Moe Lane

You expect me to play this game (Dead Island) after that?  [Warning: video below NSFW]

I’m too busy crying.

Via AofSHQ Headlines.

Moe Lane

PS: Don’t get me wrong: I know damn well that the zombie genre has always had bad things happening to kids in it, because horror is all about pushing people’s fear buttons, and for most people GET AWAY FROM MY CHILD is a big honking red button with blinking arrows pointing to it.  I especially know this, now that I’m a parent.  But, like this guy, I found watching that trailer… tough.  Not because it’s manipulative – again, you want horror to be manipulative – but because it’s too artistically successful at being manipulative.  Or something.

You’ll notice that I’m not linking to a site where you can buy the game, either.

Marvel, oh my droogies, at the caliber of establishment that the Brave Sir Robins (otherwise known as “Democratic Wisconsin state senators trying to avoid a vote on ending collective bargaining”) hid out at, rather than do their job.  I give you… the Tilted Kilt:

If you think that I’m going to pretend that I wouldn’t have a beer and something fried – AND NON-SCOTTISH – at such a fine, fine residence myself, well… I’m not.  I’d probably cheerfully eat there, if I needed to, or really, wanted to.  But I wouldn’t be doing it on the taxpayer’s dime, either – and if I’m there in Illinois when I should be in Wisconsin dealing with the fact that elections have consequences, then I’m doing it on the taxpayer’s dime whether or not I’m using my personal credit card to leave Fiona MacSchoolgirloutfit an outrageous tip that will not, in fact, result in her helping toss my caber*.

And remember this well, ye Wisconsin Republican state Senators.  That is where your ‘colleagues’ were while you were carefully avoiding letting your heads, or those of your staffers, be in a clear field of fire today.

Via The PJ Tatler, via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

*Not that I would attempt to enlist such help, being married and all.

Who Do You Love?, George Thorogood & The Destroyers

I remember being 22.  Sort of.  There was sort of… haze over everything.

I’m going with The Best of Randall Garrett: 43 Novels and Short Stories (Unexpurgated Edition) (Halcyon Classics), despite the fact that it’s only available on the Kindle, for one basic reason: Randall Garrett is quite possibly the most under-appreciated and overlooked science fiction writer of the 20th Century, and you will not regret reading him.  If you only know him from the Lord Darcy series then it’s not so bad, but the man had an effortless way of writing that makes it fairly incomprehensible to me why he wasn’t more commercially successful.  (Shrug) It happens.

And so, farewell to Marque and Reprisal.  Fun series.

From your lips to God’s ears, Jimmie.

Personally, I would like to know why the President is endorsing a movement that is openly calling for Governor Scott Walker’s assassination, but that’s just me.

I probably wouldn’t be on Colin Powell’s Christmas card list, nor he on mine – not for any particular enmity on my part, or (hypothetical) on his; we’re just not the same kind of Republicans – but I have to admit:

Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons capability.

…I’d like to know the answer to this one myself.  I mean, contrary to Lefty mythology, the liberation of Iraq did not hinge on the presence of WMDs (although I will admit that their proven past existence and use on civilian targets by the late, unlamented-by-civilized-people Hussein regime did make quite a few Democrats at least temporarily capable of being swayed by reason); but the failure to find any in significant amounts after the fact was definitely embarrassing to the Bush administration, and I join former Secretary Powell in wanting to hear the bureaucrats explain themselves.  Because we’re still counting on these people to tell us what the heck is going on, and President Obama needs to be better served by them than former President Bush was.

Moe Lane

PS: Oops! Via Hot Air Headlines.

How silly is this claim by the President that “We will not be adding more to the national debt” under his budget?  Let me put it this way: when even the left-aligned PolitiFact is forced to rank your statement as “False” – despite a frantic reach-out from the White House – well, it’s pretty darn silly.  And as that first Heritage link shows, nobody’s buying the spin on this one.

Well.  Nobody that’s even the tiniest bit independent of the Democrats, at least.  Take a good look around and take careful note of who’s giving away the game on this one.

Via @cayankee.

Moe Lane

[UPDATE]: Ann Althouse has a few photos up that rather starkly symbolize just how committed public sector unions are to cleaning up the mess.

(Via @keder) The Wisconsin GOP has put together a quick video of union attacks on Governor Scott Walker, which include: signs calling him a Nazi (and a dictator generally); signs calling him a rapist; and signs calling for his death.  What makes this a particularly hard-hitting video is that it’s interspersed with solemn quotes from Democrats who claim that their side never, ever, ever does such things: which is of course a lie, but a lot of these people haven’t internalized yet the notion that it’s harder to lie about this sort of thing these days.

Background, for those who need it: Scott Walker’s call for (limited) reforms of Wisconsin’s frankly out-of-control collective bargaining system for public sector union employees has caused a good deal of controversy, and by ‘controversy’ I mean ‘death threats.’  Excuse me: alleged death threats.  Anyway, as I noted earlier Lakeshore Laments is a Wisconsin blog covering this: note in particular the way that the ‘spontaneous’ sickouts seem to be mostly targeting Republican state districts.  It’s going to be a real interesting day in Wisconsin.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

…they need to have their writers do a little more research.  Case in point:

But America is far from the only nation worried about meeting ET. Even the Vatican is devoting serious thought to an idea formerly relegated to trailer parks and hill-folk. Father Jose Funes, speaking for the Vatican after its official conference on astrobiology (wait, what?), stated that the church has concluded that the existence of life on other planets would not invalidate anything in the Bible. And Guy Consolmagno, one of the pope’s astronomers (wait, double what?) said that he would be delighted to baptize any extra terrestrial life that comes his way, but “only if they asked.”

The Roman Catholic Church has been interested in astronomy as a scientific discipline for over four hundred years, which makes sense when you consider the Gregorian calendar reform.  They’ve had official observatories since the 18th century: the current Vatican Observatory is based out of Tucson, Arizona.  The Jesuits alone have been significant contributors to astronomy (and other sciences) for that entire period.  I understand that relying on the historical narrative of the Galileo affair (which is not inaccurate so much as it is highly simplified) can obscure things, and that Cracked.com is a humor site, but… still.  Google, madam.  Google.

Moe Lane

A group called Imagination Station* put together the 50 grand that they need to have a Robocop statue put up in Detroit, so now it’s a matter of convincing the mayor of Detroit that yea, indeed, the city needs a Robocop statue put up in Detroit.

I know, I know: you would expect that the merits of this project would be so blindingly obvious to any rational human being who encountered it that it’s a shock that there isn’t a Robocop theme park already, but consider the mayor’s perspective on this.  Robocop is no longer a dystopian vision of Detroit’s future: it’s practically a documentary of Detroit’s present.  An optimistic one: the citizens of Detroit would jump up and down in glee if they got told that a cyborg cop had been assigned to clean up the streets… at least, the streets that are still occupied.  The mayor’s got his pride, and that pride gets him up in the morning and be mayor of one of the most dysfunctional cities in America, so I can’t blame him overmuch on this.

Still, I dropped $35 on this.  Because, well, Robocop statue.

Link to Detroit Needs Robocop here.

Moe Lane

*And I suspect that this group is made up of total Lefties, but, well, Robocop statue.  I do not interfere with people having a moment of clarity.

Via Glenn Reynolds, ladies and gentlemen: your tax dollars at… actually, “waste” doesn’t have the right connotation of “bizarrely surreal.”  Essentially, Democratic legislators have mainstreamed the antiwar Left’s Giant Puppet People by bringing the cartoon aardvark Arthur to a budget discussion.

Now, here’s the thing: I try to regulate what my kids watch.  I’m assisted in this by the fact that my wife is, frankly, too cheap to pay for cable; so we buy and rent videos.  Arthur was on our list of stuff to maybe buy when the kids were older; it is abruptly no longer on that list.  It’s nothing personal, but if the Other Side is going to be using cultural icons as partisan weapons then it’s perfectly acceptable for me to respond appropriately.

Moe Lane (crosspost) (more…)

…I’m not even going to try to post today, sorry.