Return of the right-wing terrorists

So the Department of Homeland Security has published a report warning that the US might see increasing numbers of right-wing terrorists in the next few years.

Here's the key paragraph:

The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing* terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.

I have two responses.

1) Duh. Of course.

2) No, this doesn't mean that Obama thinks all Republicans are terrorists.

Any questions?

--YAHYA AL-RIIFI

PS - Read the report. It's only like seven pages long. And it's a little bit interesting, even for non-specialists.

Unfortunately true

Interesting thoughts on habits from 4-Block World. Share and enjoy.

--JUAN PENA

Some stuff I read about

Nerd news:

* Some guy rates movie trilogies. He's mostly right, although totally wrong about Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

* The SciFi channel is changing its name to SyFy. John Scalzi has even better reasons for thinking this is stupid than I do.

* Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away. Nerds, pour out a Mountain Dew for a fallen brother.

* The last book in the Wheel of Time series is going to be released in three volumes, with the first being released this November. Hooray!


Wastes of time:
* Ever wonder what anagrams could be made from your name? Wonder no longer! My favorites: Jean Navy Did Hop, A Hand-Jived Pony, Vend Any Jihad Op.

* Robot Chicken video clips from Adult Swim. Awesome!


Crazy foreigners:

* Japanese people are paying money to hang out with cats. Oddly enough, this insane new fad from Japan appears to have nothing to do with sex.

* French people who are afraid of getting fired lock up their bosses until they get what they demand. Apparently, kidnapping is not a crime over there. (Although I would advise French people to beware of Liam Neeson.)

* Swedes + Guidos = Swedos!

* Yet more proof that Brazilian prisons are the world's crappiest. Or that Brazilian prisoners are the world's awesomest.

--REDBEARD


BONUS: Cry havoc and unleash the scooters of war!

SUPER EXTRA DOUBLE BONUS TIME WASTER SUPREME : TV Tropes!

Super freaky

I just learned that Richard Alpert and Batmanuel were played by the same guy. That's freaky.

You got one freakier than that?

--FABULOUS J

Adventures in cooking

So tonight the missionaries came over for dinner. I cooked, and thought I might share with you, my imaginary readers, what worked and what didn't.

This was the menu: Stir-fried chicken with vegetables, rice, a green salad, and a fruit salad. Also, Mr. Potter went down to Lyndells and picked up some apple tarts, which were pretty good.

The chicken was the weakest link, I think. I cut the raw chicken into bite-sized bits and let it sit in a marinade for twenty or thirty minutes. (I got the marinade recipe from this cooking magazine my brother subscribed me to for Christmas.) This was mistake number one. I should have let it marinate for longer-- overnight, maybe? The chicken was not bad, but I think it would have been better if I had let it soak in more flavor.

Anyway, after marinating, I threw the chicken into a skillet and cooked it. Then I added a bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables. This was the second mistake. Fresh vegetables are always better; these were mushy. Worse, adding so many veggies to the dish diluted the spices and made it all bland.

The third mistake is that I didn't have any corn starch to thicken the sauce. So, like I said, this dish was the weak link. But it was still okay.

The salads were better. For the green salad, I started with a recipe for Asian carrot slaw, which I had made on Tuesday and really enjoyed. I used three green onions, but only one carrot, and added cabbage and lettuce. It was quite good, but could have been even better if I had waited until the last minute to toss it with the dressing. (Also, I tried toasting the sesame seeds before sprinkling them on. I didn't notice any difference, so I think that was probably a waste of time.)

Last, I did a very basic fruit salad. I chopped up two oranges and one apple, and tossed them with some peanuts and craisins. That's it. No dressing or anything. But very good. I think that might be the first time I've ever made a fruit salad, but it was a successful experiment. Very tasty, and it went well with the other dishes.

Actually, I think everything went relatively well together, and that is probably the thing I am happiest about. I can usually get a single dish to taste good, but I have trouble getting a whole meal to work. But this time I think the meal was pretty well coordinated. And next time I have some ideas that might make it even better.

And of course if you have any ideas, put me some knowledge in the comments.

Yay food!

--PAN YUE-HAN

Do I owe Ron Paul money?
Chapter 3: The Grand Alliance

It is increasingly clear that Ron Paul and Barack Obama have entered into a grand alliance. President Obama has, of course, learned of my promise to donate to Ron Paul's campaign if the gap between the Dow and the price of gold closes to 5000 by September of this year. And so to benefit his ally, Ron Paul, he is now deliberately wrecking the economy. There can be no other explanation.

And their diabolical plan is working. Since we last checked in, the actual gap between the Dow and the price of gold has been even smaller (and closing faster) than my Ron Paul nut expected. In other words, my prediction of economic stability has been wrong and his prediction of economic catastrophe has been not just on track, but ahead of the curve.

In my defense, Ron Paul and his nutty disciples have been prophesying a meltdown like this one for decades, and they've always been wrong before. Without his ally in the White House, he would be wrong again this year. But as anyone can see, Obama is determined to make Ron Paul's direst doomsayings come true. Grrr!

Anyway, here are the numbers. (A reminder for my imaginary readers: The difference was more than 10,000 in July of 2008, and my friend the Ron Paul-bot predicted that this would be halved by September of 2009. So the magic number is 5,000.)

January 21, 2009
* Dow Jones = 8,228.10 points
* Price of Gold = $849.25
* Difference = 7,378.85

February 20, 2009 (no data for 2/21)
* Dow Jones = 7,365.67 points
* Price of Gold = $989.00
* Difference = 6,376.67

March 20, 2009 (no data for 3/21)
* Dow Jones = 7,278.38 points
* Price of Gold = $954.00
* Difference = 6,324.38

If things don't turn up in the next few months, then Ron Paul and his grand allies in Washington will have won, and I will have to make a donation. Curses!

Come on, Obama! Give me some of that hope and change, man.

And a unicorn!

--JOHANNES CLERK

Wonder no longer!

Lost and found

February has been a really good month for me, and I thought today might be the day to try to recover some lost data. See, my laptop was stolen last month, which wouldn't have been so bad if I had been better about backing up my data-- but I haven't been.

I have an external hard drive, and I used to use it to back up my stuff. But last summer, I transferred all the backups back to my laptop so my brothers could use it to transfer files. I always meant to do another backup, but I didn't. And although I started moving my old backups back to the external hard drive, I never finished. Long story short, I lost a lot: all my dissertation work, all my BYU teaching stuff, years of photos, letters, journals, personal records, fiction writing, etc.

It's sucky, but I'm dealing. I mean, I wish I hadn't lost it, and I pray every day that a miracle would happen and I would get my laptop back. Actually, I pray that I will get my bag back, because it also had my scriptures in it, which I have had since my mission. Also a scarf and hat that my mom knitted for me for Christmas. January was a real loser month for me. But it's okay. I've rebooted my dissertation with a new topic, and it's rising like a phoenix from the ashes. Awesome!

So anyway, today I downloaded four or five free data recovery programs and went through the external hard drive with a fine-toothed comb. It was a lot of work, and it didn't go quickly, but I got some of my stuff back and that felt great. Mostly it was old pictures, but but I also got some dissertation notes and some records. So it's not like the stuff itself was super-awesome, but it just felt so sweet to get something back after all that loss.

--S.P. DAVIDSON

A final lesson

I don't want to be one of those guys who can't stop talking about his last relationship, but it's only been a month since the breakup. So I think I'm still in the window. And I do have something I've been thinking about for the last few days. So as a follow-on to my previous post, I'm going to share a fourth and final lesson that I have learned from contemplating my relationship with "Jem."

4: I regret not trying much more than not succeeding. This is true for all parts of my life. When I give something my best effort, I can always feel good about having tried, even if I fail in the end. And when I don't put in the effort, I always regret it.

Right after Jem broke up with me, I looked back for missed opportunities-- chances to save the relationship that I had blown. And I couldn't see any. But in the last week, I have seen one: the night she officially broke up with me.

It had been a week and a half since she had left my home to go back to her home, and in that time all our attempts at conversation had been brief and unpleasant. I knew that something was wrong, but I didn't know what. My dating experience told me that I was about to be dumped, but I still hoped that we might be able to last it another few days until we were both back in Boston and could sit down and really talk. But that's not what happened.

One night she called me up, and after a few curt sentences she paused. I thought to myself, she is trying to figure out how to tell me that she wants to break up, but she can't figure out how to start. So I asked her if there was something she wanted to tell me. And she said yes, and in another few sentences she broke up with me and then we hung up.

I now think that that conversation was a missed opportunity. It was a time where I failed to try. In that long pause, I could have told her what I was feeling. I could have said that in the last few weeks I had seen that she was not happy and that something was wrong in our relationship. More importantly, I could have said that I wanted to know what she was feeling and thinking, and that I wanted to make our relationship work. Instead of seizing the opportunity to try to make things work, I prompted her to break up. It was a cowardly act.

That was my last chance, I think. And at this point, I certainly don't see any chance of us getting back together. (In fact, some time in the last few days she took me off her list of Facebook friends. So I'm officially persona non grata.) I know that, and I accept that. But in that conversation, I had a chance. I don't know how she would have reacted, and maybe it would have made no difference in the end. The choice was ultimately not in my hands. But I'm sorry that in that moment, I didn't cowboy up and do everything I could to try to win back the woman I loved. Next time I am in that situation, I am not going to chicken out. I'm going to toss the dice. Lose or win, succeed or fail, I will try.

Okay, so now I'm done posting about this. Thank you, imaginary readers, for enduring a little melodrama. We now return to our normal schedule of posting about politics and comic books.

Hooray!

--SAN GIOVANNI UMILIATO

Schroedinger's Valentine

Since it's Valentine's Day, I thought I might talk about my love life. As many of you, my imaginary readers, are no doubt aware, my girlfriend of four months broke up with me about three weeks ago. I would have talked about it before, but the breakup kind of messed me up. This week we sat down and talked things through, though, and I feel a lot better now.

For those of you who have not heard this story, I'll give you the Reader's Digest version. To protect her identity, I will refer to her as "Jem." And to protect my own identity, I will refer to myself as "Snake Eyes."

We started going out in September, and very quickly were seeing each other almost every day. I was hesitant at first, but then gave in and let myself be happy. We made plans to visit each other's families over break, which I had never done before, but things were going very well, so it felt like the right call. My visit to Jem's family went very well, I thought, but when she came to meet my parents she seemed very distant. On the first day we talked a little bit about some of her concerns, but that was our last real conversation. She broke up with me a week and a half after the trip, but I knew it was over the day I drove her to the airport.

What killed our relationship? This was very hard for me to understand. Personally, I was very happy-- until January, when it became apparent to me that something was wrong. But things had been wrong for a while. That became clear in this week's little post-mortem discussion. There were lots of little things that were making Jem feel unhappy, unloved, unimportant. I don't want to blame these little things, though, because none of them would have been hard to fix. In virtually every case, they would have required nothing more than a few words and maybe a slight change in (my) behavior. These were not big problems. The big problem, the one that killed the relationship, is that I didn't know about any of the little problems. That's what did us in. The longer we were dating, the more little problems were stacking up without getting fixed. One day she reached a tipping point and had to get out.

Now what? My friend Rachel Van Kirk told me years ago that it's important after a breakup to think about what you have learned from the experience, and what you still need to learn. So here are three things that I think I have learned in the past five months.

1. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I thought our relationship was super-awesome because I saw no evidence of problems. But I was wrong. There were problems-- I just wasn't seeing them. And in truth, I don't know that I was looking very hard.

2. Always look for ways to help, instead of waiting to be asked. I had heard that it sometimes takes hard work to keep a relationship healthy and happy. I thought I was willing to put in the hard work, but I always thought that meant making difficult sacrifices and compromises after problems had been identified. It had never occurred to me that I might be required to work hard to find problems to be solved. I thought I was ready to do whatever Jem wanted, but what she really wanted (I think) was to have me actively spend time and attention making our relationship better instead of passively waiting around to be told there was a problem.

3. If something is wrong, holler until you're heard. In January, I knew something was wrong between us. I tried to raise the subject delicately, but I knew it wasn't working. I guess I was afraid that if I pressed the issue too hard, Jem would get upset with me and it would damage the relationship. Boy, that was stupid. Problems usually don't solve themselves spontaneously, and relationships don't stay in stasis like Schroedinger's cat until we can find the perfect moment to really open up and see what's happening. I was right in thinking that something was wrong between us. And it was getting worse every day, every hour. So, next time, I'll be direct. If I'm not happy, I'll raise a ruckus and I won't stop until I know that I am heard.

These three lessons are all I'm sure of right now, but I suspect that there are lots of other lessons I have yet to learn. In fact, I wouldn't have reached 33 as a bachelor if I didn't have lots to learn about women and relationships.

And if any of you, my imaginary readers, have lessons you want to teach me, you're in luck. I'm in a teachable mood. So please feel free to drop me a comment.

Put me some knowledge here, man.

--CASA DE DOLOR