I Was a Warren Supporter; Was Bernie Hard Done By in the January Debate?

I say I've been supporting Warren because that'll get rid of the Bernie supporters who were never going to shrug off their self-perception as downtrodden underdogs. They aren't going to read this and I'd rather they fuck off and find that one fault they need as a pretext to disregard the rest of this. Adios, morons.

For the rest of you reasonable people, I'm going to go down the questions, see how hard they are and judge in aggregate. I could assign a score from one to five, but ultimately this is all subjective. I have subjective judgement.

And if we can all agree on that, we can all agree that you have subjective judgment as well. People notoriously have a double-standard for what is considered 'fair' for their candidate and the same question can read unfairly to different people. My take is that CNN hosted the debate where everything was said and opted to put the screws to folks just so something would happen. They were hard on everyone last night and everyone will take it personally.

Going off of the transcript from the Des Moines Register, let's get to it:

Watts Bar 2

The first US nuclear reactor to come online in the last 20 years is in the Tennessee Valley Authority. Watts Bar 2 came in 6.5 Billion dollars over budget, allegedly due to nuclear regulation.

Of course, no one from CNN to the LA Times to Forbes backs that up. Everyone seems hung up on the 20-year construction delay.  Watts Bar 1, a sister reactor, went online in 1996 and it took almost nine years to build Watts Bar 2. You’ll find a lot of sprawling think-pieces which provide these basic facts, generously padded with timeline of nuclear disasters from Three Mile Island to Chernobyl and ending in Fukushima.

News articles on the subject seem authoritative until they describe the iconic cooling towers used to remove excess heat as “reactors.” Everyone is quick to bemoan the cultural insecurity which caused nuclear decline, whether it’s coded as regulatory smothering, environmental hyperactivism, or investment cowardice.

Really though, the focus should be the loss of technical literacy which makes supporters and opponents of nuclear power incapable of speaking intelligently on the subject at all.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/us/tennessee-nuclear-power-plant/index.html

Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-america-s-newest-nuke-plant-20151011-column.html

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rodadams/2016/10/19/watts-bar-is-now-commercial/#30966e7222c9

Political Mosh Pit

March 8^th, 2016. Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields approaches Trump, surrounded with Secret Service agents,  as he’s leaving a rally in Jupiter, Florida. Trump declines to acknowledge her and after a few moments his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, pulls Fields back and away from Trump.

The altercation was media fodder for a few days as the Trump campaign at first alleged Lewandowski wasn’t even there, and then that he’d never touched Fields, and then that the reporter had initiated a physical altercation by grabbing Trump. Meanwhile, Fields, with bruises on her arm, filed charges for misdemeanor assault.

Louie Gohmert: The 5 Most Impish but Professional Adventures of the Representative from Texas' First District Part 2

Previous

Fighting for Rational, Mature Discourse on Capitol Hill
Whenever Michele Bachmann took aim at Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, Gohmert hopped on board and demonstrated that rational, mature discourse on Capitol Hill is not dead. In a series of letters to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department, Bachmann, Gohmert, and three others linked Abedin to a conspiracy that placed Islamic Brotherhood sleeper agents in the highest levels of government with the goal to enact Shiara law across The United States.

It might be true that those letters were based on evidence gathered by Frank Gaffney, a man who has seen Islamic conspiracies including conservatives like John Bolton (the US Ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush and FOX News regular) and Grover Norquist (who opposes all taxes forever). Even though many of Gaffney's claims had already been investigated and dismissed by the FBI as baseless, and even though he's been condemned by the American Conservative Union for his assertions, Gohmert has stood by him in an act of integrity and commitment that surpassed common rational thought. 

Now, spamming the national security apparatus doesn't smack of "rational discourse," but the response to the letters accused Gohmert and others of McCarthyism. Even conservatives, like Senator John McCain of Arizona came out against him.

Nature of the Beast

Maybe the last thing on this gaming shit for the time being. I know it's getting old. I know the theft and spread of Jennifer Lawrence's nude photos is the hotter story right now (no pun intended).

Folks are talking about models of behavior. Devin Farici has been pretty compassionate in his depiction of gamers as mislead teenagers. I think that's fair to remember, but I doubt that most of the hate here is coming from socially put-upon nerds. 

@devincf gigantic wall of garbage text that literally says nothing. what PR company paid you for that lip service?
— Georgy Zhukov (@Georgy_K_Zhukov) September 1, 2014

This bit was in response to Farici empathizing with these guys.
But check out that twitter. He has 22 replies. All of them are replies to other people, 20 of them have been made in the last week, and a half dozen are just him tweeting the same video to Zoe Quinn over and over again like a completely sane adult.

Jimquisition: Social Justice Warriors

The Spectrum of Views on Gamer Identity

I didn't think up the idea that the identity of The Gamer is dead (I probably wasn't even the first one to come up with that title). I just seized on it when other folks brought it up because it stuck a chord of truth.

Dan Golding wrote "The End of Gamers." In it, he briefly describes the origins and definitions of Gamers before explaining why that definition is disintegrating as video games progress. Video games in the future—the near future—are universal and cannot be owned by any one group, no matter how filled with hate, fear, and bile.

Louie Gohmert: The 5 Most Impish but Professional Adventures of the Representative from Texas' First District

So Louie Gohmert has been making some headlines lately because he's been cheekily photobombing other people around Capitol Hill. The representative from Texas' first district is such a fun, whimsical character.

As it just so happens, he's from the district my grandparents vote in. I know Louie Gohmert. I've seen his fliers. Some cynical, stuffed-shirt politicians might claim that these kinds of childish behaviors are not fit for a member of the US House of Representatives. 

I differ. Not only with the assumption that there is any standard of behavior for members of The House, but that these behaviors are in any way unbecoming or inconsistent with representing the United States of America as a professional lawmaker.

So here are five other completely professional, if whimsical, actions of Representative Louie Gohmert.

Ferguson for My Family

On August 9th, in a Missouri town of about 21,000, a police officer stopped 18 year-old Michael Brown and his friend. It was one of 5,400 stops the Ferguson Police Department conducts every year, but at the end of it the unarmed Michael Brown was dead, shot several times by Officer Darren Brown.

Accounts vary. According to the Ferguson Police Chief, Brown lunged for the officer's gun and was shot in the ensuing struggle. Dorian Johnson, Michael Brown's friend and the only surviving witness says that the officer attempted to choke the victim and proceeded to shoot him when Brown pulled away.

Locals were upset after Brown's body was left in the street for four and a half hours. No ambulance was called. Detectives weren't even called to the scene for over an hour. That night, police armored up, assuming the worst from passionate, public protests. The next morning it became obvious that the meager trust between the police and the community was thinning. 

Minecraft Linkstorm 07: Crimean Ocean

Pretty tired and this is getting up pretty late. I'll upload the links later.

Minecraft Linkstorm 06: superbrighthappyfuntime

Minecraft Linkstorm Part 02

We couldn't get together for a Houma Movie Club this week. I am so eager to talk with my friends about Zombie Hunter. So eager you guys. We're going to try to reschedule, but Josh is buried in work right now and I'm going to be buried in work well into Friday.

Another one of these while I work on my city extension. The aspect ratio is screwed up and there are these little moments of silence where I had to edit out a lot of...mouth noises. It's a work in progress.

Links below the cut:

Minecraft News: Very Adult

You guys know I love talking about the news.

You guys know I love playing Minecraft.

Here's a video with predictable contents.

Counterfeiting Magic

A few weeks back, Wizards of the Coast, the folks who print Magic: the Gathering introduced a new design for their cards. They changed the border, the artist credits, and added a holographic seal to rares and mythic rares. The announcement was almost prophetic because that same week, images surfaced on reddit of high quality fakes being printed in China.

Newer Magic cards will be safe because the fakes aren't perfect and the holographic seal is going to harder to spoof. The most expensive cards in Magic were printed in 1993 though. It was a dark time, when both Wizard's budget and printing technology were far less impressive.

This Dark Matter Thing Was Handled Poorly

For those of you who don't know, which is everyone because no one cares, there was once this group of guys who were modding an FPS. Anyway, they made a really popular mod and then they made a free-to-play FPS based on that and it was sorta popular in some circles.

They didn't make much money though and they didn't like their publisher. They suspected said publisher was only out to make a quick buck and not concerned with the long-term health of the property. So when those guy began working on their new title, Dark Matter, they didn't bother with a publisher.

Then they ran out of money so they tried a Kickstarter. The Kickstarter failed at around 12%. A few months later, they released Dark Matter on steam. Despite the fact that they clearly detailed the content of the game on the site, it ended abruptly at around four hours in. With a text screen of all fucking things.

Humility in Democracy

So, last week was crazy. The Supreme Court struck down DOMA, eliminated vital portions of The Votings Rights Act of 1965, and declared that the freelance supporters of California's Proposition 8 weren't authorized to defend it in lieu of the state. Texas Congresswoman Wendy Davis performed a 10-hour Texas filibuster^[1], only for Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst to try and pass the bill after the legislative session had ended. Most notably, the saga of the NSA's Prism program continued unfolding, as whistleblower Edward Snowden was charged with espionage.

Democracy is great because it's rife with conflict. The conflict that comes from groups talking about opposing ideas helps participants develop their principles and sharpen their skills at expressing ideas. Two people can shout at each other for twenty years, but one would be mistaken if they thought that constituted a conversation. The powerful can impose their will on the weak, but no matter how they do that, it's not democracy. It's the interactive conflict that's great, not the decision that's reached. The humility to learn and reevaluate your position is one of the cornerstones of democracy ^[2].

Jesus Christ! Bad Things, you need to stop happening!

We needed to start canceling bad things happening about six days ago, when AOL shuttered Comics Alliance.

I don't really have the tools to even process this shit. I mean, yeah, it was an internet website that talked about one of the least-effective forms of entertainment. It extensively covered the flagship industry for the toxic effects of intellectual properties. To strip all of the romance out of it, it's like the cancellation of Hottest Abusive Spouses Magazine.

Boston Bombings

You guys know about the bombing in Boston and how they caught the surviving bomber, but what you might not be aware of is Representative Greg Ball of the US House of Representatives advocating torturing the Dzhokar Tsarneav.

For more people saying we should torture Dzhokhar Tsarneav you can just check out the Twitter search (admittedly, there are a fair number of people opposed to it too).

Torture in this circumstance comes from two motivations. The more reasonable is interrogation. While Chechens are usually known for terrorism against Russia, the explosives knowledge and a choice of targets (a high-profile, internationally celebrated event with minimal security) might indicate some outside help. Certainly, applying pressure to get information on that outside help is going to be more effective than asking nicely. The beauty of torture is that you can ask nicely, then apply that pressure. Personally, I don' t think torture is very effective, but then I admit there's a liberal bias in a lot of my media feeds.

The worse reason is retribution. My fellow countrymen have an unhealthy attitude with retributive punishment that really ends with terrorists. We have an entire party that wants to punish people for bad life decisions and sees prison less as a place of reform and more as the expensive shelf to keep black people on so they don't clutter the place up. What I'm saying is that retributive torture is part of a long, bad cultural excitement over making certain people suffer.

Skipping over the topic of folks who allow no impairment of the second amendment while gleefully penning exceptions to the sixth and eighth, it's discouraging to have to remind people that we are supposed to be the good people here. The use of righteous outrage as a source of infinite justification for any retributive action is the action of the enemy, not of the self-purported leader of the free world.

Linkstorm: Carrots

Disney/Star Wars

So between trying to shoot a short video for the RPG I'm running, NaNoWriMo, getting some important paperwork in order (for money), and paying lots of money so my car doesn't kill me, I haven't been the best on blogs lately (And also Minecraft, but that's not important). Anyway, the "Disney buys Star Wars (and Willow, I guess)" thing has been bafflingly contentious.

While I did enjoy The Phantom Menace and have never been fashionable enough to love Jar-Jar Binks, I'll be the first the queue up some Mr. Plinkett Star Wars Reviews to watch the detailed, no-stone-unturned documentary revealing the prequels as a visually pleasing creation with fly-by-night fundamentals created with no artistic vision as a means to further get money out of a popular franchise.