This just in: UK census identifies 390,000 fanboys as demographic group

Daily Mail: Jedi Knights demand Britain’s fourth largest ‘religion’ receives recognition:

With their vast intergalactic knowledge and ability to harness the Force, the task of convincing UN officials to recognise their cause should be a walkover for a pair of Jedi Knights.

But self-proclaimed Jedis Umada and Yunyun, better known as John Wilkinson and Charlotte Law, have adopted a more conventional approach in their pursuit of recognition – delivering a protest letter.

The unconventional pair are calling for the UN to acknowlegde what has become Britain’s fourth largest ‘religion’ with 390,000 followers.

The UN International Day of Tolerance, which takes place annually on November 16, is aimed at emphasising the dangers of intolerance and promoting integration and cohesion across the globe.

Part of me wants to ascribe Britain’s national ills to this phenomenon, but I can’t. It seems far too difficult to think that almost 400,000 people are weird enough to (a) believe that pretending to be a Jedi leads to a better life and (b) actually put that on their census forms. It’d be like finding out that a million Americans listed Oprahism as their faith — you want to make a joke, but can’t quite bring yourself to pick on them because you suspect they have other, uh, problems.

I wonder when the Star Wars Trek will begin in earnest?

Nexus 6

My eyes suck. They’ve sucked for a long time, and not just in terms of vision, though that is the most serious problem I have with them. Most people who know me casually don’t realize I’m as blind as I am (I very nearly meet the standard for legal blindness in my right eye); I wear contacts most of the time, and rarely go out with my glasses on. The first encounter with me and glasses usually provokes odd looks — even with the ultra-expensive high-index plastic lenses, my glasses still manage to deform my face, and the lenses themselves are 7 or 8 mm thick at the outer edges anyway.

To make matters worse, my right eye is dramatically weaker than my left. Corrected, this isn’t such a big deal, but uncorrected there’s enough difference in input that I get dizzy sometimes if I don’t close one eye or the other. As I say, when I’m wearing glasses or have my contacts in, my vision’s usually OK. My contacts have been problematic for a few years — as a function of my allergies (which are also getting worse as time goes on, which is why I’m starting immunotherapy soon-ish), as a function of the lenses themselves. I managed to develop a truly shocking case of giant papillary conjunctivitis a few years ago — it’s never a positive sign when your optometrist comes along, everts your eyelids, and then calls the other members of his practice group over to look at you. I went through a period where I had a serious problem with floaters around the same time, which continue to bug me under some circumstances to this day.

Two positives in all of this: One is that I don’t have an astigmatism (yet), which frankly to my mind is nothing short of a miracle. The other saving grace was that my prescription had seemingly finally stabilized — I’d had the same pair of glasses for almost four years, which was unheard of up to this point. But in the past month or so I’ve noticed that my right eye has been a little blurry, a little less sharp; I blamed it on my contacts and didn’t think anything else of it. (I’ve been fighting with the right kind of contact for a couple of years now — the ones that don’t induce GPC in me dry my eyes out or sting; the ones that keep my eyes moist induce GPC; the ones that do neither are uncomfortable as hell.) I’d been thinking semi-seriously about refractive surgery, and it’s intriguing as hell (the cost balances within a couple of years by my math), but.. I still can’t shake that nagging feeling that maybe something would go wrong. Sure, I knew a bunch of people who had it done, who swore by it, who said it was the best thing they’ve ever done.. and yet, my data-driven soul says, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” Anyway, now that my prescription has apparently changed — one would hope, anyway, that this does not signal the beginning of the dreaded astigmatism — that option’s off the table for a while again, allowing me to defer the decision once more.

So I’d sort of planned to see my optometrist in the next little while and ask about my right eye when I went and did something much worse on Monday: I tore my corneas off.

Okay, that’s overstating it. I actually tore a couple small patches of my cornea off (think of the top of a salt shaker) and irritated the living fuck out of the other parts. Officially it’s called “punctate keratitis” and it’s officially not a big deal (though I do need topical analgesia and I’m now on opthalmic antibiotics), but holy hopping hell did it ever hurt! It might well have been the most painful thing I’ve ever felt, and I’m including the time I tried to sneeze after my neck surgery. What happened was that somehow, the cornea-contact lens interface had dried out, leading the cornea to become hypoxic and irritated. When I finally pulled the lens out, it took chunks of the cornea with it; what was left of the cornea decided that it was going to just sit there and be pissed.

Monday night was brutal — an addict’s dream combination of anti-inflammatories and high-test systemic analgesics knocked me out but did little to dull the pain. I woke up every hour or so, saw the doc on Tuesday morning, then went home and went back to bed after dumping a load of diclofenac into my eyes. (The man who invented opthalmic diclofenac deserves to be kissed several times over.) I woke up in the afternoon feeling marginally better, but with a new problem: everything was just slightly blurry.

And that’s how things have remained since then. I went to work this morning and managed to function fine, though I had a tough time reading the computer screens and I found myself squinting hard at ECGs and printed paper. My recently slacking right eye decided that now would be an excellent time to be even lazier and my left eye wasn’t doing much better either, so there was a lot of close focusing and turning up the font sizes where I could. It’s a little tricky — I can get around fine and I’m OK to drive, but fine discrimination is elusive. This will, I am told, improve as the swelling and irritation goes down, and frankly I can’t wait for it. Meanwhile, it’s annoying as all fuck because things are just slightly out of focus and it takes me a couple of seconds to find the hyperfocal point where everything sort of snaps into place.

(Another interesting thing I noticed today: I am noticably stupider than I usually am. I tried to do some teaching on Monday night and found myself almost incapable of forming a complete sentence, unfairly punishing my students for my own idiocy. Fortunately my Trusted Lackey helped pick up the slack and so I doubt anyone was in a position to complain. But today I was trying to explain ischemic heart disease to a patient and I couldn’t find the words. Thank god no one died today; I can’t imagine how that conversation would have gone with all the ums and ahs and ers and duhs..)

Anyway, at the moment, I have the font size in Mozilla jacked up by +3. Which is.. interesting. It’s kind of surprising how many Wobsites out there depend on fixed-width layouts so that relatively increasing the size of the text manages to seriously screw up the design. Unsurprisingly, the one site that looks exactly the way it does with a “normal” font size is Joe Clark’s, which leads me to think that perhaps I need to put a little more effort at designing for people who need to bump the text size up a few notches..

How is this news?! Part II

From page A02 of today’s Victoria Times Colonist..

Postal worker taken to hospital after being attacked by squirrel:

OIL CITY, Pa. (AP) — Letter carriers occasionally have to deal with angry dogs or maybe even a spider’s nest in a mailbox, but a mean squirrel?

Barb Dougherty, 30, a U.S. Postal Service employee, said she was attacked and bitten Monday by a squirrel while delivering mail in Oil City, about 121 kilometres north of Pittsburgh.

“I saw it there on the porch, put the mail in the box and turned to walk away and it jumped on me,” Dougherty told the Derrick newspaper, who said the animal then ran up her leg and onto her back.”I eventually got a hold of the tail and pulled it off me. No one was home at the house where I was delivering the mail, but the neighbour lady heard me screaming and came over.”

An ambulance took Dougherty to a hospital, where she was treated for cuts and scratches. The squirrel was killed.

’cause god knows we couldn’t think of anything else to put on the second page of the paper…

Roots

From a comment over at this blagh here:

Seriously, I hear Libertarians talk all the time about how they’re socially liberal (so to speak), but it never seems to matter come vote time. In that way, I see no chance of a large “bloc” of Libertarians doing anything that moves the Republican party towards what they claims it the Libertarian agenda. If Libertarians truly had an intellectually consistent bone in their bodies, they’d have stopped voting Republican years ago.

Here’s the thing about libertarians and this US electoral cycle. I know I promised I was going to stop talking about politics (“stop talking about politics! more sad plane videos!”), but I can’t help myself here.

Libertarians are going to have to make a very painful choice here. Specifically, they’re going to have to decide whether or not they want to be rich, or whether they want to be free. If they want to be rich they can keep voting Republican and shut the fuck up about lost civil liberties. Or they can embrace the idea that maybe, just maybe the documents they claim to venerate, and the principles of limited government they claim to hold dear, are worth something — and that you can actually measure that amount in terms of real dollars. If you assume a Democratic Congress is going to cost you more money, and yet might give you some of those personal and social freedoms you hold so dear, you get to decide whether you’d rather have the extra cash or the extra freedom.

The choice is only painful if you’re an idiot. The idea that everything comes down to economics, or that happiness can be expressed solely in terms of money is as brainless when it comes from a libertarian as it does when it comes from a Marxist. I don’t have a lot of patience for people who stamp their feet and argue that, while the Republicans are bad, the Democrats must surely be worse — who the hell are you kidding with that kind of logic? Why, ’cause they’ll undo the tax cuts? Gimme a break. Freedom-fans who argue that the tax cut was more important than, I dunno, the war on drugs, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, fucking habeas corpus… I’m sorry, you’re big on freedom why, precisely?

Jim Henley (who, along with Glenn Greenwald, should start a blahg called “For Good or For Awesome”), wrote way back when:

You don’t like it, my neo friends, and that’s to your credit, but in your small way you helped to bring it about. You did this by imagining that the likes of Robert Fisk were a bigger danger to you than John Poindexter. You did it by imagining that somehow the part you liked about the Bush administration – war on your target of choice – was separate and distinct from the part you didn’t like – HSD, IAO, the brute-force linkage of the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, USA-PATRIOT. You put more energy into refuting “idiotarian” claims that our liberties had already been taken away than into fighting the people who were, right out in front of god and everybody, working to take them away in earnest. You imagined that war and repression somehow don’t go together, even that war could function to inoculate against repression. You forgot or never saw a very important adage of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s:

    Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side.

If you imagine yourselves as part of some coalition, ask yourself what you’re getting for your trouble. You lost HSD. You lost USA-PATRIOT. You get IAO. An independent 9/11 commission? Gone. A lot of you favor liberal rules on therapeutic cloning. Think you’ll get that from this Congress? Is there anything whatsoever that neolibertarians favor that the rest of the Republican coalition does not where you have gotten or expect to get your way? Any case where the Administration said “We’ve got to give the libertarians this?” Or where you can imagine them saying it? Remember, the war doesn’t count. The neocons want it and the Christian Coalition wants it. They matter. Ditto for the tax cut. I’m talking about something that neolibertarians hold dear that neocons and/or the Christian Right oppose, where the will of the neolibertarians prevails.

I’m here every day. You can get back to me.

A proposition: Neolibertarians are to the Republican Party what African-Americans are to the Democratic Party – taken for granted because they have nowhere else to go.

We really weren’t kidding, guys. War is the health of the state. It’s time to stop imagining that this government will give you a generation-long war and occupation of however many countries without piling up the internal security measures, time to stop pretending that you have a box over here marked Good! that contains Don and Condi and a box over here marked Bad! that contains Ashcroft and Ridge and Mineta and that you get to pick one and not the other.

That needs to be tattooed on peoples’ necks. I realize it’s a long block of text to tattoo. I’m OK with that. Anybody who doesn’t like they pain they’ll suffer in the experience can complain about the torture they, indirectly, helped to bring about.

This is so stupid.

Ok, look.

It’s just an airplane. I have no emotional attachment to a 737-200 except for the part where I flew on them for years and years, and beyond complaining that Airbus lacks the “oh, wow!” feeling of aviation I don’t really have an emotional attachment to any airplane. So how come I’m on the verge of tears while watching this farewell video to the 732?

Stupid airplane! Be less sad!

Waterfront property at low tide

Now with ultra-cool updates at the bottom!

So I managed to set off the explosives detector at CYEG this afternoon on my way home. It was, to say the least, a humiliating experience, enhanced only by the frustration that I was late for my flight. Why my bag was randomly chosen to be explosive-residue-tested is a bit of a mystery; my laptop, the usual suspect for this kind of thing, wasn’t in there at all, and when they swabbed the bag I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, I use a totally different bag to carry my Semtex around.

Apparently, though, when the explosive detector is activated, you get to get super-duper screened. Which involves a physical search of everything you’re bringing with you. And a physical search of yourself, which is sufficiently thorough that I think someone owes me breakfast. And, as with everything involving the government, there’s paperwork to fill out. Name. Address. Birthday. Occupation. It goes on and on. I asked what was going to happen to the form. “Oh, nothing,” the guy said a little too nonchalantly for my tastes. Yeah, right. And if you believe that one…

So I totally won’t be shocked that I’m now tagged and will get nailed every time I go to get on a flight from hereon in.

The punch line is that my bag tested positive for nitroglycerine residue. Which is, in hindsight, totally not unexpected, since it has been home to several bottles of nitro spray that at one point or another have found their way into my pockets and then into my bag. (Don’t look at me like that — I’m not stealing the damn drug. It’s just that it’s frequently easier to shove them in a pants pocket rather than keep fishing for one at the bedside or whatever, and besides, we’ve now gone to single-patient use sprays so that once you use one on one patient, it’s fininshed.) Whether one discharged, or leaked, or whatevered in my bag, it somehow got NTG molecules all over the place, and that’s what the detector picked up. The guy said this happens all the time but I’m not so sure, and in any event I’m not even remotely certain how I could go about getting the NTG residue off my bag so this doesn’t happen in the future. NTG spray has a pretty distinctive smell. All I can smell in my bag is consumer electronics, so it must have been some minute amount somewhere.

The worst part of it all is that I can’t even make snide jokes about the total uselessness of the air travel security theatre, since spotting passengers with explosives is, uh, kind of what you want the security theatre to be doing. Must.. find.. useless government joke.. in here.. somewhere..

Some time after I posted this, Bruce Schneier happened upon it and posted an excerpt on his blahg. There were a few things that came up in the comments to his post that I wanted to address, so I’ve re-posted my own follow-up here.

First of all, please understand that my post was not intended as a commentary on air travel security. I have a personal habit of having horrible things happen to me when I travel, and posted the story to my LiveJournal mostly as a means to amuse my friends; the tone of voice behind the story is one of weary resignation, not frustration or anger. (Though I’ll note that had I known Bruce would repost it here, I might have been more eloquent and thoughtful.)

Second, as mpd and the anonymous poster above me have noted, this was not a false positive result. The detector correctly detected (and identified) the nitroglycerine residue on my bag, and it functioned exactly as expected. The screening personnel also functioned exactly as expected: They investigated the source of the alarm, asked me reasonable questions to determine why the alarm condition occurred, and, having been satisfied that I did not represent a threat to air safety, allowed me to board my flight. The alarm condition was thus valid (I had nitroglycerine molecules on me), but irrelevant to the overall goal of preserving the safety of the flying public (I’m not a terrorist, so who cares if I have nitroglycerine residue on me?).

Third, keep in mind this was at a Canadian airport. CATSA isn’t a whole lot better than the TSA, but it is marginally less stupid, and the margin seems to make a difference.

The anonymous poster’s comments regarding medical diagnostics are particularly astute and I think the comparisons are very valid: If you spot a suspicious lump on ultrasound, you naturally biopsy it. When the biopsy comes back benign, we don’t turn around and say the ultrasound was a waste of time — we say that the diagnostic process worked more or less as expected.

For a variety of reasons, though, it feels as though there was some kind of failure here, although it’s difficult to figure out exactly where the failure occurred and what should have been done differently. It’s tough to argue that we shouldn’t be checking for explosives, it’s tough to argue that we shouldn’t additionally screen people found to have explosive residues on their personal effects, and it’s tough to say that we shouldn’t document instances where residues were found but posed no threat. It may be that we need to take situations like this in stride and recognize that they will happen, and design the system in such a way that these situations do not escalate into something bigger than they need to be. Viewed in that light, I think The System worked fairly well overall (though I would have preferred that it worked on someone else).

My biggest concern about the whole incident is what happens to the report that was filed as a result of the positive explosives test; not being one to have much faith in the government, I’m not at all convinced that “nothing” is going to happen to the document. Insofar as there are other risks here, I think the biggest one is the personal shock that may come from being suddenly yanked out of line and subjected to a more intensive screening process.

As to some specific comments…

Thomas: “The question is whether or not this system the best we can do for the cost (money/convenience/liberty).” I agree. After having had about a week to think about it, I’ve come to the tough-to-swallow conclusion that it is the best we can do for the relative costs. The whole thing seems excessive but on further reflection, as I said, it’s tough to argue against any one aspect of it. It pains my libertarian soul to say this, but this may be about as good as we’re going to get.

One final risk comes to mind: Because this event was related to airport security, and because we’re used to thinking of airport security as being mostly useless, we run the risk of writing off those procedures which actually do result in a net increase in safety to the traveling public.

New gambling opportunity

Dear Lazyweb,

I miss this show. Fox totally caved when yanking it off the air, and CityTV hasn’t had it for donkey’s years (buncha cowards and/or philistines). It was, like, the best thing ever — and became even more magnificent after a night shift when you couldn’t sleep but were too tired to make any sort of coherent sense out of what you were seeing.

Please help me find copies of it again; I will be your bestest friend for ever and ever.

Love,
Dr. Hazmat

Update below.


I went back and re-read all the negative commentary about Banzai from places like Asian Media Watch and I honestly don’t understand any of it. I got teased when I was a kid, too, I don’t think it was a function of TV or movies or anything else — I think it was a function of pinheads. Eventually you get past it, or you don’t, and one of the benefits of getting past it is that you get to take responsibility for your own sense of self-worth and stop paying attention to what other people say about you, particularly if those things are baseless. Banzai was pretty clearly parody from the moment you saw it; I guess the reason it was offensive had to do with fake accents and the fact that it was even less plausible and more absurdist than, say, Takeshi’s Castle (which seems to enjoy an inexplicable popularity and still manages to escape comment from organizations like AMW).

The media element that has offended me most as a nominal ethnic in the last decade was probably The Last Samurai, for most of the same reasons why I thought films like The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Green Mile were mildly offensive — because it suggested that minorities had some kind of redemptive power that exists solely to better white people, usually misguided white men. Spike Lee, among others, refers to this as the “magic nigger” movie and it drives me fucking bananas (ha ha — get it?). Having Tom Cruise be redeemed by his co-option of traditional Japanese culture (which, by the way, he had set out to destroy in the first part) was offensive; having it be suggested that he then became the embodiement of that culture was another thing entirely. Why The Last Samurai gets a pass in this department and Banzai, or, for that matter, Lost In Translation gets nailed for having negative stereotypes is a total fucking mystery to me.

Hip hip hooray!

End of General Availability for MIPS IRIX Products:

SGI launched the MIPS IRIX family of products in 1988. Since then, this technology has powered servers, workstations, and visualization systems used extensively in Manufacturing, Media, Science, Government/Defense, and Energy. After nearly two decades of leading the world in innovation and versatility, the MIPS IRIX products will end their general availability on December 29, 2006.

Of course, SGI is replacing IRIX in its systems with… Linux. (I don’t know what happened to the great NT experiment.) So it’s hard to say whether this constitutes an actual improvement or not, though it does bring to mind jwz‘s comment about “being fucked over merely by a soulless megacorp, rather than a bunch of teeangers who think my desktop is their learning experience.”

Then I think about IRIX 5.x (“yeah, you shouldn’t use the version of cc that came with the operating system, because it’s really buggy, and good luck getting gcc installed, okloveyoubye!”), and shudder.

Am I a bad person for reaching the point where I like my Windows laptop more and more?

I hung my head

If this doesn’t sum up too much of the last five years, I don’t know what else will:

This mindless, authoritarian belief in Presidential Infallibility repeats itself in almost every debate we are having. Those who favor greater protections for accused terrorists for military commissions are labelled by Bush followers as advocating for “terrorist rights” even though the whole point is that we can’t know they are terrorists until we give them a fair trial. But to Bush followers, the Leader’s decision to detain them and accuse them is all we need to know. We can place blind faith in the Leader’s judgment. Thus, to be accused by the Bush administration of terrorism is the same as being a Terrorist. Those detained at Guantanamo, or by the U.S. military, or anyone accused by the President of being an “enemy combatant,” is guilty for that reason alone. And thus anyone who advocates rights for those so accused is, by definition, advocating rights for Terrorists.

The same irrational, zombified mental process dominates the debate over warrantless eavesdropping. According to the administration, it is only eavesdropping on individuals whom it suspects are involved in some way with Terrorists. But to the administration and its followers, to be suspected of terrorism by the administration is to be a Terrorist. Hence, they will say that the Bush administration is only eavesdropping on terrorists because they recognize no distinction between being accused by the administration of terrorism and being a Terrorist. Thus, anyone opposed to warrantless eavesdropping is, to them, opposed to eavesdropping on Terrorists (rather than objecting to the administration’s ability to eavesdrop without first demonstrating that there is reason to believe they are a terrorist).

(On a totally unrelated note, I love Glenn Greenwald and want to have his babies. I think if Glenn Greenwald and Jim Henley started a group blog, they should call it “For Good or For Awesome” because it would either be good, or it would be awesome, or it would be good and awesome, and either way it would kick so much serious ass that it would probably implode upon itself revealing only a pure, dense core of amazing awesome which would probably blast away the outer shell of the blogging universe, which would be ultra-amazing awesome. Ahem.)

Glenn’s right. It is irrational. But can that many people really be crazy? Or is it just that a crazy minority of people have a really loud megaphone? Or is it that a crazy minority of people control all the branches of government in the United States so it doesn’t really mater what the non-crazy majority think? I dunno. But that doesn’t explain why the citizens are so happy to let their government do bad things. So let’s consider the rational reasons:

  1. They genuinely trust the feds. When the government says, “This is a bad person,” they really believe there’s a bad person on the receiving end of the stern look. You have to be very naive to trust the government this completely; you have to not know anyone who has ever been falsely accused of anything, fallen victim to overaggressive cops, or been jacked around by The System. It seems that in order to believe this, your interaction with the government has to be limited to filing a tax return once a year, and it’s imperative that you’re white, middle class, and don’t do anything that attracts undue government attention. Eventually most people grow out of this phase, usually by 25 or so (the first tax audit seems to do it, or the first time you’re asked for ID by a cop for no good reason).
  2. They don’t trust the feds, but they’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this issue. I think most of us inherently suspicious types were in this camp immediately after 9/11, and most of us hopped out once it became painfully apparent (almost as immediately) that the feds were no better at solving this particular problem than they were at solving, say, the drug problem. In order to be in this camp you don’t have to be quite as naive as people in the first camp, but you do need to avoid asking yourself the question, “If the government can’t deliver the fucking mail, what hope in hell do they have of successfully saving my ass from a terrorist attack?”
  3. They’re so scared that they’re willing to pay any price to not be scared. This is the first of the bad camps, exactly the people Franklin warned about in the apocryphal quote everyone’s waving around these days. 9/11 unhinged the yuppies in such a serious way that they lost control of their critical faculties and need to be slapped silly until they settle down. Exhibit A in this instance is James Lileks, who went faaaaar off the deep end after 9/11 even though the odds of his being killed, specifically, are roughly as good as his being crushed by an asteroid. But there are an awful lot of yuppies out there who are shit-scared of this thing, though weirdly they tend to live in places not actually likely to be attacked by terrorists. I note that New Yorkers, as a general rule, are not running to embrace George or his policies, and, lest we forget, they were the ones getting killed on 9/11, not some doofus in Omaha.
  4. They genuinely like dictatorship. This is the scary option. Sara Robinson has written a series of excellent essays about fundamentalist, authoritarian personality types (start here and keep reading; Kung Fu Monkey sums the series up) and though I don’t agree with her completely, there’s a lot to think about in there, and although she’s not speaking specifically to this point I feel it generalizes nicely. There’s always going to be some segment of the population who believe that it’s OK to be brutal and evil to people sufficiently unlike them, and we’re probably not ever going to be able to get away from that. Woe betide those who find themselves on the other side of the fence; it’s exactly like the Christians arguing in favor of the protection of marriage and the establishment of a state religion — what, precisely, makes you think you’re going to be the ones in control for ever?

The problem, unfortunately, is that at the end of the day the delusions — whatever their source — are ultimately self-reinforcing. If there’s no terrorist attack, that proves that whatever Bush is doing works, so we need more of it. If there is another terrorist attack, well, Bush got his hands tied by the Democrats, so we need more of what he was going to do. So either way, we need more. You would think that this bit of logic would tend to nudge people out of one of their delusional camps — two opposite statements lead to the same conclusion? wtf?! — but logic is apparently not most people’s strong suit. If you’re convinced that you’re going to die when Osama sneaks into your bedroom tomorrow night, and that only Bush can save you.. well, there’s a whole host of false premises there and nothing I can do is going to change your mind. We could do ourselves a big favor by lowering the rhetoric over terrorism and stapling James Fallows’ article from the September Atlantic on people’s foreheads, though given the bloodlust in some people with loud megaphones I doubt it would do much good.

Part of me thinks we should just concede defeat on this issue and move on, but then I realize the outcome is going to be so much worse that it probably isn’t worth thinking about. I fear for the United States and I fear for my world. I don’t think George Bush is going to get us all killed (the same way I thought Reagan was going to get us all killed), but I do think he’s doing an excellent job of fucking the shit up and making things about a thousand times worse than they need to be, which is not exactly an original thought but this is my LJ so shut up.

Frink and I have talked about Outer Context Problems, where your frame of reference is so dramatically different that we can’t hope to bridge the gap and have a meaningful conversation. This feels like one of those OCPs — either you believe that we’re all gonna die, or you have your doubts; if you fall into the former camp, nothing someone from the latter camp can do will change your mind. Unfortunately the conditions for leaving the former are very poorly defined indeed, and so I conclude that we’re going to be stuck with this for a long time to come.

And that’s your depressing thought for the morning.