ameander

I've been holding back on this because lately any writing ideas I've had seem to feed into a broader context and I want to work them into something that's a whole lot more than a blog post. Just one thought out of the big mess to entice you: Capitalism is not just, it is merely useful.

On more day-in-the-life matters, some degree of leg stiffness or soreness seems to have become a constant, as I bike more and more. I've not quite convinced myself to call one of the junkyards and sell my car (I've left my "for sale" signs in the windows, but I doubt anyone who sees/hears it in operation will be eager to buy.) Wednesday night I rode down to Best Buy on a whim after work, but determined their hard drives are too expensive (there is abundant evidence a buggy hard drive is behind my increasingly frequent windows and program problems.) So I splurged and got "The Simpsons Game" instead. Lots of fun.

"But I don't wanna go to chocolate bunny hell..."

recipenottopar

First point of the post is that it's best to put your contact lenses in before cooking with red pepper, not after.

So I made a chicken dish for lunch (and dinner, probably to last a couple days). Started out with a sort of chicken and pasta idea, shifted to more a cream-o-mushroom based thing. (I tend to improvise a lot when cooking.) Unfortunately the pasta is now extraneous (and didn't soak in the sauce properly, so it's crunchy.) Should go with some breading or potatoes or just ditch it entirely for next time. Also while I still think a spicy mushroom alfredo is a good idea, way too much red pepper poured out and I didn't have enough of the other sauce makings to thin it out. Still turned out not to bad. Just a bit of revision. Hope I remember it another time.

restaurantbitching

Restored from the brink, where lo these blogging fields have lain fallow for many weeks...

So nothing really new today, just some discourteous and probably unfair thoughts that recur to me sometimes at my job.

*Waiting at the restaurant is your just punishment for having so little diversity in your lifestyle that you actually get hungry at the same time as your neighbors.

*In a corollary, you'll find you're not the only ones who decided to wait for the end of the most popular television shows in the country to get dinner.

*If you hang up and call back twenty minutes later, that's not the same thing as being "on hold for twenty minutes," no matter how angrily you say it.

*If you've got your whole social circle together, and decide to call for take out, the one person in the group who actually suggested the restaurant and has been there before is probably the best person to make the call. The preteen child of the branch of the family who are visiting from out of state and who also is nervous talking to strangers on the phone is probably not the best person to make the call.

Really, the main point of this post is to communicate to the handful of people checking in that, yes, I'll be writing this thing again.

LTE "False Freedom"

The Salt Lake Tribune printed my letter the other day. Of course, they never bothered to send me an acknowledgment or anything. So I wouldn't have known except the people at the BMT unit brought it to my attention when I went in today.

So here's my letter on religious freedom and the FLDS.

User comments are mostly positive.

They edited it only a tiny bit. Their slight reconstruction of the first clause in the first sentence isn't any more or less awkward than mine. And there are a couple other slight tweaks. Also, where I abbreviated FLDS in all instances, they blew one up to the full church name. Though for some reason, in defiance of common writing conventions, they left the abbreviation on the first instance and wrote the full name on the second instance.

petheadache

So, if your beloved dog or cat had a splitting headache, how could you ever know? How could you ever be in a position to do anything about it? "Hey, Fido, need an aspirin?"

Just one of those little things that occasionally pops into my head. Although I'm pretty sure Milky cat isn't suffering any headache right now, given the contented demeanor.

heroesnhitman

Okay, I've left this thing inactive for a little while. So here's something not-too-serious.

First, a pretty cool thread in which people speculate on how various fictional heroes do/ought to finally meet their end: "Theories: How Does Your Favorite Genre Hero Die?"

Second, one that makes you laugh a little, then laugh a little more, then laugh a lot more. Sorry, it's a lol-monkey pic.

gettinurgun

Current Listening: Ihsahn, The Adversary

So as I was riding home from the hospital yesterday (cancer-free at last, with hope), I noted the billboards about the upcoming Crossroads of the West gun show on April 19-20. Of course they have a gun show on April 19, who wouldn't? Ask any armchair-patriot pseudo-revolutionary and he'll tell you the great importance of that date, because an average of one Patriot-Movement-endorsed historical event per century happened then (Boston Tea Party, Waco, Ruby Ridge). So holding a gun show then helps pull in extra buyers and sellers and makes a bit more money.

So why mention Ihsahn, my favorite-of-the-moment musician? Somehow the themes of the album merge with my political thoughts and got me to crawl over to the computer and post this. I believe in the union of seeming opposites and veneration of rebellion that underlies post-satanic thought (like many other things, satanism is useless except for the kind of person you can become once you grow out of it; bye-bye high school.)

What's this to do with politics? I've long felt that there really is no conflict between libertarianism and socialism. The illusion of conflict arises when libertarians use the language of conservatism (Patriot Movement), or socialists use the language of totalitarianism (Soviet communism). Capitalist versus communist may have been the driving conflict of the mid- to late-20th century, but look around, all the smart countries have mixed economies (including the U.S.) Only fanatical purists bitch about the liberalized market economies or the nefariousness of social programs.

In the last couple decades, we've seen the rise of the information economy and the open-source movement. Manufacturing costs have decreased, and increasingly information has become the primary component of value. In time, much of manufacturing could become a home industry, and information will be the only thing valued, and that will be highly structured by the rising open-source movement. The scarcities that underlie 20th century economics will not be any more relevant in the late 21st and 22nd centuries than those of 16th century economics are now, new economic issues will breed new political problems and new approaches to solutions, and capitalism and communism will be left as museum pieces. The asymptotic result of all this is a post-scarcity civilization, though that is about equal to a post-singularity civilization in its probability of being entirely wishful thinking.

conspiranoid

Conspiracy theories are a crutch for those who are so terrified of the idea the world is ruled by no one, they take comfort in the hope that at least the world is ruled by evil. Really they are a sign of authoritarian thinking. Conspiracy theories are the social/historical/political manifestation of the same errors in thought behind creationism and Soviet-communist-style command economies: that complex events cannot simply unfold or evolve, but must be put in order by a commanding intelligence.

This post dedicated to the numerous cranks of various political persuasions who have filled my email inbox over the years.

I'm writing this from a semi-stable region of consciousness between adequate pain control and drug-induced fogginess.

It's been two days since my stem cell infusion, since Day 0. A few of the nurses and techs said something interesting that day, "happy birthday."
It's oddly appropriate if you think about it.
I have had a life-threatening illness. In order to treat it, we have had to resort to a heavy-handed treatment, a treatment that will kill you. The stem cell transplant enables life to renew, enables health to be restored at all.

When this is done, I will have undergone technological death and resurrection; born again by the power of science.