A little while ago I wrote about the tax cut, noting that it would provide some relief for parents. I apologize for being too optimistic. They wound up removing the increased child credit for families making under $26,625. Ooops. (Via CalPundit.)
Author: Bryant
Showtime is filming a two hour movie based on Bush’s 9/11 actions. This might be a good time to refer back to the CCR timeline of his movements on that day. I’m suspecting that since the movie is put together by a White House supporter who describes himself as “a member of the administration,” it won’t really touch on the sense of uncertainty one gets from that chronology.
I’m pretty much gobsmacked, here. I’m not big on the “What liberal media?” call, because there are some aspects of our media which are very liberal — and some which are very conservative. However, I can’t believe Showtime is going to air a two hour campaign commercial. You can talk about the media loving Clinton if you like, but man, his movie was Primary Colors.
The Telegraph has partial confirmation of the earlier Gitmo capital punishment story. It seems fairly likely, at this point, that there are plans for a camp that include an execution chamber.
Talking about this is not being alarmist; it’s part of the system. Which is to say, it’s citizens expressing their opinions when (as may well be the case here) some military personnel let their enthusiasm get the better of them. The reason abuses like that don’t happen is because people speak up. It is not sufficient to simply say “Well, we’d never do that.” It’s our job to remind our government that we don’t do that.
The Economist has a very good report on the Congo (via Gary Farber, who would like as many bloggers as possible to raise awareness of the situation). 2.5 million have died in the Congo over the last four years; the death toll makes Saddam look like a piker. If humanitarian motivations suffice to justify the war on Iraq, then the Congo ought to be next in line. If they don’t — we still ought to do something about this.
Kofi Annan has asked for help. There are reports of cannibalism. It’s ugly.
Joshua Ellis writes on Taste Tribes to good effect. It’s also another demonstration of the slight gap between the political blogs and the social blogs; both create tribal effects but the binding is of a different type. Not a different nature, though. As always with tribes, it’s all about commonality. (Via Mr. Ellis.)
Paul Krugman, fearless economist, explains liquidity traps for the non-economists among us. Interesting stuff. He gets political towards the end, but I happen to think he’s mostly right. The extra few hundred bucks parents get on their taxes may make more of a difference than he claims, though.
Parenthetically, I am a bit baffled as to why more liberal commentators don’t address that aspect of the tax cut. It’s very hard to convince people that the tax cut mostly benefits the rich when you completely ignore the increase in the child credit. 400 bucks per child is not chump change. It is a pretty small percentage of the total cut, but that doesn’t mean middle and lower class parents won’t notice it, and you just look like a complete idiot if you pretend it doesn’t exist.
Back to the liquidity trap. Basically, the liquidity trap is what happens when you run out of room to lower interest rates. Suddenly, you’re short on ways to encourage people to spend money. This makes it hard to kickstart the economy. It happened to Japan, and there are signs we may be close to it; the EU is certainly close to it.
Krugman explains it way better than I do, anyhow.
I’m really hoping this one is wrong. Certainly the term “death camp” is overblown rhetoric. The reality is bad enough. We can’t be executing prisoners without very open due process, and Guantanamo Bay is a closed system. No appeals, no juries. No spectators.
This is not an accusation. I do not say that the proceedings would be unfair; I can’t say that, because I don’t know who the men on the tribunals would be. What I’m saying is this: our system is an open one precisely because our Founding Fathers knew that it was necessary; it is an open system because we are expected not to trust the government’s unsupported word.
Proof of fairness is a burden that lies on the shoulders of the court. They must not refuse to take up that burden.
Yao Ming is suing Coca-Cola China. One might well assume that he’s out for big money, etc., etc. One would be wrong; he’s suing for 1 yuan, which is about 12 cents, for “spiritual and economic losses.” I.e., he feels he has to sue to protect his rights but he’s not interested in punishing Coca-Cola.
Gotta admire that, even if it’s a bit unAmerican.
We played some Trollbabe the other night, and had a tonload of fun. I was kind of expecting it to be a bit turgid, since it’s a highly experimental sort of game, but it moved really quickly and provided as much drama as I could ask for.
Without going into heavy detail, it’s a game in which you play trollbabes — half human, half troll, stuck between two worlds. All PCs are trollbabes, and every trollbabe in the world is a PC. The isolation from both the human and the troll worlds is an important part of the game.
Play is divided into formalized Scenes. At any time, any PC who isn’t in a Scene can show up if there’s no reason why she couldn’t. Scenes contain Conflicts, which are either Social, Combat, or Magic. The player gets to decide if they’ll be resolved with one die roll, two out of three die rolls, or three out of five die rolls; the player also gets to decide what the victory conditions are. (“I win if I convince the bloodthirsty troll to go away.”) Finally, the player gets to narrate failures and the GM narrates successes.
All those elements combine to give a lot of power to the players, and that power means players can really relax and get what they want out of a session. For example, that old RPG cliche about splitting the party goes away when you can pretty much always go where the action is. Another example: it’s not very scary to fail when you get to narrate the exact shape of the failure.
There’s a lot more experimentalism in Trollbabe, mostly oriented towards making it a story-oriented game, but what really interested me were the aspects above. They seemed to be the keys that permit a real sense of dramatic tension in a game in which the players almost completely drive the story.
WISH 48 is all about loot. Real life loot, not the stuff you roll on the treasure table.
The price and availability of miniatures goes up as more companies leave the market. Wood costs lead to extended paper costs, and supplements and gaming systems are becoming a serious financial investment. Is this affecting your gaming any?
I’m pretty much with Ginger on this one. I’m pretty solvent, through a mixture of luck and brains, and I don’t really blink much at costs. Right now my threshold is about 25 bucks for a 128 page book (hardcover or not), and around 40 bucks for a longer book; I’ll buy those if I’m sure I want them, but I won’t buy ‘em as a casual purchase. On the other hand, a $20 128 page softcover? Sure, that’s in my budget.
I don’t buy minis often, but if I did I’d probably feel similarly unless I was collecting a Warhammer army or something. I buy a lot of cards for the one CCG I play, Shadowfist, and I could certainly get by very well buying fewer. So yeah, money issues don’t concern me often.
I also think that higher prices are a good thing for the industry. John Nephew of Atlas Games really pioneered the current pricing structure, based on his analysis which showed he couldn’t make any money with the $15 paperbacks. WotC priced the initial run of D&D core books at an insanely low price, which probably slowed the adoption of realistic pricing, but we’re getting there nonetheless.
The gaming industry needs to keep a niche open for the guys doing games as a labor of love in their basements, but it also needs real businessmen. It needs to be able to support a professional freelancer. If higher prices get us that, I’m all for ‘em.