scottyneedslesspower

The future might be like Star Trek after all.

Actually if you read the thing, "more feasible" means instead of needing a large planet's worth of hypothetical exotic matter they've never detected, they'd only need 30kg. And "working on building one" means trying to detect the hypothetical phenomenon on extremely small scales.

I'd mostly written off FTL, but hey if they think it's worth a shot, go for it. Solving the "infinite energy to accellerate to c" thing doesn't solve the time paradox thing where FTL would allow information to be sent to the past. Let's-try-it-and-see-if-causality-itself-breaks might be a most recklessly awesome future experiment.

Of course, FTL is one of the things that might make the aliens step in and say, "okay, NOW you people might be a problem."
klaatu barrada nikto

hotdogs

I think a more serious issue is, if Chick-Fil-A employees wanted to donate to political issues (on any side of any issue), it would take many thousands of them seriously tightening their belts to just barely match the influence their big boss can donate as a trivial gesture with no impact on his living. His wealth is only possible because of them, but his voice makes theirs irrelevant.

If you're gonna buy mall fast food, go to Hot Dog On A Stick which is owned by its employees.

sampleselfdoubt

Stumbling bleary half conscience-ness.
I am just aware enough to sense I haven't really Woken Up.
The words "still a good person" sound like hollow excuses.

Aren't I too not-Catholic for Catholic guilt?
The word "catholic" is said to mean "universal."

crucialmovement

I don't get why so many people (most of the crowd) go to rock or metal shows and just stand so still. Like drinking Pabst in a dive bar makes them too cool for this shit. If you wanted to just stare at something while loud music played in the background, you could have watched the band on Youtube. It's not a requirement to mosh or bang your head as fast and hard as possible, but still..

Metal is ecstatic music. It creates a sustained unusual emotional state and holds it for the length of a riff, a song, an album, a show. You let the music tell you how to move and what to feel.

I left my usual atheistic coffee and beer friends (alas, not many metalheads) last Thursday (Jun20) to hear Subrosa perform as part of Crucial Fest, a mostly-locals many-genre many-venue music showcase put together by Exigent records. I've forgotten how Subrosa first got my attention, around the time "No Help For the Mighty Ones" came out, but I'd been waiting for a chance to see them perform live. It's cool seeing a Salt Lake band get acclaim from metal reviewers across the world, even if they don't become a huge act.

Unfortunately Subrosa had at least three mics fail on them, but they let the violins and bass do most of the talking. Also performing were Reality, Salt Lakers whose set I just missed; Lord Dying, Portlanders with Salt Lake ties; and Witch Mountain, also Portlanders. It was a night of thunderous doomy music. I managed --in my usual social ineptness-- not to have any real talky-speech with the singer of Witch Mountain when I bought her CDs, but I really liked her bluesy rock singing style.

I think there's something to be said for coming from a subculture that happily takes symbols of darkness, fear, and evil and makes them into symbols of personal empowerment. It can prepare you to let go of other easy "good guy" and "bad guy" labels fed through the system. Of course not every metalhead becomes a free-questioning political independent, but if half your favorite bands have inverted pentagrams and bloody knives on their album covers, you're less likely to take society's presumed Moral Guardians seriously when they label an idea or a person "evil," and it might prepare you not to take them seriously when they label an idea or a person "foreign," "dangerous," "socialist," or "terrorist." At least I like to think music of rebellion helps one be more free-roving in the ideological landscape, better able to share the same ideas with different symbols and metaphors.

bookisusuallybetter

Alan Moore- Meet the Man Behind the Protest Mask
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/alan-moore-v-vendetta-mask-protest?CMP=SOCNETTXT6965

I think it's kind of interesting that Guy Fawkes had been a figure of ridicule in British culture, and also an icon for anti-Catholic sentiment because the real Guy had been for Papal control. Alan Moore is British, knew that, and deliberately chose to invert it for his revolutionary antihero.

In spite of some comic book silliness and 70s-80s Cold War post-apocalypse silliness, the printed V for Vendetta holds up well. The movie was pretty good but had problems where it deliberately stepped back from the comic book's vision. Notably that in the movie the nationalist leader is killed in secret by V. In the book, he's assassinated publicly by an ordinary woman whose life had been ripped up by happenstance in the machinery of State. Also the movie tacks on a romantic love angle to V's relationship to Evey, both unnecessary and seriously detracting from the theme and character.

Mostly, it's that the movie dumbs the message down to social liberal versus conservative (which many of America's Bush-era rightist pundits were coherent enough to notice and get mad about.) In the book, it's very stark, anarchism versus fascism. The neat thing is that Moore lets fascism have every possible advantage. Anything that might make an ordinary person say "of course it's bad, but under these conditions for these reasons it might be necessary," Moore grants them and then says it's still wrong. Moore's postapocalyptic Britain is starved, battered, and one of the only surviving societies after nuclear (and possibly biological) exchange. His fascist leader isn't looking for personal gain but really believes in strength and unity as the greater good. The leader is assisted by a superhuman intelligent computer to make decisions. There are invaders on the outside and plagues within. And the alternative is V who is not kind but brutal, destructive, insane. "Because I love you, because I want you to be free" is a truly chilling line (as much as the better-known Moore line from a later project, "I did it thirty-five minutes ago.")

For this tonal omission, both the delightful early dialogue between V and the statue of Lady Justice ("you always did have an eye for a man in uniform") and the later speech about Authority and the fear of Chaos are cut. The point in the film where it actually uses the word, a robber shouting "anarchy in the UK", is the very point where the book V teaches "this is not anarchy, this is chaos." Movie audiences never heard "anarchy is the absence of leaders, not the absence of order."

I saw it written on a forum, and I fully agree, when watching the movie, the point toward the end where V tips over the domino assembly is where you should stop playback or skip to the end credits (maybe watch the explosions on the way.)

merit

Meritocracy is a useful illusion. It tempts us to identify ourselves with the powerful and against the powerless. Because we are sure our own merits are great and our problems only circumstance, it comforts us that our own gain in future status in is assured. Because we are unfamiliar with others' circumstance and assume their problems are character flaws, it offers us the thrill of looking down on their unworthy laziness. It is useful because it encourages our complacence and discourages questioning our fundamental assumptions.

Saganday(belated)

Yesterday was, or would have been, Carl Sagan's birthday. I think church never really had a chance with me because "Cosmos" plus some illustrated science books had sparked a sense of wonder that the stark walls and bad music at the local Mormon ward could never hope to match. (Who knows what the interplay would have been had our family gone to a more aesthetically evocative church?)

What always stuck in my head as the "Cosmos music" isn't actually the main theme of the show, and first turns up in episode 2 (youtube excerpt that starts partway in with that music, embedding's not quite the style here). This episode has what is still one of the best popular science explanations of evolution available. (If you prefer your explanations from books, I'd suggest Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale or Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution which pulls double time as a punk rock biography.)

Americanvalues

America was born in Rebellion. America was born On the Verge, where ideas, ethnicities, philosophies, religions, languages, histories and narratives from around the world came together in the cities, salons, pubs, coffeehouses, courts, churches, lyceums, presses and public squares, to mix, intermingle, and radically transform.

In all of the great moral conflicts that have defined American freedom, there have been those who sought justice and greater human dignity for all, and there have been those who defended established hierarchy and social restriction. The struggle between cosmopolitan embrace of all humanity versus the provincial, factional, traditional and powerful was old in our republic's youngest days.

Ending the rule of kings is a fundamentally radical concept. Abolition, free speech, women voting, civil rights, labor rights, freedom of conscience, have nothing traditional or conservative about them. The truly American spirit is Speaking Truth to Power.

Freedom is the freedom of dissent, disruption. Freedom is not merely freeing the businessmen. The untrammeled right of men of wealth to do as they please and influence decisions without concern for democratic participation is not the radical gift of the American experiment, but rather the ancient way of dominion and empire. Freedom is not merely freedom to live a comfortably unexamined life in one's steady cultural tradition, regardless if that culture is Bantu, Persian, Scandinavian, or the much mythologized and over-marketed American "heartland." Freedom obligates one to engage the world, doubt oneself, and see all cultures as sources anyone might draw from to grow and change themselves.

Goodness is not America's essence but its aspiration. No one gets to assume they're the good guys, especially not trying to justify something they would condemn from anyone less good than they. There never was a Shining City on the Hill, and a city presuming itself to be that one is guilty of pride. That City is not yet built and will never be completed.

This is the "liberalism" I learned from the example of many, and is nothing like the Strawman "liberalism" pundits on the right sneer at, nor the counterfeit "liberalism" focus-group technocrats in the Democratic Party might offer, nor the empty "liberalism" the compromised media occasionally name-check when they need to say something about "both sides."

This is America as I know it and love it.

restatement

Liberals are stupid. Conservatives are evil. The pattern holds true.

Liberal stupidity plays glaringly in the delusion that there is anything like a convicted, stable Middle to be picked up. Were such a thing true, the conservative ploy of stepping further to the right every time would never work. It has worked very well. Therefore, there is no vast unrepresented Middle committed to centrist or moderate positions. There is a vast biconceptual majority who can be persuaded to think more liberally on some issues and more conservatively on other issues, and who will side with the better persuader, not the most centrist position-player.