Enoch

Neat. The track that plays automatically on the linked site is quite good. And the fact that he credits his guitar by name is pretty cool.

Zaeed + Squad Disruptor Ammo + GPR = every mech-heavy mission is a waltz. The "Hold the Line" thing is the one puzzling endgame choice because it's the only one where they don't really spell it out for the player. For every other decision, your squaddies give you generally good advice on what you should be basing your decision. But for the "hold the line" phase, you make the decision by default-- it counts the people you leave behind rather than the people you choose. I guess it's nice to have something less predictable in there, but for a game that generally strains to cater to the player and inform him/her in advance of what their decisions mean, it's a little jarring. (I didn't have a problem with Mordin on the one playthrough I've finished, but that's because I liked to take him with me when I was fighting Collectors/husks/scions/etc.-- he's entertaining, and maximum Incinerate is very useful.)

I've never been much a fan of Belgian beers. They tend to be too sweet for me. I want more bitter hops and/or richly toasted barley, not something that tastes like some apricots have been rotting in it. Ice has no place in a fine single malt. Coldness reduces the sensitivity of your mouth and nose to the flavor. Stella is too yuppyish and overpriced. It's the watery beer of choice for people too highbrow to drink Miller.

From a post I made this weekend in the "What did you eat" thread: I'll add one comment about the cherry: the bright-red maraschinos that you see in most bars and stores are terrible. I've been using a brand called Tillen Farms that makes an all-natural maraschino, which is an improvement. But a better approach would be to buy some dried cherries, and rehydrate them by soaking in the fluid of your choice. (Brandy, I'm told, works well.)

In the US, we hire contractors to do most of that stuff. It's expensive, but most of those tasks are more about specialized equipment and planning than about raw manpower. I have no idea what we could possibly think of to do with all the conscripts if there were some universal service requirement. For my part, I have done no military service, and I'm now too old for the emergency-only conscription law currently on the books. But I am a paid employee of the United States governement. I work with a lot of veterans (vets get a preference for civil service jobs), and the experience seems to have benefitted them. But my office is largely professional employees, and my co-workers with military experience were nearly all officers (my immediate supervisor was a Major in the Army JAG), so that may not be a particularly representative sample.

Given that my phone is approximately as old as my current laptop, I doubt that I'll be doing anything like that. (It is a bit odd that I'm generally pretty current on computer hardware, but hopelessly out-of-date on phones. My cell gets used maybe twice a week, on average, and only to make/receive actual phone calls. I am probably the youngest adult I know who has never sent a text message.) Anyhow, it seems like the main appeal to me would be the potential to use a wireless mouse and/or headphones without tying up a USB port. The mouse bit is tempting, but I'm not going to buy headphones that wouldn't work with any of the other various sound-producing bits of hardware I've got lying around. I'm going to put that in the "could be neat, but not worth paying extra for" category. Thanks!

I'm starting to shop around a bit for a replacement for my 5-year-old notebook PC, for use around the house and to take on trips. (I'm concentrating in the higher-end netbook market-- 11-12" screen; $400-500.) As I read through the specs, one of the features that puzzles me is bluetooth support. I know bluetooth mostly as those wireless cell phone headsets, primarily worn by total jackasses. But I don't quite understand how this particular functionality helps a laptop PC. In the PC context, what does bluetooth support let me do?

What about the right to look at child pron? Or to drive 180 MPH on the highway? If you say 100% "no" to Sandy's question, you're an anarchist. If you say 100% "yes," you don't believe in "rights" at all. It's a blanket distinction that simply doesn't work unless there are a whole lot of nuances, complications, and specific definitions of terms thrown in.

I didn't expect that to be good, but having it dubbed over the live performance video (so that I could laugh at out-of-context rocker preening) made it worthwhile. Bud Powell -- Reets and I

For any reasonable (read: not-entirely-manichean) viewpoint, there are 1000 examples where the answer is yes, and a 1000 examples where the answer is no, depending on the particular "rights" and "privileges" you're talking about.

That's not a straightforward question. It's a vague abstraction designed either to rope them into an obvious rhetorical trap, or to make them look shifty by having to qualify their answers with a lot of little nuances. And, depending on how well-funded and well-run each of the candidates' operations are, you might get a reply or two written up by some intern that does little more than refer you to the campaign webpage.

The 10th amendment doesn't say anything "specifically." It's the most generic statement in the whole document. What I didn't know earlier that may make a difference: The consequences for not complying with the individual mandate is a tax penalty. Couched simply as a higher tax on people who don't have health insurance, I think that the whole endeavor is on more solid legal ground. (Not to say that the Commerce Clause argument is a slam-dunk; it's a pretty thin reed after Gonzalez v. Raich, but with the most conservative Supreme Court nearly in a century, it does have a chance.) While there is caselaw stating that Congress can't do through the taxing power what it couldn't otherwise do through its regulatory powers, there is ample precedent of Congress using the tax code for regulatory purposes by making certain economic decisions that people make more expensive than they would otherwise be. (As a sidenote, it is very likely that the current legal challenges are going to be dismissed for lack of standing-- most of the parts that are being challenged haven't taken effect yet, and it is dubious whether State AGs would be the proper parties to bring suit even when the claims become ripe.) The bit about Medicaid expansion imposing costs on states is also a non-starter. (I assume you meant Medicaid, as Medicare is wholly federal.) Medicaid is a voluntary program that States participate in to gain matching funds from the Feds, and the Feds have always been the party that sets the qualifications. If state governments hate this legislation that much, they can cancel their Medicaid program (and face the consequences at the ballot box). The religious objections are probably the ones with the most teeth. But litigation over that will almost certainly have to wait until the potentially-objectionable portions kick in and actually impact the free exercise rights of some individuals.

Dammit. Anytime somebody mentions the Lips, I end up with "She Don't Use Jelly" stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

Thanks for the report, Pop. Laugh-out-loud good, or laugh-out-loud bad?

Had a late lunch at our local Burger Joint, so I didn't eat much dinner tonight. I've been having ****tails for dinner. Tried two different styles of Old Fashioned. My preference follows: Combine 1/2 oz. simple syrup (equal volumes plain sugar and water, mixed until totally dissolved) with a few dashes of Angostura Bitters in an Old Fashioned glass. (Yes, this drink is so good, they named the glass after it.) Half-fill the glass with ice and stir. Then, holding it over the glass, peel off a 2-3 inch long section of orange peel with an ordinary vegetable peeler. You want the citrus oils in the skin to end up in the glass. Then take the peel you've removed, give it a good squeeze (orange side down) over the glass, and drop it in. Add 2 to 2.5 oz of whiskey. I'm using bourbon, but rye works well, too. (Save the scotch for sipping.) Stir. Add more ice. Garnish with a maraschino cherry. Enjoy slowly. The variant that involves using solid sugar and starting by muddling it with fruit leaves a mess at the bottom of the glass that never really integrates with the rest of the drink. You get a drink of slightly sweetened whiskey on the rocks, followed by picking out bitter-soaked fruit from between the ice cubes. I like bitters-soaked fruit, but this method creates a better, more consistent drink in my book. Other variants use some soda to top the drink, which I think is unnecessary dilution-- if the glass isn't full enough, just make another after you finish it.

Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet -- Cherokee

Less than 40 miles away from Visceris/Hades/Sand/Killian? I'd be freaking out, too.

Clearly, that first fight should have taken place in a tunnel.

I don't disagree with most of what Pop is saying. (Or with Numbers) But, still, there's something about the history of sex-as-espionage-manipulation that gives me some hope. I think it's that I want there to be some some potentially negative consequences for pursuing the romantic options that the game presents to the player. It breaks the Bond fantasy a bit (i.e., in how Bond can always reverse the intended seduction and manipulation through pure studliness), but part of the fun of anticipating a game is that you can imagine and hope for things that probably won't happen.

The bit about the changes to the world history curriculum at the end was particularly funny: Why do they hate America? In my experience, elected school board positions are one of those offices that people only tend to run for when they have an axe to grind.

No, small business owners are rightfully worried that it is going to be a cost that they can't take in an already fragile economy. I'm sure that some are. But from what I understand, small businesses are the ones who are hurting the most in the current system-- at least the ones who provide health insurance to their employees. Without a particularly large group to pool risk, smaller businesses looking for insurers to offer them policies are seeing very high premiums. Once the law kicks in, they'll generally be some of the biggest beneficiaries, in that they'll have access to larger-group rates through exchanges. I've seen the difficulty my father has had in this since going into business for himself. His business employs only him and my mother, and she has a pre-existing condition (lupus) that makes health insurers very nervous. Buying policies on the 'individual' or small-group market is very expensive-- in the early years when the business was just getting off the ground, they had some real difficulties finding someone to cover them (us, really, as I was a minor covered under the family plan at the time) and paying the rates they were offered.

Given that most of the tax increases (scheduled to take effect in 2013) only affect payers whose individual income is over $200,000 (or $250,000 for married-filing-jointly), you're probably not going to get too much sympathy for that.

Take some standard-issue scientific uncertainty, add some interest groups fiercely invested in the answer being "yes" or "no," cycle that through the political system in today's talking-point-centered dialogue, and you get a lot of people (on both sides) with a powerful belief that just happens to support what they wanted to believe before they ever looked at a press report of an executive summary of briefing based on some of the actual evidence. I don't know the science all that well, but it seems to me that there is enough out there to confirm that human conduct is having some effect on the global climate. And, if true, this should merit a policy response-- the external costs of production/transportation/whalefarts/etc. should be internalized to the firms making those production decisions so that the proper level of reduction or counter-measures can be taken in the most efficient way possible. But the confidence interval on the magnitude of the effects of human conduct on climate seems to be incredibly wide. (Not surprising, given the enormounsness and complexity of Earth's atmosphere.) That makes for a difficult policy question-- we suspect a negative effect, but we can't really pin down how bad it will be and thus what level of resources to expend on measures to counter said future effect.

Randomization doesn't really give choice and I think that people should be able to choose who represents them rather than arbitrary representation. Ideally IMO people would run as themselves to represent their community with no additional layers between the representative and the community. The community would choose who they wish to represent them and then the person chosen would go to represent them the best they can. This gives the community the ability to determine who it wants to represent them without having the disconnect of electing a person to represent a party that represents a large population across the nation to represent the community. That was the idea back when the U.S. was a loosely-associated group of regional communities with a total population of 2.5 million (and with voting rights limited to landowning white men over 21). When you've got 300 million people and universal sufferage for citizens over 18, people aren't going to have much of an idea of who their local representatives are (unless the legislature is ridiculously big), and party affiliation makes for a useful shorthand in outlining where people stand on what are considered to be the biggest issues of the day. Also, the only reasonable response to Killian's political forecasting is .