[High Praise! to Vantage Point of the One-Eyed Jack]

Or maybe the best way to characterize Obama is as a bowel obstruction. The optimal decision he could make is to get out of the way. If he’d only cooperate, and just go with the flow, he’d finally end up where things like him belong. Instead he just stands in the way, intransigently stopping up the works, and causing pain and discomfort for no good reason.

Guns are nothing but simple tools. Come to think of it, so are Bob Costas and Jason Whitlock.

— YankInGeorgia (@YankInGeorgia) December 3, 2012

This child seals a fragile peace between the House of Windsor and the House of Middleton after centuries of intrigue and bloodshed.

— Daniel Foster (@DanFosterNRO) December 3, 2012

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, ergo diamonds get secretly happy when the girl gets fat.

— Seth MacFarlane (@SethMacFarlane) December 3, 2012

It’s fun when children’s entertainment has jokes for adults! But, conversely, it’s creepy when porn has parts designed to amuse children.

— Michael Kupperman (@MKupperman) December 3, 2012

Hey, books that finish with “The End.” The lack of additional pages is clue enough for most of us.

— Tim Siedell (@badbanana) December 3, 2012

“Banning all handguns” is impossible; thus, when that idea is promoted today, its aim is to make the speaker feel good about himself.

— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) December 3, 2012

So lately I’ve been playing this game Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition. It’s hyped about how hard and punishing it is, and it is quite hard and you really do worry about dying as that costs you. But that’s why I’m annoyed it has so little story.

When you start up the game, you have this opening cinema of a bunch of lore which makes it seem like there will be this big epic story. Then the game starts and you’re in a dungeon and fight your way out while getting tutorial like hints. And then… I’m not sure. You talk to someone who mentions offhand something about two bells to ring… though he doesn’t make it clear what that does and why you’d want to do it. But you have this big open world full of monsters that want to kill you, and you have to fight tooth and nail to get through it and… well I don’t know. It hasn’t told me. It just seems like the game should throw me more of a bone of why I’m putting myself through all this challenge and facing constant death. There are many areas to explore, but I have no idea what I’m looking for or why. If I’m going to die over and over trying to get through a new area, it seems like I should some idea why I’m doing that. Lack of story and playing for the challenge is fine when it’s linear — like Doom — but in an open world game more of a story would at least give me more of a purpose and direction.

Of course, I can go online and look at guides and message boards, but I hate leaning on that too much. I mean, I’m all for old school, super challenging game play (I enjoyed Super Meat Boy), but I’m not for confusion. Dark Souls is starting to remind me of old, poorly made NES games in that I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.

Not that I’m done playing it yet.

I’ve come to realize what a good test one’s attitude towards guns is about whether someone’s mind is liberty oriented. If one is okay with police having guns — whoever is designated as having authority — but panicked at the thought of their fellow man or themselves having guns, then that is someone who does not think like a free person. He places a magical aura around whoever is in charge and only thinks they can wield power. This will come up again in other areas, such as letting government make economic decisions but fearing individual people making those decisions themselves. Is it any wonder Bloomberg who is archaically anti-gun is so hostile to individual freedom in so many other areas? Because, as reflected in his view on gun ownership, he just doesn’t fundamentally buy into the concept of liberty at all.

On the other hand, a nice way of looking at things is that as bad as things have gotten in this country with economic liberty, we still have a healthy respect for gun rights so there is a limit to how bad things can get for people who in their hearts respect freedom.

The thing I don’t get about all this talk about reducing the deficit is about how all of them are way off the mark. Obama is proposing $1.2 trillion in reduction — mainly in taxes — and the Republicans are proposing $2.2 trillion. But that’s over ten years. And the current deficit is over $1 trillion each year. So don’t we actually need a package of deficit reduction of more than $10 trillion over the next ten years? It’s like Obama wants to buy a Ferrari we can’t afford and the Republicans are trying to get him to compromise by only buying a BMW we can’t afford.

So we’re at a situation where doing the $2.2 trillion in reduction — far less than necessary — is controversial. That’s why if I am elected president, I will do everything I can to lock pretty much all of Congress in prison forever and confiscate their wealth to ensure their families live in poverty, because that’s really the only just outcome at this point considering how they’ve treated the nation’s finances (and our incomes with their taxes). I’d place their heads on spikes and put them around D.C., but that’s unsanitary and would never fly.