Dig In - More football tomorrow. Over on the Agitator I've posted the recipe for Jim's Dry Buffalo Wings.

Life Imitates Art - In Jorge Luis Borges' classic story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the contents of a century-old fiction start replacing those of our reality.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues.

Comes now the year 2005 . . .

The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House.

My emphasis. Question: If Victor Davis Hanson's reality starts replacing our own, do we get the cakewalk retroactively? Because that would be worth it. Answer: No, that's Kenneth Adelman's reality. With Hanson you pretty much get long twilight struggles all the way down. This is really going to blow.

Also Krauthammer pulls a Walt Whitman and reviews himself. I guess great speeches demand great audiences.

Music Notes - Coverville is too cool for words - an audio blog of cover tunes. "Presented with full legal licensing from ASCAP" if you're interested. I'm so excited I had to blog it even before listening to Richard Thompson cover "Oops, I Did It Again."

Biggest hat tip of all time to Walter in Denver.

Painting Children with their Parents Blood isn't just a crime. It's a mistake.

Bunny Suicides - That is all.

(Via the Agitator.)

UPDATE: Reader Josh writes

FYI, all the images on that site are scanned from "The Book of Bunny Suicides," by Andy Riley, and given that they're there without attribution, etc., I'd say the site owner is in pretty clear infringement.

Wanted to give you a heads-up.

Topically enough, there's a sequel that just hit bookstores. One of the bunnies is squished underneath a statue of Saddam Hussein.

There are indeed two Bunny Suicide books available for sale, and they're cheap. So if you like what you see, buy 'em.

And That's Why Harper Lee Won the Pulitzer Prize = "How to Kill a Mockingbird is possibly the best book report ever made in flash," claim the authors. They are surely correct. It's also a sixteen meg files, so be patient - it's worth it. Warning: It lasts long enough that you need to beware your screensaver kicking in.

Via Chris Newman.

Republican Party Big Tent After All - John Cole, a week and a half ago:

In Matt's class, it appeared as if he was viewing [the first episode of the new season of 24 as] a real news report, or at least real torture policy, and providing counter arguments for any policy warranting or calling for torture. It appeared to me that Matt was taking the show a little too seriously.

Cal Thomas, yesterday:

The Fox broadcast network is carrying a remarkable series called "24," which brilliantly and persuasively warns America about a secret terrorist family embedded in this country for years.

Thanks to Skip Oliva for the pointer.

Four More Years Already - Who knows why, but Right Wing News did not poll me on whom I would like to see win the Republican nomination for President in five years. Seems like a fun question though, so, per the guidelines, here are my top 5 and bottom 5.

Most desired nominee:

5. No Award
4. Chuck Hagel (Senator, Nebraska)
3. Bob Ehrlich (Governor, Maryland)
2. Ron Paul (Congressman, TX)
1. Gary Johnson (Former Governor, New Mexico)

Least desired nominee:

1. Anyone named Bush.
2. Anyone from Texas not named "Ron Paul."
3. John McCain
4. Rudy Giuliani
5. Ralph Reed

Via Alex Knapp, who has his own list.

It's Not Just Me Then - Tyler Cowen too is worried about the possibility of federal investment of social security funds in private companies increasing the amount of government meddling in private companies. He says the experience of public pension fund managers over the last twenty years suggests how it could happen.

One War Too Late - Firebreathing Iraq hawk Chris Roach has the best critique of the alarming "Democratic Trotskyism" of Bush's inaugural speech that we are likely to see. Of course, it was possible to see this coming quite awhile ago.

(Via Gene Healy.)

Words and Pictures - A major virtue of comic books is that words and visuals in combination can add up to more than either words or pictures separately. Apparently, that can be true in real life too.

Ne'er So Well Express'd - Steve Gilliard on The Picture:

Every day in Iraq brings a tragedy like this. The kids who are expected to make life and death decisions. The kids who suffer from them. The kids who don't come back. A cycle of misery which was preventable and may never end. What happens to these people? The soldiers who have to live with a nightmare of a decision, the image of a toddler screaming in pure terror and covered in blood. The children who are orphaned by this.

I don't think for a second that everyone involved wouldn't like to take back that moment, do something different, so they didn't kill a family or get killed. But there are no do overs in life.

Today's Question That Needs Answering comes from Gene Callahan:

And most puzzling of all are the street dealers who adopt the style. I mean, if you had a job that involved periodically fleeing the cops, wouldn't you want to dress so that you didn't have a waistband around your thighs?

FFWIW (sic) - The Fantastic Four trailer, via The Beat.

It's impossible to tell from the trailer whether the movie will suxx0rs or roxx0rs. On the controversy of the day, I think Michael Chiklis' Thing getup looks pretty cool. As for the rest, we shall see.

Transnational Idol - If you have a sexy baritone and the temperance to forebear strangling yourself when you masturbate, have we got a job for you.

Antisemitism Watch - Matthew Hogan informs me that the American Enterprise Institute will sponsor a book forum on Monday, January 24th for the newly published The [Code Word] Reader from - AEI.

At this seminar, the development and future of neoconservatism will be discussed and debated by [noted antisemites] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Karlyn H. Bowman, Charles Murray, Charles Krauthammer, and Irwin M. Stelzer.

Must be a blank book. There's no such thing as a neocon.

Matt, whose snark response is much more controlled than mine, writes

Don't just go to things one agrees with! What's then the point of living in DC or environs? Registration is free. Pass along.

And he's right, of course.

We Get Letters - Bruce Baugh writes about the new-model Battlestar Galactica discussion:

I'm a little surprised nobody brought up Teilhard de Chardin, Paolo Soleri, or Vernor Vinge so far in talking about this. So I will. The idea of a machine race believing in a transcendent consciousness seems very cool and suitable to me.

Hey, here's a Teilhard de Chardin link for people.

Realish provided a useful intro to BitTorrent, for which I thank him.

Jon Hendry had further thoughts on sleep deprivation and either torture or "torture" as suits you:

I expect Chris_RC was in a fairly comfortable environment, boosting his wakefulness with his preferred caffeinated beverages, possibly aided by caffeine pills or stronger stimulants. Thus his mind and body were much better able to tolerate the lack of sleep.

I'm guessing the prisoners in question don't have that luxury, are kept awake by being placed in physical positions which make sleep difficult, possibly with the threat of pain should they fail to hold the posture.

The infamous picture of the guy hooked up to wires at Abu Ghraib, with a mask over his head, arms akimbo, standing on a box: that might be an example of someone undergoing sleep deprivation. Have to stay awake to stay on the box, and there was probably an additional threat of shock if he let his arms down or otherwise moved. (Could just be a physical pain torture, because holding that position would hurt before long. But it would also work to keep someone awake.)

The luckier ones might just be kept awake with bright lights and noise, but I doubt that'd be effective for very long. There'd have to be close monitoring and physical intervention, like wiring the prisoner up and sticking them on a box.

Hesiod offered more links to biographical info on Bahukatumbi Raman, author of the article discussed below that claims the US has decided to let Daniel Pearl's murder be bygones in exchange for covert Pakistani cooperation against Iran, one from the Potomac Institute and one from the US House Committee on International Relations. Raman's testimony before Congress amounts to him trying to get the US to pressure Pakistan to suppress Lashkar E Taiba terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

So there's no doubt he's highly motivated to make Pakistani conduct look bad. Which doesn't mean he's lying or telling the truth. Here's my question: Wasn't the slaughter of Daniel Pearl a cause celebre once? Was there an announcement that we were supposed to stop giving a shit, or is that the kind of thing you're just supposed to know?

It's Simpler Than That - Speaking of Matthew Yglesias, he kills many pixels trying to find financial reasons why "the mainstream 'small government' view on Social Security is that the system should be replaced with a mandatory savings system, rather than the more natural small government view that taxes and benefits should both be lowered" that doesn't also insult the integrity of his friends. But the answer is a lot simpler. "Mainstream 'small government' " types think of themselves as gradualists and pragmatists and are very much concerned with "the art of the possible." If their calculus is We can't get anyone to push genuine curtailment/elimination of social security. We CAN get a major party to push a mandatory savings system that we think is better than the current system and whose successful implementation may accustom people to more radical changes down the line. There's a real question whether they are right or wrong on the major points in that chain of thought - maybe they could get a major party to radically reduce social security; maybe a given mandatory savings plan isn't, from a limited-government perspective, better than the current system. Maybe it's worse, and they don't recognize it. But it's not "People who -- quite sincerely -- believed that replacing Social Security with mandatory savings, by contrast, did eventually start getting lots of money to advocate for their view."

Me? On some issues I see myself as a "mainstream small-government" type and on others as a thoroughgoing fringie. I've also grown very wary of the kind of "partial privatization" schemes that get proposed in the name of limited government and free-market principles that end up having nothing of either about them. (Viz California's energy "deregulation" scheme etc.) I'm extremely lukewarm on school vouchers, for instance, because I think they'll end up being the government's nose under the tent of a lot of private schools who currently get no government money and are therefore relatively free of government regulation. Once you take the bureaucracy's shilling, taking the bureaucracy's orders quickly follows. I could see such an outcome from the forced savings proposal too - plenty of politicians and activists will view the "private accounts" as "government money" invested in the stock market, and take that as right and responsibility to more heavily regulate the businesses in which that money is invested.

There's also a moral hazard attending many partial privatization and deregulation schemes: they socialize the risk but privatize the reward. (See the 1980s S&L crisis.) This could also happen with a badly designed forced savings plan.

None of the above is to say I'm against the Bush Administration proposal as it stands: I don't have a firm opinion one way or the other.

Best in Show - The two best considerations of the "Larry Summers flap" I've seen, from opposite sides of the issue, come from Matthew Yglesias and Megan McArdle.

Let's Make It Very Simple - You do not put your countrymen in a position to cause this unless you have no other fucking choice whatsoever. ONLY absolute necessity stands as a mitigating circumstance. I do not say "excuse." Nothing excuses it. But lack of choice can at least alloy the base shame with duress. America had a choice.

A Fanboy's Final Contrarian Take - Found myself once again looking at Women in Refrigerators, Gail Simone's legendary list of shit that has befallen female superhero comics characters, and it prompted a thought about the recent Gwen Stacy's Twins story in Amazing Spider-Man that all right-thinking people hated. (And I didn't.) It's an odd one: Doesn't the twins story, weirdly, restore some agency to Gwen Stacy where before she had none? In her death as originally told, she was nothing but a way for Norman Osborn to hurt Spider-Man, killed not for herself but her connection to Peter Parker. Indeed her murder reduced her to nothing but an accessory to Peter Parker.

In the retconned story, two things change: Osborn strikes at Gwen qua Gwen; also, Gwen acts purposively, even heroically, to keep her children from their monstrous father. This Gwen is decisive and perceptive. All along I've been bothered by the "anti" critique that Gwen Stacy was a symbol of "innocence" sullied by the New Reveal, but I couldn't quite say why. Maybe this is why.

Free Comics Book Blogs - A couple of sites are having contests in which you can win free copies of titles the proprietors love and want you to love too. Comic Book Galaxy is giving away copies of Street Angel, about a pubescent skateboarding ninja girl. (All together now: She fights crime!) You can also win a page of original art from the series.

Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog is giving away a copy of the graphic novel Colonia: Islands and Anomolies by Jeff Nicholson, and a piece of original artwork. There's an essay question, but it's only 50 words.

Meanwhile, Polite Dissent offers "three brand new copies of the Nikolai Dante: The Romanov Dynasty trade paperbacks." His contest is rather more elaborate, perhaps explaining why he, Mr. Medical Examiner of the Comics World, has yet to address Simon Spector's posture problems.

Wilderness of Moral Clarity - Q: Who is B. Raman?

A1: B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and, Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter.

Q: What can we say about the Observer Research Foundation?

A: Robert O. Blake, Jr. US Charge d'Affaires, delivered a talk there on January 23, 2004. According to Indian Express, "The ORF has even entered into a partnership with the prestigious Brookings Institution for research and fund raising."

Q: Why do we gotta know this stuff?

A: Because B. Raman makes a pretty serious claim in Outlook India, in response to the much-discussed Seymour Hersh article on anti-Iran plans:

Mr.Hersh, Musharraf's clandestine co-operation with the USA against Iran started in February, 2002. In return, the USA did not act against him for the complicity of his Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the journalist of the Wall Street Journal.

Raman makes a lot of other claims, but that one stands out. Point being, he's not some random wacko with a website saying this. He may be a highly-connected wacko, an Indian James Woolsey maybe, and he is surely no neutral observer. He may be putting untrue or poorly sourced things out there to try to poison the US relationship with Pakistan. He may also be putting true and well-sourced things out there to try to poison the US relationship with Pakistan. In any case, Raman seems to offer partial corroboration of Hersh's claims.

Design for Living - It's over a year-old, but kimberly_a's livejournal instructions on how to apologize are very useful. It's a skill too few people have. Bonus How to ACCEPT an Apology section free.

A Fanboy's Cinema - Reader Raf links me to a BIGASS extended Sim City trailer. And I mean 23M big. But you want to see it.

I'm not sure I like it. I might be capable of liking it - it requires divorcing expectation from experience. The American hardboiled tradition is rooted in naturalism. The trailer suggests the movie is consciously, manically stylized. There wasn't a moment of it I "believed." That directors Miller and Rodriguez probably don't want me to believe - may consider "suspension of disbelief" antithetical to their project - isn't necessarily going to save it for me.

I can't help but recall a quote from Miller on the bonus disc that came with the Daredevil DVD. In paraphrase, I got into comics trying to make them more like movies. I stay in comics to make them less so. Supreme faithfulness may not be the way to vivify such a creator's work on film.

Then again, I may love the thing when I see it. It's probably a good idea to have the trailers out there. They function as instruction manuals for the full movie's audience.

Warblog Fanboy Rampage - In a comments thread at Right Wing News devoted to a questionnaire for liberals (1. Have you stopped beating your wife? 2. Do you still believe it should be okay for SADDAM HUSSEIN to beat your wife? 3. . . . ), one Chris_RC writes

Is 9 hours of sleep out of 110 considered sleep deprivation? If it is, and if sleep deprivation is torture, I tortured myself senior year finishing one school project. I don't think sleep deprivation can count as torture. I fully agree that it changes you psychologically, for a time, but if it works, use it, no long term effects.

When someone feels like putting together a quiz for Republicans, make sure to include the question, Do you think there's any ethical difference between choosing to do something to yourself for your own purposes and having other people do it to you without your consent for their purposes?

I wonder if the sleep-deprived see pyramids of cheerleaders.

("Fanboy Rampage" concept swiped from Grim.)

UPDATE: On rerereading, I may have been a shade harsh on Chris_RC himself. While the dodge of willfully confusing consensual behavior with coercive action has been common in hawkish torture apologetics since Rush Limbaugh's "fraternity pranks" line last year, Chris_RC seems to be trying to make a narrower point: I know from experience that the trauma of sleep deprivation heals over time; therefore, it should be an accepted part of the interrogator's arsenal. I'm not sure I'm hard against sleep deprivation as a tactic myself, actually, but it really isn't the case that Chris_RC's anecdotal experience of putting himself through a trauma that he could have chosen at any time gives him the insight to pronounce on the effects of forced sleep deprivation (for possibly much longer periods of time). And I doubt "no long term effects" is itself an acceptable marker of not-torture from torture. Bruises heal, for instance; so do bones. But beating someone surely constitutes torture.

Up from Barbarism - Tom Friedman writes

Free countries don't have leaders who use their media and state-owned "intellectuals" to deflect all of their people's anger away from them and onto America.

Damn straight. In advanced societies, that's what France is for!

ADD to Your Bookmarks - Kevin Carson of The Mutualist finally has a blog.

Update Your Bookmarks - Conservablogger Moira Breen has closed Inappropriate Response and opened Progressive Reaction, adding coblogger David Fleck in the transition. Whoever he is.

Babylon and On - Ginmar, who was stationed there, says the stories of US troops ruining the digs at Babylon are exaggerated.

Mailbag - Hesiod tells me it's worse than I think:

You latest post Tar Baby on the Tigris begs the question of WHY the Iraqi "government" forces are so poorl;y equiped relative to the US.

And I'm not talking about advanced aircraft, etc. But armor.

One obvious reason is that to equip and train the native Iraqi forces with such weapons is to invite their theft and cooption by the insurgents. As you know, we don't trust the Iraqi forces on "our" side. At least not enough to entrust them with things like tanks, and Strykers. Things that, as we know, are essential to at least keep the insurgent Sunnis somewhat penned into the Sunni Triangle. [Although, that triangle includes about half the population of Iraq, including the country's most important and largest city: Baghdad. But hey, Orwellian rhetoric must win out].

This is the paradox we face with the whole "Uaqification" effort. Sure. We'll turn security over to the Iraqis themselves...eventually. But they won't have the weapons, or training to actually do anything.

Think Saigon in 1975.

That's why I think Bush and his political advisors (Karl Rove) are going to bug out of Iraq by the Summer of 2006. No later.

They want to be safely free of the quagmire before the US midterm Congressional elections. Mostly at the desperate urgence of Congressional Republicans.

That should warm the cockles of your heart. Bush will be doing the right thing (from your perspective) for the wrong reason.

I never bought into the "Bush is a true believer" nonsense. He was just scared. I mean, pants pissing scared aftre 9/11, and saw Saddam Hussein as a potential boogeyman under his bed. Soi he bought into the whole PNAC nonsense.

But, ultimately, he cares more about his political hide and that of his party's than what's best for our national security.

As soon as Iraq becomes a major political liability for him, he's outta there.

The corollary would be that as long as Iraq doesn't become a major political liability, he stays; or, and by way of explaining the vehemence of the jingosphere, so long as pulling out of Iraq looks like a bigger political liability than staying in, he stays.

Also, Hesiod scants the reports that the September Massacres of 2001 triggered a messianism in Bush more than I do. It's entirely possible that we'll get deeper in before we get out, one way or the other. (Keep in mind that, should the Iranians act against American troops operating on Iranian soil we will hear no end of the need to respond forcefully to their "aggression.")

I Save You Time and Stress - If you can only bear to put yourself through one blog response to the much-publicised Washington Post interview with President Bush, make it Gary Farber's.

More Comics Blogging - Picked up the other two of Warren Ellis' Apparat books this week. (See last week for my thoughts on the first two.)

Angel Stomp Future is cyberpunk SF shading into technohorror. It's the kind of story you might get if James Tiptree Jr. had survived into the 90s, but with more cheesecake. Artist Juan Jose Rip aims to maximize your unease by a combination of methods: he crams the panels full of detail; he tends to draw background objects with the same thickness lines as foreground objects; the uniform line thickness combines with an almost total absence of shading to seriously foreshorten perspective: scenes have all the depth of a stained glass window but none of the simplicity. By design, every panel is a big mess pressing up against the glass of the page. Ellis breaks that glass by having the protagonist, Dr. Antimony, address the reader directly. At one point she says

I'm sorry that the future is still about humping, lying, abandonment and cash. Honest.

I found a basic storytelling problem with the end, though. I couldn't tell if Dr. Antimony's last action reprises that of the pregnant woman in the first scene or not. If it's supposed to, I don't think there's quite enough to make it clear. If it's not, then I'm not sure I like the story quite as much.

Simon Spector is a pulp/blaxploitation hero who, like many of pulp marvels, gets his edge from drugs. He's also got posture problems - his head thrusts too far forward, a sign of weak erector muscles that would make it very dangerous for him to take a blow to the head - but that's neither here nor there. This story exists to give us a big gun, meathook and claw fight with a lot of heads being blown apart, as in an Authority combat or Global Frequency issue. (However, at no point does Spector club a foe to death with the spine he has ripped from another enemy.)

So the question is, how are the fight scenes? Answer, pretty good, though I don't really buy the winning move in the actual meathook fight. Artist Jacen Burrows uses all the black ink that the other three Apparat artists saved up. Even the gutters and page borders are black rather than white. It gives the look of the story a pulp garishness you probably couldn't get from black and white art otherwise.

BSGmail - Lots of reaction to my ill-informed Battlestar Galactica viewing. Several readers point me to the pilot/miniseries that I missed that clears up a lot of my questions. Stacy of Pfft! writes

Your questions were answered in the miniseries, but

1. Blond chick is a Cylon who either exists as a chip implanted in the guy's brain, or a hallucination (she claims she's a chip, but there's no direct evidence of that.)

2. Boomer on Caprica is a Cylon. Boomer on the Galactica is a Cylon too, but she's a sleeper and isn't conscious of it. Two different Cylons. What the one on Caprica is up to is anyone's guess.

and Jeb Winders adds

I thought the 70s show was nauseating but this new thing they have going is really really (really) good. The thing I like most about the current show is that, of the first 13 episodes, the cylons only show up in like 3. There is a bare minimum of the "ray gun of the week" type of story telling. Everything is mostly psychological character development type stuff.

Jeb has seen the first 11 episodes thanks to BitTorrent and stuck a big fat spoiler warning between the quoted part and the rest of his e-mail. I have foresworn reading it for now.

But I really have to look into BitTorrent. I notice that Kazaa has gotten pretty quiet lately.

Eric McErlain also suggested I find the pilot. Hm. Maybe SciFi TV needs an On Demand channel.

Brett Peters agrees with me about the show's look:

For me, my problems came down to 3 items: the IKEA clock, the whiteboard, and the wall of photos.

I thought the wall of photos an interesting touch - something that could not have appeared in the original show. But it's also something so modern, so *now* that I got yanked out of the secondary world of the story.

The clock on board Colonial-1 is from IKEA. I admit to an encylopedic knowledge of IKEA's products, but every time they showed it I kept thinking $4.99 plastic IKEA clock. Couldn't they have sprung for the $9.99 model? Suspension of disbelief is hard when you know the prices of the set dressing.

And then there was the whiteboard - I really liked the population total, and the physical act of updating it.

But a whiteboard? I don't know if I'm ready for that. What's next? Powerpoints?

For my part, I liked the wall of photos, went back and forth on the whiteboard and thought the clock was pushing it, but it was the phones that really hurt for me.

$4.99, huh?

It's a tricky line to negotiate: one of the things that impressed me about Babylon 5 were the retro touches: some people wore business suits; religion hasn't withered away or transmogrified beyond recognition. (You may note that most of the planet today follows versions of religious faith that would be comprehensible to people from a thousand years ago. Why would that still not be the case in a few hundred or even a thousand years more?) But as far as retro goes, there appear to be Good Touches and Bad Touches, just like at school.

On an actual blog, Andrew Olmsted is bothered by a few things:

Baltar's Cylon girlfriend (Number Six) has appeared only to him, possibly a hallucination, possibly the result of a chip she placed in his brain. She seems to be fascinated with the idea of God, insisting that Baltar repent when it appears his role in the defeat of the Colonies will be revealed. The idea of a machine race developing religion seems rather implausible to me; the Cylons don't need an origin myth: they already have one. That was one of my problems with the miniseries, and it doesn't appear to have gotten any better in the series: the Cylons seem to be decidedly irrational.

But that's the part I like best! And the irrationality is more extensive than just religion. Number Six tells Baltar she wants to have his child. If she's not a hallucination but a projection of an actual machine consciousness, that's out there.

And that's the cool part. The shipboard Cylon Boomer appears to have issues too - she seems to be suffering a great deal of stress in her role as infiltrator. (Viz. her conduct on the water-prospecting mission.) Is she playing an exceedingly deep game or are the humanoid cylons "more human than human?" Implacable machine intelligences of perfect and malignant rationality bore me. Freaky weird machine intelligences who appear positively bipolar in some ways intrigue me no end, at least in concept.

Nor do I agree that it's implausible that a machine race would develop a religion because the already know where they came from. Since they came from humans, that just pushes the question back a level. And it would explain why Baltar's Number Six projection seems so concerned with human sin.

Also, there are SF stories which view religion as about facts of the universe rather than illustrations of social psychology - that is, there are SF stories in which religions are true. Perhaps the Cylons are preoccupied with God because they have certain knowledge of His existence?

Or maybe if I read Jeb's spoilers I wouldn't be wondering about these things still. Regardless, while the show may not fulfill its promises, for now I'm content that it makes any.

UPDATE: The Pulp Culture maestro himself, Franklin Harris, writes to set me straight on the retro touches:

I've seen the first five episodes of the new "Battlestar Galactica," and never having set foot in an IKEA, the show's retro look doesn't bother me one bit. Clearly, it's mean to evoke our existing ideas about submarine and battleship warfare, and it was explained in the miniseries as a defense against Cylon computer hacks -- i.e., the Galactica's old analog equipment is too old to be vulnerable.

He continues:

Based on what I've seen, though, I'd have to say "Battlestar Galactica" may be one of the best SF series I've ever seen. It certainly blows away "Babylon 5" -- which I loved up until season 5 -- in the acting, dialog and production departments, if not with regard to the overall concept. The show rests on a very hard-SF premise: how do you even survive in deep space, without supplies, while vastly superior robots are trying to kill you? And the great thing is that Ronald D. Moore and company know there is enough drama in that simple concept than in all of the silly planet-of-the-week crap we got from the 1970s series.