20030927

Helplessness is learned

An animal can be taught to be helpless, in fact it can become helpless in no other way. No creature is born with a sense that it cannot do for itself. If a creature is helpless it necessarily follows that some other creature consciously taught helplessness to it.

Wisdom from Aragorn

If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must keep secret to keep them so.

Nothing good happened in the Seventies? Utter bullshit

The Fat Guy laments:
Sometimes, I just want to retreat into a little hole and never listen to anything new again, because there's already so much greatness out there that I'll never get to. It's overwhelming, really.

Let's start with Dark Side of the Moon, shall we?

The most miserable part of the Seventies was my adolescence and teenhood. But I'm not the one on trial here. Gimme a piece of that custard pie.

20030925

A policy, and a request

We have always left comments at the posts of other blogs, when we post something on that blog here at WUTT! It is both shameless traffic promotion, and a feeble attempt to strike up a new meme with other bloggers.

We ask you to do the same. If you post something on your blog, in reference to a post here, please leave a comment on the post here. Unlike many other bloggers, I do not blog from my day job. Uncle Sugar gets huffy and uses terms like "fraud, waste and abuse" and "Uniform Code of Military Justice" and so on. Between that and putting children to bed, I don't check my referral log often enough to see the waves of excited readers you send to me.

Please place a comment here, with the permanent URL of your post if possible.

20030922

There's that reset button again and here we sit without opposable thumbs

Publicola discusses Federal versus state powers, and what the Feds can demand of a state's constitution. You must go.

20030921

I am not a number, I am a free man!

Dustbury remarks on a proposal to classify blogs by the Dewey Decimal System. No blog, even a dude, your blog, like, sucks one like ours, can be captured or classified by a single number.

Knowledge springs forth at the intersection of two or more topics. I write about Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, the Stelzer motor, copyright infringement, and telemarketing, as well as shooting. What number would I receive from Central Weblog Classification Authority? A series of DDS? How about a product of them? Or a mean and a standard deviation calculated from them? Naaah.

Each post needs its own classification, in fact it needs at least two. We've admired (but regarded as somewhat anal) the categories that many other bloggers use to classify their many posts. Only recently have I decided that we can begin to do the same at WUTT!

Note that we don't use Movable Type here. Some of the enhancements made to Blogger will make categories possible, though we'll be using NZBear's WMDI meta tags embedded in the post template to do it, and they will not be tallied or accessed through a link in the blog template. It will not naturally occur to anyone looking for ideas on powered armor to say, "Dammit, all I need to do is go to Fûz's weblog! He's got a category of posts on that very subject!"

Don't look for Dewey Decimals any time soon, though, I can barely get through my own blogroll once a week, so have no time to look up each topic and post a decimal category for it.