George Pill

I'm always amused by how George Will is introduced as "the intelligent conservative," like here's an elephant that can sing.

He's about as smart as he sounds.

Romney's "Work"

Romney's boasting about his experience is a joke. He never worked a day in his life. He had everything handed to him on a silver platter from his rich daddy. Left to his own devices, he'd be working in the kitchen at a Waffle House. Obama's the guy that clawed his way up from the ranks of the working class to success. Obama rose based on merit. Romney rose because daddy was a rich man.

Daddy was a rich man, daddy was a rich man, daddy was a rich man, hey!
Romney got money, got money from daddy, and that's why he's where he is today!

So Long, Mountain Dwarves

I maintain that players should reject racism in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. By that I mean growing so attached to one race, such as Mountain Dwarves, that they lose sight of the overall picture, which is that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is the best game on earth.

 I have played every race and like them all with five exceptions. To only play one race or to think one race is absolutely required would strike me as ludicrous. My favorite race is Spriggan, but I haven't played a Spriggan in months, and why? Because I'm tired of them. My detested races are Ghoul (too much bother carrying rotting corpse chunks around, and yuck! by the way), Human (Zzz...), Demigod (I'm atheist in life but don't want to be in Crawl), Half-Orc (I'm a Tolkien fan and can't stomach the uglies), and Felid (too weak, and the lives don't matter to me with my handy dandy regen.bat).

I never did take a liking to dwarves, for purely aesthetic reasons (memories of Gimli), although they are an excellent choice for fighters and among the easiest races to play, if not the easiest. But if I were a dwarfist, I'd make the transition to Half-Orc, Demigod, Demonspawn, Ogre, Troll, or Minotaur. Any of these make excellent fighters, and the half-divine also excel at spellcasting.

Ogres are an underplayed race. I prefer transitioning to giant spiked club and going shieldless. A giant spiked club has the highest damage potential of any weapon in the game, so it makes an interesting choice. Imagine vanquishing a Hill Giant with one pop on the head. Another nice thing about Ogres is that they learn Maces and Flails and Fighting very easily, more so than any other race, and consequently it is not uncommon for a high-level Ogre to acquire 300+ hit points. Since they also excel at the Spellcasting ability, they have no problem with low-level spells such as Blink, which helps to escape bad situations.

Trolls are limited, but if one must play one, then I would suggest being either a Hunter (five large rocks!) or even a Death Knight in order to diversify the attack portfolio. Ogre Death Knights are actually the ideal Death Knights, much superior to Trolls due to their higher hit points (due to Ogres being better at Fighting). Under no circumstances would I want to play any spellcaster as a Troll.

Places in the World

When I was a boy, I used to study the globe and wonder what faraway places were like, what kind of people lived there. The truth is there aren't many places I'd want to go. If I had made the journey to Papua New Guinea, I might have wound up as dinner. They call humans "long pig" in Papua New Guinea. I don't think people from areas like that should be permitted to come to our country. They need to acquire civilization first. The same applies to people who circumcise young girls or perform so-called "honor-killings." They don't need to live here. Only countries that have a base level of civilization need to be sending any people over to the United States. I don't think an immigration policy needs to bend over backwards to avoid offending anyone. There are certain things we can all agree on, like no cannibals, no child-abusers and no wife-beaters.

The Media, Romney, and Bain

The media won't support Obama's attacks on Romney's role at Bain, because the media is controlled by plutocrats who do the exact same things that Romney did. So I'm not surprised the media is full of spin today trying to make Obama look like the bad guy. Lies, lies, and more lies are the only way Romney's going to get elected in 2012. If enough workers snooze through the politics of 2012, then we will have Bush #3 in the White House again.

Jesus

The stories about  Jesus were embellished with miracles for the benefit of the writers, to awe the simple and inspire the faithful, and they had the very best of intentions, just as the previous Jewish patriarchs did when they were composing the Old Testament. They wanted to improve humanity and reduce evil in the world, but also build their own power and secure a livelihood for themselves.

It is likely there was an extraordinary, charismatic, intelligent, and imaginative man such as the one we name Jesus. He probably was at least as gifted in speech as Oscar Wilde and was probably gay, with a reduced desire for a wife and family and increased adaptability for living with other men. When the Roman soldiers came to the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest him, Jesus was found with a naked man:

And there followed him a certain young man,
having a linen cloth cast about his naked body;
and the young men laid hold on him:
and he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
- Mark 14:51, 52

Jewish authorities were annoyed by Jesus's magnetic ability to attract followers, his heresy in declaring himself the son of God, certain of his moral teachings that strayed from orthodoxy, and his criticism of their practices, so they petitioned the Roman authority to have him crucified to discredit him in the eyes of his followers by revealing him to be an ordinary man. Their plan backfired, because the followers were so invested with love for the man that their imaginations devised and their reason accepted a fantastic alternative reality in which Jesus rose from the dead, and this story was repeated often until many came to believe it, and today two billion of our species are officially Christian, while one and a half billion are officially Muslim and accept Jesus as a prophet of God.

Sodium Cyanide for Euthanasia

A banker's recent suicide did serve at least one public purpose, in that now everybody knows that sodium cyanide can be placed in a capsule and swallowed for quick and painless death. I think there should be an exit mechanism available to all human beings. Death is a human right.

Clock Radios

After two hours shopping on Amazon, NewEgg, and E-bay, I did not find a single clock radio that was not designed by a retard. All brands are terrible. I imagine it would be easy to make a million dollars in that business, because anyone could design the best clock radio that the world has ever seen in about an hour or less.

Idea

One of my favorite ideas for a novel concern an invisible or otherwise inaccessible benefactor who performs good deeds for an old woman, who for a while remains unaware of the benefactor's identity, and after learning the identity, the motive remains mysterious.

Salt

As I ate my gourmet luxurious breakfast this morning in ease and comfort with the nice air-conditioning and pleasant company, I meditated on how lucky we are as compared to our ancestors, both recent and remote. Our distant ancestors did not have A/C, nor electricity, nor half the foods we take for granted, nor, in some cases, salt.

Imagining meals without salt led me to think about how salt is produced. Today most is mined simply because mining and transportation has increased vastly in efficiency, but there is nothing wrong with evaporating sea water, and in fact gourmands prefer sea salt for various reasons. I pondered why our ancestors did not evaporate sea water, since England is surrounded by coastline and Western Europe certainly is not landlocked.

All that is required to evaporate sea water is a pan, preferably of dark wood to absorb rather than reflect the sunlight. The Sun will do the rest. So, why did our ancestors not manufacture their own salt, instead of paying exorbitant fees to merchants? Why was salt considered a luxury in the old days? The only conclusion I could reach was that our ancestors were mostly ignorant of the process of evaporation. That led to a feeling of smugness, which is always a mistake. I asked myself, would I have discovered evaporation if my teacher had not taught me about it in the third grade? I'm not so sure it is quite so obvious to most people.

Another complication is that coastlines tend to have more rain, which would interfere with any large-scale evaporation scheme. Also, standing water can fall prey to parasites and contamination, which ancient people might not know how to counter in an effective manner. A few cases of sickness would be enough to dissuade people from using evaporation.

Wizards

Wizards are a highly powered class in Dungeon Crawl, equipped with a seven-spell spellbook, more than any other magical profession to my knowledge. They also, alone among spellcasters, come equipped with a wizard's hat, which is no small potatoes for an otherwise unarmoured Octopode.

All-Day Kitty Buffet

If you have cats take heed,
All day long they feed.
A never empty bowl
Soothes the kitty soul,
So if outside they do stray,
they'll come back the next day.
We got an all-day kitty buffet,
That's why they stay.

Murdoch is Right About Something

Well, I finally found something that Murdoch and I agree on. Romney is a weak candidate. Murdoch perceives in his own way that Obama is more intelligent, more ethical and has greater strength of character and therefore will win the election in 2012. It is difficult to imagine anyone of sound mind and an annual income below a billion dollars voting for Romney. The only possible reason would be someone who does not follow politics at all and does not read the news and has not paid the slightest bit of attention to history, but in that case, why are they even bothering to vote in the first place? Uninformed voting is worse than not voting at all.

Hooray for Turkey

I say hooray for Turkey for playing tough with Syria. I think they have a right to intervene in Syria and even to invade Syria, because Syria is massacring people of their culture and religion and the Syrian dictator is just a bloodthirsty tyrant with no sense of ethics at all who believes that only the strong and powerful matter. If Turkey severs Assad's head from his body then so much the better.

An improbable analogy is that if Mexico started killing Protestants left and right, then I think the Proestant-majority U.S. might have something to say about that. I really don't see how anyone can fault Turkey, especially after their jet was shot down, even if it did invade Syrian airspace. Who really cares about airspace? The Syrian tyrant does not have any rights, and Syria does not have a legitimate government.

It is about time a country other than the U.S. took action to set things right in the world. Our country needs some time to lick its wounds and pay off debt, thank you very much. See you next century.

Tengu Power

The optimal class for Tengus, I'm convinced, is Wizard, and the god to worship without a doubt is Vehumet, who seems tailor-made for Tengus. I finally won with one of these "glass cannons."

Courage

I don't know whether my courage has increased as I've gotten older or I've gotten short-tempered in dealing with fools. Probably the truth lies in the middle. I've faced down many a fool in the last decade, for better or worse, and many times I've been right, but sometimes I wish I had let the fool pass and get his lesson from someone or something other than myself.

When I was a boy, I scared easily, because I was ignorant and woefully unskilled in the social arena, which drew bullies to me. Nowadays I am stronger and taller of course, which matters a great deal in a pragmatic sense, and I have street smarts. Also, I am not very afraid of death, because I feel like my best years and our country's best years are behind me anyway. There isn't much that can scare me in a physical sense. The thing I really fear the most is being in the wrong. I certainly don't like the idea of being a bully myself. I like to think of myself either as a force for positive good in the world, or if compelled by the worst circumstances, at least neutral. I don't have any illusion that it is possible for a living organism to be absolutely good in every single possible circumstance. One tries to do the best one can given the available options.

What seems to provoke me the most is obnoxious, aggressive, bullying behavior, usually from men, not often directed at me due to my size and bearing but at gentle and kind people that I care about. I will assume the role of protector and accept any darts or arrows, in fact I wish to divert them all to me. I am a shield and around me in safety dwell those that I love. So I believe that courage, if not innate, can grow from a contempt of death and the placing of honor and loved ones above personal survival or enrichment.

Islamists Don't Understand History

Islamists in Mali are burning a Muslim Saint's tomb, which makes about as much sense to me as it might to you. You read that right, a Muslim Saint, not a Christian Saint. Setting aside history, aesthetics and scholarship, from a purely pragmatic perspective, destroying a historical site harms the lucrative tourist trade. I don't see a reason wealthy foreign tourists will visit Mali if not for its history or natural resources. Tourists aren't going to visit to see the ignorant barbarian Islamists, that's for sure. One can see apes at any zoo.

Death

I don't know why but I have had a morbid cast of mind for a long time now and it is increasing. I have the feeling that death is in the future, but I'm not quite sure how far away it is, yet. It can't be this month, I don't think, but could it be this year? How would the scythe connect with me--by car, stroke, heart attack, or bullet? I don't know. Perhaps I am mistaken and this morbidity is a manifestation of fear for the economy and of my future financial prospects, which have an influence upon one's health. I do feel older, it is true, and I feel acutely aware of aging, but I'm not aging any faster than most of my friends. Perhaps it is a natural part of the aging process to contemplate death and to think about what will happen after one is gone. I've always given thought to the future, even to the distant future, and I plan in advance for possibilities as well as certainties, so it is natural for me to think about the end. There are little signs and signals that let one know that the end is approaching, such as silver hairs, arthritis, bodily aches and pains, intolerance of alcohol and sugar, and fatigue. It would be foolish and short-sighted not to prepare and not to contemplate the meaning of existence.

I have no patience with theology, which seems like the outgrowth of egotism. We should be humble, because we are humble, and it is arrogant to suppose there is an afterlife reserved only for us, and that all other living organisms are condemned to be ephemeral. Our intelligence permitted us to construct an imaginary solution to the terrible problem of death, (and death really is terrible and horrifying) but whatever solace the solution offers, it remains imaginary.

I feel like I am compost, that my body is just a rental and after I'm dead, that's that, and some other life forms will feed upon my body, or if I'm cremated then most of me will transform into gas (ashes constitute only a small portion, since we are mostly water, which converts to steam during incineration), which will also be used by other creatures, inhaled by them. I suppose each of us has breathed the same air molecules that once composed part of the body of Buddha, Jesus, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain.

I don't expect to be mourned by more than a few, and don't really have a lot of regret about departing, as it is part of the deal for the human existence. I have no ambition, or only modest ambition, because the things of this world besides necessities do not interest me, and the barriers to the occupations I really would prefer to occupy, like doctor, writer, programmer, scientist or professor, are insurmountable, in today's market, to someone of my age and means. I've accomplished about what is possible given who I am and my environment.

Life is a roll of the dice. We are humble, feeble creatures, which we forget, or don't even understand when we are young, but we are temporary and our grip upon existence is tenuous at best. Life is just a series of probabilities that we will survive each successive day. Notions like justice and goodness and love are rather abstract and when we are gone they fade away from us, because we become part of the stage where other actors get to play and think about justice, goodness and love and make their own decisions about such weighty matters, decisions which have nothing at all to do with us, because we are dead and gone, part of the soil that their feet trample over, as the living think about each other without any thought to the irrelevant dead.

There is a bittersweet sense of equality that I feel with everyone, low and high, great and humble, ancient and modern. Because in the end we're all the same, aren't we? We're tilled under the soil and consumed and the earth doesn't remember who we were. What remains is the earth, for a time, and then the earth will be gone too, and the Sun as well, and the Universe. Just like that. Blip!

It is not given to us to know the meaning of existence, no more than it is given to ants to understand the secret of combustion. We are not advanced enough, not smart enough, yet, as a species, I think, to understand the reasons for our existence, for the existence of the Universe and of all things, assuming that there are reasons, and I hold out the possibility that there are, and that there may even be some kind of Creator that is unknowable and mysterious and perhaps not at all like us, but far more advanced than us, just as we are more advanced than ants. So that is why I think atheism is an appropriate description of my philosophy, because all the conceptions about God that I have heard are probably false in one way or another. If there is a sort of God then it seems probable it is unlike anything that men have described so far, and it may even be something that encompasses the totality, or a portion of the totality, rather than being a singular Being. God is probably more like gravity than a human being.

By describing God in this way, all of the common ideas about God are rendered moot, and God becomes a rather abstract thing indistinguishable from natural forces and natural law, and religion becomes superfluous. So it is possible to believe in this kind of God and be described as an atheist, because this kind of God is pretty much a phantom God that doesn't fit any of the world's major religions, but is perfectly compatible with Science and reason, and it also follows that advancements in those areas help one to understand the ways of God.

How to Get Along with Neighbors

I like my neighbors, and as far as I know, they like me too. We all follow a simple and easy protocol based in common courtesy and common sense, which is:

1. We don't play loud music. I never do, party or not, because of personal preference, but my neighbors don't play loud music more than once in a blue moon, and I can accept that very rare occasion, especially since it is always during the day and never at night.
2. We keep our animals out of each others' yards, with the exception of cats, which are welcome to patrol our yard and keep the chipmunks, birds and squirrels in check, and the occasional straying of a family dog, which is understandable, dogs being dogs. The dogs are non-threatening, friendly dogs, which is a key factor.
3. If the mailman screws up and puts the neighbor's mail in my box, I deliver it to my neighbor. I don't know whether my neighbors return the courtesy or not, but I haven't been missing any mail to my recollection.
4. We try to keep the front yard, with its high visibility to the neighbors, in good shape, although we don't mow every week like many uptight people do, because to me it seems like a waste of time, gas and constitutes a moderate level of noise pollution. If my neighbor wants to mow every single week or even twice a week then that is his business, not mine, but I don't plan to copy his behavior.

Of the above list, #1 is by far the most important. Loud music is the most effective way to transform a harmless, neutral, or even friendly neighbor into your worst enemy, even a deadly enemy in one recent case in Texas.

I used to live in an apartment complex, and the fellow that lived above me played extremely loud music on a daily basis, from the time he woke up to the time he went to bed around nine in the morning, which caused me to hate him, because one of the things I value is peace and quiet. It took a while, but eventually I succeeded in getting that SOB evicted from his apartment on an unrelated transgression--his littering of the apartment complex. His trash was blowing over into a nearby homeowner's yard, and the homeowner knew the landlord, so on my prompting she called him up and complained. Problem solved for me. Bad neighbor moved out, and new neighbor moved in. The new neighbor was quieter, although they too played the loud music about once a week. But once a week is better than every day. Eventually I saved up enough money to move the hell out of the apartment, and I bought a foreclosure. In today's economy, I feel sorry for anybody renting who can't take advantage of the low house prices of the many foreclosures on the market.

Fast and Furious

I disapproved of "Fast and Furious," a botched law enforcement attempt to track down Mexican drug cartel soldiers. Obviously it was foolish and ill-conceived, betraying a lack of understanding as to how technology works. I don't think it was the brainchild of Attorney General Eric Holder, however, and it is ridiculous to think Republicans require almost a year's worth of private emails from the White House in order to investigate the matter. The Republicans seem to be on a fishing expedition during an election year to discredit Obama, nothing more and nothing less. The NRA is clinically paranoid in raising the fear among gun owners that the White House launched "Fast and Furious" in order to pass gun control laws. NRA members need to be treated psychologically with anti-psychotic medication if that is what they truly believe, but I give them more credit than that. I think the NRA leadership is lying and just wants to help the Republicans any way they can, because they are right-wingers and like the Republicans for reasons not having anything to do with firearms.

The real lesson behind "Fast and Furious" is that law enforcement in this country is out of control, and more oversight needs to be put in place to eliminate the many abuses. Chiefs need to be fired when they make serious errors, instead of permitted to stay on the job, as is currently the practice. Republicans complain about tenure for college professors, but the reality is that law enforcement has tenure and gets away with anything at all under the Sun in many agencies, as long as they do what their bosses want, which is what the elite believes to be useful. The rights of common citizens are viewed as not as very important, something that can be ignored if an individual officer is in a bad mood or if there are other priorities, like career advancement, at stake.