) that has haunted Dean ever since. After attending Yale together, the two lost track of one another until Dean became governor of Vermont and told a reporter that he’d developed his sense of humor hanging out with Trudeau. Trudeau wrote him to protest, because during his teenage years, GBT didn’t actually have a sense of humor. This may explain why reporters don’t think Dean has one, either. Actually he does, at least around Trudeau, so GBT gave him $2000 (maxing out early) on the promise of relief from daily Dean-For-America fundraising spam, a promise that his friend has yet to make good on. Dean has also refused to soften his position on gun control, drug reform, or any other issue of importance to GBT, so a lot of good it’s done.
Which is apparently the second source NewsMax relied on when it proclaimed that Howard Dean is the media-elite darling:
Dean is “the media’s favorite long shot for president” and enjoys an “adoring national press,” confirms Editor & Publisher magazine. Why? Because he loathes President Bush even more than his rivals do and attacks him on everything possible: Operation Iraqi Freedom, tax relief, education reform, national defense…
He has more in common with the Bush administration than he’d like to admit, however, notably the secrecy he so hypocritically attacks. The frequently out-of-state guv refused to reveal his campaign trips on his schedule. It took a lawsuit filed by local yokel newspapers and an order by the Vermont Supreme Court to force him to make public his trips campaigning for the White House.
By the way, here’s the inside story of why Bush-hating cartoonist Garry Trudeau gave Dean extra publicity in “Doonesbury”: The two are longtime friends who met at summer camp when they were 13, a fact Trudeau fails to disclose in his free plugs.
Of course, Dean and Trudeau attended Yale at the same time as President Bush. Small network, ain’t it?
