Okay, phew. So it is done. Journalists call the Health Care Bill "epochal and transforming"... even though it merely (and gradually) tweaks what remains by far the most capitalistic and least "socialist" system in the industrial world. Despite armageddon rhetoric, watch how quickly (I give it 4 years) Republicans will come to accept this status quo as motherhood and apple pie, as untouchable and sacred as Medicare and Social Security.
Just look at how they now view "don't ask don't tell." A dozen years ago, the standard Republican cant pictured DADT as purely Satanic, a plot to destroy the US military. Now, it is the established thing, to be defended, like all sacred traditions. Never let it be said that conservatives are inflexible.
This flexibility is displayed by their current ire toward a Health Care Bill that is, in fact, basically the same as one that the same Republican's proposed as an alternative to the Clinton health care plan in 1993.
Lest we forget -- George W. Bush and the GOP Congress passed Medicare Part D, an expansion of federal entitlement largesse that was easily as large as Obama's. Though with one crucial difference. The Democrats' new Health Insurance Bill was designed to add nothing to the federal deficit. In fact, it is revenue neutral and even promises some black ink. The Republicans' Medicare B entitlement, in contrast, passed without a scintilla of provision for how to fund it. It simply said "bill our grandkids."
Of course, it is ironic how often facts run blatantly and diametrically opposite to common wisdom. Take the absolute truth that Republicans talk a lot about being tough on illegal immigration... while their presidents always savagely cut border enforcement. (Reagan and both Bushes did it.) In contrast, Democratic presidents talk about immigrant rights and take care of immigrant kids... but they also double the active manpower of the Border Patrol. (Clinton did it and so has Obama.) It's an easily demonstrable fact that creates mind-blowing cognitive dissonance in dogmatists; try it some time! Then have fun figuring out why the parties act this way!
The list of counter-intuitive facts goes on and on. For example, all US Army brigades were "combat ready" under Clinton and none were under Bush. Or take the fact that democrats inarguably "do" capitalism far better than republicans. The statistics -- on economic health, GDP growth, small business startups, market competition, budget balancing, de-regulation and dozens of other solid metrics -- make this abundantly clear; even though doctrinal delusion makes us ignore it.
The player, through an enhanced version of the interesting item crafting system of the first game, can break down old, weaker equipment into their base elements (steel, leather, wool, etc.), which allows him to upgrade his current equipment in a much faster and efficient way than traditional RPGs’ method of selling armor to buy new armor. If there’s a certain piece of equipment the player likes, the item crafting system allows the player to continuously upgrade the item so that it can stay useful to the player for a long time.
Josh Marshall noted last night, "It looks like Fox [News] has created the perfect interview show vehicle for Sarah Palin. An interview show based around her interviews with people she's never interviewed."
I thought he might be kidding. He wasn't.
...
It's almost farcical. Fox News announced that it would air a show called "Real American Stories" tonight, hosted by former half-term governor Sarah Palin. Promotional work for the program seems to have been deliberately misleading -- "several accounts" of the show "reported that Ms. Palin herself would be talking to the guests in the show."
A Fox News website, for example, said Palin "will kick off her new Fox News series with one of the most diverse guest lineups in memory.... The three very different guests will speak to Palin for her inaugural episode of 'American Stories ' on April 1st."
Except, they didn't "speak to Palin" at all. Fox News is taking old interview footage, and just repackaging it. Sarah Palin's guest list is made up of people who've never met Sarah Palin.
Scientists have discovered the part of the brain that makes people gullible, it was claimed today. The findings could have massive implications for treating the growing number of people who fall wide-eyed for sensationalist media reports. ...
When Morris studied individual neurons within the supra-credulus, he found that gullibility was associated with the activity of a single gene called WTF1. The less active it was, the more feckless people were. This fits with existing evidence, for faulty versions of WTF1 have already been linked to a higher risk of being Rickrolled and buying the Daily Mail. “You could say that gullibility is in your genes,” said Morris. “You’d be shatteringly wrong, but that wouldn’t matter to gullible people.”
Now, looking back at the movie with fresh eyes, I can't help but be strangely proud of it. Because out of all the sucky movies, mine is the suckiest.
In the end, did Scientology get me laid? What do you think? No way do you get any action by boldly going up to a woman and proclaiming, "I wrote Battlefield Earth!" If anything, I'm trying to figure out a way to bottle it and use it as birth control. I'll make a mint!
The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions.
The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.
It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.
Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.
The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.
In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.
Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.
Hundreds of children aged from four to 14, some of them armed with knives and sharpened sticks, were patrolling inside the historic graveyard.
They were, they told the bemused constable, hunting a 7ft tall vampire with iron teeth who had already kidnapped and eaten two local boys. ...
There were no records of any missing children in Glasgow at the time, and media reports of the incident began to search for the origins of the urban myth that had gripped the city.
The blame was quickly laid at the door of American comic books with chilling titles such as Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror, whose graphic images of terrifying monsters were becoming increasingly popular among Scottish youngsters.
These comics, so the theory went, were corrupting the imaginations of children and inflaming them with fear of the unknown.
A few dissenting academics pointed out there was no mention of a creature matching the description of the Gorbals Vampire in any of these comics.
There was, however, a monster with iron teeth in the Bible (Daniel 7.7) and in a poem taught in local schools.
But their voices were drowned out in the media and political frenzy that was by now demanding action to be taken to prevent even more young minds from being "polluted" by the "terrifying and corrupt" comic books.
The government responded to the clamour by introducing the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 which, for the first time, specifically banned the sale of magazines and comics portraying "incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature" to minors. ...
Mr Smith said it had been common for naughty children in the area to be threatened with the Iron Man - a local equivalent of the Bogeyman - by their exasperated parents.
Neither Mr Smith or Mr Sanderson [who had been two of the children involved] had televisions in their homes at the time, and neither had ever seen a horror movie or read a horror comic.
Mr [Barry] Forshaw added: "It was a perfect fit. Here was a campaign that was looking for things to justify itself, and then this event happens.
"It is ironic that the moral furore began in Scotland, where the comics could not have been more safe."
University of New Hampshire researchers studying 19th century schooner logbooks — some smudged with cod oil from the fingerprints of the Yankee skippers who kept them — established that New England fishermen landed 20 times more cod in 1860 than commercial fleets catch today.
“Even farther back, in early Colonial times, cod were so thick they would sometimes stop a vessel dead in the water,’’ said the UNH’s Karen Alexander, coordinator for the Gulf of Maine Cod Project. “It’s clear, when you pore through the archives, that commercial species were not only more abundant, they were physically bigger.’’
Meaner, too. Alexander cited a terse (and ungrammatical) 1866 log entry by Beverly fishing captain Samuel Wilson: “Rugh weather but plenty of fish [I] took a man’s foot out of a large codfish.’’
Among other things, they have found tubeworms that imbibe crude oil; a crustacean so shaggy it might be answering a casting call for Broadway’s “Hair’’; and a sort of singles cafe for sharks where great whites cruise hungrily for sex.
The irony is that Facebook games typically share four characteristics that really do promise great things for both gamers and designers:
- True friends list: Gaming can now happen exclusively within the context of one’s actual friends. Multiplayer games no longer suffer from the Catch-22 of requiring friends to be fun while new players always start the game without friends.
- Free-to-play business model: New players need not shell out $60 to join the crowd. Consumers don’t like buying multiplayer games unless they know that their friends are all going to buy the game as well. Free-to-play removes that friction.
- Persistent, asynchronous play: Finding time to play with one’s real friends is difficult, especially for working, adult gamers. Asynchronous mechanics, however, let gamers play at their own pace and with their own friends, not strangers who happen to be online at the same time.
- Metrics-based iteration: Retail games are developed in a vacuum, with designers working by gut instinct. Further, games get only one launch, a single chance to succeed. Most developers would love, instead, to iterate quickly on genuine, live feedback.
As BioWare’s Ray Muzyka put it during a panel on connected gaming, ultimately all decisions are made with a goal to make money, but the goal may be short-term revenue (“can we sell more blue hats tomorrow?”) or long-term growth (“does our community believe in what we are doing? are we creating life-long fans?”). The successes will not come from open conflict between design and business but from developers who internalize the tension and attack the problem holistically.
I have to admit my own reservations about this transformation; game design itself simply might be not as much fun as it used to be. I cannot easily sum up how enjoyable brainstorming a game is during the early, heady days of blue skies and distant deadlines. With a release-early-and-iterate mentality, these days are now over, for good. Games will no longer be a manifestation of an individual’s (or a team’s) pure imagination and, instead, will grow out of the murky grey area between developers and players. The designer-as-auteur ideal is perhaps incompatible with this model, but I believe the best game designers are the ones willing to “get dirty” – to engage fully with a community to discover which ideas actually work and which ones were simply wishful thinking. Loss of control is never fun, but as Sid [Meiers] is fond of saying, the player should be the one having the fun, after all, not the designer.
There's a huge variation in the number of mosquito bites one person received compared with the next, so people exposed to the transgenic mosquitoes would get vastly different doses of the vaccine; it would be a bit like giving some people one measles jab and others 500 of them. No regulatory agency would sign off on that,... Releasing the mosquitoes would also mean vaccinating people without their informed consent, an ethical no-no. [Shigeto] Yoshida concedes that the mosquito would be "unacceptable" as a human vaccine-delivery mechanism.
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