Random noticey bits

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.—H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Unfortunately I was never granted that mercy, and I see connections everywhere. That it might be connected to my anxiety disorder, is basically the premise of Monk. But here's a few of the things I noticed.

• Shinto, and indeed all traditional, non-transcendental religions (so, Native American and "animist" religions, folk religions, ancient paganism, but not Christianity, Buddhism, or {probably} Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism), can have their ethics summed up in one sentence:
  

  "All of human society is a Nash equilibrium."

  Think about it. A Nash equilibrium is a state of affairs where no individual will improve his chances of success by acting unilaterally. In Shinto, it's not even good to do nice things unilaterally, since that puts people in your debt, and if they can't pay it off, they'll resent it.


• Karl Popper, the vastly overrated philosopher of science, established falsifiability as the standard of science. It's not without its value as a standard, but it can't be used as an Occam-style "Razor".
  
  Here's why.
  
  So, apparently they managed to disprove one of Michael Behe's chief Intelligent Design arguments, irreducible complexity, by producing something he said was irreducibly complex in random circumstances. Thus, by Popper's standard, ID was science, it was just wrong. So far so good.
  
  Now how exactly would we disprove Darwinism?
  
  Somehow it seems to me that anything that says ID is more science than Darwin is, is probably not a friend to the kind of science-fetishists who think Popper was so brilliant.
  
  I say ditch Popper, keep Darwin, and ignore ID. As theoretical particle physicist Stephen Barr essentially said of ID, "Life is where you're looking for the signs of design? And what about the ten billion years before it showed up?" Course, that also kinda blows those Darwin-fetishizing atheists out of the water, too. See, if Darwin is an adequate explanation of the entire universe, not just one aspect of the tiny part of it that's alive, then LBJ's Great Society is an adequate explanation of America, and we have no need of the hypothesis of the Founding Fathers.


• So, linguistic note. When people pronounce Iran and Iraq as Airann and Airack, they're actually being more correct and consistent, for English.
  
  See, ever since the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels in English, other than E, have become diphthongs (A is ei, I is ai, O is ou, and U is...iu? jü?).
  
  Anyway, there's a rule in English, similar to rules in several other Germanic languages, that vowels before single medial consonants are long. That's the difference between the English pronunciations of "irate" and "irritable". I think it might actually be why final-silent-E makes the preceding vowel long: because it makes the final consonant orthographically medial.

Are you qualified?

So, I had to go to some irritating SF websites (I was trying to find a decent rocket engine; I found the beam-core antimatter rocket, which, however, brought with it a number of headaches—but I'm okay now). The folks running the sites knew their rocket science, though they had an oddly-shortsighted conception of science—they don't seem, for instance, to have even heard of the Alcubierre warp (not that it'd necessarily work, but they didn't even seem to know that there is a theoretical way to get FTL without violating relativity).

But whenever they mentioned something other than physics, they uttered howlers that a third grader would sneer at.

Basically, science fiction writers seem to think if they write the physics right, they can make up whatever horse-hockey they want in other fields. Who knew the Baron d'Holbach ("All the errors of men are really errors in physics") was the only critic they were worried about? (That'd come as news to Robert "bang the research assistants and sell secrets to Stalin" Oppenheimer, too, wouldn't it?)

• Bad linguistics arising from bad philosophy. So some idiot's story involved a logical conlang a la Lojban, because natural languages ("originating in superstitious eras") are full of inaccuracies. The example? The verb to be having all those senses, "all of them false to fact."
  
  Little boy, don't play with grownups' things. No language, natural, artificial, or machine, can cope with Being. As mentioned previously, language is composed of subject and predicate; Being is radically simple. Remember how the laws of physics can't describe a black hole well, because it's a singularity? Well, a black hole is actually a three way composite, in logic: it's a thing (essence) that has properties, however ill-defined (accidents) and it exists (being). Even math (most rationalists are some form of mathematical realists) is a composite, since it's things (essence) that exist (being). But Being? Just being. Your language is incapable of coping with that logical singularity, little boy.


• Bad sociology, deriving from errors in history and economics. How about, "You can't have lords without peasants." Really? 'Cause, um, the Glorious Revolution, which about quintupled the power of England's Lords, also ended the existence of England's proto-peasantry. The Lords, and their party the Whigs (the original Tories were populist, that's why they were monarchists), were the driving force behind England's Industrial Revolution, too.
  
  How about capitalism? 'Cause lord knows the Meiji era zaibatsu didn't have a bunch of samurai and noble clans running them, and not a single Scottish, English, or German noble was involved in industrialism in their cultures, right? If you have an elite class—which is a part of the definition of Capitalism, toddlers—you could have a feudal or Austrian-style aristocratic system. There's no reason the economic elite couldn't also be the military elite, as was the case in Prussia and is the case in both halves of Korea. Crew-based elites, a la Mt. Lookitthat in Niven or the Guild in Dune (and its knockoff in Last Exile) would be quite likely, too.
  
  How about we junk the Hegelian nonsense about the ever-unfolding increase in social equality, since it ain't gonna happen?


• Pointless, rather provincial naysaying. "Space ranks will be Air Force, not Navy." I have three problems with this.
  1. Just because NASA is Air Force doesn't mean its successors will be—navies have a lot more manufacturing infrastructure.
  2. Large spaceships are more like sea vessels than air vessels, and therefore the organization will be more like that on a ship (large organization for handling one vessel) than that on an air base (large organization for handling multiple small vessels).
  3. Most importantly, the Royal Air Force is organized quasi-navally, you provincial little infant cornpone.
  
  
• Bad scientific anthropology deriving from bad philosophical anthropology. Specifically, aliens determined entirely by their ecological niche (I'm looking at you, Niven). Really? As everyone knows, humans behave just like ostriches (terrestrial, bipedal, plains-dwelling omnivores). The total homogeneity of all human cultures—ancient Romans, 19th Century Navajos, and modern Englishmen behave precisely the same way, right?—is due to ecological niche being far more important than culture, history, or, God forbid, free will. Right, zygotes?
  
  Also, zygotes, must we have all those bizarrely misogynistic, or radically feminist, gender roles? Considering how advantageous human sexual roles were for our survival, I'm guessing aliens are going to have had to develop something similar. That is, different roles, but approximate social equality (though whichever sex handles the more glamorous jobs is probably going to get higher status). The really lopsided gender roles observed in some human cultures—the Middle East, Joseon Korea—are usually only possible once a certain level of civilization sets in, and generally only under the influence of consciously-simplified ideologies. Confucianism proper, for instance, is much easier on women than Neo-Confucianism, because Neo was a conscious striving to conform society (prescriptively) to an order that Confucianism was just observing (descriptively) as a tendency.
  
  But I doubt most of them have even heard of Joseon Korea.

How about we don't write things into our books until we've cleared the fallopian tube and read up on them, hmmm?

Captain's Logs From Nowhere

So, with the release of the new Star Trek movie (AKA Dawson's Trek, Trek: 90210, Degrassi: The Next Generation (wait...)), people are actually trying to say nice things about Star Trek. Only, unfortunately, the only nice thing you can say about Star Trek—especially this prepubescent take on the franchise—is that its vision of the future is "optimistic."

And dear God, the animals actually think that's a good thing.

Oh, sure, Star Trek is optimistic—in a quasi-Hegelian Marxist triumphalism sort of way. Roddenberry's conception of a happy future is oddly similar to the ideal Socialist state...because he was a Pinko half-wit.

Seriously, all you Libertarians that like Star Trek: were you that scared by the Cold War, that you latched onto anything that presented a future where the bomb didn't fall? Even if the show was cheerleading for the destruction of everything you hold dear, especially the system you treat as a fetish? The show said the same thing about your god it said about mine: Trek's no nicer to the almighty Market (pbui) and its Invisible Hand (if I may be so bold as to mention holy matters) than it is to Christianity.

And here's something apparently nobody notices: the supposedly optimistic future isn't even all that appealing, especially in TNG. Consider their leisure hours: they play tennis, study judo, and listen to (exclusively) coffee bar jazz or classical music. They read only the classics. They play chess; their parties look like they should be happening in some semi-employed playwright's loft in the Village.

They're fricking space Yuppies. Rather pretentious space Yuppies, who probably subscribe to The New Yorker—to read it, I mean, not just leave it lying around so they look sophisticated to shallow people. Spiritually speaking, that makes Planet of the Apes look downright Pollyanna-ish.

Oh, and how about the aliens?

Klingons: They went from being a stand-in for some Cold War player or other, to being a stereotype of warrior cultures (about 3 parts Viking to 1 part Sioux)...except nobody paused to do a lick of research into how warrior cultures function. They're also supposed to be great warriors, and yet they never kick!

Vulcans: They're ethical-cultural Jews—only Comtist positivists! ('cause Lord knows positivism hadn't been discredited by the forties)

Romulans: utterly, utterly wasted, because the show being written at a third-grade level requires simplistic bad guys. Ditto Cardassians. Their cultures look vastly preferable to 24C humanity, frankly.

Don't even get me started on the Borg, although their original version (where they were tech-looters, not "assimilate everything" cliches) was better. And Guinan? It wouldn't be TV from the 90s without Whoopi Goldberg as a Magical Negro!

The more one thinks about it, the more it becomes apparent that Star Trek is only optimistic if you're the sworn enemy of all mankind.

Gun X Sword

Time now to review my favorite show. Ever.

Since this is a positive review, let's start with the bad. The dub—seriously, did they even watch the Japanese version? Van's supposed to sound like he just woke up with a hangover from hell, not be all energetic and snotty. Also his name is pronounced "Van," as in the thing whose roof Leonardo thinks should be 3 feet higher, not "von" as in a Junker's middle name. Yes Japanese has a different A from English (theirs is IPA ɑ, ours is IPA æ), but in what universe do you render an A as IPA ɔ?

The end.

The good. How about, the voices (in Japanese)? Van's aforementioned hangover voice, Wendy and Pricilla's two levels of teenage girl voice, Ray's stone-cold insanity, Josh's innocent-little-boy voice, and Carmen...being Inoue Kikuko. Inoue Kikuko's voice...

Sorry, what was I saying? Right. How about the tongue-in-cheek but serious tone—gruesome, pointless murder and all-consuming revenge, on the one hand, and Mexican Voltron (and, later, a Robot-Luchador nun!) on the other. Need we even mention Mizugi? (Yeah, right, "Missoghi"—you named a country "swimsuit," gentlemen, now man up and admit it)

I really dig the outright iconoclasm of it—hatred saves the world, hippies, choke on that!—and how it's actually surprisingly deep. If you look at it, they basically said, "Look, let's write a story that'll stand on its own...and then throw in mecha," and yet the Armor doesn't feel tacked on.

How about the characters? Van's astounding—they took the "drifter" archetype and made him practically feral (though not compared to Calossa and Melissa). Carmen is pretty much the how-to for strong female characters—she's smart, tough, capable, (and also a dependable Oneechan-type, appropriately) but also a little insecure and spiteful. That is, she's actually got believable flaws, she isn't a Mary Sue who took two d20 rolls on "Table 37: Ridiculous Soap Opera Problems" to pretend to be well-rounded. Pricilla's a great gal, too: she's in the same league as Van and Ray, combat-wise...and she's a complete ditz (probably not as much as Van, but since he gives an entirely new meaning to "Invincible Ignorance" that's understandable). Wendy's just about the perfect execution of an adolescent character (Josh too, from a different angle), and Ray's the most believable tortured psycho in anything. The villain's the best ever, too, but don't let's give spoilers.

Plus, dammit, it's an anime with a Pulp Fiction reference.

Go, run, watch it! Over and over and over until you die and then come back and haunt somewhere that it's showing!

You ever notice?

Be sure to read the last one, about vampires, kay?

So anyway I noticed a couple of things, and I thought I'd share them:

1. The Packer power sweep (look it up), in which guys block the other side's defense and then the quarterback goes around on whichever side there's an opening, appears to me to work on the same principle as Napoleon's strategy of detached reserves. If that doesn't tell you football is the best sport ever, you're no son of mine.


2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, aside from being an example of how monstrously overrated Joss Whedon is, is something else, that I for one found kinda funny.
   
   It's Magical Girl.
   
   It wasn't so much, in the movie, but then the movie was directed by someone who realized how utterly laughable the concept "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is—if you name an idea that you mean seriously "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," they should lock you away. But in the series...how long, exactly, did it take her to collect a bevy of Slayer Scouts?
   
   What's really funny is that Whedon really thought he was thinking for himself...while recreating standard boilerplate mahô shôjô from end to end. Apparently he does that in his comics a lot, too—I hear (I don't read Marvel) that he did an X-Men story wherein he demonstrated that he thinks "computer simulations achieving sentience" is a downright groundbreaking idea. Did the name Moriarti occur to him at any time?


3. The President of the US (as such, I mean, not any one holder of the office) is the following, explicitly in the Constitution or by tradition:
   
   
   • The supreme executive of a state formally known as a Republic, that encompasses many "tribes".
   
   
   • The Commander-in-Chief of its military.
   
   
   • First among equals of its citizens.
   
   
   • Its chief of State.
   
   
   • Empowered to veto laws from the Senate.
   
   That is to say, he's the consul/censor, the imperator, the princeps, arguably the pater patriae, and claims tribunitia potestas. So, pace Pat Buchanan, looks to me like the only difference between the POTUS and Caesar Invictus is that Presidents are term-limited (and don't wear snazzy purple robes).


4. My little sister actually came up with this, but Hitchcock's The Birds is, essentially, a zombie movie.


5. Movies like Blade, and even more Vampire Hunter D, and anything where one of Them (whatever They happen to be) fights Them for us, are, interestingly, excellent arguments in favor of strong monarchy. See, monarchy does have a very real advantage of limiting the power of the society's elite; America and France have always been monarchies, that's why our Republics have such strong executives, while England has always been an aristocracy, at best—usually an oligarchy—which is why the PM is basically just a Super-Whip. A king—or any strong executive—is, in essence, one of Them (a politician) who fights Them for us, because they're the chief threat to his power if for no better reason.


6. Finally, has anyone else noticed that Riddick, as in Chronicles of, is essentially the Monkey King?

Vampires

So I got to thinking, and I realized, I really dig vampires. But they aren't usually done that well. You get one, or two, or both, of these gaping errors:

1. The science vampire. Vampires are mutants, or people with a disease, or some crap...yet they usually still lack reflections, and have about half their physically impossible powers.
   
   One could probably write a doctoral thesis on how our society feels the need to scientify (?) everything, turning elves and goblins into paraterrestrials or aliens—and turning flat-out trolls into cryptid great apes (read some actual accounts of bigfoot sightings: do apes whistle, have glowing eyes, or turn into mist?). Why would you bother to have a usually-bullcrap scientific explanation for vampires? Do you think your subliterate handwaving will heighten the realism? Newsflash, turkeys: nothing is less realistic than your mutants with magic. Ghosts, vampires, fairies, the gods, are just out of our ordinary experience, something we don't know about, that follows different rules. Your stupid mutants are a gross violation of rules we know quite well.


2. Inexplicably overpowered/de-weakened vampires. Often combined with the above, vampires are immune to their traditional weaknesses. Not usually sunlight, though—and they usually change it to "any UV", which is patently impossible for any creature that evolved on earth. Yet the vampires usually lose their weaknesses to crosses (or have it weakened to "only if the person with the cross has faith"—up yours, Kierke-tard), garlic, and running water.

Why do they do this?

The Science-Vampire is because they're half-educated, simpleminded slaves, the same as the reason for most of their failures. They've heard that science has disproved vampires, never mind that science is inherently incapable of saying anything about what are, in essence, ghosts on steroids.

Ignoramus: Walking through walls violates the laws of physics.
Sapiens: You're drinking beer. That violates the laws of Saudi Arabia.
Ignoramus: (confused) We're not in Saudia Arabia.
Sapiens: (insanely optimistic) Perhaps you begin to see the point.

As for the weaknesses, and neglect of same, they probably aren't smart enough to write around those difficulties, so they take them away with nothing to balance them.

That said, some of the rules as used by the classics, like Dracula, are actually more complex. See, the traditions of mankind were not invented by people raised on Sesame Street, they were created by people who could actually enjoy poetry in dactylic hexameters, without rhymes.

• Sunlight.
  Yes, yes, in folklore the sun doesn't kill them, we know. It does hurt ghosts, trolls, dwarves, and goblins, though. Anyway, vampires seem to be weak in the heart, and sunlight hurting them, or turning off most of their powers, may have to do with the heart being the organ of the sun in several different traditions. That or they're just spoooooky and therefore creatures of night.


• Running water.
  In folklore, it's the powers of vampires, witches, etc. that are stopped by running water, not the creatures themselves; since folkloric vampires are often projections of a witch's soul, or are tied to a grave, they obviously can't pursue a victim over running water.


• Garlic.
  In alchemical terms, garlic would be of use against vampires because of its sulfur—sulfur is the alchemist's gold, and is associated with the sun. Gold itself might have a similar effect. Anything with mercury in it would similarly be effective against werewolves, since they're alive and mercury is the opposite of alchemists' gold. Also, silver itself works against werewolves because it's the metal of the moon (it also has a purifying effect, in alchemy—and swimming pools—that might simply undo a spell that grants werewolf powers, and might also do away with vampires).


• Stake through the heart.
  Actually, in folklore, this won't do it: vampires, like Hopi and Aztec skinwalkers, often have two hearts. At best this'll immobilize them; you gotta do the head to get 'em, generally.


• Crosses.
  Vampires don't, in folklore, turn the people they bite; more often, they're like Japanese onryô: the lingering resentment of people that died badly—suicide shows up a lot. Of course, being killed by a vampire ain't a good death, so there's that. But anyway, the Cross, as a symbol of existence-as-a-good-thing (i.e. God), might not be too pleasant to look at, to a wrathful ghost.

Not only are you cripplingly ignorant...

...but you whine about it, too.

(100 Puuchuu points if you know what that's from.)

I needed to do another post like my "Reality Check" earlier—I do not suffer fools gladly, and the rest of the human race seems to be doing its damnedest to teach me just how much pain there is in living.

• So some conservative student group (YAF?) went around asking college kids if they'd like their good grades redistributed to students who weren't doing as well, in the manner of the welfare state. And of course, the students were none too pleased by the prospect. But they still insisted that it was okay to do the same with money. The comparison's not perfect (college is not a necessity of life), but it does rather nicely show up the inherent flaw of Socialism.
  
  But suppose I went around asking students if they'd like it if there were far fewer than enough textbooks for everyone, and the students had to scramble madly for them. And the students that didn't get the books had to borrow from those who did.
  
  And suppose those students who were borrowing, only got to keep a small minority of their gradepoints, the rest going to those who own the textbooks?
  
  That's capitalism, dude. Not looking much better, now is it?


• Why do people badmouth the Middle Ages, compared to the two eras after it? What mostly got reborn in the Renaissance was torture (copying the Roman legal system—medieval torture was much less nasty), and the main thing that got lit in the Enlightenment, was witches (fun fact: of the forty thousand people killed in all witch-trials ever, the vast, vast, vast majority were after the Reformation).
  
  The Middle Ages had much stricter rules on warfare than the Renaissance, let alone the Reformation/Enlightenment—conquest, without the excuse of wrongdoing on the opponent's part, was completely unthinkable in the Medieval world. Don't believe me? Then why, child, is the Bayeux tapestry so preoccupied with establishing that Harold and William were friends, and that Harold swore to give William the crown when Edward died? If conquest was the rule, why was William so concerned to establish his legal justification?
  
  The medieval economic system (or rather, three concurrent systems) were designed to maximize wealth and growth for everyone in a given industry, since they didn't need competition as a barrier to entry. Also their art and architecture were original, and they made several improvements in technology over Rome (the pointed arch, the water-wheel, even the glider (look it up)).
  
  The Middle Ages were an era of progress, and the Renaissance was a throwback to the Ancient world. The Enlightenment, though, wasnt even a throwback; nobody'd ever been that stupid before.
  


• Veganism. Just...Veganism. Two issues. One, doing it for ethical reasons? Really? Kingdomist. Have the testicular fortitude to only eat fruit, leaves, partial stocks, and seeds, like Buddhists (eating a whole plant is taking life). Ahimsa vegetarianism makes sense, and is as eminently respectable as someone taking the trouble to keep kosher; ethical Veganism is, pure and simple, stupid.
  
  As for nutrition...um, Kemosabe, humans are primates, and primates are omnivores. Most Vegans would be the first to argue for embracing our animal nature in matters of sexuality—well, why not diet? Your appendix is as small as it is because you're not evolved for digesting cellulose. Humans would never have gotten to where we are today if we were herbivores; meat's just the most efficient means of getting nutrients, because some other animal does most of the work.


• So I been reading up on Proto-Indo-European, and apparently the Kurgan hypothesis holds the field regarding its Urheimat (original territory, in this case probably Ukraine). I got no beef with the theory itself, since it seems to be best-supported by the evidence, but the lady who come up with it, Marija Gimbutas, was just a waste of nutrients. Mercifully the other scientists have jettisoned most of her crap from the hypothesis, as she had...no evidence for it, but why did anyone listen in the first place?!
  
  See, Gimbutas' interpretation was that the Indo-Europeans replaced a peaceable, matriarchal, goddess-worshiping people. Her evidence? They had a lot of female figures in their art. This is stupid, let me count the ways:
  1. Lord knows the Playboy mansion's got a lot of female figures in the art; ain't exactly a monument to the matriarchy.
  2. We don't know that the figures were goddesses; could've been Barbies, they're certainly distorted to conform to an ideal. Real Matriarchy-approved, Barbies, right?
  3. Even if they were goddesses, goddess-worship is not necessarily matriarchal; the Gorkhas worship Kali, but they're not matriarchal in the slightest.
  4. The Gorkhas and their goddess-worship sorta put to rest the myth of peaceful "people of the goddess," don't they?
  5. Even if they were matriarchal (and they'd actually have to be completely unique to be matriarchal, since there are no known matriarchies in the world), that doesn't mean they were peaceful. Aside from the fact we've got their fortifications, weapons, and yes, traumatized corpses, so we know they weren't peaceful, Golda Meir wasn't a Mensch and Margaret Thatcher wasn't a bloke, now was she?
  
  Now, admittedly, we have found that those (probably) pre-Indo-European Europeans were buried together according to enate (matrilineal) kinship, but that just means they were matrilineal, perhaps matrilocal. The Apaches and Navajo are, too—tell me, are they peaceful matriarchies? (answer: Good God, no!)

Outlaw Star

As promised, I'm a-gettin' another review out—though it ain't a new show.

Remember Outlaw Star?

Now let's do this properly, bad stuff first.

Um...

Nope, nothing. No, wait, maybe they could've stood to have more Ctarl-Ctarl. And Suzuka is a little Sue-ish, but female characters in Sunrise series that aren't strictly comic relief, or Yamato Nadeshiko love-interests like Melfina or most Gundam heroines, are always insufferable. It's like an iron law of the universe. Same goes for Hilda, now that I think of it—and Faye, in Bebop.

As for the good...first, how about the pirates? I'm a sucker for any SF that incorporates magic, as such, without pretending it's something else. And those ones are Taoists—their chant, Bagua Sanfa, is not, as you may have heard, nonsense. The "Bagua", or rather "Bāguà" is definitely "Eight Trigrams;" "Sanfa", if it's "Sānfǎ", is probably the Three Seals in Buddhism, Impermanence, the No-Self, and Nirvana. It's less weird that they're mixing the two than it probably seems—Japanese Taoism, in the form of Onmyôdô, is heavily mixed with Shingon Buddhism. I don't think this is quite as much the case in Chinese Taoism (where the rivalry with Buddhism sometimes got ugly), but Japan could make "generalization from the self" their official national fallacy.

Similarly, the caster: a gun that shoots magic spells! Oh, hell yes!

And then there's the SF. Yes they fudge it here or there for the story, and of course there's the flat-out magic, but the show's still more serious, literary SF than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and yet it's not boring. How about the magnetic monopole in the prison episode? Right outta Niven, my friends. How about when the Outlaw Star passes between the two atmosphere-sharing gas giants, and they nearly get hit by a big wave of metallic hydrogen?

The characters! All of them really, except Suzuka, and even she's not bad, just Sue-ish. But Aisha? Seriously, find me anything American with a ditzy jock-girl. Yes, I'm a sucker for the catgirl, but most catgirls don't make you suspect their real job title is Speaker-to-Animals (except, you know, without Niven's raving misogyny). Melfina is up there with Armitage and R. Dorothy Wainwright as a robot, and Harry's a great character, too: he's basically a nice kid, but he was raised by a family of assassins, so his default reaction to disappointments is to kill something. Also, he manages to make giant pink bows look downright manly. Jim is one of the few good boy-genius characters (if that episode with the cats doesn't make you cry, you have no blood and no tears), and Gene is a sort of "Shonen hero who didn't have his adventure yet".

Finally, I'd like to point out how good a show this is...and then you consider it's mostly just an elaborate ad for model-kits!. Why are Japan's thirteen-hour toy ads deeper than the stuff we make to show how smart we are?

With this post and pixie dust, you can fly.

More random thoughts, since I had a few things to say. I might do a full-length post on something later--Trigun, maybe, or Outlaw Star.

• So, Battlestar Galactica ended. There's a sequel/spinoff in the works, I hear; if you don't kill such creatures properly their power hides out, in Mirkwood for instance, and takes a new shape, and grows again. But anyhow, the series ends with the shocking revelation that all this horse-hockey is actually our past. Yes, you read that right. The people at BSG apparently thought they could get away with the hackneyed "Adam and Eve Plot." Wow, guys. You've reached Bert I. Gordon levels of suckation with this one. The whole monstrous run of your series, and you pick this as the only piece of real SF you use? Go die. In a hole. And be reborn a more sentient being--like a banana slug, maybe.


• There's an anime series I discovered, called Heroic Age, that is, in many ways, what BSG could have been--each of the races is named after one of the Five Ages of Man from Hesiod, the hero is basically Herakles (with some hints of Kintarou and Son Goku), down to having 12 labors. I'd just as soon he didn't transform into a giant monster, a la Betterman (I think there's a few designers in common between the two), but it certainly isn't any worse than BSG. Also, it's got characters! Weird, huh?


• Sartre is pretty much the definition of Euro-trash intellectualism--shallow, obfuscating, misanthropic...and an abusive, philandering squeeing-fangirl-for-Stalin! Also lied about being in the Resistance. All that, however, is immaterial, for with a wave of my magic wand (wait, that's my middle finger) I shall dispense with him.
  
  See, Sartre said that if existence precedes essence, God would be a a being-for-itself that's also a being-in-itself: which is a contradiction in terms.
  
  Aside from the question of whether that is contradictory (I don't think it actually is), Sartre's making a much more basic error, one that would've got him laughed out of the University in the Middle Ages. See, he's using the terms being and essence univocally of God and of creatures, as Duns Scotus did. Congratulations, Sartre, you dispensed with one of the weaker thinkers of Christendom. Unfortunately, we Thomists have always taught that any statements about God are true only analogically--there is more difference than likeness between any such statements and the Reality Who they describe. Since language is founded on subject and predicate, for instance, even the Tetragrammaton (I AM) is inaccurate, since the I is the AM and the AM is the I (and the fact that the word has to be marked for tense and/or aspect is another inaccuracy, since it's actually dealing with eternity...). God is not a being for Himself nor in Himself, since the concept implies a distinction between subject and predicate that's nonexistent. He's actually not even a being; he's just being.
  
  And now let us all thank God for the gift of gangrene.


• So, out of morbid curiosity, I read Roger Ebert's review of Twilight. My little sister and I had gone to see it, to riff on it (she'd read the book and didn't like it, quelle surprise)--and we were actually surprised that it wasn't too bad. Apparently actually being able to show vampire baseball makes it not suck (I've never understood how anyone can enjoy sports-fiction), and it helps not to have the climactic battle filled in, in dialog, after the fact. I know, who knew?
  
  But anyway, Ebert said something about how Edward (you fangirls may squee now; I am going to sneer) probably hates being in biology, since "Darwin came in during his time, and Darwin proved there can be no vampires."
  
  Well. Castrate and lobotomize me and call me a film critic. I knew Darwin was revolutionary, but I'd no idea he changed the rules of logic and made it possible to prove a negative! Darwin actually, of course, proved nothing (except for some revolutionary ideas about earthworms' effects on erosion); theories--which really ought to be called "models", to avoid this confusion--aren't proved at all, they're judged by their explanatory and predictive power. Darwinism is largely adequate as a model of biological change, especially the newer forms of it (Neo-Darwinism, in other words, though I admit to liking Punctuated Equilibrium's attempt to address the fossil record). But how exactly does a theory that only addresses what organisms do while they're alive have anything to say about them after they're dead?
  
  I think Ebert was just trying to be cute, but he only succeeded in making himself look philosophically illiterate.
  
  Also it said right in the film that Edward, 17, was sick in the Influenza of 1919, so he'd have been born in 1902, long after Darwin. But then, I actually know when Darwin was around.


• So a recent difficulty has revealed to me the fatal flaw in Liberal/Modernist Christianity (the fact it's a thin gruel of uninspiring platitudes is not a fatal flaw, just grounds for questioning whether something that's fatal is always a "flaw" absolute).
  
  They judge everything emotionally, not intellectually.
  
  Thus, nobody dislikes Puritanism, and indeed Calvinism in general, more than me. But I can tell you why: the doctrine of Predestination essentially makes God the author of all the evil that men do, and the doctrine of Limited Atonement means God wishes some of His creatures damned. There is also a certain Manichaean hatred of bodily pleasures, that goes beyond the caution all responsible moral thought treats it with, and a similarly Manichaean hatred of women, too (read Milton if you don't believe me); also it made possible a number of economic and social injustices in the places where it was adopted.
  
  What do most Modern Christians say about Puritanism? That it saw God as stern and unloving, disgusted with His creatures' sins. Whereas Liberal Christians see him as loving and kind and forgiving...and, historically, completely fine with the Rape of Belgium and gung-ho for the Master Race's acquisition of Lebensraum.
  
  But I kid sellouts to the Zeitgeist. The point is, their description of Puritanism is emotional, not doctrinal. They couldn't tell you in a vigintillion years where they differ from John Calvin--or Simon Magus, for that matter. All they know is Puritans were mean, and they're not. Puritans were also of human intelligence, which they most certainly aren't.

Kids get everything

So, thought it'd been too long since I did a review, but the problem is, I haven't seen anything in a while that made me want to review it at full length. So I thought I'd just mention two movies I'd seen relatively recently, Kung Fu Panda and Coraline. Maybe the kids'll turn out okay, after all.

Yes, I know KFP came out a while ago, but I'd been putting off seeing it. Frankly, the ads drove me away (Good God Effy but they do that a lot); why must they show the most dimwitted and irritating gags in the entire movie? Are they attempting to attract the Head Injury Ward set, or something?

But anyway, I thought I'd start with Coraline, since it's less deep. Yeah, I know that sounds nuts, but keep yer britches on and you'll see what I mean. Anyway, I can't think of a single thing I didn't like about Coraline, which is not something I can say all that often (Dirty Harry, the original, is another film I saw recently of which I can say that).

Great voices, great animation (shocking insight, that)--wasn't the cat Goliath in Disney's Gargoyles, and the narrator for a bunch of Navy ads? I also liked that the moral of the story was more subtle than "good vs. evil" or "reality is preferable to fantasy." See, this was actually, "never sacrifice the goods you've been given for the ones you think you want." It's not about gratitude, precisely; it's about humility, and understanding that everything good is a gift, including existence. That idea, not coincidentally, is at the heart of nearly every fairy tale--it's what good ol' GKC called "the ethics of elfland," in a chapter of Orthodoxy (wonder if Gaiman's read that). It's the fundamental ethic of Paganism at its deepest--certainly a step up from the airy-fairy po-mo nonsense that passes for most imaginative fair.

Now, Kung Fu Panda actually gave me a few complaints. I wish Jackie Chan's monkey had gotten to talk more. All that talk of "belief" was irritatingly Kierkegaardian. I don't think the villain should've been a snow leopard (I like snow leopards, sue me), and I wouldn't've made the Tiger a girl--I like catgirls as much as the next guy (probably significantly moreso, actually), but Tigers are purely Yang animals. You want a Kung Fu chick, make her Leopard (they're more Yin than Tigers are, though I don't remember that they're actually Yin).

But otherwise...A-frigging-mazing. The choreography was good, both for the gags and for the serious fights; the slapstick was vintage Jackie Chan (I wonder if he helped them choreograph it). A lot of the gags are funnier if you've seen many wuxia films; the whole thing shows a familiarity with the genre that's impressive by my standards.

Here on out, it's SPOILER COUNTRY (text purpled out).

More importantly, the turtle...is a Taoist. The stuff he says, that sounds sorta profound, but might just mean he keeps a bong in his shell? Taoism. It's reminiscent of, "And the master said, 'What if my buttocks turned into cart wheels, and I rolled down this hill?' And the pupils were enlightened." He grows peach trees, for Heaven's sake (small joke). And then when he died, he became a frigging immortal!

It don't stop there, though, kids. The whole movie's an allegory of the Zen teaching of the Everyday Mind! What's the secret technique? What's the secret ingredient?

Mu.

What's the mind of a master? Why, your everyday mind.

I didn't know Yagyu Munenori had registered any screenplays with the Writer's Guild, did you?