Peanut butter isn’t naturally sweet. Not that I dislike sweet peanut butter, but there it is. That does have certain implications regarding peanut butter possibilities, however. I badly want to try, oh, at least seven or eight of those.

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.)

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. ...

The Telegraph has partial confirmation (original) 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. ...

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.)

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. ...

Then: “I don?t think there is any role for the U.N. in the short term in searching for, or identifying, or securing weapons of mass destruction, but we do not necessarily rule out some kind of U.N. role down the road.” That’d be U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton. Today, things are different: “The United States has started discussions with the International Atomic Energy Agency to make arrangements for IAEA teams to return to Iraq to determine what may have been stolen from nuclear sites, a State Department official said yesterday.” ...

WISH 48 (original) 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. ...