The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Barry:

I always knew Palin was a Red :)

#167 ::: Janet Croft ::: (view all by) :::

"Barry @166, that question came up today in my office. Someone commented that everyone on Mad Men smokes like a chimney. I was trying to remember if everyone in Billy Wilder's movie The Apartment, set in a similar environment but filmed in 1962, featured quite as much smoking, and I don't think it did."

IIRC, the US adult male smoking proportion peaked at 2/3 in the mid/late 1960's.

#66 ::: Steve with a book ::: (view all by) :::

"It's difficult to predict the near-future, but it's also getting very hard to remember the recent past accurately. If you're writing a novel set in Britain in 1998, which of your characters should own mobile phones—just the well-off ones, or the poor ones as well? Does text messaging exist in 1998? What about photo messaging and polyphonic ringtones? Not to mention the Internet... It's a hell of a job to get all this right even now, and it'll be far worse for the poor historical novelists of 2059. "

Somebody mentioned this on another blog, asking if there were any studies of movies *made* in a certain era, vs made later, and *set* in that era.

Wesley :

"High-mindedness is great, but sometimes you're faced with something truly awful, and at times like that you sometimes need invective just to drive home the fact that things are not normal"

Part of the problem is that 'high-mindedness' is conflated with being nice, in a sugary sort of dishonest way. The Villagers, of course, are big on this

Grayson is being as high-minded as one can get - he sees people doing evil, and calls them out on it.

Thanks for posting this, Abi.

"The "folk community" things above made me blink..."

And don't think that prospective members can blithely skip the rigorous musical requirements. Singing, guitar work, song parodies and strange dances are all tested. And the goose step is *not* counted as a dance.

I've had good success braising chicken and pork (occasionally beef) with Woodchuck cider. It's not quite as strong-tasting as Strongbow. One verion of Woodchuck is oak-aged; it's rare in Michigan, but it's *great* for cooking.

The best rule of thumb for 'The New Republic' is to give them no benefit of the doubt, for two reasonse:

1) They spent a number of years disearning it, workin' hard at it. By now the odds are simply against them having anything to say worth hearing, and if they did, the next upteen items would make up for that, in a negative way.

2) The people who work there were recruited and remained employed at a highly disonest and disgusting rag. If that becomes a career injury, rather than a steppingstone, it might lead to a better mass media.

Here's a ceg - a comment beg, unfortunately, not a misspelled offer of beer :(

What newsreader software do people use?
What if you read news on more than one computer?

Send her my best wishes, Patrick!

Oh, by the way - I happen to have my latest manuscript here; I'm sure that she'll be glad to fill her empty hours in the hospital reviewing it. I'd FedEx it, but it's far too heavy. Do you mind if I send you the files (I have to break it into 20 parts, due to e-mail size restrictions), and you could print it off, and take it to her? Best to do it in color; that way she can appreciate the complex patterns I put on each page :)

It's about this Geye, in Aragon.

"Now this is where it really falls apart. Whatever else the President of the US may or may not be, almost by definition he’s one of the best politicians in the world. His talents aren’t in punching people out—they’re in talking people into donating their pants to him. He should, just by talking and turning on his charisma, get the terrorists to offer him a date with their sister. That would have been a better movie, IMHO, but we didn’t go that way. "

Well, the president is good at persuading gullible Americans to do things, and to make bargains with richer, better-informed Americans (e.g., donate $100K's, and get $100millions back). Trying to persuade foreign terrorists who start off with serious hatred would be a Vorkosigan-level trick.

#20 ::: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) ::: (view all by) ::: May 28, 2008, 05:17 PM:

"As Mary Dell wrote, Bush hasn't finished backing the truck over us after running us down, so we don't know what his final score will be. "

"And it's not like there'll be no more damage after next Inauguration Day, and we just have to clean up what he did in his eight years."

Two comments:

1) Eight years would be enough to make a good start on that clean-up, *without* massive GOP/elite MSM/corporate crony opposition. Which we'll have, so we'll certainly still be net negative after 8 years.

2) There's a whole legion (as in 'my name is') of mid-level criminals from this administration who have learned very well that the penalty for rampant criminality is nada, so long as you're a Republican, barring very bad luck or grossly poor judgement. 8 years from now they'll be high-level scum in the next GOP administration, *starting* their crimes from the level achieved by the Bush administration. They'll be able to reach new levels of evil, barring some unforeseen circumstances.

#89 ::: Clark E. Myers ::: (view all by) ::: February 10, 2008, 06:12 PM:

"I haven't seen anything from Harry Turtledove or anybody else on a George Washington as fertile as Lazarus Long and who has as much faith in his own genes - but it makes an interesting alternate history notion to imagine Washington providing for children of his own. "

Please note that the only thing worse than an infertile king is a too-fertile king. Having a half-dozen sons with a close claim on the throne is bad; throw in two dozen b*stards, and there's a plenitude of claimants.

Hello,

Just to work on the theme of 'bad words', and taking advantage of a sort of open thread, I'd like to coin a new evil: 'cleg', as in comments begging on blogs (sorry).

Could anybody direct me to information on the Senate report on the Plame affair? In particular, ISTR that some GOP Senator attached his own add-on to the report, blaming Plame and Wilson for everything, and accusing them of lying, etc. Google didn't cope well with the request, which is a sign that (a) Google is not yet omniscient, or (b) They Got to Google.

Thanks,
Barry

#3 ::: James D. Macdonald ::: (view all by) ::: August 27, 2007, 11:44 AM:

"My first question was, "They didn't write down the serial numbers? Whaaaaat? The Army didn't record the serial numbers of their weapons?"

Then the image of a black bridge floated before my eyes and all became clear."

This the f*cking Army - they'd record the serial numbers of t-shirts, if they had them. When (IIRC) 200K weapons go missing without serial numbers being recorded, it isn't an accident.

and what's with the bridge?

Johan, the figures that I had heard were ~200K rifles and pistols (plus a *lot* of body armor). I don't think that it's 4%.

#61 ::: James D. Macdonald ::: (view all by) ::: August 22, 2007, 12:59 AM:

"Guys, one thing to remember when you're reading things written by intelligence professionals: you have to read what was said very exactly. And you have to understand what wasn't said."

Or, as a friend keeps reminding me, intelligence organizations aren't there to inform us, but to gather intelligence. Anytime that they say *anything*, it's not to be trusted.

Adding on to that, one characteristic of the run-up to the Iraq war was the administration claiming that they Knew Stuff. It turned out that they were lying.

At this point, anybody who claims to Know Stuff which supports a possible war plan of the administration is running under several levels of burden of proof.

Stephan: "As economics professors say, you don't have to like what an understanding of the market implies, but pretending the market is not a powerful force is extremely unwise. Gossip sells; more people are interested in gossip than in nuanced analysis about world events. There is no need for anyone to have any particular goal, benevolent or malevolent, to explain why high production cost media (such as regionally-distributed television) tend to be trite and gossipy; that accursed Invisible Hand drives the more complex things with less universal appeal into cheaper media. (Traditionally newspapers. The New York Times may not be buying as many barrels of ink these days as it used to, but it's still producing text next to advertising, and people are still reading the articles.)"

I remember seeing some elite MSM talking heads suddenly decide that the MSM had been way too harsh on the president, and that they should tone their coverage down.

After Bush had been elected.

There are market forces, I agree. But the past 15 years have shown that there are other forces.

I expect to see some elite MSM talking heads suddenly decide that the MSM had been way too soft on the president, and that they should harsh their coverage up.

After the 2008 election.

I went and read Pournelle's comments during the election last year, and I've got to say that the Brain Eater will be moving on soon, for lack of food. Aside from blaming things on 'neocons', thinking Rumsfeld is not to blame, and looking forward to blaming the Democrats, his piece de puke was:

"One of the reasons for not going into Iraq in the first place is that the United States is not an empire. A punitive expedition to Iraq would have been popular in the wake of 911, as was the Afghanistan adventure. "

G*d-d*mn. A 'punitive expedition to Iraq?!?!?!
Somebody once wrote that if one is confused by the way a right-winger talks about 'Arabs', or 'Moslems', etc., try replacing their references with the term 'sand-n*gger'. Then, their writing will probably make more sense (as in 'some of them killed a bunch of us; let's kill a bunch of them - whichever ones we can kill most easily').

albatross, as somebody who was disappointed with Clinton, I'd like to point out the differences, as I see them.

Clinton betrayed us most on a personal matter - having an affair, and lying about it under oath.

Bush betrayed us most on an affair of national concern - deliberately starting a war for personal and political gain, lying to us about it. He then compounded this crime by conducting the war as a matter of political gain and financial looting, which has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and will almost certainly cost at least 1 million people's lives (for the end result of making Saddam's regime look not so bad, I fear).

#13 ::: Avram ::: (view all by) ::: February 27, 2007, 10:33 PM:

"We didn't install democracy in Germany and Japan, we restored it. Both nations were constitutional democracies before they went fascist.

All of the fascist nations -- Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain under Franco, Greece under Metaxas -- were democracies just before fascism. That's one of the things fascism is, a failure mode of democracy. "

I've come to a somewhat differing conclusion about this. I believe that another, possibly the major, reason that post-WWII Germany and Japan remain the major successes of US democracy promotion was that they were the *only* attempts by the US to promote Democracy.

All of the US actions in South/Central America were to destroy or 'contain' democracies, or at the least, to promote an 'Our SOB' type of government. The Bush administration had no intent of promoting democracy in Iraq; it held elections after the previous two plans[1] had failed, and Sistani threatened to unleash the Shiites.

Major interests in the USA have no desire for democracy at home, let alone abroad. Democracies make it harder to screw the people over; dicatorships are far easier to deal with.


[1] First plan was to install Chalabi as a dictator; after that failed almost before it was tried, the second plan was to run the country through the CPA for several years - in short, a military dictatorship.

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