doqz

I am watching Three Men and a Baby. And I am not ashamed.

Much.

'Mong' in Mongolia stands for 'bravery.'

Mongolia = The Land of the Brave.

The best thing by far about the civil wars (and, really there's so many to choose from) is that the bloody chaos and mere anarchy allow the best and the brightest to rise to the top. And then strut around a little waving the severed heads of their enemies.

Russian Civil War is a perfect example, because it gave the world The Mad Baron.

Seriously, as soon as you get a nickname with a 'baron' in it, it's like an automatic seal of cooletude. But if you also manage to sneak 'mad' in it somehow, you never have to worry about the job market again.

Anyway. There was this guy named, saddled with the usual Teutonicly innocuous moniker of Robert Nicholaus Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg.

Naturally the family who would name a child in such a fashion decided to relocate to Russia. Their plans for Hollywood stardom failed so there was a limited range of options as to a location which would accept their naming eccentricities and the propensity of their son to engage in his favorite pastime of getting drunk and going after his fellow military cadets with pool cues, random furniture and unsuspecting children. And sometimes play marco-polo with a gun. Which by the way makes way more sense to me that the Russian Roulette...

Also the clan reputation in Austria has been going steadily downhill for the last thousand years or, what with their clan's insistence on producing psychopathic serial killers.

And also a pirate.

So Russian Empire it was.

And what do you know, no sooner than little Roman grows up, Russia finds herself in the war with Japan. So like any self-respecting sociopath our hero drops everything and gets himself assigned to the front in order to finally solve the age old question of Pirates vs. Samurais.

During some point in the course of all this he also gets smacked in the head with a saber. The opinions differ whether it was the ninjas who tried to brain him or his own brother-officers. The history is pretty confident, however, that everyone was fairly equally bummed out when he pulled through.

Shockingly a blow to the head with a sharp object failed to improve Sternberg's mental stability to any perceptible degree.

So he did what any homicidal lunatic naturally does at some point in the their life. He converted to Buddhism.

Yep. Gathered together a bunch of friends (mostly the Cossacks and local Mongol tribesmen imbued with the same sort of pacifistic spirit) and established the Order of Militant Buddhism. The bylaws called for sexual abstinence and strict adherence to the copious regimen of hallucinogen consumption.

True story.

In the next dozen years he was slightly distracted by the First World war and nothing much is known about him - until he reappears back in Siberia during the Civil War.

With a modest plan of conquering Asia and uniting Russia and China under the enlightened regime of Militant Buddhism.

Naturally if you want to conquer Russia and China you start with Mongolia. Which he promptly did, slaughtering his way through the local Chinese garrison and pretty much everyone who stood in his way.

Than he took a little breather to enjoy life, gang-rape the majority of the local population (apparently the by-laws got changed by now. Although, apparently not the staggering level of the opium consumption).

At this point he also start building a bit of the reputation and gathering a small dossier of nicknames. Mad Baron of course, also the Bloody Baron. The Mongols - being easily impressionable as they are - decided that he was Tzakan Burkhan, the reincarnated God of War and the Dalai Llama, very excited about this whole platform of massacring the Chinese in job lots, approvingly dabbed him God of Wrath and the Most Puissant Defender Of Buddhist Values.

True story.

That was fun but there's just so much of rapine, crucifixions and drinking blood and milk of of YOUR ENEMIES SKULLS that you can do before it's time to go back to work.

The work inevitably being the extermination of the ancient enemies of the Buddhist faith - the Jews. It takes a fucking Russo-German to find Jews to kill in Mongolia, but he managed it.

Then he invaded Russia.

As you do.

It didn't go very well, so he tried again. At which point his surviving army lynched him. However, he terrified the Mongols to the degree of total loss of bowel control so they couldn't quite bring themselves to actually kill him. Instead they staked him out in the middle of the Gobi. Where he survived, apparently living on pure hate and his bodily reserves of opium and mescaline, for days, until the local Red Army unit run into him. At which point he cursed all of them and declared himself to be the rightful ruler of all Asia and they better untie him right now or he going to do all sort of horribly entertaining things to them.

Long story short he spent the next month of his life being carted around most of Central Asia in a cage to prove to the populace that he was really, really, for true this time, de-harmcified. He used the opportunity to continue campaigning on the slogans of - I am going to kill all of you to the 9th generation and you fuckers have no idea who you are messing with.

When they finally shot him with enough lead to sink a small battleship, he promised that this wasn't the last they heard of the clan of Ungern-Sternbergs.

Sort of anti-climatically, however, the only other famous descendant of the clan was a Finnish architect. Not that the Finnish architecture isn't quietly horrifying in its own way, I guess, but still - kinda a rip off.

On the bright side the capital of Mongolia is still named after the guy that captured the Baron.

Ahhh, good times.

A long while back when I posted on the climate change debate, I said that one of the more frustrating things about the entire issue was the difficulty of finding unbiased scientific analysis.

Somebody hacked email serves of a prominent climate research center and made the pirated exchanges public.

Wacky stuff and it makes for unpleasant reading.

To a large degree it validates late Michael Crichton. He is usually mis-identified as having been an opponent of the man-made global warming claim. He might have been - but not in the most famous essay of his on the topic. Aliens Cause Global Warming was concerned with the increased role of politics in scientific endeavor over the last 30 years. It's a good read - http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html

The hacked emails show the supposed men of science consumed with a near religious fervor when discussing the opponents of their thesis:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones (the center's director) writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112102186.html?nav=hcmodule

The argument of the 'climate change deniers' lacking sufficient number of publications in the peer-review literature is one of the most frequent tactics used to strip them of authority on the subject, of course.

Worse, other emails suggest that the data was routinely falsified to bolster the case of the man-made climate change.

http://www.investigatemagazine.com/australia/latestissue.pdf

Hizb'allah's claim to now have a rocket arsenal capable of covering the entire territory of Israel has now been confirmed by the IDF. This of course means that the Israeli nuke reactors are now a potential target. And given that targeting practices of the glorious warriors of God are a little iffy, they don't even have to necessarily to try and hit the reactors.

'Oops' is about to take on a whole new definition....

It's a mediocre movie with a questionable premise (am of the opinion that Logan's origins should have never been defined. Just continue push it back consistently, pulling out an occasional nemesis, lover or a daughter as is convenient for the story. As far as I am concerned there should be a random flashback of him beating the crap out of Conan in a bar brawl)

That all aside, I deeply respect the film's decision to give Remy a hat. R e s p e c t.



I came at X-Men by the way of Saturday morning cartoons, and Gambit was definitely my favorite. Logan grew on me over time - which is kinda weird. Usually he tends to be popular with 14 year olds who quite enjoy growing out of liking him and become fans of 'complicated' characters staring soulfully at them from the latest Gaiman's issue.

And the only book by Gaiman I ever liked was Neverwhere. Possibly because Carabas reminds me of Remy....

The guy running against McCain in Arizona GOP primary is within the margin of error.

Kinda reminds me of Lieberman - one month you are the VP candidate, the next purged out of the party.

Also - Catastrophic Server Failure aka Lynch the Tech (These guys need to stop watching Office Space yesterday)

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574539581994054014.html

Poor deluded wretch who knows not the Truth. He must be cleansed of the false consciousness that hath possessed him.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

Tom Wolfe is increasingly my favorite literary person. It's like God woke up one morning and punched Norman Mailer in the face. Repeatedly. "For you, America!"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/13/AR2009111302310.html

If you're a progressive like me, and you're upset by the Stupak amendment, which bars federally subsidized insurance from covering abortions, consider this: What if we had a single-payer health-care system and someone like Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin were running the country?

Many liberals remain angry and disappointed that single-payer legislation never stood a chance in Washington. To them, a government-run health-care system seemed an obvious way to put patients ahead of profits.

But a single-payer system would have put us at the mercy of whomever happened to take control of Washington. I'm very happy to have a public plan as an option. But since I don't know who will be in the White House in the years to come, I'm glad that government-run health care won't be the only game in town. If you're not happy about the Stupak amendment, imagine what other limits a conservative government could impose on our health care.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."

Going beyond that - the Stupak Amendment is clumsily written, in that it extends the limits on abortion coverage beyond those attached specifically to federal funding. Which is the sort of thing that happens when you rush a bill through Congress with no time given for deliberation or analysis of the text. Shocker.

"The recent shootings at Ft. Hood and the resignation of top Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh demonstrate how even our military officers are opposed to US strategy in Afghanistan."

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1695

Random pictures from Deviant Art:

Neon City Series by OmeN2501


Snatch by OmeN2501



Assassin by tahra


Fuchsiart

A long while back when I was still able to put words together that made actual thoughts instead of infernal incantation on the themes of the agency of subalterns within the dominant paradigm of the hegemonic discourse (.... I need a shower just typing that) someone came across a fic of mine and randomly illustrated it.




Man. Feedback is my favorite.

Christopher Walken does poetry reading of Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face.'