Moe Lane

Via Pat Cleary. The video is a little out of sync, but the sentiments are right there:

Plus, bonus points for the Rush reference; a band that was pretty much constant background music for me for most of my college existence. (more…)

That’s just wrong.

See here for details. Howard Tayler was, of course, insane to come up with the idea in the first place, and watching this video play out was subtly disturbing.

But not as disturbing as the notion that this will probably encourage Tayler to come up with something even more outlandish.

Short time for Lullaby to be on the list, but such are the vagaries of life.

I’m replacing it with David Weber’s Storm from the Shadows, which is the latest from the Honorverse. I was actually able to afford getting this one thanks to an early birthday present; it was a tough call between it and Escape from Hell, though. I’m about halfway through it, and it’s good.

Do you?

Do you?

Fine.

Here you go, via The Clue Meter & Blackfive, and courtesy of Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael:

I’m not saying that you can’t beat that – but I am saying that you’re going to have to work for it.  Slow-mo of women in bikinis firing automatic rifles isn’t going to cut it.

I wish I could remember where in Lileks I saw that bit that he wrote about why Lucas did Return of the Jedi the way that he did, but this quote of Dan Vebber emailed to me by Erick Erickson has its own charms:

But aside from what we see onscreen, the Ewoks are miserable little creatures for a completely different reason: they are the single clearest example of Lucas’ willingness to compromise the integrity of his Trilogy in favor of merchandising dollars. How intensely were the Ewoks marketed? Consider this: “Ewok” is a household word, despite the fact that it’s never once spoken in the film.

Of course, the advice that I got right afterward from a third party – which was to just get over the entire Lucas betrayed fanboy thing – was probably very sensible. At least, I bristled at it, which is usually diagnostic.

Jethro Tull, which was a band that had quite a lot of influence over my personal soundtrack when I was… geez, half the age I am now.

Depressing, only not.

A Republican Senate leadership aide responded: ‘It really is a silly campaign. What are we saying ‘no’ to? Trillions in new spending? An unpopular, earmark-laden bill that the President himself was embarrassed to sign? A new national energy tax? Releasing Gitmo terrorists into the U.S.? We’d like to thank them for reminding the American people that we are saying ‘no’ to those things.’

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

I have officially run out of alternative ways to express the concept that irony is dead, so I will simply say: “Irony is dead:”

Beginning Sunday, the White House will harness every part of the Democratic Party’s machinery to defend President Obama’s budget and portray Republicans as reflexively political, according to party strategists.

A participant in the planning meetings described the push as a successor to Democrats’ message that Rush Limbaugh is the Republican Party leader. “We have exhausted the use of Rush as an attention-getter,” the official said.

David Plouffe, manager of Obama’s presidential race, helped design the strategy, which includes the most extensive activation since November of the campaign’s grassroots network. The database—which includes information for at least 10 million donors, supporters and volunteers—will now be used as a unique tool for governing, with former canvassers now being enlisted to mobilize support for the president’s legislative agenda.

(Via Hot Air Headlines)

And this is why you don’t run candidates as if they were demigods come down to earth. You end up being critically short of people who aren’t afraid to tell you when you’re singing off-key. (more…)

He won’t even have to pay the money back.

I’ll need to remember this one if I ever have issues with my own state taxes:

Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel calls Maryland home for tax break

Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel may call himself a life-long Bronx resident, but he has also called Maryland his primary residence for years to get a local tax break that state officials have just squashed.

Engel, who rents an apartment back in his district, also owns a $1 million house with his wife in the well-off Washington suburb of Potomac, Md. – a property that has been afforded $7,000 in tax breaks since he bought it in 1993, The Associated Press reported.

The NYDN article goes on to give Engel’s claim that he wasn’t trying to defraud anyone – which is interesting, given this New York Times article on the subject:
(more…)

…threw out their copies:

Rare Superman comic sells for $317,200

NEW YORK – A rare copy of the first comic book featuring Superman has sold for $317,200 in an Internet auction. The previous owner of Action Comics No. 1 bought it for less than a buck.

It’s one of the highest prices ever paid for a comic book, a likely testament to the volume’s rarity and its excellent condition, said Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the auction site ComicConnect.com and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles.

Heck, even the 50th Anniversary Reprint Edition has a decent street value. But look on the bright side – and, for that matter, all around you: somewhere in that pile of stuff that we call a ‘house’ is an item that a descendant will be able to hock for a small fortune.

The trick is figuring out which one.

Describe the Democrats in 20 words or less.

My entry (which I believe that I’m recycling, here)… actually, let’s go with the Republicans, first:

“This is what we believe. If you don’t like it, suffer.”

Now the Democrats:

“This is what we believe. If you don’t like it, we’ll try something else.”

I believe that this is reasonably fair-minded for all involved, yes?

Crossposted to RedState.

Link here.  It actually happened in 2008; I can’t believe that I missed this!  Then again, it was an election year.

Going through the books themselves, I note that they’ve corrected a bunch of the spelling errors and what not, but not the artwork, which is vintage 1987-style “we can’t afford anything better.”  I suppose that I shouldn’t complain – the damn things are free, after all – but it’s not like LGS can’t afford decent artists these days for M&M.  I guess that too many of my fellow-gamers would complain if they jazzed up the thing for the modern audience: cheesy art is as important for the nostalgia kick as is the taste of Fritos and Pepsi.

Many thanks to Call of Cybele guru Ken Hite for the head’s-up.

Moe Lane

PS: What did I play? One of these guys. Totally homebrew, of course. I loved M&M, but it never handled running variant races well. Well, that and the lack of alternative settings. I had this campaign that I wanted to run, based on the works of an English author named John Tolkien, but I never was able to make the rules set work…

[Update]: Heh, I would have thought that the “Everett-Wheeler-Graham Model” tag would have been diagnostic.

No, really.

That’s the thing about regulating everything. You end up regulating everything. From Natural News (and won’t their server logs be confusing them today):

(NaturalNews) The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund recently reported the unveiling of the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 (H.R. 875) on Feb. 4, 2009, by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), to both the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the House Committee on Agriculture. Cosponsored by 36 other Congressmen, all Democrats, H.R. 875 would essentially transfer all state control over food regulation to the Food Safety Administration (FSA), a newly-established federal bureaucracy to be created within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Its implications point to the elimination of all independent, family farms as well as all organic farming operations due to overbearing federal regulations subjectively determined by FSA in favor of corporate factory farms.

Via Protein Wisdom, and Is this blog on? (here and here). See also the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Rep. DeLauro – and her husband Stan Greenberg – are familiar to our readers; they’re the people that gave Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel free rent for several years. Turns out that one of Greenberg’s clients is biotech giant Monsanto… and elements of the Left have been sparring with that company over genetically altered foodstuffs for over a decade. Note that Greenberg’s materially involved in that dispute, thanks to some reports that he’s written on the topic. So there’s definitely a question here over whether this legislation regulating food production has been, ah, given a certain impetus. And in case you’re wondering what’s affected by this, well, here you go:

(14) FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITY- The term ‘food production facility’ means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation.

As Darleen over at Protein Wisdom said, “No exclusions, no limitations. You grow it, you’re included.”

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