I know I’ve mentioned it before, but the Moro-Islamic Liberation Front is in the news today, and while I realize that the (admittedly juvenile) humor might not properly translate into Filipino, it still causes me to snicker.
Now, I don’t think a lengthy primary fight for the Democrats necessarily means an advantage for McCain, so I’m not taking joy out of any advantage the Republicans might get from this bitter campaign. I am, however, really enjoying seeing all the Democratic self-righteousness about “counting every vote” and “tolerance” boomeranging on them.
Imagine my delight when I saw that, after counting the Pennsylvania totals, Clinton has pulled into a vote-total (as opposed to delegate-total) lead, if one counts both the totals in Florida and Michigan. Yes, yes, I know all the arguments already about why they should be disregarded, but the fact of the matter is that more people voted for Clinton than Obama. How do you get around that and still claim it to be a Democratic process not dominated by party-insiders?
And the Texas primary is particularly juicy. Obama, who insists that super-delegates can’t overturn the pledged delegates, ended up with more delegates out of Texas, despite the fact that Hillary got more votes. Again, I understand the reason it happened, but what happened in Texas runs counter to what Obama is arguing for on a national scale. I just don’t see how he can argue that super-delegates shouldn’t over-ride the will of the people on the national level, but in Texas he takes the majority of the delegates despite losing the popular vote.
George Will has an excellent article up about the hubris of “managing” education. If you’re interested in the state of education in America, you might find it interesting.
I just finished Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and while I try to come up with something a little bit more indepth than what the standard movie critic says (especially when it comes to movies that are suppose to be taken seriously), I really can’t sum it up better than what most others have said: it’s beautiful but too much of a soap-opera and far too liberal with history. (more…)
This guy is my hero.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=353954
Seriously, I’d love to have a half-rack for my computers. It’d make everything so much neater, but it’d get a lot louder, as I’d need to have some hefty fans to keep it cool. Just with this 80-degree heat, my Raptor HD is hovering around 100-degrees, even with the three 120mm fans up at full speed.
What I need is some way to isolate the whole thing in an air-conditioned, sound-dampened box, with just cables sticking out the back.
I don’t know why, but this made me laugh:
I finally got through the main campaign in Neverwinter Nights, and I have to say the ending was a real letdown. Not that it was particularly sad or anything, but that it was just really poorly done. The narrator sounded like he was just some guy reading a script handed to him. At first, I thought it was someone playing the part of a history teacher or something – telling some future generation of the history of the legend that was the adventure you had just finished, and that would explain the rather dull tone of the dialog, but no – it just turned out that it just was some dull sounding guy telling you that such-and-such ancillary character went on to be a beacon of light or some such.
In general, I felt that the game was very good – I really liked the main plot and the mechanics were pretty fun to work with. They had some good twists in the plot that didn’t feel forced (like they were there just to be plot twists), and while there were some bugs (such as when I couldn’t trigger the start to the fight with Lorne) or weak plot elements (such as how they shoe-horned in a love story), I felt that the strengths far outweighed the weaknesses. But the end story for you if you played a good character was just so bad – it felt like an 8th grader had taken as many cliches as they could and wrote a five-minute summary of how they wanted the game to end.
I’ve heard that the evil ending is much better – I don’t know if I want to play through the whole game again just to see it, but you might want to keep in mind that playing a good character doesn’t have much payoff at the end as far as closure goes. You might want to consider playing an evil character.
I came across Skewz today, a new aggregator that classifies news stories according to bias. It classifies stories (and news sites) as either liberal or conservative, as ranked by users. Interesting idea, although unless there’s a large or intellectually honest user-base I think the rankings might be a bit off-kilter. For instance, National Review is listed as being slightly liberal on domestic policy. In general, however, it looks quite promising. I read a few “left-leaning” articles (as opposed to “way out in left field” articles), and they seemed pretty even handed. I think this is going to be common resource for me.
I just got caught up on the recent Obama flap after getting a hint of it while reading a friend’s blog over the weekend. While he was largely focusing on criticizing Clinton’s response to Obama’s statement (and I have to admit, Hillary sticking up for the rural, gun-owning church-goer does test the limits of incredulity at times), he also inserted a summary of McCain’s response (and indeed, echoed by most of the conservative movement) that Obama is an elitist, but doesn’t go on further to rebut the claim, seemingly rejecting it out of hand.
For some reason that got my gears turning on the subject. (more…)
I was watching the BBC World News America tonight, and Matt Frei was doing a piece on race-relations in Memphis, 40 years after the MLK assassination. He was in a local bar, talking to a couple of Caucasian people, looked to be in their late twenties, early thirties, about their interactions with the African-American community. They both had a southern drawl so my first gut reaction was that this was going to be a stereo-typical knock on southerners, but it turned out to be a very interesting piece that had both very good insight but also drew the wrong conclusions.
