Author: VD

Gears of War 2:very good graphics, scripting, and dialogue, interesting multiplay. However, the weapon controls aren’t great and the Locust storyline is kind of stupid. I got bored with the whole “missing wife” thing very early on; while it’s easy to see what they were shooting for, they only achieved annoying bathos. 6 of 10.

COD 5:I’ve only played the PS/3 multiplayer, but I’ve played a lot of that and it’s excellent. Absorbing gameplay, excellent graphics, good weapon controls, nice progression system. It’s sometimes a bit too easy to kill from a distance without a scope and every now and then one can empty an LMG into an enemy right in front of you without scratching them, but it’s very good. The Infinity Ward games always seem to be better than the Treyarch ones. My only complaint is that there’s little effort to make team action more viable. 8 of 10 (multiplayer)

Frontline: Fuels of War:A reasonable effort, but the gameplay is average, the graphics are mediocre, the enemy soldiers are pretty random, and the storyline doesn’t make much sense. Basic weapon controls are different than COD for no rational reason I can see. 5 of 10.

Assassin’s Creed:Great graphics. Interesting variant on the stealth concept. Absolutely terrible storytelling, abysmal dialogue, and poor design fundamentals ruin what should have been a fascinating setting. I’ve also heard the missions are very repetitive, but I quit playing very early on after being forced to listen to constant blather about how assassins are all about NOT harming innocents. Are you freaking kidding me? Why not just mount them on unicorns and arm them with paintballs while you’re at it! They went so far as to name the game after its very worst aspect. Jade Raymond is attractive and she’s a competent producer, but she definitely needs to stay the hell away from the narrative. 3 of 10.

By the way, just to confirm I wasn’t imagining the spectacular lameness, I checked out an interview with her. Get this: “This historic ambiguity has allowed us to portray the Assassins as a forward thinking group with the single objective to stop the war…. In Assassin’s Creed, Crusaders (and the Saracens) are not the Assassin’s true enemy. War is – as are those who exploit it.” Ridiculous and howlingly anti-historical. I would have had more respect for Ubisoft Montreal if they’d portrayed the Assassins as a forward-thinking group with the single objective of legalizing gay marriage.

Christian Fiction Review takes a look at Summa Elvetica:

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the winner of the most fascinating (and bizarre) book title in the history of Christian Fiction Review! That alone has probably prompted more than one second look at this most unique title. What we have here is a concept that is relatively obvious and yet never before addressed in any writings I’ve ever read.

My writing time is committed for the next four months, but it might please those who enjoyed SE to know that I spoke this week with a UK publisher who read the book and apparently quite enjoyed both the novel and the novellas. Marcher Lord is already interested in doing a second book, so I think the prospects are rather good for an eventual return to the world of Marcus Valerius, Caitlys the elven sorceress, Lodi the dwarf, and His Sanctified Holiness Charity IV.

One wouldn’t think Republicans would be dumb enough to listen to a McCain strategist, but given CNBC’s recent worries about being too harsh on Obama, it must be recognized that there are no limits on modern organizational idiocy:

John McCain’s top adviser from the presidential campaign urged fellow Republicans on Friday to warm up to gay rights and warned that the GOP risks becoming the “religious party” with its opposition to same-sex marriage.

Apparently Steve Schmidt failed to notice that at the same time McCain was getting his head handed to him in California, Proposition 8 passed. Opposition to homogamy is significantly more popular than the Republican party; no doubt this guy was enthusiastic about McCain “suspending” his campaign in order to rush back to Washington and champion Banker’s Bailout I.

Unfortunately, he’s still much too polite, as he left out the obvious, “Look, you utter morons….”

How do I say this so people will understand? Fascism isn’t a libertarian doctrine! It just isn’t, never will be and it can’t be cast as one. Anarchism, secessionism, extreme localism or rampant individualism may be bad, evil, wrong, stupid, selfish and all sorts of other things (though not by my lights). But they have nothing to do with a totalitarian vision of the state where individuals and institutions alike must march in step and take orders from the government.

Anyone who describes libertarianism as being in any way akin to fascism is either a) totally dishonest, b) totally ignorant, or c) remarkably stupid. Without exception. The heart of fascism is “nulla contro lo stato”. Nothing contrary to the State. The heart of libertarianism is “lo stato limitato”. The two ideologies are inimical and they always will be.

Spengler = David Goldman, the associate editor of First Things:

During the too-brief run of the Asia Times print edition in the 1990s, the newspaper asked me to write a humor column, and I chose the name “Spengler” as a joke – a columnist for an Asian daily using the name of the author of The Decline of the West.

Unless, of course, this is merely a red herring….

Joel Rosenberg fires off a rather good one:

Tom Maddox is an SF writer of fairly minor import. His major professional accomplishment, from this remove, is that he hangs out with his buddy, William Gibson, of (deserved, even though I don’t care for it) Neuromancer fame, who he, well, kind of worships. Back in the day, he was a frequent infestation, err, presence on Usenet, promoting Gibson (pbuh) in every context. It was kinda like when my six-year-old discovered Britney Spears.

Then one day, some guy writes in and asks something to the effect of “Which came first, Gibson’s Neuromancer or the movie Bladerunner?”

I happen to quite like William Gibson’s work. His more recent novels are arguably better than the original cyberpunk stuff with which he made his name. But he’s not a literary demigod either and his accomplishments don’t require embellishment.

JB queries local eddies in the psycho-social continuum:

I enjoyed your exploration in the angels trilogy of the psychology of two school shooters superficially similar to Dylan and Klebold. I wonder if you have seen this article offering a different story than the “bullying” line for Dylan and Klebold’s behavior.

I am not deprecating bullying as a factor since loneliness is a major part of the human suffering of psychopathy. But I suspect after reading that it was not bullying but psychopathic nihilistic contempt for humanity that best explains the massacre. I noted three points from the article:

1) Harris went quiet and planned for a year, allowing many people on the hit list to graduate
2) The planned massacre revolved around explosives, was orders of magnitudes larger, and was aimed at targets beyond the school
3) Harris seems to fit the psychopathic mastermind personality so well – the article develops a more comprehensive picture of his words and actions over time than the “bullying did it” articles I’ve seen

What do you think of the figures tossed around, that 1% or 4% are psychopaths? Could one say that you and Bane are both ones? Over the last month I have been induced by life evidence to evaluate my psychological profile, then a close friend’s, and that is how I came across the Columbine article.

It was an interesting article. Harris was certainly an intriguing personality; I’m rather pleased that my fictional portrayal appears to have gotten the dynamic between the two killers generally right. In answer to JB’s questions, I think the percentages are exaggerated, as the imprecision alone is sufficient to indicate. And I don’t believe that either Bane or I can be reasonably described as pyschopathic even though both of us might superficially appear to score higher than the average on the Hare checklist. To paraphrase something Bane once said, ruthlessness is often nothing more than a comprehensive understanding the range of the available choices and a willingness to act on the basis of that understanding. But we’re both far too accepting of our personal responsibilities and far too little impressed by our places in the vastness of Creation to ever qualify as being even remotely psychopathic.

I will admit that the highly intelligent are probably more prone to being inaccurately viewed as a bit psychopathic, although it’s not reasonable to always blame a lack of empathy for holding people in contempt; many, if not most, people are genuinely contemptible in one way or another. For example, holding an individual in contempt because he is a relative retard incapable of basic reading comprehension or formulating substantive criticism is not tantamount to denying his equal value as a human being in possession of a soul. It simply means that his opinions are of no value. I believe there is no shortage of evidence to demonstrate that this is true most of the time for most of the 6 billion individuals on the planet.

However, it’s also true that those who favor the abstract over the material, as most intellectuals do, operate in a manner that can appear to be similar to psychopaths in that they don’t tend to pay a great deal of attention to individual matters. But this is generally an issue of focus and perspective, not incapacity. The significant difference can be seen in the way that genuine intellectuals don’t take criticism personally because they know that it is their ideas that are the real target; the psychopath, on the other hand, invents slights and takes great personal offense at imaginary provocations because he believes that everything revolves around him.

This does not, however, mean that they have even the first inkling of a glimmer of a clue:

THE top suits and some of the on-air talent at CNBC were recently ordered to a top-secret meeting with General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker to discuss whether they’ve turned into the President Obama-bashing network, Page Six has learned.

“It was an intensive, three-hour dinner at 30 Rock which Zucker himself was behind,” a source familiar with the powwow told us. “There was a long discussion about whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much. There’s great concern that CNBC is now the anti-Obama network. The whole meeting was really kind of creepy.”

Too conservative. Beating up on Obama too much. Fox News, one would assume. But no, it’s CNB-freaking-C! Right, that’s the problem. You just keep telling yourself that, Schmucker, as your network fades slowly to black.

Item 1: “Mexico has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. It is in many ways similar to the United Kingdom, except with much more severe prison terms for even the smallest gun law violations.”

Item 2: “16 dead in Mexico shootout ahead of Obama visit.”

What is shocking and confusing gun control advocates is that the effect of the usual media coverage of guns has flipped on them. It used to be that coverage of a firearm-related massacre caused the average individual who didn’t think much about guns to react emotionally in favor of gun control laws. But, because so many of massacres have taken place where guns were already illegal, the emotional reaction to massacre coverage now tends to take the form of thinking: “the victims were helpless and the police were worthless… I’d really better buy a gun so that at least I’ll have a chance to defend myself.”

It’s striking and societally significant, to be sure. But the shift away from male employment is still not the primary cause for concern.

The percentage of adult American women who are employed climbed from about 37% in 1965 to about 55% in 2008, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Bureau of Economic Research. We hear less concerning the percentage of adult American men who are employed, which fell from about 81% in 1965 to 69% in 2008. The share of men in the United States with a job is at its lowest point ever.

That long-term trend is now accelerating. Since the current recession began in December 2007, men have lost the vast majority of jobs. Of the 5.1 million jobs that have disappeared, a full 20% have been lost in construction, almost entirely by men. Another 20.6% of jobs have been lost in male-dominated manufacturing. Meanwhile, employment in the female-dominated fields of education and health services has increased by 12% since the recession began. In total, 78% of the jobs lost in this recession have been lost by men, according to BLS statistics compiled by Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress. (Men comprised only about 54% of the workforce going into the recession.)