Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kov2G0GouBw]

The reference in the earlier post to the clothes worn on Big Bang Theory led me to the linked site where I wound up finding an online store which sells a shirt which summarizes the rules to Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. As seen in the above video, this is a superior way to making decisions (such as which science fiction show to watch) than Rock, Paper, Scissors. It appears a version of the game was first posted here.

For those who didn’t catch the rules:

  • Rock crushes lizard.
  • Scissors decapitate lizard.
  • Lizard eats paper.
  • Lizard poisons Spock.
  • Paper disproves Spock.
  • Spock vaporizes rock.
  • Spock bends scissors.

And for those who are interested in the shirt as a handy reference:

b597_rock_paper_scissors_lizard_spock

A Seriously Broken Moral Compass

Rod Dreher equates the holocaust and abortion. While not surprising from the right, Dreher is sometimes seen as one of the more rational religious conservatives.

What the Frak is Selma Hayek Wearing?

salma30rock

I expect to see t-shirts for genre shows on Big Bang Theory. (There is even a web site that sells the types of shirts worn on the show.) I didn’t expect to see Salma Hayek wearing a Battlestar Galactica shirt on 30 Rock last night (picture above).

Steve Schmidt’s Straight Talk On John McCain

Now that the election is over Steve Schmidt can admit to what he was really thinking during the 2008 campaign. Schmidt and David Plouffe spoke at the University of Delaware. Neither could admit it, but both knew that the election was over well before election day.

“When Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall, I knew pretty much straight away the campaign was finished,” Schmidt confessed to an auditorium full of college students. When the number of people who thought the country was on the right track “dropped to 5 percent and the economy collapsed, I knew that was not going to be survivable for us.”

If McCain ever had a chance, it could have been destroyed the first night of the convention. The one lucky break McCain got was an excuse to cancel the first night.

On the Bush-Cheney drag: “The first night of our convention was President Bush and Vice President Cheney. I literally thought by the second night of our convention we could be down 25 points.”

I continue to get comments and email from Palin supporters who deny the fact that Palin’s interviews were a disaster. Schmidt realized how bad they were:

“That is one of the two most consequential interviews that a candidate for national office has given, in a negative way, the other being Roger Mudd’s interview of Ted Kennedy . . . when he couldn’t answer the question of why he wanted to be president.”

Not only did McCain lose, but the entire Republican Party is in serious trouble:

“It is near-extinct in many ways in the Northeast, it is extinct in many ways on the West Coast, and it is endangered in the Mountain West, increasingly endangered in the Southwest . . . and if you look at the state of the party, it is a shrinking entity.”

Even Scientists Working For Energy Industry Realized Risk Of Global Warming

There is a strong scientific consensus as to the role of human activity in promoting climate change. Apparently the consensus is so strong that it even included the scientists working for the energy industry. The New York Times reports:

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995…

Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.

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Webb Believes Marijuana Legalization Should Be On The Table

Jim Webb is open to considering decriminalization or legalization of  marijuana as a part of prison reform:

“Well, I think what we need to do is to put all of the issues on the table,” Webb said this morning on CNN if asked if marijuana legalization would be part of his criminal justice reform efforts.

“If you go back to 1980 as a starting point, I think we had 40,000 people in prison on drug charges, and today, we have about 500,000 of them,” the first-term Virginia lawmaker said. “And the great majority of those are nonviolent crimes — possession crimes or minor sales.”

Webb joins several other lawmakers who have called for the exploration of legalized pot, amidst a drug war in Mexico fueled by revenues from American drug sales.

“I think they should examine every aspect of drugs policy to see what’s working and what’s not working, and where the consistencies are and, quite frankly, where the inconsistencies are in terms of how people end up in the system with similar activities,” Webb explained, reiterating his call for a high-level blue ribbon commission to reform the criminal justice system.

“Nothing should be off the table,” he said.