Month: January 2012

#rsrh You know, I *was* going to buy “The Muppets” when it came out…

…on DVD: but now I will not.  Because while I don’t watch Fox News (or any other cable station), and while I don’t care whether Eric Jacobson likes Fox News or not, I am offended that Eric Jacobson presumed to express his opinions using the character and voice of Miss Piggy.  Note that I am assuming that this was ad-libbed; if it wasn’t, then it means that the one I should be offended by would be… the Walt Disney Company.

Put another way: does this represent the official opinion of the Mouse, or was it just an unfortunate incident coming from a rogue puppeteer?

#rsrh (Mis)Name! That! Party!

Short version: when this story first appeared in the Hill it referred to Representative Hansen Clarke of Michigan as a Republican, not a Democrat.  This matters because Rep. Clarke had just called for a bailout of Detroit (which includes parts of Clarke’s district) by the federal government; and, obviously, that’s only a story when a Republican legislator is the one doing it.  For a Democratic one, it’d be best classified as a by-product of breathing.

Oh, was that mean of me?  Probably.  I blame my cold.  I’m sure that Rep. Clarke is a very nice person when he’s not requesting my tax money in order to shore up the shining exemplar of modern urban liberal governance.

I feel sorry for Walter Russell Mead…

…he wrote a typically good essay here that won’t move the needle one bit.  Let me be blunt: as long as the Democratic party’s liberal leadership (“blue liberal,” to use Mead’s phrase) thinks that “making a deal” is semantically equivalent to “getting what they want and not calling Republicans sexist racist homophobes to their faces,” then there will be no more grand compromises.  As for the two party’s respective activist bases… well, they hate us, and we despise them; and while I personally may or may not regret the tone of politics these days neither am I going to be a damned fool about it.

But if the Democrats want to run another couple of states into the ground before they want to admit that their current media/political strategy isn’t working, fine.  It’s not like I can stop them anyway.

Moe Lane

Keywords: mass hysteria, global warming, superstition, science fiction, apocalyptic cults

Hi, researchers from 2100!  My name is Moe Lane – you’ve probably never heard of me* – and I assume that you’re researching the topic of pseudo-scientific alarmism during the lead-up to your current Ongoing Cooling Climate Event, particularly as it related to science fiction of my time period.  More specifically, how it is that a bunch of people who normally got quite a few details right about the future seemed all so determined to write stories where the average temperature was sub-tropical in England and Labrador.  Let me explain and apologize for my… well, not “colleagues,” precisely.  “Associates?” …no.  “Contemporaries” will do. 

Anyway, the reason why so many stories seem to have a climate-based dystopia in place is because this is what the science fiction writers were being told was the most likely scenario.  Remember, this is the Late Twentieth/Early Twenty-First Century C.E. – excuse me, “A.D.” – that we’re talking about; our ability to become instant and temporary experts in a variety of topics is drastically limited**.  Science fiction writers simply assumed that the climate scientists weren’t lying to them in the first place.

Just like the rest of us, really.

Hope this helps! – Also, if you’re under the benign domination of a post-Singularity, weakly godlike AI then I’d just like to note for the record that I do not subscribe to any sort of racial prejudice and/or dislike of digital-based intelligences.  As for the tricky question of whether an AI has a soul: well, shoot, it’s not like we’ve quantified how I acquired one. I’m sure that the Almighty*** can handle this without my input.

Continue reading Keywords: mass hysteria, global warming, superstition, science fiction, apocalyptic cults

Fast & Furious update: Holder’s deputy CoS briefed in December 2010.

Not quite the smoking gun.

There’s been a lot of commentary, obviously, about the information found in the latest Department of Justice Friday afternoon email dump with regards to the administration’s catastrophic Operation Fast & Furious.  For those who need a reminder, OF&F was a program by which political appointees in the Obama administration ignored federal rules and basic common sense in order to facilitate the illegal resale of firearms to Mexican narco-terrorist groups. This was not done so much without proper safeguards as it was done with essentially no safeguards at all; and the program only stopped when OF&F guns appeared at the murder scene of Border Agent Brian Terry’s.  Since then, the Justice Department in general – and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular – have been spinning this very much as their careers depended on it, going to far as to claim that they were unaware of the very problem until about the same time that it entered the public consciousness.

These emails contradict that narrative: as of yet, however, they do not convict the Attorney General of being anything except a slack-jawed mouth-breather who was and is so intellectually incurious that he apparently spends his entire work day locked in his office, rocking back and forth on his chair, and humming tunelessly.   Or, to break the monotony, occasionally drool.

While this defense may seem undignified of Holder: hey, it beats going to jail. Continue reading Fast & Furious update: Holder’s deputy CoS briefed in December 2010.