Vacuum Energy favorite posts of 2010

January: The 2010 film "Legion", or "Welcome to the Irony-verse"

February: The case of the self-refuting linguist

March: Harold Ford, Jr. sells out.

April: Dungeons and Dragons is not art.

May: A political move so stupid that it could only be evidence of a brilliant strategic plan.

June: Absolutely laughable bias at Time Magazine

July: Who the hell do you think you are, Prince Charles? Al Gore?

August: George Lucas turned out to be the responsible one. Who knew?

September: The President of the United States is stuck on stupid.

October: A great reason why California proposition 19 is a dumb idea.

November: Some bad history from "The Daily Dish"

December: "Civilization V" sucks

5 weird things about the 2010 film remake of "True Grit"

1. Mattie Ross spends hours riding her horse through the snow, gets caught in pouring rain, and even immerses herself up to the eyeballs in a stream, yet she never ends up wet.



2. Everyone in this film seems to have been replaced by a cartoon character. Rooster Cogburn gets shot in the shoulder, but is still able to carry Mattie for miles. The Texas Ranger, like Daffy Duck, can get hit in the head with a boulder and just walk it off. One character gets shot in the leg, gets some of his fingers cut off, and then gets stabbed in the chest with a 6-inch knife without seeming to feel any pain or discomfort.



3. The film's dialogue sounds like it was written by George Lucas.



4. The characters anachronistically refer to "Indian Territory" as "Native American Territory". Similarly, even though the Texas Ranger fought for the Confederacy in the Army of Northern Virgina, he doesn't seem to notice that Mattie has non-white facial features (which mysteriously disappear when she gets older).



5. Mattie loses her left forearm to a rattlesnake bite just so the filmmakers can deploy the CGI "limb erasure" tool at the end of the film.

Obama's plan for the lame duck session

How is it that President Obama, the liberal's liberal, managed to convince himself that he needed to fight his own base over preserving the Bush tax cuts? And why was it so damned important for President Obama to get a repeal of "Don't Ask. Don't Tell." in the lame duck session?

Two words: Jerry Brown.

As the governor of California, Jerry Brown will perfectly positioned to mount a primary challenge to Obama in 2012. Brown has the most powerful Democratic state in the Union as his own personal fiefdom. He has loyal armies of union goons to do his bidding (if they're sufficiently compensated). Brown has no obligation to run on Obamacare, the stimulus package, Obamanomics, or any of the other Obama blunders since 2008. Brown is dumb enough to make a go of it and smart enough for his campaign to be a credible threat.

The key is whether Brown can turn the California economy around before Obama can turn the national economy around. If California is perceived as outperforming the national as a whole by 2012, Brown becomes a very dangerous man. If the national economy is doing well in 2012 and California is still mired in the doldrums, Brown has blown it and Obama wins.

Thus, the next two years are a sort of chess game between Obama and Brown. Extending the Bush tax cuts was the opening move.

Why the emphasis on "Don't Ask. Don't Tell." then? Think of that as a political gift for Nancy Pelosi. As a congressperson representing San Francisco and the outgoing Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi is obviously a major political power in Brown's backyard. Giving Pelosi this as a consolation prize from the 2010 midterms is Obama's way of making sure she stays on his side in this battle.

"Civilization V" sucks

For the sake of convenience, I'm going to refer to version # of the long-running "Civilization" series of video games as C#.

I first got invested in the "Civilization" series back in the late 90s with the release of C3. C3 had its quirks. Modern battleships would occasionally get sneak attacked and destroyed by spear-wielding barbarians in dugout canoes, for example.

C4 was the incremental improvement on C3, and it fixed some old quirks and added new ones. The most glaring lacuna is that, based on the amounts of CD-ROM space devoted to different aspects of the game, C4 is essentially an animation program for three-dimensional heads of world leaders with a few gameplay elements knocked on.

The current version of the franchise is this year's C5. If C4 was a step forward from C3, C5 is the two steps backwards. Here's a list of what I believe the game does right and what it does wrong.

Graphics
Right: the hexagonal tileset
The most obvious change introduced into C5 is the new hexagonal tile shape which gives the terrain a more natural feel compared to the traditional square tile set. Unit movement is more natural as well since it feels harder to speed up movement by gaming the tile topology. C5 also handles the problem of what do to with the polar ice caps more gracefully than its predecessor.

Wrong: the same old unit animation
A C4 warrior unit, for example, consisted of a trio of little animated warriors who walk around the map like real, little people when they follow your orders. A C5 warrior unit consists of... a few more, slightly smaller little people still walking around following orders. Maybe this is some kind of titanic, computer programming breakthrough. Maybe it's just the programmers being lazy. Either way, I'm definitely not impressed.

Diplomacy
Right: C5 eliminates the three-dimensional animated heads

Wrong: stupid diplomacy
World leaders in C5 are constantly pestering you to join "pacts of cooperation" or "pacts of secrecy". What these pacts do, why they're important, and what happens when you violate their terms is apparently a complete mystery. The "pact of secrecy" is so secret that even the game programmers don't seem to know what it is.

Audio/visual
Right: better voice-overs
C5 replaces the celebrity voice-overs of Leonard Nimoy with voice-overs by actor W. Morgan Sheppard (cf. the film "Gettysburg"). It's hard to overstate what a smart move this was.

Wrong: C4's video clips were replaced with static splash panels.
This is incredibly disappointing. C4's video clips were mind-bogglingly bad; completing, say, the Pyramids in C4 wins you a 20-second video clip showing the Pyramids being built in super-fast motion. Completing the Pyramids in C5 wins you a static splash image of the Pyramids and a 20 second audio clip. When you win the game in C4, you were treated to a 20-second video clip showcasing sweet, sweet late-90s computer graphics. In C5, you get an early-90s static image and another voice-over.

In other words, CIVILIZATION V GIVES YOU VIRTUALLY NO REWARD WHATSOEVER FOR PLAYING THE GAME!!!!

Terrain and terrain improvements
Right: "on the fly" expansion of civilization borders.
This is a major leap forward. In C4, each city had a static, pre-defined zone of tiles that it could work. In C5, cities slowly expand their suite of workable tiles, but you can also purchase tiles to work for your city. This lets cities rapidly expand to encompass strategic tiles and critical resources and then slowly filling in the gaps as other priorities rise in importance later in the game.

Wrong: workers have little to do
C5 workers can build farms, mines, trading posts, and lumber mills to improve tiles. You have one primitive improvement for each of the three primitive resources and one primitive improvement to stick on forests. And that's it. Your workers pretty much have nothing to do for a big chunk of the game. Roads also cost money for upkeep, which means you can't pass the time having your workers carve out "road spaghetti".

Game Mechanics
Right: cities have built-in garrisons
Cities can fight back against beseigers. This is more realistic and spares you from producing the large garrison armies of C4.

Wrong: Cities can shoot volleys of arrows at opponents even if you haven't researched "archery" yet.

Right: Ranged units can actually attack opponents "at range". Major conceptual breakthrough.

Wrong: Unit upkeep is a mystery.
C5 tells you a total gold cost for maintaining units. There is no way to break this down on a per unit basis. The C5 documentation is totally silent on this point. Late in the game, you'll do things like delete your do-nothing worker unit and discover it, alone, was responsible for 50% of your unit upkeep costs over the last 200 turns.

Right: You can buy "social policies" with culture points.
This seems to be a rational solution for turning culture (i.e. the stuff you do when you're not at war) into a viable game mechanic.

Wrong: You can't switch social policies.
Once you buy a social policy, you're stuck with it forever, even if it becomes worthless.

Strategies
Right: city-states
C5 has the innovative feature of non-competitive city states that you can ally with or attack. The city states will give you resources, culture, science points, food, or even military units if you befriend them. They make an intriguing addition to the game-play if you can get on their good sides.

Wrong: the game is designed to deter conquest victories
Cities have garrisons now, so good luck storming one with a handful of stone age warriors. Resource limits prevent you from mass producing key military units. Your civilization's global happiness degrades rapidly when you annex (or even "puppet") captured cities. And in a deliberate slap to the face of all of the hard-core conquest players, there are some cities that cannot be razed so a "one-city" conquest victory is impossible.

Summation: Unless you're a hard-core "Civilization" masochist, I recommend that you not drop any money on this game.

Another bad day for Democrats

President Obama's class warfare tactics are rejected in the Senate:

The Senate blocked President Obama's and Democratic leaders' tax cut plans Saturday in a foreordained symbolic vote that now sends both sides back to the negotiating table to work out a viable deal.

A bipartisan filibuster, led by unified Republicans and joined by four Democrats and one independent, proved there isn't enough support to back Mr. Obama's preferred option to extend income tax cuts for couples making less than $250,000 and tax increases for those making more than that.

Nancy Pelosi passed this bill in the House as a test of the resolve of the Senate Republican caucus. This time, the squishy moderate Republicans didn't defect as they did on the stimulus bill. I'd call this a win for the Tea Party movement.

In other news, the WikiLeaks revelations seemed to have claimed their first political victim:

"I think I will serve as secretary of state as my last public position," [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] said. Clinton's career has included not only her current position as secretary of state, but also eight years in the Senate representing New York.

Of course, the statement was made with the typical Clintonian rhetorical escape hatch. She isn't definitively leaving politics, she just thinks that she will someday in the future. On the other hand, people don't usualy go around saying that they're abandoning formal politics forever unless there is a reason.

A deceptively simple economics question

This economics question popped up in the New York Times some years ago:

"You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton? (a) $0, (b) $10, (c) $40, or (d) $50."

The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton is the total value of everything you must sacrifice to attend his concert - namely, the value to you of attending the Dylan concert. That value is $10 - the difference between the $50 that seeing his concert would be worth to you and the $40 you would have to pay for a ticket. So the unambiguously correct answer to the question is $10. Yet only 21.6 percent of the professional economists surveyed chose that answer, a smaller percentage than if they had chosen randomly.

Clearly the opportunity cost here is $10. Why? Because if you are willing to pay up to $50 for something and you are given an opportunity to buy that thing at $40, then that opportunity is equivalent to you possessing a $10 coupon. So what is the cost of letting your $10 coupon expire? $10.

So this is the economics version of “What color is George Washington’s white horse?” Here's Vox Day's answer (boldface in original):

Since various people are tripping all over their various attempts to define "opportunity cost" instead of paying attention to how it was defined in the question, I will highlight the relevant portion of the question posed by Frank here.

"The opportunity cost of seeing Clapton" is the total value of everything you must sacrifice to attend his concert - namely, the value to you of attending the Dylan concert."

The value of attending the Dylan concert to you is $50. This means the value of the discount on the ticket is $10. Now, it's vital to note that Frank assigns TWO distinctly different definitions to "the opportunity cost of seeing Clapton" in his question, thus conclusively proving his point that economists, especially economists writing in the New York Times, don't understand opportunity cost. Naturally, there are two different answers to the two different questions-in-the-question. The answer to question (A) the "total value of everything you must sacrifice", is $60 since you're giving up both the value of the Dylan concert and the value of the discount in order to see Clapton. The answer to question (B) the "value to you of attending the Dylan concert" is $50. However, the four multiple choices provided make it clear that Frank is looking for an answer to question (B) rather than question (A), which is why the correct answer is (d) $50.

Vox Day is arguing that if you DON'T buy the ticket, then you lose the $50 value of the ticket, and you lose the $10 value of the discount, and you don't have to offset this loss against the purchase price of the ticket that you didn't buy. Ken Lay call your office please!!! I think Vox just discovered a way to save Enron.

Some bad history from "The Daily Dish"

Rush Limbaugh made a minor stir this week by calling the Federal redistributive project into question:

Looked at within the prism of liberty and freedom, as our founding documents spell out, the Declaration, the Constitution, in nowhere in any of our founding documents was it ever said that people earning X would be punished for it. It was never said in our founding documents that people earning X would share a greater burden of funding the government than people who didn't.

Formally speaking, Limbaugh is correct. The founding documents of the United States make no assumption that the rich would have to accept exceptional taxation that would be spared to the poor. On the other hand, this does leave open the question of when progressive taxation emerged as a political concept. Andrew Sullivan pondered the question and came up with a bogus answer: the progressive income tax originated with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

Hilariously, Sullivan even imputes sinister motives to the Conservative movement for defying Lincoln (and Adam Smith too) on tax policy:

I'm sympathetic to Limbaugh's general argument - although I believe the debt and alarming inequality should temper one's preferences in this respect in the current circumstances. But it tells you something about today's "conservatism" that it is fiercely opposed to both Abraham Lincoln and Adam Smith on taxation and Friedrich von Hayek on universal health insurance.

In a sense this is correct. The Civil War years certainly saw the first imposition of a progressive (such as it was) income tax. The real question here, which Limbaugh is implying and Sullivan is ignoring, is where the idea of greater government impositions upon the rich, in general, originated as part of the American social ethos. The real answer is that the redistributive project originated from the experience of Americans during the early years when America was primarily a slave-holding, plantation civilization.

In colonial America, the rich derived a disproportionate benefit from the social imposition of peace and order because the rich owned slaves and the poor didn't. The bulk of the population would have been required risk life, limb, and property in order to police the slave-holding system and prevent rebellions. As compensation, the rich were expected to condescend to the poor and share the benefits of slave-produced wealth. Over time, this bargain evolved into the sense that slavery was necessary in order to promote the sense of white racial solidarity that made whites feel more equal.

A great reason why California proposition 19 is a dumb idea.

Hypothetically speaking, let's say that you own a steamship company. You observe that people in North America love eating bananas and that people in South America have lots of spare bananas hanging around. You could make money by shipping bananas from one continent to the other. What selling price do you aim for in your North American markets? Do you (A) have the United States make bananas illegal so you can smuggle them into the country and sell them for $20 a pound; or (B) dramatically reduce costs as much as possible so you can sell bananas in the United States at 80 cents a pound?

The real life banana companies go for (B) because a cheap price for bananas allows that fruit to penetrate markets, attract more consumers, and still make a profit. The backers of proposition 19, perversely, think the answer is (A). In other words, they think the dramatic expansion of marijuana consumption that will follow greater legalization will end up making marijuana less profitable to the drug gangs. The truth is the exact opposite.

Of course, proposition 19 also allows individual smokers to cultivate their own small plots of marijuana. Technically, this will reduce the price that drug gangs can charge by some small amount. It won't put drug gangs out of business. You don't see Phillip-Morris going out of business because college students are growing tobacco in their dorm rooms, right?

A pathetic president

President Obama has a new plan for economic assistance around the world:

Addressing world leaders, Obama offered no new commitments of U.S. dollars, but rather a blueprint of the development policy that will drive his government's efforts and determine where the money flows. His message was that the United States wants to help countries help themselves, not offer aid that provides short-term relief without reforming societies.

"That's not development, that's dependence," Obama said. "And it's a cycle we need to break. Instead of just managing poverty, we have to offer nations and people a path out of poverty."

President Obama's foreign policy is that countries mired in poverty are just going to have to do more with less, because the United States can't keep throwing money at a poverty problem that isn't going to just go away. President Obama's domestic problem, however, is to continue to throw money at a poverty problem -- economic malaise and 9%+ unemployment "as far as the eye can see" -- and hope that it just goes away.

The picture attached to the Fox news article underscores the point about our incredible shrinking President.

Vox Genius strikes again.

According to Vox day, voluntary exchange is a generally bad idea:

The second and much more serious error is in the statement that "voluntary exchange benefits both parties". This is both logically and empirically false because it posits a non-existent human rationalism without temporal limits. While it is true that value is subjective, thereby allowing the possibility to defend totally irrational actions as at least nominally rational, this still doesn't avoid the problem of how the subjective values that the Misean acting man assigns are necessarily momentary in nature. What the acting man defines as a beneficial exchange at one moment he may very well not define as beneficial in the very next moment for a wide variety of reasons. And it is this fatal flaw in the logical foundation that causes the entire edifice in support of free trade to collapse.

Most people tend to revise their positions when they derive a contradiction, but not Vox. So, having "proven" that free trade is a really stupid idea, how does he account for that fact that free-trading South Korea is so much more prosperous than its relatively non-trading neighbor to the north?

The way that reality works is that voluntary exchange and free trade are almost certainly economically good ideas in the presence of perfect information being possesed by both parties. There's always that slight possibility that, say, a meteorite strike will take out human civilzation, thus preventing you from purchasing your morning cup of coffee. Voluntary exchange and free trade are therefore not absolutely certain to be of mutually benefit even with perfect information possesed by both side.

In the presence of limited or asymmetric information, voluntary exchange and free trade are generally of economic benefit. Yes, it is true that the possibility of irrational decision making, rapidly changing conditions of worth, and human trickery -- in general, risk -- make exchange problematic. There have been some developments that have been discovered that mitigiate the effects of risk. For example, advanced civilizations typically develop an information economy in which some economic actors specialize in providing reliable economic data in exchange for monetary renumeration. Even primitive societies deal with risk by creating institutions such as tribes and kinship groupings. Risk management is one of the keystones of economic success, right?

The key misrepresentation that Vox Day makes in his blog post is assuming that all potential transactions are plagued by utterly disabling levels of risk, which of course makes the possibility of useful exchange disappear. In the real world, that is simply not true.

The President of the United States is stuck on stupid.

The major problem with the Obama presidency is that Obama himself is too politically weak to rein in a completely inept, out-of-control Congress.

The roots of this phenomenon appear to go back all the way to the fallout of the Clinton trial in the Senate in 1999. The major political effect of the Clinton trial was to discredit the conservative leadership of the Republican party to the extent that a Republican moderate, John McCain, was able to seize control. Control of the Republican party gave McCain a clear shot at winning the Republican nomination in 2000. McCain also wasn't shy about leveraging his party power to increase his odds of becoming president. He was more than willing to open the Republican primaries to the general public in order to build a Republican moderate/independent/liberal voting alliance to defeat the conservatives. I think it can also be taken as a given that Pat Buchanan didn't leave the Republican party by accident in 1999.

By the 2000 primary season, McCain winning the Republican presidential nomination was almost a fait accompli. Of course, the conservatives fought back and managed to engineer the presidental nomination of a fusion candidate, George W. Bush (i.e. Mr. "Compassionate Conservatism"). The end result was a situation similar to the Tyler administration: a conservative president with a weak base of support squaring off against a de facto party leader who is master of the Senate.

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 represented the same process occuring in the Democratic Party. After the 2000 elections, both Bill Clinton and Al Gore ended up being weakened as Democratic party power brokers. Clinton spent most of his time earning megatons of money for his wife's future presidential bid. Al Gore left formal politics to launch into a new career as a climate crusader. This left the Democratic party in the hands of the Democratic master of the Senate, Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy's first candidate for the presidential nomination was his own protégé, John Kerry. After Kerry's loss of the presidency to Bush in 2004, Kennedy ended up forging the Massachusetts-Illinois alliance that led to the nomination of Obama in 2008. Obama was chosen to be the nominee because of his obvious non-qualification for the position, his personally immunity to criticism in the mainstream media, and because he was personally enough of a cynical "operator" to accept being a presidential puppet.

The end result is that Obama has quickly morphed into perhaps the weakest president in all of American history. He has done nothing to lead the United States on any question. His legislative achievements in office all consisted of him free-riding on his Democratic Congress, acquiescing in whatever legislative mish-mash they decide to send to him. His presidency has consisted of golf and going on vacation; he is literally a president with nothing to do.

The end result is a massively strengthened Republican party that is going to ride a tidal wave of support into this year's elections. Paradoxically, this is expected to lead to a strengthening of the Obama presidency. Why? Because the mass extinction of Congressional Democrats will leave Obama alone as the remaining major party leader. Whether this will be enough power to get Obama re-elected in 2012 will be the next question.

George Lucas turned out to be the responsible one. Who knew?

It's interesting that a huge chunk of our science-fiction culture got tossed into the garbage can over the last couple of years.

2009's film "Star Trek" decided to totally reboot the "Star Trek" canon. The means of doing this was having a Romulan ship accidentally travel backwards in time, thus creating an alternate timeline that wipes out the original timeline. The net effect is that everything from the "Star Trek" continuity that post-dates the original series pilot episode, literally about 95% of everything "Trek" that has ever gone on-screen, has been wiped out. It never happened now.

This is only exceeded by the "Dr. Who" series 5 episode "The Pandorica Opens" which blew up the entire observable universe except for Earth's solar system. The series 5 finale "The Big Bang" even has the Doctor himself vanishing into nothingness. Of course, the Doctor and the universe get restored, but it is still unclear whether any major changes to the "Dr. Who" continuity have been made. At the strictest possible interpretation, literally the entire 40+ year television history of "Dr. Who" may now be non-canonical.

On the other hand, the "Star Wars" franchise is still going strong after 33 years, off and on. George Lucas has never been forced to reboot the "Star Wars" continuity aside from some cosmetic changes. He's never created an alternate timeline, or a parallel universe, or blown the universe up and recreated it. As pissed off as "Star Wars" fans tend to get over things like Jar Jar Binks or the Ewoks, they have to concede that George Lucas's creation has endured.

Who the hell do you think you are, Prince Charles? Al Gore?

Prince Charles seems to have this delusional belief that he, not Barack Obama, should be the Annointed One:

The Prince of Wales says he believes he has been placed on Earth as future King 'for a purpose' -- to save the world.

Giving a fascinating insight into his view of his inherited wealth and influence, he said: 'I can only somehow imagine that I find myself being born into this position for a purpose.

'I don't want my grandchildren or yours to come along and say to me, "Why the hell didn't you come and do something about this? You knew what the problem was". That is what motivates me.

'I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity.'

Consider the following. Al Gore is much poorer than mega-biillionaire Prince Charles. Al Gore only has a mere mansion or two compared to the Prince whose ancestors where pro forma owners of an entire nation. Al Gore's only formal political office is gone, never to return, compared to the royal-for-life Charles. And Al Gore himself is only a couple of generations removed from the hillbillies compared to the unparalleled breeding of the future King.

In some bizarre paradox of fate, the doctrine of global warming somehow makes Al Gore the natural king of the planet Earth that Prince Charles will never be. Al Gore's vision of human society is one in which vast hordes of peasants live lives of stark, utilitarian efficiency in order to offset the carbon footprint of keeping Al Gore's private jet in the air. Gore's radical environmentalism is a divine right of kings in all but name, and yet, a non-trivial fraction of the peasants-to-be buy into it. Prince Charles, on the other hand, has the real divine right of kings on his side, but where he to mention this in public, people would literally laugh in his face.

And then there is Barack Obama, whose spirit lives on an ethereal plane far above any mere Earthly monarch. His next stimulus package is going to be the construction of a full-scale Egyptian pyramid devoted to himself. This would have the benefits of providing his cult a secure focus for worship, housing his mortal remains when his spirit ascends to the heavens to become one with the Sky God, and, incidentally, providing a lot of "shovel ready" construction jobs for the unemployed.

My PC pet peeve strikes again.

There's nothing worse than reading a thought-provoking, intelligent book and running across a sentence marred by a really stupid sense of political correctness. The latest example comes from "How to Read Literature Like a Professor", by Thomas C. Foster, on page 123:

Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for a thousand years, yet we can still have this kind of exchange, this dialogue, with her.

Quick! How many female authors from a thousand years ago can you name off the top of your head?

Fire. Michael. Steele. Now!

This is the last straw.

Vox Day comes up with some really dumb stuff sometimes.

Here's his latest challenge:

PTQ claimed that science has a vast track record of correct predictions while religion has none. "Science has produced zillions of correct predictions. Religion has produced none. A bigger winner-loser gulf does not exist." Very well, then let's place a bet on the matter:

Religion: The poor will be with you always.
Science: Global poverty will be ended by 2025.

This is basically the foundation of a straw-man argument, and it's easy to see why. The challenge for science conflates a scientific (or, if you prefer, engineering) question, "Do we have the resources available do to this?", with a political question, "Can we convince people to accomplish this goal by 2025?" It's not exactly fair to fault the scientific method for failing to correctly motivate people to adopt one particular course of action, poverty reduction, over another. As Vox is usually the first to admit, science doesn't provide any answers as to how people should live their lives.

Suppose science concludes that the United States could spend, say, $1 trillion on poverty reduction per year through 2025 to end global poverty. Then suppose that our next several presidents decide not to spend money on poverty reduction because the pharaonic-scale pyramid that will house the mortal remains of President Obama is a funding priority. Does that mean that the scientific method is flawed and we should all give up science and become Benedictine monks instead? Obviously not!

Absolutely laughable bias at Time Magazine

Time's recent story on the relationship between United States President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ridiculously, utterly ineptly at odds with reality in its description of the two leaders. The article starts by portraying Netanyahu as the starry-eyed idealist who puts religious symbolism ahead of practical policy:

In Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel's founding, Benhamin "was born into the ideological wing of the Likud," says a Netanyahu staffer. "It's deeply ingrained." His politics are determined by this history. "Netanyahu thinks of a direct line from Moses down to him -- at the minimum, he has to be a guardian [of the Jewish state]," says his sometime political opponent, for Labor Party member and speaker of the Knesset Avrum Burg. Avishai Margalit, a professor at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, says, "The revisionists put tremendous weight on symbols and declarations. Netanyahu thinks that the minute he stops making symbolic gestures, that's the end of the Israeli cause."

It then continues by portraying Obama as the level-headed, street-hardened political realist:

That life among poor Muslims taught Obama two large lessons, according to his account of the period in his books. First, he learned that the world was "violent," "unpredictable" and "often cruel" and that survival depended not on higher principles but on "taking life on its own terms." Second, Obama lived in the kind of neighborhood from which, as he has noted before, many terrorists come. A top priority for winning the war against terrorism, he said, would be "drying up the rising well of support for extremism" in places like Indonesia -- and the Middle East."

The reality is that the article almost precisely inverts the backgrounds of the two men. Obama is the starry-eyed ideologist who puts symbolism ahead of practical action. Obama was practically born into the Communist Party. His mother was a "fellow traveller"; his father was evicted from the Kenyan government for plotting a socialist coup. Obama built a career around meaningless symbolism, starting back in his days as a "community organizer", continuing throughout his career as a tenured radical law professor, and culminating in "hope and change". If anyone in the world thinks that he is the appointed intermediary between God and Man, it's Obama.

On the other hand, Netanyahu is the one with the practical experience. If you really want to spend your childhood worrying about the terrorists living in your neighborhood, trying spending your childhood years in 1950s Jerusalem. Netanyahu became a real leader of men under conditions of full scale war of national survival (i.e. situations a heck of a lot more dangerous than Obama's faculty meetings). And I'm pretty sure that any Jew living after 1945 doesn't need lessons on how the world is violent, unpredictable, and often cruel.

President Obama supports the unsupportable.

President Obama wants to green-light commercial whale fishing:

The Obama administration is leading an effort within the International Whaling Commission to lift a 24-year international ban on commercial whaling for Japan, Norway and Iceland, the remaining three countries in the 88-member commission that still hunt whales.

The administration argues that the new deal will save thousands of whales over the next decade by stopping the three countries from illegally exploiting loopholes in the moratorium.

On this, the President must be stopped. No commercial whaling!

Just when I think that the new "Transformers" franchise couldn't get any more bull****...

...I stumble across this Stan Bush version of "The Touch". Because the one thing the original "Transformers" really really needed was the bastard child of Vanilla Ice and "Eye of the Tiger".

The original version is 100 times more awesome.

Pro Gaming in South Korea isn't all bad.

On the minus side, being a pro-gamer is a lot like joining a cult:

“The standard in pro gaming groups is for people to live together 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no traveling to or from work, and for those ranked Group 2 or lower, their entire daily routine consists of eating, cleaning, laundry and games,” said Kim Jeong-geun. “Because of this structure of bringing in young people, developing them and then replacing them when their lifespan is spent and they have been squeezed dry, it has earned the name of ‘the chicken coop.’”

On the plus side, you're probably not being exploited for sex if you're a member of a geek cult.

A Tale of Two Entities*

Joe Carter at "First Thoughts" makes the case that God exists (italics in original):

Because it is possible for the entire universe to cease to exist, its existence must be radically contingent. Even if the universe has always existed and was uncaused (i.e., the view of steady-state cosmology), its existence would still require a causal agent to keep it from ceasing to exist, to prevent its exnihilation. Since no natural cause exnihilates anything, the cause must be supernatural. A supernatural being (one that is itself uncaused) is required to prevent the universe from turning into nothingness.

In other words, even though everything that we know about universe tells us that it will not simply cease to exist, nevertheless, the universe could simply cease to exist. Ergo, there must be a supernatural being who cannot cease to exist who keeps the universe from ceasing to exist.

Call me crazy, but I'm not 100% sold on this yet.

* Original title changed to something more neutral with respect to the discussion.

A political move so stupid that it could only be evidence of a brilliant strategic plan.

Mitt Romney goes to the wall for doomed GOP Senator Bob Bennett:

There he stood, a Harvard MBA man, a man of numbers, backing a collapsing equity. Mitt Romney took to the podium in Salt Lake City, the place where he rose to prominence in 2002 as Olympic chief, and urged the GOP delegates to back Sen. Bob Bennett, Utah's three-term incumbent. Despite Romney's pleas, Bennett ended the day with a worthless bronze, dumped from the primary. For Romney, however, the moment was a silver — not a victory, but an impressive showing.

The article does two really interesting things with this piece of information. First, the article adds two and two together and gets five: that Romney's support for Bennett is due to a refreshing sense of personal honor. In reality, it's more a case of the first officer of the "Titanic" bravely rearranging the deck chairs after the captain jumps overboard.

Second, it makes an excellent case that Mitt Romney is exactly the type of mainstream Republican moderate that we've always suspected. The ultimate problem with Mitt Romney -- and with Rudy Guiliani and with Fred Thompson and with Rick Lazio, etc. -- as presidential candidates is that they were all early adopters of the McCainite politics that collapsed so catastrophically in 2006 and 2008. The one thing that is guaranteed to re-elect Barack Obama as president of the United States is for the GOP nominee to run on the bold slogan of mainstream McCainite Republicanism: "I'll never be THAT stupid ever again. I promise."

Dungeons and Dragons is not art.

Film critic Roger Ebert has achieved a huge measure of internet notoriety for his proclamation that video games, in principle, cannot be art. His latest discussion of the topic to date has drawn more than 3,300 comments (roughly 99% of them hostile).

To illuminate the question of whether video games are art, consider the role-playing game fad that slightly predated the arrival of video games. The goal of role-playing games is profoundly simple: assembling a group of players for a session of collaborative storytelling. Collaborative storytelling has been around in one form or another since the era of the oral tradition to today's "Hardy Boys" and "Star Trek" fictional universes, so we know that this can be art. The key to the success of collaborative storytelling is that there are a set of rules for the contributors in order to enforce a coherent story, setting, and theme.

In a role-playing game, the players all adopt the roles of characters within the story, except for the "game master" player who handles all of the non-character elements of the story. The game arises from the interaction between character players and the game master. The character players are entertained by being allowed to describe their character's actions within the story as they see fit. The game master has the burden of describing the non-player story elements in entertaining ways, but he also has the benefit of being allowed an immensely greater scope of personal creativity -- control over the entire game world other than the character players themselves.

Role-playing games work well as games. As art, they are an unmitigated disaster. The artistic failure arises from the fact that character players and game masters all have independent conceptions and expectations for how the story should evolve. Coordinating these ideas into a single, coherent story with artistic merit is a challenge that proves to be immensely difficult in practice.

The major design failure of modern role-playing games turns out to be their relatively poor ability to coordinate player characters with game master. The innovation in modern role-playing games for attempting to reconcile character players with game masters was to introduce probabilistic rules to govern the results of the character actions. The merit of this should be obvious: in any situation in which character players may come into critical dispute with the game master, remove the human element from the result and replace it with a random arbiter (i.e. a die roll). Neither side can therefore accuse the other of an unfair manipulation of the luck of the dice. Suffice it to say that this made the role-playing game as entertainment possible.

Unfortunately, probabilistic rules did nothing to solve the problem of disputes. This led to two major residual problems. The first is railroading, where the game master uses his control over non-character story elements to harass, intimidate, and bully the players into abandoning control over their characters to the game master. The second is minmaxing, where the players exploit the rules of the game to maximize the ability of their characters to act successfully regardless of all other considerations that the game master may wish to preserve. The modern role-playing game is so dominated by the cold war between minmaxing players and railroading game masters as to be utterly ruined as an artistic endeavor.

Thus, we come to the hallmark of the very latest role-playing games: create balance between character players and game masters by a mutual reduction of choices to a near-nullity. Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition (D&D 4e) is a prime example of this. D&D 4e reduces player disputes by requiring the players to produce characters who are essentially equal in their ability to act within the game setting. Furthermore, the game setting is highly combat-oriented -- so much so that the ability of the characters to function as a combat team is the sin qua non of the D&D 4e gaming experience. Finally, the role of the game master is to assemble combat scenarios that exactly match the combat ability of the characters. The end result is a role-playing game that functions without crippling disputes, but that also has all of the charm, flavor, and meaning of a McDonald's Big Mac.

I have a feeling that health care reform will fail tomorrow.

Suppose that you are an undecided House Democrat going into tomorrow's big health care reform votes. If you vote "yes", you're going to have Tea Party protesters hunting for your seat in November. If you vote "no", you're going to have liberal democrats from the President to the grassroots flipping you the middle finger for the rest of your political career.

No matter what you do, your re-election chances are highly damaged. So let's look long term. A House Democrat who votes "yes" is essentially betting his future reputation that a crap bill, a crap process, and all of the bribes, kickbacks, payoffs, and b***s*** is going to turn up smelling like roses someday. What are the odds of that happening?

On the other hand, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid are desperate to pass some kind of bill. If the current health care bill fails, they're almost certainly going to offer a scaled back "Plan B" to Congress before November. Imagine voting "no" on the health care bill from hell and then voting "yes" on a later, more modest "Plan B" bill for political cover. To me, that sounds like a pretty good deal for an undecided Democrat.

Of course, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid know this, which is why they've been making the "unholy doughnut" argument all year: "You're already going to hell. You might as well take the last bite of the unholy doughnut before you burn."

A horse! A horse! My presidency for a horse!

As of this writing, there is a slight glimmer of hope in the Congressional health care war. The House Democrats have been forced to reject the so-called "Slaughter Solution", which means that the house simply has no way to avoid a straight, up-or-down vote on the Senate health care bill in order to move health care reform forward. Given that the Senate health care bill is glowing green from radioactivity in the House, it might fail to pass.

In a bid to win pro-life Democratic support for the Senate bill, President Obama is reportedly considering an executive order to pacify their concerns over public funding of abortion.

To buy into this, a pro-life House Democrat would have to make some hard choices. First, this is still a dramatic weakening of the status quo on abortion. A vote for the Senate health care bill is a vote for public financing of abortions. Period. An executive order from the president might assuage a guilty conscience, but it sure as hell won't stop that rolling barrage of pro-life attack ads that will be crushing pro-life Democrats for the next 8 months.

Second, it would mean trusting the single most arrogant, incompetent, and desperate President in American history. This is a President who has repeatedly betrayed every promise he has ever made to the American people and who has endorsed every bribe, gimmick, threat or pay-off required to pass health care without scruple or qualification. This is a President who would be plunging a wooden stake into the heart of his presidency by honoring this agreement. To trust this president on this agreement would be sheer lunacy.

Finally, the logic of the pro-choice liberals will force them to oppose this executive order. The reasoning is simple:

• Under single payer health care, all health care dollars are Federal dollars


• Under the Stupak and Hyde amendments, no Federal dollars can be used to fund abortion


• Ergo, no health care dollars can be used to fund abortion, which is a de facto abortion ban.

So the Left will be forced to wage war on this executive order, whether the pro-life Democrats like it or not.

Harold Ford, Jr. sells out.

Harold Ford, Jr. recognizes that New Yorkers desperately want change in the Democratic party that governs them:

There are compelling reasons for me to run [against Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand]. I believe New Yorkers are hungry for a new direction in government. Our elected officials have spent too much time this past year supporting a national partisan political agenda — and not enough time looking out for their own constituents.

which is why Harold Ford, Jr. strongly endorses the Democratic Party status quo candidate for Senate:

I’ve examined this race in every possible way, and I keep returning to the same fundamental conclusion: If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary — a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened.

I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York, and give the Senate majority to the Republicans.

I realize this announcement will surprise many people who assumed I was running. I reached this decision only in the last few days — as I considered what a primary campaign, even with the victory I saw as fully achievable, would have done to the Democratic Party.

Harold Ford, Jr. talks tough, but he basically just admitted that he's as much of a bungler as any other Democrat.

The case of the self-refuting linguist

John McWhorter, in his book "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English", has an interesting contradiction in thought that doesn't seem to have occured to him. It is connected to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which McWhorter starts to poo-poo on page 138:

The idea that grammar is thought became influential from the writings of Edward Sapir. We met him in the previous chapter venturing that English speakers came to find nuance irritating. Even that point had hints of the language-is-thought persuasion -- supposedly the erosion of various aspects of English grammar was due to some psychological leaning in its speakers. But Sapir ventured only passing speculations in this vein.

It was Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf who picked up the ball and ran with it, in the 1930s, publishing several pieces on the subject which served as its foundational texts. The hypothesis is known, therefore, as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The hypothesis has also failed. Repeatedly and conclusively.

Earlier in the book, he devotes a large amount of space arguing for the usage of the singular pronoun "they" instead of the singular pronoun "he" when refering to an person of unspecified sex, basically on grounds of sexism (p. 66; italics in original):

My own books are full of resorts to he, which I find sexist, occasional dutiful shes, which stike me as injecting a stray note of PC irrelevance into what I am discussing, or he or she, which I find clumsy and clinical -- for the simple reason that I was required to knuckle under. At best I can wrangle an exceptions and get in a singular they or their once or twice a book.

But why do contemporary writers consider the singular, indeterminate sex "he" to be sexist? It's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: eliminate sexist grammar from English and sexism will magically disappear!

Liberals can be really f***ing stupid sometimes.

Liberals are really pissed off about these Right-wing tea parties, so much so that they have started liberal "coffee parties" of their own (emphasis in original):

Furious at the tempest over the Tea Party -- the scattershot citizen uprising against big government and wild spending -- Annabel Park did what any American does when she feels her voice has been drowned out: She squeezed her anger into a Facebook status update.

let's start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. geez. ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss 'em off bec it sounds elitist . . . let's get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.

Obviously many liberals have no understanding of American history, because the whole point of "tea parties" is that the participants are NOT drinking tea!

What planet is this Obama guy from?

Pretend for a second that you are President Barack Obama. You don't just want to reform the nation's health care system; you want to fundamentally overhaul the nation's health care system to benefit generations to come. Yet, for some reason, the Republicans aren't going along with your plans. The Republicans keep complaining about too much government control, too much government waste, job-killing tax cuts, health care rationing, and death panels. You don't really want any of those bad things, and you don't think your health care reforms will produce any of that stuff, but your health care reforms still can't pass Congress in the face of Republican opposition.

You decide that the way forward is a game-changing new proposal that will bridge the Republican-Democrat divide and finally win bipartisan support for passage of health care reform. What new proposal do you announce?

The real Barack Obama decided to propose price controls:

President Obama will propose on Monday giving the federal government new power to block excessive rate increases by health insurance companies, as he rolls out comprehensive legislation to revamp the nation’s health care system, White House officials said Sunday.

Nothing could possibly better prove that the President of the United States is utterly not competent to reform health care than the fact that he put price controls on the table. Price controls are not a serious reform because they represent "Pee Wee Herman" economics: if we all just close our eyes, the problem disappears. The unfortunate reality is that we can't all keep our eyes closed forever. Sooner or later, the price controls are going to fail and the original problem is going to be much, much worse than before.

Or think about it this way. The Baby Boom generation is currently in the process of retiring. As that generation ages into retirement, they are going to put a new, increased demand for medical care onto the existing system. The health care system will need to raise rates in order to produce the profits necessary to expand the amount of care available to meet the upcoming demand for care. If the government imposes price controls onto health care, those profits won't exist, which means that the supply of care will lag behind demand and produce substandard care and/or health care rationing. If the government doesn't get health care prices exactly right -- and it is absolutely guarenteed that the government will bungle them -- the ramifications will be catastrophic.

The real problem with health care in the United States is very simple if one looks at it in economic terms. Health care is an industry in which very large increases of capital input are required to expand and improve the health care output to the consumer. Putting government bureaucrats in charge instead of private-sector CEOs will not fix the problem. Rationing care will not fix the problem. Subsidizing care will not fix the problem. Throwing government money at the problem will not fix the problem.

The only possible way to fix the problem is to increase the efficiency of the system! That requires free market economics, competition, accurate pricing, and trust that the common private-sector economic agents across the economy can do their jobs correctly. If we want the health care system to be reformed, this is what we're going to need.

America's First Parliament

I've been trying to determine the meaning of President Obama's upcoming health care summit with Democratic and Republican leaders. Then I read a description of how the summit is going to begin and the answer hit me:

The administration's letter invited Democrats Pelosi and Reid, McConnell and House Republican Leader John Boehner, and asked each to designate four other members of Congress to participate.

The invitation list also includes Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Finance Committee; Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee; House Ways and Means Committee; House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the House Education and Labor Committee, all of which oversaw the health legislation in both chambers.

The White House said Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Sebelius, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the Office of Health Reform, would also attend.

Obama will make opening remarks, followed by remarks from a Republican leader and a Democratic leader chosen by leaders of their parties, and then the president will open discussion on insurance reform, cost containment, expanding coverage and the effect of health reform legislation on deficit reduction.

In hindsight, the meaning of the event is obvious. President Obama is abandoning the unwieldy American-style government that he can't control and doesn't seem to understand in favor of a parliamentary-style government favored by the European welfare states. Obama's health care conference represents the convening of the "de facto executive branch" or parliamentary cabinet.

Obama will be there as a first-among-equals Prime Minister to both enforce the rules and advance his party's interest. There will be various "Cabinet ministers" present in the form of the most prominent House and Senate leaders. And, of course, there will be a few extra "senior members of the executive" there to give the majority party a modest majority at all times. Once the Cabinet has reached a consensus on health care legislation, they'll send the agreement to the House of Commons and the House of Lords (the House and Senate respectively). Once it passes, Obama in his role of figurehead of state will rubber-stamp the bill and enact it into law.

The 2010 film "Legion", or "Welcome to the Irony-verse"

I saw "Legion" last weekend and it is ridiculously bad. The most interesting thing about the film is that nearly all of the main characters suffer highly ironic deaths.

• The young black man trying to win custody of his child in a divorce proceedings is killed by an angel-possessed child.


• The owner of the diner is killed when he blows the diner up to try and kill an angel.


• The wealthy, yuppy mother dies immediately after trying to "sell out" the newly born child.


• The bitter, yuppy father is killed and then his body is filled with acid


• The exhibitionist daughter of the yuppy couple is killed off-screen in a mundane car crash.


• The military veteran is killed when he gets hit in the back with acid, causing his spine to disintegrate


• The archangel Michael does more than any other being on Earth to thwart God's plans, and he turns out to be the only being that God brings back to life.

The old joke about Stephen King is that all of his books had the same basic plot: X gets possessed and tries to kill people. In "Cujo", X is the dog. In "The Shining", X is the house. In "Legion", X is the 1950s: it's iconic monsters are an angel-possessed granny, an angel-possessed "ice cream man", and an angel-possessed child (who happens to look just like the Chucky doll from the "Chucky" films).

President Obama's discretionary spending freeze will only affect Republicans.

President Obama is still playing games with the American economy. His plan for a commission that will place mandatory votes on spending cuts before Congress will only go into effect after November:

Trying to win the votes of fiscal moderates, President Barack Obama formally endorsed legislation Saturday creating an independent commission with the power to force Congress to vote on major deficit reduction steps this year, after the November elections.

Obama’s statement gives new momentum to efforts in the Senate now to attach such legislation this coming week to a pending debt ceiling bill. But the endorsement comes so late that it risks being seen as just a ploy to win over swing Democratic senators whose votes the White House needs to lift the federal debt ceiling.

Since the Republicans are widely expected to make massive gains and November and possibly win back one or both houses of Congress this November, this proposed commission is obviously a scam. Call it the standing committee to humiliate Republicans.

It's almost certainly unconstitutional as well. How can a standing committee force Congress to vote on anything?

President Obama is out of touch with reality.

For a good laugh, read this article about how President Obama -- the greatest deficit spender in the history of the American Presidency -- wants to freeze discretionary spending:

There is a “fighting chance” President Barack Obama will propose a freeze in most discretionary spending by the federal government in his State of the Union speech next week, Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, said

“The president can say in this State of the Union address, ‘I’m going to include in my budget a freeze on discretionary spending, I’m drawing a line in the sand, and I’m going to use my veto pen to enforce that,’” Bayh said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.

First, President Obama has identified out-of-control health care spending as the principle budget problem affecting the federal government. Second, President Obama's plan for reigning-in health care spending involves massively increasing the amount of money that will be spend on health care. Third, the reason why discretionary spending is such a major problem that President Obama must now address is because President Obama's first major action as president was to massively increase discretionary spending. Fourth, if President Obama wasn't the imcompetent idiot that he is, he'd realize that building a Democratic Party majority for spending restraint is utterly impossible in the modern era.

There is really only one explanation for President Obama's call for a discretionary spending freeze: the Democratic Congress believes that Obamacare will give them all of the opportunities for pork, graft, and bribery that they will ever need to run the government.

Please do not vote for California Democrats ever again because they are all totally bats**t insane.

Last year, the state of California had a $20 billion budget shortfall that required a mixture of tax and fee increases and painfull budget cuts to make up. Despite all this, the state of California will have a $20 billion budget shortfall again this year. Democrats across the state have been loudly complaining that state government is broken, that the state's taxation system is totally inadequate for funding its current budgetary problems, that only a complete overhaul of the state's revenue-producing system -- including repeal of proposition 13 -- can solve California's budget woes.

So, how are California Democrats planning to fix the economic havoc dragging the state into chaos? The current plan is to start by tripling the state budget overnight with absolutely no idea for how to pay for it. Seriously:

A key legislative committee in California revived a bill Thursday to create a government-run health care system in the nation's most populous state, two days after Massachusetts elected a senator who opposes the president's national health care plan.

The Senate Appropriations Committee released the bill for a vote by the full Senate next week. The legislation had been held over from last year because of the state's ongoing budget crisis.

Creating a single-payer system would cost California an estimated $210 billion in its first year. That's roughly double the size of the total state budget, but about what the state and federal government and residents cumulatively spend now on California health care, said Sen. Mark Leno.

This plan is so far beyond the boundaries of reality that the Democrats are planning to spend $1 million a year just for paying people to work out a way to pay for this damn thing.

The World Turned Upside Down

Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts!

The most transparent Congress ever

When Nancy Pelosi promised the most transparent Congress in American history, people took this to mean that she would open political discussion and dealmaking to public inspection. This was certainly the impression that C-SPAN received:

The head of C-SPAN has implored Congress to open up the last leg of health care reform negotiations to the public, as top Democrats lay plans to hash out the final product among themselves.

C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote to leaders in the House and Senate Dec. 30 urging them to open "all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings," to televised coverage on his network.

"The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of the sessions LIVE and in their entirety," he wrote.

Nancy Pelosi will, of course, not agree to C-SPAN's request. Instead she is going to negotiate the health care bill's final provisions in the smoke-filled back rooms of the capital and then have her brain-dead Democratic caucus rubber-stamp the final draft with no debate. "Transparency" to Nancy Pelosi apparently means "I shouldn't have to ask a congressman what his preferred bribe is."

Let the poison in the TARDIS hatch out.

Russell T. Davies ended his tenure as executive producer of "Doctor Who" at the end of 2009. Davies deserves a lot of credit for successfully bringing the show back to life, but his tenure on "Doctor Who" will be notorious for off-screen politics sneaking their way into the on-screen story.

The two-part story arc that represents Davies' final episodes, titled "The End of Time", is a rather blatant example of Davies deciding to eat his successor's lunch. Like a lame-duck American president desperately trying to put as much of the government off-limits to the opposition party as possible, Davies used "The End of Time" as an eleventh-hour "info dump" to define the new show's biggest lacuna: the fate of the Time Lords. The sheer magnitude of the "info dump" is so stunning in its scope that even io9.com is essentially conceeding that only a theological explanation is possible:

Let's see if we can't put all of this together. There's an entire race whose development is being massively accelerated, perhaps with the purpose of making the Ood the new Time Lords. (Even if that's too much of a stretch, they clearly have an incredibly strong connection to time, perhaps second only to that of the Doctor.) There's an unimportant old man whose life keeps intersecting with the Doctor's in ways that far too improbable to be the result of mere coincidence. There's a mysterious but benevolent woman in completely white clothing that keeps showing up to steer events towards the best possible conclusion for the Doctor and, indeed, all existence. If I didn't know any better, I'd say this is all the work of the White Guardian.

For those who haven't memorized every detail of the classic series, the White Guardian was an almost omnipotent figure who first appeared in Tom Baker's fifth season on Doctor Who.

Steven Moffat will get to have a little fun creating new mythology for "Doctor Who" despite the invisible hand of Davies keeping a grip on the overall back-story. In the story "The Waters of Mars" -- which immediately preceeds "The End of Time" -- Davies has the Doctor decide to become a Time Meddler. In "Doctor Who" mythology, a Time Meddler is someone who makes changes to the established timeline of events. In meta-fictional terms, a Time Meddler is a character that gives its authors an excuse to ignore continuity, which is to say that as long as Moffat decides to play in his little sandbox of a show, he has a free hand to do what he likes.

Terrorist Laundering

Everybody knows that President Obama has a major problem with his plan to close the Guantanamo prison. Paradoxically, the increased terrorist activity in Yemen gives Obama way of squaring the circle, at least as far as the Yemeni terrorists at Guantanamo is concerned.

Step 1: Make sure that Yemen won't torture any terrorists being held in custody, so detainees held at Guantanamo can be sent there under U.S. law.

Step 2: Send Yemeni terrorists back to Yemen. If Yemen keeps them under lock and key, then bingo, one step closer to closing Guantanamo.

Step 3: Assume that Yemen is basically a revolving door that puts these terrorists back into the jihad. If they get recaptured by the United States, then President Obama can send them straight into the civilian court system. The terrorists have been successfully "laundered" out of Guantanamo.

Step 4: President Obama gets to write condolence letters and authorize compensatory payouts for any Americans who died because of step 3.

Terrorist laundering is a neat trick, which is why President Obama is going to continue shipping terrorist to Yemen despite bipartisan opposition.

The end of the David Tennant era

David Tennant has finally passed on the role of the Doctor. Here are 3 things that I liked about David Tennant's tenure with "Doctor Who".

• David Tennant is not Matt Smith.
  Somebody at the BBC was put in charge of analyzing "Doctor Who" in order to determine what to look for in David Tennant's successor as the Doctor. That somebody concluded that the new "Doctor Who" was missing an essential element of the original series: Turlough! To avoid hot-linking, here's an image of Matt Smith as the Doctor to compare to a similar image of the Fifth Doctor's companion Turlough. You be the judge.



• David Tennant is a good actor for the role of the Doctor.
  David Tennant isn't the world's greatest actor, but he is pretty good by "Doctor Who" standards. For example, Tom Baker has one setting: the Doctor. Christoper Eccleston has two: happy Doctor and stern Doctor. David Tennant's Doctor was somewhat more protean than his predecessors, generally ranging between the poles of the Doctor as pick-up artist (e.g. "Voyage of the Damned"), Doctor as Sinatra-esqe loner (the very end of "The Waters of Mars", for example), or Doctor as scruffy post-doc as the plot demanded.



• "Blink"
  David Tennant's best episode as the Doctor and one of the best "Doctor Who" episodes ever filmed.