sheer potentiality

I’m spending some of my free time on Slashdot jousting with people who think that the World Trade Center was destroyed by planted explosives (and not by, for instance, gigantic jetliners that crashed into it and the resultant shock and fire damage). I think this latest exchange is my coup de gras:

I sum it all up:

You know, whoever designed the WTC must be pretty happy that you have so much faith in them that you think it’s more plausible that reptilian Jewish Freemasons from the outer space Illuminati secretly planted explosives than they were simply more vulnerable to aircraft and debris collision than they hoped.

I continue, further down the thread:

Building implosions are carefully controlled to avoid property damage to surrounding buildings. You want to get it down to a less than 1% chance of damaging other buildings. That doesn’t mean that, if a building collapses uncontrolled, it’s guaranteed to damage other buildings. It only means that random building collapses have an unacceptably high probability (which in practice may mean greater than 1%, or even greater than 0.1%) of damaging other buildings. Besides, it makes no sense to suppose WTC 7 was destroyed by controlled demolition, because WTC 1 and 2 *did* cause damage to surrounding buildings (thus making it inconsistent to be so cautious with WTC 7) and because there’s no reason to make a neatly contained implosion when your objective is to destroy inhabited office buildings to further your Masonic plot from outer space.

He finally clarified who his villain was:

Masons from space? WTF is wrong with you? The milatary-industrial-congress complex has the means and the motives to get this done. Their budgets and influence were steadily declining after the end of the cold war:

I school him on building implosions again and point out all the strange parts of his theory:

Why would the military-industrial complex (thanks for updating me on which perennial conspiracy-theory villain you’re using!) destroy WTC7 so that it would collapse neatly into its own footprint, while failing to destroy WTC 1 and 2 the same way? Why would the military-industrial complex be worried about protecting other buildings from damage when they were deliberately committing an act of terrorism? Why would they go to all the effort to make 19 predominantly Saudi nationals all appear at the same time on the four airplanes they crashed, with Arabic-speaking voices on the cockpit recorders, if they had no intention of attacking Saudi Arabia? Why would they bother crashing planes into the towers if they was rigged with explosives to start with? Why did they arbitrarily restrain the attack to the WTC and Pentagon? Why did none of the 100,000 WTC inhabitants ever notice the explosives being installed? How come no one has come forth admitting to being a part of this gigantic conspiracy? I think the more important question is–what, other than your political biases, leads you to choose a gigantic conspiracy theory over thinking that maybe you were wrong about building collapses?

Incredibly, his response contains both these lines:

Do you make mommy type for you? ‘Cause you sound too stupid to tie your own shoes.

All of your questions have been answered, all the data has been made available to you.
Don’t troll this thread anymore.

along with a bizarre claim that the military-industrial complex didn’t want to damage buildings because they owned all of them.

And my final response:

Drat and curses, you’ve found me out. I am indeed an agent of the Zionist-controlled military-industrial complex that evidently owns all the real estate in New York! While you have foiled my mission this time, be assured that our resources are far more extensive than your own!

Seriously, though, I’d love to live in your world for like one day. I’m sure life is interesting if you see fiendish plots worthy of Lex Luthor around every historical event.

It may be worth noting that the Westfield Mall and Disney security tried to bar the zombies from entering, but Apple store security did not. In fact, salespeople were jostling one another for a position where they could take the best photo of the zombies (or themselves with the zombies, or their brains being eaten by the zombies).

From News.com.com.com

Arthur Du Mosch of Israel wrestled down a leopard that jumped into his bedroom during the middle of the night, and pinned it until park rangers could arrive to take it away.

I ran out of Aussie shampoo and conditioner so I went to get more. Well, instead of the “medium” or “mild” or other conditioner/shampoo Aussie used to make, they now only have “moist” and a variety of blends that are supposed to, I dunno, be especially nice. The only ones they had at the store were “volume”, “sun-kissed shine” and “soft”. Well, my hair’s soft enough already, and volume could have been a disaster, so I tried sun-kissed shine.

It’s quite shiny.

But now on the internet it looks like they have a “catch the wave” shampoo and conditioner that not only defines waves and curls, it even “helps eliminate frizz”. AAAAAAA!

Ooh, but they make a “calm that frizz creme”!

(No pictures because my camera is in Pullman.)

is waking up from a dream where we are speaking to each other, and are friends, and then suddenly remembering reality again.

Thanks to Canadian TV, I was able to watch both of these often-conflicting shows in the same night without mucking about with BitTorrent.

24…I’m not sure what to say. I mean, clearly all the major crises were averted and Jack Bauer continued to defy capture and adversity. It’s not a terribly unpredictable show in that respect. Oh, and James Cromwell died.

Heroes was just great. I mean, it was a little less-than-awesome to have 40 minutes of characters having heart to heart dialogues about their heroism and only about 90 seconds of climactic battle with Sylar. But most of the heart-to-heart dialogues were good, and climactic battles are expensive to do the special effects for.

Also, it was nice to see Hiro thrown into the past to meet his hero. Almost better than seeing Nathan sacrifice himself to save the city from Peter.

(You might notice the lack of spoiler warnings. That’s just how I roll.)

Someone holed up in a church tower and shot at police officers at a nearby courthouse. Google is all the fuck over it, but the first word I got was from frequent commenter Laurel, who prepared to return fire last night, and is probably mighty disappointed she didn’t get to.

Well, who do you think it was? A disgruntled college student trying to emulate Cho? A crazed white supremacist making a political statement? A mentally disturbed Iraq veteran who had one flashback too many? A distraught minister who decided to turn to violence after the death of Jerry Falwell? A charismatic cocaine dealer on the run from the law, making his last stand? The Pullman, Washington panty thief who stole $2000 worth of women’s underwear? All these people, and more, have a high probability of being in Moscow, Idaho, so I’m not entirely surprised this happened. Leave your theories in the comments?

Otherwise known as “legislating from the bench”:

I got into it on Slashdot again, someone claiming that the Constitution is “threatened by the Justices behaving like philosopher-kings finding new “laws” in the Constitution that the oafs in Congress should’ve passed (practice often derided as “legislating from the bench”)”. I have decided to post my reply (in an edited form) here.

People who complain about “judicial activism” or “legislating from the bench” remind me of whiny sports fans who blame the refs every time they lose a game. If a court ruling goes their way, no complaint. If a court ruling goes against them, it’s “judicial activism”.

First off, let’s be perfectly clear on one thing–most law in the United States is case law, i.e. law that is made by the precedent of judicial rulings. This allows the law to grow organically from case analysis rather than simply being handed down from Congress every so often. This is a vital feature of the system of common law we inherited from Great Britain, so if you have a problem with it, take it up with them. It’s also an inescapable consequence of stare decisis, the doctrine that future courts will rule according to the precedents set by past courts. But for stare decisis, court rulings would be unpredictable and arbitrary.

Having a strong judicial branch with the power to strike down what Congress and the President do also protects us from the tyranny of the majority. The civil rights rulings of the 1960’s are a perfect example of this–the “will of the people”, the laws Congress did pass, all this stuff you people claim is trampled by judicial activism, were in this case part of a horrifically evil system that oppressed people for no reason other than their racial origin. It was the Supreme Court, upholding the principles of the Constitution, which stopped this. For all your complaining about how the will of the people is subverted, you fail to recognize—quite often, when the “will of the people” is to restrict human rights, it needs to be subverted.

I’m not saying the Court never makes bad rulings–they clearly do, particularly in cases like Kelo. But majority rule makes bad decisions far more often, and it’s vital that there be some way to put majority rule in check in situations where it is clearly acting unjustly. And that will necessarily involve overturning what Congress and the President do from time to time.

I recently woke up from an interesting dream.

When this dream started out, I was some type of investigator—I think a rogue investigator—who was trying to locate some woman’s guard dog, because by capturing the guard dog we could then capture the woman. I don’t know why we wanted to capture the woman, but she was some type of stripper or prostitute who worked in a bad part of town.

The woman was someone I knew from high school, I think, but I can’t give a name. I highly doubt it’s anyone who has ever read this blog though.

At some point during this investigation, I signed onto MSN Messenger. Instead of two contacts, I had about five—including people I don’t talk to anymore. I could also see people’s MSN names, which I don’t have Adium set up to do.

In another part of the dream, I was a Japanese ship’s captain, and I was ordering a bagel with lasagna on the side. (I know this makes no sense, but whatever). Then the lasagna disappeared, but it turned out it was eaten by the crew during a trip into the past. Okay.

In the next part, I time traveled into the past to help some blond woman (possibly Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, or just Katee Sackhoff, or maybe it was some other girl from high school) on some type of mission. I don’t remember much, except she decided to go back a year, or live out a year during the past in order to accomplish the mission.

The final part of the dream took place during the Civil War. I was a Confederate from Missouri who spent all his time in a Virginia bar ranting about how Virginia and Missouri together could take on the whole world. (Except I pronounced it “Missoura”). Among other things I think I dumped out a bootful of Missouri soil onto the floor, or something. As far as I can tell I was well-accepted. Interestingly enough, I didn’t remember during the dream that Missouri didn’t join the Confederacy.

Is it just me? Seriously?

I mean, who was the person who said, “Let’s do a ‘Law & Order’ spinoff where all the cases are bizarre sex offenses!”? It’s kind of perverse. Of course, perverse things aren’t all that unusual. What is unusual is that the normal conservative, not-that-edgy audiences that watch “Law & Order” want to watch a show about violent and often disturbing made-up sex offenses every single week.

What’s this about? Does sex sell? Maybe someone realized that a good percentage of the population are victims of sex offenses, and want some way of working through that. And maybe lots of people watch SVU just so they can try and work out things that happened to them in the past. (Does that make NBC good, for providing this to those people, or evil, for exploiting those people to get ratings?)

Even more strangely, how many “Law & Order” fans (who weren’t raped or anything) watch SVU without it ever occurring to them how perverse the show’s premise is, kind of like kids who grow up eating Spam without ever realizing how weird and gross it is?