So, I take it someone new linked to me? Hi, all you new people! Where you lot from, anyway?

eta: Ah, okay. Welcome, new round of bradhicks readers. ^_^

(I just posted this over at norwescon; have a copy here too.)

I'm the editor of the daily at-Norwescon newsletter - the thing what comes out every day in the morning with news, announcements, and overheards and other such slander. You may remember previous daily Norwescon 'zines such as Mr. Cranky's Disruptive Newsletter, RUN!!, Fax Cascadia, last year's STOMP, and so on. Sometimes we run with the convention's official theme, sometimes we run in opposition to it, sometimes we ignore it and robots take over the world.^*

Norwescon 32's theme is "Things Time Forgot." Accordingly, the daily 'zine this year is going to be a nasty little tabloid called Dirty. Little. SECRETS - digging up the dirt best left forgotten. And like any good slander rag, we're gonna need some devious reporters who will lie, cheat, and steal their way to the story, and even better, some slimy, evil paparazzi to help us fill Page 3. (Yes, we have a Page 3. Wait'll you see Thursday's edition. Muah ha ha ha!)

So how 'bout it, fans? Any of you lot up to it? C'mon. You know you wanna.

---

^*: c.f. INEVITABILITY

My latest article for TechNet - "IMAP Saves the World" - is out. It's about using IMAP4 to consolidate mail folders and retrieve records from old archives. And while it's a very short and simple article, it would be nice to please to go rate 5 stars now. Thanks! ^_^

I mentioned this elsewhere a few days ago, but I'll remind people about it here too: a key step in the consolidation of power in an authoritarian system (of any form) is the purge of your supporters once you attain a power goal. Make no mistake: once you secure the power, you are specifically purging the people who helped you achieve it. This is by design.

This purge may be committed in the name of corruption, it may be committed in the name of ideology, or there may be some other reason - how you select doesn't even really matter, as long as you target the most potentially independent members of your base, the ones who will object, the ones who will not put loyalty before principle. This is due to the necessity of informing and/or reminding the remainder that they are dependent upon you, not the other way around, and that without your support, they are nothing. It also removes potential future obstacles.

In this sort of culturally-republican-ish environment, and in this case, that means the instant marginalisation of ideas, regardless of merit and/or reality and/or history (c.f. the Democratic Party leadership, Olbermann, et al). In a more openly authoritarian system, it of course means far worse. Fortunately we are not there yet, various GOP rank-and-file desires to the contrary.

It is important to note that I do not suggest here that Senator Obama's actions are a particularly bad or violent example of this phenomenon. This is also not to suggest that there are no differences between the two candidates of the authoritarian establishment; there are, and they are mostly domestic, except for the issue of Supreme Court justices, which could offer the last possibility of resistance. (C.f. the 5-4 vote to retain habeas corpus.) This is also not a call to change your opinions about any token vote you might cast this November, except insofar as the election of an "opposition" party in support of the same things as the "outgoing" party casts these policies more firmly into stone. I instead remind the readers of this stage of power because this is the reality of politics in an authoritarian system; this is simply how that game is played. I suggest that the Obamaniacs take their lessons from this, and be happy that at least they'll live to fight again another day.

I, of course, also suggest that they form a new party, or take over and repurpose an existing national small one; I do not believe the Democratic Party can be salvaged, as I've said many times before. As for the reformers - they're done, certainly, for this act. See that bus, that one on their necks? That's for them. If they realise that quickly, then perhaps they might salvage something.

If you are in that opposition, you'll need to be ready for the next opportunity for turnover rather than the current one, because the Democratic Party plan is now moving into action: to embrace and extend the soft authoritarian system that Chief Executive Bush expanded so dramatically, and which, frankly, I think most Americans have at least been convinced they want. They wish to embrace and extend the lawless Presidency, to preserve the illusion of power in the legislature without the reality, to have control over those absolute powers via the Executive, and, of course, to peddle a use of these powers with different rhetoric and with perhaps a modicum more intelligence as "reform" and "opposition."

The problem, of course, is that it typically takes a significant shock to trigger a significant change in a system without a functional opposition party - by which I mean one which actually opposes - and the current situation was made worse, not better, by such a shock. And I don't think the next one will be far enough off to function as a truly separate event, or to build an actual, functional opposition.

But one, I suppose, can always hope.

Something the friendly folks at Minyanville have been talking about for a while is how social change and economic change work together, and how this will trigger a social change away from spending. Essentially, the things you can't have become uncool, in the classic "fox and grapes" scenario. You can see USA Today's take on that here, wherein they note how, for example, Ellegirl.com, the teen offshoot of Elle magazine, launched a new video fixture called Self-Made Girl, which shows teens how to make clothes and accessories. Mish talks more about it here.

In that context, I present these items:

Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus, an article from the Here Comes Everybody blog about new participatory media and collaborative activities taking away from passive activities such as television, for the better. You should read it, and then you should read:

The Gospel of Consumption, and the Better Future We Left Behind, talking about the end of the 6-hour workday and the quite-intentional development of the consumerist society in the 1920s and 1930s, when industrial leaders feared that too much productivity would destroy the business world, and their solution to that dilemma.

Then, finally, we have something of a synthesis of the first article's idea of "cognitive surplus" and the second article's advocacy of "free time," over here, in roozle's livejournal, wherein Rachel disagrees with National Association of Manufacturers president John E. Edgerson's 1927 comment, "Nothing breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure," and has other comments on collaborative tools and networked communications vs. the "real world" with which I take issue, but that's a secondary point.

Essentially, all of these are talking about paths away from having things and watching things (in both cases, consumerism, and largely passive) into more participatory activities that, arguably, innately are about the creation of value, if in no other way value of community, all in ways that involve taking power (in this case, creative and/or economic) away from higher-degree concentrations of power, either by doing things yourself, or not caring particularly what other people decide to offer to you.

And all of that goes back to the argument I've been making (on and off, here, but sadly not lately) about the reversion to a more dispersed formation of power, and the ability (or, more commonly now, lack thereof) to force the degrees of concentration of power seen over the previous couple of centuries.

I don't have a conclusion to hand you from this set, I'm afraid. But it is interesting seeing these kinds of things keep popping up.

I was riding the bus from Bothell to the University District yesterday when it stopped at the stop nearest my house (the Uplake stop), and 19 Japanese schoolgirls crowded on in a gaggle. Yes, really. No, not in uniform. I listened to them, trying to pick out enough words to figure out what was going on, but couldn't - there were too many of them talking at once, and it was too loud. (Perhaps they were from Osaka. -_^)

Anyway, I wrote bad haiku about it. (And I'm sure I botched the grammar. But I'm not fixing it here, this is what I wrote in my little book. ^_^ )

十九日本人
このバスただいま
分かりません

19 Japanese people
stepped up onto this bus
I don't understand

alternatively, in intentionally mixed language:

19日本人
boarded my bus at Uplake
次桜木町

19 Japanese people
boarded my bus at Uplake
Next stop, Cherry Tree Train Station

Eventually I ran into some of them at U. Village, which explained things. But it was pleasantly unexpected (and a little bit surreal) at the time.

The Senate overwhelmingly passed Chief Executive Mr. Bush's version of the FISA/PAA bill today. It includes every horror I've talked about, as Democratic Majority Leader Reid intended - retroactive immunity for separate and specific lawbreaking by the telecom companies that cooperated; retroactive legality of the massive warrantless domestic spying programme; forward legality for this spying programme without accountability or enforceability - it eviscerates the already-toothless FISA court. And, most of all as far as Chief Executive Mr. Bush is concerned, it ends the only functional path of investigation into his many crimes.

This is a disgrace. It is far more than the usual well-crafted lies; it's a case of badly-crafted lies, the kind of lie you can vomit out when you know you won't get called on it, or if you are, you don't have to care. Note how after he has done everything in his power - which is quite a lot, as documented here and elsewhere - to ensure this bill's passage and the defeat of any mitigating amendments, Senate Majority Leader Reid's brutally cynical condemnation of the bill runs unquestioned in the Reuters article out this afternoon. He can lie like this because he knows he won't get called on it. He is the architect of this bill's success; he set the voting requirements; he chose the worse of the two bills that came out of committee; he stifled every attempt to filibuster or amend; and, once everything was done but the final vote, voted a token "no" against the final bill he meticulously shepherded through the Senate, so that he could claim to have been against it from the start.

What contemptible filth.

This derogate bill, and the degenerate sophistry about it, is formed from the purest mockery of the very ideas of law, constitution, and the public good. This is the Church Commission finding the details of Watergate - and signing off on them. This is the vindication of J. Edgar Hoover and his many blacklists. This is Senator La Follette coming back to his office and, finding it ransacked, deciding to retroactively affirm that whole Teapot Dome thing in Federal law. This is taking another look at the Sedition Act and saying, "y'know - that wasn't so bad."

What putrescence must emanate from the very footprints of these vile men. What nauseous gasses must corrode their environs. What wretched half-formed monsters must crawl inside their bodies, straining at their bloated skins. With such glee they must celebrate their faithlessness.

There will be a last stand. It will be made in the House, which passed a bad, but less bad, FISA/PAA bill that did not include retroactive immunity, and did include at least some oversight. You can and should sign the petition demanding they hold their ground here:

Petition against warrantless spying on Americans and retroactive immunity

More actions will be coming, if there's time - but there's precious little left of that.

Gleen Greenwald called today Amnesty Day for Mr. Bush and the telecommunications industry. This paragraph is particularly relevant:

...the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin cites the primary justification for telecom amnesty -- that these companies were just doing what they were told by the Government -- and then asks rhetorically: "isn't that the very definition of a police state: that companies should do whatever the government asks, even if they know it's illegal?" I used to think that amnesty supporters held their position because they didn't understand this extremely simple point, but now I think that most of them have their position precisely because they do understand it. A lawless "police state" -- and that's the only term that can be used to describe what this bill creates -- is exactly what our political establishment desires.

I could not agree more. This happened because they wanted it to happen, worked for it to happen, insured it would happen, and then did it. Nothing less; nothing more.

On a final note: Senator McCain, the GOP leadership's chosen candidate, came by to vote the wrong way on cloture and the bill as a whole; these crimes have his wholehearted endorsement, along with that of the Republican party entire. Senator Obama found the time to stop by and vote against cloture - but couldn't be bothered to do anything more, like stick around and vote "no" on the final bill. Senator Clinton did not even manage that much, no doubt too busy trying to figure out how she could declare that the Virginia primary loss didn't count, either.

I would like to believe that Senator Obama actually cares about this issue - but I can't. A press release - no matter how strongly worded - and a token vote do not amount to caring. After all - Democratic Senate Majority Leader Reid himself condemned the bill! And voted against final passage! He can't be for it - and yet, then, there is reality. And I have no problem whatsoever assuming that Senator Clinton is as happy with the outcome as Senator McCain, and Chief Executive Mr. Bush; I imagine she just didn't want her fingerprints on the corpse, since she, like Senator Reid, condemned this bill that Democratic Majority Leader Reid worked so hard to pass.

I should have more, but I don't. There is no law; we do not have a President; there is no Constitution; and none of us - none of us - are citizens. The courts won't help; they're too busy off in fantasyland, pretending torturing suspects is fine - it's only convincted criminals who are protected against it. All that's left is the scrabbling. So go sign the House petition, and contact your so-called Representative. I've always said it's important to keep fighting all the way down, and there's not much left more now to do - the bottom of this pit is coming up at us, fast. Your signature and calls probably won't change the outcome - I do believe we have lost this war - but, if you care, at least you'll have kept your self-respect, and later, at least you will know: you were there, and you fought 'till the end.

Go, and do. It's what's left.

I've been trying to walk away, but I saw this, and, well, here I am again. Hey, what's one more drink?

One of the few constraints that the chief executive Mr. Bush and his supporters have acknowledged over the last several years - even as they claimed the right to arrest and indefinitely hold citizens without charge or court review, authorised torture, and so on - has been the right of Congress to control the budget, and, as such, spending. Indeed, they have all but dared Congress to cut funding for the Iraq war, something Congress has been too cowardly to pursue.

However, this control of spending is apparently no longer being recognised by the Bush administration, as per this recent signing statement. Specifically, Mr. Bush asserts the ability to spend money not just not authorised, but specifically forbidden by law - specifically, in the building of permanent military installations in Iraq, or exerting control over Iraqi oil resources. Mr. Bush is now claiming the right to spend money without Congressional approval, and in direct violation of Federal law, on his decision alone.

As Glenn Greenwald notes here, the most likely action of Congress will be to say "okay" and either ignore it, or pass some form of retroactive law so they can feel good about themselves. This is what they've done to date, and what they've continued to do in the face of open contempt for even the idea of an informed legislature. (See also those still unenforced subpoenas that the Bush administration ignored, now remaining unenforced courtesy the Democratic leadership.) As these acts continue to go unpunished - or, even, significantly opposed - by the powers that should be opposing them, they become normalised, precedent, and durable. The opportunity to reclaim a presidency under the law, rather than above and immune to it, disappears.

What we're seeing formed here is fundamentally worse than Soviet legal theory, and quite akin to actual, real fascist political theory as practiced. (And remember, by actively discussing Nazi actions and politics favourably, the GOP has ended the right to invoke Godwin's Law - as they have, really, waved the right to appeal to any law whatsoever.) The Soviet system involved a legislature that would delegate power to a smaller legislature that would delegate its power to the cabinet and Premier, who was typically also the General Secretary of the Communist Party. They would take whatever actions they saw fit, and then the legislative bodies could override them as they felt appropriate. This override ability was, theoretically, unlimited. Needless to say, this failed in practice, of course - but even here, the political theory allowed for greater legislative power over the executive than the Bush administration accepts.

Fascist political theory dismissed the idea of a legislature - but the absolute leader would face re-election upon occasion, or at very least referendum, to insure that he always followed the racial will of the populace. (One might call these "accountability moments.") I'm not that certain we have something all that different right now. And in actual practice, even in Nazi Germany, there was still a parliament - advisory, and mostly a propaganda platform, but with theoretical powers to act. Officially, Mr. Hitler was operating under the auspices of this legislature; under the Enabling Act of 1933, the legislature retained the ability to create new law, and could not (again, in theory) be affected by the laws decreed by Mr. Hitler. The Act even included an expiration, and was indeed renewed twice, on schedule, in 1937, and again in 1941. The act could, still in theory, be revoked by the legislature, allowing their resumption of these powers.

Even this is more of a theoretical check than Mr. Bush's administration admits to Congress today.

On the theory side of things, there is genuinely no place left to go. (On the practical side, there is obviously quite a bit further to fall. But this is a discussion of political theory.) In terms of the idea of rights as rights, of checks and balances, of limited and lawful government, of a president constrained by the law, there is no place left to go. There is no Constitution, there is no President, there is no law, and none of us are citizens. Instead, there are show trials, there is a surveillance society, there is a torture regime, there is an executive untouchable by law. There is also some shred of democracy, but with a Congressional incumbency re-election rate running around 95% despite terribly low approval ratings year in and year out, you have to question how much this shred matters. Alternatively, you decide it matters quite a lot - but then you have to accept the idea that most Americans are just fine with things this way, bitching to pollsters left aside, and want a Decider, not a President; they want torture and arbitrary arrest, not 900-plus years of Anglo-Saxon legal tradition; they want rule by person and personality, rather than rule by law.

And I just don't see how you back away from here. Not with the cast currently on stage. Honestly, I really don't - which, I suppose, is why I keep trying to walk away.

All this lens research to sell my old kit is making me kind of regretful. For the 70mm-210mm f3.5-4.5 zoom I have, I keep finding things like "wonderful lens design" and "a true bargain" and "look for it on eBay" (it's long been discontinued) and people kind of regretting upgrades to the L line and people making archives on Canon forums despite the lens not being available. Reference sites list it at $200 (+/- 25%) in near-mint.

Then you get to the 85mm f1.8 - yay, speedy - and I started remembering that the only time I ever even halfway liked shooting with the Elan was using this lens. And you see on eBay that it sells for $300, used - which is only $40 off new via mail-order in New York. Ultra-quiet, ultra-fast, and ultra-discreet, Best portrait lens in the world, a fantastic portrait lens, with jaw dropping sharpness at all apertures. The bokeh is also outstanding - creamy, buttery, milky, smooth. Excellent contrast, vivid colours, OUTSTANDING in the lab... at ALL aperture settings... and I'm thinking... I like photography. What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I selling these lenses?!

And then I remember that I haven't shot through them in, what, three years? Yeah. Three years.

Maybe four. But I think three.

So I spent some time thinking about this. Before I had the Elan - bought shortly before digitals got worthwhile, bad timing! - I had a full-metal-body full-manual SLR, like every good art-school student should. I had a really good 50mm (which, amusingly, sold for much more than I paid for it on eBay), a pretty good 135mm (and a doubler), a macro, a wide-angle, and a junky 55mm I only kept because you never know what could happen.

I loved shooting with that thing. I was super-fast with it - 2 frames per second manual-winding? CAN do sport. I hit 3fps at least once, when I didn't have to refocus. The body had a thing where you could compose with the aperture left wide open, click the aperture down to actual for preview, then shoot. Basically, it was a light tube, with film behind it. And because it was full-manual, it was built to be full-manual, and there were pleasantly few controls. Aperture and focus on the lens; shutter speed on the body; click to preview depth of field, click to shoot. That was it.

Then it died of a combination of old-age and battery-reference error (not mine; the reference replacement battery for one no longer made killed the light metre) and I thought it was time to upgrade. I surveyed the market extensively. I hated the Nikon control set a lot; I didn't like the Minolta series's limited lens set, tho' the lenses around were awfully nice; I wasn't interested in large-format (or large-format price tags), and the Canon had nice lenses available and the least annoying UI. Plus, the 100 (in Japan) a.k.a. the Elan (in the US) would let me override everything if I thought I needed to, so - the Elan it was. I refused the bundled 75-300mm zoom lens as a piece of junk, and negotiated for the faster (and clearly better even at the time) 70-210mm above instead. This, somewhat to my surprise, worked. (Again: quantity vs. quality. They still make a cheapy 75-300mm. They still make a nice 70-200, but in the L - professional - line only. But they don't make this lens anymore.)

And then I never liked shooting with it.

I didn't hate it. I thought it was just a matter of getting used to all the controls, and the approach, which was so different than the SLR I'd replaced. But it didn't really get any better with time. I shot trips to Baltimore, to San Antonio; I shot the WTO riots; it didn't improve. One thing did help, a little; getting that nice 85mm fixed-focal-length lens described above. I still missed my old camera, but... shooting with that managed to be okay. I kind of liked it. I liked not having to screw with the zoom. Not as much as I'd liked the old camera, though.

Thinking about it, I think it's because it wasn't just a light tube with film on the back. I think there's just too much crap involved. Far more controls - no, that's not right. Far more options. I had full control before, after all. It at setting locations scattered from the lens barrel to the body back, LCD display, onboard flash (that, thankfully, in the Elan version did not pop up automatically ever), modes for sports, modes for portraiture, modes for distance, modes for macro, all of which you could do yourself with less work, as far as I'm concerned - and honestly, all of that crap just got in the way. All this stuff intended to help got between me and the image, rather than getting me closer to it.

Plus, the damn thing was bigger, and despite this lighter, which, particularly with zoom lenses, made it harder to stablise. On the old camera, I successfully shot 1/30th of a second, f3.5, 270mm, no tripod. I've never come close to that with any other camera since. I was handed a Digital Rebel at Kenmore Camera a couple of days ago, just to play with. It's the cheapest digital body that takes these lenses, and it's just like the Elan in every way I didn't like.

So okay, you'd think, fine; I just need something that's a light tube with a sensor - a really good quality sensor - on one end. But that's not what I have with the PowerShot I've been borrowing from Paul for the last two years, and I shoot with that constantly. It does have some serious advantages; it's small and light, which means I can carry it everywhere and not lug a bag around. (That's a big deal for me.) But the disadvantages are huge. It has all sorts of crap going on, with all sorts of modes I ignore ("sports," "portrait," other BS the Elan had like that) but which still manage to get between me and image often enough to annoy me, usually when the setting knob gets knocked and changes modes. Its brain is still kind of dumb. Its viewfinder is useless; I use the LCD exclusively. It's only 4mp and the optics really aren't very good. And the sensor gets really unnecessarily weird when it comes to certain reds.

But despite all this, I shoot with it constantly, and most importantly, I enjoy it. You see some of the results on this journal. Almost every image I've posted for the last couple of years has been that PowerShot A80. Which leads to the obvious why? Except for being tiny and not having other lenses around, it's the exact opposite of the SLR I loved, and is a lot like the SLR I never liked.

I think it's two things. 1) It's small. I like that a lot. It's zero production work to have it with me; I throw it in my backpack and I'm off. That's one huge thing less between me and image; no camera bag. 2) The LCD lets me ignore all the crap that is between me and image because I can see the image through the camera in the way I could with the full-manual SLR (live, reasonably accurate for a low-resolution microsummary), and couldn't with the EOS 100/Elan (also live, but never really right, somehow). I don't even try to use the viewfinder, like I did on the Digital Rebel, which I could just feel misleading me, and on which I'm not going to shoot through the LCD. It's so very clearly not built for that, I'd feel like a fool.

So, I use the A80, and I use it a lot. But on the other hand, I have genuinely outgrown it. (Arguably, I did that years ago. But I digress.) The last year in particular I've been shooting shots it shouldn't be taking. Sometimes, I get away with it. Sometimes, I really don't. Obviously, I need to step up another level - but I really don't like the idea of having a digital version of my Elan. And I kinda liked the high-end Powershot line they showed me at Kenmore Camera - two models, both 10.1mp, one with a swing-out LCD that takes AA batteries (rechargeable or alkaline) so is bigger, one smaller without swing-out LCD and a weird battery. They have clearly better optics, which I certainly want, tho' certainly also are not up to the level of the lenses I'm selling. They have better sensors, tho' probably not up to the level of a digital SLR. But there's More Crap on them. Not as much More Crap as on the Rebel, but still, More Crap. And, after my last experience, More Crap makes me nervous.

So. There we are. I'm not really sure what to do and it's not like there is a lot I can do right now anyway. If I sell these lenses and the Elan body I could get a high-end Powershot out of the proceeds. I'd have the upgrade I'd like of the camera I actually use, but I wouldn't have the - theoretical - capacity to take professional publication-quality photographs anymore, and I dislike that idea on a purely theoretical basis.

But I suppose if I needed to do that for some reason, I could go dig up another used 35mm screw-mount full-manual metal-body SLR. I hear nice lenses for those things are awfully, awfully cheap...

One of the things I'm still missing pretty severely is the food - really everywhere, not just Yokohama and Tokyo. I expected all the Japanese food to be better, of course, and it was - for example, the cluster of restaurants at the train station had a sushi-train restaurant which served sushi of quality much better than that of cheap-but-good sushi here. It wasn't I ♥, but it was within range given the limited palette, and, of course, that was cheap sushi. Meanwhile, the cooked fish lacked some taste that I really dislike in cooked fish throughout North America, and while it still wasn't my favourite thing in the world, it was something I was perfectly happy to eat.

I didn't really expect the western food also to be better, as a rule. The sandwich and fries I had at Anna Miller? Really good. Good cold cuts, good bread, an unexpected but very good mayonnaise relish that I've no idea how to duplicate that was tasty without being heavy like I usually find mayonnaise to be. It came with french fries. They were solid but light and tasty, despite being deep-fried.

That became a recurring theme, really; a lot of American foods, particularly cheaper American foods, are heavy with fats and grease. While actual meats served in Japan tended to be very fatty cuts - particularly the night I tried 牛どて鍋, which is, hum, a country beef single-pot pie-like dish - you never found much of anything heavy with oil or grease (or, I suppose butter), like all fast foods, most sandwiches, french fries, and so on. I liked that a lot.

Actually, let me just me come out and say it: food was all but uniformly better than here. In a lot of cases, dramatically. Quality of ingredients showed. Everywhere but the first stop when we joined up with the Thundering Hoarde tour already in progress was at least really good. That first lunch with the group was a very western lunch aimed at reassuring a very western group of tourists, and it was mediocre, but even the tour food improved quickly. And more specifically, even the western-oriented tour food - which shrank in proportion as time went on - improved just as quickly.

I don't quite know how to drive this home with clarity. How about this: we stopped at a rest station - a combination rest stop and truck stop - on the highway between tour visits one day. I got a curry from the short-order counter, and it was good. Rest stop curry - actively good.

(Oh, there was another exception: one night we needed Food Now, and Paul and Anna dove in to an egg, italian sausage, rocket, and anchovy pizza, which I avoided for the spaghetti. I chose poorly. Amusingly, I was able to recreate what I think they were going for last night. It came out nice.)

Even things like candy-bar chocolates are better. Counter chocolates are generically of better quality than you get here without going to specialty shops. One of the reasons for the Pocky phenomenon, I rather suspect, is that the chocolate is simply much better than you get in, say, a Snickers bar, and people are reacting to that. Apparently some people think it's dark chocolate - it's not, at least, not in the standard box. But it's got a lot more flavour per volume than people expect, so they think it must be dark. iirc, "Men's Pocky" actually is dark chocolate, if you're curious.

Similarly, soft-serve ice cream - you know, the swirly kind you think of as fun in the summer but not really a good example of the art? It's just good ice cream in Japan. Very good, in fact. I particularly liked the sesame that Mariko introduced to me (so tasty!), but plain vanilla? Also very good. I was pleased to discover today that Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream bars are, in fact, of reasonably comparable quality to the soft serve vanilla - not quite as good, frankly, there's a bit of a hollowness to the taste that I can't figure out, and the chocolate shell isn't everything I'd like it to be, but it's still good. This means I'll have at least some ice creams that I can buy at a counter which aren't a big letdown. Of course, the selection is far less than I had in Japan in, say, in an ordinary ice cream vending machine, but what can you do? At least there's something.

I'm going to have to get serious about learning the art of bento. I can usually stomach airline food, but I seriously and honestly could not eat what United put in front of me on the flight home. It was appalling. But I don't think it was any worse than what I scarfed down on the way there.

Fundamentally, the way that American culture prefers "more" over "good" shows up exquisitely in food. Despite the fact that American food has improved dramatically over the last 50 years, it's still kinda crap. Fatty, sloppy, oversweetened crap, made as cheaply as possible and served by the bucketload, as though to pigs.

This quality emphasis doesn't mean limited choices, by the way. I ran into far more variety there than here. Some of it was scary variety, like HELLO JELLYFISH but! Variety.

Japan is already famous for its vending machines, of course. I don't need to go on about that too much. But in case you're not aware: they are, of course, AWESOME. (Sorry, return of t3h c4pz.) Even in a single smallish drink machine in an alley, you're looking at 20 options - soda, teas, lemon drinks, waters, coffee, vitamin waters, juices, electrolyte waters (like the well-known Pocari Sweat, which I was drinking already before I went over on vacation - it's like Gatorade, sweet, but not sickly sweet, I really like it) - often in two sizes, and the cans have lids you can put back on so you can save some for later. Also, the machines generally seem to come in clusters of three or so, without a lot of repeats.

This is as opposed to a US soda machine, with its four slots filled with Coke or Pepsi, and four other options. Maybe.

Pleasantly, I've found I can get C.C. Lemon at Uwajimaya. I got hooked on that stuff in Yokohama, and it's everywhere. Also, mmmm, tasty. This is particularly good because I tried a lemon drink at QFC a couple of days ago - an all-organic "alternative" kind of drink - and like all kinds of other things now, it mostly tasted like sugar water. I could taste lemon in it, but it was kind of drowned out by the sugar rush. So I poured it out. (They didn't have any Limonata or I'd have tried that. I still plan to try it again. Hopefully that's still good.)

So anyway. Food in Japan: overwhelmingly better. Not universally, but overwhelmingly; Japanese food, western foods, whatever. Better.

But then, on the other hand, they do also have things like this:


Admiral Cheesehead's Orange Fleet Opens Namjatown
(spazzkat's picture)

Nobody's perfect. -_^

No time for a long entry right now, so here's a short one.

I have 2700 photos and I have no idea where to start. You know how they tell you Japan isn't actually at all like anime and manga would lead you to believe, that you have to revise your expectations or you'll be really smacked around and disappointed and all that? LIES. FILTHY, STINKING LIES. At least, for the anime I watch and the manga I read. You know Megatokyo, of course? Of course you do. Piro kinda turns the reality down a notch. Not up. Down.

Except for the undead thing, of course. At least, as far as I know. But then, that's Largo. Largo, perhaps, is the balance, turning it all back up.

But I mean seriously, I know where Megagamerz is now. I know where it is. I know where it is because I've been there. No ph33rbots, tho'. At least, not at the moment. I have seen and experienced the Idol Rush. Just to mix things up, I had the Anna Miller waitress take a picture of us.

I have seen the Nausicaa glider. Here, you can too:


Nausicaa In Hangar

What you can't see from here is that it actually flies. Carrying a pilot, not a dummy, not by remote control. Oh wait, I took a picture, so I guess you can:


Nausicaa In Air

How cool is that? They had video, too. Oh, I cheated: they weren't flying it at the convention, you can't fly gliders in a typhoon. So the flying photo is a grab off another image. But a real image.

Oh, and did I mention who's on the cover of this month's Rolling Stone?


Rei

I will say one thing, though; neither anime nor manga - or rather, any I've read - prepare you for how many levels Japan exists on at once. And by that, I mean physically. In any of the cities, you'll have areas - large areas - which are multi-tiered complexes. If you've been to Seattle and been to Pike Place Market, take that, make it about, five to seven stories, and horizontally about, say, 10 times the size. If you haven't, you'll have to do your best to come up with a highly-interconnected five- to seven-storey-tall complex of independent stores contained within a single building on several levels, and "mall" is not really the right image, not even a multi-level mall. That picture of Namjatown I posted? It's an entrance to a theme park, of small but reasonable size, three levels inside, all contained within one of these kinds of buildings. It took up less than a quarter of the building.

Then make another one like that. Then a third. Then have three levels of interconnect between them. Big ones. Wide. One will be at street level, one above, one below. Then, underneath a nearby former dock, add a couple of levels under those levels that you can reach by outdoor below-grade (but extremely open) prominade or elevator. Then every so often put skyscrapers on top, big ones, which may have their own interconnections at upper floors.

Then add an amusement park outside, just because you can, and welcome to みなとみらい。 The linked AVI is not all-inclusive of what I've described. There's just as much more off to the left. I took this from a park half a mile away and I couldn't make it all fit in the frame.

Thing is, sure, this particular area's new, but it's not a oneoff. It's not even the one with Namjatown. This is all over the place. Minato Mirai 21 is special because it's the first area like that we saw, and the one where I realised that it was kind of like the multiple overlaid worlds I saw at PAX with Pictochat, only physical. I didn't make a habit of checking for more with the DS, but I imagine I'd have picked up a few at the Pokémon Stadium.

That is here, by the way. The Pokémon Stadium, I mean. In みなとみらい。

"Not like anime." "Not like manga." Yeah. Not like anime and manga my shiny metal ass.

If anybody, and I mean anybody, still reading this is on a a teaser-rate loan or primary/secondary loan pair or any other form of thing that you can't afford when the rates jump up to whatever high they can jump to when the introductory rates expire, and if your refinance option is anything other than a fully-conforming AAA-grade mortgage, then for the love of the gods, try to refinance Monday; you are out of time. And go read that article now please to see why.

Did you read that? Okay, good. What's causing this is the collapse of the secondary CDO market - the private market where these loan instruments are financed and sold after closing. For nonconforming and jumbo loans, it's all but dead. (I talked about this again last week; it hasn't gotten better since then.) Without that market functioning - and right now, please understand, it is in demand failure - non-prime/non-conforming loans are somewhere between not affordable and not happening, as lenders price themselves out of that market, as per the article above.

None of that is speculation. It is, at this point, history. I'm not guessing about anything above this line; these are things that have already happened. (I suppose I'm relying on interpretation of motives by others, but it's not a big leap.)

All this is why that Jim Cramer guy was freaking out on CNBC on Friday, begging for rate intervention from the Fed. When he says only rich guys like him can get new loans now? Sure, that's hyperbole (as is his segment, usually) but the above market failure is what he's talking about. Here's the bigger problem: he's right in that if Bernanke doesn't live up to his "Helicopter Ben" moniker, this doesn't get better soon, and more things implode. Unfortunately, the host is also right when she says a substantial rate cut would be "armageddon" - it'd be armageddon in the accelerated-collapse-of-the-dollar sense. That's what that means.

I think he might well be wrong about the idea that a rate cut would save the situation, though. That might not be enough.

Now if you want to get into speculation - well, I don't usually talk about my worst-case scenarios, because I really don't believe in them myself most of the time, but...

( here it is... )

(As an aside, the thing to note about the good consumer confidence number which came out last week is that the figure has become detached from everything except gasoline prices, with which it is dramatically well linked over the last several years. And meanwhile, gas prices have been falling steadily even as crude oil set a new record high last week before finally giving back a couple of dollars. That's neat. Oh, and not to call shenanigans, but, um, I'm callin' shenanigans on this sudden revision of American personal savings rate to "almost entirely positive" for the last 26 months instead of negative that entire time, which had been the report until a couple of weeks ago. Surprise! Combine that with the monkeyshines on the unemployment birth/death model (that model they won't release for public perusal), and dropping the M3 on the basis that "we don't need it," I'm getting an awfully sketchy feeling about this stuff. But that's at least partly my own native sense of distrust, and besides, I digress.)

( Now, why does this matter if you don't have a house? )

I leave the rest for you. And before you ask: I don't know what the market is going to do tomorrow. It could jump 250 points. It could drop 250 points. That's about the range we've been seeing. I've seen this kind of volatility in the market before, in '99-2000; I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. Good luck.

Last month, on ソラバドのほん: Life in the Convergence Zone:

I have some relevant thoughts of my own in relation to this article about the role of energy, population - in particular, control over reproduction - and the spread of rational thought which this margin is too small to contain, but which I will attempt to describe after my biology midterm.

---

We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality ... what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, here.

Part I: Political Power and Energy

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Chairman Mao Tse-tung, in "Problems of War and Strategy," November 6, 1938. Everybody knows the quote, because it's true, or true enough for the snappy pull-quote it is. But what does political power - or, perhaps more generally, government power - mean in a context of energy?

First, why do governments succeed in controlling subject populations? The obvious answer: governments aggregate power in ways beyond the capability of individual actors. The same number of people, organised, can exert more force than that number of people disorganised. In this way, a small number of humans can control the behaviour of larger numbers.

Are there bounds to this function? I assert that there are. I suggest further that these bounds are functions of projectable energy, which is to say, artificial force. At very low total energy availability levels, the ability to project force is sharply limited. Mobility is extremely energy-intensive; stone weapons are crude and low-order power multipliers.

But as energy capacity increases, power - and the technologies power made available - grow. The multipliers of force became greater. As these increase, the possible extents of empires grow, and the possible degree of control of a government over its population - of any size - grow, parallel rising curves that industrial-age thinkers of all sorts saw culminating in the global super-state. This power, ever more concentrated with ever-larger multipliers and ever-larger orders of multipliers, collected and directed by a common point of control, would overcome all opposition - eventually. It was, so the theory went, the inevitable march of history.

Many have speculated as to why this vision collapsed. (Some debate whether it has. I do not consider these arguments here.) Much of this speculation, particularly in the context of socialist states, focuses on the idea of management failure - overwhelming complexity defeating the ability of any organisation to control it effectively. I agree that certainly didn't help, but I suspect this to be more of a symptom rather than an underlying cause.

The super-government vision depends, amoungst other conditions, on the capability of the government to effectively aggregate the vast majority of the total power available. Through much of the industrial age, this paradigm held. Sources of energy - and, therefore, the products made possible by that energy - were typically large and immobile. This is in large part because energy density was not particularly high, and because the tools needed to liberate that energy were not particularly efficient.

Similarly, the vision depends upon the government having the power to aggregate power from additional subjects at a rate which allows it to control that increased population. If an individual can generate a given amount of power X, and it takes some fraction of that X to control that individual, the government has to be able to gain that fraction of power from the labours of that person, directly or indirectly. If the government can gain more than that percentage, it can use that additional power to control yet more people, or deepen its control over that individual.

It appears evident that for much of written history, these two conditions have been attainable. Not always, and not indefinitely, but certainly possible on a regular enough basis that the history of the globe is replete with imperial ambitions successfully realised. And, for that matter, of collectivist governments successfully holding power for long periods of time.

But what happens when the total available power in a civilisation (or Culture, if you prefer) exceeds the ability of the government to collect it that effectively?

In a high-ambient-energy culture, I suggest that effective government action becomes much more difficult not because of some mysterious breakdown of governmental ability, but because there's enough power - energy, communication, basic tools of self-organisation - floating around that individuals do not have to go along to have access to tools. They can go off on their own, or in their own small groups, more easily. They can have their own power multipliers. And if that energy is high density - or not particularly high density but can be converted very efficiently - then that amount which can be carried around rises above a particular effective threshold, and enables a single person to exert meaningful force.

What happens when any individual has access to enough personally-controllable power to create a genuinely disruptive level of change, if they work hard enough at it, and talk a few friends into helping out? Helping out with, say, a private suborbital launch vehicle, as a positive example of change? Or, as in Iraq, a shoulder-mounted RPG or a truck bomb? Or, as in the United States, four airliners filled with jet fuel?

In the short term, the potential for violence climbs dramatically. Grievances will be addressed, one way or another - as is happening in the aforementioned Iraq right now. But assuming - as I do - that eventually people (and governments) come to term with this reality, what do you get?

• One possible result is that associations become a whole lot more voluntary. Controlling disgruntled members of a collective entity becomes more difficult. One could argue that we're seeing this in the form of chosen communities over geographic communities.
  
• Another possible result could be that governmental entities become smaller, to try to move back into a functional power-collection point of the curve. Here, we see the end of the industrial-age aggregate states of Europe, and possibly even the United Kingdom, if current political trends actually play out. Many historians say that if the Civil War in the United States had been fought 20 years earlier, the South would have won, on the bases of projectable power; I would go so far to suggest that if the Civil War in the United States were to be fought today, the South would also win, because of the changes in the way that the distribution of energy affects the ability of a group to successfully control a subject population.
  
• A third is that governments become dramatically more aggressive at power aggregation by dropping the power and technology available throughout their society. This is possible - c.f. the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - but at great cost.

Obviously, since I'm calling out examples, I think this has been happening for thirty or so years, but that many people in positions of old-form power - I'm looking at you, neoconservative movement - have continued to fail - utterly - to grasp its significance.

This is one of the many reasons I care very much about issues such as future energy supplies. I want and prefer a high-energy, and hence high-entropy, and hence more voluntary society. The downhill slope of the oil curve will not be a pretty place to be without serious alternatives. The sooner we find these, the better.

To be continued

I went on a bit of a Wikipedia editing bender last night. Oof. Then this morning I spent three hours going through stuff and cleaning up to put off working on taxes.

Oh, and the Music: entry on this? Get a copy. You want it.

Orange Leaves
My latest little column for TechNet Magazine - a very short one, they changed the format of their print version and now it's a mere 550ish words per page - is here. Not as funny as last time, but hopefully still mildly amusing. I like the illustration they ran with it more than the article, really. ^_^

I'm so far behind in email. And CWU stuff. And regular stuff. Bah. And I accidentally let my laptop battery die completely so that the system activated emergency shutdown, so I lost some meme crap I was going to post here. Foo. Oh well, have a silly visitor map thingie. I SEE J00!


Create your own visitor map!

My LJ has gotten really boring since I started school back up. The photos are still okay, I suppose, and the CWUs I manage about once a week, but I used to write stuff for here and now I kind of don't. I spend all that time on botany instead. Now you're lucky if you get a bunch of links.

And I want to write something about this, too, but I really need instead to be working on botany or Japanese vocabulary and katakana, so I don't have time. I'll summarise a few things anyway:

I'm pro-choice, and I'm not "personally anti-abortion" as a codicil. I think legal abortion has been a net social good, period, and I don't think, from a rationalist standpoint, you can make a real coherent argument otherwise. I think laws stating that women need to be "informed about abortion" - usually meaning "lectured in theology masquerading as science" - before getting an abortion is creepy and paternalistic in the worst of senses. I think the idea that a zygote is a human being entitled to the rights of a child is benightedly stupid if sincerely held, and sophistic, at best, for the majority of people who claim such a belief. I think the idea that women should die or have their health ruined for someone else's religious beliefs - the "better two tragedies than one murder" school, as put pretty much into law in South Dakota - is obscene, and convinces me that the holders of such beliefs consider a woman to be less of a person than even a diploid cell floating in fluid which will die on its own 70% of the time.

I think enforced pregnancy is slavery.

And I think I should be able to have these opinions without being accused of hating babies, or having to append a codicil that I don't like forced abortions either. That's why it's called a choice, and why it's a freedom, not a mandate. If you can't tell those apart, you shouldn't even be talking to me, because you're some kind of reproductive Stalinist, and I'm certainly not interested in talking to you.

Anyway. Now back to vocabulary. Fun!

So far, we've gotten multi-hour blackouts about once a year since moving to our new house, Murkworks North. And we got through this past storm pretty well. We had heat, we had light, we had food and the ability to prepare it. It wasn't good, but it wasn't really so bad. Since the more people prepped to handle these things, the better, I'm carrying some comments I made in email to someone off LJ about dealing with this sort of thing over to my journal.

1. Have non-electric entertainment. During last year's blackout, we had a music jam! annathepiper even wrote up a jam report. It was good. ^_^ This time, we did crosswords and lazed about, and were getting ready to play Yahtzee right before the lights came back on. We'd have had more fun except I was busy prepping for my chemistry final all Thursday and was then kind of wiped out Friday night.

2. If a big windstorm is coming and you have warning, stock up on ice early to keep your cold food viable. (Not all these come with low temperatures.) Keep the ice in bags in the freezer until the lights actually go out (a spazzkat addition), then transfer the ice and most valuable foods to a locking cooler, and if it's cold out, put it outside. We did not do this, but have now learned. Oh well, at least the fridge is all sparkly clean. That's a switch.

3: Other food: stock more up on soup (easy to heat) and other canned fruits and vegetables (also easy to heat) and tea (easier than coffee to make), and try to keep at least a few days' supply of food in the house, stuff that you eat normally anyway, so you can rotate through it and not feel like you're wasting money. That's a little easier said than done, but a box of canned green veggies, a box of canned fruit, and a bunch of cans of soup OR boxes of mac and cheese plus canned tuna will give you a pretty decent emergency balance of protein and vitamins, and they're all easy to make in the dark without a lot of heat. Also, maybe keep some candy around for morale purposes. YAY! STORM CANDY! Or something. ^_^

Or, if you're tight on space, go over to Uwajimaya and get some decent rice. We like Nishiki brand, and no, I don't mean the sushi kind you can get at QFC, I mean their regular rice. It's easy to make, compact, tasty, and very good for you. This is something we keep 20lb bags of anyway, but even a 5lb mini-bag will keep you in calories for a good amount of time. Plus, it stores well.

If cooking heat is an issue, then there're always MREs, breakfast bars, Tiger's Milk bars, and other similar no-heat high-protein or high-fruit snacks.

3: Lighting: the cheapest way I've found to get decent emergency brightness is to get a couple or three oil lamps and keep a bottle or two of candle (paraffin) oil around. They work surprisingly well. The lamps cost about $8 (or mine did, anyway, at McLendon's Hardware), the oil costs about $4 for a large bottle. The ones I have look like 19th century little-house-on-the-prairie metal-base long-glass-chimney lights, like you'd expect Laura Ingalls to be carrying around. ^_^ One large bottle (which is, hum, a litre?) of paraffin oil fills three of the kind of lamp I have full, and we used it constantly through the evenings during the blackout and didn't even need to refill once. You can get the oil all kinds of places; Bartell Drugs even carries it. And I wouldn't recommend kerosene lamps unless you'll remember to store and replace kerosene every year; paraffin lamps aren't as bright but the paraffin doesn't degrade like kerosene does. (It's a moisture thing.) I studied for my Friday-morning chem final using one of these lamps, so they're bright enough for comfortable reading.

Alternatively, if you're thinking about this right now, you can get these sets of three press-click LED area lights that take batteries for $14 from Costco. Buy those and a brick of AAA batteries. They won't be as good for general lighting as a paraffin oil lamp, but they don't involve flame or bottles of candle oil. Oh, and LED lights are better than regular because they use less power (so the batteries last longer), don't burn out, and are brighter than standard bulbs. But as with most battery lights I've found, the light isn't very even, so reading is like reading by a flashlight.

A still more expensive but definitively more comforting solution for light is to get a good-sized computer UPS (spendy), keep it charged, then use it to power a compact-florescent light during the blackout. Get something that'll keep a full computer system running for 25 minutes or more. We have a couple of these for our servers. They were more than half-drained by the time we got all our servers shut down, but despite that, we got a full evening's light out of one, and that was mostly just as an experiment. We used a full-spectrum daylight compact florescent (Ott-Lite, available at Home Depot and other places) bulb, which we use in some fixtures anyway.

Having normal electric light around, even if it's a single fixture, definitely helps cheer people up. You want c.f. and not incandescent because of the much lower power utilisation, again - 15W for a room's worth of brightness instead of 60W means that your battery power lasts four times longer. We also recharged my cell phone off it.

4: We weren't relying on this, but were very surprised to find that our hot water heater worked through the blackout. This is the advantage of natural gas over electric hot water, and probably tanks over tankless, tho' I don't know for sure about that last part.

5: Heating: if you're willing to store (and annually replace) a bit of kerosene, indoor-use no-vent-required kerosene heaters are available, put out a good amount of heat, and aren't very expensive. But you have to run them on non-flammable surfaces like stone or tile, and you have to have the right kind of fuel (K-1 Kerosene and nothing else), or you'll get CO poisoning and die, assuming the heater doesn't, you know, explode. So it's important not to do that. ^_^ The emergency solution to the floor thing where you don't have these options already is to buy some large garden pavers, put those on the floor, then put the heater on them. The solution to the fuel thing is not to try to run the heater on something stupid like diesel. Diesel and gasoline explode. Kerosene doesn't, even if you put a lit match to a spoonful of it.

If you have your own home, of course, a better solution is a woodburning stove. It's much better to get a soapstone or other rock-lined stove, which have a higher thermal mass and are generally more efficient than iron stoves. You'll also want something made in New England that's sold to people who live places like Vermont and New Hampshire where people actually use them for heat, because those people won't generally put up with a bullshit stove. I've actually seen some of these stoves in person, and they seemed pretty good at the time.

We were surprised to discover that the gas fireplaces we've thought poorly of since moving in were quite effective heaters, as gas fireplaces go. This is not usually true - I know people who found that their gas fireplaces didn't provide any useful heat without electric fan assistance - so if you're putting in a gas fireplace, get one that will burn without electric assistance and has high BTU output without the fan as an aid.

6: This doesn't matter for windstorms, much, but when we have the next big earthquake, you'll want either stored water (difficult) or at least water-purification tablets (easy) on hand. $4 will get you a decently-sized bottle of purification tablets. Replace them every year or as directed on the package; they go bad even in proper storage.

Finally:

All the local governments and the Red Cross tell everyone in this region to have three-day packs. These are grab-and-go backpack/carrypacks containing survival supplies for three days. This kind of storm is one of the reasons why three-day packs are recommended. We didn't have to get into ours, but we had it handy, and that was really reassuring. (And I go through it once a year and restock it - tho' I should do that every six months, really.) If you think this windstorm was bad - and it was - wait 'till the next big earthquake. It'll be much worse.

Emergency Essentials will assemble a top-of-the-line 3-day pack for you. That's kind of expensive - and you'll get on some Mormon mailing lists, which is kind of funny - but comprehensive. The Red Cross sells cheaper ones that are better than nothing, but they're pretty bare-boned and you'll want to round them out a bit.

So. These are the kinds of things we (mostly) had ready and handy, and helped us deal with the multi-day blackout with a lot less pain and stress than we would have had otherwise. Feel free to offer better ideas, I'm sure this post could use 'em.