Skip to main content

state of the union

It is clear that G.W.B. wants to capitalize on the "maybe things are rocky, but you don't switch horses midstream" rhetoric that Michael Moore predicted in Dude, Where's My Country?
President Bush, wrapping the themes of his re-election campaign in an upbeat State of the Union address, said Tuesday night that America enjoys a growing economy but is still at war and must not "falter and leave our work unfinished."
After more than two years without a terrorist attack, he said it was tempting but wrong to think the danger had passed.
(...)
"Twenty-eight months have passed since Sept. 11, 2001 over two years without an attack on American soil and it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting and false."
(via ABC)
This is less a midstream proposition, as the work that is unfinished is the War on Terror. From the same Moore book, the question is "How do we wage war on a noun?" For the curious, the actual state of the union address is available from Britain. (via Findory) Further insight is available here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tony diTerlizzi and classic D&D monsters

The sixth entry of his series on drawings of classic D&D monsters is up. He's one of my favorite fantasy artists. His work tends toward the charming and cozy, rather than others' focus on machismo or melodrama.

sad fate

“Our legendary personalities are evergreen ‘brands’ with the benefit of worldwide recognition,” reads a message on the Richman agency’s website. Guardian UK Article *vomits* Where is the line drawn between “public figure” and “celebrity”? How can a dead person have an agent, particulary where there are no specific works concerned other than a sense of character? It’s one thing to insist that Duck Soup is a work that should be protected (which any more simply means controlled by whomever has the most buX0rs), but shouldn’t personalities and such pass into the public domain as well? ( boingboing : Bill Gates 0wns Einstein, Groucho , Freud, Asimov, Fuller, et al )

on sheeps and androids

The movie Blade Runner is very dear to my heart. It is a treatise on the nature of existence expanding on, and perhaps exceeding the reach of the Phillip K. Dick work which inspired it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Perhaps I have missed out on some greater subtlety of PKD's work, but the point of DADoES pursues the definition of fake, while Blade Runner instead focuses on what is real. Where the replicants in the novel are sociopathic monsters who emulate emotions solely to gain traction against humans who may hunt them, the humans there rely on machines to dictate their own emotions for them. They dial for "energetic determination" or "six-hour self-accusatory depression." As much as the replicants are machines incapable of real emotion, humans are similarly reliant on a machine to simulate emotion for them. In contrast, the movie's central them is spelled out for us in Deckard's apartment, when Rachel is playing the piano. She professe...