Burrowowl

Sometimes I think I’m a little too hard on them.

• Bailing credulous homebuyers out of their lousy mortgages is not the role of the federal government. The government should ensure that parties abide by their contractual agreements. If you didn’t like the terms, you shouldn’t have signed five times and initialed thirty places in front of a notary. If your bank is violating those terms, then it’s time to get the government involved.
• International trade is, on balance, a good thing. Protectionism generally leads to the kinds of international relations that yield wars. There is a trade imbalance between the United States and several notable nations, but when you purchase something from a store, there is a trade imbalance between you and the merchant. He profits and gets your money. You get a good or service that you felt was worth at least as much as the money you paid for it.
• You’ll pay whatever the oil companies demand for gas. Your gas prices may be affected by market speculation and big-money manipulation, but fundamentally you’re being charged what the market will bear. You’ll know when they’ve crossed the line when you stop buying it. This is not a position that the Republicans are keen to shout from the mountaintops, but that’s just because economic populism sells.
• Competition works. Well, it works when there’s real competition, and there are some markets that simply do not lend themselves well to competition, in which case the government will have to step in and make sure the natural monopolies keep things above-board (the Democrats largely agree with this, but there’s a lot of common ground).
• Beefy Austrians make for interesting governors.
• Guns are cool.

It’s an election year, so normally any musings on my part regarding the Mighty Cthulhu would center around his election to the presidency of the United States. But this time we’ve got another Great Old One from the trackless times undreamt of beneath the sea, so instead my thoughts wander to Hollywood. You see, later this month there’s a movie coming out named Cthulhu.

I had heard some time ago that there was to be a Call of Cthulhu remake featuring Tori Spelling. I thought that was a bit amusing, going from Beverly Hills 90210 to Lovecraftian horror. Figured I’d give it a shot for pure kitsch. Probably catch the matinee and laugh about it with Chunkbot or Daniel. Why not? It’ll have a big CG sea monster, crazy bayou cultists, it’d be a hoot.

Then I saw the trailer. Oh my. The Apple site describes it as “Adapted from a story by H.P. Lovecraft.” Well. Really, now? Are you sure it wasn’t adapted from 99% of the half-baked Chaosium RPG plots that have sprung up in basements and rec rooms over the past twenty years, a hodgepodge of creepy tales of Deep Ones and the Esoteric order of Dagon, with a sprinkling of “daddy never understood me” family angst. A manhole cover with a tentacled form etched onto it? Really? It’s set in coastal Oregon?

Maybe I’ve just grown too used to indie interpretations of actual Lovecraft stories, but this may take a few weeks to get my head around.

Hoo, boy.

This past weekend, I took my wife and son to the county fair. We did not go to see the flower hall. We did not go for the rides. We did not even go to see the livestock exhibition. We had done all that on our previous trip. This time we had a single goal: the Demolition Derby.

This is one of those odd American subculture things I always enjoyed as a child, and now get the pleasure of sharing with my own little one. There’s nothing quite like watching a half-dozen beat-up old junkers with gaudy paint-jobs shoving each other around, kicking up mud everywhere, and crashing left and right, punctuated by the occasional geyser from a popped radiator or flare from a burping carburetor. Yes, somebody got shoved all the way on top of the four-foot burm surrounding the track. Yes, somebody’s car caught on fire. Yes, somebody showed up with a Confederate flag painted on his Impala. Yes, the Batmobile was trashed.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of attending your local demolition derby, you’re really missing out on something. I never understood the appeal of auto racing, not as a spectator sport. I never got the appeal of tractor pulls and monster trucks. But a bunch of guys in salvaged late-model cars duking it out for a prize that maybe represents two weeks pay, smashing and scraping and steaming and burning, well that’s just good times.

Pardon the photo quality, it’s from my phone.

Just a couple of things that have come to mind repeatedly while reading the news:

• Instant run-off voting doesn’t make sense to the entrenched parties. Why give the fringe parties a seat at the table? Possible solution: introduce instant run-off in non-party contests like county seat, city council, school board, etc. Over the course of a few elections, people may get used to the idea of not having to settle.
• Nuclear power is safe, and secondary and tertiary-fuel reactors are possible and feasible. Fire a couple up where the fault-lines aren’t.
• Transmission over long distances is inefficient, and centralized production is subject to market manipulation a la Enron or physical disruption. Put some solar-panel factories near the reactors.
• Recently-viable third party forms in-state to reform state constitution and ensure that California taxpayers are getting their fair share back from the feds.
• Take a queue from Germany and give some incentives for private citizens to buy into decentralizing the power grid a bit. More resistant to interruptions in transmission lines (earthquake, fire, etc.), increases in residential population helps offset increase in consumption.
• Continue building nuclear reactors to run desalination projects for Imperial Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other inherently-thirsty areas.

Not a plan, just thinking about some ways to address California’s reliance on its neighbors.

No, really. It’s got water in it, and it’s navigable. By kayak, sure, but navigable nonetheless. I joke with my wife sometimes about them needing a TMDL for shopping carts, and about the absurdity of having one of our nation’s biggest population centers in a desert, but I just don’t like it when a government entity like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers messes something like this up. It may not be common knowledge that there’s something in the L.A. River other than the bitter tears of crushed dreams and leaked motor oil, but facts are facts.

Big hat-tip to LAist.com (also source of photo, obviously).

Austin Modine wrote today, over at The Register, about the selling of a new moon mission. Particularly a mission to establish what amounts to a colony on the moon, a permanent settlement. The underlying question is, simply put: why the Moon?

• It’s there. No, really. I flatly reject the notion that we have better things to spend our time and money on than space exploration; we waste tons of money on utter crap.
• It’s close. This is rather important, as we’re talking about long-term manned habitation of a hostile environment. If something goes wrong, we can get there a lot faster than if we skip ahead to Mars or one of the gas giants’ moons.
• It’s visible. Everybody can look up and see it, as opposed to the occasionally-visible Mars or the effectively invisible moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the other potential settlement targets. Once established, every man woman and child on Earth can look up and point to our new achievement: a permanent off-world settlement. Extra points if its lights are visible during the new moon.

There’s some boldly-going to do, folks. Hop to it.

House Bill 1089 passed in Oklahoma yesterday. For those of you who, like me, were only vaguely aware that Oklahoma existed as anything other than a Christian terrorist militia target and monument to our nation’s mistreatment of our aboriginal population, this was an effort to assert their rights as a state as originally established in the 10th amendment to the United States constitution. This was largely prompted by a backlash to Oklahoma’s recent legislation that would deny taxpayer-funded services to illegal immigrants, which is ironic, as the federal government explicitly has domain over immigration policy per Article 1, section 8, which enumerates the federal legislature’s power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.”

Well good for you guys, Oklahoma. I’ve been thinking about having my state renegotiate the terms of our entry into the union, but you seem to have found an interesting baby-step towards a modicum of independence.

The above is a fragment of Senator Dodd’s argument against retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that colluded with the U.S. Government in illegal, unwarranted surveillance in obvious contradiction of both the FISA act and the 4th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He puts it far better than I could. It’s a shame this man won’t be on the ballot for president this November. At least, unlike the presumptive Democratic candidate, he’s still fighting the good fight.

Had a little fun with the Side View Generator today. I wasn’t exactly flattered by some of the transformations (Fitzgerald turns into Deep Throat), but was greatly amused by others. I ran a couple for some frequent commenters. Are you “vulgar?” Or “sprain?” How about “est rus” or “lard” or “porno?”

A personal favorite was the transformation of “Jimbo” into “ninja.” Right on.

So I was poking around on Prairie Flounder’s site, and ran into a comment by the Progressive Conservative. Being somewhat libertarian-minded and socially progressive, as well as loving a good oxymoron, this piqued my interest. I followed him back to The Big Stick, a blog espousing a back-to-Teddy-Roosevelt variety of Republicanism that seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts these days.

Did you know that to be a proper conservative these days you’re expected to hold four separate, contradictory opinions on the value of human life? You are to be pro life in the womb, pro death penalty, anti assisted-suicide, and pro war. The precise opposite holds true for progressives. You are expected to be pro abortion (pro choice is a euphemism, let’s face it) , anti death penalty, pro assisted-suicide, and anti-war. This is why when Bill Bennett brings up the abortion issue as something that needs to be talked about in the Obama vs. McCain choice coming up in November, I cannot help but chuckle. It’s a wedge issue, something career politicians dust off every couple of years to drag the rubes into the polls. The Republicans won’t get rid of Roe vs. Wade. It’s against their interest, because the existence of that precedent keeps a lot of people punching that “R” on their ballots.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Democrats would have you think they’re against global warming, particularly with their former front-man and recent Nobel laureate Al Gore leading the charge. Do you know who was in charge of nixing every new nuclear power plant for eight years while vice president? Same guy. Thank him for all the brand-spanking-new coal-burning power plants belching greenhouse gasses into the sky. I think we are currently living in a golden age of political absurdity, where the environmental conservationists rape the land and those religiously convinced that every life has an immeasurable sacred value promote slaughter. Maybe we just need more progressive conservatives. Or maybe some conservative progressives.