Friday, February 27, 2009

What.... in the hell...

I am left torn between awe and despair when I watch these videos:

JAPANESE BUG FIGHTS!

Spoiler Alert: This is the shit nightmares are made of. Seriously, this is MMA on a primal level.

I haven't the faintest idea what the announcers are saying, and honestly I am not sure I want to. These kinds of events are a kind of gold mine for us writer types: Bizarre, real, and absolutely insane. Perfect places to throw plucky heroes, would be spies, and incompetent henchfolk.

So, grab something to eat, sit back, and... watch.

Just watch.

UPDATE: CRAWFISH ARE NOT BUGS.

Monday, February 23, 2009

The Know-Nothing Party!

Politics in America seems to have lost its damned mind. We have know-nothings on the left espousing the same reality denialism as those on the right. It is a knee jerk reaction that, if one side expresses a view on something, no matter how far out there or based in woo-woo fiction, the other must take the opposite.

Needless to say, this is fucking stupid. The opposite side of a nonsense position is one that is solidly built on rational thought and backed up by corroborative evidence that is independently verifiable.

Instead we have baseless accusations and nonsense straw men on parade from both sides. To be apart of the fun you really have to fall in step to the beat of the party, otherwise you are left in the cold. Talk about what your holy book tells you, or your gut, and make assertions with about as much evidence as the average alien abduction story and the legions will follow.

We saw it under Bush, we are seeing it again under Obama. Republicans crying out about socialism (after voting for a bailout of private industries) and Democrats turning their noses up without as much moral superiority as their predecessors.

This is a democratic republic folks, not follow the leader.
We need to be aware, and full of facts, not sound bites. We need uncomfortable questions to be asked, and when answered the answers need to be checked against the evidence and accepted once it checks out.

That last bit is EXTREMELY important. Too many times do we see legitimate evidence dismissed as a "conspiracy" or "wrong" just because of some fabricated reason in the receiver's head.

If that is too much to ask for, the welcome to the Know-Nothing Party! Everyone is invited to play the party games, just check your brain at the door.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

a random thought

As long as ignorance lingers in our minds, shadows of doubt and suspicion will fall across our neighbors and fellow men. Those who adhere to the tenets that divide us, instead of embracing those which unite us will see either our destruction or that the cycle repeats.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Future Politics

The internet acts as our generations giant cloud memory for things we commit down for the world to see.
How, perhaps, is this going to play into the future of politics?
In the past, it has been easy for political handlers to clean up an official's past by simply taking them out of that situation, and spreading the 'official word'. This revisionist trick does not work any more, as was demonstrated in our last election. Every time they tried, anyone with an itch and bandwidth pulled up the facts almost as fast as the politicos could lie.

These are more visible and immediate effects of the prevalence of the infortubes, but what say... twenty years from now? Will we find out that the presidential candidate was livejournal user darkXblood who wrote awful poetry? Will President BunnyLord's blog come back to haunt him from his days as a confused teen?

The answer as far as I can see it is: yes. No amount of revision is going to delete Google's cache page, or the cache's of any other number of sites. No amount of the party line will wipe away the incriminating MySpace photos.

I just toss this out there as food for thought. I personally am looking forward to it. It might bring us to a whole new level of transparancy in government... one we wished we had never seen.

Monday, February 2, 2009

It occurred to me

That life is very similar to 'Choose your own adventure' books, but with half the people reading it being illiterate.

Odd.