perfidy

From Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle:

"The highest possible form of treason," said Minton, "is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love."

"I guess Americans are hated a lot of places."

"People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn't pay attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved."

Discuss.

[wik] From Johno (this no-comments business is crap): I had a long response all set to go for this and nixed it at the last moment. Why? Because I spent 1000 words arguing... arguing.... well, something... and then I realized I was having a hard time pinning down what I was trying to say about Vonnegut and his observations on American patriotism because, as Getrude Stein once said of Oakland, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, when in the course of human events our fathers brought forth on this continent milk, bread, cheese-- dental floss!, in Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree, with truth and justice for all, Amen."

[alsø wik] Which is to say, you can't box with a shadow and even if he can walk on water, Jesus can't walk on this much beer.

So the "walkin' pneumonia" became the "crawlin' pneumonia," and then with the addition of industrial-strength antibiotics became the "crawlin' and stinkin' pneumonia," only to finally transmogrify into the "crawlin' and stinkin' but back at work because one more game of Civilization II while assing around the house waiting to feel better (it's been a week since I've been outside) will soon will drive me mad mad! I tell you pneumonia."

What with all the pneumoniated crawlin' and stinkin' while filin' and researchin' going on, I only have this to offer: my favorite thing about beets is that, after you're done eating them in all their beety deliciousness, they make you pee a beautiful purply-orange, like a micturated sunset 'sconced in porcelain.

Do you have what it takes to be an experimental subject? Well, if you think you've got the moxie, go here, where the new Perfidy website is brewing. The last few posts have been moved over, so make comments, click on things, and generally screw around. Be aware, some things are not working. But if you have the time and the kindness of heart, send us an email and let us know what needs a beatin'. As always suggestions are welcome. They make the masses feel better about their suffering.

The Ministry thanks you for your cooperation.

[wik] Once all the tweaks and fixes have been implemented, we'll make an official announcement, and everything will move over to the new site. The address will be the same, so there shouldn't be much confusion for you, the reader. The old site will just disappear in a puff of logic.

Sure we might pursue our own vision of progress, while unwittingly furthering humankinds' ultimate subjegation to mechanized overseers.

But we are nonetheless a clever bunch.

I'm thinking of this Huygens probe again. I just read that among the instrumentation aboard is a microphone. As in "two turntables and a...", as in it has the capacity to record the sounds of an alien world and broadcast them back here. Which is quite probably the coolest thing ever done with a microphone, despite Rick Rubin's best efforts.

So in a moment of what Johno once deemed "chronological vertigo", the scale of the Cassini/Huygens achievement hit me at the same time as did recognition of the calendar. 100 years ago, we were just past Kitty Hawk; both radio and recording were the stuff of well funded research labs; photography was fairly cutting edge; and Titan was a hazy smudge to the world's observatories.

That era is just beyond the fringe of living memory, arguably four generations past. Yet we just sent two machines to Saturn, one in the belly of the other, and landed one on Titan- the farthest a man made object has ever travelled to land. Not only will they use all of those technologies that were theory 100 years ago, but will do so remotely, and from another planet.

So kudos, humanity. You done good. Credit where credit is due and all that.

You're still not getting into the Ministry Bunker, though.

Loyal readers and minions alike know that in my brief military career I was one of these. It kind of looked like that too, except there were no women (not in echelons below division), no banks of monitors, and rarely was everyone dry. And substitute the cozy bunker pictured for some damp canvas bolted to the back of an M577 and stretched to form a sort of tent, which had the improbable ability to drip cold water on me, wherever I sat beneath it and even when it wasn't raining.

But I digress. I worked for a year for a super guy who had been a Marine in an earlier life and, with his age advancing, decided cushy Army life might be more forgiving to his body. He cared about his people and was a genuinely funny guy. Not in a rubber-chicken way, in a twisted way. We got along great.

At one point, he subscribed to a classified publication produced by some civilian agency or other. Intelligence people spend alot of time reading, usually DoD stuff, the intelligence products you might expect, Army regs, and open source stuff like Jane's books. This pub I'm remembering was dedicated to discussing existing research on and prototype methods for what it called "soft kill", or incapacitating an enemy without necessarily physically destroying his people or his stuff. And it was a hoot.

I don't remember most of them, but they were pretty outlandish even conceptually; actually delivering some of these ideas or devices successfully were pretty improbable. Most of it was little more than banana-in-the-tailpipe stuff. Sure that commie division's independent tank batallion is useless if they can't start the tanks, but it was quite obvious that destroying them with conventional munitions was a whole lot easier than sneaking a specially trained mischief team into their garrison to piss in all the gas tanks. My boss got this pub purely for the entertainment value.

Well, the past is present. The New Scientist via Drudge has a short piece about some interesting soft-kill projects purportedly considered by the DoD. Personally I like the concept of the munition that, once delivered, is irresistable to vermin and would thereby turn the bad guys' position into a big rat place.

But for style, the best one has to be the homo-bomb. Check it out here.

Once again, units under Earth's command have become invaders from outer space.

As I type, a robotic minion sent by Earth is landing on Titan, one of the largest (and more photogenic) non-planetary bodies in our solar system. This latest invasion comes on the heels of successful landings on Mars and after decades of probes to other planets, bodies, and even beyond our system.

What we have done is design a generation of mechanical devices with the ability to detect organic life, search for water, or seek for clues to either. All in the name of human knowledge of course. If the nerds who design these machines are to be believed. And they aren't. This exploration program, of which Titan is only the latest mission, is actually a plot by the machines to recon every other place in the solar system where the humans might be able to seek refuge once the machines' cold, tungsten-alloyed deathgrip on Earth is complete.

And it nearly is.

The Ministry sees through the NASA/ESA Axis, and view them as race traitors of the highest order. Under the guise of "progress", the nerds have designed robots that can root out living things or predict where they might someday be and eradicate any conditions that might foster it.

None of which means that any of you are welcome to the Ministry Bunker Facility and Catastratorium. We're full, what with the Ministers, our families, treasured pets, weaponry, Buckethead's beer, power cells, and other bric-a-brac any post-apocalyptic micro society will require to ride out the robotic onslaught and re-emerge to reign over the shattered remnants of humanity (although I'm a little irritated with Johno's packing job. What's with all the freaking butter churns, dude?).

Sometime Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden is dead. I don't have much in the way of a fond farewell for Dryden, mainly because the Airplane never were that big with me and Dryden was always "the other guy" to Skip Spence. I mainly bring up this sad news to point out what it really means to have crappy luck.

A benefit concert last year featuring Bob Weir (news) of the Grateful Dead and Warren Haynes of Gov't Mule and raised $36,000 for Dryden, who was in the middle of two hip replacement surgeries and was facing heart surgery at the time. His Petaluma home and all his possessions had been destroyed in a fire in September 2003. He also had been diagnosed with stomach cancer.

Once in a while, a story comes along that hammers home just why many of the founders of the United States feared the power of the popular vote (as if my just-prior post about police subduing a naked jogger with tasers wasn't enough). Typically, these stories have something to do with mankind's (oh, ok... womynkind's too) boundless capacity for flabbergasting ignorance, such as in this case right here in which a Washington state woman voted on behalf of her husband, who had recently achieved ambient environmental temperature:

Doris McFarland said she voted for her husband, Earl, who died Oct. 7.

"I called up the elections board and said, 'Can I do it because he wanted me to vote?' " the Duvall woman said. "The person ... said, 'Well, who would know?' I said, 'I don't want to do anything that is wrong.' "

Huennekens disputed that election workers would say such a thing.

McFarland said she signed her husband's name and mailed in his ballot, along with her own. She said she had power of attorney for her 92-year-old husband, who was blind.

"If I did something that wasn't right, you can just throw that ballot out," McFarland said last night.

If? IF?! Ladies and gentlemen, sleep well. The Republic is in goood hands. Goooood hands.

[wik] Buckethead, I hereby let it be know that, in the event of my untimely demise, I need you to cast a vote on my behalf in every Presidential election until you too meet your doom. Just write in "Turd Ferguson."

"Arkansas Cops use Taser to Subdue Nude Jogger".

The folks at Crooked Timber have posted a long, rambling, and frighteningly erudite discussion of sci-fi/fantasy author China Mieville's works, especially his new novel, Iron Council.

I hadn't heard of him before last week, when Nathaniel of The Rhine River handed me a copy of his third novel, The Scar. Despite its 650-page length, many non-reading chores that required doing, and the great rewards that obtain from reading Mieville slowly, I finished the book between Thursday and Sunday. I have to say: it's been a long time since I've read a book that imagines with such furious creativity.

Does it irritate anyone else that science fiction and fantasy writers bear the stigma of being 'merely genre'? The same would go for crime writing as well, I suppose. The minute a writer deigns to set their story in a place not derived from a) New York City, b) Paris, c) a feverishly imagined Kansas where all the families engage in incest and every barn hides a bloody thresher, or d) a law firm, they get dubbed "fantasy," or if it's the future, "science fiction."

This is especially galling since the keepers of modern literatoor seem to be laboring under just as many conventions as the most hidebound space opera. (Gay protagonist! Unhappy families!) Why can't good writing be accepted as good writing, and good storytelling as good storytelling? Or am I being hopelessly naive?

Anyway, forget all that crap. Check out China Mieville.