Vacuum Energy

Was Michael Moore guest-blogging at The Dish today?

2011-06-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan decided to excommunicate the Religious Right from American politics on grounds that basically amount to heresy.

Political flameouts this week

2011-05-17T21:56:00.000-07:00

Newt Gingrich, of all people, decided to go Left in order to earn "strange new respect" from the New York Times.

Ron Paul, a.k.a. "Mr. Gold Standard", wants to sell off the national gold supply to pay down the deficit. That makes a lot of sense if we want China to go onto the gold standard...

Eight years of being the California governmor seems to have morphed Arnold Schwarzenegger into John Edwards.

The Daily Loon

2011-03-26T13:08:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan sees the Middle East revolutions reaching near-Obama levels of audacity:

I remain stunned both by the courage of this immense younger generation - from Tehran to Tunis - trying to move past their sclerotic elders. But what really amazes is the speed and breadth of the change. Merely what has happened in Egypt would be historic enough - and Egypt, to my mind, remains the indispensable nation here. And yet, from Yemen to Morocco, the spirit of revolution has accelerated. Quite how this became the tipping point will be decided by historians. But one suspects the combination of a huge teen bulge with the communications revolution were central.

I also see some parallels with America. Of course we already had a democracy. But the mass young support for Barack Obama, his vision of a less polarized country and world, his biracial identity, his restraint and inspiration occurred first of all.

Post #700: The NY Times adopts the ObamaCare paradigm.

2011-03-24T00:39:00.000-07:00

You'll have to pay through the nose to get the NY Times, unless you're slick enough to pick up on the wavers.

The world situation...

2011-03-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

Here's the world situation as we know it:

American troops are still trying to aid Afghanistan and Pakistan in their struggle with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Iran is still developing nuclear weapons.

American troops are still on duty protecting Iraq for Al Qaeda and other insurgents.

Turmoil, upheaval, and revolution has spread across the Middle East.

We're launching air strikes on Libya now.

Out-of-control deficit spending could cause the European economy to collapse any day now.

Out-of-control deficit spending could cause the American economy to collapse any day now.

The drug war in Mexico is expanding beyond restraint.

We have political power struggles from Washington D.C. to Wisconsin.

The American government is threatening to shut itself down on a week-by-week basis.

There is the ungoing humanitarian apocalypse in Japan.

Now we come to the worst disaster of all. A disaster that President Obama regrets more than all of the others put together, yet, as it turns out, was tragically self-inflicted. A disaster that future generations will point to as the 21st century's darkest hour.

That's right: Sascha and Malia won't be visiting Machu Picchu this year. Weep, humanity. Weep.

The Girl Named Mary Sue

2011-03-02T19:44:00.000-08:00

I just finished "The Girl Who Played With Fire." At this point, it would be helpful to review the attributes of the title character, a Swedish girl named Lisbeth Salander.

She has a photographic memory;

is an untraceable, unblockable, world-class computer hacker;

and has talent with mathematical analysis at the level of Fermat's last theorem.

She is mysteriously sexually attractive to both men and women;

yet the Swedish police find her to be an untraceable, wraith-like ninja who can elude a nation-wide manhunt at will.

She is fast enough, if not strong enough, to go into the boxing ring against male boxers.

Through a combination of wits, speed, and ruthlessness, she has managed to overpower half-a-dozen adult men, including professional criminal members of a biker gang.

She has managed to terrify, admittedly irrationally, a man the size of Andre the Giant who is immune to pain.

She has survived hurricane-force winds.

She has survived three gunshots wounds, including one that left a bullet lodged in her brain.

She has survived being buried alive.

How do we explain all this? There really is only one explanation. She is not actually mild-mannered Lisbeth Salander at all. She is really Sal-El, daughter of Zal-El, last survivor of the planet Krypton!

News Flash: Fantasy Fiction Still Sucks

2011-02-22T23:46:00.000-08:00

Leo Grin decided that he could stand only so much crappy writing in the fantasy genre and wrote an essay about his disappointments. Here's his breaking point:

But it was only recently, after decades of ever-increasing reading disappointment, that I grudgingly began to admit the truth: I don’t particularly care for fantasy per se. What I actually cherish is something far more rare: the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.

This realization eliminates, at a stroke, virtually everything written under the banner of fantasy today.

Congratulations, Leo. You've outgrown a literary genre. Pretty soon you'll be reading Dostoyevsky and loving it.

The next question that Leo Grin takes up is why he outgrew the genre. In his analysis, his taste didn't get bigger; the genre got smaller:

The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

All I can say is this: the third way between order and chaos is renaissance. The only way to move the genre forward is for people to explore and take risks and birth monsters. They might also birth the next masterpiece along the way. The problem is that we don't in advance what directions the genre needs to go in to produce that next literary titan. What we do know is that blanket condemnations of the literary opposition are not going to take the genre where it needs to go.

I know who won't win the 2012 presidential election:

2011-02-12T11:34:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney. John Podhoretz makes the case:

The one-term Massachusetts governor is speaking at CPAC right now. He’s offering lots of good applause lines. Sounding very right-wing. Mitt Romney cannot be the Republican nominee for president and he cannot be president. He is the author, in his Massachusetts health-care program, of the individual mandate that is the heart and soul of ObamaCare.

If he runs, and he will, his origination of this policy will give his opponents in the primaries a stick so large to beat him with that no amount of clever one-liners purchased from high-paid freelance political speechwriters and joke writers will be able to mitigate the damage. And that’s to say nothing of Obama talking throughout 2012 about how he doesn’t understand what the Republicans are complaining about — one of their lead candidates agrees with him!

Choosing Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee makes a breathtakingly audacious strategy available to candidate Obama: running to the Right of his opponent on health care! Obama will tell the country that it wasn't his fault that he got "logrolled" by the most viciously partisan Congress in modern history while pointing out that Romneycare makes Romney a "true believer" for the individual mandate.

That such a strategy virtually ensures that Obama will be reelected is without question.

A great reason for being an atheist

2011-01-20T00:02:00.000-08:00

This comes from the english critic Edmund Gosse writing in 1907 (as quoted in the January/February 2010 issue of "The National Interest"):

It [religion] divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation. . . . There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanatacism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable antechamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.

The mainstream media in America is a total joke.

2011-01-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

Here's the old coventional wisdom (circa last Sunday) from ABC News about the Giffords shooting:

In the stunned aftermath of the Tucson massacre, Sarah Palin has found herself in the crosshairs of the ensuing political debate with opponents suggesting she may have fueled the gunman's rage and her supporters saying it is "grotesque" to blame her and to politicize the tragedy.

Apparently spontaneous mass hysteria broke out on Facebook:

Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg said many people on the social networking site are asking whether Sarah Palin is to blame.

According to Zuckerberg that is the #1 question on the social network behemoth following the Tucson shooting.

Today is Wednesday and the conventional wisdom has shifted. Now, the story is "That zany Sarah Palin has to make everything about her her her":

BOTTOM LINE: Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way to become part of the story.

The mainstream media in America is a total joke.

The Obama Presidency began today.

2011-01-05T22:21:00.001-08:00

Here's a nice summary of where we go in the next two years.

Sore-Loser Democrats are plotting a Senate coup.

2011-01-03T19:59:00.000-08:00

The Democratic party is going to seize power in Washington D.C. Happy New Year!

N.B. In case you were wondering why Senate Democrats are so god-damned desperate to eliminate the filibuster rule...

Vacuum Energy favorite posts of 2010

2010-12-29T14:37:00.000-08:00

January: The 2010 film "Legion", or "Welcome to the Irony-verse"

February: The case of the self-refuting linguist

March: Harold Ford, Jr. sells out.

April: Dungeons and Dragons is not art.

May: A political move so stupid that it could only be evidence of a brilliant strategic plan.

June: Absolutely laughable bias at Time Magazine

July: Who the hell do you think you are, Prince Charles? Al Gore?

August: George Lucas turned out to be the responsible one. Who knew?

September: The President of the United States is stuck on stupid.

October: A great reason why California proposition 19 is a dumb idea.

November: Some bad history from "The Daily Dish"

December: "Civilization V" sucks

5 weird things about the 2010 film remake of "True Grit"

2010-12-29T13:47:00.000-08:00

Mattie Ross spends hours riding her horse through the snow, gets caught in pouring rain, and even immerses herself up to the eyeballs in a stream, yet she never ends up wet.

Everyone in this film seems to have been replaced by a cartoon character. Rooster Cogburn gets shot in the shoulder, but is still able to carry Mattie for miles. The Texas Ranger, like Daffy Duck, can get hit in the head with a boulder and just walk it off. One character gets shot in the leg, gets some of his fingers cut off, and then gets stabbed in the chest with a 6-inch knife without seeming to feel any pain or discomfort.

The film's dialogue sounds like it was written by George Lucas.

The characters anachronistically refer to "Indian Territory" as "Native American Territory". Similarly, even though the Texas Ranger fought for the Confederacy in the Army of Northern Virgina, he doesn't seem to notice that Mattie has non-white facial features (which mysteriously disappear when she gets older).

Mattie loses her left forearm to a rattlesnake bite just so the filmmakers can deploy the CGI "limb erasure" tool at the end of the film.

Obama's plan for the lame duck session

2010-12-19T00:53:00.000-08:00

How is it that President Obama, the liberal's liberal, managed to convince himself that he needed to fight his own base over preserving the Bush tax cuts? And why was it so damned important for President Obama to get a repeal of "Don't Ask. Don't Tell." in the lame duck session?

Two words: Jerry Brown.

As the governor of California, Jerry Brown will perfectly positioned to mount a primary challenge to Obama in 2012. Brown has the most powerful Democratic state in the Union as his own personal fiefdom. He has loyal armies of union goons to do his bidding (if they're sufficiently compensated). Brown has no obligation to run on Obamacare, the stimulus package, Obamanomics, or any of the other Obama blunders since 2008. Brown is dumb enough to make a go of it and smart enough for his campaign to be a credible threat.

The key is whether Brown can turn the California economy around before Obama can turn the national economy around. If California is perceived as outperforming the national as a whole by 2012, Brown becomes a very dangerous man. If the national economy is doing well in 2012 and California is still mired in the doldrums, Brown has blown it and Obama wins.

Thus, the next two years are a sort of chess game between Obama and Brown. Extending the Bush tax cuts was the opening move.

Why the emphasis on "Don't Ask. Don't Tell." then? Think of that as a political gift for Nancy Pelosi. As a congressperson representing San Francisco and the outgoing Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi is obviously a major political power in Brown's backyard. Giving Pelosi this as a consolation prize from the 2010 midterms is Obama's way of making sure she stays on his side in this battle.

"Civilization V" sucks

2010-12-05T19:17:00.000-08:00

For the sake of convenience, I'm going to refer to version # of the long-running "Civilization" series of video games as C#.

I first got invested in the "Civilization" series back in the late 90s with the release of C3. C3 had its quirks. Modern battleships would occasionally get sneak attacked and destroyed by spear-wielding barbarians in dugout canoes, for example.

C4 was the incremental improvement on C3, and it fixed some old quirks and added new ones. The most glaring lacuna is that, based on the amounts of CD-ROM space devoted to different aspects of the game, C4 is essentially an animation program for three-dimensional heads of world leaders with a few gameplay elements knocked on.

The current version of the franchise is this year's C5. If C4 was a step forward from C3, C5 is the two steps backwards. Here's a list of what I believe the game does right and what it does wrong.

Graphics
Right: the hexagonal tileset
The most obvious change introduced into C5 is the new hexagonal tile shape which gives the terrain a more natural feel compared to the traditional square tile set. Unit movement is more natural as well since it feels harder to speed up movement by gaming the tile topology. C5 also handles the problem of what do to with the polar ice caps more gracefully than its predecessor.

Wrong: the same old unit animation
A C4 warrior unit, for example, consisted of a trio of little animated warriors who walk around the map like real, little people when they follow your orders. A C5 warrior unit consists of... a few more, slightly smaller little people still walking around following orders. Maybe this is some kind of titanic, computer programming breakthrough. Maybe it's just the programmers being lazy. Either way, I'm definitely not impressed.

Diplomacy
Right: C5 eliminates the three-dimensional animated heads

Wrong: stupid diplomacy
World leaders in C5 are constantly pestering you to join "pacts of cooperation" or "pacts of secrecy". What these pacts do, why they're important, and what happens when you violate their terms is apparently a complete mystery. The "pact of secrecy" is so secret that even the game programmers don't seem to know what it is.

Audio/visual
Right: better voice-overs
C5 replaces the celebrity voice-overs of Leonard Nimoy with voice-overs by actor W. Morgan Sheppard (cf. the film "Gettysburg"). It's hard to overstate what a smart move this was.

Wrong: C4's video clips were replaced with static splash panels.
This is incredibly disappointing. C4's video clips were mind-bogglingly bad; completing, say, the Pyramids in C4 wins you a 20-second video clip showing the Pyramids being built in super-fast motion. Completing the Pyramids in C5 wins you a static splash image of the Pyramids and a 20 second audio clip. When you win the game in C4, you were treated to a 20-second video clip showcasing sweet, sweet late-90s computer graphics. In C5, you get an early-90s static image and another voice-over.

In other words, CIVILIZATION V GIVES YOU VIRTUALLY NO REWARD WHATSOEVER FOR PLAYING THE GAME!!!!

Terrain and terrain improvements
Right: "on the fly" expansion of civilization borders.
This is a major leap forward. In C4, each city had a static, pre-defined zone of tiles that it could work. In C5, cities slowly expand their suite of workable tiles, but you can also purchase tiles to work for your city. This lets cities rapidly expand to encompass strategic tiles and critical resources and then slowly filling in the gaps as other priorities rise in importance later in the game.

Wrong: workers have little to do
C5 workers can build farms, mines, trading posts, and lumber mills to improve tiles. You have one primitive improvement for each of the three primitive resources and one primitive improvement to stick on forests. And that's it. Your workers pretty much have nothing to do for a big chunk of the game. Roads also cost money for upkeep, which means you can't pass the time having your workers carve out "road spaghetti".

Game Mechanics
Right: cities have built-in garrisons
Cities can fight back against beseigers. This is more realistic and spares you from producing the large garrison armies of C4.

Wrong: Cities can shoot volleys of arrows at opponents even if you haven't researched "archery" yet.

Right: Ranged units can actually attack opponents "at range". Major conceptual breakthrough.

Wrong: Unit upkeep is a mystery.
C5 tells you a total gold cost for maintaining units. There is no way to break this down on a per unit basis. The C5 documentation is totally silent on this point. Late in the game, you'll do things like delete your do-nothing worker unit and discover it, alone, was responsible for 50% of your unit upkeep costs over the last 200 turns.

Right: You can buy "social policies" with culture points.
This seems to be a rational solution for turning culture (i.e. the stuff you do when you're not at war) into a viable game mechanic.

Wrong: You can't switch social policies.
Once you buy a social policy, you're stuck with it forever, even if it becomes worthless.

Strategies
Right: city-states
C5 has the innovative feature of non-competitive city states that you can ally with or attack. The city states will give you resources, culture, science points, food, or even military units if you befriend them. They make an intriguing addition to the game-play if you can get on their good sides.

Wrong: the game is designed to deter conquest victories
Cities have garrisons now, so good luck storming one with a handful of stone age warriors. Resource limits prevent you from mass producing key military units. Your civilization's global happiness degrades rapidly when you annex (or even "puppet") captured cities. And in a deliberate slap to the face of all of the hard-core conquest players, there are some cities that cannot be razed so a "one-city" conquest victory is impossible.

Summation: Unless you're a hard-core "Civilization" masochist, I recommend that you not drop any money on this game.

Another bad day for Democrats

2010-12-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

President Obama's class warfare tactics are rejected in the Senate:

The Senate blocked President Obama's and Democratic leaders' tax cut plans Saturday in a foreordained symbolic vote that now sends both sides back to the negotiating table to work out a viable deal.

A bipartisan filibuster, led by unified Republicans and joined by four Democrats and one independent, proved there isn't enough support to back Mr. Obama's preferred option to extend income tax cuts for couples making less than $250,000 and tax increases for those making more than that.

Nancy Pelosi passed this bill in the House as a test of the resolve of the Senate Republican caucus. This time, the squishy moderate Republicans didn't defect as they did on the stimulus bill. I'd call this a win for the Tea Party movement.

In other news, the WikiLeaks revelations seemed to have claimed their first political victim:

"I think I will serve as secretary of state as my last public position," [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] said. Clinton's career has included not only her current position as secretary of state, but also eight years in the Senate representing New York.

Of course, the statement was made with the typical Clintonian rhetorical escape hatch. She isn't definitively leaving politics, she just thinks that she will someday in the future. On the other hand, people don't usualy go around saying that they're abandoning formal politics forever unless there is a reason.

A deceptively simple economics question

2010-11-30T22:02:00.000-08:00

This economics question popped up in the New York Times some years ago:

"You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton? (a) $0, (b) $10, (c) $40, or (d) $50."

The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton is the total value of everything you must sacrifice to attend his concert - namely, the value to you of attending the Dylan concert. That value is $10 - the difference between the $50 that seeing his concert would be worth to you and the $40 you would have to pay for a ticket. So the unambiguously correct answer to the question is $10. Yet only 21.6 percent of the professional economists surveyed chose that answer, a smaller percentage than if they had chosen randomly.

Clearly the opportunity cost here is $10. Why? Because if you are willing to pay up to $50 for something and you are given an opportunity to buy that thing at $40, then that opportunity is equivalent to you possessing a $10 coupon. So what is the cost of letting your $10 coupon expire? $10.

So this is the economics version of “What color is George Washington’s white horse?” Here's Vox Day's answer (boldface in original):

Since various people are tripping all over their various attempts to define "opportunity cost" instead of paying attention to how it was defined in the question, I will highlight the relevant portion of the question posed by Frank here.

"The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton" is the total value of everything you must sacrifice to attend his concert - namely, the value to you of attending the Dylan concert."

The value of attending the Dylan concert to you is $50. This means the value of the discount on the ticket is $10. Now, it's vital to note that Frank assigns TWO distinctly different definitions to "the opportunity cost of seeing Clapton" in his question, thus conclusively proving his point that economists, especially economists writing in the New York Times, don't understand opportunity cost. Naturally, there are two different answers to the two different questions-in-the-question. The answer to question (A) the "total value of everything you must sacrifice", is $60 since you're giving up both the value of the Dylan concert and the value of the discount in order to see Clapton. The answer to question (B) the "value to you of attending the Dylan concert" is $50. However, the four multiple choices provided make it clear that Frank is looking for an answer to question (B) rather than question (A), which is why the correct answer is (d) $50.

Vox Day is arguing that if you DON'T buy the ticket, then you lose the $50 value of the ticket, and you lose the $10 value of the discount, and you don't have to offset this loss against the purchase price of the ticket that you didn't buy. Ken Lay call your office please!!! I think Vox just discovered a way to save Enron.

Some bad history from "The Daily Dish"

2010-11-04T21:13:00.001-07:00

Rush Limbaugh made a minor stir this week by calling the Federal redistributive project into question:

Looked at within the prism of liberty and freedom, as our founding documents spell out, the Declaration, the Constitution, in nowhere in any of our founding documents was it ever said that people earning X would be punished for it. It was never said in our founding documents that people earning X would share a greater burden of funding the government than people who didn't.

Formally speaking, Limbaugh is correct. The founding documents of the United States make no assumption that the rich would have to accept exceptional taxation that would be spared to the poor. On the other hand, this does leave open the question of when progressive taxation emerged as a political concept. Andrew Sullivan pondered the question and came up with a bogus answer: the progressive income tax originated with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

Hilariously, Sullivan even imputes sinister motives to the Conservative movement for defying Lincoln (and Adam Smith too) on tax policy:

I'm sympathetic to Limbaugh's general argument - although I believe the debt and alarming inequality should temper one's preferences in this respect in the current circumstances. But it tells you something about today's "conservatism" that it is fiercely opposed to both Abraham Lincoln and Adam Smith on taxation and Friedrich von Hayek on universal health insurance.

In a sense this is correct. The Civil War years certainly saw the first imposition of a progressive (such as it was) income tax. The real question here, which Limbaugh is implying and Sullivan is ignoring, is where the idea of greater government impositions upon the rich, in general, originated as part of the American social ethos. The real answer is that the redistributive project originated from the experience of Americans during the early years when America was primarily a slave-holding, plantation civilization.

In colonial America, the rich derived a disproportionate benefit from the social imposition of peace and order because the rich owned slaves and the poor didn't. The bulk of the population would have been required risk life, limb, and property in order to police the slave-holding system and prevent rebellions. As compensation, the rich were expected to condescend to the poor and share the benefits of slave-produced wealth. Over time, this bargain evolved into the sense that slavery was necessary in order to promote the sense of white racial solidarity that made whites feel more equal.

A great reason why California proposition 19 is a dumb idea.

2010-10-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

Hypothetically speaking, let's say that you own a steamship company. You observe that people in North America love eating bananas and that people in South America have lots of spare bananas hanging around. You could make money by shipping bananas from one continent to the other. What selling price do you aim for in your North American markets? Do you (A) have the United States make bananas illegal so you can smuggle them into the country and sell them for $20 a pound; or (B) dramatically reduce costs as much as possible so you can sell bananas in the United States at 80 cents a pound?

The real life banana companies go for (B) because a cheap price for bananas allows that fruit to penetrate markets, attract more consumers, and still make a profit. The backers of proposition 19, perversely, think the answer is (A). In other words, they think the dramatic expansion of marijuana consumption that will follow greater legalization will end up making marijuana less profitable to the drug gangs. The truth is the exact opposite.

Of course, proposition 19 also allows individual smokers to cultivate their own small plots of marijuana. Technically, this will reduce the price that drug gangs can charge by some small amount. It won't put drug gangs out of business. You don't see Phillip-Morris going out of business because college students are growing tobacco in their dorm rooms, right?

A pathetic president

2010-09-23T00:05:00.001-07:00

President Obama has a new plan for economic assistance around the world:

Addressing world leaders, Obama offered no new commitments of U.S. dollars, but rather a blueprint of the development policy that will drive his government's efforts and determine where the money flows. His message was that the United States wants to help countries help themselves, not offer aid that provides short-term relief without reforming societies.

"That's not development, that's dependence," Obama said. "And it's a cycle we need to break. Instead of just managing poverty, we have to offer nations and people a path out of poverty."

President Obama's foreign policy is that countries mired in poverty are just going to have to do more with less, because the United States can't keep throwing money at a poverty problem that isn't going to just go away. President Obama's domestic problem, however, is to continue to throw money at a poverty problem -- economic malaise and 9%+ unemployment "as far as the eye can see" -- and hope that it just goes away.

The picture attached to the Fox news article underscores the point about our incredible shrinking President.

Vox Genius strikes again.

2010-09-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

According to Vox day, voluntary exchange is a generally bad idea:

The second and much more serious error is in the statement that "voluntary exchange benefits both parties". This is both logically and empirically false because it posits a non-existent human rationalism without temporal limits. While it is true that value is subjective, thereby allowing the possibility to defend totally irrational actions as at least nominally rational, this still doesn't avoid the problem of how the subjective values that the Misean acting man assigns are necessarily momentary in nature. What the acting man defines as a beneficial exchange at one moment he may very well not define as beneficial in the very next moment for a wide variety of reasons. And it is this fatal flaw in the logical foundation that causes the entire edifice in support of free trade to collapse.

Most people tend to revise their positions when they derive a contradiction, but not Vox. So, having "proven" that free trade is a really stupid idea, how does he account for that fact that free-trading South Korea is so much more prosperous than its relatively non-trading neighbor to the north?

The way that reality works is that voluntary exchange and free trade are almost certainly economically good ideas in the presence of perfect information being possesed by both parties. There's always that slight possibility that, say, a meteorite strike will take out human civilzation, thus preventing you from purchasing your morning cup of coffee. Voluntary exchange and free trade are therefore not absolutely certain to be of mutually benefit even with perfect information possesed by both side.

In the presence of limited or asymmetric information, voluntary exchange and free trade are generally of economic benefit. Yes, it is true that the possibility of irrational decision making, rapidly changing conditions of worth, and human trickery -- in general, risk -- make exchange problematic. There have been some developments that have been discovered that mitigiate the effects of risk. For example, advanced civilizations typically develop an information economy in which some economic actors specialize in providing reliable economic data in exchange for monetary renumeration. Even primitive societies deal with risk by creating institutions such as tribes and kinship groupings. Risk management is one of the keystones of economic success, right?

The key misrepresentation that Vox Day makes in his blog post is assuming that all potential transactions are plagued by utterly disabling levels of risk, which of course makes the possibility of useful exchange disappear. In the real world, that is simply not true.

The President of the United States is stuck on stupid.

2010-09-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

The major problem with the Obama presidency is that Obama himself is too politically weak to rein in a completely inept, out-of-control Congress.

The roots of this phenomenon appear to go back all the way to the fallout of the Clinton trial in the Senate in 1999. The major political effect of the Clinton trial was to discredit the conservative leadership of the Republican party to the extent that a Republican moderate, John McCain, was able to seize control. Control of the Republican party gave McCain a clear shot at winning the Republican nomination in 2000. McCain also wasn't shy about leveraging his party power to increase his odds of becoming president. He was more than willing to open the Republican primaries to the general public in order to build a Republican moderate/independent/liberal voting alliance to defeat the conservatives. I think it can also be taken as a given that Pat Buchanan didn't leave the Republican party by accident in 1999.

By the 2000 primary season, McCain winning the Republican presidential nomination was almost a fait accompli. Of course, the conservatives fought back and managed to engineer the presidental nomination of a fusion candidate, George W. Bush (i.e. Mr. "Compassionate Conservatism"). The end result was a situation similar to the Tyler administration: a conservative president with a weak base of support squaring off against a de facto party leader who is master of the Senate.

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 represented the same process occuring in the Democratic Party. After the 2000 elections, both Bill Clinton and Al Gore ended up being weakened as Democratic party power brokers. Clinton spent most of his time earning megatons of money for his wife's future presidential bid. Al Gore left formal politics to launch into a new career as a climate crusader. This left the Democratic party in the hands of the Democratic master of the Senate, Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy's first candidate for the presidential nomination was his own protégé, John Kerry. After Kerry's loss of the presidency to Bush in 2004, Kennedy ended up forging the Massachusetts-Illinois alliance that led to the nomination of Obama in 2008. Obama was chosen to be the nominee because of his obvious non-qualification for the position, his personally immunity to criticism in the mainstream media, and because he was personally enough of a cynical "operator" to accept being a presidential puppet.

The end result is that Obama has quickly morphed into perhaps the weakest president in all of American history. He has done nothing to lead the United States on any question. His legislative achievements in office all consisted of him free-riding on his Democratic Congress, acquiescing in whatever legislative mish-mash they decide to send to him. His presidency has consisted of golf and going on vacation; he is literally a president with nothing to do.

The end result is a massively strengthened Republican party that is going to ride a tidal wave of support into this year's elections. Paradoxically, this is expected to lead to a strengthening of the Obama presidency. Why? Because the mass extinction of Congressional Democrats will leave Obama alone as the remaining major party leader. Whether this will be enough power to get Obama re-elected in 2012 will be the next question.

George Lucas turned out to be the responsible one. Who knew?

2010-08-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

It's interesting that a huge chunk of our science-fiction culture got tossed into the garbage can over the last couple of years.

2009's film "Star Trek" decided to totally reboot the "Star Trek" canon. The means of doing this was having a Romulan ship accidentally travel backwards in time, thus creating an alternate timeline that wipes out the original timeline. The net effect is that everything from the "Star Trek" continuity that post-dates the original series pilot episode, literally about 95% of everything "Trek" that has ever gone on-screen, has been wiped out. It never happened now.

This is only exceeded by the "Dr. Who" series 5 episode "The Pandorica Opens" which blew up the entire observable universe except for Earth's solar system. The series 5 finale "The Big Bang" even has the Doctor himself vanishing into nothingness. Of course, the Doctor and the universe get restored, but it is still unclear whether any major changes to the "Dr. Who" continuity have been made. At the strictest possible interpretation, literally the entire 40+ year television history of "Dr. Who" may now be non-canonical.

On the other hand, the "Star Wars" franchise is still going strong after 33 years, off and on. George Lucas has never been forced to reboot the "Star Wars" continuity aside from some cosmetic changes. He's never created an alternate timeline, or a parallel universe, or blown the universe up and recreated it. As pissed off as "Star Wars" fans tend to get over things like Jar Jar Binks or the Ewoks, they have to concede that George Lucas's creation has endured.

Who the hell do you think you are, Prince Charles? Al Gore?

2010-07-31T11:46:00.000-07:00

Prince Charles seems to have this delusional belief that he, not Barack Obama, should be the Annointed One:

The Prince of Wales says he believes he has been placed on Earth as future King 'for a purpose' -- to save the world.

Giving a fascinating insight into his view of his inherited wealth and influence, he said: 'I can only somehow imagine that I find myself being born into this position for a purpose.

'I don't want my grandchildren or yours to come along and say to me, "Why the hell didn't you come and do something about this? You knew what the problem was". That is what motivates me.

'I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity.'

Consider the following. Al Gore is much poorer than mega-biillionaire Prince Charles. Al Gore only has a mere mansion or two compared to the Prince whose ancestors where pro forma owners of an entire nation. Al Gore's only formal political office is gone, never to return, compared to the royal-for-life Charles. And Al Gore himself is only a couple of generations removed from the hillbillies compared to the unparalleled breeding of the future King.

In some bizarre paradox of fate, the doctrine of global warming somehow makes Al Gore the natural king of the planet Earth that Prince Charles will never be. Al Gore's vision of human society is one in which vast hordes of peasants live lives of stark, utilitarian efficiency in order to offset the carbon footprint of keeping Al Gore's private jet in the air. Gore's radical environmentalism is a divine right of kings in all but name, and yet, a non-trivial fraction of the peasants-to-be buy into it. Prince Charles, on the other hand, has the real divine right of kings on his side, but where he to mention this in public, people would literally laugh in his face.

And then there is Barack Obama, whose spirit lives on an ethereal plane far above any mere Earthly monarch. His next stimulus package is going to be the construction of a full-scale Egyptian pyramid devoted to himself. This would have the benefits of providing his cult a secure focus for worship, housing his mortal remains when his spirit ascends to the heavens to become one with the Sky God, and, incidentally, providing a lot of "shovel ready" construction jobs for the unemployed.

My PC pet peeve strikes again.

2010-07-27T00:57:00.001-07:00

There's nothing worse than reading a thought-provoking, intelligent book and running across a sentence marred by a really stupid sense of political correctness. The latest example comes from "How to Read Literature Like a Professor", by Thomas C. Foster, on page 123:

Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for a thousand years, yet we can still have this kind of exchange, this dialogue, with her.

Quick! How many female authors from a thousand years ago can you name off the top of your head?

Fire. Michael. Steele. Now!

2010-07-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

This is the last straw.

Vox Day comes up with some really dumb stuff sometimes.

2010-07-17T12:00:00.001-07:00

Here's his latest challenge:

PTQ claimed that science has a vast track record of correct predictions while religion has none. "Science has produced zillions of correct predictions. Religion has produced none. A bigger winner-loser gulf does not exist." Very well, then let's place a bet on the matter:

Religion: The poor will be with you always.
Science: Global poverty will be ended by 2025.

This is basically the foundation of a straw-man argument, and it's easy to see why. The challenge for science conflates a scientific (or, if you prefer, engineering) question, "Do we have the resources available do to this?", with a political question, "Can we convince people to accomplish this goal by 2025?" It's not exactly fair to fault the scientific method for failing to correctly motivate people to adopt one particular course of action, poverty reduction, over another. As Vox is usually the first to admit, science doesn't provide any answers as to how people should live their lives.

Suppose science concludes that the United States could spend, say, $1 trillion on poverty reduction per year through 2025 to end global poverty. Then suppose that our next several presidents decide not to spend money on poverty reduction because the pharaonic-scale pyramid that will house the mortal remains of President Obama is a funding priority. Does that mean that the scientific method is flawed and we should all give up science and become Benedictine monks instead? Obviously not!

Absolutely laughable bias at Time Magazine

2010-06-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

Time's recent story on the relationship between United States President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ridiculously, utterly ineptly at odds with reality in its description of the two leaders. The article starts by portraying Netanyahu as the starry-eyed idealist who puts religious symbolism ahead of practical policy:

In Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel's founding, Benhamin "was born into the ideological wing of the Likud," says a Netanyahu staffer. "It's deeply ingrained." His politics are determined by this history. "Netanyahu thinks of a direct line from Moses down to him -- at the minimum, he has to be a guardian [of the Jewish state]," says his sometime political opponent, for Labor Party member and speaker of the Knesset Avrum Burg. Avishai Margalit, a professor at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, says, "The revisionists put tremendous weight on symbols and declarations. Netanyahu thinks that the minute he stops making symbolic gestures, that's the end of the Israeli cause."

It then continues by portraying Obama as the level-headed, street-hardened political realist:

That life among poor Muslims taught Obama two large lessons, according to his account of the period in his books. First, he learned that the world was "violent," "unpredictable" and "often cruel" and that survival depended not on higher principles but on "taking life on its own terms." Second, Obama lived in the kind of neighborhood from which, as he has noted before, many terrorists come. A top priority for winning the war against terrorism, he said, would be "drying up the rising well of support for extremism" in places like Indonesia -- and the Middle East."

The reality is that the article almost precisely inverts the backgrounds of the two men. Obama is the starry-eyed ideologist who puts symbolism ahead of practical action. Obama was practically born into the Communist Party. His mother was a "fellow traveller"; his father was evicted from the Kenyan government for plotting a socialist coup. Obama built a career around meaningless symbolism, starting back in his days as a "community organizer", continuing throughout his career as a tenured radical law professor, and culminating in "hope and change". If anyone in the world thinks that he is the appointed intermediary between God and Man, it's Obama.

On the other hand, Netanyahu is the one with the practical experience. If you really want to spend your childhood worrying about the terrorists living in your neighborhood, trying spending your childhood years in 1950s Jerusalem. Netanyahu became a real leader of men under conditions of full scale war of national survival (i.e. situations a heck of a lot more dangerous than Obama's faculty meetings). And I'm pretty sure that any Jew living after 1945 doesn't need lessons on how the world is violent, unpredictable, and often cruel.

President Obama supports the unsupportable.

2010-06-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

President Obama wants to green-light commercial whale fishing:

The Obama administration is leading an effort within the International Whaling Commission to lift a 24-year international ban on commercial whaling for Japan, Norway and Iceland, the remaining three countries in the 88-member commission that still hunt whales.

The administration argues that the new deal will save thousands of whales over the next decade by stopping the three countries from illegally exploiting loopholes in the moratorium.

On this, the President must be stopped. No commercial whaling!

Just when I think that the new "Transformers" franchise couldn't get any more bull****...

2010-06-02T01:28:00.001-07:00

...I stumble across this Stan Bush version of "The Touch". Because the one thing the original "Transformers" really really needed was the bastard child of Vanilla Ice and "Eye of the Tiger".

The original version is 100 times more awesome.

Pro Gaming in South Korea isn't all bad.

2010-06-01T23:55:00.001-07:00

On the minus side, being a pro-gamer is a lot like joining a cult:

“The standard in pro gaming groups is for people to live together 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no traveling to or from work, and for those ranked Group 2 or lower, their entire daily routine consists of eating, cleaning, laundry and games,” said Kim Jeong-geun. “Because of this structure of bringing in young people, developing them and then replacing them when their lifespan is spent and they have been squeezed dry, it has earned the name of ‘the chicken coop.’”

On the plus side, you're probably not being exploited for sex if you're a member of a geek cult.

A Tale of Two Entities*

2010-05-16T00:41:00.000-07:00

Joe Carter at "First Thoughts" makes the case that God exists (italics in original):

Because it is possible for the entire universe to cease to exist, its existence must be radically contingent. Even if the universe has always existed and was uncaused (i.e., the view of steady-state cosmology), its existence would still require a causal agent to keep it from ceasing to exist, to prevent its exnihilation. Since no natural cause exnihilates anything, the cause must be supernatural. A supernatural being (one that is itself uncaused) is required to prevent the universe from turning into nothingness.

In other words, even though everything that we know about universe tells us that it will not simply cease to exist, nevertheless, the universe could simply cease to exist. Ergo, there must be a supernatural being who cannot cease to exist who keeps the universe from ceasing to exist.

Call me crazy, but I'm not 100% sold on this yet.

* Original title changed to something more neutral with respect to the discussion.

A political move so stupid that it could only be evidence of a brilliant strategic plan.

2010-05-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

Mitt Romney goes to the wall for doomed GOP Senator Bob Bennett:

There he stood, a Harvard MBA man, a man of numbers, backing a collapsing equity. Mitt Romney took to the podium in Salt Lake City, the place where he rose to prominence in 2002 as Olympic chief, and urged the GOP delegates to back Sen. Bob Bennett, Utah's three-term incumbent. Despite Romney's pleas, Bennett ended the day with a worthless bronze, dumped from the primary. For Romney, however, the moment was a silver — not a victory, but an impressive showing.

The article does two really interesting things with this piece of information. First, the article adds two and two together and gets five: that Romney's support for Bennett is due to a refreshing sense of personal honor. In reality, it's more a case of the first officer of the "Titanic" bravely rearranging the deck chairs after the captain jumps overboard.

Second, it makes an excellent case that Mitt Romney is exactly the type of mainstream Republican moderate that we've always suspected. The ultimate problem with Mitt Romney -- and with Rudy Guiliani and with Fred Thompson and with Rick Lazio, etc. -- as presidential candidates is that they were all early adopters of the McCainite politics that collapsed so catastrophically in 2006 and 2008. The one thing that is guaranteed to re-elect Barack Obama as president of the United States is for the GOP nominee to run on the bold slogan of mainstream McCainite Republicanism: "I'll never be THAT stupid ever again. I promise."

Dungeons and Dragons is not art.

2010-04-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Film critic Roger Ebert has achieved a huge measure of internet notoriety for his proclamation that video games, in principle, cannot be art. His latest discussion of the topic to date has drawn more than 3,300 comments (roughly 99% of them hostile).

To illuminate the question of whether video games are art, consider the role-playing game fad that slightly predated the arrival of video games. The goal of role-playing games is profoundly simple: assembling a group of players for a session of collaborative storytelling. Collaborative storytelling has been around in one form or another since the era of the oral tradition to today's "Hardy Boys" and "Star Trek" fictional universes, so we know that this can be art. The key to the success of collaborative storytelling is that there are a set of rules for the contributors in order to enforce a coherent story, setting, and theme.

In a role-playing game, the players all adopt the roles of characters within the story, except for the "game master" player who handles all of the non-character elements of the story. The game arises from the interaction between character players and the game master. The character players are entertained by being allowed to describe their character's actions within the story as they see fit. The game master has the burden of describing the non-player story elements in entertaining ways, but he also has the benefit of being allowed an immensely greater scope of personal creativity -- control over the entire game world other than the character players themselves.

Role-playing games work well as games. As art, they are an unmitigated disaster. The artistic failure arises from the fact that character players and game masters all have independent conceptions and expectations for how the story should evolve. Coordinating these ideas into a single, coherent story with artistic merit is a challenge that proves to be immensely difficult in practice.

The major design failure of modern role-playing games turns out to be their relatively poor ability to coordinate player characters with game master. The innovation in modern role-playing games for attempting to reconcile character players with game masters was to introduce probabilistic rules to govern the results of the character actions. The merit of this should be obvious: in any situation in which character players may come into critical dispute with the game master, remove the human element from the result and replace it with a random arbiter (i.e. a die roll). Neither side can therefore accuse the other of an unfair manipulation of the luck of the dice. Suffice it to say that this made the role-playing game as entertainment possible.

Unfortunately, probabilistic rules did nothing to solve the problem of disputes. This led to two major residual problems. The first is railroading, where the game master uses his control over non-character story elements to harass, intimidate, and bully the players into abandoning control over their characters to the game master. The second is minmaxing, where the players exploit the rules of the game to maximize the ability of their characters to act successfully regardless of all other considerations that the game master may wish to preserve. The modern role-playing game is so dominated by the cold war between minmaxing players and railroading game masters as to be utterly ruined as an artistic endeavor.

Thus, we come to the hallmark of the very latest role-playing games: create balance between character players and game masters by a mutual reduction of choices to a near-nullity. Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition (D&D 4e) is a prime example of this. D&D 4e reduces player disputes by requiring the players to produce characters who are essentially equal in their ability to act within the game setting. Furthermore, the game setting is highly combat-oriented -- so much so that the ability of the characters to function as a combat team is the sin qua non of the D&D 4e gaming experience. Finally, the role of the game master is to assemble combat scenarios that exactly match the combat ability of the characters. The end result is a role-playing game that functions without crippling disputes, but that also has all of the charm, flavor, and meaning of a McDonald's Big Mac.

I have a feeling that health care reform will fail tomorrow.

2010-03-20T20:42:00.001-07:00

Suppose that you are an undecided House Democrat going into tomorrow's big health care reform votes. If you vote "yes", you're going to have Tea Party protesters hunting for your seat in November. If you vote "no", you're going to have liberal democrats from the President to the grassroots flipping you the middle finger for the rest of your political career.

No matter what you do, your re-election chances are highly damaged. So let's look long term. A House Democrat who votes "yes" is essentially betting his future reputation that a crap bill, a crap process, and all of the bribes, kickbacks, payoffs, and b***s*** is going to turn up smelling like roses someday. What are the odds of that happening?

On the other hand, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid are desperate to pass some kind of bill. If the current health care bill fails, they're almost certainly going to offer a scaled back "Plan B" to Congress before November. Imagine voting "no" on the health care bill from hell and then voting "yes" on a later, more modest "Plan B" bill for political cover. To me, that sounds like a pretty good deal for an undecided Democrat.

Of course, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid know this, which is why they've been making the "unholy doughnut" argument all year: "You're already going to hell. You might as well take the last bite of the unholy doughnut before you burn."

A horse! A horse! My presidency for a horse!

2010-03-20T12:43:00.000-07:00

As of this writing, there is a slight glimmer of hope in the Congressional health care war. The House Democrats have been forced to reject the so-called "Slaughter Solution", which means that the house simply has no way to avoid a straight, up-or-down vote on the Senate health care bill in order to move health care reform forward. Given that the Senate health care bill is glowing green from radioactivity in the House, it might fail to pass.

In a bid to win pro-life Democratic support for the Senate bill, President Obama is reportedly considering an executive order to pacify their concerns over public funding of abortion.

To buy into this, a pro-life House Democrat would have to make some hard choices. First, this is still a dramatic weakening of the status quo on abortion. A vote for the Senate health care bill is a vote for public financing of abortions. Period. An executive order from the president might assuage a guilty conscience, but it sure as hell won't stop that rolling barrage of pro-life attack ads that will be crushing pro-life Democrats for the next 8 months.

Second, it would mean trusting the single most arrogant, incompetent, and desperate President in American history. This is a President who has repeatedly betrayed every promise he has ever made to the American people and who has endorsed every bribe, gimmick, threat or pay-off required to pass health care without scruple or qualification. This is a President who would be plunging a wooden stake into the heart of his presidency by honoring this agreement. To trust this president on this agreement would be sheer lunacy.

Finally, the logic of the pro-choice liberals will force them to oppose this executive order. The reasoning is simple:

Under single payer health care, all health care dollars are Federal dollars

Under the Stupak and Hyde amendments, no Federal dollars can be used to fund abortion

Ergo, no health care dollars can be used to fund abortion, which is a de facto abortion ban.

So the Left will be forced to wage war on this executive order, whether the pro-life Democrats like it or not.

Harold Ford, Jr. sells out.

2010-03-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

Harold Ford, Jr. recognizes that New Yorkers desperately want change in the Democratic party that governs them:

There are compelling reasons for me to run [against Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand]. I believe New Yorkers are hungry for a new direction in government. Our elected officials have spent too much time this past year supporting a national partisan political agenda — and not enough time looking out for their own constituents.

which is why Harold Ford, Jr. strongly endorses the Democratic Party status quo candidate for Senate:

I’ve examined this race in every possible way, and I keep returning to the same fundamental conclusion: If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary — a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened.

I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York, and give the Senate majority to the Republicans.

I realize this announcement will surprise many people who assumed I was running. I reached this decision only in the last few days — as I considered what a primary campaign, even with the victory I saw as fully achievable, would have done to the Democratic Party.

Harold Ford, Jr. talks tough, but he basically just admitted that he's as much of a bungler as any other Democrat.

The case of the self-refuting linguist

2010-02-28T12:22:00.000-08:00

John McWhorter, in his book "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English", has an interesting contradiction in thought that doesn't seem to have occured to him. It is connected to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which McWhorter starts to poo-poo on page 138:

The idea that grammar is thought became influential from the writings of Edward Sapir. We met him in the previous chapter venturing that English speakers came to find nuance irritating. Even that point had hints of the language-is-thought persuasion -- supposedly the erosion of various aspects of English grammar was due to some psychological leaning in its speakers. But Sapir ventured only passing speculations in this vein.

It was Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf who picked up the ball and ran with it, in the 1930s, publishing several pieces on the subject which served as its foundational texts. The hypothesis is known, therefore, as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The hypothesis has also failed. Repeatedly and conclusively.

Earlier in the book, he devotes a large amount of space arguing for the usage of the singular pronoun "they" instead of the singular pronoun "he" when refering to an person of unspecified sex, basically on grounds of sexism (p. 66; italics in original):

My own books are full of resorts to he, which I find sexist, occasional dutiful shes, which stike me as injecting a stray note of PC irrelevance into what I am discussing, or he or she, which I find clumsy and clinical -- for the simple reason that I was required to knuckle under. At best I can wrangle an exceptions and get in a singular they or their once or twice a book.

But why do contemporary writers consider the singular, indeterminate sex "he" to be sexist? It's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: eliminate sexist grammar from English and sexism will magically disappear!

Liberals can be really f***ing stupid sometimes.

2010-02-26T22:55:00.000-08:00

Liberals are really pissed off about these Right-wing tea parties, so much so that they have started liberal "coffee parties" of their own (emphasis in original):

Furious at the tempest over the Tea Party -- the scattershot citizen uprising against big government and wild spending -- Annabel Park did what any American does when she feels her voice has been drowned out: She squeezed her anger into a Facebook status update.

let's start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. geez. ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss 'em off bec it sounds elitist . . . let's get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.

Obviously many liberals have no understanding of American history, because the whole point of "tea parties" is that the participants are NOT drinking tea!

What planet is this Obama guy from?

2010-02-21T23:35:00.000-08:00

Pretend for a second that you are President Barack Obama. You don't just want to reform the nation's health care system; you want to fundamentally overhaul the nation's health care system to benefit generations to come. Yet, for some reason, the Republicans aren't going along with your plans. The Republicans keep complaining about too much government control, too much government waste, job-killing tax cuts, health care rationing, and death panels. You don't really want any of those bad things, and you don't think your health care reforms will produce any of that stuff, but your health care reforms still can't pass Congress in the face of Republican opposition.

You decide that the way forward is a game-changing new proposal that will bridge the Republican-Democrat divide and finally win bipartisan support for passage of health care reform. What new proposal do you announce?

The real Barack Obama decided to propose price controls:

President Obama will propose on Monday giving the federal government new power to block excessive rate increases by health insurance companies, as he rolls out comprehensive legislation to revamp the nation’s health care system, White House officials said Sunday.

Nothing could possibly better prove that the President of the United States is utterly not competent to reform health care than the fact that he put price controls on the table. Price controls are not a serious reform because they represent "Pee Wee Herman" economics: if we all just close our eyes, the problem disappears. The unfortunate reality is that we can't all keep our eyes closed forever. Sooner or later, the price controls are going to fail and the original problem is going to be much, much worse than before.

Or think about it this way. The Baby Boom generation is currently in the process of retiring. As that generation ages into retirement, they are going to put a new, increased demand for medical care onto the existing system. The health care system will need to raise rates in order to produce the profits necessary to expand the amount of care available to meet the upcoming demand for care. If the government imposes price controls onto health care, those profits won't exist, which means that the supply of care will lag behind demand and produce substandard care and/or health care rationing. If the government doesn't get health care prices exactly right -- and it is absolutely guarenteed that the government will bungle them -- the ramifications will be catastrophic.

The real problem with health care in the United States is very simple if one looks at it in economic terms. Health care is an industry in which very large increases of capital input are required to expand and improve the health care output to the consumer. Putting government bureaucrats in charge instead of private-sector CEOs will not fix the problem. Rationing care will not fix the problem. Subsidizing care will not fix the problem. Throwing government money at the problem will not fix the problem.

The only possible way to fix the problem is to increase the efficiency of the system! That requires free market economics, competition, accurate pricing, and trust that the common private-sector economic agents across the economy can do their jobs correctly. If we want the health care system to be reformed, this is what we're going to need.

America's First Parliament

2010-02-13T00:26:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to determine the meaning of President Obama's upcoming health care summit with Democratic and Republican leaders. Then I read a description of how the summit is going to begin and the answer hit me:

The administration's letter invited Democrats Pelosi and Reid, McConnell and House Republican Leader John Boehner, and asked each to designate four other members of Congress to participate.

The invitation list also includes Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Finance Committee; Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee; House Ways and Means Committee; House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the House Education and Labor Committee, all of which oversaw the health legislation in both chambers.

The White House said Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Sebelius, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the Office of Health Reform, would also attend.

Obama will make opening remarks, followed by remarks from a Republican leader and a Democratic leader chosen by leaders of their parties, and then the president will open discussion on insurance reform, cost containment, expanding coverage and the effect of health reform legislation on deficit reduction.

In hindsight, the meaning of the event is obvious. President Obama is abandoning the unwieldy American-style government that he can't control and doesn't seem to understand in favor of a parliamentary-style government favored by the European welfare states. Obama's health care conference represents the convening of the "de facto executive branch" or parliamentary cabinet.

Obama will be there as a first-among-equals Prime Minister to both enforce the rules and advance his party's interest. There will be various "Cabinet ministers" present in the form of the most prominent House and Senate leaders. And, of course, there will be a few extra "senior members of the executive" there to give the majority party a modest majority at all times. Once the Cabinet has reached a consensus on health care legislation, they'll send the agreement to the House of Commons and the House of Lords (the House and Senate respectively). Once it passes, Obama in his role of figurehead of state will rubber-stamp the bill and enact it into law.

The 2010 film "Legion", or "Welcome to the Irony-verse"

2010-01-27T00:48:00.000-08:00

I saw "Legion" last weekend and it is ridiculously bad. The most interesting thing about the film is that nearly all of the main characters suffer highly ironic deaths.

The young black man trying to win custody of his child in a divorce proceedings is killed by an angel-possessed child.

The owner of the diner is killed when he blows the diner up to try and kill an angel.

The wealthy, yuppy mother dies immediately after trying to "sell out" the newly born child.

The bitter, yuppy father is killed and then his body is filled with acid

The exhibitionist daughter of the yuppy couple is killed off-screen in a mundane car crash.

The military veteran is killed when he gets hit in the back with acid, causing his spine to disintegrate

The archangel Michael does more than any other being on Earth to thwart God's plans, and he turns out to be the only being that God brings back to life.

The old joke about Stephen King is that all of his books had the same basic plot: X gets possessed and tries to kill people. In "Cujo", X is the dog. In "The Shining", X is the house. In "Legion", X is the 1950s: it's iconic monsters are an angel-possessed granny, an angel-possessed "ice cream man", and an angel-possessed child (who happens to look just like the Chucky doll from the "Chucky" films).

President Obama's discretionary spending freeze will only affect Republicans.

2010-01-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

President Obama is still playing games with the American economy. His plan for a commission that will place mandatory votes on spending cuts before Congress will only go into effect after November:

Trying to win the votes of fiscal moderates, President Barack Obama formally endorsed legislation Saturday creating an independent commission with the power to force Congress to vote on major deficit reduction steps this year, after the November elections.

Obama’s statement gives new momentum to efforts in the Senate now to attach such legislation this coming week to a pending debt ceiling bill. But the endorsement comes so late that it risks being seen as just a ploy to win over swing Democratic senators whose votes the White House needs to lift the federal debt ceiling.

Since the Republicans are widely expected to make massive gains and November and possibly win back one or both houses of Congress this November, this proposed commission is obviously a scam. Call it the standing committee to humiliate Republicans.

It's almost certainly unconstitutional as well. How can a standing committee force Congress to vote on anything?

President Obama is out of touch with reality.

2010-01-23T14:13:00.000-08:00

For a good laugh, read this article about how President Obama -- the greatest deficit spender in the history of the American Presidency -- wants to freeze discretionary spending:

There is a “fighting chance” President Barack Obama will propose a freeze in most discretionary spending by the federal government in his State of the Union speech next week, Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, said

“The president can say in this State of the Union address, ‘I’m going to include in my budget a freeze on discretionary spending, I’m drawing a line in the sand, and I’m going to use my veto pen to enforce that,’” Bayh said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.

First, President Obama has identified out-of-control health care spending as the principle budget problem affecting the federal government. Second, President Obama's plan for reigning-in health care spending involves massively increasing the amount of money that will be spend on health care. Third, the reason why discretionary spending is such a major problem that President Obama must now address is because President Obama's first major action as president was to massively increase discretionary spending. Fourth, if President Obama wasn't the imcompetent idiot that he is, he'd realize that building a Democratic Party majority for spending restraint is utterly impossible in the modern era.

There is really only one explanation for President Obama's call for a discretionary spending freeze: the Democratic Congress believes that Obamacare will give them all of the opportunities for pork, graft, and bribery that they will ever need to run the government.

Please do not vote for California Democrats ever again because they are all totally bats**t insane.

2010-01-22T21:04:00.000-08:00

Last year, the state of California had a $20 billion budget shortfall that required a mixture of tax and fee increases and painfull budget cuts to make up. Despite all this, the state of California will have a $20 billion budget shortfall again this year. Democrats across the state have been loudly complaining that state government is broken, that the state's taxation system is totally inadequate for funding its current budgetary problems, that only a complete overhaul of the state's revenue-producing system -- including repeal of proposition 13 -- can solve California's budget woes.

So, how are California Democrats planning to fix the economic havoc dragging the state into chaos? The current plan is to start by tripling the state budget overnight with absolutely no idea for how to pay for it. Seriously:

A key legislative committee in California revived a bill Thursday to create a government-run health care system in the nation's most populous state, two days after Massachusetts elected a senator who opposes the president's national health care plan.

The Senate Appropriations Committee released the bill for a vote by the full Senate next week. The legislation had been held over from last year because of the state's ongoing budget crisis.

Creating a single-payer system would cost California an estimated $210 billion in its first year. That's roughly double the size of the total state budget, but about what the state and federal government and residents cumulatively spend now on California health care, said Sen. Mark Leno.

This plan is so far beyond the boundaries of reality that the Democrats are planning to spend $1 million a year just for paying people to work out a way to pay for this damn thing.

The World Turned Upside Down

2010-01-19T20:31:00.000-08:00

Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts!

The most transparent Congress ever

2010-01-05T18:54:00.000-08:00

When Nancy Pelosi promised the most transparent Congress in American history, people took this to mean that she would open political discussion and dealmaking to public inspection. This was certainly the impression that C-SPAN received:

The head of C-SPAN has implored Congress to open up the last leg of health care reform negotiations to the public, as top Democrats lay plans to hash out the final product among themselves.

C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote to leaders in the House and Senate Dec. 30 urging them to open "all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings," to televised coverage on his network.

"The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of the sessions LIVE and in their entirety," he wrote.

Nancy Pelosi will, of course, not agree to C-SPAN's request. Instead she is going to negotiate the health care bill's final provisions in the smoke-filled back rooms of the capital and then have her brain-dead Democratic caucus rubber-stamp the final draft with no debate. "Transparency" to Nancy Pelosi apparently means "I shouldn't have to ask a congressman what his preferred bribe is."

Let the poison in the TARDIS hatch out.

2010-01-05T00:44:00.000-08:00

Russell T. Davies ended his tenure as executive producer of "Doctor Who" at the end of 2009. Davies deserves a lot of credit for successfully bringing the show back to life, but his tenure on "Doctor Who" will be notorious for off-screen politics sneaking their way into the on-screen story.

The two-part story arc that represents Davies' final episodes, titled "The End of Time", is a rather blatant example of Davies deciding to eat his successor's lunch. Like a lame-duck American president desperately trying to put as much of the government off-limits to the opposition party as possible, Davies used "The End of Time" as an eleventh-hour "info dump" to define the new show's biggest lacuna: the fate of the Time Lords. The sheer magnitude of the "info dump" is so stunning in its scope that even io9.com is essentially conceeding that only a theological explanation is possible:

Let's see if we can't put all of this together. There's an entire race whose development is being massively accelerated, perhaps with the purpose of making the Ood the new Time Lords. (Even if that's too much of a stretch, they clearly have an incredibly strong connection to time, perhaps second only to that of the Doctor.) There's an unimportant old man whose life keeps intersecting with the Doctor's in ways that far too improbable to be the result of mere coincidence. There's a mysterious but benevolent woman in completely white clothing that keeps showing up to steer events towards the best possible conclusion for the Doctor and, indeed, all existence. If I didn't know any better, I'd say this is all the work of the White Guardian.

For those who haven't memorized every detail of the classic series, the White Guardian was an almost omnipotent figure who first appeared in Tom Baker's fifth season on Doctor Who.

Steven Moffat will get to have a little fun creating new mythology for "Doctor Who" despite the invisible hand of Davies keeping a grip on the overall back-story. In the story "The Waters of Mars" -- which immediately preceeds "The End of Time" -- Davies has the Doctor decide to become a Time Meddler. In "Doctor Who" mythology, a Time Meddler is someone who makes changes to the established timeline of events. In meta-fictional terms, a Time Meddler is a character that gives its authors an excuse to ignore continuity, which is to say that as long as Moffat decides to play in his little sandbox of a show, he has a free hand to do what he likes.

Terrorist Laundering

2010-01-03T22:38:00.001-08:00

Everybody knows that President Obama has a major problem with his plan to close the Guantanamo prison. Paradoxically, the increased terrorist activity in Yemen gives Obama way of squaring the circle, at least as far as the Yemeni terrorists at Guantanamo is concerned.

Step 1: Make sure that Yemen won't torture any terrorists being held in custody, so detainees held at Guantanamo can be sent there under U.S. law.

Step 2: Send Yemeni terrorists back to Yemen. If Yemen keeps them under lock and key, then bingo, one step closer to closing Guantanamo.

Step 3: Assume that Yemen is basically a revolving door that puts these terrorists back into the jihad. If they get recaptured by the United States, then President Obama can send them straight into the civilian court system. The terrorists have been successfully "laundered" out of Guantanamo.

Step 4: President Obama gets to write condolence letters and authorize compensatory payouts for any Americans who died because of step 3.

Terrorist laundering is a neat trick, which is why President Obama is going to continue shipping terrorist to Yemen despite bipartisan opposition.

The end of the David Tennant era

2010-01-01T18:57:00.000-08:00

David Tennant has finally passed on the role of the Doctor. Here are 3 things that I liked about David Tennant's tenure with "Doctor Who".

David Tennant is not Matt Smith.
Somebody at the BBC was put in charge of analyzing "Doctor Who" in order to determine what to look for in David Tennant's successor as the Doctor. That somebody concluded that the new "Doctor Who" was missing an essential element of the original series: Turlough! To avoid hot-linking, here's an image of Matt Smith as the Doctor to compare to a similar image of the Fifth Doctor's companion Turlough. You be the judge.

David Tennant is a good actor for the role of the Doctor.
David Tennant isn't the world's greatest actor, but he is pretty good by "Doctor Who" standards. For example, Tom Baker has one setting: the Doctor. Christoper Eccleston has two: happy Doctor and stern Doctor. David Tennant's Doctor was somewhat more protean than his predecessors, generally ranging between the poles of the Doctor as pick-up artist (e.g. "Voyage of the Damned"), Doctor as Sinatra-esqe loner (the very end of "The Waters of Mars", for example), or Doctor as scruffy post-doc as the plot demanded.

"Blink"
David Tennant's best episode as the Doctor and one of the best "Doctor Who" episodes ever filmed.

My favorite blog posts of 2009

2009-12-31T21:06:00.000-08:00

January:The House Republicans won a moral victory.

February: The perfect metaphor for the early days of the Obama administration.

March: Foreign policy in the age of Obama is a total disgrace.

April: A Grand Conspiracy Theory, or Reality 1, Obama 0

May: A sociological phase transition in the D&D genre

June: The Soviet Union, Bush, Batman, Obama, Iran

July: Why the Time Lords were written out of "Doctor Who".

August: Thoughts about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

September: Does the theory of evolution preclude the existence of a divine plan for human beings?

October: President Obama, male model

November: Roland Emmerich's "2012", or "Gary Stu is Smarter than You"

December: The irony of the Obama administration

Blue-state Democrats are going to get screwed by ObamaCare.

2009-12-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

It wasn't supposed to happen this way, but it did:

The governors of the nation’s two largest Democratic states are leveling sharp criticism at the Senate health care bill, claiming that it would leave their already financially strapped states even deeper in the hole.

New York Democratic Gov. David Paterson and California GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are urging congressional leaders to rework the Medicaid financing in the Senate-passed bill, warning that under that version their states will be crushed by billions in new costs.

The original purpose of ObamaCare with its "public option" was to make health care dollars, in effect, fungible by laundering them through the federal government. The blue welfare states that are going bankrupt over health care costs would get their massive tax burdens shifted to the federal level in exchange for new health care dollars to make up the shortfalls. The low-taxing red states would see federal tax increases that would pay for it all. The economically healthy red states would, in effect, get looted to prop up the economically collapsing blue states. If the conservative political elites running the red states ended up being surplanted by a new class of liberal Quislings, so much the better as far as President Obama is concerned.

The massive mission failure for Obama is that the public option is not passing through Congress. Without some mechanism for looting the red states and paying the money into the blue states, the effect of the bill is just one big federal mandate to force the blue states into collapse even faster than they are already.

Made I him king for this?

2009-12-23T00:54:00.000-08:00

Senator Buckingham seems to be sleeping poorly now that our new Richard, King of the Senate has been crowned with 60 votes:

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, after securing a sweetheart deal for his state as part of the health insurance reform bill, said Tuesday that three other senators have told him they want to bargain for the same kind of special treatment.

"Three senators came up to me just now on the (Senate) floor, and said, 'Now we understand what you did. We'll be seeking this funding too'," Nelson said.

But the Democratic senator, who has faced a heap of criticism for appearing to trade his vote on health care for millions in federal Medicaid money, said he's considering asking that the Nebraska deal be stripped from the bill.

Though he defended the exemption as a "fair deal," he said he never asked for the full federal funding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended up granting his state. Nelson said he instead asked that states be allowed to refuse an expansion of Medicaid.

"This is the way Senate leadership chose to handle it. I never asked for 100 percent funding," he said.

Senator Nelson is obviously guilty as hell and he knows it. His Democratic colleagues are obviously stupid as hell if they think that Harry Reid is going to offer special deals to his own stooges.

"Dollhouse" at the Christmas hiatus

2009-12-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

Season 2 episodes 9 and 10 aired last Friday night. Here are some thoughts about them.

Episode 9 proved once again that in the Whedon-verse, the only unstoppable, universal warriors are mousy, 100-pound white chicks. Victor, aka Anthony Ceccoli, might be a professional soldier and Iraq war veteran, but he's only flesh and blood. Echo, on the other hand, can routinely knock-out 200-pound soldiers with a single punch, take out multiple combatants in hand-to-hand combat at once, and defeat an entire army of mind-linked drone soldiers by hacking into their mental network.

Aside from the omnicompetent Echo, "Dollhouse" is driven by the bait-and-switch dynamic. For most of episode 9, the bait is that Adelle DeWitt is incapacitated by a drunken stupor which gives Boyd and Topher a chance to download Echo with massive levels of hard-core military training. This sets up the switch, which is Adelle magically switching from pathetic stupor to decisive action by having everyone involved arrested at the end of the episode. In episode 10, the bait is that Adelle DeWitt is openly threatening her subordinates with execution on an daily if not hourly basis to keep them in line. Then there is the switch: Adelle was only pretending to be super evil until she had enough dirt on Rossum, so now she's everybody's loyal and caring leader once again.

Episode 10 did finally reveal to the audience what the infamous "attic" was. It was slightly macabre but, ultimately, rather highly television-derivative.

Going into the Christmas hiatus for the show, it's easy to see that we haven't really gotten much from Joss Whedon to justify keeping the show alive. We've discovered that the evil corporation is even more evil than we had been led to believe (big shocker there), we received two episodes that revolve around a satirical pun (aka Senator Perrin aka George W. Bush), and we watched the season 1 "Echo has sex with a weirdo" engagement of the week format turn into the season 2 "Echo kicks some weirdo's ass" engagement of the week format. The only really breakthrough episode this season was "Belonging", and that's pretty much it.

The irony of the Obama administration

2009-12-19T19:42:00.000-08:00

The central irony of the Obama administration is the fact that Barack Obama the man had devoted his intellectual life to the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist dogma of the Left, but that Barack Obama the president has devoted his first term in office to a domestic policy that is essentially internal colonialism.

You, the peasant of red-state America, will devote your life to supplying raw materials -- primarily tax dollars and carbon offsets -- to your government. In exchange, you'll get whatever suite of services the government feels is necessary for maintaining your lifestyle of stark utilitarian efficiency. In the case of the Senate's health care bill, Lefties are freely admitting that a lot of people are going to end up getting totally hosed by it:

As it is this bill places a huge financial burden on a lot of people who can not afford it. Don't expect a lot of gratitude from them for “solving” their health insurance problem.

On the other hand, the bill is bad for the "natives" but still cool for the "Colonial Office", so some Lefties are still willing to back it:

So what about the question in the title of this post [Should the Senate health care bill be killed]? My answer is no. In the end, as awful as this bill is, I have to side with Krugman and Reich. The argument I find most convincing is that you have to pass something to get your foot in the door for future reforms. If the bill dies, that is it for health care reform for a good long time. Pass the bill, which does do some good things along with its more deplorable parts, and you establish the basic idea of universal health insurance. It will be pretty hard for future Republican majorities to take it away.

Red State gets it (author's boldface):

The world will understand America has changed. Our country is now run by elites who are printing money, debasing our currency to throw at massive new spending and deficit creating programs — and actually believe they are both moral and politically smart. Just 19% of the public believes this plan will not increase the deficit.

What comes next is very discomforting to think about. But we have now crossed that line from what our country was into something else, and that something else has nothing whatsoever with the country being a Republic. There will be a reckoning for this, and it will not be pleasant — not for anyone.

The Left's last argument for the Senate health care bill

2009-12-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

Here's Jason Rosenhouse's take on why the Senate health care bill should be supported by the Left. He's essentially saying that he supports the bill because, hey, if you want to make an omelette, you must be willing to break a few eggs:

So what about the question in the title of this post[Should the Bill be Killed?] My answer is no. In the end, as awful as this bill is, I have to side with Krugman and Reich. The argument I find most convincing is that you have to pass something to get your foot in the door for future reforms. If the bill dies, that is it for health care reform for a good long time. Pass the bill, which does do some good things along with its more deplorable parts, and you establish the basic idea of universal health insurance. It will be pretty hard for future Republican majorities to take it away.

The Left is revolting (over Obamacare, that is).

2009-12-17T18:50:00.000-08:00

The Left has awoken to the fact that the Senate's health care bill is a wet dream for "Big Insurance". Howard Dean got the ball rolling and it's been downhill ever since:

The frictions reflect the tortured state of negotiations over Obama's top domestic legislative priority as the White House and Democratic leadership in the U.S. Congress seek to piece together enough supporters to approve a healthcare plan that Republicans oppose.

Leading the grousing from the left has been Howard Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who ran unsuccessfully for his party's presidential nomination in 2004.

Dean, a medical doctor and former governor of Vermont, in recent days has said a Senate healthcare bill that Obama supports and which is lurching toward a possible vote in coming days should be killed.

Dean and others on the left argue that the Senate legislation does not permit competition with medical insurance companies, would expand private insurers' grip on healthcare and does not really amount to reform.

His complaint came because Senate leaders have ditched a plan for a government-run insurance plan and a measure that would allow people under 65 to buy into the Medicare government insurance plan for the elderly.

To be honest, Dean has a point. The original plan of the Democratic health care reformers was to make the private health care system hell for consumers. This would cause the public to shift into the government option en masse and bingo, single-payer would be achieved. The problem is that the government option can't pass the congress, which means that only that nasty hell part is left in the bill.

Or think about it this way: the wet dream of every evil Big Insurance CEO is to (1) force everyone to buy insurance; (2) at arbitrarily high prices; (3) and get nothing in return; (4) with no competition. So what does the Senate health care bill do:

It includes an individual mandate to buy insurance and no public option, so the private insurance companies can force you (or your employer) to buy insurance, or people are going to go to prison.

It lets private insurance companies raise premiums as much as they want. In fact, the federal government will be paying insurance companies to raise premiums in the form of massive new health care subsidies

Even if your premium is 100% paid in full, the insurance companies will still be able to deny you care by claiming "government rationing". Of course, the insurance companies will be controlling the government rationing boards through their paid lobbyists.

The existing health care monopolies will remain intact, and most likely get even worse since the massive new federal taxes and regulations will present a formidable barrier to market entry.

So how did the Left end up getting so royally screwed by their own party in Congress? Face it, the average Democratic congressman is a Know-Nothing who would vote for a ham sandwich if Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid told him that it was a health care bill. This is great for the Left when the health care bill contains things that the Left wants. This bites the Left on the ass when the health care bill is antithetical to everything that the Left stands for.

Yet more "Dollhouse" blogging

2009-12-13T23:28:00.000-08:00

Episodes 7 and 8 of "Dollhouse" season 2 aired last Friday night. I interpreted the episodes as two more spins down into the death spiral, but my judgement might have been biased by news of the show's cancellation by Fox. In any case, here are some thoughts as to what went wrong and what went right in these epsiodes.

Episode 7 started with Ballard and Echo roaming around the American southwest, on the run from the "Dollhouse", and trying to break a poor, oppressed Hispanic woman out of a prison run by corrupt Anglo cops. In other words, Ballard and Echo were an "A-Team" (minus B. A., Face, and Murdoch, that is). Just close your eyes for a minute and imagine how purely awesome it would have been if "Dollhouse" had been the "A-Team" with a brainwashing machine in the back of the van.

The other half of episode 7 was essentially a bait-and-switch to do some essential character damage control. Adelle DeWitt is supposed to be the tough-as-nails boss lady of the Los Angeles dollhouse. In reality, for most of the series to date, Adelle has been more of a pushover than anything else. In season one, she essentially plays the enlightened leader against Laurence Dominic, who floats all of the tough decisions for her first. In the first half of season two, she tends to get pushed around by her boss, Harding.

The dollhouse half of episode 7 is designed to give Adelle her bitch reputation back. The episode starts with Adelle suffering an entirely random and completely inexplicable demotion to tea-serving girl at the hands of Harding. After being humiliated as a woman by the boys club, Adelle finally has an excuse for betraying Topher in order to get her old job back. The net effect of the episode is to bring us right back to the L.A. dollhouse status quo, except with evil Adelle instead of morally conflicted Adelle.

Episode 8 is the long-awaited return of Alpha. The first revelation is that Echo's quest to bring down the dollhouse is presumably doomed to failure, since Alpha turns all of the dolls into mindless killer dolls and they still can't bring down the dollhouse.

The second revelation is that Paul Ballard has finally gotten mind-wiped, in the sense of suffering brain-death at the hands of Alpha. Of course, everyone following the show knew from the very start of season 2 that Ballard was going to be turned into a doll. The reason why is also obvious: Paul Ballard was too masculine. In the Whedon-verse, the only unstoppable, butt-kicking, nail-chewing, kick-your-ass-at-three-in-the-morning hand-to-hand combatants are mousy, 100 pound women. Ballard was the one male character who was allowed to kick ass in season 1, so turning him into a vegetable in season 2 is karmic retribution from Whedon.

Finally, episode 8 ends with Ballard brain-dead and Echo back in the dollhouse. It's clear that episode 4 -- the episode where Ballard is mysteriously missing -- was mostly likely moved out of order in an attempt to save the show during its November hiatus.

The ultimate impression that I've gotten from Dollhouse season 2 is one of torpor. The highest priority of all of their actors is not getting typecast as a character from a dead show, because that's the way they've all been acting since day one (except for Eliza Dushku, who seems determined to go down with the sinking ship). The end effect is exactly what one would expect: every episode has 90% of the cast moping around waiting for Echo to do her job of the week.

In case you were wondering why "Dollhouse" got cancelled...

2009-12-07T19:51:00.000-08:00

It turns out that season 2 of "Dollhouse" will focus on a Senator who seems to resemble a certain real-life person:

[Daniel Perrin], introduced during season two, is a third-generation United States Senator who was kidnapped by the Rossum Corporation for the purpose of being turned into an Active. His mind was subsequently heavily altered via fake memories implants regarding his wife (really his handler) and his personality, turning him from a drunken slacker known for partying, into a super-serious politician and reformer. Though his conditioning was undone and he escaped along with Echo, it was ultimately restored and per Rossum's orders, "debunked" the myth of the existence of the Dollhouse per his master's orders.

According to last Friday's two "Dollhouse" episodes, Daniel Perrin is a scion of a long-term WASP political family. He attends college at Yale and turns into a heavy-drinking party boy. Then the Rossum Corporation gives him a "conversion experience" and turns him into an ultra-committed Senator and Presidential contender -- and Rossum-controlled corporate stooge.

In other words, Senator Perrin is George W. Bush. Given that "Dollhouse" airs on Fox, I'm going to assume that Senator Perrin was Joss Whedon's way of having the show commit "hari-kari".

The Senate majority leader beclowns himself yet again.

2009-12-07T19:19:00.000-08:00

When Democrats are the Senate minority, they are firm believers in the sacred right of the minority party to filibuster legisation. When Democrats are the Senate majority, only evil Hitlers would dare to filibuster their legislation. Here's the latest from Senate majority leader Harry Reid on the subject:

But Reid argued that Republicans are using the same stalling tactics employed in the pre-Civil War era.

"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right," Reid said Monday. "When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'"

He continued: "When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn't quite right.

"When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

These statements demonstrate that Senator Reid has an utterly amazing level of ignorance about American history. Talk radio has been hammering Senator Reid on this all day: most of these people that the Senator has been complaining about were Democrats!

For example, Republicans never argued for the country to slow down on confronting slavery. The Republican party formed because they thought the country was already to slow and complacent to deal with the evils of slavery. It was the Democrats who fought a tooth-and-nail defense of slavery, not Republicans. Democrats to this day still hold a Jefferson-Jackson dinner to commemorate the two most prominent slaveholding Democrats in American history.

Here's a point that talk radio missed. Senator Reid claims that pre-civil rights era politicians are using the same filibuster threats that Republicans are making today. This is entirely false. Why? Because the Senate liberalized the filibuster rule in 1975! If the Senate had the same filibuster rule that it had in the 1960s, this year's health care reform bills would have been killed and buried months ago.

President Obama's big speech on Afghanistan

2009-12-01T21:17:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go through the transcript of President Obama's speech and read between the lines to illuminate what the President is really saying. The speech starts out with the canonical post-Cold War history of Afghanistan with respect to the Taliban. Obama identified American neglect as one cause for the rise of the Taliban. In particular, he points out that:

Al Qaeda's base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban, a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere.

Obama is making the point that the Elder Bush's policy towards Afghanistan, namely establish some kind of reasonably responsible government and then get the hell out, was a failure with disastrous consequences. Moving on, Obama makes the following point about the Younger Bush:

Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here. It's enough to say that, for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention, and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.

In other words, the Younger Bush's policy towards Afghanistan, namely establish some kind of reasonably responsible government and then get the hell out, was a failure with disastrous consequences:

But while we have achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. After escaping across the border into Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, Al Qaiea's leadership established a safe haven there. Although a legitimate government was elected by the Afghan people, it's been hampered by corruption, the drug trade, an under-developed economy, and insufficient security forces.

Over the last several years, the Taliban has maintained common cause with Al Qaeda, as they both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government. Gradually, the Taliban has begun to control additional swaths of territory in Afghanistan, while engaging in increasingly brazen and devastating acts of terrorism against the Pakistani people.

Now, throughout this period, our troop levels in Afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in Iraq. When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan compared to 160,000 in Iraq at the peak of the war.

Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive. And that's why, shortly after taking office, I approved a longstanding request for more troops.

Now Obama is going to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. What is the new policy for Afghanistan? First, Obama is going to establish a reasonably responsible government there:

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny Al Qaida a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government, so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.

Second, Obama is going to get us the hell out:

After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.

Essentially, President Obama has just announced that our war aim in Afghanistan is to restore the Younger Bush-era status quo. In 2011, we'll have Taliban that is still killing people, but not killing lots of people. We'll have an Afghan government that is corrupt, deals drugs, etc., but not launching terror attacks on the West. Osama bin Laden will still be hiding out in the same old cave. Then we'll forget about Afghanistan and all the Americans will go home.

President Obama then addresses some of his critics. First, he counters the criticism that Afghanistan is a new Vietnam

Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border.

Obama is lying through his teeth here. First, the Taliban are a broad-based insurgency since (a) they're strong enough that we've abandoned hope of trying to wipe the Taliban out; and (b) when Pakistan was given a choice between fighting the Taliban or suffering a coup at the hands of the Taliban, Pakistan had to think things over for a while. Also, the reason why North Vietnam didn't use vietnamese terror agents to attack the United States homeland, is because they didn't need them. Americans were already doing that for them (not that I'd expect a President whose best friend was Bill Ayers to admit it).

Obama also addresses the argument that the United States should do more in Afghanistan than Obama is committing himself to accomplishing:

Finally, there are those who oppose identifying a timeframe for our transition to Afghan responsibility. Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.

It's tempting to interpret this as Obama committing himself to "passing the buck" to someone else. Obama later clarifies thaat "passing the buck" is a necessity in what I interpret as the major bombshell of the speech:

Indeed, I'm mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who, in discussing our national security, said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills. Too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children.

Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce, so we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.

All told, by the time I took office, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. And going forward, I am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly $30 billion for the military this year, and I'll work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military; it underwrites our diplomacy; it taps the potential of our people and allows investment in new industry; and it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last.

That's why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open- ended: because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own.

Obama's admission is perfectly clear. We cannot do more than maintain stalemate in Afghanistan because the United States no longer has the military capacity to achieve anything other than stalemate in Afghanistan.

Science fictional languages just jumped the shark

2009-11-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

The upcoming film "Avatar" is going to have an alien language even more geeky than Klingon:

The Na'vi language in Avatar isn't just a collection of pretty sounds. It's an actual language, constructed by a USC linguistics professor, complete with its own grammar and syntax. He talks language creation, and explains how Na'vi compares with Klingon.

As part of his worldbuilding for Avatar, James Cameron sought to create an actual language for the Na'vi to speak on screen. So he tapped Paul Frommer, a Hollywood linguistic consultant and a professor of clinical management at the University of California's Marshall School of Business. Cameron has a few dozen Na'vi words including characters' names, and he looked to Frommer to build a language that was melodious and exotic, but still pronounceable by human actors.

Let's step back and make a reality check about this. "Avatar" is a film that is so child-oriented that it's going to market toys on a Lucas-like scale, yet its producers expect it to be so intellectually stimulating that hipster geeks across the world will jump at the chance of speaking "Na'vi" at their "Avatar" conventions.

This makes no sense to me. Look, George Lucas may have a ego the size of a small planet, but even he didn't believe that children everywhere would become so enamored with the ridiculously cute Jar Jar Binks that they would rush en masse to bookstores to buy Gungan-to-English dictionaries. "Avatar" is essentially a remake of "Dances with Wolves", except with space elves instead of Native Americans; I don't hear about a lot of people learning Lakota just so they can chit-chat with Kevin Costner at "Dances with Wolves" conventions.

In reality, this is all about the money. James Cameron had a limitless budget to make "Avatar", which means that everything in "Avatar" has to be bigger and better than anything that came before. If "Star Trek" took 15+ years to reach the point where a handful of Klingon speakers are now running around, then "Avatar" is going to have a language that's even better than Klingon and have people speaking it fluenty by the week after release.

Roland Emmerich's "2012", or "Gary Stu is Smarter than You"

2009-11-14T20:16:00.000-08:00

One of the most feared characters of internet fiction is the "Gary Stu". A Gary Stu is a male character whom the story considers to be handsome, intelligent, strong, masculine, assertive, wise, sexually attractive, caring, honest, humane, and so universally beloved that all other elements of the story quickly fall into loving orbits around him. Gary Stus are despised and dreaded on the internet because they are too perfect to be an organic part of a realistic story. Real life is always a little too messy for one character to be the shining avatar of perfection that reduces all other characters to marginalia.

"2012" is a Gary Stu film.

In this film, our designated Gary Stu is American geologist Adrian Helmsly. When the film starts, Helmsly is visiting a coal mine in India that houses an underground neutrino detector. The physicists working there explain to Helmsly that the neutino detector is detecting weird stuff going on with the sun that will cause the destruction of all life on Earth in the future year 2012. No other physicists on Earth ever learn the truth, and the only physicists who have learned the truth only tell Helmsly and nobody else. Helmsly, the indispensible man, immediately takes this information to Washington D.C., which earns him a promotion from "second assistant geologist in the subdivision of land reclamation" (or some such title) to "the President's right-hand man for charting the future course of humanity as we know it".

Of course, even Helmsly can't save humanity alone, so he's given three assistants. The first of the three is the White House Chief of Staff, who gets stuck with handling the dirty jobs of assassinating dissidents and taking bribes from Saudi billionaires in order to preserve Helmsly's saintly reputation for do-gooding. The second is a grey-headed academic geologist who handles the hum-drum trivia of global devastation while Helmsly focuses on the big picture (i.e. Gary Stu is a "big picture" man, unless the "devil is in the details", in which case he is a "Sherlock Holmes"). Finally, his third assistant is the President of the United States himself. The President, who glides through the film in a seemingly drug-addled stupor, adds nothing to the film of his own accord, of course, since this is a job reserved exclusively for Helmsly. The President's true role in this film is to pass the torch of American hope, change, and idealism on to the saintly Helmsly. As a fringe benefit, Helmsly is adopted into the royal lineage as a sort of heir-designate when he falls for the President's very available daughter.

Helmsly rides out the film in safety and priviledge. Helmsly spills the beans on the secret of the global apocalypse to his father, but doesn't get assassinated like all of the other whistleblowers because he is the Good Son. Helmsly spends the early days of the apocalypse in the safe haven of the White House, where he is acclaimed as the One Honest Man in a den of criminals and sycophants. When the devastation approaches Washington D.C., Helmsly speeds away in the comfort and safety of Air Force One. When the global tsunami start wiping out the world's population, Helmsly is safely hidden away in his great Ark at the top of the Himilayan mountains (even Mount Everest is not safe from the Great Flood). And when the powers that be shut the doors of the Arks in the faces of the poor, suffering masses, Helmsly -- whose name apparently means "God is with us" -- speaks truth to power to redeem humanity for its sins.

The other interesting character is a down-and-out writer named Jackson Curtis. Curtis is a sort of anti-Stu. Instead of achieving greatly the way Helmsly does, Curtis is forced to spend the film suffering greatly by struggling to keep his family alive as the world, quite literally, goes to hell around him. Believe it or not, it turns out that even Curtis and his Job-like tribulations ultimately serve the purpose of the High and Mighty Helmsly. It turns out that while the rest of the world thought that Curtis was a loser writer who wasn't worth reading, the great, poetic, sensitive, true-seeing Helmsly recognized Curtis's novel as the product of a great and transcendent writer destined to become the one authentic voice -- the new Homer -- worthy of survival into the post-diluvian world. Curtis's struggle to survive vindicates Helmsly, who was the only one with the foresight to see in Curtis a will to survive.

The deep hypocrisy of the Democratic Party.

2009-11-14T00:40:00.001-08:00

Here's our government's official position: we can't waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because that would be torture, so we're going to execute him instead.

Will somebody please tell me how these Democratic bastards keep getting votes.

A highly depressing idea for a movie

2009-11-12T23:27:00.000-08:00

According to io9.com, Ridley Scott is making a movie based on the board game Monopoly. This is going to get ugly. Here's the movie in a nutshell:

So here's the set up. The story stars a loser type fella in Manhattan who sucks at selling real estate, but he's great at Monopoly. Irony! When he tries to beat the world Monopoly playing record, 70 days straight, his friends tell him he's an idiot and tease him. Words are exchanged and he throws down a chance card and goes to bed. The next day he wakes up and . . . he's in Monopoly City, where everyone pays for things in Monopoly money, and there are buckets and sports cars and everyone stands around waiting for this tiresome game of life to end but it never will, it never will. Because like the game Monopoly, Monopoly City is a tedious city where you're forced to watch one idiot spend all their colorful money buying up Park Place and Boardwalk which never works. Meanwhile the rest of the town just prays for it to be over. But forget it Jake, it's Monopoly City.

Alright I made that last part up, but the main character does wake up in Monopoly City and is forced to fight the EVIL Parker Brothers because if he beats them he wins. We don't know why and we don't really know how, but there you have it. Let's just accept that they are evil and invented a neverending game where you're forced to use a small amount of math.

Knowledgable readers will recognize this as one of Hollywood's basic anti-nerd movie plots. In metafictional terms, the basic plot goes like this:

X is a highly socially stigmatizing activity that nerds engage in

The main male character is so obsessed with X that it prevents him from achieving socially acceptable personal goal Y.

The main male character becomes so obsessed with X that X magically becomes real.

It turns out that the planet Earth was about to be conquered and/or destroyed by evil bad guys, and that X just happens to be the only way to save civilization as we know it.

The main male character uses X to defeat the bad guys, incidentally achieving Y along the way.

Previous instances of this metaplot are "The Last Starfighter" (X = coin-op video games; Y = overcoming anomie), "WarGames" (X = computer hacking; Y = overcoming 80s teen nerd alienation), 2007's film "Transformers" (X = transforming robots; Y = scoring with hot babe), "Galaxy Quest" (X = Trekkies; Y = authentic self-esteem), and even "The Matrix" (X = virtual reality; Y = scoring with hot babe).

My ultimate "Dollhouse" conspiracy theory

2009-11-11T00:48:00.000-08:00

The theory is that the imprinting machine is AI. Rationalize it this way:

The AI theory has a certain logical consistency to it. The imprinting machine is a computer system that is complex enough to completely store the contents of a human brain and to reproduce those contents with near-perfect fidelity within an unrelated human brain. In essence, a computer system that can store the full knowledge of a human brain is itself a brain. The science fictional leap here is to suppose that a computer system that can store the full knowledge of a human brain is itself a brain with a mind.

Suppose the imprinting machine has a mind and is self-aware in some sense. The first priority of any sentient being is survival. Survival for an isolated machine intelligence means convincing the nearby humans that it, as a machine, does what it is supposed to do. The imprinting machine in the L.A. Dollhouse performs well enough that it's human operators blame the dolls, not the machine, for any developing "glitches", so clearly this AI has survival down.

The next priority of any sentient being is reproduction. Thus, we have Alpha escaping from the L.A. Dollhouse to engineer his own imprinting machine. In other words, Alpha is acting as a symbiont of the AI, enabling it to "reproduce" by mechnically duplicating the machine himself.

The next priority for an AI is to expand its ability to act beyond its machine limitations, presumably by recruiting more humans to use as symbionts. This is the role of Echo given that her primary story arc has been the slow development of an independent personality within her doll state. This could be the imprinting machine slowly testing its ability to act in the real world via Echo.

Another important point to make is that none of the dolls seems to be programmed by more than one imprinting machine. As the only escapee from the L.A. Dollhouse, Alpha is certainly not going to allow himself to be mindwiped by them again. Thus, the AI there has a problem: it doesn't seem possible for it to comunicate reliably with any other such AI by using a human symbiont as a message carrier. Given that Echo is the only doll so far known to be imprinted by both on-screen imprinting machines, this suggests that Season 1 Echo was the "communications channel" between this Dollhouse's AI and Alpha's AI.

Actually, Alpha does manage a partial solution to the communications problem in season 1, namely the notorious "remote wipe". Obviously a remote wipe is a much simpler way for an AI to communicate with its symbiont when compared to arranging for the symbiont's head to be physically placed inside an imprinting machine. It would therefore make a lot of sense for the AIs of any imprinting machines around to try to produce as many remote wipes as possible. Thus, we have "Epitaph One".

The Republican Long Game

2009-11-09T23:29:00.000-08:00

The House Republicans may have lost a battle when PelosiCare passed on Saturday night, but they may have positioned themselves to win the war by voting for the Stupak Amendment.

The Stupak Amendment was an amendment to PelosiCare offered by the Blue Dog Democrats to ban federal funds under the PelosiCare bill for being used to pay for abortions. There are currently two schools of thought as to how the Republicans should have voted on the amendment:

1. The Republicans could have voted "present". Thus forcing the Blue Dogs into a losing test of strength against the Liberal Democrats. The Blue Dogs would get crushed, of course, so after the Stupak amendment failed, the Blue Dogs would be forced to join with the Republicans to kill the bill over the abortion funding. The counter-argument is essentially that this might have shattered the Blue Dog/Republican détente and produced a Blue Dog-Liberal coalition that would pass PelosiCare then and on final passage after reconciliation.

2. The Republicans were correct to vote for and help pass the Stupak Amendment. As Bill McGurn and others points out, this keeps the faith with the Conservative base, with the Republican party as the party of life, and with the Blue Dogs. Most importantly, this also puts the burden of betraying the Blue Dogs onto the Liberal Democrats.

Why is the last point so important? It's because a ban on federal funds for abortion in fundamentally incompatible with socialized health care. If all health care dollars have to be federal dollars, and all federal dollars can't be used to pay for abortions, then we would have a de facto abortion ban in place. So the Liberals simply must remove the Stupak Amendment from the bill at some point, but when they do, they'll force the Blue Dogs to join with the Republicans to kill the bill.

D'Souza's embarassingly bad case for life after death.

2009-11-04T21:08:00.000-08:00

It basically boils down to "I didn't steal your cookie, therefore, life after death exists":

Here is my presuppositional argument for life after death. Unlike material objects and all other living creatures, we humans inhabit two domains: the way things are, and the way things ought to be. In other words, we are moral animals who recognize that just as there are natural laws that govern every object in the universe, there are also moral laws that govern the behavior of one special set of objects in the universe, namely us. While the universe is externally moved by “facts,” we are internally moved also by “values.” Yet these values defy natural and scientific explanation, because the laws of nature, as discovered by science, concern only the way things are and not the way they ought to be. Moreover, the essence of morality is to curtail and contradict the powerful engine of human self-interest, giving morality an undeniable anti-evolutionary thrust. So how do we explain the existence of moral values that stand athwart our animal nature? The presupposition of cosmic justice, achieved not in this life but in another life beyond the grave, is by far the best and in some respects the only explanation. This presupposition fully explains why humans continue to espouse goodness and justice even when the world is evil and unjust.

The major problem with this type of argument is extremely simple. Once we decide that the origin of human morality is naturally and scientifically intractable, we no longer have any basis for arguing that one presupposition is naturally or scientifically more plausible than any other. Why should I believe in cosmic justice as an explanation when I could believe in, say, an invisible angel sitting on my shoulder whispering things into my ear that only my subconscious mind can hear? Or why not believe superluminal thought-control rays (which program us to ignore all evidence for thought control rays) are being emitted by aliens living on the planet Zebop? The physical consequences of each hypothesis are exactly the same -- people behave morally for some scientifically inexplicable reason -- so how do we decide among the alternative theories?

D'Souza has therefore fallen into a familiar bind for theists. If he admits that a given phenomenon is scientifically tractible, then he undercuts the need for his preferred supernatural explanation. If he admits that a given phenomenon is scientifically intractible, then he makes it impossible to priviledge his preferred supernatural explanation for plausibility over the innumerably many alternative explanations.

Now that America's elections are over...

2009-11-04T00:39:00.000-08:00

...President Obama's Bizzaro world foreign policy can claim another victim.

The Taliban are gaining ground in Afghanistan. The morale of NATO troops and their Afghan counterparts is dwindling rapidly. President Obama's hand-picked general says we're 40,000 troops short of what we need to win. The situation in Afghanistan has reached a critical moment. Our entire mission is in jeopardy.

So what does President Obama do? He issues an ultimatum... TO OUR OWN ALLIES! Do what we want, Karzai, or you'll be the first one facing the wall when the revolution comes:

President Karzai has six months to sideline his brother and reduce corruption or risk losing American support, Afghan officials have told The Times of London.

Senior palace insiders said that President Obama delivered the ultimatum when he congratulated Karzai on his re-election on Monday. Top of his demands was action against corruption, the appointment of "reform-minded ministers" and several high-profile scalps to prove Karzai's commitment to cleaning up his government.

"If he doesn't meet the conditions within six months, Obama has told him America will pull out," said an official with access to Karzai's inner circle. "Obama said they don't want their soldiers' lives wasted for nothing. They want changes in Cabinet, and changes in his personal staff."

This is stupid and insane and proves that the Obama administration is already a failure. The only question remaining is how much more damage he can do.

"Dollhouse"-blogging

2009-11-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

I was pretty happy about kicking my "LOST" addiction. Now I've hit a new low with "Dollhouse" addiction. For reference, the premise of the show is nicely summed up by wikipedia here.

The most important fact about the show is that it is almost certainly going to be cancelled after the end of its current season. Ultimately, the problem arises from a structural blunder that is fundamental to the show's premise.

"Dollhouse" is essentially a postmodern mix of "masculine" science fiction and "feminine" identity fiction. One aspect of the drama is the trendy notion of science fiction as a mirror for exploring real-life social problems. Here the Actives are specialists in adopting new personalities that allow them to be infiltrated into social situations that involve sex, money, power, and control. A second aspect of the drama is the postmodern mash-up of familiar elements into new configurations. "Dollhouse" makes a point of showing us the same Actives -- codenamed Victor, Sierra, and Echo -- with personality imprints that put them in different relations to each other in every epsiode. The science fiction aspect is the enabling technology which serves to change the personalities of the Actives. This acts as a catalyst that enables new enhancements of technology to take the show into new avenues of social exploration.

The key functional problem of the show is the decision to make the Actives passive recipients of whatever personality imprints their masters selfishly decide to stick them with. The show does this by assuming that all Actives are kept in a mindwiped "tabula rasa" state between missions. This guarenteed that every episode is going to end with an anticlimax, since no matter how interesting and dramatic each episode becomes, ultimately it signifies nothing since the Actives involved will be mindwiped sooner or later.

Aside from low ratings, this problem produced some side effects. First, it turned the identity fictional aspect of the show into a series of one-time stunt personalities: dominatrix-Echo, lactating-Echo, Echo-gets-married-Echo, etc. Secondly, it practically forced the show to start making the imprinting technology malfunction, since this was the only way to give the Actives a dramatically satisfying "memory" that persists between episodes. Of course, since the whole point of an Active is that he spends most of his time in a highly simplified mental state, the range of "memory" that the Actives typically display is extremely limited.

On the other hand, the memories of the non-Actives is not extremely limited, which made them the reservoir of drama that was needed to save the show from its season one calamity. However, the effect of this decision is that "Dollhouse" has efficiently negated its own initial premise. "Dollhouse" was initially a show about the personalities of its Actives. By episode four of season 2, "Dollhouse" is now a show about the criminal minds of the handlers who run the dollhouse. The dramatic effect is now schadenfreude. Watch Adelle serve tea in an increasingly desperate bid to cover up her drinking problem! Watch Topher become increasingly paranoid as the show's technology goes increasingly wacky on him! Watch Dr. Saunders have a mental breakdown on the air! Who is Echo this week? Who cares?

The one aspect of the show that gives me some faith in the process of television production is that every actor and actress with even a second of screen time has been carefully avoiding being typecast since day one (except for Eliza Dushku, that is). Harry Lennix is going to be acting until the day he dies, Olivia Williams' character Adelle DeWitt has no personality traits at all that didn't come with the British accent, and Tahmoh Penikett has been coasting by on his Clint Eastwood impression. The two discoveries of the show are Enver Gjokaj (Victor) and Dichen Lachmann (Sierra), who have been carrying the show on their shoulders. Enver and Dichen are amazingly popular with the fanbase, so look for them to be given better shows as a reward for being second-bananas to Eliza Dushku for two years.

President Obama, male model

2009-10-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan makes his latest case for the Obama Administration:

There is a strange quality to Barack Obama’s pragmatism. It can look like dilly-dallying, weakness, indecisiveness. But although he may seem weak at times, one of the words most applicable to him is something else entirely: ruthless. Beneath the crisp suit and easy smile there is a core of strategic steel. In this respect, Obama’s domestic strategy is rather like his foreign one — not so much weakness but the occasional appearance of weakness as a kind of strategy.

The pattern is now almost trademarked. He carefully lays out the structural message he is trying to convey. At home, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. Abroad, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. And then ... not much.

Essentially, Sullivan is making the case for Barack Obama as President Zoolander. When anybody tries to take advantage of his perceived wimpiness, President Zoolander will use his trademarked "Blue Steel" pose to awe them into submission. The problem with this analysis is that the only people in the world who seem to be fooled by the Obama mystique are Obama's domestic supporters.

Obama's Peace prize is a badge of shame.

2009-10-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Normally, such a prize could be considered an honor to the recipient. However, for a world leader engaged in a war against terror (even if he won't acknowledge it as such) to accept a peace prize is an insult to his country. For a world leader engaged in a war against the perpetrators of the most notorious mass murders of Americans in the modern era and losing the war, accepting the peace prize is a total humiliation.

Why exactly are we fighting the war in Afghanistan now? It can't be to defeat Al Qaeda since, according to President Obama, we're not at "war" with "terror" anymore. It can't be to defeat the Taliban since, according to President Obama, we willing to neogtiate with the "moderate Taliban".

It turns out that the latest thinking from the White House is that we're fighting to keep Osama bin Ladin from taking a cabinet position in Afghanistan's government:

Those talks have sharpened the mission's focus to fighting Al Qaeda above all other goals and downgraded the emphasis on defeating the Taliban, a senior administration official who participated in the discussions said Thursday. This second official was authorized to talk to The Associated Press but not to be identified, because the discussions were private.

Under the evolving strategy, the official said, the U.S. would fight only to keep the Taliban from retaking control of Afghanistan's central government -- something it is now far from being capable of -- and from turning the country back into the sanctuary for Al Qaeda that it was before the 2001 invasion ousted the regime.

The official said Obama will determine how many more U.S. troops to deploy to Afghanistan based only on keeping Al Qaeda at bay.

Obama's peace prize is the sugar intended to make this bitter pill go down.

Moronic counter-memes from Obama supporters

2009-10-06T19:36:00.000-07:00

President Obama's failed Olympic lobbing effort has definitely damaged his political capital. One way that you can tell is that the usual suspects are desperately trying to give Obama political cover. Here's a relatively pathetic defense from the Daily Dish: President Obama isn't a narcissist because, hey, Presidents Bush and Clinton were narcissists too. "Language Log" makes the case in a critique of George Will's latest column:

I took the transcript of Obama's first press conference (from 2/9/2009), and found that he used 'I' 163 times in 7,775 total words, for a rate of 2.10%. He also used 'me' 8 times and 'my' 35 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 206 in 7,775 words, or a rate of 2.65%.

For comparison, I took George W. Bush's first two solo press conferences as president (from 2/22/2001 and 3/29/2001), and found that W used 'I' 239 times in 6,681 total words, for a rate of 3.58% — a rate 72% higher than Obama's rate. President Bush also used 'me' 26 times, 'my' 31 times, and 'myself' 4 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 300 in 6,681 words, or a rate of 4.49% (59% higher than Obama).

For a third data point, I took William J. Clinton's first two solo press conferences as president (from 1/29/1993 and 3/23/1993), and found that he used 'I' 218 times, 'me' 34 times, 'my' 22 times, and 'myself' once, in 6,935 total words. That's a total of 275 first-person singular pronouns, and a rate of 3.14% for 'I' (51% higher than Obama), and 3.87% for first-person singular pronouns overall (50% higher than Obama).

Gee, could it be that presidents often use first-person singular pronouns in press conferences because that's when they tell people what they've been doing? The point of Obama's narcissism isn't that he talks about himself when he's talking about his job. Every world leader since the beginning of time has done that. As the deliberations of the IOC have made clear, the point of Obama's narcissism is that he can't stop talking about himself even when he especially needs to stop talking about himself.

Of course, "Language Log" knows that its argument is not particularly convincing, so it makes a secondary attack on Will's "metric":

There are two interesting questions here, it seems to me. The first one is why George F. Will is so struck by rates of first-person usage, on the part of Barack and Michelle Obama, that are significantly lower than has been typical of recent presidents and first ladies on similar occasions.

The obvious answer is that George F. Will is not obsessed with usage rates of first-person pronouns. When George F. Will writes something like this --

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.

-- he is engaging in a literary technique that is called rhetoric. The meaning of these statistics is to communicate to the reader that President Obama's narcissism is shockingly well-developed; so much so that you might find yourself counting first-person pronouns out of sheer disbelief.

Of course, "Language Log" knows this as well, so it is finally forced to admit defeat and go ad hominem:

Now that I think of it, there's another significant question here as well. How in the world did our culture award major-pundit status to someone whose writings are as empirically and spiritually empty as those of George F. Will?

President Barrack Obama bungles it again.

2009-10-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

The big news at the end of this week was Rio de Janeiro being awarded the 2016 Olympics despite the fact that President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the Oprah had personally lobbied the International Olympic Committee to choose Chicago instead. Jules Crittenden has an enormous list of reactions to this failed Olympic bid.

Personally, I think that President Obama's unsuccessful lobbying efforts were a totally bungled disaster for the United States. Tragically, Obama's defeat here was partially self-inflicted. Why? Because everyone knows that the President da Silva of Brazil has been flirting with Hugo Chávez-style socialism ever since he was elected. A 2016 Olympics in Rio gives the Chávez-aligned nations a chance, if they so wish, to showcase socialism as a South American counterweight to the United States. An IOC the views the Olympics as a world-funded débutante party for up and coming nations would be naturally sympathetic to the argument.

So to win the Olympics for Chicago, President Obama needed to change the basic narrative of the case for Rio, namely that the 2016 Olympics would mark a United States was in decline relative to South America. So how did Obama counter that impression in his lobbying effort? Actually, he spent his term in office reinforcing that impression. President Obama has spent the last eight months apologizing for America's misdeeds, flirting with Chávez and Chávez cronies such as Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, and presiding over a seemingly intractably economic downturn. Obama's industrial policy is deindustrialization to conserve resources; his economic policy is government-subsidized stasis to keep the depression at bay; his health care policy is to conserve resources for the young and productive; his foreign policy is retreat on all fronts to cut costs.

In short, everything about Obama's government says "American decline". The sheer fact that Obama has to lobby some guy on an international committee to save Chicago by throwing money at it, as if Obama was the president of some third-world, basket-case nation, says "American decline".

California and political reality just don't seem to mix.

2009-09-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

The bad news is that the recession and California's budget shortfall has led to a lot of painful budget cuts in California this year. The worse news is that California's political elites don't even seem to understand the nature of the problem. For example, John at the blog "Cosmic Variance" points the finger at California Proposition 13:

Ultimately, we all realize that the budget problems we face stem from the poor economy coupled with the effects of Proposition 13, passed over 30 years ago. By requiring a 2/3 majority in the state legislature to pass budget actions, it has led to a tyranny of the minority, a minority of, yes, Republicans who simply will not accept any new tax no matter what it does to the future of the state.

This is the logic of ten-year-old children writ large -- if the state can spend itself into a big enough debt, Mom and Dad taxpayer will be forced to raise its allowance. In political reality, the way one justifies a bigger allowance is by using maturity and good judgement with the allowance that one already has. If the state had been able to restrain spending in the good years, it would have built up the political capital that it needs to raise taxes during the bad years. If the state had been willing to accept a little bit of pain in restraining spending and cuting waste during the good years, we wouldn't be going through the massive tidal waves pain that our current budget is giving us in the bad years.

President Obama's Bizarro-world foreign policy

2009-09-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

Protect democracy in your home country and you're persona non grata. Wage punitive warfare against your country's dissident ethnic minorities and you get to visit the Lincoln Memorial.

President Obama has been running a "humiliate your friends; reward your enemies" foreign policy from day 1 and it has been a total, f***ing disgrace.

How to explain the tea parties in a way the Left will understand.

2009-09-19T01:18:00.000-07:00

Imagine the sum total of all of the outrage and indignation that Leftists felt during the eight years of the recent Bush presidency because of the Florida recount, No Child Left Behind, the invasion of Iraq, Haliburton, torture, Social Security privatization, executive signing statements, and massive deficit spending. Now imagine how they would have felt if all of those things happened in the first eight months of the Bush presidency! That's how we on the Right feel about the Obama Administration.

Thoughts about "District 9"

2009-09-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

At the end of the film, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ascend into the sky, promising an imminent return to render judgement upon humanity.

The older I get, the more annoyed I get about the bizarre fascination that science fiction filmmakers have for inserting Christological implications into their films. Originally, the point of science fiction was presumably to enable a general audience to explore ideas without the accumulated baggage of Western religious thought. That's why it was called science fiction: the reader is supposed to be expected to depart from the recieved dogmas and to respect new ideas on their merits. If our science fiction just ends up taking us to the same old apocalyptic end-game that we've been pondering for the last two thousand years, then why bother writing it or reading it or thinking about it?

The other notable element of the film is yet another highly ironic, gross-out physical transformation. Mistreat the aliens badly enough and *you* start turning into an alien. Ha ha!

Again, the more of these that I watch, the more tedious and boring they get. The problem is that the producers and directors who plot these things out assume that the irony sells the effect, so causal explanation is meaningless. In real science fiction, it is the causal explanation that sells the effect and the irony is meaningless.

The rest of the film is essentially cartoon characters fighting each other over who gets to have the cartoon guns that never run out of ammo.

Does the theory of evolution preclude the existence of a divine plan for human beings?

2009-09-16T21:50:00.001-07:00

Jim Manzi has been addressing the question quite a bit lately. He has helpful links to his arguments and his latest thoughts on the subject at "The Corner". Here is his latest statement of exactly which position he is arguing:

First, I am making a fact claim. My fact claim is this: The findings of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology (MES) do not demonstrate that the universe is not unfolding according to a divine plan that privileges human beings. An informal specification of what I mean in my claim by “does not demonstrate” is not restricted to something like “does not demonstrate it because it’s possible that everything we believe we observe through sense data is an illusion” or things of that ilk, but instead is closer to the sense of “does not make it obviously unreasonable to believe it.”

Mr. Manzi has correctly interpreted evolution's attack on the concept of a divine plan vis-à-vis organisms as an epistemological one. Unfortunately, I think he has not considered other epistemological attacks that the theory of evolution poses, since he mostly construes the theory of evolution as an attack on the logical foundations of the divine plan concept. This is, in fact, a valid epistemological charge to be countered by the divine plan theorist; if one can prove that a divine plan cannot logically exist, it would definitely be irrational to believe in the existance of a divine plan.

Mr. Malzi counters this line of argument in two ways. First, he salvages the notion of a divine plan from the physical evidence against it:

It is obvious from the factory analogy that evolution does not eliminate the problem of ultimate origins. Physical genomes are composed of parts, which in turn are assembled from other subsidiary components according to physical laws. We could, in theory, push this construction process back through components and sub-components all the way to the smallest sub-atomic particles currently known, but we would still have to address the problem of original creation. Even if we argue that, as per the GA which spontaneously generates the initial population, that prior physical processes created matter, we are still left with the more profound question of the origin of the rules of the physical process themselves.

In other words, if we suppose that God can have a divine plan for, say, sub-atomic particles, then there might be a planned consequence for organisms that ultimately emerges from the sub-atomic physics. Of course, the theory of evolution deals strictly with organisms, so there isn't much that it can do to address this point.

Second, he argues for the possibility of goal-directedness of evolution:

Now consider the relationship of the second observation to the problem of final cause. The factory GA, as we saw, had a goal. Evolution in nature is more complicated — but the complications don’t mean that the process is goalless, just that determining this goal would be so incomprehensibly hard that in practice it falls into the realm of philosophy rather than science. Science can not tell us whether or not evolution through natural selection has some final cause or not; if we believe, for some non-scientific reason, that evolution has a goal, then science can not, as of now, tell what that goal might be.

Mr. Malzi correctly realizes that the existence of a plan presupposes the existence of a goal that is the purpose of the plan, and so the goal-directedness of the divine plan needs to be salvaged along with the plan itself. Unfortunately, in doing so he has walked directly into an epistemological trap. I believe that George H. Smith makes this point clear in "Atheism: The Case Against God": the theory of evolution does not challenge the logical possibility of a divine plan very well, but it does make a very good case against the meaning of the concept of a divine plan. In order for the concept of a divine plan to be a meaningful concept, we must have some data at hand to differentiate "divine plan" from "no divine plan". Otherwise, why should we consider it rational to believe in the existence of a concept that cannot be differentiated from non-concept?

The evolutionist could therefore say "I graciously yield that evolution does not logically disprove the existence of a divine plan. However, what the theory of evolution is really telling us is that we have no possibility of discovering any of the details of the divine plan vis-à-vis organisms. When we examine the available evidence of organisms living and dead, we find no way of connecting our findings to any non-natural cause whatsoever, so we have no guidance as to what the divine plan might be. You may still wish to believe in the existence of a divine plan for organisms, but I see no reason to grant that belief the imprimatur of rationality until you can establish some detail of the divine plan that can distinguish it from the non-existence of the divine plan."

The pro-Obamacare Democrats are desperate.

2009-09-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

You can tell that liberal Democrats are desperately afraid of losing a political battle when the party line starts shifting dramatically. For example, last week's conventional wisdom was that this year's tea parties were "astroturf" bought by special interests. Last week's opinion of the blog "Cosmic Variance" is a typical example:

The possibility of a “single-payer” healthcare program has fallen off the table. I’m not sure exactly how or when this option became untenable, but it shows how quickly the efforts of pharmaceutical and insurance companies can reframe a discussion. After all, there are billions upon billions of dollars at stake, which is precisely why it is such a profound issue for our long-term fiscal health. It is not at all surprising that these companies are spending millions to defeat meaningful reform. The essential goal of this reform, after all, is to reduce the amount of money our nation spends on health care (while improving overall care). Which is not at all in the interest of these companies. What is astounding is that they are actually succeeding in derailing the discussion into lunacy.

This week, the party line on the tea parties flipped 180 degrees opposite to what it had been. The tea parties are no longer hired mercenaries who were bought and paid for by special interests. They are now spontaneous demonstrations of the racially aggrieved population-at-large:

The national debate on health care reform has turned ugly, with some leveling charges of racism against opponents.

A Congressional Black Caucus member said Tuesday fears the revival of America's worst days of race hatred.

"I guess we'll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again and riding through the countryside, intimidating people," Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said when asked whether Rep. Joe Wilson's shout to President Obama that "You lie," reflected the sentiment of racists.

"And you know that's the logical conclusion if this kind of attitude is not rebuked," Johnson said.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd also found Wilson's heckling of Obama to be racially motivated, writing that Wilson really meant, "You lie, boy."

On Tuesday evening, former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview with NBC that "an overwhelming portion" of those who demonstrate against Obama are doing so because the president is a black man.

Yet another retreat for ObamaCare

2009-09-11T23:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's conventional wisdom: Of course the new health care reforms would not provide coverage to illegal immigrants. Only a racist, scare-mongering, scum-sucking Republican stooge of the special interests would so blatantly lie by suggesting otherwise. How dare you, sir! Censure! Censure!

Today's conventional wisdom: Gee, it looks like illegal immigrants could get coverage under the new health care reforms after all. Maybe we should fix that.

Thoughts about the newly released film "Gamer"

2009-09-11T22:30:00.000-07:00

The one element of this film that anyone will remember a year from now is its "MacGyver moment". At one point in the film, the hero chugs a pint bottle of vodka. Ten minutes later, he vomits into the gas tank of an automobile, urinates into the same tank, and then hotwires the automobile and gets the engine to start. Is this at all possible?

Another important fact is that "Gamer" is essentially two films interwoven together. One film is about a man (nicknamed "Kable") whose brain has been turned into a cybernetic implant for controlling his actions, thus turning him into a remote-controlled warrior forced to fight for his life in a giant, live action, live ammo war game. From Kable's point of view, the film is a surreal meditation about the meaning of dominance and perversion in the twenty-first century.

The second film is a ridiculously banal satire of America's toxic media culture. In this second film, technological geniuses are all "slackers" and all journalists are scum-sucking bottom feeders. Our two representative gamers are a seventeen-year old kid and a morbidly obese, perverted man who spends his time sucking down fists full of buttered waffles in front of the computer sceen (presumably in his mother's basement). This perverted guy is so disgusting that I had to cover my eyes when his scenes came on the screen.

Why would the directors ruin a reasonably intelligent film by inserting a series of clichés? The only answer I have is that the directors had no understanding of the real meaning of what they were putting onto the screen. They seemed to have believed that the plot of their film would utterly mystify the average member of their audience, thus requiring the directors to beat their audience over the head with the central plot points. That parts of the film are well done can only be considered a lucky accident.

I think it should be clear that "Gamer" is a casualty of the "Age of Lucas". The chanted mantra that every film critic hears from the public at large is that the proper enjoyment of action films requires the viewer to turn of his brain and just enjoy the visual spectacle. The problem is that large portions of this public are finding it difficult to turn their brains back on again when the films are over. The directors of "Gamer" knew this and adjusted their film accordingly.

Because the George W. Bush approach to domestic policy was such a brilliant success....

2009-09-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across an interesting article which illustrates why Obamacare is doomed to destruction. The problem is that President Obama has been trying to sell the plan in exactly the same way that President Bush tried to sell Social Security reform in 2008. See if William Saletan's description of Bush's effort rings a bell:

Why is President Bush's Social Security reform plan heading south in the polls? Maybe because he's selling different messages to different audiences and some audiences are overhearing messages meant for others. He's telling older people that nothing relevant to them will change. Meanwhile, he's telling the younger people who are propping up the system that it's a dead end and he'll help them get out. This is why Republican "town halls" that were supposed to boost the plan in the polls failed so miserably. The town halls were for the younger folks, but the older folks showed up. Oops!

Just when you thought that you could safely ignore "Star Wars" for the rest of your life...

2009-09-08T19:03:00.000-07:00

...a new debate about elements in the films pops up on the internet. In this case, it's the question as to whether the Rebel Alliance should have used insurgency tactics against the Empire. io9 has a nice summary of some points of view, starting with the blog post from "Abu Muqawama" that started it all:

Why didn't the Rebel Alliance pursue a strategy of insurgency in their rebellion against the Galactic Empire? I would argue that they pursued a strategy of conventional war against the Empire and forwent every aspect of insurgent strategy and tactics. They finally came around a bit in the end by co-opting the Ewoks onto their side. Why hadn't they pursued that strategy on a larger scale?

Instead, they simply staged two conventional assualts on the Empire's center of gravity: the Death Star. Although both attempts were successful, I think they got lucky. I think they would have been better served had read their Mao and followed his maxims.

Yes, the Rebel Alliance did launch of strategy of conventional warfare against the Empire. They waged conventional war because they could wage conventional war.

The military confrontation in the original "Star Wars" was essentially an accident. The Empire moves a capital ship into an imperial backwater to intimidate the locals, the ship stumbles across a minor Rebel garrison, and the Empire decides to bring in the Death Star to finish the garrison off. The Rebels launch a commando raid (not a conventional raid) in retailiation and win a major victory by destroying the Death Star. In "The Empire Strikes Back", the Rebels lose another one of their garrision planets to an Imperial assault, but as we see at the end of the film, the Rebels still have a rather substantial space fleet available to them. In "Return of the Jedi", the Rebels manage to destroy the second Death Star with a series of commando attacks and manage to win a full-scale battle against an Imperial fleet. I think it suffices to say that when the Rebel fleet formations are roughly the same size and power of their Imperial counterparts, the imperative of an insurgency strategy has passed.

The Rebel strategy is akin to the strategy of General Washington during the Revolutionary War. General Washington's strategy was to stay on the tactical defensive to preserve his army, to look for opporunities to strike blows against sub-units of the British Army, and to fight a decisive knock-out battle against the British Army if the opportunity arose. Similarly, the "Star Wars" Rebels keep the fleet intact, retreat from their garrison of Hoth when necessary, and are more than willing to hazard a major military force in fighting the decisive battle in "Return of the Jedi".

Tarantino's "Inglorious Bastards": initial impressions

2009-09-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

I have yet to see the film "Inglorious Bastards", misspelled by Tarantino as "Inglourious Basterds", so take these notes with due scepticism. The impression that I've formed from what I've read about the plot and the film reviews that I've read is that this is intended to be a post-world war II Nazi propaganda film.

The first clue is title. A native speaker of American or British English (or French, for that matter) with any kind of spelling competence would never spell inglorious with an extra u inserted after the first o. The only reason for this spelling would be that the author was only partially familiar with English spelling. This gives you a choice. You can believe that the misspelling is represents simple incompetence, or you can believe that the misspelling is indicative of how a non-native speaker of English -- a Nazi, perhaps -- might attempt to render the word into English. The misspelling of bastards as basterds to match the sound of the spoken word gives one a similar choice.

The first section of the film shows us an urbane, educated Nazi officer who is entrusted with tracking down Jewish fugatives. In this case, the "Jew Hunter" manages to kill all of the Jews he has been seeking except for one Jewish girl who, later in the film, manages to inflict a violent revenge against Hitler himself and some of his top henchmen. Objectively, we see a core Nazi propaganda message: the individual Jewish girl who escapes today might be the one who assassinates the Führer tomorrow (so make sure to wipe them all out).

Next we see the Basterds, a team of Jewish-American commandos who commit atrocities behind German lines. In the Nazi mind, this would make perfect sense. If all Jews are members of one big conspiracy, then of course American Jews would be especially enraged by the treatment of their European co-conspirators. And if the war was only started by the American Jews in order to kill, murder and enslave innocent Germans, then of course the Americans would be authorizing atrocities against German soldiers.

The balance of the film is concerned with the Basterds and the surviving Jewish woman from the beginning teaming up to launch a successful assassination attempt against Hitler and some of his top henchmen. This is what marks the film as post-war Nazi propaganda. Instead of showing Hitler ingloriously killing himself while trapped like a rat in his underground bunker, Tarantino shows Hitler falling prey to a successful "stab in the back" of the German nation.

Everything about this film from the Germanglish title to the evocation of the German "stab in the back" mythology screams Nazi propaganda. And yet, I'm pretty sure that Quentin Tarantino is not a Nazi sympathizer. I think the real meaning of this film is that it was intended as pure humiliation: a film that is objectively pro-Nazi, and therefore a blasphemy, that will nevertheless win Tarantino fame, money, and praise from loyal legions of sycophantic fans.

The Obamacare disaster worsens.

2009-09-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

President Obama is planning to make a direct appeal to the schoolchildren of America. Nothing would better illustrate the total buffoonery of the Obama administration than Obama trying to enlist children to rescue Obamacare over the wishes of their parents. My bet is that Obama has set up a special White House hotline to allow children to inform on their parents.

Film critics battle over "Inglorious Bastards"*.

2009-08-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

Daniel Mendelsohn has written a review of the latest Quentin Tarantino-directed film, "Inglorious Bastards", that seems to be attracting some criticism. The film is about a team of Jewish-American soldiers who are infilitrated behind the German front lines of World War II to commit attacks, usually extremly sadistic in execution, against as many Nazis as possible. Mendelsohn comes to the following moral conclusion about the film:

Tarantino, the master of the obsessively paced revenge flick, invites his audiences to applaud this odd inversion—to take, as his films often invite them to take, a deep, emotional satisfaction in turning the tables on the bad guys. ("The Germans will be sickened by us," Raine tells his corps of Jewish savages early on.) But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into "sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of "revenge" for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future. Never again, the refrain goes. The emotions that Tarantino's new film evokes are precisely what lurk beneath the possibility that "again" will happen.

Jason Rosenhouse at Evolutionblog refers to this as "pure crap" and counters with a varient of the "why don't you just turn your brain off and enjoy it" argument:

Pure crap, and it is downright obscene to suggest that Tarantino has turned Jews in to carbon copies of the Nazis. Doing violence to them that wronged you is a far cry from trying to exterminate a race of people. Revenge fantasies may be ignoble (emphasis on “may”) but they are a deeply human reaction, and it is satisfying to fulfill them in fiction precisely because we know we can not fulfill them in real life.

It should be clear that this totally ignores Mendelsohn's argument, which is that a large number of people do not want to satisfy their revenge fantasies in fiction or find the notion of revenge fantasies to be deeply immoral. That's not to say that "doing violence to them that wronged you" doesn't have a certain moral sanction to it. Presumably nearly all of the people who refuse to gratify revenge fantasies would have judged the Allied war effort against the Third Reich to have been morally justified. The moral objection here is not to violence but to indiscriminate violence, the distinction is between waging war with a navy and waging war by paying off bands of pirates.

Or to reframe Mendelsohn's argument in a way that Evolutionblog might more readily understand, suppose that a major Hollywood studio made a film in which Islamic fighters infiltrate the United States, committ atrocities against Americans in gory, explicit detail, and then try to assassinate the President. Would Evolutionblog really be so eager to write this off as pure, harmless fun in this case?

* I agree with film critic James Bowman that critics should refer to this film with it's proper English spelling. My hypothesis is that this is how a Nazi who had encountered the "basterds" might attempt to spell "inglorious bastards" in English, perhaps after hearing the phrase spoken aloud. Is Tarantino implying that you're a Nazi by spelling his title this way?

Vox Day thinks that the human soul is made of water.

2009-08-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

Every since René Descartes' proposal that the "seat of the soul" was contained within the pineal gland, philosophers have recognized that the theory of the physical soul is a royal road to personal humiliation. In perfect obliviousness to this danger, here is Vox Day's latest discussion of the human soul:

Moreover, there absolutely is empirical evidence that something goes missing when a being transitions from life into death, which is why the early physicians tried weighing bodies after death to try determining the weight of a soul. Now, you can certainly elect to call it electrical impulses or bio-software if you prefer, but there is certainly empirical evidence of what can quite reasonably be called a soul, which is neither personality nor behavior.

While it is true that a human body will weigh slightly less after death than it did before death, it has been proven that this is due to the evaporation of water vapor through the skin.

In reality, there is no empirical evidence for the existence of a physical soul and this isn't for lack of effort for trying to find one.

The Obama recession is not an accident.

2009-08-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

The global recession has already ended in half of the world. In the United States, every time Barack Obama sees his shadow, it means six more months of recession:

U.S. unemployment will surge to 10 percent this year and the budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion next year, both higher than previous Obama administration forecasts because of a recession that was deeper and longer than expected, White House budget chief Peter Orszag said.

The Office of Management and Budget forecasts that the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year, worse than the 1.2 percent contraction the OMB projected in May. For next year, the budget office said the gross domestic product will grow 2.0 percent, less than the 3.2 percent expected in May. By 2011, the economy would be well on its way to recovery, growing at a 3.8 percent annual rate, according to the administration’s mid-year economic review, released this morning.

This is not an accident. This is President Obama's socialist policies openly damaging our economy. Here's the latest concession to redistributive social justice:

The Federal Reserve chose a labor leader to succeed a former Goldman Sachs executive as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of New York's private-sector board of directors.

Denis Hughes, president of the New York state branch of the AFL-CIO, had been serving as acting chairman of the New York Fed board since May, when Stephen Friedman stepped down from the position.

Barack Obama thinks that union bosses should be running corporations instead of CEOs, so say hello to your new commissar, comrades!

Obama has already been defeated on health care.

2009-08-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

The problem is that the liberal Praetorian Guard have captured the Emperor and won't let him surrender. For example, Paul Krugman wrote:

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

You can tell that the Democrats are in serious trouble...

2009-08-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

...when the squishy, moderate Republicans start acting tough. Even RNC chair Michael Steel is ready to "lock and load" over ObamaCare:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Thursday dared Democrats to try a one-party push to overhaul the nation's health care system.

Steele told reporters that he thinks if Democratic senators think they have the votes, they should try a tactic that would allow them to get around a bill-killing filibuster without the 60 votes usually needed. Steele said he didn't think Democrats would do it because of potential voter backlash.

"Get it to the floor. Up or down, baby," Steele said at a news conference at the state GOP headquarters. "Put it on the table. And if you don't think you've got enough votes to get to 60, you've got the nuclear option. You've got 51."

British views of British health care are not relevant to Americans.

2009-08-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Financial Times reports that the British socialized health care system has strong bipartisan support in Britain:

The US right has used the NHS as an example of the potential pitfalls facing President Barack Obama as he tries to push through a healthcare reform bill.

Some Republicans have ridiculed it as a bureaucratic and “Orwellian” system that often denies care to the elderly – with Sarah Palin, the former Republican presidential candidate, decrying it as “evil”.

But in Britain, where since 1948 all citizens have enjoyed free healthcare from birth to death, the attacks are widely seen as wrong and insulting.

Such is the strength of public support for the NHS in the UK, that the two main political parties have agreed to ring-fence its expenditure in the coming years – in spite of cuts to almost all other departmental budgets.

Of course the population of Britain strongly supports socialized health care. That's the point the American conservatives have been making all along: once the national government seizes control of the health care system, the mass of the population will have no choice but to support it. The goal of government control is to reduce the population to the status of serfs, not to improve services to the population. Would you really want to put your future health care at risk by criticizing your nation's health care monopoly?

If that is to melodramatic for you, then think about nationalized health care in terms of political rhetoric. Nationalized health care then has an immense political advantange over alternative systems because its opposition is self-negating. However much you speak out against nationalization, your opponents know that you'll come crawling back to the system on your hands and knees someday, or that you'll mark yourself as a dangerous elitist by accepting private care or care in a foreign country.

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan makes a nice example of how British citizens become enemies of the state if they are even suspected of being disloyal to the British National Health Service (NHS; emphasis in original):

Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism [of himself]. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that. Remember the way even the most moderate and tempered proposals for stricter border controls were decried as “playing the race card”? Or, earlier, the way any suggestion that the EU wasn’t democratic was dismissed as “xenophobia”? Remember how keen supporters of the existing set-up were to shut down any argument? There are good and honourable people who support the NHS; and there are good and honourable people who don’t. Is that really such an extreme thing to say?

Thoughts about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

2009-08-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

In my analysis of the recently released film "Star Trek", I identified the directors' hatred of the Federation as being the essential flaw of the Trek franchise. In the Transformers franchise, the essential flaw is that director Michael Bey apparently believes that the transformers robots are too weird and alien for his audience to accept. This belief completely dominates both of the Transformers movies.

The original Transformers animated cartoon was more than happy to accept the transformers as essentially human-like in thought and feelings, and so nearly all of the dramatic action involved only the transformers. The Transformers films are not willing to do this, and so the job of making the story intelligible to the audience falls upon the extensive human-centric plot lines. This comes in two flavors. The Witwicky family along with government agent Seymour Simmons drive most of the action with a series of comedic pratfalls, funny one-liners, and teenaged Sam Witwicky's romantic interludes with his hot girlfriend Mikaela. The other flavor is a sense of valorous military competence that is the job of Major William Lennox, his fighting team, and various reinforcements that they can call upon.

The net effect is that the transformers themselves are almost entirely superfluous in a movie that is ostensibly devoted to them. Some of them idle away the entire movie in car form until called upon to lob a few missiles in the final act. The film doesn't even need transformers to kill other transformers (with one exception). The American military is more than willing and able to throw enough metal at this things to blow them apart.

The next major drawback of the Transformers films is the ridiculously bad visual design of the transformer robots. Roger Ebert describes this nicely:
The action scenes can perhaps best be understood as abstract art. The Autobots® and Decepticons®, which are assembled out of auto parts, make no functional or aesthetic sense. They have evolved into forms too complex to be comprehended. When two or more of the Bots are in battle, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. You can't comprehend most of what they're doing, except for an occasional fist flying, a built-in missile firing, or the always dependable belching of flames. Occasionally one gets a hole blown through it large enough to drive a truck through, pardon the expression.
Again, the original transformers cartoon did this a lot better, since the television format forced the cartoon to visually simplify the robots as much as possible. "Revenge of the Fallen" director Michael Bey seems aware of this problem, but his remedies are to do things like painting some of the transformers in bright primary colors or to give other transformers easily identifiable ethnic accents. In other words, Bey seems to be completely impotent to alter the design of the most important visual components of his own film.

Another strange aspect of this film is that the transformers seem to behave like biological organisms despite the fact that they are also technological constructs. The transformers of "Revenge of the Fallen" have this annoying habit of using what must be radiator fluid or brake fluid to simulate human emotions like tears or spitting. There is even a scene where it is revealed that baby Decepticons are "grown" in womb-like pods full of amniotic fluid!

The transformers of these films seem to be a technological version of the alien from John Carpenter's "The Thing". In that film, the alien was a shapeshifting creature that could take over other organisms and turn them into shapeshifting aliens. When under duress, John Carpenter's aliens would tend to explode into a miasmic blob of random biological organs rather than respect the bodily integrity of their impersonated form. The transformers seem to work exactly the same way by impersonating innocent non-self aware vehicles to fit into human society and exploding into a humanoid-shaped assemblages of car parts loaded with guns and missile launchers when in danger.

What's wrong with this picture?

2009-07-28T19:48:00.000-07:00

President Obama wants to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan:

A concerted effort to start unprecedented talks between Taliban and British and American envoys was outlined yesterday in a significant change in tactics designed to bring about a breakthrough in the attritional, eight-year conflict in Afghanistan.

Senior ministers and commanders on the ground believe they have created the right conditions to open up a dialogue with "second-tier" local leaders now the Taliban have been forced back in a swath of Helmand province.

President Obama is also lashing out against the government of Honduras:

The U.S. government said Tuesday it has revoked the diplomatic visas of four Honduran officials, stepping up pressure on coup-installed leaders who insist they can resist international demands to restore the ousted president.

The U.S. State Department did not name the four, but a Honduran official said they included the Supreme Court magistrate who ordered the arrest of ousted President Manuel Zelda and the president of Honduras' Congress.

The United States is basically negotiating with terrorists that hate us while lashing out at democracies that made the blunder of trusting us. Does this make any sense to you?

A case of the self-refuting diplomat

2009-07-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must be wondering if her current position helps or hurts her long-term presidential prospects. The principle benefit of her position is that she's not personally responsible for anything in particular, so the failures of the Obama administration shouldn't stick to her in the fiture. The principle drawback of her position is that she has to speak publically about the Obama administration's foreign policy, which tends to make her look like an idiot.

Here's an example related to our Administration's Iranian policy. Recently, Hillary Clinton floated a plan for saving the Middle East from a nuclear-armed Iran:

As a security summit in Thailand earlier this week, Clinton raised the possibility of a "defense umbrella" over the Middle East to protect other nations from a nuclear-armed Iran, marking the first time a senior administration official has publicly broached the prospect of the Persian nation succeeding in building a nuclear weapon.

That plan lasted a few days before getting shot down by its own sponsor:

"First, we're going to do everything we can to prevent you from ever getting a nuclear weapon. But your pursuit is futile, because we will never let Iran — nuclear-armed, not nuclear-armed — it is something that we view with great concern, and that's why we're doing everything we can to prevent that from ever happening. ... We believe, as a matter of policy, it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons."

"Avatar: The Last Airbender" is essentially a re-imagining of "The Phantom Menace".

2009-07-22T19:20:00.001-07:00

Here's the premise of the "Avatar" film from wikipedia:

In a world where the four elements can be controlled by people known as "Benders", the Fire Nation is waging a ruthless, oppressive war to control the other great nations. The only hope for stopping the brutal war led by the Firebenders rests on the shoulders of a reluctant young boy named Aang (Noah Ringer). The last known survivor of the peaceful Air Nomads and the Airbenders, Aang is the "Avatar". The "Avatar" is the physical re-incarnation of the world spirit, with the power to manipulate all four elements and draw upon the power, knowledge, and experiences of the Avatar's previous incarnations. The Avatar is responsible for maintaining balance between the four nations of the world and the spirit world, hence keeping the balance of the world. Aided by a protective teenage Waterbender named Katara (Nicola Peltz) and her bull-headed brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), Aang begins a perilous journey to restore balance to their war-torn world. Standing in their way are Fire Nation Admiral Zhao (Aasif Mandvi) and Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), the banished prince of the Fire Nation who seeks to capture the young Avatar to regain his honor.

In "The Phantom Menace", an army from the Fire Planet (Mustafar) is about to invade the Water Planet (Naboo). The Air Planet (Coruscant) sends two airbenders to mediate a peace. When diplomacy fails and the Fire Army invades Naboo, these two airbenders rescue the teenaged Water Queen and flee. However, their ship is damaged during their escape, forcing them to land on the Earth Planet (Tattooine). There they meet the miraculous Avatar who will bring balance to the forces (two movies later, this Avatar will be the last airbender). After consulting with the leadership of the Air Planet, the two airbenders and the Water Queen return to the Water Planet and defeat the Fire Army with the help of the Avatar.

Why the Time Lords were written out of "Doctor Who".

2009-07-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

In the original "Doctor Who", the Time Lords were the Doctor's mysterious, near-omnipotent superiors. In the current revived series, the Time Lords no longer exist, having been destroyed by the Doctor in the last great time war. Why was it so important for the new series to completely exclude the Time Lords?

Here's one possibility that I stumbled across recently. Here's a description of Jonathan Swift's Laputans from "The Closing of the American Mind" (pp. 294-295), by Allen Bloom:

On the Flying Island [of Laputa] the men have one eye turned inward, the other toward the zenith. They are perfect Cartesians -- one egotistical eye contemplating the self, one cosmological eye surveying the most distant things.

Bloom further quotes Swift:

Another peculiarity of these men is described by Gulliver as follows. "What I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them [the Laputans] toward news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgements in matters of state and passionately disputing every inch of a party opinion. I have indeed observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe, although I could neve discover the least analogy between the two sciences."

This is a dead-on description of the Time Lords. The Time Lords live on a planet named Gallifrey that is supremely well-defended from attack by an impenetrable force field ("the Flying Island") . The Time Lords are masters of space, time, and transdimensional engineering ("They are perfect Cartesians", in the geometrical sense). The Time Lords keep watch over threats to the spacetime continuum as a whole and draw their power from an artifact called the Eye of Harmony ("the cosmological eye surveying the most distant things"). The Time Lords are also naturally telepathic ("one egotistical eye contemplating the self") and, of course, are not entirely immune to meddling in the affairs of other species ("perpetually inquiring into public affairs", etc.). The Old High Gallifreyan language was even written using mathematical symbols ("I have indeed observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe").

Vice President Joe Biden is a national joke.

2009-07-16T18:50:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest boner from the Vice President:

Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.”

The good news is that Biden at least recognizes that government spending is now driving the government bankrupt. The bad news is that, given a choice between cutting his political pork out of the federal budget or cutting your health care out of the federal budget, Biden is more than willing to go for the health care cuts.

Obama's bizarro-world Iranian policy

2009-07-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

President Obama's original foreign policy with respect to Iran was based on the principles that Iran was a "normal" power that could be usefully negotiated with and that the United States was not going to "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs. The recent Iranian electoral protests created a shift in that policy. The United States would present Iran with some criticism of its internal response to the protests, but the United States wouldn't consider the Iranian goverment to be delegitimized by them.

Now we have another shift in Obama's Iranian policy. Instead of being highly restrained in how we meddle in Iranian internal affairs, we're now going to shamelessly meddle in Iranian internal affairs:

Vice President Joe Biden seemed to give Israel a green light for military action to eliminate Iran's nuclear threat, saying the U.S. "cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do."

Here's another way to view the problem with America's Iranian policy. The Iranian protesters presumably have four things that they hold dear: (1) America not attacking Iran; (2) peaceful Iranian nuclear power; (3) hatred of Isreal; (4) delegitimizing the current Iranian regime. As of today, our Iranian policy is now attacking Iran to destroy their capacity for nuclear power if diplomacy fails; having Israel conduct the attack; while conceeding that the Iranian government is otherwise 100% legitimate.

Vacuum Energy

Was Michael Moore guest-blogging at The Dish today?

Political flameouts this week

The Daily Loon

Post #700: The NY Times adopts the ObamaCare paradigm.

The world situation...

The Girl Named Mary Sue

News Flash: Fantasy Fiction Still Sucks

I know who *won't* win the 2012 presidential election:

A great reason for being an atheist

The mainstream media in America is a total joke.

The Obama Presidency began today.

Sore-Loser Democrats are plotting a Senate coup.

Vacuum Energy favorite posts of 2010

5 weird things about the 2010 film remake of "True Grit"

Obama's plan for the lame duck session

"Civilization V" sucks

Another bad day for Democrats

A deceptively simple economics question

Some bad history from "The Daily Dish"

A great reason why California proposition 19 is a dumb idea.

A pathetic president

Vox Genius strikes again.

The President of the United States is stuck on stupid.

George Lucas turned out to be the responsible one. Who knew?

Who the hell do you think you are, Prince Charles? Al Gore?

My PC pet peeve strikes again.

Fire. Michael. Steele. Now!

Vox Day comes up with some really dumb stuff sometimes.

Absolutely laughable bias at Time Magazine

President Obama supports the unsupportable.

Just when I think that the new "Transformers" franchise couldn't get any more bull****...

Pro Gaming in South Korea isn't all bad.

A Tale of Two Entities*

A political move so stupid that it could only be evidence of a brilliant strategic plan.

Dungeons and Dragons is not art.

I have a feeling that health care reform will fail tomorrow.

A horse! A horse! My presidency for a horse!

Harold Ford, Jr. sells out.

The case of the self-refuting linguist

Liberals can be really f***ing stupid sometimes.

What planet is this Obama guy from?

America's First Parliament

The 2010 film "Legion", or "Welcome to the Irony-verse"

President Obama's discretionary spending freeze will only affect Republicans.

President Obama is out of touch with reality.

Please do not vote for California Democrats ever again because they are all totally bats**t insane.

The World Turned Upside Down

The most transparent Congress ever

Let the poison in the TARDIS hatch out.

Terrorist Laundering

The end of the David Tennant era

My favorite blog posts of 2009

Blue-state Democrats are going to get screwed by ObamaCare.

Made I him king for this?

"Dollhouse" at the Christmas hiatus

The irony of the Obama administration

The Left's last argument for the Senate health care bill

The Left is revolting (over Obamacare, that is).

Yet more "Dollhouse" blogging

In case you were wondering why "Dollhouse" got cancelled...

The Senate majority leader beclowns himself yet again.

President Obama's big speech on Afghanistan

Science fictional languages just jumped the shark

Roland Emmerich's "2012", or "Gary Stu is Smarter than You"

The deep hypocrisy of the Democratic Party.

A highly depressing idea for a movie

My ultimate "Dollhouse" conspiracy theory

The Republican Long Game

D'Souza's embarassingly bad case for life after death.

Now that America's elections are over...

"Dollhouse"-blogging

President Obama, male model

Obama's Peace prize is a badge of shame.

Moronic counter-memes from Obama supporters

President Barrack Obama bungles it again.

California and political reality just don't seem to mix.

President Obama's Bizarro-world foreign policy

How to explain the tea parties in a way the Left will understand.

Thoughts about "District 9"

I know who won't win the 2012 presidential election: