Digital Analogue

Happy new year

Happy New Year!

I seem to have lost a post I made a couple days ago. Damn. Anyway, the music party was fun; there were three groups, including Theory of Everything whose CD I bought and am well pleased with. Then there was a sing-a-long, which was ok but dominated by songs that didn't have much in the way of melody; ah well.

Kim and Al's party was excellent as always. It's one of the very few parties all year where I sit in one conversation and can hear one or two others that I'd actively really like to participate in. Such fun. :) I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen since last year, and got to meet a few people I didn't know or didn't know well; like Mike's sister Kristi, who is way cool. She spent a lot of time mentioning relevant legal facts, presumably due to being halfway through law school. (It reminded me of Theresa's ability to inject random medical facts into a conversation and pitch them at exactly the right level that they remain comprehensible and interesting to the lay person.)

Yesterday we sat around and talked for a while, then went on a sushi run to finish off the week. I left right from there rather than get sucked in for the whole evening.

Political thought of the day (courtesy Mike): you probably were aware that in Nazi Germany you needed to be a member of the Nazi Party in order to get government funding for your business. You've seen it in non-fiction and novels about the era; if nowhere else, you saw it in Schindler's List or some similar movie. Likewise, in Soviet Russia you needed to be a member of the Communist Party in order to get anything accomplished. Again, you'll probably have seen this in some Cold War spy novel or movie; I actually had it personally confirmed by someone who lived there---it was true at least up into the early 90s.

Well, Congressman Hall (D-TX), long known as one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, having the stated goal of remaining Democrat in order to shift the party rightward, has just announced that he's turning Republican. Why now? Because his district had been denied funding solely due to him being a Democrat.

This is a relatively new feature on the American political landscape, and it's not a pretty one. I think we're still a ways off from anything like a totalitarian regime; but it's becoming ever harder to answer the five-year-old's question "why were those countries bad?" with something that doesn't also apply to our own country. The differences are becoming ones of degree rather than qualitative, and it's disturbing.

"This shirt is for *your* protection." --Scott Harris