You have got to be kidding me.

Citizen for Community Values is one of those busybody organizations that wants to make sure you're not allowed to think salacious thoughts in the privacy of your home and, if you do, you won't have any support in doing so. They're latest press release is a giggle and a half: They want schools across the country to ban Banned Books Week.

"What people need to understand is that this is the American Library Association's way of trying to censor those who exercise their free speech rights and say that there are books in the library that should not be available to children." Of course, the American Library Association doesn't have the power to censor since it's not a governmental institution. Neither is the CCV, thank the gods. One wants to put books on the shelves; the other wants them removed. Which one stands with the censors now?

That explains so freakin' much!

Oh, my gods. So, I watched the Daily Show clip Tangled Up in Bleu, in which the Daily Show shows how the government has banned gays from jobs in the military, even in such critical areas as Arabic translation, because they can't have homosexuals even though they've changed the recruitment standards to include, as the Daily Show puts it, "the aged, the criminal, and the mildly retarded."

But what stood out in my mind was the interview with Paul Cameron, the rabidly anti-gay activist who has been kicked out of the American Psychological Association for his vicious and vacuous "studies" of the "homosexual lifestyle." Cameron makes my gaydar go off, hard. He has the mannerisms, the accent, the gestures that effeminate gay men try hard to emulate if it doesn't already come naturally. He's in his mid-60's, so I can't help but imagine that when he gets into the bath his fantasies are about Steve Reeves pulling up his loincloth and shoving his sweet manmeat down Paul's waiting youthful throat, but it isn't until Johnny Weissmuller lines up for the lucky Pierre^{[? nsfw]} that he comes in more rainbow colors than a My Little Pony six-pack.

Well, that's typical...

I missed Foolscap this year. I wanted to go.

Oh, well. It's not like I'm writing much anymore these days.

Let's ban circus clowns and musicians while we're at it!

So, I'm reading an interview with Alan Sears, the man who once exploited his position as an adjunct to the Meese Commission on Pornography to write a letter to the 7-11 parent corporation telling them that the Attorney general of the United States had identified their stores as alleged distributors of potentially obscene pornography (note the qualifiers there) and asking them to come to the Commission's meeting and explain or defend themselves against the charge. They pulled all their Playboys and Penthouses from the shelves.

How out-of-touch does one man have to be and still seem even the least bit coherent? Sears' definition of "obscene and illegal" material (funny, where is that exception in the First Amendment?) is so broad the only thing it doesn't cover is ordinary nudes, and even those he refers to as "depicting women and other persons as a subspecies of humans to amuse [the viewer]."

I wonder who the "other persons" are in Sears' imaginations. For that matter, I can't begin to approach how he thinks that pornography depicts anyone as "subhuman"; the zoophile market can't be that, can it? And yet it's the "to amuse" part that bothers me, because Sears is clearly signalling his desire to ban amusement as an evil. Let's ban circus clowns and musicians while we're at it.

Worse yet, he wants to define all porn as not having first amendment protection. He can't even really say why. (Dammit, where is that exception in the First Amendment?).

When the interviewer asks, "Is censorship bad?" Sears responds this way:

How do we define either term? Bad for the profits lost by organized criminal activity? Bad for a child molester who wasn't able to trade his "collection" of trophy photographs with others? Bad for potential child molesters who could not get a magazine at the corner store that they would use to lower their inhibitions and eventually end up acting out when they sexually abuse a neighbor's child? Bad for the Internet provider who couldn't let 12-year-olds view his wares at the tax-funded neighborhood library?

Man, if that's isn't the most fnord-laden bullroar laid down in the service of evil today, I don't know what is.

Simulationism: there's a high likelihood that we already live in the Matrix

Imagine the following: You're watching ten television screens. Each one of them shows the exact same scene from the exact same show with the exact same actors, but each one is slightly different in some way: different camera angle, or different pitch and timing when lines are read, or so on. It might be ten different takes from the same taping session, but it isn't. Only one of those shows has actually been taped live; the other nine are variants in which the original scene was digitized and revised algorithmically.

Not exactly the stuff of science fiction. This is the art of machinima and while it's hardly automated it's a lot easier to automate parts of it than it was a decade ago, and the decade before that it didn't even exist.

So, let's take it into the realm of speculative fiction, you know, the kind that the laws of physics say can happen, we just haven't figured out how to do it yet. It might be possible someday to do with streams of consciousness what the above scenario does with light and action: be convincing to the viewer. This is the basis of much "upload" SF, from the absolutely terrible Lawnmower Man to the popular Battlestar Galactica and Matrix series, along with the more deeply considerate Diaspora.

So here's the basic argument of simulationism: given that nothing in the laws of physics as we know them says we can't create simulations of consciousness in a medium other than the grey meat between our ears, it is entirely likely that, at some point in the future, there will be more streams of consciousness experiencing customized simulations of our reality than there will be experiencing the reality you and I are currently sharing.

Therefore, if it is likely that you and I are living in a reality that has this capacity (a very high likelihood), it is equally likely that this has already happened and you and I are not living in the original reality.

The alternative is actually harder for me to believe: not only are we living in the Basement Universe, but we are the first species to do so. Ever. Since the beginning of eternity.

Wikipedia calls this the Simulation Argument and puts forth a number of criticisms. Some are valid, but I disagree that what the author puts forth as the "most likely" contrapremise doesn't fly: that no civilization, ever, develops the technology necessary to do a simulation. The technology exists: it works with that quick-and-dirty hack called the brain, dependent upon chemistry to operate correctly. The trick is figuring out how to do it in a more efficient medium.

Elf vs. Pasta Sauce: Pasta Sauce Wins Again

So, I tried to move my recipe in one direction or another, this time by using organic plum tomatoes, six cloves of garlic, three ounces of pancetta^[?], and twice the recommended dose of basil.

It tasted more or less the same. The salty, savory pancetta, the garlic, and the basil all just disappeared into the sauce.

I really like this recipe because it's easy and completely home-made, but what does it take to make it taste like, well, like anything else?