"What Do You Think That Word Means?"

To be filed under "Things That Have Ruined My Childhood."

This is Orange Anal Penetration all over again. Call the Daily Mail! Won't someone think of the children!

Note To Self: Never Be Nice About The Right

I've been keeping an eye on Rand Paul ever since I gave him credit for at least being entirely honest about his totally lunatic, unworkable beliefs. Specifically, it was refreshing to see a conservative/libertarian finally confess that their approach to the concept of freedom would necessarily make life tough for some groups of people. Clearly, that doesn't make them right, but I have far more respect for libertarians who start sentences with "This will be difficult and seem unfair, but..." than I do for those who insist "Everything would be better for everyone if only...".

Well, since then Paul has been working very hard indeed to demonstrate he's just as bad as the rest of the Republican Party. His libertarian tough-talk has been getting less and less about making hard decisions, and more and more about confusing "freedom" with "getting away with a much as you can".

Anyway, I think he might finally have reached his nadir (though I'm by no means sure I'm right about that) with this slice of villainy:

"The bottom line is: I'm not an expert, so don't give me the power in Washington to be making rules," Paul said... "You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You'd try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don't, I'm thinking that no one will apply for those jobs."

"I know that doesn't sound … I want to be compassionate, and I'm sorry for what happened, but I wonder: Was it just an accident?"

Steve Benen notes one obvious take-away here: it's probably not a good sign that Paul doesn't want to have a hand in any legislation about something he isn't an expert in. God knows, we need more brains in politics, and we certainly need politicians to be briefed better, but that doesn't mean they get to wash their hands of any situation they don't want to learn about.

There's something far worse here, though. Claiming shopkeepers rights to refuse sales is more important than customers rights to be served is at least a comprehensible position, even if I think Paul is on the wrong side of it. On the other hand, arguing that a mine won't be able to hire manual labour if its safety record isn't good enough is just completely, mind-bogglingly ignorant. It would be stupid at any time, but with the US in the grips of an unemployment crisis, it pretty much beggars belief.

And the thing is, I'm pretty sure Paul knows this. Why? Because of that last line. Paul has no evidence, as far as I've been able to determine, that the disaster at the mine was anything but an accident. But he's happy to suggest it might have been. Because if it was, it would mean he didn't have to consider the risks of his position. He's put himself in a position where he's saying "Without regulations no mine will have a deadly accident", and the only way he can square that with actual fatal disasters is to question whether they were an accident at all.

It's a fairly common rhetorical trick, actually: you start with your axiomatic principles, and question the validity of any evidence that surfaces that contradicts them. I suspect almost everyone is guilty of that to some extent every now and again, but that doesn't mean this particular brand of reductio ad absurdum that the American right seems to specialise in shouldn't be condemned for what it is. It doesn't matter whether it's logically incoherent, whether you exonerate those responsible, or blame the victim: the principal tenant that less regulation means more awesome must never be allowed to face criticism or counter-evidence.

In short, I spoke too soon. Either Paul is just another cynical opportunist, or he's completely insane.

Or both. It's probably both.

We Also Know Wasps Are Sexually Aroused By Pate

This is easily one of the funniest headlines I've come across in ages. I'm wondering how hard it would be to swap specialties. Being an authority on imprecise probability isn't nearly as cool-sounding as becoming a "monkey-annoyance expert".

I'd also like to know just how long this has been going on. In my head these mavens of monkey mislike must have a list pinned up in a lab somewhere:

THINGS THAT TERRIFY MONKEYS

• Snakes
  
• Birds
• Fire
• Squirrels
• Flying squirrels
• Flying squirrels that are also on fire
• Old age
• Financial uncertainty
• Younger, cooler monkeys taking their monkey woman
• Nuclear war
• That AIDS thing finally coming back to bite them
• No bananas
  

State Of Play

This will be my final missive from the original Casa del Calamari. Hopefully the conclusion of the epic move will allow me a little more time to write (I still have a lot of unpacking to do, but that can be done at a more leisurely pace). On the other hand, I'm unlikely to have internet access at home for about a month - and that assumes nothing will go wrong, which seems unlikely when BT are involved. Swings and roundabouts, I guess. I don't want another month to go past with so little posted (I haven't done as poorly as this month in over two years), but we'll have to see what happens.

Old World Skool

Impressions of Chaos In The Old World after my first game are actually pretty positive. It looks positively gorgeous, obviously, but then this is Fantasy Flight we're talking about. Awarding a Fantasy Flight game points for looking like a work of art is like giving points to haute cuisine for not letting you starve. Sure, that's nice and all, and no-one likes starving, but that wasn't what made you book a table, was it?

So what is there beyond an admittedly drool-inducing map of the Old World and some truly exquisite plastic miniatures for each of the four Chaos Gods (including all four breeds of minor and major demon)?

Well, quite a bit. T's complaints notwithstanding, it's not a massively complicated game (important note: my definition of "not massively complicated" means I have grasped all the rules and the basic strategy in time to have a shot at winning my first ever game). Your hapless cultists and gibbering demons skip gaily across the Old World, sowing terror and misery wherever they hang their rune-daubed hats. Points are awarded both for conquering realms, and for fucking them up to such an epic extent that they actually become uninhabitable. This latter option nets you big-time victory points, but once you've ruined a realm you can't use it to farm all those squishy human things you so love to squish between your toes, so the scorched earth option is something you want to consider each and every time, even if you'd be in a position to do so (it's not an easy task by any means).

As well as the land-grab options, the other way to advance on your road to total global domination is to advance your own agenda. These are very pleasingly logical and characterful. Khorne's "plan" is probably not even worthy of the name:

Slaanesh gets his jollies by persuading members of the Empire nobility to join his pervy "Pleasure Cult":

Nurgle turns up to the largest city he can find and unleashes as many plagues as possible upon the inhabitants:

And Tzeentch....

Tzeentch...

Well, um, the thing about Tzeentch....

OK. So Tzeentch is a bit shit. Can't have everything, can you?

Still, beyond the comparative lameness of The Quest For The Prettiest Pebble, the different agendas make for a basic and colourful way to govern interactions. Slaanesh needs to devote enough time and energy to ensnare the barony, but if there's a large city in the area he needs to watch out for Nurgle. And what if Tzeentch is in the next realm over stealing all the lovely, lovely rocks? Or what if the warpstone Tzeetch craves is in a realm fat with landed gentry, or a major population centre? Or both? Will Nurgle try and seize the city, or will he look for weaker prey elsewhere. And what will Khorne do when he realises -

Yeah, never mind.

All told, it's a comparively simply, comparatively quick (and again, bear in mind that the comparisons in question are with Arkham Horror and Battlestar Galactica, two of the most Byzantine games I've had the pleasure of playing) which, whilst it requires absolutely no knowledge of the Warhammer world, works best when you can play your chosen allegiance as (that particular) God intended.

Also, Dogs Should Be Made To Wear Trousers

My latest GeekPlanet article is up now, which concerns itself with the adventures of a plucky little octopus named Paul.

On a related subject, I learned from BigHead today that professional Jew-baiting nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has pointed at Paul as a example of everything that is wrong with Western civilisation. This may be because octopuses look a little bit like a balloon attached to eight ties (which he also hates), but I think something more subtle is going on here. I think he's trying to defame Paul, eroding his authority before the Americans have the chance to indulge in some "extraordinary rendition" and claim Paul for themselves.

After all, what better way for the US to decide which country to needlessly crush next than the say so of a clairvoyant octopus? As Bighead pointed out earlier, a system by which any given country has only a 50% chance of being invaded by bloodthirsty Americans could very easily be thought of as an improvement. I'd certainly take Paul over Mitt Romney any day of the week.

Wait, What?

One of the best things about having a hit counter on the blog is the number of ancillary statistics it generates. How many people arrive a day, who is new and who is returning, where in the world my readers come from; lots of nice things to look at and consider.

Possibly my favourite part though is the list of keyword searches people have put into Google or similar that have led them to visiting my site.

Usually these are exactly what you'd think: "Cosmic Calamari"; "Musings of the Cosmic Calamari"; basic things like that.

Except today, when I found "alas smith and jones million million"; "martian water giver in the olympics"; and, most alarmingly, "I FUCK MYJAPANESE MOTHER INKITCHEN".

I'd like to apologise to all three readers, who almost certainly didn't find what they were looking for. Though I think anyone who comes to their computer thinking "Man, I need to see a Nipponese man bang his mother but only on a kitchen table" is liable to be asking too much of the internet in any case.