Month: July 2010

So, I asked myself: “How to make the oil spill…”

[UPDATE]: Glenn Reynolds is ever-vigilant.

…worse?”

And I said, “Well, the spill itself could spontaneously achieve self-awareness, coalesce into a globular carbon mass of malice, and hare off to an abyssal lair from whence it could plot dark, inky dreams of conquest.”

Yeah. About that.

For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there’s one problem — they’re having trouble finding it.”

Via @BillSTL.

Seriously, if it’s really gone that’s great.  But we haven’t gotten any favors so far, so why should the universe start now?

I’m going to disagree with xkcd here…

…slightly:

…there’s going to be a dividing line of about 1920 or so; prior to that, they won’t have enough audio/video recorded material to get a good gestalt of the time periods involved. For that matter, I expect linguistic drift to slow down a good deal, now that we increasingly have the ability to hear how our great-grandparents talked.

The American Prospect: Trig Troofers?

For those who don’t know – lucky you – “Trig Troofers” are people who believe that former Governor Sarah Palin did not actually give birth to her son Trig Palin; they instead believe that the child is Bristol Palin’s, despite the fact that Ms. Palin herself had a child at about the same time*.  This has thus become a particularly bizarre conspiracy theory, on the level of the ‘we faked the Apollo moon landing:’ it will elevate (or descend) to the level of 9/11 conspiracy theorizing once the Online Left figures out how Sarah Palin’s uterus relates to the International Zionist Conspiracy.

I mention all of this because I wanted to make it clear that people who believe this nonsense are crazy.  And apparently some of them are riddled through the ranks of the leading liberal magazine The American Prospect.  Which means that there are people at TAP who are crazy. Continue reading The American Prospect: Trig Troofers?

Rubber meeting the road: the 2010 Senate situation.

Charlie Cook is bearish on the thought of the GOP retaking the Senate this year – which, I should note, is a large step up from, say January 2009: back then they were talking about how the Democrats might increase their existing majority in 2010.  Charlie sets up the current situation as follows:

Three open seats currently in the hands of Democrats seem pretty likely to end up in the Republican column this year. Sen. Byron Dorgan’s seat in North Dakota is a goner. Democrats have strong candidates in Delaware (Chris Coons) and Indiana (Rep. Brad Ellsworth), but the strength of the opposition in the former and the toughness of the state in the latter means these Democrats, who might have won under other circumstances, are likely to come up short this time. Watch for both to resurface.

To score a net gain of 10 seats, Republicans would also have to sweep the seven Democratic seats that the Cook Political Report rates as Toss-Ups, taking open seats in Illinois and Pennsylvania and defeating incumbent Sens. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, Barbara Boxer in California, Michael Bennet in Colorado, Harry Reid in Nevada and Patty Murray in Washington. If the GOP came up short in one of those, they would have to make it up by carrying one of the two additional vulnerable Democratic races, claiming the open seat in Connecticut or beating Wisconsin incumbent Russell Feingold. Both of those races are competitive as well.

Here’s the basic problem.  Pick any one of those races listed above, and you can see how the Republican can win.  The trick is winning all of them, or at least ten of them* – statistically speaking, that’s a bit of a stretch.  Said stretch is modified by the fact that the results are not really dictated by random chance, but even so we’ll still have to count on everything breaking our way. Continue reading Rubber meeting the road: the 2010 Senate situation.

Extending tax cuts: rhetoric meets reality.

The basic situation?  The Democratic party is facing a dilemma of more or less its own doing with the looming end of Bush-era tax cuts.  The party generally ran on a program of repealing them for the ‘rich,’ which was rhetorically useful (if not fiscally so); and some Democratic legislators are beginning to worry about the political effects of that.  The problem – which the Right has been saying all along – is that raising taxes on the top two tax brackets will affect an indeterminate number of small businesses.  Democratic legislators apparently plan to solve this problem by demonizing the Republican party’s position on tax relief while simultaneously coming as close to it as they dare. Continue reading Extending tax cuts: rhetoric meets reality.

#rsrh Tattooed vegan arrested for… guess.

Yup. Arson. Supposedly he calls himself “Lone Wolf” and is responsible for burning down a sheepskin factory, a leather factory, and a restaurant that sells foie gras*. A real eco-guerrilla, by all accounts.

So meet Lone Wolf:

(pause)

Ayup.

Moe Lane

PS: Actually, I think that it’s great that they’re starting to self-identify themselves in public like this, for the benefit of normal people.

*Which is admittedly kind of a not-nice food – force-feeding, and all that – but, shoot, it’s just ducks and geese.

Book of the week… A bit of a problem, actually.

I just finished it; it’s part of an alternate-history series (Renaissance fantasy subtype) which I like in spite of itself.  The only problem is the copy-editing and proofreading was… surprisingly bad, for a book that’s from a major SF/Fantasy publisher.  I suspect that standards have slipped a little for the publisher in question.

I got nothing to replace it with, so we’re going to keep The Evolutionary Void for another week. Sorry.

New DA:O DLC: ‘Golem of Amgarrak’?

That’s the word from the San Diego Comic-Con, at least: details here and here.  High-level dungeon crawl, apparently; I’ll need to tweak my Elven Mage/Arcane Warrior/Battlemage/Spirit Healer for full Things Go Boom Now effect.

It’s interesting to see the way that complaints about the DLC for Dragon Age: Origins change every single time a new one comes out.  I’m not used to the computer RPG social scene, oddly enough: this is the first game that really has had my wife and I aware of its larger online community.  We were trying to figure out why there was so much acrimony lurking in forums for corporate decisions about a game that nobody was being forced to buy, until we realized that said acrimony was mostly fueled by a general desire to complain…

Moe Lane

PS: Mind you, Return to Ostagar should have been longer.