Aw, hell. I’ve just wasted the day polishing my response to a troll.

Francis Fukuyama doesn’t think much of libertarians.

The hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S. involvement in the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the ’90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time of the Gulf War, Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper to let Saddam keep Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel him – a fine cost-benefit analysis, if you only abstracted from the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a megalomaniac.

Kuwait had weapons of mass destruction?
( . . more . . )

It would be fair, I think, to say that James Lileks enjoyed Spider-Man, which apparently is a movie that opened this weekend. He also makes some interesting remarks about movies quâ cultural affirmation.

How to change the time zone?

Since I reinstalled Red Hat yesterday, it somehow thinks we’re in +8 (Japan) rather than -8 (California). Apologies to anyone to whom my mail appears 16 hours delayed.

The Angry Clam posted some pix of the Berkeley Morris.
My then wife used to dance with this team, from 1986 to (i guess) 1992; but I can’t recognize any faces in these shots. (Terry O’Neill, the Fool, was killed a few years ago by an experimental capacitor.)
Rory quotes someone grumbling about “White Power”; I wonder what he’d have said if Johnnie Fudge, whose complexion matches his name, were still dancing.

Today I started to read Neil Smith’s Forge of the Elders, and had to chuckle at the names of the spaceships of the American Soviet Socialist Republic: Dole, McCain, Hatch (“three misunderstood and martyred socialist statesmen who had made America what it was today”). When this part was first published (as Contact and Commune), they were Democrats: Metzenbaum, Kennedy, [?].

A few years ago, Neil started saying that he preferred openly-socialist Democrats to crypto-socialist Republicans. I guess this renaming is part of that policy.

Turns of Phrase: Dogme 95 (from the World Wide Words site). The one ‘Dogme’ film I’ve seen, Italian for Beginners, violates one of the terms as stated here – unless the IV hose really did contain morphine.