But I decided to try what I thought would be a pretty mild variation…
– wash with l’extreme d’absente
– 2 rye (Rittenhouse)
– 1/2 St Germain
stir, pour, drink.
Holy borlotti beans. It’s a completely different drink. Despite a strong aniseed nose, L’extreme d’absente is nothing like any old Pernod or Arak. In this guise, what comes through strongly is the wormwood. It tastes of antique books and spiteful Parisian landladies. It feels musty and dangerous like a Tim Powers plot.
This is what I was not looking for today. I’m glad I found it. If I give it to my usual crowd I suspect they actually might enter some kind of fugue state. First time I’ve really suspected the power in the absente.
This is a shitstorm du jour post that’s not even about games. Please move along if that’s not your thing.
So my eldest is writing a school paper on the effects of entertainment media on kids and we ran across this roundup of issues from the Canadian Paediatric Society, which seemed useful and reasonable until I got to this:
The following groups of children may be more vulnerable to violence on television:
* children from minority and immigrant groups;
* emotionally disturbed children;
* children with learning disabilities;
* children who are abused by their parents; and
* children in families in distress
…can anyone see a way that first item might not be straight up racism? Or at least a direct codification of a majoritarian point of view? Like I see that item and I think oh, right, white anglo saxon protestant Canadians must have some kind of special antibodies that make them less vulnerable. Or maybe, stronger souls? Or maybe just the advantage of not being victimized continuously by pediatricians who are immediately on their guard when they see brown or hear an accent? but maybe there’s some legitimate thing I’m not seeing.
“A showing of the film “13 Hours” in Renton, Wash., was violently interrupted when a moviegoer shot a woman. Police say the man, 29, later admitted he accidentally discharged his weapon. (Reuters)
Dane Gallion was so worried about public shootings that police say he committed one.
Last Thursday, Gallion popped a Xanax, ate a pizza and downed a 22-ounce beer. Then the 29-year-old headed to an evening showing of “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” in the Seattle suburb of Renton, Wash.
Have you ever looked at a modern toilet? Have you studied its curves and recurves, its cast porcelain inner and outer membranes, its angles and inclines and hydrodynamic streamlining? Have you wondered what it is that constitutes that perfect form that assists the toilet in its functions? What shape a toilet should take for us to call it well designed; the product of an honest, reflective cognitive process, with the purity of line and freedom from conventional constraint of a human breast or or flight itself?
so far Hide me among the graves is a serious come-down after Declare, almost like someone else writing a Powers knock off or parody. andit’s right in hishome territory ofRomantic period English lit.
Although it does contain the cruel burn, “you don’t have to write a poem, just steal a few lines from the middle of some Southey epic. No one alive has read those!”
Joseph H. Vilas I got the nocino! In fact it arrived some days ago but nobody told me. Wow, it’s really bitter. Wondering if I should try sweetening it. Thanks for sending it to me! I appreciate it. More notes when I’ve experimented a bit.
Jesus Christ, the tile setter’s radio is tuned to this voice that sounds like Criswell and is going on and on about how Barack Obama has prepared the way for the surrender of our republic and how there are three people, maybe only two, who will surrender it and they will make you change the way you think that’s why 1984 is so scary it’s about changing the way you think. Also the ads are for “Christian alternatives to health insurance.”
I guess it is a highly effective strategy. I certainly feel less like confronting him about his sloppy work.
so 1. spaceborne, planet-devouring octopods are the essence of Skyrealms of Tartary;
2. apparently there really are actual US government documents that read exactly like SJGames Illuminati player handouts:
We’re putting capabilities up in the sky that can [redacted] And the octopus to me kind of represents the idea that we are [redacted] We’ve got our fingers everywhere
Originally shared by Alex Scrivener
The logo was widely lampooned as emblematic of the intelligence community’s tone-deafness to public sentiment. Incidentally, an octopus enveloping the planet also so happens to be the logo of SPECTRE, the international criminal syndicate that James Bond is always thwarting. So there’s that.
Privacy and security researcher Runa Sandvik wanted to know who approved this and why, so she filed a FOIA with the NRO for the development materials that went into the logo. A few months later, the NRO delivered.
Some problems just never seem to go away and must be solved again for every succeeding generation.
…I could probably make a reasonable career for myself just by writing books called “Maybe the Victorians had their own issues and are not the best guide to all previous history” and “Aliens? I don’t think so.”
It might beat this slow, tedious and painstaking research business.
It’s release day. This #OSR sourcebook is brimming with new locations, magic, classes and lots and lots of worms and is now available for sale.
Compatible with Lamentations, Astonishing Swordsmen, or whatever else old school game you like.
You can play as juicy Carnomancers, charming Raconteurs, and even Chaos Djs, whose ability to make playlists can defeat even the most powerful opponents.
MU variant. Can animate one humanoid skeleton per day at first level (progresses like MUs’ spell memorization). But can only control (wis +- d6) skeletons at a time (skeletons check for obedience once at creation, then again at first combat, then every d20 days).
How should their abilities increase with level? I think a Zak Smith type d20 table that you roll on when you level up.
1. skeleton does not have to be cleaned/enchanted before animation (ie make zombies)
2. may make more dangerous skeletons from more dangerous/bigger critters (bears, tigers, dinosaurs, thoats, dragons)
Plz ignore actual video…the picture and headline are enough. WE NOW HAVE MOTHERF*CKING EX-VJs DISCUSSING REAGAN!! Get back to lying about how you like the music on Alternative Nation, you goofball! #PEAKAMTART
so just in case you thought Trump was the craziest guy out there, here’s Geert Wilders (Netherlands national fronter) proposing that all male Muslim asylum-seekers be locked up in camps because their “testosterone bombs hang over all women like a sword of Damocles.”
Suggestions for things to compare Wilders’ own testosterone bombs to are solicited in the comments.
#didIsayitwasntracismsorryitsracism
#readthecommentsifyoucan
Originally shared by lǝɔɹɐɯ lınʞ
Zodat geen enkele mannelijke asielzoeker nog de straat op kan,en wij dus al die vrouwelijke eindelijk eens kunnen opjagen en daarna neuken.
Daarom burgers van Nederland moeten alle mannelijke asielzoekers permanent worden opgesloten in AZC’s.
Want ook wij,burgers van Nederland hebben recht op een buitenvrouwtje,net als al die typhus zwarte luie 3rde rangs kut anti sinterklaas nederlanders dat hebben van bovenwindse eilanden komaf.
En alle 9 jarige klotekoters van Islamitische afkomst moeten we ook in hun reet neuken en verkrachten.
Het is tijd om ook die gebruiken over te nemen van onze 4de rangs Nederlandse medemens,want wie wegkijkt,wie wegkijkt liegt dat ie barst,en geeft toe dat ie net als ik,Geert W. ook stiekum van Moslim kontjes houdt.
Anyone actually think about education and their setting?
If anything this seems to be the MO for education in most games. Clerics and wizards learning rituals to uphold their institutions they grew up in and to gain power through gaining rank. The other classes have guilds and such that they can gain rank in but do not upset the social norms.
“1. Get used to it: the mid-20th-century’s reduction of inequality was a historical anomaly. What we see now is a reversion to the mean. Or, as Thomas Piketty put it, “Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.” (571) That’s a prose form of his famous, pithy equation,
r>g
Where r is capital’s return on investment, and g the rate of growth for the entire economy. In other words, capital is simply going to out-earn everyone else.
Extending this into the future a little but, I imagined that we could see a resigned polity coming to terms with the new (old) order through some mitigation by public services. Political unrest will be a possibility, stirred and/or sapped by media. Possibly populism and oligarchy will become new political poles.”
American Tartary is
4. Social unrest and political instability but instead of social unrest leading to more democratic forms it leads into a cult of Reagan. A softer Trumpism.
This cult is dedicated to the symbolic act of patriotism embodied by the following of Reaganic principles. Wormhole conservatism concerned with ferreting out Communists. The few Higher Ed schools left in the hellscape that is America are concerned with the affect of putting forth these values. Trade schooling is a Byzantine nightmare of knowledge in the craft learned through Patriotic displays.
So much so that I’m putting these comments under a spoilers fold.
Like this.
Or maybe like this?
Hang on a few lines…
…
almost…
OK.
…so who, then, really, was Theodora? When you consider the length of his plans, his inside knowledge about St. John Philby, his game of doubles, it seems simply implausible that he would not know about a whole world of djinn, apart from those on the mountain.
And it’s very in-character for Powers to leave us a clue. His Classical and gender-swapped surname. Jimmy/Ginny /djinni?
…was he playing the whole Britisg secret service establishment on a long plan to destroy competitors? Is this some very, very old grudge? Who moved Russia’s guardian angel in 1883?
Any thoughts? Should I write up Powers’s djinn as a tent-pole monster?
Against raw authenticity – Finding what connects, courage and what you get away with
You can’t aspire to Bowie’s level of virtuosity in this regard, but it is liberating, especially for a Gen X-er drawn toward the grimly earnest misguided intensity of the authenticity cult, to see life as a playful pageant of role-playing that can be done with more or less art. Bowie is why I tell my writing students that there is no “voice” to find, no voice that belongs to the true you, because there is no true you, only ever versions of yourself you have learned to perform, and the voice of the character you play on the page is up to you. The question is not who you are but what connects, how much courage you have, how much guile, what you can manage to get away with.
Thanks Bryan Alexander, I can imagine this being very Am Tart b/c you know sharing and shit. Scourge of America. Feral commie ponies.
I can also imagine vast hordes of communist ponies roaming in Chris Kutalik’s Hill Cantons. Enforcing a tyranny of equality for all and the outright outlawing of all Clerics and Mountebanks.
Damme but the 1794 is a magnificent drink. It’s quickly become one of my favourite ever cocktails – a Manhattan + Campari and chocolate bitters or a slightly adjusted Boulevardier, however you want to think about it. The spiciness of Rittenhouse rye is perfect for the relatively dry Martini Rossi and the xocolatl bitters rounds out the woody, earthy flavours to convince you that this drink just always existed and was waiting for you to mix it, like Michelangelo’s blarney about statues hiding in blocks of marble waiting for him to chisel them out.
I make 2 small adjustments to Doug Ford’s recipe: 2 dashes each of angostura and orange bitters, the latter to take the sweetness down a notch and marry the flavours together tighter. Thus:
2 rye
1 campari
1 Martini red vermouth
1 dropper xocolatl bitters
2 dashes orange bitters
2 dashes angostura bitters
orange twist.
I serve it in an old-fashioned glass on the rocks, like a Negroni.
liberals yelling to get Oregon militias classified as terrorists is amazin’. a few days ago, you had a bunch of people nominally against the homeland security apparatus and all of its government-sponsored, arbitrary violence.
now they want the militia to be called terrorists, completely conceding the argument because they have a suitably disagreeable target. Bonus Tartary points because a definition of terrorism that encompasses the Oregon militia would likely include Black Lives Matter tactics, too.
…what if we threw a pre-apocalypse and nobody came?
following the classic Chinese tradition of building fast and cheap, without any urban planning or long term vision, the city quickly became a spectacular failure… the only people who actually moved in were local government officials and migrant workers who could earn more here thanks to a special “relocation bonus”
One of the primary inspirations for Tartary was the set of crazy, expensive building projects in the ‘stans right after the collapse of the USSR, especially in Ashgabat and Astana – Soviet-style swagger projects commissioned by old guard Commissars who were trying to rebrand themselves as the bright new leaders of bright new national movements.
Now the ‘stans have settled down, it seems China is the center for this kind of development theater. I imagine India, too, although I haven’t heard much about that yet.
Son, trying to get his players from the intro adventure to B4, The Lost City:
“I could say their guide lost his map and now they’re just in this desert”
Me: “well Chris Kutalik has this other world overlying his regular campaign world, called The Weird, and when you cross into it all your maps are wrong”
Son, goggling: “what’s it like?”
“Weird. Often the first sign is Deodands, incompetently trying to talk you into an ambush.”
Doug Ford likes cognac in his Sazerac but I’ve come to love the spiciness of Rittenhouse Rye.
Alt Burnt Fuselage:
1 calvados
1 Amara
1/2 dry vermouth
Up.
….subbing Amara for Grand Marnier makes the drink much less sweet but also lets the vermouth dominate, and that’s no good. Calvados brings more fruit to the party. Result is off-dry, quaffable.
“The idea that this is now a “four-floor” problem—that “the entire spectrum of tactical challenges” could now be experienced within the space of four floors of a single high-rise—is a dark indicator not only that our own everyday surroundings are now being modeled and war-gamed as sites of speculative combat, but also how terrifying full-scale architectural warfare would be. Battling upward through the interior of skyscrapers, perhaps even zip-lining from one tower to another, it would be Nakatomi space taken to its logical, militarized extreme.”
this tastes like an amaro but is also a sweet orange liqueur.
…It’s a little confusing. I can’t quite decide if it’s bitter or not. It’s also a clear straw yellow. Curious to see what happens if I try it in a sidecar, atlas or mai tai in place of the orange component.
I’m suffering a bit of an uncanny valley effect with Tim Powers’ Declare. His research is, as ever, extremely good… but I can’t shake this back-of-the-brain awareness that he’s from SoCal and not, in fact, England. And he’s trying so very hard to achieve a solid sense of place with his walks through north London and Paris but the harder he tries, the more that asshole who lives at the back of my brain keeps asking “really? Are you sure?”
…would Marks & Spencer clothes be the self-deprecatingly patrician choice of an Oxford don? I rush to the web to learn that indeed, M&S were trading in 1941 but how were their clothes regarded? They’re definitely not patrician now.
I know Powers likes Laphroaig but is it credible that it would be served on a Kuwait Airlines flight in 1963? Certainly by the 70s Johnny Walker had a stranglehold on far-flung markets, and I’ve always thought of the international reach of Islay whiskies as a more recent thing…
I am disappointed in myself for being brought up short by these things. Mostly it reminds me not to try the same sort of deep referential stuff if I ever try to publish my own writing. Because Powers might well be right and I might be wrong, but it throws me out of the narrative anyway.
So some friends brought me back this tiny 2.5L barrel from Brazil. After much consideration I filled it up with Broker’s gin (remarkable quality at a reasonable price! Adam Thornton’s advice proved excellent as usual) and left it for a few weeks, during which I went to Jamaica and Florida.
On my return, my friends were eager for me to try the aged gin, to see what had happened. We had martinis. The results were remarkable. Still very recognisably Broker’s, but with a slight ochre tint and a warm, nutty, smoky flavour that didn’t compromise the dryness at all. We declared the experiment a great success and my friends have even offered to bring me another barrel for something else, since we should always have barrel-aged gin on hand from now on. They’ve gone to Brazil for Christmas, I’m curious to see what they bring back.
As they left, they admonished me to make sure the barrel was full: “you can’t let it dry out” they said, “it’s important to fill it right up!”
……..it turns out the evaporation rate on this barrel-aged gin is fierce. I’ve made maybe 8 martinis out of it and shared them around. And I just poured 2 litres of gin into it, to not let it dry out. Apparently my friends really considered this aged gin thing a success.
I’ve tried it in a martini, a research triangle (posts passim) and a negroni… even in the latter it made a noticeable difference and a delicious drink.
“Indeed, they found other examples of a reduced arm swing related to weaponry training. For example, cowboys of the Wild West, depicted in movies, also frequently have a reduced arm swing.
“We propose that this new gait pattern, which we term “gunslinger’s gait”, may result from a behavioural adaptation, possibly triggered by KGB or other forms of weaponry training where trainees are taught to keep their right hand close to the chest while walking, allowing them to quickly draw a gun when faced with a foe,” they explain.
“This should be included in the differential diagnosis of a unilaterally reduced arm swing,” they conclude.”
curious that the two Tom Waits records to be awarded Grammies are also the two I like least – Bone Machine and Mule Variations. The latter in particular seems lazy and unfiished to me.
Adam Thornton are there any Waits records you’re not so keen on?
Sharpening up my collections. I used to only have “roleplaying,” “cocktails” and then “absurdism” for all the world that didn’t fall into those first 2 categories. But James M has requested specifically to be excluded from posts about whatever controversies are going on, and that strikes me as a smart division – more useful to the people in my circles than a “politics” or “Islamophobia” collection.
So in future, if I have a Trump is secretly the pharaoh Akhenaten post, with stats and adventure locations, it’ll go in “roleplaying;”
Trump is a conspiracy theory dreamed up by David Icke’s lizard brain = “absurdism;”
Evidence that Trump is a rapist = “shitstorm du jour.”
I hope that clears everything up. I promise not to post any Trump cocktails.
I’d seen photos of this beast before but didn’t realise I was looking at a flying runway. So much crazier than I imagined, and straight into Tartary, where it can land on the sea of glass on a snailtrail of cubical gel.
Khairul Hisham is right, we should write a supplement for these characters.
Fly-gone Gin, the alcoholic ne’erdowell jedi;
What, the inexplicable alien distraction;
Little Girl: the only one who can interpret Glorious Starlord’s stentorian mutterings;
Daft Serious: a cheap droid made in the bigger next-door empire where they don’t know the Sith are supposed to be secret. Everything he says is a poorly translated unconscious parody of the Star Wars universe, but some of his stock phrases represent massive security breaches for the Empire;
R2 3PO (“Arto Threepoo”), a miserable parade of racial stereotypes, but such a confusing mash-up of them that he somehow just skirts being offensive. Ostensibly from “Brazil or Detroit,” his accent veers between cartoon-Mexican, Jamaican and Cockney.
all this talk of l’authentic Lovecraftien got me listening to what is unquestionably Genesis’s most paranoid-schizoid song – oddly enough, not from Peter Gabriel’s tenure.
Brendan S reminded me of debates about the old Authentic Lovecraftian Mood, and for my money, ST1 has more of it than almost any other film I can think of.
Alien is a fine horror movie, and Giger’s rubber suited snapper has a great uncanny vibe but it’s not HPL maybe because the horror is too physically immediate, too much of a bodily threat. ST1 has long, long sequences where you’re just “um, what now? What is this? How do I react? Andwill we be carelessly crushed?” If it also had some intimation that we were all worthless pond scum it would hit the mark squarely.
Originally shared by Daniel Swensen
Third on my #nerdy9th list of slow movies: Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I’ll be the first to say TMP feels a lot like someone rushed an old Star Trek Phase II script into a movie production after the smash success of Star Wars, because that’s pretty much what happened. It also feels like it’s trying to be either 2001 or Close Encounters, which are both fine films to aspire to. It’s languid and light on action and takes its own sweet time getting anywhere. As a result, it’s not exactly a darling among critics or fans — but I love it so.
What I love most about Star Trek, historically speaking, is its sense of exploration. The original series had a mandate to send us to “strange new worlds,” to explore new ideas and venture out into the Wild West of unexplored space. This may seem ironic, since my favorite Trek series is Deep Space Nine, but I maintain DS9 is still about exploration… just about the exploration of the tropes and assumptions of Star Trek itself. But that’s a topic for another day.
The early explorations of Trek were heavily limited by budget and technology; the scripts often relied on ideas because they had a couple of cardboard sets and ten bucks worth of makeup. TNG, while a fun continuation of the series, eventually turned less exploratory and more technophiliac, solving most of its problems by reversing polarities and “souring the milk.” Later movies would get pretty hazy on the whole exploration idea altogether, eventually abandoning it entirely in favor of all monster truck action.
And some of those movies are great! Wrath of Khan is tremendous and still my favorite. But TMP cuts off a big, chewy hunk of unleavened exploration and just drops it right into our laps with no apologies. Kirk and company face a grand mystery in the guise of V’Ger, a strange alien cloud that threatens Earth.
We’re shown early on that brute force has no place here, as some Klingons try solving the V’Ger problem by blasting it, and are handily vaporized.
The Federation calls in the Enterprise to handle shit. (Vaporizing Klingons? That’s Kirk’s job!) This early bit of the movie is keenly divided. On one hand, we see the old Trek formula kind of shook up for the first time: Spock has gone off to be more Vulcan, Kirk is no longer captain, the Enterprise is undergoing a refit and has some slight crewman-vaporizing problems in the transporter. Kirk obviously resents Decker and assholes it up through the next third of the movie In its own way, it’s pretty bleak.
On the other hand, we get that lovely, borderline pornographic sequence where the shuttle does a flyby of the Enterprise, and holy God is this shot in love with itself. The score sweeps and soars majestically as we pan over the Enterprise, as if the movie is saying HEY REMEMBER THE ENTERPRISE OH MY GOD LOOK AT IT IT’S ON A MOVIE SCREEN IT’S HUGE. And this is sort of the root of the film’s problem, really: it was more in love with Big Space and Awesome Effects than the humans inhabiting the film. But this is a weakness I can easily overlook.
V’Ger is an absolute mystery, and in between not making much headway in solving it, the crew talks about how little headway they’re making. Everybody is frustrated and disagreeable. There’s a ton of bickering on the bridge over procedure. In a lot of ways, I think it’s the most realistic Star Trek film ever made. A terrifying alien entity might destroy all life on Earth, and everyone’s caught up in one shitty board meeting after another.
My absolute favorite bit of this film is in the middle, where Spock decides to go out on his own and explore the interior of the mysterious V’Ger. He passes through a portal and sees sprawling, massive wonders: entire planetary systems replicated in full scale, mysterious structures, a gargantuan representation of fallen crewperson Ilia. It’s beautiful and bewildering and big. Special effects wise, I think it’s the most ambitious and thoughtful thing Trek’s ever attempted.
Again, what I love about this is that it’s pure exploration. Spock isn’t trying to beat up the alien cloud, or find a way to thwart it. He goes out, alone, to try to understand. This plays right to what I want out of a Trek film. I love all the Horatio Hornblower submarine-battle antics of Wrath of Khan and everything, but TMP is the mandate of the original series writ very, very large, and we will never see its like again.
I can’t let any discussion of this movie pass without talking about my other favorite thing, which is the iconic Blaster Beam. The Blaster Beam is a 18-foot long metal beam, under which are high-tension wires and guitar pickups. It’s what produces that loud, alarming BWANNNNGGGG sound you hear all over this film, Wrath of Khan, Battle Beyond the Stars, and a handful of other movies. It was also behind the sound of the seismic charge in Attack of the Clones. If I had enough money and space, I would just get one of those for my house. BWANNNGGGGGGG.
Nurse: “You know they say all people’s cellphones are going to be obsolete next year. You know what’s going to replace them? Artificial intelligence.”
Me: “Man, the day we make an actually intelligent machine it’s going to be a can of worms – we have trouble with human rights, let alone machines.”
Nurse: “They better not have any rights! They already took our jobs! Changing history, they ought to be ashamed. You can’t change what already happened.”
this is nicely done but the stillframe shown below makes me wonder how many staggering doomships of sf look like giant widgets from the hardware store.
Also I wonder how big the alien ship is in Star Trek 1. The Enterprise surfs across it for like half the movie.
Paolo Greco has reminded me of something I was thinking about the writing of history…
It is tempting to think of history as this seamless landscape, a continuum of facts and experiences stretching back into the past, and historiography (written histories) as a set of more-or-less flawed windows onto that landscape – tinted and oddly angled by bias, sure, but still pointing onto a basic consensus reality.
No. Our access to the world of the past is much more fragmentary and uncertain than that. It’s ledger books and bits of stuff accidentally preserved, but without its original meaning. Archives and artifacts suggest some kinds of knowledge but are silent about others. If nobody writes about 8th century peasant life it’s because we have no evidence (which is to say, because there’s no prior writing).
Historiography is much more like a spiderweb stretched over some random bits of junk in an attic. Each strand of spider-silk is a story some historian has told, to try to link the bits of junk together, and other strands build off those stories. When, as often happens, a strand-story is shown to be demonstrably false, the rest of the web adapts around it rather than abandoning it altogether, because there are strands built on strands built on strands. When, as occasionally happens, it turns out that some of the actual bits of foundational junk are not what everyone thought, it can be difficult indeed to work out what the implications should really be. News spreads slowly and selectively. The web itself is resilient. And there are stories nobody would want to let go of.
““My great-grandfather President Ike, who was also the Army general who led the Allied Forces to victory over Hitler, battled evil corrupt powers on Earth and took on some of the most challenging scenarios in history. As I grew up, I could sense that I was completing this battle that has ancient roots. When Hitler died and the Nazis lost power- the entities including those that were ET/Extraterrestrial did not.
They continued to find hosts and create agreements with people who were a part of the races of the patriarch and Global Elite – who want to run things through fear tactics, control and the suppression of Sophia or the essence of the Divine Feminine.””
come for the fallout, stay for the insights on how HIV isn’t really a disease!
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has marketed himself for the last three decades as an expert on everything from nuclear fallout to AIDS to climate science in the pages of a monthly newsletter, Access to Energy, which he published from his compound in the small town of Cave Junction.
1. I have to get me a compound. All the best nutters write from compounds.
2. Starting to wonder if this is the source of Cave Johnson.
Originally shared by Justin Case
Chairman of Oregon Republican Party suggests dropping nuclear waste from airplanes for its health benefits — Wants to put radioactive material from San Onofre into drinking water (VIDEO)
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has marketed himself for the last three decades as an expert on everything from nuclear fallout to AIDS to climate science in the pages of a monthly newsletter, Access to Energy, which he published from his compound in the small town of Cave Junction.
On nuclear waste: “All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean—or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases.” And: “If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law.”
Still, Robinson’s questionable scientific theories could make him some bipartisan allies; the deep-blue voters of Portland recently voted to ban fluoride from the city’s drinking water.
Apparently Walt Disney always used to point with 2 fingers because he chainsmoked continuously. From a fairly early date the cigarettes were airbrushed out of his photos, leaving him with this eccentric habit of pointing “like a gun.”
So now, staff in the parks are instructed to continue this gesture of the ghost cigarette as a Disney tradition. The official reason is that foreigners might find pointing with one finger rude.
so I got talking about guns with my physical therapist.
This is NOT a San Bernardino post, BTW.
He’s of the opinion that everyone should go armed, and anyway it’s absurd for cops not to have guns on their hips. And I said that they don’t in Britain and often don’t in France and as a result getting pulled over for speeding*, for instance, doesn’t have that extra frisson of possibly dying, and it seems like people are in general more relaxed.
And he said “well maybe that works in Europe but I know people who wouldn’t respect a cop if they didn’t have a gun on them.” And so we kind of put it down to differences in culture.
But I do not like “oh it’s culture” as an answer because it answers everything and nothing. It occurred to me that maybe one factor for people taking the police seriously as an institution beyond the individual officer in Europe was actually organizational. Britain and France have national police forces. US police are mostly local, around our way based on county boundaries. So if, for example, you zoomed off after stopping for a speeding ticket, you would know in Britain that they had your plate number and consequences would be inevitable. You would be up against the whole force of the country’s law and your license would be in jeopardy and you might go to jail no matter where you lived.
Maybe it’s not that people in the US still have a frontier mentality, but more that institutional frontiers make it harder to present the law as a coherent force.
*these days speeding in particular is handled in a totally different way in Britain and France – you get your fine in the mail, no roadside confrontation, more panopticon. But that same basic concept applies for any direct interaction.
I am sure the world needs more weird places where the Confederates won the Civil War for libertarian Freedom…. I mean seriously with libertarianism they were gonna give those slaves away… Carcosa all the way!!!
Tattered Remains of Tartary 