Ranting and Roaring

I'm just freaked out in wonder by this. So cool, so cool.

Dear De Boer's Furniture/Pizza Nova:

When I visit your site, I want to find out about furniture/order a pizza. I do not want to LISTEN TO YOUR G*DD*AMNED THEME SONG/LISTEN TO YOUR G*DD*AMNED THEME SONG or have to CLICK THROUGH A F*CKING SPLASH SCREEN/NAVIGATE THROUGH YOUR SH*TTY MENU SYSTEM. Hint: NO ONE DOES. Please fire the subliterate retards you hired somehow through a wormhole back to 1995 and hire a competent web designer and get a real site that people can use.

Thanks for your consideration,

Me.

• 35,000 people protest Iranian nutjob in front of UN
• CNN reports Iraq offers Bin Laden asylum in 1999, you know, despite being a secular state and all (tip: Captain's Quarters)

I was in Newfoundland from Thursday to Monday with Trinity-Anne visiting the family.

The Guardian is reporting that Zolpidem can awaken some from "persistent vegetative state":

For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.

Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as "a cabbage", greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.

[...] It all sounds miraculous, you might think. And in a way, it is. But this is not a miracle medication, the result of groundbreaking neurological research. Instead, these awakenings have come as the result of an accidental discovery by a dedicated – and bewildered – GP. They have all woken up, paradoxically, after being given a commonly used sleeping pill.

Jon Koch of Mountain View Gazette has a profile of Darcy "Dust my Broom" Jerrom:

Drawing on his experiences as a member of the Ukrainian-Indian Metis community in northern Manitoba, Jerrom has become a controversial figure, characterized by one left-wing activist as a "Right-Wing Blogging Injun".

Polite, thoughtful and well-spoken in person, he's earned a reputation in the Canadian "blogosphere" for publishing one of best written and original blogs in the country, becoming a veritable celebrity online and in the native community in the process.

[...] While Jerrom's thoughts on the U.S. election helped establish him on the internet, the Gomery Inquiry in 2005 catapulted the Manitoba-native into the upper echelon of Canadian bloggers.

Jerrom used his status as an American blogger to circumvent the media ban placed on the inquiry, posting testimony which was viewed by thousands of Canadians, with Dust My Broom receiving up to 500 hits an hour at one point.

As a result of the exposure received during the Gomery Inquiry, Jerrom came into contact with other Canadian aboriginal writers, who have since joined him as contributors on the blog.

[...] Since arriving in central Alberta, Jerrom's audience has continued to expand, and Dust My Broom has expanded along with it to keep up with the traffic.

Initially registering only 4 – 5 hits a day in 2004, the Broom now registers an average of 10,000 visitors a day.

The site's increasing popularity has prompted Jerrom to add four more writers to the blog's staff just to keep up with the demands for content, and he's also moved to a bigger server twice since the site's inception.

[...] Since arriving in central Alberta, Jerrom's audience has continued to expand, and Dust My Broom has expanded along with it to keep up with the traffic.

Initially registering only 4 – 5 hits a day in 2004, the Broom now registers an average of 10,000 visitors a day.

The site's increasing popularity has prompted Jerrom to add four more writers to the blog's staff just to keep up with the demands for content, and he's also moved to a bigger server twice since the site's inception.

(BTW assh*les, I know how to disable Javascript on my browser) 

Frank Miller (Sin City, Dark Knight):

Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbors were ruthlessly incinerated — reduced to ash. Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys. Imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbors. In my city. In my country. Breathing in that awful, chalky crap that filled up the lungs of every New Yorker, then coughing it right out, not knowing what I was coughing up.

For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years.

Patriotism, I now believe, isn't some sentimental, old conceit. It's self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation's survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don't all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.

"Citizens of the World", of course, will be the first one fleeing from their ideas to the US when (or if) the hammer comes down.

Lileks:

If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.

Steyn:

I don't want to be unfair to the chap — he's got a few less wearily predictable entries down the bottom end of his Hit Parade (No. 73 New Age, No. 97 John McCain, No. 98 multiculturalism) — but on the whole if you'd asked a lame satirist to come up with a parody of what an Ivy League prof would list as the evils of the planet, this is pretty much it, right down to the round of applause he gives himself in his opening quotation: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" (George Orwell), after which you expect something a little less cobwebbed than "blood for oil" (No. 6), "Reaganism" (17), "General Pinochet" (20), "Big Pharma" (36), "Christmas" (86).

[...] 

A box cutter can bring down a tower. A poem can build up a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution."

Up to a point. It wasn't the box cutter that brought down the tower, but the Islamist fanatic ploughing the jet into it, and the only reason he could get away with seizing a jet with a box cutter is because the kind of big Zinn-sized coercive hyper-regulatory regime of antiquated 1970s hijack procedures had trained an entire generation of air travellers to behave like lobotomized sheep. Had jihadists with box cutters tried to "bring down" a sports bar, they'd have had the crap beaten out of them.

More things I learned from CBC is the last 90 minutes:

• Stephen Harper is acting moderate so he can get a majority and then deal with the darkies
• Stephen Harper is divisive: i.e. a certain class of Canadians will not accept him as PM
• There is no real threat at airports; it is lie peddled by the "security industry" to make money
• All Muslims are profiled going through airports; no one else hardly is
• The US is a racist state that's difficult to get into
• An appropriate way to mark 9/11 is to play Steve Earl songs; e.g. some coked-out failure writing songs about pissing down the throat of America

Some day you'll catch another break I'm sure. 

Jeff Jarvis:

I had to leave the World Trade Center this morning.

I was disgusted that the conspiracy-theory nutjobs were crawling everywhere like the rats they are. But I was even more disturbed at the media leaches crawling around them. I wanted to go up to some of my media colleagues with their pens cocked and ready and tell them to turn around: The story isn’t a few wackos who come because you and your cameras and notebooks are here, you fools! The story is over there, in the hole that still haunts us. The story is about the families and about the heroes and about the memories and about that hole. The story is even about WTC 7, now rising above the void, shining in a sky as bright as that five years ago today. The story is about the crowd of people — more than I’ve seen in recent years — who came to pay their respect. The story is not about these disrespectful loons, who got into shouting matches, drawing more cameras to them.

 

Kenneth Andrerson:

"Liberals," she said, presumably referring to her endlessly politically correct private school (the same National Cathedral that hosted ex-president Khatami last week), "always want to tell you what to do and what to think, but then they don't even keep you safe."

Democratic Party politicians might want to reflect on that awhile. They think of themselves as defenders of freedom, protectors of civil liberties. To my daughter, however, they are merely authoritarians who tell you what to think, but then, when push comes to shove, these liberal authoritarians don't even protect you from existential risk.

I'm drawing attention to this post mainly because it highlights what I dislike about the NDP and the leftmost half of the Liberal power: the lust for control over other human beings while simultaenously abrogating their resposibility for delivering results.

Flea:

So here is a big "fuck you" from me to all the jihadis, islamists, silent "mainstream" Muslims, conspiracy theorists, carpet-baggers, opportunists, apologists, appeasers, bleeding-hearts, the entire tottering edifice of the mainstream media, people who blame the Crusades, people who blame the Jews, the people who never taught us our own history, the people who cannot be bothered to teach themselves, the people who who offer pious lectures of respect for a faith that would cut off my head and enslave every woman I have ever loved, right-wing zealots and left-wing zealots and with a special raised middle-finger to every free man and woman who thinks this is somebody else's problem.

Also, France.

 

 

Al:

More than anything, however, today my thoughts are with Trevor Greene and his family. We talk of what has changed since 9/11 and what we have given up and frankly I have given up nothing. We have not taken on a total war against terror, though we have taken on a professional one. And Trevor heard the call to join that fight to reconstruct and remake the societies in the valleys along the Afghan-Pakistan border where schools became suicide fighter training grounds, where sports stadiums became slaughter houses for militant puritan idealists, where reason was driven out – and he did so for me and us. And as the newspaper article an old friend of his and mine has linked to this morning explains, Trevor has given up much and now fights another fight I will not have to.

 

I've finally got a cell-phone. It's a Motorolla PEBL with neat features such as a cameria, video capture, e-mail, voice dial (!), text messaging and so forth; and for the inner-geek: MPEG4, Java and Bluetooth. If you're bored and need to give me a call, my phone number is 647-866-6149.

I went with Fido as my carrier with the "Urban" package which gives me unlimited incoming and 400 minutes of outgoing calls. Since I don't plan to initiate many phone calls from my cell, this will be more than sufficient. 

Tom Coates writes:

There was one speaker at FOO this year that would literally have blown my brain away if he'd happened to have had his equipment with him. Ed Boyden talked about transcranial magnetic stimulation – basically how to use focused magnetic fields to stimulate sections of the brain and hence change behaviour. He talked about how you could use this kind of stimulation to improve mood and fight depression, to induce visual phenomena or reduce schizophrenic symptoms, hallucinations and dreams, speed up language processing, improve attention, break habits and improve creativity. Frankly, the whole territory sounded extraordinary. Some examples – a depression study found that stimulating parts of the brain for half an hour once a week massively lifted mood and that the effects lasted for around six weeks after the treatment had stopped. Another study found that by stimulating deep reward centres associated with addiction you could ween someone off smoking.

The whole session was sort of terrifyingly awesome and itself rather brain-melting. Apparently complications from this kind of treatment have been reduced to nearly zero after some safety rules were proposed in 1998.

There's a sourceforge project underway if you're interested in trying a little home brain frying. There's also practical applications:

He ended by telling the story of one prominent thinker in this field who developed a wand that she could touch against a part of your head and stop you being able to talk.

That would be great for meetings. 

Here are some things I should have guessed were possible:

• How to convert Last.FM radio into MP3s on your computer
• How to do the same with Pandora

Get while the getting's good.

This is really neat — it's an entertaining Flash presentation about how to think about 10 dimensional spacetime (as opposed to good ol' 3+1 spacetime):

Welcome to the Tenth Dimension

In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of "time") by the vibrations of exquisitely small "superstrings". The average person has barely gotten used to the idea of there being four dimensions: how can we possibly imagine the tenth?

If you are a new visitor, start out by clicking on "Imagining the Ten Dimensions" in the Navigation section: you will see a set of animations, with narration and sound effects, which take you from the first to the tenth dimension. We would suggest watching them in order from zero to ten the first time… but hey, you're a creature with free will, so do whatever you'd like.   The ideas in this animation come from chapter one of a new science/philosophy book called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension".

 

And in particular, first day of _full day_ school.

Now I understand the difference:

• Class 1 Accident: "Freak": Being blown up by your allies
• Class 2 Accident: "Bizzare": Stingray stinger through the heart

I wholely endorse ESR's plea re: dear Americans, we're on the same side (mostly) please stop killing us.