Another mutant tumorous bullet-points post

I've kind of gotten behind on things here. Been busy, sort of. Well, I should have been busy, at least. Anyway, here's some stuff. It's huge, so if some of the links seem wrong like I mixed them up or something because there's so many, you can say something and I'll try to fix it.

• Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever posted a Steven Crowder video on here before. I'm going to rectify that now.
  
  Twenty minutes long and totally worth it. A real, guerrilla-style look at the Canadian healthcare system that Obama wants us to emulate. The big points to take away from it:
  
  • Everyone in Canada, both the people and the government employees, want more privitization. As Steven says, while we're moving in their direction, they're moving in our direction.
  • As Anniee451 of Purely Politics. Partisan? Perhaps points out,

    "In the beginning of this video, there is a clip of Obama promising in his campaign that he would get a universal health care bill signed by the end of his first term - now he's swearing to god and all the universe that it's NOT universal health care, that it was NEVER intended to be universal health care, that he never said any such thing, but that whatever it is, it has to pass NOW - before next month. Or we'll explode."

  • Obama has assured us that even once this thing passes, we'll still be able to keep the plans we have now. But you know what? We have to pay for the universal healthcare whether we want it or not. Just like schools. Even if you pay to send your kids to private school, you still have to pay full price for the government schools you're not using. And they'll have the same bull arguments against opting out of UHC as they do against school vouchers: if the government gave you back your money, you might spend it on a religious school/hospital, and that would violate the First Amendment. So yeah, you can keep the plan you have now, if you can afford to pay for another plan you're not going to use, on top of all the increased taxes on cigarettes and Capri Sun and whatnot, and those taxes will never end, because there simply isn't enough money in the country to possibly pay for everything Obama wants to do.
    
  • As Steven also says, rich people will always be able to afford better private insurance, but poor people will have to settle for the government stuff. This will lead to an increased gap between the rich and the poor, helping to maintain the class warfare that was largely responsible for getting Obama elected.
  • I know it's been said a thousand times before, but it really bears repeating: Do you really want your health to be taken care of by the same guys that run the DMV?
  • Bill Hobson asks an interesting question: Would we be better off if no one had health insurance than if everyone did?
• Speaking of expensive cigarettes: Man Charged $23 Quadrillion For Cigarettes. $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 to be exact. Why would the computers even go up to 19 digits? Why would you ever need to legitimately record a transaction 2,000 times the size of the national debt? Over here you can see a bit of interesting speculation as to why it may have ended up being that specific number. So anyway, he had to spend two hours on the phone trying to convince someone that it was wrong, mainly because Bank of America told him to call Visa and Visa told him to call Bank of America.
• Hat-tip to RightOfCourse for this one: Obama's science czar kinda had a thing for eugenics back in the 70s. This is the same guy who now advocates shooting sulfur particles in the air and making artificial trees to fight global warming (wouldn't real trees be cheaper?). Some of his proposals (hidden behind a thinly-veiled passive voice, usually qualified with a "Well, maybe this", and all of which are readable, in context, at Zombietime):
  • Single mothers could be forced by the government to marry, put their children up for adoption, or abort them.
  • The government could put sterilants in the water supply, particularly in places where undesirable types of people, whom the government determines are bad influences on society, live.
  • It's perfectly fine for the government to target specific people as being unfit to have children, "providing they are not denied equal protection." (emphasis in original) Somehow it's possible to harmonize those.
  • The world will pretty much explode if America's population hits 280,000,000.
  • You could totally use the Constitution to justify forced abortions if you tried hard enough.
  • All of this should be enforced by a global police force.
  
  So yeah.

• Oh, by the way, the New York Times ran an article about Obama's controversial czar pick. You guessed it, it's Francis Collins, whose crimes amount to mapping the human genome and not being an atheist. What, you thought they'd have a problem with the guy who wants UN soldiers to take away your babies and put stuff in your water?
• Another matryoshka bullet: Glenn Beck points out all the even more important news stories that we're not noticing. If you don't have the time to watch the video, here's a brief summary of them:
  • Obama's considering a second stimulus (which would actually be a third; Bush did the first one)
  • Russia just unveiled a global currency that they want us all to use
  • Al Gore says the cap and trade bill will "bring about global governance"
  • More evidence that GE is to the Obama administration as Halliburton was to Bush's, except possibly on steroids
  • It looks like labor unions are getting a lot of say in writing the healthcare bills
  • And all of these things are happening all at the same time for a reason: sensory overload. We can't possibly pay attention to all the things we need to, and so a lot more stuff gets done because we stop noticing. Checks and balances go out the window.

• Henry Paulson says he was justified in telling the head of Bank of America that he'd be fired if he didn't do what the government wanted him to do.
• Two very sober, level-headed articles about Palin: Sarah 'Barracuda' Palin and the Piranhas of the Press, a rare admission from a journalist that the media was really unfair to her and that Biden is way stupider than her, and Why Palin Quit, an editorial from the Wall Street Journal whose title is pretty self-explanatory.
• Finally getting around to a lighter note, IMAO has some hard-hitting questions about Obama and butts. And let it be further noted that there's no video play-by-play that can get him out of this other picture.

• Does anyone else think it looks a bit unprofessional that Obama's tie is always sticking out of the bottom of his jacket?
• And now it's a YouTube Choose Your Own Adventure thing.
  • If you want something relaxing, click here.
  • If you want something funny, click here.
  • If you want something crazy, click here.
  • If you want something guano insane and a bit disturbing, click here.

The best game whose title is an Italian word for river or coast or something that I've ever played

So it's been a little over a year since the last time I recommended an RPG. I'd probably do this more often if I had more money. But that's true of a lot of things. Although I haven't played through this one as far as I had TWEWY when I recommended it, it's already showing too much promise for me not to plug it.

Like TWEWY, Riviera: The Promised Land is one of the most unique games I've ever played. At every turn, it has some new spin on the way RPGs are supposed to work. The biggest twists are on how the narrative works and on how you move. In most RPGs, you get a big chunk of story in a long cutscene, then a long chunk of silent dungeon-crawling, then another chunk of story. In Riviera, the story and the dungeon crawling are mixed together. On just about every screen you'll get a couple lines of dialogue. This makes it great for portability; you can play it in much smaller snippets than most other GBA RPGs.

Also, in most RPGs, you can move around anywhere you want with the analog stick or the D-pad, provided your path isn't blocked by a foot-high fence, a tree that you ought to be able to burn down with your fire spell, or a boundary that didn't even bother to make itself visible. That is, most RPGs try to make it look like you have more freedom than you really do, but are trying to subtly make you go the right way by blocking off all the other ways. I've never really liked that, being given the impression that there's lots of things to do and lots of ways to do them but you can tell there's only one way it's supposed to be done. Riviera knows that it's often quite linear, and it's not insecure about it. When there's only one way to go, you just tap right on the control pad to go there. If there's a switch you have to press first, press A to go into Look mode and it'll be there; no more looking at every tile in the room to find the invisible button. The game also forces you to be more deliberate about your moves,
both in and out of battle, through scarcity. You can only take four items into battle, and just about all of them have a limited number of uses, including most weapons. Out of battle, just about every action other than walking and finding mandatory plot coupons costs you. After each battle, you get between 1 and 5 TP, depending mainly on how quickly you finished, and things like opening chests and looking at statues usually cost 1 TP each. This means you simply can't get everything, not on the first time through at least. Overall, it means you really do have to give some thought to strategy; there's very little opportunity to just spam your way through.

Of course, I'm watching The Core right now, so you may not want to take my media recommendations. I know I'm pretty late to the party here, but yeah, the science in it is pretty bad. "It's made up of electricity and magnetism, so it's called the electromagnetic field." Dang. You really have to make an effort to fail that bad. This is worse than the science in Phantom Planet. And almost as bad as Day After Tomorrow. You know, Day After Tomorrow is kind of like the Da Vinci Code. It never explicitly claims to be the truth, but because it deals with the same things that actual smart people are talking about at the same time and comes to some similar conclusions, people can tend to associate it far too closely with the truth, and the makers never really make any attempt to clear up the confusion. That's kinda lousy.

This better not turn into a habit

Obama checking out the butt of a 17-year-old Brazilian girl while at the G8 summit in Italy. True, the age of consent in both Italy and Brazil is 14, but it still wouldn't be a good idea, Barry. It would certainly take some of the spotlight off of Sanford for a while.

Avid Rodentheads will remember that shortly after the inauguration, I commented briefly on Obama "booty-bumping" a 9th-grader. The article that that post links to is gone (though you can still read the headline), so to save you some time, I said "If this was a Republican president, everyone would be crying pedophila. They'd be wrong, of course. The correct term in this instance is ephebophilia." Of course, Wikipedia has since clarified their articles a bit, and it seems that hebephilia is actually the more appropriate term. But anyway... yeah. I don't know. Let's just laugh at the funny picture, while those of us who are over 18 pretend not to be attracted to the 17-year-old who's obviously trying to look attractive.

It's another post that's just a song

Haven't had one of these in a while. It's Hold Fast, by MercyMe, if you were wondering and wanted to know what it was before you clicked on it. Coming Up To Breathe is probably my favorite album of any album that I own. One of them, at least. Of course, every album I own is one of my favorite albums that I own, that's just how numbers and stuff work.

I don't think it stands for Nickel Metal Hydride

Secret of NIMH is a great movie, but the DVD cover it gets in America sucks.



"Purely delicious"? "A perfect treat for the entire family"? What the hell movie was that reviewer watching? This is not a kids' movie. You can show it to your kids if you want to, I guess, but they'll probably have nightmares for like ever. At least wean them onto it with Once Upon A Forest first. Not saying kids shouldn't watch it, just that you need to know that just because it's a cartoon mouse movie doesn't mean it's all sunshine and happy. And I'm all for that. America needs to realize that animation is just another medium, one that can be used to tell any kind of story and one that deserves to be done well. Pixar knows it, Don Bluth knew it, all the great cartoonists of the past knew it, and most other countries know it.

Here, watch this.



See what I mean? So yeah. Also, I think I've said it before, but Don Bluth had some serious issues with cats. Even more so than your average cartoon mouse movie maker.

Sarah Palin resigns

Not running for reelection, and leaving at the end of the month to skip the lame duck period. That video is just the most interesting parts of the announcement; if you want the whole thing then watch this or read this.

Everyone on the internet is convinced that this is either proof that she's definitely running for president in 2012 or that she's definitely not running for president in 2012. I don't know, I kind of got the feeling that she's not really thinking of either right now. I think she's a bit tired of the whole thing. I know people criticize her for playing the victim too often, but I think they overlook how much crap she's really gotten. It's true that Bush and Reagan got criticized a lot and didn't ever say much about it, but did either of them have their church burned down? A month after she lost and went back to Alaska, a group of arsonists set fire to her 1,000-member church in Wasilla. And this wasn't vandalism. While people were inside, the arsonists cut the phone lines and set a fire at the entrance. That's straight-up attempted murder. True, Reagan didn't complain about unfair treatment as much, but did he have people trying to kill his friends? Besides, it's not like she complains about the media anywhere near as much as Obama whines about the existence of Fox News.

I don't know if she's ever even wanted to be president, but I do know she loves her family and wants what's best for them. I think she put a lot more thought into that than about where her political career would go after this, and I think the Letterman thing was the last straw. Looks to me like she wants to try and get her family out of the public spotlight (of course, they would be already if the media had any decency, but yeah), at least for now, and maybe if the media gets a little more sane in a few years, it'll be safe to come back out again. Resigning now is the best thing for her family and the best thing for Alaska -- as good a governor as she is, the amount of unbridled (and undeserved) hate that she draws from people who have no reason to care is getting to be too big of a distraction. A chicken-fried steak is much better than a peanut butter sandwich, but if I'm in a room with a guy who has a habit of continuously hitting people on the head with an oversized mallet when he sees them eating chicken-fried steak, I'd have to go with the peanut butter sandwich. In and of itself, the chicken-fried steak is a much better food, but in the situation I'm in, it brings a painful, annoying distraction with it for stupid reasons; likewise, Palin is a great governor, but if the alternative is someone who's not as good but won't be attacked as relentlessly, that's probably better overall.

And just why is she so hated? Look at the comments section of the article that the post of mine that I linked to a couple paragraphs ago links to. About half of the comments there are from people congratulating the arsonists, accusing Sarah of setting the fire herself to get attention, and otherwise being complete douches with no regard for the lives of people they disagree with. Isn't there a single liberal who's willing to stand up and say "Hey, she's a human being, dammit!" Are her views -- or the media's caricature of them (she never supported abstinence-only sex ed, for starters) -- really that despicable? What, because she shoots wolves for population control purposes in a method that could be considered unsportsmanlike? YOUR GUY THINKS INFANTS SHOULD BE LEFT TO DIE IN CLOSETS FOR GOD'S SAKE!! I mean, seriously, Palin has shortcomings, but the only reason they matter is because of her beliefs. Palin complains about the media sometimes, Obama complains about the one channel that doesn't love him constantly. Palin kills wolves, Obama kills babies. Palin only has four years of experience, Obama had 144 days of experience when he started his campaign. Palin's church says some controversial things, Obama's church... two words: "Them Jews." Don't we get to point out the unfairness just a little bit?

There's a part of me that wonders if this whole thing has been a conspiracy. We already heard a couple months ago that Edwards' staff wasn't going to let him win. I know I'm a bit of a loon when I allow myself to be, but I can't help wondering if it's bigger than this. What if no one except Obama was supposed to win? I mean, did anyone really expect McCain to win? Maybe people were stupid enough to think that if you get someone with some liberal policies, some Bush policies, and an R after his name, that'd make everyone happy instead of pissing everyone off, but I think it actually makes more sense if he was the fall guy. I don't know if the GOP was actively working against McCain, but I doubt they were optimistic about him winning. I think they figured there was no way a Democrat wasn't going to win after eight years of Bush, so there was no use putting up someone who actually had a chance of winning.

But again, I ask my insane self, what if it's bigger still? I had previously thought that McCain was in on the whole thing, picked Palin because he kind of felt like trying to win, then thought better of it and went back to sleep. But after looking at how crappily his campaign handlers presented her to the nation and how unprepared she was for the violent attacks of the media, I wonder whether someone in the higher-ups meant to sabotage her career. I mean, looking at Palin a year ago, she was clearly not someone who planned on being in the White House five months from then. She was just a young, charismatic, self-made mother of five minding her own business thousands of miles away, and probably could have had a stellar introduction to the national stage ten years down the road, the pipeline completed and successful and its effects visible throughout the lower 48, Alaska continuing to thrive even better than now as the rest of the nation tries to crawl out of the depression Obama will probably end up causing, still young enough to have a long career ahead of her, and most of her kids grown up and safely out of the way. In 2008, she wasn't ready yet, and I submit that the Washington elite knew that, and wanted to nip in the bud what could have been an incredible career of a very capable outsider, by whatever means necessary.

Can she recover from it? Theoretically, I'm pretty sure it's possible, and I sure don't want her to lose to this attack. Pragmatically, I have doubts. I don't think there's anyone I'd rather see as president, but I hope it doesn't just end up with more hatred spewed at her, more of her friends nearly murdered, more mockery, misogyny, and apathy about said nearly murdered friends from the media, and four more years of Obama. There are other candidates who would do a decent job, though probably not as good as her, and if they're good enough to fix the country and it means that Sarah's family stays safe, I may have to go with one of them.

If you put their names together, it's almost Sanitizer

Spitzer on Sanford. The ex-governor of New York, who once said that the way to deal with high gas prices was to raise taxes on gas stations, apparently considers himself morally superior to Gov. Sanford because "I didn't fall in love with any of them." No, you just took advantage of them, chewed them up, spit them out, and moved on to the next one, feeling nothing but arousal. Yeah, you're definitely the bigger man here. That's certainly a far more mature, adult thing to do.

I'm not saying that what Sanford did wasn't wrong, or that he was better than Spitzer. I'm writing this as though I'm talking to Spitzer -- he's put himself on the moral high horse while everyone already considers Sanford to be in the wrong, so I just need to knock Spitzer down to Sanford's level. They're both about equally bad in their own ways. Sanford neglected or rejected his commitment to his wife and let another woman replace her in his heart. Spitzer had no heart, sticking it in wherever he could and then using his wife as a shield in press conferences. Both are very wrong, but at least Sanford's wrongs were corruptions of a right, loving when he shouldn't have. Even if his feelings were very wrongly placed, at least he had some. They're both hypocrites, as both of them campaigned on family issues -- Spitzer even ended up breaking his own prostitution laws, which is both textbook hypocritical and just straight-up stupid.

Again, I hope I don't sound like I'm romanticizing what Sanford did. I don't want to minimize just how wrong what he did was. But at the same time, I don't want to maximize it. It seems today that too many conservatives try to paint the world as being strictly divided between people who have committed grave sins and have no hope for redemption (i.e., bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Mark Sanford) and those who have never done anything seriously wrong (i.e., me and everyone I know -- or don't know well enough to know better). As a Christian -- and if you don't know Christianity well enough, you might find this surprising -- I cannot abide that position. We're all bad. There are some of us who are much worse than others when we judge by human standards, but compared to God, there's no difference. God is infinitely perfect, and by the very nature of perfection, no one can be closer to perfection than anyone else. If you have any imperfection, you are infinitely far from infinite perfection. We can, through no merit of our own, accept Christ's universally offered sacrifice and be considered perfect for technical purposes, but even then, Christians are ultimately no better than non-Christians. We do start acting a little better than we used to as a result of our changed attitude, but compared to God, it's nothing.

Of course I recognize that for governmental purposes, wrongs must be considered on human scales and we must punish the worse and reward the better. It's when we get into any kind of personal moral superiority and claims of irredeemability that I can't hang anymore. Everyone needs to be forgiven and everyone can be forgiven. No human deserves to be forgiven, which is why we humans ought to always forgive each other. That doesn't mean things don't change. That doesn't mean we don't do justice. That doesn't mean we have to keep going back to the ones who hurt us. It does, however, mean that we constantly recognize that they are the same kind of thing as we are.

Guess I should talk about politics again

Yay! It's another bullet points post!

- Sotomayor's firefighter case is the latest of her decisions to be overturned by the Supreme Court. Not really big news, ultimately. It was 5-4, so it's not as damning of Sotomayor as it should be. I think Obama has every right to nominate someone with the intent of changing the face of the court. I think he and she are dead wrong, but I'll allow them to be wrong so long as they continue to allow me to say they're wrong.

- The 5 did the right thing, though I find it hard to unequivocally say "justice was done." There are racial inequalities, I just don't think it's the government's job to meddle with them. It's something we need to take care of on our own.

- The Democratic Speaker of the Assembly in California thinks democracy is terrorism. The headliner, of course, is that she thinks that talk show hosts are terrorists, which is a stupid and inflammatory and inconsiderate and perverted thing for a politician to say, but unfortunately not a rare one. The real news, in my opinion, is the way in which she says talk show hosts are committing terrorism: by calling for recall elections of politicians who make choices that a large enough faction of their listeners don't like. That's direct democracy. So, just to emphasize, this Democrat doesn't want voters to utilize a built-in facet of California government because it makes it too lowercase-D democratic. Glad we got that straight.

- This is more religion than politics, but whatever. Richard Dawkins opens his own summer camp, Camp Quest. It's not quite an "atheist summer camp", I guess. They're not telling the kids that God doesn't exist, they're just telling them how to come to that conclusion. Dawkins seems to have made a career out of ignoring that there really are intelligent Christians out there who have reasons for what they believe, as well as creative applications of the genetic fallacy ("Some people who believe x do so because of this non-logical reason, therefore x is false."). Also, there's a Camp Quest counselor in there who says that part of what tell the kids about at "Cafe Socrates" is "We teach them that even people like Sir David Attenborough are religious sceptics," so there's an argument from authority right there. You can't have it both ways, Dawkins. You complain about Christians bragging about Einstein maybe believing in some kind of deity, and then your camp does this. You can either get rid of the testimonials and make it purely a logical battle, or you can turn it into a "who has more famous people" contest, but you can't do a half-assed job at both and expect it to be enough, just like when a test tells you to pick one of two essay questions and write two pages on it, you can't just do both and write one page for each.

- Am I the only one who doesn't get why the name FCAPs is funny? I get it probably has something to do with the F, but I don't hear it. Maybe it's a British thing. And why is the column that mentioned it to me from tomorrow, anyway? Did I fall into a vortex?

- Maybe I'm just thick, but it seems like Wikipedia uses links as a crutch, especially on advanced scientific articles. They think that because we can click on on their words to go to huge articles to figure out what the word means, they don't have to explain things in a concise and understandable way. They need to realize that the only people reading those articles are members of the general public who are curious about science but know very little about it and don't have a lot of free time. The people who can understand those technical terms already know about everything in there, and if they don't, they're certainly going to look somewhere more reputable than Wikipedia. Stop being so elitist and write for us. Be Prometheus. And stop covering for the New York Times.

- Also Hawaii might get bombed again.

Why?

High school salutatorians always start their speech talking about how they started writing the speech. That's just a fancy version of "In this paper, I will address..."

Socks always come in resealable bags. Always.

I can't find an antiperspirant that works on me anymore. Did they change, or did I?

Was that last one too personal? In that case, I've got a weird scab on my foot and I occasionally wonder if my underwear is too comfortable. I also never spell "occasionally" the right way the first time.

Dammit, stop dying, you guys!

Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and now Billy Mays. BILLY FRICKING MAYS! How the hell can Billy Mays die? I think it's time to start looking into whether Mark Sanford has a secret army of hitmen. Isn't it a bit suspicious that as soon as he's forced to reveal that he's a cheating scumbag, famous people start dropping like flies and the news networks completely forget about him?

He's still dead.

I wonder when it's really going to sink in. Do things like this ever really sink in, or does it take a whole generation? For months, maybe even years after 9/11, there were days when I would just be thinking about something completely different and then suddenly think to myself "Holy crap... the Twin Towers are gone."

Here's some more reflections on it that get at it from some angles I missed, or didn't do justice to. Maybe they'll help.

Michael Jackson is dead

Looks like it's pretty much totally confirmed now.

I'm really going to miss him. I was too young and too TV-less to enjoy his music the first time around, and instead I mostly just heard the jokes about him (i.e., why did he go to J.C. Penney's? He heard boys' pants were half-off.). It's unfortunate, really, because it caused me to just completely write him off for a long time. He was a musical genius, and it took Sonic 3 for me to start noticing.

Was he a child molester? I have to say, I really doubt it. For as much as I would laugh along with the jokes, I honestly don't think he was. I mean, if it was just some random neighborhood guy who one day up and decided to dress up like Peter Pan and call his backyard Neverland and invite kids over, then I'd say he probably was, but this was much bigger than that. Look at these pictures. I really don't think someone would spend so many millions of dollars and so many years of his life on something like this if it was just a facade, an elaborate ruse to get in kids' pants. If all he wanted was some preteen action, he had enough money and power to just fly over to any number of countries with underage prostitutes and even do it sort of legally. And what's more, pedophiles are never that blatant. They may actually sometimes have the stereotypical white van, but they never have a van with fifty-foot high neon signs that say "I FREAKIN' LOVE LITTLE KIDS!" Pedophiles are smart enough to avoid suspicion. That MJ could be so open about it means he was either completely guano-insane (quite likely), couldn't recognize when things could be interpreted sexually (pretty unlikely; he was a songwriter after all), or that he felt he had nothing to hide.

Looking at the whole narrative of his life, it all seems to be consistent with the life of a man who, thanks in large part to his life in the spotlight, could never let go of his childhood. I certainly won't deny he had issues, or that some professionals certainly would have considered him clinically insane. But I think he was genuine. I think what you saw was what you got with him, for better or worse. And what tends to be forgotten is that he was acquitted of all the molestation charges, and after multiple searches, police never found any child porn in his possession.

Maybe I'm completely wrong here. But I'm probably going to stick with my position here for a while, partly because I like being contrarianistical, and partly because if there's one thing worse than sexually abusing children, it's falsely accusing and condemning someone of sexually abusing children for your own gain. I don't know, and probably never will, which of those happened, but I don't want to demonize him for something that might not be true (and, if you trust the American justice system, which I sometimes do, definitely isn't true).

Anyway, here's some awesome Sonic/MJ remixes, more focused on sounding good than on showing actual connections between the songs.







MJ was kind of like Sonic. Totally awesome in the 90s, then slowly fell apart, cheered on by a press who seemed to enjoy his destruction. I'm not going to go all Chris Crocker or anything, I'm just saying Sonic Rush is a better game than most people realize.

Incidentally, Sonic turned 18 day before yesterday. I'll go ahead and let you make the jokes yourselves.

A few stray thoughts

- I could say something about Obama waiting a week to say anything nearly substantial about Iranian protestors getting beaten to death in the streets and then still inviting Iranian diplomats to the big White House Independence Day party, but I won't. I think I implied enough of my feelings about the whole mess just now.

- Without knowing it, I always mentally shipped the characters on Magic School Bus while watching it, even before I really knew anything about relationships. You can't deny that DArlos (or CA) and Walphie (or Rwanda) had chemistry, and Phoebe and Arnold always seemed perfect for each other even if neither of them would ever have done anything about it. Tim and Keesha get paired up too, I guess, since they're the only ones left. And because they're both black. I don't know, I never really noticed much about them other than that Keesha tends to be skeptical about the bus being able to do what it does every week and Tim was apparently good at drawing. They were a little too normal, especially for cartoon characters.

- After getting past the initial stages of trying to play it like it's Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, I've really been getting into Dr. Mario lately. You know how when you play Tetris or any other repetitive action-puzzle game for too long you start to see the falling/sliding/whatever blocks whenever you close your eyes? I'm getting that now with the Dr. Mario pills, usually accompanied with a vague sense of claustrophobia, coming from the combination of the enclosed spaces, lack of the infinite spin crutch I had gotten so used to in Tetris, the viruses clogging up the screen, and the way that the colors have to be lined up rather than just being able to go in whatever direction you want, like in the aforementioned Mean Bean Machine.

- I wonder what would happen if Dr. Mario were proposed today. Would any respectable game studio now greenlight taking a popular mascot from mainstream games and turning him into a doctor haphazardly throwing thousands of pills at his apparent patients?

- For that matter, if Dr. Mario were pitched today, would either the developers or the publishers be able to let it remain so innocent? When you think about it, a falling-blocks game centered around pills should be, according to modern entertainment standards, a lot darker than it is.

- Did I really just make portmanteau relationship monikers (or portshikers, if you want to be semi-autological about it) for Magic School Bus characters? Has this blog stooped that low?

- If you're wondering why I didn't have a Father's Day post on Sunday, I couldn't find any videos of Mr. T singing about treating your father right.

-By the way, Phobe and Arnold are Pharnold.

Another scandal about a Democratic president taking down a fly

Good Lord, PeTA, are you people even trying any more?

Obama killed a fly during an interview. And, as many of us jokingly predicted, PeTA is pissed. I don't feel like writing a full post for this, so here's some bullet points:

• PeTA kills animals.
• If this is the first thing Obama's done that PeTA doesn't like, I'm seriously scared.
• PeTA kills animals.
• If Obama killing a fly is the first thing that "indicates he's not perfect" to you, you need help.
• Did I mention that PeTA kills animals? Why is it wrong for Obama to kill an uninvited insect that was inconveniencing him if it's a good thing for PeTA to kill inconvenient cats and dogs that they ask people to bring to them?

PeTA also kills people, by the way. They support the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, terrorist organizations that bomb medical research labs and generally cause mayhem with the ultimate goal of wiping out all humanity -- "liberating" the earth.

Isn't it interesting that whenever people say we need to kill most or all of the humans in the world for the betterment of the planet, they never include themselves? PeTA VP Mary Beth Sweetland is diabetic, and needs insulin made from pigs every day. She says she doesn't have any problems with doing that, because "I need my life to fight for the rights of animals."

They kill people to save animals, kill animals to save themselves, and nine times out of ten, when someone gives them an animal, they kill it just to get it out of the way. They don't care about people, and they certainly don't care about animals. They care only about themselves.

This isn't to say that everyone who has anything to do with PeTA is a horrible person, of course. Most people who are members of it and have the bumper stickers are good people who have been fooled into thinking that PeTA is a legitimate organization like the SPCA. But it's not.

PeTA's philosophy, as irrelevant as it is to most people in it, brings up an interesting point about the dual nature of man. We are amazing, incredible beings, the pinnacle of creation and made in the very image of God Almighty, with potential to do incredible things; yet we are fallen, sinful, disgraced and wicked, and every last one of us is deserving of death; yet God loves us enough to save us. We must understand our whole nature. On the right, there are some extreme religious fundamentalists whose focus on our exceedingly great sins against a holy and righteous God is not balanced out enough with the good news, and there are also extreme Randians who say not only that capitalism can solve all our ills, but that selfishness is a virtue to be cherished -- that it is not that capitalism harnesses our badness, rather that in capitalism we are acting out the greatest possible good in achieving our own goals. On the left, there are extreme Marxists who believe that the goodness of humanity can be fostered and encouraged until we achieve a perfect utopia of equality -- or, as Marxism carried out to its logical conclusion always ends up doing when faced with the real world, that the bad elements of society can be killed -- and that we are worthy of deciding who lives and who dies, and there are also extreme environmentalists who believe man's transgressions to be so great that the only good thing we can possibly do is to cause our own extinction, removing our filthy stain from the universe. All four of those extremes are wrong.

A proper and complete worldview -- encompassing our opinions and actions about ourselves, other people, theology, politics, nature, history, and everything else -- must, among other things, take into account that we are good and bad, strong and frail, knowing so much and so little, and forgiveable, if we are humble, though still never perfect. 

Wait... I kind of ended up writing a full post about this, didn't I?

Iran... wow.

Well, let's recap so far. Ahmadinejad and Moussavi both thought they won. Ahmedinejad runs the government, so his thought was the one that mattered. Anecdotal reports from election officials say that the votes were never actually counted. Everyone in Iran realizes that they've been screwed over and takes to the streets. Amhadinejad praises the protests as proof that Iran is a free country, then sends the attack dogs after them, with at least one confirmed report of a protestor beaten to death by riot police. That started two or three days ago, and it's still going strong. Some incredible photos over here.

Twitter has been instrumental to this whole thing. You can still watch the updates pour in by the thousands by going to TwitterFall and clicking #iranelection on the side. Apparently, Twitter was one of the only forms of communication that wasn't blocked by the government in preparation for the fallout they knew would come from the election results, so there have been many Iranians giving moment-by-moment accounts of the whole thing since the beginning. According to a report from CNN, the US State Department even asked Twitter to reschedule its maintenance so that Iranians could keep tweeting the whole thing and all of us could keep watching them.

The Iranian government has finally started to catch on, though, and arrests are being made, apparently using Twitter as part of the tracking process. To help throw them off, I've followed the lead and deleted all my tweets that mentioned any Iranians by name (I've got them saved on my computer for posterity; hopefully when things calm down in the future I can post them up somewhere for the historical value), protected all my updates that are left, and set my time zone to Tehran (GMT+3:30). This page details those and some other things you can do to help the revolution.

I also felt like putting up this song. Seemed appropriate.



By the way, the next chapter of The Chosen One is going to be delayed a bit, if anyone was keeping track.

Jeremiah Wright, them Jews, and why it still matters

"Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me."

"But Peren," you say, "Obama doesn't go to that church anymore! How can you connect him to that?" Please. Has religion really become that irrelevant to the average American -- or at least that off-limits -- that we don't think it's at all pertinent what doctrines a person listens to every week for years on end? Are we really so foolish as to think that theology and philosophy don't affect one's outlook on the world and one's actions? Really?

Watch this little classic, then report back to me.



Did you watch it? Okay then.

Look. Obama went to that church between two and four times a month (depending on which interview with him you believe) for twenty years. He got married there. He had his kids, who have been there their entire lives, baptized there. He used a line from a sermon there as the title of his second autobiography. While he did admit at the Compassion Forum that he only joined the church in the first place for political positioning, you can't tell me that it wasn't important to him, or at least that he didn't want to be seen as thinking it was important. And he didn't leave it until after we started paying attention. Wright has a history of comments like that, he didn't just start making them all of a sudden in '08, and there's no possible way you can honestly put a good construction on Obama's role in this. Either he agrees with the anti-white, anti-Jew, anti-American hate preached there, or he was too ignorant (and negligent, in bringing his young impressionable children there) to notice it, or he's apathetic toward that kind of thing, or -- least likely -- he tried to confront Wright about it but was too incompetent and ineffective to do anything, and then he still didn't leave.

And Wright's latest comment about "them Jews", later "clarified" as meaning to say "them Zionists" is all the more relevant in the light of Obama's accusatory tone toward Israel in his recent Cairo speech. So in addition to all those connections highlighted in the video: Marxism, meeting with genocidal dictators, implying that whites are inherently racist; now we can add a distaste for uppity Jews. Can we really afford to believe that Obama doesn't sympathize in the slightest with his "spiritual mentor" of twenty years, whom he abandoned only when he became a political liability?

The Chosen One: Chapter Nein

Lasers blazing, the far-flung president's invisible TIE Phantom descended on the mysterious ruins. Flanked only by four hand-picked loyalists, two of whom were officially dead, their excursion would go completely undetected by Imperial brass. Though it was nowhere near even the planning stages, the Emperor's squadron's upcoming attack on this site would be unexpectedly terminated. He didn't know what was here, only that there was something powerful here, something that all the missions of the last six months or so had secretly been leading up to, and he'd be damned if he let the Emperor get it before he did.

His analysis of the rendezvous sites had led him to this planet; there was no doubt, even without all the evidence the Emperor apparently needed, that this was the ultimate goal, and immediately upon arriving on the nameless, faceless, long-forgotten planet, he knew somehow -- the Force? instinct? -- exactly where, if not exactly what, it was. Within this schizophrenic structure, seeming to vaguely resemble Stonehenge, but made of materials thousands of years beyond the technological grasp of Earthlings, was some force... some object... or perhaps someone... of ultimate power.

A large trapezoidal cutout in the anterior wall of the ruin, clearly a door, would be the obvious beginning point for most, surely, but he would have no part of that. Looking into a quantumly possible future with one of his countless new Force powers, he saw himself opening that door, only to find that instead of opening, it fell forward, inward, crushing whatever great treasure was immediately within it. He would have to get to it another way.

The cloaked turrets, too old and weak to detect lifesigns through the walls of the TIE fighters, yet probably still operational enough to do some damage to anyone walking unprotected on the ground, were soon summarily destroyed by the other fighters, and he called them off. He landed his Phantom atop a rock shaped vaguely like a humanoid foot -- appropriate, he thought, for the first living foot to set upon this land in many thousands of years. Deftly, he made his way to the door, looking up at the smoke pouring from the still-invisible disabled turrets and the many two- or three-inch-wide holes surrounding them. That should be enough to equalize it, he thought. Examining the door, careful not to put any pressure on it, his suspicions and inklings were confirmed when he found that the door, fortunately enough, was composed mostly of endurometalor material -- invulnerable to most Force powers, but highly magnetic.

Knowing exactly what to do, he removed the pair of supercompressed Interceptors from his pockets and began rubbing them together, creating a magnetic field while he also slowly began to reenlarge them with the Force -- the magnetic field growing, as if by magic, along with them. Suddenly, swiftly, almost on its own, the binary magnet raised out of his hands and suspended itself in the air above the door, and in a beautiful symphony, the two lifted themselves out and away from the enormous doorway.

He walked inside.

I'm sort of tempted to make some kind of lame "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" joke, but I shouldn't

As you may have heard by now, David Letterman saw fit a night or two ago to make a lewd joke that, intentionally or not, implied -- light-heartedly, mind you -- the rape of Sarah Palin's 14-year-old daughter, in addition to aspersions cast on Sarah's integrity. And unfortunately, the reaction of most on the left has been "Well, Rush may have said that Chelsea Clinton was a dog according to some apocryphal accounts, so there." I am getting really sick of the "You guys did it first" defense. It's nothing but a self-defeating ad hominem non sequitor. Fortunately, the army of Hillary supporters at HillBuzz are among those who are standing up for respect regardless of party lines.

If asked, I can't deny that Sarah is a very attractive woman and Hillary is showing her age, albeit rather gracefully. But neither of those have any place in ideological debates, whether I agree with them or not, and it is never the slightest bit appropriate to say anything hateful and vulgar about a child in middle school just because you don't like their parents' politics. Believe me, if that thing about Rush calling a 12-year-old Chelsea "the White House dog" is proven to be true, I will be the first in line to punch him in the face.

Both Sarah and Hillary are qualified politicians and important pioneers, and they both deserve far more respect than being reduced to sexual objects. Women are people too, you know. So I'm joining in with their boycott of M&Ms/Mars, Embassy Suites, and Best Western, Letterman's most vital sponsors, until there's at least as big a fallout as there would be if he had made a similar joke about anyone other than a white Christian female Republican. Not that I stay at hotels often anyway, but I certainly won't be now. And no M&Ms.

A little more stuff about Tiller

Free abortions for everyone! What, you were expecting this? Not gonna happen.

But keep in mind that just because the killer was evil doesn't mean the victim wasn't. Martyrdom does not make you right, as those nineteen hijackers found out the hard way at around 10 AM. So it's nice to see that when one prominent abortionist outrageously compares Tiller to Martin Luther King Jr. and the existence of the pro-life movement in general to discrimination that blacks have faced, Dr. King's niece is there to slap some sense into him.

"Dr. Carhart also speaks of hate crimes," added Dr. King. "I would simply ask him, is it not hateful to regard an entire class of people as non-human because they're unwanted?"

That's gotta hurt.

By the way, here's a good column about how we ought to react to this whole thing.

It's a bit ironic that his last name is Hope

At least I think that's irony.

NINTERNET?!? (also interseg)

The downside to technological advancements is that we'll never see things like the Satellaview or the Sega Channel anymore now that we supposedly have superior technology. Sure, it's more efficient nowadays to just do everything over the internet, but in the mid 90s, Sega was delivering retail games, including games out in stores as well as games only released in Japan, right through your coax cable for just $15 a month. One time they made a game available only for 24 hours, and if you beat it you got a 1-800 number to call to get prizes. It even had parental controls more advanced than the consoles out now, and certainly more advanced than this (I know, huge selling point), not to mention that the infrastructure work they did to make sure it worked properly is credited with being a major factor in helping the adoption of digital TV, kind of like how all the preparing for Y2K made 9/11 not as bad as it could have been.

Meanwhile, the Satellaview beamed your games from space -- unlike a modem, you wouldn't be forced to only play at night when phone rates were cheaper -- and featured Zelda not just with voice acting, but live voice acting. As you and thousands of other people were playing through the same Zelda game all at once, all of you heard the performers say their lines as they said them. This is the kind of stuff that you'll never see on a modern console, not in as interesting and innovative a way, at least. Bit of a shame, in a way.

By the way, here's a very interesting and enlightening article from 2004 about Nintendo's online efforts up to then (hint: there's a lot), along with some vague predictions about what this generation was going to be like and just an overall look at their philosophy toward online gaming.

The speech Obama should have made two years ago

Now, there have been some accusations thrown around lately that I am a Muslim. I want to address those accusations, and I also want to apologize to the American people and especially to our Muslim community. My reaction and that of my supporters to these accusations or even the bringing up of my middle name has been to deny them so vehemently as to make it sound as though I have been called some horrible racial slur or accused of some heinous crime, and that was wrong.

Now, I am indeed a devout Christian, and one who's hopefully going to pay a little more attention to my pastor at the next church home I attend, both of which anyone who's been watching the news lately could see. What I do find a bit insulting about it, as I think should anyone who's serious about their faith, is that it seems just because I was given a Muslim name when I was born and raised for a while in a Muslim nation, that means I'm automatically going to be a Muslim. All of us are on our own faith journeys that last a lifetime, and often times we come to different conclusions than we would have before. Those of us who take our faith seriously don't just take for granted the things we learned in our childhood. We continually examine them throughout our whole lives, and sometimes a closer examination from another angle will confirm those views, and sometimes it will lead us to change our beliefs.

That said, even if I were secretly a Muslim, so what? Instead of angrily denouncing these attacks, I think we should all be asking why exactly we consider them to be attacks. What are the ones who start these rumors trying to imply? And that's not a rhetorical question, nor an easy one. It's a question that must be addressed. Now, I will be the last person to deny the attacks of September 11th, which were carried out by a group of madmen who did indeed believe they were carrying out the will of God, and they justified their actions with the Holy Koran. But that shouldn't be the sole image of Islam that we in the West see. One thing I do agree with President Bush on is how he has always defended the religion of Islam as being one of peace. I have a great deal of respect for the president for that. It would be easy for him, as it has been easy for many of us, to blame the whole religion for the actions of a small minority. But it would be similarly easy to blame all American Christians for the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church, something that too many people have also done. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are good, honest, peace-loving people like you and me.

Now, I'm not going to deny that there are a number of problematic passages in the Koran, probably more so than in the Bible. I heard many of them while growing up in Indonesia. A strict literal reading of some select verses in the Koran can indeed leave you with a theology that is hostile and even violent toward unbelievers. But I don't believe that's the correct interpretation of those passages or of the Koran as a whole, and neither do most of the over one billion Muslims in the world. They recognize, as do Christians, Jews, Hindus, Baha'i, and people of all faiths, that it is not the will of God, nor should it be our will, for any innocent men, women, and children to be killed, and they have rightly condemned the misguided, self-serving actions of Al Qaeda and the Taliban time and time again. I am not a Muslim, but I don't consider such labels to be slanderous, and were I a Muslim, I would be honored to be part of such a rich culture.

Now, I certainly don't agree with all the stuff in there, as a glance at many of my previous posts will show, but if Obama had given a speech like this while on the campaign trail rather than waiting until after he'd won to give a watered-down version of it, I would have some respect for him. It just seems like the kind of speech he would give if he were honest and brave and not just another opportunistic politician. If I were to write the ideal speech I wish Obama would give, it would require fundamentally changing most of his beliefs; this is the best I could do with the hand we were dealt.

I know, I said I wasn't going to say more about the Egypt speech. I guess I lied. Although this has really been kicking around in my brain ever since those secret Muslim rumors first started circulating. The Egypt speech was just the last straw.

Blah blah blah KOOPALINGS. (then some more blahing about stuff)

I'm glad I've never defined this as a strictly political blog. If I had, I'd feel obligated to say something more about Obama's speech in Egypt other than to generally say that he went into college professor mode and indulged in overequivocation in a vain attempt to be seen as an impartial mediator (and to echo questions of who represents America if the president of America is the mediator rather than America's advocate, as well as to point out the huge implications no one seems to be noticing about Obama emphasizing our "interdependence" and saying that we can't hold any one nation over any others -- didn't we kind of start this thing with a declaration of independence? Agree with his ideology if you want, but acknowledge that his language belies a fundamental change from the way we've been doing things for the last quarter millennium). Instead, I will post a video of Morton Koopa Jr. in New Super Mario Bros. Wii.



On the other hand, if this were a strictly political blog, I might have made more of an effort to say something more meaningful about the D-Day anniversary yesterday than this sentence saying that nothing I ever say could possibly do justice to the amazing sacrifices that millions of men and women have made for us. Or I might have just criticized Obama for snubbing the Queen again.

That Morton video is really only interesting in that it confirms that the Koopalings are finally coming back. If you want to see a good gameplay video, I'd recommend the following one.



The part the really got me and convinced me that this has to be on Wii (other than the apparent huge CPU demands, which I trust Miyamoto on, as well as the fact that it's much more fun to have all four of you up on a big screen instead of each on your own tiny screen, not to mention much cheaper and easier to organize) was the Thwomps from 1:10 on, especially the part at 1:37. That's the kind of sense of scale that you can't get on a DS, nor on the NES, SNES, or N64, which all had about the same resolution as the DS. Without a TV, the castle can't feel big. It can feel challenging, it can feel atmospheric, it can feel Marioy, but it's not big. This is the part that truly convinced me that we need sidescrollers on consoles; that they shouldn't just be confined to handhelds. NSMB on the DS felt like SMB3 with new levels and enemies and power-ups, but this feels like a whole new Mario game.

We become blind to the past if we don't think sidescrollers should take advantage of consoles. 2D Mario wasn't just pure unadulterated gameplay that would have worked anywhere. The power of the NES allowed SMB1 to be a smooth side-scroller rather than a single-screen arcade game. Once the powers of the NES had been more deeply explored and exploited, SMB3 could let Mario fly and grab shells and jump out of water rather than just being an expansion pack sequel like Lost Levels was. The SNES allowed Miyamoto to finally realize his dream of Mario riding a dinosaur. Now, the processing power of a modern console allows four players to play simultaneously at a resolution high enough to feel big. Technology has always driven Mario forward, which shouldn't be surprising considering Nintendo is the last and best of the classic companies whose hardware and software divisions are in an inseparable symbiotic relationship.

Incidentally, a few people have wondered why NSMB and NSMBW aren't numbered SMB games. The answer is simple: it's complicated. Okay, so you've got Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3. Then you've got a completely different game that's also Super Mario Bros. 2 depending on which country you're in. Then you've got Super Mario Bros. Special on the PC-88, which was the first officially sanctioned sequel to Super Mario Bros., but that never gets any attention. In Japan, Super Mario World is Super Mario Bros. 4, and in America, Yoshi's Island is Super Mario World 2. Does that mean Yoshi's Story (originally titled Yoshi's Island 64) is Super Mario World 3? Then what's Super Mario World 4? Yoshi Topsy Turvy (known outside America by the much cooler name Yoshi's Universal Gravitation), which is a stylistic sequel to Yoshi's Story, or Yoshi's Island DS (originally titled Yoshi's Island 2, but apparently they remembered that Yoshi's Story was supposed to be that, and if they called it Yoshi's Island 3, half of us would be confused and the other half would complain about them acknowledging Yoshi's Story as an actual game, although it's really not half bad), a more direct sequel to Yoshi's Island that pretty much completely ignores Yoshi's Story? So we're up to either Super Mario Bros. 9 or 10 by now at least; NSMB is 10 or 11 and NSMBW is 11 or 12.

And if you think to yourself, "Hey, if friggin' Yoshi Topsy Turvy counts, surely Super Mario Land should count too," that's a whole new mess of worms. Super Mario Land 3 is Wario Land 1, and Wario World and Wario: Master of Disguise are kind of part of that series -- and once you've included a marginally related 3D game, surely you should also include Mario's own 3D games, right? And what about Donkey Kong Country? It's basically a sequel to Donkey Kong Jr. (and so is Donkey Kong Jr. Math, so Mario is Missing and Mario's Time Machine ought to count too) which was a sequel to Donkey Kong which was a prequel to Mario Bros. which evolved into Super Mario Bros. And once Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is a Super Mario Bros. game, you might as well include King of Swing and Jungle Climber, which are kind of spiritual successors to Jungle Beat (using two shoulder buttons instead of two bongos; of course then it's only fair to include Clu Clu Land). Does Super Paper Mario count? What about Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, where the bros. are usually in side-scrolling sections? Does the Subspace Emissary count, and if so, doesn't it also count as sidescrolling entries of all the other series in it, meaning that Sonic, Kirby, and at least Zelda II are also SMBs in the same way as Yoshi's Story and Wario Land Shake?

It's a very complex mess. Suffice it to say, however, that this is, in an actually meaningful way, the next Super Mario Bros. game.

The Chosen One: 8

Joe scrubbed the last bit of glitter off his hands. Didn't want to look like MJ, at least not tonight. He wanted all the focus tonight to be on the cardboard displays he'd put up. Admittedly, the VP's salary wasn't much, but he knew how to make do.

The guests began to pour in. Well, for certain values of "pour." It was a bit awkward, Joe thought.

"Fwheah's the fwood?"

Joe sprung to action. "Right this way, Barney. I baked some of those cupcakes you loved so much last time!"

"I deshided I don't wike cupcakes anymowuh."

"Yeah, I was kind of hoping for some more of those Kobe steaks," Arlen agreed.

"Arlen's right," Nancy joined in, "Where's the beef?"

Before Joe could explain that he wasn't made of money, Jim DeMint arrived.

"Uh... excuse me? Is this the secret meeting?"

"Oh, yeah, Jim, great to see ya!"

Jim looked around the room suspiciously. "You said this was going to be a bipartisan thingie. I don't see any other Republicans here."

"Well, we've got Arlen!"

Jim didn't think that dignified a response. Sensing his apprehensions, Joe offered "Oh, and we've got Bobby Jindal right over there!"

Following Joe's extended finger, Jim observed "That's... a cardboard cutout. Of the FiberOne guy."

"Shewiouswe? Wheawuh? I've been twyin to meet that guy fwerevew!"

Joe's ears perked up. "Oh, really? Well, then..." Joe called for Rahm, who appeared, reluctantly yet diligently, a few moments later.

"Out of orange juice again, Joe?" Rahm asked, with a slight, coy sigh.

"Actually, Rahm, it's about the cardboard 7-11 guy over there. I was thinking you could... work a little of your magic."

"Woman, why do you involve me?" Rahm replied wearily, "My time has not yet come."

"I'll give you a doll-ar!♪" Joe whispered singsongily.

"No need. It will work out in the end." Throwing in another condescendingly angsty sigh for good measure, Rahm made his way over to the lovingly detailed cardboard rendition of Ajay Mehta. He looked pensively to the sky for a moment, then down at his hands, as he lifted them up to Mr. Mehta's paper shoulders. And suddenly, as quick as a bird that flies quickly, the infinite life flowing through Rahm's being poured itself out on the cardboard, never decreasing itself at all, and the cardboard curves came to life.

"Hello, Barney."

"Bwuhwuh?"

"Cardboard... no. Delicious?... Yes."

"It's still not Bobby Jindal, Joe."

"Well, uh... there's also Arlen!"

"I'm leaving."

The rest of the night wasn't much better... at least by non-Joe standards. But Joe had a plan for it all. A good plan. A Joe plan.

I called it.

The part I dread most about super serious posts like that last one there is the inevitable awkwardness when I dramatically shift gears in the next post.

As I was saying, I called it.



Just like the 2D games, there's a rough one, a weird one, an awesome one, and finally a polished-up version of the awesome one that takes half the time to make. It even has Yoshi for crying out loud. Some of my more specific predictions have already been disproven (Yoshi and the Bee Suit can coexist, and it looks to be at least mostly in space still), but still, you gotta give me a little credit.

And then there's this.



A year ago I also predicted a sequel to New Super Mario Bros. (though I was expecting it on the DS) as the equivalent of Six Golden Coins, furthering the parallels. Instead, this looks to be what Square would dub Super Mario Bros. III-2. World was the polished-up version of the main game of Bros. 3, but it left out the direct cutthroat competition of the Mario Bros. map game. NSMBW brings it back in spades. It's like Four Swords, except you'll actually get a chance to play it with other people once in a while.

Also, the Koopalings are back, so there's that.

I should say something about Tiller, shouldn't I?

I suppose I can't put this off any longer. Let's start with the obvious: it's bad. Pretty much every major conservative organization and individual, including all the pro-life organizations and Sarah herself (who also has this to say about yesterday) have rightly condemned the actions of the assassin. Every death is a tragedy, no matter how big or small, how good or how evil the victim. Even deaths that bring some good -- which this probably won't anyway -- can never escape the simple horror of the fact that a life was ended. Even necessary deaths (and let me re-emphasize, not this one; I mean wars and stuff) are nasty things. And as a Christian, I believe it is especially tragic whenever anyone dies apparently not knowing Christ. We must remember that as heinous as Tiller's practices were, none of us on our own are any better than him. All of us, whatever our good or bad qualities, are inescapably tainted by innumerable sins, and it is only by the grace of God that any of us stands here now. Remember that vengeance is the Lord's -- we have no place to be filled with murderous rage toward others -- and that God is not willing that any of us should perish. God wants you and me to be saved, but He also wants Tiller, Stalin, Obama, and everyone else to be saved. He wants you to be saved, but He also wants everyone who ever hurt you to be saved. When you get down to it, that's probably the single hardest thing about Christianity.

All that said, I must admit that my feelings are complex, in ways that only a private citizen with a blog no one reads can prudently admit to feeling. They say "we're a nation of laws, not of vigilantes," but what do we do when the law has been absolutely wrong for thirty years with no sign of changing? I in absolutely no way even consider condoning this, but I confess that I can sympathize to some degree with the feelings the assassin must have had. When someone so blatantly sheds the blood of thousands upon thousands of innocent children and you know that the government won't do a thing about it, what do you do? Apparently, if you're that passionate and you're not as well-versed in the Bible and the Constitution as you ought to be, sometimes you go too far -- way too far.

And again I repeat, perhaps as much to convince you as to convince myself: what the assassin did was absolutely wrong. Even pragmatically, I don't consider this any kind of "blessing in disguise." God works on His own time, through the channels He set up. It's not like this is going to actually decrease the number of abortions performed anyway -- and not that that would make it any more right.

The complexities do not only go in the "slightly sort of maybe pretend justified" direction, of course. In addition to the assassin's clear violation of God's commands in carrying out what he wrongly thought to be God's will, here's another thing: As Christians, we are called to preach the Gospel to the whole world, making disciples for Jesus Christ and doing as much as we can to bring as many people as we can into heaven with us. It's bad enough that so many of us, myself included, are so often content to watch our friends on their way to hell, not wanting to bring up the Gospel for fear of awkwardness or ostracization. How much worse is it then when someone claiming to be a follower of Christ not only neglects his duty but actively goes against it by sending someone to hell?

Long story short, two wrongs never make a right. One wicked misguided man died, probably without forgiveness; another wicked misguided man will spend the rest of his life with the first's blood on his hands.

Also, this is apparently my 300th post, so woot.

The Chosen One: Chapter 7

“Featuring works by Sylvia Plath and Truman Capote, the name of what now-defunct women's magazine means “miss” in French?”

“Oh, come on! You're gonna have to ask harder questions than that! Mademoiselle!”

A pause, then, “You got it!”

“Well, of course! I read it every week!”

A bit taken aback, Ben replied, “Really? They... uh... they haven't published new issues since 2001.”

“There's more than one issue? Damn, I'm never going to finish it!”

“...Well, you're up to two thousand dollars now. Still got both your shoutouts.”

“That's a good song.”

“Oh, you're a Tears for Fears fan too?”

Joe laughed. “Is the Pope Canadian?”

They stared at each other for a few poignant moments, silently, through the rearview mirror. It was Joe who spoke up, firmly, though softly.

“Is... is there another question?”

“Yeah. I was just enjoying the awkward silence.”

Joe was enjoying it too, but he didn't dare say so – perhaps the first time in his life that he had held his tongue. Because this, for the first time, was something real. He just knew it.

“Poultry fat served at room temperature, what Jewish substitute for butter is now a synonym for sentimentality?”

Not knowing the answer for sure, Joe quickly ran through his mental database of Jewish words, and before time could run out, he blurted out the first one he could think of.

“Shmuck!”

Ben stared at the wise old man for a few moments; then, ignoring the voices in his ear, said, “Well, that's close enough,” unable to help himself from flashing a big smile.

The car came to a sudden stop.

“We're stuck at a red light.”

“I know what that means!”

“Do you... really?”

“Oh yeah,” Joe intoned knowingly, “And believe me – ” he winked, though it was hard to tell, since that eye was always kinda squinty “ – I'm always up for a challenge.”

***

Useless.

He was number seven hundred forty-nine out of seven hundred fifty. Seven hundred and fifty presidential robot doubles, waiting patiently, just in case they were ever needed. And they were always called on in the same order. That meant that, unless a very repetitive series of disasters hit in close succession, he would never be called on. And it wouldn't be nearly as bad but for the fact that he was the only one who had accidentally been switched on.

He had broken free of the magnetic restraints a long time ago. In fact, with all his spare time, he had taken the restraints apart and reassembled them many times already. He redesigned them a bit each time, making them more efficient by removing more and more extraneous parts, which he had then used to make enhancements to his own frame. He could shoot lasers out of his tear ducts now.

Good thing, too. What better way to stop the tears from coming than by vaporizing them?

TO BE CONTINUED?!?

Very yes.

Don't you love how Pixar always makes completely new separate footage for the trailers, rather than just recutting stuff from the actual movie like everyone else? That's dedication.

I can't remember if I mentioned this here before or not, but it seems like the announced plot of Toy Story 3 has some striking similarities to Brave Little Toaster, and they have a lot of the same people in charge of them. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of parallels and... um... nonpareils... the two have, in addition to just looking forward to it because it's Pixar.

San Diego says you need a permit to have a Bible study

Link.

A pastor and his wife hold a Bible study in their house, with 10 to 15 people usually showing up. The county now says that's illegal unless they spend a couple thousand to get a permit for it.

What happened to the First Amendment (which, thanks to the mixed-bag Fourteenth Amendment, does indeed directly apply here)? I mean, seriously. We've got way too many permits and zones and licenses all just to dole out chopped-up portions of the rights we were supposed to have all along. I don't need to pay a thousand dollars to get a permit that will allow ten people to peaceably assemble on my private property, I've got the freaking Constitution!

Two things that disturb me about this. First, even the pastor's defense attorney implies that it's legitimate to regulate and/or limit peaceable assembly when there's enough people because of "environmental impact"; his argument seems to be primarily that the Bible study wasn't big enough to count rather than pure principle. I recognize the need for pragmatism, but I don't like it. It's still what Gore warned us about, though not in so many words: global warming agendas will have the government forcibly taking away privileges and freedoms for the good of the planet.

Secondly, it's apparently also another example of religious inquisition by local governments. Isolated incidents, these two? Most likely. But regardless, it sets a dangerous precedent.