Cerebrate's Contemplations

So, Metaplace now lets you embed your virtual worlds into a web page, such as a blog, for ease of access or to integrate them more fully into your site.

So, just to try things out, here's Minarchia Square, a simple creation of mine as a "hub" world for further development, using principally existing furnishings:

I'm going to be AFK for a while getting lunch, but I'll be hanging out in there from 1:30 PM (Central) if any of y'all want to drop in. Metaplace account required, but you can sign up right from the world.

(See my review of the first of this series, Mistborn, here.)

Well, if you did just go back and re-read my Mistborn review, you'll see that I reserved judgement on committing to recommending the series up until I'd read The Well of Ascension, too.  (And I apologize if you've been hanging anxiously on my word before purchasing, because you've been hanging for quite some time now.) 

I no longer reserve judgement; we'll call this a recommended.  Goodness of characterization and plot continues, and most importantly, the plot in this one continues to grow seamlessly out of the events and worldbuilding we saw in the first novel - including, especially, the consequences of the characters' actions - and steers a nice course around traditional fantasy cliches to get to where it's going: Victory, Unfortunate Consequences Of.

Well worth reading.  I look forward to the third.

(See also Amy's review of this book here.)

Don't Say You Weren't Warned.

Is, one wonders, the reason that the Administration is siding with Mel Zelaya of Honduras in his Chavez-aided attempt to defy the Honduran constitution and the order of their Supreme Court that deposed him...

...that they really don't want to see a precedent set that a nation's military is allowed to remove would-be constitution-defying Socialist Dictators-for-Life?

(Well, no, I don't believe it.  I'm just amusing myself.  But seriously, guys, what the fuck?  What the fucking fuck?  Why are we backing this tin-pot wanker against the rest of Honduras's goverment, its people, the rule of law, democracy, and all the rest of that good stuff?)

Just a couple of quick snapshots taken in-world recently...

SL6B Opening Keynote

Taken right at the start of SL6B.  I like Philip Linden's alpha-made car, don't you?

(Yes, some of the people in the background hadn't fully rezzed yet when I took this. Lag was INSANE.)

Traffic Lights on Zindra

Whatever you may think of the rest of the build (and the unfortunate way in which the moles laid out the roads along sim crossings, and those bizarre pop-up traffic barriers to ameliorate that), the traffic lights themselves are kind of cool.

I'm sorely tempted to steal the design for traffic lights in my own pet universe...

Looks like I was right in my first theory when I booklogged Tempest.  It's not general series malaise.

Aaron Allston once again delivers very satisfying Star Wars EU product.

(Edited: As a side note, doesn't the cover picture look to you as if Leia's about to slice her own arm off with that lightsaber?)

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it."
    -- H.L. Mencken

And now we return to a previously visited universe once again with The Summer Queen, the sequel to the (previously-read and booklogged here; Amy's booklog here) The Snow Queen.

This, alas, isn't quite as good as The Snow Queen.  By all rights, it ought to be; it continues fairly seamlessly the plot of The Snow Queen, bifurcated now with Moon Dawntreader continuing her work on Tiamat to grow her world to be able to deal with the Hegemony on more equal terms when they return; and the intrigues in the Hegemony when the secret of starflight is rediscovered enabling them to return much sooner, and the consequences of these actions playing out.

It broadens the scale of the action considerably over The Snow Queen, revealing the secrets behind the mers and the water of life, the intrigues of the Hegemony, and the plotters behind the scenes remaining from Survey, descended from an institution of the old, fallen Empire (about whose fall, also, we learn more and how that ties in to current events).  And I think this is in part the problem.  I like a complex, sprawling book as much as the next chap, but in this case I think the author lost control of the complexity somewhere along the line, and that shows.

Not that it's not a good book; it is certainly that.  But this does hold it back that little bit from being a great book.

Because when a country with the generally-considered reasonably impeccable democratic credentials of, say, Australia elects a government that pulls this kind of illiberal crap:

Australian Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, has promised to extend Australia's proposed network-level content filtering regime to block games, online games, downloadable games, and websites that sell or allow download of games that are deemed not to be suitable for a 15-year-old audience.

(Well, now, it's nice to know what the government actually thinks of the maturity level of its citizens, eh?)

"Alongside child porn, bestiality, rape and extreme violence sites, the list also includes a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

Other Australian sites on the list are canteens.com.au ("Tuckshop and Canteen Management Consultants") and animal carers MaroochyBoardingKennels.com.au.

The dentist, Dr John Golbrani, was furious when contacted to inform him that his site, dentaldistinction.com.au, appeared on the blacklist." - Sydney Morning Herald

...well, then, the democratic problem that governments inevitably end up whoring themselves out to special interests - meaning, lefties, not only big bad big business, but every activist jackass with an axe to grind - is thrown into sharp relief.  And the arguments for libertarianism take on a new immediacy.

As does the argument for hanging statists from lampposts, but I probably can't say that in Australia any more...

As a brief prefatory note, status of Booklog Pile == 15 books in queue.  That's the two I didn't get done before leaving the country (Partners in Necessity and The Summer Queen); the eleven I read while travelling (Exile, The Well of Ascension, King of Foxes, The City of Gold and Lead, A Secret Atlas, The Heir Apparent, By Schism Rent Asunder, The Dragon Reborn, The Neutronium Alchemist (I and II), and Grantville Gazette II); and the two I finished since we returned (Perelandra and Coot Club).  I am going to be booklogging well into next month just to work the pile down a bit, methinks.

At least I have some other things to talk about in the middle of it all.

Anyway, to the deed, and to the current booklog.  It's back to the Liaden Universe for me with Partners in Necessity.  This is an omnibus of the original three books published in said universe (Agent of Change / Conflict of Honors / Carpe Diem).

Those of you paying attention will realize that I read one of these already, namely Agent of Change, which we have as a separate mass-market paperback (booklogged here).  Well, I went right ahead and read it again as part of the omnibus.  Why?  Because I think it's that good.

The worldbuilding (again, with a special note to social worldbuilding), plotting, and characterization (with special notes to well-done romance and other relationships between characters and their development through the plot) continues to be excellent.  And as one additional thing to note, good use of the worldbuilding that both requires and permits you to figure out the whos and whats and whys and hows from information garnered as you go along, rather than smacking you in the face with great gobbets of exposition.  And, simply, let me put it this way: these are books and characters that it's hard to fail to want to spend time in the company of.

I'm really quite glad that the next in the series, Plan B, is only twelve down my to-read queue as of now.

Superlatively recommended.

As has been pointed out to me, I may well have confused some of my readers (US and presumably elsewhere) in the previous post by use of the rather English (and possibly Commonwealth; I know not) phrasing "The man has form".

For those not familiar with this usage, read - in effect - "The man has a record on this".

(For those interested in the actual language, it's originally - I believe, and as I don't gamble or follow horse racing myself, pray forgive any errors in the explanation below - a horse-racing/betting metaphor.

There is published, each day, the "daily racing form", summarizing the races going on that day and providing information about them, which includes information about how the horses in that day's race performed in their previous races, from which - goes the theory - bettors can extrapolate how they will perform today.

Even if the regime gives in and the happy democracy fairies install Mousavi, I heartily predict that things will continue to suck.

The man has form, people, from the 1980s, during which he was Prime Minister of Iran, including governing in a notably authoritarian manner, presiding over some of the lovelier tactics of the Iran-Iraq War ("let's stampede children over the minefield!"), and being very buddy-buddy with our old friend Khomeini.

He may be slightly less nuts than Ahmedinejad, not that that would be hard, but whatever promises he may make in his platform, his history is not that of a reformer.  It takes an incredible amount of naive optimism to believe that he's suddenly turned around his views and actually means the nice promises he makes.

An even slightly cynical reading suggests that his intentions are much more aligned with his statement that "the issue of non-compliance with the Iranian rules and regulations is the biggest problem that the country is currently faced with".  I'm quite sure that he does want to transfer law enforcement away from the Supreme Leader and have it answer to him, instead, and to disband the 'morality police'; after all, that would be in keeping with his authoritarian tendencies; having power in his hands, not anyone else's.

In short, if Mousavi comes out on top, we can expect perhaps a little less "theo" and a little more "fascism" in Iranian theofascism; but for the most part, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  And either way, bloody suppression or success, Iran will remain the kind of barbaric shithole of a country in which teenage girls are stoned to death for the heinous crime of having been raped.

A great victory for democracy, indeed.

Well, normally I hate to go en masse, but seeing as I'm about to leave the country for a week and will probably not have much time to booklog - and many of these have waited long enough - I'm going to attempt to clear a bunch of the backlog all in one go.  Fortunately, most of the backlog is parts-of-series books, so with some luck, the remainder of the series will make up for the inadequacies of booklogging in a hurry.

Downbelow Station, C. J. Cherryh

And here we have my first venture into the Alliance-Union universe, with what I understand to be the first in publication order.  (Well, technically, I suppose, the Chanur series was my first venture into the universe, but since those take place way off on the other side of Earth, they're not significantly causally connected to this series.

Alas, this has been backlogged too long for me to comment in as much detail as I might like, but I do recommend it: high points for me being Cherryh's usual excellent aliens, worldbuilding relatively high up the scale of SF hardness, and a solid plot that emerges logically from the five-sided political and economic background, while still being essentially character-driven.

Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde

You need a very high tolerance for puns. And wordplay in general. And sheer surreality of set, plot, and everything else.  And metafictional and metatextual devices.

And you should have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of literary trivia and general random factlets.

But assuming all that, it's awesome.

Words and Rules, Stephen Pinker

Here's the next one in my non-fiction reading series, which I added to my list after enjoying The Stuff of Thought so much.  As you can imagine, I recommend it to a fairly similar group of people as those to whom I recommended that book.

It doesn't cover nearly so much territory as The Stuff of Thought, per se, but looks in much greater depth at just one particular aspect of language, regular and irregular verbs and how they got that way, and in so doing covers a very large amount of territory in linguistics and cognitive science both.

And so, therefore, highly recommended to dabblers in, or the curious about, either or both of those.

Crystal Gorge, David & Leigh Eddings

I know they say "speak no ill of the dead", and so therefore I shall try and refrain from ripping in to this as much as might, but good grief, people.  If you remember my review of the earlier books in the series, The Elder Gods, and especially the one immediately before this, The Treasured One, you might not think it was possible to go downhill from there.

Oh, it's possible.  There is no meat on this skeleton any more.  This book's simply awful.  And not in any more subtle way than just plain bad writing.

You know, at some point far down my queue - since I still have the last one of this series to read, and yes, I will, since there are more busy periods coming up and it would be a shame, completism-wise, to be one book short of the man's entire opus - once I have the bad taste of these out of my brain, I'm going to go back and read some earlier Eddings from before the brain eater got him, maybe the Elenium and Tamuli.  Still fluff, realistically speaking, but decently-written fluff.

Chronicles of Corum, Michael Moorcock

Back to the sword-and-sorcery with Michael Moorcock, and the sequel omnibus to the Swords Trilogy (this one collecting The Bull and The Spear, The Oak and The Ram, and The Sword and The Stallion.).

In which Corum skips a long way down the timeline to once again save the human - well, "Mabden" - race, after the death of his human lover and much time to sink into apathy and heroic deeds to start to look good again, the Mabden of Lwyn-an-Esh have evolved into proto-Celts (given the names, and that the Big Bad is now the Cold Folk, also known as the Fhoi Myore), and Humans Are Still Bastards, inasmuch as nsgre gurl hfr uvz gb jva gurve jne, gur Znoqra xvyy Pbehz, be engure, unir uvf arj ybir qb vg, gb rafher gur jbeyq vf "serr bs nyy fbeprel naq nyy qrzvtbqf".

Again, recommended, for those who like this type of fantasy.

Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium, Sandy Mitchell

So why, you might well ask, given my expressed taste in books and universes, am I reading a Warhammer 40,000 spin-off. given that it's the ultimate Crapsack World, and books set in it tend to be grinding splatterfest slaughter-porn with optional cosmic horror-fu?  Which, for those of you who are new here, is not to my taste at all.

Well, because this one isn't.  Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium (an omnibus which collects the first three of the currently six novels and three of the short stories) uses the same setting to produce a darkly humorous Harry Flashman IN SPACE!

And does so without turning the whole thing into a farce, too.

Thank you, TV Tropes, for revealing the awesomeness that lurks in this unlikely spot.

And now, though there are two books left on the booklogging pile, I must go prepare to leave, so that's all for now, folks.

(This booklogging is out of order, but I wanted to get it down while I remember all the details.)

So, I was a little dubious about Saturn's Children when I first heard it described, and then once I started reading it I concluded in fairly short order that I was right: Stross pastiching Friday in specific and late-period (i.e., post-brain-eater) Heinlein in general feels weird and, in general, does not quite synergise right for my brain.

Plus, one of the things that tends to prove irritating about Stross's books in general is that he develops one or two annoying tics per book minimum and harps on them Anviliciously.  In this case, the annoying tic is his 'no space for you, meat people!' theme, and anvilicious doesn't even begin to describe it.

But those are minor compared with the big thing, which is that this book deserves a whole page to itself under Humans Are Bastards.  In fact, let's go ahead and call it what it is, which is more along the lines of Humans Are The Worst Filth In The Entire Universe, Quite Possibly, And Deserved Not Only Extinction But Individually Handcrafted Maximally Horrible Fates.  To describe exactly why would be a tremendous spoiler, so here it is anyway, under rot13:

Gb fgneg jvgu, uhznavgl (juvpu unf cnffrq vagb rkgvapgvba) va guvf fpranevb pna'g qrirybc NV.  Fb, gb fhofgvghgr sbe vg va gurve ebobgf, gurl ohvyq znpuvarel gung vf onfvpnyyl rdhvinyrag gb gur uhzna oenva; qvssrerag uneqjner, ohg pbzchgngvbanyyl rdhvinyrag.  Fb gurl fgneg bhg nf onovrf, naq lbh unir gb envfr gurz guebhtu n frevrf bs obqvrf.

Qenjonpx: univat onfvpnyyl uhzna zvaqf, gurl'er whfg nf zhpu crbcyr nf zrng-oenvarq crbcyr.  Ohg gurl qvqa'g jnag crbcyr, gurl jnagrq fynirf, fb gurl svqqyrq jvgu gurve vafgvapgf naq sbhaq jnlf gb uneq-pbqr Nfvzbivna cebgrpg-naq-borl-hf ynjf vagb gurz.

Rkprcg gung, orvat uhzna-yvxr crbcyr haqrearngu, gurl graq gb punsr ng gung, naq zvtug ybbx sbe ybbcubyrf naq/be svaq jnlf gb fhoireg guvf uneq-pbqvat.  Fb, gur uhznaf orvat gur ybiryl crbcyr gurl ner, naq yvxr nyy fyniref, cnenabvq nobhg gur cbffvovyvgl bs eribyg, qrpvqrq gung nf gur svany fgrc bs gurve pbaqvgvbavat cebprff, gurl'er tbvat gb erfbeg gb tbbq byq-snfuvbarq fynir-oernxvat grpuavdhrf.

Gbc bs gung yvfg (ornevat va zvaq gung jr'er cevznevyl gnyxvat nobhg naqebvqf naq tlabvqf urer): encr.

...I feel rather nauseated.

The more so because I run into enough daily ethical fail and goddamned meat-bigots that I can't immediately write it off as implausible.

You know, I have believed since well before the last election that now-President Obama was, essentially, a pragmatist weasel in the Blairite mode, and his minions likewise, and that as soon as he actually got into power, a lot of his "useful idiot" constituencies would find their interests ignored, promises to them quietly forgotten or explicitly revealed never to have implicitly happened, and that the 'phones in the White House would be ringing off the hook whenever they tried to call.  I mean, the ladder that got you where you are is useful, but you don't owe your ladder anything, right?

This, on the other hand, is a level of screw-your-ladder that I didn't expect:

We just got the brief from reader Lavi Soloway. It's pretty despicable, and gratuitously homophobic. It reads as if it were written by one of George Bush's top political appointees. I cannot state strongly enough how damaging this brief is to us. Obama didn't just argue a technicality about the case, he argued that DOMA is reasonable. That DOMA is constitutional. That DOMA wasn't motivated by any anti-gay animus. He argued why our Supreme Court victories in Roemer and Lawrence shouldn't be interpreted to give us rights in any other area (which hurts us in countless other cases and battles). He argued that DOMA doesn't discriminate against us because it also discriminates about straight unmarried couples (ignoring the fact that they can get married and we can't).

He actually argued that the courts shouldn't consider Loving v. Virginia, the miscegenation case in which the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to ban interracial marriages, when looking at gay civil rights cases. He told the court, in essence, that blacks deserve more civil rights than gays, that our civil rights are not on the same level.

And before Obama claims he didn't have a choice, he had a choice. Bush, Reagan and Clinton all filed briefs in court opposing current federal law as being unconstitutional (we'll be posting more about that later). Obama could have done the same. But instead he chose to defend DOMA, denigrate our civil rights, go back on his promises, and contradict his own statements that DOMA was "abhorrent." Folks, Obama's lawyers are even trying to diminish the impact of Roemer and Lawrence, our only two big Supreme Court victories. Obama is quite literally destroying our civil rights gains with this brief. He's taking us down for his own benefit.

In this morning's news feed...

From the Right, this, concerning the recent tragedy here in Wichita.

From the Left (unlinkable - after all, we do have some standards here - claques included), this.

There is not enough rope on the continent, goddamn it.  Well, that, and as a man of principle I do recognize that even the sewage has a right to speak without having to worry about the knotted bough of some sturdy oak, but the temptation, oh, the temptation.

(And if some whinger comes along complaining about 'eliminationism', well, don't bother commenting here.  I understand the ethical and legal obligations quite well enough, thank you so very much, and since I intend to abide by each, I make no apology for holding a preference for a universe without any of these sub-civilized excrescences in it.)

On a future Earth, regressed into pre-industry after an alien invasion, teenager escapes from attachment of mind-control device that keeps most humans docile, and flees hundreds of miles to join up, after adventures, with the surviving human resistance...

Sounds terribly hackneyed, doesn't it?  And yet, it's anything but.  Perhaps being written back in 1967, before such plots became the staples of more than a few YA books and any amount of bad fan-fic helps, but I suspect it it more that is really well written.  Our protagonist, his friends, and the people he meets on his journey are well-drawn characters, the book is fast-paced and gripping, the setting is a realistic conception of a regressed, alien-dominated world, and perhaps most importantly, the plot both makes sense and neither underestimates/infantilizes the characters nor overestimates the capabilities and wisdom of people of that age, both during the course of the book and when they finally reach the stronghold of free men.

Excellent read.  I look forward to the next in the trilogy, The City of Gold and Lead.

I've been meaning to write this entry for a while.  Well, ever since I heard that Miriel (the store, and the sim, run by the eponymous Miriel Enfield) was closing in the next few weeks, anyway, which unfortunately came right before I was away for a while, and then returned to a very busy week.  I should count myself lucky, I think, that the shorter end of the range wasn't right, and that it's still there for now.

Now, I don't know the owner, myself.  If I recall correctly, I've never even spoken to her except for one fortuitous exchange on the LiveJournal second_lifers community concerning the general awesomeness of her build on the aforementioned sim.  Which I call fortuitous simply because it let me right to her store.

Which, as those who know it know, sells what I consider to unquestionably be the best eyes (especially), and the best jewelry, which I've seen for sale anywhere in SL.  Her hair's no slouch, either.

Which brings me to what is certainly one of the points of this post, which is to encourage you to go, log in RIGHT NOW, teleport yourself straight away to Miriel (135,64,33), and go and buy up everything that strikes your fancy before you CAN'T.  That's what I spent last Friday doing, buying out my entire wish-list, in the course of which I burnt through a rather heaping pile of Lindens in a very short time, and yes, I regret NOTHING.

And then, while you're at it, just take a walk around the Miriel sim, because this:

...is one of the best-realized forest settings I've seen around the grid, too.  As are the other buildings on the sim, the setting for the "The Golden Cage" treasure-hunt.  (Alas, if only I didn't appear to suck at solving mysteries.)

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with the remainder of this post, except perhaps to say that her sim as well as her work for sale on it was also a thing of beauty, and will be sorely missed when it goes.  And, for what it's worth, to say thank you to her for giving it to us for the last few years.

I shall look forward hopefully to seeing what she may do in the future.

And now another out-of-sequence booklogging, as I come to the other survival-themed LibraryThing EarlyReviwers book I've received recently (as mentioned in my earlier review of The Survivors Club).

This is, as is evident immediately, a much more practical book than the former (which, in fairness, doesn't claim to be except in the blurb), focused on outdoor survival.  And, of course, I was predisposed to like it, because the publisher is Dorling Kindersley, who I know from experience with many of their books in the past put a great deal of effort into design to make their books both cross-informative and easy to absorb information from, and I generally like the results.  It also carries the imprimatur of the Boy Scouts, which is generally a good sign when this type of material is being covered.

Fortunately, the contents justify my predisposition, being very well-written, comprehensive (for multiple areas of the world, and going beyond the area of pure survival into how to survive well, and covering questions such as the use of pack animals), absolutely accurate in those areas (admittedly rather limited) in which I have knowledge, and in other ways generally solid.

I have only two quibbles with the book overall, in fact:

The first is minor and probably insoluble while maintaining those other qualities which I like about the book, in presentation and comprehensiveness: it's a chunky hardback, which form factor is not the most convenient for carrying with you in situations where you might expect to need the contents.  But then, since you really ought to study and practice the relevant techniques before heading off into the wilds anyway, it's a minor quibble at best.

The second is taken from page 21, in which the band of the Titanic playing on while the ship sank is given as an example of irrational behavior in a survival situation, which I do think is a grossly unfair mischaracterization of their action; but, then, what can one expect in our resolutely unheroic age?

And now the first part of my go-back-and-catch-up-with-Feist experiment, as I mentioned back in the day when I booklogged Rides a Dread Legion, which the LibraryThing EarlyReviewers program was good enough to send me.  At the time, I mentioned that the Amazon reviews suggested that the post-Serpentwar books weren't all that great, but since Rides a Dread Legion was good - and makes extensive backreferences here - I'd give them a go and see what I thought.

Well, having read this, yeah, they were at least partly right.  It's not as strong as what I had previously considered "mature" Feist.  At least part of that is because - and this is a good point for the book in other ways - it introduces a new protagonist from the ground up, a new region of the world (the Eastern Kingdoms, separate from the Kingdom of the Isles setting he's used previously), and a new culture separate from both of those, the tribal Orosini, to whom the protagonist belongs.  Which are well enough done to be of interest.

That also said, Magician and Shadow of a Dark Queen were also first books with a lot to introduce, and they didn't suffer from this "first-book syndrome" quite so markedly.

This all being said, it's still better than EFP, and even the first-book syndrome is mostly marked because he hasn't had the problem before; goodness knows, there's lots of fantasy out there in which I wouldn't even bother mentioning it, since they all have it.  Maybe not the greatest on its own, but I'm willing to read on and see where it goes.

Despite disliking the intent, result, and ethical theory of Proposition 8, I find myself at the moment looking upon the California Supreme Court with some grudging admiration.

(Full disclosure: I cannot, in all honesty, count myself fully on the other side, since I feel that it - the conventional view of gay marriage - concedes entirely too much to the statist paradigm.  I have come to consider that for people to be required to seek written permission from their owners political masters the State to validate their relationship is a damned impertinence, and thus seek the privatization of marriage entirely, leaving behind only some form contracts and a truncated family law system intended solely to protect the rights of minor children against negligent parenting.  The rest is between the couple, their god (if any), and the law of contracts.

Nevertheless, without repeating old arguments, something is better than nothing.)

But yes, admiration.  As reprehensible as the proposition which they affirmed might be from the perspective of personal liberties (and as sympathetic as I might be, deontologically, for the inalienable rights argument advanced by the CA Attorney General, Jerry Brown), I cannot but believe that it was the correct position to take considered from the point of view of the rule of law.

While in this case it has produced unfortunate results - driven, I dare say, by the combination of the concentration of ideologues and lunatics from all parts of the spectrum to be found in areas of the State of California, coupled with the unfortunate legal history (as of 1911) that makes it possible to amend the California Constitution by not much more than breathing on it...

(And for anyone who wants to challenge me on that point, I suggest Googling up and reading through the California Constitution, and seeing just how much crap has been wedged into it over the years; it's even worse than the EU Constitution draft, and that's saying something.)

- the rule of law is so very essential to a civilized society, as both Thomas Paine and John Adams took the trouble to note at the foundation of ours, and the consequences of using this general case upon a technical point (the difference between an amendment and a revision) to address a specific point so unforseeably widespread -

(Although I take a further moment to note quite how appalling I consider the note in the court's view that "the expansive natural-rights jurisprudence of the mid-19th century has long been discredited" - although acknowledging that my hard-line view of unalienable natural rights is not one embodied in our present law - and is even less credit to the California Republicans that they were willing to argue along those lines; for shame, sirs!)

- that I really can't argue that their technical decision was incorrect despite said results.  I note a footnote: "As one legal commentator has explained: 'To empower the courts not simply to review the procedures whereby amendments were adopted but also to void amendments on the basis of their substantive content would surely threaten the notion of a government founded on the consent of the governed.'"  The rule, in short, of men rather than the rule of law, and things did not work so well when last that notion was popular.

And given that they had to know, given the nature of California, what they had to work with, and exactly how much of a shitstorm they'd be drawing down on their heads by doing it, one must really credit the California Supreme Court with not picking the easy make-shit-up option and upholding the rule of law.

Even when the results are unfavorable.

Granted, I haven't checked personally, but I remain confident that somewhere in this great and populous nation of ours is a judge who meets the Administration's political requirements by being (a) female, (b) non-Caucasian minority, and (c) qualified, and yet who also understands (d) the separation of powers, (e) the rule of law, and particularly equal protection, and (f) who is not, per her own public statements, mired in the kind of subjectivist epistemology and racist (and probably sexist) identity-politics which is absolutely antithetical to (e).

Why can't we nominate that one, instead?

(See Amy's review of this book here.)

We pause now for a torrent of unqualified praise, much like last time (The Lost Steersman) and the time before that (The Steerswoman's Road).

No, seriously.  I could not love these books more if I tried.  As both of us have said, repeatedly, the worldbuilding (which hits my personal reader's sweet-spot perfectly; the ideas, yes, the delicious ideas!), plotting and characterization is all Excellent.  The device used (see the former-mentioned entry above for details, spoiler-coated for your protection) is among the best implementations of it I've seen done, if not the best.  Watching the protagonists discover the workings of their world and solve their problems over the course of these books has been an utter delight.

The only even slight complaint I have is that books beyond this point have not yet been published, and so I have to wait for more!

Impossibly highly recommended.  Exospherically recommended.  Go out and buy them all RIGHT NOW.

...to one of our legislatures.

Because if this is anything to go by (hat tip: Silmaril), I think I have a decent chance of getting a proposed amendment reading:

"Any member of this House who shall have voted for this amendment shall be imprisoned for not less than ten years or pay a fine not less than $10,000,000, inasmuch as their incompetence or laziness in comprehending the legislation they vote for constitutes a betrayal of the public trust."

...through.

And then I should be mightily amused, which is really enough justification in itself, notwithstanding the benefits to the actual practice of representative democracy.

So, I picked this trilogy-opener up recently, from a background of not having read much Known Space apart from the Ringworld series.  Nonetheless, I was rather fascinated with Puppeteer psychology from that, and the prospect of an entire book set in a Puppeteer culture was thus interesting to me.

Fortunately, it turns out that this book, and presumably this trilogy, works perfectly well as a stand-alone, so that works out well.  And Fleet of Worlds doesn't disappoint, with Puppeteer politicking and meddling in other peoples' cultures, scouting for threats ahead of the eponymous Fleet of Worlds (okay, really, not a spoiler considering how long we've known about it for), and the human Colonists integrated into Puppeteer society discovering their origins woven into a single overarching plot.

Looking forward to seeing how it develops in the next two volumes, which really is all you can ask for from an opening book, I suppose.  Recommended, if you enjoy the Known Space universe; if not, you may want to read some of the older books first to fill in background which, while not strictly necessary, is certainly useful.

...why one would post an argument of the form, "there are only two reasons I can think of" in response to someone who has just offered a reason that isn't one of them:

1. Extremely limited mindset, bordering on retardation.
2. Straw-mannery.

Oh, awesomesauce.

I have seen this day - as those who follow my Twitter will know already - an advertisement pop up in my Adsense advertising bar from the Family Research Council, or the National Organization of Marriage, or one of those other organizations that's an unpleasant and indecent group of people even if you agree with them, and even more so if you don't.

This having caused such an explosion on LiveJournal recently, this can be considered something of an attempt to head a similar one off at the pass, should it recur and any of my readers here see it, because I plan on leaving it there.

It's something of a freedom of speech issue, basically, coupled with a personal laziness issue.  While obviously I can, as a private site-owner, censor my advertising all I want without actually violating anyone's freedom of speech, frankly, I don't see it as my problem to protect people from encountering ideas they don't like.

Nor am I thin-skinned enough to feel any great urge to block advertising from organizations just because I don't like them: goodness knows I've had advertising running from companies I've had disputes with, and activist groups I more or less despise on principle, and CAIR, and ACORN, and the Obama campaign, and good grief, the Republican and Democratic Parties, to pick some people whose moral worth is pretty much negative in my sight, and I've just let 'em all run.  If Stormfront and the American Nazi Party buy keywords that make 'em show up here, I'll let those run too.  Even the bloody Commies can have space if they pay for it.  The only ad I ever blocked was one that had actual malware on the other end, IIRC.

Don't send e-mail; deal with it.  Unsubscribe if you want to; given that my opinions are tested and demonstrated to offend absolutely everyone, you probably wouldn't have lasted long around here anyway.

---

On a more direct freedom of speech note, I here append, because a large amount of the howling and complaining and calling for boycotts in the LiveJournal case was quite clearly not because of the personal offense caused to those people, but because they thought that such opinions should not be expressed, period.  Well, you guys really shouldn't write e-mail, 'cause the answer you get back will not be polite.  If I don't see protecting people from ideas they don't like as something worth doing, just imagine what my views on people who think I'm obliged to protect other people from views they don't like (or that might warp their fragile little unenlightened minds) are.

I may, one day, if sufficiently irritated, start censoring things that sufficiently annoy me.  I will never start censoring things on request, because however bad the position advocated is, the sort of petty-minded censoriousness that demands the silencing of all opinions considered unpleasant or 'dangerous' is probably worse.

Alas, now, for a tragically inadequate review of The Rise of Endymion.  I had put it off since we had entered the quarterly busy period here just as it bubbled to the top of my booklog pile, thinking that it really deserved more attention than my tragically sleep-deprived brain could muster, and so now I find myself booklogging it sufficiently long after reading it that weakness of memory shall impair my writing instead.

Ah, well.

I am forced, thus, to generalize, even more so than I would do ordinarily for the sake of spoiler-avoidance.  I highly recommend this series, then (Endymion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Hyperion being the preceding works), for a multitude of reasons: for its well-realized setting, in the shape of the fallen Hegemony's rebirth as the Pax; for a good use of a non-linear timeline in the plot; for excellently drawn characters (and a special note here for the priest who maintains and demonstrates the virtues of his faith despite the massive corruption of the Church in this timeline); for a good portrayal of one possible clade of transhumans; for a multi-character exposition scene which seems, when reached, both necessary (if not inevitable) and fitting neatly into the plot, not just as infodump; and finally, for actually delivering a satisfying ending to a series which, I must admit, seemed increasingly unlikely to have one as the pages turned and the difficulty of delivering same seemed to increase.

I have a few more notes, but frankly, I can't make head nor tail of them in retrospect, so I guess I'll leave it there.

From a marvellous article, originally a lecture, by Mark Steyn (with which I cannot but agree unreservedly) comes today's quotation of the day, week, month, and quite possibly year:

"MY REMARKS are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire's great hero of the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die!" When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other--a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn't, they went into General Stark mode and cried "Let's roll!" But it's harder to maintain the "Live free or die!" spirit when you're facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. "Live free or die!" sounds like a battle cry: We'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it's something far less dramatic: It's a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die."

Been seeing this quotation bruited about a lot recently:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

And sometimes even with another:

"The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Both from Adam Smith, of course, as if they were some sort of refutation of free markets or even laissez-faire.

I sigh, because really, ladies and gentlemen, those of us who advocate for free markets have heard this already.  We've all read Wealth of Nations.  Your argument by quotation, charming although it is and ironic as you no doubt find it, fails through lack of extension, or rather, in failing to perceive that weakness of character and the corruptibility of mankind is not concentrated in the private sector.

Had we available as market overseers a choir of incorruptible angels, who could know each man's self-interest better than each himself, perfectly reconcile them in all ways without deception and conspiracy, and enforce their rulings, then you might be able to pull this trick off.

But we do not.

We have Congress and regulatory agencies staffed by perfectly mortal (and distinctly not perfectly moral) human beings just like the rest of us.  And then we set up their incentives interestingly via, in the latter case, low (and comparatively, necessarily so, for simple mathematical reasons) civil service salaries, and in the former, the necessity of a Congressman to somehow generate far more money than he's paid simply in order to keep his job, never mind live the lifestyle to which he'd like to become accustomed.  And then we expect the lot of them to resist the wiles of people with oodles of money to throw around.

And so corruption is endemic.

And since government possesses its wacky sovereign powers, and delegates them generously to regulators in order to permit them to regulate (without which, after all, they'd be pretty damned useless at regulating), and said general corruptible condition of people, extensive regulation of an industry doth afford its major players the most marvellous instrumentality for such conspiracy, whether by regulatory capture or even simply by buying as many Congressmen as they need to have the legislature see it their way.

(One would think that it would be easiest to buy Republicans to obtain subsidies and tax breaks, and buy Democrats to have your competitors regulated into oblivion, but it would seem that both parties are willing to offer either to anyone who can pony up the cash.)

I'm sure the assortment of technocrats, wonks and mavens who push regulatory solutions to this, that, and the other think they're protecting the public from the Evil Corporations.  Well, some of them, anyway.  Much of the time.

It's a shame that what they're actually doing is providing new and exciting opportunities for corruption and the general whoring-out of the powers of government to the biggest, most decadent and least scrupulous players in the marketplace, to the great detriment of their smaller competitors, the petit bourgeois, and the private individual.

But that's what happens when the always-fun synergy of hubris and idealism stops you from chasing your ideas to the end.

Yes, it's the inverse of this project.

That one took you out (well, ish) of Metaplace and into Second Life.  This one takes you out of Second Life (well, sort of), and into Metaplace, so with one of each you can commute back and forth all you want.

Configure it with world, place and anchor (or subset thereof), and it will launch Metaplace for you right out of SL.  (Well, modulo a couple of limitations; you need to have the SL viewer set to open web pages in an external browser, the internal one not being really adequate to support it, and due to LSL limitations, it can't actually log you out - but it does have an option to park you at your home location while you're elseworld.

Get it at my usual SLURL, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Strata/251/122/51, or on XStreetSL here https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1451196 .  Priced at L$100 to cover the free updates for the next couple of years in case anything changes that breaks it, but hey, it's still cheap, right?

Next step: chat mirroring between an SL parcel and a Metaplace world.