i’ve stopped counting

Full text of the Downing Street Memo.
DSM for Dummies.

Was it a lie, or moral courage?

Was it worth it?

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Rest in peace, Ten.

I watched someone play “God of War” at work yesterday. It’s an amazing game. It starts off as your average “Greek warrior questing to take down an evil Greek god” sort of game. Then after about 30 seconds, you get to do a Mortal Kombat-style finishing move. You run under a minotaur’s legs, climb up his back, and stab him in the eyes a few dozen times. Another minute later, you get a new finishing move — this time, it involves getting eye-to-eye with someone and forcing your sword into his face up close and personal, while he’s pushing back on your arms. Later, finishing moves involve wrenching heads clean off. I can’t think of an ultra-violent game that has had such high animation and graphical quality. Most high-violence games rely on the violence appeal and put almost no effort into smooth animation, environments, etc. And the game design is really solid. Every few minutes there’s something that makes you want to keep playing. And every few minutes someone said “I thought this game was violent a few monsters ago, but jeez.”

[Why can’t I get this song out of my head?]
A few times I’ve been around that track
So it’s not just gonna happen like that
‘cuz I ain’t no hollaback girl
I ain’t no hollaback girl.

So it’s been a terribly busy month or two or three. Not in the sense that anything tangible really happened, but for me personally it’s been pretty hectic.

Just before the holidays, I decided a couple things. I decided I didn’t believe in any sort of Santa Claus. I decided that I had to stop lying to my family. And I decided that whatever might happen, it’d be the right thing to be honest even if things went bad.

So after dragging my feet about it, I took four hours one February Tuesday night and told my family via email that I was officially opting out of religion. I gave it twenty years of thought, and finally reached a moment of enough-is-enough. The ensuing conversations have gone so quickly through shock, anger, denial, rationalization, and acceptance, that I have a feeling they’ll continue straight on through that list several times more like a Wheel of Fortune spin, eventually settling somewhere between denial and rationalization. [click, click, … click! wa-wah, oh no, I’m morally bankrupt!]

The door to my utility room closes, but doesn’t fully latch. This permits me to shoulder-charge in for any or no reason without having to repair anything. I suggest that every house should have one door with this feature.

On the way to work earlier this week, I started thinking about the five thousand or so dead US soldiers who kicked it in German hospitals or on the way there. It’s a shitty thing to send people to get shot at for a lie. It’s shittier to only tally a subset of their bodies to make the lie easier to ignore. As I got to work and started my day, someone asked me why I looked so down. So without thinking too much, I answered the question. Next time I’ll go with the ol’ standby “Huh? I always look like this.”

I’ve also been thinking about what I’m doing or should be doing with this web log. For about 200 entries, I wrote about inane pointless things and quirky observations. Now something’s different. I’m tempted to rant each night about how evil some people are and how anybody who reads this page ought to change their opinion to match mine - link,link,link - but odds are I’d make the same amount of difference by just typing up the blog entries and filing them in c:\recycle.

Whenever information is presented in some way that isn’t easy to take, there’s always some other source that spins that information differently to soften up its importance or to completely change what conclusions it leads to. This seems to be a basic axiom of media and politics. For a while I was convinced that if you collect enough information about something, regardless of what collection of ’spin’, it’ll all come together and lead to the truth. Now I’m wondering if the presentation of information can be spin-less at all. Maybe truth itself is bullshit.

Great. Now my head hurts like when it did when I was trying to decide if the act of doing presupposes opposition.

Comments are now working, and all the new and old posts are under one SQL database. Yippee.

A side-effect of manually copying old posts into the database is that I wind up reading what I wrote in college a few years ago. I’ve been sitting here chuckling and nodding in agreement for an hour now. It’s official, I’m in love with myself.

I should have my website in working order this weekend, with comments and such.

Hey numbnuts! While you’re giving him a PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM can you check his pockets for the 9+ billion dollars he took?

Why is it that everybody in the upper parts of power around Bush have serious problems? Endorsing torture/murder of prisoners, rigging elections, controlling media to lie to the world, lying directly to the UN, imprisoning American citizens without trial, shredding the constitution, encouraging racism, etc. I don’t know, maybe that’s just part of the job.

Since I just get depressed when I talk about America and how it follows neo-cons to spread democracy around the world, I’ll talk about cartoons instead.

There’s a bit of interesting reading on Keith “Fear my booming voice” Olbermann on his MSNBC blog. It’s the latest counterpoint to Dr. James Dobson (of ‘Focus on the Family’ and ‘Everyone Poops but That’s Concentrated Evil Coming Out of You’ fame)’s rant about SpongeBob Squarepants’ sexuality. The conversation boils down to something like this:

Dobson: Be afraid! Schools are teaching acceptance!
Keith: What are you talking about? You want hatred in schools?
Dobson: You’re the devil! GEMÜSE IST GESUND UND NETT…
Keith: You’re scary! Save me, Jebus!

Well, ok. It’s not that over-the-top, but close. The whole thing seems like a healthy mix of some things I find interesting. Those things being:

* What Olbermann will cover (to figure out what he won’t, and maybe why)
* Dobson’s confusing attention-grabbiness
* Dobson’s dislike of the spotlight
* How everybody cherry-picks what to quote

Go to www.google.com.
Type in “worst president ever”, including the quotes.
Click on “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

It takes you right here.

Me and the SQL database are once again on speaking terms, so my webpage should relapse back into the modern age with comments and such fairly soon.

And yes, I know that it’s bad grammar to start a sentence with “Me and __” for two reasons. First because you’re always supposed to list yourself second — something to do with being polite. I don’t feel like being polite to the SQL database and I’m not required to do so as any part of our mutual communications pact. Secondly because it should have said “I” instead of “Me”. Me say screw that - Me not like starting sentences with vowels.