waagnfnp

A Message from the Minister of Justice

Most Some of you will be glad to hear that the WAAGNFNP blog will continue. While my first choice would have been to pull the plug on all of you lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing ingrates, it was clearly the desire of my Cabinet Officers and the High Council to continue on in some way. And I do try to listen to my Officers and High Council even though some of them need serious Re-Trunking from time to time.

The new plan is to scrap the idea of trying to continue on as a community blog since there’s clearly not enough interest for that. We’ll simply be your basic group blog with the philosophy that we are just a few friends talking amongst each other, and everyone is welcome to join the conversation.

There will also still be an Open Door policy for submitting posts for anyone who would like to contribute. I just will no longer be killing myself trying to keep a door open through which almost no one has an interest in walking.

The Ministry of Offense and Defense’s Tribunus Laticlavius, christian h., my valued blog co-administrator, will be gone for much of the summer. The Ministry of Justice’s GFAT (General Factotum and Tipstaff), JP Stormcrow, will be taking over for christian h. Also, stepping up to lend a hand are Loyal Party Patriots (and our two newest Cabinet Officers) James Killus and Kiera PSI. Thanks to James’ and Kiera’s help, starting in August I’ll be able to take a much-needed vacation from blog administration/organizing. Huzzah!

Wait - I know what you’re thinking: “Kiera and James? What, the WAAGNFNP blog is going to an all-Buffy, all the time format?” Well, maybe yes, maybe no. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Posting may be lighter for the remainder of the summer, (or maybe not), with a lot of our regular contributors being away. For that same reason, we may also drop our formal weekend Open Threads for the remainder of the summer unless the blog chatter picks up. Folks are welcome to use the last post of the week for any Open Thread needs they might have over the weekend. In any event, we will try our best to keep the Posting Schedule updated for you (link in the upper right hand column under “Pages”).

Yours In Service,

Oaktown Girl
Minister of Justice
WAAGNFNP

Why We Are Here

I know that the conventional wisdom is that the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party blog is just an attempt by a few desperate individuals to cling to a joke that got old a long, long time ago.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party was not the reason for this blog, it was the opportunity for this blog, and that’s a very different thing entirely. Why “opportunity”? Because I felt it was time for a new kind of blog format, specifically, a new kind of community blog. With the WAAGNFNP, we had a great foundation upon which to build for arts, sciences, humor, and progressive politics.

As you know, on most community blogs, only a few essays make the Front Page. The rest are relegated to the sidebar hoping someone might notice. Obviously, this means neglect for some really great essays that deserve way more attention. My idea was to create a community blog where there is no sidebar, so each essay posted receives the full attention of the community. This is a great way to show respect for the author even if you disagree with the viewpoint, and a great way to honor a community whose attention span is substantially greater than that of a gnat. What a concept, eh? And what a great community we had to draw from, didn’t we?

Perhaps my biggest inspiration to do the WAAGNFNP blog was to provide the space for people who had great things to share, but weren’t interested in or didn’t want the bother of keeping up a blog on their own, or joining a group blog (being part of a set group of writers). So with the WAAGNFNP blog, these brilliant, witty, erudite people would be able to submit posts when they wanted to, free from the hassle of day-to-day blogging responsibilities, and we’d all benefit. And if people already had their own blog, they could cross post at the WAAGNFNP or write original material. They’d be an active part of the community, and perhaps get a little wider exposure for their personal blog.

My other great inspiration for this blog was to provide a safe space for people in our community who would never label themselves as “writers” to actually write. I feel strongly that a lot people with some of the most interesting things to say and share aren’t “writers”, so they don’t write (at least not in public), and we all miss out. And so do they.

There are a couple of radical concepts going on here.
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By spyder

This post thread is in homage to our showiest of defendants and convicted as the showiest, Teh Chris Clarke. Since he is on the downtime swing of his 2007 rollercoaster blogging, and I have been on tour and missed several of his last postings, I missed the chance to connect and say adieu. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about his contributions to the way I experience the world, and particularly to my experience of the Greater Sonoran Desert.

And not to overstate or overtax the fireball’s interests in the greater deserts of the Southwest, I just concluded my summer solstice tour of some of the region in which and from which I find myself collecting precious alkaloid resources. And this time I took to heart and spirit my own adage - —what would Chris Clarke write? - —formulating a constant dialogue with the natural environs around me. So I shall share a few of these:

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By James Killus

So I had this little essay entitled, “The Neutron Dance,” because I’m a fan of both neutrons and The Pointer Sisters (June Pointer RIP, 11 April, 2006) and I sent it to the Minister of Justice as part of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party’s ongoing campaign for a Free Nuclear Zone.

Or something like that. And there’s the rub. Because the Minister of Justice responded by asking me to make some changes, give some context perhaps, add some background and “say a little something about where you’re going with it and why we should care.”

Fair enough, albeit with a soupçon of “are you really sure you want to get me started?” Because I can go meta in six different directions before breakfast and twelve after lunch, to say nothing of übernerd posturing, name dropping, and doing my little Smartest Guy in the Room dance at the drop of a hat.

One tempting tangent is the fact that when I was a lad, the universe was protons, neutrons, and electrons to make stuff with, and photons to make it glow. Sure, there were these cool things called “neutrinos” that had been predicted in 1930 and not actually seen until 1955 and the discoverers were lucky they were young and long-lived, because they didn’t get their Nobels until 40 years later, a full 7 years after the later discovery of the mu neutrino, there’s no justice in the world, I’m just sayin’.

There were also, when I was a lad, these things called “mesons” which are pronounced meh-son, mee-son, or even may-son, provided you want to make puns like “meson jar” or “Meson-Dixon Line.” But those were primarily good for getting funding for particle accelerators and shooting down giant birds from outer space.

But soon the particle accelerator guys got enough money to create something called The Standard Model which they insist is close to a Theory of Everything, (ToE) if by “everything” you mean “a few dozen particles and physical constants.” I mean, I’ve checked, and there is not one word in String Theory, or any of the other proposed ToEs that explains who put the bop in the bop she bop, or even where babies come from.
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By jimmyraybob

My humblest apologies for not getting this posted sooner. We here at the Ministry of Geology and Glitter (MOGG) have had a rather busy last few weeks (not that everyone else hasn’t). On top of that there were three deaths rather close to home, and the Virginia Tech shootings, and the death a Cardinal’s pitcher, and the on-going death and destruction in Iraq. Every time our travelogue subcommittee got together for a production meeting there seemed to be a smothering glum and a sense that what we were doing seemed too irrelevant in the face of issues of such magnitude – and nothing happened. However, after reviewing the report of the last closed door emergency strategy meeting of the MOGG General Commission for Figuring Things Out we seem to be feeling mo better. The report, entitled Sure Things Seem Sucky but How Do You Make Things Un-Sucky by Sitting on Your Lazy Can? Now Get Back to It and Show the Members of the Glorious WAAGNFNP Some More Pictures of the Great Fact Finding Mission to the Southwest Before We Come Down the Hall and Kick Some Major MOGG Butt!, was very well received by the travelogue subcommittee. So, without further ado……

Dateline STL (April 28 May 11, 2007): Continuing the report from the field, the MOGG entourage was able to find a very satisfactory camp on the east side of the Santa Catalina Mountainswithin the Coronado National Forest. It was a tad after dark when we rolled in so we just threw out the sleeping bag – on top of our extra thick wimpo model Thermarest pad.

The road that we were on is the Mount Lemmon Road out of Oracle, Arizona, and a nice trek that winds from desert grassland through dry woodlands and chaparral to boreal forest at over 9,000 feet above sea level. Later in the summer, when the road is open to the top, you might see wild horses & rattlesnakes along the way to a beer or a slice of homemade pie at the village of Summerhaven.

The next morning was a bit special for having painted clouds to the east across the San Pedro River valley:

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I have been working on a film script to counter claims that the WAAGNFNP unfairly concentrates on nuclear destruction over other forms of apocalypse. A précis follows. [I have the idea pretty well fleshed out, but am looking for some help from readers on a few details.]

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Working title: Triumph of the Snark.

The movie, set in the indeterminate future, starts with an unnamed narrator (later in the movie we hear him referred to as “Doc”) describing the cynical and barren life that he lives in a cramped underground city: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? That about sums it up for me. There is nothing of beauty in this city, the residents (who sarcastically refer to themselves as Morlocks, and the city itself as Turgidsonville) are mean, spiteful, rude and condescending. Most spend their days online, trading acerbic barbs and ridiculing anyone who advances any positive agenda for change. A great catastrophic event in the past is hinted at, and the viewer at first assumes that it refers to some manner of nuclear, ecological, or epidemiological disaster. Instead, it is revealed that people were merely driven underground by their own perverse thoughts, their insistence that anything “nice” or “cheery” was bad - a “New Nihilism” had swept the world, sapping people’s will to live and reproduce, and leaving a small embittered remnant ensconced in their digitally-enabled tombs.

Doc’s job as an electrical engineer takes him to the surface on occasion to look after the power grid. The surface is a pleasant enough place - though it is evident that Doc himself is utterly unimpressed with it. There are a smattering of automated farms and mines providing raw materials for factories producing mass quantities of Mountain Dew, junk food, electronic components and other essentials. Working on the surface one winter day, Doc is drawn away from the solar grid he is repairing by a vision of a giant rabbit who tells him that “death will come from the sky” in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Following the vision causes him to miss being crushed by a falling jet engine that lands precisely where he had been working. Nearby he finds an injured teenager lying in the snow, mumbling Schlachthof Fünf over and over again. Doc brings him home, and although the boy can only remember his name - Donnie McLightly - he has a relentlessly cheerful nature which proves infectious. Inspired by the song Mr. Blue Sky from a CD Donnie finds in his pocket, he convinces Doc to help him form a club which he calls Electric Light Orchestra Illuminati (ELOI) club. Tapping a hidden, seething vein of optimism in Turgidsonville, the club soon grows in number, despite what seem to be self-limiting set of rules.

The first rule of ELOI club is that you do not blog about ELOI club.
The second rule of ELOI club is that you do not blog about ELOI club.
…
…
If this is your first day at ELOI club, you have to logoff and go topside.

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A specter is haunting America — the specter of financial apocalypse. Record-breaking current-account deficits, plummeting regional housing markets, a weakening dollar, and news that major central banks around the world are beginning to diversify their currency reserves have made the possibility that the U.S. could soon experience what happened to Mexico and Southeast Asia in the 1990s newsworthy even to the reliably rah-rah American corporate media. With Time and the Atlantic Monthly examining the cases for alarm and calm, respectively, in recent weeks, the time has come for the WAAGNFNP to consider its stance on global capitalism.

Flashback: It’s Fall 1997 and I’m teaching a course called Globalization and Its Discontents in the Princeton Writing Program. The course, which examines the processes and discourses of globalization, is a challenge for my students, who come from all over the western hemisphere, but they really get into it and work incredibly hard. After surveying attempts to define globalization in the context of major post-Cold War-paradigm-shift candidates, from Fukuyama’s “end of history” to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” from Barber’s “jihad vs. McWorld” to Kaplan’s “coming anarchy,” we turn to debates over globalization of manufacturing, agriculture, trade, finance, labor, racism, civil society, and culture: is it really happening? is it new? is it a good thing? for whom? can and should it be stopped? why or why not?

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Once, gone with the Da to the Genealogical Society’s cubby in the Santa Cruz Main Library.

It’s off to the side there as you enter the building, full with all manner of raw harvested names of the past, folks registered for what must have seemed good and sufficient reason at the time with the age-old compulsive exactitude of the scribe. Stuffed with polling lists, that space is, registries of addresses. List of passenger arrivals on ships entering SF Bay 1860-1889. Reams of privately printed brochures: family trees of folks forever otherwise unremarked in history (The Johnsons of Sussex, World Concordance of Burgesses, that sort of thing). Great midden heap of ur-history in that small room, primary source material, checklists of myriads of common selves living lives only now and then winning the bare notice of public record. But, too, local newspapers on microfilm.

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Friends, fellow-travellers, and members of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party, I come before you today not to praise Technorati but to bury it. Will you join me in declaring war on this Enemy of the Party?

Consider the function of its nefarious popular page, which is a huge step toward doing to blogoramaville what was done to radio and tv (which in their day inspired similar public sphere utopianism as teh intertubes, according to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan’s New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005) — namely, promoting crap over quality, elevating voyeurism and invective over reflection and dialogue, and making ratings and profits the name of the game. Don’t get me wrong — there are certainly some good blogs among the most linked and most favorited top 100s (a certain ex-fugitive from Party justice is at #85 on the latter list) — but everyone’s heard that even a bad function can find nuts twice a day (or something like that). It’s not like Technorati doesn’t have the capacity to do better: imagine if they produced 100 top 100s, each recognizing a particular bloggy genre. But no, what counts as a new idea for them is WFT (Where’s the Fire) — I say “wft?!” to its WTF Topics list, which takes Technorati’s default-celebrity-sex-tapes/gadgetry/wingnuttia-obsession-mode to its logical and absurd end.

Ah, but Technorati is the royal road to the American unconscious, you say; This Is What the People Want. To which I say, Fuck the People; the WAAGNFNP is all about the annihilationism, not the populism or the humanism.

Others then chime in: an imaginary political party can’t declare war — only the Congress can do that (in the U.S., at least). To which I say, ever heard of the neocons? The Project for a New American Century? Dick Cheney?

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First, the update: Dr. Free Ride’s much anticipated follow-up to this extremely popular post will be arriving here tomorrow. Don’t miss it!

And now, the Thank-You’s:
The WAAGNFNP would like to thank Blue Gal and all the co-sponsors and organizers of Blog Against Theocracy Week(end). You worked your asses off to make it all possible, and it was a huge success. Thanks for bringing so many people, both religious and not, together to talk, sound the alarm, and share ideas about getting active before it’s too late. Here’s a link to the blogswarm participants. Lots of good reading in there, so check it out.

It is with great pride and an overflowing heart that I proclaim the WAAGNFNP made a truly outstanding showing for Blog Against Theocracy Week. From Friday -Monday, we had four tremendous posts offering unique and insightful angles on both the threat growing theocratic influence poses to our democracy, as well as reasons to be optimistic for the future. For those of you who have not had a chance to read these fine posts (and the extremely thoughtful discussion in the comments - a staple of this nascent community blog which is quickly making it a “must read”), please take the time to do so. Just scroll on down. You’ll be glad you did.

We actually received a total of six BAT Week contributions, but we’ll save those last two for future posting because the spectre of theocracy and the importance of keeping the church and state separate are always timely topics.

So a huge, no, a GIANT thank you to all our BAT Week contributors and commenters. Surely Gojira is smiling upon us all.

In honor of our fine BAT Week posts, I ask the following questions:
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