I was interested to see this Time article about us potentially getting a second sun next year. It has been cold lately, so that would help.
Naturally, though, killjoy scientists say it turns out not to be happening.
Most people talking about the possibility of two suns referenced the twin suns of Tatooine in Star Wars, but from the way the Time article described it, I thought it sounded more like the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall.
So, Congressman Steve Cohen said of the Republicans:
“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels…You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it.”
One of the countless reasons I find the Nazi-comparisons that are used so much in political debate to be so damned irritating is that often, in order to make them, people like to draw upon true, but purely superficial, similarities between whoever they are attacking and the Nazis.
Goebbels was not the first guy to ever use propaganda. The only reason to pick Goebbels, out of all of the other propagandists throughout history, seems to me to be to evoke a subtle association in people’s minds with the horrible atrocities he and the Nazi government he spoke for committed.
If Congressman Cohen had substituted “Bernays” for “Goebbels” in his claim, he would’ve been about as accurate, less disrespectful, and shown himself to be a man of learning beyond what we generally expect of our elected officials, besides.
The brilliance of New Vegas is really in the area surrounding the city of New Vegas. The story is obviously very good, and the writing is quite well-done, but where the game truly shines is in small moments as you explore the wasteland, especially once they are contrasted with the goings-on in the city.
New Vegas is yet another installment in Obsidian’s growing line of games that simply are literature. The land itself seems to become a character, its haunted desolation providing the tone of the whole story. The irony, however, is in the open, melancholy beauty of the Mojave contrasted with the crime-filled and ugly city. It serves well the game’s dark take on human nature: the sinister implication that humanity grows more corrupted and ugly as it rebuilds from the war.
This sense of escape, the feeling of exploring a vast expanse of land, also plays on the interactivity factor. It feels more like a world to be shaped and explored, than a pile of rubble to struggle over.
Fallout: New Vegas has its flaws, its bugs, its weak scenes and its missed opportunities. But I think of none of these when I think of playing it. I think instead about the feeling of adventure of standing out in a ruined abode in the desert, watching the sun go down behind the Mojave outpost as Marty Robbins‘ “Big Iron” plays in the background, wondering where I want to go next.
I was doing some research on historical Presidential campaigns, and I came across this 1952 ad for Eisenhower:
…and now I have that song running through my head.*
Anyway, interesting to compare that to the campaign ads of today, no?
*And I guess now you might, as well. Sorry.
Don’t you hate it when your Web browser crashes as you’re in the middle of writing a post, and the post hasn’t auto-saved due to same Web browser being weird, and so you lose everything?
Just a hypothetical.
[Although I know it will make no difference to anybody, I feel oddly compelled to write about this.]
The late President Ronald Reagan’s son Michael claims his father was “better” for African-Americans than President Obama is. He reasons:
“Under Obama, black unemployment rose from 12.6 percent in January 2009 to 16.0 percent today. This means that black unemployment has increased by more than one-fourth since Obama took office.
And the Reagan record? African-American columnist Joseph Perkins has studied the effects of Reaganomics on black America. He found that, after the Reagan tax cuts gained traction, African-American unemployment fell from 19.5 percent in 1983 to 11.4 percent in 1989.”
Alright, this practically refutes itself. He is comparing two years of a deep downturn in the business cycle (a recession) under Obama and from which we only started recovering in summer 2009 to six years of a recovery from a (milder) recession which ended in late 1982. (He could have at least started from the beginning of Reagan’s term for a better comparison.)
It seems to me fairly obvious that these statistics regarding African-American employment are nothing more than the products of broad economic trends, rather than the outcome of a particular policy on the part of either President.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that the President, whoever he happens to be, always gets undue credit or blame for the fluctuations in the business cycle which he cannot come even close to fully controlling.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t use this blog as intelligently as I could. I spent all last week informing everyone I know that New York would beat New England on Sunday. No one believed me, but I was, of course, vindicated.
But, as you can see, I did not post anything about it on here. So, there is, alas, no historical record of my powers of prediction for me to point to in future.
So, it sounds like Nintendo is remaking The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the 3DS. Looking at those screens does bring back memories. It must be five years since I last that played game, but I can still remember it well.
The odd thing is, I’ve played other Zelda games since then and I never cared for any of them. Not that they were bad, but they’re just not my kind of game. But Ocarina of Time is something else entirely. It was, in my opinion, the greatest game ever at the time it was released, and even to this day it remains in my Top 5.
Concerning politics, it is often said that “reasonable people can disagree”.
Why?
After all, when it comes to most political issues, it would seem that one side must be right and the other must be wrong, since they appear to believe the exact opposite things on all issues. Presumably, therefore, reasonable people will all be able to figure out what the correct policy is, leaving only unreasonable people to oppose them.
The answer to this, however, is that most people are not (and maybe nobody is) totally sure what the best policy is in most cases. Often, two opposing policies may have different pros and cons and it may not be clear which (to borrow a term from economics) maximizes societal welfare.
However, because this sort of thing is very hard for the average person to understand–no one really has time after a hard day’s work, to examine political nuances–this sort of thing is up to experts to discuss. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to discuss them, so their explanations must be succinct.
(This, in turn, leads to simplifying the issue into terms which make political polarization virtually inevitable, i.e. “It’s impossible to explain all the details–all you really need to know is that [whoever] is bad.”)
It’s not that people are stupid–it’s just that you need an advanced degree in economics to understand whether the Fed ought to print money in a recession or not. And if you go and get that degree, you won’t be able to get the necessary degree in climatology to understand climate change. Add in all the other issues we face and, well, nobody has the time for all that.
This means that we must rely on experts in these fields to make policy recommendations, but this inherently makes people who are not experts in any of these fields feel annoyed, especially if the experts are (or even appear to be) wrong at any time.
This sort of thing, of course, leads to populism and anti-“elitism”. It’s understandable, really–who would want to feel they were being controlled by a bunch of (mostly well-to-do) people who appear (to the layman) not to know what they are doing half the time?
Now, we seemingly have a solution to this problem ready-made in the form of the internet. Unfortunately, so far, it doesn’t seem to be working. Most people don’t seem to use the internet for the purpose of gaining access to more knowledge on many of these difficult subjects.
Two questions: