I don't believe I'm blogging the day before my midterm. And a long day (8-4, 2x1hr breaks) at that. But what the heck. It's not as if I'm get a bizzarre epiphany around midnight or anything.

I'm confused about spam - it's so obviously crap and they don't even make a decent attempt to sell anything. I'm starting to think some spammers spam for the heck of it - just to annoy people in some perverted way. It's truly weird.

Watched the Hellboy movie. Think it was a good adaptation of the comic. Or would have been if they didn't mess with the characterisation and mythic elements (which is one of the comic's main strengths. The other, art layout, was carried off pretty well) My main gripe is that demons suddenly became Lovecraftian elder gods. This caused me a serious case of cognitive dissonance.

I am seriously overweight. This sucks. Maybe if I amputated something I could lose some weight? Or maybe if I got a haircut! In other bodily concerns, I twisted my ankle 2 days in a row and started running on it before it fully healed. It's now throbbing slightly and I am not amused.

Don't know why, but I have been really work-focused and grumpy lately. Need to unwind again, but I just got back from Spring Break! (Speaking of which thanks to C for having me over!) Think I really need to get a game and blow stuff up. But there's nothing to play...

Have finally decided what I want to do with my degree. Master's in financial eng. is the goal, so I know what classes to go for. Good thing is that advanced math stuff I was eyeing, like numerical analysis and optimisation theories are part of the course prerequisites, so now I have an excuse to have fun. Thank you nessa for bearing with my while I talked your head off.

Speaking of which. In response to your post regarding torture: I can see how the system will freeze up. Consider it this way: the people who are going to have to suffer the consequences for ordering torture come in two broad categories: bureaucrats and patriots. Now a paper pusher is going to be too spineless to have someone tortured if the consequences are serious enough, while a patriot might decide to sacrifice himself. Are we then looking at a case where the patriots might be slowly removed from positions of authority because of multiple torture-orders? (I'm exagerating, of course, because the case comes up so rarely) It'd be so weird if the consequence of this scheme resulted in a hierachy full of middle-management types with no truly committed souls. Frankly, I don't think the issue should really come up (yes, I am recanting my position of last night). It's a slippery slope argument, to allow torture in some cases, even if there are consequences. And administering the consequences is going to be too damn complex.

(Sarcasm follows) We should just go with the regular assassination squad-type tactics. These have proven effective in the past and are a staple of most governments. Stop cringing about getting your special forces troops into action and actually send them in. If someone had decided to really fight an undeclared war on al-Qaeda &c early on they wouldn't be around today. Since countries like Israel sanction the shooting of civilians on a regular basis and no one really seems to do much about it, I don't see why Clinton held back on his missile strikes on bin Laden just because of possible civilian casualties. I don't even see why Bush didn't just acknowledge al-Qaeda fighters as combatants. I mean, sure, you have to treat them in accordance with the Geneva conventions, but then you're allowed to nuke them to heck and shoot the civilians to boot (the precedent for total warfare having being set in WW2, Vietnam, etc... ) With tactical nukes you can smack whomever you want dead as long as you know roughly where they are. If the blast doesn't kill them, radiation will. And it's not like Afganistan was a nuclear power who could shoot back too...

In any case, governments already have a lot of morally ambiguous options available to them. Let's not add torture to the list...

With respect to government control over the media: I'd take acknowledged government control over the alternative any day. At least then I wouldn't be fooled into trusting it. Most Americans actually believe their media is unbiased, which is scary when you consider how biased it really is. Ellis mentioned that America is a society of "conservative puritans" and hanging around here has really driven that point home to me. This is still the country where "world" = "continental US." No matter how liberal they may seem, there's usually a core of parochialism.

BTW, another gripe about America - they're really wasteful. Maybe it's just Cal, but where else in the world do they offer disposable paper towels and toilet seat protectors in all toilets? Most other countries settle for hand driers, but here you get to wipe your hands on a paper towel and then just throw it away. Every car ad I see here miffs me off because they all seem to suggest that everyone should buy a new car. I know how much pollution cars cause, I know they cost a bomb, and where I come from you keep your car for years and years. To swap cars after a year or two just because the new model has more horsepower (thus lower economy and increased fuel consumption and pollution) is truly wasteful. To get an SUV when you don't need the space is bad too. And the worst ad I've seen is this SUV ad where these guys drive their shiny SUV all over the wilderness, polluting it and causing lord knows how much soil erosion, just to do some sort of extreme sport. Then they decide driving around in their car is more fun and run off. ARGH. Might as well advertise shooting endangered species or strip mining or something.