The pointless “assault weapon” ban of 1994 is about to sunset, and the usual suspects are twitching.

The Violence Policy Center . . . notes the 1994 law does not cover new assault weapons that have entered the market place.
At the top of their list are the SKS assault rifles . . . .

Where have they been? My SKS was made in 1952.

Also about to be un-banned (knock wood) are 11-round magazines for the unbadged majority. I wonder how soon they will be available in fact.

Watching Kurosawa’s 野良犬 Nora Inu (Stray Dog) (1949), it’s often hard to believe that the earnest, clean-shaven rookie detective is Mifune! Conversely and even harder to swallow, the subhuman hooligan of the title will become the idealistic young samurai in 七人の侍 Shichinin five years later.

This is the earliest work I’ve seen by either Kurosawa or Mifune. Well worth the two hours.

I hadn’t been out to the pictures in a while, so today I went to see Spider-Man 2.

I don’t remember the first one as quite so soggy with angst; and the scientists’ lines are occasionally painful. (Hint to any aspiring scriptwriters: no scientist would use the word exponential so loosely.)

To stop the runaway El, why didn’t Spidey try dumping lots of goo on the track?

Still, gotta say, Doc Ock is pretty damn well done.

the Talmud and the gopher protocol

Simulation and Simulacra:

The whole concept of patriotism is nothing more than a simulacr[um] for the ideals supposedly put forth at the founding of the United States. I would even argue that the Constitution itself is a poor simulacr[um] of the ideal of individual liberty that really motivated the Revolution. So, we go from a passionate defense of individual liberty to the creation of a government designed to represent that ideal, to blind patriotism for that government, to blind loyalty to the President and the flag, to a chubby old guy wearing an American flag T-shirt, who has no idea what liberty is all about. It didn’t take very many generations at all to get to the least common denominator.

A belief in liberty is self-sustaining: it doesn’t require a government to keep it alive. Creating a government to protect liberty is a self-defeating proposition. Government only dilutes the essential essence of the concept, and can only lead to what we have today – idol (some would say ‘idle’) worship of a meaningless symbol with no thought given to its origin. Throw out your Pocket Constitutions – Constitution Worship might seem to be more intellectual, but it’s only a few notches more advanced than that guy in the T-shirt.

Bob Tipton: Serenity blog

Wikipedia tells more than you might imagine asking about the heavy metal umlaut. (Cited by Desbladet in a comment on John Holbo‘s blog.)

A is for Anonymous:

All Vespuccian citizens have the right to keep their biometric information (their photographs, fingerprints, retina prints, etc.) strictly apart from their financial information (their assets, debts, account numbers, etc.). A Vespuccian driver’s license has a photograph of its owner, an inscription certifying ‘this person is licensed to drive any automobile under such-and-such a weight’, and all the other usual accoutrements of driver’s licenses — but no name. . . . Vespuccian passports do have both photographs and names, but only because other countries refused to accept anonymous passports. In practice, those passports have whimsical names and improbable birthdays.