Copyright Alert [chat]

At some point we'll need to realize, as a species, that notions of "property" and "owning" are really quite dumb.  Until that time, I guess we'll just keep doing stupid shit.

Horse Meat and Idiots

It seems that some horse meat sauntered into the European food supply, and this sparked outcry.  Now, just for fun, I'm going to provide two possible reactions to the discovery that horse meat may have ended up in your Whopper.  See if you can guess which one a majority of the media / internet went with.

Option 1:  "The discovery of horse meat raises issues and concerns over the effectiveness of government regulation, and sparked an outcry for more stringent requirements and additional regulatory staff to inspect food processing facilities."

Option 2:  "EEEWWWWWWW THAT'S SO GROOOOSSSSSS!!!!!"

If you selected 1, then you are obviously confused about the nature of our species.

There are legitimate concerns to raise over the relationship between food labels and content, for the sake of allergies, nutrition concerns, and issues of food sourcing.  Some reactions to this situation focused upon these sensible issues.  For example:

"The finding of even trace amounts of equine DNA in beef products, even if of no public health concern, is relevant and worthy of further consideration in cases when the manufacturing plant does not handle horse meat products."

It seems sensible to ask why equine DNA was found in food products that were labeled as beef, since that may indicate a problem with sourcing / packaging of food products.  However, other sources indicate this may not be a problem of mislabeling:  "One of the Romanian slaughterhouses implicated, Carmolimp, said in a statement its meat was properly labelled as horsemeat, adding that it had not exported beef in 2012."  There is a question as to whether the horsemeat was actually mislabeled.

A bit of evidence against regulatory failure is the finding that:

"We also had the burgers that tested positive for horse DNA, tested for the presence of a range of animal remedies including phenylbutazone by the State Laboratory on 10th December. Phenylbutazone is a commonly used medicine in horses. Once administered to a horse, the animal is not allowed in the food chain. The FSAI received these results on 19th December and all the results were negative for the presence of phenylbutazone and other drugs."

All of the horsemeat tested seems to have been produced for human consumption, or at least meets the requirements for human consumption.  The horse meat seems to have come from eating horses, as opposed to riding horses.  The problem is that people thought they were eating cow, but were actually eating horsey.

Clearing up those issues?  Good and sensible.  Unfortunately, the majority of outcry isn't based on those sensible considerations, but rather errs on the side of horseys being inherently for riding, not eating.  And that is fucking stupid, in the same sense that any non-nutritionally based food preference is fucking stupid.

There exist persons who choose to eat horse.  Horse meat is a protein with nutritional qualities that can be processed by the human organism.  Horse is edible.  And, again, there can be legitimate problems if one has a horse allergy, or requires a specific nutritant that cow provides and horse does not.  But the actual majority of bitching isn't focused upon those nutritional concerns.  Rather, it's "EWWWW HORSEY!" which is fucking stupid.

Why is it stupid?

Well, it's stupid because it's based on shitty reasoning such as this:  "Opponents of horse slaughter essentially say eating horses is not part of American culture, equating it to the slaughter of other pets."  It's the nonsensical distinction between "things for eating" and "things not for eating" that rests on cultural biases and nonsensical emotive dispositions and preferences.  It's the same disposition that leads us to keep dogs and cats as pets, rather than snacks.  We're inclined to eat some things, and disinclined to eat others, for reasons other than acquiring the nutrients necessary to sustain life.  It's an arbitrary distinction that comes from arbitrary cultural biases.

Another consideration is the degree to which people seem to have enjoyed eating horsemeat.  Granted, they did not know that their Whopper was horsemeat at the time that they ate it, but their knowledge of its not being cow does not change the enjoyment they experienced.  There are a group of people who, if asked, would probably claim to not enjoy horse meat despite their having unknowingly consumed horse meat and enjoyed it.

That's an interesting situation, and perhaps evidences the degree to which "Horse Meat EEEWWW!!!!" is a childish reaction.

So, if you want to bitch about horse meat, focus upon the legitimate concerns of food inspection and regulation.  Question the effectiveness of labels and the relationship between consumers and suppliers.  Everything else is just emotive braying and culturally biased neigh-saying.

Robert Downey Jr. is Best

One of the reasons why Robert Downey Jr. is best.

He's the only one who claps.

Marco Rubio: Thirsty for [chat]

John Harrison is not Khan: Stardates are dumb

Is Benedict Cumberbatch’s John Harrison a version of Ricardo Montalbán’s Khan Noonien Singh?  Given the amount of internet speculation related to this question I thought someone would take the time to clearly answer it.  Unfortunately, no one has done so, and I'm bored enough to take on the job.  So, let's dig in.  First, who is Khan?

Introduced in the episode “Space Seed”, Khan is a product of human eugenics who ruled over a quarter of Earth during the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.  Placed in suspended animation sometime during / after those wars, he is awakened by the crew of the Enterprise two centuries later.  After an unsuccessful takeover attempt of the Enterprise, Khan is marooned on Ceti Alpha V.  He again appears in Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan, set 15 years after his exile.

Given that information, is it possible, within Star Trek canon, for John Harrison to be Khan Noonien Singh?  The possibility seems to rely on the alternate universe aspect of Abrams’ films, and the degree to which the Narada’s trip through time impacted the life of Khan.  Unfortunately, given the completely shitty non-organizational non-structure of temporal events within the Star Trek universe, it is difficult to discern an exact answer to this question.

For starters, the original series seems to have no clear articulation of when it takes place.  These discrepancies are laid out on the Star Trek timeline wikipedia page.  In the episode "Space Seed" Kahn is said to have been in suspended animation for two centuries since the 1990s.  This would mean the episode occurs sometime around 2190.  However, in the episode "Miri" we learned that 1960 was 300 years ago, so the events of that episode occur in roughly 2260.  While "Space Seed" and "Miri" occur at different times, it seems strange to think that the episodes occur 100 years apart, with the same crew.  So, to begin, we don't know exactly when the original series takes place, and most of the provided dates contradict other dates.

If we ignore the non-Khan events from the series, there are still temporal problems.  The script for "Space Seed" indicates that prior to boarding Khan's ship Kirk states, "Captain's log, stardate 3141.9".  The wikipedia page for Khan indicates that this stardate corresponds to the year 2267.  However, Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan, happens 15 after "Space Seed", with a provided date of 2222.  2222 is not 15 years after 2267.  Also, the script for Wrath of Khan indicates that the opening lines from the film place it on "stardate eighty-one-thirty point three."  I'm not sure how 8130.3 could be 15 years after 3141.9.

Tossing temporal information from Star Trek 2009 into the mix just fucks things up even more.  When Captain Robau is taken aboard the Narada, he informs Nero that the current stardate is " twenty-two thirty-three zero four".  For the new films, the format for stardates was revised:  "According to Roberto Orci, stardates were revised again for the 2009 film so that the first four digits correspond to the year, while the remainder was intended to stand for the day of the year".  So, the temporal disruption at the beginning of Star Trek 2009 takes place in 2233.  This is 34 years before the given date for "Space Seed" and eleven years after the events of Wrath of Khan!

To put all of that into a handy-dandy list:

Space Seed
Stardate:  3141.9
Year:  2267

Wrath of Khan  (15 years after Space Seed)
Stardate:  8130.3
Year:  2222

Star Trek 2009 opening sequence, pre-Kirk birth
Stardate:  2233.04
Year:  2233

Aside:  Someone needs to explain to me how Star Trek can be extolled as a paragon of sci-fi quality given it's complete inability to clearly, and consistently, articulate what the fuck day it is.  But I digress.

Let's pretend that the stardate issue is not a problem, and somehow all those numbers play nicely together.  Even then, we have to deal with the semi-fact that Khan was placed in suspended animation in the late 1990s.  That act would not have been influenced by the time-travel events of the Narada, given that temporal disruptions impact linear forward progressions of time, and have no regressive impact.  [citation needed]  So, even if Abrams wants to portray John Harrison as an alternate-universe Khan Noonien Singh, we would have to ask how the eugenically engineered Indian Khan Noonien Singh put into suspended animation in 1990 was alternate-timelined into John Harrison by the events of the Narada.

It seems strange to suggest that Ricardo Montalbán was floating around in suspended animation, some Romulans went back in time, and that transformed him into Benedict Cumberbatch.

While I really want to end on that joke, there's another bit of information I am obligated to include.

In the original plot treatment for "Space Seed", the character of Khan was named Harold Erricsen.  The name was changed in the first script to John Ericssen.  That name has a striking resemblance to John Harrison, with respect to both the first name and the ____son surname.  I worry this resemblance is not accidental.  It seems likely that the similarity of name is meant to indicate some alternate-timeline relationship, and we're in for a very strange homage wherein our beloved "KHAAAAAAAN!!!!" is romulan-time-travel-morphed into "JOOOOOOOOOHN!!"

The question is, again, how Abrams can turn Ricardo Montalbán into Benedict Cumberbatch by means of some Romulans going back in time to a date 34 years before "Space Seed" and eleven years after the events of Wrath of Khan.  I'll grant that "Time travel" and "Wizard did it" can answer a lot of questions.  But I don't think it's enough to do this:

Diablo 3 to Consoles on PS3 & PS4

Blizzard re-enters console market with Diablo III

Blizzard Entertainment's SVP of story and franchise development Chris Metzen said his company is revisiting its console game development roots and bringing Diablo III to both the PlayStation 3 and the just-announced PlayStation 4.

Blizzard and Sony have entered a strategic partnership through which we will take over the world," said Metzen. Diablo III released on PC in spring 2012.

It's been well over a decade since Blizzard released a commercial game for consoles. Metzen noted Blizzard's console development background and the time was right to revisit the space. "The trick has always been 'how'... how do we do it," he said.

Blizzard has made no secret that it was looking at a possible console version of Diablo III, for instance posting public job ads for Diablo III console game designers.

The developer of World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo has made the PC its focus for many years. Naturally, Blizzard's PC games are designed around the mouse, keyboard and desktop display setup, which can be difficult to translate to a couch-and-TV living room experience.

Metzen said Blizzard has "painstakingly" customized the control scheme, offering direct control over the Diablo III avatar. The game will also support four-player, full-screen co-op play.

Seth MacFarlane should really [chat] better

Dude voices a dog who drinks martinis.  He has to know how to make them properly.