"Authoritarian resilience"...? Is this the opposite of the "brittle command structure" of dictatorships that allegedly allowed U. S. troops to overrun Baghdad while Baghdad Bob was still denying anything had happened?

I'm not sure that simply flipping a parameter here and there on an existing body of foreign policy dogma contributes much to the discussion.

Try this on for size: China is a BIG meme, larger than any one brain can contain. (Insert obligatory reference to elephants and some number of blind natural philosophers here.)

It's possible that China's future will not be dystopian at all, although ours might well be. There is a second cultural revolution sweeping through China -- this one quietly green, rather than noisily red -- coupled with a thoroughly post-Maoist dialectal take on gradualism that allows it to embrace coal power production as a temporary step on the way to sustainable alternatives.

I take the Chinese at their word on this, since it is consistent with a Deng Xiaoping party line I first heard in 1975; events (in broad strokes, at least) seem to have borne him out.

Yeah, I remember that. I also remember that WR was right up there in the insufferably smug category when they predicted about a month before Sputnik that Russia was 50 years behind the U.S. in science.

This discussion (not the logo) has reminded me of the black-light swastika in the "Third Reich Decadent Cafe" from URUSEI YATSURA's "Beautiful Dreamer." No need to delve deep for those hidden meanings, 'ey? Nope, right there on the surface, in your face. We're all punk kids.

I, however, am 63 (born 1944) and I did NOT freely associate that symbol with the SS. It reminded me of that damn Zoom Zoom kid and the stretch of twisty little Autobahn, all alike, where the cocky little bastard keeps his turnip stand.

A little Roundup® should take care of that. On the other hand, if you really care, wait for the flowers to bloom and then run it through a good botanical key.

You could also play the last remaining board game where (Japanese, Korean and Chinese) kids are still smarter than the computer: Go! The best of these, judging by the license from Nihon Ki-in, is Yukari Umezawa's Easy Go ("Umezawa Yukari no Yasashii Igo") for Nintendo DS. Link

Forget the dork in the doodoo, whatsbout that rich corinthian leather ergonomic chair? My spine is killing me already.

I may never know, or care, how the final episode of Dharma and Greg turned out. Been there. Done that. Wished cess on a few bad boys who let their girlfriends take the rap for the shit they were selling.

Came to my senses as far from New York as I was from Santa Monica, alone as a discarded diaper, covered with regrets.

I damn myself for believing "Doors of Perception" and damn the whole crock of rocks for never realizing that "Crown of Creation" is the screed from John Wyndham's Rebirth. Fair use, I guess.

Fried eggs are ok. Eating your brain thirty years later requires a little pepper, a little salt. Get real.

How about this? The Vikings reclaim their ancestral lands from the ice, wiping out the ice mice (Saxons, Sammis and other aboriginals) in the process, and the rest of us pay the Danes gold to stay on their side of a line they draw? In three or four hundred years, it will all seem perfectly natural.

Pecking shows up in the Blues Brothers' street scene outside Ray Charles' axe 'n wax, except I think there it's called the chicken.

"When all the world has gone insane, the sane man appears crazy." I forget the StarDate, though. Go, Noor, go!