Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “More Ancient Watchers...”

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December 31, 2007

More Ancient Watchers...

Hatched by Dafydd

Watcher Council hot --
Watcher Council cold --
Watcher Council in the pot
Nine days old!

Another hoary, old Watcher's Council post excavated from the Cretaceous period (i.e., last week).

Council

Once again, I'm convinced the only reason we won was a really killer title...

"The Courage to Do Nothing", by Big Lizards.

This is my paeon to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK, 100%), and his plea that instead of flying off in all five directions to combat "anthropogenic global warming," we simply have to courage to do nothing -- and wait until we have some actual idea what the heck we should do... if anything.

The posts we bet on didn't do particularly well... but we still like 'em:

More on the Teacher Accused of Insulting Religion in His Class, by Bookworm Room;

I Bet Not, by Done With Mirrors.

I always enjoy Bookworm's posts, even when, as usual, they're ludicrously wrong. But on those vanishingly rare occasions when she happens, by merest chance, to be right, they're wonderful! (There, how's that for a backhanded compliment?) This time, Bookworm discusses an AP history teacher in San Juan Capistrano (about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego and very near Richard Nixon's "western White House" at San Clemente) who is, as she puts it, "accused of using his AP history classroom to indoctrinate his students in anti-Christian attitudes."

She has papers. Very worth a read.

Our second-place vote went to a post about a computer bug in Trondheim, a city in Norway. Parking tickets were erroneously issued for, ah, somewhat startling amounts:

In some cases, it attempted to drain their bank accounts of up to $148,000, which of course they didn't have. They discovered the overdraft when they went to buy food or Christmas presents and found their accounts frozen.

The post is extraordinarily short, which played a major role in our voting for it. If brevity is the soul of wit, Callimachus at Done With Mirrors is certainly more than half-way there!

Nouncil

The posts we voted for didn't do any better in the Nouncil category. The winner (sigh) was:

A Stand-up President, by The Ornery American.

I have no idea why this post won (rather, tied for first place, then got the nod from the Watcher). All right, Orson Scott Card is a semi-big name in science fictiondom; and yes, I understand that he was attempting to stick up for George W. Bush. But for Pete's sake, he spends the first half of the post running down Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush... what's up with that?

Perhaps readers were so numbfounded by the sight of a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America who wasn't a shrieking leftist, that they panicked and cast their votes upon the water...

We voted for posts that were rather less ambiguous:

Manic Misinterpretations of Climate Change Capitulation by US in Bali, by NewsBusters.org;

Mearsheimer, Walt, and "Cold Feet", by Sandbox.

Our number-one vote was in fact for the post we nominated, a companion piece to our winning entry (subtle, aren't we?). Newsbusters was the first site we saw (courtesy of a commenter on Big Lizards named Seaberry) that debunked the meme that started to spread through the dextrosphere that the Bush administration had "caved" on globaloney at the meeting in Bali.

In fact, all we agreed to do was -- to discuss what we might do in the future. We calmly vetoed all hard goals and timetables. That is probably the best that could be done, given the -- er -- climate of the international "community" on the subject.

The Sandbox piece is self-explanatory, assuming you know who Professors Mearsheimer and Walt are. And if you don't -- well, even more reason to read about these blowhards who use high-falutin high-larity to mask their own rather thuggish Jew hatred.

Lookee here

I know you're sick of reading this, but if you look here, you can see the full list of posts that actually received votes. (The others would just as soon remain anonymous -- as we did the one time we were shut out!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 31, 2007, at the time of 10:46 PM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: DKDwyer

Well it may not be a rule but Baen Books (founded by the late James Baen) is home to a majority of SFWA types that aren't screaming leftists. ;)
True Eric Flint is a Trotskyite but his work at Baen http://www.baen.com/library/ (over 60 free sf&f novels online) against the evils of encryption and DRM is a plus.
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ for more free baen sf novels from their promotional cd's
and their newish online electronic magazine "Jim Baen's Universe" is doing pretty well too.
Watch out for Colonel Kratman though he's in "A State of Disobedience".

The above hissed in response by: DKDwyer at January 1, 2008 7:03 AM

The following hissed in response by: narciso79

Orson was just pointing out the shortcomings of both Republican predecessors. Reagan didn't go
after Iran or Syria aggressively after the three
Embassy bombings; and he got suckered into the Iran initiative; which in retrospect was a mistake. Bush 1 didn't initially support the liberty claims of the Ukrainians 'chicken Kiev' was the complaint back then. And he didn't support the further operations into Iraq including aid to the Shia intifadah of 1991; as
a result, the Iranians won a whole raft of supporters and Bin Laden got his battlecry of expelling US troops from the region

The above hissed in response by: narciso79 at January 1, 2008 3:36 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Narciso79:

Reagan didn't go after Iran or Syria aggressively after the three Embassy bombings; and he got suckered into the Iran initiative; which in retrospect was a mistake.

He had more pressing matters on his plate. (And I'm not sure I would even agree that the downside of supplying Hashemi Rafsanjani with weapons was worse than it would have been to allow the Contras to be destroyed, as the Democrats wanted.)

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at January 1, 2008 4:11 PM

The following hissed in response by: DKDwyer

Well the point of supplying weapons to Iran at that point in the Iran-Iraq war was to ensure that both sides lost or at least that no one won. And using the profits to kill communists in Central America, it might have been against the law but was moral as opposed to the more common state of legal but immoral.

The above hissed in response by: DKDwyer at January 3, 2008 3:03 PM