It was, in fact, this blog that led me to start posting as "Jimcat Kasprzak". Jimcat is a nickname I've had for over fifteen years now, and there are people who know exactly to whom the name refers. But there are a lot of people on a blog like this to whom the name means nothing.
The last name, and the link to my web site, provide enough information for those who care to find answers to questions like "who is this guy and what's he all about?"
I've often thought that if all the conservatives who weren't religious nuts, and the liberals who weren't P.C. nuts, would speak up and get active, we might have sane politics in this country again.
...and then the sun hits my eyes and I wake up to the real world.
Melanie, I just googled "EEEUW" but didn't find any references to what it might stand for. Can you enlighten us? The best guess I can come up with is "Entity Engineered for Exploration and Ultimate Warfare".
Having read through the entire list, I don't see any items that wouldn't apply equally well to the Republican convention, if a Worldcon happened to be held in proximity to one of those. I don't see where you get any partisanship out of that list.
Not to trivialize anything going on in the political world. But I'll wager the vast majority of science fiction fans are not so deadly serious that they can never laugh at politics. Nor would most of them say that it's wrong for others to do so.
Actually, when I first heard of the title, I was afraid that they might have filmed the godawful thriller novel of that title by Allan Folsom, that received so much good buzz for so little reason back in the mid 90's.
Now that I know what the actual premise of the movie is, I keep thinking of Tom Petty singing, "I can't decide which is worse..."
Many thanks to Simon for the pointer to Jaron Lanier's article in Edge. I wanted to stand up and cheer while reading it.
"I'm hoping the reader can see that Artificial Intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology."
I've been saying this for years. It's a relief to know that some recognized experts in the field are equally skeptical about the Technological Rapture.
Xopher:
I'll be darned, you're right. All these years I knew that the avoirdupois pound and the troy pound contained different numbers of ounces, but I never realized that the ounces themselves were of different sizes.
This is why I'll take cgs or mks, thank you very much, over these brain-damaged systems.
But hey, so far I've learned at least three new and marginally useful facts just by reading this thread.
I saw Doc Watson perform in 1990 and was amazed then to find that he was still alive. This gives new meaning to the concept of "immortal artists".
Thanks for the pointer, Dan. I thought I knew something about progressive rock. Silly me.
Still, what I've heard of Canterbury puts me to sleep.
A porn shop, by itself, is not harassing anyone. As Rick pointed out himself, it was the streetwalkers, pimps, muggers, and drug dealers who hung out in that area who were doing the harassing. These problems could be addressed by more vigilant police patrolling to eliminate the criminal activity, rather than closing down the businesses that were, despite some people's moral objections, carrying on legal commerce.
In fact, a lot of this did take place. I started travleing to Manhattan on a regular basis at the very tail end of the 80's, and caught a few glimpses of the Deuce at its worst. By the mid-90's the street crime in that area was greatly reduced, and by 2000 it was almost nonexistent.
Getting rid of the porn shops on 42nd Street was (as the article referenced above pointed out) much more of an economic issue than one of morals or public safety. Because of the transportation structure of the city, 42nd Street between 8th Avenue and Broadway is, and will remain, a high-traffic area. Businesses are likely to make more money just by being there. Some people decided that the wrong businesses (i.e., ones they didn't own) were making that money, so they bought legislation to kick the existing businesses out.
Certainly not the first, nor the last, time that has happened in New York or elsewhere.
...and lo and behold, the text under the picture changed, just an hour or two after I posted the above. Wonder how many others noticed.
I just noticed that the picture appearing for "moll_flanders" in the actforlove.org ad today is not the same picture that appeared over that name (and the "Groucho marx is sexy; Karl Marx is sexier" quote) in the same ad yesterday.
Lydia Nickerson wrote:
"the city decided that they wanted to "draw people back to downtown." Mind you, there already were people downtown, and spending good money, too, but they were black. What the city council wanted was for white suburbanites to come and spend money in nightclubs and the like, and to do that, the faces on the street needed to be of a lighter color. "
Cities looking to revitalize their downtown core should really take a look at Baltimore. One of the things that impressed me about the Inner Harbor area was that the clientele was a dynamic mix of inner-city blacks and white suburbanites.
Mind you, there are areas within a few minutes' walk of the harbor where it's dangerous to go no matter what your skin color. But the Harborplace development has effectively demolished the fallacy that you can't build a downtown renewal with the patronage of inner-city residents. They live within walking distance, they do have some money to spend, and they won't scare away the visitors from the burbs.
Buld something clean, and fun, and reasonably priced, and the people will come. And the color of their money is all the same.
Of course, it occurs to me that this contradicts my earlier remarks about porn shops versus mass market retail. But I think that any decent sized city should have room for both. Baltimore revived the waterfront but didn't demolish its block-o-sleaze. That just means that people know where to take the family, and where not to.
I'm too Friday afternoon to argue at length, but I for one preferred the porn shops to the mass-market retail glitz.
The muggers, pimps, and drug dealers, on the other hand, I'll agree that we're well rid of.
In the "Things I'd be hammering on if I were in John Kerry's shoes" department:
The new Spanish government wants to pull their troops out of Iraq. The Polish president says that he was misled about the threat of Iraqi WMD's, and that his country may also withdraw its troops. The Bush administration's reaction is that these countries are letting us down by not supporting the war on terrorism.
Hello, Washington, the war on Iraq is not the same thing as the war on terrorism! Just about all of Bush's moral authority evaporates if people realize this, which the Europeans seem to do, while most Americans are still stuck in "towelheads=terrorists" mode.
like many of you, I’m tired of having to scroll down forever to get to the “recent comments” links, so they’ve been moved over to the right-hand column underneath the sidelights.
Yay Patrick! You anticipated my one, minor, complaint before I could even make it.
Vicki:
I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But East/West Germany was one of the few long-standing territorial conflicts in the post-WWII era (perhaps ever) to have been resolved peacefully and to the satisfaction of all parties involved. (Okay, relative satisfaction; I'm sure there are still plenty of Germans in the eastern part of the country who are still grumbling that they're not doing as well as the west.)
The deck was stacked in favor of a peaceful solution in Germany. Neither the East nor the West Germans themselves had wanted to split their nation to begin with. There was no ethnic, linguistic, or religious tension. The whole system was imposed from without, mainly by the USSR. And as soon as the USSR lost the power to force its will on Germany, they reunited by mutual consent. (Anyone who thought that the US wouldn't allow German reunification was living in an alternate universe.)
Now, compare to Cyprus: although the division of Cyprus was in large part upheld through Turkish arms, there is a very real division between the Muslim-majority northern Cypriots and the Christian-majority southerners. There are leaders in northern Cyprus who have a lot to gain from the status quo. And those leaders don't miss an opportunity to tell the Muslim Cypriots that they'd have a lot to lose from reunification.
You can draw parallels to Germany, and I'll continue to draw parallels to Ireland. But I'll say again that I'd be happy to see it turn out more like Germany.
Ken, I won't argue with your statistics -- "all employment" covers just as broad a ground as "all adults", and I won't deny that many employed people aren't in fact making a living wage.
But does Wal-Mart really hand new hires a pamphlet on how to apply for food stamps?
Re counting all the unemployed, as opposed to just counting the people drawing benefits: there's an article in The Economist this week with a rather interesting graph. It shows the percentage of the total adult population in employment in the US since 1980.
Granted, this statistic has its own caveats. I'm presuming they just take the number of people holding jobs and divide by the total population over 16. This includes some high school kids still living at home, elderly in nursing homes, physically and mentally disabled, and others who couldn't possibly work. But it's interesting to note that in the early 80's, we were employing about 58-60% of an adult population of 100 million, while in recent years, we've been employing 62-64% of an adult population of 120-130 million.
Not that this has anything to do with Cyprus, but it does shed some interesting light on the current employment situation, and the article as a whole adds some fuel to the fire of the Great Outsourcing Debate. Well worth reading.
Dreth, I think it's fallacious to blame EU politics for the inevitable effects of economics and demographics. The problems you mention would occur whether or not the EU were a factor.
As for the Cyprus issue, it's encouraging to think that the Greek/Turkish dispute could be laid to rest and the violence and animosity brought to a close. It's also encouraging to think the same thing about the UK and Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Russia and Chechnya, or any number of other long-standing territorial disputes. I think the Cyprus question is only slightly more likely to be solved in our lifetimes than, for instance, the Northern Ireland question.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 27 |
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