Here's the map. I don't have that much to say on the French EU vote, simply because I won't pretend to understand the intracacies of France, or the 450+pages EU constitution. Suffice it to say, I probably would have abstained. The vote seemed to come down to ratifying the stultifying, centralized, over-regulated technocracy of the EU, or brushing it all off in favor of the rampant unemployment and non-existent economic growth of Chirac's vaguely national socialist government. So, yeah. I would have abstained. Or moved to England.

This guy has put together an illustrated guide to the Scientology religion. Reading about the actual religion is hilarious, but the comic adds a whole extra layer.

Arch-conservative Thomas Sowell is not happy at McCain, but he explains how the Arizona Senator totally pulled off an awesome political end-run.

Those who claim that Senator McCain has forfeited the support of the Republican base by selling out his party must not realize that McCain never had the support of that base in the first place, as shown by their votes in the 2000 Republican primaries.

Senator McCain has lost nothing. If Hillary Clinton is the Democrats' candidate in 2008, what alternative would the Republican base have? Vote for Hillary?

If nothing else, Senator McCain has undermined Senator Frist's authority as Majority Leader in the Senate and made himself the media's favorite Republican. Whether or not that can be cashed in for a 2008 Presidential nomination, McCain has raised his own stock and lowered that of Frist. He is in a position to rule or ruin.

What do you get when you merge PC multiculturalism with rampant anti-communism?

Struck a museum.

Judge: Parents can't teach pagan beliefs

But, you know, you're still free to be a Christian!

You know what my favorite thing about blogs is? The remainstreaming (if you can call blogs mainstream) of severe wordplay. Blogs love to treat theri headers like EW review titles, and that's A-OK with me.

I really don't see what's so incorrect about me pointing out that we've now had soldiers flying all around the world fighting terrorists, then Saddam, and again terrorists, since 9/11. It seems exceedinly straightforward and inarguable to me.

Anyway, the descent of the Iraq War from state vs. state conflict, to uniformed soldiers vs. militias/terrorists/insurgents/criminal gangs, has largely rendered moot the large distinctions that once existed between operations against Al Qaeda and the ops in Iraq.

To wit, if we captured OBL tomorrow, it would undoubtedly reverberate to the battles being waged against us by Zarqawi and "Al Qaeda in Iraq" (particularly among the small, hardened core of foreign fighters under Zarqawi's command.) Inversely, the capture of Zarqawi would be a blow against OBL and Islamic Fundamentalism, as it would eliminate the latter's preeiminate operational "general" in the Mid East.

I don't disagree with WoT/War on Poverty comparison, but at this point, it's near-impossible to see Iraq and the War Against Islamic Terrorism as two completely different campaigns.

Quoth the Alex in comments: "Something that's interesting is that the War on Terror has now gone on longer than America's involvement in WWII. December 41 - August 45 versus September 01 - May 05. Of course, in the former, those 3.7 years saw 400,000 soldiers killed. So it's comparing apples to oranges."

A more appropriate comparison would be War on Terror to War on Drugs, or War on Poverty, or War on any other conceptual thing that is completely unwinnable in any practical sense. You can compare the Iraq War (still going!) to WW2 or Nam or what have you, but the War On Terror is just a stupid rhetorical device.

A miniature play:

Asa: How was the Lost season finale?
Alan: Really good.
Asa: So what's the big secret?
Alan: *shrugs shoulders*
Asa: I KNEW IT!

Oh man, all you folks who kept saying they'd solve it (whatever it is these days) in the season finale are chewing on bitter ash right now. That storytelling is so decompressed it doesn't even have arcs, or ends. Or maybe each season is an act in the larger story. Just 2 more years to go! Unless it's Shakespearian structure, in which case 4 more years.

Christian establishment is rethinking how it markets and positions itself on political issues.

Most controversially, the NAE statement explicitly throws its weight behind the growing "creation care" environmental movement, which asserts that Christians are stewards of God's creation. It is led by the Evangelical Environmental Network, best known for its "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign.

"As evangelical leaders, we need to step up to our responsibilities to be leaders in the fight for clean air and water, to stop the burning of rain forests, cruelty to animals, overuse of pesticides, and the countless other issues that result from our consumer-oriented lifestyles," R. Scott Rodin, former president of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, wrote in the book of essays that accompanied the report.

Better late than never. I actually think it'd be very interesting and even rewarding to be a PR rep charged with representing the Christian Coalition or whatever. There's a lot of unique re-branding and re-positioning opportunities there. I guess that's my old consumer trend analyst background talking.

Even though I'm a huge, heavily biased Star Wars fan/apologist (well, "huge" is relative, I suppose. My only memorabilia are the movies and the Annotated Screenplays), here are the Best Negative Revenge of the Sith Reviews.

5. Jeffrey Wells

4. My friend Brian

3. Reason

2. New York Observer

1. New Yorker

To follow up on Asa's post about "memes" and the term's missuse...

I'm fairly certain that the term "Nuclear Option" originally showed up in the late-winter to denote the potential Democratic *response* to the GOP if the latter changed filibuster rules. The Democratic response would in effect, "blow up" the Senate, as they would gain revenge by shutting down all Senate business through arcane procedural rules.

Somewhere along the line, this definition changed and the Nuke Option meant the change to filibuster rules. I think this situation is similar to how most people use the term impeach to mean "remove from office" when it really means, to charge a public official with improper conduct.

Dean on abortion

Stupid Gephardt, Kerry and Coporate Media for ruining the most damn sensical guy to run for President in my lifetime.

In talking to Alex last night I realized that a lot of my frustration with non-proliferation treaty reached in the Senate yesterday is that it feels suspiciously like the end of the Matrix trilogy: Disaster averted, the plucky humans have signed a treaty! Which the horrible machines could easily break at any moment. Crap.

Guess who the plucky humans are up on Capitol Hill?

Anyway, as usual Digby has hit on my thoughts exactly regarding this stupid compromise: "My only question going forward is this: if Janice Brown is not considered to be an 'extraordinary circumstance' then who in the world could Bush possibly nominate who would be worse? Ann Coulter? (She does, after all, call herself a constitutional scholar.) I'm not sure that there are any judges who are to the right of Brown or who express more hostility not only to the constitution but to the enlightenment thought that guides it. The only thing absolutely worse would be to put an Islamic fundamentalist on the supreme court."

We're already down to the extraordinary circumstances kids. That's why they were filibustering. The agreement, in practice, doesn't seem to change anything. This unsatisfying resolution brought to you by the US Senate and the Wachowski Bros.

Is it just me, or do things seem to be getting worse in Iraq? Or if not worse, certainly not better. You do have to wonder if it's only a lack of coverage, or clever framing of coverage by the media, that makes people think things are going fine and dandy.

Holy crap, 1,643 US Soldiers have died.

Yes, that's an actual headline. I wonder which group gets to be the "new black?" I'm gonna say Irish are the new black.

Well, it looks like the Senate has reached a deal averting the nuclear option. Odd, that, since it sounds an awful lot like the deal Reid offered last week that was flatly refused. Given the Mexican standoff situation today it's impossible to tell who blinked and why. One guy had the votes and one guy didn't, and it didn't make any sense for the one who had them to cut a deal. The moderates must have really held their ground and not divulged which way their votes would swing, that's the only way I can see them having leverage with both Reid and Frist to cut this deal.

Regardless, I'm not too happy. It keeps the filibuster intact, but Dems agree to approve even more of Bush's activist judges (ooh, political jujitsu!). I mean, given the way the GOP has already gutted Senate rules, and the relative number of judges approved for Bush II to those for Clinton, this is still a landslide for the theo-conservative Judiciary. And it doesn't even have the benefit of making the Republicans look like what they are: Power mad bastards.

But then again, last time anyone said that "well, maybe it has to get worse before it can get better" we got Bush II. For two terms. So maybe I should feel lucky.

I don't know why I'm posting this now, but I just felt like noting that we are officially six months away from Bizarro Week. For those unfamiliar, it is when Asa and I switch political affiliations and blog as our evil others for a whole seven days. It's equal parts disturbing and hilarious. Perhaps one day, when the technology is right, Asa and I will liberate our others and give them actual carbon-based bodies. But for now, we simply let their spirits talk through us. In six months.

There are plenty of others that I don't really care to think up right now, but the one that's bothering me at this moment is "meme." Back in college when I first learned the word it was basically as defined by Wikipedia... a unit of cultural transmission, of information or behavior, like a gene for society. Pretty cool, huh?

But these stupid bloggers (and maybe other people, I mostly see it in blogs) insist on using the word to mean any kind of chain mail-esque idea or challenge, like this "what books are you ashamed you haven't read" deal. I think that doesn't qualify as a meme by virtue of being both too small (it's not culturally pervasive and only affects a targetted group) and too intentional. You don't just declare something a meme. It becomes so by the power of its idea. As with genetics it becomes vital or obsolete all on its own.

And it mostly just peeves me because it's such a cool thing reduced to such a mundane and useless meaning.

*Sigh*

ADMIRAL NELSON saw off the mighty Franco-Spanish fleet at the battle of Trafalgar, but 200 years on, he has been sunk by a wave of political correctness.

Organisers of a re-enactment to mark the bicentenary of the battle next month have decided it should be between "a Red Fleet and a Blue Fleet" not British and French/Spanish forces.

So pretty much, if there's anything in history than can be considered vaguely offensive to anyone (be that evolution, or military victories) we must immediately re-write it and dumb-it-down so as not to offend and risk lawsuit.

Apparently Geoff Johns is ending his Flash run as of the end of the Rogue War storyline. I guess he's been on the book for 5 years, and a damn fine 5 years they've been, but he'll be sorely missed. I really like the Flash, but it's not often that the book has a strong enough creator behind it (Johns, Waid, Infantino) to make it actually worth reading. On the other hand, the next full arc after Johns' exit is by Darwyn Cooke. Sweet sweet Darwyn Cooke.

Reason mag has a great article up about one of this blog's favorite recurring political/social themes: tolerating intolerance.

Well, it's not exactly capturing Bin Laden, but it will have to do.

A leading hot dog maker, and a leading hot dog bun maker, have signed a peace treaty. Seriously.

When Dick Cheney is hanging at a party and trying to impress girls, do you think he introduces himself as the Vice-President of the United States, or as the President of the Senate? I'm going with the latter.

Am I the only person who thinks this movie looks like a Seabiscuit rehash? Replace Depression-era horse racing with Depression-era boxing, and replace the horse with Russell Crowe. I guess I'm just angry because I thought Seabiscuit was kinda lame. And unless there are Nazis, Indiania Jones, or early DC comics involved, I'm not a big fan of this time period.

"Once upon the earth, in a typical town, on an agonizingly beautiful day, a nondescript woman, whose name I forget, killed a monster robot from the future and saved the human race. The End."

— "The Terminator: The Novel," — a one-sentence joke written by
Randall Frakes and Terminator co-screenwriter William Wisher,
featured among the Terminator: Special Edition DVD extras.

Ah!

Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., got down on one knee yesterday before the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. In his hand was a light pink, sling-back pump.

"It is my shoe!" Pelosi said as Reichert made his Prince Charming-like presentation during her weekly news conference, a forum in which she usually bashes the policies of Reichert's fellow Republicans. "That is such a gentleman."

Double Ah!

"I know it's a bit of an odd-fellow, or odd-woman, mix," she said. "But the speaker and I have been talking about health care and national security now for several years, and I find that he and I have a lot in common in the way we see the problem."

For his part, Mr. Gingrich, who helped lead the impeachment fight against President Bill Clinton, called Mrs. Clinton "very practical" and "very smart and very hard working," adding, "I have been very struck working with her."

Well they certainly didn't get this right.

Seriously, did the DC logo even *need* a change? I've never heard one comic fan say, "Yeah, I'd read DC, but well, they're logo is just so fucking stupid."

So, yep. The end of an era. The only DC logo I've known during my lifetime is no more. Color me bitter.

You have no idea how happy this shot makes me. It kinda looks like they finally got it right.

Man, I've been bad about this whole internet presence thing lately. But hey, starting up a company is no easy feat. In fact, it kind of sucks. Regardless, I hope to have some glorious new materials up in the coming weeks, including ...

Cash Milliondollars! Now less than weekly because I just don't have time and the quality was obviouslt declining! Yeah!

Junk Science #3!

Someday, somehow ... supersecret outerspace comic! Probably not for a good long while on that one though.

So, you know how Lucas is doing this Star Wars TV show with secondary characters from the prequels? How weird would it be if Jimmy Smits' character from the prequels was the lead in the TV show? Just imagine the explosion your brain would endure if you tuned in every Sunday night to watch Bobby Simone running around Alderaan. That would automatically crack the Top 100 Funniest Moments of My Life.

I don't hate religions and I don't hate the religious, and I quite like a whole lot of what Jesus had to say, and I really wish that Christians would stop letting themselves be defined by what I think is perfectly legitimately called the "Crazy Christians" aka the Religious Right. And the thing is, I don't really want to get an Evolution Fish for my bumper or, as I saw on an ad on Atrios today, a Dinosaur eating a Jesus fish for my bumper. I think that stuff is kind of offensive in its way. But when you start trying to keep kids from learning about evolution and coming into my bedroom and trying to get my wonderful country its own nasty awful version of Sharia law, well then I have a hard time feeling bad about it.

Oh yeah, and the same goes for non-Religious/Authoritarian Republicans, who seem to have made quite the deal with the devil here.

(pun intended)

I knew it was bad. But not this bad. 12.6% of Germans are unemployed.

In contrast, the U.S. Unemployment Rate is 5.2%, 7.7 million people. If our unemployment were at German levels, 36.5 million Americans would be out-of-work.

Argh. I love Star Wars in all its illogical, goofy, groan-inducing glory. I also love it because lightsaber duels kick ass, Lando Calrissian and Han Solo are interesting enough for their own movie series, and the dialogue in the middle one *is* really good.

Annnnnyway...

Lucas gave yet another strange interview where he has re-written "the History of Star Wars" yet again.

I've noticed that in the Lucas Version of History, he wrote a large screenplay called Star Wars. This screenplay had three acts. This screenplay was 200+ pages. So, he went and took the first act and made this the first Star Wars. This screenplay also had a 15 page backstory which explained where all the characters came from.

Okay, fair enough. That all sounds reasonable to me.

What doesn't add up, however, (and actually, none of it adds up, if you really think about it) is that in the Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays from 1995, you'll find that Lucas only added Vader being Luke's father when he wrote Empire in 1978/79. Also, Leia didn't become Luke's sister until he wrote Jedi. Oh, and Ben Kenobi didn't die until the 4th (!) draft of A New Hope. Oh, and Yoda was only created for Empire because George killed off Kenobi in A New Hope.

So, George, I'm left with two questions?

1. What the hell does this 200-page "Star Wars" draft look like?

2: What validity does this much-ballyhooed Star Wars backstory of yours have if all the actual backstory elements found in the Original Trilogy, were clearly made up as you went along?!

The answer, of course, is that the original OT backstory penned all those years ago is meaningless. Oh, I'm sure it has some names and place-names that are found in the current movies, but for the most part, George has made up the Prequels as he's gone along. The same thing he did with the Original Trilogy.

What's getting me all the madder is how in this interview George comes right and says that the first two movies in the Prequel Trilogy don't have much plot. And that all of the backstory is actually in Episode III.

Basically, he is a slave kid. He gets found by the Jedi and he becomes part of the Jedi order and that he loves his mother. You know, that's maybe a half hour movie. And so I did a kind of jazz riff on the rest of it and I said, "Well, I'm just going to enjoy myself. I have this giant world to play in and I'm going to just move around and have fun with this because, you know, I have to get to the second part." So, then I got to the second part, and it was kind of the same thing. They fall in love, they can't and they're not supposed to, and, you know, little bits of trivia in terms of, you know, setting up the empire and how all that stuff works.

That's about another twenty percent of this story treatment. The first film is twenty percent, the second film is twenty percent and I then ended up with a third film. The problem was the third film was actually more like eighty percent of the story. So, I was sitting there with a lot more story to tell than I actually had time to tell it. It was the reverse of what I had in the first two films. I constantly had to cut it down and cut it down. I had a lot of extraneous stories going on that I could have tied up, but when you really got down to it, it was really Darth Vader's story. I focused in on Darth Vader and Darth Vader was the key element.

So, Padme starting the rebel alliance. A lot of these other things with Obi-Wan and some of the other characters, Yoda and the Jedi counsel, all these other things had to go by the wayside and I just focused on everything that was Anakin related. When I did the first script, I ended up kind of where I was in Episode IV, which had way too much script. Instead of saying, "Well, I'm going to make these into other movies," I just started dropping stuff out and then brought it down to where it was a manageable film and it focused on the one character that we needed to focus on. And then I made that the movie.

Now, George, if the original treatment was so heavy on Episode III details, why the hell didn't you just break up the story for III in the same way that you did to the so-called giant script for the OT? Wouldn't the prequels be much stronger overall if George just followed his own rules? Why couldn't we have had a Prequel Trilogy that is essentially just a giant, three-part Episode III?

Episode I: Middle of the Clone Wars, Anakin and Obi-Wan kicking ass as best friends and partners. Anakin's selfish and arrogant, however. And also friends with Palpatine.

Episode II: Anakin falls to the darkside. Palpatine' seizes control. Blablabla. Obi-Wan fights Anakin. Anakin transformed into Vader.

Episode III: Vader kills Jedi. Obi-Wan trying to hide twins. Padme organizes rebellion. Blablabla.

Again, I think the answer for why Lucas was unable to follow his own OT writing rules for the PT is simply because this legend of the 1976 200+ page Star Wars superscript is completely false. Those rules were never followed because they never existed. This all getes me so mad. And no, I won't drop it. Part of me actually likes trying to wrap my head around the twisted logic of Star Wars. The franchise, that is. I've given up trying to understand the internal logic of the PT.

I think it's more fair to now say that we truly have no idea what the hell is going on in Iraq. Whether the situation be good, bad, or simply "meh." (The most likely scenario, by the way.)

And why this lack of information? Because even the goddamn military, state department, defensee department, Iraqi Authorities don't know. Bureaucracy at "work."

In a somewhat related story...

A supposedly senior aide to Al Zarqawi has been captured. I'm officially done predicting the war's progress, but I'll certainly predict that we'll have Zarqawi by the end of the summer. And while many call for his head, I'm fairly certain that we need to get this guy alive and keep him alive.

No, not those ones, the IMPORTANT ones, in Britain and the USA.

Now that the UK has had its elections (did you know the PM gets to call for elections whenever he wants, as long as its within 5 years? How wild is that?) I think we can sum up the results thusly:

Bush eeked out a win because, despite people generally not agreeing his agenda, he managed to keep everyone terrified of the spooky terrorists.

Blair eeked out a win because, despite people generally not agreeing with his agenda, he managed to keep everyone terrified of the spooky conservatives.

Slate has a great piece up about the flaws and failings of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia mirrors the interests of its writers rather than its readers. You'll find more on Slashdot than The New Yorker. The entry for Cory Doctorow is three times as long as the one for E.L. Doctorow. Film buffs have yet to post a page on Through a Glass Darkly; they're too busy tweaking the seven-part entry on Tron.

This is kinda interesting. Right Wing News contacted 200 center-right bloggers and asked them to rank their favorite political columnists. Here's the Top 20:

20) William F. Buckley
18) Jeff Jacoby
18) David Limbaugh
17) Michael Barone
16) Christopher Hitchens
14) John Podhoretz
14) David Brooks
13) John Leo
12) Walter Williams
11) Rich Lowry
10) Peggy Noonan
9) James Lileks
8) Ann Coulter
6) Michelle Malkin
6) George Will
5) Thomas Sowell
4) Victor Davis Hanson
3) Charles Krauthammer
2) Jonah Goldberg
1) Mark Steyn

I'm surprised Goldberg is that high. I like his stuff for what it is: well-written, GOP talking points. Plus, he's funny. I'm not really suprised Hitchens made it, but I do wonder if the center-right bloggers realize he's not one of them. He's a pro-war socialist. Yes, he's the only one in existence, but those are nevertheless his politics. Buckley can still bring it. Though, his articles are now often out-of-step with the agenda of the very magazine he created. I'm glad Sowell and Hanson cracked the Top 10, as both guys are legit academics and not mere pundits or para-intellectuals (Will, Krauthammer). I think Coulter can be funny, but that's about it. I don't read Malkin. Barone is pretty cool in that he's always writing about voter metrics and demography. Brooks is okay. Mark Steyn as number 1 is a very worthy choice. No conservative writer is funnier, faster, or more global in his outlook. That is to say, Steyn writes equally good analysis of U.S., Canadian, Australian, and UK politics.

Maybe when Bush says we've (Pakistan?) got terrorists on the run we really *do* have them on the run.

The evidence.

But hey, don't you find it hilarious that the ad banner on Penny Arcade right now is for cableorganizer.com?

I wish I had been at that meeting... "You know who has a lot of cables? Nerds!

And then I click over to the site and see that they sell those big industrial cable covers that you can drive over. Didn't really think those would be the same company.

And yet even there, the guy in the photo is driving a little go-kart.

Nerds!

In honor of Family Guy's return tonight, I'd like to say that Asa and I are hard at work on Junk Science #3. Most of the art is done and the script is done; it's just a matter of finishing the other 40% of the suprising amount of work that goes into an 8 page, black-and-white comic that nobody reads. Sigh...

But, onward and upward! JS3 will be up soon and the Hand 2 is percolating. It really is.