Is there anyone more pathetically deluded than Andrew Sullivan? The man is a gay, Catholic, Republican. I just want to grab him by his cheeks and scream in his face "Dude, you can be any two of those things as long as one of them isn't gay.". Sure, there are lots of gay Catholics, there are also lots of gay Nazis, oh wait, I forgot where I was going with this, probably some tendentious analogy comparing the Catholic Church and Nazism, perhaps pointing out the fact that the main leadership of the Nazi Party, Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Roehm were all from Bavaria or Austria, the most Catholic parts of die Europaische Deutschesprachelande, and hey, we have a Bavarian pope now. But never mind. Anyways, back to Sullivan, in his blog he writes:

We have a crisis of confidence in the war. Read Congressman Murtha's speech. (Hat tip: Rod.) He's no MoveOn lefty. The president and vice-president are fighting back on the issue of their alleged deception before the war. As I have written here, I believe that the WMD intelligence fiasco was an honest and forgivable mistake, not a conspiracy or pre-meditated deception.

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/

OK, let's say that there was no attempt to deceive the American people, everything was above the board, Bush and Cheney were genuinely freaked out and for once weren't thinking about their oil interests. Let's say that they were really freaked out by that whole Iraqi Mushroom Cloud meme. OK, fine, they've gotten us into a war which has caused thousands of lives and completely fucked up the middle east getting us into a quagmire that makes America's handling of the Vietnam War look like the most brilliant geo-political strategy since the creation of the British Empire.

Now the reason this is so sad and pathetic is that Sullivan has some glimmer of intelligence, that an uncomfortable iconoclasm puts him in the uncomfortable position of trying to balance his sexuality with his religious and political beliefs, and he's just using that intelligence to delude himself into believing that the motivations for some crimes just doesn't matter in the face of their consequences, and surely bringing a nation to war is one of these crimes.

If you have an ATI video card *DO NOT!*. I repeat *DO NOT* buy this game because the folks at Firaxis were apparently too busy shooting smack instead of testing the game with ATI video cards, so, if you have an ATI video card (which apparently aren't very common in Firaxis land) you can try to get the game to run after it errors out with a DirectX 9 initialization error by doing the following:

1) Uninstall the game

2) Delete the Civilization 4 folder from My Documents\My Games\

3) Renstall DirectX from the Civ 4 CD.

4) Uninstall your ATI video card drivers

5) Restart your system

5) Download the latest ATI video card drivers. Just download them, do not install them yet.

6) Reinstall Civ 4.

7) Attempt to launch Civ 4. When it fails install your new ATI video card drivers.

8) Reboot your system

9) At this point according to the Civ 4 website the game should work. It doesn't for me. If you look at the forums on civfanatics.com you can see that this isn't the only problem with this game, it's loaded with bugs that cause video card problems, random crashes, extremely slow performance and gameplay irregularities. Don't buy this game until Firaxis cleans up their act and releases some patches. Firaxis games are garbage, it's a real pity that Sid Meier has prostituted himself to them as it's pretty much destroyed his name as far as I'm concerned.

Based on the first 2 issues that we have so far. If you had to continue writing IC and thus get to shape the future of the DCU, what would you write?

a hot sex scene between Power Girl and SuperGirl.
Someone finally just blowing the Joker's head off, preferably some anonymous cop just gunning him down as he commits a crime.

Who would be the main villain behind it all?

Jim Shooter and Ambush Bug

Who would you kill?

The Power Company
The Outsiders
about half of the Teen Titans
Deathstroke, The Terminator
Jim Lee (A generic looking overmuscled character leaps out of the page, grabs a pen and stabs him in the eye, and then goes looking for John Byrne. Talk about breaking the fourth wall!)
Green Arrow (with a stake through his heart this time)
Green Lantern (Hal Jordan with a stake through his heart and his head cut off with his mouth stuffed with garlic and buried at a crossroads during a full moon and doesn't anyone STAY dead any more? And hey, maybe the bastard heros of the DC universe should spend some time trying to resurrect John Lennon, or Bill Hicks, who were unique and irreplaceable rather than a moron character whose claim to fame is that he's really good with a bow and arrow and a Green Lantern, of which there are thousands in the galaxy and a superior replacement on Earth in the form of Kyle Rayner. Yeah, what would I rather have if I were a hero in the DC Universe? Another album by Lennon another performance by Hicks, or some quality time with those two shrieking queens Hal Jordan and Ollie Queen.) Hmmm, somewhere I lost control of that parenthetical phrase.

Multiverse or no?

Mulitiverse, and there would be an evil universe where all of the good characters in our universe were bad in the the other universe and the only way you could tell them apart was by the fact that all of the bad characters (including the women) had sneering, pencil mustaches and goatees.

Who would be prominent characters after the crisis?

Superman and the crew of Star Trek, the old series. And there would be a crossover where the Enterprise travels back in time to stop the explosion of Krypton but can't. And then there could be another episode where Brainiac shrinks down the crew of the Enterprise like he shrunk down the bottled city of Kandor, and the crew of the Enterprise beams over to Kandor to formulate a plan of escape, the title could be, "Bottled City on the Edge of Forever".

Who are going to be the heroes during the crisis?

Swamp Thing
Major Bummer (it's revealed that MB's earth was part of the multiverse, or Hypertime, or whatever the Hell it is they're calling it today. Roy Thomas will be called in to handle this bit of retconning and the story will actually be pretty good even though it's based on the overly anal attempts by some fanboys to ram everything into the highly overrated straitjacket of continuity.)

And of course, what the hell is "52" gonna be about?

"52" is going to be awesome. It's going to be a comic book about a comic book company's attempt to create some totally huge artificial event, cop some free exposure in other media (I saw two newspaper stories about
"Identity Crisis"), and get idiot fanboys to shell out huge quantities of cash so they can buy the issue with the Lee Cover, the issue with the Perez cover, the issue with the Lee/Perez double gatefold that does a homage to Steranko's pioneering work on "Nick Fury: Agent of Shield" and the foil
embossed cover and the cover with the embossed hologram. One issue will come out each week detailing what happened the week before and the hard-bitten, main editor with a brutal past who has to beat his writers and artists upside the head to get them to meet their deadlines will be based on Kiefer Sutherland.

The series will be written by Warren Ellis, Garth Morrison, an ape creature that was spontaneously generated from a mass of hair that Alan Moore shed and Jim Shooter. Jack Chick will do pencils and inks and some friggin bunch of computer geeks at some bargain basement lab with an overly cute name will do the coloring and lettering.

The series will be generated in a new format, two inches by three and one half inches, called the "Prestige Tract" format. This will make it possible to distribute the series at such non-traditional locales as bus stations,
telephone booths, men's restrooms, the lobbies of motor lodges in the southern states and from that really creepy overly religious kid you went to junior high who just sort of disappeared after high school.

writes these things? This is from the BIOS setup on my Asus motherboard

Hardware Prefetcher
                                                                  Enabled

                                                                                                                This should
                                                                                                                be enabled to
                                                                                                                enable or disable
                                                                                                                the Hardware
                                                                                                                Prefetcher Disable
                                                                                                                Feature.

OK, what the fuck? If I've enabled this then I've disabled the disabling
of the Hardware Prefetcher which would then mean that I had enabled
the Hardware Prefetcher. And if I've disabled this then I've enabled the
disabling of the Hardware Prefetcher, which would then mean that I had
disabled the Hardware Prefetcher.
                I don't think this was accidental. I think that they did this to
fuck with people.

"Can you feel the power?" joke.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/APWires/headlines/D8DIM630N.html

Texas pastor electrocuted during baptism

WACO, Texas -- A pastor performing a baptism was electrocuted inside his church Sunday morning after grabbing a microphone while partially submerged, a church employee said.

The Rev. Kyle Lake, 33, was standing in water up to his shoulder in a baptismal at University Baptist Church when he was electrocuted, said Jamie Dudley, a church business administrator and wife of another pastor there.

Doctors in the congregation performed chest compressions for 40 minutes before Lake was taken to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, Dudley said. Police said they weren't called and the hospital referred calls to the church.

The woman Lake was baptizing was not injured, Dudley said.

Pastors at University Baptist Church routinely use a microphone during baptisms, Dudley said.

"He was grabbing the microphone so everyone could hear," Dudley said. "It's the only way you can be loud enough."

About 800 people attended the morning service, which was larger than normal because it was homecoming weekend at nearby Baylor University, Dudley said.

Lake, who had a wife and three children, had been at the church for nine years, the last seven as pastor, Dudley said.

http://www.slate.com/id/2126389/

Mooooooooog!

A tribute to the eccentric synthesizer. By Hua Hsu

Posted Friday, Sept. 16, 2005, at 4:22 AM PT

Robert Moog once described his relationship with electronic equipment as inhabiting a space "between discovering and witnessing." It was precisely this blend of effortless genius and geeky, childlike awe that endeared Moog, who died last month at age 71, to the thousands of musicians who fell in love with his inventions over the years. The New York native got his start in the 1950s selling do-it-yourself theremin kits in the back pages of hobbyist magazines. While working at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the '60s, he developed the prototype for the keyboard-operated synthesizer that would become known as the Moog. Over the ensuing decades, as the size of the Moog shrank from a room to a closet to a desk, the synthesizer's whimsical sound palette won such fans as the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, and Kraftwerk. What was unique about Moog was that he never considered the human and the circuit board to be warring factions. Instead, he hoped the two would become intimate conspirators, spurring each other on in pursuit of sounds as sophisticated and far-reaching as they were beautiful.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002410316_pitts31.html

I'm not referring to Leonard Pitts Jr, who is my favorite, non-threatening negro editorial columnist, no, I'm referring to Miami City Commissioner Arthur E. Teele Jr. who shot himself to death in the lobby of the The Miami Herald last Wednesday.

Now, public officials committing suicide over their misdeeds is a rarity, Jeremy Boorda over his medals scandal, Vince Foster over Travelgate, and the classic, R. Budd Dwyer's on camera suicide in 1987. Now, one has to wonder if these officials were just weak and couldn't handle the guilt or if perhaps they were actually innocent and in despair over seeing their reputations destroyed by a vast media conspiracy (would to God more Republicans were like that). Anyways I'm upset because Arthur Teele didn't think of us, the public when he went out. I'm upset because he didn't call a press conference, stick a pistol in his mouth and blow his brains out in an homage to R. Budd Dwyer (which I actually found color footage of on the net) on the camera.

Imagine how cool a gunshot to the head suicide would be in HD? Imagine how much Fox would play it up. Imagine how CNN would whore themselves trying to catch up with those shameless bastids at Fox, imagine how the broadcast media, ABC, NBC and CBS would grit their teeth impotently, knowing that if they ever broadcast the footage they'd have the FCC on their asses in a second. Imagine the bloggers on the right and left fighting over it, and then imagine, as all of this is going on, that Al Qaeda is preparing another massive attack on the US to dwarf 9/11. That's what happened in the summer of 2001. The media covered shark stories and Gary Condit instead.

was a couple of guys going at it in high school "Lincoln-Douglas" debate. (This is based upon my three years of high school debate including my senior year where I did LD debate). I have just seen that transcended in the vice-presidential debate. If you think about it the classic differencebetween the presidential debate and the vice-presidential debateis the degree of bitchiness. This debate is way, way bitchier than Thursday night's debate.

I just bought three more pairs of scissors. There are now 6 pairs of scissors
in my house, I know where three of them are because I haven't taken them
out of the bag yet. I am hoping that the purchase of the three new pairs
of scissors will somehow magically make the other three pairs of scissors
reappear from whatever quantum wormhole they wandered into.

Log Cabin Republicans makes about as much sense as "Jews for Hitler"? I mean really, you have all of these LCR types who want limited government (not that Bush is in favor of that unless it involves corporate oversight) and lower taxes but are trying to be part of a political party that is dominated by a group that hates their guts. It's as if you had some Jewish guys in Berlin in the 1930s saying "We really like Hitler, love the fact that he ditched the treaty of Versailles, thought the '36 Olympics were great, like the new sense of national pride love the autobahns. Now if we could just get the NSDAP to moderate their 'kill all of the evil, blood-sucking Jew bastards' stance we'd really have something."

Just missed a perfect set-up between Lily and Jordan for a truly hot lesbian sex scene. Damn them! Damn them to Hell!

Happy, but hungry.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Northeast/08/21/firefighters.killed.ap/index.html

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A house blaze that killed two firefighters started in a tangle of wires and lamps that were installed to grow marijuana in a basement closet, authorities said.

The man who police say was responsible for the drug operation was charged with third-degree murder.

Fire Capt. John Taylor, 53, and firefighter Rey Rubio, 42, died Friday when they were trapped by quick-moving flames while trying to find the source of the fire.

Fire officials said the fire started in the wiring set up to run the lamps and fans used to nurture the plants, and spread more quickly because the hot lights had dried out the wood in the closet.

In addition to murder, Daniel Brough, 35, faces charges of marijuana possession, involuntary manslaughter and causing a catastrophe.

Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham called Brough "reckless," "foolish" and "greedy."

Taylor, a 32-year veteran of the department, and Rubio, who had been fighting fires for 12 years, appeared to have died of smoke inhalation, officials said.

reviews and from looking at the titles I would have to say that I had no idea that there was so much bad fantasy floating around out there. Maybe I don't get out often enough. Maybe that's a good thing.

If you try to look at it as a superhero story it sucks ass, really, really, really hard. But if you look at it as the sort of gay fantasia that Dr. Fredric Wertham described in the more salacious parts Seduction of the Innocent it's actually quite brilliant.

I mean really, look at how well the two of them accessorize, when they're about to leave the Batcave Batman hops into his harsh angular Batmobile, with electric blue neon hood and hubcaps (so much for fighting crime hidden in the darkness) and drives out of the cave. Then Chris O'Donnell, in his Robin costume with the anatomically correct nipples hops onto his Robincycle, which comes out of the ground in a large box reminiscent of the kind used for pieces of expensive, abstract jewelry, which has a neon interior. And there's the Batcave, the name reeks of homosexuality, Hell, there has to be a leather bar somewhere with that name, and if there isn't anyone who wants to start such a bar could just look at the Batcave scenes from this movie if they needed ideas for the decor.

I think though that rather than try to go back to the kind of Batman that Batman fanboys want, probably the Dark Knight of Frank Miller's series of the same name, they should take this gay Batman, which is the kind of thing that Julie Schwarz might have created if he were gay, and if Batman had been a 60's muscle magazine for mature men, rather than a comic book. But I digress, they should keep the current Batman sets, which capture that twisted essence of Gotham city that was created when Dick Sprang was doing in the 1950s, and run with the gay theme. Perhaps Tony Kushner could write the next movie, or Paul Rudnick. Nathan Lane could play the butler, Alfred and George Clooney and Chris O'Donnell could reprise their roles as the Dynamic Duo and they could fight a new threat to Gotham City, a villain named "Miss Thing".

Man, I am so onto something here!

It's called the multiplexo threshold. The multiplexo threshold is that point in a /. thread where someone posts claiming great knowledge of the topic being discussed without offering any proof of such knowledge and while posting as Anonymous Coward. As the length of a thread increases the probability of the multiplexo threshold being crossed approaches unity.