Foundation

Based on what Michelle Malkin found, I have to wonder if Sen. Boxer read my article on illegal aliens, apportionment, and districting. Says the good Senator’s amendment today:

It is the sense of the Senate that as part of the effort to count all persons physically in the United States during the 2010 Census, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau of the Department of Homeland Security should limit aggressive enforcement of federal immigration laws to promote full participation by non-citizens in the census.

The Rotten Boroughs must be fixed, and the answer is more aggressive enforcement of our existing immigration laws, not less.

For a while there I thought I was going to crack Wii Bowling wide open and have it down too perfectly. Nope; it’s still harder than I thought.

Though I still am making progress; I’m just about at the point where 1300s ratings are the baseline, with 1400s the area I’m trying to get into now.

One interesting note: the ratings system seems to care more about throwing strikes than scoring. So strike/open frame/strike/open frame…. can be much higher rated than a game with a mark in every frame, if you’re throwing more spares than strikes. Even if the score with lots of open frames is the same or higher.

“The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million souls, sends two county members; and so does the county of Rutland which contains not a hundredth part of that number. The town of Old Sarum, which contains not three houses, sends two members; and the town of Manchester, which contains upwards of sixty thousand souls, is not admitted to send any. Is there any principle in these things?”

So asked Thomas Paine in Rights of Man, and while I would disagree with the central premise of that work, I believe we all can see the problem with having a legislative body meant to represent the people having such gross inequities in its representative apportionment.

So why, now, do we continue policies that are creating rotten boroughs in our own United States?

We’re a ways from the worst of England’s old rotten boroughs, such as Old Sarum, in which seven voters elected two members of the House of Commons, but illegal immigration is creating inequities that run counter to our one man, one vote principle. Compare these results from the election of 2006:

We may as well call the House of Representatives the new Senate, if the number of voters getting to choose members of Congress is any guide. Despite the fact that we had a large number of ballot measures and statewide elections at stake, with Barbara Boxer and Arnold Schwarzenegger seeking re-election, some ostensibly equally sized districts saw only a third of the voters that others saw.

Why does Xavier Becerra (D-California 31) get the same vote as Dana Rohrabacher (R-California 46)? The answer is clear: illegal aliens in Los Angeles have created a district where the US Citizens in that state get far more influence on the Congress, than those areas with more legal residents. This trend will continue, too, affecting not just districting but Congressional apportionment. Says MediaNews’s InsideBayArea.com:

Congressional seats have been migrating South and West for decades, as a result of the Sunbelt’s rapid population growth. But the new report by a University of Connecticut demographer is an early take on how the nation’s growing population of illegal immigrants would amplify that trend when seats in the House of Representatives are next divided up. It could foreshadow a partisan political fight over the results of the 2010 Census. While illegal immigrants can’t vote, the report says their growing numbers are affecting the nation’s political balance because they are counted in the once-a-decade Census. That population tally determines how seats in the House of Representatives are split among the states and is also used to distribute more than $180 billion in federal aid each year.

The Connecticut report predicts that California, Arizona, Texas, Florida and New Jersey will gain seats in Congress after the next Census because of their illegal immigrant populations. Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, and Ohio will each lose a seat because they have relatively few undocumented immigrants. New York, which would lose two seats under the current system, would lose only one seat if illegal immigrants were excluded.

If the numbers above don’t disturb you, consider these numbers from other state, ones without an illegal alien invasion in progress:

If Barney Frank’s district can turn out the voters, despite the fact that the district and the state were not in any doubt for much of anything, then I’m forced to conclude that there’s only one reason for California 31 to be the way it is. Our lax immigration law enforcement, when combined with our apportionment and districting rules in this country, is creating systemic inequalities in the House of Representatives. It’s time we fixed them.

Banning the use of lead in electronic devices comes with a price: they will fail over time in an uncontrollable way if tin is used to solder joints instead of lead.

How long until electronic devices in hospitals start killing people because of poorly timed failures of this nature?

Rudy Giuliani launched an unprovoked attack on fellow Republicans yesterday, specifically the Congressional Republicans who to my knowledge have never come after him.

Says the Washington Times:

“We lost Congress because, ultimately, our party in Congress became just like the Democrats as far as spending money is concerned. Shame on us! Shame on us!” the former New York City mayor said. “What we should stand for is fiscal discipline.”

My challenge to Giuliani is to prove this charge; prove that our Congressional Republicans are a) just like the Democrats on spending and b) weren’t fiscally discliplined in their policy development.

Regular readers may know that slicing up federal budgets is a hobby of mine, good for a never ending series of charts and analysis, each seeming to come up with yet another conclusion. So I actually am interested to know where Giuliani is coming up with this charge, and what metrics he’s using to come to this definitive conclusion.

I just hope he’s not taking the charge from the press, or from the Porkbusters, to whom ‘runaway’ spending in 1% of the budget (that amount Citizens against Government Waste has labelled ‘pork’) is somehow indicative of a Congress run amok, spending wildly with no restraint.

That would be bad because one of his selling points is that Giuliani is a fighter for our cause and against the baseless smears made from time to time against our party, not against us and with those smears.

I will not work actively to defeat the Republican nominee, no matter who he is. Even if he is Ron Paul or Rudy Giuliani.

I will not promise my vote, and I will not promise any effort in support of the nominee, but nor will I attempt to tear him down.

That’s as far as I go, but it is what I will do.

Jesse MacBeth is a fake soldier, and Rush Limbaugh is right to call him one. MacBeth is a fraud and a fake, and we have his own guilty plea to prove it.

Anyone who condemns Rush Limbaugh for calling MacBeth a fake soldier is just defending a fraud and making a mockery of the truth.

It wasn’t a bad game. The license system wasn’t a bad idea, but it quickly became irrelevant when I had the whole board bought for every character. I kept wanting to see a ‘hyper grid.’

The combat system worked well enough; I only really had problems with it late game when multiple spellcastings would start conflicting with each other, causing long hangs in which no spells were cast, but other forms of combat continued. I’m not sure if it was buggy or not, but it seemed so.

The gambits are a good start for something that hopefully will get more development across many games over time. I didn’t expect the system to work well at all, but it worked reasonably well most of the time, including most boss battles which was interesting. A way of creating a palette of stored sets of gambits, and swapping them in and out would have been very useful though.

The hunts were a neat idea but executed badly. Too many things involved where you have to stand in this exact spot for this exact time, in the right weather which means you have to follow this exact route from A to B, all without any meaningful hints or feedback, wrecked the hunts for me though. I didn’t complete them, and in fact wouldn’t have done most of them except that I allowed myself to look several up on the Internet.

Stealing got incredibly tedious even with Thief Cuffs, which is stupid, so I eventually quit doing that, too.

The camera control worked most of the time, but got very buggy when you stand next to a wall, and the camera gets shoved up right next to your character looking at the ground, such that you can see NOTHING. That sort of issue is infuriating and should have been fixed before release.

The main plot was interesting, and the moogles were nice. The exaggerated accents of the cockatrices were stupid though, and way overdone to the point where they were annoying. I could have done without Vaan, Penelo, and the Viera, as well. Balthier was absolutely right: in the normal Final Fantasy tradition, he would have been the main character. He, Fran, Ashe, and Basch would be the main party. I wish it’d have gone like that in actuality.

The map’s arbitrary lockdowns were annoying at times, but I was able to clear out most of Nabudis and the Necrohol long, long, long before the plot called for me to, picking up Maximillians in the process, though, so I guess the lockdown wasn’t total. It didn’t feel as open as Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time, though.

The bazaar done properly requires ridiculous amounts of time spent stealing and killing every monster type on the map. Booooring.

All in all, one of the top FFs I’ve played. I’d put it third, below V and the original. Which puts it above only IV of the ones I’ve played all the way through, but keeps it way above the ones I tried and didn’t like: II, VII, VIII, X.

Now on to Twilight Princess.

It’s been thought, hinted at, suggested, guessed, and implied numerous times that the members of Congress loved most by Republican spending hawks tend the same ones loved by the abortion hawks. Or, put a different way, that being more of a standard Republican on fiscal matters correlates well with being more of a standard Republican on life matters.

Today, right now, I have gathered some evidence that the guess is in fact true.

It was a simple enough exercise that I’m bound to be criticized, and such criticisms are always welcome, but here’s what I did this morning: I took the ratings from 410* members of the House given by the National Taxpayers Union for the second session of the 109th Congress, and plotted them against the ratings given by the National Right to Life Committee for those members for that Congress:

I then asked NeoOffice to give me the coefficient of correlation for the two sets of figures. The answer: 0.82. That’s not bad at all, is it?

So I say again: we need to unify for 2008 by finding candidates from the Presidential level on down that unify the major factions of our party, making us all happy and motivated to fight come the fall of next year. We have a White House to keep, and a Congress to fight for. Let’s keep it together.

*: Some members were excluded because of formatting differences in their names making it difficult to merge their statistics using my automated processes (NTU abbreviates long names such as Millender-McDonald, and NRLC omits accents). No, I didn’t feel like manually entering every member, sorry. It was enough work taking the data from the NTU’s PDF table and lining it up in a useful manner for automated extraction!

Once upon a time, Canadians had an advantage over Americans in manufacturing: a strong US Dollar made it easier to pay Canadians (and others) to do work that Americans could also do. But, those days are over for now, as the Canadian Auto Workers may be among the first to find out.

Says the Washington Times:

For more than 30 years, Canada’s low dollar and nationalized health care system have given Canada’s auto manufacturing and assembly plants a competitive edge over their U.S. counterparts, said Dennis DeRosiers, a Toronto auto consultant. Private health insurance added between $10 and $25 an hour to labor costs for the Big Three in the U.S.

“Those days are gone,” Mr. DeRosiers said. “The dirty little secret” is that the Canadian Auto Workers union, in its last three or four contracts, ate up Canada’s health care cost advantage in higher wages and other benefits.

That and the surge in Canada’s dollar to parity with the U.S. greenback add up to “higher costs for active workers in Canada,” he said.

So Canadian employees demanded their share of the gains made by shifting manufacturing from the US to Canada, and when that advantage was gone, it became more expensive to manufacture in Canada than in the US.

Sure, this seems like a pretty narrow case: one expensive, unionized labor force gaining an advantage over the another, but it seems to me that once you subtract out the union arms race from both sides, the same principle is going to apply to non-unionzed labor, yes?