This is Easier than Full-Length Ones

Yeah, so I really don't have much that's worth talking about at full-length. Here's some more brief ones.

• So World God Only Knows has its anime a lot earlier than I expected; it's pretty good, though I would've tried to make the art a bit more like the manga. Still, though, how fast did they crank that out? Then again I don't know how far along they were when they announced the show.


• The Sgt. Frog anime isn't quite as good as the manga—I like Natsumi when she's scarier, i.e. "If that stupid alien's still there, let's dismember him and pretend this never happened. It's a good thing today is kitchen-garbage day."
  
  But did anyone else notice the bizarre number of parallels to ZIM, despite the series having a completely different tone? Aside from the green, incompetent, easily-distracted invader, there's the occult-obsessed boy with dark hair and a cowlick, the violent sister with reddish hair, and the parent who's never home.
  
  The dub of the anime hurts me, though; the only voice I like is Giroro (because he's Piccolo), and I don't like how they rewrote a lot of the dialogue. I think I have to watch gag anime in Japanese.


• So you know those "exploding schoolkid" 10:10 ads that may be the most boneheaded PR move since whatever Roger Ebert last Tweeted?
  
  Are my sister and I the only ones who thought "Wait, shouldn't there be bone?"
  
  Yeah, we know, we're messed up.


• So I reread the Screwtape Letters after several years and, um, how come nobody's read this thing? Everyone I meet apparently has a tempter who's much smarter than Wormwood, because they're doing the stuff Screwtape recommends Wormwood try and get them to do.
  
  I, of course, have a tempter who only sits around and builds Gundam models, because let's face it, I don't really need his help.


• You may have noticed I'm ambivalent at best about large portions of the First Amendment, at least as currently interpreted. A character in one of my SF books, a Japanese spy, explains it best, when he says the free press was meant to let the people criticize the government, but it's used to prevent the people from using the government to criticize the media. And the media, of course, influence what ideas are allowed, and therefore control how every other form of power gets used. He then says, "They have abandoned Heaven's favor, relinquished Earth's advantage, but have won the hearts of Men, thus gaining dominion over all three harmonies."
  
  And his little sister hits him. "Was that a Romance of the Three Kingdoms reference?!"
  
  Because it is—that was Zhuge Liang's advice to Liu Bei. Yes I'm a nerd.


• In that vein, wouldn't it be fun to run a political campaign based on, "Prove to me you're not a moron"? You know, "So the media want you to favor [these policies], and they always paint [my policies] as incipient fascism. Yet I'll bet your lives not one of you has actually judged the facts of the case, being merely content to go by what you see in movies. You probably also got all your information about the French Revolution from A Tale of Two Cities. Go ahead, vote for the other guy; confirm my low opinion of your intelligence, as, like Pavlov's dogs, you salivate at the sound of a bell."
  
  Actually that would probably work in French politics, except for the "Tale of Two Cities" thing (who knows where they get their weird ideas about the Revolution).


• Speaking of weird ideas about the French Revolution, did you know Free Trade, though it wasn't called that yet, was much more typical of the Jacobins than of America's Founding Fathers, who, again, were protectionists?
  
  Yeah, probably because the Jacobins were urban professionals and the Founders were rural landowners—protectionism is simply more advantageous to agriculture than to most other industries, though it can benefit from Free Trade just as much as the others.


• So Molly Ivins said that one of Buchanan's speeches "sounded better in the original German". It's an ad Hitlerum, so it's jackassy, but it's also just stupid; Buchanan's sole point of similarity with the Nazis is the anti-Semitic tone in a lot of his Anti-Zionism, and the speech in question was about immigration.
  
  But then, I sincerely doubt Ivins ever heard of "Chôshû dialect Japanese"—because there's a more accurate name for Buchanan's paleocon isolationism, and it's Sonnô Jôi. In modified form (partly thanks to Sakamoto Ryôma), it formed the basis of Japanese Imperialism.


• It's funny to me that people think Japanese Imperialism was an example of religious violence, by the way, because, being an outgrowth of Sonnô Jôi and therefore Neo-Confucian, Japanese Imperialism was atheist. I know, sounds weird, but all Neo-Confucians are. They merely prop up the state cults for their social utility, à la all those mainline-oldline-flatline Protestant groups that think the point of Christianity is establishing social justice (social justice actually just follows from the soteriology).