Back of the Envelope

Okay, so it's a bit late... this Sunday's Sluggy had me distracted. Still, I timestamped it where it belonged.

Sluggy Freelance -- And it's a successful mission on "Pig Sty for the Gay Guy." And things take a really cool turn as the Dimension of Lame Bun-bun shows up. Is it the final showdown between Torg and the Dimension of Pain? And yes, Pain and Lame are two different dimensions.

Day by Day -- John Kerry gets mocked (twice), but mostly it's a lot of Damon this week.

It's Walky! -- And the fight between SEMME and the Britjas rages on, only the Britjas have brainwashed quite a few SEMME agents.

College Roomies from Hell!!! (I added some exclamation points. I was negligent leaving them off, as "The three exclamation points stand for quality!) -- Mike infiltrates the party, where he has a very nasty flashback. Unfortunatley, there weren't as many updates this week as I would have hoped.

General Protection Fault -- And the false Craig is revealed, to everyone except Sharon.

Schlock Mercenary -- The alien CSI has discovered that Schlock is innocent. Cool.

All right, I'm running late today, but I changed the timestamp by a few minutes to make sure it didn't leak into Sunday.

This is a continuation of the Sluggy Archive Review. It's a chance for you to become familiar with Sluggy Freelance by going through the archives one week each day. You can start here.

Demon Summoning Week

Not having much luck summoning demons through the Internet, Riff intends to do it the old-fashioned way, with a tome of ancient evil. Torg, of course, goes along with it. Things I noticed:

1. Torg and Riff, best friends that they are, always seem to go along with each others' plans, no matter how crazy, dangerous, and outright stupid they are.

2. Where do you think the Book of E-ville came from in the first place?

3. You'd figure that Bun-bun would be more into summoning evil.

4. I particularly like Tuesday's comic, "What?! It's only okay if Bill Gates does it [summons evil to plunge the world into chaos and darkness]?"

5. It's the first mention of telemarketers on Wednesday.

6. The unpronounceable spell word is neat.

7. The "About the Author" blurb on Saturday is a nice touch.

8. Only Riff and Torg would play with the forces of darkness for such frivolous purposes.

Please do not post spoilers, or speculation that looks like a spoiler, in the comments of this post. This has been cross-posted in the Sluggy Freelance forum for all your spoiler needs.

"Third revision? I thought you weren't done with the second revision yet."

Well, yes and no. While I'm less than 70% done with the second revision, A Phoenix in Darkness is written in five parts (as I've mentioned earlier), each of which is 5500-7000 words long. By contrast, "A Stranger in the Library" is just under 6000 words long (which, not coincidentally, is the word limit for short story submissions for most print magazines). So I've finished the second revision on the first three of those parts, and I'm now on the fourth--which is on track to be done this weekend. I sent the first part to my "editors" (family members and friends whom I trust to read the story and comment on it) a couple of weeks ago, and they've finally gotten back to me with their comments. I'll soon send the second part to them, and I'm hoping that they'll be working on the third part by the time I finish the second revision. At that point, it's on to the third revision, which takes their comments into account and makes corrections. So far the most important comment I've received is that the there's not enough background in the first part, and too much reader knowledge is taken for granted. This is one of those things that's easy for me to miss: having written quite a bit of material in this world, I sometimes forget that not everyone has read it. This is bad news for me, since it's going to require some extensive additions to the first part, but good news for the readers, since the first part gets longer. Once I've made those additions, I'll polish and spell-check (I don't spell-check until the end, because spell-checking is a pain and not very useful while I'm still doing significant rewrites), then post the first part. And yes, I plan to do that before I'm done with the third revision for all the parts. If things go smoothly, a new part will be posted every two weeks. I expect I will start in two or three weeks.

The next Christian Carnival will be hosted at Parablemania. If you'd like to participate, send an e-mail to Jeremy Pierce (jrpierce@syr.edu) with the following information by 8 PM on Tuesday night:

Name of your Blog
Blog URL
Title of your Post
Post URL
Description of your Post

Old Post: I give a spirited defense of the war in Iraq here, during my first week blogging. But that's only part of the story.

Believe it or not, I was not always for the Iraq war. Back in January of 2003, I was very skeptical about the whole enterprise. The main reason was because Bush had made WMDs the centerpoint of his argument, and I wasn't certain of his evidence. Yes, this sounds very snide coming now after we haven't found the WMDs we expected (although we've certainly found some). At the time, my doubts came from being an experimentalist. As an experimentalist, when not taking data, I was analyzing it. This involves a lot of looking at meaningless data points and trying to figure out what they mean, looking for patterns that indicate some phenomenon. I always figured it was similar to what analysts at intelligence agencies do. Separating the signal from the noise is hard enough, even harder for intelligence agencies than experimentalists, but even when you're sure of the facts, it's not always obvious what they mean. When analyzing data, it's very easy to see what you expect to see, even when it's not really there. And thus, before the Iraq war, I was skeptical, since the evidence the Bush administration presented, while weighty, wasn't conclusive, and I had no way of knowing how well they had separated the signal from the noise in the first place (by noise I mean things that simply weren't true, while by signal I mean facts that you may or may not know how to interpret). It bothered me that there was no smoking gun, even with all the intelligence efforts and the weapon inspections.

I guess I wasn't really anti-war, however. Every time I got into a debate with my friends about it, I found myself on the pro-war side. Usually this was because they used the weakest anti-war arguments available, "It's all about the oil!" and "What about international law?" and "Saddam was never a threat!" and "Bush is just trying to avenge the family honor!" All of these were patently false, and war-skeptic that I was, I had to at least disabuse them of these arguments. If they were going to oppose the war, they should use good reasons. Here are the reasons why I thought the war might be a bad idea:

1. The US did not have the will to pursue a successful war against Iraq. Of course, at the time, I did not expect Saddam's government to collapse in three weeks, but this has been somewhat borne out in the opposition to the continuing efforts in the media and the Democratic party, and how the loss of less than a 1000 soldiers is considered unacceptable casualties.

2. The Arab street. Don't laugh! I thought it possible the war in Iraq would spread to other nations. Fortunately, it didn't. My views on the Arab nations and their reactions were wrong, but given what I was reading in the news media, can you blame me?

3. Saddam's threat was overblown. I'm still not sure where I stand on this one, but given our more recent knowledge about his terrorist connections and his weapons program, I'm thinking he was more dangerous than I thought at the time.

4. International law. This was by far the weakest. As I said in my previous post on why I support the war, the international law case is open and shut. Saddam agreed to the terms of a ceasefire, he didn't keep it, therefore the war continued. The question is, with whom did Saddam agree to a ceasefire? The US? Then sure, we can declare the thing voided now that he's broken it and attack. However, if it was with the whole coalition of nations that forced him out of Kuwait, then who could declare it void? The US? The UN Security Council? Would all the nations that took part have to agree? I thought one could make a case for it being the Security Council, but I thought it a pretty weak case.

Now, as I said, I was a skeptic. I balanced the reasons for opposing it against the reasons for supporting it and I didn't know for certain where I stood. Once the war started, I went to full-support. Now that it was underway, we had to see it through, not only for our national prestige and honor (which may just seem to be nice sounding words, but these things are important when it comes to dealing with other nations, friendly and unfriendly), but for the sake of the Iraqis--I remembered what happened after the first Gulf War. It was around this time when I realized that the news media was giving me only parts of the story, talking about how badly we were doing when any fool could look at a map and see that we'd made astounding progress. So I started looking for alternative news sources. I found Glennreynolds.com on MSNBC invaluable for his ability to locate these other sources, which led me to Instapundit (Glenn's other blog), which introduced me to blogs in general. Once I started reading them, I also came to a better understanding of the war and the arguments for and against, which made it easier for me to decide where I stood.

So confession is good for the soul, eh? I'm not sure I meet Dean Esmay's definition of the biggest patriots, but I'll admit his post was part of the inspiration to write this. The other part was that for a long time I've been wanting to make the analogy between experimentalists and intelligence analysts when considering the case for Saddam's WMDs.

This is a continuation of the Sluggy Archive Review. It's a chance for you to become familiar with Sluggy Freelance by going through the archives one week each day. You can start here.

Teddy Weddy

Since the guys can't beat Bun-bun, and they can't appease him, they need some other way to get rid of him. Like another "cute" talking animal who can replace him violently. Some thoughts:

1. I liked the Monday comic the best. Yeah, trust Bun-bun to sucessfully play the race card. Cute talking animals can get away with anything.

2. Teddy Weddy ain't exactly cute, but he talks, and he looks like a match for the bunny.

3. "Ka-click." That bunny has a switchblade! And he knows how to use it.

4. PETA's back. This almost makes it worth it.

5. So what is the lop-technique?

Please do not post spoilers, or speculation that looks like a spoiler, in the comments of this post. This has been cross-posted in the Sluggy Freelance forum for all your spoiler needs.

It took a while, but I'm now 58% through A Phoenix in Darkness. Technical difficulties contributed significantly to the delay, but not as much as my personal life. In the end, I'm only a week behind schedule if I can get through an entire section this weekend (well within the realm of possibility).

I've been known to recommend webcomics on this blog. The thing about webcomics is, because the entire archive is online, they tend to be serial, referring to past events and building on old storylines. For that reason, it's best to start from the beginning, but also kind of intimidating to read through six years of webcomics at once. For that reason, I've started the Sluggy Freelance Archive Review. We'll go through the Sluggy Freelance Archives in week-sized chunks. It'll take a while, but this should serve as a good introduction to one of the mainstays of Internet webcomics.

Along Came a Bunny

Now that the guys have a cute talking animal, they want to get rid of him. Unfortunately, Bun-bun fights back, and the pet store won't take returns unless they're broken. A few things to notice:

1. Monday's strip is a classic, the first where we see that not only is Bun-bun rude, he's violent, and he's more than capable of pummeling a nerd-boy ten times his size.

2. He's mischievous. In the sense that he can get you killed and/or fired. Also, it looks like talking animals are not the rule in the Sluggyverse.

3. Riff is doing an animation render. One might think he was a computer artist. What's he rendering, anyway?

4. Riff has no problem murdering cute talking animals. Of course, he has met Bun-bun.

5. While Bun-bun is usually quite intelligent, sometimes his rabbit instincts take over and he does something really stupid.

6. PETA member gets beaten up by the cute talking animal. This is how I knew I liked Pete.

7. What is it with Bun-bun and Baywatch? Why would a rabbit like human women?

Please do not post spoilers, or speculation that looks like spoilers, in the comments of this post. I've cross-posted this on the Sluggy Freelance Forums for all your spoiler needs.

I did watch the Angel series finale last night. I've always liked Angel better than Buffy, the character as well as the series. He was just more interesting and tragic. I also liked the fact that Joss Whedon did a better job of keeping the power-level reasonable in Angel. In the last few seasons of Buffy, Buffy, and especially Willow, had become too powerful, so that it was hard to find challenges for them any longer. In the last season of Angel, the principals had a lot of power, but it was more due to the organization than the characters themselves, and the organization couldn't be trusted.

That leads me to what I found most disappointing about the finale: the manner of Wesley's death. Going into the finale, I thought the chances of Wesley's survival were pretty slim; he's been borderline suicidal since Winnifred's death. Wesley had become one of my favorite characters, growing significantly from the wimp we first encountered on Buffy, and the one thing that I liked the most about him was how smart he was. He had a realistic view of his own abilities, knew where he was weak and where he was strong, and he was able to take on his opponents by finding their weaknesses and exploiting them. While Wesley knew a good bit about magic, he was never shown to be truly powerful in the way that Willow was. Thus, I found the concept of him fighting an uberpowerful sorcerer with magic out-of-character. I kept waiting for him to pull some trick, or at least a pistol (not a switchblade!). (Another reason I liked him was that he used guns. Dramatic as it is, it's unrealistic that in this day and age manually staking vampires is still considered the best way to kill them. Sure, ordinary bullets won't do it, but why hasn't anyone in Whedon's universe thought of this.) Perhaps it was a reflection of his borderline suicidal psyche, but I wouldn't expect him to throw his life away at the cost of the mission. Nor am I convinced that his plan all along was to die in Illyria's arms so she would kill the sorcerer.

I'm also not a huge fan of the cliffhanger ending. Farscape was the worst; this one was at least fun, if infuriatingly inconclusive. But if the rest of them died in the fight at the end, at least they went down appropriately, which is more than I can say for Wesley.

Instapundit points to this article by Collin Levey, which says the same thing I've been saying, that the discovery of this sarin shell is a big deal and it's not good news for any American:

It hadn't been but a few hours since the news broke when former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix grabbed a microphone somewhere to huff that the discovery meant nothing. Others briskly offered that the shell was more likely the bounty of a scavenger hunt by yahoos who didn't even know what they had.

Fair enough to be sure: At this point, none of us knows. But even forgetting the potency of one drop of liquid sarin, when did the prospect of the accidental use of loose WMDs become reassuring?

Fingers have been chewed to the quick around the world at this same prospect for years. Anyone old enough to drink has probably watched at least one show fretting over the whereabouts of vast stockpiles from the former Soviet Union. Given that Iraq's history of using sarin gas during the Iran-Iraq war and against the Iraqi Kurds is well-documented (Saddam Hussein listed some 800 tons in his possession at one point), a twinge of concern wouldn't be inappropriate.
...
Sure, every tiddlywink of Iraq news these days will be absorbed into the political machinery of an election campaign in overdrive.

But like the memo informing the Bush administration that Osama bin Laden was maybe possibly thinking about using planes to ill effect, the discovery of a potential weapon of mass terror in Iraq is a warning we could regret missing in hindsight.

It's also a reminder of why we chose this battle in the first place.

Come on, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, et cetera! I don't particularly care how you spin it as a failure for the Bush administration (I know you can), but you are failing your duty to keep Americans informed. If you can daily terrorize Americans about the dangers of botox injections, fast food, and second-hand smoke, you can at the least get them a little bit concerned about the fact that there are WMDs in the hands of terrorists!

Want to know what the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is up to? Kate at Small Dead Animals confesses all.

That reminds me, I need to renew my VRWC membership. Maybe I can get one of those fancy new membership cards.

I've been known to recommend webcomics on this blog. The thing about webcomics is, because the entire archive is online, they tend to be serial, referring to past events and building on old storylines. For that reason, it's best to start from the beginning, but also kind of intimidating to read through six years of webcomics at once. For that reason, I've started the Sluggy Freelance Archive Review. We'll go through the Sluggy Freelance Archives in week-sized chunks. It'll take a while, but this should serve as a good introduction to one of the mainstays of Internet webcomics.

The First Week

Here is where we first meet Torg and Riff. We notice right away that they're a very self aware bunch, as Torg is addressing the audience in the first comic (Fourth wall, what fourth wall?). Riff, meanwhile, is engaged in a very unconventional use of the Internet: demon summoning. By the time we're done with the good versus evil deathmatch on Riff's hard drive, we meet the strip's cute talking animal, with attitude.

My gut reaction to this week was "eh?" Sluggy always was one of those things that grew on me, like a fungus. Computer mayhem is just too common a theme in webcomics for me to be impressed by this.

Please do not post spoilers, or speculation that looks like a spoiler, in the comments of this post. This has been cross-posted in the Sluggy Freelance forum for all your spoiler needs.

Welcome to this week's Christian Carnival. I've carefully read all these posts before putting them up, and I found them all to be good. This doesn't necessarily mean I agree with all of them (or even any of them), but it does mean that they're all worth reading. I believe I got everybody's submission, but as I was shuffling through two e-mail accounts, it's possible I missed some. If you sent me an e-mail but don't see your post, just e-mail me again at the address in the sidebar. I've grouped the posts by topics, although I had no particular strategy for choosing topics aside from what suggested itself from what people wrote.

Prayer

Bob at Mr. Standfast shares a Prayer Request for a friend.

Mr. Standfast's request inspired Rebecca Writes to share a "A Few Thoughts on Prayer," including the importance of telling other people you are praying for them.

Bryan at Spare Change argues that our prayers need to be more like instant messages than snail mail. If you have no idea what this means, you should read his post "Instant Messaging."

War

Darren at Nicene Theology has a post called "The One-upmanship of Evil," describing how an appropriate response to Nick Berg's violence requires us to overcome evil with good.

La Shawn Barber looks at the war with a Christian perspective in "Onward Christian Soldiers."


Theism and Naturalism

Jeremy Pierce at Parablemania writes about miracles, naturalism, and God's will in "God's Will and Naturalism."

John Zimmer from Letters from Babylon has the latest post on whether naturalism is a necessary assumption in science, "Methodological Naturalism and the Proper Scope of Science, Revisited."

Evangelism

Intolerant Elle talks about how teaching spiritual Greeks is different from instructing spiritual Jews in "Thai Greeks."

Douglas Bass at Belief Seeking Understanding tries to understand "A Verse Many People Don't Get...", specifically John 14:12, which says: "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father."

Warren at View from the Pew thinks the Southern Baptists Convention's decision to encourage its members to abandon public schools is a mistake. "Why yield ground to the Enemy?" he argues in "Christians and Public Education."

The Church

Karen Marie Knapp at From the Anchor Hold says that Catholics should not be asking "What's the least I can do to be saved?" but "What more can I do?" in her post "Maximal Catholic Living: Spiritual Fitness Program for Beginners and the Out-of-Shape." There's good advice here for us non-Catholics as well.

Hal Paxton at The Great Separation considers a tough pro-life question in "Mother, who Refused a Medically Advised Abortion, Dies."

Samantha Pierce at Uncle Sam's Cabin takes issue with those who say women shouldn't speak at all in church, in her post "Women Should be Silent in Churches."

Thoughts and Feelings

The verb (aka Jeff) at Kingdom Come has posted "On Sensuality." Sensuality is not synonymous with sexuality, and neither is inherently evil.

Marla Swoffer of Proverbial Wife has some ideas about why both thinking and feeling are incomplete ways of experiencing the world in "Subjective Objections".

Dawn Xiana Moon has a post about community and suburbia called "Language Falters."

Doc Rampage has a long but fascinating post entitled "talking past each other." (Doc doesn't capitalize his post titles. No, I don't get it either.) Here's an excerpt:

The difference in a nut shell: the left believes that the measure of a society is how well it produces good people. The right thinks that the measure of a society is how well it controls bad people. To the left, if a society has bad people that need to be controlled, then it is a failure already. To the right, society has little impact on how good a person is, it can only control their more harmful actions.

I think Doc is largely correct. There's one thing I don't think he addressed fully:

This view of the left is also what compels them to piousness on issues of conflict. If someone is violent, it is because someone failed to adjust the perpetrator's inputs properly. So conservatives act to control the worst elements of human nature and leftists sniff, "Well, just don't have such elements." They always seem to think that if we would only be nicer to criminals, crime would vanish. There is the implicit suggestion that if you would only be nicer to criminals, crime would vanish. When the left asked after 9/11, "Why do they hate us?" it was clear from their answers that what they really meant was "Why do they hate you?", meaning conservatives, capitalists, and Christians -- the three C's of Evil or C3oE. And what they mean is that the C3oE is not on board with the effort to reprogram all those nasty violent people into bucolic Europhiles.

If you want to know what the Islamofascists hate most about America, it isn't the Christians. It's the liberals. When they look at America, what disgusts them? The sexual propaganda of our entertainment, for one. The secularism, for another. Glorification of homosexuality, abortion, the dissolution of marriage, post-modernism, the denunciation of religion... If they ever succeed in turning America into a Muslim country, we Christians will suffer, certainly. The liberals will be lucky to survive.

The Christian Carnival goes up on Wednesday. You have until 8 pm EST Tuesday night to make a submission. E-mail me (e-mail's in the sidebar) the following information:

Title of your Blog
URL of your Blog
Title of your post
URL linking to that post
Description of the Post

I've received nine submissions thus far. There's still plenty of room.

To the surprise of no one but the liberals, there's been another attempt to use chemical weapons against the US and its allies. (The first attempt was the foiled plot in Jordan.)

Once again, where's the panic? I realize that the liberals are in full denial mode, and either conservatives are just calmer, or that's just wishful thinking and they're too busy gloating. Still, while I'm not usually given to panic and there's still the possibility that this will be a false alarm, someone needs to sound the alarm, false or not:

Terrorists have WMDs.

We went to Iraq hoping to prevent it. We're hoping against hope we can contain North Korea and curb Iran and intimidate Syria all to keep this from happening. It's too late, though:

Terrorists have WMDs.

We knew it might have already happened. We knew they were working on it, but we were hoping they wouldn't be able to develop them, that their plans to acquire them would fail. We hoped and prayed they didn't have them. But they do:

Terrorists have WMDs.

Liberals, go ahead and spin it as a terrible failure of the Bush doctrine. Conservatives, point out that Bush was right all along and that we have to be even more aggressive. Just don't bury it or minimize it or say that there's nothing we can do. Like it or not, the nightmare scenario has happened. The world hasn't ended, and I'm not ready to go buy a gas mask, but can we please drop the arguments over whether we should have gone to war in the first place? While the way we question prisoners is still a legitimate question, let's not pretend that we don't desperately need the information they have. Debate how ethical it is to apply extreme interrogation techniques, but at least acknowledge that we're trying to save thousands of lives by doing so. The mistreatment of Ba'athist prisoners, the horrible murders of civilian contractors, none of these matter as much as one thing:

Terrorists have WMDs.

Update: Stupid quotation marks! The links were broken, but they're fixed now.

By now everyone has done a "Straight Eye for the Gay Guy" parody, but I thought Riff's take on home remodeling worth noting.

Well, this is two days late, and I didn't even write one for the previous week. Still, let's review, shall we?

Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism: A Primer -- I try to explain the difference in this first post on the topic. Since both these terms are pretty vague, there's some disagreement. I'm not done with this topic, by the way.

Abu Ghraib -- I wade into the Abu Ghraib debate.

Fallujah Update -- A few thoughts on the progress in the Fallujah situation.

Prisoner Interrogation -- I ask more questions than I answer when I discuss how far you can go questioning prisoners when lives are at risk and there are no legal impediments.

Homicide Bombers -- Sometimes the conservative media irritates me too.