Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Wooo!

Earthquake! Wheee!

Monday, July 28, 2008

Shooter

In the past several months I've skipped over a number of rant-worthy issues. I can't let this one go by without comment though:

Accused shooter hated liberals, expected to be killed

Traitorous right-wing warmongers have declared a "Culture War" on U.S. soil against American citizens.

These instigators have been recruiting with the traditional Christian war-call of "We are the victims!", "THEY are Godless Unrepentant Sinners!", and "Think of the Children!" and anyone daring to express dissent becomes the enemy, treated as if they turned their back on God, Family, Marriage, Country and Decency.

This war is waged with ceaseless vilification of the "Left", the "Liberal Media", the "Gays", the "Immigrants" (legal or not), those "Equal Opportunists putting White Men out of jobs", the "Feminazis", and the "welfare loving Democrats", and any other non-party-line-carrying scapegoat. Regardless of how illogical and implausible the blame may be.

The slippery slope argument comes up again and again threatening that gay marriage will destroy existing marriages and lead to rampant beastiality, incest, pedophilia, ... (and possibly even necrophilia!).

I doubt this culture war crap has anything to do with ethics or morality. It's all about money, power, blame and political CYA. The trail isn't hard to follow:

The current "Economic Situation" (gas prices, foreclosures, weak dollar, national deficit, job losses, Iraq, Bin Laden at large, etc, etc, etc) has made some people very rich and their political accomplices very powerful. The culture war is their get-away plan, so they can sneak off quietly with their ill-gotten gains and let someone else take the fall.

They are (and/or have paid off) big media networks to furtively and irrationally shift the blame onto a bunch of scapegoats and pad with so much substanceless fluff and redherrings that viewers are overwhelmed and bamboozled by it all.

And what better demographic to take the fall than those that usually vote AGAINST the corrupt reigio/corporate/military/government combination known as the American Fascist Party. (I mean the Republicans.)

Godwin's Law states "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.") ... but I can't help myself here. I do see several parallels between the vilification of the Jews in Nazi Germany... and the vilification of Gays and "the Left" in the U.S.. It is the dissimiarities that are important here though. The right-wing movers-and-shakers have learned one lesson that Hitler missed:

"An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it." -- James Lovelock

Or, paraphrased for politics: "A living scapegoat can carry more blame." -- me.

Of course, not everyone got the non-violence memo. Some idiots are so steeped in the sewage spewed by the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, and Rush Limbaugh that they think shooting up a church is a great way to go out in a heroic blaze of glory. [edit: revealed today: books by O'Reilly, Savage and Sean Hannity were found in this guys house as well]

I'm quite certain that as this stupid "Culture War" continues, there will be more hate crimes and fatalities perpetrated by idiots that buy into the madness.

Gays can't retaliate with violence, we're inherently too peaceful. We haven't the majority/massive numbers for a Ghandi-esque strategy of passive resistence. Nor do we have the enduring organization for a masonic-style secret government order. (so much for that Gay Agenda).

Our weapons? Hollywood, a little extra discretionary income, and the Bush-enfeebled Judicial System. Faaantastic. :(

The only way to end this stupid culture war is to make it considerably unprofitable to those waging it.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

SD Comic Con 2008

Well, today was the day. Procrastination gypped me out of a 4 day pass, so today was it for me. Curiously enough, I think things worked out better this way. I got there earlier, found my favorites and kept moving.

Various memories of the day:
  • One of my favorite artists, Colleen Duran, was here for the first time in several years.
  • Phil Foglio, has a new Girl Genius book out... Woot!
  • Will Wright (of TheSims fame) gave a fantastic (albeit veryfastwithoutstoppingtobreathe) talk on the insanely anticipated new game Spore, which left even jaded folks like me salivating. He showed some of the "late game play" aspects, as well as a gallery of some of the most creative/bizarre creature submissions from folks... someone even created a "companion cube" style creature... ha! He pointed out that it took users on the internet only 18 days to create a number of species roughly equivalent to how many known species inhabit the earth...
  • Got to the City of Heroes booth in time for an in-world "special disguise power"... oh yeah, and an invite to a party Saturday night. (me? party? hrm.)
  • Saw the new up-coming "Ghostbusters" game, which was drawing a lot of attention.
  • Worn out from canvasing the exhibition floor, I sat through both Capcom's "Street Fighter IV" session (because it was in the room that would have HBO's "True Blood" panel, both of which paled in comparison to Will Wright's session).
  • Saw costumes galore, but the ones that got the biggest chuckle out of me were: A plushie "headcrab" (from "Half Life 2") and another guy in a suit&ski-mask with a paper cut-out mask strapped to his face that looked like a distinctive texan engineer from Team Fortress 2. "Hey! That Engineer's a SPY!"
Anyway... sad that I only had one day at the con, but still feeling rather satisfied.

Up next: A quick review of some utterly absurd things recently seen for sale.

Befuddlement of the day: "They" say that 666 is the number of the beast. Shouldn't that be DCLXVI instead? Or do biblical warnings use Arabic numerals, then switch to Roman numerals, and then switch back to Arabic numerals? Hrm.