The Vatican is shooting itself in the jigglies.
I'm sure you've seen news articles like this one in your paper of choice. It's entirely possible television news has even given it a mention; I don't watch television. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I did turn on Public Access twice, a few months ago.) The Pope has issued a venomously-worded denunciation of gay marriage, calling upon Catholic lawmakers everywhere to rally round the banner and stamp out gay marriage whenever it might rear its head. You can read the whole thing on the Vatican website. I won't quote from it, because it's grotesquely offensive. I find most fecal the passages saying that, of course, the Church condemns discrimination against homosexual persons; the lady, as it were, protests too much, methinks, given that such sentiments are immediately followed with the most despicable condemnations of homosexual acts and relationships, claims that gay people cannot love each other, claims that letting gay couples adopt children does palpable damage to the innocent tykes. (This last is especially funny, coming from an organisation whose clergy raped and molested over 1,000 in the Boston area alone.)
That being said, I don't think this bilious text will hurt gay rights in the least in the developed world. I am of the opinion that it can only further reduce the Vatican's dwindling influence, because there are a heck of a lot of Catholic legislators out there who don't agree with these hateful sentiments, and aren't going to obey. The Catholic Church as an institution is pretty horrid in a lot of ways. Catholics are not.
Jean Chretien is Catholic, as is his inevitable successor, Paul Martin. Both support the coming legalisation of gay marriage in Canada. Both have already announced the Vatican's outburst will not influence them in the least.
Charles Kennedy, leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, is, at least nominally, a Catholic. He also likes David Bowie. By all accounts he's a dreadfully nice person, and it would delight me to no end to see him Prime Minister. He has also vocally courted the gay vote, supports Britain's upcoming pseudo-marriage partnerships, and even specifically mentions the transgendered. Britain, embrace him!
For that matter, also Catholic is the Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith. He's also 1/8 Japanese, apparently.) Even he has supported the partnerships. He couldn't switch sides now without another Tory revolt. (Michael Portillo was raised Catholic, too, and no matter what he might say, I'm convinced he's not only a total butt pirate but quite possibly Chris Morris's secret former love slave. Have you read the Paxman/Portillo slash? Making Light linked to it ages ago. I once saw Michael Portillo walking through a parking lot roundabouts Westminster Palace. His briefcase looked gay.)
Even Andrew Sullivan is Catholic.
Basically, what I'm saying is that Catholic politicians are now in a situation where they are practically and morally incapable of following the Vatican's line. It'll erode away the Church's remaining power, until the Vatican realises that it's become toothless and senile, a great gilded corpse. Minus the hyperbole, it means the Vatican can say all it wants, but the more it says, the less likely it becomes that anyone will listen. Which I think is an end devoutly to be desired.
Times change, and if the Church won't change with them, it condemns itself to irrelevance.
The Blue Angels have been buzzing my apartment building.
No, really. They're awfully low.
They sound like the world's biggest pair of trousers ripping down the bloated, inflamed buttocks.
And they're blue. Who knew?
It's 92 degrees out.
Ninety-two God-fucking degrees.
This is so wrong. This is Seattle. There's supposed to be rain, and clouds, and darkness, and gloom. I love rain, and clouds, and darkness, and gloom. That is why I moved here. I'm no Goth, don't get me wrong. I just hate the Sun. I thrive best in cool, dark places. I am much like a mushroom. (A magic mushroom? Eat me and see.)
If I ruled the world it would never get above 68 filthy American Fahrenheit degrees, everything would be perpetually wreathed in fog, and thunderstorms would be as common as crack.
I'm not just whining here...I find the heat seriously debilitating. I get these huge headaches...It becomes difficult to think properly. Sometimes I lose words. And I feel huge upwellings of primal despair, as if all my worst nightmares had come true: as if there was a God, and He was Rupert Murdoch, and that a little dwarf with huge teeth had come to kill me, and that Eric Roberts would play the Master, and that democratic socialism was dying, and that Tony Blair was my mum, and all my teeth were falling out...Sort of like that.
It is not so unlikely, the crippling power heat has over me. H. P. Lovecraft used to suffer the most peculiar reactions to winter cold; I was trying to look up a reference for you in his Selected Letters, but the damn'd things don't have an index. I did find, on page 403 of Selected Letters IV, a reference to his bloating to over 200 pounds in 1925. Here we are! Selected Letters III, page 110, in a letter of 14 January to James Morton:
Another accidental experience with the cold (+14°) on Nov. 30th last--when I lost breathing-power, dinner, balance, and three-fourths of my consciousness in an attempt to walk home from my younger aunt's before I learned how the mercury had dropped--has conclusively shewed me that I can never hope to buck up against temperatures much under +20°...
There is more justification for an anti-heat tirade than just my morbid oversensitivity. As Shaw Island's Zach Stroum relates, there have been brush fires along our freeways. I have, with my own eyes, seen grass that remained green(ish) and verdant(ish) all through the winter turn crispy yellow, like McDonald's French fries, lifeless, soulless, and salty. The University has been watering some of its lawns. And nothing is air conditioned here. The wrongness is palpable. And it feels sort of like a dead frog, stuffed with marbles, being beaten with twigs.
Humbug, I say. Humbug.
H. P. Lovecraft would have loved blogging. He would have been much better at it than I am.
This one bothered me to no end until I looked it up...It seemed so simple, yet I couldn't see how to do it, no matter how I banged my head on the chalkboard. So, without further ado:
Say a module M is Artinian if it satisfies the descending chain condition on submodules: every chain of submodules
MÊM1ÊM2Ê...
stabilises: for some n, Mn=Mn+m for all m.
Let R be a ring, M a left R-module, K a submodule of M such that K and M/K are both Artinian. Then M is also Artinian.
Proof:
We have a short exact sequence 0®K®M®M/K®0, where the first map, i, is inclusion, and the second, p, is the natural projection onto the quotient. Let
MÊM1ÊM2Ê...
be any descending chain of submodules in M. Then this chain induces two other chains,
KÊKÇM1ÊKÇM2Ê...
and
M/KÊp(M1)Êp(M2)Ê....
By assumption, each of these induced chains terminates: for some n, and all k,
KÇMn=KÇMn+k and p(Mn)=p(Mn+k).
If xÎMn, then p(x)Îp(Mn)=p(Mn+k)
so $yÎMn+k with p(y)=p(x):
x-yÎkerpÇMn=KÇMn=KÇMn+k.
Therefore xÎMn+k, or Mn=Mn+k. QED!
There's dirty work afoot...I think my hosting service has had some server troubles. The blog's fixed, but I think my e-mail is still down...This is regrettable.
No, wait! It's working now. If you'd tried e-mailing me earlier today, it may have gotten lost. But normal service should now resume.
This isn't mine...Don't shoot the messenger.
'There are only 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary, and those who don't.'
In my journeys across Blogistan, I've found a lot of politically active Democrat types who, whichever candidate they're favouring at the moment, say that they'd switch sides in a heartbeat if only General Wesley Clark would join the race. See, for example, this article from Not Geniuses, and the comments following, or sentiments from the Cattle Call threads at the Daily Kos. He is painted in glowingly generous terms as having much the same outsider appeal as Dean, only without any actual positions and with the whole general thing going on, making him an unstoppable election behemoth on foreign policy. And while he is a Rhodes Scholar and undoubtedly competent and all of that, I feel deep and serious reservations about him.
And the reason is quotes like these:
'Because there is no pattern, the fact that the Wesley Clark of today is the same one who toured Britain justifying the My Lai massacre is no more than a bizarre coincidence.'
I am having very little luck finding more concrete citations...Most of the 'Clark is a Vietnam apologist' statements I've found on the web have been on sites which at first glance do not seem, as it were, necessarily entirely reliable. But my gut instinct is to always think the worst of the military...
Can anyone confirm, deny, or clarify this for me?
While I was at Readercon, I learned that Kathryn Cramer's father John is a physicist here at the University of Washington. This rung vague sorts of bells, because I remembered reading an article several years ago about the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics which I believed to be by one John Cramer. Today, I finally got around to tracking the article down, and the Cramers John are in fact one and the same. It's quite a good article, too. You can read a longer and more detailed version here. It outlines an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Transactional Interpretation, which I think has great conceptual advantages over the standard Copenhagen Interpretation, one of them being that it isn't silly. The Copenhaged Interpretation is very silly indeed. Concepts like 'observers' and 'measurement' and sometimes even 'consciousness' enter into its descriptions of microscopic phenomena, where such things patently should not be. And there isn't even a convincing rationale for why they should be there. It seems to me to veer dangerously close to solipsism in a sense; if measurement can really change the state vector, the state vector is not an objective, external, physical entity, but some kind of conceptual gimmick, and the theory is not a physical theory at all, but a theory of a model inside our heads. That is very unsatisfying. Cramer's Transactional Interpretation avoids all this, I think elegantly, using advanced and retarded waves. Anywho, read the article, he describes it better than I would.
He uses the term 'time stream' once or twice, which I think is a delightful meeting of science and science fiction.
While you're at it, if you want a brief, non-technical look at some funky physics, read his old Analog columns. I'm very fond of the space drives. One article involves some work by James Woodward of Cal State Fullerton, whose site is well worth a look. Lots of material there on Mach's Principle, radiation reactions, and radical timelessness, of which I am a particular fan. Another of Cramer's columns describes a variation on the Alcubierre 'warp drive' which involves creating a bubble of spacetime bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Make sure the Symbol font is enabled on your browser...I'll use ¶ for the complex differentiation operator.
Let G be a bounded connected (open) region in the complex plane, and let f:G®G be an analytic mapping. Suppose there exists z0ÎG with f(z0)=z0, and that |¶f(z0)| is less than 1. Define f1(z)=f(z), and inductively, fn+1(z)=f(fn(z)). Note that this makes sense, since the range of fn is contained in the domain of f, and that all the fn are analytic, and, by induction, fn(z0)=z0 for all n. The goal is to show that fn converges to the constant function z0 uniformly on compact subsets of G.
Differentiate:
¶fn+1(z)=¶[f(fn(z))]=¶f(fn(z))¶fn(z)
By induction, we have
¶fn(z)=Õ¶f(fk(z)), k=0..n-1
Now, since G is bounded, and fn maps G into G, the functions G are all uniformly bounded by some constant. Therefore, since the fn are all analytic, the family {fn} is normal: applying the Arzela-Ascoli Theorem, we learn that {fn} is equicontinuous on each compact subset of G. (Incidentally, I've heard the term 'compacta' used for 'compact subsets', and I like it.) Now, the fun begins. Since |¶f(z0)| is less than 1, and |¶f| is continuous, $e,h, both positive, with h less than 1, with |¶f(z)| less than h for all z with |z-z0| less than e. Since {fn} is equicontinuous in a neighbourhood of z0, $d positive with |fn(z)-fn(z0)|=|fn(z)-z0| less than e for all z with |z-z0| less than d. Therefore, in this d-disk about z0, |¶f(fn(z)| is less than h, for all n. Therefore |¶fn(z)| is less than hn, which tends to 0 as n approaches infinity. Therefore ¶fn tends to 0 uniformly on this disk.
Must be off now, but I'll finish later.
UPDATE: Okay, I solved it in the shower just now. Since {fn} is a normal family, it contains a subsequence {fnk} converging uniformly on compacta to some function g. By Weierstrass' Theorem, g is analytic, and ¶fnk converges uniformly to ¶g on compacta. But these derivatives are converging to 0 on an open neighbourhood of z0, so, since nonzero analytic functions have only isolated zeroes, these derivatives are converging to 0, and hence ¶g=0: since G is connected, and g(z0)=z0, g is the constant function z0. Now, fix a compact subset K of G. {fn} is equicontinuous on K, so "e $d so that if |z-z0| is less than d, then for all n, |fn(z)-fn(z0)|=|fn(z)-z0| is less than e. Furthermore, there exists nK such that |fnK(z)-z0| is less than d for all z in K. Thus, for all z in K, for all m, |fm(fnK(z))-z0|=|fnK+m(z)-z0| is less than e. Therefore, for all large n, |fn(z)-z0| is less than e for all z in K: fn converges uniformly to z0 on all compact subsets of G. QED
This is a great day for HogBlog. Today, I had my first troll. At last, I feel like a real blogger...I have arrived. This character, called 'mike', posted several remarks to a post in honour of Appropriate Michael Savage's Name For Your Own Purposes Day. In honour of this momentous event, I will now correct his spelling and punctuation, and possibly grammar.
You people are childish.
So far, so good...
Ever herd of free speach?
Oh, dear. This sentence lacks a verb. Without more information, it is impossible to know what he wanted to ask about this herd of free speach, which I think are a sort of small Patagonian mammal, not unlike guinea pigs. Better luck next time.
If you don't like what he says don't listen.
Mike is missing a comma after 'says.' Did you know that the period and the comma are the two most popular punctuation marks? They are much more popular than the lowly semicolon. Semicolons never get invited to the Prom, and grow up to be bitter spinsters. Much like Mike.
I agree (along with most true americans) with most of his views.
What an awkward construction! Can you imagine saying this out loud? It'd flow much more naturally if he'd said 'I, and most true Americans, agree...'
And the capitalisation goes without saying.
Get a life.
I used to watch that programme when I was a kid: 'Get a Life,' starring Chris Elliott. I wonder whatever happened to him?
Let us all give Mike a round of applause: hurrah for HogBlog's first troll.
Crooked Timber had, in the recent (in geological terms, at least) past, an article which pointed me to an opinion piece, 'The Bright Stuff,' by one Daniel Dennett, that appeared in the New York Times, and to a follow-up exchange between Dennett and Michael Rea. In easy-to-swallow capsule form, Dennett comes out in support of atheists' rights; Rea argues that Dennett is speaking through his arsetrumpet when he calls for respect for atheists, since Dennett displays little respect for theists; Dennett claims to have been misrepresented; Rea says 'No you weren't.' Then Rea goes on to say a bunch of stuff that you probably won't read because all you want is porno, porno, porno. Therefore, I propose to save you the work, summarise both positions, and explain why Dennett and Rea are both wrongish, all while talking dirty to you. Penis.
Aloysius artfully aroused Adam, aggressively anally assaulting.
First off, Dennett's NYT piece. I found it amazingly offensive, and I'm a militant God-hating atheist. Dennett suggests society adopt the term 'brights' for good old-fashioned rationalists, people 'with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view.' It is to Dennett's credit that he did not invent this smugly arrogant piece of terminology; it may be the responsibility (clitoris) of the people behind this website. If you want to campaign for greater social acceptance of a particular group, do not give your group a name that screams out 'We're better than you.' Do not call yourself 'the Sanes,' or 'the Perfects,' or 'Homo Superior.' Or 'the Brights.' Dennett then goes on to say several things which are misleading. He paints atheists (this is obviously what he means by 'brights', although both he and the Brights site try to soft-pedal this somewhat) as a persecuted minority, in need of greater social representation. Dennett seems to be conflating two completely different things when he tries to push brightdom. One is godlessness, another is rationalism. The two are not synonymous. There are fiercely religious people who still maintain a rational outlook, and believe the universe operates according to apprehensible physical laws. When I was an undergraduate in physics, one of my professors was a devout Christian. That didn't stop him from also being a good physicist and a nice person. There are also godless people who are wholly irrational: take Objectivists. The Brights site would include them under its umbrella. This is silly, because Objectivist philosophy is dogmatic, propagandistic claptrap, and not at all rational. (Ayn Rand was chronically constipated.) While rationalism certainly needs to be pushed, I don't think godlessness can. There are obvious benefits to considering the world rationally, like toasters, and habeas corpus. Whether or not one chooses to accept the existence of something beyond the physical universe is more or less a matter of taste. It can't be proven or disproven; it's something beyond the reach of logic and science. Dennett then claims brights are oppressed. This may be the case in highly religious communities, but in cities, college towns, academia, anywhere remotely cosmopolitan, it's just not. In most branches of academia, I get the impression--I may or may not be mistaken--that, if one is religious, one keeps it to oneself; it's theists who stay in the closet. If mathematicians or physicists started talking about their faith in Jesus, they'd lose all professional respect. There is no place in representation theory for Jesus.
Betty bit Bruce's buttocks, blindly brushing bulging balls.
Then Michael Rea, in his 'Dennett's Bright Idea,' accuses Dennett's call for equal respect for atheists to be a bit two-faced, when Dennett and such luminaries as Richard Dawkins, husband of Lalla Ward, say rather rude things about certain theists, and want to suppress them. Dawkins, for example, is quoted by Rea as saying that 'it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.' In 'Shame on Rea,' Dennett responds to clarify his position, and here it all breaks down a bit, because Rea's response, 'Self-Defense,' completely fails to make a case for anything whatsoever. Dennett says that religion need not be stamped out, but for the good of society, dangerously false religious practices and teachings should be suppressed: no creationism in schools. All Rea does in response is claim the literal truth of Genesis is a widely-held belief. This establishes nothing. Widely-held beliefs are frequently bollocks. Rea accepts that some extreme religious positions cannot be tolerated--female genital mutilation, or, say, the sort of violent Islam practiced by Al-Qaeda--but thinks Dennett goes too far in lumping every sort of creationist and literalist into this category. Rea never explains why, though. It is now time for me to stick my oar in.
Chip's cock choked Chuck, circumambient chops clenched closely, caressing.
Dennett's call for mutual respect is disingenuous, because it is true that militant atheists do not, by and large, respect the particular kind of non-rationalist theists I might as well call counter-factualists. These are people who believe Genesis is the literal truth, or that evolution is false, and are the theists both Dennett and Rea focus on. There are undoubtedly lots of atheists out there who do respect such people, but Dawkins, and I suspect Dennett, and certainly I, are not among them. Calling on them to respect us while we will never respect them is unfair. We will tolerate them--so long as they keep it to themselves--and they must tolerate us, but tolerance is all I'd hope for or call for. Though we rationalists deserve more tolerance from counter-factualists (love that biased terminology) than counter-factualists (or irrationalists?) do from us. The trouble is, you see, that religions are, taken in any literal terms, blatant falsehoods. Take Mormonism. I cannot respect Mormonism, because it is demonstrably not true that it is divinely inspired. There are many excellent sites on the Internet detailing how the history in the Book of Mormon is completely false, and the language questionable, and the whole business basically a big con-job. (For a less venomous but more personal account, see Teresa Nielsen Hayden's God and I.) I refuse to respect that. Most faiths are less easily disproven, but they are all, in my opinion, and Dawkins's and Dennett's, equally untrue in any literal sense. They do not mesh with observable reality. They don't make sense. They're silly. Moreover, they're irrelevant; if you're ultra-dead-keen on science, there isn't any need for God. Now, if people want to believe these things, they can jolly well keep it to themselves. When they try to teach it in public schools or turn it into government policy, they're doing palpable harm to our civilisation and need to be stopped. Creationism is nonsensical, and anyone who believes in it is, as Dawkins said, an idiot. They are wilfully ignorant of or ignoring theories with an immense amount of evidence behind them in favour of something that makes no logical sense, with no empirical evidence whatsoever. That is idiocy. I am polite enough not to accost such people on the streets, wave my finger under their nose, and tell them they're idiots, but that is what I think, deep down. Dawkins is absolutely right, and Dennett is absolutely right, in saying such things should not be tolerated. For a counter-factualist to push for creationism in the schools is a matter of dogma, of them attempting to impose their baseless and unfounded system on society. For a rationalist to push for evolutionary biology in the schools is a matter of common sense, because evolutionary biology is practically useful, self-consistent, and overwhelmingly favoured by the data. In a very fundamental sense, the rationalist worldview is just better. By any practical, meaningful standard, better. Our magic works, and theirs doesn't. We can build toasters. QED.
Am I saying to this class of theists, 'We're better than you'?
Well, yes.
If you agree to allow irrationality into the schools, what grounds do you have for picking your own particular brand of irrationality over everyone else's? Why Creation Science, and not, say, laissez-faire capitalism? You're just pushing your own prejudices blindly. You cannot run a modern, Western democracy that way. Rationalism, on the other hand, does not require a leap of faith.
Dennett's mistake is not to think 'We're better than you,' but to say it in such an obnoxious, smarmy way. Because we are better; if we didn't think rationalism was better than the alternative, we wouldn't have adopted rationalism to begin with. (Likewise, theists think theism is better than atheism. If they didn't, they wouldn't be theists.)
Fundamentally, faith is not something worthy of unquestioning, unstinting respect and support. There are, and should be, limits.
(The Old Testament God is a giant penis in the sky, about seventeen thousand miles long.)
Dick.
The top story in all the UK news outlets I've checked has, for the past two days, been the death of Dr David Kelly, a microbiologist attached to the Ministry of Defence who had done work related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (back when they existed). Dr Kelly appears to have committed suicide Thursday, slitting his wrist after leaving for a walk. Kelly was caught up in the polymorphous scandal hounding Tony Blair's government over the war with Iraq, which has evolved into an ongoing row with the BBC. On 29 May, the BBC's Andrew Gilligan reported on the Today programme that, according to an intelligence source, the Government's dossier on Iraq's weapons had been 'sexed up', a phrase which appears religiously in press coverage. The government denied it. Alastair Campbell, Blair's chief spin doctor, demanded an apology. The BBC stuck by its guns, from Gilligan up to Greg Dyke and the board of governors. The Ministry of Defence demanded the BBC reveal Gilligan's source. The BBC, quite rightly, refused. David Kelly had come forward to MoD officials and told them he had met with Gilligan, and in the MoD's attempts to get the BBC to spill, Kelly's name became public. He was questioned by the MoD, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and the Intelligence and Security Committee, who at the time concluded he could not be Gilligan's primary source; yet Downing Street still harped on the possibility, hoping the BBC would relent. He was bombarded by the media. The experience left him feeling that, in the words of his friend Tom Mangold, 'this was really not the kind of world he wanted to live in.' Now Dr Kelly is dead.
The coverage of this story has been extensive. The Observer has a lengthy article with biographical details. The Guardian has kept up with events as they've developed; I first read that Kelly's cause of death had been ascertained there. The Telegraph is now reporting that MoD officials have admitted to leaking Kelly's name to the press, directly contradicting earlier claims by Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. The Independent touches on Downing Street's and the BBC's denials of responsibility. The Times follows suit. The BBC News Online site, freakishly, appears to be offline at the moment (11.58pm Pacific).
It seems the press is more or less united across the ideological spectrum in its hostility towards the Blair Government. The papers are describing this as the biggest political crisis Blair has ever faced, and reported copiously the calls for his resignation already being hurled. The Government has behaved disgracefully. Whether or not one specific claim is true or false, that Campbell had personally ordered the assertion that Iraq could have chemical or biological weapons ready to fire with 45 minutes' notice added to the Government's dossier, which is what Campbell has tried to focus all the attention on, the fact remains that all the claims Blair and his team made about Iraqi weapons, based supposedly on intelligence reports, have proven false. Certainly intelligence was distorted on this side of the Atlantic; I think it overwhelmingly likely the same was done on the other. Not, perhaps, in terms of outright falsification, but certainly in terms of emphasis and qualified doubts. Downing Street simply has and had no fact whatsoever to use in its defence. Its claims about Iraq, for whatever reasons they were made, have been shown to be false. So it attempted to sidetrack the media by making the dispute with the BBC something personal, a vendetta against Campbell personally. Dr Kelly was brought forward to draw fire, and to help discredit this specific '45 minutes' claim in the hopes that that single claim would help smokescreen all of the other entirely false things Downing Street had claimed. Kelly's public interrogation before the parliamentary committee was a circus, mired in political manoevuring, badgering, leading questions, and personal agendas. How else would you describe a session full of questions like 'I reckon you're chaff. You've been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever felt like a fall guy?' Kelly's privacy, dignity, and, to even their shock, life were sacrificed by Blair's people in an attempt to whitewash their own image. Blair's culture of spin has destroyed a man's life.
The Government is being painted as the, or at least a, villain in the media on both the right and the left, and I believe this is entirely justified. I think the reputations of Campbell, Blair, and Hoon at the very least have been permanently destroyed. This wasn't a tragedy off in some foreign land, a war on someone else's soil, something distant and divorced from ordinary life. This was an intensely personal and human event, with a very British face, and so Orwellian; this ordinary and to all appearances well-liked and decent man, who played cribbage at his local, was abused by those in power, hounded and harassed until he took his own life. People aren't going to forget.
It is time Tony Blair resigned. He is not an evil man; he is not George Bush. He appears to act out of principle, not opportunism; he seems to believe the war with Iraq was the right and moral thing to do. But his good intentions cannot save him from reprehensible deeds and conduct. He has broken faith with the British people. He has behaved in a heavy-handed and undemocratic way. No amount of spin now can hide the consequences. The only way the government can regain the trust and clear mandate of the people is for Blair to step aside, and a new Prime Minister (Gordon Brown, alas) to make a stab at a fresh start.
Of course, that's no guarantee that Blair will resign. He could well hang on a good long while, his position growing steadily more uncomfortable and the Labour Party growing steadily more uneasy. Iain Duncan Smith is useless, so I don't think there's a serious danger of the Tories dislodging him in the next election. But sooner or later Blair will decide he's had enough, or Labour will decide it has had enough of him; Blair can leave now, and cite his conscience; or fight it out a few more years, and end tired and broken; or be forced out, and end in bitterness. If he stays, it will be all downhill for him.
Dr Kelly was used, callously and opportunistically. The parties involved must take responsibility, or these sad events will taint the political world indiscriminately.
(Note: I'm an American and I live in Seattle, so when I talk about anything to do with the UK, I reserve the right to get it completely wrong and talk out of my proverbial butt. You have been warned.)
UPDATE: The Toronto Star follows the lead of the UK press; the article's worth inspecting for the photograph of the front pages of dead-tree UK newspapers. The Mirror and the Daily Mail are particularly heavy-handed: 'Spun to Death' and 'Proud of Yourselves?' respectively, with Blair, Hoon and Campbell (I think) below the second.
Blair will not be effective or popular for the rest of his tenure, however long he decides to stay. The media will undermine him at every turn.
'[Emotions] restrict and curtail the intellect, and logic of the mind.'
![cyberpot[1].jpg](http://www.koschei.net/blog/archives/cyberpot[1].jpg)
(Thanks to Graham Sleight.)
It is with great sorrow that HogBlog announces that Bob Ross, host of PBS's 'The Joy of Painting', famed for his happy little clouds and happy little trees, his afro and his tranquilising voice, has been dead since 1995. His paintings may not have been great, but he was so soothing to watch...
HogBlog always believed his dedication to happiness and serenity was due to severe trauma suffered during Vietnam, but this appears not to be the case. It just goes to show.
I don't know if you like video games. I don't know if you like zombies. But if you don't, you aren't a real American. Zombies are what made this country great, dammit. Baseball, America's national passtime, actually evolved from the Pilgrims' chief entertainment when they came to the New World, smashing zombies with boards and then running away very quickly. (It is a well-known historical fact that the East Coast was once crawling with zombies. Now, only Dick Cheney remains.) And it is this great pioneering spirit, of smashing zombies with boards and then running away very quickly, that makes Silent Hill 2 such a morally uplifting experience.
It's sort of like the people responsible decided to design the game specifically for me. There's urban desolation, an empty town, wrapped in fog...Creeping decay, the clammy hand of entropy 'pon every surface...Abandoned cars...Graveyards, suspicious characters, good old horror tropes...Strange, unidentifiable background sounds, and half-glimpsed forms moving in the shadows...The sense of paranoia it induces is intense. I love abandoned cities. And, of course, there are zombies, which you can smash with a board. It is such a while before they actually appear...You expect them around every corner...Suspecting every rustle to be the footfalls of the dead...Oppressed by a looming sense of Something come to get you...When at last I found my first, I was unarmed, defenceless, with no choice but to follow; every step was an agony. I found myself in a niche, and there it was, this grotesque parody of life, gibbering blasphemously like a Thing on H. P. Lovecraft's Doorstep! And so I smashed it with a board. Thank Providence for boards. Now I'm wandering the town, with my radio...The static builds as a zombie approaches, and I begin to see the undead in every shadow, until at last--there! It spits sawdust at me, and then I smash it with a board. But it doesn't end there! When the zombie falls to the ground, it chitters obscenely and scuttles across the earth like a great roach--scritch scritch scritch! Filled with revulsion I smash it again and again, until at last the horror is vanquished...
Have I mentioned how much I enjoy smashing zombies with a board and then running away very quickly?
It has the atmosphere of a modern-day Innsmouth...Only full of dirty, dirty zombies that need smashing. It appeals both to my aesthetic and my violent sides.
You can't go wrong with zombies.
Smash, smash!
Let V be an n-dimensional vector space over a field F, and let T be a linear transformation of V to itself. Let us say a vector v in V is cyclic for T if {v,Tv,T2v,...,Tn-1v} is a basis of V. I put it to you that if T has a cyclic vector, then the only other linear transformations with which T commutes are polynomials in T.
Let S be a linear transformation with ST=TS. Since {v,Tv,T2v,...,Tn-1v} is a basis for V, whatever Sv might be, we can expand it as Sv=a0v+a1Tv+...+an-1Tn-1v=(a0+a1T+...+an-1Tn-1)v=p(T)v, where p(x) is the polynomial a0+a1x+...+an-1xn-1. Now let us compute the matrix for S in our cyclic basis: the ith column of this matrix S' is the image of the ith basis vector under S.
S'=[Sv|S(Tv)|S(T2v)|...|S(Tn-1v)]
=[Sv|T(Sv)|T2(Sv)|...|Tn-1(Sv)]
=[p(T)v|Tp(T)v|T2p(T)v|...|Tn-1p(T)v]
=[p(T)v|p(T)(Tv)|p(T)(T2v)|...|p(T)(Tn-1v)]
S', the matrix for S in our basis, is thus, we see, precisely the matrix for the linear transformation p(T) in our basis. Therefore, S=p(T): S is a polynomial in T.
This cyclic basis puts T into rational canonical form, with a single block: the matrix for T in this basis is [Tv|T(Tv)|...|T(Tn-1v)] or
0 0 ... 0 ?
1 0 ... 0 !
0 1 ... 0 *
. . ... . .
0 0 ... 1 #
Conversely, suppose M is any linear transformation whose matrix is in rational canonical form with a single block. Then there is a basis {e1,e2,...,en} of V such that the matrix of M in this basis, which is [Me1|Me2|...|Men] is precisely of the above form: thus Me1=e2, Me2=e3, and so forth down the line to Men-1=en. Thus we have a basis of V of the form {e1,Me1,...,Mn-1e1}, so e1 is cyclic for M. Thus a linear transformation has a cyclic vector if and only if its matrix in rational canonical form consists of a single block.
Now suppose does not have a cyclic vector: then, in rational canonical form, T consists of at least two blocks. Let S be a transformation with a block diagonal matrix in this basis with blocks the same sizes as those of T. Then the product of the matrices is the block diagonal matrix whose blocks are the products of the corresponding blocks of S and T, so S and T commute if and only if each block in S is a polynomial in the corresponding block of T (since each rational canonical block is cyclic). If T contains any zero blocks, let the corresponding blocks of S be diagonal with all entries nonzero and distinct, and let the other blocks be zero. ST=TS=0 so S and T commute, but S is not a polynomial in T, since any such would have all its diagonal entries in T's zero blocks equal. If not...
This may be wrong; I just came up with it. Let A and B be the final two blocks of T; then the minimal polynomial of A divides the minimal polynomial of B, which is the minimal polynomial of T. Let S be block diagonal, with all its blocks zero but the last two, which are A and B+tI for some scalar t. ST=TS, but I put it to you that S is not a polynomial in T. Suppose that it were: q(T)=S. Then q(A)=A, and q(B)=B+tI. Then A satisfies the polynomial q(x)-x, and B satisfies the polynomial q(x)-x-t. Therefore, the minimal polynomial of A must divide q(x)-x, and must also divide the minimal polynomial for B, which divides in turn q(x)-x-t. Choose t so that q(x)-x and q(x)-x-t are relatively prime; we reach a contradiction. Therefore T has a cyclic vector iff the only operators it commutes with are polynomials in T.
Fear not, Kind Reader! It is I, your faithful bloggist, stuffing the Turkey of Truth with the Rice of Opinion. Yesterday I began an account of my visit to Readercon, and if you haven't seen that yet, you should look at it now, because you'll get nowt else of an introduction here.
John Clute popped up again on The Death and Possible Coming Rebirth of SF, which is not surprising, because the death of SF is his baby. Clute believes that science fiction is basically a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which is coming to a close...Stuff will continue to be written that looks like science fiction, but, in some subtle way, it will also be different. The panel was great fun to watch, pitting John Clute against Patrick Nielsen Hayden, with Allen Steele unable to stop talking, and Graham Sleight getting in the occasional point or joke as circumstances allowed. The conclusion was that science fiction may or may not be dying, and something else might possibly some day take its place, unless it doesn't. Clute makes good points about how the genre is changing, whether or not those changes constitute a death...
The very first panel on Friday was on "Understanding" Superhuman Intelligence, on the challenges and possibilities of writing about people smarter than we are. The name of Ted Chiang was bandied about a fair bit, and Thomas Disch, both of whom wrote about characters who attain superhuman intelligence, and moreover did it in the first person (more or less; Disch uses diary entries, which are close enough). It's a shame Leonard Nimoy wasn't on the panel. Stepan Chapman claimed to be the panel's 'token stupid person', and I believe it was he who conjectured that super-intelligent people should also be super-funny. Graham Sleight had a corker of an idea about the influence of gender on portrayals of superhuman intelligence, but the moderator beat him to the punch. Eventually it drifted off into talk of how you define intelligence to begin with, and different sorts of intelligence, and such, which I think is pretty irrelevant, when all the science fictional literature seems to adopt as its working definition of intelligence a combination of pattern-recognition and something else which was just on the tip of my tongue an hour ago but which now escapes me, which just goes to show that, whatever superhuman intelligence might be, I don't have it.
I stuck around following that for Offbeat!, on which Gene Wolfe was in fine form, contributing the lines 'I suppose you're all wondering why you've called me together today,' and 'Bald guys have a lot of hats.' Wolfe does not consider himself an offbeat writer, because his books sell. He offered the following, cute but untrustworthy, explanation of why his books are filled with so many unanswered questions: the only source of coffee in his house is in his study. His wife will, sooner or later, come for it, interrupting Wolfe at work; they'll talk for an hour or so, and when he gets back to work at last he's forgotten what was going on. Rudy Rucker explained that the sort of books he'd like to read would be 'more pornographic, less violent,' and discussed fiction about a 'talking dildo called Reverend Jerry Falwell', which encourages me to search the Infinite Matrix for some of his work.
Rucker is not quite what I'd expected. He's much less drug-crazed than I'd pictured. One particularly memorable quote from his speech was 'Fuck that shit, you know?' I collect obscenity. The speech was devoted to four different tools for writing science fiction, which he called power chords (traditional tropes like flying saucers, butt-headed Martians, alien invasions), thought experiments (science fictional situations as testing grounds for various ideas), transrealism (a philosophy of writing Rucker invented, and of which he is the sole practitioner; writing about one's actual life and the real world sort of metaphorically as science fiction), and monomyths (Campbellian mythical archetypes)...Transrealism, he holds, is intrinsically left-wing, politically, he holds. He took a moment to rag on Douglas Adams for using the power chords without 'paying his dues', without respecting them, or doing something new with them, just being, as Rucker said in a funny voice, 'Silly, silly, silly.' He did, as the audience vocally pointed out, get the Ultimate Answer wrong.
I caught Rucker on a panel on Adventures in Other Dimensions, too, where he discussed his interest in visualising a fourth spatial dimension...I must buy Spaceland at some point. The chap who edited Bowling for Columbine was on the panel, looking panicked.
I took a large quantity of notes during The Unique Authorial Voice, mainly to do with Samuel R. Delaney's magnificent Old Testament beard, which he stroked from time to time, hand-over-hand, as if he meant to climb up it. It'd be a neat trick. Everyone calls him Chip, and I have no idea why. He seems like a very approachable fellow, with a wonderful aesthetic, and he loves Alan Moore; despite this, when, later, I asked him to sign my copy of The Motion of Light in Water I was so panicked by the fact that he's SAMUEL R. DELANEY that I very nearly had some kind of spasm. It'd be like meeting the Pope, if I weren't rabidly anti-Papist. Michael Swanwick also appeared on the panel, his earring drawing the eye unstoppably; quoth he, 'I was put here on this earth to spread confusion,' which he does admirably while inscribing copies of Gravity's Angels with what appears to be a sort of riddle, which the astute reader should be able to solve: 'From maybe to the world, with stops in between...' Swanwick talked of posthumously rewriting an Avram Davidson tale, and hates the voice of the later Robert Heinlein. I was unfamiliar with Barry Malzberg before this panel, but his very entertaining, although bitter and hopeless, performance on this and other panels has filled me with a desire to seek out his work. He publishes his first drafts, for economic purposes.
Malzberg was on the Ambizione! panel too, and when talking of ambition, claimed he no longer had any, and that his life's work was as so much dust, and had an incredibly depressing anecdote about the death of Leonard Bernstein. He must be great fun at parties. Malzberg, I mean, not Bernstein. Bernstein's much too dead. Ellen Kushner is extremely animated; I should read her, too. Sometimes I think I might have ambition, but then I usually decide I'm too lazy...
And, to my delight, I managed to catch a kaffeeklatsch with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, editor, and proprietress of Making Light, which is what all blogs aspire to be. She's a terribly nice person, interested in pretty much everything, capable of knitting what appeared to be a rather fetching scarf while carrying on conversation about box canyons. While I didn't say much, I did say more than I did at any other event, and I got her proverbial John Hancock on my shiny new copy of Making Book, which is a bit good indeed, let me tell you. She's sort of like a cross between MacGyver and your favourite aunt. (My use of the term aunt should not lead you to believe she's old; it's just that I'm quite young.)
All this, yea, and the kitchen sink...Thus was Readercon. And they all lived happily ever after.
This past weekend, I attended my very first science fiction convention, Readercon 15, in Boston. It is my goal here to craft what I believe is termed a 'con report', that you, Gentle Reader, might share in the experience. However. There are a few howevers, in fact.
You may not, yourself, enjoy science fiction; a substantial portion of this blog's readership consists of folk who Google 'dirty poems' or who come for the intermittent abuse of Andrew Sullivan. (He's an arsebucket.)
You may enjoy science fiction, but have little familiarity with the world of fandom. I, myself, fall into this category. I enjoy science fiction, and, though I have no discernable talent, I've had a certain whimsical desire to write it from a young age. I'd never been to a convention, or read a fanzine, or participated in a reading group, or met a science fiction author, 'til this past weekend. To be fair, I've talked about science fiction from time to time with Graham Sleight, who is making quite the name for himself as a reviewer and was, in fact, invited to speak on several of the panels at Readercon...I knew him, by the way, before he was famous. He said, boastfully.
You may, perhaps, be a Readercon attendee yourself, who, by some quirk of fate, has Googled your way here. In which case, you're undoubtedly a lot more familiar with the people and events I'm about to describe than I am. It's conceivable you may be mentioned in this very articlet. It's conceivable that I met you, although probably very very briefly, because I'm extremely shy and have a quiet, mumbling voice that doesn't carry well. It's conceivable that I'll misquote you, or misrepresent you, or accidentally offend you in some way. Or possibly fail to mention you at all, which is not meant as a personal slur in any way, shape, or form.
It's vastly more likely that a Readercon guest might find their way here than that, say, Andrew Sullivan would. A certain amount of caution is thus called for, given that if I were to write 'Nels Beaverbrook seemed mentally flatulent on Panel X,' Nels Beaverbrook himself might wind up reading it.
Nevertheless, I shall press on. I'm going to assume you, Dear Reader, know no more, and possibly slightly less, about science fiction than I do. Bear with me.
Why science fiction at all? And why Readercon in particular? I've enjoyed science fiction for approximately 80% of my life to date; it's all my parents' doing. They had me hooked on Doctor Who reruns on PBS by the time I was four. I soon began digesting Terrance Dicks's charmingly inept novelisations, and, as I got older, began working my way through my father's collection of SF paperbacks. I branched out into more mainstream literature as I got older, but I remain a devotee. I can't imagine not liking it. Like Depeche Mode, it just seems natural for me to enjoy it. Partially, it's the science portion; I love science. Mathematics and the sciences offer the only glimpses of truth we are afforded, and I've been in love with them longer than I can remember. I somehow wound up with a BS in physics, despite being the absolute worst experimentalist you are likely to meet (as the stench of burning diodes can testify). I like literature that deals with things I'm passionate about. Science fiction deals with science; therefore, I like science fiction. There's also the unfettered imaginativity of it. Science fiction writers have extraordinary latitude to invent characters, places, situations, experiences that do not exist in the real world. They force the reader to transcend the mundane, look beyond the commonplace. Science fiction can, at times, offer a certain hope that no other genre can, the hope that humanity will actually survive a few more years and that, just possibly, things might some day be better than they are. There's also a certain amount of escapism in my love for science fiction. I see nothing wrong with that.
And science fiction can, when all is said and done, be serious literature, too. That is what Readercon is all about: the high-brow end of things, for writers who give real care and attention to their writing as writing, not just as genre fluff.
Readercon was a very civilised and respectable event. The Comic Book Guy was not present. No-one was dressed up as Darth Maul, a Klingon, or Mr Spock (although Barry Malzberg does bear a slight resemblance to Leonard Nimoy). It is a convention, as the name suggests, for serious readers, and the writers they read. The guests were accomplished, insightful, and talented, intelligent, with a lot of very interesting things to say about the genre, about writing, and more or less everything else imaginable. The panels and discussions were well-thought-out, interesting questions were asked, many books were sold. People at Readercon care about making science fiction (and fantasy, too, though I'll refrain from mentioning it explicitly) the best it can possibly be. I enjoyed it a great deal. It was educational; writers, I learned, do not speak in prose. They are, in fact, as near as I can tell, mortal humans. Only famous. This is not unintimidating, in its way. What do I have to say that could really be of interest to such people? I didn't talk a great deal. Despite that, everyone was very friendly. Though famous. Did I mention famous?
It's deeply odd, to meet someone who's written a book you've read and enjoyed. Something of theirs has come to you, but they don't know you from Adam (or Eve, as the case may be).
What did I see, you ask? In no particular order...
Mathematics and SF was a panel I was dead keen on seeing, as Rudy Rucker was on it. Rucker was not only one of the Guests of Honour, but is a real, live, breathing, honest mathematician. His novel White Light involves transfinite numbers, the Continuum Hypothesis, and the Banach-Tarski Paradox, and he's dead good indeed. Donald Kingsbury was on it, too, author of Psychohistorical Crisis, a splendid homage to Asimov's Foundation books that treats the concept of psychohistory rather more mathematically. He gave a very convincing defense of the possibilities of prediction, arguing it was more a matter of control theory than complexity theory: the predictor takes an active role in ensuring that his predictions come to pass. This completely demolishes a sort of thought experiment I'd devised to show that predicting the long-term evolution or future of a civilisation would be impossible, which I won't bore you with. Catherine Asaro was there, too, whom I've never read, but I mean to after hearing about her Spherical Harmonic. I like Hilbert spaces. Unfortunately, the panel spent its time talking about things people had already written, as opposed to things people could write, or the possibilities for mathematics in science fiction, and I fear this is a more or less inevitable consequence of the fact that mathematics is such a specialised field. Plenty of lay people know about relativity, string theory, singularities, and suchlike in physics, thanks to people like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. Very few people know much serious mathematics. (Keep in mind my ideas about what constitutes serious mathematics are likely to be somewhat biased, given that I seem to be turning into an algebraist.) I think very few people would be interested in a discussion of how to dramatise the Axiom of Choice. Ah well. On the bright side, I heard rumours that there's a story about representation theory in the Rucker-edited anthology Mathenauts...
I was just as pumped about Catholicism and Imaginative Literature, though I am not a Catholic. This panel was dominated, I think, by Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick, two of my favourites. Wolfe is a practicing Catholic; Swanwick was raised Catholic, and is now an atheist. In a mid-panel poll, probably over half the audience identified themselves as Catholics, too. All the panelists talked about the influence of Catholicism on their work, everyone, I think, mentioning the benefits of an old-school Catholic education, except Swanwick, who I think was trying desperately hard not to be really really rude about his former faith, and related an anecdote about the Nun from Hell. Catholicism appears to be quite an experience; Swanwick said 'The Catholic God is the God I don't believe in.' Gene Wolfe gave a very spirited account of the influence of redemption on his work; no-one, not even a villain, is beyond redemption. No-one, he says, goes around in life thinking 'I'm a bad person.' He then launched into an improvised impersonation of an actual bad person, in the course of which I began seriously to wonder if he was going to punch through the floor with his cane. The question I most wanted to ask was 'Why?' Why do they believe the things they believe? It seems strange to me, that people who write a literature so grounded in science, rationality, and logic can still find room for faith. I've never understood religion. I was never given any religious instruction of any kind as a child, and by the time someone mentioned the idea of God to me I'd already gotten hooked on science, and God just didn't strike me as plausible. Since then I've developed into what you might call a fairly militant atheist, and I have what you might charitably describe as a bit of a grudge against most organised religions and the idea of God. (At one point at Seattle's Pride festivities, I believe I said 'God loves my gay **** up his ***.') I couldn't think of a way to phrase my question that wouldn't be really wildly offensive, and so I held my tongue.
Swanwick, by the way, has written a novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, that involves an attempt to kill the deity. Very regrettably, I did not get a chance to hear James Morrow at all, who has written at some length about God's death. I did, however, catch a kaffeeklatsch with John Clute, a potent critic whose novel Appleseed also treats a war against the ultimate malevolence of God. I made a valiant effort to actually say something and ask him about that right at the very end, but we ran out of time. The session was mostly taken up discussing his thesis that we are heading towards the death or transformation of science fiction as the Industrial Revolution gives way to Something Else, and to a lot of questions about why Appleseed was so lingustically convoluted. (Which it is, though I enjoyed it; I counted the word 'circumambient' used thrice, and 'circumambiated' once.) Clute's an interesting fellow; you can tell he's Canadian. You can see it in his eyes. He occasionally uses British terms like 'suss'. He's also quite tall. I'll have more to say about him in another panel summary.
But the hour grows late, and I, your faithful bloggist, must retire for some much-deserved slumber. Part the second shall follow on the morrow.
This evening I will be flitting off to Boston for Readercon, an annual gathering of science fiction writers and readers (I am one of the latter). Mathematician Rudy Rucker is one of the guests of honour this year. His White Light gets a great big thumbs-up: it's the only novel I know of that makes any use of the Banach-Tarski Paradox. (Basically, under standard ZFC set theory, it's possible to take a sphere in three-dimensional space, disassemble it into some really weird subsets, and reassemble the subsets into two identical copies of the original sphere.) James Morrow will be there; he's a sort of satirist, who doesn't like God. I don't blame him. Samuel R. Delaney will be there; there's an outside chance I might be able to ask him to explain Dhalgren. The Nielsen Haydens, editors for Tor Books and bloggers extraordinaire, will also be there. And Michael Swanwick, and Gene Wolfe, too, author of more amazing novels than I could shake a decently-sized stick at. Perhaps I should ask Wolfe about the possible religious significance of Severian, protagonist of The Book of the New Sun. There are schedules here and here. Panels I'm particularly looking forward to: Wolfe and Swanwick on Catholicism and science fiction; Graham Sleight on portrayals of superhuman intelligence; a panel by Rucker and Wolfe called 'Offbeat!'; 'Psychology, Myth, and Fantasy' sounds nice; and I'm torn between one on homosexual readings of Tolkien, and one on other dimensions involving Rucker.
Hopefully between now and then, I'll figure out exactly what to say to famous people...
Canada has been rocked by another guerrilla pie-ing. This time the hapless target was Albertan Premier Ralph Klein, who has threatened to invoke the notwithstanding clause in the Canadian Constitution to keep gay marriage out of Alberta should it be approved on a federal level. The CBC reports:
Klein had just started his address at his annual breakfast at the Calgary Stampede and Rodeo when a man who appeared to be in his 20s hit him with the pie.Klein recovered quickly, remarking that the banana cream pie tasted "not bad."
This is not the first time a Canadian nabob has been creamed with a pie to the kisser. Jean Chretien himself was splattered on Prince Edward Island in 2001 (PEI...An anagram of PIE. Cute, eh?). And who can forget, just months ago, the double-pied assault upon Quebec Liberal Leader Jean Charest, now that province's premier? And there's more. The Quebec-based Entartistes claim, through their spokesman 'Pope Tart', to have pied 15 to 20 Canadian politicians over the past five years. Is a wave of sweet, creamy insurrection sweeping over Canada? Will l'Internationale des Anarchos-Pâtissiers spread appetising havoc from sea to shining sea? We can only hope.
Oh, and by the way...gay marriage is now legal in British Columbia, too.
Here is Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in Finnish.
Seitsemänyhdeksättä vuotta sitten meidän isämme synnyttivät tällä manterella uuden kansakunnan, joka oli vapaudessa siinnyt ja siihen vakaumukseen vihkiytynyt, että kaikki ihmiset ovat luodut tasa-arvoisiksi.
For absolutely no reason whatsoever, given that there is no linguistic connection between the two languages, here also are the lyrics to the Björk song 'Atlantic' in Icelandic.
Þú veist af allri hlýjunni þú finnur allan hitan þú veist að ég elska þig þú veist ég verð að faraég fer og veiði í matinn
kem aftur hlaðin gjöfum
með bér og fjaðrir og perlur
og litla effelturnaég kem og kyssi og kyssi
og kyss'og nudda hálsin
og þegar og þegar ég kem
og þegar og þegarÞú veist að ég þarnfast þín
þú veist að ég er þín
Ho-oh-oh oh, þú...
a-að ég elska þig
þú veist að ég er þín
Ho-oh, wooh-oh oh
þegar hann kemur
Oh-mey-oh-mey-oha-að ég elska þig
If anyone knows of a good resource for teaching myself Finnish, I would love to hear about it.
Behold the glory of Virgin Mobile.
The pitching of the pills...It cracks me up. I love it.
That is all. You may return to your regularly-scheduled life.
Michael 'Savage' Weiner, the six-inch-tall monkey who flings poop, has finally been sacked by MSNBC. For those of you not in the know, Weiner is a bit like the love child of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, only uglier: one of America's omnipresent offensive uneducated bigoted vicious hateful and above all loud right-wing talk show hosts who like the great serpent Jormungand rise up from the media sea and spew venom over all the Earth. Weiner, who enjoys filing suit against websites that criticise him, has, or rather had, a television programme on MSNBC as well. And, as I mentioned, he has been given the sack.
Ha, ha, and, indeed, ha.
Why was he sacked, you ask? Because of the fetid brainwrong he spews from his arsetrumpet in every medium he pollutes.
"Oh, you're one of the sodomites," Savage said. "You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it."
Michael Savage has the right to say any darn fool thing that comes into his head. He does not, however, have the right to a television show. (Or a radio programme, for that matter.) His brand of small-minded evil has no place in the discourse of any civilised society. Mocking individuals (like Michael Weiner, who is a flaming assbag) is one thing; mocking individuals is swell, great, encouraged. Without it, political cartooning would be dead, and blogs would be much less interesting. But lashing out at whole groups--gays, immigrants, women--is not acceptable behaviour; even children are supposed to know better. Whether Savage likes it or not, America is a diverse and pluralistic place, and if he's not mature enough to accept that and function in such a society, let him either shut up or go join the Taliban.
And he can take Ann sodding Coulter with him.
Not only is the McLaughlin Group a weekly public affairs television programme, it's also a finite simple group of order 898,128,000. To prevent confusion, here are a few simple ways to tell the two apart. The television programme is a flimsy and ephemeral product of human civilisation which will not long endure in this universe. The finite simple group is a logical necessity inhabiting a timeless Platonic realm of abstraction and pure truth. The television programme predicts that Pope John Paul II will win a Nobel Peace Prize. The finite simple group takes no stand on the matter. The television programme contains only very pedestrian and boring subgroups, while the finite simple group contains the Mathieu group M22 as a maximal subgroup. The television programme is generated by John McLaughlin (as far as I can tell, no relation to the jazz artist of the same name), whereas a 22-dimensional representation of the finite group over the finite field F7 is generated by the matrices
0100000000000000000000 3600000000000000000000 1000000000000000000000 0010000000000000000000 0001000000000000000000 0000100000000000000000 0010000000000000000000 0000010000000000000000 0000001000000000000000 0000000100000000000000 0000000010000000000000 0000000001000000000000 0000100000000000000000 0000000000100000000000 0000000000010000000000 4310500400000000000000 0000010000000000000000 0000000000001000000000 0000000000000100000000 0000000000000010000000 0000000000000001000000 0000000000000000100000 0000000100000000000000 0000000000000000010000 2561116463431403000000 0000000000000000001000 0000000001000000000000 0000000000000000000100 0000000000000000000010 0000000000000000000001 0000000000100000000000 3634503603202620362340 0043661213350404100000 6150405500433261654462 3416205006500132010040 5556523141121520054163 5225106102260525001050 3450340335252250144500 2543522352640541000130 2506015620240224344010 0000000000000010000000 2654224150141552331230 0052522353240445000031 0001000000000000000000.
The McLaughlin Group, and the McLaughlin group. Do not confuse the two.
The Fourth of July is upon us, the day when Americans come together to celebrate their nation's independence and wave its flag and fill its skies with shiny things, glorify its flag, worship its ideals with messianic zeal. And as Americans do so, I have a very special message for them.
Bah, humbug.
Fortunately, the fine folk at Seattle's own The Stranger share my opinion, and bring you an entire issue featuring our glorious socialist neighbour to the north, Soviet Canuckistan.
Do you love addictive Flash-based Internet games as much as I do? Then go play Doom Funnel Chasers, and make gravity your bitch. I sent my balls into the most beautiful orbit on level 25...Looping and circling like a great gallant sea-bird. But not a seagull. They frighten me.
While you're at it--an oldie but a goodie here--go help Sammy Sperm make his way to Planet Prostate. Dig that quasi-bad-porn soundtrack.
The numbers are starting to trickle in on the Democratic candidates' fundraising totals this quarter. (Speaking of numbers, let Teresa Nielsen Hayden point you towards healthy, educational fun with ancient mathematics.) The leader of the pack this quarter seems to be none other than your friend and mine, Howard Dean, MD. The good doctor took in over $7 million this past quarter, including over $800,000 in a single day on 30 June. Online. One of the things about Dean's campaign that excites me so is this potentially new model of fundraising he's using. Instead of trolling around to businessmen and lawyers and PACs and corporations for handouts, Dean has been getting his support, in many, many small parcels, from ordinary Americans. President Bush has raised about a hojillion times more by now, and will raise many hojillion times more before the election, it's true, but, like most candidates, his is whore money. Bush's financial support comes from the sort of people who can afford to drop $20,000 to give him the secret plutocrats' handshake at a dinner (where, of course, the working poor are used as furniture). With this sort of money coming in, Dean has proven himself to be a serious candidate: Dean is a bling-bling deity. He is also owned by his grassroots supporters. It's true. Without his activists not only would he have no campaign and no publicity, he'd have no money. He needs us. He is in our power. I like that in a candidate. I like that a lot. A whole lot. Bush is owned by big business. Most candidates of either party are. Dean, on the other hand, is owned by his posse.
I find this pleasantly socialistic.
Let me digress a moment, as it is Canada Day and all...The amount of money being spent on the presidential campaign here in the US is absolutely amazingly obscenely absurd by Canadian standards. As of a year ago, Sheila Copps had raised barely $50,000; bear in mind that the next Prime Minister will be chosen this November, so July 2002 would be roughly as far before the Liberal leadership conference as we are from the US presidential election now. Paul Martin, the lucre-heavy nabob, as of November had pulled in just over $1,000,000. (Canadian, of course.) Bush, on the other hand, is talking of amassing $200 million. The amount of money spent on US campaigns is disgusting, and will remain disgusting for the forseeable future.
I thought of trying to Cruise for Dean at Sunday's Pride march and rally, but some clever customers had beat me to it. There was a sizeable party of Dean partisans marching in the parade, and a whole Dean booth set up in Volunteer Park at the shindig following. Homosexuals, by and large, are enthused about Dean.
Even Andrew Sullivan has nice things to say about him, or at least not entirely nasty things. Which helps to demonstrate, I think, the sort of broad support Howard Dean could, with the right campaign, muster, should he gain the Democratic nomination. Unlike most of the other Dems, he's got a demonstrated ability to rouse and enthuse lefties like me and get us out working the streets. You might reply that Ralph Nader in 2000 had a bit of that, and look where it got him. (It wouldn't, alas, get Kucinich much further.) And you'd be right. The left can't swing an election in the US on its own, even though, in my humble opinion, the left is right, and everyone else is, well, wrong. (Yay socialism!) Dean can appeal to a wide spectrum of voters, however. He can court the NRA. He's not anti-business. He can reassure fiscal conservatives, with talk of balanced budgets and so forth. He can even wring grudging words of faint praise from intellectually-bankrupt Bush-whored sham pundits with nothing of substance left to contribute who still can't stop talking. Dean has something for everyone. Who knows, it might even help him out to play the gay card. Not actively. Dean's very supportive of gay rights, and asking him to be more outspoken on that point would be unlikely to bring him greater support and might turn off some of the less liberal potential voters. But he's made his position clear, that he is for equal rights. What if he were to confront Bush on the issue? Bush has been awfully, weaselly careful not to take a really firm stand on anything gay. He's refusing to involve himself in Frist's calls for a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage, just as he tried to steer clear of Santorum's man-on-dog fracas before. Bush still tries to pretend he's compassionate, you see. At the same time, he has to keep his Religious Reich freakshow happy, too. If someone could maneuver him into taking some firm unequivocal position, he'd risk alienating elements either of the center or the right: either the Average Joes would see exactly what a right-wing tool and creep Bush actually is, or the Fundies would yell bloody murder about him straying from the Holy Path. Either way, it could only harm him.
Just a thought.