Atomic Nerds

Y’know, it’s really too bad you have to be elected before you can be a professional hate-monger. Otherwise I’d be the best-trained sumbitch on the market.

In a rare fit of impulsiveness, I went out and purchased myself a Zojirushi fuzzy logic rice cooker. I’m still not entirely sure why, except that the prospect of painless steaming and grains without the glue-covered pot and a lot of stirring was highly appealing, and it was surprisingly cheap. Wide experimenting will be forthcoming as I learn how to use the thing, which is both very cute and very arcane since the manual is very, ah, “translated”. I had to set it to beep rather than its default setting, which is to announce start and end of cooking time by playing tunes.

So far I’ve only made the one thing, but I’ll tell you this much: if you’re a Southerner who’d like to start the morning with perfectly cooked grits awaiting you alongside your timer-brewed cup of coffee, grab yourself one of these babies. I need to figure out how to punch up the flavor more without using ingredients that can’t safely sit in the cooker overnight before cooking, but the texture was among the best I’ve had.

D4 lays down a metaphor, for benefit of his daughter, for healthcare costs, process, and control.

To his words I would only add that not only is the motivation for governmental takeover of healthcare wanting to consolidate power, another part of it is the deep and sincere belief that economics actually is as simple as making omelettes and clearly best results will be obtained by placing a national committee of chefs to accomplish it.

Last night, LabRat and myself parked before the idiot box, wanting to cockpunch the cuntpickle that invented daylight savings relaxing, the most puzzling of things appeared before us, an advertisement.

I know, I know. Ads on television? Next you’ll tell me that there are naughty pictures on the internet. What a world.

Anyway, this was yet another spot for some big money house or other. TDMorganBarneyPrudiTrade or some such. Who can tell ‘em apart? They droned on about dreams and goals, pointing out that careful management and sound advice, good research and top notch customer service, blah blah blah. What struck me was the part about “We’ll help you meet your goals.” Why did this strike me? Because aside from some truly hardcore hippies and communists (who don’t count as people anyway- they just put “Groovy, Comrade” on their census forms), at the root of things, everybody’s financial goal is “To have more money than god and do whatever the hell I want.”

Obviously this goal is more achievable for some than others, but once you strip away all the pretty little social lies like “get a vacation home,” or “retire early,” or “obtain enough firepower to make the ATF seriously nervous,” that’s pretty much what it boils down to. All those lovely little dreams take assloads of cash, now how am I gonna get some?

And that’s the problem with these ads. Having identified my goals as “be rich enough to buy all of congress,” let’s not beat around the bush, hmm? Where’s the ad for the investment company for me?

Start with a shot of a beautiful sunset on the beach. A lovely beverage sits on a table next to a lounge chair.

Voiceover: “What is best in life?”

The shot pans out, and we see an inconvenience of BATFE agents in chains being whipped in the surf.

Voiceover: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”

The shot switches to the floor of the stock exchange. One broker waves furiously to make a buy, acquires a surprised expression, and cautiously lowers his paddle. The camera pans to show another broker wearing a StingrayTrade jacket holding a knife against his ribs, and successfully making the buy.

“At StingrayTrade, we know what your goals are already, and we’re ready to help you achieve them. If kicking our own grandmother in the teeth will get you a half percent portfolio gain, we’ll be putting our boots on. Why? Because we get a cut, and we have the same goals as you do.”

A new image appears, in the boardroom. Members of StingrayTrade are on one side of the table, engaging in heated negotiations with the opposing board. Suddenly, IRS agents rush the room, dogpile the other company, and haul them out under armed guard, while a StingrayTrade negotiator smiles and hangs up a cell phone. The newspapers in the next shot exalt the suddenly improved fortunes of StingrayTrade at the expense of Crappy Co.

“We’re not going to waste time holding your hand. Holding your hand takes resources we could be using to make you, and by extension us, money. Wealth is not a finite pool, so for all of our benefits, we’ll get as much of it as we can, by any means necessary.”

The final scene turns to a fortress on a volcanic island, with a giant laser rising out of the crater.

“Any. Means.”

Keep the fees competitive and I’ll sign up in a heartbeat.

You know you’re living in the post-DST doldrums when nearly everything new you discover in a day falls either under the category of “stupid crap” or “unbelievably stupid crap”.

I think the problem is me.

There was much srs bzness, with Joe Huffman giving us the lowdown on Boomershoot, Kevin Baker providing intelligent commentary, Jews in the attic tests, and the end of the economy as we know it.

By the end we were talking about softcore porn.

Vicious Circle 42

I had a mouse I liked. For seven years, my faithful Logitech MX700 guided my cursor around the screen, giving me all the click-action I needed, and without the hassle of a cord tethering me to just one limited range of desk. Want to kick back and use a leg for a mousepad? No problem! Best of all, it worked with the usb-to-ps2 adapter and would thus play with my KVM switch.

Unfortunately, like most tech, it didn’t age terribly gracefully. After a couple years, the rechargeable batteries in it stopped holding a charge, and refused to be reconditioned. A year or two after that, the charging station stopped offering a charge to the new batteries. After another couple years of swapping out rechargeable batteries with increasing frequency, buttons started missing their clicks. The poor old thing was on its last legs, needing fresh batteries (and very specific ones at that, mind- 1800mAh, and only two specific pairs that would line up just right with the contact points when the lid was on) every other day. Then the battery compartment lid broke. It’d still hold shut, but between that, the missed clicks, the battery issue, and the desire for a few more buttons to make things in Warcraft easier, it was finally time to retire the poor thing and upgrade.

Finding a ps2 mouse that would play well with the KVM switch, with the current ubiquity of USB offerings (the small set of which I tried not being happy with an adapter), and have enough buttons to do the things I wanted in a game environment was a bit of a tall order. After some digging, I finally decided to just say to hell with the KVM switch, handle all work necessary that way with the clunky but functional remote desktop, and expanded my options. Then I saw the Razer Naga. Funky as all hell, innit?

Well, after some hemming and hawing, I finally decided “What the hell.” After all, if I didn’t like it, LabRat could give it a try as she was constantly bemoaning needing just one or two more buttons on her mouse for various paladin emergencies. I took the plunge.

Straight out of the box, I was a bit worried. The sensitivity (adjustable, but not on-the-fly) and my ancient cloth and neoprene mousepad had the cursor jittering all over the screen like a hummingbird on meth. Changing the pad out to something more suited to higher precision (and not part of some free grab-bag o’ crap) fixed that instantly. Next it was time to play with the thumbpad. By default, the buttons map to exactly what they say. Hit the 1 on the mouse, a 1 appears in your text box (or executes the command bound to 1 on your action bar in Warcrack). Kinda boring, but novel, and with practice could make an in-game rotation all kinds of different.

That wasn’t really what I wanted though, so I dug into the Naga’s software and re-mapped a few things. Suddenly all my in-game emergency buttons were right under my thumb- no more panicked mouse-jiggling to a) find the cursor and b) get it down to click on the appropriate button in time for said emergency. It took a little practice, but once I got the hang of it damn did it make a difference. The only problem is that the standard “forwards” and “backwards” buttons from a regular mouse are placed by the front of the left-click button on this one- damned uncomfortable to reach.

Now to keep this somewhat relevant to this site instead of having everybody wonder why I didn’t just guest-post over at Paladin Pants, this thing is pretty dang slick for day-to-day stuff too. To whit, you can record macros with it. Set up a second (or first if you don’t play warcrack) profile for it, map keys to things like “ctrl-c” and “ctrl-v” and have copy and paste buttons under your thumb. I can think of a couple folks for whom that might be useful, and that’s really just the tip of things. Put whatever you want in there, there’s twelve freakin’ slots.

That aside, it’s just plain comfortable. Freakishly so. And it looks neat- the nifty-lookin’ logo, thumbpad, and scroll wheel all glow blue (coincidentally fitting for where we live). The forward/backwards buttons are really stupidly placed, but for actual web browsing I almost never use those (and if I did, I could just remap them to the thumbpad anyway). The cord is nice, long enough not to be limiting in my setup at all, and braided for style and durability. Honestly, this really is openly and admittedly designed for and targeted to MMORPG players, and inside the game environment, it is simply exceptional. If you don’t play one, there’s little doubt you can get all your mousing needs taken care of with something else just as well and probably a few bucks cheaper to boot, but to me the nifty factor is hard to get around regardless.

I miss having the KVM switch to make hopping between computers easier, but for as fond as I was of my old mouse, this thing beats it hands down in every category. Nerd approved.

So, it seems that those who were hoping the Pacific war followup to the wonderful HBO series Band of Brothers would be more of the same are in for disappointment. From an interview with Tom Hanks regarding the series:

But the context for Hanks’ history lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO’s best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific, his new 10-hour epic about the Pacific theater in World War II, plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was mainly fought by isolated groups of men and was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from us. In that sense, the war in the Pacific bears a closer relation to the complex war on terrorism the U.S. is waging now, making the new series a trickier prospect but one with potential for more depth and resonance. “Certainly, we wanted to honor U.S. bravery in The Pacific,” Hanks says. “But we also wanted to have people say, ‘We didn’t know our troops did that to Japanese people.’ “

Others more well-versed in history than I have already dispensed with the very obvious historical problems here; the Pacific front was very much more like the European front than it was like the War on Terrorism. Japan had ambitions of empire in Asia and the Pacific, so they invaded Korea and China. Japan was a small and resource-starved island with a chronic lack of the metal and oil it needed to conduct a campaign on that scale. The US was nervous about its own holdings in the Pacific and about those of its allies- apprehension that turned out to be entirely rational- so it put up an embargo of its own abundant resources. Japan asked the US to lift the embargo and let them continue conquering Eastern Asia and the Pacific unimpeded. The US refused. Japan reasoned that if they wanted to press their ambitions further, they needed to neutralize US naval power as a threat, so they attacked the fleet at Pearl Harbor.

As it turned out their gamble went sour and the rest is history; the United States and Japan were indeed two very different cultures, but in terms of a war for resources and territory you just don’t get much more straightforward than the Pacific campaign. Indeed, at the time the European campaign was every bit as straightforward a territory issue- we had no idea how evil the Nazis actually were until we were already winning, having long ago committed fully to the war. At the time we saw Nazi Germany as just another problematic world power, much the way the majority of the public viewed the Soviet Union during the Cold War- and people were just as reluctant to commit to the loss of blood and treasure at the time for the exact same reasons. If anything we had less reason to involve ourselves on the European front as the territory in question was our allies’ rather than ours, but Hitler solved that issue by declaring war himself. We had nothing to gain from deciding to fight a great big naval war with Japan, no matter how “different”- except self-defense.

He hopes it offers Americans a chance to ponder the sacrifices of our current soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place,” Hanks says. “How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

As the end of the article makes clear, Hanks has no grasp whatsoever of 1940s geopolitics, he’s just overlaying his current take on our current wars on it. It’s true there was no small amount of racism toward the Japanese at the time and among our forces, but that doesn’t make it the cause of the war or the motivation to keep fighting it. If that had been true we would have gone on a worldwide military tour and obliterated most of Africa and the rest of Asia, rather than fighting the Japanese in mainland Asia as well as in our own territories. And Japan by no means attacked us because WE were “different”- the motivation was very explicitly securing resources to continue expanding and fortifying the “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. Which the rest of East Asia would have more accurately termed the “bloody and ruthless Japanese empire”.

Ultimately though, aside from the historical ignorance*, what’s really interesting to me here is that Hanks is inadvertently indulging in the same kind of racism that he’s accusing the entire 1940s US of. I’ve written before on how empathy also serves the function of letting us distinguish the monstrous from the harmless as well as letting us understand others more sympathetically, and this is an excellent example of the phenomenon. Hanks can easily understand the German Nazis as evil because they were a Western culture similar enough to us to be easily understood; same race, same basic religious structure, lots of shared cultural history even if most of it was a history of warring with each other. The Japanese are different- and he stops seeing at “different” rather than understanding their actions as the actions of people much like ourselves.

What the Japanese did to the Chinese, Koreans, and everyone else they got their hands on that wasn’t Japanese during World War II was every bit as monstrous as what the Nazis did to the Jewish and pretty much everyone else they got their hands on that wasn’t “Aryan”, they just didn’t keep as meticulous records- and we didn’t bother to prosecute them as we did the Nazis at Nuremburg. Unlike the Germans, they weren’t part of “our” world community, so we were fundamentally less interested in finding out. There were pointless mass slaughters, horrific abuse of prisoners, and even medical experimentation just as bad as Mengele’s dark dreams- it’s just lesser known history because it isn’t European history. Japan as a nation is only just beginning, in recent decades, to admit it and to begin to try and confront it rather than denying all. (Which was, in fairness to them, as much a matter of intolerable shame as their own racist tendencies.)

When we see someone as like ourselves and therefore understandable, we don’t just give them implicit credit for having the capacity to do good and behave morally- we give them that same credit for having the capacity to do evil. Writing off the bloody excesses of other cultures as just “difference” is only the other side of the paternalistic coin, with the first being writing off what they do as them just being “savages”. Whether it’s African tribes genociding each other or Japanese scientists poisoning Chinese prisoners on the “let’s see what happens” principle, genuine racists unable to empathize with the different don’t care because it all reads as “the children are fighting” to them. Tom Hanks can condemn American conduct in the Pacific theater- some of it worthy of condemnation- because he knows us. When he comes to know “different” cultures well enough to condemn them for their rationally and consciously chosen actions rather than writing a book report on Shinto, then he will have actually grown beyond what he’s tut-tutting at.

One last thing from the above quote, another historical quibble:

We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.

Hanks still needs to read his history books. We dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because we wanted to avoid invading mainland Japan. Part of that was to save our own soldiers, but part of it was because we recognized that what we’d be fighting weren’t soldiers, but the very tired and underfed elderly, women, and children of Japan- because most of their young men were already in uniform and dying during our campaign on the way to mainland Japan. They were under orders to fight the invaders using bamboo spears if that was their only recourse- and we knew this. We were already firebombing the living shit out of mainland Japan (funny how no one seems to care about those deaths), and the population was near starvation. If we had wanted to annihilate them, we would have. Instead we forced a surrender with far lesser civilian sacrifice- then MOVED IN AND HELPED. The Japanese expected us to crush or enslave them; we expected them to resist with terrorist violence. (Or geurilla warfare as we would have referred to it then.) Instead we each saw the better of that different.

Funny how the accurate history is also the more multiculturally hopeful history.

*Read the beginning of the article for extra ironysauce. Hanks had no interest in history as a child or young man, and Time is setting him up as some kind of media professor of it- with no apparent idea that he’s merely continued to reveal how shallow his knowledge and understanding actually are on a big screen.

I still don’t have a damned thing of note to say, but everyone loves recipes, so here’s one that tends to be heavy in our cold-weather rotation.

5-6 chicken thighs
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt
freshly ground black pepper
3 to 4 heads of garlic depending on size, separated into cloves, peeled
1 cup (ish) white wine, something you could stand to drink on its own
2 fresh or dried bay leaves
1-2 tablespoons flour

1. In a dutch oven or heavy cast iron pan you can cover, heat the oil over medium heat, add the garlic cloves, and stir constantly until browned light gold. Transfer to a large plate.

2. Season the chicken with salt, pepper, and whatever other seasonings you like. Brown a few of the thighs at a time, skin side first, over medium high to high heat. Transfer the chicken to the plate with the garlic.

3. Reserve two tablespoons or so of the fat in the pot. You want a thin layer over the bottom; use more oil if necessary. Whisk in the white wine and bring to a gentle boil. Add a tablespoon or two of flour to thicken, and stir in. Add the chicken, skin side up, along with the various pooled juices on the plate and the garlic. Add the bay leaves.

4. Cover tightly and simmer for 45 minutes. Every once in awhile, uncover the pot and let the water condensation on the lid slide back into the cooking vessel.

5. Transfer chicken and garlic cloves to plates, being sure to add plenty of the sauce. Serve.

The thing to eat with this is cornbread, and the way to do it is to thoroughly butter your hunks of cornbread, then mash the softened garlic cloves on top and eat as a spread. Dip into the sauce as well if you like.

- You know you’ve got writer’s block when you find yourself trawling through the comments of blogs you don’t even read that often, looking for a bit of archetypical dumbassery to refute.

- Springtime in New Mexico: transferring roughly 40% of the state’s valuable topsoil from outdoors to indoors.

- Having a female dog in heat really drives home why we use the term “bitch” or “bitchy” the way we do. From mood swings to clinginess to irritability to exaggerated pathos to bloody-mindedness, it’s like living with a menopausal Barbara Streisand.

- Gandhi: not necessarily such an awesome dude. An oldie but a goodie.

- Want to know how you can make your online gaming experience even more like a job? Become an officer in a guild/alliance/whatever. Bonus points for doing so in a guild that raids or PvPs. I have new sympathy for anyone in management of any kind, as well as those in Human Resources.

- Our latest TV thing, thanks to the #gunblogger_conspiracy folks, is Spartacus: Blood And Sand. It’s very firmly in the “so bad it’s good” category. It’s a great big bowl of sex and violence smothered in cheese sauce. I don’t even like the protagonist. I don’t like anybody except maybe the gladiator instructor, whom we last saw being kicked down a well. The entire purpose of the show’s existence seems to be getting the Starz network to pay for softcore porn so long as they match the sex parts with equal amounts of violent parts. I can’t look away.