I went straight from shooting at zombies on Xbox Live to watching President Obama’s press conference last night. The conference was relatively boring, I thought, and I was still thinking about zombie-shooting, so maybe I misunderstood, but did Barack Obama defend the $9,300,000,000,000^[a] deficit that his budget would cause the deficit to shrink because the spending would be a smaller percentage of GDP than ever before?

I only see one way to make an increase in spending to become a decrease in terms of percent of GDP. We have to increase GDP. There are two ways to do that. We can become a lot more productive society, somomething I find somewhat unlikely, given the Administration’s apparent desire to punish our most productive (read: “high earning”) workers. The other alternative is to change the measurement, which is actually pretty simple for the Federal Government to do — just cause inflation.

We now have a President all-but promising us inflation as a solution to a problem that the policies of he and his hyperliberal Congress have caused. When massive inflation is the answer to a problem, the problem is really bad.

[Update: According to the LA Times transcript of the conference, I didn't entirely misunderstand:

So, he was only talking about "discretionary" spending, but I think he and I have different ideas of what is discretionary. My disgust at the President's economic policies still stands, but he wasn't quite as openly calling for inflation as I had thought.]

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Two quick asides:

The graph in this post at Power Line shows exactly how blatant a lie President Obama is trying to sell us. He promised that his deficit would cut those of President Bush’s, the deficit that he estimates for his first year is more than $1,200,000,000,000 more than the biggest deficit of Bush’s four years. His “budget plan” would reduce the deficit over four years, but the estimated deficit for 2012 is still much larger than Bush’s worst deficit.

Also: Did President Obama actually get by without using a teleprompter last night?

[Update 2: Oh. I guess he didn't.]

1. I think it’s important that we stop hiding these numbers behind words. “Nine-point-three trillion” is a scary number to be sure, but most of the time, I think we fail to understand the true enormity of it. Typing out the whole number makes it seem a little more “real”, at least to me. [↩]

If you weren’t already aware, the SciFi channel is changing its name to “SyFy”, which is, in my opinion, an abominably stupid name. Why are they doing this? Here’s the official explanation:

“What we love about this is we hopefully get the best of both worlds,” Mr. [Dave Howe, the network's president] said. “We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.”

Greg Dean, of Real Life Comics, addressed the name change here.

While Greg mentions Enterprise explicitly in his comic, this is something that the entire Star Trek franchise (and several other “geek” franchises, for that matter) fell prey to in recent years. There’s a desire to reach out to new fans, so the franchise gets changed in ways to appeal to the people who currently hate it. The end result is, usually, that most of the new fans who’re being courted still aren’t interested, and the old fans are alienated.

What does this have to do with Barack Obama? Well, he’s reached out to Iran and gotten his hand slapped. Russia doesn’t seem too keen on the “reset” (or is that “overcharged”) United States. He’s pretty much failing to win new friends.

In the meantime, he’s given British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs he can’t even watch, and now he’s effectively given French President Nicolas Sarkozy a slap in the face by reaching out to former French President Jacques Chirac.

Well, I suppose that if we alienate every other nation in the world, that’ll be a change (and all we’ll have left is hope). That’s one way of getting Hope and Change, I guess.

I just picked up Call of Duty: World At War today. I know it’s been out a while, I don’t really care that much for the Call of Duty games. I prefer my first person shooters to be a little less… real. Finally, though, two things convinced me. First, it was on sale for $30. Second, they’ve added zombies.

So, I don’t really have a lot to add to this takedown of a student group protesting the “animal cruelty” in the game:

See, running down the street shooting dogs willy-nilly is bad. You don’t pump them full of bullets for rolling over and wagging their tails. You give them hugs, and call them Mr. Snugglewuffkins, despite what their actual names might be. I think we can all get behind this idea.

Dogs trained to tear out your throat, on the other hand, you shoot. You shoot them quickly, and should they roll over on their backs and wag their little stumpy tails, you shoot them more, because that’s a trap. They don’t want belly rubs; they want to taste your innards.

Call me a monster or an extremist, but I think it’s perfectly fine to teach our children to defend themselves from wild animals that want to eat them.

…To Bloggers

As we all know, President Obama’s tacky gift of DVDs to Prime Minister Gordon Brown was completely excusable^[a] because Bush had once given Mr. Brown a bomber jacket:

The Prime Minister has not had the best of luck when receiving gifts from U.S. presidents.

He was given a fur-trimmed brown leather bomber jacket by George W. Bush during his first trip to America in the summer of 2007.

Commentators gleefully pointed out that the garment was hardly in keeping with Mr Brown’s usual sober attire of business suit and tie.

As it turns out, though, the bomber jacket has an advantage over the DVDs. No, not the fact that random DVD movie collections are a gift only one step removed from gift cards^[b]. The bomber jacket, at least, could be used in England:

The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words “wrong region” came up on his screen. Although he mournfully had to put the popcorn away, he is unlikely to jeopardise the special relationship – or “special partnership”, as we are now supposed to call it – by registering a complaint.

Now, I am the first to admit that this isn’t the end of the world, but when the President and his staff are too overwhelmed to even get region encoding right on their unbelievably tacky gifts, should he really be taking time to go on The Tonight Show making fun of the Special Olympics?

1. Note the sarcasm, please. [↩]
2. Please note sending DVDs that are specifically picked out for the recipient’s tastes are okay. Anyone who was thinking of buying me Firefly or Serenity on Blu-Ray, please go right ahead. [↩]

Fritz von Meyer^[a], Community Organizer

A foreclosed home in Florida has been invaded by bees:

“Yesterday my daughter was coming home from school, walking down the sidewalk over there and next thing you know she was surrounded by bees,” said Mellons.

He says the bees chased his daughter and a friend as the girls ran into their homes. He’s afraid the bees might be the aggressive, Africanized variety, the so-called “killer bees.”

Look on the bright side, Mr. Mellons — bees aren’t the worst things that could be moving into the foreclosed home next door.

Seriously, though, if these bees are more aggressive than the common domesticated honey bee, I understand Mr. Mellons’s concern. If they’re the domesticated kind, I hope they can save the swarm — there’s been a fairly major decline in those bees in recent years, if I recall correctly.

( þ The Consumerist)

1. Fritz von Meyer is a Marvel comics supervillain known as Swarm. [↩]