IMO several problems make me question the brackets that Gamespot ran here. First of all, they ran Snake against Gordon Freeman way too early. That matchup is clearly final four material at least. Master Chief’s freak upset in the first round makes me question the entire competition, and Jack Carver had way more personality than some of the one-hit wonders who made the cut. Parappa? Seriously?

Also, your favorite game system sucks. Also.

Since this site never has enough nerds arguing.

***Update***

We don’t bow to peer pressure around here, so you don’t get Tunch until the next time John logs in.

Meet Whiskey. There will not be many Whiskey photos because the E-P1 is not exactly a fast camera and this hypercaffeinated teenager of a setter can’t sit still for two consecutive seconds.

Technical details: photographer held a medium sized pine cone over his head and acted like he might throw it. This worked just long enough for the E-P1 to find its focus. Whiskey then gave up on the pine cone and resumed barking and running in circles.

The superlight sub-notebook computer format has interested me since at least the mid-90’s, but for the most part tiny, portable computers seemed like a half thought-through niche product. Starting about a year ago, it appears that Asus and now pretty much everyone have hit on a winning formula that deservedly opened a huge new segment of the computer market.

Like most professional scientists Dr. Mrs. Dr. F and I usually arrange our talks at the last minute, often on the plane on the way to a conference. Given the bulk of most laptops and their life support systems, it is hard to ignore the appeal of a super-battery life computer the size of a day planner. Too bad for me, when I walked into Best Buy today they had just cleaned out their PC shelves to make room for new models that run Windows 7. For travel reasons we need one of these things pretty soon, so I am turning to you guys for help.

Has anyone tried Windows 7? I could wait until Monday and buy a new model, but past experience makes me skeptical. I had the dubious pleasure of managing digital microscopes separately controlled by Windows ME and Vista , the two biggest mistakes in the history of operating system rollouts and I fucking dare you to convince me otherwise. Plus I’m still coping with post-clippy stress syndrome. I like the idea of a portable computer running a minimal necessary OS*. Should I find an XP-powered netbook online and hope that it ships in time? Maybe you guys can convince me that Win 7 will not crash and burn like Windows f*cking ME.

If you have a netbook and want to let others know how great it is, or if you want to warn others away, feel free to share. Any and all advice will be appreciated.

(*) One other baffling point – as I recall Windows XP is just a prettier and memory-intensive graphics upgrade of Windows 2000. So why not ship netbooks with Win2K? That should free up the minimal processor and the RAM to work on computing tasks rather than unnecessary microsoft crapware. Apparently I don’t know anything about computers.

No More Mister Nice Guy blog outlines what may well be the worst article ever to appear in the New York Times, an extended whine by Paul Sullivan about all the angry email he got for his piece “A Thousand Violins, Playing Just For the Rich People“. Here’s a sample:

“That’s so stupid that you ought to be slapped for it,” one woman wrote. My favorite began: “Bowties and Reaganomics are for losers. You can cry for the rich all you want, the rest of us will be happy to see them get taxed.”

The vehemence in these e-mail messages made me wonder why so many people were furious at those who had more than they did. And why are the rich shouldering the blame for a collective run of bad decision-making? After all, many of the rich got there through hard work. And plenty of not-so-rich people bought homes, cars and electronics they could not afford and then defaulted on the debt, contributing to the crash last year.

Sullivan goes on to suggest mass psychotherapy for everyone who didn’t like the piece, because, you see, if you don’t like reading about the travails of the ultra-wealthy, that means you have an unhealthy level of anger towards rich people.

Personally, I don’t resent rich people at all. Maybe I should, but I don’t. What I do resent is the New York Times wasting space discussing the economic “problems” of the rich when there are people out there who have real economic problems. I am not one of those people, by the grace of God, but you know the drill: 45 million without health insurance, 10% unemployment, wave after wave of foreclosures. Those are real economic problems. A 30% dip in your hundred million dollar trust fund is not.

If there were some terrible disease that was only affecting rich people and Paul Sullivan asked us to feel sorry for them, I would do so. In fact, I’m willing to admit right now that there may be all kinds of psychological problems that afflict the rich disproportionately and, if so, I have sympathy for those afflicted.

But Sullivan is not asking us to feel sorry for the rich because of any of those things, he’s asking us to feel sorry for the rich because they aren’t quite as rich as they used to be. And, that my friends, is total bullshit.

It’s one thing for Sullivan to write some sob piece about the rich because one of his editors told him to do so. That’s understandable. But when you write an entire column whining about the email you got and accusing your readers of psychological problems, you’re an asshole. It’s that simple.

There are days when I wish the New York Times would hurry up and go bankrupt.

I don’t normally like to make things this personal, but this picture of the reporter is worth at least a thousand words.

Have at it.

Vote Bitsy, also too.

Interesting analysis by Democracy Corps about what motivates the conservative fringe which included this paragraph:

A central part of the collective identity built by conservative Republicans in the current political environment is their belief that they possess knowledge and insight that the majority of Americans – whether too lazy or too misguided to find it for themselves – do not possess. A combination of conservative media outlets are the means by which they have gained this knowledge, led by FOX News (“the truth tellers“), and to a lesser degree conservative talk radio. Their antipathy and distrust toward the mainstream media could not be stronger, and they fiercely defend FOX as the only truly objective news outlet.

This goes along with what DougJ has been talking about for months- that these folks really are speaking their own language, and have a complete different language, reality, and collective understanding. It really is to the point that the echo chamber is reverberating so loudly that when you hear these guys speak, it almost seems like they are from a different planet.

Only they know the real truth. The rest of us are just sheeples.

The NY Times reports:

President Obama mounted a frontal assault on the insurance industry on Saturday, accusing it of airing “deceptive and dishonest ads” to derail his health care legislation and threatening to strip the industry of its longstanding exemption from federal anti-trust laws.

In unusually harsh terms, Mr. Obama cast insurance companies as obstacles to change interested only in preserving their own “profits and bonuses” and willing to “bend the truth or break it” to stop his drive to remake the nation’s health care system. The president used his weekly radio and Internet address to push back against industry assertions that legislation will drive up premiums.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, ‘Take one of these, and call us in a decade.’ Well, not this time.”

Rather than trying to curb costs and help patients, he said the industry is busy “figuring out how to avoid covering people. And they’re earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exemption from our anti-trust laws, a matter that Congress is rightfully reviewing.”

I’m wondering if when this is all over, people will look back to the BS report from Price Waterhouse Coopers as the turning point in the debate.

I understand he really wanted an NFL team, but I can’t imagine that spending a couple weeks trashing the NFL brand is really working in his favor.

The last of this summer’s paltry tomato plants are well & truly frost-withered, and the final hastily-gathered bowlful of green fruits don’t look very promising either. But next week, the weatherpodperson promises, more 60-degree days!

Happy Friday night, y’all…

There have been a number of requests for an open thread. This video seems appropriate given the events of the last few days and my own musical predilections:

If you want to complain, please scan in the appropriate documents.

Tapper? Todd? I’d like to know.

QUESTION: One more question — have you — do you any comment on Anita Dunn’s belief that Mao is one of her favorite political philosophers?

MR. BURTON: I caught some of that from the Glenn Beck show yesterday, but I don’t think anybody takes it — takes his attacks very seriously. We’re just — you know, we go day to day in this White House trying to ensure that people know the truth about the policies and programs and positions that the President holds, and we’re going to continue to do that.

At this point, I think it would be easier to cut on the middle man and just have Glenn Beck attend the press gaggles.

Someone helped Sara Magna crunch some numbers for her latest star turn at National Review:

We rely on petroleum for much more than just powering our vehicles: It is essential in everything from jet fuel to petrochemicals, plastics to fertilizers, pesticides to pharmaceuticals. Ac­cord­ing to the Energy Information Ad­min­is­tra­tion, our total domestic petroleum consumption last year was 19.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Motor gasoline and diesel fuel accounted for less than 13 million bpd of that. Meanwhile, we produced only 4.95 million bpd of domestic crude. In other words, even if we ran all our vehicles on something else (which won’t happen anytime soon), we would still have to depend on imported oil. And we’ll continue that dependence until we develop our own oil resources to their fullest extent.

[.....]

Alternative sources of energy are part of the answer, but only part. There’s no getting around the fact that we still need to “drill, baby, drill!” And if those in D.C. say otherwise, we need to tell them: “Yes, we can!”

BPD, bitches. Betcha didn’t know what that meant before.

A LOL to start the weekend, before Apple gets it taken down…

Whether or not the tea baggers’ hatred of Obama seems, on the surface, to be motivated by race, it’s remarkable how much political attitudes break down along racial lines. Ron Brownstein:

Just 43 percent of whites polled approve of his job performance, compared with 74 percent of nonwhites (Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, and others). But that gap, though formidable, isn’t much different from the one in Obama’s support during the 2008 election, when he had the backing of only 43 percent of whites but 80 percent of nonwhites.

More telling are the contrasts across the color line on deeper measures. Both whites and nonwhites worry that young people won’t match earlier generations’ living standards, the poll found. But whites are much more pessimistic about their own prospects. Two-thirds of whites believe that living standards for “people like me” won’t grow as fast as they did for previous generations. Only about one-fourth of African-Americans and two-fifths of Hispanics agree.

Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year’s turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations, and the financial industry. Nonwhites are also sour on the private sector but are much less disillusioned with government. Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick “none”—a grim statement. By contrast, a majority of blacks and a plurality of Hispanics choose elected officials in Washington.

Brownstein goes on to claim that a racial divide like this is troubling, but I also wonder how accurate it is to look at race—as opposed to age and region—as the dominant factor here. The south voted very differently than the rest of the country in 2008—Obama got between 54 and 59 percent of the vote in the other three regions and only 45 percent in the south. And this despite the fact that the south certainly has a lower percentage of white voters than the the north or midwest (I don’t have the stats at hand so I’m not sure what the comparison is with the west). As for age, Obama did 21 points better among those under 30 than he did among those over 65. That is by far the largest gap that appears in the Roper Center’s online archives. Believe it or not, the largest gap I found before 2008 was 10 points.

It seems to me that we have now is a largely southern, largely older, and entirely white block of voters who are completely politically out of step with the rest of the United States and, indeed, with the rest of the western world. I wonder how much longer the Broders of the world can continue to describe these people as the real Americans whose attitudes define our nation’s values.

Update. Aimai points out in the comments that, aside from the southerness, this is exactly the same demographic that populates the punditocracy.

Also, yes, I realize that age, region, and racial attitudes are all closely linked.

Ted Turner on being down to his few billion:

Turner said he has learned to live with less, yet he still bemoans the decline in his net worth.

“To drop out of that league, that was hard to do,” Turner said. “I’ve had the experience of being on top and riding the roller coaster down again, nearly to the bottom. You know, if you economize and don’t buy new airplanes or long-range jets, or that sort of thing, you can get by on a billion or two.”

What the world need now is New York Times profile of the woes of billionaires who used to be multi-billionaires.

Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner has an interesting study of conservative attitudes towards Obama. Their big point is that race plays less of a role in these attitudes than is commonly believed. I haven’t had time to read it thoroughly, but it’s interesting. I’ll have some more comment on this in the updates later.

Update. I’m on a conference call about this right now and it’s quite interesting. For example, conservatives that they spoke to didn’t cite a single Congressional leader as speaking for them; almost to a person, they said that Fox News spoke for conservatives. They showed very little enthusiasm for any 2012 candidates except for Sarah Palin.

The GQR analysts believe that tea partier/conservative base politics will play a much more important role in the 2012 Republican primary than they did in 2008.

Update update. Another interesting nugget: the GQR people say that the hostility towards Obama seems much more ideological and much less personal than with Clinton. In fact, the few good things conservatives did say about Obama were almost always personal—he seems like a good family man, his children are well-behaved, etc . With Clinton, the animus was primarily personal and less ideological.