So we've got some weird sort of off-shore storm driving fifteen foot surf onto the LA beaches, and kicking up London-style fog. Total grey-out. The Lovely Wife and I are walking down the beach, watching the waves emerge from absolutely formless grey ...
.. and I look back up oni the hills of Malibu, rising stright up behind us. The fog wipes out all visibility above the road level. No sign of anything on the other side of the road, no more than the hint of cliff just past the mist ...
.. and suddenly, the sun (which we can't see) hits a glass door on house (which we also can't see) maybe two hundred feet up the cliff ...
.. and a door opens in the sky. Light streaming through the fog like a DP's dream, as if Heaven itself were on the other side of the opening that's floating in the middle of the sky. No wires, no CG, just a shining portal hanging in mid-air.
He's got a bit of a flash hand, eh?
Happy Holidays, and may you receive a little gift of inspiration from the world to start the New Year.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
One more page:
Why IS Guy Gardner so angry at Beetle? Notice he doesn't say "Who are you?" ... What's with the weird arcane symbols? Yes, BB is a One Year Later book, so why the hell doen't he quite know how his armor works?
All painstakingly explained over the first 3 issues of BB.
I Wouldn't Know Who to Apologize to First ...
Canadian courts have okayed group sex.
OTTAWA - Group sex among consenting adults is neither prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Wednesday as it lifted a ban on so-called “swingers” clubs.In a ruling that radically changes the way courts determine what poses a threat to the population, the top court threw out the conviction of a Montreal man who ran a club where members could have group sex in a private room behind locked doors.
“Consensual conduct behind code-locked doors can hardly be supposed to jeopardize a society as vigorous and tolerant as Canadian society,” said the opinion of the seven-to-two majority, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.
The beer's twice as strong, national healthcare, legalized marijuana, gay marriage, now group sex. Send in your applications people, because I have a feeling the slots in my American refugee compound are going to start filling up a little faster.
And people wonder why I carry two passports. Actually, no, after this week, most people have probably figured it out.Tuesday, December 20, 2005
FAFAFBLOG!
Why do I not have a link to Fafblog? It makes Jesus' kittens sad!
"Judicial oversight" is just the kind of big-government red tape that caused 9/11.2 In the half-hour it could take for a FISA court to rubber-stamp Giblets's wiretap request, literally hundreds of thousands of possible terrorists could be ordering pizzas, calling in late for work or arguing with their spouses, all free of the vigilant eye of the National Security Agency. We cannot wait for the smoking gun that could come in the form of a dull and lengthy conversation with your parents about your lack of focus at school!
DaRw1n hAs PWNED U !
A breathtakingly thorough judicial smackdown of the Intelligent Design foolishness in Dover, PA. All about it here.
Oversight
Hmm. I'm not sure what it says about me when I realize how much credit I'd give the President if he said: "Yes, I broke the law. I take full responsibility and have been working to fix the situation" as opposed to "I didn't break no laws! My lawyers say that the Constitution says I didn't! Nu-uh!"
Several of our conservative friends are under the misapprehension that there was indeed Congressional oversight over the project. This is understandable, as the President keeps saying it. That, sadly, doesn't automatically make it true. I know there's a certain percentage of people who sleep better believing the President has magic powers, among them the ability to shift reality through sheer force of his will, but, um, no.
And yes, I know that many times only a select few members of the Intelligence Committee are briefed on certain issues. But in this case, as this letter from Senator Rockefeller indicates, the Senators were told what was going on, told there was no way they could approve or disapprove, and then sworn to secrecy.
That's not oversight. Oversight means "watchful supervision". It means some level of control. Please pardon the crude metaphor: but if telling someone you're about to do something but they have no ability to moderate it or stop it gives them oversight, then a rape victim has "oversight" on her rapist. I call bullshit.
Oh, and for the inevitable "When will you people realize we're in a war" post: Yes, I realize that. But a war to preserve ... what? The Founding Fathers had Britain breathing down their neck. They didn't blink. I recently saw a Congressman on TV say "If Washington DC goes up in nuclear fire, the Constitution burns with it." If you want to reduce our freedoms to historical scraps of paper, that makes sense, I guess.
This isn't a war -- there's no "winning" until you eliminate every dissatisfied wingnut with a cellphone and C4 on the planet, and that ain't gonna happen in the next two hundred years. (Hell, we can't even police our own wingnuts. Remember Oklahoma City? ... You don't. No, that doesn't tend to come up much, does it ...) I mean, go ahead -- give me a definition of an operational victory in the "War on Terror". Impossible. We can't even nail down operational goals in Iraq.
No, what we're in is a long, hard struggle between order and chaos, freedom and fundamentalism, with all four sides often cross-pollinating. We are in a struggle that will every day challenge our sense of justice and identity, challenge us to rise above our fear. What's really amusing, in a grim way, is that such a struggle has a name out there in the languages of the world. It's usually mis-translated as "war", too.
We're in a jihad, folks.
Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor. The Bastard.
Several of our conservative friends are under the misapprehension that there was indeed Congressional oversight over the project. This is understandable, as the President keeps saying it. That, sadly, doesn't automatically make it true. I know there's a certain percentage of people who sleep better believing the President has magic powers, among them the ability to shift reality through sheer force of his will, but, um, no.
And yes, I know that many times only a select few members of the Intelligence Committee are briefed on certain issues. But in this case, as this letter from Senator Rockefeller indicates, the Senators were told what was going on, told there was no way they could approve or disapprove, and then sworn to secrecy.
That's not oversight. Oversight means "watchful supervision". It means some level of control. Please pardon the crude metaphor: but if telling someone you're about to do something but they have no ability to moderate it or stop it gives them oversight, then a rape victim has "oversight" on her rapist. I call bullshit.
Oh, and for the inevitable "When will you people realize we're in a war" post: Yes, I realize that. But a war to preserve ... what? The Founding Fathers had Britain breathing down their neck. They didn't blink. I recently saw a Congressman on TV say "If Washington DC goes up in nuclear fire, the Constitution burns with it." If you want to reduce our freedoms to historical scraps of paper, that makes sense, I guess.
This isn't a war -- there's no "winning" until you eliminate every dissatisfied wingnut with a cellphone and C4 on the planet, and that ain't gonna happen in the next two hundred years. (Hell, we can't even police our own wingnuts. Remember Oklahoma City? ... You don't. No, that doesn't tend to come up much, does it ...) I mean, go ahead -- give me a definition of an operational victory in the "War on Terror". Impossible. We can't even nail down operational goals in Iraq.
No, what we're in is a long, hard struggle between order and chaos, freedom and fundamentalism, with all four sides often cross-pollinating. We are in a struggle that will every day challenge our sense of justice and identity, challenge us to rise above our fear. What's really amusing, in a grim way, is that such a struggle has a name out there in the languages of the world. It's usually mis-translated as "war", too.
We're in a jihad, folks.
Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor. The Bastard.
The George Who Cried Wolf
Ah, I see Kevin Drum's gone and done all the hard work of putting together the quotes to support something I realized last night. But then, he gets paid to do this. Go read him first.
Yes, it occurred to me also -- looks like the NSA finally got all the kinks out of Echelon. And to the idea that all e-mails and websites are now being data-mined, I'd like to say I LOVE PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND JESUS.
Although it'd probably be best if I no longer e-mailed my mistress bragging that she must prepare for my "al-Zawahiri to stir insurgency in her Sunni Triangle of love" ... shit. Jesus Intelligent Design Moonbat. (Dammit, will somebody hack the algorithm so I know what the flagging ratios are?)
This really does explain everything. After all, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court is notoriously slutty in granting wiretap warrants retroactively. The Administration went to a helluva lot of effort and has brought an enormous shitstorm down on itself to slip a procedural roofie to the Paris Hilton of the Court system. Just pet the chihuhua and order another appletini and you'll get your warrant, for chrissake. The alternative is that the means by which they selected targets for the warrant, their probable cause, is something that'd make even the FISA court cough up a lung -- or even more validly, is some cutting edge piece of tech ass-kickery that we do NOT want people knowing we have.
And here we arrive at our problem. There are a million perfectly valid discussions we could be having about the nature of the Fourth Amendment in a digital age, how do we weigh the risk of another terrorist act against civil liberties ... all important issues we as a nation need to grapple with.
But instead, the Administration's arguing that none of that discussion is necessary -- that they are their own oversight. The President actually said, in the press conference when asked about "unchecked power": "There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law, for starters." That fails the EEBC miserably. "Of course I'm not screwing around on you, honey. I took wedding vows." (The EEBC never lies, people. Trust the EEBC)
Instead of defending this from their proper Constitutional position as a co-equal branch of government -- an argument I would BUY, by the way -- they're basically saying that as long as the nation is at war the President has essentially unlimited powers. Seeing as the War on Terror (ugh) will be with us until the end of this century at least, that is a spectacularly crappy idea. You want Hillary Clinton to inherit that powerful a Presidency? Yeah, I didn't think so.
It is, even by the loosest standards, the exact opposite of how the Founding Fathers designed the system to work.
And then, when you layer on five years of:
-- the President whipping out 9/11 every five minutes for his own personal gain
-- the Administration lying about rendition and torture
-- the Administration lying about a Saddam/Osama connection (yes, Cheney is part of the Amdinistration)
-- the Administration bending and breaking habeus corpus
-- the Administration cooking the books on WMD intelligence*
-- the Administration treating Congress like a rubber stamp
-- the Administration constantly announcing big "terror arrests" that wind up dissolving in court
-- the Administration and its proxies accusing dissenters of treason
-- the widespread use of "national security letters" allowing the FBI to investigate you pretty much on a whim (it's not a warrant, you see, it's a letter)
-- the Administration shagging the post-war planning, and then spending three years telling us to shut up and cheer louder ...
... on top of that arrogance ... well, that's just insane. They haven't even decided exactly which argument justifies this within their own talking points. A humble, works-well-with-others Administration would worry me with the "Hey, we swore an oath, so you can trust us" bullshit. But an Administration that has had legal documents drawn up stating that the President has unlimited powers during war, and Congress can't interfere? Errr, not just "no". "Fuckno".
And so we have the little morality tale come to life, the George Who Cried Wolf. Because an argument can be made, a reasonable one (not one I agree with, but a reasonable one) about data mining in the fight against terrorism. Hell, I even agree you can't go spilling the details of the tech out everywhere; but in that case USE CONGRESS. Even appoint a completely confidential Congressional Oversight Committee to whatever SpiffyNewTech(tm) is out there and I'd sleep a little better at night. It is a representative democracy, after all. But by now the Administration has hooted and hollered and claimed so many ridiculous things are necessary for the WoT, and has called far too many reasonable people "paranoid" and "traitors", and made so many fanciful/worrisome claims about their Right to Power, that now every argument must pass through that lens of past behaviour.
A President regretfully announcing: yeah, he's run smack up against the Fourth Amendment, and we have a difficult discussion to have here as fellow citizens -- that's one thing. Stumbling around like a drunk screaming about traitors and mis-quoting the Constitution while your minions declare that you have unlimited powers during a "war" that will stretch into perpetuity is quite another.
* if you're one of the people who don't think the Administration tweaked the intelligence it presented, then, well, you and I live in entirely different worlds, and it's probably not worth sending me an angry e-mail. Just wave at me from Flatland and we'll move past each other into our alternate dimensions.
None of these quotes makes sense if the NSA program involved nothing more than an expansion of ordinary taps of specific individuals. After all, the FISA court would have approved taps of domestic-to-international calls as quickly and easily as they do with normal domestic wiretaps. What's more, Congress wouldn't have had any objection to supporting a routine program expansion; George Bush wouldn't have explained it with gobbledegook about the difference between monitoring and detecting; Jay Rockefeller wouldn't have been reminded of TIA; and the Times wouldn't have had any issues over divulging sensitive technology.
Yes, it occurred to me also -- looks like the NSA finally got all the kinks out of Echelon. And to the idea that all e-mails and websites are now being data-mined, I'd like to say I LOVE PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND JESUS.
Although it'd probably be best if I no longer e-mailed my mistress bragging that she must prepare for my "al-Zawahiri to stir insurgency in her Sunni Triangle of love" ... shit. Jesus Intelligent Design Moonbat. (Dammit, will somebody hack the algorithm so I know what the flagging ratios are?)
This really does explain everything. After all, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court is notoriously slutty in granting wiretap warrants retroactively. The Administration went to a helluva lot of effort and has brought an enormous shitstorm down on itself to slip a procedural roofie to the Paris Hilton of the Court system. Just pet the chihuhua and order another appletini and you'll get your warrant, for chrissake. The alternative is that the means by which they selected targets for the warrant, their probable cause, is something that'd make even the FISA court cough up a lung -- or even more validly, is some cutting edge piece of tech ass-kickery that we do NOT want people knowing we have.
And here we arrive at our problem. There are a million perfectly valid discussions we could be having about the nature of the Fourth Amendment in a digital age, how do we weigh the risk of another terrorist act against civil liberties ... all important issues we as a nation need to grapple with.
But instead, the Administration's arguing that none of that discussion is necessary -- that they are their own oversight. The President actually said, in the press conference when asked about "unchecked power": "There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law, for starters." That fails the EEBC miserably. "Of course I'm not screwing around on you, honey. I took wedding vows." (The EEBC never lies, people. Trust the EEBC)
Instead of defending this from their proper Constitutional position as a co-equal branch of government -- an argument I would BUY, by the way -- they're basically saying that as long as the nation is at war the President has essentially unlimited powers. Seeing as the War on Terror (ugh) will be with us until the end of this century at least, that is a spectacularly crappy idea. You want Hillary Clinton to inherit that powerful a Presidency? Yeah, I didn't think so.
It is, even by the loosest standards, the exact opposite of how the Founding Fathers designed the system to work.
And then, when you layer on five years of:
-- the President whipping out 9/11 every five minutes for his own personal gain
-- the Administration lying about rendition and torture
-- the Administration lying about a Saddam/Osama connection (yes, Cheney is part of the Amdinistration)
-- the Administration bending and breaking habeus corpus
-- the Administration cooking the books on WMD intelligence*
-- the Administration treating Congress like a rubber stamp
-- the Administration constantly announcing big "terror arrests" that wind up dissolving in court
-- the Administration and its proxies accusing dissenters of treason
-- the widespread use of "national security letters" allowing the FBI to investigate you pretty much on a whim (it's not a warrant, you see, it's a letter)
-- the Administration shagging the post-war planning, and then spending three years telling us to shut up and cheer louder ...
... on top of that arrogance ... well, that's just insane. They haven't even decided exactly which argument justifies this within their own talking points. A humble, works-well-with-others Administration would worry me with the "Hey, we swore an oath, so you can trust us" bullshit. But an Administration that has had legal documents drawn up stating that the President has unlimited powers during war, and Congress can't interfere? Errr, not just "no". "Fuckno".
And so we have the little morality tale come to life, the George Who Cried Wolf. Because an argument can be made, a reasonable one (not one I agree with, but a reasonable one) about data mining in the fight against terrorism. Hell, I even agree you can't go spilling the details of the tech out everywhere; but in that case USE CONGRESS. Even appoint a completely confidential Congressional Oversight Committee to whatever SpiffyNewTech(tm) is out there and I'd sleep a little better at night. It is a representative democracy, after all. But by now the Administration has hooted and hollered and claimed so many ridiculous things are necessary for the WoT, and has called far too many reasonable people "paranoid" and "traitors", and made so many fanciful/worrisome claims about their Right to Power, that now every argument must pass through that lens of past behaviour.
A President regretfully announcing: yeah, he's run smack up against the Fourth Amendment, and we have a difficult discussion to have here as fellow citizens -- that's one thing. Stumbling around like a drunk screaming about traitors and mis-quoting the Constitution while your minions declare that you have unlimited powers during a "war" that will stretch into perpetuity is quite another.
* if you're one of the people who don't think the Administration tweaked the intelligence it presented, then, well, you and I live in entirely different worlds, and it's probably not worth sending me an angry e-mail. Just wave at me from Flatland and we'll move past each other into our alternate dimensions.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Chronic of Narnia
Yes, I know everyone else has it up. But I have a nice little essay about on-line entertianment coming up, so it's worth seeing the first genuinely interesting thing SNL's done in a while.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
More World Wars
Mike Nelson, author of the popular on-line novel Dingo (really, you should be reading it. It is packed with remarkable ass-kickery) is doing a new book for Boom! Studios. Mike explores a very simple idea. Say that the aliens who invaded in War of the Worlds, who were smart enough to pull off interplanetary war, suddenly licked the whole "oooo, wet coughs, didn't think of that" hink.
They're back. And they are very, very pissed. Read about War of the Worlds: Second Wave at Newsarama.
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