House of the rising Moonglum

Well I watched the debates, and I have to say Kerry impressed me pretty well. I think that he made a very good argument for his not being a “flip-flopper”. The thing that really depressed me though was Bush’s inability to answer the questions that were put to him. He warmed up later in the debate, but at the beginning, he was just spouting whatever it was he wanted to say, even if it didn’t have anything to do with the questions. I suppose that will play well with the rest of America, but it really annoyed me. I am just concerned that since he never gives interviews, he could live in the emperor’s universe, and have no one to tell him that he isn’t wearing any clothes. There will be plenty of bloggers out there to rip it apart, so I will refrain from looking at specific points, but suffice it to say that if I wasn’t worried before about Bush’s inability to lead us out of this mess, I am doubly convinced of it now. The next debate will be very interesting indeed.

The best surprise of this evening though was the Daily show! They actually had it live so they could do an actual show on the debate! This also meant that they could have the real talking heads on via satellite. Very odd. I did a little channel surfing between the end of the debates and the beginning of the daily show, and watched some Fox. That was interesting, they were actually pretty even handed for the moment that I was watching, but then Hannity came on. Then my brain exploded and I needed to change channels.

Oh yeah. Stella watched the debates too, and the one who can hear what she says let me know that she wanted to start up an online campaign, so I let her (my pet hedgehog) use the computer, and this is what she came up with:

Nothing like seeing a drug that you took for years pulled off the market. Heart attack huh? Oh well. I just hope that I don’t need it again in the future. That stuff worked miracles for me, and without the horrible GI side effects that Naproxin had. (Vioxx is (was) an OX-2 inhibitor rather than a general anti-inflammatory, thus making much nicer on the tummy.)

Have I mentioned that I love the daily show? He ripped apart both Kerry and Bush masterfully. But that was nothing compared to what he did to ORilley. See Mike’s blog for more info.

Hersh was on as well promoting his new book. He has a pretty interesting view that the neocons are basically a coup. They are ideologues who really came in and just took over. I may actually have to get that book and read it.

So it is about time for the first of two X-Prize qualifying space launches. (There is a live stream if you are interested from that page.) Also of interest is the work being done by Bigelow Aerospace to put privately funded space stations into orbit. At first these will be for scientific and government purposes, but he really wants tourists up there, and as such is funding a following space prize, an orbital prize of $50 million. (Rather than the $10 million for the X-Prize.) They have already secured launch next year for some test units, and are hoping to have their first full size unit launched by 2008, and manned by 2010.

This has been and will continue to be an exciting decade if nothing else. Wasn’t there some Chinese saying about that?

Update: it was a bit of a wild ride, but they made it! Melville (the pilot) was actually asked to abort the mission when the space ship started to roll, but he decided to keep the engine on until they cleared the required height. Balls. Of course when he was spinning he was already in space, so the space ship was safe as long as they had enough RCS fuel to damp the spin. He said he had a good time. The best thing is that the lack of stresses on the ship means that they can probably do the second launch as planned if they can figure out why the ship spun.

Strange things are afoot in New Mexico. There is just something fundamentally wrong with a company that donates to both political parties. But oh well. I guess I’d rather have these guys doing some of the security rather than having Blackwater or some megacorp subsidiary doing all of it.

Congrats to my good friends Todd and Pei Pei who just had their first kid yesterday! That is so cool, I am so excited!

(The problem with working from home is that you have very few people to tell about this sort of thing, so you all get it.)

That makes four of my good friends who have kids now!

music: Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turning.

You know, when Mike pointed me at this venture I totally didn’t believe it. Virgin airlines teaming up with Rutan’s Scaled team to make SpaceShipOne knock offs to put people in space? No way. But there are some real news agencies reporting it now. Wow. Just wow. The future is here now. When I started getting excited about SpaceShipOne a few years back people told me not to get my hopes up. This exceeds my wildest imagination at the time.

Wow. Of course they haven’t exactly made their x-prize flights yet, but hey, who needs that when you can start signing up customers. Still, for this to be cost effective they will need to really be able to fly the thing with week turn arounds repeatedly for years. This would need to be the most reliable spacecraft ever by two or three orders of magnitude! We will see if this really gets off the ground, but so far most of Rutans stuff has actually taken off. So to speak.

Too cool for words.

Update: they expect to launch 3000 people over the course of 5 years for $200k each. House or calling yoursef an astronaut? (600/year = 120 flights / 5 space ships = 24 flights / ship / year. ~ 1 flight every 2 weeks!) Heh, only the rich of the rich will fly in these suicide machines. That is awesome. It’s like the gladiators of old, only the rich get themselves killed instead of the poor. Of course, I’d do it in a NY minute if someone else was going to pay for it, but still, I like it!

No, really I’m working, but OMG… I think my favorite comic is now Schlock Mercenary. Sunday’s strip was an AI debating morals with the company’s chaplain. (Go read it, punchline SPOILER coming up…) And the captain not offering anything useful… “I’m not sure I understand your new biology Petey, but did you just offer to show the reverend your Fruits?” I am laughing so hard that I’m afraid the only way to describe it is: ROTFL.

SPOILERS!

But there are always spoilers in my blog so you should know that by now.

So I finally finished FFX. It didn’t explain anything any more than I hadn’t already figured out which was cool and lame at the same time. It was cool becuase it meant that they weren’t re-explaining everything that you already knew. OTOH, it means that they didn’t bother to clear everything up. For example, I had already figured out that the Fayth were a mechanism for keeping the memories of all the Zanarkandites for posterity. And that two of those memories had been given material form in the “current world”. But I still don’t quite understand how Yu Yevon worked with the fayth. Just a byproduct of that initial battle?

I did like that the dead people didn’t go to the farplane (e.g. the afterlife) without being sent. It meant that the world was filled with dead people walking around. That was great. I also really liked the symmetry of them not knowing that Tidus was going to vanish. He got so pissed off when he found out that Yuna needed to die, but was almost instant in his picking up on the fact that he would need to die when he killed off all the Fayth, since he was just a dream of theirs. In a strange way it made his initial anger work better, even if it seemed a bit unprovoked at the time. Made for a nice symmetry at the end there.

I still don’t understand what the hell you were doing to yevon at the end. He’d take over an Aeon and then you would kill it, but then he was there after all that, and you had to kill him. Why not just kill him first and get it over with?

All in all though a nice ending. I think my favorite part of all though was the symmetry in the super boss fight with your dad to the opening sequence with the blitzball game. Same metal music and same arena IIRC.

Cool game. Now I am down to two to catch up with, Suikoden III and Xenosaga. (Unless I am fogetting something?) Yay, grad school is almost behind me!

CNN has an article that is vastly too funny. It talks about some of the humorous process that went into making Star Wars. It is a great article. I don’t want to give anything away, but a teaser: “The only thing that worked on R2-D2 was the dwarf inside.”

It’s only five days until Scaled Composites launches SpaceShipOne on their first XPrize qualifying flight. And then a few days later another team will attempt to do the same thing. Only they haven’t done any test flights yet. *sigh* I guess they are really taking the spirit of barnstorming to heart. Lots of people died trying out new ideas back then too. I wish them the best, and pray for their safety, but you would think unmanned test flights first would be more useful.

So hurricane Ivan had a number of effects beyond the personal ones of families living in it’s path. One doozy is a disruption of 9.1 million barrels per day in oil imports into the US. Normally the us imports 11 million barrels per day. This of course causes the government to consider opening the strategic oil reserve. So lets see here, we are at war, in an oil producing country, and we release oil within the US to prevent economic problems? How about we do a little rationing in the parts of the country not affected by the hurricane? How about an extra gas tax if you drive a vehicle that uses fuel inefficiently? In CA we used to have limits on how much water we were allowed to use, and if we exceeded that limit we paid a hefty fee, how about that for gas?

This instance of using the strategic oil reserve isn’t that bad, it is a loan, and the diversion in imports is temporary, so it should be paid back quickly. However, given that that reserve is to support our warfighting efforts in times of emergency, it seems like during a war is a bad time to open it for commercial purposes. One day there will be no more oil. It seems like if we want to continue to have cheap gas we should have to conserve, and stretch it out. Alternately, if we want to burn through it, we should have to pay through the nose for it, which would hopefully fund a search for alternate sources. But all we get are tax incentives to buy SUVs, and tapping the strategic reserve. *sigh*

Heh, I just fought the big battle with sin at the end, where he as 140,000 hit points. It started well enough, I hasted the main fighters and was swapping people in and out, and then wakka got an overdrive, so I used it. And hit 2 on all three reels. Oh man. He could have taken him out single handedly. A few people missed the xp’s for that one. I don’t think that is how that battle was supposed to happen. Oh well. Better than doing it 50 times over.

Also I think it is cool, that the whole time the hero was pissing and moaning about how Yuna was going to die, when it turns out he has to die instead, he is quick to step up to the plate and not complain, or even explain to the others that that is the case. In a world of heros it is easier to make a sacrifice than to accept someone else’s. This theme keeps popping up in life as well, interesting.

Everyone’s favorite blogger cum reporter Robert Novak posted recently an article about how the US is going to be pulling out of Iraq. He is talking about American dreams and goals. He says the goal was to get rid of WMD and the dream was to instill democracy. Well if we can’t have the dream then the goal will have to do. That is such BS. And Omar eloquently points it out. I have mostly become immune to the Iraqi bloggers that I read now, but this article moved me for the first time in a while.

“NO Mr. Novak, you are WRONG and I’m being very nice here. This is not an adventure and this is not a neo-conservative dream. This is OUR dream. The dream of millions of oppressed Iraqis who saw what dictatorship can do and who were dying to witness a moment of freedom, to live a peaceful life, a life that carries hope and make dreams not that impossible, a life similar to yours, or is it too much to hope for? We had this dream before anyone heard about neo-conservatives.

I don’t believe what you say about the American administration Mr. Novak, but even if you were right, you can give up on your dream. We won’t give up on ours, and may God help us.”

Ali is one of the brothers that formed a political party to run in the election this December. I wish that we had politicians that ran on positions rather than politics to vote for. For now Obama is still one, but time will tell. I hope they get a few seats in the government. (Their electoral system is really cool. A political party is an ordered list of candidates, and you vote for parties. The number of seats that your party wins are filled in order of your list.) He also had an interesting article earlier about religious extremism that goes well with the book I just finished reading, “Under the Banner of Heaven.” Interestingly his argument about Islam, being inherently political, sound very similar to some claims made in that book about Mormonism.

[Edit: John changed to Robert]

So I am used to seeing squirrels scurrying around on the branches outside my window, but a mouse? That was truly odd. And they are really really small. My rodent size now is hedgehog size. Anything smaller than that is too small. Kind of like a bug. I suppose that does explain though why the exterminator laughed when I asked him if stella would fit into the mouse trap. Hmm… I wonder if that mouse outside is our inside mouse as well. Only comes in during the winter?

by Krakauer. So I just finished up this book today. It is a really good book. It is actually a number of books in one, but what the hey. It is a story about the Lafferty murders from the mid eighties, but also goes a little into a bunch of other Mormon fundamentalist crimes, e.g. Hoffman and Smart and the string of LeRoy murders that I hadn’t heard about in Mexico.

In addition it is also a book about the history of the Mormon church. It is a very interesting history, and given that this is the third book with mormons in it, I am starting to get a really good feeling for their history. He uses that history and the formation of the fundamentalist splinter organizations to explain why the brothers could have believed that the murder was ordained by God. He makes a very convincing argument about the dangers of fundamentalism.

My one problem with the book is that he then goes on to attempt to spread that same argument to the rest of Mormonism, and probably religion as a whole. This seems a little disingenuous to me. While it is true, that if you believe that God talks to you, you can pretty much “get away” with anything, most modern mainline religions have blocks against that. He even talks about that when differentiating fundamental religion from mainline religion. One of the cool things about religion is that it provides community. And that community provides checks and balances on “visions”. When a part of that community breaks away and becomes a fundamental sect those checks go away. IMO, this is not that different from secular governments. When you have a representative government, there are checks and balances to keep those in power from running amuck. In a dictatorship those checks are diminished, just as they are in a cult. So using that analogy, is all government bad, because dictatorships have committed crimes?

Possibly, but he needs another book to convince me of that. On the whole it is a good book. It has a well researched history of the mormons, which is always fascinating. It has a good insight into the mind of those driven to crime by “God”. It has some disturbing pieces of little known information about odd corners of the modern US. Stringing these all together though doesn’t draw the conclusions that he claims. None the less, a good read. And to quote south park:

“Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up. But I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the book of Mormon to that for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town think that is stupid, I still choose to believe in it.”

Hey why not? China just had its first peacful transfer of power. Very cool! The article goes on to opine that this was just because both Hu (the new leader) and Jiang (the outgoing leader) were hand picked by Deng, and this will not necessarily be repeated in the future. Whatever the case, making this one bloodless was the first step. Congrats to China!

All the news I have been reading lately has been bad news, so when I seem some good news, I need to post it! Turns out there are some people on the force in Chicago who see the problem and want to try to make some changes. Instead of arresting people for possession of pot, why not just fine them? I don’t think this will help the prison situation since more than 80% of the cases are thrown out anyway, but it will help the caseload in the court system, and certainly be another good source of income for the city, kind of like parking and low end traffic tickets!

How cool would that be, getting a traffic ticket is just like possesing pot. I really was a hardened criminal! (And adding to the city’s coffers.)

I’m starting to believe that this sort of thing will actually hurt the republicans more than it will help them. Though interestingly, if true, then it will probably prevent al Queda from doing an attack before the election. In any case, Haster’s claim isn’t as breathless as the headline makes it look. His main claim is that al Queda would breath easier with Kerry on top. I actually don’t believe this. Beyond the fact that al Queda will continue their murderous attempts against the world no matter who is in the White House, having read Kerry’s policy book A Call To Service, I think that he actually would more directly attack the problem of al Queda than the current administration has. For one thing he really cares about the troops, having been there himself, and has as a repeatedly stated goal, never using fewer troops than needed. For another thing, he wants to actually support the troops we have, which in turn will make recruiting easier. It is very odd, but the Democratic candidate is the one talking about making the military larger in a time of war. The system has turned on its head.

And then I read an article (from both Pam and Marty) by the military talking about just how thin our military is stretched. They don’t quite come out and say it, but they put a good deal of blame on Bush’s shoulders. And they mention a number of items which can be done to fix the problems. Things which Kerry has been proposing for a while.

I’m afraid that I have become resigned to the idea that Bush is going to win though. I suppose there is a big chunk of people for whom rhetoric like “al Qaeda would operate with more comfort if Kerry were elected” really resonates. Even though it is not true. *sigh*

Great Movie! Now forget I said that. Historically I have been very good about ignoring good reviews for movies that I see. I have a lot more fun at movies that I think are going to be bad, but end up being lots of fun. This movie was tons of fun. But all the reviews I heard made ti sound like it was going to be the most important movie of this decade. Better than Lawrence of Arabia kind of thing. And it was a great movie. Just that it was more on par with Buckaroo Bonsai than L of A.

And speaking of BB, was I the only one who thought that Sky’s army was quite similar to Buckaroo’s? I could almost see there being a blood relation there.