Quote of the Indeterminate Time Interval – Maguro

In Althouse’s thread on the news that the Obama administration will ignore* the subpoena for Solyndra documents, he said;

Most transparent, ethical administration evah!

I concur. Between this and running guns to Mexican drug gangs to build up support for domestic gun control**, they’re doing a bang up job.

*Since when can you just flat out ignore subpoenas? I thought that was the whole damn point?

**BTW CNN (and WSJ, for that matter), it wasn’t a “botched probe.” Repeating it doesn’t make it true***.

***Unless by botched they mean it was actually found out. If it was supposed to be under the radar, and now it’s manifestly not, then that’s pretty damn botched.****

****I don’t actually have a fourth note; consider this a botched footnote.

I can barely stand Kotaku anymore

They take a perfectly nonpolitical news post about a Ponzi scheme some EVE Online players ran for months (and that ultimately netted the schemers the in-game equivalent of ~$51,000), and instead of just reporting the facts, they inject politics into it.

The closing paragraph reads:

The fund’s website has a full accounting of the eight month scam. They’ll face no official moderation, just in-game consequences should any of their fleeced investors have the scratch to come after them. See, this is how much fun/more awesome America would be if the Libertarians actually ran things, and so we should root for that and for Ron Paul to win the Republican presidential nomination, the end.

I don’t really expect anything better from Owen Good; he can’t seem to resist mocking political views he disagrees with in his video game writing, whether the subject has anything to do with gaming or not. I should have known better than to click the link when this story showed up in my RSS feed, but I was curious about how much dough the EVE Online misanthropes managed to get away with this time (a previous EVE heist made off with more than $17k).

Kotaku is ostensibly a gaming news site; if I were interesting in politicized claptrap, I’d read a blog (and by claptrap, I of course mean insightful commentary). Of course, Kotaku is a Gawker subsidiary, and libertarians are the group everyone loves to hate, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.

But I do wonder about one thing: do they pay him by the straw man, or is injecting his political opinion into nonpolitical gaming news merely a service he provides gratis?

Note: Even setting aside the idea of libertarians “running things,” I wonder if it’s occurred to Owen Good that this EVE Online scam is nothing compared to the Ponzi scheme FDR stuck us with. The damages we’re going to be stuck with when that bill comes due are going to be a hell of a lot more than a paltry $51k.

Note the second: This is my blog, and I can rant about politics and games in the same post if I want to; it is right there in the header, after all. Kotaku is supposed to be gaming news (it’s billed as “Kotaku, the Gamer’s Guide”); Gawker has their main site for political stuff, and I’m sure I’m not the only reader who would prefer they’d keep it there.

Wow, I guess some bankers really *are* dicks

JP Morgan Chase had a guy thrown in jail for “forging” a check they wrote him and trying to cash it at their bank?

And they left him there for the weekend without calling the cops to tell them it was all their fault in the first place?

No wonder the banking industry is so easy to demonize. They’ve got tone-deaf morons in charge of PR as well as regular morons making the decisions.

For those of you who’ve been under a rock since the PSN went down last week

Your personal and credit card information could be at risk.

The official PlayStation Blog has the whole press release.

It’s because of incidences like this that I’ve not chosen to entrust Xbox Live and the PSN with my own credit card information; when I’ve bought DLC (or downloadable games), I’ve used PSN cards and Xbox Live point cards (if you’d rather buy content from the Japanese stores, NCSX and Play Asia can set you up (since inputting credit card information for each region requires a billing address in said region, cards are the only effective way to purchase out-of-region content)).

Of course, that’s kind of useless right now; with the PSN down, you can’t change your password, or personal info, or delete whatever credit cards you had linked with your account. So in the meantime, just watch your card history, and be prepared to cancel if some Russian guy buys a bunch of stuff.

I wasn’t going to comment on the WI union fracas

But this is ridiculous.

If I had kids (now there’s a scary though) in the WI school system, I’d be furious.

If I were a taxpayer in WI (even without kids), I’d be furious.

Public sector unions should not be allowed to exist; no group of public employees should be able to demand the rest of society pony up cash for their salaries and benefits (while refusing to exercise their responsibilities as long as those demands go unmet).

Even notorious right-winger FDR agrees.

Private sector unions are one thing; I might disagree with their methods or goals, but I’m free to not purchase cars made by UAW workers. I am not free to refuse to pay taxes; if I so refuse, the state brings the threat of violence against me.