digamma.net - notes

I’m on the road at the moment. Which road? Mae Nam Kwae Road, in Kanchanburi, Thailand.

Lack of a USB cable for my camera precludes posting anything meaningful at the moment, except to say that World War II was a horrible, horrible event.

Wow.

To me, 24 has always been about one thing: the conflict between duty and humanity. Last year was probably the most coherent realization of that theme, as from episode 1 to episode 24, Jack, Chase, David, Wayne, and Tony all found different ways to balance their jobs and their families, with varying degrees of success. Actually, with unmitigated failure, except in the case of Chase, who finally realized his duties as a father required his getting the hell out of CTU.

Tonight’s episode brought that theme back with a vengeance. Jack’s confrontation with Dina was just brilliant - they’ve both been in the position of having to choose between a child and a supposedly higher calling. Lesser writers would have made Dina change her mind about everything when Behrooz was endangered and fight on the side of CTU, but Dina genuinely believes in her war against the United States, and will only assist CTU while it has the potential to save Behrooz.

What really keep people watching this show are, I suspect, the production values. 24 just looks and feels better than most television. But character arcs like these make up for a lot of the other silliness in the writing.

My bitter-hearted but fun to read serial protectionist friend Retardo “can’t wait see the free-market nutjobs trip over themselves defending this crap.”

Then trip I will.

“This crap” is a McDonald’s in Oregon that’s sent its drive-through order-taking to the faraway shores of India Mexico North Dakota, where the minimum wage is $2.10 less than in Oregon.

Outrage over this process raises the question of how far away the International Labor Communications Association thinks it’s acceptable to go for a better deal. India and Mexico were always beyond the pale, but apparently the difference between Oregon and North Dakota is also too far. So where do we draw the line?

I’d imagine that due to climate differences, Retardo’s region produces certain crops at a cost far lower than what it would take to produce them here in northern New England. Nonetheless our consumers buy all kinds of things from them. Should state governments like Vermont’s allow this? Think of all the jobs we’re losing!

At any rate, unless you believe the right-wing lie that minimum wage laws like Oregon’s create unemployment, there’s no reason to get upset about this process at all, right?

Having watched Queimada/Burn!, I have no energy to write about another damn film about white guys stuck in the middle of a colonial battle.

However, digamma.net’s crack team of computer science researchers has achieved a feat towards which the field has been struggling for decades - an implementation of Gillo Pontecorvo in a multi-platform scripting language. Without further ado, I bring you pontecorvo.pl:

while (!$socially_relevant) {

print “Colonialism sucked, eh? \n";

By downloading and running this program, aspiring filmmakers can create their own chilling Pontecorvo films, with guaranteed historical significance!

Per NTodd’s brilliant idea, I’m putting $50 on my Eagles. If they lose, I donate it to the American Friends Service Committee.

However, I take issue with this:

AFSC is a Quakerly org, so Philly will win either way!

If only it were that simple.

You see, Philadelphia hasn’t won a damn thing since 1983 – the longest drought of any four-team city – and one theory blames it on our most famous Quaker - the Curse of Billy Penn.

So it’s possible that Penn woke up this morning and thought to himself “Twenty years is long enough. I’ll give them a shot today.” Then, as he perused his favorite Quaker RSS feeds, he came upon this bet and realized that to allow a Philly victory would be to deprive a Quaker organization of much-needed funds.

We’re screwed.

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday typing

delete from wp_comments where comment_author = “poker games";

into my mySQL console to get rid of comment spam. Annoying as this was, it beats the hell out of the Movable Type comment deletion process. WordPress, annoyingly, doesn’t let you ban IP’s by default.

I had a look at my Apache logs to see if there was a UserAgent common to all of these connections, and sure enough there was: “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0; PCUser)". PCUser? Googling revealed that other people had seen this.

Per the instructions on this thread, I added two lines to my Apache configuration file: SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “PCUser” bad_bots under IfModule mod_setenvif.c, and Deny from env=bad_bots under the Directory entry for where WordPress lives.

Not one spam since then. But I’m sure there’ll be more where “poker games” came from.

From Matthew Yglesias comes a brilliant summary of Reynoldsism:

the doctrine that “the left” (whatever it is) has been captured by an irrational and pathological hatred for western values – is a dishonest, absurd, and manipulative piece of propaganda is the least of its problems.

The thing here is that when you tease out the argument Glenn’s trying to make, the consequences are completely absurd. The anti-west faction of the west turns out to include the majority of the citizens of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, The United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The citizens, in other words, of every countries normally understood to be inhabited by western persons except for the United States and Israel. Nor have nations which have adopted western norms of human rights and governance (Turkey, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, etc.) seen their populations embrace the pro-west point of view. Indeed, outside of the Old Confederacy a majority of Americans are in the anti-west faction. The territories of Latin America, strongly influenced as they are by western culture, have turned against the west, have uniformly turned against the west.

Now if this is right, it constitutes a very serious problem indeed. A problem whose scale goes so far beyond anything insurgents may or may not due in Iraq that obsessing over the details of Ted Kennedy’s views seems irrelevant. The enemy is everywhere, apparently, and western man is doomed. The “transnational progressives” of warblogger fame have already won the battle. The only question is whether the TP faction will beat the Islamists or whether the Islamists will beat us. Or, perhaps, the ChiComs will inherit the earth after we’ve wiped each other out. The pro-western point of view has simply become a terribly small minority within its zone of cultural influence and has no hope of prevailing. Even the Pope isn’t really anti-war – he’s on the other side.

How could something like this have even happened? Most Americans have never even taken a humanities course at an elite university. But some of us have. Add to that the New York Times readers and the insidious influence of the BBC World News on continental opinion and maybe you can see.

Dreadful.

If I mention the political ramifications of The Four Feathers, I will inevitably be attacked by RETARDO (who is probably drunk already in honor of Ayn Rand’s 100th birthday) because the film didn’t have a complete history of Britain’s colonial empire and all the atrocities it perpetrated and an interview with Noam Chomsky. So I won’t.

There’s a shot near the beginning that begins on the crying but brave face of a woman who has just said goodbye to her soldier husband as he heads to the Sudan, pulls out to show a cheering crowd seeing “Auld Lang Syne", and ends up focusing on an old proud veteran. Today that scene would be a mildly interesting piece of cinema. In its time, it was groundbreaking. The modern sensibility to it makes it feel much less dated than other films released decades later by directors who were still trying to make plays with cameras stuck in the middle.

Likewise, its use of Technicolor must have been revolutionary in 1939. When a soldier nearly dies from heatstroke, audiences were looking at the African sun in a whole new way. So The Four Feathers turns out to be way ahead of its time visually, if more than a little dated politically. Whoops, there I go again.

Clap clap clap clap…. deep in the Fouuuuuurth Amendment!

After demonstrating why considering dog “alerts” can be totally unreasonable as probable cause, the pro-life Radley Balko makes a good point:

Personally, I find it interesting that Justice Stevens can find and vigourously defend a federally-guaranteed right to an abortion deep within the penumbras of the Fourth Amendment (which was clearly written to protect us from baseless searches), but not a right to be free from invasive drug searches triggered by dogs.

Me too.