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Saturday, January 11, 2003
I'm not a big fan of the death penalty because it's such a merciful punishment. If you commit whatever crime(s) you committed to get on death row, you'll have a few years to contemplate death, file some appeals, and then we'll quietly and painlessly send you off into the hereafter. Not too shoddy. I recommend that people who commit those crimes instead get to contemplate a lifetime of breaking rocks twelve hours a day, with no chance of parole. Lethal injection is not a punishment--it's a lack thereof. And I'm speaking from experience.
As far as North Korea goes, here's what I think is going on. In the 1990s we made a deal with them that we'd ship them fuel and build them two brand new nuclear reactors (which don't produce weapons grade fissile material), if they'd discontinue use of their existing reactors which do produce weapons grade material. Since then, our fuel shipments have been sporadic, and construction of the new reactors has barely started. In the meantime, North Korea has endured famine and frequent power outages. These are the result of bad luck and North Korean back-asswardness. Nevertheless, they don't make for happy North Koreans. I think this desperation is what led to the huge progress North and South Korea made at normalizing relations. This is a direct threat to the Pax Americana, as South Korea may soon decide it no longer needs 37,000 American soldiers occupying its soil. Those South Koreans bases are the United States' only major military presence in mainland Eastern Asia, so naturally we can't just withdraw them. This is why Bush included North Korea in his Axis of Evil, thereby setting the peace process back a year or two. Naturally, North Korea is pissed both at America's untoward hostility, and its failure to follow through on its end of the bargain. So now we see North Korean brinkmanship, as they try to provoke us into making peace. Rumsfeld says we're capable of fighting and winning multiple wars simultaneously, but I'm not so sure and I don't think the Koreans are, either. We might be able to win small wars, but the Chinese are a big variable in any Korean equation.
Ultimately, I think the North Koreans just want us to help them out of the Dark Ages, and they're using the only bargaining chip they've got.
Notice how I included no supporting links in my little theory. Slick.
.: posted by andy 1/11/2003
I don't really feel bad when somebody is executed. I don't really care when somebody gets life in prison, either. There are a lot of people that do have strong feelings about the subject, though, and most of those people are against capital punishment, so I don't feel bad about just deferring to them.
Our military is pretty streched with afganistan and the buildup in iraq, and there is a lot of new anti-americanism is South Korea, so if North Korea wanted to give us a headache, now is the perfect time. Is giving us a headache really a good enough reason to risk an uprising among your own people by causing most of their food and energy supplies to be cut off? Does somebody in North Korea just have a major screw loose? or is there some kind of positive end in mind for them? Coz I don't see it.
I guess if you're a fan of conspiracy theories, which I'm not, you could argue that the US administraion probably asked North Korea to give us some nuclear-saber-rattling in order to make the case for expanding our ABM program. That doesn't really make sense either, though, coz the program is just about as expanded as it can be right now.
.: posted by Jeremy 1/11/2003
Friday, January 10, 2003
Speaking of forced labor... what a bunch of jokers.
Did Andy sneak in a pic of Kim Jong-ill?
.: posted by Jeremy 1/10/2003
Video of the flying snake. How weird is this? I didn't even know there was such a thing.
You know what would be fun? It would be fun if we created an entirely fictional company, and then made a very believable website for it. With a logo, and contact info, and investor info, and press releases and everything else. Maybe it would be a defense contractor, or maybe it would do some kind of international business that no one can quite pin down, but is very shady-sounding. Then we could plant stories about it all over the web, and start a campaign against it. "[the company] uses forced labor!" etc. Maybe we could get people really up in arms about the whole thing.
.: posted by andy 1/10/2003
.: posted by andy 1/10/2003
Thursday, January 09, 2003
I just watched The Musketeer. First, let me say that it was entirely too short. I really don't like movies shorter than about 2 hours, coz they just seem to finish too soon. It felt like Act II when it was really the final fight scene. Second, they used Xin XIn Xiang for all fight coreography, and it was a bit too Matrix for my taste. I also think the Musketeers used firearms entirely too little for their names. If they really primarily used swords like in the movie, and in fact, very few were ever shown with anything except a rapier; shouldn't they have been called the swordsmen, or the epee'eers?
In a theatrical sidenote, a group of friends of mine and I have begun preproduction in ernst on a psychological thriller called Memorial Day. It's a 26 scene short about the psychological breakdown of a woman when zombies attack, as per night of the living dead or one of those. Might be very sharp. I'm still cleaning up the dialogue(written by someone who does a poor job of representing a female voice...), and I've just ordered 15 miniDV tapes of various different brands in order to deduce which works best with our camera, a Canon GL-2. Today I also procured a pound of FFFG black powder for use in making squibbs for the gunshot scenes. I really haven't found any good description of making a well-timed squibb that isn't a risk to the actor yet, so if you know of any methods, or have any ideas, please email me.
Also, my twenty-fifth birthday is approaching, so feel free to shower me with gifts and money.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/9/2003
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
I think that protecting endangered species is a Good Thing, generally. Especially when those species are at risk because of the encroachment of man or pollution, or alien species. But sometimes it's just evolution.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/8/2003
The British are about to ban gun replicas and airguns. This is in response to a 20% rise in gun crime, which has evidently increased almost 100% since the Labor Party took office in 1997. The Labor Party, by the way, is responsible for many of Great Britain's harshest gun control laws. They must be scratching their heads at this point, especially to be banning replicas and airguns.
I'd just like to point out that if law-abiding British citizens (and police, for that matter) had real guns, teenagers would replicas wouldn't be so care-free about "terrorising communities."
.: posted by andy 1/8/2003
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
I read a short story one time about some earth astronauts who were exploring a building on Mars. In the building they found a device that used a quantum black hole to communicate instantaneously across the universe. The cool part was when the scientist who was examining the machine intentionally used the black hole to murder one of his colleagues. The Martians had this tiny black hole trapped somehow, and the scientist untrapped it so that it feel straight through the planet, passing through his colleague on the way. The unintended consequence was that eventually Mars would be eaten up by the black hole, and that eventually it would probably destroy the solar system.
.: posted by andy 1/7/2003
Shit. It looks like the speed of the effect of gravity is the same as the speed of light. If the effect of gravity was instantaneous, you could have instantaneous communication accross infinite distances. All you would have to do is modulate a mass large enough and with a detectable amount of modulation so that you could detect the mass changes accross that distance.
Who pays these theoretical physicists anyway? The only thing they're good for is giving engineers headaches in their 3rd year of their BS. Bastards.
Another, equally useless and uninteresting possibility proposed by these TPs is that there could be a grand unifying "theory of everything" that will unite gravity and quantum mechanics under one common and related set of laws. Please don't read the article, I didn't.
.: posted by Jeremy 1/7/2003
You'd think that I was North Korea's propaganda minister... geez. Sanctions mean war.. blah blah blah, severest consequences for the US... blah blah blah, we will grease our tanks' treads with american babies... blah blah blah.
.: posted by Jeremy 1/7/2003
Monday, January 06, 2003
I'm going to see Spirited Away this evening. very excited.
hey guys. did you miss me? i've been going through a rather difficult transition since life in Japan. It's taken me since late septemeber to be able to say i'm back on my feet again. but i guess i am now. i've got a new job working for the senate journal. I (along with 3 others) proofread and edit the documented daily proceedings of the tx state senate, and then produce the official (supposedly grammatically flawless) Senate Journal. It's nothing glamorous, but I like it. i'm learning all kinds of interesting things about what goes on behind closed doors here. the capitol has it's own lexicon. everything in the journal is code for something else. the session hasn't begun yet, but i've a feeling we're going to get really busy starting jan. 14.
that and i'm waiting tables at Carrabba's (italian restaurant) part-time. i really don't need to keep that job, but i enjoy it. the people are fun. we go out. we drink. and i can't say I mind making a little extra money on the side...
.: posted by aida 1/6/2003
You just wanna see Leelee Sobieski, prevert.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/6/2003
Sunday, January 05, 2003
I want to see Max, but the bastards have only released it in New York and LA.
.: posted by Jeremy 1/5/2003
Jeremy, I'd have to be crazy to take that bet. I'm sure that this suicide bombing will finally get the Palestinian message through to the Israelis...
.: posted by andy 1/5/2003
Speaking of an axis of evil, what is more evil, threatening to use weapons, or giving weapons to anyone with the cash to afford them?
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/5/2003
Hangovers suck. Here's a suggestion: if you're already nauseous, don't watch Titus for the first time. But If your stomach is fine, go for it.
I bet israel withdraws from palestinian areas by the end of the day. Any takers?
.: posted by Jeremy 1/5/2003
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