Google is now fully evil, but I am also dependent on them. Their search is better than anyone else’s.

Killing Google Reader, destroying the Blogger platform, NSA complicity, etc. And more I am forgetting.

Google, I wish I knew how to quit you.

The decline of the humanities is a feature, not a bug.

The result is not only relatively fewer humanities majors but also a generation of students who get out of school and don’t know how to write well or express themselves clearly.

Science and engineering are wonderful, and absolutely essential to the world, but those fields have little to say about value and ethics, nor morality, nor beauty, nor why one should choose one path over another.

Humanities teaches one to learn for one’s self why something is worth thinking about, and how to think about it – how to de-construct it and re-combine it and most importantly to examine alternatives. It is a possible (though not necessarily actual) threat to capitalism and that is the reason for the attempted – and largely successful — purge from schools.

Does Microsoft even have any idea how much this will hurt their business?

I’ve done a lot of server roll-outs in my time and evaluation of new products. 90% of the time if it was a Microsoft product, the evaluation occurred due to a handy TechNet subscription.

In many cases I never would’ve even bothered to consider a Microsoft product if it weren’t literally at my fingertips to evaluate.

And that then lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars of software purchases.

Very smart – avoid $1 of piracy so you can “avoid” a million dollars in revenue. Sounds like a winner to me.

And this means that anyone who absolutely has to test something or learn it will now pirate it.

What the hell is wrong with Microsoft?

The new 140ppi Asus desktop monitor is available for pre-order now.

$3,500.

Due to a project we’ll be engaged in soon, I won’t really be in the market for it for a year-and-a-half.

By then, it should be $2,400 or so and I’ll be all over that.

A lot of well-intentioned people every election attempt to “get out the vote” and the like. I used to agree with them, even as recently as five years ago.

Now it’s clear that voting no longer matters. Probably hasn’t for twenty years or so, and probably won’t matter again without some drastic (likely violent, alas) change.

The extent of entwinement of Capital in our governance is now so tight and the wealth and power disparities among us so gaping that I no longer think any of the traditional routes of change, using civilized and orderly processes, will do anything to influence our course. Even social issues like marriage equality are probably not shifting for the reasons we think. As we enter into more and farther reaching global trade agreements, it will become progressively less important for Capital to worry about keeping us pacified, and the disconnection of our votes from policy will become more apparent.

The rest of the post doesn’t really concern me. Change via voting is about as likely as an elephant dying from an ant bite.

Oh sure, some things – even a few important things that Capital doesn’t care about – might change on the margins. But that’s it.

One of the best things about having a nearly-non-existent circadian rhythm is that I never experience jet lag.

Never had it, never will.

One of the worst things is that I can’t keep any sort of sleep schedule at all, and thus it is difficult to fit into normal earth life.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion of American football injuries lately.

Just wanted to point out that any sport played at an elite level is damaging to someone’s body who does it for many years.

Why?

Think about it like this. Elite athletes are nearly always operating at 100% capacity. Imagine if you did this to your car. Always flooring the accelerator and the brake, never failing to take corners as quickly as possible. Even jumping curbs at speed if that were more expedient and you could get away with it.

How long do you think your car would last?

It’s just the same for a human body. While some sports are worse than others, and the most utterly boring sports like baseball are probably the least damaging, in any sport where the only way to compete is to perform at an elite level broken bodies will be common and unavoidable.

I was figuring out how to move the earth today for when the sun gets too hot to sustain life, and the asteroid gravity-assist is the method I arrived at as well.

I hadn’t yet figured how long it would take, but that seems reasonable.

Wouldn’t have thought of the solar sail as that seems much harder physics-wise.

Just a thought experiment. Humans will be long extinct in 300 million years, when the heating up really begins.

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

-Rebecca Solnit

DOMA is no more. And a good thing, too.

But it’s clear that the culture wars aren’t being fought with the same intensity, that for the most part except the diehards the main part of the Republican mandarins (if not yet the shock troops) are deciding that in the quest to give businesses everything they want, it’s worth ceding to the seething masses a little freedom where it doesn’t matter either way to corporate overlords.

So yes, a victory. But with the VRA effectively gone, living in a surveillance state and that getting worse, with Obama arrogating to himself the role of chief drone executioner of American citizens, and the complete collapse of the idea that prosperity should be shared – and thus the wages and living standard of average Americans – it’s a hollow victory though still sweet of course especially for those who will benefit most from it.

But in reality, though, it is crumbs thrown to increasingly immiserated, intended more to distract and placate than anything having to do with freedom.

It’s just something corporate interests (and here I am referring to large corporate interests, not small businesses) just don’t care about very much at all, and since we live in a corporatocracy the defeat of DOMA was not opposed all that stringently.

Even since 1996 de facto corporate control of government and the economy has gotten far, far more prevalent. Even since the financial crisis, for that matter.

DOMA’s defeat is a victory, and long-fought one. But it’s the smallest hill in a vast range of mountains that no army is likely to be able to take back in my lifetime, or in yours.

Things that are true after losing a large amount of weight and keeping it off for about-to-be four years:

1) If you can’t stand being hungry ever, you will fail.

2) The best way to resist temptation is to not have it to hand.

3) Have a cheat day, but never cheat any other time.

4) Don’t lie to yourself. Self-delusion is easy. “Oh, just this once” or “It’s a special occasion.” No. Just no.

5) If you do slip, don’t give up. Mistakes are human. Not quitting is what elevates one beyond that.

That said as I’ve noted before, you will probably fail just looking at the stats. I know myself really well and knew that I could do it. And so I did.

However, I tend to prosper in environments with large numbers of people and even the entire social milieu telling me that I cannot do something, and that I will fail.

Statistically, the odds are against you. However, statistics only matter if you aren’t me.

Why yes, I can be a little arrogant at times.

Was a woman in my dream again. I think I might’ve been a variant of Sarah Polley in the Dawn of the Dead universe.

I didn’t realize it until I woke up and thought about it for a moment because of course feeling like a woman just feels like being human.

Sometimes dreams are so vivid that waking up to the world is like the phantasm. Not that I wanted to go back. No. In that dream, I was in charge of some experiment to test if the zombies were getting smarter.

They were.

I don’t feel a connection with any city that I’ve ever lived in. Not Lake City. Not Charlotte. Not Bellingham. Not Seattle. Not Sharm El Sheikh. Not Chengdu. And not St. Petersburg.

I just have no ties to them that make me feel anything – not talking about people, but the actual places.

Guess I don’t put down roots very easily and of course I am not a city person. Hate them, really. And none of them felt like home, even when I lived there. Even when my life was happy (which it has been often and still is).

Could I feel at home in a place? I don’t know. Perhaps I am just not that kind of person. Probably.

I did feel at home when I lived on the river but then I was almost always alone. Well, there were fish, and I like fish. I think that rootedness had more to do with the river rather than being alone, though.

I belonged there. In a city, I don’t belong and will never belong. Probably that’s most of it.

Like the NSA spying “revelations,” I am surprised that anyone was surprised that an old Southern white lady is a bit racist.

Shit, I grew up in the South. Ninety percent of everyone I knew was just like this; my closest at the time childhood friend once said, “We had ‘em in slavery once, and we can put ‘em right back in.”

About the NSA stuff, this was common knowledge as early as the mid-1990s. Where has everyone been?

The only thing it has done is made me realize that a blogger I thought was relatively intelligent was a damn idiot, so much so that I’ve now stopped reading the blog altogether.

Yeah buddy, the whole “my rights” and “fourth amendment” thing are there so that no matter what good reason the government has, it can’t just listen to my phone conversations and steal my private data. Or at least it’s not supposed to be able to.

Good fucking god, should we really have to defend this?

Those posts right there are among the two most well-written dumbass posts I have never read.

And that blog has been deleted forevermore.

Figure I’ve been carping and complaining too much around here.

Sarah Polley. Love everything she’s ever been in, and can’t wait to see the documentary she’s made.

Check out ths interview with her.

Then watch this. This sequence is one of the best openings* of any film of its type due to Polley’s reactions and facial expressions. Just perfect.

*It’s actually not quite the opening, but close enough.