"Mr. President, your, uhm, tank is here"

Car Wars at the Obama Inauguration.

Okay, it's got worse acceleration than a typical 6600-lb Car Wars luxury (0-60 in 15 secs vs. 0-60 in 12 secs for a lux with a Super power plant in CW) . . . armor is non-ablative composites (CW armor is usually plastic ablatives), no heavy weapons (as far as we can tell, just pump shotguns and tear gas cannons), state of the art electronics and a (rare for CW) an Internal Combustion engine (CW vehicles use fuel cells).

If this vehicle keeps President Obama safe from teh terrists, it's all good by me.

----------------
Listening to: Concrete Cell - Car Wars
via FoxyTunes

I can haz ifon appz?

From the folx who brought you teh cheezburgers . . .

LAWL

Okayyy

Consensual Reality and the US Economy: Is it time to Hit The Big Red Panic Button?

Best Quote I've seen about the latest financial news:
"Talk to the Invisible Hand, Wall Street!" -- US Government to Lehman Bros request for a bailout.

About fscking time somebody realized that there isn't enough money in the entire world to pay for all the funny money crap, with all these bailouts and nationalizations (Franny Mae / Freddy Mac -- where the fsck fo they get those strange names?). As a result, a lot of people are going to take in the shorts. Hard.

I'm one of those folks who has suffered loss because the market's suckage, or more accurately, would if I sold the shares in my 401k today. Yep, it's all market values, what can you sell it for right now. My losses are all on paper, though. I haven't lost a home to forclosure or a job to layoffs.

In the end, the market is all about trust, agreement, consensual reality and magickal thinking. Money exists because we say it does, markets exist because we will them into existence to meet needs and agree on the details.

Now, of course, that belief is being undermined. The Guvmint has tried to counter that loss of faith through bailouts . . . but the days of bailouts are coming to an end. They have to. Every bucket has a bottom.

Wrath of the Litch King Beta-- My First Look

I finally got to log into my beta account last night. On one server I created a new Death Knight character so I could try out the new class. It's pretty neat starting a character at Level 55. On the other I transferred Dakatirr, my Level 70 Shaman Healbot. It seems strange to be earning experience points from daily quests -- the level cap in WotLK is raised to 80 from 70. There is a lot of new quest content on the continent of Northend for Dak (I had to rename him Däkätyrr for the beta because the fïjords of Nörthënd demand umlauts).

Good points: 1. Epic mounts at level 55 for Death Knights 2. DKs start with decent gear, including some very nice rares. 3. Mounts are considered pets. They won't fight for you, but there is a new tab in the UI to manage them. 4 The ingame calendar in the UI is spiffy. Want to know when Brewfest starts? Or which BattleG holiday is happening this

There are a few things I do not like: one DK quest that forces you to engage in Player vs Player combat (something I hate) . . . a level 55 character should have a LOT nore gold (mine do, since non of my toons have crafting skills), Other than that, I'm having phun.

The RNC / Palin Nomination

Just a few observations about this week's political convention:

1. I'm going to ignore the speeches. There is nothing that they have said or will say that I have not heard before, and staying out of thrown weapons range of a TV screen is a wise maneuver. Since I'm ignoring the speeches, I'll not comment on them. As Mom told me as a wee lad, if you cannot say anything nice about someone, you're probably going to grow up a blogger don't say anything at all.

2. As to the Palin nomination, which is something that has been blogged to within an inch of its life, I have this to say: the pick clearly was not vetted by John McCain, and even more clearly was a sop to the theocratic wing of the Republican Party. I agree with Barack Obama that the nominee's families should be off limits. Palin's politics and performance as Govenor of Alaska is not. Her resume is thinner than an anorexic starlet on a week-long purge, her management style makes Dick Cheney look like Barney the Purple Dinosaur by comparison, her record on reproductive choice is unsupportable and if, Goddess forbid it, the McCain-Palin ticket wins or steals the election, this 44 year old tyro will stand one 72-year old heartbeat away from the highest office in the land. Don't be fooled by her attractiveness, she's a hardcore Christian Dominionist in sheep's clothing.

3. One more thing about St. Paul and Minneapolis: I've been there, those towns are lovely places. Hard to imagins such a place overrun with riot cops and no-knock flying squads on pre-emptive raids. It's almost as though the cops are trying to provoke a riot. As for the violent ones among them . . . I'm willing to bet some of them are cops -- agent provocateurs sent in to discredit the nonviolent ones and to justify the $50 million price tag for "security."

----------------
Listening to: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - I Won't Back Down
via FoxyTunes

From the World of SCIENCE!™

Blow Shit Up! Now with Carbon Footprint Reduction!



----------------
Listening to: Led Zeppelin - Blow Up
via FoxyTunes

Tonight's the Night . . .

. . . and not in the Rod Stewart sense of the phrase.

Tonight Barack Obama accepts his party's nomination. I *am* going to watch the speech live / streamed.

Of course, the stage setting at Invesco Field in Denver where Barack will speak has drawn some invidious comment from certain quarters because the backdrop looks like an ancient Greek temple(!). Well, people, lots of buildings are based on ancient Greek temples -- the Capitol Building in DC, Cali's own Capitol being just two. Where the hell do you think the word "democracy" itself comes from? Space fairies?

It's kind of ironic that the world has just wound down another cultural artifact that comes to us from the ancient Greeks: TEH FSCKING OLYMPIC GAMES!

OK, people, answer me this: What day is it? 28 August. On this date in 1963, another great American, also of African descent, also a great orator, gave a speech on the steps of a very similar building.

History's being made this week. The least we can do is watch it. Yes I can...and yes I WILL!



----------------
Now playing: The Elders - Turning Point
via FoxyTunes

Impressions of the DNC

----------------
Listening to: Neil Young - Lookin' for a Leader
via FoxyTunes I've been following the Democratic National Convention in Denver via teh innerweb. The national party conventions have been one of two exceptions to my "No teevee" stance / pledge -- the other exception is election night.

Without TV, I get most of my news from the various blogs and from newspaper sites. With little "drama" -- national nominating conventions have been almost drama-free since the 70s (Thank you Chicago 1968!) -- the press have been focusing on such matters as Sen. Clinton's formally releasing her delegates to vote for Sen. Obama, and the diehard Hillary supporters who are holding out inder the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) banner and the vast congregation of A-list political bloggers covering the convention.

OK, impressions:
1. Senator Ted Kennedy -- a very very sick man with brain cancer and other painful infirmities -- gave a speech, a symbolic "passing of the torch" to a new political generation . . . MY generation. Demographers call us "Generation Jones" -- the late Boomers and early post-Boom GenXers. Born right in the middle of the Cold War, too young for the sociopolitical convulsions of the late 1950s and 1960s (most of us were in short pants), too young for Vietnam / the civil rights movement and too old (many of us) for Iraq and Afghanistan. For us, the seminal political event of our young lives was the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979-81, an event widely credited with delivering the Presidency to Ronald Reagan.
The Lion of the Senate, the man one of Styx's lyrics called "First of the 80s / and Last of the Sons / First in the Hearts of his Countrymen" roared again. Goddess keep you, good Senator!
2. Michelle Obama -- What a classy, smart, eloquent woman! While First Lady Laura Bush has not been the abject embarrassment her husband continues to be, I continue to be impressed by MichelleO. Comparisons to Jackie Kennedy are already being drawn.
3. Hillary Clinton -- I did not vote for her in the primary. If she ever gets the chance to run again -- say in 8 years -- I just might.
4. Karl Rove -- With respect to his commentary: As they say in the US Marine Corps, "Golf. Foxtrot. Yankee."
5. Internet application taking the political blog world by storm: Twitter.

----------------
Listening to: Neil Young - Lookin' for a Leader
via FoxyTunes

It's Obama-Biden! YES WE CAN!

We Dems have ourselves a ticket!

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware was not on my "Hope gets the call" list (John Edwards and General Westley Clark were . . .), but I was most impressed with his performance in the primary debates. It will be nice to have a Veep who isn't a Dick. Edwards' future political ambitions are now reactor waste thanks to that affair he was having and Gen. Clark is probably better suited for a post as SecDef or SecState in President Obama's Cabinet than as Veep.

Of course, Biden supported the Iraq AMUF (boo! Hiss!) and is a bit too tight with the banking industry for my comfort . . . but he has a depth of foreign policy expertise that is unbeatable and as a career Senator, he's well prepared to preside over the Senate if that's what it takes to get all that Change™ We Can Believe In® passed into law.



----------------
Listening to: Journey - Don't Stop Believin'
via FoxyTunes

Software Review: MoneyWell

Last post I mentioned this very nice piece of software I found for managing personal finances on a Mac. Macs are starting to challenge the stereotype that PCs are only for number-crunching and gamers while Macs are only for artsy-fartsy creatives like musicians, photographers, graphic artists and the like. Apple's Numbers spreadsheet, part of iWork'08, is a great start in that direction and FileMaker's Bento database app puts Access to shame for the personal user. Sadly, there have been no decent personal finance apps. Microsoft Money -- my daughter's favorite piece of personal finance software which is among the most user friendly of Microsoft apps -- is Windows only. Since for a variety of reasons I'm not going to Boot Camp my system anytime soon or resort to a virtualization solution like Parallels or VMWare Fusion, and I detest Sicken, er, Quicken -- the other most common Mac app for financial management (I'm just not Intuit . . .) because it is crippleware next to the Winblows version. As for web-based apps, please spare me. Ick on a fscking stick.

One day while checking out VirginTracker, er, Versiontracker one day on break, I found MoneyWell. Impressive piece of software. The idea behind MoneyWell is this: If iTunes and a financial app got stinking drunk one night at the office Yule party and did the nasty in a broom closet, MoneyWell could be the result born 9 months later. Your Chart of Accounts becomes a group of playlists, your bank account is like an iTunes library, etc. Budgeting is a matter of allocating money to "buckets," add in income and the proggy fills the buckets with money. Add in the graphing and analysis tools, and you have a killer financial app. In a sense, this tool turns budgeting into a RPG point allocation system, something I have a easy time understanding. As someone who designed a custom small business financial accounting system about three jobs ago with spreadsheets and QBASIC macros (don't try this at home....) for MS-DOS 5.x / Netware 2.2.x, I know how beastly these things can get. MoneyWell's learning curve is not steep, and the built in help is as good as anything I've seen in Leopard; the online tutorials are excellent, as good as those for iPods.

Unlike many such apps form VirginTracker, this one's polished and professional. No Thirst Software did a wonderful job. It reminded me a lot of Bento, another great Leopard app I make a lot of use of in my gaming. At $39.99 USD for a license -- the shareware version is limited to 200 transactions -- it beats the hell out of Quicken.

Color me impressed by this app. If you have a Mac and you have budgeting issues, get this proggy. Try it, you'll buy it.

----------------
Listening to: The O'Jays - For The Love Of Money
via FoxyTunes

Bizarre

more graph humor and song chart memes

Not Safe For Work . . .

. . . to the max

WTF does bowling have to do with the ability to lead this nation?

Apparently, Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania the other day as part of a photo op. Apparently, Barack Obama's bowling score of 97 at this photo op was, well, not very good.

The idios on TV teed off on BO for being, well, less than manly for bowling so "poorly," implying that he was not manly enough to be Commander-in-Chief. Chris "tweety" Matthiews actually said that he should have, to be considered man enough to be Commander-in-Chief, bowl at least 150

Sexist assholes!

First a word about bowling.

As someone who spent a good part of his early teens in bowling alleys and was a state individual, league and singles champion in my age bracket (12-13), with weekly league play I carried a 21-week book average in the high 180s. In tournaments I routinely got hot; my best game ever -- 267 -- was rolled in a singles event at a state tournament. My younger brother once 6-7-10 split his last ball and wound up three pins shy of a perfect 300 and also routinely shot 200+ with about the same average as me.
I can say I know a bit about bowling. Even fit adults who don't bowl every week will typically roll right around 90 to 100.

With a few weeks of bowling with his own ball (that makes a big difference) custom drilled in a pro shop and his own shoes on his home alley, Barack Obama could get 150-160 easy. My dad, who bowled leagues in his younger days also bowled 180+ consistently.

Then again, just what does the ability to bowl have to do with leading this great nation? NOTHING! Twisted punditoid games, again. Just reminding the knuckle-draggers that BO is, well, different and, in these troubled times, different is dangerous!

Then these bastards wonder why I refuse to watch them on teevee.

Finally. if I remember correctly, I am voting for a President. One of the President's Constitutional roles, and not his most important one, is Commander-in-Chief of the US military. If I were voting for a high military leader, I'd want to vet his or her grasp of military strategy. The candidate does not have to have been a soldier, sailor or airman -- experience in that role can provide insight, yes it can. But how does BOWLING test for this? If they want to vet candidates for this ability with a game, why not give them a D&D character and run them through a dungeon? D&D is a game of intense strategy and resource management; given the nation's issues, these skills could come in handy and should be better tested here than in a bowling alley.

This could be fun. Maybe I oughta bring BO, HRC and that icky Republican together for a run through one of Miresseia's garden spots like Mid-Thule (think Norway with nasty monsters that give Thor trouble) or Stygia (Sandworms! Orcish Jihadi! Psychoactive drugs! OHMY!).

I'd love to tell Hillary to make a Will saving throw or have McBush kidnapped and imprisoned by Orcs who do not comply with the US Army field manual for interrogations.

Then there's another way to test these abilities: World of Warcraft. Leveling takes strategy, as does doing those dungeons and especially raids.

Make them all roll blood elves; HRC rolls a warlock, BO a hunter and John McLame a paladin. Power level them to 70 and drop them in a 10-man raid dungeon like Karahzan.

Now that would be worth the eewtoobery!

"McCain, L2P ya noob! We wiped form the aggro you pulled on the boss!"



----------------
Listening to: R.E.M. - Final Straw (Live)
via FoxyTunes

Tasty think-piece . . .

This is the kind of article I read all too seldom; one with historical analysis that is utterly dead-on and fascinating to this history geek/nerd/wonk.

The money quotes:

The clue to the US electoral map lies in ethnography. As the historian David Hackett Fischer and the commentator Kevin Phillips (among others) have demonstrated, ideology and region are surrogates for race and ethnicity in the US. American politics is, and always has been, a struggle for power between two coalitions of tribes. Two coalitions, instead of three or four, because the US inherited the "plurality" or first-past-the-post voting system from early modern Britain. Plurality systems ensure that third-party votes are wasted and so give countries relatively stable two-party democracy.

In most periods from 1789 to the present, the US has had two dominant national parties competing to control government: Federalists vs Republicans (1790s-1810s), National Republicans vs Democratic Republicans (1810s-1830s), Whigs vs Democrats (1830s-1850s), Republicans vs Democrats (1850s-present). Despite the changing names, the underlying coalitions have been remarkably stable. In effect, there have been only two main parties in American history: the northern party and the southern party.

The core of the northern party (originally Federalists, Whigs and Republicans, and now Democrats) has been citizens of New England and the "greater New England" region settled by the descendants of colonial-era New Englanders, an enormous area which includes the great lakes, the upper prairie and the Pacific north-west. The culture of these "Yankees" originated in 17th-century English Puritanism. Its legacy remains in a distinct New England Yankee culture which values moral rectitude and social reform.

The historic rivals to the greater New England Yankees in US politics have been the coastal southerners of Virginia, South Carolina, and the Gulf coast region, which they settled from the Florida panhandle to east Texas. Royalist refugees from Cromwell's Puritan dictatorship--the so-called "Cavaliers"--created a hierarchical, traditional, aristocratic society based on a plantation economy. They have always dominated the southern party (originally Jeffersonian Republicans, then Jacksonian and Rooseveltian Democrats, and now Republicans).

On opposite sides in the English civil war, and then in the US civil war, the Yankees and Cavaliers have always been on opposite sides in US politics. For generations, the moralism of Protestants in New England, such as Cotton Mather and John Adams, has clashed with the worldly honour code of renaissance country gentlemen in the south, such as Thomas Jefferson and Robert E Lee. In New England, the politics of reform was organised around the town meeting; in the coastal south, the politics of deference and patronage was based on the courthouse gang. "Good government" is a New England idea. So is the idea of American exceptionalism, of an American mission to set an example to the world, or to save it. The ancestors of the New England Yankees emigrated to the American colonies in order to found a perfect Calvinist commonwealth. By contrast, the ancestors of the southern elite emigrated to the colonies in order to get rich quick by lording it over Indians, blacks, and poor whites. For New England, the US is--or should be--a New Jerusalem. For the south, the US is simply the successor to the British empire. The southern oligarchs, like their cousins who once ran imperial Britain, think in terms of profit, not providence.

In other words, the roots of our politics are rooted in the 17th-century English Civil War. Royalist "cavaliers," exiled by Cromwell's Protectorate who settled in Virginia and American south; Puritan exiles in the North.

This explains far too much.