Notsothoreau #48: This is an excellent speech by Greg Walden. His district is where the Oregon standoff is. Notice that the bureaucrats tried to tell him how to interpret the bill he actually wrote:
https://walden.house.gov/speech
Just finished reading the transcript. Excellent speech.
Thanks for posting that link!
And
But those other worlds- promising untold opportunities-beckon.
I'm kinda like Bilbo after he got back to the Shire. I've had adventures. I like home.
Not that I wouldn't like to visit the elves again some time...
Hey, Maet, I've mentioned this before... I'll just elaborate this once more and after this leave it alone...
Re: Your imbedded YouTubes
I run Opera browser with javascript and plug-ins off.
On every other site, and on all AoS posts except yours, imbedded YouTubes show up with a black square and a "something's wrong" message, but that has a link to YouTube which I can copy for downloading the video. (I prefer to download than live stream because my own reasons, ok?)
On your embeds, though, I get an empty space. I have to turn on javascript and plug-ins, re-load the page, and then start playing the video before I can get the YouTube URL for copying. Then turn off settings again.
I've looked at the source code and darned if I can figure out how it even works (some script) but yours are different than anybody else's.
Maybe it's easier for you this way but it's just one more annoying technical hurdle and hassle for me.
Just my problem, I suppose, and not yours and maybe nobody else's. But FTR.
publius: Didn't some femiNazi guru just proclaim that rapists were better than racists?
Her sign read "Will trade racists for immigrants" or something like that. It was (rather obviously) photoshopped to "Will trade racists for rapists."
Amazing how many reputable sites ran with the photoshop as if it were real, though.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal, that...
all men regardless of race...
all men and women...
all men and women people...
all people and those identifying as animals...
all sentient creatures regardless of planet of origin...
You know what? Never mind. -T. Jefferson
Re colleje l'arnin' versus real-world...
After three years of college-prep high school, I chose a college that had a year-'round trimester program. I set out to do five terms on-campus, three terms off (i.e. taking all my "summers" at once), then three terms back on to finish.
I was an idiot. There were a dozen major problems with this plan that I only understood once I started living through it. I survived five terms in a row, but was seriously burned out by the end.
We were required to do one off-campus term of work, and through a relative I got a job at a TV station, bottom rung, mailroom clerk and general go-fer, but I got to wander around and watch all the operations, so it was really great. I kept the job for ten months, then traveled around before going back to college. (A year off, yet kept my 2-S draft dodge. Guilty.)
High school summers I'd worked at dirty, hard manual labor jobs, which was good, but while living at home. Not the same as being on my own out of town.
Going back to college was an eye-opener. The college had changed a lot. Courses vital to my (stupid) major had been dropped. Old friends had dropped out. My advisor was gone. I was going to have to change majors and go at least five more terms to graduate! (I got to meet the future Mrs. Webworker, so, there's that.)
But, mostly, time spent in the "real" world, even just that flunky job, paying for my own apartment (with only a little help from the 'rents), being on my own, showed me that college - at least, that liberal-arts college, was a terrible waste of my time and mind. After just two months, I quit. Probably could have done something wiser, but I had no good advice.
A couple of years later I burned up some of my inheritance trying to start a crazy business. Terrible losses, big disaster, lost friends, ended in a half-million dollar lawsuit (which I "lost," but only charged the amount we really owed and which we'd offered before the suit), but, wow! was it educational! Don't think any business school could've given me what I learned doing that.
FWIW
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I was more politically conscious on this reading of the hip urban Marxism of several of the main characters - talking about overthrowing The Man while living the life of the bourgeoisie - the kind of folks who, as commenters here say, would be so surprised to find themselves first on the firing line, or in the work camps, come the Revolution. I know some Chicagoans like that; they were well-depicted in the book.
Which brings me to: what authors do to our characters.
I know when I was writing my humble short story, Invulnerable (link in nic - see how I slipped this week's plug in there?), that my main character's troubles at the end seemed to be inherent to the story and his personality and the changes he'd been put through - inevitable, "wrote itself," rather than anything I intended at the outset.
Similarly, the harsh things Henry has to go through in TTTW seem inherent to the emotional impetus (fears) that direct his time travels, and are likewise inevitable to the story.
I'm reminded also of Rowling talking about killing off certain characters in the Potter series, specifically the house-elf, somewhat to her own surprise and consternation.
But we choose to do this to our characters, nonetheless. Don't we? However seemingly necessary for the dramatic telling, it's our own choice to follow where the story must go to be the better story, however much our dear characters suffer.
Gives one a certain sympathy with the Supreme Being's choice to create a universe of time-space free-will mortals, with all the magnificent and terrible consequences thereof - witness Jesus' prayer in the Garden to "let this cup pass," and its answer, tragic, then glorious. To be the better story.
♦
TTTW sort-of jumped into my hands before I'd finished Wells' First Men in the Moon. As I write this up on Saturday morning, I'm wondering, now what to read? (Looks around at small mountain of books in our home.)
My thanks to the book thread host and participants for the inspiration to get back into "real" reading. Took a while, but it finally seems to be working. Have to sacrifice some AoS thread-following time, but there's so much redundant political argument nowadays, it's not that hard. 
Last week, I mentioned I was re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife. Finished it on Friday.
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?blog=86&post=361178#c24730306
et al.
Some additional thoughts about the book, and the art of writing.
♦
My HS English teacher encouraged me to write for publication, and I got some very classy rejection slips before I gave up.
At the time, I really didn't think I could be a writer. "Write what you know," they say. I didn't know anything. I'd never been anywhere, or done anything, nor had any interesting experiences, so I thought. As I said once before, all I knew was the bright joys, and dark secrets, of small-town America in the 1960s; dysfunctional families that divorce and turn into two dysfunctional families; explosive teen angst - who would read about that ordinary stuff? (!)
This is why I veered more toward comedic cartooning.
Time Traveler's Wife is the kind of book that puts me right back in that humbled-to-death frame of mind.
There is a breadth of knowledge that went into it. The fine arts: poetry, opera and music from classical to punk, literature, painting, and even details of paper arts. History and mythology. French, German. Politics. I'm in my seventh decade, and I feel so abysmally ignorant in these fields - well, under-educated at least, even with my long-ago liberal-arts upbringing - that I can sometimes only barely appreciate the references. Had I been reading with computer at hand, I might've done more websearching on many of the references - a slight problem with good old print, can't just highlight and click "search."
The author has a list of acknowledgements for assistance in research, but you can't research without a good grounding in the first place.
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Tonestaple - oh, also, if you're one of those who can't use ampersands, then all bets are off, because the substitutes all start with an ampersand. Sorry you're having problems. This quirky "interface is clunky and primitive and looks like something from 1997." 
Tonestaple: ...I thought Notepad stripped off all of the unacceptable formatting....
I've never understood why people say that works. If you try to save from Notepad in ANSI format, and get a warning to use Unicode instead, that means you have Pixy-choking characters in the text, but just pasting into Notepad and copying back out changes nothing. In my experience.
BackwardsBoy: ...One of my many flights of fancy is wondering what would happen if things from the Bible were to occur today....
It's early to toot about my Easter-ish cartoon, but it was sort-of like that. More like if they had television news media, and cell phones, Twitter, etc. in the First Century A.D. (Harks of steampunk maybe?) Not.. um.. strictly Gospel-based. No irreverence intended, though.
Jerusalem Report
http://bit.ly/jeru-report
Tonestaple, you may be having trouble because you're trying to copy and paste characters the software won't accept? Angled quotemarks and apostrophes, characters beyond the standard 26 letters and standard punctuation (characters with umlauts, long dashes, etc) cause the hamsters to choke.
You can either search/replace all the violating marks, or, use this page to convert the text to acceptable form:
http://bit.ly/pixyize
More details and other hints in my unauthorized Ace of Spades Blog Commenters Survival Guide
http://bit.ly/aoshq-csg
naturalfake: ..."Behold the Man" ... I wasn't shocked so much as sort of depressed by the display of pure vitriol and hate by Moorcock....
I mentioned this in passing, maybe last week? Had pretty much the same reaction. Hideous drivel. Never would read anything by Moorcock after that.
Finally plowing through the comments...
NaCly Dog: ...My favorite is how democracy is being replaced with crime syndicates as the basis for society....
Clinton/Arkansas mob. Obama/Chicago mob. Heck, going back to JFK I suppose one might say.
"It can't happen heeerrre" -FZ
Still reading the post...
...Android Kindle app has a function that allows you to tap on a word to see the dictionary definition pop up in a separate window....
Funny you should say that. In a forthcoming comment, I'm going to mention the lack of that feature as a drawback to good old printed works.
Not done reading the post yet, but this jumped out at me:
The Gutenberg interface is clunky and primitive and looks like something from 1997.
Hmmm. (Looks at AoSHQ commenting set-up) Yeah, nobody should put up with that kind of thing.
Speaking of time-travel science fiction, which I haven't yet but will soon (SWIDT?)...
I watched the second episode of Legends of Tomorrow last night. Slight spoiler ahead. (Sorry, this is not exactly bookish, but relates to storytelling, at least.)
Old dude from the present goes back and meets his younger self in the 1970s. Younger self has startling new experiences as a consequence. Yet, older self doesn't have those memories. What have you got now?
Marty likewise didn't remember his life with his cool parents, in Back to the Future, as was well pointed out in the Everything Wrong With BTTF video.
Time alteration is tricky stuff, and most writers don't seem up to it. There was some show, I can't recall what now, that the person ended up with two sets of memories. That, at least, addresses the paradox.
/rant
Wait, wait, I just finished Vic's news in the ONT and haven't read the morning thread yet. Siiigh. What I get for getting a good night's sleep for a change.
OMuse, since you've dropped the line in the introduction, I'm wearing my TUUTu today (hash).
Went back to the ONT looking for Vic's news and ran across something by cthulhu I thought worth repeating...
...It's all lies, all the way down -- they're not refugees, they're invaders; they're not women + children, they're fighting-age males; they're not from war zones, they're from barbaric lands; they aren't seeking relief; they're seeking conquest; they're not without papers, they discarded them along the way; they don't seek to join a productive society, they wish to rule it; they're not the best and brightest from Syria, they're the insane, infirm, incarcerated, and oppressed from every 3rd-world shithole with transit to Europe....
