Because I haven't been able to post anything substantial on the VPs

The following humorous anagrams are taken from The Volokh Conspiracy:

Who's the real secret Muslim in the race?

SHARIA PLAN

Who's most desperate to win?

I NEED JOB

As for Palin, who is more of a 'surprise' than Biden was, her rollout isn't working exactly as her party hoped. Sure she's got the Republicans excited, but when anybody unknown comes suddenly into the public eye there's a huge info-dump. Unfortunately, Palin's info-dump has made the McCain campaign seem...tabloid-friendly.

So all right, McCain picks someone his base loves, and it probably picks him up a couple points among women. But then it also kinda makes his campaign NOT seem like the 'safe' thing anymore. I have no idea whatsoever if this will benefit McCain in the long run.

Polls on RCP show a post-convention, pre-Palin Obama leading in Ohio and Florida. If he wins either, the race is effectively over. There's still room for McCain, but head-to-heads put Obama between 49-51% support. While the Republican convention will probably give McCain some support, will it really drain support from Obama? If he's winning more than half of voters it means that McCain would have to rely on turnout to win the election. The way I see it, the Democrats are the ones with the new turnout advantage in this election.

And let's not forget Barr and Nader. Nader polls at 1-4%. That's bullshit. There's no way that a guy who got .4% last time he ran will do twice to ten times as well in this election, where the nominee is more exciting to vote for than Gore or Kerry was. Barr gets 1-5%, and I think he'll get about 1-2%, basically getting .5% in the coastal areas outside the South and maybe up to 5% in the Midwest. I have no idea how Nader polls so high, but it is literally impossible for him to do as well as he's polling. More people might vote for nearly-crazy-"I'm so entitled I can hit police officers and disregard regulations" Cynthia McKinney, who's the real Green Party nominee this year.

This is hilarious: fun with senate candidates!

Do you know who this is? This is the woman who was running as the Republican candidate for Joe Biden's senate seat. Her name is Christine O'Donnell. She was going to lose so badly that no one even bothered to do a poll for the race.

Now Biden is VP and the Democrats must find someone who can run in his place to maintain the seat. While it's not likely, there's the off chance that this new person will collapse under the weight of gaffes or scandals or some other unforeseen consequence.

While it's likely that O'Donnell's senate career will end before it has begun, it would be a hilarious bit of political drama worthy of the attempted spin-off of the West Wing if O'Donnell managed to make her way to the senate. At least if she doesn't appear to be a politician, she's not as unsettling as:


Bob Kelleher, Republican candidate for Montana, who loves his kerchief.

This man's name is Bob Tingle. Tingle. Would you, as a voter, let him tingle you?[Republican challenger for Rhode Island]


Scott Kleeb, Democratic challenger for Nebraska. Since when did they start casting former stars of Dawson's Creek for unwinnable seats?


Tom Udall, Democratic challenger and likely winner of New Mexico's open seat, a Nicholas Cage look-alike who thinks that the best photos are always taken in front of pseudo-picturesque mountainscapes.

Creepiest drawing of Obama ever...

Apparently it's a big worry in Arabic-language media that the US is run/controlled by Jews. No matter what you think of that idea, it cannot excuse the terrifying thing you see above you, where a disoriented and seemingly underaged Obama emerges from the marsupial-like space in the back of Israel's ill-fitting jeans.

A hilarious gay parade float

A pro-gay group wanted to have a parade float. A local government told the group it couldn't display any references to homosexuality on it.

The result?

the restrictions, which resulted in a float bearing a cowboy-and-Indian
diorama, signs such as "Who pays for school supplies?" and a giant
question mark in the middle of it.

Some people REALLY like Ron Paul

This is nowhere near the end of it.

I IMPLORE you to visit this link to view the most glorious celebration of freedom, bad editing and anachronism in all of political art. It is called "Liberty Spears the Enemy". In it, Benjamin Franklin is smoking a joint.

Aliens and religion!

Yes it's a ridiculous subject. Yes I'm going to write about it. What if, tomorrow, aliens of some kind were discovered. How would this change people's religious views?

I don't think alien existence is impossible, but the chances of any smart species somehow reaching us within our lifetimes are very low. Most people agree that if life is found off-Earth, it will be simple, proto-animals or proto-plants. It might just be bacteria. I'm not going to deal with the question of sentient aliens or alien religion because they're too speculative.

A horribly sidetracked discussion on ReasonOnline finds one James Anderson Merritt saying the following:

I think it is important that the assertion was that a belief in aliens
would not contradict a "belief in God." Belief in the truth of the
scriptures, however, is quite another thing. Genesis, Chapter 5, says
quite clearly, "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God
made he him..." We styled ourselves "God's favorites," because we were made in "the
likeness of God," and were given dominion over all of "God's
creatures." I think it is interesting that the vatican assertion was
that aliens would also be among "God's creatures." So would aliens simply be animals? If they didn't look or think much
like us, which species would more accurately reflect "God's likeness"? While belief in aliens would not necessarily preclude belief in "God,"
it would be hard to believe in a God who made us in "his likeness" --
i.e., the God of catholicism -- if we were to encounter sentient
aliens, Unless, of course, they seemed exactly like us. Not being especially religious, I nevertheless hope that I live to see the answer to these questions.

This comment is basically on-track. Meeting aliens doesn't mean everyone will magically become atheists, despite the fears of some. Since the life would probably be simple, I'm not even sure that the problem of "In the image of God" would come up. How worked up would you be about bacteria infringing on your status as God's image? Besides, the quote above sees the word 'image' very narrowly - it could be a spiritual, symbolic image. Even a literalist reading of the phrase must give it some symbolic quality, since humans can't be strictly 'God's Image' since we don't all look alike.

However, life on other planets would be a blow to hardcore creationists since the Bible seems to make it clear that no other planets were mentioned. Obviously there are ways to reconcile this: God could have placed simple forms all around the universe. Or there could be denial that the life is actually extraterrestrial - it could be blamed on contamination from whatever probes detected it.

In Islam, a group of beings called the Djinns were created prior to humans. They are more powerful, but they are not angels, since those cannot sin in most interpretations. Djinns have free will like humans, and can convert to Islam - something Muslims were actually tasked with doing if they encountered one. I bring this up because alien life wouldn't shake up Muslims as much as Christians, since Islam has a looser creation story that has a bunch of ways to reconcile a new kind of life.

Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and friends don't often deal with creation issues right now, and something like alien life wouldn't do much to disturb believers. One thing I would predict is that certain New Religious Movements - the things that derisive media usually call 'cults' - would rack up a few more followers. There have been a number of prominent NRMs that openly predict and discuss alien life and especially aliens as technological salvation. A discovery that these groups had been a least partly right in their predictions would drum up interest and some conversions at the very least.

As for me, I think that as long as alien bacteria don't kill all life on Earth, I'm perfectly fine with any alien discovery.

The historiography of grand strategy computer games (aka. the most boring title ever for a post)

I have been playing a computer game recently, and it's good. It's addictive and eats up time. It's called Europa Universalis, and it's one of the most complicated and historiographically acceptable of any of the 'conquer the world' games I've played yet. The combat of armies, the loose political organization, the factoring in of culture and religion in a non-trivial way all make for a fun but also acceptably historical game. It's nothing like another favorite of mine, Medieval: Total War, which makes each playable faction out to be an empty container that can build a massive force and steamroll across Europe regardless of culture and religion.

But amid all this is a disturbing little nugget: the way that EU calculates the rate at which your government researches technology exposes two important ideas about how nations advance, both of which are faulty.

First, advances in technology - from governmental forms to new types of military to better trading practices - come about only by direct investment from the player. Since you play as the central government of your faction, this seems to be telling us that governments create innovation, and that advances are made only this way. I give the developers a huge amount of leeway since they had to think of some system, and even if they didn't mean this, I must discuss it.
Most large advances in any area of technology came from individual or group (though not always private) experimentation or thought. They did not come from governments pouring big buckets of money into an idea. This only began to happen when new technology became expensive. The first big tech breakthrough totally made by governments was, in my opinion, the atomic bomb. There is only one other big breakthrough since then: spaceflight. Some would even argue that the government spaceflight programs are a dead end, marking not a breakthrough but a hobbled mistake that needs to be ditched. The major breakthroughs until then, from Longbows and heavy armor for knights and horses to powered flight to electronic components were mostly free of government funds. Most great political thinkers weren't subsidized.

The second problem with EU's historiography is again about technological research. In the complicated formula determining how quickly an area of research is completed, there is a variable based on which major culture group your faction belongs to. Based on which group you belong to, your research speed gets multiplied by a number. The groups and their values are:

• Latin (Western Europe): 1.0
• Eastern (Eastern Europe): 0.9
• Muslim: 0.8
• Indian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh): 0.5
• Chinese (and Southeast Asia): 0.4
• African: 0.2
• New World: 0.1

Well if that isn't Eurocentric and condescending! This feature actually wasn't required to make the game playable, unlike my first complaint. Even taking the actual values very lightly, there is a startling downplaying of New World tech and ideological prowess. Africa likewise gets shafted. The game begins in 1453, when Muslims, not Westerners, were the preeminent culture group. China's technology rivaled Europe's for maybe another two centuries.

What this means is that by the time you being to colonize as a European faction, the African and New World ones are pushovers. Your troops cut them to bits and settle on their lands. There are, however, good arguments to be made that New World tech was actually much more advanced in some areas than European kinds. The bows Amerinds made were superior to European bows and guns, and hardened leather armor they used could actually repel bullets up until better methods were found in the 1840s.

This game, like almost every other I've played, seems dead set on explaining that Europe really was the best in most every way. It's nearly impossible to play as a New World faction, and I (playing as England) ripped apart an Amerind alliance of three nations comprising the entire Southern US, then without stopping conquered all of Mexico and Central America. From this game, it's pretty evident that a kind of Eurocentric and imperialist attitude to history still exists.

(For more on Amerind sophistication, read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Charles Mann is an amazing popularizer of real, substantial history.)